The Transcendent and the Postcolonial: Violence in Derrida and Fanon

I. INTRODUCTION In his article of Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority (2002) Jacques Derrida presents his most comprehensive statement on violence, law, and the state, and makes the argument that the just exercise of force by the state is impossible. There remains in his text a problematic concept of violence which has not been sufficiently dealt with either by him or in the interpretive literature: divine violence. Although Derrida's article has been interpreted widely by legal and political scholars (see LaCapra 1990; Cornell 1993; Maley 1999; McCormick 2001; Corson 2001), the possibility for the manifestation of divine violence remains unclear. I will attempt to address the possibility of this divine violence proposed by Derrida through an introduction of Frantz Fanon's analysis of anti-colonial violence, showing that anti-colonial violence allows for a manifestation of divine violence. I will also argue that both Derrida and Fanon introduce a certain transcendence in their discussion of anti-colonial/divine violence which works against the violence of the state and towards a politics that crushes vertical structures of domination. Both authors recognize that revolutionary violence has little hope of anything but recreating the violent conditions against which it allegedly works. To move beyond this cycle requires, for Fanon, a horizontal spread of power through universal action against colonial violence; for Derrida, a Levinasian recognition of the universal value of the Other. Thus both authors appeal to the transcendent: for Derrida, this is God, for Fanon, the 'national consciousness.' I will attempt to show that these conceptions of the transcendental are complementary, and, through their mutual denial of the violent domination of the state, are potential means towards a truly postcolonial situation. Finally I will briefly analyze recent violence committed against western targets by Islamic militant groups given the preceding discussion of divine violence. Through this synthetic reading, I hope to introduce a new framework for the analysis of anti-colonial violence, and show that Fanon and Derrida may be read complimentarily for a decolonization of colonized minds, bodies, and spaces. II. JACQUES DERRIDA AND DIVINE VIOLENCE Derrida's article Force of Law is an indictment of the state and the legal establishment as inherently violent. His argument begins with a decoupling of law and justice in which he questions the very possibility of justice being enacted through law. This is followed by an interpretation of Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence (1978), in which Derrida addresses how the violence of the law manifests itself. According to Derrida (and Benjamin) this violence is not only displayed in the specifics of the state's power, such as the death penalty or the figure of the police. The state, and therefore the legal establishment, depends on an exercise of violence for its very existence; this violence is at once a preservation of the power of the state and a constant foundation of it. Every founding act includes in it the requirement of preservation, of generalization, and every preservation refounds the order which it preserves. Derrida is thus denying both the possibility of founding a state without recourse to violence, and of moving beyond this initial violence once a state has been founded. The revolutionary and therefore terribly violent moment of every founding act, when the previous order is overturned, remains embedded within every action of the newly founded state. These founding acts are always justified, but only through self-referential, circular arguments. Thus they are justified, or rationalized, but can never claim to be just. The only potentially just violence is transcendental: only God can commit just violence. This divine violence, linked with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, strikes without warning and treats every case as unique. …

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