Derrida and the Demand for an Economy of "Crises"

In the first section, I will focus on the ordinary construal of ‘crisis’ with the aim of unpacking some of its undeclared presuppositions. Conventionally, a ‘crisis’ is a danger menacing the security of a given state of affairs. This definition is upheld in Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. I will briefly refer to that work in order to argue that Husserl’s insightful and rational discourse may be interpreted as subject to non-philosophical contingent factors related to the author’s particular circumstances. If even a sober philosophical work is infiltrated by a certain interestedness, this process of infiltration is bound to be more readily at work in political and economic approaches which anyway depend on interestedness and strategic calculation. Hence Derrida’s references to a ‘theater’ and a ‘rhetoric of crisis’. In order to expose this theatricality, Derrida outlines a set of presuppositions underlying most discursive representations of a crisis. By the very act of identifying a crisis: 1) one inevitably engages in a process of unifying the body undergoing the crisis; 2) one occupies a public stage, thereby enjoying a certain mastery or sovereignty, at least in comparison with others largely excluded from any public debate; 3) one proclaims one’s ability assuredly to decide on a teleological course of action with a view to overcoming a merely provisional and temporary crisis. In light of the lack of consensus about the status of any crisis, how is one to avoid the more biased representations? How is one to judge which of the available discourses is the most equitable and the least politically or financially interested? While acknowledging the potential benefits of the dominant understanding of ‘crisis’, a radical and critical reflection on the presuppositions of any discourse on crisis may actually be helpful toward that direction. According to Derrida, the ordinary construal of ‘crisis’ involves a certain forgetting of ‘crisis’ in the sense of a ‘caesura’ or a ‘division’ pre-dating any confident determination and decision. If ‘krisis’, etymologically related to ‘keirō’ (‘to cut’, ‘to divide’, ‘to separate’), points to an originary moment of separation or an opening up of a chasm, that moment allows for a difference and an uncertainty excluded by the subsequent moment of identification and definitive choice. There are two points to be made with respect to that alternative sense of ‘crisis’. First, to avoid reducing alterity to a simply provisional structure, ‘crisis’ qua caesura retains an element of radical incalculability. The latter entails an alterity resisting all forms of identity, certainty and judgement. This is not to say that decision and judgement are impossible. It is to say that incalculability will always be necessarily possible. It will always be necessarily possible to question the validity and sincerity of any discursive judgement about a crisis. The possibility of such questioning is something one can empirically observe in public debates. However, there is also an urgent necessity that one should question and complicate in order to resist the perhaps intentional reduction of alterity to a contingent difference. Second, Derrida’s insistence on an incalculable division results from his intention to speak in the name of those others who remain unrepresented in public debates, to stress that there are concrete differences between those suffering from the crisis and those theorizing about it. The ordinary philosophical discourse and a fortiori political and economic discourses, insofar as their principal aim is to reach a conclusive verdict, do not take seriously enough this ethical imperative to respect alterity. Without wishing to undermine all sensible endeavours to overcome current difficulties by calculation and judgement, one has cautiously to analyse all discursive representations of the crisis with a view to unveiling their inherent divisions