Absolute adversity

Abstract

Derrida describes the relationship between ethics and politics as an absolute hiatus. One problematic consequence of this formulation is that there seems to be no way for the ethical law to bear on political practice. I attempt to locate a link between the ethical and the political within this hiatus, through a reading of texts by two thinkers whose confrontation is suggested by Derrida: Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. The link between the ethical and the political is that they are respectively defined by the prohibition and the sanctioning of the same act: killing. In the discourses of both thinkers, killing is pivotal on account of its exceptional character. Through an analysis of the role of the exception in their work, I determine that Schmitt’s conception of the political requires Levinas’s conception of the ethical as its formal condition. I end by considering what consequences this derivation has for politics.