Although I find Derrida much more accessible now than when I was barely old enough to legally imbibe alcohol, I still hold the opinion that he is a good deal more interested in hearing himself talk than he was in being clear. Clarity is a good thing – and deliberate lexical obfuscation (while I’m good at it) is a personal pet peeve.
The other day I picked up The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume 1 off the shelf at the Harvard Bookstore (which, in an entirely unrelated note, is now the home of Paige M. Gutenborg, a search-print-and-bind machine that will print and bind anything in the public domain for $8). Brand-new Derrida (despite his death) based on seminars. This type of format tends to annoy me, as it makes a good deal more sense in person than written down (especially with the tangents), but that’s the only way some things will ever come out, and there isn’t much to be done about it. But that isn’t the point. The point is that The Beast and the Sovereign seems eminently germane to my dissertation. So I bought it.
Like most Derrida, it needs to be read in small doses. This dose is from the Second Seminar, December 19, 2001.
What would happen if, for example, political discourse, or even the political action welded to it and indissociable from it, were constituted or even instituted by something fabular, by that sort of narrative simulacrum, the convention of some historical as if, by that fictive modality of “storytelling” that is called fabulous or fabular, which supposes giving to be known where one does not know, fraudulently affecting or showing off the making-known, and which administers, right in the work of the hors-d’oeuvre of some narrative, a moral lesson, a “moral”? A hypothesis according to which political, and even politicians’, logic and rhetoric would be always, through and through, the putting to work of a fable, a strategy to give meaning and credit to a fable, an affabulation – and therefore to a story indissociable from a moral, the putting of living beings, animals or humans, on stage, a supposedly instructive, informative, pedagogical, edifying, story, fictive, put up, artificial, even invented from whole cloth, but destined to educate, to teach, to make known, to share a knowledge, to bring to knowledge. (35)
The “if” in the first sentence seems to be an interrogative, a subjunctive that indicates doubt. Derrida goes on to discuss the idea of Terrorism as a fable, a real event made fabular by modern media and propaganda. By, he says specifically, the idea of media as capital to be bought, sold, released, or withheld. He refers to September 11 (only three months prior to the seminar) and the images dispersed by the media both pre- and post-government intervention.
But while Derrida claims that functions of government can be like a fabular institution, it seems to me that they do more than seem. Of course, there are levels of fabular. In Early Modern England, the government (especially under James I) was based on the fable of divine right kingship, a “fictive modality” that situates the king as a mini-god, a supernatural being whose touch could heal and whose intercession or judgment was that of God. In a theocracy, too, where the monarch is head of church and state, the fabular element is clear (provided one can step back far enough from the religious element to accept the equation of religion and fable).
But what about the government of the modern Western world – specifically, of America? The added “under God” in our pledge of allegiance would seem to place us within some more democratic extension of the second above example. A nation that is not theocratic in name, but seems to be so in doctrine, particularly with the rising power of the religious right.
But that is not the way I would see it. Yes, modern America is leaning disturbingly toward certain theocratic elements, but we are not a theocracy (at least not yet). But our government and ruling ideology are predicated on a fabular construction of nationalist myth. The Founding Fathers (always capitalized) have become our new political pantheon, with the occasional inclusion of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or JFK. Our fable is the fable of pure equality, the fable of pure freedom, the fable that our nation is better than any other in the world by virtue of… what? The very illusory things that make up the fable of our nation? Can truth be based on such a fiction?
Derrida seems to think so.
And me? I think so, too. But I also think that there is danger is not recognizing a fable for what it is: fiction. Now don’t get me wrong, I think fiction is as powerful a tool of education and liberation as fact – and can be used to achieve reason and rationalism so long as it is seen as fiction. But when fiction is assumed to be fact (as in the case of our nation’s foundational mythos or, for instance, religion), then we stop learning, stop improving, and begin to regress into a state of childish presumption when we think that we are the hero of our fable, that everything will bend to help us in our fabular quest, and that we – as the hero – cannot truly be harmed or die.
But it is a fable. We can get hurt. We can die. And we would do well to remember that fiction may reveal fact, but fact can never be fiction.