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Published in:
Introduction: A Political Question Read chapter Read first chapter

2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. Truth, Violence, and Difference

Author : Matthew Fluck

Published in: The Concept of Truth in International Relations Theory

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Abstract

This chapter considers Poststructuralist Veriphobia through the lens of David Campbell’s National Deconstruction and the deconstructionist philosophy upon which it draws. Demonstrating the extent to which Poststructuralist IR addresses political questions associated with ‘difference’ by reflecting on the nature of truth, the chapter considers the limits of this Veriphobia. Despite important insights into the links between truth and violence, Campbell’s rejection of truth depends on an implicit claim to philosophical insight into the quasi-transcendental preconditions of knowledge and truth. This undermines his attempts to formulate an international theory sensitive to difference and reveals the wider problems with Poststructuralist accounts of truth in the discipline.

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previous chapter The Parameters of Post-Positivism
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Footnotes
1
Richard Ashley and R B J Walker, ‘Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Through in International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 34, 3 (1990), pp. 259–268.
 
2
Shapiro, ‘Textualizing’, p. 11.
 
3
Campbell identifies this point of view in John Ruggie’s attack on ‘the moral vacuum – if not vacuity – the French Fries [i.e. Poststructuralists] would have us inhabit’, as well as in Stephen Krasner’s claim that ‘[t]here is no reason to think that post-modern pronouncements will exercise any constraint over those with power’. Ruggie, quoted Ibid., p. 5; Krasner, quoted Ibid., p. 6.
 
4
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 5.
 
5
Ibid., p. 4.
 
6
Judith Butler, quoted Ibid., p. 24.
 
7
Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe quoted in David Campbell, Writing Security, p. 6.
 
8
Campbell, National Deconstruction, pp. 25–26.
 
9
Campbell, Writing Security, pp. 4–5.
 
10
Campbell, National Deconstruction, pp. 26–27 & p. 85.
 
11
Derrida quoted Ibid., p. 26.
 
12
Derrida quoted Ibid.
 
13
Ibid.
 
14
Ibid., p. 27.
 
15
Derrida, quoted Ibid.
 
16
Ibid.
 
17
Ibid., p. 78.
 
18
Ibid., p. 80.
 
19
Ibid., p. 78.
 
20
Ibid., pp. 155–157.
 
21
Ibid., p. 27.
 
22
Ibid., p. 217.
 
23
Hayden White, quoted Ibid., p. 35.
 
24
Ibid., p. 37; See also Saul Frielander ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992).
 
25
White, quoted in Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 39.
 
26
Ibid., pp. 40–41.
 
27
Ibid., p. 42.
 
28
Ibid., p. 42.
 
29
Ibid., p. 4.
 
30
Ibid.
 
31
Ibid.
 
32
Levinas, quoted Ibid., p. 172.
 
33
Ibid.
 
34
Ibid.
 
35
Ibid., pp. 168–169.
 
36
Ibid., p. 14.
 
37
Levinas, quoted Ibid., p. 173.
 
38
Ibid., p. 174.
 
39
Ibid., pp. 182–183.
 
40
Derrida, quoted Ibid., p. 183.
 
41
Ibid., p. 183.
 
42
Ibid., pp. 183–184.
 
43
Ibid., p. 101.
 
44
Ibid., p. 182.
 
45
Ibid., p. 181.
 
46
Ibid., p. 193.
 
47
Ibid., p. 197.
 
48
Ibid., p. 202.
 
49
Ibid., p. 202.
 
50
Ibid., p. 211.
 
51
Ibid., pp. 217–218.
 
52
Colin Wight, ‘Meta-Campbell: The Epistemological Problems of Perspectivism’, Review of International Studies 25 (1999), pp. 311–316.
 
53
See e.g. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
 
54
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 182.
 
55
Ibid., p. 168.
 
56
Ibid., p. 175.
 
57
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 7.
 
58
Ibid.
 
59
Ibid., p. 20.
 
60
Ibid., p. 14.
 
61
Ibid., p. 13.
 
62
Jacques Derrida, Positions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 5.
 
63
Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 10–11.
 
64
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 10.
 
65
Ibid., p. 23.
 
66
Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. 17.
 
67
Rodolphé Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 147.
 
68
Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration, (London: Verso, 1987), p. 44.
 
69
Wight, ‘Meta-Campbell’, pp. 311–316.
 
70
Der Derian, Antidiplomacy, p. 6.
 
71
David Campbell, ‘Contra Wight: The Errors of Premature Writing’, Review of International Studies 25 (1999), pp. 317–321, reference p. 319.
 
72
Campbell, Writing Security, p. 7
 
73
Ibid., p. 6.
 
74
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 23
 
75
Ibid.
 
76
Dews, Logic of Disintegrations, p. 11.
 
77
Ibid., pp. 44–45.
 
78
Peter Dews, Limits of Disenchantment, (London: Verso, 1995), p. 120; Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, p. 318.
 
79
Dews, Logics of Disintegration, p. 45.
 
80
Ibid., p. 45.
 
81
Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, p. 88.
 
82
Campbell, National Deconstruction, pp. 171–174.
 
83
Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’.
 
84
Ibid., p. 175 (emphasis added).
 
85
Dews, Logics of Disintegration, p. 23.
 
86
Levinas, quoted Ibid., p. 43.
 
87
Ibid., p. 46.
 
88
Brincat, ‘Negativity’, p. 460.
 
89
Linklater, Men and Citizens.
 
90
Cox, ‘Social Forces’, p. 134.
 
91
Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, p. vii.
 
92
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Conceptions of Modernity: A Look Back at Two Traditions’, in The Postnational Constellation, ed. & trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 130–156.
 
93
The ideas of ‘chastened’ and ‘unchastened’ reason have been introduced to IR by Daniel Levine. Levine, Recovering International Relations, p. 33.
 
94
Richard Beardsworth points out that Derrida approaches the question of political practice from the perspective of metaphysics. Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. xiii.
 
95
Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’.
 
96
Campbell characterises the poststructuralist approach as one which rejects the search for causes and origins in favour of the examination of political consequences and effects. Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 5.
 
97
Dews, Logics of Disintegration, p. 45.
 
98
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 164.
 
99
Ibid., p. 168.
 
100
On the former problem see Selby ‘Engaging Foucault’, p. 328.
 
101
Foucault, Power/Knowledge.
 
102
Many critical thinkers have, of course, emphasised that different forms of domination have occurred throughout history, and that today’s ‘domination’ was quite possibly yesterday’s emancipation. This is Marx’s position – the bourgeoisie were a revolutionary class but also the beneficiaries of capitalist exploitation. As will be argued in Chapter 6, in his critique of Enlightenment Adorno emphasises that pre-Enlightenment thought and politics were accompanied by forms of repression to which Enlightenment subjectivity, now linked to domination, provided a solution. Theodor Adorno, ‘Subject and Object’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), pp. 497–511, reference p. 498. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that the predominant forms of domination in world politics are no longer determined by the traditions of Western metaphysics: ‘postmodernists are still waging battle against the shadows of old enemies: the Enlightenment, or really modern forms of sovereignty and its binary reductions of difference and multiplicity to a single alternative between Same and Other … In fact, Empire too is bent on doing away with those modern forms of sovereignty and on setting differences to play across boundaries…’ Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 142.
 
103
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 5.
 
104
Dews, Logics of Disintergration, p. 34.
 
105
Campbell, National Deconstruction, pp. 183–184.
 
106
Dews, Logics of Disintegration, p. 52.
 
107
Ibid., pp. 32–33.
 
108
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 198.
 
109
Ibid., p. 184.
 
113
Ibid., p. 185.
 
114
As Beardsworth points out, Derrida uses his theory of law and justice as a bridge between metaphysics and politics. Richard Beardsworth, ‘In Memorium Jacques Derrida: The Power of Reason’, Theory and Event 8, 1 (2005), p. 4, //muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.1beardsworth.html, [accessed 27 March 2007].
 
115
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 185.
 
117
Derrida, quoted Ibid., p. 186.
 
118
Ibid., p. 187.
 
119
Ibid., p. 190.
 
120
Ibid., p. 186.
 
121
Ibid., p. 199
 
122
Rodolphé Gasché, quoted Ibid.
 
124
Ibid., p. 200.
 
126
Derrida, quoted Ibid.
 
127
Dews, Logics of Disintegration, pp. 32–33.
 
128
Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 5. This ‘Cartesian Anxiety’ is discussed at length in Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. For a critique of this attitude to truth in feminist theory see Linda Martín Alcoff, ‘Reclaiming Truth’, in Truth: Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions, ed. David Wood and Jose Medina (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 336–349.
 
129
Ibid., p. 337.
 
130
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 133
 
131
Campbell, ‘Why Fight?’, pp. 516–517.
 
132
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 131.
 
133
Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, p. xiii.
 
134
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 141.
 
135
Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 279.
 
136
Dews, Logics of Disintegration, p. 225.
 
137
Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’, p. 230.
 
138
Ibid., p. 228.
 
Metadata
Title
Truth, Violence, and Difference
Author
Matthew Fluck
Copyright Year
2017
Book
The Concept of Truth in International Relations Theory

Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55032-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-55033-0

Copyright Year: 2017

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55033-0_3