The Derridian Performative & the Foundation of the Interim Transitional National Committee for Libya

In March of this year Jean-​Luc Nancy pub­lished an art­icle entitled “What the Arab Peoples Sig­nify to Us” in the Libéra­tion news­pa­per. The art­icle sup­por­ted the NATO lead mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion in Libya. Alain Badiou penned an acerbic response, claim­ing that Nancy had mis­read the situ­ation in Libya entirely. The upris­ing in Libya was not at all like the events we saw weeks earlier in Egypt and Tunisia: there were no mass protests or pro­longed occu­pa­tions; very few women were involved and hardly any ban­ners or flags of protest at the ral­lies; sud­denly weapons were cir­cu­lated amongst the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion; and very quickly a “rebel coun­cil” had emerged that claimed to rep­res­ent the anti-​Gaddafi move­ment. For Badiou, Nancy’s sup­port of the “West­ern” inter­ven­tion put him in bed with ‘riff-​raff like Sarkozy and Cameron’ whose only goal in Libya was oil and hegemony.

As Stew­art Motha has rightly poin­ted out, the back­ground to Nancy’s sup­port for inter­ven­tion in Libya needs some unpack­ing, espe­cially with regard to his under­stand­ing of sov­er­eignty. And I’ll briefly dis­cuss this back­ground in a moment. But, because I’m inter­ested in Derrida’s work, I couldn’t help but think what he would have to say in this situ­ation: what might Derrida’s work tell us about the nature of our respons­ib­il­ity to the situ­ation that emerged earlier this year in Libya?

As Badiou points out, one of the key dif­fer­ences between the Libyan upris­ing and events in Tunisia and Egypt has been the emer­gence of the NTC. The found­ing state­ment of the NTC on March 5^th claimed it was the sole legit­im­ate rep­res­ent­at­ive of Libya and called for the inter­na­tional com­munity to recog­nize it as such. It also called for mil­it­ary assist­ance short of the deploy­ment of troops on Libyan soil. It nom­in­ated rep­res­ent­at­ives, formed a cab­inet and held state-​like press con­fer­ences. Noth­ing like this was seen in any of the other upris­ings of the so-​called “Arab Spring”. Our first task then should be to under­stand the sig­ni­fic­ance of this found­ing state­ment and to do so we must return to some of Derrida’s earlier work on per­form­ativ­ity. There are two aspects to the Der­ridian per­form­at­ive that are par­tic­u­larly instruct­ive in this con­text: firstly, the inscrip­tion of the

Tags: Jacques Derrida, Tunisia

This entry was posted on 10 October 2011 at 7:20 am and is filed under Critical Legal Conference 2011, Critical Legal Theory, Political Philosophy, Series: Philosophers at War. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.