Dealing with Double Binds. Letters on Derrida’s Geschlecht III, Swedishness and the Animal Rationale

Abstract

In this paper we relate to the question about “the use of Derrida’s work as a political tool for understanding the present.” It is of course impossible to use Derrida’s thinking as we usually understand the meaning of use. It resists instrumentalisation. This text is an exchange of letters and a collective work of thought concerning different approaches to Derrida Today. The initiative for this letter exchange arose when we read Derrida’s Geschlecht III together. Our discussions around that book led to the question of how the hardening identities and sharper conflicts in our time appear in contemporary Swedish poetry. We read and listened to the song “Sverige” (a well-known song in Sweden by the Swedish rock group Kent), to see what would happen if we departed from Derrida’s question concerning nations and communities in Geschlecht III. Could Derrida help us see or hear something in the song that we hadn’t heard before? Perhaps we could twist and turn both Kent’s and Derrida’s lyrically musical words to use them as uncontrollable, but at the same time inescapable, analytical and political tools? The text became, for us, a starting point to discuss the double binds of contemporary environmental politics, nationalism and our positions as researchers. Geschlecht III has inspired the analytical process in two senses: first, in terms of form and in allowing poetry to be an object of analysis, and second, through acknowledging the link between poetry, nationalism and ideology. We have wanted to initiate a deconstruction and to think beyond some of the corner stones in Sweden’s national identity.