THE FRENCH DERRIDEANS
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missable other.'' For in order to define the conditions of legitimate authority, the tradition always conjured up the figure of the gravest danger, the most extreme decay of Mitsein. And it elected to link the latter in every case to a disturbance of the propre. The demand for the propre, then, was always the antistrophe in a chorus bewailing the menace of tyranny. This tradition reached its apogee in Hegel, where the gesture of Aufhebung-qua absolute reappropriation of absolute loss—became the guard protecting against Terror. In the sections of the Phenomenology that treat the French Revolution, the Aufhebungwas the mechanism for overcoming the unthinkable horror of a death sans phrase; it overcame the meaningless, uncompensated death that issued from the revolutionary assertion of the absolute, abstract freedom of unmediated self-consciousness. In place of this "death worse than death," the Aufhebung, qua recovery of the propre, substituted a "beautiful death under the yoke of the Law" (521-22). It follows, pace Spivak, that it is Hegel, not Marx, who is the deconstructor avant la lettre. For Hegel, claimed Rogozinski, conceives Terror as the foreclosure of differance, as the actualized presence of the absolute. In opposition to Terror, Hegelian political philosophy is established "in the shelter of differance." It exiles the absolute to another world outside history and time, refrains from attempting to realize it here and now, defers it to eternity. It maintains differentiations within civil society as well as the differentiation between civil society and the state. Thus it takes account of differance. by accepting and reinscribing differences at the heart of social space. Hegelian politics, then, preserves a nondialectical, unaufhebable cleavage (522-23). But this puts it in diametric opposition to Marxism, which seeks dialectically to overcome or abrogate differance in its "utopia of the totally transparent, selfreconciled 'une-socie'te"" (523). Marxian politics thus attacks "the stronghold of discretion protecting the reserve of the absolute" and unleashes revolutionary Terror. If the propre is metaphysics's guard against Terror, its "inadmissable other," then Marxism is "the lowering of that guard [and] hence (unhappily) the least metaphysical of projects" (523). Quoting Adorno, Rogozinski concluded that deconstruction must side with Hegel against Marx; it ought not simply deconstruct metaphysics but should be "in solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its fall" (523). Rogozinski ended his paper by formulating what he saw as deconstruction's present dilemma: on the one hand, it inaugurates itself by rejecting the radical break and contents itself with the sort of patient, faithful, disinterested endurance that corresponds to a politics of resistance. But, on the other hand, it does so in the name of another, more radical rupture; invoking the apocalyptic tone par excellence, "it sets its sights on the 'outre-cloture' [and] surrenders to the fascination of the beyond, seek[ing] the 'Orient of its text,' the other space beyond the frontiers delimiting Western metaphysics" (523). Deconstruction contains, thus, two different calls to differance, two different intonations and intensities. One