Critical Inquiry (The Late Derrida, 33:2)

Dead Again W. J. T. Mitchell In the United States, deconstruction still seems to be dying quite a bit. —Jacques Derrida ...

Author: W.J.T. Mitchell | Arnold I. Davidson

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Dead Again W. J. T. Mitchell In the United States, deconstruction still seems to be dying quite a bit. —Jacques Derrida

Shortly after Jacques Derrida’s death in October 2004, the editors of Critical Inquiry began discussing the possibility of a special issue in his honor. The question was, of course, not whether to do this, given CI’s long relationship with Derrida, but what form it should take. How could we hope to do justice to Derrida’s body of work, his contributions to philosophy and the entire range of the human sciences? The task seemed impossible in both its quantitative and qualitative requirements. Thousands of intellectuals across the world have been, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, “touched by deconstruction,” and that word has now become part of everyday vernacular across many languages. And the range and variety of Derrida’s work seems to make any thematic emphasis immediately collapse in the face of the almost infinite topicality of Derrida’s own capacious intellect from A to Z, from the Animal to Zoographia. We did, however, form a consensus on two principles. The first was our sense of appropriate topic, and this seemed to come to all of us simultaThis special issue would have been impossible without the devotion and hard work of the entire editorial group and staff of Critical Inquiry. Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arnold Davidson, Beth Helsinger, Françoise Meltzer, Richard Neer, and Joel Snyder provided key moments of editorial judgment and guidance throughout. Bill and Françoise worked aggressively to secure several of the contributions, and Arnold spent so many hours working with the contributors to improve their essays that it seems only proper to share with him the credit for editing the entire project. Jay Williams negotiated the labyrinth of copyright and permission issues that surrounds Derrida’s writing as well as guided the editing of the manuscripts, which he and Jeff Rufo—with assistance from Anat Benzvi, Burke Butler, Kate Gaudet, Robert Huddleston, Elizabeth Hutcheon, and Abigail Zitin—completed with their usual expeditious mastery. J. Hillis Miller provided crucial inspiration and practical help at all stages of the project. For all Derrida’s skepticism about Mitsein, this project was all about being with others, and my hope is that this will be evident in the pages that follow. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0009$10.00. All rights reserved.

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neously in a phrase that was inevitably and spontaneously uttered in the immediate aftermath of his death: “The Late Derrida.” Here is an extract from the letter that went out to potential contributors: We propose an issue entitled “The Late Derrida” with all puns and ambiguities cheerfully intended. Under this rubric we mean, of course, the late work of Derrida, the vast outpouring of new writing by and about him in the period roughly from 1994 to 2004. In this period Derrida published more new books, essays, and interviews than he had produced during his entire career up to that point, and many of them on important new concepts in ethics, politics, and religion. At a minimum, the shape of Derrida’s career, and the evolution of his ideas, are still only imperfectly comprehended. We do not yet know (and may never know in some basic sense) what it all amounted to, and there will be a period of continued reading as his last works are translated, disseminated, and critiqued. But it does seem clear to us that this late or final period in Derrida’s life was marked by incredible productivity, and of new turns that have yet to be digested in the way the earlier “classic” texts on difference, deconstruction, and grammatology have been. We want to keep open, however, the question of “lateness” in the most capacious possible way, and we do not intend simply a stocktaking of Derrida’s recent work in the narrow or literal sense. We would also hope for (in fact count on) a deconstruction of the very idea of lateness, lastness, finality, finitude, and, of course, death itself—the entire problematic of the “post-” and the various “ends” or “deaths”—of theory, of history, of humanism, of deconstruction itself, that marked the final decade of Derrida’s life. We would hope for a debate about the very notion of periodizing Derrida’s career, the question of the continuity of his work versus its broaching of new, unsuspected issues; the frequent claim that he “turned” in his final years to more worldly issues of politics, law, and ethics—that he “finally” got around to Marx and capitalism and justice. Were these turns merely thematic? Or did they register a deep shift in his thinking? We also wish to address (and hear from) those whose work was deeply indebted to the “early” or “middle” Derrida, and who may now feel the need to update their thinking, to go back to their previous works with second and third thoughts.

W. J . T. M i t c h e l l is editor of Critical Inquiry. His most recent book is What Do Pictures Want? (2005). His forthcoming book is entitled Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2007

The second principle was based in our desire to have an issue that would not deal with Derrida’s work exclusively from the inside. Like any powerful intellectual, Derrida had numerous followers—“Derrideans”—who devoted themselves almost exclusively to the exposition and analysis of his work. We wanted to escape the coils of what Geoffrey Hartman has called the “boadeconstructors.” And this led us to invite contributors who had made important contributions to their various fields independently of their association with deconstruction, but who nevertheless had been touched by the work of Derrida and were prepared to examine their relationship to his work in a sympathetic but critical spirit. If Derrida produced, on the one side, a cult following of sorts, he also (perhaps inevitably) produced an antagonistic cult of those who were prepared to be “critical” by dismissing his work without ever having read it. Our aim was to steer between these two extremes while tacking, it must be said, firmly toward writers who had a profound engagement with Derrida’s work, a deep respect and love for the man and the thinker, coupled with a strong sense of their own independent engagements. We believe that the authors assembled for this special issue meet these requirements, and I will have more to say about their contributions in a moment. As for my own relationship with Derrida, I played three different roles with Jacques: reader, editor, and friend. As a reader and a scholar of words and images, I was first drawn to his seminal work on grammatology and the history and theory of writing, the whole sphere of the graphic and typographic that played a role in my understanding of William Blake as an engraver and printer committed to a “wond’rous art of writing” against the grain of a dominant emphasis on voice in English romanticism. This interest took on a more general tenor as I began to explore the fields of semiotics, aesthetics, and media theory in search of an iconology that seemed like the necessary complement to his grammatology. The centrality of the grapheme at the intersection of writing and painting, the sayable and the seeable, or word and image more generally seemed to lead inevitably into the whole realm of what Derrida called spectrality, the ghostly realm of imagination, fantasy, speculation and the subject of a hauntology that renders all things or objects—all beings in other words—uncanny. Anyone interested in visual culture and iconology also had to take account of Derrida’s critique of televisuality as a dominantly Christian globalizing medium and the importance of the Abrahamic (and Islamic) tradition of peoples of the book as the deep core of image theory, especially in its iconoclastic modes. As the editor of Critical Inquiry, I had quite a different relation with Jacques Derrida. We became friends—not close friends, not nearly as close as his more intimate circle, but close enough to have exchanged hospitali-

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ties. Close enough to entertain him in my home (he watched Monty Python’s philosophers’ soccer match—ancients versus moderns—with my teenage son and cheered vigorously for the ancients, who won on a goal by Socrates, while Marx was given a red card). Close enough to enjoy the sight of him chauffering my college-age daughter and her friend from his home to the train station (report was that he was a “terrible driver” but completely charming). Close enough to have some sense of the depths of his mind and personality. And close enough to have mustered up the nerve to disagree with him on a number of political issues. Driving him from the airport to the University of Chicago in 1991, at the outset of the first Gulf war, I asked him for his opinion on what I regarded at the time as a terrible and ominous event. He shrugged and said that he could see no other course but to “go with Mitterand” and support the war. I was surprised and disappointed, but also curiously reassured to find that the man who was perhaps the greatest philosopher of the late twentieth century could hold perfectly ordinary political opinions. I use the words friendship and hospitality, then, in full mindfulness of how seriously he took these words and how deeply he tried to act upon them in his relationships with people like me, whom he knew only intermittently, at a great distance. In my role as editor, I also watched Derrida’s work evolve over what I think will become the canonical “periods” of his career: the early “radical” phase of deconstruction, oriented toward questions of language, writing, and literature and technical discussions of center/margin, and so on; the middle “defensive” period, centrally involved with the Paul de Man affair, when a number of people found the excuse they were looking for to say that Derrida was finished and deconstruction was dead. Then there is the third period; let’s call it the late Derrida, since this is already emerging as the name for his work in the nineties and beyond. This is the moment of moving to the borders of deconstruction, to the edges of the conditional, to the realm of the limit or the limitless, the unconditional and unconditioned, the pure, the absolute, and ideal—in short, the undeconstructible, to which he sometimes gave the name of justice.1 This is also the period when Derrida became a writer on politics, ethics, religion, not just as philosophical topics, but in relation to the urgent issues of the day. He emerges as what, in some sense, he always was, an occasional and unsystematic writer, responding to events and contemporary issues at the invitation of others to speak out, almost invariably with surprising, unpredictable results. Among the topics that drew his attention, many of them discussed in this issue, are capital pun1. Derrida’s first claim that justice is undeconstructible is generally located in Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11 (July–Aug. 1990): 919–1045.


ishment; animal rights; the university; political sovereignty, democracy, and rogue states; the idea of Europe; television and religion; the “return” of the “Abrahamic” religions of the book; law and justice; ethics, hospitality, and the concept of the gift; and violence, terrorism, and the war on terror. My three periods should be considered, of course, as already deconstructed in advance, as the essays by Stephen Melville and Frances Ferguson will make clear.2 If the early Derrida was perceived as a radical whose deconstruction of Western metaphysics was an alternate pathway to the disappointed revolutionary hopes of the sixties generation, and the middle Derrida was upstaged by the more explicitly political and historically minded Foucault, the late Derrida was revealed at last to be something of a liberal, perhaps even a libertarian, reaffirming the fundamental relevance of the European Enlightenment and defining the terrain of difficult political and ethical choices in terms that echo the familiar liberal double bind or negotiated settlement: on the one hand . . . on the other hand.3 And yet one gets the impression of a deep continuity in Derrida’s thinking, as if in some sense it was all fully formed very early, while at the same time it was not all that easy to predict what he would say about any specific topic. His great gift was to provide what Slavoj Zˇizˇek has called a parallax view, an intervention that changes the angle of vision ever so slightly, with momentous consequences. His opening gesture in rereading Marx’s Communist Manifesto after many years away from it was an expression of his sense that something was waiting for him in that text that he had imperfectly remembered. And of course it was there in the very first sentence—“A specter is haunting Europe.” His opening onto the question of capital punishment was a simple inductive generalization that could easily be falsified: no significant philosopher as a philosopher, he argued, has ever mounted a systematic case against capital punishment. On the question of animal rights, his challenge was to notice that the very idea of rights was inevitably grounded in a concept of human rights, which have always been defined by 2. “If deconstruction is possible, this is because it mistrusts any sort of periodization” (Derrida, “‘I Have a Taste for the Secret,’” interview with Maurizio Ferraris, in Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Donis and David Webb [Cambridge, 2001], p. 9). Derrida’s self-image, it must be said, is of someone who never really changed his thinking or moved toward politics and actuality: “I have in fact never been concerned with anything but problems of actuality, with problems of institutional politics or of politics, period” (Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek [Cambridge, 2002], p. 9). 3. Derrida’s radicalism remains in his notions of democracy, justice, and revolution to come in the form of the unforeseeable event or arrivant. “It is possible to renounce a certain revolutionary imagery or all revolutionary rhetoric, even to renounce a certain politics of revolution . . .but it is not possible to renounce revolution without also renouncing the event and justice” (Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, p. 13). For “on the one hand,” see ibid., p. 15.

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invoking the difference between humans and animals. The appeal to animal rights, no doubt a compelling one on “humanitarian” grounds,nevertheless renders the very idea of human rights deeply problematic. On all these issues, the typical effect of Derrida’s intervention was to reopen the case in question, to expose received ideas to a subtle but decisive shift that enjoined a radical rereading and enabled a reframing of settled views and new horizons of reflection and research. If, in the world of ideas, the closing of the case is the equivalent of death, nailing the coffin shut, Derrida’s effect on thought was precisely one of continual resurrection, the insistence on opening ourselves to what is to come, or (in more anxious modes) what threatens to come back. My experience of Derrida’s death is of course heavily mediated by his numerous writings on death and mourning. But it is also framed by an episode that took place during one of his many visits to the University of Chicago, shortly after the appearance of Specters of Marx in 1994. One of my colleagues asked him to compare the widely rumored “death” of Marxism to the equally common rumors that deconstruction was dying as well. Derrida’s eyes twinkled at the question: Yes, it’s true. Deconstruction is clearly dying. But we have to ask precisely how it is dying. For instance, last week we read in the newspaper that Nixon was dying, and then that Nixon was dead. Next week there will be nothing in the papers about Nixon dying. But it is not like that with deconstruction. Deconstruction has been dying for quite awhile. The first reports of its dying came to us a long time ago, and no doubt it will continue dying for some time to come. And it seems to be dying more in some places than others. For instance, in France, deconstruction is not dying. It was declared dead long ago. But in the United States, deconstruction still seems to be dying quite a bit.4 How can one write an obituary for an intelligence like that? I feel sure that Derrida would have appreciated the headline of his death notice in The Onion: “Derrida ‘Dies.’” Like Freud and Marx, he (and the thoughts he inspired) will no doubt be pronounced dead again—and again—in the years to come. Derrida’s death is, above all, framed for me by a coincidence whose significance I cannot shake off, and that is its proximity to the death of another friend, Edward Said, who passed away one year earlier, in September 2003. I don’t know how many others of my generation felt that Said and Derrida were both fundamental, in quite different and even antithetical ways, to 4. I am recalling this comment from memory, so these may not be Derrida’s exact words.


their formations as scholars and intellectuals. For me, though, the work of these two men exemplified the polarities of the critical-theoretical possibilities of our time: on the one hand, the role of the committed public critic, addressing contemporary issues with passion, conviction, and insightfulindependence from any party or ideological program; on the other hand, the role of the groundbreaking theorist, exploring the limits of deeply entrenched systems of thought. And I don’t mean to confine either of them exclusively to one side of this polarity. Both men addressed public issues and introduced new concepts that changed the world. Deconstruction and postcolonial theory were in a sense invented and founded by them, and both movements became something of a burden, a legacy that they viewed with a considerable sense of irony. Derrida refused, in recent years, to define deconstruction, a word he had coined but which had clearly gotten out of his control. And Said disavowed his status as the founding father of postcolonial theory, never failing to point out that it was a bit premature to argue that colonialism was in the past in the age of globalization. It of course occurred to me immediately that the deaths of these two great intellectuals within a year of one another marked the end of an era for criticism and theory. Between them, they had become the dominant figures in the study of culture in the last quarter century. But the real point of comparison was not their deaths as the end of anything but their lives as the provocations for what Said called “beginnings” and Derrida named the “to come of justice and democracy.” Both were intensely futuristic and utopian thinkers who remained deeply critical of their own communities, refusing to settle for either Jewish or Arab identity as the horizon of their thought.5 Both were engaged without being committed, aligned with causes at the same time they insisted relentlessly on critical independence and unpredictability. Both were rootless cosmopolitan exiles whose stories of coming to America are central to their careers and central to the intellectual and cultural relations of Europe and America. Is it not somehow fitting that an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Christian should wind up playing such central roles in the formation of American intellectual life in the late twentieth century? As befits giants who define and stand above their age, they did not get 5. See Derrida, “‘I Have a Taste for the Secret,’” pp. 38–39, for Derrida’s account of his alienation from both French culture and Judaism. Compare Gil Anidjar, “‘Once More, Once More’: Derrida, the Arab, the Jew,” in Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber et al., ed. Anidjar (New York, 2002), p. 18, for discussion of doomed Jews in the Nazi death camps as “‘Mussulmans.’” Said’s Freud and the Non-European (London, 2003) should also be read next to Derrida’s meditations on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which stages the figure of the Egyptian Moses as the founding father of Judaism.

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along that well. I don’t believe they appeared together very often, if ever, except perhaps in the pages of Critical Inquiry. Said, whose sympathies leaned more toward the institutional and political criticism of Foucault, tended to regard Derrida as something of a mandarin, responsible for what he thought of as the obscurantist navel-gazing of contemporary theory.6 I don’t know that Derrida ever made public comments on Said, but it seems safe to assume that he would not have found him especially compellingfrom a philosophical point of view. Said rarely interrogated a concept with the kind of obsessive depth and rigor that was the hallmark of Derrida’s writing. Both men had blind spots that come into focus when their positions are compared. Said’s was his relative indifference or hostility to religion, his insistence on secular, worldly frameworks as the limit of his thinking.7 Derrida’s—at least from Said’s point of view—was the question of Palestine, which, as far as I know, he never commented on except in diplomatic sentiments condemning the violence on all sides and urging the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlements from the Occupied Territories.8 One issue that both men confronted in the last few years and in fact galvanized the entire critical universe that they dominated was the question of terrorism, provoked by the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001. As a Palestinian, Said had been the recipient of accusations that he was a professor of terror, and Derrida’s deconstructive practices have routinely been characterized as a form of “‘obscurant terrorism.’”9 These sorts of charges were symptomatic of the intellectual poverty of those who lodged them, revealing the blatantly ideological character of the concept of terror itself. But, for that very reason, the onset of the “war on terror” also provided an 6. Said’s discussion of Derrida and Foucault as “textual theorists” appeared in Said, “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions,” Critical Inquiry 4 (Summer 1978): 673–714. Said commented particularly on Derrida’s gnostic notion of the text as the container of an imperceptible secret. 7. Said’s secularism, however, is considerably more complicated than one might imagine. See Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 52–77, and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Secular Divination: Edward Said’s Humanism,” in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, ed. Homi Bhabha and Mitchell (Chicago, 2005), pp. 99–108. 8. See, for instance, Derrida, “Interpretations at War,” which was given as a lecture in Jerusalem in 1988, during the Palestinian intifada that began in 1987. Although Derrida begins with a promise that he will address “the current violence, here and now,” he also notes that his topic—the “German-Judaism” of Hermann Cohen, who argued (now unbelievably) that American Jews should have sided with Germany against France and England because Germany is the true spiritual homeland of Judaism—has only an indirect and mediated relation to “that which demands immediate response and responsibility.” Derrida also expressed a wish “to participate in a conference where Arab and Palestinian colleagues would be officially invited” (Derrida, “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German,” Acts of Religion, p. 137). 9. This phrase is quoted by Ferraris in a question put to Derrida in Derrida, “‘I Have a Taste for the Secret,’” p. 15.


occasion for a major convergence of the intellectual currents that had been unleashed by the revolution in criticism and theory that swept through all the disciplines of the human sciences in the preceding half century; revolutions in religion, in media and technology, in the world’s political and economic systems had been accompanied by momentous transformations in the conceptual frameworks for understanding these things. The “theory revolution” was both a symptom of and a critical response to these momentous changes, and the onset of the “war on terror” brought that revolution a major test. On every side one heard that theory was dead, and the New York Times, even as it was urging the nation to carry the “war on terror” into the catastrophic (and theory-driven) misadventure of Iraq, announced that “the latest theory is that theory doesn’t matter.”10 Meanwhile, Said’s diagnosis of the futility of the global war on terror and its linkage with the local war of occupation in Palestine was being worked out in his final book of political writings, From Oslo to Iraq, and Derrida was pondering the deeper systematic character of terror in “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” his dialogue with Giovanna Borradori.11 I will return to Derrida’s diagnosis of terrorism in my own contribution to this volume, but for now I want to turn to the other contributors to give readers a sense of what they will find in these pages. We open straightforwardly with Vincent Leitch’s masterful account of the full range of themes in Derrida’s late work, which then turns its focus to the specific concept of sovereignty and the linked themes of community, the rogue state, and the subject. This is followed by J. Hillis Miller’s canny reflections on the isolation of the subject in Derrida’s thought, his separation of Heidegger’s Dasein from Mitsein, and its implications for ethics and politics. The focus then narrows in my essay to a single text, Derrida’s first interview after September 11, 2001, and the linkages among deconstruction, autoimmunity, and terrorism. Rodolphe Gasche´ then provides a rigorous unpacking of Derrida’s thinking on the idea of Europe, as a heritage, a responsibility, and a mourning that is wracked by the split between Platonism and Christianity. Frances Ferguson and Stephen Melville then turn us to the question of lateness and the periodizing of Derrida’s career. Ferguson retraces Derrida’s critique of linear, chronological orderings as an issue not only in the account of any life or career but also in the practices of nonlinear and nonhermeneutic reading that Derrida introduced, his lessons for readers. Melville offers an 10. Quoted in Mitchell, “Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 324–35. 11. See Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju¨rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, trans. Luis Guzman, Michael Naas, and Pascale-Anne Brault (Chicago, 2003), pp. 85–136.

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alternative version of the late Derrida, treating him as a guest who has not yet arrived at the parties (and perhaps the funerals) we have arranged for him, especially those parties that take place in universities, a subject of central concern in Derrida’s late writing. Geoffrey Hartman turns us from lateness to nowness and the copresence of disparate thinkers from different eras in Derrida’s writing, most dramatically exemplified in the simultaneous appearance of Hegel and Genet in Glas, the finest virtuoso performance of “a literature-reading philosopher, a species close to extinction.” Two poetic contributions round out this issue. He´le`ne Cixous’s marvelous elegiac prose poem treats Derrida as a shape-shifting Proteus, as if folding up the late philosopher in a winding-sheet of language. And two of Michael Fried’s short poems conjure up memorable images of Derrida’s final decade—his ever-prolific Macintosh computer, and an imagined gathering of animals at the edge of a frozen lake. “The Message” is a comment on the final gift from Derrida to be read at his memorial service. Next comes Jean-Luc Nancy, whose interview summarizes the shape of Derrida’s career. We give the last words to the late Derrida himself: his seminar on “the event,” delivered at the University of Montreal in 2003, and the words read by his son at his graveside.

Jacques Derrida as a Proteus Unbound He´le`ne Cixous Translated by Peggy Kamuf

1. Proteus To all appearances he is the seal herdsman of the great deeps. He is endowed with the power to change himself into every shape: into water, into fire, into all that crawls on the ground beneath bushes or in cardboard boxes. He can become animal or element. He can be seen changing into a lion with a mane, then into a dragon, a panther, and a giant pig. The “then” lasts only the blink of an eyelid. He turns himself into running water, division of the spring and large plumed tree beneath which passes a hedgehog ruffling its twigs, and when he’s come to the end of all his magic, here he is speaking to me and interrogating me, saying: What then? But it’s I who want him to answer me. For he possesses the gift of prophecy, although he refuses to supply information to mortal questioners. Who? Let us say Proteus, first prophetic patron saint. Proteus, you say, your oldest master guide, discovered in Algiers, and to whom you devote (devoted) gratitude and a proteiform cult so as to resist the images-of-me that have been circulating since your adolescence. Which of my faces am I going to put on? you ask yourself. Always at least more than one, barely do you make yourself a sign before you replace it/you, now lion already worm, agitated and agitating denizen of the caves and caverns called philosophy. For a given visage, a visor. The detailed user’s manual for the visor can be found in Specters of Marx. Here is the scene: There must be a beach. A sweep of sand. There is a sea. Why an immense beach? Why a sea? These two immensities are always necessary so that the thing may happen at their margins. There must be the wedding of this douCritical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0001$10.00. All rights reserved.

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He´le`ne Cixous / Proteus Unbound

ble expanse, which one can see celebrated in Proust’s Recherche as well as in My Pushkin by Marina Tsvetaeva—as well as in Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur where Jacques Derrida touches on the edge. Emerges from the water of the Mediterranean, the sea of Homer, Ulysses, Saint Augustine, Jacques Derrida. What? A kind of divine mammal fish body torn from the sea torn from sleep torn from a wild cat a body always otherwise foreign. One could say ich, the torn body of a fish whose portrait Adami did in 1975, ich, the foreign body of a word meant to interest another language, right away it is translated into a panther from there into water, solid liquid cold hot, fleeing running. Not that you are a lion or a plumed tree. But you want and have to prove at every moment that you are not a lion, not altogether. You are a nonlion, moreover a nontree, a number of things and creatures put into syntax by the movement of a deconstruction. Yourself another, shaker-upper of ondttheology as Joyce might have said and Gracehoper in your spare time. Proteus flees. Who? What? He flees. Seen-proteus, said-proteus, seizedproteus, fixed-, photographed-, identified-proteus, proteterrestrisized. Without stopping he. Il n’arreˆte pas de. As for us, unflagging but trembling during the time of the trance, we take hold of him. It’s because he has the secret. For us the questioners (descendants of the Odyssean travelers, in this instance Menelaus), it is a matter of making him talk. For him it is a matter of escaping the questioners. He wants to keep the secret. Which one? His own, ours, the final word, the secret that all men seek to find again. One may wonder why he wants to keep it. But his daughter Idothea urges us not to let him go until he’s surrendered it to us. Here the scene morphs into its other: it’s Jacob’s struggle with the angel, (then) it’s Hamlet’s struggle with the spectral Hamlet who holds the secrets. “Here, put a pin in that chap!” Pin him down. We pin him down because this guy has the keys. Without the keys there’s no going home again. H e´ l e` n e C i x o u s is Emeritus Professor at the Universite´ de Paris 8, VincennesSaint-Denis, where she founded France’s first women’s studies doctoral program in 1974. She is the author of more than fifty works of fiction, theater, and criticism, including Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2000) and Insister a` Jacques Derrida (2006). P e g g y K a m u f is Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. The author most recently of Book of Addresses (2005), she has also edited and translated numerous works by Derrida. She is presently completing translations of two recent texts by He´le`ne Cixous, including Insister a` Jacques Derrida.


All at once the god gives in. He is the first to wonder, “To what then will I have yielded?”1 To force, to fatigue, to compassion, to—No. Answer: To whom. Notice that this god speaks French through the mouth of Jacques Der` qui? To whom? What is that to say? rida. A “So I yielded,” says the self-analyst who is looking at himself (in the masterpiece that is “ⳭR”), “even before knowing it, avant meˆme de le savoir [if he yielded it’s because he had already yielded], as if I were read in advance, written before writing, prescribed, seized, trapped, hooked. And then it was my business [ça me regardait]. Making me speak, it was putting me in the wrong, but it was too late and that, ¸ca, will have taught me a lesson.”2 Why have I always already yielded? Because it is written. You will be read by whom and you will hand yourself over to whom. Who’s that? But who then or whatwho then is who? Who is called Who, who bears the proper name (of) who, alias Who’sthat? Who comes from which depths? Let’s listen to this Who. Who, Chi/Qui, in the other language, the mirror language is ich according to anagrammatic inversion. Ich? That is to say, Ich, the German I, a soft ich whose homonym is Ish, man in Hebrew, that is to say, Ich I—a piece of the fish Ichthus, that is to say, by reinversion, chi, the letter of the chiasmus, junction letter, crossroads, interchange, quadrifurcum. Qu’y a-t-il dans un Qui?! How much there is in a Who?! Who would have thought that in this simple sign there would be the crossing of so many people, worlds, Greek Jewish Christian terrestrial underwater; passing through here leaving their humid trace of tears milk or blood are Oedipus the man of the crossroads Christ the god fish this Christ with fishhook or according to the demiurgy of the Timaeus the two neighborhoods of the Self at the heart of the Same and the neighborhood of the Other.3 In saying this I am mixing the Greek operation of the two bars in v with the analysis of the topological characteristics of the sides in contemporary mathematics. Me is a who. Me Who is not a point. Who and What are crossed. Qui est quoise´. Quoi quise. Who is whatted and what whos. As soon as Jacques Derrida predicts, Who just waits for its chance to take over the stage from what. Who doesn’t know what it would do without what. Who Proteus detaches from himself, is detached and, as Jonah, spit out, he falls overboard, falls

1. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, 1987), p. 155. 2. Ibid., pp. 156–57. 3. See ibid., p. 166.

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into the heights above the agitated border of the seas—performs himself. What outdoes itself with the monumental fall is him. What falls on top of the one he is ceasing to be as he is ceaselessly becoming the following one, the suiccessor, the seccessor; it’s him, always ahead of himself. He is said to be a “philosopher.” The philosopher is someone, you say, who always asks himself the question: what is philosophy? The island is full of voices. The time is full of questions. Around you-Proteus-Prospero,questions arise all the time. And what do you do? You respond? Yes yes to every question you respond but by bringing up an additional question. Your responding, for you always respond, you were born to come and respond, is a saying otherwise of the question. You cause the key to turn above the point in the question mark. A bird catcher, you receive the question on your point, and you send it off again and farther. As prophet you prophesy: the truth. Which is to say Nothing that can be said today, nothing that can be expected, except, precisely, nothing. What to expect? you are asked. You don’t run away. You respond: Nothing. As we know, nothing is not nothing in Latin or French. Rien is res, rem, that is, a thing. Nothing is something. What are you announcing? The impossible. It’s what we worry about. It’s what we rejoice in. You give the best there is: the unforeseeable, life itself, the future. You are yourself a future, in the future. Over which your responsibility is infinite and nil, since you promise only the impossible. The impossible welcomes all desires and all hopes. Will the impossible happen? We’ll see. We’ll see it. And we’ll fall to the ground with emotion. I add that the impossible is of course countless. There are as many impossibles as there are questioners. Each has a chance. So, there must be a beach, a sea, a sky with all the paradoxes of the— impossible—limit, nondemarcation said Proust, this topology of the incalculable you say, so that a what can arrive. If it is at the border that everything arrives, happens or fails to happen,4 no scene, no place or landscape is as lacking in the lack of borders than this interminable expanse. This what is first of all a point. You see it, a pathetic little Proteus, make its entrance in Ulysses: A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand . . . . Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who? . . . The dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. Terribilia meditans. A primrose doublet, fortune’s knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you pining, the bark of their applause? . . . Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand . . . . Looking for 4. See Derrida, “Pas,” Parages (Paris, 1986), p. 88.


something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back . . . . On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired . . . . His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse . . . . Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf ’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and . . . . stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturing the dead . . . . Passing now. A side-eye at my Hamlet hat.5 In a few pages the doggod Proteus will have sent reeling the question, What is a What? as well as the question, What is a dog? And not only. If we follow the dog’s tracks and by the same token its inseparable anagram (god), we’ll soon feel we are watching the projection of a filmed and anticipatory version of the dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy that unfolded in 1988 around a table and around the question, Apre`s le sujet qui vient or said in still other terms, Who is coming after the subject or else, After the subject who is coming or else—no, I cut things off, for the four-footed dialogue wants to be and should be reread—at leisure; it says everything, simply and loudly about everything I’m trying out here by turning for better or worse toward the point of view of the dog. What does dog mean? what does doggod say? want? think? was heisst Hunddenken? Look: there are two living beings on the sand of the world: (1) one is a man apparently, for the moment a young Irishman, the theater in his head invaded by philosophical and mythical crowds, Stephen Dedalus he’s called, and right away after the subject comes Aristotle, the time it takes for Thomas Aquinas to come, morose Adam, let’s skip, peekaboo, now he’s Hamlet by the hat, “and what if I were suddenly naked here?”—that’s not Jacques Derrida who says that to the cat, it’s the artist Stephen Dedalus to the dog— no, it’s too good to continue to come after the subject; there is a tail end of all genres, all species, philosophers, saints, including vampires, spirits, pan, fauna, peacocks, you’ll find all the whos—and the whats—in the whomeland that spreads behind the veil. 2) The other is a not-man apparently, a whodog for the moment, but right after hare buck who is buck naked in the field, from there fawning bear, dogagain, grandson of a leopard grandmother soon panther-fruit of adultery, dogagain young calf almostwolf right before being a vulture and he—with all these pieces and moments of being that he succeeds himself in 5. James Joyce, Ulysses (1934; New York, 1990), pp. 45–47; emphasis mine; hereafter abbreviated U.

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being—is called Tatters. Tatters, summing up all forms, wears and tears of beings, ragged proper name of this superdog that zigzags across the always once-again-virgin page of the earth. So here then are two living beings with life and death by their sides, what comes before life and what comes after life. That’s what they are talking about Hamlet Dedalus and God Tatters each one in each one of his places. These two Proteuses that have all the sands of the world on the table around which they change into each other, each of them meets first of all death, each his dead one and his own death, each stumbles upon the cadaver of his fellow creature both touch are touched by death and the body that is not and could be mine. The double scene—Hamlet Stephen faced with the drowned one, while Tatters who has just been a calf has his nose up against the brother-carcass—is an allegorical commentary on the deeply moving critical reading that Jacques Derrida lovingly conducts of the Le´vinasian meditation on the law: Thou shalt not kill. A law addressed to man, meant for the man man institutes, as is recalled by the quietly grieving Jacques Derrida, as if thou shalt not kill obviously supposed man as its direct object and thus granted man the freedom and the right, the franchise therefore to kill all others than man humanistically defined, thus to kill Tatters, his brother and all his others. The “Thou shalt not kill”—with all its consequences, which are limitless—has never been understood within the Judeo-Christian tradition, nor apparently by Levinas, as a “Thou shalt not put to death the living in general.” It has become meaningful in religious cultures for which carnivorous sacrifice is essential, as being-flesh. The other, such as this can be thought according to the imperative of ethical transcendence, is indeed the other man: man as other, the other as man. Humanism of the other man is a title in which Levinas suspends the hierarchy of the attribute and the subject. But the other-man is the subject. Discourses as original as those of Heidegger and Levinas disrupt, of course, a certain traditional humanism. In spite of the differences separating them, they nonetheless remain profound humanisms to the extent that they do not sacrifice sacrifice. The subject (in Levinas’s sense) and the Dasein are “men” in a world where sacrifice is possible and where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on human life, on the neighbor’s life, on the other’s life as Dasein. Heidegger does not say it this way. But what he places at the origin of moral conscience (or rather Gewissen) is obviously denied to the animal.6 6. Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject” (1988), trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Kamuf et al., ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, Calif., 1995), p. 279; hereafter abbreviated “EW.”


Between the two living ones here, who shows the most respect for the fellow creature, who is the most deadly, who doesn’t kill who kills who laments whom? One then sees Stephen in his surreptitious internal courtroom confessing to no one that he did not save and would not have saved the drowned man. The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden’s rock . . . . The truth, spit it out. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer . . . . Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sands quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I . . . With him together down . . . I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost . . . . [U, pp. 45–46] I haven’t—I haven’t saved my mother. One sees poor Tatters in compassion. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody’s body. [U, p. 46] One sees Tatters, cast-off remainder in name and spirit, undergo the experience of the encounter with the cadaver. As in The Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrice’s horse had stopped short in its tracks, before the borderthing, someone’s cadaver or else body? Or else an alreadynolongerbody and notyetcadaver a thing still somewhat a being. And, marvelous detail, Fabrice turned green at the sight not of the whole but of the part that still detained the indecisive being in human life: the filthiness of the feet. What strikes Fabrice above all: the filthiness of the cadaver’s feet. That’s the half-and-half remainder of what used to be a man. Filthiness is human. It’s the proper trait of man. The human remainder, proper filthiness. One doesn’t say, about the earth, that the earth is dirty. But the filthiness of feet whose shoes have been stolen, the filthiness of stolen feet, that’s half human, half cadaver half earth, oh! you are returning to dust. As for Tatters, he remains on the dead side of the body, he analyzes gathers the different pieces and aspects of the decomposition of the brother it. Already the former dog is nothing more than a little stub of a dog, a deserted dogbody, a remnant of dog. Now, beneath the epitaph lies the tattered remainder of Tatters-the-dog, the body of that which in the Heideggerian view of his masters has never been a being capable of death but, even during his lifetime, the body of a dogbody, as Jacques Derrida remarks with regret in Aporias.

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Pity the poor body of the one who according to Heidegger is weltarm. But is he poor in soul and weltarm whoever recognizes the poverty of the other’s fate as his own? “Tatters! out of that, you mongrel” [U, p. 46] Cry the masters, poor in heart and imagination—those who take their words to be makers of truth. To be sure, Tatters didn’t save his brother. In the state of human society, Tatters is hostage to the cruelty of men’s blindness. He has to play the dog, doggone it. But Tatters, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, Tatters speaks, Tatters is not a thing in rags. Tatters communes. What does Tatters say in his language? Like Stephen he says: I. On the Joycean beach where everything speaks, all limits are displaced. Jacques Derrida comes to our aid once and for all: The idea according to which man is the only speaking being, in its traditional form or in its Heideggerian form, seems to me at once undisplaceable and highly problematic. Of course, if one defines language in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say? But if one re-inscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability, of differance. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human. [“EW,” pp. 284–85] Yes, if one is not entirely imprisoned in a horrible Judeo-Christian and Judeo-Heideggerian mental rigidity, if one can hear with one’s heart and does not seek, at all costs, to stake out borders with any and all means available so as to superiorize the human species, provided that one loves the living as oneself and has the strange wisdom of Jacques Derrida, the otherwise, who was able to get around to the dog, to the cat, by following the philosophical path of the passion for truth, before having even known cat in his heart, then one will not pose an oppositional indivisible linear limit between the human and the dog. What about Tatters’s way of being delivered over, exposed to the call? What about his self-presence, his self-identity? The internal and external life of Tatters has a spiritual richness about which those who call him scraps or rags of a thing have not the least idea. Take my cats. Not to cite them here would be to show, I believe, a lack of respect toward Jacques Derrida. I would seem to be pretending to be a Heideggerian, whereas I am a Derridean, and so are my cats. Am I thereby anthropomorphizing Philia and Aletheia? No. We know, they know ac-


cording to their knowledge, I know according to mine that we are living beings brought together by love and its complications. Let’s try out the questions addressed to us by Jacques Derrida in his approach to resisting Heidegger’s facileness, which assigns to “the animal” the sadness of a deprived man, enveloped, deprived because without access to the world of man that it nevertheless senses, thus without access to truth, speech, death, the Being of being as such. For example, does the animal hear the call that originates responsibility? Does it question? Moreover, can the call heard by Dasein come originally to or from the animal? Is there an advent [une venue] of the animal? Can the voice of the friend be that of an animal? Is friendship possible for the animal or between animals? Like Aristotle, Heidegger would say: no. [“EW,” p. 278] Philia, Aletheia, and I, and, I’m sure, Jacques Derrida as well, we say yes. What can be done against the deafness, the prejudices, all the mechanisms that give support to the repression? Aristotle and Heidegger would say no. I can only say yes. Aristotle and Heidegger speaking in their languages and according to their codes and me in mine. And the cats? They are not given their tongue. Their language is not heard. Well, this is an error that comes close to being a sin and a transgression. Whoever cannot hear the cat’s speech is just one step from not hearing a woman’s speech or a Jew’s or an Arab’s or that of the subject of one of those species that bear the destiny of banishment. Yes, the animal subject responds and has the sense of responsibility. Yes, the call can come to the animal and from the animal. We who live with fellow animals, we live a life from which none of the signs attributed to the human is lacking; they are manifested by the perfectly receivable and translatable marks of other language. All the affects and events of a life in human and in French or in English manifest themselves. Our life is Shakespearian as much in the tragic as in the comic register. To be sure, there are differences in appreciation, for example, of temporality, of duration. Our life as mortals does not have the same duration. The measure of separations and of distances is not identical, but neither is it from one human to another. What about Schuldigsein, the possibility of being guilty? I should write the passion according to Aletheia. Of course, I can write and they do not write; but, as Jacques Derrida says, writing is not limited to the tracing of pen on paper. They trace, mark, set down otherwise: fault, witnessing, guilt, acting out, wretched reproach, unconditional forgiveness. They are my mirrors, the interpreters of the unconscious, the great tragedians (as people used to say about Rachel or Sarah Bernhardt) of my passions.

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What can one say about the sublime scene of sharing bread that Jacques Derrida evokes, reminding us of this ancient and vital thing: “one never eats entirely on one’s own” (“EW,” p. 282). To learn how to give food to the other, this is the rule and the secret of one must after all eat well, it is a law of hospitality. Are Philia and Aletheia at the table with me and with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy? No? Yes. In truth, we share the need to share. To eat at the same time, to taste what the other likes to eat, to feast. You will hear my mother say that I am cooking for the cats. This scandalizes my mother who is Le´vinasian without knowing it, given that my cats do not cook for me, but that’s not correct. This unequal division occurs only when I keep them in an exclusively human home, to which they adapt out of politeness. As soon as they have a home of their own, a piece of earth and of world, they cook for me. Then it’s my turn to adapt to their cooking of birds and little rodents. As for showing thanks, we do not fail to do so on one side or the other. And I am not projecting. We are also in agreement when it comes to speaking our two languages to the extent that the species difference allows us to do so. They understand everything I say, and I think I understand what they say. The exchange can be compared to sign language. It has to be learned. Moreover, each of them having a singular idiom, I take pleasure in reproducing it in a highly calculated mimeticism: I coo in cat, I chirp a little, I’m not too sure what I am saying, but they know for me. There is nothing inscrutable or surprising here. This is how humans communicate, by appealing to all the other languages at our disposal, the language of the eyes, the fingers, the dance of gestures. But I know I am preaching to friends who share my experience, at least philosophically, so I will stop. I will say merely a few words about the call and about names that are said to be proper. What’s in a name? says Joyce in the famous Scylla and Charybdis episode in Ulysses. In a name there is what can mark the destiny of every being. If Shakespeare has a will his wife Ann Hathaway (see U, p. 191). To be sure signifiers don’t make up the whole history of a subject, but they are responsible for a much larger part of existence than we are usually willing to admit. What Jacques Derrida owes to his letters, his names, his name fragments, his syllables, and thus what we owe to these magic combinations is incalculable. Jacques Derrida’s reading in Glas of Genet and of Hegel in its turn inherits from the letters of Jacques Derrida. What does one expect when one calls a dog Tatters? And my cats, when they received the names Philia and Aletheia, how could I not have expected that love and truth would turn the house into one big theater? Note that I did not purposely program their destiny; they received these names from a god who was not me. One cannot


do it on purpose or calculate. These things, directions, everything is sent, everything arrives, happens. What is a name? A phantom? What is a phantom? It’s not what we think. Shakespeare was a phantom in his lifetime, through absence and banishment. We can say the same of Ulysses, Homer’s Ulysses, the first player on who and what in literature. It takes a lot to call oneself, to say that one is oneself called Ou-Tis, Not-someone. How can someone be called no one? Ou-tis: not-someone. Whoever says, Who? What? thus names Ulysses. Poor Polyphemus should have been suspicious of someone called no one. Why are you screaming? Someone is taking your herd? Someone is killing you? And, what, who is killing me? Outis! The Chorus: Outis? No one? Against you, no force? They left, and I was laughing under my breath; it’s my name Outis and my sharp mind that tricked him. Could one not see here a sinister parody of the scene interrogated under the title Le “Concept” du 11 septembre? How is one to defend oneself against a nameless force whose concept is inconceivable and thus all the stronger and more dreadful?7 After which, what is so surprising in the fact that Ulysses-Outis escapes death-Polyphemus as a ram? And what a ram! The gentlest the strongest the first to reach the flowers of the fields the first to the stream of the rivers the first to the stable in the evening and, today, with his double hidden under his belly in the thickness of his fleece child and phallus no one other than Jackie Outis, one has never seen a more handsome or more rebellious ram, plus bel et plus be´lier que jamais, rebelle, who does not say his name, “le dernier des derniers,” “the last of the last,” beneath the blind hands of his master who does not recognize him (Homer Od. 9.441–76). But one day we recognize him, one day, no more, in that powerful and timid figure of survivor, the one who crosses dangerous checkpoints, the sublime maneuverer who, in order to escape the condemnation that lies in wait for him, uses the strategy of substitution, artist of the mistaken identity, of the qui pro quo, the ancient and still active Proteus, genius of self-translation. Better at fraud than Freud, he has always known both that he risked being grabbed by the other and that he was capable right away of tricks to give his captors the slip. Of freeing himself from the image of his imitations—and limitations. He never answers to any of his images. At a glance, 7. See Derrida and Ju¨rgen Habermas, Le “Concept” du 11 septembre: Dialogues a` New York (octobre–dećembre 2001) avec Giovanna Borradori, trans. Christian Bouchindhomme and Sylvette Gleize (Paris, 2004). See Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju¨rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, trans. Luis Guzman, Michael Naas, and Pascale-Anne Brault (Chicago, 2003).

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in the blink of an eye, a turn on himself and there he is, another. The only way of ducking the accusation weighing on me as soon as there is any identification. “You are” is always a denunciation, a charge of guilt. Innocence survives through interruptive speed, in the ephemeral intervals between the image frames of the film, “Other fellow did it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose” (U, p. 41). “It’s me but I’m no longer there, for nothing, for nobody,” you will say in Circumfession.8 He slips away, he metonymizes himself by leaps and bounds, he epiphanizes himself in an infinite number of impossibilities that graze Being for a tangential second. On occasion and as necessary he othermes himself as a she. A few marks of the feminine here or there, a change of voice, and there he is saved from the jails of the phallogocentric Empire. Imagine if he had been Parnell, the Moses of the struggle for Irish independence, what figure would he have cut for himself to beat it out of there? How the head centre got away, authentic version Got up as a young bride, man, veil orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. [U, p. 43] To see him no one would think he was capable of it, of being a young bride, right? Well, precisely, he will always be extremely unbelievable. Otherme crowned with orange blossoms takes flight in Pas or in Circumfession, a living poem, a deeply moving figure of the dream of happiness always destined to persecution. I just called him poem. For it is as poem, by passing through the poem, by the genius of improvisation in the language, while getting help and carried away constantly thanks to the other powers living in the language, that he outruns the dreaded dangers, arrest, landing in the jail cell of petrified properness, false and forced deciphering, the chains of interpretation, nightmarish reduction to self-unity. Here then is his self-portrait, the only one that fits him, that fits his beingtrace: The poem . . . . If it maintains an apparently sovereign, unforeseeable, untranslatable almost illegible initiative, that is also because it remains an abandoned trace, all at once independent from the intention and conscious meaning-to-say of the signatory, wandering, but in a secretly regulated manner, from one referent to another—and destined to survive, in an “infinite process,” the decipherings of every reader to come.9 8. Derrida, Circumfession, in Derrida and Bennington, Jacques Derrida, trans. Bennington (Chicago, 1993), p. 12; hereafter abbreviated C. 9. Derrida, Be´liers, le dialogue ininterrompu: Entre deux infinis, le poe`me (Paris, 2003), p. 39; hereafter abbreviated B.


Careful, we’re not talking about a sad exile, illegibility is not exillegibility, illegibility is not solitude is not a reclusion exclusion. Illegibility remains a promise, the forecast of riches, incitement to a path; it does not repel, it appeals. It gives to read and to be read, it recalls to reading, and this right away on the threshold, from the first step, from the first restless quivering of nonrecognition that is awakened at the thought of who or what. “This immediate illegibility is also the resource that allows it to bestow a blessing (perhaps, only perhaps), to give, to give one to think, to give one to weigh the importance, to give to be read, to speak (perhaps, only perhaps)” (B, p. 40). Marvelous and prodigious incitement of curiosity—which is life-itself, with a small stroke of the tongue’s brush, as in that infinitesimal abyssal poem of Celan’s that Jacques Derrida cites to illustrate illegibility: UNLESBARKEIT dieser Welt. Alles doppelt [Quoted in B, p. 40] Two lines, more than a world. One must read it in German to delight in the play and caresses of gender (“UNLESBARKEIT dieser”), in the highlighting, in the majestic denuding unveiling of Welt (world, feminine noun in German). A fabulously economic staging of solitudes. No one knows or will later learn who is speaking and who is the silenced you, who is tu: And almost immediately thereafter, one hesitates in the identification of the “you” which the poem apostrophizes: anyone at all, more than one, the poem itself, the poet, the reader, the abyssal depth of some other forever encrypted singularity, God, you or me (“Du, in dein Tiefstes geklemmt . . .”). Du, in dein Tiefstes geklemmt, Entsteigst dir fu¨r immer. [B, pp. 40–41] One doesn’t know who. And that, that’s God all over or him all over. God is in the beat of the poem.

2. What Have I Been? Antonomastic. What follows seeks to be an enumeration, inevitably incomplete but at least eloquent, of his whats. Marks of being, affirmed by him, traits, masks, persons, figures, avowals, occupations, determining moods, images, dreams of being or not being, sketches for self-portraits. An unfinished set of traces that surprise you as they go by because they are so transgeneric and transcategorical: I will call them up in no order. There is no order, I believe,

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other than that of the unconscious, his, and thereupon, in the gathering gesture, mine. So, here are some: (each time one must imagine an I am or a that I am in the vicinity) Marrano, last of the Jews, fearful, mailman, countermailman or counterfeiter, child, Arab, survivor, the animal that I am following here (there’s a whole menagerie of them, to be visited later), ram, a special animal, actor, fichu (I am done in, or I am a woman’s scarf), bandit, smuggler, dreamer, expatriate from no fatherland, Elijah, philosopher, the last of the (fill in the blank), rogue, driven out, Jesus, corpus (of sentences as well), false prophet (that is to say prophet, for isn’t a prophet always a little false and a little mad?). Jacques Derrida’s what-have-I-been will always play more than one trick on the inquisitor-policeman or reader. Oh! I forgot! Specter, revenant. There are two scenes; in one, you, Jacques, are trying to see your soul in the mirror and to paint yourself with as little complacency and infidelity as possible in the manner you believe you consciously see yourself, not at all methodically, stubbornly, blindly, like Rousseau, nor by taking yourself with passionate curiosity to be the matter of your book, like Montaigne, but as you surprise yourself, at instants, rising up without exertion or artifice into view of your thinking—which doesn’t mean, of course and you know this, that you see yourself correctly and entirely. But you are a book of good faith. More precisely, there is someone in you who is a book of good faith. This interests you. Have I been a witty man, have I been gay or sad, a man of courage or fearful, overall happy or unhappy, these questions of Stendhal Henry Brulard are ones you ask yourself as well. In the other scene you pass through a thousand forms of being, all your declensions, disguising yourself and slipping into many unexpected wrappers. In one you declare yourself; in the other your actor puts on masks behind which you spend a good quarter-hour. There are two scenes for what could be called your fittings or your sittings for self-portraits. On the one hand, the scene of “Me, who am I?” the scene of soul states—anxieties, misgivings, qualms—and states of being, an always poignant scene of unruly distress (but me, who am I, Mama, who am I now, when you don’t recognize me who am I with without you, my undistant Mama, my mother myself), of internal and external wanderings, the scene of confessions indictments and defenses of himself-but-who. On the other hand, the scene of “What am I?” where stream and slip by an indefinite number of surprising incarnations, a disparate and magical fauna, a whole culture of apparitions worthy of a dreaming body—good for charming and mystifying the reader. From the wings of the text you may leap out one day in a hedgehog costume, but it won’t be a joke. This istrician moment will


turn out to have been very profoundly thought out; it will have a prehistory, a logic, and still incalculable philosophical, poetic, analytic consequences. One day it will be turned into a song. These two scenes, these two geoegographies of the soul and the body cross, and on contact they inflame each other, astonishing one another and lighting extinguishing lighting extinguishing the glowworm of the question, now who now what, now a ringed cortege. As when finding yourself at the said place Strasbourg, au lieu-dit de Strasbourg—thus not altogether in Strasbourg—you see and feel yourself to be: the-exiled-Algerian-that-I-am-andwho-has-never-felt-right-in-Paris. Let’s pause a moment over the mysteries of this stance of being and its determining circumstances. 1) The that I am is an emphatic construction. It displaces the question of who am I onto that am I, it thingifies the being-word that I am, it estranges me as if I were seeing myself from a little further away. It’s a way of not assuming the I am of identity, of displacing the accent onto the predicate. Every that I am is already a metamorphosis, a little catastrophe. 2) Notice that it’s Strasbourg and the said place Strasbourg that brings out in you the exiled one, and so on. You said it, the said place. This saying of the place always draws other and specific responses from who and what. Where who—or what—live, where they stay or remain is an essential question. Yes, the place says to whom who to be or to have been or what. You cite Creon; you cite yourself having already cited twenty-six years earlier in the same place the Creon of Sophocles’s Antigone to begin (see str. 50). You say that everything begins with a citation, and, saying that, everything always begins with a citation, yes, we ourselves, like you, we are first begun with a quotation, as a quotation and as cited, cite´—I mean City. And the citation that cites you to be what you are then is “der Ort sagt,” “the place says,” “le lieu dit,” it is the place that dictates me and to me. Creon pronounces (and you, too), “Der Ort sagt mir wohl, was ich ordnen muss.”10 Der Ort ordnet. You are yourself the proof of the saying, dictating power of place. Place is not only a place that we control, build. The said place says Sagt. It says us, captions us, fashions us. Yourself, your blood is mixed up with the places that have said you. Depending on whether you speak of, from, toward, or starting out from Algiers, New York, Strasbourg, Paris, Los Angeles, and so forth, the one who and what you are and what you say is other and otherwise said. What you pour out is poured otherwise, other tears, other sperms, other thoughts, other words and prophecies. 10. Sophocles, Antigone, in Die Trauerspiele des Sophokles, trans. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, 2 vols. in 1 (Frankfort, 1804), 2:49.

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I will remain in Strasbourg I continue because I’m there. (But I could and one should go see what is up with you elsewhere as well.) Now, what does it say to you to be and to have been the thing being place, the said place Strasbourg? What does Strasbourg say to you? What does Strasbourg say to you that you are? On the one hand, a friend, the friend, the most excellent friend. On the other, “exiled Algerian.” Paradoxical effect. It’s the refuge-city as you say that makes-says you (the) exiled Algerian. As if you must not forget to be that when you have found shelter, as if the refuge allowed you to be the exiled Algerian citizen who is hidden in you, one of your clandestine stowaways among others, one of your exiled ones among others. Also, as if you always powerfully inscribed your different beings. For you are happy to be a Strassburger on the condition of thereby being returned to being an Algerian. Another mischievous feature: As exiled Algerian you feel good and at home in Strasbourg. Place of dreams, ideal of hospitality; an open place that does not say come to you, but come back. But one has to say that there is a magic key for this said place that says yes to your being at once seeker of love’s asylum and unassimilable. Where is it? What is it? A cathedral. (There are others in your magic geography.) Do you know what it is called? That question comes to me while I am writing this, in June 2004, in your absence, in the absence of your person, in the proximate presence of your texts. It comes to me with an imagined response: I bet that you do not know. Whose name it bears in its religion? Myself I do not know. And why? I never asked it its Catholic name, for it has always been, without my ever telling myself its so very familiar secrets, the cathedral around which my mother ran as a child ninety years ago and your cathedral, the one you turn around in your turn and then you enter and then you leave—your Jewish cathedral, in sum, the one you love. At the front of the cathedral, clinging to it with her back to it, the young woman with the flowing body who “has one of the most beautiful faces passed down to us by medieval sculpture,” says the commentary, this most beautiful face is blind; one cannot say what makes for its beauty, if it is “the fineness of the other features, the noble forehead, or the delicate blindfold covering her eyes,” but love recognizes her among all other women, the Synagogue, she who is Jacques Derrida’s idol, the Synagogue with the blindfolded eyes who makes him into an idolater. There is something, a je ne sais quoi that singles her out for adoration. Beginning with the adoration of the statuary master who sculpted her around 1220 and about whom nothing is known. So perhaps it was already you—the one who makes of the dismissed young woman a symbol of an outdated world, she who remains present for eternity.


Through a feat of architectural focalization the Synagogue with the blindfold has become the figure of the cathedral; it casts a glance off to one side. The other, the Church, watches her welcome pilgrims with her bowed face. The cathedral turns its juvenile synagogue face toward us. It’s in this place, on this square where all may pass by, that when his eyes are blindfolded by the Synagogue he feels and says he is “a kind of Islamo-Calvinist Marrano.” He can be that in the blindfolded eyes of the undying one. But then is he not himself Synagogue, the gathering? Is not his corpus as he often calls it, the “said place that says or dictates to gather together, the place where one comes and goes in the encounter with others, the space toward which one conducts one’s steps and walks side by side,” as he says of her, of himself.11 At the painful dis/junction of your (plural) cathedral and my (masculine) synagogue, body to body, side by side, eyes blindfolded for philosophy he asks (himself), “as only a woman can do naı¨vely,” asking himself like the naı¨ve one he still is and despite everything: what is the truth of revelation, what is sight, the veil, or unveiling? What is Jewish? Who says the truth, what is life and existence in general? Not moving, he looks at himself in the mirror of rose-colored stone and sees himself standing there, flexible a little dismissed his body swaying the head bent, everything goes by slowly; there’s enough for an eternity, the tunic (the unique tallith) the Book that the left hand lets-does-not-let-fall, infinite thought, the uninterrupted dialogue. If one were standing in their vicinity, his and that of the image, one would hear him whispering some sentences from his Algerian corpus that have come to dance on his lips out of the pages of Circumfession first in a restrained voice: “remains (the fact) that I am here now,” “a precious but so vulnerable intruder, one mortal too many, Elie loved in the place of another,” and then in a loud voice as if capitalized: “CIRCUMCISED . . . I am and always will be, me and not another, circumcised” (C, pp. 50, 51–52, 71), as if he had been ordered to give just a one-word answer to the question: what am I? and this is the one that imposed itself. Why? For nothing can separate his circumcision from his being, his own circumcision, wound and scar, alteration of the body, a mend made on the body a seam stitching it to itself, so absolutely singular as to have become the mother-sign of the work. For he insists on declaring it, his circumcision, on raising it, brandishing it like a banner, a transparent little sheet of skin, the location of his unshakable courage, the place of his being that no torture could ever make him renounce or disavow, he who on the inside is “cowering and lacking 11. Derrida, “Le Lieu dit: Strasbourg,” in Derrida et al., Penser a` Strasbourg (Paris, 2004), p. 34.

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courage,” as he underscores with that humble naı¨vete´ of a synagogue that sets him apart. yes, goes the synagogue, yes I hear “I shall always have been eschatological, if one can say so, in the extreme, I am the last of the eschatologists” (C, p. 75), sentences he said in Nice, at his mother’s bedside, for the place told him to say them one by one, in front of his blindfolded mother, this place, this edge, of the world and of time, this edge of the origin, this other bank, to him, the one who would not be, “who would I be, me, if I did not begin and end by loving you in my private language deprived of you” (C, p. 41). Who is speaking here, in the night that broods in the middle of the day, who addresses the statue born from the love of a nameless but not faithless master—and addresses also the girl that the mother always is for the son? “Someone who has written a lot on eyes,” he says, an expert in writing on the eyes.12 Whose eyes? In general the eyes of the blind. But what is blindness? And what is writing on eyes? How and with what can one write on eyes? Poetically, of course, but still. Now I have just asked you if you know what the Cathedral is called. “It has a name?” “Who is it dedicated to? To which saint?” Your naı¨vete´ answers me right away: “Ah! that I don’t know. I never learned it.” “It is dedicated to Our Lady,” I say. Me too, I had never thought to know that. “I have never read anything on the Cathedral,” you say. “I had books and did not read them,” I say. This cathedral, “yours” (“la ‘voˆtre’”) that is, the others’, the friends’ perhaps or the Strassburgers’, the Catholics’, the goys’, in any case not-yours (pas-tienne), you say, and I say: “yours” (la voˆtre) my mother’s as a child and yours (tienne), also mine a little, this cathedral is someone to such a degree, more someone and less thing than the cathedral described by Elstir, she has to such a degree Her Obviousness and her internal place that, just as with beings one loves absolutely, it is as if she couldn’t have an external name, another name. So I continue to ask you—for here right at the moment there is a place that does not take place and is not altogether a place, and because it is the Place that tells you who (you are going) to be with, who you are, the time of the place—who you might well be at the moment if you were right then being who or what? Which is not always the case, for you are also able to be. To be being. 12. Ibid., p. 37.


And with generosity, humility, you search—and you find: “I am a prieur.” That wasn’t on my list. I don’t know if you are an impenitent prayer, or a prayer by essence or definition or the prior of the cathedral priory or a pray-hour or a prayerborn or I don’t ask you. You’re still searching. Hm, you say. That means you are really searching. And you find. “I am a . . . coursier.” Ah! How will we translate that?! As a coursier in French he is more than one, as usual. And more or less swift as well. Errand boy, courier, or, in more literary language, steed, horse. In any case, one hears the race being run: la course. Now I am going to follow in the tracks of one of these “coursiers.” We’ll find it “on the road.” To him the question is asked: what is poetry, che cos’e` la poesia, what thing is poetry? as the Italian says idiomatically, and I envy it this thing. To him who may be a her, like the coursier-steed moreover, if he were a mare. The thing nicknamed che cos’e` la poesia, if it is a text (it is written), cannot be compared to any other in the world. No one has ever seen a being like it— a borning or an unbeing. It is a Latin it. Or an ist, the ist of was ist, who would have forgotten or left behind its was so as to set off on its own on the street of dreams that Jacques Derrida clears away under the thing’s paws, or the ist of istrice, the head-being, the head with the long soft nose of the he´risson (more harshly called hedgehog in English) or the ist-oria or the hidden-ist in episteme, the part kept secret in every question, the response that doesn’t respond, for to the question he was asked (in Italian but all the same), “what is . . .” he did not give a composed response, he didn’t prosify, as a human and a philosopher would do; under the charge of the question, he rolled himself into a ball. With an absolutely amazing stroke he instantly changed himself very precisely into a he´risson, hedgehog, that is to say, into a poem, he did poem, he made himself a poem that is to say hedgehog, thing-being with a completely inaccessible and very tender underbelly, warm living thing untouchable beneath its covering of spines, thing-being capable as well of great speed, as the coursier-courier of the heart, and as apotropaic protective envelope capable of a perfect apparent immobility. He doesn’t answer the question; at most he concedes two words, as usual; he oracles, recalls that the thing poem, however infinite it may be, is brief, no larger than a living pebble, a walking leaf so short that two words is too

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much—thus in a word, he´risson, several things, beings, words, worlds, rolled up in a ball; two words then, the fewest possible of the strongest possible; thus ellipsis or election; thus heart or he´risson, yes why not. One has to imagine everything that in a dream would be whirling between ellipsis and election evasion and designation. Everything would happen without transition, absolutely within the heart. You would see the he´risson closed up, for alive it could not be picked up with the fingers of thought. One has to aspire to the thing, pray it, come, and let it be through the miracle of another memory, right away in the heart, inviolable in the inviolate. It would form one body with the heart, this animal fallen from the ground like the poeticliche´ angel falls from heaven. Let’s follow the hallucinated visit of the he´risson, alias hedgehog. One soon gets the feeling that this hedgehog is not generic. This newborn hedgehog owes nothing to anyone. It is not a hedgehog of fable. It’s the fellow of the hedgehog that I might have mistaken for a large pinecone, who put up his guard at the sight of the cats, that is, who instantly interrupted his race and played dead to escape from a dreadful attack, who made himself illegible, who made himself invisible and blind. At the same blow this animal became a thing in appearance, who put his heart under cover, this minuscule fortress that I saw crouching, secretly breathing under a pine tree in my garden, and who praise god was not killed that particular day, is a hedgehog whose armor is on a scale with its vulnerability, no one will ever know where he came from all of a sudden he was there, figure in flesh and bone of the destiny of mortals, he is a mortal, as nature takes care to remind him all the time—as it reminds Montaigne or Jacques Derrida and through him to recall us to the mortal condition, we who most often forget it. This he´risson reminds us. Precious little living creature who is wise to be frightened. Bearing in its name a syllable of Derrida’s name, the one that laughs, this body is a soul; he she is pending in transit, en souffrance, suffering always signs absolute singularity, solitude he would say, no one can die or suffer in the place of the other, and the he´risson is anguished, with ss he is caught in distress, ss and without the o, save soul he signals in silence, not even the force of an our, the more one observes him the more he looks familiar to us, this foreboding of danger, this tragic impossibility to save oneself without losing oneself, this ingenious deployment of strategies of survival, without ever being able to know what is going to happen, this very moving mental gesture of turning oneself over to the other’s keeping, to the chance of a benediction, may you say the poem well that confides itself like a prayer, and may you speak well of it, how can we not recognize him, this poem without subject without signatory, who goes on rolling his life on the roulette wheels of the autoroute, who cannot not take the risk of being trans-


lated, either to be brought safely to his destination or brought up on charges, it’s double or nothing, it’s he obviously Jacques Derrida, his metamorphosis: You must celebrate, you have to commemorate amnesia, savagery, even the stupidity of the “by heart”: the he´risson. It blinds itself. Rolled up in a ball, prickly with spines, vulnerable and dangerous, calculating and ill-adapted (because it makes itself into a ball, sensing the danger on the autoroute, it exposes itself to an accident). No poem without accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding. You will call poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart . . . . A converted animal, rolled up in a ball, turned toward the other and toward itself, in sum, a thing—modest, discreet, close to the earth, the humility that you surname, thus transporting yourself in the name beyond a name, a catachrestic he´risson, its arrows held at the ready, when this ageless blind thing hears but does not see death coming. The poem can roll itself up in a ball, but it is still in order to turn its pointed signs toward the outside.13 That’s him all right, Jacques Derrida given to be read, abandoned on the highway, exposed to chance. The corpus beyond titles, the heart-work, the thing-signature that repeats its dispersion, ahuman, neither wild nor domestic, nor reappropriable into the family of the subject. Young hedgehog—a mortal is always young—who senses that life can be shortened. He’s speaking of the poem; he’s speaking of the animal thing in danger that he is, beyond his own person, his being his letter his letters his humility. The he´risson speaks to us. The he´risson is a poem in French. All its spines are spines in French. In what state will I arrive, he wonders, will I arrive, what will happen to me in other languages on other roads? What remains of the thing in ist and iss in English, for example? What becomes of the thing when it is transported onto another mother earth? and wakes up Hedgehog, for example. Jacques Derrida: “there is some, and perhaps it leaves itself. . . . A poem, I never sign(s) it. The other sign(s).”14 With anguish, with disarmed consent, he indeed lets himself be transferred. Is he not a pray-er and a prayer? With what delight you find yourself again in the skin of an animal. I will always be amazed by this. You who in reality seem distracted in front of animals, as if intimidated, and even a little shy, as if you dared not believe 13. Derrida, “Che cos’e` la poesia?” trans. Kamuf, Points . . ., pp. 297, 299. 14. Ibid., p. 299.

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that the animal understands you who wishes so much to be understood by the other, especially the animal. You began early, when you were the dreamy child of El Biar; a silkworm, a ver a` soie taught you everything about the heart, by heart and without a word, that is, “love itself.”15 Your ver is too beautiful. It demands to be reread as a ceremony. To him-her you owe your initiation. You saw the mysteries in the temple of a shoe box. Because of it, by its grace of undecidable sex, you remain forever the child. You saw what. And of what you saw I will retain here only a few features incidental to carrying out birth. As resurrection: “namely that the silkworm buried itself, came back to itself in its odyssey, in a sort of absolute knowledge, as if it had to wrap itself in its own shroud, the white shroud of its own skin,” but a cloth that would have been woven at a distance by a Penelopean worm— himself, herself, so as to remain near itself, in the silk of self, a Ulyssex-worm able to come through every danger with the help of the gods, first version of the he´risson, first version of the promising animal—not man as a promising animal as Nietzsche says in The Genealogy of Morals, which you recall in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” but still the animal as a being of promises.16 Why are the two animals who presented themselves to me so I could begin thinking in the direction of the immense bestiary constituted in the world of your texts and where animals multiply and “jump in your face more and more savagely” as your texts seem to become more directly autobiographical in appearance;17 why are they the hedgehog and the worm, that is, the he´risson and the ver? I don’t know. Or else Perhaps because they are both the cause and heroes of sublime poems, illuminations? Perhaps because they happen to be animals who wrap themselves up and steal away, animals with veils who suggest we should interrogate the theme of our nudities, leading us thereby to the heart of that revolutionary meditation on the fate of the “animal” as beast in the philosophical butcher shop and on the (tenacious) tradition of the reduction of animal beings to The Animal. Inveterate tradition ever since the authors of the Bible began telling themselves their stories about men in Genesis (as you analyze it in your almost comic description of “the scene of name-calling” [“A,” p. 383]), a terrifying and cruel scene in which subjugations and slaveries fit together, a circus with animals in the arena, man as gladiator and tamer, and in the tiers a curious God like an emperor. Here is where 15. He´le`ne Cixous and Derrida, Veils, trans. Bennington (Stanford, Calif., 2001), p. 90. 16. See Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 372; hereafter abbreviated “A.” 17. Derrida, “L’Animal que donc je suis (a` suivre),” in L’Animal autobiographie, ed. MarieLouise Mallet (Paris, 1999), p. 286.


you note this feature: man who comes after the animals, who are thus his elders, receives the order and the right to subjugate them. I skip with an infinite regret—for I would like to spend a lifetime with this text that shocks and overturns the old philosophico-humanist temple. For want of a lifetime, then. In which, finally—and we had to wait for you to come along—the jealousy that turns man into man is put on trial and the rehabilitation is undertaken of animals as seeing beings who have been relegated for millennia to the status of things seen. The experience of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse. In sum they have denied it as much as misunderstood it. Henceforth we can do little more than turn around this immense disavowal whose logic traverses the whole history of humanity. . . . It is as if the men representing this configuration had seen without being seen, seen the animal without being seen by it, without being seen seen by it; without being seen seen naked by someone who, from the basis of a life called animal, and not only by means of the gaze, would have obliged them to recognize, at the moment of address, that this was their affair, their lookout [que cela les regardait]. But since I don’t believe, at bottom, that it has never happened to them, or that it has not in some way been signified, figured, or metonymized, more or less secretly, in the gestures of their discourse, the symptom of this disavowal remains to be deciphered. This figure could not be the figure of just one disavowal among others. It institutes what is proper to man, the relation to itself of a humanity that is above all careful to guard, and jealous of, what is proper to it. [“A,” p. 383] For me, when you say this, it is as if you were denouncing for the first time the existence of yet undiscovered concentration camps, as if you biblically brought the animals out of Egypt. The reverse of the caging two by two in Noah’s Ark in order to ensure reproduction. A few words on the scene with the cat, with your cat who is also a female cat, the one who watches you in the bedroom or in the bathroom—“a real little cat”—female, you specify, for in this philosophical narrative everything is real, you are relating here a philosophical experiment that you did in reality and that can only be conducted live, live cat, living nudity, real bathroom with bedroom. A scene in movement in which you and the cat are the characters and you (and the cat?) are the analyst. A scene that, at the moment you run away to escape the nudity that flushes your cheeks, arouses in you the question:

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Who? But, Who then? For I no longer know who I am (following) or who it is I am chasing, who is following me or hunting me. Who comes before and who is after whom. I no longer know where my head is. Madness. . . . I no longer know how to respond, or even to respond to the question that impels me or asks me who I am (following) or after whom I am (following) and the way I am running. To follow and to be after will not only be the question and the question of what we call the animal. We shall discover further along the question of the question, that which begins by wondering what to respond means, and whether an animal (but which one?) ever replies in its own name. And by wondering whether one can answer for what “I am (following)” means when that seems to necessitate an “I am inasmuch as I am after [apre`s] the animal” or “I am inasmuch as I am alongside [aupre`s de] the animal.” [“A,” p. 379] One would thus also have to try to imagine a world without animals, the world without the animals? Being after, being alongside, being near [pre`s] would appear as different modes of being, indeed of being-with. With the animal. But . . . it isn’t certain that these modes of being come to modify a preestablished being, even less a primitive “I am.” In any case they express a certain order of the being-huddled-together [eˆtre-serre´] . . . the being-pressed, the being-with as being strictly attached, bound, enchained, being-underpressure, compressed, impressed, repressed, pressed-against according to the stronger or weaker stricture of what always remains pressing. In what sense of the neighbor [prochain] (which is not necessarily that of a biblical or Greco-Latin tradition) should I say that I am close or near to the animal, and that I am (following) it, and in what type or order of pressure? Being-with it in the sense of being-close-to-it? Being-alongside-it? Being-after-it? Being-after-it in the sense of the hunt, training, or taming, or being-after-it in the sense of a succession or inheritance? . . . The animal is there before me, there close to me, there in front of me—I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also—something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself—it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat. [“A,” pp. 379–80]


I ask myself here: Why cat? To be sure, you say, cat looks at you. You look at cat. You say everything about the scene and the event. But why cat? And why not dog, for example? Would the same unfurling of questions be produced if it were an ape and you naked? My hypothesis—perhaps mad: (what causes you to see yourself seen naked) you see yourself seen by cat as if by no one. You see that cat sees you. Cat sees you, thus sees you naked. If you are naked cat sees you even more naked. You are not alone in being naked. You see the naked look of Cat. Cat has a naked eye. Cat has what you call the fathomless look, the eyes of the other. You interest Cat. Dog may have fur, a visor. Dark eyes. You see yourself seen for a long time, the time it takes to be seen and not just glimpsed. You see yourself seen by a look that does not turn away. Cat is neither waiting for food nor lying in wait. Cat looks at you with a love that doesn’t judge you, doesn’t ask you, leaves you free. (When Cat is hungry, then yes, he looks at you to ask you.) Cat gives you all the time. Cat lives. Cat takes the time to live. Cat gives time to live. Cat wants if you want. Does not obligate you. Cat has the absolute eye. Like god. Cat knows how to love well. Cat introduces to the matter of love, naturally. But I need to say a few more saving words saluting cat, the most sublime species. I am thinking here of the amazing figure of Abraham, Abraham on the ass, the one you accompany to the summit of his disappearance as a man and whose infinite silence you translate with the tact, delicacy, and superior compassion that are your invisible virtues (in The Gift of Death), the one to whom you restore time and honor. I say Abraham on the ass, a` l’aˆne. I should say: Abraham the ass since here is the being who ablated and oblated communication in human language. He’s the one who no longer speaks in human, nor in languages, nor in God either. A silence of the dead in life. A suppression without any resistance. An acquiescence to infinite exile outside reason and unreason. Abraham l’aˆnehumain, the aˆnhuman stands in total solitude, in an unknown kind of virginity on the verge of your world of living creatures with their mouths agape. The fabulous aˆnhuman is at home in him at home in you. To all the forgotten, dismissed, rejected ones of destiny who are depicted almost invisibly in the corners of the great paintings of mankind, you give back the vital importance and dignity that bibles and philosophies had confiscated from them. Here I would like to write a wild, fantastic, part zoological, part phantomatic chapter on the population of special beings in which who and what

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are made to cross and discernment is made to stagger in the path of your texts—but I will not do it. I will limit myself to an allusion and an example. You will have reminded us so many times that the question always comes down to the difference between the living and the nonliving. But where is this difference, where is it hiding, is it detectable with regard to our secondary states, when we wander, border beings and passengers “in the air” between the indefinite banks of what is called life and what is said to be death. The dead one lives still a thousand lives before the end, as long as those who think of themselves as living don’t kill him. What is a dreamer? The soul leaves its body in the bed and then becomes all forms in movement, a creature of inexhaustible invention. It happens to the narrator of In Search of Lost Time that he is himself the date of the sculptures he admires, then a church, then a quartet, then the rivalry between Charles V and Francis I. Another time he wakes up as a jam jar and this jam jar is quite alive, a creaking sound having called forth its moment of consciousness, and since it is dark and everything is fine in the cupboard, the alerted jar hurries to return “to the delicious unconsciousness of the other jam jars.” Who says: “I sometimes wonder if the immobility of the things around us is not imposed on them by our certainty that they are what they are and not something else”?18 The livingness of the socalled nonliving is far more vast than we generally want to believe. It’s not just in Kafka’s allegorical tales that we are dog mouse or ape, nor only for Swift or Lewis Carroll is the fabulous waiting for us in the corridor, on the road. In almost all your texts, deconstruction takes care to make openings in walled-up classical thought. You yourself I have seen as Socrates-the-seer at Sounion or as a blind man.19 You yourself are often found being a date like the Proustian dreamer. A forest of dates, yes. And on each date a new birth, at each event, in truth, a turning, another time. As semi-awake dreamer of Benjamin’s poignant dream, whose unconsious bearer and ventriloquist you become in Fichus; it is you who hear Voices say (to you)—to whom exactly?: “‘I, d, I am from now on what is called fichu,’” in other words, I am the one who changes a scarf into poetry, in other words, the one who, thrown over a woman’s shoulders and breast, thereupon becomes poetry.20 How far will you go and as what, fichu he´risson? ` la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadie´ et al., 4 vols. 18. Marcel Proust, “Esquisse 3,” A (Paris, 1987–89), 1:648. 19. See Derrida, “Demeure, Athe`nes (nous nous devons a` la mort),” in Jean-François Bonhomme, Athe`nes a` l’ombre de Acropole (Athens, 1996). 20. Derrida, Fichus (Paris, 2002), p. 41.


Let it be clear: in all these cases it is not a matter of literary metaphors but of transfigurations of being into those je ne sais quoi that we often are. Nor are these whims, but living crystals that spring from the unconscious, on the occasion of a seism. Seísme is a word you’re fond of, as if cradling its letters attenuated the violence of the crash. Se-isthmus, the isthmus of self. Seism, sayism an almost English word. Everything lives otherwise. Around you and your transfigures, so many unspeakable being-things crowd in and disperse, trying to whisper their secrets to you, haunting you. One ought to try to imagine a taxonomy of all these beings, idols, guests, simulacra, apparitions, all the species “of ideas” as you end up by saying. But what is an idea to which kingdom does it belong, is it not a living creature, would it not have a species of Dasein. As example here of the extraliving thing-being that is specifically Derridean, I will take those strange deities or prophetesses who sphinx you suddenly—all those human ahuman inhuman sentences that befall you. You remember the one that surprised you in Athens, concerning which you “knew right away that it must have been waiting for you for centuries,” crouching in the shadows knowing in advance where to find you?21 “Arising from one knows not where,” coming to you like the other’s speech like a guest or a host as well whose hostage you immediately saw yourself become, responsible for the salvation of each part of its body, each of its letters therefore, of its words, of its teeth, for it was like a thing and yet animal, an ageless wild cat that was faceless, and yet biting, mordant. During this encounter with a sentence come from the other world, which reminds one of the tales of Poe and their Blanchot version, you were led to ask yourself, “Who is death?” this (in French) feminine living-other, and whether or not moreover anyone had ever been able “to photograph a sentence.”22 Then after having run alongside the words (so your picture could be taken at the same time as theirs), you parted from her, even while belonging to her, your strange, “live-in” ally, and you took the plane back over to your side. I will not cite this sentence, it is yours alone, and it comes back twelve times, each time for the first time to speak to you in secret. And what about the sentence that takes you beyond the beyond by saying to you (in The Gift of Death), “Pardon for not wanting to say” [pardon de ne pas vouloir dire]. This one “simply hangs in the air,” you say. It appears phenomenal, since in the first place it appears. But “in the air” you say. Another fantastic one. It is a meteorite, masculine or feminine, it has both sexes, which has to delight you. It fills the air of the whole book. “And it is by hanging in the air that it keeps its secret,” you say.23 As if it had been projected into the air by Abrahaˆne. I will stop here, beneath its brilliant light. 21. Derrida, “Demeure, Athe`nes,” p. 41. 22. Ibid., p. 42. 23. Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris, 1999), pp. 161, 177.

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3. The Other-Powers To end. It is these presences hidden in the self, with their incalculable power, these beings-in-my-being that foment discord, that dis-cord me, that divide my heart (and you asked yourself one day in The Gift of Death, What is the heart?). I will select two of them, which are separate and complicitous: (1) the one you call “the thing-cruelty” in the unanesthetized pages of “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul.” I will quote a few of its traces (but as we know the whole book is in pursuit of the mystery of suffering, of [making] [oneself/each other] suffer). I underscore “thing”: if there is something irreducible in the life of the living being, in the soul, in the psyche . . . and if this irreducible thing in the life of the animate being is indeed the possibility of cruelty . . . . the only discourse that can today claim the thing of psychical suffering as its own affair would indeed be what has been called, for about a century, psychoanalysis . . . . Psychoanalysis, for me . . . would be another name for the “without alibi.” The confession of a “without alibi.” If that were possible. In any case, it would be that without which one can no longer seriously envision something like psychical cruelty . . . and something like the mere self-relation of this cruelty . . . . Wherever a question of suffering just to suffer, of doing or letting one do evil for evil, wherever, in short, the question of radical evil or of an evil worse than radical evil would no longer be abandoned to religion or to metaphysics, no other discourse of knowledge stands ready to take an interest in something like cruelty—except what is called psychoanalysis, whose name, associated now with evil, would become in turn more indecipherable than ever, all the more so in that only a psychoanalytic revolution would be, in its very project, up to the task of taking account of the grammatical syntax, conjugations, reflexivities, and persons that I unfolded in order to begin: to enjoy making or letting suffer, making oneself or letting oneself suffer, oneself, the other as other, the other and others in oneself, me, you, he, she, you plural, we, they, and so forth . . . . My question will be . . .: is there . . . a beyond that would stand beyond these possibles that are still both the pleasure and reality principles and the death or sovereign mastery drives that seem to be at work wherever cruelty is on the horizon? In other words, altogether other words, can one think this apparently impossible, but otherwise impossible thing, namely, a beyond the death drive or the drive for sovereign mas-


tery, thus the beyond of a cruelty, a beyond that would have nothing to do with either drives or principles?24 Psychoanalysis, if it knew how to take account of philosophy, could be said to be what obliges us definitively to think the who under the category of the what. The id is what, it shows me no pity whatsoever. The thing-cruelty and psychic cruelty as object, the thing-cruelty as object of analysis, is precisely what makes us into its thing, what escapes our control, the neither animate nor inanimate thing, animate in another way, it’s the thing that you surround take aim at and seek to stare down, as if you were inventing a drive. 2) Now, this thing has a strict relation with the other other-power that I will invoke here. I mean love, but I will speak here of ill-loving love, love that does not love well, which is one must admit the most common kind, the kind you warn about by recalling that it is (just as) necessary to eat well as (a form of) it is necessary to love well. The thing-cruelty with devouring love are the two other-powers that make of literature something like the kingdom of haunting obsession, persecution, and crime, or like the restaging of the paradise always lost by It’snotme. Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Proust describe, and in vain, machines for making oneself/the other suffer, for killing; someone in me is torturing me by putting to death in me the person who was dear to me. Dozens of your texts and seminars are treatises on passion to the death; whether you’re speaking of forgiveness or witnessing, the torment is there. You bring a charge and a complaint against X. X is our feminine unknown. X is the almost inevitable error, the human tendency toward the illloving of the other. When one loves “someone” you recall (even in the film that bears your name) one loves him or her as a who, as a singularity and not for his/her qualities, characteristics, beauty, not for her/his what. When one “loves” for life. You share this way of thinking with Pascal: I am not my characteristics. But the one who loves because of the other’s beauty, does he truly love him or her? No, since smallpox, which will kill the beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love no longer. And if I am loved because of my judgment, my memory, is it me myself who is loved? No, for I may lose these qualities without losing myself. Where then is this self if it is neither in the soul nor in the body? And how is one to love the body or the soul except for these qualities, 24. Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Kamuf (Stanford, Calif., 2002), pp. 239–41.

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which are not what make up the self, since they are perishable? For would one love the substance of the soul of a person abstractly, whatever qualities it might have? That is not possible and would be unjust. Thus, one never loves anyone, but only qualities.25 “Thus, one never loves anyone, but only qualities”: is that possible? That would be terrible. And yet it is almost always true. The word qualities could moreover be replaced today by defects or features, signifiers, and so on. But not to love someone for qualities, if that exists, to love a who—without, wherefore, or for what—that is beautiful and also terrible. It is more noble and it is more threatening. To love a singularity is to be capable of and even to be obligated to love more than one singularity. Every man is worth every other man, every being is worth every other being; this is a revolutionary, ideal, divine, and awesome position. But in general we fall into the category of what Pascal despises: Whoever would have full knowledge of human vanity has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi (Corneille), and the effects are frightful. This je ne sais quoi, a thing so slight that one cannot recognize it, moves the entire earth, princes, armies, the whole world. Cleopatra’s nose: had it been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed.26 One has indeed to love well eating the other well, you would say. Absorption, reduction, assimilation, this is the fate awaiting the objectAlbertine. When I say how wrong I was about my character and that I did not love Albertine well, say: I loved her, yes, but in the sense in which we say to the cook: “You should know that I love chicken, that I love lobster,” which is to say, “wring the neck of the one, boil the other alive so I may delight in them, I like them a lot.”27 Capital: when I speak of Albertine, Gilberte, etc. say: I who was very set on possessing them, on assimilating them.28 As for you, you put in question again what you call “symbolic anthropophagy”: And if, in the (symbolic or real) experience of the “eat-speak-interiorize,” the ethical frontier no longer rigorously passes between the “Thou 25. 26. 27. 28.

Pascal, Penseés sur religion et sur quelques autres sujets (Paris, 1951), p. 395. Ibid., p. 232. ` la recherche du temps perdu, 4:982. Proust, “Esquisse 70,” A Ibid., 4:981.


shalt not kill” (man, thy neighbor) and the “Thou shalt not put to death the living in general,” but rather between several infinitely different modes of the conception-appropriation-assimilationof the other, then, as concerns the “Good” [Bien] of every morality, the question will come back to determining the best, most respectful, most grateful, and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self. For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye—and all the “senses” in general) the metonymy of “eating well” would always be the rule. The question is no longer one of knowing if it is “good” to eat the other or if the other is “good” to eat, nor of knowing which other. One eats him regardless and lets oneself be eaten by him . . . . The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good, how for goodness’ sake should one eat well? . . . One has to eat and eat well [Il faut bien manger]—here is a maxim whose modalities and contents need only be varied, ad infinitum. This evokes a law of need or desire . . . orexis, hunger, and thirst (“one must,” “one has to”), respect for the other at the very moment when, in experience (I am speaking here of metonymical “eating” as well as the very concept of experience), one must begin to identify with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally (something one can never do absolutely without addressing oneself to the other and without absolutely limiting understanding itself, the identifying appropriation), speak to him or her in words that also pass through the mouth, the ear, and sight, and respect the law that is at once a voice and a court . . . . The sublime refinement involved in this respect for the other is also a way of “Eating well,” in the sense of “good eating” but also “eating the Good.” The Good can also be eaten. And it, the good, must be eaten and eaten well. [“EW,” pp. 281–83] Now, what about the what of Albertine? or her “qualities”? Is she a nose that took over the world? Has Albertine been well eaten? Well, no. As we know, Albertine bit and tore, and she was treated like an homard or an homarde, a boy-lobster or a girl-lobster. From the outset Albertine was a thing and a thing-for-making-oneself/each-other suffer. A thing, or as one might say in German, ein Ding, familiarly, and always one means a young girl. For what the German calls Ding is das Ma¨dchen,29 young 29. Since the fourteenth century the use of this word is set aside for persons and things that cannot or that must not be named. Concerning a “Ma¨dchen” one says: Kleines Ding! Gru¨nes Ding! “Little thing. Green thing.” Proust will say: rose thing, “chose rose.”

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girl, the neutral creature, as if the girl were more undecided than the boy. Now for Proust young girls are first of all species of flowers. Preferably hawthorn-things, plants with bisexual characteristics. And with a name in French, aube´pine, whose letters anagrammatize the beau, beauty and the dandy. But this would not suffice to satisfy his cruel love. Das Ding Albertine is a mystery, a je ne sais quoi on which one is torn to pieces in a monstrous confusion between the love for reduction and for destruction. Death, by figuration-dis-figuration, is inscribed from the first encounter with the gang, that is, la bande of the four girl-flowers at the beach. Elsewhere I have done a long reading of the mortal metonymization of the rose-colored thing. A few words about this analytic epic of Homeric dimensions. The “hero” is bewitched by A, one of the members of a set F. But it might also have been by B or C. What fascinates him is the thing in which are collected the most powers of flight, feigning, florifiction, the flower that forms having always to be the rose of the phantasm. This power of transfiguration, this speed of metamorphosis, that’s what attracts him, that’s what puts him off. A is just a letter sent from la bande or the group or the society of roses, which only ever arrives with all its thorns showing. Nothing real. Only something supernatural. The supernatural charm of the desired beings, which fades when one approaches them, but which, if it subsisted in present familiarity, would lend to this familiarity something still more supernatural than itself. The supernatural that is approached, handled, tasted, possessed, familiar. But this happens so rarely and perhaps never. So, to keep the supernatural alive, one must keep oneself from approaching it; one must hold the other, the thing, at a calculated distance, which doesn’t stop at elimination. Here is one of the “portraits of things”: But with these very young girls, if our lips do not have permission to kiss them, to know the taste of their flesh, if we cannot sit them on our knees, take hold of their breasts, at least all of that which we would so like our eyes ⬍do⬎ by looking at them, the sense of sight provides a supplement for everything, for the touch of surfaces, for the appreciation of volume, for taste, smell, baser sensations, for more profound ones as well, for feelings of sadness, for tenderness. With the result that in reality it is all of our senses that look at them, we do more than look at them, they are not things seen, mere shadows on a surface, every second that our eye opens onto them and in a single glance, they are things seen, touched, fondled, weighed, caressed, kissed, sniffed, tasted, possessed, made sad, consoled, we do not see them as flat, we see them in space with all of their volume, all the colors in which we taste their perfume in shades of rose, in the reddish hair, with that intensity of the sensations


that intoxicate us when we stroll through a marvelous rose garden. We do almost nothing with them, we say almost nothing to them . . . . I simply raised my eyes to look at one of them and I said to her: “Do you wish to sit down,” and in front of them my eyes saw her rose-colored cheeks . . . . My eyes kissed those rosy cheeks, smelled them, tasted them, put them on my knees to have her face closer to mine . . . . I said: “Sit down,” and they sat down . . . . For friendship is once again self-abdication, the rectification of the sincere boredom we experience in the company of others through the feeling of artificial cordiality, that false exhilaration we have when taking leave of a friend, or at least that exhilaration experienced in us by the one who is like the other and who is not us . . . . It is an abdication. Egotistical pleasures have for me something more profound about them perhaps because they do not seek artificially to prevent us from seeing the reality that we are eternally alone, perhaps because the artist experiences true joy only in what does not go against his instinct and because his creation can only be the work of his originality.30 To be added to the young girls . . . . They were sitting all four of them around me . . . . And these four young girls who were alongside me seemed to me to be . . . four goddesses metamorphosed into companions and nurses, and I had the impression of being Hercules brought up among the nymphs. And even as I barely responded to their questions . . . I looked at them with the drenched eye of the art lover who now has among the most ordinary furniture of his dining room paintings which he had been in love with for so long and where by caressing their shiny and adored surface his gaze rediscovered the mysterious sign and the original scintillation. I looked at their face, I emptied it of everything human and familiar that our relations had put there, with the same features that were before me, with the delicate white face of one of them, the reddish face of the other, the majestic visage of the brunette, with the other’s delicate face and its propulsive eyes, I recomposed the four unknown ones, I said to myself: They are the ones, they were posed there all four of them in the idleness and abandon of their pose, like those women that Rubens painted as Magdalenes or as saints . . . . I said to myself: They are indeed the ones, I plunged them back into the unknown, into mystery, that is to say, into the real, into what life and habit had abolished . . . and looking

` la recherche du temps perdu, 2:945–46; emphases added. 30. Proust, “Esquisse 48,” A

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at them with both my bodily eyes and those of thought, I took their hand.31 These young girls, whose species share just one hand, are plant-things to such a degree that one will find them again in drawing rooms, set down on the wooden floor in point de Hongrie for the evening, then stored away, evacuated as quasi-flowerpots, but still rose-things subject to incessant alterations and wiltings, destined to decomposition. Forever unrecognizable. Take A. She will be “loved” in vain, pursued for no reason out of curiosity for every passing girl: “the only knowledge is self-knowledge,” asserts the narrator, who is poor in other. As if the whole Recherche contained a sort of Rake’s Diary. Raked over his own coals, by his own rakish tricks. An eloquent counterexample of Derridean thought. Finally A will have been but a vase, a bottle, an urn, containing the spent days. Tragic ultimate epiphany: Then the beauty that they had for me of containing spent days became painful to the point of despair. I could very well take her on my knees, hold her head in my hands, caress her, but as if I had handled those rocks that contain the saltiness of ancient oceans or the ray of a star, I felt that I was touching merely the outer envelope of a being that on another side gave onto an infinity . . . . And I realized that Albertine was for me not even a marvelous captive kept without anyone’s knowledge and of whose presence those who came to see me no more guessed that I had managed to enrich my home than anyone guessed concerning that character that he kept the Princess of China closed up in a bottle . . . . She invited me, in a pressing, cruel, and inextricable manner, to go on a search for spent days, she was like a great goddess of Time. . . . Solitude would have been better for me, more fertile and less painful. But which statues, which paintings, which works of art contemplated or possessed would have opened in me that little tear that quickly enough formed a scar but that she, and indifferent acquaintances who are unconsciously clumsy, and for lack of anyone else, myself know so well how to reopen, that cruel exit out of oneself, that bloody little path of communication in private but that gives onto the road where everyone in the world passes by on the way toward that thing that habitually does not exist for us so long as it has not made us suffer, the life of others.32

` la recherche du temps perdu, 2:959–60. 31. Proust, “Esquisse 51,” A ` la recherche du temps perdu, 3:1127. 32. Proust, “Esquisse 9,” A


How far we have come here from the theme of responsibility that is the very essence of your commitment to thinking. How well one understands therefore that, in the fated precedence you have evoked more than once of the philosophical vocation over the literary temptation, what will have been made manifest is your vital alliance with ethics, that is, with the urgent demand to do all one can to safeguard life from the ills besieging it. Proust’s introspective power (“I had seen love place in a person what is only in a person who loves,” he says in Le Temps retrouve´) is, from the ethical viewpoint, the voluntary and voluptuous ally of psychic cruelty as engine of creation.33 Joyce says in Ulysses that Shakespeare goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide himself from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice. [U, p. 252] How terribly true this would seem to be, also about Joyce himself, about Proust, and so many others for whom loss is (his) gain, for so many old dogs or old lickers of their sores. But you, having covered the same paths, you go beyond, beyond the beyond of the pleasure principle, which is very difficult, none can go there without suffering on the way, but you do not stay there, you are no lover of sores, you set out with a superhuman step toward what remains to come, you do not make (only) a flower, you do not make (only) a work of art out of the suffering that the life of others causes (us), you do not cultivate the wound, the thing-wound so as to make it bloom into a literary work, but courageously fearfully, with the courage of fear, with fear at the heart of courage, when suddenly die Welt ist fort you set to the sublime work of carrying the dich and the who, poetically over the bottomless abyss, mindful as you are above all of the life of others, with a step that doesn’t know and doesn’t seek to know how far and how long to hold on. You must. Nous nous devons a` la vie. We owe ourselves, we must devote ourselves to life, you think.

` la recherche du temps perdu, 4:491. 33. Proust, Le Temps retrouve´, in A

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Three Poems Michael Fried

The Message According to the theory of deconstruction the sender of a message is absent in principle, even when she sits touching the excited receiver with her knee. So as Jacques Derrida drafted a few sentences to be read aloud at the memorial service that was held the week after he disappeared he smiled, despite not feeling great, to think how moved that solemn gathering would be by words that did nothing more than allegorize the condition of all speech.

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The Death of Jacques Derrida Somewhere in the north, a vast lake, partly frozen. Snow covering the ground, on the fir trees, in the distant hills. The sky a deep, radiant, metaphysical blue. Cold wind blowing in gusts. A magnificent day. No humans in view, that’s the important thing. But from the dark recesses of the forest there one by one or in small squads comes forth an ordinarily mutually shunning population of foxes, wolves, bear, elk, deer, beaver, otters, raccoons, porcupines, hares, moles wincing at the light, skunks, squirrels, field-mice, voles, no doubt other, lesser creatures as well—all seemingly pacific, self-contained, one might say preoccupied. And for perhaps an hour they mill or skitter or in a few cases leap about, to no apparent purpose, the stronger taking care not to step accidentally upon the weaker. After which they return to the forest, silently for the most part. On the snow: tens of thousands of hoof and paw prints, involuntary brushings of tails, urine traces, steaming turds, even a few crimson specks of blood. A message of farewell to one who held them in his thought.

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Michael Fried / Three Poems

Macintosh It all hangs by a hair: one day everything is going well and the next some test result comes back just slightly awry and you are embarked. When a visitor let drop the news that Jacques was seriously ill I interjected, “Vous eˆtes suˆr?” What I meant was: How can that be— as if the rate at which he produced his books not to mention the avidity with which each was devoured would keep him safe from harm until the day when he himself closed his Macintosh.

Philosophy as Chance: An Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy Lorenzo Fabbri Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

Lorenzo Fabbri: Beyond the understandable and very genuine sadness that followed Derrida’s death, doesn’t it seem to you that his passing led to the realization just about everywhere that a certain epoch of philosophy had come to a definitive close? Jean-Luc Nancy: It’s true. I think just such a realization was evident in the scope and intensity of the reactions provoked by the disappearance of Jacques Derrida. It’s as if, with Derrida, it was not just a great or even a very great philosopher who had passed away but, as you say, an entire epoch, that is, an entire chance for philosophy. Indeed, the chance of philosophy or else philosophy as chance. But let me clarify right away, before developing this answer any further, that this feeling of closure has two sides: there are those who regret or deplore it and those who celebrate it or are at least are pleased by it. That is, on the side of these latter, there are those who considered Derrida to represent not philosophy and not even just a philosophy but a sort of aberration (at best) or else a kind of charlatanism (at worst) in which a certain verbal ability replaced conceptual analysis. These are the people who think that with Derrida an entire epoch of soothsayers has passed, one to which they would no doubt claim Deleuze, Lacan, and, behind them, Heidegger, Freud, Bataille, and a few others also belonged. They are now going to feel free to flaunt the certainty of their good conscience, which is assumed to be clear, rigorous, and exempt from all metaphysical or prophetico-poetic illusions. You will not be surprised if I tell you that these people gave up philosophy long ago. They bear witness to a very narrow mind-set that has gained control of a large part of the academy today (sharing this role with various sorts of neopositivists or bioethicists, if I may speak in this Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–00012$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Jean-Luc Nancy / Philosophy as Chance

way). You will not be surprised if I tell you that I am not saying any of this out of some personal fidelity to Derrida; it is quite simply, even absolutely, a fact that philosophy has always been the total risk of thinking. Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, or Husserl are no less inventors or creators of language, of words and images, and of ways of bringing these words, concepts, and images to the limit than Derrida or Deleuze. But invention always and everywhere provokes a reaction; there’s nothing unusual in that. And yet it’s becoming clearer by the day that what is needed is not a petty rigor but a great one: the exigency of the absolute, to put it in Hegel’s terms; of the unconditional, to put it in Kant’s terms; or of the epekeina te¯s ousias, to cite Plato. But what is needed is this same, unique exigency taken back up and revitalized, hic et nunc, not copied from the ancients but repeated in its very inauguration. Thus it is, on the contrary, the nonclosure of this exigency and of the call or movement that accompanies it to which the reactions of the others bear witness, that is, of those who, whether philosophers or not, refuse to capitulate before the difficulties and risks of the present time. And, let me add, I am not just talking about those who have or who will have a positive relation to Derrida. I am also talking about those who, in their relation with him, put everything he says up for discussion, as long as it is in accordance with that genuine discussion of philosophers wherein philosophy finds its very resource. No doubt this feeling of closure can accompany the feeling of emptiness created by the disappearance of a great figure who was the last of that generation, if it is appropriate to speak in these terms (which Derrida himself did not like; he deconstructed the concept of generation, and he could no longer bear being constantly referred to as the last of the sixties generation). Lacan, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida—it’s true that we have the feeling of having reached the end of the list. And it is also true that they were all contemporaries of the time when colonial wars were coming to J e a n - L u c N a n c y taught philosophy at the University of Strasbourg from 1968 to 2004. He is the author of, among other works, A Finite Thinking (2003), The Speculative Remark (2001), and Being Singular Plural (2000). L o re n z o F a b b r i is a visiting scholar in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Irvine and author of L’addomesticamento di Derrida (2006). P a s c a l e - A n n e B r a u l t and M i c h a e l N a a s cotranslated several of Jacques Derrida’s works, including Memoirs of the Blind (1993) and Rogues (2005). They are also coeditors of The Work of Mourning (2001). Pascale-Anne is professor of French at DePaul University. Michael Naas is professor of philosopy at DePaul University and the author of Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (2003).


an end rather than of the time when identity wars and shifts in the world’s equilibrium were beginning. It is true that we are changing epochs, and very profoundly, but this change had begun with the symbolic and symptomatic date of 1968, and that is what is important and what makes the notion of generation less significant. LF: The question of friendship dominated the final decade of Derrida’s reflections. Beyond the purely theoretical relevance of this theme, how important was this dimension of love or friendship [aimance] in the life and thought of Derrida? JLN: It’s an odd question. Can I really answer it? How should I do so? How far should I go? You are questioning me as if I had the power and the right to penetrate the very intimacy of a man. But I like the audacity of the question, so I will try as best I can to respond. He was a man with an extraordinarily strong and refined sensibility. This sensibility no doubt stemmed, before all else, from a profound sense of solitude, a feeling that was itself the result of a form of thinking that was experienced by him and experienced already from the beginning, as given over to “starting everything again from the beginning,” according to Husserl’s phrase at the very end of his life, a phrase that Derrida cites at the end of his master’s thesis in 1954.1 “Given over to” can and must be transcribed as “destined to” or “condemned to” as well as “being called to.” For the effect of a powerful vocation—and the nature of this vocation itself—is, I believe, always just as much affective as it is intellectual. Or, rather, the distinction between these orders is no longer relevant here. Thought, philosophical radicality, the exigency of the originary, the related exigency to (re)make a language—all this opens up an abyss in front of a subject. The subject can then either be sucked down into it or, on the contrary, draw a renewed strength from it; but in no case can he simply leap over the abyss or fill it up. Derrida possessed exceptional power—of analysis and of synthesis, of formulation and attention, and so on—but this power was experienced as excess, as that which exceeded the capacities of the man. Believe me, I am not trying to give him a mythical stature. It is, in fact, very simple; it’s the destiny of a certain greatness that exceeds the one it inhabits and, in a sense, devastates him. That’s what accounts for the fact that he was so strongly, so powerfully, and sometimes so painfully a man of desire, of love, and of friendship. Giving love around him, pouring out his energies and affections, and asking for and awaiting love from others in order to sustain him in the solitude that he nonetheless knew was impossible to overcome. Life and thought: with 1. Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago, 2003), p. 178.

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Derrida these cannot be distinguished any more than they might be in, say, Blanchot or Artaud. LF: It is often said that Derrida did not like truth. What do you think of this claim? JLN: When people say he didn’t like truth, they forget what Spinoza said about it, namely, that truth manifests itself. And that, as a result, liking it or not liking it is beside the point. It’s even a preposterous idea! Truth imposes itself, and no one can avoid it or prefer something else to it. But we must not confuse verifiable truth with unverifiable truth, that is, with a truth that imposes itself before or beyond all verification. Verifiable truth is a truth mastered by a subject who knows; this is the mathematical and Cartesian model of truth, the truth of science. But even in Descartes the truth of “God,” of the infinite that “comes to mind” (“that comes to”: that imposes itself, that manifests itself of itself) is of another order. This truth might be called verifying as opposed to verifiable; it makes the true and makes true the one to whom it is revealed. It makes him true and is not made true by him. Such is the truth of love, the truth of meaning or sense, or of the unconditional (to use the word of Kant that Derrida revived); it imposes itself, it comes toward me. And, of course, it was everywhere present in him. This truth is not an accord or correspondence between some given and a measure of that given (for example, it is true that Derrida was seventy-four years old when he died). It’s an accord between the given (the world, you, me) and the absolutely nongiven, the incommensurable gift prior to every given. The gift, the sending—these are transformations in Derrida’s work of Heidegger’s es gibt, taken back up in a climate where contingency wins out over necessity or compromises all necessity. And always, behind it all, the rose is without why. LF: During a conference in Paris on the relationship between deconstruction and pragmatism, Richard Rorty claimed that what distinguished Derrida from other contemporary “continental” thinkers, for example Foucault, is that he was a sentimental writer, full of hope, romantically idealistic, someone who believed in the future and in utopia. When Derrida heard this he almost jumped out of his seat, but then he realized that Rorty was perhaps right (though in A Taste for the Secret and Marx & Sons he has little sympathy for Rorty’s “pragmatization” of deconstruction).2 Do you think there really is this romantic side or aspect to deconstruction? JLN: I can imagine Derrida thinking after the fact that Rorty was not wrong 2. See Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Donis and David Webb (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), and Derrida, Marx & Sons (Paris, 2002).


and that he was admitting in this way to a personal weakness, to his penchant for continuing to hope that certain things are possible. There is something similar in his more recent belief that alterglobalization represented a real political opportunity or chance. Even when he was forced to admit the weaknesses or contradictions in the political discourses of alterglobalization, he would speak in terms of strategy and wanted to be able to count on a vector of hope. But on that score I don’t see much of a difference between him and Foucault, since he’s the one being cited here as an example. Foucault too had hopes and expectations that deserved fighting for. I would say that we are all like that, more or less— for example, every time we vote, or else, if we refuse to vote, every time we become supporters of some cause or other. But that is human, all too human, and only those who put on superior airs, who are haughty and cynical or else tragic can escape it. On the other hand, to speak of romanticism, or the future, or utopia, is totally inappropriate; it’s not to read Derrida (even if he himself believed he had to admit a weakness). In Derrida the to come, the a` venir, is always strictly opposed to the future, to l’avenir, that is, to the present-future that is projected, represented, given in advance as an aim and as a possible occurrence. The to come that he loved to speak of designates the proper nature of what is essentially and always in the coming, of what has never come or come about, come down and made itself available. If democracy is given, if it is there, made, confected [faite], established, then one will no longer be able to say that democracy is to be improved; but if one says that it has not been perfected [parfaite], then it must be understood that its essence perhaps eludes all representable, anticipatable, and realizable perfection—not because it would be a utopia but because its essence is the very tension of an exigency that is not related to a realization. And yet it is not a question here of renouncing real struggles or actual transformations, far from it! (On the other hand, wasn’t Foucault romantic when he welcomed the Islamic revolution in Iran? And I am not criticizing him for this; I understand very well the hopes he had. In fact, he very quickly condemned the Khomeini regime when he saw what was happening. But in the beginning he was taken by a great, almost visionary expectation that still merits analysis and meditation today. There is nothing of the kind in Derrida, as we well know. He, in fact, ended up having harsher and harsher words for the Israeli government of Sharon and became more and more vocal about the freedom to critique it without being considered anti-Semitic.) Actually, the difference that Rorty felt but named so inadequately is the difference between the philosophical work of Derrida and the work of Foucault, which was not philosophical. Foucault analyzed situations

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and transformations; he did not call into question sense itself or truth (in saying “sense” here I am using a word that Derrida reproached me for using, even if he himself was concerned with nothing other than what is senseless within sense). I am not claiming any hierarchy here between the philosophical and the historico-critical; I am simply distinguishing. If you prefer, one could speak of two philosophical registers: the one metaphysical, ontological, and so on and the other epistemological and ideological. (I mean by this latter an analysis of discursive and conceptual formations.) It would be necessary to spend more time thinking about this difference. LF: It seems to me that even among the admirers of Derrida’s work there is some doubt about the possible political consequences of his thought. Is there something risky about deconstruction? JLN: Risky in what sense? Insofar as it might veer to the Right? That’s the only sense I can imagine behind your question. For I know that there were some, especially in America and in Germany, who raised this specter of the Right and, in Germany, even the specter of “protofascism” (though this was really directed more toward Deleuze and Lyotard). But what absurdity! What shortsightedness on the part of a “leftist”obsession become totally uncritical! I can cite a personal example because it is all the more striking: my book The Inoperative Community was criticized as being Nazi (yes, you heard me right, Nazi) in a leftist Berlin newspaper simply because the word Gemeinschaft sounded Nazi (and note that I wasn’t even saying Volksgemeinschaft).3 The book was completely misread in that article. And yet ten years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were young neocommunists who were only too happy to discover the book. Such political doubts are always cast from the position of a certain leftist assurance; one knows what’s on the Left, whether it be communist or Trotskyist, Maoist or councilist, situationalist or anarchist, and so on (and one can easily go and find all the contemporary avatars of these figures). But this leftist self-assurance always has two sides. On one side is an absolute demand for justice in the face of hierarchies, forms of domination and exploitation, differences imposed and manipulated. On the other side is the demand for a complete and total refoundation, for a revolution or a reestablishment of the city upon a new and absolute foundation. This other side brings along with it all the metaphysical weight of the foundation, of the origin, of destination, and even of a nature that is realized through a teleological history. I myself shared this 3. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis, 1991).


attitude, in a more or less conscious way, long enough to be able to say that there were times when I found Derrida to be rather cautious in politics. But today I don’t see anyone who can come along and show that one or another of these Lefts would have been better than Derrida’s distance or withdrawal; his withdrawal was able to keep at bay such forms of romanticism (yes, romanticism, as you were just saying) and allowed him to remain vigilant and not get carried away by some dangerous enthusiasm. He tried to be truly philosophical in politics, rather than applying or reconstructing a “political philosophy.” It could be said that, for him, not only communist politics, anarchist politics, and so on were outdated but even the regulative ideals of the sort developed by Hannah Arendt. He also considered the kinds of perspectives opened up by Habermas to be grossly insufficient for questioning the conditions of a common rationality. At the same time, it’s true that Derrida was very apprehensive about any kind of communitarian theme; he did not like that word community, which I had begun to use (again), and he criticized the word fraternity in Blanchot, Le´vinas, and in my own work. I did not agree with him in this and I wished to continue the debate. I believe he was mistaken regarding fraternity. But, as for community, I ended up having to recognize its ambiguities, and none of the “communitarianisms” of today have encouraged me to take it back up! That is why I ended up preferring to speak of being with, and Derrida himself agreed to speak of the with [l’avec]. His apprehension might have been excessive and probably had an affective origin (the word community suggested to him the religious Jewish community, from which he wanted to keep his distance, just as he did from the Christian community), but it had a precise political logic, one that can be debated, no doubt, but that is not in the least suspect. In the end, I would say that he knew only too well that politics or the political must be completely and totally rethought and not made to conform to yet another model. LF: In 1972 Derrida broke with Tel Quel because of its Maoist leanings. In 1974 he worked to oppose the school reform proposed by Rene´ Haby to limit the right to philosophy. In 1981 he collaborated with political dissidents of the Czech communist regime and was arrested after a clandestine seminar in Prague. During the 1980s he took part in many initiatives against apartheid, and in the 1990s he was very vocal about issues of immigration and undocumented immigrants [les sans-papiers]; and, again, in 2002 he spoke in favor of a new international law and accused the American administration of having allowed, in some sense, the events of September 11th. Considering all these dates (to which many more could be added), don’t you find it strange, even ridiculous, that

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some still maintain that Derrida’s philosophy leads us away from the concrete political problems of the day? JLN: You yourself have done a good job recalling these gestures, these interventions. I won’t comment any further on them. Let me simply add this: the political character of a work of thought is not to be measured only, indeed far from it, by the practical interventions of the man. The man is not necessarily nor in all ways the thinker. The thinker, in fact, acts politically before all else by thinking the truth (to return to this word) of a world, of the situation of a world in which concepts like politics, as well as aesthetics or ethics, have to be put back in play, put to work, and elaborated. The first political duty of a philosopher is to philosophize, just as the first political duty of a musician is to compose. It is also notable that many of Derrida’s political actions were shared by others with different philosophical orientations. During those clandestine seminars in Czechoslovakia, all kinds of philosophers participated, including (if I may use this label) analytic philosophers. As for the controversy surrounding undocumented immigrants, there were actions and declarations issued from a whole range of philosophical positions and personalities. This is not to downplay Derrida’s position. What made it unique is that it came from a place where it was not really expected, from someone who had not already been politically labeled. He showed in this way that deconstruction was committed. But, again, to expect proofs of such commitment is not the most appropriate expectationwith regard to the philosopher. LF: In light of Derrida’s reflections on the role of deconstruction, how can one rethink the relationship between the philosophical and the political? JLN: I would have to go even further than I have in my previous answers. But that would be too much for an interview. Let me just say this: philosophy and politics are twins, contemporaries for the last twenty-six centuries. In the form of metaphysics understood as the thinking of presence (of given-present-being) (which does not exhaust the auto-deconstructive resources of this metaphysics), philosophy entails a politics of foundation and authority (of arche¯), just as politics entails a philosophy of the founding origin (be that in the people or in the sovereign or in both, or else precisely in the philosopher king). To speak of deconstruction is to speak of a relinquishing of the foundation (of the groundwork, the ground, the substrate, the support, and so on) that is situated at the very heart of the construction (What is there beneath the foundations? What ground? What blood? What origin? What is the cornerstone? What holds the stones together? What cement?). It is thus to speak not only of another politics that would change the foundation (common rather than private, equality rather than freedom) but of a complete transformation


of politics or else a retracing of the political (what Lacoue-Labarthe and I had once called the retreat of the political in this sense of retracing). That is what Derrida sought in his own way—not one more politics, but another thought of politics, or else another thought than politics, if politics is inextricably linked to the arche¯ in general (or else one must reinterrogate from top to bottom the theme of the arche¯ in general—the an-archy of the arche¯, in the sense that Reiner Schu¨rmann spoke of a principle of anarchy). Above all, one must not cower before the word politics as before a sacred cow or a preemptive injunction. One must first ask, Just what are we talking about? LF: It seems that this speculation about the arche¯ of politics—as you called it—led Derrida to attempt a deconstruction of the idea of sovereignty and, especially, to call into question the borders separating the human and the animal. I recall, for example, the two last conferences at Cerisyla-Salle (“The Animal That Therefore I Am” and “Rogues”), as well as the seminars in France and in California on “The Beast and the Sovereign.”4 In this regard, the absence of comparison with the work of Giorgio Agamben is striking; there is only a brief note on the project of Homo Sacer in Rogues. Yet Derrida and Agamben seem to share many of the same themes (sovereignty, the human and the animal, the witness) as well as the same authors (Heidegger, Kafka, Celan). JLN: You are touching on a rather difficult and painful subject for me as a friend of both Derrida and Agamben. For Agamben began at a certain point to reject Derrida in a radical way, which was of course his right, all the while taking back up many of Derrida’s themes (such as messianism and, yes, the animal). He showed himself in this respect to be extremely unjust—I mean philosophically speaking. To speak, as he did, of diffe´rance as a perpetual delay is to deliberately refuse to read the texts. Or else to write about messianism after Derrida without mentioning him is aggressive and unscholarly (and I know that this was intentional). One could make a whole case here, but it would be rather petty and uninteresting. In any case, I cannot and do not want to say anything more about it; this has been a subject of discussion and even disagreement between Agamben and me. And I know that this blatant but never argued hostility was painful to Derrida. Still today I like Giorgio a great deal, and I very much appreciated his earlier texts (even if I have some reservations about more recent ones), and I would like to be able one day to really discuss this with him, if he were willing. But of course I cannot alter either my friendship with Derrida—that goes without saying—or my objective judgment of texts, their chronology and their interpretations. 4. See Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif., 2005) and The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York, forthcoming).

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LF: In 1993 in Specters of Marx Derrida wrote that he did not want to give up a certain messianic spirit of Marxism. Ten years earlier, in The Inoperative Community, you maintained, reversing Sartre’s famous line, that communism was no longer the necessary horizon of our century. Are these positions as irreconcilable as they seem? JLN: What are irreconcilable, or at least very difficult to reconcile, are the accents and nuances placed on one side or the other. If in speaking of Marxism Derrida is also speaking of communism, then there is indeed an opposition. If in speaking of communism I am speaking of Marxism, the same can also be said. But that was not the case, or not exactly. It makes sense to me to want to retain from Marx (I would say Marx here rather than Marxism) a certain force or vehemence, a demand for truth and justice, for the truth of justice. I myself did not want to call this messianism, or even messianicity without messianism because there are too many religious connotations attached to this word. I said that in writing, and Derrida was in fact more or less in agreement (and he wrote me to say so), though he also responded in an interesting way (in Marx & Sons) by speaking of a transcendental messianicity that would be constitutive of the West even beyond Judeo-Christianity. The idea of the Messiah, even if without Messiah, is fascinating because, when seen through a prism at once Jewish (the Messiah to come) and Christian (the Messiah already come), it defies both the themes of identity and accomplishment (messianic time as outside of time). There is probably an equivalent in the Shiism of the twelfth imam, as well as, though in a less visible way, in the Hegelian coming of Spirit. But in all this, and despite everything, there are for me too many connotations of a salutary or saving advent. I would want to go further than this, beginning with my debate with Derrida, which will have had the great merit of confronting head-on a formidable question: how is one to designate an advent that is not an apotheosis? LF: I have always been struck by a rather enigmatic line in Memoires for Paul de Man where Derrida writes: “America is deconstruction.”5 What is the relationship between the United States and deconstruction? JLN: Just what did he mean there? I am not going to go look for the line in the book—that would take too long—but the line is well known and I think he repeated it during a television program. Some made fun of it by saying, “We don’t get the joke!” I imagine he might have had something like this in mind: apart from the fact that America appears—rightly or wrongly—as a world in permanent destructuration and restructuration, it can also represent a decomposition or destructuration of the Eu5. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York, 1989), p. 18.


ropean West. It is constantly coming undone because it is no longer attached to its Mediterranean, Greco-Latin, Egyptian, Arab, and Berber foundation. It has no Middle Ages and no Renaissance. From the start, then, it brings about a disjoining that lays bare, to speak very generally, something like another beginning. (I am thinking again of that phrase from 1954 we spoke of earlier.) Of course, this other beginning can be taken as an absolute foundation, as an arche-originary and original originarity—and that’s what happens in a certain spirit of the American dream, the American nation, or the American way for life. But at the same time everything remains suspended there in an absence of origin. To come only from oneself is no longer to come at all and never again to be oneself. Perhaps he wanted to indicate why it is necessary to leave Europe in order to thwart the folding back upon itself of the ontotheological closure—and to understand how this closure has, in Europe itself and throughout our tradition, never ceased to undo and break free of itself. LF: Doesn’t it seem to you that the liveliness and originality of Derrida’s thought are also evident in his ability to produce polemics, in the force with which he was able to enter into a debate, able to expose the implicit suppositions and renew the necessity of an interrogation without conditions? JLN: Yes, it can be said that the exceptional force of his presence and of his discourse easily provoked controversy—a force that we shouldn’t just naively praise, however, as if we were talking about a champion in philosophical weightlifting. We must instead understand that this force carried him along while going beyond him, throwing him out of himself. His powerful, unconditional interventions often provoked discussions, indeed disputes. Polemics is not really the right word here; it evokes defensive and offensive wars around intellectual territories. But Derrida began by suspending territorialities; in this regard he was very Deleuzian (and they both also shared, though in different ways, the theme of nomadism). Most striking was always his art and science of uncovering implicit presuppositions: “You say this, but what is behind it? What preconceptions?” (for example, with regard to me, “you say ‘fraternity,’ but behind this word there is the family, paternity, the masculine as opposed to the feminine, and so on”). He knew that behind all these presuppositions he would find not an originary absence of presuppositions but the impossibility of such a pure origin—as well as aporia. He then went after such aporia with a sort of mad zeal, with a compulsion and, so to speak, a pulsion (a drive, an enthusiasm, a passion) that belonged only to him, that was his manner, his style, his force, and, yes, his vigor. This

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might have had its limitations or its blind spots, but so what? It isn’t necessary to repeat his gestures, only to observe them and understand them as well as possible. We must indeed understand, for example, that the debate with Foucault was not a debate between two theoretical positions but between a determined historical treatment of madness as a category constructed by modern rationalism and a philosophical consideration of madness as the limit of reason. This latter is actually imposed upon us by Descartes’s text itself, and it keeps us from restricting ourselves to a historico-sociological division. But that does not invalidate such a division; it’s just that we’ve completely changed registers. Derrida questioned the philosophical presuppositions of Foucault’s historicocritical discourse; he didn’t polemicize against that discourse or on its territory. LF: I would like to conclude with a question about what no doubt constitutes the difficulty of this interview. If one agrees to answer about and answer for another, vouch for another, especially when the testimony concerns a friend to whom one has only recently said farewell, for what is one assuming responsibility? JLN: You are right. All the difficulty of this interview stems from that. If I were to consider it for itself, I would refuse to speak. I would tell you that I am not interested in speaking about. (Moreover, one would need to be much more of an expert in Derrida than I am; one would need to be able to readily recall his texts, something I am not always able to do. Friendship did not lead me to spend all my time reading him, and he would sometimes say even to me, “How’s that? You didn’t read this or that very well”; or sometimes, if I wanted a clarification, I would ask him if he had written about something or other and where.) And I would also tell you that I don’t claim to be “answering for” him or vouching for him in his place. I think I could do this to a certain extent, since I think I know how he would have answered certain questions (and I am far from being the only one able to do so), but then there are other questions where I think I know . . . or where I know what he should have answered, and in such cases I correct or rectify him as I see fit. Finally, there are cases where, obviously (and including everything I’ve just said), I put myself in some sense in his place, more or less intentionally. I am certain that he would correct—or that he would have corrected, modified, or rejected—certain aspects of what I have just said. It is impossible to distinguish clearly between all these cases. But that’s not what’s important. What I owe Derrida is a certain movement of thought, which is not a teaching or a doctrine any more than it is a corpus of terms, philosophemes, and citations. And that’s where friendship plays a role in thought, the place of a friend-


ship of thought; one stimulates, provokes, and nourishes the other, sometimes aggravates or irritates the other, but one also knows that each must do his own work, have his own style. Derrida sometimes poked fun at me when I used concepts that he considered too loaded; for example, of the title The Sense of the World he said to me, “Well, it’s good to see you’re not bashful!”6 But I know that he knew what was at stake for me and that my treatment of this concept was not as heavily charged as all that. I knew that he knew that there is a necessary play between singularities. And that is what I am grateful for in him, what I appreciate with force and with tenderness. Derrida was one of the great opportunities, one of the great chances, of my life, a very great chance for work and for friendship (along with others, such as Lacoue-Labarthe and Warin, just to stay with philosophy). One does not answer for a chance! Or else, on the contrary, I answer for him only as chance.

Postscript: August 2006 JLN: Since you have offered to republish this interview, this time in an American journal, and since you are giving me the opportunity to review it (adding, in fact, the question about Agamben, which I have answered), allow me to add here a few words. (I am not going to go back over my previous answers, for that would be interminable; it’s better to let each stage bear the mark of its moment.) What I would like to add would go in the following direction: beyond the personal chance that Derrida will have been for me, he was and he remains a chance for everyone, for all of philosophy. What I mean is, he was not only another great thinker, with everything he will have given us through his thought, his language, and his style, but a great thinker whose greatness consisted perhaps above all in confronting head-on, without reservation, passionately, and almost blindly (you know the importance of this theme in his work), the entire legacy of this turning point in the twentieth century that, in one way or another, whether one likes it or not, can be called the end or suspension of metaphysics understood as a thinking of present-being (regardless of the historical reality of this socalled metaphysics). This is nothing less than the conjoined legacy of Heidegger and Wittgenstein and, at least in part, Bergson—nothing less, then, than the question of a thought that would be other than a construction or accomplishment of meaning. It is the exigency to think outside meaning, to exceed signification—but without the least irrationality, indeed, on the contrary, with complete and total rationality. Right up to 6. See Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minneapolis, 1998).

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the limit of reason. He thus put everything in motion—everything that Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Bergson, for different reasons, had not yet sufficiently or visibly destabilized. He was not alone in this. Deleuze will have been like his very strange and very foreign twin. But being twins in this way bears witness to a certain time: the time of an intense transformation of the world, one that we are not yet over. We were given the chance to be seized by this tremor. In a certain sense, it will have been the Consolatio philosophiae of our time—a time whose entire nature and significance are to be found in the mutation, metamorphosis, and changing of the world.

A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event Jacques Derrida Translated by Gila Walker

Thank you. I assure you that what I’m going to say will be much more unequipped and exposed than Gad Soussana’s beautiful lecture. Before babbling a few words, I’d like to join in the thanks already expressed and tell Phyllis Lambert1 and all our hosts how grateful I am for the hospitality with which they’ve honored me. We settled on very little in advance, but we did agree that I’d try to say a few words after Gad Soussana, that I’d then turn the floor over to Alexis Nouss, and would pick up afterwards in a somewhat more enduring way. I will try to carry through my task in the first part of this promised talk by saying a few very simple things. It is worth recalling that an event implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable, and we at least agreed to one thing between ourselves and that was that the title for this session, for this discussion, would be chosen by my friends sitting here beside me. I take this opportunity to say that it was on account of friendship that I thought I should accept to expose myself here in this way, friendship not only for those who are sitting here beside me but for all my friends from Que´bec; some, whom I haven’t seen for a long time, are here today in the audience and to them I address a word of greeting. I wanted this open-ended and, to a large degree, improvised gathering to be placed in this way under the heading of an event of friendship. This presupposes friendship, of course, but also surprise and the unanticipatable. It was understood that Gad Soussana and Alexis Nouss would choose the title and that I would try as well as I could to present not answers but some improvised remarks. Obviously, if there is an event, it must never be something that is predicted or planned, or even really decided upon. 1. Phyllis Lambert founded the Centre canadien d’architecture. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) Jacques Derrida, “Une Certaine possibilite´ impossible de dire l’e´veńement” 䉷 2003 by Editions de l’Harmattan. English translation 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3302-0013$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Jacques Derrida / A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event

What we are doing here is simply a pretext for talking to one another, maybe for talking without having anything special to say, simply for the sake of talking, addressing the other in a context where what we say matters less that the fact that we’re talking to the other. The sentence that constitutes the question and that serves as a title “Is saying the event possible?” [Dire l’e´veńement, est-ce possible?] is a question. It has the form of a question. It’s a question in five words. There’s one noun: “event”; an article: “the”; two verbs: “saying” and “is” (and “is” is not just any verb in just any mood); and there’s an adjective: “possible.” Is it “possible”? My first subject of concern had to do with the question of knowing which of these words to insist on. Even before asking myself whether or not there are unsayable events (and Gad Soussana told us a lot about this subject in his beautiful discussion of Rilke), even before asking myself about this—in the “words and arguments which occur to me at the moment” that defines my condition—I asked myself whether in fact the first thing in this sentence that should be the focus of inquiry wasn’t precisely the question itself, the fact that it is a question, the questioning nature of the sentence. I’ll be very brief here. I’m simply opening an avenue or two that I’ll explore after Alexis Nouss has spoken. There are two directions in this sentence “Is saying the event possible?” I see this question mark at the opening of two possibilities. One is philosophical. We’re in a place dedicated to architecture here and you know the affinities that have always existed between architecture, architectonics, and philosophy. The question has long, probably always, been deemed the philosophical attitude per se. A question like “Is saying the event possible?” puts us into a truly philosophical stance. We are speaking as philosophers. Only a philosopher, regardless of whether he or she is a philosopher by profession or not, can ask such a question and hope that someone will be attentive to it. “Is saying the event possible?” In answer to this question, what I’d like to say is plainly and simply “yes.” Not “yes” to the event but “yes” to saying that the event is possible. I would like to say “yes” to you firstly as a sign of gratitude. Philosophy has always thought of itself as the art, experience, and history of the question. Even when they agree on nothing else, philosophers will end up saying, “Yes, that’s who we are, after all, people who ask questions; we can at least agree on the fact that we want to give the question a chance.” It began with Plato and continued until a certain Heidegger (but there have been others too in our day) gave some thought to the fact that before the question—and this “before” is not chronological; it’s a “before” before time—that before the question, there was a possibility of a certain “yes,” of a certain acquiescence. One day very late in his life, Heidegger in


his own way said that when he had said earlier that questioning (Fragen), or the question (Frage), was the piety of thought (Fro¨mmigkeit des Denkens), well, he should in fact have said, without contradicting himself, that “before” the question, there was what he called acquiescence (Zusage). A consentment, an affirmation of sorts. Not the kind of dogmatic affirmation that resists the question. But “yes” to a question being asked, to a question being addressed to someone, to me talking to you, because, as I said, I’m basically here to talk to you, regardless of whether I have anything special to say. When you address someone, even if it’s to ask a question, before the question is formulated, there must be an acquiescence, an “I’m talking to you, yes, yes, welcome; I’m talking to you, I’m here, you’re here, Hello!” This “yes” before the question—this “before” being neither logical nor chronological—is embedded in the question itself. It is not a questioning “yes.” There is, then, a certain “yes” at the heart of the question, a “yes” to, a “yes” to the other, which may not be unrelated to a “yes” to the event, that is to say, a “yes” to what comes, to letting-it-come. The event is also what comes, what happens [arrive]. We’ll be speaking a lot of the event today as that which comes, as that which happens. We may ask ourselves first whether this “yes” to the event or to the other, or to the event as other or as the coming of the other, is something that is said, whether this “yes” is said or not. Among all who have spoken about this original “yes,” there’s Le´vinas and there’s Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig said that the “yes” is an archi-original word. Even when the “yes” is not uttered, it is there. There is a silent, unsayable “yes” implicit in every sentence. A sentence starts out saying “yes.” Even the most negative, critical, or destructive statement implies this “yes.” So I’d like to make the question mark in “Is saying the event possible?” contingent on this “yes,” on the chance, perhaps even the threat of this “yes.” A first “yes” and one then another “yes.” Personally—but I do not want to talk about myself tonight—I’ve taken a great interest in trying to interpret Heidegger’s Zusage. I’ve been greatly engaged in the question of this “yes,” this prior “yes,” prior to the no in a way. I’d like to bring up another reference to speak of another “yes to” that I hear echoing in the work of Le´vinas, whom you also talked about. And it is also in echo to what you were saying that I bring up Le´vinas. Le´vinas, and here I’ll have to go very quickly (we go very quickly by definition; indeed, the event is that which goes very quickly; there can be an event only when it’s not expected, when one can no longer wait for it, when the coming of what happens interrupts the waiting; so we have to go very quickly), Le´vinas, then, defined ethics for a long time as a face-to-face with the other, in a nearly dual situation. You spoke earlier of Hegel’s beautiful comments on the abyss of eyes

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meeting, when I see the other seeing me, when the other’s eye is not only a visible eye but a seeing eye and I am blind to the seeing eye of the other. As for Le´vinas, he defined the relationship to the ethical as a face-to-face with the other and then he eventually had to admit that in the dual relation of the ethical face-to-face with the other, the Third is present too. And the Third is not a person, not a terstis, a witness who comes in addition to the two. The Third is always already there in the dual relation, in the face-toface. Le´vinas says that this Third, the coming of this Third that has always already come to pass, is the origin or rather the birth of the question. It is with the Third that the call to justice appears as a question. The Third is the one who questions me in the face-to-face, who suddenly makes me feel that there’s a risk of injustice in the ethical if I do not take into account the other of the other. The question, the birth of the question is joined together, according to Le´vinas, with what puts me into question in justice, and the “yes” to the other is implicated in the birth of the question as justice. Later, when we talk about the event again and we ask ourselves if the saying of it is possible, I’d like these remarks on the question of the Third and of justice not to be absent. So I was asking myself what to emphasize in the sentence, “Is saying the event possible?” And I’ve been saying, not a word, but the question mark, the nature of the sentence. It’s a question. What does a question mean? What’s the relationship between the question and the “yes”? But if I’m going to say more and not restrict myself to emphasizing the suspense in this question mark, I’ll have to choose a word from the sentence and, as I’ve said, there are five words, four if we drop the article: a noun, two verbs, and an adjective. When a question is addressed to someone, there is always the risk, as you have so rightly remarked, that the answer is already insinuated in the very form of the question. In this sense there is violence in questions insofar as they impose beforehand, as they pre-impose a possible answer. It’s a matter of justice for the person who’s been asked the question to turn it around and ask the other, “What do you mean?” “Before answering, I’d like to know what you mean, what your question means.” This presupposes that the question be supported by more than one sentence, that it be given a framework, and, as you see here, my improvised remarks have been given a strong framework by friends who, unlike me, have prepared their speeches. “What do you mean?” This is basically what I’m asking them. They’ve brought me here to speak about this. “What do they mean?” And, for my part, I’m indicating what I intend to do. When I speak again later, I’ll be taking an interest in all of these words, of course, but I’ve chosen, and I’ll come back to this later, to put a more insistent accent on the word possible.


I’ll be speaking about “saying,” about “the event,” and about “is” but especially about “possible,” which I will very quickly turn into “impossible.” I’ll say, I’ll try to show in what way the impossibility, a certain impossibility of saying the event or a certain impossible possibility of saying the event, forces us to rethink not only what “saying” or what “event” means, but what possible means in the history of philosophy. To put it otherwise, I will try to explain how I understand the word “possible” in this sentence in a way that this “possible” is not simply “different from” or “the opposite of” impossible, and why, in this case, “possible” and “impossible” say the same thing. But I’m going to ask you to wait a while and I’ll attempt this explanation later. [The second speech “Paroles sans voix” is delivered by Alexis Nouss] I will not surprise you when I say that I feel very unequipped after another so intimidating and beautiful lecture. In the remaining time, I’m not supposed to be the last one to speak. This is what is called a “seminar,” and that means that we have to reserve time for questions, to be “interactive,” as they say. Although everything’s been said, in the time of a post-scriptum, I’m going to add something, if you will. I’m very grateful for what you’ve said. The names of some of the people that have been pronounced must guide our thoughts on the saying and on the event: after Rilke, I’m thinking of Celan and of some of my friends, living or dead, of Deleuze, Barthes, Sarah Kofman—I was moved to hear you name them—of Blanchot too. I hope you’ll forgive me now if I return to my prosaic improvisation in an attempt to hurry to the question that has already been overdeveloped by my predecessors. I said that there were several avenues to open, after the question “Is saying the event possible?” I spoke about the question as such, about the question mark and the questioning formulation. Now I’d like to turn to what “saying” could mean when it comes to the “event.” There are two ways at least of determining the saying in respect to the event. At least two. Saying can mean speaking—is there voiceless speech [parole sans voix], is there speech without saying or saying without speech?—enunciating, referring to, naming, describing, imparting knowledge, informing. Indeed, the first modality or determination of the saying is a saying of knowledge: saying what is. Saying the event is also saying what happens, trying to say what is presently, what comes to pass presently, saying what is, what happens, what occurs, what comes to pass. This is a saying that is close to knowledge and information, to the enunciation that says something about something. And then there is a saying that does in saying, a saying that does, that enacts. This morning, I was watching television—I’m going to speak

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about television, about the news [les informations], because it is also a matter of information, of knowledge as information—I was watching the Quebecer news and I fell on a short sequence about Rene´ Le´vesque, an archive document, a synopsis that showed his rise, his action and his relative failure, and what happened before and after the failure. The journalist, or whoever was presenting the program, made the following comment: “after making the news [faire l’e´veńement], Rene´ Le´vesque had to comment on the news.” Whereas he spoke about events after his resignation, beforehand he produced them notably through speech. And, as you know (I don’t intend to give you a class on the constative and the performative), there’s an utterance that is called constative, a theoretical speech that consists in saying what is, describing or noting what is, and there’s an utterance that is called performative and that does in speaking. For instance, when I make a promise, I’m not saying an event; I’m producing it by my commitment. I promise or I say. I say “yes,” I started out by saying “yes” earlier. The “yes” is performative. The example that is always cited in speaking about performative utterances is that of marriage, the “I do” [oui in French] in answer to “Do you take this man or this woman . . .?” does not say the event, it makes it, it constitutes the event. It’s a speech-event, a saying-event. There are two main directions here. Even if (as is my case) one doesn’t altogether subscribe to this now canonical opposition, we can give credit to it, at least initially, in order to try to put a little order into the questions we are addressing. Let’s first consider saying in its function of knowledge, observation, and information. Saying the event is saying what is, saying things as they present themselves, historical events as they take place, and this is a question of information. As you’ve suggested, even demonstrated, this saying of the event as a statement of knowledge or information, a sort of cognitive saying of description, this saying of the event is always somewhat problematical because the structure of saying is such that it always comes after the event. Secondly, because as saying and hence as structure of language, it is bound to a measure of generality, iterability, and repeatability, it always misses the singularity of the event. One of the characteristics of the event is that not only does it come about as something unforeseeable, not only does it disrupt the ordinary course of history, but it is also absolutely singular. On the contrary, the saying of the event or the saying of knowledge regarding the event lacks, in a certain manner a priori, the event’s singularity simply because it comes after and it loses the singularity in generality. But if we are attentive to the political dimension, there is something of graver significance to consider, which you have both brought up in earnest terms when speaking about saying the event in the form of information. The first image that comes to


mind of this saying the event is what has been developing for a long time, in particular in modernity, in terms of relating events and that is the news [l’information]. Television, radio, and newspapers report events, telling us what happened or what’s happening. We have the impression that the extraordinary progress in the development of information machines, of machines made for saying the event, should in some way increase the powers of speech vis-a`-vis the event, the power of informative speech. Without dwelling on the obvious, may I remind you that this would-be saying, and even showing [monstration] of the event, is never, of course, commensurate with it and is never reliable a priori. In fact, we know that as the ability to immediately say and show the event grows, so does the capacity of the technology of saying and showing to intervene, interpret, select, filter, and, consequently, to make the event happen [ faire l’e´veńement]. When people pretend today to show us live what’s happening, the event taking place in the Gulf War, we know that, as live and apparently immediate as the discourse and picture may be, highly sophisticated techniques of picture-taking, projection, and filtering enable instantaneous interpretation, framing, and selection so that what is shown to us live is already, not a saying or showing of the event, but its production. An interpretation does what it says. It may pretend simply to state, show, and inform, but it actually produces. It is already performative in a way. In a naturally unsaid, unavowed, and undeclared manner, a saying of the event that makes the event is passed off as a saying of the event. The political vigilance that this calls for on our part obviously consists in organizing a critical examination of all the mechanisms that hold out the appearance of saying the event when they are in fact making it, interpreting and producing it. Our critical vigilance regarding all these modalities of saying the event must not be restricted to the techniques being used in studios, where there are twenty-five cameras, a picture can be framed in a second, and journalists asked to record this rather than that. It must encompass the huge newsmaking and news-appropriating machines of the TV stations. These appropriations are not merely national; they are cross-border and international, and, as such, they have a dominant influence over the saying of the event. Their powers are concentrated in places that we have to learn to analyze, and even contest or transform. This saying that makes the event while feigning simply to state, describe, and relate it, constitutes an immense field of analysis and criticism for us. Event-making is covertly being substituted for event-saying. All of which leads us to a dimension of saying the event that overtly presents itself as performative: the modes of speaking that consist not in informing, reporting, relating, describing, or noting but

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in making something happen through speech. A good number of examples could be given of this. It’s understood that there’ll be a discussion so I don’t want to speak for too long. I’d just like to indicate a few points of reference for one possible analysis of this saying the event that consists in making the event, in making it happen, and to look at the impossibility lodged in this possibility. Let’s consider three or four examples. Take the example of the confession: a confession does not simply involve saying what happened. If I have committed a crime, the fact that I go to the police and say, “I’ve committed a crime” does not in itself constitute a confession. It becomes a confession only when, beyond the act of imparting information, I confess that I am guilty. In other words, the confession is not simply a matter of letting someone know what happened; I can very well notify someone of a wrong, without avowing that I am guilty. There is more to the confession than informing, more than the constative or cognitive saying of the event. There is a transformation in my relationship to the other, in which I present myself as guilty and I say, “I’m guilty, and not only am I informing you of this, but I’m declaring that I am guilty of this.” In his Confessions, Saint Augustine asked God, “Why must I still confess to You when You know everything? You know all my iniquities, You are all-knowing.” In other words, the confession does not consist in telling God what He knows. It is not an informative statement that would apprise God of my sins. The confession is a matter of transforming my relationship to the other, of transforming myself by admitting my guilt. In the confession, there is a saying of the event, of what happened, that produces a transformation. It produces another event and is not simply a saying of knowledge. Every time that saying the event exceeds this dimension of information, knowledge, and cognition, it enters the night—you spoke a great deal of the night—the “night of non-knowing,” something that’s not merely ignorance, but that no longer pertains to the realm of knowledge. A non-knowing that is not lack, not sheer obscurantism, ignorance, or non-science, but simply something that is not of the same nature as knowing. A saying the event that produces the event beyond the confines of knowledge. This kind of saying is found in many experiences where, ultimately, the possibility that such and such an event will happen appears impossible. Let’s look at a few other examples, some of which have already retained my attention in published texts, others not. Consider the gift. Giving should be an event. It has to come as a surprise, from the other or to the other; it has to extend beyond the confines of the economic circle of exchange. For giving to be possible, for a giving event to be possible, it has to look impossible. Why? If I give to the other in thanks or in exchange, giving has not


taken place. If I’m expecting the other to thank me, to recognize my gift, and to give me something in return, in some way or another, symbolically, materially, or physically, there is no giving either. Even if the thanks are purely symbolic, they annul the giving. Giving has to overreach gratitude. To be able to receive the gift, in a certain way the other must not even know that I’m giving it, because once the person knows, then he or she enters the circle of thanks and gratitude and annuls the gift. Likewise, one could say that I must not even know that I’m giving. If I know I’m giving, I say to myself “here I am, giving a present”—and you see the connection between the present and the event. If I present myself as the giver, I’m already congratulating myself, thanking myself, feeling self-gratified for giving, and, consequently, the mere consciousness of giving annuls the gift. It suffices that giving be presented to the other or to myself as giving, that it be presented as such to the donor or the donee, for the giving to be immediately annulled. This means—to go quickly—that the gift as a gift is possible only when it appears impossible. The gift must not appear to be one for giving to take place. And one will never know if it actually did. No one can ever say, with any satisfying criterion of knowledge, “a giving has taken place,” or else “I’ve given,” or “I’ve received.” Therefore giving, if there is any, if it is possible, must appear impossible. And consequently giving is doing the impossible. The event of giving is not something that can be said; as soon as it is, it’s destroyed. Put otherwise, the measure of the event’s possibility is given by its impossibility. Giving is impossible, and it can only be possible as impossible. There is no more eventful event than a gift that disrupts the exchange, the course of history, the circle of economy. There is no possibility of giving that is not presented as not being present. It’s the impossible itself. Take a word very close to giving, and that is forgiving. Forgiving is also a form of giving. If I forgive only what’s forgivable, I’ve forgiven nothing. Someone has done something wrong, committed an offense or one of those abominable crimes that were evoked earlier—the concentration camps. An immeasurable crime has been committed. I cannot forgive the person for it. If I forgive only what is venial, only what is excusable or pardonable, the slight misdeed, the measured and measurable, the determined and limited wrongdoing, in that case, I’m not forgiving anything. If I forgive because it’s forgivable, because it’s easy to forgive, I’m not forgiving. I can only forgive, if I do forgive, when there is something unforgivable, when it isn’t possible to forgive. In other words, forgiveness, if there is any, must forgive that which is unforgivable otherwise it is not forgiveness. Forgiving, if it is possible, can only come to be as impossible. But this impossibility is not simply negative. This means that the impossible must be done. The event, if there is one, consists in doing the impossible. But when someone does

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the impossible, if someone does the impossible, no one, above all not the doer of the deed, is in a position to adjust a self-assured, theoretical statement to the event and say, “this happened” or “forgiveness has taken place” or “I’ve forgiven.” A statement such as “I forgive” or “I’ve forgiven” is absurd, and, moreover, it’s obscene. How can I be sure that I have the right to forgive and that I’ve effectively forgiven rather than forgotten, or overlooked, or reduced the offense to something forgivable? I can no more say, “I forgive” than “I give.” These are impossible statements. I can always make them, but in doing so, I betray what I mean to say. I’m not saying anything. I should never be able to say, “I’m giving” or “I’m forgiving.” Therefore, giving or forgiving, if there is any, must appear impossible; they must defy all theoretical or cognitive statements, all “this is that” type judgments, all judgments along the lines of “forgiving is,” “I’ve a forgiving nature,” or “the gift has been given.” Let me take another example that I’ve recently tried to develop on the subject of invention. Here we are in a place of creation, art, and invention. Invention is an event; the words themselves indicate as much. It’s a matter of finding, of bringing out, of making what is not yet here come to be. Inventing, if it is possible, is not inventing. What does this mean? You see that I am approaching this question of the possible, which is the question that brings us together here today. If I can invent what I invent, if I have the ability to invent what I invent, that means that the invention follows a potentiality, an ability that is in me, and thus it brings nothing new. It does not constitute an event. I have the ability to make this happen and consequently the event, what happens at that point, disrupts nothing; it’s not an absolute surprise. Similarly, if I give what I can give, if I give what I have and what I can give, I’m not giving. A rich person, who gives what he or she has, is not giving. As Plotinus, Heidegger, and Lacan have said, you have to give what you don’t have. If you give what you have, you’re not giving. In the same way, if I invent what I can invent, what is possible for me to invent, I’m not inventing. Similarly, when you conduct an epistemological analysis or an analysis in the history of science and technology, you examine a field in which a theoretical, mathematical, or technological invention is possible, a field that may be called a paradigm in one case, an episteme in another, or yet again a configuration; now, if the structure of the field makes an invention possible (at a given point in time a given architectural invention is possible because the state of society, architectural history, and architectural theory make it possible), then this invention is not an invention. Precisely because it’s possible. It merely develops and unfolds a possibility, a potentiality that is already present and therefore it is not an event. For there to be an invention event, the invention must appear impossible. What


was not possible becomes possible. In other words, the only invention possible is the invention of the impossible. This statement may seem to be a game, a mere rhetorical contradiction. In fact, I believe it is an irreducible necessity. If there is invention—and maybe there never is, just as there may never be giving or forgiving—but if there is invention, it’s possible only on the condition of being impossible. The event’s eventfulness depends on this experience of the impossible. What comes to pass, as an event, can only come to pass if it’s impossible. If it’s possible, if it’s foreseeable, then it doesn’t come to pass. Now, and this will be my last example before opening the discussion, let’s consider hospitality, the example I started with in thanking my hosts. You spoke of the event as not only what comes to pass [arrive], but as the arrivant. The absolute arrivant must not be merely an invited guest, someone I’m prepared to welcome, whom I have the ability to welcome. It must be someone whose unexpected, unforeseeable arrival, whose visitation—and here I’m opposing visitation to invitation—is such an irruption that I’m not prepared to receive the person. I must not even be prepared to receive the person, for there to be genuine hospitality: not only have no prior notice of the arrival but no prior definition of the newcomer, and no way of asking, as is done at a border, “Name? Nationality? Place of origin? Purpose of visit? Will you be working here?” The absolute guest [hoˆte] is this arrivant for whom there is not even a horizon of expectation, who bursts onto my horizon of expectations when I am not even prepared to receive the one who I’ll be receiving. That’s hospitality. Hospitality is not merely receiving that which we are able to receive. Le´vinas says somewhere that the subject is a host [hoˆte] who welcomes the infinite beyond his or her capacity to welcome. Welcoming beyond my capacity to welcome means receiving precisely when I cannot receive, when the coming of the other overwhelms me, seems bigger than my house, and I can’t know beforehand if he or she will behave well in my home, in my city, in my state, in my nation. The arrival of the arrivant will constitute an event only if I’m not capable of receiving him or her, only if I receive the coming of the newcomer precisely when I’m not capable of doing so. In the arrival of the arrivant, it is the absolute other who falls on me. I insist on the verticality of this coming, because surprise can only come from on high. When Le´vinas or Blanchot speak of the “Tre`s Haut,” the Most High, it is not simply religious terminology. It means that the event as event, as absolute surprise, must fall on me. Why? Because if it doesn’t fall on me, it means that I see it coming, that there’s an horizon of expectation. Horizontally, I see it coming, I fore-see it, I fore-say it, and the event is that which can be said [dit] but never predicted [pre´dit]. A predicted event is not an event. The event falls on me because I don’t see it coming.

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Like the arrivant, the event is something that vertically befalls me when I didn’t see it coming. The event can only seem to me to be impossible before it occurs [arriver]. This doesn’t mean that events don’t occur, that there are none; what it means is that I cannot say the event in theoretical terms and I cannot pre-dict it either. This impossibility, with regard to invention, arrival, and the event, could lead us to conclude that the saying remains or should remain disarmed, utterly disarmed by this very impossibility, baffled in face of the always unique, exceptional, and unpredictable arrival of the other, of the event as other, and that I must remain absolutely disarmed. And yet, this disarmament, this vulnerability, and this exposure are never pure or absolute. I was saying before that the saying of the event presupposed some sort of inevitable neutralization of the event by its iterability, that saying always harbors the possibility of resaying. A word is comprehensible only because it can be repeated; whenever I speak, I’m using repeatable words and uniqueness is swept into this iterability. Similarly, the event cannot appear to be an event, when it appears, unless it is already repeatable in its very uniqueness. It is very difficult to grasp this idea of uniqueness as immediately iterable, of singularity as immediately engaged in substitution, as Le´vinas would say. Substitution is not simply the replacement of a replaceable uniqueness: substitution replaces the irreplaceable. The fact that, right away, from the very outset of saying or the first appearance of the event, there is iterability and return in absolute uniqueness and utter singularity, means that the arrival of the arrivant—or the coming of the inaugural event—can only be greeted as a return, a coming back, a spectral revenance. If I had the time here—but I could come back to it during the discussion—I’d try to tie in this theme of revenance—which echoes what was said earlier about Rilke, Celan, and Primo Levi—to tie in what I’m saying here about revenance and spectrality to the experience of impossibility that haunts the possible. Even when something comes to pass as possible, when an event occurs as possible, the fact that it will have been impossible, that the possible invention will have been impossible, this impossibility continues to haunt the possibility. My relationship to the event is such that in the experience that I have of the event, the fact that it will have been impossible in its structure continues to haunt the possibility. It remains impossible; it may have taken place but it’s still impossible. If I’ve forgiven without knowing it, without saying it, especially without saying it to the other, if I’ve forgiven, the forgiving must still be impossible, it must remain forgiveness for the unforgivable. If when I forgive, the wrongdoing, the injury, the wound, the offense become forgivable because I’ve forgiven, then it’s over; there’s no forgiveness anymore. The unforgivable must remain unforgivable in for-


giveness, the impossibility of forgiving must continue to haunt forgiveness and the impossibility of giving continue to haunt giving. This haunting is the spectral structure of this experience of the event; it is absolutely essential. It so happens that over the past two years I’ve been giving seminars in Paris on hospitality. We’ve examined, notably from an anthropological standpoint, certain hospitality rites among ancient populations in Mexico in which women were expected to cry upon the arrival of the other, of the guest. Usually, in hospitality rites, you smile when you greet a guest. Smiles or laughter are expected. You don’t greet someone hospitably with a hostile or tense look; you’re expected to smile. But there, the women were expected to cry when guests arrived (French guests in the case we were studying, based on a story from Jean de Le´ry’s travels). What are we to make of these tears? It is said that the women regarded the newcomers as revenants, as the ghosts of the dead coming back, and so they were to be greeted as revenants, with tears of mourning. There is a certain affinity between hospitality and mourning. The one who comes, even if I welcome him or her beyond my capacity to welcome, the coming of the one who comes is to be greeted as a coming back—and what is true for the arrivant is equally true for the event. This does not mean to say that the coming is not new. It is new. The coming is absolutely new. But the novelty of this coming implicates in and of itself the coming back. When I welcome a visitor, when I receive the visitation of an unexpected visitor, it must be a unique experience each and every time for it to be a unique, unpredictable, singular, and irreplaceable event. But at the same time, the repetition of the event must be presupposed, from the threshold of the house and from the arrival of the irreplaceable. “I welcome you,” means, “I promise you to welcome you again.” It will not do to greet someone saying, “it’s all right this time, but. . . .” There must already be a promise of repetition. Just as in the “yes,” when I say, “yes” to someone, the repetition of the “yes” must immediately be implicated. The “yes, I do” that I say when I get married, to take the performative example again, this first, singular, and unique “yes” must implicate right away my readiness to confirm the “yes” not only a moment later, but tomorrow, and the day after, and until the end of life. The repetition of the “yes” must be implicated from the initial moment of the first “yes.” Likewise, repetition must already be at work in the singularity of the event, and with the repetition, the erasure of the first occurrence is already underway—whence loss, mourning, and the posthumous, sealing the first moment of the event, as originary. Mourning is already there. One cannot avoid mixing tears with the smile of hospitality. Death is on the scene, in a way. In conclusion, before opening the discussion, I’d say that these thoughts on the possible-impossible, the fact that it was necessary to answer “Is saying

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the event possible?” by at once yes and no, possible, impossible, possible as impossible, should move us to rethink the whole question of this value of possibility that marks our Western philosophical tradition. The history of philosophy is the history of reflections on the meaning of the possible, on the meaning of being or being possible. This great tradition of the dynamis, of potentiality, from Aristotle to Bergson, these reflections in transcendental philosophy on the conditions of possibility, are affected by the experience of the event insofar as it upsets the distinction between the possible and the impossible, the opposition between the possible and the impossible. We should speak here of the im-possible event, an im-possible that is not merely impossible, that is not merely the opposite of possible, that is also the condition or chance of the possible. An im-possible that is the very experience of the possible. This means transforming the conception, or the experience, or the saying of the experience of the possible and the impossible. I do not believe that this is simply a subject of speculation for professional philosophers. To return to the subject of information, if we want to rethink what’s happening today with the virtualization and the spectralization in the technical field of image or of perception, to rethink the virtual event, we’ll have to upset our logic of the possible and the impossible—and at bottom, “Is saying the event possible?” is also, for the question of virtuality, “What is a virtual event?” and we have been unable until now to think of eventhood and virtuality as the same. This is the direction in which I would have headed, if we had had the time, to tie in what I was saying before about a political critique of information, of the saying the event according to the news, or for that matter, according to science or techno-science, together with what we’ve just been saying about the virtuality of the possible-impossible. [Question – a question from the audience about the following statement by Bachelard] “Wanting is wanting what one cannot.” I find the statement very beautiful and very true. This may be the direction I’d like to take. I can’t recreate Bachelard’s context. If I had to interpret or discuss his statement, maybe wrongly, at any rate if I wanted to make it my own, I’d have to change it. Because I’d say that what I cannot, and hence the impossible that exceeds my ability and my power, is precisely what I cannot want. Unless we are going to transform the traditional concept of will. I am keeping here to the moment when the experience of the event defeats my will. If I want what I want, what I can want—the will to power—is commensurate with my decision. I’m tempted on the contrary by a conception of decision—I didn’t


actually pronounce the word decision before, but that’s really what I was thinking about—something that would also transform the logic of decision. Just as we say “I give” and “I forgive” too easily, we also easily say, “I decide” or “I take responsibility” or “I’m responsible.” These statements are all equally inadmissible. To say “I decide,” to say “you know that I decide, I know that I decide,” means that I am capable of deciding and master of my decision, that I have a criterion that allows me to say that I’m the one who decides. If this is true, the decision is a sort of expression of my power, of my possibility. And a decision that I am capable of and that expresses my possible does not interrupt anything, it does not tear the fabric of the possible, disrupt the course of history, as a decision ought to do. It’s not a decision worthy of the name. A decision should tear—that’s what the word decision means; it should disrupt the fabric of the possible. Whenever I say “my decision” or “I decide,” you can be sure that I’m mistaken. The decision should always be— and I know that this proposition seems unacceptable according to traditional logic—the decision should always be the other’s decision. My decision is, in fact, the other’s decision. This does not exempt or exonerate me from responsibility. My decision can never be mine; it’s always the other’s decision in me, and in a way I am passive in the decision-making. For my decision to be an event, for it to disrupt my power, my ability, my possibility, for it to disrupt the normal course of history, I must undergo my decision, which is evidently logically unacceptable. I’d like therefore to develop the idea of decision as always the other’s decision, because I’m responsible for the other and it’s for the other that I decide; it is the other who decides in me, without in any way exonerating me from “my” responsibility. This is why Le´vinas always puts freedom after responsibility. If I want what I cannot, this willing must be stripped of what traditionally clothes the will and determines it as will, namely agency, control, the “I want what I want.” For Bachelard’s statement to be acceptable, it must in return destroy, deconstruct, or undo the very concept of willing. This is probably what Bachelard meant in this paradoxical statement: wanting what one cannot, even what one cannot want. As far as Janke´le´vitch is concerned, naturally I was thinking of him, as one should when dwelling on the subject of forgiveness, and I was also, as you understood, thinking of the example of the unforgivable Holocaust; there are other unforgivables. It’s not only because of my hardness, my inflexibility, and my unyielding condemnation that I can’t say “I forgive,” it’s because I simply don’t have the right to forgive. It’s always the other who has to forgive. I cannot forgive on the other’s behalf. I cannot forgive in the name of the victims of the Holocaust. Even survivors, people like Primo

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Levi who were there, who lived through it and survived, even they have no right to forgive. It is not simply because one must keep on condemning but because one can’t forgive for others. We haven’t the right to forgive: forgiving is impossible. Forgiving only means something if it is forgiving the unforgivable; this is when forgiveness can take place, if it takes place. In a dominant anthropo-theological structure, one generally says, “God alone can forgive; I don’t have the right to forgive.” A finite being cannot forgive a wrong that is always infinite. Unforgivable means infinite. Here God’s name names the Other to whom the right to forgive is always left, as is the possibility to give, to say, “I give,” “I decide.” Giving or forgiving is always done in the name of the other. [Two questions are asked, one concerning the use of the infinitive in the seminar’s title question, “Dire l’e´veńement,” the other regarding the secret in the event] I’m not the author of the topic of our debate and so, like you, I find myself faced with this question and its literal formulation. And I too asked myself questions that were, in part, the same as yours. I must say that, ultimately, what is happening here, to the extent that it was unforeseeable, that it was unanticipated for me—since we improvised to a large extent—is that an event will have taken place. It is happening and it wasn’t arranged in advance; a lot was arranged but not everything. It’s an event insofar as what’s happening was not predicted. Something is being said through this event and is being said of the event. As far as knowing who says it, the question remains open. Like you, I asked myself about this infinitive. Often it’s the rhetoric of a title: a topic proposed for discussion, left in the infinitive, as if we were taking an examination. But the impersonal nature of the infinitive got me thinking in particular that when there is no one present, no subject of enunciation to say the event in one of the modes that I’ve mentioned, then the saying is no longer constative, theoretical, descriptive, or performative: it is symptomatic. I propose the word symptom as another term, beyond the telling of the truth or the performativity that produces the event. The event defeats both the constative and the performative, the “I know” and the “I think.” The secret is at work in the story you told.2 Whenever the event resists being turned into information or into a theoretical utterance, resists being known and made known, the secret is on the scene. An event is always secret, for the reasons that I’ve said; like giving or forgiving it must remain a secret. If I say, “I give,” if giving becomes phenomenal or if it 2. See Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (New York, 1970).


appears, if forgiving appears, then there is no more giving or forgiving. The secret belongs to the structure of the event. Not the secret in the sense of something private, clandestine, or hidden, but the secret as that which doesn’t appear. Beyond all forms of verification, beyond discourses of truth or knowledge, the symptom is a signification of the event over which nobody has control, that no consciousness, that no conscious subject can appropriate or control, neither in the form of a theoretical or judicative statement, nor in the form of a performative production. There is symptom in what’s happening here, for instance: each of us is interpreting, foreseeing, anticipating, and feeling overwhelmed and surprised by what can be called events. Beyond the meaning that each of us can read into these events, if not enunciate, there is the symptom. Even the effect of truth or the search for truth is symptomatic in nature. We can offer analyses of such symptoms. You talked of differentiated forms of knowledge; one could speak of identifying positions of the subjects of enunciation, libidinal drives, or power strategies. But beyond all this, there is the symptomatology; there is meaning that no theorem can exhaust. This notion of symptom, which I’d like to dissociate from its clinical or psychoanalytical code, is related to what I was saying before about verticality. A symptom is something that falls. It’s what befalls us. What falls vertically on us is what makes a symptom. There is, in every event, secrecy and symptomatology. I think that Deleuze also speaks of the symptom in this regard. Discourse that corresponds to this quality of eventfulness that we’re speaking about is always symptomal or symptomatological, always a discourse on the unique, on the case, on the exception. An event is always exceptional. This is one possible definition of the event. An event must be exceptional, an exception to the rule. Once there are rules, norms, and hence criteria to evaluate this or that, what happens and what doesn’t happen, there is no event. The event must be exceptional and the singularity of the exception without rules can only bring about symptoms. This doesn’t mean that we have to give up knowing or philosophizing: philosophical knowledge accepts this aporia as something promising and not simply negative or paralyzing. This promising aporia takes the form of the possible-impossible, what Nietzsche called the “maybe.” Nietzsche writes somewhere that what will be expected from philosophers in the future is an investigation of this “maybe” that classical philosophers always resisted. And this “maybe” is not simply an empirical modality: there are some terrible pages in Hegel on the “maybe” and on those who explore the “maybe” and whom he regards as empiricists. Nietzsche tries to conceive of a modality of “maybe” that would not be merely empirical. What I said of the possible-impossible is this “maybe.” There “may be” giving, if there is any;

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if there is, we shouldn’t be able to speak of it, to be sure of it. Forgiveness “may be,” the event “may be.” In other words, this category of “maybe,” between the possible and the impossible, belongs to the same configuration as that of the symptom or the secret. The difficulty is in adapting a consequent, theoretical discourse to modalities that seem to constitute so many challenges to knowledge and theory. The symptom, the “maybe,” the possible-impossible, the unique as substitutable, singularity as reiterable, all seem to be nondialectizable contradictions; the difficulty is to find a discourse, that is not simply impressionistic or lacking in rigor, for structures that constitute so many challenges to traditional logic. Have I answered your question? “Maybe.” [The questioner asks for clarification on the connection between the promise and the event] I made a passing allusion to the promise. It is the privileged example of all discourses on the performative in the theory of speech acts. When I say, “I promise,” I’m not describing something else, I’m not saying anything, I’m doing something. It’s an event. A promise is an event. The “I promise” produces the event; it does not refer to any preexisting event. The “I promise” is a saying that says nothing of a preexisting event and that produces the event. Speech act theorists take the example of the promise as one performative example among others. I’d be more inclined to say that any statement, any performative utterance involves a promise, and that the promise is not a performative among others. Whenever I address the other, when I say to the other “I’m talking to you,” I’m already in a promise framework. I’m speaking to you means, “I promise to continue, to go to the end of the sentence; I promise to tell you the truth even if I lie”—and to lie, one must promise to tell the truth. The promise is the basic element of language. Saying the event in this case would not be saying an object that the event would be but saying an event that the saying produces. Serious theorists of speech acts maintain that a promise must always promise something good. One does not promise something bad: “promising” something bad is a threat not a promise. You don’t say to someone, “I promise I’m going to kill you”; you say, “I promise I’ll give you, I’ll meet you, I’ll be faithful, I’ll be your husband or your wife.” The promise always involves something good, something beneficial and favorable. If one were to pretend to promise something bad, it would a threat in the guise of a promise. When a mother says to her child, “if you do this, I promise you a spanking,” it’s a threat not a promise. This is classical speech act theory: a promise is not a threat. But I’d venture to claim that a promise must always be haunted by the


threat, by its becoming-threat, without which it is not a promise. If I’m sure that what I’m promising is a good thing, than the good can not turn to bad, the promised gift can not turn into poison, according to the old logic of the gift-Gift’s reversal, from gift to poison, from a beneficial gift to harmful gift. If I were sure that the promise was good and could not turn into something bad, then it would not be a promise. A promise has to be threatened by the possibility of being broken, of betraying itself, consciously or unconsciously. If there’s no possibility of being perverted, if the good is not pervertible, then it’s not good. For a promise to be possible, it must be haunted or threatened by the possibility of being broken or of being bad. Speech act theorists are serious people: they would say that if I promise to be at an appointment, if I don’t mean it, if I’m lying, if I already know that I won’t make it to the appointment, that I won’t do everything I can to be there, then it’s not a promise. A promise must be serious, it must correspond to a serious intention, at least when I say, “I’ll be at the appointment tomorrow” in the form of a promise not a forecast. There are two ways of saying “tomorrow I’ll be there”: there is the forecast, “tomorrow morning I’ll have breakfast,” and there is “I’ll be with you tomorrow morning for breakfast,” which is something else. A promise must be serious to be a real promise according to speech act theorists; in other words, it must bind me to do everything I can to keep my promise, and it must be a promise of something good. I’d argue that if such a promise is not intrinsically pervertible, that is to say, threatened by the possibility of not being serious or sincere, or of being broken, then it’s not a promise. A promise that cannot be broken, isn’t a promise: it’s a forecast, a prediction. The possibility of betrayal or perversion must be at the heart of the commitment to a promise and the distinction between promise and threat can never be assured. What I’m maintaining here is not a matter of abstract speculation. We know from experience that a gift can be threatening, that the most benevolent promise can in itself become corrupt, that I can do harm in promising good; we could give several examples of this intrinsic possibility. Pervertibility has to be at the heart of that which is good, of the good promise, for the promise to be what it is. It must have the capability of not being a promise, of being broken, for it to be possible, to have the chance of being possible. This threat is not a bad thing; it’s its chance. Without the threat, there would be no promise. If the promise was automatically kept, it would be a machine, a computer, a computation. For a promise not to be a mechanical computation or programming, it must have the capability of being betrayed. This possibility of betrayal must inhabit even the most innocent promise. To this, I would add—and this is of even graver significance—that

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whereas the performative says and produces the event that it speaks of, it neutralizes it too, insofar as it maintains control over it in an “I can,” an “I may,” etc. A pure event, worthy of the name, defeats the performative as much as the constative. One day we’ll have to come to terms with what this means. To come back to what I was saying about justice at the beginning—since I began by speaking of this “yes,” of this justice in Le´vinas—justice itself must be affected or haunted by its opposite, by perjury, for it to be justice. If, for example, in the face-to-face—which is the condition of respect of the other, of ethics, of what Le´vinas calls the face of the other—if the Third were not already present in the face-to-face, justice, which is the relationshipwith the other, would already be perjury. Conversely, whenever the Third enters the dual relationship that engages me in a face-to-face with the singular other, there is already perjury. Hence, there is no simple oppositionbetween perjury and justice, a solemn vow, commitment, or an oath. Perjury has to be at the heart of the oath for the oath to be truly possible. It must be at the heart of justice in an irremovable way, not as a passing attribute or an accident that can be erased. The possibility of evil, or of perjury, must be intrinsic to good or to justice for either to be possible. And so the impossible must be at the heart of the possible. [Question with regard to information, the verticality of the event, and technical mechanisms] In the interpretation, reappropriation, and filtering of information, it seems to me that the event, if there is one, is what resists this reappropriation, transformation, or trans-information. You took the Gulf War as an example. I underlined the fact that what was happening there, which we were told was being reported live, could not be reduced to this interpretative information, this trans-information, but neither could it be reduced to a simulacrum. I do not at all agree with Baudrillard who says that the war did not take place. The event that is ultimately irreducible to media appropriation and digestion is that thousands of people died. These are singular events each and every time, which no utterance of knowledge or information could reduce or neutralize. I’d say that we must ceaselessly analyze the mechanisms of what I’ve just dubbed trans-information or reappropriation, the becoming-simulacrum or becoming-televisual of events, analyze them in politico-historical terms, without forgetting, if possible, that an event took place that cannot under any circumstance be reduced to its analysis, an event that cannot be reduced to any saying. It’s the unsayable: the dead, for example, the dead.


As for the verticality that worries you, I’m well aware of the fact that the foreigner is also the one who arrives by way of the border, who is seen coming. Foreigners are seen coming mainly by customs and immigration officers and all those who want to control the immigration flow. When I have more time in a seminar or when I’m fighting for things like that in France, I make these things a bit more complicated, more than I’m doing here. I’m aware that this horizontality must be taken into account and of all that this calls for on our part. By verticality, what I meant was that the foreigner, what is irreducibly arrivant in the other—who is not simply a worker, or a citizen, or someone easily identifiable—is that which in the other gives me no advance warning and which exceeds precisely the horizontality of expectation. What I wanted to emphasize, in speaking of verticality, was that the other does not wait. She does not wait for me to be able to receive her or to give her a resident’s permit. If there is unconditional hospitality, it has to be open to the visitation of the other who may come at any time, without my knowledge. This is also the messianic: the messiah can arrive, he can come at any time, from on high, where I don’t see him coming. In my discourse, the idea of verticality doesn’t necessarily have anymore the often religious or theological use that rises to the Most High. Maybe religion starts here. You can’t talk the way I do about verticality, about absolute arrivance, without the act of faith having already commenced—and the act of faith is not necessarily religion, a given religion—without a certain space of faith without knowledge, faith beyond knowledge. I’d accept, therefore, that we speak of faith here.

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Final Words Jacques Derrida Translated by Gila Walker

“Jacques wanted no rites and no orations. He knows from experience what an ordeal it is for the friend who takes on this task. He asks me to thank you for coming and to bless you. He beseeches you not to be sad, to think only of the many happy moments you gave him the chance to share with him. Smile for me, he says, as I will have smiled for you until the end. Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival . . . I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am.”

Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) Jacques Derrida, “Derniers mots,” Rue Descartes 䉷 2005 by Presses Universitaires de France. English translation 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3302-0014$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Editorial Note

The editors would like to announce that Jeffrey A Rufo, after six years of service, has decided to leave the staff of Critical Inquiry in order to complete his dissertation at the University of Chicago.

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Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty Vincent B. Leitch

1. Derrida’s Last Decade During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Jacques Derrida published numerous books, approximately two dozen in French, virtually all translated into English, but in the 1990s and thereafter up to 2004, the year of his death and the year in which I am writing, he brought out roughly three dozen more books in France, not including the revised editions of earlier works, coauthored works, and introductions to books. In this period, which I here label late Derrida, about two dozen books by Derrida appeared in English translation, without counting three substantial Derrida readers. Not surprisingly, recent introductions to Derrida have found it especially challenging to systematize this sprawling corpus. The preferred approach is to foreground key Derridean concepts (so-called undecidables or quasitranscendentals) such as the early standbys—diffe´rance, iterability, margin, supplement, text—and later ones like gift, hospitability, forgiveness, democracy to come, justice, messianic, responsibility, spectrality. This, for example, is how Geoffrey Bennington organized his well-known “Derridabase” in Jacques Derrida, coauthored with Derrida and published in French in 1991, in English in 1993, and revised in 1999 with an updated, supplemented bibliography. A second popular approach is the exegesis of controversies such as Derrida versus structuralism (Saussure and Le´vi-Strauss), phenomenology (Husserl and Gadamer), psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), speech-act All titles in the text are listed with date of publication for the original language edition following in parentheses. In cases where an English translation exists, its year of publication is listed second. All translations unless otherwise indicated are my own. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Vincent B. Leitch / Politics of Sovereignty

theory (Austin and Searle), communications theory (Habermas), and orthodox Marxism. There are also his conflictual one-on-one encounters, numerous and sometimes recurring, with major figures like Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Blanchot, Le´vinas, Foucault, and de Man, among others. Marc Goldschmit employs this method in his Jacques Derrida: Une Introduction (2003), as does the substantial concluding chapter of Understanding Derrida (2004), edited by Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe, an introductory book containing eleven chapters by different hands on standard topics such as language, literature, art, ethics, religion, and politics. A third way of managing while introducing Derrida’s immense body of work mixes and matches key concepts, controversies, and critical encounters, also offering the usual detailed subdivided bibliographies of his works as well as works on him.1 This, for example, is how Nicholas Royle’s Jacques Derrida (2003) proceeds. Yet, given the scope and complexity of his corpus, Derrida’s scholarly readers, no matter their approach, risk becoming disciples rather than critics, expending copious energy systematizing, deciphering, standing by attentively, ventriloquizing. The many books by and about Derrida, especially during the 1990s, set the context for a visit I made to Paris in 2004, a few months before Derrida’s passing in early autumn. At that time I encountered several not yet translated texts by Derrida, namely, De quoi demain . . . Dialogue [For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue] (2001), a wide-ranging and lively dialogue with Elisabeth Roudinesco covering nine topics in nine chapters, ranging from the death penalty and anti-Semitism to the changing family and animal rights and to more expected topics like psychoanalysis, contemporary philosophy, Marxism, and theories of identity and liberty; Voyous [Rogues] (2003), two lengthy addresses focusing on contemporary politics, taking up the issues of rogue states, international law, democracy, reason, and especially sovereignty; and Gene`ses, genealogies, genres, et le geńie [Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius] (2003), an appreciation of the literary work 1. For the best bibliographical source, see Peter Krapp, “Bibliography of Publications by Jacques Derrida,” www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/jdind.html

Vi n c e n t B . L e i t c h is Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches criticism and theory. He is author of Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (1992), Postmodernism— Local Effects, Global Flows (1996), and Theory Matters (2003), and served as the general editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001). The present article is part of a book nearing completion entitled A Defense of Theory.


of He´le`ne Cixous that briefly sketches an account of genius. The political concerns of the first two books also appear, though in a more concise form, in the contemporaneous English-language casebook Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju¨rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2003), which contains a revealing interview with Derrida (as well as Habermas) by Giovanna Borradori. The texts published in the opening years of the new century followed an immensely productive prior decade that included a spate of books gathering Derrida’s many interviews, specifically Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994 (1992/1995), Sur parole: Instantane´s philosophiques [On my Word: Philosophical Snapshots] (1999), and Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (2002); his dialogues with Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (1997/2001), and Catherine Malabou, La Contre-allee´, [Counterpath] (1999); his many pieces on education and pedagogy in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? (1990/2002) and Eyes of the University (1990/2004); and the provocative The University without Condition (2001), a short book in French available in Derrida’s English-language collection of addresses Without Alibi (2002). In the realms of politics and ethics there were such late texts as The Other Heading (1991/1992), Specters of Marx (1993/1994), Politics of Friendship (1994/1997), Of Hospitality (1997/2000), On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001) (two late 1990s addresses joined in this English-only book), and Marx & Sons (2002), a small book in French published earlier in English as a lengthy final essay addressed to his leftist critics in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx” (1999). At a key point in the conversation with Ferraris, Derrida looked back over his career and revealed, “Each time I write a text, it is ‘on occasion,’ occasional, for some occasion. I have never planned to write a text; everything I’ve done, even the most composite of my books, were ‘occasioned’ by a question. My concern with the date and the signature confirms it.”2 Indeed, many of Derrida’s texts give the appearance of being thrown together like preliminary thinking exercises, lacking editing, especially for economy and careful organization, performances that amble sometimes loosely, sometimes stunningly. About writing systematic treatises in Kantian fashion, Derrida declared, “It is no longer possible to write a great philosophical ‘machine.’ . . . I always operate through small oblique essays” 2. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Donis and David Webb (Cambridge, 2001), p. 62; hereafter abbreviated ATS. This book contains five dialogues between Ferraris and Derrida from July 1993 to November 1994, plus one between Gianni Vattimo and Derrida in January 1995. “Starting in the 1990s, Derrida’s tendency to write in outline became even more pronounced as he delivered bits and pieces of [for example] a thesis on hospitality that one had to glean from a number of different texts” (Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work [New York, 2003], p. 26). Rapaport’s book focuses on a range of topics, though not politics.

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(ATS, p. 81). Concerning this generic obliqueness, Bennington notes kindly that “deconstruction happens more in the journey than the arrival,”3 and Royle observes that “all of Derrida’s work is concerned with the appearance or apparitional effects of digression.”4 And yet concepts do regularly recur from one text to another and on occasion cluster in nodal points and condensations, bringing into view Derrida’s infrastructure, his pharmacy, an ensemble of quasi-transcendental concepts, as in the case of sovereignty, a topic neither examined nor assessed with care elsewhere in the scholarly literature on late Derrida.

2. Sovereignty Deconstructed In Voyous, for example, Derrida explores several main topics, particularly rogue states, reason, and sovereignty in relation to democracy. Titled “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?),” the first lengthy address, Derrida notes scrupulously, was delivered on the occasion of a conference on “The Democracy to Come” in July 2002 at Cerisy-la-Salle, while the second, shorter lecture, “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, and Sovereignty),” took place at the University of Nice during August 2002 at the twenty-ninth Congress of the Association of French Language Societies of Philosophy. This much is clear about the book’s title and topic from the preface: the rogue state “does not respect its state duties before the law of the world community and the obligations of international law; the state scoffs at the law—and mocks the condition of law.”5 A footnote to this definition immediately questions: “Does the reason of state always submit to the condition of law? Does sovereignty itself relieve it of the condition of law? Or else does it exceed and betray it, always as an exception, at the very moment it claims precisely to establish it?” (V, p. 12n). Derrida puts the concept of sovereignty in question at the outset, and the rogue state has everything to do with it. What happens in contemporary politics plays a leading role here, as Derrida illustrates in this and a dozen other late texts.6 3. Geoffrey Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Bennington (Chicago, 1999), p. 169. 4. Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (London, 2003), p. 96. In a recent documentary, Derrida is quoted from an unpublished 1982 interview that sets improvisation against stereotypical discourses as saying “I believe in improvisation” (Derrida, DVD, dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman [Zeitgeist Video, 2003]). 5. Derrida, Voyous (Paris, 2003), p. 12; hereafter abbreviated V. 6. Bennington notes, “There is no easy way to distinguish logical concerns from epistemological ones in Derrida, nor these from ethical or political ones” (Bennington, “Derrida and Politics,” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen [Cambridge, 2001], p. 197). Meanwhile, Richard Beardsworth observes that “the domain of politics is not a privileged object of reflection for Derrida, although recent work of the 1990s has mobilized and reworked the term more immediately than that of the past” (Beardsworth, Derrida


Citing Noam Chomsky’s Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (2000), Robert Litwak’s Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy (2000), and William Blum’s The Rogue State (2001), Derrida confirms “the most perverse, violent, and destructive of rogue states would thus be, first, the United States and occasionally its allies” (V, p. 139). Insofar as this nuclear state stands arrogantly above and disregards international laws and treaties, often in the name of a supremacist nation-state sovereignty, this hegemon simultaneously relies on and yet undermines the concept of sovereignty. Can there be several hundred fully sovereign nations in the world? Are limitations necessary? How do things stand with the politics of sovereignty? Usually defined as supreme authority within a territory, linked with a historical sequence of sovereigns (God, king, people, nation, will), sovereignty among nation-states dates from the time of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), when interference in other states’ governing prerogatives became unacceptable. Following Carl Schmitt, Derrida points out that “a sovereign is defined by his capacity to decide the exception [and he has] the right to suspend the law.”7 During modern democratic times this ontotheological right passes to the governing body or leader. In the U.S., for instance, it manifests itself in the right of the president to grant amnesty from judicial judgments. Moreover, a state’s “monopoly on violence is of a piece with the motif of sovereignty. It is also what will always have grounded the death penalty, the right of the state, the right of the sovereign to punish by death.”8 and the Political [London, 1996], p. xi). Finally, in his otherwise excellent book Simon Critchley unconvincingly declares, “In my experience of reading Derrida, the closer one looks, the harder it is to find any substantial difference between earlier and later work” (Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Le´vinas, and Contemporary French Thought [London, 1999], p. 96). On the contrary, the later work appears both more haphazard and more preoccupied with politics and ethics. In his Derrida, Responsibility, and Politics (Brookfield, Vt., 1997), Morag Patrick defends Derrida against charges of ethicopolitical nihilism, and in the process he reviews many political criticisms launched against Derrida during his career. However, nothing is said about sovereignty, a key concern of Derrida’s late work. Preliminary observations on the politics of sovereignty appear in Seyla Benhabib, “Democracy and Difference: Reflections on the Metapolitics of Lyotard and Derrida,” in Jacques Derrida, ed. Christopher Norris and David Roden, 4 vols. (London, 2003), esp. 4:221–28. This four-volume work reprints sixty-five articles and book chapters of critical reaction to Derrida dating from the 1970s to the new century. Despite its 1,600 pages and 22 topics, the critical legacy is highly selective, privileging philosophers and philosophy. 7. Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris, 2001), p. 151; hereafter abbreviated DQD. 8. Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif., 2002), p. 268; hereafter abbreviated WA. This book contains five late addresses and essays plus a foreword by Derrida. Kamuf states that “perhaps the book’s essential trait common to all its chapters [is] the trait of sovereignty” (WA, p. xiii). For a useful discussion of Derrida’s thinking on violence, see David C. Durst, “The Place of the Political in Derrida and Foucault,” Political Theory 28 (Oct. 2000): 675– 89, which is a review of Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political and Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London, 1995).

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In addition to the death penalty, sovereignty enables a state to control its borders and exclude noncitizens as well as to protect itself from outside threats (today that includes forces of globalization and terrorism). In its practice, sovereignty remains connected with the use of force and the principle that might is right. There are paradoxical nondemocratic features of sovereignty, as Derrida’s various deconstructions strikingly demonstrate. Consider the contradictory idea of a sovereign (one over many), the concept of exception (being above the law), the notion of the death penalty (contravening the right to life of the citizen), and the fact that “only small states ever see their sovereignty contested and disputed by powerful states. . . . Powerful states never allow their own sovereignty to be challenged.”9 Additionally, the U.S. in special nondemocratic, contradictory ways not only “plays a virtually sovereign role among sovereign states”10 but dominates the elite inner circle of the United Nations (the nondemocratic Security Council), exercising there a sovereign unilateralism: As always, these two principles, democracy and sovereignty, are at once and by turns indissociable and in contradiction with each other. For democracy to be real, in order to grant space to a right to assert its idea, and to become actual, it requires the cratie [power] of the demos [people]—in this case of the global demos. Thus, it requires a sovereignty, namely a force stronger than all others in the world. But if the constitution of this force is indeed destined in principle to represent and protect this global democracy, it in fact betrays and threatens it at the outset. [V, p. 143] Despite the terrible aporias of sovereignty in its modern democratic forms, Derrida aimed to preserve it, but in limited and shared forms. Such 9. Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif., 2002), p. 385; hereafter abbreviated N. This extensive collection, notes the back cover, “encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years.” Among the most paradoxical features of sovereignty are the dynamics of time and language. The essential “indivisibility” of sovereignty is undermined by temporality and history as well as by discourse’s soliciting of the other and its dividing of authority (V, p. 144). Derrida does not follow up on these provocative disruptions. Here is another vexing trait of sovereignty: “The sovereign has the right not to respond; he has a right to the silence of this asymmetry. He has a right to a certain irresponsibility” (Derrida, “La Beˆte et le souverain,” La De´mocratie a` venir: Autour de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet [Paris, 2004], p. 472). This essay consists of extracts from two sessions of Derrida’s seminar “The Beast and the Sovereign” in Paris in 2001–2. 10. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju¨rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, 2003), p. 94; hereafter abbreviated PTT.


deconstructive questioning and sharing is, he realized, what is in any case happening. The Derridean deconstruction of sovereignty is at once simple and complex. Part of the complexity has to do with sovereignty’s bearing on ethics, law, and human relations. Here is Derrida assuming the role of political prophet in the context on the “war on terror”: This movement of “deconstruction” did not wait for us to begin speaking about “deconstruction”; it has been under way for a long time, and it will continue for a long time. It will not take the form of a suppression of the sovereign state at one particular moment in time but will pass through a long series of still unforeseeable convulsions and transformations, through as yet unheard-of forms of shared and limited sovereignty. The idea and even the practice of shared sovereignty, that is, of a limitation of sovereignty, has been accepted for a long time now. And yet such a divisible or shared sovereignty already contradicts the pure concept of sovereignty. . . . The deconstruction of sovereignty has thus already begun, and it will have no end, for we neither can nor should renounce purely and simply the values of autonomy or freedom, or those of power or force, which are inseparable from the very idea of law. How are we to reconcile unconditional auto-nomy (the foundation of any pure ethics, of the sovereignty of the subject, of the ideal of emancipation and of freedom, and so on) and the hetero-nomy that . . . imposes itself upon all unconditional hospitality worthy of this name? [PTT, pp. 131–32] In Derrida’s nuanced account, the limiting and sharing of political sovereignty, however contradictory to its very concept, is going on (and will continue to do so), which is a good though risky thing. It is not just the modern system of nation-states and its international components that depends on sovereignty but also ethics, law, and so on. (More in a moment about this brow-raising “and so on.”) In its very operation, sovereignty functions through and with autonomy, freedom, force (they are essential). Each sovereign exhibits such traits, including, importantly, the modern citizen-subject. “Human rights pose and presuppose the human being as sovereign (equal, free, self-determined)” (V, p. 128). Furthermore, “All the fundamental axiomatics of responsibility or decision (ethical, juridical, political) are grounded on the sovereignty of the subject, that is, the intentional auto-determination of the conscious self (which is free, autonomous, active, etc.)” (WA, p. xix). Thus, concludes Derrida, one cannot simply jettison the sovereign self, its liberty, equality, responsibility, and power any more than the sovereign nation-state.

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Many others have reached the same unsurprising conclusion, though Derrida omits mentioning the copious scholarship on the topic. Derrida developed his position on the sovereign subject while realizing full well that the self of the citizen is, in fact, divided and multiple. Among innumerable statements on this topic, particularly concerning the unconscious and the other (as well as the other in me), here is a very telling one: “Instead of a subject conscious of itself, responding sovereignly by itself before the law, we can put in place the idea of a differentiated, divided ‘subject,’ not to be reduced to a conscious, egological intentionality. And a ‘subject’ established progressively, laboriously, nevertheless imperfectly, having conditions stabilized—that is, not natural, forever and essentially unstable—for its autonomy: on the ground, inexhaustible and invincible, of a heteronomy” (DQD, p. 286).11 Significantly, Derrida has it both ways here (“yes, but” to the sovereign subject), as he does with the sovereign nation-state, and elsewhere, with the idea of sovereign asylum cities and sovereign universities.12 The concept of sovereignty reaches into many areas, starting with God and reason as sovereign. The significance of “and so on” is that the deconstruction of sovereignty—the double gesture of its erosion yet critical maintenance—is underway, and its scope remains unknown. Not only does the principle of sovereignty pop up in unexpected areas, but it invariably finds itself in a struggle of contending sovereignties (as those who work in universities know all too well). In Derrida’s late texts, sovereignty extends to God, ruler, reason, nation-state, people, subject, the asylum city, university, and domicile. In the citation above from Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Derrida abruptly juxtaposes unconditional and conditional hospitality in his discussion of sovereignty. Conditional or ordinary hospitality, by definition, offers welcome on condition that the other respects my rules and my way 11. “To come to terms with responsibility, then, requires breaking with the horizon of subjectivity, or at least referring the experience of subjectivity—decision, choice, agency—to a constitutive alterity that precedes it and that it cannot comprehend. . . . Others and their traces are always working within us already, in a space and time that cannot be reduced to that of a consciousness or self-presence” (Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics [Stanford, Calif., 1997], p. 66). Keenan’s deconstructive discussions of subjectivity and alterity are lucid, although his de Manian attribution of alterity ultimately to language (rhetoric, text, literature, or fable) is too restrictive. Alterity arrives with time, the other, others, and the unconscious as well as with language in a contretemps. Heteronomy multiply grounds autonomy. 12. On the sovereignty of future cities of refuge and asylum, see Derrida’s address to the International Parliament of Writers at Strasbourg in 1996 in Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London, 2001), especially pp. 4–8; hereafter abbreviated OCF. On the necessary sovereignty of the university, see WA, pp. 202–37, esp. pp. 206– 7, 232, 235–36.


of life. Unconditional or pure hospitality opens itself fully to the unexpected and the unassimilable, wholly other. “These two hospitabilities are at once heterogeneous and indissociable” (PTT, p. 129); the one is the condition, is transcendent to the other, and the other is inconceivable without the one. In practice, conditional hospitality limits welcome while retaining control “over the limits of my ‘home,’ my sovereignty, my ‘I can’” (PTT, p. 128).13 Like the self, the domicile is sovereign. In the closing pages of Voyous, Derrida looks back and helpfully observes, “Among the figures of unconditionality without sovereignty that have come to me to privilege in recent years would be, for example, that of unconditional hospitality” (V, p. 204), and he quickly lists others, including the gift, the pardon, justice, the impossible, reason, the event, and so on. Rodolphe Gasche´ long ago named similar doubled concepts, with their unconditional (transcendent) and conditional (ordinary) forms, “quasitranscendentals,” which, he pointed out, “are situated at the margin of the distinctionbetween the transcendental and the empirical.”14 Unconditionality without sovereignty in Derrida’s late work injects hope and idealism into politics. Is it perhaps possible to think a sovereign without sovereignty? Yes, answers Derrida. Playing ironically off the title of Heidegger’s famous interview in Der Spiegel, Derrida asked rhetorically, “How could you deny that the name ‘god to come’ just might be suitable for an ultimate form of sovereignty that would reconcile absolute justice with absolute law and thus, like all sovereignty and all law, with absolute force, with an absolute saving power?” (PTT, p. 190 n. 14). Here it is a matter of belief in the impossible, of messianicity without messianism (to use the terminology of Specters of Marx), of a democracy to come. The political form of this impossible messianic democratic sovereign without sovereignty might be, following Derrida, an international court of justice complete with its own autonomous force; or a democracy that takes into account the singularity of each existent beyond the social while respecting the social bond and legal equality; or an autonomous and democratic, unified, all-European force;15 or a New In13. Sovereignty pertains to the domicile: “No hospitality, in the classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home” (Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby [Stanford, Calif., 2000], p. 55). This book contains two seminar lectures by Derrida from January 1996 accompanied on facing pages with commentary by Dufourmantelle. 14. Rodolphe Gasche´, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, 1986), p. 317. 15. In the late works, Derrida often speaks from the perspective of European politics, most prominently in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), esp. pp. 76–80. This book contains an address from May 1990 to a colloquium on European cultural identity and an interview from January 1989. Derrida remained resolutely and self-consciously Eurocentric in philosophy and politics. For an unsympathetic account of Derrida’s politics that is particularly dismissive of his messianic view of

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ternational, an affinity or alliance without nation-state, party, citizenship, or class (and steadfastly critical of these things). What characterizes such vertiginous Derridean utopian politics is destatification and internationalism as well as perfectibility and extravagance. There is a Derridean political pragmatism that operates under the name negotiation; it regularly develops the well-known double strategy/gesture signaled by the recurring deconstructive formula, sometimes too pat, on the one hand/on the other. About the matter of nation-state sovereignty, for instance, Derrida resolutely declared, “According to the situation, I am antisovereigntist or sovereigntist—and I claim the right to be antisovereigntist here and sovereigntist there” (DQD, p. 153). But insofar as Derrida was not an unconditional sovereigntist, he tipped his wily deconstructive hand, throwing sovereignty into question. In any case, sovereigntist and antisovereigntist are not two separate, dissociated positions; rather they haunt one another, as should be pointed out for other Derridean quasi-transcendental concepts. It is a matter of the conditionality of the unconditional, a key pragmatic feature of Derridean deconstruction. In the address “On Forgiveness” a surprisingly stark moment occurs when the paradoxical dynamic of Derridean negotiation becomes clear. Here he takes off from the instance of forgiveness, both conditional and unconditional, the latter entailing an ideal noncalculating and gracious forgiving of the guilty as guilty without request or repentance: These two poles, the unconditional and the conditional, are absolutely heterogeneous, and must remain irreducible to one another. They are nonetheless indissociable: if one wants, and it is necessary, forgiveness to be effective, concrete, historic; if one wants it to arrive, to happen by changing things, it is necessary that this purity engage itself in a series of conditions of all kinds (psychosociological, political, etc.). It is between these two poles, irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken. [OCF, p. 44] Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney cogently explain Derridean “negotiation” in their preface to On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness: “responsible political action and decision making consists in the negotiation between these two irreconcilable yet indissociable demands. On the one hand, pragmatic political or legal action has to be related to a moment of justice, see Mark Lilla, “The Politics of Jacques Derrida,” New York Review of Books, 25 June 1998, p. 20, where he concludes that “Derrida is some vague sort of left democrat who values ‘difference’ and, as his recent short pamphlet on cosmopolitanism shows, he is committed to seeing Europe become a more open, hospitable place, not least for immigrants. These are not remarkable ideas.” Lilla does not mention sovereignty.


unconditionality or infinite responsibility if it is not going to be reduced to the prudential demands of the moment. . . . But, on the other hand, such unconditionality cannot, must not, Derrida insists, be permitted to programme political action” (OCF, pp. xi–xii). On the one hand/on the other. Double bond and double duty. Nota bene: Derridean unconditionals, such as pure hospitality, absolute forgiveness, or democracy to come, work on and in the future. Politics explicitly operates there. Yet for me it lacks materialist grip. There is a further dimension to negotiation and forgiveness in the context of sovereignty. Here is a strikingly blunt statement from Derrida: “since we are speaking of forgiveness, what makes the ‘I forgive’ you sometimes unbearable or odious, even obscene, is the affirmation of sovereignty.” The issue is condescension, arrogance, silencing. “Each time forgiveness is effectively exercised, it seems to suppose some sovereign power.” Is there, then, a forgiveness without sovereignty? Derrida’s dream was precisely a pure “forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty” (OCF, pp. 58, 59, 59). The Derridean double bind of political pragmatics often raises the issue of responsibility in decision making (as above), a difficult topic amplified here and there across the late work. To make a decision when the path is clear, when knowledge points the way, when a rule applies is, according to Derrida, to follow a program and calculation, not in fact to make a decision at all. It entails good conscience, morality, but also irresponsibility. Conversely, responsible decision must bear antinomies and double binds. “The instant of decision must remain heterogeneous to all knowledge as such, to all theoretical or reportive determination, even if it may and must be preceded by all possible science and conscience. The latter are unable to determine the leap of decision . . . without depriving it of what makes it a sovereign and free decision.”16 A responsible decision stems from the sovereign subject, who makes an impossible mad leap. Such pure decision starkly opposes the ordinary variety, leaving us in a jam (each time permanently). Whereas earlier Derrida dreamt of forgiveness without sovereignty, here he projects an ideal responsibility dependent on sovereignty. What’s it going to be? Sometimes a sovereigntist, sometimes an antisovereigntist: “Deconstruction begins there. It demands a difficult, almost impossible, but indispensable dissociation between unconditionality . . . and sovereignty (law, power, might). Deconstruction is on the side of uncon16. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (1994; London, 1997), p. 219. This book grew out of a 1988–89 seminar of the same title, parts of which appeared prior to book publication as addresses and printed articles.

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ditionality, even where it appears impossible, and not of sovereignty, even where it appears possible” (DQD, p. 153). This can stand as a summary statement on Derrida’s vexing deconstruction of sovereignty.

3. Derridean Politics All indications are that Jacques Derrida, a secular Algerian SephardicJew, was a democratic socialist with libertarian leanings as well as a strong cosmopolitan, someone who expected contemporary globalization, including market economics, technology, media, U.S. hegemony, and European integration to alter the world in many ways that compromise the sovereign democratic nation-state for good and ill.17 Instances of good erosions of sovereignty for late Derrida include humanitarian interventions, the International Criminal Court, the concept of crimes against humanity, the end of the death penalty (outlawed in the European Union), and the work of certain nongovernmental organizations. “We should salute what is heralded today in the reflection on the right of interference or intervention in the name of what is obscurely and sometimes hypocritically called the humanitarian, thereby limiting the sovereignty of the State in certain conditions.”18 This nuanced praise of sovereignty’s erosion is sometimes balanced by Derrida’s defenses of the sovereign democratic nation-state, especially in cases where it fends off the global hegemony of one language, of capital concentration, of one neoliberal market, of terrorism, of weapons proliferation. “The presence of the state must be limited, but that presence can be vital. And it can take only a contradictory form in constant readjustment: to struggle against structures of violent and abusive appropriation, monopolization, and standardization, to defend the rights and potential of (national and international) culture, to liberate space and forces to that end, without, however, programming, inducing, orienting—in any case, as little as possible” (N, p. 67). Under certain conditions, Derrida said yes to the modern sovereign nation-state in its democratic, nonauthoritarian, socialist form. Unfortunately, he was not forthcoming on what democratic socialism might look like. But in no case could Derridean politics have been communitarian. After 17. A good biographical source is Catherine Malabou and Derrida, La Contre-alleé (Paris, 1999), which provides an uncritical overview, but also a rich sampler of Derrida’s work, including four dozen photos (mostly from his personal collection), fifteen postcards and letters sent from him to Malabou, a French Hegel scholar, in 1997–8, and a concluding curriculum vitae of Derrida. 18. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), p. 84; hereafter abbreviated SM. This book originated as a two-part plenary address to an April 1993 conference at the University of California, Riverside, entitled “Whither Marxism?”


examining at length the democratic notion of fraternity (liberty, equality, fraternity), Derrida revealed “I was wondering why the word ‘community’ . . . why I have never been able to write it, on my own initiative and in my name, as it were.”19 His corrosive critique of fraternity is underwritten by an almost instinctive distrust of community. In the dialogue with Ferraris, Derrida demanded, “Do not consider me ‘one of you,’ ‘don’t count me in,’ I want to keep my freedom, always: this, for me, is the condition not only for being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others” (ATS, p. 27). Moreover, to Vattimo he very poignantly declared, “Place, family, language, culture, are not my own, there are no places that ‘belong.’ . . . My relation to these seemingly communal structures is one of expropriation, of disownership. . . . My point of departure is there where this belonging has broken” (ATS, p. 85). During the dialogue with Roudinesco, Derrida connected his discomfit about community to childhood experiences of being identified and typed with hostility as a Jew (see DQD, pp. 182–85).20 In Marx & Sons, he admitted, “I am, even today, I must confess—this is, moreover, easy to see—rather insensitive to any ‘sense of comradeship.’”21 Not surprisingly, Derrida remained suspicious of such key political categories as social class, party politics, nationalism. And unlike Wallerstein, Laclau and Mouffe, Hardt and Negri, and other leading contemporary Left political thinkers, he did not put stock in the new social movements,22 which in the contemporary period arguably displace party and class as innovative political forces. While I sympathize with Derrida’s query in 1989, “Need I remind people that I’ve always been on the left?” (N, p. 164), I understand people’s perplexity. I was and 19. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 304–5. 20. According to Derrida, “From that moment, no doubt, dates the feeling, the wish, for solitude, for withdrawal in relation to any community, indeed to any ‘nationality,’ and the sentiment of suspicion in regard even to this word ‘community’” (Derrida, Sur parole: Instantane´s philosophiques [Paris, 1999], p. 16). Compare this to William Corlett’s “community without unity” framed in the context of social democracy; see Corlett, “Taking Time Out for Community,” Community without Unity: A Politics of Derridian Extravagance (Durham, N.C., 1989). For a concise comparison of Derrida’s politics with those of Deleuze and Guattari, see Paul Patton, “Future Politics,” Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Patton and John Protevi (London, 2003), pp. 15–29. 21. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (London, 1999), p. 265 n. 28. Derrida responds to his nine critics (pp. 213–69, which includes ninety notes), complaining at midpoint, “I shall have to step up the pace if I am to avoid making a detailed, attentive response filling hundreds of pages (that is, indeed, what is called for, but I have not been allotted the space)” (p. 233). 22. On the vitality for contemporary politics of the new social movements versus party politics, see Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (New York, 1991), pp. 229–30; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), pp. 1–2, 87, 140–41, 159–60; and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 272–76.

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am perplexed. The intensity of broken belonging and the strength accorded the sovereign self cast a long rightward-leaning libertarian shadow over Derrida’s left-wing democratic politics. And while I concur with Derrida’s self-assessment, “I am not an anarchist,” I find more telling yet coy the rider, “Deconstruction is undoubtedly anarchic” (N, p. 22). Derrida’s most well-known political statement remains, in retrospect,his condemnation of the ten plagues of the post–cold war New World Order in Specters of Marx. He stood by this sweeping indictment until the end. In summary, these evils, familiar from leftist work, include, first, spreading unemployment, underemployment, and social inactivity, often resulting from calculated deregulation. Second, the massive exclusion from political participation of the homeless and the widespread expulsion of exiles, immigrants, and stateless persons. Third, the economic warfare between the U.S., Europe, and Japan, which commands disproportionate international resources. (With its admission during the late 1990s into the World Trade Organization, China should now be added.) Fourth, the contradictions between the values of the free market and protectionist barriers and interventionist policies. Fifth, the external debt holding large segments of humanity in thrall, contradictorily excluding them from the market. Sixth, the massive arms trafficking that links scientific research, commerce, and workers’ interests such that its suspension would entail major economic dislocations. Seventh, the proliferation of atomic weapons beyond state and market controls. Eighth, the multiplication of ethnic wars guided by irredentist dreams of original homelands and fears of territorial displacements. Ninth, the spread of profit-maximizing virtual states, organized by drug consortia and mafia, that worldwide infiltrate economic and social systems as well as political institutions. Tenth, most significant in the present context, the unequal application of international law in the interests of certain powerful states devoted to national sovereignty, backed by technical, economic, and military might (see SM, pp. 81–84). Derrida should have listed other evils of globalization, notably, environmental degradation; feminization of poverty; the spread of national security apparatuses, secret bases, militarized states, and the bombing of civilians; dedication to quick profits, speedups, short-term goals, systematic exploitation; worsening conditions in and spread of urban ghettoes and racial enclaves; and increasing privatization and uneven distribution of basic resources, particularly food, water, energy, land, education, medical care, and credit.23 Wide-ranging and detailed critiques of Specters of Marx appear in 23. See my analysis and critique of Specters of Marx in Leitch, “Global Poststructuralism and Virtual Economics,” Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows (Albany, N.Y., 1996), pp. 3–24. In Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (New York, 1983), I treat Derrida’s early works at length.


Ghostly Demarcations (1999), where nine critics, among them Ahmad, Eagleton, Jameson, Macherey, and Negri, respond, some sympathetically, some dismissively, others carefully and critically. Several criticisms aptly recur in this revealing casebook: Derrida reads Marx too selectively; he jettisons the useful concepts of ideology, social class, base/superstructure, and exploitation; he lapses into philosophically idealist mystical, sometimes religious, thinking; he skirts practical politics, appearing to be antipolitics; he is voluntaristic and advocates reform, not revolutionary, socialism. The key notions of Derrida’s inventive political philosophy in the late works remain, in my judgment, democracy to come, unconditional justice, pure hospitality, and the messianic without messianism, famously first assembled in Specters of Marx and featured regularly thereafter. These Derridean ideals, phantoms, specters, stemming from or shared by the Enlightenment and modernity, haunt the present, orienting critique and doing political work. There is a peak moment in Specters of Marx when Derrida summons the coming of a singular other, an event calling for unconditional hospitality, the incalculable and unexpected (although much anticipated and hoped for) impossible messianic democracy to come, figured as a guest, a foreigner “who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, and right in general” (SM, p. 65). How does one characterize this vision, this eccentric political projection, a peculiar assemblage of libertarian, liberal, communist, cosmopolitan, and utopian ideas?24 How do things stand with sovereignty in Recall that Foucault criticized theories of power based on sovereignty as wrongheaded and blind to modern capillary biopower: “At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality [New York, 1978], pp. 88–89). A Foucauldian critique of Derridean politics would require a separate essay; for a critical overview of his thinking about sovereignty, see Jean Terrel, “Les Figures de la souverainete´,” Foucault au Colle`ge de France: Un Itine´raire, ed. Guillaume le Blanc and Terrel (Pessac, France, 2003), pp. 101– 29. 24. The concept of sovereignty quietly presupposes ownership of private property, a feature mentioned unfortunately only in passing by Derrida. See Dan Philpott, “Sovereignty,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.Stanford.edu/entries/sovereignty.There is a rich history of sovereignty as a political concept dating from Machiavelli, Luther, Bodin, and Hobbes up to the present, as Philpott makes clear, although he omits some influential texts, such as Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (1922; Cambridge, 1985), and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif., 1998). Schmitt famously opens with the declaration, “Sovereign is he who decides on exception” (Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 5).

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this scenario? Clearly, the sovereign subject as spectral foreign guest precedes and outweighs the usual sovereignties of home, nation-state, and cultural belonging. That sums up Derridean politics, a suggestive yet troubling mix, on occasion glibly reduced by him to formulas like unconditional/ conditional, ideal/practical, on the one hand/on the other that generate toopredictable paradoxes. The telling tableau from Specters of Marx begins with Derrida self-consciously bracketing political pragmatics and negotiation, pitting the “infinite promise” against “the determined, necessary, but also necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise” (SM, p. 65). In more than one place, Derrida in the late work equated the messianic event, justice, and democracy to come with revolution depicted as an interruption, a radical break in the ordinary course of history, a rupture with a system of dominant norms or programs.25 Derrida believed in “revolution,” foreseeing, however, that it must, pragmatically speaking, “come to terms with the impossible, negotiate the non-negotiable that has remained non-negotiable, calculate with the unconditional as such, with the inflexible unconditionality of the unconditional” (WA, p. 277). Yet revolution appears unlikely under such conditions; it seems just so much speculation. The final tableau I want to evoke occurs in Voyous when Derrida generalizes, quite shockingly at first, by saying that “the States waging war on rogue States are themselves, in their most legitimate sovereignty, rogue States abusing their power. As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and rogue State. . . . Thus there are only rogue States. Potentially or actually. The State is roguish” (V, pp. 145–46). Because it is in the nature of sovereignty to seek supremacy and use force, the special epithet rogue state, Derrida argues, is misleading and should be scrapped. (No doubt some states are more roguish than others, notably superpowers with supersovereignty who unilaterally break international laws and agreements.) In any case, insofar as the recent “war on terrorism” is not state-based, the era of rogue states appears behind us, despite President George W. Bush’s doubtlessly comforting, but misleading reactivation of the category. What is most shocking in Derrida’s generalization is the severity of his critique of political sovereignty and the nation-state. The category of the rogue state becomes useless as well as hypocritical, and faith in the modern form of the state appears paper thin at this moment. 25. See, for example, WA, pp. 242, 251, 260, and chapter 6 of DQD, “L’Esprit de la re´volution,” pp. 129–74, esp. pp. 138–39.


4. Judging Derrida Having read more than a dozen volumes of Derrida’s late works, not to mention many of the early works, I am most appreciative, particularly with De quoi demain, Negotiations, Voyous, and Philosophy in a Time of Terror in mind, of his originality and inventiveness, manifested readily in such suggestive, though spectral, quasi-transcendental political concepts as hospitality, justice, the messianic, and democracy to come, all created in the course of his deconstruction of their ordinary forms. The well-known Derridean critique of traditional binary concepts and the eccentric focus on margins remain today powerful tools of analysis. Derrida’s commitments to democracy, justice, and internationalism showed him a politicaloptimist, while his ubiquitous nuances and qualifications displayed a seasoned skepticism alert to conscious and unconscious deceptions. It goes without saying that Derrida was a uniquely gifted reader of texts—very often canonical works—and was capable of finding motifs previously, in retrospect surprisingly, unnoticed. The specters uncovered in Marx’s works are astonishing, as is their linkage with Shakespeare’s ghost in Hamlet. The readings of Kant scattered across the late works, incisive and productive, should be gathered in a Derrida on Kant sampler under such political headings as cosmopolitanism, responsibility, decision, justice, forgiveness, force,reason (that is, “reason of state”). Derrida’s creative application of psychoanalysis to politics significantly shaped his accounts of otherness, subjectivity, fraternity, and spectrality, justifying with renewed vigor continued psychoanalytical research in an increasingly discouraging environment. I appreciate Derrida’s warnings, though often too broad, about the roles of family, comradeship, community, party, and the nation-state in politics. These are useful caveats. Although suspicious of the concept of hegemony as too homogenizing, he applied it helpfully and judiciously in the late works, usually to characterize expansive U.S. power in the plural (hegemonies). Derrida’s adamant secularism should be admired, but I am not so sure about his dabbling in religion, even though after September 11 it is difficult for secularists like me to continue simply dismissing religion, much as I want to. Finally, the way I see things, the end of the cold war and the rise of the U.S. empire, plus the culture wars that started during the 1980s, awakened academics to the role of the public intellectual. It was not the Heidegger or de Man affairs of 1987 that actually did so. Many of the dozens of late works by Derrida respond directly to this epochal transformation.26 26. Early on I was a follower of Derrida’s public intellectual work with the Group for Research on Philosophic Teaching and the International College of Philosophy in Paris. See my “Deconstruction and Pedagogy,” Theory in the Classroom, ed. Cary Nelson (Urbana, Ill., 1986), pp. 45–56 and “Research and Education at the Crossroads: Report on the Colle`ge International de Philosophie,” SubStance 15, no. 2 (1986): 101–14.

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In this light the famous invocation of the emerging New International in Specters of Marx, thoroughly counterintuitive, remains heartening, yet too abstract. I’ll take the World Social Forum while I await the arrival of Derrida’s New International. There is more to criticize in Derrida’s work, and the literature in this area is voluminous. Beyond the points I have already made and cited, I would mention several key matters, including those missing in Derrida’s work— such as popular culture, everyday life, capillary power, corporeality—and matters avoided—social class, ideology, mode of production. It is a question here primarily of pragmatically oriented historical materialism. How can one talk effectively about long-standing systematic social inequalities in the absence of some such categories? The Derridean notion of logocentrism that covers the period from Plato to Le´vi-Strauss will not do; it is ahistorical, disembodied, flat. Late capitalism works better; it is fully historicized, materially grounded, broadly explanatory. Finally, I am surprised and disappointed by the absence of defenses of the welfare state that one would have expected from Derrida and that the Left so obviously very much needs to mount in these times of triumphant neoliberal capitalism. The welfare state is a significant achievement of human civilization. In a recent article, Gayatri Spivak concludes that a key task is “to wrench deconstruction from its proper home in ‘Comparative Literature,’ to let it loose in ‘Cultural Studies’ so that it can transform its nice nursery of hybrid plantings to reveal the saturnalia of an imagined counter-globalization.”27 Against the U.S. background of an atrophying comparative literature and a thriving, though often shallow and overextended cultural studies, deconstruction needs to migrate and transform globalization studies. This scenario, tellingly, addresses deconstruction both as Derridean philosophyand as an interdisciplinary movement characterized by a dissident deportment, a (dis)respect for tradition, and an antinomian and anarchistic sensibility given to internationalist political criticism and work.28 Of course, Spivak 27. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Deconstruction and Cultural Studies,” Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Royle (New York, 2000), p. 35. Spivak depicts the end of comparative literature in her Wellek Library Lectures of May 2000 published under the title Death of a Discipline (New York, 2003). Here, like Derrida, she critically assesses the nation-state (in her case, vis-a`-vis globalization and the “region,” a` la area studies). Of cultural studies, she complains, it is “monolingual, presentist, narcissistic, not practiced enough in close reading even to understand that the mother tongue is actively divided” (ibid., p. 20). For Spivak, language, like culture, undetermined and performative, agonistic and heterogeneous, figures collectivity. 28. See, for example, the feminist post-Marxist deconstructions of politics and economics in J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), p. 139, where the author set out “to reject globalization as the inevitable inscription of capitalism,” and also Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism, ed. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff (Durham, 2001), p. 170: “We would like to deploy our language of class in a project of undermining capitalocentrism and unmaking


has long been a poster person for this project while remaining critical of its Eurocentrism and its (mis)handling of subalterns. What is encouraging here for Spivak, and for me, is deconstruction’s movement in Derrida’s late works not only to politics but to social science—a trajectory followed by cultural studies, although the latter foregrounds sociology more than political science, history, economics, and international relations. Deconstruction’s reckoning with sociology is for the future perhaps. Meanwhile, one of the many forms of counterglobalization evoked by Derrida is an archipelago of rogue groups, a roguocracy to use his term, which transgresses nation-state power and poses a countersovereignty to the sovereign state.29 For good and ill.

the global capitalist economy as a discursively hegemonic entity.” In his famous 1983 lecture “The Principle of Reason,” Derrida sounds a revealing note of caution at one point: “We are in an implacable political topography: one step further in view of greater profundity or radicalization, even going beyond the ‘profound’ and the ‘radical,’ the principial, the arche, one step further toward a sort of original an-archy risks producing or reproducing the hierarchy. ‘Thinking’ requires both the principle of reason and what is beyond the principle of reason, the arche and anarchy” (Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,” Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. [Stanford, Calif., 2004], p. 153). 29. With this roguocracy, “we have here all the ingredients for a counter-concept of sovereignty, a` la Bataille” (V, p. 100). Bataille’s anti-Hegelian project nicknamed sovereignty, a precursor to deconstruction and more properly named antisovereignty (subversion and disorder), is examined early on and with admiration in Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 251–77.

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Derrida Enisled J. Hillis Miller

I propose the following three hypotheses: (1) Martin Heidegger defined the human being as Dasein, being there. I suggest that the assumptions in a fiction or in a critical-theoretical-philosophical text about the nature of Dasein and about the mode of access each Dasein has to others, what Heidegger called Mitsein, tend to be consonant with the concept of community each such writer has. (2) Unless you begin with the assumption that Dasein is in some way or another fundamentally and primordially Mitsein or Mitdasein, you cannot easily think your way out of an assumption of Dasein’s fundamental solitude to a conception of community as being with. This is the case unless, like Jean-Luc Nancy, you define this being with as an agglomeration of solitaries all in the same boat of solitude, that is, as all dwelling together in what Nancy calls a communaute´ de´soeuvreé, an unworked community. (3) Jacques Derrida is unusual, if not unique, in explicitly denying that Dasein is Mitsein. His concepts of ethics and of community are consonant with this assumption of each ego’s inescapable solitude. According to Derrida, I remain alone, on my own, however much I may be open to the ethical demand each other, though wholly other, makes on me. Each demand, moreover, as Derrida says in The Gift of Death, is incommensurable with the demands made at the same moment by all the other “wholly others.”1 All translations unless otherwise noted are my own. 1. “I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing to him the other other, the other others. Every other (one) is every (bit) other” (Jacques Derrida,The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills [Chicago, 1995], p. 68; trans. mod.; hereafter abbreviated GD). See Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris, 1999), p. 98; hereafter abbreviated DM: “Je ne peux re´pondre a` l’appel, a` la demande, a` l’obligation, ni meˆme a` l’amour d’un autre sans lui sacrifier l’autre autre, les autres autres. Tout autre est tout autre.” Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0008$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Versions of Mitsein Most modern and postmodern philosophers or theorists in one way or another assume that our primordial, inalienable situation is a being with others who are more or less like ourselves and to whose interiority we are granted some degree of access. Let me illustrate this by way of several examples before turning to Derrida. Basic features of Raymond Williams’s assumptions about community emerge in The Country and the City and in the entry on community in Keywords.2 One is the conviction that a true community is not just a relatively small group of people living together in the same place and sharing the same immemorial assumptions in kindness and mutuality. A true community must also be classless. Class structures, particularly those generated by capitalism, destroy community. A second, crucial assumption is never stated in so many words. Nevertheless, it is fundamental to Williams’s thinkingabout community. This is the presumption that the individual is and should be his social placement, with no residue or leftover that is not determined by the surrounding culture. A small freeholder is a small freeholder through and through. I am my subject-position. I raise wheat or brussels sprouts, or make shoes, or work as a carpenter, or milk cows, therefore I am. Williams’s third essential assumption is that the warmth and mutuality of a true community depend on the way I know my neighbor. My social placement exposes me entirely to other people, with no corner of private subjectivity hidden away from them. I understand my neighbor or I am understood by him or her, in kindness and mutuality, because he or she is, through and through, his or her social role in a small group. This happy intersubjectivity works because all members of the group have in common a set of traditional habits and beliefs that thoroughly determines what they are. This makes Williams’s ideal classless rural community a true Gemeinschaft. Williams’s agreement with Marxist assumptions about self and community is indicated by the resonance between what Williams says and what Marx and Engels say in a passage near the end of the first part of The German Ideology: 2. See Raymond Williams, “Enclosures, Commons, and Communities” and “Knowable Communities,” The Country and the City (Oxford, 1975), pp. 96–107, 165–81 and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford, 1985), pp. 75–76.

J . H i l l i s M i l l e r is distinguished research professor at the University of California at Irvine. His recent books include Others (2001), Speech Acts in Literature (2002), On Literature (2002), and Zero Plus One (2003). A J. Hillis Miller Reader was published in 2005. He is currently at work on books about communities in literature and about Jacques Derrida’s late work, of which the present essay is a part.

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J. Hillis Miller / Derrida Enisled

“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”3 Various other theories of community roughly contemporary with Williams’s ideas have been developed and may be compared to his. Some come before The Country and the City. Some are more recent. It is unlikely that Williams had read all these writers, or they him. Such theorists of community include Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Alphonso Lingis, and Jacques Derrida.4 These writers are by no means all singing the same tune. Many subtle discriminations and careful readings would be necessary to do them justice. A full account of what they say about community would take a big book. Nevertheless, all but Derrida, along, perhaps, with Blanchot, tend to assume, or to want to assume, in one way or another, that Dasein is primordially Mitdasein. Edmund Husserl, in a passage in the fifth Cartesian meditation, to which Derrida refers a number of times, defines each ego’s knowledge of other egos as a matter of analogical apperception.5 The phrasing escapes solipsism, but just barely, since each word in the phrase distances the other ego from my consciousness. It is not direct perception but indirect apperception. It is not literal penetration of the other ego but recognition that the other consciousness must be analogous to mine. Husserl was not satisfied with this formulation and, so I am told, spilt much ink in his later years in attempting to persuade himself that being with others is part of each ego’s constitution, as he also does in the later pages of the fifth meditation, for example when he hypothesizes “a community of men and . . . of man—who, even as solitary, has the sense: member of a community.”6 3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. pub., ed. Roy Pascal (New York, 1969), p. 74. Scholars think the words are probably Marx’s. 4. See Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communaute´ de´soeuvreé (Paris, 1986), trans. Peter Connor et al. under the title The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, Minn., 1991), and Eˆtre singulier pluriel (Paris, 1996), trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne under the title Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Calif., 2000); Georges Bataille, L’Apprenti Sorcier du cercle communiste de´mocratique a` Ace´phale: Textes, lettres et documents (1932–1939), ed. Marina Galletti (Paris, 1999); Maurice Blanchot, La Communaute´ inavouable (Paris, 1983), trans. Pierre Joris under the title The Unavowable Community (Barrytown, N.Y., 1988); Giorgio Agamben, La comunita` che viene (Turin, 1990), trans. Michael Hardt under the title The Coming Community (Minneapolis, Minn., 1993); and Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington, Ind., 1994). 5. See Edmund Husserl, “Fifth Meditation: Uncovering the Sphere of Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity,” Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, 1960), pp. 89–151, esp. p. 108, on “the mediate intentionality of experiencing someone else, as ‘appresentation’ (analogical apperception).” 6. Ibid., p. 129.


Here is Derrida’s commentary on Husserl’s term analogical apperception. It appears in Be´liers, apropos of Derrida’s own extended meditation on Celan’s line, “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen” (“The world is gone, I have to carry you”).7 Derrida here ascribes to Husserl some of his own intransigence about my knowledge of the other ego: In this absolute solitude of the pure ego, when the world has retreated, when “Die Welt ist fort,” the alter ego that is constituted in the ego is no longer accessible in an originary and purely phenomenological intuition. Husserl must concede this in his Cartesian Meditations. The alter ego is constituted, only by analogy, by appresentation, indirectly, inside of me, who then carries it where there is no longer a transcendent world. I must then carry the it, carry you, there where the world gives way: that is my responsibility. But I can no longer carry the other or you, if to carry means to include in oneself, in the intuition of one’s own egological consciousness. It’s a question of carrying without appropriating to oneself. To carry now no longer has the meaning of “to comprise” [comporter], to include, to comprehend in the self, but rather to carry oneself or bear oneself toward [se porter vers] the infinite inappropriability of the other, toward the encounter with its absolute transcendence in the very inside of me, that is to say, in me outside of me.8 Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time and in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, asserts that Mitsein, being together, is a primordial feature of Dasein, his name for human being-there. Here is his formulation in Being and Time: “This ‘with’ is something of the character of Dasein . . . . By reason of this with-like [mithaften] Being-in-the-world, the world is al7. Paul Celan, “Grosse, Glu¨hende Wo¨lbung,” Atemwende (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), p. 93, l. 14. 8. Derrida, “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—Between Two Infinities, the Poem,” in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York, 2005), p. 161. See Derrida, Be´liers: Le Dialogue Ininterrompu: Entre deux infinis, le poe`me (Paris, 2003), pp. 75–76: Dans cette solitude absolue de l’ego pur, quand le monde s’est retire´, quand Die Welt ist fort, l’alter ego qui se constitue dans l’ego n’est plus accessible dans une intuition originaire et purement pheńomeńologique. Husserl doit le conce´der dans ses Me´ditations carte´siennes, l’alter ego est constitue´ seulement par analogie, par appre´sentation, indirectement, au-dedans de moi, qui alors le porte la` ou` il n’y a plus de monde transcendant. Je dois alors le porter, te porter, la` ou` le monde se de´robe, c’est la` ma responsabilite´. Mais je ne peux plus porter l‘autre, ni toi, si porter veut dire inclure en soi-meˆme, dans l’intuition de sa propre conscience e´gologique. Il s’agit de porter sans s’approprier. Porter ne veut plus dire “comporter,” inclure, comprendre en soi, mais se porter vers l’inappropriabilite´ infinie de l’autre, a` la rencontre de sa transcendance absolue au-dedans meˆme de moi, c’est-a`-dire en moi hors de moi. It would be necessary to read Husserl’s fifth meditation carefully, word for word, to decide whether or not Derrida’s commentary exceeds hermeneutical exegesis, as he claims in Be´liers all good reading does.

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ways the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with Others. Their Being-in-themselves within-the-world is Dasein-with [Mitdasein].”9 Nevertheless, Heidegger notoriously condemns the discourse of everyday shared experience as Gerede, idle talk, a falling away into das Man, the they. He most prizes those moments when a Dasein becomes aware of itself in its uniqueness and finitude, its Sein zum Tode, its being toward death. Such a Dasein may then resolutely decide to take responsibility for itself by “wanting to have a conscience” (Gewissen-haben-wollen) (BT, p. 334). What is for Williams the bad alienation of a character like Jude Fawley in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure or Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native is for Heidegger the condition of authenticity. Authenticity means taking possession, in solitude, of my “ownmost Self” (eigenste Selbst) (BT, p. 334), that is, of the possibilities special to my own Dasein, rather than living in submission to das Man. Heidegger’s valuation seems exactly the reverse of Williams’s. Heidegger, it may be, is closer to the Protestant tradition of valuing private spiritual life than Williams. Williams gives short shrift to the Protestantism of his rural Welsh border villagers. He sees the local vicar as part of the oppressive class structure. He values the dissenting chapels that were a resistance to the hegemony of the Church of England, but says nothing about the forms of solitary spirituality those chapels promoted, for example, private prayer.10 In the Marxist millennium one will not have a private subjective life. One will not need to have such a thing. Nevertheless, Heidegger, in the discussion of Mitsein in Being and Time and in a remarkable passage in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, asserts categorically that Mitsein is aboriginal. It makes sense, says Heidegger in the Fundamental Concepts, to ask whether I can ever know what is going on in the mind of an animal, but it makes no sense to ask this about my knowledge of another human being. Why? Heidegger’s answer is unequivocal: With respect to man and the human potential for self-transposition into another human being, it transpired that the question is superfluous because in a sense it does not know what it is asking. [Diese Frage ist u¨berflu¨ssig, sie weiss gewissermassen nicht, was sie fragt.] For if the question is really directed toward man in his essence, it becomes redundant to the extent that being human means being transposed into the other, means being with the other [sofern Menschsein heisst: Versetztsein in den Anderen, Mitsein mit dem Anderen].11 9. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London, 1962), pp. 154–55; hereafter abbreviated BT. 10. See Williams, “Enclosures, Commons, and Communities,” p. 105. 11. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), p. 207.


I suspect that Heidegger chose to assert so firmly that each Dasein is from the beginning Miteinandersein, “transposed into the other,” set over into the other, in order to make a preemptive strike against the danger of solipsism. He, it may be, wanted to avoid the perhaps insuperable difficulty of getting from an initial solitude to some kind of being together. He may have wanted to avoid getting in the pickle in which Husserl found himself. Further confirmation that Heidegger presumes Dasein is Mitsein is given in a later section of Die Grundbegriffe, read in detail by Derrida in the eighth seminar of “La Beˆte et le souverain.”12 Heidegger argues that human beings are Weltbilden (world-building), as opposed to the stone, which is Weltlos (worldless), and to the animal, which is Weltarm (poor in world). In spite of Heidegger’s stress in Die Grundbegriffe on Dasein’s solitude (Einsamkeit), the process of world building, through language, by way of Dasein’s openness to beings in their totality and its ability to name things as such, happens through collective action as a result of the primordial being together of all Mitdaseienden. Here is Derrida’s succinct and elegant commentary on Heidegger’s Miteinandersein: Heidegger himself is in the process of making his path, of breaking his own proper trail when, claiming to translate Aristotle’s genial but confused and insufficiently explicated intuition, Heidegger explains to us, he himself, that words are born of this essential accord [jener wesenhaf¨ bereinkunft] of men among themselves in their Miteinandersein, ten U insofar as they are together, in their Miteinandersein, in their being-onefor-the-other [leur être-l’un-pour-l’autre], ones-with-the-others [unsavec-les-autres], open to being [l’e´tant] which surrounds them, to being as such. It is this transcendence shared in Mitsein, in the common opening to being, which is the foundation [Grund] of their original accord and which as a result makes discourse [Rede] possible. Therefore it is always umgekehrt [reversed]: it is not convention that comes to add itself to natural sound, that is animal sound, in order as a result to make language possible, then human society possible. On the contrary, reversed, umgekehrt, it is transcendence, the opening to being as such and in totality [to the world], transcendence which, originally common, shared in the Miteinandersein, permits accord, language, convention, etc. And one cannot separate transcendence from Miteinandersein. Transcendence, the movement which carries, which connects to being as such, which is from the start a social movement, if you wish, a being-onewith-the-other [un être-l’un-avec-l’autre], a Mitsein. There is no transcendence without the Miteinandersein. Even solitude, which is one of 12. The last ten seminars that Derrida wrote and delivered, entitled “La Beˆte et le souverain,” were presented in Paris in 2002–3.

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the major themes of this seminar, as soon as it assumes transcendence and language, it also assumes, as solitude as such, as Robinsonophilia, Robinsonocracy, Robinsonocentrism, if you wish, [solitude assumes] Mitsein and Miteinandersein.13 In stressing, with Derrida, Heidegger’s repeated assertion that Dasein is Mitsein I am, as Arnold Davidson has reminded me, going against a strong tradition in writings about Heidegger. That tradition assumes that Heidegger’s doctrine of Mitsein is peripheral and superficial. Each authentic Dasein, this tradition claims, is, for Heidegger, alone in its decision to take possession of its ownmost possibilities of being. All Dasein is required to do in order to fulfil its obligation to the other person is let that other person be. This ontology of solitude, as it might be called, is, it is assumed, fundamental in Heidegger’s thinking. An influential paper by Emmanuel Le´vinas, dating back to 1951, “L’Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” (“Is Ontology Fundamental?”), asserts just that. From his earliest important work, Le´vinas wanted above all to define himself as different from Heidegger. Le´vinas is a conspicuous absence in my list of thinkers of community. I have omitted a fuller discussion of him for two reasons. (1) It would take a lot of space to do justice to Le´vinas’s ideas about self, other, and community. (2) The I/ thou relation, in my judgment, takes precedence, in Le´vinas’s thinking, over any relation of the self to the community. The latter is my primary topic here, or rather I want to show how the intersubjective relation between two 13. Derrida, unpublished transcript of the eighth seminar of “La Beˆte et le souverain,” 2003. Here is the original: H. [Heidegger] lui-meˆme est en train de faire son chemin, de frayer son propre chemin quand, pre´tendant traduire l’intuition geńiale quoique confuse et insuffisamment expliqueé d’Aristote, Heidegger nous explique, lui, que les mots naissent de cet accord essentiel [jener ¨ bereinkunft] des hommes entre eux dans leur Miteinandersein, en tant qu’ils wesenhaften U sont ensemble, dans leur Miteinandersein, dans leur eˆtre-l’un-pour-l’autre, les uns-avec-lesautres, ouverts a` l’e´tant qui les entoure, a` l’e´tant comme tel. C’est cette transcendance partageé dans le Mitsein, dans l’ouverture commune a` l’e´tant, qui est le fondement [Grund] de leur accord originel et qui rend ensuite la parole, le discours [Rede] possible. Donc c’est toujours umgekehrt: ce n’est pas la convention qui vient s’ajouter au son naturel, voire animal, pour rendre ensuite le langage humain possible, puis la socie´te´ humaine possibles. Au contraire, a` l’inverse, umgekehrt, c’est la transcendance, l’ouverture a` l’e´tant comme tel et en totalite´ (au monde), transcendance qui, originellement commune, partageé dans le Miteinandersein, permet l’accord, le langage, la convention, etc. Et on ne peut pas se´parer la transcendance du Miteinandersein. La transcendance, le mouvement qui porte, qui rapporte a` l’e´tant comme tel, elle est d’entreé de jeu un mouvement social, si vous voulez, un eˆtre-l’un-avec-l’autre, un Mitsein. Le Mitsein est originaire et non de´rive´, et la transcendance est un Mitsein. Il n’y aurait pas de transcendance sans ce Miteinandersein. La solitude elle-meˆme, qui est l’un des the`mes majeurs de ce se´minaire, de`s lors qu’elle suppose transcendance et langage, elle suppose aussi, comme solitude en tant que telle, comme robinsonophilie, robinsonocratie, robinsonocentrisme, si vous voulez, (la solitude suppose) le Mitsein et le Miteinandersein.


persons is related to the relation of the self to the community. The two relations are by no means identical or subject to the same problematic. Evidence of the priority of the I/thou relation for Le´vinas is the way he insisted repeatedly that the face-to-face relation that most interested him was not just my relation to my neighbor, in the sense of someone living together with me in my community and sharing my language and my assumptions, but my relation to any other person, however alien, in all his or her inability to be known as I can know an inanimate object. In this assertion a link to Derrida’s thinking may be glimpsed, though Derrida goes somewhat beyond Le´vinas in the extravagance of his insistence that tout autre est tout autre, which, in one of its meanings, can be translated as “every other person is wholly other.” When Le´vinas uses the word communaute´, he tends to use it to name what is held in common by two persons in the face-toface encounter generated by language, that is, through my invocation of him or her. Le´vinas uses the word socialite´ in the same way: It is a question of seeing the function of language not as subordinated to the consciousness one acquires of the presence of the other person or of his nearness or of community [communaute´] with him, but as condition of that “becoming conscious.” . . . Expression . . . consists, prior to any common content by way of comprehension, in instituting sociality [socialite´] by a relation irreducible, as a consequence, to comprehension.14 One does not, ordinarily, talk to or invoke a stone or a screwdriver, but language (called by Le´vinas, variously, langage, discours, parole) is for him fundamentally necessary to my invocation of the other in a face-to-face encounter. Le´vinas answers his question “Is Ontology Fundamental?” with a resounding no! Ontology is not fundamental, not a universal ground. Why not? It is because my face-to-face encounter with my neighbor or with the other person generally (autrui) is something “otherwise than being” (autrement qu’eˆtre), as the title of one of Le´vinas’s important books puts it. The quotation on the back of Autrement qu’eˆtre ou au-dela` de l’essence expresses Le´vinas’s position succinctly: “Ethics, here, does not come as a supplement to a preexisting existential base . . . . To be human means to live as if one were not a being among beings.”15 For Heidegger, on the contrary, in Le´vinas’s reading, Dasein’s solitary relation to Being in its occultation or with14. Emmanuel Le´vinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-a`-l’autre (Paris, 1991), pp. 19–20; hereafter abbreviated EN. 15. Le´vinas, Autrement qu’eˆtre ou au-dela` de l’essence (The Hague, 1974), back cover.

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drawal is fundamental. My relation to other Daseins is peripheral, a matter of “letting the other be.”16 As Le´vinas puts it: “Being with the other—the Miteinandersein—therefore rests for Heidegger on the ontological relation” (EN, p. 18). For Le´vinas, being with the other person, in a face-to-face responsiveness and taking of responsibility, is outside Being, not something that rests on the ontological relation. Le´vinas’s polemic against Heidegger is based on a series of oppositions. He opposes the invocation of the other person to knowledge or representation of the other, as though he were an object among other objects that could be cognized and described. He opposes invocative speech to the other to silent comprehension or objective description. Though Le´vinas does not use the terminology of speech act theory, one might say that his term invocation names a performative speech act, while his idea of knowledge or comprehension involves a constative use of language. Le´vinas opposes the inspection of objects, to obtain knowledge of them and of the universal Being they simultaneously reveal and hide, to the face-to-face encounter (rencontre) with the visage of the other. (Though visage is an English word, it hardly sounds idiomatic today, so I shall leave it in French.) The Le´vinasian encounter is not accurately defined by the word Sein, Being, in Heidegger’s Mitsein. Such an encounter is not only ethical. It is also properly “religious,” since the other person mediates the Infini (Infinity) that Le´vinas puts in the place of Heidegger’s Being, with a capital B, Sein: The relation to the other is therefore not ontology. This link to the other which cannot be reduced to the representation of the other, but to his invocation, and where invocation is not preceded by a comprehension, we call it religion . . . . If the word religion must nevertheless announce that the relation with people, irreducible to comprehension, distances itself for that very reason from the exercise of power, but in human vis-

16. Le´vinas is being somewhat unfair to Heidegger in repeatedly asserting that the whole story, for Heidegger, of my responsibility to other Daseins is to “let them be.” In a passage in Sein und Zeit about Mitsein later than the one I have already cited, Heidegger asserts, pace Le´vinas, that a Dasein that has achieved its own ownmost possibilities of being can go beyond passively letting other Daseins be (which Le´vinas associates with knowledge [connaissance] of the other as a form of Being) to actively helping those others, through “solicitude” (Fu¨rsorge), achieve their own ownmost possibilities of being, and through becoming the conscience of others: Dasein’s resoluteness towards itself is what first makes it possible to let the Others who are with it “be” in their ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps forth and liberates. When Dasein is resolute, it can become the “conscience” of Others. Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another—not by ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the “they” and in what “they” want to undertake. [BT, pp. 344–45]


ages rejoins the Infinite—we accept that ethical resonance of the word and all these Kantian echoes. [EN, p. 19] As the word religion here and its defiant Kantian justification suggests, an “invocation” is not just any kind of speech act. To invoke is to call forth, with a suggestion of the magic power to raise spirits or even to raise the dead, as in Jesus’ “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43), or in the way the narrator of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers calls forth his idol, the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern: “I had invoked him and he had come; he hovered before me half the time; it was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth.”17 The invocation at the beginning of a church service calls God to be present in the church and to assist at the service. The question about any invocation, thought of as a special form of speech act, however, is how one could ever verify what J. L. Austin calls its felicity. How can one be sure in a given case whether what is invoked actually comes forth? Glendower, in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, boasts, “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” to which Hotspur replies, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?”18 That is the question, all right. Le´vinas, however, seems more or less confidently to assume that when I am face to face with the other and invoke him or her, the invocation always works and is felicitous. Further evidence that what is in question is an invocation in the religious sense is the way Le´vinas explicitly names the calling forth of the other, here generalized as “discourse,” a form of prayer: “The essence of speech is prayer” (EN, p. 20). What, exactly, is prayer? Derrida devoted a whole seminar, the eighth in the unpublished seminars of 2002–3, to this question. Prayer is a performative similar to invocation. It is a curious kind of speech act that aims both to implore God and at the same time subtly to coerce Him. Prayer forces God’s hand at least in the sense of putting Him to the necessity of either answering or not answering my prayer. But how can I ever be absolutely sure that my prayers have been answered, that a felicitous outcome has been God’s work and not just the way things have naturally turned out? If my invocation of the other when I confront his or her visage is a form of prayer addressed through the other, through autrui, to the Infinite, then it is taking a lot for granted to assume that my prayer will be answered in any verifiable way. Le´vinas uses still another word to name my use of language when I encounter someone face to face: salut. “Man is the only being that I cannot 17. Henry James, The Aspern Papers, in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, 26 vols. (Fairfield, N.J., 1971–79), 12:42. 18. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, in The Riverside Shaksespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2d ed. (Boston, 1974), 3.1.52–54, p. 864.

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encounter without expressing to him this encounter itself . . . . There is in every attitude regarding the human a greeting [un salut]—were this as a refusal to greet [comme refus de saluer]” (EN, p. 19). “Salut” here does not mean a military salute, but a greeting, as in a salutation in which I wish the other good health and good fortune. To salute also suggests the kiss of friendly greeting or welcome, as in, “He saluted her with a gallant kiss.” Le´vinas does not overtly refer to that connnotation. Nevertheless, there are suggestions, in Le´vinas’s use of the word salut, of a body-to-body intimacy in the encounter with another. This is also implied in his emphasis on the confrontation with the naked and exposed visage of the other when I meet him face to face. “The nudity of the visage,” says Le´vinas, “is not a stylistic figure” (EN, p. 23). In the King James translation of Romans, St. Paul exhorts the Romans to “salute one another with an holy kiss. The churches of Christ salute you” (Rom. 16:16). To be kissed by a church! That would truly be an encounter. The difference between Le´vinas and Derrida is perhaps no more than a nuance, but it is the nuance of an infinite gulf. Both assume the singularity and absolute alterity of the other, but Le´vinas believes the naked visage of the other, when I invoke it in prayer or greeting, opens itself to me and opens to me the Infinite it mediates (though Le´vinas would probably resist the word mediates). For Derrida, on the contrary, the other remains always wholly other. Any Derridean ethics must be based on that. Derrida, moreover, resists any conflation of ethics with religion. I shall return to these differences later, when I focus directly on Derrida. I have hypothesized that a thinker’s assumptions about the intersubjective relation, that is, the possibilities of knowing the other or of being ethically related to him or her, are consonant with that thinker’s assumptions about community. Confirmation of this, in Le´vinas’s case, is suggested by his relative lack of interest in the question of community. That relative disinterest follows from his central concern with the face-to-face ethical relation to one other person as a means of reaching toward Infinity, in a properly religious relation. I find only one unequivocal reference to what appears to be a community, under the name of collectivite´, in “L’Ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” In the last paragraph of the essay, Le´vinas lists some questions that remain open for further investigation. In one of these he asks “in what measure finally the relation to the other or the collectivity is our relation, irreducible to comprehension, with the infinite” (note that “infinite” is this time not capitalized) (EN, p. 24). “Collectivity” seems added here more or less as an afterthought and not to require an analysis any different from the one provided for my relation to autrui. Derrida’s view of the exclusiveness of the ethical relation, as passages I


discuss later indicate, is not far from Le´vinas’s view, though it is not identical. For Le´vinas, for example, I invoke the other (autrui), whereas for Derrida, the other (l’autre as tout autre) calls me, demands that I respond responsibly. The call goes in the opposite direction, from him or her to me, not from me to the other. That is an important difference, as is using the word autre rather than the word autrui. The latter means specifically another person and therefore begs a question Derrida wants to keep open by always saying autre. Moreover, Derrida, in The Gift of Death, stresses, in a way Le´vinas, in his easy association of autrui and collectivite´, does not, the way all the others demand my response, incommensurably, all at once, every instant, so that to answer one call I must, inevitably, betray all the others, thereby fracturing the community. Derrida says this in an amazingly eloquent and intransigent formulation, in a tone that does not sound all that Le´vinasian: As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me also to respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah [where Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac] for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably. [GD, p. 68]19 Derrida wrote three important essays on Le´vinas. References to Le´vinas appear at many important moments in other Derrida essays. An example is a footnote in The Gift of Death identifying the way Le´vinas’s reading of the Abraham and Isaac story differs from Kierkegaard’s and, apparently, from Derrida’s own.20 Kierkegaard sees Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as beyond the ethical and its general rules, as properly religious, whereas Le´vinas sees the crucial moment of the story to be the return to the ethical when the angel stays Abraham’s hand and reinstitutes the prohibi19. De`s que je suis en rapport avec l’autre, avec le regard, la demande, l’amour, l’ordre, l’appel de l’autre, je sais que je ne puis y re´pondre qu’en sacrifiant l’e´thique, c’est-a`-dire ce qui me fait obligation de re´pondre aussi et de la meˆme façon, dans le meˆme instant, a` tous les autres. Je donne la mort, je parjure, je n’ai pas besoin de lever le couteau sur mon fils au sommet du mont Moriah pour cela. Jour et nuit, a` chaque instant, sur tous les monts Moriah du monde, je suis en train de faire cela, lever le couteau sur ce que j’aime et dois aimer, sur l’autre, tel ou telle autre a` qui je dois fide´lite´ absolue, incommensurablement. [DM, p. 98] 20. See GD, pp. 78–79; see DM, pp. 110–11. Further important references to Le´vinas also appear in GD, pp. 83–84; DM, pp. 166–67. I shall discuss the latter paragraph later.

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tion against murder that Le´vinas sees as the crucial effect of the face-to-face encounter with the other, with l’autrui. (Some anthropologists, by the way, read the Abraham and Isaac story as a parable of the historical transition in certain cultures from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. Some of my sympathy goes out to the ram, which might be imagined to have thought, as Abraham slew it rather than Isaac, “Why does it have to be me?”) As for Derrida and Heidegger, Derrida told me once that he had written many thousands of pages on Heidegger in seminars over the years. He gave, moreover, a whole unpublished seminar on Kant’s second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason. This seminar contains, as the only part yet published, Derrida’s great essay on Kafka’s parable of the same name, “Before the Law.” I have stressed, somewhat against the grain of expert received opinion, Heidegger’s insistence that being with goes all the way down to the ground, so to speak, and is generated by the way Dasein is defined as sharing language with others. I have done so because I think it helps us understand what happened in the later Heidegger, after the famous Kehre, or turn. The sinister development of Heidegger’s thinking about community, language, and nation, and his concomitant political commitment to National Socialism in the 1930s, is made possible, though perhaps not inevitable, by the presuppositions about Mitsein in the works of the 1920s: Sein und Zeit and Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Williams took somewhat similar assumptions about the need for community belonging and went, as I have shown, in a quite different direction. What happened with Heidegger was not foreordained, but it happened. Two different versions of community exist in Heidegger’s thought, the bad, inauthentic one he calls das Man, the they, and a good one he calls Mitsein or Miteinandersein. The latter lays the ground for his concept of the German folk in the work of the 1930s and 1940s. A continuity between early and late Heidegger therefore exists in spite of his turn. Heidegger came to associate, in a single system of thought, world, spirit, the German language, and the destiny of the German people (Volk). Derrida has with admirable tact and care explored this complex of ideas in De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (1987). Germany’s destiny, Heidegger thought, was to save world civilization from what he saw as a disastrous darkening (Verdu¨sterung). He associated that degeneration especially with the United States and with the Soviet Union. He saw both as the incarnation of das Man and the arrival of a world-darkening by way of the triumph of technology. Germany was geographically in the middle. Only Germany could save the world. In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), for example, Heidegger asserts that “asking of the question of being . . . is indispensable if the peril of world darkening is to be forestalled and if our nation in the Center of the Western world is to take on its historical


mission.” The translation elides a key word, for my purposes here, by translating Volk rather tamely as “nation.” It is only the German people, or folk—those who live in Germany and speak the German language—who can speak Being or respond to Being’s withdrawal. German, Heidegger held, is the only philosophically and poetically valid language now that ancient Greek is dead. German may even be better than classical Greek because the German Geist is a better word than the Greek logos to speak Being. At the beginning of this same paragraph Heidegger quotes with approval his own notorious Rektoratsrede of 1933: “Spirit is a fundamental, knowing resolve toward the essence of Being.”22 The same dangerous, and at the same time absurd, nationalist assumptions inhabit Elucidations of Ho¨lderlin’s Poetry, for example the following passage in “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones”: “So it (the ‘reserved find’ [der gesparte Fund]) will remain, if those who ‘have cares in the fatherland’[im Vaterlande] become the careful ones. Then there will be a kinship [Verwandschaft] with the poet. Then there will be a homecoming [Heimkunft]. But this homecoming is the future of the historical being of the German people [die Zukunft des geschichtlichen Wesens der Deutschen].”23 As Jennifer Bajorek has demonstrated, Heidegger makes Ho¨lderlin here say something that he does not really say; rather, he says the opposite.24 The same cluster of ideas reappears in Heidegger’s seminars at the University of Freiburg of 1942 (that is, in the middle of World War II), on Ho¨lderlin’s “The Ister.”25 I have said that such notions are sinister, dangerous, and absurd. What is disquieting about them is brought into the open even more clearly, in a way that causes me a frisson of anxiety for our own historical destiny in the United States (said by George W. Bush to be to spread democracy through21

21. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn., 1959), p. 50. 22. Ibid., p. 49. 23. Heidegger, Elucidations of Ho¨lderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York, 2000), p. 48. 24. In opposition to Heidegger’s positive reading of Ho¨lderlin’s “Heimkunft: An die Verwandten,” Bajorek writes, “On the contrary . . . it [Ho¨lderlin’s poem] inscribes a movement of infinite return, or of returning without return, at the beginning of every homecoming, as its very condition of possibility and as its falling ground” (Jennifer Bajorek, “The Offices of Homeland Security, or Ho¨lderlin’s Terrorism,” Critical Inquiry 31 [Summer 2005]: 893). Paul de Man had already defined Heidegger’s radical misreading in italicized words: “It is the fact that Ho¨lderlin says exactly the opposite of what Heidegger makes him say” (Paul de Man, “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Ho¨lderlin,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, trans. and ed. Wlad Godzich [Minneapolis, 1983], pp. 254–55). The original French version of this essay appeared as “Les Exe´ge`ses de Ho¨lderlin par Martin Heidegger,” Critique, nos. 100–1 (Sept.–Oct. 1955): 800– 19. 25. See Heidegger, Ho¨lderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” vol. 23 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1984); trans. McNeill and Julia Davis under the title Ho¨lderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Bloomington, Ind., 1996).

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out the world), when I remember that Newt Gingrich, at the height of his power as a leader in the United States House of Representatives, gave a speech in Iowa in which he said that the future of civilization depends on the English language. English language, German language—take your pick. The same disquieting nationalist assumptions are expressed in both cases, though by way of making claims for different languages.26 Jacques Lacan is, somewhat surprisingly, in accord with Heidegger on the question of primordial Mitsein, as well as on some other points. Like Heidegger, Lacan posits in his own way being with or being together, or what he calls a complexe intersubjectif, as an aboriginal feature of the human condition. In the well-known section on la politique de l’autruiche (a characteristic Lacanian pun on ostrich and Austria) in “The Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” Lacan asserts that the king, the queen, and the police in Poe’s story are locked in a pattern of political intersubjective coercion that repeats itself in different ways with different characters: “Thus three moments, structuring three glances, borne by three subjects, incarnated each time by different characters.”27 Where does the ostrich come in? Here: In order to grasp in its unity the intersubjective complex thus described, we would willingly seek a model in the technique legendarily attributed to the ostrich attempting to shield itself from danger; for that technique might ultimately be qualified as political, divided as it here is among three partners: the second believing itself invisible because the first has 26. I may perhaps be permitted to cite a passage from my essay on E. M. Forster’s Howards End: Howards End dramatizes the ideological assumption that nationality determines personal identity not only in many remarks by the characters but, more centrally, in the way the two chief protagonists, Margaret Schlegel and her sister Helen, are defined as products of a marriage between nationalities. Their father was German, their mother English. The narrator remarks that being half English and half German “was a unique education for the little girls.” Their mixed national heritage means that as children they have been exposed to English people, like their Aunt Julia, who think God has appointed England to govern the world, and to German people, like their cousins who visit their father in England, who think God has appointed Germany to lead the world. The precocious Margaret aged thirteen causes embarrassment all around when she says, “To me one of two things is very clear: either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else these do not know the mind of God.” The dangerous absurdity of these assumptions is evident, but how many of us can say we are entirely free of such assumptions about fixed national identity and its God-given mission? Which of us does not have some ignoble hankering to live in a country where everyone speaks the same language, shares the same “values,” reads the same books, and inhabits the same culture? Do not some Americans still think that God has appointed the United States to govern the world? [J. Hillis Miller, “E. M. Forster: Just Reading Howards End,” Others (Princeton, N.J., 2001), pp. 193–94] 27. Jacques Lacan, “The Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore, 1988), p. 32; hereafter abbreviated “S.”


its head stuck in the ground, and all the while letting the third calmly pluck its rear; we need only enrich its proverbial denomination [la politique de l’Autriche, a reference to the cumbersome and self-defeating diplomacy and politics of the Austrians] by a letter, producing la politique de l’autruiche, for the ostrich itself to take on forever a new meaning [un nouveau sens pour toujours]. [“S,” p. 32] I suppose Lacan’s cheeky boast is justified, since the passage has become a famous one, producing something like a Bouvard et Pećuchet reaction in many people. Lacan’s complicated joke, “Autruiche?” “Lacan’s ‘politique de l’autruiche’”—like “the Pyramids?” to which the knee-jerk response is “How did they build them?”—leads to his way of formulating the aboriginal overlapping of subjects, his version of our inescapable être avec: “The plurality of subjects, of course, can be no objection for those who are long accustomed to the perspectives summarized by our [he means his] formula: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other [l’inconscient, c’est le discours de l’Autre]. And we will not recall now what the notion of the immixture of subjects [l’immixtion des sujets], recently introduced in our reanalysis of the dream of Irma’s injection, adds to the discussion” (“S,” p. 32). For Lacan, as for Heidegger, the self is never alone and never has been alone, but is always already being with others. I and the others are all mixed up, immixed, all smoorged together, as Walt Kelly’s Pogo puts it, by way of the language of the unconscious, which always speaks to me the discourse of the Other. This means that for Lacan, the letter always reaches its destination, whereas for Derrida, in his critique of this essay by Lacan in “The Factor [Postman] of Truth,” the letter never reaches its destination or may never reach its destination, so never really reaches its destination.28 I shall soon come back again by a commodious recirculation to Derrida. Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking about community in La Communaute´ de´soeuvreé and Eˆtre singulier pluriel is complex and somewhat diverse. It is not 28. See Derrida, “Le Facteur de la ve´rite´,” La Carte postale: De Socrate a` Freud et au-dela` (Paris, 1980), pp. 439–524; trans. Alan Bass under the title “Le Facteur de la ve´rite´,” The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago, 1987), pp. 413–96. As Derrida reminds the reader, the last sentence of Lacan’s seminar on La Lettre voleé is “c’est ainsi que ce veut dire ‘la letter voleé,’ voire ‘en souffrance,’ c’est qu’une lettre arrive toujours a` destination” (Derrida, La Carte postale, p. 521 n. 29). Bass translates this as, “Thus it is that what the ‘purloined letter,’ nay the ‘non-delivered letter’ means is that a letter always arrives at its destination” (Derrida, The Post Card, p. 491 n. 66). Here is Derrida’s response in Bass’s translation: “The divisibility of the letter—this is why we [he means ‘I’] have insisted on this key or theoretical safety lock of the Seminar: the mystic atomicity of the letter—that is what chances and sets off course, without guarantee of return, the remaining [restance] of anything whatsoever: a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and from the moment that this possibility belongs to its structure one can say that it never truly arrives, that when it does arrive its capacity not to arrive torments it with an internal drifting” (ibid., p. 489; trans. mod.).

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easy to summarize in a few sentences. For Nancy, each individual is at once unique, singular, and at the same time plural, exposed, in the etymological sense of set outside, to others. The singular is always already plural, being with others. Those others remain, however, fundamentally other, alien, strangers each enclosed in his or her singularity. A community, for Nancy, is, in Donald Pease’s fine phrase, a congregation of singularities. What we most share is that we all shall die, though each singularity will die its own death. This means that each community, at all times and places, is de´soeuvreé, unworked. Nevertheless, the leitmotif of Being Singular Plural, a somewhat later book, is être avec, being with. That book argues tirelessly that the plurality of being with goes all the way down, so to speak, to each ego’s bottom and also to the bottom of being in general. Being is singular in its plurality, unlike the unified Being of the ontotheological tradition. For Nancy, being is always already divided and unified by the togetherness of a plural being with: That Being is being-with, absolutely, this is what we must think. The with is the most basic feature of Being, the mark [trait] of the singular plurality of the origin or origins in it. . . . What is proper to community, then, is given to us in the following way: it has no other resource to appropriate except the “with” that constitutes it, the cum of “community,” its interiority without an interior, and maybe even its interior intimo sui. As a result, this cum is the cum of a co-appearance [com-parution: compearing in English, a legal term that is used to designate appearing before a judge together with another person], wherein we do nothing but appear together with one another, co-appearing before no other authority [l’instance] than this “with” itself, the meaning of which seems to us to instantly dissolve into insignificance, into exteriority, into the inorganic, empirical, and randomly contingent [aleátoire] inconsistency of the pure and simple “with.”29 For Giorgio Agamben, the “coming community” will be agglomerations, not necessarily malign, of “whatever [quodlibet] singularities,” just as Alphonso Lingis’s title names the community of those who have nothing in common. Lingis’s book asserts that the encounter with the stranger is essential to human life today. Blanchot’s La Communaute´ inavouable is a small book commenting on Nancy’s La Communaute´ de´soeuvreé, in its relation to Bataille’s “acephalic community.” Blanchot describes communities that are inavouable, unavowable, in the sense of being secret, hidden, shameful, but also in the sense of being incompatible with “felicitous” public speech acts. 29. Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Calif., 2000), pp. 61–63.


Such public avowals found, support, and constantly renew the communities we all would like to live in or may even think we live in, but they are absent from la communaute´ inavouable.

“There Are Only Islands” All of these authors, except perhaps Blanchot, hold in one way or another that Dasein is Mitsein; or at least they have a strong nostalgia, a wish to live in a community that is defined as being with, togetherness. Derrida differs from all these in the intransigence with which he affirms, especially in his latest work, each Dasein’s irremediable solitude. He is deeply suspicious of Heidegger’s Mitsein, as of the validity of anything like Williams’s celebration of a community of people who share the same assumptions and live in kindness and mutuality. The seminars of 2002–3 are on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude—an odd couple, as Derrida himself observes. Derrida, in the first session of this seminar, expresses his rejection of Mitsein in a paragraph quite extraordinary for its resolute confrontation of the consequences of each human being’s isolation from all the others. In this paragraph, speaking apparently for himself as much as for Crusoe’s experience of solitude, Derrida firmly asserts that each man or woman is marooned on his or her own island, enclosed in a singular world, with no isthmus, bridge, or other means of communication to the sealed worlds of others or from their worlds to mine: Neither animals of different species, nor men of different cultures, nor any individual, animal or human, inhabits the same world as another, however close and similar these living individuals may be (humans or animals), and the difference from one world to the other will remain forever uncrossable, the community of the world being always constructed, simulated by a group of stabilizing positings [dispositifs], more or less stable, therefore also never natural, language in the broad sense, codes of traces being destined, with all the living, to construct a unity of the world always deconstructible and nowhere and never given in nature. Between my world, the “my world”; what I call “my world,” and there is no other for me, every other world making up part of it, between my world and every other world, there is initially the space and the time of an infinite difference, of an interruption incommensurable with all the attempts at passage, of bridge, of isthmus, of communication, of translation, of trope, and of transfer which the desire for a world and the sickness of the world [mal du monde], the being in sickness of the world [l’eˆtre en mal de monde] will attempt to pose, to impose, to

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propose, to stabilize. There is no world, there are only islands. That is one of the thousand directions toward which I would interpret the last line of a short and great poem by Celan: Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen, poem of mourning or of birth.30 An amazing passage! Since the difference between one world and another remains always “uncrossable” (infranchissable), any community is always constructed, simulated by an ensemble of stabilizing positings (dispositifs), more or less stable, therefore never natural, language in the broad sense, the code of traces destined, for all the living, to construct the “unity of the world always deconstructible” (unite´ du monde toujours dećonstructible)and “nowhere and never given in nature”! This claim is shocking in its remorseless rigor, in its refusal of any of the copouts that almost everyone else from Husserl to Nancy rushes to embrace. It is also an amazing passage because, as Arnold Davidson has reminded me, it goes against what one might assume Derrida believed, on the basis of his somewhat earlier work on hospitality, or on friendship, or on the concept of Europe.31 One might take for granted that Derrida believes some kind of togetherness in a community is a fundamental aspect of human existence, for example, in ethical decision. Careful reading of that earlier work, however, shows that Derrida tends to oppose quite sharply my relation to the other person and my relation to any community. The seminars on hospitality focus on my absolute, unconditional obligation to give hospitality to anyone who knocks on my door. This includes any stranger, someone from another community, someone 30. Derrida, unpublished transcript of the eighth seminar of “La Beˆte et le souverain,” 2003. Here is the French: Ni les animaux d’espe`ce diffe´rente, ni les hommes de culture diffe´rente, ni aucun individu animal ou humain n’habite le meˆme monde qu’un autre, si proche et si semblable ces individus vivants soient-ils (humains ou animaux), et la diffe´rence d’un monde a` l’autre restera toujours infranchissable, la communaute´ du monde e´tant toujours construite, simuleé par un ensemble de dispositifs stabilisants, plus ou moins stables, donc et jamais naturels, le langage au sens large, les codes de traces e´tant destine´s, chez tous les vivants, a` construire une unite´ du monde toujours dećonstructible et nulle part et jamais donneé dans la nature. Entre mon monde, le “mon monde”; ce que j’appelle “mon monde” et il n’y en a d’autre pour moi, tout autre monde en faisant partie, entre mon monde et tout autre monde, il y a d’abord l’espace et le temps d’un diffe´rence infinie, d’une interruption incommensurable a` toutes les tentatives de passage, de pont, d’isthme, de communication, de traduction, de trope et de transfert que le de´sir de monde ou le mal du monde, l’eˆtre en mal de monde tentera de poser, d’imposer, de proposer, de stabiliser. Il n’y a pas de monde, il n’y a que des ˆıles. C’est la` une des milles directions dans lesquelles je serai incliner d’interpre´ter le dernier vers d’un court et grand poe`me de Celan: Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen,poe`me de deuil ou de naissance. 31. See Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, De l’hospitalite´ (Paris, 1997); Derrida, Politiques de l’amitie´ (Paris, 1994), trans. George Collins under the title Politics of Friendship (London, 1997); and L’Autre cap suivi de la de´mocratie ajourneé (Paris, 1991), trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas under the title The Other Heading (Bloomington, Ind., 1992).


speaking another language or coming from another culture. Derrida’s work on the politics of friendship focuses on the I/thou relation that has the name “friendship, if there is such a thing,” as one of the repeated leitmotifs of Politics of Friendship has it. The other repeated leitmotif is the chilling phrase, cited by Montaigne and attributed, probably falsely, to Aristotle: “O my friends! There is no friend.”32 Even the earlier seminars on nation and nationalism aimed to put in question the notions that I am defined by my nationality or that a nation is a unified community. The Other Heading has as its goal the deconstruction of any presumption that Europe is a unified community: “It is necessary to make ourselves the guardians of an idea of Europe, but of a Europe that consists precisely in not closing itself off in its own identity and in advancing itself in an exemplary way toward what it is not, toward the other heading or the heading of the other, indeed—and this is perhaps something else altogether—toward the other of the heading, which would be the beyond of this modern tradition, another border structure, another shore.”33 One further consequence of Derrida’s assumption that each of us is enisled is the following: not only am I isolated from others, with no isthmus across to them, but also they are isolated from me, radically impenetrable and secret. This is said in an eloquent passage of The Gift of Death: “Each of us, everyone else, each other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest, originarily nonpresent to my ego (as Husserl would say of the alter ego that can never be originarily present to my consciousness and that I can apprehend only through what he calls appresentation and analogy)” (GD, p. 78).34 Derrida’s assertion here of the radical inaccessibility of the other person is another difference from Le´vinas. Le´vinas assumes that when I invoke the other, in something that can be called “prayer,” he or she responds, however infinitely other are both the other person and that God I invoke through my prayer to the other. The 32. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” Essays, trans. E. J. Trechmann (New York, 1946), p. 163. Derrida discusses at length the apostrophe, “O my friends! There is no friend,” in its Ciceronian, Aristotelian, and Platonic contexts, in “Oligarchies: Naming, Enumerating, Counting,” Politics of Friendship, pp. 1–25. 33. Derrida, The Other Heading, p. 29. See Derrida, L’Autre cap, p. 35: “Il faut se faire les gardiens d’une ideé de l’Europe, d’une diffe´rence de l’Europe mais d’une Europe qui consiste prećise´ment a` ne pas se fermer sur sa propre identite´ et a` s’avancer exemplairement vers ce qui n’est pas elle, vers l’autre cap ou le cap de l’autre, voire, et c’est peut-eˆtre tout autre chose, l’autre du cap qui serait l’au-dela` de cette tradition moderne, une autre structure de bord, un autre rivage.” 34. “Chacun de nous, chaque autre, tout autre est infiniment autre dans sa singularite´ absolue, inaccessible, solitaire, transcendante, non manifeste, non pre´sente originairement a` mon ego (comme dirait Husserl de l’alter ego qui ne se pre´sente jamais originairement a` ma conscience et que je ne peux appre´hender que de façon appre´sentative et analogique)” (DM, p. 110).

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open, nude face of the other gives me access to that other, singular though he or she is, and through that access further access to the “Infinite” behind or within him or her. As Derrida puts this in The Gift of Death: Even in its critique of Kierkegaard concerning ethics and generality Le´vinas’s thinking stays within the game—the play of difference and analogy—between the face of God and the face of my neighbor, between the infinitely other as God and the infinitely other as another human . . . . But for his part, in taking into account absolute singularity, that is, the absolute alterity obtaining between one human and another, Le´vinas is no longer able to distinguish between the infinite alterity of God and that of every human. His ethics is already a religious one. In the two cases [Kierkegaard and Le´vinas] the border between the ethical and the religious becomes more than problematic, as do all attendant discourses. [GD, pp. 83–84]35 Derrida’s concept of ethics, on the contrary, as expressed, for example, in The Gift of Death, follows from the assumption that the limitless call on me made by the other, by every other, incommensurably, comes, in each case, from someone who is wholly other [tout autre] and therefore never directly accessible, not even in such a way as the nude visage of the other, for Le´vinas, gives me access to the two infinities, the other person and God. For Derrida, on the contrary, the other is simply wholly other, tout autre, not a mediator of the Infinite or of God, but only generating an experience of complete alterity. In a more indirect way, as I shall try to show, Derrida’s notion of community is also consonant with his assertion that every other is wholly other. How is the peculiarly late-Derridean concept of community as self-destructively autoimmunitary related to his view of the always constructed and therefore deconstructible nature of every Mitsein? First, what does Derrida mean by calling every community autoimmunitary? Derrida sees every community as inhabited by something like the human or animal body’s immune system. The immune system repels foreign invaders but then, sometimes, disastrously turns its immune system against itself in what is called autoimmunity. Derrida makes a brilliant exploitation of this figure in “Foi et Savoir” (“Faith and Knowledge”) and else35. “Jusque dans la critique adresseé a` Kierkegaard au sujet de l’e´thique et de la geńe´ralite´, la penseé de Le´vinas se tient dans le jeu—jeu de la diffe´rence et de l’analogie—entre le visage de Dieu et le visage de mon prochain, entre l’infiniment autre comme Dieu et l’infiniment autre comme l’autre homme . . . . Mais de son coˆte´, prenant en compte la singularite´ absolue, c’est-a`-dire l’alte´rite´ absolue dans le rapport a` l’autre homme, Le´vinas ne peut plus distinguer entre l’alte´rite´ infinie de Dieu et celle de chaque homme: son e´thique est de´ja` religion. Dans les deux cas la frontie`re entre l’e´thique et le religieux devient plus que problematique, comme tous les discours qui s’y re´fe`rent” (DM, pp. 116–17).


where. I owe to Tom Mitchell, however, the recognition that there is something strange about this figure, namely, that it is a figure of a figure, whichever way you look at it.36 The stem mun in immune system is the same as the mun in community. It comes from Latin munus, meaning the obligation owed within the group, as the price of my citizenship, and also as a gift I may give to the community. Immune was originally a social term applying to those, for instance the clergy, who were in one way or another exempt from the ordinary citizen’s obligations. They were immune, indemnified, just as those who took sanctuary in a church were immune from arrest or just as legislators in some democracies today are immune from prosecution for some crimes. Biologists appropriated an entire social and political vocabulary, including the notion of aliens to the community or foreign invaders who must be repelled, to name the operation of the body’s immune system and the catastrophe of autoimmunity. When foreign cells or antigens invade the body, the immune system cleverly assesses those cells and then creates and multiplies antibodies designed to destroy the antigens, thereby securing the body’s immunity. Flu shots create antibodies that are supposed to make a person immune to flu viruses, safe, protected, indemnified, invulnerable. In autoimmunity something goes wrong with the immune system. It starts creating antibodies that attack the body’s own cells, as in diabetes, Crohn’s disease (experts assume), rheumatoid arthritis, or some even more deadly forms of autoimmunity in which a whole organ is attacked and destroyed. Derrida takes this already metaphorical system of terms back from biology and applies it again to the social body, the body of the community and its members. As Mitchell observes, whichever side you look at is the metaphor of the other. Derrida’s strikingly original insight, made with the exuberance and even wildness characteristic of the late Derrida, is the claim that both immunity and autoimmunity are in one way or another characteristics of every community. Therefore community cannot be understood except by way of this structure. “We feel ourselves,” says Derrida, “authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of autoimmunization. It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general.”37 Derrida emphasizes 36. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity,” pp. 277–90 of this issue. The name for this figure is metalepsis: “In rhetoric, the precise sense of metalepsis is uncertain, but it refers to various kinds of figure or trope that are figurative to the second and third degree; that is, they involve a figure that either refers us to yet another figure or requires a further imaginative leap to establish its reference, usually by a process of metonymy” (Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms [Oxford, 2001], p. 152). I must thank Kir Kuiken for this reference. 37. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York, 2002), p. 80 n. 27.

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that immunity and autoimmunity operate in any community mechanically, spontaneously, inevitably, willy-nilly, not as a result of choices members of the community make or that the community collectively makes. Everycommunity strives to keep itself pure, safe, sacrosanct, uncontaminated by aliens. At the same time, every community is inhabited by a tendency to shoot itself in the foot, as we say, in the act of trying to shoot the invader. Here is Derrida’s careful formulation of the way every community generates its own autoimmune reaction, as well as using its immune system to repel foreign invaders: But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of autoimmunity. . . . This excess above and beyond the living, whose life only has absolute value by being worth more than life, more than itself— this, in short, is what opens the space of death that is linked to the automaton (exemplarily “phallic”), to technics, the machine, the prosthesis: in a word, to the dimensions of the auto-immune and selfsacrificial supplementarity, to this death drive that is silently at work in every community, every auto-co-immunity, constituting it as such in its iterability, its heritage, its spectral tradition. Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community that would not cultivate its own autoimmunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival. This selfcontesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism. It is there that the possibility of religion persists: the religious bond (scrupulous, respectful, modest, reticent, inhibited) between the value of life, its absolute “dignity,” and the theological machine, the “machine for making gods.”38 This dense passage could be the object of virtually endless meditation, commentary, and interrogation. Several different figurative, semantic, or lexical systems are superimposed in a characteristically late-Derridean punning or etymologically echoing way. Multiple references to other works, Derrida’s own or that of others, are obliquely made: to the concept of mes38. Ibid., pp. 82, 87.


sianicity without messianism and that of spectrality from his own Specters of Marx; to Kant’s work entitled Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason and his notion of the priceless price of human life; to Bergson’s definition of human society as a machine for making gods in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; to Freud and anthropologists for the role of the phallic in all religions; to the whole vocabulary, crisscrossing biology and human society, of words with mun or mon: common, community, immunity, autoimmunity; to the concept of the machinal as a fundamental feature of teletechno-mediatic-capitalism. The notion of the machinal is here applied to the religious concept of self-sacrificing autoimmunity. It is a feature of the body’s immune system, as of the endocrine system, that it works automatically, on its own, machinelike, without any control by consciousness. Derrida affirms that the self-destructive autoimmunity of any community works in the same way. The words heilig, holy, and sacrificial connect Derrida’s concept of the autoimmunitary to his earlier thinking about religion and about sacrifice as an essential feature of the three “religions of the Book.” Reflections about sacrifice are central in Glas and in The Gift of Death. The essay about autoimmunitary communities is, after all, called “Faith and Knowledge” and is included in a book called La Religion (Acts of Religion in English). The word sacrifice comes from sacer, holy, sacred, and facere, to do, to make. To sacrifice is to do something holy, that is, something in some way related to what Derrida, echoing Jan Patocˇka, calls in The Gift of Death the mysterium tremendum. The self-sacrificial impulse in any community derives from its exposure to something secret, supernatural, wholly other and from its desire to be saved by being transported to that place, to survive after its self-sacrifice. Central in the passage, therefore, is a definition of a viable community as committed to preserving itself uncontaminated, safe and sound, pure, sequestered, hale and holy, while at the same time inhabited by an irresistible tendency to turn its self-protective mechanisms against itself, to sacrifice itself in an attempt to protect itself against itself and in order to preserve its relation to the holy and to achieve “spectral sur-vival.” Derrida takes for granted here, and throughout the whole essay or collection of fiftytwo segments that make up “Foi et savoir,” that every community, in spite of its desire for safe self-enclosure, is open to some limitless other, to which he gives various contradictory names, including death and the future, though he, for the most part, scrupulously avoids calling it God or heaven. Every community, whether it wants to be or not, however much it tries to enclose itself in itself, is open to “the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism.”

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A more recent work by Derrida, the interview in Le “Concept” du 11 septembre, would add the word terror to this list of names for the spectral outside/inside other. The title of the interview conducted by Giovanna Borradori shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center, but before the invasion of Iraq, is “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” As this name suggests, it is an analysis of the post-9/11 so-called War on Terror. It appropriates from “Foi et savoir” the notion that autoimmunity is a characteristic of every community, for example, the community of socalled terrorists and the community of those who call the United States their homeland, in an inextricable interpenetration of the two, terrorists and terrorized. Both, for example, share an interest in having the images of the Twin Towers falling broadcast throughout the world as often as possible and for as long as possible. Osama bin Laden must have rejoiced every time he saw those videos, but our government authorities also rejoiced. They rejoiced because they needed the effect of those images to justify the repressive measures they wanted to put in place. Terror is not stark fear for what has happened but, as Derrida recognizes, for what is certain to happen again at some indefinite time in the future. What is certain to happen, sooner or later, is another “terrorist attack,” as our government authorities, for example the director of homeland security or the director of the CIA, keep periodically telling us, just in case we might start forgetting to live in a state of constant abject terror and so begin wondering where our civil liberties have gone. What is most terrifying is the conviction that the terrorists are not outside, but within, secretly present as antigens, “terrorist cells,” against which it is extremely difficult, in the end impossible, to develop effective antibodies. The other is not outside, but inside, as an uncanny ghostly presence within the house. These terrorists might be anybody: the family next door, someone we see at the grocery store, and, perhaps, even unbeknownst to us, our own selves. As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Derrida uses the concept of autoimmunity to describe, for example, the way every attempt to repress or forget the posttraumatic terror just brings it back more violently: It follows that all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (in order to deny, repress, forget, to enact its mourning, etc.), these are, these too, so many desperate attempts. And so many auto-immunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and nourish the monstrosity they attempt to bury. What should never be forgotten, therefore, is the perverse effect of the auto-immunitary itself. Repression, in the psychoanalytic sense and in the politico-policing, politico-military, politico-economic sense, we


know now that it produces, reproduces, regenerates the very thing that it attempts to disarm.39 This double, self-defeating effort can be seen at work in the war on terror. We spend billions on “homeland security,” while at the same time we sacrifice the lives of thousands of our citizens in the Iraq war, not to speak of the tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens we have killed. We often direct our immunity army—the FBI, the CIA, and the more hidden security forces— against our own citizens or against refugees or immigrants or victims of repressive regimes to whom we ought to owe hospitality. We do this under the authority of the Patriot Act, an Orwellian name if there ever was one, since it is designed to take away the civil liberties of all patriotic United States citizens as well as of the alien terrorists we must be harboring in our midst, like ghosts who have invaded the homeland. The Patriot Act does the “homeland” serious harm and makes it less secure, as in the exclusion of foreign students, scientists, and scholars on whom the successful working of American capitalism depends or as in the failure to prepare adequately for the possibility of Hurricane Katrina because the Department of Homeland Security was so focused on a potential terrorist attack. A fissure, fault line, or cleft seems to exist, however, when what the late Derrida says about auto-co-immunity in “Faith and Knowledge” is juxtaposed with what he says about the isolation of each I in the passage already cited from his last set of seminars. Derrida’s theory of each community’s self-destructive autoimmunity presupposes an organic or collectiveconcept of community that determines, whether they wish it or not, the lives of the individuals within it, while my citation from “La Beˆte et le souverain” defines each individual as entirely separate from any community, marooned on a bridgeless, isthmusless island. How can these two features of the late Derrida’s thought be reconciled? What bridge will allow a crossing from one to the other? A somewhat paradoxical connection between these two ideas is implied in a remarkable passage in A Taste for the Secret (originally published in Italian in 1997 as Il gusto 39. Derrida and Ju¨rgen Habermas, Le “Concept” du 11 septembre, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Paris, 2003), p. 152: Il reste que tous ces efforts pour atteńuer ou neutraliser l’effet du traumatisme (pour le deńier, refouler, oublier, pour en faire son deuil, etc.), ce sont, eux aussi, des tentatives de´sespe´reés. Et autant de mouvements auto-immunitaires. Qui produisent, inventent et nourrissent la monstruosite´ meˆme qu’ils pre´tendent terrasser. Ce qui ne se laissera jamais oublier, c’est donc l’effet pervers de l’auto-immunitaire luimeˆme. La re´pression, au sens psychanalytique et au sens politico-policier, politico-militaire, politico-ećonomique, nous savons maintenant qu’elle produit, reproduit, re´geńe`re cela meˆme qu’elle tente de de´sarmer.

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del segreto). Derrida, in one interview in that book, echoing Gide’s denunciation of the family, resolutely defines himself as unwilling to belong to any family or community: “I am not one of the family” [Je ne suis pas de la famille].40 Why not? It is because every family, nation, or community is an artificial, deconstructible structure built precariously on some agreed-upon code. For Derrida, as opposed to Heidegger, it seems that only one kind of community exists, something quite close to Heidegger’s das Man, the they. Derrida gives it, in the English translation at least, the dyslogistic name of “the herd.” No glorification of the nation’s folk in Derrida. Every community, moreover, for Derrida, is inhabited by that self-destructive autoimmunity he describes so eloquently in “Faith and Knowledge,” written more or less at the same time as he gave the interviews in A Taste for the Secret. Who would want to participate in something doomed to self-destruct? It would seem reasonable to want to hold oneself aloof from such a Mitsein, even though some people might argue that we should make the best we can with what we have. We are all in the same boat and should love our neighbor as best we can, within the context of whatever community we have. Derrida, however, refuses to belong to any family or community because it is only in isolation from such belonging that a responsible, responsive ethical relation to another person can take place. For Derrida the strange “with” of I/thou relations between two persons, two persons who are wholly other to one another, can only happen in isolation from any family or community. In The Gift of Death, Derrida sees Abraham’s willingness to obey Jehovah and sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, as paradigmatic of this isolation from family and community paradigmatic of true ethical decision. Abraham says nothing about Jehovah’s command to his wife Sarah, or to any other member of his family, or to Isaac himself when he takes the latter off to sacrifice him (see GD, pp. 53–81; DM, pp. 79–114, 163– 73).41 I would add to what Derrida says that Jesus affirmed that one must leave father and mother in order to follow Him: “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life” (Matt. 19:29).42 Here is Derrida’s eloquent expression of his refusal to belong: 40. Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Donis and David Webb (Cambridge, 2001), p. 27; hereafter abbreviated ATS. 41. The second passage referenced in the French edition is from an additional essay not included in the English volume; see Derrida, “La Litte´rature au secret,” Donner la mort, pp. 163–73. 42. Derrida cites and eloquently comments on the slightly different version of this in Luke 14:26: “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and his wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (quoted in GD, p. 64).


Let me get back to my saying “I am not one of the family.” Clearly, I was playing on a formula that has multiple registers of resonance. I’m not one of the family means, in general, “I do not define myself on the basis of my belonging to the family,” or to civil society, or to the state; I do not define myself on the basis of elementary forms of kinship. But it also means, more figuratively, that I am not part of any group, that I do not identify myself with a linguistic community, a national community, a political party, or with any group or clique whatsoever, with any philosophical or literary school. “I am not one of the family” means: do not consider me “one of you,” “don’t count me in,” I want to keep my freedom, always: this, for me, is the condition not only for being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others. When someone is one of the family, not only does he lose himself in the herd [gregge, in the Italian version],43 but he loses the others as well; the others become simply places, family functions, or places or functions in the organic totality that constitutes a group, school, nation or community of subjects speaking the same language. [ATS, p. 27] On the next page Derrida claims we would not say we want to belong to the family or community if we really did belong to one or the other: “The desire to belong to any community whatsoever, the desire for belonging tout court, implies that one does not belong” (ATS, p. 28). This is our happy chance, since my only road to responsible ethical relations to my neighbor, the wholly other, is by detaching myself from family or community or by recognizing that I am always already and for good detached, enisled. I must detach myself from the herd in order to escape the doom of autoimmune self-destruction that always awaits such deconstructible agglomerations. Or, rather, I must come to know that I am detached and that it’s a good thing, too. The different concepts of being with I have identified are incompatible. They cannot be synthesized or reconciled. Il faut choisir. Which do I choose? I wish with all my heart I could believe in Williams’s happy classless communities or in Heidegger’s assumption that Mitsein is a fundamental aspect of being human, but I fear that each man or woman may be an island unto himself or herself and that real communities are more like the communities of self-destructive autoimmunity Derrida describes. Certainly the United 43. The word is of course related to English gregarious, which means happy to be with others, to herd with them. Arnold Davidson tells me that gregge means not only “herd” in the sense of “a herd of sheep” but also has a special modern meaning as the name for the team of cyclists that helps the star rider win a given segment of the race.

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States, these days, if you can dare to think of it as one immense community, is a better example of Derrida’s self-destructive autoimmune community than of Williams’s community of kindness and mutuality. I claim, moreover, to have confirmed through several examples the triple hypothesis with which I started: (1) the concept of community, in a given thinker, is consonant with his or her concept of intersubjectivity; (2) you cannot get from Dasein to Mitsein unless you assume from the start that Dasein is Mitsein; and (3) Jacques Derrida in his last seminars is almost unique among modern philosophers and theorists in affirming the fundamental and irremediable isolation of each Dasein. For Derrida, no isthmus, no bridge, no road, no communication or transfer, connects or can ever connect my enisled self to other selves. There is no world; there are only islands. Any community is an artificial, deconstructible construct fabricated out of words or other signs. Any community, moreover, is selfdestructively autoimmunitary to boot. One should not underestimate the consequences of holding that each human being is, from the beginning to the end, enisled.

Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity W. J. T. Mitchell

It is a bad time, we are told, for criticism and theory. The New York Times declares that theory is dead and then attempts to drive a stake through its heart by dismissing its most brilliant practitioner, Jacques Derrida, as an “abstruse philosopher” whose popularity in American academia is a mystery.1 Only one year earlier the New York Times performed a similar postmortem on the greatest critic of our time, Edward Said. The coincidence is worth pondering: an Algerian Jewish philosopher and a Palestinian Christian literary critic turned out to be the most influential figures in the American academic humanities in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Both were engaged intellectuals, not just in the promotion of their ethnic or political communities and constituencies but in the critique of the very intellectual movements they inspired: postcolonial and deconstructive criticism. Both were utopian, futuristic thinkers, urging on us the possibility of a radical mutation of human thought—for Said, a commitment to the beginnings of a democratic and unified nation of Israel/Palestine; for Derrida, a global vision of justice and democracy to come. Both were accused of being professors of terror, the favorite canard of the militant ignorance and stupidity that passes for thinking in some quarters of American culture today. For Said, terrorism was an unavoidable and straightforwardly ideological issue. By writing as a Palestinian, by insisting on his concrete hisThis paper was originally written for the Cardozo Law School’s symposium on Derrida in February 2005 and appears in a somewhat different version in Cardozo Law Review 27 (Nov. 2005): 913–25. 1. See Jonathan Kandell, “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies in Paris at 74,” New York Times, 10 Oct. 2004, p. A1. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0010$10.00. All rights reserved.

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torical identity in solidarity with both the Palestinian diaspora and the people living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Said subjected himself to the label and the stereotype of one of the most vilified, despised peoples on the planet. The word Palestinian has been rendered synonymous with terrorist in the American vernacular. As Said noted bitterly in one of his late essays, “Israel, Iraq, and the United States”: “It is worth recalling that the word terrorist began to be employed systematically by Israel to describe any Palestinian act of resistance beginning in the mid1970s.”2 And this word has indeed been elevated into an idol of the mind in the past thirty years, a figure of exaggerated power and fantastic mutability, not to mention radical evil—a perfect foil to the equally radical goodness of its self-appointed opponents. Said would know how to appreciate the recent vote of the United States Senate to declare the West Bank and Gaza terrorist sanctuaries,3 thus declaring the occupation legal by their lights and justifying even more ferocious interdictions in the everyday lives of innocent people under a regime of systematic state terrorism. The historical facts about terrorism—that yesterday’s terrorist is tomorrow’s leader of a liberation movement; that terror is an instrument of states as well as nongovernmental actors; that terrorism is rarely an act of madness, but of rational calculation; that the evil of terrorism is usually located in its means, rarely (if ever) its ends—all this is totally ignored by the moralistic posturing that passes for criticism of the phenomenon of terror as simply evil. Of course the murder of innocent people for political aims is morally reprehensible and ought to be condemned, whether it is done by Islamic fundamentalists on suicide missions or in the name of “collateral damage” resulting from high-altitude bombing of civilian populations where “suspected terrorists” might be located. Perpetrators of both these kinds of acts should be subjected to criminal prosecution in international courts, however, not peremptory assassinations and the so-called surgical strikes that kill the innocent along with the guilty. In contrast to Said, Derrida approached the question of terrorism from the outside, focusing on its psycho-political structure from a position of 2. Edward W. Said, “Israel, Iraq, and the United States,” From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (New York, 2004), pp. 214–15. 3. See Mitch McConnell et al., “Designation of Territory Controlled by the Palestinian Authority as Terrorist Sanctuary,” sec. 4 of Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006, S.2370, introduced in the U.S. Senate, 109th Cong., 6 Mar. 2006.

W. J . T. M i t c h e l l is editor of Critical Inquiry. His most recent book is What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005). This essay is part of a book in progress, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.


relative detachment. Even though deconstruction has sometimes been regarded as a kind of intellectual terrorism (an issue that I will return to later) Derrida’s own discussion of it, in his reflections on the attacks of 9/11, is remarkable for its almost clinical and analytic tone and for its emphasis on the fantasmatic, spectacular, and mediated character of terrorism: “the real ‘terror,’” argues Derrida, “consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing and exploiting . . . the image of this terror by the target itself.”4 Derrida was one of the principal inspirations for what I have called the pictorial turn in modern studies of culture and media. He is in many ways responsible for moving beyond the “linguistic turn” in the human sciences described by Richard Rorty toward a renewal of traditional disciplines such as aesthetics, iconology, and art history, and the emergence of new formations such as visual culture and the study of media, especially of the materiality of media, as well as its equally important immateriality—what Derrida called spectrality, the ghostly realm of imagination, fantasy, speculation—the subject of a “hauntology” that renders all things or objects— all “beings” in other words—uncanny. Derrida has always been, then, a primary source of inspiration for my own work as an iconologist, a scholar of images across the media. And never more so than in my current work, which has turned toward a peculiar nexus in the discourse of biopolitics, the convergence of terrorism with cloning as cultural icons of the principal techno-scientific anxieties of our time.5 The importance of terrorism and the so-called war on terror, which has replaced the cold war as the major global image of conflict in our time, scarcely needs demonstrating. Cloning likewise immediately elicits images of horror, raising the spectre of a revival of Nazi eugenics, a brave new world of engineered organisms, test-tube babies, mutants, replicants, and cyborgs, of reproduction without sexual difference. The figure of the clone itself, as a mindless, even headless repository of spare parts, the reduction of the human being to bare life, the “acephalic figure,” as Jean Baudrillard puts it, all turn out to be handy images for the figure of the terrorist himself.6 Terrorist and clone unite in the stereotype of the mindless automaton, an organism whose individuality has been eliminated, fit only for a suicide mission. Small wonder that the images of Palestinian suicide bombers cir4. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Ju¨rgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, 2003), p. 108; hereafter abbreviated PTT. 5. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Cloning Terror: The War of Images,” unpublished essay, delivered as lecture at the University of Munich, 2 Dec. 2004; see http://www.iconicturn.de/staticpages/ index.php?page⳱StreamMitchell. 6. Jean Baudrillard, “The Final Solution: Cloning beyond the Human and the Inhuman,” The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York, 2000), p. 3; see pp. 3–29 for a compendium of contemporary fantasies about the horror of cloning.

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culated on the internet are almost indistinguishable from the faceless clone army of the second episode of the Star Wars saga, Attack of the Clones. And no surprise that the horror of terrorism has been brought in to support the horror of cloning, as in the report of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which explicitly links cloning to the terrorist attacks of September 11: “Since September 11 . . . one feels a palpable increase in America’s moral seriousness. . . . We more clearly see evil for what it is. . . . [We understand the need for] a prudent middle course, avoiding the inhuman Osama bin Ladens on the one side and the post-human Brave New Worlders on the other.”7 There are many other reasons for thinking of cloning and terrorism together. There is the historical fact of their coincidence as political issues: on September 11, the lead story in the New York Times was (and had been for over two months) the controversy over stem-cell research and human cloning, which had occasioned the unveiling of President Bush’s faith-based science policy. There is also a kind of metaphorical convergence in the sense that cloning, as a figure for indefinite duplication of a life-form, is somehow the most apt image of the process by which terrorist cells breed and clone themselves. The comparison of terrorism to a virus or cancer, of invisible sleeper cells hidden inside the body waiting to strike, and of course to the biblical predictions of plague and pestilence in the last days all converge with the prospect of literal bioterrorism to make this a potent and inevitable icon in the collective imagination. Derrida provides a larger framework for the convergence of cloning and terror. In his interview with Giovanna Borradori shortly after 9/11, in discussing terror he turned to a biological metaphor, but one focused on the totality of the organism, namely, the immune system, in contrast to the figure of the clone, which is an image of individual soldiers or cells—the antibodies and antigens on the biopolitical battlefield. Derrida diagnosed the attacks of September 11 as “a distant effect of the Cold War,” more precisely, of “a Cold War in the head,” a global head cold that had now mutated in an “autoimmunitary process . . . that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself ’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (PTT, pp. 92, 94). At first glance, this diagnosis of terrorism seems counterintuitive, perhaps even in bad taste. It seems to blame the victim, the United States and the global system of which it is the head, for bringing on the attacks or even for a quasi suicide. The image of autoimmunity would seem more strictly applicable to something like a military coup d’etat, in which the armed de7. Leon R. Kass, foreword to Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics (New York, 2002), pp. xv–xvi.


fenders of the external borders and the internal order, the army and the police, turn against the legitimately constituted government, attacking the legislature, the judiciary, and deposing the executive.8 The terror attacks of September 11 came, we want to say, from outside the body politic, from far away places like the Middle East; it was an attack by aliens, by “foreign bodies” that had taken advantage of American hospitality to infiltrate our borders. Derrida’s image of autoimmunity, and of the immune system more generally, seems to be stretched to the breaking point. But, on reflection, the stretching of the metaphor seems to be exactly the point. The limits, borders, boundaries of the body (politic), its relations of inside/outside, friend/enemy, native/alien, literal/figurative are exactly what is in question in the metaphor of the immune system and in the new phenomenon of international terrorism, which is quite distinct from the terrorism of local resistance movements (Ireland, Palestine, Spain) focused on a definite territory. The United States is, as Derrida points out, not just a distinct body politic with its own determinate borders and identity; it is the “capital ‘head’ of world capital,” the chief organ of a much larger, global body, the contemporary world system (PTT, p. 96). The attacks of September 11 were not merely on U.S. territory but on the World Trade Center, the symbolic Twin Towers (whose uncanny twinness or clonal character has been the subject of a great deal of commentary already; as Baudrillard notes, “The Twin Towers no longer had any façades, any faces . . . . as though architecture, like the system, was now merely a product of cloning, and of a changeless genetic code”).9 Like the boundaries of the world system, like globalization itself, the metaphor of the immune system stretches out to comprehend at least one dimension of the totality of the present historical reality. In selecting the figure of autoimmunity as a tool for analyzing modern terrorism, Derrida chose an image with considerable surplus value, one whose immediate applicability is startling and that continues to resonate well beyond the use he makes of it. As Donna Haraway points out, “the immune system is both an iconic mythic object in high-technology culture and a subject of research and clinical practice of the first importance.”10 It 8. I am indebted here and throughout to conversations about the immune system with Dr. Hajo Grundmann, senior lecturer of epidemiology at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Bilthoven, the Netherlands. 9. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London, 2002), p. 40. 10. Donna J. Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitution of Self in Immune System Discourse,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), p. 205. For a capsule history of the evolution of immunology, see Francisco J. Varela and Mark R. Anspach, “The Body Thinks: The Immune System in the Process of Somatic Individuation,” in Materialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 273–85.

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is important to stress Haraway’s insistence on the doubleness of the concept, its status as “iconic” on the one hand and as an indispensable research tool on the other. That is, we can try to resist the image as a mere metaphor, a loose analogy, but it keeps coming back to haunt us in the biological figures that are part of the ordinary language for describing terrorism and in the unavoidable language of biomedical research. Even more interesting is what I want to call the bipolar character of the entire foundational metaphor that Derrida’s figure presumes, namely, the ancient figure of the body politic.11 This image, which invites us to see the collective, society, the nation, mankind, even all living things as one body, is reversible. That is, we find ourselves speaking, whether we want to or not, of the political body as well as the body politic.12 And it turns out that the very notion of immunity as such is originally based in a sociopolitical discourse, not a biological one: “The Latin words immunitas and immunis have their origin in the legal concept of an exemption,” a sense that returns in the notion of diplomatic immunity.13 The whole theory of the immune system and the discipline of immunology is riddled with images drawn from the sociopolitical sphere—of invaders and defenders, hosts and parasites, natives and aliens, and of borders and identities that must be maintained. In asking us to see terror as autoimmunity, then, Derrida is bringing the metaphor home at the same time he sends it abroad, stretching it to the limits of the world. The effect of the bipolar image, then, is to produce a situation in which there is no literal meaning, nothing but the resonances between two images, one biomedical, the other political. The impossibility of a literal meaning, of course, means that we literally do not know what we are talking about or what we are literally talking about.14 We are caught in the circuit between two images, dancing in the alternating current between two realms of discourse. For Derrida, this admission of ignorance is crucial because the real politics of the autoimmunity metaphor, beyond its power to deconstruct all the easy, Manichean binary oppositions that have structured the war on terror, is the restaging of terrorism as a condition that needs to be thought through analytically, system11. For an excellent discussion of the metaphor in ancient philosophy, see John Protevi, Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (London, 2001). 12. Hans Belting reminds me that this “bipolar image” also has a religious foundation in the concept of corpus Christi, the body of Christ, which is both the collective body of believers and the Eucharistic body consumed in the sacrament of the Eucharist. The same undecidable figure of part for whole, whole for part, synecdoche and reverse synecdoche operates in the Christological discourse. 13. Arthur M. Silverstein, A History of Immunology (San Diego, 1989), p. 1. 14. As Derrida puts it, “What is terrible about ‘September 11’ . . . is that we do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it” (PTT, p. 94).


ically, and without moral tub-thumping, exactly as we would approach the diagnosis of a medical condition.15 Even more far-reaching is the implication that “a mutation will have to take place” in our entire way of thinking about justice, democracy, sovereignty, globalization, military power, the relations of nation-states, the politics of friendship and enmity in order to address terrorism with any hope of an effective cure (PTT, p. 106). In other words, we have something to learn here. Preestablished certainties are exactly the wrong medicine. But one clue is offered by the metaphor (and the literal operations) of the immune system itself. There are two systems in the human body that are capable of learning. One is the nervous system (to which we will return in a moment); the other is the immune system, which learns by clonal selection, the production of antibodies that mirror the invading antigens and bond with them, killing them.16 The implications of this image are quite clear. The appropriate strategy for international terrorism is not war, but rational, open, public institutions of international justice. The war on terror is like pouring gasoline on a fire or (to maintain the biopolitical analogy) like massive, unfocused doses of radiation or surgical intervention, overreactive “treatments” that fail to discriminate the body from its attackers or even that stimulate the proliferation of pathogens. The fact that the war on terror has been accompanied by a measurable increase in the number of terrorist attacks (London, Madrid) and accelerated the recruitment of jihadists would, if viewed from a public health perspective, surely give us pause.17 Overreactive tactics can actually breed new cancer cells that clone themselves more rapidly. (Cancer has an interesting relation to autoimmunity, since it is about the body’s inability to recognize a destructive cell structure as alien. The cancer cells are the body’s own cells; their DNA lineage is indistinguishable from the host body. So the immune system sleeps through the attack by the body’s own cells). The best strategy is highly targeted and intelligent intelligence, coupled with judicious and judicial procedures, not the black-ops stormtroopers, private armies of independent 15. It must be said, however, that Derrida is far less interested in pursuing the metaphor of the immune system in its “proper” realm of immunology than I am. He does not privilege this notion, as he says, “out of some excessive biologistic or geneticist proclivity” (quoted in Rodolphe Gasche´, “‘In the Name of Reason’: The Deconstruction of Sovereignty,” review of Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, by Derrida, in Research in Phenomenology 34 [2004]: 297). My aim here is to explore the “excess” or supplementarity of the metaphor. 16. The clonal selection theory of acquired immunity was developed by Frank McFarlane Burnet, who won the Nobel Prize for his efforts. See The Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, s.v. “Frank McFarlane Burnet,” http://www.els.net. 17. As of 15 June 2006, TheReligionofPeace.com, a right-wing website, counts 5,159 terrorist attacks worldwide since 9/11. Their conclusion, however, is that Islam itself is the principal danger.

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contractors, and hooded torturers that have sprung from the Bush fantasyland of the war on terror, but infiltrators who can simulate the enemy, who speak his language, understand, sympathize—who can clone themselves as “friends” of the terrorists. In other words, to some extent this would involve shifting the responsibility for dealing with international terrorism to the Islamic world, to its internal traditions of justice, its social and political networks, its established, legitimate police and military forces, its tendencies to modernization and secularization, as well as its deep religious commitment to peace and justice. U.S. military power would be kept in reserve for emergencies, humanitarian crises, and other limited-scale interventions. Outright preemptive war, invasion, and occupation of a foreign country that had not attacked us would be pretty much out of the question. Military adventures in regime change, democratization at gunpoint, would be low on the agenda. If we listen to it, then, our immune system is whispering hints to us. That is, it is passing on a lesson to the nervous system, which is the other bodily system that can learn from experience. Not only that, the nervous system can accelerate its learning process with self-conscious reflection, critique, the preservation of memory and history. Immunity is a form of cellular memory; the body learns by experience how to fight measles, and it doesn’t forget. The most dangerous threat to the immune system, then, is amnesia, the forgetting of what it has learned: forgetting, for instance, that today’s terrorists (al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden) were yesterday’s allies, trained as antibodies against Soviet military power in Afghanistan; forgetting, even more dangerously, that yesterday’s terrorists are almost invariably tomorrow’s heroes of national liberation and that moral absolutes are not just useless but positively dangerous in any counterterrorist strategy. Unfortunately, what Marshall McLuhan called the “central nervous system” of the social body,18 what Derrida calls the “technoeconomic power of the media” (PTT, p. 108), has been traumatized by an image—the spectacle, the word, above all the number as enigmatic name: 9/11. This image, the spectacle of destruction of the Twin Towers, has been cloned repeatedly in the collective global nervous system.19 The mediatizing of the event was, in fact, its whole point, as Derrida writes: 18. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p. 3. 19. It was conjectured that the short gap between the first and second impact on the Twin Towers was calculated to maximize media coverage, since it was obvious that every video camera at the center of the global media system would be trained on the World Trade Center immediately after the initial strike.


What would “September 11” have been without television? . . . Maximum media coverage was in the common interest of the perpetrators of “September 11,” the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the victims, wanted to declare “war on terrorism.” . . . More than the destruction of the Twin Towers or the attack on the Pentagon, more than the killing of thousands of people, the real “terror” consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing and exploiting . . . the image of this terror by the target itself. [PTT, p. 108] In short, the attack was not immediately on the immune system but on the nervous system. And it was carried out by a fabricated, produced image, an impression or spectacle staged for the world’s cameras by the terrorists, exploited by a political faction to declare an indefinite state of emergency, of exemption—that is, immunity—from all the normal niceties of civil liberties and international law, not to mention from all the legitimate, wellestablished institutions of its own immune and nervous systems in the form of its own intelligence services, those diplomatic and military experts and scholars who actually know something about the nature of the threat. What has been called a “faith-based foreign policy” was the perfect twin of the spectre of a faith-based terror. One fanatic deserves, begets another, and Uncle Sam is cloned as Uncle Osama.20 Serious medical research into human cloning is banned by a faith-based science policy at one with the faithbased foreign policy that clones terror by declaring a war on it. When will it become clear that terrorism might be better framed as a public health issue, involving a grasp of biocultural systems and their ecologies? It is the “nervousness” of the nervous system that is producing the “autoimmunity” of the immune system. This is standard medical wisdom about the relation of these two systems. When the nervous system is in a state of panic, anxiety, depression, or, even worse, psychosis, generating hallucinations and paranoid fantasies, the immune system has a tendency to respond inappropriately as well. What is the cure? Derrida’s answer may surprise those who write him off as an obscurantist or nihilist: It is once again a question of the Enlightenment, that is, of access to Reason in a certain public space, though this time in conditions that technoscience and economic or telemedia globalization have thoroughly transformed. . . . If intellectuals, writers, scholars, professors, 20. See the “Uncle Osama” recruiting poster that appeared in the New York Times, calling on all patriotic Americans to invade Iraq, a bit of irony that was lost on the Bush administration, which did exactly what al Qaeda wanted. See also Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York, 2004) for a discussion by the head of U.S. counterterrorism under four different presidencies of the folly of the war in Iraq as a response to “terror.”

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artists, and journalists do not, before all else, stand up together against such violence, their abdication will be at once irresponsible and suicidal. [PTT, p. 125] Derrida invoking the Enlightenment? This will only surprise those who forget that it was the Enlightenment and the Goddess of Reason that presided over the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Reason is on the side of both terror and counterterror. This insight is crucial to the understanding of deconstruction as a rational operation, one that traces the fault lines in any system or structure. Which leads us to a final thought on the image of autoimmunity that cannot be resisted any longer. Is it the case that deconstruction itself is a species of autoimmunity? That is, in purely textual terms, is the tendency of the law, of writing, of texts, and of any system or totality, whether political or institutional or cultural, to deconstruct at some point, whether or not a deconstructor comes along to hasten the process? Is this symptomatic of a hidden affinity between deconstruction and autoimmune disorders? Derrida places deconstruction on the side of justice, of the undeconstructible demand, desire, and need for some notion of a justice to come. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice. It is perhaps because law . . . is constructible, in a sense that goes beyond the opposition between convention and nature, it is perhaps insofar as it goes beyond this opposition that it is constructible and so deconstructible.21 Justice and deconstruction are not Kantian regulative ideals, and they are not teleological horizons for which we might plan in some projected futurity. They are what arrives or simply what happens. Derrida sometimes compares deconstruction to an earthquake, a violent disruption in a system that is, as it were, built into the system, its structure of checks and balances, its normativities and symmetries. There is no method of deconstruction; the deconstructor is more like a seismologist who traces the disturbances, locates their origins, describes their qualities. This associates deconstruction with Walter Benjamin’s discussion of what might be called natural violence, which is to say, it is not a violence that concerns us in the way that political or judicial violence does.22 21. Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York, 1992), p. 13. 22. See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1977), p. 277, and Derrida, “Force of Law.”


There are some moments, however, when Derrida grants a bit more agency to the deconstructor: When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by night, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or at least hearing it from a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit route out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.23 How seriously are we to take this fantasy, drawn from the lore of the French Resistance heroically fighting the German occupation?24 And is it unfair to see that it is precisely a form of terrorism? (That was certainly the word used by the Germans to denounce the Resistance.) I can imagine the cries of protest at the very suggestion that Derrida and deconstruction are in any sense aligned with terrorism, but I do not think that simple disavowal is going to be adequate. Terror has become so thoroughly reified and reduced to an ideological slogan, a synonym for absolute evil, that it has become impossible to think clearly about it. And, in fact, I think it even stymied the fabulous powers of the great deconstructor himself. Consider, for instance, Derrida’s final remarks that allow him to condemn the terrorism of bin Laden, despite his acute awareness that state terrorism and systemic terrorism are rampant in the world system today: What appears to me unacceptable in the “strategy” . . . of the “bin Laden effect” is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. . . . That is why, in this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well, I would. [PTT, p. 113] But two objections come to mind here. The first is simply that the terrorists do, in fact, envision a future, one in which the U.S. would leave the 23. Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Donis and David Webb (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 51–52. 24. See Derrida’s comment where he points out that “members of the Resistance were regularly treated as ‘terrorists’ by the Nazis and the Vichy collaborators” (PTT, p. 109).

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Middle East, would withdraw all its forces, military, economic, and political, making room for the revival of an Islamic kingdom of God, a caliphate in which justice (by their lights) would prevail and become identical with the law. We might not like this future, but there is no denying that it is a possible future, one we must find ways to prevent and one that has been made all the more likely by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Derrida’s assertion that bin Ladenism has no future is thus, not just empirically wrong, but the projection of a nihilism, a hollowness onto the figure of the enemy that is precisely the operation that mystifies that figure as an idol of the mind, a hollow signifier to which any absolute can be attributed. The second objection is drawn from Derrida’s own account of revolutionary violence as that which simultaneously violates the law and inaugurates a new legal order in an act of founding violence. Derrida asks of these revolutionary tactics: Can what we are doing here resemble a general strike or a revolution, with regard to models, structures but also modes of readability of political action? Is that what deconstruction is? Is it a general strike or a strategy of rupture? Yes and no. Yes, to the extent that it assumes the right to contest, and not only theoretically, constitutional protocols, the very charter that governs reading in our culture and especially in the academy. No, at least to the extent that it is in the academy that it has been developed (and let’s not forget, if we do not wish to sink into ridicule and indecency, that we are comfortably installed here on Fifth Avenue—only a few blocks away from the inferno of injustice).25 Derrida’s disclaimer strikes me as both a refreshing moment of realism, with a due sense of proportion, and at the same time a straightforward admission that, yes, deconstruction is strictly analogous to the upheaval of divine or mythic violence that erupts like a volcano within any system, whether textual or political, and that may lead on to a new order of reading or of legality and political order to come. But that order to come will, if I understand him correctly, never arrive as justice itself (though it will invoke a justice to come at every moment), but only as a new order of law, a new horizon of interpretation. That is why justice, like deconstruction, like autoimmunity, like divine violence and terror itself, are not regulative ideals or horizons of possibility that can be foreseen. They are precisely the impossible, the madness of the law, and the law of madness. This also makes them structurally, formally indistinguishable from the terror of the bin Ladens, even in its imputed lack of opening to futurity. The difference, in fact, 25. Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 38.


is more like that of Benjamin’s distinction between mythic violence, which is foundational and future-oriented—and linked to fascism—and the divine violence of the general strike, which is a near-bloodless deconstruction of a political system—perhaps a Velvet Revolution.26 The innocence, in the sense of academic harmlessness or nonviolence, of deconstruction, then, is the only thing that saves it from the charge of being structurally equivalent to autoimmunity and even terrorism. But to say this is not to accuse deconstruction of anything (except perhaps being a philosophical and critical project). It is rather to make terrorism accessible to thought in a new way, beyond the moral certainties and the acts of mythical violence known as the war on terror. The idea that one can implant a democracy to come by invading and occupying a country, sacrificing uncounted thousands of its citizens as collateral damage and holding elections in which the identity of candidates needs to be kept secret for security reasons is precisely an act of mythical violence, driven by a regulative ideal of formal democracy that is an obscene parody of the real thing, much less any democracy to come that is worthy of the name. It is fascism with a Christian face, an American face. Over three thousand precious souls died in the destruction of the World Trade Center, but over 100,000 equally precious souls have died as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to the British medical journal Lancet.27 Where is the memorial to them? This brings me back to our present horizon of possibilities and impossibilities, the state of criticism and theory after Said and Derrida. I’ve said that they are linked by their utopian sense of a democracy to come and an openness to possible/impossible futures such as a single democratic state known as Israel/Palestine. Said’s secular sense of “beginnings” (as opposed to mythic “origins”) is, I think, his parallel concept to Derrida’s l’avenir.28 I want to conclude by linking them at the level of method as well, working against the grain of deconstruction as event, and thinking about ways that we might go on, if not strictly following rules, in continuing the project of deconstruction. I’ve argued elsewhere for a procedure in Said’s critical practice I call secular divination, a Nietzschean sounding of the idols without destruction.29 I’ve also described this as a pictorial turn, a swerve from lan26. Derrida describes the “violent entrance of the other in the course of history,” as the moment of “justice . . . foreign to justness or the norm of adaptation” (Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek [Cambridge, 2002], p. 9). 27. See Les Roberts et al., “Mortality before and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey,” Lancet, 20 Nov. 2004, p. 1861. 28. See Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1985). 29. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Secular Divination: Edward Said’s Humanism,” in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, ed. Homi Bhabha and Mitchell (Chicago, 2005), p. 108.

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guage to the image, a move that I see as characteristic of Derrida’s interest in writing—graphism, rather than linguistics and language, as system—and his frequent invocation of the imagination, fantasy, and spectrality as the third that comes unannounced, the stranger or guest who demands, if not unconditional hospitality (the right of residence), then at any rate a right of visitation. A word on the subject of the various figures of appearing—image, morphe, eidos, and especially phantasm. It seems to me that if . . . we take the word ‘phantasm’ to mean that which weaves the universal and the individual together in the image, then we come right back to what we said earlier . . . about the ‘coming before’ of the other in the I, i.e. as phantasm. But I would not free myself so easily of phantoms, as some people all too often say they do (‘it’s nothing but a phantom’). I think that we are structured by the phantasmic, and in particular that we have a phantasmic relation to the other, and that the phantasmicity of this relation cannot be reduced, this pre-originary intervention of the other in me.30 If I read this correctly, Derrida is saying that the image can neither be created nor destroyed (though perhaps it can and must be deconstructed). It is the other in me, which must be embraced even as a figure of terror (I take this to be Derrida’s sense of the risk involved in unconditional hospitality). It arrives, appears; it is a figure of appearing and itself an apparition, a double presence of absence, a metapicture. The law is what opposes the image, interdicts and prohibits it, and the first law of the Abrahamic religions, the peoples of the book, is the law against the making of graven images. The law can be shattered, as Moses shows in his rage at the appearance of the Golden Calf, but the calf cannot be deconstructed in that way. It must be melted down, annihilated, and then taken in, drunk by the rebellious Israelites. This drastic treatment is based in a recognition that the image cannot be destroyed; it comes back to life, appears again in a spectral form, in the eyes of Moses’ own words, the vision conveyed by his narrative.31 The idols of our time, the monumentalization of 9/11, the fetishistic concept of terrorism, the mythic cultural icon of immunity as homeland security, cannot be destroyed either. But they can be sounded, made to divulge their hollowness. They can be melted down and drunk, deconstructed, and subjected to a secular divination. This will have to do for now. 30. Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, p. 89. 31. Moses’ strewing of the ground-up calf on the water is an image of sowing, which already suggests that the fragments of the calf will regenerate, clone themselves, and spring back to life. See Arthur J. Jacobson, “The Idolatry of Rules: Writing Law According to Moses,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, pp. 95–151. For further discussion of the Golden Calf, see Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005).

European Memories: Jan Patocˇka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility Rodolphe Gasche´

Having evoked various reflections and presentations of Europe ranging from Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Paul Vale´ry and from Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida remarks in The Other Heading that these European discourses on Europe are dated. Although they are modern discourses and even “the most current, [and, indeed,] nothing is more current,” they also date back somehow.1 They are always already traditional discourses in the sense that they speak of Europe from the perspective of its end, as an end (in the sense of telos) about to be realized or something that is no longer—something that has come to an end. As the heirs of these discourses, Europeans—like all inheritors—are in mourning. But, according to Derrida, Europe must also assume these traditional discourses, particularly those aspects of them that are of acute concern today. The Europeans’ capital, their first and most current duty is to take responsibility for that heritage. Derrida writes: “We bear the responsibility for this heritage, right along with the capitalizing memory that we have of it. We did not choose this responsibility; it imposes itself upon us” (OH, p. 28). This responsibility is ours insofar as (qua Europeans) we are heirs of the discourses in question. In the brief remarks devoted in Specters of Marx to the concept of inheritance in general, Derrida points out that to be means to inherit. One is an heir even before one explicitly assumes or rejects a particular inheritance. “That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that 1. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), p. 27; hereafter abbreviated OH. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3302-0004$10.00. All rights reserved.

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Rodolphe Gasche´ / Patocˇka and Derrida on Responsibility

the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.” Indeed, Derrida continues, “inheritance is never a given, it is always a task”; it is something still before us, to which we have to bear witness as that which “we are insofar as we inherit.”2 For Europeans, this task consists above all in being such that they assume the memory of Europe. To be by taking responsibility for their inheritance in no way reveals nostalgia or traditionalist fervor. On the contrary, understood as a task, the affirmation of this inheritance does not exclude; indeed, it may even call for a radical transformation of what has been handed down. The prime duty of the European is to take responsibility for this heritage, that is, the modern tradition of reflecting on European identity.3 This is so not only because these discourses concern being European but also because such identity is always established in relation to alterity, to the other, to the non-European. Responsibility toward this heritage is thus also responsibility to the other. It consists in the double injunction of being faithful to “an idea of Europe, [to] a difference of Europe, but [to] a Europe that consists precisely in not closing itself off in its own identity” (OH, p. 29). In other words, the responsibility that Europeans bear for all of the traditional discourses on European identity, of which “old Europe seems to have exhausted all the 2. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), p. 54. 3. Derrida’s reference to heritage, and the responsibility to the latter, does not necessarily imply that he would dismiss the notion of tradition. Let us only emphasize that, in contrast to Gadamer, Derrida does not hold tradition to be homogeneous. Indeed, within the tradition one finds “dominant structures, discourses which silence others, by covering over or destroying the archive” (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins [London, 1997], p. 233). Even though repeatedly he notes that “it is no longer possible to use seriously the words of tradition” (Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” trans. Anne Tomiche, in The States of Theory, ed. David Caroll [New York, 1990], p. 74), and that in the end all concepts of the tradition have to be put aside, he also “reaffirms the necessity of making recourse to them, at least, in a crossed-out fashion” (Derrida, Psyche´: Inventions de l’autre [Paris, 2003], p. 390; my trans.). Responsibility to the tradition and its deconstruction go hand in hand.

R o d o l p h e G a s c h e´ is Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo. His books include Die hybride Wissenschaft (1973), System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille (1978), The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (1986), Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (1994), The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (1998), and Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (1999). His latest book is The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetic (2003), and he has two new books forthcoming: America’s Deconstruction (2006) and The Honor of Thinking (2007). Currently, he is completing a study of the idea of Europe in phenomenological and postphenomenological philosophical thought.


possibilities,” is thus a responsibility toward responsibility, indeed, toward the concept of responsibility itself (OH, p. 26). At this point, however, I would only like to highlight the fact that for Derrida the prime responsibility of the European is one toward the tradition of the discourses and counterdiscourses concerning his own identification. This point is made even more explicitly, though in more general terms, in For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, where Derrida remarks that “the concept of responsibility has no sense at all outside of an experience of inheritance.”4 We should remind ourselves of it as we turn toward Derrida’s discussion of a discourse on Europe that he characterizes as heretical “with respect to all the important [or grand] European discourses.”5 All the possibilities of the grand discourses of Europe have apparently been exhausted. And, yet, Jan Patocˇka’s views on Europe and European responsibility, which have the capacity to produce explosive implications if extended radically, sound a heretical note within the traditional discourses of the modern Western world, not the least because they also seek to break the ties to a certain memory and to a certain tradition. In the first two chapters of The Gift of Death, Derrida engages Patocˇka’s genealogy of European responsibility as it is presented in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. To my knowledge, this is the only occasion on which Derrida has broached the work of the Czech phenomenologist. Although his discussion is limited to the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and, moreover, largely to one of its essays (“Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why?”), it provides an exemplary reading of Patocˇka’s conception of Europe and responsibility, of its intricacies and ambiguities, as well as of the major tenets of Derrida’s own conception.6 Needless to say, The Gift of Death is not limited to a discussion of Patocˇka’s views on Europe and responsibility. In this work, Derrida also engages the thought of Heidegger, Emmanuel Le´vinas, and, in particular, Søren Kierkegaard. Although I will briefly, and very schematically, sketch out Derrida’s main concerns within the essay as a whole, no comprehensive reading can be attempted here. In any event, we will have to elaborate in some detail on 4. Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif., 2004), p. 5. 5. Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago, 1995), p. 29; hereafter abbreviated GD. 6. Moreover, Derrida does not seem to have been familiar with the basic tenets of Patocˇka’s later phenomenology, in particular his reinterpretation of the Husserlian conception of the lifeworld. According to Patocˇka, the natural world is constituted by three movements that are fundamental for understanding his reference to the exceptional (the orgiastic, demonic, or sacred), the inauthenticity of everydayness, and, above all, the motif of the care of the soul. Nonetheless, Derrida’s reading of the essay in question is a very fine account of Patocˇka’s thought.

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Derrida’s assessment in The Gift of Death of Patocˇka’s fundamental and original thesis of the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and Plato and Europe, namely, that the Platonic motif of the care of the soul (epimeleia tes psyches) is the embryo of European life and the starting point of the genealogy of responsibility in the history of Europe.7 Without doing so, we would not be able to illuminate Derrida’s own understanding of responsibility, hence of what Europe is. So, before turning to Derrida’s reading of Patocˇka, let us first remind ourselves, however briefly, of what this Platonic motif is. The notion of the care of the soul is a fundamental and elementary notion in Plato’s earliest dialogues, around which all of Socrates’s concerns are gathered. Although this theme is to be found primarily in the Apology, Phaedo, and Alcibiades I, it is, according to Patocˇka, the central issue not only of all Plato’s thought but of Greek philosophy as a whole. Let us recall that for the Greeks the soul—that is, the mover and user of the body—is the human being’s true self. As Socrates argues in Alcibiades I, “there is nothing which may be called more properly ourselves than the soul.”8 For the Greek philosopher, the body is only an instrument, or a tool, for a good life. But the prerequisite for a good life is then that the soul be in command of the body. The philosopher’s first duty, or responsibility, is, therefore, to get to know himself in order to be able to look to that which is most properly himself, rather than tending to what does not expressly belong to him: money, reputation, honor, as well as anything bodily. The soul achieves not only self-control (sophron) but also purity and transparency within itself by shunning everything corporeal. It is guided in this by the knowledge of what is and emulates the eternal, the unchangeable order of the cosmos, the Divine, or the Good. As is made clear in the Phaedo, such severing of all ties to the body culminates in the care of death, which, as this dialogue shows, is an intrinsic part of the care of the soul. By caring for death—that is, by learning how to face death easily—the soul, having freed itself from any contamination with the body, becomes able “to collect and concentrate itself by itself, trusting nothing but its own independent judgment.”9 Thus, within his lifetime, the philosopher’s soul will achieve a state that resembles the one that only the gods should enjoy and will thus also secure its full release from the body upon death. 7. This genealogy also raises the question of whether it is not also modeled in accordance with the tripartite movement that, according to Patocˇka, makes up the natural world of the human being. 8. Plato, Alcibiades I, in The Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1953), 130d, 1:667. 9. Plato, Phaedo, in The Collected Dialogues, trans. Jowett et al., ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 83a, p. 66.


What unmistakably sets Patocˇka’s discourse apart from the traditional discourses on Europe—particularly those of Husserl and Heidegger—is what Derrida calls Patocˇka’s “essential Christianity” (GD, p. 22). Undoubtedly, Derrida makes this point first of all in order to distinguish Patocˇka’s interpretation of the theme of the care of the soul from Heidegger’s analysis of care (Sorge) in Being and Time as a fundamental existential structure of Dasein. Heidegger constantly sought to separate his thought from Christianity, while at the same time ontologically recovering—and de-Christianizing—Christian themes and texts by inquiring into their originary possibility. Patocˇka, on the other hand, “makes an inverse yet symmetrical gesture. . . . He reontologizes the historic themes of Christianity and attributes to revelation or to the mysterium tremendum the ontological content that Heidegger attempts to remove from it” (GD, p. 23). But this reference to an essential Christianity also acknowledges that the emergence of responsibility in the face of everydayness and the sacred is, for Patocˇka, intimately connected to the history of religion. Patocˇka is intent on overcoming both the inauthenticity of everydayness and the demonic and the orgiastic that are an escape from it. Plato and Europe establishes Plato as the Greek philosopher who brought the motif of the care of the soul into being and also as the thinker who transformed myth into religion, the one who “recommends . . . faith.” All differences considered, “faith, as the Greek philosophers saw it, is the foundation of what we call faith in the Christian tradition”; nevertheless, only Christianity is religion in an eminent sense.10 Indeed, as Derrida remarks, Patocˇka’s thought is remarkably consistent in taking into account the event of Christian mystery as an absolute singularity, a religion par excellence and an irreducible condition for a joint history of the subject, responsibility, and Europe. That is so even if, here and there, the expression “history of religions” appears in the plural, and even if one can only infer from this plural a reference to Judaic, Islamic, and Christian religions alone, those known as religions of the Book. [GD, p. 2] If the genealogy of responsibility developed by Patocˇka “follows the traces of a genius of Christianity that is the history of Europe” (GD, p. 3), it is precisely because it is only in, or as, Christian Europe that the motif of the care of the soul—the central theme of what is European—is transformed (or, as we will see, could be transformed) into a true principle of responsibility. Christianity is the only religion that can secure the possibility 10. Jan Patocˇka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, Calif., 2002), p. 139.

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of a responsibility that is truly European and at the same time really realize the concept of responsibility. What thus sets Patocˇka’s reflections on Europe apart from those of Husserl and Heidegger is precisely the significance of religion—particularly, of the religion par excellence that is Christianity. The Christianity of Patocˇka’s texts on the care of the soul and European responsibility is not just any Christianity. It is not only an essential but also a heretical conception of Christianity. According to Patocˇka’s highly stratified genealogy of responsibility, the history of the responsible self is built upon the heritage of the Platonic conception of the care of the soul through a series of ruptures and repressions “that assure the very tradition they punctuate with their interruptions” (GD, p. 7). Although the novel twist to which Christianity subjects the theme of the care of the soul consists, according to Patocˇka, in an “about-face” by means of which Christianityseeks to extricate itself from its Platonic inheritance, Christianity has proved unable to think through and draw the radical implications of its mutation of the theme in question precisely because its overcoming of Platonism is not complete.11 As Derrida points out, if European Christianity is at its heart still haunted by the persistent presence of a type of Platonism—and of a type of Platonic politics—it is, according to Patocˇka, because it “has not sufficiently repressed Platonism in the course of its reversal, and it still mouths its words” (GD, p. 23). Now, the specificity of the reversal that the motif of the care of the soul undergoes in Christianity consists in this: the responsibility of the self or of the soul does not derive from knowledge of the Divine, the cosmos, or the Good, but from the soul’s exposure to the gaze of an other, ultimately the gaze of God as a Person, a gaze that constitutes the soul as a person and, for that, as a responsible self. Indeed, the Christian version of the care of the soul is unable to come into its own because it continues to subordinate responsibility (and decision making) to knowledge, the knowledge of the Good, just as is the case with the Platonic model. Patocˇka inscribes his discourse on Europe, responsibility, and politics “within the perspective of a Christian eschatology”—that is, within a happening in which Christianity and, by extension, the only true conception of responsibility are still hampered by the remnants of the Platonic heritage. He is thus forced to acknowledge that something “remains ‘unthought’ in Christianity. Whether ethical or political, the Christian consciousness of responsibility is incapable of reflecting on the Platonic thinking that it represses, and at the same time it is incapable of reflecting on the orgiastic mystery that Platonic thinking incorporates” (GD, p. 24). 11. Patocˇka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohak, ed. James Dodd (Chicago, 1996), p. 106; hereafter abbreviated HE.


Christianity’s inability to determine the notion and status of “the place and subject of all responsibility, namely, the person,” is indicative of what remains unthought (GD, p. 24), for, in the Christian mystery, the person is not in a relation to an objectively knowable transcendent object such as the Platonic Good but to God as a Person, to He who transfixes the self by His gaze without being seen Himself. What follows from this inability and neglect of what Patocˇka judges to be an inadequate thematization is that Christianity remains only on the threshold of responsibility. It doesn’t thematize what a responsible person is, that is, what he must be, namely, this exposing of the soul to the gaze of another person, of a person as transcendent other, as an other who looks at me, but who looks without the subject-who-says-I being able to reach that other, see her, hold her within the reach of my gaze. [GD, p. 25] Furthermore, as Derrida concludes, “an inadequate thematization of what responsibility is or must be is also an irresponsible thematization: not knowing, having neither a sufficient knowledge or consciousness of what being responsible means, is of itself a lack of responsibility” (GD, p. 25). In sum then, the Christian version of the care of the soul is, in spite of all its radicalness, “limited by the weight of what remains unthought, in particular its incorrigible Platonism” (GD, p. 28), an unacknowledged debt, which also explains the inadequate thematization of what makes the soul a truly responsible self. Christianity is also infused with a certain irresponsibility as far as its conception of responsibility is concerned. Patocˇka’s essential Christianity,then, is a heretical conception of Christianity in that “according to the logic of a messianic eschatology” he advocates a more “thorough thematization” of what sets the Christian notion of the care of the soul apart from the Platonic (and Roman) model, which bears not only on its understanding of responsibility but also on its political realization. Derrida writes: Something has not yet arrived, neither at Christianity nor by means of Christianity. . . . What has not yet come about is the fulfillment, within history and in political history, and first and foremost in European politics, of the new responsibility announced by the mysterium tremendum. There has not yet been an authentically Christian politics because there remains this residue of the Platonic polis. Christian politics must break more definitely and more radically with Greco-Roman Platonic politics in order to finally fulfill the mysterium tremendum. Only on this condition will Europe have a future. [GD, pp. 28–29]

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The realization of a European politics based on a Christian version of the care of the soul would hinge on drawing upon the full philosophical, religious, and political consequences of what is promised with the emergence of Christian Europe. This, however, is possible only on the condition of a radical rupture with the Platonic heritage, that is, precisely with a model of the care of the soul that is predicated on knowledge, in particular the knowledge of the Good. Undoubtedly, heretical, in the title of Patocˇka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, refers, at first, to the vulgar Marxist conceptions of the philosophy of history. But its heresy, which also marks a rupture with Husserl’s and Heidegger’s views on history, as Paul Ricoeur has noted, derives, as Derrida implicitly suggests, from Patocˇka’s hyperbolic conception of Christianity.12 “Taken to its extreme,” Patocˇka’s text is heretical with respect to the grand discourses on Europe by Husserl and Heidegger because it seems to suggest on the one hand that Europe will not be what it must be until it becomes fully Christian, until the mysterium tremendum is adequately thematized. On the other hand it also suggests that the Europe to come will no longer be Greek, Greco-Roman, or even Roman. The most radical insistence of the mysterium tremendum would be upon a Europe so new (or so old) that it would be freed from the Greek or Roman memory that is so commonly invoked in speaking of it; freed to the extent of breaking all ties with this memory, becoming heterogeneous to it. [GD, p. 29] Patocˇka’s conception of Europe, even though it is a version of the care of the soul, is heretical with respect to all the traditional discourses on Europe because of its attempt to emancipate Europe from the memory of both Athens and Rome—that is to say, from a memory of responsibility that rests on knowledge of the Good or of the universal state. Built exclusively on the mysterium tremendum—in other words, on the unseen gaze of an absolutely self-less Goodness, who shakes the soul (the self or person) because it is unable to adequately respond to this gift of love—Europe is to become something entirely new, something that is no longer responsible to the memory of Athens and Rome.13 Yet, before we can provide a hint of the 12. See Paul Ricoeur, “Preface to the French Edition of Jan Patocˇka’s Heretical Essays,” in HE, p. ix. 13. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, “Goodness in an absolute sense, as distinguished from the ‘good-for’ or the ‘excellent’ in Greek and Roman antiquity, became known in our civilization only with the rise of Christianity” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago, 1958], p. 73). The analysis of Goodness provided in The Human Condition and in which Arendt highlights the constitutive secrecy of good works, which must remain hidden even to the one who performs them—a good deed being good only on condition that it is forgotten at the moment it is done—as well as Goodness’s intrinsic hostility toward the public realm, converges in


implications of this radical break, it is first necessary to briefly highlight the major aspects of the essential Christian conception of responsibility that orthodox Christianity has failed to make good on. The Platonic responsible self or soul cares for itself and achieves in this manner a resemblance—however temporary—to the gods by measuring itself against the Good. The Christian self ’s responsibility rests on its relation to an other. It is neither a relation of the self to itself, nor one that the self can freely choose to take upon itself, nor one that it can ignore. Rather, “the Christian ‘reversal’ that converts the Platonic conversion in turn, involves the entrance upon the scene of a gift” (GD, p. 40). Patocˇka argues that, in Christianity, the “responsible life was itself presented as a gift from something which ultimately, though it has the character of the Good, has also the traits of the inaccessible and forever superior to humans—the traits of the mysterium that always has the final word” (HE, p. 106). Understanding responsibility as a gift makes all the difference. Such an understanding makes responsibility into a function of an event, the singular event of a gift by another, which, furthermore, is addressed to the human as a singular human being. In fact, the gift, insofar as it is always directed specifically at this human being, is constitutive of his or her singularity and irreplaceability. But, according to Christianity, responsibility is also a gift that comes from an absolute other, that is, a self-effacing Goodness that gives this gift in selfless love and to which the donee is thus constitutively unable to respond in kind. As a consequence, there is thus a structural disproportion or dissymmetry between the finite and responsible mortal on the one hand and the goodness of the infinite gift on the other hand. . . . It inevitably transforms the experience of responsibility into one of guilt: I have never been and never will be up to the level of this infinite goodness nor up to the immensity of the gift, the frameless immensity that must in general define (in-define) a gift as such. [GD, p. 51] Addressed to finite beings, the selfless gift is constitutive of their singularity; it also condemns such singular beings to guilt inasmuch as they are responsible. Furthermore, the gift of responsibility that occurs in the mysterium tremendum is a gift by a self-denying and self-effacing Goodness, who also remains inaccessible because of its very withdrawal. To be responsible is, in Patocˇka’s words, to stand in an inscrutable relation to “a many respects with what Patocˇka—a reader of Arendt—says about this notion, as well as with all the implications that Derrida draws in systematic fashion from this conception in The Gift of Death.

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Person who sees into the soul without being itself accessible to view” and “in whose hands we are not externally, but internally” (HE, pp. 107, 106). That which makes me responsible is something that remains impenetrable to me—in other words, secret. It is also something that shatters me because I cannot adequately respond to such a self-denying gift. Thus, Platonic responsibility is a function of what Patocˇka terms looking-in, or looking-intowhat-is (nahle´dnutı´)—namely, into eternal being—which like the Platonic Good can effectively be known. Christian responsibility, however, is not in the power of the subject, who is overpowered, crushed by it precisely because its source—self-renouncing and self-withdrawing Goodness—remains unfathomable.14 Finally, as Derrida puts it, the gift of responsibility is a gift by “a goodness whose inaccessibility acts as a command to the donee. It subjects its receivers, giving themselves to them as goodness itself but also as the law” (GD, p. 41)—that is, as a universality to which the donee is subject as a singular and irreplaceable being. As the result of this gift, Christian responsibility, therefore, takes the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the singular individual into account precisely by subjecting him to a universal Law. Patocˇka holds that it is only in Christianity that the most powerful plumbing of the depths of responsibility has occurred—in other words, that only here is it conceived in a truly fundamental manner. He can do so because this conception of responsibility articulates, as it were, the only conditions under which responsibility is possible. In Christianity alone, it becomes clear that “responsibility demands irreplaceable singularity” (GD, p. 51). Christian responsibility is also, therefore, tied to a gift of death—of “another death” (GD, p. 40), which is not the one to be found in the Platonic version of the care of the soul. As Derrida reminds us, when Patocˇka argues that “the mysterium tremendum announces, in a manner of speaking, another death. . . . another way of giving death or of granting oneself death,” “the word ‘gift’ is uttered” (GD, p. 40). This gift of death is a gift in an eminent sense. It is the gift by the other on which the gift of responsibility itself rests or with which responsibility coincides. Only through this gift of death does access to genuine responsibility become possible because “only death or rather the apprehension of death can give this irreplaceability [without which there can be no true responsibility], for it is only on the basis of it that one can speak of a responsible subject, of the soul as conscience of self, of myself, etc.” (GD, p. 51; trans. mod.). This gift is another way of giving oneself death, first and foremost, in the sense of apprehending death. In the originary Platonic version of the care of the soul, the philosopher, by giving himself death as that which will only affect him as a bodily 14. See Patocˇka, Plato and Europe, p. 35.


being, frees himself from death; he collects and gathers himself within himself. Derrida writes that the (philosopher’s) self “comes into being as such at the moment when the soul is not only gathering itself in the preparation for death but when it is ready to receive death, giving it to itself even, in an acceptation that delivers it from the body, and at the same time delivers it from the demonic and the orgiastic. By means of the passage to death [passage de la mort] the soul attains its own freedom” (GD, p. 40). By contrast, in the Christian paradigm death is apprehended neither as something from which the soul can distance itself through care nor as something from which it can sever itself. Christian death is experienced as intrinsically linked to my selfhood, as precisely something that is exclusively mine, that no one can take from me, or assume for me, and that constitutes my irreplaceability as a singular self. Let us remind ourselves that for Patocˇka the Christian way in which I give myself death rests on “the gift made to me by God as he holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me, the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the mysterium tremendum” (GD, p. 33). The human being to whom this gift is made is no match for the gift of death that accompanies the responsibility to which God’s self-less gift calls me. It is a gift that makes the finite subject tremble in terror because he is unable to adequately respond to it, the gift of an awareness of death as eternal death. Derrida writes: “For what is given in this trembling, in the actual trembling of terror, is nothing other than death itself, a new significance for death, a new apprehension of death, a new way in which to give oneself death or to put oneself to death. The difference between Platonism and Christianity would be above all ‘a reversal in the face of death and of eternal death’” (GD, p. 31). Radically guilty in the face of a gift that is addressed to them in their very singularity, humans confront their deaths—that which is irreducibly their own and on which their uniqueness hinges—as the complete extinction of themselves, unless they are redeemed by the grace of God. This gift of death is also the gift of a new way of putting oneself to death in the face of the prospect of eternal death, since in order to merit the grace of God the trembling creature must offer its “whole being . . . in the sacrifice of repentance” (HE, p. 108). What Christianity brings to light is not only the fact that without the singularity or the irreplaceability of the individualthere cannot be any responsible self, but also that if singularity is to be the condition of possibility of responsibility it cannot be a given, but must be constantly in danger of extinction. The Christian version of the care of the soul plumbs into the soul deeper than Platonism because this responsibility—which originates in the gaze of an unfathomable other—precedes the subject/object relation that informs the classical version of the responsible self. Derrida writes: “The dissym-

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metry of the gaze, this disproportion that relates me, and whatever concerns me, to a gaze that I don’t see and that remains secret from me although it commands me, is, according to Patocˇka, what promises itself [s’annonce] in Christian mystery as the frightening, terrifying mystery, the mysterium tremendum. Such a terror has no place in the transcendent experience that relates Platonic responsibility to the agathon. Nor does it have any place in the politics that is so instituted. But the terror of this secret exceeds and precedes the complacent relation of a subject to an object” (GD, pp. 27–28; trans. mod.). Yet such a radical way of conceiving responsibility is only announced or is only promised by Christianity. Christianity as a whole cannot be identified with this understanding of responsibility because its persistent Platonism has prevented it from thinking through this deepened conception. What is thus announced by Christianity is perhaps no longer anything Christian unless it is Christian in a hyperbolic sense.15 In any case, Christianity remains the privileged locus in which the depths of responsibility can best be plumbed. At this juncture let me return to the Platonic motif of the care of the soul and the first awakening of responsibility that is the core idea of European life, but with which the Christian understanding of the responsible self must also, according to Patocˇka, make a clear break. Let us thus once again remind ourselves that knowledge of what is eternal—justice, beauty, the Good—is the basis of Greek responsible life. Responsibility itself is something public because it is based upon knowledge, to which everyone has access in principle. It is possible to account for the concept of responsibility and to universally establish what responsibility and being responsible consist of, but such an understanding of responsibility also implies that the responsible self must be able to give reasons for any of his or her actions and beliefs, publicly whenever possible. According to this Platonic conception of responsibility, “not knowing, having neither a sufficient knowledge or consciousness of what being responsible means, is of itself a lack of responsibility. In order to be responsible it is necessary to respond to or answer to what being responsible means” (GD, p. 25). To the extent that the Platonic conception of the care of the soul is the first awakening of and to responsibility and hence that this understanding of responsibility is the first moment in the genealogy of responsibility in (or as) Europe, this demand that knowledge be involved in responsible decision making is at the heart of the history of the concept. It dominates the thought on responsibility 15. Derrida asks: “Is the reference to this abyssal dissymmetry that occurs when one is exposed to the gaze of the other a motif that derives firstly and uniquely from Christianity, even if it be from an inadequately thematized Christianity? Let us leave aside the question of whether one finds something that at least represents its equivalent ‘before’ or ‘after’ the Gospels, in Judaism or in Islam” (GD, p. 28).


in Europe from Plato’s to Husserl’s reflections on an absolutely selfresponsible universal science. Derrida refers to this Greek moment and endorses it, thus highlighting a certain continuity between his own thought and that of Husserl on this issue when he writes that responsibility consists, “according to the most convincing and most convinced doxa, in responding, hence in answering to the other, before the other and before the law, and if possible publicly, answering for itself, its intentions, its aims, and for the name of the agent deemed responsible” (GD, pp. 26–27). The Greek understanding of responsibility that constitutes the first moment in Patocˇka’s genealogy of responsibility excludes any secrecy. Although the Platonic moment incorporates demonic mystery, there is no place for secrecy and mystery in the philosophy and politics of the Platonic tradition. Everything is in the open, in the light of day, for all to judge. Like Greek political life, Greek civic responsibility “openly declares that secrecy will not be allowed.” It “presents itself as a moment without mystery” (GD, p. 33). The Platonic model of responsibility and politics is, consequently, one of democracy. Yet, since the Christian model of responsibility rests on a deepened interiority and is the gift of a self-less other who remains inscrutable, this new model has a definite place for secrecy, for the mysterium, for the mystical, unlike the Greco-Roman version, which is superseded so radically as to break entirely with its memory. Christian responsibility has its origin in a gift, in a “gift that is not a present,” and it is from the outset tied with secrecy for essential reasons. Indeed, as Derrida points out, “a gift that could be recognized as such in the light of day, a gift destined for recognition, would immediately annul itself. The gift is the secret itself. . . . Secrecy is the last word of the gift which is the last word of the secret” (GD, pp. 29–30). Originating in the elusive event of such a gift, even the transition from Platonism and neo-Platonism to Christianity remains obscure; it cannot be simply accounted for in positive terms. But since the gift of responsibility is a gift from a self-effacing Goodness (who holds the human being in its hands from within) to the individual in all his or her creatural singularity, it is “the gift of something that remains inaccessible, unpresentable, and as a consequence secret” (GD, p. 29). The donee is exclusively responsible to the donator, and hence, as Derrida’s discussion of the Abrahamic story of the sacrifice of Isaac in the second half of The Gift of Death demonstrates, he or she is relieved of the necessity of explaining his or her deeds to others. Indeed, being the unique addressee of the gift, the responsible individual must, at the limit, relate to others in an irresponsible fashion. How he responds to the divine Law remains secret—that is, unaccounted for—and ultimately secret to him- or herself as well, for such responsible decision making must, in principle, be unaccountable. How does Derrida respond to this conception of responsibility, a con-

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ception that is entirely heterogeneous to the Greek one and to the tradition to which it gave rise, one that he has characterized as “the most convincing and convinced doxa”? In seeking to answer this question, let us bear in mind that the Platonic idea of responsibility is the beginning of the genealogy of responsibility in Europe, of the European tradition of thinking about responsibility, although it is, according to Patocˇka, to be entirely replaced by the Christian model. But the Christian version of responsibility is also part of European memory, which thus consists of at least two different memories regarding what constitutes responsibility, despite Patocˇka’s description of Christian responsibility as thoroughly heterogeneous to its Greek antecedent. Further, since the lingering presence of Platonism in Christianity has prevented a full rupture with the Greek model of responsibility that Christianity is to accomplish, the break with this tradition must be completed if the very essence or future of Europe is ever to be realized. Yet, as we saw at the beginning of this essay, for Derrida the concept of responsibility makes no sense whatsoever without an experience of inheritance. Consequently, responsibility is first and foremost a responsibility for and to the specific traditions of responsibility that have been bequeathed to us. It is, first and foremost, a responsibility before any particular responsibilities to oneself, the other, God, the animal, the world, and so forth. Such responsibility does not exclude selection and critique. But would not any attempt to ignore, reject, or break with one of those legacies be tantamount to irresponsibility? Indeed, if responsibility is first of all a responsibility for and to an inheritance, to abandon or to deliberately renounce a part of the tradition in its entirety would be the gravest irresponsibility, all the more so in the case of a part of the tradition that concerns the concept of responsibility itself. Among the several things that Derrida seeks to achieve in The Gift of Death, the attempt to do justice to the conflicting models of responsibility within the European tradition—that is, also of thinking about Europe itself—prevails. The most insistent concern of The Gift of Death is that of assuming the heritage of responsibility in all its forms—particularly, the most “living” part of it, that which is most current because it continues to put limits on any traditional view on responsibility that would impose itself at the exclusion of all others. All of the other concerns of The Gift of Death presuppose this equitable treatment of the contradictory views on responsibility to be found in the traditional discourses of the modern Western world. But, far from amounting to a wholesale underwriting of all the major positions on responsibility, such responsible treatment does not exclude critique, radical transformation, or the opening to other possible models of understanding responsibility. In fact, as we will see, Derrida’s attempt in The Gift of Death to respond responsibly to the various facets of the European heritage of


responsibility indeed represents a novel concept of responsibility—that is, a novel conception of Europe. Before we elaborate further on Derrida’s response to Patocˇka in The Gift of Death, a brief and very sketchy outline of what this text seeks to achieve is warranted. We should keep in mind Derrida’s observation in the first chapter, “Secrets of European Responsibility,” that what separates Patocˇka’s interpretation of the motif of the care of the soul from Heidegger’s influence is its essential Christianity. Whereas Heidegger constantly seeks to separate himself from Christianity, “repeating on an ontological level Christian themes and texts that have been ‘de-Christianized,’” “Patocˇka makes an inverse yet symmetrical gesture” by ontologizing “the historic themes of Christianity and attribut[ing] to revelation or to the mysterium tremendum the ontological content that Heidegger attempts to remove from it.” Thus, Derrida holds that Patocˇka’s gesture “amounts to the same thing” as Heidegger’s because it is symmetrical and merely the inverse. He adds that Patocˇka’s “own heresy [regarding Christianity] intersects with what one might call, a little provocatively, that other heresy, namely, the twisting or diverting by which the Heideggerian repetition, in its own way, affects Christianity” (GD, p. 23). The Gift of Death is, of course, not limited to the mapping of the similarities and differences between Patocˇka and Heidegger; it also includes an analysis of Le´vinas and, above all, of Kierkegaard’s Protestant interpretation of the Abrahamic story of the sacrifice of Isaac. It is in The Gift of Death that Derrida seeks to establish the matrix, if I may call it that, that at once makes these four undeniably distinct positions on responsibility possible but also limits their range, distinctiveness, radicalism, and even their originality. Indeed, by inquiring into the various modalities of giving (oneself) death and of taking death (upon oneself), Derrida develops an economic model that accounts for the different positions on responsibility, their mutual contamination and passage into one another—in particular, as regards their overdetermination by themes of Christianity, Platonism, and deliberate de-Christianization, as well as of Judaism. This concern with the intersections between distinct positions also frames Derrida’s discussion of Patocˇka’s dismissal of the Platonic conception of responsibility on the basis of a decided predisposition toward Christianity’s potential to conceive responsibility, which is not yet adequately thematized, hence, outstanding. As we have seen, to conform to the most convincing and convinced doxa, that is, the Platonic tradition, the responsible party must know what responsibility means. The responsible self must be able to account for what he or she believes and does, and such rendering of accounts should, whenever possible, be public, taking place in a way that is intelligible to everyone. According to what Derrida describes as “the most reliable continuity,” the

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concept of responsibility requires “a decision or responsible action to answer for itself consciously, that is, with knowledge of a thematics of what is done, of what action signifies, its causes, ends, etc.” (GD, p. 25). Where this element of knowledge and justification is lacking, decision making is irresponsible. As Derrida emphasizes, “we must continually remind ourselves that some part of irresponsibility insinuates itself wherever one demands responsibility without sufficiently conceptualizing and thematizing what ‘responsibility’ means” (GD, pp. 25–26). Yet, although Derrida subscribes to this demand of knowledge and of giving reasons for all decisions, demands that are constitutive of the conception of responsibility from Plato to Husserl, he also agrees with Patocˇka that to subordinate responsibility to objective knowledge—namely, to established theorems and time-honored norms—amounts to merely executing a program fixed in advance and thus to annulling responsibility. Therefore, he can also write: Saying that a responsible decision must be taken on the basis of knowledge seems to define the condition of possibility of responsibility (one can’t make a responsible decision without science or conscience, without knowing what one is doing, for what reasons, in view of what and under what conditions), at the same time as it defines the condition of impossibility of this same responsibility (if decision-making is relegated to a knowledge that it is content to follow or to develop, then it is no more a responsible decision, it is the technical deployment of a . . . theorem). [GD, p. 24] In addition to acknowledging with Plato and Husserl that the possibility of responsibility is based on knowledge and on rendering accounts, Derrida thus recognizes another equally compelling demand without which responsibility is not possible. The Christian paradigm exemplifies this further condition of possibility of responsibility. According to this new conception, responsibility requires a break with established or sanctified dogmas (including the most convincing and convinced doxa). Rather than seeking conformity, one may have to set oneself apart from what is publicly or commonly accepted. In other words, responsibility is tied here to heresy in all the senses of the term—particularly, as is the case with Patocˇka, to a “departure from a doctrine, difference within and difference from the officially and publicly stated doctrine and the institutional community that is governed by it” (GD, p. 26). Heresy is not only “an essential condition of responsibility,” it “also destines responsibility to the resistance or dissidence of a type of secrecy. It keeps responsibility apart . . . and in secret. And responsibility depends on [tient a`] what is apart and secret” (GD, p. 26; trans. mod.). Indeed, if knowledge remains only on the threshold of a responsible


decision, if a decision is a decision on the condition that it exceeds simple consciousness and simple theoretical determination, the responsible self must, in principle, be unable—that is, run the risk of not being able—to fully account for the singular act constitutive of a responsible decision. It follows from this that responsibility is necessarily linked to the secret—not, of course, in the form of withholding knowledge regarding a specific decision but in the form of an essential inability to ultimately make the reasons for one’s actions fully transparent. According to this essential Christianconception of responsibility (which is also, for essential reasons, heretical), decision making without secrecy remains ultimately irresponsible. But, while a decision that is based merely on knowledge annuls responsibility, a decision that forgoes knowledge and defies the demand to give reasons is not without problems that threaten responsibility as well. As we have seen, there is no place for secrecy or mystery in the Platonic paradigm of responsibility. The Platonic model is a democratic model based on responsibility as universally accessible knowledge and on a demand of transparency. Returning to the memory of Europe, Derrida remarks that as long as Europe pays homage to its Platonic heritage and keeps that memory alive, it “either neglects, represses, or excludes from itself every essential possibility of secrecy and every link between responsibility and the keeping of a secret; everything that allows responsibility to be dedicated to secrecy” (GD, p. 34). But apart from seeking to secure the democratic demand of full transparency and generalized accountability, the fact that this heritage seeks to achieve this demand by neglecting, repressing, or excluding the possibility of secrecy clearly suggests some kind of irresponsibility that is inseparable from the demand in question. As Patocˇka’s analyses of the decadence of modern Europe seek to show, it takes very little for such a democratic model of responsibility and of rendering reason to become totalitarian. Indeed, the legitimate demand intrinsic to the concept of responsibility to publicly account for oneself and one’s deeds can easily turn into a means of oppression—as has amply been demonstrated under Stalinism and Zhdanovism in the former Soviet Union, but examples of which can also be found in the U.S. with its obsession with public confession; thus this conception of responsibility based on the demand for knowledge must also, to quote Derrida, “call for respecting whatever refuses a certain responsibility, for example, the responsibility to respond before any and every instituted tribunal” (OH, p. 79).16 This right not to respond and to keep a secret is the necessary antidote to a conception of responsibility that, based on knowledge, can always become a tool for the benefit of the worst. But 16. See Derrida, Passions (Paris, 1993).

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the Christian paradigm of responsibility, which rests on the mysterium tremendum, by which the unique and singular self is called to responsibility by God’s gift alone, harbors a similar or rather inverse risk. Christian responsibility requires of the self a complete departure from everything established by doxa and tradition, from all rules and doctrines—in particular, from the necessity of having to give accounts to others—so that one’s actions will have been exclusively one’s own. As such, it is also fraught with the danger of the worst possible irresponsibility. That Christian responsibility could become tied to the worst repression is a possibility as well. Furthermore, to demand of Europe that it abandon all memory of Platonism and become exclusively Christian—by making secrecy and mystery into the sole condition of European politics and responsibility—is tantamount to calling for a reign of arbitrariness and terror. Against Patocˇka’s attempt to free Christianity from its Platonic foundation and to conceive of a Europe emancipated from both Athens and Rome, Derrida stresses the need to remain faithful to both aspects of European memory. As the inheritors of both conceptions of responsibility, Europeans are what they are thanks to both of these conceptions and the demands that they articulate; hence, they are responsible for and to them. But this double heritage of the meaning of responsibility is not a simple given and does not entail traditionalist submission. Responsibility for and to both traditions demands first of all acknowledging that any one of these conceptions of responsibility is necessarily fraught with risks and dangers. But such responsibility calls not only for the affirmation of what has been inherited but also for the radical transformation of the heritage. In other words, responsibility for and toward the tradition is inevitably heretical. In response to Patocˇka’s claim that Christianity has failed to adequately thematize what a Person is—that is, the Person that penetrates the soul with its glance without in turn being seen and that constitutes the soul as a responsible self—Derrida writes that such a reference to “inadequate thematization . . . seems to appeal to some ultimate adequacy of thematization that could be accomplished” (GD, p. 27). Let us remind ourselves of the fact that, in the tradition of responsibility, its Greek moment may come the closest to the ideal of full thematization because it demands knowledge of the reasons, the aim, the meaning of what is done and of the circumstances of one’s decisions or actions. Although Derrida emphasizes that we must be continually aware of the fact that whenever we do not sufficiently thematize what responsibility means some irresponsibility insinuates itself into our actions, he also remarks that this is always and everywhere the case. No action, if it is to be a responsible action, is ever consciously or cognitivelysufficiently determined. Derrida adds: “One can say everywhere a priori and nonem-


pirically” (GD, p. 26). If this is so, it is because an action must transcend knowledge to be responsible as well as to include knowledge of what responsibility means. Unless it is the execution of a preestablished theorem or norm, an action merits the title responsible only if it is also effectuated without full theoretical determination. It follows from this that the thematization of responsibility is, for structural reasons, always lacking—even in the case of the Platonic notion of responsibility rejected by Patocˇka on the basis that it makes responsibility a function of the knowledge of the good. This is even more the case for the heretically Christian conception of responsibility. Derrida observes that thematization is, if not denied, at least strictly limited in its pertinence by that other more radical form of responsibility that exposes me dissymmetrically to the gaze of the other. . . . The concept of responsibility is one of those strange concepts that give food for thought without giving themselves over to thematization. It presents itself neither as a theme nor as a thesis, it gives without being seen [sans se donner a` voir], without presenting itself in person by means of a “fact of being seen” that can be phenomenologically intuited. [GD, p. 27] In a move that proves Derrida even more heretical than Patocˇka, he shows that the concept of responsibility resists all final thematization. It is a “paradoxical concept” in that, in addition to seeking to cognitively unify what responsibility means in one intuition, it also defies such an effort insofar as “it has the structure of a type of secret—what is called, in the code of certain religious practices, mystery. The exercise of responsibility seems to leave no choice but this one, however uncomfortable it may be, of paradox, heresy, and secrecy. More serious still, it must always run the risk of conversion and apostasy: there is no responsibility without a dissident and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine” (GD, p. 27). With this we have already begun to broach Derrida’s own—radically heretical—take on responsibility. Derrida upholds both injunctions of the tradition in question ratherthan solely privileging the structurally necessary element of secrecy, which Patocˇka associates with heretical Christianity, to the detriment of the cognitive element in responsibility advanced by Platonism. Yet his innovative interpretation of the heritage of responsibility consists neither in attempting to mediate between both demands nor in establishing their golden mean. Instead, what distinguishes Derrida’s interpretation of the Platonic and the Christian heritages is, first of all, the recognition that “the relation between the Platonic and Christian paradigms throughout the history of morality and politics” is defined by the “aporia of responsibility” (GD, p. 24). Re-

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sponsibility toward this inheritance is itself aporetic; it excludes the choice of one of the inherited conceptions of responsibility at the expense of the other; that is, it requires that both traditions be simultaneously honored without any mitigation of the radicalness of their demands. The injunctions—on the one hand, of full knowledge of one’s actions, on the other, of secrecy—are mutually exclusive; moreover, we are unable to account for either of them. Thus, no program exists that could prescribe a way out of this dilemma. Responsibility for and to this double heritage then requires the invention, each time anew, of a rule according to which both contradictory demands could be met simultaneously or of an action from which such a rule could, after the fact, be construed. In Patocˇka’s parlance, such responsibility toward the memory of Europe is, therefore, inevitably heretical. The relation to this memory is a responsible one only if the contradictory injunctions are met in a way that amounts to a transformation of the tradition that is new each time, one that is singular. Needless to say, what we have seen in regard to the relation to the memory of Europe is valid as well for all other responsible decision making insofar as it takes place against the backdrop of an experience of tradition. Any responsible decision making must face the demand to give reasons without at the same time being reduced to knowledge that would merely be put into effect. What, then, for Derrida, is European responsibility or responsibility as something specifically European? The conflicting exigencies formulated in the foregoing discussion of the concept of responsibility require the invention of a new way in which to renew, revive, or replay the figure, concept, or idea of Europe. European responsibility is, first of all, this openness to both traditions of responsibility, namely, Platonism and Christianity. It consists in exposure to the radically conflicting demands that these two traditions make upon their heirs as responsible selves. European responsibility is above all the uncompromising willingness to assume the challenge posed by the aporetic nature of inheritance itself—that is, by the constitutive lack of handed-down rules or norms to negotiate contradiction. Consequently, Europe is the name for a responsibility that also goes hand in hand with the necessity of having to invent, each time anew, new ways of meeting mutually exclusive demands. As a simultaneous responsibility to, at first, two opposite traditions, European responsibility consists in not letting one of the traditions overturn, outplay, or outdo the other. By doing justice to its double heritage, and not shunning the necessity of negotiating conflicting demands in the absence of pregiven norms or rules, such responsibility not only entails a radical refusal of traditionalism, for structural reasons, but also is distinguished by openness to other traditions and demands. Indeed,


from the moment that Europe is understood as a responsibility to more than one tradition or set of injunctions, its responsiveness andresponsibility extend to all other traditions. Apart from being hospitable to other historically and culturally decisive intra-European differences (such as Judaism and Islam—not in the abstract, however, but with all their shades and forms), as well as to the many minor, or marginal, differences within Europe, this principal openness that the name Europe designates consists as well in the demand of unconditional receptiveness of the tradition of the non-European other. But the demand of such unconditional openness to other traditions and injunctions does not, therefore, exclude the opposite demand, one that is heterogeneous to the former, of conditional or determinate responsibility to oneself. One responsibility comes with the other; none is possible without negotiation with its opposite. Responsibility as Europe—that is, Europe as responsibility—outlines a model of decision making that is respectful of mutually exclusive demands within the concept of responsibility itself and that endures the test of exigencies that, since they are equally valid, cannot be mediated except at the unacceptable price of rendering one exigency subservient to the other. If something like Europe exists and can be thought at all, it must be a conception that for structural or principal reasons is open to responding to still more injunctions, including injunctions from other, or non-European, traditions. Responsibility as Europe coincides with a mode of being for which identity, or selfhood, is possible only in honoring conflicting, strictly speaking aporetic, injunctions. It means that Europe is the idea of an identity predicated on aporetic demands, hence of a mode of being that structurally is infinitely open— rather than being closed off—to what is other than oneself. Europe thus understood is a name for a project that Europe has yet to live up to. But Europe, neither a figure nor a concept, neither an idea nor even an idea in the Kantian sense—all of which presuppose a formal unity of what they represent or name—is something that can be realized only by way of approximation, something whose very conception remains open, still—perhaps forever—unfinished, hence, something to come.

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Jacques Derrida and the Critique of the Geometrical Mode: The Line and the Point Frances Ferguson

To begin at the end—in reverse—I think of one of the notices of Jacques Derrida’s death—the New York Times obituary of 10 October 2004—that announced not just that he had died but that his moment had passed (in America) and had never really arrived (in France). It goes almost without saying that this obituary was both ungenerous and what one would want to call inaccurate in virtually all of its particulars, so I intend not to dwell on its words or offer to correct them. Instead, I’ll address the question of the ways in which we frequently speak of thought (exemplified by the obituary)—the ways we rely on a time line and repeated acts of pointing to gesture toward importance and the most essential observations of writers and writing. I’ll also say something about Derrida’s efforts to consider and even revise such ways of proceeding. For lately rereading some of Derrida’s books and essays and reading others for the first time has reminded me of the importance I attach to his sense of the complexity with which we construct our thinking lives and to his eminently practical challenge to the ways in which we talk about it. Deconstruction, as he practiced it, did not counter Enlightenment rationalism by frontally contesting the power of reason. Instead, Derrida’s deconstruction engaged him in thinking about the omnipresence of rational structures in our writing and our thought and the way in which we employ them to lure ourselves into methods, however imprecise and unmethodical, that substitute the anticipation of value for the apprehension of it. Such rational arrangements encourage us to think that we I am grateful to Amanda Anderson and Stephen Nichols, the conveners of “Living Theory,” a School of Criticism and Theory conference held at Johns Hopkins University in spring 2006, for having invited me to present a version of this essay and to Neil Hertz for having generously read it earlier in its life cycle. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0002$10.00. All rights reserved.

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can know a writer’s contribution in advance of having read his or her work and to think we can rely on criticism or intellectual history to single out the essential ideas and use a description approaching a mere name to designate importance. The death of a writer can seem to open a moment for producing a columbarium the width of a newspaper column. The life review aims to size up what his or her thinking really amounted to, and the New York Times obituary took that as its mission. It suggested that thoughts and the thinkers who think them are only as good as they look at this moment to a person or persons charged with impersonating an opinion poll and for whom there is a predictable story of popularity and obsolescence. Thoughts, on this account, become dated in the way that cars do—or perhaps more corrosively dated, since material objects like cars come to inherit old affections when fashion cycles pick them up and cherish them all the more for being, in their retro form, newly old. In the intellectual history of the newspaper obituary, by contrast, the time of thought is said to march on in a Darwinian progress that suggests that we will never have occasion to esteem any writer’s work any more than (some) popular opinion did immediately after their deaths. In this triumphalist account of how death seems to confirm the judgment that a writer had already slipped from an earlier, doubtless misplaced and exaggerated, eminence, the obituary confidently suggests that we’re working through the list of what we need to feel obliged to try to know. Indeed, the newspaper obituary—as if in reaction to the consciousness of mortality prompted by any death—is often written as if we had scarcely any time to work. And, for readers who have so little time, the obituary writers proceed as if they were choosing materials that will accompany them on trips to desert islands or distant planets and that therefore must meet very severe weight limits. If you could only have one or three or ten books, ought any of the work of the deceased be commended to you? The inscriptions on tombs may speak only of good people; newspaper obituaries, on the other hand, do not so much assume the affectionate view as try to assess whether those outliving an individual ought to attend the life’s work at all. But trying to explain the value one attaches to a writer’s work can be so F r a n c e s F e r g u s o n is Mary Elizabeth Garrett Professor in Arts and Sciences and professor and director of graduate studies in English at Johns Hopkins University. She is author of Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuality (1992), and Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (2004). She is currently working on a study of education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a discussion of recent accounts of reading.

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daunting as to almost explain the pleasures of detraction. For few books command our engagement with them in ways that we can recall with clarity and temporal specificity (in the ways in which people recall hearing that John Kennedy had just been shot or that the twin towers of the World Trade Center had collapsed). In fact, our ways of enacting our admiration for a book we’ve found particularly engaging usually involve our reading it again—and dissolving our sense of the exact date of our first encounter with it and, certainly, our sense of the importance of that exact date. November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001 are distinct and isolable dates. When I try to remember when I first read Of Grammatology or Margins of Philosophy or Glas, by contrast, I can only summon up a picture of a general part of my life, one that I hazily conjecture from memories of reading at a certain desk or with a particular concern. Moreover, rehearsing the chronology of the appearance of Derrida’s works doesn’t entirely resolve my sense of the difficulty of tracing a line that will enable me to localize their impact. I am not certain that I can reliably divide up Derrida’s career and speak authoritatively of its different eras. In part, my sense of the difficulty of distinguishing the various phases of his writing stems from what might seem insignificant—that I remember or believe myself to remember having heard Derrida lecture on topics on which he published decades later. It may be that I have simply failed to order his texts properly—that I have failed to follow the proper bibliographical protocols and make sure that I am identifying not just the order of publication but the order of composition. It may be that I have failed to observe the order of time that makes textual editors insist upon the primacy of an author’s earliest version, the finality of the latest, most fully corrected version (as the majority of textual editors do), or a combination of the two.1 I should begin by noting a strange feature of Derrida’s career—that identifying the periods of Derrida’s writing has seemed a readily available option from a very early point. In fact, with the publication of Glas, Richard Rorty began describing Derrida’s writing as falling into two distinct periods. For Rorty, “Derrida’s work divides into an earlier, more professorial period and a later period in which his writings become more eccentric, personal, and original.”2 In that earlier period, Rorty sees Derrida as having participated in a more public project; in the later, he—like many others—sees Derrida as having turned away from philosophy and toward literature, as having written as a writer rather than as a philosopher. 1. See Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (Evanston, Ill., 1984). 2. Quoted in Rodolphe Gasche´, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 3.


Rodolphe Gasche´ has eloquently responded to the central thrust of Rorty’s remarks and had earlier, in The Tain in the Mirror, argued against the widespread tendency in American scholarly circles to see Derrida as contributing particularly to literary studies and having little influence on contemporary philosophical debates.3 Rorty, as Gasche´ observes, sees the early Derrida as in search of “‘the mysterious transcendental “conditions of possibility” dreamed up by Kant’” and getting entangled in “‘the thoroughly deceptive question’” of such transcendental notions.4 And Rorty treats the later Derrida as avoiding such deceptive questions by becoming almost altogether “original,” which Gasche´ finds an equally problematic reaction because it makes originality look as though it were very nearly a private language. My guess is that Rorty saw Derrida’s “early” work in Of Grammatology as an example of professional philosophy because he recognized his own early work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in such terms.5 Discovering the history of the advent of truth was, for both, a dubious game, but Rorty’s book could certainly be seen to be clinging to the sense of the importance of historical unfolding, and Derrida’s could imaginably be. While Derrida was less strictly chronological than Rorty in making his arguments against the tradition of Western metaphysics (almost treating Plato, Rousseau, and Le´vi-Strauss as contemporaries), both men’s critiques were directed not simply at particular positions but at positions that had earned a place in the timetables of philosophical history. “Plato said,” and then “Aristotle argued.” While Of Grammatology looked anything but professorial to many professors in the 1970s, Rorty was, in his remark about Derrida’s “professorial” mode, I suspect, recognizing the assimilability of that book to the historical framework of philosophy. (“Idealism began . . .” on through “Deconstruction began. . . .”) Without either accepting or rejecting Rorty’s particular characterizations of what marks the early and the late Derrida and distinguishes one from the other, we can suggest that a historical framework or scaffold that he does not mention is very much in play. The division of individual careers into their “early” and “late” phases is, perhaps, the surest sign of canonization. It involves, on the one hand, having one’s name inserted into the historically unfolding list of authors-to-beread. And, moreover, it involves the insertion of a name as the insertion of more than just one name—the early Jacques Derrida, the late Jacques Derrida. To be seen to make a difference to the historical tradition, on such an 3. See Gasche´, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). 4. Gasche´, Inventions of Difference, p. 4. 5. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J., 1979).

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account, enables one to be seen to make a difference to oneself—to contrast oneself not just with Plato or Rousseau but also to be contrasted with oneself. Sometimes the writer in question cooperates with that elaborated framework in arguing strenuously with her or his own previous position. The Rousseau who was content to argue with Locke or Hume addresses himself under different names; the later Wittgenstein criticizes the position the early Wittgenstein had laid out. Moreover, as we shall have occasion to see with Le´vi-Strauss’s account of his guilt later on, the autobiographical impulse to self-criticism and the scholarly commentary on it act as intensifiers, lending the later view an ever greater sense of urgency in the light of all that it had to overcome. What I have been describing is the mergers-and-acquisitions aspect of intellectual life in an Enlightenment format. In one respect, it is a token of the self-division of consciousness that made the autobiography or confession a readily available popular form to parallel the philosophy of reflection. (Think of the prominence of the dialogic form in Rousseau’s prefaces and its sequelae in Browning’s dramatic monologues-in-the-presence-of-muteauditors and in Freud’s having populated the fields of personality with ego, id, and the superego.) In this mode, I can get more from myself in talking with, and debating with, myself. We might see this merely as the mode of self-reflection. But Derrida, as Gasche´ has observed at length, recognized the substantial limits to just such projects of self-reflection. From another vantage, we can see the triumph of a regimenting scholarly practice that produces a self-multiplying, self-conversant account of authorship and also, in an extension of such a practice, continually develops canons that will enable individuals to speak to their worthy predecessors. (“You can see what she/he means if you know what she/he is in conversation with.”) And, of course, the Freudian account of the constantly self-partitioning and selfassembling psyche brings this movement to a state of exquisite perfection. Although there may be persons with multiple personalities and epidemics in which the diagnoses of multiples multiply exponentially, the Freudian account so continually worries about whether one said something in one’s own voice or another’s that we can see that the diagnosis of multiple personalities looks more like psychoanalysis’s self-reflection than like a judgment made, as it were, empirically. I shall have more to say about questions of individual identity and Derrida’s concern with such issues later, but for now suffice it to say that Derrida mounted the most probing challenge to the model of linear chronological ordering and the phased and leveraged account of intellectual careers that I know. The Rousseau whom he focused on in Of Grammatology and whom he identified—with Nietzsche—in his Memoires for Paul de Man as having


obsessed him from his adolescence virtually invented the problem—as both a problem and a solution.6 For although there had been ways of observing decorum for many centuries and writing in the high, middle, or low styles, and although there had been many efforts to produce books that would be particularly suited to young readers, Rousseau had in his E´mile laid out an order of life—speaking, hearing, reading, and writing—that would linearize human life to an extraordinary degree. In making such an assertion, I don’t mean that Rousseau invented aging or that he was the first to notice that there are seasons to a person’s life or that perceptions of differences between the young and the old hadn’t been available before he wrote. Rather, I want to highlight the significance of the aspect of Rousseau’s writing that has been most seriously flattered by imitators—his insistent parceling and sequencing of the world’s appearance to a child. For if Rousseau argued that E´mile shouldn’t learn to read before the age of twelve (because he might think that a fable like the one in which Aesop features a fox and a crow is about the pleasures of cheese rather than the dangers of being flattered), Rousseau continually wrote as if (or, at least, was interpreted as if) the problems of human engagement with the world were responsive to orderly management. The possibility of hearing, speaking, acting, and understandingmight be given a timetable. Encounter the idea of property at this age. Be introduced to the notion of death at that. Create readers for various age groups. The Rousseauvian model as it has repeatedly been understood and imitatively applied has yielded the line—what Derrida calls, in Of Grammatology, the “enigmatic model of the line”—of which we might say that the most enigmatic feature is our conviction of its efficacy. Derrida goes on, in that same passage in Of Grammatology, to discuss how the “possibility [of the line] has been structurally bound up with that of economy, of technics and of ideology. This solidarity appears in the process of thesaurization, capitalization, sedentarization, hierarchization, of the formation of ideology by the class that writes or rather commands the scribes.”7 You will live 6. See Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967); trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, under the title Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), p. 145. Derrida speaks of having been startled to realize, on first meeting Paul de Man, that de Man shared his interest in Rousseau and Nietzsche: Rousseau-and-Nietzsche, then, and I said to myself that, curiously, this couple had always haunted me, me too, and well before I was in a position to refer to them in published works. Barely adolescent (here it comes, we are approaching the genre of “memoirs,” in its worst form), I read them together and I confided my despair to a kind of diary: how was it possible for me to reconcile these two admirations and these two identifications since the one spoke so ill of the other? [Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York, 1986), p. 128] 7. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 86.

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your life in series and show that the early Derrida has progressed by demonstrating his difference from that earlier self. As an observation about popular culture, Derrida’s account provides as good an explanation as we have for the popularity of advice books that don’t so much give instruction as enable readers to follow a line. Diet books might never be able to win approval from the FDA because their diets don’t work reliably. We could gloss their phenomenal success (even with people who have been disappointed with other diet books) as a matter of hope springing eternal, but Derrida enables us to advance a more plausible suggestion: their readers are enchanted by the linearity of the line and the cool seductiveness of its crooning: “Do this and then that and then that and then . . . .” When we so clearly don’t worry about producing results, when we exempt the diet plans from the effective causal schemes that we think we’re pursuing by their means, it is hard not to begin to think that we must be enchanted by the line. Derrida, early and late, insisted that we think about the line and the sequence. And if I continually think when I’m reading late Derrida that I’m recalling passages from a public lecture I heard him give twenty years earlier, I think that he, most importantly, authored such a thought. As he wrote of writing and reading—the stuff of literary studies—as a place of genuine philosophical analysis, he was challenging the very features of literary studies that had enabled it to become an academic discipline and a university subject in the past century. Literary studies in English, for example, had become literary studies by developing national literary canons that could be unfolded chronologically; they had produced a line that led from AngloSaxon to Chaucer to Shakespeare to . . . Virginia Woolf or Robert Lowell. And in so doing literary studies had produced a lineage like the one that Robert Smithson described in “Some Void Thoughts on Museums”: “only to end in that massive deception ‘the art history of the recent past.’”8 In the various different institutions and institutionalizations of art—and philosophy—we can see the pressure for the next new object or artist or thinker, situated in relation to (in contrast to, by extension of) the previous object or artist or thinker, now no longer obsolete but justified and revivified by having become a precursor to the current novelty. The canons and canon making that have increasingly preoccupied the study of literature (since the advent of modern literary history in the work of Joseph Warton or Sainte-Beuve) give us lines that are not merely descriptive—Chaucer comes before Shakespeare in time—but also prescriptive. The very process of drawing them and tracing them out solicits us to find the next poet, the next novelist. It tells us what to do, what we should 8. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, 1996), p. 42.


do next. Even without having recourse to Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the interpenetration of social privilege into all our aesthetic judgments, the development of a canon and the impulse to canon making renders our aesthetic judgment a deeply practical and instrumentalized activity, and this holds true even if we imagine that the making of a canon has no consequences outside itself.9 What Derrida brought to literature was an emphasis on reading, which in his account was something more than simply attending to a text. For, as I’ve been suggesting in my discussion of Derrida’s noncanonizing approach to the texts with which he engaged, he continually read in such a way as to offer up descriptions in which we could see the prescriptions in them. Their laws of genre or literary history or imagery or rhythm or spelling thus would not look merely like examples or instances of genre or literary history or imagery or rhythm that affirmed the larger categories and created the sense that these general categories were themselves empirically available. Scoffers have described Derrida’s influence as having established new prescriptions and having simply developed a new toolkit with which his followers might develop predictable new readings. But his position was, I think, more genuinely beyond hermeneutics than such an understanding would suggest. For literature in particular his position was notably radical. Scholars like Jerome McGann and Franco Moretti have treated it as a virtual commonplace that literary scholars took scriptural commentary as their model and have argued that they are, thus, members of the clerisy, not so much abandoning religious thinking as applying it to an apparently secular object.10 In McGann’s and Moretti’s views, one can reliably point to a history that sweeps over individuals like a warm wave, changing the individuals most decisively when those individuals think of themselves as most definitively changing their objects of concern. But what now strikes me most forcibly about Derrida’s interest in literary texts—and in texts of all kinds—is his repudiation of both ideology and the critique of ideology on the strongest but least apparent grounds. Even before literary practitioners developed national and international canons for study and made literary studies serious, even before the critique of ideology suggested how commentators were changed by the ways they operated with 9. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 5, 485–500. 10. See Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, 1983), pp. 1–7, in which McGann speaks of a continuity between the commentary on religion and on secular culture, and Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1, n.s. (Jan.–Feb. 2000): 57, in which Moretti characterizes close reading as “a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously.”

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the objects of their observation, literary study presented a particularly engaging field for considering the practice of remarking (finding the remarkable) and marking (underlining or noting). For literary study has, before all else, foregrounded the process of pointing: “Look at line 22,” “as we learn from the plot development in chapter 32,” “see how the rhymes work in the octave.” The study of belles lettres in the eighteenth century revolved around just such observations, and they remain familiar to us still. Like eighteenth-century commentators, we still “mark the beauties”; like Richardson’s Lovelace or Laurence Sterne, we still do the equivalent of drawing a pointing finger when we read poems and books and underline the parts that seem to us important. Every anthology is, at bottom, a pointing finger; every quotation, a way of suggesting that a text is more meaningful, more realized, more itself in some words and passages than in others. Two observations follow from our appreciating the importance of the ways we point in reading texts. First, it becomes clear that Barthes broached the question of the importance of pointing in his observations about the place of historical personages and historical actuality in S/Z.11 There he observed that historical personages may appear at a party given by the fictitious characters that a writer has created and that those actual historical personages will not so much vouch for the feeling of the reality of the fiction as enhance the reality of the fiction by retreating into relative insignificance and looking less substantial than the shadows they now serve. It would be easy enough to understand Barthes’s remarks as supporting a skepticism that has regularly been associated with literary production. (Think of the classic formulation of this view in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the actual players seem unreal and insubstantial.) Yet Barthes’s remarks enable us to begin to understand that the conditions of fictional production themselves really do support Derrida’s observation that nothing divides the text and the world. Both text and world are similarly touched by the distributions of emphasis that come from our inability to register all that we perceive and by the constructive devices we develop to endorse or overcome that partiality. There is nothing outside the text not simply because context is illimitable but also, and more importantly, because the entire process of reading is one of distributing substantiality within texts. Even if literary texts aimed to refer to actual persons, objects, and settings in the world, reading would block that process by getting us to focus on the question of when a text really means what it says, when it is more in earnest (even in its irony) and when it is “merely” talking. Second, the possibility of complete interpretation—even when a critic 11. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1974), pp. 80–83.


like Barthes is attending as closely as he does in S/Z to a story like “Sarrasine”—becomes unimaginable on this view because reading does not acknowledge the reality of the material being of the text any more than it acknowledges immaterial ideas in connection with it. Reading distributes emphases; it redistributes emphases; and it alters their relative weight. Thus, while many readers may emphasize certain features of a text over many readings, texts are continually open to re-marking—as we all know from having produced stratified underlinings that enable us to see that we didn’t always see the significance of this word or that in each phase of our reading. What Derrida helped us to see was the significance and the limitations of that process of pointing. The distinctive feature of Derridean accounts of reading was that he was not particularly interested in arguing about what texts meant. Hermeneutic criticism continually sees itself as trying to produce better and better evidence of the meaning of a text, exactly as it should do if the point of textual study is to participate in and do honor to the authority of the textual original. Yet, from Derrida’s standpoint, a crucial problem entered for hermeneutic criticism, which was that the ways of describing how one can point and make a point in a text split into two different phenomenologicalcamps. Phenomenological intentionalism, that is, makes it seem as if one could really know what a text meant if one accepted the right pointing. One need only decide whether the text really became an intentional object when the author intended it or when a reader intended it. (Hence the claims on behalf of the primacy of authorial intention, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, on behalf of the intentionality of use that Husserl identified in speaking of how a user’s intention may convert a rock into a seat without any further material working, as Paul de Man observed in “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism.”)12 What Derrida recognized better than anyone else I know is that phenomenological criticism only works by halves. It sees the real text as appearing in the pointing that the author does or in the pointing that readers do, and it becomes irresolute as soon as it tries to accommodate more than one (pointing) hand. Even the apparently fierce opposition to paraphrase (even Archibald Macleish’s insistence that the poem must not mean but be) may seem to accept no substitutes for the text itself, but in the moment that it quotes this passage rather than that, it has entered into a process of requiring that a text be a self-distilling object— that it yield up the parts of itself that make it what it really is, that it identify its essence for us. 12. See Paul de Man, “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, 1983), pp. 25–26.

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The notion of nonreferentiality in literature was one attempt to talk about how the problem of textual essence—its being most itself here, now— could not be resolved into a question of its finding its emphases in pointing to names or descriptions drawn from actuality. But the problem lingered even where there was no effort to adjudicate between rival interpretations or to say that Susie understands Flaubert better than Billy does. For the most important aspect of textuality (and of spoken textuality, as Derrida might say, as well as written textuality) is that we recruit a notion of textual essence every time we do something as simple as noticing even the sort of thing that looks as though it’s just a matter of “internal” evidence. Think, for example, of the kind of analysis that W. K. Wimsatt presented of the importance of rhyme and versification in Pope’s verse. Wimsatt was writing an essay that commented on the way Pope mobilized the acoustic resources of language to make a point about the underscoring that a rhyme might give (“The sound must seem an Echo to the sense”) and the way in which a description of an alexandrine might also be presented as an example of an alexandrine.13 While Pope’s metrical effects might be particularly intense ones, it is easy to see that many kinds of literary and textual analysis regularly proceed by describing significance as rendered by the echo and support of elements obliquely related. Think, for example, of the ways in which imagery is usually seen to support character or plot, constantly marking Rosamond Vincy with ambivalent flowers or the pavers of A Tale of Two Cities with blood. While we often speak of such echoes and conjunctions as epitomes of texts, it was Derrida’s contribution not just to have identified more of the same (adding more interlinguistic puns to our lexicons, making us think about both letters and spaces, lines and their margins). He also called attention to the very process by which close reading earned its stripes. He himself read closely, of course, but he also was a close student of reading— alert enough to the instability of the process of reading so that the question of what it is to read could come to the fore. Textbooks might not encourage one to read Genet with Hegel, as he did in Glas. Museum catalogues might lead one, as Philip Fisher has observed, along chronologies that feature the juvenilia as part of a story of the unfolding triumphalism of careers of accomplished artistry;14 they might not encourage one to pay any attention 13. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in Alexander Pope: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford, 1993), l. 365, p. 29. Wimsatt writes that “stylistic parallels or forms of meaning . . . seem to come fairly to the aid of logic; they are part of the normal framework of prose” (W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry [Lexington, Ky., 1954], p. 154). 14. See Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York, 1991).


to the frames of paintings, as Derrida did in The Truth in Painting. Literary analyses might explain the logic of imagery but not encourage one to think about the ways in which images ceased to be supports to other elements of a text (or accounts of its meaning) and became obsessional figures in their own rights. Scholars for years have noted how the fact of a text’s having been written for a patron or a king, its having been written to skirt censorship regulations, and its desire to speak to the spirit of its age obscure the realest meaning of that text and lead us on a search to uncover it in its unwarped form. What Derrida did for literary analysis was to enable us to recognize that texts are self-warping, that our very notion of what a text is involves us in acting as if it were always in the business of delivering its essence to us, its readers. Now it may seem that I am using Derrida to return a discussion of literature and textualism to familiar cries that we should either recognize the inevitability of our own subjective activity or abjure the effort to do anything like paraphrasing that would compromise the objective being of a text. Yet I should like to distinguish the insight that I see in Derrida’s work from both of these positions because it seems to me that, even as Derrida criticized the notion of a writing that would be able to deliver itself as a pure communication of knowledge, he discussed writing in general and literature in particular as a way of capturing a philosophical debate about the problems introduced by our very efforts to organize our thought. For what I think Derrida recognized about literature is that we treat it as most perfectly itself when it seems to be what it names (as in Pope’s description of the alexandrine).15 He brought to the fore a concern with the moments in which we take a particular piece of writing to be what it means, to mean what it is, and to have presented itself as a heroic act of self-identification—to have named itself. In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida famously presented a critique of structuralism that called attention to the ways in which “structure—or rather the structurality of structure— . . . has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.”16 That neutralization, he argued, occurred most particularly when the compelling notion that had dictated recourse to the term structure—the desire to avoid claiming that one has arrived at truth as such—yielded itself up in the face 15. Neil Hertz has suggested to me that this description asks to be connected with Derrida’s notion of en abıˆme. 16. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1975), p. 247; hereafter abbreviated “SSP.”

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of a supposedly felt need to act or speak. While Le´vi-Strauss did not want to lay claim to the truthfulness of the distinction between nature and culture, for instance, he wanted to argue that it could be put to use. For Derrida, then, the most notable methodological gesture in Le´vi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind was the one in which Le´vi-Strauss imagined that he could “preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes” (“SSP,” p. 255). That is, Le´vi-Strauss thought that he could point to the arbitrary character of the elements he was contrasting, could say that each element was merely lent force by its relation to an opposing term, and could then describe “bricolage” as the process of using “‘the means at hand’” (“SSP,” p. 255). (Engineering, by contrast, would elaborate its rules from the outset and apply them.) Derrida, quoting Gerard Genette’s statement that Le´vi-Strauss’s “analysis of bricolage could ‘be applied almost word for word’ to criticism, and especially to ‘literary criticism’” (“SSP,” p. 255), went on to make two crucial and linked observations. First, he said, “if one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur” (“SSP,” p. 255). Second, the idea of the engineer that Le´vi-Strauss opposes to that of the bricoleur involves the myth of someone who can “construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon” (“SSP,” p. 256), who can, in other words, depart from the world of natural languages and operate solely in the realm of artificial experience. Derrida does not—and has no need to—conduct his arguments with reference to Hume and Bentham, but the two of them perhaps illustrate most forcibly the ways in which claims on behalf of experience relied on method as a shield against otherwise intransigent positions advanced in the name of a deity, my deity, the deity who loves me best and communicates with me rather than others. Indeed, both Hume and Bentham saw themselves as conducting campaigns against strong claims for truths outside of experience precisely because they saw gods and theism not as adding to experience but as gutting it. Hence, they resorted to method to represent experience, to give it what they saw as its proper primacy over extraexperiential statements. Hence, Hume sought to develop psychological accounts and Bentham concrete systems that would produce evaluations so that they could make even psychology and evaluations more nearly objects of experience.17 Hume described emotions, and Bentham tried to talk with 17. The sort of interest that Hume brought to the project of generalizing about the workings of various emotions is related to the rising importance of the novel (and particularly to the ways in which it depicts our apprehension of other people’s thoughts as part of our experience, most obviously in free indirect style). The sort of interest that Bentham brought to the project of


precision about the relative values of individual performances and choices. In both cases, the focus on making perceptible usually imperceptible (and almost always unrepeatable) experiences involved casting method as protection against extraexperiential belief (the claim to religious revelation). Unlike Stanley Fish, much of whose recent work has been devoted to explaining the importance of belief (the beliefs that enable evangelical Christians to be a political force because they know what they believe),18 Derrida’s concerns were less with where one ended up (for instance, believing, out of the force of emotional necessity, in the incredible and thus insisting on pragmatism as an unmethodical method) than with the difficulties of all of our ways of imagining experience as something that could be pointed to. For, as is well known, dissemination for him did not particularly concern the production-distribution-consumption circuit of sociological and economic studies. Rather, he treated texts as occasions in which one had to recognize a difficulty about knowing when one began and ended them, in which one thought of them as providing an experience of reading that could be pointed to. Thus, as he said in Dissemination, the danger of a preface was that it might seem to install an account of what the text is in advance of its having been constituted, that it might seem to make it all too easy to point by quoting to the ici of the text: Don’t you see, there it says what it will say, what it will be (and already is)?19 Texts have (as in Kant’s account of the professions of the book in The Conflict of the Faculties) often been used to guide practice (to serve as the method for choices that one would otherwise not know how to make).20 Doctors, lawyers, divines (in Kant’s account) need not have experience but can always point to their guiding rules, to their texts and their techniques for generating experience when one fails to be able to point to experience that one already has. Thus, while Derrida had written in “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing” in The Truth in Painting of the referential pointing that Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger had participated in when they named the owner of the shoes in Van Gogh’s famous painting, the target of his critique of pointing—the here, the now—involved contesting both the claim that one could actually point to one’s experience in the world of natural language and the claim that one, failing to point to one’s actual expemaking value judgments themselves (temporarily) objective and perceptible is related to the rising importance of games in Western societies. 18. See Stanley Fish, “Mission Impossible: Settling the Just Bounds between Church and State,” Columbia Law Review 97 (Dec. 1997): 2292. 19. See Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1983), pp. 9–13. 20. See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln, Nebr., 1979). Perhaps the most interesting feature of Kant’s text, from the standpoint of Derrida’s concerns, is the importance that Kant cedes to method as such for the professions.

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rience, could find a method that would enable one to do so in an artificial language, a set of generative rules.21 Derrida’s continuing preoccupation with the question of names and naming revolves around this set of conjoined views. In Of Grammatology Derrida spoke of Le´vi-Strauss’s having written of names in The Savage Mind that they were not actually individual or proper names at all but marked by classification. And he also noted that Le´vi-Strauss had already in Tristes Tropiques described himself as suddenly being able to understand the proper names of the Nambikwara perfectly, as the epochal crisis of his presence introduced both writing (with what Le´vi-Strauss saw as its hierarchy-inducing force) and the possibility of personal treachery as the young girls, one by one, turned each other in to Le´vi-Strauss, revealing each others’ names when those names were (supposedly) to be kept secret.22 Derrida is everywhere in his discussion alert to the improbability of the idea that one can locate the advent of the epoch of writing and to the implausibility of imagining that what Le´vi-Strauss describes as the chief ’s imitation of his writing marks the beginning of the operations of power in Nambikwara society. And his skepticism appears most forcibly in his treatment of Le´viStrauss’s account of naming. For Le´vi-Strauss depicts the young girls as pointing their fingers at one another—pointing each other out and turning each other in—as if for crimes. Le´vi-Strauss accepts, with guilt, the information that they impart as they give up one another’s names and then the names of the adults; he insists that his presence has had a corrupting influence on them, that it has set them against one another and made them eager for his approval. Derrida captures the way Le´vi-Strauss’s elaborate confession of guilt (“I introduced the violence of writing to their society”)23 overcomes the improbability of his claim to a sudden ability to understand the situation and every name in it without hesitation or doubt. Le´vi-Strauss’s insistence on the reliability of his empirical observations was, as Derrida saw, everywhere bound up with his consciousness of his guilt, his systematic implication in the morals as well as the manners of his interlocutors. When in graduate school I first read Of Grammatology and de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Blindness,” I found Derrida’s account of Le´vi-Strauss so 21. See Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian MacLeod (Chicago, 1987), pp. 255–382. The title of the section in which this discussion appears is “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [Pointure].” 22. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 103–15. See also Claude Le´vi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. pub. (Chicago, 1966), pp. 191–216, hereafter abbreviated S; and Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (1974; New York, 1990), pp. 296–300. 23. I am paraphrasing Le´vi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, pp. 196–200, in relation to Derrida’s discussion of how “the anthropologist will prove them [the Nambikwara] innocent by showing himself as the true and only culprit” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 112).


completely persuasive that I failed to see its force. Because, that is, I thought that Derrida had found a place for Le´vi-Strauss, had pointed him and his error out, I failed to understand the complexity and significance of his analysis. For what it took me years to come to know is that in The Savage Mind Le´vi-Strauss had particularly criticized Bertrand Russell’s account of naming, in which Russell had analyzed what he called “knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.”24 Knowledge by description might involve iterating properties of objects so that even someone who hadn’t encountered a particular object would be able to identify it. (“So that’s what a runcible spoon is.”) But the recognition of someone under a proper name, Russell thought, could only be explained by pointing. As Le´vi-Strauss puts it, Russell, “in believing that he had discovered the logical model of proper names in demonstrative pronouns” (such as this and that), essentially suggested that “the act of naming belongs to a continuum in which there is an imperceptible passage from the act of signifying to that of pointing” (S, p. 215). Now, Le´vi-Strauss’s quarrel, it should be said, was less with Russell’s notion of a “passage from the act of signifying to the act of pointing” than with the notion of its imperceptibility. Indeed, Le´vi-Strauss gave proper names and their indexicality pride of place and saw them as establishing boundary lines between perceptible and imperceptible individuality. On the one hand “to say that a name is perceived as a proper name is to say that it is assigned to a level beyond which no classification is requisite, not absolutely but within a determinate cultural system” (S, p. 215). Proper names thus do not merely, as Le´vi-Strauss says, “remain on the margin of classification” (S, p. 215). They also mark the different thresholds of discourse; in the discontinuous passage to proper names, “each culture fixes its thresholds differently,” with “the natural sciences” putting “theirs on the level of species, varieties or subvarieties as the case may be” (S, p. 215). That is, we distinguish Rosa centifolia as a species and don’t bother to name each and every example (every rosebush or every rose on each bush); at the same time we recognize that “social life effects a strange transformation in this system, for it encourages each [human] biological individual to develop a personality”—to be what Le´vi-Strauss calls “‘a mono-individual’” (S, p. 214). Now the interesting feature of Le´vi-Strauss’s account is that he thinks that the awarding of proper names bespeaks differences in the way we treat human individuals and botanical individuals but that he doesn’t imagine 24. See Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (London, 1961), pp. 217–24.

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that proper names tell us about persons. Indeed, for Le´vi-Strauss the proper name does not individuate in relation to persons. It does not pick out this John or that Jane, my John or your Jane. (Hence, Le´vi-Strauss is unembarrassed by the difficulty that Russell sees in relying on purely descriptive accounts of proper names—that there may well be many persons matching the description of the John who has brown hair and brown eyes and is exactly six feet tall or the Jane who has grey hair and green eyes and is five feet six inches tall.) In other words, Le´vi-Strauss’s proper name does not individuate but simply marks the conditions of identifying individuation.Thus, the proper name indicates the moment in which a society gives itself away, so to speak—revealing its classificatory practices and the internal boundaries they establish. In the logic of the Le´vi-Straussian account, a name only operates as part of a classification. It looks as though it is available for use because it is describable in terms of a classification that no one controls but everyone honors (however unconsciously). In that, the Le´vi-Straussian name looks remarkably like the Althusserian name—which may be indeterminate in itself (you) but is always determined by its responsiveness to the system of naming.25 No wonder then that Derrida, in an essay originally published under the title Post-Scriptum in 1992 and republished under the title Sauf le nom, concluded with a meditation in which he talks about his reading and connects reading and naming: To give a name . . . . One can have doubts about it from the moment when the name not only is nothing, in any case is not the “thing” that it names, not the “nameable” or the renewed, but also risks to bind, to enslave or to engage the other, to link the called, to call him/her to respond even before any decision or any deliberation, even before any freedom. An assigned passion, a prescribed alliance as much as a promise.26 Derrida writes these words just before going on to talk about how he has brought with him a partial copy of Angelus Silesius’s Cherubinic Wanderer to “this family place, in order to watch over a mother who is slowly leaving us and no longer knows how to name” (ON, p. 85). Nuns and mothers may, as Yeats says, worship idols—most palpably when they name the objects of their worship. For Derrida, the mother who no longer knows how to name and a text (“and only extracts at that” [ON, p. 85]) that cannot readily be glossed become testimony to the elusiveness of both names and the texts 25. See Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), pp. 174–75. 26. Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and MacLeod, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif., 1993), p. 84; hereafter abbreviated ON.


that would bear them. Silesius’s text—“forever elliptical” and cherished “almost secretly, because of sentences I [Derrida] have not cited today”—saves the name by withholding the name—“always,” Derrida says, “saying too much or too little” (ON, p. 85). Texts, that is, neither call our names nor enable us to speak in anyone’s name. Derrida made it possible to recognize this as an accomplishment and to embrace it (not as the sad but rather) as the noble incompetence of human speech.

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“Alloˆ? Alloˆ?” Stephen Melville One is never done with an analysis of the variations, and keys touched upon, in playing this hymn to touch, to tactful fingering, which is to say to con-tact as interrupted contact. —Jacques Derrida, On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy

“The late Derrida” is a phrase deeply receptive to certain widely held intuitions about the shape and condition of modern philosophy. In particular, it seems to hold before us the prospect of mapping Derrida’s career in terms that have become familiar from both Heidegger and Wittgenstein— that is, on the model of an early moment followed by a later moment that is distinguished by some sort of notable rupture or turn. Derrida flirts briefly with something of this sort fairly early on when he remarks, in Spurs, that the work of several of his students, including Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, suggests the possibility of an affirmative turn within deconstruction, but the figure has no staying power with him (what he sees those followers doing does stay with him).1 Surely one reason the figure of a turn drops away is that the very word deconstruction already meant to do away with the opposition of destruction and retrieve that plays such an active role in the thought of the Heideggerian Kehre. Our feeling for a kind of justice or necessity to such a turn in the modern writing of philosophy connects up, not always clearly, with a broader sense of a belatedness constitutive of modernity. We find one highly general version of this in, for example, Gadamer’s way of opposing tradition to a modern situation that both assumes the brokenness of that continuity, thus necessitating its hermeneutic knitting up, and is ultimately falsified by the very possibility of such knitting up—modernity amounting simply to tradition’s condition of explicit visibility. That historical consciousness is itself “only something superimposed upon continuing tradition” and that “the 1. See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, 1979), p. 37. The first version of the text dates to 1972, and the final version is dated 1973. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–0007$10.00. All rights reserved.

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tradition reaching us speaks into the present and must be understood in this mediation—indeed, as this mediation” simply means that the wound hermeneutics seems to heal merely appeared to be a wound.2 Derrida’s early writings repeatedly set out from some sense of break related to the one Gadamer so uneasily draws upon; the picture Derrida most frequently sets in place is broadly Heideggerian, claiming the closure of a history of metaphysics and asserting the necessity of a thought that would succeed upon it. But he introduces this picture only to make trouble for it; the event in question is never quite an event, the rupture assumed always also a redoubling, he says in his first address to a U.S. audience. At another place he says the field in question is better thought as one in which repression is active than one from which something has been excluded or in which it has been simply forgotten (so it is, like modernism in its posting, a letter remaining to be read).3 Taken directly as rupture, modernity would evidently be deeply bound up with mourning, our age permanently wearing “the symbol of perpetual mourning even upon its thin black shoulders.”4 It is presumably this general fact that underlies one of Derrida’s more notable literary achievements: the development of the eulogy as a philosophical genre. And yet Derrida’s eulogies themselves testify perhaps above all to a certain refusal of mourning or at least of a certain understanding of mourning. In his Adieu to Emmanuel Le´vinas he writes,

2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, 1989), pp. 306, 328. Nancy puts this same point: “Hermeneutics requires—very profoundly, very obscurely perhaps—that the ‘participation in meaning’ is unaware of the absolute interruption [ne connaisse pas d’interruption absolue]. On account of this profound continuity, hermeneutics represents the process of a historicity that is valued both as suspension and as revival of the continuity” (Jean-Luc Nancy, “Sharing Voices,” in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle Ormiston and Alan Schrift [Albany, N.Y., 1990], p. 214). These formulations serve to introduce an extraordinarily careful and lucid measuring of the gap between Gadamer and Heidegger. 3. See, for example, the opening pages of “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 196–231. See also Jean-François Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 24–35. 4. Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (Oxford, 1965), p. 118.

S t e p h e n M e l v i l l e is professor of history of art at Ohio State University. He is the author of Philosophy beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (1986) and Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (1996) and is currently completing a set of essays on Hegel and recent art. His email address is [email protected]

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Stephen Melville / “Alloˆ? Alloˆ?”

Death: not, first of all, annihilation, non-being, or nothingness, but a certain experience for the survivor of the “without-response.” Already Totality and Infinity called into question the traditional “philosophical and religious” interpretation of death as either “a passage to nothingness” or “a passage to some other existence.” It is the murderer who would like to identify death with nothingness. . . . Today, I draw from all this that our infinite sadness must shy away from everything in mourning that would turn toward nothingness, that is, toward what still, even potentially, would link guilt to murder. Levinas indeed speaks of the survivor’s guilt, but it is a guilt without fault and without debt; it is, in truth, an entrusted responsibility.5 Death’s interruption recalls us to the infinite interruption that is the condition of the other’s presence, and so the element or medium of eulogy is above all friendship exposed to recollection. Evidently I find much to mistrust in the phrase “the late Derrida,” both in the particular invitations it seems to proffer and in the configuration in which it seems to hold them toward us. Against that configuration, I’m tempted to go with a much more flat-footed figure—that Derrida is, still or again, late to the parties we hold in his name, not yet arrived. Such nonarrival is of course something Derrida never stopped thinking about, an integral part and condition of his writing and his insistence on writing; so too is the figure of the guest or stranger yet to come. This means that he might be late simply because we’ve sent the invitation to an incorrect address or somehow included in that invitation the wrong time or place; when it comes to seem possible to us that our letters have gone astray in this way, we are obliged to suspect our motives may be questionable, our hospitality suspect. It is a commonly remarked oddity of the American reception of Derrida that it unfolds under the heading of theory. This is presumably a complex function of such things as the background role of structuralism, what was and was not (then, but also largely now) receivable as philosophy, and literary study’s already existent aspiration toward something it could call theory. One might imagine that the larger configuration of these things within the university marks a certain aspiration to professionalism that is a deep feature of the age of theory. It is a further and somewhat less frequently remarked oddity that we have felt a need to inflect that rubric with some loosely historical modifier, sometimes calling the web of texts and issues in 5. Derrida, “Adieu,” The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, ed. Brault and Naas (Chicago, 2001), pp. 203–4.


which Derrida figures postmodern theory and sometimes (more often, I imagine) calling it contemporary theory. Both phrases share in the same ambiguities, the adjective there in part simply to date the thing and note its novelty, and in another part to remark a more specific belonging of theory to a particular world and moment—either by virtue of its specific applicability to that world and moment as the privileged objects of such theory or in its specific and historically novel form (postmodern theory does not, as theory, behave the way other, more traditional or merely modern forms of theory do; it does not, for example, have to be true or testable, nor indeed be a theory). It’s in the nature of the beast that you can only take your catachresis as you find it, but the adjective might still be worth some worrying at. “Hegel,” Jean-Luc Nancy writes to open Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, “is the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world,”6 and I take it that we miss something crucial if we think this means the same thing as the sentence “Hegel is the inaugural thinker of the modern world” (indeed I take it to be written more or less directly in face of that more familiar sentence). The difference is that the modern world is a specific world, different from some other world (and Hegel was certainly among the first to see that there was such a world and that it was in need of specific address), whereas the contemporary world names the world in a particular condition—call it contemporaneity—that may well be constitutive of its being a world at all (so what Hegel also saw was that there was a world and that this on its own needed some special account or making out). And this is to say that the difference is that a modern world exists in time while the contemporary world—the world in its contemporaneity—has temporality as one of its dimensions, a medium of its opening at every moment. As Nancy puts it, This world of movement, of transformation, of displacement, and of restlessness, this world that is in principle and structurally outside itself, this world where nature does not subsist but steps out of itself into work and history, this world where the divine does not subsist but exhausts itself beyond its figures—this world moves toward no end or result other than itself . . . . Hegel is the witness of the world’s entry into a history in which it is no longer just a matter of changing form, of replacing one vision and one order by some other vision and some other order, but in which the one and only point—of view and of order—is that of transformation itself. It is thus not a point; it is the passage, the negativity in 6. Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis, 2002), p. 3; hereafter abbreviated H.

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which the cutting edge of sense gets experienced as never before . . . . The restlessness of thought means . . . that, if the thread of history is broken, this happens of itself, because its very continuity is only division and distension. [H, pp. 6–8] Contemporary thus insists that there is no contrast with tradition that is not internal to the world as such—that rupture is the general fact and fabric, continuity its complex effect. Modernity may be “late”; contemporaneity is only ever repeated and exposed. We get a more particular angle on this in Nancy’s imagining of “the first imager”: Let us imagine the unimaginable, the gesture of the first imager. He proceeds neither at random nor according to a project. His hand advances into a void, hollowed out at that very instant, which separates him from himself instead of prolonging his being [son être ⳱ son naıˆtre] in his act. But this separation is the act of his being [or his birth, son être]. Here he is outside of himself [autonomous then, delivered of himself?] even before having been his own self [avoir éte´ a` soi, the “a`,” preposition of contact and limit, as so often all but untranslatable in Nancy] before having been a self . . . . For the first time he touches the wall not as a support, nor as obstacle or something to lean on, but as a place, if one can touch a place. Only as a place in which to let something of interrupted being, of its estrangement, come about. The rock wall makes itself merely spacious: the event of dimension and of the line, of the setting aside and isolation of a zone that is neither a territory of life nor a region of the universe, but a spacing in which to let come—coming from nowhere and turned toward nowhere—all the presence of the world.7 To say of this “first imager” that he “proceeds neither at random nor according to a project” is to say that he does not in fact proceed at all, but will nonetheless in the moment Nancy is attempting to imagine come to see himself as having proceeded; the mark he makes is indistinguishable from the marks he made earlier that were, in their making and like this mark in its making, not made to be the marks they nonetheless are: insistence and invisibility of tradition, origination at every instant (as every instant). The firstness of the first imager—imagination’s penalty paid out against the unimaginable—gets properly undone in “The Vestige of Art”: 7. Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 74–75; trans. mod.; hereafter abbreviated M.


This has been so ever since there has been “art” (regardless of when one chooses to date its birth [naissance; “Renaissance” remains notably unwritten in this sentence], with Lascaux or with the Greeks, or with the detachment, the distinction, in effect, that is called “end of art”). [M, p. 83] The history of art is a history that withdraws at the outset and always from the history or the historicity that is represented as a process or as “progress.” One could say: art is each time radically another art (not only another form, another style, but another “essence” of “art”), according to its “response” to another world, to another polis; but it is at the same time each time all that it is, all art such as in itself finally. [M, p. 87] Translating and commenting, Peggy Kamuf reminds us that we know from Mallarme´ how this sentence ends: “tel qu’en Lui-meˆme enfin l’e´ternite´ le change” (“such as in himself finally eternity changes him,” more often rendered “such as into himself finally eternity changes him”). (Things that turn in themselves do not necessarily thereby turn into themselves; Heidegger liked to tune our ears to this difference.) The poem is one of Mallarme´’s tombs, for Poe, and it ends with a kind of prayer: If our idea carves out no low relief By which to ornament Poe’s astonishing tomb— Calm block fallen here below from an obscure disaster— May this granite at least show forever its limit To the sparse black flights of future blasphemy.8 The poem, it appears, is written “a`” Poe as Poe’s tomb shows a` jamais its limit a` the future’s flights, outside itself even before being a` soi. Poe’s tomb is evidently neither empty nor occupied by his body but exscribed, possessed of what another essay by Nancy addresses as “the weight of thought.”9 Nancy’s broken citation leaves us stranded between art’s birth and death, between its continuous displacement within itself and its chang8. Ste´phane Mallarme´, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley, 1996), p. 71: Si notre ideé avec ne sculpte un bas-relief Dont la tombe de Poe e´blouissante s’orne Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un de´sastre obscur Que ce granit du moins montre a` jamais sa borne Aux noirs vols du Blasphe`me e´pars dans le futur. 9. See Nancy, “The Weight of a Thought,” The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1997), pp. 75–84.

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ing finally into itself, perfect and imperfect, late and present, open and infinitely finished. Tombeau, waterfall. A hermeneutics without lateness, a hermeneutics of the contemporary, barely looks like hermeneutics at all, its play of horizons collapsed into the apparently simpler figure of the chain, every link the world, tangent to itself, a` soi, on its limit, and what we have tended to take as the depth of meaning becomes a fact of surface or exteriority (it is in fact what we have come to call reading).10 The “magnetic chain” Nancy borrows here from Plato figures at once the comparting of voice that is interpretation and the opening and closing of the mouth, the touch and interruption of lips, that is articulation as such, the shape of “our” speaking and “our” community.11 Placing our in quotation marks here might seem to usefully remind us that this is a community of those who have nothing in common—comparted and compearing12—but it runs also the risk of appearing to ironize a community that is in fact ours, voice at once its condition and the means of its acknowledgment. To write on Derrida now might be to write at once out of and toward such community, to write at—a`—the comparting of his voice, right at the partage des voix or the partage des voies that is—in multiple senses—his reading. Here then is a bit of Derrida on the university, late in life and in the midst (that is, between France and California, between philosophy and theory— 10. It’s perhaps useful to recall in this context Althusser’s stringent coupling of rupture and reading (over and against interpretation) and particularly his emphasis on reading out loud. Althusser wanted from this more than he could get, but the insistence on this point remains in many ways exemplary. See, in particular, part 1 of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1970). 11. It’s tempting to say that I’ve learned this way of rendering Nancy’s partage from Eva Hesse’s relief with this title, although for some that will itself need further explanation; see Eva Hesse, ed. Elizabeth Sussman (New Haven, Conn., 2002), p. 191. Compart is the vanished verb that has left the petrified “compartment” sedimented in our language; the OED offers, in part: 1. trans. To divide and share with others. Obs. 1575 FENTON Gold. Epist. (1577) 59 He coulde not comparte wyth hym his clothes. 1605 DANIEL Philotas (1717) 357 And still compart The best Degrees and Honours of the Field, In hope to win his Love. 2. To subdivide, partition, or mark off into smaller parts; to divide into compartments. a1785 GLOVER Athenaid IV. (R.), The crystal surface is comparted all, in niches verg’d with rubies. [Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “Compart”] 12. Another nice old English word, usefully pressed back into service in Tracy Strong’s translation of Nancy’s essay “La Comparution.” See Nancy, “The Compearance: From the Existence of ‘Communism’ to the Community of ‘Existence,’” Political Theory 20 (Aug. 1992): 371– 98.


in passage) of a community we perhaps no longer know well how to call ours: Against the horizon of these preliminary reminders and these classic definitions, one may see certain questions taking shape. They have at least two forms . . . . 1. First, if this is indeed the way things are, if in the classical and modern academic tradition (up through the nineteenth-century model) normative and prescriptive performativity, and a fortiori the production of oeuvres, must remain foreign to the field of university work, even in the Humanities, foreign to their teaching, that is, in the strict sense of the word, to their theory, their theorems as discipline or doctrine (Lehre), then what does it mean “to profess”? What is the difference between a trade or craft and a profession? And then between any profession and the profession of the professor? What is the difference between the different types of authority granted to craft or trade, to profession, and to the profession of the professor? 2. Second, has something happened to this classical-modern university and to these Humanities? Is there something happening to it or promising to happen to it that upsets these definitions, either because this mutation transforms the essence of the university, and in it the future of the Humanities, or because it consists in revealing, through the seismic activities under way, that this essence has never conformed to these definitions, however obvious and indisputable they are?13 “The University without Condition” is in many ways typical of Derrida’s later work: at once expansive in its address, as if the close reader of the sixties and seventies now felt the world more directly available to him, and cramped, as if he’s forced to tack back and forth in the very tight quarters set up by the dual demands of circumstance and what Derrida has come to take as the acquired apparatus, allusions, and technical terms of deconstruction. It’s not always a strategy that serves him well. Certainly I don’t find the pleasure in reading many of these essays that I still take in much of the earlier writing, and often enough a strong feel for the larger arguments and stakes eludes me, so my relation to them ends up more touch and go than I can be fully comfortable with. In the present instance, Kamuf offers some helpful reminders about the distinctively French dimensions of Derrida’s issues—most particularly the “strong resistance to the integration of artistic practice into the university institution.”14 One might add to this an uncer13. Derrida, “The University without Condition,” Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Kamuf (Stanford, Calif., 2002), pp. 220–21. 14. Kamuf, “Introduction: Event of Resistance,” Without Alibi, p. 18.

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tainty—registered to a degree in formulations like “this classical-modern university”—about the actual institution in question (the Sorbonne is not Yale or Irvine) and about the larger social circumstances of that institution (arguments over university speech do not take the same shape in France and in the United States). What then to read here? What to place or find in relief? The question of oeuvres seems to me to persist across the different French and American ways of handling artistic practice, although it becomes different in the U.S. context, where oeuvre now weighs in primarily in its contrast with the university’s overwhelming orientation toward research. To say that the American university has succeeded in a certain integration of artistic practice is to say that it has very largely bent such practice to these terms.15 On what would then be the other side of the question, one might ask how far the university is able to recognize such oeuvres as are achieved within it but outside the confines of “artistic practice” as, precisely, oeuvres. To what extent, in the humanities, do we in fact do institutional justice to—or with—the proper names and bodies of writing that are no small part of day-to-day ways we actually talk about our work and the structure of our fields? Research, whatever else it may be, is a significant relay within the professionalism that now almost bottomlessly shapes our work and our teaching. Derrida’s question about profession—and so also about the authority that informs our writing and teaching—aims at opening up some seam between professionalism and something else that might still speak within— and against—it, and this question surely ought also to be ours.16 Heidegger had, of course, already asked a version of it, and it’s a version worth recalling both because of its relation to Derrida’s question and because of what it underlines about the conditions of Derrida’s reception within the late modern, notably American, and highly professionalized university (confusions of address are not simply Derrida’s): “The research man no longer needs a library at home. Moreover, he is constantly on the move. He negotiates at meetings and collects information at congresses. He contracts commissions with publishers. The latter now determine along with him which books must be written.” Or again, “A fourth modern phenomenon manifests itself in the fact that human activity is conceived and consummated as culture. Thus culture is the realization of the highest values, through the nurture and cultivation of the highest goods of man. It lies in the essence of culture, 15. See Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley, 1999). 16. I continue to find Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1996) the most compelling summary of the current situation.


as such nurturing, to nuture itself in its turn and thus to become the politics of culture.”17 And, finally, we might want very much to hang on to Derrida’s thought that something we take to be happening in the contemporary university might be uneasily balanced between mutation (transformation, paradigm shift, ruin, betrayal—we have a tolerably rich vocabulary here) and the explicit surfacing of a contradiction or slippage internal to, even constitutive of, the university as such. It’s worth noticing that the language of paradigm shift in particular seems to be internal to the phenomenon we are trying to describe, part and parcel of the ongoing administrative redescription of the university—part of the grammar of what Bill Readings calls the university of excellence.18 The valorization of new paradigms as such often looks deeply cynical; those genuinely committed to what the historian may want to call a new paradigm are committed to it neither because of its novelty nor because of its status as a paradigm but because they take it to get things right in some sense of right to which such thinkers are equally committed. Outside such commitments new paradigms are a dime a dozen, which is of course why they are so very appealing to the university of excellence. So we need the sense of that other possibility—that the question of the university is not so much a matter of new or shifting paradigms as it is of the ever open demand for its own renewed acknowledgment or reinvention. Where we fail to see this demand, where we variously refuse or evade it (and of course the suspicion I have is that the invocation of new paradigms and the like is more often than not a way of blinding ourselves to it), we render our institution—its capacities, routines, and sense—as well as the lives we lead within it unthinkable and untouchable. Since there is nothing to be done with one’s incomparable excellence except manage it, the truth of the university of 17. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), pp. 125, 116. It may be worth underlining in this context how closely Derrida early on attaches his question of writing to Heidegger’s question of technology—as, for example, in his writing in Of Grammatology that “I believe . . . that a certain sort of question about the meaning and origin of writing precedes, or at least merges with, a certain type of question about the meaning and origin of technics” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore, 1974], p. 8). (Spivak’s “technics” renders the French technique that also renders Heidegger’s Technologie.) Of Grammatology’s related remark that “the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger” (ibid., p. 5) might as well be a direct quotation from Heidegger’s essay “The Turning.” 18. “The point,” Readings writes, “is not that no one knows what excellence is but that everyone has his or her own idea of what it is. And once excellence has been generally accepted as an organizing principle, there is no need to argue about differing definitions. Everyone is excellent, in their own way” (Readings, The University in Ruins, pp. 32–33).

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excellence turns out to be the sheer fact of administration, each one of us become his or her own administrator. Indifferent to knowledge and to our own careers, the fact of our professionalism is the ongoing institution of this indifference. What Derrida’s remarks urge is a rewriting of the university and of authority within it. It’s because nothing will count as such a rewriting that cannot also show itself persuasively as a reading of the university that Derrida is inclined to turn the question of some mutation in the essence of the university back toward the university’s permanent nonconformity with its own most fundamental claims. (It is of course far from irrelevant that the terms in play here are also those in play in our imaginations of some postmodernity; it is the same problem, the same history, at stake.) It would be up to those of us who have the university as our concrete institutional fact to carry out this reading and rewriting within the terms of its dailiness (its classrooms and curricula, the terms through which we recognize one another’s work, the means of our governance). To do this might be to discover—to recognize or acknowledge, to invent—within the infinite ruin of the university, even as that ruin, the university in deconstruction, as if there were no university apart from its reinvention at every moment in each of its parts or as if the responsibility for what one might call la chose universitaire were never other than singular. Let’s say—why not?—that the university is the organ of the Absolute, proposing this as a name for or imagination of la chose universitaire. The proposition has at least some loose historical plausibility and places the image of a systematically articulated whole usefully in the foreground. What else would we then be saying? What might Derrida have taught us about such a proposition’s reading? There’s this at least: that such reading begins in and as Hegel’s own propositions, as for example in the Phenomenology’s exposition of the speculative proposition, and that it becomes explicit in and as its further repetition—in, for something more than example, Heidegger or Nancy. Here’s Heidegger attempting to make out what Hegel means in such phrasings of absolute knowledge, standard throughout his writings, as “knowledge self-moving and in its own shape.”19 This must mean, Heidegger says, that absolute knowledge is first of all not relative and thus that it is not knowledge of anything external to it in any sense: 19. Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), p. 15; hereafter abbreviated HP.


For knowledge to be qualitatively other than relative knowledge, for it to be other than a knowledge which is carried over to what is known and is bound there, it must remain bound but must liberate and absolve itself from what it knows and yet as so ab-solved, as absolute, still be a knowledge. To be ab-solved from what is known does not mean “abandoning” it, but “preserving it by elevating it.” [HP, p. 15] This elevation is an absolving that knows; that is, what is known is still known, but in being known it is now changed. This is asking something more of knowledge than that it simply take itself into account, that it become in some special way self-conscious, although it must certainly include that (since absolute knowledge must at least be, so to speak, the biggest knowledge, and it can’t be that if it somehow manages to leave itself out). The absoluteness, the ab-solvedness, Heidegger claims Hegel aims at is a qualitative transformation: knowledge-become-objective in a special sense that precludes any reference to anything occupying any other position than that of knowledge itself. As Heidegger puts it: “The unbounded origin of the unity of both self-consciousness and consciousness, as they belong together, is a knowledge that is aware of itself as the purely unbounded, purely absolved absolute knowledge, which provisionally we call reason.” The double stroke of “unbounded” marks the job done: there are no limits to absolute knowledge that are not absolutely its own. It touches no outside. “Absolute knowledge,” Heidegger continues, “is genuine knowledge, the science. That science which knows in an absolute way ‘knows the absolute.’ Science as absolute knowledge is in itself system, according to its most essential character. The system is not an optional framework or ordering of absolute knowledge by way of addition” (HP, pp. 16, 17). Nancy gets all of this, I think, into one wonderful, short sentence: “The Hegelian ‘presupposed’ is the real, absolutely.” And this, Nancy also rightly says, “ruins all pre-suppositions or pre-givenness” (H, p. 10). He continues: Everything is in the absolute restlessness of becoming. But becoming is not a process that leads to another thing, because it is the condition of every thing. Its absolute restlessness is itself the determination of the absolute. Becoming is quite exactly absolution: the detachment of each thing from its determination, as well as the detachment from the Whole in its determination. [H, p. 12] In this sequence of readings that begins, already as reading, within Hegel’s text and so does not simply supervene upon it, we find ourselves as if moved along a series of figures—from Hegel’s “circle of circles” through

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Heidegger’s horizoned hermeneutics to Nancy’s magnetic chain and so also find ourselves obliged to ever more perspicuous acknowledgment of the ways in which such propositions are their exposition and their explicit rendering. “Philosophy,” Hegel writes in the introduction to the Lectures on Fine Art, “has to consider an object in its necessity, not merely according to subjective necessity or external ordering, classification, etc.; it has to unfold and prove the object, according to the necessity of its own inner nature.”20 And Nancy writes equally (“as if this very equality did not immediately, imperiously, and violently call for the exposition of every singularity as such, incomparable and absolutely unequal at the very heart of universal equality” [H, p. 21]): Exposition, explicitation, or interpretation is the “self-exposition of the absolute and . . . [the] display of what is.” It is a matter of letting the absolute expose itself. Nonetheless, this thought is not a passivity: self-exposition is the very nature of the absolute. Letting the absolute freely expose itself is nothing other than putting thought into play—and to work—as freedom. [H, p. 10] As we work our way through this chain, the phrase “explicit rendering” seems to mean something less and less like clarifying paraphrase and more like the bringing of text into ever sharper relief against its own ground—a work then of incising or exscribing that would be the work Hegel called aufheben and that Heidegger’s English translator could still render well enough with the standard “preserving it by elevating it,” but which now demands the full force of the genial Derridean stroke of rele`ver—to relieve, to place in relief—where “elevating” refers to no height or place other than that constituted in the writing or figuring of a surface.21 Hegel has little enough to say about artistic relief—his visible stake is in sculpture insofar as it prefigures the peculiar and essential plasticity of properly philosophical prose in its full legibility—but it’s hard not to take note of his brief remarks on it (“Reliefs have the greatest variety . . . . Here above all it is the wit of invention which launches out into the greatest variety of figures and their combination and can no longer keep in view the proper aim of sculpture”), at once seeing what they mean and hearing in them a 20. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 1:11. 21. The present essay has thus had as one of its tasks to remain more or less within the passage of this translation from its inauguration in Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (1971; Paris, 1972), through Nancy, La Remarque spećulative: Un Bon Mot de Hegel (Paris, 1973) and Hegel: L’inquie´tude du negatif (Paris, 1997), and on to Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical Inquiry 27 (Winter 2001): 174–200. A similar task has been to be never quite lost to the sight of Derrida’s On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, Calif., 2005).


word that only becomes audible where Derrida’s French retouches Hegel’s German.22 Nancy, more patient than me, arrives here by a more careful tracking of Hegel’s exposition of speculative argument: “The very operation of the aufheben entails, in all its rigor and in all its necessity, a remainder, the relief of its own—forever improper—nonsublated Witz.”23 The university, then, after this interruption of the Absolute, not as architectural container (of, for example, culture or cultural value) and not as if gathered around some quasi-sculptural idea (of, say, reason) but as worked surface, its departments containing nothing or almost nothing and thus counting above all in their sheer adjacency, as if a “crystal surface . . . comparted all, in niches verg’d with rubies.” Seen in this sparkling light, the university looks less like ruin than a relic or reliquary, a place perhaps “where the bodi or bonis or eny releef or relik . . . mai be had” and perhaps also a place in which profession might be itself an act of relief (“the bysshop . . . counsayled that every man shulde be newe sworne, and renewe their releves”), pledging the institution to the restlessness of that tangency and contingency out of which we make what sense we can.24 This would be a university made at, and everywhere of, its limits, having no idea beyond its fact of articulation, contact and the interruption of contact, in which singularities and relation are, as Nancy has it, “one and the same gift” and in which disciplines and objects thus unfold in relief of one another even as they stand out also in relief against one another (H, p. 19). If this is in fact our university—and whose else could it be?—my thought must be that we are still too much baffled in it to know how late—or early— Derrida may be.

22. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:771. 23. Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel’s Bons Mots), trans. Ce´line Surprenant (Stanford, Calif., 2001), p. 132. 24. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “Relief 1” and “Relief 2.”

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Homage to Glas Geoffrey Hartman

To thank Derrida, to celebrate his time among us, is not difficult. He was the most genial genius I have known. His intellectual generosity to students and faculty, his giving of himself, which I first experienced during his appointment at Yale, every university he visited has known. His more than ten years at Yale drew attention to a group dubbed the Gang of Four, or even the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as if we were a charismatic religious sect trying to terrify our profession locally and nationally. In the press, and by many alarmed colleagues who should have known better, Yale was identified as the command center of a satanic legion out to destroy the humanities. In truth, there was little fire and brimstone in us and not even unity; when, together with Derrida, we published Deconstruction and Criticism, Harold Bloom quipped that four of us were Deconstruction, and he was Criticism. The number four was in any case quite arbitrary, considering the important work of Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson, Andrzej Warminski, and a number of younger teachers at Yale during that time. If it is easy to thank Derrida, to think him is something else. I want to do this by offering a brief homage to Glas. Its thirtieth anniversary was in 2004. The same generosity Derrida showed in his personal and professional relations, and that always, by an eloquence of concepts and novelty of expression, aimed at a chance d’avenir, is clearly discernible in this livre-e´tape. Although, in Glas, Jacques did not enter as fully the geopolitical arena as he did in person, the breadth of his vision, the hope and the despair, are manAll translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. Versions of this essay were presented at conferences organized by Vivian Liska at the University of Antwerp and by Haun Saussy at Yale University. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3302-0005$10.00. All rights reserved.

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ifest. He refused to repress, occult, or overlook disparaties, dualities, and contraries. There are many aspects of Glas, of this strange and powerful volume, I don’t understand, among them its memento mori. The ancient theory of humors sometimes identified genius as the result of a bleached variety of melancholy, but Jacques’s veins seemed to flow rather with what Paul Celan called—referring to the Holocaust—“the black milk of dawn.” Thinking, writing, and grieving seemed to merge; with his death we participate in that merging. Yet if a life has closed, the book, as he himself taught us, remains open; a “livre a` venir.” Since Glas played a special role in my own thought, what I have to say is necessarily about myself as well as about Derrida, and for that I ask your understanding. Soon after it was published in 1974, I recognized in Glas a pivotal work of both philosophy and art. Glas blended commentary on Hegel, in one column of a vertically divided page, with commentary on Jean Genet in a facing column. There are also sidebars, or baby columns, as on the opening page (fig. 1).1 The romantic dream of a symbiosis embracing philosophical and literary thought—a Symphilosophieren conceived in the Germany of the 1790s—had come to fruition with this peculiar pairing.2 An oversized book of odd juxtapositions, Glas is a linguist’s treat. Its lines are marked by a tireless semiotic, phonemic, and literary awareness. One feels throughout the love of language and language innovation. Derrida could already have said what he told the Le Monde interviewer, just before his death, about his adopted language, the only one he felt he knew: “To leave a mark on the history of the French language, that is what interests me.”3 Conscious, also, of the carre´ as cadre, as a right-angled container that 1. See Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris, 1974), p. 7. 2. See, for example, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lyceum fragment: “Alle Kunst soll Wissenschaft, und alle Wissenschaft soll Kunst werden; Poesie und Philosophie sollen vereinigt sein” (Friedrich Schlegel, “Kritische Fragmente,” Kritische Schriften [Munich, 1970], p. 22). See also his fragments on “romantic . . . progressive, universal poetry” (Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments,” Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” and the “Fragments,” trans. and ed. Peter Firchow [Minneapolis, 1971], p. 175). Empirically considered, did this odd coupling of Hegel and Genet commend itself to Derrida because of assignments for the centralized national exam in France, the Aggregation? 3. Derrida, “Entretien,” Le Monde, 19 Aug. 2004, p. 12; my trans.; hereafter abbreviated “E.”

G e o f f re y H a r t m a n is Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emeritus and senior research scholar at Yale University. The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004) was awarded the 2006 Truman Capote prize. He is also cofounder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and continues as its project director.

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Geoffrey Hartman / On Glas

f i g u r e 1.

Opening page of Glas.

segments writing’s flow, Derrida broke out of the literary equivalent of the picture frame. Each column has its own continuity but is not impermeable to oblique interconnections. This generates a multidirectional kind of reading and a sense that the delimited verbal and semantic space, the bookishness of the book, can barely encompass such border crossings.4 Linguistic process, moreover, by potentially undermining strict borderlines, accrues political connotations. Those borders, often as fluid and arbitrary as they used to be in central and eastern Europe, include national as well as individual identity.5 At the cultural level, moreover, Glas is some4. Derrida’s most focused discussion of the cadre and such border issues, as they impact on the philosophy of art, is Derrida, “Le Parergon,” Digraphe 3 (1974): 21–57. 5. An important scene from Genet’s Journal of a Thief (1949) that depicts a border crossing makes its way into later pages of Glas but is already anticipated on the first page by the “aigle . . . blanc” mention (Derrida, Glas, p. 7). See Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven, Conn., 1980), pp. 208–11.


thing of a digest of France’s philosophical debt to Germany, as well as of French developments between the wars; it transcends the bloody FrancoGerman conflicts that had proved how divisive and destructive ideologized concepts of culture could be. Derrida is already in the midst of what he called Europe’s “autocritique en permanence” (“E,” p. 12).6 An enabling part of that critique is the impact of writing (ećriture) on verbalization, the awareness it brings of the analytic and synthesizing powers of alphabetic language. In Glas we are always kept conscious of the linguistic turn as it lessens the distinction between the language of the object of inquiry and a metalanguage seeking to make statements about that object. Derrida’s opening page notoriously “Joyces” the name Hegel into aigle by dropping an H that usually is not pronounced in French. The pun, in a jocular way, at once raises and subverts the identity issue, the investment we have in the proprium of names (Hegel/aigle; qui, lui; who he?). It also foregrounds chance as a semantic resource. That chanciness is exploited in the manner of poets by a thinker who is sober enough, yet drunk on language. So the permutation of the glottal gl, particularly close to the throat on the point of throttling itself, or being throttled, haunts in a writing that is “phonogrammatic” (Derrida’s adjective), a conspicuous array of words, marked by ablauting nouns and the binary opposition of stressed and unstressed sounds, including the series glas, glace, glaıëul, angle, aigle, gel, sigle, seigle, and glu. A Mallarmeán sense of la glu de l’aleá, the glue of the aleatory, makes a cornucopia of philosophic and literary themes cohere better than any telic (end-oriented) argument. When the originality and importance of Glas hit me, I was working on Christopher Smart, a great British extracanonical poet considered quite crazy by his contemporaries. Smart’s madhouse poem, “Rejoice in the Lamb,” composed at intervals between 1757 and 1763, was not published till 1939, the year of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Derrida’s punning overdetermination, his “epiphony,” is often as ingeniously multivocal as that of Smart and Joyce and produces an excess at once enriching and disconcerting.7 Also, at times, Derrida is not far from dadaism or surrealism—think of Duchamp’s feminine alter ego, Rose Se´lavy, and Robert Desnos’s versionings of that name in L’Aumonyme (1923) with a doubling of the R, so that Rose yields the pronunciation ErROSe. In Glas, the diction of philosophy grows as many flowers, or luscious weeds, as literature. 6. By Europe he means, primarily, western Europe. 7. See Hartman, “Epiphony in Echoland,” Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Baltimore, 1981), pp. 33–66.

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Vale´ry said Mallarme´ used language as if he had invented it. Something of that intuitive grasp of everything implied by the linguistic turn is also reflected in Derrida. He expressed his love for French not by worrying about its purity but by a transgressive play “intodetonating” (one of his neologisms) words by such portmanteau conflations or manipulating their letters.8 Consider what he does not only with aigle but also with an inconspicuous word like ici. The first lines of Glas recall the opening of Hegel’s Phenomenology, where here (ici) and now (maintenant), though written down, fixed on paper, shift their referent with the passing of time. Derrida migrates that scene of writing from Hegel’s to his own text, so the apparent immediacy of those basic descriptors of presence is mediated by quotational repetition. The hic et nunc outlives its simple deictic function and becomes historicized when moved into this new context. Indeed, the nonunitary seems to inhere in “the This [das Dieses]” from the beginning, for it already betrays, according to Hegel, a split or twofold, “the doubled form of being, as the now and the here [gedoppelte Gestalt eines Seins, als das Jetzt und als das Hier].”9 Derrida focuses on writing as a linguistic labor that redeems consciousness from abstraction. So Hegel and Marx critiqued a false or abstract immediacy. So Walter Benjamin, in his Arcades Project, portrayed coming to grips with the shock of city life as a task beyond the flaˆneur’s (and idle reader’s?) bad infinity, his unsatisfied imaginative ramblings; he called experience the outcome of work, and while interested in the sociology of the flaˆneur, his city guises and disguises, he thought of him as a type caught up in phantasmagoric pursuits. Derrida’s challenge, then, “What is left of Hegel today, for us, here, now?” articulates a question not restricted to Hegel.10 The concept of écriture invokes an interminable effort to achieve experience. Learning to write one’s life is also learning to discover or stay with a difference, to abide a labor of the negative in oneself and—let me not overlook Derrida the devoted teacher—to encourage it in his many audiences. This remained as central for him at the end of his life as it was in Glas some thirty years earlier, when he cultivated a method of “grafting without confusion the poetic on the philosophic, or a certain way of using homonyms, undecidables, the ruses

8. The word in French is “intode´tonation” (Derrida, Artaud le Moma [Paris, 2002], p. 84; hereafter abbreviated AM). Derrida refers to Artaud’s own practice. 9. G. W. F. Hegel, “Die sinnliche Gewissheit,” Pha¨nomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg, 1952), p. 81. 10. Derrida, Glas, p. 7.


of language . . . whose distinctly logical necessity [tends to be] neglected” (“E,” p. 12). Yet Derrida’s affirmative mood maintained the negative. While he links the ruses of language to what abides, he never masks his firm consciousness that no “fulness of time” exists. Instead, as in Hegel’s dialectic, the passage of time reveals at every turn an alienating force producing absence and duality, even if history is thought to be slouching toward the presence of the present, a Parousia-closure viewed as the end of history. Describing unfulfilment and phantomization, Derrida is impressed by Artaud’s dieu voleur. A self-described “alieńe´ authentique,” Artaud always lived, according to Derrida, “the morning-after of a dispossession: his own body, his property and propriety, had been stolen at birth by this thief of a god,” one born, so Artaud claimed, as a doppelga¨nger “in order to pass for me.”11 Keeping this drama of theft and dispossession in mind, I return to Glas and the (ordinarily) inconspicuous ici. Its letters signifying presence are displaced into the future by a wishful performative: “Let IC be . . . .” A positing, sounding like a fiat, and ironically overambitious, capitalizes the letters of a commonplace word to change it into the acronym of something momentous and transcendent, the Immaculate Conception.12 This is a leap, both psychologically and in terms of linguistic process. The IC now connects with the theme of purity/impurity running through the Genet column but remains a stretch for the reader; a further acronymic IC will complicate the matter. Before I turn to that IC, let me describe a second doubling in Derrida’s initial Hegel column. Derrida’s Sa abbreviates savoir absolu, the absolute knowledge attained by the philosopher, according to Hegel, at the end of humanity’s journey through all the stages of history. Derrida’s newly coined Sa is quietly grafted onto Saussure’s Sa that stands for signifiant (in distinction from Se´ for signifie´) to imply that no knowledge is absolute or final enough to escape the mediatory process of signification.13 11. Derrida, L’Ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris, 1967), pp. 341–42. 12. Breton and E´luard published an Immaculeé Conception in 1930, a book having a complex relation to Hegel and his understanding of madness (specifically of hypochondria), described as revealing in conflictual form a latent potentiality of the human spirit. See Andre´ Breton and Paul E´luard, L’Immaculeé Conception (1930; Paris, 1991), pp. 10–11. On writing and madness, see Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, trans. Martha Noel Evans and Brian Massumi (1978; Stanford, Calif., 2003). 13. Phonetically, Derrida’s Sa is also indistinguishable, of course, from the feminine personal pronoun and SA, “Socie´te´ Anonyme” (in English, “Inc.”, for Incorporated). In this way Derrida points at one and the same time to salient features of linguistic process: its highly flexible and absorptive character, its openness to subjective invention, the arbitrary nature of symbols, and the alphabetic and analytic play a literary reading fosters.

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f i g u r e 2.

Derrida and Adami, Ich.

A year after Glas, a signature engraving titled Ich reproduces, in cooperation with Valerio Adami, the angle/angle cluster of themes from that book in an issue of Derrie`re le miroir (fig. 2).14 The IC now returns via that picture’s title (and so “hors d’oeuvre”) as a pseudomorpheme of the abbreviated Greek word ichtus (fish). (The image in Derrie`re le miroir is accompanied by a remarkable concerto of poetic prose in which Derrida also plays with ictus and ichnos.) The Ich appears to be the first person pronoun in German, but its letters, when transliterated back into the Greek (I/Ch ⳱ iota plus chi or x), designate Christ as traditionally symbolized by a fishlike emblem derived from, or sponsoring, the Greek acronym for Jesus, Christ, God’s son, Savior. Derrida, further, associates a reversed I/Ch with the chi 14. See Gallerie Maeght’s issue of a Derrie`re le miroir, by Valerio Adami and Jacques Derrida, bearing the title Le Voyage du Dessin Ⳮ R (Paris, 1976).


(x) of the chiasmus whose crisscross, with its double (the mark signaling sous ratuˆre), pervades the design. The Adami print contains several other truncated words, including Derrida’s signature. Also, quasi-geometric scribbles evoke, via an angled and angular creature, a capital J (Je or J[e][u]). Is this combination of peinture and écriture, of lexical and pictographic signs, also reminiscent of Artaud’s dessins écrits?15 Or is the J more comparable to the alphabetic fantasy we find in the intricate letter illuminations of the Book of Kells? Yet this strange self-portrait seems far from intimating a crucifixion or flayed carcass. The implicit sacred allusion, nevertheless—as profane as it is sacred, since Derrida, in the accompanying text, calls what is pictured a “phallus christique”—cannot be entirely ignored, even if that connotation leads beyond the artwork’s frame. For, as Derrida insists, sustaining his fishy theme, the overt polysemy of this pictorial text should carry us away from every shore, that is, avoid whatever closes off the a`-venir. Keep fishing, he advises: “Laisser flotter le filet.” At the same time, and perhaps mocking such symbolic-narcissistic self-canonizations, Derrida’s signature, cut off like the word ichtus, points to a fragmenting or wounded self (see AM, p. 80).16 The IC that was made to denote a pure birth in Glas morphs into a pictorial index of mortality, “lait de ma mort” (milk of my death). What in this artwork, then, is integral to it (ergon), and what is beyond or outside its borders (parergon)? The frame, the cutting edge of the carre´, extrudes the da-sign in Derrida’s signature and signals a nonpresence, a fortsein.17 The creation of meaning, even of self-identity, by a cut of this kind, often alludes in Derrida to the original identity cut of circumcision. Is all this too cute as well as cutting? What is being fashioned here is a hieroglyph linking death and birth and intimating something without 15. The phrase “written drawings, with sentences inserted in the forms to precipitate them” comes from a letter to Jean Paulhan at a time (namely, 1945) when Artaud begins to draw seriously once again (Artaud, “Letter to Jean Paulhan,” Oeuvres comple`tes, 26 vols. [Paris, 1956], 9:20). See also Paule The´venin’s important summary of Artaud’s pictorial career in Derrida and Paule The´venin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), esp. pp. 20–22 for Artaud’s fascination with letter mysticism, including that of the letter H. That the H is also linked to his fascination with duality, which in turn has a bearing on the two-columned division of Glas, is suggested by a remark made in January 1946: “Deux colonnes . . . les deux coˆte´s lateraux de l’eˆtre dont chacun est une unique monteé” (Antonin Artaud: Oeuvres sur papier, Museé Cantini, 17 juin–17 septembre 1995, ed. Agne`s Angliviel de la Beaumelle and Nicolas Cendo [Marseille, 1995], p. 124). 16. Note also the comments on “la raillerie de l’auto-canonisation historico-acade´micomuseále” (AM, p. 88). 17. For Derrida’s discussion of Ich, I base myself mainly on Derrida’s cooperative work with Adami, including such details as an enigmatic quote—“Glu de l’e´tang lait de ma mort”—a reminiscence, apparently, and sole relic of his first published poem at the age of seventeen. Note that the final t of “mort” is cut off or coincides with the spine of the notebook.

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bounds rather than out of bounds. The portrait’s composite author projects a riddle, albeit not an unsolvable one. Derrida becomes his own sphinx, what he calls a sfeinctor, one who feigns a mystery or needs that mystery to create personal totems. Artaud had produced a series of pictorial missives he named Sorts (spells, destinies) and claimed there existed a totem innate to man (fig. 3). Given Derrida’s own polysemic explications de texte, the Ich cartoon is not as difficult to decipher as Artaud’s sketches from the time he was confined at Rodez.18 Yet Ich resembles them in an important respect. The concept joining Adami and Derrida (an A and D seem to materialize from the angular scribble toward the tail of the fish) has an affinity with Artaud’s drawings, insofar as the pictogram and accompanying script could be an Artaud-like exorcism.19 But where Adami and Derrida jointly create a clear conceptual image, something translatable though polysemic, in Artaud the objects depicted are less translatable, even if Derrida himself makes an attempt to find their secret grammar in Artaud le Moma. Minimally biomorphic, most of them appear to be boxed or botched mummies (momies, momos), coffined cadavers of humanoid shapes doomed to remain in a limbo of limbs, having no host organism to carry them to full term (figs. 4a–c).20 The impression of stick figures, of quasi marionettes, does not dissipate, and their diagonal upwardness may visually echo religious images of gisants levitating or awaiting resurrection. Often these crude effigies aspire, like Giacometti’s sculptures, to the phallic verticality of totems.21 Artaud’s sketches may imply a missing (and therefore all too present?) birthing element. Perhaps even a horror of the Pe`re-Me`re. (The charcoal portraits he made of the faces of friends, never with bodies, need separate consideration.) His own accompanying savage comments evoke “the suffering of the prenatal,” which I understand to mean the suffering of something that cannot find a true physical body or mode of gestation. This brings Artaud close to the Genet written up in the right-hand column of Glas and 18. Circa 1944–47. Artaud also produced there a large amount of eloquent and intransigent commentary. 19. AM discusses in exegetical detail the exorcism function of Artaud’s sketches. 20. The title of Derrida’s Artaud le Moma also conflates the acronym of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Momus, God of mockery and madness. 21. Insofar as Artaud’s art is a coherent language, it is not a “mother” tongue. Nor—despite Artaud’s fascination with Mayan (Tahamurana) ritual markers—does he seem to have found “a sort of grandiose mathematics,” a Ce´zanne-type of pictorial grammar inspired by or imposed on nature, as is the case with the less explosive carre´s and angularities of Adami/Derrida. See, for Artaud’s description of the Sierra landscape and Mayan ritual, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud.


the I/C of the Ic(h) in its relation to the “Immaculate Conception” motif in Glas.22 (In his commentary on Ich in Derrie`re le miroir, Derrida mentions la prise de Ich sur Glas.) The phantasm of a purer kind of birth or rebirth is projected. Most immediately, though, the engraving expresses a naked anxiety, that of breath being cut off, a vociferation sticking in the throat (au fond de la gorge) like a fishbone (the spiral of the sketchbook resembles vertebrae), a fear, basically, that a souffle coupe´ will emerge instead of a human voice. Indeed, the dyadic design uniting A and D (Ad . . . Da), as well as intimating the convertible force of drawing and writing, exploits the divisions and angularity of a stylized double cahier and so strengthens the icon’s apotropaic, antischizoid edge. Let us not forget that other totem, the lofty eagle. It enters as an imperial emblem, associated with Hegel’s attempt at philosophic mastery, but is subverted by the hazards, the coup de de´s(rrida), of semiotic process. That eagle—which, as Austria-Hungary’s heraldic symbol, grows into a twinheaded monstrosity and not only presides over the dual columns of Glas but is imported as an animal name to parallel Genet’s flower name (ginestra, the broom flower)—that eagle is the theriomorphic emblem of John the Evangelist. Through that emblematic contrast and the motif of the Immaculate Conception the Hegel column begins to open asymmetrically onto Genet’s life project with its own feérie, its (anti-) holy-family romance, its acute ambivalence toward not only mother but also mother-tongue. The double column, then, should be read conjointly or in a binary way. Genet’s work is valued as the sacred, not only sacrilegious, gospel of a contemporary Saint Jean. Sartre had published in 1952 a humongous biography of Genet under the title Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, while Artaud on occasion signed himself Saint Antonin. Though all biography for Derrida is thanatography, shadowed even in joy by mutability and death, here he makes a duo of life writings survive in pages that rebel against the Book as a borderline tomb. Thus everything in Glas seems about to go over the edge, and that edginess may even include the name of Kant, punningly if tacitly transposed from name into the ordinary noun Kante. 22. An Artaud painting with that name exists, finished in January 1946. That Derrida sometimes plays with the letter I or i, as if its shape mimicked an erection, might be a factor that changes, however artificially, the arbitrary relation of signifier to signified into a Cratyllic denotation and so undermines the chastity of “Immaculate.” Derrida describes what he calls Artaud’s attack on “la fausse virginite´ du je´suchristianisme” (AM, p. 88). For an interesting essay on Derrida’s use of alphabetic mysticism, see Inge-Birgitte Siegumfeldt, “Secrets and Sacrifices of Scission,” in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York, 2005), pp. 283–93.

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f i g u r e 3.

Antonin Artaud, Sorts.

f i g u r e 4a–c.

Color sketches by Antonin Artaud (Mummies? Momos?).

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The extraction of one verbal or thematic strand, however important, from the intricately woven texture of Glas, necessarily falsifies. There are so many sneaky-snaky strands. Consider that mysterious je m’eć in the righthand column of the opening page. It comes from a Genet essay whose title sentence inaugurates Derrida’s commentary on the latter;23 thus the Genet column, like Hegel’s, begins with a quotation. (An inaugural contrast between those opening gambits is that the Hegel passage, being unmarked, becomes a fully appropriated inner quotation.) Genet’s essay is doubly cited, moreover, in that it too uses a two-column format, though one that divides Genet’s own page unevenly. To go to the source in Genet is to learn how closely intermingled are sainthood, self, sex, and language. For the narrative from which that strangled phrase is extracted expresses Genet’s disgust by an ejaculation that denotes at one and the same instant, brief as the intimate yet estranging glance eliciting it, the physicality of je m’ećoule, je m’ećoeure, and, in Derrida certainly, je m’ećris. Also je meć; that is, I make myself into—take on the identity of—a mec (the slang contraction for me´te`que, a hood). Also, reimporting a gl which is mal enchaıˆne´, je m’aigle.24 The theme of saintliness enters as Genet describes his reaction to seeing a repulsive older man. He is tempted to purge an acute attack of self-consciousness after realizing with quasireligious force his nonexclusiveness, his identity with all other beings. The violent, onomatoclastic first sentence of Genet’s essay, which serves as its title, expresses not only a wish to defecate the self but also an impulse to exorcize Rembrandt’s exemplarity. Genet describes an antierotic sight that worked on him like the fatal coup of love’s lightning. He wished, yet also wished away, an illumination comparable to the perspicuous glance that fell on the object of his disgust (a negative homoerotic moment, directed at that older man glimpsed in a railway compartment). The je m’eć expresses, then, in a reverse or perverse guise, an involuntary, potentially saintly outflow of pathos, of total empathic expenditure. One feels the shadow of Georges Bataille. In Genet, moreover, contradictions cohabit, so that the je m’eć points to the contrast between the emotion of disgust (je m’ekel, ich ekle mich) and the exaltation (eć-stase) art can induce. Genet, needless to say, is not interested in aesthetic swoons but in an art like that of the late Rembrandt, whose portraits make the act of looking heavier because of the sensed carnality of the people portrayed. Genet’s scatology is human physicality curiously ennobled, as if nothing, in art, remained impure because of the force of art. 23. See Jean Genet, “Ce qui est reste´ d’un Rembrandt dećhire´ en petits carre´s bien re´guliers, et foutu aux chiottes,” Tel Quel, no. 29 (Spring 1967): 3–11. 24. For the significance of this crossover from the Hegel column to Genet’s, see Derrida, Glas, pp. 217–18, which centers on a border crossing.


That impurity, at the same time, while transfigured, is neither denied nor hidden by great art. But its trace explains the ferocity in Genet’s eloquent phrases, his transgressive images of disgust and purging disclose a sadness remaining within states of exaltation, the sadness of being in this world, “celle d’eˆtre au monde.”25 My response to Glas presented Derrida as “Monsieur Texte,” a transparent allusion to Vale´ry’s cerebral “Monsieur Teste” (“Teˆte”). After publishing Saving the Text (1981), however, I often had to insist there was life before Derrida. I was never a boadeconstructor; for me Derrida’s importance came from the inventive genius of a commentary that revealed a close reader, a literature-reading philosopher in fact, a species close to extinction. Bernard-Henry Le´vy in his “Tombeau pour Jacques Derrida” talks of his “corps-a`-corps avec les textes,”26 and Ju¨rgen Habermas in a “Last Greeting” praises Derrida’s training of students in a “micrological reading.”27 What I lacked, and what Derrida seemed to promise, was a theory to back up the type of reading and overhearing I had been practicing and that was now directed at his own text. Did I, through my own commentary, aspire to a greater measure of philosophical dignity? Yes. But a strange thing happened. Glas, as a discours de la folie, nourished by an inky humor or melancholy milk, took its toll and convinced me of the foolishness of that ambition. For it confirmed that the ideal of totality—embodied in the concept of a perfect symbol, a concrete universal, a magisterial book, a Hegelian type of worldview, or any purityperplex aspiring to a debabelized sign system, the complete harmony between theory and practice—this ideal, especially when insisting on the greatest possible genre and gender purity, was not only impossible but also dangerous to achieve. Dangerous, because of its wish for a total integration

25. Herewith my understanding of Genet’s admiration for Rembrandt as it may have struck Derrida: “Rembrandt is to modern art what the concept of Greek art, illusory or not, was to Hegel. The translucence of the spiritual in the pays bas of the carnal (‘une infinie, une infernale transparence’ are Genet’s words) suggests an incomparable synthesis or embodiment, which Chardin later can only ‘cite’ in his beautifully overdressed figures performing simple acts like reading. Rembrandt is monumental, the creation of a mirror of art that maintains the glance of subject or beholder, as subject becomes substance without (or even with, like Genet) passing through a Medusa or Narcissus complex” (Hartman, Saving the Text, p. 17). 26. Bernard-Henry Le´vi, “Tombeau pour Jacques Derrida,” Le Point, 14 Oct. 2004, p. 98. 27. Ju¨rgen Habermas,“Ein letzter Gruss: Derridas kla¨rende Wirkung,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 Oct. 2004, p. 10. See also, on the same page, Christian Schlu¨ter, “Die Freiheit des Sinns, Dekonstruktion als Ethos, nicht als Methode: Zum Tode des franzo¨sischen Philosophen Jacques Derrida,” for his tribute: Derrida “verordnete dem intellektuellen Milieu eine strenge Dia¨t, er forderte eine genaue, dicht am Text bleibende Lektu¨re.”

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resulting in the exclusion, denial, or stigmatizing of heterogeneous elements: “le reste.”28 Remainders are the spoilsports of formal perfection. They are usually decried as dirt, excess, insubordinate detail. They prevent closure of a system or ideology. There should be, there cannot be, a solution, a perfect equilibrium of left and right, of two columns that balance out to cancel duality or plurality. The Book as absolute Scripture, as Mallarme´’s “Livre” or Lyotard’s grand rećit, pretends to a dissolution of subject into substance, of singularities into the One, a collective, divine, terminal, exterminating truth. Yet Derrida, despite his rejection of an essentialist type of reading he names logocentric, found a way to preserve or, as I put it, to save the canonical texts. He made their previously neglected, rejected, and even routine features light up so that, as in the most daring of religious commentaries, nothing was overlooked. His grammatological perspective, which distinguished between writing as écriture and its closure (enclosure) in the form of the Book, complicated the mimesis or referentiality of verbal texts and removed the fear of an interpretive infinitizing that had been restricted to the word-world of sacred Scripture. His oft-repeated apothegm that there is nothing outside the text does not imply a flight from reality into pantextualism. Its scandal is that it restates the wondrousness of writing. The limits of textuality are the limits of the reader; it is we who stabilize the meanings of significant works by following their formal solicitation or imposing bounds of our own. Verbal thinking, as it questions itself, as it engages with and reflects on its medium, finds only provisional boundaries between a particular work (ergon) and texts outside of or offside to that work (parergon). Derrida, then, in his effort to project the image of an antibook, was not— as his obituary in Le Monde claimed—among the pourfendeurs du sujet, the destroyers of the (autobiographical) subject. Glas constructs a subjectivity without clear limits; it is uncontainable, even perhaps without end or justification. The work of writing, like that of grieving, knows no closure; the always emerging and incomplete book remains de´bris. Any claim of closure is but a premature entombment embellished by the vanity of words that aspire to be proper or unique denominations. After repeating the allusion to Hegel that opens the book (“aujourd’hui, ici, maintenant”), Glas signs off on the antimonumental phrase that anticipates a missing signature: “le de´bris de.” 28. “Tout le reste est litte´rature,” reads Verlaine’s famous verse in his L’Art poe´tique, rejecting from the art of poetry all but “l’impair,” or whatever was not suggestive and subtly unbalanced. The quote is confirmed against the pejorative sense of its original meaning by Derrida’s interactive colonnade. George Bataille’s concept of heterology may have played into this valuing of remainders.


No wonder literature manifests a certain violence; it shreds and disseminates proper names (recall the petits carre´s that open the Genet column) or other iconic identity markers in ways that inscribe their purging. Glas conspires with language, as it were, and becomes a critique of monumentalizing in all areas, from puristic precepts of diction to the call in religion or politics for racial, ethnic, or national purification. Literature is motivated by, if not defined as, le reste; there is an insoluble verbal core, whether material or spiritual, one that resists systematic encompassments and tends to be treated as dirt in the machine of discourse. So what is lacking is a history of trash, of precisely those things that have been devalued, remaindered, rejected, repressed, discarded, consigned to dump rather than archive. And it proves strangely seductive; this heterological garbage composed of relics or rejects sings like a siren. We have begun to scavenge it and hope for an alchemy, a philosopher’s stone to turn trash into treasure, shit into gold. Are we in the last gasp of a museal culture, a stage of archive fever beyond the restoration of ruins? But what if everything becomes a collectible? I leave that to your (or Don DeLillo’s) imagination. Capitalism certainly does not help, either from the side of planned obsolescence or of speculators who buy up every artifact, gambling on the value of trash. We should never forget the other, sinister side of this. While Hegel’s dialectic in the Phenomenology succeeds in a recycling of obsolete ideologies by assigning them a role in a progressive history almost devoid of names and so amalgamates a surplus of subject-positions until they evolve during the course of history into a sort of supersubject, Derrida links holocaustal fire (le bruˆle-tout) to a religion of solar purification and repeated sacrificial practices. His own playful tearing and dissemination of names is the opposite of a purification or Aufhebung, however. He does not want his antibook to be a massive series of proper names, whether of victims or victors, that turns history into a monumental mausoleum. But . . . who can sum up Glas? It bursts at the semes, opening philosophy (or I should say, more precisely, thought) to literature and literature to thought. I will always be grateful to this, Derrida’s most saturnalian, as well as saturnian, moment. It gave me, as it may have others, the courage to envisage a commentary without bounds, yet as precisely attentive to existing texts as the nowadays more or less abandoned tradition of meditative religious exegesis. Derrida abolished the fixed distance between literary and philosophical commentary and opened the way to a thousand and one nights of interpretive pizzazz—over which, however, as in the Scheherazade, a fatal deadline hovered.

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The Pocket-Size Interview with Jacques Derrida Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi Translated by Tupac Cruz

Freddy Tellez: Let’s start with “Cartouches.”1 I just saw a Calder show at Beaubourg, and I noticed a text by Sartre from 1946, which serves as an introduction. Reading your text on Ge´rard Titus-Carmel, one may, evidently, establish some differences at the level, if you wish, of the practice of writing, at the level of the very economy of the text between Sartre’s text and your own. What do you make of these differences? Jacques Derrida: I haven’t read Sartre’s text on Calder. So the response that I might attempt will probably be even more unjust [smiles] and simplifying than it would be in other circumstances. It will be made a priori, if you wish. Which is to say that to all possible differences between Sartre’s writing and that of “Cartouches” one has to add the difference in time, everything that has come to pass from . . . FT: Nineteen forty-six. JD: Nineteen forty-six and 1978: Thirty-two years in which many thingshave come to pass. The thematic at work in “Cartouches” is a thematic foreign This interview took place in two sessions in Jacques Derrida’s office at the Rue d’Ulm in April 1978. The transcript was reviewed and approved by Derrida in 1980, but the interview remained unpublished until 2005, when Siglo del Hombre, Universidad Javeriana, and Universidad del Cauca issued a Spanish translation. The present selections are translated from the original transcript in French, with notes added by Mazzoldi to his Spanish translation. 1. The Georges Pompidou Center at the Museé National d’Art Moderne in Paris hosted from 1 March to 10 April 1978 an exhibit by Ge´rard Titus-Carmel, “The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin et les 61 premiers dessins qui s’ensuivrent.” On that occasion, the center issued two small works contained within a single sheath made from transparent polyvinyl: Ge´rard Titus-Carmel: Soixant-un dessins annote´s par Gilbert Lascault and Ge´rard Titus-Carmel: “The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin” illustre´ de “Cartouches” par Jacques Derrida. A second version of Derrida’s text was later published in his La Ve´rite´ en peinture (Paris, 1978); trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod under the title The Truth in Painting (Chicago, 1987); hereafter abbreviated TP. Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007) 䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093–1896/07/3302–00012$10.00. All rights reserved.

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to Sartre and that has been constituted precisely through a complex trajectory—in particular, the discourse on painting, the relation between pictorial and literary writing, philosophical writing, or writing in general, the relation between them. In a general way—and it is, again, probably too general and too much of a simplification—the relation of discourse to painting has changed since Sartre. From all times and even today, for reasons that interest me greatly and that should be subjected to analysis, pictorial production is in need of a discourse if not in order to be produced at least to enter into market circulation—maybe even already in order to be produced. But the analysis that can be made nowadays of this relation between a nondiscursive production, apparently nondiscursive, such as painting or drawing, and discourse has changed greatly. And I think that, between the days in which Sartre wrote about Calder and what is done today in that same field, and in relation to what are undoubtedly analogous needs, one could notice the effects of this transformation. Let’s say that the Sartre of those days had a point of view not only about the pictorial work of art but about literature as well that has since completely changed. In his case, I don’t know, but for others very much. I find it hard at this point, also not having read the text, to put things together. The question is somewhat general. Should we try to make things more precise? Because otherwise I’ll get into an endless and, again, general discourse. What is it that struck you about Sartre’s text? You have seen both texts, which is not the case for me. You have seen both shows. FT: It’s not just the discursive relation between theory and art but rather, if you like, the relations and differences between Jacques Derrida and JeanPaul Sartre. Which is to say already the whole problem of the relation between so-called structuralism and Sartre’s philosophy of the subject, his humanist thought. I remember for example that you made a reading of Sartre himself, very lively, very intelligent, in the lecture that you gave in the United States in 1968.2 There, you offered a reading, if you like, 2. “Les Fins de l’homme,” a lecture given at the colloquium “Philosophy and Anthropology,” New York, 1968. See Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), pp. 109–36.

B r u n o M a z z o l d i studied philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and is a member of the Ca´tedra Juan Marinello at the Universidad Central de Las Villas, Cuba. F re d d y Te l l e z is the author of, among many works, De la praxis (1985), La sexualidad del feminismo (1987), Mitos: Filosofıá y praćtica (2002). He lives and works in Switzerland. Tu p a c C r u z studied film and philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Universidad de los Andes at Bogota´. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Jacques Derrida / The Pocket-Size Interview

that is a little different from other readings on the part of the structuralists. I mean that there is clearly a difference, for example, between your thought and that of so-called structuralism, isn’t there? By this I mean that there are, if you like, two relations: one between Sartre and Jacques Derrida and one between Jacques Derrida and structuralism. That’s the whole problem. JD: It’s grown even larger now! [Laughs.] Bruno Mazzoldi: Yes. JD: It’s hard to put things together. Because, in an interview like this, one has to proceed in general terms and then try to make something that doesn’t end up being a loose, formless piece of ready-to-wear clothing. And at the same time I would say that what matters in an interview like this is not, at bottom, the values, not the general pertinence of what I could manage to improvise about Sartre, for instance, but that which the economy of the interview, the constraints of the interview, are able to catch by surprise from out of my improvisation. I mean that it’s a cliche´, a spontaneous photograph, but evidently whatever I could say to you now will not resemble what I may write in a different situation. So you look, at bottom, for formulas. And in this regard what interests me in what I do is to keep an eye on the frame of constraints, to keep account of the material substrate and of the conditions of what is going on. Presently, let’s say that I am speaking for friends who are foreign to the French milieu, in front of tape recorders. So I am not speaking as if I were teaching a class, as if I were writing. So I’m looking here for some term, but in the end the most pertinent reply, in this situation, is: I’m speaking in general terms. The fact that you are interested, the fact that you are asking me, from the start, about these monuments, like Sartre or structuralism, which, personally, are not at the heart of what I am working on, confirms for me that in the end Sartre and structuralism are like pyramids. You arrive here, and I am an artisan who is walking around in the desert, and then you say, “How do you position yourself with respect to those pyramids over there?” which you are looking at from a certain distance. At the beginning I debated repeatedly, of course, in my work, with both Sartre and structuralism. I have given a lot of consideration to those pyramids, but, precisely for that reason, I don’t have general formulas that I could lay out in one word, just like that. This is what I agree with, this is what I reject when it comes to Sartre, what I reject or agree with when it comes to the structuralists. Precisely because I am too close to those pyramids. It is true that in my work Sartre was very important, in the beginning. When I was a student, he was already there, and it’s by reading Sartre that, in a certain way, I began to get into the field of philosophy and literature. For this reason, it would be absurd for me to try to


absolutely distance myself from Sartre. That being said, quite quickly I thought it clear that Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger. And so since then I have never ceased, in a certain way, to see better into all of that. [Lights up a cigar.] FT: But do you mean that from the point of view of the legitimacy of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s thought, for instance, or of a critique of the reading offered by Sartre of Husserl or Heidegger? JD: Yes, I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader. And from that point of view, it turns out that the work done by him in France was very ambiguous. I am not saying that it was simply negative, but he and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. This is not to say that it was simply a question of finding our way back into Husserlian and Heideggerian orthodoxy against Sartre. Not at all. But I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. The point is not here to issue some condemnation; since that’s how it happened, it couldn’t have happened otherwise, in those conditions and in a certain number of historical conditions. But it is a fact that Sartre’s thought obscured in quite a powerful way what was happening elsewhere in German philosophy, even in the philosophy that he himself pretended to be introducing in France. To say nothing of Marx and to say nothing of Freud and to say nothing of Nietzsche, whom he, in a way, never really read. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted. And so, from that point of view, we have to deal with a huge sedimentation of thought, a huge philosophical sediment that covered the French scene for quite a few years after the war and that, I think, has marked everyone from that generation. I would say that there was a lot of dissimulation, and subsequently it has been necessary to undo this sedimentation in order to find again what was dissimulated by it, in a way. But, in the end, I don’t want to take it all out on Sartre now and say that he as an individual is re-

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sponsible for this obscuring. If this obscuring has taken place it is due to a great number of conditions: the French tradition of thought, the state of the French university, the ideological scene in Paris, the political scene in the postwar period. OK, all of that is worthy of an analysis that would not be limited to Sartre as an individual. I would not want to privilege— not even in a critique—the case of Sartre. An analysis would have to be undertaken that would run, again, through very complex historical and political networks, right? Through, evidently, once again, what the French university was like. But Sartre is still, I would say, on this point, even though he left the university quite early and, until today, is very deeply marked, more than some professional academics, by the university, by this very building, by the rhetoric, by the display of the dissertation, of the lesson, in his writing. For this reason his writing, for instance (I haven’t read the text on Calder, but I have read others), is still, in spite of his agility, his talent, and his resources, marked by a French university rhetoric against which he has never really busied himself, whatever his position against the university might have been. That doesn’t change anything. I think that, for example, “Cartouches” is more of a rupture with respect to this rhetoric—even though I, me, personally [smiles], am inside the university to a greater degree than Sartre—let’s say, more of a rupture against that kind of writing than that of Sartre’s. But [lights his cigar again] there is much more to say, and I feel myself, no doubt, to be simplifying things too much here on these questions. It’s hard for me to respond so quickly to questions that are this important and so general in nature. To speak of the differences between Sartre on Calder and this text about “Cartouches,” it would be necessary to unfold a very, very long analysis that I can’t improvise just like that. It’s very hard. BM: I don’t quite know if it’s possible to ask questions. But in any case we can definitely talk. I would like you to talk about your name. I mean, you have already written about the body of the name, and indeed in your writings words have a body. This is not a metaphor. It’s a physical reality. And, so, I would like you to untie for us—in case we were to find here the knots of a certain piece of string—your name. First, though, a parenthesis: in a note in Spurs you write about the etymology of étron, you refer to a writer, a poet. This passage is kind of, let’s say . . . JD: Cryptic. BM: . . . written with a nonchalance, excuse me . . . JD: A little cryptic. BM: Yes, cryptic. I mean that the connection is not clear between this gentleman whom you do not name and the inquiry into the word étron,


stronzo. This passage, this ellipsis, this reserve, was this on purpose? I mean, is there an allusion in there to the name of the writer? JD: Yes. Well, here, it’s easier for me to answer because I can do so briefly. There is a very elliptical connection between, let’s say, the place where the note is inserted and the note itself, and in the note between what regards étron and what follows it. So I will give you the key to this passage, if you want. The note, then, concerns étron, which is to say the excrement that is cut off from the body. At that moment I quote Littre´. What association comes about at that point? I say: “There is place here for some additional graffiti.”3 BM: Yes, yes. True. JD: This sentence means: “We are in the shithole, we are in the place where we shit, and where, in general, we write graffiti.” That’s how the scene is set. We are in a place in which we are able to add some graffiti on the topic of excrements. In the shithole I deal with two excrements. And so that regards precisely the one whom I call “the profuse poetitian.” “Profuse” meaning, well, “he who shits profusely,” and the abundant poetitian is one who has reproached me for quoting Littre´ too often and who takes himself to be really crafty when he says, in effect: “If he quotes Littre´ it’s because he is not scientific. He refers to a lexicological tool dating from nineteenth-century historical linguistics, and he thinks that it’s enough to go and look up the etymology, and even bad etymologies, to find the meaning of a word.” Which was doubly idiotic on his part: first because I have criticized etymologism before he has and then because when I quote Littre´ it is not, by any means, in order to look for the meaning of a word, the true meaning of a word. And because I myself have criticized Littre´ and said that I don’t expect Littre´ to provide any knowl3. Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, 1978), p. 163 n. 21: “There is place here for some additional graffiti. . . . There are still those overzealous poetitians who would like to prohibit such play. They are especially upbraiding in their concern for Littre´.” Consider also this passage from “Cartouches”: Cut, for the moment, in other words truncated, entirely truncated. In short, a turd, in a series, in a rationed contingent, a piece, a bit [mors] cut (from stronzare or from strunzen) and well formed, a “solid and well-formed [piece of] fecal matter,” says Littre´, who adds for our benefit since we’ll be taking interest again in the scrolls known as cartouches: “little cone which children make from gunpowder dampened and made into a paste, and which they light at the summit.” The armament, then, in this contingent of a funereal parade, in this expedition, That’s what remains to be seen: fire. The armament, what words— 9 December 1977. A turd one would like to make one’s own [s’appropier], without ever managing to do so, which one would like to take back into oneself until the end, until exhaustion. The until (death ensues) is interminable, the termination of the analysis is apparently contingent. [TP, pp. 202–3]

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edge. So this was just the right place to quote Littre´ on the topic of étron and to quote it in order to do something, not to say the truth about the étron, about the word étron, right? At the point at which I quoted Littre´, I thought it important, I thought that it was the right moment to remind this profuse poetitian that when I quote Littre´ I am not looking to do etymologism, or bad etymologies, and that I had criticized before he had the linguistics of the word, right? So I wanted to respond to this profuse poetitian, who is in effect a poetitian. I call him a poetitian because he works with the title Poe´tique. He’s someone, not to keep it from you, called Me´schonic. Each year he writes a volume called Poe´tique, at least for the last two years, and he suffers precisely from logorrhea, from diarrhea, from some kind of dyspepsia. And so I had, in passing, just like that, to respond to him. He’s one of the two interlocutors who deserve no more than a response in a note in this spot where some supplementary graffiti can be added. The second is someone who, as I say in the note, has allowed to drop from a raised chair—which is to say an official seat— a kind of excrement. He has allowed to drop, from a raised chair, a conviction of the type: “Everything that has been written about writing in the last ten years will be judged severely by history.” It’s a pedagogue’s maxim, in a way, raised by him from a raised chair. And he has written— thinking of me, among others of course, but me above all, I think—that what has been written about writing will be severely judged: police, tribunal, school, and so forth. And the eminent chair, in this case, is that of the Colle`ge de France, and the guy who says that is Foucault. You were asking me about the structuralists. Here is a response now through a detour—there are others, no doubt—in a note. BM: Going from the shithole to the beauty parlor, I have looked for some suggestions with regard to your name in a little Larousse from the last century and I found de´rider: quitter les rides, “to remove wrinkles.” JD: It means “to make someone laugh,” de´rider. BM: But there is more. [Reading aloud from a notebook:] “To remove wrinkles; to render less serious, to enliven.” There is the wrinkle, the fold, and then your writing, which refers to a way of laughing as if not laughing and to making jokes. It is clear that you have fun when you are writing.4 And the notion of the fold is important, of the abolition of some kind 4. I’m having a great time, I will have had such a great time, but it costs a crazy price, That’s at least what they would like to tell themselves about me, hoping for the crazy price, precisely, over the top, the bad calculation at a loss, and I reply that I don’t know, I’m one of those smokers who now carry their ashtray on them, no one knows where and when they empty it, and this nonknowledge is the only interesting thing, the best condition for having a great time like a lunatic. [Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Bennington (Chicago, 1993), p. 141]


of fold. In any case, this morning I came upon something that may state briefly what I could only say through many, many words. [Pulls out from his bag a crystal box containing an ointment. Reads from the label:] “Bio-Cilvie. Eye contour area. Collagen. Placenta extract. Floral waters.” And on the other side: “Gel. Eye contour area. For the prevention and treatment of: wrinkles, fine wrinkles, crow’s-feet, circles under the eyes, baggy eyes, swollen and withered eyelids, exhaustion” (fig. 1). Really, today, I am completely exhausted, and I would really like, let’s say, to unfold my wrinkles, me de´rider. f i g u r e 1. And also to laugh those wrinkles out, de´-rire des rides. So, in a way, I would like to get some kind of rest by reading: “In the evening, after removing your make-up, or in the morning, before the make-up, apply the gel in light strokes [par touches le´ge`res]around your eyes.” It’s a mark, a cartouche. And the movement described is a kind of prendere in giro, a way of amusing and a way of making fun of what is at the center, of the eyes above all, which see things clearly. FT: Of enveloping. BM: Of enveloping. And by strokes, par touches le´ge`res, by beating briefly “around the eyes, tapping softly in order to facilitate penetration.” It’s a sealed box, and one could remove its seals, which is to say re´signer, and have a taste. At any rate, if you would like to have a direct experience. [He hands the box to JD, who examines it.] JD: Yes, this is very much related to “Cartouches.” I don’t know how you are going to translate what you have just said, since what we are saying now should eventually be published in your own language. This interests me greatly, the form of the interview, the situation of the interview, the scene of the interview. But we are smiling while that’s being spoken, in a language that we know will have to be translated, with all the problems, all of the contracts of translation, the passages from one language to the other, in the language of the other. And for a long time I have been greatly

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interested in this problem of the other’s language. Not only in the problem of translation but in the problem of the contract, of the engagement in the other’s language. How do I and what is it that happens when I engage myself in the other’s language? If I say yes, for example, in the other’s language. Oh, well, I’m closing this parenthesis. FT: I don’t know if . . . excuse me, Bruno, if I too can make a detour. JD: It’s no problem; we will make nothing but detours. FT: I mean, you are posing the problem of the other. For instance, the thought of Le´vinas is, precisely, posing the problem of the other, no? JD: Ah, yes. FT: Le´vinas critiques—in an article published in L’Arc—your thought, if you will, posing precisely the problem of the other. You too pose the problem of the other, for example, as you have done just now. JD: Yes, in that article, but the critique is not that central. It regards, in any case, the other. It’s a hard question to engage in now. FT: We can leave the Le´vinas question for now. JD: Yes, let’s wait. Well, then yes, in particular because it’s a box, that is very much related to “Cartouches,” and it can be opened. Evidently, if I were to connect the word gel, which interests you particularly, to “Cartouches,” I would go through the association of gel to glas. You know that in Glas there is a concern for the word gel and for gel itself, for the letters g and l, and at the beginning there is even the question of Hegel’s name, as it is pronounced by some people in French, with a palatal g. And there is a whole sequence where I discuss Hegel’s name in order to understand it or hear it [l’entendre] pronounced that way, with the philosopher caught in ice [glace] and gel. And what led you to this Bio-Cilvie was the question of my name and of what you call the body of my name, as it is apparently related, according to the dictionary and to the regular functioning of the French language, to the verb de´rider, to remove wrinkles by making someone laugh. This was evidently an occasion for a pun regarding my name; when I was a child people would call me Il De´rida. But I have never been convinced by this connection. To begin with my name is not a French name, and it doesn’t sound like a French name. Consequently I find it hard to hear it functioning as a word in the French language. For me it’s like a foreign body—you were raising the question of the body—with respect to the French language, which I speak. On the other hand, I think that it is careless to try to deduce the effects of a proper name, of the body of a proper name, from its occasional behavior within the language. I think those effects run through networks that are much more complicated. Of course I have a great interest in what you call the


body of my name. I still haven’t come to an understanding of that body. For me, it is something very opaque; it interests me and fascinates me, by no means because of a kind of narcissism, as one might think. At bottom I think that the relationship that one has to the body of one’s name is, in effect, something decisive, more or less important according to the name or the person, but always important. For my part, even though I have done some amount of work on the body of this name, by putting it into play in my writing, cutting it up, decomposing it, recomposing it, trying to understand what happens to it, I have remained in what is for me a preliminary and insufficient stage of the work. And all of those semantic lines that you have brought up seem to me at once possible and insufficient lines of explanation, since I live out this relationship to the body of my name, as others do. I think that when either I or another hears or even reads that name in silence the relation to the verb de´rider is not a part of the affect. There is something else. I ask you what that may be; I don’t know. BM: In Spanish what we get is fusion: I have referred to you as El Derretido. Derretir means to melt. It’s a way to gather some of the waters of this name back from dissemination, which we should do because it has melted. JD: Just so, since you speak of dissemination, I think that my proper name doesn’t manage to gather itself back, to reassemble itself completely. It’s always made out of several elements, several bits if you like. First of all there is the patronymic, Derrida, inscribed in a genealogy, and then there is the surname that classes one within and with respect to that genealogy. And that already makes an articulation of several elements that can always get broken up into bits that produce multiple effects and that cannot be brought back together. I think that to the extent that a proper name can always and necessarily be articulated into several bits, it cannot be reassembled in the unity of a single utterance or word. And that is the origin of suffering, of the inability to bring oneself back together, of the dismemberment, of the difference and differences of the proper name. FT: I think we should run through the Le´vinas situation again, precisely. For example, he asks: to say, exclusively, what one’s presence to oneself is like, positively, isn’t that, in the end, a way of returning to presence, which brings with it the possibility of confusion? I mean to say that he poses a difficulty, if you like, that I think is very much in evidence when one is reading your writing. You attempt to deconstruct presence, logocentrism, but, precisely, in order to deconstruct logocentrism you

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need to make use of the thought and the language of logocentrism. I mean that there is a difficulty at the foundation of your work. JD: Yes, but the difficulty is not in my work. It’s [smiles] come upon by my work, right? The difficulty, as I have said somewhere, is not just a difficulty proper to my work. It’s a difficulty that cannot be gotten around by anybody and that is based on the fact that, whenever we attempt to analyze, whether deconstructively or otherwise, whenever we attempt to analyze a historical and discursive set—like Western philosophy, to take a huge example, or Western culture—we cannot, we have no absolute metalinguistic overhang that would allow us, from the outside, to understand the set without utilizing elements taken from the set. Consequently, if we have no access to this position of metalinguistic overhang, we are forced to borrow from the deconstructed corpus, if you like, the instruments for its deconstruction. It’s the origin of a difficulty that cannot be treated but strategically, through strategic procedures. Not all of the instruments are equally useful. All of the instruments that I borrow are not equally useful no matter what the moment, no matter what the task. So it is necessary to pick out the instruments that are the most efficacious; they must be utilized in such and such a way, right? Having understood that logocentrism is not a closed, homogeneous set, that it is a heterogeneous set, full of contradictions, and that—taking this heterogeneity of terms into account, as well as these discontinuities—I can try to set my strategy by borrowing instruments from it—I am using the word instrument here even though it is not quite rigorous—borrowing instruments from it in order to turn them against it, one might say, in the deconstruction. And so I am quite conscious of the difficulty. It’s a difficulty to be found at each instant, a difficulty that we find at each word, and each of the words that we use in that situation is an example of that difficulty, right? But, one more time, I am not the first to come upon it. All of those who have worked in a critical or deconstructive way will find their way to it. Le´vinas himself has come upon similar difficulties. He is often forced to use—he acknowledges it—words, such as the Greek logos, in order to give us an opening into something that is not simply Greek, to use language—economy, the economy of the same, dialectics, and so on—in order to open into a thought that is no longer economic, dialectic, a thought of the other. Thus, there is here a need for permanent, strategic negotiation. FT: With regard to strategy, could you sketch out your opinion about a change in your strategy? Or are there several strategies in the progress of your writing, in the history of your thought, starting from Husserl’s Origin of Geometry and up to Glas or “Cartouches”? Because one could say,


in a schematic way, that there is a certain change in the writing structure, starting in 1972, with “La Double Seánce,” with “La Disse´mination,” maybe.5 JD: For sure. A strategy is always in transformation, for several reasons. I would say for two essential reasons: the first is that a strategy needs to take into account the accumulation of its own effects. It’s clear that a writing strategy, as it advances, has, in a way, to take into account, by anticipation, the work that has already been done, a body that has already been instituted, right? Even if one is destroying bodies other bodies are getting reconstituted, and one must, because of this accumulation, transform the strategy. It’s clear that when I wrote “Cartouches,” in a way, even though this text is, to a certain degree, readable by someone who has not read some other texts—Genet, Freud, even Glas, and so on— nevertheless this text is more readable for someone who has been able to accumulate its implicit references. And so the writing strategy is modified according to the pace of this accumulation. But on the other hand a strategy is always in transformation because the strategy that I am talking about here is not one that follows a continuous line, determined by a telos fixed in advance. It’s a strategy without an aim, as I say somewhere, a strategy that takes the differences of the network into account—of the networks in which it finds itself caught. And, consequently, it’s essentially plural and differentiated. Obviously, I cannot employ the same strategy reading a text of Husserl’s and a text of Genet’s or when I am working on the question of the institution of the university, on university politics, right? So, here, each time the strategy has to be different, has to pluralize itself, to adapt itself as well to the transformation of the field, because it is clear that I am not, me, an individual placed in a single spot, immobile on the field, a field that also remains immobile. When I was writing in 1962 the situation of the French scene was completely different. Now we are in 1978. In the meantime the transformation within this scene has had unquestionable effects on me. Inversely, I have been able, me too, to transform certain elements of the scene. And consequently the writing strategy is always essentially in transformation. True, you were right to say that around 1972, possibly, there was a somewhat sharper transformation in my way of writing. Let’s say that there are rhythms in the transformations of a strategy. There are no cuts; I don’t believe too much in cuts and discontinuity. I think that there is, in a certain way, a great con5. See Derrida, “La Double Seánce,” Tel Quel 41/42 (Spring/Summer 1970): 3–41, 3–45 and “La Disse´mination,” Critique 261/262 (Feb./Mar. 1969): 99–139, 215–49. Later versions of both essays appear in Derrida, La Disse´mination (Paris, 1979); trans. Barbara Johnson under the title Dissemination (Chicago, 1981).

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tinuity in general, and in what I write in particular there is a great continuity. It is not incompatible with transformations, jumps, ruptures— how to put it—accelerations—well—differences in rhythm. I was speaking about rhythm here rather than about cuts, right? The relationship to language is transformed, and it is a fact that—in particular when one is publishing, when one is writing—one also has to negotiate with the virtual body of readers. For me, an imaginary body of readers. There is a relationship with a background of readers. How this body is constituted is something very complicated, and, well, I won’t carry out an analysis here. But it is clear that as I continue to publish I am able at least to imagine that the reader who is following me is in transformation, the relationship to my text is in transformation, there is a memory, at least virtual, of what I may have written before, and the effects of which I can calculate otherwise, right? Let’s say that I can count on that. But these calculations are often false, only true in a very partial way. But, oh well, let’s say that an economy takes place. I tell myself, OK, I’m taking into account the preceding stages. I insist on how presumptuous and economizing these calculations can be, as if I wanted to constitute my archive even further, right? As if I said: OK, I can count on everybody having read [smiles] or on my readers having read everything that came before. It’s a very unpleasant gesture, I find it very unpleasant, and I would say that I don’t operate in this way, that I don’t make this calculation deliberately. But it’s impossible not to operate like this. Even for me, I have no desire to start writing again what I have already written, even I who, in this relationship of simultaneous memory and amnesia that I have with my own history, can’t write the same things in the same way, right? Nor say the same things in the same way, as I advance. Thus, there is a relationship of explanation, like that with myself and with my reader, and it transforms the strategy, when there is a chance to, of course. [Lights the cigar again.] FT: But certainly within this perpetual change of strategy, if you like, there, in the phase following, in 1972, to set a date, there is a kind of primacy of the ratio of the text. Well, what does that mean? What is the strategy on which that is grounded? JD: The theoretical premises of this rupture, of this breach, were laid out beforehand. I had already explained in a fairly classical way, and according to a fairly traditional pedagogy, why it was necessary to break or why one is always breaking with the linear character of the text, with the linearity of the margin, with the order of the book, and so on. Good. I had explained that in a relatively traditional theoretical way, trying to make this understood. Good. If I hadn’t started with this illusion of a wisdom


that somehow was more in line with academic norms of reception or legitimation, I wouldn’t have been heard or read at all. I’m not saying that I have been read that much, though. Let’s say that books like The Origin of Geometry or Of Grammatology have been, relatively speaking, well received, right? And have done a little to convince a certain number of people about the necessity of a certain number of things. It was only after this that, in a very logical way, I myself had to attempt to write in another way. If I had started out by writing, for example, in the style of Glas, which—and, well, clearly—additionally, has not been well received, let’s say, but, anyway, my writing wouldn’t even have had that slight of a welcome if I had started out this way. I wouldn’t even have gotten published. I think an editor wouldn’t have published that book, if previously I hadn’t—by a strategic ruse, precisely—worked at accomplishing some kind of credit or legitimacy, by negotiating with the norms of publishing, the dominant norms of publishing, which is to say by writing relatively legible books, which the editors were able to publish and could be reviewed, and so on. So it is necessary to ceaselessly use one’s cunning to deal with the dominant normativity so that—once a certain reception, a certain legitimation has taken place—one can attempt to deconstruct those norms, right? Without which you wouldn’t even be heard. And if this is not done you will lose what little efficacy you may have. I don’t have any great illusions as to the efficacy of what I write. But I think that it would be even smaller if I hadn’t undertaken that path, which meant going from a kind of writing that complied with the norms a little more, let’s say, with the dominant norms, to a kind of writing that was less respectful of these dominant norms. And that is a calculation. It wouldn’t be fair to say that I made this calculation deliberately in advance. But, still, it took place as I went along. I was able, from one text to another, to take some more risks in transgressing these dominant norms, these majority programs, so to speak. And, even so, it’s still hard, it doesn’t get through too well. It gets through very, very little, very slowly. FT: But this is also something that one could encounter on the other side. I mean, on this account I agree with you: there is a great continuity in your thought. You are attempting to deconstruct that which can be thematized and that which cannot be thematized at the same time, and you find yourself before a difficulty that is even greater than the difficulty that you pointed out in a very general sense. Because, if you like, it’s a way of heading in the direction of silence. Could one say that about your thought? What is the primacy of silence with respect to the primacy of the text? JD: There is no text without silence.

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FT: Right. JD: A text is not a full utterance. Consequently, even texts that are apparently linear and continuous are filled with silence. They work with difference, moreover, with silence. Which means that silence is not at the end. Silence comes and grinds the text. That being said, to say that all of this is heading toward a final silence [laughs], of that I am not totally convinced. In that silence, what resonates from a certain text, mine for example, is no big deal. Essentially it’s just a little skirmish. Finite, really, really finite. FT: And then there’s something else. I’m going to talk about dates. For example, 1968. I think that, in France, the most important date is 1968. And how could one situate your thought with respect to everything that May of ’68 signifies? JD: Do you know that in Margins of Philosophy, which was published in 1972—it’s a collection of texts—there is one text that is dated May of ’68? And which speaks quite explicitly about what is happening in May of ’68. The text is called “Les Fins de l’homme.”6 What I published in 1972 doesn’t date from 1972. It’s a collection of texts written mostly between 1967 and 1972. So, I don’t think that a link of cause and effect can be established just like that between May of ’68 and the transformation in my writing. If there is a transformation. I think that, even if we assume, which would be something completely random and absurd and meaningless, that there was a history without May of ’68, in my little history, it is likely—if I may say so, statistically, or anyway probabilistically—that many of the transformations that ensued would have come about in my writing. In this microphenomenon that is my little text, I think that things would have led toward, let’s say, toward “Parergon,” toward Glas. That being said, it is also very likely that this was all accentuated and inflected by the transformations in the French situation that are associated with May of ’68. Certainly. The analysis is hard to carry through, very hard to carry through, but I can say a priori—this I think can be said a priori without the risk of going wrong—that there is a connection, that there are connections. Which one, which ones, it’s hard to tell. I don’t know, if you want us to talk about May of ’68, it’s hard. We wouldn’t get much out of it. 6. The writing of this text . . . I date quite precisely from the month of April 1968: it will be recalled that these were the weeks of the reopening of the Vietnam peace talks and of the assassination of Martin Luther King. A bit later, when I was typing this text, the universities of Paris were invaded by forces of order—and for the first time at the demand of a rector—and then reoccupied by the students in the upheaval you are familiar with. This historical and political horizon would call for a long analysis. I have simply found it necessary to mark, date, and make known to you the historical circumstances in which I prepared this communication. [Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p. 114]


FT: No, I think that’s enough. JD: I think there are connections, for sure. But I have . . . FT: Well, on the surface, if May of ’68 is, if you will, the breakthrough of the word in general, of those who, precisely, did not speak—the people, the proletariat, and so forth—and then, after May of ’68, it’s, precisely, silence. In a certain way it’s silence again, which is to say normality, starting over again. On the surface one could say that there has been a great change in the strategy of Derrida’s thought, which starts over again in a kind of primacy of silence. JD: No, I would say that things are not that way at all. FT: Why so? JD: Not at all. I would be very suspicious of this schema according to which, for instance, May of ’68 is the explosion of the word, and above all of the word that some of my texts against logocentrism put into question. I don’t think that is the way things happened at all. Now, if we wanted to establish some differences and be a little subtle, then we should take the following precaution: May of ’68 was not simply speaking the breakthrough of the word. There were, indeed, instances in which the word was seized; there were apparently spontaneous revindications of this right to seize the word, and so on. But it was not, simply speaking, the living word [smiles] against the oppressing structures. It’s more complicated than that. This word that was in revolt at that time, in revolt also against those who, in the order of metaphysics, of logocentrism had established these oppressive structures, well, we can also say that it was an insurrection of writing. That can be said. I could, if you gave me enough time, show you that it was an insurrection of writing. Not just because people started writing all over the place, not just in books and official journals, but in the papers, in the streets, and on the walls. So there was also a flow of writing. Graffiti, and so on. For this reason I think that it would be a simplification to say that the word was seized against everything else in May of ’68. I think that May of ’68 was important because, in my eyes at any rate a certain number of norms and structures were shaken, which were, as I could show, those against which I try to work on my own scale, in my own measure. I mean that there were also, in May of ’68—because every phenomenon is always complete and overdetermined—metaphysical comebacks, regressions, in the discourse. At the very moment when we are getting rid of something we also fall back into precritical ways, and there were things of that kind in ’68, precritical things. Phenomena, well, ideological regressions, those happen all the time. So, to speak of what happened at that time, we would have to conduct a very sharp analysis. But in any case I don’t think that we could say the word came back at that time and afterwards died out.

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FT: It’s more complicated. JD: Yes. And my relationship to the whole thing is also definitely more complicated. [Lights his cigar again.] BM: I’m going to say that this body of the revenant, what remains, what cannot be gathered back, and this thought of the remains, it could also be defined as a thought of superstition. I noticed in the text that is illustrated by “Cartouches” certain references to the charm, to the throw of luck,7 to something that awakens envy. The zelo¯typos is the one who is jealous, like the spectator of Titus-Carmel’s paintings, of all paintings maybe. You speak of the spectator precisely as someone who is jealous. “Jealous unto madness.”8 And, well, that is a way of rendering someone, let’s say, unhappy, of putting someone under a spell. You yourself, you are fascinated by these two beakless fledglings,9 and you, if I am not mistaken—although I wish I were, I mean I wish I would trip and fall on 7. (“O: encircle, surround. Nucleus of resistance. Maneuvre aimed at breaking the charm [magic circle]”). Etc. I break off immediately discourse called up by this “charm,” by this word, and by this whole seduction of the dead in the name of Titus-Carmel. I move from there to the cords (laces, bonds, tresses, ties, strings, threads) which multiply, dance, and sometimes rear up like the snakes above the Medusa’s head . . . . Unclassifiable. No burial without a classificatory arrangement, without an ordered series, without tabulation. Otherwise it’s just a mass grave. The coffin circulates, cursor and ruptor, hyphen between the cemetery and the communal burial pit. Class is not lacking, That’s the least one can say, it is at work (order, series, lineage, chronology, taxonomy, rank, row, arrangement, with and without hierarchy). But what no longer comes under class [n’en rele`ve plus] and what it will never recover from [dont elle ne se rele`ve plus], is perhaps fate [le sort]. The fate it suffers, the fate cast upon it, the fate cast of it. [TP, pp. 242, 246] 8. The little one (paradigm) will have been built like a crypt, so as jealously to keep its secret at the moment of greatest exhibition. Jealously, because everything here has, it seems to me, to do with envy and excess zeal. For if it is offered to all contacts, to all touches, at least before its purchase by a Center acting here on authority, a national funeral company [entreprise de Pompes Fune`bres nationales] for funerals of the same name, it remains obstinately and, as they say, hermetically closed, recalling those little portable temples the Greeks called hermes. It is mute, closed beneath its altuglassed transparency. Private domain, capable of driving the attendant voyeur mad with jealousy, through these regular, more or less straight, lines— [TP, pp. 195–96] 9. To take on the waste product, such had been the contract by which Titus-Carmel had dealings with himself. He had decided to keep all the year’s “drawings,” even the least good. At the anniversary’s turn, having reached the 127th version, he had, however, destroyed two of them, to which I shall return later . . . . Those two fascinate me. Excluded or destroyed, they leave the trace of an interruption in the contract he had wanted to make with himself. . . . In what I’m calling his cartouche, he describes them in passing as “two gray, beakless fledglings.” [TP, pp. 201, 209, 210]


this scruple, this scrupus, and, if necessary, to remain there, too—but I think that you have literally stolen the coffin. From the title onward you illustrate, you put yourself on the side of the painter, you make illustrations, too. And it’s not just a painting. It’s a painting bearing on the title, the specification “illustrated by,” but it is also the title itself that encloses your signature. You give away your own plans. Maybe the word is too strong; this is not a crime. Although it is crime, an invisible crime. It can’t be reported, precisely, but if I were Titus-Carmel I would be jealous unto madness of what you wrote about my paintings. JD: I hope so. BM: But, now, the one that makes you jealous unto madness, the thing that makes you invidus—because invidus has both an active and a passive sense—that’s the sorcerer. There is no way to get around this fact. Finally, the little coffin, what is it if not a magical device? So it’s true, what I suspected from the first moment and also from the last is true: you are a magic maker. But this kind of magic never leaves reason, that it is not madness. It’s a way to operate, a way to get the body and the mind to function. I would like you to talk about that, precisely. JD: I’m jealous of you for being able to say much better than me what I would like to say now. [Laughs.] To begin with, justice must be made to Titus-Carmel. He has said that the coffin is a kind of amulet; he compared it to shamanic objects and so on. In a certain way he himself has already registered his coffin, from the start, in the space of magic and superstition. That being said, it is true that my operation, under the title “Cartouches,” is, as I have explained elsewhere, a theft. But it wasn’t enough just to say that there was a theft, to say that I was stealing, indeed, that I stole from him, in effect. You have to do as you say, it’s not enough just to say it. You have to do it. And I tried, in effect, to do it by saying it. I meant to do it in such a way that, as I explained, if Titus-Carmel were to proclaim himself as the owner of the coffin, he would immediately lose it and one wouldn’t be able, from now on, to see the coffin without me. And what if I am the thief in all the senses of the French word vol—in playing with the pickpocket’s theft, what is called le vol a` la tire, or with vol as in flying through the air, like missiles, birds, ballistics in general, and so on—and by my having signed also with the name of a thief, I mean Cartouche(s)? Cartouche is the name of a great thief from eighteenth-century France, right? So it’s a question of vol, theft and flight. But the structure of this theft has always interested me greatly, not just because I love to steal, because I am a thief, but because I think that the thief is not just someone who steals but someone who has to theorize theft and who has to turn the theory of theft into a theft. The theory of

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theft has to operate as a theft, too. I mean it has to be not just the appropriation of the other’s goods but the destruction of the norms of property. And what could one have that is more one’s own than one’s own name, one’s proper name? The theft par excellence is the theft of the proper name, the theft of the body, let’s say, of the cadaver, of the grave, of the signature, of everything that guards and keeps one. Not just the theft of something, but the theft of the guarding itself, of one’s guard, and the theft of one’s guard is the theft of the name, the theft of the thing that guards and keeps, of the grave, of the house. In this sense, indeed, “Cartouches” is a title for a theft, the theft of the theft. BM: Can I steal a cigar from you? JD: I’ll give it to you! [Smiles.] BM: [He takes a cigar from the pack on the desk.] To keep it [smiles] at the edge of my lips. Thanks. FT: [He takes a cigar.] Are these Algerian? JD: No, no. In spite of the name, they are . . . I don’t know where they’re from. [BM and FT light their cigars.] To make things quick, if you like, to find a transition between this topic of the theft that has always interested me: in “La Parole souffleé,” for example, about Artaud, the theme of the theft, of the Great Thief, Artaud too talks about the Great Thief.10 God, God is the Thief, God is the Great Thief for Artaud. In this case he steals—parole souffleé, “stolen word.” Souffler in French means to blow but also to steal. So theft is something that has always interested me. I could give you abundant proof of this, but it’s not worth it. I’m looking for a transition between theft and magic and then superstition. BM: Right. JD: What if we talk about superstition starting from the word superstition, which has something to do with the remains, with the supplement, with something that exceeds, something that therefore lacks. I am persuaded that, to give an account of phenomena such as those that are classified in the West under the name of superstition, we need a theory, if you will, of the rest, of the remains. Of the reste in all the senses of this French word: what does not allow itself to be counted in, what exceeds ratio, the count or the account. Superstition is that of which no account can be given in a rationality that attempts to erase the rest, the remains, or the revenant, the ghost, right? To treat it as something secondary. So I think that if there were no rest, there would be no magic, no superstition. Therefore, to take an interest in the rest, in the remains, is also to try, precisely, to give an account of phenomena like those of superstition, of 10. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 169–95.


magic. The thought of the rest or of the remains, then, you have seen how that gets written into “Cartouches.” Recently my texts, from Glas to “Cartouches,” if you like, have had—and this not by chance—the tendency to begin and end not just with the question of the rest or of the remains, but with the word reste: “quoi du reste . . . d’un Hegel,” at the beginning of Glas; “Cartouches” begins with “et ainsi du reste.” Clearly I am erasing the nominal and substantive strength of the rest by including it in a French syntax in which du reste is a banal expression, right? “Et quoi du reste,” “du reste”: this means sonst, in German, “by the way,” “on the other hand.” And at the same time the syntax plays in another direction by insisting on, by marking, by supermarking the expression reste—“et ainsi du reste sans preće´dant,” that gives the impression of a little phrase, right? Of a, well, an unfinished bite. And in fact that’s the title of the text; it means that the text is going to be about the rest, about what rests and remains, about the remains in a coffin, human remains, and so on, and will attempt to think about the rest in another way. And the last sentence in “Cartouches” is: “Et ainsi du reste, tout autrement.” “Et ainsi du reste” means “et cetera” in a way and, at the same time, “in this way, we have been talking about, we have been dealing with the rest, we have talked about the rest, we have dealt with the rest.” So, what I am trying to think, if you will, is what I call restance, the way of the rest, of the remains. A philosophical habit [smiles], this restance. Restance is something that cannot be thought philosophically as a modification of substance, as a substance. Generally, philosophers say: “Well, something that remains, the rest, is either the residual of an operation, of a calculation, or else it’s a permanent substance, right? It remains, which means that it’s a substance.” And, well, I try to think about the rest in a different way, precisely not as a simple residue that falls and has no effects, that falls at the end of an operation, a scrap, a residue that will not be taken into account from now on. I think that the rest or the remains have to be taken into account, but not in the form of a substance. Yes, the chain: substance, presence, permanence, essence, and so on. The rest is not a substance and, for this reason, the rest is not, in a way. We have to try to think about the rest away from the authority of being, of the verb to be and of everything that depends on it: essence, existence, substance, and so on. That means to think the rest otherwise or to think the rest as another, if you will. And I think that all these phenomena referred to as marginal, referred to as superstition, magic, sorcery, envy, jealousy, spell casting, and so on are related to this rest or remains that, in some way, exceed ontology, which exceed the thought of being, the thought of presence, the way of thinking that determines the rest either as a residue or

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as substance. And, naturally, it’s in Glas, in particular, that I have tried—more systematically than in briefer texts—to displace the thought of the rest. Not to displace it in order to produce a new thought, but to see what was hidden in there, for a very long time, or dissimulated, covered over, ref i g u r e 2. pressed—with respect to the rest. [Lights his cigar again.] BM: And this restance is also a resistance. JD: Right. BM: I mean, there is belligerence there. And, I have in my pocket . . . [BM stretches his right leg, his right hand in his pocket.] JD: He’s got it all in his pocket! [Laughs with FT and BM.] FT: Well, we are talking about magic . . . BM: It’s just chance. JD: We could call this “The Pocket-Size Interview.” BM: [He displays a white plastic cylinder.] It’s a little cartridge, milky white (fig. 2). This is not improvised. [He hands JD the cartridge; JD examines it.] I’d thought about it. JD: [The cartridge in his hand] You improvise nothing. BM: I think that you can’t really improvise anything. You know, the distinction between calculation and improvisation is entirely metaphysical. JD: Entirely impertinent. BM: Impertinent, right. And maybe in this sandy desert close to Noisy sur Ećole, I picked up this little cartridge; it’s a shell from a salvo.11 JD: Salvo: that’s a word that I find very interesting. BM: Oh yeah? JD: I regret . . . I’m going to interrupt you for a moment. I request permission to speak. I regret not having used the French word salve in “Cartouches.” It’s a missing word. Why is that? Because elsewhere I’ve taken

11. Consider, from “Cartouches”: Armament. The art of ballistics. The cartridge. The tracer bullet. I had noted above: He “ejects the paradigm.” Yes, like an empty cartridge, its case or, in free and slightly oblique fall, the first stage of a rocket (ground-ground or ground-air): it falls along the trajectory of a flight the film of which (negatives, colors, x-rays, etc.) it brings back with it. Or again: beforehand, it would have projected itself, into the air, catapulted through stacked stages, like the rocket of a female orgasm. The launching paradigm stays on the ground, on the pad. [TP, p. 230]


an interest in the word sauf, which is a very interesting word in French, because it functions as an adverb—you can say: “Ceci, ceci, sauf cela,” “this, this, and then that”—meaning the rest, the exception, what is in excess, and so on, and then, at the same time, it means something that is saved, in a way, something that is set apart. And the word sauf shows up in “Cartouches” around the question of the two fledglings that are sauf, which is to say that they are at the same time excluded, right? Not the two fledglings, rather there are two drawings, which were destroyed by Titus-Carmel, and I put those in relation to the two fledglings. They are saufs. This means that, on the one hand, he has excluded them, set them apart, and at the same time he has saved them, right? For this reason the word sauf has interested me greatly; there’s a lot to be said about it. And salvo is related to it because we have in French salvage, salut, salvation, salutation, and so on. A salvo, salve in French, is a series of blasts, cannon blasts, right? Like fireworks, used to salute. And so in salvo we find, concentrated, at the same time the idea of the multiple missile, which is at the center of “Cartouches,” and the ideas of salvation and salutation, and of fireworks, and so on. What is it that we want to save and to salute by means of a salvo? Which is to say a series of bullets, rocket shells, missiles. What is it that we want to save and salute? [Lights the cigar again.] BM: I was thinking about douille, meaning “cartridge,” and also about douillet, which is a weak person. I was also thinking about douillette;that’s what you call a kind of coat for women, quilted; by chance I fell upon the padding that Marcel Proust used around his neck, and I have to confess that all that stuff made me fall into the remains of a decapitation, let’s say a padded decapitation.13 But could we say about the resistance 12

12. Before coldly ditching this numerological thrust, I notice this: he destroyed two drawings. He told me so . . . . Those two fascinate me. . . . He seems then to have recognized that not all waste is of equal value. We can say of the two banished drawings that he has not kept them, certainly, thus consigning them to a nameless and tombless loss; but also that in losing them in order to save [pour sauver] the series . . . he saved them [les a sauve´s] from disaster or from funeral rites, from the communal grave [fosse] or the sinister exhibition of the cenotaphs. Entire except for those two [Tout entier sauf ces deux-la`]. It’s the condition of the stillborn. Look closely at these coffins, there is something stillborn in this coffin’s (hi)story and perhaps in the coffin itself. First, the annihilation of the two little ones was not without remainder. He remembers and talks about it. . . . He has left them no tomb and no name but a date at least: born and dies between 20 and 21 (!) August. [TP, pp. 209–10] 13. It was perfectly true that sometimes a scrap of cotton wool [ouate] might find its way out of his collar and that his friends would smile and push it down again with a reproachful “Marcel!”

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of restance, about this strategy of magic, that appears harmless at first sight, almost imperceptible, that it is frail, that it is douillette? Or that there is as well, let’s say, a kind of political efficacy that cannot be thought within the frame of conventional weapons, of weapons of opposition? We are still used to thinking of weapons as things that put an adversary into place, that institute the adversary as such, instead of catching the adversary, of seducing, of intoxicating, even of enamoring the adversary. As a belligerence that has nothing to do with Venus. Could we say that the resistance of restance is a belligerence under Venus, one that is not about opposing but about captivating? That’s what I’m wondering. JD: Well, I think I can subscribe to everything that you have just said. Indeed, the whole thing has to do with belligerence. This whole writing of restance is agonistic and, in its own way, polemical, but it doesn’t simply practice but rather, even in its statements, is insistent on the fact that it is not a question of “opposition.” “Opposition” is a tool of ideological opposition, if I may say that [smiles], against which I have always been in battle. Difference is not opposition. Of course, I’m not in battle against opposition, that phrase just slipped out. BM: Right, right. JD: I’m not in battle against opposition, but rather, with respect to opposition itself, I practice this captivating belligerence, if you will—yes, this seductive belligerence that you have described so well, in an admirable trajectory of writing that I couldn’t attempt to reconstruct, starting from the cartridge that you pulled out of your pocket and up to the padded beheading, right? I won’t rephrase it; that’s your text and I don’t want to steal it from you. But . . . BM: But, no, it’s yours! You gave it to me. JD: . . . that being said—but you can—no, no, I don’t have it, you’ve taken it [mixed laughs]. BM: Ah, yes. I’m confusing it with the cigar at the edge of my lips. JD: [smiling] Yes. BM: At the edge of the lips. By the way, in slang, you say “j’ai le cigar au bord des levres” when you want to go take a shit. JD: Wow, you know slang much better than I do. You’ve been in France for just a few months but you’ve already put together . . . BM: I have friends. . . . On another occasion, he called for Marie Sheikevitch. “This evening,” he said, “I’m going to carry you off! If you like, we’ll go to Ciro’s . . . but please, you mustn’t catch cold. And whatever you do, don’t look at my collar, if you see some cotton wool sticking out it’s Ce´leste’s fault. She insisted on stuffing it in and I couldn’t stop her” [Andre´ Maurois, The World of Marcel Proust, trans. Moura Budberg and Barbara Creed (New York, 1974), pp. 101, 210–11]


JD: You have friends in the right places. Me, I don’t come upon expressions like those. Well, in any case, let’s say that I sign the text that you just wrote, going from the cartridge [the head of the cartridge rings as it falls on the desk] up to a belligerence that is, did you say, enamored? BM: Yes. JD: “Enamorada” or seductive.14 That’s it. That’s what it’s like. That is not to say that it’s going to succeed, either in war or in love. I don’t think that it is of necessity efficacious. In any case, it’s true that efficacy, if there is any, is not measured by the cannon [smiles] of a war of opposition. For instance, I know that, if it is efficacious, it will be so only in an exceptional way, in regards to a minority, over just a few people, and so on. Subsequently, well, it is possible that something is won in a register of a different intensity or quality, but I think that this seductive belligerence is not the most efficacious in the battlefield. But maybe my battle is not in the battlefield. [Lights his cigar again.] FT: But to deconstruct really is to battle. [Sniggers.] At any rate, that’s where we’re at. JD: Indeed, if you take deconstruction as a method, with its own logic, its tradition, its modalities of application, and so on, it can become something like that. And it is indeed becoming that. Thus, when it is received, it becomes that. I mean to say that I often see in France, for example— and in the United States as well—in particular—or, to be brief, in other countries—that deconstruction is talked about as if it were some kind of grand method, a new logic, a kind of logistics then, too, in the military sense. That, in my opinion, is taking it the wrong way. To begin with, when I made use of the word deconstruction for the first time, I couldn’t have imagined that all of this would come, that, above all, it was going to come back to get me, that this word of mine was going to get stretched out and made into an important word, into a method. I’ve used the word almost in passing, and, well, I wasn’t very lucid. I failed to realize that that was what people were going to read and take. And so, for me, there are several other things in my text that I find of greater interest. But this word has had a success that, to begin with, I find no explanation for, 14. Consider: My desire only goes so far as the invisible distance, immediately “grilled” between the languages, between cendre, cenere, ashes, cinders, cinis, Asche, cendrier (a whole phrase), Aschenbecher, ashtray, etc. and cineres, and above all the ceniza of Francisco Quevedo, his sonnets Al Vesubio, and “Yo soy ceniza que sobro´ a la llama; / nada dejo´ por consumir el fuego / que en amoroso incendio se derrama,” it disperses, and “sera´ ceniza, mas tendra´ sentido; / polvo serań, mas polvo enamorando.” [Derrida, Cinders, trans. and ed. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln, Nebr., 1991), pp. 73–75; trans. mod.]

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especially when it is fashioned into a method, a doctrine, a general procedure, and so on. What interests me, I would even say what has always interested me, is, in effect, much more marginal, quite foreign to this great battle, all lined up, with engineers or generals running around explaining to us how it is that we are going to set up our assault on the great fortress of metaphysics. That is not my style at all; that is not to my taste. From that point of view deconstruction is something of a size and a general character that I want to say I find really surprising. So I think that, if deconstruction involves war, I find it much more interesting as a war in your sense, as a nomadic war, if you will, a war consisting of small clandestine operations rather than a big war and battle in which the lines need to be drawn. [Lights his cigar again.] FT: You’ve talked about the other. I keep coming back to this because I’m always thinking about the context of what is, outside of this interview. And what relationship could be established with respect to the thought of Foucault, for instance, who tries—particularly in L’Histoire de la folie—to understand the other, or this other, the madman. JD: I’m not sure that it’s correct to say that Foucault has tried in his book— I’m not sure he himself would agree that he has tried in that book—to understand the other as madman. It’s not so much that he has tried to understand the other, but rather he has tried to analyze the way in which political institutions, and even philosophical or medical institutions, have dealt with the madman—abandoned by history, in what he calls “the classical age”—and, even more, have constituted the notion of madness, constructed the concept of madness, with respect, precisely, to these institutional, medical, police practices. It seems to me that Foucault, rather than attempting, as you say, to understand, to get into the soul of the madman, has tried to analyze the structures, the institutional and medical forms that have locked the madman away, locked him up both physically, bodily, and locked him up in his status, his lack of status, his definition. But I’m not sure that he would say that he was attempting to understand the madman as other. FT: Right. JD: Of course, the madman is also the other, the other of this society that excludes in order to establish its own identity, in a certain way, right? So there is a phenomenon of exclusion, a principle of exclusion. It’s always by excluding the other, by instituting the other as excluded, that one arrives at self-identification. In a certain way, a long sequence has taken place—which he calls “the classical age” according to his own criteria for periodization—during which the other would have been excluded as


madman, in a way, during which certain others would have been excluded as madmen. FT: In a certain way, we could say that Foucault has precisely deconstructed this exclusion of the madman that society is constantly enacting. Yes, he has deconstructed, if you like, the security of what is normal, I mean that he has reminded us that there is a madman, and this madman is not totally other, but is rather something implied by reason itself. He makes a kind of deconstruction. JD: Right, I don’t know if he would accept the word or the thing. He didn’t use the term. Is that a matter of chance? Because, evidently, deconstruction is not just a word. The word deconstruction is also a general strategy. Is this strategy at work in Foucault’s work, L’Histoire de la folie, and so on? He has done something that, as you have said, resembles deconstruction. FT: With Foucault’s work, in Latin America for instance, or particularly in Colombia, something happens that is similar to what you have said about deconstruction. Foucault’s texts are read as if they contained some kind of understanding of the madman [smiles]. I think that this kind of thing is inevitable for any textual production of a certain size. Where there is a lot of meaning, there is also, precisely, sedimentation. JD: You know, on this question I would like to tell you something, in order to be precise, namely, that Foucault had originally written a preface to the first edition of L’Histoire de la folie, and many of his formulations there could have been taken to mean that he was attempting, indeed, if not to understand the madman, at least to give word to the madman’s silence, to give the word over to this madman who was, by definition, deprived of the word by society, or who was perceived as silent. And, additionally, in the formulation that I quote in the article I devoted to him, it is a question, indeed, of a kind of restitution, of the madman’s word, deprived as he is of the word, reduced to silence or to screaming. He suppressed this preface in the following edition. FT: That’s interesting. JD: It’s open to interpretation. BM: A final question: Do you think that the belligerence we were talking about could have something to do with pity? I mean, is a practice of pity also at stake? JD: I’m not sure. If we refer to the usual meaning of the word pity, with all the possible discourses that could surround it, that have surrounded it, then I would say no. If I try to construct a discourse around pity, then, that could certainly be done, in referring to Nietzsche, to Rousseau

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[smiles]. If that’s the background for pity, then I would say that our quilted belligerence, to bring your word up again, is pitiless. But it is possible that the affect that binds me to those against whom I am making war, in this belligerence, this affect I would maybe call pity, if I was allowed to change the word around a little. Because there is, in spite of everything, a kind of compassion in this war of ours. It’s not pity. It’s a kind of compassion, a kind of fundamental affect with regard to my contemporaries, those who have lived, no doubt, alongside me in the same times. Well, then, I would regard us all as enemies engaged in pitiless combat, but I would always say, in spite of everything, in the end they have kept me company in these times. There is something there, there is a kind of solidarity, of community, beyond whatever belligerence there is. Even in a fight to the death, when all is said and done, we would have been together. There is an affect of that kind, and it says, “OK, and so we have been together in the same present time, in a way.” We have shared nothing except [sauf] the present time, except the time, if you will. And the fact of having been together in time or in space binds me with a kind of fundamental compassion, even to the worst of enemies. In the end, I know the real situation will always be a fight to the death, but anyway we are finite, right? At any rate it’s going to end up [laughs] badly, and, well, at least we would have been together. So I think I’m giving an inaccurate description of this feeling of fundamental compassion, but this is what binds me to all of those whom I call my contemporaries, by which I mean that I look at everything from a point of view—completely utopian in nature, by the way—from the perspective, then, of a utopia in which I see myself together with these people having had a task to complete, which we referred to as a war between us all together, Mitsein [smiling]. There’s no pity there. At that point the feeling is not one of pity or compassion. Given that we in the end were mortals together, we would, in the end, have had a single time. BM: In that sense, then, we could say that Artaud’s cruelty is also a compassion. JD: Yes, it implies compassion. There is no contradiction, in this sense, between cruelty and something like what I’m calling here, with a word that is not the right one, compassion. BM: Thank you.

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Critical Inquiry (The Late Derrida, 33:2)