Derrida and Disinterest (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

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Derrida and Disinterest

Sean Gaston

Continuum


Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Deconstruction and Democracy – A.J.P. Thomson Heidegger and the Place of Ethics – Michael Lewis


Sean Gaston

Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 # Sean Gaston 2005 First published 2005 Paperback edition published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0826478239 (HB) ISBN:0826491634 (PB) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by YHT Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents

Introduction: A Disinterest for Today

vii

1. The Ruins of Disinterest

1

2. A Harsh Transcendence

19

3. Disinterest and Sovereignty

32

4. The Spectres of Disinterest

43

5. The Interests of Reason

55

6. An Absolute Difference

69

7. Re-mettre en question

72

8. The Resistance of Anticipation

85

9. Une acce´le´ration affolante

92

10. la vie la mort, la mort la vie

109

Notes

126

Bibliography

153

Index

171

For Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Introduction

A DISINTEREST FOR TODAY Is there a place for disinterest in contemporary philosophy? Nietzsche signalled the end of a tradition of disinterest that had begun with Descartes when he announced that nothing was more interested and interesting than the claim to be disinterested. Jacques Derrida points to the possibility of a disinterest after Nietzsche when he argues that as I take an interest (in the impossible), I am taken away from myself by the other, for the other: a dis-interest. Emmanuel Le´vinas, on the other hand, attempts to revive a disinterest that both redefines and reinhabits the traditional concepts of disinterest that flourished in the eighteenth century. Advocating a radical disinterestedness that founds and exceeds the interests of being, Le´vinas argues for a disinterest without good conscience: a harsh transcendence, an infinite responsibility without rest. Derrida and Le´vinas both look back to a tradition of disinterest that has been obscured by the association of disinterest with either a private autonomy (in histories of aesthetics) or a public hegemony (readings inspired by Gramsci, Foucault and Habermas). Today, disinterest is often linked to a tradition of aesthetics that began in Britain with Shaftesbury and culminated in Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790). In the eighteenth century, disinterest was not seen as a search for an absence of all interest, but as an opposite of self-interest and was at the centre of thinking about ethics. After Descartes and before Nietzsche, concepts of disinterest sought some kind of external or internal mechanism to limit the interests of the subject by mediating between the conflicting demands of the public and the private. The modern concept of disinterest began not with Shaftesbury, but with Hobbes’s reaction to Descartes and can be seen in the ongoing struggle in Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith to find a framework to mediate between the public and the private. The legacy of this tradition is apparent in Le´vinas’s belief that a certain mediation between the public and private is possible and in Derrida’s insistence that a discourse

viii

Introduction

predicated on a clear and absolute distinction between the public and the private can only fall into ruins. The confidence that a balance could be found between the public and private began to collapse at the end of the eighteenth century. This can be seen, on the one hand, in the increasing anxiety that the external world could corrupt, refashion and fragment the subject and, on the other hand, in the uneasy attempts of some of the Romantics to establish a disinterest that was independent of the public world. Kant contributes to this search for a disinterested subject, but far from being simply the father of a modern ‘aesthetic disinterestedness,’ he also internationalises disinterest by arguing that there is a public beyond the nation state and to some extent anticipates Nietzsche and Derrida by suggesting that reason must be (dis)interested. Le´vinas and Derrida’s reworkings of disinterest highlight the proximity and important differences in their thought. As Derrida’s critiques of Le´vinas’s attempts to transcend Hegel and to retranslate Heidegger show, Le´vinas offers compelling alternatives to a tradition that he nonetheless reconfirms and reinhabits. To formulate an absolutely other, a radical disinterestedness, that escapes Hegel, Le´vinas relies on a same that is identical and rejects both interior difference and history. In translating Heidegger’s question of being as a putting back into question (remise en question) and then attempting to counteract Heideggerian ‘ontology’ with a putting in question (mise en question), Le´vinas always risks being put back into question by Heidegger. In his attempts to break free of all the interests of tradition, Le´vinas remains inextricably interested. Le´vinas’s absolute disinterestedness is a disinterest without diffe´rance. For Derrida, when I take an interest, I am dis-interested by diffe´rance. It is in diffe´rance – as the possibility of the same that is not identical with itself and of the absolutely other, of a question that is not a turning back (remonter), but a turning toward what comes back and remains to come (revenance), of the resistance of anticipation, of speeds as strategic traces, and of life death as an economy of death in life – that, today, a disinterest to come can perhaps be seen.

CHAPTER 1

The Ruins of Disinterest

DISINTEREST ON THE MARGINS? Can the question of disinterest be addressed to Derrida’s work?* Can it be addressed to a work that has sought to challenge the traditional determinations, boundaries, ‘internal’ economies and ‘necessary’ marginalizations that define Western philosophy?1 As Derrida has pointed out, the question of disinterest has a significant place in the institutional history of philosophy as an academic discipline in France. In ‘The principle of reason: the university in the eyes of its pupils’ (1983–1990), he notes that in the French universities philosophy has traditionally been designated as ‘disinterested research’ (recherche de´sinte´resseé), that is as ‘the disinterested [de´sinte´resse´] exercise of reason, under the sole authority of the principle of reason.’2 What kind of interest does Derrida take in a ‘disinterested’ philosophy? Derrida has rarely used the word disinterest or, as Le´vinas, redefined it to mark a radical challenge to the interests of being. Nonetheless, the question of disinterest appears on the margins of Derrida’s principal essays on Le´vinas. In ‘Violence and metaphysics’ (1964–1967), he makes a passing, but telling, reference to Greek ‘philosophy’s apparent disinterest [le de´sinte´ressement apparent de la philosophie].’3 In ‘At this very moment in this work here I am’ (1980–1987), he cites a passage from an essay on Le´vinas by Catherine Chalier in which she speaks of an ‘eschatological disinterestedness [le de´sinte´ressement eschatologique].’4 In a footnote to Adieu (1995–1997), he quotes a passage from Le´vinas’s Of God who comes to Mind (1982–1986) which includes the phrase ‘de´s-inte´r-essement.’5 Derrida’s apparent lack of interest in Le´vinas’s reworking of disinterestedness is perhaps due to the fact that, as ‘Violence and metaphysics’ suggests, he would not follow Le´vinas in drawing or maintaining an absolute distinction or difference between interest (totality) and disinterest (infinity). Dis-interestedness, ‘desire of an other order than those of affectivity and hedonistic activity . . . desire without end, beyond Being: de´s-inte´ressement,

2


transcendence – desire of the Good [de´sir du Bien]’ belongs, as we shall see, to the rich and profound philosophy of Le´vinas.6 The narrator in Derrida’s ‘Envois’ (1980) says at one point, ‘I believe in no disinterestedness [je ne crois a` aucun de´sinte´ressement]’ and on the few occasions when Derrida refers in passing to disinterest, for example in his readings of Heidegger and Benjamin, it is more often than not to warn of a concealed economy of interest behind any proclamation of disinterest.7 As he writes in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1968–1972), ‘one must always, in the symptomatological manner of Nietzsche, be careful to diagnose the economy, the investment and deferred benefit behind the sign of pure renunciation or the bidding of disinterested sacrifice [la mise du sacrifice de´sinte´resse´].’8 Derrida is most likely referring here to the well-known passage in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) when Nietzsche signals the end of the traditional faith in a concept of disinterest that had flourished since at least the seventeenth century.9 Nietzsche writes, ‘the naked truth, which is surely not hard to come by, [is] that the ‘‘disinterested’’ action is an exceedingly interesting and interested action [dass die ‘‘uninteressirte’’ Handlung eine sehr interessante und interessirte Handlung ist].’ He goes on to argue, ‘anyone who has really made sacrifices [wirklich Opfer gebracht hat] knows that he wanted and got something in return – perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself [vielleicht etwas von sich fu¨r etwas von sich].’10 For Derrida, if there is a disinterest, it is a disinterest after Nietzsche. Unsurprisingly, Derrida has the most to say about disinterest as an economy of interest in his essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790). In ‘Parergon’ (1974–1978), he defines Kantian disinterest as ‘the question of a detachment.’11 Kant’s insistence that ‘all interest consists’ in ‘a pleasure in the real existence of an object’ leads Derrida to characterize Kantian ‘pure disinterested delight’ (le plaire pur et de´sinte´resse´, uninteressierten Wohlgefallen) as ‘the neutralization, not simply the putting to death [la mise a` mort] but the mise en crypte of all that exists in as much as it exists.’12 As Derrida says, ‘like a sort of [Husserlian] transcendental reduction,’ this absolute disinterestedness leaves a subjectivity that ‘is not an existence, nor even a relation to existence. It is an inexistent or anexistent subjectivity.’13 Derrida similarly reads the Kantian claim of the pure disinterested delight of the individual ‘to subjective universality’ as the unavoidable intervention of the ‘entirely-other.’14 Pure disinterested delight or, the ‘auto-affection’ of ‘I-please-myself-in’ (le se-plaire-a`), ‘immediately goes outside its inside: it is pure hetero-affection.’ Kant’s idea of subjective universality reveals that the ‘most irreducible hetero-affection inhabits – intrinsically – the most closed auto-affection.’15 In ‘Economimesis’ (1975), Derrida argues that for Kant ‘the most moral and the most true, the most present disinterested pleasure [le plaisir de´sinte´resse´]’ is produced by ‘poetic speech [la parole poe´tique]’ which ultimately transforms


3

‘hetero-affection into auto-affection, producing the maximum disinterested pleasure [plaisir de´sinte´resse´].’16 For Derrida, disinterested pleasure, the ‘Wohlgefallen de´sinte´resse´,’ is produced and enclosed within ‘the auto-affective circle of mastery or reappropriation.’ He concludes that the Kantian idea of disinterest has an overriding ‘interest in determining the other as its other [inte´reˆt a` de´terminer l’autre comme son autre].’17 We will come back to Derrida’s reading of Kant beyond the Critique of Judgement in a later chapter. If the question of disinterest, and particularly the question of the disinterest of the subject, is addressed to Derrida’s work, one should perhaps ask if such a ‘disinterest’ would be a strategy of repetition or of rupture? In ‘The ends of man’ (1968–1972), Derrida writes: A radical trembling can only come from the outside [du dehors] . . . But the ‘logic’ of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and the efficiency of the system that regularly change transgressions into ‘false exits’ [‘fausses sorties’]. Taking into account these effects of the system, one has nothing, from inside where ‘we are’ [du dedans ou` ‘nous sommes’], but the choice between two strategies: a. To attempt an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating [en re´pe´tant] what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language . . . b. To decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion [manie`re discontinue et irruptive], by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break and difference [la rupture et la diffe´rence absolues]. Does a disinterest, that is somehow at once more than and less than an economy of interest, presume to divest the subject of its interests (in its self as its self, its self presence, its chez soi, its interest in the colonization of the other) through repeating, displacing and dislocating these interests or through an absolute rupture or breaking free from the all interests of the subject? Both strategies, Derrida warns, have their respective risks of consolidation or blind reinstatement. There is, he says, no ‘simple and unique’ choice to be made between these two strategies. ‘If,’ he concludes, ‘there is style’ – and we would add a style of any disinterest – ‘it must be plural.’18 Since Descartes, at least, the problem of the private has always been attended by a concept of disinterest. In this sense, one could say that disinterest belongs to the post-Cartesian tradition of the Cogito and subjectivity. Though it could be associated with indifference or disadvantage, disinterest was commonly understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth century as an opposite of selfinterest, as a positive quality opposed to the exclusive rights and claims of

4


private interest and judgement. To be disinterested was to recognize a public interest or good beyond self-interest and to be able to judge impartially between our own interests and the interests of others. Disinterest has always been caught up within the problem of how one contains, manages and guides subjectivity. On the one hand, disinterest can be seen, in the Husserlian sense, as a phenomenon of the subject: a concept that has always been tied to a question of the ‘consciousness of something.’ On the other hand, after Descartes, disinterest was (at least in Britain) by and large claimed as a concept of the empiricists and defined by the attempt to find a stable point of reference outside of the subject to secure the disinterested subject. It is perhaps only after the thinkers of the late eighteenth century tried to find the ground for disinterest in the subject and that this culmination of disinterest signalled its collapse in the eventual recognition that neither the subject nor the external world could provide any reliable grounds for the disinterested subject – it is perhaps only after this transformation of the traditional or classical concept of disinterest, that it is possible to think of the failure of disinterest as a radical disinterest of the subject. However, can any ‘radical’ disinterest resist the interests of the Hegelian Aufhebung? As Derrida says in Glas (1974), for Hegel, ‘what denies and cuts subjectivity from itself [coupe la subjectivite´ d’elle-meˆme] is also what raises and accomplishes it.’19 In the Hegelian system, ‘what is sublated is at the same time preserved.’20 The Aufhebung is the engine of history as spirit in which ‘the soul . . . rises to spirit through the intermediary of consciousness.’21 Derrida challenges the Hegelian history as spirit by translating Aufhebung as relever, ‘combining,’ he notes, ‘the senses in which one can be both raised in one’s functions and relieved of them [eˆtre a` la fois e´leve´ et releve´ de ses fonctions], replaced in a kind of promotion.’22 The re- of re-lever (mis/re)translates auf-heben, marking a repetition, an indefinite re-placement as displacement, a remainder, an irreducible difference, that cannot be fully recouped or returned within the Hegelian project. If Derrida identifies Hegelian ‘disinterest’ as the essence of ‘interest’ (of the dream of an absolute interest in the self, by itself of itself: auto-affection, pre´sence a` soi) and transforms it, disables it – can this transformation be described as a certain dis-interest? If there is a disinterest in Derrida’s work it is always a disinterest: ‘the dis- of diffe´rance’ as he described it in 1968.23 The gap between the prefix dis- and interest suggests a divesting, a reversal or removal of interest that does not have its origins in the self as such, in the interests of the self, especially in the interests of the self to be, in good conscience, a disinterested subject. ‘One must avoid good conscience at all costs,’ Derrida warns.24 Can a certain disinterest avoid good conscience? Is such a dis-interest of the subject, as opposed


5

to a disinterest by the subject possible, a dis-interest of the subject despite the subject, despite myself – ‘malgre´ moi,’ as Le´vinas says?25 And how can such a dis-interest be addressed to Derrida’s work?

PRIVE´/PUBLIC AND THE SECRET

My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. — Edgar Allan Poe26 Disinterest has never simply been a question of the disinterest of the subject. The traditional concept of disinterest (in other words, concepts of disinterest after Descartes and before Nietzsche) can broadly be defined as the ongoing attempt to find a point of reference to mediate between the equivocal demands of the public and the private. Disinterest has never merely been a discourse of the private or of the public. The classical concept of disinterest has always been driven by the troubled recognition of the uncertain and unequal demands of both the public and the private. Classical concepts of disinterest are distinguished by the conviction that a point of reference or framework can be found to mediate between the public and the private. In Totality and Infinity (1961), Le´vinas gives the secret an exemplary role in mediating between the rights of the private individual and the demands of the public world. According to Le´vinas, ‘separation is radical only if each being has its own time [chaque eˆtre a son temps], that is its interiority [inte´riorite´].’ Interiority enables ‘each being’ to resist ‘universal time’ and to ‘withstand totalization.’ Interiority ‘institutes an . . . order where everything is pending [pendant].’27 The inherent ‘discontinuity of the inner life interrupts historical time.’ For Le´vinas, ‘the real must not only be determined in its historical objectivity, but also from interior intentions, from the secrecy that interrupts the continuity of historical time. Only on the basis of this secrecy is the pluralism of society possible. It attests this secrecy’ (57–8). Secrecy, the secret, is the critical attribute of interiority, of the irreducible singularity of ‘each being.’ The secret is the mark of the independence of the ‘private individual’ from the public world (the state, from a realm dominated by the universal, history, historical objectivity). The secret is indicative of the fundamental discontinuity of the private in relation to the ‘continuity’ of the public (197). The secret is the only possibility for a pluralist society. The pluralist society ‘attests’ – manifests – bears witness to the secret. Le´vinas reinforces the central role played by the secret in the relation between the

6


individual and the public world when he insists, ‘multiplicity can be produced only if the individuals retain their secrecy [conservent leur secret]’ (120; 125). Does the role played by the secret in Le´vinas’s work have any parallel in Derrida’s many writings on the secret and on the relation between the public and the private? To begin to explore this question, I would like to take a somewhat aphoristic look at a number of the ‘private’ letters that have been made public in Derrida’s remarkable ‘Envois,’ while also alluding to a number of his other, more recent, works. 1. In ‘Envois,’ the narrator wanders around the question of the public and the private and gestures towards its connection with the secret, testimony and the witness. As with many of Derrida’s texts, ‘Envois’ can be seen as part of an ongoing dialogue with Le´vinas. Derrida notes in Adieu, ‘one of the themes of recurrent analysis’ in his readings of Le´vinas has been the role played by the ‘third party [tiers].’28 In ‘Force of law’ (1989–1994), without referring directly to Le´vinas (whom he does, nonetheless, mention some pages later), Derrida summarizes a fundamental problem of the ‘third party’: ‘I cannot speak the language of the other except to the extent that I appropriate it and assimilate it according to the law of an implicit third [un tiers implicite].’29 ‘Envois’ can be seen as in part a reflection on the problem of the third party. Early in the text, the narrator says: I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, and what is more while erasing all the traits, even the most inapparent ones, the ones that mark the tone, or the belonging to a genre (the letter for example, or the post card), so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret [secre`te a` l’e´vidence], as if it were being invented at every step, and as if it were burning immediately, as soon as any third party [un tiers] would set eyes on it.30 ‘For there are third parties, in the place where we are [il y a des tiers, au lieu ou` nous sommes],’ the narrator later says (46; 52). 2. The narrator states his (or her?) interests: ‘At bottom I am only interested in what cannot be sent off, cannot be dispatched in any case [ne m’inte´resse au fond que ce qui ne s’expe´die pas, ne se de´peˆche en aucun cas].’ The narrator goes on to relate how he meets ‘a young student’ who asks him ‘why don’t I kill myself’ (14–15; 19). He answers by highlighting the acute interest of this question: I answered with a pirouette, I’ll tell you, by sending him back [renvoyant] his question, by signifying to him that he must have been savouring, along with me, the interest that he visibly was taking [l’inte´reˆt qu’il prenait visiblement], at this very moment, in this question that I moreover concerned myself with


7

along with others, among them myself. In private [je m’occupais par ailleurs avec d’autres, dont moi. En prive´] (14–15; 19). The ‘young student’ is ‘savouring . . . the interest’ in ‘this question’ that the narrator is concerned with ‘in private.’ The narrator is also savouring the interest that the student is taking in this very private question, this question of the private. He does not answer the student’s question, he pirouettes and sends it back to him. Having stated that his interest lies in what ‘cannot be sent off,’ the narrator relates a story in which ‘the interest’ in a private question ‘cannot be sent off,’ cannot be delivered. The narrator sends back the student’s question, he does not return ‘the interest’ taken in what is ‘private.’ Can the narrator’s playful rebuke be taken as an indication of a certain limitation, that the private, and the interest taken in the private, resists the savour, the relish, the craving of others, of the public? On the other hand, perhaps this story illustrates the continual, ongoing invasion of the private sphere. On the same day, the narrator says, ‘Do people . . . realize to what extent this old couple [Socrates and Plato] has invaded our most private domesticity, mixing themselves up in everything [notre domesticite´ la plus priveé, se meˆlant de tout].’ A few sentences above this, he describes the interest of ‘this old couple’ as an interest in paralysis: Socrates and Plato ‘were both very interested [les inte´resserait beaucoup]’ in the stingray, ‘this paralyzing animal’ (18; 23). The young student’s question is of course not just any question. It is a question about the narrator’s death. In Aporias (1993), Derrida links the question of death to what is ‘neither public nor private,’ to a certain disinterest: death is always the name of a secret, since it signs the irreplaceable singularity. It puts forth the public name [le nom public], the common name of a secret, the common name of the proper name without name. It is therefore always a Shibboleth, for the manifest name of a secret is from the beginning a private name [le nom prive´], so that language about death is nothing but the long history of a secret society, neither public nor private, semi-private, semi-public, on the border between the two [ni publique ni priveé, mi-priveé, mi-publique, sur la frontie`re entre les deux].31 3. In French, the word for private (prive´) is the same as the word for deprived (prive´). The private can always be (mis)read as a privation or deprivation, a lack, absence or dispossession. The private can be understood as the lamentable absence of the public, which is how Hobbes (with the exception perhaps of the question of faith) understood disinterest. Hobbes believed that disinterest is only possible when a public institution or structure provides a reliable

8


framework for disinterest outside of the subject: a public dis-interest of the private. If the private can be (mis)read as a privation or absence of the public, can it also be seen as a deprivation or dispossession? How can the private be a dispossession? A dispossession of what? To be the private, the private cannot have already possessed the public. To be private (prive´) and to be deprived, dispossessed (prive´), the private must be (mis)read as a dispossession of itself. The private dispossesses itself of itself as it is private. Is this dispossession of the private as it becomes private the trace of an impossible ‘secret without measure’? Is this dispossession a kind of original disinterest of the private? Or, is it the indication of an impossible desire for an absolutely private dis-interest of the private? The narrator (and the translator) in ‘Envois’ seem to allude to some of these possibilities when he says, I am the prive´ [the private, the deprived one], more than anyone else henceforth . . . so then the prive´ of everything [Je suis le prive´ . . . alors ‘prive´’ de tout] . . . I was speaking of the desire to pose or to post myself in a kind of absolute privatisation [privatisation absolue] (but in this case there must no longer be any position that holds). The secret without measure: it does not exclude publication [la publication], it measures publication against itself (144; 157). The narrator later returns to this dilemma of the prive´, treating it as the desire for a pure private that deprives itself, that ends in privation. He conjures up the image of a ‘perverse copyist’ who labours ‘in order to deliver nothing to publicity [a` la publicite´], absolutely nothing that might be proper (private [prive´], secret), in order to profane nothing, if this is still possible.’ The narrator comments: ‘The activity of this copyist all of a sudden appears ignoble to me – and in advance doomed to failure’ (182; 196). 4. The absolute secret is impossible or, at least, gives no pleasure. The narrator speaks of his: ‘taste for (a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e) secrecy: I can take pleasure only on that condition, from that condition. BUT, secret pleasure deprives [prive] me of the essential. I would like everyone (no, not everyone, the best telescopic soul of the universe, call it God if you wish) to know, to testify, to attend [te´moigne, assiste]’ (46; 53). The pure, absolute secret, the heart of the private, can give no pleasure as a secret, unless it is attested to by a witness, by God. The economy of the pleasure of the secret: the private must in some way be known, witnessed, but not by ‘everyone,’ by the public in general. The pleasure in secrecy cannot endure or tolerate absolute privacy. The narrator goes on to say that the need of the absolute secret for a witness is also ‘the condition for witnessing [te´moignage] – or for voyeurism – in principle universal, for the absolute non-secret [non-secret absolu], the end of the


9

private life [vie priveé] that finally I detest and reject.’ Witnessing can signal ‘the end of the private life’ but, the narrator adds, ‘while waiting, the private has to be thrown in [du prive´ il faut en rajouter].’ The phrase ‘has to be thrown in’ (en rajouter, to add more, an excessive addition), suggests that the private must in some way be ‘thrown in,’ added (as an excess) to witnessing, to publicity and the public. The private must always be ‘thrown in’ in some kind of excessive relation with the public. The narrator then insists that while he does ‘not refuse the absolute publicity of testifying [la publicite´ absolue de te´moignage],’ he does ‘reject the witnesses, certain witnesses’ (47; 53).32 For the narrator, the witness appears to be at once the condition for the secret, the private and the public. The witness is neither simply public nor private and, consequently, appears to threaten the ability to draw any clear and absolute distinction between public and private. Some pages later, the narrator gives a definition of the postcard, the p.c., within the question of the public and private: ‘about p.c., private or public correspondences [correspondances priveés ou publiques] (a distinction without pertinence in this case, whence the post card, p.c., half-private half-public, neither one nor the other [mi-priveé mi-publique, ni l’une ni l’autre])’ (62; 70). In The Other Heading (1989–1991), Derrida accords a similar status to the telephone, which prefigures the ‘ruin’ of totalitarianism since it ‘no longer leaves in place the limit between public and private [la limite entre le public et le prive´], assuming,’ he adds, ‘that such a limit was ever rigorous.’33 ‘Envois’ is concerned with postcards, with correspondences that are ‘half-private half-public, neither one nor the other.’ The narrator insists that in the case of the postcard, the ‘distinction’ between public and private is ‘without pertinence.’ When, if ever, is this distinction pertinent? The definition of the postcard can be seen as a brief history of the rise and fall of disinterest. One could say that for classical concepts of disinterest the distinction between public and private is never pertinent. Disinterest has never been a question of the public or the private, but the problem of the public and the private, of finding a reliable framework to establish the ‘half-private half-public’: an ideal equilibrium between the subject and the objective world, the not too private and the not too public. But the narrator qualifies this ‘half-private half-public,’ adding that it is ‘neither one nor the other.’ Traditional concepts of disinterest collapse when it seems that neither the public nor the private can provide a reliable point of reference to establish a disinterested subject. The narrator goes on to say, ‘the public or private [publiques ou priveés], that is secret, correspondences,’ ‘are unthinkable outside a certain postal technology’ (104; 114). This seems to reiterate that it is the postcard, which is ‘half-private half-public, neither one nor the other’ which enables, in this case, the public and private ‘correspondences’ to be thought. As if there were a-neither-public-

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nor-private ‘public’ and ‘private’ which makes the public and the private thinkable, possible. The narrator also suggests that both the public and private correspondences are secret: ‘the public or private, that is secret, correspondences.’ How can public correspondences be secret? Is this a question of official secrets, state secrets? Of ‘public’ secrets that are private, hidden, concealed from the public? Two pages later, the narrator refers to that other public state institution, ‘the secret police’ (106; 117). He also speaks of ‘a very determined type of postal rationality, of relations between the State monopoly and the secret of private [prive´s] messages’ (104; 114–15). The ‘secret’ is, it seems, neither simply private nor public. In a number of works Derrida associates the public space and the transformation of the traditional notion of the polis with the recent rapid, seemingly inexorable, innovations in the media and tele-communications.34 In Spectres of Marx (1993), he locates this transformation of the ‘public space’ in the aftermath of the First World War: Let us recall the technical, scientific, and economic transformations that, in Europe, after the First World War, already upset the topological structure of the res publica, of public space, and of public opinion [de l’espace public et de l’opinion publique]. They affected not only this topological structure, they also began to make problematic the very presumption of the topographical, the presumption that there was a place, and thus an identifiable and stabilized body for public speech, the public thing, or the public cause [la parole, la chose ou la cause publique], throwing liberal, parliamentary, and capitalist democracy into crisis, as it is often said, and opening thereby the way for three forms of totalitarianism which then allied, fought, or combined with each other in countless ways. Now, these transformations are being amplified beyond all measure today [aujourd’hui]. This process, moreover, no longer corresponds to an amplification, if one understands by this word homogeneous and continuous growth. What can no longer be measured is the leap that already distances us from those powers of the media that, in the 1920s, before television, were profoundly transforming the public space, dangerously weakening the authority and the representativity of elected officials and reducing the field of parliamentary discussions, deliberations, and decisions. The ‘powers of the media,’ he concludes, have transformed, are transforming, the public space and turning politicians into ‘mere silhouettes, if not marionettes, on the stage of televisual rhetoric.’35 One could almost say that Derrida here is repeating, inhabiting what sounds like the dying vestiges of a classical disinterest. Already in the 1790s a climate of


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increasing anxiety about the ability of the public space to provide a stable ground for public authority was being expressed through a fear that the powers of spectacle (in the media, in the streets, on the stage, and especially in the new stage technologies of artifice and illusion) were at once divorcing themselves from the subject and transforming, debasing subjectivity. As we shall see, before the spectres of Marx, the spectacle of the spectre in the writings of Burke on the French Revolution, in the popular theatrical productions of the late 1790s and the Parisian show La Fantasmagorie, the figure of the spectre signifies a profound and, ultimately fatal, threat to traditional assumptions about the public and the private, to the project of disinterest as an attempt to mediate between the public and the private spheres. The difference between Derrida’s history of the transformation of the public space in the twentieth century and those anxious and unprecedented signs of transformation in the 1790s is that Derrida already recognizes that these transformations are in effect the product of an inability to draw a clear and discrete distinction between the public and the private. As he says in The Other Heading, ‘to take account of these rhythms and these qualitative differences, the porosity of a border between the ‘‘private’’ and the ‘‘public’’ [une frontie`re entre le ‘‘private’’ et le ‘‘public’’] appears more incalculable than ever.’36 In the Politics of Friendship (1988–1994), Derrida makes a point of identifying a certain idea of the foundation and possibility of politics (in this case of Carl Schmitt) with drawing a clear ‘distinction between the public and the private [la distinction entre le prive´ et le public].’ For Derrida, this impossible distinction is constructed on a number of powerful and pervasive oppositions, such as singular/universal, woman/man, and is undone and threatened by, amongst other things, the equivocal effects of the politics of friendship, brotherhood and the sexual difference. Derrida insists that ‘whenever’ the border or frontier (frontie`re) between the public and private is ‘threatened, fragile, porous, disputable [menaceé, fragile, poreuse, contestable],’ a discourse reliant on a good, regular, ordered distinction collapses, falls in ruins (tomber en ruine). He adds that these threats to the private/public distinction have ‘intensified and accelerated’ in ‘ ‘‘our times’’,’ raising the question of an acceleration, of speeds, of a speed of today.37 If Derrida repeats a discourse of disinterest, it is a disinterest in ruins, a ruin of the classical projects of disinterest that presume that a clear distinction can be found and maintained between the public and the private. The narrator of ‘Envois’ brings to a close his (or her) scattered, but persistent, remarks around the complex and troubled relationship between the public and the private with a public statement (or confidential aside): I do not believe in propriety, property [je ne crois pas a` la proprie´te´] and above all not in the form that it takes according to the opposition public/private

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[l’opposition public/prive´] (p/p, so be it). This opposition doesn’t work [ne marche pas], neither for psychoanalysis . . . nor for the post . . . nor even for the police . . . and the secret circulates with full freedom, as secret you promise I swear [comme secret tu promets je jure], this is what I call a post card (185; 199). The postcard, we are reminded, ‘is neither public nor private’ and, without being determined by this opposition, suggests, ‘the secret circulates with full freedom.’ Some pages later, the narrator writes, ‘the secret of the post cards burns – the hands and the tongues – it cannot be kept [le garder], q.e.d. It remains secret [reste secret], what it is, but must immediately circulate [circuler], like the most hermetic and most fascinating of anonymous – and open – letters. I don’t cease to verify this’ (188; 203). The secret remains and circulates: it is neither absolutely private nor entirely public. As Derrida says in Passions (1992–1993), ‘the secret belongs no more to the private than to the public [secret ne rele`ve pas plus du prive´ que du public].’38 The secret attests to the impossibility of the autonomy of the private and the totality of the public. Does the secret, which ‘circulates’ freely when the public/private opposition ‘doesn’t work’ (and, one wonders, when, if ever, does it work?), also indicate a certain endurance or resistance of the ‘private relation’ which Le´vinas spoke of? Or, is it the case that the secret that remains and circulates puts in question the very propriety of the private? And what are we to make of the narrator’s two statements of disbelief: ‘I do not believe in propriety, property, and above all not in the form that it takes according to the opposition public/private’ and ‘I believe in no disinterestedness’?39 It could be said that classical concepts of disinterest presuppose that there is no one or no thing that is either simply private or public. There is no autonomous private or public totality. This is their starting point, it haunts them: the spectres of disinterest.

THE DECISION OF INTEREST

The situation is entangled, not to say equivocal, therefore much more interesting [plus inte´ressante].40 Is, in Derrida’s terms, a responsible and dis-interested decision possible? As I have said, Derrida rarely uses the word disinterest, but he has, on occasion, emphasized the word interest. While he exposes in ‘Parergon’ what he sees as the inherent interests of Kantian disinterest, Derrida does not offer an alternative theory of disinterest, a disinterest of disinterest. If the question of


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disinterest is addressed to Derrida, should we perhaps be asking not about disinterest but interest? What are Derrida’s interests? As early as 1953–1954, Derrida is already using ‘the interest and the difficulty of the problem of genesis’ as a guiding thread in his reading of Husserl and it is worth noting that the English translation of The Origin of Geometry (1936), begins: ‘The interest that propels us in this work . . . .’41 What is an interest that ‘propels us’? In ‘Passe-Partout’ (1978), Derrida writes: ‘what interests me’ (ce qui m’inte´resse) is what remains ‘untranslatable’ in its ‘economic performance.’42 ‘When I write ‘‘what interests me,’’ ’ he remarks in an interview from 1975, ‘‘I am designating not only an object of interest [un objet d’inte´reˆt], but the place that I am in the middle of [le lieu au milieu de quoi je suis], and precisely this place that I cannot exceed [de´border].’43 For Derrida, interest places, dis-places, constrains. Perhaps the most significant reference in Derrida’s work to interest occurs in ‘Psyche: Invention of the other’ (1983–1987) and is repeated in ‘Force of law’ (1989–1994), when he writes: ‘the interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible [L’inte´reˆt de la dećonstruction, de sa force et de son de´sir si elle en a, c’est une certaine expe´rience de l’impossible].’44 Derrida’s work is interested: it claims a certain, necessary, interest. It takes a decisive interest in ‘the impossible.’ As an examination of traditional concepts of disinterest in the seventeenth and eighteenth century suggests, disinterest has never been a question simply of asserting, finding or establishing a pure point of disinterest, a complete and absolute non-interest. Such a total absence of interest is more akin to Freud’s definition of sleep as the ‘suspense of interest in the world.’45 Disinterest has traditionally been driven by trying to find the ‘most effective’ (and perhaps impossible) balance between self-interest and the interests of others, between the demands of subjectivity and the demands of the external world. Disinterest has always been concerned with finding an internal or external point of reference or framework to establish a limit or threshold to self-interest, to the interests of the self in itself. Can ‘the experience of the impossible’ be seen as a condition for a certain disinterest? What are the interests of Derrida’s work? At the ‘beginning’ of Glas, in which he will later note the interest of Hegel (in the logos) and of Kant (in reason), Derrida places his interests within the problem of the decision (75a, 216a; 88a, 242a).46 At the outset, Derrida has made his choice: ‘Let me admit – a throw of the d(ie) [coup de de´] – that I have already chosen.’ He then highlights ‘the problem of the introduction in/to [a` la] Hegel’s philosophy’ and ‘all the difficulties . . . that the decision of such a stroke instigates.’ ‘I mark the decision’ (Je marque la dećision), he states. And, ‘even before analyzing’ the key terms of the family, civil society and the state in

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Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he says, ‘we see the stake and the interest [on voit l’enjeu et l’inte´reˆt] of this familial moment’ (3a–4a; 9a–10a). Before analysis, ‘the interest’ is already apparent. But what is (this) interest? How do ‘we see’ it? Derrida implies in Glas that interest is concerned with ‘the whole Hegelian determination of right [droit] on one side, of politics on the other.’ Interest and the decision circulate here through questions of ‘the active movement of penetration,’ ‘an active interpretation,’ the inability to decipher and still ‘be neutral, neuter, or passive.’ He goes on to write: ‘What always remains irresoluble, impracticable, non-normal, or non-normalizable is what interests and constrains us here [ce qui nous inte´resse et nous contraint ici]. Without paralyzing us but while forcing us on the course [a` la de´marche]’ (4a–5a; 10a–11a). Derrida suggests ‘what interests’ also ‘constrains,’ that interest – in the ‘irresoluble, impracticable, non-normal’ – is a kind of constraint. This constrained interest is not a paralysis, though it has its own force. For Derrida, this interest and constraint is decisive. But decisive for whom or for what? Do we choose what interests us, especially when our interest is in ‘what always remains irresoluble’? How can one be decisive about the impossible, the irresoluble? Le´vinas, on the one hand, argues that any radical idea of disinterest must preclude a decision. ‘The responsibility for the other,’ he writes in Otherwise than Being (1974), ‘can not have begun in my commitment, in my decision.’ Disinterestedness, ‘the exposure to another’ to ‘the point of substitution,’ is ‘prior to any voluntary decision.’ Disinterest is ‘an obsession despite oneself.’47 De´s-inte´ressement can never be decisive. For Derrida, on the other hand, from his earliest essays, the decision, the responsible decision, has played a key role in his thoughts on the aporia in ethics and politics. Nonetheless, like Le´vinas, he insists that a responsible decision is never decisive, in the sense that it confirms or reflects the active, voluntary power of the subject to anticipate and achieve a decision. As he writes in Politics of Friendship, ‘the decisive moment’ ceases, the ‘instant’ that it is taken to ‘follow the consequences of this which is, that is to say, of this which is determinable.’ The responsible decision by the subject is always ‘an other decision,’ passive, unconscious: ‘an agonising [dećhirante] decision as decision of the other.’48 A responsible decision by the subject is always a decision of the other: a ‘decision of the other in me [l’autre en moi].’49 As Derrida remarks in Adieu, ‘the decision and the responsibility are always from the other [de l’autre].’ It is, he notes, in the attempt to put in question the ‘traditional determination and massive domination of the subject’ that he has insisted, ‘a theory of the subject is incapable of giving an account of the slightest decision.’50 For Derrida, a decision is an unavoidable, agonising experience of finitude. The decision is marked by ‘an anguished experience of imminence.’51 It is a moment of crisis, a moment of ‘performative and . . . interpretative violence.’52


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The ‘moment of decision, as such,’ Derrida writes, ‘always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation . . . The instant of decision is a madness [L’instant de la dećision est une folie], says Kierkegaard.’53 It is worth noting that Derrida first quoted this phrase from Kierkegaard some thirty years earlier in 1963–1964 as an epigraph to his paper on Foucault and Descartes, ‘Cogito and the history of madness.’ Faced by two contradictory certainties, the decision appears within the ‘dreadful fatality of a double constraint.’54 However, as Derrida writes in ‘Force of law’: the undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obligated – it is of obligation [devoir] that we must speak – to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of laws and rules. A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal [l’e´preuve] of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process.55 This ‘ordeal of the undecidable’ or, as Derrida says elsewhere, ‘a sort of nonpassive endurance of the aporia,’ is ‘the condition of responsibility and of decision.’56 An irresponsible decision, on the other hand, is a decision that is clear from the start and in effect ‘already made’ (de´ja` prise) and, consequently, is nothing more than the implementation or progressive unwinding (de´roule) of a programme.57 The possibility of a responsible decision must endure ‘a kind of necessarily double obligation, a double bind,’ the impossible, the undecidable.58 In The Other Heading, Derrida observes ‘there is no responsibility that is not the experience and experiment of the impossible.’59 No responsibility, he writes elsewhere, ‘could ever be taken [eˆtre prise] without equivocation and without contradiction’ (my emphasis).60 It is only because I am faced with an anguished contradiction, with impossible demands, that I can and must, in an instant, take a decision, a responsible decision – a decision that is ‘like a gift from the other.’61 It is the heterogeneous time of ‘an indecision from which alone a responsibility or a decision must be taken [une dećision doivent eˆtre prises].’62 As Derrida remarks in ‘Force of law,’ ‘Justice is an experience of the impossible’ and ‘incalculable justice requires us to calculate [la justice incalculable commande de calculer].’63 ‘One cannot decide, and this is the interesting thing,’ Derrida notes in ‘Declarations of independence’ (1976) and, in ‘Typewriter ribbon’ (1998– 2001), he insists, ‘this undecidability, moreover, is what would make for all the interest.’64 Derrida has said, ‘the interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible’ (my emphasis).

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Justice, responsibility and the decision, the responsible decision, are all conditioned by ‘a certain experience of the impossible.’ What then is the relation between the responsible decision that is (un)conditioned by the impossible and the interest that Derrida’s thought has in the ‘experience of the impossible’? In The Other Heading he writes: ‘For the moment, it is the word ‘‘capital,’’ more precisely the tenor of its idiom, that must interest us in order to justify the reference to Vale´ry.’ ‘For the moment,’ he says, ‘pour l’instant’ – ‘l’instant de la decision’ – it is the word ‘ ‘‘capital’’ ’ (which of course has its own interest in interest) ‘that must interest us [que nous devons nous inte´resser].’65 In other words, at this moment, an instant of decision, we must take an interest. To make a responsible decision, we must – ‘without imperative, without order and without duty’ – take an interest, an unavoidable interest.66 As the opening of Glas suggests, many of Derrida’s works start by highlighting the contradictory, strategic and decisive moment of madness when an interest is taken. No matter how agonising, how mad, how risky, an interest must be taken. It must be decisive in its inevitable indecisiveness. Above all, it must have an interest in the ‘experience of the impossible,’ in the responsibility ‘for the other before [devant] the other.’67 An interest must be taken (doivent eˆtre prises). Derrida insists that his work is ‘anything but a neutralization of interest in justice [de l’inte´reˆt pour la justice].’68 One must take a decision of interest in ‘a certain experience of the impossible.’ This decisive interest in the experience of the impossible can be described as a certain dis-interest. The decision is (un)conditioned by the undecidable and interest (an interest in the impossible) is (un)conditioned by dis-interest, by a dis-interest that – as ‘every responsible decision’ – ‘must run’ the ‘absolute risk’ of avoiding ‘good conscience at all costs.’69 The decision of interest is a dis-interest of the subject. As I take an interest (in the impossible), I am taken away from myself by the other, for the other. Derrida hints at such a decision of dis-interest in the last chapter of Given Time (1977–1992) in a passage that brings together or entangles the motifs of unconditionality, the decisive instant of decision and disinterest. He writes: the condition common to the gift is a certain unconditionality . . . The event and the gift, the event as gift, the gift as event must be irruptive, unmotivated – for example, disinterested [doivent eˆtre irruptifs, immotive´s – par exemple de´sinte´resse´s]. They are decisive and they must therefore tear the fabric, interrupt the continuum of a narrative [rećit] that nevertheless they call for, they must perturb the order of causalities: in an instant [en un instant].70


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Disinterest appears here as an ‘example’ of a decisive unmotivated irruption, the instant of an irruption without motive: a dis-interest. On the one hand, while Derrida may have little to say about disinterest, he has a lot to say about interest. For example, in Given Time there are many kinds of interest, including: ‘the most interesting idea, the great guiding thread’; the ‘operation of exchange with interest’; ‘interest rates’; ‘an interest of the thing itself’; ‘capitalized interest’; ‘the real interest of a true wealth’; ‘interest without labor’; ‘an interesting coincidence’; ‘the common interest’; ‘the most powerful and most interesting speculation’; ‘the game of interest.’71 A narrative of disinterest could perhaps be constructed through tracing the decisions of interest in Derrida’s texts, the decision that is taken when something ‘here must interest us [doivent ici nous inte´resser].’72 Why is this or that word, concept, question, text, institution interesting? Why and at what moment does something, some text, some one, some institution elicit or demand interest – become ‘the most interesting’ (la plus inte´ressante)? What is ‘the interested reader [le lecteur inte´resse´]’ and when is a reader not interested?73 When is interest Derrida’s own interest and when and how can it be shared? In Politics of Friendship, he writes ‘anyone can interest themselves [peut s’inte´resser] in the problems that we are tackling here.’74 What is the gift of interest? Is it – irruptive, unmotivated – a kind of dis-interest? Is such a narrative of dis-interest possible? At the end of Given Time, Derrida warns, ‘the interest [l’inte´reˆt]’ of Baudelaire’s text, ‘like any analogous text in general, comes from the enigma constructed out of this crypt which gives to be read that which will remain eternally unreadable, absolutely indecipherable, even refusing itself to any promise of deciphering or hermeneutic.’75 For Derrida, this is principally a matter of ‘the secret of literature,’ but it is also a question of the secret of dis-interest and the spectres of the private and the public that haunt all concepts of disinterest. On the other hand, by taking an interest in responsibility, in justice, in politics, in capitalism, has Derrida not already taken up some of the remnants of the traditional concepts of disinterest? In ‘Force of law’ he writes of the necessity of ‘a critique of juridical ideology, a desedimentation of the superstructures of law [droit] that both hide and reflect the economic and political interests [les inte´reˆts ećonomiques et politiques] of the dominant forces of society’ (my emphasis).76 He is even more emphatic in Spectres of Marx when he insists, ‘deconstruction has never had any sense or interest [d’inte´reˆt], in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.’ He goes on to say that he is concerned with ‘the interest, and first of all the interest of capital in general [l’inte´reˆt du capital en geńe´ral] an interest that, in the order of the world today [aujourd’hui], namely the world-wide market, holds a mass of humanity under its yoke and in

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a new form of slavery.’77 Derrida had first raised this question of interest in 1968 in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ linking the interest of capital to the interest (tokos) of the logos.78 More recently, he has emphasized the interests of sovereignty. In De quoi demain (2001) he asks: ‘What are the relations between certain powerful sovereign States – nearly always the United States – and the UN when some States impose the logic of their interests [la logique de leurs inte´reˆts] on non-governmental or multi-governmental organisations, or resist, on the contrary – and this is also often the case – the logic of international law to safeguard the interests [pour sauvegarder les inte´reˆts] of their nation State and of their sovereignty?’79 To identify and challenge interests, hidden interests, the interests of the subject in itself (self presence, chez soi), its interests in the other, the interests of capital, of the state, of the logos, interests ‘in general,’ is this not the first gesture of disinterest? Derrida’s decisive, difficult and agonising interest that must be taken from ‘the experience of the impossible’ is a provocative and significant reworking of the tradition of disinterest – of, as he would say, a dis-interest a`venir, to come.80

CHAPTER 2

A Harsh Transcendence

ma responsabilite´ – malgre´ moi1

DISINTEREST, GOODNESS AND SUBSTITUTION

Emmanuel Le´vinas is one of the few philosophers to revive a concept of disinterest after Nietzsche. He makes passing reference in the late 1940s to a ‘notion of disinterestedness [de´sinte´ressement]’ that he dissociates from the ‘wellknown disinterestedness of artistic vision’ and links to a certain ‘freedom’ and ‘passivity,’ but it is not until Totality and Infinity (1961) that he singles out disinterest as a significant concept in his philosophy.2 In Totality and Infinity he redefines disinterest as an ‘ethical’ discourse. For Le´vinas, ethics is a ‘calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the other’ (43). It is a responsibility for the other that precedes (and provides a foundation for) the relation to self. ‘Responsibility,’ he remarks elsewhere, ‘is anterior to deliberation and is that to which I have thus been exposed and dedicated before being dedicated to myself.’3 Le´vinas’s concept of disinterest is founded on his characterization of the relation between the self and the other as that of ‘a separated being in relation with an other absolutely other [un eˆtre se´pare´ en relation avec un autre absolument autre]’ (218; 241). This ‘non-allergic relation’ signifies neither an opposition, a colonization, nor a synthesis: it is a relation that overturns ‘formal logic,’ a relation in which ‘the terms remain absolute despite the relation in which they find themselves’ (47, 180). Totality cannot conceive of ‘an irreducible singularity,’ and it is the very singularity of the subject that defines its responsibility for the other. ‘To utter ‘‘I,’’ ’ Le´vinas writes, ‘means to possess a privileged place with regard to the responsibilities for which no one can replace me and from which no one can release me.’ Far from limiting my freedom, the other ‘calls it to responsibility and founds it’ (300, 203).

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The relationship with the other as ‘absolutely other’ inaugurates a disinterest, a reversal or removal of interest that does not originate in the subject, in the interests of the self, even in the interests of the self in being disinterested. In ‘The trace of the other’ (1963), Le´vinas suggests that any radical idea of disinterest must be based on ‘a movement of the same unto the other which never returns to the same.’4 Hegel’s philosophy, he argues, represents ‘the logical outcome’ of ‘an underlying allergy’ in Western philosophy, in which ‘everything that is an attitude of consciousness . . . is in the last analysis self-consciousness, that is, identity and autonomy.’ The movement of the self towards the other is in effect always an act of self-interest, a momentary negation, an ersatz disinterest, which ultimately propels self-consciousness towards absolute knowledge. Any movement of the self towards the other is already guaranteed a return journey ‘in which the other is transmuted into the same’ (346–8). In a ‘departure without return,’ on the other hand, ‘the I [Moi] loses its sovereign coincidence with itself, its identification, in which consciousness returned triumphantly to itself and rested on itself [reposer sur elle-meˆme]’ (349, 353; 273). Disinterest interrupts the great project of self-consciousness as the colonization of the other. The ‘putting into question of the self is precisely the welcome of the absolutely other.’ In welcoming the other, the self exposes itself to a pre-existing, unavoidable and unending responsibility for the other, announcing ‘a surplus for which intentionality is inadequate’ (353). Le´vinas insists in Totality and Infinity that when describing the relation between ‘a separated being’ and ‘an other absolutely other’ ‘as disinterested [comme de´sinte´resseé],’ one should not ‘recognize’ any ‘intentionality’ in this disinterested relation (109; 111). Disinterest is a waking ‘sans intentionalite´.’5 The relationship with the infinitely other – especially a so-called ‘disinterested’ relation of the self to the other as an act of good conscience – exceeds intentionality. Disinterest is malgre´ moi, despite myself. For Le´vinas disinterest is linked to goodness. He writes: the infinite in the finite, the more in the less, which is accomplished by the idea of Infinity, is produced as Desire – not a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes [apaise], but the Desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies. A Desire perfectly disinterested – goodness [De´sir parfaitement de´sinte´resse´ – bonte´] (50; 42). In contrast to need, which is predicated on the subject’s lack or nostalgia and the attempt to possess and absorb the other, desire is that which ‘cannot be satisfied,’ which looks ‘beyond everything that can simply complete it.’ Desire reflects ‘a relationship whose positivity comes from remoteness, from separation’: desire ‘is like goodness.’ Goodness, the Good, is beyond being. ‘The


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Good [le Bien],’ Le´vinas writes, ‘is Good in itself and not by relation to the need to which it is wanting; it is a luxury with respect to needs. It is precisely in this that it is beyond being’ (34, 102–3; 105–6). The good is ‘better than being.’6 Disinterest is a form of goodness (an excess without need) because it is an interest – malgre´ moi – in the infinite, an interest that exceeds the need of the same and expresses the always unfulfilled desire for the absolutely other. Interest is totality, disinterest infinity. In his later works Le´vinas develops this concept of disinterest, extending it from ‘the exclusively moral sense of the term’ to ‘an even more radical sense,’ namely ‘a disinterestedness opposed to the essence of a being.’7 In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), he argues that the ‘event of being [l’e´veńement d’eˆtre]’ is ‘the esse, the essence.’ Working ‘as an invincible persistance,’ essence ‘is interest [esse est inte´resse],’ ‘being’s interestedness [l’inte´ressement de l’eˆtre]’ and ‘interestedness’ is ‘persisting in being.’ For Le´vinas, interest is ontology. In contrast, disinterestedness describes ‘an order more grave than being [plus grave que l’eˆtre] and antecedent to being’: a fundamental and ‘preoriginal’ disengagement of ‘subjectivity from its essence.’8 In the dense, rich repetitions and circling eddies of Otherwise than Being, a text which avoids the verb to be, Le´vinas argues that ‘subjectivity is the other in the same [la subjectivite´ c’est l’Autre-dans-le-Me´me].’ In other words, the subjectivity of the subject is only apparent, only expresses itself, when the other is ‘in the same.’ Dis-interestedness [de´s-inte´ressement] signifies a ‘subjectivity that . . . breaks with essence’ (25, 8; 46). Essence ‘is not only conveyed, it is temporalized in a predicative statement’ and therefore, time (‘a diachrony refractory to all synchronization’) and language (a ‘saying’ that proceeds and is betrayed by a ‘said’ which, nonetheless, retains a trace of the saying) indicate a subjectivity that is irreducible both to self-consciousness and to intentionality (39, 9, 46–7). In time and through language, subjectivity signifies ‘prior to essence’ and ‘to the other’ (45–6). For Le´vinas, signification is a substitution and substitution is dis-interestedness. ‘In its being,’ he writes, ‘subjectivity undoes essence by substituting itself for another.’ The ‘extraordinary and everyday event of my responsibility for the faults or misfortune of others’ rests on a fundamental ‘vulnerability,’ a passive exposure, a giving despite oneself: a ‘risk of suffering without reason’ (13, 49– 51). Dis-interestedness is ‘the-one-for-the other to the point of substitution.’ The other is ‘the persecuted one for whom I am responsible to the point of being a hostage for him’ (54, 59, 112). As Derrida suggests in Adieu, Le´vinas evokes a hospitality that precedes ownership of one’s self (l’hospitalite´ preće`de la proprie´te´). De´s-inte´ressement is an original welcoming of the other in which the subject is both the ‘host’ and the ‘hostage’ of the other. A hostage, Derrida notes, is ‘someone whose uniqueness endures the possibility of a substitution.’9

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In Otherwise than Being Le´vinas reworks the notion of ‘a separated being in relation with an other absolutely other’ into the idea of an irreplaceable singularity that substitutes itself for the other: ‘the non-interchangeable par excellence, the I, the unique one, substitutes itself for others.’ To be ‘dis-interested’ is to submit to an ‘undeclinable’ and original obligation to reverse interest, to interrupt essence and to divest being through a passive substitution of self for the other that conditions my subjectivity (117, 138–9, 119). For Le´vinas, ‘subjectivity is described as a substituting for the other, as de´s-inte´r-essement’ (140; 219).10

SECRECY, REASON AND ENTHUSIASM Le´vinas’s concept of dis-interestedness signals a profound break with traditional projects of disinterest in that it is not concerned with establishing a disinterested subject as much as insisting on a dis-interest of the subject. Disinterestedness should not be taken as a triumph of morality, as a victory of ethics that confirms a comforting plenitude of disinterest as good conscience. A radical dis-interestedness, Le´vinas insists, ‘could never mean altruistic will, instinct of ‘‘natural benevolence,’’ or love.’11 At the same time, it is apparent that Le´vinas repeats or at least relies on certain gestures of classical concepts of disinterest. He redefines and he reinhabits disinterest. Despite his departure from the disinterested subject, Le´vinas shares with the classical thinkers of disinterest the conviction that a framework can be found to mediate between the public and the private. For Le´vinas, disinterest is founded on the assumption that the private can be independent of the public. In Totality and Infinity he argues, ‘the individual and the personal count and act independently of the universal, which would mould them’ (218). Without separation, that is, ‘a relationship within independence,’ the individual would be subsumed in ‘an impersonal relation within a universal order’ (104, 88). The ‘separated being in relation with an other absolutely other’ is ‘the private individual’ who resists the tyranny of the state and founds the pluralist society (197, 104). By maintaining its ‘secrecy,’ a separated being provides the foundation for a pluralism or multiplicity that, ‘over and beyond the totality,’ ‘inaugurates a society’ (102, 104, 218). In Otherwise than Being Le´vinas makes it clear that the relationship with the other ‘relates us with the third party,’ ‘the whole of humanity,’ and establishes a pluralist social order through ‘fraternity and discourse.’ Keeping in mind that ‘justice can be established only if I . . . always destituted and divested of being . . . can become an other like the others,’ Le´vinas argues that the recognition of the third party inaugurates justice in


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society (157–60). As a separated being, in Totality and Infinity the private individual in society retains a secret ‘inner life’ that cannot be brought to light, made visible, in the ‘universal order’ of the state (58). As we have seen, in contrast to Derrida, Le´vinas gives the secret an exemplary role in mediating between the individual, society and the state. When he speaks of a private that is independent of the public as the foundation for a civil society, Le´vinas evokes a concept of disinterest that emerged in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, he breaks with the tradition of disinterest when he insists that the private has always already suffered a fundamental privation of its autonomy. Separation remains ‘a relationship within independence,’ ‘a separated being in relation with an other absolutely other.’ Le´vinas may share with classical ideas of disinterest the belief that one can draw a clear distinction between the public and the private – a radical belief which distinguishes him from Derrida – but de´s-inte´ressement also signals a break with the common assumptions about the origin and grounds of the private, a break that has influenced Derrida’s work. Le´vinas also differs from the tradition of disinterest in his refusal to rely on either sentiment, sympathy or sovereign reason to provide an internal authority for the disinterest of the private. The relationship with the other cannot be reduced to ‘a movement of sympathy merging us with him’ (89). Sympathy is seen by Le´vinas as a mode of synthesis that attempts to domesticate, subjugate and deny the infinite alterity of the other. While he makes a point of rejecting the sympathetic imagination – perhaps the most popular grounds for disinterest in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (I involuntarily sympathize with the other by imagining myself in his or her situation) – Le´vinas’s attitude towards reason is more complex. He redefines and retains much of the traditional associations of disinterest with reason. Socrates taught that I ‘receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside.’ This apparent ‘primacy’ and ‘permanence’ of the same is the foundation of the role played by ‘reason’ in Western philosophy. Le´vinas observes: ‘That reason in the last analysis would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing other limits it’ (43). Western philosophy has characterized reason as a ‘universal thought.’ The ‘very being’ of reason ‘consists in renouncing singularity’ and, consequently, any kind of relation between a separated being and the infinitely other (72). Le´vinas goes on to write: ‘reason makes human society possible, but a society whose members would be only reasons would vanish as a society. What could a being entirely rational speak of with another entirely rational being? Reason has no plural; how could numerous reasons be distinguished?’ (119).

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Rational discourse is a ‘monologue’ always ‘becoming universal’ (72). Autonomous and sovereign, reason ‘opens upon’ the ‘universal order’ of an impersonal state (208). In spite of his condemnation of the sovereignty of reason, Le´vinas gives rationality a significant place in his concept of disinterest. He redefines reason by rejecting the dominant view of rationality as a ‘suspension of action’ in which reason alone guides and affirms the freedom of an autonomous subject to be disinterested (82). He substitutes for this classical idea of reason the notion of rational critique that begins by putting its own origin in question. Rationality, he argues, has an ethical place within ‘the critique of spontaneity engendered by failure’ (83). In other words, reason is a critique already haunted at the outset by its failure in relation to the other. It is a critique ‘which calls into question the central place the I occupies in the world’ and which poses the ‘problem of the foundation’ (83, 85). In this context, ‘the essence of reason consists not in securing for man a foundation and powers, but in calling him in question and in inviting him to justice’ (88). Le´vinas is perhaps closest to a classical concept of disinterest when he repeats the opposition between a rational disinterest and enthusiasm. As Derrida observes in ‘Violence and metaphysics’ (1964), Le´vinas is firmly against the ecstatic ravishing of enthusiasm.12 Enthusiasm for Le´vinas, Derrida notes in The Gift of Death (1991–1999), is in the gravest sense, irresponsibility.13 Le´vinas insists ‘the ethical relation . . . cuts across every relation one could call mystical’ and defines ‘the rational character of the ethical relation’ (202–3). In ‘A religion for adults’ (1957), he suggests that, as ‘man’s possession by God,’ enthusiasm is the antithesis of disinterestedness. Enthusiasm is the source of an idolatry that denies ‘human freedom,’ responsibility and any ethical relationship with the other.14 However, as we shall see, Le´vinas also appears to associate a certain kind of enthusiasm with disinterest. The dangerous effects of enthusiasm are found in a violence arising from the modern valorization of myth. As Derrida notes in a significant passage from ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ Le´vinas associates this modern ‘enthusiasm’ with the thought of Heidegger: Despite all the misunderstandings which may be embedded in this treatment of Heideggerean thought . . . Le´vinas’s intention, in any event, seems clear. The neutral thought of Being neutralizes the Other as a being . . . The Heideggerean ‘possibilities’ remains powers. Although they are pretechnical and preobjective, they are nonetheless oppressive and possessive. By another paradox, the philosophy of the neutral communicates with a philosophy of the site, of rootedness, of pagan violence, of ravishment, of enthusiasm, a


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philosophy offered up to the sacred, that is, to the anonymous divinity, the divinity without the Deity.15 According to Le´vinas, Heidegger’s thought is overshadowed by a misguided confidence in myth and an admiration for ‘pagan violence.’ ‘Myth,’ he warns, ‘albeit sublime, introduces into the soul that troubled element, that impure element of magic and sorcery and that drunkenness of the sacred and of war that prolong the animal within the civilized.’16 Heidegger has perpetuated the violence of the mythic by seeking some kind of authenticity in the primitive and pagan. In the extraordinary essay ‘Heidegger, Gagarin and Us’ (1961), Le´vinas depicts Heidegger as an enthusiast par excellence, as an advocate of the mythic and idolatrous pagan cults of nature opposed to technology and modernity.17 He reiterates this charge in Totality and Infinity, noting ‘possession is pre-eminently the form in which the other becomes the same, by becoming mine. In denouncing the sovereignty of the technological powers of man Heidegger exalts the pre-technological powers of possession.’18 Le´vinas counters this thought – and enthusiasm as possession – by redefining humanism as ‘a system of principles and disciplines that free human life from the prestige of myths, the discord they introduce into ideas and the cruelty they perpetuate in social customs.’19

THE DISPOSSESSION OF POSSESSION Le´vinas’s view of enthusiasm and its opposition to disinterest is more complex than it first appears. As a form of possession (la possession), enthusiasm is linked in Totality and Infinity to a number of different forms of possession and nonpossession, including the possession of self, of home, of things, the dispossession by the other and the possession by a god. For Le´vinas, possession appears to be a necessary moment of egoism in the evolution of the separated being and its relation to world and to the infinitely other. As he says in ‘Ethics and spirit’ (1952), ‘every experience of the world is at the same time an experience of self, possession and enjoyment of self: it forms and nourishes me.’20 However, as he argues in Totality and Infinity, before possession as dwelling in a home (before the ‘enjoyment of self’), the subject encounters the elements. The elements are ‘essentially non-possessable, ‘‘nobody’s’’: earth, sea, light, city [‘‘personne’’: la terre, la mer, la lumie`re, la ville].’ ‘Every relation or possession,’ he writes, ‘is situated within the non-possessable which envelops or contains without being able to be contained or enveloped’ (131; 138). Formless, anonymous, the elements present ‘the strangeness of the earth,’ the there is (il y a), ‘the

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nothingness which separates [neánt qui se´pare]’ (142; 151). Any form of possession is founded on an original dispossession. After encountering the elemental, ‘the non-possessable,’ possession as habitation, as chez soi (being at home with oneself, interiority), is the essential phase of ‘the recollection of the I in its dwelling’ (157). The possession of a home in turn makes the possession of things possible. Through my labour, I seize, grasp and attempt to master things, substances, in the world: possession becomes a ‘taking-possession [prise de possession]’ (159; 170). It is through possessing things that the subject must encounter the other that resists possession: ‘A thing does not resist acquisition; the other possessors – those whom one cannot possess [on ne peut posse´der] – contest and therefore can sanction possession itself. Thus the possession of things issues in a discourse.’ It is the other ‘who calls in question possession itself’ (162–3; 174). ‘The other – the absolutely other – paralyses possession [Autrui – absolument autre – paralyse la possession],’ dispossesses possession itself (171; 185). The elemental non-possessive origin of the subject’s possession of itself and the world is indicative of ‘the radical character of the uprootedness [de´racinement] of him who is recollected in a home’ (169; 184). Hospitality, the giving or offering of what is possessed, underwrites any notion of home, of chez soi. ‘The possibility for the home to open to the Other,’ Le´vinas writes, ‘is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows.’ It is language – discourse – that ‘puts in common a world hitherto mine.’ Language ‘is a primordial dispossession, a first donation’ (6). Le´vinas suggests that there is a necessary possession by the subject of itself which in turn must lead to a dispossession of the subject’s self-possession by the other. Self-possession (already founded on an original non-possession) is dispossessed by the other. Possession is dispossession: a (dis)possession. Without overlooking the different forms of possession and non-possession that Le´vinas traces, there is a significant relation between enthusiasm and (dis)possession in his work. This link between enthusiasm and disinterest gestures towards the most traditional concept of disinterest: God as original (dis)possession. Le´vinas implies that there are at least two forms of enthusiasm: enthusiasm as violence and enthusiasm as inspiration. In ‘Ethics and spirit,’ he argues, ‘violence is to be found in any action in which one acts as if one were alone to act.’ He notes, ‘nearly every causality is in this sense violent: the fabrication of a thing, the satisfaction of a need, the desire and even the knowledge of an object’ (6). ‘But,’ he adds, ‘violence can also lie, in large part, in the poetic delirium and enthusiasm displayed when we merely offer our mouths to the muse who speaks through us; in our fear and trembling when the Sacred wrenches us out of ourselves.’ Enthusiasm is the violence both of possessing and of being possessed. The ‘violent man,’ Le´vinas goes on to write,


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‘does not move out of himself. He takes, he possesses. Possession denies independent existence. To have is to refuse to be. Violence is a sovereignty, but also a solitude. To endure violence in enthusiasm and ecstasy and delirium is to be possessed’ (7, 9). The violent man denies the dispossession of possession. In Totality and Infinity Le´vinas suggests that possession by a god, enthusiasm – which he has previously characterized as a loss of freedom and denial of responsibility – can also lead to a dispossession of the solitude of self-possession and to a relationship with the other as infinitely other. This enthusiasm as dispossession is aligned to a certain rationality. In the midst of discussing the ‘the idea of Infinity,’ Le´vinas quotes from the Phaedrus: We find that this presence in thought of an idea whose ideatum overflows the capacity of thought is given expression not only in Aristotle’s theory of the agent intellect, but also, very often, in Plato. Against a thought that proceeds from him who ‘has his own head to himself,’ he affirms the value of the delirium that comes from God, ‘winged thought.’ Delirium here does not have an irrationalist significance; it is only a ‘divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.’ The fourth type of delirium is reason itself, rising to the ideas, thought in the highest sense (49–50). He goes on to say that ‘possession by a god, enthusiasm, is not the irrational, but the end of the solitary . . . or inward thought, the beginning of a true experience of the new.’ Le´vinas suggests that there is a non-irrational enthusiasm that dispossesses the self-possession of the subject: a rational enthusiasm that disinterests the interests of being. ‘The end of the solitary,’ he writes – enthusiasm – is ‘already Desire.’ On the same page, he writes of ‘the Desire for the Infinite. . . . A Desire perfectly disinterested – goodness’ (50). After Totality and Infinity Le´vinas was more explicit about this relation between enthusiasm and disinterest. In Otherwise than Being he describes inspiration as ‘the claiming of the same by the other.’21 In ‘God and Philosophy’ (1975), he associates de´s-inte´ressement with a certain ‘inspiration’ and ‘prophetic testimony.’22 The proximity, the (im)possible suggestion of a similarity in function or ends of dis-interestedness and enthusiasm raises the most difficult questions about a dis-possession or dis-interest of the subject. Who or what can counter ‘the ecstasy of intentionality’?23 What is the difference between the possession of and being dispossessed by the self, by the other – and the most difficult question of all – by God?24 Who or what sanctions or can sanction this difference?

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DISINTEREST, GOD AND JUDAISM

If you have a sapling in your hand and are told, ‘Look the Messiah is here,’ you should first plant the sapling and then go out to welcome the Messiah. Johanan ben Zakkai25 For Le´vinas, disinterest cannot be founded on either external public structures or on the interiority of an autonomous subject. At the same time, he places disinterest outside of the subject. When Le´vinas links disinterest to inspiration it appears that de´s-inte´ressement cannot entirely extricate itself from the question of religion. It remains a disinterest inspired by God. ‘God is outside and is God for that very reason,’ he writes.26 It is a disinterest that relies on both an idea of God and an ethical and rational Judaism. Le´vinas would perhaps say that in relation to the question of dis-interestedness ‘the idea of God’ and ‘an ethical and rational Judaism’ are mediated by philosophy.27 One could also say, as Catherine Chalier has persuasively shown in La trace de l’infini (2002), that Le´vinas’s philosophy is permeated by ‘an idea of God’ and ‘an ethical and rational Judaism.’28 The boundaries or borders between ‘God,’ ‘Judaism’ and ‘philosophy’ in Le´vinas’s thought are evidently and importantly distinct and they are also unavoidably porous. In the essays collected in Difficult Freedom (1963–1976), Le´vinas implies that it is the ‘horizontal’ ethical relation between humans that indicates, announces the trace of a ‘vertical’ relation to God. God only ‘appears’ in the ethical, in the just actions of men and women. As Le´vinas says: ‘ethics is not the corollary of the vision of God, it is that very vision.’29 Ethics is ‘an optics of the Divine’ and ‘no relation with God is direct or immediate. The Divine can be manifested only through my neighbour.’30 It is this vertical/horizontal relation that provides the framework for a rational, inspired disinterest that resists the violence and myths of enthusiasm. For Le´vinas, Judaism is uniquely predisposed to an ethical, rational and inspired disinterest. ‘The ethical relation,’ he writes, ‘will appear to Judaism as an exceptional relation’ because it experiences ‘the presence of God through one’s relation to man.’31 Judaism is less concerned with ‘preparing man . . . for a private meeting with God’ than with ‘bringing the divine presence to just and human effort.’ It is because the Torah and the Talmud are preoccupied not with ‘the mystery of God,’ but ‘the human tasks of man,’ that Judaism embraces a distinctive rationalism.32 Rationalism, he insists, ‘does not menace the Jewish faith.’33 Rational and ethical, Judaism is defined by its rejection of enthusiasm:


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For Judaism, the goal of education consists in instituting a link between man and the saintliness of God and in maintaining man in this relationship. But all this effort . . . consists in understanding this saintliness of God that stands in sharp contrast to the numinous meaning of this term, as it appears in the primitive religions wherein the moderns have often wished to see the source of all religion. For these thinkers, man’s possession by God, enthusiasm, would be consequent on the saintliness or the sacred character of God, the alpha and omega of spiritual life. Judaism has decharmed the world, contesting the notion that religions apparently evolved out of enthusiasm and the Sacred. Judaism remains foreign to any offensive return of these forms of human elevation. It denounces them as the essence of idolatry.34 The rejection of enthusiasm in Judaism is the affirmation of ‘human freedom.’ The transports and ecstasy of enthusiasm both deny the freedom to be responsible and institute a divine order that transcends the ethical relations between men. This freedom is hardly assured and always menaced by violence and myth: it remains a ‘difficult freedom.’35 ‘Enthusiasm is, after all, possession by a god,’ Le´vinas remarks, and ‘Jews wish not to be possessed, but to be responsible. Their God is the master of justice; He judges in the open light of reason and discourse.’36 It is worth recalling that Le´vinas’s earliest references to disinterest associate it with a certain freedom and, like this ‘difficult freedom,’ disinterest is rational, ethical, opposed to the injustices of enthusiasm and inspired by a God that ‘is outside.’ In ‘God and Philosophy,’ Le´vinas asks ‘if God may be expressed in a reasonable discourse that will be neither ontology nor faith.’37 While he is concerned not with a God that ‘is outside’ as much as ‘the idea of God . . . or God in us’ as the ‘idea of the Infinite, [the] Infinite in me,’ he raises the question of the dis-interest of the subject by God. The Cartesian notion of the idea of the Infinite in me is indicative of an inaugural trauma: ‘the putting in us [la mise en nous] of an unencompassable idea’ (105–7). How, Le´vinas asks, is one to respond to ‘the monstrosity of the Infinite put in me [mis en moi]?’ How is one to respond to the ordeal of the Infinite transcending the subject (110)? Le´vinas responds to these questions by returning to his original account of disinterest as desire in Totality and Infinity. The Infinite ‘put in me’ announces ‘a passivity more passive than all passivity’ and the recognition of a ‘Desire beyond satisfaction,’ a ‘Desire without end, beyond Being: de´s-inte´ressement, transcendence – desire for the Good.’ It is through ‘the idea of God’ or the Infinite in me that the subject acknowledges – and endures – dis-interestedness. Le´vinas goes on to say that the possibility of dis-interestedness ‘in the Desire of the Infinite’ rests on the separation of ‘the Desirable or God . . . in the Desire.’ For disinterestedness to be possible, the ‘Desirable or God’ must remain separate: ‘Holy

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[Saint]’ (111, 113).38 As he suggests in God, Death and Time (1975–1993), ‘dis-inter-estedness [de´s-inte´r-essement]’ provides ‘the basis’ for seeking ‘a mode of access to a non-ontological notion of God.’ De´s-inte´r-essement becomes ‘the passage to being’s beyond,’ ‘the ascension toward God.’39 The dis-interest of the subject by ‘the idea of God’ describes the trauma of ‘transcendence,’ of the ‘more’ that devastates and awakens the ‘less.’40 Transcendence is dis-interest as desire: it leaves us hungry, unsatisfied – hungry for the other, starving on behalf of the other. Le´vinas’s concept of dis-interestedness may reinhabit older discourses that sought an ‘outside,’ an ‘infinite’ as the unassailable guarantee for disinterest, but he does not evoke the comforts and satisfactions of a disinterest founded on theology. As Derrida has suggested, Le´vinas’s work perhaps repeats ‘without religion, the possibility of religion.’41 At the same time, Le´vinas implies that an ethical, rational, inspired and non-enthusiastic disinterest is most ‘at home’ in Judaism. Is, according to Le´vinas, a Christian or Muslim dis-interestedness possible? Derrida has touched on this difficult question in Adieu.42 In a number of works, Le´vinas clearly associates Christianity not with disinterest, but with a lack of interest, with indifference. In an essay from 1950 he refers to the political and social ‘failure’ of Christianity to prevent the Shoah.43 In ‘The State of Caesar and the State of David’ (1971), he identifies a ‘political spirit of indifference’ in Christianity arising from the separation of the ‘kingdom of God and the earthly kingdom’ that distinguishes Christianity from the terrestrial concerns of Judaism for justice and the universal ethical imperatives that it recognises.44

AN EXTREME GRAVITY Le´vinas’s revival of a disinterest after Nietzsche – despite Nietzsche – remains weighed down by ‘an extreme gravity.’ In Otherwise than Being, he asks, ‘Does not disinterestedness [de´sinte´ressement] – without compensation – without eternal life, without the pleasingness of happiness – complete gratuity – indicate an extreme gravity [une gravite´ extreˆme]’?45 Dis-interestedness inspires a ‘desire for the Good,’ but it is also a matter of an infinite responsibility, a harsh transcendence. One can never lightly or blithely celebrate such a disinterest. As much of his work, Le´vinas’s concept of disinterest is marked by ‘the acute experience of the human in the twentieth century.’ In Totality and Infinity he writes: Freedom consists in knowing that freedom is in peril. But to know or to be conscious is to have time to avoid and forestall the instant of inhumanity. It is this perpetual postponing of the hour of treason – infinitesimal difference


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between man and non-man – that implies the disinterestedness of goodness [le de´sinte´ressement de la bonte´], the desire of the absolutely other or nobility (35; 24).

CHAPTER 3

Disinterest and Sovereignty

DISINTEREST IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

It is ‘a truth universally acknowledged’ by historians of aesthetics that ideas of disinterest in Britain began with Shaftesbury at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Inspired by Edward Bullough’s notion of ‘psychical distance,’ a unique sense of detachment from all social and ethical interests, from the early 1960s Jerome Stolnitz has exercised a lasting influence on the approach to disinterest with his theory of ‘aesthetic disinterestedness.’1 According to Stolnitz, Shaftesbury introduces the idea of a subjective detachment from all practical and social interests surrounding a beautiful object and a ‘stifling’ of all the personal interests of the spectator.2 As recently as 1994, Arnold Berleant was still speaking of the need to move beyond aesthetic disinterestedness and yet, despite critics such as George Dickie and Paul Guyer challenging Stolnitz’s account of Shaftesbury, none of these writers have questioned Stolnitz’s basic assumption that ideas of disinterest began in Britain with Shaftesbury.3 It is a mark of Stolnitz’s influence that even Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of Aesthetic (1990), accepts that there was no disinterest before Shaftesbury.4 Eagleton’s important book states, quite rightly, that disinterest in the eighteenth century can be understood as an attempt to mediate between the demands of experience and reason, the particular and the universal, the individual and the state.5 However, if histories of aesthetics tend to treat disinterest as a concept of the private, Eagleton sees disinterest primarily as a concept of the public. Disinterest is a sign of the aesthetic, which is ‘at the heart of the middle class’s struggle for political hegemony.’ Following Gramsci, Eagleton defines the aesthetic as an experience of hegemony.6 Though he adds an emancipatory aspect to the repression of the aesthetic, he assumes a pervasive internalization of the dominant ideology of the public space. Readings of disinterest influenced by Foucault have also tended to subsume


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the complex history of disinterest to the figure of the disinterested spectator whom, as both inspector and self-inspector, exercises power while internalizing public norms and rules.7 The disinterested spectator becomes the panopticon and ‘the ideal’ figure of ‘hegemonic vision.’8 Such readings no doubt account for an aspect of the history of disinterest, but they do not encompass concepts of disinterest in the eighteenth century as a whole and, more often than not, tell us more about post-Nietzschean views of the inherent interests of disinterest and the theoretical conceit in the twentieth century of an absolute or sovereign interest. The history of disinterest in Britain has also been overshadowed by the influence of Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and his neo-Kantian idea of a disinterest founded on private individuals constituting a public sphere through the ‘public use of their reason.’9 For Habermas, a ‘rational communication’ in the debates and dialogues of the coffee houses and newspapers exemplifies the bourgeois public sphere in Britain in the first decades of the eighteenth century.10 Habermas creates, as John Brewer has aptly said, an ‘extremely orderly and tidy’ notion of a rational public sphere.11 He defines the private sphere through what he calls ‘audience oriented subjectivity,’ a mode in which subjectivity is ‘confirmed’ by rational communication in the public sphere.12 Habermas’s powerful elaboration of a rational public sphere has perhaps not helped the study of the constantly shifting grounds of disinterest in Britain in the eighteenth century. For example, in the period that Habermas discusses, Shaftesbury may have placed great faith in ideal power of reason, but he was deeply troubled by the instability of the imagination and the social passions. Both Hutcheson and Hume followed him by emphatically rejecting reason as a reliable structure for mediating between the public and the private. Addison and Steele’s Mr. Spectator, the imaginary eponymous editor of The Spectator (1711–12, 1714), may have been immersed in the polite, rational conversation of the coffee houses, but his extreme ‘Taciturnity’ and refusal and inability to speak is also a sign of the silence of reason that haunts the dialogue between the public and the private in the early eighteenth century.13 Habermas’s notion of ‘audience oriented subjectivity’ restricts the private to the public rules and conventions of rational communication and overlooks the problem of an autonomous and unpredictable private which, after Descartes, preoccupied British thinkers of disinterest. A more appropriate model for reading ideas of disinterest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is perhaps Alain Touraine’s Critique of Modernity (1995). Touraine argues that modernity should not simply be seen as a history in which ‘reason alone could establish a correspondence between human action and the order of the world.’ The history of modernity is, on the contrary, the history of ‘a tense relationship

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between Reason and Subject, rationalization and subjectivation.’14 For Touraine, in the ‘great rupture that defines modernity,’ which began with the Renaissance and Reformation, ‘the divine logos that haunts the pre-modern worldview was replaced by the impersonality of scientific laws, but also – and simultaneously – by the I of the Subject.’ Modernity can be seen as ‘the increasing divorce between the objective world created by reason . . . and the world of subjectivity.’15 The modern ideas of disinterest emerge in this period and their history is haunted by the unending attempt, which ultimately fails, to bridge the gap between the public and the private, a gap that perhaps defines ‘modernity.’

DISINTEREST IN BRITAIN 1600–1790 ‘I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses.’16 Descartes’s opening words of the Third Meditation (1641) can be seen as the beginning of modern ideas of disinterest. In 1612, Francis Bacon had used what might be called a pre-Cartesian concept of disinterest in The Charge Touching Duels. Bacon argues that the state must abolish ‘private’ duelling, representing it as ‘an insult against the King’s power and authority.’ The private duellist would then ‘see the law and rule of state disinterest him of a vain and unnecessary hazard’ (my emphasis).17 Bacon uses disinterest as a verb here (‘to rid or divest of interest’), and as an unambiguous public concept. For Descartes, the ‘greatest benefit’ of his ‘new method’ of methodical doubt lies in detaching the mind ‘from involvements with the senses’ and ‘freeing us from all our preconceived opinions.’18 Disinterest, impartiality, the freedom from prejudice is fundamentally a private concept. After Descartes and until the end of the eighteenth century, there was a general belief that a framework or point of reference could be found to mediate between the public and the private and to judge impartially between the interests of the state to disinterest the individual and the precarious disinterest of ‘a thing that thinks: that is, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, [and] is ignorant of many things.’19 In the aftermath of English Civil War, Milton would write in Paradise Lost (1667), ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’20 It was precisely the apparent autonomy of the mind and the unpredictable power of the private that could ‘make a heav’n of hell, [and] a hell of heav’n’ that inspired what Richard Tuck has characterized as Hobbes’s reaction against Descartes.21 In the context of the breakdown of royal authority and the chaotic and destructive civil war that followed, Hobbes formulated a concept of disinterest based on both Bacon’s notion of the power of the state to


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disinterest the individual and the recognition after Descartes of the problem of a new claim to a private authority that was in fact rarely disinterested and more often than not interested, deluded and fanatical. As Hume notes in his History of England (1754–1761), the 1640s was a time when the enthusiastic spirit met with such honour and encouragement, and was the immediate means of distinction and preferment; it was impossible to set bounds to these holy fervours, or confine, within any natural limits, what was directed towards an infinite and supernatural object. Every man, as prompted by the warmth of his temper, excited by emulation, or supported by his habits of hypocrisy, endeavoured to distinguish himself beyond his fellows, and to arrive at a higher pitch of saintship and perfection. In proportion to its degree of fanaticism, each sect became dangerous and destructive.22 In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes identifies the ‘Authority of Private Zeal’ and ‘private Inspiration’ with religious instability, political disorder and the dangers of enthusiasm.23 As the Cambridge Platonist Henry More warns in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1656), enthusiasm undermines both Church and State by giving private judgement an apparent divinely sanctioned authority to decide ‘what is holy, just and true.’24 With its extreme passions of melancholy and madness and delusive errors and visions of the imagination, enthusiasm mistakes internal fancies for external realities.25 The modern concept of disinterest arises from Hobbes’s attempt to combat the power of enthusiasm and his reaction to Descartes’s radical doubt about the existence of the external world and belief that I can only be certain of my own internal perceptions. Hobbes responded to the problem of the private as the first and last certainty by affirming that the motion of material objects produces any movement in internal perceptions and confirms the existence of external objects. He also argues that the imagination is a passive faculty of retention, an internal inertia that is hardly distinguishable from the memory and has no internal capacity for invention. Descartes had raised the possibility that ‘all external things’ could be ‘the delusion of dreams’ and Hobbes insists that dreams are nothing more than ‘a silence of sense,’ a lull when no new, ‘more vigorous impressions’ obscure the fading memory of past sense impressions.26 Hobbes makes it clear that the mistaken belief in dreams, ghosts, superstitious fears of the ‘Power of Spirits Invisible’ and the ‘opinion of Inspiration, called commonly, Private Spirit’ are all examples of the errors of internal perception being taken for external realities (99, 55). Not knowing its inside from its outside, the private is an inherent source of instability. When a man uses his

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‘own Inspiration,’ Hobbes insists, and not the ‘Law of his Country’ for the ‘rule of his action,’ then ‘such private men as pretend to be supernaturally Inspired’ will bring about the ‘dissolution of all Civill Government’ (223–4). Hobbes’s emphatic limitation of the private inaugurates the post-Cartesian concept of disinterest. For Hobbes, disinterest requires a rigorous empiricist philosophy grounded outside of the subject as the foundation for an effective political philosophy in which the public would disinterest the private. Hobbes argues that ‘no man’s Reason’ can be taken as ‘Right Reason.’ Though ‘all men by nature reason alike,’ their internal perceptions of the external world are different and consequently, ‘when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them’ (32, 35).27 This great ‘diversity’ of ‘reception’ is compounded by ‘our different passions’ and ‘prejudices of opinion’ (31). As a result, the ‘words’ good and evil are ‘ever used with the relation to the person that useth them’ and are determined by the interests and ‘Appetite of Private men’ (39, 346). Language is interested. This ‘private measure of the Good’ crystallizes the problems of the private. Because private reasoning will make a claim to right reason through the individual nature of its perceptions and the pressures of its natural passions and private interests, right reason must be represented by ‘the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge’ (32–3). The private – and the private use of language – can only be disinterested through a common public authority. For the sake of rational and ordered communication in the commonwealth, language needs the Leviathan. While private reasoning should not claim to be right reason, reason enables the individual to recognize that the most basic law of nature, the right of selfpreservation (which, as Grotius had shown was common to all), requires the individual in a peaceful civil society to accept the necessity of laying ‘down his right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himselfe.’28 The individual must, Hobbes writes, ‘devest himself’ – disinterest himself – and ‘renounceth, or passesth away his Right’ to establish the mutual duties and securities, contracts and covenants for civil society (103, 92). Reason and the laws of nature establish that ‘no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause’ and that equity requires that ‘they that are at controversie, submit their Right to the Judgement of an Arbitrator’ (108–9). But it is only a ‘common Power with right and force sufficient to compell performance’ that can guarantee this fundamental requirement for civil society (96). For Hobbes, the disinterest of the private is grounded on a sovereign public authority. As the representative of the commonwealth, the sovereign public authority is ‘the public soule’ and embodies what is public in civil society (230). As Hobbes notes, ‘as by Publique, is alwaies meant, either the Person of the Commonwealth it self, or something that is so the Common-wealths, as no private


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person can claim any propriety therein’ (285). Having established the point of reference for a public disinterest of the private on the office of a sovereign in a commonwealth, Hobbes has to contend with the difficulty that a sovereign is no more naturally disinterested than his or her subjects. In the ‘proper signification’ of justice, he argues, the sovereign is incapable of ‘injustice or injury’ (since, as Tom Sorrel notes, he is ‘responsible for’ his subjects, not ‘to them’), but he or she can ‘commit Iniquity’ (129).29 The natural law of equity requires that a judge not be ‘partial in judgement’ and Hobbes responds to the complaint that the ‘Commands of Soveraigns’ might be ‘contrary to Equity’ (108, 172) with three arguments: the unique propensity to equity in monarchy above all other forms of sovereign power; the sovereign is obliged by the laws of nature and the primary ‘end’ of public authority, the safety of the people, to ensure that ‘Justice be equally administered to all degrees of People’; if the sovereign does act ‘contrary to Equity,’ it is his ‘offences’ against the ‘Common-Wealth onely’ that can be ‘pardoned’ without a ‘breach of Equity,’ since the sovereign has effectively acted ‘against himself.’ Acts against ‘private Persons’ can be pardoned only with the ‘consent of him that is injured; or reasonable satisfaction’ (131, 237–8). As the public person, the sovereign has a unique relation to equity – and to disinterest. Disinterest begins as a question of sovereignty, of the phantasm of an indivisible sovereignty, as Derrida has called it.30 If Hobbes’s concept of disinterest presupposes an ideal external sovereign public authority, writing forty years later in the midst of the Rye House Plot, the ‘Glorious’ Revolution and a Catholic Monarch on a Protestant throne, Locke has little or no faith in the unique disinterest of the sovereign. In the Two Treatises of Government (1689), he insists that the inevitable ‘danger’ of having the power of government ‘in one Man’ is that he will pursue ‘private ends of . . . [his] own, and not . . . the publick good.’31 The sovereign is the antithesis of the public good and, as James Tully remarks, ‘there is no sovereignty in Locke’s theory of government.’32 While for Hobbes the ability of the public to disinterest the private rests on the many being represented, or ‘becoming,’ the one, the sovereign, for Locke disinterest rests on the one, the individual, being a representative of or ‘becoming’ the many, the people. Like Hobbes, Locke believes that ‘Men being biased by their Interest,’ must surrender ‘all private judgments’ in the executive powers of law making and in punishment. The individual must ‘quit,’ disinterest himself, of ‘his Executive Power of the Law of Nature.’ At the same time, in contrast to Hobbes, the individual resigns his power ‘to the public’ as the ‘Community,’ the ‘one People, one Body Politick,’ to the collective power of every rational individual within a civil society.33 Retaining the rights of consent, property and rebellion, Locke founds the public disinterest of the private on the social roles of the individual.

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In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke observes: ‘History giving us such an account of Men in all Ages; and my own Experience, as far as I had an opportunity to observe, confirming it . . . most Men preferr their Private Advantage, to the publick.’34 Faced with the confident probability ‘that most Men’ are naturally partial, Locke reinforces his political writings on disinterest with what amounts to the internal sovereign authority of simple ideas to give the individual the capacity for rational, disinterested judgement. For Locke, the worst of prejudices are those that arise from ‘borrowed Principles’ which lead to individuals being ‘more easily governed,’ as they enslave ‘their Minds, to the Dictates and Dominion of others’ (83, 102; 99). These prejudices tend not only to a self-induced enslavement, but to the individual’s own imposition ‘on other Men’s Belief’ (660). At the heart of partiality is an intolerance that feeds the controversies and disputes that undermine peace. The only antidote is a recognition of the essential limitations of human understanding. For Locke, the foundation of the individual’s capacity for disinterest is the simple ideas that arise from experience. Finite in number, involuntarily received, unalterable and indispensable, simple ideas establish the fundamental limits of the private: they are Locke’s phantasm of an indivisible sovereignty. The individual cannot ‘invent or frame one new simple idea’ (120). Reason can ‘search out’ the ‘Bounds’ between prejudices arising from ‘scraps of begg’d Opinions’ and the true ‘way to Knowledge’ (89, 44; 6, 10). It can guide us in the ‘moderation and restraint of our Passions,’ allowing us to ‘govern’ ourselves (268). But it is simple ideas, as the origin of all complex ideas, that enable Locke to quarantine the imagination and curtail the power of enthusiasm. A ‘fiction of the Mind,’ he insists, ‘has no power to produce any simple idea’ (375). Simple ideas ‘are not fictions of our Fancies, but the natural and regular productions of things without us, really operating upon us’ (564). As Hobbes before him, Locke founds the concept of disinterest on the denial of the fictions of the imagination. For Locke, the greatest threat to the individual’s capacity for disinterested judgement is not from the circumscribed imagination, but from experience itself. His additional chapters on enthusiasm and the association of ideas in the fourth edition of the Essay (1700) highlight the prejudices, errors and delusions arising from the power of custom and education in civil society.35 Locke redefines the concept of disinterest as a question of internal management but, at the same time, he introduces a problem that will preoccupy British writers on disinterest in the eighteenth century, namely that the public itself is in fact the greatest threat to a public disinterest of the private. Most ideas of disinterest in the eighteenth century are founded on an emphatic reaction against Hobbes and Locke. Their rigorous epistemological,


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political and moral theories of disinterest as the precarious attempt to distinguish and to balance the internal and external – to discern the origin, possibility and authority of private and public judgements – were presented as essentially a theological denial of a natural, innate capacity for disinterest. Hobbes, in particular, was seen as an advocate of all things selfish, interested and partial.36 The Nietzsche of the early 1700s, Hobbes’s complex and important concept of disinterest was reduced to the slogan: disinterest is dead! In the relative calm after 1689 and the beginning of the Hannoverian period, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson redefined disinterest as the most moral of philosophies while, in truth, having to negotiate with a history of disinterest as a mediation between two sovereignties – an external authority and an internal management – that had been formulated by Hobbes and Locke. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, disinterest was already a divided sovereignty. Influenced by the Cambridge Platonists Cudworth and Whichcote, as much as his former tutor Locke, Shaftesbury turned to the superiority of innate intellectual ideas and the active power of reason to establish a natural disinterest that is above and beyond the influence of custom and fashion.37 As he remarks in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699, 1711), his ‘moral kind of architecture’ is built on the assumption that ‘everything is governed, ordered, or regulated for the best, by a designing principle or mind.’38 From the perfection of the whole, each interlocking part can be discerned in a harmonious system that balances public and private interests in a rational, natural order. Within this universal order, Shaftesbury breaks with disinterest as an unequivocal limitation of the private. The private has the natural and positive qualities of ‘rational affections’ and the capacity for rational ‘reflection’ that enable the individual to balance moderate private interests with the public good.39 Dispensing with Locke’s anchor of simple ideas to regulate the private, Shaftesbury’s later writings are disturbed, on the one hand, by the power of the active, autonomous imagination and, on the other hand, by uncontrollable social passions, such as the infectious mass delusions of religious enthusiasm.40 In his Notebooks (1689–1704) Shaftesbury asks such unanswered questions as, ‘if I say I have my reason, but at the same time judge by fancy, and not by reason, am I sound in my reason, or am I master of reason any sooner for this?’ and, ‘when my fancy and I are all one, am I then myself?’41 Without a tangible external or internal sovereign authority, Shaftesbury’s beautiful, frail ideal of a reasonable balance between public and private interests was seen by Hutcheson as prey to the instabilities of the private and the pressures of the public. In An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson introduces into the ‘closet’ of Locke’s Understanding the ‘simple ideas of approbation and condemnation’ which establish a ‘superior’ or natural moral sense that is entirely ‘independent on our will.’42

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Involuntarily felt, the ideas of approval or disapproval are immune to the delusions of the imagination and the corruptions of custom. The sovereign moral sense is both a ‘disinterested affection’ and a ‘Publick Sense.’43 In contrast to his predecessors, Hutcheson argues that a reliable measure for disinterest can be found in the individual’s sentiments, affections and passions. The greatest of affections, benevolence, provides an ideal moral guideline for the authenticity of involuntary, natural feelings of ‘disinterested desire’ in which we desire ‘the happiness of another without considering it as a means of obtaining any thing farther.’44 As Stephen Darwall points out, Hutcheson relies on involuntary feelings raised in the individual as a spectator of benevolent actions.45 It is in society, sentiment and sociability that Hutcheson grounds disinterest.46 At the same time, refuting Mandeville’s mercantile celebration of the interests of commerce and the social artifice of disinterest, Hutcheson is preoccupied by a general ‘present corruption of manners.’47 The public is both the confirmation and corruption of disinterest. Locke had suggested that custom represented at once a ‘common measure’ for moral conduct and the most powerful source of ignorance and error.48 Hutcheson’s difficulty over the status of the public when the disinterest of the private is defined by spectorial sympathy – a difficulty that perhaps always divides the authority of the public before the advent of any panopticism – is seen in the quite different conclusions reached by Hume and Smith in the mid to late eighteenth century. Hume’s transformation of the traditional concept of disinterest arose from his recognition that, given the profound limitations imposed on the human understanding by experience, only the imagination could provide an ‘assurance of the continu’d and distinct existence’ of external objects beyond immediate and present sense impressions.49 As he writes in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (1748): Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision.50 As Deleuze notes, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), Hume attempts to regulate this unavoidable freedom of the imagination and the reliance on fictions of continuity through the principles governing the association of ideas, the compelling feelings and sentiments of belief and the force of custom and habit.51 Faced with what he calls ‘the empire of the imagination,’ Hume turns to custom, ‘the great guide of human life,’ as the foundation for his redefinition of disinterest as imaginative sympathy (662, 44–5). Sympathy offers the best mediation between public and private. For Hume,


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the individual has a ‘limited generosity’ or ‘confin’d benevolence’ (494, 519). ‘We have,’ he argues, ‘all of us, a wonderful partiality for ourselves,’ and though a moderate self-interest does not preclude the ‘kind affections’ directed towards others, it does limit disinterested feelings (597, 487). Strongest with family, slightly less forceful with friends and weakest of all with strangers, disinterest is conditioned by custom. Nonetheless, more extensive feelings of disinterest directed towards strangers and the public good are both possible and necessary. It is through the natural virtue of imaginative sympathy, ‘which takes us far out of ourselves’ and places us in the circumstances of others, that we are able to exceed the narrow habits of interest. Contrary to the foundations of disinterest as proposed by Hobbes and Locke, the fictions of the imagination have become the very possibility of disinterest (534).52 At the same time, as Hume transforms disinterest, he reconfirms the tradition of Hobbes and Locke by insisting that such natural virtues as imaginative sympathy must always be underwritten by artificial virtues arising from institutional conventions and social practices. In the six editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which appeared between 1759 and 1790, Adam Smith confirmed both the lasting influence of Hume’s association of disinterest with the sympathetic imagination and the difficult legacy of Locke that had troubled Hutcheson, Smith’s teacher. Smith broadly accepted Hume’s epistemology, but came to question his faith in custom as ‘the great guide’ for disinterested judgements. As D. D. Raphael and John Dwyer have shown, Smith’s view of the best grounds for the moral sentiments changed substantially between 1759 and 1790.53 For Smith, the sympathetic imagination is founded on ‘changing places in fancy’ with another person. Through ‘conceiving what we should feel’ in the situation of another person we are able to approve or disapprove of the sentiments and conduct of others.54 Guided by a natural sense of propriety, merit and duty, the sympathetic imagination is the source of disinterested judgement. Smith attempts to establish general standards for the judgements of propriety, merit and duty through the figure of the impartial spectator, an ideal spectator that stands above and beyond any imperfect and partial operation of the sympathetic imagination. The impartial spectator allows us ‘as much as is possible, to view ourselves at the distance and with the eyes of other people’ (112). Examining ‘our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it,’ we are able to overcome our own ‘self-love’ and ‘self-deceit’ and make authentic disinterested judgements (110, 158–9). Through the impartial spectator we disinterest ourselves. In 1759, Smith broadly follows Hume and argues that the impartial spectator is primarily a reflection of the general standards of propriety, merit and duty set by social custom and convention (23, 109–10). However, even in the first

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edition Smith expresses concerns about the public space as a reliable guide for disinterest. ‘Public admiration’ for the rich and powerful and the general ‘ignorance of the public,’ he writes, can often lead to ‘groundless praise’ in society for the vices of vanity and ambition (52–5). In the revisions to the second edition of 1761, Smith begins to turn to an impartial spectator that is based not on the ‘real spectators’ in society, but on an imaginary ideal of the individual (147, 113). Smith suggests that the judgement which arises from the public belongs to an ‘inferior tribunal’ and should be overridden and corrected by the ‘superior tribunal’ of the ‘judge within’ (128–9, 134). At the same time, Smith still believes that the judgement of the ideal spectator must be ‘awakened and put in mind of his duty, by the presence of the real spectator.’ The ‘abstract and ideal spectator’ internalizes the general rules of conduct formed by the particular examples of impartial bystanders and spectators in society (153). There is a gap between public and private, but the gap can be bridged. In the sixth edition of 1790, Smith implies that this gap between public and private not only cannot be bridged but must be enlarged: ‘the jurisdiction of those two tribunals are founded on principles which, though in some respects resembling and akin, are, however, in reality different and distinct’ (130). The ‘ideal spectator’ must have an authority that is independent of the ‘real spectator,’ an authority above and beyond the public world: the private must be independent of the public. Smith marks a breakdown of the tradition of disinterest as an attempt to mediate between public and private that had begun with Hobbes and Locke. The apparent spilt between a private autonomy and a public hegemony that has haunted contemporary accounts of disinterest and its place in the history of aesthetics emerges at the beginning of the nineteenth century and signals the end of the classical idea of disinterest, an idea that had begun in Britain not with Shaftesbury, but with Hobbes. It is perhaps time to see Thomas Hobbes as the ‘father’ of modern ideas of disinterest in Britain. The history of disinterest from Hobbes to Adam Smith is the history of a phantasm of the indivisible sovereignty of the public becoming a divided and dividing sovereignty in the fictions of the private.

CHAPTER 4

The Spectres of Disinterest

a` la fois chez soi et hors de chez soi.1

DISINTEREST UNDER SIEGE

The 1790s mark a profound transformation of the concept of disinterest. By the end of the eighteenth century many writers had come to feel that the public space, the foundation of disinterest since Hobbes, had become a threat to the disinterested subject. Locke had already expressed concerns about the prejudices, errors and delusions arising from external influences on the subject. After Locke, advocates of natural disinterest such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Smith focused on the power of social customs and conventions to corrupt the moral sentiments of the individual. Shaftesbury notes that a ‘prevailing custom’ can lead the subject to ‘esteem or admire anything as virtue which is not as such.’2 Hutcheson warns that the force of custom often causes the incorrect association of ‘moral ideas’ of ‘worth, dignity, and merit’ with the ‘finer sort of habitations, dress, equipage, [and] furniture.’3 Smith similarly observes in the final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments that the corrupting influence of custom and fashion encourages the ‘disposition to admire, and almost to worship the rich and powerful.’ The ‘great mob of mankind,’ he concludes, are deluded by what is publicly praised and ‘gaudy and glittering in its colourings.’4 Hutcheson and Smith associate the dangerous influence of luxury and status with powerful images or spectacles that can raise strong feelings of admiration and mistaken approval for the vices of avarice and excessive ambition. In his Dictionary (1755), Johnson defines spectacle as ‘any thing exhibited to the view as eminently remarkable.’5 A powerful spectacle could pervert the moral sentiments of the spectator and generate a corrupt public taste. Underlying much of the hostility of eighteenth-century moralists and critics to spectacle is an

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anxiety about a public world that appears to be divorcing itself from the subject and yet, at the same time, has the power to produce intense subjective effects. The power of spectacle in the eighteenth century was most apparent on exceptional public occasions and in the theatre. Oliver Goldsmith responded to the plan for a royal procession through the streets of London as part of the coronation of George III in 1761 by deploring the ‘Taste’ for ‘Shews and Processions.’ ‘Such sights,’ he argues, ‘seldom improve a nation’ because ‘the gay frippery exhibited on such occasions turns the mind of the spectator to false objects of admiration.’ Among the ‘dreaded effects [of such] misplaced admiration,’ he warns, is that ‘the external figure shall dominate the man.’6 Spectacle is an exceptional external artifice that can displace and replace a natural internal moral authority. In the theatres, the spectacle produced by stage technology was almost universally condemned in the eighteenth century. The effect on the audience of the ‘scenes and machines’ of the theatrical production, the painted and sculpted scenes and mechanical devices used to create extraordinary stage effects and illusions, was characterized by Addison as the mere ‘Art of imposing upon the Spectators by Appearances: . . . The Knavery or Trickish Part of the Drama.’ These powerful ‘Artifices’ pose a threat because they produce feelings in the audience ‘not by proper Sentiments and Expressions, but by the Dresses and Decorations of the Stage.’7 The spectacle of the theatre is an artifice that creates feelings. While there was concern about external influences on the subject throughout the eighteenth century, the perception that spectacle posed a problem for disinterest intensified in the second half of the eighteenth century as more attention was given to the power of sympathy. ‘No quality of human Nature,’ Hume observes, ‘is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than the propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.’8 The emphasis on the role played by custom and sympathy in the formation of general standards of conduct, manners and taste contributed to the growing sense from the 1760s that the individual was unusually vulnerable to the external influences of society. While sympathy might account for the pre-eminence of the social passions and the disinterest of the subject, it also reinforced the impression that the moral sentiments and tastes of the individual could be refashioned by an ill-informed empathy, a misguided imitation, or common delusion.9 At the heart of the changing attitude towards ‘spectorial sympathy’ and sensibility was disquiet about the dependence of general standards of morality on the cultivation of particular, socially conditioned, tastes.10 It would prompt Kant in the Critique of Judgement (1790) to construct a ‘subjective universal


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validity [einer subjektiven Allgemeingu¨ltigkeit]’ that could legitimate general standards of disinterested judgement.11 The reflective judgement of a ‘conceived harmony of nature in the manifold of its particular laws’ becomes an aesthetic judgement when its ‘determining ground cannot be other than subjective’ (26, 41–2). The judgement of taste in the beautiful is an aesthetic reflective judgement because it is ‘apart from any interest [ohne alles Interesse]’ whatsoever in the objective knowledge, use and existence of an object. The beautiful, beyond the agreeable and the good, is the ‘one and only’ expression of this ‘pure disinterested delight [dem reinen, uninteressierten Wohlgefallen]’ (49–50, 43–4; 531, 524). The lack of interest in the objective world that characterizes aesthetic reflective judgements also carries these judgements beyond the particular, the private and the socially contingent to the public and the universal: Where any one is conscious that his delight in an object is with him independent of interest [ohne alles Interesse], it is inevitable that he should look on the object as one containing a ground of delight for all men. For, since the delight is not based on any inclination of the Subject (or any other deliberate interest [u¨berlegtes Interesse]), but the Subject feels himself completely free in respect of the liking which he accords to the object, he can find as reason for his delight no personal conditions [keine Privatbedingungen] to which his own subjective self might alone be party. Hence he must regard it as resting on what he may also presuppose in every person [jedermann] (50–1; 531–2). These ‘public [publike]’ judgements of a ‘general validity’ are based on a ‘subjective universality’ as the foundation for judgements of taste (54, 51; 536, 532). In his revisions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1790, in which he also attempts to establish a general standard for disinterest through an ideal imaginary internal judge that is independent of the public world, Smith emphasizes the dangers of excessive sensibility for the disinterested spectator. Sympathy becomes a liability when the public at large is deluded and seduced by powerful images that force themselves ‘upon the notice of every wandering eye.’12 For most of the eighteenth century the unreliable spectacles of society were not seen as indicative of a problem with the public space as a whole. It is not fortuitous that in 1790, a year after the outbreak of the French Revolution, both Kant and Smith evoke a standard for disinterest that is no longer dependent on a negotiation between an individual and his or her own inescapable and increasingly unfamiliar public space. By 1795, Kant would associate disinterest with an ideal ‘universal and impartial sympathy’ for ‘humanity as a whole.’13 In the midst of the revolution in France, on the streets and in theatres, the spectacles of the 1790s appeared not only divorced from the subject, but from

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all tradition. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke argues ‘the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle, that perhaps was ever exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind’ had taken place on 6 October 1789 when the king and queen of France were forced by revolutionary crowds to leave Versailles and return to Paris (my emphasis).14 This ‘atrocious spectacle’ had produced ‘the most important of all revolutions . . . a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions’ (175). For Burke, the spectacle of revolution has in one day transformed the moral sentiments that Smith had developed over thirty years. This single spectacle is akin to an electric shock, a ‘shock in which manners and opinions perish,’ that is so powerful it alters ‘the ancient permanent sense of mankind’ and ‘general stock of truth’ (my emphasis) (172, 275, 258). For Burke, the almost fatal shock of this spectacle to the social foundations of morality is so pervasive that it extends far beyond the ‘real spectators’ of the revolution in Paris, across the narrow channel to its ‘ideal spectators’ in England. In France and England, Burke insists, ‘the common feelings of man’ are in danger of being marginalized. ‘As things now stand,’ he writes, ‘with every thing respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to apologize for harbouring the common feelings of men’ (175). The public has become unfamiliar and can no longer endure common feelings or general moral standards. The works of Smith, Kant and Burke, all published in 1790, announce the failure of a tradition of disinterest that had begun in England in the 1650s in the aftermath of another revolution and the death of another King. The classical concept of disinterest ‘begins’ and ‘ends’ with the death of the King.

SPECTRES BEFORE MARX In the first of his letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), prompted by another spectacle of revolution, the ‘mortifying spectacle’ of the ‘assembled majesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors [for peace] in the antechamber of Regicide,’ Burke uses the figure of a ‘vast, tremendous, unformed spectre’ to represent a public world cut loose from ‘all common maxims and all common means.’15 For the secular proponents of disinterest – Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Smith – the spectre was an ‘inveterate prejudice’ of the imagination and custom that could be managed by disinterest.16 In the late 1790s the association of the spectre with spectacle produced a very different kind of spectre. Spectres had, of course, appeared as part of theatrical spectacles in Britain since the re-opening of the theatres at the Restoration.17


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As Fielding remarks in Tom Jones (1749), ‘the whole furniture of the infernal regions hath long been appropriated by the managers of playhouses.’18 In the 1790s, both spectacle and the spectre become unheimlich, uncanny: an (un)familiar sense that the familiar has become unfamiliar.19 For traditional ideas of disinterest, the spectre had been a problematic, but easily identifiable and, one could almost say, integral part of the private. As a spectacle in the theatre, the spectre no longer appears as a product of the imagination: it is an effect of the artifices, the ‘scenes and machines’ of stage technology. This spectre is an illusion produced in the public space. Instances of the spectre as a spectacle in the 1790s – for both the ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ spectators of the revolution in France – such as Matthew Lewis’s successful play The Castle Spectre (1797–1798), or the popular show of optical illusions La Fantasmagorie which played in Paris and London, gesture to an (un)familiar public space: a public that has detached itself from the private and, at the same time, seems to have the power to inhabit, contaminate and reproduce the private. Matthew Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre opened in Drury Lane in December 1797 and was seen by the critics of the time as ‘a pantomimical exhibition of the most extravagant nature.’20 Its extraordinary success was taken as an indication of the increasing domination of spectacle both in the theatre and in the streets of London. As Linda Colley has observed, in December 1797 the ‘external and internal tensions’ in Britain seemed to be at their greatest. In the midst of fears of French invasion and the aftermath of the mutiny of the home fleets in June, a royal spectacle was staged to celebrate recent naval victories over the French. Five days after the first performance of The Castle Spectre 200,000 people watched as the King went through the streets of London. The royal procession broke with tradition by including ‘250 ordinary sailors and marines’ in the spectacle. It is a sign of the anxiety that this innovation – introduced by George III himself – was criticized in the press for being a ‘Frenchified farce’ and following too closely the revolutionary spectacles in Paris.21 The spectacles of revolution, the revolution as spectacle had the power to affect both ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ spectators. It is a testament to the impact of Lewis’s play that Carlyle was still singling it out in the late 1820s as the most notorious example of ‘a radically bad taste’ in the British theatre.22 The Castle Spectre is a product of changes in the role of spectacle in the theatre that took place in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Thanks to the innovations of De Loutherbourg in stage scenery and lighting and the enlargement of the theatres, by the late 1790s elaborate and spectacular stage effects had become an indispensable part of any successful theatrical production.23 A contemporary review observed that the ‘popularity’ of The Castle Spectre was due primarily to ‘the stage effect’ and concluded, ‘we should disapprove this drama, did we judge of it only in the closet; but its

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effects in representation is admirable.’24 According to the critic in The Times, The Castle Spectre is ‘one of the . . . most affecting pantomimes represented on the English Stage,’ but Lewis had ‘failed’ in the ‘real imitation’ of the ‘feelings of humanity’ and ‘seems perfectly indifferent’ to ‘the varied struggles of contending passions’ and the ‘emotions of the heart.’25 In a letter to Wordsworth, Coleridge is even more emphatic, insisting that in Lewis’s play there is ‘no character at all’ and ‘not one line that marks even a superficial knowledge of human feelings.’26 Despite the absence of character and ‘human feelings,’ the critic for The Times notes that Lewis’s play can still ‘excite the most sympathetic emotions.’27 The Castle Spectre was received as ‘a piece really of one scene’: the appearance at the end of Act Four of the ghost of the murdered Lady Evelina to her daughter Lady Angela in a sudden ‘blaze of light’ and flourish of solemn music.28 After the first performance a critic wrote, ‘We must allow the effect produced by her introduction to be stronger than anything of the sort that has hitherto been attempted.’29 Though a great popular success, this new spectre was condemned by critics. According to the Analytical Review, the great impropriety of the spectre is that it is presented as no more than ‘an effect produced by the spectacle and music’: an invention of the latest technology, a spectre without tradition, a spectre of the future. It is ‘a spectre that stalks over the stage for no purpose,’ it ‘promotes in no degree the progression of the drama, or the development of its intrigue.’30 Portrayed by an actress who does not speak, the spectre appears in a blinding spectacle of light produced by an Aragand lamp. The latest stage technologies produce the spectre or, as Derrida says in Spectres of Marx (1993), ‘both invent and bring up to date [mettent au jour], inaugurate and reveal, cause to come about and bring to light [mettent en lumie`re] at the same time, there where they were already there without being there [la` ou` elles e´taient de´ja` la` sans eˆtre la`]’.31 Half human, half living, half dead, it is a spectre that has no relationship to the plot, to the narrative, to sentiment or belief. It is a spectre without precedent, an arrivant, a spectre without relationship to the human that still has the power to generate ‘human feelings’ in the living. As Derrida writes in Aporias (1993): I was recently taken by this word, arrivant, as if its uncanniness had just arrived to me in a language in which it has nonetheless sounded very familiar to me for a long time. The new arrivant, this word can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be where s/he was not expected, where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her, without expecting it,


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without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for – and such is hospitality itself, hospitality toward the event. The ‘absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity,’ nor is it ‘simply . . . a living thing,’ but it makes ‘possible . . . the humanity of man’ and cannot be distinguished, separated from ‘the dead, and the revenant (the ghost, he, she, or that which returns).’32 The arrivant announces the ruins of disinterest. In contrast to The Castle Spectre, the spectres in La Fantasmagorie were entirely products of technology. The origin of the word phantasmagoria, the popular Parisian show La Fantasmagorie was first presented in Paris in December 1792, revived in 1798 and imported to London in 1801.33 Combining the concentrated projection of light from the Aragand lamp and painted images on glass slides from the magic lantern, the show added the innovation of motion to create the illusion of ‘moving,’ spectral images.34 The spectres of La Fantasmagorie created fear and terror in its audience.35 As the review of The Phantasmagoria show in London remarks, ‘the magic lanthorn’ producing the ‘terrific figures’ was ‘let down after the disappearance of the light, and consequently unknown to most of the spectators.’36 The source of their fear was a new and ‘unknown’ technology: a machine that produces spectres. By the time Carlyle writes the influential ‘The sign of the times’ (1829), this fear had become widespread. Carlyle suggests that ‘man’s activity’ is determined by a relation between the forces of the dynamical (the inward, the spiritual, and the natural) and the mechanical (the outward, the material, and the artificial). It is ‘only in the right coordination of the two, and vigorous forwarding of both,’ that ‘our true lines of action lie.’ However, he argues, the present time has become ‘the Mechanical Age,’ an age in which ‘there is no end to machinery,’ and consequently there can be ‘no right coordination’ of the forces of the dynamical and the mechanical. Worst of all, Carlyle warns, ‘not the external and the physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.’ ‘Men,’ he observes, ‘are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.’ The mechanical has invaded the heart of the dynamical, it ‘has now struck its roots down into man’s most intimate, primary sources of conviction.’37 In what is perhaps the strangest image of the new sense in the 1790s of the dangers posed by the public space to the integrity of the subject, a reporter attending La Fantasmagorie insists that he has not only seen spectres of the dead that are products of ‘optical effects,’ ‘I have [also] seen my own image; I have seen myself, going, coming, moving in front of me.’38 Before the spectres of Marx, there are the spectres of La Fantasmagorie – what Derrida calls the arrivant as the Unheimliche ‘es spukt’: an anonymous, undecidable, (un)familiar and ‘impersonal ghostly returning [la revenance impersonnelle]’ that is ‘without real subject or object,’ ‘neither someone or

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something,’ which he translates as ‘ ‘‘it returns,’’ ‘‘it ghosts,’’ ‘‘it spectres’’ [‘‘ça revient’’, ‘‘ça revenante’’, ‘‘ça spectre’’].’39

ROMANTICISM AND DISINTEREST In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth provided a canonical articulation of the attempt to ‘counteract’ the ‘multitude of causes, unknown to former times, [that] are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind’ (my emphasis).40 For Wordsworth, the lamentable and precarious ‘present state of the public taste in this country’ is reflected in the ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’: spectacle is undermining ‘the discriminating powers of the mind’ (742, 747). Wordsworth’s well-known ‘endeavour . . . to counteract’ this threat is to advocate a new kind of poetry and a new role for the poet as ‘the rock of defence for human nature’ (753). Wordsworth evokes the counterforce of the sharpness, discernment and penetration of the subject against the social forces that are blunting, dulling, and blurring ‘the discriminating powers of the mind.’ Wordsworth’s confidence in this counterforce rests on ‘a deep impression’ of an accord between the human mind and nature. There are, he says, ‘certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it which are equally inherent and indestructible’ (747). It is the privilege of ‘the Poet’ to consider ‘man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and the most interesting properties of nature’ (752). It is the poet who decides what is ‘most interesting.’ The poet’s openness to the imagination – ‘to think and feel without immediate external excitement’ – makes him (the poet is always a man) immune to the effects of ‘outrageous stimulation.’ The poet’s speed, his ‘greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement’ enables his poetry to provide a ground for a general standard of discrimination: the poet’s ‘passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men’ (753). It is the active and autonomous imagination that provides the general standard of judgement for mediating between the public and the private. In 1805, a young William Hazlitt would insist in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action that the imagination alone could provide a true foundation for disinterest. ‘The imagination,’ he writes, ‘by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in


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it.’41 Thanks to the fictions of the imagination, as there is a future for me there is a disinterest for others. In their response to the (un)familiar spectacles of spectres of the 1790s that could no longer be confined to either the imagination or custom, the figure of the spectre comes to represent for Blake, Coleridge and De Quincey a fragmented or alienated aspect of the subject. Responding to a loss of faith in a public disinterest of the private and haunted by the impossible promise of a private that disinterests itself, romanticism can be seen as both the culmination and the collapse of the classical concept of disinterest. For Blake, the imagination (Jesus the Imagination) exceeds the bounds of the finite system or ‘ratio’ of sense-memory-reason that had previously restricted the work of the imagination and the freedom of the subject. However, as Peter Otto points out, ‘rather than being an end in itself, the freedom of the subject is, for Blake, realized most profoundly in that subject’s ability to leave his/her constituted worlds and enter into relation with others.’42 Jesus (the imagination) is the possibility of disinterest. ‘He who sees the infinite in all things sees God,’ Blake notes, while ‘He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.’43 As a reasoning power that is ‘separated/From Imagination’ and entirely confined to ‘Things of Memory,’ the Spectre in Blake’s The Four Zoas (1796– 1807) and Jerusalem (1804–1820), is a fragmented and alienated aspect of the subject that has been constituted by past sense impressions passively received from the external world.44 For the Spectre, the human mind is enclosed ‘in steel.’ The Spectre is an internalized form of the external world, an internal representative of orthodox religion and the status quo: the ghostly father of Gramsci and Foucault. He is a figure of suffering, an ‘Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing.’ Alienated from the Divine Vision, the Spectre sees ‘from the ou[t]side what he before saw & felt from within.’45 He enforces obedience to ‘Laws & Moralities/To destroy Imagination! the Divine Body.’ Under the influence of his Spectre, Albion hides Jerusalem from Jesus, separating human inspiration and freedom from divine vision.46 For Blake, the Spectre must be reintegrated through the labours of the imagination. In The Four Zoas, Los embraces the Spectre: then the Spectre enterd Los’s bosom Every sigh & groan Of Enitharmon bore Urthonas Spectre on its wings Obdurate Los felt Pity Enitharmon told the tale Of Urthona. Los embracd the Spectre first as a brother Than as another Self.47 Los’s actions suggest that the Spectre can be reintegrated by the imagination but, at the same time, in embracing the Spectre ‘as another Self’ one could also

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say that the Spectre (the outside in the inside, the public in the private) can no longer be distinguished from the imagination, the last defence of ‘the discriminating powers of the mind.’ This spectral imagination, this imaginative spectre, who now recognizes that he has a ‘Counterpart’ in Los and the hope of reunification with Urthona, describes himself as a ‘Spectre of the Living.’48 In May 1799 Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited the Hartz Mountains in Northern Germany and climbed the Brocken in search of the Brocken Spectre, an optical phenomenon in which observers saw a gigantic reflection of their own image in the sky above them.49 For Coleridge, the Brocken Spectre first appears as an unrecognized and alienated aspect of the subject. As he notes in his lectures on Shakespeare (1811–1812), when ‘a man traversing the Brocken in the north of Germany at sunrise . . . sees before him a figure of gigantic proportions . . . he only knows it to be himself by the similarity of action.’ The observer initially ‘sees himself,’ Coleridge writes, ‘without knowing that he sees himself.’50 In his poem ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object’ (c. 1817–1828), the rustic woodsman mistakenly ‘worships’ as a real spectre the image that appears before him.51 In Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge draws an analogy between an experience of ‘alienation,’ ‘inward complexity and contradiction’ and that of an observer who, rather than recognizing his shadow ‘as a projected Form of his own Being . . . recoils from it as from a Spectre.’52 The observer no longer recognizes his own shadow: it has become (un)familiar, a product of the external world. This strange sense of being haunted by one’s own shadow is only momentary. The individual soon recognizes the ‘gigantic figure’ of the Brocken Spectre as his own shadow. As the narrator says of the simple woodsman in ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object,’ ‘he makes the shadow’ (my emphasis). Coleridge uses the Brocken Spectre as an ‘allegory’ for the power of the imagination to discriminate and to mediate between the public and the private. In the Biographia Literaria (1817), the imagination (of God and the observer) allows us to distinguish between the natural and the living (the products of the primary and secondary imagination) and the artificial and the inauthentic (the products of fancy).53 The Brocken Spectre is a kind of Aufhebung for Coleridge: it endures the apparent, temporary loss of one’s own shadow only to reaffirm a sovereignty of the subject.54 Nearly twenty years after Coleridge wrote ‘Constancy to an Ideal Object,’ Thomas De Quincey devoted a section of Suspiria de Profundis (1845), his fragmentary and rhapsodic sequel to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), to ‘The Apparition of the Brocken.’ For De Quincey, when the observer on top of the Brocken makes a gesture, the spectre ‘does repeat it; but the driving showers perplex the images, and that, perhaps, it is which gives him the air of one who acts reluctantly or evasively.’ In the ‘driving mists,’ the


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Spectre appears ‘to dissemble his real origin.’55 The mist accentuates the observer’s inability to recognize the Spectre as ‘a projected Form of his own Being’ and adds an element that cannot be reduced to an ‘allegory’ on the power of imagination.56 Both the spectre and the observer remain unrecognizable. De Quincey’s narrator invites the reader to ‘ascend’ the Brocken and ‘to test the nature’ of the ‘mysterious’ Brocken Spectre. These tests are prompted by a ‘fear’ that the spectre is corrupt and unreliable.57 The ‘decisive’ proof that the Brocken Spectre is a ‘reflex’ of the subject only transforms the spectre into a ‘Dark Interpreter.’ By ‘uttering your secret feelings to him,’ De Quincey writes, ‘you make this phantom the dark symbolic mirror for reflecting to the daylight what else must be hidden for ever.’ Originally ‘a mere reflex of my inner nature,’ the Dark Interpreter ‘will not always be found sitting inside my dreams, but at times outside, and in open daylight.’ At times ‘inside’ and at other times ‘outside,’ the Dark Interpreter projects, malgre´ moi, my secrets into ‘the daylight.’ I cannot stop the force of these projections which send ‘drifting the anchors of any vessel.’58 In a further fragment of the Suspiria de Profundis published in 1854, De Quincey illustrates the origins of the Dark Interpreter by referring to the phantasmagoria. ‘Perhaps you are aware,’ he writes, ‘of that power in the eye of many children by which in darkness they project a vast theatre of phantasmagorical figures moving forwards or backwards between their bed-curtains and the chamber walls.’59 As Alina Clej remarks, the image of the phantasmagoria, ‘whether projected by an optical apparatus or constructed in symbolic terms, introduces a distance and uncertainty between subject and object or between the subject and itself.’60 By the 1850s, the ‘power in the eye’ is no longer with the poet who decides what is ‘most interesting’ and calls upon the imagination to discriminate between the inside and the outside, the public and the private. The spectre as the imaginary dark interpreter and violator of the private, as the uncanny ‘es spukt,’ can no longer be separated from the machine – ‘le fantascope’ as it was called – that produces the spectacle of the spectres of the revolution in La Fantasmagorie: the spectres of disinterest. In 1793 in revolutionary Paris, two years after Mirabeau has died and just before the start of the Terror, you would come into ‘a room hung with black and covered in images of death.’ There is only a dim ‘a sepulchral lamp’ which is soon extinguished by a ‘magic breath,’ leaving you in complete darkness. Suddenly you hear ‘the rumble of thunder,’ and amidst flashes of lightning ‘all the signs of a thunderstorm’: Then rises, from the floor itself, a whitish figure which grows larger by degrees until it reaches human proportions. First you discern it vaguely; a

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kind of cloud envelops it still; it becomes clearer, it melts away; the phantom becomes more and more visible, dazzling: you distinguish its features; you recognize it, it is MIRABEAU; it is his living countenance . . . He walks, he wanders in the shadow, he approaches, he tilts towards you: you shiver, he still moves forward: you go to touch him; he disappears, and you find yourself in the same darkness again.61

CHAPTER 5

The Interests of Reason

Il y a d’abord les sources, la source est autre et plurielle.1

AN INTERNATIONAL DISINTEREST

If there is a narrative of disinterest in Kant’s work, one might begin by saying that the question of disinterest is not confined to the Critique of Judgement (1790). Though he rarely uses the word disinterest in his practical philosophy, one could say that from at least What is Enlightenment? (1784) to The Conflict of Faculties (1798) Kant is preoccupied with the question of disinterest as the attempt to mediate between the public and the private.2 In What is Enlightenment? he suggests that the conflict between freedom and restriction can be managed through distinguishing and mediating between the public (o¨ffentlich, publik, Publikum) and the private (privat).3 For Kant, ‘the public use [der o¨ffentlichen Gebrauch]’ of reason ‘must always be free’ and he illustrates this ‘unrestricted freedom’ with the example of ‘a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers.’ The ‘private use [der Privat-gebrauch] of one’s reason,’ on the other hand, is that used by ‘an appointed teacher’ or minister in ‘a certain civil post or office’ who is, necessarily and properly, ‘very narrowly restricted’ by ‘the interest [Interesse] of a commonwealth.’ One can and should be, Kant argues, both a scholar and an appointed official, writing freely in one’s own name to the international public and speaking dutifully ‘in the name of another [im Namen eines andern]’ to a ‘domestic’ audience. What is perhaps most remarkable about What is Enlightenment? is the unexpected association of speaking in one’s own name with the public and speaking in the name of the other with the private. To use reason publicly and freely, speakers can only be writers and address an international ‘world of readers [Leserwelt].’ To speak publicly in your own name, you must speak across borders to a cosmopolitan and virtual community. To speak freely, you can only

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publish and speak to those who are not present before you as an audience, as members of the public. The public use of reason can only take place when it does not take place. Speaking freely is public ‘in the proper sense of the word [ein Publikum im eigentlichen Verstande],’ because it is cosmopolitan, because it speaks beyond the borders of the commonwealth. It is more public than the public: it speaks to ‘the entire public [der ganzen Publikum],’ to the ‘citizens of the world.’ There is no public, ‘in the proper sense of the word,’ in the state. The private use of reason, on the other hand, is a public event that takes place. It is a speech by a public official, an appointee of the state in front of an audience or a congregation. Why does Kant describe a public employee who speaks in public to the public and keeps to the public guidelines or dictates of the state as a private use of reason? He says that this use of reason can be described as private because it only addresses a small ‘domestic’ audience: the private is what cannot go beyond the state. Reason is private when it recognizes the necessity of ‘carrying out another’s commission.’ To speak ‘in the name of another,’ to fulfil the task of acting as a delegated and restricted agent for the commonwealth, is a private use of reason. When I perform my undertaking, my promise to ‘the interest of a commonwealth,’ I use reason privately. When I speak in the name of the public interests of the state, I am making a private use of reason. On the one hand, in What is Enlightenment? Kant echoes the traditional eighteenth-century view of disinterest. A mediation between the public and the private is possible: one can make both a public and private use of reason, be both an internationally published scholar who argues openly and critically about the commonwealth and an obedient public official who serves the state. On the other hand, Kant transforms the customary distribution of public and the private interests that had been in place since at least Hobbes. For Kant, the individual makes a private use of reason when he serves the public interests of the state. The individual makes a public use of reason when he or she has the freedom to exceed the public interests of the state. To be interested is to be tied to the public interest (the interests of the state, of Frederick the Great). To be disinterested is to look toward a public that is more public than the public interest. Kant confines the traditional concept of disinterest to the state and evokes a new kind of disinterest, a disinterest that is without national borders. Kant internationalizes disinterest. After the repressive royal edicts of 1788–1790 on teaching, studying and writing about religion, is Kant still able to maintain this distinction and to mediate between the public and private use of reason? The first part of The Conflict of Faculties (1794) returns to the same dilemmas and strained inversions of the public and the private in What is Enlightenment? Within the ‘public [o¨ffentlich] institution’ of the university, the higher faculties (theology, law and


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medicine) are constrained by the ‘interest [of] the government [Regierung . . . Interesse]’ and reflect the private use of reason. The lower faculty (philosophy) is guided, on the other hand, by ‘the interests of science [Interesse der Wissenschaft]’ and exercizes a public use of reason.4 When these interests come into conflict Kant evokes an inversion of the ‘higher’ (obern) and the ‘lower’ (untern) faculties, hoping, much as he had ten years earlier that the scholar’s free public use of reason would be compatible with – would exceed and influence without claiming any kind of power over – the public interests and authority of the government and state (256, 261).5 Despite Kant’s insistence that the inevitable, unending and necessary conflict between the faculties should not involve the government or the public at large (the people), the conflict of the faculties cannot escape the conflict of interests between the scholar and the state, between the public and private use of reason (260–1). In ‘Mochlos; or, the conflict of the faculties’ (1980–1990), Derrida reads Kant’s conflict of the faculties as a conflict of interests between ‘the interest of the power of the State [l’inte´reˆt du pouvoir d’E´tat]’ and an ‘interest for the truth [inte´reˆt pour la ve´rite´].’ In raising the question of the responsibility of the university today as a question of interests, of ‘the interesting and interested debates [les de´bats inte´ressants et inte´resse´s],’ of ‘large and small interests [des grands et des petits inte´reˆts],’ Derrida evokes the first gesture of the traditional concepts of disinterest (421). At the same time, he implies that if there is a dis-interest it must begin with taking an unavoidable interest in what is ‘the most interesting [le plus inte´ressant]’: in thinking from the ‘alterity of the ‘‘what’’ [‘‘quoi’’] and the ‘‘who’’ [‘‘qui’’]’ and of ‘a responsibility . . . that no longer passes in the last instance through the ego, the ‘‘I think’’ [‘‘je pense’’], intention, the subject’ (406, 408). Derrida’s reading of Kant in the essays collected in Du droit a` la philosophie (1975–1990) is mediated by his reading of Kafka in ‘Pre´juge´s: devant la loi’ (1982–1985).6 It is hardly fortuitous that the title of Derrida’s paper on Kafka raises the question of (dis)interest. Pre´juge´s can be translated into English as either prejudgement or prejudice, as the prejudice that arises from presuming that one can judge in advance. One can already see in ‘Mochlos’ the importance of the Kantian presumption which Kafka’s Before the Law (Vor dem Gesetz) (1914) radically puts into doubt, namely that one can stand – one can launch, co-ordinate and manage the conflict of interests – directly, in front of, before the law (devant la loi), before the law of reason, the law as reason. Kant’s confrontation with King Frederick William allows him ‘at least to locate the law in a body [un corps] and to assign a simple mechanism to censorship in a determined, unique, punctual and monarchic place.’ Kant is brought ‘before [devant] the father of the country’ and, as Derrida had noted in 1975, ‘the

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effect – the only effective one – of a dissemination’ occurs when there is ‘no return to the presumed ‘‘father’’ ’ (402).7 The Kantian conflict of the faculties is always standing in front of the father, before the law: reason. ‘Kantian thought,’ Derrida writes, ‘attempts . . . to attain a pure legitimation, a purity of right [droit] and reason as a court of final authority.’ In other words, it is determined by the presumption – the interest – that one can ‘respond from the law and before the law [de la loi et devant la loi] in decidable terms’ (408). The ‘first interest [premier inte´reˆt]’ for Kant is ‘to distinguish, to decide between legal and illegal conflicts’ by attempting to maintain ‘the border [la frontie`re] between his inside and his outside,’ his private and his public (411).8 Straining to maintain itself before the law, before ‘the first interest,’ hoping and fearing that one is truly, directly in front of the law (devant la loi), the Kantian discourse on (dis)interest is also, as Kafka teaches us, always before the law, in advance of the law (avant la loi), always ahead of the law and waiting for the law.9 The preface to The Conflict of Faculties (1798) depicts a disinterest (as a mediation of the public and the private) under the greatest pressure: a disinterest in extremis. The publication in the preface of a private (‘never made public [o¨ffentlich] before’) exchange of letters between Kant and King Frederick William II or the King’s Minister of Spiritual Affairs already seems to transgress the order of the private duties of an appointed teacher to the state and the public freedoms of the scholar to reach beyond the state. This is precisely what the King charges Kant with: ‘you have acted against your duty [Pflicht] as a teacher’ (239–40; 268). According to the King, Kant has failed in the private use of reason, in the individual’s obligations to the interests of the state. Kant has not been interested enough, he has made an excessive public use of his reason (a use which, more public than the public interest of the state, is already excessive). For the King or his Minister of Spiritual Affairs, Kant has been too ‘public’ and not ‘private’ enough. In relation to the interests of the state, in relation to interest, Kant has misjudged, he has not got the right balance, the balance of right, between the public and the private. Kant replies to this accusation from the state, from the sovereign representative of the public interest, with a proliferation of public distinctions. As ‘a teacher of the people [Volkslehrer],’ he insists that he has ‘done no harm to the public religion of the land [der o¨ffentlichen Landsreligion].’ In his ‘private’ use of reason he has fulfilled his duty to the public (‘the people’) and to the ‘public religion’ (the state religion, the public of the state). He has made ‘public’ use of his reason by not addressing the public. His work has not been addressed to the public, as it is ‘not suitable for the public [Publikum]’ (the people) and – following Kant’s terminology – this is what has made it properly public. His work is only suitable for ‘debate among scholars of the faculty,’ for faculties


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that ‘remain free to judge it publicly [o¨ffentlich], according to the best of their knowledge and conscience.’ Before the King, Kant insists that his public use of reason has not been addressed to the public (the people), but to the public (scholars addressing each other beyond the state) (240–1; 270). One of the evident pressures on the distinctions made in What is Enlightenment? in this exchange of private letters, in Kant’s response to the public (the sovereign authority of the state), is the absence of the word private. Kant follows his three kinds of public (the people, the state, beyond the state), with a definition of the private use of reason – ‘those who are appointed to teach the people (in the schools and from the pulpits) who are bound to uphold whatever outcome of the debate the crown sanctions’ – as yet another kind of public use of reason. Appointed and ‘bound to uphold’ the interests of the crown, these teachers are directed how ‘to expound publicly [o¨ffentlich].’ In refuting the charge that his public is too public and his private is not private enough, Kant opposes one kind of public use of reason (the reason of scholars publicly addressing other scholars) to another (appointed teachers publicly following the sanctioned line of ‘the crown’). At the heart of this strained response to royal censorship is Kant’s attempt to disentangle the public use of reason from scholars who have too much contact with the people and monarchs who have too much contact with scholars. In extremis before the displeasure of the King, the private use of reason as duty to the public interest is displaced and an occulted, secret use of reason appears. Kant swears, ‘as your Majesty’s most loyal subject [Untertan] that I will hereafter refrain altogether from discoursing publicly [o¨ffentlich Vortra¨ge], in lectures or writing, on religion.’ Kant amends this public statement of 1794 renouncing both the private (spoken) and public (written) use of reason on matters of religion, with a footnote in 1798: ‘this expression [‘‘as your Majesty’s most loyal subject’’], too, I chose carefully, so that I would not renounce my freedom to judge in this religious suit forever, but only during His majesty’s lifetime’ (242; 272–73). Under extreme pressure, the possible equilibrium in 1784 between a public that is more than public (an international disinterest that looks beyond the state) and a private that only responds to the public interest (to the state) is fractured. The public is silenced and the private returns to its customary designation as a public response to the public interest. At the same time, the private goes underground, secretes itself for a later day, reappearing after the event (after the death of the King) as the true face of the public use of reason. In ‘An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?’ (1795), which became the second part of The Conflict of the Faculties and is dated after Kant’s conflict with the King, Kant attacks what he calls ‘a false publicity [eine lu¨genhafte Publizita¨t]’ in the British political system which ‘deceives the people with the illusion of a limited monarchy,’ when in fact ‘their

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representatives, won over by bribery, have secretly subjected them to an absolute monarchy.’ In a footnote, he describes this bribery of the representatives of the people as a ‘highly transparent veil of secrecy [dem sehr durchsichtigen Schleier des Geheimnisses]’ (306; 363–4). What appears to be public (limited) is in reality private (absolute) and this ‘false publicity’ is maintained by a secret that is at once public (highly transparent) and private (veiled). In extremis, before the law, in conflict with the King, it is Kant who relies on a ‘false publicity,’ presenting himself to the King in a limited publicity that conceals an absolute privacy through a ‘highly transparent veil of secrecy.’ Before the law, the true face of the public use of reason can only appear as a ‘false publicity.’ Kant revolutionizes disinterest by unhinging the concept of the public from the interests of the state. By internationalizing disinterest in the 1780s Kant attempts to re-establish a new equilibrium between an international disinterest and a national interest. But while he looks to the imperatives of a disinterest beyond the state – to which he adds the ideal of a universal disinterested sympathy for humanity as a whole after 1789 – his own experiences of conflict with the state in the 1790s gesture to a more contemporary notion of a disembodied, virtual or fictional disinterest, a disinterest that exceeds – and perhaps resists – the interests of the state by going underground, by going global, by losing its public place. It is also, as Derrida has often remarked, a disinterest under the pressing ‘threat of . . . the becoming-literature of philosophy.’10 When it comes into conflict with the sovereign authority of the state, Kant’s international disinterest is an impossible disinterest, a disinterest that cannot speak or act in public, that cannot work as a successful mediation between the ‘public’ and the ‘private.’11 It is an impossible disinterest that has no public place other than within the silence of the strategic fictions of the individual who resists the state authority and waits until they can speak publicly once again. Kantian disinterest resides in an individual living within a state who has the (impossible) capacity to dwell beyond the state. It is a disinterest that is both international and impossible. When faced by the conflict between the freedom of the philosopher (as a member of an academic community) and the government of the state, Kant is unable to maintain a clear distinction between the public use of reason in the state and the public use of reason beyond the state. As Derrida observes in ‘Mochlos,’ ‘The element of publicity [la publicite´], the necessarily public character of some discourses, especially in the form of the archive, indicates the unavoidable place of the equivocation that Kant would like to reduce. Hence his temptation: to transform in a reserved, intra-university and quasi-private language the discourse of a clearly universal value that is that of philosophy’ (419). In ‘The university without condition’ (1999– 2001), Derrida notes that what I am calling Kant’s internationalization of


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disinterest is at once predicated on an impossible boundary within the university and an impossible – and still urgent, always commendable and necessary – ‘unconditional freedom’ outside of the state. Kant withdraws the faculty of philosophy from any outside power [pouvoir exte´rieur], notably from state power, and guarantees this faculty an unconditional freedom to say what is true and to conclude concerning the subject of truth, provided that it does so in the inside [dans le dedans] of the university. This final limitation (to say publicly all that one believes to be true and what one believes one must say, but only inside [inte´rieur] the university) has never been, I believe, either tenable or respectable, in fact or by law. And the transformation under way in public cyberspace, which is public on a worldwide scale [mondialement public], beyond state-national frontiers, seems to render it more archaic and imaginary than ever. And yet I maintain that the idea of this space of the academic type has to be symbolically protected by a kind of absolute immunity, as if [comme si] its interior [dedans] were inviolable; I believe (this is like a profession of faith that I address to you and submit to your judgement) that this is an idea we must reaffirm, declare, and profess endlessly – even if the protection of this academic immunity (in the sense in which we speak of biological, diplomatic, or parliamentary immunity) is never pure, even if it can always develop dangerous processes of auto-immunity, even if and especially if it must not prevent us from addressing ourselves to the university’s outside [au dehors de l’universite´] – without any utopic neutrality [abstention utopique].12 As Derrida first suggested in ‘Mochlos,’ when Kant internationalizes disinterest as a use of reason, it is – despite itself – in a situation of heteronomy, putting under pressure the ideal of a disinterest founded on pure reason and, at the same time, gesturing to a different kind of disinterest, a disinterest that is always marked by what is at once inside and outside of the university, of the state: a disinterest in ruins, a disinterest for today.13

A META-INTEREST In ‘Le ‘‘Monde’’ des Lumie`res a` venir (Exception, calcul et souverainete´)’ (2003), Derrida raises the question of ‘the interest of reason’ in Kant’s work.14 Derrida had touched on the relationship between reason and interest in the 1960s and first raised the question of ‘l’inte´reˆt de la raison’ in Glas (1974).15 In ‘Ja, or the faux-bond’ (1975) Derrida remarks: ‘the Kantian text, that defines an interest of reason even before its determination as speculative or practical . . .

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induces a question about an interest of reason [un inte´reˆt de la raison] in general, thus about the value of interest that no philosopheme other than that of reason can approach: the interest of philosophy itself, as reason [l’inte´reˆt de la philosophie elle-meˆme, comme raison].’16 Nearly thirty years later in ‘Le ‘‘Monde’’ des Lumie`res,’ Derrida again asks: ‘What is it that authorizes to inscribe again or already under the authority of reason any interest of reason (Interesse der Vernunft), this interest of reason, and interest brought to reason, this interest for reason [cet inte´reˆt de la raison, et inte´reˆt porte´ a` la raison, cet inte´reˆt pour la raison] which Kant reminds us is at once practical, speculative and architectonic, but first architectonic?’ For Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787) the most fundamental, the most pure ‘interest of reason’ is ‘the architectonic interest of reason [das architektonische Interesse der Vernunft].’17 This interest of interests is ‘the interests of human beings [das Interesse der Menschen],’ the interest of human nature which ‘considers all cognitions as belonging to a possible system [einem mo¨gliche System].’ The interest of reason in a system, an architecture or building of cognitions, is an interest in ‘a starting point [Anfang] that would serve absolutely as the foundation [Grunde] for its building.’ Without such a ‘starting point,’ Kant notes, the ‘completion of an edifice of cognitions [would be] entirely impossible.’ The architectonic interest of reason is both an interest in ‘a possible system’ for cognition and an interest in a ‘starting point . . . as the foundation’ for such a system. It is an interest in the genesis of a structure, a system. It is an interest in the work of pure reason: an interest of reason in pure reason. Reason is interested in pure reason as its ‘starting point’ (117, 497; 34, 449). Reason takes an interest in pure reason. The question of the interest of reason is raised by Kant as part of the wider problem of ‘the antinomy of reason.’ Finding itself within the ‘unavoidable problems of reason’ when faced with the demands of experience and pure reason, freedom and nature, ‘reason sees itself . . . entangled in a crowd of arguments and counter-arguments [einem Gedra¨nge von Gru¨nden und GegenGru¨nden so befrangen]’ which it ‘cannot look upon with indifference . . . interested [interessiert] as it is in the object of the dispute’ (my emphasis) (497; 442). Reason cannot help but be interested in a dispute, a conflict of reason ‘with itself.’ Faced with such a conflict, reason can only ‘reflect on the origin of this disunity of reason with itself [der Ursprung dieser Verunreinigung der Vernunft mit sich selbst].’ Reason ‘sees itself [sieht sich]’ entangled and interested in this conflict: it is both in the conflict and watching itself at conflict, looking at itself from somewhere away from the conflict, as if this was a regional conflict viewed from the capital. But where is, or what is, the capital of reason? This is perhaps Derrida’s question. ‘If we were forced to take sides [Partei zu nehmen]’ in this conflict, Kant goes


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on to say, our taking sides would not be a matter of ‘the logical criterion of truth but merely [of] our interests [bloß unser Interesse].’ To take sides is to be guided not by the logic of truth, but by interest. Interest can provide a ‘provisional estimate [vorlaüfigen Beurteilung]’ of the conflict. It can give an insight into ‘why [the] participants have sooner taken [haben] one side than the other’ (497; 442–3). If forced to take sides in a conflict of reason with itself, it is interest that reveals why one of the warring parties has taken the side that it has. Kant does not say that we take sides, it is only if we were forced to take sides that we would use our interest to have some idea of why the combatants have taken the side that they have. Suspended, conditional, this interest might arise if we were forced to take sides. Kant divides the two sides of this conflict – the dogmatism of pure reason (thesis) and pure empiricism (antithesis) – into three distinct areas: practical interest, speculative interest and popularity. It will be a conflict of interests on two fronts that could force us to take a side and to be guided by interest to reach a ‘provisional estimate’ of what it means to take a side. Guided by ‘our interest’ we would be able to discern and to compare the conflict of interests on both sides. This interest is a meta-interest, giving an insight into the conflict of interests. Reason is interested and it is ‘the interest of reason in these conflicts’ of interest that guides us (my emphasis) (497–8, 496). This conflict of interests is also a conflict between the practical and speculative interests of reason and the meta-interest we take in this is an interest of reason in reason. In this conflict, dogmatic pure reason serves both the practical interests of reason (an interest in morality and religion) and the speculative interests of reason (an interest in transcendental ideas and the a priori unconditioned origin of the conditioned). Pure empiricism, on the other hand, has ‘no such practical interest’ and can cause ‘an irreparable disadvantage to the practical interests of reason,’ but does offer ‘advantages to the speculative interests of reason.’ The boundary or limitation of ‘possible experiences’ in pure empiricism can hold speculative reason back from an excessive interest in ‘idealizing reason and transcendent concepts’ (499–500). Taking an interest, provisionally estimating the motives behind the organization and hierarchy of interests for each side, we can see that if empiricism moderated its own interests it could temper the potentially excessive interests of pure reason that take it beyond the bounds of nature. But who and where are ‘we,’ as Derrida asks?18 Taking a meta-interest, an interest of reason in reason, we can see how this conflict might be resolved. Kant will later call this a question of hope (Hoffen) (677; 667). It is worth recalling that in the second part of The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant also associates a certain disinterest with hope.19 Kant draws his discussion of the interest of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason to a close with the affirmation that the interest of reason in reason is

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fundamentally human and architectonic. But he ends this section of the transcendental dialectic by posing the possibility of an absence of all interest. In other words, if human reason was not interested, not interested in the practical, speculative or architectonic interests of reason, what would happen? He writes: ‘If a human being could renounce all interests [Mensch von allem Interesse lossagen], and, indifferent to all consequences, consider the assertions of reason merely according to their grounds, then, supposing that he knows no way of escaping from the dilemma except by confessing allegiance to one or the other of the conflicting doctrines, such a person would be in a state of ceaseless vacillation [einem unaufho¨rlich schwankenden]’ (502–3; 447). Without a metainterest, without the interest of reason in pure reason, we would have to take sides and, once having publicly bound ourselves to one side, we would be lost in an endless dance without respite, between thesis and antithesis. With the interest of reason in reason, we appear to take sides without taking sides. We take a meta-interest in the conflicts of interest and affirm our interest in the architectonic nature of reasoning, in our architectonic nature. Without interest there is no apparent ‘first or starting point,’ no architectonics, no we, only a ‘ceaseless vacillation’ (unaufho¨rlich schwankenden), a swaying from side to side, an indecisive, perpetually hesitant, oscillation between interests. Without the interest of reason, without taking an interest, there are only endless interests.

TAKING AN INTEREST Four years after the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant returns to the question of interest in the Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals (1785). The problem of taking an interest does not appear to be a straightforward matter for Kant. In the Groundwork, the question of interest appears in two footnotes and enters the main text before its celebrated conclusion at ‘the very boundary of human reason [Grenze der menschlichen Vernunft].’20 Kant starts the second part of the Groundwork by criticizing ‘philosophers who have . . . ascribed everything to more or less refined self-love’ and speak ‘with deep regret of the frailty and impurity of human nature’ while using ‘reason . . . only to look after the interests of the inclinations [Interesse der Neigungen]’ (61; 34). A few pages later, Kant adds the first of his two footnotes on interest, which begins by distinguishing inclination from interest (67; 42). Inclination (Neigung) is ‘the dependence [Abha¨ngigkeit] of the faculty of desire upon feelings’ which, ‘accordingly always indicates a need [Bedu¨rfnis].’ ‘Interest’ on the other hand, is ‘the dependence [Abha¨ngigkeit] of a contingently determinable will on the principles of reason.’ Both inclination and interest are structured by dependence: a pathological


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dependence (desire on feelings) and a practical dependence (will on reason). The dependence of desire on feeling indicates, produces need. What does interest produce? Kant only says that interest is ‘present in the case of a dependent will, which is not of itself always in conformity with reason [der nicht von selbst jederzeit der Vernunft gema¨ß ist].’ Interest does not produce anything, as such; it is only produced by a will that is dependent on, and not always in conformity with, reason. Interest is present when the will temporarily diverges or deviates from reason, but this interest is only produced by the dependence of the will on reason. It is an interest of reason that is present when the will, intermittently, differs from reason. This interest, that is at once of and differing from reason, is human interest. ‘In the case of the divine will we cannot think of any interest [kein Interesse gedenken],’ Kant says. When it comes to God, there is no gap between the will and reason. Kant then writes: ‘But even the human will can take an interest in something without therefore acting from interest [Aber auch der menschliche Wille kann woran ein Interesse nehmen, ohne darum aus Interesse zu handeln].’ As he had suggested in the Critique of Pure Reason, taking an interest is not acting from interest. Taking an interest ‘signifies a practical interest in the action [Handlung].’ Taking an interest, I am acting from reason, from the dependence of the will ‘on the principles of reason in themselves.’ Acting from interest, I am acting from ‘a pathological interest,’ an interest that puts reason to use for ‘the sake of inclination,’ for ‘the interests of the inclinations.’ This interest is limited to the interest in the object. As a practical interest, on the other hand, taking an interest is always an interest ‘in the action itself and its principle in reason (the law).’ When I take an interest (ein Interesse nehmen), I take an interest in reason from reason. When I take an interest I am before the law. But, as Kant will say in the second footnote at the end of part three of the Groundwork, this interest, this interest that I take in and from the gap between the will and reason, an interest that is also at once of reason and differing from reason – this interest is impossible, incomprehensible. Before marking the footnote, Kant writes of ‘the impossibility [Unmo¨glichkeit] of discovering and making comprehensible an interest [ein Interesse ausfindig und begreiflich zu machen] which the human being can take in moral laws’ (105; 97). In the footnote Kant suggests that interest is not only the gap between the will and reason, it is also the link between reason and the will that makes reason practical: ‘An interest is that by which reason becomes practical [Interesse ist das wodurch Vernunft praktisch . . . wird], i.e. become a cause determining the will. Hence only of a rational being does one say that he takes an interest [ein Interesse nehme] in something.’ Without interest, without taking an interest, there would be no practical reason. Kant attempts to resolve this dilemma – the necessity for practical reason of

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taking an interest and the impossible and incomprehensible interest that humans ‘take [nehmen] in moral laws’ – by insisting that the interest that is taken in and from reason must be disinterested: ‘Reason takes an immediate interest [ein unmittelbares Interesse nimmt die Vernunft] in an action only when the universal validity of the maxim of the action is a sufficient determining ground of the will. Only such an interest is pure [ein solches Interesse ist allein rein].’ When we take an interest, when we take an interest in reason, it should be ‘a pure rational interest.’ For Kant, this disinterest comes after the dilemmas of the interest of reason. Disinterest is an infinite labour to close the gaps within the interests of reason. It is reason always coming too late to the aid of reason. After the first footnote on the need to take an interest and before the second footnote on the need for a pure interest, the question of interest enters the main text. For Kant, the duty and respect for the law that takes me beyond my inclinations, malgre´ moi, is founded on the categorical imperative, through which ‘we would be directed to act even though every propensity, inclination, and natural tendency [aller unser Hang, Neigung und Natureinrichtung] of ours was against it – so much so that the sublimity and inner dignity of the command in duty is all the more manifest the fewer are the subjective causes in favour of it and the more there are against it’ (76–7; 56–7). The ‘specific mark distinguishing [Unterscheidungs-Zeichen] categorical imperatives from hypothetical imperatives’ is based on treating ‘the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law.’ For Kant, ‘a will giving universal law’ cannot ‘depend [abha¨ngen] on some interest’ and this indicates ‘in the categorical imperative itself the renunciation of all interests.’ The categorical imperative ‘is based on no interest [auf kein Interesse gru¨ndet]’ and is therefore ‘unconditional [unbedingt].’ It is a malgre´ moi that is above and beyond all interest and all ‘constraint’: it is ‘autonomy’ (82–3; 64). Having announced the autonomy of the categorical imperative, some pages later Kant goes on to acknowledge that this freedom from all interest does not remove the necessity for taking an interest: ‘I am willing to admit that no interest impels me [kein Interesse treibt] . . . for that would not give a categorical imperative; but I must still necessarily take an interest [ein Interesse nehmen]’ (96; 84). One is tempted to ask what interest can be taken if the categorical imperative requires the absence of all interest? But the point is that Kant’s text is constrained by two necessities: to be free of interest and to take an interest. For Kant, the constraint of interest is founded on the oldest of constraints: the rational and the sensible, the objective and the subjective. In the midst of trying to separate these two necessities Kant will speak of both ‘the higher interest [ho¨heres Interesse]’ of the freedom from interest and that ‘we can take an interest [ein Interesse nehmen] in a personal characteristic [perso¨nlichen Beschaffenheit] that brings with it no interest [kein Interesse]’ (97; 84–5).


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Of course, Kant will argue that the idea of freedom – and of morality – requires that ‘we detach [trennen] ourselves from all empirical interest.’ We can take an interest from the categorical imperative if it is an interest in and from reason, and reason alone, not least because ‘freedom is only an idea of reason’ (97, 102; 84). As he says in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), ‘the moral interest is a pure sense-free interest of practical reason alone [das moralische Interesse ein reines sinnenfreies Interesse der bloßen praktischen Vernunft].’21 In the Critique of Judgement, in yet another footnote on interest, he will summarize what might be called the Kantian Aufhebung of interest: ‘A judgement upon an object of our delight may be wholly disinterested but withal very interesting [uninteressiert, aber doch sehr interessant], i.e. it relies on no interest [gru¨ndet sich auf keinem Interesse], but it produces one [aber es bringt ein Interesse hervor]. Of this kind are all pure moral judgements.’22 For Kant, morality is an interest founded on an original disinterest and, as Paul Guyer observes, ‘paradigmatic judgements of taste are disinterested in their origin but can serve the supreme interest of morality precisely in virtue of their disinterestedness.’23 Judgement serves ‘the interest of reason.’ Taking ‘an immediate interest in the beauty of nature’ is an ‘intellectual’ interest comparable to ‘moral feeling’: it produces an interest without relying on interest – a genesis of interest that is without interest.24 But disinterest always comes after, comes too late for, the interests of reason. When, almost at the end of the Groundwork, Kant comes to the second footnote on interest, he notes ‘the impossibility of discovering and making comprehensible an interest which the human being can take in moral laws’ and then adds, ‘and yet he does really take an interest in them.’ What remains ‘comprehended in its incomprehensibility’ in the Groundwork is a source of morality that is without interest.25 For Kant, there can be no ethics without interest. It is this emphasis on the necessity – and difficulties – of interest that separates the practical philosophy of Kant from Le´vinas’s de´s-inte´ressement. For Le´vinas, ethics requires an absolute distinction between interest (totality, being) and disinterest (infinity, the absolutely other). Kant – malgre´-lui-meˆme – is far closer to Derrida’s postNietzschean dis-interest. In ‘Le ‘‘Monde’’ des Lumie`res a` venir,’ Derrida asks ‘if reason is said to be disinterested [de´sinte´resseé], to what is it still interested [inte´resseé]?’26 Kantian reason has an apparently unique capacity to be interested and disinterested. For Derrida, when I take an interest, it is an unavoidable interest (in the impossible): an interest that takes me away from myself, from my decision or act of will to take (or not to take, to stop taking) an interest. It is a dis-interest from the other. For Kant, to take an interest is ‘to will something’ and should be an instance of the ‘autonomy of the will,’ not the ‘heteronomy of choice.’27 But the interest that Kant takes – in the conflict of interests before the law and beyond

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the state, in the meta-interest that we take without taking sides, in an impossible interest and the impossible constraint to take and not to take an interest – is an excessive interest. Kant attempts to draw a clear distinction between interest and the interest of reason, but there are always interests in Kant’s work, interests in the plural, because there is always the interest of reason and the (other) interest(s) that reason is always interested in.28 Despite itself, Kantian reason is (dis)interested. As Derrida writes: ‘and first, there are sources, the source is other and plural.’29

CHAPTER 6

An Absolute Difference

In his first essay on Le´vinas, ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ (1964–1967) Derrida suggests that Le´vinas’s powerful elaboration of an ethics based on ‘a separated being in relation with an other absolutely other’ rests on the assumption that there is no fundamental ‘interior difference,’ no ‘alterity or negativity interior to the ego.’1 To avoid the Hegelian colonization of the other as a momentary negation in the history self-consciousness, Le´vinas attempts to place the other beyond negativity and history. For Le´vinas, ‘when man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history [arrache´ a` l’histoire].’ The relationship with the other as ‘absolutely other’ is founded ‘not on a totalization of history but the idea of infinity.’2 For Derrida, Le´vinas’s very gesture of escaping Hegel through an absolute alterity or difference cannot but return him to the heart of Hegelianism: ‘Pure difference is not absolutely different (from non-difference). Hegel’s critique of the concept of pure difference is for us here, doubtless, the most uncircumventable theme. Hegel thought absolute difference, and showed that it can be pure only by being impure [ne pouvait eˆtre pure qu’en e´tant impure].’3 Derrida reiterates this position even more explicitly in a footnote in ‘The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation’ (1966–1967). He writes: To attempt to reintroduce a purity into the concept of difference, one returns it to non-difference and full presence [on le reconduit a` la non-diffe´rence et a` la pre´sence pleine]. The movement is fraught with consequences for any attempt opposing itself to an indicative anti-Hegelianism. One escapes from it, apparently, only by conceiving difference outside [hors] the determination of Being as presence, outside the alternatives of presence and absence and everything they govern, and only by conceiving difference as original impurity [impurete´ d’origine], that is to say as diffe´rance in the finite economy of the same.4 The Hegelian Aufhebung, Derrida writes in Glas (1974), is ‘the economic law of absolute reappropriation of the absolute loss.’5 Le´vinas’s absolute difference,

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his attempt to break free of all the interests of the Hegelian tradition in negativity and history, remains – despite itself – unavoidably interested in Hegelianism. In ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ Derrida argues the Hegelian colonization of the other must be resisted ‘within history [dans l’histoire].’6 ‘One wonders,’ he writes, ‘whether history itself does not begin within this relationship to the other which Le´vinas places beyond history [au-dela` l’histoire]’ (94; 139). History, he suggests, can be understood as ‘the history of the departures from totality [l’histoire des sorties hors de la totalite´]’ (117; 173). Within history, radical or irreducible alterity is indicated by ‘neither finite totality, nor positive infinity,’ but an ‘indefinite,’ ‘original finitude’ or difference (114, 117, 119). For Derrida, original finitude – the in-finite, the indefinite within the finite, irreducible difference, offers a ‘more effective’ way of addressing and respecting the other as other (102). ‘We live in and of difference [Nous vivons dans et de la diffe´rence],’ Derrida concludes (153). To address and respect the other as other, the other cannot be given an absolute status, outside of history, the ego and being (123–7, 137–40). Nor should the ego, the self, the same be understood as a homogeneous entity or totality. ‘The same,’ Derrida says, ‘is not a totality closed in upon itself’ (126). The same should be seen as that ‘which is not identical, and which does not enclose the other’ (152). In his ethics Le´vinas differs most profoundly from Derrida in arguing that alterity and subjectivity are ‘founded in the idea of the infinite.’7 If alterity and subjectivity can be said to be ‘founded,’ they are founded for Derrida in an ‘original finitude.’ Finitude is the source of ‘the right of love’ and ‘the love of right.’ In ‘Force of law’ (1989–1994) he writes: I do not see ruin as a negative thing . . . I would love to write . . . a short treatise on love of ruins. What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it hasn’t always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. And for this very reason I love it as mortal, through its birth and death, through the ghost or the silhouette of its ruin, of my own – which it already is or already prefigures. How can we love except in this finitude? Where else would the right of love [le droit d’aimer], indeed, the love of right [l’amour du droit], come from?8 For Le´vinas, ‘love is only possible through the idea of Infinity [l’amour n’est possible que par l’ideé de l’Infini].’9 Perhaps the difference between Le´vinas and Derrida is ultimately a matter of love.10 Throughout his work Le´vinas is preoccupied with the labour of distinguishing the other from the same, infinity from totality, subjectivity from being, the holy

An Absolute Difference

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from the sacred, disinterest from interest. Derrida is concerned with what cannot be distinguished, with the constraints, the thresholds and responsibilities of the double bind, the aporia and le plus d’un (the more than one/no more one).11 Where Le´vinas strives to distinguish diachrony from synchrony, Derrida argues for ‘dia-synchrony,’ for being ‘in a serial at once.’12 For Le´vinas, ‘the idea of the Infinite’ places subjectivity beyond being and indicates ‘the idea of God’ that is beyond ontology.13 As Derrida remarks in Adieu, one of Le´vinas’s most profound legacies is his condemnation of the idolatry of ontology in Western philosophy.14 At the same time, Derrida questions Le´vinas’s ability to distinguish ‘between the infinitely other as God and the infinitely other as the other man,’ between religion and ethics.15 If, as Derrida says, Le´vinas evokes ‘a holiness without [sans] sacredness’ and repeats ‘without [sans] religion the possibility of religion,’ one can also ask how close Derrida is to Le´vinas when he speaks of ‘la messianicite´ sans messianisme,’ as ‘the opening to the future or the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without a horizon of waiting and without a prophetic prefiguration.’16 Perhaps the difference is a matter of prophecy. For Le´vinas, there are prophets in the desert. For Derrida, there is ‘un de´sert dans le de´sert.’17 Derrida himself has said of Le´vinas that he had ‘a conscience’ that was ‘at once clear, confident, calm and modest, like that of a prophet.’18

CHAPTER 7

Re-mettre en question

I realized that it was necessary . . . to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations. Descartes1

HEIDEGGER’S QUESTION

How does Le´vinas translate Heidegger? How does he translate what he calls ‘the great interest [le grande inte´reˆt]’ of Heidegger in Being and Time (1927)?2 While listing ‘the problems that often occur to Heidegger’ in ‘Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie’ (1932), Le´vinas writes: ‘ne faut-il pas remettre en question la notion d’eˆtre que . . . on utilisa sans critique . . .?’3 Le´vinas takes care in this early essay on Heidegger to make it clear that this is not his question. Remettre en question, remettre en question la notion d’e´tre is Heidegger’s question. In English, remettre en question has at least two quite different meanings. It can mean either to call into question (to doubt, to stop for critical analysis) or to put back into question (to start up again, put back into operation). For example, according to Peggy Kamuf’s translation, Derrida writes in ‘The university without condition’ (1999–2001): ‘Even while recognizing the power, the legitimacy, and the necessity of the distinction between constative and performative, I have often had occasion, after a certain point, not to put back in question [remettre en question] but to analyze its presuppositions and to complicate them.’4 When Le´vinas translates Heidegger’s question in his 1932 essay it can be read in English as either ‘shouldn’t one have to call into question the notion of being that . . . one uses without critique?,’ or ‘shouldn’t one have to put back into question the notion of being that . . . one uses without critique?’ Is a putting back into question that also calls into question possible? Can one restart and, at the same time, start differently, start again with a new critique? This is perhaps


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Heidegger’s – and Le´vinas’s – question. For Derrida, when it comes to the question, it is always too late to start again. La remise en question de la notion d’eˆtre is, most likely, a translation of Heidegger’s Wiederholung der Frage nach dem Sein in Being and Time. Throughout the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger argues that it is necessary to bring back again, to repeat (Wiederholen) the question of the meaning of Being.5 Macquarrie and Robinson translate Wiederholung as restating and repetition. It has also been translated as retrieval.6 For Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being must be critically repeated-restatedretrieved. Heidegger bases the possibility of this Wiederholung on ‘Dasein’s ontico-ontological priority,’ a priority ‘which goes beyond mere resumption [bloß Wieder-aufnahme] of a venerable tradition [Tradition]’ (H8–9; 11,14). The ‘mere resumption’ of tradition threatens the priority of Dasein and the possibility of critically restating the question of Being. Tradition is a masterful past that resumes and absorbs (aufnehmen) or re-absorbs (Wieder-aufnehmen) the question of Being. It starts again, but without calling into question, without critique. In such a state, ‘Dasein no longer understands the most elementary conditions which would alone enable it to go back to the past in a positive manner and make it productively its own’ (H21). Part of Heidegger’s question – which he will pass on to Le´vinas – is how one can maintain a distinction between mere resumption (bloß Wieder-aufnahme) and a critical repeatingrestating-retrieval (Wiederholung).7 For Dasein to avoid ‘mere resumption’ it must loosen, dissolve and destroy tradition (H21–2). Thrown as a ‘Being-in-the-world’ existing with others, Dasein is susceptible to losing its way in the average everydayness of the ‘they’ (das Man). The ‘task’ for repeating-restating-retrieving the question of the meaning of Being, Heidegger argues, is ‘positively making the past our own’ (der positiven Aneignung der Vergangenheit) and gaining a ‘full possession of the ownmost possibilities of such inquiry’ (H21). How do we make ‘the past our own’? How do we bring back the past without merely resuming tradition, without being claimed by a past that is not ‘our own’? Heidegger begins to address these questions in x61 by bringing together the concepts of anticipation (Vorlaufen) or the ‘Beingtowards-death’ (Sein zum Tode), and resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) or ‘the Concrete Situation’ of taking action’ founded on an anxious ‘Being-guilty’ (Schuldigsein) that gives rise to a resolute silence that silences the ‘they’ (H262, H296–304). Anticipatory resoluteness, a finite future that exceeds the presentat-hand, ‘brings Dasein back [zuru¨ck] to its ownmost potentiality’ (my emphasis) (H307). Anticipatory resoluteness brings Dasein ‘back to itself,’ ‘back to one’s factical ‘‘there’’ ’ (H383). Open to the possibility of bringing back, the ‘anticipation of one’s uttermost and ownmost possibility is coming back understandingly to one’s ownmost ‘‘been’’ ’ (H308, 326).

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Having established that the possibility of the future (of death and finitude) provides the structure for ‘one’s having been’ (der Gewesenheit) (H308, 381), Heidegger turns to ‘the ontological problem of history as an existential problem’ (H382). In the context of the priority of Dasein and ‘temporality [that] temporalizes itself as a whole’ – of ‘a future which makes present in the process of having been’ – he argues that there is no past (Vergangenheit) as a mere before or behind what is present-at-hand (Vordhandenheit) (H380, 350). It is ‘one’s having been’ that provides the authentic structure for bringing back. ‘If Being-ashaving-been is authentic,’ Heidegger writes, ‘we call it ‘‘repetition’’ [Wiederholung]’ (H339). In retrieving-restating the question of the meaning of Being, Dasein is already repeating itself, bringing itself back. Heidegger goes on to argue that in ‘the resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself [in der Dasein auf sich selbst zuru¨ckkommt], there is hidden a handing down to oneself of . . . possibilities.’ Having already distinguished the past from ‘one’s having been’ and restating from mere resumption, Heidegger completes the project of making ‘the past our own’ by distinguishing tradition (Tradition) from a heritage (Erbe) of possibilities that are ‘handed down’ (u¨berliefern).8 Resoluteness ‘takes over’ (u¨bernimmt), takes upon itself a handed down heritage for Dasein: ‘Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet chosen’ (H383–4). Bringing back is a ‘handing down to oneself’ (Sichu¨berliefern), a making ‘the past one’s own’ through ‘the repetition [die Wiederholung] of a possibility of existence that has come down to us.’ It is a ‘going back [Ru¨ckgang] into the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there’ (H385). Free for death, in its finitude, in the primacy of its future, Dasein is free to choose, to go back and to bring back future possibilities from the past. Sichu¨berliefern gives the past a future. It is repetition-restating-retrieval that enables a necessary ‘disavowal’ (Widerruf) of the past, to the extent that Dasein can reply to the past and choose the possibilities that it brings back for the future of its past (H386). In ‘die Wiederholung,’ in the calling into question or the putting back into question the question of the meaning of Being, Dasein disavows the past. Being and Time suggests that to reply to the past one can also disown and deny responsibility for the past. This is perhaps both the possibility and the failure of an ethics in Heidegger’s thought.9

FREEDOM AND MEMORY In his short essay ‘Fribourg, Husserl et la pheńomeńologie,’ published in 1931, the year before ‘Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,’ Le´vinas meets ‘a young phenomenologist’ who says to him: ‘We live under the sign of phenomenology:


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to be a phenomenologist is to put everything back into question [c’est remettre toute chose en question].’10 It is hardly surprising that Le´vinas would associate Heidegger, whom he calls Husserl’s ‘most original disciple,’ with the task of phenomenology and this could be a source for his choice of remettre en question to translate ‘the fundamental problem of Heideggerian philosophy’ in 1932.11 Though it is worth noting that here, as in his 1932 article, Le´vinas appears to distance himself from the phrase remettre en question. Once again, remettre en question is not his question. One of the earliest instances of Le´vinas using remettre en question in his ‘own name’ is in the remarkable 1934 essay ‘Quelques re´flexions sur la philosophie de l’Hitle´risme.’ Tracing the development of the Judeo-Christian ideas in Europe of the liberation from history (‘the fundamental limitation’), time (the ‘condition of the irreparable’) and ‘the tragedy of the irremovability of an ineffaceable past,’ Le´vinas describes Christianity’s ‘promise to start again [recommencer]’ and ‘the power of renewal [renouvellement]’ as the attempt ‘to go beyond [de´passer] . . . a past always in question, always put back into question [toujours en cause, toujours remis en question].’12 The themes of freedom, time and the past will dominate Le´vinas’s later analysis of remettre en question. As far as I am aware, Le´vinas does not use the phrase remettre en question in such important post-war essays as ‘Le temps et l’autre’ (1947), ‘De l’existent a` l’existence’ (1947), ‘L’ontologie dans le temporel’ (1948), ‘L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?’ (1951), ‘Liberte´ et commandement’ (1953), or ‘Le moi et la totalite´’ (1954), nor in any of the essays published in the first edition of Difficile liberte´ (1963).13 However, twenty-nine years after first linking it to Heidegger’s question, remettre en question reappears in Totality and Infinity, but only after Le´vinas begins to use mettre en question against the Heideggerian project in ‘La philosophie et l’ideé de l’infini’ (1957). To return to remettre en question, we must begin with mettre en question. In translating mettre en question it is perhaps impossible to decide between the variations of force to put in question, to place in question and to set in question. What translation, what level of force would one choose, for example, when in ‘God and philosophy’ (1975) Le´vinas speaks of ‘une passivite´ plus passive que toute passivite´; comme la passivite´ d’un traumatisme sous lequel l’ideé de Dieu aurait e´te´ mise en nous’ and of ‘la monstruosite´ de l’infini mis en moi’?14 If it is impossible to translate into one force, mettre en question can be seen as a question of force, in this case of the question of the force of the idea of God, of the infinite, that is settled, placed or put in us (mis en nous), an idea which Le´vinas has taken from Descartes’s Third Meditation. Indeed, one could say that for Le´vinas mettre en . . . is, in its origin, a Cartesian concept. The putting in me (mis en moi) of the idea of the infinite provides the structure for the radical putting in question (mise en question).15

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In ‘Philosophy and the idea of infinity’ Levinas argues that mettre en question is a question of freedom. Western philosophy has understood the truth as both heteronomy (the absolutely other) and autonomy (‘the freedom of the investigator, the thinker on whom no constraint weighs’).16 Without any constraint, the truth as autonomy defines freedom as ‘the feat of remaining the same despite the unknown lands into which thought seems to lead’ and the confidence ‘to reduce to the same all that is opposed to it as other’ (48). Autonomy: thought without limit. Without limit, freedom is the ‘dialectic of the soul conversing with itself,’ a dialectic that overcomes and transcends the alterity of nature, things and other people (49). Freedom without limit is a rejection of ‘the heteronymous relationship with an unknown God,’ a ‘negation of a God that reveals himself and puts truth into us [mettant des ve´rite´s en nous]’ (49; 232). This first appearance of mettre places it within an opposition between, on the one hand, an interior freedom that relies on an imperialism of the same and, on the other hand, a ‘mettant . . . en nous’ (the putting or placing or setting in us) of an exteriority – an idea of Infinity, of God – that always exceeds, that constrains and obliges us to respond to the other as other. Mettant en question puts in question ‘the freedom of the I [moi]’ and, Le´vinas warns, should not be confused with ‘mettre en ećhec.’ To put ‘the freedom of the I’ in check, to block this freedom, only creates a Hegelian war of opposing freedoms. To ‘find oneself put into question by the other [mise en question par Autrui],’ ‘the freedom of the I’ should put its own freedom in question (50; 234). Put into question by the other, I put myself into question. Prompted by being put in question, by the exteriority already put in me, by ‘l’ideé de l’Infini en nous,’ I become aware of the injustice of my own freedom. With Being as a neutralizing, generalizing power that reduces the other to the same, Le´vinas argues that Heidegger’s philosophy fails to put into question the injustice of my freedom. Heidegger’s project is unjust because in repeating-restating-retrieving (Wiederholung) the question of Being, it does not ‘put [mettre] the other before the same’ (53; 238). Putting back into question the question of Being, Heidegger does not radically put into question. For Le´vinas, ‘sans la mettre en question’ Heidegger ‘sums up [re´sume] a whole current of Western philosophy’ (51; 235). In putting back into question, Heidegger has only summarized, has only resumed the past, only brought back, started up again the very tradition that he sought to ‘destroy.’ For Le´vinas, Heidegger’s Wiederholung (or, as he translated it in 1932, la remise en question) is mere resumption (bloß Wiederaufnahme). Le´vinas suggests that putting in question can only be distinguished from putting back in question by the idea of the infinite that has been put (or placed or set) in us. The idea of infinity has been put in us by the absolutely other, for the other and to the other. This event has already taken place. It is not an event in


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our past: ‘It has been put in us [Elle e´te´ mise en nous]. It is not a reminiscence’ (54; 239). This already having taken place in us that is in no way an event in our past is precisely what makes the putting in question of my freedom and the putting in us of the idea of infinity radical: ‘It is the experience in the sole radical sense of the term: a relationship with the exterior, with the other, without this exteriority being able to be integrated into the same’ (54). Four years later in Totality and Infinity, Le´vinas returns to the problem of freedom, mettre en question – and to remettre en question.17 Both Le´vinas and Heidegger invoke a certain going back, but according to Le´vinas the other as absolutely other precedes and exceeds the fundamental question of Being and ‘Dasein’s ontico-ontological priority.’ Le´vinas goes back further, starts again at the farthest. Part of Le´vinas’s strategy against Hegelian totality, Husserlian intentionality and Heideggerian ontology in Totality and Infinity is the confidence that ‘we can proceed from the experience of totality back [remonter] to a situation where totality breaks up [se brise]’ (24; 9, my emphasis).18 He argues that Heideggerian ontology is ‘a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being.’ Critique, on the other hand, ‘puts into question [met en question] the freedom of the exercise of ontology’ by putting ontology into question from the start. Critique turns back on the origin of this freedom rather than turning on the other: it ‘seeks to exercise this freedom in such a way as to turn back [a` remonter] at every moment to the origin of the arbitrary dogmatism of this free exercise’ (43; 33). Mettre en question turns back (remonter). It does not put back into question, it does not restart or put back into operation. It turns back what puts itself, ceaselessly, in question as an act of being. Critique turns back putting back into question. It turns it back before it can bring back the question of the meaning of Being in general as the only question for Dasein. It is a turning back that interrupts any bringing back. Putting into question, turning back ontology ‘to the origin’ of its ‘arbitrary dogmatism’ is ‘brought about by the other’ (43). It is ethics, transcendence. Critique is a putting in question that both goes back and indicates a past that ‘obstructs our spontaneity.’ ‘The justification of a fact,’ Le´vinas writes, ‘consists in lifting from it its character of being a fact, accomplished, past, and hence irrevocable, which as such obstructs [met obstacle] our spontaneity’ (82; 80). The recognition and respect for the past ‘as an obstacle’ puts our spontaneity in question: ‘it puts itself into question, goes back beyond its origin [se met en question, remonte au-dela` de son origine]’ (82; 81). Encountering the resistance of the past, a past that is not my own, puts my freedom in question, turns it back on itself and ‘goes back beyond its origin’ to the other as other. It is the past as other that not only turns my spontaneity back on itself but also

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takes it back beyond itself, beyond its own origin. Turning back and going back beyond pre-empts any project that seeks to bring back the question of the meaning of Being. ‘To philosophize,’ Le´vinas insists, ‘is to trace freedom back to what lies before it [remonter en deça` de la liberte´].’ Knowing as critique is ‘a tracing back to what precedes freedom [remonteé en deça` de la liberte´]’ (84–5; 83). This tracing backwards is neither repetition, nor ‘infinite regression,’ nor the arousal of ‘reminiscence’ (85–6). Putting in question is ‘the tracing back [la remonteé]’ to the other, the infinitely other (86; 85). For Le´vinas, critique precedes and disenables ontology and it is in this war with Heidegger that he returns to remettre en question. Putting in question becomes putting back in question: putting back in question not as a mere resumption or putting back into operation, but as a ‘tracing back’ to the past before ontology: ‘We think that existence for itself is not that ultimate meaning of knowing, but rather the putting back into question of the self [la remise en question de soi], the turning back [le retour] to what is prior to oneself, in the presence of the other’ (88; 88).19 Le´vinas never seems closer and farther away from Heidegger than when mettre en question becomes remettre en question. Putting back in question to counteract, refute, resist and to predate Heidegger’s putting the question of Being back into question, Totality and Infinity suggests that putting in question always, ultimately, becomes a matter of putting back into question. A clear and absolute distinction between mettre and remettre en question cannot be maintained. There is only a re-mettre en question: a putting in question that always risks being put back into question, always risks bringing back the question – the question of interest in the question of the meaning of Being – from a past that is not its own and can never be its own, but which it can never entirely escape. Remettre en question: the risk of the return of the past, of my past as the past of the other, the danger of repetition, of mere resumption, of interest, of das Unheimlich.20 In translating and in putting Heidegger’s question in question, Le´vinas cannot free himself from the uncanny echo of the Heideggerian project. In Totality and Infinity Le´vinas associates putting back in question with ‘turning back to what is prior to oneself’ and, at the same time, with memory: ‘By memory I assume and put back in question [remets en question]. Memory realizes impossibility: memory, after the event, assumes the passivity of the past and masters it’ (56; 49). Remettre en question is both the impossibility of my freedom and the possibility of my memory. Remettre en question indicates, at once, a past that can never be mastered and a past that has been mastered. In other words, Le´vinas’s use of remettre en question threatens the labour of mettre en question. A re-mettre en question appears to arrest the question of the mastery of the past and to start it up again, blurring the distinction between putting in question and putting back in question.


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Two years after Totality and Infinity Le´vinas makes his most eloquent case for distinguishing tracing back to the other from bringing back being in ‘The trace of the other’ (1963). For Western philosophy, for Heidegger, Le´vinas argues, ‘memory brings back the past itself [la me´moire replace le passe´ lui-meˆme]’ in the name of a future in which ‘research and historical interpretation wander.’21 Memory attempts to give the past to philosophy. Western philosophy enacts, like the journey of Ulysses, a mere digression, an adventurous holiday with the other, which is always on its way home to itself: ‘The philosophy handed down [transmise] to us reduces to this return not only theoretical thought, but every spontaneous movement of consciousness’ (346; 263). Le´vinas rejects the assurance of returning, of any bringing back that can bring itself back to itself. There is turning, going, tracing back, but there is no bringing back. There is only a ‘movement without return’ to the other (347). The movement ‘unto the other . . . does not return to its point of departure’ (348). As soon as Heidegger sets out to retrieve-restate-repeat, to bring back the question of the meaning of Being, he has already wandered away from his point of departure, from the assurance of making the past one’s own. This ‘departure without return’ is indicative of a ‘passage to the time of the other,’ a ‘time without me’: a future ‘beyond the horizon of my time’ and ‘an immemorial past’ that ‘no memory could follow’ (349, 355). For Le´vinas, the ‘irreversible past,’ the past that cannot be brought back, is a trace of the other, beyond being, and the beginning of my responsibility. It is a past that I can never make my own and a past that I can never disavow (355). Putting in question is a putting back in question that is always going towards ‘the past of the other’ (358). For Le´vinas, mettre en question, remonter, remettre en question take us beyond Heidegger’s question. However, at the same time, if a putting in question always risks becoming a putting back in question, Le´vinas is never entirely able to extricate himself from Heidegger’s question, from echoing its structure in the name of the other. As Derrida says of Le´vinas’s reading of Husserl in ‘Violence and metaphysics’ (1964–1967): ‘Le´vinas’s metaphysics in a sense presupposes . . . the transcendental phenomenology that it seeks to put into question [mettre en question]. And yet the legitimacy of this putting in question [mise en question] does not seem to us any less radical.’22

STARTING AGAIN In contrast to Le´vinas’s translation of Heidegger’s question from Being and Time – a translation to which he remains faithful throughout his work – in a much discussed footnote to Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987), Derrida argues that ‘the privilege of the question is placed in question [mis en

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question]’ by Heidegger in the late 1950s.23 Like Le´vinas, he suggests that in the 1930s Heidegger associates the question with a certain freedom. Heidegger links the question, and the Wiederholung der Seinsfrage, to ‘the freedom of spirit’: ‘what comes before and in front [avant et devant], what anticipates and questions before all else (vor), is spirit, the freedom of spirit.’24 But in the late 1950s – at the same time that Le´vinas introduces mettre en question to challenge Heidegger’s question – Heidegger appears to displace the priority of the question in his work. As Derrida notes, in 1958 Heidegger writes: ‘The proper bearing of thinking is not questioning but rather listening to the promise [Zusage] of that which is to come into question.’25 For Derrida, ‘it is in the name of this Zusage,’ this promise, pledge or gage before the question, that Heidegger ‘puts back into question [remet en question], if one can still call it this, the ultimate authority, the supposed last instance of the questioning attitude’ (129–30, trans. modified; 115).26 Derrida takes evident care over the use of the phrase remet en question, asking ‘if one can still call it this’ (si on peut encore dire). He uses both ‘mis en question’ and ‘remet en question’ to describe Heidegger’s displacement of the privilege of the question. Heidegger puts in question and puts back in question the privilege of the question. Can one speak here of a re-mettre en question, of a putting into question that both risks being put back into question by the question and, at the same time, exceeds the question, goes beyond and before the question? If there is a re-mettre en question in Heidegger’s work, it is neither to put in question his previous work (to arrest it, to start again from a clean slate) nor to put it back in question (to put back into operation, to go back to the point of departure, to start again). When Heidegger ‘returns [revient] to one of his previous statements,’ Derrida argues, it is not ‘to put it in question [non pour le mettre en question], still less to contradict it, but to reinscribe it in a movement which exceeds it [le reínscrire dans un mouvement qui le de´borde].’ This return to the work of the past, to the past, is not a starting again. It is neither a destruction of the past (mettre en question), nor a resumption of the past (remettre en question): the past is irreducible. This return ‘does not signify a new departure, from a new principle or some degree zero.’ If there is a re-mettre en question, it is a return that reinscribes, that exceeds, without beginning again, without effacing ‘the irreversible’ path of the past. Re-mettre en question is not a ‘re-commencing,’ Derrida insists, because it is ‘always too late [toujours trop tard]’ to start again (131–2; 116).27 For Derrida, from Being and Time onward there are ‘signs and markers’ in Heidegger’s work which suggest that the affirmation and promise of language ‘precedes’ and ‘exceeds’ the privilege of the question and already engages the question ‘in a responsibility it has not chosen and which assigns it even its liberty’ (130, 133). Language has already engaged the question from an


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irreducible past, a past that ‘never returns [revient], never again becomes [redevient] present,’ that ‘always goes back [renvoie] to an older event’ (135; 120). If there is a re-mettre en question, Derrida implies in Of Spirit, it is a return that can only respond to what (or who) returns. When it comes to the question, the question of the question, the question of a dis-interest, it is neither a matter of bringing back (Wiederholen) nor tracing back (remonter), but of what comes back (revenance). What returns, what comes back (revenance) – unbidden, spectral – is what comes before (pre´venance, devance), what always remains to come (a`-venir) (40, 78, 130; 54, 116). In Spectres of Marx (1993), Derrida ties ‘the possibility of the question, which is perhaps no longer a question [la possibilite´ de la question, qui n’est peut-eˆtre plus une question]’ to a learning ‘to live with ghosts [avec les fantoˆmes],’ a ‘living more justly’ that learns – ‘from the other and by death’ – ‘the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before [devant] the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead.’28 The question (‘which is perhaps no longer a question’) that is ‘in front of us’ (devant nous) is also ‘before us’ (avant nous): ‘what seems to be out front [au-devant], the future, comes back in advance [revient d’avance]: from the past, from the back’ (10, 17; 31, 41).29 ‘Un spectre est toujours un revenant’ Derrida writes and, like the question, the question of dis-interest, as dis-interest, ‘it begins by coming back’ (commence par revenir) (11; 32). The question does not start, it does not start again from ‘life as my life’: ‘it begins by coming back,’ by returning, always too late, for me, for Heidegger, for Le´vinas, for Derrida (xx; 16). ‘The question, which is perhaps no longer a question’ is already a response: a risky, unforeseeable, yes to the other.30 Mettre en question is already haunted by a re-mettre en question, both by inadvertently putting back into operation what it wants to arrest and analyse and by being put back into question by what comes back (comes before and remains to come). Re-mettre en question: Heidegger is haunted by the ‘mere resumption’ of the question of being; Le´vinas by the fundamental, pre-original ‘ontology’ of Heidegger’s question; Derrida by ‘un essai dans la nuit,’ of the love of life, of justice, as a mourning for the dead that always remain to come (xviii; 14). For Le´vinas, mettre en question and remettre en question are inextricably connected to looking back to the Heideggerian project. He appears to reiterate this inescapable backward glance – inescapable since 1927 or 1933 – when he returns, once again, to Heidegger’s question in his remarkable final lectures at the Sorbonne (1975–1976). In God, Death and Time he argues on 28 November 1975 that for Heidegger, ‘to be in question [eˆtre en question] is to be in such a way as always to have to be [eˆtre].’ ‘Dasein makes being into his affair, his question’ and ‘the fact that he has questioning in his charge, is what is

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proper to being; it is proper to being to put itself in question.’31 When it comes to re-mettre en question, what is the difference between Heidegger’s privilege of Dasein and Le´vinas’s priority of the Other? What is the difference between being put in question by Being and being put in question by the Other? What is the difference between Dasein putting itself in question as the question of Being and putting myself, my freedom in question as a question of the Other? Could Le´vinas ever stop putting Heidegger’s question back into question? It is perhaps Descartes more than any other thinker who marks the differences and the similarities between Heidegger and Le´vinas. In God, Death and Time Le´vinas says on 12 December 1975: The Cartesian ontology, in itself adopting the idea of the infinite, thinks the Same as a totality that integrates every Other . . . But the idea of the infinite taught by Descartes (an idea put in us) [(ideé mise en nous)] makes possible the thinking of this transcendence in a passive subject . . . In question here is a singular ‘putting in us’ [‘mise en nous’]: the ‘putting’ [la ‘mise’] of the beyond-measure into the measured and the finite, by which the Same undergoes without ever being able to encircle the Other . . . In this way, and since Descartes, a relationship has become thinkable with the more-than, with the uncontainable, which is not, for all that, less than the investment by thought. A patience of the question is thus and finally rehabilitated. A patience of the question that is a relationship with that which is too great for a response. Philosophy is brought to see in this question a privation of answers, possession, or enjoyment – while it signifies the infinite (142–3; 163).32 The Cartesian gesture of mettant en nous is the origin, the possibility of mettant en question. For Le´vinas, before the question, before the question of Being, questioning as being, there is the other as infinitely other, the idea of God: the question as dis-interestedness. On 14 May 1976, he says that the idea of God ‘explodes [ećlater] . . . the thinking that always encloses in presence or that represents, and brings back [rame`ne] to presence or lets be. Here the idea of God is put in us [mise en nous]. In this putting [mise], there is an incomparable passivity, for it is a putting in us [mise en nous] of the unassumable’ (216; 245). The idea of the infinite that is settled, placed or put in us ‘explodes’ a bringing back that ‘brings back to presence,’ to being. It is the priority of the idea of the infinite, of ‘an irreversible affection of the finite by the infinite,’ of the putting in us as the origin of the question, as the beginning of all putting in question – and perhaps the end of all putting in question – that most profoundly distinguishes Le´vinas from Heidegger.33 In Otherwise than Being Le´vinas had argued for ‘a before the questioning [un


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avant le questionnement],’ for an ‘anarchy of responsibility’ that is the possibility of ‘the ‘‘birth’’ of being in the questioning where the cognitive subject stands.’ For Le´vinas, this ‘before the questioning’ remains ‘a being put in question [une mise en cause] by the alterity of the other, before the intervention of a cause, before the appearing of the other,’ a disinterestedness before the interests of the question.34 In ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ Derrida had already suggested that both Le´vinas and Heidegger evoke ‘the passageway to a former speech [le passage a` une ancienne parole]’ (84; 124). Both, ultimately, evoke a past before the question. Derrida notes the ‘proximity’ of the thought of Heidegger and Le´vinas, ‘which by opposed routes repeat[s] and put[s] into question [mettent a` la question] the entire ‘‘philosophical’’ adventure issued from Platonism’ (149; 220). Despite putting in question the pre-eminence of the cogitio and the extensio, one could say that both Heiddeger and Le´vinas repeat what is perhaps the most fundamental Cartesian gesture: the belief that one can ‘start again right from the foundations,’ from before the foundations. The metaphysical hope (‘l’espe´rance heideggerienne’) that Derrida had first identified in ‘La diffe´rance’ (1968) with Heidegger’s thought may also be the hope of the question: the hope that we can start again.35 For Derrida, it is always too late to start again. It is always too late to break free of all interest, of all the interests of western philosophy, of metaphysics, of Heidegger’s question. We must take an interest, an interest in the impossible demands of an interested inheritance, without good conscience: a dis-interest in what comes before and remains to come. Re-mettre en question: the impossibility of starting again and the impossible injunction to start again and again.36 When he first translates Wiederholen as remettre en question in 1932 and then returns to remettre en question in 1961 is Le´vinas, like Hamlet, born ‘to set right’ a ‘time that is out of joint’? In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that Hamlet: curses the destiny that would have destined him, Hamlet, to do justice, to put things back in order [a` remettre les choses en ordre], to put history, the world, the age, the time upright, on the right path . . . He curses . . . the fate that would have destined him, Hamlet, to put a dislocated time back on its hinges [a` remettre sur ses gonds un temps de´mis] – and to put it back right, to turn it back over to the law [a` le remettre droit, a` le remettre au droit]. He swears against a destiny that leads him to do justice for a fault, a fault of time and of the times . . . by making of rectitude and right (‘to set it right’) a movement of correction, repatriation, restitution, vengeance, revenge, punishment. He swears against this misfortune, and this misfortune is unending because it is nothing other than himself, Hamlet. Hamlet is ‘out of joint’ (20; 45).

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Can one describe Le´vinas’s translation and retranslation of Heidegger as a grave obligatory task (he speaks in God, Death and Time of ‘an obligatory passage’ when it comes to Heidegger) to put things back in order, to put it back right?37 Derrida goes on to ask: ‘is not disjuncture [the disjuncture of a time that ‘‘is out of joint’’] the very possibility of the other? How to distinguish between two disadjustments, between the disjuncture of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice?’ Neither Le´vinas nor Heidegger are far away from his thoughts when Derrida raises ‘this question,’ the question of the (in)justice of a` remettre (23–9). For Derrida, Hamlet’s obligatory task, ‘to put time back on the right path [a` remettre le temps dans le droit chemin], to do right, to render justice, to redress history, the wrong of history,’ is essentially tragic: ‘there is tragedy, there is essence of the tragic only on the condition of this originarity, more precisely of this pre-originary and properly spectral anteriority of the crime – the crime of the other.’ It is coming after the crime of other that makes one – reluctant, obligated, ‘out of joint’ – ‘an inheritor’ (21–2; 46).38 There is something unavoidable about the coincidence that Le´vinas gave his final lecture on death and God on 21 May 1976 and that Heidegger died on 26 May 1976. Burdened by what Derrida calls an ‘intolerable inheritance’ in his account of Freud’s reluctant debt to Nietzsche, Le´vinas speaks in his first lecture of the ‘debt’ that every contemporary thinker owes to Heidegger, ‘a debt,’ he notes, that ‘he often owes to his regret.’39 In the first of the Quatre Lectures Talmudiques (1963) Le´vinas had written: ‘one can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger [Il est difficile de pardonner a` Heidegger].’40 For Le´vinas, when Heidegger sets out towards the past, he risks a repetition that can never be entirely distinguished from mere resumption. He also risks, as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters at the end of The Great Gatsby, being ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’41 Meditating on his own unforgiving debt over forty years after he first translated Heidegger’s question, one could say that Le´vinas’s own question cannot avoid being ‘borne back ceaselessly’ into a past that is not immemorial but, agonisingly, memorial.

CHAPTER 8

The Resistance of Anticipation

Reading The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, Derrida’s 1953–1954 dissertation, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to resist the anticipation of Derrida’s later work. Hints of the diffe´rance to come linger on every page, dislocating the reader from the fascinating insight into a French philosophy of the early 1950s that was neither that of Sartre, Merleau Ponty, Hyppolite nor that of Le´vinas or Ricoeur. The force of anticipating Derrida’s future work is unavoidable, exposing the reader to a flood of anticipatory footnotes from the work of the next fifty years. One can already see in 1953–1954, for example, some of the key points of his argument against Le´vinas in ‘Violence and metaphysics.’ When Derrida characterizes an apparent ‘absolute difference’ as ‘an absolute resemblance’ it is difficult not to think of his later criticism of Le´vinas’s attempt to escape Hegel through an absolute or pure difference.1 As Derrida notes, for Husserl ‘it is because there is absolute alterity that nothing has changed – the absolute of the Other is the Same’ (74). It is precisely because of this inability, from the start, to resist anticipation that, if a narrative of anticipation in Derrida’s early work is possible, if any narrative on anticipation, on the interest of anticipation, the anticipation of interest, is possible, it must begin with his reading of Husserl: ‘a` partir de Husserl,’ starting from and departing from Husserl.2 In the long preface to The Problem of Genesis, he writes ‘the shape that we will give to our account is intimately and dialectically linked to an answer to the problems posed speculatively; this constant anticipation is not artificial nor accidental’ (xxii). Nearly twenty years later in ‘Outwork’ (1972), Derrida will return to the problem of the preface, the relation between form and content and ‘this constant anticipation’ that is neither ‘artificial nor accidental.’ The Hegelian preface, he will argue, presumes to announce, to gather the future of the past in a grand act of ‘circular anticipation.’3 In The Problem of Genesis Derrida is preoccupied with how ‘a ‘‘nondialectic’’ may constitute a ‘‘dialectic,’’ without . . . ‘‘already’’ hav[ing] to be dialectical?’ (xxii). This question is at the heart of Derrida’s reading of Husserl’s decision to inscribe ‘the a priori synthesis into the very core of historical becoming’ (xxvii,

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xxv). The a priori synthesis raises the problem of whether the origin of becoming is itself static and atemporal or genetic and temporal. Husserl, Derrida argues, is interested in the possibility of a priori synthetic judgements, but unlike Kant he is concerned primarily with ‘the possibility of an empirical and phenomenological a priori’ (31, 29). The refusal of the formal Kantian a priori synthesis is the origin of Husserlian phenomenology (37). At the same time, Husserl’s reliance on an a priori synthesis means that phenomenology is always measuring itself by its distance from or proximity to Kant (45–6, 113). Derrida writes in a footnote (footnotes were evidently already important for Derrida in 1953– 1954): ‘The whole purpose of the present work is to show how Husserl, right from the start, turns upside down the Kantian doctrine of time and is finally obliged, after endless detours, precautions, and subtleties, to reintroduce an ideality of time in the form of a teleology’ (n. 11, p. 12). Derrida suggests that it is in fact Hegel, and his recognition that ‘it is an a priori synthesis which makes experience possible,’ who stands behind Husserl’s inscription of an a priori synthesis ‘into the very core of historical becoming’ (xxiv, n. 23, p. 185). ‘It is only from Hegel and Husserl,’ Derrida argues, ‘that the problem of real genesis can be posed.’ Derrida will later write of ‘a dialectical mark’ that stamps ‘all of Husserl’s thought,’ and one can see in Husserl’s association of the Aufhebung (‘it conserves what it suspends’) with the transcendental reduction the first glimmer of Derrida’s great readings of Hegel in the late 1960s and early 1970s (63, 69–73). It is Derrida’s insistence on ‘the strange depth of a certain resemblance between Husserl’s and Hegel’s thought’ which, arguably, leads to his distinctive place in post-war French philosophy. From The Problem of Genesis to Glas (1974), one can see Derrida elaborating on this ‘strange depth of a certain resemblance’ between Husserl and Hegel and returning, again and again, to the question of anticipation. Derrida introduces the problem of anticipation into the preface of The Problem of Genesis, again hinting at his return to the question of anticipation and its relation to the preface in ‘Outwork.’ In a section of the preface entitled ‘Anticipation and the ‘‘A Priori’’ Synthesis,’ he notes: ‘for every genesis, every development, every history, every discourse to have a sense, this sense must in some way ‘ ‘‘already be there,’’ ’ from the beginning, without which one would fail to make comprehensible to oneself both the apparition of sense and the reality of becoming; a certain anticipation is thus faithful to the sense of every genesis.’ Genesis requires a ‘certain anticipation’ of the origin of becoming, of a sense that is ‘‘already there.’’ This sense must be a ‘synthetic sense,’ a ‘synthetic act’ that refers to ‘something other than itself’ (xxiii). There must be a synthetic generation or initial marking of difference to register genesis as becoming. To get started, to begin, there must be an anticipation of the past (of what is ‘‘already there’’), of the past as the possibility of a synthetic generation,


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a marking of difference. One must take (capere) before (ante), take the past beforehand, forestall the event of the past, the past as an event and, as Derrida will later say, wager or bet on the future of the past. For Husserl, Derrida notes, ‘it is always through an ‘‘anticipation’’ which is at least formal, that any signification, founded on an a priori synthesis, appears, and appears to itself originarily’ (xxv). In another footnote Derrida equates this anticipation with Husserlian protention. Anticipation is part of an ‘originary dialectic of time’ in which a ‘protention is made possible in an originary now, by a ‘‘retention’’ of the past’ (n. 16, p. 184). Anticipation (as protention) is ‘made possible’ in the present through the past. Derrida goes on to write: ‘It is on this originary dialectic of time that every synthesis is founded; it is through it that the synthesis remains irreducible as an a priori synthesis.’ A few pages later, he suggests that Husserl has presumed that the future of the past can be contained, directed and provide a foundation for the origin of genesis as becoming: If some anticipation is always necessary, if the future in some way always precedes present and past, hence if some implication always remains hidden, then the intelligibility and significance that depend on it essentially, being always referred toward the indefinite of a past, of a future of the past, and of a past of the future, and thus stripped of their absolute foundation, of their radical and original validation, run the risk of being definitively compromised by this (xxvi). The a priori synthesis as the origin of becoming, as a synthesis of time, as an anticipation of ‘a future of the past, and of a past of the future,’ is itself subject to an originary temporality. As the possibility of beginning, of getting started, anticipation cannot be dissociated from the originary ‘indefinite of a past, of a future of the past, and of a past of the future’ that has already exposed any ‘absolute foundation’ to ‘an indefinite that is irreducible’ (5). In The Problem of Genesis Derrida already alludes to the relation between ‘an indefinite that is irreducible’ and ‘an idea in the Kantian sense’ which will dominate his later readings of anticipation in Husserl’s work. Husserl’s invocation of ‘an idea in the Kantian sense’ implies an intuition of ‘the very indefiniteness,’ of the ‘essential incompletion’ of the retentions and protentions that constitute ‘an infinite totality of possible ‘‘nows’’ .’ It presumes a complete apprehension of the ‘inaccessible’ past and the ‘undetermined’ future as an infinite and ‘pure present.’ However, for Derrida, this very presumption, this very would-be anticipation ‘of a future of the past, and of a past of the future’ exposes, transforms the dream of the infinite to the endurance of the indefinite. ‘How is an intuition of what is not there possible?’ Derrida asks. Taking beforehand what is not yet there, what has already been there, Husserlian

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anticipation puts into doubt the unbroken assurance of the ‘there.’ Raising the possibility of ‘the transformation of an infinite into the indefinite,’ Husserl – like Hegel before him – introduces ‘negation into originary lived experience’ (97–8). Derrida returns to ‘the strange presence’ of ‘an Idea in the Kantian sense’ in Husserl’s thought in his 1959 paper ‘ ‘‘Genesis and structure’’ and phenomenology’: It is the infinite opening of what is experienced, which is designated at several moments of Husserlian analysis by reference to an Idea in the Kantian sense, that is, the irruption of the infinite into consciousness, which permits the unification of the temporal flux of consciousness just as it unifies the object and the world by anticipation [par anticipation], and despite an irreducible incompleteness [un irre´ductible inache`vement]. It is the strange presence of this Idea which also permits every transition to the limit and the production of all exactitude.4 Despite ‘an irreducible incompleteness,’ despite alterity, the ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ or ‘the irruption of the infinite into consciousness’ unifies the temporal flux of consciousness, the object and the world through anticipation.5 Faced with an ‘irreducible incompleteness,’ the idea of the infinite should enable Husserl to anticipate, to take beforehand, to make use of the unity of the temporal flux, the object and the world.6 The infinite anticipates a virtual completeness: presence. In his introduction to the Origin of Geometry (1962), Derrida similarly describes Husserl’s notion of horizon as ‘the anticipated unity in every incompletion [l’unite´ anticipeé en tout inache`vement].’ Horizon forestalls the future. It is ‘the always-already-there of a future [le toujours-de´ja`-la` d’un avenir] which keeps the indetermination of its infinite openness intact.’ The indetermination, the incompleteness of the future is (ideally) anticipated, put to work by the infinite in ‘the production of all exactitude’ (117; 123).7 Husserlian idealization, which Derrida describes as ‘an anticipatory structure of intentionality,’ establishes ‘the ideal and invariant pole of an infinite approximation’ (134). This ‘idealization of anticipation’ determines anticipation within a teleology. Presence is a present that functions through the anticipation of the end as a future presence. Horizon privileges the ‘position of the protentional dimension of intentionality’ and unifies the retentions and protentions of the temporal flux into ‘the Living Present’ (lebendige Gegenwart) which, for Husserl, is experienced as ‘lived anticipation [anticipation većue]’ (141; 155). Husserl places anticipation at centre of the construction and maintenance of presence. As Derrida remarks elsewhere: ‘The present of presence and the presence of the present suppose the horizon, the


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precomprehending anticipation of Being as time.’8 To privilege anticipation, he suggests in Of Grammatology (1965–1967), is to risk the effacement of time.9 Having identified the role of anticipation in the privileging of presence in Husserl’s work from the mid 1950s onwards, Derrida’s essays in the 1960s emphasize the force of anticipation as a teleology. Presence is present, Derrida argues, ‘only in being deferred-delayed [diffe´rant].’10 At the same time, Husserl situates this delay, this diffe´rance within a telos of ousia. The delay is in effect already an anticipation of the end: the presence of the present. It is a foreclosed anticipation. Derrida traces a similar assumption in Jean Rousset’s structuralist reading of Corneille in ‘Force and signification’ (1963). Corneille’s ‘work and development are put into perspective and interpreted teleologically on the basis of what is considered its destination, its final structure.’11 As Derrida has said, he was never simply an opponent of structuralism, being more concerned with the difficult question: ‘what does this opening hide? [qu’est-ce que cette ouverture nous cache?]’ (6; 14).12 In its ‘most precious and original intention’ structuralism should resist ‘blind anticipation.’ Focused on ‘preserving the coherence and completion of each totality at its own level,’ structuralism ‘first prohibits the consideration of that which is incomplete or missing, everything that would make the configuration appear to be a blind anticipation [l’anticipation aveugle] of, or mysterious deviation from, an orthogenesis whose own conceptual basis would have to be telos or an ideal norm’ (26; 44). Structuralism is a noble refusal of the telos, but ‘the rejection of finalism is a vow of infidelity to telos which the actual effort can never adhere to. Structuralism lives within and on the difference between its promise and its practice.’ Adhering to the view that ‘meaning is meaningful only within a totality,’ structuralist thought cannot endure the idea of ‘an organized totality [une totalite´ organiseé]’ that is not ‘animated by the anticipation of an end [l’anticipation d’une fin]’ (26; 44). Derrida returns to the need for an organized totality to anticipate an end in ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the Human Sciences’ (1966), noting that in an organized totality, a structure with a centre, the ‘repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning – that is, in a word, a history – whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated [anticiper la fin] in the form of presence.’13 In refusing a telos, structuralism is still unable to break away from the Husserlian concept of horizon as ‘the anticipated unity in every incompletion.’ Anticipation remains an incorporation of the incomplete with ‘an ideal norm.’ Structuralism cannot resist anticipation. In Time and the Other (1946–1947), Le´vinas had already identified a tradition of anticipation that subsumed the future as ‘the present of the future’: ‘Anticipation of the future and projection of the future, sanctioned as essential

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to time by all theories from Bergson to Sartre, are but the present of the future and not the authentic future.’ He goes on to add: ‘the future is what is not grasped, what befalls us and lays hold of us.’14 After having examined the inability of structuralist thought to resist a metaphysical notion of anticipation, Derrida touches on Le´vinas’s emphatic rejection of anticipation in ‘Violence and metaphysics.’ Le´vinas places the ‘encounter with the absolutely-other’ beyond all conceptuality, horizon and anticipation. Derrida writes: there is no way to conceptualize the encounter: it is made possible by the other, the unforeseeable ‘resistant to all categories.’ Concepts suppose an anticipation [une anticipation], a horizon within which alterity is amortized as soon as it is announced precisely because it has let itself be foreseen [pre´voir]. The infinitely-other cannot be bound by a concept, cannot be thought on the basis of a horizon; for a horizon is always a horizon of the same, the elementary unity within which eruptions and surprises are always welcomed by understanding and recognized (95; 141). On the one hand, as we have seen, Le´vinas’s rejection of anticipation is founded on an absolute or pure difference – a denial of interior difference, a placing of the other as other beyond all history, ego and being – which, despite his avowed anti-Hegelianism, ultimately invites the Hegelian colonization of alterity (99, 120). On the other hand, Le´vinas also establishes a resistance to the force of anticipation on the trace, which is ‘present at the heart of experience,’ but not present as ‘a total presence.’ For Derrida, the trace registers ‘diffe´rance in the finite economy of the same’ (95, 102).15 Though Le´vinas founds the ‘unanticipatable irruption [l’irruption inanticipable] of the totallyother existent’ on the ‘Idea of the Infinite,’ his rejection of anticipation without relying on an organized totality gives Derrida an alternative to the limitations of structuralism and prompts his engagement with Hegel over the question of anticipation in the late 1960s and early 1970s (149; 221). Hegelianism, Derrida notes in ‘From restricted to general economy’ (1967), represents a ‘a discourse, by means of which philosophy, in completing itself, could both include within itself and anticipate all the figures of its beyond [anticipait . . . toutes les figures de son au-dela`], all the forms and resources of its exterior.’ It exemplifies a restricted economy of ‘phenomenology in general,’ from Hegel through to Husserl, which ‘relates the successive figures of phenomenality to a knowledge of meaning that always already has been anticipated.’16 In ‘The pit and the pyramid’ (1968), Derrida first refers to a Hegelian ‘teleological anticipation’: ‘a predisposed non resistance to the work of idealization.’17 It is precisely the question of the pre in predisposed, in the preface that ‘reduces the future to the form of manifest presence’ that Derrida


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addresses in ‘Outwork,’ nearly twenty years after the first preface in The Problem of Genesis; yet another sign of the extraordinary coherence of Derrida’s thought.18 Anticipation is unavoidable and, at the same time, it must be resisted. As Derrida says of teleology in Glas: ‘It can be questioned, denounced as a lure or an effect, but its threat cannot be reduced.’19 The resistance of anticipation is always a matter of the resistance of anticipation and, at the same time, of the strategies for resisting anticipation.20 It is only by some taking beforehand, by some exposure to the future, to the future of the past, that we can begin. It is only by not taking beforehand, by foreclosing the future, the advent of the future, by dreaming of the future as present, as already behind us, that we can begin. We can never simply anticipate anticipation, the interest of anticipation, the anticipation of interest. We have always only just started when it is already too late.

CHAPTER 9

Une acce´le´ration affolante

SAUTER! What is speed? Can one ask what speed is? Can one write a ‘history’ of speed or even a commentary on speed (la vitesse) in the work of Derrida? What is the right speed to write about speed? Is it possible, today, without feeling slightly mad, to anticipate precipitately what is exactly the right speed for me, for Derrida, for the other? I am not sure that I can answer any of these questions. When Derrida has raised the question of speed, he has left it unanswered, suspended. But speed has always been there in Derrida’s work. Or, more accurately, speeds have always been there. If there is speed in Derrida’s work, it is ‘other and plural.’1 If we can begin to write about speed, Derrida suggests, it is not a question of speed, but of the demand of speeds. Derrida’s speeds place at least two contrary imperatives on the would-be commentator: a patient, painstaking gathering on the margins and a jumping, a leaping from text to text, year to year, decade to decade. These contrary imperatives are conditioned by a trace that is neither a part nor a whole, a trace that is both the possibility and ruin of any induction or deduction. There are traces of speeds in Derrida’s work. In asking how one reads Hegel in Glas (1974), Derrida notes: ‘somewhere we would have to anticipate [il faudrait quelque part anticiper], even were it the end of the first sentence of the first text . . . Anticipation or precipitancy [l’anticipation ou la prećipitation] (the risk of the precipice and the fall [de prećipice et de chute]) is an irreducible structure of reading . . . So we can neither avoid nor accept as rule or principle teleological anticipation [l’anticipation te´leólogique]’ (5–6a; 11–12a). Reading is a demand of speeds: one anticipates and one must resist anticipation.2 At the same time, precipitation is always a risk, always rushes ahead, leaps ahead and risks the precipice. Derrida suggests that reading Hegel as Hegel ‘meant to be read’ is the question of ‘a leap’: What Hegel says of the structure of Potenz – and this will be true of the


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dialectical moment – explains for us how he, Hegel, meant to be read [entendait eˆtre lu]. What he states on each Potenz can be transposed to each organized totality [totalite´ organiseé] of his text, which at once repeats and anticipates, yet marks a jump, a leap [un bond, un saut], a rupture in repetition, and all the while ensures the continuity of passage and the homogeneity of a development. A plurality of continuous jerks [secousses], of uninterrupted jolts [saccades] – such would be the rhythm (105a; 121a). For Hegel, the leap (Sprung) is a ‘rupture’ that ‘ensures . . . continuity’ and accounts for the proper ‘rhythm’ or tempo for reading: ‘a plurality of continuous jerks, of uninterrupted jolts.’ It is not a matter of a moderate, tempered speed, but of a controlled rushing ahead or leap (saut), a contained explosion (saut): a combustion of the engine that powers history as spirit. How does one read or write about speed, when to speed up, to rush ahead, to leap is already to read at the right speed for Hegel? For Derrida, there are at least two leaps. On the one hand, there is ‘the tranquil assurance’ of the commentary ‘that leaps over [saute par-dessus] the text towards its presumed content, in the direction of the pure signified’ (my emphasis).3 On the other hand, there is the leap of the text: language is the rupture with totality itself [la rupture meˆme de la totalite´] . . . the caesura makes meaning emerge. It does not do so alone, of course; but without interruption – between letters, words, sentences, books – no signification could be awakened. Assuming that Nature refuses the leap [le saut], one can understand why Scripture will never be Nature. It proceeds by leaps [sauts] alone. Which makes it perilous. Death strolls between letters.4 How does one respond to the leap of the text? A leap presupposes a precipice, an abyss, a gap. In his reading of Rousseau, Derrida speaks of ‘the structural necessity of the abyss.’5 The gap, he insists, ‘must remain open’ and yet, at the same time, he warns that it is a resource for speculative philosophy.6 There is always a risk with a gap. It is the play, the saturnalia of Sa (savoir absolu), of absolute knowledge with ‘a gap’ that leads to the scratching of the concept with writing in Glas: ‘To play with the four seasons: this play, this evil of Sa, opens this play with a gap [d’un ećart] that no longer assures it of being able to reappropriate itself in the trinitarian circle’ (233a; 260a). Reading with the gap, with the leap of the text, if such a thing is possible, is to read with the risk of a leap that blows up:

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Dissemination treats – doctors – that point where the movement of signification would regularly come to tie down the play of the trace, thus producing (a) history. The security of each point arrested in the name of the law is hence blown up [saute]. It is – at least – at the risk of such a blow-up [sauter] that dissemination has been broached/breached. With a detour through/of writing one cannot get over.7 A commentary on the traces of speeds in the work of Derrida risks the infinite patience, the anguish of the encyclopaedic urge and jumping with Hegel, leaping over the text. It also risks the gap and the leap of the text. Is to write about speed to risk the worst: paralysis, disintegration? What is at stake? Why all this effort for speeds? In his reading of Jabe`s, Derrida writes of the ‘perilous’ leap of the text, where ‘death strolls between letters [la mort se prome`ne entre les lettres].’ At the end of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ (1853) Melville describes the letters of ‘the Dead Letter Office’: ‘On errands of life, these letters speed to death.’8 Are the traces of speeds in Derrida’s work perilous ‘errands of life’ that, from the moment they are sent, even before they are sent, already ‘speed to death’? In his ‘almost never-ending’ ‘dispute’ over the speed (la vitesse) ‘for life’ (pour la vie) in the work of Cixous – which is also a question of letters that speed – Derrida remarks: ‘Me, I always and each time keep recalling, for my part, that one dies in the end, too quickly [trop vite].’9

PRECIPITATION The traces of speeds in Derrida’s work are strategic. This is most apparent in his readings of Hegel. The tempo of the Aufhebung puts speeds to work for history as spirit. The contrary imperatives in the Phenomenology – ‘each moment has to be lingered [verweilen] over’ and ‘the progress [Fortgang, advance] . . . is unhalting [unaufhaltsam] and . . . no satisfaction [Befriedigung] is to be found at any of the stations on the way’ – are resolved in the right speed for the ‘goal [Ziel],’ for absolute knowledge.10 Though Hegel famously evoked ‘the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative,’ Derrida argues in ‘From restricted to general economy’ (1967) that there is a ‘blind spot’ in Hegelianism around ‘an expenditure and a negativity without reserve.’11 This blind spot ‘is the point at which destruction, suppression, death and sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity . . . that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system.’ He goes on to write: In naming the without-reserve of absolute expenditure ‘abstract negativity,’


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Hegel, through precipitation [par prećipitation] blinded himself to that which he had laid bare under the rubric of negativity. And did so through precipitation toward [par prećipitation vers] the seriousness of meaning and the security of knowledge.12 Hegel made a principle of rushing away from the radical negativity that was inadmissible to the Aufhebung and of rushing toward history as spirit and absolute knowledge. This is perhaps an example of what Derrida refers to in an earlier essay as ‘dogmatic precipitation [prećipitation dogmatique].’13 Here, precipitation does not so much threaten philosophical discourse as sustain it. In many of his essays in the 1960s and early 1970s, Derrida is preoccupied with the claims for an ‘outside’ of philosophy, of a clean break or escape from metaphysics that, ultimately, reiterates or reconfirms the ‘inside.’ In the opening of the Margins of Philosophy (1972), dogmatic precipitation appears as a part of the ‘resistance of philosophical discourse to deconstruction.’ Derrida warns that without destroying the ‘two kinds of appropriating mastery’ in philosophy, ‘hierarchy’ (the general subsuming the particular) and ‘envelopment’ (the whole predetermining the part), all the liberties one claims to take with the philosophical order will remain activated a tergo by misconstrued philosophical machines, according to denegation or precipitation [la prećipitation], ignorance or stupidity. They very quickly [tre`s vite], known or unknown to their ‘authors,’ will have been called back to order.14 Linked to its classical associations in philosophy (ignorance, stupidity), ‘precipitation’ nonetheless indicates not a discourse that has failed to be properly philosophical, but one that ‘very quickly’ reiterates or reconfirms, that calls ‘back to order,’ the proper in philosophy. While Derrida opens the Margins of Philosophy with a precipitation that returns philosophy to itself, that has anticipated its ‘outside,’ he also opens Dissemination (1972) with a precipitation that loses its heading, a precipitation that resists anticipation. In ‘Outwork,’ Derrida draws attention to the prefix pre-, to the preface and precipitation in speculative philosophy. The pre- in the Hegelian preface ‘makes the future present, represents it, draws it closer, breathes it in, and going ahead of it puts it ahead [en le devançant le met devant]. The pre reduces the future to the form of manifest presence.’15 Hegel puts precipitation to work: the rush, the headlong fall, that is ahead of itself – prae (in front, before) and the praecipito (the headlong fall, the fall of the head) – appropriates, colonizes what is ahead of it (the future). Speculative precipitation requires not only a precipitation that pre-empts the future, but also a pre-

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that is itself already contained by a post-. The preface is ‘rightfully . . . written only after the fact,’ it is ‘in truth an endless postface’ (14). Derrida writes: The signifying pre-cipitation [la prećipitation signifiante], which pushes [pousse] the preface to the front [en avant], makes it seem like an empty form still deprived of what it wants to say; but since it is ahead of itself [en avance sur elle-meˆme], it finds itself predetermined, in its text, by a semantic aftereffect [l’apre´s-coup se´mantique]. But such indeed is the essence of speculative production: the signifying precipitation and semantic after-effect are here homogeneous and continuous. Absolute knowledge is present at the zero point of philosophical exposition. Its teleology has determined the preface as postface . . . This point of ontoteleological fusion reduces both precipitation and after-effect to mere appearances or to sublatable negativities (20; 26). Hegel predetermines precipitation; the ahead of itself that rushes and pushes ahead never loses its own head: dogmatic precipitation. For Derrida, on the other hand, the preface and its precipitation cannot be so easily incorporated or neutralized within speculative philosophy. He argues, though prefaces ‘have always been written, it seems, in view of their own selfeffacement . . . this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it’ (9). In predetermining precipitation, Hegel attempts to erase ‘a certain occurrence of the break between anticipation and recapitulation’: If the preface appears inadmissible today, it is on the contrary because no possible heading [en-teˆte] can any longer enable anticipation and recapitulation to meet and to merge with one another. To lose one’s head, no longer to know where one’s head is [perdre la teˆte, ne plus savoir ou` donner de la teˆte], such is perhaps the effect of dissemination. If it would be ludicrous today to attempt a preface that was really a preface, it is because we know semantic saturation to be impossible; the signifying precipitation introduces an excess facing [la prećipitation signifiante introduit un de´bord] . . . that cannot be mastered; the semantic after-effect cannot be turned back into a teleological anticipation and into the soothing order of the future perfect; the gap [l’ećart] between the empty ‘form,’ and the fullness of ‘meaning’ is structurally irremediable, and any formalism, as well as any thematicism, will be impotent to dominate that structure (20–1; 27). In ‘the gap’ that cannot be bridged between anticipation and recapitulation, (there is) another precipitation, a precipitation that loses its heading. This other precipitation is indicative of ‘la restance,’ a remainder, an excess, that resists


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‘teleological anticipation’ (8; 13). The traces of speeds are an aspect of ‘a textual economy that no concept can anticipate or sublate,’ an endless opening of ‘a snag in writing that can no longer be mended, a spot where neither meaning, however plural, nor any form of presence can pin/pen down [agrapher] the trace’ (35, 26). There are at least two translations of restance. In ‘Outwork,’ Barbara Johnson translates restance as ‘left-overness,’ as a remainder (44). In ‘Provocation: Forewords’ (2001), Peggy Kamuf translates restance as ‘remaining,’ as what remains to come.16 Restance: resistance of a left-over to come. For Derrida, precipitation resists the reappropriation of what remains and the anticipation of what remains to come. Precipitation (praecipitis) is a question of the head, of the heading (capitus, caput) and of anticipation (antcipatio, anticipare, antecapere). To go ahead – to anticipate, to go in advance, to go before – is to go beyond one’s own head or heading, beyond any calculation or programme.17 To go ahead is always a question of speed. In The Other Heading (1989–1991), Derrida speaks of ‘the heading of the other [le cap de l’autre]’ and ‘the other of the heading’ [l’autre du cap],’ ‘before [devant] which we must respond.’18 To respond to l’autre du cap is to respond from an anguished experience of the impossible, from a ‘double injunction’ that demands a decision, a responsible decision. When I take an interest in (a) speed, I am dis-interested by the traces of speeds. The unforeseeable (l’impre´visible) is the possibility of a responsible decision, of a precipitation that goes out ahead without anticipation. The traces of speeds are always demanding decisions.

LET US NOT HASTEN ‘I would like to begin as quickly as possible [le plus vite possible] with this warning . . . don’t go too fast [n’allez pas trop vite].’19 There is always the other speed, always more than one, more than two speeds. ‘There are not only two, there are more than two speeds,’ Derrida says in ‘Negotiations’ (1987).20 There is always the threat of another speed when an order of speed has been set. ‘Here I am going to force and accelerate a bit the interpretation beyond commentary,’ he writes in ‘Of an apocalyptic tone newly adopted in philosophy’ (1983).21 In the 1960s, these strategic traces of speed are apparent in Derrida’s work on speech and writing and raise the question of the relation of speed to diffe´rance. In ‘La parole souffleé’ (1965), Derrida gestures to a speed that both constitutes and threatens speech. To ‘diminish’ the naivete´ of ‘speaking toward [parlant en direction]’ Artaud, Derrida writes, ‘a dialogue would have to be opened between – let us say as quickly as possible [disons pour faire vite] – critical

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discourse and clinical discourse.’22 This prominent and seemingly unnecessary qualification can be juxtaposed a few pages later with Derrida’s insistence that ‘we will not rush toward [ne prećipiterons pas]’ the ‘too solid commonplace’ of accepting that ‘by definition, there is nothing to say about the unique.’ This speeding up (saying as quickly as possible) and slowing down (not saying too quickly that there is nothing to say), are indicative of a ‘furtiveness’ that ‘eludes discourse and will always elude it’ (172,173; 257). Furtiveness ‘is the manner of the thief, who must act very quickly [tre`s vite] in order to steal from me the words which I have found. Very quickly [tre`s vite], because he must invisibly slip into the nothing that separates me from my words.’ This furtive speed plays a part in a ‘dispossession which always empties out speech as it eludes itself’ and in an ‘original elusion without which no speech could ever catch its breath [ne trouverait son souffle].’ It is a speed that both gives and takes away the breath of speech (177–8; 264–5). When Derrida introduces the supplement in Of Grammatology (1965–1967), it is a question of speed. He argues that for Rousseau, ‘when Nature, as selfproximity, comes to be forbidden or interrupted, when speech fails to protect presence, writing becomes necessary. It must be added to the word urgently [d’urgence].’23 Writing and speed supplement, as fast as possible, nature and speech. Speed contributes to the gathering of presence. Speed also destroys the project of presence. The supplement quickly fills a void and even more quickly replaces, displaces, re-marks, a fundamental lack, an abyss, a gap. It is a speed that replaces before it displaces.24 Derrida again warns, ‘one cannot abstract from the written text to rush [se prećipiter] to the signified’ (150; 215). The leap over the text will always explode, out-run by the leap of the text, the saturnalia of a gap: We know what importance Emile gives to time, to the slow maturation of natural forces. The entire art of pedagogy is a calculated patience, allowing the work of Nature time to come to fruition, respecting its rhythm and the order of its stages. The dangerous supplement destroys very quickly [toute vitesse] the forces that Nature has slowly constituted and accumulated. In ‘out-distancing’ natural experience, it runs non-stop [bruˆle les e´tapes] and consumes energy without possibility of recovery (151; 217). In one of his earliest published essays Derrida links precipitation to diffe´rance. Recalling his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962), he observes in ‘Force and signification’ (1963): Meaning must await [attendre] being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself [diffe´rer de soi], what it is:


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meaning . . . It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward [prećipitation essentielle vers] the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future.25 Derrida associates precipitation (and what he will later call a precipitation that has lost its head, that ‘does not know where it is going’) with writing and diffe´rance, the pre-original differing and deferring that constitutes meaning. What is the relation of speed to diffe´rance? Let us not hasten, as Derrida says, as we attempt to answer this question. While Derrida makes use of a rushing ahead, an explosive leap, a precipitation without anticipation, he also employs a strategic slowing down. As he evokes a precipitation that has lost its head in ‘Outwork’ he also calls for a ‘prudent, differentiated, slow [lentes], stratified’ reading of Hegel (33; 40). We must read slowly, at a speed that allows for prudence and that endures differentiation, stratification. But how does one read slowly? What is the risk of reading slowly? How does one slow down, mark a delay that is not just a waiting station towards absolute knowledge? For Hegel, Derrida notes in Glas, the particular absolute totality of a given moment or power ‘comes to a halt, stops itself [s’arreˆte].’ In stopping itself it takes on ‘a certain independence,’ which ultimately manifests the absolute: ‘the delay [le retard] it thus takes on itself . . . is the positive condition of its appearing, of its glory.’ The delay, Derrida observes, ‘is also an advance, progress, an anticipation [une avance, un progre`s, une anticipation].’26 The risks of slowing down are either to come to a halt (which is just an advance, an anticipation waiting to happen), or to slow down without being able to stop: a slowing down without anticipation, an ‘arreˆt sans Aufhebung.’27 Writing requires a resistance to a certain haste, a patient wandering, a slow errancy that is faithful to the future, to what remains to-come. At the beginning of Of Grammatology Derrida writes: Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation on and around what is still called writing, far from falling short of a science of writing or of hastily dismissing [la conge´dier haˆtivement] it by some obscuranist reaction, letting it rather develop its positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge (4; 14). He adds later that his ‘efforts will . . . be directed toward slowly detaching’ the

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concepts of the ‘graphie’ and ‘the instituted trace’ from ‘the classical discourse from which I necessarily borrow them.’ Derrida insists on going a` petite vitesse, at a slow speed, to resist a certain haste of metaphysics. The graphie and the instituted trace, he argues, ‘should not be too quickly interpreted within the classical system of oppositions’ (46). If there is a speed of metaphysics, it is a speeding toward ‘the classical system of oppositions.’ Derrida reiterates this injunction against haste in ‘Freud and the scene of writing’ (1966). We must slow down if we want to avoid seeing memory ‘in terms of the opposition between quantity and quality.’ ‘Let us not hasten [ne nous haˆtons pas]’ he writes, ‘to define this other of pure quantity as quality: for in doing so we would be transforming the force of memory into present consciousness and the translucid perception of present qualities.’28 If we rush and reduce memory to this classical opposition in metaphysics, we transform it into presence. This warning against the haste of metaphysics, the haste toward presence, is a prominent link between speed and diffe´rance. In both ‘Freud and the scene of writing’ and ‘Diffe´rance’ (1968), Derrida refers to a passage from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that emphasizes the operation of ‘differance as detour.’29 He quotes the passage at length in ‘Diffe´rance.’ In the English translation, Alan Bass has followed the Stratchey translation, which differs from Derrida’s French translation of Freud. The English text reads: In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud writes: ‘Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle. This latter principle does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road (Aufschub) to pleasure.’ Derrida’s text reads: Dans Au-dela` du principe du plaisir, Freud ećrit : ‘Sous l’influence de l’instinct de conservation du moi, le principe de plaisir s’efface et ce`de la place au principe de reálite´ qui fait que, sans renoncer au but final que constitue le plaisir, nous consentons a` en diffe´rer le reálisation [we consent to defer/to differ from fulfilment], a` ne pas profiter de certaines possibilite´s qui s’offrent a` nous de haˆter celle-ci [to not take advantage of certain possibilties that offer themselves to us to hasten fulfilment], a` supporter meˆme, a` la faveur du long de´tour (Aufschub) que nous empruntons pour arriver au plaisir, un de´plaisir momentane´.’


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The differences between these two translations are striking. To cite only a few examples: ‘s’efface et ce`de la place au’ becomes ‘is replaced by,’ losing the rich associations in Derrida’s work with erasure and effacing;30 ‘en diffe´rer le reálisation’ becomes ‘the postponement of satisfaction,’ in effect, reducing the speeds of diffe´rance, of deferring and differing, to an interminable slowing down, suggesting that diffe´rance has only one speed; finally, the injunction against haste, the call for slowing down, is entirely absent. Traces of speeds are vulnerable to the speeds of translation. The haste of this choice of translation touches on the theme of the question of haste, translation and Freud in Derrida’s later work. As if he were offering a commentary on a translation that was yet to appear (Bass’s translation appeared in 1982), Derrida warns in ‘Parergon’ (1974–1978), ‘Let us not be too hasty [ne nous haˆtons pas] about translating this as: the beautiful beyond the pleasure principle.’31 He opens ‘To speculate – on ‘‘Freud’’ ’(1975–1980) emphasizing that Freud himself begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle with a kind of dogmatic precipitation, writing: ‘ ‘‘In the theory of psychoanalysis we have no hesitation unbedenklich [sans he´siter, sans scrupule, sans re´flećhir] in assuming . . .’’.’32 Derrida remarks on Freud’s ‘haste’ to advance beyond the pleasure principle; a haste, an attempted anticipation, that only slows down and defers this advance.33 The absence of the Freudian deferral of haste in the English translation of ‘Diffe´rance’ diminishes the demand of speeds in Derrida’s account of diffe´rance. Immediately after quoting the passage from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida writes: Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of diffe´rance, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange cleavage [partage]. We must not hasten to decide [il ne faut pas se haˆter de dećider]. How are we to think simultaneously [a` la fois], on the one hand, diffe´rance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred [diffe´reé] by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, diffe´rance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? . . . If diffe´rance is unthinkable in this way, perhaps we should not hasten to make it evident [ne faut-il pas se haˆter de la porter a` l’e´vidence], in the philosophical element of evidentiality which would make short work of dissipating the mirage and illogicalness of diffe´rance and would do so with the infallibility of calculations

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that we are well acquainted with, having precisely recognized their place, necessity, and function in the structure of diffe´rance.34 The repeated injunctions against haste, the calls for slowing down, put the question of speeds at the heart of ‘the very enigma of diffe´rance.’ When it comes to the demands of diffe´rance – to defer and to differ at once – ‘we must not hasten to decided’ on one speed. We should not hasten to submit diffe´rance to the speed of evident philosophical ‘calculations,’ to the haste of metaphysics. The demand of speeds is the a` la fois. There are speeds for diffe´rance as ‘the economic detour’ that ‘aims at coming back’ to presence (my emphasis): a calculated deferral that is already a deferring and a differing, a slowing down and a speeding up. The speed of the evident philosophical ‘calculations’ that would read diffe´rance at one speed is also already a product of incalculable speeds. There are speeds for diffe´rance as ‘the relation to an impossible presence,’ ‘as expenditure without reserve’ and ‘the irreversible usage of energy,’ evoking Derrida’s readings of Hegel and Rousseau and a precipitation that has lost its head and the ‘toute vitesse’ of the dangerous supplement. Speeds: ‘the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time,’ the ‘rhythm of diffe´rance.’35 Let us not hasten (il ne faut pas se haˆter; mais ne nous haˆtons pas). The injunction against haste is repeated in ‘Ousia and Gramme¯’ (1968), ‘The ends of man’ (1968), ‘White mythology’ (1971) and ‘Qual Quelle’ (1971).36 The emphasis in the late 1960s and early 1970s on not hastening (which may also be a response to a certain euphoria and enthusiasm from 1968), and perhaps the translation of diffe´rance as postponement, has led Derrida in the 1990s to, once again, emphasize the precipitation, the urgency of diffe´rance.37 In Spectres of Marx (1993), he writes: differance . . . does not mean only (as some people have too often believed and so naively) deferral, lateness, delay, postponement [diffe`rement, retard, de´lai, postponement]. In the incoercible differance the here-now [l’icimaintenant] unfurls. Without lateness [retard], without delay [delai], but without presence, it is the precipitation [la prećipitation] of an absolute singularity, singular because differing, precisely, and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency [l’urgence].38 Diffe´rance: speeds. There is always more than one speed: there is no one speed, (there are) only traces of speeds. Speeds: the possibility of ‘the here-now,’ the impossibility of presence. In H. C. pour la vie, c’est a` dire . . . (2002), Derrida argues that it is impossible to answer ‘the question ‘‘what is speed? [qu’est-ce que


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la vitesse?]’’.’ The question is already ‘overtaken by a speed [prise de vitesse par une vitesse],’ by the ‘unformalisable differential of speed,’ by ‘the changing of speed.’ Speeds – slowness, acceleration (la lenteur, l’acce´le´ration): ‘there is no essence of speed [il n’y a pas d’essence de la vitesse].’39 In ‘the delineation of diffe´rance,’ Derrida writes, ‘everything is strategic and adventurous.’40 Speeds: strategic traces of diffe´rance.

THE SPEED OF TODAY? Is there a speed of today? The question of today (aujourd’hui) has always been a part of Derrida’s work. To cite just four examples for more than forty years of the todays of Derrida: ‘This is very little – almost nothing – but within it, today, is sheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity and duty of decision’ (1964); ‘What, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?’ (1974); ‘How not to speak, today, of the University?’ (1983); ‘Today again, today after all, today otherwise, the great question, would still be religion and what some would hastily call its ‘‘return’’ ’ (1996).41 What does it mean to write today? Is it an attempt to record what is here and now? To claim that there is something unique about ‘our’ time, ‘our’ epoch? Is it a political act? Is it a mark of finitude? Is it already an act of mourning, a memorialization for oneself, or even an open gesture to the future, for those to come? In ‘ ‘‘To do justice to Freud’’: The history of madness in the age of psychoanalysis’ (1992), Derrida comments on the strange dislocation of today: yes, we are saying today [oui, nous disons bien aujourd’hui] a certain today . . . And so today, like yesterday [hier], I mean in March of 1963, it is this question of the today [la question de l’aujourd’hui] that is important to me, the question such as I had tried to formulate it yesterday . . . Here, then, is the question of yesterday, of the today of yesterday [de l’aujourd’hui d’hier], such as I would like to translate it today, on the side of Freud, transporting it in this way into the today of today [l’aujourd’hui d’aujourd’hui]: Derrida goes on to quote a passage from ‘Cogito and the history of madness’ in which he writes, ‘it is not by chance that such a project could take shape today.’42 Today (February 2003 when I first wrote this, today, May 2004 when I am reading it again), Derrida’s ‘today of today’ (November 1991), that he places in relation to ‘the today of yesterday’ (March 1963), has itself become ‘the today of yesterday.’ Today (aujourd’hui) could indicate, as Le Robert says, ‘ce jour meˆme, de´termine´

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par le moment ou` l’on dit ce mot,’ ‘le temps ou` nous sommes’ (Le Robert amply conforming Derrida’s critique of the pervasive link between speech and presence and of the necessity of asking ‘who, we?’). The difficulty is that when writing or reading the phrase ‘this very day,’ it can denote any given day. ‘Today’ can mean this day (a unique and irreplaceable day) and any and every day. When I read ‘today,’ I cannot tell if it is or was or will be today, yesterday or tomorrow. ‘Today’ can only indicate the strange time of the absolutely unique (this very day) and the always repeatable (any day, all the days). Taken on its own, if such a thing is possible, ‘today’ cannot avoid being of today and not of today. Derrida touches on the question of today in a number of works on the date, dating and the ‘date of today.’ Towards the end of ‘Cartouches’ (1978), an essay presented as a series of dated diary entries from 30 November 1977 to 11–12 January 1978, he turns to the problem of dating: 7 January 1978 When the date itself becomes the place of crypt, when it stands in for it. Will they ever know why I inscribe this at a given date? Throw of a die. . . . There is the date of today [la date d’aujourd’hui], they’ll never know anything about what was given to be lived in it – and taken away. The date itself will stand in for a crypt, the only one that remains, save the heart. In law, dating is said of the place of writing or signing for the engagement, the contract, the missive, the will. Who will ever know where I date this, today? There is the gift (es gibt) and there is also what, today, I will not have been able to give. And which I want to keep better than ever. 8 January 1978 43

(Speed up the process today . . .).

The date is encrypted. Dating gives and it does not give. With a date, the why, the who and the where of today still remain in question. The ‘date of today’ is not an anchor for ‘today’ as an unequivocal presence of the present.44 With a date, ‘today’ is still both of today and not of today. As Derrida suggests in ‘Schibboleth’ (1984–1986: from the today of delivery to the today of publication), the date is both unique and repeatable. In the context of the dates of Celan’s poems, he argues that ‘the silence of pure singularity’ of a poem, marked by a date, must be broken, effaced by an iteration, which allows the poem to speak to ‘another date,’ to be read. To date, the date must detach itself, breaking its ‘immediate adhesion’ to the ‘here-now [l’ici-maintenant].’45 The unique singularity ‘this very day’ must detach itself from a simple equation


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with the ‘here-now.’ As Derrida notes in ‘Living on: Border lines’ (1979– 1986), today (aujourd’hui), is adjourned (ajourne´) and has gaps and openings (ajoure´).46 The question of the speed of today is a question of a speed that is of today and of another day. From the 1960s, Derrida has often referred to a precipitation or acceleration of today but, to my knowledge, it is not until ‘No apocalypse, not now: a` toute vitesse, sept missives, sept missiles’ (1984) that he addresses explicitly the question of the speed of today.47 The ‘premie`re missive, premier missile’ of ‘No apocalypse, not now’ can be read as a sketch of an unwritten (and perhaps unwritable) work on speed, starting from the first sentence of the essay: ‘In the beginning, there will have been speed [la vitesse].’ How does one begin to write on speed when one is already ‘on’ speed?48 Writing about a certain kind of speed, of ‘a sprint’ (une course de vitesse), to respond the nuclear arms race (la course aux armements), Derrida remarks: ‘As everyone knows, there is not a moment, not an atom of our life, not a sign of our relation to the world and to being that is not marked today, directly or indirectly, by this sprint.’49 Having identified this speed of today (April 1984), he immediately asks if this is a unique speed, if it is a speed only of today: ‘Are we having another experience of speed today? Is our relation to time and movement qualitatively different? Can one not, on the contrary, speak of an extraordinary acceleration, though qualitatively homogeneous, of the same experience?’ Recalling the injunction from ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ against the haste of the classical oppositions of quality and quantity that reduce memory to presence, he warns against the very speed of the question of today that ‘opposes quality and quantity.’ To begin to ask the question of the speed of today one would first have to ask ‘what temporality can one still trust in when posing the question in this way?’ One would then have ‘to re-elaborate all the problematics of time and movement, from Aristotle to Heidegger, by way of Augustine, Kant, Einstein or Bergson’ (364). A timeconsuming task indeed! The question of the speed of today is already caught in the demands and risks of speeds. There is a demand to ‘decelerate’ (the speed of today is not unique; ‘this is neither the first nor the last time’). There is a demand to accelerate (the speed of today is ‘absolutely unique,’ unprecedented, unexpected) (365–7). Speeds demand, at once, an ‘immediate’ response to the urgency of today and a response, held in ‘reserve,’ to what remains and remains to come.50 The risks of the speeds of today are, on the one hand, with a cap, ‘an excess of anticipation’ (an acceleration of anticipation, of calculation in advance) and, on the other hand, without a cap, ‘an anticipation sans cap’ (an acceleration without anticipation, without foresight): a capitalization of speed and a speed to come, a`venir.51 Today (this very day, any day) there is a war of speeds. In Ulysse Gramophone

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(1987; or, rather, two texts with two dates, two todays: 1982 and 1984), for example, Derrida traces la guerre between ‘the babelian adventure of the book’ and ‘the repetition of the yes’ in the works of Joyce and the latest computer technology for the translation and creation of encyclopaedic concordances of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.52 The rapid calculations, the ‘accelerated capitalization’ of computer technology will never be fast enough to calculate the ‘speed’ of ‘the babelian theme’ in Finnegans Wake and the ‘precipitation’ of the ‘other yes’ in Ulysses.53 Today, Derrida says in The Other Heading (1989, 1990–1991), the acceleration of new technologies of communication and information are transforming the traditional notions of the polis, the public space, of the capital, capital and capitalization. This transformation is intensifying the double injunction of ‘neither monopoly nor dispersion’ and the demand of speeds is, in turn, intensifying the imperative from the impossible to take a responsible and just decision.54 Today, Derrida argues in Spectres of Marx (1993), there is a war between capitalization, the ‘virtual event,’ the ‘haste’ of metaphysics and a speed to come. The ‘new speed of apparition [nouvelle vitesse d’apparition] . . . of the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, and the virtual event’ is both intensifying the ‘techno-mediatic power’ powers that are put to work for ‘the politico-economic hegemony’ and pointing toward ‘a thinking of the event’ that exceeds the classical opposition of ‘effectivity and actuality’ and ‘ideality.’55 The speed of these virtual events breaks down the opposition between presence and non-presence and ‘obliges us to think, from there [from the impossibility of opposing ‘the living to the non-living’], another space for democracy. For democracy-to-come [a` venir] and thus for justice’ (169; 268). Of today and of another day, speeds sans cap resists the calculation, the programme in advance that denies a just decision and closes the space for a democracy to come (23; 49). Today, Derrida writes in ‘Force of law’ (1989–1994), the ‘structural urgency [urgence] and precipitation of justice’ requires that it ‘has no horizon of expectation (regulative or messianic). But for this very reason, it may have a future, precisely, a to-come.’ A just decision ‘always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation.’56 Today, at the same time, as Derrida emphasizes in Voyous (2002–2003), the ‘absolute urgency’ (urgence absolue) of a democracy to come is also a question of hesitation, of spacing, adjournment, of the gap and ‘of the trace as gap [de la trace comme ećart].’57 Today (the todays of 1996, 1997, 1999, 2003) Derrida argues there are speeds of tele-technoscience, autoimmunisations, forgiveness, hospitality, international law, la mondialisation, ‘rogue states.’58 The response to the speed of today, taking an interest in the speed of today, is always a question of speeds: ‘The response, a response that is


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responsible to the urgency of actuality demands these precautions . . . One must, at the same time, defer, keep a distance, linger and rush [s’attarder et prećipiter].’59

UNE ACCE´LE´RATION AFFOLANTE ‘In the beginning there will have been speed [la vitesse] which always already overtakes, outruns [prend de vitesse, gagne de vitesse].’60 Speed overtakes, outruns speed: speeds.61 There is not enough time to answer the question: what is speed? Strategic traces of diffe´rance, speeds mark the impossibility of ‘la bonne vitesse,’ of the right speed that can be set, put to work for presence ‘affecting itself without delay [sans retard]’ and going ahead, in advance, without losing its heading.62 There is not enough time. ‘– No hasty step here [Pas de haˆte ici], no hurrying pace [pas de prećipitations] toward the answer. Hurrying along [la prećipitation du pas] is perhaps what no one has ever been able to avoid.’63 Derrida writes of ‘the general dis-location to which our time is destined,’ an acceleration and differentiation ‘beyond the norms of speed [des normes de vitesse] that have until now informed human culture.’64 In the context of the relation of humans to animals, he proposes, hesitantly, a ‘hypothesis’: For about two centuries, intensely and by means of an alarming rate of acceleration [une acce´le´ration affolante], for we no longer even have a clock or a chronological measure of it, we, we who call ourselves men or humans, we who recognize ourselves under this name, we are engaged here in an unprecedented transformation.65 Une acce´le´ration affolante: a frightening, a distressing, a disturbing, an alarming, a crazy, a mad acceleration; mad because we ‘no longer even have a clock or a chronological measure of it’; mad because (there are) speeds. Une acce´le´ration affolante: speeds beyond ‘the hubris of the right measure [la bonne mesure].’66 Une acce´le´ration affolante: speeds as dis-interest. Une acce´le´ration affolante: a commentary on speeds gathering and leaping, leaping and gathering ‘without rest.’67 Une acce´le´ration affolante: speeds beyond the commentator. ‘– Yes, I’m going rather too quickly [un peu vite] here.’ ‘– That’s moving far too fast [beaucoup trop vite].’68 ‘Whatever happens, I can do no more about it. I await everything from an event I am incapable of anticipating.’69 ‘Run in circles, but I promise you that you will have to run faster and faster [de plus en plus vite].’70

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‘He must not and cannot decipher it en route, he is only a facteur. He attempts to divine, but what a job. He would have to be able to stop running.’71 ‘Nothing works, but everything goes very fast [tre`s vite], in this paralysis, which I know something about.’72 ‘The countdown is accelerating, don’t you think?’73 ‘Il nous faut aller de plus en plus vite.’74 ‘Ce temps ne me sera jamais donne´.’75 ‘moi, je vais a` la fois trop lentement et trop vite.’76

CHAPTER 10

la vie la mort, la mort la vie

– I am not ‘against life,’ but I am not ‘for life’ as her. This discordance is at the heart of the book – and of life. – You are against death and fiercely for life. But otherwise. Dis/quietly.1

LIFE AS DEATH, DEATH AS LIFE

How does one choose, can one choose, between life and death? Can one choose between la vie la mort (life death) or la mort la vie (death life)? Can one decide on an order, a sequence, a capital letter, when it comes to life and death? Do we begin with life or with death? When it is a matter of life and death one has to take a decision. We arrive in the midst of a seminar at the beginning of Derrida’s ‘Spećuler – sur ‘‘Freud’’ ’ (delivered in 1975, published as fragments in 1978 and in 1980). He writes: ‘Perhaps you remember. If not, perhaps you have verified the consequences during the course of these ten sessions: from the first one on I had pulled in [entraıˆne´], and I do not say justified [justifie´], the title of this seminar, life death [la vie la mort].’2 How are we to read this unjustified title? There are at least two possible titles for Derrida’s 1975 seminar. In an interview conducted in October 1975 and published in 1977, ‘Ja, or the fauxbond,’ Derrida says: ‘I am using Freud’s term [speculation] from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a word whose re-evaluation I am attempting this year in the course of a seminar on Life death [au cours d’un se´minaire sur La vie la mort].’3 In ‘Freud’s Legacy,’ the second part of ‘To speculate,’ a note is reproduced from its publication in the journal Etudes freudiennes in 1978 which says this is an ‘extract of a seminar held in 1975 at l’Ecole normale supe´rieure under the heading Life death [sous le titre La vie la mort]’ (292; 313). Derrida repeats this

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version of the title in a note to part four of ‘To speculate’ and twice in ‘Envois’: ‘Speaking of which, M., who has read the seminar on La vie la mort along with several friends, tells me that I should publish the notes without changing anything’ (29 August 1977); ‘I took up ‘‘La vie la mort’’ . . . again’ (4 May 1978).4 However, in ‘Notices (Warnings),’ the first part of ‘To Speculate’ which appeared in La carte postale in 1980, Derrida describes and introduces ‘the title of this seminar [le titre de ce se´minaire]’ as ‘life death [la vie la mort]’ (259). How are we to make sense of these different versions of the title of Derrida’s 1975 seminar, a difference marked in the French by the feminine definite article la/La that leads to a capitalization of life in the English?5 The interview ‘Ja, or the faux-bond’ was published in 1977, but given in 1975, the year of the seminar. Is this the first, the most original title? Should one begin with La vie la mort and read the change in the title as a de-capitalization of life and death? And how does one indicate in a recorded interview that life and death are to be transcribed and printed as Life death?6 And what is the difference between saying that the title of a seminar is La vie la mort and that you are giving ‘a seminar on La vie la mort’ (my emphasis)? Derrida warns ‘a title always has the structure of a name, it induces the effects of the proper name.’7 On the other hand, the first part of ‘To speculate,’ which gives the title to the seminar as ‘la vie la mort’ was published in 1980, but may be an unrevised reproduction of the original seminar session in 1975. Should we then begin with life and death uncapitalized, without a heading, sans cap? Or, if ‘Freud’s Legacy’ is a fragment of the 1975 seminar published in 1978 and again in 1980 with a note saying that the seminar was entitled ‘La vie la mort,’ should we take this revised repetition, this re-capitalization, as Derrida’s last words on the matter? Whatever version we take, we cannot know what title was uttered in the Ecole normale supe´rieure in 1975. And whether the title in 1975 was La vie la mort or la vie la mort, these titles were both disentitled in 1980 when the traces, the fragments of the seminar appeared as a speculation on a ‘proper name in quotation marks’: ‘To Speculate – on ‘‘Freud’’ [Sigmund Freud; Freude – pleasure: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Au-dela` du principe du plaisir, Jenseits des Lustprinzips].’8 In its ‘final’ form in La carte postale, the title of Derrida’s 1975 seminar has two titles: la vie la mort, La vie la mort. It is a title that appears, at once, equally un-capitalized and unequally capitalized. As in Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s La folie du jour, la vie la mort also appears both as a title and as an untitled phrase in the text.9 ‘The title will thus remain suspended, in suspension.’10 When it comes to la vie la mort we are always dealing with what Derrida calls in Voyous an equality that is not equal to itself.11 Can one ever make an order, a chronology, an argument out of life death? ‘Life is no argument [Das Leben ist


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kein Argument],’ Nietzsche observes in The Gay Science (1882–1887), ‘the conditions of life might include error.’12 ‘la diffe´rance,’ Derrida says in 1968, ‘is not announced by any capital letter [majuscule]. Not only is there no kingdom [royaume] of diffe´rance, but diffe´rance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. And it is always in the name of a kingdom that one may reproach diffe´rance with wishing to reign, believing that one sees it aggrandize itself with a capital letter [s’agrandir d’une majuscle].’13 The equally and unequally un-capitalized and capitalized titles of Derrida’s 1975 seminar raise the question of the capitalization and the ‘decapita(liza)tion’ (l’emajusculation) of Life death, life death.14 Is the capitalization of life ‘a capitalized pleasure’? Freud writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), ‘while on his own for this long period of time [his mother was ‘absent for many hours,’ though he was being observed by the narrator, his grandfather, Freud] the child had found a way of making himself disappear [sich selbst verschwinden]. He had discovered his reflection in the fulllength mirror reaching almost to the floor, and had then crouched down so that his reflection was ‘gone [fort].’15 Derrida describes this scene as ‘A capitalized pleasure [Jouissance capitaliseé]: the child identifies himself with the mother since he disappears as she does, and makes her return with himself, by making himself return without making anything but himself, her in himself, return’ (319; 340).16 The child plays this game ‘all the while remaining, as close as possible, at the side of the PP,’ of Freud the grandfather and of the masterful pleasure principle, of which Derrida has just written: ‘the master (life, the PP as life, the living PP, the PP alive) [le maıˆtre (la vie, le PP, comme vie, le PP vivant, le PP en vie)]’ (318; 338). A capitalized pleasure ‘as life’: making the absent, even the dead, return – return with the living, in the living. ‘Playing at disreappearance’ (la dis-reápparition): life as fort/da (324; 345). The child’s game of fort/da (gone/there) is the ‘scene of writing and of inheritance,’ of Freud obliquely mourning the loss of his own proper name, of his inheritance as a father to a daughter, a grandfather and the ‘father’ of psychoanalysis (224–336, 340). Freud capitalizes life (Leben). Capitalizing life as the game of fort/da is not only to make the dead return in the living, it is already to mourn for this capital (of a) life, to worry about the inheritance as if one were already dead. Capitalizing life, one is already in mourning for the proper. Capitalizing life: life as death.17 If Freud capitalizes life and attempts to give an order to life death, to write of life as death, Derrida implies it is through Freud’s reading of Nietzsche that he also capitalizes death (Tod). In the ‘fragments’ of the 1975 seminar collected in ‘To speculate,’ Derrida alludes to sections that have not been published, including those on Nietzsche ‘on life as a very rare genre of that which is dead

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[sur la vie comme un genre si rare de ce qui est mort]’ (269; 287). One of the many Nietzsches in The Gay Science warns: ‘Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life [das Tod dem Leben entgegengesetzt sei].’ Derrida will later echo this warning in Otobiographies (1979–1984), a paper on Nietzsche which may contain traces of the 1975 seminar, writing: ‘what one calls life [la vie] – the thing or object of biology and biography – does not stand face to face with something that would be its opposable ob-ject: death [la mort], the thanatological or thanatographical.’18 Nietzsche raises the most difficult of questions: how to speak of life and death otherwise? At the same time, he follows this warning with a statement that gives an order to the relation between life and death: ‘Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead [Das Lebende ist nur eine Art des Todten], and a very rare type.’19 If death cannot be opposed to life, life must be seen as a ‘genre’ or ‘type’ of death: life is of death. But can one speak of life as a ‘genre’ or ‘type’ of death? And can one speak of a ‘genre’ or ‘type’ of death?20 Freud speculates that ‘the goal of all life is death [Das Ziel alles Lebens ist der Tod]’ because, somehow, all life arises from and returns to a pre-existing (but can one say pre-existing when one is talking about what is before life?) ‘nonliving matter’: ‘the inanimate existed before the animate [das Leblose war fru¨her da als das Lebende],’ the inorganic before the organic.21 In The Gay Science, what we might call Freud’s Nietzsche argues ‘the organic [das Organische]’ is ‘exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental.’ The ‘nature of the organic’ should not be seen as ‘something essential, universal, and eternal.’ Projecting ‘our aesthetic anthropomorphisms’ – ‘order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom’ – on to the ‘eternal chaos’ of nature, we have opposed the fantasy of a deified life to death. We can only get a glimmer of what life, death and nature actually are when ‘God is dead’ (Gott ist tot). For Nietzsche, ‘the formation [Bildung] of the organic’ is ‘an exceptions of exceptions [Ausnahme der Ausnahmen]’ made possible by the ‘order and relative duration’ of the ‘astral order in which we live [die astrale Ordnung, in der wir leben].’22 Everything rests on the death of God, but how can we know that God is dead if we do not really know what death is? And can Nietzsche speak of the ‘astral order’ as the possibility of ‘the formation of the organic’ without returning to the oldest of stories: to the sun as the source of life? For Plato, to deny ‘the soul of the sun’ is an act of atheism.23 Nietzsche’s sun is an atheist’s sun, an inorganic, a dead sun, but as the star of our ‘astral order’ it is also the origin of the organic, it gives life. ‘Plato’s sun does not only enlighten: it engenders,’ Derrida observes. ‘The good is the father of the visible sun which provides living beings with ‘‘creation, growth, and nourishment.’’ ’24 The Platonic sun resembles not only the logos and the good, but also ‘the death that one cannot look at face to face.’25 The logos, the logos-zo¯on (speech as a living creature)


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‘protects us from the sun.’26 At the end of book four of The Gay Science, another Nietzsche, Zarathustra, rises with the dawn and steps out of his cave to address the sun: ‘You great star [Du Grosses Gestirn!], what would your happiness be if you did not have those for whom you shine? . . . Bless me then, you calm eye that can look without envy even upon an all too great happiness. Bless the cup that wants to overflow in order that the water may flow from it golden and carry the reflection of your rapture everywhere [u¨berallhin den Abglanz deiner Wonne trage].’27 Derrida suggests that Nietzsche and Freud attempted not to oppose life and death while, ultimately, they capitalized both life and death, returning and reappropriating life death to either death as life or life as death. When, Derrida writes in ‘To speculate,’ Freud reluctantly follows Nietzsche and speculates that life is of death, when he argues that ‘the evolution of life [l’e´volution de la vie] is but a detour of the inorganic aiming for itself [en vue de lui-meˆme]’ and that life ‘resembles an accident of death or an excess of death [exce`dent de mort],’ he is assuming that ‘the component drives are destined [destineés] to insure that the organism dies of its own death, that it follows its own, proper path to death [meure de sa propre mort, qu’il suivre son propre chemin vers la mort]’ (355; 377–8). If one could capitalize death, if there is a Death life, it is founded on the expectation or anticipation that when life is of death one can always ‘die one’s own death.’ Death as life is the return of the proper. It is evoked, Derrida writes, ‘not in order to keep oneself from death or to maintain oneself against death, but only in order to avoid a death which would not amount to itself [ne lui reviendrait pas], in order to cut off a death that would not be its own or that of its own.’ ‘The drive of the proper,’ Derrida concludes, ‘would be stronger than life and than death’ (La pulsion du propre est plus forte que la vie et que la mort) (356; 378–9). ‘I am living so that I may die properly, and so that my death is my own [vivement que je meure proprement et que ma mort me revienne]’ (358; 381). Death as life is the attempt to capitalize death to forestall the theft of my death by the other and to ensure that my death would be ‘given to itself by itself [donneé luimeˆme]’: ‘it (he) wishes to toll its (his) own knell [propre glas], wishes the impossible’ (356; 379). When Derrida describes death as life as ‘a theory of suicide deferred [en diffe´re´]’ this can also be read as an oblique reference to Blanchot’s account in The Space of Literature (1955) of Kirilov’s decision to kill himself in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (1871) (355; 379). For Kirilov, suicide is the ultimate, the most absolute, the most proper, most god-like and Goddenying act of self-will. Blanchot writes: ‘If he dies freely, if he experiences and proves himself [s’il e´prouve et s’il se prouve] his liberty in death and the liberty of his death, he will have attained the absolute. He will be that absolute. He will be absolutely man, and there will be no absolute outside of him [pas d’absolu en

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dehors de lui].’ For Blanchot, as an attainment of the absolute, suicide is impossible. My death, my death as the return of the proper, has already and will always elude my attempt to master it: ‘Even when, with an ideal and heroic [virile] resolve, I decide to meet [d’aller a`] death, isn’t it still death that comes to meet me [vient a` moi], and when I think I grasp it [la saisir], does it not grasp me [me saisit]? Does it not loosen all hold upon me [me dessaisit], deliver me to the ungraspable? . . . Do I myself die, or do I not rather die always other from myself, so that I would have to say that properly speaking I do not die? Can I die? Have I the power to die?’28 One can also see death as the return of the proper long before Hegel and before Koje`ve’s description of the death of the subject as ‘something that is proper to him and belongs to him as his own.’29 Long before the celebration and colonization of the negative, one can see this rich tradition in Montaigne’s eloquent and succinct title: ‘To philosophise is to learn how to die’ (‘Que philosopher, c’est apprendre a` mourir’) (1580–1592). For Montaigne, ‘no matter what role a man may assume, he always plays his own part within it’ and in learning how to die most of all. ‘We do not know where death awaits us [ou` la mort nous attend],’ he writes, ‘so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom.’30 Montaigne suggests that my life is no more than a theft, while my death is an unending and steady task of building, as if one lives as a thief in the night and dies building one’s own mausoleum: ‘All that you live, you have stolen from life [desrobez a` la vie]; you live at her expense. Your life’s continual task is to build your death [bastir la mort].’ At the same time, Montaigne recognizes the impossibility of building one’s own death. One is always waiting to say goodbye to oneself: ‘I have already half-said my adieus to everyone but myself [sauf moy].’ When we are dying, we only encounter ‘ ‘‘a brand new way of life’’ [nouvelle forme de vivre]’ – death is elsewhere.31 Montaigne’s title has Socrates behind it. Socrates says in the Phaedo: ‘And the true philosophers, Simmias, are always occupied in the practice of dying [apothne´skein]’ (67e).32

PLATO IS BEHIND . . . In a footnote to The Problem of Genesis (1953–1990), Derrida writes: ‘one cannot fail . . . to regret that Husserl and numerous of his interlocutors and his disciples were not questioned, at least once in their lives, by a Socrates.’33 What does it mean to be questioned about life death ‘by a Socrates’? Freud ‘forgets Socrates,’ ‘Plato is behind Freud,’ Derrida says in ‘To speculate’ (347, 398).34 Freud cannot advance beyond the pleasure principle because he defines this step [pas] beyond pleasure, the death drive, as ‘a drive to restore a prior state’:


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the return of the animate to its inanimate origins. Freud cites the Symposium to illustrate ‘the need to restore a prior state [Trieb ab von dem Bedu¨rfnis nach Widerherstellung eines fru¨heren Zustandes],’ forgetting the Socrates of the Philebus who defines not death, but pleasure as the ‘return of the elements to their original state.’35 It is this forgotten Socrates who identifies pleasure with the return of the proper: ‘the return of all things to their own nature is pleasure’ (32b).36 It is also this forgotten Socrates of the Philebus who prefigures the Hegelian Aufhebung of pleasure, the Aufhebung as pleasure, as the capitalization of life and death. Socrates argues that only when the infinite (comparatives, degrees, excess, the indefinite) is limited and ‘bound down’ by the finite (number, measure, definite quantity) that it gives rise to ‘the mixed life of pleasure and wisdom,’ a life which is, ultimately, founded on the ‘eternal, unchangeable and unmixed’ authority of the mind and the soul (24–30, 59). Restricting to raise, limiting to increase, this ‘strictural supplement,’ as Derrida calls it, of an apparent ‘binding-itself’ (se-lier) already relies on ‘a binding itself in a differantial relation to itself.’ A binding – which can never tighten or loosen itself enough to bind-itself to ‘‘life’’ or ‘‘death’’ – that ‘sends and posts itself. Destines itself. Which does not mean: it arrives [Il s’envoie et se poste ainsi. Il se destine. Ce qui ne veut pas dire: il arrive]’ (401–2; 428–9). Derrida suggests in his reading of Freud that life death marks, is marked by, an elusive rhythm, a ‘rhythm of diffe´rance’: the ‘sentinel of life [sentinelle de vie]’ and ‘the courier of death [courrier de mort]’ that Freud, perhaps malgre´ lui-meˆme, attempts to foreclose and direct to a mourning for the proper (life as death) and a return to the proper (death as life) (269, 361; 384).37 ‘Is,’ Derrida asks at the end of ‘To speculate,’ ‘what we have retained from Beyond . . . anything other than a rhythm, the rhythm of a step [le rythme d’un pas] which always comes back [revient], which again has just left [revient de partir]? Which has always just left again [repartir]?’ (405–6; 433).38 Plato touches on life as the problem of a certain rhythm in the Protagoras. As Protagoras the Sophist debates with Socrates over whether virtue can be taught, he offers an apologue on Prometheus and Epimetheus and the creation of human life. After Epimetheus has used up all the attributes that he has been given on the creation of animal life, Prometheus is forced to steal fire and ‘the mechanical arts of Hepaestus and Athene’ to provide ‘the means of life [biou]’ (322a). For Protagoras this myth – which Bernard Stiegler uses to describe the origin of human life as ‘the de-fault of origin or the origin as de-fault,’ of life as the reliance on a supplementing technics – illustrates that ‘virtue may be acquired and taught’ (323c).39 It is through education, he argues, that a child can be taught what is just/unjust, honourable/dishonourable, holy/unholy. By reading the poets and playing the lyre, a child can be introduced to the lyric

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poets and become ‘quite familiar’ with ‘their harmonies and rhythms . . . in order that they may learn to be more gentle, and harmonious, and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action.’ ‘For the life [bios] of man,’ Protagoras says, ‘in every part has need of harmony and rhythm’ (326b).40 Human life, the Sophist argues, needs harmony (armonıá) and rhythm (ruthmo´s). Acquired and taught, ‘rhythm and harmony’ are an essential aspect of life. Socrates counters Protagoras’ myth on the ‘rhythm and harmony’ of the supplemented life with a staccato question and answer dialectic driven by the logic of the one and the many, the whole and part, the same and the different (329–33).41 Socrates then threatens to break off the discussion because Protagoras’s answers are too long. Protagoras is making speeches when he should be participating in an argument. Disrupting the proper long/short, slow/fast rhythm for dialectic, the Sophist’s speech has a wandering, slippery rhythm without proportion or harmony. Protagoras never really recovers from Socrates’s re-assertion of the Socratic rhythm (335–6). For Socrates, ‘the art of measurement [metre¯tike¯ te´khne¯]’ is ‘the salvation [soterıá] of human life,’ bringing order to the conflicts of the more and the few, the great and the less and the near and the far (356d–357e). Human life is a rhythm that is saved – from itself – by the art of measurement. The art of measurement saves human life for knowledge, for philosophy. The good life is geometry.42 But human life can only aspire to geometry. Despite Socrates’s refutation of Protagoras, Plato appears to acknowledge in the Philebus and in the Laws that human life needs an acquired and taught ‘rhythm and harmony.’ In the Philebus, Socrates asks, ‘And am I to include music, which, as I was saying just now, is full of guesswork and imitation, and is wanting in purity?’ Protarchus replies: ‘Yes, I think you must, if human life [bios] is to be life [bios] at all’ (62b–62c). Impure, tainted with the mortality of mime¯sis, ‘rhythm and harmony’ are a necessity ‘if life is to be life at all.’ It is Rousseau, occupying, Derrida argues, ‘a singular position’ between Plato and Hegel, who articulates the Socratic anxiety about ‘rhythm and harmony’ as the supplemented life. For Rousseau, harmony is ‘a principle of death’ and is ‘the originary supplement of melody,’ the ‘principle of life.’ Harmony is a ‘dangerous supplement,’ an addition that marks an original lack. It is a principle of death that is ‘already within’ life and that is indispensable for life.43 Despite itself, human life is always in need of ‘harmony and rhythm.’ In the Laws, the Athenian Stranger remarks: For men say that the young of all creatures cannot be quiet in their bodies or in their voices; they are always wanting to move and cry out: some leaping and skipping, and overflowing with sportiveness and delight at something, others uttering all sorts of cries. But, where as the animals have no


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perception of order [ta´kseon] or disorder [ataksıón] in their movements, that is, of rhythm [ruthmo´s] or harmony [armonıá], as they are called to us, the Gods, who, as we say, have been appointed to be our companions in the dance, have given the pleasurable sense of harmony and rhythm; and so they stir us into life, and we follow them, joining hands together in dance and songs (653d–654a). The rhythm of life – of life death – and the need for ‘harmony and rhythm’ raises the problem of the difference between the human (ańthropeios) and the animal (zo¯on), ‘the living other [l’autre vivant],’ as Derrida describes animals in ‘The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)’ (1999).44 The ‘young of all creatures,’ the Athenian Stranger says, ‘are always wanting to move and cry out.’ Human life is distinguished and defined by a ‘sense of rhythm and harmony.’ A gift of the Gods, rhythm and harmony – the apparently uniquely human ‘perception of order and disorder’ – ‘stir us into life.’ Animal life is a movement, a leaping and skipping, a crying out, that is without ‘rhythm or harmony,’ a movement that has no perception of order/disorder. At the same time, the Athenian Stranger implies that ‘the young of all creatures’ share this movement before order/disorder. Like the logos, which as Derrida notes, begins as ‘a wild creature [un vivant sauvage], an ambiguous animality,’ life – human and animal – begins without ‘rhythm or harmony.’45 What makes us human, the Athenian Stranger suggests, is a second life, a gift of ‘harmony and rhythm’ from the gods that ‘stirs us into life,’ a re-animation of life, of a life that knows the difference between order/disorder and that allows us to follow the gods ‘in dances and songs.’ Echoing Plato, Rousseau will suggest that animals are incapable of harmony, a limitation that both removes them from the dangers of the supplemented life and announces, Derrida writes, ‘the still living myth of fixity . . . of nonsupplementarity.’ Animal life is ‘a moment of life which knows nothing of symbol, substitution, lack and supplementary addition.’ In other words, animal life is ‘a life without diffe´rance [une vie sans diffe´rance].’46 As Protarchus says in the Philebus, ‘if human life is to be life at all,’ it cannot do without ‘harmony and rhythm,’ that is without an exposure to guesswork, imitation and impurity. At the same time, Derrida argues, the dream of the propre of man, of human life as an ‘impossible . . . self-proximity,’ is founded on ‘excluding his other from the play of supplementarity.’47 In life, Diotima tells Socrates in the Symposium, there is ‘no absolute unity.’ In life, ‘there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation – hair, flesh, bones, blood and the whole body

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are always changing’ (207d–207e).48 Man ‘is called the same,’ but like ‘every animal,’ his life is the ‘short interval’ of a continuous alternation between ‘loss and reparation.’ From loss to reparation, from reparation to loss: the rhythm of life. Relying, as Derrida says, on the single episode in the Symposium of the unreliable voice of Aristophanes, Freud equates the death drive with the myth of love as the need to ‘restore’ humans to their ‘original state’ of androgyny.49 Beyond pleasure, the death drive as ‘the need to restore a prior state’ returns the animate to the inanimate, the organic to the inorganic. Thinking of Freud reading Plato, this need to return to an original state can also be read as a kind of Sehnsucht, an infinite yearning for the infinite that must always remain unfulfilled. ‘Longing to grow into one,’ weighed down by ‘the intense yearning’ to ‘become one,’ there is no return to the one, no restoration of the one, only the infinite and impossible yearning of the more than one (plus d’un) (191a– 191b, 192e). When Freud reads Plato, death is elsewhere. Nor does Freud take into account the very different voice of Diotima in the Symposium, who argues that the reparation, renewal or restoration of a prior state is part of a ‘perpetual process of loss and reparation,’ a rhythm of restoration as loss and loss as restoration that is not the death drive, but ‘the short interval’ of the economy of life. A restoration that only restores or returns so far until it loses itself and a loss that only goes so far before it is restored. Life, according to Diotima, is a finite economy that – while it lasts – resists or prevents any absolute restoration or any absolute loss, any absolute difference: an economy of life that preserves the proper. Death, she suggests, is an absolute difference: a loss without restoration, a restoration without loss. Next to the apologue of the Protagoras and the myth on the origin of a supplemented life in need of harmony and rhythm, one could place the ‘very pretty tale’ of Socrates in the Gorgias on the origin of human death (523–4).50 It has been ‘a law’ since ‘the days of Chronos,’ Socrates says, that those who have lived justly will be sent after they have died to ‘the Island of the Blessed,’ while those who lived unjustly will suffer in Tartarus. However, ‘even quite lately in the reign of Zeus’ this judgement ‘was given on the very day on which men were to die; the judges were alive, and the men were alive; and the consequence was that the judgements were not well given.’ The judgement of death was given by the living to the living. The ability to give a right judgement about death was impaired by the trappings of life. Both the judges and the judged ‘have their clothes on, for they are alive’ and it is the clothes of the living, with their ‘fair bodies’ and ‘wealth or rank,’ which distort the impartiality of the tribunal of death. For Socrates, the clothing of the living is indicative of the senses and the ‘whole body’ which is ‘interposed as a veil’ before the soul. It is only when humans are naked (gumnos) – without clothes and


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without the clothing of their bodies – that they can be judged for death (thańatos). To be naked is to be dead. To be naked, to be without clothes, is to be human: this is a death without animals, a death between humans and gods. As Derrida remarks, clothing and nudity are an essential aspect of ‘the proper of man.’51 From now on, Zeus decrees, to make the judgement of death ‘just [dikaıá],’ humans will be ‘entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge too shall be naked, that is to say, dead.’ To guarantee the judgement of death, the naked must judge the naked, the dead must judge the dead and ‘the proper of man’ must judge ‘the proper of man.’ Zeus adds that he will also ‘deprive men of the foreknowledge of death.’ He removes death from life. There can be no knowledge of death in life. Nor can the living make any judgements about death or about what is after death. Above all, human life is of the body and human death is of the soul. As Socrates uses this ‘pretty tale’ to state emphatically what death is, he also reflects the inability of the living to make a right judgement about death: ‘Death [thańato], if I am right, is in the first place the separation from one another of two things, soul [psukhe`s] and body [so´matos]; nothing else’ (my emphasis). Can any philosopher write about death, about life death, without Plato behind them, without the death of Socrates in the Phaedo? Is the death of Socrates ‘the scene of writing’ for philosophy? If he is right, waging everything on an impossible judgement about death, Socrates argues that the philosopher ‘is always pursuing death and dying’ because it is the absolute achievement of the ends of philosophy: ‘to get away from the body and to turn to the soul’ (64a–64c). Striving for death in life, for the soul that is free of the body, for a ‘thought free of the senses,’ the philosopher can only celebrate the promised ‘separation of the soul and body.’ Thinking is a kind of death. Philosophical thought is ‘the practice of dying.’ Philosophy is a habit, a repeated action, a repetition, a representation or a representative of dying in life. The more we think, the closer we are to death. ‘Men study,’ Socrates insists, ‘to live as nearly as they can in a state of death’ (67e). If he is right, in dying Socrates will know ‘pure knowledge’ (66e). ‘The death of the body,’ Derrida notes, ‘is the price that must be paid for ale¯theia and the episteme¯.’52 Socrates places everything on ‘wisdom after death’ (my emphasis). In life, he says ‘we have no time to give to philosophy’ because ‘the body is always breaking in upon us’ (66d). If he is right, after death, without the body, with the soul, there will be time, a time without interruptions, for philosophy, for pure thought, for truth. If he is right, Socrates has ‘reason to hope . . . I shall attain that which has been the pursuit of my life’ (67b). Everything rests on the ancient hope, for which there is ‘no evidence,’ that ‘when man is dead his soul yet exists’ and that ‘souls go from hence into the other world, and returning hither, are born again from

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the dead’ (70d–70c). ‘If [ei] it be true that the living come from the dead,’ Socrates says, then he has ‘reason to hope’ that after death he shall accomplish the death that he has sought in life: the proper death of Socrates (70c–70d, my emphasis). Socrates’s hope for a proper death rests on the return of the dead ‘to life.’ To hope that his soul continues to exist after his death, Socrates must believe in the possibility of ‘the birth of the dead into the world of the living.’ To support this recycling of the dead into life, Socrates insists in his dialogue with Cebes on two propositions: Well, and is there not an opposite of life, as sleep is an opposite of waking? True, he said. And what is it? Death, he answered . . . Is not death opposed to life? Yes. And they are generated one from the other? Yes. What is generated [gegno´mai] from the living [zontos]? The dead [tethneko´s]. And what from the dead? I can only say in answer – the living. Then the living, whether things or persons, Cebes, are generated [gegno´mai] from the dead? That is clear, he replied. Then the inference is that our souls exist in the world below? That is true (71c–71e). The opposition of life to death and death to life and the generation (gegno´mai, growth, becoming, birth) of life from death and death from life are in turn founded on a fundamental concept: ‘If generation [gegno´mena] were in a straight line only, and there were no compensation or circle [ku´klo] in nature, no turn or return [anaka´ptoi pa´lin] of elements into their opposites, then you know that all things would at last have the same state, and there would be no more generation [gegno´mena] of them’ (72b). Generation is a circle, a ‘turn or return,’ a bending-back (anaka´ptoi) backwards (pa´lin) – a folding back – that compensates. There must be difference, but only a difference within a circle, within a re-turn, within a folding back that compensates: life and death after Plato. But a life death already haunted, re-marked, by what Derrida calls ‘a certain folding back’ (repli) that in re-turning (to itself) divides and doubles (itself), that is ‘at once its own outside [dehors] and its own inside [dedans];


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between the outside and the inside, making the outside enter the inside’ and ‘is never pure or proper,’ folding (pliant) ‘back on to itself [sur lui-meˆme] without any possibility of fitting back over or onto itself [recouvrement].’53 life death: ‘a structure of alteration without opposition.’54 For Socrates, death in life is thought. After death, (is the hope that) philosophy is truth. But where is death ‘itself’ in the Phaedo? If he is right, after death we can give all our time, all of time to philosophy. But when death comes in the Phaedo, there is so little time. Two sentences before the end of the text, Crito asks Socrates, ‘Is there anything else’ and Plato writes, ‘there was no answer to this question’ (118). As Le´vinas says at the opening of God, Death and Time (1975–1993), saying perhaps all that needs to be said of death at the outset, ‘death is the sans-re´ponse.’55 Since Plato, for philosophy, death is the withoutresponse.

DE LA MORT . . . DANS LA VIE

We must . . . entrust ourselves to traces56 In an earlier published ‘fragment of a lecture,’ ‘Freud et la sce`ne de l’ećriture’ (1966) and in the 1968 paper ‘La diffe´rance,’ Derrida had already noted the importance of the Freudian evocation of what he calls in ‘To speculate,’ ‘the waystation of a diffe´rance (Aufschub).’57 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud notes that the pleasure principle is both ‘useless [unbrauchbar]’ and ‘highly dangerous [Grade gefa¨hrlich]’ when it comes to self-preservation. However, he goes on write, ‘thanks to the influence of the ego’s self-preservation [Selbsterhaltungstriebe des Ichs] drive it is displaced [abgelo¨st] by the reality principle, which, without abandoning the aim of ultimately achieving pleasure, none the less demands and procures the postponement of gratification [Aufschub der Befriedigung], the rejection of sundry opportunities for such gratification, and the temporary toleration of unpleasure [Unlust] on the long and circuitous road to pleasure [auf dem langen Umwege zur Lust].’58 As we have seen, from at least 1966 Derrida has been preoccupied with this passage in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. His most recent reading of it was in 2000.59 He first cites this passage in ‘Freud and the scene of writing’ in the opening account of the unpublished ‘first part of the lecture.’ Once again, ‘there remain only traces.’60 Derrida writes: ‘The difference between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, for example, is not uniquely, nor primarily, a distinction, an exteriority, but rather the original possibility, in life, of the detour, of diffe´rance (Aufschub) and of the economy of death [la possibilite´ originaire, dans

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la vie, du de´tour, de la diffe´rance (Aufschub) et de l’ećonomie de la mort].’61 From the Freudian Aufschub, Umwege (postponement, deferring, delay) of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, Derrida sees ‘the original possibility, in life [dans la vie] . . . of diffe´rance and of the economy of death [de la mort].’ In life, he suggests, there is diffe´rance and ‘the economy of death.’ There is an economy of death in life. In the second, published part of his lecture on Freud Derrida returns to Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For Freud, he notes, the detour (Aufschub) is part of ‘the effort of life [effort de la vie] to protect itself by deferring [en diffe´rant] a dangerous cathexis [l’investissement], that is, by constituting a reserve (Vorat).’ Derrida then asks: ‘Is it [this detour-delay by life for life] not already death at the origin of a life [la mort au principe d’une vie] which can defend itself against death only through an economy of death, through diffe´rance, repetition, reserve?’62 Derrida argues that the ‘effort’ of life to maintain itself as life needs death ‘at the origin.’ In the first part of Of Grammatology (1965–1967), which provides the opening for his reading of Freud in 1966, he had already suggested that the trace is indicative of ‘the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living present’ and, as an economy of death in life, death is ‘a trace retaining the other as other in the same.’ In life, an economy of death is the perilous possibility of life – of a life that is always marked ‘at the origin’ by ‘the enigmatic relationship of the living [du vivant] to its other.’63 An economy of death is the ‘dangerous supplement’ of life. It is both the possibility of life and its finite, mortal threat – its constant exposure to chance, accident and the unforeseeable.64 In his early critical readings of Husserl’s emphasis on ‘the temporality of lived experience’ as ‘the Living Present’ Derrida had discerned that the living present needs writing, needs ‘scriptural spatiotemporality,’ as ‘it differs from itself in order to reappropriate itself.’65 He develops this in his first essay on Jabe`s (1964) when he raises the question of life, literature and diffe´rance. ‘Life negates itself in literature,’ he writes, ‘only so that it may survive [survivre] better. So that it may be [eˆtre] better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself [se diffe`re], and writes itself as diffe´rance.’66 In ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ he offers an account of life: life is that which ‘differs from itself’ through an economy of death, ‘in order to reappropriate itself’ as life. As an economy of death in life, life is always more than and less than ‘the living present.’ In 1967, the year before ‘La diffe´rance,’ Derrida distinguishes life as an economy of death in life from both life as presence and as an economy of life. Returning to Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, he writes that Husserl’s ‘ultratranscendental concept of life’ should be defined as a ‘phenomenological voice [la voix]’ that will ‘continue to speak and be present to itself – to hear itself [de


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s’entendre] – in the absence of the world.’67 Derrida argues that the inherent repetition (re-presentation) in this ideality of life as presence already marks a concealed relation to death and finitude.68 Diffe´rance – the economy of death in life – is the possibility and the ruin of lived experience (veću) as auto-affection, as the living present.69 In his essay of the same year on Bataille, Derrida suggests that the economy of death as a perilous possibility of life should not be confused with what he calls an economy of life, an economy which is inseparable from the labour of the Hegelian Aufhebung. He writes: This life is not natural life [la vie naturelle], the biological existence put at stake in lordship, but an essential life [une vie essentielle] that is welded to the first one, holding it back, making it work for the constitution of selfconsciousness, truth, and meaning. Such is the truth of life [la ve´rite´ de la vie]. Through this recourse to the Aufhebung, which conserves the stakes, remains in control of the play, limiting it and elaborating it by giving it form and meaning (Die Arbeit . . . bildet), this economy of life [ećonomie de la vie] restricts itself to conservation, to circulation and self-reproduction as the reproduction of meaning.70 Derrida had first described death as ‘an economy, a structure of diffe´rance’ in ‘Cogito and the history of madness’ (1963–1964).71 As an economy of death in life, death is ‘necessarily finite.’72 In other words, death cannot be determined only as ‘the absolute’ or ‘the uneconomic expenditure,’ as a pure difference.73 Such a ‘pure expenditure’ (la de´pense pure), which Derrida later identifies in the very different work of both Le´vinas and Artaud, only invites the Aufhebung.74 In ‘The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation’ (1966), Derrida links a certain capitalization of ‘Life [la Vie]’ with Artaud’s desire to ‘erase repetition in general’ from theatrical representation (243, 245; 357). For Artaud, ‘repetition separates force, presence, and life from themselves,’ a separation which Derrida sees as the economy of death in life: ‘this separation is the economical and calculating gesture of that which defers itself in order to maintain itself [se diffe`re pour se garder].’ ‘To reject death as repetition,’ Derrida observes, ‘is to affirm death as a present expenditure without return’ (245–6; 361). Artaud’s desire for ‘an expenditure without economy’ is, ultimately, a desire for ‘the purity of a pure difference’ (247, 249). In his 1963 lecture on Foucault and Descartes, Derrida offers the first sketch of the notion of an economy of death and of diffe´rance that he perhaps best summarizes five years later in ‘La diffe´rance.’ After quoting the passage on the Aufschub from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Derrida goes on to say that ‘the very enigma of diffe´rance’ entails the difficulty of thinking ‘simultaneously’ (a` la fois) ‘diffe´rance as the economic detour’ – an economy of death in life – and

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‘diffe´rance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct [pulsion de mort], and as the entirely other [tout-autre] relationship that apparently interrupts every economy.’75 How can one think ‘simultaneously’ life (as an economy of death in life) and death (as ‘the entirely other’)? In ‘To speculate’ Derrida emphasizes that Freud’s strange text about life (‘diffe´rance as the economic detour’) is haunted by death (diffe´rance as ‘the entirely other’), a death that eludes his mourning for and hopes of a return to the proper (life as death and death as life). In his scene of writing (the proper), Freud: ‘writes himself, sends himself [il s’ećrit, il s’envoie]: but if the length of the detour can no longer be mastered, and rather than its length its structure, then the return to (one)self [le retour a` soi] is never certain, and without return to sender [sans retour a` l’envoyeur] the engagement is forgotten to the very extent that it becomes undeniable, unshakable’ (282–3; 302). Evoking life or death, while asserting life as death, death as life, Freud’s text cannot escape (the traces of) life death: ‘Because the pleasure principle . . . enters only into contract with itself, reckons and speculates only with itself . . . and in sum encounters no opposition, it unleashes [dećhaıˆne] in itself the absolute other’ (283; 302). As Derrida had already written in 1966: ‘death and finitude’ are ‘within [dans] the psyche.’76 And while, as he says in 1975–1980, ‘the diffe´rant detour therefore forms the very actuality of the process, of the ‘‘psychic’’ process as a ‘‘living [vivant]’’ process,’ death – as both an economy in life and the entirely-other – cannot be opposed to life and ‘if death is not opposable it is, already, life death [si mort n’est pas opposable, elle est, de´ja`, la vie la mort]’ (284–5; 304). If one can think life death – ‘it gives (itself to be) thought without ever being given or thought [ça (se) donne a` penser sans eˆtre jamais donne´ ni pense´]’ – if one thinks of life (as an economy of death in life) and death (as ‘the entirely other’), the great projects or projections of the proper on death and life (of death as life and life as death) fall into ruins, only vaguely registering that (the traces of) life and death are elsewhere (285; 305). In his 1966 paper on Freud Derrida insists that life ‘must be thought as trace’: No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, diffe´rance. But we must be wary of this formulation: there is no life present at first [d’abord] which would then come to protect, postpone [s’ajourner] or reserve itself in diffe´rance. The latter constitutes the essence of life. Or rather: as diffe´rance is not an essence, as it is not anything, it is not life [n’est pas la vie], if Being is determined as ousia, presence, essence/existence, substance or subject. Life must be thought of as trace before Being may be determined as presence.


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This is the only condition on which we can say that life is death [la vie est la mort].77 It is perhaps the propensity of the formulation ‘life is death [la vie est la mort]’ to be (re)turned to Being determined as presence – even though it is qualified by life as diffe´rance, which ‘is not life [n’est pas la vie], if Being is determined as ousia, as presence’ – that leads Derrida to the title(s) of his 1975 seminar. In Of Grammatology, he modifies ‘life is death’ to ‘life (is) death [la vie (est) la mort].’78 A few years later, he ends ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1968–1972) with the interminable and impossible labour of Plato trying to separate ‘two types of repetition’: ‘life only going out of itself to come home to itself [la vie ne sortant de soi que pour rentrer en soi]’ and ‘life going out of itself beyond return [la sortie sans retour de la vie hors de soi].’ Plato ‘tries to distinguish between [these] two repetitions,’ ‘listens, [and] means to distinguish, between two repetitions’ – and remains conditional, suspended, haunted by la vie la mort, la mort la vie.79 When I take an unavoidable interest in life or death, when I try to capitalize (on) life or death, I am – already – dis-interested by the ‘rhythm of diffe´rance,’ by the speeds of life death, death life. Whether the title of his 1975 seminar was La vie la mort or la vie la mort, Derrida begins with life. Life comes first. One has to start somewhere. A decision must be taken, from the impossible. Even my title – la vie la mort, la mort la vie – has to place one of its ordered pairs first. To begin to write one must choose: life or death. And Derrida has chosen life.

Notes

Chapter 1. The ruins of disinterest *

1

2

3

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5 6 7

Derrida’s works are cited with their original delivery or publication date in French including, where necessary, the dates of their revised and final publication. Page numbers cited in the text refer to the English translation of Derrida’s work and are followed, where necessary, by the page number of the French edition. Where only the French edition is cited, I have used my own translation. Details of the published translation can be found in the bibliography. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘Derrida and the ruins of disinterest’ in Angelaki 7.3 (2002): 105–18. I would like to thank Routledge for permission to reprint this work. See http://www.tandf.co.uk/ journals. Jacques Derrida, ‘Les pupilles de l’Universite´: Le principe de raison et l’ideé de l’Universite´,’ in Du droit a` la philosophie (Paris: Galileé, 1990), pp. 479–80. Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Le´vinas,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 97; ‘Violence et me´taphysique: Essai sur la penseé d’Emmanuel Le´vinas,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 145. Jacques Derrida, ‘At this very moment in this work here I am,’ in ReReading Le´vinas, trans. Ruben Berezdivin, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 47; ‘En ce moment meˆme dans cet ouvrage me voici,’ in Psyche´: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galileé, 1987), p. 196. See Catherine Chalier, Figures du feminin: lecture d’Emmanuel Le´vinas (Paris: La nuit surveilleé, 1982), p. 97. Jacques Derrida, Adieu – a` Emmanuel Le´vinas (Paris: Galileé, 1997), p. 180, n. 2. See also, Donner la mort (Paris: Galileé, 1999), p. 71. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ in De Dieu qui vient a` l’ideé (Paris: Vrin, 1998), p. 111. Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois,’ in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 206; ‘Envois,’ in La carte postale: de Socrate a` Freud et au-dela` (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 2003), p. 221. On Heidegger: Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago:

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9

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13 14 15 16 17 18

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University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 18–21; ‘De l’esprit,’ in Heidegger et la question (Paris: Champs/Flammarion, 1990), pp. 31–4. On Benjamin: ‘Force of law: ‘‘The mystical foundation of authority’’,’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, trans. Mary Quaintance, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 51; Force de loi: Le ‘Fondement mystique de l’autorite´’ (Paris: Galileé, 1994), p. 122. Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 120; ‘La pharmacie de Platon,’ in La disse´mination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 137. Derrida refers to the ‘madness’ of the question of ‘l’acte de´sinte´resse´ de l’e´goı¨sme’ in Beyond Good and Evil in Politiques de l’amitie´ (Paris: Galileé, 1994), p. 52. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp. 338–9 (x220); Jenseits von Gut und Bo¨se, in Nietzsche Werke, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968) IV: 160 (x220). Derrida returns to the question of an economy of disinterested sacrifice in Donner la mort, p. 143. See Nietzsche’s comments on le de´sinte´ressement, Kant and Schopenhauer in On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp. 462, 539–42, 555. See Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), pp. 99–100 and Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 82– 3, 149. See also, Jean-François Lyotard, ‘L’inte´reˆt sublime,’ in Du sublime (Paris: Belin, 1988), pp. 149–77 and ‘Inte´ressant?,’ in Moralite´s Postmodernes (Paris: Galileé, 1993), pp. 49–61. Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon,’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 39. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 43–4; ‘Parergon,’ p. 46; ‘Parergon,’ in La ve´rite´ en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 54. ‘Parergon,’ pp. 44, 46. The Critique of Judgement, p. 51. ‘Parergon,’ p. 47; ‘Parergon’ (French), p. 55. Jacques Derrida, ‘Economimesis,’ in Mimesis: des articulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975), pp. 83–4. ‘Economimesis,’ pp. 7, 89, 92. Jacques Derrida, ‘The ends of man,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 134–5; ‘Le fins de l’homme,’ in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 2003), pp. 162–3. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pp. 12a–13a; Glas (Paris: Galileé, 1995), p. 19a. Further references will be cited in the text. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 106.

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21 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), p. 11. 22 Jacques Derrida, ‘The pit and the pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s semiology,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 82; ‘Le puits et la pyramide: introduction a` la se´miologie de Hegel,’ in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 2003), p. 102. 23 Jacques Derrida, ‘Diffe´rance,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 25; ‘La diffe´rance,’ in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 2003), p. 26. 24 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 19. 25 Le´vinas, ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ p. 118. 26 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter,’ in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. David Galloway (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 334. 27 Emmanuel Le´vinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1996), pp. 55, 57; Totalite´ et Infini (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001), pp. 48, 50. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 28 Adieu, p. 64, n. 1. 29 ‘Force of Law,’ pp.17, 22; Force de loi, pp. 40, 48–9. 30 ‘Envois,’ p. 11; ‘Envois,’ p.15. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 31 Aporias, p. 74; Apories, (Paris: Galileé, 1996), p. 130. 32 I have modified the translation here. 33 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 43; L’autre cap (Paris: Minuit, 1991), pp. 44–5. 34 See for example Derrida’s remarks on e-mail, the Internet and the police in relation to the public and the private in De l’hospitalite´ (Paris: CalmanLe´vy, 1997), pp. 45–65. 35 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 78–80; Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galileé, 1993), pp.132–3. 36 L’autre cap, p. 120. 37 Politiques de l’amitie´, p. 107. 38 Jacques Derrida, ‘Passions: ‘‘An oblique offering’’,’ in On the Name, trans. David Wood, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 25; Passions (Paris: Galileé, 1993), p. 58. See also, Aporias, p. 85, n. 10; Specters of Marx, p. 50. 39 In ‘Negotiations,’ Derrida says, ‘I do not believe in the conceptual value of a rigorous distinction between the private and the public,’ in Negotiations, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 15. 40 Donner la mort, p. 173. 41 Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. xxiv.

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, trans. David Carr, in Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 157. Jacques Derrida, ‘Passe-Partout,’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 5; ‘Passe-Partout,’ in La ve´rite´ en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 5. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ja, or the faux-bond II,’ in Points . . . Interviews 1974– 1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 67; ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond,’ in Points de suspension, Entretiens, choisis et pre´sente´s par Elisabeth Weber (Paris: Galileé, 1992), p. 72. Jacques Derrida, ‘Psyche´: invention de l’autre,’ in Psyche´: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galileé, 1987), p. 27. In ‘Psyche´: invention de l’autre,’ the original sentence from which this phrase is taken reads: ‘L’inte´reˆt de la dećonstruction, de sa force et de son de´sir si elle en a, c’est une certaine expe´rience de l’impossible: c’est-a`-dire, j’y ferai retour a` la fin de cette confe´rence, de l’autre, l’expe´rience de l’autre comme invention de l’impossible, en d’autres termes comme la seule invention possible.’ In the English version of ‘Force of Law’ (1992), this phrase is found at the end of a quotation from ‘Psyche´’ in the main body of the text (p. 30). In the French edition of Force de loi (1994), the quotation has been altered slightly and placed in a footnote (p. 78, n. 1). See the revised English translation in Acts of Religion, ed. and intro. Gil Anjdar (London; Routledge, 2002), pp. 230–98. Derrida also makes a point of linking ‘interest’ and ‘deconstruction’ in ‘Negotiations,’ p. 15. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 117. In the ‘Pit and the pyramid,’ Derrida also cites – and translates – ‘un inte´reˆt spećulatif’ in Hegel’s work. This phrase only appears in Derrida’s French translation of x378 of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia in ‘Le Puits et la pyramide,’ p. 86. Emmanuel Le´vinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000), pp. 10, 54–5. Politiques de l’amitie´, p. 52. Politiques de l’amitie´, p. 208. Adieu, p. 52, n. 2. The Other Heading, p. 5. The Other Heading, pp. 31–2; ‘Force of Law,’ p. 13. ‘Force of Law,’ pp. 26; Force de loi, p. 58. Adieu, p. 66. ‘Force of Law,’ p. 24; Force de loi, p. 53. Aporias, p. 16. The Other Heading, pp. 41, 45; L’autre cap, pp. 43–6. The Other Heading, p. 29; L’autre cap, p. 33. The Other Heading, p. 44. ‘Passions,’ p. 9; Passions, p. 25. Politiques de l’amitie´, p. 88. Adieu, p. 201. ‘Force of law,’ pp. 16, 28; Force de loi, pp. 38, 61.

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64 Jacques Derrida, ‘Declarations of independence,’ in Negotiations, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 49; ‘Typewriter Ribbon,’ in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 110. 65 The Other Heading, p. 57; L’autre cap, p. 58. This passage is translated as: ‘For the moment, we must focus our attention on the word ‘‘capital’’.’ The phrase ‘nous devons nous inte´resser’ has become ‘we must focus our attention.’ 66 De l’hospitalite´, p. 77. Derida is referring to Kant here. 67 Politiques de l’amitie´, pp. 87–8. Derrida later writes, ‘One responds before [devant] the other because first one responds to [a`] the other,’ p. 282. 68 ‘Force of Law,’ p. 20; Force de loi, p. 45. 69 Aporias, p.19. 70 Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 123; Donner le temps: I. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galileé, 1991), p. 157. 71 Given Time, pp. 40–2, 97, 124, 129, 139 (trans. modified), 151, 156. 72 Politiques de l’amitie´, p. 104. 73 Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc a b c . . .,’ in Limited Inc (Paris: Galileé, 1990), p. 80. 74 Politiques de l’amitie´, p. 302. 75 Given Time, p.152; Donner le temps, p. 193. 76 ‘Force of Law,’ p. 13; Force de loi, p. 32. 77 Specters of Marx, pp. 92, 94; Spectres de Marx, pp. 151, 155. 78 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ pp. 81–3. 79 Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . .: Dialogue (Paris: Fayard/Galileé, 2001), p. 162. See also, ‘La raison du plus fort (Y ´ tats voyous?),’ pp. 117, 138, 141, 147, and ‘Le ‘‘Monde’’ des a-t-il des E Lumie`res a` venir (Exception, calcul et souverainete´),’ (pp. 209, 216) in Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galileé, 2003). 80 Derrida notes in Politiques de l’amitie´ that the to-come (l’a`-venir), comes apart, loosens, dis-joins itself (se disjoint) and ‘it dis-joins [disjoint] the self [le soi] that would still like to join itself, put itself together [s’ajointer] in this disjunction’ (p. 58). I would like to thank David Clark and to dedicate this chapter to Viviane de Charrie`re.

Chapter 2. A harsh transcendence 1

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‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ p. 118. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘Le´vinas, disinterest and enthusiasm’ in Literature and Theology 17.4 (2003): 407–21. I would like to thank Oxford University Press for permission to reprint this work. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Reality and its shadow,’ in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 132; ‘Reálite´ et son ombre,’ in Les impre´vus de l’histoire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2000), pp. 110–11.

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Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Diachrony and representation,’ in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 111. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The trace of the other,’ in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor, trans. A. Lingus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 348; ‘La trace de l’autre,’ in En dećouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 3rd edn. (Paris: Vrin, 2001), pp. 261–82. References to this work will be cited in the text. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ p. 99. Otherwise than Being, p. 19. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The youth of Israel,’ in From Sacred to the Holy: Five New Talmudic Readings, collected in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 127. Otherwise than Being, pp. 3–4, 5–6, 9; Autrement qu’eˆtre ou au-dela` l’essence (Dordreht: Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 13, 15, 17. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Adieu, pp. 85, 200, 103. See also, Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The old and the new,’ in Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 135. Otherwise than Being, p. 111. ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 97. Donner la mort, p. 15. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘A religion for adults,’ in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seań Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 14. All further references to the articles collected in Difficult Freedom refer to this edition. ‘Violence and Metaphysics,’ p. 97. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Being a Westerner,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 48. See also Derrida, ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 318, n. 79. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 46. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘For a Jewish humanism,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 273. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Ethics and spirit’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 9. Otherwise than Being, p.141. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ pp. 123–4. See also Otherwise than Being, pp. 140–52. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ p. 113. See Derrida’s comments in Donner la mort, pp. 101–3, 117. Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, The Book of Legends – Sefer Ha-Aggadah: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash, trans. William G. Braude (New York: Schocken, 1992), p. 361 (no. 24). Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The Pharisee is absent,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 29. Emmanuel Le´vinas, Is it Righteous To Be: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 61–2. Catherine Chalier, La trace de l’infini: Emmanuel Le´vinas et la source he´braı¨que (Paris: Cerf, 2002).

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‘A religion for adults,’ p. 17. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Jewish thought today,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 159. ‘A religion for adults,’ p. 16. ‘For a Jewish humanism,’ p. 274. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The Spinoza case,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 107. ‘A religion for adults,’ p. 14. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Education and prayer,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 272. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The Ark and the mummy,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 54. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ p. 96. Futher references to this work will be cited in the text. See Jacques Derrida, Foi et Savoir: suivi de Le Sie`cle et le Pardon (Paris: Seuil, 2000), pp. 26–7, 98. Emmanuel Le´vinas, God, Death and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo, intro. Jacques Rolland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 180, 203; Dieu, la mort et le temps, ed. and intro. Jacques Rolland (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993), pp. 208, 232. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ pp. 112–13. Donner la mort, p. 75. Adieu, pp.136–148. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Place and Utopia,’ in Difficult Freedom, p. 199. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The state of Caesar and the state of David,’ in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 177. On the recognition of universal imperatives, see Difficult Freedom, pp. 90, 96 and Derrida’s comments in Adieu, pp. 25, 119–20. See also, ‘Toward the other,’ in Four Talmudic Lectures, collected in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 15. Otherwise than Being, p. 6; Autrement qu’eˆtre, p. 17. I would like to dedicate this chapter to David Odell.

Chapter 3. Disinterest and sovereignty 1

2

Edward Bullough, ‘ ‘‘Psychical distance’’ as a factor in art and an aesthetic principle,’ in Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1957), p. 129. Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the origins of ‘‘aesthetic disinterestedness’’,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961): 131–4; Stolnitz, ‘The artist and the aesthetic ‘‘in Interesting Times’’,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1979): 401–14. Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the significance of Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory,’ Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1961): 97–113. Though not directly concerned with aesthetics, Ann Hartle’s Death and the Disinterested Spectator: An Inquiry into the Nature of Philosophy (New York: University of New York Press, 1986) reflects this history in characterizing the stance of the so-called ‘disinterested spectator’ as an absolute distance and removal ‘from the immersion in very day life,’ p. 26.

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Arnold Berleant, ‘Beyond disinterestedness,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 34 (1994): 242–54. See also, ‘The historicity of aesthetics – I,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986): 101–11. George Dickie, ‘All aesthetic attitudes fail: The myth of the aesthetic attitude,’ in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, eds. George Dickie and R. J. Sclafani (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), pp. 800–14; Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytical Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See also, Dabney Townsend, ‘From Shaftesbury to Kant: The development of the concept of aesthetic experience,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 287–305. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 3, 35–42. Eagleton cites Stolnitz, p. 67, n. 10. See also Eagleton, After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 133–4. Eagleton, pp. 15, 21–2, 33, 93. Eagleton, pp. 39, 3, 23. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1992), pp. 12, 242, 268. Michel Foucault, ‘The eye of power,’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (London: Penguin, 1992), pp.146–65. See for example, John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson), pp. 32–44; Paul Scott Gordon, ‘Voyeuristic dreams: Mr. Spectator and the power of spectacle,’ Eighteenth Century 36 (1995): 3–23. Thomas R. Flynn, ‘Foucault and the eclipse of vision,’ in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 274; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 195–230. Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), pp. 23, 27. Habermas, pp. 32–3, 42–3, 57–67. John Brewer, ‘ ‘‘The most polite age and the most vicious’’: Attitudes towards culture as a commodity,’ in The Consumption of Culture, 1600– 1800: Image, Object, Text, eds. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 345. Habermas, pp. 49, 54. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) I: 2–5, 98. Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 1, 5. Touraine, pp. 204, 4. Rene´ Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: ed. and trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 24. Francis Bacon, The Charge Touching Duels, in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 304–7. Descartes, pp. 4, 9.

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19 Descartes, p. 24. 20 John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), Book I, line 254–5. 21 Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Descartes,’ in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, eds. G. A. J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 11–42. 22 David Hume, The History of England, intro. William B. Todd, 6 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983) V: 441–2. 23 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, & Power of a CommonWealth Ecclesiastical and Civill, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 487, 268. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 24 Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, or A Discourse of the Nature, Causes, Kinds and Cure, of Enthusiasme (London: F. Flesher, 1656), p. 2. 25 Michael Heyd, ‘The reaction to enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an integrative approach,’ Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981): 258–80; John Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 26 Descartes, p. 15; Hobbes, p. 17. 27 See also, Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 64–5. 28 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 173–4. 29 Tom Sorell, Hobbes (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 119. 30 Jacques Derrida, ‘Provocation: Forewords,’ in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. xix-xx. See also ´ tats voyous?).’ De quoi demain and ‘La raison du plus fort (Y a-t-il des E 31 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 361, 376. 32 James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 37. 33 Two Treatises, pp. 324–5, 351. 34 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 662. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 35 Tully, pp. 189, 224; Cathy Caruth, Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 17–18, 23. 36 Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). 37 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Benjamin Whichcote’s Select Sermons, in The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C. A. Partides (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 42–61. Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.177–8. 38 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed.

Notes

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John M. Robertson, 2 vols (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963) 1: 314, 240. See also Lawrence E. Klein’s new edition of the Characteristics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Inquiry, pp. 256, 292. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols (Gloucester; Peter Smith, 1963), pp. 13, 31– 32. See also, Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London: Macmillan, 1900), p. 175. Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), is divided into two separate treatises: An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed. Peter Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 30; An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good, in British Moralists, ed. D. D. Raphael, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) I: 269, 265. An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, p. 278; Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Paul McReynolds (London, 1742; repr. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimilies & Reprints, 1969), p. 5. An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, pp. 264, 277. Darwall, p. 209. John Dwyer, ‘Enlightened spectators and classical moralists: Sympathetic relations in eighteenth-century Scotland,’ Eighteenth-Century Life, 15 (1991): 96–118. Francis Hutcheson, Thoughts on Laughter and Observation on ‘The Fable of the Bees,’ in Six Letters, ed. John Price Valdimir (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1758; repr. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1989), p. 80. Locke, Essay, pp. 354, 718–19. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 193. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principle of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 47. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 24. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 47. D. D. Raphael, ‘The impartial spectator’ in Essays on Adam Smith, eds. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 83–99; John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), pp. 170–1. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), pp. 9–10. Further references

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to this work will be cited in the text. I would like to dedicate this chapter to the Penroses of Brixton and the Wrights of Balham.

Chapter 4. The spectres of disinterest 1

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12 13

14

15

In ‘Abraham, l’autre,’ in Judeíte´s: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galileé, 2003), Derrida describes Unheimlichkeit as being ‘a` la fois chez soi et hors de chez soi,’ p. 30. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘Romanticism and the Spectres of Disinterest,’ European Romantic Review 15.1 (2004): 113–29. I would like to thank Routledge for permission to reprint this work. See http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. Shaftesbury, Inquiry, p. 306. Hutcheson, Thoughts on Laughter, pp. 61, 66. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 61–2. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1755). Oliver Goldsmith, The Taste for Shews and Processions Deplored, in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) III: 170–2. The Spectator, I: 180, 178, 177. Janet Ruth Heller, ‘The bias against spectacle in tragedy: The history of an idea,’ The Eighteenth Century 23 (1982): 239–55. Hume, Treatise, p. 316. See Earl Wasserman, ‘The sympathetic imagination in eighteenth-century theories of acting,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 46 (1947): 264–72; R. D. Slzek, Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), pp. 95–100; David Marshall, ‘Adam Smith and the theatricality of moral sentiments,’ Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 592–613; Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, pp.169, 182; Eric Daffon, ‘Double trouble: The self, the social order and the trouble with sympathy in the Romantic and Post-Modern period,’ Gothic Studies 3.1 (2001): 75–83. Dwyer, ‘Enlightened Spectators,’ p. 97. Critique of Judgement, p. 54; Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Schriften zur a¨sthetik und Naturaphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1996), p. 536. Further references will be cited in the text. Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 62. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of Faculties, in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 302, 304. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 59. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Edmund Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, in The Revolutionary War 1794–1797, ed. R. B. McDowell, collected in The Writings and Speeches of

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Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford et al., 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) IX: 206. Hume, Treatise, p. 166. See Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 77, 373–4, 441; Locke, Essay, pp. 396–7; Shaftesbury, A Letter on Enthusiasm, pp.13, 34– 7; Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, pp. 82–6; Hume, Treatise, pp. 225–6; Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 71. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Penguin, 1991); Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1978); Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. R. P. C. Mutter (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 549. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 129–34. See also Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Review of The Castle Spectre, The Morning Herald, 16 December (1797), p. 2. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992), pp. 215–16. See also, Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Thomas Carlyle, ‘The state of German literature,’ in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 3 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1889) I: 37–38; Life of Friedrich Schiller (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), p. 177. Allardyce Nicoll, The Garrick Stage, ed. Sybil Rosenfeld (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 137–41; Sybil Rosenfeld, A Short History of Scene Design in Great Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), pp. 80– 97. Review of The Castle Spectre, Critical Review 22 (1798), p. 476. Review of The Castle Spectre, The Times, 19 December 1797, p. 2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–1973) I: 379; Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Gothic ghost as counterfeit and its haunting of Romanticism,’ European Romantic Review 9 (1998): 283–92. The Times, p. 2. Review of The Castle Spectre, The European Magazine 33 (1798): 42. Matthew Lewis, The Castle Spectre, intro. Jonathan Wordsworth (London, 1798; repr. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1990), pp. 78–80. James Boaden, The Life of Mrs. Jordan, 2 vols (London: Edward Bull, 1831), p. 347; Robert Reno, ‘James Boaden’s Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage,’ Eighteenth Century Life 9 (1984), pp. 100–2. Review of The Castle Spectre, Walker’s Hibernian Magazine 21 (1789), p. 36. Review of The Castle Spectre, Analytical Review 28 (1798), pp. 184, 186. Specters of Marx, p. 79; Spectres de Marx, p. 131. Aporias, pp. 33, 35. See also Specters of Marx, p. 168.

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33 ‘La Phantasmagorie: description d’un spectacle curieux, nouveau et instructif,’ in La Feuille Villageoise 28 Fe´vrier 1793, pp. 505–10, in Laurent Mannoni, Donata P. Campognoni and David Robinson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture 1420–1896 (Udine: Le giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995), pp. 100–4; E. G. Robertson, Me´moires recreatifs scientifiques et anecdotiques, 2 vols (Paris, 1831–1833); William Nicholson, ‘Narrative and explanation of the appearance of phantoms and other figures in the exhibition of the Phantasmagoria. With remarks on the philosophical use of common occurrences,’ A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts 1 (1802): 147–50. 34 Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 217–20. See also Terry Castle, ‘Phantasmagoria: Spectral technology and the metaphorics of modern reverie,’ Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 6–61; The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 35 Castle, ‘Phantasmagoria,’ p. 30. 36 Nicholson, p. 148. 37 Thomas Carlyle, ‘The sign of the times,’ in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 3 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895) II: 59–63, 73–4. 38 Mannoni, p. 103. 39 Specters of Marx, pp. 133, 172–4; Spectres de Marx, pp. 212, 272–6. 40 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 746–7. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 41 William Hazlitt, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind, in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998) I: 1–2. 42 Peter Otto, ‘A sublime allegory: Blake, Blake studies and the sublime,’ The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 21 (2002), p. 77. 43 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. Comm. Harold Bloom, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), E3. All further references to the page, plate and line number in Blake’s works will be followed by the page number in Erdman’s edition. 44 Jerusalem: The Emmanation of the Giant Albion, 74:10–12, E229. See Morton D. Paley, ‘Cowper as Blake’s Spectre,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies I (1968): 236–52; Peter Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Laura Quinney, ‘Wordsworth’s ghosts and the model of the mind,’ European Romantic Review 9 (1998): 293–301. 45 Jerusalem, 10: 14–15, E153; 8: 25, E151. 46 Jerusalem, 74: 12–13, E229; 4: 15–16, E146. 47 The Four Zoas, 95 [87]: 26–30, E367. 48 The Four Zoas, 87: 35, E369; 84: 40, E360. 49 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, 4 double vols (London: Routledge, 1957–1990) I: 430. 50 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819: On Literature, ed. R. A.

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54 55

56 57 58 59 60

61

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Foakes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) I: 352; II: 441, 514. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) I: 455–6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 227. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) I: 304–5. Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourses of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 96, 204–59. Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an Opium-Eater, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 155–6. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 227. Suspiria de Profundis, pp. 153–4. Suspiria de Profundis, pp. 156–7. Thomas De Quincey, ‘The dark interpreter,’ in Miscellanies: Chiefly Narrative (Edinburgh: James Hogg, 1854), p. 7. Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. xxvii. Mannoni, p. 102. My translation. See Robertson on ‘le fantascope.’ I would like to dedicate this chapter to Peter Otto.

Chapter 5. The interests of reason 1

2

3

4

5

Jacques Derrida, ‘Qual Quelle,’ in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 2003), p. 330; ‘Qual Quelle,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 277. See for example, Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 88; Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor, pp. 240, 244. Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 18–21; Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkla¨rung?, in Schriften zur Anthropologie Geschichtsphilosophie Politik und Pa¨dagogik (Frankfurt am Main: Im Insel, 1964), pp. 55–6. The Conflict of Faculties, p. 248; Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten, in Schriften zur Anthropologie Geschichtsphilosophie Politik und Pa¨dagogik (Frankfurt am Main: Im Insel, 1964), p. 281. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘Mochlos ou le conflit des faculte´s,’ in Du droit a` la

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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29


philosophie (Paris: Galileé, 1990), pp. 416–17, 425. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘Pre´juge´s: devant la loi,’ in La faculte´ de juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 87–139. ‘Ja, or the faux-bond,’ p. 44. Jacques Derrida, ‘Privile`ge: titre justificatif et remarques introductives,’ in Du droit a` la philosophie (Paris: Galileé, 1990), p. 40. ‘Pre´juge´s,’ pp. 116, 118–19, 123; ‘Privile`ge,’ p. 28. See also, Jacques Derrida, ‘Avances,’ pre´face a` Le Tombeau du dieu aritisan, de S. Margel (Paris: Minuit, 1995), pp. 14, 18. Jacques Derrida, ‘The right to philosophy from a cosmopolitan point of view,’ in Negotiations, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 333; ‘Pre´juge´s,’ p. 108. ‘Mochlos,’ p. 417. Jacques Derrida, ‘The university without condition,’ in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 219– 20; L’universite´ sans condition (Paris: Galileé, 2001), p. 45. ‘Mochlos,’ pp. 401, 409, 411–15, 427, 430. Jacques Derrrida, ‘Le ‘‘Monde’’ des Lumie`res a` venir,’ p. 169. Jacques Derrida, ‘From restricted to general economy: A Hegelianism without reserve,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 252; Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 183; Glas, pp. 216a; Glas (French), p. 242a. ‘Ja or the faux-bond,’ pp. 69; ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond,’ pp. 73–4. Translation modified. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 502; Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Im Insel, 1964), p. 449. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Derrida first asks ‘Mais qui, nous?’ at the end of ‘The ends of man,’ pp. 136; 164. The Conflict of Faculties, p. 302. Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 108; Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in, Schriften zur Ethik und Religionsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Im Insel, 1964), p. 102. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Critique of Practical Reason, p. 204; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Im Insel, 1964), p. 201. Critique of Judgement, pp. 43–4. Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, p. 96. Critique of Judgement, pp. 35, 157–60. Groundwork, pp. 106–8. ‘Le ‘‘Monde’’ des Lumie`res a` venir,’ p. 170. Critique of Judgement, p. 48; Critique of Practical Reason, p. 166. Critique of Judgement, p. 64; Kritik der Ureilskraft, p. 546. ‘Qual Quelle,’ p. 277. I would like to dedicate this chapter to Stephen Farrow and Tony Birch.

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Chapter 6. An absolute difference 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Totality and Infinity, p. 218. ‘Violence and Metaphysics,’ p. 93. Totality and Infinity, p. 52; Totalite´ et infini, p. 45. ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 320, n. 91; ‘Violence et me´taphysique,’ p. 227, n. 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 333, n. 20; ‘Le theáˆtre de la cruaute´ et la cloˆture de la representation,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 366, n. 1. Glas, p. 133. ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 117; ‘Violence et me´taphysique,’ p. 173. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Totality and Infinity, p. 26. ‘Force of law,’ p. 44; Force de loi, p. 105. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ p. 112. See Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galileé, 2000), p. 110. See for example, Specters of Marx, p. xx. ‘At this very moment in this work here I am,’ p. 30. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ pp. 105–7, 110–13; Otherwise than Being, p. 25. Adieu, p. 25. Donner la mort, p. 117. Foi et Savoir, pp. 98, 30; Donner la mort, p. 75. See also Le Toucher on Le´vinas and the ‘x sans x,’ pp. 96–7. Foi et savoir, p. 29. Adieu, p. 25. I would like to dedicate this chapter to Robyn Gaston and E. B. M. Higgins.

Chapter 7. Re-mettre en question 1 2 3

4 5

6

Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 12. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Lettre a` propos de Jean Wahl,’ in Les impre´vus de l’histoire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2000), p. 94. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,’ in En dećouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 3rd edn (Paris: Vrin, 2001), p. 80. See also, p. 81. ‘The university without condition,’ p. 209; L’universite´ sans condition, p. 24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Sein und Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977). The ‘H’ in the cited page numbers refers to the marginal page numbers of the standard German edition. Charles B. Guignan, ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 24.

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16

17

18 19


Derrida notes that anxiety about ‘mere repetition’ has a Platonic origin, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ p. 109. Simon Critchley, ‘Black Socrates: Questioning the philosophical tradition,’ in Ethics Politics Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999), p. 130. See Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995). Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Fribourg, Husserl et la pheńomeńologie,’ in Les impre´vus de l’histoire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2000), p. 90. Husserl associates the phrases ‘places in question’ and ‘puts in question’ with the ‘transcendental question,’ in ‘Phenomenology,’ in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 130, 133. ‘Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,’ p. 81. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Quelques re´flexions sur la philosophie de l’Hitle´risme,’ in Les impre´vus de l’histoire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2000), pp. 24–25. In On Escape: de l’e´vasion (1935), he continues to associate remettre en question with the question of being, trans. Bettina Bergo and intro. Jacques Rolland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 53, 55. The details of these works can be found in the bibliography. ‘Dieu et la philosophie,’ pp. 106, 110. In ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (1929), Heidegger had said ‘every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, placed in question. From this we conclude that metaphysical inquiry must be posed as a whole and from the essential position of Dasein that questions’ (my emphasis), in Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell, rev. edn. (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 93–4. See also p. 109. Le´vinas may have taken Heidegger’s own phrase, translated it and, ultimately, used it against him. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Philosophy and the idea of infinity,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 48; ‘La philosophie et l’ideé de l’infini,’ in En dećouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 3rd edn (Paris: Vrin, 2001), p. 229. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. I have modified the translation. Le´vinas also uses mettre en question in Difficult Freedom, pp. 17, 198. In his translation of Totalite´ et Infini, Alphonso Lingis renders mettre en question as either ‘to call into question’ or ‘to put into question,’ implying that to call and to put into question are interchangeable. There is a slight but significant difference between to call (a precarious summons to someone who has not yet responded) and to put (putting someone or something – that one already has – in place). Lingis’s translations of mettre en question suggests a distinction and a possible confusion or complication that Le´vinas does not make. I will translate mettre en question as to put in question. Further references will be cited in the text. See also Bernhard Waldenfels’s reading of Otherwise than Being in ‘Levinas and the face of the other,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 76.

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20 Freud, The Uncanny, pp. 143–5. 21 ‘The trace of the other,’ p. 345; ‘La trace de l’autre,’ p. 262. 22 ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 133; ‘Violence et me´taphysique,’ p. 195. See Michael Naas, ‘The phenomenon in question: Violence, metaphysics, and the Le´vinasian Third,’ in Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 93–114. 23 Of Spirit, p. 132; Heidegger et la question, p. 118. Further references will be cited in the text. For discussions of this footnote (p. 94, n. 5: pp. 129–36; pp. 114–21) by Geoffrey Bennington, Simon Critchley and John Sallis see Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 90–1, 95–7, 127–32. 24 Of Spirit, pp. 43–5; Heidegger et la question, pp. 57–9. 25 John Sallis, ‘Flight of spirit,’ in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 130. Sallis cites and translates this sentence from Heidegger’s ‘Das Wesen der Sprache,’ in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Phullingen: Gu¨nther Neske, 1959), p. 175. 26 Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby’s translation of remet en question as ‘again puts in question’ appears to contradict Derrida’s reading of Heidegger. This putting back in question is not a putting in question again. Heidegger has not put the privilege of the question into question before this late ‘retrospective upheaval’ (pp. 129–31). See also Foi et Savoir, pp. 91–6. For some other notable examples of Derrida’s use of remettre en question, see La voix et le pheńome`ne (Paris: P.U.F., 1993), 1, 40; Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 2003), pp. 53, 61, 74, 187–9, 192; De quoi demain, p. 43; Voyous, pp. 45, 67, 215–16. 27 See Derrida’s comments on zuru¨ckschaut, ‘rebeginning’ and the politics of regeneration in ‘Otobiographies: The teaching of Nietzsche and the politics of the proper name,’ in The Ear of the Other, trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 14, 20, 24–8. On ‘trop tard,’ see also Gene`ses, geńeálogies, genres et le geńie (Paris: Galileé, 2003), p. 100. 28 Specters of Marx, p. xviii-xv; Spectres de Marx, pp. 15–16. Further references will be cited in the text. 29 See also ‘Pre´juge´s,’ pp. 87–139. 30 Of Spirit, pp. 94, 129–36. 31 God, Death and Time, p. 26; Dieu, la mort et le temps, p. 36. Further references will be cited in the text. 32 I have modified Bergo’s translation. 33 Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘The idea of the infinite in us,’ in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Athlone Press, 1998), p. 220. 34 Otherwise than Being, pp. 26, 75; 48, 121. See also, pp. 31, 91, 102, 126, 157. 35 ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 27; ‘La diffe´rance,’ p. 29 36 Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans.

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40 41


Giacomo Donis, eds Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), pp. 68–70. God, Death and Time, p. 22. I have modified Kamuf’s translation. See also De quoi demain, pp. 134–7. Jacques Derrida, ‘To Speculate – on ‘‘Freud’’,’ in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), p. 266. God, Death and Time, p. 8. Emmanuel Le´vinas, ‘Toward the other’, p. 25; ‘Envers autrui,’ in Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1982), p. 56. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 172. I would like to thank Robert Eaglestone and Joanna Hodge and dedicate this chapter to the Landau family.

Chapter 8. The resistance of anticipation 1 2 3 4

5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12 13

The Problem of Genesis, p. xxxiv. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘Re´sistances,’ in Re´sistances – de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galileé, 1996), p. 43. Jacques Derrida, ‘Outwork, prefacing’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 9. ‘Jacques Derrida, ‘ ‘‘Genesis and structure’’ and phenomenology,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 162; ‘ ‘‘Gene`se et structure’’ et la pheńomeńologie,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 242. ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 120. See Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 46–52; Leonard Lawler, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 73, 82, 127. Origin of Geometry, p. 117; L’origine de la geóme´trie, de Husserl, Introduction et traduction (Paris: P.U.F., 1974), p. 123. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 139. Of Grammatology, p. 66. Origin of Geometry, p. 153. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force and signification,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 17; ‘Force et signification,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 9–49. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. De quoi demain, p. 20. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 279; ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 410.

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14 Emmanuel Le´vinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987) pp. 21–94; Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978); ‘L’ontologie dans le temporal,’ in En dećouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 3rd edn. (Paris: Vrin, 2001) pp. 111–28; ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?,’ in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Athlone Press, 1998), pp. 1–11; ‘Freedom and Commandment,’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), pp. 15–24; ‘The I and the Totality,’ in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, pp. 13–38; Difficult Freedom, pp. 76–7. 15 See Robert Bernasconi, ‘The trace of Le´vinas in Derrida,’ in Derrida and Difference, eds. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985), pp. 17–44. 16 ‘From restricted to general economy,’ pp. 252, 271; ‘De l’ećonomie restreinte a` l’ećonomie geńe´rale: un hegelianisme sans re´serve,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 370. 17 ‘The pit and the pyramid,’ pp. 90–1. 18 ‘Outwork,’ p. 7. 19 Glas, p. 6a. 20 In the introduction to Re´sistances, Derrida writes of ‘une re´sistance a` pyschanalyse’ and ‘une re´sistance de la psychanalyse’, p. 9. I would like to dedicate this chapter to Leif Isaksen and the Brierleys.

Chapter 9. Une acce´le´ration affolante 1

2 3 4

5 6 7 8

‘Qual Quel,’ p. 277. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Oxford Literary Review 25 (2003). I would like to thank the editors of the Oxford Literary Review for permission to reprint this work. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 105. Of Grammatology, p. 159; De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p.228. Jacques Derrida, ‘Edmond Jabe`s and the question of the book,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 71; ‘Edmond Jabe`s et la question du livre,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p.108. Of Grammatology, p. 163. ‘Outwork,’ pp. 6, 11, 21. ‘Outwork,’ p. 26; ‘Hors livre pre´faces,’ in La disse´mination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p.33. Translation modified. Herman Melville, ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’ in The Complete Shorter Fiction (London: Everyman’s Library, 1997), p. 51. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Re´sistances,’ pp. 38–9; ‘Joseph N. Riddel (1931–1991): A demi-mot,’ in The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 131.

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23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31


Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie, c’est a` dire . . . (Paris: Galileé, 2002), pp.9–10, 56–9. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 17 (x29); p. 51 (x80); Pha¨nomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952). Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 10 (x18). ‘From restricted to general economy,’ p. 259; ‘De l’ećonomie restreinte a` l’ećonomie geńe´rale,’ p. 381. ‘ ‘‘Genesis and structure’’,’ p. 167; ‘ ‘‘Gene`se et structure’’,’ p. 251. Jacques Derrida, ‘Tympan,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. xix–xxii; ‘Tympan,’ in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 2003), pp. xiv–xv. ‘Outwork,’ p. 7; ‘Hors livre,’ p. 13. References to this work will be cited in the text. ‘Provocation: Forewords,’ pp. xxxii–xxxiii. See also ‘Limited Inc a b c’ (French), p. 103. The Other Heading, pp. 14, 18, 71; L’autre cap, pp.19, 23, 70. See also, ‘Parergon,’ p. 26. The Other Heading, pp. 15, 18; L’autre cap, pp. 20–1, 23. Jacques Derrida, ‘No apocalypse, not now: a` toute vitesse, sept missiles, sept missives,’ in Psyche´. Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galileé, 1987), p. 365. ‘Negotiations,’ pp. 28–9. Jacques Derrida, ‘Of an apocalyptic tone newly adopted in philosophy,’ in Derrida and Negative Thelogy, eds. Howard Coward and Toby Foshay (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 34. Jacques Derrida, ‘La parole souffleé,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 169; ‘La parole souffleé,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 253. Further references to this work will cited in the text. Derrida returns to the ‘tre`s vite’ in Artaud le Moma: interjections d’appel (Paris: Galileé, 2002), where he also writes of ‘la vitesse d’une prećipitation,’ p. 33. Of Grammatology, p. 144; De la grammatologie, p. 207. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. H. C. pour la vie, p. 67. ‘Force and signification,’ p. 11; ‘Force et signification,’ p. 22. See also, ‘From restricted to general economy,’ p. 259. Glas, pp. 106–7a; Glas (French), p. 122a. Jacques Derrida, ‘Survivre,’ in Parages (Paris: Galileé, 2003), p. 195. Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 202; ‘Freud et la sce`ne de l’ećriture,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 300. See also, pp. 215, 318. ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 19; ‘La diffe´rance,’ p. 20. See also, ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ pp. 198, 202. See Jacques Derrida, ‘White mythology,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 251, 270. ‘Parergon,’ p. 30; ‘Parergon’ (French), p. 36.

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32 ‘To speculate – on ‘‘Freud’’,’ p. 273–4; ‘Spećuler – sur ‘‘Freud’’,’ in La carte postale: de Socrate a` Freud et au-dela` (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), p. 293. Translation modified. 33 ‘To speculate,’ pp. 297–8. See also, pp. 313, 327–8. 34 ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 19; ‘La diffe´rance,’ p. 20. 35 ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 8; ‘To speculate,’ p. 361. 36 Margins of Philosophy, pp. 60, 112, 251, 293; Marges de la philosophie, pp. 70, 132, 299, 349. See also, more recently, Gene`ses, geńeálogies, genres et le geńie, p. 12. 37 Jacques Derrida, ‘A ‘‘madness’’ must watch over thinking,’ in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 346–9. See also, Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Emergencies,’ in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 162–79. 38 Specters of Marx, p. 31; Spectres de Marx, p. 60. 39 H. C. pour la vie, p. 66. See also, ‘Negotiations,’ p. 28; Echographies, p. 77. 40 ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 7. 41 ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 80; Glas, p. 1a; ‘Les pupilles de l’Universite´,’ p. 461; Foi et Savoir, p. 61. My translation. 42 Jacques Derrida, ‘ ‘‘To do justice to Freud’’: The history of madness in the ˆ tre juste avec age of psychoanalysis,’ Critical Inquiry 20 (1994), p. 230; ‘ ‘‘E Freud’’: L’histoire de la folie a` l’age de la psychanalyse,’ in Re´sistances de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galileé, 1996), pp. 95–6; ‘Cogito and the history of madness,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 38. 43 Jacques Derrida, ‘Cartouches,’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 240; ‘Cartouches,’ in La ve´rite´ en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), pp. 275–6. 44 ‘Envois,’ p. 195. 45 Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth – pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galileé, 1986), pp. 23, 31–2. See also, ‘Signature event context,’ Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 328. 46 ‘Living on: Border lines,’ p. 90; ‘Survivre,’ p. 126. 47 See for example, ‘The ends of man,’ pp. 113–14; ‘Outwork,’ pp. 20–1. 48 See Jacques Derrida, ‘The rhetoric of drugs,’ in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 228–54. 49 ‘No apocalypse, not now,’ p. 363. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. See also, ‘Avances,’ p. 12. 50 ‘Negotiations,’ p. 28. 51 The Other Heading, p. 18; L’autre cap, p. 23; Memoirs of the Blind: The SelfPortrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 17; ‘ ‘‘Il courait mort’’ Salut, Salut: Notes pour un courrier aux Temps Modernes,’ Les Temps Modernes 587 (1996), p. 22. 52 Jacques Derrida, Ulysse gramaphone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galileé, 1987), pp. 45–6, 38, 89.

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53 Ulysse gramaphone, pp. 96, 28, 22, 127, 141. 54 The Other Heading, p. 41. See also, ‘Nietzsche and the machine,’ in Negotiations, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 249–50; De l’hospitalite´, pp. 55. 55 Specters of Marx, pp. 51–2, 63; Spectres de Marx, pp. 93, 108. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 56 ‘Force of law’ pp. 27, 26; Force de loi, pp. 60, 58. See also, ‘Ethics and politics today,’ in Negotiations, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 295–314. 57 ‘La raison du plus fort’, pp. 53, 62–3. 58 See Foi et savoir; De l’hospitalite´, ‘The university without condition’; Voyous. 59 Jacques Derrida, ‘The deconstruction of actuality’ in Negotiations, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 92; E`chographies – de la television: Entretiens filme´s avec Bernard Stiegler (Paris: Galileé, 1996), pp. 17–18. See ‘As if it were possible, ‘‘within such limits’’ . . .,’ in Negotiations, p. 350. See also, Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 4–5. 60 ‘No apocalypse, not now,’ p. 367. 61 H. C. pour la vie, pp. 58–9, 66–7. 62 ‘No apocalypse, not now,’ p. 366. ‘Tympan,’ p. xii; ‘Tympan,’ p. xiii. 63 Jacques Derrida, ‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing,’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 262; ‘Restitutions de la ve´rite´ en pointure,’ in La ve´rite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion), p. 299. 64 Specters of Marx, pp. 169, 82; Spectres de Marx, pp. 268, 137. 65 Jacques Derrida, ‘The animal that therefore I am (More to follow),’ trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002), pp. 392–3; ‘L’Animal Que Donc ` Suivre),’ in L’animal autobiographique: autour de Jacques Derrida Je Suis (A (Paris: Galileé, 1999), pp. 274–6. 66 Given Time, p. 64; Donner le temps, p. 88. 67 ‘Negotiations,’ p. 13. 68 ‘Restitutions,’ pp. 273, 379; ‘Restitutions’ (French), pp. 312, 318. 69 ‘Envois,’ p. 47. 70 ‘Envois,’ p. 63; ‘Envois’ (French), p. 70. 71 ‘Envois,’ p. 134. 72 ‘Envois,’ p. 141; ‘Envois,’ p. 153 73 ‘Envois,’ p. 163. 74 Foi et Savoir, p. 82. 75 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galileé, 1995), p. 17. 76 H. C. pour la vie, p. 59. I would like to thank David Punter, Nicholas Royle and an anonymous reader for the Oxford Literary Review and to dedicate this chapter to Sheera and Erga Sutherland.

Notes

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Chapter 10. la vie la mort, la mort la vie 1

2

3 4 5

6 7

8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

Jacques Derrida, He´le`ne Cixous and Aliette Armel, ‘Du mot a` la vie: un dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et He´le`ne Cixous,’ Magazine litte´raire 430 (2004), p. 26. The book in question is H. C. pour la vie. ‘To speculate – on ‘‘Freud’’,’ p. 259; ‘Spećuler – sur ‘‘Freud’’,’ p. 277. Further references for this work will be cited in the text. See Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 129–71. ‘Ja, or the faux-bond,’ p. 52; ‘Ja, ou le faux-bond,’ p. 57. ‘To speculate,’ p. 401, n. 8; ‘Spećuler,’ p. 428 n. 3; ‘Envois,’ p. 41, 140; ‘Envois,’ p. 47, 152. It also leads to translation as a capitalization of death: in ‘Ja, or the fauxbond’ Peggy Kamuf translates ‘La vie la mort’ as ‘Life Death’ (p. 52; p. 57) and in ‘Envois’ Alan Bass translates the 29 August 1977 citation as ‘Life Death’ (p. 41; p. 47). See also, Jacques Derrida, Feu la cendre (Paris: des femmes, 1987) on the difference between ‘la’ and ‘la`.’ On the importance of the ‘graphic difference,’ see ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 3; ‘La diffe´rance,’ p. 4. Jacques Derrida, ‘Titre a` prećiser,’ in Parages (Paris: Galileé, 2003), p. 210. See also, ‘The Double Session,’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) where Derrida first raises ‘the question of the title’ which is also a question of ‘the ‘‘pious capital letter’’ of the title,’ pp. 177–8. ‘Titre a` preciser,’ pp. 225–6. ‘Titre a` preciser,’ pp. 219–21, 223; ‘To Speculate,’ p. 285; ‘Spećuler,’ p. 305. The phrase ‘la vie la mort’ appears twice in Derrida’s reading of Blanchot in ‘Survivre’ (195, 200), which also addresses the question of a capitalized Life (Vie), p. 115. ‘The double session,’ p. 180. ‘La raison du plus fort,’ p. 80. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), x121 (p. 177); Die fro¨hliche Wissenshaft, in Nietzsche Werke, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973) 5.2: x121 (p. 156). ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 22; ‘La diffe´rance,’ p. 22. ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 27; ‘La diffe´rance,’ p. 29. I am following Alan Bass’s inspired translation here. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick, intro. Mark Edmundson (London: Penguin 2003), p. 248, n. 12; Jenseits des Lustprinzips, in Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940) 13: 13, n. 1. See Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines, pp. 180–2. In Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida writes of ‘La vie comme une Morte,’ p. 65. ‘Otobiographies,’ p. 5; Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Galileé, 1984), p. 41. I have revised the earlier English translation. See also Feu la cendre, p. 53.

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19 The Gay Science, x109 (p. 168); Die fro¨hliche Wissenshaft, x109 (p. 146). 20 See Jacques Derrida, ‘La loi du genre,’ in Parages (Paris: Galileé, 2003), pp. 231–66. 21 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 78; Jenseits des Lustprinzips, p. 40. 22 The Gay Science, x108–9 (pp. 167–9); Die fro¨hliche Wissenshaft, x108–9 (pp. 145–6). 23 Plato, The Laws, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) V: 898–9, 967. 24 ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ p. 86. Derrida quotes from the Republic, 508a–509b. 25 Of Grammatology, p. 91. 26 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ 79–80, 83. 27 The Gay Science, x342 (p. 275); Die fro¨hliche Wissenshaft, x342 (p. 251). 28 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 97, 98; L’espace litte´raire (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 120, 122. 29 Alexandre Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, trans. James H. Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 245. 30 Michel de Montaigne, ‘To philosophise is to learn how to die,’ in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 90, 96; ‘Que philosopher, c’est apprendre a` mourir,’ in Essais, intro. Alexandre Micha, 3 vols (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1969) I: 132. 31 ‘To philosophise,’ pp. 103, 98, 107; ‘Que philosopher,’ pp. 138, 134, 141. 32 Plato, Phaedo, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) II. All citations of Greek in Plato are taken from the standard Loeb editions. 33 The Problem of Genesis, p. 191, n. 36. 34 See also ‘To speculate,’ pp. 369–79, 398–400; ‘Envois,’ pp. 53, 57, 166. 35 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, pp. 97, 76; Jenseits des Lustprinzips, pp. 62, 38. 36 Plato, Philebus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) IV. 37 See also ‘The double session,’ p. 178. 38 In ‘Cogito and the history of madness’ Derrida speaks of the ‘rhythm of crisis and reawakening’ as part of the economy of death in life, pp. 61–2. 39 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time I: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 188. 40 Plato, Protagoras, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) I. 41 On ‘mytho-logic,’ see ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ pp. 73–5, 86, 134, and Jacques Derrida, ‘Khora’, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 113. 42 Philebus 57. 43 Of Grammatology, pp. 97, 212–15. 44 ‘L’Animal Que Donc Je Suis,’ p. 274. 45 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ p. 116; ‘La pharmacie de Platon,’ p. 132.

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46 Of Grammatology, p. 242; De la grammatologie, p. 344. 47 Of Grammatology, p. 244. 48 Plato, Symposium, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) I. 49 ‘To speculate,’ pp. 369–74. 50 Plato, Gorgias, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) II. 51 ‘L’Animal Que Donc Je Suis,’ pp. 254–5. 52 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ p. 120. 53 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ p. 104; ‘La pharmacie de Platon,’ p. 118; ‘The double session,’ pp. 229, 251; ‘La double seánce,’ in La disse´mination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 259, 282. 54 ‘To speculate,’ p. 285; ‘Spećuler,’ p. 305. 55 God, Death and Time, p. 9. 56 ‘Edmond Jabe`s and the question of the book,’ p. 68. See also, Be´liers – Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poe`me (Paris: Galileé, 2003), p. 39. 57 ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ pp. 198–202; ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 19; ‘To speculate,’ p. 282. 58 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 98; Jenseits des Lustprinzips, p. 6. As in 1966, the end of Derrida’s French translation of the passage from Freud’s text in ‘La diffe´rance’ is distinguished by the citation of a German word: ‘a` la faveur du long de´tour (Aufschub) que nous empruntons pour arriver au plaisir, un de´plaisir momentane´’ (20). Just before Derrida quotes from Freud, he states, ‘the difference between the pleasure principle and reality principle is only diffe´rance as detour’ (19). He then concludes this sentence with two German words in parentheses: (Aufschieben, Aufschub). Inexplicably, Alan Bass leaves these words out of his translation. This displacement of Aufschub in the English translation is a strange echo of Derrida’s own displacement in the French translation of Freud’s text. This displacement only appears, or reappears, when Derrida returns to Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1975–1980. In 1968 he writes: ‘du long de´tour (Aufschub)’ (19). In 1975, he writes: ‘ce ‘‘long detour’’ (auf dem langen Umwege)’ (301). In other words, in 1968 Derrida moves Aufschub from its original place in Freud’s text – which would have made it a translation of en diffe´rer – and substitutes it for Umwege. A detour (Aufschub) for a detour (Umwege). 59 Jacques Derrida, ‘Psychoanalysis searches the states of its soul,’ in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 238–80. 60 ‘The double session,’ p. 211. 61 ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ p. 198, translation modified; ‘Freud et la sce`ne de l’ećriture,’ p. 295. 62 ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ p. 202; ‘Freud et la sce`ne de l’ećriture,’ p. 300. 63 Of Grammatology, pp. 62, 71, 70; De la grammatologie, p. 103. 64 My reading here is indebted to Nicholas Royle’s remarkable book Jacques Derrida.

152


65 The Problem of Genesis, pp. xviii, 97; Origin of Geometry, pp. 87, 147–53; ‘ ‘‘Genesis and Structure’’,’ p.166. 66 ‘Edmond Jabe`s and the question of the book,’ p. 78; ‘Edmond Jabe`s et la question du livre,’ p. 116. 67 La voix et le pheńome`ne, pp. 14–15. I would like to thank Jonathan Tiplady for bringing the question of life here to my attention. 68 La voix et le pheńome`ne, pp. 55–61, 76, 114. 69 La voix et le pheńome`ne, pp. 89, 92. 70 ‘From restricted to general economy,’ pp. 255–6; ‘De l’ećonomie restreinte a` l’ećonomie geńe´rale,’ p. 376. See also, Of Grammatology, p. 179. 71 ‘Cogito and the history of madness,’ p. 62; ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie,’ in L’ećriture et la diffe´rence (Paris: Seuil, 2001), p. 95. 72 Of Grammatology, pp. 131, 143. 73 ‘Cogito and the history of madness,’ pp. 61–2. 74 ‘Violence and metaphysics,’ pp. 95, 102; 142; ‘The theatre of cruelty,’ pp. 246–7; ‘Le theáˆtre de la cruaute´,’ p. 362. Further references to this work will be cited in the text. 75 ‘Diffe´rance,’ p. 19; ‘La diffe´rance,’ p. 20. 76 ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ p. 228; ‘Freud et la sce`ne de l’ećriture,’ p. 336. 77 ‘Freud and the scene of writing,’ p. 203; ‘Freud et la sce`ne de l’ećriture,’ p. 302. 78 Of Grammatology, p. 274; De la grammatologie, p. 349. 79 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’ pp. 168–170; ‘La pharmacie de Platon,’ pp. 195–6. I would like to thank Hywel Evans, Sarah Douglas, Lisl Haldenwang, Anya Wilson and Jonathan Styles for their help with the publication of this book. I would like to thank Jacques Derrida for his gracious and generous interest. I WOULD LIKE TO DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO CARMELLA ELANGASTON.

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Index

acceleration 92–108 animal 107, 115–19 anticipation 85–108 Addison, Joseph 33, 44 Artaud, Antonin 97, 123 Bacon, Francis 34 Bartleby, the Scrivener 94 Bass, Alan 100–1 Bataille, Georges 123 Benjamin, Walter 2 Berleant, Arnold 32 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 100–1, 109– 15, 118, 121–4 Blanchot, Maurice 110, 113–14 Blake, William 51–2 Brewer, John 33 Bullough, Edward 32 Burke, Edmund 46 capitalization 10, 16–18, 62, 97, 105–6, 110–11, 113, 115, 123, 125 diffe´rance 111 life and death 109–14, 123, 125 speeds 97, 105–6 Carlyle, Thomas 47, 49 The Castle Spectre 47–9 Chalier, Catherine 1, 28 Celan, Paul 104 Cixous, He´le`ne 94, 149 n.1 Clej, Alina 53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 48, 51–2 Colley, Linda 47 Cudworth, Ralph 39 custom 38–9, 41–3 Descartes, Rene` 3–4, 15, 33, 34–5, 72, 75, 82–3, 123 Darwall, Stephen 40 death 7, 81, 94, death life 109–25 decision 12–18 Deleuze, Gilles 40

De Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques 47 De Quincey, Thomas 51, 52–3 Derrida, Jacques absolute difference 69–71, 85 acceleration 92–108 animal 107, 117, 119 anticipation 85–108 a priori synthesis 85–7 arrivant 48–9 capitalization 10, 16–18, 62, 97, 105–6, 110–11, 113, 115 123, 125 death life 109–25 the decision of interest 12–18 diffe´rance v, 4, 69, 85, 89, 90, 97 103, 107, 111, 115, 117, 121–4 dis-interest 4–5, 11, 16–18 dogmatic precipitation 95–6 economy of death in life 121–4 Freud 100–1, 109–15, 121–4 gap 4, 93–4, 96, 98, 105, 106 good conscience 4, 83 Heidegger 24–25, 79–81, 83–4 Hegel 4, 13–14, 69–70 hesitation 97–103, 106 history 70 Husserl 85–91 impossible 12–18 incompleteness 87–8 (in) finitude 14, 69–71, 124 interest(s) 1, 2, 4, 6, 12–18 interesting 17 justice 15–17, 71, 81, 83–4, 106 Kant 2–3, 57–8, 60–2, 67–8 Le´vinas 1–2, 21, 23–4, 30, 67, 69 71, 79–81, 83–4 life death 109–25 madness 15–16, 107 mettre en question 79–80 Nietzsche 2, 110–13 Plato 114–21, 125 precipitation 92–7, 107 proper and death 110–11, 113–16, 118–21, 124 public and private 5–12 re-mark 98, 120

172

Index

Derrida, Jacques (continued) remettre en question 80–1, 83–4 re-mettre en question 80–1 responsibility 12–18 restance 96–7 revenance 49, 81 revenant 48–50 s’arreˆte 99 sauter 92–4 secret 5–12 sovereignty 18, 37 spectres 48–50, 81 speeds 92–108 speed of today 103–7 starting again 79–81, 83–4 structuralism 89 taking an interest 16–18, 97 technology 10, 44, 47–9, 106 teleology 89–91 third party 6 today 11, 17, 103–7 trace 8, 90, 92, 94, 97, 100–3, 106, 110, 112, 121–4 tradition 79–84 uncanny 43, 48–9 vite 95, 98, 107–8 Derrida’s works Adieu 1, 6, 14, 15, 21, 30, 71 ‘The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)’ 107, 119 Aporias 7, 15, 16, 48–9 Archive Fever 108 Artaud le Moma 146 n.22 ‘As if it were possible’ 148 n.49 ‘At this very moment in this work here I am’ 1, 141 n.12 ‘Avances’ 140 n.9, 147 n.49 ‘Before the law’ [‘Pre´juge´s; devant la loi’] 57, 143 n.29 Be´liers 151 n.58 ‘Cartouches’ 104 Cinders 149 n.5 ‘Cogito and the history of madness’ 15, 103, 123, 150 n.38 ‘‘‘Dead man running’’’ 105 ‘Declarations of independence’ 15 ‘The deconstruction of actuality’ 106–7 ‘Diffe´rance’ 4, 83, 100–3, 111, 121–4 Dissemination 95 ‘The Double Session’ 110, 120 21, 149 n.7 ‘Du mot a` la vie’ 109 Echographies of Television 106–7, 145 n.2, 147 n.37, 147 n.47 ‘Economimesis’ 2–3 ‘Edmond Jabe`s and the question of the book’ 93–4, 122 Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry 13, 88–9, 98, 122

Derrida’s works (continued) ‘The ends of man’ 3, 63, 102, 147 n.47 ‘Envois’ 2, 6–12, 107–8, 110 ‘Ethics and politics today’ 148 n.56 ‘Faith and knowledge’ 71, 106, 108, 132 n.38, 143 n.27 ‘Force and signification’ 89, 98–9, 103 ‘Force of law’ 6, 14–17, 127 n. 8, 70, 106 For What Tomorrow [De quoi demain] 18, 134 n.30, 143. n.38, 144 n.35, 145 n.12 ‘Freud and the scene of writing’ 100, 121–22, 124–5 Gene`ses, geńeálogies, genres et le geńie 147 n.36 ‘From restricted to general economy’ 90, 94–5, 123, 140 n.15 ‘‘‘Genesis and Structure’’ and phenomenology’ 88, 95 The Gift of Death 12, 71, 126 n.5, 131 n. 41 Given Time 16–17, 107 Glas 4, 13–14, 16, 61, 69, 86, 91, 92–3, 99, 103 H. C. pour la vie, c’est a` dire ... 94, 102–3, 107 ‘Ja, or the faux-bond II’ 13, 57–8, 61–2, 109 ‘Jospeh N. Riddel (1931–1991)’ 145 n.8 ‘Khora’ 150 n.41 ‘The law of genre’ 150 n.20 ‘Limited Inc a b c’ 130 n.73 ‘Living on’ 105, 149 n.9 ‘A ‘‘madness’’ must watch over thinking’ 147 n.37 Margins of Philosophy 95, 143 n.26 Memoirs of the Blind 105 ‘Mochlos; or, the conflict of faculties’ 58, 60, 61 ‘Le ‘‘Monde’’ des Lumie`res a` venir’ 61, 62, 67, 130 n.80 ‘Negotiations’ 97, 105, 107, 128 n.40, 147 n.39 ‘Nietzsche and the machine’ 148 n.54 ‘No apocalypse, not now’ 97, 105, 107 ‘Of an apocalyptic tone newly adopted in philosophy’ 97 Of Grammatology 89, 93, 98–100, 116–17, 125, 140 n.15 Of Hospitality 106, 128 n.46, 148 n.54 Of Spirit 79–81, 126 n.7 The Other Heading 9, 11,14–16, 97, 106 ‘Otobiographies’ 112, 143 n.27 ‘Ousia and Gramme¯’ 102 ‘Outwork’ 85, 91, 93–7, 99, 147 n.47 ‘Parergon’ 2, 12, 101 ‘La parole souffleé’ 97–8 ‘Passe-Partout’ 13

Index Derrida’s works (continued) ‘Passions’ 12, 15 ‘The pit and the pyramid’ 4, 90, 129 n.47 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ 2, 18, 112–13, 117, 120, 125, 142 n.7, 150 n.41 Politics of Friendship 11, 14, 15, 17, 127 n.9, 130 n.80 ‘The principle of reason’ 1, 103 ‘Privilege’ 140 n.8, 140 n.9 The Problem of Genesis 13, 85–88, 91, 114, 122 ‘Provocation: Forewords’ 97, 134 n.30 ‘Psyche: Invention of the other’ 13, 129 n.44 ‘Psychoanalysis searches the state of its soul’ 151 n.59 ‘Qual Quelle’ 55, 68, 92, 102 ‘La raison du plus fort’ 106, 130 n.79, 134 n.30 Re´sistances 145 n.20 ‘Re´sistances’ 144 n.2 ‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing’ 107 ‘The rhetoric of drugs’ 147 n.48 Right to Philosophy [Du droit a` la philosophie] 57 ‘The right to philosophy from a cosmopolitan point of view’ 60 Schibboleth 104–5 ‘Signature Event Context’ 147 n.45 Specters of Marx 10, 17, 48–50, 81, 83–4, 102, 106, 107, 141 n.11 Speech and Phenomena 122–23, 143 n.26 ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourses of the human sciences’ 89 A Taste for the Secret 144 n.36 ‘The theatre of cruelty and the closure of representation’ 69, 123 ‘Title (to be specified)’ 110 ‘‘‘To do justice to Freud’’’ 103 ‘To speculate – on ‘‘Freud’’ ’ 101, 109–15, 118, 124, 144 n.39 Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy 141 n.10, 141 n.12, 149 n.17 ‘Tympan’ 95, 107 ‘Typewriter ribbon’ 15 Ulysse gramaphone 105–6 ‘The university without condition’ 60–1, 72, 106 ‘Violence and metaphysics’ 1, 24 5, 69–70, 79, 83, 90, 103, 112, 131 n.17,152 n.74 Voyous 106, 110 ‘White mythology’ 102, 146 n.30 Dickie, George 32 diffe´rance v, 4, 69, 85, 89, 90, 97–103, 107, 111, 115, 117, 121–4 Disinterest aesthetic disinterestedness 32

173

Disinterest (continued) Britain 1600–1790 11, 23–4, 34–42 capitalization 125 decision 12–18 diffe´rance 4 difference 69–70, 85 dis-interest (Derrida) 4–5, 11, 16 18 disinterested affection (Hutcheson) 40 disinterest as community (Locke) 37 dis-interestedness (Le´vinas) 1–2, 19–31 (dis)possession 25–7 ethics 19 Descartes to Nietzsche 2–5, 13, 23 4, 32–42 God and disinterest 28–30 hegemony 32–4 internal management (Locke) 38 interest(s) 1, 2, 4, 6, 12–18, 36–8, 71 interest and anticipation 85, 91 interesting 17 interests of disinterest (Nietzsche) 2 Kant 2–3, 44–5, 55–68 life death 125 natural disinterest (Shaftesbury) 39 Poet as ground (Wordsworth) 50 public and private 5–12, 22–3, 32–4 public disinterest of the private (Hobbes) 36–7 rational, inspired disinterestedness 28–30 romanticism 50–4 ruins of disinterest 11 sovereign, absolute interest 33 spectres of disinterest 12 speeds 97, 107 sympathetic imagination (Hume, Smith) 40–2 to disinterest (Bacon) 34 take an interest 16–18, 97 (Derrida), 61–8 (Kant) tradition 83 dispossession 8, 25–27 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 113 Dwyer, John 41 Eagleton, Terry 32 economy of death in life 121–4 enthusiasm 24–5, 35–6 La Fantasmagorie 11, 47, 49, 53–4 Fielding, Henry 47 Finnegans Wake 106 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 84 Foucault. Michel 15, 32–3, 123 French Revolution 11, 45–7, 53–4 Freud, Sigmund 13, 84, 100–1, 110–15, 118, 121–4, 151 n.58

174 Freud, Sigmund (continued) Beyond the Pleasure Principle 15, 118, 121–4 uncanny 45, 47, 49, 78

Index

100–1, 109–

gap 4, 34, 42, 65, 93–4, 96, 98, 105, 106 God and disinterest 28–30, 75–6 Goldsmith, Oliver 44 good conscience 4, 20, 22, 30, 83 Gramsci, Antonio 32 The Great Gatsby 84 Grotius, Hugo 36 Guyer, Paul 32, 67 Habermas, Ju¨rgen 33 Hamlet 83–4 Hazlitt, William 50 Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 13–14, 69–70, 76,77, 85–6, 90, 92–6, 99, 102, 115, 123 Aufhebung 4, 52, 67, 69, 86, 94, 95, 99, 115, 123 Heidegger, Martin 2, 24–25, 72, 73–4, 75 84, 142 n.15 the future of the past 74 making the past one’s own 73–4 mere resumption 73, 76 the question of Being 72–4, 76–8, 80, 82 tradition 73–4 Wiederholung (repetition-restating retrieval) 73–4, 81 hesitation 97–103, 106 Hobbes, Thomas 7–8, 34–7, 38, 39, 41,42, 46 Descartes 34–5 ‘‘father’’ of disinterest 38–9, 42 public disinterest of the private 36 37 Hume, David 33, 35, 40–1, 44, 46 disinterest and imagination 40–1 Husserl, Edmund 2, 4, 13, 74–5, 77, 85 90, 98, 114, 122, 142 n.10 anticipation 85–90 Hegel 86 horizon 88–9 future as presence 87–9 Kant 85–88 teleology 89–90 Hutcheson, Francis 33, 39–40, 41, 43, 46 Hyppolite, Jean 85 imagination 23, 35, 38, 39, 50–1, 52 Blake 51–2 Coleridge 52 fictions 38, 40–2 sympathetic imagination 40–2 infinity 1, 21, 27, 67, 69–71, 76–7

Jabe`s, Edmond 94, 122 Johnson, Barbara 97 Johnson, Samuel 43 Joyce, James 106 justice 15–17, 22, 24, 29, 30, 37, 71, 76, 81, 83–4, 106 Kafka, Franz 57 Kamuf, Peggy 72, 97 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 12, 33, 44–5, 46, 55 68, 86–8 (dis)interested 68 international disinterest 55–61 meta-interest 61–4 pure disinterested delight 2–3 taking an interest 61–8 universal standards for disinterest 44–5 Kant’s works The Conflict of Faculties 55, 56 60, 63 Critique of Judgement 2–3, 44–5, 55, 67 Critique of Practical Reason 67 Critique of Pure Reason 62–4 Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals 64–7 What is Enlightenment? 55–6, 59 Kiekegaard, Søren 15, 127 n.10 Le´vinas, Emmanuel 1–2, 5–6, 12, 14, 19 31, 67, 69–71, 72–84, 85, 89–90 death 121 decision 14 dis-interestedness 1–2, 19–31, 82–3 (dis)possession 25–7 disinterest, God and Judaism 28–30 freedom and memory 74–9 good conscience 20, 22, 30 Hegel 69–70 Heidegger 72, 74–9, 81–4 infinity 1, 21, 27, 67, 69–71, 76–7 interest 1, 20, 21, 71 justice 22, 24, 29, 30, 76 Kant 67 mise en moi, en nous 29, 75–7, 82–3 mettre en question 75–9 past as trace 77–9 Plato 27, 121 public and private 5–6, 22–3, 55–61 rational, inspired disinterestedness 28–30 reason 23–24 religion 28, 30, 71 remettre en question 72–3, 75, 78 81, 83–4 re-mettre en question 78–9 remonter 77–9, 81 secret 5–6, 22–3 third party 22–3 trace 21, 28, 79, 90

Index Le´vinas’s works ‘A religion for adults’ 24 Difficult Freedom 28–30 ‘Ethics and spirit’ 26 Existence and Existents 75 ‘Freedom and commandment’ 75 ‘Frieburg, Husserl and Phenomenology’ 74–5 ‘God and Philosophy’ 1–2, 20, 27, 29–30, 70, 75 God, Death and Time 30, 81–2, 84 ‘Heidegger Gargarin and Us’ 25 ‘The I and the totality’ 75 ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’ 75 ‘Martin Heidegger and Ontology’ 72 ‘L’ontologie dans le temporal’ 75 Otherwise than Being 14, 21–2, 27, 30, 82–3 ‘Philosophy and the idea of infinity’ 76–77 Quatre Lectures Talmudiques 84 ‘Some thoughts on the philosophy of Hitlerism’ 75 ‘The state of Caesar and the state of David’ 30 Time and the Other 75, 89–90 Totality and Infinity 5–6, 19–27, 29, 30–31, 69–70, 77–9 ‘The trace of the other’ 20, 79 Le Robert 103–4 Lewis, Matthew 47–8 life death 109–25 Locke, John 37–8, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46 custom 40 disinterest 37–8 Lyotard, Jean-François 127 n.10 Marx, Karl 11, 46 Marxism 17 Melville, Herman 94 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 85 mettre en question 75–81, 83 Milton, John 34 mise en moi, en nous 29, 75–7, 82–3 Montaigne, Michel de 114 More, Henry 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 5, 19, 30, 33, 67, 84, 110–13, 127 n. 10 death 110–13 interests of disinterest 2 Le´vinas 19, 30 Kant 67 Otto, Peter 51

175

Plato 7, 27, 114–21, 125 animal 115–18 death of Socrates 119–21 life and death 114–21, 125 rhythm and harmony 115–18 Poe, Edgar Allan 5 proper and death 110–11, 113–16, 118–21, 124 public and private 5–12, 22–3, 32–42, 55 61 Raphael, D. D. 41 reason 23–24, 33–4, 36 remettre en question 72–3, 75, 78–81, 83–4 re-mettre en question 78–82 remonter 77–9, 81 responsibility 12–18, 19 Ricoeur, Paul 85 romanticism 50–4 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 93, 98, 102, 116–17 Rousset, Jean 89 Sartre, Jean Paul 85 secret 5–12, 22–3 Schmitt, Carl 11 Schopenhauer, Arthur 127 n.10 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of 32, 33, 39, 42, 43, 46 Smith, Adam 40, 41–2, 43, 45–6 disinterest 1759 to 1790 41–2 general standards for disinterest 45 Socrates 7, 114–16, 118–21 sovereignty 18, 32–42 spectator disinterested 33 ideal and real 42, 46 spectacle revolution 46 stage technology 44, 47–8 streets, shows, theatres 11, 43–4, 47–50 spectres Blake 51–2 The Brocken Spectre 52–3 Burke 46 The Castle Spectre 47–8 Coleridge 52 De Quincey 52–3 Derrida 48–9 La Fantasmagorie 49, 54 speeds 11, 92–108 acceleration 92–108 anticipation 85–108 hesitation 97–103 of today 11, 17, 103–7 preciptation 92–7, 107 s’arreˆte 99

176

Index

sauter 92–4 vite 95, 98, 107–8 starting again 72–3, 79–81 Steele, Richard 33 Stiegler, Bernard 115 Stolnitz, Jerome 32 sympathy 23, 40–1, 44 sympathetic imagination 40–2 taking an interest 16–18, 97 (Derrida), 61–8 (Kant) technology 10, 25, 44, 47–9, 106 today 11, 17, 103–7 Touraine, Alain 33 trace 8, 21, 28, 79, 90, 92, 94, 97, 100–3, 106, 110, 112, 121–4

tradition 22–7, 28–30, 74, 79–84 Tuck, Richard 34 Tully, James 37 Ulysses 106 uncanny 45, 47, 49, 78 Whichcote, Benjamin 3 Wordsworth, William 48, 50 Zakkai, Johanan ben 28

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