Mario Ortiz-Robles

Department of English
University of Wisconsin, Madison
mortizRobles@wisc.edu

 

 

Review of: Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi. Ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.

 

Without Alibi, a collection of five essays written by Jacques Derrida in response to various provocations both in France and in the United States, is not without its own alibis. It is, first of all, a book that came into being at the suggestion of Peggy Kamuf, one of Derrida’s most reliable American translators, and, in this case, also his editor, compiler, and virtual collaborator. As Derrida tells us in his foreword–or alibi of a foreword, sandwiched as it is between the editor’s preface and the translator’s introduction–the book is “more and other than a translation” since it is “countersigned” by Kamuf. In her own telling, the collection seeks to trace the “movement of response and engagement” that characterizes the reception of Derrida’s work in the United States and his own critical reaction to that reception. Kamuf’s collection is, in this sense, Derrida’s American alibi, or “elsewhere” (“alibi” in Latin), an apt description of the act of translation and a compelling prescription for an ethics of authorship, or of countersignature as performance, that the book can be said to be enacting. It is in this regard tempting to group Without Alibi together with other collaborative works Derrida published late in his life. I am thinking here of the very different and very differently conceptualized collaborations he performed with a number of French women, Elizabeth Rudinesco (For What Tomorrow…), Catherine Malabou (Counterpath), Hélène Cixous (Veils and Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint), and Anne Dufourmantelle (Of Hospitality).

 

Unlike these books, Without Alibi is a peculiarly American product, and not only because it is, as Derrida puts it, a “native” of “America,” referring no doubt to the fact that the book was published in America by an American university press without, as it were, a French alibi. Indeed, there is no “French original” to this book, even if all five essays were written in French and four were delivered, in French, as lectures before audiences in both France and the United States. The fifth, “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying,” which was the only piece originally destined for publication, was written for a volume commemorating the work of his “friend and eminent colleague” J. Hillis Miller. Two of the lectures (both of which have appeared in print elsewhere) were also delivered with a specifically American alibi: “Typewritter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)” was first read at a conference held in 1998 at the University of California, Davis, on Paul de Man’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, and “History of the Lie: Prolegomena” was presented at the New School for Social Research in New York as part of a series commemorating the work of Hannah Arendt. To use a designation elsewhere explored by Derrida, the book has thus been thoroughly “copyrighted” in America (and copyrighted, at least materially in this instance, by the trustees of Stanford University, which Kamuf calls a “great university” and which, incidentally perhaps–a professional alibi?–sponsored the conference at which Derrida delivered “The University Without Condition,” the only essay in Without Alibi not to have appeared in print before). America is thus, in this collection, one of the most persistent alibis for the labor of translation and editing and collaboration and even copyright Kamuf so ably performs. Being Jacques Derrida’s “elsewhere,” Kamuf does an admirable job of bringing together five texts that, in their different ways, trouble the conditions of production that have brought them together in the first place. And if, as Kamuf writes in the introduction, the “essential trait” shared by all five essays is the notion of sovereignty, then we can say that it is American insofar as, today, sovereignty can be given the name “America” even as it actively, and without alibi, claims it as its own copyright.

 

The book is peculiarly American for another reason. Its “essential trait” may well be a different sort of collaboration or about a different sort of copyright. Derrida’s complex, often critical, at times openly hostile, and ultimately fruitful collaboration with the work of J.L. Austin (particularly How to Do Things with Words, the lectures Austin delivered at Harvard), and speech act theory more generally, becomes a compelling alibi for the choice of essays in this collection. I may be seen to be using the term “collaboration” somewhat loosely here: Derrida’s critique of Austin, whose performativity as an intervention is too often allowed to go unnoticed, could hardly be said to entail a working together, or co-labor. In addition, the far from collaborative, and, indeed, belabored, debate that took place in the 1970s between Derrida and John R. Searle, who seemingly took upon himself the task of responding for and in the name of Austin to Derrida’s initial critique, revolved on one of its axes around the question of copyright and the incorporation of various collaborators, real or virtual, into a single legal identity, a “Limited Inc,” as it were. Yet, as the essays in Without Alibi demonstrate with their citational and iterative use of performativity, the term “collaboration” can be understood in the active sense of “working with” others, a joint intellectual labor that, to use Austin’s catchy phrase, does things with words. In the spirit of Derrida’s treatment of ethics and responsibility in his later work, this co-labor may be said to entail an engagement with or response to the call of the other as the horizon of performative force. The word “collaboration,” of course, trembles under the weight of its political history and, especially, of that of Paul de Man’s wartime writings, an act that remains categorically “without alibi,” no matter what revanchist purposes they have served his detractors. Derrida’s patient, arduous, and no doubt painful response to de Man’s wartime writings–one of whose moments or occasions is the essay “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying” that appears in this volume–is, at least in part, articulated by his understanding of what it is to do things with words: a co-labor responsive to the other’s call. Indeed, de Man’s own reading of Austin–a reading to which Derrida returns in “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)”–has so many points of contact with Derrida’s reading that one can only imagine it as a collaborative effort, an act of interlocution that was in no small measure responsible for initiating or inaugurating what came to be “deconstruction” in America. Derrida’s long-standing engagement with the United States critical scene and with the reception of his work by the American academy can in this same sense be profitably thought of as a collaborative critique of performativity.

 

It is this general critique of performativity, I want to suggest, that makes the Kamuf/Derrida collaboration in Without Alibi particularly valuable at a time of increased resistance to theory and perhaps to non-coercive forms of collaboration. At one level, many of the topics or themes Derrida pursues in his essays pertain to explicit performative speech acts of the sort Austin isolated, such as lying, promising, making excuses, professing, confessing, and producing alibis of all sorts, and, at another, many of the concepts Derrida treats, such as the signature, responsibility, the event, citizenship, the death penalty, and mondialisation, are formulated from within his critique of Austin. At yet another level–and this is where collaboration nears performative efficacy–the collection itself encapsulates the history of Derrida’s engagement with the United States critical scene, a history that, in Kamuf’s selection at least, is linked to a general critique of the performative. Two of the essays in Without Alibi, for instance, look back upon the work of some of Derrida’s most important collaborators (as in co-workers or sometime colleagues) in the United States (whether American or not): “‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying” is written for a collection of essays for J. Hillis Miller, but deals with a fictional account (Henri Thomas’s novel Le Parjure) of what may be read as Paul de Man’s life before arriving in the United States; “Typewritter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)” traces some of the most salient motifs of de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s Confessions as an occasion to revisit Derrida’s reading of Austin and Searle’s critique of this reading as it appeared originally in “Limited Inc a b c.”

 

All five essays, in fact, perform or enact this critique, such that, more than the “essential trait” of the collection, one could say that performativity is its “alibi” since performativity, in Derrida, never really achieves the systematicity of a method nor even the thematic density of a concept metaphor. A discursive modality that categorically resists allegorization, the performative precipitates, prompts, and provokes narrative effects through discrete acts of speech but never itself becomes a central organizing principle. In her illuminating introduction, “Event of Resistance,” Kamuf characterizes Derrida’s return to Austin in the essays as a response to the tendency (perhaps especially, but not exclusively, evident in the United States) of taking “performativity” to be a transformative empowerment. Precisely because these cultural theories of performativity rely on the conventionality of speech acts to create the appearance of social inevitability, Derrida asks us to reconsider and resist the all-too-neatly reflexive notion that the performative produces the event of which it speaks. As he writes in “The University Without Condition”: “where there is the performative, an event worthy of the name cannot arrive” (234).

 

As these examples illustrate, Without Alibi forcefully reminds us why Derrida was initially drawn to Austin’s formulation of the performative and why he found the various attempts at formalizing the latter’s discovery highly problematic. First of all, insofar as Austin’s isolation of the performative was the formalization of an always already existing force of language that, while operative, had never been named, we can consider the confusion between constative and performative utterances (that is, between statements that can be said to be true or false and locutions that actually do something by being uttered) as a particularly significant instance of the sort of ideological obfuscation Derrida termed “logocentrism” and whose critique–call the necessary course it took “deconstruction”–was in itself as “great” an “event” as he claims Austin’s discovery of the performative to have been. For Derrida, Austin’s formulation of the performative shatters the traditional concept of communication since the performative is found to be, as act, a nonreferential force of language that categorically resists the notion of speech as the transference of a given semantic content oriented towards truth. And it is precisely the nonreferential aspect of performative speech acts that was initially of most interest to Derrida and can even be said to have set the conditions of the possibility of his critique of Austin since it is the latter’s failure to take account of the general applicability of his own discovery that destabilizes the oppositions he wishes to formulate (constative vs. performative; parasitic vs. non-parasitic uses of language; happy vs. unhappy performatives; etc.).

 

The political and intellectual stakes of Derrida’s critique of performativity are certainly very high. In the “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” for instance, he speaks of the “performative violence” of state law:

 

When performatives succeed, they produce a truth whose power sometimes imposes itself forever: the location of a boundary, the installation of a state are always acts of performative violence that, if the conditions of the international community permit it, create the law . . . . In creating the law, this performative violence--which is neither legal nor illegal--creates what is then held to be legal truth, the dominant and juridically incontestable public truth. (51)

 

The very real events that performative speech acts can and do effect within institutional frameworks rely for their efficacy on a particular misreading or, in a vocabulary Derrida seldom has any use for, ideology, both in the sense that the performative is often confused with the constative (insofar as an act is read as a true or false statement) and in the sense that it is naturalized as an evident or obvious fact with no history of its own. For Derrida, it is not enough to identify the force of the performative and formalize its features (a task, in any case, undertaken with admirable clarity by Austin himself). One must also be alert to the instability of the performative/constative distinction and be ready to live with the constant oscillation between the two as the condition of possibility of responsible action.

 

In “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Culture,” the last essay in Without Alibi, Derrida explores this oscillation within the institutional confines of psychoanalysis, proposing nothing less than a new revolution in psychoanalytic reason in the spirit of a States General of Psychoanalysis. Of the three states or orders he isolates, it is the performative to which he ascribes the role of “inventing and reinventing” the institutional, normative, procedural “laws” of psychoanalysis in contradistinction to the theoretical or descriptive order of knowledge we associate with the constative. But it is only when psychoanalysis begins to contemplate the impossible coming of an event worthy of its name that the distinction falls apart and, in the face of unpredictable alterity, the orders of power (constative) and of the possible (performative) are “put to rout.” In practical, should we say academic, terms, the stakes of this form of deconstructive practice are also taken into account, not least because the “event” of Austin’s originary formulation is, as Derrida reminds us, an “academic event” in the first place. Thus, in the sixth of the seven theses or “professions of faith” with which Derrida concludes “The University Without Conditions” (in a manner, one need perhaps not add, that is itself performative), he has this to say concerning the humanities of tomorrow: “It will surely be necessary, even if things have already begun here or there, to study the history and the limits of such a decisive distinction [between performative acts and constative acts] . . . This deconstructive work would not concern only the original and brilliant oeuvre of Austin but also his rich and fascinating inheritance, over the last half-century, in particular in the Humanities” (233).

 

Without Alibi has the great merit of exposing us to a significant part of that inheritance through Derrida’s specific engagements with Austin and through the rich history of what I have called these essays’ “collaboration.” Derrida’s reading of Austin and the many debates, commentaries, and countersignatures this reading has inspired over the years can, I think, be singled out as one of the events that helped launch and entrench deconstruction in America. Its force as event might serve as a reminder or emblem of the stakes involved in conceptualizing the performative: it can revolutionize the intellectual landscape. To call Derrida’s critique of performativity “American” is then also to point towards a certain performative violence that, in the service of institutional truth or of legal expediency (read: copyright), has been done to the humanities, generally making them less hospitable to collaboration, countersignature, deconstruction–in short, to theory.

 

It would therefore be naïve to characterize Peggy Kamuf’s countersignature in Without Alibi as a “performance” of Derrida or of deconstruction. Naïve because it is not a matter of choice or intention to utter certain speech acts, and, in so doing or saying, to transform ourselves into an “other.” We do not have that choice, since the performative/constative distinction turns out to be, more than a discursive modality, the very condition of possibility of language doing or saying anything at all. Being Jacques Derrida, one realizes after reading Without Alibi, is a far more difficult task than performing a critical role (that would be, perhaps, just an alibi for responsibility); it is an impossibly collaborative event towards which Kamuf bravely makes the leap as though to salute a stranger who only gets stranger with each subsequent exposure.

 

Robert Oventile

English Division
Pasadena City College
rsoventile@pasadena.edu

 

Review of: Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice.Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

 

Contemporary intellectuals interested in progressive and even militantly leftist possibilities within religious thought have turned increasingly to the letters of Saint Paul. Should one concede Paul–himself a notable casualty of Empire–to the Right, whether it take the form of theocratic boosters of a global Pax Americana or any other? Paul’s letters have thus become a crucial site for a political renegotiation of religion that has opened new paths of inquiry for thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. All three have engaged with Paul in order to reformulate and to extend abiding political and theoretical concerns. Agamben argues that Walter Benjamin’s allusions to Paul’s letters signal a vital relation between Benjamin’s and Paul’s respective understandings of messianic time: a Benjaminian Paul becomes newly readable as addressing how one lives life in the state of exception. For Badiou, Paul emerges as “a poet-thinker of the event” (2). Paul’s uncompromising fidelity to the “Christ-event” and his articulation of the “discourse of truth” that the event underwrites makes Paul the template “for a new militant figure” (23, 6, 2). And, in league with Badiou, Žižek finds in Paul “an engaged position of struggle, an uncanny ‘interpellation’ beyond ideological interpellation” that cuts through liberal multiculturalism, pragmatic reformism, and desire stalled in transgression to allow for a “community (or, rather, collective) of believers” that is “held together not by a Master Signifier, but by fidelity to a Cause” (112, 138, 130).

 

Equally important to this turn to religion is Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, a text that worked to reassess Marx’s judgment of religious belief as ideology, and that has thus played an important role in the “return” of some on the academic left to religion. Indeed, over the last decade and a half, Derrida has intensively queried religion and religious texts, arguing that any renewed left project must come to terms with both the messianic promise implicit in Marx and the autoimmune complications of the messianic in the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Yet, unlike Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek, Derrida refrains from offering either an explicit re-evaluation of Paul’s letters or an endorsement of a “left” Paul. On the contrary, Derrida directly aligns Paul’s discourse on veiling and unveiling with the history of “truth as onto-logical revelation” that Derrida works to transcend (“Silkworm” 83). Given Derrida’s relative reserve on the subject, is a rapprochement between Paul and Derrida conceivable? Are there Pauline aspects to Derrida’s texts and deconstructive logistics available in Paul’s letters? Should we add Derrida to the growing list of thinkers for whom Paul is a political friend?

 

Theodore W. Jennings’s Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice works to answer just such questions. Jennings wants to show how Derrida’s writings can illuminate Paul’s Letter to the Romans and, more specifically, the apostle’s various claims about justice. Jennings argues that Derrida and Paul resonate intriguingly with one another because both share a passion for justice and for thinking through the various aporias that the pursuit of justice entails. Jennings’s chapters juxtapose Paul and Derrida on law, violence, gift, faith, hospitality, and pardon in order to make sense of that resonance.

 

Jennings convincingly elaborates a number of striking parallels between Paul and Derrida. For instance, Jennings argues that Derrida’s claims in “The Force of Law” about the ways in which justice necessarily exceeds law give us a new way to understand Paul’s distinction in Romans between law and justice. For Derrida, justice exceeds law as law’s condition of (im)possibility; Jennings reads Paul as relating law to justice in a similar manner. This reading brings Paul much closer to Derrida’s focus on justice as a crucially political question.

 

The English-language tradition of theological commentary on Romans tends to understand Paul as concerned with a personal, moral uprightness as opposed to politics as such. To loosen this tradition’s hold, Jennings argues that while the terms in Romans that stem from the Greek root dik– (dikaios, dikaiosune, dikaioo, dikaioma, dikaiosis, etc.) tend to appear in English as words related to the idea “righteousness,” these terms are better translated as variations on the word “justice.” Take the following example from Romans: “Do not put your members at sin’s disposal as weapons of wickedness [adikias], but . . . offer your members to God as weapons of uprightness [dikaiosunes]” (Romans 6:13). The translation of adikias as “wickedness” and of dikaiosunes as “uprightness” (or as “righteousness” [NRSV]) obscures what Jennings identifies as Paul’s emphasis on an opposition between justice (dikaiosunes) and injustice (adikias). Jennings thus retrieves Paul as a specifically political thinker who, in writing on the relation between justice and injustice, offers an account of political life under empire.

 

This retrieval continues with Jennings’s claim that in Romans Paul addresses both Mosaic Law and Roman law as complexly related to and yet finally distinct from the event of justice. The Paul obsessed with beating down the Mosaic Law (Torah) might, in other words, be a caricature bequeathed to us by such theologians as Martin Luther, who depicts Paul as having “a contempt for the Law of Moses” and as elaborating a violent theological devaluation of the Law as starkly opposed to Christian grace (241). Luther’s Paul ominously declares, “the Law must be crucified,” foreshadowing Luther’s Against the Jews and Their Lies, in which Luther recommends that Christians burn synagogues and forbid rabbis, “under threat of death,” from teaching (245; qtd. in Hall 45). Contra Luther, Jennings finds a more subtle Paul who works instead to define grace as the law’s supplement: without grace, law cannot realize justice. Like Derrida, Paul interrogates the relation of justice to law in general, however much Paul’s letters focus on the commandments Moses brought down from Sinai. For Paul as well as for Derrida, law executes justice. Justice only has a chance if law exists (justice’s occurrence depends on institutions of law acting upon demands for justice); yet law inevitably falls short of and even thwarts justice. On the one hand, law only exists as law in reference to justice; on the other hand, law becomes unjust when it is thought of as a closed system immune to the demands of justice.

 

Jennings reads Jesus’s crucifixion as an instance of the law executing justice. Though both can legitimately claim to carry out justice, Roman law and Mosaic Law each had a hand in the execution of the one who for Paul embodied divine justice. Thus, neither Mosaic Law nor Roman law can be a perfectly adequate vehicle for divine justice. Law’s death-dealing limits emerge from its very effort to bring about the justice that law inevitably betrays in practice. The hope for justice at once provokes law into action and exposes law as unjust. Here Jennings shows another point at which Paul and Derrida overlap. For Derrida, justice is the undeconstructible source of the law’s deconstruction, so that “Deconstruction is justice. . . . Deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of law” (“Force” 243). In this interval, Paul takes his seemingly ambivalent stance towards law. The impression of ambivalence recedes when, thanks to Jennings, we see that Paul, desiring justice, can neither simply embrace nor simply reject the law.

 

Jennings argues in related terms that deconstruction neither finishes law off nor brings forward a new law. Rather, deconstruction returns one to the realization that no effort one makes to pursue justice by acting on or reforming existing law can result in a “good conscience.” To rest easy in the assumption that one has met one’s responsibilities to justice defines “good conscience.” In the interval between deconstructible law and undeconstructible justice, one undergoes the traumatic realization that any simply lawful action one takes will fail to satisfy the “demand for infinite justice” (“Force” 248). “Incalculable justice commands calculation,” but any legal calculation one makes to redress a transgression compromises justice (257). Given this aporia, the assertion of a “good conscience” becomes the alibi of those who collaborate in a violent erasure of the interval between law and justice. Jennings links Derrida’s rejection of “good conscience” to Paul’s impatience with “boasting”: “Where, then, is there room for boasting? It is ruled out! On what principle? On the principle of deeds? No, but on the principle of faith. For we maintain that a human being is justified by faith apart from deeds prescribed by the law” (Romans 3.27). Paul confronts antagonists who claim that their adherence to law proves their justness. But for Paul, such a claim is “boasting,” a self-interested forgetting of the irreducibility of divine justice to law. This forgetting leaves one open to accepting the violence institutions call lawful.

 

Though the crucifixion exemplifies such lawful violence, any and every law emerges as crucifixional insofar as it sacrifices Pauline divine justice or Derridean infinite justice to the preservation of existing institutions. No “deed” or “work” of law, to use Paul’s terms, can escape crucifixionality because any “deed” or “work” only counts as such within existing legal institutions and thus necessarily reinforces those same legal institutions. The same will be true for any reformed institution of law. Paul insists that the only hope for untangling oneself from the crucifixional aspect of law is God’s free gift of grace. All “those who receive the abundance of God’s grace and his gift of justice” become just; they are “justified freely by his grace” (Romans 5:17, translation modified; Romans 3:24). For Paul, one becomes just not by one’s deeds but by the gift of grace, a gift one receives irrespective of any work of law one either does or does not perform. Grace alone allows one to fulfill the law and to achieve justice. The event of grace as gift both exceeds the economics of works and allows a work of law to arrive at justice. Since a demand for infinite justice motivates law, no work is sufficient to clear one’s debt to the law. Only in grace is one justified, so justice too is God’s gift. No action can pay for grace; one can only have faith that grace and thus justice will come.

 

Paul’s notion of grace both foreshadows and finds clarification in Derrida’s writings about the gift. And, as Jennings points out, gift and justice are for Derrida intimately related concepts. Jennings cites Derrida’s statement that his analyses of “the gift beyond exchange and distribution . . . are also, through and through, at least oblique discourses on justice” (“Force” 235). Derrida’s writings on the gift allow one better to understand the paradoxical interaction in Romans between the aneconomic gift of grace/justice and the law, which is inseparable from the economics of works. Referring to Derrida’s work on the gift, Jennings argues that far from making justice superfluous, the Pauline gift of grace is that which allows justice to happen.

 

Jennings thus helps us to understand that, for Paul and for Derrida, one cannot simply make justice happen. On the one hand, justice demands that one work to prepare the best terms for its arrival, but, on the other, when and if justice arrives, it arrives as a necessarily unprogrammable event. Jennings’s emphasis on justice as gift finds confirmation in one of Derrida’s last essays, “‘Justices,’” in which Derrida writes that, to be among the just is a “gift that one cannot acquire”: “The just one has a gift” (691). Preliminary to the arrival of the gift of justice is forgiveness. In Romans, the just have been forgiven, even for their participation in the crucifixional dynamic of the law. The gift of grace and thus justice arrive precisely in the forgiving of the unforgivable; again, Jennings’s point is that, like grace, forgiveness allows justice to happen. Derrida leads the way to this understanding of forgiveness or pardon in Paul when he argues that one can only meaningfully forgive the unforgivable. Any transgression or fault that could simply be redressed by paying a fine or undergoing a penalty does not require or solicit what Derrida calls “pure” or “unconditional” forgiveness. Only the utterly and frighteningly unforgivable can be forgiven.

 

A book-length study of Derrida in relation to Paul is overdue, and Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice offers readers of Derrida many new insights. Even so, Jennings leaves aside a number of difficult questions as to how and why Paul and Derrida might diverge in their thinking. At several points in Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice, Jennings acknowledges that Paul and especially some of Paul’s theological exegetes (Luther, for example) bear responsibility for the grievous history of anti-Semitism, religiously excused colonial violence, sexism, and homophobia. Why does one not find an extensive chapter in Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul that grapples with this responsibility? Although Jennings indicates in his conclusion that he is preparing just such work, the avoidance of the question of Paul’s responsibility for injustice may find an explanation in the Derrida Jennings brings to Paul. Jennings emphasizes the Derrida of such texts as “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, Of Hospitality, and On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, rather than the Derrida of such texts as Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology. That is, Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul tends to avoid the Derrida whose deconstruction of the opposition between letter and spirit stems from his passion for justice. Rather than a solution or answer to justice’s aporias, this Derrida would arguably find urgently problematic Paul’s statement in Romans that “one is not a Jew outwardly only; nor is real circumcision external, in the flesh. Rather, one is a Jew in secret, and real circumcision is of the heart, a thing of the spirit, not of the letter” (2:28-29). Outside versus inside, tangible flesh versus intangible heart, letter versus spirit: such oppositions are at work when Paul claims that the believer, as “a letter of Christ,” is “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Corinthians 3.3). And these oppositions are crucial to Paul’s effort to distinguish the “new covenant” in Christ from the “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets” (2 Corinthians 3.6, 3.7). The new covenant is “not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3.6). The Paul who allegorizes the Mosaic Law as a “ministry of death” is the Paul of whom Derrida can write that he is “this very mild, this terrible Paul [,] . . . whose monstrous progeny are our history and culture” (“Silkworm” 76).

Works Cited

 

• Agamben, Giorgio. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Trans. Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
• Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” Trans. Mary Quaintance. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. 230-98.
• —. “‘Justices.’” Critical Inquiry 31.3 (2005): 689-721.
• —. “A Silkworm of One’s Own.” Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Veils. Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. 17-108.
• Hall, Sidney G., III. Christian Anti-Semitism and Paul’s Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
• Luther, Martin. “Death to the Law.” Trans. Jaroslav Pelikan. The Writings of St. Paul. Ed. Wayne A. Meeks. New York: Norton, 1972. 236-50.
• The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Ronald E. Murphy. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
• Romans. Trans. Joseph A. Fitzmyer. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.

 

Chad Wickman

Department of English
Kent State University
cwickman@kent.edu

 

Review of: Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

 

Giovanna Borradori’s Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida stages an encounter between two philosophers whose respective bodies of work are as vast as they are vastly different from one another. For Borradori, however, Habermas and Derrida share a common bond–each has looked to the uses and the limits of Enlightenment philosophy for perspective on current global crises, particularly those related to 9/11. Borradori attempts to reveal this commonality by asking similar questions in her conversations with Habermas and Derrida. While there is no direct dialogue between Habermas and Derrida in the book, readers can nonetheless see how the two contend with each other and with contemporary issues ranging from global terrorism to international law. Philosophy in a Time of Terror invites readers to think about how philosophy can help us to understand 9/11 and the crises of which it is part.

 

Although Habermas and Derrida have found ways to collaborate politically (both, for instance, participated in the publication of a May 2003 statement in the Frankfurter Allgemeine and La Liberation that called for a unification of European foreign policy as a response to U.S. hegemony in world affairs), that collaboration has taken place in spite of certain basic philosophical differences. One need look no further than Habermas’s critique of Derrida in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, or Derrida’s own familiar suspicions regarding the universalism and rationality to which Habermas subscribes. Part of Borradori’s task is in that case to account for a dispute that has long existed between Habermas and Derrida. In her introduction to the volume, she describes how Enlightenment ideals figure differently in Habermas’s and Derrida’s respective philosophies. If, as part of the tradition of the Frankfurt School, Habermas aims at an “improvement of the present human situation” dependent on a “belief in principles whose validity is universal because they hold across historical and cultural specificities,” that belief would seem to run up against Derrida’s distrust of the notion of the universal as that which can “impose a set of standards that benefit some and bring disadvantage to others, depending on context” (15-16). That Derrida also believes in a responsibility that “articulates the demand for universalism associated with the Enlightenment” suggests to Borradori that there are important points of overlap between the two philosophers (15-6). The connections Borradori makes between Habermas, Derrida, and the Enlightenment offer a refreshing perspective on a longstanding debate.

 

It would, however, be wrong to see Philosophy in a Time of Terror as a treatise that seeks simply to unite these figures. While Borradori is interested in identifying continuities between Habermas and Derrida vis-à-vis the Enlightenment, she does so with another interest in mind: to demonstrate how philosophy can help make sense of global terrorism, 9/11, and the current state of international relations and international law:

 

While for Habermas terrorism is the effect of the trauma of modernization, which has spread around the world at a pathological speed, Derrida sees terrorism as a symptom of a traumatic element intrinsic to modern experience, whose focus is always on the future, somewhat pathologically understood as promise, hope, and self-affirmation. Both are somber reflections on the legacy of the Enlightenment: the relentless search for a critical perspective that must start with self-examination. (22)

 

Borradori thus gestures towards themes that readers can expect to find in the dialogues and reveals the critical perspective she would have readers adopt as they “walk along the same path” as Habermas and Derrida (48). Borradori clears this path for readers by including essays that situate each dialogue within the larger context of Habermas’s and Derrida’s work. Although the terms of these summaries will be familiar to the already initiated, they offer the uninitiated reader a chance to enter directly an ongoing dialogue between Habermas and Derrida. It is to Borradori’s credit that her book allows readers to see so clearly how Habermas and Derrida position themselves in relation to these pressing topics.

 

The terms of Borradori’s questions reflect her broader aim of understanding how Habermas and Derrida situate 9/11 in a cultural, historical, and philosophical context. With her initial question, for instance, she asks each to explain the significance of 9/11 as an “event.” Habermas, for his part, offers an historical analogy, suggesting that 9/11 is similar to the outbreak of World War I in that it “signaled the end of a peaceful and, in retrospect, somewhat unsuspecting era” (26). He explains, however, that the attack on the World Trade Center was itself unprecedented because of “the symbolic force of the targets struck” (28). For Derrida, the way the attack has been named–“as a date and nothing more” (85)–signifies that “we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this ‘thing’ that has just happened, this supposed ‘event’” (86). We are not only unable appropriately to name and, in doing so, to grasp the significance of 9/11, but we must also live in a world where terrorist attacks hinder our ability to carry on our lives. Since there is no way to know when or where a terrorist attack might occur, a sense of impending doom threatens us just as it keeps us from coming to grips with terror already faced. Derrida writes, “there is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from the possibility to come of the worst, from the repetition to come–though worse” (97). This is part of the power wielded by terrorists. They do not seek to overthrow but to destabilize the systems of countries such as the U.S. Indeed, it is through the symbolic force of their acts, as Habermas suggests, that they incite terror and, thereby, inflict their wounds.

 

Habermas and Derrida also share an interest in the ways in which the rest of the world has been affected by and has responded to the attack. For Habermas and Derrida, the Bush administration in particular should be held accountable for its actions, which, they agree, have tended to increase rather than reduce the potential for violence. This criticism stems from the nature of global terrorism and the administration’s response to it. Today’s terrorists gain power not by overthrowing, but by destabilizing the systems of world superpowers. Because terrorists work at the level of the symbolic, they wage war without marching onto a battlefield and cannot be defeated like a typical enemy. As Habermas notes, “the global terror that culminated in the September 11 attack bears the anarchistic traits of an impotent revolt directed against an enemy that cannot be defeated in any pragmatic sense” (34). This kind of conflict can benefit both “sides”: it benefits terrorists because it enables them to continue to wage war on a world stage, and it benefits governments like the U.S. because a “war on terror” is a useful political tool for assuring that under-motivated military and political actions will be tolerated indefinitely. This scenario may appear obvious to some, but its specific mechanisms, as Habermas and Derrida make clear, must be addressed if it is to be in any way ameliorated.

 

Habermas locates the potential causes of global terrorism in the clash between religious fundamentalism and modernization. He sees fundamentalism as analogous to a “repression of striking cognitive dissonances” that “occurs when the innocence of the epistemological situation of an all-encompassing world perspective is lost and when, under the cognitive conditions of scientific knowledge and of religious pluralism, a return to the exclusivity of premodern belief attitudes is propagated” (32). This means that for Habermas modernization is largely responsible for religious fundamentalism. Secularization and economic growth, as exemplified in and by the West, is a threat to many non-Western countries that have been “split up into winner, beneficiary, and loser countries” (32). A country like the U.S. serves not only as a model of what many countries strive to attain, but also “as a scapegoat for the Arab world’s own, very real experiences of loss, suffered by populations torn out of their cultural traditions during processes of accelerated modernization” (32).

 

While Derrida does not ignore the role that fundamentalism plays in terrorist acts, he takes a different approach in explaining what he feels are the origins of global terrorism. For him, global terrorism is made possible by an “autoimmunitary process,” meaning that imperial powers in the West make possible the very attacks that they hope to preempt. He writes, “as we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (94). Derrida categorizes autoimmunity in the case of 9/11 into three moments of “reflex and reflection” that involve: 1) “the Cold War in the head”; 2) “worse than the Cold War”; and 3) “the vicious circle of repression.” The first moment of “suicidal autoimmunity” occurs when a country trains the people who will later terrorize it. The second follows when the world is put at risk by the “terrorists” who were initially enlisted as “freedom fighters.” No longer affiliated with the state that funded them, these terrorists become a risk to a world that has no real way to appease them other than to reverse the process of modernization that helped make them powerful in the first place. The last moment, according to Derrida, is exemplified by the war on terrorism. As he suggests, such a “war” will continue to be waged indefinitely since civilians and other insurgents, people who consider the acts by countries such as the United States terroristic, will continue to fight back using their own means. For Derrida, this circle of violence will continue if left unchecked by international law.

 

On the subject of international law, Habermas and Derrida share similar ideals even if they endorse different methods for realizing those ideals. It is also on the subject of international law that their ties to the Enlightenment become most apparent. While Habermas endorses universalism in various forms, he also understands that universal concepts can be used ignominiously: “the universalistic discourses of law and morality can be abused as a particularly insidious form of legitimation since particular interests can hide behind the glimmering façade of reasonable universality” (42). By the same token, he claims, “just as every objection raised against the selective or one-eyed application of universalistic standards must already presuppose these same standards, in the same manner, any deconstructive unmasking of the ideologically concealing use of universalistic discourses actually presupposes the critical viewpoints advanced by these same discourses” (42).

 

Habermas’s reliance upon universals is, of course, at odds with Derrida’s rejection of them. But readers might be surprised to find that Derrida comes close to advocating the need for what Habermas refers to as “universal discourses of law.” Derrida writes:

 

Despite my very strong reservations about the American, indeed European, political posture, about the "international antiterrorist" coalition, despite all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy, international law, and the very international institutions that the states of this "coalition" themselves founded and supported up to a certain point, I would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the "political," democracy, international law, international institutions, and so on. (113-14)

 

Derrida does not claim that international institutions are without fault. Indeed, one of his most important critiques of organizations such as the United Nations is that the countries that make up those organizations do not always abide by the laws they create. Still, as he suggests, international institutions and the possibility of their “perfectibility” are necessary, for if there is to be any semblance of stability or accountability in the world, it must come about both through constant revision of existing institutions and through their promise, and perhaps their ability, to help establish and maintain open, equitable, and peaceful relations among nations and peoples.

 

Both Habermas and Derrida see cosmopolitanism as one way to achieve a modicum of peace and stability across the globe, but neither would stop at achieving a cosmopolitan world order. For if cosmopolitanism broadly construed implies the belief that all individuals are citizens of the world, then the term itself carries with it the possibility that people can be defined as citizens within and apart from states to which they may or may not belong as legal subjects. This notion has benefits–it could make way for mutual respect and perspective-taking, for a start–but it may also have drawbacks, particularly if being a citizen means subjecting oneself to doctrinal laws and beliefs. It is a useful concept if it is not seen as an end in itself. Accordingly, Derrida offers a particular way to move beyond cosmopolitanism:

 

What I call "democracy to come" would go beyond the limits of cosmopolitanism, that is, of a world citizenship. It would be more in line with what lets singular beings (anyone) "live together," there where they are not yet defined by citizenship, that is, by their condition as lawful "subjects" in a state or legitimate members of a nation-state or even of a confederation or world state. (130)

 

While Derrida would do away with the nation-state, he would not replace it with a world-state in which all peoples would be “united” under a single regime as world citizens. Indeed, such a position would limit his notion of “democracy to come.” His notion of “democracy to come” bypasses the limitations of cosmopolitanism because it is less about individuals defined as lawful subjects or citizens and more about living together as “singular beings.” “Democracy to come” can, then, be seen as the promise of an equitable and perhaps peaceful future that is embodied in the present. If seen in this way, Derrida offers not a solution to specific problems of international law but, instead, a scenario for readers to consider, an ideal that, even if not immediately realizable, could nonetheless prompt thinking and dialogue.

 

Like Derrida, Habermas believes in cosmopolitanism but also notes its flaws: “the ontologization of the friend-foe relation suggests that attempts at a cosmopolitan juridification of the relations between the belligerent subjects of international law are fated to serve the masking of particular interests in universalistic disguise” (38). Habermas sees cosmopolitanism as useful, but only if the concept involves rational communication and what he calls “mutual perspective-taking”: “in the course of mutual perspective-taking there can develop a common horizon of background assumptions in which both sides accomplish an interpretation that is not ethnocentrically adopted or converted but, rather, intersubjectively shared” (37). Habermas’s ideal vision, like Derrida’s, invites readers to consider a world in which citizens share an equal opportunity to live how they wish to live, speak how they wish to speak, feel how they wish to feel. Although both share a somewhat utopian vision, it is Derrida who hits upon a crucial critique of such a world. He understands that equitable communication as Habermas describes it would involve universal access to the same type of reason. Derrida questions universal reason, but he also considers the possibility of such reason necessary when addressing issues of international law, global terrorism, and globalization in general.

 

This implicit debate between Habermas and Derrida is, in fact, most direct–and most lively–in their discussion of the notions of tolerance and hospitality. Habermas emphasizes the notion of tolerance, despite certain limitations. He understands that tolerance is problematic in that the concept “possesses [in] itself the kernel of intolerance” (41). This is so because tolerance involves setting boundaries that one allows others to cross. In short, tolerance suggests that a stronger person or nation allows a weaker person or nation to act as he, she, or it pleases in relation to a certain limit. Beyond that limit, tolerance devolves into intolerance. Habermas counters this scenario by explaining how a constitutional democracy does not involve a single person or group tolerating another: “On the basis of the citizens’ equal rights and reciprocal respect for each other, nobody possesses the privilege of setting the boundaries of tolerance from the viewpoint of their own preferences and value-orientations” (41). Anticipating Derrida’s critique of tolerance, Habermas notes, “straight deconstruction of the concept of tolerance falls into a trap, since the constitutional state contradicts precisely the premise from which the paternalistic sense of the traditional concept of ‘tolerance’ derives” (41).

 

Derrida picks up where Habermas leaves off, criticizing tolerance while endorsing his own notion of hospitality: “Tolerance remains a scrutinized hospitality, always under surveillance, parsimonious and protective of its sovereignty” (128). As Derrida suggests, tolerance does more to protect the hegemony of the person or state that tolerates than it does to achieve equality. Opposed to this necessarily limited tolerance is Derrida’s hospitality: “Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other” (128-29). Given this definition of hospitality, it seems as if Derrida chooses to ignore the concept’s applicability. Not so. As he writes, “an unconditional hospitality is, to be sure, practically impossible to live; one cannot in any case, and by definition, organize it” (129). This is not to say that hospitality is impractical, even if it is “practically impossible to live”; rather, it may be that the realization of the concept lies in the ability or willingness of individuals, not nation-states, to embrace it. Put another way, hospitality may be realized in practice by individuals even if it may be unrealistic at this historical moment for nation-states to do the same. In this sense, hospitality at once resists unified organization by a nation-state as it encourages unified understanding among individuals who would accept it as a way of relating to others in the world.

 

For Borradori, the realization of Derrida’s vision is possible only if philosophy plays a central role in understanding 9/11, global terrorism, and international law. Indeed, part of her aim in Philosophy in a Time of Terror is to think how philosophers might be involved in helping the world understand and, perhaps, mourn 9/11 and the events that have followed it. Habermas, for one, does not seem to believe that intellectuals have a specific role in offering the world ways to cope with 9/11 or with global terrorism. He feels that we should exercise caution when delegating responsibility to specific groups who may or may not have the expertise to make informed decisions: “If one is not exactly an economist, one refrains from judging complex economic developments” (30). Derrida has a different vision of the philosopher’s role in dealing with the trauma provoked by 9/11: “Though I am incapable of knowing who today deserves the name philosopher . . . I would be tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, reflect in a responsible fashion on these [Borradori’s] questions and demand accountability from those in charge of public discourse, those responsible for the language and institutions of international law” (106). For Derrida, the responsibility of the philosopher is to find responsible ways to make sense out of tragedy, even if it means criticizing those very countries that have been victims of global terrorism. He could, that is, “condemn unconditionally . . . the attack of September 11 without having to ignore the real or alleged conditions that made it possible” (107).

 

It is possible, I think, to take something from both Habermas’s and Derrida’s positions. Habermas is right to suggest that philosophers and intellectuals are not necessarily expert in all areas of war and conflict and should not act as “armchair strategists” (30). Derrida, in line with Borradori, offers important insights as well. To understand global terrorism requires that we understand its causes and effects. From economics to politics, from international law to human rights, philosophy provides a discourse that can help the world better understand and learn from global terrorism, its effects, and its causes. Ultimately, the dialogues in Philosophy in a Time of Terror reveal that the differences between Habermas and Derrida outweigh the similarities. Even so, readers have reason to find hope in the way Habermas and Derrida consider each other’s differences. And this, I think, speaks to one of the most significant messages in Philosophy in a Time of Terror. If Habermas and Derrida, rationalism and deconstruction, have found ways to communicate, to collaborate, then it is possible for others to do the same. It is up to us to begin and to sustain dialogue with those of whom we have tended to think without toleration.

 

 

R. John Williams

Department of Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine
rjwillia@uci.edu

 

Review of: Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Voyous: Deux essays sur la raison.Paris: Editions Galilée, 2003.

 

 

Well, I’ve always regarded the link . . . I’ve never really perceived much of a link to tell you the truth.

 

–Noam Chomsky

 

In the quotation above, Noam Chomsky attempts to answer a question put to him by Jonathan Ree in an interview for Radical Magazine about the relation between his theoretical work in linguistics and his activist and anarchist work in politics. In this interview and elsewhere, Chomsky denies that there is such a link, even though some of his readers might find that disconnect unfortunate. “I would be very pleased,” Chomsky says in another interview, “to be able to discover intellectually convincing connections between my own anarchist convictions on the one hand and what I think I can demonstrate or at least begin to see about the nature of human intelligence on the other, but I simply can’t find intellectually satisfying connections between those two domains.”¹ If, however, Chomsky rejects the possibility of those links, Jacques Derrida’s Rogues: Two Essays on Reason seems on the contrary to revel in making “intellectually satisfying connections” between the realms of epistemology and political philosophy.

 

Certainly, it makes sense to understand Derrida in his recent work as directly engaged with issues of contemporary political philosophy, even as he has continued to revise and advance a theory of language and thought which he began to develop in the 1960s. The marketing description of Rogues, for example, advertises “unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current democratic realities,” claiming that the essays “are highly engaged with the current political events of the post-9/11 world,” and Derrida’s publishers will no doubt continue to accentuate this ongoing political relevance. But if it seems to some readers that Derrida’s work has become more political in recent years, Derrida himself refuses to see this as something new. In the two essays on reason that make up Rogues, Derrida attempts self-consciously to revisit and revise his earlier projects, bringing out their political relevance. For instance, in a passage on paradoxical tensions within the idea of “democracy,” Derrida argues,

 

there never was in the 1980s or 1990s, as has sometimes been claimed, a political turn or ethical turn in "deconstruction," at least not as I experience it. The thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political, of the contour and limits of the political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune double bind of the democratic. (39)

 

Derrida characterizes his initial, meta-performative revision of structuralist linguistics (différance) in terms of its relation to the empirical and ontological limitations of democracy important to his recent work.

 

The two masterfully translated essays collected in this volume were initially presented as lectures, one at Cerisy-la-Salle on 15 July 2002 and the other at the opening of the twenty-ninth Congrés de l’Association des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue française [ASPLF] at the University of Nice, 27 August 2002. Mixing straightforward political commentary (on 9/11, the war on terrorism, human cloning, etc.) with discussions of political philosophy (in passages on Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Nancy, and others), the essays in Rogues work together to deconstruct “democracy” as a mode of sovereignty.

 

In his preface to the two lectures, Derrida quotes from La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” in which a ravenous wolf accuses an innocent lamb of having muddied the wolf’s drinking water. The lamb protests, citing the persuasive evidence that the lamb is in fact 20 feet downstream from the wolf and therefore could not have muddied the wolf’s water. “You’re muddying it!” the wolf insists, “And I know that, last year, you spoke ill of me.” But the lamb protests again, “How could I do that? Why I’d not yet even come to be . . . at my dam’s teat I still nurse.” At every point of defense, the wolf seems to win out, and, in the end, “the Wolf dragged and ate his midday snack. So trial and judgment stood” (x). The moral of the fable comes, in a manner that seems characteristic of the exercise of sovereignty, at the beginning of La Fontaine’s version, before the narrative has unfolded (the decision before the evidence, the judgment before the trial): “The strong are always best at proving they’reright, / Witness the case we’re now going to cite.”

 

Derrida’s preface to these two essays thus invokes an old and venerable tradition of thinking about the relation between force and law and, indeed, the priority of force over law, which “long preceded and long followed La Fontaine, along with Bodin, Hobbes, Grotius, Pascal, Rousseau, and so many others, a tradition that runs, say, from Plato to Carl Schmitt” (xi). But at the same time Derrida wonders, “What political narrative, in the same tradition, might today illustrate this fabulous morality? Does this morality teach us, as is often believed, that force ‘trumps’ law? Or else, something quite different, that the very concept of law, that juridical reason itself, includes a priori a possible recourse to constraint or coercion and, thus, to a certain violence?” (xi). Of course, following Derrida’s answers to these questions requires not only a close reading of these two essays, but also an understanding of much of his later work and especially of his last lectures and seminars on “The Beast and the Sovereign,” to which he refers several times in Rogues.[2]

 

packed full of wolves from the four corners of the world, the seminar [on the Beast and the Sovereign] was in large part a lycology and a genelycology, a genealogical theory of the wolf (lycos), of all the figures of the wolf and the werewolf in the problematic of sovereignty. It just so happens that the word loup-garou in Rousseau's Confessions has sometimes been translated into English not as werewolf but as outlaw. We will see a bit later that the outlaw is a synonym often used by the American administration along with or in place of rogue in the expression "rogue state." (69)

 

The first and longer essay in Rogues, “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?),” was presented at a conference entitled “The Democracy to Come (Around Jacques Derrida).” This phrase, “the democracy to come,” echoes throughout Rogues as a kind of refrain. “Democracy to come” comes to mean different, even contradictory things over the course of Derrida’s argument. “Democracy to come” suggests, on the one hand, a protest “against all naïveté and every political abuse, every rhetoric that would present as a present or existing democracy, as a de facto democracy, what remains inadequate to the democratic demand” (86), and on the other hand, something charged and pregnant on the horizon, an “event” with all of the political and sexual promise of what is “to come.” It signals, in other words, the political and the biological, “force without force, incalculable singularity and calculable equality, commensurability and incommensurability, heteronomy and autonomy, indivisible sovereignty and divisible or shared sovereignty, an empty name, a despairing messianicity or a messianicity in despair, and so on” (86).

 

All of the binaries that Derrida balances in the notion of a “democracy to come” turn on the fulcrum of what he calls the paradox of “autoimmunity.” Autoimmunization, as any doctor could tell you, involves a condition in which the cell-mediated response of an immune system begins to act against the constituents of a body’s own tissues. That is, the body becomes confused, and supposes that it has somehow begun to be dangerous to itself, and so reacts accordingly. In a like manner, “democracy” seems to require a certain “auto-immunization” in order to survive, as when populations decide democratically to abolish democracy. Here Derrida points to the example of Algeria:

 

The Algerian government and a large part, although not a majority, of the Algerian people (as well as people outside Algeria) thought that the electoral process under way would lead democratically to the end of democracy. They thus preferred to put an end to it themselves. They decided in a sovereign fashion to suspend, at least provisionally, democracy for its own good, so as to take care of it, so as to immunize it against a much worse and very likely assault. . . . There is something paradigmatic in this autoimmune suicide: fascist and Nazi totalitarians came into power or ascended to power through formally normal and formally democratic electoral processes. (33)

 

Derrida also points to the example of the aftermath of 9/11 in the United States and elsewhere, where a phantom “war on terror” means, at least to some, that the United States “must restrict within its own country certain so-called democratic freedoms and the exercise of certain rights by, for example, increasing the powers of police investigations and interrogations, without anyone, any democrat, being really able to oppose such measures” (40). This is not to say that 9/11 created this situation, even if that event “media-theatricalized” the effects and preconditions of an autoimmunization already in progress (xiii).

 

Still, as useful as the concept of “autoimmunization” is, the notion that “democracy” operates within a monopolizing code of “exceptions” is not new; in the seventh chapter of Rogues Derrida concedes as much: “Had I said or meant only that, wouldn’t I have been simply reproducing, even plagiarizing, the classical discourses of political philosophy?” (73). In fact, Derrida reminds us, Rousseau’s On the Social Contract argues that in its “strict” sense democracy is impossible: “Taking the term in the strict sense, a true democracy has never existed and never will” (73). So what, then, does Derrida contribute to the discourse of political philosophy?

 

There are a number of important interventions in Rogues. In the first essay, Derrida asks: “can one and/or must one speak democratically of democracy?” (71). This question calls attention to the general epistemological predicament of explaining democracy (which Derrida has already shown to be an aporetic concept) so that “anyone” could understand it. It is a surprisingly simple question that points to the difficulty in achieving any kind of true democracy. As Derrida explains, to “speak democratically of democracy,” or to say that “anyone must be able to understand, in democracy, the univocal meaning of the word and the concept democracy” is to imply “that anybody or anyone can or may, or should be able to, or should have the right to, or ought to, and so on” (71). Significantly, the italicized portions of that last quotation were delivered in English, the rest of it in French, even as the previous paragraph is sprinkled with words in Greek and German. Not surprisingly, Derrida implies in the following paragraphs that it is not possible to speak democratically of democracy, for to do so, “it would be necessary, through some circular performativity and through the political violence of some enforcing rhetoric, some force of law, to impose a meaning on the word democratic and thus produce a consensus that one pretends, by fiction, to be established and accepted–or at the very least possible and necessary: on the horizon” (73).

 

This refusal to allow for some fixed and stable speaking “democratically of democracy” may be what allows Derrida to posit “intellectually satisfying connections” between his theoretical and political work. By contrast, Chomsky, as I have mentioned, sees no problem with “speaking democratically of democracy” and so resists any effort to posit necessary links between a specialized theory and politics. In Language and Responsibility (1979), for example, Chomsky emphasizes the danger in attempting to find links between his writing in linguistics and politics:

 

One must be careful not to give the impression, which in any event is false, that only intellectuals equipped with special training are capable of [social and political analysis]. In fact that is just what the intelligentsia would often like us to think: they pretend to be engaged in an esoteric enterprise, inaccessible to simple people. But that's nonsense. . . . The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries. For that reason alone one should be careful not to link the analysis of social issues with scientific topics which, for their part, do require special training and techniques, and thus a special intellectual frame of reference before they can be seriously investigated. (3)

 

Whereas Derrida’s poststructuralist stance uncovers problems in the very idea that “democracy” could as a concept be understood, Chomsky’s socialist libertarian work relies on the assumption that, given the correct information, people will arrive at the truth of a given political situation–a difference that helps to explain their distinct approaches to the matter of bridging theory and politics.

 

If Derrida and Chomsky are coming from different places, the former nevertheless draws productively on the latter in Rogues. In what may be the most interesting chapter of the book, “(No) More Rogue States,” Derrida refers to Chomsky’s Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs in order to present the hypothesis that “if we have been speaking of rogue states for a relatively short time now, and in a recurrent way only since the so-called end of the so-called Cold War, the time is soon coming when we will no longer speak of them” (95). We will no longer speak of them because, in the first place, people have since 9/11 begun to take a more active and instrumental interest in the official discourse of “rogue states,” which means that it will be more and more difficult to speak of them other than in the self-contradictory terms of U.S. political discourse.

 

[Chomsky's] Rogue States lays out an unimpeachable case, supported by extensive, overwhelming, although in general not widely publicized or utilized information, against American foreign policy. The crux of the argument, in a word, is that the most roguish of rogue states are those that circulate and make use of a concept like "rogue state," with the language, rhetoric, juridical discourse, and strategico-military consequences we all know. The first and most violent of rogue states are those that have ignored and continue to violate the very international law they claim to champion, the law in whose name they speak and in whose name they go to war against so-called rogue states each time their interests so dictate. The name of these states? The United States. (96)

 

But if the United States seems the most roguish of rogue states, it is not the only one. All states, whether “democratic” or not, act according to the foundational logic of roguishness. Such is the fundamental clash between the demo– and the -cracy: “As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state” (102). There cannot be, in other words, a sovereign who is not also a rogue: “There are thus only rogue states. Potentially or actually. The state is voyou, a rogue, roguish. There are always (no) more rogue states than one thinks” (102). The parenthetical “no” is Derrida’s shorthand way of saying “when there are only rogues, then there are no more rogues” (103).

 

Another reason why, in Derrida’s hypothesis, the phrase “rogue states” will eventually disappear is that the hyper-theatricalized media aftermath of 9/11 illustrated an already obvious truth: “after the Cold War, the absolute threat no longer took a state form” (104). 9/11 simply announced or amplified this fact:

 

Such a situation rendered futile or ineffective all the rhetorical resources (not to mention military resources) spent on justifying the word war and the thesis that the "war against international terrorism" had to target particular states that give financial backing or logistical support or provide a safe haven for terrorism, states that, as is said in the United States, "sponsor" or "harbor" terrorists. All these efforts to identify "terrorist" states or rogue states are "rationalizations" aimed at denying not so much some absolute anxiety but the panic or terror before the fact that the absolute threat no longer comes from or is under the control of some state or some identifiable state form. (105-106)

 

If, however, the phrase “rogue states” has fallen or will shortly fall into desuetude, “rogue” is by itself still very much with us. In fact, the Pentagon now describes those soldiers accused of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib as “rogue soldiers,” a move that demonstrates the depth of Derrida’s contention that “abuse of power is constitutive of sovereignty itself” (102).

 

Another contribution made by Derrida’s Rogues occurs in the second lecture, at a moment when the aporetic aspect of democracy seems to have made political action all but impossible. What is one to do if democracy, in all its messy autoimmunity, must remain forever on the horizon, always only “to come”? What can we do while we wait for what is “to come”? In a complex, but strikingly lucid passage, Derrida attempts to answer these questions by referring to the question of “unconditionality.” Political philosophy has seemed fairly unanimous on the connection between unconditionality and sovereignty:

 

This inseparability or this alliance between sovereignty and unconditionality appears forever irreducible. Its resistance appears absolute and any separation impossible: for isn't sovereignty, especially in its modern political forms, as understood by Bodin, Rousseau, or Schmitt, precisely unconditional, absolute, and especially, as a result, indivisible? Is it not exceptionally sovereign insofar as it retains the right to the exception? The right to decide on the exception and the right to suspend rights and law [le droit]]? (141)

 

If sovereignty and unconditionality are inseparable, what would it mean to speak of their separation? Derrida argues that the “democracy to come” depends on our attempt to separate them: “It would be a question not only of separating this kind of sovereignty drive from the exigency for unconditionality as two symmetrically associated terms, but of questioning, critiquing, deconstructing, if you will, one in the name of the other” (143). That is to deconstruct sovereignty in the name of unconditionality. With this gesture, Derrida refers us again to some of his previous work:

 

Among the figures of unconditionality without sovereignty I have had occasion to privilege in recent years, there would be, for example, that of an unconditional hospitality that exposes itself without limit to the coming of the other, beyond rights and laws, beyond a hospitality conditioned by the right to asylum, by the right of immigration, by citizenship, and even by the right to universal hospitality, which still remains, for Kant, for example, under the authority of a political or cosmopolitical law. Only an unconditional hospitality can give meaning and practical rationality to a concept of hospitality. . . . Another example would be the unconditionality of the gift or of forgiveness. I have tried to show elsewhere exactly where the unconditionality required by the purity of such concepts leads us. A gift without calculable exchange, a gift worthy of this name, would not even appear as such to the donor or donee without the risk of reconstituting, through phenomenality . . . , a circle of economic reappropriation that would just as soon annul its event. Similarly, forgiveness can be given to the other or come from the other only beyond calculation, beyond apologies, amnesia, or amnesty, beyond acquittal or prescription, even beyond any asking for forgiveness, and thus beyond any transformative repentance, which is most often the stipulated condition for forgiveness, at least in what is most predominant in the tradition of the Abrahamic religions. (149)

 

Hospitality, the gift, forgiveness. These are difficult concepts, and it is difficult to imagine what forms they may take in our postmodern political sphere. But this invitation to imagine otherwise is necessary at a moment when the vulgar adhesive that joins unconditionality and sovereignty seems to be drying fast. Is Derrida’s complex mix of poststructural and political philosophy (presented within an “undemocratic” matrix of rhetorical play and discursive sophistication) more likely to split the atom of sovereign unconditionality than Noam Chomsky’s quasi-Cartesian attack on American exceptionalism? Fortunately, we need not answer that question absolutely, since both have something to offer; it is, however, important to keep asking.

 

Notes

 

1. Both interviews are featured in Achbar and Wintonick’s now-classic documentary “Manufacturing Consent–Noam Chomsky and the Media.” As recently as 2 November 2003, in an interview with the New York Times, Chomsky maintains that there is “virtually no connection” between his publications in linguistics and politics. Chomsky’s refusal to find a link between these domains has not prevented others from attempting to find it for him. See, for example, Salkie, chapter 9, “Connections.” The introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Noam Chomksy also contains a section on the unity of Chomsky’s theoretical and political thought.

 

2. The brief summary of Derrida’s seminar that follows is based on my notes of his lectures at the University of California, Irvine, from 2002-2004.

 

Works Cited

 

• Achbar, Mark and Peter Wintonick. Manufacturing Consent–Noam Chomsky and the Media. Zeitgeist Films, 2003.
• Chomsky, Noam. Language and Responsibility. New York: Pantheon, 1979.
• —. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. Cambridge: South End, 2000.
• Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry. 28 (Winter 2002): 369-418.
• Salkie, Raphael. The Chomsky Update: Linguistics and Politics. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990.

 

Fond Perdu, 2004 Collage. Acrylic on paper (29 x 44 cm). Gérard Titus-Carmel

Bob Perelman

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
perelman@english.upenn.edu

[To Jacques Derrida]
 

I was already iterable when I woke up this A. M.:
I had begun to write to [you]

 

in Philadelphia and am now in New York,
dragging a motley pageant of tenses

 

across the first sentence
which is only just now finishing.

 

The deadline for this piece
on the occasion of [your] death

 

had passed before I began
and of course it is even later now,

 

which iterates me more. Across the mirror
it must be strict and still, I imagine:

 

no iteration. But imagining
means nothing when words

 

have stopped moving.
Direct address between the living

 

and the dead is foolish, unless
some gemütlich, unheimlich correspondence course

 

has already been inaugurated,
and has either of [us] signed up for that?

 

Here, times and places still bleed into one another,
New York, Philadelphia, yesterday, two days later,

 

and we continue to cut ourselves.
Courting coincidence, possibly. Myself, twice

 

while making dinner, nicking one thumb
(think empiricism meets formalism) and ten minutes later

 

grating the knuckle of the other on the cheese grater
(think pragmatism applied with brute disregard for local

 

circumstance). One thing bleeding into another:
can’t that be one of the pleasures

 

of a settled art? Watercolor.
But words, think: which is more

 

to the point, “words bleed into one another,” or
simply “words bleed”? Neither.

 

They’re neither the neutral relays of a combinatory
enjoyment, nor the carriers

 

of a transcendently central
materiality of language.

 

“Words bleed,” that’s the feeling
of unstanchable vulnerability

 

that underlay modernism at its most Deco-baked-marmoreal.
Here, where [you] have died, we remain in the midst

 

of a long, stuttering song
that no one now writing

 

can’t not hear:
it’s going strong, shattered into slogans

 

each designed
to carry the tune. Blood

 

and boundaries: dull old tropes
but still tripping up heels faster than ever.

 

O, [you] who never
seemed to like finishing a sentence

 

when it was always possible
to go on writing it, as if,

 

within what might be made intelligible,
it was always the height of noon,

 

now for [you] the untraceable ink
of an endless period

 

has put a stop to the continuous
present [you] inscribed

 

onto just about every word.
“I weep for Lycidas, he is dead” we say

 

and life remains iterable.
[You’re] not, however.

 

So questions of address
remain vexed, especially since

 

the language I am writing from,
flighty and false-bottomed as it is,

 

makes a few inflexible and awkward demands.
Here (American-English) there is no avoiding

 

the overlap of the sound of a formal regard
for appropriate distance–[you]–

 

with a more intimate noise–[you].
[You], sir, and [you], old mole,

 

seem to be one and the same,
at least if sounds sound like

 

what they’re supposed to mean. Hence the brackets.
Which makes for a certain double-jointedness.

 

But doesn’t meaning only appear
after address has been exchanged?

 

And I have addressed [you.]
[You] first appeared as a stage villain

 

in “Movie” in Captive Audience
–do I really have to tell [you] this?–

 

where against Grant and Hepburn [you] played
some shadowy figure with shadowy powers

 

suggesting an end to their regal portrayals of spontaneity.
In other words: there was a script,

 

or more, a counter-script, which [you] had in your possession.
At one point the poem

 

suggested [you] and Hepburn
had forged a certain intimacy

 

but it was one of those ‘always already’ shots,
where the audience doesn’t get to see anything

 

except [your] arm handing her
a towel in the bathtub.

 

Next, [you] appeared in “The Marginalization of Poetry”
in propria persona, as [yourself] so to speak,

 

where I quoted Glas as an example of multi-margined writing:
“One has to understand that he

 

is not himself before being Medusa
to himself. . . . To be oneself is

 

to-be-Medusa’d . . . . Dead sure of self. . . .
Self’s dead sure biting (death)” after which

 

I shrugged and winked:
“Whatever this might mean, and it’s possibly

 

aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman,”
and then issued a vague compliment:

 

“nevertheless in its complication of identity it
seems a step toward a more

 

communal and critical reading and writing
and thus useful.” Useful:

 

that’s one of those
canapes that taste of nothing

 

but institutional compromise.
Words are usable things

 

but it doesn’t go the other way:
things aren’t words. I can quote “Lycidas”

 

but not the tormented street tree out front.
“Poems are made by fools like me,”

 

the man wrote, “but only God can quote
a tree.” When [you] live by the book

 

[you] tote it around, die by it,
and by the book is how [you] continue.

 

That’s the same in poetry and philosophy.
But, still, the notion of two activities forming

 

the basis for a critical community is,
as [you] might say, utopian.

 

(We might say imaginary.) Poet
and philosopher at times have issued

 

cordial invitations for the other
to come over and discuss the pressing

 

common concerns, but there hasn’t been
much pressure to actually visit.

 

I continued, “Glas is still, in
its treatment of the philosophical tradition,

 

decorous; it is marginalia, and the
master page of Hegel is still

 

Hegel, and Genet is Hegel too.”
The names don’t go away

 

when the eyes close. Neither do
the already crowded screens of younger readers

 

at least as long as the arrow of time
keeps pointing in the same direction.

 

And all attempts at instruction will,
somewhere along the line, find the instructors

 

in the discombobulated position of gesturing toward
some ideological Rube Goldberg ruin, folly, pratfall.

 

The poem. The concept.
But let’s not let parallelism set precedents.

 

On the other hand, note
how the upcoming line break, although

 

philosophically insignificant (and semantically insignificant,
it must be said), is poetically

 

still up for grabs. We poets
(it must be written) really don’t know,

 

are prohibited (structurally) from knowing
what we write before it’s written, and,

 

in a back-eddying double-whammy,
can’t really forget what’s come before

 

the most recent word.
In that we model both the alert insouciance

 

of the newborn (with its millennia of entailments,
but still in-fant, unspeaking) and

 

the fully aged fluent inhabitant
of language flowing

 

around a life, offering infinite comprehension
all the way out to the sedgy banks

 

with fields of goldenrod beyond them
but not the algorithm that would allow for

 

moment by moment access to the whole story
which we never get to hold with frankly human concern

 

but have to address via the nerved scrimmage
of writing. Skin’s mostly healed, but mind persists

 

in changing. Before, I’d figured [you] as some
jauntily allegorized emblem of

 

unknowableness and now [you] are
playing that part more unerringly than ever.

 

 

David Wills

English Department and Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University at Albany, State University of New York
DWills@uamail.albany.edu

 

. . . and after the telephone call, I will turn my back on you to sleep, as usual, and you will curl up against me, giving me your hand, you will envelop me.

 

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

 

The first version of this essay was written for a conference on Derrida’s Politics of Friendship sponsored by SUNY-Stony Brook in New York in November 2002. As fate would have it, that was the last occasion I saw Jacques Derrida before he fell ill, watching him back away down 6th Avenue, slightly bowing as he stretched out his arm to wave in his very personal and personable manner, as if he never wanted to be the first to turn and walk away. I could not have known then what sort of definitive “back” he would have turned towards us by the time my words found their way into print, even though the fact of mortality is readable in everything he wrote, and especially in Politics of Friendship. What I did know, and what enlivens the memory of him in the wake of his death, was the experience of a friendship in practice, upright and supportive from start to finish. This is dedicated to that memory.

 

What sense could one give to the idea of a friendship against nature? We can imagine friendships that might be deemed unworthy of the name because something in them betrays the very positivity we ascribe to amity: the friendship of rogues, an unholy alliance, or a friendship of convenience. We could also imagine a friendship that demeans for one reason or another, or a friendship that is excessive according to this or that norm or expectation, and so is considered reprehensible. We could even imagine what some might consider an unhealthy relation between human and animal (he spends all his time with his dog), or human and machine (she spends all her time with her car), and although in the latter case we might be getting closer to what I am trying to have us imagine, it would still be a matter of the various moral rights of inspection by which what is supposed proper to friendship is controlled and determined. What I am asking us to imagine is instead a friendship that would be unnatural in its very conception, a concept of friendship that did not suppose it to issue from a beating heart, or some seat of emotion. In short a friendship artificially conceived or produced, what we might call a prosthetic friendship.

 

Supposedly no such thing exists. Its possibility is certainly not entertained by the various philosophical discourses on friendship that are the objects of Derrida’s analysis in Politics of Friendship. Friendship, it seems, is systematically an affair of the natural and of the living. An unnatural friendship could only be conceived of as an immoral friendship, an uneconomical or wasteful one, but which in no way impugns the vital originary force of its pathos, its pneumaticity. However, as soon as friendship becomes a matter of politics, something it appears always already to be in its philosophical conception and therefore something that the conceit and title, not to mention the analyses, of Derrida’s book point to, then everything is otherwise. Indeed, it could be argued that it is precisely an unnatural friendship that Derrida promotes once he evokes “a deconstruction of the genealogical schema . . . . to think and live a politics, a friendship, a justice which begin by breaking with their naturalness or their homogeneity, with their alleged place of origin” (Politics 105).¹ The deconstruction and originary rupture he has in mind in that context have to do with the thinking and implementation of another politics or democracy, and not with my idea of deconstituting a concept of friendship that is limited to the living, but clearly a friendship that is also a politics has in some way been impersonalized if not depersonalized. It has gone public or become something like a business relationship in a way that exceeds or acts in competition with what we naïvely understand friendship to be. Perhaps, in fact, the very question of friendship is a problematics of the relation between public and private space, that whereas amorous and familial relations are conceived of as private, and economic and political as public, friendship functions across the border separating private from public. What I am suggesting in any case is that a friendship that is always already “corrupted” by, say, a politics that is presumed to function outside of it, also raises the question of its supposed originary naturality. If friendship partakes of politics, would not the naturality that founds it also be seen to enter into a relation with some form of unnaturality?

 

Let me add another set of questions. What would such an unnatural friendship look like? What does any friendship look like? What is its phenomenological representativity, or appresentativity? How do we know that such a thing exists, and what would the sense of it be, outside of its performance: outside of a frequentation (seeing two people, say, corresponding or keeping company), or outside of an exchange (of embraces, of gestures, of tokens, and so on)? Not that a secret friendship isn’t possible, but we would have to presume its very secrecy to be a function of its performativity. That is to say, the very effects of its secrecy would have to be negotiated in view of the fact that most friends show signs of affection; one could keep a friendship private only by scrupulously avoiding the public, one could keep it secret only by scrupulously declining to show the signs of it, by performing the non-performance of the signs of friendship, which is not the same as not performing the signs of friendship in the way that non-friends do. Furthermore, how would a phenomenology of friendship be distinguished from or opposed to that of something called love or passion? Is there a figure for friendship analogous to, but distinguishable from, what exists in a relation of passion, analogous to but distinguishable from the act of love, lovemaking, the carnal embrace? Or is it rather that friendship acts like a “preliminary” subset of the carnal, with looks, smiles, touching, embraces, and so on, but stopping before it gets to certain types of kiss and all the rest? If the carnal includes all the signs of friendship (and much more), then does friendship–at least to look at, the way we see it–have any specificity other than that of a domesticated or controlled carnality?

 

If Politics of Friendship inscribes an originary heterogeneity in friendship in order to argue for a different genealogizing of it, and so of politics; if, in terms of its argument, friendship needs to be otherwise politicized, and politics otherwise structured in terms of amity, then Derrida’s book similarly raises questions concerning the rigorous purity of the distinction between friendship and love or friendship and the madness of passion. While raising those questions, Derrida to a great extent respects the tradition of the distinction; to do otherwise, he writes, would involve an impossible analytical project (“it would take another book” [221]). But his whole analysis comes and goes between the two, via an extraordinarily complex configuration, as I hope to show. One is left, in a sense, twisting and turning between love and friendship, as between philía and eros, and it is difficult to know, in the final analysis, what it all adds up to beyond the turning itself, beyond the torsion of a tropic catastrophe through which one continues to hear the disembodied voices of Diogenes, Laertius, Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Blanchot, and others, repeating something while no longer knowing where they first heard it.

 

So if I were to go quickly towards the vantage point I want to work from, I would contend that friendship presumes the figure of an inter-view, a reciprocal perception, a face to face symmetry whose inimical converse would be the back to back that initiates a duel; and that within the same figural terms, a repoliticized friendship, perhaps distinguishable from love but only problematically so, would look like a dissymmetrical something, back to front, dorsal rather than frontal. And yet it would only be from the perspective of such a dorsality that a politics of and for the technological age as we experience it could begin to develop.² Such a politics, a posthumanist politics as it were, would seem, after all, to be the very wager of Politics of Friendship.

 

It is thus a certain figurality–a word I will distinguish from “positionality”–of love and friendship, sex and politics, that I want to entertain in what follows. Roland Barthes described his fragments of a lover’s discourse as choreographic figures, “to be understood, not in [their] rhetorical sense, but rather in [their] gymnastic or choreographic acceptation . . . . the body’s gesture caught in action” (1-2). I will argue that, short of a thesis, there is a type of choreography to be drawn out of the relations between politics and friendship in Derrida’s discussion, a series of turns that articulate a complicated figural or figurative set of gestures. It is as if, in looking at friendship as it articulates with politics, we see certain corporeal gestures or movements; as if there were complicated turns of amicable discourse deriving as much from friendship’s relation to the political as from its relation to the carnal, turns that imply and implicate, therefore, both a rhetoric and an erotics. What follows will play across the love/friendship distinction in pointing towards a figure, or set of figures common to both and yet without being in any way inimical to the lines of argument that are developed and the distinctions that are drawn in Politics of Friendship. This will involve a torsion of those arguments, a turning or détournement, something of a diverting of them, yet still within the context of a re-con-figuration, a particular rearrangement and perspectival shift.

 

Turning is explicit from the beginning of Politics of Friendship; one of its major chapters is entitled “Recoils,”³ and by the end, with Blanchot’s formulation of a friendship of abandon(ment) through death (301-2), the choreographic sense of it has been developed far enough to suggest that friendship involves turning one’s back. Thus if there is to be a figure for distinguishing friend from enemy, beyond or this side of Schmitt’s reliance for that on the constant possibility of war (cf. Politics 130), it will be the gesture of turning one’s back, a politics of friendship as dorsality. It would be a choreographic instance that looks neither like a breaking-off of negotiations–walking away from talking, the end of diplomacy that for Schmitt doesn’t exist since it gets continued by means of war–nor like turning the other cheek, which can occur only after friendship has foundered on an initial act of violence. And if I am still insisting on a visual version or phenomenality of that gesture, it would be because it takes place only once friendship has broken out of the circuit of the sentimental, out of the self-enclosure of its privacy, become political and–this is my insistence–become technological. Such a turning of the back would be the figure for a particular fiduciary relation in the world, the trust that it implies, its presumption of non-enmity, something functioning beyond an economics of appropriation, within the aneconomics and analogic of the “perhaps” that is the opening to a hospitality of radical otherness promoted by Derrida throughout his discussion.

 

In order to configure the question of friendship as a hypothesis about turning one’s back, about “facing” back to front, where “hypothesis” is itself understood in the similarly choreographic sense of a turning towards a positionality, we will need to work through the complicated rhetorico-philosophico-political formulations, and compounding abyssal enfoldings and reversals of Politics of Friendship. For, as Derrida makes explicit in the first of the many parenthetical insertions within his text that will ultimately become the focus of my reading, in “striving to speak . . . in the logic of [Aristotle] . . . doing everything that seems possible to respect the conceptual veins of his argumentation,” one finds oneself changing the tone and embarking upon “some slow, discreet or secret drift” that is undecidably “conceptual, logical or properly philosophical” rather than “psychological, rhetorical or poetic” (13).

 

A first set of rhetorico-conceptual junctures in Politics of Friendship may be identified simply as turns, beginning with the pivotal role given to that epigraph of doubtful origin–“O my friends, there is no friend”–and with the epigraph itself. The reader is led through versions the motto borrows in context after context and from the pen of writer after writer. As Derrida emphasizes, this maxim by means of which friendship is analyzed is a trope (a rhetorical “detour”) that is itself a turning. “O my friends” constitutes an example of the figure called “apostrophe,” that singular form of address that involves, as explained in the preface to The Post Card, “a live interpellation (the man of discourse or writing interrupts the continuous development of the sequence, abruptly turns toward someone, that is, something, addresses himself to you)” (4); or, as repeated here: “this impulse by means of which I turn towards the singularity of the other, towards you, the irreplaceable one” (5, emphases added).⁴

 

However, “O my friends, there is no friend” in turn turns within itself. It has the form of a chiasmus, whose two parts intersect by means of a reverse impulse. The end of the saying comes around and back to meet its middle, creating an imperfect symmetry, such that it could be rewritten “O my friends, friend there is none.” But this chiasmic structure, that of a folding back, gets compounded once Derrida draws attention to the alternative version of the expression, where the initial omega of the Greek “original” is accented to shift from the simple vocative interjection of an address to “my friends,” to a dative. “O my friends” thus becomes something like “he for whom there are (many) friends,” and the full sentence shifts to mean “he who has (many) friends can have no true friend.” Derrida nicknames the latter version the repli (209), translated as “recoil,” which is one of its senses, but which loses the nuance that matters to me here, that of a folding back or turning in upon itself. “Recoil” does, however, suggest the somewhat vertiginous series of twists (Derrida will later call it a “zigzag” [221]) along which the motto is deployed throughout the 200-odd pages of analysis.

 

To summarize: a trope (rhetorical turn) that is an apostrophe (turn to a single addressee) borrows the form of a chiasmus (a syntagm that turns back on itself) whose exact version (L. vertere, “to turn“) is uncertain, potentially diverting or turning its sense, or at least creating a further turn or chiasmus (Derrida’s word, 213) between its two forms. But what is all the more telling about the attention given to the alternate rendition and reading of the “O my friends” maxim is, it seems to me, the reflective and almost cautious manner in which Derrida introduces it, the explicit reference he makes to the rhetorical ploy or gesture that he is thereby advancing. I am referring simply, for the moment, to the fact of that reflection and caution–I will later return to examine their substance–and to the gestures of rhetorical, exegetical, and scriptural intervention that they represent as yet another turn in the abyssal layerings that striate through the book. I mean that above and beyond his “discovering” another version of the maxim, or his reading of that version, Derrida pays particular metadiscursive attention to the means by which his reading is being deployed. More on that shortly.

 

A second set of gestures in or movements of Derrida’s text may be characterized as reversals. However difficult it may be to conceive of a pure linear movement, we nevertheless understand a turn to be by definition disjunctive, a shift away from the straightforward, and the chiasmus of “O my friends, there is no friend” reinforces that. Derrida begins chapter one of Politics of Friendship by emphasizing the contretemps of the “two disjoined members of the same unique sentence” (1). Such a contretemps works against any reciprocality that the figure of the chiasmus seems to imply. In spite of producing a type of symmetry, necessarily imperfect except in the case of a palindrome, and in any case given the two opposing directional movements, the chiasmus involves a disjunctive force that allows, potentially at least, for substitution and reversal. The folded back second half of the syntagm sets itself up in competition with the first half, overlaying what precedes and effectively having the last word. Indeed, substitute and reverse is precisely what the maxim does, the “no friend” of the second part substituting for and reversing the “my friends” of the beginning.

 

More such reversals are to come. Aristotle, we read, breaks with the reciprocality of friendship, its two-way traffic (“the reciprocalist or mutualist schema of requited friendship” [10]) to argue for a preference of loving over being loved (or liked). Since one can be loved without knowing it, and since in general terms it is better to be the active party, preference is given to the one doing the loving, and this makes for what Derrida calls “the necessary unilaterality of a dissymmetrical phileîn” (23-24). Now while that perhaps says more about Aristotle’s conceptions of activity and passivity than about friendship (“Being-loved certainly speaks to something of philía, but . . . . It says nothing of friendship itself” [8]), it nevertheless describes a friendship, “friendship itself,” true friendship, that would have to contend with two equally perplexing alternatives: the seeming impossibility of two active parties without any object for that activity, two parties loving each other without being loved one by the other; or a friendship that remains one-sided or lopsided, where only the active party is defined as a friend. Indeed, still following Aristotle, a true friendship would be one that was lopsided to the extent of preferring love for the dead or departed. The activity of friendship that makes true friendship, dependent as it is on the breath of a living, active soul, is, at the outside (an outside that becomes its innermost possibility), dependent upon death and mourning: “Friendship for the deceased thus carries this philía to the limit of its possibility. But at the same time, it uncovers the ultimate motive of this possibility. . . . I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death. Therefore, beyond life” (12). It therefore looks as though the Aristotelian logic has reversed the supposed reciprocality of friendship to make it unilateral or unidirectional, and substituted a dead object for its living one.

 

Nietzsche, in typical fashion, gives his own series of twists to the question. The first is that of volume one of Human All Too Human, where, as a riposte to the dying sage’s “Friends, there are no friends!” the living fool retorts “Foes, there are no foes!” (148-49, 274). For Derrida, the reversal constituted by this inversion or conversion, a simple substitution of the foe for the friend, “would perhaps leave things unaltered” (175). Another version, that of the “good friendship” described in the Assorted Opinions and Maxims, involves instead a more complicated “rupture in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion or confusion between you and me” (62). But when Nietzsche writes in honor of friendship in The Gay Science, it is by means of a fable of a Macedonian king and an Athenian philosopher and is articulated through the logic of the gift, with all the disproportion or impossibility of any equilibrium of giving and receiving that that implies (72). Derrida refers to such a rupture as “a new twist, at once both gentle and violent,” one that “calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion” (63) and whose stakes are high, for it leads him directly into the heart of the aporetic “madness” of the chance of friendship, as of decision, justice and democracy.

 

Once again, as it were beyond the reversals uncovered in the maxim, or in Aristotle or Nietzsche, Derrida enacts something of a reversal of his own with respect to the disjunctions or dissymmetries at work in the elaborations of friendship he is analyzing. And this takes place precisely with respect to the distinction between friendship and love, along the faultline separating philía from eros (to the extent that one can presume that to be the distinction between friendship and love, to the extent that love can be conceived of as non-erotic) in any case, in the trembling of those differences. As we have just seen, he underlines what, in certain cases at least, appears undeniably as the disjunctivity and dissymmetricality of friendship. But then, in the context of his analysis of the other possible version of Aristotle’s or Diogenes’s maxim, he calls upon that very disproportionality to distinguish love from friendship:

 

The request or offer, the promise or the prayer of an 'I love you', must remain unilateral and dissymmetrical. Whether or not the other answers, in one way or another, no mutuality, no harmony, no agreement can or must reduce the infinite disproportion. . . . Here, perhaps, only here, could a principle of difference be found--indeed an incompatibility between love and friendship . . . supposing such a difference could ever manifest itself in its rigorous purity. . . . Simply put, friendship would suppose . . . the phenomenon of an appeased symmetry, equality, reciprocity between two infinite disproportions as well as between two absolute singularities; love, on the other hand, would raise or rend the veil of this phenomenon . . . to uncover the disproportion and dissymmetry as such. . . . when one names the friend or enemy, a reciprocity is supposed, even if it does not efface the infinite distance and dissymmetry. As soon as one speaks of love, the situation is no longer the same. (220-21, translation modified; Politiques 248-49)

 

The logic here is complicated, and sets up a reverberating reversal between two sides of an opposition that functions as if in permanent imbalance, like some spinning machine that causes the whole apparatus to wobble. Love is unilateral whereas friendship is less radically dissymmetrical. Friendship presents a reciprocity where two infinite disproportions have made peace (une réciprocité apaisée), whereas, for its part, love rends the very veil of dissymmetry. But this difference, or indeed incompatibility between love and friendship, is itself “appeased” inasmuch as the rigorous purity of the difference between the two cannot be presumed. It is as if between love and friendship there were either a relation of love (disproportion or incompatibility) or of friendship (appeased reciprocity), and so on into the abyss, for each of the terms subdivides within itself ad infinitum.

 

But Derrida’s reversal here is radical in another way. If love is to be distinguished from friendship, he maintains that it will be in terms of the question of reciprocity. As a result, “I love you” is spoken into a type of void, performed as a promise or prayer to which one cannot expect an answer. We might therefore imagine it turned around to the extent of being uttered from behind, so that even were one to proffer a response, even a symmetrical “I love you (too),” it would also be spoken into a type of emptiness in front of one. Derrida seems to suggest that it is only by means of the disproportionality of love that friendship can be taken out of a Schmittian schema of amity and enmity and liberated from that version of the political; only by that means can one gesture toward a different politics, one of promise. But, if my analysis of his logic is correct, this will mean preserving and at the same time breaking down the distinction between friendship and love, dragging friendship, as it were kicking and screaming, across an abyssal incompatibility that is perhaps not rigorously pure, and into the dissymetricality of love. I doubt one could successfully choreograph such a rhetorical pirouette without having it teeter like an imbalanced spinning top, and fall. But any attempt to do so, and any movement toward a new politics informed by either love or friendship or both, would necessarily involve, like a fleeting glimpse or a languid caress, a relation of front to back. There at least one could begin to see friendship and wait for love in terms of a dissymmetry that did not for all that fall into an impossible contortion.

 

A twist or turn, even a torsion, without for all that being an impossible contortion. That would be the risk and wager of a politics of friendship that reckons with the dorsal. So it is also with the practice of deconstruction. We will have spent our professional lives trying to account for the difficult protocols of intervention within textual form and substance undertaken by such a reading practice, trying to determine what particular twists Derrida gives to the texts he is examining, how and to what extent he either identifies or “causes” the effects of stress on the basis of which the text says, is heard, let, or made to say more than it wants to. Since the exorbitance of the methodological question raised with respect to the analysis of Rousseau in Of Grammatology we have had those questions before us. This essay has, up to this point, operated on the basis of certain presumptive answers to those questions, purporting to distinguish between turns or reversals that can be identified as relying on the rhetorical gestures of here an Aristotle, there a Nietzsche, there a Derrida.

 

However, there appears to be a surplus of methodologically reflective moments in Politics of Friendship, and a multiplication of forms borrowed by such moments in the text. Most obvious, even if only typographically–no small thing, however–are the multiple parentheses, emblematic of a variety of interruptions, glosses and diversions, interventions that can only be described, in the context of this discussion, and of the book, as “apostrophic.” I am referring here only to those parentheses that are set apart in the text as separate paragraphs, there where the normal flow of the text is interrupted by a smaller or larger section that appears within parentheses. There are also any number of parentheses doing what one might suppose to be normal duty within the text, adding short clarifications with minimal disruption to the reader. At one point, following a slew of those putatively minor or everyday parenthetical insertions, Derrida writes, “And let’s not talk about the parentheses, their violence as much as their untranslatability” (221, translation modified). Given that reference to violence and untranslatability, and since, in the final analysis, the everyday parentheses differ only in size and not in kind from the larger inserted paragraphs or sets of paragraphs, we would have to remark the structural violence of any parenthetical insertion as a preface to what I am about to develop.

 

The larger, “apostrophic” parentheses begin in the Foreword with a polylogue of four discursive units (x), and continue throughout the text, ranging in length from a single line (70) to twelve pages (in the French) (Politiques 178-88) or more (I’ll come back to that “or more” in a moment). I counted twenty-six of them. Two of them use (square) brackets rather than (round) parentheses, and one of those says as much, although it imputes them, syntactically at least, to Montaigne, something that gets lost in translation.⁵ Their content varies enormously and it is difficult to determine the precise logic that justifies them. Sometimes they constitute digressions that are perhaps too long for a footnote, but that has never been an objection for Derrida in the past. Sometimes they are reminders of previous points in the discussion, sometimes openings to other questions. Some of them, uncannily, deal with the question of the female friend or the sister to whose exclusion or marginalization from philosophical discussions of friendship the book explicitly wants to draw attention.

 

Still others, and these are the ones that interest me most, fall into the category of “questions of method” à la Grammatology. Thus there is the reference to the “respect” for Aristotle that nevertheless involves “some slow, discreet or secret drift” (13) that I quoted earlier. In the following chapter there appears a similar admission of a complicated logic of fidelity to Nietzsche: “(Of course, we must quickly inform the reader that we will not follow Nietzsche here. Not in any simple manner. We will not follow him in order to follow him come what may” (33). At a particularly apostrophic moment in Chapter 3, Derrida declares “that is all I wanted to tell you, my friend the reader” (70). And, much later, he inserts a perhaps unnecessary reminder that “we have not privileged the great discourses on friendship so as to submit to their authority . . . but, on the contrary, as it were, to question the process and the logic of a canonization . . . . paying attention to what they say and what they do. This is what we wish to do and say” (229, emphasis added). Such meta-discursive glosses, however, do not always appear within parentheses, that is to say as interventions circumscribed by a pair of conventional, round diacritical marks. Indeed, not only is there extensive explanation of the methodological protocols in play throughout the analysis of the repli version of “O my friends,” but one needs to ask whether, following Derrida, one could ever hope to distinguish rigorously between the constative and performative elements of any commentary–indeed any text–distinguishing what it says in general, and what it says about what it is doing in particular, from what it does. As we just read, Derrida does or says both (what he says and what he does) in the same breath.

 

Or in a slightly different breath. The matter of the two versions of the “O my friends” maxim turns precisely on the question of breathing, of aspiration, and of the diacritical textual intervention–a subscript iota–that would mark the same in the Greek: “it all comes down to less than a letter, to the difference of breathing” (209). On the basis of the way a single omega is written, with or without the subscript iota denoting an aspirate, a whole philosophical tradition can be reassessed, including, one has to presume, its distinction between constativity and performativity. On the basis of what Derrida earlier calls “a philological sidetracking” (177)–in French un mauvais aiguillage philologique (Politiques 201), bad directions, bad shunting, bad philological flight control, an inattentive switch from one track or corridor to another–there is potential accident and catastrophe. But we have to understand that almost imperceptible difference as also a formidable chance, the chance of a whole other text, a whole other reading, and a whole other tradition for the questions, for friendship and politics. By the time Politics of Friendship gets to it, therefore, it is difficult to tell who is taking credit for it, and that can perhaps no longer be the question:

 

The time has perhaps come to decide the issue [trancher]. . . . a tiny philological coup de théâtre cannot prevail in the venerable tradition which, from Montaigne to Nietzsche and beyond, from Kant to Blanchot and beyond, will have bestowed so many guarantees on the bias of a copyist or a rushed reader by, without knowing it, staking a bet on a tempting, so very tempting, reading, but an erroneous one, and probably a mistaken one. Luckily for us, no orthographic restoration or archival orthodoxy will ever damage this other, henceforth sedimented archive, this treasure trove of enticed and enticing texts which will always give us more food for thought than the guard-rails to whose policing one would wish to submit them. No philological fundamentalism will ever efface the incredible fortune of a brilliant invention. For there is here, without doubt, a staggering artifact, the casualness of an exegetical move as hazardous as it is generous--indeed, abyssal--in its very generativity. Of how many great texts would we have been deprived had someone (but who, in fact?) not one day taken, and perhaps, like a great card player, deliberately feigned to take, one omega for another? Not even one accent for another, barely one letter for another, only a soft spirit [esprit, breath, aspirate] for a hard one--and the omission of the subscript iota. (207-208; Politiques 234)

 

If I have quoted this paragraph almost in its entirety, it is because, if space permitted, I would dearly love, passionately, in and beyond friendship, to compare it with those famous pages on Rousseau from Of Grammatology (157-60), to see how far deconstructive reading practice had or had not evolved over the preceding thirty years of its history, and to assess the current rapport de forces between “philological fundamentalism” and “invention.” But that will have to keep. Suffice to emphasize here that the glosses that punctuate or apostrophize the analysis of the version de repli–“where are we heading?” (214), “does one have the right to read like this?” (216), “it is . . . [the temptation] of the book you are reading” (218), “our objective was not to start down this path” (220)–have to be considered to be as much a part of the analysis as the rest. Perhaps they are the very constative part of it, to the extent that they deal with the question of analysis as analysis, and perhaps an analysis that does not deal with its own status, that simply presumes to be able to (con)state, reduces to a pure performative. In any case, those glosses, along with the abyssal twists, torsions and openings, that go all the way from an almost inaudible “_i” to lengthy parenthetical excursus, inhabit finally the same structural space of possibility, the same rhetorico-political space as the “risk,” chance or wager of the “perhaps” and more properly philosophical questions–event, aimance–around which Derrida’s text turns. All such questions derive from minute but uncontrollable textual ruptures, intersecting apostrophically with the secrets or silences of philological chance or accident, with the brilliant inventions of an insignificant stroke of the pen, the slight torsion or curvature of a line that produces or introduces the beginning of a parenthesis of untold promise.

 

The “perhaps,” for example, emerges from Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human and is first developed in the second chapter, whose title (“Loving in Friendship: Perhaps–the Noun and the Adverb” [26]) suggests that it again opens a faultline between love and friendship. It is presented from the beginning as something to which we must be particularly sensorially attentive: “Let us prick up our ears [Tendons l’oreille] . . . towards this perhaps, even if it prevents us from hearing the rest” (28; Politiques 45). The “perhaps” is then described as an “unheard-of [inouïe], totally new experience” (29; Politiques 46), where the adjective inouïe refers, in its literal sense, even more directly than does the English “unheard-of” to the impossibility of being perceived by the organ of hearing. Finally its operation is said to depend on its “hold[ing] its breath” in order to “allow what is to come to appear or come” (29), making the perhaps perhaps comparable to a quasi-inaudible aspirate. At the least we could say that it relates to what is on the edge or outside of earshot and of vision (“prick up our ears . . . allow what is to come to appear”). Now if we were to try to figure or configure that according to our choreographic principle, we would have to imagine its occurring by means of a friendship or love relation that was other than the simple face to face, yet not so fractured as not to constitute a relation. It would be a function of friendship or love that operated in or across a type of sensorial peripherality, something that could occur once ears and eyes were required to deal with what was taking place outside of their normal frontal hemispheric field, once they had to deal with what comes from behind, required to see, listen to, indeed feel–like uneven breathing on the nape of the neck–what is dorsal.

 

It would be quite a turnabout. For not only does the perhaps interrupt and disjoin “a certain necessity of order,” but “this suspension, the imminence of an interruption, can be called the other, the revolution, or chaos; it is, in any case, the risk of an instability” (29). The perhaps, to say the least, turns things around, and perhaps changes everything. It is said here to occur to Nietzsche “in the upheaval of a reversing catastrophe” (30), and is later referred to as a “catastrophic inversion” and “reversing apostrophe” (50). The word translated as “reversing” in both cases just mentioned is renversante (Politiques 48, 69), suggesting in the first place a radical overturning, but including overtones of disorientation, change in direction, backwards movement (for example, in the expression tête renversée, head bent back as in ecstasy, or écriture renversé, writing that slopes backward). For Derrida also says explicitly that he is talking about “something other than a reversal [renversement]” (31; Politiques 49).

 

Perhaps then, a catastrophe that is also a chance, an apostrophe that overturns without for all that simply reversing. Both “catastrophe” and “apostrophe” should be heard in more than one sense: a climax or cataclysm but also a change in poetic rhythm or stress, an interruption in favor of a single addressee but also an ellipsis. Some minimal thing that changes everything in the context of a philosophical discussion of love and friendship marked by persistent parenthetical attention to its methodological principles, that would seem to be what we are looking for as we read Politics of Friendship. On the basis of that, let me try, if not to draw a conclusion, to draw something in conclusion.

 

As I previously made clear, apostrophe as discursive interruption and readdress is a conceit of “Envois” in The Post Card, playing as that text does across the face-off between a singular private loved one [toi] and just any reader [vous]. But apostrophe as punctuation that represents a textual omission also functions in “Envois” by means of the blank spaces in the text whereby, one might suppose, the most intimate pieces of the correspondence, the most apostrophic apostrophes remain undisclosed, excised, censored. As a result of that, perhaps, there is a parenthesis in “Envois,” about which I have written at length elsewhere, that opens but never closes.⁶ But the possibility of the text’s being irremediably or irredeemably opened already exists as soon as there is apostrophe, or any punctuation whatsoever. Indeed, any mark whatsoever, any barely inaudible breathing effect whatsoever. The principles of iterability, detachability, and substitution which determine that fact are explicitly repeated, in formulations echoing very closely those of “Signature Event Context,” within the analysis of the version de repli discussed above: “every mark has a force of detachment which not only can free it from such and such a determined context, but ensures even its principle of intelligibility and its mark structure–that is, its iterability (repetition and alteration)” (216). And, as develops a couple of pages further along (219), iterability also means undecidability, the motor and fulcrum of Derrida’s ethics and politics.⁷ So this is no ordinary or simple nexus. Everything hinges on it.

 

One reason I have kept on reading Jacques Derrida’s writing since 1980 is in the hope of finding an end to the parenthesis he opens in The Post Card. And I would like to think that the reason he has kept on writing has been because he has been looking for just the right place to bring it to a close. So I was heartened to see the multiplication of parentheses in Politics of Friendship and I searched carefully for an amicable end to the violence of that moment from The Post Card. I searched for a westward-facing arc to match the easterly one of the text from fifteen-odd years before, for the closure of two parenthetical faces, face to face and smiling like an e-mail abbreviation, to resolve the unilateral challenge or ultimatum of that opened parenthesis. Instead, sadly, I am faced with a serious case of recidivism. On page 58 of Politiques de l’amitié, Derrida opens a parenthesis and writes “Let’s leave this question suspended” (Politics 38). He never closes it. The English translation follows the French to the letter, or at least to the absence of a “).” Suddenly the “(” of 1980 is inexorably drawn in to the context of the “(” of 1994. Two massive bodies of text slide into some sort of compromising position. There they are, henceforth, for me at least, side by side, or rather front to back, “( . . . (.”

 

I’m tempted to say that they come to exist in aimance. Aimance, which is somewhat unfortunately translated as “lovence,” is a term Derrida borrows from Abdelkebir Khatibi (7) to deconstruct the opposition between love and friendship, between passive and active, to mean something like “lovingness.” Unable to “take place figurelessly” (69), it is said to “cut across . . . figures” (70), to be “love in friendship, aimance beyond love and friendship following their determined figures, beyond all this book’s trajectories of reading, beyond all ages, cultures and traditions of loving” (69). The gesture of two unclosed parentheses is thus made, in the first place, towards a figure of that sort of lovingness. But it is also, obviously, a figure of catastrophic inversion, a disruption of the symmetry and closure of a love or friendship that is presumed to function only in the face-to-face, and which therefore remains open to the politics of enmity presumed by a Schmitt. For that figure to be fully drawn, there would have to be more specific reference to an erotics of corporality such as I have just been suggesting, a problematization that extended not just to the distinction between friendship and love, but, presuming it is not already implied, to that between philía and eros. In contrast to the face to face, the back to front relation, or embrace, is more difficult to conceive of outside of an erotics; the rhetoric of its figural pose cannot but refer, at least in part–both because of the version of intimacy it represents, and because of its trangressive turn–to a carnal embrace.

 

I would argue that Derrida allows for that in the very metadiscursive parenthesis without parentheses within his analysis of the version de repli where he speaks of the violence and untranslatability of parentheses (221). The parentheses he is referring to might as well be the two I have just brought into proximity across the texts of The Post Card and Politics of Friendship; their proximity might be said to draw a figure of them, of their very violence and untranslatability. For, as I have already pointed out, the same paragraph in which he refers to them comes back to the unilaterality and dissymmetry of the “I love you” that was said to perhaps be the only difference between love and friendship, the interruption of reciprocity that must imply some turning, some détournement of a presumed face to face of the same.

 

That would be the force of an “I love you” spoken from behind. It would involve a catastrophic turning “towards” the other that means turning one’s back, something like the passive decision that Derrida describes at length (68), a patience in no way reducible to passivity, an act of trust that lets the other come in the figure of surprise that one might contrast with the economics of an appropriative pre-emption that, we are reminded only too well these days, is increasingly the single permissible version of political discourse and practice. This love, friendship, and politics of dorsality would also involve the principle of substitutability; it comes to function immediately anything like an “I love you” is proffered, immediately a singularity of address is determined, immediately the supposed general discursivity of the text is interrupted, a parenthesis opened, immediately there is any apostrophic turning whatsoever: “would the apostrophe ever take place, and the pledge it offers, without the possibility of a substitution?” (5). Turning one’s back allows the other to come as other to the other, as other other, as another other.

 

And so this love, friendship, and politics of dorsality is finally what I’ll dare to call a love, friendship, and politics of prosthesis in order to allow for the scandal or chance of a love, friendship, and politics of the inanimate. A prosthetic politics that would perhaps be more productive a concept than a posthumanist politics. From the beginning of Derrida’s book, friendship has had to be understood within the structure of revenance and survivance, of spectrality and inanimation. Derrida refers to a “convertibility of life and death” (3), to the fact that, after Aristotle, “one can still love the deceased or the inanimate,” and that it is through the possibility of such loving–whose directionality I am letting turn here so as not to limit it–that “the decision in favour of a certain aimance comes into being” (10). And again, in the same passage where the incompatibility of love and friendship is described in terms of the dissymmetry I have been insisting on, Derrida writes of the “non-assurance and . . . risk of misunderstanding. . . . in not knowing who, in not knowing the substantial identity of who is, prior to the declaration of love” (220), which I read also as not knowing the substance that distinguishes the identity of a who from that of a what. And finally, at the end, we are asked “to think and to live the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of a certain ahumanity” (294).

 

A prosthetic love and friendship, erotics and politics should be understood as something different from a raising of the stakes of non-identity or de-subjectivation, different from taking things beyond the human, even beyond the animal, to the inanimate. Prosthesis refers for me not to the replacement of the human by the inanimate but to the articulation of one and the other. So such a love and friendship, erotics and politics would, as we saw to begin, break with the naturalness of the supposed homogeneity of those concepts; it would, from the perspective of an always already prosthetic, allow us to begin to think the subject of love and friendship, erotics and politics in its biotechnological becoming, to think the radically inconceivable otherness of the other as coming upon and coming to bear upon, a being let come upon and let come to bear upon the sameness of a presumed reciprocal relation; and it would be the trust required to let that come, behind one’s back, unable to be known, in the confidence of an unrestricted hospitality, in a fiduciary relation reaching toward or arching back upon the possibility of a friendship and a politics at once unheimlich and aneconomic. Such a love and friendship, erotics and politics would encourage us to think detachment, substitution, dissymmetry, disjunction, letting come the interruption of an apostrophic or parenthetic reversing catastrophe, the figure of a double retrait in torsion, ((, a coupling, if that is what it is, whose only ending would be another opening, to another.

 

Notes

 

1. Further references to the English translation will be included in parenthesis in the text, preceded where necessary by the mention “Politics,” and in some cases followed by reference to the French original (Politiques).

 

2. Earlier in the project from which this work is extracted, I analyze the “dorsality” of Lévinas’s ethical relation, and before that Heidegger’s work on technology. The latter appears as “Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality.”

 

3. In French, “Replis.” See my discussion below.

 

4. Comparisons can be made between the figure of apostrophe favored by Derrida and the Althusserian “interpellation,” that moment or structure of the constitution of the subject as ideological and political, something I develop in the final chapter of the forthcoming Thinking Back.

 

5.”[Convenance, inconvenance. Digression. Soit dit entre crochets, Montaigne tire la plus audacieuse et la plus incontestable consequence . . .” (Politiques 203, emphasis added). Inelegantly preserving the French syntax, this would transliterate as: “[Suitability, unsuitability. Digression. Said/speaking, as it were, within brackets, Montaigne draws the most audacious and the most uncontestable consequence” Cf. Politics 178: “[A digression here, remaining between square brackets, on suitability, unsuitability. Montaigne draws the most audacious and the most uncontestable consequence.”

 

6. See my Prosthesis 286-318.

 

7. Cf. “Signature Event Context.” For discussion of iterability/undecidability as aesthetics/ethics nexus, see “Lemming,” in my Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
• —. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
• —. Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994.
• —. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. “Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 307-30.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Josephine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
• —. Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
• Wills, David. Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
• —. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• —. “Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality.” Parallax 10.3 (July-September 2004): 36-52.

 

Vivian Halloran

Comparative Literature Department
Indiana University, Bloomington
vhallora@indiana.edu

 

On 9 October 2004, Jacques Derrida became “irreplaceable” through his death, a gift (don) which was never his either to give or take, as he argues in The Gift of Death, but which nonetheless ensures the self’s passage into individuality because of its very irreproducibility. No one but Jacques Derrida could have died Jacques Derrida’s death, and even he could only go through this experience once. So definitive is the break Derrida sees between life and death, and so unique does he consider the instant of one’s death, that when he reads The Instant of My Death, Blanchot’s third-person narrative of his near-execution at the hands of a Nazi Russian firing squad in 1944, in Demeure, Derrida concludes that “when one is dead, it does not happen twice, there are not two deaths even if two die. Consequently, only someone who is dead is immortal–in other words, the immortals are dead” (67). While this conception of death affirms the negative gifts death gives the individual who dies–immortality (the inability to die) and irreplaceability (the impossibility of having an Other fulfill the duties and/or functions of the Self)–Derrida’s view of death is also strangely positive: a person’s death becomes the most defining aspect of his or her life since that, in its way, can be thought of as a long process of dying the death he or she is going to die eventually. For Derrida, the timing of a person’s unique death is extremely important because it cannot be repeated. He considers Blanchot’s “life” after the unexperienced experience of his assassination in 1944 as a mere “moratorium of an encounter of the death outside of him with the death that is already dying in him,” and continues to affirm that the French writer’s death happened at that very instant, despite his un-dying (Demeure 95). The most concrete instance of mortality Derrida reads in Blanchot’s brief text is the disappearance of a manuscript that was inside his house at the time of the execution that did not take place. Calling it a “mortal text,” Derrida contends that its loss is equivalent to “a death without survivance” (100). In the essay that follows, I look at a different way through which Derrida experienced an encounter of the deaths outside of him with the death that was already dying in him: by mourning his friends, colleagues, and mentors through a public performance of (re)reading their texts after the occasion of their deaths. Because the texts the deceased left behind have not been lost, like Blanchot’s fateful manuscript, Derrida gives them, if not his friends, an element of survivancethrough the concerted act of (re)reading.

 

Derrida’s meditation on the individuating effect of the experience of death in his reading of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History can be interpreted both as an enactment of mourning for Patočka, who died in 1977, and as a recognition of the impossibility of writing about the other’s experience of death: “Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, ‘given,’ one can say, by death” (Gift 41). As Derrida points out, the paradox inherent in regarding death itself as a gift, yet not a present (29), lies in its uniqueness and irreproducibility for a given individual–death does not function as currency in a social economy of exchange as Marcel Mauss argues other types of gifts do in Essai sur le don. But by imagining the eventual fulfillment of his own future individuation through the prism of his always already impending death, Derrida takes death on credit, so to speak–he claims the benefits of it by memorializing himself before he has paid the price of ceasing to live.[1]

 

Two insurmountable aporias separate the potentially replaceable, introspective then-living Jacques Derrida from the now-defunct-but-irreplaceable Jacques Derrida: the metaphysical and the rhetorical. Through his own death, Jacques Derrida forever stops experiencing Jacques Derrida’s other deaths: those of his friends. He finally stops carrying out the work of mourning inherently demanded by every relationship, even as his still-living others–his family, his friends, his readers–begin the endless process of mourning (for) him. In (re)reading his various texts on the religious, social, and symbolic functions of death and mourning, we can both duplicate Derrida’s performance of the debt of mourning owed to the dead and also begin to appreciate the wholeness of his written oeuvre as a finished work, much as he urges his audiences to do to the oeuvres of the writers he memorializes.

 

Would-be mourners can negotiate these aporias through performing or carrying out the task that Derrida, convinced of the impossibility of mourning the dead through speaking either about or directly to them, sets for himself in both The Gift of Death and The Work of Mourning: (re)reading the texts of the deceased as a fitting way to honor their memory. Derrida’s ethics of mourning-by-(re)reading present a non-violent internalization of the (text of the) other distinct from the “interiority” (Gift 49) that Penelope Deutscher calls his cultural cannibalism, his “eating of the other” (163). Derrida’s self-reflexive mourning addresses itself to the other-within-the-self, thereby avoiding falling into cannibalistic narcissism. In his various texts of mourning, Derrida instead assumes the rhetorical stance of the survivor bearing witness who acknowledges the impossibility of ever again addressing himself to the now-dead friend. Instead of speaking for or to the internalized other, he prefers to repeat a previous act of engagement with the written (body of) work of the other. I shall mourn Derrida by analyzing how he defines his own role as an ethical friend-in-mourning through (re)reading, an act which engages him simultaneously in a personal recollection, a private introspection, and a public performance of witnessing and scholarship. I pay particular attention to three texts contained in The Work of Mourning: Derrida’s (re)reading of Barthes’s theory and performance of mourning-as-grieving through photographs in Camera Lucida and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes”; his performative (re)reading of de Man’s last letter to Derrida, where the former reads his affliction/diagnosis as a death sentence in “In Memoriam: Of the Soul”; and his meditation on the unexpected emotional impact that reading Louis Marin’s posthumous book, Des pouvoirs de l’image: Gloses, has on him in “By Force of Mourning.” Seizing on repetition as the mimetic model par excellence of carrying out the work of mourning, in this essay I mourn the mourning theorist as well as the theorist of mourning who, in turn, mourned those who had not only enacted mourning themselves through their texts, but who were mourned by the texts themselves in their posthumous publication.

 

The specificity of the death of the other, the manner through which each meets his or her end and becomes irreplaceable, haunts both The Work of Mourning and The Gift of Death. The editors of each volume seek both to intensify and to remedy this sense of haunting by filling the gap of information left by Derrida’s texts of/in mourning. In his “Translator’s Preface” to The Gift of Death, David Wills not only informs his readers of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka’s role as a contemporary and collaborator with Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek; he also goes so far as to establish the fact of Patočka’s death and the manner in which it came to pass: “He died of a brain hemorrhage after eleven hours of police interrogation on 13 March 1977” (vii). In this way, Wills overdetermines the Derridean text that follows his preface as an enactment of mourning, where the living Derrida engages the work of the dead Patočka who wrote on the topic of death. The preface also overdetermines the function of the reader as an a priori mourner for a dead writer from whose works she or he is now forever displaced through and by Derrida’s own reading of Patočka’s essay on death, “La civilization technique est-elle une civilization de decline, et pourquoi?” No innocent reading of it is possible, just as Derrida’s own discussion of Patočka’s text is always already unable to engage in a dynamic dialogue with the Czech writer. Precisely because of the death he mourns through writing of his (re)reading, Derrida cannot engage in a textual conversation like the one he carries out with Emmanuel Levinas in his “Violence and Metaphysics” and Levinas’s Otherwise than Being.[2] The intertextuality of The Gift of Death can be read as an enactment of mourning through the performance of (re)reading: in this text, Derrida mourns a fellow writer as a writer or, even, as his text, instead of claiming Patočka as an internalized lost friend.

 

Nowhere in his published letters, eulogies, and memorial speeches does Derrida explicitly address the manner of death of those he mourns–a marked silence, given how much introspection and self-conscious reflection upon mourning goes on within a text that does nothing but mourn the loss of another. The only death Derrida discusses in detail in The Gift of Death does not actually take place: Abraham’s would-be murder of his son Isaac.[3] Derrida’s delight in analyzing Isaac’s unrealized death, as well as his refusal to mention the circumstances surrounding the death of his friends, have the cumulative rhetorical effect of displacing the event of death itself from the occasion for mourning. By invoking Kierkegaard’s image of a trembling Abraham disregarding ethics and familial love out of a sense of obedience he owes God, Derrida convincingly demonstrates that the work of mourning begins even before the fact of death has been established. Since Abraham’s plight is a direct result of God’s expressed desire to test his servant’s loyalty, Isaac’s looming death never actually enters into the gift economy both Patočka and Derrida invoke. Isaac has no explicit knowledge of the violence that threatens to befall him, so he has no time to interpret his coming death as a potential “gift” to him from God. Abraham pays the emotional toll of being asked to sacrifice his son, but even then what makes him tremble is not the fear of his own death and final judgment, but the guilt of occasioning the death of an/other that weighs him down. Both Kierkegaard and Derrida use kinship as a metaphor through which to investigate the obligation and responsibilities humans owe to God the Father in metaphysical and religious accounts of death within the economy of sacrifice of/for the divine Other.

 

While Derrida’s reference to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac contextualizes the discussion of death and mourning within a family setting, his conception of dying-as-a-gift is profoundly personal and individual; he insists on the relational nature of mourning as a process. Derrida’s meditation on the importance and relevance of the work of mourning grows out of his discussion of friendship rather than of familial relationships. In The Gift of Death, he confesses,

 

as soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also respond, in the same way, in the same instant to all the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don't need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. (68)

 

Thus Derrida blurs the separation of the private sphere of relational experience, kinship, from the public sphere in which friendship develops from interactions between unrelated human beings and goes on through time. As with Abraham’s gift, however, the gift of death Derrida-the-friend seems to offer is that of the death of the self to others, rather than the gift of killing the friend or the self. He avoids the metaphysical implications of this gift exchange by extending the impact and relevance of the story of Isaac’s sacrifice to those who are not necessarily believers, but who nonetheless define their own cultural capital as literate and literary: “The sacrifice of Isaac belongs to what one might just dare to call the common treasure, the terrifying secret of the mysterium tremendum that is a property of all three so-called religions of the Book, the religions of the races of Abraham” (Gift 64). As both readers and joint inheritors of this religious/literary tradition, we can learn from the private drama that occurs in Abraham’s family as well as from the larger implications of the duty the living owe the dead.

 

In his performative (re)reading of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Derrida writes of a mourning within the dynamic of kinship. Barthes mourns the death of his mother by discussing an absent photograph, not reproduced nor included among the twenty-five stills he reads in this text. More so than is the case with friendship, the relationship between parent and child is founded upon the expectation that one of them will live to see the other die. The familial bond is both more random and more permanent than the intimacy developed through the fragile and contractual nature of friendship, precisely because it is founded upon this very expectation. Parents see their children enter the world, and expect to have those same children mourn them as they die.

 

In Camera Lucida, Barthes, like Derrida, (re)reads in order to remember family. In the first sentence of “The Winter Garden Photograph,” Barthes situates himself spatially with relation to his mother’s death–“There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died”–as well as imaginatively, in the grieving process of mourning-through-rereading: “looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved” (Camera 67). As he mourns, Barthes (re)reads not only the visual texts of the photographs themselves, but also the emotional landscape of a shared life with the mother (re)captured and (re)presented by the photographs as articles that exist in time and are shaped by the passing of time. The death of his mother affects not only Barthes’s description of himself in Camera Lucida as someone actively engaged in the act of grieving–of constantly existing in pain–but also colors Derrida’s reading of the short time span separating the event of Barthes’s mother’s death in 1977, the same year as Patočka’s demise, from Barthes’s own tragic death in 1980, as an in-between period of no life, unlife, or a death-in-life. Although Derrida never knew Barthes’s mother in life, the son’s (re)reading of the winter garden photograph is so powerful it makes Derrida imagine this woman who “smiles” at both her son and, by extension, at his friend (Work 36). Derrida argues that her dying took a toll on Barthes’s “way of life–it was for a short time his, after his mother’s death–a life that already resembled death, one death before the other, more than one, which it imitated in advance” (47). By linking Barthes so definitively to the example set by the mother, Derrida suggests that the self is prone to endless duplication and repetition; Barthes may not be able to die his mother’s death, but he can die soon after she does, thereby (re)enacting the finality of her death, if not its irreplaceability.

 

Derrida himself duplicates and repeats Barthes’s gesture of grieving for the m/other through (re)reading when he confesses his own impulse to look at the photographs in Barthes’s middle books as a mimetic gesture that allows him to emerge from the abyss of grief to carry out the work of mourning. The unfamiliarity of the absent winter garden photograph as a visual element in Barthes’s text prompts Derrida to stop (re)reading Barthes’s words and to focus instead on his images: “Having returned from the somewhat insular experience wherein I had secluded myself with the two books, I look today only at the photographs in other books (especially in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes) and in newspapers” (Work 63). The photographs in Camera Lucida depict mostly exotic others to whose appearance or affect Barthes responds through analysis and commentary. Those in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes are more personal; they portray Barthes at various stages of his life, and also include images of his relatives and objects of sentimental value to him. Ironically, in returning to the visual image of Barthes duplicated within the pages of the autobiographical text, Derrida affirms the symbolic distance separating his experience of the loss of Barthes-the-friend from the loss of self Barthes confesses to feeling when gazing at his own image in Camera Lucida: “what society makes of my photograph, what it reads there, I do not know (in any case there are so many readings of the same face); but when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person” (14). When Barthes interprets his image as an object synonymous with Death personified, he evinces an understanding of the individuation that Derrida argues death gives us all as a gift. However, since Derrida looks at images of Barthes after the latter has not only become Death, but has also died, the exercise only heightens the perception of these visual texts as the simulacra of the man whose image they represent.

 

In adding Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to his discussion of Barthes’s alpha and omega works, Writing Degree Zero and Camera Lucida–Derrida sets it, and through its autobiographical prism, Barthes himself–as the punctum or point through which to view his own understanding of Barthes’s implicit theory of grief and mourning. Whereas no one can take or give the gift of a person’s death to or from him or her, people can authorize themselves whether or not the author has died a physical death. Barthes explains this in “The Death of the Author,” when he acknowledges that “the author still reigns in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, magazine interviews, and in the very consciousness of litterateurs eager to unite, by means of private journals, their person and their work” (50). The very public nature of the document through which he “unites” his “person” and his “work” distinguishes Barthes-the-writer from the “litterateurs” he disparages. As the title of the text clearly indicates, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is a self-authorizing document through which the author usurps the generative agency of the Mother. This self-naming gesture becomes doubly significant according to the Derridean deconstruction of reading and writing practices because through appropriating the Lacanian name of the Father, Barthes at once inscribes himself into the Freudian family romance and reduces his public “self” to the limitations of language in its naming capacity.

 

Roland Barthes claims to have frustrated the Oedipal relationship because of the early death of his father. In a caption printed beneath a photograph of his progenitor, he writes, “The father, dead very early (in the war), was lodged in no memorial or sacrificial discourse. By maternal intermediary his memory–never an oppressive one–merely touched the surface of childhood with an almost silent bounty” (Roland Barthes 15). Despite this image of benign neglect, or of a complacent emotional distance separating his childhood self from the pain of the loss of his father, Barthes reveals the emotional trauma of being identified as a mourner when he tells an anecdote about one of his schoolteachers:

 

At the beginning of the year, he solemnly listed on the blackboard the students' relatives who had "fallen on the field of honor"; uncles abounded, and cousins, but I was the only one who could claim a father. I was embarrassed by this--excessive--differentiation. Yet once the blackboard was erased, nothing was left of this proclaimed mourning--except, in real life, which proclaims nothing, which is always silent, the figure of a home socially adrift: no father to kill, no family to hate, no milieu to reject: great Oedipal frustration! (Roland Barthes 44-45)

 

The public inscription of the name of the father on the blackboard embarrasses Barthes by the intimacy the relationship implies, even as the lived experience of that intimacy is absent. In his attempt to honor the dead, the teacher draws attention to the young Barthes’s status as both a mourner and an orphan, and thereby emphasizes his difference from his peers. By using the plural in the title of his eulogy, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Derrida avoids repeating the teacher’s mistake. Derrida acknowledges that Barthes experienced death in several ways while he was alive, and does not appropriate any one of these for his own grieving.

 

The editors of The Work of Mourning, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, fill in the gaps left by the deaths of each of Derrida’s mourned friends and by Derrida’s rhetorical silence concerning the same. In a situation parallel to that occasioned by Wills in his “Translator’s Preface” of The Gift of Death, Brault and Naas structurally make mourning possible for the reader of The Work of Mourning by prefacing each essay with a brief biography/thanatography of Derrida’s dearly departed colleagues. Given the length and attention to detail of these biographical sketches, we can read them as supplements to Derrida’s account of his friendship with each person as chronicled in the essay itself. Since they include important information about the circumstances surrounding the death of each person, the sketches highlight the absence of Derrida’s discussion of the death of his friends.

 

This omission is especially glaring in the accounts of Sarah Kofman and Gilles Deleuze, two people who literally give themselves death–“se donner la mort” (Gift 10)–by committing suicide. Derrida’s silence concerning the circumstances of Kofman’s death is stunning; by ignoring the doubling and reversal inherent in Kofman’s timing her death to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth (Work 167), Derrida does not acknowledge the performative self-mourning inherent in her violent internalization of the gift of her death. Ironically, in The Gift of Death Derrida already lays out the groundwork through which to interpret suicide as a sacrificial gift to an/other. Derrida claims, “it is the gift of death one makes to the other in putting oneself to death, mortifying oneself in order to make a gift of this death as a sacrificial offering to God” (Gift 69). In this passage the other is God, but in Kofman’s case, I would argue, the Other to whom she “gives” her death as a birthday present is Nietzsche. Rather than affirming her own irreplaceability, Kofman forcefully imbricates the event of her self-authorized death with the raison d’être for a large portion (five books) of her distinguished oeuvre on the German philosopher. Deleuze’s suicide is less self-consciously theatrical than Kofman’s, and so does not warrant as close an analysis.

 

While Derrida’s silence about suicide can be said to mute its impact as a performance, in “In Memoriam: Of the Soul” he quotes from de Man’s private writing, his letters to Derrida, to illustrate a willful act of (re)reading his own illness as a double metaphor: de Man reads cancer through Mallarmé as a process, “peu profond ruisseau calomnié la mort” (Work 74), but recoils from the implied threat contained within the living symbol of his affliction, “tumeur/tu meurs” (75). By reading the letter as de Man’s affirmation of living-in-death instead of interpreting it as a memento mori or even as an “intimation of immortality,” Derrida mutes the power of de Man’s rhetorical gesture towards a self-authorized (or self-authored) death. Even as he mourns his friend by (re)reading his letter, Derrida’s invocation of de Man’s pun on his illness keeps him frozen in time, as it were, as a reader reading about his impending death rather than as someone who give himself death through suicide. Derrida tries to evade the responsibility inherent in mourning for de Man by endlessly postponing the moment of mourning until some future time outside the narrative. The essay he writes in memory of Paul de Man and which appears in The Work of Mourning, “In Memoriam: Of the Soul,” is a 1986 translated transcription and adaptation of the speech Derrida originally gave at the memorial service held at Yale in 1984 (qtd. in Mourning 72). In its internal displacement from itself, the essay embodies the very postponement it announces: “At a later time, I will try to find better words, and more serene ones, for the friendship that ties me to Paul de Man (it was and remains unique), what I, like so many others, owe to his generosity, to his lucidity, to the ever so gentle force of his thought” (Work 73). Derrida feels weighed down by the outstanding balance of his friendship with de Man, a debt that now can never be repaid. When he writes “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” published in Reading de Man Reading (1989), a volume explicitly dedicated to memorialize the work and thought of de Man, Derrida fulfills the promise he makes in “In Memoriam.” However, although he carries out the work of mourning by engaging in a careful (re)reading of de Man’s “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” Derrida once more postpones addressing the loss or lack of de Man in the world until another time.

 

The final structural mechanism through which Derrida postpones the moment of mourning in both of these essays is the juxtaposition of the familial world to that of friendship. In each of these two texts, Derrida triangulates his interaction with de Man through the introduction of a son–Derrida’s actual and Cicero’s historical offspring–into the dynamic of friendship. These two sons mediate Derrida’s interaction with de Man by perpetuating the distance that separates the dead one from the still-living (at that time) other. This gesture is most overt in the opening paragraphs of “Psyche,” where Derrida approaches his reading of de Man’s essay on allegory through the prism of the “invention” in a discussion of Cicero’s dialogue with his son. In between his reading of the Latin pater familias and the Belgian reader of allegory, Derrida speaks a few words of mourning:

 

I should like to dedicate this essay to the memory of Paul de Man. Allow me to do so in a very simple way, by trying once more to borrow from him--from among all the things we have received from him--a bit of that serene discretion by which his thought--its force and radiance--was marked. ("Psyche" 26)

 

As he writes about de Man here, Derrida distances himself once more from the grief of his mourning by asking his readers to authorize him to write what he is about to say. The analysis that follows this personal irruption in the text is tonally objective and somewhat removed.

 

Derrida describes a similar experience of feeling distanced from de Man during a car ride through the streets of Chicago, when he listens to, but does not join, de Man’s conversation with Derrida’s son, Pierre, about music and instruments. Although he was not himself a musician, Derrida recognizes the artistry shared by his son and his friend in their proper use of language, “as technicians who know how to call things by their name” (Work 75). He translates this “technical” discussion to the language of images once Derrida learns that “the ‘soul’ [âme] is the name one gives in French to the small and fragile piece of wood–always very exposed, very vulnerable–that is placed within the body of these instruments to support the bridge and assure the resonant communication of the two sounding boards” (75). This definition of the “soul” [âme] of the instruments, rather than giving Derrida greater insight into the conversation his friend and son were having, sends him instead into metaphysical flights of fancy, through which he associates the instruments of the conversation with “the argument of the lyre in the Phaedo” (75). In this mental distancing from the conversation in the car, Derrida exhibits his own status as a rhetorical technician, rather than as a musical one. This recognition of an unbridgeable gap of experience is sparked by Derrida’s almost visceral reaction to the word “soul”: “I was so strangely moved and unsettled [obscurément bouleversé]” (Work 75). I read Derrida’s reaction as a sign of alienation from the two musicians in the car retold as a story to the assembled crowd both to pay tribute to the specialized skills and knowledge of the dead, and to affirm Derrida’s own, and the community’s, status as living beings who grieve for a common loss.[4]

 

Unlike Barthes’s photograph of his mother in the winter garden, which leads him to discover a truth about his mother, Derrida’s image of “soul”/âme emphasizes his own exclusion from the conversation he overhears. He does not know what it means. The conversation teaches him about his son’s expertise as well as revealing a previously unknown facet of de Man, but the mental/textual image of the “soul”/âme as an apparatus shows his own distance from the conversation.

 

While his friendship with de Man may have been unique, it was not exclusive. The reproducibility of a social dynamic–friendship–as well as the inescapable fact of every person’s eventual death unites the speaker and the audience in a public expression of mourning that is both reproduced and disseminated through the publication of the anthology of Derrida’s writings years later. In “In Memoriam,” Derrida uses repetition to convey the cycle of grief and mourning as an experience that brings him closer to the audience of fellow mourners than to the dearly departed de Man: “We are speaking today less in order to say something than to assure ourselves, with voice and with music, that we are together in the same thought” (Work 73).

 

With the distance of time also comes the burden of responsibility. The communal wound that Derrida chooses not to help heal is the pain occasioned by the revelation of de Man’s anti-Semitic writings in Belgium when he was a young man. Derrida’s silence about these texts through the various translations and adaptations of these two essays can be read as his attempt not to speak for the other now that there is no chance to obtain a reply.[5] The insurmountable silence of death condemns us all to ignorance regarding de Man’s readings of his earlier publications in light of the wisdom he developed as he aged. Derrida’s repeated references both to grief and to ignorance of what the future would hold–“How was I to know,” “so painfully,” “everything is painful, so painful” (Work 75)–give witness to his friendship with de Man as it was at the moment of de Man’s death, as yet untainted by the scandal of revelation but always already injured by the existence of the few de Manian texts Derrida is not at pains to (re)read.

 

Derrida discusses mourning as a process that begins upon the loss of the other, but which had its origins much earlier. The inevitable potential loss of the friend casts a shadow upon the very foundation of friendship, as Derrida argues in other essays in The Work of Mourning. In “The Taste of Tears,” Derrida’s celebration of his friendship with Jean-Marie Benoist, he explains the expectations of mourning built into the pact of friendship: “To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die” (Work 107). His emphasis on the ocular nature of this contract implicit within friendship is all the more ironic in that Derrida confesses to not having gazed upon the dead friend for quite some time before his or her dying. In his insistence on (re)reading as the proper activity through which to work at mourning, Derrida privileges sight, the process of turning seeing into knowing, over the gaze, the continued and sustained observation of the already familiar image. To succeed at mourning, the surviving friend must be seen to be working at mourning.

 

Furthermore, Derrida assumes that mourning is both a duty–an obligation to be fulfilled by a friend–and an unavoidable burden placed upon the friendship itself. It is incumbent upon the surviving friend to perform or give witness to his or her own “fidelity” (Work 45) to the relationship with the now-dead writer (as it happens, all the people he memorializes in this collection are writers). The death of the friend, then, on the one hand, effectively ends the friendship itself: while he lives, Derrida can remember his friendships with the dead, but he can no longer be the friend to the dead that he was to the living. On the other hand, the death of the friend perpetuates the friendship as it was up-until-the-moment-of-death–with the death of the one friend and the subsequent elimination of the possibility for further interaction, the friendship becomes static, forever frozen as it last stood. The surviving friend may give witness to his or her own fidelity, but he or she may not alter unresolved issues or disappointments that may have occurred in the past. In contrast, Derrida describes the beginning of friendship as an infinitely fluid time. He does so by consciously failing to draw a firm distinction between his role as a reader of the now-dead-writers’ texts and his eventual status as the writers’ friend. In his letter to Didier Cahen about his reaction to Edmond Jabès’s death, Derrida says his relationship with Jabès began before they met–it was an occasion “when friendship begins before friendship” (123). Derrida’s friendship for Jabès began when he first read Jabès’s The Book of Questions. Here Derrida characterizes the reader-text relationship as a gateway to a possible friendship between reader and writer so long as this possibility is not foreclosed by the death of either party. While friendship is a dynamic system that demands interaction between two parties, mourning may be communal, but it can never be reciprocal.

 

Derrida’s essay on the death of Louis Marin, “By Force of Mourning,” begins by negating the very premise of its origin: Derrida announces the absolute lack of a language through which to convey and understand the process of mourning as a work. “There is thus no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work” (143). It follows that the work of mourning cannot succeed fully in language. Derrida points out that the posthumous publication of Marin’s last book, De pouvoirs de l’image, effectively makes Marin (re)appear in print; he is no longer the friend who can be “followed” by the eyes of the gazing other, but that does not discount the visual presence of the dead-Marin-as-text through his posthumous book. Like the (unseen) photograph of Barthes’s mother in “The Winter Garden Photograph” and the (unheard) melody made possible by de Man’s and Pierre’s “soul”/[âme], Marin haunts Derrida’s imagination as the trace of an irreproducible visual image. As a textual portrait of Marin’s work on images, the posthumously published Des pouvoirs de l’image fixes him as an eternal revenant, an undead that rises out of the grave with each act of reading. As he does in his earlier reading of Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida, Derrida here privileges the opposite function of the visual image, “the pictorial vocation,” of Marin’s book “to seize the dead and transfigure them–to resuscitate as having been the one who (singularly, he or she) will have been” (Work 156). Where he sees the textual image of Marin in the book affirming the irreplaceability hard-won through accepting the gift of death, breathing new life into his experience of having-been-in the world, Derrida reads Barthes’s gaze upon the picture of the mother as a self-obliterating gesture that erases all difference between the parent and child.

 

At this nexus where self-confusion intersects with the affirmation of individuality, Derrida theorizes the concept of “grief” in his discussion of mourning, instead of appealing to writing-in-pain as he does in “In Memoriam.” In Camera Lucida, Barthes had already noted the co-incidence of grief and mourning as supplementary processes of being-in-relation-to-death. For him, the act of gazing upon “The Winter Garden Photograph” brings about a synaesthetic recognition of a larger truth; the photograph “was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Frühe which accords with both my mother’s being and my grief at her death” (Camera 70). Grief as an emotion defines the timelessness of his “mother’s being” as well as the abyss of loss Barthes experiences “at her death” and continuously thereafter. For Derrida, the act of reading Des pouvoirs de l’image proves the emotional power inherent of the image of the loyal friend giving witness to a now-lost friendship. Although he does not give it a name, Derrida feels “the emotion of mourning that we all know and recognize, even if it hits us each time in a new and singular way, like the end of the world, an emotion that overwhelms us each time we come across the surviving testimonies of the lost friend, across all the ‘images’ that the one who has ‘passed away’ has left or passed on to us” (Work 158). The uniqueness of the grief we feel is only intensified by the encounter with an endless number of texts that are possibly about the lost friend as a friend to others. Rather than diminishing pain, the reproducibility both of the interactive dynamic of friendship in “By Force of Mourning” and of the performance of Schumann music refine the expression of grief to a pure form: being-in-pain. One does not work at grief; one exists within it: I grieve.

 

If the gift of death is the individuation of the self, and the work of mourning consists in (re)reading the (text of the) other, then the work of death is the silent gaze of the dead on the living. Derrida explains that this work of death is carried out by the internalized image of the dead within the living and, as such, affirms a permanent alterity as it escapes reciprocity:

 

However narcissistic it may be, our subjective speculation can no longer seize and appropriate this gaze before which we appear at the moment when, . . . bearing it along with every movement of our bearing or comportment, we can get over our mourning of him only by getting over our mourning, by getting over, by ourselves, the mourning of ourselves, I mean the mourning of our autonomy, of everything that would make us the measure of ourselves. (Work 161)

 

Where Marin interprets the gaze of the dead upon the living as part of the power/pouvoir of the (internalized) image, Derrida’s experience of it recalls the internalization of power as surveillance in a Foucauldian sense. With the irruption of the friendship occasioned by the death of the friend, the survivor’s mourning becomes multiple–for the self, for the defunct friend, and for the other–without being reciprocal. Other than by postponing the moment of mourning infinitely, the only way out of mourning and grief lies through the acceptance of a continued state of living through and under the gaze of the internalized other. As readers who can no longer hope to become Derrida’s friends, we can internalize not the image of Derrida’s gaze upon ourselves, but the image of his gaze upon the page, and use it to guide us in our grieving.

 

 

A.J.P. Thomson

Department of English Literature
University of Glasgow
A.Thomson@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

 

There is something of a rogue state in every state. The use of state power is originally excessive and abusive.

–Jacques Derrida, Rogues 156

 

 

Faced with an apparently inevitable and overwhelming victory for the Islamist Front Islamique du Salut party, and following the resignation of President Chadli on 11 January 1992, democratic government in Algeria was dissolved between the first and second round of elections, to be replaced by military rule. Jacques Derrida draws our attention to these events in the third chapter of “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?)” (2002), the first of two texts collected in Rogues (2003).¹ Derrida does not go into any great detail about the event, whose interpretation is extremely complex: neither Chadli, nor the ruling Front de Libèration Nationale, nor the Islamist party that looked set to gain nearly seventy-five percent of the available parliamentary seats with the support of barely a quarter of the electorate could have formed what might be comfortably described as a legitimate government (Roberts 105-24). But Derrida’s attention is elsewhere, concerned not so much with the specific history of his homeland as with what it might tell us about the idea of democracy itself. This is an example, he suggests, of a suicidal possibility inherent in democracy. Derrida appears to mean this in two senses. First, it highlights a risk to which a democracy is always exposed: the apparently suicidal political openness that allows that a party hostile to democracy might be legitimately elected. (Derrida acknowledges that this is itself a matter of interpretation, noting “the rise of an Islamism considered to be anti-democratic” [Rogues 31, emphasis added].²) Second, that democracy may interrupt itself in order to seek to preserve itself: a suicide to prevent a murder. In either sense, this seems to be both a threatening and unsettling way to describe any political regime. Moreover, a stress on the end of democracy would appear to be at odds with the emphasis on its future that had previously characterized Derrida’s political writing, pithily encapsulated in a phrase borrowed for the title of the Cerisy conference at which this troubling essay was first presented: “democracy to come.” Disentangling this puzzle means posing a question that is crucial for the political future of deconstruction: in the final years of his life, did Derrida change his stance on the relationship he had asserted so memorably in Politics of Friendship: “no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction” (105)?

 

I

 

Derrida’s account of suicidal democracy is closely linked in Rogues to the idea of “autoimmunity,” a figure introduced into Derrida’s long essay on religion, “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” (1995), and given its fullest development in his post-9/11 interview with Giovanna Borradori, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” (2001). Autoimmunity is a term used in the biomedical sciences to describe a phenomenon in which a body’s immune system turns on its own cells, effectively destroying itself from within. Autoimmunity is a feature of every immune system: although it is usually harmless, there is no defense system that is not threatened by the possibility of such a malfunction. To give a preliminary idea of how Derrida links autoimmunity and democracy, it seems clear that he wants to describe a threat to democracy that comes from within rather than from without. Or in more florid terms, democracy always carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

 

In the interview with Borradori, Derrida describes “autoimmunity” as “that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its ‘own’ immunity, to immunize itself against its own protection” (“Autoimmunity” 94). The immune system defends a body against external threats, but depends for its effectiveness on, at the very least, the ability to distinguish self from other, the body it protects from the outside. Autoimmunity is the always-possible failure of such a system to distinguish what it protects from what it protects against. Deconstruction, which focuses on the impossibility of ever finally distinguishing between what lies within and without any limit, might find a figure here for what is interesting about the formation of any identity. However, Derrida is not exact about its use, and I am not entirely convinced it is possible to reconcile the different uses to which it is put in the three major published texts in which it appears. I think it fair to say that the translation of the idea of autoimmunity from a biomedical to a philosophico-political discourse infects it with a certain amount of ambiguity. It will help to recapitulate the two earlier discussions.

 

In “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida proposes “autoimmunity” as a way of thinking about the relation between religion and technological modernity. On the one hand, religions make use of radio, television, the media–all the advantages given them by the communications technologies of advanced industrial society; on the other hand, religion protests against those same developments, which seem to threaten its authority, its established traditions, or its power. Religion makes use of that which threatens it, in order to develop and survive; so the means of its survival is simultaneously the risk of its destruction: “it conducts a terrible war against that which gives it this new power only at the cost of dislodging it from all its proper places, in truth from place itself, from the taking-place of its truth. It conducts a terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it, according to this double and contradictory structure: immunitary and auto-immunitary” (“Faith” 46). The autoimmune and immune reactions endlessly circulate: a religion lives and prospers only to the extent that its autoimmune systems can repress its reaction against the modern world from which it tends to isolate itself. Derrida extends this autoimmunitary economy to community as such, a concept of which he has always been suspicious (e.g. Politics 298), to suggest its tendency to close in on itself, to exclude that outside on which it depends for its survival. This tendency is not a perversion of proper community (whether inoperative, unavowable, or coming, as for Blanchot, Nancy, Agamben), but the condition of its existence: “no community that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact). . . . This self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself” (“Faith” 51).

 

In our second source, his interview with Giovanni Borradora, Derrida underscores the “terrifying” quality of the autoimmunitary process: that “my vulnerability is . . . without limit” before “the worst threat,” that which comes from the inside (“Autoimmunity” 188n7). This is developed in three forms. First, 9/11 itself should not be seen as an attack coming simply from without, but from within. Alongside America’s unprecedented and apparently unthreatened status as a world power comes its massive exposure to such attacks, through the concentrations of symbolic and actual power in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the easy availability of the means to conduct such an attack. Moreover this is not an attack from an external enemy, but from a former ally, and so takes place within a process initiated by the Americans when they armed bin Laden and his followers. Second, Derrida diagnoses something like a post-Cold War world order in which international terrorism replaces competition between power blocs as the major threat to the world system: a threat grounded in the possible repetition of such traumatic events. Third, Derrida expands the idea of autoimmunitary reactions to be regarded as something like an historical law: “repression in both its psychoanalytical sense and its political sense–whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy–ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm” (99). Derrida will argue in Rogues that no enemy of democracy can refuse to call himself a democrat; similarly “every terrorist in the world claims to be responding in self-defence to a prior terrorism on the part of the state, one that simply went by other names and covered itself with all sorts of more or less credible justifications” (103). In “Faith and Knowledge,” the autoimmune is what keeps religion, or community, alive, a virtuous if dangerous principle of contamination by and exposure to the world; to be wholly immune would be the closure of the system, or of the body, to the outside. If this remains Derrida’s model, the American attacks on Afghanistan and on Iraq, for example, would be examples of an autoimmune process that, in engaging the United States in the world, exposing it to the world, suppresses the immunitary response (some kind of retreat to isolationism), and prolongs the cycle of violence, repression, and reaction.

 

In Rogues, Derrida develops his discussion of autoimmunity out of the Algerian example I have cited. He reads the history of colonial and postcolonial Algeria in terms of a similar cycle of repression and reaction: a colonial power which denies democratic government to its dependent territory provokes a war which can best be seen as internal, rather than a war with an enemy power, as the political consequences in France certainly indicated; subsequently the postcolonial state is forced to suspend its own democratization process to protect not only its own control but the principle of democracy itself against the internal enemies it has managed to provoke in the aftermath of independence. It becomes hard to tell whether this action is that of the immune system–a defense against a threat to democracy, as the opponents of the Islamists might claim–or whether democracy’s suicide is an autoimmune reaction–another step in the existence of democracy, a slow self-destruction. Derrida suggests that the two are fairly indistinguishable: “murder was already turning into suicide, and the suicide, as always, let itself be translated into murder” (Rogues 59). This suggests that Derrida is not terribly concerned to differentiate between the immune and the autoimmune, and accounts for his use of the term “autoimmunitary” to refer to both processes as if they were a single phenomenon whose pervertibility or malfunction is regularly and critically indistinguishable from its proper purpose.

 

II

 

Does the extension of the idea of the autoimmunitary from religion in “Faith and Knowledge” to his account of democracy by the time of Rogues constitute a significant alteration of Derrida’s earlier understanding of “democracy to come”? If we were to seek confirmation that Derrida is challenging us to examine his use of the concept of democracy, we need only look to comments he makes immediately after citing the Algerian example. As a way of making the outlandish notion of democratic suicide seem more familiar, he draws a comparison between the cancelled Algerian election and the French presidential election of 2002, the year in which his paper was first given: “Imagine that, in France, with the National Front threatening to pull off an electoral victory, the election was suspended after the first round, that is, between the two rounds” (Rogues 30). The possibility of a Le Pen presidency underlines the ever-present threat of the legitimate democratic election of an anti-democratic candidate. This becomes something like a general principle of democratic systems: “the great question of modern parliamentary and representative democracy, perhaps of all democracy, . . . is that the alternative to democracy can always be represented as a democratic alternation” (30-1). The virtue of democracy, that opening to the future which leaves it open to change, institutionalized as the possibility of competing parties taking turns, exposes it in turn to the risk of destruction by the electoral institution of those who seek to suspend or restrict democracy. It is worth bearing in mind that Derrida rarely uses “democracy” to mean simply a particular form of government, but more often to suggest a whole political culture: equality, rights, freedom of speech, protection of minorities from majority oppression.

 

A further implication is that today both friends and enemies of democracy will present themselves as having impeccable democratic credentials. One of Derrida’s interests in Rogues is the apparent hegemony of the democratic itself; as he comments, even “Le Pen and his followers now present themselves as respectable and irreproachable democrats” (Rogues 30). Only a passing acquaintance with contemporary political trends in Britain suggests that this might be more than an exceptional problem, but a commonplace. It is not only the perma-tanned populist demagogue or the single-issue party that seeks to short-circuit established democratic decision-making procedures (although they may always also be the vehicle for a legitimate democratic response on behalf of an excluded group). An elected administration with a parliamentary majority but an increasingly centralized cabinet government may well be judged a threat to democracy even before the introduction of legislation which contravenes particular democratic principles (but always in the name of the opinions of the people, or the security of the state). The implication we might take from Derrida’s allusion to this problem is that responsible citizenship must mean (at the very least) interrogating all those who present themselves as democrats. They may always turn out to be voyous–rogues.

 

This poses a challenge, in turn, for Derrida’s audience. For after all, Derrida appears before us today, as he has done for a while, as a democrat. Derrida begins his address in “The Reason of the Strongest” with the idiomatics of voyou, but also by drawing our attention to the possibility that he too, is voyou. Derrida recalls his earlier words directly: “I would thus be, you might think, not only ‘voyou‘ but ‘a voyou,’ a real rogue” (Rogues 1; 78-9). It is up to us to say; Derrida stresses that the word voyou is never neutral, but always a performative judgment, an accusation, or an interpellation. To judge someone to be voyou is to place them outside the law and to ally yourself with the law (64-5). The possibility that a democrat is really a rogue reflects a “troubling indissociability” between the two, in part because the word’s provenance in the nineteenth century associates it with the threat of the demos, of the people at large, as it is largely used to stigmatize a specifically modern, urban population, perceived as a mobile, anarchic threat to bourgeois order (66-7). The voyou belongs among the spectres not only of a specifically revolutionary or simply despised class, but also of populism, which Benjamin Arditi helpfully describes as an “internal periphery” of democracy. Or in Derrida’s terms: “Demagogues sometimes denounce voyous, but they also often appeal to them, in the popular style of populism, always at the indecidable limit between the demagogic and the democratic” (67). If Derrida might turn out to have been merely a rogue, no true friend of democracy, that must be an inexorable condition of his own appeal to “democracy to come.” In Rogues he exhibits this undecidability, flaunting the necessary possibility that “democracy to come” might also turn out to be merely a verbal conjuring trick, mere politics in the pejorative sense. What is at stake in reading and responding to Derrida’s apparent revision of his account of democracy is the status of political interest in deconstruction, what Derrida argues is not a “political turn” within deconstruction but has always been there as the question of “the thinking of différance as always [a] thinking of the political, especially around the enigma or the autoimmune double bind of the democratic” (39).

 

III

 

Evaluating the place of “democracy to come” in Derrida’s work prior to Rogues is itself a challenging task. Since my conclusions on the subject can be found at greater length in Deconstruction and Democracy, here I will give an account of Derrida’s use of the term “democracy” that may allow us to judge whether his presentation of the relationship between deconstruction and democracy changes over time. (Since this essay takes into account texts which were not available to me in 2001, when the bulk of Democracy and Deconstruction was written, it may be read in part as an attempt at self-criticism, in the light of what may now be called, with regret, Derrida’s last writings. It is also a work of mourning.) Such an explication is made more difficult by Derrida’s refusal to define definitively what he understands by the word “democracy,” and his tendency to approach the subject from entirely different angles in individual texts. In Politics of Friendship, the most extensive treatment of these questions, democracy is primarily analyzed in terms of the relationship between fraternity and equality in the Western tradition of political thought; but in other texts, for example in “Passions” (1992), Derrida appears to suggest a more historical approach, tying the development of Western liberal democracy to institutional and legal developments, and particularly to the idea of literature.

 

Derrida’s hesitation about defining democracy also testifies to a certain tension or torsion within democracy itself, beginning with the problem of the word “democracy.” This is not simply a matter of distinguishing between democrat and rogue, or between a democratic state and a rogue state. Indeed it might begin with the question of whether we approach democracy as a word, rather than as a concept. If we had a clear definition of democracy, many of the difficulties in which Derrida is interested would disappear: we would have fixed criteria against which an individual or a state could be judged and declared democratic or not. Derrida does not even begin to speculate on whether such a set of criteria could be reasonably secured. This is not out of a desire for obfuscation or obscurity, but out of the conviction that such criteria would be inadequate to the futurity of democracy, to its openness, in which lies both its promise and its risk, its chance and its danger. All of that, indeed, which Derrida wishes to underline in his use of the phrase “democracy à venir “: usually translated as “democracy to come,” but in which we hear avenir, “future.” So Derrida never says quite what he means when he uses the word democracy, nor when he intervenes in the name of “democracy to come.” Indeed, as he suggests in “The Reason of the Strongest,” he may not always have been entirely serious in his use of the phrase: “I have most often used it, always in passing, with as much stubborn determination as indeterminate hesitation–at once calculated and culpable–in a strange mixture of lightness and gravity, in a casual and cursory, indeed somewhat irresponsible, way, with a somewhat sententious and aphoristic reserve that leaves seriously in reserve an excessive responsibility” (Rogues 81).

 

This may go some way to account for the confusion or bemusement with which Derrida’s political work has been greeted. Since the late 1980s, it has no longer been possible for readers of Derrida to accuse him of a failure to explain the political dimension of deconstruction, a demand that had been clearly evident as long ago as the interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta entitled “Positions” (1971). In his written texts and numerous interviews, Derrida has addressed an extensive range of specific political concerns, including nationalism, religious fundamentalism, cosmopolitanism in international affairs, the United Nations, immigration, and the idea of Europe and its place in world affairs, while more theoretical work has revolved around the concepts of decision, responsibility, justice, and hospitality. But where Derrida was once berated for failing to address political questions, new concerns have arisen among those following the development of his work. There has been a tendency to assimilate Derrida’s work to that of Levinas, despite the fact that a careful reading of texts such as “A Word of Welcome” (1996) will show that there has been no significant alteration in Derrida’s position on Levinas since his first criticisms in “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964).³ In turn this has led to the charge that Derrida has offered only “a politics of the ineffable” (McCarthy 115). Even writers sympathetic to Derrida have called for a political supplement to deconstruction such as might be found in the work of Laclau and Mouffe (Critchley 283). Slavoj Žižek speaks for many of Derrida’s critics when he suggests that Derrida’s actual political commitments are those of a concerned western European liberal, while his political theory amounts to a “melancholic post-secular” lament for the impossibility of politics (664-65). Derrida’s account of “democracy to come” seems to leave him open to attack from both sides. For self-proclaimed radicals, his work is too close to the liberal tradition, reformist rather than revolutionary. For many liberals, and particularly for the discursive democrats influenced more by the work of Jürgen Habermas, Derrida’s political writings are still too abstract, too vague, and remain divorced from everyday politics. In Deconstruction and Democracy I have tried to show that these concerns are misconceived and to substantiate Derrida’s claim that deconstruction is not best understood as a theory or a method–that is, as a political program–but as a description of “what happens.” As a project of political analysis, deconstruction is first and foremost a sensitivity or patient attention to upheavals and disruptions already underway. From this perspective, we should be able to see deconstruction, différance, an opening to a future which cannot be predicted or determined, in any political regime: by renaming this ungrounding of politics “democracy to come” Derrida is countersigning a political dimension which has been implicit in his work from its very beginning.

 

IV

 

Most of the arguments Derrida attaches to the idea of “democracy to come” are not particularly new in his work, but it is their elaboration in terms of democracy which is original. In Politics of Friendship (1989-90/1994), which contains its most extensive discussion prior to Voyous, “democracy to come” functions as a substitute for what Derrida more consistently calls justice.⁴ The book as a whole investigates the traditional association of democracy with equality, manifest in the recurrent figure of fraternity in political philosophy. Democracy is distinguished from other forms of political association by analogy with the non-hierarchical friendship between brothers. However Derrida rewrites this equation in a startling manner. Brotherhood betrays rather than confirms democratic equality. This does not mean singling out good and bad instances of democratic theories and polities. There is no democracy, Derrida argues, which will not overwrite friendship with brotherhood. Friendship in this schema stands for the possibility of befriending just anyone, brotherhood for an established relation with particular friends. As soon as I have determined friends, I owe them something; they become my brothers, and my obligations to them appear natural, or programmed. Such a programming cancels the very possibility of responsibility for Derrida, just as brotherhood cancels equality by virtue of being a preferring of some others to other others.

 

It is important to stress that for Derrida friendship and fraternity are inseparable, because this highlights the power, but also perhaps the limits, of Derrida’s analysis of democracy. Fraternity is naturalized friendship, analogous to “nationality” as a bond between citizens which claims to be natural, automatic, unquestionable. Deconstruction, which is above all, denaturalization, insists that the idea of brotherhood, as of the nation, obscures particular political decisions. Friendship, which prefers, cannot help becoming brotherhood. Similarly, democracy, which embodies an appeal to equality, can never live up to its name. As soon as a state prefers its citizens, even in so minimal a way as by naming and counting them as its citizens, democracy is being blocked or cancelled. All the more or less evident restrictions of equality within a so-called democracy (the de facto or de jure inequality of women, of the poor, of minorities, of minors, of strangers tolerated only according to a limited hospitality) can and must be criticized in the name of democracy, judged and found wanting against the principle of equality. But any and every democracy will also always be found wanting because it must refer to a bounded territory or a limited population, because it must be constituted by a decision as to who is and who is not to count as “equal” in principle in this state. Derrida extends the analysis to the principle of equality itself, which can never do justice to the irreducible singularity of those counted as citizens–but without which there could be no laws, and no possibility of legal justice in the first place.

 

A similar double bind occurs in a discussion of democracy in relation to freedom of speech. In “Passions,” Derrida associates deconstruction with literature and literature with democracy. The right to say anything, the idea of literature, and the freedom of speech guaranteed in liberal democracy in its modern form are all related. This does not mean that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. We might deduce that there will be “very little, hardly any” democracy. There can be no absolute freedom of speech, since it is limited by codes governing what can be made known (publicity) and what must be protected (privacy) or hidden (secrecy). These limits will, ideally, be subject to scrutiny and political contestation: a society in which there is no debate on what is right and proper and permissible to say is to that extent no longer democratic. Democracy can never be an experience of absolute freedom, just as it cannot be a matter of absolute equality. Rather we have to understand democracy in terms of tensions and strains, in the constituent limits that democracy places on the principles which define it.

 

But as soon as it becomes clear that democracy as equality is in the sense to which Derrida appeals impossible, things start to look more problematic. What use is a criticism so general that it must by definition include every state which claims to be democratic? What good is an analysis that will continually and repeatedly testify only to the failure of democratic claims? My own response is that such an understanding of democracy can at least give us grounds to judge more or less democratic tendencies within a particular state, or to compare (in a qualified manner) two systems that claim to be equally democratic; but also that the apparent negativity of this analysis is a necessary correlate of the permanent critical vigilance on which the possibility of responsible citizenship depends. A democrat may become a rogue, even while pursuing the exact same aims, should circumstances happen to change. Our political judgments require constant reinvention. It should also be clear that the idea of democracy to come is an acknowledgment that the idea of democracy, its name, and its tradition, are what make possible such a criticism. For this reason there can be no immediate question of jettisoning democracy. Derrida’s use of the phrase “democracy to come” is in part an acknowledgement of this debt to both an historical and an intellectual heritage. But it is also an attempt to stress or underline the fact that for all the real and existing limits to democracy identified by deconstruction, we should not lose faith in it. Here Derrida’s strategy is rather ambiguous. What sounds like the promise of a more democratic future is in fact nothing of the sort. There is a promise within democracy, as there has always been, but there can be no guarantee of more democracy in the future. “Democracy to come” implies rather that even where there is less, or ever so little, democracy, a future for democracy still remains–and this is perhaps clearer in Rogues, where Derrida uses the figure of the turn to suggest that democracy might always come around again. The suspension of democratic government in Algeria in 1992 was not an end to democracy, but its deferral. The futurity of “democracy to come” must be monstrous, unimaginable because it implies the devastation of all the conceptual systems by which we reckon politics. In Politics of Friendship Derrida wonders a number of times whether democracy to come would still even be democracy: “Would it still make sense to speak of democracy when it would no longer be a question . . . of country, nation, even of State and citizen–in other words, if at least one keeps to the accepted use of these words, when it would no longer be a political question?” (Politics 104). The title of another interview hints that democracy to come might be both a promise to be welcome and a threat to be deferred: “Democracy Adjourned” (the published translation bears the more optimistic sounding “Another Day for Democracy,” and cf. Rogues 68).

 

V

 

It is I hope clear that Derrida’s use of the phrase “democracy to come” prior to Rogues is by no means either simply critical or simply affirmative. Both a profession of faith and an affiliation to a particular tradition, Derrida’s work reiterates and sends on the democratic appeal he inherits: “When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness?” (Politics 306). Yet it still seems to me that Rogues is circumspect about “democracy to come.” This difference however is not conceptual–nor has Derrida’s evaluation of democracy as an ideal, or of liberal democratic states as a partial success and a partial failure in relation to that ideal, changed. Rather, the change from “democracy to come” to the suicidal democracy of the autoimmunitary system must be understood first and foremost as a political shift. Particularly in the first essay, I am tempted to believe that faced with an admiring crowd, gathered to discuss “democracy to come,” faced with the risk of the complacently remoralized deconstruction, the “consensus of a new dogmatic slumber” against which he warned in “Passions,” Derrida wanted to make democracy look as ambiguous as possible (“Passions” 15). My suggestion is that we might understand his account of democracy in terms of autoimmunity as a definite development, although perhaps not a substantial alteration, of what was already a deeply ambivalent portrait of democracy.

 

I have cited Derrida’s remark in Rogues that he may never have been entirely serious about democracy. But what Derrida does not quite say is that his use of the word “democracy” will always have been itself a question of political strategy, meaning in part that he chooses to employ a particular vocabulary in a particular context, but also implying that a certain type of engagement will have forced itself upon him, will have seemed necessary. However, in interviews of the period in which he began to use the phrase, this sense of strategy is quite clear. For example, in a 1989 discussion with Michael Sprinker, Derrida remarks that “perhaps the term democracy is not a good term. For now it’s the best term I’ve found. But, for example, one day I gave a lecture at Johns Hopkins on these things and a student said to me, ‘What you call democracy is what Hannah Arendt calls republic in order to place it in opposition to democracy.’ Why not?” In fact Derrida insists that his use of the word democracy is a polemical and political intervention: “in the discursive context that dominates politics today, the choice of the term [democracy] is a good choice–it’s the least lousy possible. As a term, however, it’s not sacred. I can, some day or another, say, ‘No, it’s not the right term. The situation allows or demands that we use another term in other sentences’” (Negotiations 181). In his 2003 decision to be a co-signatory with Jürgen Habermas of a call for a specifically European political initiative, Derrida seems to be going against his earlier warning in The Other Heading (1991) about assigning such a privilege to the idea of “Europe.” But this should remind us that such warnings are always bound to contexts.

 

Because of this insistence that we must use particular words here and now, although this does not necessarily add up to a particular political program, I propose that we consider Derrida’s use of the phrase “democracy to come” as a tactical, indeed as a political, action. It is a pledge of faith in something attested to in democracy, in both the history of the concept and in the democracies of the contemporary world; but it is also a capitulation to the demand for deconstruction’s political secret, which Derrida had refused to provide for many years. The timing is critical. Although it actually precedes Derrida’s decision to finally address Marxism openly in Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida confirms in Rogues that he first uses the phrase “democracy to come” in the long introductory essay to the collection of his previously published essays on the university, The Right To Philosophy, in “1989-1990” (Rogues 81-2; cf. Who’s Afraid 22-31). My suggestion is that both gestures need to be understand as attempts to maintain a critical stance in the face of the supposed post-Cold War triumph of liberal democracy following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this context it seems as if the phrase “democracy to come” may well be an attempt to say something critical about the so-called democracy of the times, in underlining an obligation for democracy to continue to transform and improve itself. But wishing to avoid both the inevitable accusations of nihilism and the charge of political naïvety in being unable to differentiate democracy and totalitarianism levelled by Claude Lefort in a combative paper to Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political in 1980, Derrida has to find a way to retain the name of democracy, while reserving a space for its equally urgent critique.

 

Over a decade later, and in changing geopolitical circumstances, Derrida re-issues his appeal for a “democracy to come,” but the terms in which it is phrased have hardened. What do we gain politically by translating “democracy to come” into “autoimmunity”? We learn that modern democracies may be seen to be caught up in a permanent process of self-destruction, inseparable from their attempts to sustain their own existence. Democracy, the legal and political frameworks of the sovereign state, can secure all kinds of goods, but only at the cost not only of others–Derrida refers to the classical example of the tensions between liberty and equality–but also of its own existence. To the extent that it protects itself, that its borders are patrolled and its immigrants counted and controlled, the state is no longer democratic, it closes itself against the future; yet to the extent that the rule of law is not maintained, that the boundaries of its territory are indeterminate or its citizens undifferentiated from others, the state no longer exists, and we are no longer able to speak of anything like a democracy, and certainly not of a democracy to come, that seems to depend upon the survival of a particular tradition of critical and reflective thought linked to the state form. Derrida stresses the link between the autoimmunitary and undecidability. The suppression of civil liberties in the name of security may be legitimate in protecting democracy against those who are set against it, but it is also autoimmunitary in exposing the immune system, by which democracy defends itself from its enemies (and thereby threatens the principles of democracy), as an “a priori abusive use of force” (Voyous 65). We can extend these figures, should we so wish. A state whose repressive measures outlaw a peaceful opposition party will doubtless provoke more violent measures–may rule out the possibility of reform rather than revolution.

 

So the idea of the autoimmunitary can help to sharpen our sense that the effort to maintain democracy will always threaten to erase the public goods that make it worthwhile. But that process of destruction, in threatening to create ever greater counterforces, will in turn open new possibilities for democratic change. In particular it shifts us away from the apparent promise of “democracy to come,” and clarifies a mode in which we might undertake the analysis of actually existing democracy, as well as the theoretical and philosophical tradition that underpins it. (This looks like a shift from one philosophy of history to another, from a more messianic account to a more dialectical one: this might be seen as problematic, had we not learned from Derrida the impossibility of doing without metaphysics, so long as such schemes are subject to a perpetual critical and deconstructive vigilance.) Politically, I think the idea of democracy’s autoimmunitary systems might serve to bulwark a skepticism against the attack on freedom in the name of security. Democracy’s exposure is the price of its liberties; while democracy’s closure, its need to secure its borders, its need for a mediated system of political representation, contravenes the unconditional principles of democracy to come, and so threatens it as democracy. There can be no question of programming decisions here: no one can dictate the balance of liberty and security in a particular situation, just as no one can predict what degree of protection a democracy will finally provide for those minorities sheltered within. Derrida’s work on hospitality suggests that there is only hospitality when it is offered unconditionally, that is to the point at which the guest becomes the host in my place, when I no longer insist on asking the stranger his name in my language rather than in his. But this does not lead to the conclusion that all restrictions on immigration, even though they are always unjust, and we must work for less unjust laws, should be lifted. To do so would be to dissolve the constraints that define and protect the democratic space being offered to the newcomer. Similarly, we can only expect so much of democracy, so long as the political form most devoted to freedom and equality remains linked to security, property, sovereignty, state, territory, people, or nation.

 

VI

 

Derrida’s ultimate target in Rogues may not be democracy after all, but sovereignty, and with it our sense of propriety, of sanctity and security, of the supposedly legitimate force wielded over any body, state, or identity. Derrida underlines another double bind. As we have seen, democracy depends on something like sovereignty: there can be no democracy without political control over a territory, a population; but democracy also means that same political control must in turn be subject to the authority of the people. The demos is a threat in any regime: democracy is suicidal in enshrining that threat at the heart of the regime. A whole tradition, the most insistent modern representative of which is Carl Schmitt, has argued that sovereignty is indivisible or is nothing. Derrida will agree with Schmitt, and with the tradition, that sovereignty must be indivisible, but, like other exceptional and sovereign features of the philosophical in which Derrida has taken an interest–reason, decision, responsibility, forgiveness, exception, presence–this means sovereignty is also impossible. It can never achieve the indivisibility it claims as its prerequisite. To the extent that it seeks to do so, it must enforce the law with violence. Derrida reminds us that “there are in the end rather few philosophical discourses, assuming there are any at all, in the long tradition that runs from Plato to Heidegger, that have without any reservations taken the side of democracy” (Rogues 41). Might this be because the sovereignty of reason is itself threatened by the figure of democracy, the arguments of the philosophers by the voices of the people? Just as deconstruction seeks to open philosophy to its outside, so the faltering of sovereignty within democracy needs to be exposed.

 

Derrida argues that there are always “plus d’états voyous“–“(No) more rogue states” (Rogues 95-107)–than you think. The idiom resists translation: there are always no rogue states, and always more rogue states. Being “voyou” is inscribed into the very principle of sovereignty, into the constitution of every state. The play on the idea of rogue state is an explicit attempt to link geopolitical reflection, and in particular a contestation of the right of the United States to identify and vilify particular “Rogue States,” to the more profound sense that all sovereignty is somehow abusive and violent. Yet where the retort that takes the United States as the exemplary rogue state has a clear political and polemical force, Derrida seems to risk going astray: if states are rogue not in exceptional circumstances, but by default, isn’t there a temptation to shrug one’s shoulders?

 

As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue State. Abuse is the law of its use; it is the law itself, the "logic" of a sovereignty that can reign only without division [partage]. More precisely, since it never succeeds in doing this except in a critical, precarious and unstable fashion, sovereignty can only tend, for a limited time, to rule indivisibly [sans partage]. (Rogues 102, translation adapted)

 

We’re faced with the same dilemma that arises from a “democracy to come”: that if all politics is hostile to democracy, just as all politics is an opening to more democracy, more equality, more justice, how are we to choose and prefer some politics rather than other politics? If all states are rogue states, which should we denounce?

 

Yet the emphasis he places on “plus de” shows that Derrida acknowledges this problem. If there are only rogue states, there are no rogue states: the distinction appears to lose its force. This is no excuse to back away from politics itself, nor for a resignation in the face of the future: patience need not mean waiting. Despite the fact that “there is something of a rogue state in every state [and] the use of state power is originally excessive and abusive” (Rogues 156),

 

it would be imprudent and hasty, in truth hardly reasonable, to oppose unconditionally, that is, head on, a sovereignty that is in itself unconditional and indivisible. One cannot combat, head on, all sovereignty, sovereignty in general, without threatening at the same time, beyond the nation-state figure of sovereignty, the classical principles of freedom and self-determination. . . . Nation-state sovereignty can even itself, in certain conditions, become an indispensable bulwark against certain international powers. (Rogues 158)

 

Despite its opposition to nationalism, as an exemplary form of political brotherhood, deconstruction cannot dictate a categorical opposition to the idea of “nation,” not least where it might provide a point of resistance to imperialism, and precisely in the name of democracy. The deconstruction of reason, and of its political logic of sovereignty, is not to be accomplished by simply opposing democracy to sovereignty, or by setting security against freedom. The relation between these figures is more complex; to appeal to “democracy to come” is one way of saying this–to underscore the autoimmunity of democracy, of sovereignty, of reason, is another. “Democracy to come” highlights an insufficiency within any and every existing or possible democracy, while promising more rather than less democracy: but the figure of suicidal democracy emphasizes instead that what promises more democracy may well be the extent to which democracy takes risks. The distinction is one of words, that is to say of the different strategies that evolving political contexts may call forth. But the deconstruction of sovereignty cannot mean the rejection of sovereignty.

 

In an interview given shortly before his death on 9 October 2004, Derrida confesses to two “contradictory feelings” concerning the legacy of his thought: “on the one hand, to say it smiling and immodestly, I feel that people have not even begun to read me, that if there are very many good readers (a few dozen in the world, perhaps), they will do so only later. On the other hand, I feel that two weeks after my death, nothing at all of my work will be left” (“Je Suis”). This is a question of a legacy, of the past, but also of the future. I have argued that in Rogues Derrida continues to develop his analysis of democracy, and to some extent might be seen as backing away from the syntax of “democracy to come.” As elsewhere, what Derrida is really interested in is a future that cannot be identified in advance, since it would be a break with all the old names. Democracy without sovereignty might no longer be democracy, either. Yet for all this talk of the future, Derrida does not mean us to turn away from what is happening now. Autoimmunization, with its insistence on a process that is always already underway, for all its potential confusions–and it’s clear that, as Gasché comments, this must be understood “far beyond the biological processes” (297)–may prove a more useful starting point. As in the case of the link between sovereignty and democracy: “such a questioning [of democracy] . . . is already under way. It is at work today; it is what’s coming, what’s happening. It is and it makes history” (Rogues 157). In his 1981 interview with Richard Kearney, Derrida remarked that “the difficulty is to gesture in opposite directions at the same time: on the one hand to preserve a distance and suspicion with regard to the official political codes governing reality; on the other, to intervene here and now in a practical and engagé manner whenever the necessity arises” (120). Although Derrida is silent on the subject in Voyous, we must reserve a place for the possibility that what is coming will not be democracy, or might no longer be usefully called democracy. Despite its prominence in his work since 1990, we cannot take Derrida’s engagement with democracy to be the last word on the politics of deconstruction.

 

VII

 

Because Derrida’s death is written into every single word he ever wrote, so his literal, physical decease changes nothing. No philosopher has insisted so completely and so powerfully on the fact that one’s future demise is a necessary precondition of one’s every utterance. Friendship is always mourning, because it must always anticipate the death of my friend. As Derrida described it in mourning his own friend Paul de Man,

 

the strange situation I am describing here, for example that of my friendship with Paul de Man, would have allowed me to say all of this before his death. It suffices that I know him to be mortal, that he knows me to be mortal--there is no friendship without this knowledge of finitude. And everything that we inscribe in the living present of our relation to others already carries, always, the signature of memoirs-from-beyond-the-grave. (Memoires 29)

 

This situation is neither to be regretted nor condemned, since it is what makes friendship possible: “there belongs the gesture of faithful friendship, its immeasurable grief, but also its life” (Memoires 38). Returning to this theme in Politics of Friendship, Derrida remarks: “I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death. Therefore, beyond life” (12). Our first engagement with the thought of Jacques Derrida will always have condemned us to suffer his loss. But then, as he famously argues in Speech and Phenomena, his death was already predicted and anticipated in every word he wrote: “My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncing of the I. . . . The statement ‘I am alive’ is accompanied by my being dead, and its possibility requires the possibility that I be dead, and conversely” (Speech 96-7). If Derrida’s death was always inscribed in his writings, we must refuse the temptation to ascribe his work a provisional or hypothetical unity based on its finally delimited finitude: its physical completion should not be allowed to dictate a conceptual closure. This means seeking not only to reconstruct the steps in the trajectory of his own work, but also continuing to challenge and renew his questioning, to think it in other ways, and in other words.

 

In a short and lucid article on Derrida’s political thought, Geoffrey Bennington argues that “deconstruction on the one hand generalises the concept of politics so that it includes all conceptual dealings whatsoever, and on the other makes a precise use of one particular inherited politico-metaphysical concept, democracy, to make a pointed and more obviously political intervention in political thought” (32-3). There is a danger in this account that it returns us to democracy: that democracy might become the last word, the only word, through which deconstruction might seek to engage politically. The inverse of such a risk is that any existing democracy could seek to shore itself up with the prestige of a deconstructive logic. I have argued that this need not be the case, and that “democracy” is only one word under which a political intervention might be made. Yet there are places in his work where Derrida does seem to grant a particular privilege to democracy, which must mean not only a concept but also a name and a particular historical tradition. For example, in the Borradori interview:

 

Of all the names grouped a bit too quickly under the category "political regimes" (and I do not believe that "democracy" ultimately designates a "political regime"), the inherited concept of democracy is the only one that welcomes the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself. ("Autoimmunity" 121)

 

Democracy, he continues, “would be the name of the only ‘regime’ that presupposes its own perfectibility” (121, emphasis added).

 

This is a figure of intense ambivalence. Is democracy the only site of a political invention of the future? Is democracy the only possible name for such an invention? Does the Western philosophical tradition, do the Western liberal democracies, offer the only spaces in which alternative political possibilities might develop? Is there really no future for politics, for deconstruction, outside of democracy? This remains to be seen. Derrida insists that democracy is always and will always be a question of what is to come. The challenge of a political invention of the future, and this is perhaps where deconstruction’s real radicalism lies, is the acknowledgment that what makes a new politics possible is that which also threatens to destroy politics. Only a state willing to consider the surrender of its own sovereignty, to place equality before security, only a suicidal democracy might live up to the idea of a “democracy to come.” This may seem a long way to go in the current political climate–or indeed in any political climate. But we should remember that by the logic of the autoimmunitary process, the logic of deconstruction itself, even a state that appears to be drawing rapidly away from democracy may in fact be exposing itself even more to the possibility of what remains to come.

 

Notes

 

An early version of this essay was presented to the conference “Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy” at the University of Aberystwyth, January 2005. I would like to thank both the organizers, the Aberystwyth Post-International Group, and the participants for their responses to the paper. I am also grateful to the editors of this special issue of Postmodern Culture for their suggestions.

 

1. Where I associate a date with Derrida’s works, it is not usually the date of first publication, but the date the work was first presented in public, at which an interview was given, or the date of revision where one is indicated in the published text. This is an attempt to suggest a more accurate chronology for Derrida’s writings than that provided by the somewhat erratic order of their publication.

 

2. The ambiguities raised by Derrida’s choice of example, and the apparent confrontation in the Algerian political process between a Christian Enlightenment heritage and the question of Islamism, are deliberate.

 

3. I make this argument in part 3 of Deconstruction and Democracy. Derrida suggests elsewhere that his later engagement with Levinas has been overdetermined by a political question: the need to rearticulate Levinas in order to rescue his work from a growing religious and moralistic appropriation (see Papier Machine 366; see also comments by Hent de Vries in the Preface to Minimal Theologies xix-xx).

 

4. Politics of Friendship is presented as a transcript of Derrida’s seminar of 1989-1990 of the same title. This would make the use of “democracy to come” in the text contemporary with its use in The Right to Philosophy. However one assumes that the text has been revised for publication (in 1994). Since it shares many features in common with Specters of Marx (first presented and published in 1993), which does make some use of “democracy to come,” but also with “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation’ of Authority” (first presented in 1989 and 1990, and published in English in 1990, before being slightly revised for the French edition of 1994), which makes very little, my guess is that many of the references to “democracy to come” are later additions, but that “democracy” is certainly on Derrida’s agenda for the first time in 1989-1990. A textual criticism to come will prepare us to answer such questions, and begin to read Derrida with the attention to singularity his texts demand.

 

Works Cited

 

• Arditi, Benjamin. “Populism as a Spectre of Democracy: A Response to Canovan.” Political Studies 52 (2005): 135-43.
• Bennington, Geoffrey. “Derrida and Politics.” Interrupting Derrida. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Critchley, Simon. Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity. London: Verso, 1999.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” Trans. Giovanni Boradorri. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 85-136.
• —. “Deconstruction and the Other.” Interview with Richard Kearney. Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. 107-26
• —. “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Trans. Samuel Weber. Religion. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. 1-78.
• —. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority.’” Trans. Mary Quaintance. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Eds. Drucilla Cornell et al. London: Routledge, 1992. 3-67.
• —. “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même.” Interview with Jean Birbaum. Le Monde 18 Aug. 2004. Trans. Pascale Fusshoeller, Leslie Thatcher, and Steve Weissman. truthout 27 Aug. 2004. No longer available online.
• —. Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
• —. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
• —. The Other Heading. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
• —. Papier Machine. Paris: Galilée, 2001.
• —. “Passions.” Trans. David Wood. On The Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 3-31.
• —. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
• —. “Positions.” Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta. Positions. 1972. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 37-96.
• —. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994.
• —. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• —. “Violence and Metaphysics.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. 79-153.
• —. Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right To Philosophy I. Trans. Jan Plug. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
• —. “A Word of Welcome.” Adieu: to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. 15-123.
• Gasché, Rodolphe. “‘In the Name of Reason’: The Deconstruction of Sovereignty.” Research in Phenomenology 34 (2004): 289-303.
• Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. “February 15th, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for A Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe.” Trans. Max Pensky. Constellations 10 (2003): 291-97.
• Lefort, Claude. “The Question of Democracy.” Trans. David Macey. Democracy and Political Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 9-20.
• McCarthy, Thomas. Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Critical Theory. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
• Roberts, Hugh. The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in a Broken Polity. London: Verso, 2003.
• Thomson, Alex. Deconstruction and Democracy. London: Continuum, 2005.
• de Vries, Hent. Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
• Žižek, Slavoj. “Melancholy and the Act.” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 657-81.

 

 

Megan Kerr

kerr.megan@gmail.com

 

I read Derrida’s Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation. Je lus or Je lis will be a difficulty for a French translator to resolve or to leave open [thus]. The ambiguity of “I read” is my right as an English writer, but by what right do I write “Derrida’s Passions: An Oblique Offering“? He wrote none of this text:

 

David Wood . . . suggests to me [m'offre] that these pages be entitled "An Oblique Offering." He had even printed it beforehand on the projected Table of Contents of the complete manuscript before I had written a line of this text.

 

Should I ascribe this quotation to (Derrida, “Passions” 12) or to (Wood, “Passions” 12)? Derrida’s only words are in square brackets which are not his. This is no mere rite: I respond to “response” without parenthesizing the parentheses. It is not polite to accuse Derrida of words he did not write, but I raise the question not as a gesture, from duty or out of politeness, but out of love. This opposition–love vs. gestures, duty, politeness–is crucial, as is the object of love: right now, love of Derrida and love of meaning. May I say I love Derrida, whom I have not met? By what right? What do I mean by that? I will have to defend my love of meaning and my love of Derrida in order to say, “I read Derrida’s Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation,” but for now, you know what I mean–I read Derrida’s Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation:

 

I Read Derrida’s Passions:

 

I begin by enacting the ritual of the critical reader with which this text opens:

 

Friendship as well as politeness would enjoin a double duty: would it not precisely be to avoid at all cost both the language of ritual and the language of duty? Duplicity, the being-double of this duty, cannot be added up as a 1 + 1 = 2 or a 1 + 2, but on the contrary hollows itself out in an infinite abyss. (Passions 7)

 

Let us leave politeness aside for a moment. There is no such abyss in friendship, Jacques. How does one escape the abyss? If indeed, such a double duty were valid, the abyss would be inescapable, the duty to avoid duty recurring in the familiar figure of infinite regression, but only if the former putative duty resembled the latter. One must avoid the language of duty to engage in friendship worthy of the name, by eschewing duty not out of duty but out of what supersedes it–a compulsion, yes, but of a different order. “It is insufficient to say that the ‘ought’ [il faut] of friendship, like that of politeness, must not be on the order of duty. It must not even take the form of a rule, and certainly not of a ritual rule” (8). Politeness still to one side, “insufficient” is not “inaccurate,” merely lacking. Rules supply a lack, in both senses, simultaneously creating and trying to regulate disobedience. How do we know where in the abyss to apply the rule and what form it should take, before disobedience is possible? What khôra is it trying to emulate with its ritual structure? That it is a hollow copy is certain, trying to find itself “beyond reproach by playing on appearances just where intention is in default” (8). Voilà our khôra, which is no mystical arcanum unless we are so lost in the logos as to consider everything which we cannot formulate to be formless and unformed. “This very singular impropriety . . . is just what must be kept for it, what we must keep for it” (Derrida/McLeod, Khôra 97). This khôra can be given a name, indeed, many names, all of which will fall into the trap of making “one forget the vicariousness of its own function” (Derrida/Spivak, Of Grammatology 144). As with mercy and justice,

 

friendship resembles duty, but it comes from somewhere else, it belongs to a different order, at the same time it modifies justice, it at once tempers and strengthens duty, changes it without changing it, converts it without converting it, yet while improving it, while exalting it. (Derrida/Venuti/Kerr, "What" 195)

 

Only if the intention, the friendship, the feeling, the relational motivation, the titular passions, are missing does “duty” come into play as an insufficient substitute, the letter of the law. The “abyss” recurs:

 

Taken seriously, this hypothesis . . . would make one tremble, it could also paralyze one at the edge of the abyss, there where you would be alone, all alone or already caught up in a struggle with the other, an other who would seek in vain to hold you back or to push you into the void, to save you or to lose you. (8)

 

It hollows itself out only if the relational compulsion is absent. The “abyss” is anti-relational; if you are “all alone or already caught up in a struggle with the other” then the abyss appears, the hollow friendship, for friendship is already absent and duty fails to wholly supply the lack. The “Passions” of the title is also a theological intervention that this article nevertheless lacks, and which “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” (Derrida/Venuti) addresses repeatedly. The Passion of Christ heralded, theologically, the coming of grace, of a love that is higher than the law–the Spirit and not the Letter: “(literal circumcision of the flesh versus ideal and interior circumcision of the heart, Jewish circumcision versus Christian circumcision, the whole debate surrounding Paul)” (194).

 

Already reading a different text from that written by Derrida, I am now doing so perversely: the word duty, already split into duty/devoir, doubles again, for here, I say, there is no such duty, there is love. Henceforward, I see each mention of “duty” as perhaps duty, perhaps love, and choose my interpretation by relating it back to the countertext that I am reading, which is no longer Derrida’s Passions: An Oblique Offering, which I nevertheless continue to read simultaneously. The next disagreement, arising in both, increases these ghost-texts (res in potentia) exponentially.

 

One cannot simply count expotential readings–every word is an opportunity for a new text to spring up, but I single out a few, which I divide, though they are concurrent, into two groups: in the first group, I disagree with Derrida’s meaning; in the second, I question issues of translation from French to English.

 

“Derrida’s meaning” abounds with presumptions which run contrary to my poststructuralist literary and linguistic training. I could say simply “the text,” avoiding a confrontation either with Derrida or with meaning, and this text would be shorter for it. Instead, I open a can of worms: that the meaning I understand is the meaning Derrida meant; that the meaning belongs to Derrida; that I can understand his meaning; that his meaning is carried from French to English and remains the same meaning. These are the same worms I faced at the beginning and they will not vanish if I say coldly “the text” and keep the presumptions secret. Why not? Because in any case I am about to treat “the text,” performatively, according to meaning, whether or not I avoid the word “meaning”; because in order to mount my disagreements, I must presume that there is meaning running through the text that is not mine alone, that the words have enough of a meaning to mean something which is not only my interpretation (“For a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written” [Derrida/Weber and Mehlman, “Signature” 8]); because I am reading this text because it is Derrida’s and because I love Derrida even though Wood wrote the English words. I still say “I love Derrida” and I mean that in general I love his meaning (when I read in English) and both his meaning and words (when I read in French) and so to defend my love of Derrida I still have to defend meaning. (I feel no need to defend any notion of Derrida or his meaning being “unitary”; I don’t believe that is true or that love depends on that.) I will defend meaning, but for now I will demonstrate it, rely on it in my peformance, as I mount my disagreements.

 

Nevertheless, the meaning of these words troubles me, from my own fingers or in the article I read: love for . . . what, duty to . . . what? I read on, perversely:

 

An axiom from which it is not necessary to conclude further that one can only accede to friendship or politeness (for example, in responding to an invitation, or indeed to the request or the question of a friend) by transgressing all rules and going against all duty. (8)

 

I leave aside politeness, still. This doesn’t follow; that one should be motivated by friendship, not duty (this according to my countertext), does not necessarily require one to transgress any rules, much less all: any rules, because we have not yet entered the lack which rules will supply; all rules, because we need not include those against incest and jaywalking. The abstract noun, “duty,” troubles me, for duty cannot be codified. Rather than singular, it is uncountable. It was never unitary, even before I split it into duty/devoir and then perverted it as “love”–what of contradictory duties, what do I, my aunt, my mother, my father, my lover, regard as my duty? If this insistence on duty in life constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy, then philosophy constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of life. It is not so; such a word must remain “without a general and rule-governed response . . . linked specifically each time, to the occurrence of a decision without rules and without will in the course of a new test of the undecidable” (16-7). Only by treating the word “duty” as a homogenous summary of all duties, which insists on an at least possible codification whether realized or not, can one conclude that if friendship must avoid duty, it must avoid all duty. Any abstract noun is dangerous until we have asked “From whom? To whom?” (6) and insisted that it is different whenever the answers to those questions are different.

 

The abyss is a well of love; it becomes an abyss only when that love is lacking and the friendship is (temporarily or permanently) absent; it is love that does not need duty or the language of duty. Similarly, “morality” requires its emotional antecedent.

 

Furthermore, would it be moral and responsible to act morally because one has a sense (the word emphasized above) of duty and responsibility? Clearly not; it would be too easy and, precisely, natural, programmed by nature; it is hardly moral to be moral (responsible, etc.) because one has the sense of the moral, of the highness of the law, etc. (16)

 

What is “morality”? I cannot codify it any more than I can codify duty; it too demands questions of specificity: when, where, for whom, to whom? It, too, must be “linked specifically each time, to the occurrence of a decision without rules . . . in the course of a new test of the undecidable.” (17) I elide “without will” deliberately: one’s morality requires the will to be moral. So far, Derrida, Kant, and I agree, but the sense of morality triggers another expotential reading within the multiplying texts that I am still trying to read simultaneously. This sense, sensibility, emotion, is treated, following Kant, as necessarily “pathological,” i.e., diseased:

 

This is the well-known problem of "respect" for the moral law . . . this problem draws all of its interest from the disturbing paradox that it inscribes in the heart of a morality incapable of giving an account of being inscribed in an affect (Gefühl) or in a sensibility of what should not be inscribed there or should only enjoin the sacrifice of everything that would only obey this sensible inclination. . . . The object of sacrifice there is always of the order of the sensuous motives [mobile sensibile], of the secretly "pathological" interest which must, says Kant, be "humbled" before the moral law. (16)

 

Everything hinges on the second “only,” the sacrifice of everything that would only obey this sensible inclination. “Sensible,” in English, hovers awkwardly between its current, common signified (If you would only be sensible!) and the more archaic signified towards which the context forces it. Slyly, through the complex relationship the two languages have enjoyed, English proffers a violently perverse interpretation: sacrifice everything that makes sense. Nevertheless, I withdraw from that expotential bubble; I am not after common sense; it is still Derrida’s meaning that I am chasing, if only to disagree. I reread: /sãsibl/. Anything that would only obey this sensible inclination would require its own sacrifice to the law, for it would be an instinct forever higher than the law and beyond control. Only if “only” is removed, can we conclude that a sense of morality is inimical to morality and we define morality as the sacrifice of all emotional impetus, regardless of what it drives us towards. It thus becomes moral to commit adultery as long as I don’t want to. In refusing the sense of the moral, in seeing it as an instinct, Derrida has removed “only” and acceded to Kantian binarisms. The above passage continues,

 

this concept of sacrificial offering, thus of sacrifice in general, requires the whole apparatus of the "critical" distinctions of Kantianism; sensible/intelligible, passivity/spontaneity, intuitus derivativus/intuitus originarius, etc. (16)

 

Can I make such a wild, even heretical accusation? For once, Derrida will admit no doubt: “it would be necessary to declare in the most direct way that if one had the sense of duty and of responsibility, it would compel breaking with both these moralisms” (15); “Clearly not“; “too easy and, precisely, natural, programmed by nature“; “This is the well-known problem“; “this concept . . . requires the whole apparatus of the ‘critical’ distinctions” (16; emphases added except for “sense“). The concept that he unequivocally insists on rests explicitly on this binary between easy, natural, instinctive, sensible (emotional), passive, derivative, and less easy, unnatural, intelligible, spontaneous, originary.

 

Stepping momentarily into this code, I gave the example of reluctant adultery; we must accept that absurdity as long as we denigrate the emotions. “The example itself, as such, overflows its singularity as much as its identity. This is why there are no examples, while at the same time there are only examples” (17). It could not have been an example without my stepping into the code. Such instances can only be pressed into service as “examples” once the code which they exemplify has already sprung up out of these very instances–but not from all of them. The code is an hypothesis based on selective data and treated as truth. Creating an “example” of an instance bastardizes it by reversing the chronology. Derrida’s instance of nonresponse that is valid or invalid for the law and my instance of sanctioning reluctant adultery become metonymic lies about nonresponse in general, about denying emotion in general. The instance, made to act as an example, is forced to lie and deny its singularity. The example is derivative; the instance is originary. The example, however, is of the code; it lies on the intelligible side of the binary, pretending to be “originary.” The instance rests with the other. Derrida accepts the binary, while resisting it with “passion”:

 

the same goes for the concept of passion; what I am looking for here, passion according to me, would be a concept of passion that would be non-"pathological" in Kant's sense. All this, therefore, still remains open, suspended, undecided, questionable even beyond the question, indeed, to make use of another figure, absolutely aporetic. (16)

 

A non-pathological passion, for Kant, would surely be arational/passion,a term spliced and made impossible by such “critical distinctions.” Derrida seeks apassionate/moralitythat the terms of his argument structure as impossible. Morality must be a decision, not an automation, based on will, not on instinct.

 

A sense of the moral, however, is not inimical to that will that gives rise to decision, but is intrinsic to it. This “sense,” as something seemingly instinctive and emotional, may belong to the limbic system of our brains, rather than to the cortex. Through his work on synesthesia, Richard Cytowic has shaken previous assumptions about the roles of these areas of the brain. Previously, it was thought that “the cortex is the seat of reason and the mind, those things that make us human” and that “conscious perception of experience takes place in the cortex” (The Man 23, 132). According to Cytowic, the limbic system, also known as the paleomammalian brain, is concerned with the preservation of the species, socialization, parental care, play, and emotion. The cortex, in the new model, remains the seat of analysis, logic, and other “higher” functions, but its status is dramatically undermined:

 

The limbic system gives salience to events so that we either ignore them as mundane and unimportant, or take notice and act. It is also the place where value, purpose, and desire are evaluated, a process referred to as assigning negative or positive "valence." . . . The limbic brain has retained its function as the decider of valence. What the cortex does is provide more detailed analysis about what is going on in the world so that the limbic brain can decide what is important and what to do. (168)

 

While cognition can offer analysis, it remains subordinate to the “emotional core of the human nervous system” (168). Although this seems to privilege emotion above reason, Cytowic specifically warns against maintaining this Cartesian distinction. In The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology, he writes of “how the phenomenal dichotomy between reason and emotion does not hold up at the neural level,” “the illusive nature of self-awareness,” and “the false dichotomy between first-person and third-person points of view that are usually labeled subjective and objective” (283).

 

As long as we hold onto the emotion/reasonbinary, we regard “emotional decisions” as “irrational decisions.” Observation of split-brain patients indicates that when they receive verbal stimulus, whose nature remains unknowable to them, they nonetheless respond to the emotional tone of something they cannot perceive. On noting this response, “the process of verbal attribution takes over and concocts an explanation that, while perhaps plausible, is nonetheless incorrect” (Cytowic, The Neurological 295-96). Refusing to accept the “irrational,” they invent the “rational.” From the neurologist’s “unimpaired” vantage point, the explanation is obviously wrong. As “unimpaired” individuals, we assume this cannot apply to us, for we can perceive the stimulus for our decisions–or so we thought. Not only are all decisions based on the limbic system’s “emotional” evaluation, but the decision itself remains inaccessible to consciousness, or what we have hitherto liked to think of as consciousness. Kornhüber’s work shows that the build-up of brain activity called “readiness potential” for decisions “far antedates the subject’s decision” (Cytowic, The Neurological 298). Cytowic explains that

 

such a decision is an interpretation we give to a behavior that has been initiated some place else by another part of ourselves well before we are aware of making any decision at all. In other words, the decision has been made before we are aware of the idea even to make a decision. If "we" are not pulling the strings, then who or what is? One answer: A facet inaccessible to introspection. (298-300)

 

Descartes, according to neurology, was wrong: sentio ergo cogito, or, as Cytowic puts it, “strictly biological models of emotion . . . place emotion as the causative antecedent of cognition” (295).

 

The decision, within the emotion/reasonbinary, is a moment of madness. To logic it remains forever undecidable, for logic is not neurally equipped with the capacity to make a decision:

 

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 obliged--it is of obligation that we must speak--to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. . . . The undecidable remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost--but an essential ghost--in every decision, in every event of decision. (Derrida, "Force of Law" 24)

 

The madness, the emotion, the khôra, the impetus, is the ghost in our machine. Rather than being “just an instinct,” a sense of morality is the prerequisite for a moral decision. The code arises out of instances analyzed; the instances arise out of the passions. The decision is always already a subject of passion.

 

Although this article is called Passions: An Oblique Offering, Derrida repeatedly opts for the “cold” option of rule, duty, law, codification, rather than for the “hot” option of an emotional response. The possibility of a passionate friendship is obfuscated with a hollow abyss and a duty to avoid the language of duty; passionate morality is held to be a contradiction in terms–leaving us with the view that the passions are immoral, unfriendly; the codes are the reliable or moral guide. The passions, at the beginning, are placed outside the person; to write that “even if his activity is often close to passivity, if not passion” (4) formulates “passion” as an extreme form of “passivity,” which would regard the passions as metaphorically external agents acting on him who is passive. We have defined ourselves as those who know, and what we cannot know within ourselves is externalized, seen as beyond our control (“we” are not pulling the strings) rather than as that which constitutes our control because it constitutes us. In so doing, we generate khôra–the compensatory dream and unconscious of the logos. What has Derrida said of khôra? It defies “that ‘logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers’ of which Vernant speaks” (Derrida/McLeod, “Khôra” 89) and is indefinable: “One cannot even say of it that it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that” (89). Like our retrospectively rational decisions, “the khôra is anachronistic; it ‘is’ the anachrony within being, or better: the anachrony of being. It anachronises being” (94). We cannot speak of its origins, but it appears, as having always existed, when

 

according to Hegel, philosophy becomes serious . . . only from the moment when it enters into the sure path of logic: that is, after having abandoned, or let us rather say sublated, its mythic form: after Plato, with Plato. (100)

 

With the logic of non-contradiction arises A/Not-Abinary; A is everything that observes the logic of non-contradiction and Not-A is variously khôra, the pleroma, mythic thought, and Derrida’s secret. To say that the latter can have nothing to do with the logic of non-contradiction itself rests on the logic of non-contradiction. Hence, its compensatory function cannot be simply contrary, for that reinforces rather than sublating or undermining A. Rather, it needs to be aA–“alogical and achronic, anachronistic too” (113). The logic of non-contradiction makespassionate_morality impossible, but passion laughs at the logic of non-contradiction. The passions are chronologically and neurologically the foundation of the code, not merely in opposition; they make the code possible, as well as (sometimes) necessary.

 

The offering may be oblique, but the Passions are tangential to the offering: they touch it at the point of (someone else’s) title and in the troubled concern about the Jesus motif (“By speaking last, both in conclusion and in introduction, in twelfth or thirteenth place, am I not taking the insane risk and adopting the odious attitude of treating all these thinkers as disciples, indeed the apostles” [18]), but they fail to enter the argument: it ignores the theological motif of grace, passion, feeling, that could redeem friendship and morality from perpetual paradox by scorning the logical foundations of the paradox. This tangent of Passions creates my most persistent countertext; I turn to it again, to redeem invitations from splitting and paradox:

 

An invitation leaves one free, otherwise it becomes constraint . . . . But the invitation must be pressing, not indifferent. It should never imply: you are free not to come and if you don't come, never mind, it doesn't matter . . . . It must therefore split and redouble itself at the same time, at once leave free and take hostage: double act, redoubled act. Is an invitation possible? (14)

 

Free–from what? To what? This paradox depends on free being always and only free from constraint, obligation, in short, free from duty–but I can be free from duty without being free from feelings. Perpetual friendship would require no politeness, for it would already exceed it; when friendship is lacking (momentarily or permanently) politeness can step in as its appearance.

 

Let me return to politeness: “A critical reader will perhaps be surprised to see friendship and politeness regularly associated here” (8-9)–and once more the obliging critical reader, I agree, but only to disagree:

 

the hypothesis about politeness and the sharp determination of this value relates to what enjoins us to go beyond rules, norms, and hence ritual. (9)

 

What is sometimes called “true” politeness is not just polite: should politeness and sincerity coincide exactly (“That was a wonderful speech”), one is not just being polite: “I’m not just being polite, I really mean it!” The rules, norms, and rituals are hard to apply and must be disguised, for they, like duty, substitute for the genuinely considerate, responsive behavior that cannot be codified. The intention, emotion (the usual litany) supersede the rule and in overflowing it make it unnecessary. “Mere” politeness remains a pretence in ways subject to one’s society, micro and macro: for instance, “children . . . must not ‘answer back’ (at any rate in the sense and tradition of French manners)” (20)–well then, what of the macro society that uses the word politesse and not politeness? What is politeness in England is not politeness in South Africa; what is politeness in English is not politesse in French.

 

An Oblique Offering in Translation

 

“A difficulty suddenly arises, a sort of dysfunctioning, what could be called a crisis” (5): I am trying to read Derrida, with the familiar difficulty of the referent being withheld–“a crisis,” what crisis? The nature of the crisis is withheld until the next page, and immediately after it is being identified, another is established, also based on an antecedent hypothesis and strung with its own hypotheses, and while everything is thus held in the air, in parentheses as it were, I am (via parentheses) given a new ghost-text to hold in the air as well:

 

At a certain place in the system, one of the elements of the system (an "I," surely, even if the I is not always and "with all . . . candor" [sans façon, also "without further ado"] "me") no longer knows what it should do . . . But does the hypothesis of such a risk go against [à l'encontre] or on the contrary go along with [à la rencontre] the desire of the participants, supposing that there were only one desire, that there were a single desire common to all of them or that each had in himself only one noncontradictory desire? (6)

 

I am jolted from unravelling subclauses and hypotheses into speculating better translations for sans façon which might not require such an interruption and wondering why [à l’encontre] and [à la rencontre] were deemed necessary when “go against” and “go along with” also echo each other’s structure. I become aware of the French text–haunting this text, or in a different dimension to this text–and begin to translate mentally (le désir des participants . . . commun à tous), to attempt a retrieval of the French text, at the moment that this text breaks with it. L’autre n’a pas de crochets.¹ If the “Passions” of the title and “I have my two hands tied or nailed down” cast Derrida as Jesus, then the translator here casts himself as John the Baptist, granting me a vision of “the original” while insisting he is unworthy to carry His sandals (22, 10). In other words, the translation is not good enough to substitute for the French, but must be supplemented with it.

 

What is the purpose of this supplement? Before the purpose, let me consider the effect. “The supplement is maddening, because it is neither presence nor absence” (Derrida/Spivak, Of Grammatology 154). I am now reading not Derrida’s Passions, but the translation. I no longer trust the translator, for he does not trust his translation to carry the meaning, and I regard phrases skeptically. For instance, in “what one calls in French a secret de Polichinelle, a secret which is a secret for no-one” (Passions 7), I see a French ghost of that entire phrase as simply “un secret de Polichinelle” and an English ghost, an alternate translation if that French ghost is indeed real, “an open secret.” What the French might be and what the translation could have been double and redouble the already-legion ghost-texts.

 

The insistence of my countertexts makes it harder and harder to read Passions: An Oblique Offering:

 

What we are glimpsing of the invitation (but of the call in general, as well) governs by the same "token" the logic of the response, both of the response to the invitation and the response by itself. (14-5)

 

I have rejected the model of the invitation and substituted my countermodel instead; how, then, can I apply it to “the response”? Moreover, in trying to understand “politeness” and “response,” the second group of expotential readings re-emerges: “And to wonder whether ‘to respond’ has an opposite, which would consist, if commonsense is to be believed, in not responding” (15). For a moment, I am prepared to wonder this alongside Derrida, as a metaphysical problematic, but my wondering is cut short as my native language readily supplies just such an opposite: ignore. This opposite, like “responsiveness,” is unavailable in French; the reading splits expotentially, again (so many times), for in my reading that particular question no longer haunts the text, unanswered. And while I, too, “cannot fail to wonder at some point what is meant by ‘respond’” (15), my wondering is of a different order from Derrida’s: the vision of réponder floats above or behind each appearance of “respond”; I read and interpret “respond” while holding réponder in the air as that which might make my interpretations invalid and lay to rest at least some of these spectres: “Is it possible to make a decision on the subject of ‘responding’ and of ‘responsiveness?’” (15). Decisions being ultimately “emotional” (in a sense that refuses to oppose itself to “rational”), responding and responsiveness are that which permit decision-making: both respond and responsiveness rely on a motivation of feeling. I respond out of feeling, and my degree of responsiveness is the degree and immediacy of my feelings. Given this, the second “fault,” if Derrida responds to the invitation, is no fault at all: “If I did respond I would put myself in the situation of someone who felt capable of responding: he has an answer for everything” (19). On the contrary, to be capable of responding is not at all to have an answer, a solution, for everything, but to be capable of reacting. To respond would be to use the texts as a springboard, not to answer them; to show the texts capable of stirring him, which is to respect them, not to resolve them, which is to disrespect them. If “respond” means “respond,” then not to do so “would smack of a hybris” (19)–but what does Derrida mean by “respond”? I read further, looking now only for a definition of a single word:

 

The overweening presumption from which no response will ever be free not only has to do with the fact that the response claims to measure up to the discourse of the other, to situate it, understand it. (20)

 

This does not describe the word “response”; if an English word is required, then “answer” would be more apt–and would fail to connect with “responsibility” or “responsiveness.” The sentence does not make sense as it stands, but how is one to translate it–ought one to settle for “from which no answer [réponse] will ever be free?” This is what Tr. frequently chooses to do in this article–though not here, where the sense requires it. I criticize the translation “while running up an infinite debt in its service” (Derrida/Venuti, “What” 174)–a two-fold debt: that I can read it in English; and that his translation provides me with material. If I criticize the translation, I must answer two questions: what do I think he should do, and why am I reading Derrida’s Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation, when I could read it in French?

 

I answer the first in conjunction with an earlier question: what is the purpose of the supplement? The purpose–for whom? According to whom? Consider some of the supplements in this text, in addition to those I have already quoted: “aspects [traits]” (5), “brought their tribute [apporter leur tribut]” (7), “Let’s not beat around the bush [N’y allons pas par quartre chemins]” (9), “n’y allons pas par quatres chemins [an almost untranslatable French expression which invokes the cross or the crucial, the crossing of ways, the four and the fork of a crossroad (quadrifurcum) in order to say: let us proceed directly, without detour, without ruse and without calculation]” (9-10), “what is at issue [il s’agit de]” (10), “in front of you [in English in the original–Tr.]” (10), Deconstruction [‘la’ Déconstruction]” (15), “testimony [témoignage, also the act of “bearing witness”–Ed.]” (23), “having to respond [devant–repondre], having-to-tell [devant–dire] . . . before the law [devant la loi]” (29).

 

The intention is presumably to replicate the original as closely as possible. The subtleties of “n’y allons pas par quatre chemins” and the punning on devant must be replicated somehow if the meaning of the French text is to be transferred to this text and if English does not have an equivalent for that phrase or permit that pun. That the square brackets do not replicate the original is already apparent: l’autre n’a pas de crochets [French in the original]. I am alternately grateful for, bemused by, and irritated by the interjections: grateful for “devant,” bemused by “apporter leur tribut,” and irritated by “témoignage, also the act of ‘bearing witness’” which I judge as unnecessary, for “testimony” already has both the legal and religious overtones of “bearing witness.” In this instance, the effect is “[I don’t think you quite got that–Ed.]” and “[I’m still here–Tr.].” Effect–on whom? Me, of course; I hate to be interrupted when I’m reading. Even if I judge my irritation to be singular, and hardly exemplary, part of that effect remains: ” . . . which I judge . . .” If one cannot understand a word of French, most of the words in French add nothing to one’s experience of reading, though one might garner the pun on “devant“; if one understands the French supplements, the effects are in part to remind one that this is a translation and to prompt one to evaluate the translation. Every square bracket, whatever else it says, says also: This is a translation and translation is ultimately not possible–[Tr].

 

Is translation possible? “Je viens de lire” (viens–come–etc. etc.) and “I have just read” (just–only and justice, etc. etc.) invite very different responses. “I have just [viens de] read” is not at all both at once: it is a double-take, a break in the flow, an excess, a superfluity, an invitation to compare “have just” and “viens de,” an invitation to respond to the act of translation (which breaks with the source-language version which offered no such invitation), which is precisely what I have just [viens de] done [faire]. Past participle vs. infinitive: discuss. Je réponds à ce texte: in English (in which I live and breathe and have my being), I respond to the text (the text is my springboard), I answer back (cheekiness–of confronting The Derrida, my superior in age, degrees, prestige, knowledge, and of confronting the translator) but I do not claim to answer the text. Nevertheless, I do answer my own questions.

 

Is translation possible? What are the conditions of translation? Can it be “the transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential vehicle of any signifier whatsoever” (Derrida/Venuti, “What” 195): in other words (I translate from English to English), meaning that exists independently of signifiers, a wholehearted breach of faith with poststructuralism and Saussure, a restoration of the old lost faith in language, before the Fall. The example to which the question “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” returns is “mercy seasons justice.” The corporality of the signifier prevents the transfer of an intact signified: “seasons” relates itself both to seasoning (“season to taste”) and the seasons (of the year). One could call this an accident of language–sometimes such correspondences are “accidental.” A word enters the language and finds there a homonym or homophone with which it shares no ancestry. Sometimes the two words share a common derivation, though they are now quite different–sense and sensibility. Sometimes a word will leave a language and re-enter from another language, to find its relations have grown up quite differently, as with relevant rejoining reléver in French. Nevertheless, their corporeal correspondence is such that, whatever their derivation, they inform each other and open up multiple entrances–as with réponse and réponsibilité, response and responsibility. This corporality is untranslatable precisely because translation requires a substitution of one signifier (or a set of signifiers) for another. One might say a transubstantiation, if one believed that the spirit could thus be transferred–which would be to believe already in a signified, a meaning, a spirit, which is in the word but not of the word–l’être du mot not letter du mot, l’ésprit du mot. How shall I translate “ésprit“–with spirit, mind, or wit? How relevant² is it, in this context, that ésprit can mean “wit” as well as “soul”? If I shear it of those additional meanings by choosing “spirit,” what do I mean by “additional”? To me, they are additional, because in English, wit, mind, and spirit are quite distinct. However, I am not so laissez-faire about “ignore,” which can be translated into French as ne tenir aucun compte de (pay no attention to), faire semblant de ne pas s’apercevoir de (pretend not to notice), faire semblant de ne pas reconnaître (pretend not to recognize), ne pas répondre à (not answer), ne pas respecter (not respect), and so forth, depending on the thing that is being ignored. This does not constitute a list of signifieds, but the full and unitary signified of ignore. “I ignore Derrida”: je ne tiens aucun compte de Derrida (I pay no attention to Derrida), je fais semblant de ne pas reconnaître Derrida (I pretend not to recognize Derrida), or je ne respecte pas Derrida (I don’t respect Derrida)? None of these is sufficient to my meaning.

 

Two linguistic phenomena are at work here: signifiers that inform each other through physical resemblance, and signifiers that permit a greater range of meaning than can be matched by signifiers in the target language. In each case, corporality gets in the way of the spirit. It is words themselves (corporeal signifiers) that prevent us from believing in pure translatable meaning.

 

If we killed the word, what would survive? “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language” (Saussure/Baskin 112). If the Saussurian view of language is right, then translation is not possible. We cannot ever achieve “the transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential vehicle of any signifier whatsoever” (Derrida/Venuti, “What” 195) because there is no such thing as the intact signified before the signifier, and once embodied in a signifier the physical resemblances and ranges of meaning come into play in all their untranslatability.

 

This linguistic atheism obtains if I am coming from the direction of the signifier, the body. What if I were to do what certain religious people advise one to do, take a leap of faith, and first of all believe in the meaning and then try to find the word? “No one shall come to the Father except by Me,” said Jesus: this is said to be the spirit and not the letter. Alongside Derrida, “I insist on the Christian dimension . . . the travail of mourning also describes, through the Passion, through a memory haunted by the body lost yet preserved in its grave, the resurrection of the ghost or of the glorious body that rises, rises again [se relève]–and walks” (199-200).

 

I cannot yet mourn meaning; I still hope that meaning is more than a product of language, because if it is not I shall never speak to Derrida and my love of his meaning is not even a doomed love but a lie. I hope; I take a leap of faith: “hope, faith and love, but the greatest of these is love.” Let me start, then, with love, another ghastly abstract noun that means nothing until I have answered “From whom? To whom? When and how?” There is nothing without context, but this context is above all private: I say, “I love you.” And this lover of words is inarticulate with love, cannot count the ways (quantification), and is disgusted with the poverty of the signifiers “I love you” that fail to signify the least part of my meaning. When I was a more devout poststructuralist, I thought like a devout poststructuralist, I reasoned like a devout poststructuralist. I explained the poverty of this word, “love,” by arguing that it had been used in so many different contexts (respecting the network of signifiers), many of them quite contradictory, that, unable to mean everything simultaneously, it subsided into near emptiness. “Ce signe pur–vide, presque–il est impossible de la fuir, parce qu’il veut tout dire” (Barthes, 1383; French in the original).³ Now I have read more and loved more, both quantitatively and qualitatively. “I love you,” rather than being overloaded with meaning and descending into hopeless ambiguity, cannot even begin to translate what I feel. “The oath passes through language, but it passes beyond human language. This would be the truth of translation” (Derrida, “What” 185).

 

I say “to translate”: I have accomplished my leap of faith if I say that (did you leap with me, or are you my Critical Reader, churning out ghost-texts?), for to translate assumes a pre-existent language and yet the language from which I am translating is the language of feelings. I use a linguistic metaphor, but I could offer others: the word cannot “bear the weight” (feeling as a physical load), it cannot “explain” (feeling as a mystery resisting logic). If I attempt to say, instead of “I love you,” a litany of these loving feelings–admiration, security, lust, fascination, protectiveness–I am equally disappointed in the words, the finitude of their meaning, and the finitude of the list. Hence “words cannot convey” and all those other helpless linguistic gestures towards what is not linguistic in nature. I cannot explain this love to you in words–but you know what I mean. That is, I have faith that you know what I mean, that you have experienced love; that is, that you have experienced what we designate as “love” without it being the identical experience–apart from the feeling of uniqueness in love, you have not loved my love, and those who have, have not been me loving him.

 

What shall I say now, about this signifier “love”? Love, lover, loving, lovable, lovage, beloved, in love, make love, lovely: “love” and “lovage,” one of those all-important linguistic accidents, adds nothing to the meaning of love. Its usage, in certain parts of Britain, as a form of address (“Here you are, love,” says the shopkeeper) adds no facet to my declaration, “I love you.” Its meaning is before, above, and beyond all words. But you know what I mean. If “I love you” has meaning, it does not come from the words. We poststructuralists have been accustomed to regarding anything prior to the symbolic order as unspeakable: “an insurmountable problem for discourse: once it has been named, that functioning, even if it is presymbolic, is brought back into a symbolic position.” (Kristeva, 24n16). Derrida, whom I love (differently and specifically; love is nothing if it is not specific), will loose me from these shackles of language with the prelinguistic mark, declaring with Derridean authority that

 

writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute make one forget the vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements. (Of Grammatology 144)

 

Whence this Derridean authority to which I appeal and which I challenge, alternately? It is vested in him, not by him but by us, collectively: this is also the model of language which says the meaning is vested in the word, collectively. Academic mechanisms have created the word “Derridean”; is the authority ours, to attribute and withdraw, collectively, and did we then create it? Somewhere, once upon a time, there was a student whose writing was judged worthy not as marks upon a page but in its function as meaning; then there was a young academic, whose peers reviewed his articles and found the meaning interesting, important, violating previous understandings and instituting new meanings for new words. The creation of “Derridean” was collective; the creations of Derrida were singular, and his own; both rely on his meaning, however imperfectly or perfectly understood by us. “Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself”–Derrida is only a name, pointing at a man who writes articles and signs them, who questions the signature but not his legal right over that which he has signed, in whatever language it may appear. Words point at meanings, without encompassing them; shall we then say that there is a secret here?

 

What could escape this sacrificial verification and so secure the very space of this very discourse, for example? No question, no response, no responsibility. Let us say that there is a secret here. (23)

 

I read “response” as “answer” and as “répondre,” in my expotential countertexts, and I answer back: “Why? ‘Let us say . . . ‘ You have said it, I did not and hardly agree.” Now I must make sense of page after page about this secret, in whose existence and theoretical necessity I do not believe. Derrida writes, Wood translates, that this secret of his (I took no part in declaring it, although he repeatedly invited me–I declined the invitation, as an invitation permits one to do) is not numinous. I was not invited to define the secret; in fact, he denied an infinite number of definitions when he said “it remains foreign to speech” (27) and refuted every claim he made for it with contradiction, except the claim that it is secret. I make sense of it, for myself; I institute meaning, using what I am told and disbelieving, according to my own mind. I declare in the margins that I have met such beasts before; that contradiction-in-stasis belongs to mystical writing, to the Gnostic pleroma, to khôra. Like a Gnostic, I want to know and to understand, I refuse to accept mystification; rather, I demand, “From what position of knowledge does he so firmly declare that this secret is unknowable?” As well as his declarative contradictions, his saying all of this is a performative contradiction. I know his secret; I will give it a name: meaning.

 

The above paragraph is full of “I”: whose meaning am I reading, Derrida’s or my own? There is a pragmatics of meaning, in the matters of salt-passing, legal documents, even academic discourse (you are engaging this pragmatics to read this): the word does not fully encompass the meaning, it points at it, but we have a pragmatic understanding which will do. Mere information can be passed, like salt. Passions: An Obscure Offering is not mere information, nor is Shakespeare, nor is this article: responsiveness and responsibility, seasons, and ignore must all be allowed their full range and resonance without being cut down to mere information. This is the quality of the literary: a range of meanings, of expotential readings, among which the reader can choose.

 

When all hypotheses are permitted, groundless ad infinitum, about the meaning of a text, or the final intentions of an author . . . when it is the call [appel] of this secret, however, which points back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself which keeps our passions aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us. (29)

 

Expotential readings among which the reader can choose do not permit all hypotheses, groundless ad infinitum: they spring into being at the point of disagreements (which presuppose a meaning in the text with which to disagree; else we are all schizophrenics) and in the signifiers’ multiple possibilities which are legion but not infinite. Pragmatism is not merely an attitude we adopt to make sense of an infinitely meaningful language; it is language balking at further meaning, delimiting sense. The secret is meaning, and the more potential meanings are opened up, the more the secret impassions us, for that is the point at which I can insert myself into the text:

 

Certainly, one could speak this meaning in other names, whether one finds them or gives them to it. Moreover, this happens at every instant. It remains meaning under all names and it is its irreducibility to the very name which makes it meaning, even when one makes the truth in its name [fait la verité à son sujet] as Augustine put it so originally. The _m^s_e^e_a^c_n^r_i^e_n^t_g meeting is that one here calls it a _m^s_e^e_a^c_n^r_i^e_n^t_g. (countertexts 26)

 

I have said that words point at meanings: I do not equate meaning with the signified for the signified is that which is already in language and delimited by a signifier. “I love you”: call this meaning love, amour, a chemical reaction, make a necklace of substitutions–admiration, security, lust, fascination, protectiveness–but it remains meaning under all names and it is its irreducibility to the very name which makes it meaning. The abstract nouns, which cannot be pointed out or demonstrated, which seem the most likely candidates for the argument that meaning is a product of language, point at something that cannot be reduced to the name: duty, love, passions. They cannot be codified and left to language alone in the appearance of homogeneity, for then they are dangerous, then they claim “to be presence and the sign of the thing itself” and make us “forget the vicariousness of [their] own function.” (Of Grammatology 144). Like “its” and “their,” they are deitic and specific, meaningless until we have answered each time “From whom? To whom? When and how?” qualified by individual instances that proliferate into the future, defying codification. Where do these instances come from, before the code, if not out of meaning in life? The meaning makes the code possible as well as (unable to press brain to brain) necessary.

 

Is a translation possible? The condition set down by Derrida is “the transfer of an intact signified through the inconsequential vehicle of any signifier whatsoever” (“What” 195). The signified is already in language, that part of meaning generalized, specified, delimited by its signifier. Signifiers have their own corporeal lives and relationships, affecting the signified, but they also have meaning which was never, in the first place, passed into language in its full richness and resonance, but pragmatically, like salt. In saying, “I love you,” I have already had to resign myself “to losing the effect, the economy, the strategy (and this loss can be enormous) or to add a gloss, of the translator’s note sort, which always, even in the best of cases, the case of the greatest relevance, confesses the impotence or failure of the translation” (“What” 181), but you still know what I mean. Meaning can be conveyed through inconsequential vehicles; the signified cannot, for the vehicle is anything but inconsequential to it. This is also the definition of the literary: that the exact words matter.

 

L’Etre and the letter, meaning and the signified, are the soul and body of the literary. Translation is possible as reincarnation; we mourn the signified and erect monuments [thus] to it which only those who knew it will appreciate. New words open new possibilities in this new life, and the meaning lives on. I can say, at last, I love Derrida’s meaning, and I read Derrida’s Passions: An Oblique Offering in translation.

 

Notes

 

1. The other has no square brackets.

 

2. Elle fait allusion à “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevant’” (Quinzièmes Assises de la Traduction Littéraire (Arles 1998) (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), 21-48), traduit en anglais comme “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”

 

3. Translator’s note: “It’s impossible to escape this pure–almost empty–sign, because it means everything, it wants to say everything.”

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. “Le Tour Eiffel.” Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. 1. Normandie: Éditions du Seuil, 1993. 1383-1400.
• Cytowic, Richard E. The Man Who Tasted Shapes. London: Abacus, 1994.
• —. The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology. Cambridge: MIT P, 1996.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority.’” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson. New York: Routledge, 1992. 3-67.
• —. “Khôra.” On the Name. Trans. Ian McLeod. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 89-127.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering.’” On the Name. Trans. David Wood. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 3-31.
• —. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 1-23.
• —. “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Trans. Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry 27:2. (2001): 174-200.
• Kristeva, Julia. Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974.
• Royle, Nicholas. Jacques Derrida. London: Routledge, 2003.
• de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Rev. ed. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Reidlinger. Trans. Wade Baskin. Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1974.

 

Michael Marder

Philosophy Department, Graduate Faculty
New School University
mardm926@newschool.edu

 

Ah, how tired we are, how I would like finally to touch “veil,” the word and the thing thus named, the thing itself and the vocable! I would like not only to see them, see in them, toward them or through them, the word and the thing, but maintain a discourse about them that would, finally, touch, in short a “relevant” discourse that would say them properly, even if it no longer gives anything to be seen.

 

–Jacques Derrida, Veils

I

 

To touch the thing itself: to traverse the distance and to maintain it in spite of, or thanks to, this traversal. The I caught in the impossible conjunction of maintenance and traversal–the strange combination of the word’s tactility and the thing’s vocalization–is not content with mere visibility, with the sight of the phenomenon that gives itself to be seen, with the movement toward or even through that which presents itself in luminous but empty space. Because the thing in question is not any thing whatsoever but veil (voile), which is to say “every thing,” because of this obscure singular universality, the supplement of blind discourse, the only proper and relevant discourse that touches this thing, is indispensable. Are we able to say it properly? Can we hear its apposite resonance? Will we detect in the veil itself (not behind it) the oblique thing that will never become an object welcomed by consciousness, that will more than anything else disentangle the thing from the object, yielding the difference however imperceptible to the eye and, even, to the ear? The impossible, tiresome tenacity of the distance maintained in the measure of its traversal is the attribute of the thing, of the veil touched and caressed but not lifted, of the vocable spoken by diminution, at the same time reducing the interval and attenuating the intensity of the sound (Cixous and Derrida 23).

 

The current attempt “to disentangle the thing from the object” is necessarily preliminary and provisional in the face of the overwhelming risks of ossifying and essentializing the distinction thus outlined. If that which disentangles the one from the other is, indeed, a veil, then the act of disentangling cannot take a form of unveiling that will prompt the reader to respond to the question of difference between thinghood and objectivity with the confident and unequivocal, “Sure thing!” Here, I do not wish to claim either that this difference is fixed, all-encompassing, and absolute, or that the obfuscation of this difference has been a merely accidental representational failure. My goal is to register the remarkable porosity of boundaries between the two, allowing the thing to pass into the object and vice versa. These passages, however, portend a risk which is diametrically opposed to that of essentialization and which may result in the conflation of thinghood and objectivity–the conflation that would obscure various “encounters” with which Derrida is concerned, including the ethical, the aesthetic, and the commodity-fetishistic.

 

To be sure, objects, like things, are inconceivable without distance (or distancing), which will not be completely traversed if their objectivity is to stay intact. Before recollecting, with Derrida’s help, the specifically Husserlian ideal object, we should meditate on objectivity in general as that which is pre-sent in front of us (Derrida and Thénevin 71), that which we face in a perpetual opposition, if not a standoff, accentuated, for example, in the German Gegenstand. As something posited in opposition (Hegel would say, in “oppositional determination”) to the subject, the object appears to be secondary to what it opposes. It has only negativity, negation, and resistance to offer; hence, it is one-dimensional and unidirectional, devoid of depth or volume, ideally present through and through, completely visible, open to view in the shape of a flat screen unfolded against me and defined by this absolute unfolding. Total resistance of the kind that both produces and consumes the objectivity of the object spells out nothing but its complete surrender to the resisted “authority.”

 

Woven into the memorable economy of the supplement, this secondariness, nonetheless, turns into the origin of origin. On the one hand, the resistance proper to the object is non-reactive and mute–a distant reverberation of the impersonality marking the there is (il y à, es gibt). There is resistance; it gives resistance. On the other hand, the subject comes face-to-face, or rather face-to-surface, with the object, but this encounter is inevitably belated insofar as it supervenes upon the determination of sense on the basis of its relation with the object (Derrida, Speech 75). In terms of our analogy, sense isn’t yet sense unless it is projected onto the screen of objectivity. Conversely, my face is, in some sense, affected by the surface exposed to it and by the light reflected from this surface. Oppositional determination presupposes determinations of reflection (Reflexionsbestimmung) that always solicit, shake up the rigidity of opposition from within. In Derrida’s reading of Husserl, this solicitation finds expression in the supplementation of the first meaning of “against” (l’encontre) with tout-contre, the “‘up-against’ of proximity” (75). Owing to the latter, the distance is all but eliminated the moment the subject’s boundary touches, perpendicularly, that of the object, ostensibly defying the logic of relationality outlined thus far.

 

Cutting and pasting Husserl’s text, Derrida places the op-positional and com-positional significations of objectivity side-by-side, right up against each other, but also in a glaring antinomy that will not tolerate Hegelian Aufhebung expressed in the simultaneous cancellation and preservation of distance. Granted, we cannot resolve the antinomy by way of reiterating the tired platitudes on the irreducible “gaps” and fissures that accompany the superimposition of uneven boundaries and that render the greatest proximity still insufficiently proximate. But what if this impossible situation is the predicament of the subject par excellence? What if the “nearness of distance” in tout-contre allows us to imagine the subject as a non-oppositional object, as Gegenstand minus “Gegen-,” as the absolutely indeterminate spatial positionality of -ject only subsequently (though not in a logical or a chronological sense) subjected to opposition? To raise these questions is to veer toward the attributes of the thing which paradoxically falls on the side of this “inexistent or anexistent subjectivity” and which will come to the fore later on (Derrida, Truth 46). Let’s not forget that in the closure of metaphysics which the subject and the object now inhabit, there is a third dimension completing the first two, namely “philosophy as knowledge of the presence of the object” (Derrida, Speech 102). Curiously enough, this third dimension will undergo important modifications in the course of Derrida’s writings, so that by the time of Specters of Marx it will be a scholarly belief (croyance) in, not knowledge of, what is present “in the form of objectivity” that will subtend the whole enterprise (Derrida, Specters 11). How is it possible to integrate philosophical knowledge and scholarly belief with the structured opposition between position and opposition?

 

The subject-object relation crystallizes in the opposition between the subject’s horizontal position of a substratum (“between beneath and above” [Derrida and Thévenin 71]) and the object’s vertical opposition (face-to-face, face-to-surface) to the subject.¹ In keeping with the geometrical delineation of this structure, knowledge and belief will stand for the diagonal linkage of the subject and the object marking the distance between the two and completing a metaphysical “right angle” triangulation. In a certain Foucaultian mode, one could define this triangulation as “the microstructure of modernity.” The point where the two dimensions initially come up against each other and touch, the point of proximity to the opposition, is too much for the subject to bear. Its unbearable weight pressing on the internal infirmity of the underlying subjective thesis (Stand) already anticipates the philosophical/scholarly prosthesis that will support and fortify the dimension facing such stern opposition.² Moreover, the prosthesis itself needs to be fortified with credence and belief supplanting knowledge or, better yet, denoting its spare prosthetic devices, the prostheses of the prosthesis.

 

But the closure so formed is certainly not static. Although the one-dimensional object may be an arrested effect of something else, of something Derrida, in the wake of Artaud, calls “subjectile,” it embodies an arrested effect itself set in motion. Its “against-ness” will not abide unless “self-consciousness appears . . . in its relation to an object, whose presence it can keep and repeat” (Derrida, Speech 15). Should we perhaps follow Derridian graphic analysis of the ob-ject and transcribe self-consciousness in the manner of “self-con-sciousness,” the split identity complicit with (con) what is set against it? In other words, the opposition that yields the conditions of possibility for the sense-determining object is itself wholly dependent upon the idealization of the object in infinite repeatability, upon the acts of self-consciousness and, specifically, the vocal mediation allowing one to hear oneself speak (53).

 

It is not by a pure coincidence that the famous Husserlian example of the inner voice, “You’ve gone wrong . . . ,” cited by Derrida, is above all a protest, a remonstration, an objection the subject raises against itself as the object of reproach (Speech 70). Here, in the doubling of presence, the subject is set against itself (l’encontre) with/in itself (tout-contre), projected unto itself, opening the avenue for a relation with other ob-jects. Repetition elliptically refers to the repetition of objectivity and objection, as though I did not hear myself speak the first time, as though my discourse was useless and irrelevant, as though it did not crisscross the inner space of difference and touch, to paraphrase Derrida, “the thing that I am.” Husserl’s subjectivity (hearing one’s own speech) is virtually deaf and ineducable; it must feign these qualities to keep itself and “things” or, strictly speaking, “athings” going. Suppose, on the other hand, that some object is given or pronounced once, eventfully and uniquely facilitating iterability without iteration.³ Without the detached complicity of self-consciousness, the event of the object will run the risk of passing into a thing.⁴ Or, at the very least, the swerve of its non-idealized remainder will point in the direction of thinghood.

 

II

 

Given the oppositional pivot of objectivity, what are the consequences of its “de-saturation”? First, in an early commentary on Levinasian philosophy, Derrida says, “I could not possibly speak of the other, make of the other a theme, pronounce the other as object, in the accusative” and, thereby, gives us a hint apropos of the difference between the objective opposition and the absolute separation (“Violence” 103). Conjunctions and disjunctions no longer make sense. When I am in a face-to-face situation with the other, I do not stand against the other (in either sense of the term), but in non-oppositional proximity to her, across the infinite distance maintained despite my adventurous traversal of it. Neither counter nor even adjacent to the other. According to Derrida’s engagement with Levinas, the injunction of the face is to respect the other “beyond grasp and contact” (“Violence” 99). This injunction has been misinterpreted as an extreme version of the multiculturalist sentiment allegedly governing contemporary thought in France.⁵ Even though, to my knowledge, Levinas does not use this particular word chosen by Derrida, more is at stake in the idea of “respect” than a mere adulteration of absolute alterity or, on the contrary, a reverence for and admiration of the foreign and the unknown. In a subtle way, it allows the difference between objectivity and thinghood to enter the ethical situation through the backdoor to the extent that I can attempt to return the look or “pay” respect to a thing (res), but not to an object blindly facing me in a predetermined frame of opposition. Hence, we could say that respect is an ontological and, more precisely, a hauntological fact more basic than a psychological attitude. Because it transcends the proprietorship characteristic of grasp and contact, this fact arising on the groundless ground of separation foils the fixedness of and fixation on that to which it is “paid.” As such, respect is one of the overtly affirmative, albeit largely ignored, features of the deconstructive approach that, as a rule, is highly attuned to the minute motions of the texts with which it works and that regards them as things rather than ideal objects calling for analysis.

 

What “things share here with others,” Derrida writes, “is that something within them too is always hidden, and is indicated only by anticipation, analogy, and appresentation” (“Violence” 124). This is not to say that the other is reducible to a thing, let alone to a transcendent Thing. The other is both a thing and not a thing: “the other as res is simultaneously less other (not absolutely other) and less ‘the same’ than I” (127). From a strictly phenomenological perspective, the quality common to others and to things is that, unlike objects, they do not–indeed, cannot–expose themselves to us in their entirety. The volume of the thing conceals a considerable portion of its surface from our view and necessitates a completion of the given “by anticipation, analogy, and appresentation” of the yet invisible outlines. Similarly, regardless of the exposure of his denuded face, the interiority of the other is inaccessible to us from the unique standpoint available to this interiority alone. But whereas we can turn the thing around or change our spatial position in relation to it in order to inspect some (though not all) of its temporarily hidden dimensions, the other’s interiority defies all provisional visibility. In the aftermath of the metaphysical closure articulated in the subject-object-knowledge triad, Derrida and Levinas put forth a different, non-oppositional, ethical constellation of other-thing-respect.

 

Second, the Kantian aesthetic sphere is a place where pure and, therefore, “inexistent” subjectivity flourishes in pleasing without enjoyment. “This pleasure is purely subjective: in the aesthetic judgment it does not designate [bezeichnet] anything about the object” (Derrida, “Truth” 46). Purely subjective pleasure is two-fold. Not only does it manage to do away with the designations of objectivity–that is, opposition–but it also rids itself of complacent self-interest (47) and of the desire to cling to existence at any price. Though it imputes beauty to objects, a judgment on the beautiful declares its autonomy vis-à-vis beautiful objects, the external screens onto which the subject’s attitude is projected. Derrida, however, takes a further step in the direction opened up by Kant and argues that hiding the object, changing its locus of existence, displacing the opposition into another “world,” passing from knowledge- to belief-structures–that none of these machinations is adequate to strike “the sans of the pure cut” (83). Instead, the beautiful boasts an indeterminate position not coordinated by the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal signposts and tensions of the subject-object-knowledge triad.

 

If the tenets of representative relationality are no longer relevant to the aesthetic sphere, if the reference to the object is superfluous, if nothing guarantees the existence of the subject, then in Artaud’s “pure painting” the means are the only things that will be expressed. The opposition between the painter-subject and her object dissipates when the painter’s hand, the canvas, and, say, the sky enter a work of art on the same footing with the movement of expression (Derrida and Thévenin 97). The projection falls into the same series as the projected, the projectile, and the screen–each transforming itself into the passage for the other and bringing the edgy standoff to a culmination. From art in general congealed into an object replete with inner meaning, one and naked (Derrida, “Truth” 22), we pass into a wealth of means without ends, the means irreducible to objects, the non-totalizable multiplicity of passages or media we call “things.” The surface is right on the face, and the face right on the surface–Artaud traverses the distance, but does he maintain it? So long as the subtraction of Gegen– from Gegenstand is not satisfied with the lingering undifferentiation of positionality that nostalgically mirrors the one, naked, and absent unity of the object, we will have to respond in the affirmative. The serialization of the means already goes a long way toward internally spacing and re-membering this space. Thus, in the eccentric company of Kant and Artaud, in the shadow of Heidegger, and not without sensing a major aporia, Derrida holds onto a modalized and dispersed trajectory of the jetée (forcing one to hurl oneself into the experience of throwing [Derrida and Thévenin 75]) that desaturates opposition in indifferent pleasure. I am tempted to think that in this double bind Derrida revamped and radicalized the old procedure of phenomenological reduction (epoché) whose energy he re-channeled toward peeling off layers upon layers of the subject-object opposition, knowledge, and belief. And what he found under the veneer of the objective “against” was not a pacification of various struggles and tensions in some sort of nihilist indifference, but the previously tamed and abused pure force barely perceptible in the unreduced Gegenstand.

 

Thought together, ethical and aesthetic implications of the object’s desaturation that places a renewed emphasis on the thing seem to have much in common. Some of the obvious commonalities include the recession of knowledge and representation to the background of my engagement with the other and with artistic media, as well as the emergence of different modes of relationality involving respect and the jetée. But a more interesting question is whether disinterested pleasure without enjoyment of the beautiful pursues a trajectory parallel to the Levinasian shift “beyond essence” and beyond the corollary desire to persist in essence.⁶ If this is so, then in the context of the ethical and the aesthetic disinterestedness, Hegelian synthetic actuality (Wirklichkeit) will be attacked on two fronts simultaneously: the existence of the subjects and objects of beauty will become irrelevant to the production of the beautiful, while the essence of the ethical will be transformed into a contradiction in terms.

 

III

 

In the concluding pages of Speech and Phenomena, Derrida writes, “contrary to what phenomenology–which is always phenomenology of perception–has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes” (Speech 104). Surprisingly enough and despite phenomenological maxims, the thing itself does not fit into the Husserlian noetic-noematic constitution. We could add that the reason for this elusiveness is that, in contrast to the object, the thing does not survive in opposition to the subject, nor does it occupy a determinate position in marked space. To be a thing, something needs to be both unmarked and de-posited, deranged, deprived of substantial identity with itself, “at once set aside and beside itself [à la fois rangée et dérangée]” like the famous table from Marx’s Capital (Derrida, Specters 149). The thing opposes nothing because its ecstatic composition, which is also its decomposition, bars it from mustering the force it harbors and from gathering itself up to face a single direction. As such, the Derridian thing which is “all over the place,” scattered, and disseminated tacitly counteracts Heidegger’s thing that “things” and that names “manifold-simple gathering” (Heidegger, “The Thing” 171). Nevertheless, in the case of a commodity-thing to which we shall return, this derangement and dissemination befall a marked thing, one that is branded with the signs of value, forgets its materiality, and poses as a pure number.

 

“At once set aside and beside itself,” the thing dispersed into a multiplicity of pluri-dimensional surfaces is forgotten (Heidegger would write, “neglected”), such that its end is deposited somewhere–both posited and abandoned. Hence, thinghood is infinite, even though infinity is not necessarily tied to the thing. And again, the example of the commodity-thing will be inadequate to illustrate this deposition since in the circulation of Capital the end of the commodity is simply transposed from material use onto what was previously conceived as mere means in exchange (abstract, symbolic value). Where investment is an operation one performs on objects in the hope that they will yield interest in the circulation of their symbolic equivalents, idealizations, or indefinite repetitions, deposit (consigne) is proper to things consigned to oblivion. The thing and the gift, the given thing and the thing as giving, are annulled in “simple recognition” since “it [recognition] gives back, in the place, let us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent” (Derrida, Given Time 13). Grasping nothing other than objects of exchange, recognition claims the place occupied by the thing itself–the fictitious, delimited place in which the symbolic equivalent resides. Yet, the act of recognition extended to an object forgets the thing itself, forgets radical forgetting and, in the same breath, institutes the memory of exchange.

 

This economy of forgetting obtains for the infinite chains of signification aiming, in each case, at the unattainable hypostasis of the thing in the present where the manifold would be gathered: “The sign is usually said to be put in place of the thing itself, the present thing, ‘thing’ here standing equally for meaning or referent” (Derrida, “Différance” 9). But if a single and determinate place of the thing is nothing but a piece of theoretical fiction, then every sign is bound to miss its mark in a self-effacing search for “a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 49). Further, it is by falling short of its declared goal that this movement unexpectedly reaches success. Inasmuch as it leaps from sign to sign, signification remarks and retraces the contours of the deranged non-identity of thinghood, echoes the dispersed effects of this non-identity, seeks to put an end to indeterminacy, and thereby engrosses itself ever deeper in deposition and unrest. Signification is thingification. The thicker the cloth or the veil of “relevant” discourse, the greater the work of weaving that still lies ahead. Or, in Levinas’s concise formulation of infinite ethical responsibility: “duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished” (Totality and Infinity 244).

 

Différance lies not far beyond the horizon here. Recall the subject-object configuration comprising the opposition between position and opposition. The object is more than it is because it exceeds oppositional identity and encompasses its overarching relationship with the subject. Likewise, the thing is more than it is because it “contains” différance, or as Derrida puts it, “differance, which (is) nothing, is (in) the thing itself” (Given Time 40). In this sense, there are no things “themselves” equal, identical, or reducible to some inner kernel around which they are constituted. While these terms are reserved exclusively for the object, every thing is at least twice removed from itself if one conceives it in terms of a resemblance of its own prosthesis (Derrida, Specters 153), which is to say, in terms of the interplay of simulacra and supplements. The bracketed interiority (in) of its bracketed being (is) testifies to the thing’s incessant turning inside out, passing from the interiority of thinghood to the exteriority of signification. In the thing, différance comes to pass.

 

Derrida’s point is that this passage to the outside is not locatable outside of the thing itself, but “is” in the excess of the thing over its being. Would it be enough to say that things and signs partake in the movement of différance, in the same disquietude of non-adequation and non-identity that magically guarantees adequation and non-arbitrary character of the sign by way of retracing the dispersion of the thing and rejoicing in a more sophisticated version of the vulgar “correspondence theory of truth”? Neither a perfectly symmetrical correlation of signs and things, nor a secondary derivation (Derrida, “Différance” 9) of the former from the latter avoids the betrayal of différance. On the contrary, in a certain primary secondariness or secondary primariness, signs take the place of things that have no place of their own. (Still, it would be inaccurate to equate the thing with pure distance and différance outside of the mediations provided by the bracketing of interiority and of the copula. Interpreting Nietzsche, Derrida muses that “perhaps woman is not some thing which announces itself from a distance, at a distance from some other thing . . . Perhaps a woman–a non-identity, a non-figure, a simulacrum–is distance’s very chasm, the out-distancing of distance” (Spurs 49). It is not that the thing is too figural or too(self-) identical to stimulate the opening of a chasm; rather, the chasm opened by the thing, between things, contains an ineluctable reference to measurable distances in space suspended inside the brackets.)

 

What the thing’s turning inside out implies for phenomenological research is an inversion of that “fundamental property of consciousness” which Husserl calls “intentionality.” The sole aim of the meaning-intention is an object or, in Derrida’s words, “meaning [bedeuten] intends an outside which is that of an ideal ob-ject” (Speech 32). But in our relation with things, the direction of “aiming at” changes. The Thing, suddenly capitalized in spectrality, aims at us, looks at, and concerns us (“Cette Chose nous regarde” [Specters 6/26]⁷) without offering itself to our gaze. The “visor effect” (l’effet de visière), the sheath for the skull behind which the inapparent Thing appears and which Derrida borrows from Shakespeare, is etymologically associated with the French viser–to aim at, or to intend. The inversion of Husserlian intentionality traverses the history of twentieth-century phenomenology that grounds the Derridian approach. If the face (visage) of the other in Levinas is read in the context of this phenomenological heritage, then both the visor and the visage of the Thing and of the other translate intentionality into haunting, first, when “we” become its intended target–the destination or the horizon of its look–and, second, if the location from which it is launched remains indeterminate. Likewise, in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception things not only “display themselves” to me but also “see” and guarantee the permanence of those dimensions of other things that are hidden from my view (79). Besides inverting the structure of intentionality, what these approaches have in common is the implicit deconstruction of the distinction between the categorial and the existential analytics developed in Being and Time. Unlike Heideggerian “entities [that] are present-at-hand within the world” but are “worldless in themselves” (Being 81), Derrida’s thing occurs “within” the world and, at the same time, has a world of its own. This will be articulated most clearly in Of Spirit where the Heideggerian distinction crumbles in light of the ambiguous location of the “living thing,” or the animal (48-54).

 

There are no fulfilled intuitions evidentially supported by the presence of objects to consciousness here, in this space inundated with impossible possibilities and flash-like breakthroughs of exteriority that “comes to us from the region of transcendence and death,” as young Levinas likes to put it. Undeniably, the thing and, first of all, the jug is nothing to be filled or fulfilled. An inverted intention bypassing intuition, it is already full of itself in itself and beside itself. Full to the point of indifferent, unenjoyable pleasure. Full without measure, “at the bottom without bottom” of an abyss (Derrida and Thévenin 138). From the pages of a different work, another voice of Derrida anachronistically retorts, “Write, if possible, finally, without with, not without but without with, finally, not even oneself” (“Truth” 17). The writing of “without with” is the writing of a broken articulation, the writing of the hinge (Derrida, Of Grammatology 65-73). Refusing to admit any elements of relationality or, even, to be negatively defined by this refusal, the abyssal thing stands, perhaps, for sheer non-oppositionality, a radicalized subject, and a plentitude that departs from the objective “with without” (I now translate Gegen as toward-against to accommodate both renditions of the German word) and from oneself. Derrida has never been closer to and farther apart from Heidegger, who concludes that the non-objective thing “stands on its own as self-supporting” (“The Thing” 165). What the quality of self-supporting ultimately aims at is the pure without, the negation of the oppositional-negative dependence embodied in the object, and, correlatively, the affirmation of the thing’s autochthonous position. Conversely, without with denotes that which “stands on its own” only inasmuch as it is supported by the other, “without with . . . not even oneself.” Both Heidegger and Derrida enact the thing’s release from the confines of conscious representation, but whereas the former wishes to reclaim the independence and the self-identity of the thing, the latter conjoins, hinges and unhinges, the plentitude of the thing on the abyss.

 

It is in this faint light that I want to read the opening line of the “Parergon” section of Truth in Painting–“it’s enough to say: abyss and satire of the abyss”–the line that hints at the satire of satire, the satisfaction of satire (without) with the bottomless bottom of the thing amidst patient and obstinate suffering that bears things in silence (Derrida and Thévenin 137). “It’s enough to say” this cryptic expression once and anew each time. Suffice it to say that this will be an event of saying: unrepeatable, non-idealizable, unobjected, yet touching the abyss, immediately relevant to the word and the thing thus named. That is why the first line of “Parergon” hangs on the outer edge of the first internal frame of the text, immodestly enclosing the empty space drawn from the abyss.

 

IV

 

Metaleptically and in a paraphrase, it’s enough to say: the thing and satire of the thing. For the thing contains, without containing anything in its bracketed interiority, the force of animation, transformation, and decomposition. The thing works, and the animated work becomes (another) thing. Inhabiting without residing (Derrida, Specters 18/42), effacing itself in the apparition, it spatializes its habitation, our habitation, in a way that is foreign to the one-dimensional object that merely resides, without inhabiting, in opposition to us. Does the thing give space without taking any for its multiple surfaces and dimensions that are more unobtrusive and inconspicuous than the flatness of the objective screen?

 

In addition to giving space, the thing also temporalizes, gives time: “The thing gives, demands, or takes time” (Derrida, Given Time 41).⁸ To continue accounting for the “properties” of the thing and of the object, I suggest that the latter, at least in its ideal form, is driven by a frustrated and a priori thwarted urge to withhold time and to maintain the fantasy of eternal presence in the indefiniteness of repetition. One of the most compelling, properly satirical elements underlying this difference is that the mute resistance of the object is indebted to the thing, which gives time and, therefore, gives (objects, among other “things”). Evidently, the thinghood of the thing that, as something “un-conditioned (un-bedingtes) . . . conditions the thing as thing” in Heidegger (“What” 9), may explain the unconditionality of the gift, of forgiveness, of hospitality in Derrida. (For the latter, however, the conditioned “thing” is made possible only in the mode of impossibility: the impossible gift, forgiveness, and so forth.) In turn, the object acquires its potency, its force of resistance by proxy, from a proximate distance to the non-oppositional animation of the thing and the positional situation of the subject. The objective “against” stands for “against-toward.”

 

What does Derrida mean when he writes that “if things run as though on wheels, this is perhaps because things aren’t going so well, by reason of an internal infirmity” (“Truth” 78)?⁹ Does he not imply that this thingly “hastiness” is an upshot of an accelerated temporalization whereby the thing gives, demands, and takes less time, or almost no time at all? Will the things so sped up give us an impression that they happen in the Augenblick, the blink of an eye that transfigures them into ideal objects, into the prostheses sustaining their “internal infirmity”? If the things run along in haste, this is not because they are able to somehow “cover” and open up more space in a shorter stretch of time, but because they betray their own demand for temporalization and refuse to give. The more animated they are, the faster they work–the closer they come to being unworkable “by reason of an internal infirmity” which, as we know, is constitutively open to exteriority in things that are always beside themselves in themselves. The thing’s infirmity un-sublated in any prosthetic device is attached to the inner frame posited and deposited by the work that seeks to counteract–and that just succeeds in aggravating–this infirmity.

 

When “things run as though on wheels,” they reveal their deranged (dérangée) verve or madness. And the margins of Derrida’s (but not only Derrida’s) texts augment this derangement. At several crucial junctures in Specters of Marx, the textual voice addresses itself directly to the reader. “Let us accelerate things [Accélérons],” says Derrida before outlining the madness of the new “ten plagues” that haunt contemporaneity (80). “As we must hasten the conclusion, let us schematize things [schématisons],” he implores toward the end of the book (169). We must not rush to decide on what is consequential here; what is a “mere” accessory to the argument; what is an idle, colloquial, and highly idiomatic turn of phrase; what is an imprecision in the translation of the pleas “accélérons” and “schématisons” lacking any specific objects of acceleration and schematization; and what belongs to the “core” of the exposition. For the prospects of the text feeding on the increased tempo and rhythm of the thing are not definitively excluded.

 

Consider, for example, Marx’s tried and tested solution to the problem of conjuration: “to close out his accounts . . . he counts things up” (Derrida, Specters 142). And Derrida? Does he not “accelerate” things by counting down the new plagues and arriving at the same number (ten) as Marx? Of course, Derrida does not simply force things into a new tempo of giving less, but discovers the acceleration immanent to the things he counts in the decontextual context of globalization and commodification. Significantly, the commodity-thing (the object-thing) does not admit any other treatment. Materiality-cum-number, “sensuous non-sensuous,” “a ‘thing’ without phenomenon, a thing in flight” (150), it contracts and reduces the circle to a point, gives expression to circulation time striving to zero (as Marx observes in the second volume of Capital), demands less time for production, is instantaneously destroyed in consumption, dreams up its Augenblick in the evanescence of purely financial transactions carried out in the global communication networks, all the while becoming madly unworkable and masking its internal infirmity, i.e. the relatively non-commodified production of the labor force. At the summit of madness, this “thing” demands term and temporalization, gift and restitution (Derrida, Given Time 40), that is, surplus value and fair remuneration, but also forecloses the term it demands, erases the trace of différance that orders it, and lapses into the routines of objective ideality desiring the eternal present of capitalization. Commodity fetishism is the capitalist style, its very stylus whose dual function it is to imprint and to scratch out the trace of justice, protecting “the thing itself” only on the condition that its thinghood should be forgotten: “on the condition at least that it should not already be that gaping chasm which has been deflowered in the unveiling of the difference” (Derrida, Spurs 39).

 

Counting things is a strategy justified by the historical incarnation and self-effacement of the thing in the commodity form, but the satire of the thing makes inaccuracy unavoidable. Like no one else, Derrida knows that the thing is more than one and, more precisely, that there are always “three things of the thing [trois choses de la chose]”that haunt the haunting (Specters 9/29).¹⁰ So, the ten plagues and the ten manifestations of ideology are actually thirty–at least thirty–if we are willing to correct the forgetful calculus that counts the thing as one and naked object, to correct it, precisely, through the explication of (a) mourning, (b) productive or generative historicity (“generations of skulls or spirits”), and (c) work in each of the plagues and in each of the manifestations. One may rightly object that the improved re-accounting protocols are as useless as their simple-minded counterpart, if, to paraphrase Derrida, everything in the thing impels the number and the annulment of the number. With this improvement, we have not yet gauged the axiom of the non-numerical infinity of the gift, postulating that “the direct ‘object’ [what is the nature of direct oppositionality suspended in the indirection of quotation marks?] of the act of ‘giving’, . . . the given of the giving alter[s] radically the meaning of the act each time” (Derrida, Given Time 49). In this case, the most attentive and scrupulous of accountants will find herself faced with the dilemma of Carroll’s Alice, who, after desperately trying to sum up the sequence of “one and one and one and . . . ” proposed by the White Queen, had no other choice but to respond, “I don’t know. I lost count.” She loses count on account of the complexity hidden in the linear-sequential “and one” which means the exact opposite (“and not one”): the more than one in one, the non-identity of the one, the absolute separation between the one and the other (one), and so forth. In other words, the thing is never “just this one,” as it is for Heidegger.

 

The satire of the Thing irritates its proper-improper name. Why “the Thing”? The first clue to this capitalization ties together the sanctioned multiplicity of contradictory translations–the multiplicity “internal” to the Thing–and “the signature of the Thing ‘Shakespeare’: to authorize each one of the translations” (Derrida, Specters 22). By the same token, though steering toward the impropriety of the proper name, the thing’s inability to procure and to secure a proper name, Derrida refers to “some ‘Thing’” that “will have frightened and continues to frighten in the equivocation of this event,” the event of Marxism (104). The signature of the Thing “Marx,” however, refuses to authorize the legacies and bastardized political translations that call themselves Marxist and that break the name and the Thing thus named into an array of one-dimensional objects. (As Derrida will not fail to note upon reading Blanchot, there are always three “voices” of Marx. Lest each of the voices is heard, Marxism is bound to linger in one of the three -isms of economic determinism, detached scientism, or political nominalism. And, therefore, the rules of multiplying this Thing, like any other, by three necessarily apply here as elsewhere.)

 

The feigned signatures, the only possible signatures, of the Thing proliferate to such an extent that its inscription in quotation marks is supplemented with a more radical strategy of equating it with the exact opposite, the Athing: “Nominalism, conceptualism, realism: all of this is routed by the Thing or the Athing [la Chose ou l’Achose: the difference between the two is, again, entirely graphic] called ghost” (138, emphasis added). But both in the oral and in the conceptual registers, this opposition does not subsist as an opposition, for, if it did, it would have immediately transformed the thing into another object. Which means that, all the more imperceptibly, the thing indistinguishable from its opposite loses itself (its thinghood) in objectivity. It is only graphically that the non-identity of the Thing “itself” is exposed, but the price paid for this exposure is a ghostly incarnation of the name in the nameless (the routing of nominalism) and, again, of the thing in the object. Cited directly, without detours, head-on, the indeterminate spatiality of thinghood passes into the most rigid and determinate opposition of objectivity.

 

V

 

The passage of the thing into the object unbrackets the interiority of the thing, unhinges its (unhinged) deposition beside itself, and reverses the process in which it turns inside out. Derrida’s word for this reversal is “invagination”–not a total incorporation of the remainder inside something which is no longer a thing, but “the inward refolding of la gaine [the sheath, girdle], the inverted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket” (“Living On” 97). The object does not internalize the thing, for, should it do so, it will have instantaneously lost its flat objectivity in the volume obtained by proxy from that which it will have swallowed up. Inversely, turning the thing “outside in” without decisively crossing the border, without reducing non-identical excess, the object will resemble more and more a crumpled screen, an uneven surface that hampers direct reflection and interrupts the monotony of negativity. The subject is then faced with abstruse, non-idealizable objectivity which “makes sense” exclusively in the modality of not-giving something it will never contain.

 

The satirical trappings of the thing overlaid with its invagination in the object yield what appear to be slippages in Derrida’s texts–the rare moments when rigorous differentiation between the two collapses, when one is mentioned right after the other in uncomplicated chains of equivalence and substitution. On the surface of it, one of the slippages takes place where it matters least, that is, where Derrida puts the object and the thing to one side, in opposition to something else that annuls the gift, as in the first chapter of Given Time. He writes, “it suffices that the other perceive and keep, not even the object of the gift, the object given, the thing, but . . . its intentional meaning, for the gift to be annulled” (14). Need we say that to place the thing along with the object in opposition to . . . is to objectify the former straight away? Moreover, we have already established that intentionality, “intentional meaning,” differs according to the object and the thing to which it attaches itself. To put it crudely, whilst the thing and the other aim at me, I aim at the object. How, then, is the opposition between the thing and the object on one hand and “intentional meaning” on the other possible?

 

And what about the other who is the subject of this sentence? In line with the logic of “Violence and Metaphysics” buttressed with the haunto-logic of Specters of Marx, the intentionality of the other is allied with that of the thing in the relation without relation of haunting, in the conspiracy of conjuration, and in the apparition of the inapparent. No intentionality, including this one, can aim at something, at someone, at me who (that) is altogether present and who (that) is, therefore, kept in presence in the form of a repeatedly given ideal object, intuited in the fullness of presence. “It belongs to the original structure of expression to be able to dispense with the full presence of the object aimed at by intuition . . . . The absence of the object aimed at does not compromise the meaning” (Derrida, Speech 90). The absence of the object here does not automatically entail the absence of the thing; in fact, shortly thereafter, Derrida explicitly distinguishes one from the other (“Two identical expressions . . . may mean the same thing, and yet have different objects” [91].) It follows that when the present-absent thing aimed at is “the I” whom the other perceives, the gift of the thing is not annulled if the other regards the thing of the gift from the other side of his visor, in non-reciprocal reciprocity, qua other (the uniquely given, each time for the first time), not qua another given (object) of the giving.

 

To return to the route of invagination: commodities, in Derrida’s reading of Marx, assume the character of equivocally invaginated things. Taking the table that Marx gives as an example deposited near the beginning of Capital, Derrida points out that “this Thing which is no longer altogether a thing . . . unfolds (entwickelt), it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders” (Specters 152). This unfolding is not the only factor that negates the thinghood of “this Thing,” the thinghood that performs its endless routine of turning inside out, as usual. A whole new series of operations of refolding coterminous with this usual routine is in order. Derrida will group these operations under the title of “automatic autonomy” (153), of the paradoxical in-animation that commences, on the one hand, with the turning upside down of the table, the static repositioning of the table on its head, rendering it both useless and more stable, and, on the other, its sudden inspiration and deposition, driving it to the marketplace where it is ready to face other commodity-thing-objects. “The market is a front, a front among fronts, a confrontation” (155) inviting faceless, standoffish objects to a surface-to-surface relationship, to a faceless facing toward-against, but also requiring that they rush to it themselves, crawl on the inverted table top that will never function as a sheath for itself or for the value it is supposed to undergird, forget the security of their position and opposition, lose their grounding, execute a salto mortale, as Marx calls it, of valuation and exchange. The commodity is an object-thing in which the fundamental lines of demarcation between things and objects are contaminated, while commodification understood as invagination is a leap of the thing into the object, and back again.

 

The generative unfolding of the thing is immanent to its constitutive multiplicity. In the course of invagination that searches for the trace of this unfolding within the folds of the thing itself, in the course of the “mutilating excavation of things [excavation mutilatrice des choses],” one uncovers “the stratified layers, the abyssal series of sedimentations” (Derrida and Thévenin 125, 145). Conversely, the object accommodates multiplicity only on the condition that it shatters into a number of fragments or is torn to shreds and thus rendered “partial” (Derrida, Given Time 49). The thing is both more and less than the object. More than the object, its pluri-dimensionality has volume and “interiority,” with which it nonetheless does not coincide. Less than the object, it does not face us as such in infinite repeatability, but promotes “the mutilating excavation” historically replaying and contorting singular and abyssal sedimentations. Both more and less, the thing brings to a grinding halt the multiplicity of types but not the non-numerical multiplicity of “the gift,” whose meaning changes with every given. Invagination adumbrates this precarious margin, assesses the breadth of difference, and enforces the traversed distance between the thing and the object.

 

VI

 

A footnote at the end of The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud announces our problematic, inflecting it with a tinge of “auto-deconstruction.” “Will I have been forcing things? [Aurai-je forcé les choses?] Perhaps it will be thought that I have given too much weight to this word the subjectile . . . But first of all no reading, no interpretation could ever prove its efficacy and its necessity without a certain forcing. You have to force things” (156n80). Derrida proceeds to reflect on force and its role in interpretation, but has he not already, in the very gesture of self-criticism, forced “this word the subjectile” into a word and a thing, or rather, into things? This is the first possibility, but certainly not the last. For, what is it exactly that “will have been” forced into what? To the first possibility we might add the pernicious forcing of things into objects, into themselves, or into the thing in the singular; the invaginated forcing of aesthetic things (say, Artaud’s notebooks) into vocable media or words; the entwined forcing of chance into the necessity of chance and of inefficacy proper to the inexistent or anexistent subjectivity–into the efficacy of willful agency; the perverse forcing of the things that aim at me into the intentional coherence of my consciousness; the endless referential, reiterative, cited, and translated forcing of texts into other texts they are welcome to serve. There is also the force immanent to the things themselves, the force buried in the multifarious sedimentations that form them, the force awaiting “the mutilating excavation” that will faithfully manifest, denude, and betray the excavated “materials.” You have to force things only in this manner, both traversing the difference between forces and maintaining the pathos of distance in spite of, or thanks to, this traversal.

 

Notes

 

I owe a debt of gratitude to Edward S. Casey and to two anonymous reviewers who offered constructive comments on the earlier drafts of this article.

 

1. I am thinking of the Hegelian enunciation of the identity of difference and identity. And yet, the opposition between position and opposition only formally resonates with this enunciation. The content of this opposition refers to irreconcilability, rather than to Hegelian reconciliation.

 

2. Here I elaborate upon Derrida’s remarks on the “infirmity of the thesis” in The Truth in Painting; see 78.

 

3. On “iterability without iteration,” see Derrida, Limited Inc., 48.

 

4. In What Is a Thing? Heidegger claims that, in the broadest sense of the term, the thing “is every affair or transaction, something that is in this or that condition, the things that happen in the world–occurrences, events”; see 5.

 

5. The paradigm cases of this critique are Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf and Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, esp. Chapter II: “Does the Other Exist?”

 

6.”Esse is interesse; essence is interest” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence 4).

 

7. The second page number refers to the French edition of Spectres De Marx.

 

8. Also see Heidegger’s What Is a Thing?: “The question ‘What is a thing?’ includes in itself the question ‘What is Zeitraum (time-span)?’, the puzzling unity of space and time within which, as it seems, the basic character of things, to be only this one, is determined” (17).

 

9. It is worth noting that Heidegger’s essay “The Thing” (1971) begins with the acceleration immanent to tele-techno-communications, the reduction of distances in space and time, and the consideration of the thing as that which is near to us.

 

10. In contrast to the object of consciousness, things can “belong” only to the thing, folding the genitive form inside out: into the thing “itself” only as the multiplicity of things, that is to say, as the difference of forces constitutive of the thing “in” the thing.

 

Works Cited

 

• Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.
• Cixous, Hélène, and Jacques Derrida. Veils. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 1-27.
• —. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
• —. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.
• —. “Living On: Border Lines.” Trans. James Hulbert. Deconstruction and Criticism. Eds. Harold Bloom et al. New York: Continuum, 1979.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.
• —. Of Spirit. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• —. Spectres De Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993.
• —. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• —. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Trans. Barbara Harlow. London: U of Chicago P, 1979.
• —. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
• Derrida, Jacques, and Paule Thévenin. The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Trans. Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962.
• —. “The Thing.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: HarperCollins, 1971. 163-86.
• —. What Is a Thing? Trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.
• —. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.

 

Jan Mieszkowski

German Department
Reed College
mieszkow@reed.edu

 

From his earliest essays to his final lectures, Jacques Derrida endeavored to come to terms with the legacy of German Idealist philosophy. First and foremost, this involved a sustained engagement with the work of G.W.F. Hegel, a thinker who makes extraordinary claims for the self-grounding, self-explicating authority of his project. Seemingly resistant to the usual interpretive strategies, Hegel is notorious for presenting his readers with unique challenges, or threats. There is a widespread sense, as William James put it more than a century ago, that the Hegelian “system resembles a mousetrap, in which if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering” (275). As the history of Hegel scholarship attests, grappling with a philosopher by steadfastly refusing to do so is a chaotic endeavor at best. Of course, Derrida has inspired somewhat similar reactions. Like Hegel, he is frequently accused of redefining the standards of argumentation to such a degree that he cannot help but have the last word, pre-empting commentary or criticism before it is ever formulated. Does this mean that the only recourse one has in the face of the Hegelian monolith is to seek to outdo it by undertaking an even more radical transformation of conceptuality, or is it simply the case that Derrida was profoundly influenced by his Idealist predecessor?

 

Derrida wrote a great deal about his relationship with Hegel. What I want to argue in this essay, however, is that some of Derrida’s most important contributions on Hegel are in texts that never cite him by name. In particular, Derrida’s account of linguistic performance–an analysis developed across a host of essays on different literary and philosophical figures–offers insights into the more radical dimensions of Hegel’s understanding of language and subjectivity. The result is a call to view language not as an infinite resource of signification or performance, formation or destruction, but as a dynamic whose transgressive potential paradoxically depends precisely on its essentially finite character. It is only from this perspective, Derrida suggests, that a full evaluation of Hegel’s theory of praxis is possible.

 

Although he is sometimes described as “transcending” Hegel, if not rendering him obsolete, Derrida himself avoids such gestures. On the contrary, Hegel is to be championed, for his work shows “that the positive infinite must be thought through . . . in order that the indefiniteness of différance appear as such” (Speech 101-2). At the same time, Derrida stresses the need to at least attempt to mark one’s departure, even if it is only infinitesimally slight, from the Hegelian project: “Différance (at a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel . . . ) must sign the point at which one breaks with the system of the Aufhebung and with speculative dialectics” (Positions 44). To attempt to “break” with a system founded on the capacity to mobilize the conceptual authority of breaks is already to enter into an extremely complex “mousetrap” in which a discourse’s ability to assert a reflexive relationship to its own presuppositions and procedures is at once a demonstration of self-affirmation and of abnegation. In the simplest terms, it is very much an open question whether a “break” with Hegel can be effected at all.¹

 

The influence of Derrida’s work on contemporary Hegel scholarship provides a good starting point from which to consider the challenges of interpreting a philosophy that claims always already to have interpreted itself. Self-described “deconstructive” commentators have sought to reveal “cracks” or “flaws” in the Hegelian system, locating passages with which to argue that he is not a thinker of mastery because he understands subjectivity as a constant process of abandoning oneself and that he is not a thinker of totality and of pure self-presence because he treats discord and privation as constitutive of any position. To some degree, these demonstrations must be welcomed given the all-too-common impression that Hegel is a purveyor of reconciliation who strives to “mediate” between extremes, employs negativity to “erase” negativity, and offers us unlimited optimism in the form of a system that can only make progress in its quest for the truth of absolute knowledge.² Unfortunately, such efforts to locate instabilities internal to the Hegelian system may lack a broader interpretive significance. As Derrida never tires of reminding us, merely reversing the terms of an oppositional hierarchy does not necessarily even alter the dynamic at work, much less explain why it takes the form it does or what its pretensions to a totalizing authority may be. To highlight a passage in which it is revealed that identity is difference rather than the other way around may help counter some clichés about Hegel’s “monolithic” idealism, but in a corpus in which the relationship between part and whole is subject to unparalleled scrutiny, the stakes in when and how one intervenes in the analysis cannot be higher.

 

It is also not obvious that the goals of Hegel’s project can be assessed by isolating a single moment in the argument and elevating it to the status of a truism to be celebrated or debunked–“everything ismediated”/”theslave is the master”–a point Derrida attributes to Georges Bataille (see “From a Restricted to a General Economy” 253). At every stage in his reading of Hegel, then, Derrida asks to what extent the system under examination already accounts for and explains itself far more completely than any “external” argument can hope to do. One of the best-known Hegelians of the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno, describes the challenge in the following way:

 

Like other closed systems of thought, Hegel's philosophy avails itself of the dubious advantage of not having to allow any criticism whatsoever. All criticism of the details, according to Hegel, remains partial and misses the whole, which in any case takes this criticism into account. Conversely, criticizing the whole as a whole is abstract, "unmediated," and ignores the fundamental motif of Hegelian philosophy: that it cannot be distilled into any "maxim" or general principle and proves its worth only as a totality, in the concrete interconnections of all its moments. (Three Studies 2)

 

The bind in which Adorno situates the would-be explicator of Hegel must be taken seriously. To suggest, as Derrida repeatedly does, that Hegel’s text is “not of a piece” and that it can be read “against” itself can invite one to make a great deal out of individual tensions, “hiccups” that ostensibly trouble the smooth modulations of the dialectic. The problem is that from the perspective of the whole, the dialectic is driven by nothing but interruption and resistance. When Derrida calls for us to reexamine Hegel’s work, “that is, the movement by means of which his text exceeds its meaning, permits itself to be turned away from, to return to, and to repeat itself outside its self-identity,” one cannot help but feel that Derrida is basically just summarizing the account that Hegel’s philosophy offers of its own operations (Positions 78-9).

 

On the other hand, an attack on the viability of dialectical analysis as such is bound to reduce the content of Hegel’s thought to a set of slogans–“being is nothing,” “the rational is the real”–thereby negating the object of study in the course of analyzing it (and ironically repeating the very dialectical gesture from which one is seeking to break). These efforts to critique Hegel only end up confirming his authority, which is one reason that Hegelian scholarship has a tendency to assume an almost comical form in which one commentator after another accuses his peers of unwittingly quoting Hegelian doctrine at the very moment they claim to take leave of it.³

 

For Derrida, the way in which the Hegelian system anticipates the criticisms to which it is subject must be considered in terms of Hegel’s account of the history of spirit as the story of an essentially self-interpreting entity. Hegel writes:

 

The history of spirit is its own act (Tat); for spirit is only what it does, and its act is to make itself--in this case as spirit--the object of its own consciousness, and to comprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself. This comprehension is its being and principle, and the completion of an act of comprehension is at the same time its alienation and transition.[(Elements 372)⁴

 

The subject of Hegelian thought only is insofar as it is engaged in the process of interpreting itself, even as this act of self-comprehension, the product of its own being as self-interpretation, is equally an act of self-alienation, the relentless exposure of itself to yet another interpretive revision. To enter into an evaluation of this dynamic is necessarily to become part of a process in which meaning and the act of making something meaningful are supposed to coincide in the praxis of a self that aims to grasp itself as an entity with an unlimited interpretive grasp. The discourse of spirit is the discourse in which signification becomes both possible and actual in and through self-referential self-clarification.

 

This dimension of Hegel’s thought–which may in one sense be its only dimension–is an attempt to explore the full implications of J.G. Fichte’s foundational claim that the self “is at once the agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action (Handlung) and act (Tat) are one and the same, and hence I am is the expression of a deed (Ausdruck einer Tathandlung), and the only one possible” (97). For Hegel, the “expression” of a deed (“and the only deed possible”) is the expression of the very condition of performance such that the acts of the self can facilitate its own self-interpretive presentation of itself to itself as itself. The expression of a deed is the act of coming to know oneself as the one who renders one’s own meaningfulness meaningful. Historical praxis is this, and nothing else.

 

Because “the completion of an act of comprehension is at the same time [spirit’s] alienation and transition,” the self is never finished making itself into the subject and object of the acts by which it establishes itself as the standard of all agency. Paradoxically, the much-disparaged drive to totality in Hegel’s system stems from its frankness about its own incompleteness, its tireless self-exposure to everything that has not yet become conscious of the fact that its own significance will stem from this auto-interpretive onto-logic. Hegel’s text holds out the promise of a system to end all systems because it is permanently open to the readings to which it has yet to submit itself, and which will in turn be submitted to it. This is a philosophy that pre-reads and pre-writes all its future encounters as events that will only become meaningful in their own right insofar as they come to know themselves as subjects–in both senses of the word–of the spirit’s self-interpretive dynamic.⁵

 

As the attempt to control the difference (or lack thereof) between reference and signification where its process of auto-confirmation is concerned, Hegel’s work anticipates what Derrida calls “the figures of its beyond, all the forms and resources of its exterior” (“Restricted” 252). Hegel offers the promise of systematicity as such, the promise of a systematizing force that can pre-posit all the standards on the basis of which it will call itself meaningful and be called meaningful by its other. Importantly, this system does not just prefigure the evaluations it will inspire; it pre-judges them, as well. To prove that you have really begun to read Hegel, you have to be able to demonstrate that he has been expecting you. In other words, you confirm your ability to say something about Hegel by becoming part of a process in which the very possibility of making sense of your own activities depends on the extent to which you can show that you are always-already written and read by your object text, by the textyou–perhapsfancifully–imagine that you selected, rather than the other way around.

 

Even to aim at willfully misunderstanding Hegel in order to elude the self-interpretive dynamic with which he confronts us does not help. In Glas, Derrida reflects on the paradox that since any finite misreading is already anticipated by the Hegelian text, one can never miss by enough to confound the system’s ability to take one’s commentary into account. Hegel’s interpretation of his own work is “too conscientious,” says Derrida; it leaves no place for an acolyte or a detractor to make his or her mark (“Restricted” 260). One can choose either to salute Hegel or to reject him, but one should not be deluded into thinking that one’s decision is of any consequence for (or surprise to) his system: “Dialectics is always that which has finished us, because it is always that which takes into account our rejection of it. As it does our affirmation” (“Theater” 246). Among other things, this means that one does not have the luxury of electing first to take up the task of understanding Hegel’s philosophy and only later, having garnered some command of the material, deciding whether or not to embrace it. Even to engage minimally with this thought is already to become part of its own auto-evaluating structure.

 

The challenge, then, is to adopt a stance that neither misses the whole nor the concrete interconnection of the moments and yet that allows one to do more than play the role of Hegel’s puppet. Derrida’s most important reflections on these difficulties may lie in his analysis of linguistic performance. Thanks to his polemic with John Searle, Derrida’s work on iterability in J.L. Austin is eminently familiar to his allies and detractors alike.⁶ Indeed, many projects concerned with the significance of Hegelian thought for contemporary debates about ethnic and gender identities take Derrida’s discussions of repetition as their starting point.⁷ It is equally critical, however, to recognize that Derrida does not simply think about speech acts with reference to the conventions or codes that ostensibly give an utterance such as “I do” its authority at the altar. Derrida is equally concerned to ask about the ways in which a language of acts–like the discourse of Hegel’s spirit–claims to institute its own conditions of possibility. How, inquires Derrida in his reading of Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law,” are “the conditions of a performative . . . established,” that is, how are they originally possible, prior to the formulation of any empirical rules or regulations (216)? The topic is vast, encompassing a host of questions about the linguistic dimensions of contracts and compacts that have occupied philosophers and political theorists since the eighteenth century. In much of his later work on law and justice, Derrida grapples with the issue of performance in precisely these terms.

 

Where the relationship between performance and self-interpretation in Hegel is concerned, Derrida’s discussions of Paul de Man’s work on performativity–part of the two critics’ extensive debate about Rousseau–are crucial.⁸ Is it the case, inquires Derrida, that all utterances are preceded by a pre-formative, a promise–to use the figure on which de Man dwells–to be language, a promise on the part of language to perform meaningfully, a promise that is itself neither simply constative nor performative?⁹ Although Hegel is rarely present by name, he is clearly the guiding figure for much of what Derrida has to say about proto-performative acts of language in a series of texts that, like his Kafka piece, focus primarily on literary works. In his analysis of the end of Ulysses, for example, Derrida takes up the Fichtean notion of self-positing and argues:

 

Before the Ich in Ich bin affirms or negates, it poses itself or pre-poses itself: not as ego, as the conscious or unconscious self, as masculine or feminine subject, spirit or flesh, but as a pre-performative force which, for example, in the form of the "I" marks that "I" as addressing itself to the other, however undetermined he or she is: "Yes-I" or "Yes-I-say-to-the-other," even if I says no and even if I addresses itself without speaking. (298)

 

Before positing itself as a content, before even presupposing the announcement–“I am”– that will become its self-inaugural declaration, the language of the self must pre-pose a mark–“yes”–that refers to nothing outside of language, a “quasi-act,” as Derrida also describes it, that shows nothing, states nothing, and ultimately says nothing, yet which constitutes language’s own minimal assertion that language will happen. “Yes” is language’s avowal that a statement can be a performance rather than a mere instance of a code, that an utterance can be active or productive rather than just passive and mimetic, that a verbal event can be an end as well as a means. In the beginning there is what Derrida terms the “transcendental adverbiality” of “yes,” the condition of possibility for any speech act, the pre-formative on which the ecstatic quality of language–its power to posit the very possibility of positing–depends (297).

 

At first glance, this might seem like a simplistic exercise in unearthing layer upon layer of conditions of possibility–“A positing is made possible by a pre-positing, which is in turn made possible by a pre-pre-positing, etc.”–as if each stage in the expansion of our meta-(meta-)languagenecessarily constituted a corresponding advance in understanding. Derrida insists, however, that to ask about the conditions of possibility of linguistic performance is necessarily to call the possibility of a meta-language into question because any discourse about language “will itself assume the event of a yes [a pre-performative force] which it will fail to comprehend” (299). Prior to saying anything in particular, all language must assume that it has always already said “yes” to language and “yes” to its own status as the producer of possibilities; but no language is capable of making this proto-active “yes” into a content that it could then recognize as the product of the activity of itself or of an other.¹⁰ Language necessarily assumes that it has said “yes” to its own ability to affirm itself, but no language can actually state this assumption as an affirmative claim. In other words, any proposition–be it part of a discourse about language or not–presupposes a pre-positional force that never takes the form of a subject or object of representation. No instance of language can present its own promissory “yes” as the formative act or pre-act that it “pre-supposedly” is. Far from confirming language’s self-identity, “yes” reveals language to be anything but present-to-self, suggesting, among other things, that it is by no means clear whether or not the Hegelian subject can ever make good on its commitment to fashion a self-meaningful discourse in which constation and performance coincide.

 

The reflexivity of linguistic concepts and the self-representation of language are among the most challenging problems in contemporary theory. For the purposes of our discussion, the question is whether the issues Derrida raises about pre- or proto-performance constitute a genuine stumbling block for the self-interpretive praxis of the Hegelian subject, fundamentally challenging either its ability to be a discourse about the self or its ability to be a self-interpretive discourse. In other words, is the problem that the self cannot comprehend itself–that its acts of self-reflection can never catch up with its acts of self-positing–or is the problem that the self cannot comprehend itself and is fated to discover that its models of semantic coherence apply to anything but its own determinations? To evaluate the full significance of Derrida’s argument, we have to look more closely at Hegel’s own account of the relationship between language and subjectivity. To this end, it will be helpful to turn to the theory of poetry he offers in his Lectures on Aesthetics.

 

Hegel declares that poetry is supreme among the arts, combining music’s apprehension of the inner life of the mind with the determinate phenomenal character of sculpture and painting.¹¹ In contrast to many of his contemporaries who make similar claims, however, Hegel never wavers in insisting that poetry is the crisis of art as much as it is its triumph. Poetry’s uniqueness stems from the fact that the subject and the object of poetry, the medium and the message, are one and the same. Unlike painting or sculpture, poetry can deal with any and every topic in any and every fashion because in the final analysis what poetry really expresses is the mind’s apprehension of itself to itself in itself.¹² The medium of poetry is the imagination, and “its proper material is also the imagination, that universal foundation of all the particular art-forms and the individual arts” (Aesthetics 967). Cut off from any material restraints, any restrictions on form and content, poetry

 

appear[s] as that particular art in which art itself begins . . . to dissolve . . . . [P]oetry destroys the fusion of spiritual inwardness with external existence to an extent that begins to be incompatible with the original conception of art, with the result that poetry runs the risk of losing itself in a transition from the region of sense into that of the spirit. (968)

 

No longer comprehensible in terms of a connection between a material medium and an intelligible meaning, poetry is the highest achievement of art as the confirmation of spirit’s pure self-apprehension, but this triumph is equally art’s demise. The ultimate articulation of the sensible with the intelligible, of the world of appearances with the world of ideas, poetry’s success leads it astray–in its autonomy, it threatens to abandon its mediating role and evacuate itself of any representational duties whatsoever.

 

The pinnacle of art and its collapse, poetry forces Hegel to rethink his account of self-determination as linguistic praxis. Predictably, this occurs in his discussion of lyric, traditionally the verse of the self and the first member of his tripartite genre scheme, which is rounded out by epic and drama. Having stressed that it makes no difference whether we read or hear poetry since its medium–language–is essentially non-phenomenal, Hegel nonetheless insists that because lyric is the highpoint of artistic subjectivity, the expression of interiority as such, it must be grasped as an act of a self in a way that epic and drama cannot be. The important thing to realize is that a lyric act of self, unlike the deeds of the self-interpretive spirit described in the Philosophy of History or the Philosophy of Right, must remain stillborn. Lyric praxis, writes Hegel, cannot “be so far continued as to display the subject’s heart and passion in practical activity and action, i.e., in the subject’s return to himself in his actual deed” (Aesthetics 1112). For the model of self-interpretive subjectivity, the self is nothing other than its own acts of self-interpretation, yet lyric, the poetry of the self, must be language that acts in such a way that the action can never be grasped as the coordination of a self and an act. Lyric acts without becoming someone’s action. To think about this even as a claim for the agency of language replacing the agency of a willful entity would be misleading. The lyric poet, the poet of poets, the poet whose discourse will articulate the very subjectivity of poetry as the discourse of spirit itself, acts by losing his power to articulate a language that would tell its own story, the story of language’s coming into meaningfulness by its own hand, the story of language being able to make sense of its own promissory “yes.” Lyric is the last language in which an act and the explanation of that act will coincide in the self-signification of an auto-interpretive process.

 

In setting the imagination free, poetry reveals that the imagination talks only to itself. Poetry, says Hegel, “must emphasize . . . the spiritual idea (geistige Vorstellung), the imagination which speaks to the inner imagination (die Phantasie, die zur inneren Phantasie spricht)” (Aesthetics 969). The point is not that the lyrical imagination speaks nonsense (or remains silent). With the simultaneous triumph and dissolution of art in poetry, we encounter a language that, in contradistinction to the prose of spirit, does not present itself as a discourse that understands itself in and as its own acts of self-understanding. This is a language that never offers a grammar or syntax that could serve as a model for relations between agents and their deeds or between subjects and objects. With lyric, says Hegel, the imagination “is essentially distinguished from thinking by reason of the fact that . . . it allows particular ideas to subsist alongside one another without being related, whereas thinking demands and produces dependence of things on one another, reciprocal relations, logical judgments, syllogisms, etc.” (1035). The inactive praxis of lyric confronts us with a paratactic discourse in which hierarchy and synthesis have no place. In the final instance, it is a war against both art and thinking: “Lyric . . . becomes the outpouring of a soul, fighting and struggling with itself, which in its ferment does violence to both art and thought because it oversteps one sphere without being, or being able to be, at home in the other” (1128). The language of radical non-self-understanding, lyric poetry cannot self-clarify or self-interpret in the course of articulating itself as the product of its own articulations. Where lyric subjectivity is concerned, the self’s expression of itself to itself is as destructive as it is creative. Lyric presents the subject as that which does violence to itself, but not, as the commonplaces about subject philosophy would have it, by treating itself as an object. Lyric fails to demonstrate that its own self-interpretation begins and ends with the acts by which it makes its own significance self-evidently meaningful to itself. On the most basic level, this means that the self-interest of self–the notion of the self as even minimally self-related or self-concerned–has lost its inevitability.

 

If lyric, the pinnacle of subjective expressivity, turns out to be a discourse in which both self-interpretation and self-interpretation are in jeopardy, this does not simply mean–again, as the clichés about Hegel and Derrida would have it–that identity is irremediably compromised by the force of difference. Interpretation and attempts to coordinate reference and signification continue unabated in poetry, but it is no longer evident that such efforts are primarily waged in the service of a self that performs them. The question for our study of the relationship between Hegel and Derrida is whether the negativity at work in this dynamic requires us to alter our customary picture of dialectical negation. Is lyric praxis an example of what Derrida describes in Bataille’s reading of Hegel as a negativity that is no longer part of the semantic work of the concept “because it literally can no longer labor and let itself be interrogated as the ‘work of the negative’” (“Restricted” 260)? According to Hegel’s Aesthetics, lyric poetry occurs as an event that does not reflexively tell the story of its own emergence as a semantic agent, and in this respect, it challenges the understanding of poetry as “productive” if that term necessarily implies the appearance of a product that can be known as the effect of its producer. At the same time, is it clear that lyric’s repeated acts of non-self-understanding could not be recuperated via the inversion whereby subjectivity, brought to its radical extreme, would coincide with its other and thus confirm its implicit sovereignty after all? Hegel’s theory of art provides the resources for a more radical vision of self-expressive activity than is normally attributed to him, but ultimately, Derrida is interested in pushing the account of lyric even further. In “Shibboleth: for Paul Celan,” one of relatively few of his texts that is primarily devoted to verse, Derrida writes about the way in which Celan’s work effects a break with the very idea of agency as self-expression. The voice that speaks in his oeuvre is in retreat from the paradigm of self-determination as self-representation; and subjectivity, such as it appears, makes no claim to being either the cause or the effect of the referential powers of language. For the philosophical project, argues Derrida, the encounter with Celan is the “experience of language, an experience always as poetic, or literary, as it is philosophical” (“Shibboleth” 48). For Derrida, this experience is the experience of linguistic finitude. This does not mean that it is an encounter with a discourse that fails to refer to or perform anything and everything. Rather, it is an engagement with a language that–unlike the self-interpretive dynamic of Hegel’s historical spirit–no longer presents itself as the deciding instance in virtue of which all past, present, and future utterances become meaningful through the evaluation to which this language subjects them. This is the experience of a language in which all reading and writing are no longer always-already pre-written and pre-read by its own self-confirming conditions of signification, a language in which the resources of the “yes” Derrida reads in Joyce are not necessarily inexhaustible.

 

It is around the question of finitude that the challenges posed by Hegel’s lyric intersect with Derrida’s work on the notion of the event (Ereignis) in Martin Heidegger. A true event, argues Derrida, is entirely unforeseeable; it is a pure surprise, something impossible to accommodate through existing norms or schemas, something that literally comes upon us out of nowhere and overwhelms our ability to process it. In this sense, a confrontation with an event is an encounter with the experience of a limit of experience, an encounter with the very impossibility of fully understanding or appropriating that with which we are faced.¹³ Importantly, this experience of limits as limits of experience does not itself become a definite border, something that one can “tackle head on” and thereby overcome. For Derrida, the experience of a limit is simultaneously the experience of the limit of limits, an experience of the way in which something that is truly limited, something that is not simply a temporary delimitation that can facilitate its own supersession, fails to manifest itself as decidedly determined or determining. It is in these terms that Derrida invites us to think about the event of Hegelian lyric as an irreducibly finite act. Such a lyric “happens” by exposing the limits of auto-interpretation, by questioning whether the self-interpretive project is inherently self-compromising, and this occurs, moreover, in such a way that the limits never become a fixed border to be transgressed, as if the act of self-interpretation could interpret itself as self-limiting and, having confirmed that the limitation was wholly its own, surpass it. Such a lyric points beyond itself, calling out for description and comprehension, but it never verifies that this call is the promise of its own meaningfulness. Language’s self-avowing “yes” can never completely say “yes” to “yes.”

 

From this standpoint, Derrida is demanding nothing less than a reconceptualization of the classical opposition between the finite and the infinite. Finitude, claims Hegel, is a matter of boundaries that are themselves endpoints, boundaries that in marking completion, termination, or death reveal themselves to be true restrictions rather than thresholds, conclusions rather than bridges to something new. One should thus understand finitude as that which is ceasing to be: as a positively extant phenomenon, finitude is only insofar as it is becoming something that always-already no longer is. Finite things, writes Hegel, “are not merely limited . . . but on the contrary non-being constitutes their nature and being” (Science 129). To say that something is finite means that non-being, the negative determination organizing the opposition between being and nothing, constitutes its existence without rendering it purely indifferent to what is or is not. In a slightly more dramatic formulation, where finite things are concerned, “the hour of their birth is the hour of their death” (Science 129).

 

Approached in this fashion, finitude is the condition of always-already being through, yet ironically, even this may not be finite enough. If something is to be truly finite, its limits must be absolutely limiting and limited, but the moment limitation is invoked as a category with which to explain finitude, the resulting boundary between what is and is not finite potentially opposes itself to finitude–it is the other of finitude, the frontier at which finitude confronts something beyond itself–at which point the finite is no longer merely terminal. In other words, the negativity characteristic of finitude is permanently at risk of serving as the grounds for a self-relation that will implicate the finite in a dynamic of self and other. The consequence is that the exposition of finitude can become an exercise in determining a series of transitions–alterations, as Hegel calls them–between different finite entities, each of which is shown to be a “something” in its own right that is limited by yet another change via expiration, and so forth: “We lay down a limit; then we pass it; next we have a limit once more, and so on for ever” (Encyclopedia 138). Either an infinite regression emerges–each finitude produces yet another finitude, ad infinitum–or else what has been described is a straightforward double negation–“the limit is limited in such a way that it is not just limited”–that becomes the ground of an unlimited field of finite phenomena. Both alternatives leave us with what Hegel famously calls a “bad” or “wrong” infinity, an interminably repeated negation of the finite that never actually completes the task of negating it.

 

In the Science of Logic and the first volume of the Encyclopedia, Hegel devotes a great deal of energy to confirming the possibility of articulating an infinitude that can be distinguished from this “bad” infinity.¹⁴ At the same time, he more than hints that finitude offers a resistance to thought that is not the customary resistance of negation:

 

The thought of the finitude of things brings this sadness (Trauer) with it because it is qualitative negation pushed to its extreme, and in the singleness of such determination, there is no longer left to things an affirmative being distinct from their destiny to perish. Because of this qualitative singleness of the negation, which has gone back to the abstract opposition of nothing and ceasing-to-be as opposed to being, finitude is the most stubborn category of the understanding; negation in general, constitution and limit, reconcile themselves with their other, with determinate being; and even nothing, taken abstractly as such, is given up as an abstraction; but finitude is the negation as fixed in itself, and it therefore stands in abrupt contrast to the affirmative. The finite, it is true, lets itself be brought into flux, it is itself this, to be determined or destined to its end, but only to its end--or rather, it is the refusal to let itself be brought affirmatively to its affirmative, to the infinite, and to let itself be united with it. (Science 129-30)

 

Finitude’s refusal to yield to the negation of its negative stance, its refusal to be brought “affirmatively to its affirmative,” is equally its refusal to yield to the positivity of its negative stance, hence, finitude literally has no posture that could be called its own. Foreign to both determinate being and abstraction, finitude is not really a determination at all, and yet, it is not indeterminate, either. “The most stubborn category of the understanding,” finitude “stands in abrupt contrast to the affirmative” because it presents us with a negation taken “to its extreme,” but for once, this radicalization of negativity does not subject finitude to a reversal whereby it would become an affirmative positing in its own right. Finitude is a negation that refuses to be in-itself or for-itself. It is a negation with neither a positive nor a negative valence.

 

The first question to ask is whether the interruptive, even paralyzing function of finitude has always already been re-written and re-read as part of a larger reflective process that sits in judgment on any effort to “radicalize” the argument by tarrying with this disruption. If the concept of finitude is to be ascribed a broader significance, it will have to be shown that it in some way forces Hegel to alter his account of signification itself. To move in this direction, it could be argued that the thought of finitude brings with it a sadness or mourning (Trauer) not simply because mortal entities die, but because once finitude is invoked, the usual procedures of thought–determination, negation, determination as negation–are themselves at risk of being revealed as essentially limited, too. Hegel stresses that the experience of the concept of finitude is an encounter with something that is not precisely of the order of being or nothing, and he appears to acknowledge that what is lost in the transition from the finite to the infinite is not just finitude, but the possibility of another kind of thinking, a possibility he declines to explore.¹⁵ Thought, we might say, never gets over its brush with the finite, however dexterous the ensuing presentation of the infinite proves to be, however ardently it is maintained that the infinite carries the finite within it. Mourning (Trauer) becomes melancholia, and finitude is transcended only at the price of thought–in contradiction to the most basic tenet of Idealism–showing itself to be finite rather than infinite. This is the concern Hegel expresses in the Encyclopedia when he cautions against doing exactly what he does in the greater Logic, namely, juxtapose the finite and the infinite in a stark opposition, thereby implicitly granting that the infinite is limited rather than unlimited, bounded rather than boundless.

 

At this juncture, it might be clarifying to distinguish the finite from the concept of finitude by arguing that the latter always bears a mark of the generality of thought that contravenes the singularity that is its ostensible substance. In slightly different terms, if the articulation of finitude as a concept in a discourse invariably betrays what we mean by the finite, then can we speak about the emergence of finitude as an event whereby the universality organizing any act of reference or signification is compromised in being exposed to a limit? Hegel seems to go in this direction when he argues that finitude is the expression of the nothing as something limited and hence as not merely nothing. Hardly just another way of facilitating the reversal of the finite into the infinite, the expression of finitude betrays a contradiction in expressivity itself. Finitude interrupts the smooth modulation from the act of representation to the content of what is represented, as if once you represent finitude, you no longer know precisely what representation is or does. In this respect, the language that purports to express finitude challenges its own ability to continue to be language; it confronts itself not as a self-grounding force that posits its own conditions of possibility, but as something restricted, fragmentary, or even mortal. At least for the moment, “yes” is only a half-hearted “more or less ‘yes.’”

 

If the expression of finitude renders expression finite, it is still unclear whether this fundamentally alters the Hegelian model of self-signification. The language of Hegelian lyric praxis may constitute a genuine alternative to spirit as auto-interpretation, but we need to say more about finitude’s peculiar “refusal,” as Hegel puts it, to play along with affirmation and negation alike. One way that Derrida tries to describe this “other” negation can be found in his discussion of totalization in Claude Lévi-Strauss:

 

Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field--that is, language and a finite language--excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. One could say . . . that this movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center's place in its absence--this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement. ("Structure" 289; translation modified)

 

This passage is part of a larger argument made in Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena about signification in Rousseau, Edmund Husserl, and Saussure. With each of these authors, Derrida shows that the attempt to describe the logic of the sign reveals that the referent it “announces” or “substitutes for” is always already implicated in a broader semiosis. With respect to its presence-to-self, an object of reference is thus invoked only via a process that exposes it as fundamentally empty or lacking.¹⁶ The result is that expression can no longer be understood as the articulation of something that exists independently of expression. Every signifier marks the difference between a signifier and a signified, but no signifier can signify that what it signifies is actually a signified rather than just another signifier.

 

The inscription of the infinite within an inherently incomplete field coupled with the suggestion that the inexhaustibility of the field stems precisely from its constitutively deficient state fundamentally alters the way in which we must understand language as limited or unlimited. Instead of speaking of a discourse’s inability to refer to or perform anything and everything–even when that anything and everything is the discourse itself–the very possibility of language as a signifying force is now said to rest on its inherently unfinished status: “The overabundance of the signifier,” writes Derrida, “its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented” (“Structure” 290). The point is not just that any act of language misfires or fails to constitute itself in the form it promises. Understood as a system of signification, language acts by disrupting the grounds for identifying the infinite with totality or completion. Conversely, it is no longer possible to speak of the finite as terminal or as the antithesis of open-ended. By radicalizing the idea of limitation and its role in effecting semantic determinations in general, Derrida reveals that the classical opposition between the finite and the infinite is incompatible with his understanding of linguistic performance.¹⁷

 

This argument has enormous consequences for the study of Idealism and Romanticism since both are routinely characterized as celebrating the unlimited authority of language as a force of creation or destruction. Following Derrida’s analysis of Lévi-Strauss, the power we accord language can no longer be evaluated in terms of language’s ability to supersede boundaries, even its own, and must instead depend on the manner in which language proves to be irremediably self-compromising–a misprision that cannot be inscribed within the polarities of complete and incomplete or of fragment and whole. Still, if we are to link the dynamic of supplementarity to the logic of proto-performance Derrida interrogated as the pre-positional mark enabling the I am to establish itself as the archetypal utterance of subjective self-actualization, we need a more precise picture of the negativity at work in this theory of linguistic finitude. Derrida has written extensively on the subject of negation, perhaps most famously in response to the charge that deconstruction is merely a version of negative theology (see “How to Avoid Speaking”). One of his central concerns is whether any negation is invariably treated as somehow derivative of an affirmation, i.e., as the “counter-position” to a pre-existing assertion. What would it mean to understand negativity as a power in its own right, a power that may be constitutive of all determinations, positive or negative?¹⁸ Derrida pursues this question by examining the French negating particle pas (which is, of course, also the word for “step”), and we may be able to work in parallel with his argument by considering the term not. If not is to be read as the mark of the compromising expression of a finite discourse that cannot be governed by the auto-practical subject of self-interpretation, not must first and foremost be disassociated from any representation of lack or incompletion, which can always be recuperated as the presentation of something positively given as a signified or referent. Like the compromised figure of Hegelian finitude that interests Derrida, not hovers uneasily between the poles of being and non-being, but perhaps even more importantly, it puts strain on the categories on which we customarily rely when we talk about the elements of a sentence. Like all adverbs, not modifies verbs, yet it is the “limit” case of an adverb–ad-verbal to the point of annulling the very nature of what verbs, if not all words, do. Unique to language, not changes what we understand by linguistic acts. Insofar as it is dependent on the proposition of which it is a part, it cannot be said to confirm the power of language to perform or posit (like Derrida’s “yes”); and it cannot be understood as the self-elision of language by language (as the “transcendental adverbiality” of “no”), either. If anything, not seems to be the point at which language speaks to itself about what it is not doing and cannot ever do: “I do not promise” / “I do not take thee as my lawful wedded wife.”

 

In On Interpretation, one of the founding texts of dialectical logic in the West, Aristotle famously declares the basic linguistic utterance to be a proposition (logos apophantikos) that is either true or false. The paradigmatic form of speech is thus established as “a statement that possesses a meaning, affirming or denying the presence of some other thing in a subject in time past or present or future,” or more simply, it is a “statement of one thing concerning another thing” (17). This doctrine has been enormously influential for a host of attempts to describe the relationship between language and the things about which language speaks. It is less often noted, however, that Aristotle’s commitment to an apophantic model of predicative expression is paralleled by his insistence that any proposition is permanently exposed to the authority of not (ou). “He is a man,” to use his example, conforms to the paradigmatic form of language only insofar as it is equally plausible to say, “He is not a man.” We may readily assent that from a logical perspective any affirmation is structurally exposed to the possibility of its denial and vice versa, but it is precisely the condition of possibility of such a “logical perspective” that is at stake. The very opportunity for an utterance to become a proposition, to say something about something, rests on the utterance’s openness to not, its openness to the possibility that language may equally well pronounce, truly or falsely, that the contrary is the case. Not marks language’s minimal autonomy from that about which it speaks; it reveals that a proposition is never entirely reducible to what it refers to or signifies. In this sense, not is a proto-logical condition, fundamental to and yet never explained by the accounts of syllogistic reasoning that follow in On Interpretation.

 

If basic utterance is conceivable only on the condition of its exposure to not, then even when not is not uttered, the fact that it could potentially pop up at any moment ensures that its impact is felt. In this way, not underscores its own independence from any act of negation (or, in its absence, affirmation) in which it participates. Not, the para-word of words, literalizes the potential of any statement to be ironic, that is, the ability of all language to say one thing and nonetheless mean the opposite. Any instance of language may or may not say “not,” whether or not it says so, and yet no given statement can assert its control over this possibility, since one can always add or subtract one more not and reverse the proposal: not is (not) the condition of possibility of (not) saying “not.” Understood as a referential statement about what is or is not, the function of not amounts to nothing more than a definition of contingency. Expressed as a condition of possibility of discourse, however, the authority of not marks the absolute disjunction between what words say and how they are (or are not) meaningful. Not is the moment language says something about itself, and what it says is that language can not exhaustively refer to its own capacity to signify (or not) as something it does (or does not) meaningfully perform. It is along these lines that Derridean supplementarity can be recast as a theory of linguistic finitude.

 

Uncertainty about not and the operations it does or does not facilitate is legible throughout the history of Western philosophy. When it is explicitly identified as an issue in its own right, not is usually subordinated to the discussion of negation and of nothing, but each time this happens, there is a hint that not is less derivative than we are being asked to believe. The problem could be explored in G.E. Leibniz’s consideration of why there is something rather than nothing; in Fichte’s description of the primordial co-positing of I and not-I; and in Heidegger’s declaration that “the nothing is more original than negation and the ‘not,’” a claim immediately followed by the qualification that only in the revelation that they are beings and not nothing do beings become aware of their own radical finitude (99). For each of these thinkers–and many similar examples could be given–the word not is never simply an expression of alterity or a reference to contingency, limitation, or mortality. Not always also names a failure peculiar to itself, the failure of the word not to become a force of self-reflexive self-determination in its own right. Not cannot guarantee the performance of the negations it announces, which is also to say that not is not a performative failure that lays the grounds for a future success. In this regard, not does not facilitate the self-transcendence of the finite. It does not impel language to establish itself as inherently self-transgressing.

 

To appreciate the full implications of this “alternative” dimension of negation and its significance for Derrida’s rethinking of the relationship between finite and infinite discourse, it will be useful to look briefly at one example of how Derrida’s work differs from another well-known call for a transformation of our understanding of language. In his 1916 essay “On language as such and on the language of man,” Benjamin inveighs against what he terms the “bourgeois” strategy of reducing language to its instrumental function, completely subordinate to the ends to which it is employed by those who use it to communicate. Benjamin thus invites us to distinguish between the customary, that is, the reductive, sense of communicating through language and a new notion of communicating in language. Rejecting the assumption that a word is a means for relating something to an addressee, he argues that language has no content but imparts itself in itself. The condition of possibility for any instrumental language is this idea of language as the communication of the possibility of communication, communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) as such, prior to any particular instance of mediation or information transfer. This is a language of pure means that can never fully be grasped as a collection of means to ends.¹⁹

 

In recent years, Benjamin’s work has been extremely influential in prompting critics to ask what it would mean to think about language without relying on the instrumentality inevitably ascribed to it in even the minimal gesture of conceptualizing it as an object of study. At the same time, there is a crucial respect in which Benjamin’s essay is still governed by the classical opposition of the finite and the infinite Derrida seeks to unsettle. Benjamin re-describes the relationship between the bourgeois and non-bourgeois understandings of language as a fall from the discourse of Adamic naming into its mere parody, the instrumental human word, which always refers to something beyond language: “The Fall marks the birth of the human word, in which name no longer lives intact and which has stepped out of name-language, the language of knowledge . . . .The [human] word must communicate something (other than itself)” (71). Accordingly, even the proper names in human language, the very “frontier” between “finite and infinite language,” have to be understood as “limited and analytic in nature in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word” (69-70). In contrast to these formulations, Derrida’s reading of Hegel suggests that the power of a discourse may lie in its limited rather than its unlimited character. Derrida and Benjamin differ on this point because the latter’s critique of the instrumentalization of language remains committed to one of the most traditional gestures in Western linguistic theory, the absolute privileging of the noun or name, the onoma, as the key to semantic dynamics. In its most canonical form, the move is readily legible in Aristotle’s definition of metaphor as the transfer (epiphora) of the name (onomatos) of one thing to something else (allotriou), a structure of analogy based on the transposition of words that presents changes in meaning as patterns of substitutions of one unit for another (Poetics 57b 7-9).

 

Naturally, we should not underestimate the radicality of denomination. At the very least, it can be argued that naming is a linguistic act that breaks with the tropological model of language to which, thanks to Aristotle, it owes its preeminence. At the same time, it is not by chance that in “White Mythology” a sustained exposition of the Aristotelian doctrine of metaphor leads Derrida to a discussion of catachresis in which “the order of the noun is largely surpassed” as we begin to speak of the “metaphor-catachreses of prepositions” (256). Derrida urges us to think about linguistic finitude in terms of the syntactic resistance of a not that traverses the Hegelian discourse of self-interpretation without becoming just one more resource of self-negation. Perhaps, then, we can describe not as the metaphor-catachresis of ad-verbiality that confounds any effort to explain performativity with a model in which, as in Benjamin, denomination would be the formative schema of linguistic praxis and the noun the paradigmatic linguistic unit.

 

From this perspective, we can see why Benjamin’s transformation of linguistic theory remains limited by not being limited enough, that is, it is committed to the traditional understanding of the infinite resources of language and the creative authority of divine naming. At the same time, we should not miss the polemical import of Benjamin’s argument. His analysis warns that in our efforts to characterize a finite discourse that will counter the absolute semantic rule of the auto-interpretive Hegelian spirit, we risk returning to the most old-fashioned instrumental conception of signification in which words passively do what they are used to do. It is therefore essential that the problems we have explored in Derrida not be mistaken for an announcement of the death of verbal creativity and the demise of coordination between an utterance and its effects. The language of finitude and the discourse of not suggest that no speech act can entirely make good on its promise to be meaningful. This is not, however, a claim about the impossibility of performance per se. Rather, it is an injunction to conceptualize linguistic events less in terms of agents who act and more with reference to modalities of expression–adverbial or adjectival–that are impossible to assimilate to a traditional logic of constative affirmations.

 

Revealing language to be a dynamic whose finite resources are not unfailingly devoted to its own self-determination, Derrida provides both a new picture of self-interpretive agency in Hegel and a vantage point from which to assess the limits of any project that would base its critical authority on its own self-reflexivity. In this respect, Derrida’s interrogation of discursive finitude is a far-reaching challenge to the humanist enterprises that valorize introspection as the grounds of analysis and insight. As the importance of Derrida’s work for contemporary social and political thought is debated in the decades to come, these issues may well prove to be an increasingly central dimension of his legacy.

 

Notes

 

1. Derrida says that this break with speculative thought may only be a break from a “certain” (as the familiar qualification runs) reading of Hegel, a “certain” Hegelianism, for Hegel’s corpus offers considerable resources to the operations that seek to oppose it: “I emphasize the Hegelian Aufhebung, such as it is interpreted by a certain Hegelian discourse, for it goes without saying that the double meaning of Aufhebung could be written otherwise. Whence its proximity to all the operations conducted against Hegel’s dialectical speculation” (Positions 40-1). Hegel can be pitted against the inheritors who celebrate him as their own–Hegel the idealist can be matched against Hegel the realist, Hegel the formalist can war with Hegel the nominalist, and so on–assuming it is still clear what conflict means in this context.

 

2. Hegel is frequently accused of being overly abstruse, if not downright obscurantist, yet the ferocity of these charges appears to be inversely proportional to the accuracy with which his arguments are popularized. Far more than with Immanuel Kant or Friedrich Schelling–hardly easy reads–it is the caricatures of Hegel’s thought that hold sway, even at an advanced level of scholarship. It seems that we constantly need to be reminded that in Hegel the disruption that inevitably manifests itself within a concept is not unambiguously an opportunity for an advance in insight. Each “negation of negation” is as much a confirmation of the incoherence of the prior stages of the argument as it is a resolution of confusion, which is simply to say that Hegel’s philosophy does not inexorably build skyward on increasingly solid ground. It would be equally accurate to maintain that things get shakier every step of the way, a point that has been emphasized by much of the criticism that takes its cue from Derrida’s work.

 

3. Over the last fifteen years, this charge has frequently been leveled at Derrida by Slavoj Žižek:

 

Derrida incessantly varies the motif of how full identity-with-itself is impossible; how it is always, constitutively, deferred, split; how the condition of its possibility is the condition of its impossibility; how there is no identity without reference to an outside which always-already truncates it, and so on, and so on. Yet what eludes him is the Hegelian inversion of identity qua impossible into identity itself as a name for a certain radical impossibility. The impossibility unearthed by Derrida through the hard work of deconstructive reading supposed to subvert identity constitutes the very definition of identity [in Hegel]. (37)

 

What is notable is that Žižek–who is fond of quoting his subject matter at considerable length–almost never offers even a phrase-length citation of Derrida, and in the extended discussion of Derrida and Hegel from which this passage is taken, there is not so much as a single reference to any of Derrida’s numerous published writings on Hegel. In accusing Derrida of working with a straw-man Hegel (“identity is privileged over difference,” “the self reigns supreme over the other”), Žižek is himself working with a straw-man Derrida, (“self-presence is impossible,” “all binary oppositions auto-deconstruct”). In fact, upon closer examination it becomes obvious that Žižek’s account of Derrida’s understanding of Hegel takes as its primary source not a book or essay by Derrida, but a book about Derrida, Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror. In a curiously ambiguous gesture, Žižek relies on Gasché as his reference for condemning Derrida’s analyses at the same time as he goes out of his way to accuse Gasché of the error he attributes to Derrida: “Gasché presents as specifically ‘Derridean’ a whole series of propositions which sound as if they were taken from Hegel’s Logic” (74). For Žižek, the would-be critic of Hegel–Gasché, Derrida–is unable to recognize that his “refinements” of Hegel simply are Hegel’s positions. Remembering the interpretive bind described by Adorno, it is perhaps inevitable that Gasché responds to this critique by arguing that Žižek has erred by taking one section of the greater Logic on identity and reflection as Hegel’s last word on the topic and ignoring the broader teleological parameters of his thought. His assertions about the radicalism of Hegelian reflexivity notwithstanding, Žižek is said to lapse into an extremely primitive oppositional model. (Gasché adds that “in Žižek’s theory of identity, socio-psychological and psychoanalytic concepts have become mixed up with [identity’s] philosophical concept” [Inventions278-9 n14].)

 

4. This section of the Philosophy of Right condenses an argument made at greater length in the opening section of Hegel’s Philosophy of History.

 

5. For two important discussions of the way in which a truly totalizing system is never done totalizing, never done anticipating (and co-opting) its future readers, see Hamacher’s Pleroma (esp. 1-81) and Part II of Warminski’s Readings in Interpretation, “Reading Hegel” (95-182).

 

6. See in particular “Signature, Even, Context” and Limited Inc.

 

7. In this context, Judith Butler’s work has been enormously influential for attempts to assess the Derridean understanding of linguistic performance and its importance for the understanding of identity “after” Hegel.

 

8. See Mémoires for Paul de Man (esp. Chapter 3, “Acts”) and “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2).”

 

9. Hamacher has written extensively on the promise and its importance for Kantian thought (see Premises) and has explored this dimension of Derrida’s project and its intersections with his own work in “Lingua Amissa.”

 

10. Fynsk explores the presuppositional structure of language in detail in Language and Relation: … that there is language. See also Agamben’s Potentialities, especially §13, “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality.”

 

11. As poiesis, the discourse of productivity as such, poetry should be the place where the auto-generative act of self-interpretation and the product of that act, the discourse of self-creation, coincide. Of course, a glance at almost any nineteenth-century thinker reveals that the productive powers of the artistic self are not easily coordinated with the forms this productivity assumes. While there is widespread consensus in post-Kantian thought that poetry distinguishes itself by its ability to give full expressive range to the imagination–literally setting it free, as Kant himself says in the third Critique–this does not simply mean that poetry gives the mind a forum in which to run wild with ever more novel creations. Rather, poetry liberates the imagination from the requirement that it be defined by its capacity to synthesize a product. To put this slightly differently, radical creative autonomy would appear to imply at least a degree of independence from self-creation as the sole standard of autonomy. The discourse of poiesis is thus ironically the field in which the mind is emancipated from the requirement that it be poietic; it is the discourse in which producer and product are revealed to co-exist in an indifferent rather than a mutually reinforcing relationship.

 

12. Hegel writes that “den Geist mit allen seinen Konzeptionen der Phantasie und Kunst . . . für den Geist ausspricht” (225).

 

13. Derrida explains:

 

The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. It consists in that, that I do not comprehend: that which I do not comprehend and first of all that I do not comprehend, the fact that I do not comprehend: my incomprehension. That is the limit, at once internal and external, on which I would like to insist here: although the experience of an event, the mode according to which it affects us, calls for a movement of appropriation (comprehension, recognition, identification, description, determination, interpretation on the basis of a horizon of anticipation, knowledge, naming and so on), although this movement of appropriation is irreducible and ineluctable, there is no event worthy of its name except insofar as this appropriation falters at some border or frontier. A frontier, however, with neither front nor confrontation, one that incomprehension does not run into head on since it does not take the form of a solid front: it escapes, remains evasive, open, undecided, indeterminable. (Philosophy in a Time of Terror 90-1)

 

14. In the greater Logic, Hegel’s response to the quandaries we have been describing is to offer a complex argument about the finite’s doubly negative relation to its limit as both the determination of what it is and is not. This line of discussion culminates in the conclusion that the finite, “in ceasing-to be, in this negation of itself, actually attains a being-in-itself [and] is united with itself” as the negation of the finite, or the infinite (Science 136). One need only compare this demonstration with the treatment of the transition from the finite to the infinite in the Encyclopedia Logic, however, to recognize that the entire topic leaves Hegel uneasy.

 

15. For an effort to explore this “other” thinking, see Nancy’s A Finite Thinking and Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative.

 

16. Derrida writes: “The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude”; but the supplement “adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place” (Of Grammatology 144-45).

 

17. In Speech and Phenomena, the discussion of supplementarity leads to the explicit claim that différance explodes the classical opposition of the finite and the infinite (cf. Speech 101-102).

 

18. On this question, see in particular Derrida’s “Pas.”

 

19. Following Derrida’s “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (1989), discussions of pure means in Benjamin have proliferated, largely as part of an ongoing study of the Benjamin essay Derrida analyzes there, “The Critique of Violence.” For an account of the political stakes of these arguments and in particular their connections with Benjamin’s theory of language, see Hamacher’s “Afformative, Strike.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Adorno, Theodor W. Hegel: Three Studies.Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993.
• Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
• Aristotle. Categories. On Interpretation. Prior Analytics. Trans. H.P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
• —. Poetics. Ed. D.W. Lucas. New York: Oxford, 1988.
• Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. 62-74.
• —. “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen.” Gesammelte Schriften II:1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991. 140-57.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Before the Law.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. Trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston. New York: Routledge, 1992. 181-220.
• —. “The Double Session.” Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 173-285.
• —. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. Trans. Mary Quaintance. New York: Routledge, 1992. 3-67.
• —. “From a Restricted to a General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 251-77.
• —. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.
• —. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. 3-70.
• —. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.
• —. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. “Pas.” Gramma: Lire Blanchot I 3-4 (1976): 111-215.
• —. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Ed. Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.
• —. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan.” Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan. Ed. Aris Fioretos. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 3-74.
• —. “Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 307-30.
• —. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.
• —. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference 278-293.
• —. “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.” Writing and Difference 232-50.
• — “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2).” Without Alibi. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 71-160.
• —. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” Acts of Literature 253-309.
• —. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Margins of Philosophy 207-71.
• Fichte, J.G. The Science of Knowledge. Eds. Peter Heath and John Lach. New York: Cambridge, 1991.
• Fynsk, Christopher. Language and Relation: . . . that there is language. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.
• Gasché, Rodolphe. Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.
• —. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.
• Hamacher, Werner. “Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence.’” Trans. Dana Hollander. Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. Eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. New York: Routledge, 1994. 110-38.
• —. “Lingua Amissa: the Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx.” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Ed. Michael Sprinker. New York: Verso, 1999. 168-212.
• —. Pleroma–Reading in Hegel. Trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• —. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. Trans. Peter Fenves. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
• Hegel, G.W.F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991.
• —. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Vol. 2. Trans. T.M. Knox. New York: Clarendon, 1998.
• —. Hegel’s Logic (Encyclopedia Part I). Trans. William Wallace. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.
• —. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. New York: Prometheus, 1991.
• —. Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller, New Jersey: Humanities, 1991.
• —. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983.
• Heidegger, Martin. “What is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings. New York: Harper, 1977.
• James, William. “On Some Hegelisms.” 1882. The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, 1911.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Ed. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
• —. Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. Trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002.
• Warminski, Andrzej. Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso, 1991

 

Eyal Amiran

Department of English
Michigan State University
amiran@msu.edu

 

This special issue of Postmodern Culture is dedicated to the work of Jacques Derrida. The issue does not attempt to consider his achievements as a whole or to say what place his work will have in philosophy, literary theory, or literature. What has been apparent for some time during his extraordinarily prolific career, however, is that people who have spent time with his writings and have learned to think with him have been thankful to live and work while he was around. To us it has seemed that Derrida was and will be a major figure in intellectual history. Part of our enjoyment and astonishment may have come from the experience of being in the presence, more or less, of such a phenomenon. Socrates knew he was the talking cure of his age, but probably did not expect to doctor the future; Nietzsche said he was a destiny, but other people did not reflect that knowledge back to him. Derrida, whether in the future we will think of him with them or not, has, to paraphrase Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, always compared himself to them, and seemed to us to be in that company.

 

That sense could not have been easy to live with, and in light of it one of Derrida’s remarkable talents has been his intuition or inclination to do and to be Derrida over the years. With that rhetoric of destiny hovering over him, he collaborated with translators, conference organizers, colleagues and students. He traveled often and far, lectured, taught, lent his name to social causes and to institutions. For example, in 1984 Derrida both wrote and travelled more than he had in a previous year: by his own calculation he lectured in fourteen cities, and published Memoires: for Paul de Man, the important Psyché, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” Ulysse Grammophone, which gestures toward his own odysseys, and Schibboleth (Malabou 209, 211). Whatever his sense of destiny, he includes in his writings people who have a claim on his attention. His interlocutors, like Socrates’s, show the social and communal nature of philosophy, especially when it is at its most abstract and may seem to be mostly about itself. It is often remarked how generous and responsive Derrida has been–at lectures people would introduce him as the one to whom we owe debts that cannot be paid, whose gift exceeds our capacity for exchange, etc. That is precisely the rhetoric that does not trip his writings. On the other hand, being so open to others produces a logic of loss too, as David Wills suggests in his essay here: the danger of having no friends because everyone is your friend. Wills cites Derrida’s epigraph, “of doubtful origin,” from The Politics of Friendship: “O my friends, there is no friend,” which can mean, Wills writes, that “he who has (many) friends can have no true friend.” The logic applies to the authenticity of the voice of the one whose work is translated by so many hands: the Derrida most readers know is in English translation, and, as Megan Kerr points out in her essay, there are for that reason many Derridas. When we read Derrida in translation we are actually reading another name, though we call it Derrida. These translators include David B. Allison, Alan Bass, Geoffrey Bennington, Rachel Bowlby, Pascale-Anne Brault, Eduardo Cadava, Mary Ann Caws, George Collins, Mark Dooley, Joseph F. Graham, Barbara Harlow, Michael Hughes, James Hulbert, Barbara Johnson, Peggy Kamuf, John P. Leavey, Jr., Ian McLeod, Jeffrey Mehlman, Patrick Mensah, Eric Prenowitz, Michael Naas, Jan Plug, Mary Quaintance, Richard Rand, Avital Ronell, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Gayatri C. Spivak, Samuel Weber, David Wills, Joshua Wilner, David Wood, and others. Without them we would have a different Derrida, just as without Derrida they and other readers of Derrida too would be different. As Derrida points out, translation does not reproduce or copy an original, does not translate translation, and one cannot translate a name or a signature: for these reasons a translated work “does not simply live longer, it lives more and better, beyond the means of its author” (“Des Tours” 179). Who then is the Derrida whom translators and readers embody, and can there be a Derrida when he is embodied in so very many different ways? Like Elvis, Derrida is a king with many bodies. As Jean-Michel Rabaté has written, Derrida’s circumfessional efforts have multiplied rather than answered the question of his identity (100-1). What does it mean to be Derrida, to keep an intuition of the work and career in the face of its own self-contradictions?

 

Derrida’s intuition allies him with Western philosophical and literary tradition, often overtly, and sometimes less so (as Jan Mieszkowski’s essay argues in relation to Hegel), and is expressed as a fierce social idealism. Derrida’s investment in literary and philosophical traditions lends his work shape and teleology. He rarely writes about little-known or “marginal” intellectual figures. By definition he battles with giants. There is a price for that kind of allegiance: Derrida’s work builds on and values foundational structures as it dismantles them. Building may be a price of doing philosophy–a price even Wittgenstein could not avoid. One such structure is Derrida’s own work, which revisits itself in the late work (as Alex Thomson suggests in his essay), as the visionary short late books of the Hebrew Bible follow upon the long and historical early books. Derrida’s idealism is expressed in his style, the coloring and value of his strokes, as well as in his topics and arguments, and produces an odd kind of perfectionism and qualification in his writing. It is unusual for a perfectionist to write as many works as Derrida has–and to find a form of perfectionism that opposes the idea of perfection and the need for completeness. The desire to be adequate is everywhere in his writing as a desire to do justice to ideas, rather than for example to complete or to perform justly those ideas themselves. The justice is to the impulse, the motive, the desire, which is often represented by the declarations of incompleteness Michael Marder notes in his essay here (if I only had more time for this talk, he often writes). The purity of motive leads to an unfinished project, the sense of being on the way. Hence it is not surprising that JD turns to justice itself as a concept eventually. His later work can be thought of in part as a meditation on the principles that motivate the earlier work, and not on deconstruction as a method which was a subject earlier on.

 

In a late interview (“Je Suis,” quoted in Thomson’s essay), Derrida confesses to two “contradictory feelings” concerning his legacy:

 

on the one hand, to say it smiling and immodestly, I feel that people have not even begun to read me, that if there are very many good readers (a few dozen in the world, perhaps), they will do so only later. On the other hand, I feel that two weeks after my death, nothing at all of my work will be left.

 

It is an odd claim, as though only by standing guard over his own work was Derrida compelling to the many who read and wrote about and with and published and edited his work. It is as though Derrida imagines himself the living consciousness of the world, and that once he is gone a night light would go out and with it the world itself. And yet he knows, as he says, that the future is the future of reading him, that he will be read “only later.” The contradictory sentiments echo Freud’s claim in a 1920 letter to Ernest Jones, a claim Derrida cites in his essay, “Coming Into One’s Own.” Freud rejects the charge that he is an artist, not a scientist: “What the great speculator is saying,” writes Derrida, “is that he is ready to pay for the science [of psychoanalysis] with his own name [payer la science de son propre nom], to pay the insurance premium with his name” (142). “I am sure,” writes Freud, “that in a few decades my name will be wiped away and our results will last.” In Freud’s case especially, Derrida argues, the name and the work are not separable, so that Freud’s idea that he would lose his name to gain the success of his work cannot work (143). “Note,” Derrida adds in a parenthesis, “that he can say ‘we,’ ‘our results,’ and sign all alone” (142). Freud recognizes the plurality of the work but not the plurality of the signatory–for it is “the science of his own name” that “remains to be done” (143). Derrida writes: “There must be a way to link one’s own name, the name of one’s loved ones (for that’s not something you can do alone), to this ruin–a way to speculate on the ruin of one’s name that keeps what it loses.”

 

Derrida in his interview speculates, in effect, that his fate may be Freud’s, to create a system in ruin that relies on others to be and keep itself. His ideas of himself over the years–as a gambler, a rogue, a chance taker, a thief like Genet and also someone who gives it all away–fit this vision of Freud the speculator. If we mourn Derrida by reading, as Vivian Halloran writes in this collection, we also live with Derrida by taking part in a system that he built, the great deconstructionist. “Paying for the science with his own name,” writes Derrida, Freud “was also paying for the science of his own name . . . he was paying (for) himself with a postal money order sent to himself. All that is necessary (!) for this to work is to set up the necessary relay system” (134). We say yes, we reply to and embody the idealism and energy of Derrida as best we can, we think with Derrida here and in the future.

 

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. “Coming Into One’s Own.” Trans. James Hulbert. Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 114-48.
• —. “Des Tours de Babel.” Trans. Joseph F. Graham. Difference in Translation. Ed. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 165-207.
• Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. Trans. David Wills. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Future of Theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002.