After Derrida: Literature, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century 1108426107, 9781108426107

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A FTER DERRIDA Literature, Theory a n d Criticism in the Tw enty-First Century

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JE A N -M IC H E L R A B A T E University o f Pennsylvania

關 C a m b r id g e

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Contents

List o f Contributors

page vii

Introduction Jean-Michel Rabate

i

PART I FRAMES

1

19

The Instant o f Their Debt: Derrida with Freud and Heidegger in Greece Vassiliki Kolocotroni

2

Derrida and the Psychoanalysis o f Culture Andrea Hurst

3

Derrida and Sexual Difference Ginette Michaud

4

Derrida Queries de Man: A Note on the Materiality o f the Letter versus the Violence o f the Letter Martin McQuillan

21 39 58

80

PART II FOCUS

95

5 Derrida as Literary Reader Derek Attridge

97

6

Broken Singularities (Derrida and Celan) Joshua Schuster

111

7

Derrida and the Essence o f Poetry Yue Zhuo

126

8

From Mallarme to the Event: Badiou after Derrida Laurent Milesi

143

v

Contents

vi PART III FUTURES

9 Ecce animot: Animal Turns Jane Goldman 10

Deconstruction, Collectivity, and World Literature Jen Hui Bon Hoa

11

Literature Calls Justice: Deconstruction^ KComing-toTerms” with Literature Elisabeth Weber

12

The Documental Revolution and the Archives o f the Future Maurizio Ferraris

Index

159 161 180

197 212

226

Contributors

d e r e k a t t r i d g e , emeritus

Professor o f English at the University o f York, has authored many books, which include Post-structuralism and the Question o f History (co-edited with G eoff Bennington and Robert Young) (1987), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995) and Joyce Effects: On Language} Theoryf and History (2000). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust, and is a fellow o f the British Academy.

is Professor o f Philosophy at the University o f Turin, where he also runs the Inter-University Centre for Theoretical and Applied Ontology and the Laboratory for Ontology. He is the author o f more than fifty books on aesthetics, Derrida and continental philo­ sophy. Books in English include History o f Hermeneutics (1996), Documentality, or Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces (2012), Goodbye Kant! (2013), Manifesto o f New Realism (2014) and Where Are You? Ontolog)/ o f the Cell Phone (2014).

m a u r i z i o f e r r a r is

ja n e

Go l d m a n is Reader in English Literature at the University of

Glasgow and General Editor o f the Cambridge University Press edition o f the writings o f Virginia Woolf. She is the author o f The Feminist Aesthetics o f Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics o f the Visual (1998) and the co-editor o f Modernism: An Anthology o f Sources and Documents (1998). Other publications include Modernism ， 1910—1945: Image to Apocalypse (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (1006). She is currently completing a book on Virginia Woolfand the Signifying Dog. is Assistant Professor o f Comparative Literature at Yonsei University^ Underwood International College. She specializes in modern French and English literature and continental philosophy. She

j e n hu i bo n h o a

vii

viii

List o f Contributors

is currently writing a book on post-Marxist theories o f community and representations o f the city in contemporary French non-fiction. h u r s t is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She is the author o f Derrida Vis-a-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (2008). She has published more than forty papers on authors such as Lyotard, Levinas, Heidegger, Lacan, Irigaray, Zizek and Adorno in various journals.

andrea

k o l o c o t r o n i is Senior Lecturer and Head o f English Literature at the University o f Glasgow. She has co-edited Modernism: An Anthology o f Sources and Documents (1998), In the Country o f the Moon: British Women Travellers in Greece 1718—1^ 2 (2005), Women Writing Greece (2008) - a collection o f critical essays on gender, Hellenism and Orientalism - and The Edinburgh Dictionary o f Modernism (2017). She has a special interest in the subject o f Hellenism and its uses by modern writers and thinkers, which is the focus of her next book, Still Life: Modernism s Greek Turn.

vassilik i

is Professor ofLiterary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Dean o f the Faculty o f Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. He is the author o f four books {Roland Barthes or the Profession o f Cultural Studies, Deconstruction after p/ny Paul de Man and Deconstructing Disney). He has edited nine collections o f essays on topics like Paul de Man, Rousseau, Muriel Spark and Post-theory.

m artin m cq uillan

is Professor o f French Literature at the University o f Montreal. She is the author o f more than twenty books and collections, half o f which deal with Quebecois literature, half with deconstruction and Derrida, whose seminars she is publishing in French and English. In 2010 she published Battements du secret litteraire: Lire Derrida et Cixous, vol, 1, and Comme en revey vol. 2. In 2013 she published Cosa Volante， and in 2014 she co-aiked Appels de Jacques Derrida.

g in e t t e m ich au d

formerly Chair o f the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, is Tenured Professor o f English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is one o f the general editors o f the Theory, Culture and Politics series at Rowman and Littlefield International and, together with Arleen Ionescu, edits the international journal Word and Text - A Journal o f Literary Studies and Linguistics. He has edited James Joyce and the Difference o f Language

lau rent m ilesi,

List o f Contributors

ix

(2003) and coedited Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money (2017). He has translated works by Jacques Derrida (H. C. fo r Life, That Is to Say , 2〇〇6) and Helene Cixous (Zeros Neighbour, 2010; Philippines, 2011; Tomb(e)y 2014). s c h u s t e r is Associate Professor o f English at Western University. His book The Ecology o f Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (2015) won the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada. Recent essays have appeared in Humanimalia, Minnesota Review and Photography & Culture, as well as in an edited volume, Critical Perspectives on Veganism^ and in the book Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements (2016). His next book is What Is Extinction? A Cultural and N atural History o f Last Animals.

jo sh u a

El i s a b e t h w e b e r is Professor o f German, Comparative Literature and

Religious Studies at the University o f California, Santa Cruz. She is the author o f Verfolgung und Trauma (1990). She has edited Das Vergessen(e): Anamnesen des Undarstellbaren (1997) and Questioning Judaism (2004). She is the editor o f works by Jacques Derrida, and the translator into German o f texts by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Felix Guattari. Recent publications include the co-edited volume Speaking about Torture (2012) and Living Together: Jacques Derrida's Communities o f Violence and Peace (2013). has taught at Yale and has been Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow at the University o f Pennsylvania. She is the author o f the forthcoming La force du negatif, Georges Bataille et la question du sacre. She has published twenty articles on Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Pascal Quignard in various edited volumes and journals, including Contemporary French & Francophone Studies', Critique^ French Forum\ Modern Language Notes' Theory, Culture & Society% Litterature; Yale French Studies^ and Revue TextueL

yue zhuo

Introduction Jean-M ichel Rabate

It is important for the materialist historian, in the most rigorous way possible, to differentiate the construction of a historical state of affairs from what one customarily calls its wreconstruction.” The “ reconstruction” in empathy is one-dimensional. “Construction” presupposes “destruction.”1 Almost fourteen years after the death o f Jacques Derrida, the least one can say is that his inheritance is as contested and fraught with rivalries, rejec­ tions, and appropriations as at the time o f the flowering o f deconstruction in American universities in the seventies and eighties. A halt was observed in 1988-89 after the posthumous revelations about Paul de Man’s past in Belgium and Derridas embattled defense o f his friend.2 Today, in France, one often hears that ^Derrida a fa it I'Ecole mais n *apas fa it ecole^ meaning that Derrida passed the entrance examination o f the prestigious Ecole normale superieure, where he taught for a long time, where he met Paul (!clan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and many other luminaries, wlicreiis he never had a real “school” in France — no real institutional hacking beyond the various Parisian places at which he taught later, or lluwc he founded, like the College de philosophic; his following constiUltcil o f young philosophers, only a few o f whom became university professors in their turn and disseminated his teachings. However, the mechanisms o f power within the French university remained closed to Derrida until the end; besides, he wanted to prevent the stereotyped reproduction currently observed from master to disciple.3

' Wkiltrr Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, M A: 1larvard University Press, 1999), 470 . See Mcij lies I )crrida, M em oires fo r P au l de M an, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Colum bia l !tt)vct\ijy Press, 1989). 1 riiri r is .is yet no good historical account o f the links o f Derrida with French pedagogical institui Imiin, nmlunj； comparable to the reliable and thorough survey o f Derrida^ years o f schooling and *'♦ 11 ly ir.u at tlic flcolc normale* siip〇i>hy, 106S (i l.unhiiil^r: ( Cambridge University Press, 2011).

I

2

J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

True, throughout his life, Derrida kept friendly conversations with scholars like Jean-Luc Nancy, France4 5s leading phenomenologist; however, Nancy has developed his own vocabulary, themes, and specific strategies, moving away from a strict version o f deconstruction.4 One o f the star students whose dissertation was supervised by Derrida, Catherine Malabou, now teaching in London, moved in different directions by developing a post-Hegelian concept o f plasticity and engaging with the neurosciences. But indeed, one can say that her work has pointed in the direction followed by another gifted disciple, Francesco Vitale, a professor at Salerno University. Vitale moves into the field o f biology, taking Derrida’s latest seminars as oflfering original perspectives on auto­ immunity and what he calls “bio-deconstruction.” Another brilliant follower, Bernard Stiegler, explored technology and media before launching his philosophy o f politics and a new definition o f the bases o f democracy. However, despite these exceptions, in France today at least, the impact of Derrida on the humanities and literary studies has been minimal; in what concerns the study o f the literature, the consensus among professors o f French literature is that the theoretical site Derrida occupied has been preempted by thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. Nevertheless, it is Derrida who is still blamed for the exportation and re­ importation o f wTheory,,> whether French or Fresh, into Anglo-American universities, a fashionable mixture appealing to artists and critics, abstruse theories often descried as a compound o f hurried philosophemes and heavy-handed abstractions indiscriminately applied to artworks and texts. In 1998, burning what he had adored previously, Antoine Compagnon dubbed this trendy moment Kthe demon o f T h e o r y ,a neat phrase used to encapsulate the pernicious effects o f Roland Barthes^ theoretical legacy.5 If Barthes^ demons or theoretical imps have survived, Derrida is regularly exorcised as the Devil himself. An intellectual public keeps reading Derrida, which is confirmed by a steady stream o f previously unpublished seminars and collections o f hitherto dispersed texts,6 but he is rarely taught in departments o f French or comparative literature, and almost never in those o f philosophy. When his influence can be observed

4 Derrida's at times tense debate with N an cy is in evidence in Derrida, O n Touching—Jea n -L u c N ancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 2005), 135-58. 5 See Antoine Com pagnon, Literature, Theory an d Common Sense, trans. Carol Cosm an (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2004). 6 A good example is Jacques Derrida, Periser a ne pas voir: Ecrits sur les arts du visible, i^y^ -20 0 4, ed. Ginette Michaud et al. (Paris: Editions de la Difference, 2013).

Introduction

3

as one sees in the work o f Jacques Ranciere, a visible philosopher o f the arts and literature using a post-Marxist discourse, DerridaJs analyses o f the “errant letter” are reproduced typically without being acknowledged: Ranciere never mentions Derrida’s groundbreaking “grammatology,” a notion developed as early as the sixties, and he jumps directly from Plato and Aristotle to readings o f modern literature and film. The situation is different in English-speaking countries, even though we have come a long way from the promises o f knowledge-as-power rashly made by the proponents o f deconstruction to American students at the time o f its conquest o f campuses. Walter Kirn has documented this theoretical infatuation in a witty memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy^ in which he exposes the clangers o f being taught to deconstruct a 9), ui,

4

J E A N - M I C H E L RABATE

deconstruction by combining approaches and juxtaposing types o f com­ petence: the authority o f seasoned specialists who have worked directly with Derrida and the innovative work by younger scholars who testify that Derridas ideas are still alive today. This is obvious in countries like Brazil, Mexico, China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, where Derrida s ideas have enjoyed a renewed visibility and vibranq^ recently. This late flowering has to do with the emergence o f a global culture unified by the techne o f writing as developed by electronic media, even if Derrida never ceased deconstructing globalization and stressed the need to rethink the nature o f archives and documents, as Maurizio Ferraris shows in this collection. There are excellent introductions to Derrida in the English language.8 These guides help students and first readers to orient themselves when confronting the mass o f essays, books, and posthumous seminars written by Derrida. At times, the impact o f deconstruction on scholarship, speci­ fically in literary and visual studies, has been made legible by focusing on a single author or theme. Moreover, we now have a reliable biography, an excellent book that reads like a novel: it gives voice to Derrida by quoting numerous letters, drafts, unpublished texts, and personal testimonies. Benoit Peeters^ biography9 allows us to reconsider Derrida^ oeuvre in light o f his personality. In Peeters^ account, Derrida appears driven, tormented, excessive, impassioned, a true Romantic, a Byron o f philoso­ phy much more than a famous academic. Peeters makes us want to know more about Derrida's secrets; often his theoretical archive overlapped with his private life; theoretical positions and political commitments were intermingled. A spate o f books in English written by friends and disciples wishing to honor Derrida^ memory, monographs by Nicholas Royle, Peggy Kamuf, Derek Attridge, and Geoffrey Bennington,10 all memorialize a beloved mentor. These disciples disseminate his teachings while refusing to “mourn” his untimely disappearance. Their books say important things about aspects o f Derridas theories while hesitating between the status of personal memoirs and textual exegesis. They sublimate the pathos o f 8 See, for instance, Leslie Hill's lucid and condensed book The Cam bridge Introduction to Jacques D errida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Claire Colebrook^ useful collection o f annotated Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2015). 9 Benoit Peeters, D errida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 10 Nicholas Royle, In M emory o f Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Peggy Kamuf, To Follow : The Wake o f facques D errida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Geoffrey Bennington, N o t H a lf N o E n d : M ilitantly M elancholic Essays in M em ory o f Jacques D errida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Derek Attridge, Reading a n d Responsibility: Deconstruction^ Traces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Introduction

5

personal loss by developing the legacy o f deconstruction. Other approaches consist in interpretations o f Derrida’s philosophy by authors who were not close to Derrida and therefore wanted to rethink his concepts and methods in their own vocabulary. They were eager to avoid mimicking Derrida's idiosyncratic style and autobiographical mode. Thus Peter Sloterdijk5s Derrida, an Egyptian1 and Alain Badiou's homage in Pocket Pantheon^ are typical. Sloterdijk compares Derrida with Sigmund Freud, Franz Borkenau, and Niklas Luhmann before identifying a central metaphor in his oeuvre, the inverted Egyptian pyramid. Badiou insists on the politics at work in deconstruction. For him, Derrida was a wman o f peace5' intent upon destroying all dichotomies, whether philosophical, like Being and being, racial, like Jew versus Arab, or political, like democracy versus totalitarianism. Key in Derrida’s thinking would be the “indistinction” o f distinction, another variation on the undecidable. A similar effort at recapturing Derrida5s thought has been evinced by Martin Hagglund in his book on Radical Atheism ^ Hagglund unifies apparently disjointed or divergent problematics by rejecting the cliche that Derrida moved from a playful and Nietzschean critique o f founda­ tions to serious, ethical, or even religious concerns for alterity, justice, and messianicity. Going back to the concept o f “writing” containing the idea o f trace and deferral, the complex notion o f differance understood as temporal and spatial distance, Hagglund presents the logic o f survival as the keystone o f deconstruction. On this account, there is only one Derrida, from his first essays to the moving last interview in which the philosopher talks about his impending demise with Jean Birnbaum in 2004.14 Here we find a thinker o f radical finitude and the true heir o f Heidegger, not a Levinas in disguise. A third group o f authors working with Derrida tends to function dialogically by pursuing a dialogue between his work and other thinkers. To take one example among many, in a collection edited by John Sallis entitled Deconstruction and Philosophy^ Derrida is paired with Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, and Husserl. He is contextualized within the discourses o f metaphysics or ethics. Leonard Lawlor has examined DerridaJs critique " Peter Sloterdijk, D erriday an Egyptian (London: Polity, 2009). '* Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures o f Postwar Philosophy, trans. D avid M acey (London: Verso, 2009), 125-4 4 . ' ' Martin Hagglund, RadicalAtheism : D errida an d the Tim e o f Life (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 2008). He applies the logic o f survival to modernist literature in D ying fo r Tim e: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 2012). S tr Jacques Derrida, Learning to L ive Finally, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and M ichel Naas (hrooklyn, N Y : Melville House, 2007). *' hreottstnu tion and Philosophy, a l. |olm Sallis (Chicago: C h ic ^ o University Press, 1987).

6

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o f phenomenology in Derrida and Husserl.16 Raoul Moati reopens the dialogue between Derrida and Austin in Derrida/Searley Deconstruction and Ordinary Language.17 In this book, Moati does not bring his personal testimony but displays the probity o f an impartial investigator. This was a prerequisite, given the fact that the ground had been mined by the copious exchanges o f insults between Searle and Derrida. Moati highlights Derrida^ blind spots as much as Searle's dead ends. He insists on Derridas dependence upon “metaphysicaT models that he then dismantled, while pointing out Searle^ dangerous rejection o f the unconscious and o f fiction. A Companion to Derrida, a huge collection o f essays o f more than 600 pages, confronts Derrida with major themes like Truth, Difference, the Transcendental, Messianicity, and the Law, but strangely enough never once quotes Maurice Blanchot and has comparatively few pages discussing literature.18 After Derrida offers similarly contextualizing rereadings while asking more pointedly about the visibility and productivity o f Derrida^ legacy. The focus will be on literary studies, which includes the varied discourses o f Theory, and a retrospective and prospective survey aimed at capturing the various strands o f Derrida’s polyphonic corpus and assessing his influence in the humanities. To begin historically, one needs to go back to 1967, when a triple deflagration shook the French world o f letters and philosophy: the almost simultaneous publication o i O f Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and The Voice and Phenomena. No one who was a student at the time can forget the shock. It has been evoked with verve by Emmanuel Levinas, who compared the effect o f deconstruction to the sudden void in political power that the French experienced during the exodus following the German armys victory in 1940: At the beginning, everything is in place, and after a few pages or paragraphs, under the impact of a terrifying questioning, nothing remain[s] as a habitable site for thought. Here was, besides the philosophical meaning of the propositions, a purely literary effect, the new frisson, the poetry of Jacques Derrida. When reading him I see again the Exodus of 1940. The retreating military unit reaches a city that has no inkling of what is 16 Leonard Lawlor, D errida and Husserl: The Basic Problem o f Phenomenobgy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 17 See Raoul Moati, Derrida/Searle, Deconstruction an d Ordinary Language (N ew York: Colum bia University Press, 2014). French version published by Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. 18 Sec Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor, eds.,^4 Companion to D errida (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). T he exceptions are Nicholas Royle^ "Poetry, Animality, Derrida" (see pages 524 -36 ), in which D . H . Lawrence serves as a literary example, and Andrew Benjam ins ^Art's W ork: Derrida and Artaud and Atlan,w with four excellent pages on Antonin Artaud (set* pages 398-40 2).

Introduction

7

happening, where cafes are still open, where society ladies still go to ^Novelty fashion stores/' where hairdressers cut hair, bakers bake, where viscounts meet other viscounts and exchange stories about viscounts, and one hour later, everything is empty, desolate, houses closed or abandoned, left with open doors, suddenly devoid of all inhabitants.19 This historical analogy dramatizes the moment when Derrida^ ques­ tions seemed if not to destroy then at least to suspend skeptically the foundation o f all foundations, our innate and obdurate belief in “selfpresence.” Such a belief manifests itself whenever we imagine our con­ sciousness as the ability to speak to ourselves without any mediation. At this crucial point, Derrida inserts the gap o f writing, o f traces, o f a host o f spatiotemporal differences. Quite symptomatically, Levinas talks here o f a “purely literary effect” and mentions the “poetry” o f Derrida5s thought, which betrays some impatience, if not a lingering resentment. Levinas insinuates that he, at any rate, will not mix philosophy with literature. Most philosophers o f language from the Anglo-American schools tend to agree with Levinas on this point. These are some o f the questions that we want to revisit half a century after the sudden shock o f the Blitzkrieg waged by Derrida. There is a danger in winning a war too rapidly, as the US Army discovered after its first campaign in Iraq. Derrida^ sudden victory in major American departments o f comparative literature was followed by entrenched resistance and then by the opening o f other theaters o f opera­ tions. One o f these, surprisingly, was the return o f the signifier o f udeconstructionMin unexpected political areas; thus Stephen K. Bannon, once the mastermind behind President Trum ps populist ideology during his con­ tested election, could say on Thursday, February 23, 2017, that his program was a ''deconstruction o f the administrative state.,,2° O f course, Bannon meant by this a systematic dismantling o f the system erected by Obama, but the term appears as a dubious symptom o f the times; at least, one currently shared caveat is that one should not talk about destruction but o f deconstruction. Could this be Derrida's Pyrrhic victory? Whatever we can say about these political issues, the truth is that some fifty years later we still have to learn from deconstruction, for it still holds a few surprises in reserve. In order to prove that we should keep on learning from Derrida’s deconstruction, and from a deconstruction that has

,y Kmmanucl Levinas, wJ ac£?ues Derrida,Min Nom s Propres (Paris： Fata Morgana, 1976), 82. J Derrida implicitly dialogued with Heideggers conception o f poetry before developing his own myth: poetry is seen as a little hedgehog, an animal lying on the side o f the road; moreover, poetry is defined as a text requesting to be learned by heart. How can one reconcile this statement with the problematic o f writing that dominated in Derrida^ earlier texts? How can Derrida point to the uheart，> as the organ o f poetry? In order to analyze his statements about poetry, Zhuo discusses first how Paul de Man negotiated between Hegel, Holderlin, and Heidegger before presenting Derrida^s readings o f Celan and then o f Paul Valery, Francis Ponge, and Antonin Artaud. Another French poet, Stephane Mallarme, provides the opportunity for a last dialogue, the contentious conversation between Derrida and Alain Badiou. Laurent Milesi tackles their interaction in aFrom Mallarme to the Event: Badiou after Derrida.” The writings o f Mallarme durably inspired both philosophers. I f Badiou’s Platonician foundationalism clashes with Derrida's anti-foundationalism, both engage with the poetry o f Mallarme in order to posit an “experience o f the impossible.” This experience ushers in the notion o f an event to which any subject will be connected by an inner necessity, whether it be an ethical responsibility or a fidelity to a truth that has brought something radically new. Milesi highlights points o f convergence and divergence: if both philosophers adhere to diverging concepts o f the trace， Badiou appropriated Derrida’s concept o f dissemination while Derrida used Badiou's idea o f subtraction.

Introduction

15

Their dialogue took a more positive turn after 2000, when both thinkers were united by a common concern for the experience o f the event as both undecidable and impossible, which led them to dismantle generalities and posit teeming irreducible singularities. The third section, “Futures,” discusses topics that point to an elsewhere， to other domains deconstruction has opened up. One o f these is what is currently called animal studies. For Derrida, the animal poses a decisive question that is also the issue o f the language we use. Taking the coining o f ilanim of as a point o f departure, Jane Goldman starts from Derrida^ posthumous book The Anim al That Therefore I Am to investigate the contested divide between humans and animals. Derrida was instrumental in launching animal studies in the literary field given a relentless criticism o f all previous writers who had discussed animals, but when he reviewed and attacked canonical analyses o f animality presented by Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, and Agamben, he found his strongest allies among poets. How does Derrida allow us to read the animal in literature? Goldman tackles this question, already broached in the collection The Anim al Question in Deconstruction (2013), by adducing examples from authors like Daniel Defoe, Paul Celan, and Virginia Woolf. Against Robinson Crusoe^ dog introduced in the seminar The Beast and the Sovereign^ against Emmanuel Levinas^ Kantian dog critically discussed in The Anim al That Therefore I Am - unlike Virginia Woolf, a modernist writer who had found an original strategy to give voice to Flush, a cocker spaniel - Derrida chose to follow his unnamed female cat, even if this meant doggedly questioning the limit separating humans from animals. It is to a similar expansion o f deconstruction that Jen Hui Bon Hoa invites us. In ''Deconstruction, Collectivity, and World Literature,5, she interrogates a wider community o f readers. Derrida has observed that while no text can escape the regulatory regimes o f genre, such a participation in genres never amounts to a belonging. Can one extrapolate a principle o f non-identitarian community from Derrida’s concept o f participation without belonging? Derrida shows that texts are always already enmeshed in identity politics relying on communities o f genre while not completely identified with them. In a famous 1983 essay on ^inoperative commu­ nities,^ Jean-Luc Nancy had privileged indetermination facing genres; however, this position bars him from addressing sociohistorical particular­ ity, a tendency that becomes more marked in Giorgio Agamben^ theories of community. Derrida indicates a solution by positing not an originary itidetermination but the proliferation o f determinations. These principles t)l community are brought to bear on concepts o f cosmopolitanism and

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translation as they have been used in debates on world literature with Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Ranciere, and Emily Apter. Here, examples like Virginia W oolfs A Room o f One's Own and Viet Thanh Nguyen^ 2015 novel The Sympathizer are used to verify the relevance of Derrida's view that the premise o f originary dispossession is the founding condition o f politics today and in the future. Another topic that forces us to pose the question o f the future is the couple formed by deconstruction and justice. In ''Literature Calls Justice: Deconstruction^ Translated by James Swenson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Royle, Nicholas. In Memory o f Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Sallis, John, ed. Deconstruction and Philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press3 1987. Sloterdijk, Peter. Derrida, an Egyptian. London: Polity, 2009. Szafraniec, Asja. Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. 》

沒

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PART I

Frames

CHAPTKR

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The Instant o f Their Debt D errida w ith Freu d an d Heidegger in Greece Vassiliki Kolocotroni

Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida both speak o f their trips to Greece as eagerly anticipated but delayed. Both admit to a reluctance to take the step; Heidegger records ua long hesitation due to the fear o f disappointment”： [T]he Greece of today could prevent the Greece of antiquity, and what was proper [Eigenem] to it, from coming to light. But also a hesitation that stems from the doubts that the thought dedicated to the land of the flown gods was nothing but a mere invention and thus the way of thinking [Denkwe^ might be proved to be an errant way [Irrwe^.1 Derrida too reflects on a similar motif: “This was my third stay in Greece. Barely stays, regrettably， more like visits, multiple，fleeting, and all too late. Why so late? Why did I wait so long to go there, to give myself over to Greece? So late in iife?>,2 This is o f course partly a commonplace, quite literally a topos, a well-trodden rhetorical path in its own right, the traveler^ signature nod to a weak sublime: one always arrives in Greece too late —witness Virginia W oolf s diary entry while there in 1906: Once again, the Ancient Greek had the best of it: we were very belated wayfarers: the shrines are fallen, & the oracles are dumb. You have the feeling very often in Greece, that the pageant has passed long ago, & you are come too late, & it matters very little what you think or feel. The modern Greece is so flimsy and fragile, that it goes to pieces when it is confronted with the roughest fragment of the old.3 Two years earlier, in 1904, Freud experienced a disturbing sense o f incredulity (or “derealization,” as he put it in his retrospective rendition , Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece, trans. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Albany: State University o f N ew York Press, 2005), 4 -5. 1 latqucs Derrida, Athens, S till Remains: The Photographs o f Jean-Frangois Bonhomme, trans. A n ik* Brault and Michael Naas (N ew York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 17. * Virginia W oolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 189 7-19 0 9, ed. Mitchell A . Leaska (l om lon: Hogarth Press, 1990). 3M-

ZI

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o f the scene in 1936) at the fact that he, in middle age, actually found himself on the Acropolis, the originary site o f the civilization he was busily analyzing at the time o f that recollection. The shock was compounded by guilt, for this was a feat his petty bourgeois father, a self-educated mer­ chant, could neither accomplish nor appreciate. The episode has been richly commented upon,4 not least by Freud himself, who made o f it an exemplary manifestation o f what Derrida would later call “hauntology,”5 the persistent presence o f the past in the present, as well as a testament to the psychic work o f the uncanny, turning the ambivalent feeling o f dread toward the dead to ^filial piety/5 thus temporarily laying to rest familiar phantoms.6 As Freud put it: aThe very theme o f Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son^ superiority. Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment o f the journey to Athens was a feeling offilia l piety!"7 Freud had begun to explore that fraught relationship in Totem and Taboo (1913): Where in earlier times, satisfied hatred and pained affection fought each other, we now find that a kind of scar has been formed in the shape of piety, which declares ade mortuis nil nisi bonum.MIt is only neurotics whose mourning for the loss of those dear to them is still troubled by obsessive selfreproaches - the secret of which is revealed by psychoanalysis as the old emotional ambivalence.8 The connection with the uncanny was then made in the important 1919 work of that title: All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances depen­ dent on improbable and remote conditions; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of piety.9

4 I list a few o f these in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, ^Still Life: Modernism's Turn to Greece,5, Jo u rn al o f M odern Literature 35, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 1-2 4 . 5 Jacques Derrida, Specters o f M arx: The State o f the Debt, the Work o f M ourning, an d the N ew IntemationaU trans. Peggy K am uf (N ew York and London: Routledge Press, 1994), 18. 6 Sigmund Freud, UA Disturbance o f M em ory on the Acropolis," in The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psycholo^cal Works o f Sigm und Freudy trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 22 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 24 7-48 . 7 Ibid., 248. 8 Sigmund Freud, The Origins o f Religion: Totem an d Taboo, Moses and Monotheism a n d Other Works, ed. Albert Dickson and trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 122. 9 Sigm und Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David M cLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 149.

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That uncanny ambivalence toward the past, the incomplete substitution o f piety for dread, is conjured up by the visit to Greece. A Mvisit>， can be both literal and metaphorical, or indeed if we are to read the literal into the metaphorical, literally transportative, and in the case o f the two visits to Greece on which this chapter dwells, both senses are continually at play. Like Freuds earlier transcription o f his moment o f uncanny transport on the Acropolis, Heidegger^ 1962 Greek asojourn>, and DerridaJs ^demeure! residence” in Athens thirty-one years later record confrontations with familiar ghosts. That Greece is the common site o f this confrontation is no accident, nor simply a stop in a modern-day philosophical Grand Tour; it is rather the destination o f that errancy, error and wandering that both haunts and drives philosophy, at least in Heidegger^ and Derrida^ errant terms: Mthe craft o f thinking, unswerving, yet erring,,J as Heidegger put it in 1950；10 or as Derrida responded in 1964: That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger - and philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of death - or that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying . .. all these arc unanswerable questions . .. Nevertheless, these should be the only questions today capable of founding the community, within the world, of those who are still called philosophers; and called such in remembrance.11 To follow the trail o f that destinerranceylz as Derrida would call it, requires the unpacking o f a few mot-valises and the writing off o f some considerable debts. uNous nous devons a la m orf - W we owe ourselves to death5*: the sentence provides the subtitle for DerridaJs Athens, S till Remains, written in 1996 by way o f a preface to a collection o f photographs by Jean-Franq:ois Bonhomme. Here, Derrida draws on memories o f his brief stays in Greece, uso late in life/5 and reflects in an ^aphoristic and seriar way on the photographs with which he traveled there.13 The motif o f death, treated

Heidegger, KT h e Thing,** in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofetadter (N ew York: Harper &C Row, 1975), 186. " Derrida, 'Violence and Metaphysics: A n Essay on the Thought o f Emmanuel Levinas,0 in W riting an d Differencey trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1978), 79. There are echoes here (and throughout D errida^ thought) o f Montaigne's reflections on philosophy^ debt to death. See, for instance, chapter 20, book I o f wT o Philosophize Is to Learn H o w to D ie," in Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M . A . Screech (London and N ew York: Penguin Books, 2003), 89-108. '* See J. Hillis Miller, KDerrida5s Destinerrance,n M odern Language Notes 111 (2006): 89 3-9 10 and Joiin 1^avey, “ Destinerrance: T he Apotropocalyptics o f Translation,” in I*hilosopf)y: The Texts o f Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press,

19H7), U 43* " D(*rricl； i, Athens, S till Rrm aim , j .

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exhaustively (though inexhaustible) in his writing, makes an instant appearance: It was this past July 3, right around noon, close to Athens. It was then that this sentence took me by surprise, in the light - uwe owe ourselves to deathw- and the desire immediately overcame me to engrave it in stone, without delay: a snapshot [un instantanS\^ I said to myself, without any further delay.14 Though unacknowledged, the provenance o f the sentence may lie in a deep memory recalled “by surprise” from the personal archive o f Derrida’s encounters with Greek writing, as it features in a celebrated epigraph by Simonides, whose appearance in Plato^ Republic and Protagoras as a poetbete noire will have registered with Derrida, incidentally at the very least: aA certain Theodorus rejoices because I am dead. Another / shall rejoice at his death. We are all owed to death.,,T5 As Anne Carson has noted, KWhat Simonides contributed to our style o f thinking and talking about death is a central shaping metaphor: the metaphor o f exchange,J; more specifically, a[t]he idea that human life is not a gift but a loan or a debt, which will have to be paid back, originated with Simonides.5>l6The instancing o f the phrase ain the light/516however, points firmly toward the visual and conjures up an image o f a Kerameikos column: [0]n the distended skin of an erection, just below the prepuce, a sort of phallic column bears an inscription that I had not yet deciphered, except for the proper name. Apollodorus. And what if it were that Apoilodorus, the author of a history of the gods? I would have loved to sign these words; I would have loved to be the author of an epitaph for the author of a history of the gods.17 For Derrida, wthe phallus or the colossus o f Apollodorus immediately becomes the metonymic figure for the entire series o f photographs col­ lected in this book,> and cit itl.1, Aihm s, S till Rmutins, 7 1. n〇tc 1.

** I )«viii Wills% review in Ox/im/ 1 itrntry Hrvirw

no. 2 (December 2011): 271.

43 Ibid., 270.

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VA SSILIKI K O L O C O T R O N !

each still, as a ^generalised punctum/5as Wills puts it,44 but also in formal terms. Formally, we see the repetition o f the image o f the Parthenon in the frame that freezes the “photographic waiting，” or the doubling o f the name on the sign on Persephone Street (uOAOZ riEPZECDONHZ/ PERSEFO N IS”). The picture-within-a-picture trope appears in the image o f the Greek woman who contemplates a street painter^ attempt at reconstructing a local scene; and finally, photographs directly redouble or mirror each other, as in the flea market seller whose pose echoes the figure o f the Silenus on the frieze at the Theatre o f Dionysus. Above all, Derrida concludes, it is what the sentence does, £51 Gourgouris goes on to ground and gloss the particular connotations o f “cosmopolitanism” in the German cultural context of the late 1920s and 1930s, dominated by wGerman-Jewish thinkers who essentially thought in Greek terms.J，52 Ultimately, Gourgouris argues, Heidegger, though not anti-Semitic per se, was c, in Greece he recites and con­ sults as a vade mecum. Only on Delos and the temple o f Afaia on Aegina does he accept the possibility o f vision - and that, it becomes clear, because o f the names, ArjAos; - manifest, A-cpaia - unapparent, which contain in them evidence o f o-Arjdeia, conceived by Heidegger in his rather ucoercive,> or errant etymology,60 as Mthe unconcealed concealment.m61 Denied vision, then, becomes the vision, not in the interpretable, representational or allegorical manner o f a dream, but as a failed conjuration, an unheeded call, no less insistent or urgent in its arecollective}，force, to quote Marc Froment-Meurice^ analysis o f the Greek concept o f knowledge:

' 6 uT he Greek element remained an expectation, something that I was sensing in the poetry o f the ancients, something that I intimate through Holderlin's Elegies and Hymns, something that I was thinking on the long paths o f m y own though t.H eidegger, Sojourns., 19. *7 Ibid., 55. 58 Ibid., 22. 59 Ibid” 54.

The adjective is H ans-Georg Gadamer’s, who distances himself from

his teacher’s “coercive, acts” when dealing with the Greek language, especially in Heidegger’s use o f pre-Socratic texts. See Ciadamer, HeieUgger's Ways, trans. John W . Stanley (Albany: State University o f N ew York Press, 1994), 143. Heidegger himself seems to admit no such Schuldigsein in relation to originary language, however: 4lThe truth, then, here and elsewhere, is nor that our thinking feeds on etymology, but i^tlicr that etymology has the standing mandate first to give thought to the essential content Involved in what dictionary words, as words, denote by implication.w Heidegger, MThe T h in g,15175.

11c iilc ^ c r ,

Sojourm, 4K.

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Knowledge (since the Greeks) has always expressed itself as a having-seen, in advance, a re-cognition. Sight constitutes much more than a simple med­ ium. It is rather the horizon at the heart of which Greece will be able to appear as what it was, this having-been that addresses itself at once as origin (but veiled, deformed by what has come after: technology) and the recourse to a possible aturning,Mwhen the glance makes itself memory {Andenken) and not forgetting . .. The whole question is thus 從 一 what seeing is. 2 For Heidegger, indeed, aWhat is coming only draws near and lasts for an insistent call•” He asks: “Are we today still heeding the call?” and then adds: In such a time, amidst the lack of vision, the suspicion awakens that such a sight is possible indeed, a sight that, since it exists, demands that we look even farther . . . How are we to find this field of anticipation? ... This field lies behind us, not before us. What is of necessity is to look back and reflect on that which an ancient memory has preserved for us and yet, through all the things that we think we know and we possess, remains distorted ... The historical future of the age will be decided by whether its relationship to the beginning will remain in oblivion or will become a recollective thinking.63 The idea o f recollection contains a fundamental ambivalence, a doubleness such as we saw captured in Derrida s reading o f Bonhomme5s photographs. Jacques Ranciere traces a similar effect in his definition o f what he calls Mthe archaeomodern turn,” a kind o f vanishing point for the perspective of modernity: The archaeomodem turn sets up two categories: that of figurative reason or of sleeping meaning, and the temporal category of anticipation. These two categories combined define a concept that will be crucial to the self­ interpretation of modernity: prehistory . .. Prehistory thus means two things: it is the sleep, the wnot yet,J, the unfufillment of modernity, but, at the same time, it is the backward movement that stems from the inner discrepancy, the wtoo early>， of modernity . . . So the logic of the archaeomodern might be a logic of the one-turn-more, a logic of the regressio ad infinitum, located at the core of the modern project.4 Derrida’s thought already inscribes the logic (and effect o f return) in the encounter with the ruin, as he puts it in Memoirs o f the Blind: uThe ruin

6z M arc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heideggers Poetics, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 1998) ，224. In the “ Farewell” section, Froment-Meurice analyzes Heide 路er’s atypical or recalcitrant “tourism” in Greece. See pages 222-33. 6} Heidegger, Sojourns, 2 -3 , 38. 64 Jacques Ranciere, MT h e Archaeomodem T u rn ," in Walter Benjam in and the Dem ands o f Historyy ed. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, N Y : Cornell University Press* 1996), 27, 28.

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does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment o f the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory o f itself, what remains returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and figuration is eclipsed.,,65 The uarchaeomodern turnn in Heidegger's ruminations, how­ ever, is cast in the form o f an insistent questioning o f the very possibility o f return, suggesting a negative while maintaining the effect o f a derealization, as Freud experienced on the Acropolis. The Parthenon, the ruins o f Apollo5s temple in Delphi and on Delos, the temple o f Afaia on Aegina are confirmed as uvacant lots/' retaining the power to awake the “sleeping meaning” o f still inhabited words. Heidegger’s resistance and recollection proposes a prolonged farewell, or rather an almost ritualistic emptying, a vacation o f the site o f its weak, false echoes and apparitions. Only a sustained backward look can call up its recollective power and keep open “the field o f anticipation.” Heidegger’s look proposes an impossible recuperation that could be seen as doubly focused. As Paul Duro argues, Mapped onto his Grecophilia, Heidegger5s desire to achieve intellectual union with the essence of Greek thought looks less like a philosopher^ professional interest and more like an attempt to resurrect the myths of Volk and Heimat that were foundational to the fascist ideologies of the 1930S. Seen from this perspective, the seemingly innocuous exasperation Heidegger evinces at Corfu, Ithaca, Rhodes, and elsewhere in failing to experience the hoped-for sojourn takes on a more sinister complexion. His metaphysics of origin remains, as it had been in 1935, a call to arms, a rallying cry, and a symbol of the “coming-to-presence” of the German people.6 Suspended thus between fiction and testimony, to echo Derrida s reading o f Blanchot, Heidegger’s “Greek thing” is a forced re-enchantment o f the word, o f the Greek word, o f the poetic word. It is literally an ^artificial archaism,” as Gadamer put it，67 or, in a Benjaminian context, the restoration o f its aura, as if it were an artwork. In that sense, the anearMis “preserving its famess,” as in Heidegger’s definition o f “The Thing”： The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing； rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is Jacques Derrida, M em oirs o f the B lin d : The Self-Portrait an d Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1993), 68. Paul Duro, yet” because “no-longer.” For Derrida, that power resides, remains with memory - as he put it in a late piece: wM y first desire is not to produce a philosophical work or a work o f art: it is to preserve memory^;70 and Greece in these accounts seems both a preserved memory and the privileged procedure o f preserva­ tion itself. Or, to put it differently, Heidegger^ and Derridas sojourns conserve in the world’s memory bank, where re-collectors “poetically dwell,” the “Greek thing,” its debts always necessarily unpaid. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn, 254. London: Fontana, 1973. Blanchot, Maurice, and Jacques Derrida. The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Carson, Anne. Economy o f the Unlost: Reading Simonides ofKeos with Paul Celan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. wViolence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.,> In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, 79-153. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 197B. O f Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Memoirs o f the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Specters o f Marx: The State o f the Debt, the Work o f Moumingy and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge Press, 1994.

68 Heidegger, wT h e Thin g,n 184. 69 See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy o f History II ” ： “T h e past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection . . . For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled lightly. The historical materialist knows w hy.w Walter Benjamin, IlluminationSy ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, i 973)> ^ 5470 Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: A n Interview with Jean Bim baum , trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, N J: Melville House, 2007). Cited in Copy, Archive, Signaturey xxix.

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The Gift o f Death. Translated by David Wills. C^hicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Learning to Live Finally: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007. Demeure, Athenes. Paris: Editions Galilee, 2009. Athens， Still Remains: The Photographs o f Jean-Fran$ois Bonhomme. Tv么 by Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. Edited by Gerhard Richter. Translated by Jeff Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. u, In The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works o f Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, 239-48. Volume 22. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. The Origins o f Religion: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Other Works. Volume o f The Pelican Freud Library. Edited by Albert Dickson. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Froment-Meurice, Marc. That Is to Say: Heidegger's Poetics. Translated by Jan Plug, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Cladamer, Hans-Georg. Heidegger^ Ways. Translated by John W. Stanley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 资mY’\s，Sethis. Does Literature Think? Literature as Theoryfor an Antimythical Era. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. uThe Thing.5>In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 165-86. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Sojourns: TheJourney to Greece. Translated by John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki. wStiIl Life: Modernism's Turn to Greece.MJournal of Modem Literature 35, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 1-24. Ltmbropoulos, Vassilis. The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 1x*avey, John. “Destinerrance: The Apotropocalyptics of Translation.M In Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts ofJacques Derrida. Edited by John Sallis, 33-43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

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Malabou, Catherine, and Jacques Derrida. Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Translated by David Wills. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Miller, J. Hillis. wDerridas Destinerrance." Modern Language Notes 121 (2006): 893-910. Naas, Michael. 19 Deconstruction attacks the metaphysics o f presence under its multiple shapes, which includes, as Derrida argued repeatedly, the tenets o f Freudian psychoanalysis whenever it aimed at creating a science or a system. Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis For Derrida, it is not only instructive but also ethically exigent to uncover where and how the elisions necessary for myth making transpire: inevita­ bly, somebody or something will suffer from the violence o f mythologiz­ ing. This deconstructive work is, without doubt, similar to the psychoanalytic work that uncovers repressed material, but there is an important difFerence. For Freud, different kinds o f pathological construc­ tions result when the ego represses, rejects or disavows events that cause traumatic, affective dissonance or incoherence. Pathological constructions stem from the ego's desire to conform to or reconstruct a reality that affords the ego a measure o f mastery and control. Freudian psychoanalysis unpacks these anomalous constructions in order to iron them out; the aim is to release the ego from paralyzing, irrational illusions o f mastery and pseudocontrol, and to remobilize the rational ego^ power to integrate events into a coherent, shared, socially approved narrative. By contrast, Derridas efforts to undo theoretical constructions and uncover the elements that theorists elide, repress, reject or disavow in18 9

18 See Jacques Derrida, ^Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse o f the Human Sciences,n in W riting an d Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1978), 2 7 8 -9 3. 19 Ibid, 27 9 -8 0 .

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their efforts to achieve a coherent myth do not aim to iron things out. Based on the idea that perfect coherence i» artificial, static and dangerous, the point o f a deconstructive reading is to render a work more realistic that is, more dynamic and open to contingency. For Derrida, the instabil­ ity or anomaly in a situation o f paradox or dilemma is not a sign o f error but an indication o f “truth.” Our obligation is to fece up to the “truth” o f our uncertainty and work out how to deal with meaning and ethical life within the strictures o f this discomforting predicament. Therefore, to any suggestion that deconstruction is the psychoanalysis o f philosophy Derridas negative response seems well grounded.20 And yet, in another twist, the move that places deconstruction and psychoanalysis in discursive competition means that psychoanalysis, because it looks so much like deconstruction, was never purely a matter o f myth construction. This would make Freudian thinking a precursor to deconstruction. The justification for this about-face lies in the observation that besides being a notoriously authoritarian mythmaker, Freud was also a revolutionary genius, a fiend for jokes, who recognized obscurity and riddles, gave us the “primary process,” “ kettle logic” and myriad other novel concepts that radically upset age-old ideas and pushed us to think in new ways. Consider Freuds remark in a letter to Fliess o f February 1,1900: MFor I am actually not a man o f science, not an observer, not an experi­ menter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador — an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic o f a man o f this sort.>,21 Accordingly, it was to the adventurer in Freud that Derrida was consistently attracted. He saw in Freud a thinker open to chances, not just the myth constructor erecting a system. In repeating Freud differently through deconstruction, Derrida remains faithful to what was radical in Freud; this sometimes meant turning “the Other Freud” against Freudian mythologies. Similarly, in Lacan’s famously proclaimed “return to Freud,” it was an u〇 therwFreud that was launched against the mainstream legacy o f classical Freudianism. In minutely responsive dialogue with Freud5s texts, Lacan enters into the Freudian universe, inspects the intricate details bit by bit, loosening here, overturning there, disrupting the text, and prying concepts loose. This is a matter o f working through Freuds texts and not against them. Lacan submits to the concepts and then submits them to their own

*n I:or a detailed discussion, see AJan Bass, ctT h e Double Game,'* in Taking Chances, 74 —79. 11 T h f CompUte Letters o f Sigm und Freu d to W ilhelm Fliess, 1887—1904 ^ed. and trans. Jeffrey MoussaiefF Masson (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1985), 398.

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uncertainties and complexities by pressing them to follow through on what they open up. Both Derrida and Lacan, through intensive readings o f Freud5s texts, aimed not to dismantle psychoanalysis as such but to open its texts to a future, to give psychoanalysis its chances. In this sense, the aims o f deconstruction are compatible with the aims o f Lacanian psycho­ analysis. In that sense only, there would be seeds of truth in the suggestion that deconstruction is the psychoanalysis o f philosophy. We who come after should be wary o f anything Derrida or Lacan had to say about the other's projects and focus instead on what they tried to do. This caution, initially voiced by Barbara Johnson,22234 5is particularly impor­ tant given that, ironically, Derrida set the frame for an antagonistic encounter between deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis when Lacan^ analysis o f Poe5s The Purloined Letter^ provoked him into writing a critical essay, wLe Facteur de la V 6tit6^ published first in Poetique^ later reprinted in The Post Card.ZA To detail the points o f contact is too complex for a short discussion, but it is important to emphasize that Derrida and Lacan share a starting point. Acknowledging that the enigmatic Other necessarily transcends human understanding, both argue that anything that is given to us to interpret is more “event” than “object.” It is more correct to say that it “happens” than it “exists.” Neither Derrida nor Lacan makes the philosophical error of giving the transcendent a figure or a content. Transcendence remains as a reminder o f the permanent possibility that any event can be interpreted differently. One must sidestep Derrida^s remarks about Lacan^ multi­ layered treatment o f the aletterMas a metaphor for the event or the Real in his analysis o f Poe^ The Purloined Letter.^ Without claiming to do justice to Lacan’s encounter with Poe’s The Purloined Letter and Derrida5s intricate critique, it is productive to consider briefly what each tried to do in the name o f producing intensive readings. Lacan saw in Poe^ story an unintentional illustration o f the intricate intersubjective dynamics， driven by desire for mastery and power, that are always occasioned by an event. Lacan shares with Derrida the conception o f the event as an enigmatic Other that necessarily 22 See Barbara Johnson, MT h e Frame o f Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,** in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida an d Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. M uller and W illiam J. Richardson, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, M D : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 213-51. 23 See Jacques Lacan, KSeminar on lT h e Purloined L e t t e r ,i n The Purloined Poe, 28—54. 24 See endnote 4 4 in Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Henri Ronse (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 10 7—13. See also The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud an d Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) ， 4 13-9 6 . 25 See Lacan, “ Seminar on ‘T h e Purloined Letter.’ ”

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transcends human understanding and requires interpretative engagement. Neither makes the philosophical error o f giving the event a figure or a content. Transcendence remains as a reminder o f the permanent possi­ bility that any event can be interpreted differently. An event, therefore, is always traumatic in the sense that it transgresses an existing status quo, and both cannot and must be accommodated within its bounds. In PoeJs story, the purloined letter, whose contents are never divulged, provides an analogy for the traumatic, transgressive event. Lacan extended this analogy to language, arguing that it applied in principle to any sign. For Lacan, the letter allegorizes the itinerary o f a signifier whose signified remains inac­ cessible. Even though the letter has no inherent, essential content to analyze, the letter’s presence as a transgression has effects. Part o f Lacan’s multifaceted aim was to draw psychoanalytic insight for training analysts regarding the letter^ effects. The most important o f these have to do with the strategies o f Khide and seek55 played out between analysts and analyses in the interpretative situation. Poe5s tale articulates three intersubjective scenes from which Lacan draws psychoanalytic insight by asking such questions as: Who remains blind? Who is protected from analytic insight? Who wishes to hide/show the transgression? Who is exposed to whom? Who ^sees^ (understands) what? In the first scene, the King, who embodies the law and draws his power from his status quo position characterized by ideological closure, remains blind to the very possibility o f legitimate transgression. He, there­ fore, cannot see or interpret what happens. The Queen represents the discomfort o f transgressive insight. In her awareness that the status quo lacks and transgression is possible, she either risks her own safety or threatens the status quo. The letter, which she hides out in the open by placing it face down on the table, is a symptom o f transgressive insight. A symptom is produced by the desire to simultaneously hide and show a trauma. The Minister represents the power o f analytical insight. Astutely assessing the situation, seeing the Kings oblivion and the Queen^ dis­ comfort, the Minister understands that the Queen5s unwillingness to risk her safety will render her impotent. The Minister may act in favor o f any o f the three subjects. His decision will have the efFect o f changing the power dynamics o f the intersubjective scene. He decides to steal the letter, in the hope o f profiting from its possession. Under the Queen5s silent gaze, he switches her letter for one o f his own. This act repositions the letter, which, In turn, has the effect o f reconfiguring the intersubjective power relations. In his analysis o f the second scene, Lacan introduces a second major theme, pertaining ro language, whidi draws on his articulation o f the four

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discursive positions that condition the interpretation o f an event/sign. The Queen5s unwillingness to openly transgress the status quo ties her to its discursive conditions. She operates now from the King5s position of absolute power to command allegiance. That the letter must be recovered is an imperative that is obeyed by the Prefect o f police through loyalty rather than reason. The Prefect commands the resources o f rational dis­ course to serve the master. Lacan is quick to demonstrate its limitations in the analytic situation. The Prefect and his detectives never find the letter because they impose rational assumptions concerning how the letter must be hidden, and these condition the rules o f their search. The Minister retrogresses to the discourse o f transgressive insight that previously ren­ dered the Queen impotent to act. He displays the same vigilant anxiety o f the one who hides the transgression out in the open, and remains, there­ fore, in indecisive limbo. Dupin is introduced at this point as the analyst whose sensitivity to poetic wisdom enables him to grasp the complexities o f the situation and who is able, therefore, to act decisively. In the third scene, the letter is again repositioned. Dupin, drawing on his insight into the Ministers mental process, prepares an exact double o f the stolen letter and strategically reverses the first theft. As an analyst who has transcended the status quo, Dupin is not drawn into the aporetic power dynamics o f paranoid master and transgressive hysteric. He does not, in turn, hide the letter in the hope o f profiting from it. Instead he profits by halting the circulation o f the letter and presenting it to the Prefect o f police, for a sum. M ay one propose Dupin as a role model for aspiring analysts? Lacan affirms Dupin5s analytical astuteness and exteriority to intersubjective power dynamics. But the task o f an analyst is ethical. In this respect, Dupin falls short in many respects, including his stance o f cynical extern­ ality, which enables him to profit from the status quo, without challenging it. Further, not content with the Minister s inevitable downfall, Dupin is animated by the wish to settle an account with him and acts to ensure that the Minister will recognize him as the instrument o f his downfall. In the fake letter he leaves in the place o f the Queen^ original, Dupin quotes lines by Crebillon. that will identify him to the Minister. In this act o f egotistical one-upmanship, Dupin exposes himself to the all-seeing gaze o f the author, Poe, or o f his readers, who are in the position o f the psychoanalyst. In aLe Facteur de la Verite/5 Derrida does not directly address Lacan5s aim to elucidate intricate intersubjective dynamics for training analysts, but takes Lacan to task for tacitly resorting to about eight o f the most deconstructible motifs in philosophy in his textual production. Derrida argues that these motifs necessarily support Lacans basic insistence that wa

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letter always arrives at its destination,Mwhich goes hand in hand with the claim that the letter cannot be divided. As Barbara Johnson indicated, it is not very difficult to demonstrate point for point the injustice o f Derrida^ criticisms. However, to quibble over the proper interpretation o f a multivocal aphorism such as “a letter always reaches its destination” or “a letter cannot be divided” is to miss what both Derrida and Lacan aim to demonstrate regarding interpretation. Instead, one may produce a productive reading o f this encounter by following Johnson’s lead and resisting the temptation o f egotistical one-upmanship. In outline Johnson argues that Derrida produces a violent reading o f the aSeminar on T h e Purloined Letter,w that flattens out the ambiguities in Lacan?s text. She attributes this violence to a rhetorical strategy that aims to demonstrate performatively how the textual effects o f Lacan's cavalier importation o f metaphysically loaded terms subverts what he is overtly trying to demon­ strate. Due to the metaphysical baggage still carried by the terms Lacan uses subversively, Derrida demonstrates how easy it is to produce a relatively coherent “metaphysical” reading o f Lacan’s text that binds up multiple reinforcing motifs such as circular return, indivisibility, phonocentrism, phallocentrism, and so on. Derrida demonstrates performatively that Lacan, ironically, did not carefully follow his own advice to remain vigilant concerning the textual effects o f the letter and to astutely attend to its Mtruth,5 defined in terms o f its effects rather than in terms o f adequacy. Importantly, however, a criticism o f Lacan for a textual performance that is inconsistent with what he wishes to say tacitly grants that the Lacanian discourse itself cannot conform to the metaphysics o f presence. This returns us to the final lesson o f the MSeminar on 'The Purloined Letter, which is a caution against falling, along with Dupin, into the trap o f adversarial one-upmanship, which tempts even the most astute analysts. Lacan and Derrida both go to great lengths to show in what sense the languages we have developed to mediate events are in themselves complex. Derrida writes that , flutters into circulation as the epitome o f chance. Our habitual response to chance is to try to control its effects and rigidly protect our subject positions under the illusion that they afford us mastery, but we only create other chances for interventions that endanger us in these positions. Second aporia: Lacanian therapeutic work involves helping people traverse the fundamental fantasy. But, in line with the complexity o f the

27 For a treatment o f dijfirance in its economic and ManeconomicMmodes, see Derrida, wDifFerance,Min M argins o f Philosophy^ trans. Alan Bass (N ew York: Harvester, 1982), 1 - 2 7 . 28 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas D utoit (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 1993), 20. See also Derrida, wForce o f Law : T h e 'M ystical Foundation o f Authority,,w in Deconstruction and the Possibility o f Justice, ed. Drucilia Cornell et al. (N ew York and London: Routiedge, 1992), 2 2 -2 9 for an extended discussion o f Kthe plural logic o f the aporiaMin relation to the acts o f ethical decision­ making.

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plural logic o f the aporia, this working through that opens up habitually structured relations must not risk the schizophrenic opposite extreme at which self-interpretations break down, leaving only arbitrary reactions to utter contingencies. Derrida, likewise, is wary o f the waneconomic， extreme, which leads to a second dead end. He acknowledges that there is always an equally valid and necessary interpretation o f the same event. It will be construed in terms o f random indetermination, o f dynamism and diversity. Such an “aneconomic” interpretation aims to do justice to the dynamic multiplicity o f forces at play in every event. However, a fully “aneconomic” interpretation o f an event is a contradiction in terms. When an interpretation becomes too inventive, loose, playful, or over­ complicated, it fails to do justice to the event for it misses the legitimate regularities, patterns and trends that enable us to make the general theore­ tical propositions essential for deciding what to do. The aporia o f this approach lies in the reversal by which too much dynamism makes it impossible to move. In sum, both economic and “aneconomic” interpretations are aporetic in the sense that the closer either gets to its perfection, respectively o f absolute systematic modeling or chaotic randomness, the more likely it is to auto-deconstruct by opening up to its opposite. The violent imposition o f a rigid code o f laws creates the conditions for its violent overthrow. Equally, absolute refusal to configure codes and laws leaves people vulner­ able to the imposed strictures o f brute force. In a more complicated articulation that brings the two together, one may argue that if one chooses absolutely one side o f the economic/waneconomic，> pair, the other side is lost. Yet, because they are interdependent - one is the necessary condition for the other - this means also to lose the original choice. To the question o f how one might make a choice between these opposing approaches to interpretation, Derrida's answer is that the choice is impossible. Economic and “aneconomic” senses o f an event form a double bind; they are tied in such a knot that loosening one side tightens the other, in a movement that Derrida calls ^stricture/529 This is the shape o f the third aporia. Derrida names the third aporia uthe impossible/530 In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak offers a detailed, performative example o f how Derrida's third aporia shapes the problem o f speaking and otherness.31 Briefly outlined, she accepts that, as Derrida l，> Derrida, Resistances o f Psychoanalysis, 36. 30 Derrida, Aporiasy 20 -2 1. " (Jayatri C'hakravorty Spivak, wCan the Subaltern Speak?15 in M arxism and the Interpretation o f (.ulturr, cd. Cary Nelson and I^wrence Grossberg (Champaign: University o f Illinois Press, 1988),

之7_ V 4.

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insists, we must speak.32 Absolutely waneconomicMrefusal to speak simply means a paralyzing exclusion from the human condition. But can every­ one speak? Regarding the subaltern (the other who is subjugated), this question engages Derrida^ third aporia. The condition that makes it possible for the subaltern to speak is the very condition that eradicates the subaltern as such. Since speaking includes being heard, to speak at all, a subaltern speaker must form words and thoughts according to the dictates o f the dominant discourse within which she wants to be heard. But by this very act o f t, she is o f course, no longer speaking as a subaltern. Derrida argues that we face the plural logic o f the aporia in all aspects o f human life and that there is no way o f resolving its reversals, double binds and circularities.33 This would not be something to bemoan. The form o f the double bind offers us breathing space, that is, freedom from the ideological stasis o f any preprogrammed economic stance or paralysis of an “aneconomic” stance. I f language is the key to unlock the human condition, then sensitivity to this aporetic complexity transforms the task o f contemporary literature as much as that o f philosophy and psychoanalysis. The shared task o f the hermeneutic arts becomes to address the question o f how to get along with Kthe plural logic o f the aporia，5that will never be resolved. For Derrida, any hope would lie in the Other. By nature, the identified territories o f dominant discourses have margins; they always open up ''secondary or marginal areas.5,34 Further, the necessary violation that divides the central from the marginal sparks the resistance from the margins that may reopen a discourse to its chances. A good example can be found in Henry Louis Gates^ The Signifying Monkey (1988). Gates argues that Africans dislocated by the slave trade were forced to use the language - Standard English - o f a people who defined them as less than human. To use the language at all was necessarily to pay lip service, at least, to the values inscribed in it, the values o f white super­ iority, thereby to entangle oneself in an aporia-, as a consequence, to speak is to engage in a process o f self-destruction. Instead o f resulting in paralysis, however, a black vernacular, a resistant, subversive manner o f speaking, developed in the margins created by Standard English. Words and phrases were subversively

J2 Derrida, aForce o f Law: T h e lMystical Foundation o f Authority,，w 28. 33 Derrida, Resistances o f Psychoanalysis., 36. 34 Derrida, “ Force o f L^w: T h e ‘ Mystical Foundation o f Authority,’” 28.

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doubled so that literal utterances that “signified” in Standard English would “Signify” in black vernacular. This constituted an inventive practice o f saying something Significant, without literally saying it, because it lay behind a literal utterance that signified something else. Further, as Gates's attempt to document this practice indicates, if this practice o f subversion from within through “saying without saying” were to remain an internalized secret code tied to the specific context o f slavery, it would become extinct in succeeding generations. However, the work o f contemporary authors is not only to recover and document the ways in which the double-edged practice o f “Signifying” interlaces languages in ways that transform both. Its task is also to learn from the art o f “Signifying” a transformative practice that can be applied in new contexts. This kind o f inventive mobility, practiced “out in the open” so to speak, requires openness on all sides to the genuinely transforma­ tive engagement that is, perhaps, the fundamental condition for ethical interpretation. Derrida insists that we have an obligation to brave the anxiety and the burden o f responsibility associated with the double bind, and face ethical, political or conceptual paradoxes and dilemmas that can neither be overcome nor evaded, but must be worked through interminably. The hermeneutic task that unifies contemporary literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis is to teach humans to surrender the desire for mastery and control, and open our future to the chances, unimaginable at present, for something other than the power struggle. Although this task, formalized as getting along with the plural logic o f the aporiay is easy to grasp at an intellectual level, it is extremely difficult to marshal the will to practice it. The “shocking truth” that psychoanalysis reveals is that people often do not want the therapeutic intervention it offers: they do not want to be healed. The same may be said o f deconstruction. Demanding the secure authority o f an irrational master, people resist the ethical goals o f the hermeneutic arts - autonomy, creativity, self-reliance, responsibility. Many will suffer, even desire, their neuroses and psychoses, for fear o f releasing the power o f dialogical engagement, which requires the risk and responsibility o f deep, honest self-reflection. Thus, in conclusion, one can say that the Derridean intervention facing psychoanalysis was timely but also out o f its time: in fact, it is still to come. We who come after Derrida in time are, at least, no longer going after Derrida in virulent antagonism, but we are still chasing after Derrida in the hope of catching up.

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Works Cited Bass, Alan. “ 丁 he Double Game.” In 7^々/«笑 C/wfWf打 . £)价 77么 ， 这松/ Literature. Edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 66-85. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Carroll, David. ''Institutional Authority vs. Critical Power, or the Uneasy Relations of Psychoanalysis and Literarure.w In Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. Edited by Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 107-34. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. wFreud and the Scene of Writing.,? In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, 196-231. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. ” ^Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.MIn Writing and Difference, Translated by Alan Bass, 278-93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. uDifFerance.M In Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 1-27. New York: Harvester, 1982. uForce of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority/In Deconstruction and the Possibility o f Justice. Edited by Drucilla Cornell et al., 22-29. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Resistances o f Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary ofLacanian Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Fink, Bruce. Fundamentals o f Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: W. W. Norton &c Company, 2007. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 2y Studies on Hysteria (1893—1895). Edited by James Strachey, 1-322. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Gates, Henry L., Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofAfrican-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Griswold, Charles L. uPlato on Rhetoric and Poetry.MThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://pIato .stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/pIato-rhetoric. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake, Introduction by Seamus Deane. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

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Lacan, Jacques. "Seminar on 'The Purloined letter.，MIn The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading. Edited by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Translated by Jeffrey Mchlman, 28-54. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Masson, Jeffrey M., ed. The Complete Letters o f Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliessy i88y-ip 4, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Plato. ^Phaedrus/5In The Dialogues o f Plato: Translated into English. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, 431-89. Volume 1. Third edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “On Tfe S仰 ? Ti me in the Works of Faulkner.” In Faulkner: A Collection o f Critical Essays. Edited by Robert Penn Warren, 87-93. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Spivak, Gayatri C. £CCan the Subaltern Speak?5>In Marxism and the Interpretation o f Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-314. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Stone, Alan A. KWhere Will Psychoanalysis Survive?>, Harvard Magazine. Last modified 1997. https://harvardmagazine.com/1997/01/freud.whole.htmI. Thomas, Dylan. KOn Poetry/* In Quite Early One Mornings 192-93. New York: New Directions, 1954. 〇

C H A P T E R

3

D errida and Sexual D ijference G inette M ic h a u d

What will the index be? On which words will it rely? Only on names? And on which syntax, visible or invisible? Briefly, by which signs will you recognize his speaking or remaining silent about what you non­ chalantly call sexual difference? What is it you are thinking beneath those words or through them? -Jacques Derrida, “ 0

化 々 /江 知

Sexual Difference, O ntological D ifference” 1

Since the beginning(s) - and by “beginning(s)，” I do not mean only in Jacques Derridas philosophical body o f work but also in his life, what in “Otobiographies” he would later call, with no small irony, “ ‘my-life，’ the H iv e ” ’12 - the problem o f sexual difference was to play a part for “Jackie,” someone whose first name had a feminine flexional ending, as well as a childish diminutive derived from “Jackie Coogan，， ，a.k.a. “The Kid,” the American child hero o f the silver screen made famous by Charlie Chaplin^ film. As is well known, Derrida changed his first name upon entering the public sphere, because he found that aJackie was not possible as the first name o f an author.”3 “Jackie” lacked the authority, the legitimacy and ultimately the virility required to affix one^ signature to a philosophical oeuvre. Derrida thus opted for “Jacques,” “a semi­ pseudonym” that he calls “very French, Christian，simple，” even as he admits that this gesture ^erased more things than [he] could say in a few words/*4 Without going as far Peter Benson, who argues that Derrida ahas 1 Jacques Derrida, uGeschlecbt\ Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," trans. Ruben Berezdivin, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy K am u f (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1991), 381. 2 Derrida, KOtobiographies: T h e Teaching o f Nietzsche and the Politics o f the Proper Name,** trans. Avital Ronell, in The E ar o f the Other： Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, ed. Christie V . M cD onald (Lincoln and London: University o f Nebraska Press, 1985), 14, 9. 3 Derrida, 1,1A ^Madness* M ust W atch over Thinking,,M trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points . . . Interviews, 1 9 7 4 - 1 9 ^ ed. Elisabeth W eber (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 1995), 344. 4 Ibid., 344.

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therefore conducted his whole professional life in a form o f drag, donning a new name for his public p e r s o n a , t h e fact remains that this decision is by no means negligible in the construction - or decon­ struction - o f an ， in aCircumfession,w an essay that, much like Glas (1974) and The Postal Card (1980), is unquestionably one o f his most adventurous texts, because it lays bare the question o f sexuality in the life o f a philosopher (all o f these words imply invisible quotation marks, o f course). Discovering the gift o f the (first) name, something o f the relation to sexual difference then com­ pelled Derrida in all o f its paradoxically essential ambivalence, equivo­ cation and instability. In the film Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida declares all at once his interest in the topic o f the sex lives o f philosophers: KTheir sex lives . . . I would like to hear them speak about their sexual lives … Because it’s something they don’t talk about. I’d love to hear something they refuse to talk about. Why do philosophers present them­ selves asexually in their work? Why have they erased their private lives from their work?>,6 This is not a joke as one might think but a most serious question: indeed, Derrida makes the apparent asexuality o f philosophical discourse in Kant, Hegel, Levinas and Heidegger a true focus for his work, and not simply a secondary theme. More than any philosopher before him, Derrida has insisted on a re-sexualization o f philosophical or theoretical discourse, especially each time he would discern a “strategy o f neutralization,>7 aimed at erasing sexual difference. The stakes invested in the wfeminine,>, a notion that cannot be reducible to the opposition between man and woman, has remained at the core o f Derrida^ embodied thinking, as he underlines it in ^Geschlecht 11?,: 5 Peter Benson, MCross-Dressing with Jacques and Ju d y ,u Philosophy N ow , last modified 2000, accessed Novem ber 14, 2016, https://philosophynow.org/issues/28/Cross-Dressing_with_Jacques_a nd_Judy. Benson parallels Derrida's gesture and that o f Judith Butler, who did not like to be called M Ju d y ,M a first name that she considered "patronizing and excessively feminine,w in Bodies That M atter: On the Discursive Lim its o f aS ex u (N ew York and London: Routledge, 1993), ix. Benson concludes: wButler and Derrida, therefore, have both manipulated their names towards a less feminine form with the aim o f preserving and enhancing their authority, rather than with the aim o f subverting and mocking gender conventions.n Derrida, D errida: Screenplay an d Essays on the Film (N ew York and London: Routledge, 2005), 105. Set* Derrida, directed by Kirby D ick and A m y Ziering Kofman (Jane Doe Films/Zeitgeist Films,

Z002). Derrida, ,4(Choreographies,15 trans. Christie V . M cD on ald, in Points, 105.

6〇

GINETTE MICHAUD

wThinking is not cerebral or disincarnate.,>8 This insistence over deter­ mines the importance that he always grants to the question o f sexual difference in his philosophical work not only in its conceptual regime but also in its textual strategies; this appears most eloquently in his polylogues,8 9 those polyvocal, polylocal and polysexual discourses that he puts forward in a number o f essays (uRestitutions o f the Truth in Pointing,w Memoirs o f the Blind, Feu la cendre^ uRight o f Inspection,,5 UA Silkworm o f OneJs Own/' to name but a few). These texts stage a performative scenography enacting a desire not to remain at the level of the division o f “sex(cl)uality” but on the contrary to multiply and divide the innumerable, infinitely differentiating voices woven in each sex and text. Derrida alluded to this weaving o f voices in Safaa Fathy’s film 戰 Derrida (one can note that this film stressed much more the question of sexual difference than the American Derrida10*), by stating to which point a constant vigilance should be exerted against the sexual repression and violence exerted on women wherever their voices are at risk o f being muted, censored or prohibited. The essay in Veils, in which Derrida announced that by pulling on the string o f this single word, the whole fabric o f culture would follow (uto touch 'that， which one calls VeiF is to touch everything. You^l leave nothing intact, safe and sound, neither in your culture, nor in your memory, nor in your language, as soon as you

8 Derrida, uGeschlecht II: Heidegger's H and," trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Deconstruction an d Philosophy: The Texts o f Jacques D errida, ed. John Sail is (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 171. This text was reissued to accompany the D V D Unpacking D errida's Library, ed. Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy (Princeton, N J: Slought and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, 2014). 9 Described in a famous mathematical equation as “ ‘polylogue’ （ for « + 1 — female - voices).” See Derrida, MRestitutions o f the Truth in Pointing," in A D errida Reader, iy，43 or, later still, o f his discussion o f genius (a word normally masculine in French but here parsed as a feminine for Helene Cixous, just as she had invented for Derrida a masculine ant, ^lefo u rm f instead o f the correct feminine word la fourm i, in wAnts>，44), a concept that comes precisely to block genealogies —no, if Derrida's contribution remains decisive in order to think sexual difference, it is above all because o f his position as a reader, that is insofar as he reconfigures the concept o f reading as such, as for example in 45 It is such an oscillation that has been privileged in his readings since Spurs, whether he discusses Genet, Ponge, Nietzsche or Heidegger. Sarah Kofman was one o f the first com­ mentators who noted that this oscillation was Derrida^ distinctive mark, a signature resisting any stabilization in Glas {uM y excitement [emoi] is the wa•仏 ",62 If, in a first moment, feminist critique profited from the deconstruction o f sexual difference (notably with feminist 16 Ibid., 121.

57 Derrida, “Choreographies,” 91.

58 Ibid.

Derrida, Spurs, 52. 61 Dt.rritla, “ Choreographies,” 93. u, Dcutschcr, How to Read Drrrifiti, -jH.

59 Ibid., 93.

7〇

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psychoanalytic critics, Marxist feminists and feminist dcconstructors such as Shoshana Felman, Peggy Kamuf, Jane Gallop, Gayatri Spivak and Barbara Johnson), the gap between feminist critique and deconstruction widened for reasons well summed up by Elizabeth Meese, who evokes wthe issues underlying the fears feminism and deconstruction have o f one another”63: American academic feminism fears deconstruction because (i) the latter denies critical pluralism its mask of inclusion, seeing pluralism instead as a capitulation to the center, both forcing and denying choice; (2) further, deconstruction denies certainty to Feminism^ ethical vision, demanding that it reveai the exclusions, the traces that are covered over in order to make any such unicentered, coherent narrative of identity possible . . . ; and (3), deconstruction would force feminism to (dis)articulate itself in terms of an as-yet-unimaginable end, an unending drama with a changeable cast. Deconstruction likewise fears feminism because (1) the latter wants to write female desire in nonoppositional, nonmasculine, or nonheterosexist terms; (2) further, feminism wants male deconstructive critics to refuse their power over women, to read and respond to texts written by women, and to apply the practices of deconstruction to their own phallogocentrism in the interest of unsettling male heterosexual and homosocial privilege . .. ; and (3) finally, feminism challenges male deconstructors to review the knowl­ edge of centuries, constructed through (among other things) the repression or absence of women to permit the production of the particular andro­ centric, heterosexist, racist narrative we call Western Civilization.646 5 The relations between deconstruction and feminism (rwo terms that should always be used in the plural) generated many misunderstandings but let us not forget that this is a positive concept for Derrida, because a dispute (a dijferend) can keep open the possibility o f a critical dialogue to come and reveal historical and cultural differences in the translation of philosophical concepts, as Anne-Emmanuelle Berger has shown in The Queer Turn in Fem inism ^ One can note that the term ^gender^ was rarely used by Derrida, as Peggy Kamuf has underlined.66 Derrida has also been taken to task for having avoided to read closely women philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, a reproach that is not without ground if one recalls the almost total absence o f discussions with

63 Elizabeth A . Meese, M(Ex)Tensions: Feminist Criticism and Deconstruction,M in (Extensions: Re­ figuring Fem inist Criticism (Urbana and Chicago: University o f Illinois Press, 1990)* iB, 64 Ibid., 18-19 . 65 See Anne-Emmanuelie Berger, Le G rand Thedtre du Genre: Identites, sexualites et fem inism e en Am erique (Paris: Belin, 2013). 66 See K a m u f,c>2 This means no predetermined philosophical axioms (unlike, for example, with Alain Badiou), no elaboration o f a theory ahead o f time that fixes meaning, and no claim to ever having a finished reading. Philosophical and literary readings are without guarantees, before and after the act. If no reading can be either established in advance or definitively settled, then each reading must develop a way o f knowing that also always makes room for further iterations, surprises, interruptions, unknowns, and new ways of reading in the future. The study o f philosophical and literary singularity - its idioms, condi­ tions, and after-effects - in large part became the guiding challenge for Derrida. This motive inspired some o f the best readers o f Derrida to construct a poetics from this sense o f singularity, especially in the versions developed by Derek Attridge and Jonathan Culler. Both Attridge and Culler attend carefully to the double practice o f respecting and responding to an individual literary work while also recognizing that no work is genre­ less or wholly distinct from a history o f literary practices and a formalized system o f signification. Both theorists recognize that, strictly speaking, singularity is unreadable. If a work remained wholly singular, it would not be thinkable or readable since there would be no way for thought to have any access to the singular. The singular concept or literary work is only known because it is comparable. It is only readable because it is breakable: in Derrida’s words, “There is no pure singularity which affirms itself as such without instantly dividing itself, and so exiling itself/53 But, at the same time, every literary work entails a unique and singular world. Thus the singular must still remain singular, although to be read it must be broken. Every literary work must both retain and forfeit its singularity in order to be read. As Attridge remarks, ''Singularity is not pure: it is constitutively impure, always open to contamination, grafting, accidents, reinterpretation, and recontextualization.，H In this chapter, I want to reflect a little further on what the cultivation and care o f literary singularity have meant for Derrida and readers after. There has been certainly an immense amount written on the application of Derridean ideas to literary study, but I still think that several important aspects o f singularity have been under-examined. First, the literary singular has profound effects both on the way we read and on the literary object Jacques Derrida, Acts o f Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 65. Ibid., 66. 4 Derek Attridge, The Singularity o f Literature (New York: Rourlcdgc, 2004), 63.

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itself. Just as there are no guarantees that any reading will have the final word or stabilize meaning, there are no guarantees that a specific work o f literature or even the concept o f the literary should retain its coherency. The implications o f Derrida5s turn to singularity deserves the utmost emphasis: it is not that Derrida elaborated a methodical poetics that first detected irony, error, play, trace, and difference and then treated these elements as the enabling and disabling features o f a literary work (this was more Paul de Man’s project); rather, for Derrida the pursuit o f singularity involved a series o f open-ended questions and entanglements that pro­ foundly implicated both the work and the reader. How is a singular work made? How can one have a singular response to a singular work? In what ways can a singular work be broken yet retain a sense o f singularity? How does its singularity endure? What happens to a work before and after it is read, and how are these issues o f the comings and goings o f a work built into its singularity? For Derrida, one consequence o f singularity - a concept or literary work without guarantees - is that there is always the possibility for the concept to no longer be effectual or for the literary work to not signify or be read ^ ain . The condition for literature to be without guarantees stands in sharp contrast to a certain tradition o f philosophy according to which assertions o f truth are bonded to a guarantee o f universal applicability. Plato assumed that a truthful philosophical claim would be valid for eternity and certify itself in perpetuity. In The Republic, Plato in part dismisses poetry for its lack o f guarantees, accusing poetry o f being unreliable. As a secondary and mimetic knowledge filled with emotional instability, poetry confuses truth and opinion. Plat〇5s polis allowed for only a thin sliver o f poetry whose meaning could be fixed to the unambiguous praise o f noble feelings and representations o f good character. By contrast, AristotleJs Poetics makes an argument for the value o f poetry largely contingent on its educational value for an audience because, since poems could not categorically fix their meanings or values, Aristotle envisioned a time when poetry could be abandoned. The insecurity o f address, interpretation, and readership o f literature leaves it only to watch and wonder at philosophy^ claims to universal relevance. Derrida sought a literary theory o f singularity - and more broadly a commitment to reading the singularity o f any text - specially attuned to issues o f what it means to read along with these insecurities, rather than against them and toward a secured horizon o f systematized interpretation. Thus, instead ofsystematically pointing out trace structures and archc-wriring ;is Icmiuivn ol constancy across texts, Derrida found

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himself more pressed to consider how these very properties o f language led to the insight that literature is never sure o f its archive and its structure, that what makes literature readable might also make it unreadable or unread. T o follow a singular poetics after Derrida, then, would involve studying the path a literary work takes without a sense o f its destiny or guarantee of interpretability. Specifically, I have in mind here a singular poetics that would not only emphasize the instabilities o f signifiers and genres but would study, for example, how a poem could be involved in figuring its own unique paths o f persistence, resistance, recitation, refiguration, and deterioration. Instead o f concentrating on locating and pointing to the meaning o f a poem with a formalist reading, or being content to point out the undoing o f meaning-making in a poem, this poetics looks at the dramatization o f meaning that happens when a poem is set adrift or “ disseminated.” A singular poetics, a poetics without guarantees, is the inverse o f the romantic notion o f a literary absolute.56 7This poetics reflects on how the uncertainty o f the future is built into texts and into readings, into modes of literary address, to the extent that the very address o f literary works is that they have no fixed address. In this view, to be a poem is to continually be asking: how long will I be read, and what happens to my singularity with each reading? Derrida, in his idiomatic essay wChe cos^ la poesia?>5 does not offer an analysis o f anthropomorphism as a supremely poetic device (unlike de Man) but fully anthropomorphizes the poem itself, in order to have the poem speak o f its own desire to be read while it worries that it will be forgotten: W I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard and keep me, look out for me.,,6^On an uncenain journey o f dispersion, the poem keeps calling out to be remembered. Shifting to an address o f the second-person wyou,>as reader, Derrida writes,uYou will call poem from now on a certain passion o f the singular mark, the signature that repeats its dispersion, each time beyond the logos, ahuman, barely domestic, not reappropriable into the family o f the subject/57 While Derrida sought to avoid turning deconstruction into a preprogrammed method, he also did not want to elevate singularity into a dictum by which a literary work would be placed on a pedestal for 5 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory o f Literature in Germ an Romanticism^ trans. Phillip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University o f N ew Y ork Press, 1988). 6 Jacques Derrida, A D errida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy K am u f (New York: Colum bia University Press, 1991), 223. 7 Ibid., 235.

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its uniquely expressive or existential qualities. Although many have accused Derrida o f foregoing philosophical argumentation for poetic allusions in his writings, it bears mentioning that Derrida did not treat poetry in the grandiose way that Heidegger had advocated. Heidegger saw the nonrationalist, indirect yet intuitive, emotional powers o f Mthe p〇em>, as a necessary guide for thinking the truth of being in an age disposed to treating the entire planet as an instrumental object. Derrida does not choose to laud poetry for its expressive or existential superiority. Rather it can be said that Derrida pursues the existential issues concerning how a poem is made, read, and unread. This existentialism o f the literary device appears when Derrida claims his reading is in “excess” o f any formalism or hermeneutic method and instead follows Kthe trace o f the poetic work, its abandonment or survival, beyond any signatory and any specific reader.5,8 In using the term “existential,” I am not referring to any school o f thought initiated by Heidegger or Sartre. Rather I use the term to indicate how the properties o f a poem have become ontological problems, in that many poems question whether they will continue to exist. Thus the poetics I am emphasizing after Derrida attends to the existential drama (^abandonment or survival，>) o f the devices, tropes, and forms o f poems as they circulate among writers and readers and inquires into the breakability and durability o f singularities that comprise a poetic work. This approach builds on recent theorizations o f singularity in poetics, but accentuates the ontological questions that are raised by the formal and material properties o f poems in addition to the literary and ethical uniqueness promoted by previous readers o f Derrida. In Derrida^ numerous writings on Paul Celan, the existential poetics o f the device, combined with an assiduous heed for singularities, becomes a key issue. Derrida most certainly did not want to approach writing on Celan, with whom he had a brief friendship, as a mere demonstration o f Derrida5s own preestablished poetic theories. With regard to Celan, Derrida repeatedly emphasizes humility and uncertainty as a reading prac­ tice, which rejects any sense o f theoretical mastery over the poems: uThe certainty o f a guaranteed reading would be the first inanity or the worst betrayal. This poem remains for me the place o f a unique experience.”9 Derrida s first major essay on Celan, based on a lecture Derrida delivered in 1984, offers a series o f reflections on figurations o f

N Jacques Derrida, Soverrignties in Question: The Poetics o f P au l Celany ed. Thomas D utoit and Ouri Pasancn (New York: l ortllum University Press, 2005), 149. y Ihid., 148.

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singularity in Celan^ work, including references to circumcision, unique memorial dates, and the untranslatable utterance o f a shibboleth (an arbitrary phonetical mark that only a certain community o f people can pronounce). These are treated as exemplary instances o f being Kthe oneand-only time” o f an event.10 Derrida discusses the careful entangling o f these singular figurations in several Celan poems, often fixating on lines where Celan inscribes the word “shibboleth,” such as the poem “In Eins” （ “In One’’)， published in 1963. The poem begins: “ Dreizehnter Feber. Im Herzmund / erwachtes Schibboleth. M it dir, / Peuple / de Paris. No Pasarann (^Thirteenth o f February. Shibboleth / roused in the hearth mouth. With you, / peuple / de Paris. No Pasardn ').11This poem carries its date on its sleeve, although as Derrida notes, the year is not given, and the immediate importance o f this date is not explained in the poem. Celan's uNo Pasaran^ a slogan used by Popular Front fighters against fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, suggests the open-ended date is in solidarity with the tradition o f leftist resistance. The figure o f the shibboleth here gathers several languages that are left untranslated in the poem: German, Hebrew, French, and Spanish. Derrida points to the date as a kind o f shibboleth as well, since it both marks the poem as highly specific and conceals the exact significance o f this date. Derrida goes on to argue that the effect o f the shibboleth can be seen across Celan’s work, as a recurrent trope or figuration in which “a ciphered singularity . . . gathers a multiplicity.” 12 Derrida treats the shibboleth as a figure o f linguistic and poetic singularity, yet that also recirculates with and among other Celan poems, including his poem titled “Schibboleth” written in 1953-54. These poems tie together acts o f solidarity, remem­ brance, various European geographies and languages, and attention to linguistic difference and poetic accent. However, as both Celan and Derrida well know, the power o f the term “shibboleth” comes from its brief mention in Judges 12:6 as the word used by the Gileadites to identify Ephraimites, who were defeated in their raid into Gilead territory. The Gileadites caught a number o f fleeing Ephraimites, who were forced to identify themselves by trying to pro­ nounce the word wshibbolethM(which refers to the part o f a plant contain­ ing grains). The Ephraimites could not pronounce the Ksh,J phoneme. Once they were discerned, they were killed. The term l6 Borrowing from, but slightly altering, the tradition o f negative theology that invokes an absent God, this poem is a prayer sent specifically to no one: uPraised be your name, no one. / For your sake / we shall flower.>,17 The blessing o f the poem is also offered to no one, placing the poem between utter M An interesting usage o f the term that condenses the connotation o f insider status is found in Sigmund Freud's Three Contributions to the Theory o f Sex'. ^Progress in psychoanalytic work has resulted in an ever clearer p iau re o f the significance o f the Oedipus complex; its recognition has become the shibboleth which distinguishes the followers o f psychoanalysis from its opponents.n See xSigmund Freud, Three ( '.ontrtbutions to the Theory o f Sex, trans. Abraham A. Brill (New York: K. P. Dutton, 1962), lii〇un)U* i .j . M I'icrn da, Soirreigritirs in (^uruion, u. M Paul C'd.Tii, ('o lltrirtl ! % rn\t, juris UoMiurir W aldrop (New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), 23. ,A ( Vlnn, l*oetm nj I'nul ( r/,fn. 1 *•>

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abandonment and an appeal to any listener in particular. And yet, in the midst o f this half-abandoned address, a “we” blooms. Derrida provides a poignant reflection on this appeal to no one: To address no one is not exactly not to address any one. To speak to no one, risking, each time, singularly, that there might be no one to bless, no one who can bless - is this not the only chance for blessing? For an act o f faith? What would a blessing be that was sure o f itself? A judgment, a certitude, a dogma/8

Prayers must be open-ended speech acts, which address an other but are never sure o f reaching any audience at all. Just like there is no guarantee for a poem, there is no guarantee for a blessing. Again we see Derrida s attention to the impact o f an address without assurances on the ontology o f the poem. By speaking to Mno one,w KPsalm>, points itself beyond any specific reader or any ultimate listener, but there may be no reader at all in that beyond. Yet, as Derrida points out, the poem still insists that an address be made: aEven if it does not reach the Other, at least it calls to it. Address takes place.n19 It is possible, then, to read this poem as also an address to the function o f poetic allusion, which itself is barely functioning. The poem’s address to “no one” occurs because the act o f address is being pushed to its limit. The address o f the poem is situated between no one and no address at all. Celan put so much pressure on the function o f address in his poems that, as Gadamer wrote, reading his lines forces one to ask, “ [W] ho am I and who are you?”20 CelanJs poem addressed to no one resonates with a later poem where Celan creates the word “das Genicht,” or the “ noem.” Celan writes between the poem and the noem, between address and the dissolution of address: Weggebeizt vom Strahlenwind deiner Sprache das bunte Gerede des Anerlebten - das hundertzungige Meingedicht, das Genicht. Eroded by the beamwind o f your speech ,8 Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 42. 19 Ibid” 33. 20 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadam er on Celan: (,W h oA m I and Who A re Y o u ^ a n d O ther Essays, ed. and trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (Albany: State University o f N ew York Press,

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the gaudy charter o f the pseudoexperienced - the hundredtongued perjurypoem, the noem.2,1

丁he “noem” is a hollowed out poem, negated from within, yet still one hears the echo o f a poetic utterance. The translation o f “Mein-gedicht” is much thornier, as it could be either “my-poem” or, if “mein” is used as in the word “Meineid” （a false oath or perjury), a falsified or untrue poem. The anoem,w not exactly a non-poem, suggests a poetic undoing o f the poem. Celan^ poem teeters between the erosion o f speech cast into the wind and the chattering o f a hundred tongues. At the end o f the poem, Celan locates what he calls a “breathcrystal” lodged “Deep / in the timecrevasse.”22 The ubreathcrystalMcould be frozen and likely archaic, but still has the potential to signify. There is a sense that breath must travel through the “noem,” through the oblivion o f ice and snow, and be dug out from the depths o f time, and only then might it stand as wyour unalterable / testimony.”23 These poems by Celan and readings by Derrida are examples o f what it means to attend to the formal existentiality o f the poem itself. Such reading involves questions about the durability and longevity o f singularities with­ out guarantees and considers how a device or trope might maintain or fail to retain its functionality. This does not mean exactly that one correlates the poem to the existential drama o f the human, which might imply that one would anthropomorphize every trope and the poem itself. To understand the existential conditions o f how poems are constructed for different short and long terms, one need not assume that “the poem” has a special role in the fate o f humanity. Rather, reading the existentiality o f devices as they appear in the poem emphasizes how, in the longer history o f the lyric as a genre, lyric poems can register the significance o f such speech acts without guarantees and possibly without any readers. As we see in Celan and in Derrida5s reading, the lyric as a genre must always grapple with being between poem and Knoem.wTo be between poem/noem is the existential condition o f the poem and requires readers to inquire at the same time into the meaning or “aboutness” o f the poem and how long that aboutness can endure. I think this insight implies to the genre o f poetry

11 Paul C dan , Breathturn into Tim rstead: The Collected Later Poetry^ trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar, Straus and Ciiroux, 2014), 19. 41 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

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generally: it is the condition o f the poem to be aware that there may a condition o f no more poems. Derrida^ writings on Celan pursue the varieties o f singularity in his poem and also what happens when those singularities are exposed to demands o f repeatability and the transience o f the archive. A singularity must lose itself, break itself, alienate itself in order to be knowable, but there are no assurances at all that this broken and lost figure will retain its sense o f singularity or remain legible. Lyric poems are formally different in terms o f the function o f address from the epic, whose readership histori­ cally is tied to the fate o f a specific people and a political institution, and the dramatic, which is constituted by its live performance for an audience. The structure o f the lyric poem requires it to be open-ended, to always be in search o f reader, to risk itself in the openness o f an encounter, and thus to risk its own death, as Derrida realizes: I believe that all Celan's poems remain in a certain way indecipherable, retain some indecipherability, and the indecipherable can either call end­ lessly for a sort o f reinterpretation, resurrection, or new interpretative breath, or, on the contrary, it can perish or waste away once more. Nothing insures a poem against its own death, either because the archive can always be burnt in crematoria or in flames, or because, without being burnt, it can simply be forgotten, or not interpreted, or left to lethargy. Oblivion is always possible.24

When does indecipherability enable the existence o f the poem, and when does it annul it? Because poems retain some indecipherability or illegibility, they call for reading and interpretation in the first place. And because a poem cannot be exhausted in one reading or with one meaning, a poem always is marked by the question o f when it will be read again. Writing that is completely legible and interprerable, if such a thing could exist, would present itself as instantly functional information and direct command. Yet even information must be moved, transferred, and stored, and none of these processes or archives can be said to be immune to error, perishing, or wasting away. Derrida s concept o f ^arche-writing55 thus does not affirm that everything textual is retraceable according to the logic o f the trace, but rather that the ontological condition o f writing always takes on an exis­ tential risk, such that the interpretability and durability o f any form or instance o f writing will always be in question. This argument for attending to the existential formalism in the poetics o f Derrida dovetails with recent debates in poetics over what has been M Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 107.

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called “New Formalism.”25 There is no one single argument for a return to formalist thinking, but a number o f scholars have been attracted to issues o f structuralist poetics, genre theory, and even New Critical close reading techniques in order to reinvent reading methods that have seemed deva­ lued by literary critical methods that favored diagnosing a politics o f the (human) subject or deferred literary context to historical context. Within arguments for New Formalism, a split has emerged between theorists o f poetry who seek a historically specific and detailed account o f poems and poetic models and theorists who seek a broader, transhistorical under­ standing o f what poems are and can do. These different agendas have most often centered on whether to treat the specific genre o f lyric poetry as fairly consistent in structure across more than 2,00 0 years o f its usage. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, in The Lyric Theory Reader, insist that the concept o f the lyric elaborated in the twentieth century does not apply to how poets and readers in previous periods made and circulated poems. The task o f a New Formalist, then, is to trace uthe history o f lyric reading,5,26 which primarily involves tracing the history o f the usage o f the term “lyric” and its implication in poems. However, from the opposite spectrum, Jonathan Cullers Theory o f the Lyric seeks to elaborate uthe long tradition o f lyric,5, by which C，33 Derrida came to see his own philosophical writings as susceptible to the same anxiety over readership as he saw in Celan5s poetics. Each work, Derrida believed, needed to attend to the singularities o f a text or argu­ ment, and also create a singular event for the reader. I f l had invented my writing, I would have done so as a perpetual revolution. For it is necessary in each situation to create an appropriate mode o f exposition, to invent the law o f the singular event, to take into account

Ibid., 46. }, Ibid., 47. ('clan's "Mcricliajj，' \pct\h is p ro v iJa l as an appendix in Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 181.

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the presumed or desired addressee; and, at the same time, to make as if this writing will determine the reader, who will learn to read (to MliveM ) some­ thing he or she was not accustomed to receiving from anywhere else.34 Philosophical concepts and arguments are also events beholden to the vicissitudes o f dates. Derrida felt that philosophy too had to take it upon itself the act o f leaving messages, as if in a bottle, for unknown readers. This did not mean one should collapse poetry and philosophy together, but rather one had keep sending bottled messages, to multiply exchanges between the two modes o f thinking and writing to learn from each other5s condition. Derrida saw the philosophical text as reaching out to readers while hoping to survive the author, a text taking leave o f death while searching for life. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it5s something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, “proceeds” from me， unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing. It^ the ultimate test: one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how? Will there even be any heirs?35 Deconstruction^ singularity remains both legible and still ciphered, that is, re-readable and perishable. Derrida did not tie his thinking to the task of how to systematize thought or provide a transcendental analytic for being. Rather, here thinking begins when being and meaning are not guaranteed, when the given is not always assumed to be given. Such broken singulars do not need fixing exactly, but they do need to be attended to by some reader somewhere. Works Cited Attridge, Derek. The Singularity o f Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bogel, Fredric V. New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Celan ，Paul. 丁ranslated by Rosmarie Waldrop. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

34 Jacques Derrida, Learning to L ive Fin ally: The Last Interview , trans. Pascal-Anne Braulr and Michael Naas (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 31. 35 Ibid., 32-33.

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Poems o f Paul Celan. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1995.

Breathtum into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry. Translated by Pierre Joris. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Culler, Jonathan. Theory o f the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Edited by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Acts o f Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics o f Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Translated by Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Freud, Sigmund. Three Contributions to the Theory ofSex. Translated by Abraham A. Brill. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Gadamer on Celan: ( (1986a, 51, translation modified). By deconstructing HegeFs distinction between sign and symbol, de Man has also dismantled the hierarchy that Heidegger establishes between thinking as memory/recollection on the one hand, and science (technics, writing and literature) on the other. The de Manian interpretation ''delineates a gesture quite different from that o f Heidegger,” concludes Derrida, “by recalling that the relation o f Gedachtnis to technique, artifice, writing, the sign, etc., could not be one o f exteriority or heterogeneity. This amounts to saying that the exteriority or the division, the dis-junction, is the relation (109). This brings us to the second aspect, which involves the figure o f allegory. De Man’s development on allegory in “ Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s (Heidegger, 1968, 144; Derrida, 1986a, 92). In the interview ^Istrice 2: Ick biinn allhier,n Derrida explains that there are two undissociable experiences o f the heart in his use o f Mlearn by heart.M u

Es ist alles andersn (1962) is first translated by John Felstiner as all D ifferen t. . . Hin his Selected Poems and Prose o f P a u l Celan (2000, 205-09), translated by Michael Hamburger as ''Kverything's Different . . .,,5 and included in the revised and expanded edition o f Poems o f P au l Celan (2002,1995-99). M " ("I'] he name o f Osip walks up to you, and you tell him/what he knows already, he takes, he accepts it From you, with hands/you detach an arm from his shoulder, the right, the left/you attach your own in its place, with hands, with lingers, with lines/ - what was severed joins up again - /there you have It, so take it, there you li;ivc them both/ ihc name, the name, the hand, the hand/ so take them, keep llicni as a pledge/ lie takes ii (00, iiml you l»;>vr/;jg;iin what is yours, what was hisM(Celan, 2002,195).

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One involves the Heideggerian understanding of poem, avery close to thinking —to the gift, to the coming or the event, to memory or gratitude/1 and the other the mechanic faculty o f memorization (1990, 324). Heidegger, he adds, would “have more difficulty” including the latter in his definition o f poetry {Dichtun^} because he would associate it with a fallen state o f automaricity or technicity, or at least o f aanimality5> (314). In his approach to poetry, Derrida has largely surpassed Heidegger in placing the figure o f animal and the mechanic at the core o f the Kessence>, o f poetry, especially in his last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. One question, however, remains: does poetry need inscriptions? In What Is Called Thinking, Heidegger points out an ^abysmal difference，> between Occidental poetry and European literature: K these poems are not properly literature. Literature is literally that which is written down and rewritten {couche par ecrit et reproduii)^ and whose destination is to be accessible to the public for reading' (cited in Derrida, 1986a, 151). What about poetry? Does poetry, in its essence, need to by lain down by words? It is perhaps here that we encounter the ultimate undecidable for Derrida. In his earliest writings on the subject, dedicated to one o f the most opaque and important poets, Antonin Artaud,14 Derrida is already interested in the words “stolen”（ 如故 An?从 ）tw ic e :办似W by the prompter [soujfleur) and heard by the audience, having 3), 224-44. See also Arleen Ionescu, aSpacing Literature between Mallarm^, Blanchot and Derrida,Mparallax 21, no. 1 (2015): 58-78. 5 Jacques Derrida, ^Signature Event Context," in M argins o f Phibsophyy trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 329 ； see also Positions^ trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1981), 41, alluding to the double stance reading Mallarme in Dissemination. 6 Jacques Derrida, ^Letter to a Japanese Friend," trans. David W ood and Andrew Benjamin, in Psyche. Inventions o f the Other, ed. Peggy K am uf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, vol. 2 (Stanford, C A : Stanforil University Press, 2008), 1. 7 T he term is used by Lacan to designate a “conjunction o f the imaginary and the symbolic.” Str The Sem inar o f Jacques Lacan, Book X I ：The Four Fundam ental Concepts o f Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 118. Badiou's use o f Lacan^ technical concept becomes relevant in my discussion o f subtraction. 8 Despite Badiou's claim that the German philosopher Mis the last universally recognizable philo.so pher.MSee Alain Badiou, Being a n d Event, trans. Oliver Felrham (I.〇iui〇n: ('.ontinuum, 2005), 1.

From M allarm e to the Event: Badiou after D errida

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A closer precursor here would be Gillcs Dclcuze, for whom the task o f philosophy was to winvent concepts/' Such a conceptual focus departs from deconstruction^ stubborn resistance to univocal concepts, its mistrust toward structures and programs, a suspicion introduced by Derrida as early as the groundbreaking and well-known essay aStructure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse o f the Human Sciences.”9 Although Derridean deconstruction, pace his detractors, is not synon­ ymous with endless procrastination and ^sitting on the fence/510 one has to concede that the structural undecidability o f the critical moment, whose other name is differance, this wordeal o f aporia,>without which Kno decision would ever take place,w even ano responsibility . . . no event would take place . . . not even the place，”11 estranges it from Badiou’s ethico-political imperative to act fast, strongly and politically, that is to respond to urgency by “taking the plunge•” Nevertheless, the experience o f deconstruction as a faithful relation to figures o f singularity12 or the emphasis on夕/奶 (more than one/ no more o f one language) in which Derrida proposes to ofFer for once a “single definition o f deconstruction”13 is not far apart from Badiou’s conception o f being as the apure m ultiple,through which he works out the conditions o f a “universal singularity” in a truth procedure.14 Although Badiou’s claim that “ [a] truth procedure interrupts repetition”15 appears at odds with Derrida^ original iterability affecting the structure o f singularity and o f aeventuality,5 {evenementialite),16 the faithfuFs unconditional con­ version to the event producing an ^irreducible singularity],,I? for Badiou ends up sharing some analogies with Derrick’s machinic conception of 9 See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, W riting a n d D ifferencey trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 352. *0 In “Ethics and Politics Today,” Derrida emphasizes the necessity o f the “ interruption” o f reflection for responsible action to happen; see Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions an d Interviews, 1971-2001^ ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 2002), 296, 302. 11 Jacques Derrida, Resistances o f Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy K am u f et al. (Stanford, C A : Stanford University Press, 1998), 37. u Jacques Derrida, MFid^lite a plus d'un - meriter d^eriter ou la g^nealogie fait defaut,n Cahiers Intersignes 13 (Autumn 1998): 221. n Jacques Derrida, M em oires: F o r P au l de M an, ed. and trans. Cecile Lindsay ct al. (New York: Colum bia University Press, 1989), 15. 14 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul：The Foundation o f Universalism y trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) ，[卜14 and

'' Ibid., 11. ,f， Jacques D errid a,，lA C'crtain ImpossiMc* Possibility ofSaying the Event,Mtrans. G ila Walker, C ritical

Imfuiry 33 (Winter 2007): .|.ji 61. xr Alain B.idiou, I'.thics： An AVw/pon ihr lh u lrr\t,n u litivo fI\vii trans. and intr. Peter Hallward (London:

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blind faith.18 If Badious universalist philosophy is a uPlatonism o f the manifold” waged on the joint resources o f ontology (or philosophy) and mathematics (or scientific rationality), Derrida's plural singularity and generalizable inscription o f division-as-multiplication also challenges the Oneness, which is the principle o f identity in classical thinking. Even in Badiou’s “foundationalism,” as opposed to Derrida’s ceaseless interrogation o f the ，42 Thus both Badiou and Derrida recognize the necessity o f surprise, agrace>> or even a miracle in the structure o f eventuality. In order to take place, Badiou's event must be ^surprised by the paradox o f the multiple.，H3For Derrida, an event likewise ^implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatablew;44 indeed, it must arrive as “untimeliness o f the infinite surprise.”45

36 ,8 i9 41

Badiou, Being a n d Event, 192. 37 Ibid., 196. Badiou, l> designation o f a rupture within a known, given structure, for Derrida it is exemplified in the singular form o f a gift {don), forgiveness (pardon)y debt and duty, promise, hospitality, responsi­ bility, secrecy, decision (and, thereby, critique), invention, but also the miracle o f translation. With Kthe interruptive vitality o f the event,，5° is opened up what Derrida frequently called, from the late 1980s onward, ,: love; see Alain Badiou, M anifesto for Philosophyytrans. and ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State Univcrsiry o f New York Press, 1999).M
In Difficult Freedom. Translated by Sean Hand, 151-53. Baltimore, M D : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Llewelyn, John. “Where to Cut: Boucherie and Ddikatessen.” 7?打似n:/; Phenomenology Ap, no. 2 (2010): 161-87. Marin, Marie-Eve. wWorlds Apart: Conversations between Jacques Derrida & Jean-Luc Nancy.wDerrida Today 9, no. 2 (2016): 157-76. Muller, John P., and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore, M D : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Pease, Donald. ''Marginal Politics and T h e Purloined Letter,: A Review Essay/' Poe Studies (June 1983): 18-23. Poe, Edgar Allan, uSilence - A Fable.w In The Works o f Edgar Allan Poey 29-33. Volume 3. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott & Company, 1905. Royle, Nicholas. MPoetry, Animality, Derrida.55 In A Companion to Derrida. Edited by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawler, 524-36. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

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Ryan, Derek, wThe Question of the Animal in Flash'' In Virginia Woolfand the Materiality o f Theory: Sexf Animal, Life, 132-70. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Animal Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1988. Wooif, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929. Fltish: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.

CHAPTER

I

〇

D econstruction, C ollectivity, a n d W orld L iteratu re Jen H ui Bon Hoa

Striking a conciliatory note in her long-standing debate with David Damrosch over the pedagogical and scholarly project o f world literature, Gayatri Spivak writes: aFor me, the best reason for walking with David Damrosch is his plea for collectivity/51 Spivak makes clear at the same time, however, that the best reason not to walk with Damrosch is his pluralistic concept o f collectivity, which, as she has observed, ulets us all be selfinterested and provide for identitarian enclaves.M2 The question o f collec­ tivity, I suggest, is at once the core theoretical problem and stake o f world literature from a deconstructive perspective. This becomes clear in the objections that Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter, two o f the most promi­ nent practitioners o f a deconstructive approach to world literature, raise to DamroscK's project and their attempts to formulate an alternative. The vision of world literature Damrosch presents in What Is World Literature? and more recent texts is aligned with the basic principles o f the American Comparative Literature Association^ Bernheimer Report of 1993, which urged an updating o f the discipline to reflect a multicultural, globalized world.3 By facilitating access to non-Western texts through initiatives such as his multivolume Longman Anthology o f World Literature, Damrosch has sought to correct comparative literature's Eurocentric bias and to promote a canon that offers more ''windows on the world.”4 Alongside greater exposure for underrepresented cultures, Damrosch advocates a heightened focus on global connectedness, propos­ ing that the study o f world literature track the transnational circulation ol 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, KT he Stakes o f W orld Literature,Min A n Aesthetic Education in the Urn 〇 J G lobalization (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 2013), 464. 2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch, ^Comparative Literature/World Literature-： A Discussion,w in W orld Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (Hoboken, N J: Wili-y Blackwell, 2014), 374. 3 Charles Bernheimer, ed. Com parative Literature in theA geofM ulticulturalism . Baltimore, M D : Johns H opkins University Press, 1994. 4 D avid Damrosch, What Is W orld Literature^ N J: P nikvkmi Univcrsiry Press, 200O, if.

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texts and rewrite the histories o f national literary traditions in light o f the mobility o f influence. While few would deny the importance o f dismantling European and American exceptionalism, both Spivak and Apter take issue with the limitations o f a multiculturalist approach to the problem. Apter identifies two distinct tendencies at work, either ^toward reflexive endorsement o f cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been nichemarketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”5 The first o f these disregards difference, hitching the claim o f equality to that o f an essential sameness. As Roland Barthes observed of the liberal humanist affirmation o f a KGreat Family o f M an53: a[W]e are kept at the surface o f an identity, prevented by sentimentality itself from penetrating into that deeper zone o f human conduct, where historical alienation introduces those 'differences5 which we shall here call quite simply Injustices.”’6 Likewise, positing a “Great Family o f Literature” on the basis o f cross-cuhural commonalities o f literary form has the ideological efFect o f obscuring historical relations o f domination and uneven development. Moreover, as Barthes notes, it tends to reaffirm the static nature o f the existing order; and, indeed, the premise o f a universal literariness typically reproduces the aesthetic values o f the hegemonic culture, whereby non-Western texts are judged worthy o f inclusion in the canon based on their similarity to Western agreat works/5 Diametrically opposed to the first tendency Apter mentions, the second emphasizes difference as such. This can take either the form o f a culinary enjoyment of diversity, or a more politicized form that draws attention to the politics o f location in order to attack the universal status attributed to hegemonic values. In the latter case, non-Western traditions reveal the canonical construction o f literature to be an ideological expression o f Western hegemony by pointing to the very fact o f their difference and their exclusion from supposedly universal categories. While the unmasking o f false universals is indispensable to any critical concept o f collectivity, the problem with a multiculturalist approach is that it allies the politics o f location with identity politics and, consequently, grounds its resistance in a particularism that relativizes all universals into a system o f competing particularities and special interests. The efFect, ultimately, is a ghettoization o f knowledge on the basis o f the essentializing ' Em ily S. Apter, Against W orld Literature: On the Politics o f U ntranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013), 2. Rolaml Bartlics, uT hc Circat l*；unily o f M an," in M ythologiesy trans. Richard Howard and Annette I.;ivi*rs (New York: Hill .md W ； ing, 2〇n ), 197. Translation lightly modified.

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assumption that one both necessarily represents and can only represent the part o f the world from which one comes; as Spivak puts it, “we the ‘others’ are caught within our politics o f identity and can only offer as a substitute [to the Western canon] something coming from our own neck o f the woods.”78 Dispossessive Collectivism For Apter and Spivak, world literature^ unfulfilled promise lies ultimately in its capacity to imagine a globalized world beyond capitalism and its conceptual framework o f possessive individualism, which, they argue, is possible only to the extent that world literature takes its distance from identity politics. The relationship between identity and property is deeply entrenched. Historically developed in tandem with the concept o f the bourgeois legal subject, identity is grounded in a person’s possessions and is itself viewed as a form o f personal property. This is evident in the foundational documents o f bourgeois liberal democracy, such as the Declaration o f the Rights o f Man and the Citizen. More surprisingly, the idea o f self-ownership also undergirds Marx's radical critique o f this society, notably in the theory o f alienation that presents human essence “species-being” - as the rightfUl and originary property o f which humanity is dispossessed under conditions o f capitalism. Therefore, while a world literature oriented around what Apter calls dispossessive collectivism is naturally sympathetic to the Marxist tradition, it cannot adopt a Marxist framework without rethinking its reliance on the concept o f identity. Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1983 essay “The Inoperative Community” sought to tackle this very problem. In response to the implosion o f the left in France after May 1968, Nancy called for a radical revision o f the communist project and, in particular, its central concept o f community. Drawing from Maurice Blanchot5s reflections on the desoeuvrement or which is her translation o f bajey khorochy a term Rabindranath Tagore used to describe comparative literature. She proposes the potlatch as a figure for the stakes o f world literature12 because Mthe uncertain intimacy open to ethical alterity is 4wasteful/5,13 World litera­ ture^ promise lies in staging experiences o f othering that can only truly take place without reserve. World literature initiates us into the perspective o f planetarity when, for example, it interrogates European periodizations, genres, and other categories used to bolster Europe^ claim on modernity and relegate other parts o f the world to “tradition,” a euphemism for premodernity or ahistoricity.14 Spivak scathingly contrasts world litera­ ture^ Bataillan general economy or will to dispossession with the t£tax 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death o f a D iscipline (New York: Colum bia University Press, 2003), 72. 11 Ibid. 11 Sec Spivak, " I'Ih' Slakes o f W orld Literature,** 464. M Spivak and D am rosdi, " ( IcunpiiriHivc I.itcraturc/World Literature,M377. H l;or a disuiNsion oi lin' prohlrm "m roi lim n o lo g y ,se e Apter, Against W orld Literaturey 57-69.

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deductible write-offs o f purchased virtue” embodied by the emergence o f an industry o f world literature anthologies, compiled by North American academics and distributed by for-profit textbook publishers.1516 Apter s discussion o f originary dispossession in Against World Literature spells out the relation between non-identitarian collectivity and Spivak5s figures o f expenditure without return and dwelling granted on loan. u〇ne reason why literary studies falls short as anti-capitalist critique,A p ter writes, ais because it insufficiently questions what it means to 'have a literature or to lay claim to aesthetic property/516 Approaching literature from the perspective o f translation, for Apter, disrupts the possessive and individualistic concept o f identity that shapes the way we conventionally construct the literary work as an object o f knowledge. She argues that the translated work, which is neither fully the property o f the author nor the translator, presents “a model o f deowned literature.”17 Translation here plays the role o f a Derridean supplement to the original, in the sense that it disrupts the very concept o f originality. By privileging translation, Apter reimagines the literary work as a site o f collaborative labor and ^collective, terrestrial property^ dissociated from the individual author, the nation, and other identitarian structures.18 Spivak and Apter both acknowledge their debt to Derrida^ analysis o f linguistic identity and national community in Monolingualism o f the Other; or? The Prosthesis o f O rigin}9 Neatly summarizing the main claims o f his book, Derridas title presents two apparent paradoxes: one^ wown，5 lan­ guage as a locus of otherness and the origin as addendum. Taking a rare autobiographical approach, Derrida explores the impossibility o f identity through his relationship to French, the language that constitutes his sense o f cultural belonging and that, therefore, he might be inclined to consider in some way his language. He discovers, however, that the relation of belonging is not reversible; while humanity may be said to belong to language, language does not belong to humanity. In terms resonant with Spivak5s planetarity, Derrida describes his relationship to French as one of dwelling: uM y monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me.，，2c> The French language, for him, is an ''absolute habitat [milieu absolti\n in the sense that it conditions his very subjectivity: UI would not be myself 15 16 19 10

Spivak and Damrosch, ''Comparative Literature/World Literature/* 375. Apter, Against W orld Literature, 15. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. See Spivak ， Z)似必 o f a D iscipline, 83； Apter, Against W orld Literature, 15. Jacques Derrida, M onolingualism o f the Other; or, The Prosthesis o f O rigin, trans. Patrick Mcn.s；ih (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1.

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outside o f it,J —nor, indeed, would anything else in the world be itself: Mit dictates even the ipseity o f all things to mc.MZ, Everything Derrida is and knows arises from “his” language. “ Yet,” he continues， “ it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to speak.,J22 As Spivak writes o f the planet, language is given only won loan.>, Language resists assimilation onto the order o f identity and, by the same token, resists possession. Thus, in a refrain that punctuates the book, Derrida concludes: ^I only have one languageyyet it is not mine.n2i It was, Derrida relates, his childhood experience in colonial Algeria that brought him initially to see monolingualism “in the species o f alterity,” to use Spivak5s expression. He found himself in a heteronomous relationship both to French and the non-French languages o f Algeria; both were equally languages o f the other. He describes, on one hand, the ''organized marginalization,J o f Arabic and Berber in everyday life, most notably at his lycee, where Latin and French were compulsory, while Arabic was, along with English, Spanish, and German， an optional “foreign” language and Berber was not acknowledged at all.24 On the other hand, French monolingualism (and national identity) were simultaneously imposed and withheld: French was imposed insofar as it was supposed to be his native language, yet withheld since its “source norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere.”25 丁he idemitarian structures o f mother tongue and motherland shape the conditions o f Derrida5s existence and yet are never fiilly habitable. At once overbearing and strangely absent, their presence is ghostly. Indeed, Derrida suggests that his ambivalent relationship to national identity was a key reference for the motif that has figured so prominently in his thought: wDeep down, I wonder whether one o f my first and most imposing figures o f spectrality, o f spectrality itself, was not France.”26 Opposing a traditional ontology that posits full, undivided presence as originary and opposes to it absence，multiplicity, and difference as derivative，Derrida’s “hauntology” takes the specter， with its undecidable play o f presence and absence, as the point o f departure. This idea emerges clearly in his critique o f Abdelkebir Khatibi's account o f his relation to the “mother tongue.” Taking issue with Khatibi’s phrase “my mother tongue has lost me,5,27 Derrida suggests that the loss Khatibi laments does not modify a prior wholeness and that the claim o f natural possession under­ lying the concept o f the mother tongue Cmy mother tongue^) is illusory. Ibid.

17 ( !iu\l in

" H

z . K»-

”

ll 、 ul.

H Ihul.. \H.

15 Ibid., 41.

26 Ibid., 42.

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J E N H U I BON HOA

The originary dispossession o f language is, for Derrida, an u, however, since this autonomy is achieved only in the imagination. The relation to the Law ''remains necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at bottom, the essence o f any law.>，31 Whereas this first set o f implications exposes the heteronomous nature o f identity, the second highlights the conditions o f resistance to heteronomy. Derrida describes his relationship to his French identity and monolingualism as a “solipsism” that precedes the self —that “ is myself before me,，3Z - and the condition o f being held hostage demeure^ or with a permanence associated with dwelling. These metaphors figure a heteronomy that underlies the order o f the same in its most primordial and hermetic forms. Rejecting the fantasy of recovering a lost wholeness is, for Derrida, the first step toward a viable politics. Avoiding the ''symbolics o f appropriation”33 shared by nationalist and Marxist discourses alike is crucial to ensuring that resistance efforts do not inadvertently reproduce the logic o f the system they oppose, or as Spivak puts it, to preventing “failed revolutions.”34 Asserting a universal condition o f dispossession and heteronomy, however, runs the risk o f occulting the reality o f global inequality. While

28 Ibid., 27. 29 Ibid” 25. 30 Ibid., 3931 Ibid. 32 Ibid. ， 2. ” Ibid .， 64. 34 Gayatri Chakxavorty Spivak, “ R e 出inlcing Comparativism，” in 仰m G lobalization (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 2 〇h ), 476.

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Derrida acknowledges the danger o f neglecting ^determinate expropria­ tions against which a war can be waged on quite different fronts,Mhe discusses neither the specifics o f such a war, nor what role deconstruction might play in it.35 The task that remains, then, is to link up the ontology o f dispossession with a politics that addresses determinate acts o f disposses­ sion. Transposed to the discourse o f world literature, this means theorizing the connection between conceiving o f uworId，> in terms o f planetarity on one hand, and continuing to address the politics o f location on the other. The goal o f this exercise is, in Judith Butler’s formulation, to construct “ethical and political ways o f objecting to forcible and coercive dispossession that do not depend upon a valorization o f possessive individualism” 一 in short, to articulate a politics o f location that goes beyond identity politics, or what Derrida might call a hauntopological politics o f location.36 Situatedness and Exemplarity Derrida5s cursory treatment o f actual struggles in Monolingualism o f the Other is perhaps all the more curious since he introduces his argument with an account o f a historical act o f expropriation. Early on in the book, Derrida relates a formative childhood event: when he was ten years old, in October 1940, the Vichy regime stripped Jews living in Algeria o f their French citizenship for a period o f three years. It was a moment o f collective anamnesis according to Derrida, recalling Algerian Jews to the disturbingly recent origins o f their recognition by the French state under the Cremieux decree o f 1870. Far from a natural and inalienable property o f their existence, French identity was revealed to be something that Mhad been lent to them as if only the day before.J，37 The general claims about language and identity Derrida advances are thus self-consciously traced back to an unquestionably uncommon experience. To bolster what might seem to be a tenuous form o f evidence, Derrida elaborates a theory o f exemplarity that stands as an alternative to the logic o f representation and indicates how to connect the politics o f location with non-identitarian political ontology. Derrida presents himself - or, rather, a first-person narrator with ^only a vague resemblance to myselfJ - as Kthe exemplary Franco-Maghrebian.,，3S This caricatural self-staging enables him at once to bear witness, as a FrancoMaghrebian, to a certain experience o f dispossession, while recalling us to the ,s Derrida, M onolingualism o f the Othery 63. i58 then to be a sympathizer means to occupy a liminal position between ，3 Derrida explains: The question deserves perhaps to be put the other way: could one address oneselfin general if already some ghost did not come back? I f he loves justice at least, the “scholar” o f the future, the “intellectual” o f tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.4

As the book5s title makes clear, Derrida sets out not to repeat the mistake or fault o f Marx, Freud, Heidegger and other predecessors, whose work, nonetheless, as he underlines time and again, is indispensable for his own scholarly path. After dedicating the book to Chris Hani, the popular hero o f the resistance against South Africa5s apartheid who had been assassinated twelve days before the original version o f Specters o f M arx was given as a lecture at a conference in Riverside,5 Derrida writes in his aexordium，>:

1 Jacques Derrida, Sfurtcrs o f M arx: The State o f the D ebt, the Work o f M ourning, an d the N ew InternutionaL nans. I V ^ y K ； hiih I (N rw York: Routledge, 1994), 220. 1 Ibid. ' Ibid. '* Ihitl., ))\, ' Ihiil., xv xvi.

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^If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations o f ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name o f ) 奶Z iC ’ “No ethics” and “ no politics” are “possible and thinkable z n d ju s f without the recognition o f Kthose others who are no longer,J or those Hwho are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born.,,22 Justice, in the name o f which one deconstructs the law, is not deconstructible. So you have two heterogeneous concepts, if you want, two heterogeneous ends, the law and justice. Yet, despite this absolute radical heterogeneity between the two, they are indissociable. And, in different contexts, I reformalise: the relationship between two terms, the two poles o f this struaure, which are absolutely, radically heterogeneous and nevertheless indissociable. Why? Because if you want to be just, you have to improve the law.23

To ^improve the law/5 it will be necessary to get to work. While, as Christoph Menke writes, the udeconstructive unfolding o f the tension between justice and law” occurs “in the name o f an experience that no political stance can capture,，J such an unfolding ^nevertheless affects any politics as its border, and therefore as its interruption.”24 19 George Lipsitz, back cover o f Avery Gordon, :这 / Im agination (Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1997). 20 Attridge, "Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning o f Literature,5> 26. 21 See Jacques Derrida, KAvowing - T he Impossible: 'Returns/ Repentance, and Reconciliation,** rrans. G il Anidjar, in Elisabeth Weber, L ivin g Together: Jacques D errida s Comm unities o f Violence a n d Peace (New York: Fordham, 2013), 18-41. 11 Derrida, Force o f Law , 255. It is in the spirit o f such urgency that Derrida was an active and outspoken critic and commentator on issues such as South Africa's apartheid, the Israeli—Palestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death jx'iialty and the so-called war on terror. 2, D errida, UA D iscussion witl> |;kijiic s n c rrid a .w

M C h r i s t o p h M c n k c . /i i f rin r dcr Dekonstruktion, i n A n s e l m I I ; w c i k . u n p (l i.iiik lm 1 S u l i i k . i m p , •»>*).}). 286.

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Derrida was drawn to literature, because it materializes an aunfolding o f the tension between law and justice.，> Like no other discursive practice, insisting on justice for the living and their ghostvS, literature can welcome what Derrida describes as uthe law o f the phantom, the spectral experience and the memory o f the phantom, o f that which is neither dead nor living, more than dead and more than living, only surviving, the law o f the most commanding memory, even though it is the most effaced and the most efFaceable, but for that very reason the most demanding.>，25 Like no other discursive practice, literature gives voice to the amost effaced and most effaceabk” memory, even though and because it is the “most demanding,” even “commanding.” This may also explain why one “striking feature” o f Derrida’s responses to literary texts, as Attridge observes, is Ktheir predominantly affirmative mode: they affirm what they take the texts to be doing in their most challenging operations, they bring this quality or movement out into the open (as far as it is possible to do so), they celebrate it, they put it to work, they invite a further response to it. By contrast, the mode o f his writing on philosophical texts may seem neutral or even antagonistic.”26 In contemporary American literature the “potency” and “economy o f literarure，5 understood along Derridean lines is at play and at stake with breath-taking strength and equally powerful tenderness in Toni Morrison5s novels. Even though to my knowledge, Derrida never published a text on Toni Morrison5s oeuvre, her writing, as I show in what follows, corre­ sponds in a singularly germane way to a number o f traits that Derrida reflects on in his thinking on “literature.” In Morrison’s novels, “the most effaced and the most efFaceable,5 memory, the multilayered and suppressed memory o f slavery, returns as the “most commanding” and “demanding.” A conversation between Derrida’s reflection on literature and Morrison’s writing is thus productive and promising, as, for example, Jeffrey Weinstock has shown.27 Morrison states categorically that a certain “living together” and a direct address guide the entirety o f her writing: If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn't about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about 15 Derrida, Force o f Law t 259. Attridge, “ Introduction，” 20-21. 17 In this chapter, I consider only a small selection o f the vast number o f scholarly analyses o f Morrison's work. JefFrq? W einstock^ essay offers a lucid reading o f M orrison with Derrida, to which I return. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, wTen Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved's Epitaph,55 Arizona Quarterly: A Jo u rn a l o f Am erican Literature, Culture, a n d Theory 6 1, no. \ (Autumn 2005): i}6 .

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anything, I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams - which is to say yes, the work must be political. It must have that as its thrust. That5s a pejorative term in critical circles now: if a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow itJs tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is tainted . .. It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.18 If the “best art is political” and is “about you,” it is, by definition, concerned with the community, with the question o f how to live together well. That means that far from being an idle pastime, literature, fiction, a novel has work to do. According to Morrison, a novel ^should be beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work. It should have something in it that enlightens; something in it that opens the door and points the way. Something in it that suggests what the conflicts are, what the problems are. But it need not solve those problems because it is not a case study, it is not a recipe.,>29 It is neither a sociological study nor a philosophical or moral treatise. It is able to disrupt the present and presence and their (chrono) logical discourse. Morrison’s fiction ventures into such disruption in order to confront the aforementioned “terrible price” and in order to invent other modes o f “living together” from which the “needy dead”30 would not be banished. The immense challenge is to confront a past so violent that it is ,) a failure: uit didn't work: many readers remain touched but not moved.5,38Again, the notion appears that a novel has work to do. The task, the work of the noveK is not just to wtouchMthe readers, but “move” them, which, along the lines o f Morrison’s argument that the best art is political, would include moving them to a different commitment for the community in which they live. What is at stake is to move readers, which is similar to Gayatri Spivak5s description o f what ueducation in the Humanities attempts to be/5namely 0Such a rearrangement is all but aan uncoercive rearrangement o f desires/'37*394 guaranteed. It is more improbable than likely. It is “impossible” in the sense Derrida uses this word: highly questionable, impracticable, unpre­ dictable, incalculable. Seen from what already wis,> and what is considered 4p o s s ib le ,it is not. Literature, however, is a privileged place for the impossible to happen because its labor lies in conjuring a “rearranged” desire into occurrence through the invention o f language. For Derrida, the promise o f literature lies in the fact that in the process o f allowing language to wget out o f the way,J， it may not only change language, but also, ^in changing language, change more than language^: Even if that isn’t a moral or political duty (but it can also become one), this experience of writing is “subject” to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form o f acts o f writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that o f promises, orders, or acts o f constitution or legislation which do not only change language, or which, in changing language, change more than language . . . In his or her experience o f writing as such, if not in a research activity, a writer cannot not be concerned, interested, anxious about the past, that o f literature, history, or philosophy, o f culture in general. S/he cannot not take account o f it in some way and not consider her- or himself a responsible heir, inscribed in a genealogy, whatever the ruptures or denials on this subject may be.4° 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. ,9 Gayarri Chakravorty Spivak, uRij»hting W rongs,5* The South A tlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/ Summer 200,}): Spiv.ik tomimicv: ulf you are not persuaded by this simple description, nothing I s;»y ahoui ilu* I lum.miiirs will movr vou." 40 D crriilii, " I liis Snatip.c Insrih iiinu ," \v

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Literature, then, is the form o f discourse that performs something “impossible” ：to provoke an “ uncoercive rearrangement o f desires” through “kidnapping” the reader into extremely “ inhospitable terrain” such as the vast uterrain,5 o f slavery and its legacy. Derrida’s “hauntoiogy” has potentially far-reaching consequences for a political theory and practice. His reflection on the ufinal solutionJ>can be justly invoked for the immense question o f what Avery Gordon has called the 'lingering inheritance o f racial slavery,Min Jeffrey Weinstock^s words, a “social trauma that lives on in American culture”41: I ask myselfwhether a community that assembles or gathers itself together in order to think what there is to be thought and gathered of this nameless thing that has been called the “final solution” [and one could justly invoke here wsIaveryMor Kthe Middle Passage5'] does not have to show, first of all, its readiness to welcome the law of the phantom, the spectral experience and the memory of the phantom, of that which is neither dead nor living, more than dead and more than living, only surviving, the law of the most commanding memory, even though it is the most effaced and the most effaceable, but for that very reason the most demanding.42 Morrison’s fiction makes “demancis” on the reader by “kidnapping” him and her, throwing him or her “ ruthlessly into an alien environment” that is hospitable to the wchaos o f the needy dead/743 and thus to the ghosts that haunt our present, but also the ghosts that haunt the ghost herself. ‘‘Beloved， ，is, in Morrison’s novel, the name on the tombstone o f a dead girl, o f whom the reader never learns the living name. As Caroline Rody succinctly writes, the term aexpresses at once the greatest anonymity and the dearest specificity>，44 (a feature Derrida explores repeatedly in his 41 Gordon, Ghostly M atters, 139 ；Weinstock, MT en Minutes for Seven Letters,w 136. W einstock also engages Gordon's book. 42 Derrida, Force o f Law , 259. 43 Morrison, Beloved, xix. 44 Caroline Rody， quoted in Weinstock, “Ten Minutes for Seven Letters,” 132. "Weinstock continues: KIt is the private name each person gives to his or her most intimate relations and personal treasures. However, in addition to serving as *an address conferred by the lover on the object o f affection,J the term ^beloved* also names everyone in the impersonal rhetoric o f the Church and, as noted by May G . Henderson, is ^ sed in matrimonial and eulogistic discourse, both commemorative, linguistic events: the former prefiguring the future, the latter refiguring the past* (67). In the N e arly Beloved1 o f the marriage ceremony and the funeral eulogy, the term beloved1 unites the celebrants or mourners in a present moment o f anticipation or commemoration. In its public contexts, it functions simultaneously in two capacities, marking both the specific relationship o f the affianced to each other or the bereaved to the deceased, and the general relation o f the Church to all. In its various uses, the term thus connects public with private, the intimacy o f the individual love relationship with communal gatherings o f both celebration and grief. T h e term also structures a tension between the timeless present o f one's most intimate encounters and the communal marking o f time through the rememoration o f significant events in the lives o f individuals particularly the joining o f marriage and the passing o f death. T he use o f the term, at least in its

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reflections on the proper name). I hc violence o f Beloved^ death and the brutality o f slavery that caused it make her haunt the lives o f her mother, her brothers, and o f all their relations. It is o f her, the returned and disappeared ghost, but also o f the ghost that haunts the ghost, that Morrison writes: KDisremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name?”45 Beloved’s memory is, indeed, “ the most effaced and effaceable,” and, as Morrison’s book powerfully shows， “ the most demanding•” So unbearably demanding that, in the end, her apparition is chased back into invisibility: wIt was not a story to pass on.5,46 The challenge that Derrida^ thought and Morrison’s fiction address to us is to realize the need to “learn,” from the other, from the nameless, from the phantom, how to address ourselves to her; how to learn her name with the keen awareness that looking for that name and learning it bears in itself the risk o f “losing，” forgetting, betraying it in its singularity. As Avery Gordon and others have shown, in the novel Beloved, ^Beloved the ghost’s double voice speaks not only o f Settle’s dead child but also o f an unnamed African girl lost at sea, not yet become an African-American. (丁he book’s memorial dedication reads simply ‘Sixty Million and more.， ） However, neither Sethe nor the others can perceive that the ghost that is haunting them is haunted herself.,，47 Jeffrey Weinstock succinctly summarizes the task, linking it to Derrida's Specters o f Marx: The question that Derrida raises here - and that Beloved forcefully engages - is the question o f how to live with these spirits, victims o f brutal violence, victims o f the Middle Passage. How does one live with a history or an inheritance that is too painful or shameful to be remem­ bered - one that an individual or a community or an entire culture desperately wishes to forget - and yet which is too important to be forgotten? How can one do justice to the dead and, if this is the task that is required to live justly, or to learn to live at all, is learning to live even possible? For Derrida, the opening o f the future as something other than a repetition o f the present is dependent precisely upon the work of mourning, and, importantly, on mourning that never succeeds fully in working through or domesticating the trauma o f loss, mourning that fails in uintrojecting,5 the absent loved one. The absence o f the other remains public contexts, thereby marks a vacillation, a wavering in time, the fullness o f a present marked by a past - and an openness to a future beyond the event.MWeinstock, *Ten Minutes for Seven Letters,11132. 45 Morrison, Beloved, 274. 46 Ibid., 274-75. 47 Gordon, Ghostly M atters1 140.

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and this absence, this loss, can never be filled with words, can never itself be articulated completely.48

There is absence, and there is the ineffable, there is silence. But for Morrison, the writer^ responsibility is to Mshape a silence while breaking it.,，4S>There is silence by the millions - as Beloved reminds the reader even before the first page, wsixty million and morew- one by one. For them, the destruction is absolute. To a certain degree, the ushaping，5o f such silence is a betrayal o f the victim, because it runs the risk o f soothing and thus undermining the absoluteness o f the destruction. Literature, then, wit­ nesses to that betrayal too. There is no room here for the ^comfort o f pity.55 But the silence stemming from Pecola’s “psychological murder” whose damage is utotal，，5° is shaped in order not to lose them and her to utter oblivion. While The Bluest Eye chronicles Pecola^ “journey to destruction” (wCouple the vulnerability o f youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.M) and stepping winto madness,” leaving her at the end o f the novel “searching the garbage,” 51 Beloved starts after the sealed destruction, the murder o f a child, chron­ icling the surviving o f ^memories that are too brutal, too debilitating, and too horrifying to register through direct historical or social science narratives,Min both senses o f who or what survives and who or what is survived. The novel, again, has some work to do. As Beloved shows with powerful and heart-breaking tenderness, to use a formulation by Derrida, aeven if one wanted to, one could not let the dead bury the dead/552 Beloved cannot bury herself as the murder victim, and she cannot bury the dead by whom she herself is haunted: the nameless and uncounted usixry million and more.” T o quote Beloveds narrator, ''somebody had to be saved, but unless Denver [Beloved^ surviving teenage sister] got work, there would be no one to save, no one to come home to, and no Denver either. It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve.” 53 Something, then， needs to be done. In the case o f Beloved, most importantly two things need to be done, as Avery Gordon elaborates: First the ghost that haunts 124 Bluestone Road in 1873 will have to be evicted so that home can be moved finally from Sweet Home to 124. The ghost is 48 Weinstock, ^Ten Minutes for Seven Letters,M14 0-4 1. 49* M orrison, The Bluest Eye, xiii. 50 Ibid., x, 204. st Ibid., x, 206. 52 Derrida, Specters o f M arx, 174. 53 M orrison, Beloved, 252.

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nor living in the spirit world. It is living, ami not too graciously at that, in the real world of day jobs, burnt toast, sibling rivalry, sought-after love and companionship, adjudging neighbors, and something will have to be done about that . .. The second task involves confronting the trauma of the Middle Passage, confronting what readies down deep beneath the waters or beneath the symbolics of emancipation, free labor, free citizen. This trauma links the origin of Slavery with a capital S to the origin of modern American freedom, to the paradigmatic and value-laden operations of the capitalist market. This is a market whose exchange relations continue to transform the living into the dead, a system of social relations that funda­ mentally objectifies and dominates in a putatively free society. The Middle Passage is the decisive episode rhat establishes the amnesiac conditions of American freedom: emancipation as enslavement. In order to manage this ^remembering which seems unwise,wit will be necessary to broach carefully and cautiously the desires of the ghost itself. The ghost,s desires? Yes, because the ghost is not just the return of the past or the dead. The ghostly matter is that always Kwaiting for you,55 and its motivations, desires, and interventions are remarkable only for being current.54 In Morrison’s book, it is the community o f women who exorcises the ghost. It remains open how successful the exorcism may be for Sethe, her lover Paul D and her daughter Denver. As Derrida writes in Specters o f Marx, exorcism would need to occur anot in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome - without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out o f a concern for ju stic e^ US history post-Reconstruction and into the twenty-first century shows blatantly that the exorcism as described by Derrida has not yet successfully occurred in American society and politics. Again, Gordon’s succinct analysis is helpful: The ghost is not other or alterity as such, ever. It is (like Beloved) pregnant with unfulfilled possibility, with the something to be done that the wavering present is demanding. This something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had. The ghost always also figures this utopian dimension of haunting, encapsulated in the very first lines of Jacques Derrida's book on specters: wSomeone, you or me, comes forward and says: / would like to learn to livefinally.^6 S4 (lordon, (ihosily M iinn s, \(^ (^). s,: rather, given the existence o f marriage, people can think awhy donJt my panner and I get married, like X, Y, and Z did?w Thus far, I have looked at an exemplary theoretical controversy o f the past century. Another extremely important element is that Derrida, back in 1 DcrrUia * Scarlc

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1967 —when personal computers and the Internet were still far away — made a very strong claim in his Grammatology\ maybe books as an organic and complete totality a la Hegelian encyclopedia will come to an end, but what is about to begin is the boom o f writing. He made this claim when McLuhan was prophesizing the end o f writing, which - as we can easily see today - was far from the truth. Think o f our everyday lives, with our smartphones, tablets, laptops, smart watches. This boom, for reasons I will now clarify, can be best described as a KdocumedialrevolutionM: the med­ ium called to creating documents and, through them, social reality is writing, which is now revealing its full power, bringing to light character­ istics o f society, technology, and human nature that had so far remained hidden. Documediality Everybody thinks that the Web was a revolution, but the real question is what it is about and what consequences this entails. In order to under­ stand this, the concept o f “documediality” suggests that one should understand the technological revolution as a socio-anthropological revelation. The changes brought about by the Web are many, and they have been widely analyzed over the past few decades. Its greatest merit is to reveal the deep structures o f social reality, which were there long before the Web itself. Understanding the Web, therefore, means much more than analyz­ ing our tools o f communication. Suffice it to say that globalization does not depend on jets, but on writing —a technique that is older than the pyramids and yet is the only means to transfer not only physical objects but also social ones like money, laws, policies, and identities. And there’s more: writing, as well as recording in general, performs the miracle of constructing social objects (verba volanty scripta manent). Through the Web we can understand the true nature o f action and social reality, not by overestimating the gnoseological potential o f big data (as often hap­ pens), but rather by understanding that society cannot do without inscriptions and recordings, archives and documents, and the archetechnique o f writing. The boom o f writing prophesied by Derrida and realized by documediality suggests that the sphere o f documents - from economics to war, from bureaucracy to epidemiology - is where Foucault's ^governmentality” lies. It wouldn’t be the first time that a contingent construct reveals the necessary structures o f social ontology. Think o f capital as it was theorized by Marx, who recognized in an instance o f technology

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(the factory) the fundamental structure o f the social dynamic, and then more general aspects o f it independent o f social contingencies. What the Web does better than capital (which is merely an economic-social phenomenon limited to a part o f the world) is to reveal its globalized dimension, which offers resources for a much wider, deeper, and fully postcolonial knowledge that goes way beyond the dimension o f homo faber. After all, the revolution proposed by documediality is different from Kant’s Copernican revolution. The latter, in fact, was rather Ptolemaic, as it placed man in the center o f the universe. From the perspective o f documediality, instead, the answer to the question W what is man?” is to be sought in the question “what is society?” 一 as many philosophers have noted. Both questions then find their answer in another, fundamental question: “what is techne?” (which is less obvious). If you want to know the human soul you must look at the society man lives in, but if you want to understand the society man lives in you have to look at what technology he can use (even though very often it is technology that uses him). What the Web reveals is not the posthuman, but human essence. The documedial revolution rests on the following axioms: 1. The Web is mainly recording, not only communication. It doesn^ work only as a T V , a newspaper, or a radio, but also as an archive. 2. The Web is mainly action, not only information. It doesn’t merely archive knowledge, but it defines a space for social acts (promises, commitments, orders). 3. The Web is mainly production, not only transmission. It doesn^ merely transmit what already exists; it constructs new social objects (documents, institutions, transactions). 4. The Web is mainly real, not only virtual. It doesn5t merely provide a virtual extension to social reality; it progressively turns into the general backbone o f social reality (marginalizing traditional political and economic institutions). 5. The Web is mainly mobilization, not only emancipation. It doesn^ merely give its users new informative and expressive possibilities; it has turned into the tool to transmit orders and responsibilizations aimed at the performing o f actions. 6. The Web is mainly emergence, not only construction. It doesnJt merely realize the technical intentions o f its programmers and the collective intentionality o f the community it arises in; it develops based on its own autonomous finality that has to be understood. 7. The Web is mainly opacity, not only transparency. It doesn’t merely reveal the structures o f social reality; precisely because it reveals them (aaing as a transcendental, that is, a condition o f possi­ bility) it escapes iinmcdiaic knowledge.

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Documentality According to this axiomatic, documediality tries to outline the way in which new technologies reveal the deep structure o f humans and society and its institutions. This approach4 is articulated in three levels: the definition o f the structure o f social reality as documentality', the recognition o f the specific nature of social reality as mobilization; and the analysis o f the genesis o f society and intentionality as emergence. Documentality, mobili­ zation, and emergence thus constitute the first theoretical elements at the basis o f documediality. Documents as the foun dation o f social reality. As mentioned at the beginning o f this chapter, the thesis underlying the theory o f documental­ ity is that what keeps society together must be sought in the sphere o f the fixation o f actions and the construction o f social objects. In the perspeaive o f documentality these insights are systematized by the constitutive law o f social objects Object = Recorded Ac^\ a social object is the result o f a social act that takes place between at least two people, or between a person and a delegated machine, and that has the characteristic o f being recorded on some surface, including the minds o f the social agents. This constitutive law is articulated in four levels. 1. Recording is what allows for social objects - things like promises, bets, assignments, money, which require acts o f communication, but must set themselves as recordings, otherwise they would remain empty words. A stock exchange session without price lists, a marriage without registers, a sale without a contract, a trial without a sentence would all be nothing but frivolous exercises, and I doubt you would have bothered reading this chapter if you knew you^ forget everything you read. Indeed, the acts we produce acquire meaning only if inscribed, and once inscribed they are extremely powerful: think o f signatures deciding for war or peace, or typos causing stock market crashes. This is why documents are so crucial; this is why we queue to get them and are desperate if we lose them - this is why documentality is an important ingredient o f society. 2. There is another sense in which peopled deep motivations and initia­ tives depend on texts. The role o f documentality in the constitution of intentionality also concerns - in the most obvious and elementary sense the benefits coming from sharing plans in the management o f collective 4 Ferraris 2009 and 2014.

5 Ferraris 2005.

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intentionality. Acting on the basis o f written documents is the secret o f military efFectiveness, but more extensively it is the foundation o f social action, as demonstrated by the importance of hurcaucracy in the formation and management o f power. 3. More decisively, documentaliry is the condition for the genesis o f individual intentionality. It is nor true that first we have intentions that then can be fixated in documents. I hc opposite is true: the human being becomes such through an education that involves learning a language, rituals, and attitudes - i.e. document apparatuses that precede, not follow, the formation o f conscience and moral responsibility. 4. This becomes particularly evident in highly mediatized societies, as evidenced by the documedial revolution, which is the best observatory to grasp the dynamics o f documentality. Behaviors and feelings (consider the role o f literature, films, and songs in the definition o f love) are strongly oriented by documentality. M an as a m obilized anim aL The result o f this omnipresence o f docu­ ments, and above all o f their active value, is the fact that the funda­ mental nature o f humanity is not understanding, but action and mobilization. Imagine we are in the middle o f the night from Saturday to Sunday, a night traditionally devoted to rest. In the dead o f night, I wake up. I want to see what time it is and I obviously check my cell phone, which tells me that it is three o5clock. At the same time, I notice that someone has sent me an email. I cannot resist the curiosity, or better the anxiety (the mail concerns an issue at work), and that^s it: I read it and reply. I am suddenly working on Saturday night, no matter where I am. If there is one thing that the documedial revolution has revealed better than any historical event or technical apparatus, it is that we are mobilized animals, submissive and willing to act on command, with­ out understanding why. For us action is the fundamental value (what else, other than a need for action and recognition, might lead us to post contents on social media fo r freei). This isnt alienation - the transformation from rational animal into mobilized animal - but a revelation: we thought that in the beginning was thought, but the truth is that in the beginning was action. Pragmatism has understood the nature o f the human being as a mobilized animal and the deriva­ tion o f intentionality from action. James said that one is sad because one is crying aiul not via* v i t ,s； i . However, beyond pragmatism, the

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point is to focus on the technological implications o f this mobilization o f intentionality, and on the crucial role played by recording and archives. Technology as emergence. The thesis underlying the hypothesis o f emergence is that society derives from technology much more than it is constructed by social actors. The Web (as well as capital, power, etc.) is not something that is constructed, perhaps by some big brother: it emerges, as always happens with technology, following no specific plan or design. Once again, documediality proposes a Copernican revolution in which technology isnJt an extension o f man, but rather man is an extension o f technology. This is in line with an interpretation that has been widely supported in the twentieth century, even though the perspective o f documediality is characterized by a markedly positive view o f this determination. For documediality, this is no alienation o f human nature but rather a revelation o f its innermost truth. Let^ start from a trivial consideration, namely the fact that techno­ logical devices seem to develop in directions that in many cases are not those provided by their inventors. The inventor o f gunpowder had fireworks in mind, that o f the phone was looking for something like a radio and that o f the radio was looking for a phone; and yet, regardless o f their inventors, the devices have been following their own logic, which therefore, rather than being programmed and planned, has emerged. Like technology in general, the Web is not an alienation o f human nature - something that leads man astray from his supposed true self - but rather a revelation o f what a human being really is: a weak and dependent being that is structurally in need o f technology to be what it is. So, technology is both what makes up for our failings and what reveals the characteristics o f human nature. Technological emer­ gence is thus an anthropological revelation, in the sense that what emerges from technology is a specific feature o f the human being. Nobody expected the developments o f the wheel, fire, writing, or the Web, but each o f these techniques has helped culture to answer the question: what is man? Similarly, those who designed the first personal computers did not foresee in any way that it would transform the life of humanity, and whoever introduced text writing into mobile phones would never have thought that most telephone traffic would take place as writing.

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O f course you can always argue that technology and documents alone do not speak; you need humans to make them talk. I hc documedial perspec­ tive answers: humans alone do not speak either, you need other humans to activate the module o f language, and for this to happen there has to be a code, which is ultimately a document (the language must be a public language, which retains its meaning and is shared). The same holds for education, taste, will, and intentionality: the humanization o f humanity passes through processes o f training, imitation, and motivation that are essentially document-like. The great lesson to be learned in this respect from udeconstructionw consists in the need to recognize immediacy — starting from intentionality and seif-consciousness - as an effect and the result o f a mediation, rather than a cause. Documents and mobilizations in turn stem from technology. No transformation could take place without a recording, i.e. without the establishment o f a social memory. At first the latter is sedimented in rituales - external media needed to fixate memory in a society without writing. However, something like writing comes to be very soon: for example, take technical acquisitions like flint-working, i.e. a reification o f memory in artifacts. With the development o f writing, sociality evolves much more rapidly, and the document’s role is strengthened. In fact, as we have seen, they both fixate the actions, taking a prescriptive role, and coordinate them. Technology With rare exceptions, technology has generally been underestimated by philosophy, which has merely conceived o f it either as a simple vehicle o f alienation or as an autonomous power antithetical to the spirit. Technology, though, is what connects ontology (what there is) with epistemology (what we know). It is therefore not technical, but metaphysical. Derrida knew this, not because he had had the time to see mobile phones and the power of emails (which he refused to use), but rather because, ever since his very first steps in phenomenology, he had developed a reflection on technology as what overcomes the distinction between authentic and inauthentic, natural and artificial, technology and anthropology. Technology a n d anthropology. The first act o f the naked monkey is not the creation o f values or norms, but rather the construction o f technical apparatuses, as its most pressing need is to eat, protect itself, and keep warm. The first norms, as derived from technology, will appear much later.

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The Web is not one o f the many alleged alienations leading astray our (almost) perfect humanity: it is the revelation o f our true nature, in need of technology, dependent, much less free, and far more subdued than we are willing to admit. And this awareness has taught us to respond, with political action or moral choice, to the imperatives o f technology — which are mandatory only for those who think they are (usually for lack o f culture). We turn out to be animals in need o f technology, all too ready to exchange our imaginary freedom for real security and comfort. The human dependence on technology, therefore, is not a specific trait o f our age as is often claimed. Most o f all, the idea that humankind risks being replaced by machines seems meaningless, because the notion o f machine can only have a meaning in relation to humankind. Indeed, to what extent can human subjectivity be understood prescinding from technical apparatuses, as suggested by the theories o f the extended mind - and as implied by the classical descriptions o f the link between identity and memory? Conversely, to formulate an adequate theory o f identity and society, one has to think o f those not only in relation to humankind, but also by accounting for the technological and documedial system as an integral part o f a social ontology and o f an individual psychology. Ontology, epistemology, technology. It has been rightly noted that tech­ nological skill is what allows for the jump from apes to human beings, which therefore doesn^ happen with Homo sapiens (the rational animal) but with Homo abilis (the technological animal) —as genetic research has confirmed. This, though, is not just about the remote origins o f man, but also about his highest intellectual achievements, like mathematical reason­ ing. Euler claimed that the full power o f his mathematics was concentrated in the pencil with which he did his calculations. The denial o f the role o f technology seems to be the root o f all denials, starting from that o f the body in relation to the mind - if you think about the importance of pen and paper to the development o f thought, it is difficult to underestimate the importance of, say, gender differences. Without technology, there is no human nature. Thus, technology is not the antithesis o f the spirit, but its first manifestation: the spirit itself is technology. There is nothing in the brain to justify our difference from non human animals. Instead， there is much outside o f the brain. In particular, technology seems to be an excellent candidate to link ontology (what is in the world) and epistemology (our knowledge o f the world). In line with an argument that can be found pragmatism,

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phenomenology, and philosophy of technology, technology plays an essen­ tial role, and documediality aims at providing a complete theory o f it. Technology as competence without understanding• 了 he thkd importam aspect is that the true nature o f technology is competence (action, know­ how) without understanding. This circumstance, far from placing it in a subordinate position, makes o f technology an essential heuristic device: we act before thinking, and so we cud up finding new truths. Instead, understanding is related to analytical reitsoning within the sphere o f established knowledge. In other words, technology looks like the real presupposition o f a priori synthetic judgments, which Kant only formu­ lated analytically precisely because he did not take technology into account. Culture is deferred nature, nature is different culture, and the link between them is given by technology (this is the great lesson to be learned from pragmatism). What has been said against ^instrumental rationalityJ> seems to forget that reason as such is a tool. Technology can achieve a superior and surprising synthesis - a synthetic synthesis, rather than an analytic one. As unreflected competence, it is what underlies both the emergence o f the fundamental structures o f social ontology and the human psyche, and the development o f knowledge. In the beginning was technology: action comes before understanding, and inscription comes before intention. In the theory o f expression we find forms o f inscription (marks, drawings, traces) that take an expressive value then associated with a meaning. In the theory o f man, first o f all we encounter techniques revealing otherwise unexpressed human character­ istics ~ from the will to power to the love o f theory. In the theory o f society, we encounter organizational forms rooted in our animal past, which are then formalized and perfected into customs, rules, and documents —which later give rise to collective intentionality. This may seem an abstract theoretical statement, but it gets supporting evidence from the investiga­ tions promoted by udocumediality，>: observing the technological revolu­ tion - according to the reasoning that consists in going from the empirical condition to the transcendental structures that determine it - we can reach the a priori forms o f human nature and social reality. Exemplarity There is still one question to be answered: to what extent can archives (that seem intrinsically related ro the past) address the future? To put it differently, how can tlu* expression Marchives o f the future5> not be taken as an

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oxymoron? The fundamental concept to answer this question is that o f exemplarity, to be understood as the principle o f a transformation that, through a single case, allows for the formation o f a virtual cla^s, a series o f new possibilities—which is the basis o f the concept oParchive o f the fliture.” This, in an emergent perspective, means: without free actions there would be no freedom, without imprinted letters there would be no spirit, without repetition there would be no creativity. Culture - the archives o f the future is indeed the sphere in which this exemplarity programmatically unfolds, benefiting greatly from the boom o f writing and the documedial revolution. Exemplarity is not a return to the old canons, but the creation o f some­ thing new that perhaps is not yet understood, and that will become exemp­ lary. So the point is to ask ourselves questions such as: what are the good examples (exemplary actions, good practices) that can guide the formulation o f a praaical reason for the Web, that is, a not purely passive reception o f what emerges from technology? In something dominated by the public dimension like the Web, in which (especially in social networks) seeing and being seen are fundamental actions, a concrete, accessible normativity, made o f concrete examples, is certainly more dominant if compared to a system o f general and abstract principles. Good examples, exemplary aaions, the stories o f exemplary individuals (who are still individuals, like us and like everyone else) are paradigms because they show a model (be it ethical, juridical, or otherwise). This leads to three considerations. M em ory a n d technology. The first concerns the link between memory and technology. Every technology, as we have seen, is a form o f memory (iteration); and each iteration, even if taking place in an organic space (such as thinking, speaking, or normed acting) results in a form o f mem­ ory. This link between memory and technology is what explains the Copernican revolution o f documediality, which consists in overturning the traditional view and understanding intentionality (the spirit, the mind, the will, and purpose) as derived rather than founding, compared to the forms o f fixation (the letter, the expression, the rule). The thesis that documents alone do not speak but need people to make them talk is a variation o f 4Now, if there is a distinctive feature of the automaton, for example the thermostat, it is that it takes action automatically, that is, without external intervention. If we insist that acting automatically is different from acting autonomously, I would note that it is highly doubtful that humans act autonomously - Kant himself assumed this presupposition as a hypothesis rather than a demonstrable fact. Anyhow, humans alone do

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not act either: at most they react to stimuli, just like a photometer or a thermometer. Therefore, the question that often arises before the specter o f some artificial intelligence, uwill the machines control our destiny?Mis an absurd and rhetorical question, though often asked in good faith. Indeed, has humankind ever, in any place and any time, controlled its own destiny? The finality that we perceive actually emerges from documentality. Freuds grandson used to play with a reel that had a piece o f string tied around it: he would toss the reel away from him to where it could no longer be seen {Fort!), before pulling it back into view and hailing its reappearance with a cheerful ^Da!' Freud attributed the whole thing to compulsion and the bond between the drive to repetition and death. But let us not forget that one could also see this game as the Schillerian emblem o f freedom: the boy is playing; no one is forcing him to. In playing, he manifests the technical mastery o f a repetitive practice, Fort! Da, and this gives him pleasure. No one forces him to act as he does, unless one chooses to invoke the profound ancestral grounds that Freud refers to. Why should one see the game as the submission to a drive rather than an alteration by which from the drive one achieves freedom? And why not recognize the deep complicity that unites technology to liberty and justice, the letter to the spirit, the automaton to the soul? As in Pascal^ wager, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Gesture a n d mimesis. The second point concerns the relationship between gesture and imitation. As a tool, the document always recalls the function o f the gesture. We have seen how technology consists o f compe­ tence without understanding, that is, an expert action that does not know the principles, and often not even the reasons, o f its own operation. These features are typically those o f the gesture: driving a car, whisking eggs, standing up without falling, that is, respecting the laws o f physics, are gestures that exemplify the idea o f competence without understanding. Some o f these are more or less innate (standing up) but others - including language, morality, conscience, politics - are learned. This learning doesn5t take place by some transfer o f meaning, but through imitation. As we know, imitation is an essential characteristic o f the human being, one that Derrida has focused on ever since his early work. This doesn^ make intentionality, responsibility, and freedom any less authentic: it simply acknowledges their origin in technology, recording, and mediation. Consider a passage that was very important to the later Derrida, Hamlet’s “time is out o f joint” ：injustice manifests itself as a technical flaw. And justice, the remedy that Hamlet is called upon to bring, also appears as a technical operation, a repair (Kto set it right>,). One

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could say that it was just a figure o f speech, that righting a wrong is not the same as fixing a broken chair, but how can we know? When presuming that the spiritual soul is opposed to the inert mechanism, isn*t one biased by the prejudice o f authenticity versus inauthenticity and immediacy versus mediation? The given a n d the trace. The third element regards the distinction between the given, as an inert element, and the trace, as that which is not merely deposited, but produces a horizon. Here too you have to overturn the view that, in the twentieth century, has solidified in the criticism o f the umyth o f the given.MThe argument that data as such are never given, because they are determined by theories, must be overturned: data are there, regardless o f our theories. Some o f these, with a random development dominated by contingency (which is characteristic o f an emergentist philosophy) may give rise to science and art, thus shaping themselves (again to resume an enigmatic expression dear to Derrida) as the traces o f thefuture. Precisely because there is no human in-itself, but only an interaction between humanity and technology, the humanities are not the opposite of the latter, but its most eminent realization. The human comes into being through an education that involves learning a language, rituals, attitudes, i.e. document apparatuses that precede, not follow, the formation o f conscience and moral responsibility. The spontaneity and creativity that we feel within us, the fact that we have mental contents and ideas, and refer to something in the world, do not contradict in any way the fact that the origin o f all this is to be found in recordings and inscriptions. There is a single thread that from recording leads to responsibility and then to teleology, or purpose. There hasn^ been a single time in history when human beings sat at a table and created a social world. Rather, there has been a very slow process begun with animal sociality; think o f termites, who didn’t use to be social animals but have become so through evolutionarily successful genetic modifications, ending up by creating superorgan­ isms (extremely cohesive societies). Humans, like some other animals (few, according to zoologists) have developed a form o f eu-sociality, that is, of social cooperation. However, human cooperation is not even remotely as cohesive as that of termites, which indeed seem to have a collective intentionality. And yet it appears meaningless to speak o f intentionality in this case. So, if shared intentionality is not the reason, what explains the copresence o f social cooperation and conflict, and the evolution from

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elementary sociality to complex social realities like ours? The answer, as always, lies in archives, which for tliis very reason arc the archives of the future. Works Cited Derrida, Jacques.