Chronicle of Separation: On Deconstruction’s Disillusioned Love 9780823265824

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CHRONICLE OF SEPARATION

CHRONICLE OF SEPARATION ON DECONSTRUCTION’S DISILLUSIONED LOVE

MICHAL BEN- NAFTALI Translated by MIRJAM HADAR

Fordham University Press New York 2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ben-Naftali, Michal. [Kronikah shel peredah. English] Chronicle of separation : on deconstruction’s disillusioned love / Michal Ben-Naftali ; translated by Mirjam Hadar. pages cm. — (Idiom: inventing writing theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6579-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6580-0 (paper) 1. Deconstruction. 2. Interpersonal relations. 3. Gender identity. 4. Anorexia nervosa. I. Title. B809.6.B4613 2015 149'.97— dc23 2014033583 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

CONTENTS

Foreword: Friendship, Unauthorized by Avital Ronell

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Preface

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1

From Absolute Love to the Politics of Friendship

2

Let’s Show Our (Post) Cards

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3

Julia

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4

“And She Did Eat and Was Sufficed and Left”: Deconstruction as an Anorexic Perspective

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5

1

The Book of Ruth

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Epilogue

173

Notes

175

Bibliography

189

Index

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FOREWORD: FRIENDSHIP, UNAUTHORIZED Ronell

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Avital

I have wanted to get a close-up, to confirm an incomparable alliance. Maybe show up for her, if only as a measure of the postal logic to which her writing bears witness. I could enact the stalls of arrival, tracking the uncharted convergence of a destiny and its destination. Show up without properly manifesting, develop an itinerary that stays depropriative— at once steady in its nearness and prudently off range. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has taught us to think in terms of depropriation, which entails a form of rigorous hesitation when assuming responsibility for the work or thought of another, an ally or ancestor, or unknown straggler of writing. I would be capable, I tell myself, of refraining from putting stakes down as one does when claiming a territory. To the extent that I am at all “capable”—willed-to-power on any level of existence, able to accompany and say and squeak, like my cousin Josefine, Queen of the Mausvolk. But that’s another story of certifiable kinship, another depropriating route; I shall desist from exploring my literary roots to follow a different cut of destination. Postal logic indicates that we might not make it, that some other form of address, inadvertent and remote, might overtake the travel plan that I had in mind. Nonetheless, I wanted to show up for her, take the call by accompanying her writing, at least part of the way. Not sure what in fact propelled me, I would do my best, “faire mon impossible,” as I sometimes tell myself. But why, in this instance and to this address?

1 Maybe we were meant to be friends. Yet, so much militated against such an extravagance: the hypothesis that we were meant to be friends. Language, philosophical habits and markers, existentially pitched checkpoints were stacked against us. On what basis could I possibly befriend Michal B.—according to what ledger of determinations, approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates? The blocked passage to friendship remains a divii

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lemma for those constituted, if only in passing, as women. The restrictive covenant is a rigorous part of the order of things. When you’re a girl, friendship doesn’t just happen; you have to be willing to go against all sorts of grains and traditionally set restrictions, the blowback of cynical postulations. Still, no flex of muscled lucidity will help you make the grade as friend, for the situation is not a matter of some accidental lockout. Our metaphysical heritage has rigorously demanded the embargo on the female clasp of friendship. Despite revolutionary breakthrough stances or carefully attended displacements, one still remains tethered to a grating heritage that defines, oppresses, structures, feeds, regulates, or plumps any attempt at reconfigured personhood, setting up the rules and regs, metaphysically speaking, that make politicallytinged aspects of relatedness an affair of men. Metaphysics, our homeroom language and shared existential springboard, puts a ban on friendship among women. The stakes are undoubtedly high, for the motif of friendship ensures the modeling of all sorts of vital ethical and political dispositions, grounding our sense of justice. As Derrida has argued, friendship serves as the blueprint for political and amorous cleaves. Women, for the most part, have been assigned to the historical sidelines, even though they prove adept at traumatically intrusive break-ins and manage to achieve a modicum of social rewrites. One thinks of Antigone, of Kleist’s feminine figurines that shoot out counter- memory to block historical narratives of entitlement; one continues to be struck by the howls of one-woman–lone-warrior types like Valerie Solanas; one continues to stress over the seething deflations of Ingeborg Bachmann and the ongoing peel- down of Sylvia Plath. (I have more names in mind; I love enumeration and memorializing remembrance—I can go overboard with my lists, but this is not the place.) So. How to get around this embarrassment and still make some sort of legitimate outreach program primed on the protocols of friendship stick? My share of Penis-neid is wrapped up in withheld friendship, an attachment or disposition, an inclination of being-in-the-world declared off-limits to women. Of course male designees yammer staggeringly, from Aristotle to our day, about the nearly impossible attainment of friendship, but that plaint operates on an entirely other level and register of constraint and taboo. Maybe I was called up by a different politics of friendship, a different grid or writing practice that pulls one close to another’s distress. I search out the skies daily for smoke signals, often discreet and sophisticated or technologically upgraded. I am always on the lookout for signaling systems, no matter how remote or deferred, no matter how misdirected or suddenly they appear on my desk. I

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am not the only one waiting anxiously at the ready to sign for a designated— or stray— envoi. I for my part may be the warp of a defective GPS, for I cannot imagine that my function as address has been taken all that seriously. Still, things, no matter how deflected or dead letter boxed, do have a way of showing up at my door or on my desk (the door is law for Celan, the desk for Kafka: these are not contingent architectural motifs). I have little to offer, and less that I can do. At most, I can provide a reading. But is that so derisory? For so many of the luminous writers that command my moves and immobility, reading sets the stage for friendship’s sweep, for the amicable rejoinder, establishing the levers that pull in another Dasein. I first heard of Michal Ben- Naftali from Marguerite Derrida one afternoon in Ris-Orangis, when we were hanging out and Jacques was taking lunch in Paris with his Hebrew translator. Since that initiatory encounter—a rumor, a discreet shadow enfolded in the Aufgabe from which Walter Benjamin whipped us (well, me) into a hysterical frenzy—I have been following Ben-Naftali’s trajectory, wondering, among other things and destinations, about the vectors defining our intellectual kinship and the conditions of an a priori fellowship, quietly staging the “sight unseen” kind of embrace that I was prepared to offer. Or, digging out of a paleonymic rut, let us say that I probed the premises for establishing a relationality, whether gendered or not, maybe even scouring our shared traditions in search of solid amity, a kind of grrlship, since “fellowship” sounds peculiar, if not altogether void. In any case, I have felt, from day one, responsible to and for Michal Ben-Naftali. Lately, though, the gentle disposition has turned into a streak of fearfulness, for I have become anxious about initializing her important text, upsetting its carefully laid tracks and ecosystems with my inescapable tripups prompted by the historical panic attacks that make language hard to come by, self-undermining and capable of upturning the most serene trajectories of thought. Already in the early paragraphs I flail about for a bolstering idiom, a way to designate “fellowship” among, let us say, women— or more crunched still, among women authors, philosophers in the feminine, and the stock of conceptual incompatibilities bequeathed to Michal and me. The inevitable slip-up, the stammer and stall, is not entirely my fault when I try to give expression to an inclination on my part to befriend Michal Ben-Naftali. You already know that, on the whole, philosophy squeezes out friendship among women, even merely so- called and difficultly coded women. I am on repetition compulsion; but this bears repeating, calling out, obsessing with, lamenting. There’s simply no call for friendship among women in the meta-

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physical dialup—at most, grrls were accorded some provisional and retaliatory alliances, identificatory contrivances, or other busts in the consolidation of Mitsein. For Hegel, woman not only famously stood as the irony of the community, but she figured also as its enemy. Still, friendship can host adversity; friendship among enemies was not accommodated, however, as a particular style or option in philosophical rosters—at least not before the alliance of Montaigne and Nietzsche was closed, or before Werner Herzog’s boundary- breaking film, Mein bester Feind (My Best Enemy) or the notion of “frenemy” was coined relatively recently. We know from other well-documented philosophical tendencies that friendship can spin easily enough into enmity, or even that enmity is the intensification of friendship, as when Blake writes, “Be my enemy for friendship’s sake.” I don’t think that Hegel, who was in it to win it, was dialectically angling for the capture of powerful affect, for raising the stakes of friendship by turning women into standout enemies, though. When you scroll down the philosophical corridor of determinations, becoming friends—the interlocution or supplement of narcissistic annexation that this may imply—is strictly a man’s affair. We inherited this relentless state of things, remain inscribed by its persistence, no matter how removed from the injurious logic of metaphysical say-so one might hope by now to be. Under the circumstances, what was I to do? Inventing complicities, I started tracking a fantasy friendship, always in the making. I have a fertile imagination and can make all sorts of improbables happen. Like the emotionally fragile beings that one occasionally comes across, I can embrace across the distance any number of best and only and absolutely singular friends. I am always in earnest and elfishly intense. Still, I try not to be a psycho about it— about the making and keeping and responsibly tending to the custodianship of friendship, whether real or make-believe. As a Nietzschean, I do not scare away easily from the virtues of fiction, from masks, and play, and the dance of Dis-tanz—the separations and parting of ways that make nearness at all possible. One does not bag a friend; rather, one approaches from a distance: maintaining position, one tries not to violate the air space of the other. In this case, though, with Michal, to invoke a Shakespearean way of squatting in language’s felicities, I am very likely sharing the heir space where one tries very hard not to collide or puncture the flight plan of the other. In Shakespeare “air” and “heir” keep each other going, or knock each other out. The responsibility of finding temporary residency in another’s work and highly cathected air/heir space is enormous, nearly unnegotiable— especially if you are coded as a girl and must take into account all

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the problems of legitimacy and the history of catfights that this traditionally implies. Not that men aren’t parricidal, fratricidal, genocidal— don’t get me started. Michal and I spring from and cover Derridean expanses. Does that give friendship a sororal spin? A lesbo-maso-pedic advantage? A scholarly edge, perhaps?

2 Among scholars, hanging onto a friend is laughably difficult, nearly impossible. It is not easy to make friends in the first place, not when one is tethered to the book, bound by its exigencies, overwritten by dead zones, held in existential lockdown day in day out. Let us get back to basics, think this whole thing through before I saddle the work before us with a notice of friendship, an unavoidably violating approach. Does the work even want me around, welcome my framing practices or mediating pretense? Have I been summoned, or like K. of The Castle, do I show up in order to impose a faux legitimacy, drumming up a title—be it that of land surveyor or signatory, purveyor of a critical introduction. Who called me to occupy this place? And even if one thinks one has been called, is it not the height of arrogance to take the ostensible call? Perhaps every text needs a friend; yet, I should not assume that this one has been forlorn or left abandoned. The question of whether a friend is even wanted, and if so, whether a friend is wanted dead or alive—supposing such determinations can be made at all—remains an open one, especially in our age of undead socialization. Nowadays you are haunted even if the other proves to be more or less alive! As for scholars, they notoriously spin on a solitary axis, despite the steadiness of their gathering rituals when they book flights and attend conferences, sit on panels, evaluate incoming manuscripts, and offer the occasional keynote—all of which implies, in the end, a passion for relatedness within the precincts of nonrelation. Friendship is a hard nut to crack when everyone is sitting in solitary, conferring with Nietzschean shadows in the aftermath of what Derrida has said that everyone else has said about the constitutive glitches in having or being a friend. How much dependency gets uploaded into the zones of friendship? If you want to keep a friend, assuming such things are possible, you have to make a number of concessions, besides scheduling the narcissistic time-share. Let us give this some further consideration. When you get up close and personal, decide not to run away and manage to hang in there, really liking them, the resolve to stave off the cannibalistic libido can indicate one such concession,

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which for some Daseins is a tall order. All of this gets decidedly complicated when one considers the difficulties, tracked by Montaigne, Emerson, Blanchot, and now Michal Ben-Naftali, of knowing the friend. Emerson levers the friend as a figure for the unknown, a kind of dead brother— oh, but this runs us into a thicket of anxiety.1 Let me drive philia in another direction, in an effort to get the inclination right. The process of introjection indicates some violence; from the looks of it, those in the process of becoming friends must stave off many sorts of transferential addresses and currents coming at them from all sides, with their strong sense of Dis-tanz. I understand that pluralizing the singular friend brings trouble, for how many friends is one allotted? Multiplying friendship into a near-horde is problematic, according to Aristotle. If you are overpopulated with friends, you have no legitimate claim to friendship. But how many is too much? Asks Derrida. There are some downsides to this offer of friendship, in addition to the emergence it proffers of bright moments. Friendship opens up timelines, putting you within earshot of finitude’s atomic clock. Capable of shifting intensities and barometric pressure, friendship refines skills associated with the organization of limits and stop-clocks. For Nietzsche, the friend was the future, noncontemporaneous, a promissory note. For others, the friend offers different modalities, thwarts, and comforts, of non-presence. Even if, as Derrida has taught, quoting a long lineage of friendly agitators, there is no friend. But wait. In order for the friendless announcement to cohere, one will have turned toward friends to scope the vacated space of friendship: “O my friends!” Turning away and turning toward make up part of the same movement of friendship to which one inescapably bears a relation, not excluding such times as when the friend is quietly dismissed or rigorously unavailable, ever cutting away from a given call-out. Even the littlest of people make friends, move in and out of early stages of intimacy and play, know the staggering experience of break up. Some of us, shy and reticent, are still frozen in time, quietly playing with dolls, our pretendfriends. Am I able to have a friend, one wonders? As for me, I tend to get attached and put together a make-believe family. At least, I appear to stick to the tropologies of husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. I have matured since the days of miniature tea parties with my dolls, when I could coddle a selected stand-in for all proximate beings, a stuffed animal. (I never really played with dolls, but that’s another matter. They were real, even then, and in some ways still are so.) At one point, I must have set out to find more fleshy friendships, though I can see Nietzsche’s point about the non- contemporaneity of the other, the way he alerts us to the inescapable disappear-

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ance, the dropped call, of friendship: one should expect a locator malfunction when it comes to fixing the Gesprächspartner, the species of friend built up around the interlocutor as inner dream team, the friend as fantasy, as fiction of address and tireless reader of one’s exploits, inner recesses, persistent disarticulations. Let’s face it. On the outskirts of academic endeavor one is commonly on one’s own. I am provisionally counting out the specular colloquy and private horde of cowriters, well-established dictators that populate one’s solitude, the offshore friendship account, the secret store of cheerleaders, those who show up when you can’t go on, you must go on. Closer to the core of university life, friendship scores some points here and there, but tends quickly to snag and fold, perhaps as is to be expected in any theater of work or in the shadow of competitive exertion. Still, one needs allies, craves a kinship network—whether disruptive and improbable or reliably bolstering, familiar—and wants to think of oneself as capable of making friends. At least let me be able to make friends. For Bataille, reading constitutes the sovereign act of friendship. Emerson follows other but similarly run protocols to requite friendship with reading. The performativity of making friends, or the injunction to fake-until-youmake friendship, in itself leaves one insecure and feeling basically alone, unprotected—the affective Grundstruktur of any workstation in the university. In the fledgling stages of becoming- intellectual (I use shorthand; “intellectual” does not cut it, keeps you in the rut of modernist paleonymy, stuck with obsolesced concepts and habits, but what’s a grrl to do?)—priming the intellectual program, some of us cast as a certain type: a bit of an outcast, a somewhat defiant but mostly vulnerable misfit. Defiance was not meant to style one’s original stance; some of us were painfully earnest baby scholars, dedicated, conditioned for every sort of servitude, understanding that doing time, whether in graduate school or as part of a teaching body, amounted to acts— or, rather, passivities— of cultish subjection. The solitude was not icily absolute. In the old days, one formed aggregates and quasi-gangs along the way. One could be menacing to others—that’s a relationship in itself. One certainly could not afford to practice extreme forms of social isolation. Are you kidding? One needed to move in and out of sectors of the group psychology dialup. One could regroup, fall apart, regroup, change the menu, shift ground, regroup. Before going into scholarly lockdown, I, for my part, was able to form a primal horde with that friend or this teacher, but that’s about it, and this spare social diet, with only some add-ons, seemed to suf-

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fice for some of us in our salad days as stand- alone students of deconstruction. Academia was not exactly a nurturing haven for the sassy yet anxious, horribly serious young scholar, already set for sleeplessness and off-the-chart intensities. Brimming with Kantian enthusiasm and our sick/healthy humor, we were not entirely appreciated (and I, let me be clear about this, was consistently depreciated even though I wore tight dresses and sparkly rhinestones, always trying to look my best as I delivered papers and listened to my teachers without once retouching my lipstick during seminar). Some of my friendships, I admit, were hitchhikers on the death-drive. They frazzled my nerves and wore me down, hitting me in the sensitive parts of my Geworfenheit. Others were vital to my growth. Still others remain to this day incalculable, inenarrable; yet, I am convinced they have saved my life, such as it is or was. Still, the need for friendship, whether intellectually called up or close to the vest, unruly or stealthy, rich and cheerful, feels like it may require some genealogical purging, for this need may signal some part of a steady weakening, a long-term or mere bout of existential fatigue, unsovereignty. I can understand if Michal chooses to repel this offer of friendship, if her work bounces me off its walls, or if Paul North plays Türhüter, the Kafkan security guard, to my effort to get through the first portal. There is every reason for them to reject this bid and its intrusive blueprint. But could it be the case that I need them? And so I go after the work, its dead-or-alive author, its protective custodian and overseer. What does that say about me, I wonder? As a practicing paranoid lectrice— what Kathy Acker might call a “Hannibal Lectrice” after the deranged cannibalistic reader of minds and texts, the Incorporator par excellence—I read up on the hypothetical options available to me. When they are not plainly out to get me, these texts offer instructions about my case, for they are only meant for me—nurfürdichbestimmt, again following up on the Kafkan security-doorkeeper function, who tells you, at the threshold, that you are its exercise of an apostrophic ethics: you were awaited and inscribed—this opening, only aimed at you, its singular address. I’m in it, deep. Finding oneself in need of friends is often delineated in Shakespeare as the default position of something like psychic stability, and the needy are ever on the way to meeting the same destiny as Hamlet’s BFFs, sent to their death—as Freud reminds us, despite Hamlet’s supposed paralysis: despite his legendary indecisiveness and world-historical stall, Prince Hamlet still sends his friends to hell. Blowing off friendship, he powers up and goes into action, on a killing spree. Horatio, another cut of friendship, is preserved in order to write up Hamlet, assuring his epitaph, ensepulchering him in narrative remembrance.

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It could well be that each friend is responsible for surges in writing— or, more resolutely offered, for flagging the relation to writing that threatens to undermine us all. If it weren’t for this threat, and we were not faced continually with an unstoppable fear of freak-out, the store of feints that writing announces, who would bother writing—I mean who would bother to write? The friend in Kafka’s Judgment stands and deflates with writing’s destination, fixed as a pinpointed axis that can be collapsed by a paternal flex of muscle. The famous “friend in Russia” to whom George corresponds, and from whom he squeezes an address, is on Father’s payroll. Any level of complaint or mere description, any prompt tossed in the direction of another has been intercepted by the father in Kafka, who compromises his-son-the-writer by severing the imaginary remove of friendship, even cutting out the enticements of an undeniably disappointing friendship. Russia, in Kafka, appears to function as the address of non-address, somewhere near the undetectable Castle-territory of his last and uncompleted novel. In some ways, writing fills out the blanks of a world- historical grievance, preparing the brief on a complaint that does not always manage to locate its addressee, as is the case with yet another text of Kafka, his Letter to Father. I cannot be sure that Michal’s work subscribes to this description—that she enrolls her intervention in a history of the plaint, even as she tracks and triggers the itineraries of affect— in Hebrew, “affect” and “emotion” share for the most part the same articulation, are not differentiated distinctly, which may explain some standoffs and directions taken or averted on different discursive planes. Is there a complaint lodged at the heart of this book—something that cries out urgently to be rectified or reconfigured? I think so, though the inroads to the “grieving subject” are subtle, retiring, and measured. I would situate this writing as part of the Heideggerian Schreiben/Shrei, the cri/écrit or close to the Nietzschean slice of assertion wherein a relentless series of complaints are launched like so many smart missiles at our metaphysical tradition. Thinking—for Heidegger no longer philosophizes—unfolds in the neighborhood where a plaintiff ’s cry has been neither subdued nor tagged out. Some of the Heideggerian transmitters admittedly have been knocked down in the meantime, in no small part due to the affective foreclosures of his still unscrolling text. The disturbed world called out by Heidegger, in a work admittedly shaky though fiercely thought- provoking, collapses in ways that are pertinent to how we map and contour problem areas and the language that continues to protect them. What Heidegger saw as a destiny undergoes investigation and controlled turbulence in the rerouting proposed by Derrida and the deracinating grid set down by his vast work on Heidegger’s eva-

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sive maneuvers and targeted underhandedness. But if Heidegger were merely underhanded or dismissible, we would not have to be watching his every move, the wrong turns his often lumbering yet essential work takes. This timely context is why, among other reasons, it becomes necessary to read the disruptive itineraries traced by Ben-Naftali’s considerations of Derrida’s Post Card, which takes aim at the Heideggerian conflations of destinal statement, and institutes a crucial “distinerring” of his key terms of attunement and address. By means of his apostrophic ethics, Derrida indicates the way to a necessary and critical interruption of Heideggerian gathering and landing patterns, also taken to account by Lévinas. The disseminative, nomadic spread of Derridian expanses and their tele-outposts press against the volkish commitments of gathering-motifs underscored by the Heideggerian text. Michal Ben-Naftali does not produce familiar discursive runs or collate conventional academic dossiers. She takes liberties; she takes pains; she digs up dirt on missing concepts; she redirects a biblical icon. She strikes out in the direction of minoritized traces while sticking with the big guns of critical theory. She approaches her work with an idiomatic tempo and temperament, diverging here and there from the Einstellung or attitude of normed scholarly argumentation. Her plaint strikes some unfamiliar notes, in a way that makes us question past appropriations of parallel review. For while her tonal modulations are undoubtedly new, her sense of inherited meaning and historical conservationism remains firmly entrenched in the protocols of tradition, offering poignant hermeneutic spinoffs of literary innovation and solidly set philosophemes. Yet the plaint she launches has to do with a particular tone that Ben-Naftali brings to the table, tuning her work to historical and philosophical fissure and a certain proto-feminist verve. Sometimes the thinking woman’s complaint is a matter of tone, notoriously difficult to fix or stabilize for the purpose of conceptual runs and reliable determinations. Derrida ran up against the limit-case of tone in philosophy when tapping different registers of meaning in Kant’s work. The tonal quality of Ben-Naftali’s investigations indicates a mark of urgency without strident affect, a respectful intensity compelled by the texts and themes under review. If there is a teleological term to the book, it is set in terms of failure—a determination that keeps the work clean, unrelentingly on track, sober, and humble. The voice that speaks to us of its critical directives is, in many ways, an anguished one, seeking the right tonal articulation within the constraints of necessary failure. If she were self-assured, in full complicity with the tenets of reasonable argumentation, the work would have fallen short of its tensed exertion and stated intention: to capture the consistent lurches and collapses of

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failure. At this time, let me pass the mic, and start her off as Michal questions the very pressures under which she will venture to address us. Taking her cue from Derrida’s rigorous reluctance to speak for the other, to make definitive claims on behalf of the other for whom one advocates— or presumes to introduce—Michal Ben-Naftali outlines the binding terms of her dilemma, a fateful fecundity: Derrida, however, is convinced that the failure to write about the other is a condition for the success of writing— a conviction that is not merely cognitive but in fact, and first of all, ethical. Since failure is given, one must write, or maybe even more so: there is a mode that is more appropriate than others. Can I find this mode, if only by approximation, in order to identify in advance with the impending failure? The scroll safeguards your privacy, your difference, your secrets, and articulates the limits of my memory, those narrow limits of relationship, which outline precisely and without pity the limits and spaces of writing. I try to contain you in it, in me, as far as my hand reaches, in vain, I try to speak to you [. . .].

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PREFACE

Philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greater proximity to madness. This silent and specific moment could be called pathetic.1

In two essays dedicated to the question of translation, “Des tours de Babel,” in which he closely reads Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator,” and “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation,” following Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, Derrida presents two notions of translation.2 The first points at literal translation, such as Benjamin searched after, namely a translation which stays close to the source’s pound of flesh, while the second notion refers to a conceptual translation that strives to find a semantic equivalent in the target language through a dialectic reappropriation which Derrida, himself translating from Hegel, calls “relevantization.” On the basis of The Merchant of Venice, both notions are translated into the language of the Judeo- Christian conflict between Shylock and what one owes to Shylock, “the insolvable itself,” on the one hand, and Antonio, Portia, and, by extension, Venice, who demand from Shylock conversion-translation without residue, on the other. Derrida, while addressing a public of translators (“those men and women who, to my mind, are the only ones who know how to read and write”)3 and incorporating into his discourse Shylock’s figure and speech, wonders to what extent the translator, anyone, Jew as well as non-Jew, does not wish after all to consume the idiomatic body of the other in a cannibalistic, regressive gesture—in order to translate, or better, in order to be. The poetics of Chronicle of Separation: On Deconstruction’s Disillusioned Love is the cannibalistic poetics of the pound of flesh in several senses: firstly, in the way it incorporates Derrida’s corpus; secondly, in its phenomenological, first person style of writing, a style which becomes more and more committed to the Woolfian essay as the writing assumes idiomatic liberty and approximates the body of its woman-writer literally; and lastly, in the attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida, and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience. We left xix

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behind Derrida’s early reception à la Gasché,4 which translated his thinking into a quasi- Kantian transcendental lexicon, or looked persistently for a specific deconstructive procedure of reading, to get to Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida,5 which emphasized the profound religiosity of deconstruction. Yet the interest of the present book is not the religious but the erotic economy which absorbs other registers of existence. Moreover, the pathetic experience of deconstruction inheres in Derrida’s emotional repertoire, which I shall try to present, but no less in the emotional repertoire Derrida’s touch evokes in the reader. The book is thus bi-focal—Derrida and reading Derrida, a duplicity that is perhaps even more needed today. For although the book was written in Hebrew some fifteen years ago, when Derrida was still alive, for his readers, the unavowable community of pathos he created (Derrida’s disguised autoanalysis in his eulogy of Blanchot showed his awareness of not leaving behind a school),6 the question concerning “after Derrida” is surely a relevant one, with and without quotation marks. Is it possible to “relevantize” deconstruction and move ahead confidently, so to speak, toward the next station in the Spirit’s exhausting yet hopeful voyage? Is “post- Derrida” also “post- deconstruction”? Can deconstruction, which has always already existed, actually cease and become “a thing of the past,” and if so, in what sense? It is not that deconstruction aroused no emotion in the past. If its earlier reception neutralized its experiential dimension, the intellectual phenomenon itself, and sometimes those who were identified as its “representatives,” provoked harsh debates, perhaps among the most emotional known in twentieth century academia, debates that sometimes overflowed into semi- academic and popular journals and circles. Moments of polemics (like the Paul de Man affair but also, and not altogether disconnected, Heidegger’s French affair) are moments in which thinkers and researchers, perhaps inevitably, enable us to peep into their emotional world, if only into the intense connection they feel with their stance as if it were their very identity card, and thus also into the existential repulsion they feel toward a stance opposing theirs. Of course, we should avoid separating between such outbursts of polemical agitation and the intellectual stance itself, as if the latter were neutral, emotion-free, and uncontaminated by impulses. Yet the deeper reasons for the desperate rage often provoked by Derrida’s name or face (deconstruction has always had a face), and which put him in the mouths of many—apparently serious—people who never actually read him, the deeper reasons for the fact that Derrida seems to have been divided between a real Derrida and an imagined one—lie in the tacit as well as manifest emotional repertoire of deconstruction which deconstructed, among other things, the very dichotomy

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between theory and feeling. Furthermore, this repertoire provoked resistance not necessarily because of its theoretical complexity or philosophical abstraction (Hegel or Kant is not easier to read), but because it presented, perhaps for the first time in the history of philosophy, a weak, fragile, parasitic, tremulous mode of thinking, one that renounces sovereignty and thereby threatens to radically desocialize the philosopher and his alleged task. The polemical fervor that accompanied deconstruction was thus not accidental. It is connected with the crucial weight given to emotions at the very heart of deconstructive writing, at times in the way that certain emotions are explicitly discussed (although the word “emotion” itself does not often appear in Derrida’s writings) and at others in the manner in which they are enacted by, or else activate, the readers. One can thus say: deconstruction on emotion and as emotion. But isn’t deconstruction, aimed as it is at the traditional concept of the subject, ipso facto a deconstruction of emotion? Where should the emotional world be located? In her Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject,”7 Rei Terada raised the question of the significance of emotion (a psychological experience which she distinguishes from affect, its physiological aspect) in relation to postmodernist theories—Deleuze, de Man, or Derrida, against Jameson’s attempt to link the “death of the subject” and the demise of the autonomous bourgeois monad to the abolition of emotion, which is so crucial to modernist thought (in relation to notions such as anxiety, shame, uprootedness). In Terada’s view, it is precisely because the poststructuralist subject has no stable identity basis that he or she feels, since emotion is by definition nonsubjective: “It is time to consider the possibility that poststructuralism is directly concerned with emotion. In order for this to be, emotion has to be nonsubjective. . . . Far from controverting the ‘death of the subject,’ emotion entails this death. . . . I am arguing that a discourse and ideology of emotion exist; that poststructuralist theory shows their relation.”8 This involves two distinct arguments: one disconnects between a coherent notion of the subject and emotional experience; the other privileges poststructuralist theories which precisely by dividing the notion of the subject are more adequate in engaging emotions. Accepting this position involves, however, a new understanding of emotion, which is no longer in expressive, intuitive, or intentional terms. Emotion is never present in itself because it is not a direct or interior expression of the subject. Emotion is always mediated, involving a rhetorical or textual representation. From this perspective, we ought not to separate between the linguistic turn, which is usually connected with postmodernism as a radicalization of the modernist philosophical discussion of language,

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and the affective turn, which addresses emotions, feelings, and moods both in the humanities and the social sciences, mainly from the 1970s onward. For at least in the poststructuralist version of these turns, linguistic analysis is crucial to the discussion of both affect and subjectivity. Unlike Terada, who discusses some of Derrida’s early writings on Foucault, Rousseau, and Husserl, I wish to deal directly and indirectly with his later work, starting from The Post Card and continuing with Memoires for Paul de Man, Circumfession, Schibboleth: For Paul Celan, and Politics of Friendship— books in which the earlier deconstructive lexicon, notions such as trace, différance, or arche-writing, makes place for melancholia which colors the whole oeuvre and in several senses. Not only are grief and mourning thematically discussed in the memoirs for de Man and in other eulogies, they become, as I will show, the preeminent deconstructive operation, namely a central characteristic as such of the deconstructive text which as a result radically changes its temperature, turning into an incorporation of the work of the other. Although this touch of melancholia has more recently come to serve as a prism through which to read Derrida’s work, not enough emphasis has been put on melancholic incorporation as the specific reading gesture of deconstruction, a gesture which is sometimes even more remarkable than what we call “doing deconstruction.” The deep melancholia of Derrida’s text, which has often been formulated in terms of spectral inheritance, pervades the pathetic community of readers he founded. Terada herself emphasizes that “emotion engages the textual structures that belong to the death of the subject,”9 a sentence that can be understood differently by different thinkers. For Derrida, however, the alleged death or liquidation of the subject is not a rigid paradigm. There exists always a “who”10 who responds to the call of the other, whose anticipated death haunts every relationship, love, friendship, encounter; these latter become textual in this sense, presupposing the becoming-writing or becoming-sign of both subjects involved. The emotional shift in the discussion of Derrida, and even more so my focus on the melancholic incorporation he performs, lead me to put a crucial weight on the complex negotiation between deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Of course, Derrida does not accept the archeological theses of Freudian psychoanalysis and its followers. And yet, the oedipal scene, when spectrally worked through, namely as a non-biological and non-genealogical scene which constitutes the subject-inheritor in his or her relationships with chains of mothers and fathers, appears to be the founding plot of deconstruction. In other words, even without presenting an etiological thesis or committing itself to singular and uniform nucleus figures, the deconstructive family scene does not radically deter-

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ritorialize the notion of a family, and goes on orchestrating the tragic drama that notion has always directed. This scene forms the basis of Derrida’s description of the literary space in his Gift of Death as an elaboration or rather enactment of a “letter to the father,” before Kafka’s letter ( Yerushalmi’s letter to Freud, Kierkegaard’s letter to his father, Derrida’s letter to all his spectral fathers, etc.). In relation to this archaic scene, Derrida himself becomes the father-addressee of this present book, which to me appears more and more clearly a letter from daughter to father. In the face of this scene I also decided at a certain moment to change the addressee into a pre-oedipal woman, namely to extend the plot’s active protagonists and write a letter to the mother which ponders the complicity between the parental figures. This book’s engagement with Derrida’s emotional world is then not exhausted by description and analysis only. The emotional process comes to completion in enacting, emphasizing, amplifying, and exaggerating the emotions. The affective response of the woman reader leads eventually to a feminization of Derrida and to the introduction of “Mrs. Derrida,” paraphrasing the manner in which Avital Ronell perceives Heidegger’s treatment of Nietzsche.11 And yet this trajectory produces, rather than a Nietzschean outcry, a hushed voice that wishes to proceed slowly from the consciously emotional to the unconsciously affective, reaching the absent body of deconstruction, although even this body is revealed to be a non-spontaneous one, one that is pregnant with representations. The book’s first two chapters are still written against a hermeneutic horizon. They attempt to formulate a general interpretive position in relation to deconstruction. Derrida’s direct preoccupation with love, friendship, and melancholia, and with the manner in which separation and death always already define what he calls a “mournful friendship” leads me to distinguish between melancholic friendship and economical friendship in order to map Derrida’s ways of reading throughout deconstruction’s general corpus. The distinction between the economical and the non-economical, between mournful economy and melancholia, also enables me to discuss Derrida’s essay on Paul de Man’s early politics in emotional terms, namely to examine Derrida’s intervention in the de Man affair not from its political aspect but rather from its emotional conditions of possibility. Derrida’s erotic stance in facing the friend, with its radical manifestations, may become an absolute or religious responsibility, wherever the aesthetic register absorbs other existential registers. De Man takes the place of the wholly Other for Derrida, just as Naomi occupies this place for Ruth the Moabite, who rewrites her scroll in the last chapter. The secret of absolute mel-

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ancholia is a melancholic secret, and those who take it upon themselves are thus excluded from society: colleagues and students in Derrida’s case, the Moabites and the inhabitants of Yehudah in that of Ruth. The Post Card is described in the second chapter as the primal scene of deconstruction, a singular moment from which—and toward which— deconstruction is revealed to be a renouncement of an erotic passion for presence and is thus divided between a contractual relation to the other on the one hand, and a sacrificial relation based on promise and gift on the other. But deconstruction as a postal condition, linked to the destruction of the metaphysical dream of romantic love, to the failure or the impossibility of love, to disillusioned love—is necessarily inscribed on a post card’s textual materiality. The reproduced Oxford post card that inevitably addresses the beloved as well as the reader mediates the emotion and ruptures ipso facto the coherence and uniformity of the living present.12 The third chapter considers Fred Zinnemann’s film Julia, based on a memoir written by the playwright Lillian Hellman. In the sequence of chapters dealing with love and friendship as deconstruction’s emotional foundation and pattern of plot, this chapter signifies, however, a transition from reading Derrida’s texts to a Derridean reading of other texts, as well as from friendship between men to the part-economical, part-melancholy friendship between women, which is mediated in this case too by post cards and letters, written by only one side to the other. What are left from the living friendship are layers of memory or an archive which alternately accumulates and strips in order to reveal its contours in pentimento. Transferring the discussion to a woman is not an attempt at a feminist critique of Derrida or to use deconstruction as feminist critique. Like all of Derrida’s alliances, the alliance with feminism also has to be re-invented13 in the face of the changing function and status of the feminine figure in his writing, outside the closed system of metaphysical concepts and the symbolic order. In The Gift of Death, Derrida leaves unexplained his ambiguous mention of a “sacrifice of woman” “according to one sense of the genitive or the other,”14 raising the question whether it is the woman who sacrifices, is sacrificed, collaborates with the ritual of sacrifice, or indeed orchestrates the whole process. The last two chapters examine the question of feminine sacrifice by means of different writing strategies: in the fourth chapter through a theoretical-performative essay on anorexia as sacrifice and as sacrificer, as accomplice and as initiator, and in the fifth and last chapter through a quasi- biblical fiction. In the fourth chapter deconstruction is a woman. In other words, the chap-

PREFACE

ter is not only about a gender change of deconstruction but rather about its complete feminization, although the woman here is neither fertile nor being fertilized in any other sense than through deconstruction. Deconstruction itself, just like the anorexic figure who is juxtaposed to it, is submerged in eating disorders, enacts its eating disorders, enacts its symptoms while philosophizing.15 This is a literal deconstruction, a deconstruction of the pound of flesh, a somatic, abject deconstruction that deals with the body and becomes one. This chapter tries thus to overcome the objectual effort to read Derrida or to read, through Derrida, his own texts or texts written by others. With emotion and pathos in action, the weight of emotion here is neither descriptive nor analytic. Derrida is incorporated into a text which no longer follows the way he himself incorporates other texts. But this incorporation into the text brings about a dismemberment of the writing woman-subject, namely, it involves a simultaneous process of working and unworking (désoeuvrement), or inspiration, in Blanchot’s terms. What I called earlier on a loss of sovereignty or possession becomes lucidly manifest here. The anorexic figure is described as lacking any immediate or natural possession, as a barren, impotent figure who does not give birth. Eating disorders in general and anorexia in particular are presented in this chapter as a paradoxical embodiment of deconstruction. Paradoxical—since despite the deconstruction of the distinction between the idealistic and the empiricist subjects, between mind and body, nature and culture, despite the contamination between these positions and their mutual pervasion, the anorexic does not perceive her stance as transgressive. Anorexic barrenness is neither accident nor hazard but a fundamental position. The anorexic woman’s improper feminine fulfillment, as she sees it, though it might be an internalized normative judgment which leads to neither protest nor transgression, can also become a way of action in the world. In other words, an anorexic can manifest consent and conformity, as well as identification of the excluded with the excluding instance to the point of self-destruction. She might read only the conservative text of her consciousness, which adheres to the status quo, ignoring the outcry of her body’s radical text, even if she has a maladroit command of both mother tongue and father’s language, and even if at any level, body and soul, any given tactic occurs simultaneously with its opposite, each gesture hidden or dazzled by its own shadow. Anorexic existence is therefore documented here as a Blanchotian condition of unworking, a moment before it is appropriated by a revolutionary gaze or an activist discourse and thus to become a critical voice, a philosophy of action or a feminist refusal; a moment before—where the spectral theater of self- sacrifice constitutes a singular performative.

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Deconstruction thus enables a complex meditation on anorexic being, on its ambivalent emotional world and on the space of action left to the non-fertile woman, a space in which she experiences the same desocialization or parasitism as experienced by the son. From being an enemy of the community she becomes her own enemy, withdrawing from the convoy by the very gesture with which she joins it, apparently obeying cultural norms but actually refusing them by enacting a powerful regression which locates her in “some existential corner.”16 The juxtaposition of two genres of “letters to the father”— that of Kafka, his antecedents and followers, and that of the anorexic, all of whom refuse to participate in fertile socialization, adhering instead to parasitical literary life—raises a question which we, Derrida’s readers, must face from now on, namely the question of deconstruction’s fertility. This seems exactly to offer a starting point from which to raise the question about deconstruction and the political. The concluding chapter of the book moves to the fictive. “The Book of Ruth,” which repeats the title of its Biblical original, reinvents the historical figures of Ruth the Moabite and her mother-in-law Naomi. The interpretive discussion of this book both in feminist and in lesbian literature has not ignored the motif of emptiness and fullness, hunger and harvest, which dominates the story. As D. F. Rauber writes: “The fertility of Ruth and the fruit of her womb are triumphant rejoinders to the barrenness which darkened the first chapter. Here also is the human manifestation of the theme of harvesting which has pervaded the work from chapter 2 on. Here also is the re-establishment of the full family and social harmony.”17 In the story I present emphasis shifts from fertility and redemption, to barrenness, to a pregnancy that safeguards the virginal or non-fertile side of the pregnant woman, a woman who redeems all the rest, paradoxically, with her sick body. It is a book of emptiness, not fullness, which treats of impaired feeding and of the reserved hosting of the foreign woman, a book that takes place on the narrowest part of the threshold, on the thin line between inclusion of the other and fear and hostility toward her. This is a book that eventually surrenders its two heroines, but especially Ruth, to archaic needs which are in inevitable conflict with customs and commands unknown to the Moabite stranger, and with which she does not identify. She moves, unintentionally, between two economies, between two regimes of law and truth, between the symbolic law and the semiotic, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, between the law of the father and a yearning to revert to the mother’s body. However, in writing this book, her own scroll, Ruth is revealed as another descendant of a genealogy of imaginary women originating from Eve, the second-Eve genealogy, so to speak, a genealogy whose primal sin condemned it not to family life but to a life of the mind,

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to being inside mind to the point of self-annihilation. The second-Eve genealogy emerges at random, with no meta-program, in the margins of humanity, in the shape of saints or martyrs or of women, like in the former chapter, who live in the body of knowledge, a life that costs them another economy of sorrow, suffered by those who do not pass the ultimate trial of the concrete. Each descendant of this genealogy brings it necessarily to term; each embroiders its history according to her needs, inventing or finding themselves mothers and sisters, the way outcast women find refuge in one another in the women’s gallery. If this book does not change me utterly . . . if it does not help me love life even more, then it will have failed.18

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CHRONICLE OF SEPARATION

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FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

Friendship is at issue in several of Derrida’s writings, especially from the 1980s onward: Memoires for Paul de Man, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Politics of Friendship, The Work of Mourning.1 These works seem to plot two poles in his thinking: one attempts to sketch an absolute, non-economic and asymmetric friendship, and the other a political–economic friendship. Yet, given the elaborations of the notion of friendship that Derrida offers, deconstruction as such could be regarded as an enactment of friendship, an enactment of the emotional psychodynamic that attends upon friendship, expressed in the very relations that emerge between Derrida and the texts of others. Seen through such a lens, two deconstructive gestures come into view: one of these embodies absolute friendship (as in the texts about Shakespeare, Paul Celan, Paul de Man, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous), while the other expresses economic friendship (as in the texts referring to Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, or Claude Lévi-Strauss). A division of this kind can also be perceived in Freud’s distinction between melancholic incorporation (absolute friendship, beyond the pleasure principle) and mournful introjection based on anaclitic object relations (an economic form of friendship).2 Derrida’s attitude toward Freud himself (and—for other reasons—toward Heidegger, whom I shall leave out of this discussion) is ambivalent, as we shall see, especially in the light of the above typology. Freud is Derrida’s intimate other, an excessive proximity both acknowledged and rejected. 1

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I start this chapter with a consideration of the analysis of the phenomena of mourning and melancholia suggested by Freud and Derrida—his wild and unruly disciple/friend. I will discuss how Derrida—both in Memoires and in his article “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War”— joins a topical elucidation of the idea of absolute friendship and its activation by means of melancholic writing. While I will follow in Derrida’s footsteps in order to deconstruct conceptual contradictions in Freud— contradictions that turn out to be less pronounced and unambiguous than would appear—I will refer to Freud to illuminate Derrida’s own contradictory and tortured textual spectacle. Politics of Friendship, given these tensions, is a critical turning point in Derrida’s articulation of the notion of friendship, as well—in fact—as in his adoption of strategies of reading and writing that are essentially unlike those used before. More precisely, this book is split between amicable, moderate, economic discussions concerning friendship, dealing with figures from the Greek- Roman and Christian traditions, and melancholy, hyperbolic ones, linked with the names of Nietzsche, Blanchot, Bataille, and Levinas.3 Nevertheless, however much they differ, these two deconstructive gestures do not influence Derrida’s conception of historicity which stays consistent throughout. While it may seem that I am proposing a developmental narrative based on a sequence of chronological dates marking the publication of the works in question, this is, to a great extent, a methodological, perhaps didactic constraint resulting from the genre of this writing and its argumentative tonality. For these works, I think, convey the distilled “essence” of deconstruction “in its totality”— however alien these terms and adjectives are to its own “spirit.” The conceptual demarcations that Derrida applies between the “absolute” and the “economic” in friendship are not as rigid as this type of a scheme of reading may lead us to believe. Asymmetry and reciprocity are a likely part of any relationship, depending on the perspective we choose to take. With the passing of time, they may change or redefine themselves. Derrida’s own discussions of friendship, which focus on its conditions of possibility, seem to suggest clear divisions, but when we examine, over and beyond the topical-conceptual developments, his actual engagement with texts, the picture becomes complicated. For, indeed, the texts he writes actively “constitute” friendship. This is, moreover, perhaps the one way in which we can experience how he understands friendship that is not confined to the speculative discussion of conditions of possibility. Friendship as writing and writing as friendship construct the idea of friendship, its essence, its dos and don’ts and its implications. Such a perspective on deconstruction enables us to approach one of its fundamental problems: since writing is a replace-

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

ment for actual friendship, and always already remembers the friend, it forgets, as it were, her or his presence.

MELANCHOLIA The experience of mourning is at the heart of the formation of subjectivity— both Freud and Derrida believe this, although they offer different analyses. It is not just that Derrida’s text is a conscious deconstruction of the dichotomies Freud—at least ostensibly—assumes between object relations and regression or narcissistic identification, between introjection and incorporation, or between mourning and melancholia.4 Freud’s oeuvre may provide the groundwork for problematizing or rather deconstructing the distinctions Derrida makes—an argument that becomes more salient as we advance with the textual discussion.5 Indeed, Freud cannot wholly keep apart melancholia and mourning and acknowledges the tentativeness and lack of certainty of his conclusions. Still, he insists, from an etiological and symptomatological viewpoint, to distinguish between these phenomena. Mourning and melancholia, on the one hand, share a number of symptoms such as the total identification of the self with the lost object, depression, self-punishment, a loss of interest in the world, and a full surrender to grief, to the extent of losing all ability to embrace any other, alternative object of love. Mourning, however, does not, eventually, lead to total self debasement or neglect. For Freud, mourning is neither pathological nor fatal regarding the mourner’s ability to cope with pain and reality. Even if she or he reaches delusional psychosis, reality will triumph at the end of the day. Melancholia, on the other hand, is all too likely to evolve into psychosis. The melancholic’s reality is defeated and respect for it will not be restored. Actually, the melancholic avoids directly confronting separation and loss by ingesting the object (incorporation), thereby splitting himself into two authorities: the self and the ideal self or conscience. By taking the object captive, it is he himself who becomes captive to the object. The shadow which the object casts on him and which makes him shadow-like, that is two-dimensional and lifeless as well, is critical and judgmental.6 The struggle between these two authorities exposes him thus to overpowering self-criticism, expressing his sense of moral inferiority. While mourning involves the self ’s loss of the object in the real world, melancholia makes for a gaping loss within the self as such which crumbles steadily, becoming a dead-alive self. In his Politics of Friendship Derrida quotes Augustine who adopts— without direct reference— Aristotle’s definition of friendship according to which one soul lives in twin bodies. And since the soul cannot be

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divided, the person who is left behind remains with half a soul: he survives, that is, and does not survive at one and the same time. Book IV of Augustine’s Confessions describes this “arithmetic” melancholia: “Life to me was fearful because I did not want to live with only half a soul. Perhaps this, too, is why I shrank from death, for fear that one whom I had loved so well might then be wholly dead.”7 Freud believes that, etiologically speaking, these two strategies of coping with loss originate in diverse processes of individuation and development. The melancholy response occurs because the loved object is perceived as formative of the self ’s very being and potency since the self lacks the necessary strength and coherence to bear the existence of distinct realities. Once the object vanishes, the melancholic self confronts its inability to tolerate damage and to accept changes in either internal or external reality which may affect the topography of his psyche. From the outset, that is, his object choice was narcissistic. Melancholia is a late manifestation of primary narcissism. In other words, Freud argues that melancholia constitutes a regressive, identificatory, and ambivalent object choice rather than an object relation. It is only to the extent that he can repress the otherness of the object that the narcissist loves. His choice is gratifying because the object responds to his narcissism and reciprocates it. Its being an ideal-self, seemingly ensuring the transfer of his desires to a real object full of goodness and beauty, reveals the re-enactment of this narcissism. The loss of the object is performed by the same ego resources as those leading to incorporation, either at the oral or at the cannibalistic stage of libidinal maturation. A hitherto muted aggressiveness, which has not so far been apparent in the person’s relationships, will now manifest itself. The pathological response concerns a hidden poison long since present in the involvement with the other and now replaced by self-punishment. The mishap in the relationship with the object entails unfinished business which, in his absence, is moved inside. The mourner blames himself for having, as it were, wished for this loss or abandonment. The narcissistic identification with the object generates a complex reaction consisting of self-hatred and masochistic pleasure in suffering.8 Now the sadism that was implicitly directed at the object turns on the self, even though in this way it contrives to avenge the primary object. Regardless of the degree to which the object might actually have contributed to the sense of frustration, the wretchedness and the bitterness of the self, narcissistic injury is key to our understanding of his intense and traumatic response to the loss. More than the loss of the object, he mourns losing the fantasy of omnipotence as such, shocked as he is by the very fact of otherness. In death as in life, the other is swallowed by the melancholic’s empty mouth whose hunger cannot be stilled.

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

Taking on and refining Freud’s distinction between introjection and incorporation, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok prefer to call the latter “demetaphorization.”9 Their explanation resembles the portrayal of Julia Kristeva’s “somatic people” according to which the latter “are not individuals who make no utterance, but rather subjects who lack, or drop, the dynamic of metaphoricity.”10 Abraham and Torok claim that the ingestion of the body through incorporation annihilates language’s representational power. The subject fantasizes the full or partial swallowing of what was lost with the aim of not having to deal with the pain of reorganization, as though he had been healed magically. The infant, when he develops normally, from the start experiences the empty space of the mouth— also in the mother’s presence— and fills it with crying and wailing. The breast, the mother’s fullness, is withdrawn and he demands it by means of his tongue, filling the oral cavity with sound. An act whose success depends on the mother’s witnessing of it, this is the earliest model of introjection. The child will go on exchanging this original emptiness of the mouth with the verbal relations he forges with the speaking community, “the community of empty mouths.” The gap between incorporation and introjection, then, is associated with the use of words. When it does not fill with introjective speech, then our empty mouth becomes regressive, yearning for food as it did before language was acquired. For Abraham and Torok, what is crucial about the incorporation fantasy is not related to a backward looking to a cannibalistic stage of development but to the cancellation of figurative language, the destruction of the very possibility of representation.11 Given these conceptual constraints, formulated by Freud and further processed by his followers, Derrida’s first gesture in Memoires seems somewhat predictable: What is an impossible mourning? What does it tell us, this impossible mourning, about the essence of memory? [. . .] Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?12

Derrida questions Freud’s distinction between healthy (possible) mourning and pathological (impossible) mourning—a distinction that assumes an autonomous self that is self-present and self-identical and that recognizes that self and other have clear contours and boundaries. It is on the basis of this assumption that the healthy mourner, then, introjects the other and brings the work

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of mourning to its dialectical completion instead of incorporating him in an interminable melancholia. Derrida does not only cast doubt on the dichotomy (as well as the hierarchy) between introjection (internalization) and incorporation (ingestion), he believes that healthy mourning is failed mourning. Indeed, mourning “succeeds” when it is pathological in Freud’s terms, for the other’s otherness can never become internalized in mourning. By means of deconstructing the Freudian lexicon, Derrida attempts to present a notion or idea, as it were, of another melancholia, perhaps an arche-melancholia which receives a quasi-transcendental status and which allows him to rethink subjectivity. Melancholia (depathologized) thus becomes a condition for “healthy subjectivity” which renounces the logocentric sublimations of speculative dialectics that erase the very otherness of the other. This deconstruction necessitates a redefinition of several concepts in the psychoanalytic dictionary, first and foremost that of narcissism. For Derrida it is thus impossible to make the sharp distinction Freud was wont to make between narcissism and object relations. Since our very openness to the other is marked by narcissistic injury, narcissism does not constitute a state of self-absorption that precedes our relation to others. There is no self- sufficient identity prior to object- relations, concrete as well as imaginary. No self, however jealous of its liberty and independence, pre-exists its social being in both the actual and spectral senses of the word. We must, therefore, refine our notion of narcissism, which functions differently in different psychic economies, from a jealous safeguarding of the self to generous hospitality: Others would speak too quickly of a totally interior speculation and of “narcissism.” But the narcissistic structure is too paradoxical and too cunning to provide us with the final word.13

And in an interview: There is not narcissism and no-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. [. . .] Love is narcissistic.14

The lover, thus, is by necessity a narcissist with an object. By means of the idealization lavished on him, the other, the object of his love, returns his ideal image. This is indeed the narcissistic moment—and yet the other, still, remains other. Aiming to be good to the other the lover acts in the way he likes it, for himself, for once he stops loving himself he stops loving the other. The lover

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obeys the other’s heteronomous imperative which resides both within and outside himself and which addresses, calls, and orients him. Derrida pinpoints this elusive stitching or boundary in many texts, as early as in Aristotle who distinguishes between friendship negotiated in terms of utility and ethical friendship which is directly based on trust and faith, without the intervention of a third party. Friendship of the latter kind is grounded in gains made from a position that has given up on gaining, that has come to expect remuneration— even if it is narcissistic or symbolic—to reside in generosity as such and the interest-free virtue in whose name it acts.15 It also appears, as mentioned, in Augustine who remains “half a soul” following the death of his friend, with whom he was one, and who wonders, now, whether he survives for himself or for the other or, again, for the other within the self—“in a narcissism which is never related to itself except in the mourning of the other,” as Derrida comments.16 Already in his early book Glas, Derrida, following in the footsteps of Hegel, describes the moment of love in terms of contradiction. Both self and other, in order to reach wholeness, position themselves as the one within the other. This wholeness is not available to them as independent, autarkic subjects. I do not wish to be independent; I do not wish to be what I am; I experience autarky as a lack. [. . .] I count something for the other. [. . .] I speculate here, like the other, in order to derive some profit from a contract between love as narcissism and speculative dialectics.17

But the relations between Freud and Derrida become entangled once we deconstruct Derrida’s ideas by way of Freud.18 The unique intertextuality between the two is crucial if we want to consider friendship, subjectivity, and melancholia in Derrida, especially because his discussion of these matters is full of holes, unarticulated and lacking self-analysis. The Memoires for [and about] Paul de Man are a powerful instantiation and formulation of Derrida’s perception of subjectivity as always already melancholic. Yet it is a complex book that reflects several crucial elements of Freud’s own conception—though Derrida privileges melancholia, rejecting, or ignoring altogether, its unsettling pathological implications. He writes: The terrible solitude which is mine or ours at the death of the other is what constitutes that relationship to self which we call “me,” “us,” “between us,” “subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “memory.”19

I will first try to show how Derrida, writing about de Man, brings into play— as though he were following stage directions—Freud’s image of melancholia. Then,

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referring to Derrida’s response to the “de Man affair,” I will deconstruct his text by looking at some of Freud’s suggestions, thus pointing out Derrida’s reticence and his sealed and blocked ambivalence. The Memoires present us with the intellectual oeuvre of Paul de Man, a distinguished professor of literature and literary theory at Yale University in the United States, especially during the last two decades of his life. Derrida attempts to link his own philosophical-psychoanalytical descriptions of the processes of mourning and melancholia with de Man’s rhetorical discussions of autobiography, allegory, irony and prosopopeia— the last of which de Man defined as the master trope of poetic discourse. On a certain level, the reason for this juxtaposition is related to the fact that de Man seems to be “traversed by an insistent reflection on mourning, a meditation in which bereaved memory is deeply engraved.”20 In other words: de Man— who is identified more than anyone else with “deconstruction in America”— and Derrida meet in a common search which is both described and enacted through Derrida’s incorporation of de Man’s text. The trope of prosopopeia—its features and featurings in this book—however, requires closer attention. De Man argues that prosopopeia takes a central role in the theory of tropes, which is part of rhetoric. It is a figure directed at an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, a figure whose etymology derives from the Greek words prosopon—a face or a mask—and poeiein—to make or to confer. Prosopopeia thereby infuses abstractions or inanimate objects with human characteristics and faculties, proffering a mask to what is faceless and enabling it to speak. Still we must maintain the distinction between anthropomorphism and prosopopeia. Anthropomorphism strives to intrinsically identify the human and the natural to the point of erasing the difference between man and nature. Prosopopeia, by contrast, registers the distinction between mind and world. This is not full- blown personification, descriptive realism, or mimetic identity. It is, instead, an imaginary, fictive trope which does not hark back to sensory experience. Prosopopeia’s specific conventions inaugurate a new, unprecedented sign in a given textual entity. Thus, in Milton’s epitaph on Shakespeare, presented in Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs and discussed in de Man’s The Rhetoric of Romanticism— “Dost make us marble with too much conceiving”— the dead person is the one who silences life and, by pronouncing a voice from beyond the grave, transforms life into a tomb. In the chiastic space of this sentence, subject and object cross over or are transposed into each other’s place. The subject may thus invade the object, or the object may come to overpower the subject. Such a lyrical fusion yields a fictive voice, and yet this voice does in no way present

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us with “false knowledge.” As Derrida puts it, it “already haunts any said real or present voice.”21 De Man does not think of prosopopeia as a facement. For facement is inherently a de- facement. Through prosopopeia the face “itself ” is rendered. What we call the “face” is not rendered from the start, naturally, as belonging to the person. It is through the mode of discourse, in the act of language, that the face as a figure becomes conveyed.22 Prosopopeia therefore does not indicate an entity; it rather installs a relationship between concepts which is apparently structured as sensory perception. De Man, moreover, argues that “as soon as we understand the rhetorical function of prosopopeia as positing voice or face by means of language, we also understand that what we are deprived of is not life but the shape and the sense of a world.”23 Derrida does not limit himself to presenting us with his friend’s rhetorical elaborations— elaborations which resonate his own questions about mourning and the specters that indefatigably haunt us. For halfway through his essay an important shift occurs. We witness a typical Derridean maneuver, one that recurs in many of his texts—those which bring to bear this particular sense of “bereaved friendship.” Derrida wonders whether it is possible or indeed desirable to abandon prosopopeia where it comes to the bereaved memory of the friend. Death, for him, death which occurs once only to the other and to one’s self, leaves no choice between memory and hallucination. Death leaves behind absolutely nothing of the other except for what remains within myself, our selves. The other is no longer: his life is within me or within us only. My self, our selves, therefore, stop being really ourselves, self-identical, now that the other is inside us. Since the friend is dead, in other words, our memory— or the friend’s place in our memory— cannot be rendered in the language of being (ontology) but only in a spectral, hauntological mode. No longer does the friend have a concrete face or a sensory existence or an acoustic voice. And yet he has a powerfully expressive face and a strongly resonant voice with which he seems to be addressing and commanding us from beyond the grave. Derrida stresses that this strange situation, this heteronomous law that comes from the other, is known from the start, anticipated before the actual death of the friend. This being “in us,” the being “in us” of the other, in bereaved memory, can be neither the so-called resurrection of the other himself [. . .] nor the simple inclusion of a narcissistic fantasy in a subjectivity that is closed upon itself or even identical to itself. [. . .] Already installed in the narcissistic structure, the other so marks the self of the relationship to self, so conditions it that the being “in us” of bereaved memory becomes the coming of the other, a coming of the other. And even, however terrifying this thought may be, the first coming of the other.24

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The description which rejects both the theological and the psychological suppositions (namely the notions of resurrection and narcissistic fantasy), insists then on the “first coming of the other” since the latter’s absent presence does not have to await the other’s death. It always already accompanies the living friendship and is called in other Derridean texts “the law of friendship.” This radicalization of the state of mourning, melancholy’s becoming the conditio sine qua non for any reflection on subjectivity, has significant consequences for our positivistic semantic lexicon, striving, as it does, in vain to maintain a sharp distinction between autobiography, memoirs, fiction, prosopopeia, hallucination, dream, and wakefulness. Derrida uses the somewhat perplexing notion of “the prosopopeia of prosopopeia” in order to transform his description of prosopopeia, which is built upon direct quotations from de Man and paraphrastic elaboration of his ideas, into a quasi-transcendental category. Reading/interpretation and (melancholic) friendship are mutually interlinked, they have a shared corpus. The process of memory has a textual dimension which is always already mediated by the non-empirical voice and face of the friend. With the friend gone, having departed, reading and writing become an act of memory. Transplanted from its relatively narrow rhetorical context, prosopopeia becomes then a prerequisite for any reflection on subjectivity, writing, reading, and friendship. Thus it immediately turns into “arche- prosopopeia.” As this trope “belongs” to, or has been taken from, de Man’s theory, Derrida, in this manner, gives homage to his friend. He speaks in his tongue, adjusts his beloved one’s tongue to his own, encounters him in his affective concerns and intellectual meditations, borrows fragments, remnants, and uses the procedures of scholarly quotation to dissolve the boundaries of lines and worlds in order to create his “own” indistinct texture. Liable to incorporation, prosopopeia, de Man’s figure, is devoured by Derrida’s corpus/text in a process that involves transformation, extension, and amplification. But such incorporation characterizes Derrida’s writing throughout his texts: Celan’s “Schibboleth,” Levinas’s “trace,” Kierkegaard’s “sacrifice,” Shakespeare’s “pound of flesh” or— though more ambivalently— Freud’s “melancholia” (to mention but a few)— all these tropes and figures are swallowed by the Derridean corpus in order to become conditions of possibility for defining human experience as such. Prosopopeia denotes the process whereby, within ourselves, we bestow a “human” face on our living- dead— those who constitute us, render us possible, carry us—and possibly maintain us. In Politics of Friendship Derrida quotes the following from Nietzsche: “Higher than love of one’s neighbor stands love of the most distant man and of the man of the future; higher still than love of man I account love of causes and of phantoms.”25

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

Still, in spite of the emotional eros Derrida infuses into any text with which he engages (in The Ear of the Other he writes: “I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from the deconstructive point of view are texts that I love, with that impulse of identification which is indispensable for reading . . . my relation to these texts is characterized by loving jealousy and not at all by nihilistic fury”),26 his libidinal investment is far from evenly divided. De Man was a beloved, singular friend—it transpires from Derrida’s melancholy work of mourning. In Memoires, with its melancholy reading/writing, this absolute friendship is rendered thematically and reflexively, while in the article on “Paul de Man’s War,” it is conducted in a much more exposed manner. It is, nevertheless, interesting to note that Derrida with his unique awareness of contamination—indeed, deconstruction in its entirety may arguably be pointing in this direction—remains silent about the question of ambivalence regarding the beloved friend. Negativity, as though sidelined, is not mentioned in these texts, yet it finds its own elusive ways. We have seen how in Memoires Derrida persistently uses expressions like “being inside me/us” or “among us.” This topography, with its attempt to outline the spectral existence of the friend “inside” memory, refers us to “For,” one of Derrida’s early discussions of Freud which addresses the issue of melancholia by way of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s reading of the Wolf Man.27 In this complex essay Derrida analyzes diverse manifestations of the unconscious and focuses on the multivalent concept of the for. Though its major meaning derives from the word forum, thus referring to an open, bright, exposed space, in French it connotes the conscience—Le for interieur—which is situated in the foris, that is, outside the walled enclosure. Derrida is interested in an even more deeply nocturnal space, namely, the quarry or tunnel or crypt in which traumatic events find their lack of peace and tranquility, a crypt linked with fort (fortress). While this crypt is tightly shut and impenetrable to any interference from outside, it is also and simultaneously excluded from the inside. It is both inside and outside, a hermetic safe, a secret interiority on the public square, the forum—and extraneous to it. This is sheer violence, responds Derrida. The traumatic event, the loss deposits something wholly extraneous, dead and alive at the same time, within me. I am invaded by the phantom of an alien whose traces form a crypt which immortalizes, rather than the lost object itself, an eternal yearning for it. Bringing Derrida’s early discussion to what’s at issue here is likely to help us in formulating a number of questions and hiatuses regarding the violence missing from Memoires and “Paul de Man’s War.” While he examines the Wolf Man’s

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melancholic incorporation of the father in his “For,” in the present chapters he addresses friendship without touching on the family. The eulogies he wrote throughout his life, later to be collected in The Work of Mourning, were also addressed to friends. Unlike Kristeva, Derrida never explicitly linked between object loss and the loss of “the maternal thing,” namely one’s capacity or incapacity for matricide. But it is no coincidence that the aforementioned works share the same terminology. It seems that Derrida uses this connection to argue that infantile injury or injuries are formative of the possibility, as well as the impossibility, of any future friendship. “Impossibility” because his redeeming act of writing hints at the fact that true friendship, doomed as it is to enact the unfulfilled desire for one’s parents, cannot be and that its only possibility relates to the compulsive (textual) work of the memory.28 Derrida’s Circumfession is an interesting text in this respect because, though it is dedicated to a young friend, Geoffrey Bennington, G., as it were, the omniscient god, the beloved— G. has no presence in the text. The loved one, the significant and missing- presence in this text, as perhaps in all of Derrida’s writings, is the mother— whose figure we will consider again in Chapters 4 and 5. The addressee in Circumfession is not identical to the addressee in The Post Card, who will be discussed in the next chapter. In Period 31, Derrida rummages in the wardrobe of the bedroom, in Nice, where his mother is on her death bed, to discover that she has held on to only a small number of all the letters and postcards he wrote her twice a week over a period of thirty years—3,120 letters and postcards. She kept very little, he says. The Period is all about theft. Little Jackie and his cousin Claude sneak into an Arab landowner’s vineyard in Algiers and are caught red-handed, before they manage even to take a bite. This theft is more like a game, a game with themselves, with how it feels to steal, with the pleasure of transgressing against the forbidden fruit, and all of a sudden the picture shifts from this archaic Eden which resonates with literary thefts and Augustine’s confessed theft (of a pear) and Rousseau’s (a ribbon), to the mother’s bed, to the mother’s grave theft, to the theft addressed to her which reverts to the theft of a piece of skin in circumcision and to Derrida’s reappropriation or stealing of the text as, in sorcerer’s fashion, he documents this multi-temporal situation. This is a different scene. It is not the hedonistic burning of letters proposed in The Post Card, while we, the readers, are not invited to peep into a coded correspondence that does not address us. For the thief is the mother. And writing as though he were stealing his own property, what belongs to him, the one remaining thing, Derrida is entitled to steal, to write as part of a drama of revelation and of mourning for the letters, for her, for him.29 There is a gap of three years between Memoires and “Paul de Man’s War,” Der-

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rida’s response to the youthful de Man’s collaboration with the Nazi occupation when he wrote literary reviews for the fascist Belgian newspaper Le Soir between 1940 and 1942. I shall refrain from dealing with the political and moral issues that arose around the “de Man affair” (in the United States) which must be seen in the context of other cultural-political scandals of the 1980s and 1990s (Heidegger in France, the Historikerstreit in Germany, Céline in Israel), which—in their diverse national settings and their different intensities— occasioned bitter controversies concerning the specific responsibility of intellectuals and concerning the principle itself of intellectual responsibility, both in the Second World War and in the present. I choose to focus on the emotional involvement that agitated Derrida, and which was bound to clash with public expectations and taboos, both within academe and outside it. “I want to say,” he writes, revealing the presupposition and the bottom line of his intervention, “that whatever may be—how to say—the wound that these texts are for me, they have changed nothing in my friendship and admiration for Paul de Man.”30 Derrida opens the article by wondering about the implications of the notions of responsibility/response—an ongoing preoccupation from as far back as his early texts on Husserl, and perhaps more intensely, from the 1980s. Responsibility, he believes, in this case, binds “us”— that is to say all of those who are connected to de Man: his friends, his students, his readers, and his colleagues. The core of the article, indeed, is Derrida’s own responsibility toward de Man, a responsibility which is by definition asymmetric: I believe there is no responsibility, no ethico-political decision, that must not pass through the proofs of the incalculable or the undecidable. Otherwise everything would be reducible to calculation, program, causality, and, at best, “hypothetical imperative.”31

Derrida alone, therefore, without partner, is responsible, and he excludes any question regarding de Man’s responsibility—for his Le Soir readers in the early 1940s, for his actual students, his friends, his readers, and, eventually, his colleagues. Derrida underlines the lack of symmetry that constitutes friendship in a manner dispensing with all mutual-economic considerations as irrelevant. Since the public domain is founded on economic assumptions which it enacts through a variety of exchange relations, the collision between these two orders is inevitable. In Derrida’s words, as in a desperate attempt to bridge the gap, venturing out from the “I, your dedicated friend” to “we”: I know that I am going to reread him and that there is still a future and a promise that awaits us there. [. . .] He is in the ashes, he has neither the grounds, nor the means, still less the choice or the desire to respond. We are alone with ourselves. We carry his memory and his name in us.32

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Reading and friendship complement one another, and actually overlap, materialize in one another. Still, as we sail further out and dive, Derrida’s persistent engagement with his responsibility throughout the article takes some interesting turns. He reads young de Man’s early writings attentively, trying to derive his esthetic- political thinking from them. Derrida argues that de Man, at first sight, seems to present us with a typical modernist ideological logic. In this view, he simply uses encoded and stereotypical arguments that offer a familiar, Eurocentric spiritual geography. This, according to Derrida, is a gesture that is not unique to de Man. It can be traced back in many modernist onto-politicalesthetic texts, by, for instance, Paul Valéry, Martin Heidegger, or Edmund Husserl. No matter how much these authors differ in their political outlooks and their implications, they share a belief in the supra-national, spiritual hegemony of Europe. In another book—The Other Heading33—Derrida dedicates extensive attention to this logic which regards Europe “proper” as the capital of human culture, as the universal essence of humanity and its spearhead. Thus, being a philosophical rather than an empirical phenomenon, European nationalism immediately becomes transcendental, supra-nationalism. This logic, however, which can be found in de Man—Derrida offers examples—is not all there is to say about the story of de Man’s journalistic writings. The picture is more complicated and heterogeneous, believes Derrida, and it allows for deconstruction. Indeed, it suggests that the young de Man himself, who was to become the “representative” of deconstruction in the United States, deconstructed his own articles. In this analysis, de Man appears alternatingly as a conformist (who adjusts himself to the modernist discourse) and as a member of a cultural resistance (who secretly questions this discourse). Based on a close reading of the texts, Derrida formulates a type of general rule. On the one hand, argues Derrida, these articles are profoundly marked by and committed to the official ideological-political context in which they were written—the language and the expectations of the occupier, and as such they rest on stereotypical schemes and sources of argument. But on the other hand, de Man’s discourse is fractured, riddled with internal conflict, and it involves a movement and a counter- movement that problematizes the former and undermines its determination. This opposition, however, suggests an equivalence: each of these options is equally valid. Though readers may expect or demand “one side,” monadic and unequivocal, de Man already at this early stage reveals himself as a sophisticated ironist who subjects his own dominant voice to criticism. I will consider neither the specific readings Derrida suggests for charged and troublesome passages in de Man, especially in the article on Jews in contemporary literature, nor the fundamen-

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

tal validity of Derrida’s argument, nor, indeed, its implications. What matters to me in this context is the fact that Derrida, aware that his statements may be interpreted as empty formalism, unawareness, apologetics, excuse, and worse, evidence of a lack of intellectual honesty and integrity, is resolutely determined to make them. He knows that the absolute an-economical responsibility he feels with regard to de Man cannot be translated into ethical responsibility. By definition, the first one is secret and reticent and cannot be explained and justified in words. Committed to the other, it inevitably excludes, even sacrifices, others. The absolute idea of friendship, which is distinguished from its chance empirical manifestations, is not accessible to deconstruction. This is the guiding principle of Derrida’s friendship/ reading for/of de Man and it supplies the framework and the possibility for the deconstructive procedures occurring in this article. Derrida constructs his subject position regarding de Man under orders resembling those marking Abraham’s relationship to God. If it was up to him alone, this loyalty, this absolute devotion would not require explanation and indeed does not have an explanation. Following in Kierkegaard’s footsteps, in The Gift of Death Derrida describes Abraham’s necessary straying from the ethical order: The highest expression of the ethical is in terms of what binds us to our own and to our fellows (that can be the family but also the actual community of friends or the nation). By keeping the secret, Abraham betrays ethics.34

Derrida develops, then, the aporia of responsibility. These excerpts are important because this aporia is brought to bear touchingly in Derrida’s defeated attempt to declare himself about de Man’s war: The first effect or first destination of language therefore involves depriving me of, or delivering me from, my singularity. By suspending my absolute singularity in speaking, I renounce at the same time my liberty and my responsibility. Once I speak I am never and no longer myself, alone and unique. It is a very strange contract—both paradoxical and terrifying— that binds infinite responsibility to silence and secrecy. It goes against what one usually thinks, even in the most philosophical mode. For common sense, just as for philosophical reasoning, the most widely shared belief is that responsibility is tied to the public and to the nonsecret, to the possibility and even the necessity of accounting for one’s words and actions in front of others, of justifying and owning up to them. Here on the contrary it appears, just as necessarily, that the absolute responsibility of my actions, to the extent that such a responsibility remains mine, singularly so, something no one else can perform in my place, instead implies secrecy. But what is also implied is that, by not speaking to others, I don’t account for my actions, that I answer for nothing and to no one, that I make no response to others or before others. It is both a scandal and a paradox. [. . .] Absolute responsibility is

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not a responsibility, at least it is not general responsibility or responsibility in general. It needs to be exceptional or extraordinary, and it needs to be that absolutely and par excellence: it is as if absolute responsibility could not be derived from a concept of responsibility and therefore, in order for it to be what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable: it must therefore be irresponsible in order to be absolutely responsible.35

But Derrida does try to explain himself. In the first place, it would seem, because that is what he is expected to do. His audience— colleagues, students, readers, and rivals—are keenly awaiting his response. He is forced to negotiate between ethics and his absolute responsibility (even if there is “no friendship without the possibility of absolute secrecy”),36 or between “the law of the day” and “the law of the night,” “the law of man” and the “law of woman”— to put it in the language of Glas37—given that his intellectual activity takes place in the public sphere. This affair, after all, is ethical-political through and through and his response is inevitable. Translation between the registers, however, is impossible and comes out awkward, artless, unconvincing. In the face of the wild and murky waves made by these irresolvable tensions he tries, nevertheless, to make order and coherence. Gradually, however, his unconditional responsibility for de Man transforms into an intense effort to prove de Man’s morality and to clear his name. Why? Is he addressing de Man? Is it his friend’s war he is fighting or his own, a struggle concerning himself, for the sake of his own (psychic) economy? Could it be that below the surface there’s an ambivalence that Derrida is not ready to bring into account, let alone express? Why should the act or enactment of friendship urge him to fight for the friend’s good name? Is this inevitable? Can we not go on being friends with our friends, if only inside our souls, once we acknowledge their immorality? When we think badly of our friend, are we no longer good friends or friends at all? Does this sheer thought contaminate us, does it contaminate friendship? Should we therefore think no evil of our friends, indeed, should we be forbidden to do so? And what are we to do about the negativity that simmers on within us? Derrida hushes these questions, as if he were ignoring the mental dynamic that links— according to Freud— melancholy reaction to an unresolved conflict with the lost object. While, at the beginning of the article and toward its end, Derrida is prepared to consider our implication and contamination in evil and in fascism (“Since we are talking at this moment about discourse that is totalitarian, fascist, Nazi, racist, anti-Semitic, and so forth. [. . .] Do we have access to a complete formalization of this logic and an absolute exteriority with regard to its ensemble? [. . .] Such a formalizing, saturating totalization seems to me

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to be precisely the essential character of this logic whose project, at least, and whose ethico- political consequence can be terrifying”),38 there is a certain point at which he must stop. De Man’s redemption is crucial to the redemption of Derrida himself, because, as he testifies and mentions again and again, the matter is most serious. The argument is indeed suffused by the music and tone of a profound seriousness and gravity. Thus, for instance, by associating the word resistance with the young de Man’s behavior—risking to taint, to obliterate the memory of the real members of the Resistance, those who endangered their lives by living and acting outside any institution—Derrida expresses a recurrent anxiety of his own. He himself is repeatedly preoccupied with this concept in his writing and deals with its diverse aspects: resistance against theory, against therapy, political resistance, and— of course— the “Resistance.” Toward the end of Circumfession we are presented with a fantastic wish: When I am not dreaming of making love, of being a resistance fighter in the last war blowing up bridges or trains, I want one thing only, and that is to lose myself in the orchestra I would form with my sons, heal, bless and seduce the whole world by playing divinely with my sons producing with them the world’s ecstasy.39

Of these three dreams, the one that mentions the Resistance refers to a different order of time. It marks a possibility never realized and never to be realized. In the passage, then, which attributes “cultural resistance” to de Man in the most criminal of his writings—the one about Jews in contemporary literature— are we witnessing Derrida’s projection or is it an inverse type of identification with one who was in Europe at the time and could have been, or should have been, in the Resistance? Whose guilt is talking here, in these passages? Whose plea for forgiveness? Through the experience of the ultimate test of separation and death, Derrida’s bereaved friendship causes him to confront himself, issues that trouble him throughout his writing: ethical responsibility, absolute responsibility, the articulation between living-together and loneliness. His love for de Man may also be a desperate bid to love himself through de Man, in spite of de Man, something which is possible only in these anomalous conditions. Because this is not an anticipation of the death of his friend. The present expression of this friendship itself becomes possible only posthumously.40 And inevitably it reverts to the economy of the self. De Man gives Derrida a valuable gift, the most valuable gift, perhaps, a friend can offer his friend. He allows him to reflect on himself, and Derrida expresses his gratitude between the lines. In Politics of Friendship he will quote Zarathustra/Nietzsche who identifies the creative friend with one who

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gives his beloved one an entire world, and he will confirm: “A friend who does not give you the world, and a world which, because it exists, has form and limit, [. . .] gives you nothing.”41 The transposition of the conversation with the living friend to an internal conversation which, it would seem, never occurred with the actual de Man, and could never have occurred due to the friend’s counter-time and his distance— constitutes Derrida’s melancholic experience and becomes the condition of possibility for writing and friendship, writing as friendship, and friendship as writing. Derrida explicitly mentions this possibility in Politics of Friendship by distancing his testimony to the relationship between Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault. There, given the different temporalities at work in Blanchot’s text in memory of Foucault—the time of intimate recollection of his friend, the time of the statement attributed to Aristotle (“Oh my friends, there is no friend”), and Foucault’s own time—Derrida, quoting from Blanchot, writes: This friendship could not have been declared during the lifetime of the friend. It is death that “today allows me” to “declare” this “intellectual friendship” “as. . . .” May thanks be given to death. It is thanks to death that friendship can be declared. Never before, never otherwise.42

Even when friendship is declared within the lifetime of the friends it announces the very same thing: the death due to which, in the end, the chance to declare will occur. Both Memoires and “Paul de Man’s War” are flooded by an emotional tension which does not allow these texts to conduct a systematic conceptual analysis of the ideas of subjectivity, memory, melancholia, and historicity. That Derrida’s writing about melancholia is melancholic itself is of considerable importance for our construction of these ideas. Freud, as we have seen, characterizes one of the symptoms of melancholia in terms of a delusional psychosis which makes a cut between the melancholic person and the outside world. In so doing he supplies us with another way of denoting the unbridgeable Derridean abyss between absolute responsibility and ethical responsibility. For what room is there for the social, legal, and political reality in Derrida’s melancholy commitment to the other which is realized in and through writing? 43 This scruple regarding the reality principle will become critical once we recognize the about-turn Derrida makes in Politics of Friendship. Here he discusses contradictory principles of friendship, an apolitical or trans-political position in Montaigne, for instance, according to which friendship, which is not amenable to either representation or legislation, eludes the public domain, resides “beyond the political principle.” In the context of this discussion, sober, Derrida

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

can allow himself to wonder whether this really is the good (the good beyond existence),44 while throughout this entire book he searches for another idea of the political, based on a notion of distance, that is, on a different notion of friendship, which concurs with the a-logical demands suggested by aporetic Blanchotian formulations like “a relation- without- relation” or “a community- without- community.”45 Much is at stake here, and Derrida is extremely aware of this: Is the “friendship of a justice” over and beyond the law, acceptable, he asks, and if it is—then in the name of what? In the name of politics? Ethics? Law? Or in the name of a sacred friendship which would no longer answer to any other agency than itself? The gravity of these questions finds its examples— endless ones— every time a faithful friend wonders whether he or she should judge, condemn, forgive what he decides as a political fault of his or her friend.46

This negation is not merely directed against the external world, however. Freud, as will be remembered, argued that melancholic self-abasement is the self ’s ambivalence regarding the lost object. As the melancholic openly, exhibitionistically, accuses himself of narrow-mindedness, egoism, insincerity, and lack of autonomy, these accusations are actually addressed at the loved one and then moved inside. The melancholic camouflages his disappointment and the conflict inherent in his love, and because the original negativity is not directed at the self he feels at ease in putting his failures, his unfairness, his dependence, and his guilt on full display. Does Derrida’s dominant gesture, emphasizing his own responsibility and guilt, shift the disappointment he feels in the face of de Man’s behavior? From this point of view, the article on de Man’s war reveals a rupture between the self (Derrida’s) and the critical agent whom he has swallowed in an act of incorporation (de Man), a rupture which cannot but repeat again and again the irresolvable conflict and unfinished business of the living friendship, since Derrida could not either then, or since then, and not even now speak about, or admit any feelings of, ambivalence toward the late de Man. In the course of the article, indeed, de Man’s spectral presence becomes ideal, and Derrida confesses to hardly any feelings of shame, let alone anger or hostility, toward him. The text constitutes a tightly sealed crypt which conceals the wound and perpetuates the rupture.47 If we consider this text to encapsulate— hyperbolically speaking—the whole of Derrida’s oeuvre, then deconstruction here is seen to enact its notion of friendship, its ongoing work of mourning and memory by creating a symbolic environment that is shielded from any real contact with the world and is shielded, in fact, from any real contact with the friend.

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The language of touch, of the senses, tact, good measure, relates to human beings and texts as in one breath: “How to touch him”, he writes, whether about Jean-Luc Nancy himself, or about Nancy’s texts: in speaking of touch, in a way that is at once pertinent, but not without tact, and contingent, but not arbitrary. [. . .] Beyond imitation or commentary, beyond simple repetition, what form of baroque contagion or imperceptible contamination should I imagine? And how to do it in the correct fashion, by touching it without touching it too much, while observing the limits of decency, of duty, of politeness— of friendship?48

No one knows with certainty where discreetness begins and where it ends in tactlessness and irreverence. The secret that must be left intact is not given a priori, implying as it does a certain contact and the promise that that contact holds.49 Friendship is bereaved: an alliance, bereaved from the outset, with a transcendent other who cannot be represented or re-presented fully, whether in his lifetime or after his death. As a result, its virtues, depending as they do on living context, seem to evaporate from Derrida’s description: consolation, confirmation, good will, help, humor, accessibility. In relation to the immemorial and an infinite future, the friend takes on a phantom- like status, as though there were absolutely no shared criteria, equality, or hoped-for equality—as though these were wholly incalculable: Is it possible, without setting off loud protests on the part of militants of an edifying or dogmatic humanism, to think and to live the gentle rigor of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of a certain ahumanity, in absolute separation, beyond or below the commerce of god and man?50 Friendship is never a present given, it belongs to the experience of expectation, promise, or engagement. Its discourse is that of prayer, it inaugurates, but reports nothing, it is not satisfied with what is, it moves out to this place where a responsibility opens up a future.51

It may be that this compulsive position allows Derrida to control his private grief on the death of his friend and avoid falling to pieces. But the specific response becomes generalized as soon as the singular friend evolves into a formative discursive position. Anticipating his absence through a meditation about the bereaved dynamic of memory, engaging in intellectual and erotic melancholic relations with traditionally bequeathed texts, and positing a self that is always already an heir—all these turn Derrida’s own muted ambivalence into a principled abstract condition—an ambivalence which, in the end, is also aimed at

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

all relationship and intimacy. A suggestion to this effect can be found in Politics of Friendship, where Derrida mentions the analogy between anticipation of a friend and anticipation of the Messiah, both of which, due to their intolerable terror, simultaneously involve a wish to precipitate and a wish to procrastinate until the end of times.52 It is as though by anticipating death deconstruction sets a kind of defense mechanism against any eventuality. As though its frustration, its anger, its disappointment is so great that it turns friendship into a transcendental signified, unattainable while settling, itself, for a relentless textual mania. The wound, or wounds, at its origin do not form a scab. All is moving forward in pursuit, as it were, of what was always already lost, knowing that it cannot be restored, cannot be retraced. At the most, the writer can gain control over the discourse, the work of memory, to preserve his desire to preserve. Derrida makes an a priori commitment to live for the sake of memory, a commitment which means both less living friendship and infinite melancholia. Friendship is overcast by the threat of separation and is deflected as the desire for a more sober and tolerable pain displaces it. This experience with friendship thus involves Derrida’s hauntological commitment to reading and tradition, however much for him this term indicates plurality—a plurality of friends, a plurality of interpreters, a plurality of interpretations. He emphasizes in Specters of Marx: Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. [. . .] To be [. . .] means, for the same reason, to inherit. All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance. [. . .] That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, [. . .] but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.53

And in Politics of Friendship: As if one could neither inherit nor not inherit what is left for us to inherit, the heritage of a culture, the heritage of a friend.54

Does not such a strategy make friendship impossible? Doesn’t it cast a shadow over living friendship, turning it into obsession— elusive or withdrawn from the outset? Does the other actually speak in this friendship? Though Derrida states that it is the other who spoke first, can this other be considered a friend? While he appears to be the friend—for am I not boundlessly committed to him, redeeming him by the grace of a stubborn and obsessive memory— his specific voice is almost erased. Why did I decide to crown him of all people, and in his own lifetime? How did this decision affect our living friendship? Did it enable the friendship and regulate it? Did it undermine it?

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Friendship and heritage involve the postal condition—relations that do not always find direct expression. The Post Card, as we shall see, renders the lover’s frustration, pain and bitterness. Only when he acknowledges the shattering of his metaphysical dream of the beloved’s full presence, only when he recognizes the fatality of the postal condition, as well as the exchange and the suspension that are inherent to the life of love, can he be reconciled and can he channel the pleasure principle that rules over open cards into a textual-intellectual eros that averts instant gratification. His position, ironically, approaches those “traditional” philosophical positions that envision a dialectic move away from the body, from the chains of the senses and the particular: “Truth [. . .] is always the death [. . .] of what it is the truth of.”55 Comradeship with the other is immediately spiritual comradeship, ideal, subtle, one that incorporates him, exceeds him, even as it acknowledges his total extraneousness.56 Hence the emotional intensities registered by the texts that register desire. Hence their affective density and length which bundle together and figure forth a manifold of temporal layers, the results of the combined interpretive work and the process of reading as such. The fatal logic of mourning, unable to internalize and conserve its object and doomed never to reach completion, is at work in writing. It is as though the texts were about to burst with the excesses of their elaborations, which hold in one binding—in addition to the closest friends—transferential agents who are always “themselves” as well as someone else. Following Kant, in Politics of Friendship Derrida distinguishes between love and friendship—a distinction that is not maintained throughout the entire book—in terms of spatiality and respect: A respectful separation seems to distinguish friendship from love. [. . .] Love harbors hate within itself. [. . .] It could be compared to a death instinct or a demonic principle. [. . .] If this is indeed the case, friendship would then be at one and the same time the sign, the symptom, the representative of this possible perversion, yet also what protects us from such perversion.57

For friendship to occur, the inevitable distance implied by the very addressing of the other must be recognized. The question—Are you still there?— assumes your archaism and your counter-time and seeps into the immediacy of living speech. I always already wait for you. I presuppose your freedom and my pained consent to it: Imagine my having thus to command the other (and this is renunciation) to be free (for I need his freedom in order to address the other qua other, in desire as well as in

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

renunciation). I would therefore command him to be capable of not answering—my call, my invitation, my expectation, my desire. And I must impose a sort of obligation on him thereby to prove his freedom, a freedom I need, precisely in order to call, wait, invite.58

A freedom I need in order to write. As if I were calling someone—for example, on the telephone—saying to him or her, in sum: I don’t want you to wait for my call and become forever dependent upon it; go out on the town, be free not to answer. And to prove it, the next time I call you, don’t answer, or I won’t see you again. If you answer my call, it’s all over.59 Owing to the name, friendship begins prior to friendship; friendship always begins by surviving. One might just as well say friendship is never there.60 We have never yet seen each other. Only written.61

MOURNING Politics of Friendship marks an important development in Derrida’s thinking about friendship and the manner in which he performs it. Focusing on texts by classic philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, the opening essay raises questions that Derrida has not addressed in the past. Derrida is prepared to challenge the absolute idea of friendship through economical considerations, and to use these as a starting point for self-scrutiny. He is prepared not to deal with one singular friendship but to count his friends, some, not too many. He can afford to feel a sadness that might cast its shadow over the friendship, with the two friends avowing that they do not see eye to eye where it comes to their expectations from one another, that they confuse each other, are confused themselves, dissimilar in their political, social, normative, or cultural identities, yet still they stay in touch, respecting their potential enemies in their friends, those who may use their freedom to escape the bond. Calculation is inevitable, even in a perfect friendship, which transforms into a type of never-attained objective. It is this gap between my own and the other’s emotional involvement that is at the source of the sigh, soberly addressed to friends: “Oh my friends, there is no friend.” Do friends exist? Where should I address this question? And to whom if not to my friend? Each time that the common measure and the straight and narrow path are in default for these friends who are indeed friends, but have not managed to concur on friend-

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ship, one wanting one of its forms, the other yet another, [. . .] each time in the grievance one can address to the other, calling him “friend” but telling him that in their case there is no friendship.62

Derrida, then, asks—through Aristotle—how many friends a person can have, more than one, but not too many (one who has too many friends has no friends), and perhaps he also asks how many friends of the absolute, melancholy kind can a person incorporate, and should the friend, maybe, be protected and defended against his absolute friends? As if suddenly he was in doubt: Have I sacrificed too much? What for? For whom? Moreover, while it dedicates an extensive discussion to the death, memory, and immortalization of the friend, Derrida’s text is not a melancholy text. It is not a melancholy text because his involvement, intense as usual, with other thinkers does not incorporate their ideas. Once distance and difference are acknowledged and respected, libidinal investment is seriously reduced. The exchange between the philosophers happens in the public space where we should acknowledge the objective measuring tools, the dates, time schedules, place names, and the constraints these impose on our desires, if we want to give the encounter a chance even though loneliness continues its trickling, and in the absence of understanding or agreement. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant makes the distinction between friendship and love, or between moral love and esthetic love, ascribing grave philosophical import to distance as a condition of possibility for the former. Love is the enemy of friendship and the enemy of morality. A terrorist, morbid, it entails radical evil. Friendship must be shielded from it. Too much softness and tenderness tend toward possessiveness and mutual merging, to exaggerated attraction, and these, as if bound by a catastrophic law of nature, eventually lead to rupture. Derrida quotes Kant: Friendship is something so delicate that it is never for a moment safe from interruptions if it is allowed to rest on feelings, and if this mutual sympathy and self-surrender are not subjected to principles or rules preventing excessive familiarity and limiting mutual love by requirements of respect [. . .] love in friendship cannot be an affect, for emotion is blind in its choice, and after a while it goes up in smoke.63

Friendship fluctuates between opposing emotions— attraction and love on one side, repulsion, respect, the curtailment of intimacy on the other. The friends must not get to know each other too well. Derrida’s focus changes sharply now that the other is removed from his seat and the self can observe him directly. He says, as it were, that he himself chooses his friends and that it is his duty to justify the choice, even if only to himself.

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

The friend must resemble him, or, to use Cicero’s image, he must be an ideal image, an exemplar, of him. At the earlier stage, such worries, questions about the friend’s personality, did not even arise. Our relations transcended good and evil, taking on a sacred quality. My friend took all of me, captured my heart, filled up my world and was swallowed by my empty mouth, in his life as in his death. I could not ask him who he was or whether he actually satisfied my needs. I took him into me, erasing, as it were, myself and respecting his otherness. In fact I was deeply immersed in my void and I could not allow myself to stand up facing the very person with whom I was involved to distraction, ask whether he actually suited me, ask him for explanations, assume that he was interested in mine. At this “new stage” Derrida’s friendship becomes earthbound. My friend is the very best friend, and yet, earthbound. The politics of friendship is a secular tractate. No more holy of holies. The best friendship is in the here and now. It is dynamic, communicative, moderate, protected, ambivalent, even. To the extent that Freud’s distinctions are unsatisfactory, Derrida renders a radically different formation of the self: A self that lives in peace with its own worthlessness, knows its limits, criticizes, makes choices, changes its preferences, rallies back. Hence, Montaigne’s dictum, quoting a rumor attributed to Aristotle, plays a considerable role throughout the text— “Oh my friends, there is no friend”— with its modernist, affective repetition, which engraves unto the text the compulsiveness of the anxious, asking psyche. I am skeptical about friends. I come closer and closer and then withdraw. Sometimes we meet, at other times we don’t. Our time is not synchronous, nor can it be. While in the past I was wholly passive with them, ready to absorb them and, paradoxically, immersed in myself, in my needs, it seems that I can let go, give up on healing the fundamental, impossible wound, which was unconsciously agitated in my obsessive link to others, and succeed, for the first time perhaps, to have friends, enjoy their company. The first move in the opening essay is deceptive. On the face of it, Derrida follows Aristotle who accepts Socrates’ suggestion in Lysis that friendship lies in the lover’s approach, not in that of the beloved one, and that these are not equivalent. The idea of friendship unsettles the principle of symmetry. A person may love the sick one, the dead, or the inanimate. Friendship is possible with an animal, a plant, a mechanical doll, or a parrot. The question of friendship can be addressed as it were via the lover’s feeling, his energy, his dedication, investment, actions. What makes friendship worthy is that it inspires the lover with life. I love, therefore I exist. Addressing myself as it were to the other, I return after all to myself. Once more, friendship is brought up to its very limit. A living friendship, in the full sense of the word, relates to the bridge between

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life and death, to loving the sick. Though it cannot survive where love has expired, friendship can very much survive the expiry of its object, it can go on loving the one who departed or whose life was taken. Aristotle even institutes a hierarchy between those who are born to love and those who tend to be loved, who pursue respect, recognition, and honoring. Derrida’s argument, therefore, would seem to return us to absolute, melancholy intentionality with its horizon of death: Friendship for the deceased thus carries this philia to the limit of its possibility. [. . .] I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the dead other.64

Still, at this point this asymmetry presupposes mutual friendship. I don’t live beyond my friend, I cannot and must not survive him other than to the extent that he, as the last survivor, my heir, already carries my death. This is an extremely significant addition. If absolute asymmetry is not joined by necessary symmetry, it is not friendship we are dealing with. Then we are dealing with another relationship, which, however meaningful, vital, and crucial to a person’s life, does not deserve the name of friendship. Friendship involves a negotiation between mutuality and non-mutuality. I am ready to do anything for my friend, regardless of what he does for me and in the belief that he is ready to do so regardless of what I do for him. I act as though all of this were self-evident and expect him to act similarly, expect him to repay me in the exact same currency precisely there where rates of exchange are completely negated. “To count on a profit in renouncing profit, to expect a recompense, if only a narcissistic or symbolic one, from the most disinterested virtue of generosity.”65 Where all transaction between us stops, the friendship ends. There is an irreducible primary dissymmetry here, writes Derrida, but “this same dissymmetry separates itself [. . .], it folds, turns inside out and doubles itself at the same time in the hypothesis of shared friendship, the friendship tranquilly described as reciprocal.”66 Such tranquility is characteristic of Derrida’s work with some thinkers, those who do not attract or extract emotional intensities from him. Most of his friends, in fact, come under this category and allow him, paradoxically, to conduct a “typical” deconstruction so to speak— one that affirms but is skeptical, is responsive but not conservative, not reproducing, productive, one that entertains economic relations of proximity-distance with its addressees, is respectful but not obsequious, serious but ironic, sufficiently protected in order to be able to register what the friend, either classic or modern, leaves out, forgets, excludes and puts in the margins, loyal and remembering, violent and inventive by turns.

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

The diverse levels of involvement deconstruction proffers, affecting as they do the manner in which it appropriates textual residues, do not threaten, however, its fundamental notion of historicity. Derrida refers to the constitutive conception of his book Politics of Friendship, which can be applied to his other works as well: We have not privileged the great discourses on friendship so as to submit to their authority or to confirm a hierarchy but, on the contrary, as it were, to question the process and the logic of canonization which has established these discourses in a position of exemplary authority.67

And further on: For we should not forget that we are first speaking in the tradition of a certain concept of friendship, within a given culture. [. . .] Now if this tradition harbors within it dominant structures, discourses which silence others, by covering over or destroying the archive, a tradition is certainly not homogeneous, nor, within it, is the determination of friendship.68

The tight relationship between tradition, the archive, and friendship is notable, together with the animosity this relationship suggests, even if only implicitly (“Without an enemy, I go mad, I can no longer think”);69 tradition, archive, and friendship, consigned to “us,” the unnatural, illegitimate heirs, the community-without-community of friends, who always already covet unattainable meaning. The history of friendship, the history of the idea of friendship as a history of reading subverts the traditional (historicist) view of historicity, for the canonical discourse on authentic friendship (written by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, Kant, Hegel, and others)— the one which apparently glorifies values like mutuality, equality, and sovereignty and, moreover, associates these values with moral and political reason— is where we find counter- movements that suggest another possibility. The dominant discourse needs not wait for a deconstruction by Nietzsche or Bataille, Blanchot or Nancy—all of who, however remote they are from it, still rely on its resources—in order to conduct its own self-deconstruction. At certain points, at crucial junctures, this discourse turns against itself, subverting the determination of its arguments. Aristotle and Montaigne, for instance, couple their reflections on friendship’s mutuality and symmetry with contradictory statements which take their notions of presence, self, family, and familiarity to the brink of collapse. They talk about mourning, about the loss of friends and the loss of friendship, and with their rhetoric they constitute hetero-logical conditions of possibility for friendship— outside space

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or compatibility; crazy conditions of possibility for friendship, conditions of possibility for a crazy friendship, outside the political or civic principle. Still, Greek philia, though positing lack of symmetry, disintegration, and infinite distance, cannot tolerate them and must exert control. For these thinkers proper friendship is fraternal, and virile, right from the start. In its exclusive manifestations it is likely to give shelter, believes Derrida, to nationalism, patriotism, and ethnocentrism even if it hides behind a camouflage of universal brotherhood which to all appearances escapes both the natural and the genetic. Thus Derrida mulls over charged words like “brother” or “community,” fearing to surrender to the traditional philosophical household models which focus on the father-son relationship and bypass mother and daughter, heterosexual friendship, and friendship between women. In my own special way, like everyone else, I believe, I no doubt love, yes, in my own way, my brother, my only brother. And my brothers, dead or alive [. . .] I have more than one, and more than one “brother” of more than one sex, and I love having more than one, each time unique, of whom, in more than one language, across quite a few boundaries, I am bound by a conjuration and so many unuttered oaths.70

Politics of Friendship points toward the feminine, but repeated attention to feminine figures is left to other works, Glas, Circumfession, to the essay on Levinas, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” to the epilogue to Marie- Françoise Plissart’s photo-roman Right of Inspection, to H.C. For Life for Hélène Cixous, and elsewhere.71 Always these figures, unamenable, unclassifiable, and indigestible in their terms, lacerate the unified system. The system would prefer to ignore them, it struggles to repress them, but to no avail. Derrida, by contrast, who is also aware of how the system is tempted by gratification, surrenders to them, and like his venerable old and wise friend Hegel, who is enchanted by the character of Antigone, the tragic sister, speaks about them using a lexical blend whose components are cognitive, nutritional, and familial: And what if what cannot be assimilated, the absolute indigestible, played a fundamental role in the system, an abyssal role rather, the abyss playing an almost transcendental role and allowing to be formed above it, as a kind of effluvium, a dream of appeasement? Isn’t there always an element excluded from the system that assures the system’s space of possibility? The transcendental has always been, strictly, a transcategorial, that could be received, formed, terminated in none of the categories intrinsic to the system. The system’s vomit. And what if the sister, the brother/sister relation represented here the transcendental position, ex-position?72

FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP

Derrida feels close to the sister—almost as close as he feels to the mother. She, after all, is the one who takes his abyssal role in the familial and disciplinary picture, in the philosophy which is both family snapshot and banquet. She is the bad girl of the system and the good girl of the family, the system’s vomit and the family’s secret. She performs her duty faithfully and in silence—she supervises the work of mourning and attempts to disturb physical nature’s abstract doings by means of her ceremonies, rituals, funeral arrangements, shrouds, burial ceremonies, and wakes. She leaves behind. He almost understands her.

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BEFORE SEALING THE ENVELOPE From the point of view of postal systems, letters are not a marginal genre. This may seem a trivial statement, but it isn’t when post or address suggest the condition of being of, and constitute a condition of possibility for reflection on, the cultural and political present and on cultural and political history; for bringing together here and now, as well as in the past, broken hearts separated by seemingly great distances. This is not about the actual correspondence between thinkers, and not about the dispatch of their ideas in letters or on post cards. Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794),1 letters which were addressed to his patron Duke Friedrich Christian von Augustenburg and published in a periodical which he edited, also take part in operating the general principle of addressing, in an activity that is always already going on as a quasi-transcendental category enabling us to think about the constraints and the limits of experience. For Schiller’s other writings, by extension, the same obtains, whether or not they are epistolary: the historical essays, his plays, his aesthetic treatises, his private correspondence. The Post Card 2 is, as it were, Derrida’s Combray, though it is not the first work he wrote (and had it been, we must assume that its time of dispatch would have been delayed).3 It allows itself to be more demanding, even bitter, than any 30

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of his other writings, before or after. The Post Card is angry with the very condition of address, angry with the need to renounce the metaphysics of presence inherent in loving, and—somewhat ironically—it addresses this anger, in spite of itself, and, as it were, anticipates the deconstructive conclusion it implies. Derrida produces a drama of the struggle between two forces: between addresser and addressee, and between addresser and himself; between aesthetic subject and ethical subject; between the dogmatic believer and the open-eyed skeptic; between absolute love and a politics of friendship. He seems to abandon this direction after the publication of The Post Card, as if more reconciled than before to the intolerable tension which he experienced and described in detail. Indeed, what has been rightly or wrongly perceived as the “ethical turn” in his work, from the 1980s, appears to have taken root in memory— on both the existential and the thematic levels. The wounded and unappeased aesthetic demand which The Post Card conveys restrains itself, yields its place, escapes for the benefit of an aesthetic of the sublime and an ethical discussion, whose injunction is memory and responsibility. The ethical escape or therapy is expressed in a life of study and persistence, love play is replaced by the crying game, and Derrida rejoins the exchange with the postmodern ambience of his closest milieu.

N.B.2 The modern women who kept salons in Paris, Berlin, or London at the end of the nineteenth century were in the habit of sending letters to one another, to their lovers, their suitors, to literati and men of action with whom they socialized. These letters were dispatched at a frequent rate, sometimes more than once a day. Their contents ranged between the regular and the exceptional, between the emotional and the reflective. From a feminist perspective on the history of educated women—including female artists—in Europe, these correspondences tend to be regarded as a conscious choice of a legitimate and possibly exclusive channel of self-expression. The ambiguous status of a genre written in the margins (partly personal and partly public) allowed these women to outsmart their exclusion and repression, to overcome the clipping of their wings and the censoring of their voices. The decision to send letters, it would therefore seem, was a kind of default option for those who— except for some unusual cases—found it hard to publish in periodicals or have their own books printed. In The Post Card Derrida proclaims a different position on the issue of cor-

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respondences. The letter is a heterogeneous genre, mixed, and including the whole gamut of literary genres. Far from being the bastard of the kingdom of writing, it is identified with literature itself,4 and by extension, with culture, political life, and fate. Playing an active role in the dispatch of letters, the post concretely operates historical dispatch systems, systematic and often perplexing systems, which involve the classification, channeling, and conveying of messages. Though this extensive era can be subdivided into different periods, the genealogy of ideas confronts us from the earliest times—from the fourth century BC—until this very day with irresolvable problems yielded by the condition of address: What is the relationship between a private and a public letter, between a secret, encoded letter and an open one, formal and intended for the public? Are there any stable positions or terms in postal systems, like for instance “addresser” or “addressee”? What are the implications for the fate of history, of the letter that returns to its sender, a stray letter, a delayed letter, a lost letter? For the fate of love? Correspondences accompany the changes and permutations of Western thinking. Plato, Schiller, Goethe, Freud, Kafka, Derrida in the present text—they write to other thinkers and writers, to friends and loved ones. But the interest that the guardians of tradition (professors, academics, librarians, archivists, and writers) have shown in the relationship between written correspondences and the general corpus should not be considered merely on the thematic level. For this relationship seems to be crucial given the indetermination at the very root of the concept of post, an indetermination that subverts any regular continuous line of development and affects critical notions such as influence, legacy, and debt. From Plato to Freud there is some letter. It is the same world, the same epoch, and the history of philosophy, like literature, while rejecting the letter into its margins, [. . .] was counting with it, essentially.5 Our entire library, our entire encyclopedia, our words, our pictures, our figures, our secrets, all an immense house of post cards.6

The attitude of deconstruction to the cultural present—an attitude haunted by the condition of address and postal scandal, is therefore desperate and anachronistic. Specters rob us, addressees and heirs, of our emotional and spiritual property which fills, as it were, the post boxes with sealed, closed envelopes pointing at themselves alone. Have we really emptied the box? Have we been reading what was addressed to us? The box is full to bursting yet we’ve been awaiting a letter for years now.

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N.B.1 Whoever writes letters must take into account that they will be drained of their relevance when the addressee, his family, perhaps his acquaintances, die. Once the container of personal remembrance to which they were sent stops existing it is easy to neglect letters, put them in the drawer, push them into the margins of the collective memory. What, however, about open letters? Is their lifespan longer or, on the contrary, shorter? Do open letters have resources to which personal letters have no access? Or perhaps the other way around? Does the distinction hold? Open letters, it would seem, are sent to public postboxes, to newspapers, periodicals, publishers. Those who send them do everything they can to ensure they arrive, that they don’t get stuck in the post, lost in a drawer, thrown in the garbage. They would seem to be saying all they have to say to their addressee. They direct themselves directly, openly, carefully formulated. The envelope forms a short delay, to be stripped and cast off, so that the secret can be laid bare— open in its own time and open for times to come, to the detective effort of the archival guardians. It is as though the envelope does not interfere with the continuous temporality of letters. Still, from the perspective of the condition of address their authority does not suffice them. Always, their road is errant and aberrant and it is unclear whether they will arrive, and when, where they will arrive, and to whom. Dear Friend, What I like about post cards is that even in an envelope, they are made to circulate like an open but illegible letter.7

Given their rigid and limiting format, the status of post cards, in the internal hierarchy of correspondences, seems to be inferior. Historically speaking, they started circulating only in the nineteenth century (from 1869 in Australia, from 1870 in England), and the type with which we are familiar, carrying a photograph, first appeared in 1894. The post card became the general name for both image and text— a flat and indivisible entity. And yet, letters are always already post cards. Like them, letters are neither legible nor illegible, they are not comprehended and, eventually, they are lost or they go lost to their addresser and to their addressee as soon as they are written. Derrida’s post card, that very post card or, to be precise, that very image which is sent over and over again, is addressed to the loved one. Its affective language is open and explicit. We learn about the response implicitly, through

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quotations, at times, or in paraphrases, in a context which grows increasingly delirious and dense—in a lost struggle against the addresser’s anxieties. The other is not revealed. His post cards and letters are not made public (if I publish them, writes Derrida, “they will accuse me of appropriating for myself, of stealing, of violating.” If I don’t, “I will be accused of erasing you, of stifling you, of keeping you silent” 8 ). Do the post cards have a flesh- and- blood addressee with a first name which only we don’t know? Does it matter? Plato might have invented Socrates, suggests Derrida, in order then to reap his glory. Doesn’t Derrida invent an addressee? (“So, they’ll think what they like. All the same, I wasn’t going to sit them down around your letters, so much longer, more numerous, too beautiful. I will be the only one to know.”)9 The distinction between the intimate, specific addressee— however split his personality— and an infinity of anonymous public addressees is crucial if we want to understand the tension between the state of love and the ethical relationship, the condition of address. The major part of Derrida’s work focuses, as said, on the interpersonal, intertextual condition of address, and the inherent ethical disposition toward others it involves. It constitutes the addressee, simultaneously passive and active, of thousands of post cards and letters, enacting, by its written appearance, the condition of address which may be performed, alternately, through melancholy or economical friendship. Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? To what address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know. Above all I would not have had the slightest interest in this correspondence and this cross-section, I mean in their publication, if some certainty on this matter had satisfied me.10

To whom, then, does Derrida respond? The names that appear on the post cards move between specters from the past, further and nearer (Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud), and thinkers and academics from his own surroundings (Paul de Man, Hillis Miller, Sam Weber, John Searle, Alan Montefiore, and others). If there are any dispatches to more addressees, we don’t know. Derrida is not sure—neither of the destination nor of the address. He does not show his cards. His reasons stay oblique. At a moment of comprehensive reflection which can be applied to all of his work—that preceding the Post Card as well as what follows—he writes: I have published a lot, but there is someone in me, I still can’t quite identify him, who still hopes never to have done it. And he believes that in everything that I have let pass, depart, a very effective mechanism comes to annihilate the exposition.11

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What we see here is a far-reaching problematization, which on the one hand distinguishes between addressers, signers, senders, addressees, recipients, and readers while subverting with a counter-movement their very presence to themselves. Each and every category crumbles into the plural. Sometimes the addressee is unknown or dead, and the concrete addressee, the one intimately loved, turns out to be a representative of the dead, someone sentenced to death in the very act of being addressed. The confusion between addressee and addressees, between the living and the dead, penetrates all: “Who are you, my love?,” asks Derrida. “You are so numerous, so divided, all compartmented, even when you are there, entirely present and I speak to you,”12 I, the sender, who relays his sentences and is restored to life, thanks to you. Is this the fate of every correspondence? If post cards are the lover’s statement of presence conveying with unrestrained urgency: I am here (listen, look), then how are we to understand the lover’s non-response? How are we to understand betrayal or abandonment—topics that are not usually discussed elsewhere in Derrida’s writings—in the context of The Post Card which far from adjusts to the catastrophe at the core of one’s relationship with the other? The post card is delivered by public, unidentified post carriers. Before landing in the arms of the one and only, it falls into the hands of others. “Other” and “others” constitute cardinal positions in this situation, positions which must not be blurred. Still, one way or another, the post card must be readable, as an open secret which does not hide itself, which does not decide not to show up, even if it does not entirely lay itself bare. The post card cannot be deciphered once and for all, even not by the addressee: parts of it are coded, deleted, or wildly, savagely, and very privately associative. The metaphysical dream of the subject’s absolute presence to him- or herself or that of the loved object to the subject, forms the surprising position, convincing in its open resoluteness, of The Post Card: “You have always been ‘my’ metaphysics, the metaphysics of my life, the ‘verso’ of everything I write (my desire, speech, presence, proximity, law, my heart and soul . . .).”13 It would be hard to overstate the importance, throughout Derrida’s philosophical oeuvre, of the critique of metaphysical patterns of thinking and concepts (structure, voice, center, spirit, reason, and so on), with all its implications in the realm of power/knowledge, a critique that links him with critical- reflective traditions from Romanticism to the Frankfurt School, from Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology all the way to the exchange between these various approaches and French post-structuralism. Deconstruction, moreover, traces the elements of this critique in the canonical tradition itself, its most obvious expressions, so that tradition itself is revealed to

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be operating according to an autoimmune deconstructive principle. Yet in The Post Card something unusual takes place, something not to be grasped.14 Here Derrida takes an absolutely different tone vis-à-vis the metaphysics of presence. He does not mind announcing his position in public. He complains and protests and expresses (romantically) the pain of loss, perceiving a present presence as a sine qua non for fulfilling a life of love. Acknowledging its impossibility takes a heavy toll on the soul. However, at the same time, the question of legacy and address, the hypothetic inversion of the relations between Socrates and Plato, are a sign of what is to come, of the comprehensive course of deconstruction “before” and “after,” a development that constitutes a quasi- Aufhebung of The Post Card or else its remanence. The harmony suggested by the naïve metaphysical picture stands revealed as a mirage when the relations between addresser and addressee, writer and speaker, old and young, teacher and student, bequeather and heir can be read in both a linear and an inverse fashion. In the books before The Post Card and again in those following it, Derrida deals with memory and the ethics of memory. Such an ethics, directed at the past and the future to come (an immemorial past and an infinite future) is an attempt to come to terms with the shattering of the metaphysical dream. The pleasure principle, which rules The Post Card, is channeled into a textual-intellectual Eros which always exceeds instant satisfactions. The knight of love transforms into the studious melancholy student. Though deconstructive study does entail hedonistic elements, these dwell under one roof with destructive, morbid resources. Without reservations, the self adjusts to the other, adjusts, even, to the other’s outpour of violence, repressing, to the point of total restraint, its own violence. It is only in The Post Card that we find plain and touching evidence of this violent neediness of the self. The expropriation of the other, the expropriation that comes from the other, exposes a huge vulnerability and brings along intensive assaults of fury and protest. The dimension of time implied in the word post card, la carte postale, hints at the cumulative failure that gains speed from one post card to another. The card/map is always sent to the loved one afterward, in the footsteps-of: it always runs late, it’s not on time, not well timed. The French word carte, moreover, has the anagram écart which marks an interval, tear, split. The picture on the post card, the post card itself, is always already a reproduction, in advance of the trajectory it will cover once it is sent. Constantly, Derrida shifts between drunkenness and sobriety. At times, he believes that the only suitable metaphor for the post card is organic. The act of sending is likened to fertilization and dissemination in the present. Will it ever be possible, he wonders, to disseminate and bear fruit and passion? An elegiac tone, however, gradu-

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ally creeps into the longings of the heart. He is increasingly obsessive about the tongues of fire which will leave not the merest trace of the correspondence. This conflagration enfolds redemption. The burnt pieces (names, commas, words, sentences) leave behind a scorched, forever- undefined earth. Erasure is total. The supreme pleasure of the post card, its desire, is that its addressee may tear it up. On the face of it, love, contemptuous of parasitic memory, comes true in the absolute present. And yet, its very realization is in doubt, and this doubt penetrates the lovers’ consciousness. Thus the metaphysics of love constitutes an emblematic realization of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida describes it, without further ado, as controlling, violent, and lacking inhibitions. A feeling of love can attend any action: a fire, a struggle, torture, stubborn silence, pain, jealousy, madness, a merciless war, even murder. Love rests on a great abyss: it plays, laughs, and dances on it, defiles it, cloaks it, exposes and humiliates it; an abyss at which Derrida, for now, only hints and, in other works, turns into a structural absence, into a quasi-transcendental condition which constitutes the ethical relationship and the condition of address:15 As you come to me from the only place in which I do not feel myself loved, I also have the feeling that you are alone in loving me, alone in being able not to love me.16 No, if I die, it’s because there are two injuries. A single one never broaches anything. Two injuries and a single wound, the hell in which I now believe for having let myself be sent into it—the two form an inseparable couple.17

I want my loved one not to be able to breathe without me, writes Derrida on one of the post cards. He must breathe through me. He loves me only when I am there. “Our delinquency, my love, we are the worst criminals and the first victims.”18 When I die, they will bury my body. The urn with my ashes which you will receive will mingle with your breakfast, and with time you will fall in love with yourself and will fail slowly until you die as you reach the absolute point of appeasement between us.19 Love in The Post Card has no ethical dimension, it does not follow Kant’s distinction quoted in Chapter 1, which protects friendship from excessive emotion by keeping distance and respect. Love’s nondistance and exclusiveness subjects life to a perverted, masochistic pleasure, where rupture with the loved one kills me and restores me to life time and again: “and wouldn’t we be happier—and even more in love—if we did not know anything, anything about each other?”20 Horror- stricken, the lover finds that he is reborn through the words of his loved one, finds that he writes everything his beloved enables him to say. And yet, this murderous pathology is linked with correspondence or address which

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infiltrates consciousness and stands revealed as a condition neither derivative of nor secondary to love but rather inherent in it, in both its possibility and impossibility. Love is addressed to someone who is not its sole addressee. The actual address to the loved one is preceded by a fundamental, quasi-transcendental address due to which my gestures of address do not and cannot return to me. The self, losing its full identity as a sender, can no longer address itself to itself. This awareness pervades the post cards and interferes with love. The recognition of distance is stubborn and poisonous. For some time it feeds into dependence and lack of control and though it strengthens the resolved grip—this is to no avail, for the fall is inevitable. Your absence is reality to me, a reality that registers my own death. The language of ontology is cardinal to any description of the condition of lovers, to the fort/da game of love. If you’re far away from me, fort, if you’re not here, da, I am helpless. Presence and power are mutually intertwined. You mark for me both reality and death; absent or present moreover (you are always there, over there, in the course of going back and forth).21

Love is zealous about the truth and operates a hyperbolic morality. It does not belong, however, either in the ethical order or in the order of consciousness. Love’s truth and morality are singularly its own. It is in the name of the cursed truth, writes Derrida, that we lost one another. It is the passion for truth that drove us to make terrible “confessions” which put a distance between us, as well as between us and ourselves, while we did not come any closer to the truth, not a step.22 Love lays claim to secrets, including untrue ones, secrets that do not deserve being confessed, secrets that will damage love. The compulsive urge to confess is another expression of love’s reign of truth, of the failure—potentially and in practice— relayed by post cards and post carriers. Before the fire, Derrida demands that the post cards be read, that is, re-read. The post card must be incorporated, it must be swallowed and saved as was done in the Resistance, a crypt, as it were, sealed to and from communication. Ingesting the post card is not just a metaphor of the lovers’ symbiosis. It is a bodily enactment of the idea of love perceived as address. Always already the lover mourns the beloved, a beloved who resides under his skin, is with him all the time, the addressee of his words, object of emulation. The experience of Romeo and Juliet, Derrida will write elsewhere in order to put his testimony at some distance, illustrates the essential impossibility of an absolute synchronicity. The encounter between their passion and the poison is not a matter of accident. The ultimate certainty is that one must die before the

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other, to see the other dead, to survive him even if it is for a moment. The one carries the death of the other for it is impossible that each of the two survive the other. Yet nevertheless, the impossible happens—not in objective reality but in the heroes’ experience. Romeo and Juliet each experience the death of the other, observe it, mourn it. I love because the other is the other, because its time will never be mine. The living duration, the very presence of its love remains infinitely distant from mine. [. . .] If you die before me, I will keep you, if I die before you, you will carry me in yourself, one will keep the other, will already have kept the other from the first declaration. This double interiorization would be possible neither in monadic interiority nor in the logic of “objective” space and time. It takes place nevertheless every time I love.23

The one I love, argues Derrida, is neither facing me nor outside me, unlike the gazes of others which one may reject, from which one may turn away one’s head. Here, as we suggested, the reader will be aware of the themes of melancholy and incorporation, which Derrida processed ever since “For” in Memoires for Paul de Man,24 The Work of Mourning, and “Rams,”25 in the context of a deconstructive discussion of Freud, in the form of an attempt to “redeem” the pathology diagnosed by Freud, and to convert it into an ethical injunction as well as a hauntological condition forming the basis of his notion of subjectivity. It seems that we should, in this respect, differentiate between two modes of preservation, between two economic principles, and to be more precise, between one economic and one aneconomic principle which do not mutually agree. Archives and memories, deconstruction’s “obsession” such as we have come to know it from the bulk of these texts, are foreign to the lovers’ domain and to the wish fundamental to their “archive fever” which aims at the destruction of any traces. Indeed, in this particular context they denote chill techniques for putting out fires, for silencing voices, at times. They signal mold, unfreshness, the stale: when love ends. At best, they allow a sad solidarity, of the kind that is instituted by the common denominator, something remembered, which is neither everything nor the essence. “I am still dreaming of a second holocaust,” writes Derrida in a harrowing sentence which amplifies the tension between these two economies, “that would not come too late. [. . .] The first catastrophe is the ignoble archive which rots everything.”26 “A great holocaustic fire, a burn- everything into which we would throw finally, along with our entire memory, our names, the letters, photos, small objects, keys, fetishes, etc.”27 There is nothing more alien to both the letter and the spirit of deconstruction than all-erasing catastrophe in the name of a utopia of a new beginning, in the name of the lov-

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ers’ “new order.” Here Derrida is ready to expose the fierce impulses and urges, total and totalitarian, with which his entire oeuvre does battle. The use of the word holocaust is important because on the historical-existential level, deconstruction constitutes an affirmation of impersonal memory, without which neither heritage nor archive nor historicity can be thought. In The Post Card, nevertheless, the collective memory receives quantities of contempt and mockery. In his later work, following The Post Card, Derrida will transfer traits belonging to the condition of love to the responsibility-for-memory. His transformation, the transformation of deconstruction, will address itself, as we saw earlier on, to a friend who carries features of a lover, features that overwhelm the addresser with strong yearning and helplessness. The ambivalence of The Post Card anticipates this development. But here, at a certain juncture,28 with exemplary precision, he plans the memory he will leave behind “for us,” an abject memory, second rate, which will keep the lovers in extreme isolation, so that what we are left with is, at the most, a history, a psychoanalysis and a philosophy of address, the outline of a project which will be elaborated into an essay in the following parts of the book. Films, tapes, post cards—all, except for the Oxford post card, is destroyed. The fragments, lifted out of the narrative sequence, are addressed to us with a rude and vexing gesture of aversion. We draw from what’s accessible, marketable, the visible, the adjacent—apparent eyewitnesses only, we have no keys, no knowledge. The loved one, kept to the lover alone, is driven out of the market. In the lover’s eyes, the ethics of memory is an ethics of the market place, in contradiction with what Derrida believes once he analyzes the aporia of responsibility and the conditions of possibility of meeting the injunctions of memory. It’s an ethics of the market place, argues the lover, because it involves signs, that is: because it is legible and universal. Derrida, in The Post Card, treats “us” neither with the yardstick of the law (third party) nor with deconstructive justice. The intuitions that guide him throughout are those of the jealous lover. The borders of the secret are closed, and he is the one who controls them, tries to control, uninhibited. Into our direction he casts some shreds of instructions, signposts of time and place, and first names. We receive information which, by definition, is accessible to language and exchange, information that fails to catch even the smallest bit of experience. “Language poisons for us the most secret of our secrets.”29 The present letter attempts, with inevitable awkwardness, to approach the multivocal, at times non- significant, remainders left behind by The Post Card’s love story. One way of doing this consists of juxtaposing sentences—fragments of them, sometimes— distributed throughout the post cards or in the repro-

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duced post card, so as to deduce a phenomenological description of the lover, avoiding almost all interference from outside. Such a reading, elementary though it may be, reveals a romantic aspect which is (usually) entirely repressed in deconstruction—a crucial aspect if we want to understand its pathos, even where it is absent or implied. The Post Card is the only place in which Derrida directly expresses an aesthetic, sensual passion for life, for voice, for fertility and synchronicity. I love you, he writes, I love what’s alive, beyond its name. Yet nevertheless, he is aware all-this-time-which-is-an-eternity, witness to an everaccelerating countdown. One day it will be as though none of this ever happened. I will not know how to call you, how you secretly call yourself. “Do you believe that ecstasy, what they call orgasm, the synchronic if you please, releases the time difference? Myself, I do not.”30 It is as though the love post card were the pivot of things, and all the offspring/seeds it disseminates and casts far and wide, its remains, were barren and lifeless. This, however, is an illusion, the illusion of love, of the post card. In fact, Derrida does not believe in it and his work wholly rids itself from it, leaving no mark and casting no shade. Love’s passion for presence does not tally, as said, with the condition of address and with the impossibility of identifying a singular addressee. The condition of address structurally precedes the condition of love. The former is the latter’s condition of possibility, it is into the former that the latter necessarily collapses. The “condition of address,” moreover, is associated with the logos even though this is not where love comes from and “with reason we do not love each other.”31 The fantasy of a total erasure of memory, conscious and unconscious, which in the post cards gathers speed offering an exclusive escape route and a chance of survival, of perpetual youth and of rebirth, is a fantasy of two absolute and symbiotic people alone. The lovers carry their memory in their mouths, there is no registration. They speak one tongue, they promise each other and swear to each other, in vain, not to remember. Everything must be forgotten in order to love, a love without past. As long as we are talking with each other, even if we are tearing one another, cursing or denouncing, you are there—and this is how catastrophe is kept at bay.32 I put you inside me, I put your inside inside mine, and I don’t pull back, I don’t recoil. You will carry it everywhere.33 Like a lyrical poem, the singular, impossible, pure poem—about which Paul Celan speaks in his Meridian speech and Derrida in “Shibboleth”— the poem without genre and concept—like this poem are the lovers in The Post Card with no one but themselves aware of their love. The poem, the element in which I love, is not and cannot be audible in the letter. Burning is the medium for the supremely intimate communication: direct address, immediate and tele-

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pathic, that defeats the address principle and triumphs over distance leaving no residues, in need of no mediation. Burning is the result of neither caution nor secrecy. It is crucial, restorative, for being reborn every moment, without anamnesis: “At bottom I am only interested in what cannot be sent off, cannot be dispatched in any case.”34 Alongside the physical-external act of burning, Derrida describes various modes of internalizing a letter: drinking, swallowing, digesting, idealizing, incorporating, locking it into the body. All in vain. The dream of symbiosis collapses in writing, in the différance that corrupts its shape beyond recognition. How ironical is the following statement: Myself, I am a man of speech, I have never had anything to write. [. . .] You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that I write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words, you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper. . . .35

The address may not reach its destination, or, should it reach, it may well meet with incomprehension. This is exactly why readability, when addressed to the singular other, is an intolerable, hopeless burden. There is not one tongue for love. Its tongues are many and confused. I want to tell you, writes Derrida, and the reply, if it comes, will come from you. You, moreover, are the one who dictates to me, gives the order, and thus this correspondence becomes an entity in its own right, as if it were another voice which transcends the lovers and survives after their love. “A tragedy, my love, of destination. Everything becomes a post card once more, legible for the other, even if he understands nothing about it [. . .] It may always arrive for you, for you too, to understand nothing.”36 There is no necessary link between readability and comprehension. Readability in itself involves cooperation, and hence the failure to comprehend is not the absolute failure of contact, though it is experienced as such. Readability involves the distance associated with the convertible sign. Derrida makes the utmost effort, in written language, to cope with this bitter knowledge. He chooses techniques from the modernist inventory, transforms language into a thing, stresses its materiality, repeats himself incessantly. I write you tomorrow, he stresses, explicitly in the present tense, “I always say it in the present.”37 And I send you, over and over again, the same post card, the same word, the same name. I strive for maximum simplicity through maximum erasure, as in a process of distillation. I invent a secret language which self-destructs the moment a third party looks in. “At least help me so that death comes to us only from us. Do not give in to generality.”38 And yet— do I write to you to bring you closer, or in order to put you

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at a distance, that is to say: to put who at a distance? And who is present at the point of writing, when you are not present, and I too am not there? Its being public, therefore, is inseparably part of the gesture of writing—in the case of the post card as well as that of the letter. This writing is not for in the drawer. In Derrida, though, the post card turns into a sealed letter. Like the letter, and possibly even more than it, the post card, though total exteriority, problematizes the distinction between covert and overt, between inside and outside. What is the rhetorical-affective weight of a post card that does not show its cards? What does intelligibility mean? With what criteria do we gauge difficulty? In contrast with the letter, the post card, in its terseness, its language of report, seems to assume a demand for immediate intelligibility, to arouse neither fear nor suspicion. Still, its shortwindedness introduces something enigmatic, secretive, implied. Its unknowing is not the work of concealment but a structural given. The post card does not block information or hide something. The experience it renders is heterogeneous to knowledge and encodes itself directly. The bad reader, Derrida believes, is one who rushes to decide, runs ahead, and tries for his reading to match his expectations so as to immediately restore it to himself. The Post Card presents the condition of address as necessarily split. Everything is related to it and passes through it: fate, encounter, coincidence, chance. Every act of significance is possible since dispatch into any specific direction cannot be ensured. It is no longer possible to understand the meaning of to come, to come before, to come after, to return, to bestow, to write a will, to dictate, to speak. Love, including self-love, passes through the condition of address, through the other, although it ruptures the structure of narcissism, because it does. Without narcissistic appropriation, on the other hand, embodied in such an intimate and ostensibly boundless relationship, without the experience of losing one’s head, the relation to the other will be entirely destroyed. Narcissism, then, is marked by a two-faced logic. Though it is impossible and stands defeated, appropriation is crucial to love. The relation to the other cannot be specular because an other always exists before the self. Directing myself to this other changes me in an essential and violent manner, because he is an other and because unless this were the case, there would be no other. I must separate from you, writes Derrida, to see you. “The condition for me to renounce nothing and that my love comes back to me, [. . .] is that you are there, quite alive outside of me. Out of reach.”39 I have never known how to take leave or to separate,40 and once I learn how to do it I will take you into myself so that no distance remains between us. We try ceaselessly to cross to the side of the other, to incorporate his place, move our body like his, drink in his words avidly.41 The others within us,

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however, constrain us. We are more alien and more ignorant and more distant than what really occurred and what we told each other. Lacking in knowledge though we are, we do have an ability to affect each other, even to destroy one another,42 the encounter between us has the power to corrupt and to fertilize in all respects. Yours, To Whom It May Concern The Post Card consists of one, specific, reproduced post card, with which Derrida deals, which he analyzes with obsessive devotion, by means of myriad dispatches. He offers a highly inspired, fascinating, funny analysis of a delirium and apocalyptic revelation. At the Bodleian, in Oxford, he comes across an astrological “fortune- telling book” from the thirteenth century, a book that carries an image, on the back, of a post card. The image is a negative, or so it seems, of the familiar historical picture, the one which is known in the light of day. In our contract with the history of ideas it says that Socrates came before Plato and that the order of generations is irreversible. Socrates did not write. Plato, his heir, did write. On the post card, however, it is Socrates who writes as he faces Plato. Derrida, in fact, acknowledges the validity of the negative which he has always carried within him. The post card constitutes an elaboration of a 2500-year-old negative, one that was implied in a letter Plato sent to Dionysus in which he wrote that a work written by him would never exist!43 Socrates, then, does his copying, bent forward docile, with his back to Plato. Plato stands behind him, small but authoritative. Socrates does not see Plato who sees him. But Plato only sees Socrates from his back. This is the truth of philosophy: Everything is played backward until the end comes.44 Socrates turned his back on Plato who made him write everything he wanted while pretending he took it from him. “The presumptive heir, Plato, of whom it is said that he writes, has never written, he receives the inheritance but as the legitimate addressee he has dictated it, has had it written and has sent it to himself.”45 Philosophy is tied up with dispatch. In his essay “Shibboleth,” dedicated, as said, to Paul Celan’s poetry, Derrida discusses the philosophy of the date or the dated philosophy. An analogous insight, built on telephone cables and the postal services, arises from The Post Card. This “routinization” through the use of postal metaphors of philosophy gives it a sense of urgency, relevance, and sentimental charge. Philosophy, language, culture in general, discourse, all involve the exchange of letters. The library of the great thinkers is therefore an

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epistolary library which is subject to an issueless attempt at conclusive organization and categorization. The library’s voices speak themselves, constantly, coming from everywhere, unfiltered, because they are not the trivial writings one addresses to her- or himself only. Whoever preserves everything, or believes this can be done, is doomed to die by poisoning. He will have to write forever and deposit the safeguarding with the other. What we mentioned earlier in relation to the question of self and other also obtains in the case of intellectual history. The sending of any type of message is doomed to inherent loss. The means of caution that philosophers use are utterly useless: filtering, retraction, reception, copyright, encoding, signature, envelope; and alternatively, legal means or idiosyncratic techniques. This knowledge—regarding the condition and its constraints—is met with total denial from the post carriers: guardians, archivists, professors, journalists, philosophers, literati, and—to an extent— psychoanalysts.46 The latter ignore the tendentiousness of address, the fact that the missive, fort, does not reach its destination, sometimes, stays unanswered. A letter may always not reach its destination. It is not immune to either infestations, or rain, or a wrong address. This possibility, however, is not a negative thing. It constitutes the very possibility of dispatch and arrival (it is not that the letter necessarily fails to arrive, Derrida stresses; such a statement, when adduced as proof, immediately refutes itself ). Speculative idealism perceives history as a teleology with certain stations on the way, like the dispatch of a letter, or an über-letter, which eventually reaches its destination. Deconstruction which puts into doubt the transcendental truth that reigns superior in the humanities, follows us as we dictate to Freud, who dictates to Plato, who dictates to Socrates, even if we come late in time, even if we are no more than heirs. Spectral communication does not require thinkers to read one another or correspond with one another or live coevally or be directly influential vis- à- vis one another. The affinity at the heart of the condition of address is inherently transferential. It is for this reason that Derrida criticizes archivism, which presumes mathematical measures to differentiate between authentic and false address. Between authenticity and simulacrum, rhetorical exercises and fake, there is no mappable, stable difference. “For the day that there will be a reading of the Oxford card, the one and true reading, will be the end of history. Or the becoming prose of our love.”47 History diverges from the progressive scheme and from any hermeneutic conditioning. Thus the lyricism attributed to the condition of love extends into an aesthetization of history and of philosophy, respectively. For it is, of course, possible to write invented post cards, and to duplicate, triplicate, and so on, both writers

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and recipients. It’s easy to betray the offspring so that they will not know a thing, so they will be unable to conserve, to expose, or to bequeath. Already written post cards can be reproduced, corrected, reinvented. Who will prove that the sender is the same man, or woman? And the male or female addressee? Or that they are not identical? To themselves, male or female, first of all? That they do or do not form a couple? Or several couples? Or a crowd? Where would the principle of identification be? In the name?48

Sincerely, Dear, A letter is written from a safe distance, without the stuttering of the spoken word or exactly with a stutter: it is impossible to silence it from this far. Distance enables it to be fluent or halting, to maneuver as it wishes, to write under erasure, to send a first draft or a thoroughly elaborated manuscript. It enables camouflage and closeness, transgression and exhibitionism. Paradoxically, the dream of metaphysical presence may have an illusory viability due to the handwriting on the post card. For a while, even Derrida is able to overcome his restrained caution and linger with the eros of dispatch and receipt, with the anticipation of a letter, with the obsessive dependency. For some time he is utterly present in a life-between-dispatches. (Perhaps my use of the word aesthetic in describing the experience of The Post Card is too strong, and I shall write to you about this in another letter, when we have time to deal with more elevated matters. To be brief, a crack, after all, has appeared in the barrier between the aesthetic and the ethical which has been replaced by negotiation between the domains, so that aesthetic writing, or writing about aesthetics, activates ethics and is always already associated with a moral imagination. The confabulation or suspension of reality characteristic of the realm of aesthetics do by no means reduce the impact of the mechanisms of identification and the attempts to understand and achieve self- definition required of any agent who dedicates himself to this condition—whether he writes, reads, or looks. Aesthetic reality does not exist in its own right, it continues and complements extra- aesthetic reality. Ethical investment finds a critical channel of action in texts because it perceives this world as a cumulative enterprise of IOUs, of memory, an enterprise which transforms— owing to the dynamics of history—the actual into the spectral, thereby in its turn enabling the existence of the actual. This does in no way blur these domains.)

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Love exists in an absolute present, hedonistic and tormented at one and the same time. For a short, long duration there is, in fact, redemption. The secret and hermetic world of the lovers does not ramify into its surroundings, it neither interferes nor changes it. The failure of romantic love signals a radical change, which surprisingly does not constitute a conversion or a “turning point”— rather a joinup to intuitions from before the love affair. This makes of The Post Card a type of black hole—which casts the whole of this work into a more glaring, maybe also pathetic, light: deconstruction as a philosophy of disappointed love. The transition from the metaphysics or aesthetics of love to memory, the sharp distinction between these two dimensions of existence, can be found in The Post Card itself: Turned toward you, I, the obsessional “passist,” the great fetishist of memory, I let the most sacred part of my history annihilate itself. [. . .] it’s you who are losing my memory.49

For a while, a dizzy, deceitful while, love manages to outwit the ethics of the sworn “passist.” The condition of address, however, defeats it, and as Derrida himself writes: “If the post . . . is announced at the ‘first’ envoi, then there is no longer a metaphysics.”50 The metaphysics of love, exemplary expression of the metaphysics of presence, stands revealed as an illusion. Love is present, all the time, in a correspondence that both suspends and postpones it. Along with it comes a necessary process of representation which implies dilution and oblivion. The stalling of time seems to release something, “makes me fly,” but slowly the wings of love melt. These time lags, after all, are not mere, materialexternal constraints. Someone always comes early, and someone always catches up, or surpasses or comes late. “You are distancing yourself again, I do not cry. I only become more and more grave, I walk more heavily, more seriously, I like myself less and less.”51 Derrida is aware that his passion for a postal history is one way of grieving for the end of love and the end of the lovers’ correspondence. He reverts to work, exhausts himself in it, yet is invaded and distracted in his mourning. I myself am in mourning. For you, by you, smeared with death, and paralyzed. Paralysis does not mean that one can no longer move or walk, but, in Greek if you please, that there is no more tie, that every bind, every liaison has been unknotted [. . .] and that because of this . . . nothing holds together any more, nothing advances any more.52

The regaining of knowledge, which is accompanied by a return to a more conservative type of writing, forges an idea and a topic out of this mourning,

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and leads to a total change of perspective. In The Post Card, Derrida writes that the part of myself that belongs to the beloved one is larger than myself, while in the discussions dealing with melancholy as an idea that makes an interpersonal ethics thinkable, he focuses on the part of the other which is contained within me, inside me, yet haunts and calls me as if from the outside: I who am always already mourning her loss. The ethical discussion centers on the self ’s responsibility and disqualifies as unethical the question of mutuality. The lover who wonders whether she herself or her loved one respond to one another, gives up any complaint and all expectations of reciprocity. In The Post Card there is fear of death, but nothing comes close to the more horrible fear of surviving the loved one. This is the testamental anxiety of the bequeather who outlives her or his heirs, or of the parent who laments her or his children. Derrida acknowledges the possibility of existing under such constraints, the responsibility that such an existence entails, the terrible concession it demands: “I am only a memory, I love only memory and reminding myself of you.”53 The same unbridgeable gap also obtains for the idea of forgiveness. In the ethical relationship, forgiveness is an infinite and absolute command, which engages a constant negotiation between the “theater of forgiveness” and the “unforgivable” and which demands or expects the literary specular and speculative imagination of myself as the other,54 while in erotic relations there is no forgiveness whatsoever: “You are not only sending me, myself, as one emits a poison that reaches the heart without waiting, an ‘image’ of myself that I will have a hard time pardoning you for.”55 The forfeiting of erotic love is accompanied by a reduction in the occasionally exalted expressions of joy in The Post Card. Derrida writes about the threatened paradoxality of self-forgetfulness and forgetfulness of the other that is the result of this intoxication. This is an ecstasy that eludes the dimension of time—a total oblivion, a cocooning in one single moment of presence. It is a moment of encounter between opposites, and an escape from contradiction, an aesthetic moment of mutual love and contempt—a loss of boundaries. The condition of address, however, is stronger than this moment and incorporates it so as to transcend it. It cannot be reduced to terms of existence or of essence. It is called “the pathology of address” to stress the general (and not just Derrida’s) postmodern link between pathology and ethics. The post cards are forced to re-engage in the game of fort/da. The family picture that Freud sketches in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”— which is essayistically discussed in subsequent parts of The Post Card—is in fact one in which most if not all participants—the grandchild, the grandfather, the mother/daughter, the

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father/son-in-law—are absentee presences. Freud himself, in this text, moves in a frenzy from one hypothesis to another, from thesis ( fort) to its antithesis (da). Like both his own bequeathers and his heirs he takes off beyond the pleasure principle: It is . . . the Postal Principle as differential relay, that regularly prevents, delays, [. . .] the depositing of the thesis, forbidding rest and ceaselessly causing to run, deposing or deporting the movement of speculation.56

Derrida’s separation from Combray is his explicit admission that he is running on empty, that he is creating meanings that are neither given nor natural: no matter how familiar, they carry his stamp. One must confront the absence directly—he seems to say—without barriers or frivolities, for solutions are always dubious, and all therapy, whether physical or in love, is fraudulent. Anxiety cannot be beaten, but nor can it be pinpointed or defined. Exposure, in The Post Card, includes at times desperate expressions of neediness, which attest to the recurrent wound that speaks on my behalf no sooner than I open my mouth. “You speak to me and send me my blood from the depths of me.”57 Abandonment anxiety bubbles all the time though it seldom bursts out; its non-chronological time— documented neither in the conscious nor in the unconscious memory— rocks the entire discursive order. The moment of departure may be now or years ago or years ahead. It is arbitrary. Occasionally I have the feeling that you push me to busy myself with these pictures in order to distance me, you push me to write like a child to play by himself while the mother, freer in her movements. . . .58

Yours, Always To Whom It May Concern What, on the face of it, is the relation of philosophy to the exposure of the philosopher’s identity or signature—in a letter, on a post card? Philosophy defines itself as an intellectual activity which is shielded from a thinker’s autobiography. The philosophical text as such, moreover, the written text, is erased in the face of its conceptual content. The philosopher tries to forget that he leaves behind a written form, and that this form involves other textual contexts which he cannot undo. The decision of those philosophers who write letters, those who choose to activate the condition of address as it is, not to deny it or to repress it, is extremely provocative. Letters, indeed, belong in a different space:

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prosaic, mundane, hybrid. Thus the very use of the genre implies a critique of the sterile spatialization of philosophical time. The relations between inside and out turn out to be complex, their boundaries brittle. The letters are written and signed. They are irreplaceable, exactly because they were addressed at a specific moment in time, dated, to an other or others. Not all is said by mentioning their idiomatic language and the idiomatic situation that makes them possible. The specific addressee will try to decipher the signs, and so will the non- mentioned addressees. All discourses (whether poetic, or philosophical, intimate or public) are not exempt from common rules and norms. These are the conditions for their readability. The signed letters or post cards are sent to an address that is not fixed, or known only in part. This is why they are so influential, for if the addresser’s voice comes from a fixed place, predisposed in the social order, it will resound less, according to Derrida. Letters and post cards are not easily domesticated in institutions or disciplines. Where articles are submitted or emails are sent, they instill their different pace, a different flavor, more akin to handwritten pages and erasures. In many ways, Derrida’s provocation moves seriously away from the standard letters of his predecessors. The notion of burning the post cards, that is, turning them into such elemental ashes that they are not even subject to mourning, encapsulates the most glaring anti- significance. It is an ultimate threat of annihilating memory and destroying philosophy. Such radical oblivion, amounting to philosophical nonsense, finds its due place on post cards. If philosophical theoretization, which in principle strives for the absolute knowledge of all the possible types of discourse and arts, is a simultaneous expression of control and a surrender of control, then letters or post cards might be more exposed than it or better able to stress the counter-move, the movement of surrender, the one which erases itself, which claims something and immediately withdraws. They employ a less “technical” language, whose philosophical charge is less outspoken, and sometimes a clearly non-philosophical language (mundane, poetic, historical), which transforms, by generalization, into a quasi-transcendental system that has the power to question the closed nature of the philosophical lexicon (e.g., “date,” “circumcision,” “ashes”). The intuition underlying this question is that natural language is convenient for registering discursive vicissitudes—those of any discourse—between pure idiomaticity (which, in its conclusive shape, enfolds nationalist catastrophe or cultural death) and generality which, as it does not respect the language of the other, may also cause the destruction of memory. Natural language, thus, is better at reflecting this tension than instrumental philosophical language, situated as it is

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at the universal-abstract pole and preventing those who work with it to recognize the extent to which they are committed to natural language. Sincerely,

N.B. “(one day I will talk to you about the problem of money between us and of the absolute prohibition that I’ve put on it).”59

As aforementioned.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When it happens, it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines. A tree will show through a woman’s dress. A child makes way for a dog. A large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento, because the painter repented, changed his mind. — Lillian Hellman, Pentimento

3 JULIA

–Do you understand? –Yes, of course. But I didn’t understand.

Julia (1977), Fred Zinnemann’s film based on Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman,1 two parts of the autobiographical works of the Jewish American playwright Lillian Hellman, registers different levels of misunderstanding— direct, indirect, explicit, and implicit. –But what about Paris? What about Rome? –Lilly, you aren’t listening. –I am listening.

There is hope in the world, at last, says Julia to Lillian who has come to visit her in Oxford. She wants to move to Vienna, finish her medical studies, and work with Professor Freud, for Vienna has become a place where workers can be creative. –Do you understand? –Yes, of course. But I didn’t understand.

In the hospital, following Julia’s serious injury in an incident with fascists at Vienna University—she lies battered from head to toe—she tries to tell her some52

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thing. Her hand lifts, her finger stretches and points at something, and when she is not understood, she repeats the gesture. Lilly does not decipher this sign language. I don’t understand what you mean, she says. Between them stretch months of a muddled, inconsistent flow of unanswered letters. Then the mission. Mr. Johann, the sudden emissary, meets her at the Meurice in Paris, he is the spokesman of an antifascist group which is taking action against Hitler: Catholics, communists, a mixed bag of people free of religious or national constraints. He proposes that she change her plans and travel to Moscow from Paris via Berlin so as to transfer $50,000 of Julia’s money which will be used to free prisoners. Johann gives her a note from Julia, and once she’s finished reading it, he takes it back. The note says that she must not push herself into doing this. Julia will understand. Lillian does not understand. Who is Von Franz, who organizes her stay in Berlin? And who are the mysterious Mr. Johann, Walter Franz— the “nephew” in the train heading toward Berlin—and John Watson, who is responsible for the arrangements around Julia’s funeral in London and who conveys his condolences to Lillian? These are only some instances of the invasive failure to understand and with which the film teems: the perplexity of the American woman from the peaceful Californian coast who arrives in Europe of the early 1930s (Dear Dash, I try to concentrate on writing, but I feel sick. Something evil is happening here Dash, and it is going to affect all our lives) where she encounters darkness, blackouts, demonstrations, violence right at the surface and below it; the consternation of a writer, immersed in her private, intimate life, who moves out into a political world whose rules she cannot grasp (Why is it like that?—she will ask, wellneigh scream, when facing Julia at Kaffee Albert in Berlin); the incomprehension at the level of language which, throughout the story, translates awkwardly from English to French, or to German or to Russian; the failure to understand the mechanism of memory which— or at least that part of it that concerns Julia—is as it were “safe” from falsification. It is recorded with a sure hand, in a lively manner, in both the happy as well as the painful episodes, when the hand, taken aback, writes falteringly, in spite of itself. In contrast with the doubt we must generally cast on the truthfulness of our memory, Lillian concludes, this part is distorted by neither emotions nor illusions. Lillian does not question her ability to preserve the content of this recollection. The images, readable and poignant, flood her with their clarity. Yet this is exactly where the most fundamental misunderstanding resides, the misunderstanding that causes the story and the film to be so tragic. This misunderstand-

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ing, moreover, exceeds the specific context of the friendship with Julia, as if saying something general about memory and hallucination and about the fact that the choice between them is not a voluntary one; about the finitude of a memory that carries something immeasurably greater than itself; about borrowed memory or else invented or fictive memory; about the limits of self- knowledge and the futility of the yearning for truth. The memoirs open up an infinite distance at the specific moment when she sits in her boat, her days coming to an end, and tells her story. The past has no simple existence for her, and the present, too, has never had a simple existence for her. Among other things, Julia constitutes a failed attempt to extricate the origin of her creation from the depths of memory, to talk about the wound that preceded their meeting and which, following that meeting, came to life again to be a hugely important, yet never conscious, companion, inarticulate. Had she been able to understand it fully, she might have fallen silent. Misunderstanding is necessary in her economy. The poetic effort she displays, however condensed its pretensions, is doomed to be missed. Here too, Lillian chooses— or perhaps is forced—to be mimetic, elusive, unironical. She’s not even reflective. From the perspective of years, she does not understand, after their separation— once Julia departs to start her studies in Oxford—a decisive separation, fateful, which with the murder of Julia transforms into a final separation; after ages and ages go by and she is, for all intents and purposes, capable and mature enough to deal with her recollections, all she is able to achieve is a detailed, annotated testimony. This mourning for Julia has always already been going on, an “abnormal” mourning which straddles her entire life. The final rupture will come, one day, and though Lillian is absolutely ready, prepared for it, even though she knows, the separation will catch her unawares, weak, grudgingly accepting, and unable to accept. In the first separation scene, still in America, Lillian tries to stall. Julia is curt. One wishes to protract the sadness of separation endlessly while the other is rushing out toward the future that is awaiting her. Both deny the envisioned loss, and their available strategies are polar, as usual. Julia denies the present (doesn’t Lillian exist, doesn’t she still exist) while Lillian denies the future (I must take leave of Julia and move on. I know she belongs in the past and I must go on without her now. But this is exactly why I want to procrastinate). Lillian’s tendency to delay will stay with her to the end. In that sense, these memoirs are the most exposed statement about stalling. It is as though she were saying: I am still close to you. I am slowing up this separation, fifty years onward still, and I am struggling with all my might to undo it. She seems absolutely unaware of the extent to which this separation is not only a loss, the

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extent to which it actually sets her free for the relationship with Dash and for writing, her future of intimacy and creativity. For her (not for Julia) the separation occurs before her individuation as a woman and as an artist has come to term. The process has ground to a halt, as it were, in the most vulnerable region of her life, from then until its end, the region of Julia, which will from now on, and with a growing intensity, bear the fixation of their relationship. This pain will always accompany her, on hearing her name as it blends with her image. It is not surprising that this part of the memoirs goes under her name. Yet through and beyond her name, Julia triggers the problem of recollection as such, which emerges as the essential feature of experience. A traumatic event may sometimes damage the very function of memory, the cognitive capacity to accumulate perceptions with the aim to perform generalization, abstraction, reconstruction, or conceptualization, activities that are at the foundation of identity. But it may also leave this function seemingly unharmed, and instead damage the subjective capacity to contain and to process precisely that which does not obey the linear regularity of the cognitive memory. In fact, in contexts that are not explicitly traumatic, as well, a person who has what is called “a good memory,” like the autodidact in Sartre’s Nausée or Mr. Ramsey in Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, may lack the subjective capacity to contain memories. The passage here between the singular and the plural does not refer only to the passage from the function of “memory” to the content of “memories,” but also suggests the passage from the singular— the collective, monumental, encyclopedic memory—to the multiplicity that escapes the history books or orients history toward individuals, that is, toward the subjectivity of those who remember. In this sense, we are living under a paradigm that is closer to the one defined by thinkers such as Benjamin and Freud in the first part of the twentieth century, and even more so by the Holocaust literature mainly during the 1980s and the 1990s (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Lyotard, Derrida, Claude Lanzmann, Giorgio Agamben, Shoshana Felman are only some of the thinkers who dealt with this question), if only in the sense that we feel assailed by unprecedented events and by the daily fragmentary and reductive prattle on these events, which uses the mechanical possibilities of memory and transmission, but in a way that eventually impoverishes experience, replaces stories with information and information with sensation without the respite that is crucial for reflection and working through. Perhaps this explains at least part of our yearning for a literature of memoirs, since, whether authentic or inauthentic, false or fictive, it supplies us with true propositions in relation to our existence, thus answering our profound need for meaning. For at least some of us vacillate

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between two versions of liminal memories: the somatization of memories, on the one hand, and speechlessness or aphasia, on the other. Interesting enough, both these extremes inhabit Lillian Hellman’s memoirs. In her bereaved experience, to use Derrida’s expression, Julia functions more like a somatic symptom that does not only preserve the past but imprisons it in a primitive, pure, presymbolic condition as if it were an impression without impression, the impression of naked life that speaks itself by compulsion, almost without distance, let alone any transformation which of necessity condemns memories to a certain economy of oblivion. Lillian’s loneliness, as it is described in both the book and film, constitutes her melancholic subjectivity, or rather her “inter- subjectivity.” She is draped in this shapeless and horrible loneliness even before the murder, a loneliness wholly linked to Julia and absolutely not linked to her at all. Julia is, hence, both subject and object of the memoirs, even if she is not there mostly, even if she does not answer to her name, not in her life and not in her death. Lillian’s memories, her waking dreams and even her fantasies, which are meant to construct sophisticated defenses against total collapse, do not contrive to block out the fatal weakness at the very base of the relationship. The choice— of Alvin Sargent, the scriptwriter, and of the director—to add to the story of Julia and Lillian’s friendship the chapter she dedicated to her relationship with the author Dashiell Hammett helps us to this perspective. Hammett is a “third party,” powerfully connected with her personal life, yet not evoking the same identification, incorporation, and frustration. The audience constitutes an impersonal “third party” which is not related to her in any way, and it is Hammett’s presence that allows this audience to look at her relationship with Julia in a twice-mediated manner. For with Hammett she is angry, not submissive, needy, explicit, rebellious, developing, changing. We must, however, not hurry— “we” readers and spectators who are let into the secret of recollection. These are not our images, they are not our fantasy and our materials, even if they reveal such familiar psychological mechanisms. Lillian’s very own nostalgia, her events as they are registered in and deleted from her memory and her writing—in their time and with hindsight— expose her to the blessed curse of writing (and the cinema). They add to the complication of the problem of faithfulness both regarding Julia and herself. They reveal how her journey through time stays, in spite of everything, within the frame of the possible, her possibilities, and they give us the crippling power to judge their friendship. Lillian Hellman’s choice, however, even before Fred Zinnemann’s intervention, displaces her memories, prevents them from getting riveted on herself and thus expiring.

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Lillian’s writing of her memories, committing them to the public, is an act of betrayal. She knows this. A betrayal of her dear ones, of her dearest one, and perhaps of herself. Lillian avoids touching on secrets, and if she does it is by suggestion, even in the chapter of the book that ends differently from the film. She recoils from dealing with Julia’s secrets and with the secret of their relationship, with what is never said in it, with the silence ordained long before Julia was deprived of her life. She does not try to explain Julia, not to herself either, and even more surprisingly, she does not explain herself to herself. Nevertheless, her very turn to the genre of the memoirs, beyond addressing herself, addresses a secret that eludes the interplay between covering and revealing, and between forgetfulness and anamnesis. A secret which, amazingly, is not (just) intimate, even though it is what allowed for the two women’s encounter, and even though it is its frustrations that weighed down their relationship, even prior to its actual extinction. It stays a secret, regardless of the name the writer gives it, though the title she chose for her book has exactly this in mind: Pentimento. Re-painting suggests both a renewed painting and the artist’s repenting. The artist, it would appear, changed his mind. With the passing of time the paint on the canvas grows transparent so that a tree shimmers through a woman’s dress, or a dog shows up from below a child. What was the artist’s original intention? How do we talk of intentions in a world in which humanity and animality, vegetation and inanimate objects lose their outlines? The memoirs hold on to dates, wondrously exact ones. Memory is disciplined into periods of childhood, adolescence, youth. Even so and regardless of the fact that the film’s flashback structure would seem to invite changes of perspective, the secret is not revealed. What, of all this, is truth and what is fabrication? What is under conscious control and what escapes it? Julia is no longer there to read these words. But just possibly her daughter, Lilly, may read them. Maybe not. Maybe she really did die, as Dash believed she did. Yet perhaps she is still alive. The two of them are the sole addressees, singular addressees, of this testament, of this epilogue, this cry. And perhaps not. Perhaps Lillian is the sole addressee, who tries to process these things without processing them, to open them up while avoiding to exploit the room for maneuver offered by time. For sure, Julia is the addressee. The dead addressee. Perhaps. Memory, addressing her, asks as it were how she would read these things, how she would read and whether she would read them at all—these are questions never asked, when she was alive too, when she received Lillian’s plays, dispatched to diverse postboxes throughout Europe, she received and did not answer, did not respond. Why is this memory so protected? Why does the terror that accompanied the

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relationship and was never given explicit expression return to cast its control, at full force, on the old, lonely woman, in her boat on the river, angling, in pastoral serenity, asking herself what was there for her once, and what is there for her now? Why does she respond, committed to her even now, reverting to take pictures, like a girl, processing a dynamic of the very same kind? What’s the point of resuscitating in the absence of the temptation—and necessity—to work through? Neither the film nor the book tells us about Lillian’s family. Like a waif she arrives at the cold, alien house of two old people, Julia’s grandmother and grandfather. A senile grandfather, a living corpse, and a cynical, austere grandmother, proud and aristocratic, who are joylessly raising their granddaughter. Their daughter, her mother, is living a wealthy life in a castle in Scotland. Lillian observes, fascinated, sympathizing and identifying with her friend, as they conduct a strange ceremony on New Year’s Eve, seated around a huge table, speechless, no communication, in mutual hostility. But she is there, present at this family event. Not at her place, at home. They are hosting her, they and Julia. And Julia’s hosting is generous and intriguing and stirring and self-centered. She is an angry adolescent who lives with grown-ups who are indifferent to her, and she chooses to divert her anger into social-political domains. As though it was not she, suffering the burden of her grandparents’ and mother’s lack of care and sensitivity, but a global failure which must be understood from this perspective in order to come to the rescue of those who are exploited. When she grows up, ironically, this is how she’ll behave using her mother’s money. This festive meal of Julia and Lillian’s, during childhood, and again after some years when they’re already young ladies— these are the only scenes in the film that happen at home. All other documented encounters occur in public places—at the university, the train station, the port, a café, a hospital, postboxes. These early scenes, therefore, are very important. Julia is the hostess, Lilly the guest. Herself an adopted child, Julia opens the door to her home and adopts her friend, who adores her, who strains to the point of exhaustion to understand, then and ever since, to accept her and to respond to her, even if she’s homeless, not at home, and in the absence of a real encounter, even if the milk of friendship gradually sours and runs out, and even when she meets a man who illuminates an independently powerful face inside her. Then too she is ready to pursue this friendship with a stubborn tenacity, until the end, and is ready to undertake a dangerous mission for the fantasy of friendship, a mission that may cost her her own life. And following all this, she elects to preserve the memory as close as possible to how it was experienced at the time, untouched, untainted, crystal clear. Dash’s perspective on what’s going on, a perspective on herself that his presence affords

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her, does not make the slightest difference. Certainly not the ironic, sometimes bitter, remarks—ungenerous and sometimes biting—from acquaintances and advisors. The compact of silence between Julia and Lillian outdoes all this resonance. Lillian’s huge needs overcome Julia’s actual absence and overshadow any feelings of lack of care and lack of satisfaction which have been a steady part of the relationship from childhood. The film, as said, does not show us anything of Lillian’s childhood at home. This is an important detail. There is something about Julia’s dominant, captivating presence, something about her stories, her knowledge, her experience, even as a young girl, that excites Lillian, her gaze directed upward, something exciting, and stirring, and awe inspiring (idealization and idolization inspiring, even), which also silences and suffocates her. She feels her friend’s generosity, but in their relationship she is always the less important one. She is less important than young Julia’s half-baked insights concerning the class struggle, and certainly less important than the antifascist struggle in which she will engage in 1930s Europe. And so it is that they meet-and-fail-to-meet throughout the years, obeying the rules—impossible, asymmetric, unconscious— of an alliance which rests on fears and lack of confidence and on repression and self- denial and hunger. Julia’s own needs for Lillian are, of course, part of the picture. But they are of a different order: less urgent, less compelling, less frequent. She is able to disconnect. If there is a poisonous ambivalence, as there seems to be in all her relationships, including that with her one-year-old baby girl, she declines to confront it and put it to the test of any real relationship, for any length of time. She roams through the world and addresses it as follows: as a woman among the brotherhood of combatants, as a comrade and not a friend. People can be replaced. Lillian’s romanticism is remote from rationalism and the rationale of the struggle in which each comrade counts but can be substituted because he or she is of no personal account, only from the point of view of the joint enterprise, nothing else. Julia goes her way, ever more away from any home. Her codes do not meet with the codes and expectations of Lillian who observes her moves, perhaps anticipating them deep inside her frightened knowing, and who, for love, mentions nothing to her. Julia offers no explanations for her actions, she is under no obligation to report her motives or reasons, she neither justifies nor apologizes. Such negotiations which, theoretically, are an inextricable part of friendship, not always practically, and never in friendships this intense, are an unnecessary impediment to her freedom, to her commitment and her duties which are directed to the political struggle. This story is so sad because it brings together two women and two different sensibilities, brings together the ethics of

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the private and the morality of the public and suggests the impossibility of this encounter, on the intimate level, first of all, but also on the political one. Staying with the one means sacrificing the other. Julia is prepared to sacrifice Lillian for political reasons. She is prepared to sacrifice herself too. Lillian is prepared to sacrifice everything, including herself, for the sake of Julia. Mr. Johann, the messenger, in Paris, hands Lillian a note from Julia. It is an invitation: not to a home, not for a visit, but to join a struggle. Still, the invitation does its job, in spite of the absolute contradiction inherent in the situation and the context. It acts according to the same formal and psychological rules and constraints under which their friendship emerged a long time ago. Lillian responds as though it were an invitation that extends hospitality rather than a request to collaborate in an activity with which she has nothing to do, which exceeds her background and possibilities and which may endanger her life. An invitation, as such, as a way toward interaction, leaves us free. It does not come to constrain our deeds. We are free to accept or to reject, as suits and seems right to us. Julia, thus, takes pains to write Lillian not to force herself, and Mr. Johann repeats this to her: Miss Julia asked me to remind you, he says, as they sit in the Tuilleries, that you are afraid of being afraid and that this may lead you to do things that you cannot do. But in her note, Julia adds that her friend Johann will tell her what it is she needs: My friend Johann will tell you what I need, but I tell you, don’t push yourself. If you cannot do it, I will understand. Love, Julia. An invitation, then, leaves us free while urging us. Free to refuse, we may not accept; the invitation, however, is not indifferent to our reaction. It conveys a mood, desire, demands that we respond. It isn’t as though whether we accept or decline, so be it, it is one and same for the addresser. The chronicle of Lillian’s response is of course foretold. As far as Julia is concerned, trains or coffeehouses, they all feel like home. Lillian will respond, in fear and horror, she will not understand and respond, because the trials through which her friend puts her gladden her. She will travel to her, as she will, later, travel in search of Julia’s daughter who lives with a baker’s family in Alsace, and she will, eventually, fight for her memory against the attempts of Julia’s family to commit her to oblivion (a paradoxical war since the name “Julia,” out of respect for the family, is not the friend’s real name). We shall look at this later. And Julia is aware of the great power she has over her friend, of the latter’s absolute loyalty which she will never be able to redeem, and with which she long since abandoned any reciprocity. From the distance of geography and politics—and perhaps thanks to this distance—the expectations do not slacken. The relations reproduce themselves because they are not of an everyday nature. We do not see Julia spitefully

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or unwillingly refusing or meeting Lillian’s entreaties. Due to the circumstances, they are spared the trial of their friendship. Its absence, however, is what fixes Lillian’s memory, the pentimento which she freezes in unambiguous tints. Did she invent Julia? Does she, in her final days, invent, or reinvent, without correcting, without change, without contamination, her intimate friend? We saw how little we know about her life, but obviously something about the encounter with Julia, who is so different and unalike and not understood, puts her in touch with extremely vulnerable places of her own. The relationship remains economical even if we are witness to acts of altruism that lack any apparent balance or resonance. For otherwise it is hard to see how the encounter, across the years, yields the same patterns of behavior. The encounter is difficult but crucial for her, restorative. Julia also is the story of an early awakening which revisits Lillian in her adult life and dreams, an awakening of deep personality components and structures, as a result of the encounter. What happens to her happens only with Julia. Her openness toward Julia, her total exposure, is in this sense an exposure toward herself, more so than with Dash or the rest of the world, and more than could ever have happened to her were it not for Julia. The wound Julia inflicts on her, the wound she represents or intensifies, is unrelated to her. She, with her specific characteristics, did not cause it. Yet the encounter with her, with her personality, her departure, with her frequent separations and her final separation topples all of Lillian’s defenses, invading her waking life as well as her nights, only in order to signal that certain, slippery thing within her. Though Lillian does not confront its reasons, this does not mean that the story is lacking in insights. Indeed, the old woman who is piecing together her childhood, her youth and her adulthood, is sufficiently honest with herself to show us a dependent and frightened picture. It is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman, the author, is unaware of what she’s doing here. I am underlining the matter of economics because it is not explicit in either the book or the film. This requires a slight detour which may enrich our viewings and readings. Derrida discusses the gift on two levels. On one of these, the gift functions in a cycle of exchange. It is part of a system of checks and balances in which I give on a certain date in order to receive, to receive immediately (on a day of celebration, for instance), or after some time, with a delay (on my birthday). Even when I give with no intention to get awarded, reward is ensured given my generosity which is conscious of itself, or given the recipient’s obligedness toward me, even if only in terms of gratitude. Is there a gift, in fact, on any other level, a “pure” gift without symbolic or material credit, without reciprocity? A pure gift, a present that does not belong in the order of presence, is

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one that neither giver nor recipient recognize as such. It has to occur as it were below or beyond the phenomenal plain, in the place-without-place of absolute forgetfulness, without memory— deep or surface—and without trace. In a moment of madness it rips through the cycle of exchange, in an ex-centric time that belongs neither to the present nor to a future present. The notion of the subject, however, does in any case assume a giving that involves the expectation of return. If the gift is another name of the impossible, we still think it, we name it, we desire it. We intend it. And this even if or because or to the extent that we never encounter it, we never know it, we never verify it, we never experience it in its present existence or in its phenomenon.2

Julia and Lillian operate within the cycle of exchange. This must be stressed, even if seen from the outside Lillian seems a defeatist, willing to settle for leftovers. Indeed, unwittingly, they are playing a dangerous game based on a distribution of emotional resources. They are friends because Lillian feels that Julia loves her and gives to her. Giving her name to her daughter is an expression of this. For her this is not a meaningless gesture. Hence Julia can make her demands from her without the grudge she might have felt given the two-fold— doubtful—privilege of having a friend who is both a giver without limits and the victim of their relationship. In this sense, friendship must not base itself on the pure gift. Derrida, it would seem, does not insist on this with the necessary emphasis. Once friendship stops exchanging power, resources, and foods according to the idiosyncratic definition of the partners in the relationship, once it wholly escapes from economics, it is doomed. The difference between the friends is preserved until the bitter end and beyond it. The perpetual mourning for Julia does not bring along a loss of identity, assuming her behaviors, or a change in Lillian’s way of living. Julia lives inside her as different, never like she, herself. She is an ideal self, other, and endlessly desired. Her death, her sacrifice, they carry enormous weight for Lillian, whose own sacrifices, compared to hers, are featherweights, devoid almost of value. Her conscience carries the imprint of the lost Julia, the demands and values she incorporated, and hence the sense of insufficiency which will take over after Julia’s death. I did not try enough. I did not insist enough. I am neither a heroine nor capable. This harrowing dialogue between Lillian and herself, Dash is its witness, is actually conducted with Julia. For this she must be punished. This incorporation postmortem is augured by a game of their girlhood. They are running across a field. Julia casts a sentence into the open air, challenging Lillian to

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add her own, which in turn challenges Julia, and so on. In her opening sentence, Julia imagines a soldier with a gun that does not shoot. Lillian takes up this line of thinking. The soldier asks for another gun. Then Julia concludes: And someone yells back, Sorry soldier, that’s the last gun. Her expectations, her fears, her hopes, her criteria, her goals—they impress themselves upon the dynamic. She will remain an unattainable inner ideal for Lillian, who will never be able, however much she tries, to move beyond herself toward these places that are not hers. When, on a hike, she does not manage to cross a bridge, young Julia tells her that there’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’ll do it next time. These are the words that later give her the wings to travel to Berlin on the mission negotiated by Mr. Johann. “Reparation,” however, has its limits. She is different and will remain different. Her own act of resistance lies in her writing. Not only does her writing talent compensate for an inner distress that might have defeated her, reduce the sense of loss and deprivation, and suggest a way to adjust to a world in which Julia is no longer present, but it is also through writing that she will eventually fight Julia’s family’s attempt to obliterate her memory, indeed: obliterate the very obliteration of her memory. The family will reach for absolute destruction and disappearance. Lillian will bring the ashes to the United States, will re- cover the traces, and in her story, while giving up on full identification, she will, as it were, take Julia’s revenge and allow her an eternal present, released from time. Lillian Hellman, as a writer and playwright, reinvents herself constantly, for others as for herself. She plays with her possibilities and is born anew. After her death, rumors started about the truthfulness of her personality and the reliability of her memory. The film, whose creation and production she attended, at the time raised problems regarding her public persona. This, however, is not what I want to deal with. I turn to the film (and, to an extent, the book) as a sufficiently rich and suggestive object for phenomenological description, departing from the legal or historical question. Lillian’s act of invention, like any invention, regardless of the existential plane on which it occurs, is not creation ex nihilo. The encounter enables her to discover, it would seem for the first time, what already exists within her. In the motto of pentimento she seems to sense and acknowledge this, even if she is not conscious of the full range of implications of what she says about the description itself of the friendship with Julia. Memory is selective, tendentious, emotional, unreliable. It is controlled and organized but also goes out of control and becomes chaotic. It is fettered to our lexicon, which itself is linked to expectations, images, a world view, and cultural ensemble. Yet it manages to take us by surprise, again and again. Documenting

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her life from the start, Lillian subverts her own expectations as well as ours of memory’s praxis and dynamic, exactly because with regard to Julia her memory is so fixated, exactly because of her refusal to renew anything. Inventing something new about her friend is wholly outside the range of her possibilities. The economics of invention—which, in this case, is her métier— cannot, and must not, break her spirit. From this angle, Julia is her poetics, a story about the limits and limitations of the author who invents the possible on the basis of the possible, nothing more. No other information whatsoever penetrates, or indeed can penetrate, the idealistic plot she forges (personally, politically, as well as sexually). I don’t want to hear any attacks, she lashes out at Sammy, whom she has known from her youth and who is the brother of a former classmate, on Julia’s life and beliefs. Those who may insert information, in a roundabout way, are, as said, other people, the film director, the scriptwriter, Dashiell Hammett, people who are around, readers, and spectators. But they add information that neither touches nor influences her. Such information only affects their own perception, even though they may miss the point of the film as a result, if they try too hard. Lillian guards Julia jealously, with a priori determination, in a test-proof bubble. Nothing in this bubble undergoes change, is redrawn or revealed within its forgotten contours, though the atmosphere around the bubble changes, maybe radically, from one extreme to the opposite, even if Julia brought a girlchild into the world and abandoned her in the home of an Alsatian bakers’ family. While Julia may set the rules in their empirical kingdom, its frugal economy of meetings, Lillian remains sovereign and autonomous in her own kingdom. No one sets a foot there—not even Julia. The effort she must make to maintain the kingdom is huge at times. We can observe this, for instance, in the Berlin coffeehouse. Here, too, she comes with a great hope to see her wishes fulfilled, then to encounter, bump into, what has already happened so many times, on their outings as young girls, at Oxford University, in broken phone calls during which, from the words of the one interlocutor—Lillian—that reach our ears, so precious little is said; she comes in order to re-encounter gestures that repeat themselves, gestures she has documented in spite of herself as she sweetens them firmly with antidotes, possibly sees, possibly hears, her arms overflowing with her desire on her return to the world. The expectations do not lessen, their dimensions do not shrink. They stay enormous throughout, her companions, which clash with her real experience. The downfall that each such event occasions only nourishes her yearning and her ideals regarding this relationship.

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–I am Paris. –I am Paris and I am a string of beads. –I am Paris and I am a string of beads on a hot dancer. –I am Paris and I am a string of beads on a hot dancer and a romantic Frenchman who carries me off . . . .

Julia, a charming, sophisticated girl, switches to speaking French in the course of play. We return to New Year’s Eve, an early scene in the film. If you want to understand, she says to Lillian, you must learn French. In the next scene, some years later, not long before their separation, they try to revive the game, to preserve the text as much as they can recollect. Instead of the French sentence, Julia prefers to add to the text. She says that outside it is Renoir and Degas. Lillian, exploding with laughter, says that inside it is hard and hot. Lillian of the inside and Julia of the outside is one way of describing this connection that is defeated from the outset, Lillian who is in love with her friend’s beauty, gentleness, and the strong features of her most wonderful face, the unrealized homoerotic love, whose conduits for release are so few, leaving one with a taste for more. The conversations are laconic, usually. What are you reading now? She asks Julia in Oxford. Darwin, Engels, Einstein—You understand Einstein?—Sure. And some hint, along the way, about the men in their lives, and Julia’s enigmatic body language, the distracted- seductive finger which she passes over her lips when something comes close to being touched, close to her intimacy. Julia sojourns abroad, in a public, at times heroic, place of knowledge (she senses the significance of the fascist threat), partial knowledge in retrospect— calamitously for her—naïve, ideological, idealistic. Lillian’s knowledge is unsure, impressionistic, intuitive, less learned, lacking political-historical astuteness. Is Julia a paradigmatic tale of friendship? In his dialogue Lysis, Socrates raises the following question: “Which is the friend of which? Is the lover the friend of the beloved or is the beloved the friend?” And subsequently, Aristotle believes that: In its essence friendship seems to consist more in giving than in receiving affection. [. . .] As then friendship consists more especially in bestowing affection, and as we praise men for loving their friends, affection seems to be the mark of a good friend. Hence it is friends that love each other as each deserves [. . .] whose friendship is lasting.3

Friendship resides with the friend, the lover, even where she loves the one who hates her, her enemy. In contrast with the intuition that marks both Plato’s dialogue and Aristotle’s work, we are not required to look for symmetry and rec-

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iprocity to warrant trust, openness, and exclusiveness. Lillian does not have to be as important to Julia as Julia is to her. These are imponderables dimensions which are interlinked and become mixed up with their absolute past. She carries the burden— or the privilege— of the friendship, by choice or compulsion, in Julia’s lifetime and after her death. The recollections are another gift in their chain of exchange, a chain whose rules they did not formulate but which they knew and sensed. Friendship’s condition of possibility, Derrida will argue, is enfolded in its impossible extreme, where the friend is not there, absent as a direct and immediate addressee, whether she is alive or dead. Friendship, if there is such a thing, always already foresees the friend’s disappearance and is committed to her memory. Its time is infinite because it is not exhausted by the concrete time spent together, which is self- consciously finite. Lillian’s memoirs, insofar as they direct themselves to a time not given to recollection and project themselves to a future that will not return to her, illustrate this temporal order. The events leading up to the Second World War blend in with the friendship, which only comes to emphasize the blurred outlines that depict it in a hazy fashion from the start. The historical-political situation is not what deprives them of each other. Separation haunts them even before they meet. Julia, European compared to Lillian, understands more than her the rules of the game, as she lies bandaged in a Vienna hospital. Ironically, she now is protected from an encounter and intimacy even more than before. Then the operation comes between them, of which Lillian initially is not at all aware, and whose outcomes she totally refuses to take in. Everything here is wrapped in stealth, secrecy, and suspicion. If the encounter between these two polar worlds is also a struggle, then Julia’s actual world triumphs, a Pyrrhic triumph as she herself, alone and helpless, is defeated by murderous forces and institutions whose action is unpredictable. Lillian’s inner world, whose objective validity is doubtful, succeeds through writing to find its way out. I already mentioned Julia’s emissary note, perhaps command, prior to the voyage to Berlin. There are a number of notes from Julia throughout the film. They are never epistles of any substance. They’re laconic, unclear, crumbs of information, crumbs of feelings. Mere instructions, at times. Go back to Paris, she jots down following the scene in the Vienna hospital, they’ll now take me to another place. Love, Julia. What does she mean to say? Is Lillian supposed to go in search for her, try and find her? Is that what she would want? Or should she get out of her life? Should she get out now? Forever? Vagueness reigns supreme. Because of the political situation in part, but not only. Lillian does not protest, neither when these things happen nor in retrospect. She does not ask, What

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does she want of me, after all, and why are her messages so unclear? Later she learns that she must address her letters to a postbox in London, usually a oneway address, no continuous correspondence. Julia knows that they will meet and this knowledge supports both of them. The voyage to Moscow via Berlin constitutes the dramatic climax of the film. Mr. Johann tells her, in advance, that they are aware she is not the best-suited person for this mission because she is Jewish. She is an American Jewess, naïve, not understanding, and she decides to go in for it. Though she takes some time to make up her mind, it is a decision foretold. Refusal is out of the question. She wants to see Julia. She has not been told that Julia will be awaiting her in Berlin, but the possibility has always been an active, mobilizing force (so it was when she traveled to Paris when she got stuck writing her play). We have already seen how when they were young girls—she recollects—they once crossed a bridge over a stream. Young Lillian’s gaze fastens on her friend, she walks across the bridge toward her, for her, rejecting her friend’s suggestion to make the crossing from below. Now she trips, needs Julia’s hand, and she puts her on her feet again. In the Berlin coffeehouse, Julia—amputated—will do this for some brief moments. On her way, she returns in her dream to a later outing. In the light cast by the campfire in a grove, in a primeval, harmonious, perfect landscape, Julia quotes from Robert Herrick’s poem “Upon Julia’s Clothes”— dedicated to me. Lillian embraces her and her words, I love you Julia, in their banal simplicity encapsulate the affective ground of the relationship. Against the romantic backdrop of nature, it is as though she says: When I am with you I am whole. You are, to me, a mother and a lover and a friend who enables me to overcome my basic weakness and to identify with you all the way to the end. All of Lillian’s recollections suggest such fantastic and symbiotic states of perfection. All of them, even the most difficult, convey a sense of endless pleasure even if between it and reality there is next to no connection. In coffeehouse Albert in Berlin, Julia will order caviar and wine so we can celebrate. But, except for a moment, there is no time. They have to get themselves together. Everything’s ok, she tries to reassure. Nothing will happen now—How much time do we have?—Not much. Something may still go wrong.—You still look like nobody else, says Lillian and weeps. Julia’s knowing eyes, eyes that know no one is to be trusted, meet Lillian’s tearful, unknowing eyes. Julia does not let Lillian’s overt, direct weeping paralyze her. Lillian in her turn never once breaks into hysterics. Isn’t it interesting that she, the writer between them, is so verbally spare when they are together? The sounds she makes, her sighs, her

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body’s controlled shivering render, more than anything, her vulnerability. This encounter, all of its conditions, are subject to unwritten rules, and Lillian tries hard to follow them. She subdues her anxieties, the panic, as much as she can, the force of her emotion, and what is exposed is a limpness, a lack of focus, instability. No tears, Lilly, demands Julia, somewhat impervious, as it were communicative. The artificial leg . . .—You were there in Vienna. Didn’t you see?— Sorry. And then, Take off the hat, Lilly, listen to me.—I am listening.—Do what I tell you. And in the end: Take the hat, say goodbye to me, and go. The childhood dynamic returns, from beyond the years, and imposes itself. Just like the dynamics between mother and daughter, as though it wasn’t two same-aged women friends. Lillian displays respect toward a loved woman whose experience, as far as she is concerned, is richer than hers, more understanding, wise, knowing. She has grown accustomed to Julia’s lack of attention when she listens, to the laconic nature of her response to her theater plays, to her indirectly delivered judgments. A woman-girl facing a woman-adult; a distant, omnipotent, opinionated, experienced mother, facing a helpless and immature daughter. Be gay, says Julia now. Can you act gay? And to the waiter who approaches: This is my best friend. [. . .] I want you to know that you’ve been much more than a good friend to me. You’ve done something important. With this money perhaps we can save a thousand people. [. . .] We can do today what we can do today and today you did it for us. Is there any ambivalence, from Lillian toward Julia? Does the book or the film express any such thing? Does the tension between Lillian’s self and Julia’s ideals, which have become absorbed in her conscience and after the murder disturb her sleep with nightmares, does this tension exasperate her or provoke her anger because she has made such an effort to stifle the conflict between them, between her needs and the reality of the relationship? Doesn’t the long drawn-out rejection which she suffered and the abandonment, which were then replaced by death, turning her, as said, into the one destined to document and perpetuate—as against Julia’s family’s crass attempt at erasure— doesn’t this come with some pleasure, power, a sense of revenge? We witness—and Lillian, as it were, witnesses—Julia’s murder as Lillian watches Hamlet in a Moscow theater. Is she dreaming, wondering, envisioning, hallucinating? Are these events taking place simultaneously? Do the expressions of frustration and violence occur after Julia’s death, transposed and directed against herself? In her sleeplessness, in her dreams, in her nightmares, as well as during her waking hours, Lillian loses her balance. She wakes up yelling, expresses bitter guilt, evidence that she did not act right, that she neglected her, that she did not try hard enough.

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Her whole being is suffused with frustration, hopelessness, and a sense of nothingness. Could the shock she experienced and the paralysis overtaking her, could they dissuade her from finding the baby? She seems to recoil, a girl with no grip on reality, alone without her friend stretching out her hand, and with the deeply internalized friend who judges her for her failures. Here again Dash appears to point at reality—to her and to us. They never wanted to find the baby. They wanted Julia’s money. You did what you could. You hired lawyers, detectives. But Dash cannot help. Not in this sphere. Let it be, he urges her. Julia was alive and isn’t. The baby is dead. The sharpness and clarity with which, so many years later, Lillian reproduces these agitated moments, almost without filtering, raises the question whether the process of mourning ever ends. Not because the memoirs were written in a state of depression. Quite on the contrary, this is reconciled, appeased writing, translucent and not hysterical. And yet, the force of the narrative and of the compelling experience conveys the stress, the tears, the breathlessness, the emotional distance she took from everyone to the point of caricaturing them, it conveys her hostility and her anger, as if all this happened only yesterday. Mourning does not come to an end. The one lifeline that can save her from the infinite void, symbolized by the sea and the rowing boat, is through keeping Julia alive, by accepting her death on one level— emotionally arbitrary and indifferent—and denying it in the internal reality. Julia remains illuminated, everywhere present, the object of a libidinal tension which is never released, captured in images, in a poem ostensibly about her, in her letters, her dress, her voice. Her colors don’t pale but the original outlines are not to be seen. They must not be allowed to gorge themselves on the real love.

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“AND SHE DID EAT AND WAS SUFFICED AND LEFT”: DECONSTRUCTION AS AN ANOREXIC PERSPECTIVE

It is a long time since deconstruction first offended against good taste, subverting, infringing, expanding, and reducing almost across the board: philosophy, ethics, law, aesthetics, politics, academia, languages, cultures, concepts. What is its relation— deconstruction with its free, as it were light, movements—to the boundaries of the anorexic world, not to be crossed, its doors tightly shut, heavy, covering a bottomless pit, an open mouth the code to whose lock was lost long ago? And yet. For unlike in the traditional philosophical discussion which, even if it touches the extremes of hedonism and ascesis, avid gluttony and self-denial, has failed to develop sufficiently flexible categories to address eating disorders— if we want to understand the complexity of motives and the experience, so human and so animal, unfree, creating with an apparent willfulness radical conditions of hunger, robbed of a sense of autonomy and selfhood, struggling for restraint, trying to broaden its horizons but finding itself cast out, absorbed— again and again in the object it rejects more than any other—it is the questions deconstruction raises that are pivotal to these issues. This is not necessarily due to its explicit dealings with cannibalism and hospitality, its discussions of subjectivity, the unconscious, responsibility, alienation, gropingly advancing death, the necessary relationship between culture and death, sickness, the shrinking outlines of the body, its volume and spread, the right to own life and its limits, or the yearn70

DECONSTRUCTION AS AN ANOREXIC PERSPECTIVE

ing that is inherent to deconstructive writing and experience. Not necessarily because of deconstruction’s preoccupation with the traditional concept of the spirit which resonates with the abstraction most fundamental to anorexic existence, which— on its part—tries, in vain, to fuse with it. Not necessarily due to its observations regarding the body and its parts: eyes (weeping, blind, unblinking), the ear, arms, genitals, face (not symmetric), a deconstructive human body, a distorted anatomy, anorexic, anorganic, out of control, always exceeding what the senses perceive, in the direction of the specific parts. We will, in due time, revert to compose this body. The connections between deconstruction and eating disorders, however, and anorexic and bulimic practices, are tighter and more concrete than the likely relationship between interpretation or analysis and its object. The boundaries between these phenomena—self-starvation, vomiting, deconstruction—are blurred, contingent, expressing different stages of articulation, as it were, a wish for and attempt toward contact with self and other who are in tension with a total inability, a blocked effort, a gradually examined guilt, initially marked on the body, through a silence wholly incapable of putting words to emotional states, slipping out fast by eating/vomiting, then to be said, written. The portrait of deconstruction. The incongruous portrait of an ambivalent woman, focused on herself yet remote from herself, taking in—literally—her mouth wide-open, the symbolic order, yet nevertheless shut and disconnected to the point, in some cases, of psychosis; desperately dependent on her mother, on motherhood, yet preventing this instinctual connection, preventing it from flourishing. She does not know herself in those of her regions that have been afflicted, but paradoxically, strangely, she feels great proximity, engages in a non- verbal dialogue with her lowest parts, with the most humiliating and horrifying of her body’s activities. The boundary of her self-knowledge is obstructed. There is no contact, no encounter except for that with a repetitive economy “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over- rides.”1 Her yearning, at the same time, as a result, for an encounter outside the self is huge, a penetrating encounter, penetrable boundaries, with the other, the remedy, that it may assuage the violent conflict with the undeciphered boundary, obliterate the wound, will cause it to be forgotten. She is waiting for the absolute stranger, nameless and without an identity, who has a language and a world all his own, to influence the whole of experience, to answer, to satisfy, to nourish, bring about a total crumbling of the systems, of the very perception of self, make it possible to process all that dead matter, lacking in energy, from the past, work it anew into the relationship. Someone, something I cannot even imagine: as far from me as possible, it must be the farthest possible, so that ev-

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ery sign of identity and every familiar outline is mingled and tossed. And yet, this threshold, fundamental as it is, which she knows with a deep knowing from within, overshadows every relationship, every transcendence and overcoming. She disarms the stranger, does not yield, does not let herself be captured. Turned in upon herself, she sits at home and waits. She has few connections. She does not cultivate connections. As though immersed in her own things, still the encounter shows her that she has nothing of her own, that inside she hides an abyss of non-being and what she considered hers is not her property. She grows more paranoid from one relationship to the next, evolves a deconstructive sensibility to language, continuously analyzes the meanings of words, choices of words, verbal violence, omissions. The encounter consolidates features either forgotten or repressed. It allows her—forces her—to look for reparation and due to her growing sobriety, the hand of time, her greater, more subtle articulation, it hurts all the more, and a slamming door—from outside—appears neither strange nor really surprising. Being so familiar, overly familiar, it causes more pain. Someone who slams the door to his house and heart shut to her, prevents her, evasive, comes and goes, forbids, slips away, only reflects back the truth she knows without knowing about herself, that she is not deserving. His vanishing confirms the hole that she is, the split within her between self- love and self- hatred. Always, separation is late, delayed response, fierce and only partially conscious. While she recognizes that there is “another side” with its limits or problems, facing him she is obliterated, this does not alter her sense of failure, and the failure in love is her failure to heal. She moves in a vicious cycle where everything crashes on the relationship, collapses due to it, it and nothing else, and she goes to pieces easily, experiencing a magnified trap with no escape or space to move. And where an adult, manageable, economic possibility seems to arise, its anticipated end depends on its always being processed through the coordinates of her map, eating and vomiting, and they harden and calcify over the years. They are stronger than the stranger and assimilate him forthwith. Her lovers will be weighed down by the burden, and if they lack the strength or ability or confidence to actively forge proper boundaries with her, should they lack the motivation, maturity, or appetite, they will run while they can, away from the role, from the inflated importance they were given in spite of themselves, given their aggrandizement, given the demand made on them, so very long ago, beforehand. She will enthrone them, appoint them as those who nourish her, soothe her, look after her, longstanding objects of desire, and they will please her, won’t neglect, will respect, understand her limitations, they won’t impose, and later they will remove themselves in anger, impatience, revulsion, exploit-

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ing, at times, the power they gained to humiliate her. Why do you give me such a role, why do you curb me, you don’t know me, I don’t know myself, it’s embarrassing and it’s frightening, scary, I don’t know why you love me so much. She, from her side, will do anything to maintain them, supreme queen of temptations and turn-offs. She will listen for the faintest whisper of expectation from the one who is with her, and she will comply, painstakingly like a priestess or like a knight, woman-man, for if she fails they will abandon her. She creates an ideal world of love, an inner sanctum where no one can sojourn for long. People want to spend time in her world, miles away from theirs, only to be pulled back to the familiar and gray and comfortable and easy- fitting of their own,2 since she does not know how to be good to them and to herself, and a stranger will not understand, will not know how to approach and caress her. Our relationship was anorexic. You knew it all along. You understood according to the measure of your wish to know, to become acquainted, to help. You took your place because of me, you did not demand such a place. I wanted to release you from all that’s incurable, from all your troubles, your distress and frustrations, your sense of missed opportunity. I wanted to release you from your age. With anorexic determination I managed to believe in this, make you believe, for a moment, that it was possible. More than anything, I wanted to give up on myself, forget myself. I who am not your daughter, I who feel a daughterly guilt toward you, give up on myself in order to ensure your love, ready to abandon everything I have been doing to be for you only, wrongly assessing my abilities, wrongly perceiving your response, repeating familiar dynamics, under control, as it were, to heal them. More than anything, I want you to know me, to acknowledge me, to recognize all that is spontaneous, all that is authentic, but this self, obviously, is covert and hidden, a self-in-role, wanting to please, already it is unclear who is the true one, what it wants or asks for, whether at all it exists. Between us, there was a hunger-relationship, stamped by the mark of hunger. We drifted in our imaginary space, important, precious, and essential, you followed me who was following you along a path not yours, and this angered you, after all, as people are angered when they feel expropriated of their world. You hated my sacrifices, my self- effacement for you, your specific gravity within me, into whose proportions you did not fit. You felt the polarity between the vivacious woman you knew, involved, strong, the one you loved and respected, I suppose, in whose company you wanted to be, wanted to be more than her, and the other one—weak, dependent, who aroused your need to protect her and to withdraw in fear from her demandingness and her sickness. You had no wish to

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give re- birth to her. And as for me, as your reactions fill me with terror, my fundamental weakness deepens, reminded of itself, the sense of worthlessness, leaving and going to the place where I wanted to be the good girl, the most perfect loved one, from there I aim my thoughts and worries, doomed from there to the inevitable fall. It’s all my fault what’s happening; often I forget the impossible link of anorexia to other pathologies, their damaged, radical, mad encounter: The more affected a person is by the powerful influence of abandonment anxiety, and the less able she is to imagine and cling to good caring internal objects, the more intense becomes the drive to inclusion and fusion. [. . .] The reality of the patient who suffers from eating disorder and functions on this level is her fear that no matter what needs to be done to preserve her identity, it will involve the destruction of the very object on which she feels she depends for survival. She must face the horror of her own cannibalistic tendencies, especially those that are aimed against the people she loves. Her fear interferes with the holding-soothing system she needs so desperately and which will allow her sense of self to evolve.3

She is revisited by the chronicle of separation. At least this once she must understand the recurrence of texts, forge the link between what she perceives as her infinite need for relationship and the mystery of other people’s fear, ask herself whether she is not equally scared, possibly afraid many times more, digging a pit under any possibility once she erupts with her panic. A chronicle of separations. Exemplary reconstruction of an archaic time inaccessible to memory, in whose presence everything returns, experienced for the first time. She is the one who documents, who separates, writes down again, on her body, all the time, the boundaries between life and dying and death, conducts rituals of burial and mourning, asks in spite of herself about the price of existence. She is victim and victimizer, who asks, when she tires of coping with her hunger, defeated, loses her Pyrrhus-victory intoxication, under her now heavy eyes, for an end to this insipid effort, to this lonely, bitter suffering which is so hard to share or to gain empathy for; revenge perhaps for what she experiences as lack of empathy and support from the surroundings whose attitude to this symptom—which, in a way, ambivalent, reneges on these very surroundings— arouses identification and anxiety and hostility by turns. She does not know. It changes, after all. These elements and many others stir within her. Together with the wish finally to repose in her life, full with/drained of such an elementary, rudimental, shabby struggle, every day and hourly, full of an exhausting, humiliating, sickening concern, a life drowning in intimacy with the disintegrating, decaying, extinguishing aspects which she is obliged to know with her body, aspects which terrorize her,

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cause her shame, of which she wants to be cleansed, from which, disciplined, she takes off on imaginary journeys, into spheres not of this world, not of hers. She, with her tensions, her exemplary self-control, even at predictable moments of release—what’s deconstruction’s tentativeness, its experimental nature, its skepticism to her? What’s between her and this philosophical writing, whose formulations are often formal, soaring up from elemental, elementary experience toward its cognitive, moral, emotional conditions? And yet. The encounter with experience, both in deconstruction and in anorexia, is panicked, intensive, dramatic, extreme. As though always associated with a turning point, always already conscious of death, prematurely, conscious of immaturity, it carries on between victory and defeat and defeatism. Neither deconstructionist nor anorexic live as though time was theirs, infinite, inexhaustible. They are never at leisure. Deconstruction’s rich and non-rigid lexicon helps us touch anorexic riddles, secrets, amazements, and mazes where an extensive literature in psychoanalysis, sociology, history, and feminism has failed, I believe, to do justice, touching to an extent, yet never comprehensively, anorexia’s world of experience. Deconstruction achieves this because it itself is a kind of eating disorder. How is such a base, and at the same time, hungry-for-life situation to be explained? How to explain one’s relationship with one or more strangers, who are ravaging his house, against his will, his plans, his ambitions? How to explain the total inversion of the hierarchy between guest and hostess, between an abject, persecutory, invasive double, whose time is not present and who is not remembered, and the owner of the house? If anorexic or deconstructive vitality is conserved—and this, certainly, is not always the case: at times it loses grip, caves in upon itself, stumbles, dies—the picture is not unambiguous, varies with age, but if this vitality is conserved it is coupled with a terrifying struggle between the survival-oriented self, and something, the other, which I shall try to describe, to illuminate from various sides as we proceed with this chapter of the chronicle which of necessity is a journey into the recent past and the remote past, and which is utterly private and utterly typical. I would like to insist on an experiential terminology and to advance assumptions that may not agree with all those who belong to the group of anorexics, a tribe comprising monadic entities, proud, full of reverence, often not in touch with each other, not speaking.4 There are layers, important parts, which I choose to ignore (the regulating role of culture and the media, or the historical disciplining of the female body whose dramas occur not only in the family but also in the social and political domain), and qualifications which I prefer

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not to consider—anorexia as withdrawal due to a fear of adolescence or, alternatively, as an expression of independence—both because people have already written about them, and because I do not understand or identify with them sufficiently, or because sometimes they seem crude and sweeping, wholly passing any specific responsibility, as though there were some clearly defined force, with distinct features, that constitutes an anorexic body made up of a distinct lexicon of cultural images, internalized to the point of a total counterfeiting of the girl-woman’s internal voice, an equally distinct voice itself which fundamentally wishes to eat and be nourished. This force does, indeed, exist, but it is concealed, stubborn, erosive, and violent, and will not abide homogeneous description. I assume, therefore, first of all, that like deconstruction, anorexia is by definition a liminal phenomenon, poised on a thin line, which varies between one girl or one woman and another, who is subject to a supreme effort to maintain equilibrium; constantly living the conflict between a despotic, destructive, and negative instance and a positive, redeeming, reviving awareness, a conflict that may, however, appear in many guises—intellectual, artistic, or otherwise. With the balance restored, the conflict is settled one way or another. Here it’s already a choice between life and death. So long as it dominates, anorexia is an undetermined situation, an unresolved conflict, frustrating, mind- boggling experience of indeterminacy between youth and maturation. Between the romanticism of the nubile body which turns grotesque with the passing years and the rounded softness, creased and folded, of old age. At times diverging from this toward some escape appears a sublime, unattainable goal. That’s why she is bitter, dissatisfied, and impatient, unable to do anything, on occasion, weighed down by the burden of paralysis she has brought upon herself, that has been brought upon her. What makes life possible, food, is also, for her, what makes life impossible. It is taboo, death, which fuses with her life and with which her life fuses, as though anorexia was the corporeal condition of possibility of deconstruction having lit upon an especially subtle way of deceiving and masking its sources. It’s to death that already I owe everything I earn, I have succeeded in making of it, as I have with god, it’s the same thing, my most difficult ally, impossible but unfailingly faithful once you’ve got him in your game, it costs a great deal, believe me, a great deal of love, you have to forgive yourself the hurt you do yourself.5

Obviously this argument is not in the biographical range. Most probably, Derrida would object to an overly simple fit between origin and symptom. But this association between deconstruction and illness, ascetism, seclusiveness,

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even the romanticization of sickness in this tubercular philosophy which deals with crises of identity at several levels simultaneously, this association is key to understanding deconstruction when, from its side, anorexia, being a distinctly psychosomatic phenomenon, touches upon body, psyche, and textuality. Two phenomena, both generational, one perfectly verbal, the other non-verbal, one manic, the other melancholic, one the image or negative of the other, jointly strive for plenitude, are extremely sensitive to lack, fluctuate intensely between moments of depression and of euphoria. One of them in the circle of philosophy, the other in the family circle. They arouse similar responses from their surroundings—anger, attempts to intervene and prescribe and worry—for the conflict with them is not always open and explicit. The anorexic girl embodies the family’s symptom with her behavior, using her body symbolically. Deconstruction speaks directly about the conditions of the conflict and does not play the group dynamics through actions only. The respective family circles are taken aback and point at it, anorexia, deconstruction, as the problem itself. For as far as they’re concerned, it does not really touch them. These are her/its symptoms, her/its problems. They are willing to lend a hand, to help her/it get out of the pit she/it has dug for herself/itself— if they are not too hurt by the “symptoms,” which may take cultural and family values to a ridiculous extreme as they use their support in order then to renege on them and subvert them. Both cases are treated as in exorcism, by punishment, focusing solely on symptoms and not on the problems. But anorexic determination, deconstructionist determination, is sophisticated and severe. It is not always penetrable. It would already seem to open the door, calling you to break in, anticipating and surrendering, but basically it steels itself, strong. If deconstruction prefers to stay within laboratory conditions, instituting a quasi-transcendental thinking about what it takes for an experience to be actually carried out, without being invaded too crudely by a humiliating, demanding hunger—its Eros, its hungry Eros, is nevertheless anorexic. It is not, as said, about anorexia. It is anorexic. It struggles for the cognitive leisure to rethink concepts and ideas outside the norm and the law that set them in the present, it wants to unsettle all existing determinations or perceptions of responsibility and obligation, to point out something unrepresentable without which determination, responsibility, and obligation, respectively, are not worth their names—and it does all this being subject to ceaseless psychic mechanisms which impose themselves on its writing, directing and distracting its observations of itself and its surroundings. Something seeps into the ideal, protected, deconstructive condition, spoils it, falsifies and crucially affects the decisions taken. This something is not articulated, even though Derrida speaks,

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speaks a lot. Deconstruction’s silences, as we have seen, are important—not less so than its flowing and flooding words. In deconstruction’s existential condition, which I distinguish from its formal expression, its reserved and very well conserved mode of formulation, the familiar Derridean freedom and elasticity do not prevail. This condition, on the contrary, generates a sense of being trapped, a tightening of boundaries, a struggle for existence and survival that takes place in the writing, by means of it. Alongside and within formative experiences of expansion and openness, reading and learning, interaction and otherness, an abysmal pathology rumbles denial, prison, self-hatred at times and a compulsive repetition of the wish to kill oneself.6 There is not always movement in deconstruction, much as it may wish for it. Not always is there a way. The fluctuation between formal expression and existential condition, hence, is also one between medicine and illness. Deconstruction is anorexia that channels its hunger into writing. A sliver of hope, it is in control of its situation, grows stronger, to a degree, though always aware of its limitations. Like the anorexic, it too has lost touch with itself, lost its spontaneity, closeness, the vital, lustful bite taken from its own needs. Both direct themselves to others, afflicted by feelings of inferiority and deficiency, by ambivalence about closeness which manifests an inclination to fusion, on the one hand, yet on the other is terrified of being flooded and of the neediness it manifests. We have seen, in the two first chapters, how the consolation of writing is evident in a question that straddles deconstruction, which yearns with all its might for presence and is simultaneously and wholly entangled with the inscription and documentation of the impossibility of this presence: the question of love and of friendship. Deconstruction writes about these from within the state of loneliness and disconnection that writing requires. It assumes their impossibility, the death that trickles through them, the injunction to remember which they address to the one who remains behind. Even more so, it enacts this friendship through an erotic interaction with texts others have written, an ongoing love story which is, in fact, instantaneously, that story’s transformation into archive, into memory. This inscription is testimony, living testimony to deconstruction’s frustration, to its hunger for presence, its lack of confidence, its destructiveness. And so it withdraws into its safe haven—having renounced the interaction between living humans and preferring to write an opus autobiothanatoheterographical.7 The beloved one becomes supremely important yet is of no importance at all as a concrete creature. Writing kills its human objects and subjects yet also redeems them from death, from the loss of memory, from being swallowed by the ground. It takes the writer’s libidinal investment into itself, for which he pays by

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being severed from the world since he is required to move onto the transcendental plane of discourse, as if having to flee away from experience and to its condition of possibility: sharp and in focus, free from distractions. Writing now no longer concerns the particular loved one, less and less of him or her, but is about love in general, already, always. Though they—she, he, the concrete loved one—are what made writing possible. Integration has been achieved, limited though it is since it does not happen with living people, and the text emphatically conveys self- definition, a cry, and self- effacement, all at once: In spite of everything I (appear to) give, I have no doubt never known how to love, other than in the place (double place, with internal partition and the essential replaceability, referral towards the absence of the other) of a figure unknown to me.8

Derrida would like to blur the distinction between “text” and “life” and hence he uses an affective and corporeal terminology to describe writing. He speaks of circumcised words, of blood and a bleeding pen, but the distinction, I think, stays stubbornly valid. I love everything that I deconstruct, indeed, but of course I also love outside this praxis, prior to this praxis, to the side of this praxis—not only within it, as this chronology and topology have meaning and weight. To begin with, always already, I relate to others, in a non- articulated way, prereflective, and next everything goes wrong, following which— deconstruction, a derivative “procedure,” conditioned, dependent, dispersed, fractured, bleeding, not always bleeding enough, for the weight of the pain, physical, mental, exceeds what it can conceptually capture. Deconstruction is anorexic. It is not bulimic and does not offer the bulimic person a language congenial to her body. Life and culture are interwoven with death and resignation much like not-eating is a condition for survival. Overcoming the desire for food is not the same as a loss of appetite or the cessation of thought about food. Cure opposes cure. It chews undigested matter at length, a compulsive chewing, without vomiting, the long drawn out and obsessive expression of its depression. It is a bit strange. Always, it already assumes heteronomy at the base, and strives, in doing so, to yield its own version on the topic of autonomy, to flex its muscles, to rule its experience. Its expectations allow it to anticipate the encounter with disappointment, with frustrated hopes. Deconstruction, anorexia involves a great abyss, a rupture, restraint— of appetite and self-realization—accompanied by an obsessive preoccupation with the objects of restraint. It lives alone and acts alone and sleeps alone and is repelled by itself alone and is angry alone and talks alone and has pleasure alone and is happy alone, and hones its aloneness and the aloneness of its intellectual life into a

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cultural tissue, transferring its hunger to edible things. And finally, it argues that writing must not be thought of as a concession since such a position is bound to give writing a secondary status, parasitical to the primary fundamental ontological position attributed to psychic life. I beg to differ with this premise, in spite of the revolutionary deconstructive notion of writing, well-considered and well-designed though it is, and I assume the immediacy of needs, the priority of the bodily self, at ease, protected, warm, or breached open wide and on edge, however mediated it may be. And I regard deconstruction as a crucial therapeutic strategy, stimulating, challenging, but reactive through and through, contaminated by what it tries to overcome, to diagnose and, as it were, to constitute anew. Deconstruction, the anorexic, disciplined, even if it does not appear so, conceals its shame of its needs, buries them and her negativity, emptiness, deep into the text which replaces another, never-written, text: And I am trying to disinterest myself from myself to withdraw from death by making the “I,” to whom death is supposed to happen, gradually go away, no, be destroyed before death come to meet it, so that at the end already there should be no one left to be scared of losing the world in losing himself in it. [. . .] “I want to kill myself ” is a sentence of mine, me all over, but known to me alone, the mise-en-scène of a suicide and the fictive but oh how motivated, convinced, serious decision to put an end to my days, a decision constantly relaunched, a rehearsal which occupies the entire time of my internal theater, the show I put on for myself without a break, before a crowd of ghosts, a rite and an effusion which have a limit all the less for the fact that their invisibility is guaranteed.9

Deconstruction, the anorexic, takes on obligations, looks for justifications, a mission. Its superego is sky- high, making no definite demands to anyone except itself. It gives insufficient expression to its violence and aggression, to the abject, and to its destructive impulses which act silently, voicelessly, erasing, as it were, their own traces which are heterogenous to writing and thinness. It erupts leaving no mark of anger or frustration. After all, the weaknesses it reveals are lovable and forgivable. There’s no real crime in them. It expects sympathy, the others should show sympathy or at least respect for what befalls it, for the effort, and for what’s at stake, and it invests them with a basic trust, childish, a faith that crashes again and again and recovers. Responses—too frequent— of contempt or disrespect, rejection or hostility or domestication or normalization, enrage it. The most urgent object of its efforts to please, the primary, beloved one who has gone, is not expected to do anything. The tension of these expectations and these crashes, however, must come out and stand revealed, even if it is subtle

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and tries to defend. I am beholden to them, says Derrida about his loved ones, I am beholden to them through the texts they wrote, depending on these texts as a source of self-worth, an inexhaustible safe haven, generous, responsive to my identifications, my creativity. I must treat them gently, exercise restraint, extend them my gratitude, be considerate. I have a responsibility. I must insist. There is always the possibility that the other is not available, that I got the address wrong, that I was too late, took a wrong turn, failed to reach the goal. I must keep in mind: It is only thanks to them that I can extend myself in space, find myself a place, as part of a process in which rather than being nourished only, I also provide nourishment, project wishes and questions, knowing that because of the impaired recognition of myself and my body, the object relations issuing from me make for problems both in the text and outside it. Deconstruction draws attention to how the heroic, splendid, focused edifice of metaphysics is tottering, trying to hide its own instability from itself. This it does not only by means of argumentations and illustrations but using a speculative way all its own, a way of registering in its very being the fundamentally neurotic dynamic of culture: If the entry into culture involves the sublimation and displacement of an original impulse, then deconstruction focuses all levels of attention on the stages of this process and its costs, demonstrating both libidinal chaos and its repression at the same time. Thus deconstruction is an important stage in the self-therapy of the structure prepared to confront its own void; it searches for a state of affairs more exposed, but also more powerful, a strength visible in deconstruction’s pleasure. It is dense, its temporality is dense, and every sentence it produces and each and every of its wanderings speaks its curiosity. And it is not subject to aging in spite— or maybe because— of its ongoing obsession with death. Hence its interest in madness as the neglected yet necessary threshold of philosophy, and the compulsive war it wages about culture and tradition, the solution or creative permutation of its ills. There is a culturally deep-rooted expectation that the philosopher take command, will steer, lead. Derrida refuses, simultaneously shows willingness and refuses, steadfast and terribly weak. He confuses and embarrasses and annoys, pulls and pushes, tells his readers that he’s vulnerable, tells how he weeps, talks, consternated like a boy when they take what he thought was his, believes that the whole of philosophy’s enterprise rests precariously on this panic. Confesses that his limits are not always clear, that he takes seriously trivialities other people tell him about himself, that he lacks healthy defenses, a cause of embarrassment to the world of philosophy, the whole of its identified and distinct milieu whose messages are mediated through departments and discursive norms and legitimate or interesting questions. “The hor-

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rible expression that I win, that’s what they will never have understood, I like neither the word nor the thing, whence the indefinite referral.”10 Nevertheless, he unfolds a bizarre discipline which demands plenty of time, swaths of time, a constant reading of texts, encounters, elaborations, recurrent, which insists on the right to imagine, and which continues, in spite of its difficult and demanding language, the everyday effort, questioning this seam’s boundary between inside and out, recognizing the turning and tossing of experience, its instability, sensitive to the slightest, mutable shift, pretending in vain to trap it. Personal, subjective, it becomes more and more confessional with the passing of time, yet even so not exhibitionistic, it does not indulge in candor, detailed and condensed, it generates a profound conversation with its readers, irreducible to the information it conveys because it raises questions, turns the face of familiar reality, scares, instills fear with the fear it displays, a touching fear, aggravating. And only eventually, in specific circumstances, it may click, it must be allowed to take its time to trickle through, to linger, to pave its way, to become a companion who realizes the mission of philosophy as it sees fit, a philosophy with both a nether and a higher existence, an ideational substance and mood, a resounding silence traversing its words: If [. . .] I have remained, me the counterexample of myself, as constantly sad, deprived, destitute, disappointed, impatient, jealous, desperate, negative and neurotic, [. . . and] if in the end the two certainties do not exclude one another for I am sure they are as true as each other, simultaneously and from every angle, then I do not know how still to risk the slightest sentence without letting it fall to the ground in silence, [. . .] how to say anything other than as an interest as passionate as it is disillusioned for these things, language, literature, philosophy.11 The unforgettable power of my discourses hangs on the fact that they grind up everything including the mute ash whose name alone one then retains, scarcely mine, all that turning around nothing.12

His strength inheres in his limpness, his looseness, his coherence, his tightness, in the signature which is not an accidental supplement to a mature intellectual document. The document is identified with the signature in the most concrete of its dimensions, tied in with fantasies and anxieties and burning, not merely when it is about them or when it processes them, for when life doesn’t breathe as it should, when it’s moving too fast and restless, then the text’s breathing, too, falters, panic-stricken. This is the obsessiveness that Circumfession bears out, the short fuse, in its very typography and measures. Derrida’s text is located at the edge of the page, whose main body is straddled by

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Geoffrey, G., the student, the interpreter, God, and the diverse printed letters which Derrida uses are reminiscent of handwriting in a copybook, a dense writing, hard to decipher, as though the contents, the mother, Jewishness, death, the torn flaking skin, its scars, are being poured into the size of these letters and are embodied by them. Derrida tells about an additional psychosomatic phenomenon that attacked him in the course of writing, half of his face was paralyzed, openly revealing the burning body, his left eye staying wide open, Cyclops-like, stopped blinking, stuck, without perspective, distorting the mouth and the facial symmetry. And like the writing, the face too was a mask, and the wound would not show but for sparse moments, hinted, then went back to concealment, to cling to sleep-inducing, vital, anesthetizing patches. Without weakness I must describe the escarre of my life. [. . .] I only know how to deceive, deceive myself, deceive you, and you and you again, my escarre jealous of itself.13

Circumfession, The Post Card before, and Gift of Death after it, clearly mark three charged emotional states which have no proper textual escape, like stages of life, road signs put out by deconstruction at moments of sobriety and avowal of its own limits. The other texts are relatively protected. Lack and self-starvation transform into a moral idea, a categorical imperative concerning dedication and consideration, and the costs of enchantment, which does not link up at all with feelings of anger and guilt, as though it had dropped out of the psychic economy and expectations of reciprocity—are repressed. And yet we witness them, nevertheless, appearing in the form of a symptomatic writing, perforated, cavernous, tense, tired, repetitive, brought to a halt, starved, constituting, with a marked effort, a way to join forces between its affective and its analytic contents, experiential and speculative, and as though short of cement, as though there were no one to take it into their arms, welcome it, embrace: And then I remember having gone to bed very late after a moment of anger or irony against a sentence of Proust’s [. . .] which says: “A work in which there are theories is like an object on which one has left the price tag,” and I find nothing more vulgar than this Franco-Britannic decorum, European in truth, [. . .] the grimace of a good taste naïve enough to believe that one can efface the labor of theory, [. . .] that one must and above all that one can efface the price to be paid [. . .] I always ask what the theory is a symptom of and I admit I write with the price on, I display.14

In an interview, Elisabeth Weber asks Derrida about the traumatic motivation underlying his writing. Do you think there is a traumatic date from which you started to philosophize? And, evasively, Derrida answers her that the question

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should be formulated differently, generally, with regard to the philosopher in general. They have been discussing Paul Celan, the Jewish community, their shared experience of trauma from which Derrida is trying to disconnect himself. From his perspective, others’ trauma is not simply passed on by inheritance, but in the same breath he stresses: A philosophical discourse that would not be provoked or interrupted by the violence of an appeal from the other, from an experience that cannot be dominated, would not be a very questioning, very interesting philosophical discourse. That said, the discourse can also be destroyed by the traumatism. When the discourse holds in some way, it is at once because it has been opened up on the basis of some traumatizing event, by an upsetting question that doesn’t let one rest, that no longer lets one sleep, and because it nevertheless resists the destruction begun by this traumatism. [Philosophy] has to “deal,” so to speak, with the traumatism. At the same time discourse repeats it— Freud teaches us, one is trying to get control of it—it repeats it as such, without letting itself be annihilated by the traumatism. [. . .] It is between these two perils that the philosophical experience advances.15 If I go on like this, you said to me, I will eventually burn. The heart of the lonely is tough Like a desert shrub. They eat their bread in sorrow With bitter salt, Until their tooth is blunt, Until their voice is hoarse, Hushed from saying: My God Do not take the one I love from me, Do not leave me alone. Tuvia Ruebner16

D. W. Winnicott presents a range of situations in the relations between subject and object, a range associated with the discovery that the object is outside the subject’s omnipotent control rather than having been placed in the world by the latter. Initially, the subject strives to destroy the object, but the object withstands the aggression and survives. Eventually, at the final stage, the subject is able to use the object, who exactly because it is what it is, not-I, is the only one who can feed the subject. This relationship between subject and object can come into being due to a “third area,” the domain of play, a potential, hypothetic space which is neither inside nor outside, neither inner world nor actual reality. Play helps the child along from one situation to the next, and hence it is hugely

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important for her existence. It is through play that the child gains stability and endurance, independence as it were, and recognition from others, even if the child’s play does not have the same experiential meaning for them. For unlike the child, they develop no dependency with regard to her play nor do they attribute erotic warmth to it. And yet, their presence is vital. The child must be able to be alone in the presence of an other who respects the child’s space, enabling her thus to create her own boundaries.17 Deconstruction’s play, which entertains an intimate relation with internal reality, which is flung between repulsion and dependence, is archaic. Its potential space is deconstructive, a twilight zone, a conciliatory formation, which is neither connection nor non-connection, neither symbiotic unity nor absolute separation, neither death nor life, though the component of pleasure and creativity in deconstruction is extremely pronounced. It deceives. Its archaism is not self-evident, for even if it announces, absolutely, that it accepts the adult world’s rules of the game, and uses the coinages, symbols, traditions, and genres that are in its purview, it still also refuses with an infantile madness, in order to point out their inappropriateness. There is a degree of anxiety which becomes unbearable, and which can destroy the play, writes Winnicott. Depression may lead to the loss of control and distortion of the ability to imagine control. Then it is the objects that receive the power to control the sick person’s inner world. Deconstruction does not reach there: unlike anorexia and unlike bulimia it shields and looks after itself, using exemplary, magical control, with a talent that can only flourish in the context of reliable intimate relations and perhaps indicates, from the distance, a healthy archaic model of interaction and testimony between mother and child. Its range of meanings is broad, its possibilities evolve all the time. And as it succeeds, at least, to seclude itself in its isolation and to address its surplus, due to a rare and elegant intimacy with a creative corpus supplied by the world of culture, that is, to engender play that is simultaneously idiosyncratic and familiar, its madness is not apparent in its face. “I am tearing off my skin, like I always do . . . while sagely reading others like an angel, I dig down in myself to the blood.”18 If philosophies usually exist in an external reality of communication and cooperation, an assumption that should be doubted, deconstruction resides in the domain of aesthetics, resides in it actively, close to communication but also far from it. This may be why the deconstructive community is also a community of experience, “delirium is the theory of the one, while theory is the delirium of several, which is transmissible.”19 Between my love for you and my love of texts the difference is great. My expectations from texts are huge and restrained, they depart from me and return to

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me, however much I change them, or myself change with regard to the text. I accept loneliness. I am not bitter. My disappointment has not become a generalized disappointment, a total resignation, yet these polar registers, life and text, have melded together. I have become a “deconstructionist,” someone who lives in constant suspension, as if “under the aegis” of constant suspension, not satisfied but living nevertheless, to a certain extent better than in the past, protected by this entity, reading/writing, which is separate, which intermingles with my very flesh and yet is unconnected. You turned into text, my memory sifts and sorts its private property, carefully culls the pearls of your maternal features—soft, comforting—makes its way, the interpreter, the proprietor. Writing makes you present, overcomes your absence, you leave and I return to my house, my room, urgent, I overcome the insult locked inside me, I turn inward away from you, for the first time spend considerable time at my own place, voluntarily, introverted, protected, compensated, closing blinds, not knocking on other doors, not drifting from one bar to the next looking for comfort among nameless crowds. I must write it all, everything that happened so recently, something inside me does not allow me to let go, also not to take flight into old, fixed patterns of behavior that displace dejection to the silenced sphere of food which fills the mouth and empties it of the words which, I feel, grow closer, stronger, more meaningful to me, situated in a contaminated zone, following upon each other feverishly fast, suddenly allowing me to call by names, to think, not to get absorbed in thoughtless, dazing, choking activity, which declines to know and to cope with itself. The words have something less desperate, less magical, less cyclic than the compulsive repetition of eating-vomiting, striving to define, to name, to convey images, express experiences. They allow me to change and to accept changes, to dare see you familiar and also unfamiliar, to dare and take a distance from you. They cannot, because of this, really render the despotic intensity of the frenzy of eating and evacuation, they do not share the same rage, cruelty, shaming. They cannot answer the needs and reflect the symptoms of the body, and certainly they cannot overcome them, wholly subdue them. They rearrange the field, they erase surpluses, they reduce, confront me with my feelings in a more clear-cut way, assuage the trauma of seeing you as you pass by, a stranger, cool, unnoticing, of seeing myself obliterated before you, loathsome, they do not repeat the trauma “perfectly,” allow me to channel the wordless burden, overcome the paralysis that takes hold of me in your presence, to put things into order, to slowly put them into words, at a creeping pace, one word, another word. I want to say them to myself first, addressing and being addressed, looking at them on the screen and trying paradoxically to un-

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derstand them with hindsight, to tell all possible stories, to write to you, to call you, joylessly, ungratified and unsatisfied. The devotion of this activity, for me, confirms its necessity, the freedom it holds. I don’t feel emptied out afterward, on the contrary, I have not written enough, as though there were more words, others, enriching, precise, about which I have not thought, about which I don’t know whether they indeed exist for me and which layers they will undo, which ideas they will develop, and what they will find in this endless process of separation which is also the fundamental encounter of my loneliness with you and with myself. One more angle, a pause, and thought, and then thoughtlessness. Mostly, in your presence, I am passive, your actions dictate my moves, flood me with fears, exposed to what I tasted in the past, far and near, with the same force, walking outside toward the known unknown, energetic and apprehensive, I am not giving up, you have already caused me such grief, and when there is implicit consent I greet you, in the blink of an eye, and if there isn’t there isn’t, I rehearse the rules which no longer surprise much as they appall me, and next, one way or another, the price, the price, hours of staring, walking, wandering, recovery, and once more we bump into each other, and it starts all over again. Once, overeating was the extension of this passivity, wholly uncontrolled, a frustrated hunger, bitter, resented, which throttled and marked me, forcing me to react, to this momentary, humiliating pleasure, a quarter of an hour, half an hour, at the most, after which the evacuation, vomit, secretions, and the consequences, the contact with myself, with the world, things to do, others I cared for. Deconstruction. To take responsibility for these wretched situations, the resentment of or the disconnection from the loved one. Deconstructive bulimia, hunger, a dark transformed cavern, symptom at the core of writing, object of writing, indelible. I am not always sure about the correlation between hunger and writing, or between writing and you, or between hunger and you, poor economist, only that it’s all there simultaneously, you, hunger, who are stronger than I who am moved by both of you and who returns to you, I empty myself out to you, you who are my first and last reference point, inexhaustible source of my pain. You, all of you, triumph but I, maybe for the first time, try to fight you, translate you no matter how banal the situations, however worn the words. This writing offers no frame whatsoever for thinking about relationships in general, nor does it indicate an a priori ideal or horizon. It marks the horizon of my possibilities, opens it and my longings, and appears to me, at times, as a storehouse of raw materials, quite opaque, lacking in plot or direction. Suddenly I am in need of writing like I am in need of you, set into motion by your going, and fertilized by you, a writing that is both fantasy and an attempt to clarify fantasy, I understand it and don’t,

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it indulges me, as I break my way to it gradually, falteringly, hesitantly, discovering, camouflaging, protected, sober, calmed, comforted. I pass through it from the absolute not-possible, the relationship with you, to the possible, to a future with direction, which is not capricious, which depends on me who depends on you, without confronting your alienation, evading the limits you set me and us. I get stuck, sometimes, unequal to this, I linger behind, or shun, want to render incisive account, but cannot, go in circles with the symbols, approach explosive materials and like from fire I flee them, suspending confrontation. There are times when less than writing, I am being written, finding it hard, in retrospect, to identify myself. Do I know more, know more than I write or am ready to write, yielding to whatever it is inside me that struggles to erase, surrendering to this because the specific, beneficial, healing memory is not as welcome as the anti- therapeutic erasure, which preserves my longing for the unattainable, for you, and I prefer to long for you, far from any economic or erotic calculation, to long and forgo foods that nourish, rejecting them emphatically. Derrida writes about the internal contradiction of archival desire, about the inner possibility of oblivion and destruction which is not only repression. No archive fever fails to process the accumulating data, adding to them no less than they add to it, besieged by a silence that casts its shadow over the archive, occludes it, more interesting, more important than it. Here and there I know things about my silence, about how it paves the way to my symptoms which, facing it, cry out. I feel stupid, at times, superficial, ungainly, shifting uneasily between reportage, theory, and story and fantasy, briefly rising up high only then to fall into a dark pit for the foolishness of all this, abject, invaded, passive once more, investing you with an enormous power which weakens me. You enter and leave, come and go, as you wish, as I wish, it alternates, I am responsible for both gesture and counter-gesture. You interrupt my chain of thought and help me think, make me focus on you, take hold of me, question, loud. Not a moment’s respite during our truncated meetings, once a week, for long hours, the mood is good, I await them eagerly, sometimes stealing a little something on weekdays, night wakes, I set out on an adventure taking you along, you who rob me of my place in a way that allows me to take it with resignation, once we stop moving, once movement between us comes to a halt, and I go on developing with you, without you, turning almost everything upside down except for my static, stubborn body image. On the computer, another document carries your name, a separation document entitled separation.doc, which joins scores of others gathered, in the past, under a foreign title that held them together for a while, under your wings I took shelter, loved and worked, I who understand not

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a thing in this world, amazed at its immediacy and its erasures, I correct documents by copying them for a second and third time, holding on to all drafts. I would have liked to tell you about this, at times, share with you, ask, ponder aloud, soften the corners, soften you, make you laugh, I search for you in vain, knowing that you are no longer part of my hesitations, my joy or my failure, and that I might have considered them less important if you were here. I read books all the time, depending on other people’s materials, relying on those in higher places, I research, find out, reproduce and quote and quote, reread through the metaphors, or concepts, or ideas, or categories I have amassed, via a substrate of stories and myths and dreams and fantasies already told, wolf-like voracious I devour worlds others have labored to refine, for if I don’t my memory will prove unfit. “The impossibility of being without repeated legitimation (without books, man, family).”20 I try to clarify why I chose a certain corpus, compelled to be its heir, what it articulates or demands, why I am unable to understand myself without it. And in part the answer comes from the same place which led me to turn you, too, into such a generous bequeather, dependent, a dependence you couldn’t bear and which I now transfer to this soft, adjustable, obliging grounding, befriending it in order to understand me and you as much as I have it in me to understand, wanting to create more and more contexts for interpretation, broaden the limits of my understanding, and noting down feverishly, hardly selecting, responsive to all stimuli, alternative to my lack of restraint, I don’t offer plots, I don’t invent, with great, released fury I get rid of non-nutritious texts, that’s not it, absolutely not, without a measure of mercy or pity and fearing I might be ridding myself of valuable things due to my impaired understanding, the entrenched ways of thinking, my preconceptions which resist challenge, abstractions which I experience as figures alive, active, sentient, tasting. And no, not a replacement for you, only a possibility inside me whose limitations I sense, for alongside the endless plurality and multiplicity writing allows, reading allows, all the persons who dwell within me in a multipurpose system of monologue and dialogue and discussion, and alongside the intensity of the experience which may appear to include more and more people, or at least one person, I am not seldom left without breath, overcome by insecurity, at the very heart of this world, structured, of the memory, aware of dark oblivion, resistance, taboo which elude analysis and deconstruction, any speech that comes to access the occult, a darkness in which you see not an arm’s length ahead, the darkness of the end whose meaning I am already tired of trying to decipher. And I live-yet-don’t-live with its consequences, responding with increasing vehemence, and I don’t know why, why I respond in this way, why so vehemently.

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Technical words have no sex. They have no scars or histories. [. . .] These words serve as a mask to those who use them, men and women alike.21

And it takes over, that insecurity, because the anorexic knows that, like in deconstruction, there are companions she tags along, a companion, against her own will, she tries not to write from loneliness. She cannot write from loneliness, even though this is the situation in which she got caught, to which she was led, where she led herself. She is unable to live alone, though that is how she actually lives. And she is not sure of herself, not as is necessary to write of herself, she hesitates, carefully touches the first person, direct speech, drags things into herself, swallows, selectively, as the choice who to quote and what is based on the similar, that which may render her clumsy thought a delicate and persuasive expression. There are greater thinkers and writers than she, an infinite outside that eludes the boundaries of her speech, the vocabulary she formed and was formed by, chose, crammed. This is not her speech, unfortunately, it will never be. Like in our country which divides into women-of-Dahlia and women-of-Yona,22 who speak differently, those saying it this way, and those who say it the other, and the former admire the latter, are perplexed, outraged, jealously wield their tongues, audaciously, coarse. Part of our strange partnership, in spite of the realms of difference, was enfolded in the gray, at times euphemistic, area of the unsaid. More than in talking, we met in silence. Your puritanism meeting mine, even if, on that basis, we chose different routes, even if you live Yona and speak Dahlia, undecided as ever. This is how she feels when she rises in the morning following a day and a night of exhausted intimacy, sad, dazed, almost unable to collect herself and rise to what is awaiting her. And she feels older and older, she finds it hard to put a finger on the reason, whether it is the result of writing, writing laced with solitude, or other omissions, or the absence of touch, or knowing that there is no time and the worry that she has not yet cultivated herself inwardly, steadily, ongoingly, with dedication, or the appeal which at times she experiences like a plea even though her voice is inaudible, and she hopes that maybe all this gathering negation will grow and grow until it explodes, and this will be the end, there must be an end, for it is hard to go on like this. You tire her. She tires her. You have absolutely nothing to do with this. I know, at moments like this, that I must go, I show clear signs of exhaustion, and what started boldly now grows more oppressive by the week, dwindles, totters, stays without resonance or reaction from you, crushing, barren. I must find another solution, refrain from the split between life and death, between writing and daydreaming and being, forget, not to miss, I no longer know what or whom, to make space. Must stop talking and

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thinking incessantly, with you, think love without two, I go on struggling with the clear knowledge, disowning it, disowning you, to myself, I refuse and write, I hold you captive in words, don’t let you go, don’t allow myself to go on, trying to be on top of things, to articulate all possibilities, all lessons to be learned, the ways and deviations, the failed timing, and then something comes along and confounds this understanding. And then I go back to vomiting, my cruel work, after many months, I want to go to you beforehand to prevent it, and again I am lost, putting out fires daily, literally putting out, because yesterday the electric pillow on which I was sleeping during the night’s first watch went up in flames. She wants the world to like her. Incessantly she struggles for a perfection that eludes her, she trains herself, always afraid, rehearses aloud, she wants to achieve in her speech the same texture, density, repetitiveness, information, surfeit as that of writing, for she is unworthy without it, the contempt she feels for herself, her dependence on others if she wants to please herself and her clear knowing that they, the others, have no access to her inflamed territory. She avoids dealing with negative feelings, jealousy, grudge, hatred, or at the most she touches their conditions of possibility, is drawn to look at situations of contamination, the shallowness of the good conscience, a treatment that touches and fails to touch, for her conscience is very heavy, whether for good reasons or not. It seems to her that her entire life, her way, her thinking, her spiritual world, her obsessive responsibility, her functioning—it is all ruled by hunger, conditioned by it. Hunger, even when she controls and restrains it, is the fundamental possibility of her being. She is addicted to hunger. In her experience, there is a huge difference between doing a good deed and doing a good deed while sensing hunger, to do a good deed from a sense of hunger. There is, in every relationship she forges, a bit, or a trace of self-interest, of self-directed obsession. This obsession may express absolute neglect. Still, this is what sets the tone, this, her escort. You talk to others, you face them, teach them, you are supposed to feed their open mouths, you do things for them, and while you do it you feel that your hunger and your fear of them weigh them down with intensities that have nothing to do with them, you don’t know, maybe they are an embarrassment, maybe they arouse hostility, even if you have managed to refine the burden as much as possible. Your conscience is not quiet. You’re not a professional woman. You don’t know how to exclude and create separate, ritual spaces, frameworks that may cover, and not just expose, you, who immediately break the boundaries which collapse onto you, always the same one. Always taking risks in spite of your enormous fear, you try to create the appearance of integration, wholeness,

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though you’re tossed this way and that, full of holes and hesitations. You are like an open book, in addition to the material you bring along, and you must safeguard yourself, only to inform, in case your conduct sets an example due to the erotic state in which you find yourself, mixed up and mixing up. You refuse food but are constantly preoccupied with it, indefatigably curious, eager for new sensations and pleasures, you develop an intellectual interest. But your world is limited to a plate. You shrink in the face of your transcendent pretensions, knowing that for you everything originates in another, limp place, that your education is the fig leaf covering your baseness which others surely notice, that the sophistication is the sophistication of the hungry, that the irony is the irony of the hungry, of those who know very well that there is no culture without a full stomach, that there is no alternative, not even through consuming more and more alcohol, which gets the stomach juices churning, causing pain to the point of yelling out, loss of control. You take another sip of culture and another, spending yourself into a sense of searing failure, dissatisfaction for being unable to tell or report on your wanderings in foreign fields, tell yourself in the first place, to bypass what you know, the one thing you know about you, the truth about you, clear, cruel, known with hindsight and in advance. You are so hungry you’re dazed, your judgment dulled, you’re the last eye and ear witness, you’re the one who removes testimony, and the displacement, your adaptation, appears coerced, poor, unconvincing except for that it protects you, providing you with justifications. At times you feel like this about deconstruction. As though you’d extorted it, tilled it for your own emotional purpose, caused it to be exposed and trivial and despicable like you, and inevitably you’re missing out on something, something central, far more important, its implications reaching far, political, social. When you level this against yourself, you are still able to come up with a counterargument, tell yourself, for instance, that, of course, deconstruction takes an inherent interest in the margins, in appendices, introductions, frameworks, notes, and that in this sense you, too, are writing in the margins, and by way of proof you point at Derrida’s autobiography, Circumfession, which is written on the page’s margins, and you say to yourself that this text had to be written this way, and that perhaps, nevertheless, you have made some sense, yet you’re easy bait for criticism. Every comment is taken as justified doubt in you, every event your responsibility. And she figures this, and once, when we’re deep into the struggle, she complains that you’re not involved, take no interest. For hasn’t she already understood, realized from what stuff you’re made, and she does not understand why this sounds brutal to you, why you get hurt by this, and you think, isn’t she right, she’s cracked me, you’re discon-

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nected, lose touch, and you don’t argue with the judgment and the final verdict. She’s right, you don’t protest, don’t get involved, can’t protest, and when finally you go, listen to the resolute, self-assured speeches, the music and messages, you feel distressed and anguished for the grief you have inflicted, as though you were attending the counterprotest, you’re so fastidious, doubtful, you fold into your own time, scared of intrusions like a baby, unprotected, whose belly was not properly fed and which empties itself again and again whether you want it or not. And our surroundings, teeming with war and accident, so confident of their family ethos, add to your sense of sapped strength and scarcity. You’re superfluous, dig yourself a pit, indulgent and damaging, internalizing an education of generations who are used to think in terms of essences and objectives, economists, unambiguous, impatient, disparaging, who have trained themselves not to listen, to bounce back fast, for the sake of the addresser, as it were, for her benefit, to advise, as they cannot understand the need for detailed description, for stopping, for weeping, who reach practical conclusions and ineffective plans exactly because of that one missing link, the link of information which in their efficiency they wanted to skip. During your spates of bulimia the tension with which you live is at times even tougher as you totter between self-control, anger, and neediness, your nights raided by harsh visions of excrement, disintegration, and waste, which you don’t remember, you cannot reconstruct, only the fact that they came by, these sights, and they run all across your subject-perception, incurably wounding what you wished to believe about yourself, sending you to wash and clean yourself obsessively, clean, clean, clean your house in a rage, when every grain of dust or shoe print become painfully evident, though hardly anyone comes or goes in your house, though you have long since departed from it, whose rooms have become transparent like the heart’s chambers, staging a permanent exhibit, live experience fully exposed, which gains resonance— impudent, intensified, insufferable for one who has become a guest, who enters, as if by surprise, a place close to yours and miles away. Derrida talks about the good conscience as a comfortable subjective certainty which does not cohere with the absolute risk enfolded in every promise or responsible promise. The good conscience claims theoretical knowledge, is, as it were, derived from it, theoretical knowledge that transforms experience into nothing more than the implementation of a plan, a rule, or a norm, while responsibility which is heterogeneous to these plans, lacks certainty. Anorexia carries, in its body, this structure of responsibility, ambiguous as it is, takes it one step further, because its forgoing of self-deception—for isn’t it always guilty, always unknowing—feels like the fundamental, painful truth of its being. And, in

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fact, it is the fundamental, painful truth of deconstruction, too, however overly reductive and canny this may sound. From many of its texts the feeling emerges that alongside, and sometimes at the very base of, its lack of certitude and its persistent questioning, there is a firm and grave statement, as though, at the very root of things, Derrida says, I know. I am guilty. I am ashamed, inside me I carry murder, a diffuse guilt, persecuted, nervous, harried, by you, you my pardoner who knows there’s nothing to pardon, and I am your absolved one, you need me as absolved, innocent absolved, you would not love me if I were innocent or guilty, only innocent absolved of a fault which it seemed to me I had committed, before me, when it fell upon me like life itself, like death. [. . .] You have to let yourself be “charged” [. . .] and struggle with that charge, doubtless significant enough to serve later as a paradigm a whole life long.23

And he reports on a lecture on “The Final Solution,” which he gave to students in California. Someone asks him what he did to save the Jews during the war. He knows that the question is not warranted, nasty, aggressive, deceitful, unfair, and yet he admits, he is unprotected, he must think in seriousness about the things for which he has been reviled. The one who asked, who blamed, may be right. And he writes on, as if continuing a naïve conversation: You always think the other is right, perhaps you did not do enough to save Jews.24 The egocentric panic, the helplessness, of the speaker ex-cathedra, the authority, who feels so unequal, so weak and despicable and responsible. It is all directed at him, so he assumes from the outset, not due to dignified norms, because they bear no relation to the guilt he directs at himself: As though anyone in the world could be more severe and pitiless toward me than myself, as though I needed someone to hurt me more with the hurt I have caused, as though someone had the right or the power to deliver me from it.25

This stubbornness, the stiffening spine, is the fruit of a deficit. She does not have the tools to interpret all motives and inner resources that have yielded this product, yet she senses them powerfully, which is why she is so frustrated, trying with all her might to defend something, to maintain a situation that is no good for her yet nevertheless is the one situation she knows, and from there she finds herself, as it were, discarded into solid positions, bold, without which she might totally collapse. Everything conspires to explode. And it will come upon her any moment now, in just a little while some statement or fatal gesture will come upon her, a fist in the stomach, they will penetrate her, and all will be lost, she will be lost. Does she want to get out of there? Certainly she does not want,

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finding herself in a situation rather than choosing it, even though she also makes her choices, even though she is perfectly abstract and formulated in everything concerning objectives, and what is allowed and prohibited. How to speak it, she is stuck, cannot extricate herself, and the material expression, a chronic constipation, she holds in her stomach, even if what she cannot bear is exactly that, even if she would like to unburden herself of all weight and fly, she senses the limits of change, her ever-diminishing openness, the more piercingly as her other, sublime, world takes flight fleeing her.

BODY Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye.26

The chronicle may be rewritten from the start. Through the specific anatomy of deconstruction, a non-physiological anatomy, an essential platform for the mapping of impairments and infirmities of the body, perhaps of the soul. We do not cry because we have eyes, we have eyes because we cry, we do not hear because we have ears, we have ears because we hear. Our body parts, the eye, the ear, the hand, address themselves, by their very definition, are all finely focused on the friend, the other, and we are bound to only apparently own intact bodies, incapacitated, inattentive, inaccessible, closed tight. I sketch the portrait, passing from eyes to ear, moving up to the mouth and hand, finally the entire body, grotesque. Between two partners there is always one who weeps more, to whom weeping comes more easily, makeup smudged, staining the face, dark pools, swollen, around the eyes, dropping their screen. “I wonder if those reading me from up there see my tears, today, those of the child about whom people used to say ‘he cries for nothing.’ ”27 We are at the very beginning. Look at yourself, you tell me, tears welling up, you are an enlightened creature, we see the very heart of the matter, everything is within reach, our gaze alternately removes and brings closer, imprisons us, isolates, blurs boundaries, still wet, we are clear, knowing, tasting the difference between flavors the eye can’t see, our concrete voices and our archaic voices that tie us to the past, perhaps to what we want to hear, beyond statements, contents, advice, or opinions, beyond the eardrumrending noise, following us wherever we turn. Today I don’t need your presence to listen to them, finding it easy to also hear the voices of others, a hidden reservoir I had no idea I contained, and yet the range and the nuances I recollect from you are incomparably more detailed, an intonation, rhythm, humor, sarcasm,

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recorded messages on the machine, warm and rich and caressing and funny and generous sounds, as well as frightening ones, argumentative, blighted, ugly, calculated, crushing, critical. I must attend them carefully, sort them, especially now that once more I am thrown back on my basic oral functions, those that shut down long since. My tongue sticks to my palate, I don’t speak with you or with myself, slowly I turn my back to all pleasure, blind to what is tasty and appetizing, to the appropriate and the needed, not responsible for what goes in, what must go in and nourish the soul. A famished body does not think like a sated one. Its hunger seeps into thought, affects it, leads it along, assigns its limits, signals its consternation, its tension, its energy, its pace, its focus, its distraction, its obsession. Derrida follows Heidegger’s discussion of the human hand which is thought, thought that is equivalent to handwork, cognition which is therefore necessarily practical, extended in order to host and be hospitable, stretched out for contact, interactive, creative, carrying, emerging, signifying.28 And like her essential blindness and deafness, her manual actions are bluntly animal-like: a clear animality and a clear humanity at the same time, she gets hold of waste materials, grabs, puts inside her, sticks her fingers into her throat, shivers, takes pills, damages herself, against, not for, her. Yearns for touch, an embrace, giving, striking a bond, yet she cannot, she cannot hug herself, touch herself the right way, shrinking away slowly from the light, space, people. Once, I told you, I studied English with a private teacher. I was in third grade, turning up at her place at three thirty once a week, entering through the door which was open for me. I went to her, one day, at the appointed time. The door was locked. I assumed, worried, that something must have gone wrong with my watch, and I waited outside for a long time, eventually trying out some very faint knocks. She appeared like a storm, why had I not rung the bell, she closed the door after me in anger, and as I followed her I heard her hissing, “The damn fool.” We sat down immediately, as we were wont to, facing one another, with the Stage One booklet between us, me reading and she, upside-down, a champion, checking my pronunciation and comprehension. Her hissing is still between us, it makes my voice tremble, and the terrible silence between these voices, the silence of not-understanding, of the unspoken apology, the stubbornness, the respect, the authority, the generation gap, these sounds suffuse the short, remaining meeting, for then— it is the first time in our lessons— she rises and accompanies me to the door and strokes my hair on the doorstep. I ask myself what caused me then, and ever since, to be reconciled so quickly, panicked, to allow good words like an arrow to pass through all the charged layers so as to accept the status of the ultimate meaning, the bottom line while

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remembering very well the moment of the insult and the helplessness and the injustice I felt, feeling that I cannot say a thing because I have been robbed of words and that, at best, I have some Stage One to learn by heart, the proper text, like this “Hello” I say to you now, symptom of a childhood disease, facing your probing, champion eyes, “Hello” which is, so to speak, the very pith of what I want to say and am able to say, but of course there is no pith, there are only subwords and super-words, and even so I am obliged to recite this elementary text, Stage One, the text you allowed me to read aloud, in your presence, for when I sent you a different one, well- camouflaged, you could not but fail to respond, fail to listen, and when you saw me after some time, you chose your own Stage One which evacuated, at one blow, all its value and substance for the sake of a miserly etiquette, to teach me, to teach me that I had not been circumspect enough with you. At night I would leave the house hungry and crazed, missing even when inside, wanting more, not to disconnect, forced, returning to what was called my home, hurried, acutely aware of my exaggeration and excess, of the panicked bouts of bulimia, which no longer involve the slightest pleasure, of my squanderous spending, the blasted economy I operate, the brutality, I hate myself, buy food, a lot, devour it in a flash at weird hours, far more than I need, shove in whatever, I’m slack, solids and fluids, a scramble of tastes, fast, with gluttonous capacity, without rhythmic, voluntary, time-taking chewing, without attention, without leisure, till it overflows the measure, I vomit, dehydrate, empty out, so nothing will remain and settle down here with me, I deprive myself of sleep, bitter, and cannot address myself, not to you, to no one, unable to take advice from experts and semi-experts, I read the signs, know that you too are reading them, and that you know that I know, that in the silenced agreement between us there is no talking, prepared to go on like that till the end, my needs are stronger than all of this destructive dynamic, than lack and than tiredness, than confusion and than this distraught wandering. I must not cause anger or be capricious or demand, I accepted this from the outset, I don’t deserve otherwise, even inwardly I do not argue with this arrangement, as though ordained from above, you don’t accept my aggressiveness, you are unable to contain it, and I cannot express it, my childish repertoire amazingly fitting your maternal repertoire, trying hard to adjust itself to your measures, you are tailor and jailor, who wants me, on the one hand, less inhibited, less good, less clean, less annoying, and meanwhile demands absolute obedience, and again, this body, ill at ease, reacts with its typical simplicity, something, here, is out of order, not healthy, with so much passion at hand, so little freedom. My eating adventures become more and more frequent

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and increasingly enraged, and I don’t know what, active or passive, don’t understand anything, not aware, not of the past, at times not of the present either, again and again, and the one thing I gather is that it is not good, not good that I leave your house, not good to leave your house hungry, not good that you are not with me, not good this secrecy, not good that I don’t confront the distress as it is and rather turn its symptom into the main torturing issue. Not good, because you see and feel and worry and grieve and refuse. And I know when it will all end, that it will all end, afraid to tell you, to expose the aggressiveness of my hunger, the accompanying frustration, to relax, to let go, to express clearly that you do not want to hear, that you know yourself. It never occurs to me to phone you, tell you that I need you now, your presence, so you can soothe me, so we can talk, if only you were there, if only you were. And exactly as you move toward total intimacy, exactly in your ultimate gesture of approach to my very guts you will know crystal clear that you don’t want and are unable to take this commitment, in spite of curiosity, in spite of trying, in spite of the connection. I can’t do without this food, a fleeting taste, very salty, very sweet, of which I remember nothing, what accompanied it, words I was reading, a vain attempt to learn even at such moments, just the proximity of events, my addiction. I can’t give up, can’t keep it in my belly, always in stealth, out of sight, instead of longed-for rest, and this dryness, the sour, bitter taste, the parched throat irritated, raw, prickling, which stays with me into tomorrow, torn and worn, my face a mess, a grimace, maintaining a mask of all-rightness, my pupils shine from their dark puffy sockets, like Cain’s mark on a small act of murder, of the self, banal, whether or not I swallow pills, the hands reeking persistently of vomit though soaped over and over again, and perfumed and oiled, the teeth that bit into the hand near the thumb, and maybe it would really be better to lie down now, right now, the day, after all, is coming to an end, skip this aching ritual, what makes me chafe myself, who planted this demon inside me. And I can already foresee it now, as the last few crumbs are crammed into my mouth. If there were someone around here, not you, someone who would call her name or beckoned her to come or sent her home kindly, who would bring her from one place to another, look after her, because she wanders the road alone, is forced to wander, with the irreversible damage she does, the years passing, and she has to take medicine in order to achieve normal bodily functions, trying still to maintain a façade, inside and outside, afraid the stains may visibly erupt, turning her into one big stain leaving no skin untainted, and this terror comes with a sense of relief, triumph, at having managed to empty herself, without anyone knowing she ingested, she carries the memory of the disgrace of aggressive

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filling and crass voiding, one item after another. Her skin seems to hang on her, and her privacy, shame, the closed banquet, sealed from the observing eye. She watches her own ways, peeks at herself, at her abject escape from the existence and presence of flesh and blood, the bestial loss of self control in a ritual which is the total inverse of the social ritual, at the sink, on the floor, never at the table, in motion, near the trash can, picking out leftovers from previous attacks, when she decided to put an end and stuck them deep into the bin, leaving herself the option to come back for them or she would already have made sure to get them simply out of the house, she eats with her hands, dirty, no imagination, and most paradoxical of all, these disgusting twitchings become her life, she is wholly there, they are what make her feel alive, tearing through the screen of decency, but she is worn out, absolutely void, even if she has not managed to release everything, empty and fed up with herself, collapsed, flat, miles away from anything, even from you at those moments, truly on the other side of the narrow bridge of normalcy, reality, community, in a place from which she cannot know a thing about the world out there, which rouses her curiosity, yearned for, whose spaces are alien and whose time is its own. Her need for food is vehement and imperious. She is longing all the time, inside her mouth, her nostrils, slave to her body, which she seems to rule with strict authority, drawing lines, defining, regulating, sitting in a café surrounded by the smells of meat and mustard, frying and baking, dizzying, which she has not tasted long since, which overwhelm her, ways of cooking that have become wholly erased from her memory. She cares less about how the food looks. She is intimate with it mainly via the nose which overpowers vision, she hates neutral ingredients, water for instance, which is empty, hungry, sick. Her vocabulary is impoverished, drawn from a remote memory, hankering after basic flavors, instinctual, bold, pithy, after sourness, sweetness, the savory, the hot, more after the flavors than the foods that they season. Her possibilities are few, one possibility, in fact, for she has no choice whatever. And she fears the intensity of her appetite, for if she will give in she will surely swell to enormous dimensions, for it is impossible to satisfy her, impossible to please her eyes that are incomparably bigger than what she can take. Her appetite is infinite, exacting, embarrassing, the act of eating shames her. Bulimia sprawls at her orifices, lack of control, the blushing body. She fears to gain weight, prefers her angular body, monstrous, androgynous, deconstructionist, with its protrusions, her tamed body, as she has no limit, no demarcation, and the ability to distinguish and identify satiety at all, she knows not what she sees and does not see, rotten, steeped in despair, totally confused about the states of her body and mind, which center in

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her belly and her stomach, which she neglects criminally, only in order then to rediscover that her very core is wrapped up in them, has difficulty functioning anywhere beyond the familiar, she withdraws fast, no longer able to simply eat, simply sleep, simply be. And with her it is very difficult to simply be, in view of her incessant effort with herself, her effort regarding who is with her, a respected effort, alarming, repulsive, which arouses astonishment or diminishment, her effort which fills itself with serving food to others, feeding them with things to eat and presents, her identification with their repleteness.

FAMILY SNAPSHOTS She is waiting for me to go out, we will leave together, she was holding my hand, we were going up by the route known as the little wood and I began to invent the simulacrum of an illness, as I have all my life long, to avoid going back to nursery school, a lie that one day I forgot to recall, whence the tears when later in the afternoon, from the playground, I caught sight of her through the fence, she must have been as beautiful as a photograph, and I reproached her with leaving me in the world, in the hands of others, basically with having forgotten that I was supposed to be ill so as to stay with her, just, according to our very alliance, one of our 59 conjurations without which I am nothing [. . .] while she was smiling at me in silence for her capacities for silence and amnesia are what I share best, no arguing with that.29

Blood flows all along this text, Circumfession, between words, water, and tears, the mother’s “bad blood,” as she puts it,30 the blood drawn by circumcision from the child who ever since has spent his life teaching “so as to return in the end to what mixes prayer and tears with blood,”31 the crucial covenant with the mother, her tears, her blood, her pain, her prayers, her anxiety, to carry her name, since everything returns to her in spite of her primal sin of giving the father the right to castrate his son, she is responsible for his wounding, for the pain that has no memory, a memory that was not chosen, in a paradoxical ritual of severance from her and the ring-like fusion of a covenant with him. She entrusts, abandons him violently, symbolically into the hands of a third party, sacrificing him to the tribe’s social order. He does not willingly sign this treaty, lacking both a will and a name, nor does he strive to in a pre- reflective way, only to fuse with her, in their crucial alliance, fateful, from before the covenant [brith], circumcision. With time he will grow to resemble her more and more,32 imagining her circumcising him in the Biblical way, using her mouth to separate his skin from his member, “slowly provoking ejaculation in her mouth just as she swallows the crown of bleeding skin with the sperm as a sign of exultant alli-

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ance, her legs open, her breasts between my legs, laughing, both of us laughing, passing skins from mouth to mouth like a ring,”33 visiting her deathbed after 59 years, guilt ridden for writing about her before she is dead, for killing her by the very act of writing, in a text which concretely depends on her loss, though all texts always already depend on her loss which gropingly advances, unforeseen. Gradually, she proceeds toward “herself,” her foundations, the intimacy of her flesh displayed, skinless, fading as she reverts to real life without symbolic dimension, an undefined condition, human inhuman, outside the event, outside history, and she no longer recognizes him, no longer remembers his name, unable to weep or mourn for him. He is dead for her, absent, and his absence is not present. And on February 5, 1989, in a hair-raising scene, she answers his question whether she is in pain with the following words: “I have pain in my mother,”34 as though she speaks in his stead, on his behalf, in a manner that now involves the memory of her own mother, whom she increasingly resembles. For the reader will have understood that I am writing for my mother, perhaps even for a dead woman and so many ancient or recent analogies will come to the reader’s mind even if no, they don’t hold, those analogies, none of them.35

The story is familiar. Seemingly. A historical, sociological, psychoanalytical, and biographical corpus has been dedicated to it, trying different takes on early object relations, given cyclic, repetitive psychic processes, in order to describe how eating disorders come into being, anorexia and its inverse, bulimia. And yet it is always incomplete, with schematizing tendencies, and simplistic equations (bulimia— chaotic family; anorexia— controlling family), using general categories, unsubtle, unconvincing, because it is rooted in a terrain that is lost, pre-originary, preverbal, and the only way of wandering there requires symbols and images. “At the heart of a disordered relation to food there is a disorder in memory.”36 I collect insights or thoughts which I think with difficulty, which refer to the seam between the real and the fantastic, treading the thin line between flesh- and- blood mothers and internalized mothers, between bodily and psychic touch, between dealing with the mother and dealing with her child, I try in vain to cross the boundary between my own mother and the maternal, to articulate something in which I have lingered unconsciously, not knowing, to refine memory, respect its limits, to stop. Books lie open in front of me, lending concepts to states I experienced unwittingly, a supporting conceit, encouraging an ongoing conversation, helping to spin threads in time prior to consciousness, and my threshold test, test of appropriateness and conviction, is obviously wholly subjective, depending on their richness, the degree to which they contribute to the

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journey, evoke identification, separating out the voices that make up this clamor in my head. Even if Julia Kristeva’s complex theoretical metaphorical language is not always clear and easy to digest, to me she still is a crucial figure on this journey, close to anorexic and bulimic dreams and nightmares. Though she has not directly addressed these phenomena, unlike Derrida she enters as deep as she can into fluid places, violent, pre- Oedipal, places demarcating boundaries on the level of the individual and the collective psyche, she does not stay on the abstract discursive level of contamination. Heterogeneity, filth, secretions bubble and stir her discussion at high levels of intensity, and they take one closer, the deeper one sinks, to a real physical sense— even in reading— of the liminal labor that physical existence carries out as it erects barriers and defenses against flooding, striving to make sense even before language and culture. And I am aware of my tendency to see you as cure and haven, make you the impossible origin and object of my love, its crises and waves, the variables which enable me to tell a story, which tie up loose ends, nostalgic, utopian, of an archaic past, pre-anorexic, and a promise. The point of departure of the complex, torturous, relationship between the mother and her daughter, full of guilt and fears, reverts to a direct union, before the acquisition of culture, authority, and the law. They know something before words, beyond words in their nourishing-poisoning connection which always already overflows the measure, mothers recollecting themselves as daughters, daughters who will eventually become mothers, giving birth to themselves, more or less free to move, more or less stuck, more or less in control vis-à-vis ancient internalized injunctions. Chernin’s Hungry Self follows anorexia’s unfolding through the intellectual groundwork of Melanie Klein, who succeeded in reconstructing or, indeed, in constituting an ambivalent world linked to object relations in the first months of life, to the child’s (whether boy or girl) sensual relation to the mother’s body (at first her breast, given and taken, present and absent by turns, then her whole body) which dominates its complex phantasmic world, in which the mother is associated not only with good things, but with danger, separation, destruction, and persecution as well. But we do not move together. When one of us comes into the world, the other goes underground. When the one carries life, the other dies. And what I wanted from you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive.37

The anxieties that emerge at this stage preceding both subject and object, the polar experience of love and destruction, split the maternal object into bad

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and aggressive, on one hand, and good and ideal, on the other, thus anteceding Oedipal development in all its sadistic and self-idealizing aspects. Not yet making the distinction between himself and his mother, the child perceives her breast/her body as part of himself, a source of supreme pleasure and dependency. Enraged, jealous, and frustrated, the infant fantasizes that he attacks the body, eviscerates it, tears it to pieces, depriving it from its contents and devouring it. Pillaged, the body turns into a dangerous object, an object of shame and mourning for the mother. Synthesis between feelings of love and destructive impulses towards one and the same object—the breast—gives rise to depressive anxiety, guilt and the urge to make reparation to the injured loved object, the good breast.38

The infant remembers that he loved her but feels that he devoured and destroyed her, especially when the actual mother is not there as a nourishing witness, accessible and consistent, someone to rely on, who soothes the infant’s anxiety regarding the destructive mother he internalized. It therefore happens that the anxiety accompanying this process is so grave that the formation of symbols is not fully achieved or sufficiently articulated. The infant senses that the problem does not lie with the mother’s reaction but is situated in the inappropriateness of his needs and their desperateness. Those who suffered lack in the nourishment required at the onset of their life are more alone and locked into an internal world of object relations than they are in the actual world. The new relations they create, moreover, tend to take the features of the original object relations, dependent like them, impaired like them. The fear of taking from the mother (or taking in the mother) is likely to be at the root of subsequent problems with eating.39 Later psychoanalytical ideas [after Freud] combined the original Freudian model of conflicting impulses with object relations theory. These approaches conceive of the anorectic as suffering from unresolved problems at the oral stage, problems that got in the way of separation and individuation. The anorectic patient fantasizes the oral inclusion of a bad, overly dominant maternal object which later becomes equated with her own body. Self-starvation is often regarded as the adolescent girl’s attempt to put a stop to her body’s growing femininity, thus to reduce to a minimum her ambivalent identification with her mother.40

Kristeva, who unlike Klein focuses on the mother and the foreign body of her pregnancy and of her child, rather than on the newborn’s relationship to the mother figure, sketches a similar picture. Like Klein, she does not regard the oral phase of development as an ideal episode of infantile unity with maternal

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pleasure, because it features incorporation, rejection, and negation vis-à-vis the mother’s milk and blood, the sources of life and death, of nourishment and threat. This is, as said, an Oedipal logic whose outlines are already drawn in the mother-infant bond that precedes the acquisition of language. The maternal referent, in fact, will go on having its impact at other levels of meaning. Early and late have a similar potential of alliance and refusal, identity and difference. The process of growth already involves negativity and as such it proceeds via material being within the maternal foundation to the symbolic order. The first effort of the subject-to-be, still a liminal creature, separating itself from the preOedipal mother and instituting a territory of its own, involves repudiation and nausea. Will it become a waste product, eliminated from the mother’s body, or will it become absorbed within her? At the root of the infant’s psyche there is an empty space, a void that appears like the schism between what-is-not-yet-me and what-is-not-yet-an-object. The erected screen, hiding nothing, is the condition of possibility of any future distinction and symbolization. This screen must be preserved because without it total chaos and fragmentation reigns. The infant must deal with the void even before the Oedipal drama and protect herself from it. Her very being is always linked with loss and lack, though not because someone deprived her of, or prevented her from, something. Her effort to cope is not “initiated,” since it is this very confrontation that generates what is called the subject. It is her desire to go back to the origins that constitutes identity, rather than the latter deriving from an already existing identity. This is why, in the absence of an original identity, she is so threatened. The subject is the product of this confrontation, the product of what Kristeva calls abjection. It is the negativity of the unconscious and its ambivalent yearning for an original body that form the core of the individuation process as unalterable structural hypotheses, and what is subject to change, in fact, is the human tactic of coping with loss, of making order— on either the personal or the social level. Abjection, which describes the human narrative as a story of the body associated, already at a primeval stage, with limit- making practices, filters through into language, which could, as it were, violently detach itself from the corporeal, repress it, and disavow its heterogenous tissue. Kristeva, however, does not believe that language’s run for its life succeeds. The demonic potential of the maternal body is not sufficiently locked out from the symbolic economy and returns in order to inflict horror. In terms of this struggle for survival, existence, and order, Kristeva can diverge from a psychological analysis focused in the individual’s neuroses in order to observe historical processes of systemic dissolution and social sacrifice so as to always identify the object of sacrifice with the figure of

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the mother, the archaic mother (though the processes she describes cannot be reduced to or exhausted by the opposition between masculine and feminine). At moments of crisis, the maternal, the abject or semiotic, as she formulates it, returns to attack the subject, and the latter will have to gather all its strength to focus this archaic, violent negativity and delimit it. For as long as the liminal efforts of the subject who is growing into the symbolic order appear to be in vain facing the ongoing threat of abject filth, it is the figure of a sacrificing motherhood that arms against the threat. This sacrifice allows the subject or its environment to reorganize. Ritual practices that engage the body are experienced as more vigorous agents of border and body-bounding than is language proper. When humans graphically and viscerally engage the body in ritual, reimpressing order and securing boundaries against threat, the force of their actions overweighs that exhibited by Symbolic edicts.41

The subject, however, may adopt another tactic, turning itself into sacrificer and sacrifice simultaneously, as though to apply the economies of both the symbolic and the semiotic in its bodily space. This, indeed, is what the saintly female mystics of the Middle Ages did when they enacted the crucifixion on their very bodies, reflecting Christ’s body by means of severe asceticism, the stigmata piercing deep into their flesh, fleeing from and toward the body at one and the same time, living the body in an intensified manner, or alternately diluting their experience and ridding themselves of it. They would take up gradually less space, speechless, as if absorbing the silence of death as they crumbled. Describing these women in dialogue with the theories of Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Kristeva, Reineke stresses that their self- inflicted violence, much as it was perceived as cultural, political, and spiritual protest, did not amount to a liberating act. Their bodies were not free, crashing as they did, after all, against the walls of their late medieval conditions of production, of a society that erected fortifications against threats of contamination from outside so as to reconsolidate the truth of its codes and put them on a firm footing, thus sacrificing these women as the product of its own liminal work. This is how the threat, condensed in their depraving and corrupting body—as it was perceived— did not spread into other cells of the organism. When, moreover, they consumed God and melded their flesh with his, they underwent transformation from embodying catastrophic invasion to embodying redemption, from being sources of defilement to being sources of healing. Thus, in view of the crisis that overshadowed this era, Christianity set into motion an entire archaic drama, down to the smallest details, of subject formation:

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Perhaps in no other time did Western culture come so close to unveiling the truth of its origins. Perhaps in no other time were the fractures at the foundations of the sacrificial economy deeper or the possibilities for women’s subversion of the Law greater than during the late medieval age.42

The question of the link or analogy between the mystics and contemporary anorexics, between the Middle Ages and capitalist society, has been discussed and dismissed in view of the fundamentally different social economies. Still, I omit the learned reservations which would have been appropriate in other contexts, momentarily ignore hyperbolic differences between, on one hand, the many-layered mystic commitment to general social interests and spiritual insights, and, on the other, the narrow confines of anorexia, to which I shall return, in order to focus on similar patterns of behavior. The anorexic is propelled by mere physical work, crude, lacking the proper, protective distance of the sign, returns in spite of herself, regardless of her age, to a chaotic, primitive state of being, revolving around herself, wholly losing her tongue, the ability to put into words what is happening to her, pursued and persuaded to engage in a restless search, hopeless, she doesn’t know its aim, or in another reincarnation funnels food into her mouth in order to purge herself of it immediately and be clean. Anyhow, she struggles to preserve a clean self, afraid of her body and its imagery of secretion and sickness, in silence, wordlessly, she perceives of food as a source of corruption and poisoning, ignorant to the recognition of its life-giving qualities, reverting to a fundamental stage before the entry into the symbolic order, even if she fully functions like a subject in other dimensions of her life. She lives the contradiction between total repression of the world of signifiers to the point of being disconnected from reality, and a total submission to the taboos of the symbolic. This is why she is unable to make proper boundaries, not in these infected and dangerous areas which are the very condition of possibility for the forging of boundaries, and she constantly has to face her inability, transferring, wherever she goes, an anxiety which is not of this world, with every encounter that comes her way offering simultaneously a chance of assimilation and a threat of submersion, so that one must become wholly addicted to this encounter or to flee it come what may. The weakness of body boundaries in anorectic patients means that there is no clear difference between closeness and intimacy, and the threat of incorporation by the other person, or of being crushed by her own greedy tendencies to appropriate or incorporate this other person. When two people come too close, only one of them survives. For certain patients the outcome may be a type of removal from the world of external

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relationships to a condition whereby real attachment is only to internal figures, or one in which the place of relationships becomes usurped by substances like drugs or alcohol or by their association with food.43

She carries the banner of language and the violence of language against the semiotic, and she turns this violence against herself. She is sacrificer and sacrificed, identifies with the mother and rejects her and her physicality, she effects a transformation of her own body, neutralizes its defense forces, internalizes and fully responds to the charge of collective matricide. And like society as a whole, she links her impulses to negativity, sexuality, denies their existence, terrified by them, framing them, putting on brakes, keeping them in firm control until she draws blood. She makes a symbol of her body, as though to state—without speaking— confirming, here is the seat of evil, the uncanny, and here is where I can purify myself, I must be purified, killing myself in order to be myself, insensate to everything that happens to me. The body of the patient who suffers from eating disorder turns into a battle field on which she struggles not only with her internalized parental figures, but also with her own human instincts, drives and insights, [. . .] the expansion or reduction, the punishment or destruction of her body, these are the overt signs of the struggle which is really a struggle for the survival of the body/spirit/self at the expense and risk of the body.44

Mothers lacking a clear sense of boundaries and identity invade the bodies of their daughters who have not yet processed their own identity. They have not realized themselves, they are depressed and depend on the identity the girl will forge for herself, her achievements and failures, easy to dominate the girl’s life, interfere on the basis of their joint desire for symbiosis and harmony. The daughter feels guilty toward the mother, a kind of survivor’s guilt. Although anorexic women refuse to acknowledge the extent of the physical depletion they have taken upon themselves, it is surely of interest that they have afflicted themselves with the most tragic and dramatic imagery for human devastation our culture knows.45

She must not survive. She has privileges her mother hasn’t. She is younger, more able, freer. So that she has to ask herself whether she may demand anything from her mother, isn’t her demand immediately an inconsiderate deprivation directed at who has so little of and for herself. Power is not equally divided. The mother whom she hosts in her body penetrates too soon. She doesn’t yet have a home of her own, or a notion of ownership as such. She wonders how

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she is external to her and inside, a question that will revisit her frequently later on, as if fated, as long as the outside breaks into the inside, like a storm it surges, inconsiderate. She will find it hard to filter, will even have a hard time asking herself whether this exterior is for her or against her and whether it has what it takes to allow her to develop a different motherhood, first and foremost toward herself. “You have a tendency to firmly attach yourself to anything older and female, collecting mothers in a way.”46 She devours, with the same intensity as her hunger, unreflective, unsuspecting, facing anyone who merely shows her a sign of warmth, collecting her belongings from place to place, for not one of them fits her or can contain her. Come, she begs, almost crawls, come on already, cross the line, teach me, be with me, unaware she constitutes the conditions for adoption, inserting the other in the family drama she lives intensely, while failing to identify and avow her feelings and intention. You are her home, she is freeing up the entire space for you, so you can fill it to bursting, must reduce herself so they may love her, the nameless unidentified woman, the stranger, who is so unlike her mother, for you don’t pay attention where she would have paid attention, you, with your desires, independent, woman and not just mother. And you are startled and for a brief moment are taken in, take her into your embrace, distract her and yourself into thinking that it’s for life, while both of you know that you have arrived late and that you have neither served as, nor been, direct cause or outcome in one another’s lives, that it is only in spite of yourselves that you have been cast onto this shared path which, in the long term, endangers both of you. And it seems over the top to you, something here doesn’t feel right to you, not well timed. Yet you are confused and tired of problems, and she is giving you such a huge and important role, wants to be useful to you, and available, and wanted, she is terrified by your criminal concessions, immediately feeling her guilt even more intensely, that she caused you damage somehow, your experience of her, as if you had omitted things because of her, scared of seeing you in your incubation periods, and you have neither the courage nor the ability to refuse, already immersed, sharply observing her unnourished self, exposing itself to you abysmally and repressed and urgent, revealed in order to be rejected anew, as when frustration reigns you will diminish her. And she registers the discordance but cannot stop, does not trust her judgment, not ready to acknowledge her error and step back decidedly rather than because she is being cast out. Will we ever be able to be mothers to each other? She stamps her foot. Is the equivalence of our needs condition for a relationship between us or is it what gets in the way of it? Will we be gratifying and nourishing? And if you, her adopted mother, disappoint her expectations, what—after all— does

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that say about her? Is she, once more, a not good-enough girl? Is it punishment? Your unresponsiveness indicates to her the immoderate and no-good aspect of her needs. She is guilty toward you, it’s because of her that you’re going, she lets you throw her out, internalizes the contemptuous and vacant looks you direct at her. She knows you, in fact, in the first adolescence she undergoes thanks to you, having had no adolescence. Hence the childish behaviors, unworked out, you see, don’t you? She left her family only recently, fearful, challenged, but she does not allow their anger, criticism, dissatisfaction to dissuade her, she sees you, imagining only you, her alternative home. And she wonders whether it’s by coincidence that in the second, critical, as it were, adult, time she chose to reciprocate the encounter, with you, she found herself having to make impossible concessions, as though obliged to actively re-occupy that very familiar position, this time facing her increasingly powerful needs, and what madness it is, what injustice and how unreasonable, to expect parenting, compensation from you, an expectation that isn’t actually sufficiently clear to herself. The processes of exposure and rejection and punishment come to the fore clearly, those mechanisms, well-oiled, which go about their actions like automata, but now she can see them, see the huge relief she initially felt in being with you, the hand’s caress that gradually tightened, refusing, her knowing, her conduct, that initially powerfully ignored the knowledge that it does not work and won’t work, this structure that Derrida calls supplementarity, which seems to indicate a parasitic element, unnecessary, which gets added to the already existing whole, and eventually reveals itself as the necessary supplement to something that is as yet incomplete, or even as an addition which reveals the lack in what it comes to supplement. All major attachments in adult life constitute versions, or permutations, of earlier attachments, which is tantamount to saying that adult interpersonal relationships reflect the object-relational history of the individuals concerned.47

The mother invades. She advises or commands: lose weight, you must grow thinner, come what may. She prepares a menu. And you are hungry. You are a good girl who demands nothing from others. You must try to cope on your own with this new situation. “I feel that my body belongs to my mother [. . .] and I feel that my mind belongs to me. She made my body. I can make my mind.”48 But the picture isn’t that clear, body and spirit interweave, and the body is too much, coarse, unsubtle. She is within your body, observing you from inside. You did not have problems with eating until then. On the contrary, you have good memories, unclouded by doubt. It was tasty, a lot, of all kinds. You always had a huge

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appetite, no fuss, rushing at it, no particular sense of guilt. You loved chocolate and honey and burnt marshmallow and bread and canned food. You were full and satisfied, simple, funny. You played a lot, you were dreamy, your lightheartedness and self-acceptance were considerable. And restraint was wholly alien to you, it’s difficult even now, your second nature. This vital principle, eating without a thought, eating for the heck of it, plain thirst, plain hunger, it won’t return. That’s what you long for most poignantly. You want to be like all people. Somewhere, at age fourteen, you started starving your body, punishing it, torturing it. You refused everything associated with it, anything lavish. You cannot remember a time before that when you experienced it as causing evil, as evil in itself, as shameful and despised. You don’t remember how, or if at all, you linked the flesh with evil or the flesh with guilt. You recollect one traumatic event when you broke the Yom Kippur fast. You could not keep up that fast, and the circumstances were tragic, a girl in your class had died, and when you returned home you opened the fridge without giving it a thought, an automatic movement, taking a big, nervous, frightened bite from the apple, your forbidden fruit, you stole it, fruit of your shame, and your father was angry with you, that you couldn’t control yourself just this once. A sort of funny and terrible story, the kind that turns into myth over the years, for from then on, after all, you did not stop controlling, and your breaching the taboo of this fast— once a year—turned into an overarching command you assiduously obey each and every day, nearly, of the year, an expiation rite, as it were, which frees you from your lust day by day, a ritual related to your two-fold guilt, for eating and for the girl who died. You knew there was a connection, and you knew you were forbidden to eat and that you must repress all at once, all desires and actions relating to food. You knew he was right, and that the anger was directed at everything that was you. And you are ashamed, shame troubles you more than anything, bad girl, who once got a letter from him, years before, in Austria, you were on a delightful trip with your grandmother, full bodied, who played rummy for a few pennies, mornings and evenings, losing, and who emptied the sumptuous breakfasts into her handbag. Her old-world, diaspora habits drive you nuts, jars of honey and jam, and you’re eating all the time, hard to believe the things you shove down your throat, putting on about ten centimeters in length and width that summer and with such an appetite. It is 1976. Esther Roth-Shahamorov came in sixth at the Olympics. You linger, as yet, in these worlds of games and pleasures and leisure and food, and in the letter, which you read excitedly to your grandmother, who reads with some difficulty— it takes her three years to finish Golda Meir’s My Life—he sends warm kisses to his beautiful and good (?) meydale, that’s what it says, with the

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parenthesis and the question mark, and your voice crashes as you read this to her, you don’t tell her a thing, the moistness in your eyes goes with you, with your crimes, your wretchedness, your vacuous wish to do nothing and to play, your difficulty at being serious. It is not easy to measure shame against grief, the time of shame against the time of grief, the time of shame which is endless, other than by this unsure determination, which touches without touching, to say something about it, to confess. Hélène Cixous suggests that shame may be worse than grief because what we lose in the former is ourselves, our image, which all of a sudden is no longer the same, we are not identical to ourselves while we remain who we are. And then one day, unexpectedly, we succeed to utter, to externalize, finally to say, what was impossible to say earlier, always too late, always with some residue, maybe the essence, which cannot be confessed. And the common denominator between eating and shame, the internal observation they share. You ingest proscriptions and prohibitions, in your private economy you accuse and stand accused, persecute and blush, undergo the amplified demands of your surroundings, picture constantly how it appears in their eyes, don’t know what you need, struggle with those demands, but doing the best you can to comply, you’re not angry, you don’t protest. And what gives you the strength to do this, to accept and to refuse, is your anorexic revolt which is inviolate to them. It is hard to interfere with what’s on somebody else’s plate. That is outside their control as well as outside yours because the method of being you have set up for yourself, so perfectly organized, is lacking all logic and sense. She does not work, at first, she passes her time, destitute, present in her body and not providing for her own needs and the needs of her girls. One day she is bound to go out for work, no longer be a mother at home, in her nightdress, taking a rest. Put yourself less in me, and let me look at you. I’d like to see you while you nurse me; not lose my/your eyes when I open my mouth for you; have you stay near me while I drink you. I’d like you to remain outside, too. [. . .] I would like both of us to be present. So that the one doesn’t disappear in the other, or the other in the one.49

Something in the relationship between you will stay the same and something else, important, will change radically. She will not share, or direct, or teach, or be at your side, she will not present you with possibilities, you are on your own, absolutely. You have no one to address, but when she is at home, at least, you are her support. Your supportive environment is leaning on you, on your responsibility, or at least so you feel, for if you relax a little everything will founder.

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You are important because you nurse, vital, you remove your demands from her like, later, you will moderate your appetite, you will create yourself a different world, unconnected with the body and its needs, in which you depend on no one, far away from any sort of consciousness regarding your actions, you are not afraid even. During a certain period she often weeps, and on one occasion her sobbing floods her and this scares you. It scares you to identify with her muteness which sometimes breaks out in the form of weeping or a scream, as you are also scared of ignoring her, taking a distance, shutting yourself off from it, putting it aside, betraying her. You escape from home, remember exactly what you wore, blue flared trousers and a checkered shirt, and your uncle was sent out to look for you, he knows where he may find you, and you tell him about what you heard and about the fear. And he tries to soothe you, and he says that there are things that people say in the heat of the moment, you ask him what is the heat of the moment, and later at home he leaves the two of you alone, and mommy combs your hair and she cries and you cry, and I think that this was one of the few times that I felt close to her pain, and perhaps, that she felt close to her pain from which mostly she was remote and therefore remote from me. And you were so near me because you were so close to your pains, and I experienced them intensely through you, with you, identifying, and your incessant weeping, from which I almost drank. “I would like us to play together at being the same and different. You/I exchanging selves endlessly and each staying herself.”50 You don’t play together. You don’t play in her presence and when you play you don’t assume her presence. She does not reflect back anything from what you are, what you do or think or imagine. With the other one, too, you will not play even though play is what you would like to do most with her, of all the virtual possibilities of relationship that pass through your mind. That space might have suited the two of you, between your intense, absorbing joint internal reality and the external, social, familial world, impossible for you, in which you were forbidden to meet, in which you failed, a third home, Third Temple, sanctum, which gives the lie to objective constraints that warn “No.” You laugh at the sight and the sound of the things you would bring for play: dolls of various sizes and types, whole, lame and crippled, dressed and naked. Which doll are you, and which am I, all patchwork, could we play, do I know to play. You probably think that it’s my problem, not knowing how to play, but all we did, in fact, was play, a serious game, with our world, our bodies, a game whose rules we forged, ourselves, subject and object of the game, which in retrospect turned out to have been no less limited than reality. We could, in the end, have played or stopped playing. We could not

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break, open our eyes, grow up. Active in the background was a secret knowledge that we had no time, that this potential space would not always present itself to us, now, immediately, we rush at each other, trying, without any mechanisms of delay or caution, to consume everything, no tentative steps, patient, as though fully sensing the rapidly approaching end in a game without winners, whose outcome is incontrovertible, even if only one side started, it would seem, or gave it the stamp of approval. Silence we share. I grow up without the words to tell her, slowly learning to speak and to write, unconcentrated, making a lot of spelling mistakes, solving crosswords, making progress at something, and reaching high-school age, moving from a small, warm, loving framework to a world of supreme judgment, not personal, not invested, when the homeroom teacher says hello at the start of the first class, before Rosh Hashanah, before the soft season of Jewish holidays, gradually introducing the load to suit us, treating us to another few days of gazing and repose, and doing an experiment, right now. She is both homeroom and chemistry teacher. She is wholly in the world and wholly not maternal. Today I cannot recollect her gestures, not even her name, only the powerful impression of this something that I absolutely don’t want to resemble yet which is a condition for survival, and like with food, I must conduct a comprehensive reorganization in order to get there. It’s no mean task. One must restrain, acquire learning habits, from scratch, no indulging. I understand something, wholly unarticulated, I don’t rebel, I don’t remember rage or internal debate. I’ve no time for that, in the race, trying still to pave a way by means of books which I love, here I cannot fake, they must be my friends now at my time of need, I must be wholly connected to them. They are the adaptation and the revolt, I can take off with them and through them learn about all the experiences I don’t experience, for which I don’t even have a name because of my depressiveness, my inhibitions, setting out on imaginary voyages. And in fact, I no longer leave home, I’m inside all the time, cramming, learning by heart, I pore over the dictionary, refine the use of symbols, industrious, and my vocabulary expands, but fundamentally I have nothing to say, and reality always eludes me, perhaps even mainly corporeal reality, its language, which lives in tension with my language, text of down and text of up, even if the latter would superficially appear concentrated and filling all holes. This tongue will meet your tongue, experiential, dense, close to the body, rich like it, tired, at times, like it, heavy and cruel like it, for in the split of its first identifications, in the plurality of conflicting models, and the foolish wish to preserve the dignity of all in the impossible economy it installs, lacking questioning and irony—it unites with the father against the mother, against her

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language, against what she represents with her body by reducing the body. The mother looks on at this identification, does not intervene, and having herself internalized the codes that encourage it, because she herself believes that weight must be reduced, she is pleased by the identification for a while, encourages it, her pleasure depending on her denial, to the extent that the girl is not like her, respected, a girl, fragile, not a woman, not feminine. No one is alarmed yet, no one warns or senses danger. Food will become the sign and essence of the struggle between you two, a struggle for the rupture of dependence, neediness, a rite of passage without end, an archaic channel of communication marked by giving and the absence of giving and the refusal to give. It will unsettle the stability of the home, which runs along peacefully, everything as usual, everything okay, for you carry the symptoms in your conduct, deflecting thought, attracting attention, but it’s all a matter of food, and when that’s resolved, things will return to normal. It will take time, long, too much, but you will at some point become a problem in which others take no part, a hard-to-conceal problem, frightening, more and more conspicuous, diagnosed, its foundations occult and complex, arousing guilt, wounds, fears. Your movements become fixed, your self-image rigid, lacking in nuances, designating you in relation to yourself, your family, your surroundings. In the family circle you state that you do not belong, I am not part of you, a you which is undefined, you aim in all directions, that of love, of intimacy, the body, the family, the environment, nature, you want them to let you be, for no one to interfere, for no one even to see you, to leave, to go, free, without structure, to get on with the job of self-destruction and at the same time your conduct and your impaired self-care make you conspicuous, eccentric, dissociating yourself gradually from everything related to food, you are totally indifferent to the cultivation of vegetable patches, to kitchen furniture, kitchen utensils, food shops, substituting one praxis for another, you rule out, not understanding, not asking, what food is, what hunger is, only indirectly, you ask desperately, with no addressee, how you are supposed to be. You must make concessions now, because the limitations, the prohibitions, the shame, lies, secrets, they make it impossible for you to socialize, prevented from meals and friends, from openness and access to pleasure, you speak less, as it were, a part of your world evolves, is dynamic, becomes addicted to work and study, but its ground is childish, stubborn, hollow, stagnant, tense, it’s with you in every interaction, something comes about whose meaning is unclear. No matter how you try to avoid the gaps, you will not be able to conceal your non-being. You don’t make it easier for yourself, almost ever. Here and there a concession, things without which it’s impossible. But you’ve already lost the ability to

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identify what is sustaining, lost all direct touch with any sense of satiety or hunger that is not relayed by your consciousness. At one blow, from being anorexic you turned bulimic. In some women that process is reversed. With you it’s absolutely logical. Hunger has become impossible for you. You suffer greatly from it, even though you are addicted to it you can’t bear feeling it for longer stretches. The survival instinct is what maddens anorectics and bulimics more than I can even articulate. [. . .] Refusing to starve, my body ate; refusing to stand any longer, my body buckled and fell. The awful paradox is that, to me, it seemed that my emotional survival, my basic personal integrity, was dependent upon my mastery, if not total erasure, of my physical self.51 Anorexia is so disembodied, so imperceptible for such a long time, so socially sanctioned, that you can go a long time clinging to your belief that there’s nothing wrong with it. The minute you stick your fingers down your throat, you know damn well something’s wrong. You know you’re out of control. [. . .] And then, the horrible, nauseating realization that you are, in fact, as uncontrollable, as needy, as greedy, as you’ve always already suspected.52

You have to, must, put something into your mouth, compensate yourself for anger, for sadness, for loneliness, and then you already find yourself wholly in the dominion of bulimia, you are no longer reacting to some specific emotional state, ruled by the independent existence of the symptom, and as you’re wont, it must be excessive, rushed, stormy, addictive, impulsive. The asceticism you imposed on yourself when young seems more remote than ever, unrestrained, unbridled, you stuff yourself, devour, your mood is low, hidden away, but when outside, too, you note you always drink more than others, almost immediately empty your glass and want more, need more. A close observer will understand that something in your balanced cover is teetering. Wine and milk have a strangely filling effect on you, sharpen your senses, intensify the sense of pain, rock your thinking, sometimes taking it into cul-de-sacs, self-directed violence, leaving you hypersensitive and without shield. They’ve long since stopped making things easier for you, giving relief, comfort. You drink, ecstatically, overdo it, knowing with your senses what’s good for you and what isn’t good for you, but you let it be, as usual. You know, you read, didn’t you, that there’s an analogy between eating disorders and drug abuse and the use of alcohol. You belong with the addicts, except your addiction does not consist of loss of control only: it is excessive control simultaneously which comes back at you like a doubleedged sword, a symptom of being out of control with life and the body. And everything still comes under a strict structure, rigid, monotonous, which some-

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how gives you a sense of security, your second nature, your identity. If anything changed, you might fall apart. You can’t afford, must not look different, that is, be different, that scares you, burdens you, threatens, you go about keeping a subtle balance between the general and the particular, between the positive, interactive outside and your mute and disconnected inside, between the public, the apparent, which is sacrosanct, and your dailiness which you hide carefully behind closed doors. You are hugely watchful about time, you experience it piercingly, struggling against time passing, pre-empting the end, low on energies. You’re revolted at the waste involved in thinking about food, the fast passing of satiation, the activity to which you must surrender at those rare moments of pleasure. With the proper food it’s possible to be more clear-minded, focused, less distracted, in your entire being you feel the connection between eating, freedom, knowledge and self-consciousness. Hunger wastes time. Hunger annuls doctrine. This is not productive, you know, and you’re driven crazy by this fixation of yours, struggling daily for concentration and understanding, afraid to be unable to think well, there being nothing to nourish you, push you to continue, nothing to appease your hunger, and your hunger for learning. Learning is the triumph over hunger which it then, once more, encounters in spite of itself. Other than for certain intervals, you find it hard to escape, but for some hours. The sense grows of not having done things to the full, no chance, no fuel, a constant tension and burden weighing down on existence, of a kind that cannot be resolved by eating, a settlement too simple, too unambiguous, the only one that seems possible, so possible, yet its simplistic vitality offers no solution. Indeed, an anorexic person who wants to learn will eat, she always eats, finds the formula, eats out of a tiresome self-awareness, guilt, regret, pays for it by fasting or vomiting, calculates her actions, reckons when, how, and how much, an intelligible, predictable life, worried, while the tension does not abate or dull. There’s always a danger that she will be sapped of all her energy, all her thought, her creativity. That is why she must be very familiar with her threshold, know in advance that if she crosses it she might pay a price heavier than the price of not eating. The strength of her legs is waning, her thigh and shin muscles, and she has a hard time, already, riding the bike. Her body is the most sophisticated defense mechanism, the sanest, the only one she has. She does not respect it at all, but it has self- confidence enough to send her messages, protest about its neglect, insist on its due rights. This entire struggle takes place, is locked, in a present that moves nowhere. She has no future. Her functioning becomes gradually less harmonious, nervous, faltering. At moments when she observes herself she takes fright, what

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will happen, for the absence of mobility is tantamount to regression. She finds it hard to accept this, the change, the dwindling, the damage, she has difficulty developing a new attitude to the world, alienated, she does not take in, she can’t, its responsiveness, its generous hospitality, its availability. Eating is part of a linear time frame, of early and of late, of recognizing the need at this moment now and of pre- empting its fulfillment later, and this basic fault can be seen in everything, in the past that persecutes her present in all kinds of obsessive ways, turning it into a kind of inchoate mass, unmarked by periods, as though everything were one fatal gesture of time, total fate, with here and there some changes of decorum which she, unsuccessfully, tries to sort and characterize, one big sprawling anorexia, ongoing, indivisible, it swallows, with its weight, its importance, all events, everything she was, everything she did, poisoning the taste, eclipsing the image of it all. Except for the books she read. Except for you. With you I remember all the details.

GIRL LOVES WOMAN Now from the start. I want to stop for an instant, collect the ties and motifs which I loosened, deconstruction, the anorexic and bulimic body image, deconstruction as an anorexic discipline which identifies not with the stereotypically feminine but with the disfiguration of the feminine, the trauma of the feminine, possibly with any achieved notion of selfhood, like a fear of all fat that might offer a too easy support of self- confidence and - sufficiency, family snapshots, and eventually the reaction, overreaction to separation, to cast a light, again, on two junctures which repeatedly emerge in this explicit story and in an implicit and suggestive manner in the Book of Ruth toward which we are heading: the one touches on the melancholy connection between eating yourself and eating the other, and the second on the question of the other’s sexuality— does it follow from these reflections that the anorexic bond, due to its maternal origins, because of its melancholy which is understood in dyadic, pre-Oedipal terms and is related to what occurs between girl and mother, starting with breastfeeding all the way to a crazed ingestion, does this of necessity connect to the female other, does she need only a female other? Is it possible to discuss its relations in unambiguous terms of gender or sexuality? Is she a woman, a woman-man, after all she feeds— does-not-feed, eats and is eaten, gives birth and is barren? Who actually is she, whose boundaries are flooded all the time? “The girl on a diet longs to have the body of a boy.”53 Maybe that’s the outward expression of her yearning, her nostalgia, morbid, which causes her to perceive herself as an armor-bearer,

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female or male, of someone, a mistress, who will take her by the hand, instruct her, guide her, care for her, for her deprivation. In her personal drama mothers and girls play, additional figures, male, archetypal, are secondary, not main actors. She falls in love with an abundant woman, soft, fertile. All the softness that she does not have for her own potential abundance, the abundance she has annihilated and destroyed, she radiates outward, filling up from the very sense of having these feelings suddenly, the pleasantness, the contentment, and the lusciousness of another femininity, not a distorted one like hers, with whom she struggles and with whom she experiences a great closeness. When she is with her, she does not feel barren, taking, through identification, her attributes and traits unto herself. Unable to be a good mother for herself, she makes the other into the good mother. When she is with her she is at her most connected, and her concentration, the tension of her bearing, they crumble and are absorbed by the other. She hungers after a relationship and she hungers for food, and she wonders to what extent proximity and fullness will undo the inhibitions she imposed on her food. She does not think the other woman will neutralize the need or the appetite. But perhaps the other woman will set her free from her neurosis, give her the legitimacy by which from being nothing she will become someone weighty, will be able to rest, finally, in her presence, released from her anxieties. Perhaps in the end she will surrender her anorexia, though the very notion of fusion and integration of which she dreams is deeply anorexic. Incorporation comes before separation, and ironically this is also an incorporation of food, food which has transformed into an idea for which she always longs, inside her but other than her and unattainable. Susie Orbach argues that women with eating disorders have an unconscious wish to be fat.54 But the other woman, at one and the same time, causes her to give up on her femininity, it is with the man she identifies regarding the other. She is her man. And this too is a source of difficulty, because the experience of barrenness is her fundamental experience and problem. All of her value and lack of value are measured in terms of her bereaved motherhood. And when a baby girl arrives in her family, she never holds her and gathers her on her lap, like everybody else does since everybody is an expert on newborns, and they hold the baby girl skillfully and speak with loud voices, and she fears that if she holds it something horrible will come to pass, something awful that is connected with the baby girl inside her to whom she clings and whom she rejects violently, and she knows that if only you were here at her side now, you would have calmed her, because at such moments you’re really okay, nonjudgmental, understanding, seeing things from the inside, seeing things from a distance, connected to the girl within you, and afraid of her,

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for it’s a long time since you were a girl. She is mad about the femininity of her woman and watches out, Argus-eyed, to avoid using metaphors of birth in relation to the act of writing, she does not want to blaspheme, to deceive herself. It’s an illusion. It’s not of the same order. It’s lower, writing is lower, because I am a woman. I am up to my neck in sublimations, try to fight what has been preordained, what I still believe is the only thing that will give me self- worth. Barrenness forces its way in everywhere. She does not believe in the notion of spiritual birth or in the experience, not for her. Writing helps her, at most, to forget. It does not count, because I am a woman, it is feeble, parasitical, limited. It is not fecund. Hence she always tries to fill herself with the creativity of others, which she processes and which then becomes her possibility. Which she holds in high regard, values, admires, even, as she looks on in amazement facing the self perception of creators who speak of their creation in terms of birth, appropriating the feminine in order actually to transcend it.55 From another point of view she thinks that, indeed, her ability to become attached to someone who is the opposite of herself, is related to aspects of her being in which she herself is the opposite of herself, aspects in which she is fat, or indulgent, or lazy. She is not wholly identified with her thinness, is more fat than thin. Observing a fat mode of conduct in the world, listening to a fat mode of conduct in the world— these are not foreign to her, scary or repulsive. She misses the fat part of herself but cannot take the step. Only in one domain, that of study, is she a compulsive eater. She thinks she is fat in the deepest, internal sense, which is why she is so profoundly anorexic. It is these two options, both manifest within her, polar, that make her such an extremely tense woman, for one of these options triumphs while the other never stops letting go, reminding her all the time how hungry she is and how very lazy she is and how much she must stay in bed or embrace in love or stare or rest, rest, rest. For all she is, every action, goes into a different direction. She is an eternal thin one, and someone internal, which today is you and once upon a time would appear in the form of her grandmother, placated, happy, loved, at ease, her intimate other. You are more intimate to her than she is, by what you stand for, enabling her to humanize her outer body, which is not pleasant to her, due to the way you treat it. She entrusts you, therefore, with the intimate places, she relinquishes to your good will, your caprice—the intimate places where her jarring sense of self is enfolded. And you appear in my dream as a striking woman, bohemian, big, and you say to me, in a voice crushed by pain, momentarily we have traded places, that if I leave it is because you’re too old for me, and I look at you closely and suddenly see that it is not you who are talking to me but my grandmother.

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Some of the things I have noted down are charged and raise questions in terms of the contemporary discourse, and I should clarify my intentions. For, as transpires, I regard the anorexic as a woman who internalizes normative images to the point of losing all power of judgment, and her broader worldview is, in fact, narrow, anxiety-ridden, rigid. Good and bad, all right and not all right, reductive categories which don’t let her be. Certainly, anorexia is a reactive phenomenon, but it is neither subversive nor a protest strategy, it is not constructive, has no vision, no rehabilitation, liberation, no hope. It comes wholly under the sign of humiliation. Her perfection is attended by her own gradual erasure, by the definition of her identity through denial and nullification, a starved body, and a complicit adoption of her cultural perception as absence. Her struggle, at least in the immediate sense, has no social- political significance, even if sociological categories are important in the attempt to decipher it, and she is related to contemporary cultural-political symbols, internalizes their injunctions, their discipline and subjection, or sadly replaces their injunctions with her own which are even more extreme. Only an outside observer, the cultural critic, for instance, would refer to anorexia as a subversive activity and see in its distraught bodily existence an enacted questioning of mechanisms of social formation. But this is not starvation with a purpose and calculated opposition, nor is it starvation for the sake of one’s self even if the disintegrated self is at its center, its addressee, who thereby addresses it to the intimate as well as the public sphere simultaneously. Anorexia leads to a dead end, a nowhere, and leaves behind a mind-dulling experience, impenetrable, material, ravenous, piteous, hardly aware of itself, of what caused it. Its destructiveness, in that respect, confirms the order of things— if that, indeed, is what it fights. It has no resonance and all it leaves behind is a bad taste of failure and defeat, and shame. It is hard to get rid of, hard to solve. It repeats itself and grows more powerful. Here and there, memories arise in her, key events, books, influences, figures: to an extent she may recover the story that’s in her possession, but this won’t suffice to elucidate the journey-less and hopeless journey she is conducting, without progress, without revelation, a heavy journey of marking time, years and years, diet and starvation begetting frustration and hunger which lead to the intensification of the hunger and the intensification of the frustration, and over and over again. If she gives in to the hunger she may have to pay an intolerable emotional price. And if she doesn’t, she’ll go on like this, in a cold sweat at times, tossing this way and that in her bed, given the roundabout or direct hints at a bad and bitter end, she fades, and what has been done cannot be restored. But isn’t my description subject to the pathological constraints that I de-

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scribe? Is this the anorexia of an anorexic from which feminist writing could have extracted messages that have eluded her? I raise this doubt at least as a question, examining inside myself whether I was never drawn, other than when writing this book, to seriously look into feminist literature, whether by accident I was repulsed by a world that seemed to me to use a blaming tone, aggressive, not taking responsibility. And yet I cannot refrain from seeing how I have internalized in my intimate unconscious world, as it were seamlessly, stereotypical images, and how I have lived according to them, have judged myself by them, have felt guilty in their presence, angry, disgruntled, creating a huge gap within me between my insights and the world of the superego, wholly nonintellectual, non-complex, conformist, humble, unambiguous, accepting a feminine self- definition in bodily terms, and even when it diverges from that definition, seemingly, the latter stays the criterion for legitimacy and non-legitimacy. Here there is no room for creative women, for a differently formed subjectivity, it’s as though there is a place but a defeated one, which does not deserve the accolade of being fertile, a place of barrenness, missed opportunity, non-being. I want to argue that this is how the anorexic imagination works. That these are its boundaries. An anorexic person experiences herself as a failure on the most concrete level, decreeing a shortage, she’s in check, fastening her fetters to no purpose, focused on the struggle itself, no more. The walls between her and the world grow more defensive, and she finds her way, her foothold, in a compromise formation, she does not entirely lose her will to live, for if she did she would be dead, for she has to confront, constantly, her final fundamental idea, the credo she internalized. Her choice, she thinks, her choice for words, filling her mouth with thick words, filling the empty space, her nudity, her impotence, with knowledge, this choice is remote from her “nature,” and she believes she has a nature, a nature with which fat and fertility are symbolically linked, a nature which was most basically intended for her. She chooses or is being chosen to act differently but feels she is not equal to the choice, not equal to the magnificent defense system she erected, and for this she pays a set price in guilt, which attacks her with diversely intense waves, in lack of confidence that she may be roaming a terrain not hers, in a sense that she, unworthy of it, has sinned by eating from the tree of knowledge. She feels perverse and so her position confirms and maintains and enfeebles all at once. She is steadfast, delights, and stumbles, as though she had exited the circle of life and was trying to exist there, on the cusp, on a low burner. Whether she reads literature regarded as subversive or non-conventional, and even if she herself would have wanted, more than anything, the freedom to imagine anything, whatever comes to mind,

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anything that can be put into words, which allows thinkers vitality, imagination, everything that is not relevant, she does it in her usual way: she locks herself up, inactive, takes no part in laudable struggles, she’s ready to give up and go, not even knowing where and whether elsewhere she will actually find peace. She flees herself and in spite of herself approaches herself, when she realizes how precarious her world is, she loses out on a lot, she knows, blind, she does not penetrate, the more she understands something and does not understand other things, and certainly does not get involved with them or for their sake, to advance some issue. She is and isn’t astonished to find that she is writing this, is and isn’t astonished about her conformist, obedient, conservative imagination. That’s another angle from which to consider her way with food even if it’s not a case for one- to- one comparison or threads that can be taken apart and defined, one after another. Since she is not acting like a woman, as a woman is expected to conduct herself, since she is not subject to the archaic impulse to give birth, does not answer it, she does not need this body of hers with all its qualities and capacities. She punishes herself, ascetically, for the choice, for her interest, her freedom. She must try hard not to become sated, not to eat as she likes, always be hungry. This aspect of anorexia is exactly what makes things easier for her. She must not exist, erase the body, for then the duties expected from her as a woman will be erased. There will be no one to expect from. Her existence is worthless in the eyes of society as well as in her own. And then she comforts herself. She says that there is a degree of poetic justice in her physical position, because it forces her to give birth to herself, to be born before she herself gives birth. It won’t let her fake, won’t let her precede herself, as it were. Poor people’s joy. She has a strong internal bodily truth, which will come into its own when she comes into her own. It will happen, won’t it, and if it doesn’t then it’s real, this failure is real, wise, honest, and just. This truth dominates the most sublime of her formulations. She takes pride in it, even, trusts its authenticity, just like at good moments she trusts the authenticity of her words, which can express only what they can express. She relies on the gap inside her body, a gap that acts in favor of her body, in her favor. And she knows that she has no chance of healing until she closes the gap. For as long as she goes on wanting a mother rather than being her own mother, to bind that aggravated bond anew without withdrawing there, she will not move because the womb that preoccupies her jails her, it’s tight, and does not allow her independence. Due to the anorexic person’s strong corporeality, because, more than she tells, she is being acted upon, retreating, in her depression, from speech and from turning to others, because, fundamentally, she is the renunciation of

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objects- in- the- world through identification, taking in, consuming, containing, controlling a dead thing that she must not lose, a whole and complex system of disintegration and compensation, because she is so stubborn and her renunciation is not, in fact, renunciation— the libidinal investment remains fierce, saving itself internally. Her ongoing melancholy constitutes a repeated transfer of childhood experiences at every encounter, a failed act of vengeance, defeatist, masochistic, which she herself brings upon herself. She is anger and guilt incorporated due to her prior knowledge of loss and due to the pending prohibition regarding relations, repressed feelings which nevertheless always already exist, which due to the fact of loss will grow stronger as they are repressed. Then she will devour the object of loss and internalize the event as marking strongly and boldly where she is and where the world, where abundance and where dearth. Her whole external world consists of projections of her condition. On the basis of this experience, which takes the other woman with determination and by storm, she cannot acknowledge her ambivalent love. In the obscure intimacy that emerges between them, there’s a taboo on expressions of resistance. There’s no exchange in the order of anger. The rules of their polar worlds ironically join forces against the necessary economic expenditure of the negation they accumulate. She blames herself, directing her criticism inward, at the object she incorporated in her appetite, and fails to check the extent to which this blame is actually directed outward, she does not recognize conflict, sift it out, put it on the table. That it is so difficult to talk about anorexia is the result, in part, of the fact that it’s all under the table, literally. Women who eat compulsively [. . .] have made their bodies the recipient of feelings they cannot bear to hold in consciousness. Their rage is expressed through their mouths, their need for love and solace is experienced as a longing for food, their guilt comes to them as a feeling of fatness, their shame is transmuted into a sense of dislike for their bodies, their need for penance and absolution is expressed through self- starvation, their sacrificial offering of themselves to the mother is made through a breakdown that involves hunger and eating, mouth and flesh.56

As we saw in Chapter 1, Freud defines melancholic narcissism in “Mourning and Melancholia” as a regression to an infantile stage of object choice, a stage in which the self is built from the corpses of its loved ones, sadistically incorporated, as is the case under the cannibalistic or oral mode of organization, the most primitive in the individual’s libidinal development. “Projection” defines subject and object around the trauma of the archaic loss of the mother. In other essays, for instance “The Ego and the Id” or “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,”

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Freud presents “introjection” and “projection” as key interpretive processes in the formation of the subject and its object choices. The subject is constituted around the attempt to control loss. It contains the object, incorporates it into its own structure, identifying with it as it takes on its features. This is a fundamental rule which creates what is called the “self ” from the world and what is called the “world” from the self. Disconnection from the object is at the very same time a strong involvement with it. Neither momentary nor accidental, identification is an experience that affects the very structure of the self. The melancholic finds a way to survive the loss of such a vital emotional relationship, an obstacle course, conflict ridden, contradictory, endless. For the pain is not exhausted by the fact of loss. The conserved object goes on leaking, as though it was its second nature, impairing all distinction between acquired traits and primary inclinations. When we talk, in this context, of a delayed effect, this does not mean the reproduction of an origin. The sense that something with an archaic ring is occurring here does not come with a clear image, it rather relies on the powerfulness of the consternation and the invasiveness of the experience. It is related to a void that opens suddenly, an abyss of loss that exceeds the object of loss, hidden suffering, nameless, fixed in place behind the stage of events and responsible for its movement. This is why she cannot reconcile herself to the situation, she does not internalize the separation. She must dive into it in order to grasp why she was touched there, what was it in the presence of that woman, to which rooms did she give her access, did she invite her, in her weakness, quickly changing her status from guest to resident, and for the very same reasons fighting against her and for her, as well as repairing her. This is the affected zone, because the experience of separation is predictable, because the relationship is doomed, and from the depths of her pathology she calls out, already calls, always calls, to the wrong woman, she looks to her for nourishment, safety, remedy, and love, in order, again, to encounter a witch doctor. Her hunger only intensifies. Yet it is only in this way that she is able to approach herself, approach her hidden fears and her guilt through the personification of powers which hitherto were nameless within her, through a specific relation in which food and sex become patently interwoven, no matter what the emotional and the somatic price. At this stage, already, she has no control whatsoever. All of this overwhelms her. She lets this woman into the very heart of her being, the heart of to be or not to be, makes her into the all or nothing of her existence, internalizes her rejection, undergoes the searing failure to be important to her, the condition for her being important to herself, she becomes impervious, shrinks, hurts her dignity and pride, gives in to the rules of the destructive cycle, in which she accuses herself,

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punishes herself, she and not you. She swallows you and feels her stomach soft and empty, ready to absorb any blow that comes, withdraws to an alienating retreat, her retreat, which does not allow her nourishment. If you don’t think I deserve your warmth and your love, then I am undeserving, also of expressions of warmth between me and myself. I have no resources of my own, I waited for you, and you came, and now that you’ve left you put me to shame out there and inside I resonate you. I am your hostage, I cannot get rid of the revulsion that sticks to me, I conduct cleansing rituals, wound myself. I have sinned against you and continue sinning against myself, and forget your sins against me and your sins against yourself, or perhaps this is my way of remembering all this. All of this comes under her responsibility, her powerlessness, because she is also strong in her act of swallowing, succeeding to avert the concrete recollections in which she was dismissed, and creating an internal space where the one she loves stays wholly hers and with her, until those moments when reality invades, interferes, when something prosaic happens to remind her: nothing, zero, and in spite of herself she is forced to look on, aghast, lacking the tools and the fantasy, her specialization, to settle the gap. Anorexic melancholy turns her into a plenitude of emptiness. No room for another person. She is less available, does not want them to disturb her, doesn’t want them to disturb us, her hunger tempting her occasionally to move ahead, to others, but returning in the end to find you. She retires from humanity. Shifting between euphoria and depression, she makes herself a substitute life, complete, interesting, attractive and stimulating, absolutely cut off from what goes on around her. She lingers there so much, so settled, that she nearly stops living. Her world consists of reactions to sensual impressions and of a big abyss which she projects and which devours even the smallest bit of objectivity. She also forgets that though in her own image she is absolutely present, thoroughly involved in body and soul, in reality she has become a professional absconder, detesting boundaries and putting up barriers, she vanishes so that it’s hard to catch her, hard to make sure she’ll be available. This incorporation of the other woman’s body into herself is linked with another identification of the anorexic, and with another interface between her and deconstruction, which I touched upon earlier. In spite of possible criticism she may have, in her very perception of herself she actually gives absolute precedence to the discursive, the rational, the conceptual, as she attempts to clear herself a way to the transcendent, to justify herself by means of words that are not hers, to wholly disregard the symptomatic place of culture in her personal economy, to blur the traces or wipe them out. She is, ironically, the epitome of

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the traditional western gendered text, a straight bodily expression of the dualistic horror of the feminine body, its desire, the one that must silence itself so as to define a subjectivity that is proper, sterile, incorporeal, intellectual, restrained.57 She observes her body from outside, refracted by cultural images and filters, as though other, generations-straddling eyes, were looking at her, she paradoxically strives for autonomy, for a redesigned self, for purity and high-mindedness, though she acts like a marionette— cast off first and foremost by her body, her materiality, her surroundings—acts in a wholly concrete manner without giving account or trying to make symbolic sense of her actions. She distracts herself, as it were, into thinking that she will be redeemed only when she gives up on her sexual difference, becoming a non-feminine individual, without a body, not being in order to be, she’ll be in heaven where she will find protection and strength, stability and the ability to withstand injury below the belt, even if her masculinity is not on good terms with itself, contaminated, even if she is attached to the feminine, like a shadow-woman who is stuck with her body, tied to her senses, drawn in fine nuances and tones, identified with a feminine alter-ego which is her own opposite. She would like to acquire a communicative language, rich in information. To get there, she believes, she must quell her appetite till none is left, and her playfulness, her dreaming, her torpid tendency, her sexuality too at times. It’s she herself who is responsible for the entire process, the persecution of the body, its indictment, judgment, the sentencing, with an obsessiveness, brutality, that alternately identifies with tradition and with her femininity. Her failure, however, is not total. For as she caves in following the events, exposed to coarse interferences from outside, nearly killed by them, as she absorbs insults or stabs directed at her or at the weight given to the spiritual in her world, she is able to survive thanks to what she built, to take flight with determination and get herself safely ensconced. She’s always got somewhere to roam, a reason to get up in the morning. She has not read enough and she must learn and get to know and understand more and more. There’s something she can learn from deconstruction—she learned that the thinking self must be stretched right to the edge of insanity, that one should bring philosophizing right up to the limit of thought and speech where it touches silence, if there is to be any philosophy at all, or alternatively: –mark the abstract and timeless in the date, the place and subjects of its seal, or alternatively: –touch the spirit with love.

The final station of this chapter is perhaps the most complicated and least sure, a station I revisit all the time, the pivot of this journey, and I have not yet

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given it a definition due to perplexity and lack of knowledge and a feeling that I must be on the move, that I try to move via a similar conceptual inventory between the general and fundamental, on one hand, and the private and idiosyncratic on the other, and that I don’t always observe the distinctions. Slowly, slowly. The relationship between anorexia and the love of women. The translucent yearning for exactly this partnership, which for her carries an intrinsic quality, or more so, healing and redemption, only here, not elsewhere. What she will do with this eventually is unclear, certainly it isn’t from the outset. She is, after all, well-versed in escapes. But is it really possible, can one really speak of anorexia in unambiguously erotic and emotional terms? The argument sounds extreme, disturbing, on various grounds. For on the one hand, I have not offered a methodical frame to discuss anorexia in its various aspects. I chose to present some intuitions which interweave with a personal narrative which in its turn is interspersed with a variety of texts: literature, theory, poetry. On the other hand, not only is it impossible to speak in a unified, static way about a lesbian community or lesbian identity, not for any length of time, and not at any specific point in the present, I also don’t have the ambition or the ability and competence to contribute to the rich discussion that has been accumulating over the past forty years. The differences, moreover, between “being an anorexic” and “being a lesbian” are crucial from every perspective, whether it’s regarding experience or being, even if both cases concern a distinctive guiding and organizing principle of life, for the simple reason that anorexia is an illness and carries its pathology to its lesbian destination, whether or not it actually realizes this destination. What, then, is there in common between lesbian self- definition and the isolated existence of the anorexic who is connected, whether she wants it or not, to a reference group which though it has shared symbols, a similar sense of reality, shared emotions, even, but is not connected actively, in an activist or public sense, for she is so afraid of belonging, shutting down more all the time, into her own space, her own time, knows from afar that there are women like her, this soothes her occasionally, but she does not look for their company, engages, without wishing to do so, in an intermittently internalizing and rejecting conversation with her surroundings, and basically she withdraws, disconnects, naïve and suspicious at one and the same time, the more transparent she grows, skinless and absorbent. She does not have the time to spare, not really, and not by coincidence, to apply herself to social issues or those concerning women and femininity—violence, rape, abortion, sexual exploitation, labor, rights—not always is she aware of the problems. And yet, in spite of these and other reservations, the broad perspective offered by the theoretical discussion on gender and sexuality starting in the 1980s and continuing, and even more so the undecided

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Derridean platform which cannot be assimilated into a party politics of identity because it undermines the very opposition between the homosexual and the heterosexual and in one breath speaks of an “impossible homosexuality”58 and in any case of an “impossible heterosexuality”— all these allow me to sketch, to propose this connection as one thread among many that make up each being in itself. But that’s not all, and this buttressing is superfluous, for isn’t it the certain choice of an object that forms the very center of this chronicle, a choice that is clear and sharp and invested, if only in fantasy? So in spite of the promise held by the word “definition,” I shall not try to venture into the pastures of theory, and this final chord is nothing but a repeat of everything said until now. A girl loves a woman, always. Already. No matter what their ages. The bond could have been rendered in formal terms, to point out socialpolitical configurations of the body and of sexual identity in the dynamic historical contexts of patriarchal discourse and, more particular, the specific formation of marginal classes of gender and society, all the way to their pathologization in a sexological or genetic discourse. (There is a fascinating confluence, in modernity, between misogynistic medical conceptualizations of lesbianism and anorexia, which use an identical moral-psychological terminology to describe and qualify these phenomena, for instance: degeneration, regression, narcissism, nervous disease, hysteria, emotional immaturity, and abnormalcy.) Such a formal gesture, however, which in recent years has become paradigmatic in the discussions of critical theory, with all the important questions it raises regarding the difference between nature and culture, between essential and authentic identity and structural identity, between an ontological discourse and a cultural discourse, is not what concerns me now.59 In fact, the formal umbrella which maps subject positions as the passive product of networks of power and knowledge may blur a crucial distinction in the case we are considering: Though both anorexics and lesbians problematize their normative identity through their bodies and through their conduct, anorexia does not expressly grapple with sexuality. The sexual and gender-related implications of her acts are not avoided but her own practice is asexual. While neutralizing the body’s traditional female sexuality would apparently lead both of these positions to a fluid and androgynous self- definition, anorexic neutralization is rather like an absolute denial of sexuality. Possibly, not necessarily, they end up where they are due to a common experience of a “failed” femininity which is not attractive or “good” enough, or through the active discarding and sacrificing of it. And still, anorexia does not speak of its desires and preferences even if, unconsciously, it is all about desires and preferences. The connections she makes between her prohibitions, her boy-

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cotts, her violence, her body and spirituality do not directly tap into an erotic or sexual worldview. In the mirror of her images she is neither butch nor femme nor a tomboy even if, for a while, she is pleased with her child- like fixation, with trousers she buys—an adult girl—in the children’s department, because after all she is trying to escape the cycle that refers to the self in terms of sexual object choice and activity. Her identity is exclusively focused on feeding the body— eating, calories—and does not leave her space to deal with its other aspects. This, therefore, is a radically different attitude, a radically different way of listening to the body and its needs: Anorexic self-denial and disavowal, panic and guilt and fear, on one side, versus the erotic acceptance and avowal of someone who is both erotic subject and object, who nurtures in herself, and by extension in the world, the possibility of liberated pleasure. Even when the anorexic expands her gender identity as a result of her consistent treatment of her body and its non-nourishment, this is not her aim. Controlling the self through the body is an effort to subdue the latter in disgust because of its needs, its secretions. One can say, given her gnawed attitude to the body, that the anorexic’s path is wholly paved through despair, suffering, and taking suffering to the extreme. It involves no energetic statement about identity, it involves no struggle for legitimacy and recognition. She disciplines her body, supervises it, and creates an existence in which she is not at ease, a burden weighing her down, it troubles and is so imposing that it allows her no pleasure. Thus her sexuality is another domain, one of many, in which she is poorly practiced. It is because of this that her evolving conceptual world does not directly relate to any bodily praxis, is not consequent upon the body. On the contrary, it ignores the body, must ignore it and its annihilation in order to strengthen her, to enrich her, it subdues the body, repels it, and goes defiantly to other places, purist ones. She is scared, threatened by what she calls “parochial” theories that deal with questions closely related to the body and tends to mock and be put off by them; second-order, boring theories, which repeat themselves—they shock her yet at the same time she feels the temptation and the liberation enfolded in the ability to speak of the body, or to know that others think about it. As far as she is concerned, her intellectual life must stay miles and miles away from herself if it is to be of any value. Her moral and existential world is fundamentally dichotomous, judgmental, moralistic, a gut feeling, extremely physical while at the same time striving for a world that is all goodness and saintliness, distinctions she needs in order to make order and control the situation. Stuck in a deep pit, she lacks the freedom and authority of the self to be experimental and flexible, at times she makes an attempt to scale the walls when she seems to have achieved integration and has recovered, died

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and reborn and over again in her traumatic rituals, conducting a strange struggle to maintain her outline, as she imagines it, her boundaries of penetration, by literally reducing her social place, struggling for the materials that constitute her subjectivity but without taking cognizance or rendering account. Vandalizing the body is more like a displacement of the identity issue rather than a brave encounter with it, for she is not mobile, poor in possibilities, stuck in the familiar: stimulation she actually gets from violence against herself, from the delight of surviving in spite of the ongoing vandalization. And it’s as though she does not need the drama out there, the news, she needs not dig there to absorb it, to generate her own fears, fill all the roles in her own theater. She is not invested in life as she is in death, afraid of and attracted by it, playing a serious game with creation, grave, because she cannot accept change, because she cannot acknowledge the fact that her body is subject to change, insists it should be the same, itself, or, actually, herself. The anorexic body is an external manifestation that is hard to mistake. It includes a considerable, even if ambivalent, degree of exhibitionism, however much she tries to reduce herself in space, what’s more it arouses the surroundings’ curiosity. She is secretive in her patterns of behavior but she is visible, needs externalization, needs recognition of her thinness, her helplessness, depending as she does on the environment for reflecting and confirming her identity. She does not play with her looks, does not dress up, sticks to a certain appearance, underlines it. She does not have a variety of images of her body, fantasies she would like to realize, attracting special attention to it to make it more and less visible at one and the same time, scrutinizes it with a look that is hers and not hers, so that it’s hard to tell who is the “agent” in its destruction.60 The risk she takes in exposing herself, unlike the risk she constitutes to herself, even if the former comes with hostility instead of compassion or the wish to protect her, is in no way equivalent to homophobic violence. She is not an “evil woman” who must be feared and branded as a target for attack and exclusion. Inside her it is vague while the outside, for her, is clear and organized, even if she is aware of the crucial cognitive weight that must be attributed to ambiguity, to contamination, the collapse of definitions and categorizations, even if she— conscious of the fundamental crack in her world— displays tolerance, enchantedness, regarding spectacles of humanity that clash with her. This enchantment, this hunger, explains her sudden and decisive shift into bulimia, to physical sensuality, a transition that makes it possible—via an extremely problematic and painful route— for her to open up again to a world of flavors and fragrances, to be pulled into the broader bulimic repertoire, more frenetic, intensive, sexually too. The bulimic potential sheds light on anorexia and may at

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times be its safeguard which transposes her from reactive withdrawal to relational, dynamic experience, and yet often bulimia remains a lonely ritual act toward her body, suddenly infused with yearnings she did not know, which overwhelm her, seep in, no less than the lack of food. A number of patients [. . .] associated their bingeing with some form of sexual contact. Quite frequently, the bulimic patient’s sexual imagery includes powerful androgynous figures, who the patients connect with notions of not needing a male sexual partner and who are in control of all of their bodily needs.61

In her metaphorical world, feminine and masculine components occur alternatingly, a baby girl and girl and sister and woman-friend and man and hungry woman. In her dissonant identity she reaches optimal vitality. Though she may die seventy deaths at the side of the woman she loves, ignited, addicted, writhing, and extinguished, it is there that she is most fully, and she is not in any of the situations that her everyday life provides her. A girl loves a woman. Always. Already. No matter what their ages. One night I dreamed that our houses were connected by a tunnel, hidden from sight, yet nevertheless not below the ground, a tunnel suspended in the air, breaking through all barriers and walls, so very, very long. I don’t remember whether you too used it, whether you knew at all that it existed. I swear I don’t remember. I remember myself walking along it and arriving. I arrive, an hour before time, and they tell me, once again, that I gave them a role, and talk to me sadly, with pain, gently, wanting something from me, at times wanting a lot, at times imperiously, and I grow more and more empty in their presence. I am a lot to them, but no, not an umbilicus, not a womb, no lifeguard, and to me they are all these things, and in fact, very little, no good, not enough, insufficient, but already I’m sunk deep and sucked in and dwindling, and they have the power, so that if they depart, when they depart, in spite of this nothing or this sparseness, where shall I go.

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INTRODUCTORY NOTE Short and laconic, the Book of Ruth, read annually during the feast of Shavuot, is a multi-layered text given to many different, necessarily selective, readings: from those motivated by theological-ethnocentric presuppositions to feministoriented readings; from structuralist readings, committed to either explicit or implicit patterns of meaning, to poststructuralist ones which ignore any single textual center. It is hard to miss the story’s patriarchic metanarrative: The women’s fate is determined by men who strive to perpetuate their name by giving birth, there where natural and human circles coincide. Not only does the book or the scroll end with an exclusively masculine genealogy, it seems that Ruth herself is mobilized to supply her mother-in-law Naomi with descendants in face of the barrenness that befalls her due to her progressing age. Nevertheless, the text is pregnant with enigmatic and foreign elements in more than one sense, and encourages both transgressive and orthodox interpretations.1 The women’s dominance throughout the story, their initiative, their bravery, the risks they take move the plot. What captures the attention, however, is the character of the relationship between the two women protagonists: Ruth and Naomi. Julia Kristeva emphasizes the passion between them,2 Phyllis Trible refers to the concern the mother-in-law manifests for her daughter-in-law’s well-being,3 while Danna No132

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lan Fewell and David M. Gunn insist on Naomi’s embarrassment, ambivalence and resistance toward Ruth, which are most brutally manifest in her recurrent silences: “She speaks not a word either to, or about, Ruth, from this point [after Ruth insists to follow her] to the end of the scene of the arrival at Bethlehem.”4 Nolan Fewell and Gunn thus raise the question why, toward the end of the story, the women of Bethlehem say “A son is born to Naomi”— tacitly implying Ruth’s role as a surrogate, and hinting thereby at Naomi’s “jealousy and resentment that come when other women bear children for the barren”5—and why Ruth seems to agree with this statement by making herself scarce at the end of a book which, after all, is named after her. This question forms, to a large extent, the basis of the rewritten Book of Ruth that concludes Chronicle of Separation. It is now a scroll narrated by Ruth herself, who wonders in her own voice and language—Moabite—why she decided to follow Naomi and what was the origin and nature of her surrender to an economical contract with her mother-in-law, a contract that apparently clashed with her own yearnings. The weight of motifs like famine and deprivation, barrenness and loss-todeath is as crucial in the following scroll as it is in the original one. If Ruth wishes to compensate Naomi for her loss, this motivation is sufficient to justify the reaction of the women of Bethlehem. But “my” Ruth reveals herself to be the imaginary mother of the anorexic barren figure of Chapter 4. Furthermore, Ruth stands at the primal beginning of the whole chronicle. Although Derrida did not write about the Book of Ruth (as he did on other biblical episodes, such as Noah, the sacrifice of Abraham, the blessings of Isaac and Jacob, Eliah, Moses, Shibboleth), it is the postal condition that now enables Ruth to speak, perhaps for the first time. Now it came to pass. Though fortuity is foreign to your ways of thinking, and though you do not believe in it, tying your fate with the Creator of the Universe whose precise plan is beyond your grasp. Now it came to pass. I know no more. I have sinned against my native land, my place, the royal court, my parents, my acquaintances, my sister, my home. I cast them off and followed you, striking anchor.6 We knew, both of us, that things were not simple. You said, again and again: Look at things as they are, simply. And I went on delving.

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I told you: if ought but death part thee and me—at a rare moment, with you, of doubt-free resolve. The primal scene of our bond. My entire history led me to this impossible place, even before I knew anything about it, neither reason nor outcome, ancient failure and late remedy. I clung and cleaved unto you, I deposited my burden and my trust, I confided, since my guilt had forever already been toward you and I wished to repair. It was not my choice. You were, from the earliest of times, object of identification beyond either choice or speech. Maybe beyond love, too, you were—always already part of me, set aside for me alone, who am not myself without you. You called me daughter, you were my parent and conscience, mother and motherland, taking me in, mistress of the house. I wanted you to gather me up, having long awaited you, old as I was for my years, a prolonged waiting, passive, slack at the very core of my sound, poised appearance. My memory of that feeling is sharp, that first night of our journey, when my sleep, disturbed, slipped away and I found myself conscious, all of a sudden, of my falsehood, cramps in my lower belly, I was drawn to put something on papyrus, to express a sense of affirmation and strength I had not known before. People are never just their own age. To some extent, they are every age or no age at all. You don’t belong with your generation, I don’t with mine, and yet, our time is neither shared nor ours to dispose. Anxiously, I always dreamed of our anachronistic encounter, I crowned you queen of my home, or what I knew or recognized as my home, something locked, inaccessible, consumed by experiences I buried, muffling their obscure presence, trying in vain to wipe out their traces. We always served as each other’s landmark on the separate maps of our being, on the suppressed, and variously and antithetically intersecting, archives holding parts that are masculine and feminine, that activate and oppress, that contain wisdom and pathos. Death, mourning, ghosts, bequests, fortune, destiny constituted our relationship and flooded it, foretold its end, your leaving, your loss, my way with myself and with you, you as you were inside me and outside me in our bereaved loving. I learned that no bequest is free of poison. But nor can the heir sift the chaff from the bequest—to cleanse it, pick the poisonous element and filter it out. I who have been compared— against my will— to Rachel and Leah, feel an affinity with your Biblical figures only in that region where women like myself, the same as you, are big with history, defined by our infinite pasts and futures. Yet relentless yearning, my vital and stubborn yearning, diverges from this collective purpose. I must, even today, allow you to be inside me, as you are, different, desired, unattained, who warms and keeps at an arm’s length, constitutes, crucial, throws my nights and days into disarray, is extraverted and then hermetic, reveals and hides. I must give you your freedom,

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not restrain you with my fetters. You live and breathe and flutter far from me inside me, alive in that part of you that does not, that cannot, reject me. Just a part, I know, not the whole. I was demanding, demanding and blind, blind and knowing, defeated, as always, by my needs. You were a fulfilled woman, you had given life, given birth to two sons, you let me marry one of your children, before you were visited by disaster which left you destitute. I was childless, a widow, barren, unable to continue the line. And you were my womb, the woman I wanted and could not be. For some time, there were no men in our world, fathers and sons, yet both our internal world and that outside abounded with figures— present and absent— of men and women who affected our lives together, the way I was or wished to be, your man and your woman, who affected my insufficiency for you. There had always been a third, chimerical side, still before Boaz, impersonal, unspecific, which upset the balance between us, redeeming the relationship, on one hand, and giving it a future, while at the same time driving it to the abyss that signaled its impossibility. Still before Boaz, we moved frantically between two poles of identification, between father and mother, law and body. We were both in crisis, each in a different way and from a different angle, trying to clarify for ourselves and one another the layers that made up our identity. I felt, at first, that I was not worthy to witness your suffering, the disclosures, the departures, uprootings, scars, your bitterness toward everybody, toward yourself and your god and Orpah and me, crushed by the weight of your burden, the intensity of our joint walking on our roaming ways. It was as if we leapt over unnecessary hurdles, over futile introductions, vain words—straight to the point. But did we actually leap? Can one leap? Did we see it as it was? We crossed each other at midway, we diverged, adjusted, like birds of prey eager to pounce, lift, and nest. We met in our loneliest, most desolate places, intimately in touch with the far ends of existence, places where one can no longer be sure to distinguish teacher from pupil, mother-in-law from daughter-in-law, big one from little one, the one with experience and the one without, mistress and slave-girl, the places in which I am enslaved to you and enslave you, the other, she whom I need to exist, suppress myself in order to be near, forcing myself to get used, forgetting myself and, in the end, forgetting her, identifying with her to the end, sucking in her symptoms, hidden and revealed, her fears, sorrow, ravage. Places in which you recognize the stranger within you. Places between pleasure and disgust, between comfort and bitterness. I need your words, your gestures, to make a new imaginative horizon, to hold out in my cramped world, and you need mine—so stuck we feel within ourselves. As if for the first time, I made your acquaintance, not

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as my husband’s mother even though I spent ten years near you. Now I became familiar with your depressions, the despair, the contradictions, and your rage, the sensitivity and the obtuseness, the domineering and the helplessness, the carefulness and the neglect. The images have stayed with me, each and every one of them, moving and stirring. Our exposed feet imprinted forever with the rock-strewn road, your seduction, the time when we were full of assent, lithe, lovely, distracted, healthy, as it were. For surely there are things that are possible only on the way, on the way to the land of Judah, in a tent, in a private space, on side tracks, away from the other travelers, from home, beyond sovereignty, stability, and beyond expectations, prohibitions, and commands. Some things are only possible due to their temporary nature and their mistiming: their aimless, ec-static, occult, violent motion, the taking of distance in the dark, without bounds and without the panic that will thwart the uncanny encounter with the void, nipping its temptations in the bud, for the sake of survival. Feather-light other-timed things, not gradual, direct, slashing the gaps, alive and bubbling and afloat and quickening, as against the dead weight of routine and its knowingness, its petty quarrels and strife, which cannot digest them. They get in its way. It won’t let them. It will interfere and crush and treat them roughly, it will raze and prevail. They require wandering, a true wandering, not just of the mind, after love or in the absence of love, in flight of it, or to find it. When this journey came to an end we had to adjust to a wholly new situation, to set up home in Bethlehem in a disciplined place that was struggling against itself for the sake of stability, against a relapse into anarchy, a place with clear and defined boundaries. What was this to do with us, two women, beloved, outcasts, powerless, with not a marketplace to go to, surrounded by bored housewives whose world was narrow and whose choice scant, disconnected as they were from where decisions were made and influence brought to bear; what seemed to them to exceed the burdens they were wont to carry piously filled them with fear. They suffer, unknowingly, from world-absence, and world-absence, almost of necessity, issues in friendlessness. This setting in which we found ourselves was bound to challenge, again, our resolutions about what was external and what intimate, the possible and the impossible, and in its one-dimensionality, with its pressure, left us with little choice—and no guidance—in how to conduct ourselves shifting between worlds. I felt guilt for your suffering, which affected me as though I was a girl, I took it up without observing distance. I wanted to insist with you, I wanted you to insist, wanted you to know that there was time, in spite of our dwelling, obsessive and dangerous, arousing and agonizing, on memories, wanted you to

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know that the future, open, lay ahead of you. I swore to you: if ought but death part thee and me, and I could only imagine the way, the search, the illusion of arrival and achievement. I followed you, wholly immersed, caught up in you, ready to become absorbed in your world—your scenery, your people, your religion, your god. As long as it pleased, I did not mind. Indeed, I had always been god-fearing. Your people’s faith, Boaz, everything that happened subsequently, issued from that limit, the ultimate, the freedom of action and the nullity of action it anointed. You were important and I wanted to crouch under your wings. They are of lesser importance, sometimes none. Later, Boaz understood it was pointless to contend for my heart since I have no interest whatsoever in the young men, or feel any attraction for them. You straightaway grasped my affinity, how it needed you and became one with you, as I attached myself to you. You saw how determined I was, how easily I would transform into the echo of your wishes. You recognized the internal drama, the intensity, how I contained, let go, the anxiety. It scared you, possibly, you flinched, scared of yourself, of your improper passion, your desire, scared of abuse. Aware of it all, you were, of the odds in favor and against. You thought to yourself, steady on Ruth, your people are not mine, your god isn’t mine. Do not rush. At first you entreated me to go back to the place you were leaving, then you did not answer me, said no more to persuade me, to prevent me. You wondered yourself about your boundaries, and you were, as always, closely in touch with your needs, with your hunger, with what you were able and unable to bear, as in the years with Elimelech. And you were prevailed upon, and we walked together. Waiting for the other is related to death, the limits of death, where we await one another knowing in advance [. . .] that there the one waits for the other, because the one and the other never reach this encounter simultaneously [. . .] and the one who is awaiting the other there, at this limit, is not the one who arrives first. On the contrary, if one wants to wait for the other at this meeting place, one must come late, not early.7

We fixed ourselves a rule of exchange to suit us. It included my gifts and your motherhood, later your household too. It was wholly mutual, this rule. My payment was fully what I deserved. You made me born again. I hosted you inside me, whatever I owned was yours, the entire household I carried with me, my whole being, unconditional, boundless. A breeze of hope filled us with joy and faith and ease and security and promise. It seemed that even the most hysterical and intense of gestures did not contrive to breach any circle. And what appeared torn, what may have considered to go mad, found some answer. There was, between us, understanding, expectation within the expectable

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range, not extreme. I believed that our agreed relations, even if mediated through the customs of the Hebrews by orders of marriage and economy whose rules we never formulated, would remain wholly unaffected. For I knew: these constraints were not the gist of the relationship, this gist was escaping them toward our aimless and unmeaning eroticism. We could imagine, within the confined world of the elders that hemmed us in, another world, outside it, coming before it, our world, yours. A primal world, beyond language and text. We imagined the entire way we covered together, our wordless way, beyond the read and the readable, detached, wholly surrendered to the emotional drama between us, feeding from each other, reading each other’s thought, knowing, knowing as it were, with the knowledge of a bird who puts food into the beaks of her fledglings, or of the bitch licking her puppies. We ate each other, as if absorbing, losing independence, while deep inside we felt how the transformation was never complete. Much as I crushed your distinct features, much as I fashioned you after my needs, something basic remained, unambiguous, that resisted digestion and disintegration. And as of then, you remember, I ate, and was replete, and left. You cared. You offered me your tender places. The places in which you were appeased with yourself. You said, Come, enter, enter now, without stay. You invited me to cross the threshold. You said to me: Look, it’s not so terrible to be at peace with yourself. You said to me: You don’t know yourself. And you were right. Your wanderings took you this way and that—to be tormented, to be cruel to yourself, to put parts of yourself to death and to relish. You did not love me all the time. At times you loved, at other times you became detached. I was in need of unconditional love, like the love I offered you. I was in need of unreserved support. And you could not meet all the demands that dallied in me. Nor could I meet yours. We looked after each other. Everything I did, I did because I loved you, it was for my own good when I was good to you. In absolute consciousness, proud, I moved within my course keeping it ajar—for you, toward you. You hosted me warmly and generously. You opened your doors, your heart to me, you acknowledged my vulnerability and my need, but you stayed mistress of the house, your house, in full command, and I the stranger, so powerfully wishing to stay the night, a guest, an other. I crossed boundaries where it was risky to cross, unguarded crossings. You called on me so we might heal each other, so we might fill the horrible emptiness we felt. You called on me because we were lost in our religion, among our people, in our society. There was not the slightest chance for us to receive public acknowledgment for the joint existence we

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created. It was possible for as long as we could live our intimacy, regardless of where, for as long as we believed it was forever, until intimacy came between us, was no longer in our favor and gradually made place for distance and disrespect. Were we partners to a sheer illusion? We did feel omnipotent, wanted, deluding ourselves with the notion that we fitted each other perfectly, celebrating ourselves and our triumph over a world heavy with pain and frustration, we were carried away by the rite of encounter. Your troubles, though, and mishaps were more important than mine. They took you away from me—I who functioned like a sort of magnifying glass, I was over the top, you felt—and they took me away from myself. I sensed your injuries. I put my trust in you. I could not tell you what influence they had on me. I was only partially aware of how scared I was, the dread I felt, but I am used to repressions, and the door, your door, seemed a possible passage to a place of perfection, like at that time, on the road, when we walked toward Bethlehem. Only slowly did I come to see that neither the otherness, mine, that of the stranger, nor your power, were obliterated in the nest we built. That power was potentially hostile. Always, hosting includes a measure of hostility, there is always a proper place, property, without which the host is not a host nor is hospitality hospitality. Feel at home, you told me, you included me in the covenant. Later, all of you, people of Israel, took me into your covenant. Act as though your people were my people and your god were mine. Yet remember: It is not true, this is not really your home and you are expected, required to respect my home and my property, my boundaries and my whims. Come on in, blessed be you, come cross the threshold of my home, but look at me, at my identity, acknowledge my sovereignty. It is I who am the hostess, and the power to choose and select is mine. I am the hostess, subject myself to a hosting community, I cannot always go against it, do not always wish to go against it. It dictates my movement, obliges me, enforces, sometimes it leaves me without a home of my own. You trouble me, and it too, troubles me, and between you and it, my community, I choose the latter: it I know, feel at ease with. But you promised me, you knew how I heard your promise, you were aware of the weight these words carried in my world. At times I give you credit for too much knowledge, a vision, a lively lucid internal conversation, and a type of delicateness toward me, one that has never scolded me. At other times I think you failed to understand, that had you understood you would have realized the destructive potential of your acts, of your judgment, that had you known and not chosen, also, not to know, you might not have been so taken aback, you who set me free, as it were, while clenching me all the more with your motherhood which became miserly and hollow once more. So it seems you did not under-

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stand, for if you had you would not have acted in this manner, making promises you could not keep. Specters mocked us, vanishing momentarily, like a tabula rasa, without memory, pointing ahead, but in every corner they lurked. And you spoke sincerely and forgot sincerely, and the words, tasting of honey, got stuck in the wax of my memory, and my specters reveled and danced, drawing close and pushing away, as though stirred by the intensity of your promises, steadfast entourage, infinitely devoted. Then we reached Bethlehem. You stayed inside the house. I went out to the field, to glean and gather, throughout the harvest, three months, ninety days and nights, so as to save you from the gaze of the others, their disagreeable distrust, I came and went daily, gathered behind the reapers so they would not notice me, tending, myself, to avoid contact with people, bewildered, keeping away, exposed to the burning sun, crying out for bread and vinegar to quench my thirst and cool my body and to spare my deteriorating digestion, yet also avoiding these, always sitting on the side so they would not see me, my thoughts carrying me to you. And Boaz offers me from his abundance, yet I insist, refuse, afraid to take from this goodness, gathering small blighted quantities of corn to bring them to you late at night, to your house, so you will not stay alone, telling you about what befell me, adjusting information that may hurt you, you who are still worried for us, you who are still jealous about me, and Boaz suggests I should keep close to the maidens and I tell you that he said: keep close to the young men who work for me, and I do not know that shortly already you will have a firm plan, splendidly conceived, and you will not care to whom I shall stay close as long as I do not cleave to you. It was no longer as it had been on the way, it could not be as it had been on the way. We lived inside. And something in the balance between the two orders, between the law and customs, and the world we made, was upset. When I left at daybreak you could choose to lock or to open the door, as you wished, to let me in or to indicate no entry, to send me off, as I was a hindrance and had become unwanted. Though the transition was gradual, still it was stark and sharp, without preparation, without time for adjustment. Gradually you stopped calling me, as you were wont to, my daughter, even if it did not always please me, this name which you used freely for many, unspecific, not just for me, the one you also stuck to Orpah who turned away from you, and over whom you never preferred me, the name which became one with Boaz’s way of calling me, all of you joining up against me by means of the same codes, the same blessings, and

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as I became more able to find my way with you, your people, them, the more lost I was. Did I know all the time what I wanted to say or to give to you? Did I know what I meant? Did I know how to give? I stressed, I insisted with you, Take more, and the floor burst into flames under my feet from the moment you came into my debt, when my expectation was not met, could not be met, turning heavy suddenly as if beyond our dimensions. Already you no longer acknowledged me, gave up on the right kind of touch, stopped sensing me. For a long time after I was thrown into the street I thought I could give you a pure gift, fleeing the hyper-consciousness that we shared into absolute forgetfulness, voided of our intentions, yours as well as mine. But this was a vain thought which always came back to me. The economy of our relations was too tight to embrace such a superficial possibility, one without traces, without a deep memory. You picked up, from afar, this readiness to throw myself at your feet and, from afar, you averted any encounter with it. I wished for this impossibility, it was what I intended, I saw it as something simple, I tried to imagine it, fantasize about it, and immediately I knew that between us it was not simple, no simplicity, and I asked myself what I was looking for in that place that is not concrete, that deviates, where a gift occurs without intentional activity from the participants. Why must we wander there, far away from the sour, necessary experience of acceptance or gratitude, or of rejection, the rejection of the gift, rejection of the giver. Why not revert to our own places, to what is familiar, to those moments when the recipient’s face hardens, becomes angry, to the cloud that casts its shadow on this face and closes it. Why not talk about the gift as a channel of communication and as a litmus test for relation, a yardstick measuring whether it was desired, needed, or disdained and unattractive. My gifts piled up layers of indifference, taken for granted, followed by grudge, and the door was really already about to slam shut. They overloaded your conscience, angered you, and put a distance between us. Between us, things fell apart. You no longer wanted to play at the game we invented, the one that was not institutionalized, not recorded in the scroll, its silenced, erased foundation condition to the possibility of its writing. I had no memories of that house in which we lived, I sat in it infrequently, seldom in comfort. For me it was what had been spun between us and no more, a passing sense of domesticity, like at that time when together we washed, dressed carelessly, funny. Amazed that the Hebrews and the Moabites, it seemed, had the same cleaning habits, with the same thoroughness—wet, using a lot of soap, and another dry run. And the calm and sweetness that followed, in our joint range of high- low, routine- special; one of those difficult and perfect days of infinite

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closeness and infinite knowledge of limits, that I must, in the way of all things, go. I have no cupboard there, or beakers set aside, or hiding places, or clothes, or corners of my own. Not even a room. Beyond rushed overnights, I did not rest there. I did not simply tarry there. I suppose that I did not feel at home in that house, that we did not create a protective, pleasant family den. It was you, to a large extent, you who decided, who left her marks, and exile was fated to be from you, only from you, not from a place to which I had become attached, a big woman who moves in it at ease, harmoniously, reclining, sprawling on its sofas—away from the way you were there, from the attention and carelessness, from the neglect and from the fastidiousness. I was so lonely with you, unable to predict your moves, only to sense precisely when something happened, when tension dropped, and I hushed, afraid, as though silence protected me from vicissitude, I colluded with your silence, never on an equal footing, taking shelter behind a protective wall, without explanation, without confrontation, as if this type of companionship, if not justification or self- justification, or argumentation or excuse, as if all these were unnecessary, banal obstacles to your freedom. And I knew: there it was not for me to speak, I had no right to protest, right to appeal, and I did not have the strength to try—neither on my behalf nor on yours. And in your silence you were accountable to no one but yourself: neither to god, about whom you always had your reservations, he who visits his people but omits you, making you bitter and estranged, nor to some other order which only I did not know. It is your heart that instructed you along the way and when you diverged, this way and that, jolting you from responsibility and decency to guilt, curling up snail-like, and then to deep fellowship. And then suddenly you saw that primal, cyclic time, the time in which we were moving, being led back and forth through its shaft, this time that showed us our own reflections, again and again, was imposing its own memory on us and would continue planting hope in me, raising more illusions, and you knew that each response of yours would reopen the wound and the neediness, my craving and insufficiency, and you feared its temptations and its wretchedness. And the intimacy that had sprung into existence so suddenly was now blocked just as abruptly. I did not know whether this was temporary, another reprieve, or forever. You knew I would never thrust in unasked, I would not raise my voice or make demands or quarrel with you, as I do not have the strength or the courage or the confidence to do so. So that I responded as you wished me to respond, in the manner you knew I would respond. I may have known there would be no further opportunity, or perhaps I thought there would be opportunities aplenty. I knew it was fatal. I refused to acknowledge it was fatal.

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I thought that our relationship was stronger than both you and me, and that you, too, would eventually surrender to need and yearning. I thought it was indispensable to you as it was to me, like mother’s milk, like the corn ears, like bread, and that you do not forgo bread, you do not forgo your self. Was I bread or an extravagance? Today I think you were bread for me, paradoxical remedy which makes hunger grow the more we taste of it, and I was an extravagance for you, an extravagance you wanted, in your generosity, to swallow, and I wanted nothing but to be eaten by you, be your divine feast. But it so happens with extravagances that you cannot allow yourself to have them, at times, since their price is too dear, the cost high, and you need this energy to exist, to preserve your existence carefully, including all its parts, its repeated, steadying circles. You wanted to taste no more of me, tasteless now to your palate, it was a reaction of the body, prereflective. I was, after all, less crucial, I demanded too much, over and beyond the price of my mere being. You let go, you did not require me, you believed you did no longer require me, you let go of me, you let it go. Now, all that was needed was to extirpate me and the whole episode that had my name attached, my memory, the scalding memory of our failure. With what right do I want, do I ask for myself, to be part of this circle, after we tried and failed, after, having become an intimate part of it, I still remained outside, outside its center, my very presence shifting the center, breaching it, maybe wounding it, I do not know, you never belonged to me, I have no rights, and you want to return to the circle, which, itself too, consists of a mass of fragments, insisting to tauten it again, wanting to be a chrysalis, a butterfly again, while knowing, at the same time, that should you ever wish you might break it yourself and not find the gates locked, and I would walk toward you along the same paths which have, in the past, led us to a dead end. And, yes, this circle in which you are, enclosed you again, impenetrable, ever tighter. You breached it for me, to address me, and in spite of yourself you went with me mile upon mile, forced by circumstance, totally surprised, without prior expectation. You were not merely fulfilling your obligations to this lost bride. I believe you loved me and that I was your woman companion, and that you came to depend on the support I gave, and I depended on the support I gave, on your need for me, and on my need for you to need me, and on my need for you, and you, who now no longer needs me, are angry that you should have needed me so much, some time in the past. You decided to be by yourself, to raise Oved on your own. You had long since become too old to have a man or a woman, long before you met me. You wanted to withdraw. The hearts of lonely people are

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tough like desert shrubs. I knew that text of yours. I used to regard it as a striking expression of sincerity, later though I thought that it was an alibi too. You don’t see, you said to me, you’re trying to push for a nonexistent continuity with those gestures of yours. You’re pressuring me, lavishing more and more upon me, you’re trying but losing me with each attempt. Because the more you give, the more you need. You become embittered, dispose in order to come close, then hit upon refusal, knowing full well that it is impossible to artificially distribute the sources of our feelings. You only further underscore the gap, the insufferable lack of mutuality between us, which became engraved in the very definition of our relationship from when you said, on the roadside, determined as usual: Wherever thou goest, I will go. You know that I am not there, and that you can no longer come. I am telling you: you are excessive and eccentric, I’m amazed you don’t see that. You don’t expect me to give you, actively, anything, but you expect that I’ll be happy to receive both yourself and your gifts. You want to satisfy all my needs and you can’t, it’s arrogance on your part, you cannot save me, fulfilling an other’s needs— that’s a form of pride we should shed, and my unresponsiveness to you is a form of respect, not of sloth, I know this is hard for you to understand. Yet I don’t want you, I don’t want you in my life, I cannot bring myself to look at you from where you are and look at myself in relation to you. I have had enough of you, of your blindness, your defenses, your worry. Enough of being in this anomaly and of giving to you by the spoonful, capricious as I am, mutable, I who cannot love you without deficiency. I am oppressed, you see, oppressed exactly because I care for you, because I don’t want to see you offended, I don’t enjoy it, and because, identifying, I can be tortured by your torturedness. You are always wholly, but I am not, I am always in part, never wholly. And you go on being the way you are even though you know. And perhaps you were more respectful toward reality than I, you were right, understanding more than I, reading its limitations, the absurdness, the lack of prospect and the pointlessness, the illusion wrapped in the possibility, or the belief in the possibility, of straying, the thing I was unable to read or see, and you summoned ingenuity and responsibility to release us from spontaneous impulsiveness, forgetful and clingy. You may have saved, redeemed me from you by this going of you, which is unconnected to me. For it happens always when I push my thought to the limit, that I find you are right even though you are so mistaken. So you are right, I knew it was going to end badly, it was bad. I, the ultimate giver, constantly taking the initiative, trying from morning till night, I the beggar, making do—beggar-like—with the scraps. I am replete, as it were, and leave

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aside, more and more, everything I do not dare to distinctly feel and say to myself. I gather from the parched corn they leave for me and gather myself up to go and get more. Don’t entreat me to leave you, don’t beg me to leave you: no longer do I act, I make only sacrifice upon sacrifice, unable to process the information, the signs, everything cracks and crumbles, my beliefs, my confidence, my repressions, it crashes with unbridled force. I revert to an archaic struggle which I do not really understand, a struggle for space in a world that has spat me out. And I send you one more sign, one more meaningful gesture, and you are not ready for this, absolutely not, now it is really too much, even though time has passed, exactly because time has passed. I refuse to hate you. You are right. You are angry about what you are and angry about what I am and angry with yourself for having been tempted, regretting that you responded to my bear hug which gives you too much, takes you too seriously, with an empathy you are looking for and also flee, flouting your power and the sublime status you gained inside me, which was not acquired with enough labor but rather in the blindness of my need, I who think of you all the time, much, much, much too much, and you are carried aloft on the small wing of dependence that unfolded and drew me down, acknowledging my weakness, both respecting and despising it at the same time, and you are unable to bear, neither this dependence nor me, unable to bear its implications and the fact that you were not strong enough to stop and that you were not strong enough to refuse, and I do not want gifts from that lack in you, and neither of us tolerates what we have become. And why did we not take a brief pause to define the right degree, which is hard to define in advance, or indeed as it is going on, even not with hindsight, the pattern that emerged was stronger than us, and you were skeptical about whether it could be changed, and essentially you were, of course, right. Where there is a gap in needs there is no full freedom, there is no space to maneuver— neither from where there is more nor from where there is less. And our friendship should have steered clear of obligation, yet your demand for freedom was so powerful that any balance there could have been, between obligation on one hand and invention or impulse on the other, was in utter disarray. When we started on our way there was still a balance between how I tied as well as freed you, when you wound yourself in my ropes as if finding a great prize. These ropes, however, never agreed with your needs and soon they lacerated, leaving no space, and when nothing remained but my yearning for you to come yours grew into a wish to refuse. We knew you came lustless, only by invitation, and later you no longer wanted to be invited nor did you feel the urge to invite. And the covenant, hopeless, left home in full knowledge, which put me to

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death, put to death my power to act, lucidly knowing that this was your will and I must respect it, that there was nothing for me but to respect it since all ways leading to you, all the ways to reparation, had become blocked. Yet still I am alone in this knowledge, jealously guarding the necessary knowledge that shatters me, but keeping you and our intimacy in the distance that erupted, lacking a fantasy of a joint, long-term future, which, solely answerable to our will, would not be included in the business of redemption, land, levirate marriage. I read in the scroll that was named for me and feel at times I know nothing beyond what is written in it, and also that what I know has not been written there at all. You found yourselves a way to circumvent my silence, to trample my loneliness. I hardly speak, speak too little, and so do you, who honed an art of silence that lends itself to an infinity of interpretations. I must write it anew, this scroll, for the first time, as there is no signatory, writer, or judge who has the authority to redact the synapses of the private, minute memory that are heaped and meshed inside me. What they can do is to reproduce the familiar narrative and point out precedents and analogies with the fathers of the nation and its mothers so as to render the events meaningful and put them in order. They can, must, take control of me, abandon me, sure of themselves, chosen, superior, determined. And sometimes, I must admit, they even tempt me. It is that easy to take the image others have of us and internalize it, explaining every gesture of mine in terms of the respect children owe their parents or in those of Judaism, to assimilate it to the world of judgments and judges and simply ignore what actually pushed me into this covenant with you, the impossible injunctions I imposed on myself, the wordless grief coming from what came to us. My narrative principle, though, is different. It is not historical, not spiritual, or docile. It is wholly unanticipated, restless, it demands caution and alertness. According to it, inside the apparently grave definitions of the Omnipresent and of the congregation there a pendulum-like movement is hidden, a possibility internal to the events themselves to express a different logic, a shadow-making logic that lowers them deep into the dark and prohibited, tending toward the improper, toward bliss and pain. Yet, even though it may seem that this hidden logic is sheltered away under the wings of history, or that, indeed, there is no common language between these two whatsoever, or that my scroll, my world, all that remained for me, was consumed and wasted, I insist, nevertheless, to try and speak it and only it, speak the base aspects of cyclic redemption, the redemption of the earth, Boaz the redeemer, Oved the redeemer, redemption

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of the dead. Who, actually, did I redeem, and who redeemed me, and was I indeed redeemed? And how does it touch me, this glib language of redemption, rights, laws, and rules? I, congenitally foreign, strange secrets are my company, I, who keep close to women. I who am beyond the law, outside the law, and I who scorn the law. And how can it be that even though I have given life, it is only now in this scroll, as it is being written, that I feel I can give birth to myself, as if from the start, be born anew, tear myself clear away from the prison-story of which we were robbed, tear myself away from you, from your prison, so as to talk with you, not instead of you, not in your name, to try and accept reality and master myself rather than struggle uselessly for your heart. From the start. Not to identify with you or with this dismissal, to numb the huge dependence on the one who sent forth, you who became a place of refuge and sign of the worthlessness of the one who was sent forth, sign of her incompatibility, her cumbersome weight. Initially I was unable to think about it. I grew accustomed to the story they are wont to tell of us even if I could find myself in it only with difficulty. I had no story of my own, not even a private one, only simple, schematic connections between cause and effect as well as an apocalyptic, crude picture, an offense to the events, dragging them high up and then deep into the pit, and there was your talk, your name which precedes mine in the scroll, and which seals it leaving me no place; your name, your utterance which is so unlike mine in its pace, its falterings, its charm. If only we could have written this scroll together, mingling each other’s mother tongues, Biblical expressions and slang, slight words and solid ones. Had we written together your talk would have become coupled with mine, realizing our shared potential to create, be fruitful. Imagine us both on the same page, moving from body to margins, each woman recognizing the other’s misunderstanding, forgetfulness, beguiling, opening our doors, leaving an empty space, unafraid, trusting each other. But it is no coincidence that this scroll is not called the Book of Ruth and Naomi. Had our house been shared, then the scroll, too, would have been shared. Our language, however, was never the same language. I spoke Moabite. You spoke Hebrew. And when I started to speak Hebrew I stopped speaking the language of my mother and my people, adopting your language. I was wholly foreign to you, even before becoming foreign to the obligations of a Hebrew woman in Bethlehem. I tried to be at home, with you, in a tongue that was not my tongue, with my strange accent, my unsure, blundering speech. No, maybe not. Perhaps I insisted on talking Moabite with you, my language, or to speak Ruth-ese with you, invent, when I said: but death part thee and me. I am trying to create a place for myself without you, and

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it is far, this place, from being whole. But I want you to listen, I want all of you to listen, I demand of you, of all of you, your attention for my point of view, which differs from yours in particular and from that of all of your in general, in mood and insight and given generational differences, sites of experience, touchstones for sifting corn from chaff, good from bad. A point of view that questions everything, your authority, your space and the space you allot to others, your smooth patterns, the houses of fathers and of mothers. I never spoke your language, from the moment I pledged my allegiance, not as a man does to a young woman: a young woman who resolutely addresses herself to another one. Everything is so clear among you, in the world of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He, everything so accessible. And you wanted to take me and impose your conditions, tell me how and in what way. I, however, was in doubt, even back in Moab, even there I already turned my back on all this, from family and nuclei. I came to you undone, lacking a patronym, nearly anonymous, depending on you and carrying with me nevertheless, in spite of myself, my language, my one mobile possession, an intimacy which outdid even my intimacy with you, which does not forsake me, the one thing that stays with me in times of distress, and resists it, resists you. In The Post Card and later again in Circonfession, Derrida affirms that when one writes, one always asks for forgiveness and leaves it an open question whether the object of the apology is a previously committed crime or already implicit in the very act of writing. Derrida, however, is convinced that the failure to write about the other is a condition for the success of writing—a conviction which is not merely cognitive but, in fact, and first of all, ethical. Since failure is given, one must write, or maybe even more so: there is a mode that is more appropriate than others. Can I find this mode, if only by approximation, in order to identify in advance with the impending failure? The scroll safeguards your privacy, your difference, your secrets, and articulates the limits of my memory, those narrow limits of relationship which outline precisely and without pity the limits and spaces of writing. I try to contain you in it, in me, as far as my hand reaches, in vain, I try to speak to you, to fill the void of your absence with words. We always had different ways of defining what is intimate and what is public. In spite of the silence you and your people imposed on me, taking from me, through your violent silencing, my right to cry out and protest, transforming me to an invisible and inaudible woman, I do turn to you and the whole of Israel so as to explain myself. It may be that this is customary in the case of separations: that they should always be skirted and, anyway, how does this connect to ethics? Nevertheless, as for the question of ethics between us, God will have to

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judge. What I am trying to do is to understand us, to aim at discrete regions that are not exactly situated, mapped, and which, nevertheless, are not entirely submerged, so that one can aim at them, sufficiently remembered and sufficiently forgotten, revealed momentarily to become hidden again. I am certain of one thing about them: they are what made our encounter possible and they, too, are its ruin. It is they that seep into the most innocent images I have in my memory and that puncture their wholeness. They are secrets that will remain secrets, no matter what name or description I give them, secrets we inherited both, open, conscious of themselves as secrets and hence the less solvable, unknown to us, these secrets will never be opened, prized apart as they move through the structured, predictable, therapeutic passage from unconscious to conscious. What was mute will remain mute, beyond detail and clarification, a persistent source of disappointment, frustration and curiosity. I am trying to undo some knots, to utter a few riddles in the tight, exacting, compulsive, and analogous undergrowth of the unconscious and the conscience, bit by bit, without a clue, not a trace, not always able to sift between things, to appreciate how large and huge, actually, is the minute, which has the power to instruct about the entire process of development, to estimate what involves you and what does not, separate as you are from me, from my identity, and shackled to it. How to speak of separation without apportioning guilt and without, on the other hand, reproducing even now my attitude toward you, the submissiveness, humbleness, self-erasure in the face of my excess. I want to talk to you in a language I did not speak, things I did not and could not say, because I did not know, was not aware. And to speak to me. To speak to others, unknown people, and entrust them with my scroll. My scarred scroll drips with blood and debris, the things we hid from ourselves, what was hidden from us, what I am unable to set apart except by ungainly abstraction in a last-ditch attempt to keep hold of you, to stay close to you, to reconstruct our silenced journey of which none but we know—and perhaps not us either—how long it took and what happened. Even you do not know, nor even I, what we had, where we rested, what we ate, what we said to one another, our souls, our bodies in motion all the time, and what happened later, when I was pregnant, how our lives unfurled, our fears, how we experienced the rift between what we had been for each other and what was destined to utterly upset the protected enclave we, unnoticed, had created. For it is no coincidence that that scroll was not written, the scroll from the depths, prohibited, abhorrent, disclosing scroll, incestuous scroll which shocks me while I write it far away from you, in a city of refuge, scroll of Ruth, scroll of hooked,

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scroll of havoc, scroll of taboo and of scrapping taboo, smashed, incoherent and unanchored. It is only as it were by accident, as if at a whim, that it occurs in your official text, overwhelming the author who studiously inserts limits and order and periodizations and genealogies and places, using his prudent language which keeps fantasy in bounds, censures the erotic, showing a bit and concealing all the more, keeping its poise without slippage yet it takes the upper hand— vengeful, hard to harness, exactly because he cannot stand it, exactly because he ignores it, intrusive, headstrong— in order to afflict, deceive and cast shade. And [the women] lifted up their voices and wept.8 Women doubtless reproduce among themselves the strange gamut of their forgotten bodily relations with their mothers. Complicity in the unspoken, connivance of the inexpressible, of a wink, a tone of voice, a gesture, a tinge, a scent: We are in it, released from our identity papers and names [. . .] the community of women is a community of dolphins.9 And I shall glean ears of corn.10 And she gave her what she had left over after she had eaten her fill. . . .11

Then, before I was able to speak, I delivered my secret, saying in my unconscious, childish way: “No!” “No!”— to you, your recollections, to my appetite, my greed, my desires, struggling to contain you, acknowledging my ineptness, my empty stomach, my hollow feelings, flirtatious with my death and delivering a trace, a remainder. Somatic people are not individuals who produce no utterance, but rather subjects who lack, or drop, the dynamic of metaphoricity.12

And the scroll seeps into the dominions of day and of night, into the activities of the day and of the night, into their separating twilight which obscures their outlines at the hour when one man cannot recognize another. Wherever thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. It seeps until time is undone, morning and evening, morning and night, half a night until morning, with an unending excitement to the point where places confound as in a labyrinth, the landmarks inside the chaotic space of my memory. Initially it appears in the passage from personal to impersonal, between so and so, between our proper names and our sexual identity, we, Ruth and Naomi, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, woman and woman, ageless, widow and young woman, subject to the most neutral appellations, to the most radical questioning, lacking a well- defined identity, at the start of a road whose end who could foretell, even if the author seemingly solved the riddle, undoing the delicate balance with

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which his writing began, sticking to clear rituals and identities, daughter-in-law, Moabite, convert to Judaism, ancestress of a lineage that leads to David. It, however, bursts forth, and once again, appears in the strange, hardened passages from feminine to masculine, in the metaphors of hunger and satiety, of the possibility of satiety which signals the alternating of times collective and individual, or in that of fullness and the void. And it orients the gaze at another truth, that of the lower abdomen, of the impulses, the intestines, of our melancholy womanhood which swallows into its bowel both the dead and the living, of the womb, your womb which I seek, of the small nutrients that operate in the world of the great nourisher, the god who visits and abandons his people at his whim, the small nutrients which are us, we who set aside some of our bread or do not indulge ourselves or others. And it arises through your preoccupation with aging and through mine with food, me the one who delivers, full, as it were, unable to digest even a corn ear, my harvest for you, my detritus, my gleaned forgetfulnesses, whatever I cannot take or swallow, my sickness, how I mark boundaries, unconscious, with my body, its gestures, its secretions, its products, my anxious asceticism. And it gushes forth through my silenced pregnancy, the suffering it caused me, my body that suddenly doubled itself for you, pregnant with my infant and my fear, my body that became strange to me and due to which you grew estranged from me, the child that was taken away from me to you and your people, your people’s households which prescribe, to both you and me, endless sacrifice. And it sneaks in at the very end through my disappearance, breach of the vow that I pledged to you as I returned to my home. Is there, for this relationship, a naked truth, clear, dichotomous, defined, shorn of doubt? A truth neither distraught nor perverse? And is this truth monstrous, fruit of the distance between two worlds that were at such odds from the start, (not-)meeting so as to deepen the abyss between them? But does not this truth of necessity exist side by side with other truths, each constantly changing, elusive, clouding over, mocking us, visible behind our destructiveness, which is not always directed at something we reject, something we are obliged to reject, but at what is good. And what I realized intuitively, all of a sudden, this is the truth as well. And in that place, no one can console me. And perhaps this scroll itself is the pure gift, ambivalent, the hardest of my gifts, the one escaping any control and any hope of reciprocity, and maybe not, as it writes alongside the anonymous addressees, their indistinct plurality, to one single addressee. I am writing this letter for you, addendum to the Book of Ruth, a substitution. You ask me why I should be doing this and what it consists of,

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actually: is it a summary or a will, a call or a yell, surely the nation does not need this scroll, the nation takes no interest in what is not general, shared, agreed, and you are skeptical about memory, you who do not withhold your censure, neither from others nor from yourself, diminishing the weight and value of each achievement, turning it into something vulgar, unsatisfactory, shunning like fire the arrogance that allows us to think otherwise, sneering at me that, after all, it is only for your sake, for your own sake you wish to recover your voice, to show me through signs and samples how you kept the promise you made to me on the road, how you could transform resentment into yearning. It is you who has to process it in order to be able to continue, while I must turn it into a barren desert, for exactly the same reason. I agree. Refusing to disconnect from you, afraid of doing so, afraid of the guilt I will feel when I take my distance, or that I will think badly of you, afraid of disconnecting from the running water, from the forking I created through you, an inner split that both torments and holds me tight, that abates my solitude and increases it sevenfold. At times I would like you to let me go, to leave me alone, that we will never meet again, never again overflow the cup, since things as they are, from the distance, are less deadening than when you were there, accessible. Yet it is as though I am in debt to you, a debt whose meaning eludes me, far beyond our deficiencies and maladies. In order to receive the words of the other woman, in order to assimilate them, to repeat and reproduce them, I become like her, one: subject of an expression. Through osmosis/psychic identification. Through love.13

This entire nation knows the meaning of this debt, except for me, who came for other reasons and stayed behind, dissolved and scarred, with the obligation to uphold your memory, clear, full of life, the obligation to make my peace with you, excuse every caprice, accusing myself. And I am able to do this exactly because you are not here, to temper your destructiveness, mitigate my need, to forgo, forget, become less dependent on you, woman who is outside me. And I believe that all the addenda to our scroll and to the scrolls of others must go on being written continuously, I am calm now, talking to you in spite of your decrees, from an obscure corner beyond the danger zone. What was the matter with you? Boredom? Indifference? Envy? Competition? A drop in tension? Depression? Neglect? Haste? Comfort? Impatience? Deep insight? Frustration? Fear? Over-involvement? I will not know what it was, then, that happened in your soul, what remained with you of all this, is it only the official version, the witness proceedings— or did they betray you, too? I can now

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imagine even better what I knew all along, and document some of your recurrent gestures, those I understood in spite of myself, those recorded even by the scribe himself, as by a glitch of his quill, those that haunt me even today, though I have become addicted to my fantasies and have sweetened all those pills, maybe seeing, maybe not, hearing with half an ear, becoming part of the substitute world that I erected meticulously and that demands to be recognized, to execute its right to exist. I ask myself why I protect it so strenuously, receiving information from outside, allowing it to slowly trickle into me, subdued by it, and nevertheless with a kind of determination that comes before the act, insisting on the key principles of our encounter. Nothing stains you, not really, everything can be removed. Our bubble, the moment of our birth, remains protected, it is a plant I water day by day, routinely, except for the fact that the atmosphere underwent radical change, and that we live in it rather than in the bubble, I rehearse to myself, it is that atmosphere that befell us like an edict from on high, or from you. To what extent do we invent our intimate other? Do we do it in the same way as we invent fictions, or tools, or gods? Are we capable of letting another voice penetrate our world and inscribe us with its difference? Was I actually able to contain your absolute otherness, or you mine? At the hard point where we met, given the wounds that were scalding inside our bodies, it was almost impossible to unravel the closed structures of our already-formed personalities. I woke into your presence as an adult, wife of your son, opening up toward you in order to return to my surroundings even more pointedly than I had ever experienced them. I came to know myself better thanks to you, I discovered myself. In his Circonfession Derrida writes that the wish to understand one’s self is related to the need to be understood by an internalized other, an internalized good object, whose universalized fantasy appears in the form of the twin, whose image, as it were, represents dissociated, unstructured parts of the ego, those that the ego would like to understand by its reconstitution within them. I depended on you, on your otherness which at the same time caused profound pain, opening wounds as it did. I find it difficult to explain this paradox. A mother, of a certain age, a Jewess, alien, in a country not her own, stirs up in me such a shattering deluge, shaking me to my very core, baring my bones, unsure roots—all this just to indicate that something is out of order. Yes, I was in a permanent state of chaos, I knew it, held in a delicate balance. It was as though those repressed structures had long since conceived to get out of their prison, and you were there at the point of decision: to go with you to me or to let go and stay with what was familiar. You were bigger than me, much. I showed respect for the generation gap

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that extended behind us and stood between us with everything this involved, struggle and paralysis, my youthfulness and your aging, your experience and my immaturity, our femininities which were at opposite stages of development. I listened to your stories, which moved, suffocated, stupefied, and disheartened me, which were part of your giving. But part, too, of your self-immersion, looking after yourself, and yet not caring sufficiently, listening distractedly, impatient, to mine, and judgmental, almost always. You came first, more important than me. I was hesitant. I was afraid of you. Trying to protect you, I forgot to protect myself from you. I could not and did not want to revolt against you, breaking the unwritten rules of this covenant which relied, among other things, on your inhibitions and mine, on my insecurity, and on your way of blocking channels of giving that were reserved for your tribe. I needed you to protect me like a baby, craved your touch and attention. And thus I tied my hands which were tied anyhow by loving you, being in awe of you. Still, strangely, we had shared horizons. Across the huge difference you speak, rant, cover up, and feel—more powerfully than I—the great void, you feel it without mercy or pity for yourself, ironic, bitter. Exalting me in the face of our sisterhood of the void, then showing your nails, shifting into the defensive, humiliating, attracted, projecting, unable to take more. With our senses we knew what was impossible, precisely, and the impossibilities, with their various origins, coincided. I did not guess what was coming, I did not realize the intensity of the crisis that had occurred or of those that were in store. I was waiting. Huddled, I listened for your response to the women of Bethlehem. I went out full and the Lord has brought me back empty, even though I was there at your side all the time. I knew you were not there in the same way as I was, that something was eating away at you from inside. This was a prophetic image, it went unnoticed, of what was to happen again so many times. You needed me, your adoptive daughter, to reinvent yourself, toy with your options in the society from which you had been exiled for some time and to which you came back, an exile in your homeland, known and unknown, change having furrowed your face and etched your body. You needed me to recognize your old-new face, to caress it, to make it legitimate, exactly because I was a stranger. Strange, for it was I who enabled you to belong. We paid a price, we still pay dearly for living in the cultural, ideological environment in which we developed. You grew up with a much more outspoken sense of otherness than I did, you were proud of that feeling, but at times weary, frustrated with it, craving peace and tranquility, stability, and because of this more sensitive, attuned to my otherness, anxious for me, wanting to marry me to a man, to smooth the transition for me. I did not grasp your moves at first. I let you become full and give

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birth to yourself. Birth and procreation, a mother and her daughter, these were the metaphors we lived by, the metaphors we literally were, as we exchanged roles. I allowed you to vanquish your void, to make yourself a place, only when I brought you things that were not me, only when I curbed our joint pleasure, sacrificing it so that, late in life, you could feel, for perhaps the first time, that you belonged, identified, even if only incompletely, with the law. Thus when I came back with Boaz’s property, when I took care of your food, and when I gave you a child, your child, because I became pregnant in order to become you, I became pregnant to a man who was closer to your age, without grasping at what cost, I became pregnant in order once again to merge with you who swallowed me, clouding my power of judgment altogether, which devoured you as if into its entrails. The compulsion to stay with what had arisen in me, in the world we created, clashed with a more pressing need to protect this child inside me, not to relinquish him, a reflection of my attachment to you. It dawned on me only then that I had no real notion, that I did not internalize my being part of your people, the obligation of every woman in your community to accommodate her needs and yearnings, to subjugate her womb to the family. I was an utter atheist, a hybrid creature, identifying neither with your laws nor with your god, with Boaz who, in his splendor and righteousness represented that world, I was not prepared to let go into your people’s bear hug, be subject to surveillance, to authority and purposefulness— only yours, I enthralled myself to be sucked back, blameless, grateful to you, thus giving birth for you, in your place, becoming one with you, becoming you, and staying infertile, after all, virginal, boyish, as if knowing already that the child would be taken from me, who was unable to raise the boy, whose loyalty to you came before my loyalty to him, my loyalty to myself, that he would seek my devotion in vain: Psychotic people remind us, at times—in case we had forgotten—that our representational machinery, which causes us to speak, constitute or believe, rests on nothing. Could it be that they are the most radical of atheists, who do not know that the ability to represent requires a third, thus remaining prisoners of the archaic mother whom they mourn through the agony of emptiness?14

The mode of exchange I knew was ours, nothing else, the food that passed from my mouth to yours, thy people—my people, thy God—my God. Boaz understood that I must not come to you empty-handed, that only thus my existence in the nourishment of your old age was ensured. Always you two met in the face of shared fears. It has been fully related to me all that thy hast done

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to thy mother-in-law since the death of thy husband, and how thy hast left thy father and thy mother and the land of thy birth, and art come to a people whom thou knewest not before. And as you were fulfilled, so was I. I ate and left and was replete, wishing all the time for you to feed me with a spoon, gulping your words thirstily, famished for your love, consumed by jealousy for you. I invested in you, and inevitably in the order of your desire, I could not escape this paradox. And they gave you respect, place, acknowledgment, shelter, due to me. All of a sudden you became a proper member of the religious and moral institutions, the ones that always demand explanations, confessions, etiquette, those who you could not stand, those who caused you to wander to the fields of Moab, those whose violence you violently rejected. I enabled you, me, the stranger, by force of a law that was not ours, to enter the ritual, to settle down, to acquire progeny, a name, continuity, security, customs, a history, to disavow me, since you knew, much like I did, that there was no law or custom, no charter and no agreement that could regulate our relationship, because it depended on us only, on our ability to observe attentively, to resonate each other’s experience, on our loyalty, integrity, without guarantee or security, and if we only kept to it then it too would keep. And in spite of all we did, what happened between us, you found yourself, again, as though at the very point of departure, worn out, angry, not belonging. Both of us, perhaps, made sacrifices, as our lives long since had been all sacrifice. We understood that if we wanted to exist in this society we had to concede our desires and our bodies to its aims. I did not sacrifice anything when I pledged my loyalty to you at the start of our way. I was, then, extremely close, the closest, to myself and my desire. Those around us, though, were unable to let us be. They made their demands, make us a child and then go, and you agreed, you did not refuse, you did not rebel, you did not quarrel my quarrel. If order was to be restored, I had to be marked, I the stranger, stripped, from the outset, of her own homeland and yours. As for me, I had never had a home of my own, neither there nor with you, always uprooted, a passerby, always passing. Given the perplexity and confusion of those years, given the total unraveling undoing the structures, without props, without clarity, given years of hunger and ruination, there was a desperate and intense need to cling to the family, the land, the dynasty, and thus to conclude, with a cathartic determination, the scroll that was attributed to me. I lost all direction. Prostrate, I fell to the ground, flattened, for where should I go, back, to the mother I left, the homeland I abandoned? And if I stayed, could I, sufficiently mature, acknowledge this separation and accept it? And again my body gave me

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a negative sign. You falter, it warned, you falter and may find yourself, again, falling short. All those around us grasped this and made light, judgmental and intolerant as they tended to be, spreading rumors about us everywhere, and when they talked with you, since you had recently joined their ranks, they did so right through me as though I was transparent, insubstantial. The women of the place recognized my importance for you, those who snarled at you on your return, watching you, suspicious and petty, full of grudge about your perfidy, the way you took your distance, your misconduct, examining you, finding it hard to recognize you, and gloating. Now that you came back in earnest, they opened their arms wide as though to receive a lost soul, one of them, like all the others, and with that very gesture they neutralized me, averted their gaze, as if telling me, You came here from another planet, daughter of a people who are born from incestuous sin, but since you are here now it is up to you to repair and redeem, neither to sin, yourself, nor to cause others to sin, and you struggle to maintain your difference, continue being a stranger in our place. Someone had to make a sacrifice, someone had to go, to surrender and restore order. The women of the city were prepared to accept you and the child, they did not explicitly try to condemn me, but they indicated, in their way, that I had no place in your community. And Boaz was no longer alive to protect me from their scolding and their harsh words, to make sure they would not bewilder and distress me. I did not have it in me to insist, before you, and my renunciation had to be two-fold: you and the child, both from my very insides, whom I had to feed, both of you, from my waning, tainted sources, who always left more than they had taken in, and who had no redeeming power. Then there is this other abyss that opens up between the body and what has been its inside: there is the abyss between the mother and the child. What connection is there between myself, or even more simply, between my body and a foreign body, this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body and . . . him. No connection. [. . .] The child, whether he or she, is irremediably an other.15 And Naomi took the child and laid it in her bosom and became nurse to it.16 And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying: “There is a son born to Naomi.”17

Everything you said I did unflinchingly. Paying heed, in absolute trust, like a blind woman, to your painstaking plans, woman of the world. And your mind, as always, unconventional, daring, aware of the power of seduction and the

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effects of excessive drinking and eating on judgment and on sincere devotion and intimacy; woman of her people, in spite of herself, who plays the social and familial politics of her surroundings to suit her needs. I could still hear the last sounds of your doubts, speaking to me and about yourself in the same language on that night, confusing between us, go get washed, and I anointed myself, and I put thy raiment upon thee, and I went down to the threshing floor, and I lay down, listen to yourself, what is the matter with you, but you are very fast to recover, determined to separate from me, you ask me, on my return: Who art thou, my daughter? Wanting me to change, us, so that we will no longer know ourselves. And we wait, our last time together like this, to see how things will turn out, before you send me to an old man, in his eighties, who will die on my wedding night. I did not grasp, then, that this was your way of telling me: Go, please, live out there in the world, be at peace, that you were reverting to your usual language, from before we went together, supposing—why—that married life held peace and security, that you had enough of me going mad on your account and you going mad on mine and about me. And I help you to steer me through my absolute love for you, my unobserving faithfulness, and assist you in ridding yourself of my burden, I return to the world of action for your sake even though I am partner neither to it nor to its sons, resisting its defenses, its united front, its pressures, and I who am not a woman of concessions. As for myself, I was sleepwalking, exhausted by work, brimming with energies, as if throwing myself to the floor, flattening myself on the ground, toward the abyss, toward the start of your redemption which equaled the start of my downfall, and perhaps my redemption, perhaps my redemption too, attending to my body alone— somewhat neglecting it, negating life, or actually responding the more intensely to its needs, I, the one who survives in spite of herself, widow of Makhlon, your god turned me into a laughing stock, feeble like him, defiant and not forgiven.18 Our birth, our motherhood, the hour of grace, the energy, each of us alone, the world we created, its power, mutual, unprecedented, where I was vital and you were vital, addressed to me from you, to you via me, a possibility that saw the light of day with us, thanks to us, Puah and Shifra, you joked at the time, in an attempt to find our ancestry, acknowledging the singularity of response of me, of you, of each of us to the other. Yes, we too made life, we too gave birth, together, but we touched, too close, a light touch, tender, restoring—as it were—a possibility that does not return and, not being the way of the world, cannot be restored. During an art exercise, two patients, one bulimic, the other anorexic, chose to make a joint drawing. What happened between them, and was emphasized in the process

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of this activity, functioned as a basis for the two patients’ modes of relating to others. The anorexic patient (A) was unable to make independent, autonomous drawings in the presence of the bulimic patient (B). If she did so, she feared, there would be a violent counter- attack from B. She feared that “being herself ” would provoke B’s attack. She therefore persistently chose to please B (who was clearly not asking for this) by following her work around the sheet of paper, while she herself made additions and elaborated B’s drawings. B’s ability to “swallow” her on the paper, she felt, was so powerful that the best line of resistance she could come up with was “not to be there,” so that there would be nothing for B to swallow up other than the empty space. B, on the other hand, was taken aback by the intensity of her feelings and her ability to control A. So rather than feeling pleased, as A was reporting her reason for chasing after B on the sheet of paper, B explained that the very thing that A was trying to protect herself from (i.e., to be swallowed) was actually what she herself was experiencing. A’s eager statements about her fear of being swallowed by B in fact created a situation in which B felt she was being swallowed.19

My dreams are confusing, seductive, oppressive, I do not remember them in detail in the way you process and have keen dialogues with yours, and the order of time eludes me, dreams that prophesy and express wishes and that come after the event, and the fearsome gap that opens between nighttime and wakefulness. One evening I came to you, I entered, and the house, which I no longer recognized and which no longer recognized me, soon became flooded with figures we knew from the city, all of them, all the important ones, actually, and they adroitly arranged a feast, they put tables together and sat you at one end and Boaz at the other, Boaz, who, as always, notes what is going on, undaunted, does not reprove, and perhaps does not fully understand, and as the meal proceeds your hair grows gray, whitens, and as time passes the skin on your throat creases, and I, seated not far, look at you, at the neck and the face I loved so much, and am filled with tenderness and warmth for you. The limits of relationship are always the limits of invention and discovery— extensive, like them, and like them, too, narrow. And we delve so as to unearth for the first time, as if unprecedented, what has been there to begin with. The syntax and the idiosyncratic lexicon, completely formed, of each one of us. We were astonished, surprised, shaken each by the other, each from the other, and we needed to accept ourselves, respond to our own expectations of ourselves, to withdraw, to revert, to fold back, to merge with the familiar. I turn it over in my thought and wonder, would like to move away from the harsh, disenchanted conclusion that imprisons itself in the expansive, homogenous order of the present which opens only apparently to the accidental and new, then to immediately

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seal and congeal at its horizon and economy. You did not invent me. I did not invent you. Both of us were circling around ourselves, even when what seemed to be going on was a trespassing of the last frontier, crossing from land to land, from religion to religion. We clung to the possibility that seemed to be there when we met, one magic moment when it seemed that we really could contain one another. But at the end of this long journey we found ourselves startled, frustrated, disappointed— each of us with herself, with each other. Could it be that it was necessary for us to open up like this, be exposed, our expectations in a mess, to become one, so that we may feel the more powerfully what was missing, deluding ourselves that what came back at us, directly or indirectly, from this joint walking, stimulated our narcissism and appeased it, dulled its pains. And what you created through me, by means of me, went on coping very well without me. It did not return to me, first perhaps in the form of gratitude or regard, and soon it turned away from me. My motherhood for you, whose outlets were unfortunately so few, had one single side and I was happy with it, and felt strong and powerful and vital and important—yet you soon had enough of it, your enchantment short lived, in a flash, lifting me up then casting me down, all at once. I became more and more ephemeral in your presence, and you more and more hermetic in mine, and once I left Oved in your trusty hands, what I remained with was this creation of mine, which is closer to me than sons, where I have no merits, the creation by means of which I work through, and ask questions about, my freedom, my tethered freedom, which was addressed to you, unknowing, and has not returned and does not stop being astonished at the wealth and poverty of all that abides together in this one, miserable, shocking, and superfluous relationship we made. Yes, each detail of our demise I recall precisely, pointedly, painted from my poor petrified perspective. Each detail including the deceptions, the last gropings for a reality which in just a little while would no longer be ours. Dates, hours, inflections, gestures, an arbitrary, quivering chronicle of daily life, violence and resentment that were not directly aimed, that did not rise to a surface which, in its turn, eddied oblivious and serene. White days. Regular days. It is all remembered and not remembered, blocked, not situated and not defined. And the moment, the moments, those sites in the body that absorb the hardest sentence, the one bearing poison, the one that darkens everything, that drives the mind crazy, crushes structures, stupefies thought, even if its apparent meaning does not suggest it. I, however, noted something there, and I knew that from now on everything would be up to me, for my sake, reparation, rehabilitation,

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mending, and I knew it had already become impossible to settle. Would we have agreed about the time, the date? At what moment did the murder occur, at what did mourning set in? The time of our distinct mourning will surely designate different calendars, we have long since moved outside the clock, and it will shed a new light on what was, and what we took, and how we continued, what we removed and repressed and lulled to sleep within us, and whether we met at all, whether separation led us inward or pushed us out, where you took it, what you approached in its wake, did you rend your garment in mourning before lowering the screen, covering the face, does there remain any recollection of me that touches you, a sound, image, tune, object circulating within you, a love you carry inside, that you feel in spite of the distance, that you trust, hold on to, believe in as in a good potion. How accessible is this recollection? How erased or intrusive? How sorrowful, or bickering with itself about things you said or kept yourself from saying, or did or recognized or did not fully appreciate? I always came early, I always come early, and you are always late. You were late by minutes, then by long hours, then you stopped. My obsessiveness as opposed to your hysteria, my archivizing, which broods over the palaces of memory, as opposed to your sharp mutations and incisions, my measured and predictable days of celebration and ritual as opposed your distaste for any routine rhythm, with its pact of commitment, my conservatism and your anarchy, the severity of my discipline, the flow of your non- discipline, my stability and your caprice, our polar defense mechanisms, our modes of channeling impulses and destructiveness, what we did with the chaos that threatened us. I love memory. This is nothing original, of course, and yet, how else can one love?20

The king tells Hamlet that to go on mourning beyond its appointed, “normal” time is a gesture neither filial nor “manly,” indeed it is not even human and constitutes, rather, a crime against both the dead person and reason. And the chorus repeats his words, assuming that the time of mourning may be reduced, delimited, mitigated, assuming that mourning depends on us rather than on the others within us, declining to recognize its archeological dimension, the vital journey which it is upon the mourner to conduct toward the fantastic and the nightmarish, at the margins of empirical reality. The undefined term of mourning constitutes the impossible measure and yardstick of the play. ’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father: But, you must know, your father lost a father: That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound,

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In filial obligation, for some term To do obsequious sorrow: but to persevere In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness; ’tis unmanly grief: It shows a will most incorrect to heaven; A heart fortified, a mind impatient; An understanding simple and unschool’d: For what we know must be, and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense, Why should we, in our peevish opposition, Take it to heart? Fie! ’tis a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd, whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corse till he that died today, This must be so. We pray you, throw to earth This unprevailing woe; and think of us As of a father.21

Hamlet, listening to his step-father, his uncle/father by law, believes that rational discourse is bestial, for only the animals do not mourn and have no notion of dates, that this is a rationalizing ploy which comes to cover up criminal interests, and he wonders, wanders in his memory since when he has actually been in mourning: But two months dead!—nay, not so much, not two. And we do not know, writes Derrida, whether Hamlet is speaking figuratively or is hallucinating or else is toying with madness in order to outwit his partners, in order to fool everyone so as to put the foundational act of violence, which has turned into a phantasm, back on stage by arranging for a theatrical reprise which will capture the criminal in his own symptom. Oh God! O How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world! Could I have reduced the period of mourning, delimited it, mitigated it, mourning the lost opportunity and the lack of opportunity lost, which disintegrated in the face of reality and of our souls, leaving behind an absolute void. Time passes, sealed and inaccessible. Not a thing happens, as if it stopped occurring, as if time were mourning for itself. Instead of stretching and expanding, it shrinks. Another month has passed as if it never was, maybe all this has been a mere interval, a delay, after all. Passover, Shavuoth, New Year, and they have already started reading the scroll, like an open book, and another Passover, Shavuoth,

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New Year, two cycles of holy days, two cycles of living days, without blessings— and once again. Is there time that is not time of mourning? My memory reels under the weight. It could, as it were, help to forget or wipe out, if it would dare to proudly bear the pressure of the events, and show me—woe me!—through signs and symbols that any future, any future, is instantly more deserving, liberated. But it can insist, invert, turn the matter over, dull the edges, fantasize, filter, surround itself with icons. It can fit me out with vengeful feelings. It can cause the rush of arrows which I aim at myself, and their poison, to surge, arrows of censure and punishment, my remorse for not having acted otherwise, for what-if and perhaps. And still, what happened may have had to happen, there was something sobering about it, some truth lacking the strain of truthful talking or of confession. It was difficult for me, perhaps impossible, to admit to myself, to invent words for what I saw and felt, to explain the growing distance. But the end was true to itself. Something clean, inarticulate, mute, without the superlative babble that is characteristic of beginnings, which characterized our opening, wherever thy goest I will go, thy people shall be my people. There was tiredness—true fatigue, and forgetfulness—true forgetfulness. It was terrible but true, and there is some comfort in truth. On the plains we were traversing, the choice had to be strictly authentic and unambiguous. Either yes or no. I could see how you reacted to me, to what now was not a mere exaggeration over which we might shake our head, already accustomed and with astonishment, but distasteful madness, unrealistic. And from sheer immersion in your experience of my madness, in which you could find neither head nor tail, I did not pay attention to your madness, the madness of your resentment which was ever more rising, to your lack of understanding and restraint. I stopped pleasing you, I knew reprieve was beyond my power. For some time I went on pestering both you and me, forgetful of the new rules of the realm, and the fruits of this overexertion were embarrassing and barren. Time is out of joint, and from being a determined woman, determined to move with you, at your side, across all boundaries, I became paralyzed, reserved, withdrawn, watchful, apathetic, like Hamlet, excluded, in a dying world, a world that lapsed into disorder, not taking part, neutralized, much like him, knowledge makes me feel nauseous and be inactive, for I cannot change anything in the essential nature of things, the way in which intimacy and routine and the habits that give composure and render calm even when they are saturated with stress, come to nothing. I am swept from rage and tumult to an inability to respond, to struggle, to speak, to discuss, vanishing into an insignificant spot in space, in absolute expectation of something, signs from outside, of manifest changes, a waiting that goes on and on and on, while

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the conversation between us is at its height, lively, dynamic, flowing and safe. And we flourish. And I immediately suppress the impulse that urges me to knock on your door, your boundary, your walls, to go there in a run in order to tell you something, balling my fist at the delirious moments when I am on the verge, unarmed, naked. You are forbidden to me, and all around, the chorus—my peers in Bethlehem, and yours, who have not forgiven you— clamor univocally against my wantonness, measuring it in time. A young woman, you are still a young woman, they say, and the years pass and you waste them thinking of her and waiting for her and dealing with the knowledge that, of course, she will not come back, which you knew from the start, the two of you knew, that there was no chance, that is: many years wasted, a premeditated waste, and more waste now, of work and effort and paper and my youth, irreversibly, becoming more remote, waste, too, of dreams and wishes and potential coupledom, and waste of moods and tears and distances taken in order to escape you. A terrible waste, conclude the observers, those who take measure, asking whether it was worthwhile, a good investment. And I reject the standard, learning about economics all the time, about frustration and appetite, about the three-dimensional vision on the outside, and the internal one-dimensional kind, and about the outside’s no-vision in face of the aura inside. Our difficult, neurotic city makes for a motley space to move in, with its crowds, masses, traffic. One can look away, cross dirt paths, be silent, be loud to the extreme, mock or show scorn or curiosity, one can ignore, shrug, turn one’s back, slip away, and all this from the distance. Yet the open plot on which we are playing, differently, with the parts of our souls, suffocates us and closes in on us. I cannot look for your eyes as you pass in the street, alone usually, like me, you too notice, secluded and alone, with other people, at times, at times with Oved, in all the public places, crowded, clamorous, at the city gate, at the inns. Civility is reasonable, inscrutable, flat, laconic. The city forces an indistinct homogeneity on us. At the surface our otherness loses its outline, its outstandingness, its substance, the trail of memories that comes in our wake as though erased, accompanies us now in hidden rivulets. The city is an efficient tool for avoiding touch and confrontation, unparalleled in its violence, intrusive, waking me from my nap, preventing me from floating or drifting, for any length of time. Its streets are pretty but I am not alive to their detail, I am drowsy, attuned to your random existence or absence. There was a time when we were able to move our home into public spaces. Wonder and clarity were not lost or put at risk as we moved from here to there. We were wholly immersed in ourselves, oblivious, deep into

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the senses, the sensory, as though a hidden thread tied us into each others’ arms, into our thoughts, the apprehension that was flooding us. We pushed the surface into the margins. I find it hard to remember even one important public event during those wild, miserable days under the authority of the judges. And I who went on with this existence in fine- tuned isolation, who now live the lack of symmetry in full privacy, without your knowledge, without your presence, I ask myself how you casually enter the picture, passing by “precisely” as you pass through me, passing me in a faint voice, harsh, weak, since softness, your softness is born from strength, your eyes are empty, shut, evasive, denying, frozen and freezing, you avert your face, tell me, No, that I must desist, that I am a burden you resist, an imposition you hurl away, furious, compelled to kick as once you felt compelled to embrace, forgetful of the girl within you, the one to whom such a gesture would be offensive, smarting, frightening, killing, the girl who more than others is familiar with the smarting and the panic as with the supreme value of kindness and compassion, who identifies what is fragile, humiliated, miserable, abject, scorned, you forget the girl within me whose heart—as your step meeting mine falters, spinning on its heel, rushing every which way so we do not meet— is crushed and afflicted, and you bolt into the depths of a shop, aware of my eyes on you, still without even slightly reducing the power of my fantasy about you, toward you, about the enlightened woman who lives inside me, her smell, her touch, filtered clean from unpleasant information, from disappointment which I allow myself once in a while to feel without immediately finding interpretations and justifications, a woman who wanders along counterfactual paths in counter-time, the time of my soul which taught itself not to need you. Even the most casual of meetings is suffused with significance as the disconnection grows and expands, becomes tighter. I cling to the world I created because it is all I possess, more real than the relationship I had without a true partner. Sometimes it scares me, as though it renders my way impassable, my way whose patterns are fixed, fixated and rigid, satisfying and frustrating at once. Each time anew, the same event in its entirety, detailed, heavy, which is not taking place at all. It has its own, private time, and it vanishes just as suddenly as it comes. Yet this recurrent pattern according to which you always appear as the same figure, taking the same roles, enables me to cope with the suddenness of your leaving. I can cling to it, control it, summon it as I wish, I go to the inn, putting my hat on the chair at my side, just in case, just in case you suddenly turn up. I think it was this pattern that supported me then as well, when we were together, protecting me from you and from the ongoing failure of being with you. It was, also, a way of solving the ambivalence that tore me, the repressed

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ambivalence which could not but register or feel the lack of satisfaction that marked our encounter. When withdrawn deep, in secrecy, I always felt obliged to restore what had been plundered in your presence, under my full responsibility. I look after you, after your sanity, with such tenacity, because I always kept close to you, and because I cannot, in fact, forgive you the wrong you committed, your sins, what you inflicted on me, beyond any either spoken or tacit agreement between us. I refuse to consider my own destructiveness in order to fight you, your view of the world, the darkness which you cast on yourself and your surroundings, your self-image which I do not want to contemplate. You are in denial, and I am not in denial, and actually, yes, I am, in denial about your denial, about what my eyes can see. Fantasy is neither dream nor reality. It is void, shorn of intuitions, and nevertheless it becomes not just a substitute for reality but a mode of revealing it, situated at the very origin of expectations, hopes, and debacles. Dream and reality are entangled, excessive, I have difficulty controlling them, I have difficulty letting you go into their dominions, not yet, time is not ripe. You erased me with such a terrible erasure that I changed—in your eyes too—into an utter victim. I had to become nothing, disappear completely, as even the slightest reference to my existence—which was too dense for you—any sadness, regret and guilt and yearning and failure interfere with determined, clear-cut erasure, jolting the two of us yet again. What was it about me that you had to flee from me? Why can’t you meet my gaze, why is such a simple gesture impossible now? And what was the matter with me that this gesture should have such deep significance, as if I were telling you: Know me, please, acknowledge me, say my name. You, however, can no longer bear that recollection, the pillar of smoke, the living monument, the ghost that flits through the street, popping up again and again, where you are, not a lover, not a bride, not a friend, existing, present, exposed, moving among the people, you and you and you, related and hating it, important and hating it, suddenly hating everything about me, hating more than you love, hating yourself, hating to see yourself in the mirror that is me, who so easily became your superego, which you longed for and identified with, while now you avoid it so it will not put you in mind of some image you want to forget, hating my wretchedness and my joy, hating how I keep close to the maidens, with a cruel anger, desperate, guilt-ridden, vengeful, from afar, your gaze rests, differently, on my shoulders, my gait, my expression, my face, my clothes, scrutinizing me with a bland curiosity from the places where we walk or sit, which we dominate in our weakness, exhausting one another. To you, I became your enemy, and either you are aggressive or on the defensive as you process or distort the information and impression refracted by me. And I

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identify with you, as it were, rise firmly on my legs, act, walk, but my soul shatters stunned under your negation, I enter a dizzy spin and, like you, can no longer bear my own presence, hate myself, taken aback, our negatives join hands. I punish myself for continuing to be, though you do not want me to be, taking myself to task because you are forced to mobilize such huge forces of negation, polluted source, lightless, a fortified wall against me, forces that crush your own self-image. I hate myself for what I have caused you to show me, for your terrible anger with yourself, your depression, your judgment that pierces and fails to pierce, poignant and superficial. I cannot accept the ugliness that got released without feeling ugly as a result. There are times, in those undiluted situations which hold nothing but you and me, that I, too, do not want to be, want not to be for you, just as I wanted to be completely when you wanted me. And so death will part thee and me. You are the one who ordains life and death. Your departure meant death for me, you are alive and I am dead for you, and I am dead for myself and as a result struggle daily to live in spite of this death, the scalding memory of the killing act, and I do not turn to you because I cannot die twice over. It is thanks to you that I am impervious to killings at the hands of others. The thought that I could have left before you does not give me the slightest satisfaction, in much the same way that my sense of humiliation results neither from my total defeat nor your total victory. But I find it easier to imagine separation through death, death organizes separation in a way that life does not contrive. It distributes functions: it is clear who is the archivist and what is his task, when he profanes, clearly not in the sense of predetermined imperative, but as a result, and due to the persistence, of the psychological dynamic that prevailed. When separation occurs in life, inventiveness is required. Someone continues to be alive, and someone lives less, is less lively, and it is not so clear what should be kept and whether it is possible to keep it and whether what is kept is not forever tainted and whether it actually deserves keeping and for how long. Something stylized entered your gaze, a masking, a certain neutral expression, a harsh look, flat, self- conscious, refusing, concealing, in masterful control, contentious, scornful, as if not disclosing anything, not allowing any direct encounter, on the other side of the cloak, other than very scant moments of vulnerability, fissure, familiarity, blessed interval, moments that communicate some added value which I cannot name, allowing me to imagine you, to be close to you, to share the pain of your graying hair as if we had been talking, to respond poignantly as if we were in touch, because we are in touch, allowing me to take you

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unto me— or alternatively these moments do not look, become oblivious, turn their backs, on me, on the world. It is not only in the home that relations form, they are subject to what happens in the street. You do not wish to be carried away, you resent me because you were carried away. From the distance, I turn into a species, an object with a definite identity, one of a kind, unspecific, a nightmare in which you do not wish to belong, a type the encounter with which depresses you, which represents your failure, your insufficiency, and I want to yell into your ears that I am not a type at all, and you know it, how do you dare inflict this on me, you, and us, and why do you busy yourself with classifications, and what makes it impossible for you to see a woman who loves you and respects you, recognizes your talents, acknowledges your goodness, and I want to call you by your name, I find other women whose name is the same as yours for the sake of this prosaic pleasure of using their name, to greet them, remembering how you called me once, creasing the name in your way, with your voice, and I am aware that these intensities, the slope that slides us down into beyondknowing, these spirits are larger than me and you, who conducts negotiations with so many figures from the past and the present, whom the Almighty has dealt with bitterly, even in joy, and all of them, whether from the netherworld or from the upper regions, put a distance between us beyond reason and beyond emotional tokens. And most intensely, therefore, you hate my love, feel enormous guilt toward me, who went on abiding by you, who swore allegiance and did not breach my vow, who went on respecting you, as you did not yourself, so that perhaps you are right to have avoided confrontation. I want to go to you, rush at you, but the demons are strong, outdoing my dreams and fantasies, more powerful than my nightmares, reality. Better so, perhaps—it is they who are reality, they who constitute its boundaries. And I hate them and am crippled. They chase me away from you and they will drive me out of this city of ours and land of ours, to hell, to my ancestral tombs, so far away from you. I have not the strength for this spectral fight, a struggle I never wanted. Vanquished, I lie in a crazed sleep invaded by absurd scraps of dream which I cannot put together, wrapping myself, heavily burdened, pushed out to get going. And as I leave you will rejoice. No longer will you be confronted, over and over, with your decision, with your weakness, my pain, your absence of pain, you will not be disturbed—as I disturb such a fragile balance in you, my whole body, reacting to you, ashiver, my body that strains under the burden of its memories, becomes weak, its muscles slackening, its energy fading, my knees grow rigid, find it hard to move, decline to recover, and I crawl inside the cloud of stifled tears, while I still, faintly, love your movement, your supple step, soft, sensitive to the substance of

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the ground, your gait which outdoes mine in stability, the possibility of us meeting, coming up against each other, and, in the end, it is not you but a shade, or some other woman, similar, or even someone who is not similar, on certain days, at certain hours, on the market, on the field, and always, nevertheless, a shock, a shock for which I am prepared, which catches me unawares, huge and tumultuous. As time passes, I grow more aware of my body’s reactions and put them to the test once more. I don’t know whether they will continue, whether they will come back to afflict me again, at the same intensity or another intensity. I tremble with fear for what causes my fear and for what I cannot firmly anticipate now. Always I want to see you, but I fear you, and I want to slip away from you and your enigmatic presence, from your face that has stopped telling me anything, that eludes my vision and knowledge. My body, as it weakens, is more resolved to take the blows, under attack, consumed from within, dejected, dragging on with difficulty, hounded, everything seems to conspire against me, and I flee into apprehensiveness, defeatism, I don’t want to fight, wars hold no interest for me, and I barely manage the urgency and panic in my voice, when I make my announcement, recount, or ask for help. Sometimes you relent. You relate to me indirectly, but you will never again seduce, you do not invite. Not wanting any connection. I must not come near and touch your cloak. I must eschew all this like fire. I would like to accompany you as I was wont to, your existence opens and closes at will, as it wishes, as it needs, and it may not consider me at all important, not explicitly, as far as its current life is concerned, it may well be that it observes no connection between its manifestations and wishes and my waiting, my expectations. This is not a generous friendship, a generous love, it is not a generous separation. For there is no generous separation. In my wildest fantasies, not necessarily those in which we revert to the state of love, you go on being remote but you respond, from the distance feeling the currents passing from me to you, and this is enough to fill me. The friendship was deeply anchored in the freedom of each of us. This is our responsibility and it has not been voided because we are scattered and lost in our populated world, divided, distended, tearing us apart. I believed you erred when you distinguished between the two: your freedom was bound up with a lack of responsibility toward me, of the kind that does not take my freedom into account, usurps my freedom, situated at the very crux of the struggle for it, which I have to maintain on my own, without you, fighting for you and me, a silly struggle, superfluous, you think, whose name does not need cleansing, by anyone, nor do you care what I think or say in retrospect. You do not care whether I am reconciled or easy to appease, you do not believe that these matters deserve an apology, moral

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or emotional, you have no need for me to ease a sense of responsibility that you do not feel or do not allow yourself to feel. You are no part of this anyway. You share nothing with me, no common burden, no actual connection, and the child, as stipulated by law, is with you. My loss, therefore, does not touch you, and your choice is exactly as valid as my choice to keep you, and your silence counts as much as my speech, like the latter, it too is a condition for your sanity, your refusal is just as legitimate as mine which swallows you, swallows you together with your refusal turning you into part of my identity. At times, nearly everything suggests that it must be removed, the traces wiped out, the pictures folded and thrown. All this preoccupation with witnessing, documents, scrolls—it only bears witness to my vulnerability vis-à-vis you. A day will come when this chronicle reaches its end, all its issues, the state of mind roaming it, the need to immerse myself in it. It will perish, become faint, I will go back to life, I shall not send it to you, I will not expect your response, will not wait for your unmeasured time, will not struggle for your attention, feelings will dull, shrivel, and go, the radiance will grow dim and dark and disappear, as in a dream I had, unadorned for the first time, an opaque, oppressive image. You were sitting behind me at the inn, I failed to notice you on entering, and someone hinted you were there, and we rose and gestured a greeting. You signaled from behind the glasses you were wearing, recalling the blind man’s spectacles in Beckett’s Endgame, which I had seen the night before, a casual gesture, familiar, insulting, enthralling, and it put me in mind of our tyranny and blindness, the blindness and tyranny, and of the Hebrew language that you and your people use which highlights the link between words and states.22 And I also dreamed that you were a prison warden, a gatekeeper, who wants me to address the female prisoners who are in her charge, on the subject of Moabite customs, and I come, of course, and when I finish speaking, I search for you, wanting to talk with you, to tell you I am leaving this place, and they indicate that you are asleep in some room, but when I entered you had already left, the door ajar, and out in the open, faraway in the field, you are sitting, smoking a cigarette, I approach you, you rise, your face young, as in a picture I remember, taken in your youth, I wonder how you have settled in my memory as you were at a time before we were together, while the lower half of your body is as it is now, and you blow the smoke straight into my face, and say: Go, it’s lovely, travel: Egypt, Ammon, Palestine. You are, once more, the owner of the key, you open and close, let in and see out. Disillusioned, I flee this, the humiliation, the destruction, the gaps, the resonance, the poison that both feeds and confines me. A day will come, bright, out of the blue, elsewhere, we will not have met for ages, all

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of a sudden, by surprise, you will come, having got there by chance, the distance protecting us, protecting and exposed—missing, curious, for you have already given up, we have given up, we will meet at an inn that reminds us of something, or near your guest house or my home, we will sit together. You want to say something, nevertheless, or not, assuaged with the passing of years. Our truth was, to begin with, the truth of a moment, time outside time, yet it is not true that you are outside my time, again I insist, vulnerable to your caprice, cumbersome, carnage. Again I know, groundless, without proof, know with deep conviction, same as then at the crossroads, as we were coming to Bethlehem.

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EPILOGUE

I wake in the morning And you lie beside me Your hair spills on the pillow The song of your breath even and soft So deep your sleep I say to myself, pleased Putting my feet Into my slippers Rising to make coffee And when I’m back you’re gone. Day by day I invent our memories.

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NOTES

FOREWORD 1. Eduardo Cadava delivered a paper November 2013, at Brown University, on friendship and reading in Emerson, where the motif of the unknown emerges. I asked to read “Emerson and the Wildness of Friendship” beforehand, as I was mentally preparing this piece. PREFACE 1. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Madness, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 59. 2. Jacques Derrida, “Des tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham, 209–48 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” Cultural Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 174–200. 3. Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” 174. 4. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 5. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 6. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 7. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 8. Ibid., 3, 4. 9. Ibid., 16. 10. “There is [. . .] an instance [. . .] for some ‘who,’ a ‘who’ besieged by the problematic of the trace and of difference, of affirmation, of the signature and of the so- called proper name.” Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 260. 11. Avital Ronell, in Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, trans. to Hebrew by Idit Shorer (Tel Aviv, Israel: Resling, 2005), 11. 12. In The Archive Fever Derrida describes a similar situation through the figure of the archeologist, Hanold, in Jensen’s Gradiva as it is discussed by Freud: “When the 175

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step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the printed archive is yet to be detached from the primary impression in its singular, irreproducible, and archaic origin. [. . .] In the instant of the pure auto-affection. [. . .] An archive which would in sum confuse itself with the arkhe¯. [. . .] An archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible from the impression of its imprint, Gradiva’s footstep speaks by itself! Now this is exactly what Hanold dreamed of in his disenchanted archeologist’s desire.” Jacques Derrida, The Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 97–98. 13. Ewa Ziarek,”From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference,” in Derrida and Feminism, ed. Mary Rawlinson, Ellen Feder, and Emily Zkin, 115–40 (New York: Routledge, 1997). 14. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 76. 15. Hebrew refers to both anorexia and deconstruction as a “she.” 16. Ronell’s expression, referring to many of us who— classified and excluded— engage our totality in order to push away the pressure of “social psychoization.” In Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 9, 25. 17. Quoted in Edward L. Greenstein, “Reading Strategies and the Story of Ruth,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader, ed. Alice Bach (New York: Routledge, 1999), 217. 18. Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 77. 1. FROM ABSOLUTE LOVE TO THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP 1. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler, E. Cadava, and P. Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (New York: Verso, 1997); Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” in Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism, ed. W. Hamacher, N. Hertz, and T. Keenan, 127–64 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) (from here on “Paul de Man’s War”); Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 2. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. J. Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 245–68. 3. He admits this toward the end of the book. “Without seeking to conceal it, it will have been understood that I wish to speak here of those men and women to whom a bond of friendship unites me—that is, I also want to speak to them. If only through the rare friendship I am naming, which always occasions in me a surge of admiration and gratitude.” Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 302. 4. A thorough re-reading of Freud’s essay as the precursor of object relations the-

NOTES TO PAGES 3–9

ory is presented by Thomas H. Ogden. See: “A New Reading of the Origins of Object Relations Theory,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83 (2002): 767–82. 5. By conducting a deconstruction of Derrida’s text via Freud, I do not wish to proffer any conclusive diagnosis concerning Derrida’s writings on the issue, or indeed of Derrida himself. Such an impression may arise here because Freud’s terminology makes the paternalistic gesture inherent in the very act of interpretation, which of necessity is not symmetric. I want to emphasize, first and foremost, that my suggestions are limited to what can be read in the text. In other words: Given Derrida’s frequent dealings with Freud, in general, and with his notion of mourning more particularly, juxtaposing their relevant writings seems the almost obvious thing to do. Derrida’s writing, moreover, the very texture or weave of his texts, mobilizes the psychodynamic mechanisms Freud described and analyzed. A reading of these texts is likely to help us understand some crucial questions regarding deconstruction, concerning, for instance, both the intimate and political dimensions it involves. 6. Ogden, “A New Reading of the Origins of Object Relations Theory.” 7. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. P. S. Pine- Coffin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1961), 78–80. 8. In Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), ch. 1. 9. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, trans. N. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 10. Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 254. 11. Kristeva also insists on melancholic silence, basing her insights on elaborations by both Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal. 12. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, 6. 13. Ibid., 32. 14. Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 199. Derrida does not mention it explicitly, but he is close to both Klein and Kristeva in assuming that Narcissus has an object. Primary narcissism is never an autarkic auto-affection. 15. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 205. 16. Ibid., 187. 17. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. J. Leavey Jr. and R. Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 18. 18. A more comprehensive discussion of these relations would involve texts such as The Post Card, The Archive Fever, and Resistances of Psychoanalysis. 19. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, 33. 20. Ibid., 22. 21. Ibid., 26.

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22. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 23. Ibid., 80–81. 24. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, 21–22. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 87, quoted in Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 288. 26. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. P. Kamuf and A. Ronell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 87. 27. Jacques Derrida, “For: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. B. Johnson, foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Work: A Cryptonymy, by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, trans. N. Rand, xi–xlviii (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 28. Politics of Friendship also bears out the manner in which friendship resonates the family scene. Relating in terms of the uncanny to the lack of symmetry, both in time and in space, that is inherent to friendship, Derrida uses Freud’s lexicon which describes the child’s coping with her parents’ absence: we bring them in (the friends) so as to speak with them— da— whereupon we send them back— fort— as we say to and about them that they are no longer there. We do not talk about them other than in their absence and about their absence (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 173). 29. These comments are based on some enriching distinctions made by Hélène Cixous during a lecture at the Paris École normale supérieure, on November 13, 1999, in the course of a seminar on the history of fruit: thefts, sin, and shame in texts by Augustine, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Jean Genet, Thomas Bernhard, Derrida, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Interestingly enough, these motifs of the forbidden fruit, sin, and the Christian genealogy of confession, will reappear in a later essay Derrida dedicates to de Man’s reading of Rousseau in the context of a discourse of excuse and forgiveness. This essay manifests thematic and emotional ambivalence left wholly concealed in the earlier works I examine. See Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 71–160. See also Andrzej Warminski’s discussion of that work in his essay “Machinal Effects: Derrida with and without de Man,” MLN 124, no. 5 (2009): 1072–90. 30. Derrida, “Paul de Man’s War,” 149. 31. Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 273. 32. Derrida, “Paul de Man’s War,” 157. 33. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. P. Brault and M. B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 34. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 59. This chapter incorporates Kierkegaard in order to extract a generalized affirmation about sacrifice which is no longer limited to the unique drama of the Knight of Faith on Mount Moriah—but is our daily fate and therefore constitutes

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a newly defined aporetic ethics. See Michal Ben- Naftali, “A Letter to the Other Father,” Bijdragen International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 72, no. 3 (2011): 283–97. 35. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 60–61. 36. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 258. 37. Derrida, Glas, 142–43. 38. Derrida, “Paul de Man’s War,” 154. 39. Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 208–9. See also Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascal-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), ch. 1. 40. One question which Derrida does not present is pertinent: What is the relationship between loss through death and loss as a result of separation or abandonment? What about the friend who leaves when still alive, having had enough, departing, or withdrawing? Can such a choice be understood under the same economic constraints that Derrida describes? 41. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 287. 42. Ibid., 302. 43. “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen,” Derrida returns time and again to meditate on Celan’s line in “Rams,” in Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 44. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 183. 45. Ibid., 298. Following in the footsteps of tradition, interweaving his own threads with its texture, Derrida develops the idea of friendship in a political context and to a political purpose. I may therefore be queried for choosing to relegate the usual sense of “the political” to the margins for the sake of a broad, fluid sense pointing toward the public sphere, economy and general law. Derrida asks: “Is the political a universal translating machine?” (Ibid., 196) in the face of ongoing efforts to reduce friendship to an anthropocentric and androcentric concept which will justify a certain interpretation of the political. And thus the book develops in two different directions: on one hand it analyzes the interplay between the concept of the friend-brother and democracy-brotherhood and on the other it questions the validity of these concepts and figures, which exclude other relatives (cousins, uncles, aunts, mothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers) and limit our imagination of the democracy to come. In doing so Derrida expresses his reservations regarding the canonical, exclusive model of thinking and rejects its semantics to the extent that these institute a particularist social and ethnic mode of organization. Is it possible, he asks, “to open up to the ‘come’ of a certain democracy which is no longer an insult to the friendship we have striven to think beyond the homo- fraternal and phallogocentric schema?” (Ibid., 306). Formulations of this type, always in the form of a question, appear repeatedly

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throughout Politics of Friendship. They deconstruct a fundamental concept of the political, and of adjacent/overlapping concepts of friendship and justice, by extension. However, while they indicate a new political horizon, they do not constitute the very nucleus of Derrida’s argument. Regardless of how problematic and easily deconstructable the distinction between the private and intimate, on one hand, and the political on the other may seem—Derrida’s mode of writing, whenever it becomes fundamentally melancholic, casts doubt on its political significance even when it deals explicitly with the political. See also: Michal Ben- Naftali, “The Painter of Postmodern Life,” in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber, 211–26 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 46. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 183. 47. A more comprehensive examination of expressions of negative emotional dynamics in Derrida’s writing may have to focus on other texts which he wrote polemically against his intellectual opponents, like John Searle; in the debate with Marxist thinkers following the publication of Specters of Marx, or alternatively the perfectly ambivalent text he dedicated to his teacher, Foucault, following Madness and Civilization, a text due to which their relationship was disrupted until 1984 when Foucault signed a petition to François Mitterand to obtain Derrida’s release from Czechoslovak prison. As I mentioned earlier, Derrida’s later “Typewriter Ribbon” brings to the surface, more than a decade later, through dealing with the different readings both he and de Man suggested to Rousseau’s sin, guilt, and confession, de Man’s allegorical preoccupation with his own political biography. Derrida writes explicitly that de Man’s “writings can and should be read as also politico- autobiographical texts.” Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 150. According to Warminski, “What strikes me as still more peculiar about ‘Typewriter Ribbon’— because so unlike him— is [. . . an] almost petty quality to the many minor complications he notes in de Man’s reading of Rousseau. Derrida’s other texts on de Man’s work are nothing if not generous. [. . .] Derrida’s ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ is all ‘about’ [. . .] to perform an act of impossible forgiveness for the unforgivable.” Warminski, “Machinal Effects,” 1086. 48. Jacques Derrida, “Le Toucher; Touch/to Touch Him,” Paragraph 16, no. 2 (1993): 146. This article then developed into a book: Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilee, 2000). 49. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 259. 50. Ibid., 294. 51. Ibid., 236. 52. Ibid., 173–74. 53. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 54. 54. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 301.

NOTES TO PAGES 22–35

55. Derrida, Glas, 32. 56. Ibid., 169. 57. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 252, 256–57. 58. Ibid., 174. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 291. 61. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 68. 62. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 206. 63. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 257. 64. Ibid., p. 12. 65. Ibid., 205. 66. Ibid., 13. 67. Ibid., 229. 68. Ibid., 233. 69. Ibid., 175. 70. Ibid., 305. 71. Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Invention de l’autre (Paris: Galilee, 1998); Jacques Derrida, H. C. pour la vie (Paris: Galilee, 2002); Marie-Françoise Pissart, Droit de regard: roman-photo, suivi d’une lecture par Jacques Derrida (Paris: Minuit, 1985). 72. Derrida, Glas, 151, 162. 2. LET’S SHOW OUR (POST ) CARDS 1. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. R. Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004). 2. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 3. Derrida’s autobiographical Circonfession would seem to deserve this title, but its preoccupation with identity, circumcision, Judaism, and the son’s relationship to the mother is thoroughly deconstructive, as its title already discloses, splitting as it does the subject position into Judaism (circumcision) and Christianity (confession). 4. Derrida, The Post Card, 48. 5. Ibid., 62. 6. Ibid., 53. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Ibid., 231. 9. Ibid., 237. 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Ibid., 80. 12. Ibid., 193. 13. Ibid., 197.

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NOTES TO PAGES 36–44

14. Ibid., 235. 15. In his History and Memory after Auschwitz, dedicated to the problem of representing the Holocaust and the interstices between memory and history, Dominick LaCapra considers the postmodern position, following the Holocaust, as a post-traumatic expression of a conceptual confusion between loss (historical) and absence (structural, trans-historical). This displacement, in his opinion, is an intellectual failure whose cost is the forfeiting of critical distance from experience (however traumatic) and a paralysis of the ability to ethical action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 16. Derrida, The Post Card, 115. 17. Ibid., 188. 18. Ibid., 67. 19. Ibid., 196. 20. Ibid., 154. 21. Ibid., 181. 22. Ibid., 82–83. 23. Jacques Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 420–22. 24. See Chapter 1. 25. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 26. Derrida, The Post Card, 29. 27. Ibid., 40. 28. Ibid., 176–77. 29. Ibid., 224. 30. Ibid., 111. 31. Ibid., 82. 32. Ibid., 128. 33. Ibid., 170. 34. Ibid., 14–15. 35. Ibid., 194. 36. Ibid., 23. 37. Ibid., 11. 38. Ibid., 118. 39. Ibid., 29. 40. Ibid., 42. 41. Ibid., 44. 42. Ibid., 46. 43. Ibid., 59.

NOTES TO PAGES 44–73

44. Ibid., 49. 45. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 52. Derrida will come back to this motif with the notion of the “Letter to the Father,” a propos Kafka’s letter, in The Gift of Death, chapter 5. It is always about the son, he writes, giving voice to the father giving voice to the son, a specular movement in which the son eventually invents himself. 46. Derrida, The Post Card, 51. 47. Ibid., 115. 48. Ibid., 234. 49. Ibid., 121. 50. Ibid., 66. 51. Ibid., 135. 52. Ibid., 126–27. 53. Ibid., 246. 54. See Derrida, The Gift of Death, chapter 5; Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in Questioning God, ed. J. D. Caputo, M. Dooley, and M. Scanlon, 21–51 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 55. Ibid., 135. 56. Ibid., 54. 57. Ibid., 122. 58. Ibid., 210. 59. Ibid., 36. 3. JULIA 1. Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1999); Lillian Hellman, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000). 2. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29. 3. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), 212; Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 483. 4. “AND SHE DID EAT AND WAS SUFFICED AND LEFT”: DECONSTRUCTION AS AN ANOREXIC PERSPECTIVE The quotation that appears in the chapter title is from Ruth 2:14. 1. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 294. 2. For Peggy Claude-Pierre, it is because negative consciousness imposes chaos that the person with an eating disorder tries to adopt some framework. Often, unfortunately, she fails miserably because she does not have the use of a balanced

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NOTES TO PAGES 73–90

perspective. Society often tends to interpret this attempt at order as the victim’s effort to control those around her. It does not perceive that she is struggling to exist in the world as she has no self-identity other than her failure to create a perfect world for the others. See, Peggy Claude-Pierre, The Secret Language of Eating Disorders, trans. to Hebrew Y. Ofer (Kfar Saba, Israel: Arie Nir, 1998), 48. 3. Mary Levens, Eating Disorders and Magical Control of the Body, trans. to Hebrew by B. Menes (Kiryat Bialik, Israel: Ach, 1999), 75–76. 4. People with eating disorders on the whole do not talk to each other, argues Marya Hornbacher in her fascinating book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 282. 5. Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 172–73. 6. Ibid., 37–39. 7. Ibid., 213. 8. Ibid., 213. 9. Ibid., 38, 190. 10. Ibid., 44; Kristeva argues that ever since Plotinus, theoretical thinking has forgotten its own rumble over the void, before it went on to the sun-drenched source of enlightened representation. See Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 257–58 11. Derrida, Circumfession, 268–70. 12. Ibid., 273. 13. Ibid., 101–2. 14. Ibid., 62–63. 15. Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 381–82; see also Herman Rapaport’s rich analysis in his article “Archive Trauma” of Derrida’s words in this interview which transfer the specific relationship between trauma and his writing to a fundamental relationship between traumatic destruction and philosophical writing. Herman Rapaport, “Archive Trauma,” Diacritics 28, no. 4 (1998): 68–81. 16. Tuvia Ruebner, The Traces of Days: Collected Poems 1957–2005 (Tel Aviv: Keshev Le’shira, 2006). 17. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 2005). 18. Derrida, Circumfession, 240. 19. Francois Roustang, Dire Mastery Discipleship: From Freud to Lacan, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 34. 20. Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, 174. 21. Marie Cardinal, In Other Words: An Autobiographical Novel, trans. Amy Cooper (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 72–73. 22. The reference, here, is to the two poets, Yona Wallach and Dahlia Ravikovitch, who presented two polar options in modern Hebrew poetry.

NOTES TO PAGES 94–117

23. Derrida, Circumfession, 299–301. 24. Ibid., 312. 25. Ibid., 215–16. 26. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 126. 27. Derrida, Circumfession, 38–39. 28. Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 161–96. 29. Derrida, Circumfession, 271–72. 30. Ibid., 227. 31. Ibid., 20. 32. Ibid., 253. 33. Ibid., 218. 34. Ibid., 23. 35. Ibid., 25. 36. Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 155. 37. Luce Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other,” trans. H. V. Wenzal, Signs 7, no. 1 (1981), 67. 38. Melanie Klein, “Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,” in Developments in Psycho-Analysis, ed. J. Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1970), 203. 39. Levens, Eating Disorders, 86. 40. Ibid., 81. 41. Martha Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 98. 42. Ibid., 127. 43. Levens, Eating Disorders, 73. 44. Levens, Eating Disorders, 129. 45. Chernin, The Hungry Self, 61. 46. Hornbacher, Wasted, 163. 47. Robert Rogers, Self and Other: Object Relations in Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 29. 48. Cardinal, In Other Words, 165. 49. Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir,” 61. 50. Ibid. 51. Hornbacher, Wasted, 134. 52. Ibid., 223–24; and also 93, 107, 153. 53. Chernin, The Hungry Self, 122.

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54. Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 78–96. 55. See, for instance, Walter Benjamin’s essay “After Completion” [“Nach der Vollendung”], as cited in Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1996), 70. Michelle Boulous Walker (Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence [New York: Routledge, 1998], 55), following Kristeva, develops an interesting argument regarding the “normal” psychosis that constitutes many texts in the patriarchal culture. Fear of the mother’s ability to give birth issues in ambivalence toward her archaic body (i.e., an attempt to deny it, to substitute the mother and to appropriate the principle of birth through writing). Theologians and mystics like Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Meister Eckhart look for fusion with the mother, become mothers themselves since God only reveals himself to a maternal person. As we have seen, Derrida who, in Circumfession—as he describes his writing-word/circumcision-bleeding when separating from the mother whom he is nursing in bed— has a sense of “maternal brotherhood” with Augustine who indeed accompanies this text all along. See also, Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234–63. 56. Chernin, The Hungry Self, 136–37. 57. In her essay “Women and Philosophy,” Michele Le Doeuff points out that while women have access to institutional philosophy, they occupy marginal positions: loyal, caring , idolizing, conscientious, playing second fiddle to their teachers’ hallowed texts; quoted in Walker, Philosophy and the Maternal Body, 22. 58. Derrida, Circumfession, 159. 59. The analogy between the discourse formative of lesbian subjectivity and of anorexic subjectivity can be gleaned from the inventory of documents provided by Helen Malson, in The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-Structuralism and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Routledge, 1998). In the second half of the nineteenth century, women, usually adolescents between age 15 and 20, who suffered from eating and digestive disorders were described as displaying hypersensitivity, hysteria (feminine madness displaced from the womb to the stomach), hypochondria, tendency to insanity, emotional repressions in their family surroundings, partial delirium affecting their intellectual energy, stubbornness, capriciousness, and lack of responsibility for their actions or their symptoms. Neurological disorders had always been understood in psychic and moral terms as a combination of a “real” neurological disorder and a sham illness. Foucault pointed at the medical-sexual regime of this period which intervened in the definition of the proper function of the woman and which regarded the family as an agent of control, which in turn was itself subject to corporeal regulation. This process was associated with the psychiatrization and medicalization of “marginal” sexuality (i.e., sexuality which does not subserve the purpose of procreation). From this point of view, homosexuality was perceived as an illness, much like anorexia, which must be corrected by healing.

NOTES TO PAGES 130–61

60. See Malson, The Thin Woman, 175. 61. Levens, Eating Disorders, 111. 5. THE BOOK OF RUTH 1. “What may seem outrageous, blasphemous, and irreligious about woman’s reimaginings of the Bible is both forbidden and invited by the very text and tradition she is challenging.” Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Feminist Revision and the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 57. See also Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 2. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 3. Phyllis Trible, “A Human Comedy: The Book of Ruth,” in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, vol. 2, ed. Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis and James S. Ackerman, 161–90 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1982). 4. Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, “ ‘A Son Is Born to Naomi!’— Literary Allusions and Interpretation in the Book of Ruth,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader, ed. Alice Bach (New York: Routledge, 1999), 234. 5. Ibid., 238. 6. Some Jewish sages have suggested that Ruth and Orpah were daughters of Eglon, King of Moab, who wanted to marry them to Mahlon and Chilion when they became respected members of Moabite society. 7. Jaques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 66. 8. Ruth 1:14. 9. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 257. 10. Ruth 2:2. 11. Ruth 2:18. 12. Julia Kristeva, “Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents,”in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 254. 13. Kristeva, “Freud and Love,” 244. 14. Kristeva, “Freud and Love,” 258. 15. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 254–55. 16. Ruth 4:16. 17. Ruth 4:17. 18. Ruth’s late husband, Makhlon, resonates the Hebrew words makhala, illness, and mekhila, pardon. 19. Mary Levens, Eating Disorders and Magical Control of the Body: Treatment through Art Therapy, trans. to Hebrew by B. Menes (Kiryat Bialik, Israel: Ach, 1999). 20. Jacques Derrida, “ ‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age

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NOTES TO PAGES 161–70

of Psychoanalysis,” trans. Pascale- Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 ( Winter 1994): 227. 21. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.4. 22. The words “ivaron” (blindness) and “aritzut” (tyranny) share two consonants: ‫ר‬, ‫ע‬.

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Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Translated by N. Rand. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. Augustine. The Confessions. Translated by P. S. Pine- Coffin. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1961. Bal, Mieke. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Ben- Naftali, Michal. “A Letter to the Other Father.” Bijdragen International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 72, no. 3 (2011): 283–87. — — — . “The Painter of Postmodern Life.” In Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, edited by Elisabeth Weber, 211–26. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Caputo, John. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caputo, J., M. Dooley, and M. Scanlon, eds. Questioning God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Cardinal, Marie. In Other Words: An Autobiographical Novel. Translated by Amy Cooper. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Chernin, Kim. The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity. New York: Harper & Row, 1994. Claude-Pierre, Peggy. The Secret Language of Eating Disorders. Translated to Hebrew by Y. Ofer. Kfar Saba, Israel: Arie Nir, 1998. de Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. “Aphorism Countertime.” In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 414–34. New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. Aporias. Translated by Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. ———. Apories. Paris: Galilée, 1996. 189

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———. Politics of Friendship. Translated by G. Collins. New York: Verso, 1997. ———. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. Psyché: Invention de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1998. ———. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Pascal-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Shibboleth: Pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée, 1986. ———. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Translated by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ———. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by P. Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994. — — — . “ ‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis.” Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 227–66. — — — . “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible.” In Questioning God, edited by J. D. Caputo, M. Dooley, and M. Scanlon, 21–51. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. ———. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée, 2000. ———. “Le Toucher; Touch/to Touch Him.” Paragraph 16, no. 2 (1993): 122–57. — — — . “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Cultural Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 174–200. ———. Without Alibi. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. The Work of Mourning. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Fewell, Danna Nolan, and David M. Gunn. “ ‘A Son Is Born to Naomi!’— Literary Allusions and Interpretation in the Book of Ruth.” In Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader, edited by Alice Bach, 233–39. New York: Routledge, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, 268–338. Translated by James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1991. — — — . “Mourning and Melancholia.” In On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, 245–67. Translated by J. Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Greenstein, Edward L. “Reading Strategies and the Story of Ruth.” In Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader, edited by Alice Bach, 211–31. New York: Routledge, 1999. Hellman, Lillian. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2000. ———. An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1999. Hornbacher, Marya. Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

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Trible, Phyllis. “A Human Comedy: The Book of Ruth.” In Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, vol. 2, edited by Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis and James S. Ackerman, 161–90. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982. Walker, Michelle Boulous. Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. New York: Routledge, 1998. Warminski, Andrzej. “Machinal Effects: Derrida with and without de Man.” MLN 124, no. 5 (2009): 1072–90. Weigel, S. Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. New York: Routledge, 1996. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge, 2005. Ziarek, Ewa. “From Euthanasia to the Other of Reason: Performativity and the Deconstruction of Sexual Difference.” In Derrida and Feminism, edited by Mary Rawlinson, Ellen Feder, and Emily Zkin, 115–40. New York: Routledge, 1997.

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INDEX

abandonment: and anorexia, 74; Derrida on, 35, 49 abjection, 104–5 Abraham, Nicolas, 5, 11 absence, 38, 49, 101 absolute friendship, 1–2, 23 Acker, Kathy, xiv address, condition of, 31–33, 37, 41–43, 45, 47–48 addressee, 34–35; Derrida as, xxiii; Julia and, 57 addressing, 30–51 aesthetics, 46, 85 affective turn, xxi–xxii Agamben, Giorgio, 55 ambivalence: anorexia and, 74; Derrida and, 18– 20, 40; and friendship, 25; Julia and, 59, 68 anorexia, 70–131, 158–59; and body, 95–100; Book of Ruth and, 155; and mother, 100– 17; nature of, 75–76, 107; and sexuality, 117–31, 186n59 anthropomorphism, versus prospopeia, 8 anticipation, Derrida on, 19–20 anxiety, 49, 103, 106 archivism, Derrida on, 45, 88, 175n12 Aristotle, xii, 3, 7, 18, 24–27, 65–66 asymmetry, and friendship, 13, 25–26, 66 atheism, Book of Ruth and, 155 Augustine, 3–4, 7, 12 barrenness, 118–19, 121; Book of Ruth and, 132–33, 135. See also birth Bataille, Georges, xiii Benjamin, Walter, ix, xix Bennington, Geoffrey, 12 betrayal: Derrida on, 35; Julia and, 57 birth: Book of Ruth and, 155, 158; and writing, 119. See also barrenness Blake, William, x

Blanchot, Maurice, 18 body: anorexia and, 95–100, 107, 109, 122; Book of Ruth and, 150; mother and, 102–3; mystics and, 105 boundaries: anorexia and, 72, 106–7; Book of Ruth and, 136; Derrida on, 82; and play, 85; and relationships, 91, 95 bulimia, 71, 87, 93, 97–100, 115, 158–59; and sexuality, 130–31 burning, 36–37, 39, 41–42, 50 Cadava, Eduardo, 175n1 cannibalism, xix, 74 Caputo, John, xx Celan, Paul, 10, 41 change, anorexia and, 130 Chernin, Kim, 102 choice, and friendship, 24–25 Cicero, 25 Circumfession (Derrida), 12, 17, 82–83, 92, 181n3 Cixous, Hélène, 111, 178n29 Claude-Pierre, Peggy, 183n2 cleanliness: anorexia and, 106; bulimia and, 93 community: Book of Ruth and, 139, 157; Derrida on, 28 condition of address, 31–33, 37, 41–43, 45, 47–48 conscience, anorexia and, 91, 93–94 contamination, 11, 16 control: anorexia and, 99, 107, 110, 124, 183n2; bulimia and, 115–16; letters and, 50; melancholia and, 124–25 correspondence, 44–45; burning, 36–37, 50; Derrida on, 31–32; women and, 31 covenant, Book of Ruth and, 139 creativity, eating disorders and, 119, 121–22, 158–59

195

196

INDEX

crypt/encryption, 18, 70; anorexia and, 80; Book of Ruth and, 149; letters and, 38 culture: deconstruction and, 81; and hunger, 92 death: anorexia and, 76, 110, 130; anticipation of, 19–20; Book of Ruth and, 134, 137, 150, 167; Derrida on, 9, 18; letters and, 33, 35; and love, 38–39; mystics and, 105; of subject, xxi–xxii deconstruction: anorexia and, 70–131; body and, 95–100; de Man and, 14; and emotion, xx–xxiii; and friendship, xix–xxvii, 1, 15, 18; future of, xx; and love, 47; and play, 85; and psychoanalysis, xxii–xxiii; Ronell on, vii–xvii de Man, Paul, xx, 7–23 demetaphorization, 5 depropriation, vii Derrida, Jacques, xix–xx, 55, 92, 148; on archivism, 45, 88, 175n12; and emotion, xx–xxi, xxiii, 26–27, 41, 83; on family, 12, 100–1; and forgiveness, 17, 48, 180n47; on friendship, viii, xi, 1–29, 66, 176n3; on Hamlet, 162; on mourning, 5, 7–23; on political and friendship, 179n45; The Post Card, 30–51; on responsibility, 93–94; Ronell on, xv–xvi; on signature, 175n10; on translation, xix; on weakness, 81–83, 94; on writing, 79 Derrida, Marguerite, ix determination, anorexia and, 77 discipline: anorexia and, 80; Book of Ruth and, 136; Derrida on, 82 disconnection, anorexia and, 72 distance: Book of Ruth and, 152; and friendship, 22, 24; and letters, 38, 46; and love, 42–43 Douglas, Mary, 105 eating disorders. See anorexia; bulimia economic friendship, 1–2, 23; Julia and, 61–62 education, eating disorders and, 113, 116, 119, 126 effacement, Book of Ruth and, 146–48, 166, 168–69 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xii, xiii emotion, xix–xx; anorexia and, 127; and deconstruction, xix–xxiii; Derrida and, xx–xxi, xxiii, 26–27, 41, 83; Julia and, 68 enemies: Book of Ruth and, 166–67; and friendship, x eros: anorexia and, 127, 129; Book of Ruth and,

138, 150; and deconstruction, xx, 11, 36; and forgiveness, 48. See also sexuality escape, anorexia and, 76, 129 ethics, 31; and aesthetics, 46; and condition of address, 37; of memory, 40 experience, anorexia and, 75–78, 96–100 failure: anorexia and, 72, 120–21; Book of Ruth and, 148; and love, 47; Ronell on, xvii family: anorexia and, 77, 100–17; Book of Ruth and, 155; Derrida and, 12, 100–1; Freud on, 48–49; Julia and, 58; and relationships, 97 fascism, 16; de Man and, 13; Julia and, 52 father: anorexia and, 110–11. See also family fatigue: anorexia and, 74–75; Book of Ruth and, 163; and relationships, 90 fear, anorexia and, 74, 98 Felman, Shoshana, 55 feminist theory: anorexia and, 75; reconsideration of, 121 for, term, 11 forgiveness, Derrida and, 17, 48, 180n47 fort/da game, 38, 48–49 Foucault, Michel, 18, 186n59 freedom: and friendship, 22–23; and invitation, 60 Freud, Sigmund, xiv, 1, 10, 16, 123–24, 177n5; on family, 48–49; on melancholia, 3–10. See also psychoanalysis, deconstruction and friendship: Derrida on, viii, xi, 1–29, 66, 176n3; literature on, 27–28; versus love, 22, 24; maintenance of, xi–xii; need for, xiv; negotiation and, 59; types of, 1–2, 7, 23. See also women and friendship future, Julia and, 54 gender, anorexia and, 117 gift: Aristotle on, 65; Book of Ruth and, 137, 141, 144, 151–52; Derrida on, 17–18, 61–62 guilt: anorexia and, 107, 121; Book of Ruth and, 136, 142; Derrida on, 94, 101 Gunn, David M., 133 Hammett, Dashiell, 56 Hegel, G. W. F., x, xix, 28 Heidegger, Martin, xv–xvi, xx Hellman, Lillian, 52–69 heritage, 21–22; Book of Ruth and, 134, 149; Derrida on, 20; Ronell on, x–xi

197

INDEX

Herrick, Robert, 67 Herzog, Werner, x Holocaust: Derrida on, 39–40, 94; LaCapra on, 182n15; literature on, 55 homosexuality. See lesbianism hospitality: Book of Ruth and, 139; and narcissism, 6 hunger, 96–98, 110; Book of Ruth and, 143; bulimia and, 116; and relationships, 73, 87, 91–92; and sexuality, 118 ideal: anorexia and, 73, 91; Book of Ruth and, 153; and friendship, 25; Julia and, 63–64, 67 identity: anorexia and, 77, 107, 129–30; Book of Ruth and, 150–51, 155; and philosophy, 49–51; and relationships, 88; sexuality and, 127 imagination: anorexia and, 121–22; Book of Ruth and, 138 impossibility: Derrida on, 12; and friendship, 21; and sexuality, 128 incorporation, 6, 39; Book of Ruth and, 138; Derrida on, 10; letters and, 38, 42; melancholic, xxii, 1, 3, 5; and sexuality, 118, 125 introjection, 6, 124; mournful, 1, 5, 169 invitation, Julia and, 60 Julia (film), 52–69 Kafka, Franz, xv Kant, Immanuel, 24 Kierkegaard, Søren, 10, 15, 178n34 Klein, Melanie, 102 Kristeva, Julia, xxvi, 5, 12, 102–5, 132, 184n10 LaCapra, Dominick, 182n15 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, vii language, 50–51; anorexia and, 107; Book of Ruth and, 147–48; de Man and, 9; Derrida on, 15, 40; Julia and, 65; and love, 42 Lanzmann, Claude, 55 learning, eating disorders and, 113, 116, 119, 126 Le Doeuff, Michele, 186n57 lesbianism: anorexia and, 117–31, 186n59; Book of Ruth and, 136–38; identity and, 127. See also relationships letters, 30–51; burning, 36–37; internalizing, 42; Julia and, 53, 66–67; philosophy and, 49–50; publication of, 34

Levinas, Emmanuel, xv–xvi, 10 linguistic turn, xxi–xxii loneliness: anorexia and, 78; Book of Ruth and, 135, 142–44, 146; deconstruction and, 79–80; and identity, 127; mother and, 103; and play, 85; scholars and, xi, xiii; and writing, 90 loss: Book of Ruth and, 162–64, 169–70; Julia and, 69; letters and, 45; melancholia and, 124–25; mother and, 104; shame and, 111; types of, 179n40 love, 126; anorexia and, 72–73; condition of, 41–42; Derrida on, 6–7, 37–38; versus friendship, 22, 24; language and, 42; metaphysics of, 37, 47; for texts, xi, 11, 36, 78–79, 85–86; and writing, 79 Lyotard, Jean-François, 55 Malson, Helen, 186n59 mask: Book of Ruth and, 167; Derrida on, 83 melancholia, xxii, 3–23, 39; anorexia and, 123– 24; Augustine on, 4; characteristics of, 4, 18; Derrida and, 48; Julia and, 56; origins of, 4 melancholic incorporation, xxii, 1, 3, 5 Memoires for Paul de Man (Derrida), 7–8 memory: Derrida on, 9–10, 13, 20, 31, 36, 40, 48; and eating disorders, 101; Julia and, 53–56, 60, 63–64; and relationships, 86 metaphysics: deconstruction and, 81; Derrida on, 35–36; of love, 37, 47 Milton, John, 8 misogyny, anorexia and, 126 misunderstanding, Julia and, 53–54 Montaigne, Michel de, 18, 25, 27 morality: anorexia and, 129; and friendship, 27; and love, 24, 38 mother: anorexia and, 100–17; Book of Ruth and, 132–71; Derrida on, 12; patriarchy and, 186n55; and relationships, 97; and sexuality, 118 mournful introjection, 1, 5; Book of Ruth and, 169 mourning, xxii, 3, 23–29; Book of Ruth and, 161–67; Derrida on, 5, 47; Hamlet and, 161–62; Julia and, 54, 62, 69; origins of, 4; versus shame, 111 mystics, anorexia and, 105–6 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 19 Naomi, 132–71

198

INDEX

narcissism, 123, 177n14; Derrida on, 6–7, 9; love and, 43; and melancholia, 4 natural language, 50–51 needs: anorexia and, 71, 80, 99, 108–9; Book of Ruth and, 135, 138, 142, 144; Derrida and, 36, 49; for friendship, xiv; Julia and, 59 negativity: anorexia and, 91; Derrida and, 11–12, 18, 44, 180n47; mother and, 104 negotiation, and friendship, 59 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xii–xiii, 10, 17–18 Nolan Fewell, Danna, 132–33 object, Winnicott on, 84–85 oedipal scene, xxii–xxiii open letters, 33 Orbach, Susie, 118 order, Book of Ruth and, 156–57 Ostriker, Alicia Suskin, 187n1 The Other Heading (Derrida), 14 past, Julia and, 54 pathetic experience, xix–xx; Derrida and, 41 Pentimento (Hellman), 52–69 philosophy, 44; identity and, 49–51; and trauma, 83–84; and women’s friendship, ix–x Plato, 25, 34, 44 play, 84–85; and relationships, 112–13 Politics of Friendship (Derrida), 2, 18, 21, 23, 27, 178n28 The Post Card (Derrida), 12, 22, 30–51, 83 postmodernism, xxi, 182n15 poststructuralism, and emotion, xxi–xxii prayer, Derrida on, 19 presence: Derrida on, 35; metaphysics of, 37, 47 present: bulimia and, 116; and condition of address, 32; and love, 47 procreation. See birth projection, 123–24 prosopopeia, 8–10 Proust, Marcel, 83 psychoanalysis, deconstruction and, xxii–xxiii, 177n5 publication, 34, 43 punishment: anorexia and, 110; Book of Ruth and, 167; Julia and, 62 Rauber, D. F., xxvi Ravikovitch, Dahlia, 184n22

reading: and friendship, xiii, 10–11, 13–14, 27; and relationships, 89 redemption, Book of Ruth and, 146–47, 158 reflection, 55 Reineke, Martha, 105 rejection, Book of Ruth and, 144–45, 157, 162–67 relationships: anorexia and, 73–74, 80–81, 86–93, 108–9, 117–31; body and, 95–100; Book of Ruth and, 132–71; breakup of, Book of Ruth and, 159–71; versus deconstruction, 85–87; Derrida on, 81; melancholia and, 124; play and, 112–13 relevantization, xix resistance: Derrida on, 17; Julia and, 63 responsibility: anorexia and, 111–12; Book of Ruth and, 142, 169; Derrida on, 13–14, 18–19, 40, 48, 93–94 rhetoric, 8 risk: and conscience, 93; and relationships, 91 Ronell, Avital, vii–xvii Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12 Ruebner, Tuvia, 84 Ruth, Book of, 132–71 sacrifice: anorexia and, 73, 107; Book of Ruth and, 145, 155–57; friendship and, 24; Julia and, 60; mother and, 104–5; mystics and, 106 Sargent, Alvin, 56 Schiller, Friedrich, 30 scholarship, and friendship, xi, xiii secrecy: Book of Ruth and, 149; Derrida on, 15, 19; Julia and, 57; and language, 42; and love, 38 self-knowledge, friendship and: anorexia and, 124; Book of Ruth and, 153; Derrida and, 17–18; Julia and, 61 separation, 88–89; Book of Ruth and, 148–49, 167, 169; Julia and, 66; mother and, 104 sexuality: anorexia and, 117–31; Book of Ruth and, 136–38; bulimia and, 130–31 Shakespeare, William, x, xiv, xix, 8, 10, 161–62 shame, 111 “Shibboleth” (Derrida), 41, 44 silence, 39; anorexia and, 78, 88, 90, 96, 123, 126, 128–29; Book of Ruth and, 133, 142, 146, 148; Derrida on, 34; Julia and, 57; mystics and, 105; and relationships, 113

199

INDEX

Socrates, 25, 34, 44, 65 solitude. See loneliness somatic people, 5, 150 spirit, anorexia and, 71, 126 subject: death of, xxi–xxii; and grievance, xv; Winnicott on, 84–85 subjectivity, Julia and, 56 supplementarity, 109

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 55 violence: anorexia and, 107; Derrida on, 11–12; mystics and, 105 voice: anorexia and, 76; relationships and, 95–96; Ronell on, xvi

taste, 70, 83, 98, 120 Terada, Rei, xxi, xxii texts, love for, xi, 11, 36, 78–79, 85–86 theft, Derrida on, 12 time: anorexia and, 75; Book of Ruth and, 142, 162; bulimia and, 116–17; Derrida on, 82; and friendship, 25; and letters, 30, 34, 36, 50; and love, 38–39, 47 Torok, Maria, 5, 11 touch: anorexia and, 96; Derrida on, 19 translation, xix, 16; Julia and, 53 trauma: Derrida on, 83–84; Julia and, 55 Trible, Phyllis, 132 tropes, 8 Turner, Victor, 105

waiting, Book of Ruth and, 137 Walker, Michelle Boulous, 186n55 Wallach, Yona, 184n22 weakness, Derrida on, 81–83, 94 Weber, Elisabeth, 83 Winnicott, D. W., 84–85 women: and anorexia, 70–131; and emotion, xxiii; Hegel on, x; and letters, 31 women and friendship, xix–xxvii, 173; Book of Ruth and, 132–71; Derrida on, 28–29; Julia and, 52–69; Ronell on, vii–xvii Wordsworth, William, 8 writing: anorexia and, 74, 78–79, 119; Book of Ruth and, 147; deconstruction and, 80; Derrida on, 42–43, 79; freedom and, 23; friendship and, xv, 2–3, 10, 18; Julia and, 53, 56–57, 63, 69; love and, 79; and mourning, 22; and relationships, 87–93

An Unfinished Woman (Hellman), 52–69

Zinnemann, Fred, 52–69

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Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica. Translated by Catharine Diehl and Jason Groves Michal Ben-Naftali, Chronicle of Separation: On Deconstruction’s Disillusioned Love. Translated by Mirjam Hadar Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, eds., Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction