Derrida, Supplements 9781531503406

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Derrida, Supplements

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Derrida, Supplements

jean-luc nancy Translated by anne o’byrne Afterword by alexander garcía düttmann

Fordham University Press new york

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2023

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Copyright © 2023 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. This book was originally published in French as Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida, suppléments, Copyright © Éditions Galilée, 2019. Chapters 14–16 are original to the English edition. Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la Culture–Centre National du Livre. This work has been published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture–National Center for the Book. 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 available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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Contents

Prologue

1



Elliptical Sense

5



Borborygmi

27



The Judeo-Christian

44



Derrida in Strasbourg

63



J.D.

68



Parallel Differences: Deleuze and Derrida

75



Derrida da capo

88



Mad Derrida: Ipso facto cogitans ac demens

95



The Independence of Algeria and the Independence of Derrida

110

 Eloquent Stripes

115

 Derrida disant dix

121

 A Differant Orientation

124

 Jouis anniversaire! “Scenes of the Inner Life”: On the Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Jacques Derrida

131

 Derridapolitics

146

 Homage to Jacques Derrida: An Interview with Laure Adler

153

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 What Is Deconstruction? An Interview with Federico Ferrari

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161

Afterword: Nothing to See, Nothing to Do by Alexander García Düttmann

175

Notes

185

Bibliography

199

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Derrida, Supplements

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Prologue

It’s not a matter of adding something to Derrida. It’s not about making up deficits. It has nothing to do with the double sense of the word supplement, which he made one of his conceptual signatures (along with “differance,” “specter,” “come!,” and so on). Generally speaking, one doesn’t complete or replace anything in the work of an author. The work stands as it is. I’m thinking, rather, of a third meaning of the word supplement, the literary or journalistic sense according to which one publication is added to another, offering another way of speaking, or another aspect (a magazine supplement, an audio supplement, or indeed the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville . . .). The following texts were all written in response to particular circumstances—colloquia, anthologies—over the course of twenty-five years, and they are not studies or commentaries or interpretations of Derrida’s thought. Instead, I think of them as responses to his presence. We shared a friendship from 1970 on but I can also say that, from the very start, when he erupted into my intellectual landscape through his essays in the 1960s, it was also the eruption of a presence. From the first time I read him I could see not only the power and incisiveness of a thought but also the resonance of something current, present; for the first time I really heard a voice of our time. I remember comparing it to the experience I had had when I discovered electronic music—so-called musique concrète—a few years before: the reality of my time was taking shape. I realized that the music—or philosophy—I had been preoccupied with up until then, despite all it had to offer, was a thing of the past. I even included Heidegger

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there. I had read him as one author among others, until Derrida gave me a new point of access to his work. * This “new point of access” needs to be emphasized today, since it has been misrecognized and misinterpreted. Here’s a detail I discovered only recently: in 1968, Derrida, along with some others, published a collection of essays called L’endurance de la pensée: Pour saluer Jean Beaufret and included in it “Ousia et grammè.” (The essay was later collected in Marges de la philosophie.) This text is certainly the most important that Derrida devoted to Heidegger’s thinking of time. In it, he takes up what prevented Heidegger, despite himself, from shifting the “present” in the direction of “coming to presence” [venue en présence], a move which has in fact been available since Aristotle (the move of exceeding the “metaphysics of presence” from the inside) and which, Derrida notes, Heidegger may have become more sensitive to as time went by. It all comes down to the relation between the words Gegenwärtigkeit and Anwesenheit. In fact, the lecture Temps et être was included in the same collection, in pride of place. It had not appeared up until then, and in it one can very clearly see Heidegger shifting his evaluation of Anwesenheit. Without knowing it, Derrida accompanied Heidegger even as he projected him beyond himself. These insights are as precious as they are rare. Those who denounce Heidegger as a swine, and Derrida along with him, should think again. It’s not a matter of this or that author; it’s a matter of getting access to ourselves, to our history of yesterday and today. * The encounter with a presence was completely bound up with encountering a thought. I immediately understood the rigorous analysis of selfpresence in the “silent voice” of Husserl as the arrival of an unknown in whom I recognized a presence. This was not exactly a presence “to self ” but a presence in the world, present to us insofar as we were in a moment when we could feel an era passing away (with Sartre, with the end of the war in Algeria) and something new arriving. In their various ways, all of these texts were ways of saying this arrival, or this coming, as it continued to come and come again (after 2004). I’ve left out some texts (just a few) that had more to do with theoretical analysis, and also the little texts or interviews I was invited to give after he left us. Derrida is known as the one who deconstructed the “metaphysics of presence.” He was also someone who never stopped presenting himself in

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his thinking—and therefore absenting himself from it. He thought as he came to a meeting, or scribbled three words on a scrap of paper or even as he picked up the phone: living in different cities, we used to talk on the phone a lot. I can still hear the very particular tone of voice he used, both hesitant and decisive, when he would say: “It’s Jacques.” Also included here, as a supplement to the supplements, is a text by Alexander García Düttmann that seemed to me to fit into the amicable proximity of the presence—still so close—of Derrida.

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 /

Elliptical Sense

Writing on Derrida strikes me as violent. There is nothing more banal than writing “on” somebody, that is, writing about his work or his thinking. Derrida himself does it. But here, on this occasion, where I am supposed to write on him, he has set a trap. His use of language, his passion for playing around with it, his mad desire to touch it—always violently— means writing on him, on his body. Not the corpus but the body. It means passing it through the machine from Kafka’s Penal Colony, or maybe tattooing it. He cannot but suffer as a result, and will surely try to find some artifice or other to cover up the tattoo—a rose, a heart with an arrow through it, an eagle, an anchor, or an ellipse. To cover up and reveal these pieces of skin. But this is how the body is lost [le corps se perd ]. Scratches and tattoos: there, “right at the body” [à-même-le-corps], the body is lost, losing its character as a sort of tissue stretched—closed and mute—over its interior. (What interior? A soul? The soul of Jacques Derrida? Psyché ? The one that can touch and embrace the body of its lover—the body, its lover—but is forbidden to see it? Derrida always struggled against unseen assailants.) This lost body, this à corps perdu (lost accord?) that I would end up writing “on,” is the first thing that occurred to me when I was asked to write on Jacques Derrida. A “lost body” is a body already covered with marks and writing and thus relieved of its organicity (with a nod here to Deleuze on Derrida). Body as surface, as nothing but surface and traces.

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This violence has yet another face. Is “writing on” not a way of avoiding writing, absolutely? A way of leaning on another writing, delivering a commentary instead of writing itself? What do we care about commentaries if they don’t touch on the thing itself? Isn’t there a violence in turning away, in refusing, even if the refusal is an effort to avoid the violence that the thing inevitably does to writing? But what if writing is the thing itself? What if the thinking of writing, which the signature “J.D.” gets mixed up with, calls for, demands a surplus of writings, graphes, grammes, traces, to the point of being violently illegible? But what about this trap? Could it be that it, in turn, has been set too well, too carefully calculated to send us straight into the abyss, into a silence beyond calculation? I am not going to try to sort all this out. In the end, it would be vain to try to write without violence. This is too often forgotten these days. For a long time now, Derrida has recalled nothing but this. I have never written on Jacques Derrida: neither on his body nor on his work. There was one occasion when I addressed the voice of duty in his work, but I have never “written on” this thinking, nor proposed a reading of that particular text. This is understandable. We are too close, and I’ve often written in the space of that closeness, and thanks to that space. This does not always mean that we converge or connive. It is an elliptical sort of proximity, not a matter of identity, and the ellipse traces this lack of a simple identity. After all, an ellipse is a circle bent out of shape, deformed. This lack of circularity, this distance that disrupts any absolute return to self, is also what governs the relationship between Derrida’s text— “Ellipsis”—and the book by Jabès “on” which it is written. If I now decide to write on Derrida, or if I at least pretend to do so, our proximity is not erased. On the contrary, I’m doing it because I want to retrace the movement of this ellipse. It was enough that a “happy fate,” “ein freundliches Geschick,” as Hegel puts it, gave me the opportunity. I knew right away that, of all Derrida’s texts, I would write on “Ellipsis.” (It’s easy to imagine how “writing on the ellipse” could become a theme or concept in the Derridian corpus. But it’s not our job to augment the corpus here, only to pass close to the body.) I chose this text for the sake of pleasure. Then I realized that this short text, certainly the shortest of his “properly theoretical” texts (though we can’t forget the violence that such a categorization does), describes elliptically the whole orbit of Derrida’s thinking. Yet it does not complete or close off the figure of the ellipse, but inscribes in it the doubling, displacing curve by which this orbit, like the orbit of the earth and the orbit of all thinking, does not remain selfidentical, but turns and bends à corps perdu.

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In the end, I am writing here because I choose to, for the sake of the pleasure of friendship. It too is an ellipse.

1 For Kant, a pleasure that we no longer perceive is at the origin of thought. This is why thought is “originally impassioned,” as Derrida puts it in “Ellipsis.” The trace of this pleasure might be found in all philosophy. It is the pleasure of the origin itself: the satisfaction or joy of discovering the source, getting to the center or ground. More exactly: the satisfaction or joy which the origin experiences in finding and touching itself, the joy of originating from itself in itself. This is also, properly speaking, the act of thought that Kant calls transcendental: reason discovering itself, making itself available as the principle of its own possibilities. We shall have more to say about the transcendental. But for the moment let us say that “Ellipsis,” in writing on the origin and on writing as the “passion of the origin,” adopts a transcendental standpoint. Or at least it seems to adopt such a standpoint. From this position is derived the condition of possibility which is not itself the origin (and this ellipsis or eclipse of the origin in the Kantian “condition of possibility” is undoubtedly what sets off the whole of modern thought), but which forms, on the contrary, the condition of possibility of the origin itself. This is our history since Kant: the origin is no longer given—likewise, its pleasure is no longer given—but becomes instead that toward which reason regresses, or that toward which it advances, up to the very limits of its possibilities. The origin enters what Derrida will call its différance. The origin differs or defers, differs from itself or defers itself. And that is its joy or passion: à corps perdu. The origin, or sense, if the origin is by definition the origin of sense, contains within itself (and/or differing) the sense of the origin, its own sense, itself being the very sense and site of sense. Nothing less than sense itself, “all sense,” as is written in “Ellipsis.” (This is the only occurrence of the word “sense” in Derrida’s text. In one fell swoop, for the entire text and its ellipsis, all sense. The slightest text of thought can expose no less.) The condition of possibility of the origin (of sense) is called writing. Writing isn’t the vehicle or medium of sense; were this so, it wouldn’t be its condition of possibility, but the condition of its transmission. Here, “writing” doesn’t refer to Derrida’s writing, which communicates to us the sense and the logic of a certain discourse on the origin, sense, and writing (at least insofar as this sense and this logic are communicable). This writing is not that of the book which this text concludes and closes

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(which is entitled Writing and Difference). Or rather, the writing of the origin is this writing itself, and this book itself: there is no other, there is nothing more to read once the book has been closed, there are not two writings, one empirical and one transcendental. There is a single “transcendental experience” of “writing.” But this experience attests precisely to its non-self-identity. In other words, it is the experience of what cannot be experienced. Writing is difference. Thus writing is said to be the “passion of and for the origin.” This passion does not arise at the origin: it is and makes the origin itself. The origin is a passion, the passion of the self in its difference, and it is that which makes sense, all sense. All sense is always passion, in all the senses of the word “sense.” (Hegel, building on Kant, was well aware of this: sense— the sense of being—is also the sense of sensibility. For Hegel, this was the  crux and the passion of the aesthetic in general, and hence also of writing in its relation to philosophy, in the sense of its relation to philosophy.) What makes sense about sense, what makes it originate, is that it senses itself making sense. (To sense the sense or to touch the being-sense of sense, even if it were to be senseless—that’s Derrida’s passion. To touch the body of sense. To incorporate sense. Scratching, cutting, branding. Putting to the test of sense. I shall write about nothing else.) Sense isn’t a matter of something having or making sense (the world, existence, or this discourse of Derrida’s). It’s rather the fact that sense apprehends itself, grasps itself as sense. This means that sense, essentially, has to repeat itself: not by being stated or given twice in identical fashion, as is the case with the “reissuing of a book,” but by opening in itself (as itself) the possibility of relating to itself in the “referral of one sign to another.” It is in just such a referral that sense is recognized or grasped as sense. Sense is the duplication of the origin and the relation that is opened, in the origin, between the origin and the end, and the pleasure, for the origin, of enjoying that which it originates (that of which it is the origin and the fact that it originates). Such is the passion, the whole passion of writing: sense, in order to be or to make sense, has to repeat itself, which is to say, in the original sense of this word, it must make repeated demands on itself. Sense is not given; it is the demand that it be given. (This implies a giving of the demand, but that is precisely what, in Kantian terms, ought to be termed the “transcendental” and not, of course, the transcendent, which would be the pure presence of sense, neither demanded nor capable of being demanded.) Sense must interrogate itself anew (though it is in this “anew” that everything begins; the origin is not the new, but the “anew”); it must

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make demands on itself, call to itself, ask itself, implore itself, want itself, desire itself, seduce itself as sense. Writing is nothing other than this demand, renewed and modified without end. Sense calls for more sense, just as, for Valéry, “the sense calls for more form” in poetry. And, in effect, it comes down to the same thing. All poetry, and all of Derrida’s philosophy, meets this demand. Consequently there is something missing in sense, something missing from the start. And “all sense is altered or exhausted by this lack.” Writing is the outline of this alteration. Hence, this outline is “in essence elliptical,” because it does not come back full circle to the same. Ellipsis: the other in the return to the self, the geometral of the pas of meaning, singular and plural. Strictly speaking, however, nothing is altered. It’s not as if there’s a first sense that would then be diverted and disturbed by a second writing, doomed to lament its infinite loss or painfully to await its infinite reconstitution. “All sense is altered [tout le sens est altéré].” Which means, first of all, that sense is thirsty [altéré as the opposite of désaltéré, “refreshed”]. It thirsts after itself and its own lack; that is its passion. (And it is also Derrida’s passion for language; in the word altéré as he employs it here, an ellipsis of sense makes sense, the alteration and the excess of sense.) Sense thirsts after its own ellipsis, for its originary trope, for that which hides it, eludes it, and passes it by in silence. Ellipsis: the step/pas of sense passing beneath sense. What is passed over in silence, in all sense, is the sense of sense. But there is nothing negative in this, nor, in truth, anything silent. For nothing is lost, nor anything silenced. Everything is said, and, like every philosophical text (every text in general?), this text says everything about the origin, says the whole origin, and presents itself as the knowledge of the origin. (“Here” is its first word, and later on we read “we now know.”) Everything is said here and now, all sense is offered on the surface of this writing. No thinking thinks more economically, and less passionately, than in thinking everything, all at once. No pleasure of thinking can enjoy in a lesser degree than absolute enjoyment. Thus this text pronounces itself, or the orbit that carries it, to be nothing less than a “system,” the system in which the origin itself “is only a locus and a function.” Writing is the passion of this system. Broadly speaking, a system is the conjunction that holds articulated parts together. More strictly, in the philosophical tradition, it is the juncture, the conjoining of the organs of the living being, its life or Life itself (this life which, according to Hegel, is most profoundly characterized by sense, insofar as it senses and

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senses itself sensing). The adjoining or conjoining of writing is the “binding joint” of the book, or its life. The life of the book is played out—is “in play” and “at stake”—not in the closed book, but in the open book “between the two hands which hold the book,” this book by Jabès that Derrida holds open and reads for us. Jabès, who writes nothing but a continuation of the book, and on the book; this book of Derrida’s which he writes to us and gives us to read and to hold in the ellipse of our hands. The maintenant, the now, of sense articulates itself, repeats itself and puts itself in play in the mains tenant, the hands holding the book. These mains tenant multiply the now (the maintenant), dividing presence, eliding it and making it plural. These are “our hands”: it is no longer an I that is being uttered, but the uttering and articulation of a we. This juncture goes beyond the adjoining of a living being that reads. It prolongs and exceeds him. It is not someone living who reads, even if it is not someone dead. (And the book itself is neither alive nor dead.) What now holds or takes the book in hand is a system whose systematicity differs from and defers itself. “The différance in the now of writing” is itself the “system” of writing, within which the origin is inscribed merely as a “place.” Différance is nothing other than the infinite re-petition of sense, which consists neither in its duplication nor in its infinite distancing from itself. Rather, différance is the access of sense to sense in its own demand, an access that does not accede, this exposed finitude beyond which, now that “God is dead,” there is nothing to think. If sense were simply given, if access to it were not deferred, if sense did not demand sense (if it demanded nothing), sense would have no more sense than water within water, stone within stone, or the closed book in a book that has never been opened. But the book is open, in our hands. Différance can never be conceptualized, but it can be written. Différance is the demand, the call, the request, the seduction, the imprecation, the imperative, the supplication, the jubilation of writing. Différance is passion. With a blow—because it is a blow, struck by the origin against the origin itself—“the joint is a brisure [‘hinge’].” The system, then, really is a system, but a system of brisure. This is not the negation of system, but system itself, suspended at the point of its systasis. Brisure does not break the joint: in repetition “nothing has budged.” Or else, the joint has always already been broken in itself, as such and in sum by itself. What joins divides; what adjoins is divided. Brisure is not the other of juncture, it is its heart, its essence, and its passion. It is the exact and infinitely discrete limit upon which the joint articulates itself. The book between our hands and the folding in of the book upon itself. The heart of the heart is

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always a beating, and the essence of essence consists in the withdrawal of its own existence. It is this limit that passion demands, this that it craves. The limit of what, in order to be itself and to be present to itself, does not come back to itself. The circle which at once closes itself off and fails to do so: an ellipsis. Sense which does not come back to itself is elliptical. Sense which, as sense, does not close off its own sense, or closes it off only by repeating and differing from itself, appealing again and again to its limit as to its essence and its truth. Returning to itself, to this passion. To appeal to the limit is not to set out to conquer a territory. It is not to lay claim to boundaries or borders, for when borders are appropriated, there is no longer any limit. Yet to demand the limit as such is to demand what cannot be appropriated. It is to demand nothing, an infinite exposition which takes place at the limit, the abandonment to this space without space that is the limit itself. This space has no limits, and is thus infinite, though this does not mean that it is an infinite space, any more than that it is “finite.” Rather, it is, not “finished,” but the end, or finitude itself. Thought of the origin: of the end: of the end of the origin. An end that initiates a cut into the origin itself: writing. Such is the last page of the book, the last line of the text—the other site of the ellipsis, after the hic et nunc of the beginning—which is what the book, the text, never stops demanding, calling for, soliciting. The ellipsis of “Ellipsis” closes itself off in différance and its own circularity, and in the play of a recognition which never returns. In the last line Derrida inscribes the final words of a quotation from Jabès. It is a signature, the signature on a fragment, a pronouncement that precedes it: “Reb Dérissa.” All the authority, if not all the sense, of the text will have been altered by this move. It will have been the thirst or the passion for putting into play the I, the origin, the author, the subject of this text. Closing of the text: quotation of the other text, ellipsis. This quotation, almost signature. The signature marks the limit of signs. It is their event, the propriety of their advent, their origin or sign of origin, or origin itself as a singular sign, which no longer signals anything, which cuts sense in two. Derrida signs and de-signates himself; his signature is repeatable. It owes its “sense” entirely to its repetition; it has no signification. Its sense is repetition, the demand for the singular. Derrida asks for himself, and is altered. Singularity is doubled and thirsts after itself insofar as it is the origin of the text. An exorbitant thirst, the thirst of one who has already drunk, who has drunk the entire text, the whole of writing, and whose drunkenness asks for it all over again. Derrida is a drunken rabbi.

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The mastermind that ordains the system of the text bestows his own name on a double (itself unreal; the text has not neglected to remind us that Jabès’s rabbis are “imaginary”). The double substitutes a double “s”— that “disseminating letter,” Derrida writes later—for the “d” in the “da” of “Derrida.” An elsewhere in the guise of a here, a fictitious being in the guise of Dasein, or existence. Dérissa—slim, razor-sharp, derisory— touches the limits of a name and a body “with an animal-like, quick, silent, smooth, brilliant, slippery motion, in the manner of a serpent or a fish,” as the text says of a book that insinuates itself “into the dangerous hole” of the center, filling it in. Fills it to bursting with pleasure: because it’s a game, yes, it’s a laugh. Estos es de risa: this makes us laugh. Here laughter breaks out—laughter is never anything but explosive; it never closes up again—the laughter of an ellipsis opened like a mouth around its paired foci: Derrida, Dérissa. Mocking laughter. But mocks or mimics what? Nothing; merely its breaking out. The origin laughs. There is such a thing as transcendental laughter—and several times the text has evoked a certain “joy” of writing . . . What would a transcendental laughter be? Certainly not an inversion of the significance or value ascribed to seriousness and necessarily demanded by thinking. This laughter doesn’t laugh at seriousness, but laughs at the limit of the serious—of sense. It is the knowledge of a condition of possibility which doesn’t tell us anything. This isn’t exactly comedy: neither nonsense nor irony. This laughter doesn’t laugh at anything. It laughs at nothing, for nothing, for a nothing. It signifies nothing, but it is not absurd. It laughs to be the explosion of its own laughter. It laughs derridally, dérissally. This is not to say that it isn’t serious, nor that it is untouched by sorrow. Rissa, rrida: it is beyond any opposition between the serious and the nonserious, between pain and pleasure. Or rather, it is at the juncture where these oppositions meet, the limit they share, a limit that is itself no more than the limit of each of these terms, the limit of their significations, the limit at which these significations, as such, are exposed. We could say, in other words, that such a limit—a limit of this type, Derrida might say—where pain and pleasure share the joy [of their encounter], is the site of the sublime. I prefer to say, in a less aesthetic language, that this is the place of exposition. The origin exposes itself: to not being the origin. There is a joy, a gaiety even, that has always been at the limit of philosophy. It is neither comedy, irony, grotesque, nor humor, though it perhaps mixes all these significations together. But it is also the ellipsis of these comiques significatifs (“modes of the comic as meaning,” to adopt Baudelaire’s phrase), evoking the “strange serenity” the text has named. In and

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by this serenity, knowledge relieves itself of the weight of knowing, and sense recognizes or feels itself to be the extreme lightness of a “departure from the identical” which “weighs nothing in itself,” but “thinks and weighs the book as such.” This play on pensée, what is thought, and pesée, what is weighed, this play inscribed in language itself, speaks thinking as measuring and as test. Here the book, its juncture, is measured, put to the test. But precisely this, this which indeed says something, and which says it through the meaningful game of a slippage of the etymon, says nothing or means nothing. It appropriates nothing of the etymon; it doesn’t appropriate an originary propriety of sense. No more than the ellipsis “Derrida/ Dérissa” lays claim to any kinship. Thought will not let itself be weighed, and weight will not let itself be thought, by it. If there is anything here at all, it is the lightness of laughter, this gossamer, infinite lightness which laughs at nothing, one must reiterate, but which is the lightening of sense. No theory of comedy or of the joke has been able to master it. Here theory laughs at itself. Derrida will always have laughed, with a laughter at once violent and light, a laughter of the origin and of writing. In lightening itself, sense does not cast off its ballast, does not unburden or debauch itself. Sense lightens itself and laughs, insofar as it is sense, with all the intensity of its appeal and repeated demand for sense. Its lightening (which is not a relieving), means having its own limit as a resource and having the infinity of its own finitude for its sense. This sense, this sense of “all sense,” this totality of sense made up of its own alteration, this totality whose being-total consists in not allowing itself to be totalized (but in being totally exposed), is always too hastily translated into “wordplay,” into an acrobatics or linguistic mischief, in sum, into meaningless surface noises. However, one would be equally wrong to seek to “sublate” these plays on and in language in the manner of Hegel, who sublates the dialectic itself in a play on the word “sublate.” There is no spirit of or in language, no origin of words before words, that “living speech” could bring to presence. Things are infinitely lighter and more serious: language is alone, and this is just what the word “writing” means. It is what remains of language when it has unburdened itself of sense, confided it to the living yet silent voice from which it will never depart. “Language is alone” doesn’t mean that only this exists, as is naively and imperturbably believed by those who denounce as “philosophies imprisoned in language” all thinking which does not offer them—that is to say, which does not name for them—a ready-sliced “life” and “sense” of the “concrete.” On the contrary, “language is alone” means that language is

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not an existence, nor is it existence. But it is its truth. Which is to say that if existence is the sense of being, the being of sense, then language alone marks it, and marks it as its own limit. Existence is the “there is [il y a]” of something. The fact that it is [qu’il y a]—here is the origin and the sense, and in these words “there is” language bursts into flames, laughs, and dies away. But for the “there is” of anything whatsoever there is only language, and singularly so for the “there is” of any “there is” that transports us, delights us, fills us with anguish, for the “there is” that is “there, but out there, beyond.” That is to say, the truth of being, existence, the immanence of transcendence—or finitude as what defies and deconstructs the metaphysical pairing of immanence and transcendence. This “there is” is presence itself, experience just at itself, right in our hands and as of now. But the there of “there is” can’t be put “there” or “beyond,” or anywhere else, for that matter, nor in the nearness of some inward dimension. “There” “signals” the place where there is no longer any sign, save for the repetition of the demand, from sign to sign, along all of meaning, toward the limit where existence is exposed. The there is infinitely light, it is juncture and brisure, the lightening of every system and the ellipsis of every cycle, the slender limit of writing. Here we touch on presence that is no longer present to itself but is repetition and supplication of a presence to come. (Derrida will say, will write, “Come!” as the imperative, imperious, yet impoverished, ellipsis of an entire ontology.) The text says: “the future is not a future present.” This is because it is to come, to come from the there and in the there. And that is why “the beyond of the closure of the book is not something to wait for.” It is “there, but over there, or beyond,” and it is thus to be called for, here and now, to be summoned at the limit. The appeal, the repeated demand, the joyous supplication says: “let everything come here.” That everything should come here, that all sense come and be altered, here, now, at the point at which I write, at which I fail to write, at this point where we read: the passion of writing is impassioned by nothing other than this.

2 In the “there is” of existence and in that which “comes there” to presence, being is at stake, as is the sense or meaning of being. In its two major philosophical forms, the transcendental has designated something put in reserve, a withdrawal or a retreat of being. For Aristotle, being is what keeps itself in reserve over and above the multiplicity of the categories (predicaments or transcendentals) through which it is said in

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“many ways.” Being offers itself and holds itself back in this multiplicity. For Kant, the transcendental denotes the substitution of a knowledge of the mere conditions of possible experience for a knowledge of being that would subtend this experience. Being offers itself and holds itself back in these conditions, in a subjectivity which does not apprehend itself as substance, but which knows itself (and judges itself) as a demand. When the question of the sense of being was reinscribed in philosophy, or at its limit, it was not in order to break through the transcendental, to transcend it and thus penetrate the reserve of its withdrawal. Rather it was, with Heidegger, in order to interrogate this withdrawal itself as the essence and as the sense of being. Being: that which is no part of all that is, but which is at stake in existence. Such is the “ontico-ontological difference.” The difference between being and everything that exists is precisely that which exposes existence as the putting-at-stake of the sense or meaning of being (in and as its finitude). In these circumstances, the opposition or complementarity between the transcendental (as the withdrawal of the origin) and the ontological (as the resource at the origin) loses all pertinence. What becomes necessary is another kind of ontology altogether, or else a completely different transcendental; or, perhaps, nothing of the sort, but an ellipsis of the two. Neither the retirement of being nor its givenness, but presence itself, being itself qua being, exposed as a trace or as a tracing, withdrawing presence, but retracing this withdrawal, presenting the withdrawal as what it most properly is: the nonpresentable. This propriety is nothing other than absolute propriety itself and the propriety of the absolute. The absolute as the absolute of finitude—its separateness from all gathering, from all sublation in an Infinite—gives itself in the event of the trace, the appropriation of inappropriable propriety (Ereignis, perhaps). (Need I emphasize the historical, ethical, and political ramifications of this turning, of this torsion of the absolute? The question is nothing other than the question of the “sense of existence” now that God, along with the Idea, Spirit, History, and Man, is dead. And, indeed, even before this question, the whole passion of the sense of existence. From a circular sense to an elliptical sense: How can we think and live that? At this point, we should add that decisively, and despite what might be said, philosophy has not failed. Derrida, and others with him, in the anxiety and collapse of the age, will have beaten the path, a path that must always be beaten afresh, in the quest for the sense of existence.) The thought of writing (the thought of the letter of sense, rather than of the sense of the letter: the end of hermeneutics, the opening and initiation of sense) reinscribes the question of the sense of being. Ellipsis of

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being and the letter. What happens with this reinscription? What happens when we discern at the origin, as “Ellipsis” does, a “being-written” and a “being-inscribed”? There is no question of giving a complete answer here. What “happens” there has not finished happening, Derrida has not finished making, transforming his own response. And undoubtedly the “response” comes in the very movement of writing, which we are bound to repeat, writing “on” him, but also writing on “us.” What we can perhaps say here, however, is this: that in the ellipsis of being and the letter, in the différance of the sense of being, being no longer simply withdraws into its difference from what exists, or into the gap of that difference. If the ontico-ontological difference was once taken to be central (but was it in Heidegger himself? and if so, to what extent?), if it ever constituted a system centered on the juncture of Being, and of a Being established in its own difference, it can do so no longer. Difference (of being) is itself differant. It withdraws still further from itself, and from there still calls itself forth. It is withdrawn further than any assignation to a “difference of being” (or in a “different being,” or in any Other) could ever remove it, and it is altogether yet to come, more so than any annunciation could say. Later, Derrida will write that “within the decisive concept of the ontico-ontological difference, everything is not to be thought in one stroke.” More than one trait or ductus (to adopt a paleographic term designating each of the lines used to trace a single letter, suggested to me by Ginevra Bompiani): this means at once the multiplication and the ductility of the trait, its fracturing at its juncture and also, as the condition of these events, the effacing of the trait: less than a single trait, its dissolution in its own ductility. This signifies the ductus of difference, in difference and as the “inside” of a difference that has no interiority (it is the withdrawal of the inheritance of being to what exists). An inside which arrives to the outside. The sense of the ontico-ontological difference lies not in its being this difference, nor in its being such and such, but in the fact that it is to come, to arrive, an sich ereignen [to emerge in the proper-ness of its event], still to appropriate its inappropriable, its incommensurability. Being is nothing outside of or before its “own” folding of existence: the folding of the book in our hands, as we hold it. The fold multiplies the traits and opens the book to writing. The only difference is in a coming equal to the infinite withdrawal that it traces and effaces at one and the same time. It is “there, but out there, or beyond.” As altered sense, existence demands, calls for, intimates there its “beyond.” Elliptical sense, existence surpassing its sense, withdrawing and exceeding it.

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That’s what writing is, he says. Perhaps we should also say that, by definition, there’s nothing beyond being (and its fold), and that this marks an absolute limit. But an absolute limit is a limit with no outside, a frontier without a foreign country, an edge without an external side. This is no longer a limit, therefore, or it is the limit of nothing. Such a limit would also be an expansion without limits, but the expansion of nothing into nothing, if being itself is nothing. Such is the infinity proper to finitude. This expansion is a hollowing-out without limits, and this excavation is writing, “a void which continues to excavate itself,” as the quotation from Jean Catesson in “Ellipsis” puts it. Thus the void nullifies itself in itself and brings itself to light. Writing excavates a cavern deeper than any philosophical cave; a bulldozer and caterpillar for tearing up the whole field: a terrain, a passion for the machine, a mechanical passion, mechanical and machinated. This machine, marked J. D., excavates to the center and the belly. The belly is the altered void. The machine carries out an evisceration that is itself hysterical. The hysteria of writing lies in bringing to light (a light unbearable yet simple), through a genuine simulacrum of disemboweling and parturition, this limit of being that no one can stomach. Writing perseveres and exhausts itself there, à corps perdu. But writing doesn’t do anything; rather, it lets itself be done by a machinery, by a machination which always comes to it from somewhere beyond itself, from being’s passion for being nothing, nothing but its own difference to come, and which always comes there, there where the beyond is. This also means that, as in the question of writing, the question of sense (of being) is altered as a question in such a way that it can no longer appear as a question. A question presupposes sense, and aims to bring this sense to light in its answer. But here sense is presupposed merely as the appeal to sense, the senseless sense of the appeal to sense, the ellipsis which finally never closes off anything, but which calls: the “gaping mouth,” there, where the ellipsis itself, and its geometry, are eclipsed by a cry. But a silent cry: nothing but altered sense. What responds to a call or to an appeal is not a response but an advent, a coming to presence. Ereignis, for Heidegger, names the advent of presence proper in (and to) its inappropriation. “Writing” bespeaks the ellipsis of the present in this advent itself, this ellipsis of the present by which the event takes place—taking place with no other place than the displacing of “all natural place and center,” the spacing of the place itself, of the “trace,” and of “our hands.” Yet writing, at the limit that is its own but where it is not itself, wouldn’t

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“say” even this. It wouldn’t substitute an affirmation to the question. It wouldn’t substitute anything for anything; it would operate no transformation, re-elaboration, or re-evaluation of discourse. The “system” of writing is not another discourse “on” sense. It is the movement, the passion, and the impatience which arises with sense, “all sense.” In a sense, an exorbitant sense—the ellipsis of ellipsis itself—there is no discourse, no philosophy, and thus no thinking that is Derrida’s. This, at least, would have been his passion: to elide, to eclipse thinking in writing. No longer to think, but to come and to let come. Needless to say, this doesn’t amount to a “project” or to a particular “enterprise of thinking.” Yet might we not say that there is a “program” (a trace running always ahead of itself), the program of an extenuation? One that Derrida carries out relentlessly? The sense of being differs—differs (from) its own difference, coming to be the same as existence and nothing else—and calling to itself, calling for itself, and repeating itself as being the “same,” right at existence, its difference, always remembering itself in the letter of sense which literally does not make sense, the rabbi of open books and not of the biblia, all of this wouldn’t be Derrida’s discourse, any more than it would be Dérissa’s or anyone else’s. It would be what comes today, here and now, our history, to all discourse, in all discourse, at its fractured juncture, no possibility of this coming ever being halted—being, on the contrary, what is always coming, and to come. What is it to come or to enjoy? What is joy? This is no longer a “question.” It has never been a question for philosophy, whether philosophy has never wanted to know anything about it, or whether it has always known—and here Spinoza speaks on behalf of all philosophers—that it is not a question. But it is precisely about coming, coming to the limit, and the limit of coming: infinite finitude. As for what it comes to and where it comes from, this is discourse still less; this is no longer writing—writing is the coming, and its call. But it is—all the rest, all the sense of all the rest: what we call, and what perhaps we need to rewrite totally as the world, history, the body, sense, work, technology, the work of art, voice, community, the city, and passion, passion yet again. Let no one come to say, in any event, that this joy beyond question—but not beyond appeal—reeks of facile and complacent discourse. It is “happiness” that reeks. Happiness succumbed to the killing fields, to grocery stores and to crack. The stench is still with us. Its accumulation will explode, of course. Joy, the sense of existence, is the infinite but irrefutable, irrecusable demand.

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3 Let’s go back; let’s repeat the text again, returning to the other end of the ellipse, and take up the altered ring at its beginning, insofar as a ring has a beginning. “Here or there we have discerned writing”: everything is there, in one fell swoop, in this lapidary incipit whose affirmation or affirmativity rests on a discreet prosody. (And here, we ought to reread this sentence with its proper scansion.) Everything is there in a passion of language which has overcharged with sense this simple sentence, otherwise so anodyne; which has saturated with resonances this very brief monody, to the point that somewhere, in some obscure place, it alters itself, fissures, and noiselessly gives in. Derrida has always had a devouring thirst for language, and has always striven passionately to make it do his will. “Here or there”: the first words of the text effect a mise en abîme, both of this text itself and of the book it closes. What has been done (the discerning of writing) has been done right here, and so it is right here: in a present already past, just started up. When did we begin to read? When did he start writing? It is done; a discovery has taken place; a principle has been laid down—this incipit is a conclusion, the systematic conclusion of the book—but it is here, under our very eyes, between our hands, and it never ceases to be at stake, still and most especially when it is written “here.” It is not a “present perfect,” but the passage of the present of writing (its present, its gift, which gives nothing without also giving the giver, “on” whom we are writing); it is the coming into presence of what is not present. (What comes into presence does not become present.) It does not stop coming, and coming at a limit. Presence itself is nothing but limit. And the limit itself, nothing but the unlimited coming to presence—which is also the unlimited gift, present, of presence, or its offering: for presence is never given, but always offered or presented, which means offered to our decision whether or not to receive it. And the here is immediately redoubled: it is either here or there. There, the there, will come at the end of the text, and will be redoubled in turn: “there, but out there, beyond.” Here or there: already the two foci of the text, already the ellipsis. It’s all there. Some years later, at the end of another text, accompanying once again the form and forgery of his own signature (of the proper sense of the proper name, where all sense is altered in effect), Derrida will write that he signs “here. Where? There.” Here removes itself from its own place and there pierces its own place (in performing it). Derrida’s entire text and oeuvre is altered by perforating and performing itself. He has, he

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is, an inextinguishable thirst for a wild and drunken pursuit of selfexternalization of offering himself up where he is not, of blocking himself from being where he is. He cannot bear himself, though he is borne only by himself. And that sums up the violent, desperate, joyous errancy of the sense of the age, of our sense, disseminated in a great gust coming from beyond the West, just as it is sedimented and paved over by the thickness, and thus the speechlessness, of our words. All of Derrida’s text is a deafmute text. It is already time to inscribe an ellipsis here—as the title (Derrida’s, and mine in repeating it) has already done. Or, more exactly, one can’t do less, but one must go to the end, the ellipsis of ellipsis. For Derrida has neglected, by ellipsis, in accordance with the tropological use of the word “ellipsis,” which surely he could not have failed to remember, making explicit the sense of this word. (And so: “Ellipsis” as a title; the ellipsis of the title. He contrives not to entitle this text any more than he signs it.) He will inscribe it in Greek, and elliptically attach to it the double value of a lack, of a decentering, and of an avoidance. El-lipsis, from ek-leipo¯, I avoid: I avoid—writing what I write. I live off writing, I leave off writing. And he will leave out saying (writing) that the ellipsis (as eclipse) has as its etymon the idea of fault, of the absence of precision or exactitude. The geometrical ellipsis was initially a generic term for figures that failed to be identical, before being used (by Apollonius of Pergamon, in his treatise on Conics) in the sense familiar to us, as designating what is missing in a circle and doubles the property of the constant radius of the circle into the constancy of the sum of two distances, which always vary. All of this, together with an entire structural, historical, rhetorical, and literary analysis of the ellipsis and ellipses, has been subject to an ellipsis. However, it is not simply a question of the specular play “Ellipsis upon ellipsis, and in ellipsis.” In calling itself “Ellipsis” (which is not at all the same thing as being entitled “On Ellipsis”) and in its display of abyssal speculation, itself simple, infinitely so, the text says, writes, or “ellipses” (eclipses and reveals) something else entirely. It indicates that something else is subject to ellipsis, something we cannot and must not know. It lets us know that we are really and truly missing something. Lots of things at once, no doubt: for example, the identity between “Derrida” and “Dérissa,” or else “this other hand,” named, pointed to, and shown to be invisible, unnameable—and those suspension points that follow it . . . serpent’s hand, or fish’s. . . . This text says all sorts of sensible things about writing and about sense, and it says that it has something else tucked away, that it’s telling another story. But also it says that this exhibiting of a secret

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hides nothing, that there isn’t another story or, at least, that he doesn’t know it himself. . . . This text effaces as much as it traces, effaces precisely insofar as it traces, retracing the effacing and effacing this trace as well. . . . Certainly, we will have missed the sense. It will have changed us. The passion of J.D. is to alter or to change his reader. What other passion could a piece of writing have? Once again, and first of all: “here or there.” An ellipsis of places, of two foci, neither of which can center the text or localize the writing that we have discerned. This double focus, these two fires, two lights, two burnt patches, are shown to us, then removed from view. What is more, “two” is more than two; “two” opens onto the multiple. In the “here or there” it is the suspension, the hesitation, and the beating of the or that counts. Of this or [ou] which does not say where [où] writing is. Nor when, nor how. “Here or there” is without a definite place, it is also “sometimes, at moments, from time to time,” and therefore “by accident, by chance, fortuitously.” Writing can only be made out by accident. Even the calculus of writing, which we see Derrida give himself over to here—a calculus that is meticulous and fierce, with all the rigor of the geometer (is he also from Pergamon, the city of parchment?, this little secret, scratched here?), a tenacity ruled by the systematic tracking down of what deregulates and disseminates sense—this very calculus (in fact, especially this calculus) is given over to the vagaries of language. Here or there language might favor the game or even make the rules. If the circle of sense did link up, the game would take place everywhere or nowhere: no more play, nothing but sense. But the game of sense implies the hazardous ellipsis of its rules. Neither manifest literalness nor mise en abîme, no less manifest, makes sense of the text. Neither the “whole” nor the “hole” of sense. But always once more the ellipsis, which is to say: sense itself as ellipsis, as not moving around a fixed point, but coming endlessly to the limit—here or there—where signification is eclipsed and a presence only arrives at its sense: a rabbi, a fish, a piece of parchment, who and what else? This sense of a presence is the joy, the pleasure and pain of the enjoyment of this presence, exposed before or beyond all presentation and any present of a signifiable sense (of a sense present to itself?). This takes place where place has no signifying privilege, unassuming places indifferent to all presences, to all the differences between them: a constant sum, here or there. What by chance takes (has taken) place here is a discerning (“here or there we have discerned writing”). That is to say, a fine, penetrating insight, a perspicacious gaze which has insinuated itself into writing, across “labyrinth” and “abyss,” plunging “into the horizontality of a pure surface,

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which itself represents itself from detour to detour” (for where else is writing to be discerned if not here, right at the “grapheme” itself?). In the interstices of a “deconstructed” discourse, a piercing theory has seen what had never been seen before. So far, a classic incipit of the philosophical text. But to dis-cern, strictly, means to see between [to glimpse, entrevoir], it is barely to see, or to guess, in an ellipsis of the eye. Theorein has been reduced here to an extenuation, to a vestige in the half-light—to a twilight vision, not one of daytime. “We have discerned”: we have divided off with a cerne, which in French is the contour and particularly the ring of fatigue around tired eyes; thus we have divided off from two cernes, tracing the contour and the division, the division as contour. (The sentence that follows in the text will “sketch” this “dividing line”—and that “dividing line” will divide and share of itself; separation and communication, exchange and isolation.) We have retraced the limit of writing, writing as limit. We have written writing: it can’t be seen, or barely; it writes itself; it traces itself and effaces itself under the very eyes of anyone who would try to look. It sets its course by groping along its traces. But its effacement is its repetition: it is its demand and its calling forth; it is “all the sense” that traverses it, always coming from elsewhere, and nowhere, offering itself to us as it takes us away from ourselves. But who, “we”? This we which has, or have, discerned writing is both the modest authorial “we” and the royal “we” of the philosopher. But it is also ours: the we of a community in its history. “We” voices the historiality of the discerning of writing. This discerning is as recent as the outline, in modernity (let us say from Benjamin and Bataille to Blanchot), of a certain title or graph of writing whose philosophical inscription Derrida has assumed and assured (in other words: where he invents “literature”). And yet this discerning is as ancient as the first philosophical inscription. Later, Derrida will retrace the separation of book and text back to Plato: ellipsis of the West. Here we are at this limit: the waning [occident] of sense, the distension of its foci, frees up the task of thinking (though in what sense is it still “thinking”?) the sense of our finite existences. Transcendental experience is right here. There is, in effect, nothing in this incipit that does not bear the stamp of the empirical: the randomness of place and moment, the simple facticity of discerning. The incipit gives the origin and the principle of the system in the register of the empirical. Here’s what happened, it’s happened to us. It not only opens up discourse to writing, but it already breaches it (“breach” will be the penultimate word of the book). It opens up an irrepressible empiricity, in writing it, in

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offering as a narrative what is, by rights, an exposition more geometrico, but elliptically so. Thus the transcendental experience of writing is not Husserl’s “transcendental experience.” Husserl’s was meant to be pure experience, the reduction and purification of the empirical. Here, by contrast, experience is impure—and this is why, undoubtedly, the concept of “experience” is itself inappropriate, at least insofar as it presupposes some sort of experimental setup, as is the concept of the transcendental (which always lays claim to an a priori purity as condition of possibility). Instead it is a question here of putting together what befalls us, in the non-purity of the event and the accident, the historical passage in which all sense of History is changed: wars and genocides, collapses of representation, the erosion of politics by global technology, the drifting of “unchained peninsulas.” In that case, experience should be expressed or thought as “wandering,” as “adventure,” and as the “dance” named in the text—in short, as passion itself: the passion of sense. What would pass as a “condition of possibility” here (but also an “ontology”) would be on the order of passion. But passion is always destined to the impossible. It does not transfom it into the possible, does not master it; rather, it is dedicated and exposed to it, passive at the limit where the impossible comes, which is to say, where everything comes, all sense, and where the impossible is reached as the limit. The impossible is the center, the origin, and the sense. Ellipsis is the ellipsis of the center, its lack, its failing, and the presentation of the “dangerous hole” into which the “anxious desire of the book” seeks to “have insinuated itself.” But when it insinuates itself there it discovers or discerns that it has plunged into nothing other than the “horizontality of a pure surface.” The circle gapes; the ellipsis surfaces. Touching the center, one touches writing. All sense is altered—but what glides across the surface (brilliant, slippery fish . . .) and what plunges into the hole (tightly rolled parchment), would these not be the same? The same which alters, and all sense, once again, without end? And is it the same passion to touch the center and to touch writing? Is it the same machine which digs, fills in, and traces anew?

4 Undoubtedly it is the same machine: has there ever been more than one passion—more than one anguish, more than one joy, even if this unicity is in essence plural? The passion for the center, for touching the center, and for the touching of the center has always been J.D.’s passion—

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the passion of philosophy as the passion of writing. The one and the other, according to the two senses of the genitive, and one in the other, and one for the other. Both completed, raised up, or cast into the depths by the passion for touching language, as he will have repeated. To touch language: to touch the trace, and to touch its effacement. To touch what moves and vibrates in the “open mouth, the hidden center, the elliptical return.” To touch the ellipsis itself—and to touch ellipsis inasmuch as it touches, as an orbit touches the edges of a system, whether cosmological or ocular. A strange, orbital touch: touching the eye, the tongue, language, and the world. At the center, and in the belly. It is the same passion: to discern is to see and to trace; it is to see or to trace at the point where the rings around the eyes touch—between the eyes. Discerning is where touching and vision touch. It is the limit of vision—and the limit of touch. To discern is to see what differs in touching. To see the center differing (from itself): the ellipsis. There is a certain narrowing in all discerning: sight narrows to the extreme, and becomes sharper and more strangled. It always has its two hands clenched around the book. It is the system, again. It is the will to system. (But what is will? Who knows, or thinks he knows? Doesn’t will differ in its essence?) It is the will to touch: the wish that the hands touch, across the book, and through the book; that its hands touch, reaching just as far as its skin, its parchment; that our hands touch, always through the intermediary of skin, but touch nonetheless. To touch oneself, to be touched right at oneself, outside oneself, without anything being appropriated. That is writing, love, and sense. Sense is touching. The “transcendental” of sense (or what is “ontological” in it) is touch: obscure, impure, untouchable touch, “with an animallike, quick, silent, smooth, brilliant, sliding motion, in the manner of a serpent or a fish,” even more than hands, the surface of the skin. The skin repeats itself, here or there. The text says nothing of this: it will have effected an ellipsis of the skin. But that is why there is no skin as such. It is missing and always being undone, and this is how it covers up, unveils, and offers. Always an undoing of sense, always an ellipsis in which sense emerges. It is the passion after a skin to write on. He writes endlessly on his own skin, hand to hand, à corps perdu. (This means that whoever writes “on” Derrida is no different from Derrida writing “on” sense and “on” writing, or from anyone who writes on anything at all. We always write “on” someone, on some singularity of the skin, on a surface scratched and tattooed yet smooth and slippery, on a piece of parchment, on a voice. An epidermic writing, mimicking the movements, contortions, and altera-

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tions of a skin of sense stretched tight and perforated, intact and enacted, miming a writing which imitates nothing, no sense having been given to it. One always writes as if overcome by a sovereign, sublime Mimesis of Sense, and by its inimitable Style; in writing one is always mimicking the gestures and dances of this senseless model, à corps perdu.) This corps perdu, this lost body—Derrida found it one day written in French in Hegel. (See the beginning of Margins.) It is the passion of writing. Writing can do nothing but lose its body. As soon as writing touches the body, writing loses touch itself. Writing has only to trace it or efface it. But the body is not lost in the simple exteriority of a “physical” or “concrete” presence. Rather, it is lost to all material or spiritual modalities of a presence full of sense, charged with sense. And if writing loses the body, loses its own body à corps perdu, this occurs to the extent to which it inscribes its presence beyond all recognized modalities of presence. To inscribe presence is not to (re)present it or to signify it, but to let come to one and over one what merely presents itself at the limit where inscription itself withdraws (or exscribes itself, writes itself outside itself). Derrida—under the name “Derrida” or some alteration of this name— will not have stopped inscribing the presence of this lost body. He is not trying to make some new power arise through language, to erect any system or nonsystem of some new disposition of sense. On the contrary, he has always played—on stage and at stake—the body lost at the limit of all language, the foreign body, which is the body of our foreignness. That is why this body is lost in the very discourse of writing and the deconstruction of metaphysics, insofar as that is a discourse (a philosophy or even a thinking). The experience named “writing” is this violent exhaustion of the discourse in which “all sense” is altered, not into another or the other sense, but in this exscribed body, this flesh which is the whole resource and plenitude of sense, even though it is neither its origin nor its end, yet still place and the ellipsis of place. This body is material and singular—it is also the very body of Jacques Derrida—but it is material in a singular way: one cannot designate it or present it as a “[subject] matter.” It is present with that presence of the unavoidable withdrawal of writing, where it can be nothing but its own ellipsis, there, out there, and beyond. There, out there, beyond “Derrida” himself, but nonetheless here, on his body and his text, philosophy will have moved, materially, and our history will have moved. It will have inscribed/exscribed something which has nothing to do with any of the possible transformations of ontology or of the transcendental (even if the discourse frequently proves susceptible to being brought back to such transformative operations). Philosophy

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will have moved with a movement discreet, powerful, and trembling: the movement of a lost body presented at the limit of language. This body is made of flesh, of gestures, forces, blows, passions, techniques, powers, and drives; it is dynamic, energetic, economic, political, sensuous, aesthetic—but it is none of these meanings as such. It is the presence which has no sense, but which is sense, its ellipsis and its advent. Derrida “himself ”—or his ellipsis—is a wild singularity of this body, crazy for it, crazy with its presence, crazy with laughter and anguish at the always-retraced limit where its own presence never stops coming à corps perdu—discreet, powerful, trembling like everything which is to come. —Translated by Jonathan Derbyshire and Anne O’Byrne

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 /

Borborygmi

1 “Borborygmi” was a nonchalant and hasty response, premature as always, to the request to provide a title for this talk. I thought: I don’t know what to say. I was mumbling and stammering. Then this word came to me: a Greek onomatopoeia, now a medical term for a rumbling in the bowels, which has, in turn, developed a figurative meaning in French, connoting “incomprehensible and inarticulate remarks.” As it happens, this sort of response isn’t restricted to this particular request—the request to speak about Derrida. More and more, I find that each request to speak arouses in me an anxiety—but also, paradoxically, a need to respond with an inarticulate grunt. As if each time it became clearer to me that the response, indeed every response, must lead back to the edge of language, exhausting its semantic resources in order to let something that is, immediately and materially, the unheard sense of which we are the hearkening, murmur and creak, albeit at the price of any possibility of identifying this “we.” So, at the very moment that I let you in on this insignificant anecdote concerning my title, doing so simply in order to avoid having to come back to it, I am confirming its structural or transcendental, which is to say historial, necessity. What behooves us—us other philosophers—is to articulate the inarticulate remarking of a sense more powerful and more remote than all configurations, constellations, or constructions of sense. What falls to us in this way is the job, precisely, of articulating sense, its

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power and its withdrawal. It is a matter of articulating the inarticulable, not of lapsing into mumbled incantation (poetry in the worst sense) or of settling for the displacement, reversal, and perpetual relativization of concepts (of settling, that is, for nihilism). It is the inarticulable as such that has to be articulated, with the proviso that it is precisely the “as such,” in withdrawing, which is the problem here, though in such a way that this withdrawal is seen to belong essentially to the “as such” as such. In short, we need to express the fact that truth, each time, opens and inaugurates the outside of all truth, but in a way that is, each time, proper to itself, absolutely proper, exact, clear, distinct and distinctive, unique, certain, and present. Or, to put it another way, we must name that which has no name, name that which, by definition, withholds itself from nomination. More exactly, we have to name de-nomination itself, put a name to the very withdrawal of the name, as opposed to naming a “that” which would have no name. The tradition has always sought to give the name “God” to what has no name. God is the (nick)name of the Name taken absolutely. It is the nominal essence of what is beyond all names. If the “death of God” means anything, if we are at last to find a sense of ourselves in it, it is because we need to learn to stop naming a “this” or a “that” which would be beyond all names (but which would be, for this very reason, the repository of an ultimate nomination and propriety) and instead to name properly, for every “this” and every “that,” for all things, the deprivation of the proper and the name: the most essential origin in the midst of the inessential fragility of being. Naming requires that a name be made. In Greek this is called onomatopoeia, the production, creation, or poiesis of the name. We know that there is never genuine onomatopoeia in languages. Its very concept is contradictory: either there is a noise, which is precisely not a name, or there is a name, which imitates a noise without being the noise itself. A contradictory or limit concept, then, but one that language nevertheless brushes up against incessantly: the thing making a name for itself, rather than the ostension of its sense by its name. Not a proper name then, but the thing itself, materially, being the singular stamp of its truth and, at the same time, the syncopated withdrawal of its name, and this very withdrawal, moreover, being the truth of the name. Is it possible to think of an onomatopoeia of truth? Of truth naming itself with its own sound, so that what is proper both to it and to us can resonate or ring out? But truth is essentially self-presentation. Truth presents and names itself. All the while truth turns itself inside out, as a relation to itself, as the enfolding of the innermost distance which forms

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it, just as it presents itself to itself and as it presents self. Can we thus imagine a borborygmus for truth’s “intestinal difference”? This self-presentation is so intimate and intestinal that it is also entirely foreign. Is it a question, then, of a barbarism, of the language of truth being a language of the other, of the wholly foreign, and, as such, being badly formed, mumbled, and stammered? A barbaric idiom? Does Derrida think about anything else? Is Derrida naming anything else when he writes his own name, “Derrida,” when he writes this name and about this particular proper name beneath his signature? Throughout his work autobiography is at issue to such an extent that all other questions appear secondary or derived. The philosophical order itself seems to dissolve, to capsize, or to run mad in the erratic empiricalness of a name beyond all question or concept. But beneath autobiography, and beneath this “outside,” if not as this outside, could it be that what is really at stake is an auto-hetero-graphy of truth?

2 What or who is there behind Derrida [derrière Derrida]? There is more than one question here—as we might suppose he would say himself. This question cannot be made univocal, for it could conceivably contain questions of genealogy, antecedence, foundation, or substance, as well as a suspicion about a disguised presence or motive. Similarly, there are several ways of construing that “behind” as a meaning or direction: backwards, forwards, as already given or to be discovered up ahead; as “behind,” de retro; as an antecedent or a return, as already there or as the coming of a return. But always coming from behind, never frontally. We could say the same about the object of the question: what is there or who is there, two possibilities that leave open the elision crossed by “there,” the “there” that stands there for the “there” presupposed by “behind” or “after,” precisely. Finally, the question leaves open the very subject of its questioning: Derrida the individual, the philosopher, the signatory, the signature, the name, the signifier, or the improbable signified of a proper name, in general, the sense of a “derrida,” like that of a dérivoir, a derry, or a rideau [le sens d’un “derrida,” comme le sens d’un “dérivoir,” d’une “éridelle” ou d’un “rideau”]—but in what language? Consequently, such a question must be handled in accordance with the use he himself—he, Derrida, the one in question here—makes of the such [tel], of a such without an as or a that, of this archaic such, which he has made into one of the singular features of his lexicon and syntax (precisely, of his syntactical lexia). His fanatical use and abuse of the such shows just

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how much he values the ability to upset demonstrative, indicative, or indexical determinacy—of this, that, or the other—to make resonate there both under- and overdetermination. A such that is not as such, a such which stands alone, the subject of an ostension rather than a designation, without reference or referent, comparable only to itself and therefore incomparable, incommensurable, with no gap between the similar and the same. Neither as such nor such as it is, but such without relation to any genre, or else strictly unique in its genre and thus without generality or genus. The idiom of a unique singular, one such, such a Derrida. The real Derrida or the truth of Derrida, or even such a truth of such. What is there behind that? In putting these extremes of the idiom together—on the one hand, the extremity of the syntactical operator which connects nothing (the “such”) and, on the other, the nominal form which signifies nothing and names only the name, as the proper itself, “Derrida”—we are brought to the outermost limit of the idiom. There is nothing behind it. It refers to nothing, it makes no sense or connection, it merely echoes itself, like a shot or a noise, like the emphasis of a pure phasis. And yet it is already implied in reference; it relates to relation and names naming. In a vacuum, granted, but a vacuum which creates a gulf, an appeal for sense that is like an intake of air, a pure and vertiginous aspiration. Idiom is impossible, we know. It is the impossible, as he (Derrida) never stops repeating: it must be understood that we stand face-to-face with the impossible, faced with the question: “How does the impossible express itself, what does it mean?” How the expression of the impossible is an impossible meaning. But this same wanting-to-say-the-impossible makes the impossible itself snap or crackle, a barbaric idiom whose very barbarity can be heard at least by those with an ear for it. Against such a name, sense or truth itself resounds: its sound, its echo, its muffled cry, its rustle, its murmur, or its shout. Just at [à même]: that is the law of idiom, in the double polarity of the such and the proper name. No relation, no signification. What is said, if it is said, what is stammered, mumbled, or murmured, is just at the idiomatic word, just at the onomatopoeia of the impossible. There is nothing behind, therefore: no depths or reserves of sense or of truth. There is nothing behind Derrida as such, evidently and eminently, nothing. All background, all hypokeimenon or subjectum, disappears ipso facto: the idiomatic gesture or tone is responsible, by itself, for this disappearance and abolition of all wishing to speak, all intentionality, and all plan. Nothing behind and, in consequence, everything up front. Everything pushed forward, but a forward with no backward, not even a phenomenon, not even a surface.

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If there is nothing behind, there is nothing in front, either: nothing ahead of itself or of us, nothing which relates to itself or to the other. Not a manifestation or an event, not a story and thus neither a process nor a narration. No autobiography, therefore, but the scratched outline of an autograph, an event, if you like, though with nothing occurring or arising but the most extreme sense or truth of all sense and truth. And all this only in a sense, of course, for there could never be sense without the alterity which works over sense as such. That is its truth, in fact, the truth of sense. If I say such and Derrida, and if I say One Such in general, I could very well be said to be saying nothing, but it could not be said that I am not saying. And that is what cannot be affected by even the most extravagant claims of the skeptic. The most obscure and barbaric idiom can indeed take language to the limits of meaning and communication—but it is still language, it is language which is thereby stretched to the limit. It is language that has become a thing, withdrawn from any relation to sense. But this thinglike language, this noise or mark, itself means, even if it expresses nothing, if it wills to say nothing, or even if it wills not to will. It is beyond the will. It seeks neither to communicate nor to signify, but is the pure expression of that which puts itself forward without going outside itself, stamping its own truth on itself. Dividing itself without going outside itself, necessarily an auto-hetero-graph. An expression so pure and so in tune with itself that it is precisely the annihilation of the will as representation and as power to present representation. It is, in its tension, just the triggering of self-presence. The click of the trigger. “I cl’,” he says: clack, lack, alc, gl, tr, infraor intra-verbal phonemes, like the inaudible “a” of “differance” or such parentheses, onomatopoeias, such glug-glug, tic-tak, trrr, or words that might one call, in their way, phone-emphatic, wink, gul, hinge, thence, dike, tint, sing, an obsession with resonance and assonance, a poetics that is above all sonorous, infra-significant, where one blows out of all proportion sonorities slipping outside the sign, drawing out the sound of the sign, angiospermic, androeciumic, epigynetic, petroglyphic, heliotropic, and thus communicating with a philosophical beyond of signification, portmanteau-words and concepts multiplied almost to the point of exhaustion, untenable yet retained, hurled, lost in the profusion, destinerrance, emasculation, peniclitoris, logoarchy, signsponge, the jerky spasm of an eructojaculation, logoroperatergo. This is not all: one must then consider the whole sentence, and then the set of sentences making up the book, and then the indefinite sequence of books and the fearsome, irrepressible manner in which he piles them up and arrests them, allowing questions or hypotheses, references and allusions, to proliferate, making

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them each other’s guardians until he decides to banish them or send them all flying, to the point that he pulls the rug out from under his own feet or takes back what he had already given away up front. A tergo, here we go again. It is from behind language—from behind by letting oneself slip to the bottom, to the rear, or indeed from behind it by turning around back to the front, by twisting all the front to make it turn back in the rear—that his frenzy of language seeks indefatigably to make idiomatic the barbarous, thus making a language purely wordbound, but also, cut off from any tongue, purely the thing itself, a characteristic that would no longer be Leibnizian because of no longer being symbolic— unless it were so absolutely, purely, and simply: a pure division of the symbolizing thing from itself, splitting so as to let its fracture sound and thus let itself be recognized, by and to itself. For and in itself—but then, necessarily, such that to the other, in the other, and for the other this language engraves or has engraved itself on itself, a mark that at the same time sets language going behind and in front of itself, always in retreat and always sent up ahead and behind: and thus, properly. And what is behind all this, at the very least and in a first approximation, what if not what is proper, what is its own? But what is properly the alterity of the proper? What haunts the proper, as he likes to say, as he likes to haunt himself with haunting and the sound of the word “haunting”— is that it is not enough for the proper properly to be the proper. What is most properly the proper is the development and sequence in itself of a formidable logic of self-marking, self-reference, and self-expression. There is no proper, no own, without appropriation, and the “I” is nothing, not even a Kantian empty “I,” without such an auto-graph, the very automark by which alone the “auto” sets itself in motion: the originary trigger, or starter of self-presence, stemming originarily from presence to itself. A heterogeneous auto-mark, generated from the other in the most intimate or intestinal reaches of the auto. But what is this trigger if it is not truth? What else could it be but this alterity of the true, which grasps the thing as such and properly names it, not in order to signify it, but to make of it the senseless origin of sense? The truth is that the thing names itself properly in such a way that nothing precedes it or subordinates it; it says itself in being, if not this side of or beyond being, but always saying itself with a saying before or beyond discourse, saying or manifesting the itself of the proper and the proper as itself—the to-itself which opens sense itself. Without that, would there be anything there at all? Would there be someone, a thing or a person? In allowing the impossible idiomaticity of the proper to proliferate in a starry madness of sub- and sur-nominations,

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of hyper-nominations, like galaxies expanding around a black hole of the proper name absorbing all sense, it is the proper which “Derrida” is stalking and tracking, and trying to make melt away and implode on top, underneath, behind, or in front; nothing less than the totality and the architotality of the proper in truth, thus its absolute, singular, irreducible, incompressible, irrefragable, irrecuperable uniqueness, but also its absolute, indefinitely plural, multipliable, extendable, communicable, exchangeable generality. Such a Derrida = One Such = all origin, any living present of sense, the birth and death of each one as every one which recognizes itself as such, as having nothing to recognize but its uniqueness without unity.

3 Let’s leave Monsieur Derrida there, as we must. Let’s abandon him to that for which he is merely the borrowed name: the self-naming-in-truth of everyone, of each entity unique in itself. This today is the absolute need, the most pressing requirement of philosophy (and/or poetry, of their intestinal difference) in the age of suspended assumptions and abandoned figures: that everyone be truly named and that sense emerge afresh from the heterology of all these singular nominations. Let’s immediately move behind Derrida, straight to this truth. We can expect to do so, however, only by passing through his eponym (as if there were ever a name that wasn’t borrowed . . .). What is behind him is behind there: truth does not reside in a generality, or, at the very least, this generality does not have the consistency of a homogeneous other world or of a subsumption. On the contrary, its “consistency” is that of the discrete, singular disjunction of all in one and one in all, at once the same for all, just like that identical for all, and each time identical to itself alone. (It’s the same question: neither “the people” nor “the individual”; neither “the community” nor “the hero”; and indeed, neither “philosophy” nor “the thinker”; neither “language” nor “the poet.” Rather, the question is how one distinguishes itself from the other, and how to pass from one to the other without referring or reducing one to the other.) Behind there: in the same spot as the name “Derrida,” a random place like any other, but also the unique, the most unique place to which he accords the exorbitant privilege of revealing what truth truly amounts to—that there is no truth which is not, each time, exorbitant. “What or who is behind Derrida?” is the only autobiographical question worth asking, so long as one hears it as a question about autoconstitution or auto-manifestation, not so much a question, in fact, as

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a wish or a drive to search behind the self for what moves the self and makes it come to itself, as itself. (Posed from outside, it is in effect a false question, one that belongs on the side of the antithesis in the Kantian antinomies, reaching back all the way along the infinite regress of causes. But it will be understood that the truth I am speaking about is inseparable from freedom, from its singular and absolute beginning, from its liberation before each and every particular “freedom.”) The autobiographical question—or the autobiographical urge, curiosity, attraction, instinct, compulsion, and indulgence—can only proceed from this interrogation: What is there behind the self, and what ensures the advent of the self, something hidden from the self but which it searches after in order precisely to be this very self? This questioning or drive must inquire after what precedes it: it, the question, or the drive, but that is to say the autos itself, which is not there unless it seeks itself, demands itself, and pushes itself (marks itself or implodes), and, preceding, is conjured up, that which is pre-dicted in being pro-duced, is made to resonate before it finds its own voice and indeed so as to let be heard in advance what is proper to its voice (the proper of a voice in general; that is to say, a unique resonance and an inimitable timbre, or that which wants to express itself as such). Strictly speaking, therefore, the autobiographical question can be nothing but the question of the heterological antecedence of the autos itself, or in the autos itself, or in its ownmost behind. And it is there, after all, this behind that gives to this question or compulsion, this compulsion to question, at once its absolute, vertiginous necessity and its constitutive trait of impossibility: it always fizzles out at the very point at which it is being put together. But perhaps it’s precisely the sound of this fizzling out that it wants to be heard, even if that means bursting the eardrum or putting up with the echoing of the void. Derrida hasn’t failed to amplify the question. In a frenzied autobiographical turn, he has not only answered the question “What or who is behind Derrida?” but has given, prescribed this response in inscribing “Derrida,” already, right at the back. Thus (and here I’m cutting, extracting from, a text that’s arranged precisely to prevent such abbreviation; I’ve supplied enough of the context, though, so as to give a whiff of the chords and harmonies of the autobiographical music in play here): A fleet of screens [paravents] with purple sails, purple veils [voiles pourpres], a fleet ready for the attack, the defense, a fleet guarding itself at the prow and the poop, gold spurs for the parade. The parade always stays behind [derrière]. Derrière: every time the word comes first, if written therefore after

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a period and with a capital letter, something inside me used to start to recognize there my father’s name, in golden letters on his tomb, even before he was there. A fortiori when I read Derrière le rideau [Behind the curtain]. Derrière, behind, isn’t it always already behind a curtain, a veil, a weaving. A fleecing text. Behind a veil, the truth. The truth of what is behind, of what either can be unveiled or remain hidden, a promised and intangible nudity, and at the same time the back or behind of truth, the back side of the fabric, texture itself, itself and spun out of itself, not something to be veiled or unveiled, but something set out—something that sets sail, in the sense of taking to the high seas and making for clear water, without limits, a showing that is both exhibition and protection, ostentation and dissimulation. What is he showing here, what truth? He shows how he already grabs hold of himself from behind himself, or rather, he says how “something in me” grabs hold of itself, how the very thing of the self grabs hold of itself by itself, a self behind the self, a self like its own origin or provenance. Not just the active origin of the father, but an origin already originated ahead of time and before its hour, ahead of its own emergence, already, properly speaking, conveyed to its properness of immemorial provenance. The deathly inscription of the name, the inscription of the death of the name, of the name as death, my own death, then, in my name, though a death seized from behind as what was already behind the origin itself. Before me the tombstone allows me to see the name as the obverse, as the reverse of the origin—of its own origin, which it will never grasp or recognize, except from behind and as the behind. “Derrida,” therefore, picked up and turned upside down, turned upside down and cut off from his da: da without da, like Sein, or, who knows, like Mit-Sein. Being alone, and being-with, being-alongside-oneself, being-with-what-is-before-oneself, and not being-there, nor even being-the-there, but being what is behind the there, what is not there, offered, indicated, or localized, but inscribes itself beneath. Isn’t that the truth of the there, however? The truth of each there in and as such? For there is not one encircled locality, determinate and opposed to another (not the da as opposed to a fort, but rather the fort of all da). Da is the opening up of place before the place itself, the already-open without which there would be no place, no site of being: the hinterland of place. The da cannot be occupied. Rather, it is a matter of being; that is, instead of presupposing it as a given locale, presupposing oneself in and as the ownmost presupposition of the da, in and as its taking place before

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and behind the place. Da is the “essential openness” which Dasein “carries in its ownmost Being”: it does not carry it in front of it, like something it might present. Rather, it literally brings it along “all the way from home” (von Hause aus mit), which is a way of saying “originally” or “in its ownmost being,” and which implies a house behind or from which one emerges, even if, at the same time, it is the emergence which makes the house (as the assonance Hauslaus suggests): the emerging which makes the opening or clearing in which the house consists. The house or home: the family, the name of the father, and, first of all, the genetic outpouring, emergence, genealogy. Hence da is behind as the up-ahead of the clearing which always precedes, which is precedence itself and thus the essence of pre-sence. A dwelling place, in which dwelling consists in opening and opening oneself, opening a “self [soi]” as such, which is to say, again, a “home [chez soi]” which is always, infinitely, behind itself and, in consequence, also always ahead of itself. Derrida cuts off his da, he scotomizes it in order to substitute for it, like a delocalization and an alteration (er, “he” in German; erring of the trace and of errance; era of the great temporal openings): thus, he gives his da over to its truth, he reopens it and reinitializes its ending—and this gesture is none other than one of collecting, by which he inscribes on the stone or weaves into the curtain the paternal da, on the era cut off in its turn. The exchange is impeccable: derrida is always already behind [derrière], which is always already behind derrida always already behind. Derrida is always susceptible to surprising himself from behind. He watches himself, watches out for himself, gets himself caught. He is on the trail of the trace, which he effaces insofar as he leaves its imprint behind him. He is on the scent of effacement itself: he effaces an enormous overload of traces, marks, and gilded letters. His mania for marking is the madness of effacing the mark in marking effacement, in one fell swoop always knocking himself out, from behind. But this “Derriere” with a capital letter, this “Derriere” “coming first”— not as a substantive, therefore, not as Monsieur Derriere, but first in the syntax, thus coming about in the course of the sentence, raised through a dot and through a blank space behind it—this “Derriere” that he cannot encounter without recognizing what is his own, what is proper, his proper provenance, birth-and-death, by writing it is he appearing to himself, holding himself up, or objectifying himself? Has he sent this back in advance? He didn’t miss the opportunity. See, for example, a double occurrence in The Post Card (which comes after Glas, and is duly legible by any well-informed reader).

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The first occurrence, one line at the top of a verso page, begins with the last words of a sentence that remains invisible behind it: “cup. Behind the great man the dwarf with the flat hat, the slave or the preceptor seeks to hitch himself up.” “À dès” concludes “a dice cup,” as if to make more plausible that this cast of assonant words that ends in a beginning that stammeringly repeats—dé-dé [“à dès. Derrière”]—was a matter of chance, when it reveals itself as what he so visibly calculated (and with that mark, of course, he disguises his own track, if ever a throw of the dice . . .). The second occurrence, this time at the beginning of a paragraph, is “Behind Socrates he is as stiff as justice.” I won’t try to dissect what is so clearly presented to us in disguise, the open secret that he wants us to ignore yet to recognize in the same blink of an eye: Derrida behind and ahead of everyone, ahead of an entire genealogy and lagging behind the whole of philosophy, the philosopher cut off, by default or excess, from the self-engendering which defines the philosophical as such, defines the philosophical family and ancestry in the idiomatic logic of the proper, which is perhaps only a double tautology, and of which the whole of Derrida’s text, the whole text of every Derrida, would wish itself to be nothing but a gigantic tauto-phonographo-cryptophaner-ology, biting its own tail, in all senses and with all imaginable effects simultaneously, fireworks and cold ashes, a madness watching over itself in the moment that it unwinds, but arising also from this very close watch.

4 Once more, and very logically, we need to leave Monsieur Derrida there. Not only, in effect, better compulsively to show that he hides himself behind, but also better frantically to emphasize that he puts himself forward, in order to turn round and be nothing but his back, as if showing a clean pair of heels. Not only to be seen only from behind, but in order to be simply the back, in the absolute sense of being, in order that the sein of this Dasein be nothing other than this da which precedes it, but which it has to be in opening itself up, not yet being, then, only opening itself to being, not being, not being an entity there, but instead withdrawing so as to emerge from behind any allocation of being, substance, or subject, so as to burst forth in the sub or the hypo which no longer refers to anything, is no longer predicated of anything: an absolute incipit gaping at the origin of what is properly or improperly called “metaphysics,” that is to say, the intestinal difference of the phusis and technology of its reversal. Everything comes back, you see, to the capital letter: the whole affair

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of the behind, and what went on behind, comes down to the capital letter or, at the very least, goes by way of it. It is the capital letter which triggers the propriety of the name in the impropriety of the behind. There must be the incipit of the sentence: there must be the sentential or phatic opening, the affirmation, the declaration, the leap without consequence or subsequence, before all sequence, the casting into words, speaking as a cast, and perhaps a cast before all of speech, the blow or throw. But first, at the incipit, the capital letter is undecidable: Derrida gives this situation a sort of general formalization when, proposing this leading ( princeps) sentence “He will have obligated,” he asks, “Who is the ‘He’ in this phrase . . . by what right He carries a capital letter?” He replies, “Perhaps not only as an incipit,” since one must allow the hypothesis “of another capital letter or of the capital letter of the Other.” The capital letter can simply be the mark of the incipit, “he” may be anyone, or perhaps the mark of the absolute distance of the Other—a hyper-incipit more withdrawn, buried deeper, than any primacy of the logico-grammatical subject. It is both at once, it carries both at once and one in the other, it replaces or covers over one with the other indefinitely. The covering up of “Derrida” by “Derrière” effects nothing else: at once any “behind” [n’importe quel ‘derrière’], which is also to say any proper name, and anything as a proper name, simply the mark of this absolute limit: naked propriety, which, as such, has nothing proper about it and, at the same time, the absolute, unique “behind” which subtends all possible presence, the opening and withdrawal into the other of all identity and all presence; but also, and again at the same time, any “derrida,” the son or the father, and of course with that the father’s father (which process, from son to father, one thing leading to another, will soon end up scrambling all proper names in the complexity of genealogies), and at the same time the one and only Derrida, the madman who signs all that, absolutely, though by doing so he makes himself something other than all identity, something which passes behind all possible identification (or else echoes like the trigger or the echo of the faint timbre of the other at the very heart of its own identification). All this is not as vertiginous as it appears—or rather, this very real vertigo is basic or elemental. The appropriation of the proper (reaching behind oneself in order to endow oneself with the proper) can only take place in the properly untenable conjunction of an absolute “Illeity” (the Other, the Most High, the Most Distant) and a common, indifferent and interchangeable “he” (the other, always an other, yet an other). What occurs in this conjoining or conjunction is nothing less than the conflagration of sur-significance and in-significance: the one can only

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emerge by way of the other, the one opens out in the other. This mutual opening opens meaning or significance in general: that it has sense, or the truth of sense, is something absolutely proper, unique and originary, and thus indistinguishable from its own substitution by every other. To put it another way: the absolute Narcissus can only grasp himself, if he does so, as identical and equal to all others insofar as he is the Unique itself. That, after all, is the most enduring lesson we have learnt about the constitution of subjectivity—going back at least as far as Saint Augustine and then right up to the Jemeinigkeit of Dasein, by way of the ego sum, the universality of the Hegelian I, and the Husserlian alter ego. This lesson forces us to confront what is perhaps the most significant fact, certainly the most powerful constraint, the one richest in resources and aporias, in our entire tradition: namely, that autology is intrinsically heterology. Logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetics, and politics are all subject to this axiom, and to its double condition or double bind: that I must always, inexorably, retreat both forward and backward, into what is more intimate and internal, even intestinal, to me than my ownmost innerness; and that there is sense, in all truth, only to the extent that I go outside myself, am exposed to other origins and to the other, to all others, at the origin. This requirement owes as much to the erratic, incalculable, and inappropriable luck of others as it does to myself. The singular has no necessity: it is each time its singular necessity. I occupy necessarily the indifferent site of an absence of necessity which I share with everyone, and where sense opens out. The retreat behind myself is the same thing as voyaging out among others: both are plunged into the proximity of an infinite distancing. They touch at a distance: this is what is called “being in the true.” In this connection, what purpose does the detour by way of “Derrida” serve? Why should such a general lesson have to pass through there? Through “there,” through “Derrida,” which, of course, also means: through anywhere and through anyone, but anywhere and anyone insofar as the “any,” here, signifies each time in its singular occurrence. The generality of this lesson—and, I repeat, there is perhaps nothing more general or more generic in what passes, in the widest sense of the term, for “our tradition”—lies precisely in its nongenerality: the heterology of autology constitutes autology itself in singularities whose difference constitutes, institutes, and opens the “auto” as such. In the singular—singulus, one by one—generality is not arranged in discrete units carved out of an overarching, transcendental or original homogeneity: the genus, here, is from the outset the differential uniqueness of each “one.” Without doubt, each “one” is as such in-significant and substitutable. But, in order to be substitutable or substituted for, it must

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be given in its uniqueness, without which there could be no substitution. Without that there would just be indistinctness, the mere, massive conservation of a substantia noumenon. Nothing would happen and no-one would come on the scene, there would be neither birth nor death. No Derrida, no Plato, no Dupont, no Schmitt, and nothing behind, everything quite simply put up front, vorhanden, objectum. What happens, on the other hand, the subjectum surging and bursting forth, is that everything happens, everyone comes on the scene. It comes from nowhere—from behind, ever farther behind—given, thrown rather, like nothing so much as a uniqueness empty of sense: this emptiness, in truth, is the opening of all sense, in and to all senses and in all directions. But the opening has to be opened, slit, launched, burst apart, or cracked, each time, incessantly.

5 Opening has the character, simultaneously, of something entrenched and of generality or universality. Entrenchment because it (ça) opens, it snaps apart, the depths or the whole is undermined (those depths or that whole which will therefore never have taken place, which subsist nowhere, which are neither depths nor whole). Universality because once that snaps open, it opens in every sense, communicates opening to all points and in all directions (it is that which opens points and directions as such). All our concerns are gathered together there, those belonging to us latecomers and early risers: we emerge from the depths and the whole, and we call this emergence history, Occident or world, technology. We spring up, strange and frightening, from an opening which gapes everywhere and which refers all cohesion of ground and of totality to the nonplace. Thus from behind ourselves, from beyond all identity, we come on the scene, which is to say, we bring ourselves on the scene, unspeakably new. They come on the scene, over there, up close, just behind or ahead of us. This violent torsion exhausts and dazzles us. In a flash, an entrenchment is communicated throughout. Its absolute uniqueness (its infinite value and dignity) is distinguished absolutely: this distinction is nothing but the negativity of entrenchment, a negativity which is itself the most complete affirmation, the unique and its propriety, the unique appropriating itself properly. All distinctions are equal, they each merit, equally, the passion of the origin, an excessive love which signifies nothing less than the recognition of unrecognizable uniqueness. They are equal, and substitutable, though this equality is the equality of what is most unequal in the world: equality of the incommensurable,

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equality of an appropriation which is each time an infinite overflowing of self into self. The proper is not only what digs itself in, entrenches itself against the rest: it is also what digs itself in and retreats into itself infinitely in order to open there the space of appropriation. The advent of self is behind every self. The proper pushes the self back beyond all propriety, so as to let it emerge. Proper is pro privo, it is a movement, not a given but a giving: a giving of itself to itself, which in fact means giving itself up to what has no other place or consistency than the “itself ” of the “giving itself up” itself. To appropriate oneself: giving oneself up, or devoting oneself, to giving oneself up or to devoting oneself—and always, in the final analysis, surrendering to the infinite turning back which constitutes the structure and the sense of self. Behind, consequently—not what would be behind, but the beingbehind-itself of the unique. Behind there is nothing for sense, but this nothing itself is like a hard, impenetrable, resisting thing: the being-back of the back itself, which attaches to nothing and through which nothing, coming from elsewhere, can penetrate. Behind each “one,” as its behind, there is the primal matter of the unique: uniqueness itself, insignificant and as if reduced to its impenetrability. Primal matter is the back side: that is to say, that which has no face, that which one cannot face up to, but which opens and which comes into the open, or as the open itself. The open as such: that which cannot be indexed “as such,” being comparable to nothing, not even itself, since the “self ” itself is still, infinitely, to come. The open as such, incomparable, but which, barely open, resounds in itself as itself, the echo of its idiomatic creaking, cracking, and straining. This is why it must be one, each time one, which impossibly passes behind: it doesn’t pass behind as one might journey to the depths, behind appearances or into the supposed consistency of a whole. Rather, it must pass uniquely to the unique reverse of the unique. This reverse is neither present nor absent, it is, properly speaking, neither form nor matter, though it has the irreducibility of matter and presence, and it has the alteration and torsion of absence and form. This torsion of the irreducible, this splitting at the bottom, which does not arise from it but nonetheless belongs to it just as it breaks it to pieces—this splitting which consequently withdraws into the depths, as unobtrusive as disruptive or difficult—is a “kernel,” not as a hidden presence, but as something which escapes from “the laws of presence itself.” It is the hard kernel which is not some other thing behind the thing, but the thing itself behind itself, withdrawn into its reality. It is here just a question of the real: res, the thing itself in its own detonation. Derrida’s thinking is an absolute

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realism of the pure real, that is, of the real which springs forth from behind everything: realizing everything, while being nothing realized, being nothing, the res of realization itself. Not only does this realism affirm the real, it touches it. To touch it is not to merge with it: it is to come into contact, to experience the resistance of the impenetrable, of the thing or being as the hard blow which rings out. This is why Derrida wants to touch himself as if touching this real, he wants to touch the real as if it were himself: to be himself the inexpressible kernel from which sense originates in what is beyond sense, in a behind of sense or, rather, in a sense behind which is neither the reverse nor the excess of sense, neither its hyperbole nor its exhaustion, but merely its opening and its gaping wide. This is simply being-to-self, but beingto-self turns out to be nothing but a being-to-that-which-is-not-alreadythere: self, the real, is a hard kernel because it is not given, because its being as kernel consists in an endless recoil or retreat, though this recoil without end, far from implying flight, is its most proper stance, its emergence in a combination of anxiety and joy. When I say that he wants it, I mean: he wants to get behind the will, he wants to wish just that its breath is taken away, anxiety and joy mixed together, in the jubilant mourning for his name, which resounds as a lost name. Thus he wants to touch the secret of his name, which is the secret of all names and is the secret par excellence: what remains secret even when one unveils it, especially when one unveils it, that about which there is nothing to say, except to say its name again and again, a bizarre and barbaric background noise. (Music deprived, at bottom, of art and of articulation in general, of discourse, of form, and of sense, a proffering of the unnameable, architracing trait of the sonic rip around which the air wraps itself, vibrating: the spirit of philosophy out of the matter of music, this is our entire history.) Being-to-itself: being-thrown—but not simply precipitated into an abyss, but thrown into the splitting which opens it, and out of which it emerges in falling. Thrown, then, as if rhythmed by its going-to-itself, in itself, which takes it out of itself, wrenches it from the depths and the whole in order to hurl it toward the inexpressible unique which, in turn, hurls it back into the general communication of all uniquenesses in the very rhythm which disjoins and conjoins them one to the other. Rhythmed autoheterography of existences. The itself of the self is just the step and the echo of this rhythm, where the real properly refers to itself, across its opening, the absolute and original impropriety of the thing itself; the syncopated beat of being, to which

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being is reduced. Already and not yet language: the back of language, a barbaric glottal stop at the back of the throat, the rough crashing and the ending of a song, growling and grunting, a nonspeaking animal which gives voice. In order to touch this rhythm, one must never stop “effacing all the traits of language,” toward “ ‘words’ that are so ‘true’ that I can no longer recognize them myself.” Words which no longer name anything, or rather which name only the behind of all naming, which articulate what is unarticulated in the opening of the real, a song which sings nothing but which modulates—or even silences—this opening itself. A proper name, then, like the rhythmic and melodic idiom of the origin itself, its unique poem. All proper names are common nouns and, reciprocally, all common nouns are proper names: names and language are born in this vacillation. Any which, consequently, any such and any da, making any sound, indefinitely substitutable, a simple exemplar at the heart of the innumerable: but at the same time, necessarily, not any one but this one alone, the unique and inimitable example of self, “Derrida” in this case then and behind Derrida still Derrida rather than a bottomless behind. There must never be any exemplarity: the unique must begin (itself) again each time. The example of the inexemplifiable must bury itself in and re-emerge from each uniqueness. Right at the insignificance of a name, in the vagaries of its assonances, and by their very coinage, is coined the absolute significance of one for itself as much as for every other. It resonates dimly, it creaks or grinds, chokes even. It’s not something that can be heard, it hovers as if between unnameable sounds and the inimitable timbre of a voice, like the echo of one to the others, which a hiccup would suspend. This does not make itself heard, but the whole of the real resonates there. —Translated by Jonathan Derbyshire

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The Judeo-Christian

By way of epigraph, at the end of this colloquium, and to return to Gérard Bensussan’s initial presentation: might the “last of the Jews” not be the first of the Christians? This is a question that we can rightly call “historial.” It is, in any case, the one I will pose today to Jacques Derrida. “Judeo-Christian” is a fragile designation. The word appears in the Littré dictionary with a historical definition that restricts it to the religion of the first Christian Jews, of those who considered that non-Jewish Christians should first “be associated with, or incorporated into, the nation of Israel.” This signification sets aside the partisans of the measures of the order taken in Jerusalem under James’s authority and reported in Acts 15. It is no longer the same meaning as in Harnack at the end of the century, which indicates only a preferential place for the Jewish people as the distinctive trait of the Judeo-Christians. Harnack thus distinguishes them from those whom he will call the “pagan-Christians” (who will also be called “Helleno-Christians” or “Hellenic-Christians”). Today, the use of the term Judeo-Christian is still less restrictive, as a function of complexities that historians have brought to light. At the same time, certain among them have expressed doubts about the validity of the category, if only because of the diversity of movements or stances that it is able to cover. In the meantime, usage of the term has authorized a still broader and nonhistorical role when one speaks, for example, of Judeo-Christian culture or tradition to designate a certain interweaving, at the base of European civilization, of the two enemy sisters or, indeed, of the mother and the daughter, the Synagogue and the Church. In truth, this composite

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term so far has been taken to designate an imbrication or conjuncture essential to our identity or our thought, even “the most impenetrable abyss that Western thought conceals,” as Lyotard wrote of the trait d’union [hyphen] that holds this composition together or de-composes it at its core—which makes of its center a disunion. The enigma of this noncomposable composition should interest us in more than one respect; in fact, it should interest us in five respects. 1. Insofar as the name Judeo-Christian can go so far as to posit a—or even the—salient characteristic, that is, the incisive and decisive, if not essential, characteristic of a civilization that will call itself “Western,” its stake is then nothing other than the composition and/or the decomposition, in and for itself, of this “civilization.” 2. Insofar as its name de-composes what we have agreed to call, in our culture, “religions,” it implies, within the determination of Western thought (and in its self-determination), a hyphen drawn between “religion” and “thought,” precisely where thought—in the name of “philosophy,” itself albeit otherwise self-composed—was determined as nonreligious, even anti-religious, thereby drawing its line over religion, to destroy it or de-compose it. This name thus implies an irritation or a vexation of the West in itself and for itself. 3. Insofar as it implicates philosophy—if only in the guise of an offense or contradiction—this name communicates in some sense with that other composite: the Greek-Jew and/or Jew-Greek. This composite names nothing other (before becoming a name forged in Joyce’s language of de-composition) than the vis-à-vis of Judeo-Christianity, understood as pagan-Christianity or Christian Hellenism (and the latter being the origin of the missionary expansion of Christianity, which may also be the fact of Jews speaking or thinking in Greek, and designating their new religion, moreover, as one more philosophy). For this motif, there is no Judeo-Christianity, under the circumstances, that is not also JudeoGreco-Christianity, and philosophy cannot hold itself apart or stand free from this double mark of dis-union. 4. Insofar as this mark multiplies at least once by itself, its reduction [sa démultiplication] will not cease thereafter: it draws or traces from itself a general de-composition. This de-composition first disunites the three religions called “of the Book,” and thus composes with Islam another assemblage and another discontinuity relative to the West, another dis-orientation and re-orientation (after all, as we know, the aftermath of historical Judeo-Christianity exerted very specific influences upon the birth of Islam, just as it had, a few centuries earlier, on the formation of Manichaeism). This reduction once again de-composes Judaisms,

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Christianisms, and Islamisms among themselves, setting in play each time a new form of contrariety with, or attraction to, philosophy. For its part, philosophy itself only presumes to be one insofar as (and at the least among other motives) across its extreme synchronic and diachronic disparity; it posits itself as distinct from religion (or again, within religion itself, as essentially distinguished from faith). 5. Insofar as the Judeo-Christian composition thus conceals or stimulates what we could call the general dis-position of the West (or indeed, what we should spell, in Greco-Latin, its dys-position), it so happens that this composition espouses formally a schema whose recurrence and extent/amplitude are not insignificant in our entire tradition of thought: this is the schema of coincidentia oppositorum, whose declensions include, among others, the oxymoron, the Witz, the Hegelian dialectic, or mystical ecstasies. From which of these four species the Judeo-Christian composition comes is perhaps not the question to ask, for it may arise from all of them or compose them all. But it is a constant that the most general law of this schema (like the structure of the Kantian schematism, which forms a species of the same genre) is to contain at its center a gap [un écart] around which it is organized. The hyphen passes over a void that it does not fill. Upon what could this void open? That is the question that a consideration attentive to the Judeo-Christian composition cannot avoid posing. Such a consideration is perhaps virtually a reflection on the composition in general of our tradition and within our tradition; that is, ultimately, on the possibility of the cum [“with”] considered in itself. How could the cum, how could the communion—taken as a generic term (that term of Cicero, taken up later on in Christianity to absorb and sublate the koino¯nia, the societas, and the communicatio)—include constitutively the voiding of its center or its heart? How, consequently, can this voiding call to the deconstruction of this composition: that is, the penetration in the midst of the possibility, which is a possibility of composition that is both contracted and combated? (A parenthesis for two axioms. 1. A deconstruction is always a penetration; it is neither a destruction, nor a return to the archaic, nor, again, a suspension of adherence: a deconstruction is an intentionality of the tocome [l’à-venir], enclosed in the space through which the con-struction is articulated part by part. 2. Deconstruction thus belongs to a construction as its law or its proper schema: it does not come to it from elsewhere.) Here, deconstruction is therefore none other than the logic, altogether historical and theoretical, of the construction of what one might readily call in the language of painting “short-stroke composition” [“la composition au trait d’union”]. To be sure, composition, or the composed or

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composite characteristic, is not an exclusive trait of Christianity or the West. Nonetheless, Christianity never ceases designating, by itself and as itself, a communication or placing-in-common, a koino¯nia that appears according to circumstances as its essence or as its acme, and it is indeed Christianity that has marked the West, or even as what is Western itself, with the intentional drive toward a “pleroma of peoples” (ple¯ro¯ma to¯n ethno¯n, plenitudo gentium; cf. Romans 11:25) whose restored community with Israel must be the touchstone, according to this text of Paul. Likewise, the pre- or para-Christian Judaism of the Qumran is a strain that considered the community to be the true Temple. From the religion of the Temple to communitarian or “communal” faith, from the religion of the sons to the religion of the brothers—all the way to republican fraternity and to the comparison Engels developed between the first communists and the first Christians or, more precisely, those Jews he called “still unconscious Christians” (referring, above all, to the John of Revelation)—from this passage, then, which also brings to its end a generalized abandonment of the Temples of antiquity and leads toward the constitution of a “church,” which means, above all, an “assembly” (just like a “synagogue”), up to the question of what the koino¯nia of our globalization or becoming-global and its being-in-common in every sense of the term could mean, there is an insistent continuity of a com-position that would carry in itself, in its cum itself, the law of a deconstruction: What is there beneath the hyphen and in the hollow of the assemblage? Over what and from what is the hyphen drawn? And how is this hyphen drawn from the one to the other—from the one to the other edge and from the one to the other “self ”? How is it drawn such that it might withdraw while at the same time remaining intact: not untouchable but intact, remaining intact throughout the entire Greco-Judeo-ChristoIslamo-Euro-planetary history, an intact spacing that has perhaps never yet come to light, having perhaps never yet taken form or substance, but remaining always residual, the uncomposable and undecomposable nonthought of our history? I am drawing no conclusions, for the moment, from this enumeration of headings for the uncomposable composition that requires our attention. I propose today to examine only one of the most remarkable tendencies of Judeo-Christianity: that which was incorporated, ultimately, in the Christian canon of the “New Testament,” even at the price of remarkable doubts and resistances, which have persisted, in some cases, up to our day. I mean, here, the epistle attributed to James. That letter is the first of those a very ancient tradition designates “catholic.” This name does not designate, at its origin, some particular

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orientation of these texts toward the Roman Church, but rather, as in the initial expression katholike¯ ekkle¯sia, their general or, if you will, universal destination. In this sense, rather than being addressed to a community, to a synagogue, or to a determinate church (like the Pauline epistles), they are addressed to a larger whole, which each time arises from the diaspora. That catholicity and diaspora might initially have to do with one another is something worth reflecting upon: do the “whole” and the “dispersion” produce a whole out of dispersion, a dispersion of the whole, or, indeed, a whole in dispersion? In a sense, the entire question lies there: I mean that the entire question of the West as totality and/or as dissemination resides therein. Today, then, for us, the Judeo-Christian will be James. And it will be, in a manner that remains to be discerned, a secret thread or a hyphen that could tie the historic James to that other James [Jacques] around whom, or on whose pretext, we have come together here; and who is another Judeo-Christian, or indeed another Judeo-Helleno-Christian. This secret tie has nothing contrived or arbitrary about it; nor am I proposing it as an ad hoc rationalization. At the very least we should venture the risk, here, of its relevance. That relevance would be tied simply to this: if it is possible, at the end of the twentieth century, that a philosopher, and thus in principle a Greek, experience the necessity of re-interrogating a category of faith or of a faith act, or, again, that he or she speak of the real as resurrection—and if it is possible that this philosopher do so in a reference that might be at the same time Jewish (i.e., holiness, borrowed from Levinas) and Christian (i.e., a “miracle of witnessing”), then in what relationship can this take shape within historical Judeo-Christianity and what could this allow us to discern, and deconstruct, in our own origin or provenance? (Parenthesis: before reading the Epistle of James, I would like to make it clear that I am going to proceed without furnishing any erudite sources, for that could only be excessive here. Recent studies on the many JudeoChristianities and on the messianisms of James’s time are multiplying. This is no doubt also a sign. But I neither want nor am able to do the work of a historian, no more than I intend a commentary on Derrida: I intend to work precisely between the two.) The James to whom we attribute the letter in question has been distinguished as “the minor,” from James the major, whom all of Europe went to venerate at Compostela. The tradition also names him “the brother of Jesus,” and we believe we have finally identified him as the head of the Church of Jerusalem or of the “Holy Church of the Hebrews,” who brings down the decision, reported in Acts 15, in favor of the non-Jews by declar-

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ing that “God chose for himself a people in his name . . . so that other men would seek the Lord, all those nations over which his name was invoked.” With these words, James confers his authority (and that of a citation from Amos) on the words that Peter had pronounced when he said: “God has borne witness to the nations in giving them the holy spirit just as he did for us.” God is a witness, that is, a martyr, for all men: the witness of their holiness or of their call to holiness (which is to say, to his proper holiness). Such was the message that the assembly sent Paul and Barnabas, along with a few others, to deliver to Antioch, where tempers had to be calmed in regard to what was due to the Jews, and what to the others. God bears witness for all men insofar as he is the one who “knows human hearts [o¯ kardiognoste¯s].” Israel is thus the singular site chosen for this witness about hearts: the visible or visibly marked (by circumcision) site starting from which the Holy One attests to the invisible and uncircumcised holiness of all humanity, or of the pleroma of his peoples. It is from this angle that I will approach the Epistle of James. In it one reads, at 1:18, that God sought “to engender us from a word of truth such that we might be the first-born of his creatures.” “We,” here, is first “the brothers” of the “twelve tribes of the dispersion,” to whom the letter is addressed. It is thus the Jews who must be the “first-born of the creatures.” The first-born represent the part reserved for the gods of a harvest or a herd. The relation of the Jewish churches to the rest of humanity stands, here, in this single verse. The Jews who have faith in Jesus consecrate to God his own creation. Now, the letter reminds us further on that “men are made in the image of God” (3:9). (No doubt, the “we” of this verse can just as well tend to designate all men as the first-born of creation in its entirety: we shall come back to that.) The resemblance of men to God, and with this a thematic and problematic of the image that are infinitely complex, belongs to the essential core of biblical monotheism. This resemblance occupies an important place in the thought of Paul, for whom Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). But the Epistle of James stops at this mention of the well-known verse of Genesis and ventures nothing in particular about the relationship between man-as-image and Jesus. The mediation of this relation remains at a certain distance. As we shall see, it is not the economy of a Christo-centric salvation that organizes James’s thought: it is, as it were, directly, a certain relation of man to holiness that becomes an image in him. Before proceeding we must make a remark about methodology. An absence of Christology, and even of theology in general, characterizes this text—which we could call more parenetic or spiritual than doctrinal—to

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the point that this has aroused suspicion about its authenticity, or about whether to consider it simply a Jewish text. In passing, it is remarkable that Harnack does not even mention James in his History of Dogma: in fact, one can grant him that this epistle does not provide us much, by contrast to those of Paul, for the development of a discourse about the contents of faith (I would readily put it as the contents of a knowledge of faith, but that would be to anticipate too much). The epistle is wholly given over—as we shall show—to the act of faith. I am not claiming to reconstitute (others have done so much better than I could) the backgrounds or the implicit thematic (Essene, in particular) of this text. I am taking it in the form in which it is given. Now it is given at once as a text rather thin in theological speculation (as Luther said, “an epistle of straw”) and as a text whose intention is not to oppose Paul but to correct a tendentious interpretation of Paul that tended to cut faith off from all action. James’s theological reserve seems therefore intentional. But that means we must look here not for theological thinness but for a retreat of theology, or for a theology in retreat, that is, a withdrawal of any representation of contents in favor of an active information by faith—which is also to say that we must look for that alone which activates the contents. It is not another theological position, even less an opposed thesis: it is the position that stands precisely between two theological elaborations, and thus perhaps also between two religions, the Jewish and the Christian, like their hyphen and their separation [trait d’union et d’écartement], but also of their com-possibility, whatever the status of this “com-” might be: like their construction and their deconstruction taken together. That is to say that this position is like one of those points, one of those situations, in which the construction in question, like any construction, according to the general law of constructions, exposes itself, constitutively and in itself, to its deconstruction. Let us return, then, to the internal logic of this letter. If humans were engendered according to the image (gegonotes kath’omoio¯sin theou), then what is this homoio¯sis? To what or to whom are humans similar or homogeneous? The God of the letter is described rather briefly. He is unique, to be sure, but therein does not lie what is essential to the faith, which concerns more the works of man than the nature of God (James 2:19: “You believe that there is but one God, and you do well. The demons also believe this and they tremble,” which is to say, this is not enough to qualify your faith). This God is not the God of Israel in his jealous exclusivity, but neither is it properly speaking the God either of the Trinity or of love (nonetheless, the love of others plays a primordial role in the letter). God is “Lord and Father” (James 3:9), and this is uttered in the same

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verse that mentions homoio¯sis, just as in 1:17–18, where it is said that he “engendered us as the first-born of his creatures.” The father is father of and in his resemblance (we could even say that paternity and resemblance share a reciprocity here), just as in Genesis, in the second story of creation, the resemblance of Adam to God passes into the resemblance between Adam and his son Seth: in this way opens the genealogy that will lead through Noah to Shem, Ham, and Japheth. This resemblance distinguishes man in creation; it makes of him the first-born of creation, which is to say that it is (and that through it man also is) the mark or the homogeneous trace that dedicates the world to its creator. This resemblance therefore does not depend on generation (as we are accustomed to thinking); it is rather generation that consists in the transmission of the trace. The created world is less a produced world than a marked world, a world traced, simultaneously imprinted and traversed by a vestige (as Augustine will say later on), that is to say, traced by that which remains withdrawn and by the withdrawal of an origin. From what, then, is this homoio¯sis made, this trace of the creator as such? The letter names him “Father of lights” (1:17)—he who opens the world in the division of light from what it illuminates (according to a very ancient cosmogonic schema). Immediately thereafter, it is said that from him comes “every beautiful gift, every perfect donation [pasa dosis agathe¯ kai pan do¯rema teleion]”: that is, every action of giving and all things given, the first being literally called “good,” and the second “fulfilled,” “completed.” God is first the giver. And it is as such that he is the “Father of lights, with whom there is neither change nor a shadow of variation.” He gives as light and what he gives is first, essentially, his light (the Latin allows us to specify: lux, illuminating light, not lumen, the glimmer of the illumined thing). He gives not so much some thing as the possibility of the clarity in which alone there can be things. If the logic of the gift is indeed, as the other James [Jacques] enjoys thinking, that the giver abandons him- or herself in his or her gift, then that is what is taking place here. In giving, in fulfilling the gift, God gives himself just as much as he remains in himself without shadows, since it is this dissipation of the shadow, this clearing of light that he gives, and since he “gives to all, simply” (James 1:5). To give and to withhold, to give oneself and to withhold oneself, these are not contradictories here and, correlatively, to be and to appear would be identical: a theology that is phenomenological and not theophanic. The logic of the gift and the logic of the homoio¯sis are superimposed: the homoios is of the same genos as that which engendered it (this theme, which displaces the pre-Greek and pre-Jewish relation of man to the

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divine, runs from Pythagoras via Plato up to Cleanthes, from whom Paul will borrow in addressing himself to the Athenians), and that which engenders or which engenders itself, gives itself, gives precisely its genos. Further on, the letter names the thing given. In James 4:6 we read: “He gives a grace better than covetousness,” and again, “He gives this grace to the humble” (a citation from Proverbs 3:34). Grace is favor, that is, at once the election that favors and the pleasure or the joy that is thereby given. Grace is a gratuity (Émile Benveniste shows that gratia, which translates kharis, gave us both gratis and gratuitas). It is the gratuity of a pleasure given for itself. In verse 4:6, the kharis is opposed to the desire that is pros phthonon, the desire of envy or jealousy. The latter is associated with voluptuous pleasures (he¯donai). But the logic of the text cannot be reduced to the condemnation of the philia tou kosmou (“the love of this world”). Or again, perhaps this condemnation should be understood according to the ampler and more complex logic in which it is inserted. James says, in effect, that the desire of envy proceeds from lack: “you covet and you have not, so you kill” (4:2). Phthonos is the envious desire for the good or for the happiness of the other (as we know, the phthonos of the Greek gods takes aim at the man whose success or happiness irritates them). Now, James continues: “but you have not because you ask not.” And then: “you ask and you receive not, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend for your sensuous pleasures.” There is thus a logic of lack and of jealous appropriation here, as well as a logic of asking in order to receive that which cannot be received other than by the gift or as the gift, that is, the favor of grace. This kharis is the opposite neither of desire nor of pleasure: it is desire and pleasure qua receptivity of and to this gift. This receptivity must equal the donation in gratuity. This gift gives nothing that might be of the order of an appropriable good. (We must also remember, so as to come back to it again shortly, that this epistle is the most vehemently opposed to the rich in the entirety of the New Testament.) This gift gives itself, it gives its own gift’s favor, which is to say, a withdrawal into the grace of the giver and of the present itself. The homoio¯sis is a homodo¯sis. To be in the image of God is therefore to be asking for grace, to give oneself in turn to the gift. Far from coming out of an askesis, one may justifiably say that this logic of grace arises out of enjoyment, and this enjoyment itself comes out of an abandon. That supposes, no doubt, according to the letter of the text, “unhappiness” and “bereavement,” “weeping” and “humiliation,” but these are not a sacrifice: they are the disposition of abandon, in which joy is possible. To be sure, something is abandoned, and it is lack, along with the desire for appropriation. But that is not sacrificed: it is not offered and consecrated to

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God. James is not preaching renunciation here: he is laying bare a logic separated as much from envy as from renunciation. And this logic is that of what he calls faith. As we know, the letter of James—while it may not be as opposed as one might think to the thought of Paul—is clearly distinguished from the latter, at least by its great insistence on the works of faith. (That was, moreover, the first reason for Luther’s severity toward this text.) But it is important to understand clearly that the works of faith in question here are not opposed to faith: they are, on the contrary, faith itself. The relationship of faith to its works is set forth in chapter 2, whose most famous verse is the eighteenth: “show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” The injunction or the challenge does not concern the necessity of proving one’s faith. Besides, the preceding verse has just stated: “without works faith by itself is dead (kath’heauten, by itself, in itself, as to itself).” These works do not stand in the order of external manifestation, or in that of a demonstration through the phenomenon. And faith does not subsist in itself. This is why what is in question here is to show faith ek to¯n ergo¯n, on the basis of works, and coming out of them. Instead of works proceeding from faith, and instead of works expressing it, faith here exists only in the works: in works that are its own and whose existence makes up the whole essence of faith, if we may put it that way. Verse 20 states that faith without works is arge¯, that is, vain, inefficient, and ineffective (curiously, the Vulgate translates this term by mortua, like the nekra of verse 17). Argos is a contraction of aergos, which is to say without ergon. James is thus stating a quasitautology. But it means: the ergon is existence here. That also means, then, that the ergon is understood in a general sense, as effectivity much more than as production; it is understood as being-in-act much more than as the operari of an opus. This logic is so precise and so restrictive that it obliges us to set aside a certain comprehension of the ergon to which we are more habituated, and even our Platonic and Aristotelian understanding of poie¯sis—a word that appears in 1:25, tied to ergon, and which everything makes us think, following several translators, in the sense of “practice” (thus, of “praxis”), that is, if praxis is indeed action in the sense of by or of an agent and not the praxis exerted upon an object. One might say: pistis is the praxis that takes place in and as the poie¯sis of the erga. If I wanted to write this in a Blanchotian idiom, I would say that faith is the inactivity or inoperativity [désoeuvrement] that takes place in and as the work [dans et comme l’oeuvre]. And if I wanted to pass from one James to the other [to Jacques Derrida], I would say that faith,

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as the praxis of poie¯sis, opens in poie¯sis the inadequation to self that alone can constitute “doing” [“faire”] and/or “acting” [l’ “agir ”] (both concepts implying the difference within or unto self of every concept or the irreducible difference between a lexis and the praxis that would seek to effectuate it). Extrapolating from there, I would say that praxis is that which could not be the production of a work adequate to its concept (and thus, production of an object), but that praxis is in every work and it is ek tou ergou, that which exceeds the concept of it. This is not, as we commonly think, that which is lacking in the concept, but rather that which, in exceeding it, thrusts the concept out of itself and gives it more to conceive, or more to grasp and to think, more to touch and to indicate, than that which it itself conceives. Faith would thus be here the praxical excess of and in the action or in the operation, and it would be this excess, insofar as it aligns itself with nothing other than itself, that is to say, also with the possibility for a “subject” (for an agent or for an actor) to be more, to be infinitely more and excessively more than what it is in itself and for itself. In that sense, this faith can no more be a property of the subject than it can be the subject’s “work”: this faith must be asked for and received— which does not prevent it from being asked for with faith, quite the contrary. (In James 1:6, one must “ask with faith without turns or sidestepping”: there is at the heart of faith a decision of faith that precedes itself and exceeds itself.) In this sense, faith cannot be an adherence to some contents of belief. If belief must be understood as a weak form or an analogy of knowledge, then faith is not of the order of belief. It comes neither from a knowledge nor from a wisdom, not even by analogy. And it is also not in this sense that we should understand Paul’s opposition of Christian “madness” to the “wisdom” of the world: this “madness” is neither a super-wisdom nor something symmetrical to wisdom or to knowledge. What James, for his part, would have us understand is that faith is its own work. It is in works, it makes them, and the works make it. Taking a step further, even a short step, we could extrapolate from James a declaration like the following: “It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a ‘belief,’ for example, in the belief in redemption by the Christ, that which characterizes the Christian; only Christian practice is Christian, a life like that lived by him who died on the cross”—a declaration that we could read in Nietzsche. Spinoza, for his part, asserts that “God demands, by the Prophets, of men no other knowledge of himself than that of his divine Justice and his Charity, that is to say those attributes which are such that men might imitate them by following a certain rule of life,” by which he is referring

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implicitly to the citation from James’s epistle, which he mentioned earlier in the same text. That faith might consist in its practice is the certainty that commands James’s interpretation of Abraham’s act or of that of Rahab (Genesis 2:21–25). Contrary to Paul (Romans 4), James maintains that Abraham is justified by his work, designated as the offering of Isaac. For his part, Paul does not mention this episode, but rather that of Sarah’s sterility (in Hebrews 11:1ff., the sacrifice is evoked, but the fundamental argument remains the same). According to Paul, what is important is that Abraham believed that God could give him a son, against all natural evidence. His act thus depended on a knowledge postulate (or it consisted in one; in the text of the letter to the Hebrews, we find the word logisamenos: Abraham judged that God could). For James, on the contrary, Abraham did. He offered up Isaac. It is not said there that he judged, considered, or believed. (Likewise, Rahab the prostitute saved the emissaries, and James says nothing, by contrast with Paul, about her belief in the promise the emissaries had made her, whereas the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Rahab expected that her life would be saved.) In a certain sense, James’s Abraham believes nothing, does not even hope (Paul says that he “hoped without hope”: even this dialectic is absent in James). James’s Abraham is not in the economy of assurances or substitutes for assurance. Abraham is neither persuaded nor convinced: his assent is not in the logismos. It is only in the ergon. If the notion of “faith” must be situated in the “logical” or “logistical” order (as the origin of pistis in peitho¯ would invite us to think: “to persuade,” “to convince”), then this faith resides in the inadequation of one’s own “logos” to itself. The reasons that this faith has “to believe” are not reasons. Thus it has nothing, in sum, with which to convince itself. This faith is but the “conviction” that gives itself over in act—not even to something “incomprehensible” (according to a logic of the “I cannot understand but I must or I may still believe,” and still less according to a logic of the credo quia absurdum), but to that which is another act: a commandment. Faith is not argumentative; it is the performative of the commandment—or it is homogeneous with it. Faith resides in inadequation to itself as a content of meaning. And it is in this precisely that it is truth qua truth of faith or faith as truth and verification. This is not sacri-fication but veri-fication. That is, also, the contrary of a truth believed. This faith, above all, does not believe. It is neither credulous nor even believing in the current sense of the term. It is a faith not believed. It is a nonbelief whose faith guarantees it as nonbelievable. The concept of “trusting oneself to” [“se fier à”] or “confiding in” [“se

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confier à”] opens on two sides: on the one hand, it is a matter of a kind of assurance, of a postulated certainty, something wagered, by a confidence poised upon some anticipation risked toward an end (analogous to the Kantian postulates, which are precisely those of a rational or reasonable belief into which Christian faith metamorphosed or by which it was eclipsed). But faith, according to James, is effected entirely in the inadequation of its enactment to any concept of that act even if it be a concept formed by analogy, by symbols, or by an “as if.” The work of Abraham is the acting or the doing of this inadequation: a praxis whose poie¯sis is the incommensurability of an action (to offer Isaac up) and of its representation or its meaning (to immolate his son). Faith as work could very well be knowledge—or nescience—of the incommensurability of acting with itself, that is, of the incommensurability of the agent, of the actor, or of the acting entity insofar as it exceeds itself and makes itself in the act, or makes itself exceed itself, or be exceeded by itself therein: thus, radically, absolutely, and necessarily, it proves to be the being-unto-the-other of its being-unto-self. In this, faith would be the very act of a homoio¯sis with the gift itself, understood in the sense of its act. Homoio¯sis as heteroio¯sis, the identity of the concept (of “knowledge” or of “thought”) qua the incommensurability of the conceiving in actu. This incommensurability would be tied to the following: this faith (“persuasion,” “wager of confidence,” or “assurance of faithfulness”) must come from the other, this faith must come from outside, it is the outside opening in itself a passage toward the inside. This faith would be—or, again, the Judeo-Christian and Islamic faith would be—the act of a non-knowledge as non-knowledge of the necessity of the other in every act and in every knowledge of the act that could stand at the level of what James here calls (5:21, 24–25) “justification”: that which makes just, that which creates a just one (which could never be, could above all not be in the adequation of the knowledge of its own justice). This act would be tied first to faith in the other—which the other James, or Jacques [Derrida], calls “the relation to the other as the secret of testimonial experience,” if by “testimony” we mean, as he does, the attestation of truth that all words postulate in the other or from the other, and in me qua other to myself (just as, Platonically, I “dialogue with myself ”). The just one or the justified one would be he who lets himself be attested, borne witness to, in the other. This truth and this justice open most precisely where it is no longer a sacred presence that assures and guarantees, but the fact itself—the act and the work—of not being assured by any presence that might not be of the other, and other than itself, other than the presence of sacred gods: in

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a sense, or if one wishes, the sacred itself or the holy (to fuse them for an instant), but as not given, not posited, not presented in an order of divine presence—on the contrary, “God” “himself ” as unlike any god, as gift and as the gift of the faith that is given to the other and that believes in nothing. With this, then, the Judeo-Christianism of James as deconstruction of religion and, consequently, also as self-deconstruction: leaving nothing subsisting, if this is indeed subsistence at all, but the hyphen and its spacing. This is why the work of faith, the poie¯sis-praxis of pistis, presents itself in the letter under three aspects: the love of the neighbor, the discrediting of wealth, and the truthful and decided word. In these three forms, in question each time is an exposition to what cannot be appropriated, to what has outside itself, and infinitely outside itself, the justice and truth of itself. In question is what the letter calls “the perfect law of freedom” (James 1:25 and 2:12). Unlike Paul, James does not sublate the law (supposedly ancient) into freedom and/or into a law (reputedly new). The “law of freedom”—of which no precept is really foreign to Judaism— is the arrangement or framework that would have it that acting should expose itself to the other and be nothing other than this very exposition: it is the acting of relationship or proximity rather than the doing of desire or appropriation; the acting of the word and the truth, rather than the “logistical” doing of representation and meaning. This formula—“law of freedom” (nomos te¯s e¯leuthe¯rias), which is perhaps a hapax in the Scriptures—could be understood with a Stoic resonance, and we would have, in that case, one of the marks of the implication of philosophy in this Christianity in statu nascendi. If something like this could be attested, then that should refer us to the deepest level of Stoicism’s understanding: not the submissive acceptance of an order that escapes me, but the sharing (nomos) of the event as the opportunity of a becoming-self. In this we can hear Jacques Derrida’s text on Abraham resonate with Deleuze’s lines on Stoicism: “to become worthy of what befalls us, thus to want it and to set it forth in its event, to become the son of one’s own events . . . and not of one’s works. For the work is itself produced only by the son of the event.” The nomos is thus the following: that we are only liberated by the truth that does not belong to us, that does not devolve to us, and that makes us act according to the inadequation and the inappropriation of its coming. It would be outside the scope of this conference to analyze the triple determination of the “law of freedom” according to love, the word, and poverty. I will therefore not attempt to do so today and I will conclude simply with that which can no longer be deferred: namely, Jesus Christ.

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In a certain sense, the only indubitable attestation of the JudeoChristian composition of James’s letter is his mention of Jesus. This mention is made from the first verse, in the formula, also used by Paul, “James, servant of God and of the lord Jesus Christ.” Then, in the first verse of chapter 2: “my brothers, you who have faith in our Lord Jesus the Christ of glory.” On the one hand, as I have already noted, this mention of the Christ stands withdrawn from any Christology. On the other hand, and at the same time, this mention alone determines faith, no longer according to its (praxical or operative) nature, but according to its reference, its scaffolding, its support, or its guarantee. Mere faith in the uniqueness of God, as we have seen, is not, by itself alone, truly faith. Faith, in order to be, that is, in order to act, draws its consistency from somewhere else: from a proper name. Being the carrier of no specific theology, the proper name does not turn into a concept. This proper name is no introduction to a logic of the mysteries of incarnation and redemption. At the most, we may suppose, beneath the name Jesus, an implicit reference to the teaching transmitted by the gospels, especially that of the Sermon on the Mount. For everything else, this name serves only to identify Christ, that is, the messiah. If the messiah is named, it is because he is come, because he is present in one way or another. He has presented himself. The name states this presence come to pass. A reader unaware of this would have no reason to think that this Jesus is no longer of this world. This presence is not that of a witness who would give reasons to believe, or some example of faith. The presence named here refers only to the messianic quality. The expression “messiah of glory” could be, itself, a hapax. The messiah is the anointed one. Anointing is, in Israel—which inherited it from other cultures—the gesture that confers and signs the royal, sacerdotal, or prophetic function (a later Christology will attribute these three functions to Jesus). To be sure, whoever says “messiah,” in Israel, understands this triple function, and foremost, the first one, that of the reign—which verse 2:5 names here, speaking of the “reign that God promised to those who love him” (four verses after the “Christ of glory”). A reflection on messianism cannot forgo consideration of this royalty or kingship. (Without wanting to go into details here, I would say that the somewhat biased reduction of the meaning of messiah to the idea of a “savior” overlooks the functions implied by anointment and the fact that this “salvation” requires these functions—which also implies, eventually, a dehiscence of or a disparity between these functions, like that between priesthood and prophecy.) A messiah “of glory,” whether he be anointed with glory or glory be the splendor of his unction, is an absolutely royal messiah: resplendent with the magnificence that the Scripture never ceases to attribute to God, and

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which the oil, luminous and perfumed, reflects as it flows over the hair and onto the beard of the anointed one. Royalty according to glory is not firstly of the order of power. Or again, it is not of that order without being identically in and of the order of light and dispensation, the order of the “beautiful gift and perfect donation.” (Glory, éclat, or splendor is a very ancient attribute, divine and/or royal, in Assyrian and Babylonian representations, in whose context one also finds it allied with seduction and pleasure, especially on the part of feminine deities: this is the splendor associated with favor. In this regard, a great Hellenist once wrote: “It is with the Greek notion of kharis that the rapprochement is unavoidable between charm, external grace, power of seduction, but also the luminous sparkling of jewels and materials, bodily beauty, physical wholeness, sensual delight, the gift that woman makes of herself to man.”) Ultimately, there would no longer be messianism here, but charisma, an inappropriable gift. Glory purely and simply gives itself, and precisely as that which is not appropriable—not even by the one from whom it emanates—it is only admirable, and perhaps admirable to the point of not being able to be contemplated. Faith in glory or faith of glory (pistis tou Kuriou Ie¯sou Christou te¯s doxas) is faith in the inappropriable: and once again, as the inadequation of the work or the inadequation at work. This faith receives itself from inappropriable glory, it is in glory in the sense that it comes from glory, where that glory provides faith its assurance, which is not a belief. The doxa of Jesus is his appearing: the fact that he is come, that the glory of his reign has appeared, already given as faith. Jesus is thus the name of this appearing—and he is this doxa qua name: the proper name of the inappropriable (that is, as we know, the very property of the name or, if you prefer, its divinity). And it is thus a name for any name, for all names, for the name of every other. The whole verse says: “take no account of persons in your faith in the Lord Jesus the Christ of glory,” in order to introduce considerations about the poor. In a certain sense, we can only attempt to understand, likewise, that it is a matter of not taking account of the person of Jesus (either his face, his proso¯pon, or his persona). Thus a deconstruction comes to pass even before construction, or during construction and at its very heart. The deconstruction does not annul the construction, and I have no intention to reject, in James’s name, the subsequent study of Christian construction—I do not want to take up again the gesture of “returning to the sources” and of “purification” of the origin, so obsessive in Christianity, monotheism, and the West. But this deconstruction—which will not be a retrocessive gesture, aimed at some

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sort of morning light— henceforth belongs to the principle and plan of construction. Deconstruction lies in its cement: it is in the hyphen, indeed it is of that hyphen. For the present, here, of the hyphen in “Jesus-Christ” there remains but the dash that ties a name to glory. There remains this dash or hyphen, like a schema, in the sense of the conjunction of a concept and an intuition, but above all, in the more precise sense according to which, in this conjunction, each of the edges, exceeding the other, remains incommensurable with it. And so there remains the schema like a name, which is always the name of an other, the way the name James is the name of more than one James (as the other one would say), always the name of an other, even if it were my own—and the doxa of what shows itself, the fame of the name so far as it puts faith to work, and a faith that creates a work, as at first blush, the deconstruction of religion as of the onto-theology that awaits it in its history—that awaits it to deconstruct itself therein. But now, glory is only what it is insofar as it does not shine like gold or silver (unlike the jewels and the clothes of the rich man in verse 2:2). Glory is monstration, the exhibition of faith in the act (the deixon of the “show me your faith” carries the same semantic root as doxa), and yet for all that, glory is the exhibition of inadequation or incommensurability. It is in that way that glory is the anointing of the messiah: that is, the messiah exhibits the withdrawal of that with which he is anointed. This withdrawal is not a sacred separation: it is, quite precisely, the withdrawal of the sacred and the exhibition of the world to the world. To be sure, anointment is a consecration. But it is the nonsacrificial consecration that does not seal within the offering a transgression of the sacred separation, but which pours upon the world, in the world and as the world—as the work of creation— the very withdrawal of the divine. James’s letter says, toward the end (5:8), that “the coming of the Lord is near [literally: has approached, has become near].” The parousia is nigh: this is to say that parousia is and is not in proximity. Proximity is what never ceases closing and opening itself, opening itself in closing (it is not promiscuity, which would be a mixture). Parousia is—to be set apart from the very thing that approaches, to be a gap with and in itself [l’écart de soi]. Parousia—or presence close to—differs and is deferred: in this way it is there, imminent, like death in life. What is changing, in the instituting configuration of the West, is that man is no longer the mortal who stands before the immortal. He is becoming the dying one in a dying that doubles or lines the whole time of his life. The divine withdraws from its dwelling sites—whether these be the peaks of Mount Olympus or of Sinai—and from every type of temple.

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It becomes, in so withdrawing, the perpetual imminence of dying. Death, as the natural end of a mode of existence, is itself finite: dying becomes the theme of existence according to the always suspended imminence of parousia. The conclusion of James’s letter recommends anointing the sick with the “prayer of faith” and the mutual confession of sins. The Catholic Church will found what it calls the sacrament of extreme unction on precisely this text, albeit much later. We must understand that the unction supposed to “heal,” as the text says, heals the soul and not the body (“the prayer of faith will save the ailing one, the Lord will pick him up, and the sins he committed will be forgiven him,” 5:15). This is to say that unction signs not what will later be called a life eternal beyond death but the entry into death as into a finite parousia that is infinitely differed or deferred. This is the entry into incommensurable inadequation. In this sense, every dying one is a messiah, and every messiah a dying one. The dying one is no longer a mortal as distinct from the immortals. The dying one is the living one in the act of a presence that is incommensurable. All unction is thus extreme, and the extreme is always what is nigh: one never ceases drawing close to it, almost touching it. Death is tied to sin: that is, tied to the deficiency of a life that does not practice faith—that cannot practice it without failing or fainting—at the incommensurable height of dying. Yet despite this, faith gives; it gives dying precisely in its incommensurability (“to give death,” “the gift of death,” he says): a gift that it is not a matter of receiving in order to keep, any more than is love, or poverty, or even veridicity (which are, ultimately, the same thing as dying). Not sacrifice, or tragedy, or resurrection—or, to be more precise, no one of these three schemas, insofar as it would give to death (one way or another) a proper density or consistency, whereas death is absolute inconsistency, if it is at all. (Hegel writes: “Death, if we would give a name to this noneffectivity.”) Each of these schemas gives consistency to death: sacrifice seals in blood the reconciliation of a sacred order; tragedy soaks in death the bloodied iron of destiny (the utter rending of the irreconcilable); resurrection heals and glorifies death within death itself. Whether in one mode or another, each of these schemas gives a figure to the defunct and substance to death itself. No doubt, each of these schemas can be understood differently—each one, or all three together, in some composition that remains to be set forth and that could well be, precisely, Christianity in its most elaborate form. But we can draw from these still another thread or splinter; that is, an inconsistency of death that would be such that the mortal does not “sink” into it, and still less escapes into it or from it, but rather, remains safe

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from it at the precise point where he disappears qua mortal (and thus disappears “in death,” if you will: but in death there is nothing, no inside, no domain). At this point where he dies, the mortal touches, making the only possible contact, upon the sole immortality possible, which is precisely that of death: it is inconsistent, inappropriable. It is the proximity of presence. The only consistency is that of the finite so far as it finishes and finishes itself. For this reason, death can do nothing to the existent— except that, in its irreconcilable, inadequate way, it makes that existent exist, after a birth expelled it into death. Death thus puts the existent in the presence of existing itself. In the Epistle of James, everything unfolds as though faith, far from being a belief in another life, that is, some belief in an infinite adequation between life and itself, were the setting in act [la mise en oeuvre] of the inadequation in which and as which existence exists. How did faith, one day, with the West, start composing a decomposition of religion? That is what still places that curious day before us, ever before us, ahead of us, like a day that would be neither Jewish, nor Christian, nor Muslim—but rather like a trace or hyphen drawn to set space between every union, to untie every religion from itself. —Translated by Bettina Bergo

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 /

Derrida in Strasbourg

It was only natural that Derrida, the thinker of the origin differed and deferred [origine différée], was in Strasbourg before he got there. He had already come before we told him: “Come!” He was there in thought, but not only in the sense that he would have thought about the city, dreamed of it or thought about its philosophical history from Eckart to Goethe, Benjamin, Blanchot and Levinas, not forgetting Canetti, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Ricoeur, and Henri Lefèvre. Maybe he never really thought about Strasbourg at all, but he arrived there first as a thought. We—Philippe and Jean-Luc—met in Strasbourg in 1967, and we had read or were in the process of reading Derrida—Of Grammatology in Philippe’s case, Voice and Phenomenon in Jean-Luc’s. These works immediately became a major shared reference point at the heart of contemporary thought, of properly philosophical thought. Meanwhile, on a more political level, we shared— each in our own way—a sort of Situationism, thanks to Daniel Joubert, a common friend who was no stranger to the Situationist events in Strasbourg before and during ’68. Neither of us had met J.D., but we had already encountered his texts several years before. This encounter was part of something like a great rendez-vous of the era: an “old world” seemed to be crumbling. What happened afterward would show how true that was. It was on the basis of these shared interests, along with other elective affinities, that the two of us made the decision—strongly encouraged by Lucien Braun, about whom we’ll have more to say—to stay in Strasbourg. In the autumn of ’68 we had lost nothing of the élan of May (which is not to say that it has faded, even now). We were not so interested in

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reforms here and there, but were putting our energy into a sort of teaching which we shared with some eager students, and into an interdisciplinary research seminar put together on the fly with colleagues who were just as impatient as the students. We were encouraged and given some resources, thanks to Lucien Braun, the only one on our faculty who saw what was at stake in what would later be encumbered with the label “the thinking of ’68.” That seminar began with Bataille, whose name had surely never been uttered in our university before then, and it went on to give rise to a “Research Group on Theories of the Sign and the Text” [Groupe de recherches sur les théories du signe et du texte], which went by the acronym GRTST. That laborious title was an indication of the set of interests we wanted to declare and the role that J.D. played in it. During this time, Jean-Luc wrote a sort of “inventory” of the philosophical field as he saw it for the seminar. Thanks as always to Lucien Braun, we had the opportunity to publish these texts in the Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres (the issue of December 1969, which was in fact the last issue of this publication before the reorganization of the Faculties) and Jean-Luc decided to send his to J.D., whom none of us knew personally. What address was it even sent to? The École Normale Supérieure, no doubt. To our surprise, J.D. responded, at some considerable length. He said he had already read some of Jean-Luc’s articles in Esprit and what he wanted to emphasize above all was how pleased he was to feel that he now had company in what he described as a situation of isolation at the heart of the University. A little later, in 1970, he also wrote to Philippe, who had just published “The Fable” in Poétique, the review founded by [Gérard] Genette, [Philippe’s] old professor from the hypokhâgne at Mans. Genette and Derrida had also met there, in Mans. So we decided to invite him to a little colloquium on rhetoric. This was an interest of Philippe’s partly on account of Genette, who was our first invited speaker. Then there was Lyotard, whose wife taught at our university and knew about our project. This is how it came about that in the spring of 1970, in a configuration that was quite exceptional in ways that we only half-understood at the time, we heard texts that would later be published in Figures II, in Discours, figure, and Marges [de la philosophie]. J.D.’s text was La mythologie blanche. Thanks to Lucien Braun and his connections, our guests were lodged in the rather luxurious quarters of the Société des Forges. We no longer know how all the details were worked out, but it seems to us that that first colloquium went well. We remember a walk along the Ill. Philippe walked ahead with Genette, Jean-Luc followed on with J.D. (Lyotard hadn’t arrived yet.) Genette and Philippe knew one another well and were chat-

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ting; Jean-Luc, in contrast, was discovering J.D.’s capacity for silence and was a little thrown off by finding himself reduced to pointing out the palace of Rohan, the cathedral, the old customs office. None of this brought any sort of response. But J.D. became more talkative after a while and told the story of his young son who had recently taken off on his bicycle without permission along a busy road. The fear it had caused in him was still evident. We were vaguely astonished; we were learning that one doesn’t always have to talk philosophy with a philosopher, and that the work happens in the texts. Nevertheless, Philippe spoke to him about the various theoretical and political positions of Tel Quel, which J.D. still had connections with. From that moment there was no stopping our relationship, and J.D. came to Strasbourg often. At the same time, he invited us to talk at rue d’Ulm where he was with Althusser and Pautrat, and he introduced us to Michel Delorme, the founder of Galilée, where we published our first work together, a work on Lacan that we had done for that interdisciplinary seminar we had organized with our colleagues. Later, with J.D. and Sarah Kofman, we would direct the series “La philosophie en effect.” Through all these exchanges, Strasbourg became for J.D. not only a privileged place but also a sort of signifier or emblem of that collaboration and that friendship. * During one of his visits—we can’t remember which one, or whether it was for a lecture or a thesis defense, since there were a lot of those— Lucien Braun took J.D. aside to suggest that they pay a visit to Heidegger (with whom Braun had been in contact over many years). Lucien Braun was eager to go, sketching out the plans and explaining that Heidegger had already heard of Derrida. But the visit never happened. J.D. did not take up the offer and no doubt (our memory is hazy) he remained as we both were, suspended between the desire for just such a visit and the sense of its inanity (as I said, you don’t do philosophy talking with a philosopher . . . ). Of course Faye had already published the Rectoral Address in Médiations in 1962. But this was not really what would later be called “the Heidegger affair.” That wasn’t exactly the problem. There was also the fact that Heidegger was already weak and ill. For whatever reason, none of the three of us made the trip to Freiburg. Later Philippe went with Braun to see Heidegger’s widow, who gave them some books. The relationship that grew between us and that played out in Strasbourg as well as in Paris and in other parts of the world meant that Derrida’s links to Strasbourg had a particular character. Indeed, it was the

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town in France that he visited most often since that time, whether for professional or personal reasons (not counting Nice, which is where his family was). And, just so that nothing is left out, this is how rue CharlesGrad, where we lived together from 1970 to 1988 (and where Jean-Luc still lives) came to be mentioned in The Post Card (p. 165 in the French, dated 22 June 1978) “after the dinner at rue Charles-Grad, Philippe’s Antigone, which I reread aloud on the airplane without anyone noticing.” As far as we know, the only other place this street—named after a député protestataire —shows up is in Sylvie [sic] Morgenstern’s novel Le vampire du CDI . . . Of all the various circumstances that brought J.D. to Strasbourg, we will mention just the more notable ones, so that our memory won’t let us down too much. The first was the international colloquium in 1979 on “genre,” which was initiated by Sam Weber, another friend of J.D.’s whom we had met in Berlin and had invited to Strasbourg that year. It was the beginning of the summer and a great meeting of Americans (Paul de Man was there, Avital Ronell), Germans (Werner Hamacher, among others), Luxembourgeois (Rodolphe Gasché), and so many others (such as Lucette Finas), too many to enumerate. J.D. delivered “The Law of Genre,” the first of his texts devoted to Blanchot. During the colloquium, Les Percussions de Strasbourg performed a concert for us in the aula of the university. In 1974 (or so), we invited him to a meeting focused on Roger Laporte, with whom he already had a connection and who had dedicated Fugue (1970) to “Jacques and Marguerite Derrida.” In 1980, he was invited, under the aegis of Lucien Braun, to deliver the inaugural lecture of the Congrès des Sociétés de philosophe de langue française on the theme of “Representation.” The same year we were both invited to direct the first of the ten-day conferences at Cerisy-la-Salle “starting from the work of Jacques Derrida.” Our title—“The Ends of Man”—was the title of a text of J.D.’s from 1968, which was published in Marges in 1972. In 1987 he was on the jury for Philippe’s doctorat d’état thesis, directed by Braun. (He and Braun were on the jury for Jean-Luc’s the following year, but that was in Toulouse, since the director was [Gérard] Granel.) He took part in various other juries, notably Daniel Payot’s. In 1992, at the Carrefour des littératures européennes directed by Christian Salmon, we organized a meeting of philosophers (Agamben, Balibar, Cacciari, Virilio) where Derrida spoke on the themes of The Other Heading, which he had just published. The following year he came back to the same “Carrefour,” where, this time, he was in the company of Bourdieu,

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Surya or Rancière, among others. Salman Rushdie put in an appearance. Taking off from the “Carrefour,” we put together a “Parlement international des écrivains.” Catherine Trautmann, who was then the mayor of Strasbourg, publicly declared the city a sanctuary city for writers in exile. In the following years, many writers from the Balkans were welcomed there. Later, in 1999, J.D. was invited by the European Court of Human Rights to a large meeting on the death penalty, a subject to which he had devoted a seminar, along with various texts. Finally, in 2001, he was invited by Isabelle Howald to the Kléber forum to talk about his relation to literature, or to his own literature, depending on your perspective. And if we were to continue, we would have to cross the Rhine (after all, what would Strasbourg be without a port and a bridge on the Rhine?) and follow his footsteps to Freiburg, Tübingen, Heidelberg and, if not as far as Berlin, then to Frankfurt where he was solemnly awarded the Adorno Prize in 2001. But rather than going on with the chronology for too long, we will end with a vignette, or a video. One winter day, sometime around 1980, the two of us drove with J.D. from Isère for the thesis defense of a student, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. Levinas was waiting for us in Strasbourg, where he was to give a lecture. It began to snow heavily, which slowed us down a lot. The journey dragged on and on. J.D., armed with a flashlight, reread the thesis and scribbled some extra remarks. In those days not a winter went by without snow in Strasbourg. And hardly a season of thinking went by without his white hair passing through. It seems today that we had always known him with white hair, white like his Mythology from 1970. —Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy

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 /

J.D.

1 JD: This is what or who is in question here. We shouldn’t be expected to approach it head on. Let’s circle around our object. The inverse of jd is dj. This latter is therefore, first of all, a jd flipped around in a sort of pig Latin [en verlan]. But this verlan is not a matter of a simple pronunciation. As code, it offers access to language. It sets about making language— idiom and even superidiom (an idiom is always superlative). DJ, discjockey, opens onto the language of techno music, raves, samples, records, scratch, vinyl. Its verlan, which could also stand for Joy Division (staying in the realm of music) or, keeping up the assonance, would at least be able to cut short some sort of jack-deal. What this means would have to be figured out, but it’s something that the business of philosophy could take up as its concern. A dizzying business, to be sure, and already the concept is getting lost. But let’s watch the tables turning, sampling and synthesizing the jd. We are dealing with a corps sonore [literally, a sonorous body]. That’s what we have so far.

2 jd, pronounced another way, as though slipped into a Semitic psaltery, could be jedi, pronounced dhidaï, which is close to but not the same as jeudi (the day of Jove, Dios, day of day, day of luminous skies and the place of the divine)—jedi, like in Star Wars. And it’s true that the Jedi, especially

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since they return, and no doubt return eternally as the affirmation of the awakened force, could sometimes look as though they are approaching us from whatever it is that jd might stand for as sign, acronym, signal, wink of an eye or onomatopoeia. But, as in the training of the masters of the force, nothing must be left out, and a more familiar or less communitarian pronunciation would lead us straight to je dis [I say]. He says, then. But what does he say, jd? We hear the voice very well, but what’s the phenomenon?

3 Let’s go back and get as close as we can to the dj hunched over his turntables, and let’s talk cool: djédi. I’ve said. [J’ai dit.] It doesn’t say now, it doesn’t say presently (as someone in Dakar might say). But he has said, already. As soon as he says “I say” he has already said it. [À peine je dis dit-il qu’il a déja dit.] Moreover, in French the expression “he says” [il dit] is undecidable, either present or simple past. He says that he has already said and therefore he says and he is said. Because in order to say I, he had to have been called I by the other, that is to say, called you—or indeed du in the language that, after Greek, is the least improper for metaphysics. We should note that we are now in the throes of first philosophy, the science of initials: the initial j.d. is also b.b., once again staying in the realm of music. The a—aleph, alpha—will remain at the end, e-i-a: we will harmonize as best we can later. This all runs the risk of seeming esoteric, even kabbalistic, but how to avoid it? This is the gloss and gnosis of letters, transcendental grammatology with an onomastic schematism. At least the terms have been set and we know what we’re dealing with—music.

4 Once it has been called you, the I calls itself and flips over into me. The other of the other who called it, and therefore the other that comes back to the same. It’s a scratched old record, stained with fingerprints. But never let it be said that there’s no other of the other; that’s all there is. The same is more other than the other, (the same) I deferring and differing from (the other) I so that I can say I say. The same is therefore other than the other itself, so as to be the same, that is to say, to miss itself infinitely, to always be in danger of ceasing to say I say. It addresses itself to itself (“me”) only long after having addressed itself to the other (“you”), who has always already hidden itself from it, the as-for-itself, the pure I think of the Kantian self [le quant-à-soi, le pur je pense kant-à-moi]. As a result,

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[it addresses itself to the other] not after having addressed itself, since the it itself was not yet there. (Besides, where would this there have come to be situated, if I had not been born? There = the most powerful reason and, as mentioned above, a scratched record, I tell you [ j’te dis]…). Addressed first of all to the other. By whom? Certainly not by me, but by the other in the other. Not the other of the other, who is the same, jd/dj, but this other in the other that will have already altered it. This already, back then [déja, ja, jadis], always already already there, right there, that is to say, at a point in time that at no point has any points, this leap from point to point that falls flat, in a word, this other in the other that is forever changing [s’altère à jamais]; this is what is called language.

5 In the other, language is foreign, a monolingualism long since destroyed [déglinguée] by globalingualization [mondialectisation]. His name, Jackie—said to him, sent, telegraphed without error and in real time to the most proper of the proper, is a single echo of the origin, bouncing from one side of its source to the other. There, in complete emptiness, right between the eyes. Jackie! In metaphysical language: Ja, who? Ja, you! [Ja, qui? Ja, du!] “Jackie, come here, come into the world!”

6 This is how the there [là], arrived: du, da, between the eyes, there where it is, there where it comes from, there where it goes, all right here and in the same ja of time. It sets off gently from the first name to the surname, from the drift of the da, derrida, family, lineage, a Sephardic Marrano journey from one shore to the other, back and forth according to the whims of peoples and families, but always arriving, always asserting itself even though at the mercy of the drift. A jack (for hooking up an amp) drifting off into da (an old-style affirmation: oui-da!): this is what I’m talking about. An amplifier hooked up to some crackling hearsay [ouï-dire], and the current running through it, the sound system, identification, attribution, inspection, rhythm, signification, eventually the signature. That’ll be him, j.d., unmistakable. Ja-da: from one to the other, nothing but a derivation. From head (first name) to tail (family name). The one—I’m coming! And the other—Come! Come, make a name for yourself! But how should we understand “make a name for oneself ”? Glorify it or trash it? And whatever is supposed to come of it, will it actually happen? When we celebrate it, as we are doing here, in this collection,

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what happens? How will this arc de triomphe be deconstructed? In whose name? In the name of what? In its own name?

7 A name: for example, Jidé, a brand of automobile whose maker named it using his own initials: Jacques Durant. But what sort of philosophical vehicle could he have engineered and assembled using his own name as a brand name? Surely not some sort of speculative machine that would be neither auto-mobile, auto-motive, nor auto-matic. Here, an acousticographic, iterological machine. There, the DJ of an auto-phasing dispositif with a deconstructive crossfader, airplane, juggling and all the gear that goes along with it: concepts, margins, Khôras, strictures, destinerrances. He scratches forward, backward, crossdown and in every direction, sampling Socrates, Husserl and Joyce, all the standards, the hits and refrains, the whole eternal return of spinning vinyl, and he says (spins) to himself [se dit(ji)] that at the end of all this deejaying some unidentifiable, cosmopolitical race car will emerge, stamped with initials…

8 But this is where the disconnect [méprise] happens. The connection is shaky, or at least it can’t be relied on. The sound doesn’t come through clearly. Maybe he himself—maybe he himself !—is the source of the interference and confusion. Jackie, jack; see how Jacques drops the ki. He gets rid of his who [qui]. What [quoi] remains—remains calm [coi]—now turns away from the question of “Who? Who am I? Who are you?” He refuses to respond “I am the one who . . .” and instead clings to his “I am.” I say: I am, that’s all there is to say. It is stamped, postmarked, sent to the right address: his own. J.D., right there: rue des Bergeronnettes, a bird—a wagtail—that displays the sort of attachment to our species that would unite most animals to us, if they were not repulsed by our barbarity. There he is, indulging the attachment of the birds in his garden [ jardin].

9 That he is there, and that he is, this is what remains beyond doubt, each time he says it or thinks it in his mind. But what does he think? That he is a thing that thinks, certainly ( je denke), but what else? It’s a thing or a substance that perceives itself in everything that it does (even when it does nothing). Which, as a result, distinguishes itself from itself, like

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the wagtails do. Which is therefore not in itself to itself. Ich bin nicht Da. Maybe not even for himself, and certainly not by means of himself. Something derived, adrift. That he is, therefore = that he differs from himself. Differs, diffuses, and diffracts ja as much as da, and along with it. He doesn’t stay there, wherever there may be. Here I lie—that’s not for him.

10 j.d. = je diffère, I differ. From myself, first of all. From you too. And from all others and the All Others. From him most of all. Differing from him I also differ from my own difference. I differ and defer it. I introduce into it something differed and deferred; I slip an a into differeance [sic], ja, da. I slip in a spacing letter. From j to d there’s an a. I have a becominga. Privative a, vocative a, intensifying a, intentional or directional, ab, ah, ad. I address myself to [à], I address myself à in desperation. From j to d: allô! moshi moshi! pronto! I’m like E.T.: “Phone home.” JD = ET? Why not? Extraterrestrial, thrown into the realm of pure beginnings, into the originary eidetic. But there, right there, two initials j and d, name and surname, the pronominal and the nominal, the specific and the generic, singular and plural, American and Arab, French and Jewish, irreconcilable and each [trying to] take precedence [ préséance], in their double session [séance], from ja to da and from game to dice [ jeu to dé]. [But not even] the throw of the dice will put an end to the play of chance and the risk that is part of this intimate initiality.

11 Ja-da—yes, there or even yes, yes, depending on the language in which I’m declining, vocalizing and semanticizing. In Sanskrit, it would be matter, finitude:

In Hebrew, knowledge, judgment:

In Arabic, gift, generosity:

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Jada is versatile, and serves as a proper name even in Chinese:

But always, in all languages, a = a, from Aristotle to Fichte and a bit beyond—indeed, right up to the point where we just were déjà (in the garden, with the birds). A, the letter of differance, a letter that spaces and traces, menaces, balances, lances, even makes us laugh (hah hah!). Note that the d also has this spacing effect, the de or dis that disorders, displaces, deconstructs and in the end loosens things up and smooths them out [déride] as in joues déridées, a face without wrinkles. The d also decides, which is to say separates, divides (decido with a long i, from de and caedo). It decides in conditions of undecidability, of course, for how does the decisive cut of judgment happen unless there is a compact mass and a Gordian knot? This is the basis of his logic: displace what cannot be displaced and loosen up what cannot be loosened. Rejuvenate, wrinkles and all, and laugh in the face of anxiety.

12 In the midst of this unfolding equality, something persists and signals: jAcques derridA. We see right away that there are six letters plus an A in each case. Twice seven letters, like two menorahs, and twice a as the seventh branch, set up first by J, then by D. The a had to be duplicated, the mother of all initials. The arche [arché] had to be bent across like the original arch with its two pillars and the void in the middle. Between ja and da there lies an interval that cannot be filled, the scratch of its own origin. This is what’s going on under the arch; they’re dancing a swinging java on the void, a bit roguish, a little swaggering, the derridance.

13 Let’s go back to the dj, though now there’s a new disc on the turntable. We’re moving on to the record of the last Jew [dernier juif ]—right after J.C., who was the first Christian and the only one, as far as Nietzsche was concerned. Or maybe it’s the record of the last of the righteous [dernier juste], and so just before the first evil one, the first liar, the evil demon. But the demon could deceive jd as much as he liked, and still could not prevent him declaring “I doubt” (the indubitable).

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14 Coda (Musically dedicated to Peter Szendy for his “D.J.—The Phantom of the Opera”) And of course, in the end, Don Juan—A Spaniard who was not a Marrano but was just as defiant of the church. Beyond doubling, indefinite multiplication, mille e tre, a thousand traits, number of women, number of oui and oui-da, number of words, number of numbers, numerations, innumerable enumerations, no end of them. Number of D, number of J, a jouissive dissemination.

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 /

Parallel Differences: Deleuze and Derrida Difference repeats itself by differentiating itself, and yet never repeats identity. . . . Difference returns in each of the differences; each difference is therefore all the others, notwithstanding their difference. —François Zourabichvili 

1 Deleuze and Derrida shared . . . That could have been the start. At least, it could have been a Derridastyle beginning, a beginning that, in its irruption, both anticipates and eclipses an end that will not come, that will have already withdrawn. But all that’s needed to make a Deleuze-style beginning is one word: a beginning true to itself, carried by the momentum of a movement that is never interrupted and always already begun. It’s enough here to add difference: they share difference. The statement itself is something we might wish we had shared with them. We would have liked to hear the two of them, close to each other and far apart, sharing—confronting, contrasting, perhaps combining their different ways of receiving this statement, which we would have put to them as the point of departure for a double portrait of their thinking, a double silhouette, two shadow figures. There, against the background of our schemas, the various turns of our thinking, we would have tried to grasp the double profile—disjointed but discreetly connected—of a certain identical necessity of thinking in that time—in their time.

2 Deleuze and Derrida share. To begin (again), they share absolutely. That is to say, they take part together and each one takes his part. They

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participate, divide, and decide. Even before saying what, before pinning down what task they were taking on, or what heritage—if one day it will ever be possible to really come up with that sort of precision—it is essential to affirm how they shared themselves and among themselves. It was their contemporaneity. They differed in age by only five short years (Deleuze was the elder) but, much more importantly, they shared the philosophical time of difference. The time of the thinking of difference. The time of different thinking of the different. The time of a thought that had to differentiate itself from what came before. The time when identity trembled: the time, the moment, of a sharing. They share the contemporaneity of a disjunction of identity, the self, the one—of Being understood as one and as being (as being-one). They had received this disjunction together, from Hegel as much as from Bergson, from Heidegger as much as from Sartre and, although separating out the various inheritances is not as simple as we might wish, it was the same task that demanded thought, the task of penetrating difference itself. The moment when this request took shape in philosophy is not itself a matter of indifference: the post–World War II era (which we should think of as the era after the two world wars) was the era when all certainty about visions of the world and the foundations of humanity, including the very concepts of “world” and “man,” were subject to scrutiny from every possible angle. European humanity had come to signify to itself the terrifying impasse of its own identification: wishing itself identical to itself, and [thinking itself] the model or principle of identity for the world had opened up the dehumanization of the world. Other concepts were shattered along with “world” and “man”: “history,” “progress,” and, more generally, “continuity” and “homogeneity,” and eventually being, understood from the point of view of a self-identity that could be [the identity] of a substratum or a process of the totality of beings. And as a result, the concept of nothingness, understood as the negation of such being, was shattered too. Negativity changed when it became necessary to deny, or trouble and displace the opposition of position and negation. (In a certain way, what was put in play all over again, and for different stakes, was the very heart of the Hegelian dialectic. But that’s another story.)

3 So we have landed—run aground, really—on the shores of difference, which must have seemed so strange and so worrying to those used to thinking only in terms of restoring the identical, man, and reasonable reason.

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Once again, it was necessary to confront what couldn’t help but appear strange and had to remain strange, what could lend itself to thought only by requiring that thought lend itself to its object, as it always must; in fact, it must give itself to it, give itself over to it, give itself up to it, never being the thought of an object without being that object itself as the subject of its own thinking utterance. Deleuze called this gesture “the creation of concepts” and Derrida called it “touching language.” They do not come down to the same thing, but they do come down to the difference of or from the same, which returns to the same only by being diffracted through its own prism. It does not return; it is not returned; it does not return to itself. Deleuze and Derrida shared in a vanishing of thinking, insofar as thinking was understood as the view from on high, a matter of statements “on the subject of ” the object, and its transformation, its transvaluation into the subject without object, the subject of the experience of thought. This is how they began again, for their time, what philosophy always begins again if it is to avoid being reduced to the conception and deduction of the real, while never being the proof of its consistence and its movement. But this, this experience, this sense of the experience of thought, this is something they shared in the thought of difference, and they shared it differently. I like to think that it was one happy transcendental dispositif— a transcendental realm, an existential or transcendental that was itself mobile, differential and not really transcendent but transimmanent to that moment in our history—that made this double D of philosophy possible: departure, demand, destiny, becoming, giving, and saying [depart, demande, destin, devinir, donne, et dire] in a double figure, a double body, under a double signature. (I like this, but I am also quite certain that it is more than just something that happens to appeal to me. It is real and it is true.) For all that, it is not in any way a matter of a unity redoubled. The division of the two, their disjunction, their disparity preceded them. The transcendental of difference could not offer it as a unity, a pre-given identity that each of them would then work out in various ways like an amoebean verse. Deleuze and Derrida weren’t preconceived in a matrix. They are themselves the differents of difference, though [this is] a difference that precedes only in the way being different or becoming different has always preceded—one, always and forever differing from itself, and the difference of the one never, for its part, forming a more primitive unity or an origin presupposed more archaically in itself than all other possible positions.

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It is exactly that, that itself whose self-sameness dissolves right there in the movement of its being designated as such and being brought into play, that is what makes, what forms what they shared. And that, in a way, is simply something they shared as something handed down to them or abandoned on their doorsteps by who knows who.

4 There is no common measure that would allow us to measure the distance from one door to another, from one point of entry into thinking to another, and I don’t want to invoke any sort of community or continuity here. On the contrary, all I want to suggest is their parallelism. I am not going to demonstrate it. After all, the existence of parallels in the Euclidean sense is axiomatic. I will just offer a short sketch. Not a study, or an analysis. I’ve lightened my load and avoided all references and citations. I’m just making an opening move. I’m not opening the game—the struggle—for the sake of symmetry or some sort of conciliation. Is it contentious, when it comes down to it? That’s not clear; it remains to be seen. Perhaps there is a differend in Lyotard’s sense, as between the two Ds, from one to the other without passage: the impossibility of providing a common rule for two sentence structures, two language games. But—and this is also what Lyotard wanted—philosophy itself presents itself to us as a system of rules not given. A general regime of incommensurability: from one thinking, the other—this Célinian turn lets the “to” fall away and sets the one against the other, though without passage, without a common measure, without any point of contact, like parallel lines. At the same time, from one thinking, the other: from the point of view of one, the other is always in view, even when it remains unidentifiable, unassimilable, maybe even impossible to recognize. From one D, the other: this is the form of their sharing. Each of them is the other to the other. They have this absence of community in common. This is how they shared difference. The one like the other, they both took up the work of distinguishing difference for itself or in itself. They concerned themselves with it and not with the identities that it differentiates. Their non-point in common—perhaps Deleuze would have called it their “virtual”? Perhaps Derrida would have said their “spacing”—is difference itself, the sameness of difference. For a long time, Kant dominated the problem of distinction and also, therefore, the problem of reuniting what had been distinguished, a

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reunion that certainly sustained the distinction in the midst of reunion. But in the end, the problem inherited from Kant was understood most of all as the problem of reuniting separate sides. Hegel carried that reunion along in the movement that reabsorbed difference, a sort of reabsorption that was itself differential because, for him, what was distinct identified itself only by means of the identification of the identical in the passage of one into the other. From this we get two readings of Hegel that are surely the readings of the two Ds: on the one hand, the passage is itself taken up in the result (“synthetic dialectic,” the representation of the union of contradictories) and, on the other, the result is the passage itself, so no result at all. Nietzsche identifies being with becoming, becoming with the return of the same, and the return of the same with its own differentiation (“eternal return” = not an escape from time but time continually discontinued, its completion, result, and resolution all cut short). Heidegger thinks Being as the transitivity of ek-sisting, being set outside itself, the difference of being opened in itself to itself. The “absolutely transcendent” that Heidegger describes as Being is nothing other than the different, the different from itself or the absolutely self-differentiating: Being as unidentifiable. We would not go too far wrong if we summed up the situation like this: the absolutely Different, the Same as the Other of all existence, the absolute existant identified in its presence to self (in itself for itself), and inexistant as a result, gave way to or divided itself into (we could talk about which) difference that differentiated itself right at [à même] the sameness of all things, right at the sameness of the world.

5 In any case, up until this point we have seen the degree to which the differentiated terms remained in certain ways entangled with their identities: positive and negative, Being and becoming, Being and being. The precise degree is difficult to pin down because now we have a frame of reference that allows—forces—us to find the work of difference “itself ” already under way in our predecessors. For example, we can no longer understand Spinoza’s substance as something immobile and unchanging underlying its modes. Both Ds had a parallel interest in carrying along the history of philosophy more deliberately and vigorously than ever before, in the movement of a certain auto-differentiation, a differential and differentiating rewriting of itself that was not just a matter of changing our hermeneutic spectacles. Instead, it was about the very becoming same [le devenir même] of philosophy as its own difference—as the philein of its

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own self, open to and by its difference, and therefore also as the singular philein, the singular attraction—attraction and repulsion—that there is between two parallel lines. The only thing they have in common/not in common is their impossible meeting at infinity; put more rigorously, they have the infinite as the true regime of their conjunction (that is, the absolute object of philosophy). Up until this point: the point where difference itself becomes the object, before all difference of terms. The point where it also therefore becomes the subject of a philosophical double gesture. [It is] no longer a matter of terms, but a difference that is no longer their difference; [it is a matter of] a difference that differs first of all, a difference in relation to which different, differentiated or deferred terms will be merely secondary, arranged around the edge of the open spacing of difference itself. Perhaps we can pause on this single motif: between D and D, there was a sharing of difference itself, for itself, by itself. “Difference itself ” is a contradiction only if we make the mistake of regarding it as a term. In that case, we would have to distinguish it from identity. But the identity of difference itself is identity that does not distinguish itself from difference— by definition—and by not making that distinction it relates to itself as difference. This is where the parallels begin. Difference opens up here: it opens between them and, opening between them, opening one another and not to one another, it opens tout court. That is to say, it opens in itself and opens to itself: it differs in itself. Therefore, it differs from itself. It differs in itself from self in general, if the form of the self is identity to self. Deleuze’s formula: “to differ with self.” Derrida’s: “self differing from self.” [La formule de Deleuze s’énonce: “différer avec soi.” Celle de Derrida: “soi se différant.”]

6 The distance between them is not inconsiderable. On the one hand, the self is given and taken with difference and as difference. On the other, the self is given and lost in the difference that differs it. Deleuze does not even say “differ from and with itself ” [différer d’avec soi], as we might be tempted to say. (Grévisse specifies that using “de” before “avec” is meant to insist on a “positive difference” between the terms. The way to think about it, though, is not in terms of “positive difference” in this sense, that is, difference that puts the emphasis on the terms that are being distinguished.) Deleuze says “differ with itself ”: difference and self are given together, with one another, neither formally identified as if the one were

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the other nor separated from one another as if the one excluded the other. But Being, here, is identical with difference. This is why “univocal” Being does not speak of itself (which as such is not and cannot be said) but is said only from all its differences, if it is said at all. Derrida does not talk about Being (not in this regard and, indeed, hardly at all). Behind him is Being as the limit of ontico-ontological difference, that is, Being as presence, and presence to self. In front of him, in contrast, is an open space without limits (limits lost, drowned in a past that never was), the differing of presence itself. Presence itself only ahead of or in the wake of “itself.” Pursuing this with all due rigor, Being would therefore be neither univocal nor plurivocal. Instead, the very sense of “Being”—and, as a result, the very “same” sense in general, the sameness that authorizes a sense, is in this “differing from self ” [“se différer ”]. Distance opens up like this: on the one side, sense makes use of differentiation; on the other, differentiation is where sense is undone. The one leans heavily on sense as movement, production, novelty, becoming; the other leans just as heavily on sense as ideality, as perceptible identity, and as presentable truth. The difference between the two sides turns out to form a double difference of sense: inaugural for the one, terminal for the other, sense is either engendered in being differentiated or loses itself in being disseminated. In a certain way it’s a matter of sense on both sides, a matter of what makes sense of sense, of what it is about sense, in sense, that differs from a signified identity, a given truth. But the one sees it differing as it opens up, the other sees it being open as it differs [Mais l’un le voit différer en s’ouvrant, l’autre le voit être ouvert en se différant.] One is in the gush and spurt of sense, the other in its promise, a promise never to be kept.

7 This is how the production of what is new without precedent is distinguished from the replacement of the old that is gone forever. This is life and death. And it is not in any way an opposition between a positive and a negative. The life of one does not exclude the death of the other, which, for its part, does not negate the life of the former. For the life of the former, differentiated and differentiating from itself, also, of its own accord, opens the dehiscence of death, the underlying repetition of the identical that is nevertheless differentiated in its turn, taken up differently in the events of the world. And the death of the latter is differentiated from and “in” death “itself,” opening there the impossibility that differing from self is ultimately engaged in: the relation to the other as other.

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Do these parallels cross, then? No, because everything plays out in two heterogenous spaces. On one side, the world of rich, fecund chaos, agitated, all in motion; on the other, a voice that says “yes” to something that it would never call a world. The heterogeneity and dissymmetry are complete. Difference drifts in both directions and in both senses, drawing on both sides and also holding the parallels infinitely open, to the point of their improbable crossing. Or maybe they do indeed cross, but the crossing point, located at infinity, uncrosses itself in the instant of crossing. The intersection distances itself from itself: it immediately redistributes differences from the one side and the other of difference itself, which thus both joins and separates them. This partition plays out again immediately, repeating and dividing at the same time. For the one, the disjunction is included in the synthesis (in the division of the self in itself) while, for the other, the conjunction is excluded from the division of the origin (from the origin / in place of origin). We keep on tugging at the double thread of this ongoing dehiscence. A world already there, multiple, co-implicated or a voice, also already there, cut off. A world before the world or a voice before all voices. A germination and a creativity, or a declaration and a promise. An initial resource, a bourgeoning, an élan, or even a withdrawn beginning, a recoil into the origin, a cut into and before the opening. A swarm of pre-individual singularities or a pro-thetic and archi-substitute for all possible unity. We can continue in many different ways, in many different registers. Difference keeps playing out from one D to the other, blow for blow, constantly touching, separating, on and on. Touching, that is to say, separating: contiguous, contingent, contagious, distinct, decoupled, intact. Each of them in some way transcends himself toward the other and, as much as each transcends himself, he becomes immanent to himself to the same degree. The element in Deleuze that opens to the general “arche” of Derrida also makes the arche proliferate and multiply; the element in Derrida that opens to the difference of forces in Deleuze also separates that difference from his own game. Neither allows difference to be identified in the other, and each, reclaiming it for himself, makes it still more different. For there are no degrees of difference. They appear only when we’re concerned with terms that differ. But difference itself differs absolutely, with no question of more or less. Differ in itself, differ from itself, differing, differentiating. In this way, on this precise point—Being differing absolutely in itself—D comes to equal D and, in that equality, begins to differ from D all over again.

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8 As we know, two forms of writing follow from this: differenciation for Deleuze, differance for Derrida. It’s quite remarkable that each of them ran up against the need to differentiate the writing of difference and both produced two different -graphies (typographies, orthographies, polygraphies) not for the same word but for two words, the one (differentiation) right away naming difference as process or movement, while the other (difference) names difference as a state. For, in the word “differentiation,” which is the normal term, Deleuze inscribes difference between differentiation and differenciation. The former is equivalent to determination or distinction (of an idea, of a thing in its idea, or as virtual in Deleuze’s sense); the latter designates the actualization of the former, that is, its incarnation in qualities and parts. It is not that the latter is a real copy of something possible; it is the actual divergent expansion of virtual singularity in its alterity (in its differentiel). Deleuze’s form of writing, which he marks as a “distinctive trait,” thus distinguishes within difference the virtual of the Idea (the differential of a singularity or, more precisely, each time, the differential of a concomitant group of singularities, since there is a proliferation of these singularities before there is any individuality) and what is actually differenciated, the thing as it is shaped and organized in the world without, for all that, stopping its own differenciation. On the contrary, it constantly carries it further, entering into new relations and new modifications and modalizations. Derrida’s form of writing works out very differently: instead of tracing a differential and differentiating trait in difference itself (which is itself only as differentiation and, consequently, as the difference of differentiation and differenciation), this writing reopens in the word “difference” the verbal quality of the verb to differ/defer. Differance is the activity of differing, but this introduces the first, transitive quality of the verb. “To differ/ defer” in fact differs from “to differ from.” The latter stands between two terms. The former indicates the action of delaying until later. The “later” of differance is not chronological; it is a “later than itself ” of difference that would not coincide with itself and for which, as a result, this “later” is also an “earlier.” Difference does not coincide with itself, and this is how it is its “self.” The difference between the two graphic differences or differentiations is therefore very stark. For Deleuze, difference differs from itself as the virtual differs from the actual. The former is the power—but not the possibility, the simple tracing of the real in retrospect, according to the lesson

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learned from Bergson—of creation, that is, the activity of novation (rather than novelty) as the condition for a becoming that does not move toward a limit but toward itself, that is, “toward” its own difference. This becoming implies a temporality, but not a rectilineal temporality that goes from t to t'. Rather, it’s a matter of a multiple, heterogenous temporality open to the outside of the successivity or simultaneity of chronological time. We could say that becoming goes toward nothing but its own differenciation as the inflection and division of chronological time, “the infinite of a caesura.” It is at these points, where differenciation flexes or turns, that becoming crystallizes as a coming to self of difference itself (that is, each time, the coming to self of such difference or differenciation of differentiality). For Derrida, differance prevents the Being of difference from coming to fruition. Not only is it not a matter of difference between terms, but difference itself cannot come to an end. It is its own end, and this is not a matter of coming to fruition or reaching a limit, which is to say that difference does not identify itself. This is why “the appearance of infinite differance is itself finite.” Finitude is the appearing of the infinity according to which difference differs and is deferred. But appearance here must be understood in the strongest and least phenomenological sense (the sense of appearing to a subject): to appear is to come into the world, to come into the world and make a world of it. What is implicated here is therefore also the contingency of this coming, and the departure that is its correlate. Not death as decease at the end of life but as the parting inscribed in the coming, that is, once again, as the differance of Being insofar as it is put into play in what exists. It is still a matter of time: of a time interrupted or syncopated by differance. Yet this break, this distancing that extends the instant of presence does not open onto another time and so differ from the Deleuzian “infinitive.” Derrida would not attribute to Deleuze or indeed to Heidegger the possibility of a concept of nonchronological time (or of a time torn from the present as simultaneous or successive). What differance turns toward as toward death is, rather, an outside of time that has no place in time, but that “precedes” and “follows”—that will always have “preceded” and “followed”—time itself as the deferral of the present.

9 Ultimately, the two parallels spin off on either side of the linear chronological course of time. The question Deleuze and Derrida took it upon themselves to respond to is the question of a present whose presence

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seemed to them to have been carried off in a successivity that no history, no teleology could assure us would come to a peaceful end. Together they were the thinkers of difference itself, because right before them, in their time, the difference between points in time—and so too between places, things, and subjects, between all terms that separate and relate the time of our actions, the time of our lives—stopped allowing itself to be caught up in its own resumption in the reunion of terms, or in any general sort of identification. Identity was in abeyance, in crisis, and they responded by differenciating it. Together, they are the thinkers of difference in identity, difference carried to the heart of identity, opened within it as its opening to itself, and this is why they are the thinkers of difference itself. Not difference posed as a distinct term, but precisely as difference not posed, carried forward as the movement that no term would terminate. Opening one another in this way—and one opening the other—[they open] the need for another relation to self, something other than an appropriation by self of a being for self: engaging the “self ” in its difference to itself. Engaging it in this way, in a negativity different from the negativity that annihilates or nihilates by means of some process or other: in a negativity that is neither negative nor positive, in something that might be called neutrality, but a neutrality that differenciates and differs, the active neutrality of what refuses to cling to the terms laid out on either side of difference itself. For Deleuze this activity always already begins in the proliferation of virtualities and movements of differenciation; for Derrida it is always already unleashed in the deferral of its own beginning, which would therefore already be infinitely finite. Once again, it is tempting to reduce their difference to “life/death.” But that would be wrong. The life of one, whatever its power of generosity and proliferation, is nonetheless the life that death also comes to differenciate. The death of the other, whatever the tone of its originary mourning, is nonetheless just as generous, in a certain way even as generative (disseminating . . .) as life—but its generosity comes from a different place. An elsewhere, a lost alterity; perhaps that is what makes the difference here. Perhaps.

10 The one and the other, therefore, the one with the other, but not like one another, although also not against one another. The one differently from the other, the one differing from the other and differing or differenciating the other. You might say that Deleuze is the differed of Derrida

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[est le différé de Derrida]—Derrida, for whom nothing ever “arrives” in the strict sense of the word—and that Derrida is the differential of Deleuze [est le différentiel de Deleuze]—another Idea, another singular configuration whose differenciation begins from his side [of the equation]. Still, both of them call us to—philosophy, that is, to an exercise, an activity, a praxis. What they share is also [the thought] that to philosophize is to enter into difference, to leave identity behind and take on the means and risks required by this departure. Perhaps this is what philosophy has been about since the beginning: not being able to stay in the place where we seem to have been put at the beginning, assured of a ground, a home, and a history. But as soon as we start moving, difference comes into play and there cannot be just one way of entering into difference. May I try to gather each of their calls now, differenciating them as an initiation and an invitation? It would be a matter of two modes of delivery or address, of convocation or interpellation by philosophy to philosophy. An initiation: the offer to enter into the movement of difference, to engage in it as the becoming self of the self of difference, to self-differenciate in becoming—for example, becoming animal, woman, imperceptible, which, at the end of the day, always means becoming difference itself in a more advanced, more singular way, self differing itself, becoming nothing other than the self of a renewed division of itself—an initiate who inscribes on himself and across himself the distinctive trait of his differenciation; an initiate who is always initial. An invitation: a call to the other, a “come!” that emerges not from me but from someone or other, from some animal or other, or from whatever in “me” precedes with an anteriority before all antecedence and confuses every “archi” with the mourning of the arkhe, a “come!” that doubles as a “yes!” that is not quite another word; this double word, this double call that has no sense other than inviting the other and so inviting itself as other to this “coming,” which remains suspended as the differing identity of the call and the coming. Two parallel calls, both of which we hear, the one like the other and yet the one without the other, never ruling out that, in a certain way, we might hear them through one another. Perhaps each of them opens toward the other even as they distinguish themselves from one another absolutely. Perhaps they heard one another at a distance, beyond the reach of each other’s voices. Perhaps, even, each of them heard himself in the other, perhaps he heard himself differed in the other and being called by the other. Called to respond as well as called to stay nearby. As Nietzsche

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would have it, these are the calls or flares that pass from star to star in the course of a stellar friendship. The important thing is that a double voice, a resonance—it doesn’t really matter which names we attach to it—comes to us from difference itself: difference itself holding in itself something of this singular shared ipseity that it is up to us to hear and understand. For what resonates here is the demand for a metamorphosis of sameness in general. Two parallel calls to differ in our turn—“we ourselves.” To meet at infinity: yes, to go there and meet there, each in his difference—provided only that it is really and truly at infinity.

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 /

Derrida da capo The god of writing . . . cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play. —Jacques Derrida, Dissemination 

1 Here, in an homage that will inevitably be too short, will it be possible to situate Derrida’s thought and recognize its depth and originality without embarking on an analysis? Will it be possible to try to say less about the content of his thought and more about its movement, its motion—indeed, its emotion? How did he interpret what we call “philosophy”? What voice did he give to it? One thing is certain: he is not an interpreter in the received sense of the term; he is not engaged in a “hermeneutics” based on the assumption that sense is available to us. He is an interpreter like Hermes, the carrier of messages, messages that are modulated along the way, dispersed in their very sending, leaving no identifiable sender behind. We must try to make a sketch of this Hermes. If metaphysics is indeed the science of Being as Being and/or the science of the principles and ends according to which Being is ordered; if it is this archontology (and I offer this portmanteau with a smile at the memory of the one who so loved to play with this sort of crasis—here, the genitive onto of the object of “onto-logy” in a contraction with the participial ending of “archontate”); if philosophy has in all its history only ever been used for working up, transforming, displacing, refounding, smashing to pieces, deconstructing or reopening the very definition or possibility of the object of such a science (and doing the same to the definition or possibility of its subject, whether that is philosophy itself or the

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philosopher who expresses or addresses it), then it would have to be said that Derrida’s only interest was in replaying metaphysics da capo. In doing so, he does just what every philosopher does as a philosopher. This is true even of the moments when he veers away from the received positions of “philosophy,” and indeed even when he seems to desert or subvert them in order to go in another direction, that is, go somewhere not “in” philosophy. For there is no “interior” of philosophy so long as it remains attentive to the position of its object, which specifically forbids it to assume some “position” in relation to this object, an object that must precede all possible objectivity and so must precede itself in the end—or rather, in the beginning.

2 Da capo: from the start, from the top, the principle or the origin. As a musical notation, it requires us to take up an air or phrase or piece again, perhaps at the end, perhaps in the course of a movement before one or more reprises lead to a conclusion. We can’t say if it ever occurred to Derrida to use the expression, but let’s use it here of our own accord, taking it up as an instruction to be deciphered and carried out as we approach his work. Of course, this instruction does not apply just to him. It could also be attached to the greatest movements of thought of the twentieth century, most of all, and most clearly to Deleuze, whose thinking was so close to and so different from Derrida’s. After all, both of them had been raised on the great reprises da capo of Husserl and Bergson. On this point it must be repeated right away what was already said above, that is, that this movement of reprise, re-beginning, which stands out and is marked as such in the thought of the twentieth century—marked or noted, if we want to stay with the image of a musical score—is merely a matter of bringing to light and noting expressis verbis and as a law of execution a structural or even driving [ pulsional ] necessity of philosophy as metaphysics. For philosophy was always metaphysics, and this goes back long before the word “metaphysics” was coined as the title for certain courses of Aristotle’s. Ever since then, in an exceptional, singularly malicious twist in the destiny of words and philosophy, we have not been able to stop working over the concept that was accidentally created under the heading of that word, worrying and troubling it whether to sustain and support it or destroy it. Certainly, the concept of what is meta ta physica—that is, what is after or beyond things that are given and available to us—supports, makes possible, precedes, legitimates or abolishes the possibility or even the

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necessity of things themselves as given and available. It is the concept of what precedes Hermes.

3 Replaying metaphysics da capo means putting into play all over again whatever there might be of this “beyond”—beyond being-given, beyond the world as present-at-hand. In fact, let me repeat, the most general motto of the twentieth century turns out to have been Wittgenstein’s saying—“the meaning of the world lies outside the world”—even though there is no outside of the world. To replay something da capo is not usually a matter of starting over in exactly the same way; rather, it means putting the performance into play, coloring, ornamenting or vocalizing it in a different way. Da capo does not mean “from the beginning” unless that means asking the beginning itself to begin otherwise. Some have been able to replay the beginning not by beginning again at all, but instead by picking up a thinking already under way, a thinking always already immersed in its own flux and/or in the flux of “Being” (which itself was never anything but flux). But certain others, in contrast, never stopped replaying the beginning as such, never stopped addressing themselves to it and wanting to be addressed by it and ready for it as necessarily anterior to something or other. This is the lineage Derrida comes from. It is the lineage of archontology as such, if I can put it that way. It is the thought that gets under way once the principle has been put into play again, and Being along with it (the principle, foundation or nature of Being, and the Being, character or content of the principle). In the beginning, the beginning is not given. And perhaps, arguably, it never will be. Husserl insisted everywhere and in every respect on the possibility of a return to the origin, to this German ur- that we translate as archi- and that, certainly since Goethe’s Urphänomen, has represented the “arch-ontic” summons sought in the very place where the primordial instance slips away, the instance that creates the world and founds sense. The Husserlian archi- is like the movement of a never-ending ascent, since its aim is to reconstitute the possibility of constitution itself. Heidegger substitutes originarity as ek-stasis, a leap or a spurt beyond (Ur-sprung). Derrida also takes up the “archi-” but makes it less ek-static and more extended, more distanced from itself. The origin is not itself [à soi], and it takes place only by distancing itself from itself.

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4 The element or dimension that sub-tends this movement of thought has a provenance as ancient as Kant’s, and it is called time. Time became a sort of primordial given (or the giving of the arche and of being), and this happened at the turning point when all reference to a god and/or a cosmotheoros subject was withdrawn from the world. The world is no longer visible like in a theater. Its visibility is the visibility of what moves, the mobile, the cinematic. Before Derrida, thinking tried hard to take on the allure of time, to slip into its duration or its gushing flow, but he, in contrast, holds that there is no “non-vulgar” concept of time, and that the present, the present instant, is the only way to designate it—for all of metaphysics as the thinking of being-present (the archontology of Being as such, that is, in its subsistence). He thereby casts doubt on whether Heidegger’s originary time can really be separated from this subsistence. He turns attention to what—from Aristotle and Augustine to Husserl and Heidegger—has always given the present its untenable, irremediably fleeting character, that is, its internal distension. The present instant needs more time, and singularly at the instant of a presence-to-self, such as the presence-to-self of a “consciousness.” Time is needed in the present in order to present oneself, in order to be present. Archontology circles this point, that is precisely not a point. Irresistibly, the origin precedes and succeeds itself, while Being can no longer be “subsistent” as such. Derrida, like Heidegger, puts Being under erasure. Bringing together the Parmenidian motif of the “there is” and the Heideggerian motif of “Dasein,” we could say that it is no longer Being as such [comme tel] but Being that is [qu’il est]. Derrida barely retains the word Being at all. He commits to the process by which, in the absence of signification, it was necessary to mark it: “erasure.” This is where archontology pivots to grammatology.

5 Gramma, graphe, trace and writing—erasure is a trace made on the name and thus on sense. It is a trace that strikes through or cuts into it, that touches it with alterity. Sense does not gather and does not return to itself, not at the origin and not at the end. Derrida speaks of archewriting [archi-écriture]. It’s important to understand that “writing” carries “arche” in its trace, even though the character or essence of the trace

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itself (if I can put it this way) is to not subsist; in the end, which may be at infinity, the trace erases itself. It must also be understood that “writing”— thinking here in the general vicinity of Blanchot—does not set the written letter in opposition to the spoken word, but indicates the regime of sense in differance. The whole of Derrida’s work is the development of that quasi-word—differance. Introducing an “a” into the middle of the French word “différence” introduces—thanks to a barbarism—[yes][the sense of] infinite delay or deferral. But, with this word, what turns out to have withdrawn is the possibility of isolating and identifying differences or, more exactly, the different terms at either extremity of a difference. Differance suspends difference along with identity. The trace is not the sign: it signals that rather than what, or even, in the case of a something, it signals that this thing has passed this way, not that it is here or continues to exist in some other place. In a certain way, the some supplants the thing. But this is nothing other than a da capo. Philosophy has always known that both identity and the difference that might fix it in place and make it distinct remain hidden from the identitarian point of view, that is, from the point of a view of a “sufficient reason” that goes hand in hand with an essence of its being. This is what we find in Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Derrida merely reopens the refrain that echoes there, giving voice to that deep singing in a new way. The Being “that it is,” Being-being in sum and not even the Being “of ” being, the sort of “being” that definitively sets aside the possibility that it might be confused with its subject, as Levinas did at first, for example; or better yet, “that Being be,” “that there be something,” withdraws from all subsistence and delivers a trace instead of a sense. And since the trace is erased, sense is lost before it can be accomplished. Derrida designates what he calls the “aporia:” the absence of issue, exit, accomplishment or saturation. But the aporia is not an impasse. We might even say that it is the finitude of the infinite itself, and then add that this is what we are responsible for. We are responsible for this alone, and philosophy is nothing other than the announcement of this responsibility for and engagement with the aporia. In a certain given sense, we are not responsible: a response has come in advance from the one who gave [this sense] and the one or the thing to which it refers. But in a sense not given, a sense that thereby escapes sense—in the sensed sense of sense, in the sense of dissemination that affects every possibility of sense in the very sending and as its sending—this is [precisely] where there is responsibility. Because there is risk, of course, and uncertainty. Derrida was the

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thinker of the “undecidable” because, in his thinking, he wanted to connect the originary withdrawal of the origin, the “that” of Being rather than beingness [étantité], and the erasure of the trace in truth. Under these conditions, decision takes on its full weight and cost.

6 Da capo: metaphysics has always opened onto the outside of the world. Replaying metaphysics, interpreting it anew, is each time a matter of modulating this outside, this other anew. Derrida wanted to think the other as so very other that nothing and no one would be able to identify it. He wanted to think that this other was both nowhere else—certainly not behind the world in any sense, and not offering an escape or salvation or resolution of tensions—and also that this same other was always infinitely more other that any alterity could indicate. There is no “Other” could have been his maxim, if he had written in maxims. But instead he wrote in turns and returns, as if trying in some indefinite way to exhaust all the possibilities that would constantly reopen an infinite possibility, similar, in this regard, to an impossibility that is unidentifiable as such—but unconditional. Unconditionally, it is impossible to fix Being and sense. There is no Other because there is, in general, no proper and no propriety that would not be put into play right away and therefore properly ex-appropriated, as he used to say. But alterity and alteration keep on both inscribing and erasing their traces, all in the same movement—the movement of the same. Derrida replayed the origin: da capo he opened its mouth, the source, in order to make himself and us familiar with what comes from our history, what comes to us in our history and is the rupture of movement conceived as process, that is, as the progress of being [l’étant] in the light of a Being [un être] whose History would be the final subsistence. This sort of History, which was already at work in Husserl as well as Sartre and maybe also Heidegger, has a particular sort of consistency—reductive or resumptive of historicity itself, of becoming and what is to come, of the event—that collapses under the internal distension of the present. We don’t come from, and we also don’t just come about, unless in a way that only ever keeps coming. “Come!” was his word, perhaps his most powerful thought. This “come!” is not put off until later, it does not set up a parousic presence; ousia or Being is suspended in its entirety and withdraws. “Come!” is here and now, in the distension of the instant. In a sense, Derrida says “come!” to metaphysics itself.

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This form of collapse, of breaking off—whether breaking off the course of time or discourse or sense—is precisely what reopens the origin to itself, to its ownmost differance. This is the new experience of the metaphysical demand, replayed from the top; the unconditional postulate of reason, as Kant would say, or the absolute restlessness of Spirit, as Hegel would have it. There is neither beginning nor end, but always a sending, always address and disinterment [desinterrance] (as he writes). There is always a new Hermes, or perhaps Hermes is always another and always sent otherwise. Derrida thinks in this sending, in this infinite return of the sending. He never stopped sending himself there, madly, generously, relentlessly, with a heedless prodigality, excessively, imprudently, recklessly, even—and then some. Da capo, he nearly lost his head, just as metaphysics always began by losing its meta in the outside-place [hors-lieu] reserved for it, to which we must always respond.

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 /

Mad Derrida: Ipso facto cogitans ac demens

“It’s absolutely mad.”  Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida put into play, in a famous debate, not only two ways of reading Descartes, but also two ways of interpreting the alleged division that the pair of terms “reason” and “madness” presuppose. We will not recall here the precise terms of that debate. Let me just recall that whereas Foucault identified the exclusion of unreason in the institution of classical rationality, Derrida replied by arguing that the socalled subject of the so-called reason could not be determined, identified or presented without his or her subjectivity [subjectité] being ipso facto ascribed under both headings of “madness” and “reason.” Ipso facto: this expression means “by the fact itself ” [thereby], alternatively “by the sameness of the fact,” and was sometimes replaced by eo ipso, “by that very act (or quality)” or imperceptibly, in Latin, “through that alone,” if not, more meticulously, “through that alone itself ” [de lui lui-même] [OED]; this expression is used here precisely to mean the “same” and the sameness of the same. What is at stake here is the cardinal statement ego sum, which is far from signifying simply “I am,” since it announces the subject of the sum—the first person singular already thereby inscribed (eo ipso) in the verbal form sum without the need of an additional pronoun—the subject of that “being” declared by the verb, that being itself in its most proper ontological quality (in its very being), that being or beings [étant] in so far as it is. I am it, me who states it, ego, in fact a superfluous pronoun whose excessive character

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turns out to be co-extensive and coessential with the ontological property at stake. * Let us pause here for a moment in order to clarify our premise: we are not interested in the debate itself between the two authors. We will take for granted two simple propositions: 1. Foucault and Derrida operated on different levels. Foucault was interested in the history of the practical and theoretical schemes of “reason,” of the representations and operations carried out under their guidance (the “containment” of madness). Derrida, on the other hand, was concerned with the philosophical operation—whatever shape its epochal configuration takes—in so far as it cannot do less than endeavor to keep in suspense, indeed to thwart the schemes and representations of reason at its disposal, at any point in time [dans le cadre de son temps]. In other words, Derrida was concerned with what, under the heading of philosophy (but no matter under which heading, the latter must also be kept suspended), can resist all forms of assignation or prior determination of what “reason” means. In principle—which means that the principle here is to deny all principles, failing which the shortest first step would remain impossible. Derrida’s deep-seated disposition could only be understood by the yardstick of Descartes himself: a general suspension of all assent; alternatively, in Hegelian terms, a radical and essential skepsis (doubt) at the heart of the philosophical act itself; or, in Husserlian terms, an epoche, which precludes the imposition or imputation of a constituted meaning. In any case, it is impossible to identify “philosophy” with any determinable kind of “rationality.” 2. There is a paradox in this debate. Foucault, who first of all presented himself in sympathy, indeed empathy, with the “madness” the rationalist apparatus tries to repress and constrain and whose work indeed provides many remarkable examples of that proximity or intimacy with the uncanny character of madness; Foucault, who sensed so well how madness suspends the possibility of the work, in other words, the possibility of the cathartic or apotropaic poiesis elaborated by the unbearable encounter with the non-face; Foucault remained marooned on the shores of reason, caught up in its discourses and works. This was the only space from which the conceptual, medical, social and

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institutional closure, the culture of which he was describing so well, could be identified. Playing on the opposite side, Derrida was, at least implicitly, committing himself not to let this closure simply close in front of him or his discourse, but to let, on the contrary, in some way and at some point, the trace of the closure to be blurred, torn or opened, thus running the risk and taking the chance of throwing reason into a panic instead of grounding madness. Let us begin again, after these remarks which, we should make clear, did not aim to validate or endorse one position by invalidating the other. Rather, they point to an irreducible heterogeneity, which is present whenever philosophy endeavors to be itself.

To Come to the Same (Thing) To say philosophy “itself ”—is precisely to utter a difficulty, an uneasiness [inquiétude], indeed an anxiety and an aporia about the identification of philosophy itself (properly itself, without uncertainty, identical to itself). Philosophical reason—the sophia itself, then, or the logos, pure reason, Spirit or the Will, Intuition or Thought. All these terms gravitate, more or less favorably, heavily, around an identical and immutable center of gravity, if not in the immediate vicinity of a black hole. Philosophical reason does not come to the same (thing): not to the same as some other reason which one would be able to find or to invoke, not even to the same as a reason which could exclude madness, and thus it never either comes to the same as itself. This is what Derrida ceaselessly explored and what made him oppose that more intimate dissension in reason “itself ” to Foucault’s sharing between reason and its other. This is why he had to embrace that madness within which reason sinks ea ipsa when it succeeds in identifying itself—unless the reverse be true, which is to say, unless Derrida came to philosophy, destined for it in a frenzied manner, driven by a madness. As we know, Derrida displayed his intimacy with frenzy [ forcené ], as with other figures of strayed furore [fureur égarée]. (This does not mean that Foucault was not driven, in fact, by another and similar madness. If I am allowed to give a simplistic account, however, the contrast between them was that between a thought devoted to warding off its madness and another warding off its reason. Let it be clear, however, that we are not psychologizing here; rather we are presenting at most a characteriology of thought.) Contrary to what unthinking commentators or hasty interpreters

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have been claiming, Derrida never conspired against the subject. Rather, he recognized in it the necessary crossing of identity and difference (of identity and its difference). If he never practically thematized or problematized that crossing under the heading of the “subject,” it is precisely because, from the outset, that term seemed overdetermined, either by the vacuity of the Kantian unity which appropriates representations, or, on the contrary, by the blocking of the completeness of the ego. In either case, the premise itself was under suspicion: that the subject is a substratum or a suppositum [suppôt] of the self, essentially able to support and to relate self to itself (to the same), a substance without accident. Despite this, Derrida never gave up the affirmation of the first person, therefore nor of the person itself, even if that term is not part of his vocabulary for the obvious reason that it is compromised with the hypocritical smugness of the “human person” (with its life, dignity, and a concise handbook of rights). Philosophy has rarely, probably never, known of the first person, of a philosophical writing written in the first person since Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Descartes (or else, since Plato’s dialogical mimesis—we should indeed pay attention to all the dialogues in Derrida, to all the “you,” in the singular and the plural, at which the “I” is directed—dispatched, entrusted to, devoted to, alienated—unless it is, more obscurely, since the “I engender time” of the Kantian schematism, or of the Heideggerian Jemeinigkeit). But Derrida makes exceptional use of an utterance and a personal perforation, an egological punching out of the concept, indeed, an exorbitant or extravagant, in a nutshell, mad use, when he claims to depart from the reasonable and regular anonymity of reason. There is a simple question which has been neglected so far. Why has Derrida written so much in the first person and in conformity with all the roles of that person, such as the transcendental ego, the character in a dialogue, the signatory, the one who confesses, the dispatcher of cards and letters? Its importance lies in the way it performs madness in reason and the madness of reason, as much as it perforates reason with madness, with its own madness. The first person both challenges the impersonality of the discourse of reason and pretends to substitute itself for it, carrying out alone—ea ipsa—the performance or the performing [performation] of a truth seipsam patefaciens at the same time as it perforates that patefaction of the only singular opening of its elocution. * As for the manifest abuse of assonances and of all kinds of verbal contacts, contractions and contaminations, that alliterative outburst which,

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by the way, I just imitated, let us decide its fate. Yes, it is Derrida’s madness to make an alliteration resound indefinitely, an alliteration in which he wants to hear and make us hear—and be heard—not only the literal or literary assonance counterposed to the tonelessness [détimbrage] and the flatness [matité] of the pure concept, but also the allotropic iteration of which the subject cannot but be seized, and of which we will now speak. It is certainly a dangerous madness, on the brink of a hyperbolic cratylism—as if the word “différance” or “destinerrance” had to give form to the thing itself. However, the latter also foils itself or in any case defies itself (and distrusts itself) by pretending not to constitute “a word, or a concept,” by multiplying frenetically its linguistic, stylistic and bookish effects all the more to abandon them, disseminated, like pebbles carried away by its raging flow. If Foucault’s madness is the absence of a work, that of Derrida is the excess of a work, a double polarity. * Writing (saying, letting out, throwing) I, Derrida shows, as anyone who uses that word, that the one who says/writes “I” instantly detaches and leaves outside of himself or herself that operator of identity. That deposition or exposition maddens as much as it assures. It maddens him in order to assure him, and precisely because it assures him. In the enunciative ontology of the ego sum, Descartes recognizes above all that the logos here is not about being [au sujet de l’être] but, rather, it is the subject of being and the essence of a substance whose whole quality is to relate to itself. Descartes knew that and took care to specify that the validity of the egological truth is co-extensive with its pronouncement. The ego subsists by saying itself and by the very fact of its saying: eo ipso, ego. It comes into the world in so far as it is staged and put into play through its utterance—and therefore, in so far as the irreducible gap between self, as the subject of its enunciation, and itself, as the subject of its utterance, appears suddenly, as a gap that no science of linguistics can reduce and no poem can fill in. This gap determines the coming into the world as a staging (he will be the actor of his own role) and as a gambling (with the gain of the subject and the loss of the substance, or else the reverse: henceforth the logo- and the onto- play against each other in the two senses of “against”). A theater of errors, a tragi-comic illusion. Descartes specifies that the utterance—ego sum—may be verbal or mental. This equivalence introduces, surreptitiously, if not an aggravation, at least a severe confirmation of the harsh laws of egology. If the mens is equivalent to the vox (while the vox, at this textual moment of the Second Meditation, is equivalent to its scriptum, to its left trace, exposed

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and deferred in itself, as the Husserlian instant of the living present is), it is because the voice calls itself as much as the writing remembers [se rappelle]. It resonates, it resounds in order to be, and in order to resound it must have a hollow body. Why would Descartes’s and Derrida’s body, or that of anyone who says “I,” not be the same as these glass bodies with which the madmen imagine themselves endowed, according to Descartes? How could that body not tremble when resounding with its own call? What it utters—sum, I am—calls it away, very far away; ego as an echo which hardly comes back to itself, which comes back to itself only by breaking and losing itself, and which nevertheless returns to itself [se revient] and remembers from the most immemorial, the most antepredicative, the most prenatal and insane place. Mens seipsam dementat: the spirit maddens itself at the very moment it spiritualizes itself.

Where the Subject Gets Lost Derrida appears to me—with Artaud so close to him as to be able to touch him despite the different frenzies—as someone who has had one day, and probably every time he speaks and thinks, the experience of that dementia which constitutes the most remarkable and the most terrible present modern man has managed to give himself: the coincidence with oneself takes place through a collision whereby the substance and the subject break against each other. The accident becomes essential. From the moment that thinking comes down to experiencing itself thinking (is this not the case since Parmenides and Plato or Augustine and Anselm?) it also experiences the meaninglessness of something for which a relation is impossible because it is the relation itself. This is the quality of the ego as ego ipse, the ipso facto of the ego, recognized as stemming from a fact of language and from the fugitive consignation of a trace which will never lead us back to that of which it is the trace. He is maddened (Derrida, the subject) to find nothing but his trace and to find this trace fading away. He is maddened to find that he is a trace [de se trouver trace]. He must redraw himself [se retracer]—picture himself again—so as to attempt to retain a little of what he knows absolutely that he is not able to retain, even though he can touch it, but always only touch it, without seeing or knowing it, without possessing or understanding it, at the risk of willing only willing itself and its furious rage. Derrida deploys as a result the power of the enunciative ontology, in an insatiable, unrelenting uttering, following the most archaic decision. Always prevent the echoing speech of the ego from stopping to resound, the echoing speech of the ego, which can only compose itself alliteratively

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in order to come close to the very small amount of reason its madness lets shine, during the incalculable time of the coincidence eo ipso, a coincidence which is impossible and certain, fortuitous, eternal, contingent and necessary, luminous and mortal, hopeless. This very small amount of reason, whereby reason faints when assuring itself about itself [s’assurant de soi], maddening itself through that very assurance, stems from nothing less than the other in self, which self recognizes—the other, itself, its language, its gender, its friend, its law, its voice, its trace—as constituting the heart of Kantian freedom, of the Hegelian spirit, of the Heideggerian being, finally, of the Cartesian ego which makes itself here more faultlessly, more madly known at the vanishing point of an original loss. The nerve, the knot or the high point, the nerve-meter [le pèse-nerfs], which maddens thought emerges as the property of an original loss and through this loss, in it, the origin disappears in its own opening. It is another version of the original sin, which does not befall but constitutes the subject. It constitutes it as a sinner, which is to say, indebted to the saintliness, which founds its existence (but one can only ever owe to saintliness). Derrida does not use this language, but that of an incurable grief. The melancholy of the lost other (of the lost other in me, of the other lost by me, the other than me and the other me, the other innocent saint) will not be sublated by mourning, will not be redeemed by salvation. That grief drives him mad, or rather, that grief is mad, it is madness itself. It is the straying of reason in itself—which makes its law, its structure, its history and finally its very reason (its raison d’être, its fully sufficient reason). What is lost this way—the other, the same—is what we could legitimately call the brother or the sister of reason. Derrida challenges few motifs as vehemently as that of fraternity. Without taking up again the details of that disputatio, I would like simply to make the following remark: not only is the brother given through the death of the father (in accordance, in fact, with the Freudian legend), but he may also be given only as having himself disappeared, lost from an original loss. To invoke fraternity, then, does not summon a familial model (natural, pertaining to blood relations, indeed, masculine—I leave aside here the problem of gender). Rather, it is a matter of moving the family away to the realm of the impossible. To speak of the “family” amounts to speaking of the impossible tying together the necessary and the contingent, nature and culture, the aporia of all thought modeled on the scheme of the origin (of generation, of the genos, of the genre, etc.). De facto, the family, fraternity, cooriginarity (which is to say, the origin in itself, if no origin can be represented otherwise than as a common origin) are, and must remain, the

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impossible, the intolerable, the very risk of suffocation in the substance— and no subject emerges otherwise than by getting out and “leaving one’s mother and one’s brothers.” We should finally ask what could a command, or prescription of the impossible mean—for example, the prescription of a moral and political “fraternity.” I will not elaborate further on that topic here. I only wanted to note that Derrida’s madness is perhaps nothing else than such a confrontation with or such an exposition to the necessity of the impossible. (We are all bound to the impossible. However, there are two ways in which one lets oneself be bound by it: one is tuned to the impossibility of the impossible, the other to its possibility. To separate [départager] the one from the other is not easy—it is not possible. However, the separation [partage] is the same as that which distributes reason and madness as the unity of the same subject.)

Contingency and Coincidence Despite all this, in fact, the subject announces and presents itself. In fact, it touches its other. It reaches, touches itself and, at that very moment, it not only escapes (not by standing aside the present moment, but by escaping in the present itself); rather this very touch is the cause of its flight. It would not flee from itself, had he not found itself. He would not make itself impossible [s’impossibiliserait], had it not come up against that possibility. By reaching itself, it also repels itself, it pushes away from itself that self which can only be close according to a law of proximity, which imposes the greatest distance the more it approaches itself and its neighborhood, its bordering [côtoiement], its flowering. The subject therefore knows itself to be in the implacable distance of its proximity. It knows itself not to be so, and it knows itself not to be itself. It is gripped, hindered by that double bind, which pulls and stretches it out in opposite directions, like a torture victim pulled by four horses toward the four points of the compass. Its reason is lost on contact with itself. When it encounters tangency, that coincidental contingency, which is also the point of the subject (of birth, of presence, of taking off [partance]), it maddens itself at that point. That madness has nothing exorbitant about it, nothing excessive or immoderate: it is measured exactly against the unity and the certainty of the subject of reason. To say it with Kant’s help, “madness” does not mean here Schwärmerei (delirium, an unbridled representation, the ignorance of the limits of experience); on the contrary, it designates the Trieb of the unconditioned, the drive, desire, the power of reason toward a “principle

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of principles,” beyond which nothing else can be expected from reason and nothing is missing from its sufficiency. The subject of reason is not what it ought to be unless it is engaged—and thus strayed—in that properly exorbitant drive. Nothing must escape its mastery; reason must be capable of encompassing its most proper and most intimate disappropriation in its sovereignty. In this sense, its madness is a paranoia, the madness of identity and of the unconditional surveillance of everything that could undermine its absolute exception: an unidentifiable identity, which cannot be brought back to unity but is disseminated in its principle and is, for this reason, arch-originary [archi-principielle], which is to say archaic, archaeological, and architectonic up to the point where the arche precedes itself indefinitely, irrepressibly, anarchically, impossibly. This same madness is modulated, however, in a schizophrenic mode. Its essence is a redoubling, a repetition of itself in itself, precisely, where reason itself, in redoubling itself, interrupts itself, coming to itself when it leaves itself. The reason of reason, the foundation of the foundation, the sameness of the identical, the mutual antecedence of the utterance and the enunciation, ego sum, “me, I am,” proclaimed in the absence or in the original loss of any I. This madness is therefore, on the one hand, the madness of belonging to oneself: it is mad for itself, in the sense in which one says “he is mad for his body” (in fact, it is also mad for its body to the extent that its soul is far more intimately intertwined with the body than any captain can be with his ship). On the other hand, it is the madness of belonging to oneself only as to an other, in the other, in the sense that the other has no essential in-itself, to which self can be introduced and find himself again. The “other” means the same engulfed, thrown into itself in the abyss of the into. The interiority, the “internal sense” which has no strict sense and no final reason except for reabsorbing in itself the totality of the outside, without remainder, at least without other remainder than the very movement of incorporation and absorption, the interminable intussusception. To swallow oneself is what the self cannot do. It cannot digest itself, not totally. There is always one too many or a missing one, who prevents self from becoming one, from being someone, simply one or uniformly ordinary like anyone who appears to be one. Self needs the other, but the other is missing. The other leaves self as soon as it reaches it, as soon as it has contact with its sameness. The other disappears from the outset, and abandons it to what he ends up calling “the cogito of the farewell.” I am, it says, bidding farewell. In taking his leave, he says “farewell! farewell!” “ade, ade,” “winke, winke,” like a German child, like a divine child,

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throwing the dice of contingency, that insignificant sign, that Wink, the god’s gesture toward Ereignis, toward the appropriating event, which always moves away, distancing itself from the other.

Coagitation This is the heart of madness: the proper, the appropriation, the exappropriation of the proper. The cogito of the farewell to the proper: I am, and I am in so far as I think that proper being or, I think myself properly being. I think, which is to say that I am toward myself in an identical position to that I am toward the object of my thought. I am thinking myself. I erase all distinctions concerning the object, I reduce them to my most proper subjective distinction. I grasp myself by grasping my being; that would go without saying, eo ipso, if only my being and the being which thinks did not immediately amount to two, at that very moment when unity is simultaneously ipso facto dislocated. Goodbye, then, goodbye already to the same and to the other at a single stroke. The old identity of Being and thought—this identity that suits reason— is lost when it finds and moves away from itself, when it touches itself. If this identity were to succeed, either Being would evaporate or thought would reel. Farewell to the one or to the other—and perhaps also to the two together, when the subject comes up [se pointe] as a pure real cogitating itself (coagitatio, frenetic agitation from and between self and oneself). In fact, there are two possible identifications of being and thought. The first subsumes being under a presupposed thought, and produces a manic, destructive, dissolving, totalitarian madness. The second confers the weight and the thickness of being to thought, the proof of a nondeducible existence. A secret madness results from this, elated only by maintaining itself at the limit of the possible from where it keeps watching out for the necessary as much as for the impossible, for the improbable and the incalculable. The certainty of the ego sum is not rationally founded, since it is its own reason. The Cartesian evidence is as much invisible to itself as is illuminating. There is no reason at the foundation [ pas de raison au fond ], or no foundation to reason. There is no shop-sign at the Inn, says Leibniz. One cannot recognize oneself there. Ego and Sum found each other or, we could say, they take from each other the possibility of their certainty. Far from supporting each other, they only hold together thanks to a nervous trembling, a kind of shared blackout or vertigo, which abandons both being and thought to the insane.

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This is how Derrida understands Descartes, and this is, at the same time, why he understands him. The point of certainty, the point of presence to oneself, the point of ego (far more than the point of “the ego”) is a point of rupture, a constitutive collapse of the “ground which would be entirely my own.” Farewell, he says, I have lost you, I have already lost you, you who are more intimate to me than my intimacy, you who are more internal [interné] than my interiority. My egoity, my Ereignis, my Eigenschaft (my own quality), my Eigentum (my own good), my sameness or my alterity (it is all the same, if it is “mine,” each time mine) alienates me in principle and originally, an alienation that expropriates me at the point of my propriation. My unshakeable certainty, faced with the extravagant claims of the skeptics, becomes certain because it is unprovable and improbable, undecidable. Each time my assertion poses this certainty, my enunciation shows its fault. It is nothing more than an open mouth, which shows its dark recesses and the spasm of its glottis: gl, ss, qual, ponge, différance . . . a mad language, a borborygmic concept, cogito in the tone of a toll [glas], a patho-logy understood as a chiasmus of two terms, a pending language, an illness of language, a passion in the guise of language, a pathetic enunciation, an obsidian logic. * This pathology begins in a narrative or in an argument, of which language alone is the subject—which is to say that it is both its author and theme. An idiotic and idiomatic automatism takes charge or makes up for the self-constitution of ego. If there is a “cogito of the farewell,” it is because the instantaneous loss (in fact a transcendental or existential loss) of oneself (of the same and of the other) is immediately modulated into a long, really interminable farewell. It modulates itself; it complains, it pours out, it sings, it vocalizes itself, it exclaims or writes itself—interminable threnody of a se, an ipse, a oneself in itself engulfed in the other and telling itself farewell, as it also says come! and yes, as it salutes itself in the other, as it speaks to the other, as it dispatches itself and sends itself to the other, as other. It looks as if what is at issue is to find itself again by losing itself—not however through a compensation for the loss, but through the incalculable, indeterminable, undecidable hollowing out of the loss itself, in such a way that the loss might be alone in keeping the secret of oneself in general. This is what his pathology recites, his madness to be calling always for more language and for more languages in order to attest to the same, unique, irremediable errance.

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Self-Love This is an amorous madness. It loves itself and it wants to be loved by itself. In other words, it wants in itself (in itself as a wholly other oneself) the other from all others, the singular absolute, indeed the object of a cherishment, of a dilection, of a predilection and of an election which is itself singular, absolute and irreplaceable. By loving the other in oneself, the other of oneself, it may be crossing without filling in or reducing the infinite distance of the loss and of the farewell. This primitive passion is self-love, according to Rousseau, whose confession is to know himself as even more unrelated to the world than he is present to himself, but in this way, all the more outside of himself, more intimately alienated than any other strangeness in the world might be able to reach. Love is nothing else than self-love at the precise moment it loses its very object. It is the love of this strangeness, which presents itself by uttering the singular word ego, which does not designate anyone else but the speaker himself or herself, each time different. From Augustine to Descartes, Rousseau, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, it has never been otherwise. Self-love knows itself by losing its object in the other, abandoning its object to the other subject, to the inexhaustible alterity of the subject. That infinite loss drives him mad—mad with pain and joy, unable to distinguish tears from laughter. Thus he is alone. Has anyone ever been more lonely [seul] than in madness? Has anyone ever been more lonely than Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rimbaud and Artaud? More alone than someone who does not relate to any other but remains abandoned, engulfed in his impossible unity as he is in the evidence of his own death (the death which takes the same away)? Being alone is to be prey to a self-love without object, to a madness that comes to the fore of that void, opened by the mouth whence “ego” comes out, without vis-à-vis or face-to-face, without face or surface. Only the interval, between self and oneself, between the same and the other, between you and me, who is another you. Ego sum wants to hear itself respond you are—but it cannot know if it, in fact, hears more than its own will. He is alone, he is mad, but his loneliness is populated with all similar solitudes. All those similarly afflicted in forlornness, equals in their ego, all equally incommensurable to their being-oneself as they are incommensurable with respect to each other, in spite of their equality or because of it. All properly inappropriate to their very being, to their sum, to their existo.

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All love is the election of the proper. It wants the proper of the proper, it wants its Ereignis; it wants to enteignen itself and to zueignen itself to its Ereignis—to alienate itself and to devote itself to its appropriation. In the most ecstatic and mad passion, which is more intimate than any interiority that is exalted and loses itself in the other. No thinking about love can ignore this, irrespective of the way it wants to modulate it—love of bodies or ideas, of knowledge or beauty, of God, of the neighbor [ prochain], of what is distant [lointain], of oneself, of the other. In the end, there is no difference between oblational and concupiscent love (others would say: between love and desire). There is only the difference through which the proper moves away from itself in order to appropriate itself—infinite difference which Derrida punctuates with the insane marking of its “differance”: differance of the farewell, of the cogito, of being and thought— opening of their sameness. Self-love is the proper of love in so far as the proper, by distinguishing itself and by infinitely entrenching itself, by withdrawing itself beyond any propriety and all possible appropriation, has no other injunction except to lose itself in itself and outside of itself. (To be sure, let us say in passing that this analysis cannot endorse the opposition Rousseau wishes to establish between, on the one hand, a primitive and innocent self-love and, on the other, a self-love that comes in contact with others through the desire to distinguish oneself. This opposition replays that between the love of God and self-love.) This is because the others are always already there; the desire for distinction always already mingles the wickedness of self-love with that of others. What we call ethics is played out at the place of this mêlée. Oneself lost in itself and lost in oneself—or else ego sum, ego existo understood in its most literal translation: me I am, I go out, I present myself outside and consequently I stray. I stray “me”: I expose it and I exile it outside of its residence [demeure], or rather outside in the proper inside of its residence (outside in the inside of Descartes’s stove), according to the delay, the differantial moratorium attached to every residence, where one only ever resides in the expectation of a last home, where there will be no question of residing and of remaining (as he anxiously noted and pointed out). Already now, however, here and at this very moment, permanently and without staying there, love properly entertains, animates and agitates the desire and the taste for oneself, for belonging to oneself and thus, for going without waiting, immediately, without reservations or delays to what has no hold on anything with or without mediation. Love indeed entertains

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the desire to go to this alterity of the same and the sameness of the other, to that madness of reason; finally, to the errancy of the principium rationis in which reason alone knows itself, according to the exorbitant event of its unconditionality, of its infinite and unfounded invention, of its properly insane transcendence (what he likes to call its “deconstruction”: the impossibility of completing the edifice and to hand over its keys, as much as to close the work’s accounts). Mad love is the proper of the proper who says farewell to oneself in itself and for itself, to the same in the other, therefore, also to the other as an other same. Derrida writes: “I must carry you,” which he borrows from Celan, “is forever carried on the ‘I am,’ on the sum and on the cogito” [“l’emporte à jamais sur le ‘je suis,’ sur le sum et sur le cogito”], for “before being me, I carry the other.” In that immemorial, non-originary and orificial antecedence, the I proceeds and precedes itself in fact in so far as it carries the other. This could be understood as the carrying of a burden, as the carrying of a disabled person, as a taking charge of and of course also (he thought about this) as a way of being pregnant. I carry the other in me according to the law of her division, which trembles in my bosom, and will distinguish her from me. This is how the subject subjectivizes: by being a support of the other. * This also means: act in such a way so as to make reason love itself in self-love—philosophy itself, or thought, the weighing, the gravity, the idea of the body in its own fall. Make reason love itself up to the point where that love reveals the originary alienation, which precedes and carries it away since it is reason. The logos, the madness to engulf oneself in the responsibility—response and guarantee—concerning the subject [au sujet du sujet], concerning the one, him or her, or what will never vouch for oneself, in any heard language, but who or which will always make its idiom resound sonorously, “the world has left / I must carry you” (this, then, also occurs where philosophy and poetry have the experience of each other, carry each other, both unbearable). Patho-logy again: he suffers, he is ill from making himself heard so badly or so excessively. He prays at once in order for us to listen to him and to turn away from him: “I must carry you” he tells the reader as much to move away as to come closer; it sounds like a call and a complaint, more like a kind of prayer. Before the utterance of ego sum, there is something like a prayer, like an imploration, which both welcomes the other and is weighed down by its burden—what we call love. This imploration is everywhere in him, it ceaselessly resounds in his

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voice. It is the secret prayer of his discourse, to carry the other, to go out of the world by carrying the other, thus carried by him, carried away by him. The differance between oneself and oneself, the differance between the same and the same, in identity or in being, is a thought of that amorous prayer: ‘I carry you and in this way, you carry me away. I pray to be delivered from me.’ Love is, for Descartes, one of the actions or properties of the res cogitans (alongside willing, conceiving, imagining or feeling). It consists in conjoining oneself to another up to the point of considering himself or herself as another self. An other self; an other, then, instead of the same, but also an other who is like me other from himself. An other who relates to himself by being exposed outside of self. An other who carries me away while I carry her. This carrying away is a madness. This madness, the reason of a thought. This thought, the rigorous and consequent development of what has for so long been launched under the name of the carrying and the supporting— the hypokeimenon, the base, the suppositum [suppôt], the subject—the substructure and the substance of that accident which we are. —Translated by Céline Surprenant

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 /

The Independence of Algeria and the Independence of Derrida

1 Mustapha Chérif took the initiative and arranged this meeting, and it was he who suggested putting these two together. Jacques Derrida’s independence happened at the same time as the independence of Algeria in the sense that Derrida took hold of his philosophical autonomy in a public way at the same moment that Algeria became independent—1962, the year of the Evian agreement and The Origin of Geometry. It was a coincidence and more than a coincidence too. This coincidence brought together two events that, under the two species of politics and philosophy—that double species of the genus “the Mediterranean adventure,” also known quite simply as “Reason”—two events that marked a turning point. Not just in themselves but among others in an exemplary way. Putting it in Derrida’s own terms, the turning point was a dehiscence of presence to self. This dehiscence was, and still is, the conceptual signature of the independence of Derrida’s thought, “the impossibility of remaining in the simple now of the Living Present,” a present that rather discovers itself to be “always other in its self-identity” and “always self-differing.” The independence of Algeria, exemplary among all the independence struggles under way over the preceding forty years (Egypt) across all of Europe’s “empires,” was the independence of a country whose autonomy had always been a multiple autonomy and whose identity was formed in the context of its status as a French territory. This meant a certain self-

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difference that distinguished it from its neighbors in North Africa; it still does. Yet it is a double self-difference, an intra-French and intra-African difference that in turn cuts across the difference between “indigeneity” and citizenship. (We should, of course, go even further back, to the era of domination by the Turks, but this isn’t the place to do so.) The independence of Algeria was not so much a matter of restitutio ad integrum or refounding on the basis of an origin as it was a matter of the invention of an “origin” still to come, an origin en différance, symbolically exemplary, therefore, insofar as it remained detached from any assumption of being incorporated into (or grafted onto?) a “patrie” or “fatherland” in order to invent itself as a “nation” according to the model produced by the European tradition, a model on the basis of which an identity might be found rather than found again. For this was the time when the first signs began to appear of a destabilization of political certainties across and beyond Europe—it would soon be ’68, after all—both in terms of the identities of nation-states and of international identities, or the identity of the “International.” These were the two poles of a tension that had stretched across the previous half-century, the tension out of which independence movements had emerged. The sovereign, independent, autonomous state on the one hand and socialism, with its tendency to abolish the state and stymie all attempts to separate out “the political,” both saw their respective certainties fall away. In addition, in politics, or as politics, “presence to self ” came to be understood as not being able to “enclose oneself in the innocent wholeness of an originary Absolute” (isn’t sovereignty an auto-originary absoluteness?) and also, on the other hand, “to understand that it is always to come.” (These quotations are all from the conclusion of The Origin of Geometry.) Since then, the imperative of independence, whether philosophical or political (since independence is always also an imperative of philosophical practice, of the philosophical life, as could easily be shown), also underwent a turn or transformation. It could no longer be the imperative Descartes was responding to when he wanted to build “on a ground [sol ] that would be completely mine” (as per his remarkably politicalphilosophical formulation in the Discourse on Method ). In fact, it put in question all forms of self-founding and self-determination (which is such an important term, and which became so necessary in the 1950s, having been introduced into the charter of the United Nations in 1951). There was a complex and delicate coexistence of two regimes in that turning, both of them philosophical as well as political: one the regime of auto(nomy) in general and the other the regime not of heteronomy

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(that would have been a simple opposition bound up with a banal sort of Kantianism, and thus just the sort of thing “deconstruction” took aim at) but an “alterautonomy,” a Latin-Greek word that Derrida himself could easily have made up. That is to say, this independence or this absoluteness is only ever thought and is only ever lived insofar as it is traversed by the other. This contradictory coexistence offers no possibility of a Hegelian way out. In fact, at every turn in politics and in philosophy it has called this supposedly dialectical model into question, and for a long time this left intellectuals in a difficult position. It is no longer possible to simply invoke the single and identical “sense” of a “history,” or the “subject” or “end” of a history. We have to respond to two demands regarding the subject of identity (unity, ipseity, etc.), that is, its affirmation and its differance. Put in a more concise way: the unconditional affirmation of a differance of affirmation itself and of self-affirmation. This formulation, which I think is fairly faithful to Derrida’s deepest disposition, philosophical as well as political, was not easily accepted in a political context—still less a moral one—where the values and imperatives of self-determination played a major role, and rightly so. This was the very moment when the increasing complexity of the world was setting all the familiar horizons in motion. (I’m thinking of Marxism, which Sartre regarded as “the insurpassable horizon of our time”—though it was the times themselves that were changing—and also nationalism, a horizon that could, strange as it seems, be connected up with internationalism when the need arose.) In a word, there was nothing insurpassable left, but there was also nothing to suggest that any sort of general (self)surpassing had happened.

2 The history of Algeria has unfolded along the general arc of decolonization and the related arc that saw the rupture and displacement of the great structures of global equilibrium [équilibres mondiaux]. Note that globalization [la mondialisation] is a remodeling of the world that effaces horizons, while the Husserlian notion of “horizon” is what Derrida always thought against, preferring a beyond-horizon [outre-horizon], even if that was the impossible itself. In this context, where identitarian demands of every sort exerted their pressure—the identities of “peoples” as well as “revolutions,” “struggles,” “classes,” “knowledges,” “generations,” all of them identities that were supposed to be guaranteed [assurées] (a word that Derrida loved to make tremble)—Jacques Derrida was for a long

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time suspected or accused outright (first of all, and above all, in America) of being tepid and disengaged where politics was concerned. It must be pointed out, on the contrary, that he did not withdraw prudently from political engagement in the banal and timid sense of the term prudence. Far from it. He perceived with finesse and prudence, in the strong sense of the term (which, after all, as phronesis or prudentia, is nothing other than the virtue that instructs justice in all its forms, even “undeconstructable justice”), the constraints [sujétions] that had become canonical, that is to say, the constraints of identity, and the need to displace our engagements with respect to those constraints. It wasn’t so much a retreat from political engagement as a consideration of what Lacoue-Labarthe and I had called “the retreat of the political” when, at Derrida’s suggestion, we founded a Centre for the Study of the Political at the École Normale Supérieure. What we wanted to do with that term was signal that the central self-constitution and autonomy of the political, its metaphysical essence as the presence-to-self of the “common,” ran into trouble, maybe even was lost entirely, at the moment when the principle of self-sufficiency reached a crisis. This was not by virtue of some abstract philosophical decision (a rejection of the subject, as some said) but by virtue of an actual and practical turning point in history, a turning point that I’d like to signal today using the date 1962, understood as a political and philosophical date. At this turn, the modern essence of the political—sovereign selfsufficiency—confronts “the impossibility of a single and absolutely absolute origin of fact and right, of being and sense.” (I am still citing The Origin of Geometry). What followed was the retreat [retrait] of a certain political “automatism,” but retreat as a sort of resort, a resource for opening up toward a new possibility that in The Politics of Friendship Derrida would name “a step (not) beyond the political.” It was a turn of phrase discovered by Blanchot, and I can’t open up the analysis of it again here; it is already too long. What was happening around 1962 was a general rupture of selfsufficiencies, origins and their guarantees. As a result, it was also a rupture of the political itself, of the identity of the concept of the “political” that could be grasped according to a model of foundational autochthony, a model of self-contracting self-constituted subjects or a model of sovereignty. This rupture was the inevitable accompaniment to the rupture that had opened in the thought of identity as present to itself and originating in itself, which happened even as the identity of “philosophy” itself found itself in play. I think that today, nearly half a century after 1962, we are in a better position to understand what was at stake in that turning

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point. Independent of the particular histories of the Algerian republic and Jacques Derrida, we now know more than we ever wanted to know about just how disastrous affirmations of identity are when their guarantees [assurances] crush not only exterior differences but also the internal differance that alone can open an identity to “itself,” that is, open it to its “to come” in the way Derrida wishes to understand this term. Derrida certainly refrained from producing a “political philosophy” that would have aimed to set up one more politics on the basis of a new way of thinking. For this new way of thinking—his but, along with his, the whole movement of that era, the era of taking independences—this way of thinking would displace the very idea of “founding” a politics, and, at the same time, the very concept of “politics.” On the other hand, Derrida practiced a politics of philosophy in the sense of a set of strategies and maneuvers aimed at preventing philosophy from once again identifying itself as just another “philosophy,” just another “worldview.” No more “worldviews,” no more “pre-visions” seen through the eye of a master-subject; the aim now was to make appear before our eyes all that was not yet visible of a world that—beyond all visions and conceptions—would be worthy in another way of the name “world.” A world “to come,” to take up one more time this Derridian shibboleth: to come, not future, not something that could be anticipated or programmed, but a world the very structure and nature of which would be the “coming” and the “to come”. This also means a world and a word—the word “world”—whose sense is not given, any more than the sense of the words “polis,” “politics,” “community,” or “philosophy.” [It is] a sense before and after sense, what he called “disseminated,” a reserve of sense or voice from before the sign, [sense] as reposing in that “nocturnal well” that he takes from Hegel, “this night pit, silent as death and resonating with all the powers of voice that it holds in reserve” (Margins, 77), this well from which the possibility of a “sense to come” is drawn and in which it is exhausted. El Biar. We’ll go there tomorrow. The name means, or will have meant “the well” and more precisely, “the wells”—more than one well, more than one origin, more than one independence, more than an independence . . .

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 / Eloquent Stripes

Derrida certainly spoke about art and the arts. How could he not? Indeed, how could he have avoided having to speak about them? After all, art is no longer a “thing of the past” (Hegel) that first made itself known as a standin for divine, heroic, glorious services. Rather, there is a question—but far more than a question, really, something more like a demand—that, under the name “art,” claims a considerable tribute from the enterprise of thinking. And he must surely have been wary of this word “art,” perhaps more wary of it than of all the other words inherited by philosophy, for art in the singular only ever exists in the multiplicity of the arts, whose original heterogeneity relates to a heterogeneity of the sensible itself. (“Itself?” he would have said. “Where is the sameness of the sensible, which senses only in being sensed and in sensing itself sensing, and therefore separating the self from the very sensation of itself?”) And he was wary of it to the point of distrusting himself—I mean, distrusting philosophical discourse—as an approach to the work and as a way of apprehending it. Unlike many philosophers and theorists of his time, Jacques Derrida spent very little time talking about works themselves, analyzing them or exploring their various textures and attitudes, whether from the point of view of history, technique or symbolism. More often than not, when he approached a work, he would pick up the guiding thread of a thought and follow it to the end. Thus, writing about Atlan, he very quickly found himself engaged in the “stories” that he said these painting told him. Or, writing about Titus-Carmel and Micaëla Henich, he sets up a

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counterpoint with their drawings in a text that unfolds largely for and by itself, according to themes, motifs and resources that he treats as distinct from the works themselves, rather than taking hold of them and making them say whatever it was the discourse needed them to express. In fact, he is altogether too convinced, a priori, of the complete autonomy [autarcie] of the work, its silent independence—silent, also, in terms of discourse, when it comes to poetry. He writes, in the notes for Micaëla Henich’s Lignées: It is easy to see the house, that is, to project it onto each of these drawings, each one self-sufficient as it is and in no need of my projection, I mean, no need of these eloquent rays of mine that, I might add in passing, have no need of them either. “Eloquent stripes”: they are traits of his, of his writing. Just before this, he wrote: “never forget that words are also traits, that is to say, rays by which we see without seeing anything of them.” The two orders of trait are set side by side, rays running alongside but also overtaking each other. There is a disparity, a discrepancy or dehiscence between these orders, regimes or registers of traits, a discrepancy that is fundamental but has nothing to do with a common origin. This means that philosophy does not have the right or the power to grasp the work, while art has neither the desire, the disposition nor even any particular ability to create any sort of discourse about itself. We could search further in Jacques Derrida’s texts. I will not do that here, but we could very well find him recusing himself from “speaking about art.” It is there, everywhere, each time his writing approaches an object that has been designated as “artistic.” Right away, he rejects its position as object. He thinks of them both—the trait of writing and the other trait—in terms of an independence, a space for the sort of wandering proper to each of them. Each one follows its own path, neither subject nor object but truth, each time striking a single note, strange to the other, to the others. A tone, yes, a single resonance, irreducible to any other tone. Produced by a single stroke. “A burst of music,” therefore—a blast of “therefore” that disrupts by opening onto the outside, the strike of a gong, the timpani, the first note that opens an ear in the way Jacques Derrida wanted to open the ear of philosophy. He made philosophy attentive to timbres, rhythms, cadences, dances and traits, tractions, rays, touches or patches, all of which are outside, others, whose alterity can only be recognized or approached when held at a respectful distance, protected from the mastery of the discourse. [This alterity] can remain other only by remaining with all possible force, all the pregnancy, insistence, persis-

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tence, solidity that the “other” maintains toward and against everything— everything, that is, except that for whom it is “other” and that—therefore—it remains. It remains outside and, initially, out of sight, as Memoirs of the Blind explains at length; a polymorphous, polyphonic trait whose trace or tracing begins at a point or instant of obscurity, the instant of an eye closing as it opens, in order to open. This is why and how Jacques Derrida holds back in front of a work of art. He does not want the object nor, in a certain way, the propriety of the “work,” nor the subject if he has to be the subject—if he ends up having to speak—of another mode of enunciation that is definitively “other” only in terms of a different complexion of the modalities of the trace. No, he will not speak of art or on art, and no, he will not make it speak. He’ll turn away, he’ll circle around it. I’d like to explain, taking my time, circling around, which is what one is reduced to when one tries to use words around inaccessible bodies [in this case, bodies drawn and painted by Colette Deblé]. As expected, Jacques Derrida sets up a double entendre: “I’d like to explain what one is reduced to” and “I’d like to explain, circling around, since it’s what one is reduced to.” In other words, he would like to both “explain” and make understood what is being talked about in “what we’re reduced to,” and he would like to “explicate,” unfolding words as he circles around, without touching, without getting access to, since this is what he’s reduced to. No doubt it is pretty clear that the former is led into an impasse by the latter: I won’t be able to understand, not completely, what it is that I’ve been reduced to. But there remains, yes, it is what remains and what he elsewhere calls the restante to which I am reduced. It remains the case that there will always remain a difference between the strokes or traits of my writing and the strokes or traits of drawing, splashes of paint, strokes or traits of music, stretches of dance. What difference? The difference that separates regimes of the sensible, which is also to say, regimes of sense. Jacques Derrida did not put it like this—he avoided the word sense. It’s a crude [gros] word, he told me, once again making sure to make the ambiguity felt. But I call up this word here because we are speaking, we are supposed [censés] to be speaking about aesthetics, that is, about sensibility and therefore sense. I won’t insist on the crude word anymore, but I should say this: Jacques Derrida does not do “aesthetics,” or “philosophical aesthetics,” precisely because he does not want to submit the founding, archi-original disparity of sense and the senses to some sort of

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unifying presupposition, that is, the presupposition of a discipline, category of knowledge, method or theoretical regime. He submitted sense and the senses to dissemination from the start. That is to say, he submitted them to disjunction at the origin, and so from the origin, and to an infinite destination. Dissemination does not only affect so-called “intelligible” or “intellectual” sense. It affects the sense of all possible sense, which is to say, what is important and what is at stake for everything that comes under the heading of a relation with an exterior or an other. Sense always refers to some exterior and/or some other. As a result, all Jacques Derrida’s insistence on the inaccessible character of the work, the alterity of the trait or line—whether drawn, sung or danced—is a way of refusing to use the name art or aesthetics for something like a way of giving an account of art, or giving reasons for art, or even [taking art as] the “setting into work of truth” (at least, if this Heideggerian formulation can still be understood as such, if I can put it that way). At the same time, it is an affirmation of the contact, contamination, and intrication among all the different traits, above all, of course, between the traits of the various arts and the traits of various writings. What is it that makes contact in this entwinement or contagion? What is it in the trait of writing or the plastic arts or melody that makes contact? What sort of meeting happens? This is precisely the character of the trait, its common character even though there is nothing common about it other than its own division, its own dissemination among words, on the one hand, and the forms and forces of wordlessness, on the other. In other words, Jacques Derrida finally “explains” definitively “what it is he is reduced to with words.” In a single gesture, the gesture of writing, he is reduced to the poverty and one-sidedness of sense in the truly sensed and signifying sense of the word—which without a doubt defines the sphere of everything that is not “aesthetic.” With no distance, no difference and thereby differing [différant] its proper sense, he understands how his way of “circling” without ever really getting access to the traits traced beyond words, to other traits, to the traits of others, how this style falls over his words like a shadow of their own trace. With this shadow, a truth of writing itself appears: that writing extended beyond itself, by words outside words, by the signification of the outside of signification. Still, it doesn’t become “art” for all that, however much it wants to, however much it tends in that direction. And who is to say which artistic tendency—drawing, dance, music—is at work chez “Derrida”? I’m not talking about the psychology of Jacques Derrida but about his grammatology. It is a non-scientific, non-“artistic” “science,” a knowledge of what exceeds these distinctions, a knowledge of the gramme, of the trait in gen-

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eral, which is only ever general by virtue of being particular. This is the knowledge that distances writing from the word, just as the supplement without essence of an alterity and an alteration is distanced from the signification of an essence. This alterity and alteration cloud the presumed transparence of pure signification, displacing it and always carrying it further away. In other words, art will always have preceded, worked, traversed and altered the pure transmission of pure sense. Or: there is no pure sense; sense is its own dissemination and alteration. There is a discourse that has pure sense as its regulative idea, and Jacques Derrida’s desire is to turn this discourse back on itself and put it in touch with its own alteration, to let it glimpse the shadow of its own outline [tracé] and to see there the inaccessible proximity of all of these traits traced outside words (or, indeed, across them, by poetry). This shadow can have quite an allure “if not something like the iron shadow of the motet of an unutterable antique music, like the leitmotiv of a theme despairing of its own subject.” This is Artaud talking about Van Gogh. Derrida cites him at the conclusion of the text he has devoted to “the truth in painting.” Derrida rewrites it in order to re-cite it on his own behalf. It is, undoubtedly, the shadow of a music more ancient than anything we could give an account of—and isn’t all music “unspeakable” [inénarrable]?—and for this reason reduced to “despairing of its own subject,” a theme that is therefore without a thesis, a motif therefore without motivation. Subject without object, object without subject, but a movement of turning around that allows something to appear in the midst of its circling, at the heart of its circling, that is, the abundant proximity of traits that take shape in the boiling chaos that is fertile without being generative. Chora, chasm, spacing that is preceded by no trait, no contour, and indeed no nomination, but which offers (because we cannot say here that it “is” or that it “forms”) the very thing that is indispensable to the traced, the drawn, the drawing of a trait, any trait whatever. It is therefore also what is needed for the “eloquent stripes” of the speaker [discoureur] who comes to scratch [rayer] the surface of the drawings, to scratch over [surrayer] without blocking [enrayer] that to which he grants non-access, without himself gaining access to it, just as one could make possible the harmony of instruments and voices of a music yet to come. In these “eloquent stripes” we must see both the suspicion long inspired in us by the idea of eloquence as merely ornamentation, flattery and artifice, and, at the same time, discreet aspiration. After all, it is a matter of doing right by the “stripes,” by what until recently was called “the art of speech.” This might also be nothing other than a supplement—

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a dangerous one—to the word, presumed to be direct, pure and alive, stripped of art and artifice. The eloquent supplementary stripes supplement, in their way, what also scratches [rayer] the traits, the lines [raies], the rays [rais] of the artist: sense as a complete figure, representation, signification, the proper, or the trope as the turn of the proper. Later in the same text, he writes: “just in time to warn you, by means of erasure [rature] or scratching out [rayure]: this is not a figure, not the right figure; what we are looking for together is beyond the figure.” Beyond? But it’s here. Right here, where both of them trace their traits, scratch their surfaces and their words. Together? Yes, together, just like one another and with one another. But this “like” is not any sort of analogy. It refers only to the fact that every aesthesis is like another, that is, sensible in the sense that no sense, no sensible is “like” or comparable but always incomparable, irreducible, inaccessible from the outside since it is itself each time the opening of a singular outside. And the one with the other. This “with” obeys the law of the “with,” apud hoc, proximity, the smallest, infinitesimal distance but distance nonetheless and, as such, unbridgeable. This is the distance between word and trait, between the trait of a word and the stroke of a pencil [trait de crayon], between the stroke [trait] of one pen and another, between a musical passage [trait de notes] and the movement [traction] of a dance. A little later in the same text he cites Silesius: One must go beyond God [. . .]. Myself I must be sun, whose rays must paint the sea, The vast and unhued ocean of all divinity. Stripes and scratches [rayures] have become rays [rayons]; beyond the figure becomes beyond God, therefore, beyond the beyond. And in the same stroke [trait], therefore in a single beat, Derrida becomes Silesius. But Silesius himself has already become what he said he must be: the radiating sun. Eloquent ray.

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 /

Derrida disant dix Exergue: to listen here to some rogue who will go on nonstop for ten years. That is because such a distinction is Greek to them and they are losing their Greek and Latin: decade, let them be assured, meant in the Greek calendars and right up until the day of the French Revolution, only ten days, not ten years. Nor, as you might be fearing today, ten hours. —Jacques Derrida, Rogues 

Ten years on, Derrida. Coming back? Not at all: he was still here. All the time, all the ten times. Where? Invisible? More than visible: sensible, everywhere, as a tone, as a touch, a vibration within the philosophical orchestra, a touch of ten. * A vibration that includes the frequency ten. Would he concern himself with it, Derrida? With ten, the ten, the ten of them? Of course, he would be the first to say: “but that’s all I’ve ever talked about!” Count, just count: you will find ten in his work, groups of ten, more than one group of ten, more than ten lines of poetry (a decastich). It is there at least since the appeal in the Kabbalah to “the authority of the number 10 (1+2+3+4)” and “the tree of the ten sephiroth corresponding to the ten names or categories,” all the way to the categories of Aristotle, which he locates in the “most fundamental text, which gives the most complete list of these properties, ten in all (Categories, IV).” Derrida refers to this in the middle of a text—“The Supplement of Copula”—that itself was part of Margins of Philosophy, an ensemble of ten: “ten texts are

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gathered here,” it says on the cover of the book and the ten is repeated throughout, starting in the first few pages: “these ten pieces of writing in fact pose the question of the margin.” It is as if he needed to tympanize us with it. * This is how he loved to quote Mallarmé: “I sow, so to speak, here and there ten times this whole double volume.” (You might say that it’s him, no? I also think he hears himself say this “I.”) This is how he interrogated Marx’s ten: “He pretends to count off the specters of the other on his fingers; for there would be ten of them, as if by chance.” This sends us back to a kabbalah or a Pythagoreanism of the ten, because this is not about counting on our fingers, it’s about the transcendental-historical that is presented in this way: “the ten plagues, the mourning and promise it announces.” It’s a ten that Derrida would like to take up on his own behalf and that he in fact takes up using the transparent device of presuming permission: “If one were permitted to name these plagues of the ‘new world order’ in a ten-word telegram.” * There is nothing he can do. It’s an obligation, the categorical imperative of the aporia: “Nine or eleven times, they involved the same aporetic duty; they involved ten—plus or minus one—commandments considered as examples in an infinite series in which the ten could only count a series of examples.” This is how one—how he—would have started from the group of ten only in order to progress towards it or in it: “And Reb Lima: ‘Freedom was originally engraved ten times on the Tablets of the Law, but we deserve it so little that the Prophet broke the tablets in anger.’ ” (Regarding Reb, remember Reb Dérissa, who pretty much signs Writing and Difference.) * Which doesn’t take into account a particular taste for speaking in terms of ten years on: when he sets about telling the history of philosophy, he says that one has the right to have the right to this history from the “moment [in 1863] when, ten years after its suppression, Duruy reestablished the philosophy class under the Second Empire.” Yet a process had already begun long before with “DuBellay’s bookmanifesto The Defense and Illustration of the French Language, [which]

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dates from 1549, ten years after the royal decree of Villers-Cotterêts,” then continued with “[Descartes’s] famous letter to Mersenne of November 20, 1629 (the era of Regulae, almost ten years before the Discourse)” and indeed [Descartes’s return to the theme of universal language] “ten years later, in the ‘Letter from the author to the translator of this book (which can serve as preface),’ ” a process that would lead to “the industrialized society that, less than ten years later [ten years after Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties in 1798], would provide the great model of the University of Berlin.” * But the inventory stops here, despite the bright future it has in ten years or ten times ten years, because Derrida knows very well that the ten must be kept for its right and fecund measure. After all: If we sharpened or blunted our senses tenfold we should perish: that is, with regard to making possible our existence we sense even relations between magnitudes as qualities. Saying ten like this, just ten that he feels and relates to such a possible existence, saying ten over and over again, many times ten years before the after that he therefore keeps with us, as: All that I have shared with him here during the last ten years, from the most simple day-to-dayness to the most intense moments of the work that allied us with each other and with others, the friends, students, and colleagues who grieve for him so close to me here. “Ten years,” which crops up twice more in the same text. Here as elsewhere, the ten shows up in citations from several other writers, returning to him, in his work, “who sees, coming to meet him, what appears to be the body of a drowned man: only one? Perhaps two, perhaps ten” speaking to him of “the disease she had been fighting for ten years.” .............................................................................................................................. “Ten lines further down, royally cutting short this development, with no other apparent elaboration . . .” “Like the ten thousand people in the auditorium, one is confronted with the thing itself.”

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 / A Differant Orientation

1 There is the Middle East and the Far East. That has been our habitual way of talking, in our European language, for a long time. The East, the near one or the middle one, is halfway between us and the far one. Like all mediating terms, it holds together two extremes. It already turns toward the West, the sunset, the Maghreb. The Middle East must also be a Middle West, Machrek, the Levant, which, like the word or adjective Levantine, was once a European word. There is in fact no middle, no midday. We pass continually from morning to evening to morning. It is only far away, at the extreme, that we find the Middle Kingdom (or the “central plains”). It is not a matter of rising or setting, there, but of coming. Derrida wrote in 2002: “We have to . . . understand right away what is happening there in China, to free ourselves from our Eurocentric shortsightedness, to see coming what is already coming upon us, and that will come to us more and more, more and more forcefully, faster and faster.” And that is as far as it goes, in terms of the coming extreme; at the bottom of the same page, the same thinker acknowledges that he has never learned Chinese and that this is something he will always regret. He never learned Japanese either, but this other Far East, the extreme of the Rising Sun whose own East becomes our West has long been westernized, Europeanized, Americanized. A French philosopher could cor-

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respond with a Japanese expert on Claudel, Bergson or Heidegger. He also never learned Arabic; he had not been able to because his French school [in Algeria] did not allow it. But he had an ear for the language. So, there are easts and easts, more than one east; orients and orients, more than one orient. Some have already become part of the west and its trajectory; some that come to it with the heavy, almost immobile step of the Center; some, the closer ones, that were always already part of the trajectory from East to West, from the Levant to the Couchant, from sunrise to sunset and back again. There is jostling, shoving, rushing, crossing over from East to West, toward the West, of course, because it is a matter of following the course of the sun, the course of a day. One moves towards the Hesperides, the evening land given by the gods to Aeneas the Trojan as the end of his journey, the place where Rome would be founded. But for Rome in its turn, the Hesperides would be Iberia, Gibraltar and the great ocean; it would be evening and the fall of night. Is there a Far West, an extreme Occident? Yes. In Arabic there was Al Maghrib Al Aqsa, the most distant sunset of all. In Andalusia and Morocco this distancing was converted into gardens, perfumes, sciences and poems. Further north, it was a matter of setting out to brave the ocean. The Far West comes to be bound up with an entirely Nordic and Atlantic sunset as people ventured out into the fog, through the seaweed, across the sea. “The European trajectory from East to West” that Derrida spoke of in relation to Heidegger [was] a frantic chase after the evening, the setting of the sun, the night in which we must learn to remain—whether in the bottom of the hold like a barrel of pickled cabbage or like an ebony box. The time spent by the spirit in negativity is less about repose and repair before another day begins and more about the trial and testing of the spirit, which recognizes itself as its own black sun, and is sublated in its obscure light.

2 The world is divided by the middle sea, the sea of the mid-place between lands—another mid-place, a liquid plain riddled “with thousands and thousands of sun idols” as well as thousands of languages and, in some of those languages, it is the “white sea,” that is to say, the sea to the South. Ulysses and Aeneas both set off from the Asian shore, one heading for Ithaca, the other for Latium. Alexander left for India, turned back and died

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at Babylon. While Rome came to unite all the shores of the sea, the empire lost no time in dividing it. The West lived up to this accident, becoming the land of anguish, the fall, the sun already black, and god made flesh. The East had new mornings: Spirit, breath and flame. Islam reaches the Hesperides before turning back to its rising [levant] and toward Baghdad, not far from Babylon. The arc is toward the sunset, toward another possible day—a day where there will be no sunset, the electrified night of megacities joining up with the sea journeys beneath the stars, circling the globe with the wakes of ships and aircraft. The days of the world follow one another without the world ever sleeping. As a result, it never wakes up either. A night watch stretches on. It no longer knows points on the compass. The West is everywhere and at the same time has shriveled to almost nothing. “All those elements of philosophical research in France or in the West that take the form of technologies, rules and procedures, they are all part of a very limited process, one that is taken up—and therefore surpassed—by the much larger, more obscure, more powerful processes between the earth and the world.” “Between the earth and the world.” This does not mean in the opposition or confrontation of these two as it was set up by Heidegger. It means that the opposition between the hidden, silent earth and the exposed, signifying world is exceeded. We have exceeded the dyad of reserve and opening where they each provide a contrast to and a resource for the other, each providing the other’s orientation. Whatever surpasses the West on the basis of Western “research” (what a word, the watchword of the West!) is the very thing—more ample, more obscure, more powerful—that means that research can no longer be oriented. That is what is known as a disorientation. If there is one thing that is necessarily in solidarity with the idea of “deconstruction” that we associate with Heidegger and Derrida—and that, thanks to them, goes far beyond them—it is clearly a disorientation. It becomes clear at the same time that this disorientation is not a matter of straying from a straight path. The disorientation is originary. It is in the origin. The West begins in disorientation. It therefore ends there too. It threw itself into it even as it was being formed. This headlong leap is the proper movement of this turn toward the night, toward death, disenchantment, melancholy and madness. We must not forget that the Mediterranean, European, Western turn begins with concern about death. The Egyptians took great care over the passage to the other world, which means there was some uncertainty about where the dead would go. No doubt other cultures up until that point had a better idea about how the

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dead lived. In Egypt, people began to wonder if there were a chance that they might die completely . . . Essentially, constitutively, something seems to have been lost: the presence of the dead, gods, sacrifice, all that testifies to a relation with the inapparent.

3 The West orients itself, all by itself, by its own self-designation as evening-land, land of the setting sun, of the arrival of night out of an East that has all the power of morning, daybreak, and the clarity that is born and spreads over everything. But since the East rises, since it consists of always already having risen and so also always already on the way to setting, it is lost from the start. In the midst of many other testimonials, Rousseau offers this: Our languages are worth more written than spoken, and there is more pleasure in reading us than in listening to us. Oriental languages, on the other hand, lose their life and warmth when they are written. Only half of the meaning is in the words: all its force is in the accents. Judging the genius of the Orientals from their books is like painting a man’s portrait from his corpse. Derrida cites this passage and then goes on: The oriental corpse is in the book. Ours is already in our speech. Our language, even if we are pleased to speak it, has already substituted too many articulations for too many accents, it has lost life and warmth, it is already eaten by writing. The catachresis “eaten by writing” is remarkable. It no doubt refers to the mention earlier in the book of Rousseau’s habit of reading during his meals and therefore to an association between reading and assimilation, an operation of digestion rather than listening. And so the rising day of the West is already eaten up by the night to come. “Nothing yet shows itself here; the orient passes here immediately into its pure being-other, absolute dark or occidentality.” Heidegger “repeats and claims to go beyond the European trajectory from East to West.” Today we are even better placed to appreciate how correct that description is. The most recently published texts of Heidegger’s show him at his most inflamed and show how deeply his intellectual and ultra-political or hyper-messianic disposition at that moment was marked by the motif of a catastrophic completion or accomplishment

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of the West—the Abendland—whose annihilation would open the possibility of “another beginning.” This new beginning means that we must be exposed not to dawn or dusk but to a nocturnal light that alone makes possible a new day: “How can the new day come if the night remains hidden from it and if everything remains reduced to the twilight of indecision?” “Going beyond” means replacing the slow dusk (of morning or evening) with a flash of light in the night, the one sudden flash of decision that opens onto a new day. This replacement would have to replace the passage or transition of rising and setting with something like an immediate surging forth of day in the middle of the night, the surge of a day that suddenly opens not beyond the night but onto night and into night, the night that is not hidden or withheld (vorenthalten) from it. Perhaps there is a new version of the Hegelian spirit here that remains in death. But there is a difference, and it is found in the refusal of passage, which appears as half-day or half-night, the half-light of indecision.

4 What if it were all chiaroscuro? What if it were about passage, the intermediary or, even better, the imperceptible transformation of the sun’s rising and setting? What is the difference between passage and upsurge? The latter emerges as something immediate and therefore as an identity or a sameness of light and dark. Light itself is invisible and therefore obscure; Heidegger talks about this later in those same pages. The East must identify itself with the West in order to be the absolute East, the origin. This is Heidegger’s pretension, in every sense of the word pretension: an unwise aspiration and an outrageous claim. We could say that this is exactly what characterizes “metaphysics” in the sense that Heidegger wants to give the term after Nietzsche: pretension to mastery of the arche, to what is most originary in every origin. But as Nietzsche said: “there are many sorts of dawn.” Perhaps diversity is a necessary element of dawns and twilights, diversity understood as the indefinite and continuous variation of intensities of light and shade, the one in the other, the one by the other, and the one as the other. There is something about the very early morning or nightfall that attracts us and would have us linger, and this is what is important here: the infinitesimal growth or fading [of light], an alteration barely perceptible but impossible to miss. Perhaps what is most originary always pushes the origin further back; perhaps it opens up an alteration in it. In that case, its “most” is more

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like an “other”: the other of the origin in the origin. No more origin as supplement to the origin; augmentation and substitution, aggravation and vicariousness. “ ‘What then is signified by this supplement of originarity? Does it have the slightest determinable content?’ That could be one of the forms of the question toward which we are making our way. But also a first sign signaling toward what precedes or exceeds questioning itself.” Questioning the origin, asking questions about the origin, is exceeded and redirected as a practice of questioning, that is, as a process that is oriented by an object that is itself elaborated, posed and designated by the question. Which is the orient? Which way is east? It is a question preoriented by orient and occident, by an occidentality, an essential accidentality of the setting sun and the night in which we want to find assurance of a new day. It is the question and fear of the day to come, the day that might not come. Step aside, turn away. Become disoriented. Or rather, stop being oriented by orientation or the negation of orientation. Take the whole business of origin, coming, rising or indeed opening and turn it another way. In other words, this is what we talk about when we talk about an other. It’s not a matter of calling up the figure of an Other, capital O, a divine, holy, feminine, foreign or animal Other that is always on the point of reconstituting some sort of Orient. (We should be just as wary of the orientalism of the other as we are of the occidentalism of the same.) In a way that is less figurative and much more tonal or chromatic (in both the musical and painterly sense of those words), it is a matter of being attentive to the alterations—always plural, singular plural—without which not even a sameness could ever come about. This attention welcomes variation, diminution or augmentation of intensity, degree, accent, nuance, tendency or touch by which it alters, rises or sets, always a little more or a little less emphatic than we expect from an opening or closing. “If the category of the welcome everywhere determines an opening that would come even before the première, before the opening, this opening can never be reduced to an indeterminate figure of space, to some sort of aperture or opening to phenomenality. . . . The welcome orients, it turns the topos of an opening of the door and of the threshold toward the other; it offers it to the other as other, where the as such of the other slips away from phenomenality, and, even more so, from thematicity.” Neither opening nor closing but welcoming—if we want to welcome this term without adopting a self-righteous tone, and bearing in mind everything involved with questions of immigration, frontiers, asylum, extraterritoriality, etc. Welcoming as a change of orientation. If we think in

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terms of an orient in which “nothing is made manifest anymore,” the decline of the West is a foregone conclusion. Instead, [we can think of] welcoming as a turning away from the alternatives of appearing/disappearing, day and night, an in-appearance that is not a failure to appear but, on the contrary, a constant trans-pearance in variation, passage, and modification, the crescendo and decrescendo of a vibration, of a resonance the very sense of which consists in increasing and decreasing, rising, moving, flexing, extending itself and declining. A differant orientation.

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 / Jouis anniversaire! “Scenes of the Inner Life”: On the Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Jacques Derrida

1 He saw us coming from a long way off, of course, as always, going ahead of us in all our initiatives and alerting us, warning us well in advance. He has been waiting for us not just for the past ten years but for four decades, waiting for us at that turn. Which turn? Why, the one where the turn absolutely has to happen, turning right around in order to return to self—though the return is infinite and so never returns. Four decades ago, in 1974, he wrote: “How is the event of an anniversary possible now? What gives itself in an anniversary?” As Hegel said, more or less, this “now” loses nothing in being reread outside its present. It takes on the possibility of a distinct sense of sense certainty. It takes on the iterative now-ness of signification. Now is always now. “It is there. But out there, beyond, within repetition but eluding us there . . . the third party between the two hands holding the book, the differance within the now of writing, the distance between the book and the book, that other hand.” What other hand? The text does not tell us. But another, later one at least gives us some indications. This other text is concerned with “Heidegger’s hand,” and it notes that for this thinker, grasping with two hands has to do with “the rush of utilitarian violence” and the two hands should instead be joined and placed together “in prayer or in oath.” Derrida also notes that “nothing is ever said of the caress or desire.” He adds that Heidegger could object that the caress comes only after “the coming

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[avènement] of the hand from speech” and as a result of this emergence— “the hand that gives, gives itself, promises, lets go, gives up, hands over, and engages in alliance and oath.” He could have, but he didn’t. “Why not say it, then?” Derrida asks. He asks it of his reader, of himself, of Heidegger. Just before this he has asked: “Does one make love . . . with a hand or with hands?” Then, when he imagines Heidegger’s possible response, he recalls this question by mentioning “what is vulgarly called making love or caressing or even desiring.” The adverb “vulgarly” contains at least part of the answer to the question: “Why not say it?” or “Why not have said it?” There is an amorous, erotic, desiring vulgarity that the thought of the single hand coming from speech has nothing to do with. As such, it offers and receives, is offered and received in a way that means that “All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.” I’m not saying that it isn’t. I’m only asking what authorizes us to reserve the work of thinking and speaking (whether loquacious or silent) for a single or singular hand, and to subordinate, even abandon, the vulgarity of two hands making love, one’s two hands on the body of the other or inside it, not to mention the hands of the one (masculine or feminine) entwined with the hands of the other, given over to, abandoned to the caress, to mani-pulation and sexual jubilation (which is another quotation; we’ll get to that). We will need to come back to this suspicion of sexual and manual vulgarity. But first, now, what’s happened to the anniversary? It’s not far away, it’s still waiting for us in its reiterated now, another hand separating book from book at the same time as it separates, approaches and handles two loving hands. What other hand, and what separation?

2 In Glas, the question “What gives itself in an anniversary?” (242) appears at the pinnacle of the left-hand column; at that point, at the symmetrical pinnacle of the extremely dissymmetrical but nonetheless parallel right-hand column, there is this sentence: “The absence of the hand was as real and effective as a royal attribute, as the hand of justice.” It has to do with the severed hand of Stilitano; its absence and supplement had been signaled by the division or dissemination of moignon in two parts. The first part, moi, was cut off [on p. 238] and then followed four pages later by gnon (which is a slang term for a blow, specifically a punch). Between the moi and its punch, there are long sexual, biblical and tattooed variations on this imperative: “What is necessary here: hands induced to

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bandage the column. The column is wounded, otherwise it would not be a column.” The column [colonne] is also slang for an erect penis (as in se taper le colonne [literally: whacking the column]). Here, it is a column in a book, but the book itself brings up that other meaning with its talk of “two supplementary columns that seem detached from one another” (238), just before it cuts off the moi—a castration that is not privative since it also raises the column, brings on the erection. It says, basically: “Nothing ever stands erect, it seems, except a stump, a moignon.” A broken, circumcised column, “covered with scars and legends”— here, it is the other-than-Jewish circumcision, circumcision of the heart, that of Saint Jude whom, on the following page, he goes looking for in Jean Paul’s Fibel (Bibel in dialect, in vulgar language), this Jude—the Christian name of Judas—who “sought to create a common asset of the Old and New Testament” and “never let himself be converted.” To which he adds: “Perhaps what I am doing with you.” (Yes, this is what he adds, dropping it there, off-handedly, right opposite “the gift of es gibt” that “gives itself to be thought before the Sein” and also “displaces all that is determined under the name Ereignis, a word often translated as event.” Turning the page, at the top of the column, he continues: “How is the event of an anniversary . . . ?” But patience, patience. Let’s wait a little longer, even though he’s being incredibly annoying, lying in wait for us like this, transforming himself at every turn but remaining the same, yes, the eternally dissimilar, stretching himself even further. He is in the process of showing us how to remain oneself without self, how to appropriate improperly, to erect by cutting off, and to be sexed without being differentiated. So bandaging the columns is a matter of tending to the wounded member—wrapping it with “meters of white gauze.” But this is not the same as healing; it is not a way of returning to the same nor a way to mark identity by separation. Bandaging the wound not only frustrates the logic of castration understood as taking something away—the general logic of loss or absence—but, at the same time [du même coup/gnon], it blurs the distinction between the sexes since this sexy, exciting wound [blessure bandante] must now also be related to what we are being told [in the right-hand column] about the Torah, with its “robe and crown,” the bands in which it is wrapped being undone, “its two rolls parted like two legs.” (Remember that god as a column guiding his people is also a double, a column of fire at night and a column of cloud in the day, which means we

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have to reckon with the “undetermined play” of these two sorts of formless matter: flame and cloud, clarity and obscurity.) (Let’s not forget that “The column does not have being or being-there, neither here nor elsewhere.”)

3 The anniversary was there already in the left-hand column, across from the Torah. There, it was a matter of the erection of the pyramid that “guards life—the dead—in order to give rise to the for-(it)self of adoration.” The for-(it)self is not given with adoration. Nothing is given with adoration. It gives, gives itself, gives itself up. It addresses the other without accepting an address in return. But the Hegelian logic brought to light here consists entirely in the sacrifice to the for-(it)self of the initial “panic and pyromaniac dissemination,” the fire that burns everything, the holocaust. Without this sacrifice, which sacrifices the complete sacrifice that came before it (if it ever even happened, if the originary ever happened at all), adoration itself would never happen, for it is adoration of the initial fire, its dazzling invisibility. The pyramid makes it possible for adoration to find itself and to keep to itself. And by keeping itself, adoration sacrifices itself, becomes an exile from its “instant of consummation” and “the irruptive event of the gift.” This is the anniversary: the gift is annulled by being returned. It is transformed into the “Gift for (it)self ” according to the decisive formula that is soon to come. The gift for (it)self is “the annulus, the ring or collar or necklace, the chain.” Anniversary, annulus, annulment of the irruptive gift, the link to Being or of Being, the return to self and reappropriation. But could we not add that propriation in general—or Ereignis, since that is another translation, and a necessary one—is Enteignis and Zueignis, even Übereignis? The archi-initial event—more ancient, more deeply buried than all archeology and “logoarchy”—is so archaic that it doesn’t even precede; it does not take place or it “is not.” (He does speak at one point of the “all-powerful precession of Being” from which the “es gibt” tears itself away, but it is important to understand that, like Being, the gift also exceeds precession or precedence.) “There is no gift.” It flashes, burns; it burns everything and burns itself up. Like the “archangel,” who came up earlier [in the text], the “virgin born of a virgin, who announces himself,” it sparks and shines. “To come, glisten, glow, shine, appear, be present, phuein: to band erect. . . . In the beginning, en arché, that [ça] will have banded erect.”

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Archangel, arch-messenger, not so much the one who announces the arche as the arche of the annunciation, news of the new: everything begins with a piece of news, an annunciation, a message, and it is the gift itself, even though it is nothing, nothing that endures but [rather] fire, appearance, phuein. (Note that each time there is a burning, each time man “is ablaze in the light” that he doesn’t receive because he belongs to it and is a property of it, and each time “the secret of the gluing, milky substance is pressed out of the object and shines, the substance, like gold,” each time es gibt, it gives, it gives itself to be adored, it appears and disappears in its appearing.) This fire shines; it burns, burns itself up and reflects itself—“reflected and cooled by the glass of the mirror,” that is, the glass of the “speculum,” of philosophical speculation. This latter is the effect of both the blaze consumed in itself and its reflection. As a result, [it is] a reflection [reflet] as exact image of the self-burning-itself and also a reflection on it in thought [reflexion]. What is annulled reflects in its annulus the simultaneity or “simul of erection and castration.” But simultaneity calls up—attracts—the homophony of simulation, just as specifying the reflection of light and reflection in thought [du reflet et de la réflexion] slyly dissimulates what is lost in a reflection of light. Perhaps the “at-the-sametime” of band and contra-band dissimulate a semblance, something like the “endless simulacrum” of writing or even a game of dress-up: “‘Would you like me to dress up as a woman?’ I murmured”—written at the top of the right-hand column, on his bandaged wound—or maybe as a simulation of jouissance: “Perhaps you were playing at coming.” Yet “at the climax, you were lit up with a quiet ecstasy, which enveloped your blessed body in a supernatural nimbus.” Playing at coming led to more coming. Across the page, according to the simul of the columns, we are reminded that “natural things do not exist for-themselves.” The spirit that emerges from nature appears to itself, liberates itself and accedes to the for-itself. The supernatural nimbus of a pimp, of you to whom “I was giving all my attention, [whom I] felt flow into me, warm and white, in little continuous jerks,” this saintly nimbus carries the reflection [reflexion] of this play, this feeling (“sense experience (Empfindung)” according to the left-hand column). Playing at something is simulation and simultaneously experience, re-presenting what is being played. Feeling is indeed sensing [Le se-sentir est justement sentir]; the game does indeed create the truth of what is annulled. The present of the present-being cannot avoid being overwhelmed—presented, perhaps, or re-presented—by the gift and the archi-archaic stakes [la mise en jeu archi-archaïque]. This is what is at stake: however much the irruption of

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the beyond-arche—the gift, the jouissance of giving, the jouissance of abandon—must lose itself in order to make itself (“The end of enjoyment is the end of enjoyment: the final point, period. The bone or snag of enjoyment, its chance and its loss, is that enjoyment must sacrifice itself in order to be there, in order to give itself its there, in order to touch, and tamper with, its Da-sein.”) however much its loss reflects in thought, reflects as light, re-presents and re-appropriates for itself that which was not even itself, neither self nor law nor faith, there is also something that comes to shine and burn, a moi cut down to gnon, a blow— a low blow or a violent hit that does not reappropriate reappropriation [but] reopens the night at the back of the eye and, from there, casts a glance not only “on the Hegelian system” as he says, echoing Feuerbach but into the depths [of] what it is that the system dissimulates, simulates and reveals all at the same time, that is, “a sort of signifier without a signified, the wasting of an adornment without the body proper, the total absence of property, propriety, truth, sense, a barely manifest unfolding of forms that straightaway destroy themselves.” This glance lands on the “fire artist without being” whose burning and crackling formula seems to indicate the impossible “other without self that means (to say) nothing, whose language is absolutely empty, void, like an event that never comes about itself.” In the same way, at the same time, simultaneously, the writing of this book here now “will never return, by some proper or circular course, to its own place.”

4 The annulus is not simply annulment. It returns to itself but also separates from itself. Broken into the two pieces of a symbol, it “does not reconstitute itself.” Whatever assembles separates. The symbol, the symbiosis it signals, is not visible from outside. “It’s a matter of a ‘mystical operation,’ ” which the text says over and over is not a matter of a dissimulated secret but of what is revealed in something properly evident (in the improper evidence of the proper). The text offers a precise analysis of the “Mystical Rose,” which comes up many times. We might venture that it’s the same for the annulment of the archi-an-archic gift, the anniversary and the return to self: evidence and the obscure light of self-abandonment.

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“Today, here, now, abandoned, me”—and opposite, on the left: “the result, in the enjoyment, is itself robbed of its being-there.” Let’s turn again to the page with the ring that does not close on itself, that is not reconstituted. In the right-hand column we read: “Writing remains modest because it is caught in a fleece. . . . Freud proposes a model natural to the feminine techniques of the text: the hairs that dissimulate the genitals.” Further on: “The gulf hides its borders there. In the weaving of this dissimulation, the erection is produced only en abyme.” Which means that it both ruins itself in the collapse that annuls the elevation of the column [and] puts itself en abyme, taking itself up into itself again, into the heart of its own escutcheon, infinitely, to the point of invisibility. “The phallic upsurging and a vaginal concavity (small glas grown, summed up in between, at the back of the glottis), intact virginity and bleeding castration.” A mystical operation, then: no symbol, no symbiosis, synthesis, sympathy, no copula or coupling without the trait of relation and union being hidden from view, inaccessible to concepts, escaping our grasp, and revealed, exposed to another view, not fixated on one form. “Small glas, grown, summarized in between”: this very book, the book with two columns, the law with open legs, and the god of smoke and fire cross themselves, becoming small, resonant, and summed up—that is to say, reprised, repeated, rewound, even rehashed, as we read above. The book is not even properly his. Whichever self or for-itself we might want to hook this possessive onto, the book cites or recites the following: “This book aims only to be a fragment of my inner life”—citing and therefore appropriating without coming back to some self or other apart from the self of “this [book]” written, reread, rewritten here and now. Across the way and to the left of the middle space, the other column speaks of the Sphinx being put to death and the solution to its riddle that is “Man, free, self-knowing spirit.” What self-knowledge responds—from one column to the other, across the fault line, fissure, white space—to this book, which never stops falling into ruin and falling into the abyss? Surely the knowledge of an essential waiting. Between the without-self and the for-self there is expectation [s’attendre], stretching oneself in anticipation [se tendre dans l’attente]. “I await myself and nothing else; I myself await myself in myself; and this is the most identifiable and identifying self-relation, that is, the ego’s memory or promise of itself.” But we know that waiting and expecting must always come back to waiting for the other and expecting the arrival or the departure of the

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other. If I wait for myself, it is the other. If it is the other, waiting is not a matter of reaching [l’attente n’est pas l’atteinte]—unless it is the waiting that “reaches the far off without harming it [atteignant le lointain ne lui porte pas atteinte].” The other remains at a distance. The closeness and remoteness is the source of his particular allure, the attraction that draws me out. This is what happens with “a book from which poisoned, feathered phrases swoop down on me. The hand that launches them sketches, as it nails [clouent] them somewhere, the dim outline of a Jean who recognizes himself, dares not move, awaiting the one that, aimed at his heart in earnest, will leave him panting.” This is what he is waiting for, the one who makes the book, who writes it by copying so so many sentences—“each sentence, [each word], each stump of writing”—the one who is not Jean but Jacques, which inevitably reminds us of Jean Jacques—“in all this, only love of myself is at work and amour-propre has nothing to do with it.” It is what he expects from a love that comes from the other, from Jean to Jacques and also from Wilhelm or, indeed, from Jesus, whose favorite of all the disciples was Jean (as Wilhelm reminds us). He waits to be loved, to love himself as loved by the other, without amour-propre, receiving its arrows, he waits, he reaches out, stretched out in the desire to hear the strikes plunging into his panting flesh, the flesh of a reader, lover, beloved, of one who bandages his own wounds. He writes: “If I write two texts at once, you will not be able to castrate me. If I delinearize, I erect. But at the same time I divide my act and my desire. I—mark(s) the division, and always escaping you, I simulate unceasingly and take my pleasure nowhere. I castrate myself—I remain(s) myself thus—and I ‘play at coming.’ Finally almost.” What is this “almost”? It is this: “Almost: the ideal place for transvestism is, of course, presqu’’île, almost an island, peninsula, Péninsule. He becomes almost a woman on a tongue [langue] of lone land penetrating into the Atlantic Ocean.”

5 He splits apart, simulating himself, cross-dressing, trans-sexing thanks to a tongue, a language that penetrates the Ocean. On the opposite side, in the other column or the other peninsula (penis solo?) it’s a question of “the inner process of the plant’s relation to itself . . . uprooted from itself, toward the outside, by the light,” except that, in the case of the flower, it emerges in a light that comes from the interior of the plant itself. And

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“this passage is analogous to the one that relieves the outer resonance of noise in(to) voice.” Voiced sound, singing, speech, sonorous language in the Ocean, that is, in the archi-originary element, where the irruption, the event takes place, sinks, is annulled and appropriated, as when “the galley slave exhausts himself over his oar. Rhythmically, he attacks the surface of the glistening sea; he makes a mark there, finds support, but the movement is endless, the element is equal to itself, re-forms, impassible, engulfs the wake or churns it to foam.” The galley slave is the author. In case you did not notice yourself, it will be explained later. He is “driven to write by orders received at the back, threatened with the whip if he stops,” while, on the opposite side, to the left, there is a reading that raises up written words in their sensed truth, just as the mystical jouissance of bread and wine annuls bread and wine as objects and raises them up in Christ. Reading takes joy in the galley of writing. The author, he reads himself too; “he shows you this or that with a finger, and yet fucks you, his eyes elsewhere. He thus comes [jouit] completely.” Completely? Completely ruined, yes. He enjoys his pain as the pain of one who lies panting under the impact of sentences pointed like arrows. And we come back to the hand, the hand that bursts out of the book, that draws the bow and lets the arrows fly. This is “the other hand,” the hand that calls, that issues an invitation to play, to join the work of two hands. Like the hands of this woman, “this whore,” who takes care of the feet of Jesus, “adoring it, pressing it gently with her hands, soothing it with a holy pomade, wrapping it with strips of cloth (bandalettes) the moment it begins to stiffen.” Across from these strips of cloth, on the right, [we find] a necklace, a Golden Fleece (which later becomes a pubic fleece) around the neck of “Harcamone the Christ.” Sexual attributes meld, cross-dress, get swapped around, transformed, transubstantiated. In Christ’s Last Supper, the “mystical action” plays out: “This is my body” proceeds to a “copulation without a proper object” and “more precisely, a penetration.” At the place where the analysis of transubstantiation begins in the left-hand column, we read on the right: “The Golden Fleece surrounds the neck, the cunt, the verge, the apparition or the appearance of a hole in erection, of a hole and an erection at once, of an erection in the hole or a hole in erection: the fleece surrounds a volcano.” The volcano and the “erect hole,” which have already appeared in the text, designate or, rather, produce, exhibit, inscribe and point to “such incalculable enjoyment,” which is how the communion of the body and blood of Christ is described. The hole is no more a secret chasm than

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the bandaged verge is a glorious plenitude: the one passes into the other, passes to the other. They are not determinable, just like the differance that “is never offered in the present” but also does not “dissimulate itself as something, as a mysterious being, in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with determinable borders (for example, in a topology of castration).” This is how it “exceeds . . . the order of truth.” “In truth [which we take to mean “that which exceeds itself ”] a sexual difference is still necessary,” according to the left-hand column, at the point where the right-hand column brings up the “de-generated gl,” namely the symbol, the phlegmy rumbling, the speculative glass that “reflects and refreshes” the all-burning above all. A sexual difference is needed, still, and it must be different from sexual difference as opposition, distinction and attribution. Different from a difference between the sexes. What is needed is a differant difference, one that plays back and forth between the columns, from side to side, and with no sides or edges. What is needed is an annulus that does not turn back to itself, a difference or, even better, a plural, a dissemination of “unheard of, incalculable sexual differences.”

6 Sex. Can we can talk about it in the singular like this? Indeed, can we even name in some sense that is not just anatomical? In any case, here sex does not serve in any way as an example or an analogy for the exorbitant problematic of the “for-itself of adoration,” that is, as an analogy for how momentum, abandon, being thrown into an absolute outside could be related to self in order to in some way appear in the heart of disappearance, annulling the annulment of everything while nevertheless losing itself all over again in the annulus, the anniversary, and their symbolic rupture. “Sex” gives form to this particular obligation: “the need for the singular to look for the “self-feeling” in the other.” It is the exact reverse of adoration, which runs aground in the “jolt,” the “leap,” or the “force” that it adores, while sex seeks itself outside, goes after the jolt, leap and force. As we read above: “the natural tendency of sperm is opposed to the law of logos.” But this feeling of self doesn’t appropriate or re-appropriate a pre-given identity. The self of adoration—of jouissance—seeks itself in the other and therefore does not find itself there. It will not be recovered there, speculative Aughebung or not. Or, rather, speculative reflection will not be recovered here any more than (in the opposite column) the stroke of the “je

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m’éc”, exchange, disgust, flow, write, listen [“je m’éc”, échange, écoeure, écoule, écris, écoute] can come to reflect itself “in Rembrandt’s looking glass.” This stroke is just one more in the endless rain of blow upon blow that pounds, punctuates, cuts and recuts his writing and his cries, strokes of the donc [therefore], the gong, the tail, the glottis or the gl. He does all of it—exchanges, flows, etc.—blow by blow and all at once, he changes sex, disgusts with phlegm, flows with sperm or drool, writes and cries out and listens, not talking but erupting into bloom. It is a book about flowers, the flower that “equals castration, phallus, and so on” and that, in signifying the opposite while deposing them, “recoups” or traverses, cuts, crosses and uncrosses “virginity in general, the vagina, the clitoris, ‘feminine sexuality,’ matrilinear genealogy, the mother’s seing, the integral seing, that is, the Immaculate Conception.” Elsewhere, the “virginal flower” will be described as “varginal: between verge and vagina of the virgin, little stone or clitoral bell.” Flowers occupy a considerable place in Glas. Hegel mentions the cult of flowers, and, on the other side [of the page], “the general tendency to unisexuality among floral systems” is a way of mixing, adapting and dispersing sexual products. This is why the flower or flowers are associated with all the sex parts, the sex of the virgin and that of the “handsome soldiers whose dropped trousers show “those heavy flowers whose odor strikes me like thunder.” This is how “the religion of flowers follows the religion of the sun.” In a certain way crowns and doubles the pyramid, the for-itself of adoration and the opening of the anniversary annulus. It is the color of a flower—broom [genêt]—the color of “yellow corn mush” that occasions a “touch”; he no longer knows “where to put my adoration.” This touch, which he places (“here”), is erratic and arbitrary but also nonetheless the touch that tries most eagerly to touch: “I will have done nothing if I have not succeeded in affecting you with genet, in coloring, smearing, gluing you, making you sensitive . . . out of the most proper affect of this text.” He adds: “But is there any? And of what text? Of his? Of mine?” And it is just after this that he “places this touch here,” this touch of color, the color of a yellow flower, which he says he doesn’t know where to place. In fact, another yellow—reseda—is the color of the trousers from which “those heavy flowers” were pulled. “Yellow and waxy” is also the description of the stain [tache]—and the touch—of the balm “of an unctuous nature” with which Mary Magdalen “made the body of Christ glisten [reluire].” (Remember that in French argot, “faire reluire” means to make someone come.) Pollen in its “disseminance” is also described as yellow. Yellow is “like gold or like betrayal,” like the sun or like transvestism.

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Elsewhere he recalls Celan, who talks about “my yellow stain, my blind stain, my Jewish stain” and notes: “Macula, the name of the stain (the yellow stain at the back of the eye) still has this connotation of a mark that soils the immaculate, stains or inculpates like an original sin of vision.” The affect that most thoroughly belongs to the text, the affect he wants, that he owes it to us to soak us with, to smear and stick all over us, is the balm, cum, milk, the divine sap of unity or the sibylline whiteness of the woman, “the clitoral glue, the cloaca of the abortion, the gasp of sperm.” After that we would have to follow up on all the tremors and jerks, secretions, suctions, and glottal stops, and the “streaming, gleaming, gliding emergence” that John enjoys as he takes the baptized body out of the water—“wanting to lose himself in the plenitude of the aqueous universe.” Across the way, in the right-hand column, the interminable dictionary entry on the word classum flows on, with all its references to glas, the sounds of bells or trumpets. It flows and blows, gets bogged down and drowns in this broth of plenitude where the unity of a new life is coupled with all manner of dispersion and disarray. The most proper affect is the one that affects the proper in general: the “contradiction that inhabits the proper itself,” its original sin, its sin as origin; it wants to be relieved of itself in order to be properly what it is, a proper in relation to a non-proper or with another proper (which, in its turn…). Everything turns—though there is no turn and no everything—on what he has called, elsewhere, “this collusion without identity of the near and the far,” that makes the proper the most proper. Sex is the exhibition, annulment, the annulus of this, which is to say, it is both its neutralization and division, its overflowing and excrescence, “virginity,” and, in the end, that which “in sexual difference is carried beyond the one and the two, beyond dual or oppositional difference,” that is, beyond the proper and the improper. And also, therefore, the clean [propre] and the dirty. Beyond: that is, ever deeper into the inextricable entwinement of two.

7 This affect of the proper—the impropriety of the name of the flower or, across the way, of the family collapsing on itself, “the logic of antherection: prosperity/misery, shame/glory, wild/tame, improper/proper” (in relation to lice), and so on—is certainly not so different from the “organizing affect” of writing, form its “compulsional matrix” characterized as “the coagulation of sense, form, rhythm.” Opposite [the place in the lefthand column where] the marriage contract, and the need to overcome

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its formalism and institute modesty, which holds instinct back only to allow it to burst out all the better, this coagulation is offered as twisting on itself, a spasm of the one who writes and of what is written, who feels the rhythmic tremors of a sense that spurts out with the beat of words and sentences. I have already cited Freud: “The symbolic sexual sense of the fountain pen reverberates through the act of writing as it discharges,” noting, of course, the singular regime of this symbolic sense, which is discharged here quite literally. Derrida continues to cite Freud, adding this remark: “at the origin of the symbolic sexual significance of the fountain pen there is probably that of the weapon [l’arme] and the hand”—that is to say, an aggressive hand, sadistic or exhibitionist. Perhaps it is the hand that jerks off the one who is jealous of himself, who misses himself and cannot even reappropriate his jealousy as his own, who finally “swallows himself, touches himself, delivers himself, gives birth to himself . . . bands himself erect to death, finally masturbates himself or fucks himself by flowing out of himself: je m’ec, je m’enc.” “Je m’ec” appeared already on the first page in the form of “moignon d’écriture [stump of writing].” First it was extended to “Je m’écris [I write myself]” and completed as “je m’échange, écoeure, écoute, écoule [change, disgust, listen, flow]” or, elsewhere, “Je m’écarte [distance]” or “je m’écrase [crush].”  But there is no extension of “je m’enc,” a stump waved in our faces, readers so ill at ease, despite the fact that we’ve been warned. Because it’s all quite vulgar, isn’t it? It’s very vulgar, more vulgar than obscene (obscenity would be modest, he says). The vulgarity of “making love” and “with two hands” was part of Heidegger’s protestataire prosopopoeia. This has been studied at some length elsewhere, in the context of another vulgarity rejected by him, that is, “the vulgar concept of time.” Contra Heidegger, “Ousia and Gramme¯ ” teaches that it is impossible to distinguish two concepts of time without using the metaphysical language of “authentic and inauthentic, originary and fallen.” For here the glas tolls, indefinitely, only for certain remains, by and for remains that are not [permanent, substantial,] subsistant—certainly not [remains as] “a scrap that falls (entombed) or stays.” Instead, “the remain(s) here suspends itself.” The impossibility of separating the vulgar from the noble or elevated, the fall from elevation, the slit from the projection (the column from its wound, the penis from the vagina) contrives to have this whole text be about the impossibility of distinguishing authenticity and inauthenticity (or trash), the proper and the improper and the dirty. At the heart of the matter, “in the heart of hearts” that is at issue here, [passed] from one

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column to the other along with the Hegelian dialectic of the hermaphrodism that is inherent in the process of sexual differentiation, in this heart of hearts, “before a red rose of monstrous size and beauty,” there is no opposition or distinction (in all senses of the word). This is where “setting es gibt free from the all-powerful precession of Being” plays out, a freeing that was set in motion by the same Heidegger (though, we might guess, not single-handedly). If it is never a matter of something being either vulgar or distinguished but always first of all the “neither-nor of the ghouls (between man and woman, between man and non-man, language and non-language, etc.” (this is on page 157 [in the English], opposite the place where Hegel is caught up in the intertwined arrangements for a wedding reception and a university position), then the “for-itself of adoration” comes about as soon as a self exposes, opens, offers itself, a corn mush spewed over the pyramid, and the explosive eruption of the gift comes to haunt and sound [de hanter et de chanter] across all possible reappropriations. This is also why this book—double and more than double—plays out several scenes at once: grand scenes of family, genetics, and the Gospels, tragic scenes and scenes that are obscene or invaded by lice, crime scenes, scenes of burglary, and then interior scenes, where all the others meet and are exchanged: “I am a prisoner who plays (who plays for himself) scenes of inner life, you will require nothing other than a game.” (This appears on page 126 [in the English] as an interpolation, an incision, a notch cut in the side of the column.) The interior is the for-itself but sometimes the glimpse of something else: inside a pair of trousers, the interior irony of community (woman), the inner hammer of a bell, and many others too. The scenes the prisoner plays out, that he cannot but play—and plays against all backdrops (the text makes sure that the game proliferates at every turn, all the way to the game of God “playing with himself as the infinite becoming finite”)—all these scenes are played out because the interior is a game through and through; it plays itself out as it departs from itself, opening its own annulus, the anniversary annulus of the proper making a scene of itself. It is very much a game when he says “I,” at the point where I play at saying “I.” Elsewhere, in a film—another form of play—he said that he wanted philosophers to talk about their sex lives. It was a game, more or less; he was playing at playing, but he does it here [too]. He does not talk about his own sex life but Hegel’s—Hegel, whom he lauds as “a philosopher seated before a column”—and Kant’s, which for Hegel “remains fetishism,” and some others like Socrates, who invites the tongue to glide over “unctuousness, glutinousness, viscosity, stickiness” until “the liquid

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antagonism floods [écoule] the coming [la jouissance],” and then Rousseau, who “loves balls” but whose quill we all recognize. Even the flower is stripped bare here: “downy [à poil], veiled, fuzzy, eriopetal flowers (all this is heavily burdened, isn’t it? Too rich and in bad taste, the gendarme or the upper bourgeois would say”—vulgar, then, “a sort of popular novel,” he says in the opposite column, “the secular complicity of philosophy and religion.” But is it a matter of life when it is a matter of sex? All these interior lives shaken, jerking, flowing and sticking together— set outside, thrown, unable to return, ejected, ejaculated without difference and amalgamated, coagulated, stuck in the glue of differance. (“The detached remain(s) stuck there, stuck by the glue of différance, by the a [Le detaché reste collé par là, par la glu de la différance, par l’a].”) Differance no longer differentiates, it mixes and brews in spasms, in an embrace, in “everything that can happen to the porridge, to the mush of gluttonous nurslings.” Sex adds both natural vulgarity and adoration to this mix in a confused sort of way. They smear and sully one another. For “natural desire, as such, is destined to lose itself, to be incapable of reflecting itself in its naturalness,” and adoration gets stuck in its yellow stain. Sex never returns to the same. It does not return to itself. It is not for itself; it is not. It sticks. Separating them with two hands, it glues the columns without Being and the distended annulus of its anniversary.

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 / Derridapolitics

1 Let’s join together the two words—the name and the word—that made up the title of this colloquium. I didn’t do this for the colloquium itself since I was giving a talk but, now that it comes to writing, a title becomes necessary. But it’s not a portmanteau. It’s just a collage that nods to his neologistical inventions, though it is also a way to avoid attaching politics to his name as if it were a way of referring to an “aspect.” When it comes to politics, what did Derrida do and say about it? The grammar of attribution always seems to presume a “subject” with multiple facets. A thinker has facets only if we fail to pay enough attention to the thinking that makes him, that passes through every part of him. Certainly, there is a politics of thinking associated with every thinker, but we don’t tread carefully enough. We’re too busy tracking the positions he takes, the interventions and demonstrations, the ballots he casts, that is, we become preoccupied with all the external signs of “politics,” and these are not necessarily a good or complete indication of his thinking. This happens for a specific reason, which Derrida emphasizes whenever he speaks of politics as a place or regime of negotiation. I’ll come back to this. For such a long time—perhaps always—Derrida was regarded with suspicion by “radicals” of all sorts and of all continents, but this was no doubt on account of his restraint when it came to taking up positions and making what we like to call “radical” declarations. [The

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radicals] would have liked him to man the barricades and hand out leaflets. They liked to contrast him with Foucault, whose actions were seen as a new sort of practical philosophy, engaged in action and not just making declarations, like Sartre. Without going into the well-known limits of Sartre’s positions (which don’t detract in any way from the stature or the thought of the person himself) it would help to examine more carefully how Foucault’s actions went hand in glove with a way of thinking that was nonrevolutionary because it remained very conscious of the deep mutations of politics and was concerned above all with denouncing the humanist illusions of progressivism of all sorts. Derrida, for his part, having failed to pay his dues in terms of engagement and radicality, was regarded with such suspicion—indeed, to the point of even being attacked by the “activists,” that is, those for whom action only happens on the street—that he decided to (dare I say) demonstrate his position on various occasions, for example, on the subject of Nelson Mandela. But that is not where his political thinking was to be found. Nor, contrary to certain beliefs, was it to be found in his work on hospitality or forgiveness. These works concerned only that which, under these headings or in these concepts, remains and should remain inaccessible to politics. At most, we can say that his texts on the death penalty have a more direct relation to politics, since they are devoted above all to showing the extreme difficulty of finding a philosophical foundation for that “penalty.” As for the seminar on “the beast and the sovereign,” the point of that was certainly not to come up with constitutional legal measures relating to sovereignty and subsidiarity.

2 If this is the case, it is because politics—J.D. never used the distinction between “the political” and “politics”—constituted for him the specific register of negotiation. There is so much that we could refer to. I will content myself with going back to The Politics of Friendship, to a passage near the end of chapter 8. There, he distinguishes very neatly and very forcefully between what he calls the “madness” of essential or primary undecidability and the negotiation “that this madness is not,” but into which it must enter in order for there to be politics. This is the situation that inevitably precedes not only politics but also ethics, law and every consideration and action that has to do with relation. Relation is possible only where it has not already been decided. The possibility of failure always “haunts” its very possibility. Without it,

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there would be no relation, only a mechanistic series or sequence. Politics decides. It decides essentially. There is politics only as the effect of a decision. We could turn to other texts, particularly the dialogue “Politics and Friendship.” The constant given of politics (even if, as he says, we don’t have a clear concept of what the word means) is that it is the register of negotiation and compromise, which is the condition for the possibility of agreement, entente and decision. As he says, “bonne entente” is never given; it could never be a given. But something else must be added, something no less important: negotiation is not a matter of avoiding or accommodating what is unavoidable and cannot be accommodated. It is a matter of bringing it into negotiation as such. Negotiation must happen in the name of the unconditional that is nonnegotiable (justice, hospitality, friendship). This is how we can make possible relations that are relatively stable but also—and far more importantly!—how we can ensure that the unconditional does not remain stuck and trapped in its purity. The clearest example [of this] is Derrida’s examination of the process of “reconciliation” engaged in by Desmond Tutu in South Africa. Derrida emphasizes that the way the procedures created for the occasion were organized implied certain calculations (among all the stakeholders) that, by definition, were incapable of calculating the pardon of the impardonable, which is the very sense of pardon. “Politics or law can never be founded on pardon.” The unconditional and the conditional are absolutely heterogenous—and also indissociable, as he writes in the same text. Yet, for all that, the unnegotiable is not an unattainable ideal. It is the source of all relations, those that require negotiation and those that do not (even if all relations can oscillate between these two positions). The unnegotiable must be negotiated, and so there must be intransigence at the heart of the transaction. That is to say, we must negotiate with negotiation itself! (Psyché ) And this means that there can be a determinate unnegotiable in a negotiation. This is basically J.D.’s axiom on the subject of politics. Unpacking all that it has to offer and all its difficulties could be the single focus of this lecture. But I want to follow up on some other leads.

3 First of all, we must be sure to be on guard against a particular confused use—and abuse—of the word “politics” [ politique]. He noted often, particularly in The Politics of Friendship, that this word is far from clear.

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And the form he feels least confident about is democracy: “the idea of democracy having no unconditional virtue, no speech can elude the space of theological-political authority? Absolute theologization as absolute politicization?” Two brief comments on this affirmation. First, democracy has no unconditional virtue because it cannot present the people’s own sovereignty, that is, the sovereignty proper to them, since the people itself is already a collection of undecidable relations. (Both the relations and the collection of relations are undecidable.) This is how it must be if politics is to escape the shadow of theology; this would be a foundational decision. Democracy consists in remaining in the place of undecidability of the relation of a group or a “society.” It is not preceded by a divine or metaphysical decision. It does not rest on the autonomy of supposed subjects, whether individual or collective. This autonomy is itself undecidable or impossible to assign. Here, I’d like to quote some lines that come not from Derrida but from our friend and colleague in Santiago, Juan Manuel Garrido. He writes: The alleged autonomy of the subject . . . provides the principles and rules for practical reasoning that allow him or her to produce maxims in accordance with universal laws. The intimacy of the self consists, on the contrary, in being fully exposed to unforeseen situations: the self is bound, obliged, compelled by a situation whose radical singularity makes it absolutely alien to any possible autonomy. In another text he writes the following, which seems to me to be perfectly consonant with Derrida: Politics encounters [limits] not only as a human power vis-à-vis super-human powers (the divine, for instance), but as human power vis-à-vis the unpredictable configurations of community itself—of the human itself, in a way. Community is the intractable demand of meaning that transcends, exceeds, disrupts in politics, or makes politics—that is, the shaping of the common—essentially incomplete. Returning to J.D., I would add that democracy assumes an agreement, pact, contract, entente—that is, a “yes.” In “Eating Well” he writes: This “yes, yes,” the answers before even being able to formulate the question, that is responsible without autonomy, before and in view of all possible autonomy of the who-subject, etc. The relation to self in this situation, can only be differance, that is to say, alterity or trace.

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4 Alterity is therefore constitutive of politics because it is the outside of politics. It is not “foundational,” but “constitutive” and, as a result, already escapes the authority of an overarching or foundational unity, even if this unity is presented as the unity of a people. Derrida writes this in The Politics of Friendship regarding the One: The One divides and opposes itself, opposes itself by posing itself, represses and violates the difference it carries within itself, wages war, wages war on itself [se fait la guerre], itself becoming war, frightens itself, itself becoming fear [se fait peur], and does violence to itself, itself becoming violence [se fait violence], transforms itself into frightened violence in guarding itself from the other, for it guards itself from, and in, the other [il se garde de l’autre], always, Him, the One, the One “different from itself.” A careful commentary on these lines would show how war—the sovereign right par excellence—is given with the One, and how the thought of democracy—as its undecidable precondition—must therefore always be the thought of plurality. But plurality is always in danger of lapsing into the addition of one plus one rather than opening up to relation. And war—whether civil war or not—is also already there. War as a violent mode of negotiation, a contra-negotiation. In one sense, this is nothing new. But something is brought to light quite clearly here, that is, the thought that violence is nonetheless always possible in the project of peace (civil or otherwise) that politics implies. Not inevitable, of course, but possible. But in order to avoid it, we have to negotiate, and not settle for a reaffirmation of the principles of “humanity.” [Derrida writes in “For the First Time in the History of Humanity” in The Politics of Friendship:] 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 gods and men? But maybe negotiation is not enough. Or perhaps it’s necessary to renegotiate negotiation in another way. That is to say: politics. The text goes on: And what politics could still be founded on this friendship which exceeds the measure of man, without becoming a theologeme? Would it

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still be politics? What happens politically when the “Who?” of friendship then distances itself from all these determinations? Derrida cannot stop at circumscribing “a” politics or even “politics.” His political lesson necessarily indicates a surpassing of politics in order to be able—perhaps—to reinscribe the name and the concept in another context. I think that Derrida, along with Foucault, was one of the very first to see the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of this sort of surpassing or mutation. The question is therefore: either an uncertain and menacing theologeme (as theologemes always are) or a “beyond” that opens here and now, between us, and that can come to terms with a politics that really has left behind all uncertain and menacing (or deceptive) references to political theology? For up until now our politics has been a matter of either simple managerial immanence or theology cloaked in some sort of humanism, socialism or liberalism, all of which have become more and more uncertain, deceptive, and ruinous.

5 Or we could try something else, something that Derrida suggests even if he doesn’t quite articulate it. We could designate politics as the register of bond [lien] or bonds (social bond, contract, convention) and think of relation [rapport] as unbound, beyond bonds. In the same text, Derrida writes: Death is the supreme ordeal of this unbinding [délaison] without which no friendship has ever seen the light of day. The book [Blanchot’s Friendship] has as its epigraph these words of Georges Bataille: “friends to the point of this state of profound friendship in which a forsaken man, forsaken by all his friends, meets in life he who will accompany him beyond life, himself lifeless, capable of free friendship, detached from all bonds.” Of course, “fraternity,” like “community,” is for J.D. a particularly dubious way to talk about bond; he makes a point of this in relation to Blanchot and Nancy. He’s right from various points of view, but I object nevertheless (in my own name and not on behalf of Blanchot) that the state of “brothers” (and “sisters”) is precisely the state of being unbound. Brothers and sisters are together by convention (an uncertain convention: pater semper incertus) that binds them in a weak way. They must always renegotiate their familiarity—or not. Indeed, whatever form it takes, the “family” is already

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political. This is why marriage can be rejected by those—homosexual or heterosexual—who do not want to enter into its bonds. There is something queer in Derrida’s beyond-politics [l’outre-politique], if queer means some sort of relation that is not a bond. As we’ve already seen, this is the undecidable relation, always yet to be decided, in relation to which politics demands stability (“State”) and therefore negotiation. If there were a politics of this lovence, it would no longer imply the motifs of community, appurtenance or sharing, whatever the sign assigned to them. Affirmed, negated or neutralized, these “communitarian” or “communal” values always risk bringing a brother back. He can also write that democracy is not just a political concept, or not even a concept at all: Without any further study of linguistic or political translation, we assume that there exists in Greek a proper, stable, and univocal meaning of the democratic itself. But we are beginning to suspect that this is not the case. For it is perhaps a question here of an essence without essence that, under the same name, and through a certain concept, would have no aim. It would thus be a matter of a concept without concept. This is why, in the years when Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and I were running a “Center for Research on the Political” at the École Normale, where J.D. had invited us to open a research center on whatever topic we chose, he himself came to speak only one time. It was when he came back after being imprisoned in Czechoslovakia, and what he had to say situated him entirely within a political framework. But he didn’t enter into the conceptual work we were doing, or engage with the archi-politics we were trying to expose. Later, I told myself that already back then he was silently developing a thought that would not lend itself to distinguishing “the political” from “politics” as an essence from an accident. Instead [he was thinking in ways] that were better suited to distinguishing the register of the unconditional from that of conditions, both needing to be negotiated, each needing to be negotiated by the other.

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 / Homage to Jacques Derrida: An Interview with Laure Adler

Laure Adler: How did you first meet Jacques Derrida? What were the circumstances?  Jean-Luc Nancy: I met him in person, but without knowing it. I knew him by name but didn’t know who he was or what he had published. At the time he was Ricoeur’s assistant, like Levinas, and he was in a sort of seminar that Ricoeur had with some master’s students, doctoral students, and his two assistants—Derrida and Levinas. I always remember having seen this trio—Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida. I don’t even remember if he spoke then, or if Levinas did. Maybe. I don’t know. I had never had a class with him at the Sorbonne for various reasons, but very soon after that I read his first texts and reading them was a certain sort of meeting; not meeting the man, but meeting a character, a temperament and a presence that was very strong and very contemporary. That is what has always remained with me. I said to myself for the first time: “Aha! Here is thought that is happening today, that thinks today, that is truly my contemporary. For me this sense was much more obvious there than in other contemporary texts that were available at the time. And then I met him because I wrote to him and sent him a little text—a very clumsy text, no doubt—that I had written in Strasbourg for a seminar with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. That was in 1969. He replied, and I was astonished when he said that he had already read some of the poor little articles I had written for Esprit, things that weren’t about him at all: an article on Nietzsche and Deleuze, one on Althusser. He had read those. We met after that.

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Adler: Which was the first text for you? Which one struck you as something new in the field of philosophy the first time you read it? Nancy: I can’t say which was the first text. Well, for me it was Voice and Phenomenon but I can’t say for sure that that was the first one I read. It doesn’t matter. In any case, for me, Voice and Phenomenon is Derrida’s founding, generative text. It’s not that he can be reduced to it, but that is where Derrida separates the subject from itself, shows that presence-toself is at the same time a distance-from-self, a difference-from-self, and that maybe this distance or difference is infinite. There’s a passage at the center of Voice and Phenomenon where he says that what happens in an instant, an Augenblick—in the blink of an eye, in Husserl—is the instant of the silent voice in which the subject addresses itself to itself. Derrida writes: “But this Augenblick, this blink, has a duration!” What happens in that time? A sort of minuscule disturbance enters into the idea of presence to self, an open spacing in what we are accustomed to thinking of as immediate, being to self, being in oneself, [what we think of] as a sort of evidence of presence that is substantial, instantaneous, and not spaced out, that is, something other than the truth of the ego as Descartes understood it. The Cartesian ego is enunciated. It takes time, time to be spoken, to be thought. Descartes says so himself. Nevertheless, from Descartes to Husserl, we see a sort of reinforcement of a desire for the immediacy of a closed, immobile, in some sense mute presence, [a desire] for a voice that is—and ought to be—silent. Whereas what Derrida makes us understand is that this voice speaks; it is silent but it speaks. If there is speech there is spacing, distance, a passage, and you could say that all of Derrida’s work flows from this tremor running through presence to self. Adler: How can you explain his philosophical theory: deconstruction. First of all, is it even a philosophical theory? Nancy: Not exactly. I think that if he were here he’d say: “But I’ve just told you, it’s not a theory! I’m not teaching you a method!” and so on. So, it’s not a theory. You know, he wound up saying that the word deconstruction was something we must be able to let go of because it was absolutely essential to avoid letting it become fixed and hardened and even turning into a concept. It’s possible to dismantle the concept of deconstruction up to a certain point; we can say that whatever else it might be, it is not in any sense a matter of destruction—which, by the way, is already there in Heidegger. It’s not destruction. It’s the dismantling of a structure, and when a structure is dismantled—and this is something that is very much present in everything that’s known as structuralism—the dismantling always reveals an empty space, thanks to which the whole structure functions. But

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it’s a matter of a structure that’s jammed or inhibited and no longer works, so that in deconstruction there is a destructuring that doesn’t demolish anything, that makes clear how it functions. How what functions? You could say how presence functions, the present being. Here we are, you and I. But if we are simply there like things set next to one another, are we? No. We are there, but what is this “there”? Being present there is to be present to one another, to present ourselves to one another, what Derrida called “to arrive” or “to happen.” That happens, we arrive, I arrived at the studio just now, and in a certain way even if we had met before, neither of us could know how and even who the other would be in the moment of this meeting. Adler: Is that to say that we are many, and we are weighed down by lots of things here in the present, things we have to try to shrug off? Nancy: And, above all, we are never simply present in the sense of being put there, except in certain moments. You could say, by the way, that this is also the truth about time: it always comes, [it’s a matter of] arrival, the one who arrives, as Derrida put it, the event, the fact that [something] comes, that it happens; this is the characteristic feature of time. Time is not simply succession, it’s a matter of coming and going, and this thinking of time as coming and going is something Heidegger discovered. You can read this in Derrida, through Derrida, in that other notion of his: differance with an a. He introduced time into difference. Differance with an a does not mean that something will come later, as many confused minds have claimed, leading to the impression that Derrida was leading us on: “Coming soon! Watch this space!” But it is absolutely not for later! It means that in the present, in the now, there is always [something] to come. We can’t say: “look, there you are, there’s Laure Adler, there’s JeanLuc Nancy, done.” We have to wonder: what do these names mean? What do these identities mean? What does the relation between the two mean? What does the fact that we are talking to one another mean? And about whom? About Jacques Derrida, but we are here because the name Jacques Derrida itself doesn’t encompass a fixed identity, an identity whose contours we could identify. Adler: Who is Jacques Derrida today, ten years after his death? People talk about the multitude of registers he used, they talk about this fruitful thinking that he constantly improvised as he spoke, without ever interrupting the idea. It was very impressive to hear him speak. He didn’t need to be hunched over a blank page in order to articulate philosophical ideas. Not at all. It was like a wellspring, always producing new things. Nancy: Though he spent a lot of time bent over blank pages!

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Adler: Though he spent his life writing. But where did that ferment of thinking come from? Can it be circumscribed, or does it take off in so many different directions that it can’t be assigned a particular place, neither in the history of philosophy nor in a specific conceptual field? Nancy: It’s both. It can in fact be assigned a place in one sense, because one could easily trace his system of production from Husserl to Heidegger, maybe passing through Merleau-Ponty. But, as with every arrival, there is something absolutely new, something that emerges at a given moment. Why did it crystallize in a particular moment around one person, around this guy, this French Algerian, why this whole story? Obviously, there’s no way to respond to that, but it’s true that it crystallizes in something that is embedded in a history and that is also disseminated—that’s one of his words—in a number of ways. Today, I think there is some element of Derrida that circulates in literary studies, in the practice of literature, in artistic practice and then in philosophy in many different ways. There are people who work on Derrida in a very conceptual way, locating him very close to phenomenology. There are others who work in a quite different way, inspired by his formal research, the sort of work he does in books like Glas or The Post Card. Those were inventions and didn’t refer, strictly speaking, to the practice of philosophy. Adler: Would you consider Glas a sort of poetry? Nancy: Yes and no. As you know, Glas has two columns: one on Hegel, one on Genet. In a certain way, of course, there is poetry in this text but, at the same time, it’s a text in which Derrida himself says he will not let himself get trapped. He says that he is in neither column, that when you think he’s in one, he’s in the other. Glas is a crazy piece of work. You could say it’s literally crazy, a crazy attempt to take philosophy to its own limits—philosophy according to Hegel himself. This is why you have Hegel on one side, Genet—who is in no way a philosopher—on the other. It’s because Derrida tries to bring them together [les faire toucher], to make them crash into one another but also to have them interpenetrate in a certain way. In other words, Derrida wonders: What is driving Hegel, what happens to Hegel and by means of Hegel that is altogether different from the Hegelian system as we know it, as we analyze it? When Derrida was beginning to work, Hegel had already been taken apart and dissected in every possible way. But there [in Glas] he went looking for something else, for a force, a thrust, a drive. I think there is something in that book that he gets from Nietzsche. That is to say, a philosophy is also a character, a thrust. It’s a certain desire, a certain thrust, even a certain violence that finds expression in a given moment, in a particular way, in language, in a language, in more than one language, a violence to the concept and to

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thought. Why? Why do this? He did it as a way of showing that while the great philosophical systems and the great theoretical constructions were presenting images of the world, well, the world had noticed that it was all falling apart. Adler: That it was falling apart, and Derrida is the thinker of that collapse, the advent of that collapse? Nancy: Yes, but a collapse that we shouldn’t necessarily think of as a destruction. It’s not a matter of a pile of ruins, but the movement of the history of Western thought, that is to say, the movement of a thought that became global [planétaire], that became the technical, juridical, political, even ethical logic of the whole world; even where it met the fiercest resistance, this thought became sort of engorged on itself. It had to get out of itself, to look at itself and say: What’s going on here? Is this all coming to an end? No, indeed, I think Derrida is the witness to something that ended up aiming for an end where it would reach completion, a history that would end in a total humanity, a humanity living under moral laws, as Kant would have it. It is what Lyotard called the grand teleological narrative, which had already begun to come undone or to sense its own limits. And Derrida did not try to substitute another [narrative] for that one, but he saw emerging from it the “it happens,” before whatever it is that happens, “it happens” as he said in Glas with reference to Heidegger. He said: Heidegger is the one who put the “es gibt,” that is, the “there is” [le “ il y a” ] in German—except in German it also means “it gives,” so something is given—a “there is” that is above all, above being itself, not a matter of being and . . . No, it’s a “there is,” “it happens,” “it comes about,” and from there perhaps there can be being. And I think this is always the driving force behind Derrida’s thinking. Adler: I think there’s also a carnal side to Derrida’s work, which isn’t talked about much at all. Nancy: It’s important to emphasize that Derrida is really the first thinker of non-mastery. Yes, I really think that that’s how to put it, even if he shares some traits with Deleuze in this respect, though in a different way. But I really think that, for him, this sort of recognition of the end of systems, the end of assurances and guarantees, was also a matter of recognizing the limits and fragilities of mastery. What is mastery? It’s Descartes’s big proclamation: “master and possessor of nature.” Well, today we know all too well how extremely fragile nature and we ourselves have become. At worst, you could say that we are no longer conscious, that we don’t know what we are doing, that we are not the masters of what happens to us, from climate [change] all the way to our own urges and drives. It’s not a matter of renouncing mastery but of recognizing that mastery is

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not the be all and end all of man, of the subject of being. It’s a matter of being in non-mastery, that is, being in receptivity (sensed, even carnal), in the ability to welcome, to be before what comes as impossible or improbable. This is a very important point—putting mastery into question. It was set in motion by Bataille at the same time as Heidegger. Bataille is also somebody Derrida worked on, and in Bataille it often takes the form of opposition to the project [and the structure of projection]. And what does Derrida say? That you can’t be entirely in the project. I work on a project, it’s thrown out ahead [of me] with no guarantees. Obviously, when you undertake a serious project it’s important that it works and you have to equip yourself with all sorts of guarantees in order to bring it to completion, but we can’t measure the meaning of a life or an existence in terms of a project. A life is not a project. A life is not: “I will be Chateaubriand or I will be nothing.” No, it’s not that. Or maybe saying: “I will be Chateaubriand or I will be nothing” is not a project at all but a madness, a fantasy, a way of throwing ourselves in at the deep end. And yet the project, looking ahead, planning, the various ways we have of looking at the future underlie all that we are. It’s not by any means a matter of giving up, saying: All right, we no longer know what we want to do, we don’t do anything anymore. Instead it’s a matter of getting to the point of thinking what it means—if it means anything at all—maybe getting to the point of thinking that it means nothing, but what would it even mean to say that it means nothing? What does it mean to say that maybe we have to give up the idea of a complete sense? That we cannot give ourselves the project of any sort of mastery—not of nature or the world or ourselves—even though we remain obstinately stuck in it, like sleepwalkers. We send satellites to Mars, manufacture nano-technologies, intervene in matter, even living matter, but it becomes increasingly clear to everyone that we can’t give ourselves a project like Kant, Hegel, and Marx thought we could. Husserl was still working in terms of a project. Heidegger too. Adler: You mention Heidegger. A previously unpublished text of Derrida’s has just come out: The Last of the Jews. You wrote the preface, saying: “The ones who come to mock won’t get very far. Derrida knew all about Heidegger’s antisemitism. It could be shown by looking at any number of his texts, though here it will be enough to look at a very clear sentence in his commentary on the Rectoral Address, or at the irony with which he mimics Heidegger when he was making excuses for having forgotten [the Hebrew] Ruah, or at the very precision with which he dismantles certain anti-Heideggerian diatribes.” This Derrida text was published at a time when he was already well aware of certain writings of Heidegger, notably the famous Rectoral Address, but it came out before the appearance of the

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Black Notebooks. The relation between Derrida’s thinking and Heidegger’s is a complicated subject . . . Nancy: I think that Derrida was first of all completely fascinated—well, I shouldn’t say fascinated, but subjugated by the power of Being and Time, Heidegger’s great work. I remember that he read it often: one can’t ever be done with that text. What happens in Being and Time? What happens there is the displacement of the traditional subject, the subject-presence, into the existing being, Dasein [l’existant, le Dasein]. Meanwhile, very quickly, even before the publication of the Rectoral Address, Derrida was absolutely aware of Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party. Not only that but, I would say, he was aware of what it was in Heidegger that renewed a certain project, a project of accomplishment or completion, that takes the form of historical completion on the part of a people, the German people, in a language, the German language. He was aware that what had to be “accomplished” for Heidegger was itself a complicated name, that is, Ereignis, which is event, event as apparition but also, for Heidegger, appropriation, disappropriation, and also Zueignis. Derrida took all that into consideration. But he was very conscious of the fact that Heidegger could make this formidable gesture of reinserting the question of the meaning of being into the history of philosophy and that this did not prevent him submitting it to a certain sense of history, a certain destiny or destinality, something on the order of a project. I can’t really say it was a matter of mastery, since Heidegger was also opposed to that, but Derrida was very sensitive to a conjunction of two things in Heidegger, a conjunction that you could say was contradictory but explicable in the terms of the 1930s. Derrida always showed himself to be very precisely aware of all this. I’m not really just talking of the Nazi side of things, but the opportunism on Heidegger’s part that led him to join the Nazi party and, then on the other side, Heidegger’s petty human weakness . . . Adler: But certain people say that with the publication of those recently discovered Heidegger texts, which Derrida never had the chance to read, it becomes clear that the roots of his thought were in Nazi ideology. Nancy: No, I don’t believe that. This claim doesn’t take account of what’s in these texts. I mean, three volumes have appeared at this point and I don’t know how many lines, well, very few [touch on these things]. But it’s not a matter of quantity. . . . In any case, in these volumes there are many other things that revolve around the question: What’s happening to the West? There are many things that have to do with Nazism but also Bolshevism, Americanism, technology, capital, everything, and in the midst of all that, things to do with the Jews, along the lines of the most common, banal antisemitism of that era. But, in the same texts,

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Heidegger also distances himself from this. But it’s not a matter of defending him. Instead, it’s a question of taking note of the fact that there is a sort of chunk of antisemitism that it was quite natural for Heidegger to swallow, if I can put it like that. But, at the same time, he never did anything about it in his published books. That’s the question. I think we need do a very precise analysis of the reasons why Heidegger didn’t want, or dare, or have the courage to undertake, to analyze [this]. Why antisemitism? Because antisemitism is an absurdity when you set it alongside opposition to technology and capital. Adler: And then he didn’t make an act of contrition after the war, as Karl Jaspers asked him to. [Meanwhile,] it is still the case that Derrida’s texts continue to generate thinking all over the world, particularly in the United States, in India, in Portugal . . . Nancy: Because it’s a thinking of its time . . . Adler: Of its time, and perhaps also visionary? Nancy: Yes, but that’s what it is to be of one’s time: to open toward the future in some way, though not in the sense of a project. Derrida’s thought is not only of its time, coming to a halt when his life ended ten years ago. We are in this time. Perhaps what he sensed is growing, becoming amplified, bringing on new questions that are new ways of taking up and prolonging Derrida. This seems pretty clear to me today, given that, at the tenth anniversary of his death, there are colloquia all over the world because there is a resource here that demands thought. For example, the publication of these two texts under the title The Last of the Jews is, I believe, going to make us reflect in a much deeper way on antisemitism even as we think about being Jewish itself. The two texts revolve around what he called “my belonging without belonging” to Judaism or Jewishness.

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 / What Is Deconstruction?: An Interview with Federico Ferrari

Federico Ferrari: I would like to begin from afar. In 1955, Gérard Granel, whom you know well (from when exactly?), translated a fundamental lemma of Heideggerian thought, Abbau, with the word deconstruction. In 1955 you would have been fifteen years old. I can’t believe that you were already reading Heidegger, let alone reading that translation of “ Zur Seinsfrage” [On the Question of Being] in which Granel introduced the word deconstruction (Abbau) to distinguish it from Zerstörung, the destruction of metaphysics. Do you remember the first time you encountered Heidegger’s thought? Jean-Luc Nancy: You’re right! At fifteen I knew nothing at all about philosophy. I got to know Heidegger through books (and first of all through a friend, François Warin) in the 1960s, while I was studying philosophy. I got to know Granel’s books around then—above all, his book on Kant—but I met him in person only a lot later, after I had met Derrida. In fact, I read Granel’s article on Derrida in 1967, which at the time was certainly one of the major articles on this new author. Of course, I also used to read Heidegger and the translations that were coming out in those days; Granel published a translation in 1968 and that is where he used the word deconstruction. This word wasn’t a neologism, as people sometimes say, because it existed already in Littré’s dictionary, its meaning split between the dismantling or disassembling of the words of a phrase, on the one hand, and the dismantling of the parts of a machine, on the other. Note that, for Heidegger, it was first of all a matter of Destruktion, a term that also

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seems to have had a linguistic origin, perhaps tied to the dismantling of tectonic structures or plates. This is bringing up memories because, of course, this was something that interested me a lot in the 1960s and 1970s. And it all had to do with Heidegger’s word, because Destruktion is a word with a Latin root (and a lot has been written about its relation to Luther’s destructio of a huge part of the theological and ecclesiastical construction of Catholicism). The use of that word, along with all the commentaries Heidegger wrote on it, always served to focus our attention. For me, as for many others, the important thing was the originality of a gesture that was different from critique, from refutation, and that also refrained from announcing a new “construction.” For the first time, someone was proposing that we penetrate to the interior of a “structure” and not just change our point of view or switch to a different model of structuring. This gesture had to do with “the meaning of Being.” Ferrari: Excuse me for interrupting, but it makes me smile when you point out the importance of “deconstruction” as the translation of the Heideggerian gesture, not in its revolutionary being (not a break and a radical change of point of view) but rather, in a certain sense, as reforming (an internal transformation) “the sense of being.” It makes me smile because I think of how you and a good portion of your generation were revolutionaries of social life. I’m thinking for example of the philosophical and existential connection you had with Philippe [Lacoue-Labarthe]. I imagine that he, like you—if not even more so—would have found “deconstruction” to be of prime importance for leaving behind an interpretation of Heidegger’s thought that had been overdetermined, especially in France, by existentialism, on the one hand, and by Beaufret, on the other. How were all of you—I’m speaking of 1968 as you just described it—able to hold together social revolution and philosophical reformism? But I may be overinterpreting your words. Nancy: I think that it’s better to think of all that in a different way, not as “revolution vs. reform” on the one hand, and the distinction between “social and philosophical,” on the other. Instead, there was a connection between Heideggerian Destruktion and a profound disaffection for all the political perspectives available in that moment. In order to understand this, you have to remember that we were caught in a sort of double “disinheritance,” if I can put it that way. We had no political inheritance because of the way in which the independence of Algeria (which had been our big political concern ever since we were teenagers) ended up disappointing all attempts at revolution, though this was surely just the most visible, the most immediate aspect of a deeper disenchantment that went

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back to the events in Hungary in 1956, the various socialist dissidents like Tito or the others who came from Czechoslovakia or the “Third World,” as we used to call it back then. Responses to all of this included the malaise that was on the rise in many communist parties, the French communist party above all, and Leftist movements that were in full swing and in total disarray. [At the same time,] we lacked a philosophical inheritance because, in the course of our studies, we had not come across Heidegger—exactly as you said—this Heidegger that belonged neither to existentialism nor to the lyricism of Beaufret. This is why the discovery of the “Destruktion der Ontologie” had a revolutionary force for us, one that was completely removed from all political thought. In 1968, especially in Strasbourg, where there was a strong Situationist presence, which took the form of a refusal of all “progressive” politics because we were confident that what we needed to do was concern ourselves with something else, in particular, the destabilization of “Being.” That is why the mere mention of the word Destruktion—that is, something that was neither destruction nor a new construction—could focus our energies. I should be clear, though. Even if this was true for both Philippe and me, it is still the case that he believed in a violent political revolution that would be sudden and somehow apocalyptic, while I was as skeptical about politics as I was fired up about the question of the “meaning of Being.” That is why—here’s a last thought on the subject—Derrida’s use of the word deconstruction remained secondary for me, for quite a while. On the one hand, I was very taken with the force of the analyses in The Origin of Geometry and even more with Voice and Phenomenon but, on the other hand (and this is bizarre, I admit), I was not very attentive to the relation with Heidegger, even though Derrida was making that relation quite clear, even if he wasn’t really insisting on it. In fact, I don’t think he started talking about “deconstruction” until Of Grammatology. I know that that shows a lack of rigor on my part, but that’s how it was. I could say that there was, for me, a correspondence or a very strong resonance between “Destruktion der Ontologie” and “differance in the relation to self,” but I wasn’t entirely conscious of it. This touches on a very mysterious aspect of Derrida’s development in those years. He was working most obviously in a Husserlian idiom (which I was not very familiar with) but he was already in a very tight and very complicated relationship with Heidegger. In fact, I later came to think that Derrida had decided very early on to step back from the question of “Being” as such. He was concerned less with Being and more with presence-to-self. For me, it was the other way around.

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I mention all this only in order to try to explain why “deconstruction” had not been hugely important as an emblem of Derrida’s thinking— much less important than “differance,” which I have always also understood as a twist or a transformation of “ontological difference” (though Derrida never said as much). Ferrari: Yes, it’s true that it is only in 1967, in Of Grammatology, that Jacques Derrida takes up the word deconstruction again. You had already read Derrida before then (Derrida’s introduction to On the Origin of Geometry is from 1962). Do you remember, then, the first time that you encountered his work? Nancy: Yes. I read The Origin of Geometry first. I found it incredibly difficult, and lost myself in it. But I did manage to get the idea that “the Absolute is the passage” and that this is how it is exposed to a danger—or this is how sense is exposed to the risk of being lost. This was very new to me. But I was much more taken with Voice and Phenomenon. I often go back to the passage where Derrida writes that the Augenblick, the blink of an eye, the instant of the relation to self, must have duration. The German word Augenblick—very concrete, something we experience—introduced duration right where there seemed to be none at all; this I found really gripping. As if the text had winked at me. It was as if, for the first time, the “one” had been displaced for me. And it is certainly the case that I recognized something of Hegel here, though in Hegel, it still seemed more complicated, part of a larger operation, whereas here it landed all at once. And for me all that resonated with Heidegger because this distension of the one was in communication with the ek- of ek-sistence, that is, with the fact that the “meaning of being” is not “one” sense but rather a spacing (a “sending,” a “being-thrown,” etc.). There is also this: in the Letter on Humanism, I had read that “humanism does not rank the humanitas of man highly enough” (I’m citing from memory). That was a big shock! There again was distension, spacing. . . . Let me quote the exact text: “Gegen den Humanismus wird gedacht, weil er die Humanitas des Menschen nicht hoch genug ansetzt.” Speaking of “Humanitas” in this slightly strange way since it is a Latin word and a word for essence—no doubt he did it deliberately since “Humanismus” is a Latin term—speaking, then, of “Humanitas,” Heidegger wanted to make us understand that what is properly human in man is not grasped at the level it deserves, not given the importance it deserves by humanism. And that his thinking wanted to rise to the necessary level . . . Ferrari: I would like to return to your principal interest in the work of Derrida in those years, namely in “différance” as opposed to “deconstruction.” (The former is untranslatable in Italian and plays, among other things,

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with the idea of difference as the act of deferring, as internal difference in every identity). However, you have said (albeit obscurely) that the two questions were already linked for you. In fact, doesn’t it seem to you that, at a certain point (when?) the two questions—that of difference (internal to presence) and that of deconstruction (in the sense of being)—are fused together (maybe this was the case for everyone, if just a little) in a dazzling short-circuit that shook all of metaphysical thought at its foundation and all the identitary certainties of Western civilization? Nancy: Yes, for me, the two motifs of “differance” and “deconstruction” were related from the beginning, even if it was not entirely clear to me at the time. (But, of course, this was also the case for Derrida himself and indeed for everyone who was a bit more advanced than I was in these things.) [The terms] were linked because whatever opened up a distance inside the relation to self would also have to be related to the effort to make Dasein something other than the Cartesian subject. (I say “Cartesian” because Heidegger refers to Descartes in Being and Time; later I realized that his understanding of Descartes there was insufficient, but I came to that realization thanks to Heidegger himself, and Derrida.) After all, there is a deep solidarity between the subject as presenceto-self and Being as subsistence-in-itself—that is, fundamental substance—of all that is. Today, I might say that the “subject” in this sense is the “Being” of modern metaphysics and, reciprocally, that Being as “supreme Being” (causa sui) would essentially be the “subject” (subjectum— hypokeimenon—suppositum). All of this was decided when Kant destroyed the ontological argument by declaring that “Being is not a real predicate.” (I won’t go into Heidegger’s reading of Kant here—this is not the place.) I wonder if you can really understand how, for a young man of twenty in 1960, all this did not exist at all. In 1961 I had just begun to discover Hegel, for whom the “subject” is not simple causa sui but a process, leaving the self, alienation in the other, etc., as a sort of reprise of the theology of the incarnation (and the Trinity). (I discovered Hegel through Georges Morel, a Jesuit who was leaving the church and who held classes for a circle of rather “activist” philosophers and theologians. This is significant; it gives a sense of the climate back then.) But I didn’t immediately grasp how far the Hegelian process could go—maybe had to go—in order to avoid ending up in self-certainty. I think this was Morel’s profound thought but, in fact, it was Derrida who revealed it to me. Now, it occurs to me that there is something I should add here. In 1960 I saw on all sides the threat that philosophy would disappear, attacked by the human sciences. From many different directions came discussions

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of the uselessness of philosophy and the self-confidence of sociology, psychology, ethnography as well as historical prediction and planning in general. It made me worried. I believe it even made me afraid because I did not share in this sentiment in any way but I didn’t really know what I wanted to defend. I think there was a while when Merleau-Ponty was my reference point—alongside the Ricoeur of Finitude et culpabilité and “Le symbole donne à penser”—and that left me empty-handed in the face of people who were referring to history, social struggle, etc. I think that if I had had a more political temperament, I would have taken other paths. And certainly Hegel, Heidegger, and then Derrida showed me that there was a whole other dimension of philosophy that was much more contemporary and active. But later, in ’68 and ’69, it was our concern with the opposition of philosophy and the human sciences (and also of philosophy and that form of scientism Althusser was applying to Marx, which was alien to me) that prompted me—along with others—to write to Derrida. That was our first interaction. Let me add this too. Science and scientism were very prestigious in those days. Bachelard (and his daughter [Suzanne]) and Canguilhem played an important role in my education, parallel to the role played by Morel, Hegel, Warin, Heidegger. I think this was what pushed Derrida to make a gesture that mimicked science by talking about “grammatology.” Certainly, Heidegger refused any notion that the sciences had a capacity for “thinking” as he understood it, but at the same time (because, for me, all this happened at the same time) Husserl was continuing to support rational knowledge. I must say, I did not really know where “reason” was in all this. And Sartre wasn’t persuasive because he was too anthropological for me, if I can put it this way. I have in mind Being and Nothingness because the Critique of Dialectical Reason only came out in 1960 and I did not find that convincing at all: it was too late to convince me of a historical project. I have some clear memories of colleagues who reacted as I did (leaning more toward Althusser, Rancière, Balibar). The thing that could convince me would have to touch on metaphysics because, perhaps quite simply, I had to thoroughly and completely settle accounts with God. For that, Heidegger and then Derrida were excellent preparation. But Hegel too. (In 1962 I did a thesis [maîtrise] with Ricoeur on religion in Hegel, on the Aufhebung of religion.) I’m sorry if I’ve gone on too long but it’s complicated to sort out this whole past. Ferrari: Can you explain why Heidegger and Derrida, or deconstruction and internal difference, were ways of coming to terms with God? In other

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words, how were they ways for beginning the deconstruction of the history of Christianity from within? Nancy: That’s a bit complicated. To tell the truth, in 1960 I no longer had a personal problem with God, if I can put it that way. I’d left religion behind, even though I maintained ties with some militant Christians, priests and theologians who moved in the so to say “progressive” circles to which I belonged. But if this corresponded to a political and intellectual consciousness disengaged from the church, on the one hand, then, on the other hand, I had also learned a lot that could come under the heading of “negative theology.” From the point of view of philosophy, this meant that, on the one hand, I needed to understand even better how the dead God—the God of metaphysics—had taken up so much space. There are many interesting things to work through from this point of view in Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, etc. But, on the other hand—and this interested me more—was the fact that, from Saint Augustine to Hegel, Trinitarian and Christological theology had developed a lot of things that were not really all that religious at the end of the day. The place of God was not completely empty: it was also the place of what Pascal was pointing to when he said that “man infinitely transcends man.” But this infinite transcendence must not create either a new god (à la Feuerbach) or a simple “godlessness.” Or, put another way, in order to completely disengage from God, isn’t it necessary to call on God? Early on, this quote from Meister Eckhart became my motto: “Let us pray to God that we might be free of God.” It was the epigraph for my thesis. None of this took shape as a “deconstruction of Christianity,” but it was the germ of that idea. Of course, I needed to take another path first. This is where Derrida and Heidegger played their role but also, at the same time, Lacoue-Labarthe and Bataille: these are two channels through which the question of “literature” came to me, that is, at the end of all that philosophical content. If there are indeed no clear and distinct significations (“man,” “history,” “god”), how does philosophy speak? All of this was taking shape in me and around me in 1968. Ferrari: Returning to “deconstruction,” do you remember when this term became a sort of method (even if Derrida rejected this notion of deconstruction as a method) or, more to the point, how it became a philosophical movement, gradually taking the place of structuralism and—to take one example in a country such as Italy—of a certain Marxist hegemony? My impression is that it happened because of the diffusion of the term in American universities, which probably took place before then, thanks to the friendship

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between Derrida and de Man and the birth of what would be called the Yale School. This was followed up by Derrida’s frequent presence at the most important universities in the United States, especially at the University of California at Irvine. It seems to me that it was precisely in those years that deconstruction began to become different from what a young French Catholic would have been able to see as the 1960s were coming to a close. Nancy: Yes, it was after what we might call “the American event” that a phenomenon took off, one that I discovered only slowly and that emerged in a very confused way. First there was a colloquium in Baltimore in 1966 (I heard about it only several years later). [To understand it all] we would have to bring to light the deep reasons, motives and motivations for this colloquium. Again, this is work for a historian, work I’m not able to do. There was certainly a profound displacement going on in American thinking about literary criticism (in the sense of the critique, analysis and interpretation of texts). This had been included under the heading of “New Criticism” and it led to a convergence with the European innovations of the 1960s that are evoked by the names Barthes, Lacan, Todorov, Derrida, all of whom were invited to the colloquium, and Girard and Donato, who were among those sending out the invitations. An evocation of what, though? This is the difficult question and the one we have to ask. Behind what would come to be called “structuralism” was Russian formalism and the Moscow and Tartu school of semiotics, as well as the linguistic work of Jakobson (who worked with Lévi-Strauss before coming to the USA). And behind this complex ensemble there was—this strikes me as important—an effort to counterbalance a certain Marxist spirit—the most simplistic, the most grossly materialistic—whose inadequacy had become clear in the USSR as much as elsewhere. In a way that applied not just to Marxism but more broadly, I think that the dominant positivism was put in question, a positivism where confidence in technological and social progress tended to take the place of thinking while, at the same time, various fascisms churned out their own mythological verbiage. On the one hand, too much sense; on the other, too little. Maybe this is the best way to describe the malaise. Certainly, Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre were all philosophical witnesses to the same situation. But philosophy seemed to have its own regime of discourse, separate and autonomous, whereas literature crossed over into the language of everyone. I think this is why literary criticism found itself in a very particular position because what was at stake there was the very possibility of sense. Bataille—such a singular figure—was someone who communicated with all the actors of that era (Sartre, Lacan, Blanchot . . .) and who so expertly revealed a

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restlessness, even anguish, regarding the possibility of saying and thinking existence. I can’t linger too long on this but I’m sure that at the turn of the 1960s there was a very deep “crisis of sense”—the counterpunch to the entwined destinies of communism and fascism. This is also why my generation was a bit lost, indecisive, adrift (at least regarding being Trotskyist or Maoist, or indeed post-fascist, which is something that already existed back then). The participants in that 1966 colloquium were our elders and America was where they flourished. This was not only because European and American research was converging (a convergence that was no doubt due to the fact that both belonged to the Western space that was increasingly experienced as such at that time, that is, experienced as both entirely particular and also self-globalizing) but also because the crisis of sense I’m talking about in Europe was not so strongly felt (in the universities, in the media, etc.) because—at least, this is my hypothesis—there still existed in Europe a general confidence in what I would describe as a progressive humanism that was expressed if not in Marxist then at least in more or less socialist terms. (The terms were increasingly vague, but they could still be seen.) This was certainly happening in France most of all, because that is where the Marxist tradition had been most deeply shaken and also where, over a thirty-year period, German thinking had mobilized the French at a time when Germany itself had forgotten thinking. All this is to say, simply, that there was an event in America in 1966 in which Derrida played a central role, and his lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play” seems to have made a particularly strong impression. In order to better understand its success we would have to reread the text but, in any case, after this event and after the publication of the proceedings in English, a powerful interest came to light in the USA in what was first called “structuralism” and later “poststructuralism” once it became clear that it was not a matter of simple structural models—far from it! The word deconstruction appeared a little later, first used by Derrida himself in Of Grammatology (1967) and then taken up very quickly and in a more insistent way, for example in 1967, in the introductory note to “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (in Writing and Difference). In the United States, more quickly than in Europe, the word was quickly adopted as the name perhaps not of a method but at least of an attitude regarding texts—because textual critique was the starting point. It happened that Paul de Man (who may have been in Baltimore in 1966, though I don’t know) developed and taught an approach to texts that he, his students and then Derrida thought of as resonant with what was

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known as “deconstruction.” Paul de Man’s important audience contributed to the expansion of what after a short while became the fairly imprecise idea of a method that—putting it in terms of the caricature that some of its opponents used back in those days—allowed us to make a text say whatever we wanted. Even today in the USA, Germany, and no doubt other places too, “deconstruction” has become a synonym for a “joyful— or grotesque—interpretive anarchy.” This sort of thing can happen to the best of us. The adjective “categorical” in Kant’s “categorical imperative” is still most often understood as “rigorous” or “authoritative” despite the fact that its Kantian meaning can only be understood in terms of the distinction between “hypothetical” and “categorical.” There are lots of examples of this. Indeed, as soon as Derrida saw what was happening, he set about making himself better understood. But he only succeeded in making himself less well understood because he did not want to determine a meaning of “deconstruction” but wanted rather to indicate the impossibility of settling on a determinate meaning. I think that it is possible to lay all of this out much more clearly now. But once the harm is done, it inevitably leaves traces. The worst [of these] is that in French the word has become quite banal and now means “demolition.” For example, there was a Front National tract that read: “Macron is deconstructing France.” [“Macron déconstruit la France.”] I think it happened like this because Derrida, despite himself, allowed the word to become too attached to him, his manner, his style, instead of going back to its starting point in Heidegger. In the end, Derrida wanted the word to be abandoned altogether. Ferrari: You nicely reconstruct several turning points that seem to have been lost for the youngest among us today, for those who are beginning to read and to be interested in that “thing” that took on the name of deconstruction. And now it’s really clear how deconstruction was established as well as lost in departments of literature and in the critical work done on the major and minor texts of world literature. Yet, to take up the question again from another point of view and to return to the twin concepts (perhaps Siamese twins) of deconstruction and differance, it’s clear to me that nearly all of the thinking of difference that will have been elaborated across decades would not have been even remotely conceivable without Derrida’s notion of differance: the myriad of men and women thinkers, quite different among themselves in terms of gender, ethnicity, kind, etc. and, obviously, also in all of the rhetoric that surrounds political correctness. Without “difference,” as it emerges in Derrida’s work at the end of the 1960s, the political radicalization of thought that has so profoundly affected the very structure of

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our societies would not have been conceivable. Certainly, one could say that this second strand was born as a hybrid—again, American—of Derridean difference and Foucault’s archaeological genealogy, on the one hand, and Deleuzian thought on the other. But it remains the case that, depending on your point of view, it is only thanks to a radicalization or an impoverishment of differance (of this movement differentiated internally by presence and for which there is nothing but difference) that the social claims of all the various thoughts of difference could come about. What do you think? Is this also the “sort of thing that happens to the best of us?” Or is it precisely what happened because it had to happen? Nancy: Not only do I agree with you but I think you really put your finger on it when you talk about difference as a major pole of thinking in the second half of the twentieth century—and right up to our time. (Let me mention in passing that I published a piece called “Parallel Differences: Deleuze and Derrida” precisely in order to try to show a parallel, nonconvergent proximity between the two ways of thinking, each one using a different way of writing difference—“differance” and “differenciation).” I’ll start by reconnecting difference and deconstruction; this will be the best way to situate them both. If deconstruction consists in dismantling, detaching the pieces of an assemblage or a system, then it’s clear right away that it puts the emphasis on spacing, distinction, difference. Difference is capital for Heidegger (it’s quite clear in the most recent volume of the Black Notebooks to have appeared in German; he never stops talking about it) and it is for him the difference between Being and beings (often referred to as the “ontological difference”). “Beings” refers to everything that exists. “Being” refers to the fact of existing. Obviously, there are no beings without Being, and no Being without beings. But the fact of Being—we could use Thomistic language and say the act of Being (Gilson used to compare Aquinas and Heidegger)—is not itself [a] being. It is not a being, not even a “supreme” being. The death of the metaphysical God is completely tied to the Destruktion of Being as supreme being. If it is not a being, it is not at all in the sense in which a being “is” (exists). Being is not. The noun should never be used, only the verb “to be.” Difference is therefore like the difference between verb and noun. A verb has no substantial meaning; “to eat” [or “eating”] is not a thing (even if, in old colloquial French, “eats” was used for “food” or “meal”). A verb stands for an action. What is the action of the verb “to be”? It is not a production or generation or a determinate activity. In the end, Heidegger tried to say that Being uses or deploys—and needs—beings (drawing on all the meanings of the German verb brauchen). It is a mix of activity and passivity—but I don’t want to linger

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any longer on this theme since it would delay us too much. I would just like to point out the difficulty opened up by the difference of Being/beings. The important thing is still that “Being” “is” not and cannot be thought as an existence: neither as “one,” nor as present in the world or elsewhere. Derrida does not take up the question in these terms but rather in terms of relation-to-self, that is, in terms of the Husserlian subject. But it is a way of putting Being back in play because the subject is also not something present and unified in itself. It is only as relation to self. On this point, Derrida follows a line of thinking that runs from Descartes to Hegel via Kant, and is then picked up by Nietzsche: relation to self is not a matter of the presence to self that one would presuppose for a single, simple, homogenous thing. The “to” of “to self ” implies a distance, a pause, a time. Derrida’s name for that draws on the verb “to defer” [“différer”] meaning “put off until later” or “delay.” And to make a noun, he takes the present participle “différent” and concocts the word “différance,” which doesn’t exist. This is the name for the difference between act and substance (identity, thing, that which is given or posited, that which is present). I could translate it like this: “I am not, I am always and each time to be or having been.” [“Je ne suis pas, je suis toujours et chaque fois à être ou ayant été.”] Differance names this but this is still unnameable. This is why differance “is neither a word nor a concept,” as Derrida would often say. At the same time, differance is clearly by rights infinite: the “I” is not accomplished as a full identity; nothing is every fully accomplished. This in turn means that we have to say that “infinite differance is finite,” as he writes in Voice and Phenomenon. Heidegger’s famous finitude is set out in another way: the finite is not the lack of infinity but, on the contrary, it is testimony that the end (death) is inscribed in the infinite. Nothing is ever accomplished; everything is beyond measure, if you will. This is why Derrida spent so much time discussing death with and against Heidegger. By affirming that death is intertwined with life (see his seminar “Life, Death” which was published recently), Derrida separates out Heideggerian death as pure solitude (and also therefore death of the pure warrior community that succeeds it in Being and Time) and the representation of accomplishment that Heidegger sometimes seems to promise (in the form of beings getting swept up in the pure ecstasy of Being). It seems that today we are obsessed with the question of human finitude, which also appears in the form of the finitude of the human race, even the finitude of the world. If we are to avoid transhumanist delirium—the delirium of accomplishment—it might be wise to think about differance.

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Ferrari: To conclude: after your attentive review of deconstruction, I would like to ask two questions. Fifty years after deconstruction’s dissemination across Western culture and now globally, what has deconstruction become today? And, recognizing that you are not a Pythian priestess, what is its future or its legacy? Nancy: I’m certainly not the Pythian priestess but, then again, for her it was never a matter of predicting the future. The Greeks themselves sometimes asked for a second consultation with the oracle if they didn’t like the first response. They knew that the future is always to come and cannot be foreseen. But, in fact, it is not really a matter of the future. If I wanted to play the prediction game, I could say, for example, that “philosophy, as it has been understood up until now in the metaphysical tradition, will undoubtedly end up disappearing, giving way to reflections on what is reasonable and possible on the basis of what is given and what is shown by objective calculation.” But I could also say: “undoubtedly, an overturning of civilization comparable to what happened with Christianity or capitalism (which in a certain way prolonged Christianity) will arise in the form of a ‘revelation’ of a whole new sensibility toward existence, toward life.” I could also try to imagine various combinations of these two hypotheses which, no doubt, would have to include legacies, the handing down or resurgence of various forms of thought from the ancient world (that is to say, our world). There are people who are right now imagining possible futures in this way; it is a gesture that has always been part of our modern civilization. But if this civilization is struggling with itself—if it is discontented, as Freud put it—this entails a distrust of foresight, promise, expectation. And the first effect of this is that we must understand that what is to come has already begun, that in a certain way it already precedes us. Our world has already slipped out of joint. It can no longer think of itself according to the model of a progressive and continuous history, just as it can no longer think of itself in terms of an unchanging presence. In both cases, it is the principle that’s missing—principle or law, the unity of origin and end. Because this is exactly what will have been deconstructed: the unity of the origin (and therefore of the end). Divine nature used to have this sort of unity, and scientific-technological nature had another, and neither of these unities are in good shape now. The big difference between Derrida and Heidegger is that Heidegger remained committed to an archi-principled unity, which is why he thought it necessary to make “another beginning.” Derrida never shared this thought. On the contrary, he made a point of showing that it contradicts everything about the Destruktion of metaphysics, insofar as

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it is the thought of a fundamental “Being,” original and final, presenting itself to itself. This is very clear in his book Of Spirit. At this point, I would say that deconstruction is already behind us. The modern world has really left behind all reference to a unity of origin and end. What it is now experiencing is a matter of errance, at the least, or panic, at most. Our question is no longer “What is truth?” (or indeed “Where do we come from, where are we going?”) but rather “Is questioning enough?” “Doesn’t every question predetermine a response?” This interrogation began to take shape in Heidegger; Derrida amplified it and gave it much greater force. (I’m referring to the same book—among others, of course.) Derrida told me one day that I was a “post-deconstructionist.” It was partly a joke, since he knew well the intrinsic weakness of talk of “post-” this or that. But it was serious too because there is absolutely no doubt that he himself would have preferred to have had nothing more to do with the word. Not only because it had been turned into a “method” and a term for “demolition” but because he was already beyond it, even if he didn’t himself know what that could mean. Beyond deconstruction, many expected to see a reconstruction, preceded, for some, by a “deconstruction of deconstruction.” The trick embedded in the word is certainly the privative “de-”. Negation can happen only on the basis of affirmation. This is why I have suggested that we talk of struction. In Latin, struo means to pile something up. A pile is a non-construction. It has no order, no principle. I would say—because you have written a book called L’anarca, but also because I want to make reference to Reiner Schürmann’s book on Heidegger—that there is an essential anarchy (if this way of talking is even possible) in the spirit of differance. And for this very reason neither deconstruction nor differance can become pretend-tools, pseudo-utensils marked, calibrated, and ready to be put to use. To go into a landscape that is without origin or end is not to be lost. It is not a matter of finding another end. It is other, even more obstinately other.

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Afterword: Nothing to See, Nothing to Do Alexander García Düttman

1 If discourse is engendered in a retreat of the visible, it must announce this movement, which is its own and in which it is caught up, at the same time as it announces what appears only in being carried away by it. This is what Jacques Derrida does when he analyzes the art of drawing as setting to work the visible and the invisible. A scene of jealousy shows how the verb came to be: I suffered seeing my brother’s drawings in permanent display, religiously framed on the walls of every room. I tried my hand at imitating his copies: a pitiable awkwardness confirmed for me the double certainty of having been punished, deprived, cheated, but also, and because of this even, secretly chosen. I had sent to myself, who did not yet exist, the undecipherable message of a convocation. As if, in place of drawing, which the blind man in me had renounced for life, I was called by another trait, this graphics of invisible words, this accord of time and voice that is called (the) word—or writing, scripture. A substitution, then, a clandestine exchange: one trait for the other, a trait for a trait . . . I draw nets of language about drawing, or rather, I weave, using traits, lines, staffs, and letters, a tunic of writing wherein to capture the body of drawing, at its very birth. But why should drawing be inseparable from a “rhetoric of the trait,” as Derrida claims? A “rhetoric of the trait” right at the trait: this simultaneity

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is the result of a retreat [retrait] implied by the structure of the trait (by its tracing), and so is not really one at all. Because it refers to a retreat, Derrida takes up the question of rhetoric (or that which cedes the floor [laisse la parole]) at the point where he shows how blindness and the invisible structure the visible and the (graphic) trait. Where can we situate the invisible origin of vision? How can we describe the blindness of what allows us to see [donne à voir]? Derrida comes at the question from several angles. —Drawing [le dessiner], as a condition for the possibility of the drawing [le dessin], is invisible and invariably hidden from the representation that it promises by virtue of its transcendence. It is a transcendental or quasi-transcendental logic, and Derrida points out that it could be redirected toward a violent and sacrificial interruption, in which case history would be presented as the history of transcendence, and would bear the mark of “that which could come before our eyes—or come into view.” Following this genealogical or archi-historical hypothesis (the hypothesis of a history prior to the organization of space and time according to the opposition of the empirical and transcendental), there is no pure “transcendental blindness,” only an effect of transcendence attributable to a stability that itself turns out to be quite precarious. In any case, Derrida admits that sacrificial violence already circulates in an “economy” or in the “circle of exchange.” Does the event that founds transcendental logic allow itself to be recouped by an interpretation of evental violence, transforming it into sacrificial violence, substituting the structure of the event—transcendence—for history, and substituting logic for the aleatory? In the “time of war” inaugurated by the weakness or clumsiness of the jealous brother (both a vocation and a calculation), Derrida adopts the strategies of a demonstration that thinks its own possibility starting from what demonstrates nothing. Even if he makes way for a demonstration, the trait does not immediately belong to the order of the discourse that is instituted by virtue of its retreat [retrait]. For Derrida, the important thing is not so much the decision demanded by various strategies, but rather the hesitation that keeps decision in suspension. This hesitation makes every decision in favor of some purity or other quite impossible. But if it still does not come under a thought, it inevitably tends toward (a radical thinking of) the event, history, and the aleatory, given that it cannot leave intact the extremes that cause it to tremble. Hesitation and strategy go together. After all, isn’t their alliance founded in the necessity of a double gesture? A strategy that tries to conserve (provisionally) the concept (and its “old name”) by inverting the hierarchical relations between them; a hesitation that begins to displace the concepts (and their “old names).”

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Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to a neutralization: it must, by means of a double gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that deconstruction will provide itself the means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions that it criticizes, which is also a field of nondiscursive forces. —The visible “as such,” the visible “as the singular body of the visible itself, right at the visible” is absolutely invisible. Derrida always wanted above all to avoid confusing this absolute invisibility—which comes as close to the visible as it possibly can, approaching precisely to the extent that it distances itself—with visibility. [Being] absolute, invisibility is such only insofar as it escapes the schema [dispositif] that relies on the distinction between power and act, between the conditions for the possibility of experience and empirical occurrences. It is not a question of a distribution or succession determined by the unity of space or the synthesis of time. [Derrida writes:] “In order to be the other of the visible, absolute invisibility does not have to take place elsewhere, nor constitute another visible, like something yet to appear or that has already disappeared.” Derrida sets this absolute invisibility in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “pure transcendence, without an ontic mask.” How can we determine more precisely how to distinguish the transcendence of absolute invisibility from a simple condition of possibility, and how to relate it to “pure transcendence”? —The graphic act is characterized by a fundamental “a-perspective,” which could be either a “reserve of visibility” (in the two modes of “anticipatory perspective” and “amnesiac retrospective”) or a heterogeneity without synthesis that is “utterly foreign” to the “phenomenality of the day.” Isn’t this “a-perspective of the graphic act” the a-perspective of all action? So long as it is not the instrument of an ultra-strategy (the mastery of the unmasterable), and so long as it does not just indicate the absence of thinking, doesn’t hesitation between two or more strategies come down to an a-perspective that is impossible to master? —When it comes to the blindness that afflicts the act of tracing, Derrida moves on to the “eclipse” of what remains of this act. If he established in Of Grammatology that writing was the “eclipse” of the logossun—referring to Plato’s Republic—now he is interested in the “eclipse” of the trait that he distinguishes from the “a-perspective of the graphic act.” A tracing, an outline, cannot be seen. One should in fact not see it . . . insofar as all the colored thickness that it retains tends to wear itself

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out so as to mark the single edge of a contour: between the inside and the outside of a figure. Once this limit is reached, there is nothing more to see, not even black and white, not even figure/form, and this is the trait, this is the line itself. Discourse never fails to speak to us of the visible and the invisible, not only because the term is itself a sonorous phenomenon, and language “truly speaks to us, all the time, of the blindness that constitutes it,” but also because discourse itself is elaborated right at the trace of the visible, without which there is neither visible nor invisible. If this is true, what happens to the invisible that the word allows us to see (retreat of the word)? And what about the supplement to visibility that discourse always carries with it? What does it signify? Nancy writes, with respect to Derrida, that “no thinking thinks more economically and less passionately, than in thinking everything, all at once.” For any thinking worthy of the name, any thinking that tries to think through to the end, that thinks and says all (that does not equivocate when it comes to thinking and saying all), [any such thinking], in thinking the possibility of its speech and in making itself say it, touches the limit where the invisible and the visible are no longer opposed. That is to say, radical thinking is speech that is already spaced in a visibility without vision.

2 “Deconstruction” is perhaps the name (though without “nominal form”) of a radical thinking (or of the radicality of thinking), though only if that radicality is defined in terms of the spacing that hides thinking from itself, from its own speech, from the speech given by the spacing of the visible. Every radical thinking is a finite thinking. In the end, thinking shows that right where it finally becomes thinking, where its speech can finally be thought, there is nothing to say, nothing to see, nothing to do. It all happens “right away.” Before and afterward, talk of thinking serves only to indicate this instant, from which we can infer that speaking thinking [la parole de la pensée] does not make anything visible other than not making visible, and that it would probably be premature to conclude that by making no object visible, thinking brings itself to the fore as the speaking that makes visible or shows [ parole qui donne à voir]. The only time that it shows, it already exceeds the determination that gives it the power of showing. The instant thinking reaches the limit that divides it is the instant when everything is made visible and everything is said, precisely because there is nothing to say and nothing to see; it is not in any way a

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matter of thinking everything in its ideality, inaccessible to finitude. Right on the limit, thinking confronts the division that cannot be grasped, and that prevents it from gathering itself to itself. A visibility without retreat or withdrawal would be absolutely invisible. As a result, speech, the supplement of visibility that is not seen but heard, is what allows the visible to be seen. Seeking within itself, seeking (in thinking) to say and to make visible its own possibility at the heart of the visible, speech is struck by a this-ness that is its spacing, its becoming visible. Yet this becoming visible of radical thinking (radically lucid in its unavoidable blindness) is not a passage from the intelligible to the sensible, from idea to nature, interior to exterior. . . . By speaking at the limit, thinking runs up against a visibility without vision, and this is how its belonging to the spacing of the visible (not the spacing of a visibility without limits) becomes apparent. When it makes visible the fact that there is nothing to be seen, when we can hardly see at all and cannot make anything out, eyes opening and closing at the same time, it makes itself visible, a thing without a name, beyond sense, not seen. Thinking becomes visible even as it remains invisible and unintelligible to sight and spirit. If we could conceive of a way of delimiting the invisible in opposition to the visible, there would be no limit. Nothing would be invisible and nothing would blind thinking because it would be known at each instant what was seen and what was not seen; the instant of thinking would disappear. Thinking at the limit, thinking the indiscernibility of the visible and the invisible, does not thereby come down to thinking [in terms of] a substitution, but rather to thinking the limit and its irreducible invisibility or blindness: the visible and the invisible are no longer in (relative) opposition; there is too much and too little to see (both at once). To think and to know are not the same thing. To think means to think at the limit, and thinking—which is, in principle, alien to the objectification with which knowledge concerns itself—is devoted to the interminable birth that takes place in the instant in which everything is thought. It is the instant of a caesura. Abandoned to its own birth, radical thinking instantly spaces itself. The effects of thinking at the limit are all the more destructive because thinking does not apply itself to this or that object of knowledge; it alters the visibility on which knowledge depends. Does knowledge not feed on the impatience we feel about thinking? What about tradition, the transmission of knowledge that sometimes amounts to nothing more than [a pile of] recuperated thoughts? What does it show? If it is true that the lingual experience of the limit that we call thinking is shared but not transmitted, and that in order to be something

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other than a storehouse or reservoir, tradition must resist the actualization of knowledge, and if we must understand that tradition always also constitutes itself as a hermetic tradition, doing so independently of the accidents of history that might happen to knowledge (perhaps this is how it offers itself to thought), what, from the perspective of essential blindness, is the difference between knowledge and thinking?

3 Words in painting, traits or lines of drawings: whether or not they are legible, whether we can make them out or, looking closely, get blinded by them, they figure the spacing of the (speech of) thinking, whose interminable birth coincides with its death. This figuring happens by means of the illegibility of their writing or trace (which is the writing of the plastic arts in general, insofar as the spacing of the visible is revealed there). “The fact that a speech supposedly alive can lend itself to spacing its own writing is what originarily set it in relation to its own death.” Blind and lucid, thinking thus “finds itself ” in the art gallery, the labyrinthine shelter for its offspring “archaic scene,” created by spacing. (In his essay on “living speech,” Derrida described this spacing as an “opening to the outside” that is produced in the “movement of temporalization” and that deconstructs the “pure interiority of speaking” from the inside, as it were.) Thinking speaks for itself and shows itself, or gives itself to sight, insofar as it puts the visible and the invisible to work (in the plastic arts or in the “figurative arts”). Likewise, a certain artistic act makes visible the act of thinking. Would art permit thinking to show its blindness?

4 The limit thinking reaches is not a limit separating two entities or two identifiable unities, and it is not itself subject to the regime of identification. It does not allow itself to be identified because it is the indiscernible limit where the visible and the invisible are no longer opposed but blend together, change places, divide, join together and separate according to the trait or trace. After all, making “apparent” the fact that the experience of the indiscernible limit on which speech is spaced (the experience of the impossible) is the eccentric center of all thinking, isn’t this what we call “deconstruction”? Nancy writes: “The passion for the center, for touching the center, and for the touching of the center has always been J.D.’s passion.” As a result, we would be making a mistake about its modus

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operandi (if it even has one) if we tried to assimilate deconstruction—this supplement to visibility—to some sort of operation that could be added “today” to a tradition (a “phonologocentrism” that we recognize as limited) in order to draw attention to the end of this tradition. Rather than forcing thinking to form a totality or to think the whole, deconstruction returns it to the blindness that gives it its evental character. When we speak of the thinking that takes place by being spaced on the indiscernible limit (for thinking, there is no other place to take place), we could say that it is being deconstructed or that it is “under deconstruction.” [Derrida writes, in “A Letter to a Japanese Friend”:] “Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs itself.”  For when it confronts the various sorts of revisionism that try to negate the event, deconstruction, which shows being-underdeconstruction (a being-under-deconstruction that extends all the way to the concept of epoch that dominates it), is not indebted to a political progressivism. [That would be something] it would be forced to commit by a more or less external prescription. Deconstruction happens or takes place because it doesn’t wait for anything; it doesn’t wait for a chronology, history, teleology, eschatology, meta-narrative or fiction of the political to be put into place. Or, we could say that deconstruction takes place because there is “always already” deconstruction and, for that very reason, there is a gap between closure and end. [This is] the paradox of the disconcerting temporality of “always already” (which seems to immediately efface the event of each thinking and the event of deconstruction called by its “name” but without indicating a presence in the past) and the event itself (which seems to efface this temporality). Derrida poses the question of this paradox, notably in Memoires for Paul de Man. It emerges there in two ways. [Derrida writes:] Deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day; it is always already at work in the work; one must just know how to identify the right or wrong element, the right or wrong stone—the right one, of course, always proves to be, precisely, the wrong one. Since the disruptive force of deconstruction is always already [emphasis added] contained within the architecture of the work, all one would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do memory work. Since I want neither to accept or to reject a conclusion formulated in these terms, let us leave this question hanging for a while.

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Then, further along: Always already, it was said, there was deconstruction at work in history, culture, literature, philosophy, in short, in Western memory in its two continents. And I believe that this is true; we could show it in each discourse, each work, each system, each moment. But what of this “always already” when deconstruction receives this name, improper as it may be? For it to be possible for an event to take place, it must “always already” have taken place. Deconstruction has “always already” taken place insofar as it is the singular event of each thinking. But once deconstruction has received its unreceivable name (“improper” or without “a nominal form”), once it has been denominated and has revealed what it can do in thinking, it may be that we can no longer talk of it as an event. Deconstruction that distinguishes itself by means of a self-reference, the reflexivity of which breaks with all relations of identity (with all mediation and all constitution), performs this act or this step that, as Heidegger would put it, can be thought under the name of Einkehr. This is an obscure and troublesome name, if only because of the element of assembly intrinsic to it and a certain opposition between interior and exterior that it seems to presuppose. In the seminar on “On Time and Being,” Einkehr in das Ereignis indicates entry into or gathering in the event (or advent). How are we to think the de-nomination of deconstruction or gathering, Einkehr in das Ereignis, if not as abandon (as the abandon that is not a matter of a double gesture, or a strategy, or a hesitation . . .)? When it is a matter of deconstruction “as such,” de-nomination signifies the only event that is an exception to the event-character of thinking. Without detracting from the blindness that it brings into view, putting it to the test in writing, deconstruction situates itself beyond the event (retreat of deconstruction). It is carried beyond the event but is still nothing but the visibility without vision of eventality. What is the effect of this carrying that is nonidentical with itself? On the one hand, the closure of knowledge can be interpreted as an inauguration or a sort of beginning that demands that “other names” be heard “across the memory of the old signs.” It is certainly difficult, almost impossible, to avoid attaching meaning to “today,” that date without foundation that apparently marks the deadline when an “irreducible world to come” is announced “in the present” and “in the form of absolute danger” (a monster). On the other hand, since it no longer makes anything visible, deconstruction runs the risk of becoming interested in “itself,” thus

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producing a simulacrum of (collective) identity. The displacement that operates in its name provokes the desire for mastery of what cannot be mastered (a double genitive), stirs up passionate and institutional quarrels, turning conversations and discussions, misunderstandings and rectifications, strategies and persecutions, ruptures and reconciliations into spectacles. This is why, in the end, all that is needed is deconstruction that is not interested in “itself.” (No modesty, no disinterested gesture, no asceticism intervenes here.) What is written in the name of deconstruction must be written without “ever trying to make writing impregnable.” In this way, writing remains, as Blanchot taught us, “exposed to all the winds of a reductive commentary, always already taken up and held, or rejected.” Is that to say that writing would be impregnable by virtue of being exposed, or abandoned? […]

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Notes

Prologue 1. Jacques Derrida, “Ousia et grammè,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972); Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme¯ : Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 29–57. 2. The lecture was originally delivered in 1962; the 1968 French translation by François Fédier that Nancy refers to here was the first version to be published. It appeared under the title Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969) and in English as On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).—Trans. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy adds (in an e-mail exchange, May 13, 2020) that he is trying to show here that, at this time, Derrida was thinking differently from Heidegger by thinking not just another “concept of time” (a nonmetaphysical as opposed to metaphysical one) but by thinking inside the concept of present, which Heidegger calls the “vulgar” concept of time. This is the core of Derrida’s discussion in “Ousia and Gramme¯ ”: that differance is at work within the present, where something is already opening toward a “coming to presence” [venue en présence], a term Nancy points out is more his than Derrida’s. How remarkable, then, that in the same volume, Heidegger can be seen reconsidering in Time and Being the difference of Anwesenheit and Gegenwärtigkeit, in a way that can be seen as analogous to the “displacement” being made by Derrida.—Trans. 4. Most of these texts have been reworked for this volume. 5. Some of the translations in this volume have previously been published elsewhere; in some cases they have been slightly edited for consistency. I am grateful for the work of all my fellow translators—Bettina Bergo, Timothy Campbell, Céline Surprenant, Jonathan Derbyshire, and for help from Samir Haddad, Robert Harvey, Michael Naas, and Jean-Luc Nancy.—Trans.

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186 / notes to pages 5–29

 / Elliptical Sense 1. The original circumstances in which the piece was composed—a symposium at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum directed by Rodolphe Gasché in 1987—dictated that I speak about a particular text by Derrida. I chose “Ellipse,” the concluding essay of L’écriture et la différance (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 429–36; translated by Alan Bass as “Ellipsis,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 295–300. This implies a reading of that text throughout this essay. [That version appeared in an English translation by Peter Connor in Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988) and also in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 36–51. A later, substantially revised version appeared in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 180, no. 2, “Derrida” (April–June 1990): 325–47 and in JeanLuc Nancy, Une pensée finie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 269–96 and in an English translation by Jonathan Derbyshire in A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 112–29. The text that appears in Derrida, suppléments and in translation here is the revised version, with the addition of a preamble. With the exception of the preamble, this chapter appears by permission of Stanford University Press, © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.—Trans.] 2. À corps perdu—literally, “lost body”—indicates a precipitous, unconditional commitment. “Elle se jeta à corps perdu dans la bataille.” “She threw herself into the fray.”—Trans. 3. Rodolphe Gasché’s invitation to Nancy to deliver a lecture at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum. 4. See, too, the opening pages of Nancy’s Le poids d’une pensée (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1991)—Ed. 5. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 18; translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 23. 6. See Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972); translated by Alan Bass as Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 330.

 / Borborygmi 1. “Borborygmes” appeared in L’animal autobiographique, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999), 161–80, and in Jean-Luc Nancy, La pensée dérobée (Paris: Galilée, 1999). This translation by Jonathon Derbyshire appeared in Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 112–29, and appears here by permission of Stanford University Press, © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. 2. Everything that follows speaks, according to the rules of the game, of Derrida, from Derrida, or alongside him or his œuvre. I will keep textual references to a minimum; there would either have been too many or too few, and my concern here isn’t a philological one. I’m searching for the extremity at which a thought begins or exhausts itself, at which its subject is stripped bare. 3. The expression appears in Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 364; translated by Alan Bass as Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of

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notes to pages 29–38 / 187 Chicago Press, 1978), 247. On the intestine, the brain, and the tympanum, see Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), i–iv; translated by Alan Bass as Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), x–xv. 4. See “Circonfession,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 275; translated by Geoffrey Bennington as “Circumfession,” in Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 298: “the question of me, with respect to which all other questions appear derived.” 5. Nancy is playing with the sound of words here rather than with their meanings.—Trans. 6. It would be pointless to try to provide references. There are hundreds of them, unevenly distributed across texts and perhaps even across periods. Moreover, the two uses of “such,” the “normal” and the “retro,” often occur almost side by side. See, e.g., Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 14. 7. Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 7—as for the rest, I must pass it by, I forget it. But everybody knows what it concerns. 8. It is worth noting that although here Nancy credits Derrida with having raised the specter of “haunting,” the term was actually part of Nancy’s vocabulary long before it was adopted by Derrida. See “The Kategorein of Excess,” below.—Ed. 9. These last two terms are employed and discussed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Le sujet de la philosophie (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1979), 221ff. His theme finds certain echoes here. 10. Glas, 79–80; translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., as Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 67–68. 11. See a bit further on in Glas: “everything is always attacked from behind [de dos], written, described from behind [par derrière]. . . . Absolutely behind, the Derrière that will never have been seen face on, the Déjà preceded by nothing” (97 / 84). 12. La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 86; translated by Alan Bass as The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 78: the da counting for nothing with regard to the do or the dos, “as if behind the curtains,” still. 13. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Neimeyer, 1993), 132. 14. See also “My signature . . . cut off before the da” (Jacques Derrida, La vérité en peinture [Paris: Flammarion, 1978], 181; translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod as The Truth in Painting [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 158). 15. “And philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness” (Derrida, Writing and Difference, 92 / 59). 16. I can’t attempt to locate all occurrences; I’ll rest content with a hasty overview, ocular and erratic, which does, after all, constitute a test of pertinence. It might be informative to take the time to screen through the whole corpus, which would not leave less intact the game of a calculus that is proper or absentminded, unconscious, or surconscious, of Jacques Derrida around his texts and their behinds. 17. Derrida, The Post Card, 44, 171 / 38, 158. One might add a caption in small caps without punctuation: “plato behind freud” (422). 18. Jacques Derrida, “En cet moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici,” in Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 161; translated by Ruben Berezdivin and Peggy Kamuf as “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Psyche:

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188 / notes to pages 40–64 Inventions of the Other, Volume 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 145. 19. An allusion to Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (Leipzig: O. Wigard, 1882); translated by Steven T. Byington as The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual against Authority (London: A. C. Fifield, 1913)—Trans. 20. Jacques Derrida, “Moi—la psychanalyse,” in Psyché, 154; translated by Richard Klein as “Me—Psychoanalysis” in Psyche, 1:138. 21. See Derrida, “Donner la mort,” in L’éthique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pensée du don, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté and Michael Wetzel (Paris: Métailié, 1992), 59ff. 22. See Derrida, Psyché, 626–38. 23. The Post Card, 125 / 114.

 / The Judeo-Christian 1. “The Judeo-Christian” appeared in Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2003). This translation by Bettina Bergo appeared in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, edited by Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 214–34. 2. The term historial echoes Heidegger’s notion of authentic historicality, which is what Dasein is by its essence. It concerns the fundamental way in which we live our temporality. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), § 74, “The Basic Constitution of Historicality.”—Trans. 3. I will generally translate Nancy’s trait d’union as “hyphen,” which is standard in the translation of Lyotard. When Nancy speaks simply of trait, I will use “mark” or, occasionally, “hyphen,” according to context.—Trans. 4. In composition, the short or dashed stroke technique is found in the NeoImpressionism of Georges Seurat and in some of Van Gogh’s Seurat-influenced work. Short strokes of contrasting colors create a vibrant light.—Trans. 5. See Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1, Économie, parenté, société (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 199–202.—Trans. 6. A reference to Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).—Trans. 7. The French s’y sauver means to save oneself by dying and escaping one’s faith. The French s’en sauver means narrowly to escape death. In both cases, the French verb sauver contains a resonance with the signifying universe of Christology and soteriology, which the English “escape” does not convey.—Trans. 8. The paradoxical French reads, “La seule consistence est celle du fini en tant qu’il finit et qu’il se finit.”—Trans.

 / Derrida in Strasbourg 1. This chapter appeared in the collection published in connection with the session of the “Parlement des philosophes” devoted to Derrida in Strasbourg in June 2004. Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, et al., Penser à Strasbourg (Paris: Galilée / Ville de Strasbourg, 2004). The chapter was coauthored with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. 2. The hypokhâgne is the first year of the intensive two-year post-baccalauréat course taken by students who aim to study literature at the Grandes Écoles.—Trans.

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notes to pages 64–75 / 189 3. The dates are only rough indications; our memories aren’t always reliable. 4. For more on this episode, see Lucien Braun’s account: “À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida,” in Penser à Strasbourg, 21–26. 5. This was Hölderlin’s Antigone, translated and staged by Philippe and Michel Deutsch. Sarah Kofman and Jean-Christophe Bailly were also present, as they often were in those Strasbourg years. 6. Charles Grad was one of a number of deputies from Alsace-Lorraine elected to the German Reichstag in 1871 but who asserted their right to remain French.—Trans. 7. Susie Morgenstern, Le vampire du CDI (Paris: L’école des loisirs, 2018).—Trans. 8. “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 55–82. 9. Jacques Derrida, Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: Colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet–2 août 1980 (Paris: Galilée, 1981). 10. Derrida, Séminaire La peine de mort, Volume I (1999–2000) (Paris: Galilée, 2012) and Volume II (2000–2001) (Paris: Galilée, 2015).

 / J.D. 1. “J.D.” appeared in “Derrida,” ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, special issue of Cahier de l’Herne 83 (2004). 2. In Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony (1722), corps sonore refers to a vibrating system—for example, a vibrating string—which emits harmonies in addition to its fundamental frequency. He regarded it as the unique principle of music.—Trans. 3. Buffon, The Natural History of Birds, trans. William Smellie (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1793), 5:253. 4. Graphics prepared with the assistance of Ariella Azoulay, Héba Machhour, and Jan Shung.

 / Parallel Differences: Deleuze and Derrida 1. François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event: Together with The Vocabulary of Deleuze, ed. Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, trans. Kierna Aarons (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 103. 2. This essay first appeared in André Bernold and Richard Pinhas, Deleuze épars: Approches et portraits (Paris: Hermann, 2005). It was republished in Derrida, la tradition de la philosophie, ed. Marc Crépon and Frédéric Worms (Paris: Galilée, 2008). 3. Let me add: I once suggested to Deleuze and Derrida that they might respond to a few questions together. They accepted in principle. This was not meant to be an interview, but two parallel series of responses to the same questions. We set up this plan among ourselves in the spring of 1995, but Deleuze’s condition got much worse that summer and he did not recover. Derrida alluded to this episode in his homage in November 1995. (“I will have to set out all on my own,” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001]). The delay that rendered the whole project moot was my fault. I spent too long imagining the questions, intimidated by all the precision and delicacy involved. I was wrong, and I regret it. It should have gone ahead right away. But I also believe that this delay, this “too late” revealed a law: the present does not understand itself in the present; its own difference has to come to it from elsewhere. The difference between Deleuze and Derrida as proper difference—and, as a result, as identity that is divided in itself—of a

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190 / notes to pages 76–115 time, a present of thinking that would have been a decisive turning point, this difference remains to be thought. That’s not what I’m trying to do here. I’m sketching some drafts. I’m still late. But if I am still trying, despite everything, to make it to a rendezvous, it is out of fidelity to the missed meeting and also out of friendship for André Bernold, the tenacious artisan responsible for the present volume [Deleuze épars: Approches et portraits], who was a friend of them both. 4. We find Levinas at a certain distance from this sharing, on the edge of it, the third. 5. At the same time, Adorno was working out his Negative Dialectics under the heading of the “rigorous consciousness of non-identity.” 6. Robert, following Littré, recognizes différentiation as a homonym of différenciation, but specifies it for use in the mathematical sense (“An operation aimed at obtaining the differential [différentielle] of a function”). In addition, Robert introduces différance in a note at the end of the entry for différence, making explicit reference to Derrida and citing a passage from De la grammatologie. 7. See Deleuze’s lecture, “Méthode de dramatisation” in L’île déserte (Paris: Minuit, 2002). Deleuze, “The Method of Dramatization,” in Desert Islands, ed. David Lapoudade, trans. Mike Taormina (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 8. François Zourabichvili, Le vocabulaire de Deleuze (Paris: Ellipses, 2003), 24. 9. Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris: PUF, 1976), 114. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102.

 / Derrida da capo 1. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 93. 2. “Derrida da capo” appeared in French in Hermès 41, no. 1 (2005): 174–78. 3. A cosmotheoros is one who beholds or spectates on the cosmos.—Trans.

 / Mad Derrida: Ipso facto cogitans ac demens 1. “Mad Derrida: Ipso facto cogitans ac demens” was first published in Derrida pour les temps à venir, ed. René Major (Paris: Stock, 2007), 118–39. It first appeared in English in this translation by Céline Surprenant in Adieu Derrida, ed. Costas Douzinas (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 17–33. The translation is reproduced here by permission of SNCSC.

 / The Independence of Algeria and the Independence of Derrida 1. The meeting “Sur les traces de Jacques Derrida” was held in Algiers, 25–26 November 2006. This address was published in Derrida à Alger: Un regard sur le monde: Essais (Barsakh/Arles: Actes sud, 2008). 2. This is from Marges de la philosophie, published in 1968, another year that marked another turning point. See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 77.

 / Eloquent Stripes 1. “Éloquentes rayures” appeared in Annali della Fondazione europea del disegno, 2009/V, “Spettri di Derrida” (Geneva: Il Melangolo, 2010). Reprinted in Derrida et la

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notes to pages 116–21 / 191 question de l’art: Déconstructions de l’esthétique, ed. Adnen Jdey (Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2010). 2. Derrida, “Lignées,” in Mille e tre, cinq, with the drawings of Micaëla Henich (Bordeaux: William Blake, 1996), drawing 878. 3. “Eloquent stripes” is an inadequate translation of “Éloquentes rayures.” Rayure means stripe or scratch; the related raie means a line drawn on a piece of paper, a stripe in the coat of an animal, a groove cut in a piece of wood; rayon, which appears at the end of the essay, means a ray of light; the verb rayer means to cover a piece of paper with lines, to scratch the surface of a glass, to cross out, to erase, to strike a name off a list by drawing a line through it, and to disbar. Moreover, in the essay, these terms are closely related to ligne, meaning line, lignée, meaning lineage, and trait, meaning line, mark, trait, and characteristic. I have translated each occurrence according to its context.—Trans. 4. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 160; Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), ix–xxix. 5. Derrida, Prégnances: Lavis de Colette Deblé, peintures (Mont-de-Marsan: L’Atelier des Brisants, 2004), 19. 6. See what he says with regard to “philosophy and music” when he rejects “the temptation of a metalanguage with the theoretico-philosophical allure contaminated by some sort of objectification” (“This night in the night of night . . .”). Presentation at the Collège international de philosophie about La musique en respect of Marie-Louise Mallet, in Rue Descartes, November 2003, 125. 7. As we might expect whenever any of Jacques Derrida’s statements intersect or clearly cut across statements by Heidegger, things get complicated. See, for example, “Cartouches,” which is devoted to a series of drawings by Gérard Titus-Carmel, and the affirmation that a truth found “outside the work” “falls into ruin” (The Truth in Painting, 184–247). But before that one would have to carefully reread “Parergon” and the other texts in The Truth in Painting. 8. The Truth in Painting, 381. 9. Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 90ff. 10. “Lignées” in Mille e tre, cinq, drawing 922. 11. Angelus Silesius, Angelus Silesius: The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1986), 1:7, 39 and 1:115, 44. See also: The Ray Becomes the Sun My spirit once in God will eternal bliss become; Just as the sun’s own ray is sun within the sun. (4:136, 32)—Trans.

 / Derrida disant dix 1. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2. 2. “Derrida disant dix” appeared in another translation in A Decade after Derrida: Oxford Literary Review 36, no. 2 (2014): 277–80. 3. These seven lines are in English in the original.—Trans. 4. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 185. Nancy’s text mistakenly notes this passage as being quoted in “Ousia and Gramme¯,” another of the ten essays in Margins of Philosophy.—Trans.

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192 / notes to pages 122–27 5. Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xxiii. 6. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 25. 7. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 138. Translation modified. See also 142. 8. Specters of Marx, 142, 86. 9. Specters of Marx, 81. 10. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 17. 11. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 67. 12. Writing and Difference, 300. 13. Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 160. 14. Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 7, 29–30, 85. 15. Nancy included this citation: Novalis, Werke III, ed. Ewald Wasmuth (Heidelberg: Schneider Verlag, 1953), 861. However, the quotation is from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), §563 p. 304.—Trans. 16. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), xviii. The other mentions are on p. 42 and p. 224. 17. Jacques Derrida, Parages, ed. John P. Leavey; trans. Tom Conley et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 55, 136. In each case, it has to do with quotations from Blanchot. 18. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 181. 19. Jacques Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists!,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 64.

 / A Differant Orientation 1. This is the text of a lecture delivered at the colloquium “Derrida’s Orient,” Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, 2015. 2. “Signé l’ami d’un ‘ami de la Chine,’ ” preface by Marie-Claire Bergère to Aux origines de la Chine contemporaine: En hommage à Lucien Bianco (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). 3. Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 396. 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” in Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 257–310. Chapter 11. Emphasis added by Derrida. 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 246. 6. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 238.

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notes to pages 127–37 / 193 7. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 101. 8. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, IV, vol. 95, Überlegungen 7–11 (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 2014), 54. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn, trans. Brittain Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), §568, 280. 10. Derrida, Of Spirit, 90. 11. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 53–54.

 / Jouis anniversaire! 1. “Jouis anniversaire! (‘Scènes de la vie intérieure’: Pour la dixième anniversaire de la mort de Jacques Derrida)” was first published in L’entretien, no. 3, “Jacques Derrida” (Paris: Le Seuil / Le Sous-Sol, 2017). [“Scenes of the inner life” is a quotation from Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 126.—Trans.] 2. Derrida, Glas, 242. 3. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 300. Translation modified. 4. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 302. 5. Psyche, 50. Translation modified. 6. Psyche, 43. Quoting Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Collins, 1976), 16. 7. Derrida, Glas, 242. 8. Glas, 239. 9. Glas, 242. 10. Glas, 240. 11. Glas, 48. 12. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 342. 13. Glas, 243. 14. Glas, 76. 15. Glas, 167. 16. Glas, 82. 17. Glas, 150. 18. Glas, 144. 19. Glas, 242. 20. Glas, 22. 21. Glas, 237, 223, 24. 22. Glas, 24. 23. Glas, 25. 24. Glas, 239. 25. Glas, 238–39. 26. Glas, 56. 27. Glas, 60. 28. Glas, 260.

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194 / notes to pages 137–42 29. Glas, 66. 30. Glas, 68. 31. See Glas, 47. 32. Glas, 68. 33. Glas, 256. 34. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 64. 35. Jacques Derrida, Parages, ed. John P. Leavey, trans. Tom Conley et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 18. 36. Derrida, Glas, 201–2. 37. Glas, 1. 38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 90. 39. Derrida, Glas, 65. 40. Glas, 245–46. 41. Glas, 245–46. 42. Glas, 63–64. Translation modified. 43. Glas, 70. 44. Glas, 107. 45. Glas, 62. 46. Glas, 67, 66. 47. Glas, 66. 48. Glas, 68. 49. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6. The Derrida text reads “a whole with indeterminable borders,” but Nancy’s quote includes “a hole with determinable borders.” See Alan Bass’s footnote on the same page, locating this line in the context of Derrida’s polemic with Lacan.—Trans. 50. Derrida, Glas, 149, 240. 51. Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 99. 52. Derrida, Glas, 110. 53. Derrida, Dissemination, 153. 54. Derrida, Glas, 111. 55. Glas, 47. 56. Glas, 85. 57. Glas, 252, 251. 58. Glas, 17. 59. Glas, 240. 60. Glas, 104–5. 61. Glas, 105. 62. Glas, 63. 63. Glas, 255. 64. Glas, 42. 65. Jacques Derrida, Béliers: Le dialogue ininterrompu; Entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 60. 66. Derrida, Glas, 74, 159, 121. 67. Glas, 89.

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notes to pages 142–49 / 195 68. Glas, 89–90. 69. Glas, 138. 70. Derrida, Parages, 33–34. 71. Derrida, Glas, 17. 72. Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens, 9. 73. Derrida, Glas, 164, 195. 74. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 394. 75. Derrida, Glas, 179–80. 76. Glas, 1, 111, 64. 77. Glas, 129. 78. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 63. 79. Derrida, Glas, 226. 80. Glas, 112. 81. Glas, 168. 82. Glas, 249, 187, 228. 83. Glas, 30. 84. Glas, 184, 207, 235–36, 151. 85. Glas, 129, 201. 86. Glas, 167. 87. Glas, 121. 88. Glas, 148.

 / Derridapolitics 1. The title of the conference, organized by the Catholic University of Chile and Diego Portales University and held between November 27 and 30, 2017, was “Derrida político: Responsabilidad, perdón, justicia.” Initially, Nancy had proposed a different title for his Zoom presentation—“De l’obscurité du politique”—but at the last moment changed it to “Derridapolitique.” My thanks to Andrea Potestá for this information. This chapter does not appear in the French edition of Derrida, suppléments but was added to the English edition at the author’s request.—Trans. 2. Here I take up and reorganize the talk I improvised for the colloquium in Santiago de Chile in November 2017. But I do it on the basis of various Derrida quotations that I had gathered for that occasion. I’m including them again here as I did in that lecture, that is, without citation other than the titles of the books, since I haven’t looked up the pages and editions. To be honest, there are probably times when I haven’t remembered the quotation quite accurately. I hope my readers will forgive me. Inevitably, and without meaning to, I’ve also modified the original version here and there. 3. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso Books, 2020). 4. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, chap. 10. 5. Juan Manuel Garrido, “Self-Determination and Personal Identity: A Note on the Prenormative Roots of Moral Action,” CR: The New Centennial Review 17, no. 2, “Subjectivities” (Fall 2017): 23. In English in the original.—Trans. 6. Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronnell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 261.

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196 / notes to pages 150–74 7. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, “The Phantom Friend Returning,” 109n13. 8. Politics of Friendship, 294. 9. Politics of Friendship, 295. 10. Politics of Friendship, 298. 11. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 32. 12. Derrida visited Czechoslovakia in January 1982 and was arrested after an unofficial philosophy seminar organized by Charter 77. He was in prison for three days.—Trans.

 / Homage to Jacques Derrida: An Interview with Laure Adler 1. This interview appeared as part of a week of programming devoted to Jacques Derrida in the “Hors Champ” series by Laure Adler on “France Culture,” October 14, 2014. It can be heard at https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/hors-champs/semaine -speciale-jacques-derrida-25-jean-luc-nancy. This interview does not appear in the French edition of Derrida, suppléments but was added to the English edition at the author’s request. Jean-Luc Nancy adds: “Laure Adler sent me the complete transcript of our interview. The only corrections I made were of certain details that could have made this or that passage unintelligible. I did not intervene at all in the awkwardness that afflicts all transcriptions because they try to fix in place something that was fluid and fleeting. I might add also that it was about a year after this interview that I published Banalité de Heidegger” (Paris: Galilée, 2016). 2. Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

 / What Is Deconstruction? An Interview with Federico Ferrari 1. This interview was published in Italian on Doppiozero (https://www.doppiozero .com/materiali/che-cose-la-decostruzione), on January 6, 2020. The translation of Ferrari’s questions into English is by Timothy Campbell. This chapter does not appear in the French edition of Derrida, suppléments but was added to the English edition at the author’s request. 2. Paul Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté: Finitude et culpabilité (Paris: Éd. Points, 2009); Paul Ricoeur, “Le symbole donne à penser,” Esprit 275, no. 7/8 (August 1959): 60–76. 3. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196. 4. The essay appears in the present volume.—Trans. 5. Jacques Derrida, Life Death, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf; trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 6. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 7. Federico Ferrari, L’anarca: La libertà del singolo tra anarchia e nichilismo (Milan: Mimesis, 2014). Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

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notes to pages 175–83 / 197

Afterword: Nothing to See, Nothing to Do 1. Rien à voir appeared in La part de l’oeil, no. 7 (1991). 2. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 37. 3. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 329. 4. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1990), 56. My translation.—Trans. 5. Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle, 50. 6. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 139. My translation.—Trans. 7. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 53–54. 8. Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 94. 9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 43. Translation modified. 10. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 117. My translation.—Trans. 11. Nancy, Finite Thinking, 109. 12. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 4. 13. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al., rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 73. 14. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, 124–25. Translation modified. 15. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 19. 16. Derrida, La voix et le phénomène, 115. My translation.—Trans. 17. “The future can be anticipated only in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can therefore only announce itself, present itself, in the species of monstrosity.” Derrida, Of Grammatology, 5. 18. Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 76. My translation.—Trans.

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202 / biblio graphy Silesius, Angelus. Angelus Silesius: The Cherubinic Wanderer. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1986. Stirner, Max. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Leipzig: O. Wigard, 1882. ———. The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual against Authority. Translated by Steven T. Byington. London: A. C. Fifield, 1913. Zourabichvili, François. Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event: Together with The Vocabulary of Deleuze. Edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith. Translated by Kieran Aarons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

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