Derrida: Writing Events 9781472546357, 9781847062475, 9781441102010

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of ‘Writing Obsession’ was published as ‘Obsessional Writing’ in Textual Practice 18.1 (2004): 47–63. ‘Writing Friendship: Agamben and Derrida’ originally appeared as ‘Law of Friendship: Agamben and Derrida’ in New Formations 62 (2007): 89–105. ‘Raelity’ first appeared on-line in Culture Machine 2 (2000) (http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk). I am grateful for the permission to reproduce this material here. I would like to thank a few people who have commented on draft work, responded with helpful remarks at various events, assisted in the prior publication of parts of this book or shown encouragement more generally. Among them are Avital Ronell, Sean Gaston, William Watkin, Peggy Kamuf, Nicholas Royle, J. Hillis Miller, Peter Boxall, Peter Nicholls, David Glover and Gary Hall. Chris Shilling was hugely supportive during his time at Portsmouth. Finally, special thanks are due to Samuel Weber for the incredible kindness and generosity he has shown over several years – it is difficult to convey my gratitude to him.

Introduction: Writing the Event, or, Citations from an Archive of the Future

Thinking the Event In his interview with Giovanni Borradori conducted just a few weeks after the attacks in the United States on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,1 Jacques Derrida dwells on Borradori’s opening suggestion that ‘September 11 (le 11 septembre) gave us the impression of a major event’ (p. 85). Throughout the dialogue, Derrida offers a clear and compelling account of what is at stake in analysing this ‘event’. With great incision, he explores how ‘the impression of a major event’ must be understood in terms of the intersection of highly determined political, military and media interests and powers. In particular, the ‘ritual incantation’ of the name to which the ‘event’ was so quickly reduced – ‘September 11’, ‘9/11’ – sought at once to ‘neutralize the traumatism and come to terms with it through a “work of mourning”’ (p. 93), while at the same time maintaining a mechanical repetition, ‘a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain’, which in the end ‘admits to not knowing what it’s talking about’ (p. 86). (Perhaps also, we might add, this ‘ritual incantation’ served, whether intentionally or not, to cultivate an all too familiar and increasingly banal reaction or nonreaction of ‘shock’ in the face of terrorist ‘atrocities’, allowing certain vested interests in the government, military and elsewhere to steal a march on the interpretative process and occupy the rhetorical high ground.) Despite the fact that the United States had not been attacked on American soil for almost two centuries, Derrida wonders about the singularity and surprise of this event, given the numerous attempts to target American interests abroad (Derrida notes in passing the difficulty, today, of distinguishing fully between the ‘national territory’ of the United States and ‘American interests’ more generally); given, too, the infamous Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (while McVeigh

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and Nichols were US nationals, the perpetrators of ‘9/11’ were also, in a sense, home-grown, trained on American soil, launching the attack from ‘within’ by utilizing ‘US’ technology, being themselves ‘produced’ by a longer-term background of American support and training in Afghanistan and elsewhere during the Cold War); and given the previous attempt to blow up the Twin Towers in 1993. He asks not only why the CIA and FBI did not see it coming, as filmmakers uncannily seemed to do (the release of a number of Hollywood blockbusters was halted soon after the attacks, since these movies contained elements which resonated all too uncomfortably with the events in New York and Washington), but also why this ‘event’ might qualify for ‘major’ status in contrast to ‘quantitatively comparable killings, or even those greater in number’ which ‘never produce such an intense upheaval when they occur outside European and American space’ (p. 92). Since what is ‘major’ or distinctive about ‘9/11’ is not, strictly speaking, either the motivation for the attacks, the means and technology used (hijacking aircraft), or the size of the atrocity, Derrida embarks on a qualitative analysis which explains the events of ‘9/11’ as not only a new phenomenon occurring ‘at the end of the Cold War’ but also a distant effect of the Cold War itself, albeit an effect that ‘appears infinitely more dangerous, frightening, terrifying than the Cold War’ (p. 99); as an act of terrorist aggression which, when one seeks to bring out its definition, reintroduces the question of so-called state terrorism, including that pursued by the United States; and, in the last analysis, as one notably spectacular incident of quasi-suicidal autoimmunity. Autoimmunity is the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts as such, therefore resulting in an immune response against its own ‘self’. For Derrida, autoimmunity thus names a process in which, while seeking to protect and defend itself, a thing actually violates and does violence to itself, so that, in what may look like a further twist, ‘an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’ (p. 94). Furthermore, since the upshot is at once a violent non-recognition of the ‘other’ in the self, but also an inextricable, antagonistic dependency of sorts upon the very same ‘other’ that is projected and denied, the effect of such autoimmuni-

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tary processes is ‘to produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome’ (p. 99). Thus Derrida analyses the shared quasi-suicidal traits that in fact define the divisible or deconstructible ‘identities’ of the ostensibly polarized adversaries in the scenography of ‘9/11’. Despite the highly complex analysis that this understanding of autoimmunity on a world-wide stage produces, Derrida does not hesitate to express his unconditional condemnation of the attacks, and moreover states: [If] I had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well, I would. Despite my very strong reservations about the American, indeed, European, political posture, about the ‘international antiterrorist’ coalition, despite all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy, international law, and the very international institutions that the states of this coalition themselves founded and supported up to a certain point, I would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the ‘political,’ democracy, international law, international institutions, and so on. (pp. 113–14) What Derrida ultimately rejects in what he calls the ‘strategy’ of the ‘bin Laden effect’ is ‘not only the cruelty, the disregard for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism’. It is ‘the fact that such actions and such discourse open onto no future and, in my view have no future’ (p. 113). In contrast, while the European tradition has fostered international institutions and law that remain deeply flawed and are frequently ineffectual, these still provide the occasion for a deconstructive affirmation of the democracy to come, not as a programmable or foreseeable future, but as an opening occasioned in fact by a continuing exposure to the ‘aporia of the demos’. Between the ‘incalculable singularity of anyone, before any “subject,” the possible undoing of the social bond by a secret to be respected, beyond all citizenship, beyond every “state,” indeed every “people,”’ and ‘the universality of rational calculation, of the equality of citizens before the law, the social bond of being together’ we find the impossible

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there is of the ‘demos’. This is ‘ineffaceable’ and yet, beyond its own non-closure, such an impossible there is exposes us ‘to time, to what comes upon us, to what arrives or happens, to the event’, and, Derrida adds, to ‘history, if you will, a history to be thought completely otherwise than from a teleological horizon, indeed from any horizon at all’ (p. 120). What is interesting here is this. On the one hand, Derrida tells us, the event – precisely in order to be worthy of its name – implies an irreplaceable and unmasterable singularity, a pure idiomaticity (strictly speaking, beyond even the idiom) that evades its own appropriation by any given language, discourse or context, and which therefore dislocates the interpretative horizon on which it is hoped or expected to appear. (‘A major event should be so unforeseeable and irruptive that it disturbs even the horizon of the concept or essence on the basis of which we believe we recognize an event as such’ (p. 90).) Yet this ‘absolute surprise’ and ‘unanticipatable novelty’ (p. 91) doesn’t simply place the event forever outside the ‘world’ which we inhabit, a ‘world’ in and of which we speak, the ‘world’ where we ‘act’ and ‘know’. Instead, it is precisely what is unappropriable in the event (in Derrida’s own example, the irresolvable-uncontainable aporia which marks the event and advent of the ‘demos’) that in fact charges it with world-opening force. This is one reason why ‘9/11’ leaves the impression of a major event. As Derrida points out, if in the aftermath of the attacks the Americans, and indeed the entire world, could have been reassured beyond all doubt that the destruction of the Twin Towers constituted an absolutely unrepeatable violence, an outermost horizon of evil that would never again be crossed, the ‘work of mourning’ might have been both a smoother and more short-lived process. Yet ‘9/11’ remains an event to the extent that it cannot be consigned to the past, but continues to inflict upon us the traumatism of the ‘to come’. The event of ‘9/11’ is the event of this ‘to come’. (‘It is the future that determines the unappropriability of the event, not the present or the past’ (p. 97); ‘An event always inflicts a wound in the everyday course of history, in the ordinary repetition and anticipation of experience’ (p. 96); ‘One day it might be said: “September 11” – those were the (“good”) old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous!

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What size, What height! There has been worse since. Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this . . .’ (p. 102).) Thus, ‘9/11’ may be ‘an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar’, but the archiving of the event does not so much store, deposit, consign or contain it, as tremble with its very impression (even if the date or datedness of ‘9/11’ seeks to fix, stabilize, memorialize or amortize the event, at the same time this designation harbours the prospect of a terrifying, intensifying, transforming repeatability). And this impression is itself an event, as Derrida insists (p. 88). (At one point in the interview, he notes that ‘the real “terror”’ of ‘9/11’ came not so much from the actual attacks but rather from the exploitation of their ‘image’ in the media ‘by the target itself’ (p. 108), so that the event was produced as much by the target – the USA – as by the Islamist hijackers.) It is not just, as Derrida writes of the archive in Archive Fever, that there is ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’ (p. 12) – an extrinsic support, a detachable prosthetic which the event in its irreplaceable singularity threatens to absolutely exceed and thus incinerate – since the archiving of the event in precisely its impossible transaction with the event is itself . . . something of an event. What we are thinking of here, between the impression and the event, recalls, in Derrida’s Paper Machine,2 the impossibility of thinking of paper – until recently, and perhaps still today, the means we privilege for recording our impression of events – as simply passive and secondary in relation to the act or event of writing. Here, paper is not so much a historically circumscribed technological convenience, an extrinsic support for the psychic or imaginative process which joins itself to bodies and materials only in order that, through writing, evanescent thoughts (events of thinking) may be concretized or ‘stored’. Instead, for Derrida, paper itself provides the very figure for considering the paradoxical divisibility of its host of its traits, feuilles or folds. In particular, Derrida regards paper’s supposed function as a subjectile or bodily support for the traces or marks ‘that may come along and affect it from the outside’ to be part of a ‘discourse’ that is ‘heavy with . . . assumptions’ (pp. 42–3). This ‘discourse’ becomes

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problematic at the point when we ask whether, when we say ‘paper’, we mean ‘the empirical body that bears this conventional name’ (my italics) or whether we are ‘already resorting to a rhetorical figure’ (p. 52). The problem is apparent, in other words, when we come to understand that the notion of ‘an empirical body that bears’ the name of paper already gives itself over to a figure of speech, so that the reference to the ‘empirical’ here is not in fact supported merely ‘empirically’. How could ‘paper’ support the figure of itself as (a) body? The advent of paper is therefore an event to the extent that the impression it bears is also in some way unbearable (it cannot itself bear it), and this transaction between the bearable and unbearable, like the aporia of the demos, leaves open a future (for paper, says Derrida, whatever we may come to mean by that term beyond a ‘discourse . . . heavy with assumptions’, and perhaps beyond the apparent waning of a papercentric era). This notion of transaction significantly recurs throughout the interview: unconditional hospitality as an absolute openness to the other which itself transcends the political, the juridical and perhaps even the ethical, must inevitably transact with certain ethico-political and legal conditions in order for an effective hospitality – a determinate giving – to take place. Here, the unconditional ‘risks being nothing at all’ unless it enters into this transaction, which is the place of ‘political, juridical, and ethical responsibilities’ – yet such a transaction between the conditional and unconditional, like that which takes place between the impression and the event, is itself ‘each time unique, like an event’ (pp. 129–30). Similarly, the problem of sovereignty which lies at the heart of our thinking about those political formations and transformations named by the nation-state and, indeed, by cosmopolitanism and international law calls us to ‘reconcile unconditional auto-nomy (the foundation of any pure ethics, of the sovereignty of the subject, of the ideal of emancipation and of freedom’ with ‘the hetero-nomy that . . . imposes itself upon all unconditional hospitality worthy of this name, upon the very welcoming of the other as other’ (pp. 131–32). It is this transaction ‘between the imperative for autonomy and the imperative for heteronomy, the two being equally imperious’ (p. 132) that, rather like the aporia of demos, opens a way for the responsibility and event of a decision. Such transactions, then, force the

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conditional and unconditional to transact in an entirely necessary yet somewhat impossible way, to reconcile the irreconcilable, and it is this that produces an event. Here is Derrida, in the ‘Autoimmunity’ interview, struggling with this thought of the event once again: The ‘impression’ cannot be dissociated from all the affects, interpretations, and rhetoric that have at once reflected, communicated and ‘globalized’ it, from everything that also and first of all formed, produced, and made it possible. The ‘impression’ thus resembles ‘the very thing’ that produced it. Even if the so-called ‘thing’ cannot be reduced to it. Even if, therefore, the event itself cannot be reduced to it. The event is made up of the ‘thing’ itself (that which happens or comes) and the impression (itself at once ‘spontaneous’ and ‘controlled’) that is given, left, or made by the so-called ‘thing.’ We could say that the impression is ‘informed,’ in both sense of the word: a predominant system gave it form, and this form then gets run through an organized information machine (language, communication, rhetoric, image, media, and so on). This informational apparatus is from the very outset political, technical, economic. But we can and, I believe, must (and this duty is at once philosophical and political) distinguish between the supposedly brute fact, the ‘impression,’ and the interpretation. It is of course just about impossible, I realize, to distinguish the ‘brute’ fact from the system that produces the ‘information’ about it. But it is necessary to push the analysis as far as possible. (pp. 88–9) In this passage, the event and the impression are brought into a highly complicated relation of antagonistic, unstable and almost excessive intimacy. Although we should always seek to distinguish the ‘brute fact’ of the event from the ‘impression’ that is produced of it by the ‘organized information machine’, nevertheless this impression is itself part of the event, as much indissociable and ‘spontaneous’ as ‘controlled’ and ‘informed’, Derrida tells us. (The impression thus carries within itself a divisible trait that redoubles the inextricable divisibility of impression and event.) Indeed, to ‘distinguish the “brute” fact from the system that produces the “information” about it

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requires us to assume our philosophical and political duties’, Derrida tells us: ‘We must do everything possible to make this new “disorder” as intelligible as possible’ (p. 110). Yet presumably the word ‘duty’ is chosen carefully by Derrida, as a term which, everywhere in his own thought, would come to be associated with the conditional rather than the unconditional. Much less than directing us towards a ‘pure’ and unmediated experience of the event, this dutiful undertaking once more calls for a complex transaction, an irreconcilable reconciliation, between the conditional and unconditional, between the unappropriable and the call for a ‘movement of appropriation’ which must nevertheless always falter somewhat at the ‘border’ or ‘frontier’, calling for the sense or impression of incomprehension that is itself, first of all, an event (p. 90), giving rise to a new impression, transacting riskily between acknowledged incomprehension and the call for another intelligibility, producing itself as event.

The Archive and the Impression ‘But what is an impression in this case?’ (p. 88). It is in a ‘seemingly “empiricist” style’, Derrida tells us, ‘though aiming beyond empiricism’ (and we’ve already questioned whether ‘empiricism’ has its origins in the empirical), that he deploys the term ‘impression’: ‘as an empiricist of the eighteenth century would quite literally say, that there was an “impression” there, and the impression of what you call in English – and this is not fortuitous – a “major event”’ (p. 88). Of course, ‘impression’ is a term that comes to Derrida, somewhat unexpectedly, as he responds to a call from Elisabeth Roudinesco, placed several years before the ‘Autoimmunity’ interview, to participate in an international colloquium on ‘Memory: The Question of Archives’. Derrida thus speaks of how this term comes to inhabit the title of a lecture that was to be revised and published as Archive Fever:3 I undoubtedly owe you, at the beginning of this preamble, a first explication concerning the word impression, which risks, in my title, being somewhat enigmatic. I became aware of this afterward: when Elisabeth Roudinesco asked me on the telephone for a provisional title, so as indeed to send the program of this conference to press,

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almost a year before inscribing and printing on my computer the first word of what I am saying to you here, the response I then improvised ended up in effect imposing the word impression. (p. 25) Impression: a word that is itself conjured, and conjures itself, between surprise and inscription, between the provisional and the enigmatic, between that which is improvized and that which imposes itself, between writing and event, between the other’s call and the press, between initial incomprehension and a text to come. A text on the archive and the event – of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, the archive takes place in a situation of ‘domiciliation’ or ‘house arrest’ (p. 2), abiding in a more or less permanent dwelling which, however, marks the ‘institutional passage’ from the private to the public but not necessarily from the secret to the non-secret (the archived text may – indeed, cannot but – always keep in reserve what in its attestation can never be reduced or exposed to mere ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’). The archive is formed through acts of consignation which entail not only ‘assigning residence or . . . entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate’ but also ‘the act of consigning through gathering together signs’ (p. 3), about which more will be said later on in this book. Although it is undoubtedly the aim of consignation to ‘coordinate a single corpus, in a system of synchrony in which all elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration’ (p. 3), nevertheless this very same feature of the archive renders it ‘eco-nomic’ in a ‘double sense’: ‘it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion’. Thus, every archive is at once ‘conservative’ and ‘institutive’, at once highly traditional and, in making its own law, radically inventive or revolutionary (p. 7). Relatedly, the archive is not merely the passive receptacle and, thus, external substrate or support of what comes to be archived. Rather, it makes its own law in a situation which is neither simply autonomous or autofoundational (for how can law found itself in a lawful fashion?) nor crudely heteronomous (the archive can never simply found its own law, yet nonetheless Derrida asks us to think of the archive as not merely the inactive recipient of the event or advent of the other). Similarly, and according to a similar transaction ‘between two orders or, rather, between order and its beyond’ (‘Autoimmunity’, p. 133),

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the very production or event of psychoanalysis is not indifferent to the conditions of its archivization and archivable impression. Writing of ‘the geo-techno-logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable’ (‘MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail’) (p. 16), Derrida says: I will limit myself to a mechanical remark: this archival earthquake would not have limited its effects to the secondary recording, to the printing and to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (p. 16) Although, as Derrida tells us in ‘Autoimmunity’, the event is to be thought of as irreducible to its ‘impression’, nevertheless the conditions of archivization transact with the very event or advent of psychoanalysis in order to produce its event. A few pages later, Derrida goes on: [we] should not close our eyes to the unlimited upheaval under way in archival technology. It should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event. It conditions not only the form or the structure that prints, but the printed content of the printing: the pressure of the printing, the impression, before the division between the printed and the printer. (p. 18)

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Here, once more, the impression, in the sense of the very pressure of printing, names an intimate, near incestuous friction, a dynamic transaction (reconcilable-unreconcilable) between the printer and printed, between the event (of psychoanalysis) and its impression ‘in print’. This pressure of the impression is at once singular in its occurrence, finding or making ‘its trace in the unique instant’ (p. 99) where momentarily one can not be separated from the other (printerprinted); and yet this apparent synchronicity which might otherwise translate the archive’s dream of a ‘single corpus’ or ‘unity of an ideal configuration’ is disrupted at the origin, since the impression is always divisible, repeatable, iterable: ‘The possibility of the archiving trace, this simple possibility, can only divide the uniqueness. Separating the impression from the imprint’ (p. 100). The impression, in other words, ‘would have been possible . . . only insofar as its iterability, that is to say, its immanent divisibility, the possibility of its fission, haunted it from the origin’ (p. 100). If I am here citing copiously from Derrida, in order perhaps to fashion a text that archives the traces of his thought according to a law which must be both conservative and institutive, but which also seeks to conjure an impression of the event of his thinking, then a just few more quotations may be called for: Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective preknowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, as I will explain later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. (p. 29) It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is the question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. (p. 36)

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For Derrida, the notion of the impression of an event as at once distinct and indistinct from the event, a part of that of which, in other senses, it is not a part, itself may be considered by some to amount to a weak concept or subconcept; yet the complex logic of the impression as it unfolds painstakingly in the texts we are reading here is in fact crucial to a thinking which, instead of consigning the event to an irreplaceable and irretrievable past, or indeed to an indivisible instant or unique present, entails perhaps the very possibility of a concept of the future – that is, a future for the event as the ‘to come’, insofar as it remains restlessly worked or bound into a complex relationship with its ‘impression’. Here, as we have already said, the archive of the event is not thinkable merely as a stable and exterior site of consignation or depositing, not least since the very idea of the archive calls for new forms of thinking which resist the notion that we might call upon ‘an archivable concept of the archive’. Thus, the archive and the concept of the archive do not find their origin or foundation – or indeed their future – in what is archivable. For Derrida, one might even say, this makes the archive, for us, today and tomorrow, an event, perhaps. (As such, Derrida once more moves us away from the idea that an archive simply accommodates, violates, monumentalizes, amortizes the event.) Certainly in Archive Fever, the question of the psychoanalytic archive is bound to a thinking of the psychoanalytic event to come, an event which not only marks ‘in advance’ the entire landscape of our intellectual, disciplinary, historical and cultural ‘archive’, but which is still destined to transform it: I wish to speak of the impression left by Freud, by the event which carries his family name, the nearly unforgettable and incontestable, undeniable impression (even and above all for those who deny it) that Sigmund Freud will have made on anyone, after him, who speaks of him or speaks to him, and who must then, accepting it or not, knowing it or not, be thus marked: in his or her culture and discipline, whatever it may be, in particular philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, and more precisely here, because we are speaking of memory and of archive, the history of texts and discourses, political history, legal history, the history of ideas or of culture, the history of religion and religion itself, the history of institutions and of sciences, in particular the history of this institutional and scientific

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project called psychoanalysis. Not to mention the history of history, the history of historiography. In any given discipline, one can no longer, one should no longer be able to, thus one no longer has the right or the means to claim to speak of this without having been marked in advance, in one way or another, by this Freudian impression. (p. 31) Thus, as Archive Fever turns its attention to an extended reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, the very event of Yerushalmi’s book is viewed by Derrida in terms of ‘dramatic turn’ and ‘stroke of theater’ (p. 37) which, in a rather sudden and surprising way, threatens to unravel a painstaking work of scholarship fit for the archive itself. This comes at the point when Yerushalmi departs from the classical norms and conventions of scholarly writing in order to apostrophize inventively according to a complex fiction which hails Freud’s spectre: ‘Professor Freud, at this point I find it futile to ask whether, genetically or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science; that we shall know, if it is at all knowable, only when much future work has been done. Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined’ (cited in Archive Fever, p. 37, with italics added by JD). This question of psychoanalysis as perhaps a Jewish science (since as Yerushalmi points out it can only be decided in the future) radically transforms ‘the relationship of such a science to its own archive’, transforming in turn the meaning of the terms or concepts being used here, and, for that matter, their (conceptual) relationship to one another: ‘science’, ‘archive’ (‘Jewish’, too) (p. 45). Orienting them – even and especially according to their ‘rich and complex history’– towards an unprogrammable future. Or, rather, opening them to it. Thus, the archive, the very ‘structure of the archive’, is ‘spectral’ (p. 84) in the sense that, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Specters of Marx, it begins by coming from the future.

Singularity and the Event This laboriously worked body of citations from Derrida has been crafted in order to contribute to a certain line of debate that in fact

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crosses and divides the entire humanities. One way to capture a sense of the controversy in question is to turn our attention to Timothy Clark’s recent book, The Poetics of Singularity.4 For Clark, the concept or quasi-concept of singularity – a term which involves us in a reading of Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, Gadamer and, more recently, contemporary critics such as J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge – has provided the means for those within a broadly deconstructive tradition to oppose or resist the ‘cultural politics paradigm’ which today seems largely to dominate the entire field of interpretation. For Clark, this paradigm may be understood in terms of acts of interpretation where the chosen object of study – the literary text, for example – is in the last analysis referred and reduced to its cultural or historical ‘context’, or located in terms of a ‘politics of identity’, which gives texts meaning in terms of ‘ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, class or gender’ (p. 1). Such a paradigm, suggests Clark, might be judged to stealthily reintroduce ‘intellectual dogmatism’ in its very manner of proceeding, as well as provide a cover for ‘the premature good conscience of much politically engaged criticism’ (p. 2). ‘Singularity’, meanwhile, has established the means to ‘affirm an understanding of the “literary”’ in terms that refuse ‘to be conceptualisable or mastered’ by the paradigmatic framework of ‘culture’ itself (p. 1): ‘Singularity names the specific being of a text or work, inflected so as to underline its resistance to being described in general categories or concepts’ (p. 2). Singularity, therefore, may be allied in certain of its key features to that dimension of Derrida’s thinking about the event which emphasizes what is ‘unforeseeable and irruptive’, the ‘absolute surprise’ and ‘unanticipatable novelty’ that makes an event worthy of its name, and yet, Clark notes, the argument ‘that literature should finally be valued rather because it is inassimilable to fixed stances or cultural programmes’ than because it might be understood in terms of its cultural significance is ‘now becoming rather shop-soiled’ (p. 1). Although singularity has ‘borne the main weight of the argument’ in books like Hillis Miller’s Black Holes (1999) or Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004),5 Clark worries that the argument is sometimes made ‘with a rather vaguely self-justifying force’ (p. 2). Singularity is ‘good’ because it

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evades or disrupts paradigmatic mastery, but for this very reason the analysis of singularity must be brought up short if one is to avoid repeating the paradigmatic approach of describing the object according to ‘categories or concepts’ which become more ‘general’. The singularity of singularity, in other words, can tend to encourage a rather sterile opposition in which the impasse between ‘culturalist’ and ‘deconstructive’ approaches sediments into mutually self-justifying hostility, and in which deconstructive thought risks giving way or giving ground on the question or definition of the ‘historical’, the ‘political’ and so forth. Now, it is certainly not my interest here to reappropriate these terms in their classical meanings for the deconstructive tradition, or, for that matter, to broker a deal between two very different modes of enquiry. Rather, through close attention to some relevant texts by Derrida, I simply want to demonstrate that the thinking of singularity, the singularity of the event for example (and, for Derrida, what ‘event’ could not be ‘singular’, what ‘singularity’ could not be an ‘event’?), certainly need not come at the price of a poorly thought-out antagonism towards all that might fall outside the ‘pure’ event construed as unique and aparadigmatic. What we have learnt from Archive Fever and the ‘Autoimmunity’ interview about the impression and the event, the event and the archive, does not so much (if at all) reconcile the event of a text with the question of the context that receives and interprets it, as reformulate the very question of the ‘event’ so that the impression and the archive form an inextricable part of its thinking. This, in turn, equips us – indeed, requires us – to carry a deconstructive thinking of the event into the very ‘archive’ of all of our ‘culture’ and ‘disciplines’ whatever they may be – including, as Derrida puts it, ‘the history of texts and discourses, political history, legal history, the history of ideas or of culture, the history of religion and religion itself, the history of institutions and of sciences . . . Not to mention the history of history, the history of historiography’. My, how ‘history’ is repeated here! – but a repetition which, as it opens onto new horizons, indeed horizons without horizon, transforms the meaning of the term it repeats, as something of an event, perhaps. ****

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Derrida: Writing Events

In a number of different ways, the essays that make up the chapters in this book continue to think about how one might ‘write’ the ‘event’, or how writing the event may come down to a very strange practice of conjuring citations from an archive of the future. In the first chapter, ‘Archives and Anthologies’ it is the donation of a Cixous archive to the Bibliothèque nationale de France that sets the scene for Derrida’s own thinking about the limits of the predominant conception of an archive as merely a deposit, stock or store. The encrypted writing of Cixous’s letters, notebooks and dream journals smuggles contraband into the library, addressing itself to the guardian, the reader and indeed the ‘unconscious’ of the archive as, precisely, the ‘unavowable-avowed’. This singular archive, then, prizes open a metonymic series – thesis, book, library, institution, law, statute, state deposit, nation-state – in order to expose the library to what is ‘unconditional’, beyond or despite the title and entitlement of the ‘national’ lodged in the BNF. Since the corpus thus ‘remains immeasurably vaster than the library supposed to hold it’, this strange relation between the part and the whole recalls the problem of the anthological (or of flower-gathering) in Glas, as that of a certain ‘transcendental excrescence’, a maddening yet irreducible supplementarity which nonetheless opens the library to the unsaveable-saving of the Cixous deposit, and thus to the ‘to come’, perhaps even the book ‘to come’ of which Derrida writes in Paper Machine. Against the backdrop of seemingly immense changes in the spheres of technology and media, such a ‘book’ would itself make a new ‘impression’: that is, at once an event and yet also something of a ‘restructuration’ in which, as Derrida puts it, perhaps ‘the oldest form survives’. Picking up on such themes, the next chapter in the book, ‘Writing Obsession’, seeks to respond to claims about the radical and decisive transformation of media, technology and communications in contemporary times, by proposing a theory of obsessional writing in which the latter manifests itself in terms of an originary technicity. Here, the intricate relationship between the impression and the event might once more suggest itself: that is, the event or advent of obsessional writing. Drawing on psychoanalysis, deconstruction and the writings of Sartre and Genet among others, this chapter argues that such an originary

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technicity entails a ceaseless re-invention without simple origin, producing variants and mutations – tele-effects – in the realms of writing, media and technology, which in turn force us to rethink conceptions of the ‘newness’ of contemporary forms of communication and archivization in quite specific ways. Such tele-effects are also those that re-wire in surprising fashion the circuitry of exchanges between Derrida and others considered in this chapter. The correspondence – sometimes, the non-correspondence – between Derrida and Agamben in particular, as well as between Agamben and Nancy and Benjamin and Scholem, carries this theme of writing’s circuitry into the next chapter. Rather than seeking to evaluate the philosophical grounds of Agamben’s longstanding misgivings about deconstruction’s philosophical project and future, ‘Writing Friendship’ concentrates on the way in which, around the time of Derrida’s passing, Agamben re-stages his critique of deconstruction in terms of a notion of philosophy’s proximity to friendship. As such, the Derrida– Agamben relation is read as much in its performative dimensions – that is to say, as something of an event – as in terms of its philosophical gravity. Here, Agamben’s manner of doing philosophy begins to resonate with the image of deconstruction he wants to present and criticize, in a way that disrupts the philosophical and historical distinctions that Agamben himself wants to draw in order to support his own position. At times, all this depends on what is found in an exchange of letters, in replies or in their lack, in what is made ‘open’ or kept ‘secret’, what is avowed or not, calling for a vigilance that will be required of researchers in the Cixous deposit in the BNF as well as those visiting the Derrida archive at UC Irvine. ‘Anonymity Writing Pedagogy’, meanwhile, explores the notion of a radically anonymous origin, or indeed non-origin, at issue in a single text by Beckett. Company, which might be considered an example of prose fiction from Beckett’s later period, sees Beckett devising an intricate intermingling of voices woven around the three classes of personal pronoun, in order to establish the testing ground for a perhaps new form of writing. New, in the sense that the ‘I’ not only verges on the impossible here, but hints at the necessarily anonymous origin of its own voicing, an origin which cannot therefore be located at a single

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point, but which nevertheless encourages or compels a certain effect of pluralizing dissemination. As the chapter develops, Beckett’s Company is seen to revisit the inaugurating scenography of Descartes’ Meditations; and indeed the language politics of Descartes’ writings, in Latin and in French, provide a way to re-read several of the texts that begin the second part of Derrida’s Right to Philosophy, so as to propose the problem of a pedagogy at once conditioned by ‘national’ language and yet exposed to a certain unconditionality, beyond name, title, nationality. Here, again, the lasting impression made by a certain language politics, which Derrida seeks to treat as a vast ‘historical’ problem, may be seen to relate complexly to the possibility of teaching as an event. The last two pieces in the book seek to affirm the event of writing by foregrounding certain of the performative conventions surrounding their own composition. ‘Raelity’ turns its attention to the Research Assessment Exercise (R.A.E.) in the United Kingdom, the major national audit of university research activity which takes place every few years, in order to experiment with the notion of ‘research’ as a countable stock; as well as to reckon with the implications of Bill Readings’ analysis of ‘The University in Ruins’, and to wonder about the age of audit in which we currently seem to live – indeed to ask about the auditability of an age and the very time of philosophy, this time via Derrida’s essay, ‘The Age of Hegel’. No doubt the R.A.E., in the sense that it informs and directs as much as records university research in the United Kingdom, amounts to an ‘archival technology’ which, to borrow Derrida’s own terms, establishes not merely ‘the moment of the conservational recording’, but instead exists as a form of radically institutive archivization that ‘produces as much as it records the event’. In an inventive spirit, ‘Raelity’ seeks to register this event otherwise. Finally, a discussion with Paul Bowman about the ‘politics’ of cultural studies today sees a perhaps eventful tussle take place between his well-formalized questions about the possible relationship between political theory and cultural studies, on the one hand, and, on the other, a more speculative thought of cultural studies as a kind of dream-thinking on my part. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the dream’s structure is one of Enstellung as a restless process

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of distortion, dislocation or disfigurement. Dream-thoughts may be considered as the entstellte ‘fulfilment’ of conflictual and hence unresolved desires, and they unavoidably ‘branch out in all directions’ while at the same time giving ‘dislocation’ a sort of ‘focus’, as Samuel Weber has put it. The notion that cultural studies may constitute a sort of dream-thinking replaces the more traditional question of cultural studies’ ‘politics’ with a new idea about the structure of its ‘thinking’, one which may equip us to reckon with its possible significance in a ‘globalized’ world. The book concludes with a short section that seeks to capture a sense of Derrida’s thinking about the impossible possibility of saying the event. Concentrating on a lecture given near the end of his life, summarization vies uneasily here with the event of reading Derrida’s final words.

Chapter 1

The Archive and the Anthological

The Archive I mentioned the Greek word biblion not to sound scholarly, or even – it’s too easy – to explain the word bibliothèque. I spoke Greek to observe in passing that biblion has not always meant ‘book’ or even ‘work.’. . . . does any oeuvre, be it literal or literary, have as its destiny only a ‘bookish’ incorporation? This must be one of the very many questions that await us.1 In ‘The Book to Come’ Derrida notes that biblion ‘didn’t initially or always mean “book,” still less “oeuvre,”’ but could instead ‘designate a support for writing’ – paper, bark, tablets (p. 6). Thus, biblion itself gathers and extends a series of ‘metonymies’; metonymies which, perhaps in the very nature of their metonymic relations, do not so much harmonize particular instances by dint of an overarching generality, referring varied examples to a single point of origin, as indicate a series of uneven shifts and potentially unstable movements, as much historical as they are linguistic. If in Greek bibliotheke means ‘the slot for a book’, its ‘place of deposit’ – linking our sense of the library to a more original notion of storage, putting, depositing – one should nevertheless not forget that this supposed ‘act of immobilizing, of giving something over to a stabilizing immobility’, as Derrida puts it, in fact only takes place under the banner or in the wake of a word that itself gathers without exactly ‘setting down, laying down, depositing, storing’ (pp. 6–7). ‘The idea of gathering together, as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit, seems as essential to the idea of the book as to that of the library’, he writes, adding that ‘there will be no surprise in rediscovering these motifs of the thetic position and the collection: of the gathering together that is

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statutory, legitimate, institutional, and even state or national’ (p. 7). Here, no doubt quite rightly, an entire ensemble is gathered up – thesis, book, library, institution, law, statute, state deposit, nationstate – although also laid down somewhere between a metonymic series and a thetic order. However, if, as Derrida contests, ‘all these motifs are themselves collected together in the question of the title’ (p. 7) – that which allows orderly depositing (classification, cataloguing and so forth) – then what function is biblion to assume, and what limits does it assign, as the very term which gathers? In ‘Paper or Me, You Know . . .’2 Derrida observes that the ‘norms and figures of paper . . . are imposed on the screen: lines, “sheets,” pages, paragraphs, margins, and so on’ (p. 46), while a papercentric language still pervades the discourse of computer programmes (‘cut’, ‘paste’, ‘clip’, etc.). Nevertheless, here he allows himself to wonder about the future of the bibliothèque in view of ‘texts, documents, and archives that are further and further away from both the support that is paper and the book form’. ‘“What about the book to come?” Will we continue for long to use the word library for a place that essentially no longer collects together a store of books?’ What happens when, sooner or later, libraries become spaces that are dominated by ‘electronic texts with no paper support, texts not corpus or opus – not finite and separable oeuvres; groupings no longer forming texts, even, but open textual processes offered on boundless national and international networks, for the active or interactive intervention of readers turned coauthors, and so on’ (pp. 7–8). ‘The Book to Come’ was presented to introduce a discussion with Roger Chartier and Bernard Stiegler at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in March 1997. In May 2003, Derrida returned to the BNF in order to celebrate the donation to the Library by Hélène Cixous of an archive of letters, notebooks and dream journals. Just as any testimony worth its name must keep a secret at precisely the point it is weighed as reliable attestation, keeping in reserve that which is radically heterogenous in relation to ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’, so this encrypted writing ‘smuggles in that which is and remains unavowable, even as it is being avowed, brings it in clandestinely, as contraband’, as Derrida writes in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius.3 The library

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is thus transformed through the encryption of this address, the unavowable-avowed, hence the readable-unreadable. Speaking thus, speaking secretly, beyond its own depositing, storage or potential immobilization, the Cixous archive inhabits the theatricalized space of the psyche, engages or disturbs the other, its scenography becoming that of the ‘unconscious’. Cixous’s texts engage the memory, pervade the dreams, of the true guardian of the archive. As Derrida tells us in ‘The Principle of Reason’,4 faithful guardianship (of knowledge, tradition, the archive, the institution) paradoxically entails keeping what one does not have and ‘what is not yet’ (pp. 154–5) – the possibility of the to come – since to keep without a certain ‘double keeping’, to merely defend, encircle or enclose, is to risk the greatest infidelity – just as those who blindly assert the principle of reason badly negotiate a tautological circle on the one side (reason’s grounds or justification is . . . reason) and what is abyssal on the other (if reason cannot ground itself in reason without risking irrationalism or question-begging, what is its foundation?). The faithful guardian must therefore observe a certain ‘strategic rhythm’ of the ‘blink’, neither keeping a hard-eyed watch over reason’s transparent good sense, nor falling into blind dogmatism, but opening and closing the eye in (viewless) view of a certain barrier and a certain abyss. Such a ‘double keeping’ demands of the faithful guardian that he or she gather in a certain way of non-gathering, a gathering of what cannot be gathered, a winking eye cast over what cannot be brought to light. Since the Cixous archive ‘addresses the library’s unconscious’ as much as its double-keeping guardian – who must avow the unavowable, keep beyond keeping – its gift implies a certain transformation of the BNF itself, intruding on or prizing open that metonymic series (thesis, book, library, institution, law, statute, state deposit, nation-state) in order to expose and commit the Library to the ‘unconditional’, beyond or in spite of the ‘national’. As Martin McQuillan, in his foreword to Derrida’s text, puts it: The donation of the Cixous archive to the BNF is a dangerous gift because it compels the library to avow what it cannot comprehend, to guard what it cannot have, to house what it cannot master. Rather, the donation of Cixous’s letters, notebooks and, above for

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Derrida, her dream journals . . . represents an abyssal opening beyond the eyes of the library. (xi) The Cixous archive thus remains unmasterable by any form of sovereignty: ‘she has handed over to the BNF an all-powerful, powerless other’, as McQuillan puts it, the name of which might be . . . literature itself. Literature’s secret is the unavowable-avowed. As McQuillan notes, Derrida insists that ‘the corpus remains immeasurably vaster than the library supposed to hold it’ (p. 72). This strange relation between the part and the whole not only exposes the BNF to its supposed ‘outside’, to the ‘unconditional’. It also recalls, in Glas,5 the very question of the anthological. Digging into the roots of this word, we find something like its original meaning in the gathering of flowers. In Glas, as we see, the flower is a part, a figure or example, of the whole of rhetoric or poetics. Yet as ‘“the poetic object par excellence”’, or as the very ‘figure of figures’, the flower simultaneously partitions, sets apart, distinguishes, determines, delimits these fields in general. The flower is both – and seemingly impossibly – gatherer and gathered. As Derrida therefore observes, the flower comes to ‘dominate all the fields to which it nonetheless belongs’ (p. 14). At which point, of course, it simultaneously stops ‘belonging to the series of bodies or objects of which it forms a part’. Not unlike Cixous’s archive, therefore, the flower is only to be comprehended, only to be gathered, as an ‘all-powerful, powerless other’. This aporia, which Derrida names as that of a ‘transcendental excrescence’, is also perhaps that of philosophy, whose asymmetrical contract with the university consists in the fact that, in one sense, philosophy belongs to the university which, in another, it itself partitions or allots, and the same aporia concerns the relation of literature to its institution, or, here, to the library. Again, a problem of gathering, putting, depositing, keeping, holding. In Archive Fever,6 it is the death drive that is to be discovered at or as the foundation of the Freudian archive. The death drive is the ‘original proposition’ which stops psychoanalysis from becoming ‘a lot of ink and paper for nothing’ (pp. 8–9). But the death drive, as Derrida calls us to remember, ‘not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or to anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can

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never be reduced to mneme or anamnesis, that is the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum’ (p. 11). If the death drive is indeed invoked as the principle reason for conserving psychoanalysis’s paper(s), no wonder that the ‘archive always works, and a priori, against itself ’ (p. 12). The ‘silent vocation’ of that which psychoanalysis archives is therefore to ‘burn the archive’, ‘incite amnesia’ and thereby refute ‘the economic principle’ of the archive as ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’(p. 12). In The Post Card,7 Derrida recounts his own promise not to ‘bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame’. Derrida is required to take this oath before he is permitted entry to Oxford’s Bodleian in order to view the original illustration by Matthew Paris of Socrates and Plato, the image at the ‘centre’ of the book. Yet Derrida recites (re-cites) his promise with certain omissions: Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I would have never been permitted to enter) stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor flame into the premises: ‘I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the Library.’ (p. 211, p. 216) What do these ellipses suggest? At the first time of asking, their insertion means that Derrida’s promise is not recited in full, it is not recited as the or a full promise. At the second, they imply that something other, some other than the fire or flame just mentioned, has suddenly been incinerated by dint of an elliptical gap. But what exactly incinerates, here, what burns, if not the fire and flame that Derrida openly states and refutes in the cited part of the promise? Although by the more dutiful insertion of ellipses Derrida would seem to observe (indeed guard) the ‘proper’ rules of quotation, in contrast perhaps to The Post Card’s wholly errant and insupportable general convention of ‘the blank of 52 signs’, the recited promise nevertheless burns with elliptical omissions, omissions however which are not of ‘fire’ and ‘flame’. Does Derrida’s recitation, his text, break

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or keep its promise? Does something or nothing burn? Or both, impossibly, undecidably, beyond memory or forgetting, economy or aneconomy? 5 June 1997: ‘I am sending you Socrates and Plato again . . . my small library apocalypse’ (p. 11, the blank of 52 spaces replaced by my own ellipses). 7 September 1977: the one that I call Esther. You know, I confided to you one day, why I love her. Her or her name, go figure it out, and each letter of her name, of her syngram or her anagram. The quest for the syngram Esther, my whole life. One day I will divulge, I do not yet accept them enough to tell them. Only this, for you, today. Estér is the queen, the second one, the one who replaces Vashti for Ahasheuros. What she saves her people from, a holocaust without fire or flame. (p. 71) Here, once more, Derrida’s guardianship is of the unavowableavowed, while the one he loves saves, just as, in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, the BNF must ‘[s]ave in its unconscious’ nothing other than the unsaveable-saving Cixous dream-archive. Her ‘people’ saved from ‘a holocaust without fire and flame’ – but, then, if from this flameless, fireless holocaust, from fire-and-flame itself? Does nothing or something burn? Like the question itself, the Cixous archive should remain open, without condition (an open secret). Derrida ventures that, if the archive ‘is to be meaningful, that is, if it is to have a future, [it] should be at the heart of an active research centre, of a new kind, open to scholars from all parts of the world’ (p. 83). This, of course, was Derrida’s dream for the International College of Philosophy. McQuillan, meanwhile, wonders about what possible ‘architecture’ might ‘link the Cixous collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale to the Derrida archive at the University of California, Irvine and to any future deposit of Derrida letters and manuscripts’. Indeed, he wonders how the archive might: stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, to accommodate all the researchers of the world linked by the thread of Cixous-Derrida? What would be the spaces, virtual or imagined, material and concrete, of such a Centre without centre? (p. xiii)

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The ‘enormous problematic of the archive and the other’, as McQuillan puts it, into which we are thrown by Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius reintroduces the question of computerization and electronic media, one that Derrida tackles with the utmost rigour in Paper Machine. Will the technological developments associated with Derrida’s own generation keep the archive endlessly open while causing paper to get burnt up by something like a death drive? (As Derrida observes, Cixous ‘always writes by hand, no matter what, she writes using a tool – pencil or pen – that is, without a machine or machinetool; without a typewriter or a word processor. Something which is fairly unusual and of critical importance for the archives of which we speak’ (p. 39). Writing and the hand is a question that will come to interest us.) For Derrida, such a notion of the traditional archive’s demise is perhaps not altogether in keeping with his thought of what the archive double-keeps: For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with a new economy.

The Anthological By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. It is not only the traditional consignatio, that is, the written proof, but what all consignatio begins by presupposing. Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system of synchrony in which all elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. (Archive Fever, p. 3) A moment ago, we remarked upon the fact of a very strange relation between the part and the whole, the Cixous archive and the

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national library, whereby for Derrida ‘the corpus remains immeasurably vaster than the library supposed to hold it’ (p. 72). This always supplemented and never-stable relation of the part to the whole, then, not only incites or agitates biblion’s metonymic series but also exposes the BNF to an ‘unconditional’ exteriority (which in fact also resides in its very depths). The deconstructive force of the archive recalls, too, the very question of the anthological in Glas. In some ways, the two questions – that of the archive and that of the anthological – might therefore be gathered together, so that the architecture (virtual or otherwise) that one could dream up to connect the Cixous archive at the BNF to the Derrida archive in California might also extend itself so as to establish links with the various anthologizations of texts involving these two thinkers and writers. This would include several ‘readers’ as well as numerous kinds of texts which combine the work of Derrida and Cixous with that of others, incorporating those texts, like Veils, which brings their writing together. The anthological as much as the archive, then, puts the question of gathering, putting, depositing, keeping. In Glas, as we are reminded, anthology is, at root, a flower-gathering. However, the standing of the ‘root’ is immediately complicated, to the extent that the flower is as much what gathers – ‘“the poetic object par excellence”’ or the very ‘figure of figures’ (p. 14) – as that which is gathered; so that, maddeningly, the anthological cannot itself be gathered on the strength of a flower-gathering that is itself gathered by the flower. The part is larger than the whole, and therefore cannot support what supports it. For how is one to gather – or comprehend – the flower, if it in fact determines the entire field within which – and of which – it becomes the principal figure? A slightly infuriating deconstructive logic gathers itself up here so as to arrest, block, impede gathering itself. Glas gathers together Hegel, Genet, Sartre, along with many others, some secretly or in silence, encrypted in the text. Glas, with its two great columns, its two (tree-)stumps of writing, standing rigidly upright like pillars, like towers, or like tombstones, risking perhaps a fall into the deadening (castrating) monumentalization of the work. But two columns that are also wound about or wound around – two

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columns that indeed grow up from the ground – by what is planted and propagated in Glas, so as to compose the text ‘in liana and ivy’ (p. 18). ‘Liana and ivy’: namely, that which weaves, braids, binds, grafts, overlaps, and sews together the parts of the text that would otherwise appear to stand apart, banded erect. Genet, for example, ‘has made himself into a flower. While tolling the glas (knell), he has put into the ground, with very great pomp, but also as a flower, his proper name, the names and nouns of common law, language, truth, sense, literature, rhetoric, and, if possible, the remain(s)’ (p. 12). It follows that the style of Glas, at its peak, would have everything to do with ‘the erectile stem – the style – of the flower’ that, when the bloom flowers at the stem’s summit, nonetheless sees ‘the petals part’ (pp. 21–2) and the flower head divide (decapitate itself). The flower in anthologization thus becomes, as Derrida puts it, ‘(de)part(ed)’. No longer just a bit of a larger whole, but the very part that at once allots or partitions a generality, thereby effectively deconstructing its normative workings, the flower holds or harbours in itself ‘the force of a transcendental excrescence’ (p. 15). This suggests an odd outgrowth or projection (an extended-distended architecture?), an ‘extra’ part that both enlarges a figure (the flower), making it larger than the whole (of itself), larger than the rhetoric or poetics it comes to distinguish or define; but which also distorts, ruptures and interrupts the entire economy and very idea of a whole or of a generality, of which it somehow remains an (excrescent) part. Obviously one can detect here the logic of supplementarity inscribing itself at the very origin of what is supplemented. The anthologized part becomes an outgrowth and supplement which in an originary way both constitutes and deconstitutes, constructs and deconstructs the whole, the body (of a thesis, book, library, institution and so forth). The flower – the anthological part that is (and is not) gathered – is ‘(de)part(ed)’, then, by force of this ‘transcendental excrescence’ that sets it apart from the ‘series of bodies or objects of which it forms a part’. The anthological (gathered/not gathered) part is consequently singular, not in the simple sense that it is uniquely individual, but rather because it is what insistently remains, beyond the logic of ‘part’ and ‘whole’, in the wake of its own ‘transcendental excrescence’. The somewhat ghostly remains of the anthological or

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‘(de)part(ed)’ part are therefore always already ‘at work in the structure of the flower’ – the structure of the anthological – as a ‘practical deconstruction of the transcendental effect’ (p. 15): In little continuous jerks, the sequences are enjoined, induced, glide in silence . . . They are always only sections of flowers, from paragraph to paragraph, so much so that anthological excerpts inflict only the violence necessary to attach importance {faire cas} to the remain(s). Take into account the overlap-effects {effets de recoupe}, and you will see that the tissue ceaselessly re-forms itself around the incision {entaille}. (p. 25)

Chapter 2

Writing Obsession

Is obsessional writing just a matter of writing a lot? Or might one write obsessionally in the form of writing very little: writing avoidance, or writing to avoid writing, that is? Might it be possible that one could write a great deal, that one may even be quite unable to stop writing (writing obsessionally), in the interests of – or in pursuit of, or on condition of – very little writing at all? What would such ‘writing’ be? What would this ‘very little’ mean? ‘Very little, almost nothing’, to allude to Simon Critchley’s book on death?1 ‘Writing, if there is any’, to borrow and adapt a somewhat familiar Derridean phrase? Almost, but not quite, a writing that stages its own disappearance, a writing which turns itself into nearly nothing, amid – and by means of – a virtually unstoppable, entirely excessive (and thus luxurious or wasteful) torrent of words? Think of Sartre’s Genet, scribbling furiously on those brown paper bags he is required to make by the French prison authorities, in order to transvalue as much as subvert its double-speaking disciplinary ethos: work is freedom.2 By the incessant stroke of the pen, Genet indulges in an impossibly unproductive kind of labour – for it is impossible to imagine, from the vantage point of its conditions of writing, how such a text could ever survive. The unproductive dimension of Genet’s prison writing – however prodigious and unstoppable it may be – establishes a link with Sartre’s reading of Our Lady of the Flowers as an indefatigable masturbatory fantasy, in which the rhythms of the book – the luxurious strokes of the pen – build inexorably towards the ‘development of onanistic themes’ pursued as a means of ‘introspective exploration’, as Sartre euphemistically puts it (pp. 462–3), and since, as Sartre shrewdly points out, ‘masturbation is the derealization of the world and of the person masturbated as well’ (p. 368), Genet – the writing of Genet – comes to disappear,

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precisely amid this ‘powerful labour of erosion’ (pp. 391–2). Defining himself from childhood by means of private or secretive acts of theft and onanism, Genet leaves nothing left to be seen (p. 15). Thus, the work ethic and panoptical ethos of the prison regime and the phenomenologico-hermeneutical thrust of masterful Sartrean reading alike come away empty-handed, as Genet – drifting between what Sartre calls an ‘Ethics of Evil’ and ‘a black aestheticism’ (p. 355) – comes into his empty hand. Yet, if we follow another line in Sartrean analysis, Genet’s refusal to communicate,3 his resistance to conventionally productive or reproductive acts, merely recalls the fundamental impotence – the ‘derealizing’, destructive force – of the most fecund imagination. As Sartre tells us: In short, one must make oneself a nothingness . . . The imagination is two-sided; if the just man wants to make good use of it, it is an admission of impotence: one imagines what one does not possess and what one cannot create; but if some lost, proud soul loves images for their own sake and aspires to create an order of shams, a parasitic universe that cynically feeds on ours, a diabolic caricature of Creation, then the imagination becomes a blasphemy and a challenge: since man as a being comes from God, he will choose himself resolutely imaginary so as to derive from himself alone. The dream manifests the realm of man because man alone can produce appearance, but it does so only to present this kingdom immediately as a nothingness. In dream, man can do all, but this absolute empire is only the absolute power of self-destruction. (p. 359) Genet’s relentless writing dreams up its own disappearance and perhaps, given the sweeping paradoxes of the ‘imagination’ that Sartre describes, not just its own. In these terms, everything counts as nothing, nothing everything. How could one account, then, for this strange economy of writing, or count on any such account one might hope to give of it? In her introduction to the English translation of Blanchot’s The Space of Literature,4 Ann Smock writes: To see something disappear: again, this is an experience which cannot actually start. Nor, therefore, can it ever come to an end.

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Such, Blanchot insists, is the literary experience: an ordeal in what we are able to do (for example, see) becomes our powerlessness; becomes, for instance, that terribly strange form of blindness which is the phantom, or the image, of the clear gaze – an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen. (p. 9) In this respect, the question of writing and obsession – not unrelated to the question of literature itself – would tie in to just such ‘an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen’. In our very ‘ability’, we are powerless, we cannot stop, although by the same token it is impossible (contra Sartre) to say – or see – where the whole thing started. Very early on in Saint Genet, Sartre writes that the rejection from birth of her son by Genet’s mother leads him to ‘compare himself to filth, to a waste product’ (p. 8). This interpretation of the circumstances surrounding and defining Genet’s appearance in the world, whereby maternity is denatured and birth is thereby considered excremental, recalls Freud’s study of anal eroticism, published as ‘Anal eroticism and the castration complex’ (SE, Vol. XVII).5 Here, Freud explains how the castration complex gives rise to anal eroticism: When his dream . . . conjured up before him the picture of the sexual intercourse of his parents as it had once been observed (or construed) by him, there can be no doubt that the first view of it to come up was the old one, according to which the part of the body which received the male organ was the anus. (p. 79) Although ‘the difference between the sexes and the sexual part played by women’ had been brought to the notice of the male infant, he nonetheless decides ‘in favour of the intestine and against the vagina’ (p. 79). This displacement of the female sex organ, whereby the vagina is replaced by the anus, obviously signals the effort to counter the dread of sexual difference which characterizes the castration complex. On the basis of this part of Freud’s work, with which Sartre would probably have been familiar (although the allusion remains unacknowledged as such in Saint Genet), we might wonder whether Sartre’s attempt to reduce Genet to a figure of excremental or anal

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birth in order to comprehend decisively the primary influences on his life and writing in fact derives from the perspective or standpoint of the castration complex. Does Sartre depict Genet as an excremental ‘waste product’ to counter or veil a deeper trauma which might stem from the fact that he appears to be a brutally discarded ‘part’ of the castrated mother? A figure of the castration complex as much as that of anal birth, the violent severing of the son from his mother when reinterpreted in terms of Sartre’s excremental vision of Genet suggests that it might be Sartre, as much as the unloving mother herself, who is guilty of a profound avoidance of the fact(s) of birth. Indeed, Sartre’s text may itself be considered obsessional in the sense that, if it is indeed written from the unacknowledged perspective of the castration complex, this hints once again at ‘an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen . . .’ To borrow and adapt Samuel Weber’s remark, which actually concerns psychoanalysis in general, Sartrean reading and interpretation is thereby ‘progressively caught up in what [it] set[s] out primarily to describe and elucidate’. The play of detachment and (re)attachment characterizing the forces and relations of the castration complex, as much as the game of seduction itself, might therefore be seen at work in Sartre’s ‘writerly fetish’ for Genet as a veritable ‘object of devotion’, as Robert Harvey has suggested,6 and a ‘waste product’ at the same time. Indeed, it might even be possible to say that, just like the subject of Freud’s paper, Sartre ‘interrupts’ the scene of anal eroticism he ‘observes’ or ‘construes’ by ‘passing a stool’: in this case, Saint Genet itself. As Freud puts it: ‘What he was feeling was want of sexual satisfaction, which he had taken as being anal . . . he was ready to give . . . a baby, and was jealous of [the] mother’ (pp. 80–2). Are we just seeing what is not there to be seen? Let’s try to start again from something like the beginning, as did Sartre. Beginning with what might be seen, indeed, as the beginning of obsession – starting with psychoanalysis.

Writing Obsession 1: Empty-handed Psychoanalysis Enclosed with a letter written to Wilhelm Fliess in January 1896, we find in draft form Freud’s thoughts on ‘The neuroses of defence’,

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including some brief remarks on paranoia, hysteria and obsessional neurosis.7 Of the latter, Freud writes: Obsessional neurosis can be cured if we undo all the substitutions and affective transformations that have taken place, till the primary self-reproach and the experience of belonging to it can be laid bare and placed before the conscious ego for judging anew. In doing this we have to work through an incredible number of intermediate or compromise ideas which become obsessional ideas temporarily. We gain the liveliest conviction that it is impossible for the ego to direct on to the repressed material the part of the psychical energy to which conscious thought is linked. The repressed ideas – so we must believe – are present in and enter without inhibition into the most rational trains of thought; and the memory of them is aroused too by the merest allusions. (p. 226) Freud’s interest in obsession also arises in an essay on ‘Obsessions and phobias’, written two years earlier.8 Here, Freud identifies ‘true’ obsession with a ‘constant’ emotional state in which the patient is ‘fixated’, although remaining so only on the basis of a continual substituting or re-placing of the ‘original’ object or idea that sparked the obsession or the obsessive behaviour in the first place. If, as Freud tells us, curing neuroses of the obsessional kind involves the ‘undoing’ and ‘laying bare’ of all the substitutions and transformations associated with the patient’s condition or case, by working back through the various ‘intermediary’ layers of material which characterize them, then the problem for psychoanalysis is that the ‘repressed ideas’ one expects to encounter as one picks one’s way through the winding pathways of various ‘compromise’ formations are, as Freud acknowledges, nevertheless quite able to enter into ‘the most rational trains of thought’ – presumably those of the analysand and analyst alike. The ego directs the products of the conscious life onto ‘the repressed material’ only impossibly, and this gives rise to the ‘liveliest conviction’ on Freud’s part: one that, needless to say, suggests an intensely animated mental or emotional state which is itself somewhat removed from ‘the most rational train of thought’. Elsewhere in this particular passage of writing, of course, Freud – or rather

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psychoanalysis itself, in the vicinity of paranoia, hysteria and obsessional neurosis – is ‘aroused’ and ‘must believe’. Here, the origin of obsession is as difficult to see as it is impossibly hard to say just where psychoanalysis might reach its own ends or limits, insofar as the question of obsession is concerned. This problem resonates powerfully with that of the interpretation of dreams. For Freud, dreams cannot be considered, in terms of their latent content, ultimately to harbour a single, determinable meaning; nor, therefore, are they reducible to a self-contained object of cognition that is susceptible to an interpretative practice that defines its task in terms of explication or disclosure. Instead, dreams constitute themselves, as Samuel Weber has put it, ‘through, and as, interpretation’.9 Freud tells us that the dream manifests ‘a particular form of thinking’10 which Weber describes as ‘that of a de-formation which serves to dissimulate its deformative character by creating a representational facade’ (p. 79). Whereas Freud insists that all dreams are in principle liable to interpretation (although not general theoretical categorization or reduction as such) the dream’s dissimulation should therefore not be construed as a veil to be penetrated by the interpretative effort of a traditional hermeneutics, so as to reveal a fully determinable object, the ultimate meaning of the dream itself. Instead, the ‘representational facade’ dissimulates the ‘essence’ of the dream-work as a form of ‘thinking’, interpretation, distortion or dislocation, occurring as the effect of conflictual wish-fulfillment. From this point of view, the interpretation of dreams would not so much ‘undo’ or ‘lay bare’ their hidden essence or content, as participate in the structure or process of ‘thinking’ which dreams themselves constitute, including redoubling rather than exposing the ‘representational facade’ which is required to dissimulate and defend the work of the dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud therefore writes: ‘It is true that we distort dreams in attempting to reproduce them . . . but this distortion (Entstellung) is itself no more than a part of the elaboration which the dream-thoughts regularly undergo as a result of the dream-censorship’.11 In Weber’s terms, it is this very problem which invites us to ‘explore how Freud’s writing and thinking are progressively caught up in what they set out primarily to describe and elucidate’.12

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The dilemma of being ‘caught up’ in the object of one’s analytical interest is therefore just as pronounced in Freud’s work on obsession. In his paper on ‘Obsessions and phobias’, Freud begins with the effort not only to differentiate between the two, but to distinguish genuine from unimportant obsessions, by way of a reference to ‘Pascal’s obsession: he always thought he saw an abyss on his left hand ‘‘after he had nearly been thrown into the Seine in his coach’’ ’ (p. 74). Such an obsession is set aside by Freud as an inauthentic and thus merely trivial example, yet tellingly it remains unexplored as the initiating instance in a piece of writing that seeks to separate, isolate, determine and classify the phenomena to which it is devoted. This becomes all the more important, since it is precisely then that Freud goes on to link ‘true’ obsession to a distinctive and persistent emotional state in which the patient remains ‘fixated’ on condition of a continual substituting or re-placing of the object or idea that originally sparked the obsession or obsessive behaviour. But might not ‘Pascal’s obsession’, to which Freud refers so dismissively, be just such an ‘object’, quickly abandoned and hastily replaced by the ensuing text, a text which is nevertheless initiated by this example, but which then takes place, as it were, in place of an investigation of the original instance? In which case, Freud’s text may itself show signs of obsessional behaviour, and the exclusion of ‘Pascal’s obsession’ as an unworthy example – not a handy citation after all! – may remain far from convincing on Freud’s part. ‘Pascal’s obsession’, it would seem, deals obsessionally with trauma or the possibility of loss by way of re-placing the ‘abyss’ – of imminent death, of the deep waters of the Seine – in or by means of the hand. The obsession which (if we allow the paradox) always manifests itself in abyss on the left hand (side) of Pascal is attemptedly dealt with through writing, a writing on or of an other hand. A writing which, in a double sense, re-places the obsession.13 Pascal’s hand . . . yet, we cannot help but suspect, Freud’s too. Psychoanalysis, like Pascal, may well come away empty-handed when it comes to writing obsessions, yet obsessional writing itself – that which comes to disappear – nevertheless leaves the impression of a ‘terribly strange form of blindness which is the phantom, or the image, of the clear gaze – an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen’. Look, look away.

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Writing Obsession 2: Unflinching Obsession If we are endeavouring to recount or account for obsession (beginning, however impossibly, with an abyss re-placing itself in the hand), we could always start again from a different place. In Derrida’s Glas, John Leavey’s Glassary14 tells us, obsession indeed crops up, although only twice. Once, when Derrida cites Genet, who describes Stilitano in the following terms: ‘I think it was by him that I was initiated, that is, my obsession with his body kept me from flinching’. Stilitano is to whom Genet dedicates his very first thefts, in particular to the ‘singularity’ of ‘that magnificent one-handed man whose hand, cut off at the wrist, was rotting away somewhere, under a chestnut tree, so he told me, in a forest of Central Europe’.15 Here, it is nothing other than ‘obsession’ which stalls the possibility of avoidance, the blinking of the thief’s eye, arresting the onset of what might be termed a castration of vision, amid a series of relations that overdetermine the spectacle of loss: the loss of Genet’s chastity (the disappearance of which could never have been seen) through the initiation of which he speaks here; the stark yet unseeable vision of a severed hand, the hand which perhaps initiates (or which parts), buried deep in the liminal space suggested by the darkened forests of Central Europe; the dedication of Genet’s initial thefts (the forced taking or detachment of a part) to this figure of initiation and obsession and so on. All this is in a text that, as Derrida shows, continually ruminates on the anthological, the gathering of flowers, the cutting of stems, or, in other words, the parting on which such gathering is premised – a problem which is intimately tied, in the Genet–Sartre–Derrida matrix, to that of the poetic or literary (we will have cause to come back and look at this again). The severed hand which, in a sense, suggests an echo of this anthological ‘cut’ – not least when recalled in a text such as Glas – therefore undoubtedly bears some relation to the hand that writes (and which takes or causes to disappear): Genet’s hand. Yet the losses incurred in the vicinity of this hand – its parting gesture is always to disappear – are nonetheless somehow deferred or delayed, substituted or supplemented, transformed or re-placed only to be continually, obsessively re-played by an unflinching obsession: that is, by the obsessive gaze and writing of Genet, which cannot stop

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looking at or cannot help seeing what has nevertheless departed or disappeared, ‘what is not there to be seen . . .’ In another passage found in Glas, Derrida reflects upon Genet’s place in a ‘powerful, occulted tradition’ that he associates with ‘those movements in ana’ (‘anagrammatizing proper names, anamorphosing signatures’). In this part of the text, we find Genet described as one who ‘silently, laboriously, obsessionally, compulsively, and with the moves of a thief in the night, sets his signatures in [the] place of all the missing objects’ (p. 41b). This remark occurs by way of one of many unstated sideways glances at Saint Genet. Here, it is an abiding concern with those techniques and effects in Genet’s writing which Sartre associates with the ‘derealization’ of the material world that comes to haunt Derrida’s own text. Indeed – just like Genet – Derrida, too, sets his own signature in the place of what is always found missing/wanting: Genet himself. Furthermore, Derrida countersigns, with very little acknowledgement, certain Sartrean ideas and motifs upon which Derrida therefore works ‘silently, laboriously, obsessionally, compulsively . . . with the moves of a thief in the night’. Genet’s gesture of re-placing (himself) in the place where loss happens – which is also, nonetheless, the very place of the signature – is perhaps naturally that of the thief. But it is one that Derrida, no doubt just as deliberately, steals in to take for himself. That such acts are carried out ‘obsessionally’ by writerly hands which sign in order simultaneously to re-place, repay and replay a loss suggests that the theft is part of a larger, more complex economy.

Writing Obsession 3: ‘A Game of Seduction and Counterseduction’ Robert Harvey has written this of Genet: ‘When the writer we may consider the most marginal and outrageous of our time can say that the two most prominent philosophers in his cultural sphere have each published studies on him so imposing as to be valued as sacraments, something has occurred that must give us pause’ (pp. 103–4). Harvey refers, of course, to the two texts we have been circling around: Sartre’s Saint Genet and Derrida’s Glas, published in 1952 and 1974 respectively: the former text written arguably at the height

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of Sartre’s powers, the latter, perhaps, just at the moment his star is waning.16 Harvey goes on to ‘hypothesize that a game of seduction and counterseduction that Genet controls telegraphically by a linguistic manipulation inherent to his early writings, draws his two famous glossators into con-verge-ence’ (p. 105). If this ‘con-verge-ence’ results from a ‘mutual devotional fascination’ (p. 105) on the part of Sartre and Derrida alike, then as each in their turn succumb to it, what is implied is a gravitational movement or force-field working in an opposite direction – or, at any rate, a different one – from the contrary tug of the various philosophical influences, standpoints and attitudes which are normally taken to set them apart. Indeed, serving as more than just another contribution to Genet studies, Harvey’s essay begins to suggest that the relationship between the two philosophers might be interpreted as much according to the intricate dynamics of such a ‘writerly fetish’ for Genet – the very ‘object of devotion’ (p. 104) – as in terms of the sorts of distinctions and connections that acquire explanatory force within intellectual history. Thus, while there is, for Harvey, no point in seeing Genet’s texts as the grounds for ‘attempting some incongruous reconciliation’ (p. 104) between existentialism and deconstruction, or between Sartre and Derrida, nonetheless the ‘overwhelming’ influence (p. 105) of each of their studies – and indeed the apparently strong contrast between their two books – might just be comprehended in terms of the complex energies and relations of attraction and repulsion, sanctification and contamination and ingestion and excretion, taking place by way of a very specific play of forces. (A force-field, then, which remains irreducible to the mere neutralization or reversal of those differences normally construed in terms of absolute oppositions.) Thus, as Harvey shows, Sartre’s book on Genet has been read as a tenacious effort to circumvent, curb or contain the philosopher’s own latent homosexual tendencies by satiating them through the secret pleasures of the texts which Sartre reads and writes.17 For Harvey, the complicated play of ‘overwhelming’ influence, ‘devotional fascination’ (p. 105), fetishization, seduction and denial (a possible source of as much as a way of relieving anxiety or unpleasure) also characterizes Glas, in which Sartre is, we are told, ‘virtually ignored’ by Derrida. Harvey argues that, ‘by turning him into a mere allusion,

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Derrida redoubles Sartre’s virtual presence everywhere’ (p. 106). According to Harvey, it is precisely because he has not been dealt with explicitly in Glas that Sartre returns to reanimate and indeed ‘redouble’ the very ‘game of seduction and counterseduction’ by means of which the critical, intellectual and linguistic manoeuvrings of Saint Genet might themselves be understood. The telegraphic network thus extends, or rather shifts, so as to triangulate a tangled series of relations between these three notorious twentieth-century Frenchmen. The extent to which Derrida’s Glas may be caught up in or replay this ‘game of seduction and counterseduction’ as one primarily of ‘linguistic manipulation’ might therefore be determined by the number and kinds of references we find in the text to ‘seduction’ itself. Or which we do not find. That is to say, the problem of finding or of not finding ‘seduction’ in Derrida’s text may be related to the question of whether or not we find Sartre himself in Glas, and indeed whether (and in what way) our findings on this question help us with the outcome of the ‘game’ Harvey thinks is being played. If we follow John Leavey’s Glassary, Sartre is in fact mentioned by name only twice, although once it is by way of a quotation from a well-known essay on Genet by Georges Bataille (p. 217b). (It is Bataille, of course, who insists on Sartre’s suggestion that Genet’s writing does not attempt to communicate, that it refuses to communicate.) Furthermore, the first reference in Glas to Saint Genet (of a sparse few, especially if one excludes straightforward transcriptions from Sartre’s book inserted directly into Derrida’s text) famously alludes to that which is avoided in Sartre’s text: the ‘anthological question’, the question of the flower as that of the poetic, or the literary (pp. 13–14b).18 Where Sartre or his book are explicitly named or identified, then, it is in terms of certain types or themes of avoidance, so that one might wonder whether the overt linkage of Sartre with the theme or motif of avoidance on Derrida’s part suggests a different position in, or relationship to, the ‘game’ than that of Sartre himself, who, as Harvey believes, becomes a blind, unwitting participant in the linguistic manipulations controlled ‘telegraphically’ by the writings of Genet. But does Derrida, equally, succumb to such ‘seduction’, amid this apparently ceaseless play of avoidance, detachment and substitution? In light of the above discussion, the entries in Leavey’s glossary regarding ‘seduction’ may shed at least some light on the matter.

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Turning once more to Leavey’s Glassary, then, one finds in the Genet column of Glas the two following remarks on seduction. At one point Derrida writes: ‘How does one seduce, how does one win love without telling you I am dead? Not just ‘‘pay attention, I am going to die,’’ ‘‘I am mortal,’’ which would only have a relative and provisional effect, but ‘‘I am already [deja] dead,’’ even before living . . . I am and I am dead are two statements indistinguishable in their sense’ (p. 79bi). In the same column, later on, this: ‘It is, then, the postiche, the detachable, which seduces, fascinates, attaches – the detachable. It is itself the origin of what ‘‘for want of other words – I shall call poetry.’’ It is itself what can ‘‘baffle and wound . . . disgust . . . the very people who desire it’’ ’ (pp. 213–14b).19 How might these two remarks be put together? Tilottama Rajan has pointed out that ‘when Derrida speaks of language he speaks of death’.20 She alludes to Derrida’s remark in Of Grammatology to the effect that ‘death is ‘‘the master name for the supplementary series’’ that keeps language in motion as a process of ‘‘metonymic substitutions’’ ’ in order to suggest the ethical as well as ontological dimensions of the ‘ ‘‘dispossession’’ we experience through language’.21 The autonomous subject of reason posited by the Cartesian cogito in terms of a self-contained, selfconscious ‘I’ construed by pure process of self-reflection (hence as pure phenomenal object) nevertheless undergoes splitting, substitution and ‘dispossession’ by dint of the very act of naming, stating or positing itself as if by another, or as if it were another, henceforth placing death (death’s alterity) at the origins of identity and tying language (naming or stating) ineluctably to death, so that, indeed, ‘I am and I am dead are two statements indistinguishable in their sense’. Yet Derrida suggests that stating this indistinguishability is precisely how one wins love, or how one (although ‘one’ no longer) seduces. (This may be just the place to pursue the ethical and not just the ontological significance of the interplay between death, language and seduction, in Glas and elsewhere.) Furthermore, in the second quotation from Glas concerning seduction, it is that which cannot avoid being split, substituted, detached and reattached or re-placed – like the ‘I’ itself – which Derrida couples with the ‘seductive’, the ‘fascinating’ – and, indeed, with poetry (‘for want of other words . . .’: poetry’s very name itself arises by dint of dispossession and substitution in language). Is seduction therefore the name for a process

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of reattaching, or at least one of re-placing by ‘metonymic substitution’, that which is nevertheless intractably detached, dispersed and disseminated – even if such ‘seduction’ occurs by dint of stating or staging the indistinguishability or undecidability of presence and loss, naming and dispersal, identity and the other, language and death? (I am and I am dead: is such a ‘seductive’ statement to be considered poetry ‘in other words’?) Amid these seductive questions, one might furthermore ask: Which is the ‘master name’ here? Seduction? Death? Language? Poetry? Or are these terms each part of a series of ‘metonymic substitutions’ which each nevertheless seeks (however impossibly) to partition, define, master and hence transcend? This, indeed, would be the very question of the anthological gathered up in Glas, as well as, perhaps, the question of the triangulated (at the very least!) series of relations – Genet–Sartre– Derrida – comprising the ‘game of seduction and counterseduction’ relayed by an always shifting telegraphic network. An unstable, continually mutating, labile, transformative network in which ‘communication’, or, for that matter, the non-communicable, may very well never ‘go through the same exchange’, to borrow a phrase Derrida uses in a footnote in ‘Envois’, where he takes a ‘collect call’, probably a hoax, from ‘Martin’, ‘Martine’ or ‘Martini’ ‘Heidegger’ as the occasion to hint at his ‘private relations’ to the deceased, departed German philosopher.22 (These ‘relations’ would include an entire yet uneven network, featuring influence, fascination, avoidance (with which Derrida’s Of Spirit begins), (telephonic) haunting . . . perhaps ‘an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen’, perhaps obsession.) The continual substitution of the ‘master name’ within and by means of this ever-shifting network means, then, that there is finally no self-identical point of exchange, no central term or terminus through which the ‘game’ itself might at last be apprehended. The always ‘supplementary’ series of ‘metonymic substitutions’ without master name shifts and extends to include . . . obsession. Such a series, when construed as a tangled and tumescent telegraphic network with open yet distorted lines of communication, might indeed be considered to call (us) up (as) a ‘game of seduction and counterseduction’ of just the kind Derrida hints at when describing that particular ‘collect call’ in ‘Envois’. Such a game of seduction, suggests

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Glas, would be one which inextricably involved detachment and (prosthetic) substitution, linguistic manipulation and the possibility of avoidance, dispossession and signature: all of which we might – or, rather, might not – find in the hand that writes.

Writing Obsession 4: Archive Fever, Writing and Technicity Drawing primarily on the texts of Freud, Genet, Sartre and Derrida, we have so far begun to develop something like a ‘theory’ of obsessional writing – and, indeed, of writing as obsession. Through the complex and irreducible relationships of detachment and reattachment which characterize both Freud’s (obsessive) writings on obsession and the ‘game of seduction and counterseduction’ played out along the lines of the Genet–Sartre–Derrida network, such obsessive writing (writing as obsession) may be seen as the condition or effect of an originary prosthesis or technicity, a controlling telegraphicity, or a tele(non)communications network. It is from this perspective – that of the originary technicity or tele-effect of obsessional writing – that we may be able to evaluate, in a somewhat different vein than is perhaps usual, ongoing arguments concerning the relationship of writing to technology, encompassing questions about the historical conditions, shifts and effects of the different techniques associated with handwriting, typewriting and electronic writing, and by extension with new forms of media. Such analyses would obviously demand very specific attention, which is more than is possible here. However, it may be worth risking some initial thoughts on this topic more generally, as an invitation to further thought and research. In Archive Fever,23 Derrida notes that the history of psychoanalysis is not only the history contained in its archival records, but that it is more fundamentally the history of its very archivization, as irreducible prosthetic supplement: for psychoanalysis (as Freud’s work on dreams and obsessions amply demonstrates) is nothing less than archival thinking, archivo-analysis, archive fever. This archivization of psychoanalysis is in turn ‘determined by a state of the technology of communication’ (p. 16) which does not merely lie on the outside of psychoanalysis. The very formation and character

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of psychoanalysis as archivo-analysis therefore depends on the technological conditions surrounding archivization in Freud’s time: One can dream or speculate about the geo-techno-logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail. . . . I will limit myself to a mechanical remark: this archival earthquake would not have limited its effects to the secondary recording, to the printing and conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. . . . The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (pp. 16–17) Nevertheless, one writing machine that psychoanalysis is able to consider in its own day is the Mystic Pad (der Wunderblock). We might consider this, Derrida tells us, ‘a technical model of a machine tool, intended, in Freud’s eyes, to represent on the outside memory as internal archivization’ (p. 13). However, referring to his earlier text, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Derrida reminds us that: Freud does not explicitly examine the status of the ‘materialized’ supplement which is necessary to the alleged spontaneity of memory, even if that spontaneity were differentiated in itself, thwarted by a censorship or repression which, moreover, could not act on a perfectly spontaneous memory. Far from the machine being a pure absence of spontaneity, its resemblance to the psychical apparatus, its existence and its necessity bear witness to the finitude of the mnemic spontaneity which is thus supplemented. The machine – and, consequently, representation – is death and finitude within the psyche.24 Of course, as we have already seen, death is the irreducibly improper master name for an always supplementary series of ‘metonymic substitutions’ to which – when reading Glas – we might also assign the

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name of ‘seduction’. The seductive force of a reattacheable postiche: does the technicity of this writing machine as the originary supplement of the psyche it is supposed ‘to represent on the outside’ get psycho-archivo-analysis ‘feverish’? For Derrida, the death drive is at the origin of the Freudian archive, it is the ‘original proposition’, the latest news, which stops psychoanalysis becoming ‘a lot of ink and paper for nothing’, an empty-handed writing which ultimately says nothing, or nothing new (pp. 8–9). Yet the death drive is simultaneously that which ‘not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or to anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mneme or anamnesis, that is the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum’ (p. 11). Thus the death drive leaves psychoanalysis emptyhanded, burnt up with a fever. In this way, the ‘archive always works, and a priori, against itself ’ (p. 12): death-driven archivization causes the archive to burn feverishly. The otherwise ‘apparently useless expenditure of paper, ink, and typographic printing’ accompanying the production of the psychoanalytic archive is only justified, insofar as Freud is concerned, by ‘putting forward the novelty of his discovery’, that of the death drive, the ‘silent vocation’ of which is to ‘burn the archive’, ‘incite amnesia’ and thereby refute ‘the economic principle’ of the archive as ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’ (p. 12). In this sense, the Mystic Pad is itself the originary supplement of the Freudian archive, or of psycho-archivo-analysis, or of psycho-archivo-fever. Archive fever replays a game of seduction in which obsessional writing comes to disappear,25 giving the impression of ‘an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen . . .’ and this seductive game, as we have seen, is inseparable from a number of tele-effects (those of a ‘tele(non)communications network’, for example) which, if they are to be considered a ‘materialized supplement’, nevertheless impose themselves from the outside much less than from within the non-self-identical space or network of the game ‘itself ’. In this sense, the ‘geo-techno-logical shocks’ which would make psychoanalysis unrecognizable to itself today come less from just a straightforward ‘outside’ of psycho-archivo-analysis or psycho-archivo-fever, less from

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what is simply outside the realms of its machinery, than from an evershifting network of tele-effects (one to which we might assign many substitutive names: ‘obsessional writing’, ‘the game of seduction’, ‘archive fever’) which extends to produce new variants, new mutations, both within and beyond psychoanalysis ‘itself’. Such shocks to psychoanalysis’s system register a wider effect, therefore, the impact of which occurs less as part of a decisive historical break or radical transformation in the field of media, technology and telecommunications, and more as a function or feature of the structure and technicity of obsessional writing as I have tried to describe it here: that is, of a substitution or mutation which, at the same time as it confounds any simple attribution of causality, nevertheless operates complexly as a reinvention without ‘origin’ rather than a pure difference. We should always try to remember (mneme) to proceed with caution, then, if we find ourselves driven to report and record such reinventions, such variants as simply the ‘latest news’. Although doubtless we are bound to forget this.26

The Book to Come In ‘The Book to Come’, Derrida addresses the topic and title of his essay as a ‘question trembling all over, not only with that which disturbs the historical sense of what we still call a book, but also with what the expression to come might imply’.27 Here, it is the future – or otherwise – of the book that is in question. In view of ‘electronic and virtual incorporation, the screen and the keyboard, [and] online transmission’, which together ‘seem to be dislodging or supplementing the codex (that gathering of a pile of pages bound together, the current form of what we generally call a book such that it can be opened, put on a table, held in the hands)’ (p. 9), Derrida reconsiders the question that is frequently posed in terms of the end of the book. In ‘Paper or Me, You Know . . .’ he notes that a papercentric language and thinking continues to pervade the act of writing on a computer, to the extent that the ‘norms and figures of paper . . . are imposed on the screen: lines, “sheets,” pages, paragraphs, margins, and so on’.28 ‘Cut’, ‘paste’ and ‘delete’ still name software functions, while machines are programmed with ‘Notebook’ or ‘Office’. (In addition, the computerization of writing profoundly

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alters without bringing to an end the work of the hand.) In this particular essay, then, paper is not so much increasingly replaced by new technology, according to a stable chronology charted in terms of historical advance or change. Rather, paper itself provides the very figure for thinking the divisibility of a number of its traits, folds or feuilles: not just in the sense that the story of the apparent gradual reduction or withdrawal (retrait) of paper is also the story of a general expansion in its production and circulation; but also in the sense that paper’s supposed function as a subjectile or bodily support underlying the traces or marks ‘that may come along and affect it from the outside’ (a ‘discourse’, Derrida tells us, that is ‘neither true nor false, but heavy with . . . assumptions’ (pp. 42–3)) is complicated by the question of whether, when we say ‘paper’, we mean ‘the empirical body that bears this conventional name’ [my italics] or whether we are ‘already resorting to a rhetorical figure’ (p. 52). (The idea of ‘an empirical body that bears’ the name of paper gives itself over to a figure of speech, of course. How can ‘paper’ support the figure of itself as (a) body? And how does ‘paper’, as much as being written upon, serve to write a discourse?) In other words, paper neither exactly appears nor disappears according to a stable historical chronology, but instead folds in on or over itself, bears itself only through a constitutive slippage between the empirical and the rhetorical or figural. This slip-sliding, to and fro, recto, verso, is therefore the support/non-support for what we call ‘paper’. Thus, to return to ‘The Book to Come’, Derrida writes that the codex ‘had itself supplanted the volume, the volumen, the scroll. It had supplanted it without making it disappear, I should stress’ (p. 9). This is the process we are invited by Derrida to witness, however impossible such witnessing might be: one in which we can watch nothing disappear, or in which the play of appearance-disappearance obeys an altogether different logic, an entirely other economy: For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with a new economy.

Chapter 3

Writing Friendship: Agamben and Derrida

Agamben and Derrida In December 2004, just two months after the death of Jacques Derrida, a special issue of the on-line journal Contretemps devoted itself to the work of Giorgio Agamben. The publication of such volumes reflects the fact that Agamben’s reputation and influence as a philosopher of language and contemporary politics has risen sharply in recent years, particularly in terms of his reception in the Anglo-American world. For many, Agamben’s spellbinding readings of Benjamin, Schmitt, Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault and others, as well as his distinctive reinterpretation of the biopolitical, the camp, sovereignty, law and the potentiality of community, have helped renew the ‘theoretical’ project, amid widespread rumours of its irreversible demise. In short, Agamben has emerged as a leading European critical figure, seemingly able to rethink and reconfigure the entire terrain of twentieth-century critical thought in terms of an intellectual project that sets itself no less of a task than responding to the most pressing contemporary realities. Agamben himself chose to contribute an essay to this particular edition of Contretemps, titled simply ‘Friendship’.1 Whereas the piece must surely have been written before news broke of Derrida’s passing, the essay itself constituted another in a series of critical engagements on Agamben’s part with Derrida’s thought, this time via a number of references to Politics of Friendship. Going right back to some of his earliest publications, Agamben’s critical ‘relations’ with deconstruction have proved themselves to be indispensable to the elaboration of his own philosophical project, both in the realms of Agamben’s

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philosophy of language and his political thought. For example, he closes his early work Stanzas, first published in Italian in 1977, with a description of deconstruction as a ‘grammatological project’ which ‘effects a salutary critique of the metaphysical inheritance that has crystallized in the notion of the sign’ but which fails to succeed in ‘accomplishing that “step-backwards-beyond” metaphysics’ itself.2 Here, in contrast to the apparently more prudent Heidegger, Derrida is presented as rash in his claims about what the deconstruction of metaphysics might achieve. Thus, if ‘the origin of Western metaphysics’ is, for Agamben, exposed in and by the fact ‘that presence be always already caught in a signification’ nevertheless ‘placing writing and the trace in an initial position means putting the emphasis on this original experience, but not transcending it’.3 ‘The metaphysics of writing and of the signifier is but the reverse face of the metaphysics of the signified and the voice, and not, surely, its transcendence’ Agamben writes, in the process reducing the deconstructive project to that of a simple reversal of the hierarchical binaries of Western metaphysics – doubtless, for many, a gesture on Agamben’s part which remains far removed from any possibility of ‘transcendence’ over or unproblematic return to that very same metaphysics. In several other texts, meanwhile, one almost feels that the entire momentum of Agamben’s critical re-elaborations of virtually the whole field of post-Enlightenment thought, not to mention his fascinating re-encounters with medieval texts and philosophy, builds ultimately towards a critique of deconstruction. Or, perhaps even more significantly, that the readings and arguments found in Agamben’s writings aim to culminate in an insistence that the era of deconstruction (‘the prestige of deconstruction in our time’4 as Agamben puts it in Homo Sacer) must necessarily draw to a close. For instance, in Homo Sacer, perhaps the single best-known text by him in terms of its reception in the Anglo-American world, Agamben dwells on the disputed reading of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ found in the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem. (We’ll come back to Kafka’s text and its contested critical reception a little later on.) This correspondence presents us with a question: On the cusp of our own modernity, does the tale endorse an image of power being in force without

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significance, a pure form of law beyond its own content, as Scholem would have it, or does it signal instead a state of exception turned into the rule, pointing towards, in Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s interpretation of the story, ‘law’s fulfillment and its becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to rule’?5 (As we’ll see, Agamben finds in his own interpretation of the Benjaminian position the greater potential for thinking the political today.) Whatever the outcome of this dispute, the evocation of Kafka’s text provides the occasion for Agamben to read deconstruction itself in terms of this enigmatic little tale. (Derrida, of course, writes his own essay ‘Before the Law’ around Kafka’s story, to which Agamben implicitly alludes in this particular passage from Homo Sacer.) Thus, deconstruction is presented as that which can only negotiate infinitely with the law, thereby becoming – or so Agamben hints – merely a symptom or exemplar of the ban-structure of sovereign power, a power which neither exactly prohibits nor permits, but which offers an apparently absolute form of freedom or release from the law (the ban), only in order to capture or subjugate by more uncrossable means. For Agamben, then, it would seem that deconstruction itself dwells at – indeed, ceaselessly redraws – this threshold of indistinction characterized by the Kafkaesque figure of the ‘open’ door of the law. In the process, deconstruction effectively remains bound within precisely the same zone of indistinction that gives rise to the sovereign exception and to bare life, which conjointly form the ‘originary political element’,6 an ‘element’ before which deconstruction therefore remains at once blind and powerless. (In reference to this assertion of such an ‘originary political element’ it is important to note that, in Homo Sacer, Agamben specifically rejects the friend/enemy relation as the decisive categorial pair of Western politics, a move that in some respects paves the way for his dissatisfaction with Derrida’s Politics of Friendship while at the same time establishing a context for some of the remarks about friendship’s political potentiality found in his contribution to the 2004 Contretemps issue.) Since Agamben has become more prominent as a contemporary critical thinker of real significance, notably in the wake of debates about ‘the end of theory’ which have so preoccupied the AngloAmerican academy, philosophical engagements with the Agamben– Derrida relation are already beginning to appear. To take just one

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example, in his essay ‘Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida’ Adam Thurschwell has argued that Agamben’s view of Derrida – that is, in Agamben’s own terms, that Derrida ultimately ‘endorses the notion of a “negative ontological foundation” of metaphysics’7 so that deconstruction itself represents, in Thurschwell’s gloss, a continuation rather than a rupture of the metaphysical tradition as a whole, whereas Agamben’s philosophy of language understood in terms of potentiality overcomes such ‘negative’ foundation – is itself predicated on a disastrous misconstrual of deconstruction. For Thurschwell, this is because deconstruction moves towards the point at which it is ‘ethics in the Levinasian sense’ rather than ‘fundamental ontology’ that is taken as ‘first philosophy’.8 Whether or not deconstruction is properly construed as, at bottom, ethical or, rather, compelled by ‘ethics in the Levinasian sense’ is of course open to debate: admittedly, Thurschwell is himself quick to distinguish an ethics of the other from ‘properly’ philosophical thought or discourse, so as to complicate any simple-minded conception of its foundational standing in place of any ontology. One could of course multiply such ‘philosophical’ readings and counter-readings of the Derrida–Agamben ‘relation’, and undoubtedly (and perhaps necessarily) there will be many more of these to come. However, since in his essay on ‘Friendship’ Agamben begins by noting the close proximity of the very name ‘philosophy’ to a concept of friendship, my approach in this essay will be to explore – and to read – the possible connections and undoubted tensions between Derrida and Agamben in terms of the significance friendship acquires in their various references (or non-references) to one another, or in other words amid their correspondences or noncorrespondences. In the first stages of his essay, Agamben envisages that research into the question of friendship (the latter so closely linked to the very possibility of philosophy) might best be undertaken alongside performative acts of friendship – hence he alludes to a correspondence conducted with his ‘friend’ Jean-Luc Nancy on this very subject which, we are told, was intended to double the question of friendship as a research topic with the performative dimensions of a friendly correspondence. The question of friendship as a (perhaps the) philosophical question, then, was thought by Agamben to be best encountered through a self-reflexively performative exercise or

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operation, rather than by the dry and somewhat context-less formulation of propositional statements. That the posing of this question of friendship in the realm of philosophy was in fact blocked or forestalled by an abrupt end to the correspondence (signalling either the incompatibility of the topic with a friendly exchange, or the end or diminution of friendship itself) hardly alters the fact of an irreducible, though not necessarily harmonious, bind between the ‘staging’ and the articulation or expression of philosophy/friendship – though it may of course shed new light on what is in fact entailed by the friendship that Agamben wants to place near the heart of philosophy itself. Philosophy as a question of friendship, friendship as a (the ?) philosophical question: the failed correspondence between Nancy and Agamben to which the latter refers in his essay on ‘Friendship’ almost unwittingly offers the possibility of a transformative reconfiguration, an ‘othering’ one might say, of these questions and connections. It is in this light, then, that I want here to pursue the Derrida–Agamben relation less in terms of a ‘philosophical’ assessment of their relative positions and differences in relation to each other, and indeed in regard to the entire field or tradition of Western thought, than by tracing out what joins and separates these two ‘philosophers’ (though Agamben hesitates to use this name in reference to Derrida) in terms of the enactment of a certain correspondence or non-correspondence between them. In other words, I want to ask what exactly is going on between Agamben and Derrida by pursuing ways in which, between the two of them, friendship as a question is taken up and performed, whether this occurs in a friendly or unfriendly fashion (if indeed it proves possible to distinguish between the two.)

‘Friendship’ Agamben begins his essay ‘Friendship’, then, by asserting that friendship and philosophy are intimately linked according to a longstanding and essential affinity. This association finds its most obvious expression and archaeology in the philos of philosophy, by which the friend – or the concept of the friend – is included or implied in philosophy’s very name. Friendship and philosophy are

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almost one, and are seemingly unthinkable without the other, since they nearly share names (and, tellingly, Agamben will have more to say later in his paper about what friendship, philosophy and indeed insults – as common terms – actually come to name): Friendship . . . is so closely linked to the very definition of philosophy that one can say that without it, philosophy would in fact not be possible. The intimacy of friendship and philosophy is so deep that philosophy includes the philos, the friend, in its very name and, as is often the case with all excessive proximities, one risks not being able to get to the bottom of it. In the classical world, this promiscuity . . . of the friend and the philosopher was taken for granted . . . Today the relation between friendship and philosophy has actually fallen into discredit, and it is with a sort of embarrassment and uneasy conscience that professional philosophers try to come to terms with such an uncomfortable and, so to speak, clandestine partner of their thought. However, while philosophy and friendship share a deep and even promiscuous intimacy, it is also true that the very recourse to a language of proximity or closeness at the same time in part differentiates, distinguishes or divides friendship and philosophy. (In fact, Agamben himself uses the term ‘con-divides’ later in the essay, although here the term is taken to imply an original fold or alterity in existence, something like a pure, undeconstructible potentiality that transcends individual subjects or subjectivities.) Friendship, then, isn’t quite philosophy – nearly, but not quite. Instead, one might say that philosophy shares a friendship with friendship. Here, from a point of view that is undoubtedly other than Agamben’s, friendship might be seen to function in terms of what Derrida elsewhere calls a ‘transcendental excrescence’9 or in other words a supplement in relation to philosophy. It is neither simply inside nor outside philosophy, neither merely an exemplary example nor a master term, but instead gets located or, rather, dislocated, somewhere between the two, therefore strangely redoubling its own divisible trait. Hence, the relationship of philosophy to friendship includes a measure both of distance and proximity, inordinately difficult to stabilize or

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enumerate (in other words, a somewhat immeasurable measure), which is nevertheless in constant need of reckoning. This situation recalls Derrida’s retranslation of Ent-fernung from Being and Time in Parages, where Ent-fernung is the distancing or withdrawing that creates proximity or closeness for Dasein. Heidegger’s insight is that proximity can only begin with distance, but a distance that can only hope to find its measure (however impossibly) through proximity as, therefore, the non-oppositional ‘other’ of itself.10 Thus, while – in the very next move of his essay – Agamben tries to postulate the falling into discredit of the relation between philosophy and friendship in modern times, which he suggests begins with Nietzsche but finds perhaps its most recent echo in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (the strategy of which, Agamben tells us, is both to affirm and ‘distrustfully revoke’ friendship), nevertheless the intimacy to which Agamben points between friendship and philosophy – precisely because it is of the nature of a friendship, that is, unstably or incalculably split between distance and proximity, origin and supplement – is surely always able to potentialize a falling out. Thus it is no easy matter to simply oppose (following Agamben) the ancient or classical conception of philosophy’s friendship with friendship to a more recent (post-Nietzschean) situation characterized by philosophy’s uneasiness and ambivalence about friendship itself. Rather, the remarks about philosophy and friendship with which Agamben begins his essay in Contretemps actually destine the same problem – that of a dislocating supplementarity, a divisible trait, rather than an oppositional difference – to inhabit and define not only the relationship between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ conceptions of friendship but also, by necessary implication, Agamben’s own (un-friendly) relations, here, with Derrida and deconstruction. Nonetheless, Agamben moves ahead with his essay on ‘Friendship’ by referring to his own friendship with Nancy: Many years ago, my friend Jean-Luc Nancy and I decided to exchange letters on the subject of friendship. We were convinced this was the best way of approaching and almost ‘staging’ a problem which otherwise seemed to elude analytical treatment. I wrote the first letter and waited, not without trepidation, for the reply.

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This is not the place to try to understand the reasons – or, perhaps, misunderstandings – that caused the arrival of Jean-Luc’s letter to signify the end of our project. But it is certain that our friendship – which, according to our plans, should have given us privileged access to the problem – was instead an obstacle for us and was consequently, in a way, at least temporarily obscured. Here, Agamben’s friendship with Nancy is therefore ‘staged’ in terms of a certain correspondence: the exchange of letters. Agamben foresees that an exploration of the question of friendship is best conducted by way of performative acts of friendship associated with the epistolary intercourse between two philosophers. But, in fact, despite the expected doubling (or redoubling) of the very question with the act of friendship, in the movement between the concept and its exercise friendship proves not to be the same as itself. Once more, even as it attempts to draw closer to its classical ideal (and thus away from its discredited standing ‘today’), friendship proves an unfriendly friend of philosophy, or indeed vice versa. Agamben tells us that the question of friendship is inhibited or blocked by its own performative staging, via acts of friendship or the exchange of letters, precisely at the moment the other (Nancy) writes back. And Agamben seems to choose his words carefully here, so that it remains a little unclear whether it is Nancy who, in his reply to Agamben, writes of his decision to end the project, or whether indeed it is Agamben, upon reading Nancy’s letter (whatever its contents might have been), who concludes that the exchange cannot continue. Clearly, the strongest hint is that Agamben is the injured party and it is Nancy who decides against friendship in at least a double sense. (There is a troubling mixture here of a strongly paraded modicum of professional discretion on Agamben’s part and, at the same time, the irrefutably ‘clandestine’ insinuation of blame lying elsewhere.) However, the lack of clarity on this point in Agamben’s own text perhaps unwittingly points to a deeper truth: that it is Agamben, finally, who decides to end the correspondence or break the circuitry (of or between friendship/philosophy) by refusing, in his own essay, to circulate or communicate the precise reasons why the arrival of Jean-Luc’s letter signifies the end of the project. Agamben, in other words,

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‘goes public’ with this apparently otherwise private correspondence, while keeping its secret (or telling of its secret) in a way which, precisely in its interlinear evasiveness, can only reduce the possibility of ‘writing back’ – not least on the part of the reader. At this level, then, the decision to end the correspondence (and to decide, more or less clandestinely, against friendship in at least a double sense) would not, finally, be that of the other. However, the Agamben–Nancy correspondence mentioned at the beginning of the essay ‘Friendship’ – howsoever it is ‘staged’ – does set the scene for a somewhat different exchange with Derrida. From the beginning, at least, the Nancy example seems to follow the original or originary theme of an essential linkage between friendship and philosophy or, indeed, philosophers. Thus, as philosophers the two (and this is more or less naturalized in Agamben’s paper) correspond as friends, at the beginning, at any rate. In this context, there are two very telling features about the Agamben–Derrida correspondence as it is presented in the essay. Let us quote the passage in question at some length before attempting to analyse its salient characteristics: Jacques Derrida chose as the Leitmotiv of his book on friendship a sibylline motto, traditionally attributed to Aristotle, that negates friendship in the very gesture with which it seems to invoke it: o philo, oudeis philos, ‘o friends, there are no friends’. . . While Derrida was still working on the seminar which gave birth to the book, we had discussed together a curious philological problem that concerned precisely the motto or witticism in question . . . if we open a modern edition of the Lives of the Philosophers, we do not find in the chapter dedicated to the biography of Aristotle (V, 21) the phrase in question, but rather one almost identical in appearance, the meaning of which is nonetheless different and far less enigmatic: oi (omega with subscript iota) philoi, oudeis philos, ‘he who has many friends has no friend’. A library visit was enough to clarify the mystery. In 1616 the great Genevan philologist Isaac Casaubon decided to publish a new edition of the Lives. Arriving at the passage in question – which still read . . . o philoi (o friends) – he corrected the enigmatic version of

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the manuscripts without hesitation. It became perfectly intelligible and for this reason accepted by modern editors. Since I had immediately informed Derrida of the results of my research, I was astonished, when his book was published . . . not to find there any trace of the problem. If the motto – apocryphal according to modern philologists – appeared there in original form, it was certainly not out of forgetfulness: it was essential to the book’s strategy that friendship be, at the same time, both affirmed and distrustfully revoked. Before one even attempts to tackle the contents of this extraordinary passage, there are some noteworthy features surrounding its very ‘staging’ in the essay. First of all, given that Agamben is not prepared to divulge the contents of the Nancy–Agamben letters – and, remember, this was an exchange presented as one undertaken with a friend – it is telling indeed that Agamben has no scruples, just a few lines on, in revealing what he wrote to Derrida. Tellingly, also, while Derrida is positioned here primarily as the recipient of letters – letters on the subject of friendship – he is noticeably, by contrast, not called a friend. Recall the essay’s opening gambit: ‘Friendship . . . is so closely linked to the very definition of philosophy . . .’. That one can correspond with a fellow philosopher who is not called a friend acquires a heightened significance here, even the implication that in comparison to ‘my friend Jean-Luc Nancy’ Derrida is no philosopher. Through library research, Agamben – as is his wont – clarifies the mystery of a double translation of ancient sources and, in the process, effectively delegitimates the motto which provides the leitmotiv for Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. Or so he thinks. For – whatever the rights and wrongs of Agamben’s decision to present a certain interpretation, tradition or translation as authoritative, and regardless of whether he is correct in asserting the complete absence of any trace of the so-called corrected version from the published book by Derrida – surely there is a further supplementary twist here, another dislocating graft of the performative onto the constative of friendship? In the very act of refuting as authoritative the central motto of Politics of Friendship, Agamben actually confirms its persistence as an

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apt description of what is happening in this correspondence (or ‘open’ non-correspondence) between the two philosophers: namely, that while Derrida is the object of Agamben’s address, the intended recipient of a letter from a philosopher (and philosophy is from the outset bound up with friendship, Agamben says), he is with some deliberateness (i.e. in pointed contrast to Nancy) not called a friend. In the very structure of this address, then, what better ‘staging’ of the motto ‘o my friends, there is no friend’ could one imagine? By extension, what better ‘staging’ might one imagine of the so-called post-Nietzschean mixture of affirmation and distrustful revocation of friendship – the very same ambivalent combination from which, precisely, Agamben wishes to distance himself? (Distance, as Heidegger suggests, has proximity as its other name.) Agamben continues his essay by seeking to locate and define the word ‘friend’ in terms of its linguistic class or category: I believe that ‘friend’ belongs to that class of terms which linguists define as non-predicative – terms, that is, on the basis of which it is not possible to construct a class of objects in which one might group the things to which one applies the predicate in question . . . Strange as it may seem, ‘friend’ shares this characteristic with another species of non-predicative terms: insults. Linguists have demonstrated that an insult does not offend the person who receives it because it places him in a particular category (for example, that of excrement, or of male or female genitalia) which would simply be impossible or, in any case, false . . . What offends in the insult is, to be precise, a pure experience of language, and not a reference to the world. If this is true, ‘friend’ would share this condition not only with insults, but with philosophical terms: terms which, as is well known, do not have an objective denotation. Given the highly ambivalent relations Agamben forges, albeit in different ways, with both Nancy and Derrida in this essay (one an unfriendly friend, the other no friend at all); perhaps it comes as no surprise that the quality or standing of friendship as a non-predicative term is shared not only with philosophy but also with insults. What offends in insults, says Agamben, is ‘not a reference to the

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world’ for, in these terms, the insult – which places the recipient in an impossible or false category – cannot be identified with, and therefore cannot cause genuine offence. Instead, Agamben tells us, the insult consists simply in ‘a pure experience of language’. We might note in passing that this formulation decisively shifts the territory or field of discussion to a place near the heart of Agamben’s own philosophical project, construed as an enquiry into the ramifications of the potentiality of language as pure fact. Thus insults, and by association philosophy and friendship as similarly non-predicative terms, are drawn into a deep correspondence with Agamben’s thought, at the expense of Derrida . . . who could only be insulted, not least since – as Agamben himself asserts – the insult given here names nothing or no-one, and certainly not the friend or philosopher (Derrida, remember, is named as neither). What an insult! – the non-content (or non-referential content) rather than the (referential) content of which is responsible for the offence! Yet perhaps the insult backfires. For, precisely in sharing (becoming friends) with these other terms – friendship, philosophy – according to a nonoppositional and promiscuous divisibility of a common trait, the insult does indeed seem to re-enact and partake of the ambivalence, duplicity and untrustworthiness that Agamben wants to reject in post-Nietzschean philosophies of friendship. In giving insult, then, Agamben’s triumph is short-lived in that his elaborate (though necessarily unelaborated) insult unavoidably comes to share in the conception of friendship that Agamben himself sets out to repudiate or supersede. Derrida doesn’t write back, of course – how could he? Although, maybe, just maybe (and in an unintentionally parodic reconfiguration of the interrupted exchange with Nancy), Agamben’s text unwittingly reveals itself as doing just that for him. Agamben’s own text, perhaps, writes back for Derrida.

Before the Law In ‘Friendship’ Agamben writes the following: [In] the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics [Aristotle tells us] one cannot live without friends . . . Friendship belongs to

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the prote philosophia, because that which is in question in it concerns the very experience, the very ‘perception’ of existing . . . ‘Friend’ cannot be a real predicate . . . In modern terms, one might say that ‘friend’ is an existential and not a categorical. But this existential – which, as such, is unable to be conceptualized – is nonetheless intersected by an intensity that charges it with something like a political potency. This intensity is the ‘syn’, the ‘con-’ which divides, disseminates and renders con-divisible – in fact, already condivided – the very perception, the very pleasantness of existing . . . It is essential . . . that human community should here be defined . . . through a cohabitation . . . which is not defined by participating in a common substance but by a purely existential con-division and, so to speak, one without an object: friendship, as concurrent perception of the pure fact of existence. How this originary political synaesthesia could become, in the course of time, the consensus to which democracies entrust their fates in this latest extreme and exhausted phase of their evolution is, as they say, another story. In Homo Sacer, Agamben specifically rejects the friend/enemy relation as the ‘fundamental categorial pair of Western politics’,11 giving rise to a position which, if correct, seems to devastate the very project of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship as a deconstructive archaeology of precisely such a ‘relation’ or ‘pair’. Here, then, friendship is decisively rejected as a point of departure for rethinking the political, and for Agamben – the Agamben of Homo Sacer – Derrida’s Politics of Friendship would therefore presumably constitute nothing more than a misconstrual of the grounds of the political. In Homo Sacer, we are told, these ‘grounds’ should instead be understood in terms of the interplay between the sovereign decision and the production of bare life as the fundamental political element. However, in the passage quoted above from Agamben’s more recent essay on friendship, it is the existential rather than categorical dimension or disposition of friendship which allows it to become ‘intersected by an intensity that charges it with something like a political potency’: that of the condivided nature of existence expressed as the pure fact and potentiality of language – in other words, perhaps, the coming community (as a conception not reducible to the concept, or as a name for something

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one cannot name – a non-predicate, to put it another way). Thus, friendship – excluded on the one hand from the very definition of the political – returns here as the figure of a certain messianic salvation or fulfilment, charged with the potential for redeeming democracies ‘in the latest extreme and exhausted phase of their evolution’. (It must be left to the reader to decide whether the (un-friendly) friendship ‘staged’ in Agamben’s own text on ‘Friendship’ establishes an ‘existential’ that might be considered redemptive for any politics, any communities, any sharing, any correspondences or relations. This messianism of Agambenesque friendship, staged in performative or non-predicative terms in the essay ‘Friendship’ – what does it redeem exactly? Friendship?) In Homo Sacer, however, the friend/enemy relation appears to be discarded since, as we’ve just noted, it gives rise only to a misrecognition of the basis of the political; and yet the question of friendship or of ‘correspondence’/‘non-correspondence’ is nevertheless unavoidably raised or implied – put at stake – at the moment Agamben seeks, in Homo Sacer, to critique deconstruction on the strength of Derrida’s interpretation of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’. As previously mentioned, Agamben sidles up to this text by way of revisiting its disputed reading in the correspondence between Scholem and Benjamin. Thus, it is precisely in the vicinity of a friendship or ‘friendly’ dispute that the question of the political is supposedly reshaped or refined (and thus differentiated from that of ‘friendship’) by Agamben himself. Furthermore, as we shall see, the tale in question – Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ – not only establishes complex relations of rapport/nonrapport, as Derrida himself notes, but acquires exemplary status in Homo Sacer only on the strength of Agamben’s own rapport/nonrapport with both the story itself and, by implication, Derrida’s reading of it. The ambivalent ‘friend’ uncannily returns, therefore, precisely where he is attemptedly set aside. In Agamben’s reading of the disputed reading of the tale, Benjamin wholly rejects Scholem’s interpretation of the text as one which concerns the idea of a power being in force without significance, a ‘pure’ law divested of meaningful reference to its actual content. For Agamben, the Benjaminian position, in which he detects the greater potential for reconceptualizing contemporary political realities,

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signals instead a state of exception turned into the rule, which achieves at once ‘law’s fulfillment’ and, perhaps more promisingly, ‘its becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to rule’. To understand better the possible promise of this ‘Benjaminian’ interpretation – and to see why, in Homo Sacer, the Benjamin– Scholem dispute actually presages the Agamben–Derrida relation – it is perhaps worth situating this section of the text in terms of its broader ‘political’ concerns, arguments and ideas. Through a variety of readings running from the classical period right up to the present day, Agamben seeks to demonstrate the paradox that it is exception that gives rise to the law in all its force. Following Schmitt, he argues that the power to decide exceptions to the law is in fact what defines sovereign power, which therefore realizes itself in the capacity both to exclude and capture human ‘life’ precisely within the sovereign exception. The most recent example of this might be the detention without legal status of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, although tellingly – and controversially – Agamben traces out a near identical structure of what he terms ‘biopolitical’ power in the very form of the Nazi concentration camp, which he sees much less as the absolute outer limit of possibility of human endeavour within the history and traditions of the West, than a more or less inevitable consequence of its specific political formation since ancient times. As a consequence of his analysis, then, Agamben sees sovereignty – construed as the right to decide exceptions to the law – as far from waning: a perspective which runs somewhat counter to Foucault’s conception of sovereignty’s epochal demise amid the modern reconfiguration of power in terms of governmentality, administration and discipline. Sovereignty, as that which is the innermost centre of the juridical order and yet also above or outside (or out of reach of) the law, thus constitutes itself through the ability to decide exception to the law as the law, and therefore to wield its power – in a state of ‘emergency’ – against bare or ‘sacred’ life: a category Agamben derives from Roman criminal law, one which indicates the enigmatic figure of the sacred man, homo sacer, who can be killed but not sacrificed, a ‘banished’ individual who as such becomes the object of a purely profane

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violence (outside any tragic paradigm) that enacts itself to the complete exclusion of all categories or contexts of moral or ethical responsibility, and in total absence of legal rituals or rights. Sovereign power, that is, resides precisely in a ban-structure, whereby it acquires its force paradoxically by abandoning life to its barest condition; casting out or, in a certain sense, freeing biological existence from the politico-ideological reach of the law, in order to exercise power over ‘life’ all the more unremittingly, precisely in its excluded ‘bareness’. From this perspective, Agamben casts a new and unsettling light on debates concerning basic human rights, eugenics, euthanasia, medical intervention, organ donation, brain death, ethnic cleansing and the concentration camp itself, by insisting that the power derived from the sovereign exception is ultimately biopolitical power, the ‘fundamental activity’ of which is none other than ‘the production of bare life as originary political element’.12 Thus, Agamben detects a hidden complicity between discourses and practices devoted to the preservation of bare life (i.e. those discourses which seek its ‘liberation’ from ideological, political or religious determination in order to assert the basic, inalienable value of ‘life’ itself), and the biopolitical or thanatopolitical death machines associated with the worst horrors of the last century. As Agamben therefore tells us, today it is not in the city but rather through the camp that we might find the fundamental political paradigm of the West. Both sovereign power and bare life thus dwell at the threshold of indistinction between law and violence, states of emergency or exception and the permanent condition of rule, exclusion and inclusion, inside and outside, the human and the non-human. Since, for Agamben, the state of exception can be found at the very origin of political and juridical formations, this very same ‘state’ – as precisely an unstable threshold of indistinction – increasingly becomes a permanent condition of the politico-juridical order, and, without a profound reconceptualization of the political being put into effect, appears likely to extend itself in planetary terms. Thus the sovereign decision as exception is today exercised along a biopolitical horizon that includes the physician and scientist as much as the political leader; while the figure of the sacred man remains obscure to us nowadays, Agamben insists, only inasmuch as we are all virtually homines

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sacri. Meanwhile, as Benjamin Noys, following Agamben, has put it, ‘‘‘bare life” gains confirmation in the “humanitarian interventions” that confront us with the images of that “bare life” on our television screens and, at the same time, maintain that “bare life” as the support for sovereign power’.13 In other words, in exceptional circumstances or states of emergency, such examples of ‘bare life’ in fact maintain the power to decide beyond the law. It is in the context of this broader interpretation of the political, then, that Agamben chooses to side with what he sees as the Benjaminian view of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, rejecting the idea of a more intractable ‘political’ end-game found in the notion of power ‘being in force without significance’ through the pure form of the law, in favour of the potentiality of law’s non-transcendence – at the threshold of indistinction – over life itself. Whatever the ‘political’ or ‘philosophical’ gains that might follow from this position (or, indeed, whatever its limits might be), what interests me here is the way in which this revisitation of a disputed reading – and indeed of a certain correspondence that is apparently based, once again, on a degree of misunderstanding – sets the scene for another of Agamben’s critiques of deconstruction. By re-reading (in a chapter called ‘Form of Law’) Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’, then, Agamben stages a critical encounter with Derrida’s own essay ‘Before the Law’ and indeed his other seminal text ‘Force of Law’. In a compelling and difficult paragraph, Agamben writes: The experience of being in force without significance lies at the basis of a current of contemporary thought that is not irrelevant here. The prestige of deconstruction in our time lies precisely in its having conceived of the entire text of tradition as being in force without significance, a being in force whose strength lies essentially in its undecidability and in having shown that such a being in force is, like the door of the Law in Kafka’s parable, absolutely impassable. But it is precisely concerning the sense of this being in force (and of the state of exception that it inaugurates) that our position distinguishes itself from that of deconstruction. Our age does indeed stand in front of language just as the man from the country in the parable stands in front of the door of the Law. What

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threatens thinking here is the possibility that thinking might find itself condemned to infinite negotiations with the doorkeeper or, even worse, that it might end by itself assuming the role of the doorkeeper who, without really blocking the entry, shelters the Nothing onto which the door opens. As the evangelical warning cited by Origen concerning the interpretation of Scripture has it: ‘Woe to you, men of the Law, for you have taken away the key to knowledge: you yourselves have not entered, and you have not let the others who approached entered either’ (which ought to be reformulated as follows: ‘Woe to you, who have not wanted to enter into the door of the Law but have not permitted it to be closed either’).14 Here, as already noted, it is as if deconstruction destines itself to ‘negotiate infinitely’ with the law only in the form of becoming a further example of the ban-structure of sovereign power, which neither simply prohibits nor grants, but which offers an apparently total form of release or freedom from the law only in order to then overpower by more irresistible means. Thus, for Agamben, it would seem that deconstruction itself resides at and, indeed, endlessly redraws this threshold of indistinction such as it is characterized by Kafka’s ‘open’ door of the law. Deconstruction, in other words, remains caught within the same zone of indistinction that gives rise to the sovereign exception and to bare life, which together constitute the ‘originary political element’. This originary element remains unseen and unchanged by deconstruction. Many of those more sympathetic to Derrida might seek to challenge this critique of deconstruction along ‘philosophical’ lines – an undertaking which could very well involve at once a massive re-reading of the canonical and non-canonical texts of deconstruction, and more particularly a serious reconsideration of whether Derrida’s thinking of undecidability (or of ‘force’) really gives rise merely to an infinite negotiation which remains ultimately impotent or inaccessible. However, my own preference is to respond to this critique first of all by examining the way in which it is performatively enacted or ‘theatricalized’ around Kafka’s text, remembering once again that for Agamben philosophy itself essentially implies a

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friendship or correspondence with philosophy or between philosophers, albeit one which (as the Nancy episode demonstrates) ‘stages’ itself in a way that dislocates the very same relation or correspondence – and thus, the very same ‘position’ of philosophy – that it implies. In the staging of this critique, in its ‘theatricalization’ around the Kafka text, then, does Agamben in fact unwittingly dislocate just the ‘position’ he hopes to secure in relation to deconstruction? Before undertaking the hugely daunting task of exploring the philosophical foundations of Agamben’s critique of Derrida (or, indeed, before assessing the extent to which Derrida’s ‘Before the Law’ or ‘Force of Law’ might ‘write back’ in answer to this critique, which in itself would take more space than is available here), might one instead begin by asking whether the text – and, indeed, the scene of reading or non-reading – that Agamben chooses as the battleground upon which to engage with deconstruction in fact provides stable and reliable grounds for the critique that Agamben wishes to venture? Will Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ do the job Agamben wants it to do? Let’s begin by quoting Kafka’s text at length, as it is cited in Derrida’s essay: Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a countryman and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. ‘It is possible,’ says the doorkeeper, ‘but not at the moment’. Since the gate stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the gateway into the interior. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: ‘If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers . . .’. These are difficulties the countryman has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. . . . During these many years

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the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. . . . Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has already altered much to the countryman’s disadvantage. ‘What do you want to know now?’ asks the doorkeeper . . . ‘Everyone strives to reach the Law,’ says the man, ‘so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?’ The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: ‘No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it’. Franz Kafka, ‘Before the Law’15 It would be an easy enough matter to read this text along standard literary-critical lines in order to identify in Kafka’s story a paradoxical interplay of the hospitable and the inhospitable, the open and the closed, welcome and cruelty, violence and kindness, animosity and friendship, all of which – not least on Agamben’s view – might be seen to inhabit the deconstructive account of friendship’s ‘politics’; and therefore to redeploy the Kafka text, contra Agamben, in order to show that the literary example he chooses to place centre-stage in this elaborately theatricalized dismissal of deconstruction forms part of a basis or foundation for the argument that remains far from secure. But, in advance of any such reading, it seems important to note a perhaps more fundamental fact. First of all, while Agamben alludes to Kafka’s story in the midst of a series of references to Benjamin, Scholem and deconstruction, he does not read it, as Derrida does in great detail in his own ‘Before the Law’. Instead, Agamben builds his own ‘position’ on a view of the text, and of its possible relationship to various strands of critical thought, that proceeds with a degree of haste which echoes the confidence he displays in a brief ‘library visit’ – the one that for Agamben proves ‘enough’

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to undermine the entire project of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. Thus, through an allusion which falls short of a reading, Agamben enters into a somewhat enigmatic or perhaps even ambivalent relationship of correspondence/non-correspondence or rapport/ non-rapport with Kafka’s text (not to mention with Derrida’s). This in fact resonates, not only with the double structure of rapport/ non-rapport that for Derrida in his own ‘Before the Law’ accompanies the Freudian story of prohibition, the father and the law (a story Agamben would want to repudiate – not least in Derrida’s apparently ‘Scholemesque’ retelling of it – in favour of his own ‘Benjaminian’ interpretation of the law), but also with what might be called the opening move of this very same text by Derrida (though his ‘Before the Law’ itself asks the question: where does a text open or begin?). At the most obvious level, at least, Derrida’s text commences by replicating Kafka’s own title, taking it as its own. But is a title – whether or not it functions as a citation – ever a beginning? Is it indeed part of the text, or outside it? This more or less undecidable question, one that recalls the parergonal effects discussed in The Truth in Painting, is of course repeatedly raised by Derrida himself. Derrida’s ‘borrowed’ or ‘stolen’ title, then, replays as it repeats the original, putting it back into play, just as the incipit in Kafka’s tale – in the very act of replicating the title – redoubles and divides the proprietorial or territorial space of the heading, and indeed of the ‘work’. This not only shows the borders of a text to be radically unstable at precisely the moment it plays with a notion of self-identity (i.e. between ‘work’ and title) – thus calling into question an authoritative or masterful description of a text of precisely the kind ventured by Agamben. It also re-enacts the very question or effect of iterability, to which Derrida draws our attention on many occasions, whereby the mark repeats itself so as to become legible only according to an irreducibly doubled and divided structure of sameness and difference. In other words, from the outset Derrida’s text re-performs the problem of a text’s relationship to itself (and indeed to others) as inextricably one of correspondence/non-correspondence, or rapport/non-rapport. If such an effect of rapport/non-rapport is also apparent from the outset in Agamben’s gesture of allusion without reading, then the uneasy (yet intractable) mixture of proximity and distance,

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affirmation and distrustful revocation, that would seem for Agamben to accompany post-Nietzschean philosophies of friendship also comes to inhabit the very relation of Homo Sacer to Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ (and perhaps, by extension, to Derrida’s text of the same name), substituting for a supposedly masterful critique of deconstruction the stealthy reintroduction of a tenacious problem which Agamben wants to project elsewhere in order to differentiate and define his own ‘position’. Needless to say, the complex relationship of Agamben to Derrida calls for much more extensive thinking and reading than is possible here, and undoubtedly – given the changing climate of contemporary critical thought – a painstaking excavation of the philosophical terrain upon which the two meet and disagree has only just begun within the academy. The preliminary gesture of this essay has been to question whether the propositions, formulations and conclusions about language, politics and philosophy found in Agamben’s work – often masterful in tone and spellbinding in nature – are always matched or supported by his own critical procedures. Here, the critique of deconstruction acquires special significance since, on several occasions, it is what ostensibly allows Agamben to clarify and develop his ‘position’ or to embark on different pathways. However, on close reading, the (non-) correspondence with Derrida may re-establish a supposedly ‘deconstructive’ problematics of friendship which, for all the undoubted merit of Agamben’s writings, casts a somewhat different light on certain aspects of his way of doing philosophy (‘friendship . . . is so closely linked to the very definition of philosophy’ . . .).

Chapter 4

Anonymity Writing Pedagogy: Beckett, Descartes, Derrida

Beckett’s Company As Peter Boxall has recently noted,1 Beckett’s Company cleverly contrives an autobiographical atmosphere, responding to an unanswerable demand for self-revelation or self-explanation on the author’s part. It does so by means of an ingeniously constructed fable in which it is an unknowable other (itself written by who knows whom) that effectively writes the subject’s biography, indeed the ‘self’ itself. As Boxall notes: The story of ‘one on his back in the dark’, to whom a ‘voice’ tells stories of a past, a present and a future, is a form of autobiography in several different modes, but each kind of autobiographical writing that is present here is also a denial of the possibility of writing a life, or inheriting a history. The personal stories that are included here . . . are interwoven, often seamlessly, with an attempt to produce a digest of the public Beckett, an attempt to bring into presence the entirety of Beckett’s oeuvre. There are snatches, echoes, snippets from almost every published Beckett work in this short piece, references even to work that was yet to be written when Beckett published Company. (p. 307) Company, then, is ‘studded with images from Beckett’s life’ (the ‘story of the hedgehog ruinously saved in a box, the father sheltering from his labouring wife in country walks . . . the child sheltering from his parents in a refuge on the outskirts of a city, poring

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over his Longman’), which also turn out to be drawn from the very ‘landscape of his writing’. (In particular, for Boxall, ‘the central image of the son walking across pastureland with the ghost of the father beside him’ connects Company to Beckett’s entire oeuvre). Yet the formal character – the very grammar – of the text violently interrupts, complicates and confounds the attribution of authorial identity in any reading we might undertake. Company is often described as a late work, one which S. E. Gontarski introduces by giving it the name of a ‘closed space’ novel.2 This way of classifying the text draws on Gontarski’s assertion of a profound shift in Beckett’s writing from the mid-1960s onwards, whereby the journey theme which had been a ‘mainstay of Beckett’s fiction from Murphy and Watt’ (p. vii) through to the Trilogy and beyond (a journey theme characterized by the ‘fact of movement rather than any particular destination that consoled’ (p. viii)) is replaced or, rather, rethought by way of fictions which feature ‘stillness or some barely perceptible movement’, often entailing ‘little more than the perception of a figure in various postures, like an exercise in human origami’ (p. vii). (Badiou3 tells us that Beckett’s closed space is a precise arrangement allowing ‘what is seen’ to become coextensive with ‘what is said’ – ‘under the sign of the closed’ (p. 5).) This shift of emphasis towards so-called closed space (the borders of which, however, frequently remain highly problematic in Beckett’s writing)4 thus operates as the fictional conceit, construct or device for the reformulation of certain literary-philosophical problems in Beckett. Moreover, Gontarski notes that this rethought space of Beckett’s writing is accompanied by another ‘innovation’, that of a ‘new character’, one that is ‘devised’ on the strength of ‘someone else’s imaginings’, thus emerging as a ‘him’, occasionally a ‘her’, sometimes a ‘one’ or an ‘it’ (pp. viii–ix). Company, indeed, both establishes and puts into question its own fictional ground, space or machinery by dividing its narrative and discourse according to the three classes of personal pronoun, whereby the ‘one on his back in the dark’ – the figure supposedly at the centre of the tale – is given in the third person as the apparent addressee of a ‘voice’ that speaks in the second, a voice which says, for example, ‘ You are on your back in the dark’, ‘ You first saw the light on such and such a day’, ‘ Your mind never active at any

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time is now less than ever so’ and so on (pp. 3–5). However, the uncertainty of this voice’s object of address is soon noticed: Though now even less than ever given to wonder he cannot but sometimes wonder if it is indeed to and of him the voice is speaking. May not there be another with him in the dark to and of whom the voice is speaking? Is he not perhaps overhearing a communication not intended for him? (p. 4) Of whom and to whom the voice speaks, whether to and of the ‘one on his back in the dark’ or to and of another (in the same dark or in another dark altogether), is a question which cannot finally be answered, since while the voice seems to apostrophize, to give itself over to the most intimate linguistic intercourse saturated by memory and melancholia, it nevertheless always resorts to the second person in an impersonal and general sense (it speaks to an unnamed ‘You’). This also means, as the text itself wants to insist, that the voice cannot itself be addressed or spoken to, precisely because the question of whom it addresses, whom it calls to respond, remains irresolvable. If the voice indeed speaks to another, a possibility which cannot be discounted, it must therefore also speak of another, in a way which cannot but profoundly alienate and displace the supposed (auto-) biographical subject within the narrative space which we might otherwise think devotes itself to him. (‘To inherit one’s memories is to be violently displaced from the present’, Boxall writes (p. 307). Here, paradoxically enough, it is the apparent full immediacy of an address in the second person – ‘ You’ – that forces memory’s return to realize itself in the form of violent displacement.) Unable to respond to the voice in the second person in which the voice itself speaks, and unable to register a language or sense of ‘self’ in the first, precisely because the supposed biographical content of the voice’s remarks – which might otherwise allow for self-recognition – could very well relate to some other addressee altogether, the ‘one on his back in the dark’ is consigned and condemned to dwell in the third: Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not. (p. 4)

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Here the voice, announced by the use of the second person, ominously regains focal control of the text (we shall return in a moment to the question of just who it is that, a moment beforehand, says ‘He’), uttering a prohibition which may be meant for the one on his back, but which may also very well address another still, including quite possibly the reader him- or herself, who is just as likely referred to by the voice that says ‘ You’ as any addressee we might find ‘in’ the text. Thus, borrowing from Gontarski, one might even say that the reader as possible addressee is henceforth implicated by and therefore stealthily drawn into the now uncertain space of the work, as something like a ‘new character’ who is indeed ‘devised’ on the strength of ‘someone else’s imaginings’. (A new character, then – you, as reader – whose devising nonetheless precludes the possibility of saying ‘I’.) Thus, the borders of the text become as dislocated as its ‘internal’ space and workings, this sense of dislocation being reinforced by the one on his back’s failed attempt to calculate the ‘form and dimensions’ (p. 23) of the dark as a place according to a ‘unit’ of measurement based on the reach or span of a ‘crawl’ (p. 35). (Indeed, as the text dwells both on its own repetitions and the limits of its memory, setting out each time ‘from nought anew’ (p. 27) – a phrase which mixes a sense of endless recurrence with that of unballasted improvization – it becomes evident that time itself cannot be counted, or counted on, with any more certainty than steps.) Thus, it is as much due to the ‘formal’ problem of the voice’s uncertain address as because of the vicissitudes of memory or the encroaching yet unknowable ‘darkness’ as a metaphor for mental disintegration that the supposed closed space of an autobiographical subject and narrative is incalculably opened, irreparably dislocated. But who, then, says ‘ You’, ‘ You cannot’, ‘You shall not’? For that matter, when it is asked whether or ‘why’ another (another addressee) may reside ‘in another dark or in the same’ (p. 16) the question immediately imposes itself: ‘And whose voice asking this?’ Which, in turn, raises another question still: ‘Who asks, Whose voice asking this?’ To seek to attribute or identify the ‘voice’ (any voice that speaks in the text) implies that it has become the object of address, the object of enunciation of another. Which other? To ask the question merely redoubles the problem, since this other that seeks to render

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an other ‘voice’ nameable can itself be brought into language – and, thus, to the point of recognition – only as the object of enunciation of another still. According to a logic of a certain proliferation – one so fundamentally dislocating that it could never be contained in any one place, including any one text – the very possibility of attributing identity emerges only on condition of a deeply unnameable and everretreating ‘deviser’ (a ‘deviser’ of ‘company’) that radically replaces the subject or, indeed, the traditional structure of a subject-position. The proposition of an autobiographical ‘self’, the possibility of recourse to the first person, the idea of the text’s (or the dark’s) knowability, and hence its ultimate self-containment or closure, the dream of assigning a name to the voice that speaks – all these aporetic possibilities come into view only via a movement of continual displacement with radical anonymity as or at its (non-) origin. Thus it is that, far from faltering according to some paralysis in the function of the personal pronoun, the text cannot but continue to speak from the perspective of a radical and ‘originary’ anonymity that collapses the relations between its three recognizable classes. As Boxall puts it: But it is also the case that Company conjures, from its demonstration of the stalled machinery of historical time, a kind of continuation, just as it conjures, from the collapsing relations between first, second and third person, a voice which continues to speak. (p. 313) Thus the inaugural voice of the text – not that of the ‘voice’ marked by use of the second person, but instead that of the voice of the ‘voice’, or in other words that which voices the ‘voice’ – remains unnameable, unclassifiable. Who says ‘he cannot. He shall not’ prior to the ominous reintroduction of the ‘voice’ (‘You cannot. You shall not’) if the class of pronoun used is not that of the second person? In fact, then, another voice opens the text, the one which, in uttering Company’s very first line, names the voice as ‘voice’: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine’. This ‘deviser’ remains unplaceable within the linguistico-topological field of Company to the extent that its utterance flouts the distinctions found among the classes of personal pronoun. In speaking of a ‘voice’ coming to ‘one’, the text’s inaugurating sentence implies (if read in one way) a certain kind of

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self-reference, and yet (if read differently) might also predicate ‘one’ as the other or another, blurring the boundary between first and third person while contriving a sense of address that is strongly redolent of the second. (This ‘one’ is therefore radically and undecidably pluralized in the text’s inaugurating moment.) What is uttered in the incipit, then, radically opens the text, and whoever or whatever speaks here retains an essential anonymity in relation to the voice that it ‘names’ (as possibly, yet undecidably, its own – a voice, that is, which comes to ‘one’ perhaps in the sense of coming to oneself-as-oneself). Yet, as Badiou notes, this unnameable origin of the nameable is a ‘trickier’ figure than that of the opposite or double or of a formal paradox, since there is always a ‘three-fold configuration’ – another still – which triangulates through opening as much as closing the third side (pp. 11–13). The effect more or less repeats itself at the text’s point of ‘closure’. Here, the final word – ‘Alone’ – seems on the one hand to imply that whatever company we encounter in Beckett’s novella is a mere illusion or delusion, fostered by a disintegrating self confronted with those fragments of memory which, rather than permitting selfrecognition, violently displace the ‘self’ from itself. However, ‘Alone’ is preceded by a long paragraph given in the second person: Thus you now on your back in the dark once sat huddled . . . Huddled thus you find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well that nothing has occurred to make this possible . . . From time to time with unexpected grace you lie . . . So in the dark now huddled and now supine you toil in vain . . . Till from the occasional relief it was supineness becomes habitual and finally the rule . . . Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end . . . And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were. Alone. (p. 46) Is ‘Alone’ uttered by the ‘voice’ on behalf of another (the ‘one on his back’), therefore emerging as the conclusive act of dispossession, the last instance of alienation, in a text which bars recourse to the first person? Perhaps. But then again, despite the rhetorical flow in which the text culminates, apparently targeting this last word as its

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crescendo, what proves that ‘Alone’ is voiced by the ‘voice’ which characterizes itself by use of the second? Of course, it is simply not possible to determine, grammatically, which – if any – class of personal pronoun provides the context or setting for this stand-alone word ‘Alone’, and therefore it is not possible to know who says it. In fact, with similar effect to the ‘one’ referred to in the text’s incipit, ‘Alone’ (precisely as it stands alone) does not isolate but pluralizes. In a sense, despite its ‘aloneness’ it keeps a sort of company with (and within) itself, albeit of a kind which – just as the word ‘Alone’ shares itself undecidably among plural possibilities – anonymizes. Company is thus open-ended at both ends, and the ‘one’ and ‘alone’ (all-one?) that inaugurate and close the text reinscribe originary anomymity at the heart of those linguistic possibilities – and limitations – stemming from the interplay of the different classes of personal pronoun. This founding anonymity, indeed, is what might be said, not only to establish the conditions and limits of possibility for the use of personal pronouns in Company, but more fundamentally to author the text itself.

Descartes’ Meditations As John Pilling wrote more than thirty years ago, Beckett ‘received no formal philosophical training’ and ‘not unnaturally’ remained ‘sceptical about philosophy’s claims to answer the questions it raises’ (p. 111).5 ‘Nothing would be easier than to dismiss the philosophical dimension of Beckett from our discussions’, writes Pilling, ‘except for the crucial fact which is insistently forced upon us: that he has read, and been attracted by, most of the major philosophers from Pythagoras onwards’. For Pilling, it is Beckett’s exposure to Descartes in particular that gives him ‘a concrete model from which to seek satisfaction on the fundamental questions, metaphysical, epistemological and linguistic, that philosophy asks’.6 Indeed, for Pilling, it is Descartes’ philosophy which, in ‘moving away from abstract metaphysical system-building, and beginning with one’s epistemological relationship with the outside world’, succeeds in marking ‘the beginning of modern thought’ (p. 112). Yet while Beckett accepts

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Descartes’ ‘methods’ he refuses his ‘consolations’, insists Pilling (p. 114). Descartes’ ‘Meditations seem to echo behind every page [Beckett] writes’, but nonetheless the conclusions reached by Descartes’ philosophy are rejected. Moreover, the ‘style’ and ‘serenity’ of Descartes’ writing is strongly at issue in precisely those echoes found in Beckett’s work, as if the philosophical content and linguistic form of Descartes’ texts go hand in hand, and one cannot be confronted without the other. It is not too difficult to see in Beckett’s figure of the ‘one on his back in the dark’ a degraded caricature of the Descartes that we encounter in Meditations.7 Beset by the radically doubtable nature of memory, belief, experience and environment, both set about testing the possibility of, as Company puts it, ‘what can be verified’, in a spirit of rigorous scepticism which includes at its centre a crucial element of self-doubt. While, of course, Descartes assumes certain apparently irresolvable problems and positions in the interests of advancing a particular philosophical argument, so that the ‘serious difficulties’ (p. 23) into which he is thrown in the first two meditations in fact allow the grounds to be established for a more ‘serene’ philosophy to emerge, nevertheless the images of Descartes with which we are presented – of a figure unsure whether he is awake or asleep, mistrustful of his senses, uncertain of the dimensions or existence of his body, sceptical of scientific ‘truth’, and aware that he may continually be deceived by ‘some evil mind’ (p. 22) – resonate powerfully with the dark and uncertain landscape and linguistic interplay of Company. If, as Peter Boxall argues, it is impossible in Company to own one’s own life or one’s own past, precisely because ‘the experience of lived time does not allow for the possibility of gradual accumulation’ (p. 307), this fundamental insight resonates with the opening move of the First Meditation, not least in drawing out one of its more enduring – if unacknowledged – problems. For Descartes, it is the entire edifice of one’s beliefs accumulated over a lifetime that calls for wholesale investigation, since any false or misguided belief provides a local platform upon which others come to base themselves. Thus, one must go back to the most basic foundations, ruthlessly pruning out not only what is palpably false, but also stripping away all

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that is in any way doubtworthy. Moreover, this ‘general overturning’ must, above all, be timely. Thus, while Descartes conceives of his ‘project’ at a much earlier age, nevertheless he waits: to reach such a mature age that no more appropriate age for learning would follow. Thus I waited so long that, from now on, I could be blamed if I wasted in further deliberation whatever time remains for me to begin the project. Therefore today I appropriately cleared my mind of all cares and arranged for myself some time free from interruption. I am alone and, at long last, I will devote myself seriously and freely to this general overturning of my beliefs. (p. 18) Setting about his task neither too early nor too late, eschewing both undue speed and unwarranted delay, Descartes begins his project with perfect timing ‘today’, in a ideal present unencumbered by youthful haste or melancholic regret. Indeed, if ‘the experience of lived time’ that is itself responsible for the stealthy accumulation of beliefs is not to interfere with the serene inheritance (and rationally conducted ‘general overturning’) of what has been gradually accumulated, this massive undertaking must indeed be realized firmly in the present instant, ‘today’. That such a task is paradoxical is of course fairly self-evident, given that some ‘lived time’ would always have to be taken to correct the ‘gradual accumulation’ that characterizes the work of time itself. But the problem is compounded here by the fact that the work of the first two meditations, which culminates in Descartes’ philosophical breakthrough (cogito ergo sum), apparently takes place over two days. Or, at any rate, it occurs as an event during a period of time which seems to straddle the threshold between night and day, mapping an uncertain borderline which drifts and divides precisely where thought vies with dreaming. Thus, it is doubly uncertain whether Descartes’ thought ever takes place during the day, ‘today’, in the present tense. Of course, the story of Descartes’ Meditations is well known. Writing in an era characterized by the onset of profound scepticism, Descartes chooses not to reassert dogmatically the value or idea of truth, which would be wholly counterproductive in regard to its intention, but instead decides to radicalize doubt, to put it to work with

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such impeccable rigour that anything which survives the onslaught might open a pathway to certitude. It is indeed doubt that does all the work here: the very fact that Descartes is able to doubt proves to him that there is something or someone there doing the doubting – that someone or something exists and must exist in order to doubt. Doubt, paradoxically enough, turns out to be the very thing that gives rise to certainty. Thus, Descartes is certain that he exists because doubt demonstrates the existence of thought and of a thinking being. Yet, as has often been noted, the affirmation of the cogito is accompanied here by an unwanted effect. The cogito is doubled as subject and object of the Meditations, appearing as that which is thought, and as that which thinks. In other words, the cogito is both the endproduct of a philosophical investigation based on the radical assumption of doubt, and the prior condition of possibility of this philosophical procedure, without which doubt could not take place. Indeed, at the very beginning of the First Meditation, Descartes assumes that he is able to clear ‘my mind of all cares’ – that is, to separate and distinguish the content of the mind, that which is doubtworthy, duplicitous, other, from its essential nature and pure performativity as rational thinking tool – and that it is possible for him to arrange ‘for myself some time free from interruption’ (even though the meditations effectively proceed as a series of unacknowledged debates and dialogues with unattributed philosophical arguments). Uninterrupted time, a pure present that ultimately emerges as indistinguishable from the pure and uninterrupted presence of a rational self-consciousness – this surely presupposes the principal characteristics of the modern Western subject in its classical guise? In this sense, the very last thing that is doubted in Descartes’ Meditations is the cogito itself, the one thing that is supposed to withstand the test of doubt in its most robust form. Thus, the cogito is radically dislocated across the uncertain space and time of the first two meditations, emerging as its own double, both thinker and thought, subject and object of philosophical enunciation. Yet this double is irretrievably fractured and dispersed in the text, since the cogito functions as both unquestioned precondition and resilient end-product of doubt, and there is triangulation once again here, since this effect is not only one of a closed, formal paradox, but opens the very question of its own origin: what Badiou might see as the ‘third’ (pp. 53–4).

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In Descartes’ Meditations, the cogito is indeed named. But the question of how it earns its name both describes the very task of the Meditations and indicates its profound shortcomings. In one sense, it is the other (rather than the double) of the cogito that may be found – or, rather, that may be concealed – at the origin of its own name and naming in Descartes’ text. This insight helps reinforce Pilling’s assertion that Descartes is a seminal thinker for the writer of Company. In both texts, what is radically anonymous establishes (but of course also jeopardizes) the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of what is nameable, what traces out the chances of an autonomous-autobiographical subject, hoping to speak in the first person. Indeed, by its logic of proliferation – of another still – this anonymity moves us beyond, or calls us to rethink, the oppositional logic of the two (nameable/unnameable).

Derrida’s ‘If There is Cause to Translate’ In the four texts that begin the second part of Right to Philosophy,8 including ‘If There is Cause to Translate’ I and II, Derrida explores a ‘French history’ characterized by a complicated series of connections between ‘the violent and interminable constitution of the French State’ (p. 6) from the sixteenth century onwards, and the development of a certain ‘language politics’ (pp. 2, 5). This politics of language, inextricably tied to the politics of the emerging French State, was therefore negotiated between French as a ‘natural’ language – the language of a country or nation as well as the eventual ‘medium of philosophical and scientific communication’ (p. 5) providing the basis for the modern French university – and Latin as the dominant-cum-residual language of officialdom, the Catholic Church, the law, scholarship and the book. Derrida argues that this ‘French history of a problem found in all countries scans to the rhythm of three great historical eras’ (p. 6): first of all, the establishment of ‘monarchy as State’ (p. 6), characterized by the ‘imposition of a State language’ with the ‘obvious purpose of conquest and administrative domination of a territory’ (p. 8); next, the complex historical shifts and movements leading up to the French Revolution, in which the crucial matter of ‘linguistic force and form’ gets

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reconstituted, for Derrida, in a different phase of politics (here, ‘the movement towards State control once again came up against the juridico-political problem of translation and the intelligibility of decrees’ (p. 16)); and a third ‘great convulsion’ which, at the time of writing, Derrida saw as very much contemporary, a different phase characterized ‘on the inside’ by questions of the rights of ‘linguistic minorities’(questions about how to relate to potentially resistant idioms which, in fact, had pressed from the very beginning), and ‘on the outside’ by a struggle against ‘attempts at monopolization of techno-scientific language, through the techno-linguistic powers that dominate the world’ (pp. 16–17) – a renewed defence, then, of the national language. However, what we discover in the passage between ‘the three great dramatic phases’ which define ‘this history of the French language, as State institution’ (p. 15) is not simply ‘the clear event of a rupture’ but ‘also the continuity of an interminable, and interminably conflictual, historical process’ (p. 5). Thus, on the one hand, ‘Descartes was, for us, the example of a philosopher who, while explaining himself and struggling with all sorts of institutional authorities, never did so as a teaching philosopher, as a professor and civil servant in a State university’ (p. 43); on the other, however, the ‘language politics’ in France which, up to this day, reinscribe the ‘imperative of national language’ are ‘not without analogy’ or, indeed, ‘continuity’ in relation to Descartes’ own time (p. 5). Similarly, while Descartes never had to ‘deal with a teaching of philosophy organized by the State and entrusted to teachers who are also servants of the State’ he nevertheless certainly ‘posed pedagogical questions and analyzed the rhetoric and language of “exposition”’ (p. 43). Part of this analysis of exposition’s linguistic and rhetorical form ties in with Descartes’ decisions about writing in different languages. While he writes Discourse on Method in French, his Meditations are authored in Latin. In Right to Philosophy, Derrida repeatedly cites the penultimate paragraph of Descartes’ Discourse on Method: And if I write in French, which is the language of my country, rather than Latin, which is that of my teachers, it is because I hope that those who use only their pure natural reason will better judge my

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opinions than those who believe only in old books, and because I am sure that those who combine good sense with scholarship, whom I alone wish to have as my judges, will not be so partial to Latin as to refuse to hear my reasons because I express them in a vulgar tongue.9 To write in French of his decision to write in ‘the language of my country’ (a language, which as Derrida points out, was in fact very far from being shared by everyone in France at that time) powerfully combines, in the present tense, the constative with the performative. It does so, in the interests of a language politics – indeed a philosophy and pedagogy of language – which, precisely, enacts itself as it declares itself, and which therefore connects powerfully with the language politics that Derrida detects in the first great phase of the history of the French language and State. However, as Derrida puts it, to compose his Discourse on Method in French represents a choice on Descartes’ part ‘to write in a vulgar language in order to appeal more easily to “natural reason”, which the School and ancient books have not yet managed to dim and obscure, which dogmatism, intolerant of doubt, has not yet impressed’ (p. 26). It is commonly said that the Latin language was chosen by Descartes, and his contemporaries and forbears, when it was deemed necessary to resort to a more scholarly or technically rigorous form of philosophical argumentation. If his Discourse on Method were to have been written in Latin, then, this would have called up a convention whereby the arguments of philosophers, including sceptics, would become more highly visible, possibly to the dismay of a wider readership. Yet, as Derrida reminds us, the text is translated into Latin, in a version which Descartes himself revised. Why? ‘If Descartes yielded’, writes Derrida, ‘it was first of all before a law, a norm, a social contract that was still dominant in certain circles: one had first to write in Latin those texts for which French could only be a vulgarizing language’ (p. 22). Indeed, Derrida sees the French version of the text – the supposed original – as in fact already a translation from a more original language, that of Latin. The translation into Latin, in other words, is nothing more than a restitution, a ‘leading back toward what should have been, by rights, the original language’ (p. 22). A more fundamental situation – an

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unavoidable hierarchicization – therefore reverses the chronological sequence of original and translation. This means, in essence, that Descartes merely makes a ‘pretence of beginning with the vulgar language’, while in reality he drafts the translation first (in French) before restituting the text to its more fundamental language of origin (Latin).10 One the one hand, then, while the penultimate paragraph of Descartes’ Discourse on Method is potentially intensely powerful, it risks problems of translation. Derrida notes that ‘this passage disappears pure and simple’ in the Latin translation of 1644, while ‘the great Adam and Tannery edition indicates the omission of this passage’ with a ‘sublime’ sentence: ‘There was in fact no cause to translate it’. As Derrida puts it, ‘when an “original” speaks about its language by speaking its language, it prepares for a kind of suicide by translation’ (p. 19). There is something about the combination of the constative and performative in the present tense which causes this passage, written in French, to remain in a certain way untranslatable. On the other hand, however, it is already a translation, its supposed presence, purity and originality being radically disrupted by the more original standing of Latin as the very language of philosophy. The deconstruction of this supposed purity of the passage in French (according to which the constative and the performative are apparently wholly reconciled and unified) becomes all the more significant when Derrida recalls that, in the first great phase, French as a national tongue sought ‘to reduce the ambiguity of language’, to dispel the idiomatic and outwit forms of resistance by presenting itself as a ‘linguistic medium purified of all ambiguity’, a language of common good sense (p. 11). If even – and precisely – in the pure present tense of Descartes’ ‘And if I write in French . . .’ French itself turns out to be already a translation, then the language politics (the philosophy and pedagogy of language) which underlie this particular ‘exposition’ begin to unravel. Or, to put it another way, the strategy and rhetoricality which mark this exposition as also a pedagogy risk foundering in the movement of translation which dislocates their very origin. In contrast to his Discourse on Method, Descartes’ Meditations, which we began to read a moment ago, gets written first of all in Latin.

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Yet, as we saw, this matter of fact no more restitutes the origin to itself, no more restores purity to language and philosophy via unambiguous ‘exposition’, since we were able to trace in this text a profound anonymity – as the other ‘self’ or ‘side’ of the cogito – animating the (impossible) movement of the cogito towards itself, towards its own identity. Latin, as the origin which makes all French ultimately only a translation, is the (proper) language of a philosophy (Cartesianism) which at bottom remains excluded from its own origin, an origin or foundation which remains radically inaccessible. In this scenario, Latin and French are less clearly opposed or ordered, and, in fact, to borrow Derrida’s own description of the complex movement of history, they simultaneously partake of the ‘event of a rupture’ and an ‘interminable’ process that crosses clear-cut lines of demarcation. With Descartes inscribed somewhere near its centre, Derrida tells a complicated story of the emergence of a ‘language politics’ of the State, a politics which entails and advances a very particular philosophy and pedagogy of language. Yet if those ‘interminable’ questions of language and philosophy that surround Descartes’ ‘exposition’ in both Latin and French are at once prior to and yet not totally excluded from the highly determined situation of a State-organized scene of teaching inherited today, does this imply that we remain bound to a pedagogy without origin, or to forms of ‘exposition’ which have a radical anonymity at their core? How would we assess and assume the implications of such a situation, or incorporate them into our sense of teaching, if to identify the situation as such reactivates the Beckettian question: ‘Who asks, Whose voice asking this?’ How, then, might we conceive of the scene of teaching, for student and teacher alike?

Chapter 5

Raelity1

Things You Might (Try to) Count on: Deadlines, Dates, Numbers 1. Rather like the widely paraded discourse of the last man, the end of history and philosophy, the death of the author and the tomb of the intellectual, the idea of the university in ruins has been so exhaustively repeated of late that it is already beginning to feel (to quote a little ‘out of joint’ or out of context) ‘like a tiresome anachronism’.2 Or, at least, even if everyone were to agree that Bill Readings’ enormously influential discussion of the University of Excellence remains timely, the idea or story itself seems in danger of becoming old hat. A story of newness, radical departure and ‘post-historical’ transformation, recounted at the end of the twentieth century, already going stale. Time ‘out of joint’. Fitting perhaps. 2. Nevertheless, for old times’ sake, let’s repeat it one more time. The university is in ruins. The rise of transnational corporate institutions has hastened the decline of modernity’s nation-states, leaving the university bereft of cultural legitimacy or ideological rationale such as was established after the Enlightenment. Faced with this predicament, the university has uncritically adopted corporate thinking and language. It has embraced customerorientation, quality assurance and the logics and practices of excellence. It has disregarded any fundamental concern for the content of its activities, giving itself over to a pure performativity that marks and re-marks itself only as the experience of ‘technology’s self-reflection’.3 Through the commodification of its practices

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of knowledge-exchange, the university has swiftly repositioned itself according to the needs and demands of globalized late capitalism. (Now we’re getting in the swing of things.) 3. Thus, despite the ‘dereferentialisation’ of today’s university with regard to any idea or foundational principle, some might say that – at long last – this quaintly archaic, antiquated institution has been forced to face up to reality. It has been made to submit to the reality of the marketplace, to address the reality of vocational needs and social partnership, to accept the reality of modernization, accountability, transparency, equality of opportunity and so on. Always more than one reality, here, of course . . . but let’s leave this aside for the present moment (if the moment we are dealing with could indeed be described as such). The university facing up to reality, to realities, then – about time, too! Even though the (coming of) age of the ruined university implies a somewhat ghostly renaissance, the era of excellence – born virtually of the millenium’s last minute – appears to be characterized by the very timeliness of its time. So what, if the story of the University of Excellence is becoming old hat, out-of-joint with excellence’s very time(liness) – who needs stories, retelling, recounting of any sort, when you’ve got (a) reality that adds up to and fits (with) itself? 4. The age or time of excellence underscores the precisionistic punctuality of its coming precisely by means of an assiduous regard for dates and deadlines, needless to say. These structure and regulate (punctuate) the seemingly seamless repetitive work of its ensemble of evaluative devices and machineries. Dates and deadlines underpin and mobilize its indicators of quality and achievement, its monitoring tools, its assessment exercises. By such means, excellence carves up time, arrives on time, in time. The time, at last, of reality. The R.A.E., it goes without saying, calibrates this lastminute experience of reality, the reality (not before time) of the university. R.A.E. – as beautifully punctual and punctuated as Lo-lee-ta, even though (to risk being crude) she comes before her time. Amid the ruins of the university, each and every letter of R.A.E. arrives dead on time, never mind the possibility that arriving is always conditional upon the chance of non-arrival, or that

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these dead letters might be delivered stillborn. The Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom, just in the nick of time, demanding delivery on-time and on time, as live and real as it gets. 5. In fact, we’d do well to recognize the services done by the R.A.E. in the name of Reality. The very midwife of Reality, our reality. Let’s honour her, then, by naming the time, the age, the era of excellence, thus: ‘R.A.E.lity’. No harm, on second thoughts, in losing the punctuation, since it is precisely the ‘punctuative’ that the R.A.E. so neatly defines, and that so neatly defines the R.A.E. Goes without saying. No need for an articulation only superficially expressed by punctuation marks. RAElity, then. No damage done, when you think about it, removing upper case initials except in the case of the first capital, since every empire of every age needs to know where its capital is, to build and begin from there. First and only capital. There can be only one. All roads lead to Rome.4 So, Raelity. 6. There might be a slight problem, though, with the Reality of Raelity, the Raelity of Reality. Raelity skews, distorts, mis-sorts the Reality it serves, mis-spells the present spell of the Real. The temporality of the letter, and thus of the law (the letter of the law), of Reality is subjected to a disjunction going beyond a mere typographical error. Unless we allow the possibility that ‘Reality’ is actually in error, is disjunct: after all, everyone knows ‘a’ comes before ‘e’ in the alphabet. ‘Raelity’ might thus reveal that ‘Reality’ mis-spells itself. (What is the time of a spell?) Always ‘a’ before ‘e’. ‘Raelity’ before ‘Reality’, then. So late in the day, yet just in time, ‘Raelity’ comes first so as to expose the temporal disjunction, the anachrony, of Reality itself (to itself). Coming before Reality, in a dictionary yet to come, Raelity begins by coming back: this is the spectre of the R.A.E. Maybe, however, with astounding literalness, ‘Raelity’ radicalizes or presses to an extremity the ‘timely’ and the ‘punctual’ (always ‘a’ before ‘e’). It perhaps radicalizes the ‘timely’, so bound up with notions of urgency, contingency and the real, to the point where it appears to be continually in deconstruction.

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7. There are those who come late to higher education after a spell in the other ‘real world’, the other of our ‘real world’. They will often tell you that the language of excellence (with all its reality-effects) which now passes muster in the university – if it isn’t already being re-placed by other terms – has been around in the private sector almost as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, outside the university, its star has been on the wane for many a year, they say; going on to point out that its more recent history in the realm of university life has been laughably outdated, woefully anachronistic. But such tales, even though told by latecomers (those who were at the party long before we arrived), don’t do justice to the anachrony of the R.A.E. – to a Raelity fundamentally out of synch with Reality, yet at the same time reflecting and exposing its very disjointedness. 8. If the story of the University of Excellence, once so terrifically new (it seems only a moment ago), has with astonishing rapidity become old news, perhaps we still need to go back to Readings (we are not done reading him yet), to see whether The University in Ruins anticipates or senses this fractured, implosive, anachronistic temporality of the institution’s time in any way. To see whether Readings’ book is simply susceptible to the structure and force of anachrony, or whether it productively utilizes and deploys anachronism at the moment it inhabits, dwells within the (ruins of the) university. (How could it ever belong there?) Whether The University in Ruins, if we can say this, pre-programmes anachrony (the anachrony which, before too long, was bound to dog it) in its very thinking of the university. (Pre-pro-gramme: think about the etymology and articulation of these phonemes for a moment.) Anachrony before its time, we might then say. How fitting that would be. A book that already is to come. 9. Of course, in an obvious way, Readings’ book is indelibly marked by an anachrony that relates not only to the histories of its reception, but to its own reception of and receptivity to history. Although the University of Excellence is, according to Readings, ‘posthistorical’, in a certain way out of time, beyond the historical time of modernity, its conditions of possibility and production

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nevertheless entail a certain teleology or chronology – that is, a historical, epochal narrative of succession (‘reason-cultureexcellence’), cemented in and by the very structure of his book (‘reason-culture . . . The dead-lines of history’?). At one level, this seems to indicate that Readings’ thinking on the question of the academic institution is simply contradictory. However, a more thoughtful consideration of this apparent inconsistency might allow us to say that, being at one and the same time historical and post- or non-historical, Readings’ University of Excellence is, precisely, anachronistic, (in and) out of time with itself. 10. The University in Ruins reveals anachronies of the university in other, perhaps more complex ways, too. Readings suggests the decline, at the end of the twentieth century, of long-standing expressivist or synecdochic relations between individual and community, discipline and university and, crucially, university and nation-state. These kinds of relations underpin the thinking of, for example, the ‘human’, the ‘social’ and the determination of ‘rights’ as an expression of modernity after the Enlightenment. Such a decline therefore brings about the erosion of a notion of communicative community in the university as advocated by the German idealists, one that founds a tradition of the very Idea of the university which runs all the way through to the likes of Habermas. Amid the ruins of communicative community, then, Readings envisages the possibilities of a ‘community of dissensus’. This perhaps impossibly fluid grouping would found itself on a rather groundless commitment to ‘thinking without identity’, as Readings puts it (p. 127). The midwife, or parent even, of such a dissensual community would be none other, of course, than the ‘dereferentialised’ University of Excellence itself, now utterly Idea-less, now entirely unconcerned with the grounding and coherence of its contents. Yet such a community of dissensus, insofar as it would be characterized by the activity of ‘thinking without identity’, could only produce research findings and ‘objects’ for study that were ‘systematically incapable of closure’ (p. 128). Thus it would necessarily be incompatible with the strictly calibrated measure of excellence, the latter

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demanding delivery on time. The dissensual community would therefore not simply be a dissenting one, engaged in full-frontal opposition with regard to today’s academic institutions. As a product or offspring of the ruined University of Excellence, it would mark and re-mark the disoriented non-self-identicality of the contemporary institution, its incommensurability with itself. Or, to put it another way, it would expose and indeed enact the ‘two-left-footedness’ of today’s university. This would not only mean that the evaluative thinking of dissensual communities would transvalue the evaluations of excellence. It would demonstrate, once more, the out-of-joint-ness of excellence with itself. Or, rather, excellence/dissensus. The anachrony of its time. For an anachronism is not simply that which is profoundly out of step or out of time with an era or age. More complexly, it is formed of a strange mixture of belonging and non-belonging. An anachronism does not belong to a time precisely by virtue of belonging to it. It is this anachrony that dissensus inscribes within the time of excellence, puncturing punctuality. Readings’ book – when read as a meditation on (perhaps even an enactment of) the anachrony that was bound subsequently to define it – belongs profoundly, by dint of its non-belonging (to a time), in the university, to the university (for all time?) 11. Despite all the performance indicators, then, the University of Excellence seems to have two left feet (excellence/dissensus as non-self-identical doubles: undecidably two left or two right feet of the university; never simply a right and a left). The university ‘walks on two feet’, undecidably two left or two right feet – just the motif Derrida has used, in ‘Mochlos’, to describe the founding and footing of the Enlightenment university as a ‘parliamentary faculty’ envisaged by Kant in The Conflict of the Faculties. In this sense, the University of Excellence was always going to deliver old news. News: that is, more than one species of newness. News, at least twofold, doubling the new, although perhaps not quite two, more than one but less than two, more or less than two: excellence and dissensus. Such news already old, then, as old as Kant.

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12. Or Hegel.5 But what is the age of Hegel? 13. ‘“. . . and if I may be permitted to evoke my own experience . . . I remember having learned, in my twelfth year – destined as I was to enter the theological seminary of my country – Wolf’s definitions of the so-called idea clara and that, in my fourteenth year, I had assimilated all the figures and rules of syllogism. And I still know them.” And he still knows them. Hegel in his twelfth year. You can see the scene from here.’ (This is Derrida, in 1986, on the first page of his essay ‘The Age of Hegel’, quoting Hegel’s letter of 16 April 1822, ‘To the Royal Ministry of Spiritual, Academic, and Medical Affairs’.) How timely! A fortunate coincidence. Except it takes an/other one (no. 13, i.e. 12 + 1) to indicate the coincidence of the question (no. 12) with the answer: Hegel, between his twelfth year, when he’s eleven, and his fourteenth year, when he’s thirteen, must be twelve (you’ll notice I’m careful to remember to subtract one from the year to get the real age of Hegel). A lot of dates and numbers here, but can we reliably count (on) them? One minute adding, the next subtracting, to count in the very same way on the coincidence of the number with the age. (Excellence counts on just this coincidence of the number with the age. The R.A.E. is an adding machine in and of the age of Excellence. Raelity does a real number on time.) Is there already the hint of another mathematics coming into play here? Still, on the other hand, between the twelfth and fourteenth year, Hegel in a certain way tells (out) his age, the very age of Hegel. But also, perhaps, in a somewhat nostalgic frame of mind, he gives away his age, lets it show or slip. (In 1822 he is fifty-two years old.) Between his twelfth and fourteenth year, then. Is thirteen our lucky number after all? (I mean the thirteenth year, not of course the age thirteen. In terms of the age, our thirteen is really a twelve.) Or do things slide at thirteen, a slippery slope?

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14. Thank goodness, we seem to have got past or beyond that passage (an untimely interruption, an unilluminating interval, the blink of an eye). The passage, that is, from twelve to fourteen (where we are now, of course) – which, in turn, marks the passage from childhood to adulthood (the fourteenth year, the age thirteen, teen-age). It seemed to take an age. Perhaps now we can grow up a bit, stop playing around. Although, of course, we’ll have to go back to it. Especially if to add is to subtract, in the strange mathematics of number and of age being played out here. Coming or going back to thirteen, just as Hegel does (or did, or will do) in full maturity, with all his ‘great works’ behind him. 15. In his twelfth year, or perhaps between twelfth and fourteenth year, he was already a philosopher, then. In one respect, this image of Hegel as a child reinforces what Derrida calls, a little later in his essay, a ‘naturalist mystification’ positing ‘the bare truth of an “infant” always already ready to philosophize and naturally capable of doing so’ (p. 7). Philosophy, on a certain view, as perhaps the discipline for children – no wonder Hegel’s age, in so far as we can be definite about it, is twelve, will have remained twelve! On the other hand, though, Hegel at twelve is, of course, not yet a philosopher. Not just because his all great works are still to come. As Derrida suggests, in the Hegelian system or philosophy itself, the dialectics of negation and completion posit a complexly inextricable relation between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’. As Derrida puts it, in a way that links the more with the less obvious point, ‘in view of the corpus of the complete works of his maturity, this already will have been a not yet’ (p. 3). The whimsical autobiographical anecdote turns out to provide a serious demonstration, ‘treating the issue of (the) age as a figure in the phenomenology of the mind, as a moment in the logic’ (p. 4). So, already-not-yet a philosopher (and not just at twelve). Derrida tells us that the ‘conceptual, dialectical, speculative structure’ of this already-not-yet needs to be thought through before we can understand anything ‘about the age (for example, that of Hegel). Or about any age whatsoever, but especially and

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par excellence that of philosophy or for philosophy’ (pp. 3–4). (The age of) Philosophy doesn’t quite add up (at any age). If our passage is anything to go by, certainly not according to simple maths (which, of course, is supposedly the province of His Excellency Raelity.) 16. Remember, all this is going on in a letter to the Ministry of Spiritual, Academic and Medical Affairs. (Remember, Hegel remembers what he already remembered in his twelfth year.) All this is going on, by way of such a letter. The letter is part of a special report commissioned by the Ministry, ‘by a State bureaucracy in the process of organizing the nationalization of the structures of philosophical education by extracting it, based on a historical compromise, from clerical jurisdiction’, Derrida reminds us (p. 4). Not just a ‘minor’ text then, but a significant landmark in a statist problematics of education, or of modernity’s institution of reason.6 Although Hegel may well have thought that the rationality of philosophical instruction might ‘culminate most universally and most powerfully in the concept of the State’ (p. 5), his recollection of (the age of) childhood, and of the already-not-yet of philosophy (at once a matter of private confidence, philosophical demonstration and public address) finds Hegel foundering, ‘advancing or foundering, with more or less confidence, in the techno-bureaucratic space of a highly determined State’. A State to come, for philosophy or by way of philosophy, which, for philosophy, nevertheless already is. In such a state, in relation to such a State (already is to come) no wonder Hegel advances and founders at once, to’s and fro’s, ‘with more or less confidence’. Again, we might remark the simultaneity of this ‘more’ and ‘less’, the simultaneity of addition and deduction as the characteristic feature of an apparently (although only apparently) self-same state, the state (State) of Hegel, which has everything to do with his age. In letters to the Minister written during the same period, Hegel frets over the State’s provision for him in his old age, and for the family after his death. Hegel is in a state, when he thinks of his age (now adding years on instead of taking them away, although still during the same period of 1822 of course), and he wants – however

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impossibly – to be definite about numbers, specifically about sums (fittingly, though, these are described by Hegel as ‘supplementary revenues’). He wants to be sure about his currency (in both a broad and narrow sense) with the State. Narrowly, he wants assurances of money for the future (insurance), in the interests, supposedly, of future philosophical research. ‘I dare anticipate the realization of these benevolent promises only in connection with Your Excellency’s noble plans for the development of knowledge and the education of the young, and I regard the improvement of my own economic situation only as a subordinate element in this totality’, writes Hegel.7 Ring any bells? But how can one be sure that the age of Hegel, or indeed of philosophy, is current with the State (or, indeed, the state) Hegel finds himself in, ‘advancing’ and ‘foundering’, more or less? A State or state that already is to come. Raising again the spectre of the R.A.E., the mis-sorted temporality of (a State-sponsored) Raelity, and the question of its currency and its sums. A timely reminder. 17. This moment of a State-sponsored, possibly ‘techno-bureaucratic’ institutional reformation of philosophical education does not just belong to the age of Hegel, of course. It also relates to the age of Derrida. To his involvement with GREPH during the 1970s and 1980s, going towards a report to the French government on the reformation of philosophy’s pegadogy and institution. The latter involving the question of the age of philosophical education, in at least its double sense – forming more or less the brunt of ‘The Age of Hegel’, and, in Raelity, relating to our age, today, and no doubt beyond. Already-not-yet: is this temporality, already, or yet, Hegelian? ‘There is a Hegelian hierarchization, but it is circular, and the minor is always carried, sublated . . . beyond the opposition, beyond the limit of inside and outside in(to) the major. And inversely. The potency of this age without age derives from this great empirico-philosophical cycle’ (p. 33). And yet, according to the temporality at work both in the vicinity of Derrida’s reflections on ‘The Age of Hegel’ and my own essay on ‘Raelity’, we do

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not seem to be able to count on things coming full-circle within a self-realizing totality. (As I will go on to suggest, R is never quite R.) Nevertheless, the doubling of the pronoun in the formulation ‘age without age’ is itself telling, as it posits a repetition with a difference, indicated of course by the preposition ‘without’. Far from underlining an atemporal structure or cycle of recurrence, ‘age without age’ in fact suggests the non-self-identicality or noncoincidence of the ‘age’ of Hegel with itself, a sharply disjointed temporality, along the lines perhaps of the mis-sorted time of Raelity. Hegel remembers, and remembers himself remembering, not just mechanistically, formalistically, via ‘mechanical memorization’ (p. 18) of the kind that allows for the repetition of syllogisms – although he does in part remember this way (of remembering). But neither does recollection, for Hegel, happen simply via or within the processes of a speculative, ‘organic’ development of thought in its totality, as the autobiographical anecdote reveals. What kind of rhythms are played out between these two, on the basis of this problematic, with regard to the very project, the entire system, of speculative dialectics? The rhythms of a blink of an eye? We’ll leave this motif hanging there, in the dark, for a moment. Today, already, the memory of philosophy cannot simply or wholly oppose itself to mechanistic recounting of the kind counted on by the R.A.E. That is, to a numbers game. This remains true, I think, even at the most minimal level, despite the fact that, as Derrida remarks, the GREPH had been ‘quick to criticize’ the practice, inherited in a certain way from Hegel’s imperatives, of ‘beginning with teaching the content of knowledge, before even thinking it’ – a teaching based on a mechanistic memorization as the prephilosophical pedagogic mode, which in turn assures a ‘highly determined prephilosophical inculcation’ (p. 26). For Derrida, such pedagogy is deeply inscribed and engrained as part of the statist problematics of education within modernity, denying or postponing (in the Hegelian version, among others) ‘access to thought – in its speculative form – of

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something whose content is already present [prior to this thought] . . . In other words, philosophy proper is excluded, but its content continues to be taught, albeit in an improperly philosophical form, in a nonphilosophical manner . . . This schema, so familiar by now, is one of the principal targets of the GREPH’ (pp. 31–2). Of course, Derrida is quite right to be wary of a mechanistic recounting – of the kind that informs Hegel’s memory of childhood memory – preceding and determining philosophical education. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the politics of Derrida’s essay is not simply reducible to strategies of full-frontal opposition, or dissent. It depends also on certain tactical engagements (albeit very knowing ones) with an established statist rationale of philosophical education derived in part from (if we can say this) the memory of Hegel. Thus, for philosophy to survive (‘as everyone knows – for example, since Hegel – that philosophy is finished’ (p. 18)), the memory of philosophy cannot simply eschew or deny the adding machine, the calculated accretion or accumulation of content. In a sense, philosophy depends upon a kind of rhythmic attachment and detachment in relation to the entire machine, to another body, more or less other (a mother body, or other than mother?), giving ‘birth [to] philosophy in the age of European civil service’ (p. 11). But such rhythmic play might yet trace within the workings of the machine (monstrous mother, or dead father?) another arithmetical operation at work, not quite other, more or less other. In the blink of an eye. A mis-sort. 18. ‘On, then, on to R’. Eighteenth letter of the alphabet. A number that signals another coming of age. Manhood perhaps (Law of the Father). First letter of (the age of) Raelity, when we all grow up and face Reality. Forget, for a moment, the disarranged or rearranged vowels – we’ll come back to mis-sorted letters in a moment. Leaving that aside, how neatly coincidental all of this is, and how fitting. On, then, on, from the philosophical mind and memory of H. to the ‘splendid mind’ of R. 19. And I quote:

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For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q . . . But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q – R – Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the ram’s horn which made the handle of the urn, and proceeded. ‘Then R . . .’ He braced himself. He clenched himself . . .. A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying – he was a failure – that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R –8 20. Like the most impossibly excellent R.A.E. panellist, Mr Ramsay – as part of a discriminating elite, a father-figure – has ‘no sort of difficulty’, no difficulty of any sort, in sorting letters, letters of the kind sent by Hegel perhaps. Or perhaps papers, made up of letters and sent as if they were letters, together with covering letters, to the panels of the R.A.E. For Ramsay, the number of letters are ranged ‘all in order’. (An easy matter, to talk of logocentrism and phallocentrism in To The Lighthouse.) Although, of course, ‘on, then, on to R’ always seems to entail a counter-movement, a counter-trajectory and temporality: ‘back to Q’. A rather tiresome repetition, always going back, time and again, to Q. Progress stymied by a compulsion to repeat. To and fro between Q and R, as if one is ‘compelled to follow the circle’, to ‘circle in the circle’9 of Q to discover any chance of taking a step (marked perhaps by the oblique line that differentiates Q from a circle, a O, a zero,

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Derrida: Writing Events a nil) out or on or even back to R, which in the quoted passage doesn’t always come after Q. Judgment of R is never simply judgment of R, but depends, of course, on the prior evaluation of Q. An evaluation (of Q) which in some sense is yet to come, or which in a certain way arrives after itself, only in the experience or moment of the judgment of R (which, of course, is not then the same as itself). R. (i.e. Ramsay) is only ‘sure’ of Q at the moment he’s ‘on to R’. Time ‘out of joint’. The number of letters, all ranged in order, with no difficulty of any sort, suddenly subjected to a mis-sort. Perhaps not unlike Raelity itself, after all, however. Judgment of R. (Ramsay) is never simply judgment of R (the letter R). The letter collides yet never quite coincides with its recipient, never quite arrives in the capital (i.e. the initial of the proper name). Rather like the letters, perhaps, whose on-time delivery is apparently demanded by Raelity. Judgment of R. is never simply judgment of R because of this non-coincidence that characterizes their coincidence. Anachrony, again, arriving right on time; disjunction, again, at the very moment of conjunction; but, now, also, a certain blindness just where it was hoped to find transparent, self-evident self-identicality (‘If Q then is Q – R –’). Instead of a reassuring look in the mirror (R. is R, therefore the sure identity of knowledge and the subject remains visibly intact) we have a disconcerting blink, right where it ought not to be. ‘A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying – he was a failure – that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R – ’. The hour is late. Nearing the end. Last hour. Midnight hour. Twenty-four-hundred hours. (Sort of coincidence again.) Time speeding up, right on time? Things are getting dark. Here is Derrida once more, on the institution, on memory and sight, on rhythm and the blink of an eye, finally on the question of vision in the university, vision of and for the university:

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Opening the eyes to know, closing them – or at least listening – in order to know how to learn and learn how to know: here we have a first sketch of the rational animal. If the University is an institution for science and teaching, does it not have to go beyond memory and sight? In what rhythm? To hear and learn better, must it close its eyes or narrow its outlook? In cadence? What cadence? Shutting off sight in order to learn is of course only a figurative manner of speaking. No one will take it literally, and I am not proposing to cultivate an art of blinking. And I am resolutely in favour of a new University Enlightenment (Aufklarung). Still, I shall run the risk of extending my figuration a little farther, in Aristotle’s company. In his De anima (421b) he distinguishes between man and those animals that have hard, dry eyes [ton sklerophtalmon], the animals lacking eyelids, the sort of sheath or tegumental membrane [phragma] which serves to protect the eye and permits it, at regular intervals, to close itself off in the darkness of inward thought or sleep. What is terrifying about an animal with hard eyes and a dry glance is that it always sees. Man can lower his sheath, adjust the diaphragm, narrow his sight, the better to listen, remember and learn. What might the University’s diaphragm be?10 Here, Derrida implies that thought, learning, knowledge of any kind itself requires ‘regular intervals’ at which to pause, rest, evaluate. The R.A.E, it goes without saying, comes at regular intervals, in order to undertake evaluation exercises. (What is the relation between rest/pause and exercise here?) At night, in the dark, their relationship is an uncanny one, however. The ‘intervals’ which Derrida describes as vital to knowledge, learning and thought are precisely not characterized or presided over by the intensely unremitting stare of Ramsayesque ‘hard, dry eyes’ dedicated to the spectacle of transparent, self-evident selfidenticality (Q is Q, R is R). Although such a piercing gaze might suggest the punctual, punctuating, puncturing advent of the R.A.E. (into reality), Derrida (long before time) reminds us that

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the ‘interval’ which actually facilitates thought, prompting us to evaluate knowledge, and to remember learning, is characterized by the blink of an eye, the passage of darkness. In this sense, Ramsay’s failure, in a ‘flash of darkness’, would possibly (spectacularly) redeem itself. 25. No need, then, to simply bemoan and wholly repudiate the intervention or insertion of the interval (the R.A.E. is a certain intervention or insertion of an interval, of course, although in its more continuous effects not only this), since the interval (between the twelfth and fourteenth year, for example?) reactivates the structure of the already-not-yet, calling us to remember learning (to come), calling us to evaluate knowledge and (however impossibly) evaluation itself, calling us to begin (again) to think. But the interval will not only aid illumination and transparency, since it must also entail a suspension, a forgetting, a darkness, played out (against and within the light) according to the rhythms of a blink. The institution built on the principle of reason is also, if we follow Heidegger, built ‘on what remains hidden in that principle’, Derrida tells us, so that the ‘principle of reason installs its empire only to the extent that the abyssal question of being that is hiding within it remains hidden, and with it the question of the grounding of the ground itself’ (p. 10). Just as, in Derrida’s ‘Mochlos’,11 the footing of the institution is found on uncertain foundations, so the vision of the university proceeds from what remains concealed (reason cannot establish its reason in reason without risking tautology or question-begging of the kind against which it customarily sets its face). However, this raises the question of responsibility in that critics, professors, academics working at ‘multiple sites [on] a stratified terrain’ with ‘postulations that are undergoing continual displacement’ need to observe, as Derrida puts it in ‘The Principle of Reason’, ‘a sort of strategic rhythm’ playing itself out between the ‘barrier’ and the ‘abyss’, between the protected horizon, the secured partition, of the university space and the invisible and unthought bottomless chasm on which this is founded, between the circular logic of reason and its irretrievable origins. For Derrida, the ‘strategic

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rhythm’ that pulsates between the barrier (horizon of vision) and the abyss (hidden and unseen) provides a way to play one off against the other. Such ‘playing off’ as the responsibility of the critic or academic appears partially to redeem speculation – perhaps even the spectacularly specular thinking of Ramsay (R is R), in whom we have traced a figure of the hard-eyed vision of the R.A.E. It is this ‘strategic rhythm’ Derrida associates, finally, with ‘the blinking of an eye’ (p. 17). 26. Last letter. On time, out of time. Raelity – blink and you miss it? Don’t count on it.

Chapter 6

Can Dreaming be ‘Political’? Some Questions on the ‘Politics’ of Cultural Studies: An Interview with Paul Bowman

PB: Which particular political theories or theorizations of the political informed the formation of cultural studies, and what consequences did these ideas have for the orientation of cultural studies? That is, what did these political theories privilege, marginalize, enable and conversely remain blind to, and what consequences did and does this entail for the orientations of cultural studies? SMW: Undoubtedly the history and practice of cultural studies has developed in a way that is never too far from the question of the ‘political’. There certainly isn’t space here to do justice to the nuances of political affiliation, negotiation and influence that accompany different varieties of cultural study, or indeed to chronicle the political impact or organization one finds in the vicinity of cultural studies’ history and practice in all its forms. While it is possible to turn to any number of different accounts concerning the formation of cultural studies, including the political implications this inevitably entails, one particularly striking – and doubtless highly contentious – image of cultural studies’ ‘politics’ can be found, you may recall, in an essay by J. Hillis Miller on ‘Literary Study in the Transnational University’.1 Here, Miller wants to explain the acrimonious relationship between so-called ‘Theory’ (including deconstruction) and some of those working in cultural studies today. Miller suggests that cultural studies installs itself in disciplinary terms alongside a strong idea of human subjectivity and identity as – in the very last analysis – the product or condition of cultural, political or ideological ‘context’; a ‘context’ which, notwithstanding its frequently declared plurality, complexity and difference,

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is imagined as sufficiently homogenous to leave its unmistakable impression on – or, indeed, to effect the very constitution of – the subject. As such, Miller argues that cultural studies glues together unquestioned conceptions of identity, agency and cultural milieu according to a ‘reinstalled referentiality that can no longer afford to be put in question’. This kind of cultural studies, then, depends upon a basic level of ‘referentiality’ directed towards a ‘context’ of at least minimal coherence, in order to allow ‘the project of cultural studies and related new disciplines’ to actually get going. Furthermore, insofar as, for Miller, this ‘context’ would thereby establish a more or less generalizable or at least repeatable framework within which might be understood the shaping of identity in particular instances, it could be considered to work so as to reanimate and secure anew a conception of the subject in its traditional ‘political’ inscription, not least in respect of the practitioners of cultural studies themselves. In assuming that there is always a more or less determinable or limited ‘context’ which can be known to surround and inform every ‘text’, every ‘event’, every ‘subject’, every ‘phemonenon’, a cultural studies of the kind described by Miller would therefore reinstall the ‘particular’ as an expression or exemplar of a relatively ‘set’ historical, cultural, ideological or social situation (dynamic, plural, contradictory, maybe – but recognizable or decipherable nonetheless) which, in turn, might be considered to encourage less astute analysis of the inchoate implications and effects of what has been called ‘globalization’ or ‘transnationality’. The reinscription of the ‘particular’, albeit in all its complexity, as a nevertheless concrete and reliable ‘example’ of a more ‘general’ situation tends to bring out ideas of the ‘production in a subject or subjectivity of an identity’ (p. 83) produced by a cultural setting of whatever kind, howsoever this is conceptualized. The recuperation of knowledge in relation to the human subject which this entails is only part of the story. In addition, the grounding of a certain kind of cultural study upon the inherited models of cognition indicated above would inevitably tend to recast practitioners of cultural studies as themselves knowing subjects. From Miller’s point of view, then, some of the character traits we recognize in a particular line of cultural studies – its shift of attention towards the agency and participation of subjects, its foregrounding of ‘identity

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politics’ on occasion, and so forth – might be seen to reestablish the intricate binding of knowing subjects, on the one hand, and subjects of knowledge, on the other. Whatever the merits or shortcomings of the story Miller tells about cultural studies – and Miller is certainly guilty of reducing and explaining its very singular texts, histories and practices by locating or fixing them within a universal ‘context’ called ‘cultural studies’, which can then be narrativized in terms of general or predominating trends in a way that reverts to and replays the very same ‘outmoded’ strategies or vantage points of knowledge Miller himself derides – nevertheless, to my mind at least, there is some interest in this idea of the doubleness, or even the uncanny ‘shiftiness’, of the subject of cultural studies – precisely where one wishes to locate, identify or describe it. And this is an effect Miller’s essay in fact exemplifies in the process of revealing its force, however unwittingly this may happen. In fact, the doubling of cultural studies with its object in the image or interests of a subject (however duplicitous this may be) itself constitutes a somewhat fraught identificatory effect, one not dissimilar to the Lacanian mirror-stage, which can be traced in a variety of texts and perspectives that have proved influential over the years. One thinks of Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘The Culture Industry’2: a much less current and now strongly disputed text, in which can be discerned very complex and ambivalent patterns of identification, differentiation and objectification in relation to its chosen topics, themes or ‘objects’ of enquiry. Although one might claim that this more traditional example of cultural critique has now been by-passed by more contemporary work, the essay is nevertheless still of interest precisely to the extent that some practitioners in the field would wish to place it firmly ‘outside’ the space of cultural discourse today, when all the time the gap or tension between its constative and performative dimensions insistently re-opens the question of (the politics of) identification – or, indeed differentiation – in regard to the subject of cultural study. In its meticulously detailed invective against mass culture, ‘The Culture Industry’ shows that to criticize popular forms one must first know and consume them. While the subject-asconsumer is deplored in this essay as an unthinking dupe and recipient of capitalist commodification, selling out on their destiny

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as politicized agent of historical change, the utter submersion of just such a subject within popular culture suggests an inescapable situation which, if the critical or intellectual force of Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay is to hold, must equally apply to all kinds of consumers – whose apparent variety, rather like the products they buy, only thinly conceals a dreary uniformity. If one ultimately cannot choose between different sorts of consumers, simply because there isn’t a genuine choice to be made, then the authors of ‘The Culture Industry’ as consumers of the Culture Industry cannot finally maintain the extraterritorial position they seek to occupy in relation to the ‘object’ of analysis or enquiry. On the basis of the essay they themselves write, it simply isn’t possible to know how this singular act of escapology can itself come to be possible. Instead, the figure of the other demonstrates its constitutive force (and ultimately eludes objectification) as it both splits and reflects the identity of the critical subject of knowledge, the knowing subject, haunting uncannily its self-image as the authoritative, intentional agent of critique. This situation even replays itself in more recent optimistic and populist work, which identifies with and connects to the popular, but also relentlessly identifies it as an object of study ripe for the contemplative gaze of the academic spectator. For instance, in Mica Nava’s ‘Consumerism Reconsidered: Buying and Power’ the continual naming and listing of popular groups and forms such as ‘ordinary people’, ‘women shoppers’, ‘the young’, ‘black hairstyles’, ‘video games’, ‘sound systems and computers’ serves to reproduce the identificatory and distancing effects traditionally associated with the formation of academic knowledge, as much as it produces an image of the popular which provides ‘something to identify with’, ‘something which is much more exciting and fashionable’ for the ‘postmodern’ academic as well as the postwar populace.3 Patterns of consumption can here be identified as the categorized objects of authoritative representation, now at one remove from the academic discourse that speaks of them through the apparently unavoidable reinscription of critical distance; but they can also be taken to structure academic desire itself which must consume if it is to know. Again, consumption is undecidably and antagonistically both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ academic discourse, invested with an empirical aura through which concepts of

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culture are legitimated from the standpoint of positive knowledge, while also indicating the internal, structural, psychic or discursive conditions and (im)possibilities of criticism itself, for which the articulation of the ‘object’ as such may provide only a pretext. PB: Arguably, political theory and cultural studies are fundamentally different: political theory seeks to take an object of knowledge and to know all about it, while cultural studies also seeks to intervene in (alter, ‘improve’) its object. What are the political ramifications of these differences in orientation? SMW: What I’ve just being trying to suggest – and this leads to a response to your question – is that there is no straightforward choice or distinction between ‘political theory’ as the domain in which one might hope or expect to locate and comprehend the ‘object’ as an expression of positive knowledge, and ‘cultural studies’ as the name we assign to the academic practice or history of seeking to intervene in, alter or improve the ‘object’. Instead, it might be possible to say that cultural studies is what happens when the constitutive force of the other uncannily returns to split and reflect – to redouble – the non-self-identical doubleness which this very same distinction itself belies. Which is why I would like to assign another name to the politics of cultural studies: dream-thinking. In Samuel Weber’s essay, ‘The Blindness of the Seeing Eye’, we are offered a succinct yet illuminating discussion of Entstellung in Freud’s writing.4 This term Entstellung signifies distortion, but, according to Weber, carries the sense of dislocation as much as of disfigurement in Freud. For Freud, dreams cannot be considered in terms of their latent content ultimately to harbour a single, determinable meaning; nor, therefore, are they reducible to a self-contained object of cognition that is susceptible to ‘a hermeneutics that defines its task in terms of explication or of disclosure’ (p. 79). Instead, dreams constitute themselves, as Weber puts it, ‘through, and as, interpretation’ (p. 77), which must itself be conceived in terms of a process that is closer to Entstellung than Darstellung (the latter signifying presentation or exposition). Freud tells us that the dream manifests ‘a particular form of thinking’5 which Weber describes as ‘that of a de-formation which serves to dissimulate its deformative character by creating a representational façade’ (p. 79).

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While Freud insists that all dreams are in principle liable to interpretation (although not general theoretical categorization or reduction as such) the dream’s dissimulation should therefore not be construed as a veil to be penetrated by the interpretive effort of a traditional hermeneutics, so as to reveal a fully determinable object, the ultimate meaning of the dream itself. Instead, the ‘representational façade’ dissimulates the ‘essence’ of the dream-work as a form of ‘thinking’, interpretation, distortion or dislocation occurring as the effect of conflictual wish-fulfillment (conflictual wish-fulfillment of a kind that is perhaps not so far removed from what goes on in Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud therefore writes: ‘It is true that we distort dreams in attempting to reproduce them . . . but this distortion (Entstellung) is itself no more than a part of the elaboration which the dream-thoughts regularly undergo as a result of the dream-censorship’.6 The interpretation of dreams is thus a dislocating repetition and a repetitious dislocation of the dream: it should be construed in terms of Entstellung as discerned by Freud in the dream-work, arising on condition of a conflictual wish-fulfillment which cannot be set apart as simply a characteristic feature of dreaming when asleep, for example. Indeed, in The Legend of Freud, Weber takes Freud’s insight further, so as to write: ‘The logic of identity takes its place in the dream’s strategy of displacement as that which dissimulates the distortions that have taken place, have taken the place of the conscious mind precisely by seeming to yield to it’.7 The dream’s structure as Entstellung therefore provides something like ‘an allegory of the Freudian unconscious’, as Weber, in a footnote to another essay, tells us. Here, ‘the position of the spectator is revealed as both specious and unavoidable’.8 Unavoidable, since the dream offers itself as spectacle precisely so as to construct or constitute the observational vantage point of the (self-) conscious ego, yet specious, because this very same mode of representation or interpolation is what draws in and dislocates the spectatorial viewpoint as a figure of the dream and a function of the dream-work itself. Of course, a well-known example of this process taking place in Freud is the dream of finding a coin. As if by chance, the dreamer happens upon this shiny object of interest and value, lying far below at his feet. Initially at least, this conveys a sense of above-ness, even of voyeuristic

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‘outsiderdom’, as the dreamer stands poised above the coin, assured of his position (despite the fact that this dream-scene bears the indelible stamp of luck or chance) as one of control and decision. Yet this is merely a ruse of the dream, a strategem to encourage the dreamer to imagine that he can indeed, if he so wishes, reach down and snatch up the booty. Indeed, it is the very sense of distance from the coin – its allure – that impels one to try to attain it. Precisely by seeming to yield to the conscious mind, by pandering to its self-assured impression of itself, the dream in fact envelopes consciousness within itself, drawing it into a place or space which thereafter inevitably eludes objectification. The dream, of course, tells a story of self-interest confounding, contradicting or conflicting with itself at the very moment of wish-fulfillment (isn’t this the story Lacan tells of the mirrorstage?). And the crafty little coin may serve as an allegory for images of consumerism or of the marketplace which have so interested cultural studies in all its various forms over the years. Of course, this particular dream in Freud, if we are to take it as an exemplary case, undoubtedly raises the issue of orientation, one that forms part of the fourth question. For it is an Enstellte representation, a dislocating and hence disorienting ‘work’. At the very moment one has a sense of being above, beyond and outside the dream, one is in fact being drawn into and enveloped by it. The feeling of autonomy, decision and control is merely a function of the other, of the unconscious, of the dream. The latter extends into the conscious life, which it itself shapes or constitutes, in order to promote a specious semblance of intelligibility, a beguiling distraction, which, for Freud, allows the dream-work to proceed all the more effectively or expeditiously, perhaps even more ‘economically’ (although, on the other hand, it is far from clear whether the reduced expense of energy in the dream-work which such a situation entails in fact equals or exceeds the efforts involved in producing this ‘de-formation which serves to dissimulate its deformative character by creating a representational façade’). As we have already said, then, the dream as a complex form of ‘thinking’ establishes a strongly ambivalent relation to consciousness, self-interest and wish-fulfillment. In The Interpretation of Dreams, however, Freud speaks of the ‘navel of the dream’, a near abyssal spot

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which threatens a decisive separation between knowledge and the unknown. Here: one notices a tangle of dream-thoughts arising which resists unraveling but has also made no further contributions to the dream-content. This then is the navel of the dream, the place where it straddles the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which interpretation leads one are necessarily interminable and branch out in all directions into the netlike entanglement of our world of thought. Out of one of the denser places in this network, the dream-wish rises like a mushroom out of its mycelium.9 Dream-thoughts, as the entstellte ‘fulfillment’ of conflictual and hence unresolvable and ongoing desires, unavoidably ‘branch out in all directions’. They become an entangled and spreading expanse in which the dream-thoughts exceed their ‘contributions to the dream-content’, thereby inevitably dislocating the dream and its interpretation alike. As the ‘netlike entanglement’ thickens or intensifies, then, it also spills out and into ‘our world of thought’, as Freud puts it, and in particular, as Weber notes in ‘Taking Place’, into ‘our waking thoughts’ (p. 133). Yet, if such a dislocating movement or process were permitted to continue without impediment, presumably the dream would become so swept into this ‘navel’ as to no longer simply ‘straddle’ the unknown. Instead, it would surely be entirely engulfed by it, to the point where even the most minimal degree of coherence or recognition would be lost. The dream would no longer be liable to any interpretation whatsoever. Equally, since the ‘netlike entanglement’ of dream-thinking would also engulf waking thought, nothing could stop conscious life becoming so drawn into the navel of the dream that it would be utterly incapable of establishing or maintaining any focus of attention. However, since – as Freud asserts – dreams do remain susceptible to interpretation, albeit of a specific and provisional kind, and since conscious life never seems to give itself over entirely to the ‘navel of the dream’, the dissipating movement of Entstellung must somehow be held in check. Freud’s suggestion is therefore that this ‘mycelium’ not only proliferates and extends its ‘netlike entanglement’ but that it in fact gives rise

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to a ‘mushroom’ – at last, a recognizable form found growing among this most fecund organic matter, somewhat akin to decomposing compost – to which Freud assigns the name of the ‘dream-wish’. The dream-wish is, as Weber has put it, ‘a new phenomenon rising above the proliferation of shadows to provide the badly needed bright new center of attention’ (p. 133). Yet, as Freud himself insists, the dream as the fulfillment of a wish cannot be construed in terms of the expression of a latent content, which might endow it with integrity as an intentional and objectifiable phenomenon. Rather, the dream-wish ‘fulfills’ itself only as it arises from the always conflictual and hence irresolvable play of desire(s) that give it its specific force or structure. As Weber tells us: The dream-wish, then, which arises out of the dream-navel, endows the interminable proliferation of dream-thoughts with a certain structure. But at the same time this structure recenters the dream around the ‘unknown’, around the overdetermined conflictuality of which the dream is a self-dissimulating dissimulation. The emergence of the phallic dream-wish therefore does not abolish . . . the thallic dynamics of the dream – it merely gives its dislocation a focus. (p. 134) Dream-thoughts (imbued with a ‘thallic dynamics’ wherein, as the O. E. D. definition of Thallus suggests, the ‘true roots are absent’) unavoidably proliferate, spread, traverse and exceed their bounds, branching out and breaking into conscious life (as sensible, rational, voluntary and so forth). Yet the dissipating and decentring force of the dream-thought is somewhat held in check by what Weber calls a ‘structure’ or ‘focus’ conferred by the fulfillment of the dream-wish, which in turn ‘recenters’ the dream around the ‘unknown’, here conceived in terms of ‘overdetermined conflictuality’ and ‘selfdissimulating dissimulation’. The dislocating movement of Entstellung associated with dream-thoughts plays itself out through the specific form – the ‘mushroom’ or reef – of the dream-wish, the fulfillment of which both decentres and recentres, structures and destructures the dream around the ‘unknown’ as the dream-navel, as the unconscious, as ‘overdetermined conflictuality’ itself.

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Now, just a moment ago I said that there is no simple choice or distinction to be made between ‘political theory’ as a field in which one might count on discovering and explaining the ‘object’ as a function of positive knowledge, and ‘cultural studies’ as the name we might give to a discourse, practice or history characterized by interventions of various kinds; but that, instead, it might be possible to describe cultural studies as what happens when the constitutive force of the other uncannily returns to redouble the non-self-identical doubleness which this separation itself belies. And I have tried to show, by means of just a very few examples, how such ambivalent effects attending the identification of cultural studies and the subject of cultural studies – an ambivalence we might describe in terms of conflictual wish-fulfillment – in fact recall the effects of dream-thinking itself. Among these effects we find not just the undecidability which accompanies the structure of subject-object relations, and not just the fact that orientation (towards the dreamed-of coin, for instance) happens on condition of a fundamentally disorientating kind of (dream-) thinking – two effects which, by themselves, would raise serious questions for any attempt to champion or cultivate a traditional sort of ‘politics’ for cultural studies (as active, conscious, calculated, voluntary, volitional, etc.) – but also the idea that, as these effects intensify in drawing us towards the very ‘navel of the dream’, as a spot where we straddle rather than become engulfed by the unknown, at the same time the irreconcilable desires, interests and wishes which attain a partial fulfillment in finding their centre of attention cannot help but destine us to occupy an always shifting ground. If cultural studies is indeed dream-thinking, some of us may well recognize the dynamics of cultural studies itself in Weber’s description of the thallic dynamics of the dream: giving ‘dislocation a focus’. While such recognition could take a variety of forms, and be explained by a number of reasons and perspectives, obviously the problem of cultural studies’ orientation and its politics in the context of the question of the rise of interdisciplinarity in today’s ‘ruined’ university would spring to mind here. PB: My questions so far have assumed that there is a strict disciplinary division and distinction between cultural studies and political theory. What are the justifications for and political consequences of

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disciplinary divisions? For, cultural studies claims it must be interdisciplinary because the borders between disciplines are at once so problematic and also so academically and politically consequential (marginalizing, hierarchizing, excluding, etc.). But isn’t limitation inevitable, and so isn’t cultural studies’ dream of interdisciplinarity at once a pipe-dream, a fantasy or an ideology and a desire for improving its own hegemonic status? What is the best it can hope for, and the worst that should be avoided, regarding the ‘politics of disciplinarity’ or the ‘politics of knowledge’ and the ‘establishment of knowledge’? SMW: In response, I would say that the tale Bill Readings has told of cultural studies as fundamentally devoid of a source or centre of orientation, thus giving rise to a somewhat vapid and projectless interdisciplinarity which can all too easily be incorporated in terms of the demand for modular and administrative flexibility that characterizes today’s institutions – in other words, a description or explanation of cultural studies as a telling symptom and, indeed, exemplary servant of the University of Excellence – may only be part of the story. If my portrayal of cultural studies as a kind of dream-thinking has any purchase at all, this would imply that cultural studies is not just utterly ‘dereferentialized’, utterly without a point of reference, or, for that matter, ultimately just too self-referential. Rather, if cultural studies is the name we could assign to a discourse and practice that aspires to a sort of wish-fulfillment – however conflicted, impossible or inconsistent this may be – which nevertheless gives ‘dislocation’ a focus, only to confound its self-interest alongside an inevitable counter-shift in the direction of the ‘unknown’, then this somewhat different description of cultural studies might open the way for an alternative thinking of its political and ethical possibilities, its institutional politics, its ‘knowledge’ and ‘(inter)disciplinarity’ – or, in other words, its relation to the ‘other’. (What compels and impels cultural studies, from this point of view, couldn’t so easily be harnessed or so smoothly be assimilated by the rationality of the techno-bureaucratic university.) Indeed, this characterization of cultural studies as dreamthinking might help us negotiate the idea or proposition found in your question, that ‘limitation is inevitable’ so that an all-engulfing interdisciplinarity can only remain a ‘pipe-dream’ or a ‘fantasy’ of

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hegemonic dominance. What we find in the navel of the dream suggests that a focus is indeed inevitable, that limitation must happen, but that the focus acquires its focus only on the basis of a conflictual wish-fulfillment or compromise formation that is bound eventually to loosen, split, open, tear or tangle the borders of the form it constitutes. As such, the navel of the dream as the locus of cultural studies’ thinking also calls to mind the parergon in deconstruction. Here, of course, I’m referring to the Kantian problem of aesthetic form, such as it is treated by Derrida in The Truth in Painting. The delineation and hence the demarcation of an object, upon which the very conception of aesthetic form depends, requires the contour or frame (of the ‘work’, for example) to be clearly distinguished, and to remain distinguishable. Henceforth, however, the frame itself appears to have a constitutive function, serving as an enabling limit of the work. Kant, of course, wishes to downplay the importance of the frame as neither proper nor essential to the form of the aesthetic object. Yet in attempting to distinguish between ‘frame’ and ‘form’ so as to be able to take the latter as a standpoint or basis from which to judge – and from which to dismiss – the aesthetic value or pertinence of the frame, Kant alludes to an a priori conception of form, the legitimacy of which remains in question since its form as a concept cannot yet have been properly delineated, preceding as it does the supposedly secondary term of the ‘limit’, border or frame. The ‘frame’ must therefore remain an indispensable element in the composition of ‘form’, and thus cannot be distinguished or excluded so decisively in relation to the formal properties of the aesthetic object. The very concept of form, and, indeed, the very form of the concept, cannot be exempted from that which would appear to set it apart. Yet the fact that the ‘limit’ or ‘edge’ of the work irreducibly partakes of and participates in the ‘form’ which it would otherwise serve to particularize means that, as Samuel Weber tells us, ‘just this participation would require another frame’10 for the aesthetic object to be comprehended as such. And then, presumably, as this frame once more partakes of its constitutive function as an indispensable element in the composition of form, another. And then another . . . and so on. The undecidable yet constitutive, always shifting, always re-forming

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borderlines of cultural studies as characteristic of a type of dreamthinking (and the dream of finding a coin doubtless replays the problem of the parergon) therefore always involve it in a kind of ‘participation’, or draw it into a focus or form, which nevertheless always requires this other or supplementary frame, other than the frame. Again, I think such a view or characterization of cultural studies might open up different possibilities or perspectives than those we find in some of the passages Readings writes in The University in Ruins. PB: In what ways have subsequent developments in political theory problematized the initial understandings of what cultural studies ‘should do’, and in what ways does cultural studies’ own attention to the political challenge or alter political theory ‘proper’? Some political theorists may argue that cultural studies tends to rely on very narrow or crude conceptions of the political, and that this skews and limits both cultural studies’ academic ability to comprehend the political and its political ability to intervene effectively. Must cultural studies encompass and comprehend the entire discipline(s) of political theory before it can legitimately even speak about the political world? One background to all my questions is that of the political effects or forces of ‘globalization’, ‘capitalism’, or ‘Empire’ on cultural studies. Many have more or less directly argued that cultural studies is itself a symptom of such political processes – that cultural studies’ attention to deconstructing identity-essentialisms, to breaking down barriers, with trying to emancipate the marginalized (into what?) operates and even facilitates the march of these political processes. How should cultural studies think this situation and decide its position about what it should and could be and do within it? SMW: If it indeed undermines or changes everything to do with volition, agency, consciousness, objectification or positive knowledge, and indeed the grounds of intervention, how exactly can the dreaming or dream-thinking of cultural studies, as I’ve described it, be ‘political’, ‘political’ in some other sense? Or, to modify your questions, how (if at all) can cultural studies attend to the ‘political’ in ways which challenge or alter ‘political theory “proper”’, which the question itself construes as more like a standpoint of positive

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knowledge in relation to the political ‘object’? How could cultural studies in fact be seen to broaden a relation to the ‘political’, without merely seeking to extend its purview by encompassing without remainder what is called here political theory ‘proper’, given that the very identity of cultural studies and the subject of cultural studies emerge alongside a situation in which the constitutive force of the other forestalls any possibility of the objectification of the field according to a stably grounded vantage point of knowledge and cognition? And, if the identity and politics of cultural studies are to be understood in terms of this idea of giving ‘dislocation a focus’, then does this automatically reduce cultural studies to a mere symptom or expression of ‘globalization’ or of the forces and conditions which give rise to it, thereby effectively stripping cultural studies of any possibility of active intervention in the political contexts or problems about which it might hope to speak? To return to the work of Samuel Weber one last time, a telling and highly resonant description of ‘globalization’, which you ask about, emerges in a discussion he held with Gary Hall and myself, during which he dwells on the events and the aftermath of September 11, 2001.11 Here (and forgive me if I go on to quote at some length), Weber tells us that ‘the notion of the world as “globe” suggests two things’: First, something visible. Second, as a sphere, something selfcontained. A ‘world’ is not necessarily visible: a ‘globe’ is, at least potentially. It is a visible Gestalt. As such, it implies a viewer. But this is no ordinary ‘globe’: it is, as just mentioned, a globe that contains everything. It is planetary, the site of all life as we know it, and in particular, of all human life. ‘Globalization’ in this sense implies totality (although not, in the literal sense, ‘universality’): it defines the space or site of all options open to life in general, and to human life in particular. As a sphere, it is self-contained, even if it is not all-inclusive. Self-contained also suggests self-sufficient: the globe is the site of a life that can, and must, take care of itself. And yet, as a visible Gestalt, anything that is ‘global’ is also an object of perception and of understanding. An object of consciousness and of

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cognition. But as the site of all life as we know it – and it is hardly an accident that ‘globalization’ coexists with, and perhaps encourages, a heightened fascination with the ‘extraterrestrial’ – ‘globalization’ names not so much an object as the conditions for all objectification, the conditions of cognition and of action. This is why we speak of ‘globalization’ and not just of the ‘globe’ or the ‘global’. ‘Global war’, for instance, is a term that antedates the age of ‘globalization’. ‘Globalization’ is a process by which the world of possibilities is at the same time totalized and restricted. This is why it serves as an appropriate figure to name a certain vision of the world in the post-Cold-War period. The term ‘globalization’ does not merely emphasize the transnational interdependence of different parts of the world: it implies that there is no longer any alternative to the not-so-new world order of ‘late’ capitalism, and to the relations of power and hierarchies of subjugation that this order entails. It implies this in a message that may often be transmitted subliminally, but that seeks to eliminate all ambiguity. Nevertheless, ‘globalization’ remains highly ambiguous, as a term and as a process, not so much in its message as in its means of address. For ‘globalization’ does not merely name a worldwide, socio-economic process: it also constitutes an address and an injunction, one that demands a response . . . (pp. 120–1) Rather like the dream-thinking of cultural studies, ‘globalization’ may well signal a ‘process by which the world of possibilities is at the same time totalized and restricted’. It may well replay the conflictual dynamics of the parergon, of the borderline or boundary, whereby what emerges as the enabling limit of the work (in this case, the discourse of ‘globalization’ itself) shifts and vacillates between a specious participation in the totalized realm it itself designates, and an ultimately unstable and unsustainable separation, transcendence or dominance over the space or phenomenon it posits as an object of cognition, perception and, indeed, intention. From this point of view, however, the distinction carefully drawn by Weber, whereby ‘“globalization” names not so much an object as the conditions for all objectification’, itself implies that the vantage point which establishes

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such ‘conditions’ must be upheld by means of an always violent imposition upon or arrestation of a process which is finally uncontrollable or incalculable. If cultural studies and ‘globalization’ itself form part of the same dynamics, which entail (to borrow from the questions themselves) both the ‘breaking down of barriers’ and an ‘inevitable limitation’ imposed on the basis of a focus of self-interest, however conflictual or conflicted this may be, then my characterization of cultural studies as dream-thinking nevertheless implies a difference. I just don’t think it’s possible to say that cultural studies, viewed in this way, aspires to ‘eliminate all ambiguity’ – in Weber’s view, the hallmark of the discourse and practice of ‘globalization’. No-one could seriously suggest that cultural studies gives the impression of seeking or being able to deny any ‘alternative’, in the way the ideology or hegemony of ‘globalization’ works. Of course, one could not separate the two entirely – and to try to do so would perhaps be to reduce the pertinence and significance of cultural studies in the context of this discussion. Instead, it might be possible to say that, whereas ‘globalization’ names the ultimately impossible process or ‘dream’ of absolute and universal participation in a scenario contrived from the vantage point of particular interests, cultural studies – when construed as a kind of dream-thinking – exposes the extent to which giving ‘dislocation a focus’ inevitably draws self-interest once more into profound conflict with itself, driving us in a counter-direction whereby knowledge and control are once more swept into the vicinity or navel of the ‘unknown’ (or into the midsts of ‘overdetermined conflictuality’.) As such, the focus given to dislocation by cultural studies not only re-engages questions of interdisciplinarity, leaving us in the disputed realms of academic knowledge, institutional practice and debate. Cultural studies opens up a space in which what can be discovered emerges less as an alternative to ‘globalization’ than as a counter-tendency or counter-movement which forms part of, but also profoundly deconstructs, the dynamics of ‘globalization’. And, given the institutional and international discursive, cultural and pedagogical purchase of cultural studies (not overwhelming but significant, I think), there is no reason to imagine that this deconstruction would need to be merely ‘textual’ or ‘rhetorical’. Cultural studies, then, is

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the ‘other’ of ‘globalization’, an uncanny twin or double. We might recall that Poe’s uncanny short story about the doppelganger, ‘William Wilson’, begins with a fraudulent citation from Chamberlayne’s Pharronida: ‘What say of it? What say {of} CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path?’12 Yet the double in this story is not just reducible to the pricking of conscience as a moral rejoinder or textual effect. A dream, perhaps; but perhaps not just a dream. No longer speaking in merely a whisper, the other speaks in a voice which ‘I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said’: ‘You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforth art thou also dead – dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist – and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou has murdered thyself’. (p. 178)

Chapter 7

End Note: Saying the Event

What we are doing here is simply a pretext for talking to one another, maybe for talking without having anything special to say, simply for the sake of talking, addressing the other in a context where what we say matters less than the fact that we’re talking to the other .1 This, from a partly improvised lecture given in the last year of his life, the English translation of which is published posthumously in a special issue of Critical Inquiry titled ‘The Late Derrida’. A lecture on ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, to which we’ll return. Yesterday, I began reading Cixous’s Dream I Tell You. ‘Docile I say not a word the dream dictates I obey eyes closed’. Automatic writing, I suppose. In the second dream, one of fifty, she has lost the notes of a lecture she’d given once before ‘with J.D’: Nothing to fret about. We were with the family in one of those utterly sinister and poverty-stricken parts of the foreign city where the buildings are of coarse granite. Every now and then you heard a sharp crack in the East. The news arrived: someone had just killed himself. You couldn’t imagine a more sinister place.

A little later on: My lecture was all but unreadable an erasure had occurred. Probably the last time I gave it this wasn’t a problem it was still in me, still new, I remembered. I hadn’t been put off by what showed up now on the paper: lines out of focus, miniscule. Peering closely at it I managed to make out a few of the erased words and I was able to write them but that took ten minutes. I leafed through. I noticed that I alluded constantly to one of J.D’s texts: (a) what was the text,

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I hadn’t made a note of it, probably I knew when I gave the lecture. It was too late to check. In any case I didn’t have the books with me. Glancing ahead I saw J.D.’s lecture, which I’d written down, perfectly clear. It was mine I was missing.2 Yesterday, a bit after noon, I receive an email from my administrative assistant, who works in another building across the campus. The email is headed ‘Spinnaker Tower collapses’. Immediately, without opening the message, and without thinking, I rush to the window across the corridor. This affords sight of the 170-metre landmark which – as I remember from the tourist information I once cited in a conference pack – offers panoramic views across the harbour, and which looms improbably above the harbour railway station, where I am due – in just a few minutes – to meet the publishing editor of this book, someone I do not know except from her emails. I struggle to pick out the tower against the backdrop of an expansive, clear blue sky. It’s not there. It can’t be, it must be. No, it is, it’s there. I go back to my office and open the message, which includes a link to some video on the ‘You Tube’ website. My computer will not allow me to listen to the soundtrack, but the BBC News item carries an information stream of ‘Breaking News’ which tells of an explosion in a lift shaft ‘at popular tourist attraction’. Just as the words ‘concerns over the tower’s stability’ appear, shockingly the edifice snaps near the base, crumbles slightly, slumps like a drunk, then spins and crashes into the sea, everything in near slow motion, slicing into two a sedentary ferry. It is 14.09, the screen tells me. Immediately a succession of video images of the collapse are shown, each taken from a different camera angle, as the giant white rib cage of this headless, limbless, broken-spined skeleton plummets, again and again, into the sea. The entire scenography amounts to a thinly veiled reference to ‘9/11’. I watch the footage one more time, and notice that the piece is introduced by a black screen which carries, in white letters, the legend ‘BBC News Archive’. I have been watching a computer-generated video made by a student at my university. My assistant laughs at me, in another email, when I tell her I am easily spooked. Last week I went to order a copy of Cixous’s Insister of Jacques Derrida, anticipating it as a text that I might be fated to read at the end of this book. But it’s not out yet, I don’t think, in English translation.

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I’m not sure, but the publisher says a copy is earmarked for me. The blurb says: It is a book that should never have existed. Hélène Cixous wrote it in 2005, after Derrida’s untimely death, in anticipation of a conference which Derrida had promised to attend on ‘Reading Cixous and Derrida Reading Each Other’. ‘Impossible to keep one’s word on this subject’, Cixous writes, ‘the subject of the colloquium, I don’t see how, said I tormenting myself, in 2005, how to be able, it’s only barely that I can want to, but to be able to, in the state in which we are, said I to myself, half dead, and thus half alive, and no one to say which is which, and how to keep our word together . . .’ Last week I received a letter. Or rather I found it, very early in the morning, sitting alone in my pigeonhole, just one flight down from my office. Or rather, it fell from On High, and the sheer verticality of its coming, absolutely beyond any horizon of expectation, knocked me off balance. The letter invited my application for a senior post in a major university in the United States. I’m astonished. It would be impossible to accept any such position, even if it were offered. I do not decide this. But I write back with an application nonetheless, and I write about it now, as I do of these other episodes, to make myself more at home, perhaps, as I write this at my office desk, in an institution to which I have never felt any sense of belonging. To counteract somewhat the surprise that I think may be coming. The Derrida lecture says ‘a few very simple things’, as he puts it, about the question of the possibility of saying the event. We could rehearse these very quickly and schematically, as indeed Derrida himself does, at least in a certain respect. (The lecture is also very warm and friendly, touching in places, even if – or especially because – it may not have anything special to say to those friends gathered to hear it; while the more complicated issues with which it does confront us have to do with the difficulty of negotiating between the points that Derrida schematically rehearses): z z

‘An event implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable’ (p. 441). The ‘saying of the event as a statement of knowledge or information, a sort of cognitive saying of description, this saying of the

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event is always somewhat problematical because the structure of saying is such that it always comes after the event . . . it is bound to a measure of generality, iterability, and repeatability, it always misses the singularity of the event’ (p. 446). Today’s ‘information machines’, far from simply increasing ‘the powers of speech vis-à-vis the event, the power of informative speech’ lead to a saying or showing of the event that is ‘never, of course, commensurate with it and is never reliable a priori’ (p. 447); ‘I do not at all agree with Baudrillard who says that the war did not take place. The event that is ultimately irreducible to media appropriation and digestion is that thousands of people died. These are singular events each and every time, which no utterance of knowledge or information could reduce or neutralize’ (p. 460). Nonetheless, ‘we know that as the ability to immediately say and show the event grows, so does the capacity of the technology of saying and showing to intervene, interpret, select, filter, and, consequently, to make the event happen’. Crucially, there is an inordinately powerful effect here, calling for the utmost ‘political vigilance’: ‘a saying of the event that makes the event’ is frequently ‘passed off’ as a mere reporting, description, information, statement of fact (p. 447). There is ‘a saying that is close to knowledge and information, to the enunciation that says something about something. And then there is the saying that does in saying, a saying that does, that enacts. . . . For instance, when I make a promise, I’m not saying an event: I’m producing it by my commitment. I promise or I say. I say “yes” . . . The “yes” is performative’ (pp. 445–6). Thus Derrida can say ‘yes’ to ‘saying that the event is possible’ (p. 442) and even, perhaps, in a certain way, ‘yes’ to the question of the possibility of saying the event, since saying – in its performative aspects – is or could be an event, something that does not just ‘say the event, it makes it, it constitutes the event. It’s a speech-event, a saying event’ (p. 446). We can consider ‘three or four examples’, which recall many of Derrida’s published texts: i) Confession, which is more than ‘informing, more than a constative or cognitive saying of the event’ – ‘In his Confessions, Saint

End Note: Saying the Event

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Augustine asked God, “Why must I confess to You when You know everything? . . . ”’ – ‘The confession is a matter of transforming my relationship to the other, of transforming myself by admitting my guilt. In the confession, there is a saying of the event, of what happened, that produces a transformation. It produces another event and is not simply a saying of knowledge . . . A saying the event that produces the event beyond the confines of knowledge’ (p. 448) ii) The gift ‘should be an event’ – but, as such, ‘it has to extend beyond the confines of the economic circle of exchange’ in order not to be annulled as gift. To recognize the gift – whether on the part of the giver or receiver – leads back towards an economy of exchange, since acknowledgement of the gift, or indeed the self-gratification or self-congratulation that comes from the sense of giving, repays the gift in effect. Thus, the gift ‘is possible only when it appears impossible’ – ‘giving, if there is any, if it is possible, must appear impossible. And consequently giving is doing the impossible’ – the very ‘eventfulness’ of its event (p. 449). iii) The event of forgiveness must exclude forgiveness of the forgiveable: ‘If I forgive only what is venial, only what is excusable or pardonable, the slight misdeed, the measured and the measurable, the determined and limited wrongdoing, in that case, I’m not forgiving anything. If I forgive because it’s forgivable, because it’s easy to forgive, I’m not forgiving. I can only forgive, if I do forgive, when there is something unforgivable, when it isn’t possible to forgive’. The possibility of forgiveness stems from its impossibility, but this means ‘that the impossible must be done’ – the event ‘if there is one, consists in doing the impossible’ (p. 449). iv) ‘Invention is an event; the words themselves indicate as much’ yet ‘inventing, if it is possible, is not inventing’ – ‘If I can invent what I invent, if I have the ability to invent what I invent, that means that the invention follows a potentiality, an ability that is in me, and thus brings nothing new. It does not constitute an event’ – ‘if the structure of the field makes an invention possible . . . then this invention is not an invention. Precisely because it’s possible’ (p. 450).

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v) Genuine hospitality must be absolute and asymmetrical, going beyond the capacity to welcome, the ability to receive. To receive and welcome what can be received and welcomed annuls the gift and event of the hospitable in the midsts of a calculated exchange with a knowable guest. ‘The arrival of the arrivant will constitute an event only if I’m not capable of receiving him or her’ (p. 452). All in all: ‘The event’s eventfulness depends on this experience of the impossible’ (p. 451); ‘the event is something that vertically befalls me when I didn’t see it coming’ (p. 452). However, if one might presuppose ‘some sort of inevitable neutralization of the event by its iterability’, nonetheless ‘there is iterability and return in absolute uniqueness and utter singularity’ – as we saw, at the outset, concerning the impression and event, impression of event, event of impression – so that ‘the arrival of the arrivant – or the coming of the inaugural event – can only be greeted as a return, a coming back, a spectral revenance’ (p. 452). A repetition at the origin. An inaugural-inaugurating divisibility which (begins by) coming (back) to the possibility of the possible, takes the form and structure of the impossible. To which we must say ‘yes’, before even saying it, as an absolute condition of possibility we cannot but affirm. Yes, yes. There, done. Leave it now, rattled off. Near automatic writing, of another kind, enclosed within a body of quotations that keep the sky from falling in, save the edifice from collapse, bring the lines back into focus and restore proper citation. ‘The event that is ultimately irreducible to media appropriation and digestion is that thousands of people died.’ ‘These are singular events each and every time . . .’ ‘It’s the unsayable: the dead, for example, the dead.’ This on the penultimate page, and on the reverse, of course, as many will know, Derrida’s final words. ‘Final Words’. Those read by his son at the funeral. No, don’t mention them. I have no right. ‘Jacques wanted no rites and no orations.’ I, last of all, should speak of this. Let the text stand in its own right, ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, without noting its reverse, which should be left to stand in its own right, too. I knew it was there, of

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course, having read it before, and, before having read it, hearing word from Nick Royle of its contents. Which he, like me, took as a gift, I think. I have no right – what of Cixous, and her dream of two texts seemingly muddled together, one as near total substitute for the other, and yet . . . Or of her tormenting promise, an impossible word to keep – ‘it’s only barely that I can want to, but to be able to, in the state in which we are, said I to myself, half dead, and thus half alive, and no one to say which is which, and how to keep our word together . . .’ Keeping a word together, no rites, no orations, but a text – whether by Cixous alone or somehow between Cixous and Derrida, or somehow both, but a text (as yet unread) that surely defies my jotting a word or two. It’s hard, still, not to register the impression made by these final words, reproduced alongside a scanned copy of Derrida’s original handwritten lines. An im-possible event, this text, in its structural as well as its affective dimensions. One that cannot fail to make its impression, and which, in that sense, must be read, calls to be read, however unreadable the text may seem, even as it shelters itself somewhat, keeping its secret. At any rate, one which vertically befalls you. Still, one must be careful not to say too much. ‘Jacques wanted no rites and no orations’, the note begins. Writing of himself in the third person, or as if of another, whether this decision invites or complicates autobiographical reading, it certainly exceeds, overreaches, transforms the paradox of the ‘autobiographical’. (Classically, an autobiography aims at an authoritative, comprehensive overview of a life, yet its possibility resides in the fact that – the autobiographer being, necessarily, still alive – the ‘work’ must unavoidably remain incomplete. We are, of course, indebted to Derrida for such insights.) From a grammatical perspective, these final words are written so that they make sense – on the occasion of their delivery, in their very eventfulness – as an address from the son’s point of view. Derrida not so much writes his own send-off, to be spoken in imitation of his own voice as it were, as gives a text which, paradoxically, his son could have authored, drawing in words from his father. The note speaks of Jacques as of a living person – ‘he asks me to thank you for coming and to bless you’ (perhaps it is that Derrida does not feign to write as if already dead while he composes the note, as if he wishes to

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calculate otherwise) – and it relays a number of messages – ‘Smile for me, he says, as I will have smiled for you until the end. Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival . . . I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am’. Slowly, then, Jacques’ voice seems to speak through the words of his son, and the use of free indirect speech in some way loosens the distinction between the two, although equally the relation – the difference – is respected in other aspects of the way in which these final words compose themselves. There is an odd combination of the touchingly familiar and a far from hollow respect for formality here. The impression, in the end, is not at all that of an uncomfortable experience of ventriloquistic mastery through which the dead father, from somewhere beyond the grave, regains possession of the living voice of his offspring. On the contrary, the note seems to be designed with great care: Derrida’s son is spared the pain of reading a text that is prepared as if it were to be spoken by the departed father (e.g. ‘I want no rites and no orations’) – that is, he is spared the experience of an impossibility divested of any affirmative dimension – nor is he charged with the ordeal of a funeral oration in its own right, of which Derrida well knew the pain. Equally, through the composition of these lines, in which Derrida restricts himself to saying ‘I love you’ in the form of free indirect speech issuing from an address that can only be spoken by his son, the father (and friend, and so on) is ultimately exposed, rendered absolutely vulnerable, his final words being those of his child. But I suppose what I would want to say, in the end, is that the responsibility of each, here, father and son, is, at last, the responsibility of other – that is to say, it is not of ‘the order of the masterable possible’,3 pertaining to a performative act which originates in a sovereign ‘I’; the ‘text’ of each is that of the other (the other-in-me); the writing works so that each ‘text’ – if we can say this – comes, if it comes at all, from the other . . . is, in a sense, the decision of the other (the other-in-me). The love, too, of which these final words speak, is not – in what I am tempted to call the impossible grammaticality of the text – a love which measures itself along the horizon of that ‘masterable possible’, it isn’t a love that is the ‘unfolding of what is already possible . . . of the order of power, of the “I can,” “I may,” or “I am empowered to . . .”’.4 Instead, its true possibility is in the impossible event of this address, this saying beyond saying.

Notes

Introduction 1

2

3

4

‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Giovanni Borradori, ed. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), pp. 85–136. Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998). Further references will be given in the body of the text. Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Further references will be given in the body of the text. Clark’s work on literary singularity, as well as that of Attridge (see n. 5 below) might be seen as part of a larger field of study including, for instance, Peggy Kamuf’s exploration of the ‘occasion’ in regard to Derrida’s notion of ‘address’ (Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)). In fact, the question of the ‘occasional’ in Derrida inspires much of the present study. In ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’, Derrida writes: ‘Each time I write a text, it is “on occasion”, occasional, for some occasion. I have never planned to write a text; everything I’ve done, even the most composite of my books, were “occasioned” by a question. My concern with the date and the signature confirms it’ (Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), pp. 1–92; see p. 62). In the aftermath of his death in 2004, Frédéric Regard wrote of Derrida that he made ‘his life a story of chance meetings’, ‘letting himself be carried away by l’enchant’, and producing himself principally ‘through citational grafting’ (Frédéric Regard, ‘Autobiography as linguistic incompetence: notes on Derrida’s readings of Joyce and Cixous’, Textual Practice 19.2 (2005): 283–95; see 293). Regard speaks, rather floridly, of Derrida as ‘this moving target, this unpredictable projectile, this chameleon-like “subjectile”’ – a figure who, through his close and insistent association with the ‘counterfeit signature’, inevitably placed himself outside the traditional habits and structures of French academe. Such images of Derrida are doubtless prompted by the vast number of texts he leaves us which were written on invitation for particular occasions and events across the world, the large body of extraordinarily inventive performances in interview, and the series of major works from The Post Card to Counterpath which can be read to portray Derrida

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as travel writer, voyager, drifter. (And a figure, to boot, that you could barely travel with, as Derrida himself notes; see Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 3.) Derrida therefore becomes a writer whose texts, frequently delivered in apparently the most traditional fashion at leading academic or institutional venues, are nevertheless written ‘on occasion’ and perhaps even en vacance – from philosophy, from tradition, even from the university. Derrida as an Algerian émigré, a postcolonial outsider, an idiomatic writer feeling himself tied to a language (French) that is not exactly his own, and a figure obsessed by the singularity of the literary or philosophical event, thus emerges as someone whose thought always arrives on occasion – never working itself free from the chance happening which includes the constitutive possibility of non-arrival. That said, this book sets out to explore the (im-)possibility of writing the event in Derrida, taking into account the risk that such stories of Derrida’s life and work sometimes tend to misunderstand the essential unpredictability at work in the conditions of Derrida’s thought, at the expense of a more rigorous understanding of the event’s structure and historicity. It is in this context that we should weigh Clark’s comment that the association of singularity with an irreducibility to ‘fixed stances or cultural programmes’ is now rather ‘shop-soiled’ (p. 1). The image of Derrida produced by this version of literature’s ‘singularity’ is, for Clark, one of a ‘simplified and processed’ thinker (p. 2), and Clark’s own project (itself fraught with difficulty) is therefore to schematize the ‘singular’ to avoid its elusive mystique drifting towards merely negative dogma. Geoffrey Bennington, too, has commented recently on the ‘curious kind of coherence [in Derrida’s thought] for which there is no doubt no good working model’ (Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Foundations’, Textual Practice 21.2 (2007): 231–49; see 231). Going back to some of the earliest texts by Derrida, Sean Gaston has sought to rethink the ‘historical’ in Derrida (see, for example, his Starting with Derrida (London and New York: Continuum, 2007). Vincent B. Leitch, meanwhile, in an essay that summarizes and evaluates longer trends in Derrida’s philosophical career, writes that: ‘The key notions of Derrida’s inventive political philosophy in the late work remain, in my judgment, democracy to come, unconditional justice, pure hospitality, and the messianic without messianism, famously first assembled in Specters of Marx and featured regularly thereafter. These Derridean ideals, phantoms, specters, stemming from or shared by the Enlightenment and modernity, haunt the present, orienting critique and doing political work’ (Vincent B. Leitch, ‘Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty’, Critical Inquiry 33.2 (2007): 229–47; see 243). For Derrida, in Specters of Marx, Marxism (in the sense of a legacy he would wish to affirm) constitutes ‘the absolute singularity of a project – or of a promise – which has a philosophical and scientific form. This form is in principle non-religious, in the sense of a positive religion; it is not mythological; it is therefore not national . . . The form of this promise or of this project remains absolutely unique. Its event is at once singular, total, and uneffaceable . . . There is no precedent whatsoever for such an event’ (Jacques Derrida, ‘wears and tears (tableau of an ageless world)’, in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt,

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the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 77–94; see p. 91). Specters of Marx ‘writes’ the event, in other words, in order to reflect on the ‘political’ with a considerable degree of rigour, including addressing the question of how the notion of the ‘political’ might itself be reconsidered in the aftermath or spirit of Marx and Marxism. Such texts do seem to call for Clark’s more challenging approach to questions of ‘singularity’ or the ‘event’: how might one reconcile the constitutive importance in Derrida of the unknowable event or unpredictable occasion, the constitutive pull of the singular, the idiomatic and the unanticipatable surprise of the ‘to come’, with the idea, not just of deconstruction’s critical and philosophical meticulousnessness, but its own claims to rethink the event itself with some degree of rigour? What is the relationship between writing and the event, in and for deconstruction? This question is near the heart of this book. J. Hillis Miller, Black Holes, in Black Holes/J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading, by J. Hillis Miller and Manuel Asensi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004).

Chapter 1 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Book to Come’, in Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 4–18; see pp. 5–6. Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)’, in Paper Machine, pp. 41–65. Further references will be given in the body of the text. See also, in the same book, ‘Machines and the “Undocumented Person”’, pp. 1–3, and ‘The Word Processor’, pp. 19–32. Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 31. Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, Diacritics 13.3 (1983): 3–20. Reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 129–55. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Further references will be given in the body of the text.

Chapter 2 1

Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997).

130 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13

14

15

16 17

18

Notes

Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (London: Allen, 1964), p. 447. Further references are included in the body of the text. The allusion here is to Georges Bataille’s reading of Genet, part of which was published in English translation as ‘Genet: the refusal to communicate’. This may be found in P. Brookes and J. Halpern (eds), Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 24–30. Ann Smock, Translator’s Introduction to Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 1–15. James Strachey, (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (S.E.), Vol. XVII (London: Hogarth Press, 1968). Page numbers are given in the body of the text. Robert Harvey, ‘Genet’s open enemies: Sartre and Derrida’, Yale French Studies, 91 (1997), pp. 103–16; see p. 104. Further references are included in the body of the text. It should be noted that this issue of Yale French Studies is devoted to Genet and contains a host of interesting material. See also a special issue of Paragraph 27.2 (2004), edited by Mairéad Hanrahan, which includes a number of fine essays on Genet, and also includes Derrida’s own text, ‘Countersignature’, pp. 7–42. Sigmund Freud, ‘Draft K: the neuroses of defence’, in S.E, Vol. I, pp. 220–9. Further references are included in the body of the text. Sigmund Freud, ‘Obsessions and phobias: their psychical mechanism and their aetiology’, in S.E., Vol. III, pp. 74–82. Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, expanded edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 77. Further references are included in the body of the text. S.E., Vol. V, pp. 506–7, cited in Institution and Interpretation, p. 79. S.E., Vol. V, p. 514, cited in Institution and Interpretation, p. 78. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud, expanded edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 1. If psychoanalysis can be ‘spoken of, and in part incorrectly, as a ‘‘depth psychology’’ or an ‘‘abyssal psychology’’ ’ (p. 27), as Derrida puts it in Archive Fever, the question of the abyss does not only lead us into hidden depths. What is abyssal concerns, of course, the process by which analysis gets progressively – obsessively – caught up in what it seeks chiefly to discover, illuminate and explain. John P. Leavey, Jr., Glassary (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Jacques Derrida, Glas (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 175b. Further references are included in the body of the text. This, at any rate, is how Harvey sees it. My attempt to explore through Freud’s discussion of anal eroticism the opening gambit of Saint Genet depends much less than other accounts of this book upon the idea of Sartre’s latent homosexuality. For a fuller discussion of the ‘anthological’ in Derrida, see my ‘Anthologizing Derrida’, Symploke, 8 (1–2), pp. 151–63. Here, an inextricable problem is that the flower as poetic object par excellence becomes a privileged figure or

Notes

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

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exemplary part of that which it is nevertheless supposed to distinguish, determine, partition, allot and thereby transcend: the poetic itself. The flower is thus both the gatherer and gathered. Here, in conjunction with the discussion that ensues in this part of the chapter, it is worth recalling that in Forget Foucault Baudrillard distinguishes between ‘production’ as a process of rendering visible, a strategy of causing objects and relations to become distinctly knowable, and ‘seduction’ as that which ‘withdraws something from the visible order’ (Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1977), pp. 21–2). Yet by assigning the name ‘seduction’ to such a process of withdrawal, that is, by stating its nameability or legibility, Baudrillard’s own text suggests that ‘seduction’ in fact names nothing less than ‘an incapacity to stop seeing what is not there to be seen’. The always shifting network which extends ‘telegraphically’ to include not only Genet–Sartre–Derrida–Bataille–Baudrillard, but also seduction and obsession alike, appears to be intimately bound up once more with the subtler arts of disappearance, of a disappearing without end. Here, the play of detachment and reattachment, appearance and withdrawal, which Derrida associates with seduction, is replayed yet again within a ‘supplementary series’ characterized by ‘metonymic substitutions’ whose master-name is at once nameable and unnameable: death. Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 7. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 142, 166 and 183, cited in Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, p. 7. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 21. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever; A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Further references are included in the body of the text. Derrida’s reference to ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ on p. 14 of this text may be found in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 227–78. In Archive Fever, Derrida writes: ‘The trouble de l’archive stems from a mal d’archive. We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute en mal de, to be en mal d’archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble or from what the noun mal might name. It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself’ (p. 91). Such comments would seem to lead us right back to my opening remarks concerning obsessional writing. Reminiscing on his essay concerning Freud’s Mystic Pad written nearly three decades earlier than Archive Fever, Derrida notes that what is at issue in the question of the archive machine ‘is nothing less than the future, if there is such a thing. . . . As techno-science, science, in its very movement, can only consist in a transformation of the techniques of archivization, of printing, of

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inscription, of reproduction, of formalization, of ciphering, of translating marks’ (pp. 14–15). However, the question of the future transformation of the archive, of the writing machine, and indeed of media technologies of all kinds, including the news media, raises the issue of whether it is better to gain an impression of the archive in terms of complex patterns of mutation, than by way of a cruder picture of radical and decisive change. Thus we should try not to forget that Derrida remembers what he wrote in 1966 concerning the Freudian Mystic Pad, as a way to preface the intimate connection he wishes to make between the question of the archive and that of the future, rather than simply that of the past. Whereas Archive Fever shows that the ‘past’ cannot simply or stably be archived in the conventional sense, or be consigned to the past, the future towards which we are (death) driven by archive fever depends on a movement which entirely flouts the ‘economic principle’ whereby temporal distinctions might be decisively calculated according to a reductive separation of the categorical pastness of the past. The future, if there is one, therefore acquires a more complex sense. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Book to Come’, in Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 4–18; see p. 8. Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)’ in Paper Machine, pp. 41–65; see p. 46. Further references will be given in the body of the text. It should be noted that, in this essay, the question of paper – its complicated historico-ideologico-politico, etc., structure – also enfolds the question of the sans-papiers in an age that some envisage in terms of an increasingly ‘paperless’ or ‘de-paperized’ world.

Chapter 3 1

Giorgio Agamben, ‘Friendship’, Contretemps 5 December 2004 (special issue on Giorgio Agamben), available on-line at http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/ 5december2004/agamben.pdf For a further comment on the Derrida–Agamben relation, see Lorenzo Fabbri’s interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Philosophy as Chance’, Critical Inquiry 33.2 (2007): 427–40. Here, when asked about a certain sharing of ‘themes’ between Agamben and Derrida, Nancy says this to his interviewer (it seems appropriate to record the remark in full, without selective omissions): ‘You are touching on a rather difficult and painful subject for me as a friend of both Derrida and Agamben. For Agamben began at a certain point to reject Derrida in a radical way, which was of course his right, all the while taking up many of Derrida’s themes (such as messianism and, yes, the animal). He showed himself in this respect to be extremely unjust – I mean philosophically speaking. To speak, as he did, of différance as a perpetual delay is to deliberately refuse to read the texts. Or else to write about messianism after Derrida without mentioning him is aggressive and unscholarly (and I know that this was intentional). One could make a whole case here, but it would be rather petty and uninteresting. In any case, I cannot and do not want to say

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anything more about it; this has been a subject of discussion and even disagreement between Agamben and me. And I know that this blatant but never argued hostility was painful to Derrida. Still today I like Giorgio a great deal, and I very much appreciated his earlier texts (even if I have some reservations about more recent ones), and I would like to be able one day to really discuss this with him, if he were willing. But of course I cannot alter either my friendship with Derrida – that goes without saying – or my objective judgment of texts, their chronology and their interpretations’ (p. 435). Whether or not the case is indeed ‘petty’ or ‘uninteresting’, Nancy clearly feels it establishes an important context for the question he is asked. It is worth noting, too, that Samuel Weber has recently written on Agamben’s ‘Friendship’ essay, in an as yet unpublished paper, ‘“And When is Now?” (On Some Limits of Perfect Intelligibility)’, scheduled to appear in MLN in the Fall issue of 2007. Here, Weber isolates in Politics of Friendship a passage which he reads as Derrida’s response to the letter from Agamben mentioned in ‘Friendship’ – a response which Agamben denies ever happening in the course of the book’s development. See Politics of Friendship (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 208. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 155–6. 3 Ibid. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 54. 5 Ibid. p. 53. 6 Ibid. p. 181. 7 Adam Thurschwell, ‘Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida’, in Andrew Norris (ed.) Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 173–97; see p. 181. This volume contains a number of fine critical essays on Agamben’s perhaps most famous text. Also of interest, in terms of the growing critical reception of Agamben’s work in the Anglo-American world, is Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, edited by Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), which includes essays by Ernesto Laclau, Antonio Negri, Dominick LaCapra and Paul Patton. See also Paragraph 25.2 (2002), including Josh Cohen’s ‘“A Different Insignificance”: The Poet and the Witness in Agamben’, 36–51; and also other essays included in the aforementioned special issue of Contretemps on Agamben. 8 Ibid. p. 185. 9 Jacques Derrida, Glas (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 15b. 10 I am grateful to my friend Sean Gaston for this reference to Derrida’s retranslation of Heidegger and for the point it allows me to make here. See Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986). 11 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 8. 12 Ibid. p. 181. 13 Benjamin Noys, ‘Time of Death’, Angelaki 7.2 (2002): 51–9; see 59. 14 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 54.

134 15

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Cited in Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 197–204, from Franz Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Stories, trans. Willa. and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).

Chapter 4 1

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5

6

7

8

9

Peter Boxall, ‘Since Beckett’, Textual Practice 20.2 (2006): 301–17. This essay reads Beckett alongside DeLillo, finding in DeLillo’s late novel The Body Artist the possibility of Beckett’s legacy returning us to the spirit of Marx, so that we become haunted by ‘a dialectical history, alive in the empty time of the ongoing end of history, the time, as Moran would have it, of “finality without end”’. In ‘the weightless, spaceless time of the new millenium’ Boxall traces a pathway – ‘a road which belongs to the material history of industrial capitalism’ – that leads to DeLillo’s novel, where even when ‘living itself has become a form of mourning, this something is still taking its course’. Boxall concludes: ‘For DeLillo, as for so many of us who write and read since Beckett, it is in Beckett’s legacy that we might find the seeds of the future’ (pp. 314–15). Further references to this essay will be given in the body of the text. I will refer throughout to the 1996 Grove Press edition when citing Beckett’s Company, which is published alongside Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho under the title Nohow On. This includes an introduction by Gontarski, S. E. ‘The Conjuring of Something Out of Nothing: Samuel Beckett’s “Closed Space” Novels’. Further references to this introduction will be given in the body of the text. Badiou, On Beckett (Manchester: Clinamen, 2003). Further references will be given in the body of the text. Badiou in fact traces a complex ‘fusion’ of closure and open space into what he calls ‘the grey black’ as that which localizes being in-distinctly between movement and immobility (p. 6). John Pilling, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). Further references will be given in the body of the text. As Badiou puts it in On Beckett, ‘Beckett was raised on Descartes’ and ‘the reference to the cogito is explicit in many texts’ (p. 9). However, Badiou sees Beckett as complexly ‘reversing’ Descartes, while inhabiting his procedure to a significant extent. I will refer here to René Descartes, Meditations and Other Philosophical Writings (London: Penguin, 1998). Further references will be given in the body of the text. I refer to the first three essays of Derrida’s Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004): ‘If There is Cause to Translate I’, pp. 1–19; ‘If There is Cause to Translate II’, pp. 20–42; and ‘Vacant Chair’, pp. 43–63. Further references will be given in the body of the text. Cited in Derrida (2004), p. 1. Translated from Descartes’ Oeuvres. Vol. 6, Librairie Philosophique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1964–69), pp. 77–8.

Notes 10

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In On Beckett, Badiou has some interesting prefatory remarks on the ‘French’ and ‘English’ Beckett which similarly question conventional orderings of the original and the translation (pp. xxxv–xxxvi).

Chapter 5 1

2

3

4

This essay was written in 1999, in view of the impending Research Assessment Exercise of 2001. At the time of writing this book, the R.A.E. of 2008 looms. There is currently much speculation about what may replace the current Research Assessment Exercise after this time. At present, the new framework that has been mooted bases itself on the use of three indicators: bibliometrics, research student data and external research income. The bibliometric indicator will be made up of citation impact information, normalized across discipline areas, deriving data from the Thompson Scientific database for appropriate subjects. Although quality profiles in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, medicine) will almost certainly derive from the combination of these indicators, there has been talk of a ‘light touch’ in other subject areas, including the arts, humanities and social sciences, with some measure of peer review retained. However, the precise details are unclear and more consultation is proposed. It is possible that the somewhat fuzzy discourse of ‘light touch’ may operate as a mere placeholder for serious debate, and that, as time lapses, the pressure will grow to adopt more strongly a bibliometric indicator made up of citation impact information. Of course, it is equally likely that any new system of research funding will not rock the boat of an established pecking order among UK institutions (the move to counting citations, if not handled carefully, might well produce unpredictable results – the ‘objectivity’ of a certain arithmetical approach will presumably be ‘structured’ to ensure that radically unpredictable effects are limited). However, the prospect of counting citations in order to evaluate the quality of research in arts, humanities and social science subjects indicates that the ‘Raelity’ I described in the late 1990s is likely to mutate into new and potentially more powerful forms, rather than simply disappear, with the end of the R.A.E. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 15. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 39. Further references will be given in the body of the text. In the Chambers Dictionary, 1994 edition, there is only one word beginning with the letters ‘rae’, and it is a name (not of the improper sort I have coined, i.e. ‘Raelity’): Raetia (or Rhaetia), ‘a province of the Roman Empire, roughly Grisons and Tirol, to which Vindelicia was added’. The only characterizing feature, above and beyond the rough designation of this province, being addition itself. Raetia adds (itself) to Rome. However, while its capital (the letter R) belongs to the capital (Rome), Raetia adds to but does not, of course, quite add up to Rome. R is not quite R. Pluses and minuses, more or less, here. We’ll come back to this.

136 5

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7 8

9

10

11

Notes

I refer in this section to Derrida’s essay, ‘The Age of Hegel’, published in Samuel Weber (ed.), Demarcating the Disciplines: Philosophy, Literature, Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) pp. 1–43. This includes, as an appendix, G. W. F. Hegel’s letter of 16 April 1822 ‘To the Royal Ministry of Spiritual, Academic and Medical Affairs’, trans. T. Cochran and S. Weber. Further references will be given in the body of the text. The essay is also published in Derrida’s Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 117–57. The sudden, although I suppose quite familiar, shift from Kant to Hegel in this section might be justified by a reading of Peggy Kamuf’s chapter on ‘The Walls of Science’ in The Division of Literature, Or, The University in Deconstruction. Here, via a close reading of Hegel’s speech of 29 September 1809, given to commemorate the commencement of exercises at Nuremberg’s classical Gymnasium, Kamuf shows that Hegel’s institution, as much as Kant’s or Readings’, walks on ‘two [left] feet’, displaying just the same kinds of highly conflicted and ambivalent effects consequent upon the dynamic of differentiation required by the fraught processes of institutionality; and thereby revealing the non-self-identical doubleness of apparent opposites that crop up in the institution’s vicinity. See Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, Or, The University in Deconstruction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). It is important to note that, in ‘The Age of Hegel’, Derrida in fact gives a patient and detailed historico-sociological analysis of the complex interplay between liberal discourse and the ‘mobile, subtle, sometimes paradoxical dynamic’ of the given forces of civil society that flow from, into and within Hegel’s missives to the Ministry. Cited in ‘The Age of Hegel’, p. 13. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (London: Triad/Grafton Books, 1977), pp. 40–1. See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns (eds), Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 647–708, esp. p. 651. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, Diacritics 13:3 (1983): 3–20; see 5. Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘Mochlos’, in Richard Rand (ed.), Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 1–34.

Chapter 6 1

J. Hillis Miller, ‘Literary Study in the Transnational University’, in Black Holes/ J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading, by J. Hillis Miller and Manuel Asensi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 3–183. All further references to Miller’s essay are given in the body of the text.

Notes 2

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6 7

8

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137

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 120–67. For a reading along similar lines of this text, see Gary Hall, ‘“It’s a Thin Line between Love and Hate”: Why Cultural Studies is so “Naff”’, Angelaki 2.2 (1996): 25–46. This essay is included in Nava’s Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism (London: Sage, 1992). Samuel Weber, ‘The Blindness of the Seeing Eye’, in Institution and Interpretation, expanded edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 73–84. All further references to Weber’s essay are given in the body of the text. See Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 5, pp. 506–7. Ibid. p. 514. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud, expanded edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 200), p. 103. Samuel Weber, ‘Taking Place: Toward a Theater of Dislocation’, in D. J. Levin (ed.) Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 107–46. This reference, however, is to n. 22, pp. 252–3. All further references are given in the body of the text. For fuller accounts of Weber’s thinking about theatricality, see Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Simon Morgan Wortham and Gary Hall (eds), Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); and my own book, Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003), esp. pp. 81–102. See S.E., 5, p. 530. Samuel Weber, ‘The Unraveling of Form’, in Alan Cholodenko (ed.) Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 9–35; see p. 23. This discussion, between Samuel Weber, Gary Hall and myself, appears in Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading and is also published in South Atlantic Quarterly 101.3 (2002): 695–724, as well as in Weber’s own Theatricality as Medium, pp. 336–64, under the revised title of ‘Stages and Plots: Theatricality after September 11, 2001’. The reference given here is to the version published in Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading. In terms of the question of cultural studies and globalization, alongside the general tenor of discussion here, it is worth noting Gayatri Spivak’s comment, some years ago, that our task should be to ‘wrench deconstruction from its proper home in “Comparative Literature”, to let it loose in “Cultural Studies” so that it can transform its nice nursery of hybrid plantings to reveal the saturnalia of an imagined counter-globalization’ (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Deconstruction and Cultural Studies: Arguments for a Deconstructive Cultural Studies’, in Nicholas Royle (ed.) Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 14–43; see p. 35. See also Samuel Weber, ‘Reading Over a Globalized World’, Textual Practice 21.2 (2007): 267–78, and Jacques Derrida, ‘Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism’, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 371–86.

138 12

Notes

I refer here to the version of the text included in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).

Chapter 7 1

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4

Jacques Derrida, ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007): 441–61. Further references will be given in the body of the text. Hélène Cixous, Dream I Tell You (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Further references will be given in the body of the text. Jacques Derrida, ‘The University Without Condition’, in Without Alibi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 202–37; see p. 234. Ibid.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 120–67. Agamben, Giorgio, ‘Friendship’, Contretemps 5 (2004), on-line at http://www. usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/agamben.pdf —, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). —, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Attridge, Derek, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). Badiou, Alain, On Beckett (Manchester: Clinamen, 2003). Bataille, Georges, ‘Genet: The Refusal to Communicate’, in P. Brookes and J. Halpern (eds), Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 24–30. Baudrillard, Jean, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1977). Beckett, Samuel, Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1996). Boxall, Peter, ‘Since Beckett’, Textual Practice 20.2 (2006): 301–17. Calarco, Matthew and DeCaroli, Steven (eds), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Cixous, Hélène, Dream I Tell You (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). —, Insister of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Clark, Timothy, The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Cohen, Josh, ‘“A Different Insignificance”: The Poet and the Witness in Agamben’, Paragraph 25.2 (2002): 36–51. Critchley, Simon, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London: Routledge, 1997). Derrida, Jacques, ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007): 441–61. —, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998). —, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Giovanni Borradori, (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), pp. 85–136. —, ‘Before the Law’, in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 197–204.

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Plato to Heidegger (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 647–708. Kamuf, Peggy, Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). —, The Division of Literature, Or, The University in Deconstruction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Leavey, John Paul Jr., Glassary (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Leitch, Vincent B., ‘Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty’, Critical Inquiry 33.2 (2007): 229–47. Malabou, Catherine, and Derrida, Jacques, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Miller, J. Hillis, Black Holes, in Black Holes/J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading, by J. Hillis Miller and Manuel Asensi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Morgan Wortham, Simon, Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003). Morgan Wortham, Simon and Hall, Gary (eds) Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘Philosophy as Chance’ (interview with Lorenzo Fabbri), Critical Inquiry 33.2 (2007): 427–40. Nava, Mica, Changing Cultures: Feminism, Youth and Consumerism (London: Sage, 1992). Noys, Benjamin, ‘Time of Death’, Angelaki 7.2 (2002): 51–59. Pilling, John, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976). Poe, Edgar Allan, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Rajan, Tilottama, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Readings, Bill, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). Regard, Frédéric, ‘Autobiography as Linguistic Incompetence: Notes on Derrida’s Readings of Joyce and Cixous’, Textual Practice 19.2 (2005): 283–95. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (London: Allen, 1964). Smock, Ann, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Blanchot, Maurice, The Space of Literature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 1–15. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Deconstruction and Cultural Studies: Arguments for a Deconstructive Cultural Studies’, in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 14–43. Strachey, James (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–73). Thurschwell, Adam, ‘Cutting the Branches for Akiba: Agamben’s Critique of Derrida’, in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 173–97.

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Index Adorno, Theodor 104–5, 107, 137 n.2 Agamben, Giorgio 17, 48–69, 132–3 n.1, 133 n.2, 133 n.4, 133 n.7 anthological 16, 23, 27–9, 37, 40, 42, 130–1 n.18 aporia 3–4, 6, 23 archive 5, 8–13, 15–7, 20–7, 43–6, 120, 131 n.25, 131–2 n.26 Arendt, Hannah 48 Aristotle 56, 59, 99 Attridge, Derek 14, 127 n.4, 129 n.5, 134 n.15 autoimmunity 2–3 Badiou, Alain 71, 75, 79, 134 n.3, 134 n.4, 134 n.6, 134 n.10 Bataille, Georges 40, 130 n.13, 131 n.19 Baudrillard, Jean 122, 131 n.19 Beckett, Samuel 17–8, 70–7, 84, 134 n.1, 134 n.2, 134 n.6, 135 n.10 Benjamin, Walter 17, 48–50, 61–62, 64, 67–8 biblion 20–1, 27 biopolitics, biopolitical 48, 62–3 Blanchot, Maurice 14, 31–2, 130 n.4 BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) 16–7, 21–3, 25, 27 Borradori, Giovanni 1, 127 n.1 Bowman, Paul 18, 102–18 Boxall, Peter 70–2, 74, 77, 134 n.1 Calarco, Matthew 133 n.7 Casaubon, Isaac 56 Chartier, Roger 21 Cixous, Hélène 16–7, 21–3, 25–7, 119–21, 125, 127 n.4, 138 n.2 Clark, Timothy 14, 127–9 n.4 Cohen, Josh 133 n.7 confession 122–3

consignation 9, 12, 24, 26, 45, 132 n.26 Critchley, Simon 30, 129 n.1 cultural studies 18–9, 102–4, 106, 108, 111–18, 137 n.11 Dasein 54 death drive 23–4, 26, 45, 132 n.26 DeCaroli, Steven 133 n.7 deconstruction 16–7, 29, 39, 48–51, 54, 61, 64–7, 69, 83, 87, 102, 113, 117, 129 n.4, 137 n.11 demos 3–4, 6 Derrida, Jacques (works) ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, 119, 124–6, 138 n.1 A Taste for the Secret 127 n.4 Archive Fever 5, 8, 12–13, 15, 23, 26, 43–6 ‘Autoimmunity’ 7–10, 15 ‘Before the Law’ 50, 64, 66–68, 134 n.15 ‘Countersignature’ 130 n.6 Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius 21, 25–6 Glas 16, 23, 27–8, 37–44 ‘Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism’ 137 n. 11 ‘Mochlos’ 90, 100 Of Grammatology 41 Paper Machine 5, 16, 26 Parages 54 Politics of Friendship 48, 50, 54, 57, 60, 68 Right to Philosophy 2 18, 80–4 Specters of Marx 13 ‘The Age of Hegel’ 18, 91, 94 ‘The Book to Come’ 20–1, 46–7 The Post Card/‘Envois’ 24, 42 ‘The Principle of Reason’ 22, 100

144

Index

Derrida, Jacques (works)(Cont’d) The Truth in Painting 68, 113 ‘The University Without Condition’ 138 n.3 Writing and Difference 131 n.24 Descartes, René 18, 76–84, 134 n.6, 134 n.7, 134 n.9 dream 11, 16, 18–9, 21–3, 25, 27, 31–2, 35, 43–4, 78, 106–14, 116–18, 119, 125 empirical, empiricism 6, 8, 47, 94, 105 Entstellung 19, 35, 106–7, 109–10 event 1–19, 44, 78, 81, 84, 103, 121–6, 128–9 n.4 evidence 9, 21 Fliess, Wilhelm 33 forgiveness 123 Foucault, Michel 48, 62 Freud, Sigmund 12–13, 23, 32–6, 43–5, 68, 106–10, 130 n.7, 130 n.8, 130 n.17, 131 n.26, 132 n.26, 137 n.5 friendship 17, 48–61, 66–9, 121, 126, 133 n.1 Gadamer, Hans–Georg 14 Gaston, Sean 128 n.4, 133 n.10 Genet, Jean 16, 27–8, 30–3, 37–43, 130 n.3, 130 n.6, 131 n.19 gift 22, 123–5 globalization 7, 19, 86, 103, 114–18, 137 n.11 Gontarski, S.E. 71, 73, 134 n.2 GREPH 94–6 Habermas, Jürgen 89 Hall, Gary 115, 137 n.2, 137 n.8, 137 n.11 Harvey, Robert 33, 38–40, 130 n.6, 130 n.16 Hegel, G.W.F. 18, 27, 91–7, 136 n.5, 136 n.6 Heidegger, Martin 14, 42, 48–9, 54, 58, 100, 133 n.10, 136 n.9 history 4, 10, 12–15, 17, 18, 43–4, 62, 70, 74, 80–2, 84–5, 88–9, 93,

102–6, 128 n.4, 132 n.28, 134 n.1, 136 n.6 Horkheimer, Max 104–5, 107, 137 n.2 hospitality 6, 67, 124, 128 n.4 impossible 3–5, 7, 17, 19, 32, 34, 47, 58–9, 77, 84, 112, 117, 121, 123–6 impression 1, 4–13, 15–16, 18, 36, 45, 103, 108, 124–6, 132 n.26 institution(s) 3, 9–10, 12, 15–16, 21–3, 28, 81, 85–6, 88–90, 93–4, 98–100, 112, 117, 121, 128 n.4, 135 n.1, 136 n.5 insults 53, 58–9 invention 3, 9, 13, 17, 18, 46, 123, 128 n.4 Kafka, Franz 49–50, 61, 64–9, 134 n.15 Kamuf, Peggy 127 n.4, 136 n.5 Kant, Immanuel 90, 113, 136 n.5 Lacan, Jacques 104, 108 language politics 18, 80–4 law 3, 6, 9, 11, 16, 21–2, 28, 48–50, 61–9, 80, 82, 87, 96 Leavey, John 37, 40–41, 130 n.14 Leitch, Vincent B. 128 n.4 library 16, 20–5, 27–8, 56–7, 67 Malabou, Catherine 128 n.4 McQuillan, Martin 22–3, 25–6 Miller, J. Hillis 14, 102–4, 129 n.5, 136 n.1 Nancy, Jean–Luc 17, 51–2, 54–9, 66, 132–133 n.1 Nava, Mica 105, 137 n.3 Nietzsche, Friedrich 54, 58–9, 69 Noys, Benjamin 64, 133 n.13 obsession 16, 30, 32–8, 42–3, 45–6, 130 n.13, 131 n.19, 131 n.25 paper 5–6, 20–1, 23–4, 26, 45–7, 97, 119, 132 n.28 Paris, Matthew 24

Index Pascal, Blaise 36 Pilling, John 76–7, 80, 134 n.5 Plato 24–25 Poe, Edgar Allan 118 proof 9, 21, 26 psychoanalysis 9–11, 13, 16, 23–4, 33–6, 43–6, 130 n. 13 R.A.E. (Research Assessment Exercise) 18, 86–8, 91, 94–5, 97, 99, 100–1, 135 n.1 Rajan, Tilottama 131 n.20, 131 n.21 Readings, Bill 18, 85, 88–90, 112, 114, 135 n.3, 136 n.5 Regard, Frédéric 127 n.4 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 8 Royle, Nicholas 125, 137 n.11 Saint Augustine 122–123 Sartre, Jean-Paul 16, 27, 30–3, 37–40, 42–3, 130 n.2, 130 n.17, 131 n.19 Scholem, Gershom 17, 49–50, 61–2, 67–8 secret 3, 9, 17, 21–3, 25, 27, 31, 39, 56, 125 seduction 33, 38–43, 45–6, 131 n.19 September 11/‘9/11’ 1–5, 115, 120, 137 n.11

145

singularity 1, 3–5, 11, 13–16, 28, 37, 104–5, 122, 124, 127–9 n.4 Smock, Ann 31, 130 n.4 Socrates 24–5 sovereignty 6, 23, 48, 50, 60, 62–5, 126 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 137 n.11 state 2–3, 6, 16, 20–2, 24, 50, 62–4, 80–2, 84–5, 89, 93–4 Stiegler, Bernard 21 teaching 18, 81, 84, 95, 99 technology 2, 5, 10, 16–18, 26, 43–7, 81, 85, 93–5, 112, 122, 131–2 n.26, 135 n.1 testimony 21 Thurschwell, Adam 51, 133 n.7 unconditional 3, 6–8, 16, 18, 22–3, 27, 128 n.4 Weber, Samuel 19, 33, 35, 106–7, 109–11, 113, 115–17, 130 n.9, 130 n.12, 133 n.1, 136 n.5, 137 n.4, 137 n.7, 137 n.8, 137 n.10, 137 n.11 Woolf, Virginia 136 n.8 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 13