The Derrida Wordbook 9780748680375

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The Derrida Wordbook

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For Jackie Jones For everything over the years beyond words and beyond thanks

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THE DERRIDA WORDBOOK 2 Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys

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© Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2275 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8037 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8038 2 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 8039 9 (Amazon ebook) The right of Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Foreword and acknowledgements Abbreviations Words, Words, Words

vii xi 1

Apartheid Architectonics Arrivant Aporia Believing Bêtise Betrayal Book Call Circle Circumcision Conjuration Corpus Death Deconstruction Democracy Différance Doors Exhaustion Eyes Face Family Fold Forgiveness Frame Future (l’avenir) Genesis Geshclecht Ghost Haunting Spectrality Hand Hospitality Hymen I Identity Iterability Jealousy Joyce Kafka Kho¯ra Knots Knowledge Literature Love Matter/Materialism Messianicity Metaphor Mimesis Name Origin Performativity Photography Reason Representation Story Subjectile Telephone Trait Unconditionality Undecidability Violence Virus Visitation Voice Writing Xenos Yes Wordhoard

359

Appendices I Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida II Contents pages

421 444

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Foreword

Foreword: a word before all the other words, not the same not quite, occupying this space, that which comes before, and which is also affirmative; it is for words, rather than against or contrary to words. It comes in advance, the avant-word, a word or two, or more, opening onto every other word. But wait a minute. At any moment in any given reading, in every encounter with an inscription, which, legible and iterable, demands a response, and promises, or appears to promise some communication, delivery, posting, a sign, even if what the sign signifies, beyond the signification of all signs, may not be clear: is this not every word, wherever we are, wherever one finds oneself, immersed in, surrounded by, words, words, words, a wordhoard, gathered together, a verbal ‘treasure’, or archive at the very least, to be unlocked, as the Old English phrase, wordhoard or wordhord, should remind us – it reminds some while to others it remains locked, exclusive – by those who shared it and were defined by it, or by a sage whose purpose it was to unlock the wordhoard. So every word a ‘foreword’, regardless of where we find ourselves, where you start; for, in order to make sense, to give sense, to receive sense and so open communication in response to the trace, you must treat every word as on the one hand suspensive, interruptive, giving you pause, requiring that you consider, reflect, unpack; while on the other, that which inaugurates, coming as it does before what you have yet to read, and also having a certain spatial as well as temporal relationship to what has been read, inasmuch as can modify, transform or translate what you have already glossed. Every word comes before, even when it arrives after, every other word. Every word signs a place, in order to give place to every other word, while always remaining, in that place, in that reading and in every reading to come, singular in its operation. But . . . a word book, word-book, a wordbook. Is such a thing, after Derrida, possible? Is not the word that which escapes and exceeds the book, going by the book? Does not the one oppose the other? Does not the idea of the book favour implicitly, in its vii

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The Derrida Wordbook histories, institutions, juridical discourses and practices, the ontologic of calculability, reason, order, meaning and all those other non-synonymous modes of presentation that aim at definition and limitation, including naming, determining, representing, and so on? And, this being the case, is not the idea of the word (always already more than one idea, generative as much as it is genealogical), inimical to that of the book? Wordbook sounds to me as if, and here there is a hypothesis on the impossible, the unforeseeable – who knows what will come? – I repeat, as if (to invoke a fiction of an unforeseeable future, to come, in the present moment, as if this present moment were, in fact, the moment when that future will have arrived) there were some software program, a program that undoes all programming, that exceeds its programming, as if, again, words exceeded the pages of a book on which they were printed – which, of course, they do, every time some one reads. Thus wordbook © in which the program remains subject to that which is at its very core, as though it were host to a parasite, a virus in the program. Or, imagine, perhaps, Derridawordbook, this one word, as the name of the program, but a program which disables, suspends the running or anticipation of any program, an antiprogram, in the form of some subversive delivery; a Trojan horse perhaps, viral in its ability to enter into the system of words, exposing their limits, paradoxes, illogicalities, those places where there is in operation, an undecidable suspension of value, meaning, forcing the reader to choose in the absence of any but the most basic semantic framework or content. This is the contract, the agreement and, therefore, thereafter, the response and the responsibility by which I am bound, to which and by which I bind myself: one word for one letter, and more than one word, one word, or another, from one text, one word only from each publication, book or essay, the word found in the midst of a passage, of a discussion, reflection or reading that comes to pass, and which, in staging that word is removed violently from its surroundings. But the word, the one word for the one letter, though singular, does not stand alone; a text is irreducible to the book, the essay, the chapter. Touching on, and being touched, perhaps translated by, other words, the word traces a matrix, perhaps an archive, mapping, as it were, without coordinates or boundaries, everything + X, which is given one to read, which arrives and causes reading to encounter a limit, and which returns, so as to cause the possibility of an impossible reading to be taken up. viii

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Foreword Beyond the usual feints, qualifications and caveats attendant upon and designed to efface any statement concerning Jacques Derrida – intended to distance writing from thetic statement, acknowledging the impossibility and at the same time the necessity of speaking upon a writer who makes evident that same problematic – the concept of a Wordbook demands a very particular negotiation. In its description as in its physical form, the Wordbook presents its own challenge. It withdraws certitudes even as it appears to offer them, which is not to say that it offers no substance but rather that the definitive architectonics implied by the term ‘book’ and extending to the content of its pages is here given as its own deconstruction. As the trace of a reading, its form vanishes into the difference of writing. The word book can take multiple forms; from the papyrus and codex, the scroll and manuscript, through the Book of the Word, to the text and the e-reader, the hypertext and the app. These latter would seem to be already more formally indicative of a certain type of reading, and to perhaps presume a distinction between work and text from the perspective of the reader; the form, announced in the term, predicates the reading: it emphasises the aleatory, multiple, undecidable and non-finite. Though the former appear to embody the book to which Derrida would refer when pronouncing its end – or, rather, its indefinite closure – in Of Grammatology, as he also showed in that text, they are disrupted as that totality from within. This Wordbook, a portmanteau text bringing many words together in plural combinations, gestures to that disruption in its title. A book of writing, it issues a rejoinder to that term as it has come to be understood. As a book that is not a book in the classical sense, it foregrounds the necessity of deconstructive reading, both as it is held within these pages while exceeding their limit in relation to the temptation, such as it is, of a presupposed reading founded in a theoretical position by virtue of an already predicated term. This book of words can be read backwards and forwards, from beginning to end in a recirculation without arche or telos, from a middle that destabilises the centre or from any other point in the text. It can be read from cover to cover, alphabetically or at random, dipped into or navigated via an arbitrary structure – all the D words first, perhaps – that will serve to emphasise the gaps in that structuration and therefore its opening; any reading will upset the assumption of a totalising form. It might be thought in terms of a hypertext, where that form is simply the cybernetic version of this already textual operation, impelled by the call to the reader and allowing ix

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The Derrida Wordbook a singular reading to form, dissolve and reform as other readings. The book is altered already by those other readings implied within it; each reading remains provisional, offered singularly and with the understanding that another will arrive. The words in this book span the Derridean oeuvre, ranging from the first writings to the seminars now being published. They create a network, though not a system, that brings those writings into contact; rather than offering a viewpoint or precis, they allow the reader to make connections and to read Derrida singularly; not only to read his work as singular, or from a singular perspective, but to read it again and again, each time in different ways, through the prism of another word or an altered emphasis. In the connections between words that are forged and broken, reforged and conjoined with others, juxtaposed or brought together in order to create a position or make explicit a heretofore latent affiliation, another reading emerges of, and from, Derrida. In this way, the Wordbook shows that there can be neither a definitive reading nor a total and totalising overview, either of Derrida or in principle. And this is where you find yourself, before words, being for words, the wordbook already running in the background. *

*

*

We would like to thank the following who deserve more than we can say, and who have, unstintingly given of their time, had their lives interrupted by the disordered tower of Babel you have in your hands, and who have made this work, even if they had no idea they had done so. Thank you: Catherine Bernard, John Brannigan, Sudipto Chatterjee, Brenda Cortes, William and Fiona Dick, Thomas Docherty, Ortwin de Graef, Ruth Heholt, Paul Jenner, Dragan Kujundzic, John Leavey, Karen Leeder, Robbie McLaughlan, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Arianna Maiorani, J. Hillis Miller, Lawrence Phillips, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Russell Richards, Ruth Robbins, Michael Syrotinski, Ken Womack, Simon Morgan Wortham.

x

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Abbreviations

A AEL AF AFFI AL AR ATTIA BS C CLW CTJD D DC DE DHR DN DRBB DRWP EHOG EIRP EO ET EU FWT G GII

Aporias Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression Acts of Literature Acts of Religion The Animal That Therefore I Am The Beast and the Sovereign Cinders Chora L Works Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida Dissemination Deconstruction and Criticism Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars The Derrida-Habermas Reader Deconstruction in a Nutshell A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue Glas ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis. Rptd with minor changes to the translation in Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume II, eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. xi

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The Derrida Wordbook GD/LS GGGG GT HC IMDD JD LI LLF MB MO MP MPM N OCF OG OH OHRTE ON OS OT P Pa PC PF PGHP PI PIO I PIO II PM R RI RP RTER S/S SA/DVA

The Gift of Death, 2nd edn, and Literature in Secret Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money H. C. for Life, that is to say . . . The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony Jacques Derrida Limited Inc. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins Monolingualism of the Other: Or, the Prosthesis of Origin Margins of Philosophy Memoires for Paul de Man Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness Of Grammatology Of Hospitality The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe On the Name Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy Positions Parages The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond Politics of Friendship The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy Points . . .: Interviews, 1974–1994 Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume I Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume II Paper Machine Religion Rights of Inspection Resistances of Psychoanalysis Rogues: Two Essays on Reason Signéponge/Signsponge ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Jacques Derrida, Peter Brunette and David Wills, xii

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Abbreviations

SAAA SM SNS SP SQ TP TS V WA WAP WD WM

trans. Laurie Volpe, in Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, eds Peter Brunette and David Wills The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan The Truth in Painting A Taste for the Secret Veils Without Alibi Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy Writing and Difference The Work of Mourning

Selected contributions in other volumes and edited collections Except for those titles where Derrida offers several contributions, as in transcribed oral responses to others’ papers or lectures – as for example in Arguing with Derrida – the abbreviations below indicate both the title of Derrida’s contribution in Roman script and the title of the volume in which it appears in italics. In a couple of cases, there are both major contributions by Derrida and subsequent responses. In the case of such texts (Augustine and Postmodernism, for instance), these are marked in the list below with an asterisk. If a collection has several contributions by Derrida (as in Deconstruction: A Reader), abbreviations for each essay are given. The titles of Derrida’s essays or commentaries are given after the volume title. . . . ap/VISD

*A/SIR *AD *Af/Af

*AT/TNOF

Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, eds Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. ‘. . . and pomegranates’, trans. Samuel Weber (326–46) Anyone, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson. ‘Summary of Impromptu Remarks 58 minutes, 41 seconds’ (39–45) Arguing with Derrida, ed. Simon Glendinning Afterwords, ed. Nicholas Royle. ‘Afterw.rds or, at least, less than a letter about a letter less’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (197–203) Annotation and Its Texts, ed. Stephan A. Barney. xiii

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The Derrida Wordbook ‘This Is Not an Oral Footnote’, trans. Stephen A. Barney and Michael Hanley (192–206) AtD/AiID Applying: to Derrida, eds Julian Wolfreys, John Brannigan and Ruth Robbins. ‘ “As if I were dead”: an interview’ (212–26) BM/PTCC Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Mark Poster. ‘Back from Moscow, in the USSR’, trans. Mary Quaintaire (197–235) *CC/AP Augustine and Postmodernism: Confession and Circumfession, eds John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. ‘Composing “Circumfession” ’ (19–28) *CFP/JD Conversations with French Philosophers, Florian Rötzer. ‘Jacques Derrida’, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (43–57) *CiS/I Criticism in Society, ed. Imre Salusinsky. ‘Interview’ (8–26) CV/PdF La Case Vide: La Villettte 1985, Bernard Tschumi. ‘Point de Folie – Maintenant L’Architecture’, trans. Kate Linker (4–20) *D&D/TQ Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, eds Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. ‘Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (52–4) *DCP/DO Debates in Continental Philosophy, Richard Kearney. ‘Deconstruction and the Other’ (139–56) *DCP/TRNP Debates in Continental Philosophy, Richard Kearney. ‘Terror, Religion, and the New Politics’ (3–15) DIIA/TOJ Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp. ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, trans. Peggy Kamuf (14–40) *DP/RDP Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe. ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, trans. Simon Critchley (77–88) DSEF/DoD Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. ‘Derrida on Derrida: Q & A with Jacques Derrida’, Jacques Derrida, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (110–17) DSEF/I Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. ‘Interview’, with Kristine McKenna (118–27) DSEF/S Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. ‘Derrida: Screenplay’ (51–109) xiv

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Abbreviations *DUG/EC

*FH/P

FT/LAT FTIA/DI

Gy/PHtwp HCR/F I:D/TMPP

IS/LAN

*J/AO

J/PR

L/CM LD/CIPSE

LD/PSI

Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle. ‘Et Cetera . . . (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.)’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (282–304) The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, Catherine Malabou. ‘Preface: A time for farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou’, trans. Joseph D. Cohen (vii–xlvii) Life. After. Theory, eds Michael Payne and John Schad. ‘Following Theory’ (1–51) French Theory in America, eds Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen. ‘Deconstructions: the Im-Possible’, trans. Michael Taormina (13–32) Glassary, John P. Leavey, Jr. ‘Proverb: “He that would pun . . .” ’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr (1720) The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers. ‘Foreword’ (vii–xiii) ‘Introduction: Desistance’, in Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, eds Christopher Fynsk and Linda M. Brooks (1–42) Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer–Derrida Encounter, eds Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. ‘Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions’, trans. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (58–71); also published in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels (1–19). Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, eds Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. ‘Abraham, the Other’, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (1–35) Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come, eds Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundzic. ‘Justices’ (228–61) Logomachia, ed. Richard Rand. ‘Canons and Metonymies’ (195–219) The Late Derrida, eds W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson. ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, trans. Gila Walker (223–44) The Late Derrida, eds W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson. ‘The Pocket-Sized Interview’, trans. Tupac Cruz (171–205) xv

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The Derrida Wordbook LW/SQR M&S/GD

MF/WB OGD/GGP

P/OCP

PAT/T PI/BP

PQT/COO

PSJ/TWJ

PTT/ARSS

QJ/TG R/HN RH/HEP

RM/AANJ

RTP/NAAT

‘Some Questions and Responses’, The Linguistics of Writing, eds Derek Attridge et al. (252–64). Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker. ‘Marx & sons’, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (213–69) Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. ‘Women in the Beehive’ (115–28) God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. ‘On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Moderated by Richard Kearney’ (54–78) Postmodernism: ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignanesi. ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, with Geoffrey Bennington (209–28) The Path of Archaic Thinking, ed. Kenneth Maly. ‘Tense’ (49–74). Passion for the Impossible: John D Caputo in Focus, ed. Mark Dooley. ‘The becoming possible of the impossible: an interview’ (21–33) Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ‘Coming into One’s Own’, trans. James Hulbert, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (114–48). Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. ‘Two Words for Joyce’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (145–60) Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Giovanna Borradori. ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (85–136) ‘A Testimony Given’, Questioning Judaism: Interviews, Elisabeth Weber (39–58). Recumbents: Poems, Michel Deguy, trans. Wilson Baldridge. ‘How to Name’ (191–222) Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis. ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr (163–220) Religion and Media, eds Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. ‘ “Above All, No Journalists!” ’, trans. Samuel Weber (56–93) Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by xvi

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Abbreviations

SST/ST

SW/I T/D:R TFUI/QG

TSM/DDP

WMMW/F

Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves. ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr (117–72) The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll. ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, trans. Anne Tomiche (63–94) Selected Writings, Sarah Kofman. ‘Introduction’, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (1–34) ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle. Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (496–526). Questioning God, eds John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley and Michael J. Scanlon. ‘To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible’, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (21–51) Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabrielle Schwab. ‘The Transcendental “Stupidity” (“Bêtise”) of Man and the Becoming-Animal According to Deleuze’, ed. Erin Ferris (35–60) The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson (xi–il)

Selected contributions to journals The following articles are, as far as we have been able to find, not reprinted in any collection or monograph published in Derrida’s name. There may also be omissions and one small difficulty is that, on occasions, when articles have been re-translated, either partially or in toto, the title of the essay has changed. However, the rule has been that we have taken the later, often book-publication, to be the final, if not the authoritative version, as these frequently represent versions of essays, lectures and so forth, which Derrida has expanded and revised, the translation available in book form reflecting these changes. AE

‘All Ears: Nietzsche’s Otobiography’, trans. Avital Ronell. Yale French Studies, 63 (1982): 245–50 xvii

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The Derrida Wordbook API BB

BSDF

BW C *[DF]

DiA EH EM

*FWL

ICCN IFPL LFP LJPL LO

LP MBM

‘Artists, Philosophers, and Institutions’. Rampike, 3: 3 – 4: 1 (1984): 34–6 ‘But, beyond . . . (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)’, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry, 13: 1 (Autumn 1986): 155–70 ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry, 15: 4 (Summer 1989): 813–73 ‘Becoming Woman’. Semiotext(e), 3: 1 (1978): 128–37 ‘Countersignature’, trans. Mairéad Hanrahan. Paragraph, 27: 02 (2004): 7–42 [Discussion on Fries], James G. Hughes, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Fries, Jean Bollack, Michel Deguy, Martine Broda, Henri Meschonnic, Bernhard Böchenstein, Wolfgang Fietkau and Hans Hagen Hildebrandt. boundary 2, 11: 3 (Spring, 1983): 155–67 ‘Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. Critical Exchange, 17 (Winter 1985): 1–33 ‘A Europe of Hope’. Epoche 10: 2 (2006): 407–12 ‘Excuse me, but I never exactly said so’. Interview with Paul Brennan, On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia), 1 (1983): 42 ‘From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’, interview with Aliette Armel, trans. Ashley Thompson. New Literary History, 37 (2006): 1–13 ‘In conversation with Christopher Norris’. Architectural Design, 58: 1–2 (1989): 6–11 ‘An Idea of Flaubert: “Plato’s Letter” ’, trans. Peter Starr. MLN, 99: 4 (September 1984): 748–68 ‘Let us not Forget – Psychoanalysis’. Oxford Literary Review, 12 (1990): 3–7 ‘Letter to John P. Leavey, Jr.’ Semeia, 23 (1982): 61–2 ‘The Language of the Other: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman’, trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Genre, 37: 2 (2004): 319–29 ‘Literature and Politics’. New Political Science, 15 (Summer 1986): 5 ‘Memories of a Blind Man’. Art International, 14 (Spring/Summer 1991): 82–7 xviii

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Abbreviations OR

ORC

*ORH

OTNH

P PH PM

PT

RDL S:OR

T(TBS) WP WRT

WWC

‘ “On Responsibility”, an interview with Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Dronsfield, Nick Midgley & Adrian Wilding, May 1993’. PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997): 19–36 ‘On Rhetoric and Composition (Conversation with Gary Olson)’. Journal of Advanced Composition, 10: 1 (1990): 1–21 ‘On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium’. Research in Phenomenology, 17 (1988): 171–88 ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Oxford Literary Review, 14: 1–2 (1992): 3–25 ‘Play: The First Name’, trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Genre, 37: 2 (2004): 331–40 ‘The Principle of Hospitality’. Parallax, 34 (2005): 6–9 ‘ “Perhaps or Maybe”, Jacques Derrida in Conversation with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ICA, 8 March 1996’. PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997): 1–18 ‘Poetry of twilight in Collins’ “Ode to Evening” and in Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. By Jacques Derrida.’ Oxford Literary Review, 25 (2003): 5–37 ‘Response to Daniel Libeskind’. Research in Phenomenology, XXII (1992): 88 ‘Sending: On Representation’, trans. Peter and Mary Ann Caws. Social Research, 49:2 (Summer 1982): 294–326 ‘Title (To Be Specified)’, trans. Tom Conley. SubStance, 10: 2 (1981): 5–22 ‘Writing Proofs’. PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997): 37–50 ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’, trans. Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry, 27:2 (Winter 2001): 174–200 ‘Who or What is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation’, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Discourse, 30: 1 & 2 (Winter and Spring 2008): 22–53 xix

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A Apartheid (PIO I 378–9) That which grows like an animal, from the inside can always be less than benign, monstrous in fact, destructive and murderous. It is therefore necessary to maintain an utmost vigilance, keeping a watch over whatever appears as a symptom, or which might otherwise let itself become contaminated through the contagious hospitality of opening oneself to the other. One must guard against a sinister incorporation. If there is a system that is an organic form, there is also that other system, of partition, which functions through separation. If institution is the belated expression of a rhapsodically received Idea, there is also that institution that declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes. A system of marks, it designs places in order to assign forced residence or to close off borders. Apartheid remains a pernicious and virulent term, all the more so because of its remaining apart itself, a term without direct translation, but which nevertheless speaks venomously of its power and in its segregational force. At root it names not simply the ‘fact’ or exercise of a system of separation; it also signals a condition of being for those who are its subjects, it names the abjection of the one who is subjected to being-apart. Of course to some it might appear singularly inappropriate to focus on language. To concentrate on the materiality of language and what resides within the structure of a word, when the matter at stake is the experience of human beings under apartheid, could be construed as frivolous at best, irresponsible at worst. And yet . . . And yet the materiality of language, its power to issue injunctions, to name, to limit, prescribe or proscribe is intimately and often violently, inextricably, part of the weft of the political and historical realities by which a person or group of people causes another or others to suffer, if not die. After all, there is no racism without language. Derrida’s focus on language is thus not a retreat into the formal or the ‘merely rhetorical’, as if rhetoric were so easily separable from the political. That apartheid remains as a name for the 3

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Apartheid untranslatable, that it is untranslatable, signals the seriousness with which language must be taken. Derrida stresses in effect the performative dimension of the term, its performativity residing perhaps in its power to determine, and so limit the ontological, as well as the ideological termination of its subject, of the one who is subjected to, abjected by, this word. Apartheid at once names with the glaring harshness of abstract essence while, simultaneously, wielding in its nominations the most specific and material effects. Apartheid names, in naming segregation, an authorised gesture and act on the part of racist logic, implicit in which, through the use of language, is an immunity to critique following from the essentialising force of the untranslatable word. At the same time, this word carries with it and its power to separate and make distinct one group of humans from another the powerful and wholly unjustifiable perception that the group being displaced and removed or corralled is somehow less fully human, if not animal or bestial. To think in such a manner demonstrates something else which remains untranslatable into English: in treating the other as a beast, and exercising this power embedded in the authority of language as a SOVEREIGN force over another (sovereign because affirmative of its essential self-evidence in its linguistic ‘purity’), the thinker reveals about him- or herself that it is not the other who is bestial, but that the thought which would be sovereign and affirm its law makes clear a lack of judgement; in this there is no faculty of judging in any fair sense; or rather, we might say, invoking another untranslatable term, apartheid signals a certain quality of judgment there where judgment . . . implies perception and knowledge; which precipitation to judge, [an] excess of will over understanding, . . . proper to man is called in untranslatable French Bêtise. Language in the service of racism is therefore inescapable, and must be faced, for no act of racism can find its starting point, by which it orients one group while disorienting another in the effected separation and segregation of a self/other dichotomy, without the word, without a word, or words which act as if they were the word, the law. If there is no racism without language then, so there is no politics without ontology. One must always think the philosophical question alongside the ideological one, the philosophical within, harboured by, the political and ideological or hegemonic. That this is inescapable is signalled in Derrida’s reading of what appears not only essentialist but naturalist and creationist (hence performative: language creates even as it distorts or destroys), whereby the perver4

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Architectonics sion that is language, the perversion that institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes, through marking and designation, as surely as if one had tattooed on the arm of another a number, in the making of forced residence. And here is perhaps the final word regarding the relation between language, ontology and the political. In the act of naming and the per(ver)(de)formative linguistic enactment, that which nominates and so defines through the guise of a recognition of essentialism that is, in fact, the branding of the other in essentialist, naturalist and creationist terms (creating the very identity that one needs in order to enforce one’s law), so one imposes an onto-political identity, a subjectivity the home of which is also determined. Home without home, home in the expulsion from home, from a homeland, the division of the homeland, and the making unhomely of the other, in the sentence of apartheid, as the direct consequence of the other’s hospitality. Thus we might reflect on the perversion of what takes place when the word names and so founds an institution in which the role of architectonics is paramount in the fulfilment of an idea, an idea as inimical to the one Idea (in the Kantian sense) as it is possible to be.

Architectonics (EU 57–8) Kant tells us that architectonics is the art of systems. Derrida paraphrases here the first sentence of the penultimate chapter of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Chapter III (‘The Architectonic of Pure Reason’), Part II (‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’).1 There is, for Kant, a necessary order of knowledge, arranged architectonically, and it is this order which converts vulgar knowledge into science. Science in Kantian terms refers not to what we understand today as science, but as knowledge in an ordered and systematically arranged form, as a ‘systematic unity’ (691) constituted through the rational arrangement of ‘manifold cognitions’ in harmony and relation to one another, in order that such systematic and hierarchical rigour may serve to ‘support and advance its essential ends’ (691). In such ordering, Kant perceives an organic relation governed by ‘one idea’ (691) determined, or which, perhaps more precisely, serves to 1

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and eds Paul Guyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 691–702, at p. 691. All further page references to Kant are given parenthetically following citation in the body of the text.

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Architectonics determine the organic and systematic unity a priori. Indeed, Kant observes at the outset of the chapter in question, ‘there can be no contingent addition or undetermined magnitude of perfection that does not have its boundaries determined a priori. The whole is therefore articulated . . . and not heaped together’ (691). From this, it can be reasoned that Kant sees the architectonic as a projection of the human mind in its ability to present thought through rational and systematic manifestation. Reason, what Derrida calls in his reading of Kant the essential function of reason, is the gathering of data, the organising of information, of concepts and ideas, and to enable these under the regime and the legislation of reason qua sovereign power in regulated and harmonised fulfilment of an idea in (Derrida stresses twice) the Kantian sense, which, in its iteration, is modified as in the sense of a certain inaccessibility. Thus architectonics names the process by which what Kant calls ‘rhapsody’, for the philosopher, the expressive, possibly ecstatic, but certainly, non-rational perception of ideas and feelings, comes to be translated into regulated forms of knowledge and brought together in unified and organic relationship made manifest in the institutional and practical structures of the world. All institutions, democracy, government, philosophical thought, State power, the idea of the university; all are related inasmuch as they are systematic manifestations and expressions of the rational order of the Kantian Idea, which is to say, following Derrida, the one Idea which remains absolutely other, and therefore inaccessible, except inasmuch as we may suggest it is human intellect, thought and reason, as the gift of God, the gift of the other. Rationality, manifested in the world as an architecture structured by an architectonic, within which everything is accounted for in its possibility and its growth, is, by this analogy, in interior projection of this a priori architectonic, which, in turn, in its coming to mind, in its being presentable to the world as order, system, and so forth, allows us to reflect on that which remains before and beyond as the a priori condition of thought always already awaiting its manifestation, its being made to appear in architectonic fulfilment. There is, it has to be said, a certain paradox, if not an aporia (apparently), in Kantian thought, which has to do with temporality and relation. Kant observes that ‘[i]t is too bad that it is first possible for us to glimpse the idea in a clearer light and to outline the whole architectonically, in accordance with the ends of reason, only after we have long collected relevant cognitions haphazardly like building materials and work through them technically with only a hint from 6

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Architectonics an idea lying hidden within us’ (692). We only come to realise and perceive the architectonic order belatedly, even though the Idea itself remains uncontested as a priori given. Moreover, while there remains the gap between what is given and what is realised, there is also in the Kantian analogy the presentation of two different types of form: organic and inorganic, and it is the former, which serves to make available the fact that an idea is also . . . of an organic whole [which] explains that this organic whole, in this case knowledge itself, grows like an animal, from the inside and not by the mechanical addition of parts. For example, the whole of a system ‘grow[s] internally . . . but not externally . . ., like an animal body, whose growth does not add a limb but rather makes each limb stronger and fitter for its end without any alteration of proportion’. Systems, Kant continues, ‘seem to have been formed, like maggots [Gewürme – worms] . . . from the mere confluence of aggregated concepts, garbled at first but complete in time, although they all had their schema, as the original seed in the mere self-development of reason’ (692). What gives to us the perception of architectonic order, and from that to the one, otherwise inaccessible Idea, is the apprehension of the inscription of the schema ab initio or ab ovo. Kant moves between incommensurate forms, the inanimate and manufactured (building materials) or those growing in nature capable of technological and mechanical manipulation, to organic forms. Yet, it can be argued – can it not? – if knowledge grows like an animal, or some organism, from the inside and not by the mechanical addition of parts, then this would suggest that any system, in being organised around, and according to the rational ordering of the very same vulgar knowledge, has within itself the conditions for its own undoing despite Kant’s assumption of that which grows internally being of a piece with the system it encourages. Kant’s admission that belated knowledge and sight, or hindsight, of system comes into view only following the possibly haphazard collection of cognitions, and which admits in its temporal account the conditions for such an undoing, if not the very aspect of architectonic form which might be named its deconstruction, if there is such a thing. This is not a flaw in the construction, so much as it is in its organic inevitability. Not so much a ghost in the machine as a parasite in the host, or to think machine and organism together within an understanding of architectonics not available to Kant, there is possible, always already, a virus, however dormant, inhabiting the host, as that which while dormant can always and at any time overrun the system’s functioning. There 7

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Arrivant • aporia is that in any system which is and remains other, even though taken into the structure and body of a system. There is always the possibility of that which in being other than of any ‘proper’ architectonic form, makes the architectonic possible, and yet which deforms form, exceeds the formal, the purely systematic, the reasonable or rational. The university as ‘exemplary’ form is constructed therefore on the principal of its own organic, and therefore irrational, extension, deformation or, again to risk this word, deconstruction. There is also in the Kantian argument and the analogies another aspect for which he does not account. The practical or political role of architectonics, let us call it its ideologico-pragmatic manifestation, resides in the fact of its capability for obfuscation, occlusion, mystification; the power of architectonic form given externalised and ‘practical’ form in any society resides in certain practices of censorship in fact, disguised as modes of governance, quality assurance, funding based measurement, and so on. Understood another way, there is no one architectonic. Instead, system plays against system, supposedly in the name of greater goals such as ‘the good of the nation’, ‘democratic equality’ and so forth. The politico-practical ‘end’ of the manifestation of the one Idea is subject always to ‘a strategic calculation’,2 whereby a ‘censoring structure of reason’ (EU 63) makes claims within itself of what is ‘reasonable’, what is ‘rational’ or what is ‘pragmatic’, what is ‘common sense’. As practice, as implicit discourse governing, rationalising and ordering all other discourses within and as the whole and the idea, on the principle of the Idea, architectonics promotes, maintains and controls the ‘inevitability’, the apparent unquestionability of the form it gives to the singular expression of power through the architecture of a given institution, within its own relations and as those relations serve to produce the ontology of the institution in relation to those other ‘external’ forms of power on which it relies, and which it mediates. The art of systems is also, in its regulative and regulated relationships, an architectonics of the ideological and the political.

Arrivant • aporia (A 32–4) What takes place when, for example, one seeks a starting point? To begin is also to depart, so what is left behind, and how does the begin2

Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (63). All further citations are given parenthetically.

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Arrivant • aporia ning come about? Is one immobilised, as it were, before a threshold? And does one face or encounter, does one suffer an aporia, when one begins or attempts to begin writing? Rhetorically, an aporia is the expression, real or otherwise, of a certain doubt, such as ‘how might I begin to write about my subject’? Behind this lies another question, if not several, for instance: ‘What is my subject’? ‘How do I define my subject’? Rhetorically, the aporia is that figure of speech in which, through which, I express a difficulty or recognise in this difficulty an insuperable problem, whether insuperability is momentary or permanent. Philosophically, an aporia is also a difficulty, perhaps, though not exclusively, an enigma, certainly an impasse that announces – announcing itself as – a limit; as, for example, in, or to thought, to the working through of a problem or difficulty, in the quest for an answer or a truth. Recognising that one has encountered, one is encountering, or experiencing – again, suffering – this aporia, one is put in the position of asking the question, what takes place, or what comes to pass with the aporia? What may appear feigned or fake, what might seem ‘merely rhetorical’ – supposing for the moment that there were ever just an expression that is ‘merely rhetorical’ (or conversely that one ever is outside or beyond a mode of reflection or articulation defined as ‘rhetorical’, a term at once blindingly obvious and yet enigmatic for all that) – might this not also be ‘philosophical’? To put this differently, if I ask the question what takes place, what comes to pass with the aporia? is my rhetorical formula a genuine expression of a conceptual perplexity, beyond which I cannot step, without at least a first, perhaps false, step, a misstep, which is ‘rhetorical’ in its structure; so that its ‘feigned’ condition is, simply, a performative articulation, a manifestation or embodiment, of the ‘real’ difficulty, the as such of an aporia, which remains otherwise inexpressible, impossible to gauge, to measure, or to show, to illuminate or to bring forth in plain sight? We, that is to say I, who have been hiding behind the impersonal figure of the one, do not seem to have got very far, if, indeed, anywhere at all. Clearly, something has arrived, and not merely the first ‘problem’ of the passages, given primacy of place according to its alphabetic determination – arrivant, aporia – but also something, a thinking, not yet calcified into a ‘thought’, much less a hypothesis, theory, theorem, concept, epistemological framework, or a philosophy, which in arriving gives me pause for thought, as the saying goes. To pause, for thought: to halt momentarily, in the face of this arrival; to enter into a place in which one has been placed by an arrival, 9

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Arrivant • aporia to experience a hiatus – to what? an absence of thinking, a blind non-thinking unconscious-consciousness? – which comes about, comes to pass, and so causes one to dwell on an act of thinking that not only determines the pause but also defines that temporary (apparently temporary) experience of a limit to thinking. So, finding ourselves no further forward than the limit to which we conventionally give the names ‘beginning’, ‘start’, ‘opening’, ‘inauguration’, let us turn back, starting again for the first time, and [l]et us ask: what takes place, what comes to pass with the aporia? Is it possible to undergo or to experience the aporia, the aporia as such? . . . Does one . . . pass through this aporia? Or is one immobilised before the threshold, to the point of having to turn around and seek out another way . . .? What takes place with the aporia? The structure of being unable to pass through is performed here in the writing, through the repetition, or more accurately, the reiteration of the question concerning the encounter with or experience of the aporia. The performative writing places one in the experience, inasmuch as one gets no further forward, apparently, than the question with which one began, and which device one may dismiss as ‘merely rhetorical’. Nevertheless, this stalled start, a kind of rhetorical ‘idling’, as if one were in a machine the engine of which were ticking over, having been started, and the gesture sets up the resonance of the question without hurrying to respond. This is a necessary motion, for it places the problem as problem. The question, not to be ignored, and so foregrounded performatively, teases out the double thread: the aporia, if there is such a thing, causes something to take place. At the same time, something comes to pass as a result of the taking place. Taking place and coming to pass: a structure is announced, one not to be confined to the ‘merely rhetorical’ but, instead, one implicated in the ‘greater’ philosophical dimension, in a movement from rhetoric to philosophy, but in a movement which is already underway, inasmuch as what takes place, what comes to pass, is announced with as near a simultaneity as it is possible to achieve in any linear articulation or comprehension, or in such a form dependent on the linear as writing or speech. That near-simultaneity is only possible through difference, and thus the structure of which the words speak is always already underway, at work, taking place and coming to pass in the inaugural articulation or inscription. And the structure that is thus unveiled in this reflective moment, a moment coming to pass and taking place through a reflective idling and iterability, is the admission at the start, as the start, of spatiality and temporality. We 10

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Arrivant • aporia encounter, in attempting to get underway – but we have not ‘failed’, we have got underway, even if that getting underway is just this ‘idling’ motion, movement in moment – the becoming-space-of-time, and the becoming-time-of-space. We find ourselves back at a ‘beginning’ before our beginning. We find ourselves back with Aristotle; we remain in the Aristotelian epoch, our thinking still informed or haunted by this. Admitting this, admitting the ghost of Aristotle in our language, a ghost, by the way, which has never departed, but which has resided invisibly, and all the more insistently for not having been faced, we have to turn around and seek out another way. Asking the question again, then, and having traced the spatio-temporal structure within and exceeding the rhetoric of the problem qua problem (and thus performing the experience of the aporetic, allow me to reiterate the point, even though we cannot say yet whether it is possible to undergo or to experience the aporia, the aporia as such), we arrive at an understanding: that [w]hat we are apprehending here concerning what takes place touches upon the event [of encountering a limit] as . . . possibilities of the ‘coming to pass’ when it meets a limit. In our apprehension, which expresses in the moment or event of reflective consciousness (or just say consciousness, all awareness being self-awareness, inasmuch as one thinks oneself in the event) what Kierkegaard called the ‘condition of existence’ (existents-forhold), we recognise a taking-place and ‘coming-to-pass’ of an event; or at least that which, in not yet being some thing, but happening nonetheless, might be given the name ‘event’: e-venire – something comes out of somewhere, something arrives; something arrives to give us pause, to catch us and immobilise us, however fleetingly. Apprehension plays between the intellectual and the emotional, announcing a coming to consciousness that has both to do with the experience of both the sensible and the intelligible, with knowledge and feeling. On the one hand, to apprehend means to feel emotionally or be sensible of, to feel the force of some arrival. It is also to become conscious by the senses of any external impression, as the OED puts it. On the other hand, apprehension is to lay hold of with the intellect, and so perceive, recognise or see the existence of, something, some one, some other. Between feeling and intellect, between, we might suggest, the passive and the active (these ‘positions’ or ‘identifications’ are neither stable nor certain; they certainly do not remain in place, and this displacement, this destabilisation from any conceptual or epistemological determination or certitude is, we might apprehend, the 11

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Arrivant • aporia effect of the aporia’s arrival), there is the sign of some aporia. Such a double motion, apprehended in the motif of apprehension, reiterates silently the perplexity of Derrida’s inaugural questions, in which the problem of the aporia is also a problem of whether one experiences or whether something takes place and comes to pass, which one must suffer passively. Thus, in knowing that one does not know, in feeling that one does not yet fully apprehend or comprehend what one believes oneself to apprehend, however inchoately, we must ask another question. In this, we have to appear to abandon the question of the aporia as such – the question as such, the aporia as such – in order that, having been immobilised before the threshold we find ourselves having to turn around and seek out another way. Hence the arrival of another question, rather than an answer to the inaugural and iterable question. Another question arrives: What is the event that arrives? This is no simple question, as can be seen in the manner in which this question opens, doubling the figure of the arrival and of what arrives from within itself: What is the arrivant that makes the event arrive? Nothing simply arrives. There is that which, though we cannot define ‘it’ (is it an ‘it’? is it available or imaginable as some thing?), nonetheless might be apprehended as standing behind, or propelling from within itself the arrival that is not ‘itself’, this untranslatable arrivant. The word remains untranslatable, and not merely from French to English, for, always already duplicitous, and giving nothing away in French, it gives access to the ‘what’ and the ‘who’, without revealing the ‘what’ or the ‘who’: this word, arrivant . . . can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be here where s/he was not expected, where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her without expecting it, without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for . . . As is observed shortly thereafter, the arrivant does not have any identity yet. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. With regard to what you are presently reading, the particular starting point, the letter A, has already doubled itself, through the arrival of two words, aporia and arrivant. In this, The Derrida Wordbook, beginning with a moment of pause and reflection, in which language and being are implicated in one another, this is a necessary, if arbitrarily imposed, inaugural moment. Arbitrary? One has to begin somewhere, and a wordbook, not aspiring to the status of a dictionary, ought to follow or conform to certain conventions, however minimally, as its points of departure. 12

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Arrivant • aporia But this question of arbitrariness might simply be another way of acknowledging that in the event of beginning this project, something has to have arrived, and what arrives, what arrived and remains as the present horizon, are the two words in question, which themselves are the focus of a series of interrogations around what takes place, what comes to pass, and of course what arrives, not to mention what causes, who causes, the arrival. To take a different tack, turning around and seeking out another way, as it were, what arrives throughout The Derrida Wordbook are sheaves of citations, short passages illuminating the ways in which a notion, motif, concept, idea comes to be thought differently; or otherwise, in other words, how the difference within a motif, idea, concept, notion motivates it, causing it to arrive in unexpected ways. Definition, comprehension, or apprehension at the least, are perhaps names for the desire and response in the face of possibilities of the ‘coming to pass’ when it meets a limit. In the most minimal way, a wordbook is the constant acknowledgement of, and response to the affirmation made by Derrida that something arrives and this affects the very experience of the threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light. There, on the page, is a word, more or less familiar, and it arrives in such a manner that one is caused to pause, to reflect on its work, on the ways in which it is made to work, and to do so on a threshold, at the limits of meaning. But who, we might inquire, is the ‘he’, this arrivant, who brings to light and thus affects the very experience of the threshold, in this case, the threshold of comprehension, interpretation, translation? Naively, one might answer, Jacques Derrida, who, in the case of the aporia and arrivant, asks particular questions and approaches language, the conceptual or other matters in such a way that he causes, or at least makes possible, the encounter and experience of what takes place and what comes to pass in language; not only as a rhetorical or formal procedure, but also in relation to matters of ontology, epistemology and a sense of being. In this, there is implicit a connection between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’, between the singularity of a manner of interrogation and the neutrality of procedure, neutral in that nothing is taken for granted, and one begins by pausing, opening oneself as much as one’s subject to a questioning. Derrida is, though, merely that figure in the present naively imagined scenario – fictional narrative as analogy – who stands in for the hypothetical ‘he’ who ‘brings to light’. Derrida illustrates for me, here, a way of perceiving what is taking place. That Derrida may 13

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Arrivant • aporia be read – or perhaps say that I may be read as reading Derrida’s ‘arrival’ – in this fashion, as a rhetorical figure for some other to whom I respond, and for whose words I am responsible, then in this it has to be observed, following Derrida, that while being the reader who also writes, I have placed myself in the position of the one who was awaiting him or her and yet without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for; that is to say, whenever I pick up a book by Derrida, open it, enter it and thus transform it into what it already is, a text, I know that while Derrida’s name is on the cover, while it is, we might suppose, a certain Jacques Derrida who I am awaiting, nevertheless, there is that in Derrida’s reading that can always arrive, if I am attentive, which was not expected, and for which I wait without waiting . . . without expecting it, without knowing what or whom to expect. One must therefore learn to read with hospitality, with hospitality for the other, hospitality toward the event, even though one cannot guarantee that the experience or the event will occur. The scenario remains ‘naive’, however, for it still operates on the surface of its structure as remarking a threshold or limit between self and other, between two identifiable places, the proper and the foreign, the proper of the one and the proper of the other. We find ourselves still no further forward, still at some barely definable threshold, the power which keeps us all the more maintained, undiminished, despite our reflections, perceptions and summary approaches. We remain in the experience of the aporetic, within an architectonic structure of thinking that functions through its implicit relations and spacings, despite what may or may not have taken place and come to pass. And this remains so because there remains to come what Derrida calls, without nomination or identification, the absolute arrivant. Whatever, whoever, this may be, we cannot be sure that ‘it’ has arrived, or if it arrives at all, unless awareness or consciousness of the event or experience of an arrival worthy of being called an event is belated, untimely – until after the experience of an event which we cannot suppose with any certainty will have taken place or come to pass. What Derrida names without naming is, we might propose tentatively, an experience which can always occur – there is always the possibility as that which is to-come, ‘the to-come’ (l’avenir), but which cannot be guaranteed as, or equated with a programmable or predicatable future event, a messianicity without a messiah. The absolute arrivant gives no name, and yet stands in for (the anticipation, a weak messianic hope) that which 14

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Believing may come to pass and so cause to take place an experience that is radically, irrevocably transformative. If there is an aporia by which one is immobilised, then it is this thinking of what remains to-come, but which, in its radical alterity, remains only de-identified.

B Believing (HC 3–4) To speak or write of belief, one must enter into a suspension of sorts: the suspension of certainty, of knowledge, either in its vulgar forms or as it is presented in a system. One has to have faith in what, in essence, has no essence, and what remains therefore irreducible or incalculable: irreducible to a certain knowledge and incalculable as to the extent of its meaning or force. The notion of belief is illustrated simply, starting out from a semantic distinction invoking forms of speech act, and in which distinction, an equivocation, if not an aporia, arrives. Or rather, we might say that behind, underneath, within the presentation of the equivocal there resides irreducibly that which remains itself, truly itself, but which cannot be determined directly and so remains other. In this there is the possibility of the experience of the aporetic, but only this possibility, never certainty itself. I believe this and, in this belief, the difficulty comes to reveal itself. There remains, as that which arrives in one’s reflection on the question, that which remains heterogeneous to knowledge, certainty or identification. And this has to do with the act of faith in the given word, as that which, in turn leads onto the royal way of the untranslatable itself. In the experience of the aporia that we might, for the moment, name belief, we are given to think what ‘believing’ may mean. Of course, what something may or may not mean is irreducible to what it does mean. We began with a question of language, and have continued on with this question, and we find ourselves still with this question. With that we find ourselves entangled still in particular philosophical as well as semantic or lexical questions, in this particular instance what it means to believe, what believing, inimical and radically heterogeneous to all knowledge, entails. To believe is to open oneself to the other, to think with the other, with an otherness or alterity beyond or completely other than the order of the possible. 15

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Believing may come to pass and so cause to take place an experience that is radically, irrevocably transformative. If there is an aporia by which one is immobilised, then it is this thinking of what remains to-come, but which, in its radical alterity, remains only de-identified.

B Believing (HC 3–4) To speak or write of belief, one must enter into a suspension of sorts: the suspension of certainty, of knowledge, either in its vulgar forms or as it is presented in a system. One has to have faith in what, in essence, has no essence, and what remains therefore irreducible or incalculable: irreducible to a certain knowledge and incalculable as to the extent of its meaning or force. The notion of belief is illustrated simply, starting out from a semantic distinction invoking forms of speech act, and in which distinction, an equivocation, if not an aporia, arrives. Or rather, we might say that behind, underneath, within the presentation of the equivocal there resides irreducibly that which remains itself, truly itself, but which cannot be determined directly and so remains other. In this there is the possibility of the experience of the aporetic, but only this possibility, never certainty itself. I believe this and, in this belief, the difficulty comes to reveal itself. There remains, as that which arrives in one’s reflection on the question, that which remains heterogeneous to knowledge, certainty or identification. And this has to do with the act of faith in the given word, as that which, in turn leads onto the royal way of the untranslatable itself. In the experience of the aporia that we might, for the moment, name belief, we are given to think what ‘believing’ may mean. Of course, what something may or may not mean is irreducible to what it does mean. We began with a question of language, and have continued on with this question, and we find ourselves still with this question. With that we find ourselves entangled still in particular philosophical as well as semantic or lexical questions, in this particular instance what it means to believe, what believing, inimical and radically heterogeneous to all knowledge, entails. To believe is to open oneself to the other, to think with the other, with an otherness or alterity beyond or completely other than the order of the possible. 15

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Believing Belief therefore as a figure of otherness itself, belief in and of the other, without claiming that the other is this or that; indeed, without thinking that one can determine the other. Derrida illuminates the problem of the word ‘believe’ from the start, thereby throwing into doubt knowledge concerning belief, and what it means to believe through an implicit challenge to epistemological and semantic certainty. In this manner there comes to be registered the sense that one has to believe in belief, in the word and the idea. In this way, the question of belief is come at from another perspective, from a different direction, and one begins to see how Derrida remains with the aporia or allows the aporia to stand, while also moving around and beyond it. In this method of interrogation the otherness of the subject is allowed to stand, to be respected and to be addressed on its own terms, according to what it dictates, rather than treating the enigmatic and equivocal as that which can be solved, resolved, controlled or mastered. In the initial gambit, the destabilisation of meaning from within itself, a calculation is measured, and with that an economy of ‘false’ belief (if I can put it this way) unveiled. Rather than say ‘false belief’ instead just say ‘calculation’, for what is determined is that which may well be possible. Strictly speaking, the possible, that which is always possible, does not belong to the order of believing, of absolute belief, true belief, or the strong sense . . . of this word which no longer belongs to the order of the possible. To believe in what is not possible, to believe in the unbelievable, is to abandon calculation and all ‘economic’ modes of thought, all epistemologies of the calculable, and to open oneself to the impossible. Not impossible, but the impossible, the very figure of the impossible, which figure is also a name, which, though naming nothing as such, nevertheless in two directions at least gives a name to that which cannot be presented or represented directly. In two directions because, on the one hand, there is that which is the impossible beyond any possible calculation, definition, representation; on the other hand, the name stands in, on this side, if you will, as representation for that other, which remains absolutely and wholly other, irrecuperable in any sense, save for this figure. It is this to which one must open oneself, to that which, though neither something nor nothing, figures in the possibility of the impossible a radical alterity. But in order to arrive at this point, to situate an understanding from which it becomes possible to perceive how one might open 16

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Bêtise oneself to the impossible figure of the impossible, Derrida must first enumerate and so exhaust all the calculations, their variants and different modes, everything that would no doubt be related to economy in order to work through a logic which in its structures resembles the closed system of economic calculation; in short, all the beliefs that are not absolute or true modes of belief, but which reside within the measurable, the economic or the calculable must be exhausted through enumeration. In doing this, he exhausts the epistemo-calculability of the commonplace value of belief, excavating its semantic and, once again, epistemological resources, mining them in order to cause that collapse already implicit at the start, from which undermining one might begin to arrive at, or cause to arrive, while remaining untranslatable and other, at what ‘believing’ may mean, at the bottom of the abyss. So, we find ourselves reflecting back on an inaugural gesture, which bears within itself its own problematic as a particular condition of what takes place and as a possibility of what might ‘come to pass’ when we recognise what arrives in thinking the singularity of that arrival, as it destabilises, displaces from within itself its own certainty, in a moment of ‘de-identification’, in this case of what ‘belief’ means. In perceiving this, and in understanding also the immobilisation that occurs in the face of enigma and equivocacy, the injunction must be to turn around and seek out another way. As this singular example maps for us, this involves putting to work what takes place and comes to arrive, so as to exploit all the resources already at work in the destabilisation of common knowledge, so as to think the difference of the notion of belief, and thereby, in opening oneself onto the abyss, beyond all economy, to turn towards an other, ‘true’ notion of an impossible belief, a belief without condition or reserve.

Bêtise (TSM/DDP 35–6, 45, 46) A return to, the return of, the untranslatable, which, nevertheless, demands a ‘translation’ of sorts, in the form of an unfolding of what remains hidden in the folds of the untranslatable term. The difficulty with translation from the start is not one of moving between languages, say French to English, German to French, and so forth. As soon as there is language, the sign that communicates or seeks so to do, there is, if not the desire then, the possibility as a bare minimum of a recipient, an addressee, however meagre the chance is. Even as I think, I hear myself and understand, or believe I understand, myself. 17

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Bêtise In that there is always implied this ‘between-two’ in any articulation, inscription, sound or sign, there, as part or effect of that implication, is the necessity of translation. That which is sent, transmitted, spoken, has to be received in a manner in which there is some form of understanding, comprehension. At the same time though, whatever is received is not necessarily apprehended fully. Translation, a ‘full’ translation, is at once necessary and impossible. While the French ‘bête’ may be translated without apparent difficulty as ‘beast’ or ‘animal’, it can also be translated as ‘stupid’, pas intelligent my dictionary tells me, of a personne, idée, question. A workaholic might be une bête de travail. There is thus in the noun itself an internal ‘division’, a doubling – and, therefore, a ‘translation-effect’ if not a translation – that signifies, conventionally, on the one hand a quality of human intellectual capacity (perception, judgement, behaviour) and, on the other, the more or less simple determination of a living organism other than a human being. Moving towards our adjective ‘bêtise’, and recalling English translations of ‘bête’ which are apparently unproblematic, ‘animal’, though inadequate as a translation of ‘bête’, inasmuch as it comes via Middle English from Latin anima (having breath), blurs the human/ non-human distinction, while exposing the necessity for imposing hierarchies in thinking concerning ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ animals; which hierarchies immediately undermine any supposedly straightforward binary definition. ‘Beast’, from the Latin bestia via Old French beste, if not used in English to refer to a (non-human) animal is employed in a largely pejorative way, although this is now somewhat old-fashioned or culturally idiomatic, belonging to the speech of specific social groups in certain national cultures (‘the weather is beastly’, ‘he behaved like a beast’, ‘you are an absolute beast’, ‘it is a beast of a storm’). What the use of ‘beast’ in English tells us is that someone or something assumes or can be perceived to take on characteristics of (non-human) animals, orders of existent organic creatures that cannot be defined as human. This, perhaps obviously, implies something about levels or degrees of intellectual capacity or intelligence in general. Although Geoffrey Bennington begins by observing in his notes to the Derrida Seminars Translation Project, ‘ “bête” corresponds reasonably well with the English “beast” ’,3 Derrida insists 3

Derrida Seminars Translation Project, 2008 Workshop, Translators’ Notes, derridaseminars.org/workshops.html. Any further remarks are taken from this site.

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Bêtise in our extract and throughout the text from which it is taken that ‘bête’ is untranslatable, ‘bêtise’ even more so, and this, of course, is the position Bennington also takes in extending his initial observation. The problem is, to cite Bennington once more, that when used in a ‘human’ context, ‘bête’ does not indicate someone who is ‘[not] exactly stupid, not exactly idiotic, not exactly dumb, although these words are in the same semantic field’, all of which stumbles Derrida expounds upon in his painstaking tracing of the deconstruction that takes place at the heart of any thinking of the ‘human/animal’ division – the very thinking of which, if not questioned or assumed as a given, might be taken to be an example of bêtise. A larger point here has to do with translation and the untranslatable. What Derrida shows through the very singular examples of bête and bêtise is what Bennington aptly describes as a ‘kind of general impossibility of ever immobilizing the meaning of any term at all (entailing thereby a kind of general impossibility of translation altogether)’. This is not a problem which happens to be about the translation from one language to another; the difficulty, if not ‘profound’, is more grave, more radically expansive in its disturbance to understanding: [e]ven within the borders of the French idiom, there is no stable semantic context that could univocally guarantee a safe translation from one pragmatic use of ‘bête’ or ‘bêtise’ in a given context into another one. Broadening out from this recognition, and stepping out from the bêtise that marks the assumption, the revelation that Derrida maps is that translation demonstrates how one can never get to the bottom, the origin, the stable truth of something, There is no ground or limit. All thinking, semantic or epistemological endeavour, paradigm or discourse that are structured by, ‘founded’ on, or rely, however implicitly or unthinkingly, on notions of base or absolute, fundamental or basis, have in them, haunting them and marking the limit at which thinking stops or which it cannot get beyond in its desire for and reliance on source, basis, fundament, metaphysical absolute or truth, the articulation of what Bennington describes as ‘a sort of basic bêtise’. To seek to translate this word is only to repeat the bêtise that resides within, and as the other to, thought. So bêtise, whatever it means . . . has nothing to do with knowledge or with the adequation of a determining judgement to truth or error . . . Whatever it means, though it has nothing to do with knowledge and so forth, bêtise has to do, nevertheless, with common names, common nouns. Remaining ‘improper’ to knowledge and judgement, 19

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Betrayal bêtise is always, only, proper to man or to the sovereign as man. Though not a modality of knowledge any more than it is a mistake in knowing, what is bête about thinking is the way in which the human thinks and, in thinking, assumes that mode, that way or approach to be proper, to make manifest sovereign reason. After all, [o]ne can be truth, one can be in the truth, one can know everything, and nevertheless be bête. The distinction that Derrida marks out between will and understanding, specifically an excess or a precipitation to judge, to know, as this faculty of decision determines understanding by an end to understanding (‘enough theorizing, now for action’, ‘life’s too short to keep thinking about such things’) – this is what signals the bête in the human, and what defines without limiting that which is bêtise, that which is, we might say, human, all too human. What might also be said is that the failure of translation, or perhaps the rush to determine and so avoid the deliberation or judgement necessary to a translation – and this is a responsibility to the other under which I suffer in any act of reading or receiving – is, itself, a sign of the finitude of the understanding. And with that end, in which a wilful stupidity resides, there arrives, makes itself known, or announces itself, the bêtise in the human, as in phrases such as ‘deconstruction is X’, ‘deconstruction is a school of thought’, ‘deconstruction is a critical methodology’, et cetera . . .

Betrayal (WA 172–3) Our extract opens with a hypothetical premise or scenario, admitting to the possible future moment of lying. The implication here is that betrayal and lying are related. In the same scenario, Derrida maps a temporal space across which the act(s) of perjury and false testimony have taken place. This is signalled in that notion of the time of perjury, a time of division, doubling, duplicity, always already underway from the very first moment. Of provisionally distinct times, we might acknowledge that there is that future conditional of the ‘if I’. It assumes a future moment which may, or may not, arrive or come to pass. Assuming that it does – this is a fiction of sorts, if not actually a lie, inasmuch as, while it may not have happened yet, this does not mean to say it will not happen; how can one say, with any certainty? There is always that ‘future’, or more accurately that which is ‘to-come’, that which can always arrive without being expected or anticipated, but which may never take place; one can always find oneself in a moment where what comes to pass can take one by 20

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Betrayal surprise – then the moment of lying becomes marked temporally as the moment in which I have perhaps already lied by promising (seriously, it is understood) to tell the truth; or I have perhaps already lied by promising to tell the truth. Derrida’s gesture is to construct a story involving different times and different scenarios constituted spatially and temporally around an imagined, or perhaps fictional, speech act. This gambit – can a gambit be similar to a gesture? can a motion of a part of the body, in this case the hand holding the pen or moving over the keys, have an equivalence, even one that is of the order of analogy, with a mode of action or remark ‘entailing a degree of risk, that is calculated to gain an advantage’, as the OED has it? – involves placing particular stresses in different places within similar grammatical structures. Derrida begins in this manner seemingly so as to expose himself (gesture) or reveal what language can do, in order to trip the unwary (gambit) and so cause us to focus on what is at work in words, and in modes of linguistic gesture, such as promising and other forms that supposedly bear or tell the truth. For example, one may promise in all seriousness to tell the truth, to do something, to carry out an act. And yet, in this promise, in order for it to be a promise properly speaking, there has to be a possibility that the promise will not be kept, that the word of the person issuing the promise will not have the truth it seems to bear in anticipation of its completion. Structurally and temporally therefore, anything that appears to be a promise must always bear in it the future conditions of its own infelicity, despite intention or what one means to say. Thus Derrida: I have perhaps already lied by promising to tell the truth in all seriousness, and yet not known that I would lie, I would have lied – I will, therefore, always already have lied, albeit unintentionally – by failing to deliver on my promise; it is as if the lie, now dormant in its host, has come to life as it were, as if that contamination that is inescapably there becomes no longer benign at a certain point. There is always that possibility to-come. There is always the possibility of the unexpected that may arrive. This is what Derrida calls l’avenir as opposed to le future. The latter signifies a future that is guaranteed, predictable; an example might be ‘night will fall’ or ‘I will die’. L’avenir on the other hand: Derrida relies here on the homophonic resources of this type of future to indicate that (la) which may come (venir), which may arrive or come to pass, but which is not to be expected, and which cannot be predicted with certainty. Where is the lie, though? After all, if the premise of every promise is its own 21

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Betrayal failure, how can I keep my word with any certainty? The question (among many) here is one of the limits of consciousness, conscious intention and so forth. On the other hand, I have perhaps already lied by promising to tell the truth, lied before lying in not telling the truth. Here is conscious, deliberate intent to deceive, to lie. Again the question comes down to one of consciousness, of what one ‘means to say’. Derrida’s ‘hypothetical’ or ‘fiction’ (depending, perhaps, on how you wish to read it, despite Derrida’s intentions, whatever they may have been) comes down to or begins from the problematic of this meaning-tosay, of conscious intent and that which the other gives us to speak, that which remains unconscious and therefore unavailable directly. It is for this reason that [t]hese two moments are at once rigorously distinct and strangely indiscernible. What makes the moments distinct is not simply a matter of stress, of verbal gesture or the use of italics to lay stress on the perhaps or the already in-between which so much is at stake in knowing how to interpret, in knowing what oneself or another has meant. There is also a rigorously distinct temporal order, between, on the one hand, a second moment, which Derrida chooses to stress again in placing it before the first, and, on the other hand, that first moment, which in the order of narration is supplementary to the second, as – perhaps – a deliberate gesture or gambit that has a degree of performative power in it in the structure of the argument. However, this is more complicated than even such a reversal or inversion might appear to make it. These two temporalities or these two structural phases seem after the fact to envelope one another. This belatedness – one only reads what has taken place after the fact, in the wake of what has taken place – indicates the difficulty, the contretemps that is at work here. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, one can always supplement the statement with a fiction (or a truth) by which one insists one sincerely promised. That aside, there is also, always, the possibility that in the moment when one spoke one was in good faith, being sincere and not perjuring oneself. Not yet. The undecidable haunts intention and ‘meaning-to-say’; undecidability remains at the secret heart of consciousness. The problematic of ‘meaning-to-say’ is intimately enfolded with the question of undecidability. A citation may serve to further our understanding, not only of what Derrida is observing (which is quite self-evident), but, importantly, how he says it, and why he unfolds and refolds the gambit in the gestures of which his writing partakes. 22

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Betrayal The citation comes in an interview, in a response to Henri Ronse, from Positions:4 I try to write (in) the space in which is posed the question of speech and meaning. I try to write the question: (what is) meaning to say. Therefore it is necessary in such a space, and guided by such a question, that writing literally mean nothing. Not that it is absurd in the way that absurdity has always been in solidarity with metaphysical meaning . . . To risk meaning nothing is to start to play, and first to enter into the play of différance which prevents any word, any concept, any major enunciation from coming to summarize and to govern from the theological presence of a center the movement and textual spacing of differences. (P 14)

At the heart of every act of writing for Derrida is the ontological investigation of conscious speech, intention and meaning. In order to open and maintain this question, of speech, meaning, conscious intention, and so submit it to what may in some cases appear as a phenomenological or quasi-phenomenological ‘reduction’, writing has to put to work the play that is always already ‘there’ in language. As can be seen in the passage on ‘Betrayal’, this play that is traced by Derrida is at work not simply at the level of the single word and the concept for which it stands but in complex semantic and conceptual structures. Derrida’s initial gesture/gambit is to risk making the act of promising mean nothing in order to illuminate the différance that makes possible the ‘movement and textual spacing’, which also leads to the unfolding of the temporal disruption. ‘Meaning to say’ is a translation of vouloir-dire. As Alan Bass, translator of Positions, remarks, ‘ “Vouloir-dire” is etymologically linked to the idea of will (voluntas). It carries the connotation that meaning is the “will to say” ’ (P 98, n. 15). Writing being other than speech can always bear in it that which is other than what the author, or more generally, the one who speaks, who promises, who says I was sincere, in good faith, means or intends to say. But this is not merely a difference between writing and speech; it is, as Derrida wishes to illustrate through the posing of a fiction or hypothetical, what resides within any meaning 4

Derrida also discusses the relation between ‘meaning-to-say’ and what he calls the ‘abiding “alienation” ’ which one suffers as a result of one’s language being always the language of the other in Monolingualism of the Other or, The Prosthesis of Origin (MO 25). Michael Naas offers some insight into this paragraph and Derrida’s understanding of hearing-onself-speak apropos ‘meaning-tosay’ and the voice as spectral phenomenon in Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 190). See also John Caputo on justice and the subject’s ‘intending’, in Deconstruction in a Nutshell (DN 144).

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Book or intention, any vouloir-dire. To understand this another way, ‘writing’ assumes an expanded meaning for Derrida, being that play of differences that undermines, or has the possibility to cause to arrive and so undermine, conscious meaning or intention.

Book (PM 4–5) But then, what idea, concept, ontological category or certain identity should we not put into question? None, inasmuch as there is an implicit assumption of universal or total self-sufficiency and homogeneity to the work of category, identity or concept as conventionally employed. To ask the question again, this time in somewhat amended and amplified terms: what apparently stable and coherent structure of meaning is not available to the interrogation of the system that undergirds its seeming homogeneity or discrete ontology? Again, none, for similar reasons as those given in response to the first question, and nothing illustrates this more, perhaps, than the seemingly unobjectionable notion book, or, indeed, the word signifying the idea. If there is an abiding concern with exposing the difficulties inherent in defining the seemingly obvious, then it might be said that the question of the question concerning any system, structure, identity, concept or meaning must necessarily be posited before any certainty can be permitted to assume primacy, allowing us to get on with business as usual. Hence Derrida’s observation – an observation that involves a careful mapping of distinctions and a separation of the term and concept within itself – that the word book is as difficult to define as the question of the book. If the questioning of ‘belief’ and what we had believed ‘belief’ to mean had been if not troubling then a little disorienting, then the question of the book and raising the ‘problem’ of the word ‘book’ are all the more counterintuitive as propositions. In order to slow proceedings, we might wish to enumerate the different books here, to count the differences between the ‘forms’ of ‘book’, supposing, as we must, that it is a given that we can no longer count on the book, as opposed to the word ‘book’ or the figures of the book, however many of these there might be. The perplexity arises doubtless because [t]here are books, things that are legitimately called books, but even these are not simply available to untroubled determination, written as they are according to systems of writing that are radically heterogeneous. Put naively, a novel is 24

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Book not a codex, neither is it a ‘history’ in any commonplace sense, nor a dictionary, a political treatise, and so on. All might be called ‘books’, and yet because their modes of writing differ – and here, in passing at least for now, we have to acknowledge that the notion of writing must itself be subject to a rigorous questioning – not all books can be understood as the same, except in the most fundamental ways. This final observation is subject to a caveat though. For, what is called a book, however barely and fundamentally, is in the process of undergoing various changes, at least in presentation, from paper to screen, from printing to digitisation, and so forth. And this aside, which recognises that there are technologies of inscription, the idea of the book cannot be conflated simply with that of writing, or the mode of writing, or [once more] the technologies of inscription. Writing may take place and yet a book not come into existence as a result. Thus it is the case that the problematic of the book is one of an apparent homonymy between so many assumptions that are cultural, political, historical and which requires an elaborate set of questions . . . involving all the [following] concepts . . .: writing, the modes of inscription, production, and reproduction, the work and its working, the support, the market economy and the economics of storage, the law, politics, and so on. While the set of questions is indicated, each set itself comprising and generating many other questions requiring a careful elaboration, an enumeration which, in turn, in its process does not reduce but instead multiplies, just two fundamental and profoundly oceanic problems are given to be thought here. One is that question of the incommensurable difference between the book and writing. The other question concerns another incommensurability, which has at its centre the understanding that the question of the book is irreducible to, irreconcilable with, the question of the work. Not all books are works, Derrida reflects, even as he offers the reciprocal, disorienting figure of the equation: plenty of . . . works of written discourse are not necessarily books. So, in seeking to enumerate the various questions of the book, we begin again with the acknowledgement of the dissimilarity between ‘book’, ‘writing’ and ‘work’. (The notion or idea of ‘text’ is not raised, you will note.) Let us take therefore Derrida’s first cautionary complicating separation, of the word and the book, both of which are equally difficult to define. From its earliest uses, in Old English and old High German the words from which the word ‘book’ derives are associated with the law, with right. Variants are also found in Teutonic, Frisian and Saxon, but usage remains consistent. The bo¯c 25

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Book or booc was a grant or charter, its verbal form signifying the granting of a charter. Subsequently, the idea of the ‘book’ takes up the question of rights when questions of authorship and copyright are established, though this is much later in its history, when the book has become a secular and to some extent commercial object, bound up with questions concerning technologies of reproduction and inscription. Until the advent of author rights and property, ‘Book’ came to signify for several centuries the material binding of writings, first by hand and then printed, in a single volume, though content varied. Leaping over several centuries, the question becomes one of the ontology of the book, reconsidered through the lens of support systems; that is to say, technological modes of presentation by which the book as book comes into being. It is not enough to claim that the materially printed and bound form is a book, while other forms are not. One might ask, for example, is the book a book if its pages are blank? Or is the book a book if its bound material is written by hand, on parchment for example, or on paper, as opposed to being printed? Thus, if we acknowledge that both the handwritten and the printed bound forms are books, the same but different, it follows that we cannot rule out of question the thing called ‘book’ if it is produced virtually, electronically, if its figure is assumed by virtue of that ‘dynamic support’ that is telematics or belongs to some other manifestation of tele-technologies (computers, desk- or laptops, Kindle, iPad, and so forth). However, if one must dissociate the idea of the book from writing and also from the work, then the idea of the book should not be conflated with that of supports, bound or projected, handwritten or digitised. The question of the book then comes back to a question of right, which, for Derrida, is at the heart of the question of the book. In positing such a hypothesis Derrida has turned the logic of thinking the book on its head; the question of right does not arise as a result of the production of the book in whatever form. Instead it is that by which a book comes to be defined, and may be determinable, according to juridical and, in addition, semantic, political, social and economic interests. While it remains difficult to define the book then, it is possible to observe the following: the idea of the book, which began with the conferring of rights, and which, in the act of writing or granting a charter, brought to bear on the concept of the book not only juridical but also political, social and economic concerns, remains today as a material interest. The ‘book’ is always tied to historical and material interests, it serves to name through its 26

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Call presence as concept interweaving systems and institutions. Modes of inscription, technologies of writing, forms of support: all are incidental to the idea of the book, and that we come to be occupied with such concerns, and with questions also of what constitutes a canon, an oeuvre, opus or ‘work’, suggests the extent to which the question of the book remains to be defined, and the extent also to which the idea of the book serves to mystify thinking, hiding in the meanwhile the various institutional expressions of social and cultural identity. Societies, cultures, nations even, all redefine the ‘book’, at once both broadly abstract and determinedly material, according to the specific demands of a given historical moment, while that definition stays in its relative occlusion somewhat stable as regards the exercise of right, which, in turn, we might argue, is of epochal import, and within which epoch we remain from the earliest manifestation of the idea of the book to the present day. Taking this to be the case, it might therefore be said that Derrida’s thought offers a radically materialist re-visioning of cultural, philosophical, ideological and epistemological determination.

C Call (PI 276) I am made the subject of a call. I find myself to be such. The question of the call does not come down though to the experience of the everyday in which someone or some event demands or requests my response. We are not talking simply of any call, certainly not a call that we can identify as such: as, for example, when, imagine this, you are walking down a street, and you hear your name. You turn, and, of course, it is someone you know; however unlikely this may be, given the most singular circumstances you can imagine – you are in a large city, New York perhaps, for the first time, on a side street, after dark, and one person out of 8,000,000 knows you from the town you live in – it remains a possibility nevertheless. Then there is the wrong number. You answer your phone, and are either met with silence, or the person at the other end asks for someone of whom you have never heard. Though relatively infrequent, rare even, such moments might take place. Even in such circumstances, there is an inexorable premise at work: a call can arrive at any instant. Such an 27

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Call presence as concept interweaving systems and institutions. Modes of inscription, technologies of writing, forms of support: all are incidental to the idea of the book, and that we come to be occupied with such concerns, and with questions also of what constitutes a canon, an oeuvre, opus or ‘work’, suggests the extent to which the question of the book remains to be defined, and the extent also to which the idea of the book serves to mystify thinking, hiding in the meanwhile the various institutional expressions of social and cultural identity. Societies, cultures, nations even, all redefine the ‘book’, at once both broadly abstract and determinedly material, according to the specific demands of a given historical moment, while that definition stays in its relative occlusion somewhat stable as regards the exercise of right, which, in turn, we might argue, is of epochal import, and within which epoch we remain from the earliest manifestation of the idea of the book to the present day. Taking this to be the case, it might therefore be said that Derrida’s thought offers a radically materialist re-visioning of cultural, philosophical, ideological and epistemological determination.

C Call (PI 276) I am made the subject of a call. I find myself to be such. The question of the call does not come down though to the experience of the everyday in which someone or some event demands or requests my response. We are not talking simply of any call, certainly not a call that we can identify as such: as, for example, when, imagine this, you are walking down a street, and you hear your name. You turn, and, of course, it is someone you know; however unlikely this may be, given the most singular circumstances you can imagine – you are in a large city, New York perhaps, for the first time, on a side street, after dark, and one person out of 8,000,000 knows you from the town you live in – it remains a possibility nevertheless. Then there is the wrong number. You answer your phone, and are either met with silence, or the person at the other end asks for someone of whom you have never heard. Though relatively infrequent, rare even, such moments might take place. Even in such circumstances, there is an inexorable premise at work: a call can arrive at any instant. Such an 27

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Call arrival, that of the call that comes to pass, can mark the likelihood, and can effect the very experience of a threshold: between self and other, for example, and to recall the discussion of the arrivant. It can arrive or take place at any time, unlooked for: [w]hat we are apprehending here concerning what takes place touches upon the event [of encountering a limit] as . . . possibilities of the ‘coming to pass’ when it meets a limit. We appear to be back where we began, no further forward, encountering the revelation of a limit, and with that, as that by which the limit is experienced, perceived as somehow there, we experience the possibility of some arrivant, something or someone other; some other simply, before any question of the who or the what, the singularity of which is so marked as to cause me to recognise, and assume as my response to this arrival, some responsibility. The premise of the call, that which haunts all calls as part of the ‘logic’ of the call (if it can be termed this), is announced in even the most mundane of circumstances, to which I’ve already alluded. What if your phone were to ring now? What if the doorbell rang, or there were a knock? Such events are imaginable, because however unlooked for, or however unlikely, they can take place or come to pass. Before the everyday therefore, informing chance, there is always the ineluctable demand of a summons, a cry or hail. With these, we come to apprehend a ghostly structure at work, which informs the condition of being human, and with that all forms, instances, possibilities of communication between the self and the other, the host and the guest or ghost, the living and the dead. Even if no one has said anything to me, when I begin to write, or when I start talking – to give a lecture, or in a seminar – what I call ‘my’ words, arrive as a response to some unheard, but nonetheless persistent call. In effect, it is a matter of response and responsibility. I am answering a call. In this my ‘answer’ is typical of every articulation, inasmuch as it acknowledges an other, however tacitly. My ‘answer’ as a response haunted by this tacit recognition of the call of the other is informed, anticipated in advance of any articulation and every expression by the ‘logic’ – and rather than say ‘logic’ let us acknowledge it as the ‘law’ – of the call; for there is a law at work inasmuch as the call institutes a responsibility. This is marked in that link or bond between the notion of response and that of responsibility. For the responsibility is instituted in response, even, or especially, when the origin of the call . . . comes from nowhere, even, or especially, though it is an origin in any case that is not yet a divine or human ‘subject’. Before there 28

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Call is any subject identifiable as the other; before there is any event that stands before me as that which stands in for the other thereby issuing a demand before any such definable or determinable occasion, there remains a call, and with that the law of the call. Whether I choose to ignore this or respond, the demand of the other is still in place, still taking place. Though I appear to avoid response and responsibility by appearing to ignore the summons, such an avoidance remains a response and thus an acknowledgement, an affirmation of the call. In being a manifestation of some arrivant, in the possibility of its coming to pass, of its always already being structured by the chance of its arrival from somewhere that has no definable origin as such, and even though there is no ‘it’ of which to speak – and thus, in this, the arrivant can always arrive from what, too easily perhaps, we call ‘past’ or ‘future’ – the law of the call is traced not by any certain futurity but instead by the ghostly inexorability of l’avenir, that which can arrive, at any time, but which, unlike the future as such, cannot be guaranteed. The call remains; as such, it remains to come. But this call, its law, though remaining to come, remains also, in arriving from nowhere as such and having no origin, as coming before, and therefore, at the root of all ulterior responsibilities (moral, juridical, political), and of every categorical imperative. For this reason it is important to apprehend the call as being indiscernible as a response in itself. So other is this call that, acknowledging its being without any knowable origin, we must perceive such a call as arche-originary, before, outside of any ‘origin’, human or divine; in this, the idea of the call must be maintained – this is Derrida’s demand – through the rigor of a certain inhumanity. If demand seems a harsh or implacable word here, this is because Derrida, taking up the responsibility he assigns to the call as that which the call institutes, perceives in its singular and radical alterity a condition of our responsibility, which is that, in our response, we must recognise and so maintain [s]omething of this call of the other [which] must remain nonreappropriable, nonsubjectivable, and in a certain way, nonidentifiable. The call, its law, structure, origin-without-origin: all must remain absolutely other, absolutely singular, a sheer supposition. I cannot be certain in anything I write here that such a call is possible; none of the statements can be made with any certainty, although every observation and reflection must be made under the law of an insuperable bond: such a law does not leave us any choice. What I imagine is then the possibility of the impossible. In this the call and the point of its issuance, supposing this to be imaginable, is not to be 29

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Call determined as subject, but to remain forever problematic. Such is the significance of understanding the call aright in its otherness, thereby protect[ing] the other’s otherness, that the responsibility the idea of the call imposes on me is not, never, merely a theoretical imperative. Thus, impossible but necessary demand – the call of the call – sheer supposition must maintain itself, and so make possible the survival of the problematic as such, in the face of any accusation or misapprehension that such supposition, such problematisation, belong to or are of the order of the merely theoretical. There is no way out of this aporia, or, to approach this differently, in accepting the fragile, and barely conceivable belief in the possibility of the impossible as the expression of a particular, bare rigour of thought, having experienced the threshold, what remains as the responsibility to the call is a question of the most meagre faith. And this, in itself, would be the name for our responsibility for, and the name we give our response to, the call. Concerning this responsibility, in effect it is a question of perceiving that one is always after the call, but always before the law. Never on time with ourselves, as subjects of, subject to, the wholly other’s ‘interpellation’, the responsibility thus instituted by the call is ours prior to encountering or being involved with any specific, local, institutional or strategic ‘human’ responsibility or imperative. There is a difference here between the human condition of ‘being-prior-to’ particular situations and institutions, and the condition of Being as this is found always already as being-before-the-law. Derrida’s essay, ‘Before the Law’, on Kafka’s parable of the same name (published both as a short story and as an interpolated text in The Trial) addresses this.5 Reiterating Kafka’s title, ‘Vor dem Gestez’, but rendering it in French, ‘Devant la loi’, Derrida’s formal device illustrates in passing the law of iterability – that every ‘repetition’ functions in its communicability and the affirmation of the singularity of the mark only by marking repetition with a difference – while also playing on the priority, spatially and temporally, of titles, which announce themselves, and so remain, before any text, any subsequent reading, but which come to be reread in the light of the reading of 5

‘Before the Law’ (AL 181–220). Concerning the subject’s obligation or responsibility to the law, see additionally ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Avital Ronell (AL 221–52). Regarding the ‘anachrony of the self’ and the question of the archeoriginary condition of the call, one might also refer to the essay ‘The Time before First’ (D 330–47; DRWP 130–40).

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Call the text which the title both names and, in encrypted fashion, offers to read. The law of the title is thus analogous to an extent with that of the call: one is always after or before, but never on time, in one’s reading, and in one’s relation to that law. While Derrida’s consideration of Kafka’s text interrogates the law by which a text is determined as literary, the discussion also circles around the condition of one’s being ‘before the law’. The law, like the call, remains problematic, because it remains inaccessible as such, as does any true absolute origin. The before and after that is inextricably implicated in one’s subjectivity is always already a topology, a spatial as well as temporal determination of the self apropos the other, and the impossible, as a result of the unending demand or summons that the other issues to, imposes on, one. Such a relation is all the more fraught, impossible to resolve, but inescapable as far as the responsibility or obligation in this relation is concerned, because the other remains inaccessible. The other is only ‘known’ in my response, a response acknowledging my responsibility; in what I do is the other’s only appearance and my only relation to the other. As Derrida observes ‘[w]hat remains concealed and invisible in each law [and just before this remark he has nominated particular ‘laws’, ‘moral, political, natural, etc.’ which list echoes that in the citation concerning the call (moral, juridical, political)] is thus presumably the law itself, that which makes laws of these laws, the being-law of these laws. The question and the quest are ineluctable, rendering irresistible the journey toward the place and origin of law’.6 Thus, we find ourselves circling back as a result of this double principle of ineluctability and concealment to the origin of the call that comes from nowhere, but which institutes a responsibility, which imposes an obligation all the more insistent and intractable for all that the call remains nonreappropriable . . . a sheer supposition. Facing this, without the possibility of being face-to-face with the other, it has to be concluded of this ‘fiction’ of the call, which in its sheer, problematic suppositionality the other guards and protects, that the law ‘is even more frightening and fantastic, unheimlich or uncanny, than if it emanated from pure reason’.7 In short, a fantastical affabulation, the ‘impossible story of the impossible’.8

6 7 8

AL (192). AL (199). AL (200).

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Circle

Circle (GT 7–9) If there is any. The ‘gift’ – the very idea or possibility is and remains, for Derrida, uncertain, perhaps undecidable. If there is any gift, it must remain as the possibility of the impossible, and thought only as that which breaks with the conventional thought of what we call a ‘gift’, the ‘gift’. This phrase, if there is any, takes up and announces, in a supposition haunted by the impossible and the undecidable, the figure of the ‘there is’, a trope, for want of a better word, to which Derrida returns on a number of occasions, not only in Given Time, the text from which the extract being cited is taken, but elsewhere. Of that, more to come, but first, this question, and with it, the logic, of the gift, if there is any . . . The logic of the gift – if there is any – is complex, and counterintuitive on the surface of things at least. Let us assume though, that which Derrida wishes us to question, in order to begin; let us begin with the hypothesis that there is a gift, though not that the gift exists as such. I am not speaking of this or that gift, the existent thing you receive for your birthday, for some other anniversary, or for an act of kindness, just to enumerate the most obvious of instances in which an object is given by one and accepted by another. Behind this and all the other instances of the thing-being-given, there is that which, though not being a thing, being what Alain Badiou calls the ‘inexistent’,9 nevertheless is supposed – in our culture and in others also, the idea of the gift, of gift-giving, functions as a concept behind, within, the act of the transfer of an object involving giving and receiving. Hence my distinction between saying, on the one hand, there is the gift and, on the other, the gift exists. A specific thing exists, it has a material reality, but the ‘gift’, that logic and conceptual framework by which the thing is conveyed, does not, it has no existence, save as thought, and except as the truth of that thought. (Truth also, Badiou would have us understand, is an inexistent, and yet, while truth does not exist, it has no material existence, there is truth, truth there is.) If there is any gift, Derrida assures us – and in doing so, he unsettles the conventional unthought of the thought, by bringing that to 9

See Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), for sustained elaboration of the notion of the inexistent; in particular, in relation to Derrida’s thinking, refer to pp. 545–6. Also, with reference to the inexistent apropos ‘truth’, to which I allude, see the ‘Preface’, pp. 1–7.

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Circle light – this would no doubt be related to economy. No doubt – in the midst of caution, speculation, as a countersignature to the act of imagining the impossible, reflecting on the undecidable and positing the barest possibility of the inexistent, here is that which cannot be refuted: certainty, with as great a force as if it were economy itself. In this local manner, to propose a microreading of rhetorical form, that about which one has to posit the most provisional caution is placed in a dialectic, a relation, to that of which there can be no doubt. However, given that the figures in this singular example (gift, economy) are in this structural relation, it is also posited, again, with all the signs of doubt and wariness that the former, the gift, if there is any, [is] also that which interrupts economy[.] That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange. Neither expression of this meagre possibility is stated with any certainty but proposed as two questions. In this process, language works through the double, and seemingly paradoxical logic of the proposal, introducing in its movement an interruption, as the movement comes off the rails, thereby marking the logic of the one with a logic of the other, and so introducing in the hiatus an experience of the aporia, even though, of course, one has to remind oneself of an earlier question: Is it possible to undergo or to experience the aporia, the aporia as such? As the act of writing interrupts what it sets in motion, so it performs that which the very possibility of is being supposed, questioned and worked through. An other thought arrives from within the one thought – it gives itself to be thought – to displace and decentre the otherwise inescapable logic of the convention of the relation. The circle is inscribed only to appear to rupture itself from within its inscription, as a consequence of that act of tracing the circle. We are witness therefore, by analogy, to [t]hat which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange, and in this suspension, [t]hat which opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, . . . so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return, the circle is, if not closed, then completed in such a manner that the inauguration of that rhetorical and writerly turn, we find reiterated and opened to another direction, another trajectory, the motif by which we had begun: If there is gift, in which a phantom supplement arrives, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given . . .); in this arrival the truth of the gift, if there is any, is affirmed. No longer a question, without doubt, that which names the inexistent of the gift is traced. Nothing as such, there is nonetheless the given, which is to say the that-which. That 33

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Circle to which Derrida is directing our attention is the impossible, the very possibility of the impossible. Not impossible but the impossible. We are dealing here with otherwise unimaginable, only indirectly conceived tropes, without form, nothing as such: inexistent, let me insist on this. Hence: The very figure of the impossible. It announces itself, gives itself to be thought as the impossible. There is, it might be posited that which is given, if there is to be the arrival of the impossible, that which gives itself. Again, there is something to be said concerning the there-is, this having a relation to the that-which, but again this must be deferred. The gift then never comes down simply to something purchased, already made, and transferred from one person to another. This transference and the premises by which it takes place are already written into, and belong to the circular structure, the endless selfclosing turn, marked by the common measure, by a symmetry and reciprocity of the closed system, and with that the necessary movement of circulation and process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of a return to the departure. Thus it is that the figure of the circle is essential to economics. The figure of the circle – we are again speaking of figural as much as material structures and logics – is that which encircles and besieges us with the intractable tyranny of what is ‘common’: common measures, common sense, circular and circulating in a ready-made thought the acceptance of which is marked by a certain bêtise. Against the persistence of such modes of thinking and representation (the two belong to another circular relation that is powerful and ineluctable), Derrida’s desire for the exit posits a counterlogic, motivated by, directing us towards, the impossible. But the impossible, as this is expressed through the singular figure of that which gives itself, that which is the given of the gift is much more violent than might be perceived initially. That it interrupts we already know. Inexhaustible, its power, if it has any, is not simply to be found in the gesture of suspending economic calculation. Having a relation of foreignness to the circle of economic exchange, calculation and symmetry, and moreover implicated in the idea of representation (the economy of representation and the representation of economy) itself – the circle qua representation of time, [o]ne of the most powerful and ineluctable representations, at least in the history of metaphysics, in which [t]ime would always be a process of a movement in the form of the circle or the sphere – the given, the impossible, if there is any, is that which does not merely interrupt 34

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Circle or suspend. This figure has a violent instantaneity analogous with burglary, with breaking and entering, or rather breaking and exiting, a breaking out. This is the desire, desire for the exit, the desire for the violence of the instant, and only an instant, of effraction. The temporal measure is interrupted, and it is perhaps only on the condition of this instant that no longer is part of the circle of time and economy, that, if there is any, there is the gift, the given of an other thought. The other of economic thought, the other of the circle, its instant is given to be thought, in an instant without measure. It is that which signals some arrival, some arrivant. That which Derrida addresses is, once more, not some thing, some existent. It is difficult to speak of ‘it’ without using a common language (‘it’, ‘thing’) that implies ontic condition or ontological status. ‘It’ is ‘that which’ is there. In signalling the there is, something other, at a remove, not here, known spatially through a difference from presence, is acknowledged. That which takes place and is irreducible to some thing or phenomenon – the given of the idea of the gift – is that which signals the truth of a particular conceptual mode of apprehension, having a relation to the normative mode of that concept’s inscription into representation in the history of metaphysics; but which truth though having a structural relation is, in keeping a relation of foreignness . . . a relation without relation of familiar foreignness is the singular enunciation and arrival in that instant of the impossible. Thought gives us to think the other of its motion, to interrupt that motion with the arrival of this other thought, thought of the other. If there is any gift, it is that which is the impossible, the given of the gift; it is, simply, the there is. The figure of the there-is involves a translation in which something remains untranslatable. Something is carried over but is not there in the figure before you. Unavailable to ‘representation’ from one language to another, the figure is one of that which, though untranslated, has to do with giving, the given, and with being, with what makes possible thinking, the gift, time. A translation of il y a [there is], itself a translation in Derrida’s writing of the German phrase es gibt [it gives], there is might also be read, or one might also read indirectly in it – we are, in a different sense, dealing with or treating of a relation to foreignness, and, with that, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness, whereby the transport or transfer across languages never accommodates entirely the other of the foreign, which therefore remains irrecuperable in any exchange – that which is [the] given. What is being addressed then, to return to the thinking of the 35

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Circumcision gift in such a way that the circle can be interrupted for an instant comes down to a matter of thinking, ‘a matter’, Derrida observes in Given Time, ‘precisely of thinking’. One must think the there is/it gives ‘between the impossible and the unthinkable’.10 In working on the reserves of the exchange and the remainder between il y a and es gibt, Derrida has in mind the use of the German expression as it first makes its appearance for Heidegger in Being and Time. As Derrida goes on to point out, the German idiomatic phrases es gibt Sein and es gibt Zeit are translated into French as ‘il y a l’être’ and ‘il y a le temps’ (GT 20). It gives Being/It gives Time become There is Being/There is Time. Were one to ‘return’ the translation to German and so close the circle, il y a might become ça donne [it gives], in which the ça [it] ‘is not a thing’; ‘it’ names the inexistent giving, ‘and it is in this giving that gives but without giving anything and without anyone giving anything – nothing but Being and time (which are nothing)’ (GT 20). And thus thinking, an other thinking, an other of common sense (which might be an idiom or a translation for bêtise, for a fall from thinking into the closure of the unthought that passes for conventional wisdom), breaks the circle, breaks with the mode of exchange, the economy of thought that encircles and besieges us. This at least is the desire, that such an instant might arrive, might come to pass, and with that, an instant of effraction might have taken place.

Circumcision (JD 59–60) For years, though, Derrida confesses to have been going round in circles. This being so, who has not? That being said, such a motion both describes an apparent constant return to where one has been, and in making this movement, moving over the trace of an earlier circumference, reiterating or restaging without ever returning to an earlier line as such. There is a question of attempting to recollect, to re-member the self, to put the self together again, despite the inescapable conclusion that such a gesture, such an inscription, inscription as in incision – an incision in memory seeking to recall to memory the other self on whom memory alights, all those other selves by which one might become obsessed – cuts one off as much as it can be said to re-join, re-member. For the turn, turning returning, makes a mark 10

Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (GT 10). Any further references are given parenthetically in the text.

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Circumcision and wears away as much as it traces what is always already traced. In doing so, in seeking to mark all the more vividly a circular line without beginning or end, one, being always where one is, always covering the same ground, never getting anywhere, but, nevertheless, never doing anything except erasing as one reiterates the trace of the self re-membered; in re-marking the ghost of a line, one cuts deeper and deeper. Writing wears away as much as it leaves the mark. This leaves one to ask, as one circles: what would the writing of a circumcision, the writing of circumcisions, writing as circumcision, more than one, look like? What is the event of circumcision, does an event takes place? In what forms might the syntactical and grammatical schema appear, how would writing be treated, how would one treat writing and treat of a writing, an inscription that is also a circumscription, a circumcision, or, as it is called here circumcision? There is a self, writing of the self, writing the self, which, in writing, circumvents the direct fiction of representation, and its equally fictive directness, its ‘truth’, the true lie of narrative representation, in order to write otherwise, to inscribe apophatically the trace of the self, cut off from itself, and announcing itself in every line, in every circumscriptive gesture. Clause after clause, clause before clause, marking, re-marking, cutting and linking, gesturing backwards and forwards – in which direction should one read? This is undecidable. So, the autobiographical trace, in which there is always that which is and must remain other, the other must remain nonreappropriable, nonsubjectivable, and in a certain way, nonidentifiable, a sheer supposition. We seem to be getting ahead of ourselves, even though we are going, or appear to be going, nowhere in this vicus of recirculation. One must acknowledge though that the passage in question flirts – in all seriousness – with, but perhaps also in the wake of, a haunted autobiography, an auto-bio-spectrography, with the ghost of a self, a self cut off from itself, becoming itself blindly, unknowingly, becoming-subject to a cut. I am circumcised therefore I am. This is not a matter of reflection, even though it would seem to be a singular moment for reflection around a single event. The language plays on that movement between blindness and insight: not to see myself being seen, the writer assures himself, all with a view to the one unique act, the inscription/incision producing the unique one that I know perfectly well took place, one time, they told me. Knowing what took place never produces the desired viewpoint, there is no perspective, and memory borne out of narration will always leave the subject separated from its inception, from its coming to be in the 37

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Circumcision moment of being cut, being written, the self written on the self in the act of being cut. Instead, therefore, blindly, there is the desire to take onself as witness, always blind to the unique moment, in an effort to re-member, to bring self together again – this is the impossible; everything tends towards a writing with which one will never do anything; which all the gathering, collecting, annotating, inscribing, collating, indexing will fail to cause to bring about, because every transcription about all the circumcisions in the world will never lead one to oneself being written, being circumcised, inscribed, incised. It is as if there is a call from the other of the self to oneself, and yet, as a result of having always already been separated by the decision of the circumcision, one will never know the origin of that call, the origin of the call that comes from nowhere, which institutes both an impossible responsibility and a ghostly narration of the other, a fantastical affabulation. Circumcision names as well as inscribes a fictional modality, it cultivates this fiction. Pause over this phrase, fantastical affabulation. To fabulate is to talk or narrate in fables, to speak in a mythical mode of representation, and hence indirectly, perhaps through the invention of allegory, by which the self is presented indirectly, as other, as an other more closely, intimately, refiguring, re-membering the self, than would be the case in any so-called straightforward, documentary account (as if the self could be reduced to, weighed up by, calculated through, the facts, so-called). To tell onself, to remember oneself to oneself as a myth, to say, for example, for years I have been going round in circles. (And, pausing for a moment before continuing back around the circular route, it has to be speculated, to risk a little myth-making, to read fabulously as it were, that the phrase ‘for years’, spoken in French, coming to us from French, in a foreign tongue that moves the words around the mouth, moving, the tongue around the mouth, describing circularity in and through the buccal ‘O’ . . .; do we not hear, or perhaps wish to hear another’s mouth, witness another’s pen, in the act of seeking to re-member the self, one who strives to re-member a lost time, and so bear witness? For years . . . for a long time . . .). Thus, fabulation, but affabulation? An obscure word, one that is lost to the present, so remote from everyday use as to take on the property of fable or myth itself, and to appear as if it were a new coinage; to affabulate is to assign or to attribute to legend, to attribute fabulously, the prefix af- intensifying even as it distances, cutting one off from, the otherness of the subject of fable, the other of fable, fable of the other. This prefix af- arrives 38

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Circumcision from an older French in the modification of various words, among which a-, ad- and other related prefixes have been conjoined, such additions serving in French where no Latin prefix was valid, and which therefore served as what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as ‘mechanical or pedantic’ additions; in short, an almost entirely ‘fictional’ or fantastic suturing, a false re-membering if you will, the linguistic equivalent of a phantom limb or member. If this appears just too fabulous, remember this is mere speculation, merely a gesture of circling around certain suggestive possibilities, itself akin to a fantastical affabulation. Thus the suspicion of cultivation, of speaking well, of cultivating a civil or courteous, complaisant or benign mode of address, of speaking affably as well as through affabulation, fantastically so. Such affability, and such affabulation, belongs to an effort both to re-member, and so mark oneself by a desire that is also an obsession. Doubtless. But it is perhaps to circumscribe oneself, to speak, or to write, circumspectly. For the ‘I’ confesses as much. Its enunciation marks the page, the self, with an affirmation that is also affabulation. Everytime one says ‘I’, writes ‘I’, one speaks singularly of the self as a fiction, as if what one calls the self could be circumscribed, ex-cited. As Derrida suggests elsewhere: [T]he “I” constitutes the very form of resistance. Each time this identity announces itself, each time a belonging circumscribes me, . . . someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, you’re caught . . . One ought to be able to formalize the law of this insurmountable gap. This is a little what I am always doing. Identification is a difference to itself, a difference with/ of itself. Thus with, without, and except itself.11

‘I’ is thus both incisive and ex-cited, simultaneously the enunciation of relation and non-relation; it re-marks a certain cut or wound, while being also the gift of articulation from the other, the origin of which is undecidable. It announces and enacts a double location that is both interior and exterior, passing silently between these situations. ‘My’ identity, what I call ‘my identity’, is subject to events of resonant transference from incomprehensible addresses to unknowable destinations which leave their trace or mark on ‘identity’, and which determine the structuring of identity, while revealing that no identity is ever simply there but is always manifestly unstable and contingent on alterity. The self can never re-member itself therefore. 11

PI (340).

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Circumcision Yet, as we have seen, for all that the desire is remarked in order to bear witness and so re-member, the question involves a certain mark, a trace which is also a cut, a one-time incision to be reiterated over and over again, a circumcision which signs the name ‘Jacques Derrida’. Searching everywhere, gathering together and confessing to accumulating in the attic, my ‘sublime’, documents, iconography, notes, learned ones and naïve ones, dream narratives or philosophical dissertations, applied transcription of encyclopedic, sociological, historical, psychoanalytical treatises will always amount to nothing, save for reminding oneself that one is cut off from the origin. So, circumcision as signature, an irrevocable event taking place in the moment of inscription. This is confessed elsewhere, in response to a question concerning Circumfession (and what the text that goes by that name turns around), that internal margin written by Jacques Derrida for Jacques Derrida: Under the name circumcision, I am often asking myself . . . whether there is a ‘real’ event that I can attempt, not to remember of course, but to reelaborate, to reactivate in a sort of memory without representation – or whether this is a lure, a simulacrum . . . a screen destined for the figural projection of so many other events of the same type . . . Circumcision means, among other things, a certain mark that, coming from others and submitted to in absolute passivity, remains on the body, visible and no doubt indissociable from the proper name which is likewise received from the other. It is also the moment of the signature (the other’s as well as one’s own) by which one lets oneself be inscribed in a community or in an ineffaceable alliance: birth of the subject . . . rather than ‘biological’ birth. Every time there is this mark and this name . . . the figure at least of a circumcision is imposed on me.12

Circumcision, the moment of the double signature: the arrival, the address and the mark of the other, as well as the naming of the self by the other and the communication between the two or, at least, the announcement of a possible between; nothing less than the application of the name, public and private. Circumcision is then a figure of the partage, the simultaneous mark or trace of the sharing and dividing of identity. The other applies to identity. Circumcision is administered, brought to bear. Perhaps, even, we can say that circumcision is, in a certain way, an envois from an unknown location – the gift of the other – the gift of the other, the arrival of which promises each time to determine the identity of the self as the place between, 12

PI (340–1).

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Conjuration in-between the other and an ‘ineffaceable alliance’. For example, there is the birth of the subject ‘Jacques Derrida’; ‘Jacques Derrida’, this proper name, is applied. Circumcision is an act of giving; ‘Jacques Derrida’ is given. ‘Jacques Derrida’ thus names, gives name and form to, a singularity. However, it is a mistake to believe that a singularity equates simply with a who. As Derrida observes, ‘the singularity of the “who” is not the individuality of a thing that would be identical to itself . . . It is a singularity that dislocates or divides itself in gathering itself to answer to the other, whose call somehow precedes its own identification with itself’.13 This much is confessed: ‘I’ announce that which is given, that which is grafted or written on me by an other. I am the subject of a call, for which I have responsibility.

Conjuration (SM 50–1) To conjure: an old verb, the meaning of which was not to do with, as it is now, illusions, sleights of hand and so on performed by an entertainer. Its earliest uses concerned swearing oaths, a juror, for example, being someone who takes or swears so. At a certain moment, conjuration came to signify supernatural processes, such as the invocation of spirits or demons, or the causing of events to occur supernaturally. At the same time, though, to conjure could mean to exorcise, to be rid of such unnatural forces. Thus conjuration operates in a double manner, simultaneously. This simultaneity, and with it the ambiguity and ambivalence that such instability associated with the trope and term ‘conjures’, is at work in Derrida’s critique of those who, in these times (the times being the last decade of the twentieth century, the years following the removal of the Berlin Wall, when Specters of Marx, as it became, was presented in an earlier form by Derrida as a two-part plenary address on 22 April 1993, for a conference titled ‘Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective’, at the University of California, Riverside; SM ix), conjure Marxism in a supposedly post-Marxist world, and conjure it repeatedly, with a strange anxiety, only to seek to conjure it away, to exorcise the very thing, which, though supposedly ‘dead’, over, finished, bankrupt, redundant, nevertheless hovered like a ghost in the machine of global politics, or as if it were a spectre at the feast of the New World Order. Thus it is, our extract begins with a reflection on these times, when a new ‘world order’ seeks to stabilize a new, necessarily new 13

PI (261).

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Conjuration disturbance . . . by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony. Derrida’s diagnosis of the symptomatic, perhaps pathological fervour of those who affirm the new order, and those who seek to install with much irrational force this unprecedented form of hegemony, situates from the outset a desire for a stability which, with the ‘fall of communism’, had already come to be, supposedly. The chief symptom of something being rotten in the state of an alleged post-Marxist, post-Communist world (as if Marxism and Communism were the same thing) resides in what Derrida identifies as a novel form of war, resembling, and taking on the form therefore, of a great ‘conjuration’ against Marxism, which, let us remind ourselves, is haunted by that simultaneous counter-conjuration (without which the ‘conjurationagainst’ could not take place), a ‘conjurement’ of Marxism. Seeing the other everywhere, we seek to destroy, and so lay to rest the spirit of the other; but such is the increasingly febrile sense of an other that this alterity must be called up in order to banish it all over again, in a strange iterable, and self-justifying circular logic. Always anew there is a new mobilization against, and, it seems, in anticipation of the idea of a new International. Of what does the new International consist? Nothing, save for the idea, which resides in the minds of, and is generated or engendered by, those who, in installing an unprecedented form of hegemony, need the new, necessarily new disturbance of such an idea, which they, the new ‘world order’ (or those who claim to speak for such an order, to represent an ‘it’ which they are in the process of constructing and projecting), will continue to represent . . . and to combat . . . by exorcising it. While we might suggest – and not without reason in response to the ‘modern’ phenomenon defined as ‘spin’ – that politicians, if not politics, in these times (that is to say in the times after the Berlin Wall), and also in the times in which I write (are we not still in the same epoch?), are readable as exercising modes of representation given to sleight of hand, legerdemain, along with all the verbal and tele-technological substitutes for, as well as being metaphors and metonymies of, the magician’s stage act, that ‘conjuring’, the term, conjures, as it were the ideal image of political activity in the West, it should not be overlooked that Derrida stresses both the old and the new. In effect, this discourse on conjuring is marked by a simultaneous novelty and archaism; to put this differently, the ancient resides within, haunts the novel. The privilege given to the older senses of conjuring – distinguished as conjuration and conjurement – functions in two or three ways at least: first, it conjures with the spectral 42

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Conjuration force of a language that, in being very old, remains invisible to the everyday ‘modern’ perception of political discourse and practice; second, it inaugurates the invention of what is always already there in its own doubled tongue but which goes unobserved: the power of a non-logical force, something other, the so-called ‘supernatural’, unavailable to the logic, economy or ontology of the political, which at a certain ex-centric centre within that onto-logic nonetheless serves in its alterity and occlusion to maintain the work of the political; and, third, in invoking or ‘conjuring’ that which is [v]ery ancient in both the term and the practice of conjuration, which is the act that consists in swearing, taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility, in short, committing oneself in a performative fashion, we have brought before us the insuperable link between the word and the world, language and politics, theoria and praxis. What is all the more disturbing about the revenance of conjuration and conjurement, which attention to the term only serves to make visible and so to foreground, in the face of ‘rational’ and ‘practical’ actions, oaths, behaviours, events and practices on a global scale, that which motivates such political effects against which we feel ourselves helpless, and without an adequate counter-discourse, is that this very ancient process, and all that it can be said to conjure, is now all the more powerful in its haunting return as a result of the latest spectral media, the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, tele-communications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity, that which . . . assures . . . the phenomenality of the political). Far from being in an age of science and technology, and of the assured bêtise of empirical rationalism, we are, more than ever, subject to the phenomenal, the phantasmal, the spectral. This is not to say that there is a ‘real’ ghost, there never was; rather it is to acknowledge that the media are also mediums: they conjure spectral, tele-technological images, languages, icons with an instantaneity, or quasiinstantaneity, which, in displacing this frontier between the public and private, admit the spectre of the political to conjure in us the worry, fragility and anxiety of an unseen, hostile and ghostly force: The enemy to be conjured away . . . is, to be sure, called Marxism . . . Though produced through modern technological devices, the medium of the media relies on a spectrality that is of the technology in question, and by which, to our televisions, radios, through the Internet, to our computers, hand-held devices, and so on, a spectralised world is being endlessly delivered and projected; there and not there; neither living nor dead, present nor absent. The medium 43

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Corpus spectralizes; belonging to no stable order or identity, the destabilising ghostly force, termed a hauntology, a spectral and phantasmic power irreducible to an ontology, makes everything possible today, in these times. To speak therefore of conjuring, conjuration, spectres in general or spectres of Marx, is not an idle intellectual game. No mere playing with words, no mere rhetoric, the double-trope of conjuration/conjurement brings back and calls up a world of politics that haunts our every action.

Corpus (S/S 24–6) Already, an immense corpus is implied, imminent, a body particularly hard to define with respect to its limits. Whether this has been my intention, whether or not I was aware of this; whether I have sought to avoid all statements or remarks suggestive of the idea, implication and imminence are inescapable. It might even be said that these are the conditions of the reader, if not reading. While reading, reading of the proper kind, good reading, reading which admits to itself that reading is inexhaustible, one never comes to the end of a reading, and so one can never claim, one day, to have read this or that text; while reading is never done or over as such, the reader remains another matter entirely. For the reader the corpus remains. As a result, implication and imminence are inescapable, the corpus being that after which, in the imagined wake of which, some readers read. The imminence of the corpus is a phantom projection, being the imminence-desire of the reader, who wishes to know, to define, to understand in a nutshell, and so to encapsulate. Yet what remains? What remains! For it remains the case that the corpus is as hard to define as ‘it’ is, or can be said to be, immense, illimitable. This is a corpus of writing, in writing, to which we assign, and to which, in legal as well as other terms, is signed by the signature and proper name (the two are not equivalent) ‘Jacques Derrida’. The particular ‘book’ you are holding, and in particular the text of which it is comprised, consists of merely a few of the words that make up the woof of this illimitable corpus ‘Derrida’; however, it neither places limits on this corpus, nor, in making each of its unreasonable and somewhat violent excisions – excisions that begin as incisions, decisions, circumcisions, which both take from the body as well as write on that body, rewrite, translate, invent the corpus – does it pretend to a comprehensive suturing of all of those dismembered and re-membered fragments. The corpus, if there is such a thing (and we 44

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Corpus behave as if there were), remains nonreappropriable. The very idea of the corpus is sheer supposition, a fantastical affabulation and any act of writing that plays on the corpus engages with, responding to, the body in question, pretending to know its limits, its ontology, how it can be determined, where to draw the line, and so tell the impossible story of the impossible. All that I have said so far flirts with the supposition and the act implied in supposition that [w]e always pretend to know what a corpus is all about. Were I never to have mentioned the proper name or signature ‘Jacques Derrida’, the ‘author’, and by some form of supplement, the biography, is and remains designated. In inventing my response to the event of the signature I have sought not merely to turn self-reflexively around the question of the corpus and the signature implicit in that, or as that which authorises the very idea of a corpus; I have too attempted to begin the work of thinking the problem and the question of the corpus in relation to the event of the signature in such a manner that, while not pretend[ing] to know what a corpus is all about, nonetheless draws attention through the self-reflexive foregrounding of this project – which involves a foregrounding also of self-reflexion – to that very pretence: [w]hen we put the texts . . . on our program, we are assured . . . of knowing at least what the link is, be it natural or contractual, between a given text, a given so-called author and his name designated as proper. Into the pretence, and considering as he annotates in brief the complex web of assumed connections, Derrida picks at the various threads, enough to expose each to our view, as if the pretence and the so-called corpus on which it is premised were a tapestry-body, or as if the corpse, once sutured, had a form of life all its own: the proper name; the idea of the ‘author’; the relation between these, and between each of these and the text, taken as ‘given’; the legalcontractual bind by which the proper name is designated as that of the ‘author’, but which, far from simply conferring authority – supposing this to be the case, which in fact is very far from the truth, save for the so-called protection of so-called rights – serves, instead, to ‘translate’ the proper name into the figure that stands in for the socalled author in order to make that author into a subject of the law, in this instance of contractual obligation, subject to the requirements and demands, the property rights of a given publisher; the ‘natural’ figure of the one who writes, nominally considered, for whom the proper name signifies and by which act of writing or signature event, a singularity is conferred, on both text and so-called author, so-called 45

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Corpus textual producer – as if a text, supposing it to be determined as the equivalent of a book, and therefore having finite limits, being itself a corpus, but also being a member or fragment of the larger corpus, taken as all the ‘works’ of a so-called author, came down to just this one or that one. And this is not even to admit the biography (even if we dismiss the author’s biography . . .). But then the tapestry is woven according to a given institution, to wit, the academic conventions of literary biography [which] presuppose at least one certainty – the one concerning the signature, the link between the text and the proper name of the person who retains the copyright. Literary biography begins after the contract . . . after the event of the signature. Following the unstitching of the corpus-weave, what might appear to some a counterintuitive proposition is situated as the necessary corollary or consequence of such a ‘reduction’: literary biography rests on the translation of the proper name from what it is to the author’s signature, to an entity in law, the signing of a contract being a signature event, and an event that exposes or brings out (e-venire) in a singular, though iterable manner this binding transformation. The event changes irrevocably, this is the condition of an event, or one of its conditions: that it cause to come about a transfiguration or remaking. The proposition goes further, for it implies in its apprehension of the event of the signature that what is called literary biography is not only an act of writing the life of the author, but instead that the ‘author’ is, itself, a legal fiction, a corpus produced through the ‘literary’ or literary-legal production of the notion of ‘the author’, a figure which, though differently fictional, is nevertheless a fiction, or at least a fictional subject, as much as any text produced in the name of that author. An illustration might be risked. Take a particular scene from Derrida, the film directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman.14 14

Derrida, dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (Zeitgeist Films, 2002). For the purposes of this text, I am referring both to the film and to the book, also named Derrida, in which the film-to-text adaptation is to be found, details of which are as follows: Derrida: Screenplays and Essays on the Film, foreword Geoffrey Hartman, essays by Nicholas Royle, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, interviews with Jacques Derrida, film-to-text adaptation Gil Kofman (New York: Routledge, 2005). The film-to-text adaptation (51–110) from which I will cite, or to which I will refer (referring implicitly at the same time to the scene from the film, which serves as the illustration or example), will be cited parenthetically in the text. Already, this footnote, intended to conform to academic conventions makes available, if one cares to read it, a complication of the notion

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Corpus The scene in question might be designated the second, following images of Paris and the Seine seen from the Métro, but before the opening title sequence (51–7).15 The first scene ends, and we are transferred to an interior, Derrida’s home. As Kofman’s transcript observes, ‘[s]cenes alternate between footage of Derrida in his house in the morning intercut with News Footage documenting his reputation and renown’ (53). As Derrida moves between an enclosed patio and the interior of the house, being spoken to by Marguerite Derrida (off-camera) and searching for his keys, before putting on his jacket and turning to speak, in a language not his own, English, to the camera about the artificiality or, perhaps, ‘foreignness’ of the situation and his sense of inhospitality (‘Forgive me for not even saying hello. It’s a bit difficult . . .’), a succession of commentaries and cuts (cuts which are stitched into the filmic motion) from, in turn, Polish, British and Belgian television, present snapshot or postcard observations on ‘Derrida’ as, respectively, a ‘great thinker’ of the twentieth century (53), a ‘French philosopher’, supposedly the ‘founder of the post-structuralist mode of analysis known as deconstruction’ (55) and someone who, born ‘in El Biar, Algeria’, has a name ‘now known on five continents’ (55). The second of the three, from the BBC, places a voice over an image of Writing and Difference, as if the text and the French philosopher who is a ‘founder’ were the same. Meanwhile, Derrida, the other Derrida, let us call him the Derrida to whom the proper name is assigned, finds his keys and, with the camera person, can leave home. Without having the space to explore questions of private and public, the question of the key, voice as distinct to visual image, and a host of other matters that tempt one to an abyssal analysis, we have to pose a deliberately naive question: which Derrida is Derrida, or are there more than one (and, therefore, no one Derrida, as such)? Is the proper

15

of a corpus, and the various links between, and concerning, the natural and contractual, between a given text, a given so-called author, and his name designated as proper. In other contexts, the placement of this, and the preceding scene, both prior to the titles, can be said to be in a marginal relation to the film, though in the film, they can be read as raising the question whether they perform a preface to the corpus of the film proper, as signified by the placement of the title sequence. Were we to suppose the two scenes in question as in a margin, constituting a margin, or as a filmic translation of the preface or foreword, we would be obliged to ask about their identity, their location, what they might be read as having to say, or indeed withholding, apropos the body of the film ‘proper’.

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Corpus name Derrida more assignable to the man with the white hair looking for his keys, or this ‘French philosopher’, ‘founder of deconstruction’, and ‘great thinker’ who belongs to the legacy of the European philosophical heritage? How does one suppose the link, particularly if [l]iterary biography [or filmic biography for that matter, the fiction of a life that narration, whether in one textual form or another, made of words or moving images, produces and constructs or projects] begins after the contract? And what are the implications where the proper name becomes that of a film and its subject, as well as being, already, the proper name and signature of a so-called author? One could easily lose count of all the Derridas proposed here, unless of course one becomes one of those critics or philologists who do not as such ask themselves a single question of the kind just articulated. What the scene from the film presents, and indeed what it performs, what it offers as the filmic example of a performative speech act, is the work of the abyssal machinery that engages in the commerce between said author and his proper name, with all the paradoxes of name and reference, of nomination and description, and so forth, to which a certain Derrida, in a certain manner calls to our attention through a reflection on the corpus. In the face of any habeas corpus, in fact before any such writ is issued or can be issued in the name of literary biography as a form the laws and conventions of which are well known and equally well rehearsed, Derrida’s meditation on the assumptions concerning the corpus in relation to the event of the signature offer a perspective on the absence of any corpus; or, to argue this from another perspective, that the corpus is a fiction, assumed a priori but constituted a posteriori from the dubious, fragmentary evidence (dubious because fragmentary) available and gathered in the event that the proper name becomes refigured as the proper signature of the author, so-called. In none of the maintenance of such a fiction is there a consideration of language, nor of the logic of the unconscious, whether this language or this unconscious belong either to Derrida (the author, the subject) or, in the example given, those belonging to the film-makers. One might argue that Derrida writes his publications, but then it should be asked whether, and to what extent, Derrida is the ‘author’ of Derrida, the documentary; to what degree are Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick the ‘authors’ of Derrida or Derrida, one Derrida, several Derridas, all of whom will never be suturable or reassemblable as the authoritative Derrida? As regards the event of the signature [and] the abyssal machinery of this operation, which is already implicated and 48

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Death imminent in the scene to which I have referred, the question becomes one of what one can assign to the scene, and to what, strictly speaking, takes place between the proper and the non-proper in that one brief moment. Putting aside the question of whether Derrida searching for his keys and turning to the camera belongs to a proper notion of the Derridean corpus (supposing there is such a thing), or indeed to a ‘proper Derrida’, there must even be a question here of the ‘writing’ of the film, its language, as it belongs to the commerce between the author and his proper name. Who authors this scene? Granted that the editing, undertaken by Kirby Dick and Matt Clarke, but not Amy Ziering Kofman, places various cuts together as an assemblage, this might be said to be signed by the film-makers, or some of the filmmakers. But, to what extent is there a conscious or an unconscious logic at work in the constitution? And, if we were to read the various juxtapositions as being in some ways indebted to or informed by the film-makers’ (or some of the film-makers’) reading of the Derridean text (for want of a better phrase), to what extent is it even valid to speak of Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, Matt Clarke, Kirsten Johnson (one camera operator), Gil Kofman (another camera operator and the transcriber), as the ‘authors’? Is Derrida the author? It is no longer a question of whose corpus it is, but rather a matter of whether the corpus is not wholly fictional, a phantasm of convention and institution, law and propriation, property and the proper.

D Death (LLF 32–3) In his essay ‘The Uncanny’, Sigmund Freud writes of the profound disturbance occasioned by the idea of death, one of the scarce matters ‘upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times’. ‘Two things’, continues Freud, ‘account for our conservatism: the strength of our original emotional reaction to it, and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it.’16 Death 16

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ [‘Das Unheimliche’] (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Volume XVII (1917–19): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217–56 (at pp. 241–2).

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Death imminent in the scene to which I have referred, the question becomes one of what one can assign to the scene, and to what, strictly speaking, takes place between the proper and the non-proper in that one brief moment. Putting aside the question of whether Derrida searching for his keys and turning to the camera belongs to a proper notion of the Derridean corpus (supposing there is such a thing), or indeed to a ‘proper Derrida’, there must even be a question here of the ‘writing’ of the film, its language, as it belongs to the commerce between the author and his proper name. Who authors this scene? Granted that the editing, undertaken by Kirby Dick and Matt Clarke, but not Amy Ziering Kofman, places various cuts together as an assemblage, this might be said to be signed by the film-makers, or some of the filmmakers. But, to what extent is there a conscious or an unconscious logic at work in the constitution? And, if we were to read the various juxtapositions as being in some ways indebted to or informed by the film-makers’ (or some of the film-makers’) reading of the Derridean text (for want of a better phrase), to what extent is it even valid to speak of Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, Matt Clarke, Kirsten Johnson (one camera operator), Gil Kofman (another camera operator and the transcriber), as the ‘authors’? Is Derrida the author? It is no longer a question of whose corpus it is, but rather a matter of whether the corpus is not wholly fictional, a phantasm of convention and institution, law and propriation, property and the proper.

D Death (LLF 32–3) In his essay ‘The Uncanny’, Sigmund Freud writes of the profound disturbance occasioned by the idea of death, one of the scarce matters ‘upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times’. ‘Two things’, continues Freud, ‘account for our conservatism: the strength of our original emotional reaction to it, and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it.’16 Death 16

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ [‘Das Unheimliche’] (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Volume XVII (1917–19): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217–56 (at pp. 241–2).

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Death is simultaneously das heimlich and das unheimlich, the secret that is known and unknown. It is familiar, both as a cultural ritual and as the spectre of mortality, yet at the same time radically unknowable as an experience; this simultaneity produces the experience of the uncanny and, like the uncanny it engenders, death remains irreducible to either term. In the context of his final interview with Jean Birnbaum, Derrida spoke of death in terms that recalled those of his friend and recalled in their echo the shadow of that friend, Roland Barthes, whose own death he had addressed in a haunting fashion within a speech of fragments called up by a response, or fidelity, to Barthes and the call of his thinking. Barthes returns there like the other inside Derrida, but also enacting the death of Derrida through his effacement as the author, a violence the latter speaks of in this interview.17 Speaking of death, Derrida appears to call it up and name it as the death of the author, an abjuring of control that also evokes a paradox of fidelity; he admits that out of a concern for fidelity, as you say, at the moment of leaving a trace I cannot but make it available to whomever: I cannot even address it in a singular fashion to someone. Fidelity is thus a question of deconstruction, as it happens in the work but also as the work, and the writer must take account of it in order to remain faithful to the law of writing; and yet this fidelity is something like a responsibility, a response to the trace. The condition of the trace is that it might both be iterable, available to repetition, and at the same time a singular mark. In leaving that singular mark, the author does not direct it, either in terms of intending its meaning or directing it towards a recipient; rather, writing moves through the author as the trace of the trace of his being. Like the uncanny, the trace of différance is that which is other within the self, preventing the self being thought on the basis of presence. Writing calls forth that trace of archi-writing, and leaves it in its trace. Though the trace may be conceived as a singular mark – as evidence of the otherness within that destabilises individual identity while at the same marking it as singular by binding it to that alterity – the opening out of writing means that it cannot but be addressed to singularity: the coming of the other, or becoming other, whether within the author or a readership, and within the trace itself as its constitution, which precludes identity from a predication upon 17

This allusion seems to shadow that of the plural deaths Derrida alludes to in his essay ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’; see WM (31–68) and PIO I (264–98).

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Death presence. The meaning of the trace is then in a state of becoming plural, as is its destination: the demand of the other forbids its being addressed in a singular fashion to someone, because the alterity upon which singularity is constituted, and the respect for alterity it entails, recognise the possibility for this plurality as the condition of its constitution through différance. This death of the author in the refusal of a final signified and recipient is yet expressed as a necessity realised in terms of a grief, in a paradox of fidelity. A fidelity to the trace, and by extension to deconstruction, is only elicited by the traducing of a faithfulness to the idea of the addressee; [e]ach time, however faithful one might want to be, one ends up betraying the singularity of the other whom one is addressing. The iterability of the trace always contains the possibility of redirection towards the other and towards another, yet that condition is also always already inscribed in the body of the one writing, the one who cannot control his gestures either in their destination nor even at the very moment of their constitution as and by différance, and as he is effaced by that différance and becomes the site of their traversal. In this sense, fidelity calls for a betrayal. It asks that the one writing and thinking traduce what is traditionally understood as faithfulness. Such an understanding is based upon an assumption of control through the concept of the proper, in terms of ownership, both of the self and the self’s intentions, and the assurance that, being thus owned, they can be transmitted to the other. To belong, or to receive that which belongs to another, is dependent on a prior self-presence, a proper self capable in turn of its own ownership. The excerpting of Derrida’s words throughout this essay is both a violence against, and a performance of, this thought: the violence of their excision and their entering into a rewriting through my words is an enactment of the original statement, emphasising the fact that words – and meaning – are not original except in that they are created by an originary différance and thus without owner or origin; [s]poken or written, all these gestures leave us or begin to act independently of us . . . On the side of the other, too, there can be no direct address to singularity. In the deconstruction of monologism effected by archiwriting, and in the concomitant opening out of the multiplicity of language, it follows that there can be no one language in which to address the other. As well as the plurality that is the condition of language, its demand for iterability means that there is no private language, no intimacy of the monolingual that would admit the other 51

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Death while excluding others; in this certain sense, too, the call to remain faithful to singularity is a call to its betrayal. For the singularity of the other to be respected, it cannot be personalised or individualised. To discuss the death of the author, then, is to avoid speaking only of Derrida, and of the death of Derrida; by speaking in this way, however, we are able to approach that singular death, because for Derrida death, and the discussion of his impending death at the time of this interview, is intimately bound to writing. If for that reason there is a tension in Derrida’s words between the acknowledgement of death and the wish for survival, that tension translates as a structural problem, a problem of deconstruction; or, what it means to be faithful to deconstruction. The original title of Learning to Live Finally, as Derrida’s last interview was entitled in its English publication, was ‘I Am At War With Myself’. The tension between the arrival of death and the demand of deconstruction elicits a hard fidelity. If one’s life is to become a close reading wherein a deconstruction of the subject takes place by that subject, who then absents himself as authority and witnesses his own death in writing, that tension is in evidence within this work. The discipline of writing is most urgent where death becomes literalised in writing; the responsibility to remain disciplined leads then to a working-out of death through writing, where the author is both effaced and survives through the trace. Discussing what the death of Derrida means for deconstruction, it marks its survival as per his insistence that his own name not become the identification and definition of a concept. Death is also the realisation of a deconstruction, for it functions not as an absence of presence nor as a negativity but as a persistence in the trace that is still to come. If death marks life as a spectre from the future, the trace marks death as non-final. And yet to know this in the abstract is not the same as confronting it in one’s own being. This is how deconstruction brings us under a hard responsibility: it is a discipline, and it is felt as one here. There is a flux between a holding on and letting go of life, of an idea of life: giving up to deconstruction the illusion of presence, and the strictness that demands such an admission. Having to live in the presence of death is the way to survival in the trace. One learns how to live only in coming to terms with one’s mortality; learning how to live is simultaneously learning how to die. Only once the fact of absolute mortality has been confronted can one live, for before that there is no understanding of life beyond absolute presence; life can only be understood, not in its relation but in its very being in relation, to absolute absence – death – and in relation 52

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Death to that which originates and survives it: the trace. When Derrida speaks, then, of the uneducable specter who will never have learned to live, he is speaking of the fact that it is death, rather than life, that teaches one how to live, for learning how to live is to learn how to die: in philosophy, we learn to die; if absolute mortality cannot be accepted, and ‘I have never learned to accept it’, Derrida writes, then the opening is left for the ghost to return (LLF 24). That he does so by speaking of writing points to a further tension surrounding the question of mortality. The death of the author is the survival of the work, in any act of writing; but it is also, literally and philosophically, the work that remains after death. Death is marked in the trace, writing visits death upon us – not just the author in the act of writing but every subject, born out of différance – and it also constitutes our life after death. The trace of writing survives the subject, in the work but also as the condition of living; the trace that marks our becoming, that brings us into existence, also marks our absence: from self, from world, from presence. The structuration of life as a learning how to live through death, a structuration founded in a tension between awareness and discipline, emerges from the structure of the trace, which is not a striving for immortality. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die, Derrida writes; all these leavings are structured by the trace and it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. It is the unchanging structure of all life, and the task of one’s life is, in one’s own person, to learn that this structuration holds. As the trace structures life, deconstruction survives the structure in the trace. This différance in structuration, or structuration as différance, thus also deconstructs a linear teleology wherein life is structured through the Alpha and Omega of origin and death. The survival of the trace functions to deconstruct an ontotheological return to life as presence of being. If one submits to the discipline of deconstruction, a means of survival is offered which is not survival as presence any more than life is the plenitude of being. Death conceived as the différance of being offers a way out of life and death even as it points to death in life. When Derrida speaks of leaving the text, he is acknowledging the trace that undoes the hermeneutic circle. Albeit that one cannot escape the circle death structures, but the trace survives and the deconstruction of the structure within which it operates – that of presence and absence, life and death – survives it. This is the haunting effect that is not identity, the uncanny arrival of the other within the self that structures being. The intimacy of writing and life is that of 53

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Death a death (of plenitude of being) and survival at once in the trace, both abstract and personal. This discussion of life and death in terms of writing is not a feint but a serious consideration of what one cannot talk about other than as a term in a chain. The death of the author is not a metaphor nor an allegory here, but a means to approach death as intimately bound up with living. The text is both so personal to Derrida and not his at all; at the end as in the beginning, archi-writing brings the proper into question and deconstructs an ownership of writing predicated upon an ownership of the self. We are never ‘ours’, and leaving a text here is the stage or scene of that knowledge. It remains as a text of the testament to the structuration of life by deconstruction. He remains as the trace but we are all implicated by it: he absents himself from this personal text and leaves it as the structure of life, the death of the author as all our deaths conceived in terms of presence and absence. If we then think of life as différance, we can read the trace as it deconstructs death as absence. In that sense, one is living out philosophy in one’s body. Coming to terms with death is also a coming to terms with deconstruction, which, like death, is not nihilistic. One is never so close to the love with which Derrida speaks of presence, a love for the whole of philosophy and its heirs, but also to presence as that space within which deconstruction takes place. The demand of the work is to learn to live finally; deconstruction cannot be learned, but a learning of its ultimate stakes here, in one’s own person, has a profound depth. To abandon deconstruction in the face of death would be to abjure it as an exercise. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. Again, my words – Derrida’s words – leave me; this is as true of myself writing, as it was for Derrida. My citation of his words is the condition of intertextuality, according to Barthes, for all text is ‘past citation’; there is nothing original, or, as cited by Derrida, no ‘horstexte’.18 These have become ‘my’ words, I have cited them within this essay in order to show that what Derrida says is true, even as they place truth under erasure as a metaphysical category. His words are not his; they can be reappropriated, and can even be reappropriated in order to enact the point he makes with these words – the graphic 18

Roland Barthes, ‘The Theory of the Text’ (1973), trans. Ian McLeod, in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 31–47 (at p. 39) and Jacques Derrida (OG 163).

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Deconstruction trace of the spoken trace of the archi-trace – by showing at once how they mark his death and survive it, and by showing how this was the case even in life, because of the difference and deferral from presence these words mark, and mark as a graphic mark of the difference and deferral of self-presence within his own being. And yet these words also become the trace that I leave and, in leaving me, they represent my taking leave of my self, now and in the future. The system of traces that survives is not that of a personal mark, but a singular one, dissociated from the ego. I am effaced by these words, which teach me how to live. One is being asked to keep faith with something which does not exist, and there is a further tension between discipline and the impossibility of an escape from discipline. Deconstruction continues after death; here we are offered, not the consolation of philosophy, but a philosophical thinking of death structuring life, and structured as survival. At the end of Specters of Marx, Derrida asks: Can one, in order to question it, address oneself to a ghost? To whom? To him? [. . .] The question deserves perhaps to be put the other way: Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. [. . .] they are always there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (SM 221)

By addressing himself and his own death made possible through the revenant, Derrida, the spectre, no longer and not yet, addresses too the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow, all those heirs, who should learn from it and from the ghost.

Deconstruction (MPM 13–18) The problem of nomination attends deconstruction: a name for that which has no definitive being, and a name that resists definition. The deconstruction of the name, insofar as it implies the unmediated presence of being, is the operation of deconstruction; to name it as such would be to place deconstruction in a notional exterior to that which it deconstructs – the total, definite and finite – and to establish a metaphysical concept, named as deconstruction. There can be no definition of deconstruction as a concept, as what is called or calls itself ‘deconstruction’; to do so would be to traduce its movement, which would anyway already be at work within ‘itself’. Yet the 55

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Deconstruction operation is not, as often conceived, an apophatic one; it is not that we must only have recourse to a negative definition of deconstruction as what it is not and as that which is not. Since deconstruction operates within binaries to deconstruct them, it cannot be defined apophatically. Rather, the movement of its operation works to deconstruct the logic of definition, of naming, which is the logic of the ti esti: definition in terms of, and as, the presence of being. In its operation, it calls into question the ti esti, and therefore cannot be subject to it. ‘Deconstruction’ in inverted commas ‘is’ or ‘is not’; the binary upholds the same logic of presence. Deconstruction operates to undo this logic from within, and is already immanent within that logic which therefore undoes itself, the identity upon which it is predicated and the concept of identity. It also shares in that logic, firstly because it ‘happens’ or ‘takes place’ within metaphysics and so is a paradoxical deconstruction both of an identity founded upon presence and of the idea of identity as presence, and also a movement by which metaphysics is shown already to be constituted by that which makes it ‘other’ to ‘itself’. This is not to misread it in terms of metaphysics being ratified by deconstruction, in the self-reflexive identity of a philosophy of totality affirmed by the containment of its opposite. Instead, metaphysics as a present concept, and moreover the concept of totality – as metaphysics itself – is undone through its deconstruction by the ‘other’ which it always already has within it; not an opposite but ‘other’, the différance (both difference and deferral) that deconstructs presence as such. Secondly, it shares in the logic of metaphysics because to stand outside of it would be to institute deconstruction as metaphysical, in the form of a metaconcept. A definition of ‘deconstruction’ as such must remain a fallacy since deconstruction takes place from within, in order to undo the opposition of interior and exterior which relies upon metaphysics and upon which metaphysics relies. This deconstructs the metadiscourse which would be affirmed by its definition and the attendant implication of an external methodology – external in theory as in practice – separable and therefore ‘applicable’ to metaphysics. Such a methodology is itself a metaphysical concept. As the movement of différance, deconstruction is simply the condition of metaphysics that puts the ‘is’ – the presence of Being, and Being as presence – under erasure, and therefore metaphysics itself. The operation of deconstruction is irreducible to itself. As such, if ‘deconstruction’ were to be defined as a concept, it would also work 56

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Deconstruction within itself; it is impossible to write about without first recognising the impossibility of writing on. As it has been written into the history of thought, the term contains the name of Derrida but is not contained by his name. Coming from the Heideggerian destruktion, or Abbau, a term regarding which Derrida wrote in the ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ that he ‘wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heideggerian word Destruktion or Abbau’, it is already a translation of a translation, a word that takes place across a philosophical history and across language.19 A writing on deconstruction would therefore presume its conceptual definition while also being non-cognisant of the chain in which deconstruction takes place alongside archi-writing, which deconstructs the possibility of writing on by calling into question a fundamental binary through which metaphysics is instituted, that of speech and writing. The quotation marks around ‘deconstruction’, as opposed to deconstruction, lead into this issue of disavowal: a disavowal of the proper by naming. Neither a philosophy, a method nor a person, deconstruction cannot be made proper through naming it as such, and Derrida distances himself from that name by marking it as ‘deconstruction’. What, therefore, is called ‘deconstruction’ – so-called Derridean reading – is a witness to the operation of deconstruction, a close reading. At the same time, ‘deconstruction’, misconceived as a method or process, also bears witness to the very movement that deconstructs it, if read as a symptom. A close reading may observe that deconstruction happens, and that it takes place only within its movement as the articulation of différance, a singular and yet iterable operation: singular because every time responsible to a particular question, iterable because deconstruction happens wherever there is metaphysical logic. Yet because it is an ethical engagement with singularity the possibility of iteration can be neither that of simple repetition – repetition without différance – nor of an essential definition thereby. In every instance it is marked by différance: from other locations (wherein deconstruction ‘takes place’) and therefore – because each ‘taking place’ must constitute another deconstruction, where the trace of the others is discernible yet which is singular – temporo-spatially from the concept of the ipse, from a concept of the ‘itself’ which requires the continuation of being. Deconstruction is not a flux between being and non-being, between the proper and a lack defined in terms of 19

See Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ (DRBB 269–76, 270–1).

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Deconstruction the proper, of the proper as the definition of presence: presence as identity and therefore Being as presence. In such a way, deconstruction can be auto-interpretive – rather than self-reflexive – insofar as it is the différance that it also traces. Through its happening, deconstruction is constituted, but as a refusal of a constitution that would survive as a separable entity and identity; its survival is in the text, and deconstruction can thus have no meaning outside of the sentences which inscribe it and carry it within themselves. In the same way it takes place from within metaphysics as its very condition of being and as the condition which it tries to repress, so deconstruction, too, is subject to accretions. The necessity of deconstruction is most in evidence where it is most called into question, and that may also be in a situation wherein the interrogation is ostensibly an affirmation. This is the issue Derrida addressed in the Wellek Library lecture on Paul de Man from which the excerpt accompanying this essay is taken, when he spoke in 1984 of the vogue for ‘deconstruction’ specifically in terms of its codification as ‘deconstruction in America’. In asking whether we can speak of ‘deconstruction in America’, Derrida is not engaging in an act of cultural violence which would seek to understand deconstruction as an import from continental Europe, an import, moreover, that has been bastardised by that logic of commodification; a paradoxical illegitimacy at that, one that depends on the name of the father to call it metonymically into being as ‘deconstruction’.20 Yet, the naming of ‘deconstruction’ at this point in history, and in Europe as elsewhere – where it is a hybrid growth born of a reading of philosophy interpolated by the capitalism of its commodification as ‘deconstruction’ – is perceived as an American label for certain theorems, a discourse, or a school. This problematic exports us as readers back to the first line, and its reference to what is called, or calls itself, ‘deconstruction’. As a reification of that which acts upon the concept of the proper, which becomes only in that operation, and which therefore in order to remain in that becoming cannot be commodifed, ‘deconstruction’ is the ‘proper story’ – the meta-narrative – of deconstruction, and subject to it. If it can be discussed, for it refuses a general narrative and therefore cannot be followed through a narrative, it is as that 20

In fact, he insists elsewhere, in the ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, that deconstruction construed as a motif associated with ‘poststructuralism’ is part of a cultural process that begins in America, since the latter term is unknown in France ‘until its “return” from the United States’ (DRBB 272).

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Deconstruction which refuses a proper place; it takes place as the différance that splits unity, and that splits the tempero-spatial unity that is the very constitution of the idea of the proper. It refuses, too, a proper story: story as storia, or as histoire, wherein history and story are contained in the same signifier and split language, deconstructing any claim to monologism that it may have by revealing the plurality of the signified. Questioning the proper story, it deconstructs history itself as the history of metaphysics, the history of the proper and of Being as proper; indeed, the term contains its own history, referring to the Heideggerian Destruktion that begins the operation of bringing the proper history of Being into question. From the German to the French to the American English, the term thus gathers to itself the history of its own translation, and of its mistranslation as a concept. And it is fitting that if there is one definition of deconstruction to be risked, it is as plus d’une langue, more than a language and no more of a language. The simultaneous translation of ‘plus de’, which in French means both ‘more than’ and ‘no more’ and which here Derrida refuses to choose between, functions to trace différance and deconstruction; by maintaining the duality of meaning it splits the concept of the sign as a representation of deferred presence and follows the play of difference as deconstruction. This is the admission of multiplicity and of plurality into the monologic of the proper. It is a logic, as previously noted, that depends on the separation of speech and writing, whereby the latter is subordinated as the artificial notation of the former. Phonocentrism is derived from the ostensibly natural superiority of speech – the phone¯ – and its implication both of the presence of God, who breathed life into Adam, and of self-presence: it is in our interior speech that we believe ourselves to be present to that self, and it is through the communication of speech – its flow – that we give that self, in all its presence, to others. By showing how phonocentrism is in fact reliant upon the supposed secondary artificiality of writing, Derrida suggested that deconstruction shows how archi-writing and, through it, différance, marks presence in the moment of its constitution. Thus deconstruction is more than a language, and no more of a language: no more of a tongue (la langue), the association of language with speech, and therefore with presence. The writing that deconstructs the presence of language, the presence of speech as language, shows that it is the multiplicity within and of language that undoes the binary upon which Derrida identifies metaphysics to rest; therefore the deconstruction of metaphysics lies in the deconstructing 59

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Deconstruction of language as the carrier and embodiment of metaphysical presence. To be such, language itself would need to be monologic; deconstruction opens up the condition of its being as one of plurality, thereby deconstructing the whole narrative of history. Deconstruction is translation, Derrida writes in his ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ (DRBB 270), and it is the act of translation that deconstructs the langue – the tongue, or phone¯ – in la langue, making it plus d’une langue; différance marks the signifier as plural, and thus marks the deconstruction of presence that is the definition of deconstruction therein.21 And yet the example is a humorous one, for in risking a single definition that defines itself through an exposition of language as the deconstruction of the monologic, the definition is already opened up to the multiplicity that marks the logos – presence – with différance and thus deconstructs the concept of the logos as presence. The single definition is knowingly constituted as the multiplicity that denies any possibility of single definition. It both is plurality and therefore cannot be defined by that ‘is’ which marks the imposition of a single definition, a single closed meaning upon that which is the deconstruction of such an understanding of meaning. By defining definition as multiple, and thus acknowledging the impossibility of a single definition in principle, Derrida also enacts that multiplicity: for if the definition is not single, it cannot be attached to his name, and attached moreover as the definition of deconstruction whereby deconstruction would become synonymous with that name who could thus otherwise be said to have ‘authored’ it. In the act of being made, the intention of the speech act goes astray. This observation extends to the comment on deconstruction being plus d’une langue; irreducible to the French of Derrida, it cannot be subsumed by the logic of property and nor – this is the condition of all language – is it 21

The deliberate allusion to transference is an echo of the psychoanalytic discourse which traverses the citation (and, upon first rereading, can be traced as unconsciously being re-echoed in this essay). It is apt that it should take place in an extended quotation within which Derrida alludes to the split of the monologic, and refuses the association of deconstruction with his name, which is for himself both the name of the father and a name which can be followed through a psychoanalytic reading of the subject who belongs to it, and who would be revealed as a split subjectivity according to psychoanalytic terms. It is notable that the refusal of the definition of deconstruction through nomination as ‘Derrida’, a philosophical issue that runs through his writings, should seem to present itself in a parallel reading that reveals a subtextual deliberation on and around psychoanalysis, the science of the non-unified subject. Not so much a narrative of repression through parapraxis, this occurs more as an invocation of affinities.

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Deconstruction ‘at home’ with ‘itself’ in that language. Othered in his native tongue, deconstruction cannot be reduced to a linguistic identity. The definition is thus between an engagement and an exposition: any attempt to define deconstruction will take part in an economy. This, too, is the economy at play in the statement that America is deconstruction, whereby both ‘deconstruction’ and deconstruction are brought into tension. The ti esti returns – America is deconstruction – and America occupies the place of metaphysics. We have already seen that metaphysics is deconstructed from within, that its dynamic is that of the movement of deconstruction within its ostensible presence. Here that dynamic is named, America defined as the metaphysics within which deconstruction operates: metaphysics is deconstruction, as America is deconstruction. Again, however, the smile returns. ‘Deconstruction’, as a formula to be learned and applied, has some basic tenets, one being always hasty attributions of proper names, and the proposition has to be abandoned. The proposition, however, has already been abandoned, was never seriously proposed, as evidenced by the use of the subjunctive: were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis. With a smile, Derrida feints definition while at the same time outlining the problem of ‘deconstruction’. Two terms are at play in the lecture, ‘deconstruction’ and deconstruction, that shadows it as its différance. There is another lecture between the lines, by which the two terms, one with marks and one without, play off logic and différance, the one becoming visible through its deconstruction of the other. The literal – my hypothesis must therefore be abandoned – comes lines after its refusal – were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile – and we must read closely in order to discern that the hypothesis was abandoned before even being articulated. In the refusal, Derrida is acknowledging the issue of ‘deconstruction’, a misconception associated with his name: its literal issue, giving birth (with the attendant fallacy of origin) to misreadings. In avowing responsibility for his reading, he is also warning of the dangers of misconstruing it; if ‘Derrida’ were not associated with ‘deconstruction’, a reading tracing a metaphysics of America may be hazarded. Because the two are synonymous, to do so would be to risk a definition; and such a definition would be, not that of deconstruction, but of ‘Deconstruction’. Defined as such by Derrida – commenting on the codification of deconstruction as metaphysics in America, and its exportation back to Europe – it is, 61

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Democracy however, received as such by ‘deconstruction’ a methodology which would go to work upon the definition in order to ‘deconstruct’ it but in doing so would also define itself by it. Deconstruction, however, is not defined by Derrida, in either sense: and in both senses, nor is deconstruction his definition. In such a way, deconstruction is not defined as being. As it is, Derrida refuses the ‘is’, as he also refuses to define ‘deconstruction in America’. Such a definition can only exist as a simulacrum of truth, an allegorico-metonym, a tale of naming wherein there is the fiction of an origin; and as a particular historical moment, an occasion in the historicity of the term in which deconstruction could take place. It is a totalising narrative of ‘deconstruction’ and in this tale of naming, ‘America’ is available to deconstruction.

Democracy (PF 22) How can democracy depend upon friendship? If the de¯mos – the people, the assembly and also, importantly for the latter centuries, the ‘village’ or region – carries within it the understanding of equality, then how does it rest upon a relationship of affect; is it the case that democracy is the politicisation of affect? Or is it the case that it is friendship which should be understood as a political economy, and that therefore the two are not irreducible to the other? To each other, but also to the ‘other’ in the sense that, thought on this basis, friendship becomes a delimitation of the alterity of the ‘other’ in order that a relationship may be established – in the specific, but also as a general principle – in similitude and not in the awe of the singularity of the other that can never be approached but must always be respected? A philosophy of friendship borne out of the alterity of the other recognises an irreconcilable distanciation in order to achieve intimacy. In other words, I can only ever approach the other, my friend, knowing that they are ultimately unknowable to me. Within that recognition, there can also be similitude, but on an abstract and a communal level; there are certain experiences which are common to us all, certain events through which we must all come, and certain affective responses shared. Our singular response to those communal events, however, cannot be experienced by the other. I recognise that I can never share in the singularity of my friend, just as he cannot share in mine, and it is that recognition that establishes our friendship. My affect is for the unknown affect in the other, for that which I am unable to approach: it is, in this way, 62

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Democracy a friendship of solidarity with the solitude of the other. Friendship here may be conceived of in terms of a mourning, one which respects the singularity of the subject and bears witness to it. In this sense, community is both a radical and a political concept, a communality founded upon demand for respect of the différance of the self and a social justice in and of itself. And is this also the case for a philosophical economy of friendship, in which a different sense of community necessitates the understanding of différance in an economic way? Can différance ever be understood within an economy, is it not the deconstruction of economy? This concept of friendship might be conceived of as a legal fiction that delimits the other in order to protect them; by pretending to efface the fact of the irreducibility of the other to the self, and by entering the singularity of the other into an iteration of what it means to be ‘human’, this concept of friendship establishes a community that is predicated upon a shared similitude founded in the concept of a knowable ‘difference’, moreover in knowing the other through his or her difference, rather than a similitude within which community is achieved through a shared and irreducible solitude. As such, it operates as an economy of friendship that reduces the other, through a violence of equivalence. Democracy is subject to différance as a term; translated as the power (kratos) of the people (de¯mos), it is left open to deconstruction, which is, after all, the question of translation. A paradox of power and equality, and of the issue of whether the ‘people’ is a category that implies an inherent and a priori equality or, rather, whether it carries within it an already politicised concept of equality, and therefore of equality as a political concept, these fissures are present within democracy, fracturing it in theory and in practice.22 Democracy is also fractured by the friendship it implies and upon which it is predicated, and friendship subjects democracy in turn to further economy. The aporia is that democracy must, at the same time, be a response to absolute singularity and simultaneously operate as an economy, which is also that of friendship and 22

In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida asks what remains within the concept of democracy as it is deconstructed, ‘[w]hich orders us not only to engage a deconstruction but to keep the old name?’ Moreover, to keep it in the name of the democracy to come, which yet calls us ‘to inherit from what – forgotten, repressed, misunderstood, or unthought in the old concept and throughout its history – would still be on the watch, giving off signs or symptoms of a stance of survival coming through all the old and tired features’ (PF 104).

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Democracy – another of the problems articulated in Derrida’s late work – of hospitality. In the same way that democracy opens through a violent rupture of law that then instates the new order of the law, so, in order to be democractic, democracy must respond to singularity. Therefore the term is brought into question, not only as a term but as a concept.23 More serious than a contradiction, political desire is forever borne by the disjunction of these two laws; more serious than a contradiction, democracy is instated as its own impossibility. The dual laws of singularity and universality to which it is subject split it from within and without, at the same time splitting the distinction between internality and externality the concept demands in order to be unified. Were democracy to be understood as the manifestation of the externalisation of the person, wherein that person is figured as the internalised subject and externalised model of liberty, equality and fraternity, it could remain a unified concept. Where the person is irreducible to an equalisation as a subject, either internally or as an external model, then democracy too is riven by this divide. It must be instituted as a simultaneous affirmation and denial of singularity, and comes into existence as its own failure. The idea of the nationstate, and of a community of nation-states, is incompatible with democracy because the concept of the state is predicated upon a sovereignty and its predicates – the proper and discrete – that forbids an openness to democracy either in the singular or as a paradoxical community of proper entitities. This extends to the problem of being open to all, which is the call of democracy on an individual level of fraternity and on a communal level of a universal fraternity, the community of states. In acknowledging that one cannot provide hospitality to all the cats of the world, one recognises that in fraternity too we enter into an economy. Who do we become open to? The very idea is based upon the calculation of majorities, founded in a countable singularity as a way to a universal fraternity. In other words, a reduction of singularity, where every other is equally altogether other. To avoid the reduction of the other to the same and to avoid the reduction of the multiple to the one – another danger, which would elevate the most singular to a position of sovereignty 23

It is in this context Derrida can write that justice is the only transcendental signified. The question of justice might lead us on to Specters of Marx, which posits a ‘New International’ in response to Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history in liberal democracy, and is suggestive here in that the question of democracy is now inseparable from the question of capitalism.

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Democracy – the becoming-political of friendship is also a becoming-political of democracy. Within his postulation of this irreducible wound, Derrida consciously or unconsciously echoes the terms that give embodiment to the aporia, naming it spectrally as France.24 Liberty, coterminous with equality and fraternity, already calls up democracy as the becoming-political of the people, rather than their politicisation as democracy, the perpetual becoming of the concept. The concept rather relies upon an a priori qualification of the people, the region or the assembly as a reduction of alterity; that is the condition of entering into democracy. We thus return to the question of how one can be both radically other – an undefinable, illimitable and unknowable singularity – and also be defined by that singularity, a violence against alterity that betrays the very notion of that through which democracy is attempting to define itself.25 Here, benevolence must always entail an ignorance of what is actually at stake in order to operate, and it is through this wilful ignorance of the radical other – with the possibilities for good and for ill it incorporates – that benevolence operates.26 Democracy is an ideological enterprise in terms of a being in the world that represents a fundamental rupture with democracy, and by turns an elision and a model of the ruptures within it. It elides by way of its effacement of singularity, instituting the people as an already political concept; and it at the same time makes a model of the contradiction within democracy between the people and power, 24

25

26

France here occupies the place of Europe synecdochally, through a tradition of fraternity begun in Greece (see PF 100–1). Democracy is thus seen to be the history of Europe, bound up with the implications of those terms for Derrida. The impossibility of its existence is addressed in Rogues as a problem of the European – the history of Europe, which is the history of metaphysics, or rather history itself. Derrida touches upon it in his final interview, during a discussion of sovereignty and the political in which he links them explicitly to that postulation of ‘democracy as a European idea, something that at once has never existed in a satisfactory way and remains to come’ (LFF 46). Even the ‘we’ used here as a form of address becomes problematic, implying as it does a fraternity that must operate within the same aporia. Benevolence here represents a value contiguous with the humanist values of democracy, and the attendant problematics of those values within the context of that democracy. This is again perceptible within liberal democracy, which can be read as the ideologico-political wing of an overarching ideology, capitalism. The understanding of benevolence within that system – regulated charity, the privatisation of philanthropy within commerce, and the erosion of social welfare – points to liberal democracy as a diminishing of politics from an end in itself – the polity – towards an end, that of the ideology of capitalism and a construction of the polity.

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Democracy where, were the alterity of the people to be accepted, the demand for humility made by and before alterity forbids the presumption of violence inherent in power. Presupposed upon singularity, democracy negates, and is negated by, it. If I wish to understand my friend and neighbour as other, and to come into relation with them through that understanding, then I must also understand both that I can never do so, and that the attempt to establish equality – or a relationality based upon the presumption that equality actually means a bringing-into-relation with each other – must at the same time traduce it, by imposing on my neighbour an understanding of them as other. Not an understanding of radical alterity that is precluded by différance from understanding it, but an understanding, a quantification and a definition, of my neighbour’s alterity; not as an absolute, but in the intimacy of its specificity. This is the tragedy of democracy; a betrayal of, and in, the institution of an equality, in other terms a democracy, a bringing together of the people as a people, because of the originary difference (or otherness of the word) within democracy that makes it impossible to decide whether the people are an already politicised economy. We perceive the violence of imposing a fiction that is violent to that which it serves, and in the name of which it is established. The issue is with the concept of definition, which necessitates delimitation, the quantification of singularities, stabilisation and knowability. There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ . . ., without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. And this necessitates identifying and representing the other, and this is irreconcilable. The wound opens with the necessity of having to count one’s friends, to count the others, in the economy of one’s own, there where every other is altogether other. But where every other is equally altogether other. Again, we return to the rupture in the name (de¯mokratía) – and in definition through naming – that is also the disunification of the concept. The issue is with this definition, not only the defining of democracy but the concept of definition itself, which then becomes the problem of the defining of democracy. Definition is ideological in that it commodifies through naming and thus works both in the specific instance and in principle as an agent of ideology, naming through the ideology of commodification and as commodity. In this manner it does not name that which pre-exists it but calls into being the commodity qua commodity. The name of democracy (de¯mokratía), and 66

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Democracy the irreconcilability domiciled within it, is also the definition of a commodity. Democracy is not implemented as a phenomenon in the world through an ideal; it does not have its being according to the Platonic idea of democracy. Rather, that ideal is defined through, and as, its being in the world: the idea of democracy is coterminous with its example, which is defined as, and by, ideology. The dynamic is extremely subtle, for in any individual instance, whether historical or by contemporary radical irruptions, democracy seems to be brought into being as democracy. In other words, as a phenomenal example of the ideal; however, democracy is an already ideological name for that which is then defined through the ideological example. The return of the name again signifies the tension between power and alterity, between the people, given political expression, and the already politicised ‘people’; the attempt to define democracy, and thus to give the name ‘democracy’ to any situation which is then called into being as such – whether in France, America or the uprisings of what has been named the Arab Spring – is to bring into being from ideology and as an example of ideology.27 It is an act that attempts to unify originary rupture and to efface différance. The rupture of the old order takes place in the name of an originary justice, but the democracy that takes its place is a fiction of radical power by definition. It unifies the ruptures that prevent definition – which is the very unified itself – and as such the word is altered to elide the alter within it. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida asks how we might reinterpret the concept of equality, in the name of a democracy to come. If democracy means a universal fraternity that functions as an economy of inclusion and exclusion, democracy to come would pierce the securing of the proper and render it open, moving from the potestas implied by sovereign power of the ipse that governs the absolute power of the sovereign as it also does the individual within the shared power of democracy. It would require another way of thinking calculation and number, ‘another way of apprehending the universality of the singular which, without dooming politics to the incalculable, would still justify the old name of democracy’ (PF 104). ‘Would it still make sense to speak of democracy,’ Derrida asks, ‘when it would no longer be a question [. . .] of country, nation, even of State or citizen – in other words, if at least one still 27

A new weight is lent to the ‘to come’ in light of the declaration of the ‘end of history’, which could be argued against in terms of democracy, the history of Europe, as a democracy-to-come. What would be a non-ideological democracy?

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Democracy keeps to the accepted use of this word, when it would no longer be a political question?’ (ibid.). The friendship alluded to above, that which might be thought a type of communion through the mourning of communality-as-similitude, cannot enter into a democracy founded upon the paradox of a qualifiable, countable singularity; once the economy of friendship gives way, so too does an ideological democracy founded upon economy. The possibility of a democracyto-come which would recognise alterity thus remains on the horizon, not as a teleological goal but as an always already anticipated advent. It could never name itself democracy for it would be in a state of becoming and not of being; it remains to come because such a democracy, in attending to the ruptures and to the irreducibility through which it becomes and would in turn become democratic in the sense of the word, could never be stabilised as an identity. Post The Politics of Friendship, Derrida begins to think democracy in relation to this ‘to come’ and to autoimmunity, an understanding of the system as self-destructive and therefore as democractic, in the sense that a self-protective community relies on a constitution through the proper that negates democracy. The autoimmune state is a democractic state because it is open to that within itself, as to that ostensibly outside itself, which would destroy it. Only in that openness that deconstructs the idea of the nation-state can democracy arrive.28 Geoffrey Bennington argues it is the thought of that openness that defines democracy as politics in Derrida’s late work, tracing his reading of Aristotle in Voyous in the context of discussing the moment of difference ‘at which “democracy,” as a tentative inherited name for the political as such, breaks or ruptures the horizon or the teleological perspective within which metaphysics has always, constitutively, attempted to think and control politics’.29 28 29

See ‘Faith and Knowledge’ in Acts of Religion for the autoimmune. See Geoffrey Bennington, ‘For Better and for Worse (There Again . . .)’, in Diacritics, 38: 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 92–103 (at p. 95). In the article, Bennington examines Derrida’s movement in that work from metaphysical sovereignty in Aristotle to politics in Plato, and suggests that Aristotle may be resituated by arguing that he does not support the thinking of the State as the reduction of multiplicity to the sovereignty of the One. By conceiving the State as proceeding from an originary plurality, democracy is thus opened out, for following Aristotle ‘the polis is in essence plural, and . . . this means that it is from the start contaminated by something of the order of democracy, insofar as democracy names something of this essential plurality at the root of politics’ (Bennington, ‘For Better’, p. 100).

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Différance He locates this moment as that of a plurality that disrupts origin, arguing that where Plato operates a dialectics that reduces plurality to unity, Aristotle attempts to reduce the constitutive plurality of the polis by means of reducing it by combining it with another form, that of oligarchy. Bennington shows how this logic cannot be supported for, to operate, it would rely on an excessive delimitation of the mean, and Aristotle cautions against excess. We are therefore confronted with ‘an irreducible residue of plurality that constitutes the political as such, as inherently and irreducibly plural’, a plurality that opens out the polis as a state in a multitude of states as it does ethics to politics, ‘the dual face-to-face already to the third party (and therefore all the others, where “tout autre est tout autre,” of the political)’.30 Rereading Aristotle in Derrida, Bennington thus suggests that it is ‘the connivance of this motif of plurality with the concept of democracy [that] motivates its deconstructive survival’.31 The thought of openness – of a polis to the other, and of the state to that which deconstructs it as a state – links politics inextricably to democracy, insofar as democracy enjoinders openness. In the plurality of the polis, the becoming-political of the question of democracy thus opens, as a question of the openness of the state and its comingtogether with the other in a community of friends.

Différance (MP 13) The idea of the present, the temporal understanding of the presence upon which metaphysics is founded, is understood both as a time and as a space. It is the place of plenitude, which denotes also the plenitude of being in that place, and it is marked by an interval from that which was and that which is yet to be: it is the here (spatial) and the now (temporal). This extends to an understanding of being as selfpresence, specifically the presence of and to the self of a unified selfhood founded in the idea of the plenitude of unified being. Therefore the self, as it is founded in presence, relies too on presence constituted as a temporal and spatial indivisibility. The presence of the present, however, has to be sundered in order that the present may exist as such, may be brought into being as presence. If we understand the present as the here and now, the plenitude of the moment, and of being in the moment which is the plenitude of 30 31

Bennington, ‘For Better’, p. 101. Bennington, ‘For Better’, p. 101.

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Différance being, then we also require that the present be separated off from the past which was and the future to come. To exist as such, meaning as presence, an interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself. That interval also divides the present: bringing it into being, it divides its being, and thus divides it as presence. Thus there is an aporia here present. To understand the present as such, it must be conceived temporally and spatially as plenitude. In the very instance, then, of its institution as plenitude, the present – and therefore presence itself – is instituted not as an originary presence but by, and as, an originary division. The interval that separates the present in order that it might be brought into being, and in order that being might be brought into being in accordance with its definition as self-presence, is also what divides it and what institutes it as division, or as the irreducibility of the present to presence, therefore the irreducibility of presence to itself except as an originary division in presence and therefore in origin. Once that is understood, origin can no longer be understood as an instituting plenitude from which all other hypostases of plenitude, or presence, derive. Its deconstruction is the movement of the originary trace which divides origin as such and which places the trace before such a concept. The very notion of the prior is thus brought into question by the trace, for it disturbs the concept as it refers to origin. As an originary ‘prior’, it refers instead to the division within origin that prevents the conceptualisation of origin as presence; the trace is also the mark of originary division that therefore institutes both origin as division and any subsequent institution as already divided from ‘itself’ conceived in terms of a unified being. The very fact of the sundering of the present means that it is itself sundered, according to its own definition, and that, being sundered, it can no longer be thought of as a present – nor as presence – that is not only predicated upon, but instituted as, that which is whole and indivisible.32 The definition is split because that which the definition defines, presence, is split prior to any concept of the unitary. The deconstruction of the definition happens as an enactment: the originary trace that separates presence from itself and from the possibility of discussing presence as 32

Being split according to its definition, it therefore splits its definition. Doing so, it splits definition itself, because as it infers a unitary and definitive signified which is proper to the signifier, definition is a metaphysical concept based upon presence. The deconstruction of presence by the trace also deconstructs the idea of the proper required for definition to function.

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Différance ‘itself’ – a concept which presupposes indivisibility – also moves in the definition of presence to disturb it. It is not, therefore, that presence can be redefined as the trace, the non-originary within ‘origin’ that deconstructs it as a metaphysical concept: there can be no definition of the trace, because it has no being, and definition is intimately involved in the expression of being. The originary moment of institution is an aporetic one, for in order to be instituted as the present, that is as a metaphysical concept founded in the indivisibility of presence as a totality ultimately based in the plenitude of the logos, the present must be born divided. There is, therefore, no originary presence; what is more, the very idea of an origin must be sundered as the condition of being brought into being, and therefore sundered as origin, the concept of the unitary and indivisible source. Insofar as presence is the principle upon which to think and conceptualise, and it is divided, so too is that which is thought from presence and so too is conceptualisation, idea, thought itself; not because they are predicated upon a presence which is now simply divided, but because the trace dividing presence does so as its origin. The origin itself, as a concept – and the concept, idea, thought, all of which are conceptualised in relation to that origin – can no longer be said to exist, or more accurately has never existed, as such, for its existence depends on the understanding of origin as presence. As the spacing divides the present in and of itself, it is thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present. This spacing Derrida calls différance. Both difference and deferral, it is the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space. We become subject to différance, and we become subjects through its trace; différance deconstructs the being of the individual, thought on the basis of self-presence and the proper, and instead places us in a state of becoming; this is rendered, not as non-being but rather as a becoming of the subject constantly in process and therefore not conceived as the plenitude of unitary being in a unitary present. Different as to the self of yesterday as it is to that self imagined in a tomorrow, the subject is in this state of becoming within the non-unified present precisely because the present, and presence, is constituted as non-unified. Even in the present, then, the subject is not self-present, both because the presence of the present that would allow it is always already sundered, and because the subject is constituted by the trace of différance. A claim to self-presence does not take account of the différance through which the subject is brought into a state 71

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Différance of being and which is prior to any communication of subjectivity. The interior monologue predicated on the basis of the present, and by which the self is thought to be directly communicated to the self through an internal speech, is always already traced by différance, or archi-writing; the archi-trace, or originary moment of difference and deferral that brings origin as presence into question, is already within the supposed ‘presence’ of being, presented as self-presence through the interior monologue. Where writing is thought to be the secondary and artificial representation of a natural speech, différance traces the trace dividing the presence of speech. Thought on the basis of the present, the phonocentrism that upholds logocentrism is deconstructed by the archi-trace, archi-writing or différance that separates presence from itself – the possibility of ‘itself’ – and constitutes it as this separation of plenitude in the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space, the simultaneity of difference and deferral. As the deferral of time becomes a marker of the separation of space, so too is the separation of space a marker of the deferral of time; différance traverses the foundations of the presence of the present in the undivided space of the ‘here’ and the undivided time of the ‘now’. Derrida writes that it is this constitution of the present, as an ‘originary’ and irreducibly nonsimple . . . synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protections . . . that I propose to call archi-writing, archi-trace, or différance. Which (is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization. Here, writing is the graphic trace, or what Derrida calls ‘narrow writing’, of archi-writing. It is the visible sign of archiwriting, as well as the trace of that trace which is the deconstruction of structure, and it puts under erasure the possibility of writing ‘it is’, were that ‘is’ to be founded in the presence of being; it is, then, a disruption of the sign conceived as structure, in which the signifier corresponds as its representation to the signified. Within this system writing represents the death of a living speech and takes place as its secondary representation, wherein the word becomes removed from the presence of the signifier-signified correlation in speech and is thought of as the signifier of the signifier: a copy of the signifier that is effaced through speech, because it is co-present with the signified which is itself co-present with the speaker. Speech is thus the presence of self-presence, through which being-as-presence is expressed, both when it is directed towards others and when it takes place as interior monologue. For metaphysics, writing represents the gap between the presence of self-presence – being – and its representation. In the above sentence, the words would represent the 72

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Différance removal of presence to a second degree, that of its representation; understood within that metaphysical logic, writing is the cultural derivation of natural speech. The différance of graphic writing, the deferral and difference of the words and from the presence of the signified in the materiality of their inscription, is yet a signifier of the movement of différance as archi-writing. Beyond graphic writing, archi-writing institutes origin as différance; it is the movement of différance within structuration itself. Before speech and before presence, there is archi-writing, a movement of différance that constitutes speech and presence as a fiction of plenitude always already marked by difference and deferral. Graphic writing is but the representation of that archi-writing, the trace of its trace that marks the division of presence from itself. In the sentence above, then, the words on the page are the marker of différance and the trace of its movement. The black of the ink against the white of the page is the mark of the spacing that constitutes the presence as divided, and it is this constitution of the present, as an ‘originary’ and irreducibly nonsimple . . . synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protections . . . that Derrida proposes to call archi-writing, archi-trace, or différance. The division of the here and now as a temporo-spatial concept of presence through différance, which (is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization – note the tracing of (is) – takes place as the writing before speech, the trace before origin, and the difference and deferral before presence. Différance is not even a name, nor a word or concept: it resists the attribution of the proper and the possibility of ‘itself’ by tracing a trace through the graphic mark. In the ‘a’ of différance the movement of différance can be traced; in constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, and the spacing of the ‘a’ divides difference spatially and temporally, preventing it from entering into an opposition with presence by enacting the différance that deconstructs that logic. Imposing the trace of writing upon an apparent priority of speech, the ‘a’ of différance can be seen but not heard. That spacing also resists the naming of différance as a concept available to definition and thus to a co-opting of différance by the proper that it always already traces with the interval of spacing. Were it to be constituted in such a way that it could be accorded attributes and definition it would already be a derivative of presence as plenitude, but différance remains the movement within presence, though it does not belong to it, such an idea again being predicated on the idea of the proper that it moves within to 73

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Différance deconstruct. It has no separate entity and mounts no oppositional challenge, and only in this way can différance operate to deconstruct, rather than affirm, origin as presence. It is through a reading of Heidegger in which he locates the ontotheological trace in his work that Derrida goes beyond a Heideggerian understanding of difference as an ontico-ontological difference between Being and beings, positing that epoch of difference as one of the ‘intrametaphysical effects of différance’ , the latter ‘so violent that it can be interpellated neither as the epochality of Being nor as ontological difference’ (MP 22).33 The text of metaphysics still remains to be gone through, but takes part in a structure of reference wherein the present becomes the trace of the trace, a trace of différance and of the metaphysical erasure of the trace of différance. Through the archi-writing, archi-trace or différance of metaphysics, logic thought on the basis of presence is thus shown to be originarily divided. Deconstruction evades definition, and in outlining this fact Derrida emphasises that complexity in terms of différance. By calling up one complexity through another, Derrida shows that both have no being that would re-enter them into a metaphysical logic independent of their movement within that logic. Deconstruction, which has no existence independently of each singular event of its taking place, is simply the operation of différance, but as différance constitutes origin as the irreducibly non-simple, it brings metaphysics into being as an already divided non-simple logic; différance, and deconstruction, have no existence outside of metaphysics not because they are parasites within it but because différance is the trace that comes before the logic it inscribes. This originary différance remains, however, without an originary value in terms of what Derrida points out are the traditional understandings of such a concept as a deno33

Différance traces the way in which this history of being-as-presence, especially where presence is manifested through dialectic or difference, deconstructs itself. This takes place from the Hegelian Aufhebung, of which Derrida says in Positions that ‘[i]f there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève wherever it operates’ (P 38), to Heiddegerian ontico-ontological difference. The Aufhebung functions to idealise difference in self-presence through the relève of a binary opposition, creating it as a third term. The ‘a’ of différance marks the departure of its play from these systems of difference. Where Derrida discusses Saussure, he emphasises, with the ‘a’, that différance, which differs and defers from any possibility of being constituted as ipseity, cannot be elevated to a transcendental signified.

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Doors tation of presence: ousia and parousia, the archic origin as telos.34 As far as deconstruction takes place in metaphysics because of the trace that already divides it from itself, one can name metaphysics as deconstruction: différance divides the name from its origin.

Doors (AFFI 68–72) The topology of doors, a tripartite topology that is also, on the one hand, a topo-logic, and on the other, a tropo-logic: at work in this passage, apropos that which is to come and which is irreducible to the idea of the future; as that which is programmable or predictable, the logos of the trope and that of place, of topos, assumes the burden of responsibility for the illuminating and staging of an other thinking, if not the thinking of the other – the other where I do not think, the other to or of thought, the other’s thought, and thought of the other, as such, an impossible thought of alterity that does not, in its thinking reduce the other to ‘an other’ in itself or as such – a thinking otherwise of Jewishness that is at once irreducible and indeterminate: irreducible to Judaism, as programme, institution, tradition or archive, and indeterminate with regard to any predictive possibility. Can we open the door to this? Do we have the key, can we act in an open and hospitable manner, without reserve or reservation? Nothing so much as a treatise on doors (and yet so much more), their location and operation, their place, that which they allow to take place, and their tropical play: the doors imagined here might be seen, if seen at all, as revolving doors, doors that turn and turn around. You find yourself before such a door. You find yourself after that door. You pass through the door’s motion, that ‘turn’ or ‘trope’ that it allows, to which it gives place. Such a turn effects a return of sorts, one comes back to where one was, though, like Alice, on the other side. Hence, door as trope: not simply the figurative use of the term otherwise designating a ‘literal’ object, thereby troping the object, opening the door, so to speak, onto its tropological possibilities by displacing it from its ‘proper’ place; but also, in speaking of the one as the other, and admitting in turn that there is always more than one door (three at least, as this passage admits, all of which have to do with, which offer the possibility of opening onto, or being opened towards, l’avenir). 34

See MP (9).

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Doors We should pause at the door, before the three doors, these doors of the future. In Jewish homes affixed to the door is a mezuzah (Hebrew for doorpost), a handwritten parchment text on which are written particular verses from the Torah, and which, commonly, is placed in a case. This is practised to fulfil the mitzvah.35 However, what is permitted to be written on the back of the mezuzah is dependent on whether Ashkenazy or Sephardic custom is followed. While both traditions insist that ‘Shaddai’, one of the names for God (but which also serves to signify ‘Guardian of Israel’s doors’), be written on the back of the parchment, Sephardic tradition bans the inscription of an encrypted version of a phrase on the front of the parchment, ‘Adonai, Eloheinu, Adonai’.36 Can we say that this is relevant here? Could that be risked? Derrida is, after all, reading Yerushalmi’s reading of Freud, in a text, moreover, to do with archives, inscription, encryption, the secret. To say with any certainty, this is impossible, but the possibility remains nonetheless. It may be that encrypted here is a question of impossible autobiography, impossible to read but nonetheless calling as that possibility, demanding a commitment, a response; to step through the door or not. In a sense, I have opened a door onto another door, but in order to do this, I have already passed through the door onto which I have just opened. Without saying any more than the possibility has been opened onto, definition of what takes place remains just as this opening. Stepping through the door only leaves us on the threshold; or, rather say, before the threshold, on its edge, and thus recognising in being at this point, point of suspension, that we have yet to step across that which we believed we had traversed, and which, in effect, we have only just crossed. Out of order, last door first, entrance to the future is, from the beginning, disordered, as if to signal the undecidability that governs both the arrival of any future, any authentic instance of that which is to come, beyond the merely calculable, calendrical certainty, and, at the same time, to suggest that however one steps into the future, whichever door one passes through, there is no way in which order is to be governed. 35

36

In some homes according to practice, every door has a mezuzah attached, with the exception of bathrooms. The verses written are taken from Deuteronomy 6: 9, 11: 19. ‘The Lord, our God, the Lord’. The encryption takes the form of a substitution cipher in which each letter is shifted by one letter.

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Doors Governing our passage through the doors, the very door chosen, the impossibility of ever crossing, for one time and one time alone, any perceived threshold is that which remains to come; not the future as such, nothing programmed, but that which, ungovernable by any programme is just that which can always arrive at any time. It is, seemingly paradoxically the affirmation of the to come which appears to respond in its affirmation, nothing other than the affirmation itself, ‘yes’ as the condition of all promises, any messianic thought in fact, without, at the same time as the affirmation stages itself, guaranteeing that which can come or may come on any given day, at any time, the arrival of the other. Something other opens the door. Something calls on us to open the door, some other appears to arrive from the other side of the doorway, according to three modalities, places of opening to which Derrida wishes to give the provisional nomination of doors: places between one place and another, between certain locations or fixed situations; places that, in being liminal, marking boundaries doubly (inside and outside, the outside of the inside, inside of the outside) both encourage the idea of passage, if not passage itself, and also disrupt any simple thinking of past/future, inside/outside, self/other. So, you step through a door, only to find yourself before a door you had thought you had already passed through. Stepping into an outside, you remain before the door, as if you had found yourself in a parable embedded in a narrative, concerning the approach towards the law, but never able to gain access, remaining always before the door, before the law. Such a Kafkaesque situation is hardly surprising. What is surprising though is that this fantasy scenario is staged between the historian and the psychoanalyst, between Yerushalmi, the historian who speaks only of the past about an archive which is yet to be established, in his ‘Monologue with Freud’. To be a historian who speaks only of the past is, for Derrida, a gesture of negation of the historian. If this appears a further instance of paradox, of tangling the skein in temporal as well as spatial terms, this can hardly be accidental. That reversal, inversion of the order of doors has already announced this, whereby Derrida has already brought out the sense of the impossible that informs the very affirmation of any future. The self does not have direct access to the other who calls, but instead, under the illusion of passing through what is being called a door, in finding access onto another modality of affirmation, in turn reinscribes oneself back into a position of waiting for a future radically to come, which is to say never available to me as such, and 77

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Doors thus remaining as an indeterminacy by which the future can only be apprehended, indetermination forcefully and doubly potentialised, indetermination en abyme. Thus we are led through into the place where we always were, the third door also the first. In this, Judaism is not a messianic promise, but instead an interminable experience of waiting, suffering passively, apprehending and awaiting a future to come. In this apprehension one must wait, one cannot do anything other than await the arrival, an arrival always indeterminate, never available to the one, but for which one must nevertheless remain structurally open, waiting for an opening of a relation to the future, the experience of the future – or, it has to be suggested, a future event, experience to come of the event to come. Such an event or experience ‘does not belong to the order of what is possible for me, but participates in the nature of the event worthy of its name . . ., which by definition surprises all my capacities and powers’. Such ‘an event by definition exceeds me . . . but does so’, Geoffrey Bennington concludes, doubling the temporal paradox already at work in Derrida’s thinking of the event, the experience of the future as that which is to come, ‘by befalling me in a here and now’. Thus the historian who is not one in remaining only with the past, not yet being open to the promise. In the case of Derrida’s reading of Yerushalmi then, it is not that a certain Jewishness remains as a possibility to come, at some as yet indeterminate point; rather, it is that the definition of any Jewishness, but particularly a Jewishness to come, is always already ‘indetermined’. There is, it has to said, no ‘category of the subject’ that would go by the appellation ‘Jewishness’ of which Derrida would not display a wariness or suspicion, if that subjectity were taken as given, as fixed, knowable, whether in the here and now or to come. Indeed, ‘Jewishness’ here might be said to name only the most provisional and open quasi-definition, a nomination without fixed concept, irreducible to ‘Judaism’, a figure in the fixity of its subject of the past. If this hypothesis can be advanced, ‘Jewishness’ would thus be one name for the openness of which Derrida speaks, an opening onto that which is to come, which can always come, but also the name for the event to come itself – though never an ‘itself’ that can be defined, apprehended once and for all to me, for me, in this very moment. In this, there is another figure standing, as it were, in the doorway here, behind Derrida: Walter Benjamin, figure of the historian’s other, signature of an other historicity, looking backwards but facing, pointing forward, poised on the threshold, affirming the 78

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Exhaustion future to come. This pause, the disorder of the sequence attests to the necessity of remaining open, and, with that, nothing other than the affirmation itself, the ‘yes,’ insofar as it is the condition of all promises or of all hope, of all awaiting, of all performativity, of all opening to the future, whatever it may be, for science or religion. With this affirmation, arriving between science and religion, neither one nor the other, yet exceeding both, anticipating, welcoming a history or archive of the future to come. The phrase, we note in conclusion, arrives at least twice – future to come. What does ‘future to come’ say that ‘future’ does not say? What does it give to be opened? What remains to be thought? Here, the ghost, the trace of Derrida, always already inscribed as the trace of himself, voice superimposed on film, visual images of passage, travel, without destination: I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and ‘l’avenir,’ . . . There’s a future that is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But, there is a future, l’avenir (to come), which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future [future to come, a future for the future that is absolutely unpredictable, which can always arrive one day to knock at one’s door, demanding a response that could not have been foreseen], it’s l’avenir in that it’s the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival. (D 53)

Leave it at that, indetermination potentialised, en abyme and to come.

E Exhaustion (ON 48–50) Having been given a finite amount of words in which to discuss exhaustion, there is no beginning and no end to this discussion. The question is how to exhaust a word that deals in the nature of its impossibility, and also in that as the impossibility of its own nature? A word that can be spoken of only in the perspective of a complete formalization, the impoverishment of a discourse that would otherwise tire itself out. The dilemma then becomes not how to avoid saying too much but how one might say nothing. 79

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Exhaustion future to come. This pause, the disorder of the sequence attests to the necessity of remaining open, and, with that, nothing other than the affirmation itself, the ‘yes,’ insofar as it is the condition of all promises or of all hope, of all awaiting, of all performativity, of all opening to the future, whatever it may be, for science or religion. With this affirmation, arriving between science and religion, neither one nor the other, yet exceeding both, anticipating, welcoming a history or archive of the future to come. The phrase, we note in conclusion, arrives at least twice – future to come. What does ‘future to come’ say that ‘future’ does not say? What does it give to be opened? What remains to be thought? Here, the ghost, the trace of Derrida, always already inscribed as the trace of himself, voice superimposed on film, visual images of passage, travel, without destination: I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and ‘l’avenir,’ . . . There’s a future that is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But, there is a future, l’avenir (to come), which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future [future to come, a future for the future that is absolutely unpredictable, which can always arrive one day to knock at one’s door, demanding a response that could not have been foreseen], it’s l’avenir in that it’s the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival. (D 53)

Leave it at that, indetermination potentialised, en abyme and to come.

E Exhaustion (ON 48–50) Having been given a finite amount of words in which to discuss exhaustion, there is no beginning and no end to this discussion. The question is how to exhaust a word that deals in the nature of its impossibility, and also in that as the impossibility of its own nature? A word that can be spoken of only in the perspective of a complete formalization, the impoverishment of a discourse that would otherwise tire itself out. The dilemma then becomes not how to avoid saying too much but how one might say nothing. 79

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Exhaustion In being named as such, exhaustion becomes inexhaustible. I can never exhaust the possibilities of this word, nor close on a definitive signified. This observation does not simply pertain to the signifier while leaving the concept intact, because the concept of exhaustion is implicated insofar as its essence is inseparable from language. In order to discuss this proposition with regard to negative theology, we might first turn to deconstruction, another word that challenges definition as such, to the extent that, like différance, it is neither a word nor a concept. Insofar as deconstruction has been said to exist it has been described in terms shared with negative theology, both defined by that which is not. As opposed to cataphatic theology, the apophatic discourse can never approach God in language. This definition retreats into a negative formalisation, a definition constituted by the absence of presence. The problematic is the problem of definition: definition proceeds from a presumption of existence and, specifically, of existence as a value. The attribution of value, whether positive or negative, rests on a prior ontological understanding of a binary between that which is and is not – presence and absence – whereby existence becomes the realisation of presence as a value. Absence thereby takes its definition from that value; it is a lack of presence. Presence therefore assumes the value of a positive and creates value as a positive. In ‘deconstruction’ and in negative theology we see negative value become positive, a definition of what is emerging from what is not, and through that prior ontological understanding of existence as a value becoming subsumed into a metaphysical structure. Definition is thus problematic a priori, since it proceeds as a secondary instrument that, in naming, already names a concept within that structure. As far as the name is singular, the act of naming constitutes a positioning of the entity as a value within that logic, whereas the very possibility of naming means that, in the abstract, what is brought into existence by the name is brought about under that conditionality. It therefore exists, prior to the name, through the possibility of being named. In the case of deconstruction, it brings it about – literally, brings it into being – as a misconception. Deconstruction cannot proceed from the idea of existence itself as presence and thus be founded. The very principle of foundation emerges from an ontological presumption that then demands a definition in terms of value or negative value. To say deconstruction is not is not to define it in terms of the ineffability of a non-definition, but to extend the thinking of the hermeneutic 80

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Exhaustion circle within which it operates – rather than pretend to extend outside the circle, and thus become unwittingly returned to it again – in order to encompass a critical understanding of the circle itself. Already in ‘Différance’ Derrida spoke of the circumlocutions he would be forced to take in order to discuss différance without naming it as such – and with all that naming implies for ipseity – so that the syntax and caveats used ‘will resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology’ (MP 6). Like the qualifications of différance, deconstruction is not, derives from no being present or absent and has no present being, nor either existence or essence. Yet Derrida is unequivocal: these features of différance ‘are not theological, not even in the order of the most negative of negative theologies’ (ibid.). Negative theology must locate an archi-essence that goes beyond essence as a limit of presence and furthermore this ‘superessentiality’ goes beyond existence in its being (ibid.). In the sense that deconstruction is refused being as such, it has been allied with negative theology. In its exceeding of the possibility of presentation of the present, it does not, however, retreat into a super-essence or meta-being, refusing the mysticism of a definition according to the strict formalisation of a negativity that nevertheless has a positive value and ultimately seeks to place the reader in a position of unity with the ineffable. Deconstruction and différance have no essence or existence and might be construed to border the language of negative theology in the way in which they are discussed: in that they are not, they are in opposition to everything, where everything is understood not only as an unquantifiable totality but its plenitude thought on the possibility of presence of being. The exhaustion of a discourse, whether that of the via negativa or of deconstruction – and perhaps especially where they are conflated – is therefore a structural issue, within the structure of presence as it relates to a putative origin from which essence and existence, including the essence and possibility of language, is derived. Herein, exhaustion refers to the impossibility, at a certain stage, of describing God according to a negative theology; the discursive possibilities of the via negativa are doubtless exhausted. This is not only a historical problematic, but one that proceeds from the very origin with which it attempts to come into unity through this discourse of non-definition. The ‘essence’ of negative theology is said to be language: it takes place in language, existing as description and expression of that which has no description and no expression, the ineffable being of God. 81

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Exhaustion Is it more or less than a language? Does it, in its own terms, have essence outside of language, or is it both enough of a language and not enough of one? And yet negative theology, in conceiving God as indescribable and unapproachable, exhausts itself in its essence, will always consist in an intimate and immediate exhaustion of itself and its discourses. The question is whether the two can be divided: negative theology depends on language to the extent that it has no theological expression of God outside of the structure of language, while maintaining simultaneously that it is because God remains outside of language – in fact, outside of all the structures presenting from the ineffable – that he cannot be described. The poverty of language is its essence. In casting suspicion on the very essence or possibility of language, negative theology – which is also a language – exceeds language, so that the ‘essence’ of negative theology would carry itself outside of language. Becoming a metalanguage in which to speak of the impoverishment of language – more and less than a language – it is therefore speaking of language when it is speaking of itself. As it refers to itself, the proposition . . . has no rigorously determinable reference: neither in its subject nor its attribute. Not only are the possibilities of this language exhausted, but they consist in exhaustion, an intimate exhaustion that folds the language back on itself. Impoverishment is de rigueur, and the formalised compression of language to an essence of inadequacy ultimately leads to a discourse that exhausts itself as a formal gesture, so that one can speak of exhaustion [d’épuisement] only in the perspective of this complete formalization. To say that negative theology . . . is a language is then to say little, almost nothing, perhaps less than nothing. It can have no essence outside of that which it cannot describe, and exists as a retreat into that impossibility of language: in its exhaustion it exists as a comment upon that exhaustion, a complete formalization, that uses language as a metaphor to come into union with an inexpressible ineffability. What if, however, the structure of language was not considered to proceed from a ‘superessentiality’ that confirms the presentation of presence as essence and existence that derive from it? Then it would be possible that to say ‘what is called “negative theology” . . . is then to say . . . less than nothing’, and to say that negative theology says less than nothing, where nothing is in opposition to everything. If the structure of language is considered to come from a non-simple origin, then that origin makes language irreducible to a theological and ontotheological source wherein it could also be 82

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Exhaustion purely exhausted. As the trace, language would not be exceeded by the ineffable that constitutes its own impossibility. The ‘essence’ of negative theology is an effect of the trace that inscribes it and exceeds it; in that sense there is no existence for negative theology outside of language. The trace is ‘the very opening of the space in which ontotheology – philosophy – produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return’ (MP 6). By inscribing the polarity of everything and nothing that proceeds from the ineffable being of God into the trace of différance, the origin itself is put under erasure. Negative theology, if it is a language, would then escape the dialectic and enter into a dissemination of the trace, whence its inexhaustible exhaustion. It means (to say) through the play that disseminates meaning and prevents its relocation in the mastery of an origin. In trying to say something other than something – to define by way of non-definition – negative theology is carried off by language and says something other than something in that it cannot be returned to the theological source it then inscribes. Language has neither essence nor existence, not because it is inadequate to that which stands outside of it but because it questions the very idea of an orginary source that would allow an ‘outside’ of language just as it would produce Being as presence in relation to that source. In trying to provide a language for that outside of language, negative theology approaches exhaustion not as its telos but its predicate, if it is accepted that there is nothing outside of language, that language in fact inscribes and exceeds the opposition of internal and external as well as the ontotheology that structures it. At the same time, negative theology also tests the limits of language and its essence, exceeding it ‘by testifying it remains’ (ON 54). The trace deconstructs negative theology in that it remains within apophasis, leaving its mark on the acts of language that constitute it, measured in terms of the void that the withdrawal of the name of God leaves and against which every other linguistic act exhausts itself. It is the trace that constitutes it as nothing, inscribing in apophasis its own continuance beyond a formal evacuation that would make something out of nothing. The erroneous charge against deconstruction of being a closed system without reference wherein language itself becomes a theological value of mastery does not account for either the fact that deconstruction inscribes and is intimately involved with a metaphysical philosophy, or its engagement with the complications of exterior and interior. The importance of dissemination lies in the inexhaustibility 83

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Eyes of play, that by extension places negative theology within the language it attempts to escape and complicates both its claim to existence as a language as it does to having an essence outside of language; not even a name or a reference exists for God in negative theology, its descriptive possibilities and very essence exhausted by virtue of his non-being and non-essence. This lack of a name, however, becomes elevated to a supra-linguistic value external to the system and from which it derives. That there is no proper name for the trace and its substitutions, Derrida writes in ‘Différance’, is not because ‘[t]his unnameable is . . . an ineffable Being which no name could approach: God, for example’ (MP 26). By its inscription of alterity into negative theology, it leaves its structure open and renders the exhaustion of its formal gesture inexhaustible.

Eyes (MB 126–7) Can différance not also be at work visually? Writing of the eyes, sight, blindness and tears, Derrida engages with the Heideggerian notion of ale¯theia: the process of truth as unconcealment, the bringing into phenomenality of that which is present. This making-apparent of being places sight into a privileged relation with presencing; it is the means by which being, now unconcealed, is made manifest through the thing itself. And yet Derrida here draws a veil; he brings forth the blurring of sight, the dimming of vision, the world as seen through a film of tears. Following Heidegger37 the question of sight is the question of being, in that through phenomenology being is constituted, made present by presencing, though the truth of being lies in what is forgotten by metaphysics, its concealment of the distinction of the difference between Being and beings. If we accept, however, that being is subject to différance, then both being as difference and the unconcealment of being through a phenomenological presencing of that truth – ale¯theia – are temporally and spatially displaced. Différance then takes place in the eyes. Sight operates as the vision of a being made present through différance; it sees, too, the ontological phenomenality of the world brought into being through différance. If sight for Heidegger is the 37

See, in particular, Being and Time for an account of Heidegger’s divergence from Husserlian phenomenology with specific attention to the access of ontology, rather than consciousness, through phenomenology.

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Eyes access through phenomenal disclosure of the truth of being then for Derrida the constitution of being through différance is also in the eyes of the one who sees. This is the truth of those who ‘see’, whose vision is physically unimpaired, yet it is true also of those who do not see, whose vision is blind, or obscured through tears. In the eponymous 2002 film of which he was a subject, Derrida muses briefly on the eyes, confining himself to observing that Hegel called the eyes the outer manifestation of the soul and translating that thought by suggesting ‘that one’s act of looking has no age. One’s eyes are the same all one’s life’. He continues ‘[i]t is the eyes and the hand that are the sites of recognition, the signs through which one identifies the other [. . .] it’s very difficult to have an image of our own act of looking [. . .] It’s the other who knows what our hands and eyes are like.’ Drawing tacitly on Lévinas’ belief that it is through the face of the other – the only face we see, being blind to our own faces – that we are made responsible to alterity, Derrida here too, it seems, is speaking of the other within the self, the différance of being that separates him from a Heideggerian understanding of ontology. That ontology is opened up through the eyes, but for Derrida tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. The clear vision of an eye that perceives ontology through phenomenal disclosure – what is given to its sight – closes upon an eye brimming with tears and blind to the world. If tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience . . . an essence of the eye; the tears are both the revelation of an essence – ‘they reveal’ – and an essence of the eye itself. This takes place as a revolution itself; all the old forms fall away: we can no longer open our eyes to the truth, see clearly. The argument Derrida proposes in Memoirs of the Blind is that sight is not the essence of the eye, nor the revelation of truth of being through phenomenological access; the association already has a long history, from the Oedipal myth that Derrida turns away from into the lex Talionis of the Old Testament and the Doubting Thomas of the New. Thomas is pertinent here, being the apostle who refused to believe unless he could perceive, in contrast to those whom God blesses because they have faith, yet cannot see;38 the way to truth and its revelation is already through blindness. Before that, in the Greek tradition, the relation of sight is to knowledge; the blind are so because 38

Cf. John 20: 29, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’.

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Eyes they do not want to know, and if one cannot see, one cannot know. It is a transgression against both Nature and the nature of the will, an exercise of a perverse will not to know, though the will can move the blind man beyond perception (MB 12). Derrida’s genealogic story of the eye thus moves its orbit from Greece to the Bible, occasioned by a study of self-portraits by artists whose drawings, he avers, are themselves blind.39 Above all, the history of the eye is a Greco-Biblical one, for the West ‘draws upon the reserves of a Greek memory that is an-Oedipean, pre- or extraOedipean, and it draws, above all, from the crypts or the apocrypha of a Bibilical memory’ (MB 18). Blindness is here also connected to knowledge, but it is a knowledge that is of an order other than the Greek Idein, eidos, idea, a knowledge of the truth of God that can only be received by blindness and borne witness to by blind men. In order to see this truth, one must first become blind, as the phenomenological revelation of truth through sight and the knowledge accorded by vision cedes to the truth of the eyes as abocular. What is proper to the eye, its destiny and essence, are tears. Beyond knowledge conceived as a phenomenological given, there is the knowledge that is a gift of a veil of tears, and it is thought, in the anthropo-theological discourse, that only man knows how to go beyond seeing and knowing [savoir], because only he knows how to weep . . . Only man knows how to see this – that tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. Tears show us how to perceive beyond perception because, as John D. Caputo writes, ‘[o]ur eyes are always structurally veiled, and above all veiled with tears’.40 The eyes are veiled because where knowledge [savoir] gives way to faith, truth is not revealed by phenomenological understanding, or only insofar as it is a truth already veiled by the difference of perception that makes vision blind to revelation. This insight draws, or reveals, a veil over the Western tradition of a certain ontotheology, a blindness with regard to a whole history of seeing and being. To illustrate this Derrida draws a rhetoric of blindness, sketching from the literary canon and outlining its blind figures – Homer, Milton, Joyce, Borges 39

40

See MB (42), where Derrida draws the distinction between two blindnesses, one the transcendental blindness of drawing and the other the sacrificial blindness that is its theme. John D. Caputo, ‘These Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears’, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), Chapter 19, pp. 308–29 (at p. 313).

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Eyes – as well as its figures of blindness, one of which is Rilke’s die Blinde, in French l’aveugle (for the language, as Derrida mourns, because blindness for him is also gendered and it is men who have most access to its revelation, makes no distinction between male and female) who recalls for Derrida the sight of his mother and his drawing her as she lay dying, her eyes blind with cataracts. What drawing brings forth, as the eye moves from the object to the page, blind always to one or the other, drawing with a blind hand while looking or blind to the object while drawing, is that the object remains heterogenous to the trace of the drawing and that heterogeneity is ‘abyssal, whether it be between a thing represented and its representation or between the model and the image’ (MB 45). There are two ways, Derrida suggests, to interpret this: either the artist retains ‘a reserve of visibility’, where memory takes the place of perception both as practice and in the status of the drawing as a memory or archive, or else this abyss is ‘radically and definitively foreign to the phenomenality of the day’. ‘This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible’, then, ‘can haunt the visible as its very possibility’ (MB 45). The premise of sight is its loss and its condition the loss of intuition. The eyes of the blind, because they have given sight to memory, restore and retain perception as witnesses and replace eyes of vision with an inner light. The spiritual in-sight of veiled eyes makes the blind witnesses to faith which is capable of opening the eyes of others. It is such that Derrida recalls the Confessions of St Augustine, in light of a turning ‘from the light to the light, from the outward realm to the realm within’ (MB 117). This self-portrait or confession is a turning towards the invisible God through whose light visibility comes to be, and leads others towards the knowledge that it is not knowledge but the light of God that the gaze should be turned towards, veiled by the tears of prayer. Ale¯theia is the truth of the eyes rendered by a veiling-as-unveiling, where the anamnesia of the blind keeps in the reserve of memory the way to light. The forgetting by metaphysics of the difference of being that is then revealed through phenomenological vision is here complicated by the blindness of tears that surge up out of forgetfulness, and where ale¯theia, the truth of the eyes, reveals the ultimate destination of the eyes to be implication, to address prayer, love, joy or sadness rather than a look or gaze . . . By rendering vision blind, tears reveal the essence of the eyes as they surge up out of forgetfulness, a reserve that turns sight inward to the light of God who cannot be seen. The apocalyptic blindness of a gaze veiled by tears, a visionary prayer, is itself an apocalypse, 87

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Face which in the words of Derrida ‘is nothing other than a revelation or laying bare, an unveiling that renders visible, the truth of truth: light that shows itself, as and by itself’ (MB 122). By praying – by sacrifice and imploring – in order that tears come to the eyes, making oneself blind and drawing the veil, the eye unveils, by way of what Derrida recalls as the ‘sacred allegory’, the eye of the other. The human eye, allegorised to divine vision, is then revealed to différance.41 In understanding the self-portrait as an allegory not only of the divine gaze but of self-presentation or unveiling, sight too can be understood as an allegory of self-presence, the unveiling of truth through knowledge given to sight. Where that gaze is veiled and the eyes become blind, the différance of self-presence opens the eye to its essence as the revelation of blindness. By going beyond knowledge, given to sight, tears unveil through the insight of blindness what is proper to the eye: the process of truth as the revelation of a turning inward.

F Face (AEL 110–11) In the face, there before me, you present yourself. Irreducibly, you and no other. Face to face with you though, if there is a condition of representation it is in this: that recognising you as you and none other, I must concede that who you are is not this or that look, this or that quality or presentation of features. Through these something other is announced; it arrives for me, to me as itself, pure. In this, to come to see this, there must be recognition of a doubling in the one 41

Citing again the self-portrait, as Derrida does in his reading of Jan Provost’s Sacred Allegory, the painting can represent the human eye gazing upon that of the divine, where the theme then becomes the allegory itself and shows the transcendence of drawing in the sacrificial drawing by representing the exchange upon which the former takes place. The self-portrait, however, remains a representation of the scene and of the self, as it does of drawing as a transcendence, in other words the possibility of drawing itself that brings forth the phenomenological drawing as possible. Self-presentation in the portrait can never be simultaneous with the desire for self-presentation; it is ‘never met, it never meets up with itself, and that is why the simulacrum takes place. Never does the eye of the Other recall this desire more sovereignly to the outside and to difference’ (MB 121).

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Face which in the words of Derrida ‘is nothing other than a revelation or laying bare, an unveiling that renders visible, the truth of truth: light that shows itself, as and by itself’ (MB 122). By praying – by sacrifice and imploring – in order that tears come to the eyes, making oneself blind and drawing the veil, the eye unveils, by way of what Derrida recalls as the ‘sacred allegory’, the eye of the other. The human eye, allegorised to divine vision, is then revealed to différance.41 In understanding the self-portrait as an allegory not only of the divine gaze but of self-presentation or unveiling, sight too can be understood as an allegory of self-presence, the unveiling of truth through knowledge given to sight. Where that gaze is veiled and the eyes become blind, the différance of self-presence opens the eye to its essence as the revelation of blindness. By going beyond knowledge, given to sight, tears unveil through the insight of blindness what is proper to the eye: the process of truth as the revelation of a turning inward.

F Face (AEL 110–11) In the face, there before me, you present yourself. Irreducibly, you and no other. Face to face with you though, if there is a condition of representation it is in this: that recognising you as you and none other, I must concede that who you are is not this or that look, this or that quality or presentation of features. Through these something other is announced; it arrives for me, to me as itself, pure. In this, to come to see this, there must be recognition of a doubling in the one 41

Citing again the self-portrait, as Derrida does in his reading of Jan Provost’s Sacred Allegory, the painting can represent the human eye gazing upon that of the divine, where the theme then becomes the allegory itself and shows the transcendence of drawing in the sacrificial drawing by representing the exchange upon which the former takes place. The self-portrait, however, remains a representation of the scene and of the self, as it does of drawing as a transcendence, in other words the possibility of drawing itself that brings forth the phenomenological drawing as possible. Self-presentation in the portrait can never be simultaneous with the desire for self-presentation; it is ‘never met, it never meets up with itself, and that is why the simulacrum takes place. Never does the eye of the Other recall this desire more sovereignly to the outside and to difference’ (MB 121).

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Face place, where the face reveals, revealing itself and in itself simultaneously, the place of the other’s visitation as both host and guest. Moving from singularity and iterability, reciprocity as a condition for hospitality, an open hospitality as the unconditional condition of remaining open to the manifestation and realisation of the other, wherein, through the endless substitution of the individual face, face after face, there is always to be received, even as it always already gives itself, whether or not we perceive this, the other in all its singularity. Stripped, naked, properly pure, the other as ghost, spectre: without understanding this, there is, Derrida remarks in his reading of Lévinas, particularly here two texts or certain motifs, motions and tropes in the given texts, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, there is no proper apprehension of what hospitality to the other entails, in the face of the other’s arrival. Beginning with a figurative turn haunted by the trace of Kant, opening with analogy – as if – doubling has already taken place, in and as the possibility of the beginning. Imagine, we are asked; consider what we see as both there and more than what is there. Seeing the face in its absolute and irrecusable singularity, I am given to apprehend a doubleness from the first gaze. What presents, what gives itself as the supplement of the singular, the iterable within the apparent unicity, is that which might be said to take the subject hostage, to which the subject is subjected, destined, and to which, therefore, the subject is host. We only ever recognise the face of a stranger. For Derrida, responding to Emmanuel Lévinas, the face announces the destiny of subjectivity, the subjection of the subject, as host or hostage. In his eulogy to Lévinas, published later as part of the work here cited as Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida meditated upon his work, particularly Totality and Infinity, and on the debt of France to the Talmudic scholar who introduced it to the thought of Husserl and of Heidegger; the scholar who introduced phenomenology to a generation, and whose ethics was founded in the face of the stranger. For Lévinas, ethics is prior to philosophy, and thus philosophy is always already an ethics. It is an ethics of alterity, of the face-to-face encounter with the Other.42 The subjection of subjectivity to the Other is felt in this encounter, where the I is revealed stripped of every ontological predicate, a bit like the pure I that [Blaise] Pascale said is stripped of every quality that, as pure I, as properly pure, 42

The capital here designates the Other as tout autre, the wholly Other.

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Face it would have to transcend or exceed. The I is instituted through and towards this Other, in and as subjection: being is towards the infinitude of the Other. The subjection is to the alterity of the Other, who cannot be brought into the knowledge or assimilation of the ‘I’, because the ‘I’ is constituted through the unknowability of this other, which forbids the logic of ontology that would allow knowledge and assimiliation to take place. The face is the site of this encounter with heteronomy which is the founding of subjectivity in subjection. In Totality and Infinity, Lévinas describes the encounter with the Other in the face-to-face relationship as an interruption of the self in its self-relation; for Derrida, the auto-affective relation of the self is shown to be heteroaffective through the face-to-face encounter, which others the self as it opens the self to the Other. Preferring to term metaphysics ‘ontology’, Lévinas insisted that because the Other is prior to the self, it cannot be the object of inquiry of the self; the subject thus stands in a position of responsibility, rather than a position of inquiry – the position of metaphysics, or ontology – towards the Other. That Other can never be known by the self, for the subject is founded upon the alterity of the Other, the capital implying the unknowability of alterity, which can never be reduced to the same, to the self. The truth afforded by the Other is therefore not truth in the metaphysical sense of that which comes to be known, but is a truth which deconstructs metaphysics and ontology, the responsibility that calls into question the reduction to the same achieved through the possibility of knowing and therefore the absolute value of truth as the reduction to knowledge which is the proper. The Other cannot be reduced to the subject, precisely because the subject cannot be reduced to the same as it is founded upon the responsibility towards the Other. My subjectivity is formed through the Other and the demand the Other places upon me in and as that formation. I am oriented, not towards myself, but towards the Other, in my very formation, as also, it follows, in the practice of my diurnal life. The demand the other places upon me makes me responsible for the Other; not in a relationship of reciprocal obligation after the fact of my self, capable of entering into such strategic relationships, but as my constitution. This demand of the Other and of responsibility to the Other is the condition of my coming into being. It is, therefore, beyond any type of social or legal relation, and beyond the relationality of the acquaintance and stranger. The law that forms my subjectivity forms 90

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Face me as a response to this demand; my responsibility to the Other constitutes my subjectivity and is its condition. My orientation is towards the other, it cannot be towards my self – for there is no question of a self that exists prior to or independent of the Other, and not just in a relation to the other but as a relation to the other – or, rather, my orientation towards my self exists insofar as that self is created in relation to the other. My subjectivity is in that subjection. I am, therefore, responsible for those strangers whom I meet, but also for those whose faces I will never know, who will remain strangers and will remain my responsibility. In the same way, my obligation to my friend is to her unknowability, the stranger inside. And it is that stranger who forms me as a foreign body, foreign to the proper self: the stranger to whom I am called forms that self, and at the same time my subjectivity is formed by the stranger it is formed too as strange – different – to the idea of the self, the proper self. This responsibility to alterity is articulated for Lévinas in the commandments and the imperative towards the other that they institute as the law. My responsibility towards my neighbourstranger is encapsulated in the edict ‘Thou shalt not kill’; the ethics of subjectivity, our relation to each other in subjection, is held in this commandment as it recognises the unknowability of the Other that cannot be traversed or mastered, even in death. Ontology places a primary relation on being, whereas Lévinasian ethics figures being only in its relation to heteronomy; it moves the priority away from the question of being in order to ask how being comes about only as a response to the demand of the Other, and therefore a subjectivity instituted without primary relation to itself or the concept of the ipse. The relationship is not that of a master–slave dialectic but rather a palimpsestous connection, wherein the question is never that of a subject oriented towards an object, or placed in subjection to it, but of a subject born into the idea of subjection, and therefore into the questioning of ontology itself. It is only through a response to the demand of the Other, prior to any sense of consciousness formation that would allow the acceptance or otherwise of such a demand, that an ethical subject – a subject prior to the self of philosophy, of ontology and of metaphysics – can be born, and can thus imagine a deconstruction of that philosophy from the place of being upon which it is traditionally conceived. Before the self, there is the Other. The uprightness [droiture] of the law of the Other is ‘stronger than death’, as Derrida cites Lévinas in his address towards he who must obey, he says and writes, that 91

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Face ‘uprightness’ (AEL 2). Uprightness is towards, and towards Lévinas Derrida cites again his words, calling to the Other as ‘to define uprightness, Emmanuel Levinas says, in his commentary on the Tractate Shabbath that consciousness is the “urgency of a destination leading to the Other and not an eternal return to self” ’ (AEL 2). It might be thought of as dative, towards an indirect object, from a subject who cannot conceive in traditional ontological terms when confronted by the truth of unknowability. He continues, citing his words, unable to stop addressing through the Other; [i]t is as if, Derrida writes, the unicity of the face were, in its absolute and irrecusable singularity, plural a priori . . . The most general possibility of substitution [is] a simultaneous condition, a paradoxical reciprocity . . . of the unique and of its replacement . . . the placement of the singular as replaceable . . . Thus understood, substitution announces the destiny of subjectivity, the subjection of the subject, as host or hostage . . . The Other that forms the subject in subjection through the impossibility of refusal or rejection of its demand, the demand of its irrecusable singularity. This singularity cannot stand for others – such would be a denial of singularity – but is rather plural a priori, the multiplication of the singular across all the faces that we encounter and those we do not, and which all make their singular demands of us. This encounter with the Other is therefore never-ending, and it exists upon the condition of its infinitude and forms us according to its iterated yet always singular demand of hospitality. This is not just the singularity of the Other whom we know or may encounter, but the principle of encounter with the Other through which we perpetually are becoming in response to its demand, and through which we are formed as a priori ethical beings; therefore as beings who are a priori before philosophy as ontology, a sense of being that accommodates the other to the self. Within this ethics as first principle of philosophy, the concept of the ontological being is devastated by a subjectivity created through the absolute irreducibility of the Other, of which singularity becomes an iteration. Hospitality thus becomes us, our welcoming in of the other who places us under its law. In such a way, it becomes, too, a danger to ourselves, or rather our selves are constituted through the dangers implied in the obligation of a hospitality without reserve. Hospitality cannot stop because it has never, in an important sense, started; if to begin is a conscious decision, then it would be in opposition to the subject formed by the demand of the irrecusable Other and prior to any decision. This ethical ‘I’ also has a certain poetics, a sharing in 92

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Face an idea of passion as a suffering of total abjection and total welcome, an ‘I’ born into the acceptance of subjection. That encounter is also the breakdown of the barrier erected by ontology between the self and the world – and, it follows, of the self and the other – through a concept of the proper which the fluidity implied by the ethics of the face-to-face encounter obliterates prior to its constitution; this is also why the Other, and the demand of responsibility and of hospitality, is experienced not only as a phenomenological encounter but as an abstraction, for the other is not reducible to its actual predicates [the who irreducible to the what] . . . any more than the I is . . . [in] its infinitely exposed vulnerability . . . The question becomes for Derrida how to respond to the imperative of this demand, where response is not a choice but a choice must be made in order to be able to negotiate it; the demand comes from the other we have not met, as well as the other within our acquaintances and as the formation of the other of our selves; it is neither capable of satisfaction nor of accommodation. My subjectivity is formed in accordance with this law that orients it towards the other, but it is in an important sense a subjectivity of failure in practice, for only in the abstract can this orientation towards the other respect alterity as radical difference. Once I have made a decision about how to implement this law that has already made its demand, I enter into an economy towards the other that negotiates alterity by denying it as an absolute value in action while retaining it as an absolute value in principle. The alternative is that the other would lay waste to me. And yet the alternative is a razing or erasure of subjectivity through the demand that forms it and would also obliterate it; the imperative to respond also demands a certain intact subjectivity, intact insofar as it is never complete, is always traversed by difference in its institution through the other, but necessitating a remaining of subjectivity in order to be able to respond. It is these limit cases that are the test of our understanding of hospitality and the demand that it makes through us who are both host and hostage to that demand. It is not a question of opening ourselves out into the gesture of hospitality, or of choosing where to make the hospitable gesture, even taking a narcissistic pleasure in conscious subjection, in going too far in order to demonstrate the self through an ostensible and choice self-sacrifice. It is a being founded upon hospitality, in which there is no choice to be made because the subjective constitution is prior to any logic of choice. A subjectivity founded upon the other remains open like a wound as the law of its existence; 93

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Family there is no possibility of refusing hospitality, in the abstract or individual instance, without traducing the law of its constitution and entering into an ontology of the self. The demand of the absolute Other will also be a test of ethics. If ethics is the enjoinder to a general response – a responsibility to all – then ‘all’ must be understood as countless Others, a proliferation of singularity unassimilable to an entity and to which I am unable to respond. The ethical obligation to the Other entails a failure of ethics, in that by responding to one I am, unjustly and without possibility of justification, failing to respond to all the Others to whom I have an ethical obligation. To practise ethics in the name of the Other is also to sacrifice the Other, though action remains imperative.43 The face of the Other is a palimpsestuous phantom because we are simultaneously its hostage, its host and its guest [hôte]; we are obliged to invite it in when it arrives, but we become responsible to it and are reciprocally displaced in that responsibility to the hospes from the structure of the I as ipse. Unable to think ourselves ‘at home’, we are thus constituted not by a primary relation to ourselves but to the Other; we are othered by the Other, and by a hospitality that exceeds the ‘I’. Being does not end on the horizon of death but returns as the wholly Other. The name of God, that of the absolute Other, refers no longer to an epoche¯ determining being or non-being, but to a disruption of time that returns us to the future, the expectation of the coming of the Other.

Family (FWT 36–7) The distinctions are simple enough, so simple in fact as to be at once self-evident and overlooked. However, at a time when questions of family are being asked indirectly through the debate on what constitutes a marriage – what is the family? Is there such a thing as ‘family’? What are the parameters, or limits, of ‘family’ and its religious, juridical, institutional definition? What do such questions have to do with matters of right, hospitality, incorporation? – it is clearly still a question that remains as unresolved as it is, to some, self-evident. 43

Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas discusses at length the illeity of the third, the figure that for Lévinas interrupts the face-to-face encounter in order to mark the demand for justice in the law. On the origin of justice in Lévinasian ethics, taking ethics into the political dimension, Derrida holds that it nevertheless belongs to and is produced through the face even as it interrupts it, making the singular face plural.

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Family Self-evident that is in being sacrosanct, a shibboleth, unavailable to questioning. There is a logic of prohibition surrounding the idea or concept of the family, one in which ‘marriage’ as institution and ontotheological concept is, if not synonymous, then significantly similar, in the minds of some, with the equally ontotheological concept of ‘family’. Don’t ask, don’t tell, might be the catchphrase here, and for the very reason that any interrogation into the ontology or phenomenal perception of ‘family’ renders itself hostage to a further unveiling of the unspoken, the inexpressible, and, from within that, an economic and historical burden for which there is no intrinsic justification save for those of economics, the political and history. Derrida raises the question of ‘the family’ in response to another question, from Elisabeth Roudinesco, a question concerning the word ‘deconstruction’. In responding, Derrida opens a number of topics relating to history, society, particular symbolic, especially Freudian models, what he terms ‘statutory “organization” ’ (FWT 37), and with these, a certain concern for the permeable boundary between definitions of the ‘human’ and ‘animal’ is also announced. Additionally, inevitably, there are also the matters of ‘coparenting, same-sex parenting, artificial insemination etc.’ (FWT 36). Key to understanding Derrida’s reading of ‘family’ is a certain give and take in his response to Roudinesco between, on the one hand, a matter of ‘organisation’ and on the other ‘deconstruction’, of the deconstruction that comes to pass or takes place, of ‘ “what happens” or “what arrives” [ce qui arrive], . . . “what happens to the family,” but as the impossible’ (FWT 37). I will come back to this, but first the question of ‘organisation’. At once, once more, simple, the obvious, and yet unspoken as a result, Derrida makes it clear that the obvious has to be said in order that its unspoken become spoken, its invisibility dismissed, bringing that which is hidden, silent, into full view, a formative or foundational step in the interrogation of any possible ontological or ontotheological-historico-economic structure. So, by organisation, Derrida refers to ‘what institutes a normative, dominant, or even legal model in a given society’ (FWT 37). So far, so reasonable, at a general level. This does not go far enough, however, for it has to be recognised that every ‘expression’, every ‘manifestation’ of the ‘family’, even those which conform seemingly, most nearly, to the ‘normative’, the ‘dominant’ and any other supposedly typical example, is, in practice, ‘in each case singular’ (FWT 37). Beginning, or seeming to begin with this matter of ‘accepted’ or ‘majority’ organisational model, there is, Derrida insists we 95

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Family recognise, already a swerve, a deviation from the norm, within the norm, so-called. The normal model does not exist save in its most abstracted theoretical formulation, that which is governed in its organisation according to questions of what constitutes the normal, the dominant, and these in turn are decided, through a vague, yet firm consensual process involving legal, economic, societal, cultural, religious factors, values, institutions, beliefs, ideologies and so on and so forth. At the beginning of thinking the family, the singularity of any family, however normative, causes one to pause in one’s thought from the outset, and so not to take that first step, but rather to step back. And in stepping back, the founding question – ‘what is called “the family”?’ – becomes foregrounded as a necessity, as a necessary gesture, the framing of the question rather than the unthinking deployment of the nomination that gives access to a concept residing equally in the unthought. Hence, a return to that which has always been ‘ “of the family” ’: deconstruction (FWT 36), as that which can happen or arrive, given that it has always been part of that which is being put into question. If this is so, if deconstruction, supposing that to exist, is already underway in the concept, in any concept, as the precursor for what can happen or arrive; as the necessary ground in fact that undermines, pulls the rug from out under the feet of the organised, institutionalised concept; then it must follow that without any deconstruction-always-already-underway as a condition ‘of the family’, that is to say of any concept, organisation or institution of the dominant, normative model of ‘the family’ at any historical, social or political moment, therefore, there is more than one figure of the family within any representation or consideration of ‘the family’. On the one hand, there is that which is normative, dominant, holy let us say, and there is that which, on the other hand, despite any normative enforcement or legislated organisation in the interests of some manner of conservation or maintenance, unsettles, solicits the dominant while, as the sign of the singular, the sign of an alterity, an im-possible other causes to come about ‘a few small “revolutionary” consequences for civil society and the state’ (FWT 36). This both announces and affirms, therefore, the singularity ‘of the family’ against any general organisation, while also making possible the impossible, the ‘transformation of family structures’, which, as Derrida points out to Roudinesco apropos her own work, causes an effect manifesting itself as the ‘transformation of the psychoanalytic milieu’ and with that a ‘new generation of analysts and patients’ (FWT 36). 96

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Family Of course it is impossible to state, to define or generalise in any way about what a deconstruction – and every so-called ‘deconstruction’ will differ from every other, every deconstruction is singular – might be, regarding the idea of the family. The only thing that one can begin to say of the ‘deconstruction “of the family” ’ is that, the very idea, ‘of the family’, would not have maintained itself under the guise or illusion of an ‘itself’, undifferentiated, unchanging, eternal, unless always already at work there were, historically, culturally, socially, some deconstruction that comes to take place, to arrive in the institutional or organisational project of a normative or dominant concept maintained under the heading, in the name of the family. As soon as there is ‘family’, there is, there comes to pass, deconstruction, if there is any. Thus, one must ask again, as if from the outset, without necessarily being able to take any step forward that does not involve a belated looking back, a retrospective gesture after the fact that offers a deconstructive genealogy of the family (‘of the family’) to be delineated through the survival, a certain survival that is as spectral as it is material in our historicised apprehension, of that which remains unalterable, that which will continue to traverse History, and that this survival, in all its mutations, adaptations, transfers, as it were genetically, something of a family, some social bond organized around procreation. In order that we speak of family we have therefore to address not an ‘eternity’ but, instead a transhistoricity of the family bond. Any model that is founded on a nuclear, heteronormative structure is, perforce, limited historically, belonging to a limited sequence, as Derrida argues at once very long and very brief, according to the chosen scale. This apparent paradox is not in fact one at all. For ‘length of time’ is always available to different measurements, sequence open to analysis and interpretation according to different and differing criteria, which, though not mutually exclusive, nevertheless do not account for one another ostensibly. Despite this, one functions as if its own laws, its own economic regulation where, in principle and in fact, defining the other, the definition of the other being assumed, subsumed, within the one. We are speaking, clearly, of different times of the concept of the ‘family’, as a figure by which, transhistorically we are enabled to address the subject or concept, and by which we authorise ourselves to address the idea or notion. There is that very long scale, duration and length read as great because it covers millennia. Not as a figure of eternity as such, but as a substitute in our thinking whereby millennial duration stands in for 97

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Family the eternal, there is that understanding of the ‘family’, which, while taking ‘very little interest’ in ‘what are called “animal” families’ when accounting for ‘the symbolic, social and familial structures’ (ibid.) to which so much attention is paid, which only concerns itself in its overarching and reductive logic to what, speaking anthropologically (but also politically and economically according to particular historical models) is ‘ “proper to man” ’ (FWT 37). However, not in opposition or as a paradoxical element, that which is very brief in the determination of the family model is figured here in that phrase ‘proper to man’ as one example of the economic exploitation of one time scale by another; for, in the reading of millennia elided by ‘what is proper to man’ and therefore ‘of the family’, there is to be seen the process of organisational nomination, whereby the idea of the family is instituted. Far from being ‘natural’, the ‘family’ as ontotheological concept has a history, determined by all those factors – economic, social, political, ideological, religious, etc. – already mentioned. It follows therefore that in order to maintain itself through the various processes of auto-co-immunisation of which Derrida speaks elsewhere, social organisation has to maintain ‘family’ through adaptations and mutations that have always been underway from the start, as it were. Thus it is that Derrida is able to say that the moment . . . is already being announced, when [the model referred to by Freud and others] will be if not deinstituted, then at least diabolically complicated. Indeed, this is not something that will begin one day, or has started recently: It is already terribly overdetermined, and has been for a long time. What Derrida is announcing in effect is something that is only ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that such ‘revolutions’, those ‘few small’ occurrences as he puts it, are the inevitable occurrences – of deconstruction that happens, if it happens at all – in ‘the transformation of society itself, a transformation of the very model we’ve been talking about: whether it’s a matter of sexuality, the single-parent family’, and so forth. There is always already at work as the necessary condition and determination of the family and society, a ‘social turbulence’ which produces and ‘will produce effects’, and not simply on the ‘psychoanalytic scene’ (FWT 36), even though this is the primary example of transformation and turbulence to which Derrida alludes, in response to the singular situation addressed by Elisabeth Roudinesco. Derrida thus moves out in widening circles in his argument and hypothesis, starting with a specific model, already self-deforming as its own condition of being, out to that response that is clinically and socially reflected in the practice 98

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Fold and scene of psychoanalysis, and so beyond into the wider circles of societal organisation and transhistorical transformation, as the social, comprising various singular models, each made up of many small singular examples, maintains itself in deconstruction. Derrida does not predict any specific change, but merely notes given transformations, with the hypothesis that transformation will continue to take place, and that what, though historically determined is assumed as ahistorical, will nevertheless, in the way of things, come to an end, replaced by, survived by that matter of the ‘bond’. From which comes the observation, despite a neutrality that neither ‘rejoices’ nor ‘deplores’ transformation, that ‘we can imagine so many “familial” configurations! And even in what we consider “our” most stable and familiar model, there are so many subspecies’, even ‘families with 3 + n parents’ (FWT 37).44 Thus, whatever comes about takes place, or that whichever can arrive, the im-possible, is not for Derrida the unknown; there is merely that for which there is, as yet, no specific registration or nomination (and in imagining the unnamed, the unimaginable, there is in Derrida’s thinking an echo of Husserl’s consideration of geometry before the name), but which can always be called ‘family’, the unfamiliar becoming familiar, in the event of an unforeseen transformation.

Fold (WAP 36–7) This circular discourse, circulation of a circle one might say – the right to teaching assumes the knowledge and teaching of right. The right to, as right of access . . ., assumes the access to right – can open itself out to reading. It is a circularity that inscribes a certain linguistic and philosophical competence within itself; at the same time, it is inscribed by a linguistic and philosophical competence. Another circularity then ensues. This circle is also that of a hermeneutics, outside of which one cannot take a position. In fact, the circle, or better yet, let us think of it as a circular band or invagination does not frustrate the possibility of a simple divide between interior and exterior but the possibility of thinking and of the ordering of thought along that divide. The relation of the figure of the fold to that of the circle, invagination, is held in the frustration of a containment or inclusion through division – both of which are simultaneously partaking in their 44

Derrida is referring here to certain cases of artificial insemination with a donor.

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Fold opposition, the containment defined by that which is outside of it and the inclusion by that which excludes – whereby the inside and outside cease not only to be discrete and non-porous, but more importantly cease to be distinct and therefore to function as a structuring principle (as the principle of structure). As the interior and exterior become implicated in each other, both become denotationally meaningless; as a signifier of a structure, this retreat from meaning signals the arbitrariness of the opposition itself, its openness to infiltration and therefore the falsity of the distinction it institutes and is instituted upon. We could turn Derrida’s argument outside in; the point is that it would still be the same argument, for the problematic, or issue, would be in the fallacy of presuming it inhabits one pole. Seen in those terms, it would make no difference whether the argument was as above, or its opposite, since both would be essentially the same, separated by a division instituted as its own deconstruction. If, however, we were to consider this argument not as a position which engenders and is engendered by its opposite, but emergent from a philosophical history that it deconstructs by refusing to seek the illusion of a position outside of it, the significance of the figure unfolds. The fold displaces the notion of an inside and an outside – the notion of a structure – as it literally displaces the outside in, making of it the inside and showing that it was, always already, so; the potential for the inhabitation of the outside and inside simultaneously in the same place becomes the dissolution of those categories as a simple binary by the complexity of the fold.45 45

Arkady Plotnitsky has discussed the figure of the fold in Derrida as it is distinguished from that of Deleuze, the latter conceived upon geometric principles and the former on algebraic; the discussion is illuminating for its distinction of the Heideggerian fold, in its quotation of Deleuze: When Heidegger calls upon the Zweifalt to be the differentiator of difference, he means above all that differentiation does not refer to a pregiven undifferentiated, but to a Difference that endlessly unfolds and folds over from each of its two sides, and that unfolds the one only while refolding the other, in coextensive unveiling and veiling of Being, of presence and of withdrawal of being. (Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, quoted in Arkady Plotnitsky, ‘Algebras, Geometries and Topologies of the Fold: Deleuze, Derrida and Quasi-Mathematical Thinking (with Leibniz and Mallarmé)’, in Between Deleuze and Derrida, eds Paul Patton and John Protevi (New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 98–119 (at p. 105))

In the Derridean fold, différance traces difference: rather than a coextensive presence and withdrawal of being, a simultaneous alternation, the presence of being is displaced from presence by the fold. In that sense, meaning is produced as plural, rather than multiple, from this irruption in being.

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Fold ‘The Double Session’ draws on Mallarmé’s fold in order to demonstrate it in a chain of spatial figures – the hymen, fold, re-mark and blank – that then inscribe spatiality and temporality as already marked and folded upon, divided as subjectile. By folding the text upon itself, the logic of the fold, like that of the hymen in which it is also implicated, makes of the text an abyss within which the referent recedes to an always deferred presence. Like the hymen and chora, it holds the text open to that operation of the margin that prevents the system from achieving closure, of meaning being unveiled and disclosed in the form of revelation ultimately grounded in time and space. In that chain each term is substitutable, referable to another without synonymity, and ultimately replaceable, put into play as the play of meaning without return to a stable or recoverable point of fixity. The fold does not operate as an unveiling or exposition of difference, nor either its internment through a spatial gesture. Through the remarking of the fold, the undecidability of meaning does not become quantifiable and therefore economic, in other words representable as the exposition of a qualified play. The hymen is not divided by the fold, it is already divided through its fold; it is related to itself, as the mark is, for if in the fold ‘the hymen differs (defers) from the present, or from a present that is past, future, or eternal, then its sheet has neither inside nor outside, belongs neither to reality nor to the imaginary, neither to the original nor its representation’ (D 241). The fold is not the simple confusion of distinction but its undecidability, where the fold has effaced the space upon which to erect poles of opposition. The undecidability remains in play and cannot be fixed or determined according to any of these terms. The fold denies mastery of meaning, meaning as such in the sense that it emerges as the sense of a structure. In the text, it re-marks so as to dislocate any possibility of a thematics construed through a posited meaning. It is no longer even strictly a signifier, Derrida writes (D 260), the implication here being that the signifier stands in for something, even for a putative richness of pluralities that would reconstitute a thematics from the text. The fold has no such relation to itself as either a representation or impetus, as it inscribes the referent in its fold. It acts, moreover, on itself; ‘the fold folds (itself): its meaning spaces itself out with a double mark, in the hollow of which a blank is folded’ (D 265). In the fold, thought as a structuration, two or more terms are implicated into one another such that neither is the originary or superior term; this goes beyond a relationship of dependence to inscribe origin, the arche as an-archic. The terms 101

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Fold exist neither co-dependently or independently – which would imply a definable entity – but are folded into a dissemination of meaning whereby neither has a discrete identity because the fold has undone identity itself, in the sense of what is delimited and appropriable. The inside becomes outside and the margin takes the place of a displaced centre. Like invagination, which turns a boundary or limit upon itself so that it creates a figure wherein the interior exceeds the figure, this is a spatial figure that marks the spatial as problematic.46 By making the surface the substrate, then re-folding in order that the relationship be one of undecidability rather than simple reversal, it creates a structure that functions according to a dispersal of structuration, where the latter is conceived as interior and exterior, centre and margin. The fold in the subjectile means that each mark has no referent identity, no being except in its relation to others; the blank retreats as a present presence – reality – and it is shown to be already written on, inscribed by the trace that separates the present from itself and separates reality from the presence and as reality, the presencing of the present. As invagination folds the exterior inwards, it resists interpretation insofar as the act of interpretation takes place according to and with reference to a putative exterior. The outside takes place from within, the inside is already the outside; such categories cease to be useful, or are useful in that they retain the trace of a system that is always already inscribed and mark its reinscription. The structure of metaphysics is already within: it is inscribed by deconstruction, that which operates in it and folds it upon itself. Rather than existing outside of it and thus as its arche, the claim to an origin is inscribed within its structure, which is in turn inscribed within the trace. The fold denies separation of subject and object as it folds the border between the two, a border constructed upon an anterior structuration. One is implied in the other, and the categories cease to function except in this implication by the other. This applies to the right to teaching, which assumes the knowledge and teaching of right. Right, as conceived in Derrida, is always implicated by power. The right to teaching is already inscribed by the teaching of right, which here takes the form of a right to access, a right that in turn assumed the access to right, which assumes the capacity to read and interpret, in short, instruction; or, the right to teaching. As the category of anterior and posterior collapses, right [droit] is both a 46

See ‘The Law of Genre’ for a reading of invagination as it folds the text inward.

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Fold principle and those issuing from it; it occupies the form at the same time of an originary force and its derivatives. Like invagination or the circulation of the circle, the fold operates upon the concept of ability, in which it is marked or inscribed; again, however, this ability is of course inscribed in the circle, but it is also the condition of the circulation of the circle, as it is marked by the fold but is also the condition of the enfolding of the fold. Right is dependent on ability, the ability to comprehend – in this example, a linguistic and philosophical competence, that would authorise the right: who is allowed to teach, and who to receive it? – but this ability is simultaneously implicated in the right that appears to found it, rather than posterior to it.47 In order for right as an ethical rule to become a political instance, it must be mobilised, but the mobilisation is dependent on the becoming effective of right, as right to: it is not its issue. The moment of the founding of right – as right to – is also the moment of right as founding or originary principle. As the fold places time and space into a non-simple relation that complicates linearity, it turns the discourse of the exterior – a discussion of right – upon itself, demonstrating that the possibility of discussion is already founded in this ‘right to’ in which the apparently originary right is already folded. The originary right authorises the right to but it is the right to, the becoming effective of right, that authorises the discourse of right; in the context of the teaching of philosophy, any discussion of right – here, the right to philosophy and to a philosophical teaching – issues from a right to that is prior to the right, enfolded within it. Only the becoming effective of right enables the discussion of right, which does not then stand outside or authorise the issue of the right to, but is implicated in it. Similarly, the right is not appropriable in the sense that right to derives from a prior determination of right as right to. The enfolding of right into its becoming effective as right to means that the latter cannot be determined according to the former, but the former is implicated in the latter already and thereby authorises it as it is authorised. The issue of right becomes othered, displaced from the appropriable and made the right of the other; not to be given under certain conditions, but already displaced by the plurality of the fold. The issue of the right to a philosophical education is contained in the 47

The work of GREPH, the Groupe de recherche sur l’enseignement philosophique, emerged from this fold in 1975 to supplement the teaching of philosophy as it was being withheld as a matter of policy from French students.

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Forgiveness verb can [pouvoir] in that the verb implies both ability and power, the ability to teach and the power to teach: in the fold, we can discern that the power derives from the ability as the ability derives from the power. To deny the ‘right to’ teaching is thus to deny right as ‘right of’. Where the two become enfolded, the ‘right of’, insofar as it can be reasoned, is seen to already be inscribed by the right to, and therefore the withholding of the latter the withholding of the former. The denial of the right of education is made effective in the withholding of the right to education. It is a circular reasoning and within that logic a withholding of reason on the basis of reason, a folding of logic that exposes its own fallacy.

Forgiveness (OCF 27) To measure is to avoid forgiveness, it limits the act and so annuls it. But while, in principle, there is no limit to forgiveness, would, could this ever be possible? Again, we are at founding questions, with first questions, such as what do we call ‘forgiveness’? What calls for ‘forgiveness’? Who calls for, who calls upon forgiveness? Without supposing answers, one begins right away by acknowledging that one hardly knows how to measure or to take the measure of such questions. Such questions indeed, the weight of each of which can barely be borne. Standing before the questions, before uttering them, before assuming we can articulate their demands and interrogations, we have to consider why, for example, of the three interrogatives being posed, posing themselves with an implacable poise, demanding our attention; we have to ask why only two of the three frames ‘forgiveness’, marks it off, as if seeing to limit, suspend it, thereby taking the measure, or seeing if one can measure up to the demand of the question. Suspended, it is the idea of forgiveness which presents itself, presenting and presented in such a fashion that the good reader must pause to consider the very idea, of what is understood by this particular term, and behind it, the concept that the motif claims to re-present, as if understood, as if given, as if the idea, as much as ‘forgiveness’ itself, were given, could be given, were a given. Then, not to be overlooked, there is that distinction made between the who and the what. Who asks, what situation calls for unconditional forgiveness? (Is there any other kind, strictly speaking?) Then, a distinction is to be noted concerning the one who calls for, as opposed to the one who is assumed to be calling on, forgiveness. Finally, there is this question of the call itself, or rather say the various calls, the 104

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Forgiveness different demands, summons, pleas, entreaties, exhortations, the hail, the regard or consideration, exclamation, and with this, in the idea of any call, that calling, vocation that is also a nomination, as if someone, something, were being named, performatively – christened? baptised? – ‘forgiveness’. Every possible variation of the call indicates what, doubtless with too much haste and too great a facility, in too facile a manner, we might nominate ‘subject positions’, those who subject others to the call, those who are subject to the call, those who are the subjects in need of forgiveness, or who demand, cry out for forgiveness. Assuming for the moment we believe we understand what ‘forgiveness’ names, what it calls for and entails, what it is and what is constituted by, what has to take place according to the premise of any act of forgiveness, its uses transhistorically have to do with forms transference: the giving up of a claim or one’s resolve as the OED puts it, the remittal of a debt. Something is surrendered, someone surrenders, from one to another, transferal, surrender takes place. At the same time, there is obviously assumed that sense of giving or granting. Give and take therefore, the common assumption and practices of forgiveness determined, corralled by an economic limit, operating in a calculated fashion, wherein lies the confusion, forgiveness confounded . . . with related themes: excuse, regret, amnesty, prescription etc.; so many significations of which certain come under law. And with the law there is always the matter of penalty, punishment, some punitive measure. We find ourselves back within the limit of thinking in a measured way, measuring, ‘meting’ out forgiveness, as if it could be measured, as though it were conditional, limited, calculable: so much, so far, and no more, no further. The archaic boundary haunts forgiveness, seeking to keep it in check. It hems it in, while authorising the act of doling out, of dispensation, according to the measure, and a law that assumes the propriety, the appropriateness of the measure as such, by which forgiveness is given. It is a given that the measure is known. While today, the notion of measuring has about it something more abstract, geometrical, to ‘mete’ out forgiveness speaks of that very borderline that dispenses forgiveness up to a point and no further. Yet, Derrida’s argument goes, this is not truly forgiveness; forgiveness up to a point, within bounds, according to some calculated law determining ‘forgiveness’ within such limits, is never authentic, merely the name for amnesty etc. There is here an interesting gesture on Derrida’s part in that ‘etc.’ For, while the idea of forgiveness is named as having no 105

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Forgiveness limit, in principle, the principle of the limit engages in, opens up, acts of substitution and nomination, nomination as substitution, which, by the very gesture of the ‘etc.’, can always extend infinitely. In law then, which is in opposition implicitly to the very idea of forgiveness, there is no limit to the lengths those authorised by such a law may go in limiting forgiveness strategically. No limit to the limit, no end to the remapping of borders. Under the law, before the law to which forgiveness becomes subject, the boundary must always be redrawn in order that a true act of forgiveness may not take place, in principle, and so escape or exceed its governance. In reading this as the implicit tension between law on the one hand, and forgiveness (‘true’ forgiveness, forgiveness as excess, as overflow of any legal or economic limit) on the other; understanding this as the history of the measuring of any gesture of forgiveness, it becomes clear why, today is announced, a today that Derrida explicitly identifies as that which takes place especially in today’s political debates which reactivate and displace this notion, thereby maintaining today equivocation as the measure of what should be unequivocal. And equally unequivocal in the face of such political, global maintenance, is the need for the questions by which, without limit, the focus on what constitutes forgiveness, what is proper to the word, the concept, the meaning, is and must be redrawn. That forgiveness begins not as a certainty but as that which grounds a number of questions concerning the proper, what is proper to the name, without moderation, without measure, but as an ‘enigmatic’ concept (OCF 27) is unequivocally important concerning which there is no limit, but on the condition that we can agree as to some ‘proper’ meaning. Agreement has to be reached, this is the condition of unconditional forgiveness. As paradoxical as this might appear, the first step is absolutely necessary in order that there be no equivocation on the point of what some ‘proper’ meaning might be, especially if one remembers that, in the place of the concept of forgiveness, assumed and not questioned, are all those improper displacements, substitutions, economical, political and authorised renominations. The act of naming, under the equivocal exigency of a ‘today’ that suits the political gambit, authorising itself in its gesture, is precisely the act, also, of marking the boundary, measuring what is proper to the question unequestionably for those who do not wish the question as question to be raised. For what takes place, today, and in all those todays where excuse, amnesty, prescription, etc., appropriate just enough of forgiveness, of the concept of forgiveness 106

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Forgiveness as is appropriate to the exigent matter at hand, a boundary is drawn which, on the one hand, keeps forgiveness in check, while, on the other hand, maintaining forgiveness in an exteriorised, displaced and homeless lawlessness. This can only be achieved, and maintained, if the question of forgiveness qua question be excluded in the first place; which of course, historically, historico-theologically (OCF 28) has been the case, hence the return to first, foundational questions, where thinking is called for, as much a matter of an ethical commitment as it is a question of philosophical rigour. That the case is for Derrida all the more urgent, where an oppositional ‘theatre of forgiveness’ (OCF 28) has to be staged against that other ‘theatre’ in which that which is or ought to be ‘singular and on the way to universalisation’ (OCF 28), is marked by the scene of the ‘today’ illuminated by a ‘proliferation of scenes of repentance, or of asking ‘ “forgiveness” ’ as, in part, a sign of a ‘universal urgency of memory’ (OCF 28). A symptom of this is the viral spread of an Abrahamic language, which is, already, the ‘universal idiom of law, of politics, of the economy, or of diplomacy’ (OCF 28). There is a danger in the universal urgency, in the ‘universalisation’, of a historical erasure, the erasaure of the signs of particular material conditions and historical events that have called into existence the need to inquire into the question of forgiveness, with a renewed interrogation, and an urgency, but without the avoidance of rigour, commensurate with that of the rush to universalisation of the discourse and articulation, politically, diplomatically, economically, etc. What then might be proposed as an improper and excessive forgiveness, in order that its ‘proper’ meaning might begin to be glimpsed? On what conditions could an unconditional forgiveness be apprehended? At bottom, all the conditions, politically and historically, of limited ‘forgiveness’ have been those marked by the paradox of ‘economic transaction which, at the same time, confirms and contradicts the Abrahamic tradition’ (OCF 34). It is thus important, in beginning to unfold the questions of forgiveness, its genealogy, its histories and fortunes, its various paradoxical enactments, to ‘analyse at its base the tension at the heart of the heritage’ (OCF 34). What I have deliberately referred to as that in Derrida’s reflection as ‘oppositional’ is misleading to the extent that I have, for the purposes of engaging the problematic, simplified strategically and provisionally this internal tension in order, for the moment, to separate what I am tempted to identify as the realpolitik of forgiveness in its historical manifestations and stagings into a fictional pair. As 107

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Forgiveness Derrida’s double phrase makes plain, however – confirmation and contradiction – forgiveness is, within itself, already double. There is always already in any idea of forgiveness both the limit and illimitability. There is, in every expression of forgiveness, the double and other of its other. At ‘the heart of the heritage’ there abides, remains and is maintained, ‘on the one side, the idea which is also a demand for the unconditional . . .’, while, ‘on the other side’ inscribed everywhere in texts treating of forgiveness, testimony of ‘a conditional forgiveness’ is registered, which is ‘proportionate to the recognition of the fault, to repentance, to the transformation of the sinner who then explicitly asks forgiveness . . . To this extent, and on this condition, it is no longer the guilty as such who is forgiven’ (OCF 34–5). In asking foundational questions, therefore, one is not being merely theoretical, merely philosophical, retreating from materiality or history; far from it. Insofar as they question the fundamental constitution of forgiveness by returning to its ontological construction, foundational interrogations in returning to first principles (assuming these to exist) inaugurate through an analysis resembling a material phenomenology the recovery as far as possible of the historicity of the concept in all its immediate political, ethical, juridical, theological and economic articulations. In this, the irreducible double structure of the concept, its internal paradox or rivenness is unveiled. In principle, forgiveness must exceed any judgment, however ‘fairly’ made. It must outstrip the weighing of evidence or any form, manner or expression of calculation. It must remain foreign to any symmetry ‘between punishing and forgiving’ (OCF 37); for otherwise, there is always that crime, even the most worst, ‘like the Shoah’ that remains ‘ “inexpiable” ’, ‘ “irreparable” ’ out of ‘all proportion to all human measure’. Here, Derrida agrees, finds consensus with Vladimir Jankélévitch,48 up to a limit, to a particular point. When the philosopher places himself in ‘L’Imprescriptible’, in the symmetrical exchange, coming to a conclusion that ‘ “forgiveness died in the death camps” ’ (OCF 37), Derrida agrees, simply, unequivocally: ‘Yes’. Absolute affirmation, complete agreement. The performative stasis, the total suspension in the performative dimension of that affirmation that is also, on Derrida’s part, an agreement, a response, a consensus, calls to an end a particular history of forgiveness, up to, and as a result of the death of forgiveness in the death camps, 48

Vladimir Jankélévitch (31 August 1903 – 6 June 1985), philosopher and musicologist.

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Frame the impossible in the face of the inexpiable, the irreparable, that for which there is no vengeance, no judgement or condemnation severe enough, and so, accordingly, no human measure of forgiveness equal to the abysmal nature of the crime. Unless. Unless, Derrida suggests, ‘unless it only becomes possible from the moment that it appears impossible. Its history would begin, on the contrary, with the unforgivable’ (OCF 37). Here we have it then, a proposition that wants to imagine the possibility of forgiving the unforgivable, and so, in this, imagine the beginning of a history for forgiveness; and with this an invention of forgiveness that overflows its entire history to this moment, introducing an ‘anecomonical and unconditional forgiveness: beyond the exchange and even the horizon of a redemption or a reconciliation’ (OCF 38). In reaching this point, stepping beyond what appears an ineradicable border, the limit begins to be erased, and we find ourselves back with the first questions: ‘What do I forgive? And Whom? What and whom? Something or someone?’ For, ‘between the question “whom?” and the question “what?” ’ everything remains to come, in every singular instance when the question of forgiveness returns (OCF 38).

Frame (TP 60–1) We exist in what is coming to appear as an endless, if spectral present: a ‘today’, or ‘now’. Such a today is provisionally definable by various manifestations of tele-technological supports and substrates taking forms of text and postal systems in more obviously ‘spectral’ directions. This is a today which has been lasting for a decade at least, the relatively recent (as I write) release of the iPad and its successive ‘generations’ (a today now, as I revise, already out of date, supplanted, supplemented), marking the permanence and supplementarity of now. In this suspended, sustained moment, in which the intimacy of the touch touches on tele-techno-spectral-communication – touching without touching, flesh upon glass, the hardness and indifference of the structure, rebutting the soft, firm grasp of flesh, desire at the limit of the skin, a parergon but not like all the others, not quite (what is taking place?) engaging in a spectro-erotics, all virtual, phantasmic intimacy framed, supported by, the substrate – the condition of the frame as border or limit, as intermediary, is being called to our attention, albeit implicitly. A partial ‘side effect’ of this, an adjunct to the tele-technological substrate and frame, supporting, re-enforcing, reminding us of that 109

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Frame which stands between here and there, presence and absence, self and other, has to do with a return to the question of the book. Confused on occasion with ‘text’, the alleged problem of the book’s demise has surfaced repeatedly. The question of the book, that is to say the ‘concern’ or ‘interest’ in the printed, bound, mass produced textual mode of transmission, arrives in various guises: with anger, anxiety, perplexity, whichever apparent abandonment of reflection or taking up of polemic you care to choose. However – and the question of the book is raised only so as to let it drop again, its passing interest here nothing other than a sign of its own historically fleeting passage (taking the long view) – stepping away from such debates, whatever I may think (and I have to confess to a sentimental preference for paper and card over plastic and glass, to the materiality of page turning to the swipe of a finger), the ‘book’ as object is, most neutrally understood, nothing more than a means of transport and delivery. The book carries and gives form to the singularity of a particular textual production. A substrate, a support for text, it is also a means of remarking the division between word and world, text and context. Thus, though by no means the most obvious expression of a ‘frame’, a book ‘frames’ and is a ‘frame’ nonetheless. The book is a frame of sorts, a limit certainly, between the inside and the outside, the interiority of meaning and the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription, in other words, all the empiricisms of the extrinsic . . . incapable of either seeing or reading. As frame, the book, like any frame, marks a limit; but as with any frame, its edge, boundary, border, limit, is never single: that there are given to be read such internal and external edges immediately makes one aware of the doubling condition of a frame. For the frame marks a division, announcing spacing and difference in the following manner, though not necessarily with any sequence, priority or order such as this definition must have recourse to: the frame marks the outside of the inside, separating with its internal limit the point to which the integral inside extends, this ‘inside’ being the body proper of the ergon. However, in marking this boundary the frame also effectively announces the point up to which the space of the ‘outside’ also extends. In any attempt to account for the work of the frame there is to be reckoned with therefore the inner and outer aspects of framing. With this internal limit as that which passes between . . . clothing and the body, the column and the building on the one hand, there is to be acknowledged on the other hand the whole field of 110

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Frame what in far too blithe a manner is called ‘context’, this ‘field’ which, in being not only event, institution, practice, the ‘everyday’, but also inscription, is comprehensible as an articulation of textuality. Without understanding the thickness and surface of the frame, the parerga, no ‘theory,’ no ‘practice,’ no ‘theoretical practice,’ can intervene effectively in this field. ‘This field’ is that of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced. That which is the ‘margin’ if you will (a poor name for the frame, but one which highlights the misperception of the frame’s operation); that which is conventionally marginal to any discourse on textuality, close reading of said textuality, to the work of art or its meaning, is read strategically as being central in this drive to signature. Equally, the margin(al) is also that which, in being centred, foregrounded in such a reading that places the marginal at the centre, takes the edge as the focal point rather than either ‘text’ or ‘context’, ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, ‘word’ or ‘world’, simply, simplistically, understood or rather misunderstood; a misunderstanding driven itself by all the empiricisms of the extrinsic, that is to say a reductive historicising contextual reading. Notice though how, in working through the problematic of the parerga, working out the initial steps in beginning to read the simultaneous work and silencing of the frame, there is a discursive, reflective multiplication. Each step of this proliferation is, itself, framed, suspended in quotation marks, thus: ‘theory’; ‘practice’; ‘theoretical practice’. Such a ‘proliferation’ of the stakes of reading the frame and failing to read the frame is also a ‘reduction’ phenomenologically. For, as the steps multiply, complicating one another, so what had appeared ‘simply’ an empirical division between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (much like the ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, text and context, and so forth) becomes in this ‘stripping down’ revealed in all its complexity, a complexity made all the more dense by the assumption of an empirical simplicity in which what takes place not only fails to see the hugely overdetermined problematic of the frame but also maintains an illusion of simple separation. Denuded of all cover the ‘empiricisms of the extrinsic’ are laid bare in their manner of covering up the complexity of the idea and work of the frame. In this, they are shown as either incapable of seeing or reading, or otherwise shown up as missing the question completely. And this is achieved through that multiplication, that reducing unravelling that takes place, clause after clause, layer following layer stripped away, each veil falling in the performative gesture of the text’s serial 111

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Frame negation: no ‘theory’, no ‘practice’, no ‘theoretical practice’. Nothing is adequate in any discourse concerning the inside and the outside, text and context, word and world, present and absent, visible and invisible, unless one focuses rigorously on that means by which any framing, or en-framing, is accomplished, and perceived in this as the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning . . . and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic. Once more, the performative gesture at work, put into operation through grammar and syntax and the, again, crucial, if silent, deployment of diacritical and other signs of writing that frame and support the voice. Whereas in the previous iteration of clauses there had been the performative double work of the negation and the quotation mark, here, in this phrase there is that complication qua revelation or unveiling that takes place through the marginal or framing agency of the parenthesis, which not only marks but enacts framing; and in doing so, illustrates in its performance, at the margins of commentary, so to speak, the margins, the frames by which commentary, complicating itself unveils in itself the truth in framing. Of course, the use of the parenthesis in conjunction, substitution of prepositions might go unread as performative, or simply unread at all, neither seen nor read, in much the same way as the empirical reader might, almost surely will have either overlooked the strategic gambit of the multiplied clausal negation that leads to a more subtle apprehension concerning the limits of seeing and reading. Or perhaps worse than failing to read, to see and so to apprehend that which is at stake through the calculated risk of the inscribed gesture on Derrida’s part, there would be the misreading; this would be misread to the extent that it would announce the multiplication, the use of quotation marks (‘scare quotes’) and/or parentheses, diacritical markers etc., as being all merely ‘badly’ written, ‘inelegant’ or ‘needlessly verbose’ gestures on the part of the ‘typical’ ‘poststructuralist’, or ‘postmodern’ text or practitioner. (‘This is just what Derrida does’ might be the worst case scenario of an appalling and also hilarious misreading, as though – and is this not the case, has this not been so? – sentence formation were assumed to be nothing more than yet more evidence of a certain signature effect.) Derrida’s use of ‘to (between)’ and ‘(to) all’ effectively frames, as well as centres the entire argument concerning the need to focus on the decisive structure of what is at stake, on the ways in which the ‘drive to signature is produced’ in the history of textual analysis. Each parenthetical modification alters perception 112

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Frame of the en-framing gesture, while simultaneously, and as a result of altering perception – providing one sees, one looks carefully enough; you can lead a horse to water as the saying goes . . . – marking and remarking, as it lays out before the reader totally naked, the work of the frame; and it does this, each gesture does this through the function that is as formal as it is functional: for it seeks to draw attention to the way in which each parergon marks and remarks a doubleness of the frame’s limit, signing on the one hand the outside of the inside, and on the other hand, the inside of the outside (each of which of course will have their own ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and so on, abyssally). But this question of the ‘drive to signature’, that which is engaged, supported, generated and maintained in a succession of ‘todays’ as work of a ‘cover up’, by (through) the ‘whole field of historical, economic, political inscription’, an inscription which has been subscribed to for quite some time: the maintenance of the ‘simple’ separation between inner and outer, text and context, and so on, serves both to downplay the work of any parergon in its mediation between work and milieu (TP 61) while promoting the idea of the author, artist as sole generator or producer of a given work or text. Thus those readers who wish to keep apart rigorously the interiority of meaning and the apparently straightforward significations of the extrinsic empirically given, strive generally to support and promote the drive to signature, thereby entering, reinscribing themselves and their acts of analysis into that ‘whole field’ of inscription. And it is not just the various and manifold ‘empiricisms of the extrinsic’ which have toiled so tirelessly. Those who have sought to read just the interior, locating meaning only in the play of words, the semantic valence and the poetics of form – those whom Derrida identifies as sheltering the interiority of meaning, those belonging to the ‘whole hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist tradition’ (TP 61) – have equally marginalised the margin and its significance, ignoring or failing to read, or see, the ways in which the parergon detaches itself ‘both from the ergon (the work [the translation strategically framed here, parenthetically, while parergon remains to stand alone, stand out, detach itself {se détache}]) and from the milieu’ (TP 61). All of which brings us, in the end, to a point from which to begin the interrogation of the frame, the parergon, and of the idea, the function, the muting or silencing, the history of the service of parerga in general, though all the while taking each example of the parergon 113

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Frame as singular. The question of the frame arises for Derrida not as a certainty but, in a reading specifically of the figure of the parergon in general, but also in a particular passage, in Kant’s Third Critique (TP 63). The frame is merely the example of parerga in general, but what is a parergon? This has to be, as is always the case in Derrida, the fundamental starting point of any analysis: the question, and with that a confession if you will of uncertainty. One must always begin, again, from a perception of one’s own lack of knowledge. Or rather, one must begin from the point of questioning what one thinks one knows, by examining that about the figure, the subject, topic or object, the idea, belief or concept, which one takes as given, and about which one has yet to give (over to) thought. For, as Derrida says, not of Kant, but of the Kantian text for which the proper name serves not as signature but as a framing device in the history of certain aesthetic projects, or in the history of aesthetics: The Critique presents itself as a work [ergon] with several sides, and as such it ought to allow itself to be centered and framed . . . But this frame is problematical. I do not know what is essential and what is accessory in a work. And above all I do not know what this thing is, that is neither essential nor accessory, neither proper nor improper, and that Kant calls parergon, for example the frame. Where does the frame take place. Does it take place. Where does it begin. Where does it end. What is its internal limit. Its external limit. And its surface between the two limits . . . Before deciding what is parergonal in a text which poses the question of the parergon, one has to know what a parergon is – at least, if there is any such thing. (TP 63)

Thus, I come back to Derrida’s confession of unknowing, supplemented by the proliferation problematics of the parergon, for example the frame, or for example the book, given not as questions but as statements of the various sides and surfaces that frame the question of the parergon; statements given as such and not as interrogations in order that we might see the framing, the en-framing and thus the various parergonal figures that inform, form, give form to a text, giving it meaning without limiting that meaning either to the drive of the signature or the interiority of meaning. The example of the book, of the text named book, presents in a peculiar manner the matter of uncertainty as to what constitutes the parergonal, and acutely so for any careful reading. Close reading, so called, is often guilty of merely assigning the figures of parerga to a particular background, or otherwise misreading such tropes as the work of contextualising narrative. A place is given such tropes; otherwise 114

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Future there is also that effect, or scene of misreading, whereby the assumed marginal figures are simply not accounted for, because reading has proceeded according to the making of significance, the formation of a unification for the interiority of meaning. Before we can begin to question simple questions of framing that separate inside and outside (supposing that one knows what such concepts are, or that there even are such things), it remains to be asked what a parergon is, what parerga are (if there are such things, without supposing that parerga do not differ from one another and cannot by example be exemplified), and what the play of parerga enable, make possible in any work or textual field.

Future (l’avenir) (R 17–21) The duplicity of origins is a division of originary presence at its genesis, one that installs a doubling and a splitting of the fiction of the unitary as its condition of being. The unitary is unified neither in fact nor in principle, but the one and the other. Origin is duplicity itself. In speaking of the future, we must distinguish, like Derrida, an inexorable temporal future from a certain futurity, the future as l’avenir: such a future is that of the other, whose coming is unforeseeable and which is itself unanticipated. This unknown future, the coming of the other that will never be known, is an opening of the space of the future as the ‘to come’. It is a messianic opening in that it opens the way for the coming of a messianicity – a weak messianicity, without a known messiah yet open to the advent of the unknowable other. The future is in this way also that of a justice to come; the future, like justice, remains a promise. This future is undeterminable in that it is not temporally conceived, and as such it challenges the ontology of being in time. It is, rather, a rupture in presence; where the future emerges through the coming the other, it will be as a rupture in temporal and spatial understanding of being. It cannot itself be conceived in terms of what is to come as a temporal understanding of futurity, a delimited prevision of a determinable future event inscribed as a more or less imaginable point in a linear chronology. Instead, it will arrive as an unpredictable event that will rupture not only that expectation but an understanding of temporality figured on the horizon of the epoch and the predictable closure it entails. Again, this is a structural future that would undo structuralism as a totalising closure; the future event not 115

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Future only comes unforeseen but comes as a structural inscription that in its opening out also leaves open the structure of temporality conceived on the basis of the epoch. As early as Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses the necessity for an epoch to remain open in order to avoid reinscription into a metaphysical closure, placing deconstruction into a relation with history and to the future that would be elucidated in his later work.49 The future thought as l’avenir is a structural opening within that structure, and it is thus the necessity of the opening that is contained in the future. If we were to think the future on the basis of a specific time to come, we would make it subject to a presenting of the future as presence and, at the same time and on the same basis, as a time which will end: thus according to a temporality defined as epochal, always with relation to the present. This is also a structural relation to deferral; for presence to be thought, it must be in relation to the ‘to come’ and to the deferral in self-presence that constitutes it as non-unitary. In that sense, the ‘to come’ is the opening out of presence to that which is within it; thought in this way, the future constitutes a relation to being as to time and space. It is on the basis of the future that presence can be thought, though it makes presence, understood as perfect and undifferentiated, impossible. The origin of history in presence is therefore duplicity itself. A doubling of ipseity (itself) in the other of the one, it shows origin to be divided at its source; this division is given two names, names which are ‘historical’ though the phrase must be re-marked, for they render a concept of history, predicated upon the basis of the closure of epochs and the horizon of that closure, inappropriate. These two names are messianicity and chora, yet the act of naming is itself a divisive violence, either appropriating division to the proper or making a sign of the thing itself and further disseminating its already-divided nonsimple presence. To go back to the name of God, the name the via negativa will not allow the name to be said because the way towards the unitary is out of language; messianicity substitutes the other for the one; more accurately, making it the name of the one and the other at the same time by inscribing unitary presence through alterity. The first name is thus not that of God but the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. L’avenir is both the future and coming, so this messianicity is both the opening to the future – which is also the opening out of structure by the future – and the coming of the other. It is a weak messianicity, a coming without a messiah: the 49

See ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’ (OG).

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Future unknown arrival of an unknown other, irreducible to a prefigured event and a predetermined figure, without prophetic prefiguration. This coming of the other is the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation. Justice, for Derrida the only transcendental signified, remains a promise to be fulfilled in the future to come; though it should be sought in the present, justice is coterminous with an opening out of metaphysics that means it remains undetermined. It cannot be thought in terms of what might be ‘achieved’, where achievement would imply a closure of the possibility of justice in the name of the presencing of the present. It thus remains without horizon of expectation, in other words without a determinable date of fulfilment. When justice arrives, it will be in a form that is unpredicated by the delineation of the horizon, another closure based upon a thinking of temporality that would return it to a closed structure that cannot account for the originary différance of its institution. There can therefore be no anticipation of the future, and the coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event. This opening out to the other means that it arrives as a surprise, as also might radical violence. This arch-violence would be the reduction of singularity, the elison of the other into the one in a movement that appropriates irreducibility to the proper.50 Where the possibility is one of opening history, it can always interrupt history, or at least the ordinary course of history and by inscribing a linear teleology of history, particularly one that claims to end in a fixed horizon, in a structure of différance, history itself is ruptured insofar as it can no longer take place as a fixed narrative with ending. This rupture takes place as an active-passive decision to let the other come that can also be disguised as the apparently passive form of the other’s decision. What this signifies is that to obtain the possibility of the future as l’avenir, we must first take responsibility for decisions made in the so-called present, where political and ethical questions demand a response that is already open to the opening out of the future. Even there where it appears in itself, in me, the decision is moreover always that of the other; by being responsible to alterity in my ethical decisions, I am always merely responding to the other that inhabits me, and the decisions I make are thus those of the other, for they cannot be thought with regard to a simple self-communion: they come from me only as a response, to that which is already making a demand for recognition within me. This does not, however, exonerate me of 50

See R (65).

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Future responsibility insofar as it is my decision whether to open myself out to the other and the mode my hospitality will take, a hospitality that at the same time enjoinders decisions directed towards that opening out to the other in the world. The orientation of the impossible future towards the other opens the space for the possibility of action in the present. The second name of originary division also consists in an opening out. This second name (or first name prior to all naming) would be chora. In the Timaeus Plato designates it as the space inbetween, an antrum before which being takes form. It represents too an interval in phallogocentrism in that the chora is identified as a maternal space and is the name before naming since it is the space before definition of the thing itself as it comes into being. As the chora comes before being, it cannot be constituted as a form with being.51 It rather takes the place of a radical spatiality, a space of alterity without essence. From the (open) interior of a corpus – a phrasing that recalls the maternal space of the chora, which takes place as a womb within the body, a female inscription of the phallogocentric – it shows that corpus to be opened out from the inside. The system and its forms – corpus, language, culture – are opened out by the alterity that is already within them and divides them from simple presence. If the chora as a site of origin situates the place of absolute exteriority, then it is also, it follows, the place of a bifurcation between two approaches. As a place outside of sensibility and intelligibility it cannot be named, in the tradition of the ‘via negativa’ and thus a Greek tradition leading up to the hermeneutic circle of Heidegger and beyond, in the form of the impossibility of a thinking of Being in language; the thought of that which is without essence or existence, the thought of that which is beyond being (epekeina tes ousias), as well as the thought of being outside of language. This remains an ontotheological understanding, where the horizon should open to a determination of being and the realisation of a fullness of being in time. The chora, however, is the space which, not allowing itself to be dominated by any theological, ontological or anthropological instance, without . . . history and more ‘ancient than all oppositions (for example, that of sensible/intelligible), does not even announce itself as ‘beyond being’. Being cannot be united in the one beyond 51

Here, Derrida refers to ‘chora’ as it is written after Plato. When he himself is writing of the figure, he names it as khôra; see ON (89–127) for a reading of khôra.

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Genesis being; it proceeds from the chora, an originary space that is before division into absence and presence and thus a division before opposition, including all that which is thought on the premise of that originary opposition. Because chora remains absolutely other (an utterly faceless other), it never presents itself as such, it is heterogeneous to all binaries as it is to Being. It does not take part in the unfolding of historical process [Ereignis] or in the disclosure of Being through time, a disclosure which ultimately orients itself towards death, because it is heterogeneous to the concept of history and time within which those processes unfold. Chora is nothing (no being, nothing present) in that it does not take part in a system where ‘nothing’ is opposed to ‘something’, but opens out that system from within. Neither is it the nihilism through which for Heidegger in Being and Time Dasein is opened, through the experience of anxiety – an experience directed towards the indeterminate – as it is come towards itself with the horizon of death. Where phenomenology is opened to the future, it must be towards a future still to come, where an understanding can only be founded in that future; yet that future remains always to come, never becoming present. The determination of being through an orientation to death opens out the question of Being in relation to a temporally determined future horizon, re-entering it into a system. The opening of the system through the choratic space is an opening to that other to come (à-venir) as it is to the future (l’avenir).

G Genesis (PGHP 145–6) In 1990 Derrida published his Mémoire, or Master’s thesis, written in 1953–4, as The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. The text extends his first published work on Husserl, and can be read in accordance with Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, Voice and Phenomenon, and the essay ‘ “Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’, first written for a 1959 conference and later revised for publication in 1965 and 1967 respectively, the latter for inclusion in Writing and Difference. Under the influence of Eugen Fink’s writing on Husserl and the sensibilities of the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida’s reading of Husserlian 119

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Genesis being; it proceeds from the chora, an originary space that is before division into absence and presence and thus a division before opposition, including all that which is thought on the premise of that originary opposition. Because chora remains absolutely other (an utterly faceless other), it never presents itself as such, it is heterogeneous to all binaries as it is to Being. It does not take part in the unfolding of historical process [Ereignis] or in the disclosure of Being through time, a disclosure which ultimately orients itself towards death, because it is heterogeneous to the concept of history and time within which those processes unfold. Chora is nothing (no being, nothing present) in that it does not take part in a system where ‘nothing’ is opposed to ‘something’, but opens out that system from within. Neither is it the nihilism through which for Heidegger in Being and Time Dasein is opened, through the experience of anxiety – an experience directed towards the indeterminate – as it is come towards itself with the horizon of death. Where phenomenology is opened to the future, it must be towards a future still to come, where an understanding can only be founded in that future; yet that future remains always to come, never becoming present. The determination of being through an orientation to death opens out the question of Being in relation to a temporally determined future horizon, re-entering it into a system. The opening of the system through the choratic space is an opening to that other to come (à-venir) as it is to the future (l’avenir).

G Genesis (PGHP 145–6) In 1990 Derrida published his Mémoire, or Master’s thesis, written in 1953–4, as The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. The text extends his first published work on Husserl, and can be read in accordance with Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, Voice and Phenomenon, and the essay ‘ “Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’, first written for a 1959 conference and later revised for publication in 1965 and 1967 respectively, the latter for inclusion in Writing and Difference. Under the influence of Eugen Fink’s writing on Husserl and the sensibilities of the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida’s reading of Husserlian 119

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Genesis phenomenology brings it together with a Hegelian discourse in order to investigate what he perceived to be problematic in Husserl’s thinking of phenomenology, located in the aporia of objectivity and its genesis.52 At the beginning of ‘ “Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’, Derrida contrasts the attitude of the phenomenologist to that of the metaphysician: the former seeks to comprehend by returning to the thing itself and the origin of meaning, whereas the latter operates within a dialectical structure of history that imposes the necessity of decision and thus of closure. By virtue of recognising this distinction, he concludes, Husserl is ‘attuned to the historicity of meaning and to the possibility of its becoming, and is also already respectful of that which remains open within structure.’53 This opening of the structure, Derrida shows, already imposes a conflict between the genetic approach and the structural approach; where the structure can be closed there is a difference inserted between that closure, which is itself structural, and the structuration of the system in its opening. Derrida avers that Husserl would stress the importance of both approaches, as would be apposite to the object of discussion and the mode it necessitated, for the phenomenological framework dictates the removal from such dialectical choice. It is here that he views the aporia within phenomenology, offering two suppositions. To begin, that beneath the concepts is a debate that governs the phenomenological description as it progresses and ‘whose incompleteness, which leaves every major stage of phenomenology unbalanced, makes new reductions and explications infinitely necessary’ (WD 196). Then, that this debate threatens phenomenology by forcing Husserl into a dialectical position towards a ‘metaphysics of history’, through which ‘the solid structure of a Telos would permit him to reappropriate, by making it essential and by in some way prescribing its horizon, an untamed genesis which grew to greater and greater expanse’ (WD 196). Derrida suggests that phenomenology is born, as a project, from the failure of Husserl’s attempt to reconcile the 52

53

Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology by Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002) sets out the history and scope of Derrida’s early engagement with phenomenology; a further account that relates Derrida to his contemporary environment can be read in Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Jacques Derrida, ‘ “Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’ (WD 193–211, at 194).

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Genesis structural demand – for description of a totality – to the genetic demand, the description of the genesis of that structure. Neither approach, however, can account for the problem of genesis, the foundation of objectivity. It is, on the one hand, structurally impossible to close a structural phenomenology, which is ‘the infinite opening of what is experienced, which is designated . . . by reference to an Idea in the Kantian sense, that is, the irruption of the infinite into consciousness’ (WD 204). The irruption then ‘permits the unification of the temporal flux of consciousness just as it unifies the object and the world by anticipation, and despite an irreducible incompleteness’ (WD 204). Where phenomenology invokes the Idea in the Kantian sense, Derrida argues, it simultaneously invokes the telos and orders itself according to a dialectical structure; by reference to the irruption of the infinite into consciousness – the pre-experiential, that which is not given to intuition, into being – it allows for the temporality of consciousness to be unified according to a telos which unifies the world and object, ‘despite an irreducible incompleteness’. In other words, it assimilates that incompletion and allows for the plenitude of the structure through anticipation. The problem is a temporal one; there must be an anticipation in order that becoming might take place, that the origin or genesis of becoming happens, for there must be a prior understanding of sense, by which becoming is understood, in place. Anticipation is essential to the present in that it is the protention of the future in that present, but that protention is reliant on the retention of the past in consciousness as it is extended into the present; anticipation unifies the flux of time into a unified presence where even incompletion is assimilated through protention as the opening of the structure into infinity conceived as presence. This is the temporal dialectic into which phenomenology, and genesis, is inscribed. The imposition of the telos by Husserl is simultaneously an imposition of historical structuration upon phenomenology, or rather phenomenology as historicity, and the imposition of a structure upon genesis. When Derrida refers to ‘anticipation’, he is signalling the means by which Husserl structures phenomenology as a metaphysics of presence. The issue is that in trying to give structure to genesis, Husserl must have recourse to a passive synthesis according to an already known structure that cannot be located in the phenomenological process. It is thus at the price of the actual originality of becoming that the final form [. . .] is not only ‘known beforehand’ but in a way that is even more precise and more complex. The origin of the form cannot 121

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Genesis ultimately be discovered in the form itself but is structured according to an anterior arche and a telos that cannot be known to intuition through evidence, but is rather imposed upon the transcendental subject in order to sustain the opening of the horizon. Hence the ambiguity: Husserl is interested only in the a priori and ideal form of the constituted project of genesis. He begins from this form, but that presupposes that a being as sense does not become such in the transcendental act of genetic constitution that gives its sense to itself, but that sense in order to be comprehended as such must be anticipated; the living present is diachronic in its protention and retention as in its constitution as a series of presents. Thus sense is given to the object by forms and conditions of an a priori possibility that make genesis itself intelligible. This is a paradox, in that for genesis to be understood in the form of an empirical genesis . . . which becomes possible and intelligible through the transcendental activity of a subject, that subject is ultimately not actually engendered. The subject is not produced as a being through sense because the genesis of the subject is located in a prior and non-empirical genesis. Thus the unknown has its genesis in the ‘structural forms of the known’ and is organised according to that structuration of genesis that is outside the transcendental act of genetic constitution. These forms intervene in philosophical reflection [. . .] only at the moment when they can define a priori the sense of every possible genesis . . . Whatever may be the product of any genesis whatsoever, it will be comprehended and organized by the structural form of the known. That means a genesis which is universal and a priori, an atemporal origin that as such is originarily taken out of genesis. Taken out of genesis, it precedes active synthesis and constitutes the possibility of the phenomenological act. Derrida takes issue with Husserl’s distinction between himself and Kant with regard to the known form, predicated upon the Husserlian a priori being phenomenological, that is to say, concrete. [G]iven to an intuition, Husserl would argue that it does not precede and legislate knowledge as a prior category of knowledge. Derrida counters this by pointing to the atemporality of the pure a priori, which would define itself according to that atemporality or an absolute temporal antecedence. Here Husserl intervenes to impose the telos through passive synthesis in order to resolve the temporal issue of the concrete in relation to truth and being, in other words to a guaranteeing a priori and an a posteriori becoming of being in sense. By doing so, he transforms the guiding principle of phenomenology which is an 122

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Genesis a priori intuition of essences, in the light of the dialectic that then orders temporality according to a transcendental genesis. Being is not then given as sense through the act of intuition, but is constituted before that act. Within this schema in which the telos opens itself out, it represents ‘the most powerful structural a priori of historicity’, which Derrida stresses is not to deem it a thetic value enclosing ‘the genesis of Being and meaning’ but rather the ‘concrete possibility, the very birth of history and the meaning of becoming in general’ (WD 210). ‘Therefore’, he concludes, ‘it is structurally genesis itself, as origin and as becoming’ (ibid.). Within this schema, every genesis is already structured through a genesis itself structured as metaphysical. The invocation of a telos by Husserl effectively totalises through the horizon of a future the opening of the structure, in the synthesis of the dialectic; it inscribes the dialectic into phenomenology in its turn. By structuring phenomenology through its endpoint, the telos simultaneously gives to it its genesis in that telos, the logos. There is no phenomenological evidence for this a priori, which is structural in that it gives to phenomenology the possibility of origin according to which meaning, the process of describing origin of experience, will be understood. It is the ‘birth of history’ and of phenomenology as a dialectical structure in which the origin of becoming will be understood according to that dialectic and the synthesis in which it is inscribed. Thus genesis is structured according to that temporal synthesis and cannot be located except within a dialectic; consequently, the origin of becoming takes place within a process founded and situated within a movement towards the telos. This genesis is therefore exterior to consciousness; where consciousness discloses an ideal object, that object must be given meaning in a genesis that precedes that of consciousness. As Leonard Lawlor stresses, this process too would, however, have to have an ‘ “already constituted” object’, and thus the consequence of this phenomenological aporia is that ‘for Husserl, according to Derrida, a universal reason animates this infinite historic regression and, in turn, produces an infinite historic progression: teleological Reason animates all history with an Idea of an infinite task of knowledge’.54 In order to describe the genesis of an experience, then, phenomenology must have recourse to and be structured through a non-simple origin, by which it could not be structured as a dialectic with a closure in telos, and thus according 54

Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, p. 26.

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Geschlecht to a structure that ultimately aims to achieve a totality that would negate the opening through an effective closure in synthesis. It could be said, in this respect, that from this early configuration Derrida thinks his work on the basis of the trace within genesis.

Geschlecht (PIO II 28–30) Geschlecht: sex, gender, race, generation, lineage; Geschlechtlichkeit: sexuality; Geschlechtstrieb: sex drive.

But you know that, according to the contexts that come to determine this word, it can be translated by sex, race, species, genus, gender, stock, family, generation or genealogy, {or} community. It is a question of a word, and not just any word. There took place, under this heading, following its guidance, a series of essays, lectures, prompted, David Farrell Krell assures us, by a 1953 essay of Heidegger’s, ‘Language in the Poem: A Placement of Georg Trakl’s Poem’.55 That essay assumes the need for a discussion concerning what Heidegger calls ‘the site’ of Trakl’s work, the site as the place where ‘everything comes together, is concentrated’, gathering, penetrating, pervading. Site is therefore not simply a material, historical or biographical locus but what, for the German philosopher, is caused and causes this gathering, this ‘em-placement’ and what thus shines out from, illuminating the site and its possible thinking.56 Of the four pieces that make up the series, it is in the third that Derrida focuses on Heidegger’s essay. In the first of the series, under the aegis of the relation between sexual difference and ontological difference, Derrida wishes to question specifically Dasein, most particularly the ‘there of Being as such’ (PIO II 10); which must perforce take into account, ‘armed’ as Derrida puts it ‘with psychoanalysis’ (PIO II 9), both the absence of sexuality, the silence in Heidegger, and also the gender of the there, the always engendered beingness of Being, if one is not to find oneself slipping back into an a priori metaphysical assumption that displaces the very materiality of Being, its thereness. 55

56

David Farrell Krell, ‘Marginalia to Geschlecht III: Derrida on Heidegger on Trakle’, New Centennial Review, 7: 2 (2007): 175–99, at p. 175. The essay by Heidegger to which Krell refers is translated as ‘Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work’, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper Collins, 1982), pp. 159–98. Georg Trakl (3 February 1887 – 3 November 1914); Austrian poet. Heidegger, ‘Language’, pp. 159–60.

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Geschlecht It is thus that Derrida comes to erect what amounts to a polemical declaration: ‘it is by the name of Dasein that I will here introduce the question of sexual difference’ (PIO II 10); a ‘psychoanalytic’ corrective is issued, if you will, to the ‘historicist’ or ‘materialist’ phenomenology of the Heideggerian perception of Being, which endangers its own perspective by remaining silent on the question of ‘sexual neutrality, and even a certain sexlessness (Geschlechtslosigkeit) of being-there’ (PIO II 11). The question of sex seems though a mere point of entry into the larger discussion, even though each of the essays or seminars in the series identify themselves with the figure of Geschlecht. The figure is generative, it engenders Derrida’s introduction of the question. Heidegger’s reading of that which dwells, that which the site informs as site is though, if we follow Krell (and without his critical reflections, a gap is left in our understanding of the place of the figure and the question of ‘Geschlecht’), the initial, ultimate and principal motivation in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl. But returning to the word, and the passage. Here, the question appears first and foremost to be one of a problematising translatability; or, probably more precisely, the untranslatability of this German word, which, in all its Germanness, keeps to itself all its possible meanings and the ‘identities’, and with these the sites, it could be said to name. Geschlecht as the site perhaps, as that which gathers, penetrates, illuminates, all the while remaining beyond the recuperation of the single, the given translation, one given over another, determined provisionally according to the contexts that come to determine this word. If it is the contexts that determine the word, this might in turn serve to direct a light toward the site that Geschlecht could be interpreted as being. For – and, admittedly, this might seem a stretch, it is a long way from Derrida’s comments cited from Geschlecht II to the opening of Heidegger’s essay where he dwells on the distinctions to be made apropos site, wherein ‘Geschlecht’, the word, is not mentioned at all – in Derrida’s admission that the word is ‘given’ only through the determination that context imposes, but that the word therefore escapes any final determination, any termination of its play; we might risk here a strong reading of ‘Geschlecht’ to say that, untranslatable though it remains, it remains nevertheless as a figure for, a troping of the idea of site in Heidegger’s essay. Naming ‘site’ otherwise, naming without naming at all, and certainly not in any manner that could be construed however wildly as being in any way ‘direct’; ‘Geschlecht’, 125

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Geschlecht determined only by context, and context being always changeable, substitutable, endless – il n’y a pas de hors-texte – traces invisibly the idea of site; ‘not’, as Heidegger puts it of the latter term, ‘like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature’.57 Context would name the many translations alluded to by Derrida for an ‘encapsulating shell’; but seen from the other side, as it were, Geschlecht gathers and penetrates those contexts its untranslatable withdrawal serves to illuminate. Turning to Derrida, the ‘stretch’ is authorised, we find. For in Geschlecht II, following the introduction of the topics of nation and nationalism as the ‘contextual landscape’ for this particular session (PIO II 28) with attention directed toward the lecture on Trakl, Derrida then orients the consideration of ‘Geschlecht’ in relation to the national, nationalism. It is worth noting that figure of ‘landscape’ in passing here, unfolding the discussion through brief commentary on Fichte’s ‘spiritual’ ‘Geschlecht’, in the light of which Derrida observes of Fichte’s text that in this the ‘sole analytic and unimpeachable determinations of Geschlecht in this context is the “we,” the belonging to the “we” ’ (PIO II 29). While Derrida has said that probably I will not translate it [Geschlecht] at any point, he is unequivocal in illuminating the determinate use of the term in the text of Fichte. Indeed, leading to all those questions concerning how one might translate the word and, with that its untranslatability, Derrida – doubtless in full knowledge of Heidegger’s discussion of the site in the poetic text of Trakl towards which he has acknowledged we are heading – states that ‘Geschlecht is a whole, a gathering (one could say Versammlung [meeting or assembly; various conjugations signify freedom of assembly, meeting place, and so forth]), an organic community in a non-natural but spiritual sense, one that believes in the infinite progress of the spirit through freedom’ (PIO II 29). Geschlecht thus retreats from translation through causing to appear, illuminating in its gathering ‘an infinite “we,” a “we” that announces itself to itself from the infinity of a telos of freedom and spirituality’ as the articulation of an ‘infinite will’. Holding off translation, keeping itself to itself as the untranslatable expression of this spirit, Geschlecht in the text of Fichte announces itself in its untranslatability, to use Derrida’s word, as ‘an essential Deutschheit’ (PIO II 29). In this, in its affirmation of its unstranslatabilty, the word includes 57

Heidegger, ‘Language’, p. 160.

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Geschlecht connotations indispensable to the minimal intelligibility of discourse, and these connotations belong irreducibly to German, to a German more essential than all the phenomena of empirical Germanness, but to a certain German [à de l’allemand]. All these connoted senses are copresent . . . they appear virtually in that use, but no sense is fully satisfying. Derrida is clearly not speaking of the German nation as such. Instead, more essential than any empirical manifestation and all the attendant phenomena that signify such an empirical model of national identity is that sense of what remains expressed through the given word, but which the word does not speak or sign in any direct manner. We might ask the question in the following way: what is it that is traced in the word, irreducible to any semantic equivalent, but which various contexts come to be mobilised by, opened in the affirmation that speaks in the word? There is an essential Germanness haunting the word, by which we might suggest the word is endlessly overdetermined, and which it serves to deploy as it gathers to itself, in its place that sense of a spiritual community, the ‘we’ (and with that, perhaps a certain idea of the Volk, albeit signalled only in the most haunting fashion). Here then is the problem, and the place wherein the problem dwells, but from which place it also illuminates its own problematic, while only beginning, in Derrida’s reading and interrogation, to highlight all those inexhaustible contexts. That a certain word might be untranslatable, strictly speaking; and yet, in this untranslatability that it not only retains but also, and after a fashion, displays or causes to appear virtually the various connoted senses simultaneously in every use; this foregrounds the problem to be addressed all the more. For the problem is one of more than just semantic resonance. It is far more fundamental than that, and also impossible to pin down because it is nowhere as such in the semantic or historico-cultural etymological field. Given the problem of translatability, what you have just read shows signs of a certain equivocation between translations, so that the questions How is ‘Geschlecht’ to be translated under these conditions? How is one to translate? become all the more significant in a self-referential, not to say an urgent manner. And if one must ask why, the answer is given: the ‘we’ finally comes down to the humanity of man, to the teleological essence of a humanity announced par excellence . . . For here, the question is nothing less, I venture to say, than the problem of man, of man’s humanity, and of humanism. ‘Humanity’, ‘humanism’, both implicitly exclusive, closed off in the ‘we’: this figure of spiritual community in turn maintains itself 127

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Geschlecht inside the bond of its own auto-definition, structuring for itself in the process a goal in its infinite regeneration. And with that of course there is, specifically, a self-justifying explication to which the idea of Geschlecht gives singular example. It gathers and gives place, wherein what can be defined by its ‘Germanness’ (starting with the word) serves in the teleological enforcement of the spirit of national identity through the statement of purpose. Stressing the fundamental ‘Germanness’ of Geschlecht, its encircling or binding spiritual force, in its various connotations and both the indispensability and undecidability of those various resonances, Derrida thus draws our attention to certain irresolvable problems to do with matters of identity, spirit, community. Can one speak of an identity, apprehended in relation to a national identity, however ‘spiritual’, and, therefore, perhaps ‘thought’ (though this is not guaranteed), and evoked in a language markedly of, and serving to determine a particular nationality for an identity (and in words which, explicitly, are claimed to articulate, resound with or embody the spirit of that national identity)? Can one speak (of an) identity, without recuperating that into, or otherwise having one’s speech, one’s writing, recuperated into unthought, possibly ‘vulgar’ or ‘base’ expressions or articulations of another national identity, an other of the national identity that is perceived as spiritual in a ‘positive’ or ‘good’ sense (if such senses might be imagined to exist in a ‘pure’ or ‘uncompromised’, ‘uncontaminated’ form), an other that calls up, and possibly names, has leant its name historically and, on occasion, to violence, to evil? To what extent can there be an identity which, in being inclusive, in assembling or gathering together, binds one to itself, binding one to the ‘as one’, the comme une, as it were, in a manner which excludes or serves in the determination of the laws of exclusion, expulsion, and so on? Beyond the singular question of a particular teleologically determined ‘spiritual’ expression of ‘Germanness’, the problem of not knowing how to translate ‘Geschlecht’, in becoming revealed as the problem of ‘we’ presents a larger problem: that of any notion of humanity, and of humanism as the problem, and one which Derrida works through elsewhere, not only in the Geschlecht series, but also at length in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Derrida had, of course, begun his seminar on ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism’ in 1983, culminating in the publication of Politics of Friendship, and thus forms the perception of a political ‘turn’ in Derrida’s work, as well as introducing, particularly in the Geschlecht 128

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality series, subjects which in turn developed according to Derrida’s interrogation of the limits – once more with reference to Heidegger, among others – to the difference that informs, and the limits that mark, any thinking of ‘the human’ as opposed to ‘the animal’. It is thus because of that statement of Derrida’s – I am not going to translate it for the moment. Probably I will not translate it at any point – that there is that movement from the question of sexual difference that remains silent and unaddressed in the thinking of Dasein to the problem of humanity, the problem of assuming a ‘we’ and the attendant difficulties concerning any affirmation of a nationalism or national identity. In this movement, in its folds Derrida thereby opens an interrogation into the very conditions by which identities, such as sexual difference or national identity, come into being or are given meaning, on the proviso that no alternative meaning be offered, that there by no translation. In order to begin to think Geschlecht in all its ambiguity, its multiplicity, it must be allowed to remain, as that site gathering to itself many of the traces that more obviously political solutions have sought to oppose, and so fail to solve. As Elizabeth Grosz remarks in her essay on the first Geschlecht essay, ‘[o]ne must accept [in reading Derrida] the tangible and singular irresolvability of oppositions in their concrete contexts, and in contexts to come’. In this Derrida maintains an ‘openness to its own retranscriptions and rewritings’.58

Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality (MPM 6467; OS 48–50; ET 115–17) The idea of the ghost has a certain frequency, for all that ghosts always pass quickly, with the infinite speed of a furtive apparition, in an instant without duration, presence without present of a present, which coming back only haunts. That which comes back then does so not as a presence; the ghost is never present, never has presence, even if its appearance is not nothing, even if, unlike the spectre, or spectrality, the appearance, the revenance of a ghost, the ghost-effect, is not one subject to the discourse or realm of the visible. Although a ghost does not exist and offers itself to no perception, nevertheless a ghost may arrive, may return, may haunt, but its passage will have remained for all that not subject to the visual, and thus perhaps may come to be felt as all the more haunting. From one perspective, the 58

Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Ontology and Equivocation: Derrida’s Politics of Sexual Difference’, Diacritics, 25: 2 (Summer 1995): 114–24, at p. 124.

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality motion, the play if not the role of the ghost has to be considered as a literary and theoretical – that is to say speculative, if not specular or visionary – trope, even if its purpose amounts to so much more; not that we will have known except belatedly. For the ghost, le revenant, the survivor, appears only by means of figure or fiction. There are at least three manifestations, I will not say types, of the ghost and other forms of the spectre: there is that spectral convention framed folklorically as a narrative of received, shared wisdom. Doxical knowledge offers insight into traditions of haunting before which there is some expression or experience of destitution; second, there is recorded that experience of the uncanny, an apprehension – a frisson, the touch of which announces the countersignature of phenomenological reception – of the self as other, the self received as the doppelgänger, the living as dead. As soon as there is doubling, as soon as there is some relation to the double, there is, Derrida argues, a relation of haunting. The ghost thus arrives before it arrives, it ‘returns’ unexpectedly as the anticipation of a future, from that future, as that which is to come. The last figure of the ‘ghost’, mere metaphor as it seems, admits to a number of modern conceits: on the one hand, it appears to suggest psychological burden, that which is written on subjectivity and the subject’s psyche. On the other hand, it bespeaks a certain historical psychic weight, wherein memory and history, the personal and broader cultural or material events might coincide. It remarks a desire for a different place for the subject, as if place itself were – perhaps fetishistically – haunted. Such understanding also intimates that a ghost cannot leave its given place, while, perhaps naively, expressing the hope that if a ghost is a thing of the past, it also remains outside memory and conscience, not really inscribed within the subject. And of course a commonplace phrase such as ‘the ghost of the past’ determines haunting as a matter of structural figuration, while signalling that, in the words of Jacques Derrida, the ‘age already in the past is in fact constituted in every respect as a text . . . [as] such the age conserves the values of legibility and the efficacy of a model and thus disturbs the time (tense) of the line or the line of time’ (OG lxxxix–xc).59 59

Spivak’s translation includes ‘tense’ in parentheses, following the first reference to time, in order to distinguish between the two uses of temps in Derrida’s text. Derrida’s chiasmus relies in part on that which is legible, and so comprehensible, between the two uses as a ‘writing effect’ not available through voice. To have given the translation as ‘the age [or epoch] . . . thus disturbs the tense of the line and the line of time’, would have lost the disruptive graphic motion that

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality This is not to deny the past, of course. Only the most perverse misreading or avoidance of reading would assume such a thing. Instead, it is to acknowledge that the past as such can never be present in the present, and that to acknowledge this is to acknowledge also that what we name the past exceeds any mere present moment by virtue of its being legible, by leaving legible traces and inscriptions, the very persistence and revenance of which disturb both structure and history, as Derrida’s chiasmus gives us to comprehend. That chiasmus places the absolute separation of text and context, word and world, under erasure. In this crossing through, an unsuturable fissure opens, and the ghost of modernity appears. Its apparition causes us to comprehend how being is written. More than this, however, being, in being apprehended as what Derrida terms l’être écrit (OG 31; the being written/the written being) is written as being haunted: subject to the traces of historicity, and to those disquieting eruptions that remain all too legible, one’s being – if it can be expressed thus – is never on time with itself, its presence and its present always already disturbed by the ghost of itself, and also the ghosts of all its others. Any ontology of being is therefore always already ruined from the start. The house of being is a haunted locus, and any naive desire to escape the ghost of the past fails in its tragic comprehension to appreciate the extent to which the ghost remains with us, as that which we cannot admit determines who we are. The most difficult aspect of comprehension is in recognising that if the past is ghost, then so too is that which is to come, and that the future, irreducible to a programme by which we can anticipate our ‘future anterior’, is the apparition of ‘ce monde à venir et . . . ce qui en lui aura fait trembler . . .’ / ‘that world to come . . . and that which will have made [or caused it to] shake’ (OG 14; translation my own). Such shaking or trembling is caused to take place temporally, as well as spatially. It has to do with the opening of a gap, and so, with that instant of sundering, the appearance of a double, an other. Derrida inscribes in the iterable term temps, and thus render invisible that which haunts the French original. Another point to make here concerns Derrida’s use of ‘époque’. Generally, Spivak’s translation favours ‘age’. While both ‘age’ and ‘epoch’ can be used, commonly, to refer to periods of time, epoch also, and in contradistinction to the common use, signifies in its Greek roots the suspension or stoppage of time. Derrida’s preference here has this double sense in mind arguably, especially as the notion of epoch in its other sense would serve, presumably, in the ‘demand that reading should free itself, at least in its axis, from the classical categories of history’ (OG lxxxix).

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality Derrida apprehends the appearance of any spectral form as a condition of technological or written reproduction, and so, implicitly, traces a link to matters of repetition and representation: ‘When the very first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with the realm of phantoms’ (GD/LS 61). As soon as there is some image, as soon as some ‘image’ is there, and perception of that, there is both the material objective form, and its phenomenal counterpart. What this always comes down to, though never in exactly the same manner, is the eerie efficacy of the spectral as an inescapable condition of most forms which we inhabit, literally or metaphorical, and which we need to get along, at home, at work and in the sense of ourselves in relation to the world. The ‘architecture’ of every form, everything we understand as ‘reality’, whether it be that of a house, a town, a novel, the notions of subjectivity or being, is traced by a double, an incorporeal phantom or phantasm, a ‘gap’, to use Nicolas Abraham’s word. Abraham remarks that ‘what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others’.60 As we see from the epigraphs, perception admits the other within the structures we mistakenly believe to be unities, complete, whole and undifferentiated. Yet, haunting is irreducible to the apparition. The spectral or uncanny effect is not simply a matter of seeing a ghost. There is as much the experience of an absence in the lack that the ghost, or any haunting effect, introduces or causes to return, as for example the deprivation of touch, the tactile effect or affect is violently summoned by its very frustration, summoned to come back [appelé à revenir], like a ghost [un revenant], in the places haunted by its absence. Thus, while it is to be admitted that there exists the series of more or less equivalent words that accurately designate haunting, specter, as distinct from ghost [revenant {that manifestation of haunting or ghosting that announces itself explicitly in its return}], speaks of the spectacle; but haunting is not limited to spectacle, to the visible, even while it is the case that this logic of the specter is that [which] regularly exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and invisible, phenomenal and nonphenomenal, a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. As a result of this logic, announced through that 60

Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, trans., intro. and ed. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 171.

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality series of words but irreducible to any one of them alone, the haunting process puts into play a disruptive structure or, to consider this another way, recalling the idea of the phantom or phantasm as ‘gap’, a disruption that is other to the familiarity of particular structures wherein the disruption is itself structural and irreducible to a simple, stabilised representation. The disruption of the familiar is clearly an important aspect of the work of the ghostly. The familiar is made, becoming, the unfamiliar. What opens from within this is a question of competing knowledges, differing epistemological frames that are irreconcilable. While any apparition and reproduction of an image may be read as an encounter with the ‘familiar’ the ‘ghost’ that appears is also readable as a phantasm, which, as Peter Schwenger points out, ‘is both a ghost and an image in the mind’.61 As Rodolphe Gasché remarks of the idea of the phantasm, ‘the phantasmatic “structure,” puts in play not the phantasm itself – there never could be one – but one of its figures . . . the phantasmatic is the space in which representation is fragmented’.62 The efficacity of haunting is in its resistance to being represented whole or undifferentiated, or being ‘seen’ as itself rather than being uncannily intimated. To ‘see’ something is, however precariously, to initiate a process of familiarisation, of anthropomorphising domestication. The spectral or haunting movement neither allows analysis nor decomposition nor dissolution into the simplicity of a perception; it opens a ‘gap’ already there, albeit hitherto invisible. This is far more troubling because, despite the apparent fact of a ‘perception’, the estranging effect of the spectral suggests we can only acknowledge its effect at the limit of comprehension. What is all the more perplexing, to make this point once more, is that the phantom or the spectral is not alien to the familiar space, even if it is other, but is as much at home within the architectural space as we are (if not more so), wherein its motion causes what Mark Wigley describes as that ‘uncanny internal displacement’,63 which belongs so intimately to the domestic scene. We may inhabit the spaces and places in question (whether we refer to our sense of identity or our homes, which indeed we also 61

62

63

Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 5. Rodolphe Gasché, ‘The Witch Metapsychology’, trans. Julian Patrick, in Returns of the ‘French Freud’: Freud, Lacan, and Beyond, ed. Todd Dufresne (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 169–208, at p. 172. Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 162.

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality comprehend as belonging to a sense of selfhood), but the spectre, though incorporeal, is incorporated into the very economy of dwelling, even as its otherness both exceeds and serves in the determination of the identity of place. What remains as its haunting possibility is the unexpectedness of its coming, as the epigraphs tacitly acknowledge, the final epigraph seeking to forestall such an event through flight. The question of the unexpected arrival that catches one unawares, so that one’s response cannot be calculated or anticipated, is central to the thought of the other’s haunting of the subject, whether that other arrives from the past or a certain future. In this scenario, the subject’s unpreparedness defines the modern condition. Apropos the subject’s awaiting the other, it is arguable that ‘ambiguity and incompletion are indeed written into the very fabric of our collective existence rather than just the works of intellectuals’.64 The ghost is thus not only, no longer, a thing of the past, it is no longer containable, on the one hand, to a realm of investigation and research, or on the other, to popular narratives and genres, communities of oral transmission or folkloric traditions – if it ever was. What we name ‘ghost’ acknowledges no boundaries, other than to mark their porosity, as is well known. In an appreciation of the modernity of Henry James’s writing, Virginia Woolf observes, in a well-known and frequently quoted passage on what might be registered as the epochal shift from the Gothic to the psychoanalytic, that Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts – the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange.65

Marked as it is with a tacit, and almost imperceptible, admission of the uncanny, Woolf’s reading of James has the effect of dating – if such a thing is possible – the interiorization or incorporation of the ghostly and spectral. Consigning the ‘origin’, or finding at the very least, inventing, the return of a phantasm always already at work but hitherto unavailable to apprehension of, such disquieting forces to an 64

65

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis, foreword, Stéphanie Ménasé, intro. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 32. Virginia Woolf, ‘Henry James’s Ghost Stories’ (1921), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 324.

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality otherwise inexpressible significance ‘within us’, Woolf acknowledges James as a writer whose work moves across, or through, a boundary, on one side of which lie narratives about the ghostly, and on the other manifestations of ‘ “ghostly narrative” ’, to borrow a fine and significant distinction drawn by Nicholas Royle.66 What Woolf admits into the discourse and experience of the ghostly is, most obviously, a psychological dimension, one which, in writers of the nineteenth century, was, if not ‘explained’, then at least narrated through tales of mediumship, uncanny foresight, visions and so forth. What marks James’s writing, or, perhaps better said, the difference by which James’s text remarks itself as being haunted, is that explanation is inevitably found wanting, as James’s ghostly narratives do not so much close as they remain open to the undecidable, the possibility of the impossible and the experience of the other. This is entirely appropriate to any hauntological event, for [g] hosts always pass quickly, with the infinite speed of a furtive apparition, in an instant without duration, presence without present of a present, which, coming back, only haunts. What Derrida’s appreciation of the spectral – as the phenomenal flickering of the trace of the other – shares with Woolf, after a certain fashion and, differently, with James, is the apprehension of the unexpected related, on the one hand, to eruption or overflow and, on the other hand, to duration or frequency. The ghost, le re-venant, the survivor, appears only by means of figure or fiction, but its appearance is not nothing, nor is it mere semblance. And this ‘synthesis of the phantom’ enables us to recognize in the figure of the phantom the working of . . . the transcendental imagination . . . whose temporalizing schemes . . . are indeed ‘fantastic’ – are, in Kant’s phrase, those of an art hidden in the depths of the soul . . . the art of memory and . . . the memory of art. Irreducible to mere representation, that which is approximated as a quasi-ontological quasi-being, the ghost, is nevertheless only possible through a tropic, fictional coming-to-pass. Inasmuch as it can be said to take its passage, its significance is only ever perceived, if at all, belatedly, as Woolf’s affirmation of ‘the significant’ that overflows. What comes to overflow only becomes available as ‘the significant’ after the event of its having come to pass, and having retreated in its becoming, leaving behind the trait that one attempts to read as the signature of ‘the significant’. This phenomenon, that which discloses itself in coming to light and so shedding light in those places where 66

Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 1.

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality we have no direct expression for the experience, is both the art of memory and the memory of art, to reiterate Derrida’s words. To conjure the ghost of Hegel, art, it has to be said, therefore, ‘is a thing of the past’ (MPM 64). If that which survives beyond any mere existence returns through a phantasmic and phantastic revenant temporal scheme, whether through the memory of art or the art of memory, then this is to admit, in the most ghostly terms, that memory and art stage the phantoms of history, in a performative projection of the trace of historicity. Yet, it is just this opening to historicity’s ghostly remnant, its rem(a)inder, which is not acknowledged in Woolf’s psychoanalytic and phenomenological appreciation of Jamesian modernity. The ghostly trace of historicity must then be acknowledged as the supplement to that which is already supplementary, the haunting opening of modernity’s narratives. To become modern one must open oneself to those manifestations of a past which has never been present and will never allow itself to be reanimated in the interiority of consciousness. This admission takes place, if it occurs at all, through writing, the sign, tekhne¯, with that thinking memory, that memory without memory, which narrative has the possibility of enabling. Thinking this, we are opening the thinking of narrative as a form of tekhne¯, a mnemotechnic to be precise, ‘whose movement’ and operation as an exteriorised, archived and prosthetic survival of memory without memory, marks it as a phantom machine – both a ghostly mechanism constructed out of nothing other than writing, the sign and so forth, but also a machinic medium the purpose of which is to conjure and project its singular-collective of phantasmagorical traces – ‘whose movement carries an essential affirmation, a kind of engagement beyond negativity . . . which is mourning itself’ (MPM 65). And, it being the case that in the element of haunting . . . deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present . . . like the work of mourning . . . all work produces spectrality. Arguably, such mourning does not concern James; or, at least, it cannot, is not to be admitted. Similarly with Woolf’s reading. So ‘modern’ is the Jamesian interiorisation of the spectre in those characters who Woolf takes to be figures of analogy with ‘us’, whose powers of expression have momentarily failed, allowing the upsurge of the phantom, that it is, in effect and in fact, dated, past its sell-by date. James’s is an old-fashioned, even a quaintly anachronistic modernity, a modernity in which is written the anticipation of a modernism, the very coming of which would always already have 136

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality dated it with the trace of a historical moment, the tragedy of which is that it is without the fortune to have become anachronistic, or to have been countersigned by a necessary affirmative anachrony making it other than its times. James’s ‘modern’ ghostly narrative becomes dated precisely because it gives no access to ‘the immemorial or unrememberable, with an archive that no interiorizing memory can take into itself’ (MPM 67), by which a text might announce an ‘affirmative . . . an amnesic fidelity’ with the ‘dead being that will never itself return, never again be there, present to answer to or to share’ (MPM 66), what amounts to a faith, keeping faith with a past that can never be present. To open in a proper fashion to that which memory cannot take into itself, and so risk everything on the invention of a historicity at once more and less modern, we have to admit to the limits of the ghost and any effect of haunting, considered to be purely psychological. As Derrida reminds us, apropos Heidegger, the human has world, while, problematically, seemingly paradoxically and admitting to a ‘logical contradiction’, the animal ‘does and does not have a world’ (OS 51). As Derrida is quick to point out, the fault, or let us call it limit to thought and to be thought, is not with the ontology of the animal, animality and so forth; it is with the thinking of ‘world’, specifically the concept of world rather than its material counterpart (to think for a moment the unthinkable, in imagining, in theory and as some fictive projection, the separation of the two). The question thus becomes one of spirit, for this, and ‘Heidegger insists on this, is the name of that without which there is no world’ (OS 51). The appearance of the spectral reminds us, if we attend properly, that we never truly have world. And this is what makes makes our experience so strange. We are spectralized . . . Our disappearance is already there. Haunted by our own futurity, the loss of ourselves to ourselves as that which remains to come, returns in the apprehension of its phantasmic double, and through the realisation that we have world, but that ‘having’ is haunted by the loss. A photograph will always mark this loss in presenting us to ourselves. We apprehend our disappearance in seeing ourselves: we know this already, we are already haunted by this future. To have a world and not have a world according to the apprehension of a spirit to which one nevertheless has no access is, I would argue, that which presents the subject with its own abject being-in-the-world. We are marked, perceiving ourselves doubly, as human animals, either through a poverty of spirit and perception, or through knowing ourselves to have that ‘theoretical’ vision, from 137

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality which imagined world we are excluded. Oddly, uncannily, such a sense of Being, revelation of Dasein, unveils the determining of the Being of beings according to thrownness, en-worlding, en-knowning, temporality, care and death, somewhere between the fully human and the animal. This, we might wish to speculate, is the very sign of an uncanny historicity. Becoming-human, and therefore, reminded of his or her materiality, his or her belonging materially as a mortal to the earth and shut out from spirit, Being being perceives that which he or she can never become. Thus in such glimpses, we come to see our Being put under erasure, crossed out but maintained as a material reminder of the possibility of one’s becoming anachronistic and surviving only to haunt where one both is and is not, leaving in the wake of this crossing-out or crossing through, only a ‘benumbedness’ (OS 54), a condition which closes one off while simultaneously leaving closure open, remarking an access through which the figure cannot go. It is this hovering on the threshold that marks us in our spectrality, announcing that spectral condition, a becoming-spectral, as a modern symptom of being anachronic, belated, of Being as loss. The ghost, or rather say the phenomenon of becoming-spectral is thus tied to an existence that is neither of a world touched by spirit (and so not fully alive), nor one in which one’s death is absolute, unconditional, without doubt. We exist as mere, poor beings who hover, as if they were dead. The spectral and ghostly thus admits to a relation, without relation, of past with future, wherein consciousness, ‘seeing the phantom of being-in-itself vanish before it’ and encountering also to itself the ‘disappearance of an essence that exists only for it, for it qua specific consciousness’, gives place to a truth concerning the subject’s apperception of its historicity, ‘which is both in-itself and for consciousness’.67 The spectre of modernity thus enables the momentary ‘reconciliation of the history of thought with thought itself’.68 Such reconciliation is scant comfort, however, a brief and illusory apprehension of transcendence; for reconciliation is the place where the spectral announces itself to consciousness, only as consciousness, subjectivity or being apprehend themselves in relation to being other. Thought is always this affirmation of the other within 67

68

Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Chernaik and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 228. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, p. 228.

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality the self, whereby the self is revealed to itself as an other. There is an inescapable uncanniness by which the modern subject is caused to suffer, through the self-reflection of thought that dwells on the relation between thought and being, and the revelation to being’s consciousness that the self is at the axis of past and future, with the responsibility to decide on the meaning of being in the face of the undecidable. Crucially, the haunting experience of immanence – which can be most immediately understood through the example of the imagination apprehending the experience of an other, a double – is perceived not for someone in themselves, but as that which marks the space between the one and the other, or, to take the example offered by Derrida, the self perceived in its exteriority when confronted by the photograph. Being, apprehended as an other in the immanence of the apprehension of the other for the subject, is what gives determination to being, rather than being as such, or in itself.69 I am thus doubled, as it were, phantasmically in my access to the other’s experience – and this of course is that, in principle, by which we might define the work of literature. For immanence gives to my apprehension the phantasmic experience of that which has what Heidegger calls the ‘peculiar nearness of something coming but not yet on hand [that] constitutes the structure of the encounter’ we call uncanny,70 while also maintaining an ‘indefiniteness’, ‘a nothing worldly’, though constitutive of ‘being-in-the-world’, and ‘nothing definite’.71 That ‘nothing definite’ reveals that very thing one is deprived of, as much as in spectrality as in the gaze which looks at images or watches film and television. Distinct from the ghost, the spectre is first and foremost something visible. It is of the visible but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood. All of this is revealed through the gaze, through the seeing that spectrality enables, Like the spectre, the phantom is the sign of that visible incorporeality. The image I see returns as both the spectral figure of myself as other, and yet also it figures in its return the immanence of my disappearance. Yet, what is perhaps most uncanny about the look – which is to say, the fundamentally and primarily theoretical orientation of the being towards the world – is that it cannot give us to comprehend in any unmediated manner the truth 69 70 71

Heidegger, History, p. 103. Heidegger, History, p. 286. Heidegger, History, p. 290.

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality of being. We have disclosed to us our own inmost, most intimate loss, Being-as-loss; there is revealed the haunting experience of being unable to access the truth of Being, and we are caused to dwell on this, on the condition of Being’s dwelling. There is thus the trauma of becoming-conscious of one’s historicity. In any encounter with the trace of the past, its textual traits it is given us to read an experience of a radical, destabilising anachrony, with its simultaneous phantasmagoria of past moments in which we may apprehend our own disappearance, becoming-trace, as just one more in a temporal sequence takes place precisely because he is written into history at this and no other moment. The historicity and materiality of Being is traumatically unveiled to consciousness through the spectral, through the phantom, because apprehension involves the phenomenological reflection – and anticipation – of one particular moment of modernity and supposedly stable subjectivity as being imminent in its own passing away. We cannot anticipate the sudden apocalypse of ‘sensuously accessible phainomena’72 that project themselves ‘in the ephemerality of this . . . presence of appearing’, which is the result not only of any personal education but also as the historical result of the material, historical givenness of Being.73 Nothing prepares us for the aesthetic mode of sensuous apprehension by which self-reading comes to takes place, and its arrival, the unveiling of the truth of being retreats almost as soon as it has unveiled itself, in the disclosedness of its singular modality. The impossibility of any preparedness is what renders spirit destitute. Being’s spectral disclosedness retreats, then, in the moment that I perceive its having returned. We appear to ourselves, in our reflective perception, through memory’s re-presentation, and are enlightened, through the revelation of the loss of ourselves in the ineluctable passage of Being’s temporal materiality, as self-spectres, that memory without memory; and in this, here, this possibility is sufficient to make the destitution of spirit a priori inevitable. We are made aware of our own occluded, obscure subjectivity in coming face to face with all that fails to perceive us, as if we were already ghosts. The historicity of this revenant transmission, the structure of which is profoundly complex, is marked in the event of becoming self-aware; we may have revealed to us the spectres of other 72

73

Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 22. Seel, Aesthetics, p. 20.

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Hand anonymous ghosts, the traces of other historical moments, events and experiences. Our own coming to consciousness concerning our bare existence and the paucity of our being for others, opens to us the analogical apperception of those countless others whose traces constitute a spectral history. Paused, suspended in such reflection, we find ourselves on the verge of disappearance. Always on the road, but without destination except the revelation of his own finitude, we encounter the spectral not-self at the obscure heart of being. We apprehend our destiny as only an ‘avenue to’ oneself and that ‘there is no oneself without “them”,’ those others already spectral that serve as the historical traces affirming our own loss and isolation.

H Hand (OT 174–80) There [is] a good reason for the choice of the ‘example’ of the hand. Reading Husserl, situating a response to the phenomenologist’s privileging ‘of the tactile’ and his discourse on the hand (OT 174), Derrida posits the possibility of an interrogative reorientation that is acknowledged as starting from the phenomenological perspective itself, but with a difference, ‘in the determined perspective that is ours: between the modern condition of haptology and the thinking or pondering of touch according to Nancy’ (OT 174). From here, then, after Nancy in the wake of Husserl, and yet with this other perspective ‘that is ours’ by which ‘we’ shall start, another response, another inauguration, ‘to discern the places and modes’ where JeanLuc Nancy follows, and ‘breaks away’ from Husserl (OT 174). A sequence underway therefore, which, as much orientation as it is reaction and beginning, coordinates as temporal in their organisation as they are spatial. We begin here, in this place at this time, from a present moment of reading, which, though now arrives belatedly after the reading of a reading, after a reading which both follows and departs from that prior reading of the hand: perspective, now, on perspective, then, of a perspective, before, which too was a beginning, and to which we return, which returns to us, in beginning with this response that reorients and seeks to set out, with a perspective that is both our own and, simultaneously dictated, already oriented, determined. 141

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Hand anonymous ghosts, the traces of other historical moments, events and experiences. Our own coming to consciousness concerning our bare existence and the paucity of our being for others, opens to us the analogical apperception of those countless others whose traces constitute a spectral history. Paused, suspended in such reflection, we find ourselves on the verge of disappearance. Always on the road, but without destination except the revelation of his own finitude, we encounter the spectral not-self at the obscure heart of being. We apprehend our destiny as only an ‘avenue to’ oneself and that ‘there is no oneself without “them”,’ those others already spectral that serve as the historical traces affirming our own loss and isolation.

H Hand (OT 174–80) There [is] a good reason for the choice of the ‘example’ of the hand. Reading Husserl, situating a response to the phenomenologist’s privileging ‘of the tactile’ and his discourse on the hand (OT 174), Derrida posits the possibility of an interrogative reorientation that is acknowledged as starting from the phenomenological perspective itself, but with a difference, ‘in the determined perspective that is ours: between the modern condition of haptology and the thinking or pondering of touch according to Nancy’ (OT 174). From here, then, after Nancy in the wake of Husserl, and yet with this other perspective ‘that is ours’ by which ‘we’ shall start, another response, another inauguration, ‘to discern the places and modes’ where JeanLuc Nancy follows, and ‘breaks away’ from Husserl (OT 174). A sequence underway therefore, which, as much orientation as it is reaction and beginning, coordinates as temporal in their organisation as they are spatial. We begin here, in this place at this time, from a present moment of reading, which, though now arrives belatedly after the reading of a reading, after a reading which both follows and departs from that prior reading of the hand: perspective, now, on perspective, then, of a perspective, before, which too was a beginning, and to which we return, which returns to us, in beginning with this response that reorients and seeks to set out, with a perspective that is both our own and, simultaneously dictated, already oriented, determined. 141

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Hand Determined on the one hand by this ‘modern condition of haptology’, a thinking or possible theorisation of the perceptibly tactile copresence of world and body: a condition of experience as reflected on, mediated in thought, perception of the material as ‘real’ or material experience as such, by which there is always already introduced that perceptual reflection, a first-order ‘re-presentation’, to use Husserl’s word, of corporeal encounter in space and time. Touch acknowledges a proximity, an immediacy or apparent immediacy of experience; there must still be, however small, some relay, some deferral, some différance by which experience passes from the pre-cognitive to the phenomenological apprehension and re-presentation of the immediate as the illusion, the phantasm of absolute, undifferentiated immediacy, by which I can say ‘I’ distinct from the world, but as a Being immersed in that world, as being-there, being-in-the-world; and therefore, by which I can say ‘I touch’, ‘I walk’, ‘I feel’, ‘I kiss’, and so on. Therefore, while Maurice Merleau-Ponty articulates the two sides of being – elementary material experience of the world and perception of that experience as the revelation of one’s Being – as mutual and inextricably related (‘the visible world and the world of my motor projects are each total parts of the same Being’), in privileging sight through ‘the map of the visible’, he does not, in this instance at least, appear to give to ‘everything I see’,74 the tactile immediacy that Husserl reads in the hand, hence the latter’s choice of the ‘example’ of the hand. The hand ‘connects’, if you will, it serves, if I can put it like this in a certain intermediary, if not parergonal, fashion: for, on the one hand, the hand touches, it feels with immediacy, a closeness, as has already been averred. On the other hand, the sense stimulus, the experience of the touch, is that by which I experience the world and I know myself to be in the world in a ‘real’ (empirical) but also ‘sensory’ (perceptual) manner. The hand is both ‘me’ and exterior to me, heterogeneous in its exteriority . . . with regard to the sensing or sensible impression of any object. The hand partakes, as Derrida argues, of this doubleness and also, at the double margin of self and world that is touch, it reveals to me the experience of the touching-touched. A ‘double apprehension’ is therefore experienced and afforded me, by way of what Derrida terms a detour by way of the foreign outside: 74

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 162.

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Hand such apprehension allows me to know that I am both touched and am touching. It is in this experience, in the sensible impression or sensing, in that which is sensate or sensual, there is that which allows me to undergo the test of this singular experience and distinguish between the I and the non-I. And such possibility of distinguishing in its singularity is occasioned, made possible by a difference, the heterogeneity of a spacing, without which, on the one hand, there would be no touching-touched, no double apprehension of this, or, on the other hand, the revelation of the differentiation between the ‘I sense’ (touching) and some not-I (touched) by which difference I am afforded the very possibility of saying (to myself, thereby perceiving that) this is I, I am I. Difference insinuates, making the I possible. I do not come before the world. The world does not come before the ‘I’. Rather in the unveiling of the double apprehension, in the touchingtouched, there is first difference, allowing the self and world to show themselves in relation to one another. Thus the significance of the hand for Husserl, precisely because of the extensio, because of the visibility and the possibility at least for the hand to be seen . . . that manual touching – even just touching my other hand – cannot be reduced to a pure experience of the purely proper body. Difference before the one and the other, no I, no not-I therefore without difference; double apprehension always already there, neither pure experience of the purely corporeal, nor pure ‘solipsistic’ presentation in the self, for the self to itself. Apprehending this, seeking to come to terms with that irreducible ‘impure’ doubleness and duplicity, the question is asked concerning introjection and its inaugural moment. From this comes the already doubled question of how one can speak and what one speaks of in seeking to address, reflect on, this condition. Is there any ‘pure’ phenomenological intuition not always already riven, touched by the unconscious trace at work in one’s projection (perception, re-presentation) of one’s experience of the materiality of the world? If introjection takes place, if there is some introjection – and this can neither be proven nor disproved – and, as a corollary hypothesis, moving from the realm of psychology to that of Husserlian phenomenology once more, if there is thus some analogical appresentation or ‘analogical apperception’75 starting at the threshold of the touching-touched, there can be no immediacy, no full intuition, therefore, which Derrida describes as an 75

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), p. 108.

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Hand immense problem of phenomenological intersubjectivity. To grasp the problem fully, it is perhaps worth bringing Husserl into the discussion at this point. For the phenomenologist, ‘experience is original consciousness’ of an other.76 In its encounter with alterity, consciousness has itself reflected back to itself as a ‘ “there too” ’.77 Perceiving myself to be mediated by my experience of the other, in this case the hyletic content of the world, I come to a mediated awareness of place. But my consciousness of myself is simultaneously opened to me as never capable of achieving a pre-originary sense of ‘an “itself there” ’.78 In coming to perceive the ‘I’ as not pure presence, but as being made aware of being what Husserl calls ‘ “co-present” ’,79 I am conscious of myself through appresentation. Doubled and divided, the ‘I’ is haunted by its not-I but also by the doubled sense of the ‘I’, to which the touch in its perceived exteriority leads. I find myself given, according to Husserl, through my ‘ “analogizing” apprehension’ of my Being. ‘Every apperception’, Husserl insists, ‘in which we apprehend at a glance . . . the already-given everyday world . . . points to . . . an analogizing transfer’.80 What goes for the glance, stands too for the touch, the touching-touched. But the problem raised by Derrida is that, in being unable to state where introjection begins, one is left with what Husserl calls a ‘givenness beforehand’,81 and thus an absolute separation of self and other, which cannot be sustained if introjection and thus spacing, heterogeneity takes place, has always already taken place. Indeed, elsewhere, Derrida asks in an apostrophe why Husserl reads sequentially: ‘we may wonder what justifies this succession’ (OT 179). Working through Husserl’s text, Derrida queries the Husserlian consideration of the ‘touch’ of the heart, when, for example, one might say, ‘I feel my heart (OT 177), which for the German philosopher has an immediacy, but about which he does not explicate as ‘profitably’ as he had in ‘assert[ing] the “privilege” of touch’ in the example of the hand (OT 177). The problem is of thinking a ‘pure’ exteriority and/or a ‘pure’ interiority, hence the interrogation of introjection and the impossibility of verifying that; for, if sequence or succession are, and remain, unjustifiable, that is to say any temporal 76 77 78 79 80 81

Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 108. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 109. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 109. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 109. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 109. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p. 111.

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Hospitality ordering in the analysis of the touching-touched, for which the hand provides an ‘exemplary’ figure, then, equally, the ‘pure’ siting of interior/exterior as spatial coordinates must also come into question. If there is no ‘pure’ body, there can be no ‘pure’ psychic dimension. Thus the following question asked by Derrida: ‘And thus if we assume the “interiority of psychic acts,” isn’t it necessary, from the outset, that visibility, being exposed to the outside, the appresentative detour, the intrusion of the other, and so forth, be already at work?’ (OT 179). Denying the possibility of a tactile experience of the touching-touched is not the point. Derrida is at pains to stress this, as he seeks to dismantle priority, succession of any thought of a surface by which exterior and interior are maintained exclusively, absolutely separate, save for the contact point of the surface (the ‘manual or digital example . . . as best and paradigmatic example’ (OT 179)). He had previously asked how Husserl can articulate a ‘then’, an afterward . . . grounded in . . . pure presence. The provisional answer is that the experience of the touching-touched to which the site of the hand as paradigmatic example attests is that said experience is constitutively haunted, by some hetero-affection related to spacing and then to visible spatiality. It is thus understood that any pure phenomenological reduction is problematic, if not impossible. The ‘dehiscence of the outside and the other’, Derrida goes on to argue, in raising the ghost that haunts experience through the exemplary visibility of the hand as the invisible experience of some heteroaffection . . . where an intruder may come through; some thing, some one, some host, other of the other, ‘comes to inscribe an irreparable disorganization, a spacing that dislocates, a non-coincidence’ (OT 181). As a result of which spectral effect, we come to feel – do we not? – the dwelling of this auxiliary other, a revelation of one’s being haunted, of Being as the dwelling place of all haunting, ‘which also yields the chance effects of full intuition, the fortune of immediacy effects’ (OT 181). What Husserl calls immediacy, what the fiction of a pure phenomenological reduction would maintain, is that which really touches us: our others, our ghosts who dwell, inhabiting in the most interior of places, that interiority that is at such a remove as to be the outside of the inside, one’s heart of hearts [tout for intérieur].

Hospitality (DHR 210–11) Hospitality has been accommodated by the English language, welcomed into its house, hosted, as a more or less domesticated guest, 145

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Hospitality from the French, hospitalité. In turn, the word had arrived from Latin, travelling across Europe, and informing the English in its adjectival form, hospital, signifying now more or less obscurely, qualities or feelings of welcome and courtesy. The etymology is not without significance, for Derrida explicates the relations, from the Latin hospes onwards, a word undecidably doubling and dividing, as if from its very start (if we can imagine this fictional arrival or origin). The double, perhaps initially disconcerting, figures on the one hand the host, the one whose responsibility it is to be hospitable, on the other hand the guest, the one to whom, in principle, hospitality is to be shown. Thus, within itself, the hospes affirms and ‘stages’ both host and guest, the stranger or foreigner. And of course, if we consider these affiliations, possible filiations, and with those, certain relations more or less determined by welcome and guardedness, openness and the implicit – or sometimes explicit – announcement of an economy of hospitality (the limit to which the host will be hospitable, welcoming, guarded in his or her openness, open only to a point, and therefore not open as such), then we must also be open to ideas of the host and hostage, the hospital and the hospitable. The exchanges are implicated in the fiction of the origin, from the very start, at the heart of any concept or practice of hospitality. With that admission, the accommodation of the hospes as guest, within, and yet other to the host, that, perhaps parasitical relationship to which the host is prone, we might also consider the hostis, from whence derives hostility, originally ‘stranger’, in classical use ‘enemy’ as the OED avers: hospitality is opposed to what is nothing other than opposition itself, namely, hostility. The guest or friend can always be seen in the figure of the other who is perceived as a threat, or who threatens. The suggestion haunts, in the weave of etymologies, even the guest, as ghost, as that which haunts even in the most familiar, or familial of dwellings, the other within the one. Derrida signals this doubleness, the tension and the experience of the aporetic to which the figure, and from there the concept, attests, in the title of the talk from which the present extract is taken: ‘Hostipitality’ (DHR 208–30). Beginning, as he does elsewhere on a number of occasions, by citing ‘a long and celebrated passage from Kant’ (DHR 209), on the idea of ‘Cosmopolitan Right’ relating to a universal or unconditional hospitality, Derrida moves through his introduction, without moving beyond the beginning, by stating, in response to Kant, paraphrasing Kant, that universal hospitality comes from ‘an obligation, a right, and a duty all regulated by law’ (DHR 210). In 146

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Hospitality this opening of the beginning that admits the aporia, the principle of hospitality is given to be apprehended as a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only . . . deconstruct itself . . . in being put into practice. As soon as there is hospitality, as soon as hospitality is seen to take place, or to be staged in any conventionally perceived manner, there what is called deconstruction occurs. It does not take place according to the actions of some subject, some individual’s manner of being hospitable. Rather, deconstruction is always already underway in the practice, the putting into practice of the concept, in its normative economy and articulation. As soon as an opening to the other occurs, there already is guardedness, despite the apparent opposition to opposition itself. As a result, there emerges a ‘performative contradiction’ (DHR 213) at the heart of all the words framing, informing any thinking of hospitality, as well as all those other expressions of host, guest and so forth, implicated in, or implicating histories and praxes of the hospitable. For this reason, we find ourselves ‘on the threshold’; we find ‘we are beginning or pretending to open the door’; and, as a result, it has to be said that ‘We do not know what hospitality is’ (DHR 213), a statement which is reiterated throughout. The trope of the door opens itelf also (DHR 213), a means of negotiating the limit between hospitality and hostility, host and guest, master and stranger. The door opens to offer or give asylum, but equally can always be closed, its premise being that of guarding the premises, the household of the master. It is that figure, that marker where there is given the place of the limit, of limiting the gift, of fixing a limit to hospitality; while equally affirm[ing] the law of hospitality as the law of the household, in short of all economy, the very authority of the Oikos; and with that, in its maintenance of authority, the figure of the door affirms both law of a place and the law of identity. In playing the figure of the door, Derrida introduces in the economy of metaphor a performative figure that encapsulates, embodies or gathers to itself economically all those limits, those acts and practices of de-termining, of marking the very end and beginning of any hospitality conventionally conceived. It is then, let us reiterate this, the reason why hospitality must be perceived as a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only . . . deconstruct itself . . . in being put into practice. The concept and experience ‘deconstructs’ itself, the master is merely the servant of this deconstruction that takes place in the practice, experience and concept, which remains there, as irreducible to the very idea, within 147

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Hospitality all three, of an otherwise assumed, undifferentiated ontology of hospitality. And it is this ‘deconstruction-always-already-underway’ which is put on display through the seemingly innocuous, apparently merely metaphorical, merely formal figure of the door. It is that figure within that causes to be architectonically organised as difference of thought and the thinking of difference by which the good reader might grasp the function of authority and, with that, the truth of authority, by which the master, the servant of authority and the truth of that authority, is licensed in limiting the gift proffered and [thereby] making of this limitation, namely, the being-oneself in one’s own home, the condition of the gift and of hospitality. The statement though: we do not know what hospitality is. The phrase is reiterated, as we have said. Not simply repeated, a difference marks the return. In this, the statement remains to be read, issued as a limit beyond which the reader cannot yet go. It is uttered with differing inflections, in different ‘voices’, each of which requires an openness or, if you will, a ‘hospitality’ on the part of the reader, who must welcome this strange, apparent affirmation in the face of what seems commonsensical, a given concerning the ‘nature’ of what is called hospitality. And of course, though this seems obvious, it should be remarked that, even in the cited passage alone Derrida has gathered around the figure of hospitality certain notions: of law, of economy, of the practices of nations, of what connects hospitality to asylum, politically, historically, ethically and morally; as well as to the more fundamental question of Being, of self and other, and other related ‘first’ philosophical interrogations into the meaning of Being, with that specific emplacement of the self in one’s own home, whatever this strange phrase might signify. ‘One’s home’ signifies not a place separate from Being, but a condition of Being, on which this condition of the gift and of hospitality is founded, which is the architectonic foundation for any condition of the gift and hospitality; at least in principle. But turning to that iterable remark: ‘pretending to open the door’, being ‘on the threshold’, we find, in this fiction of Derrida’s that, standing, as it were, at the door, waiting to come in, to be admitted, to be given hospitality is this statement that ‘we do not know what hospitality is’. The door opened, we find ourselves greeted by, recognising, the strange, the other, the foreign at the very heart of familiar, the (possibly) familial, apprehension of hospitality. On its second appearance, the phrase now appears as the quotation of another, placed in quotation marks, suspended doubly, drawn to our 148

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Hospitality attention by the emphasis given its strangeness (already remarked in its having first been uttered in boldface type). Derrida reiterates the phrase, having just spoken of the welcome, the hospitality, the (youare)-well-come [bien venu], that is proffered ‘when I begin to speak in my language, which seems to suppose that I am’ at home (DHR 213). At the threshold then, the phrase reannounces itself, drawing attention to the limit of a language not our own, but that of the host. From which iteration comes the admission that the language of hospitality, its ‘code’ or ‘lexicon’, has been ‘the most used’, which is to say that which is the most formal, the least sincere – in principle – because the most formulaic, the most familiar. Familiarity is made strange in being foregrounded as the unseen familiar. This is the language ‘of the threshold’ (DHR 213). Hence a third utterance: ‘to address the first sentence with which I began, ‘We do not know what hospitality is’, as a host to a guest [comme un hôte à un hôte] . . . seems to contradict, in a self-contradiction . . . a performative contradiction, everything I have just recalled’ (DHR 213). The very act of speaking in such a manner in the face of hospitality, in questioning what passes as unquestioned engages in a performative contradiction; this has been noted already. But that condition is now intensified in Derrida’s own reiteration of his performative precisely in order to call a halt to any possible progression, any stepping over the threshold. Indeed, this self-reflexive reading estranges even the initial gesture of calling violently to a halt any passage over a presumed or unthought threshold. Moreover, as the parenthesis in French demonstrates – making plain that which still remains implicitly in the English, between ‘host/guest’ as what resides as the etymological ‘ghost’, hosted by both terms – unless there is what one blithely calls a ‘context’, that which places any given term, trope, gesture, practice, in a place that serves to define, to limit, to de-termine, it is and remains impossible to know the host from the guest, one hôte from the other hôte. As a result – and here Derrida admits, offering an apologia in preparation for a fourth reiteration that, as the guest he ‘owes’ his ‘hosts an explanation’ (DHR 214) – the unfolding of the contradiction, and the experience of the aporetic that this phrase enframes, and which becomes no less strange with every passing return, ‘implicates us’, while equally giving us the possible insight we ‘do not know what “welcome” means and that perhaps no one welcomed is ever completely welcome’ (DHR 214). As a result, ‘the whole question of hospitality is focused here, too’ (DHR 214). 149

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Hymen Thus, from this point Derrida proposes ‘at least three and doubtless more than four’ possible ‘acceptations’ of the phrase, having first considered the work that takes place in the Latin verb accipio (DHR 215). The habit of receiving is equated with the act of welcoming, of taking something in return, and introducing in the motion of the ‘re-’ the ‘sense of return or repetition’; and this, in turn, acknowledges ‘the idea of necessary repetition and thus law, iterability, and the law of iterability at the heart of every law of hospitality’ (DHR 215). In the very language of welcome there is what Derrida defines as a ‘readiness from the outset to repeat, to renew, to continue’ (DHR 215). Thus, while it is not the purpose here to work through and so reiterate the ‘at least three and doubtless more than four’ possible ‘acceptions’ that Derrida proceeds to unpack from the various thresholds to which he draws our attention in opening the door through the statement and reiteration in the performative contradiction of that strange and estranging phrase we have already acknowledged, it is important to understand what is at stake in the rhetorical gesture that structures this particular talk. In reiterating, and then playing out the various acceptations, of the sentence ‘We do not know what hospitality is’, Derrida’s performative contradiction is not, never merely, a negative intending to question, to throw into doubt, to oppose the idea of hospitality. Instead, it strives in its iterability, in its returns, to be a welcome, unceasingly to perform an openness to a hospitality without condition, without limits, beginning with the very question of hospitality itself and the truth that underlies this question – which is, of course, that until we begin with that question as a question, we do not know what hospitality is.

Hymen (D 212–15) Like the parergon or the supplement, the hymen is one of the figures of undecidability in Derridean discourse. It is a ‘figure’ in that it signifies, rather than represents or adequates to a concept. Not a representation or an adequation, but a figure that challenges representation as a simple correlative relation, and the logic that underlies and therefore forms that assumption. The logic of the a priori, logic itself. These figures challenge that status, and we are thus moving . . . to the logic of the hymen. What would be a logic of the hymen? The logic of the hymen disturbs logic: it is logic deconstructed. If logic is predicated upon the question ‘what is?’, the question of being and its presence, the hymen 150

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Hymen brings that question into its veiling and puncturing of the fabric of being. The hymen is the figure of the between: the ontologically disturbed that disturbs ontology in a tissue between the internal and the external. It is the figure of the text. Between the inside and outside of the female body, between the state of desire and that of fulfilment, the hymen occupies the interim between these modes of being. A transparent medium, it is the simultaneous occupation of both states, the inhabitation of a duality that frustrates the fiction of a unified self. Figuring this duality, it goes beyond it and a dialectical opposition of binaries that would be constituted by the logic it undoes. The logic of the hymen, which itself undoes ontological presence, is thus the undoing of logic as it is founded in that presence. The question it brings and complicates is the question of being. In order then to ask what a logic of the hymen would be, we would, having outlined the above, have to place ‘be’ under erasure, for logic no longer stands in determinate relation to itself, an ‘itself’, when the logic of the hymen is placed between it. The hymen disorders time and space, and therefore disorders order. A physical as well as philosophical differential in time and space, it separates presence from itself and inserts that difference into the illusion of a self-communion.82 As a barrier between any reversion to thinking along the order of presence and non-presence, the hymen institutes a demand for a non-simple mediation; a third term between to be and not to be, and a third term, it follows, within a logic founded upon an ontological premise located in this dialectical principle issuing from the logos. The confusion between presence and non-presence figured by the hymen is also the confusion of an ontology based on presence and non-presence – the question of that which is, and that which is not, and the impossibility of a third term to complicate that dialectic and therefore that ontology – as it is also the confusion and infiltration of a logic predicated upon that order. The hymen thus disorders a whole series of oppositions, both specific – between perception/nonperception, memory/image, memory/ desire – and abstract, for it is the figure that undermines the structure of opposition generally. 82

What Gayatri Spivak calls ‘a hymeneal fable’ in her ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Of Grammatology (OG lxvi) also issues a challenge to phallogocentric reason and its situation of meaning in being; by placing the corporeal into the logical, the hymen inscribes the polarity upon which logic is maintained into the space of the in-between.

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Hymen The hymen produces the effect of a medium between two states, enveloping both at once and deconstructing the dialectical opposition between two poles and the assumption that lies behind and institutes them; in perception/nonperception, memory/image, memory/ desire, we see the basic principle of presence/absence ordering the structure, which is therefore founded in the logic of the logos, presence itself. In mixing memory and desire (in echo of Eliot), the logic of the hymen deconstructs that logocentric logic through the infiltration of one term by the other, through the effect of the mediating hymen. By instituting a logic beyond that founded in opposition, it is both the figure of logic and its deconstruction; the latter because it deconstructs the traditional logic – logic as tradition – and the former because it yet remains as a structuring principle, but one which calls the precepts of structure into question. Turning outside in, the hymen takes its place in a chain that includes différance, archi-writing, the supplement and trace, one of a number of figures that elude binary opposition and crucially cannot be resolved to a third term within a dialectic; the contradictions which exist within the figure are neither reconcilable nor at any moment definitive to the exclusion of the other. In the figure of the hymen, the relation of the outside to the inside displaces either as present, relating both to the past and future, virginity to consummation, desire to satisfaction. The hymen stands as the fold of that relation, wherein what is determined as the present happens only with respect to the spacing that constitutes its différance from itself. Derrida emphasises the necessary irresolution that flows from that différance in Positions, arguing that ‘the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, neither the inside nor the outside, etc.’ (P 40). If the hymen were to occupy alternately these spaces, such epochal shifts would constitute a break between past and present, given that the epoche¯ is the temporal limit of definition founded in presence and one of the precepts of metaphysics. The epoche¯ is challenged by the figures at work within the metaphysical tradition; they are the structures that undo structure from within, in the fold that, leaving the structure open to disseminating play, marks the impossibility of its closure as a structural impossibility and therefore its totalisation as structure itself. The hymen, and the chain of non-synonymous figures it enters into, mark the dissemination that overflows the attempt of any authority to govern by means of the imposition of a determinate and finite structure of meaning on the level of a thematics that would 152

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Hymen simultaneously enforce a metaphysical structuration of presence as its predicate. Its remainder re-enters the illusion of authority into the chain it pretends to govern, producing it as an effect in the chain. The text can be viewed as a scene of this dissemination, overflowing as it does any conceptual system designed to produce it as a structure within that systemic discourse and the governance of an authority. Derrida reads the hymen in relation to Mallarmé’s writing, wherein the blanks of the page suspend not just meaning but the relation of meaning: the transparent relation of the signifier to signified and of the signifier to a referent reality of which it is presumed to be the mimetic shadow. The suspension figured by the hymen is the suspension of meaning. This implies an undecidability that prevents both the resolution of opposites, and therefore an ultimate returning of ontology to presence through Aufhebung, and a correlative nonclosure of meaning that precludes the closure of a system through either determination or synthesis. In fact it precludes the system in toto, insofar as it is assumed to be a structure capable of closure, in lieu of a dissemination of meaning that is in continual production. Where meaning and reference are kept in an undecidable suspension, so too are the dialectics upon which they are maintained, including that of the interior/exterior. That opposition structures the subject itself, both in its relation to its own ipseity and then in the relation of that self to the external world. Where the hymen, caught between inside and outside, holds that opposition so as to suspend the limit, the comprehension of structuration according to that divide – the subject, text, literature and its relation to truth, as well as its history, which is history itself, the relation of all three to mimesis which institutes the double of reality and its imitation – is brought into the disseminating chain that it hitherto had been thought to assimilate according to its system. The hymen is not a figure that takes place within a system as a legislated difference that is then assimilated back into that system with the effect of confirming it. Coming from within the system, it disrupts any model along which structure might be thought, thereby refusing reabsorption as permissible difference and instituting différance as the reserve that exceeds containment or internment, exceeds the structure itself. It is a sort of textile. The suspension of the hymen is the suspension of the text, in its moments of undecidability, in the space of the inter that holds it in reserve and in an excess that cannot be retrieved to a system necessarily governed by meaning and reference. The text is not confined to the written page, but even there it can be staged 153

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Hymen as the scene of writing; in Mallarmé, the virginity of the ‘yet unwritten page’ opens up that space of suspension between [entre].83 The white space returns in between words on the page, setting into play a temporal and spatial difference and deferral of meaning whereby meaning is disseminated. In this dissemination the mimetic relation is also set into play, as the signifier is displaced from unification with the referent and the barrier between internal/external brought into question by the disseminating movement between the hymeneal virginity of the blank and the black, a constant movement of the space between that interposes signification in the blanks of the text. Derrida recalls that mimesis is dependent on two types of truth, which are the two forms in which truth has been figured: the first is ale¯theia, the process of the veil being lifted back to reveal the thing itself in its self-presentation; the second, related to the first, is the relation between the re-presentation of the thing and the itself.84 Inscribing the whole history of literature, as well as history itself, in the relation between imitator and imitated, signifier and referent, mimesis is reliant on the presence of the present as the appearance of truth in order to function. Where writing divides that present through the re-marking of a simple present in the undecidability of its trace, the relationship of imitator to imitated is exceeded. The system that emanates from truth is shown to be part of the chain it ostensibly commands, and truth one of the effects of that chain; this double mark of writing, Derrida insists, ‘escapes the pertinence or authority of truth: it does not overturn it but rather inscribes it within its play as one of its functions or parts’ (D 207). Operating at the edge of being, the hymen works at the margin of any opposition to become the ‘inter-’ that displaces a polar spatiality of the binary. In so doing and in remaining a medium, it evades location and evades being thought according to location, where the latter is a coordinate of being. In its confusion between present and nonpresent it simultaneously displaces being conceived as a temporal state according to a dialectic of presence and absence, and so the hymen never becomes a mere mediation of work of the negative; it outwits and undoes all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner 83

84

See D (215); entre shares homophonically with antre the opening or hollow space that is also an interval. The collapse of ‘e’ into ‘a’ shadows the différance in the ‘cave’ of the antre, which is indistinguishable from entre – between – and partakes in the interval of the hymen. In ‘The Double Session I’ (203–7) Derrida unfolds this argument so that it might begin to disseminate throughout the text.

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I of dialectics. It outwits them and . . . it envelops them, turns them over, and inscribes them. The dialectic is contained within its own history as the hymen operates to reveal the difference on which it is constructed. In the undecidability of its being, the hymen is both virginity ‘and’ marriage: it inserts ‘and’ where dialectics depends on ‘or’, overturning the structure of logic. By abolishing the difference between desire and its fulfilment, by confusing proper identity in its fusion not only of two beings but of being and non-being, difference and non-difference, presence and absence, the hymen eradicates the differential between the determination of two poles. In the same way, the virginity of the ‘yet unwritten page’ is shown already to be marked by archi-writing inscribing the ‘yet unwritten’ as the already written: the hymeneal page that is both immaculate and marked, the virgin page is already written on through the trace of différance, caught in a suspension that opens up the space of the hymen, the space that undoes dialectic space. By collapsing the distinction of either/or, predicated upon the interiority and exteriority of the real and its representation – imitator and imitated, signifier and signified – the hymen does not collapse difference, but the differends that create difference as an effect of presence. The hymen displaces the present along with its modifications, past and future, so that there is no longer any thought of the centre from which to structure logic. As it does not present itself and is without being, the hymen is without proper meaning and disorders meaning, understood as meaning originating in being. Its non-simple fold becomes the site of dissemination, an opening out that unfolds the play of meaning.

I I (ATTIA 92–3) I think, therefore I am, holds Cartesian logic. For Kant, as for Descartes, I exist prior to this utterance. Me, myself and I, the thinking ‘I’ exists as self-presence to the self that is the essence of the human. As the ‘I’ is defined as identical self-presence of the conscious, or thinking, self, it also comes to define thought itself as that which can be gathered together, there where it remains the same, gathered and present to itself through this power of the I. The ‘I’ is the thinking ‘I’, yet thought is the power of this ‘I’ to think it as a unity 155

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I of dialectics. It outwits them and . . . it envelops them, turns them over, and inscribes them. The dialectic is contained within its own history as the hymen operates to reveal the difference on which it is constructed. In the undecidability of its being, the hymen is both virginity ‘and’ marriage: it inserts ‘and’ where dialectics depends on ‘or’, overturning the structure of logic. By abolishing the difference between desire and its fulfilment, by confusing proper identity in its fusion not only of two beings but of being and non-being, difference and non-difference, presence and absence, the hymen eradicates the differential between the determination of two poles. In the same way, the virginity of the ‘yet unwritten page’ is shown already to be marked by archi-writing inscribing the ‘yet unwritten’ as the already written: the hymeneal page that is both immaculate and marked, the virgin page is already written on through the trace of différance, caught in a suspension that opens up the space of the hymen, the space that undoes dialectic space. By collapsing the distinction of either/or, predicated upon the interiority and exteriority of the real and its representation – imitator and imitated, signifier and signified – the hymen does not collapse difference, but the differends that create difference as an effect of presence. The hymen displaces the present along with its modifications, past and future, so that there is no longer any thought of the centre from which to structure logic. As it does not present itself and is without being, the hymen is without proper meaning and disorders meaning, understood as meaning originating in being. Its non-simple fold becomes the site of dissemination, an opening out that unfolds the play of meaning.

I I (ATTIA 92–3) I think, therefore I am, holds Cartesian logic. For Kant, as for Descartes, I exist prior to this utterance. Me, myself and I, the thinking ‘I’ exists as self-presence to the self that is the essence of the human. As the ‘I’ is defined as identical self-presence of the conscious, or thinking, self, it also comes to define thought itself as that which can be gathered together, there where it remains the same, gathered and present to itself through this power of the I. The ‘I’ is the thinking ‘I’, yet thought is the power of this ‘I’ to think it as a unity 155

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I present in both time and space. The ‘I can’ of the ‘I’, in other words its power, is defined by the power to think at the same time as it also gives thought its power as it constitutes the ‘I’. The understanding of this ‘I’ is not reliant on the possibility of its expression, for it exists independently of any ability to speak it, whether in person – I am, I think, I exist – or as a language. ‘Every human language has at its disposal this self “as such,” even if the word for it is lacking’, writes Derrida. What does this mean? That question – what does this mean – is intimately related to that of the ‘I’, in fact can only be asked in relation to it. The thinking of the ‘I’ as a thinking ‘I’ exists before and does not require the articulation of the ‘I’; this is made clear by Kant, who separates the power of thinking the self from the power of saying it, the literal power of uttering ‘I’. Language does not require the word for this self in order to call it up. It does not require it because that concept of the self conditions language: not merely a language, or an aspect of language, such as the word ‘I’, but language itself. The idea of language proceeds from the idea of the self: the latter, being created as selfpresence, presupposes an internal language of thought that is present and is presence, creating language as a derivative of this self-presence. Language, understood within this framework as communication of one consciousness to another, is made in the image of the self and meaning itself, conceived as a unitary truth, derives from this truth of being, founded in presence. It ‘means’, therefore, because meaning comes from it and it means meaning itself. Language requires this self ‘as such’ in order to be; it derives from and operates according to the logic of presence established in the ontological identity of the ‘I’ as presence, and, understood as such, it promotes that logic that derives from a primary non-articulation (the thinking of the self) with regard to every subsequent concept that is born from it and must be articulated in language. In the utterance as well as in its thinking, language and meaning are understood as derivatives of the ‘I’ and language is both thought in accordance with it and performs that self-presence. As such, it is a carrier of meaning both as it becomes a conduit for meaning and a representation of it.85 The adventure of the ‘I’ in continental philosophy, the story of the ‘I’, traces the ontological question from its foundation in language. 85

The Greek translation of metaphor as carrier of meaning is here pertinent, in that the problematic of metaphor is that it enacts this potential of language to carry and perpetuate.

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I As the emphasis shifted onto language as a determinant of being rather than as a carrier of a predetermined being-as-presence, the Kantian unity of consciousness had to be rethought; as language was being considered both as the trace of difference and as the constitutor of man, it thus followed that, as language deconstructed the idea of unitary presence, there could be no unified consciousness of man who was constituted – rather than represented – by language. As there was no unified consciousness, so language becomes the representation of man’s representation to himself in a consciousness already traced by archi-écriture, created by différance. The I is the essence of the human, or rather the essence of what it means to be human as such and what human means as such; the ability of man to put himself – again, the logocentric discourse is also a phallogocentric one – at both the centre and apex of his world is an anthropocentric assertion of his sovereignty. The emergence of animality as an issue in Derrida’s thought is an address to that anthropocentric view by which man defines himself as ‘I’ with regard to that which he is not, namely the animal; the definition by exclusion of the other as species is also a definition by exclusion of that which is shared between species, that which infiltrates the ‘human’. By placing the human as sovereign being at the centre of the world, the world is then created in the image of man and thought is prefigured upon that anthropocentric model. The ‘I’ is then predicated upon the exclusion of the animal from within, an internal abjection that leads to the taxonomisation of species based upon a shared and fundamental difference from the sovereign human being. The identity of the ‘I’ and of the human is thus derived from the animal, rather than as a precedent of it; the subordination of the animal to the ‘I’ does not take place as of right or nature but is required by the self-definition of the human in terms of the necessary secondarity of the animal other; the animal is then understood in terms of the ‘I’, as a subordinate other that creates the sovereign ‘I’, and one which in addition is comprehended in relation to the ‘I’ that thus defines itself as human. The alterity of the animal, Derrida argues, threatens the anthropocentric view of animality at the same time as it also threatens the ‘I’ as such, identified as human in relation to that anthropocentric perception of the animal difference. Where that difference is understood in terms of simple difference from simple presence, the human is created; once radical alterity is admitted, the différance of animality itself becomes a challenge to the concept of the human predicated on the animal. 157

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I Derrida refracts this problematic through the figure of his own cat, whose gaze makes him aware of his own nakedness. The dilemma this feline gaze engenders is focused on the human being; why should one feel self-conscious, indeed feel ashamed, of one’s own naked body, when confronted by the animal? The alterity of the cat forces the human to be aware of all that he expels from his own body and consciousness in order to constitute it as such. The difference – rather than différance – of the human and animal, the difference that constitutes the human as presence in opposition to itself, is both created and deconstructed in the gaze of the cat. As the human is founded in his difference from the animal, the feline gaze structures that difference by making him aware of his own selfconstituted identity, an identity that has its foundation in the exclusion of the animal, part of which is the distinction of cultured habits, such as the impetus towards clothing oneself, from animal states, here nakedness. The gaze also, however, makes the viewed being aware both of the radical unknowability of the cat – in particular, the unknowable limits of the cat’s own intelligence – and therefore of his own constitution through a fiction of animality conceived in opposition to humanity.86 In this structuration humanity is placed as sui generis among species, defined by its exclusions in order to centre being around the sovereignty or potestas of the self conceived as such through that exclusion. A coming face-to-face of the human with the animal problematises that construction as the human realises, not his difference from the animal, but that difference is predicated upon the animal; the intimacy of the human–animal relation brings the human into contact with that which disturbs his humanity per se. In this mode of thought, the animal might be thought of as a supplement to the human: it is both that without which the human must still necessarily exist, if the human is to be sovereign, and that which supplies a lack in the human, which constitutes it as such. The ontology of the human is an animal ontology, in that it exists because of that exclusion of the animal; it might also, in a very different way, be said to be an animal ontology because once the human is understood in relation to the animal, the taxonomy ceases to be definitive. The priority of the animal’s différance upon which the ‘I’ is founded becomes the différance of the self to self-presence, and to that which the self attempts to exclude in order to say ‘I’. 86

This is, of course, an investigation of Montaigne’s dilemma: when I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not in fact playing with me?

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I Insofar as there is an ‘I’, it presumes the exclusion of animality in order first to think and then to speak itself. This exclusion is, as has been outlined, a fictitious one: it is not that humanity can only be thought once the animal is excluded; rather, humanity creates the concept of the non-human in order to create itself as human. The axiomatic understanding of the human as such in relation to the animal is a distinction which exists only in the essence of the ‘I’ in opposition to the ‘animal’, where the latter is understood as the reduction of all that is not human, but which then precedes and creates the human. Such a conception of the ‘I’ can only be structured and sustained through the difference of being as such, the essence of being, from that of the animal. This Kantian conception of the sovereignty of the ipse as it derives from the animal and more specifically from power over the animal constitutes the essence of the ‘I’ or the ‘person,’ the essence of the human. This presence to oneself, this self of the presence to itself, this universal and singular ‘I’ is conceived as a sovereign ‘I’, an identity wherein the ‘I’ possesses a self-identical potestas that legislates for that identity as a matter of right. That ‘I’ precedes and enables the ‘I’ who speaks, but the ‘I’ remains intact from the possibility of its own articulation; it is an originary ipseity from which articulation follows. The discretion of this personal subject, which Derrida terms its selfness, comes before as it also lends its identity to speech, which comes into being as a derivation and power predicated upon the power of the ‘I’ that authorises speech. The power to gather defines the ‘I’, and is another power that Derrida perceives to be an attempt to define and exclude the animal, thus constituting through that definition and exclusion a human identity issuing from the sovereign ‘I’. ‘I’ . . . defines thinking itself as what gathers itself, there where it remains the same, gathered and present to itself through this power of the I, through the I can of this I, this I can I as an ‘I think’ that accompanies every representation. The Kantian conception of the ‘I’ as the unity of a consciousness assumes the a priori ‘I’ of ‘I think,’ the originary unity of the transcendental apperception that accompanies every representation; experience is preceded by the knowledge of an ‘I’ that comes before it and understands through processing its intuitions. The thinking of the I – the ‘I think’ – Derrida argues is organised as a gathering together in self-identical presence through the sovereign potestas of ‘I’, the ‘I can’ that precedes ‘I think’ as an a priori. Derrida approaches this gathering of thought as an organisation of ‘I’ as such through his treatment of Heidegger, in which gathering is the idea that structures the I as such by lending it a 159

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Identity human being, or Dasein. Through his discussion of animality in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida ultimately questions the ontological categories according to which Heidegger unfolds his discourse on the question of being, the question of the I in relation to itself.87

Identity (MO 14) The question of identity does not belong to itself. It is the property of language, and language disturbs the proper; so it becomes lost property, belonging to nobody and nobody belonging to it, an orphan child without origin. To be a child of language is to be deracinated. It is the removal of any idea of a ‘natural state’. What does it mean, in this context, to say that ‘our question is still identity’? We should ask what it infers of the presumptions upon which the unified question rests, and the multiple implications of the statement that cleaves that unity or shows it to be already multiple. The very fact of the pronoun that claims identity even as it brings it into question should trouble us from the beginning, leading us to ask what kind of non-simple identity could be lodged in that second person plural, and what community it evokes, founded in a deconstruction of belonging. Our question is still identity also because it is the same old question – the oldest question of the same – out of which the tradition of metaphysics, implied also in that ‘our’, is created; if deconstruction is Europe, it is because metaphysics is Europe. It is its tradition and its history, because it creates the idea of history that philosophy is then called to interpret. And that tradition is rooted in the concept of identity, understood as the self-identical presence coextensive with the logos and therefore with presence itself. So our question is still identity, because we remain in and as that tradition that identifies itself as the question of being and identifies us as such. It is our question, and we are implicated within the question as its history – the history of metaphysics, history as metaphysics – and historically. As we cannot escape this question, so it cannot escape its own questioning and its own division; we remain within metaphysics and we remain also as the trace that is within it. Our question is still identity as the question of identity fractures a history based upon it, because it is fractured as the non-simple originary source of metaphysics. Historically, it is ‘our’ question as it is the question of philosophy, its genesis and 87

See ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand’ for an elaboration of this argument, which Derrida continues into The Animal That Therefore I Am.

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Identity genealogy; it is also historically our question as the idea of identity, never natural, becomes ever more fraught. Always a political question, identity now takes the form of a ‘politics’. Among the contemporary debates on mono- and multiculturalism, on nationality and on citizenship, the interrelation of these issues with the concept of identity returns to a shared predication upon, or departure from, its proper place. Proper also to itself, for, within this understanding, what is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and, in general, belonging? Many ways of belonging which are still one: if one can belong to a country, or culture, or the idea of a state, it is because these entities are thought on the priority of the proper and thus of ownership. In this sense, we are all colonial subjects, in that we belong within a logic of ownership. Identity is a relationship of subordination, but we might think it in terms of the sado-masochistic dynamic wherein the state becomes dominated by its domination; the one who belongs and therefore is owned by, is in fact partaking in a narcissistic replication which sees the state become merely a reflection of the self. For these debates which figure the nation-state and culture as sites predicated upon a belonging (or non-belonging, which resides in the same logic) under the presupposition of identity as transparent to itself, signal a move from a specific to a general belonging, the latter constructed upon the logic of the former and both upon totalisation: the logic of metaphysics built upon the perfection of the self as a self-present identity, and the presupposition of its transparent identity to itself. The presupposition of these larger entities is therefore based upon that originary presupposition that then becomes the spur to enable presupposition in all cases upon that first cause and within that proper tradition. The identity of the subject which ‘our’ question of identity goes back to is also a colonial subject within this concept of identity as belonging and is colonised from within as its a priori by this logic of ownership, being proper to the self. Again within the model of domination which is not simply an analogy, the subject understands itself as both master and slave, or coloniser and the colonised. The owner and owned are at one and the same time indivisible by nature. Before the identity of the subject there is this ipseity. It does not rest on articulation, for it is the ruling of the self that is predetermined by having self: a sovereignty over a proper selfhood understood 161

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Identity as self-presence. When the subject recognises his ipseity, he does according to a sovereign right to be identified as himself, deriving from the potestas of self-identity. The concept of the subject as a cognisant presence and able to identify as such an ideality, entire and transparently self-identified, by saying ‘I’, is anteceded by ipseity, which cannot be reduced to an abstract capacity to say ‘I’, which it will have always preceded. The ipse signifies, in the first place, potestas, the ‘I can’ that allows the ‘I’ to be articulated; it is the first signifier of presence and the originary signifier in and from that first place. It is fitting that the designation should be a temporo-spatial one, for it is in that first place and in that first signifier that originary différance is at work. There might be a way to rephrase this first question, the initiatory question in more ways than one, and, if I can rephrase it, I can call into question its own identity even as I call into question my own, insofar as it resides in this ability to say ‘I can’ as an antecedent of my identity as a subject.88 There is another way of putting this question, by translating it into the same language, which is to say a translation of the other within the ipse: our question is still language. The archi-writing of language splits the subject and splits the ipse even as it constitutes it. No thought before writing, no presence without the orginary différance of the trace of archi-writing, and therefore no self-presence that is not marked by its own difference from itself, the difference and deferral of the ipse. If language has man and if, moreover, our language is not our own, then the archi-writing of the ipse constitutes it as originarily divided. Deconstructing the logic of the proper, language makes it possible for Derrida to say ‘I only have one language; it is not mine’ (MO 1). Articulating a radical disempowerment of the potestas of the logos, Derrida thus draws attention to the split occasioned prior to the ‘I can’, the split in the ‘I’ of identity. His words, in a text that circles around a hermeneutics of language and identity, recall those of Stephen Dedalus; ‘[t]his race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am’.89 88

89

The ‘I can’ comes before the ‘I’ in ipse, associating the ‘pse’ of ipse with the potestas and sovereignty, Derrida claims, of the hospes which takes place in a semantic chain that includes both hospitality and hostility (see MO 14). In this sense, one can be both a hostage and a guest, and this was the condition of the Franco-Maghrebian Derrida. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Definitive Text corrected from the Dublin Holograph by Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellmann (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 207.

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Identity The acknowledgement follows from an epiphany regarding the language of the coloniser; ‘[t]he language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine [. . .] His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech’.90 When Stephen despairs – ‘[m]y soul frets in the shadow of his language’91 – he is recognising not only the performative colonisation in language, colonialism as an iterated speech-act.92 Like Derrida, he is averring that ‘I have only one language; it is not mine’. If language does not belong to us, if in fact it is the trace that disrupts the possibility of belonging, so too our identities must be rethought along this disempowerment of the potestas, the ipse. To express myself as I am, I cannot express myself other than as I am created in writing. I cannot but express myself as an identity separated by language; ‘I shall express myself as I am’, acknowledging that there is nothing outside of that being in language before an articulation of that being. To say ‘I have only one language; it is not mine’ is both then a particular historical condition for Derrida, born in French Algeria, disidentified and reclaimed, but it is also the case for all of us. Language and the proper are irreducible. I have only one language, and it is not mine, for identity is différance; it precludes the possibility of the proper. And therefore I am called to say ‘I must express myself as I am, riven by différance’; to say ‘I’ in order to articulate its impossibility. This is not an illogicality, nor is it rhetorical. It is only the articulation of the subject that cleaves the ipse even as it tries to announce its self-presence in that articulation. Drawing from his own altered experience of having lost and regained French citizenship, having belonged to no state in the interim, Derrida emphasises that citizenship remains as a concept threatened or provisional. The belonging or not-belonging of citizenship is furthermore not only associated with, but derives from, the belonging or non-belonging to language, to a national language and then to language more generally. Rather 90 91 92

Joyce, Portrait, p. 194. Joyce, Portrait, p. 194. In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida expresses a reserve about this word, noting that he ‘would not like to make too easy use of the world [sic] “colonialism” ’ (MO 39). The felicitous slip – ‘world’ for ‘word’ – sets off more than a thematics of a text about the impurity of language and the possibility of belonging, containing the play of that impurity within itself, divided from itself, dispossessed of intention. It might be noted that it repeats, faithfully, a previous slip, from the work of an author whose uncanny affinity to Derrida is already marked in this essay.

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Identity than speaking of who possesses a language, the question is whom language possesses and, in that possession, inscribes the sovereignty from which ipseity takes its power with a différance that would rend self-possession at its ostensible origin. We are possessed by language, a non-simple possession that denies propriation and its effects, making us uncanny to our selves; where language creates us as unheimlich in both our personal and public states and makes our expression but the trace of the différance that precedes it – rather than the articulation of ‘I’ that follows ipseity – one cannot be at home in language.93 For Derrida, growing up in Algeria with the problem of the mother-tongue (MO 34), having had no language except that of the coloniser, language was already a political structure and being structured as political. This is Derrida as Dedalus; already riven by différance in his very constitution, he is also created as an explicitly divided being, a state that a fiction of citizenship, far from creating unity, exposed not only as a political, but a political because ontological, division.94 We cannot place ourselves outside of language or have any identity separate from it, any identity which is not already implicated in language and in our belonging to it. The ability to say ‘I’ is already inscribed by the deconstruction of the ipse understood as sovereign power in archi-writing; the internal monologue that would be coterminous with self-presence and from which the presence of language, mastered by the ipse, would proceed, is already made different by archi-writing that forms identity and from which the articulated ‘I’ is always already a trace of a trace.

93

94

See MO (17), where Derrida questions this ‘being-at-home’ [être chez-soi] in language as a derivation of mastery, associated first with the language of colonialism that places the colonial subject in a position of being mastered through language and then locates that as a symptom of a more profound disturbance of belonging by language, which disturbs any conceptuality of mastery that would precede belonging through the intermediary of propriation. ‘Explicitly divided’ because the division of presence at the origin of being is already a political division and creates the subject as a political subject, regardless of circumstances of nationality. This political division can, however, be extended to all nationalities – though in the case of Derrida, again they are explicitly staged in his circumstances and the scene of his non-belonging – by this positing of citizenship as a concept which is already threatened by the deconstruction of belonging thought upon the basis of the sovereign and upon which it is predicated.

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Iterability

Iterability (LI 7–8) In writing this, my concern is how to style an absence: how can I address a reader? The obvious answer is to say ‘you’; how to style your absence? Another option is to avoid ‘you’, by writing ‘one’, instead. There are issues with the third person address, however; in the elision of singularity and the risk of appropriating the singular to the general, or, alternatively, to the dominance of an alignment with the ‘I’ ventriloquising ‘one’ and taking advantage of ‘your’ absence. On one level the person of address is academic, for it is the address itself that is at issue, more particularly with regard to the text within which it takes place. The text is constructed via a need and structural imperative for iterability. It demands the possibility of reaching not one, or even any, but many addressees, to be repeatable across contexts. This is the structure of language itself, which is the simultaneous deconstruction of language as a closed system; if language were to be read as a closed hermeneutics rather than the dissemination of the signifier, its iterability would be finite. How does the text remain singular and also iterable? This is where you – and I – return: not as respondents to the text that ‘make’ its meaning – the old fallacy, that there are as many readings as there are readers – but to write the text according to its play. The quotation this essay takes as its spur calls differently to me and to you, as this essay produces meaning in ways I am not aware of because it effaces me. My writing is a reading (of Derrida); yours is also a writing, by reading. To pretend to address you is to reduce différance to presence. There can, strictly, be no address to you, in order to be faithful to you, and to your alterity and mine. Unless one were to recognise that every time I say ‘you’, it is a different ‘you’ I am addressing, a singular ‘you’ who nevertheless is styled as an absence. How to style your absence? And that of every other reader, who is not ‘you’? For to say ‘you’ in this context would simply be a fiction, were I not to recognise that it must go out to every you that might happen along this, and that to say you, therefore, is to address a multiplicity, if I do not wish to insult you by pretending that you are the only ‘you’. So this mode of address is at once intimate and a disclosure, it has to be a confession that there is not just you and I in order for me to remain faithful to you, to avoid insulting your intelligence. But what we can hope is that you will respond to the text in your way and that you and I will be reinstated in the text even as it obliterates us. I am 165

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Iterability effaced in the moment of writing, as are you when you rewrite, by reading, what disseminates before you in the text. Your absence does not imply your binary presence elsewhere, nor that the text becomes a prosthetic medium for a psychic communion between you and I in our self-presence. Rather, the absence I am styling is the absence in presence that defies reduction or synthesis; one might ask, instead, how to style that absence to self-presence, how to style your différance? I, iterable yet singular, can say ‘I’ only if I can acknowledge that I am always different to my self and that, moreover, the condition of my iterability is that each time I will repeat myself with a difference. I will never be present to a stable self. The written sign is not a secondary subsitute for the absence of its recipient, an absence that again is not merely a distant presence, one which is delayed or which, in one form or another, is idealized in its representation. The written signifier does not become the symbol of this presence, by proxy. Nor is it an absence that can be reduced to presence or to being understood according to the logic of presence. The différance of the receiver must be absolute for the structure of writing . . . to constitute itself. If the receiver were to be understood as an absent presence, or as an absence within a logic of presence, then the structure of writing is merely that of a secondary mediator of presence, one which moreover takes its place as an artificial and derivative absence of a natural presence. Where the différance of the receiver, no longer constituted as self-presence or its absence, is not governed by that conceptualisation and becomes an absolute absence in the sense that the receiver is not postulated as the recipient of the self-presence by proxy of the writer, then writing is no longer conceived through the ontological matrix of presence; writing could no longer (be) . . . [a] modification of presence. The reader is no longer the recipient who deciphers the text, which exists in the play of its dissemination and must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver. It must be capable of iteration – repetition – beyond the calculability of an identifiable recipient, identifiable in regard to a humanistic union whereby the writer and reader communicate in lieu of presence through a text which must be transparent per the transmission of intention. The text is no longer constituted by the intervention of a reader who recreates those intentions and thus communicates with the author-figure. With the disappearance of any receiver, the text retains readability – the possibility of repetition, iteration, beyond the singular instance and single recipient – as meaning is produced in the play of différance 166

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Iterability that constitutes it as sense but also as a non-finite and non-exclusive reading. That play continues beyond each reading, and each reading is produced differently, so as to constitute the text as both iterable and singular, as well as irreducible to the mastery of one reading. Every repetition of the text is therefore a repetition with a difference; its repetition, iterability, is tied to its alterity, its otherness. Whether archi-writing or narrow writing, the mark must also be readable by the other of the addressee: were it to be discernible only in the address it would be erased as writing and occupy the space of an exclusive communication, in other words be unreadable as text. It would be a private system, incapable of repetition or comprehension other than by the subject. In such a system, the subject stands in a relation of governance to the code. Writing must be iterable because it is the deconstruction of the subject, of every empirically determined ‘subject’ understood as an individual created in selfpresence. To admit the différance of the subject and the irreducibility of ontology to presence entails the understanding of writing constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability in the absence . . . of every empirically determined ‘subject’. Writing must be capable, not merely of being understood by more than one subject, but of functioning without a subject. When it no longer is thought on the basis of a secondary carrier between two subjects, thus as a projectile that supports the subject physically and philosophically, writing must become decipherable beyond that individual passage. The mark of writing removes the idea of the subject, as it removes that of the author. To be understood, writing must first, however, be constituted as repeatable, able to be comprehended in more than instance. This iterability defines the mark, for it is the possibility of repetition – decipherability – that structures writing as a disseminating network. The comprehension of the mark that enables its repetition means that every iteration is the trace of the non-simple origin that it institutes. In repetition, the mark is both the same and different, and it is this simultaneous iterability – repetition and alterity, with the result that the repeated is also the singular – that enters writing into play. The repetition of the sign, already riven by différance, produces meaning differently depending on the context in which it operates and therefore meaning is not fixed. The polysemia of the text first deconstructs claims of its being a textile of transparent communication, the mark of the self-presence of the author reconstituted in the self-presence of the reader. In such a conception, repetition is still called for in order for the text to be comprehensible by more than 167

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Iterability one reader, but every reader would receive the text in the same way: the mark would be repeated without difference, the meaning determined and the system closed. With iteration, the repetition is always structured and thus made singular by différance. Writing, entered into different contexts, produces meaning in the mark and in the disseminating play of its interrelation with other marks so that it is both comprehensible according to its past citations and different from them. Meaning goes on being produced in this dissemination, so that it is destabilised twice over: differing and deferring from presence in the sign, it differs and defers from fixed meaning both in its relation to prior meaning and therefore to meaning as a structural fixity. This is neither meaning as presence nor absence, but the différance of presence of meaning that prevents its being returned to the logos through opposition. Instead of signs being fixed and interned as a passage of intention between individuals, the dynamic between signs in a textual network functions to deconstruct intention itself, insofar as it is predicated upon the simple origin of subjectivity in self-presence and of the presence of that subject’s intentions as they are available both to themselves and to the transparency of communication in the ‘artificial’ sign where they stand for the absence of the subject and the representation of their presence. There is always the possibility that the message can be misdirected; this is the basis of Derrida’s debate with John Searle surrounding J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory. Austin makes the distinction between constative and performative speechacts, where the former take the form of a statement while the latter have an effect in the world. While signification must be mutually comprehensible in order for communication to take place, Derrida holds that iteration inscribes the necessity of miscommunication of intention, as well as the possibility of intention going unfulfilled. The performative speech-act – that is a spoken intention that has the force of committing action: I promise, reciting an oath; I do, at the altar; I swear, while on the stand – relies on fixity of meaning, assuming that the force of the act is attained in its repetition and that each repetition, in order to obtain that force, is the same without difference. Derrida counters that, in fact, the performative act always takes place in the shadow of the possibility of its own failure: there is always the potential for language to go astray. Iterability does not murder either author or receiver, it is not involved, as a mutation or descendant of this concept, in a violent event that then ushers in a new era. Rather, it is impossible to believe 168

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Jealousy both in iterability and in the transmission of intention as determinate meaning from one being to another: iterability is of a different order, it does not act upon in that sense, it is an indication of a writing that does not oppose but envelops all opposition, all genealogies and authorities. To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every determined receiver in general. This does not take the text to a teleological end, even in death: it produces the text as inexhaustible, and this is required of writing in order to be what it is, rather than required of it as an end in itself, insofar as that would imply that writing is instrumental. The structure of writing – and of speech – is such that it can only function as writing where it is repeatable and where dissemination is possible, in the absence of a constituting presence at either end of its ‘creation’. If the text can still be read in the absence both of a reader and author, then the trace survives death as it also requires it, in order to be demonstrated as a signifying structure that remains comprehensible and repeatable in the absence of an addressee; the possibility of the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark. What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or producer . . . For a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written . . . Writing acts without me as it effaces and exceeds me; the question of how to style your absence folds back on itself, turns out to have been a question directed to myself. Who will receive this, and how?

J Jealousy (PIO I 187–8) Do we know what jealousy is? Really? If jealousy is at stake in everything Derrida talks about, what do we not understand, what do we not see, that we do not realise the persistence of jealousy? It is impossible to speak of jealousy in Derrida’s text, without recalling the various subtle ways in which Peggy Kamuf has opened the question of jealousy in the introduction to A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (DRBB xiii–xlii), the very title or, rather, subtitle, of which plays on what is seen, what is obscured, if not directly by jealousy ‘as such’, but by the jalousie, the blind. Introduced into the 169

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Jealousy both in iterability and in the transmission of intention as determinate meaning from one being to another: iterability is of a different order, it does not act upon in that sense, it is an indication of a writing that does not oppose but envelops all opposition, all genealogies and authorities. To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every determined receiver in general. This does not take the text to a teleological end, even in death: it produces the text as inexhaustible, and this is required of writing in order to be what it is, rather than required of it as an end in itself, insofar as that would imply that writing is instrumental. The structure of writing – and of speech – is such that it can only function as writing where it is repeatable and where dissemination is possible, in the absence of a constituting presence at either end of its ‘creation’. If the text can still be read in the absence both of a reader and author, then the trace survives death as it also requires it, in order to be demonstrated as a signifying structure that remains comprehensible and repeatable in the absence of an addressee; the possibility of the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark. What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or producer . . . For a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written . . . Writing acts without me as it effaces and exceeds me; the question of how to style your absence folds back on itself, turns out to have been a question directed to myself. Who will receive this, and how?

J Jealousy (PIO I 187–8) Do we know what jealousy is? Really? If jealousy is at stake in everything Derrida talks about, what do we not understand, what do we not see, that we do not realise the persistence of jealousy? It is impossible to speak of jealousy in Derrida’s text, without recalling the various subtle ways in which Peggy Kamuf has opened the question of jealousy in the introduction to A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (DRBB xiii–xlii), the very title or, rather, subtitle, of which plays on what is seen, what is obscured, if not directly by jealousy ‘as such’, but by the jalousie, the blind. Introduced into the 169

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Jealousy discussion, Kamuf recalls the phrase cited above, which, she tells the reader, ‘occurs in a polyvocal text of Derrida’s, and, as I recall, it is spoken by a feminine interlocutor’ (DRBB xxi). This feminine, this other voice, ‘not Derrida himself’; and yet, ‘and yet it comes from him, but as if from another than himself’ and ‘caught up in a jealous movement, a movement through jealousy’ (DRBB xxi). Before this, almost as soon as jealousy is introduced into a dialogue concerning self-betrayal, betrayal of the other and faithfulness, and soon after that line of Derrida’s is recalled, jealousy interjects, marking the conversation repeatedly, as that which interrupts partially the focus if you like, certainly what one might otherwise come to see. And it does so, in a dialogue about a dialogue here, the voices multiplying all the while, at least two voices about two other voices at least; and this, moreover, always alluding to jealousy not merely as ‘a theme, a topic, or a subject’ but as a movement. It is not that jealousy only is a movement, defined by this, or that it is simply in motion itself, not necessarily; but instead: as soon as there is jealousy, there is, to cite Kamuf once again, a ‘certain movement through jealousy’, a motion that is ‘both of and against: the movement of jealousy, as that through which movement is given or provoked, and the movement against jealousy, as that through which movement passes and indeed offers a resistance’ (DRBB xxi). This is at once straightforward and yet obscure inasmuch as, before we can even begin to think seriously about the statement that jealousy is in everything, that it is the motivation in Derrida’s writing, if I can put it like this, then we have to think this question of what this relation of movement to, through, against jealousy might mean. Kamuf explores – and explores brilliantly – everything that there is to be said about the motion of jealousy in the text of Derrida, explicating that motion that is everything in that text, which motivates everything that Derrida writes, in everything about which he talks. In the particular instance of this phrase – in everything I am talking about, jealousy is at stake – Derrida is in a dialogue as we have said, in that text recalled by Kamuf, on the subject of Emmanuel Lévinas, the text called ‘At this Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’. Thus we find ourselves involved, ‘caught up’ in a web, ‘the subtle, just visible threads’ that reach beyond the text on Lévinas, ‘going from one text to another’ (DRBB xxv). It is not my intention here to reiterate, imperfectly, the tracing of the matrix that Kamuf has pursued, but there are particular observations on this movement of jealousy, if not a jealous movement, a gesture by which one jealousy guards, hiding 170

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Jealousy from view, the other, all the while seeking to play out the faithful commentary, here and here, there, at this or that moment. First, say, in the wake of Kamuf’s double-voiced fidelity, that while Derrida ‘often speaks of jealousy’, he does so almost always in passing or on a sidetrack from the principal path of a text. He has never devoted more than a few lines, at most a paragraph, ‘to the problem of jealousy although he as always marked it as a problem whenever he speaks of it’ (DRBB xxii). This is what we see, do we not, in the extract to which attention is turned – or remains to be turned, remaining to return – here. In that very observation, one of Kamuf’s two speakers draws attention to that which remains ‘beyond the thematizable’ in the text of Derrida, namely jealousy (PIO I 187). But such is the problem already acknowledged by a certain Derridean ‘voice’, which illustrates its own betrayal of a certain fidelity – a betrayal, which is also a fault, ‘the fault to which the one and the other expose themselves’ and which ‘will have always, already taken place’ as soon as that which, resistant, immune to all thematisation ‘is put in a singular seriasure within that which he cannot sign himself’ (PIO I 187). A ‘singular seriasure’: what does this last neologism signify? That which, in being thematised or formalised, as a theme, a topic, a subject (despite its resistance, its immunity, this takes place, all the time; think of ‘deconstruction’ in this light, a light which obscures and occludes this ‘figure’ as a movement in order that the unthematisable be thematised), is given to a serial iteration, made reiterable, repeatable, given over to a programme marked by a betrayal of the other in order that a certain formalisable ‘truth’ concerning that ‘topic’ be signed in the name of the one who does not, cannot sign. And for all that it is made serial, that is to say available to a certain repetition, a mode of formal, schematised continuity, from there to there, then and now, the singularity of the trace forgotten, rendered invisible; for all that a seriality takes place, and will always, already have taken place in the commentary, however faithful one might have wished the commentary to be; as soon as (the) one reads the other thereby taking the other to itself, for itself, then there is (and this is the end of reading as much as it is a reading, let us not forget that), an erasure of the singular alterity, subsumed in a moment of Aufhebung perhaps, suppressed and elevated, muted or even terminated in its thematic centralisation: and this is then available for its serial repetition, its programmed function to which the other had never signed or authorised: seriasure – the serial, endlessly reiterated erasure of the singularity of the trace and its motion in the 171

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Jealousy serial formalisation of that motion into a theme, topic or subject, having taken place in that attempt at a fidelity, a remaining faithful to the other, which betrays through a certain rigour. We come to find ourselves caught therefore in attempting to move on; guarding jealously the truth of a given text, we betray that, and remain ensnared in the ‘fault’ of a double bind, a bond, which is also an aporia and experience of that aporia. ‘I am’, confesses Derrida, just after he has acknowledged that such a betrayal, such a ‘contamination’ already underway in the text of Lévinas, ‘contaminating this irrepressible thematization in my turn’, leading in turn to the reflection on a possible ‘absolute ingratitude’ (PIO I 187). So, I give and play ingratitude against jealousy . . . The thinking of the trace as put in seriasure by EL, thinks the singular relation of God (not contaminated by being) to jealousy. While we do not yet know what jealousy is then, we must guard against any rush to thematisation, especially with regard to that which cannot be thematised. For, only in being beyond all being, is it possible to be exempt from jealousy . . . pure of all jealous economy. Even this presents a problem, however. Even imagining the possibility of the impossible, this purity, this exemption, there would be the very possibility of all jealousy. For in wanting to maintain its without-jealousy [sans jalousie] such a ‘purity’ would need, if this is the right word, to guard jealously its purity; keeping itself pure, it would manifest an act of jealousy in its absolutely reserved passed [passée]. This would announce, seemingly paradoxically, the very possibility of all jealousy inasmuch as in its own unannounced jealousy, that jealously that would keep itself free of all contamination, it would readmit, even to a performative degree, a jealousy all the more fierce in its being kept hidden, under wraps as it were, not in plain sight. To ask where to begin, from where to imagine such jealousy, such possibility of all jealousy emanating from the ‘absence’ of jealousy’s contamination – all jealousy abandoned because of a beyond-being given the name God, for example – we would perhaps turn back to Kamuf, who identifies a ‘who’ to whom such jealousy might be said to belong, from whence it arrives. If there is a pure jealousy, this would be the jealousy of God, a God who would jealously guard, maintain his purity by demanding he be the only God, and that God be a ‘unique’ and only deity, having a ‘unicity’ that prohibits ‘any kind of substitute, any doubling of the eternal One and the Same’ (DRBB xxiii). Derrida announces that desire (desire itself being a figure that reveals finitude and so being, the limit of being, which in turn returns 172

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Joyce to us an economy of self and other) for unicity, the desire of the One for itself in itself, without translation, without differentiation, while signalling also the ‘hide’ of jealousy (that which is kept out of sight but that which limits the view), through the doubled relation of ellipsis/ellipse. On the one hand, there is that omission, an ‘erasure’ of sorts; on the other hand, there is that closed figure, both announcing jealousy, and both as that which jealousy affirms. Thus, as Kamuf has it in her reading of the passage in question: ‘in order that no desire for possession or nonsubstitution, which are marks of finitude, contaminate the beyond-being of God, it must keep itself from substituting another finite jealous nature for its own infinite one’ (DRBB xxxiii): the without-jealousy jealously guards itself and keeps itself, otherwise said, keeps-itself-losing-itself. Impossibly then, beyond being, beyond the face, jealousy appears ‘between the blinds’ through a partially sighted, partially invisible series of traits, a series of regular traits and re-treats/re-traits – no more jealousy, nothing other than this without jealousy, jealously, with a zeal that keeps its force, its motions all the more unseen, all the more in retreat, countersigning with the re-trait of its movement in the insistence of a without-jealousy. Because ‘without’ or ‘absence’, like ‘no more’ ‘cannot secure its borders against contamination by “more jealousy,” no more is always also more, and that calls up more zeal’ (DRBB xxxxiv).

Joyce (DN 25–6) Why ought it to be even more difficult for Derrida, for whom it is already difficult to write on Joyce, to speak on Joyce? And to have, nevertheless [. . .] to try to say something, compelled to speech by the event of a writing that occludes all writing before it? After all, this is not Beckett, about whom Derrida has spoken – but not written – elsewhere, nonetheless making an event of archi-writing, through the trace of that speech, of the fact that he cannot write on Beckett, who is ‘too close’ to his own mode of thinking and his own understanding of language (AL 60). That intimacy precludes Derrida from writing on Beckett, because any such writing would be a deconstruction of what is already self-deconstructive in the works of an author before whom ‘the limits of our language tremble’ (AL 60). First of all, there is the question of why it is more difficult for Derrida to speak rather than to write on Joyce, when speech necessarily entails a writing before the fact that arrives to undo its origin in presence. In his two 173

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Joyce essays on Joyce as well as in his early engagement with his work and in The Post Card, Derrida figures Joyce implicitly as a counterfigure to the Beckettian project, insisting there also on the impossibility of speaking on Joyce.95 In ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, an essay which retains the trace of its genesis in a spoken address to the James Joyce Symposium, he first speaks without speaking of Joyce, circumlocuting through an apostrophe to the audience his fear of standing before a gathering of experts on Joyce. Derrida’s writing on Joyce, especially when it is the writing of speech, more than once takes the form of this impossibility of expression. Where it is impossible to write on Beckett because he is too intimately implicated in Derridean thought, Derrida can, however, speak of Beckett;96 where it is impossible to speak on Joyce, it is possible to write on him, even where that writing takes the form of an adynaton. This totalising experience of Joyce is an effect, Derrida seems to suggest, of the totalising work. That the first reading of Joyce took place at Harvard as an encounter with Ulysses situates that book in an epic position with regard to Derrida’s own philosophy. Reading becomes that which is not only experienced but institutional; Joyce is not only an event of reading but the form of a representation, the representation of a whole philosophical history that deconstructs itself in a cybernetic memory.97 For Derrida Joyce represents, beyond the work itself, an idea of the work: the most gigantic attempt to gather in a single work, that is, in the singularity of a work which is irreplaceable, in a singular event. The naming of Finnegans Wake and Ulysses as the singular ‘event’ posits the work as an apocalypse; as an attempt to contain history within the pages of the book, the figure of the book as Derrida has read it in Of Grammatology returns and is represented by Joyce. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake thus become a synthetic culture, the presumed totality, not only of one culture but of a number of cultures, a number of languages, literatures, and religions. What Derrida perceives to be Joyce’s attempt to appropriate all knowledge as totality to his book suggests a reading of Joyce as a maximalist opposition to a Beckettian minimalism. 95

96 97

This is also Beckett’s dilemma with regard to Joyce ‘I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding.’ James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 352. See AL (60–1). See ‘Two Words for Joyce’ (145–59, at 148).

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Joyce Where this is a project of literary modernity, it is one of philosophical classicism, but the two are complementary. The perception of Joyce’s modernity is implicitly aligned with that of a High Modernism in the Eliotic mode wherein tradition is retained through a formal revolution that returns the world to a metaphysical foundation. Joyce is again not an example but the exemplar, or figure, of this retention; in the Derridean figuration the work is, in an exemplary way, both new in its modern form and very classical in its philosophical form. Joyce attains the position of metaphysics in Derrida, becoming, in his thought, the representation of a historical mode of representation. This mode is bound to the concept of history as it is founded in totality and then itself becomes totalising. The comparison to Hegel, from his Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, alludes to the attempt to reach absolute knowledge through a single act of memory [. . .] made possible by loading every sentence, every word, with a maximum of equivocalities, virtual associations, by making this organic linguistic totality as rich as possible. It is this equivocality that Derrida opposes to Husserl’s univocity in that book, positioning Joyce as the accretion of history in opposition to Husserl’s transparent revelation of history through language. Derrida compares Joyce to Husserl, whom he perceives as representing one of two paradigms, the other inhabited by Joyce, with respect to a relation between language and history by which both attempt to approach a ‘pure historicity’, though in different modes (PSJ/TWJ 149). Husserl posits a transparency and univocality of language, limited to the transmissibility of meaning that then constitutes tradition, which is therefore the condition of historicity as a concept of intelligible historical memory. From this perspective, ‘something of the meaning [. . .] must cross the threshold of intelligibility through the thousand and one meanings of the expression, for a history to take place, [. . .] and at least the history of the work’ (PSJ/TWJ 149). Joyce, however, represents the other paradigm as the Wake performs an act of war upon meaning; the book, writes Derrida, ‘repeats and mobilizes and babelizes the (asymptotic) totality of the equivocal [. . .]. [H]e tries to make outcrop, with the greatest possible synchrony, at great speed, the greatest power of the meanings buried in each syllabic fragment’ (PSJ/TWJ 149). In an interview with Peter Brunette and David Wills, Derrida elucidates his relationship to the concept of the institution, particularly where that relation is concerned with an idea of competence; he speaks of being able to ‘devise a certain program, a certain matrix 175

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Joyce of inquiry that permits me to begin by asking the question of competence in general terms’.98 That is to say, he continues, ‘to inquire into how competence is formed, the processes of legitimization, of institutionalization, and so on, in all domains’; thereafter, then ‘to advance in different domains not only by admitting my incompetence very sincerely but also by asking the question of competence, that is to say, what defines the limits of my domain, the limits of a corpus, the legitimacy of the questions’ (SA/DVA 9). Here, Derrida outlines, not a methodology for deconstruction but at least the philosophical stakes of what he calls elsewhere in that interview ‘deconstructive schemas’ (SA/DVA 11), the economic stratagems by which a reading progresses and the concerns they delineate. If these are the concerns by which Derrida reads in order to counter a certain violence, ‘each time [. . .] trying to discover what in a determined field liberates it from philosophical authority’ (SA/DVA 10), they constitute a structuration of the authorities – competence, domain, corpus and legitimacy – which deconstructive reading undermines from within. It is instructive, then, that in 1984 Derrida speaks of Joyce in the following terms: ‘[f]or a long time, I have thought – and this is still true today – that I would never be ready to give a talk on Joyce to an audience of Joyce experts’.99 Derrida frames Joyce as the structure of authority that deconstruction is called to read, determining the work deliberately in terms of those questions of competence, domain, corpus and legitimacy that, years later, he would aver to be the concerns of his ‘matrix of inquiry’. The question of competence is at the very centre, for Derrida places himself into that question when he professes to an incompetence before Joyce and the institution he has metonymically created, ‘one of the most remarkable of institutions’ and one which ‘bears the name of a man who did everything, and admitted it, to make this institution indispensable, to keep it busy for centuries’ (AL 268). The institution of Joyce thus begets, in another filiation of competence and legitimacy, an institution centred around his corpus, where the semantic accretions of this portrait of Joyce and of his institution call up those of the later interview in which he speaks in such language of metaphysics, the ‘philosophical authority’ to Derrida has committed a ‘deconstructive schema’. The 98

99

Peter Brunette and David Wills, ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Brunette and Wills, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 9–32, at p. 9. ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’ (AL 265).

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Joyce uncanny echo of his admission to the Joycean institution is heard in his profession ‘to advance in different domains not only by admitting my incompetence very sincerely but also by asking the question of competence, that is to say, what defines the limits of my domain, the limits of a corpus, the legitimacy of the questions’ (SPA/DVA 9). And yet Derrida performs a doubled structure in his reading of Joyce, for not only does he represent the potentially infinite memory of humanity in a totalising institution, ‘it is an institution which he did everything he could to make impossible and improbable in its very principle, to deconstruct in advance’ (AL 268). By deconstructing his own work even as he erects it, in an equivocality in language that allows it to accrue historicity, Derrida manages to figure Joyce as both totalising and non-totalising: Joyce is metaphysics and its own deconstruction. Through a total project of writing that undoes itself in its own archi-writing and in its attempt to contain a sum of knowledge that it will, paradoxically, always exceed, Joyce remains as the book while being entered into a writing which reassembled the history of literature and inaugurated and produced a break in the history of literature. Derrida argues that in doing so he is ‘even going as far as to undermine the very concept of competence, upon which one day an institutional legitimacy might be founded, whether we are dealing with a competence of knowledge or know-how’ (AL 268). In this gesture, Derrida displaces the question of competence at the centre by displacing the centre itself, the competence in Joyce around which an institution is erected and through which propriation it maintains itself in a self-identity or ipseity that is particularly here governed by the force of sovereignty guaranteed by the potestas, the self-authorising I can. By displacing competence, he displaces too a sense of belonging based upon competence, not simply by alienating those members of the institution by removing the grounds for their belonging to it – the grounds of competence – but, in removing competence, removing the identity upon which propriation can take effect. When Derrida asks, in a seemingly rhetorical aside that appears to follow on from and alleviate an admission of self-professed incompetence, ‘[b]ut when it comes to Joyce, what is an expert?’ (AL 265), he is deconstructing the grounds upon which expertise can be established and showing how those grounds are already deconstructed in Joyce. By discovering what in a ‘determined field’, that of Joyce, ‘liberates it from philosophical authority’ – which is the paradox of its philosophical authority, self-deconstructing – the claim to competence must be disclaimed or disclaimed in a certain way in order to read Joyce. We are forced 177

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Kafka back into a position of humility that is a humility before metaphysics and its deconstruction, and this gesture of humility is also one of warning; to claim a legitimacy or competence in Joyce is to enter into an impossible position, a position which is unsustainable ab initio, before reading has even begun. The only way to read Joyce is to remain without mastery; like Derrida, who wrote ‘I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with this work’ (PSJ/TWJ 148). We remain on the edge of reading.100

K Kafka (AL 196, 198, 199–201, 206–8) In a certain way, Derrida’s reading of Kafka is always bound up with the law, as a questioning of its paradigmatics that, though he chooses to confront the author in his text Before the Law, goes beyond thematism, and of the law of literature that is indivisible from it. By beginning to read Kafka’s text, in the eponymous essay the title of which opens up all the possibilities of its re-citation – a diversion of the original and its usurpation (AL 183) – ‘reading here’, avers Derrida, ‘amounts to citing’ (AL 183). Reading Derrida here under the title of Kafka will amount to another citation, of Kafka and of Derrida, and a reading between literature and the law. In Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation of Before the Law, Derrida locates, in Kafka’s already doubled words, some initial propositions that can be agreed upon, notwithstanding that they will later be destabilised by the undermining of the foundations of that consensus. The first is that, among a community of readers, it can be agreed that the text ‘has its own identity, singularity, and unity’ (AL 185). Both the singularity of literature and that of the text itself, governed by its internal conditions, are held within the limits of that text. There is a law that establishes and guarantees this ‘self-identical’ text (AL 185), a law which is not natural, Derrida holds, though it is most commonly thought to be founded in natural law, but rather created and historical. The second axiom is that the text is signed by an author, this convention, too, ultimately founded in the law that requires that 100

Cf. PSJ/TWJ (148): ‘You stay on the edge of reading Joyce’.

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Kafka back into a position of humility that is a humility before metaphysics and its deconstruction, and this gesture of humility is also one of warning; to claim a legitimacy or competence in Joyce is to enter into an impossible position, a position which is unsustainable ab initio, before reading has even begun. The only way to read Joyce is to remain without mastery; like Derrida, who wrote ‘I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with this work’ (PSJ/TWJ 148). We remain on the edge of reading.100

K Kafka (AL 196, 198, 199–201, 206–8) In a certain way, Derrida’s reading of Kafka is always bound up with the law, as a questioning of its paradigmatics that, though he chooses to confront the author in his text Before the Law, goes beyond thematism, and of the law of literature that is indivisible from it. By beginning to read Kafka’s text, in the eponymous essay the title of which opens up all the possibilities of its re-citation – a diversion of the original and its usurpation (AL 183) – ‘reading here’, avers Derrida, ‘amounts to citing’ (AL 183). Reading Derrida here under the title of Kafka will amount to another citation, of Kafka and of Derrida, and a reading between literature and the law. In Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation of Before the Law, Derrida locates, in Kafka’s already doubled words, some initial propositions that can be agreed upon, notwithstanding that they will later be destabilised by the undermining of the foundations of that consensus. The first is that, among a community of readers, it can be agreed that the text ‘has its own identity, singularity, and unity’ (AL 185). Both the singularity of literature and that of the text itself, governed by its internal conditions, are held within the limits of that text. There is a law that establishes and guarantees this ‘self-identical’ text (AL 185), a law which is not natural, Derrida holds, though it is most commonly thought to be founded in natural law, but rather created and historical. The second axiom is that the text is signed by an author, this convention, too, ultimately founded in the law that requires that 100

Cf. PSJ/TWJ (148): ‘You stay on the edge of reading Joyce’.

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Kafka literature be authorised with a ‘legal personality’ (AL 186) by an author who himself has legal personality and exists separately from the fiction and its world. The law and laws – theoria and praxis – that allow for and establish these conventions do so, according to Derrida, only in that they are established upon their own contravention; the problems of authorship and of the identity of the text occurring throughout the history of literary works render this law a fragile one (AL 185). The third presupposition outlined by Derrida is that literature is named as such according to the axiomatic relation of events within the text, its narrative function. Though narrative here belongs to literature, it is not its sole preserve and therefore, Derrida warns, we cannot define Before the Law as literary on account of that narrative arc, for ‘[t]here are fictions, allegories, myths, symbols or parables that are not specifically literary’ (AL 186–7). Why then, he asks, does Before the Law correspond to what we think of when we think of literature? This triple axiomatics gives rise to a double question: ‘Who decides, who judges, and according to what criteria, that this relation belongs to literature?’ (AL 187). It is an impossible question, one which Derrida self-professedly cannot answer, yet one which, he stresses, is not constructed in such a way as to withhold the secret of literature in a linguistic aporia, an aporia designed to define and perform the problematic of ‘literature’ as one which has no essence or proper name and which cannot be recalled to the law of naming without calling it into question (AL 187).101 It is not that these complex questions are not involved in Derrida’s reading of Before the Law, but rather that, as these internal laws establish as the law of literature its singularity and self-identity, such questions generalise the singularity of the text and its singular relation to the law. We are reminded, in this recollection to the text, of Derrida’s insistence that deconstruction is nothing but close reading and that, therefore, its law is that of singularity; only in a countersigning of the singular text, a text in which deconstruction already happens, can reading take place, and there can be no deconstruction outside the text. While the singular and general essence of the law are necessarily related, this is their conflict: ‘There is a singularity about relationship to the law, a law of singularity which must come into contact with the general or universal essence of the law without ever being able to do so’ (AL 187). 101

See Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (GGGG) for the discussion of literature in terms of the secret.

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Kafka It is this dilemma that Kafka names for Derrida in his literary text, the space between the general and singular law. The countryman comes before the law but cannot gain admittance; only when he dies is he told by the doorkeeper that the gate is made solely for him. While all strive towards the law – it is, in that sense, general – each does so according to a singular relation to the law. This play is also that of the literary text, and where it is bound to the law. Kafka’s story is also that of [an] inaccessibility, of this inaccessibility to the story . . . no method, no path to accede to the law, to what would happen here, to the topos of its occurrence. The fourth axiom of the law, that the title is the boundary of the text, here involves the story in its own question. For to bring literature before the law, to question its idiom in order to discern where its singularity lies and by whose judgment it may be deemed literary, is to bring the singular into relation with the general law. This was the question underlying Derrida’s reading of Kafka in a seminar devoted to bearing out the text with regard to the law, and specifically with regard to the question of whether the law ‘without being itself transfixed by literature, shared the conditions of its possibility with the literary object?’ (AL 191).102 In tracing how that story, related to the law, also appears before it at the same time, Derrida simultaneously traces how the story cannot be extrapolated from; ‘[i]n truth, it was Kafka’s story that laid siege to my attempt at a discourse on moral law and respect for law in Kant’s doctrine of practical reason, and on Heidegger and Freud’s views on moral law and respect in the Kantian sense of the term’ (AL 190). Where Before the Law is a story of the inaccessibility of the law, it is not the carrier of such a discourse but shares in that inaccessibility, which is also that of the reader before literature. To approach this inaccessibility, Derrida first states that readability is no guarantee of access to the law; it might be, in fact, that readability of the text bars access insofar as the sense of the text remains hidden. The story takes place as an event, a reading he relates back to Freud, who outlines his understanding of moral law in relation to the Kantian categorical imperative through the historical event of the murder of the father in Totem and Taboo. A story therefore ‘refers 102

The text retains the mark of its seminar reading through a relation to Kant’s doctrine of practical reason and Freud’s Totem and Taboo, a reading that Derrida implies appeared to offer up the text before the realisation that it was precisely the contiguous relationality it seemed to render which was being withheld before the law; see particularly (AL 190–2).

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Kafka back to the unique historicity of an event’ (AL 197). Derrida reads Freud’s account of the killing of the father as a return to fiction, the event becoming a quasi-event because the murder returns power to the figure of the father, and morality is inaugurated from a redundant crime; ‘[e]verything happens as if’ (AL 198). The murder reinstates the father as it removes him, thus removing at the same time the murder of the father from the proper place of an event to that of a non-happening; event without event, pure event where nothing happens, the eventiality of an event which both demands and annuls the relation to its fiction. The structure of this event, Derrida goes on, is here evanescent, since it both instates the law and removes it from a proper place, making the event approximate a fiction, such that one is compelled neither to believe or disbelieve it. As such, the event is the origin of literature at the same time as the origin of the law. It insists that the law might emanate from that place of the imagination, from a fantasy without origin or finitude. Indeed, [w]hether or not it is fantastic . . . this in no way diminishes the imperious necessity of what it tells, its law. This law is even more frightening and fantastic, unheimlich or uncanny, than if it emanated from pure reason . . . The familiar-unfamiliar site whence the law arrives is also that of literature, and can be read in the story that contains its own uncanny inaccessibility in the title by which it announces itself, for [i]f the law is fantastic, its original site and occurrence are endowed with the qualities of a fable, we can see that das Gesetz remains essentially inaccessible even when it, the law, presents or promises itself. The doubling of the title is redoubled again in the problematic it presents within the text apropos of the supplicant. Derrida asks, [d]id the man from the country wish to enter the law or merely the place where the law is safeguarded? We cannot tell, and perhaps there is no genuine choice, since the law figures itself as a kind of place, a topos and a taking place. In that sense, however, the law remains heterotopic and untraceable to an origin, a topos without place and a taking place of the event that returns the law to that quasi- or nonevent wherein origin is lost. At all events, however, the man from the country, who is also a man existing before the law, . . . does not want to stay before the law, in the situation of the doorkeeper. The latter also stands before the law. Both exist in a different relation to the law, the man wishing to enter in either to the law itself or to its place, before or prior to – the first undecidable – and the guard in a prohibitive function . . . This inscription ‘before the law’ is therefore 181

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Kafka divided . . . It . . . redoubles itself in what it says or describes: namely a division of territory and an absolute opposition in the situation with regard to the law. Neither supplicant not guard is present before the law, both divided from it by the other – their opposition to the law in the heterogeneity of the other – as by their own opposition to it, in being before it. It might here be apposite to recall Derrida’s statement that ‘the story of prohibition is a prohibited story’ (AL 200). The title divides the protagonists as it divides the story. The redoubling of the title in Derrida’s essay is a further undecidability by which this relation of the law and literature are brought into contact through the prohibition of the story as he approaches its law; it is, in fact, prohibited in accordance with its law. For Derrida concludes that the law is precisely that place of prohibition, rather than a prohibited entity (AL 203). It is the very relation to the law, the relation which Derrida establishes cannot be established in his reading of Before the Law, that is deferred in order to prohibit. ‘What must not and cannot be approached is the origin of différance: it must not be presented or represented and above all not penetrated’, Derrida writes (AL 205). It is the preservation of this non-place of the law, some law which is not there but which exists (AL 205), which is the law of law; the essence of the law, it is that the latter has no essence . . . the law calls in silence . . . it forces an answer, it calls for responsibility and guarding, by refusing the presence of essence of Being, an essence of the law. Furthermore, the story (of what never happens) does not tell us what kind of law manifests itself in its non-manifestation, and offers no definition of the law – moral, natural, political or judicial. It maintains those within it, as it maintains the reader, before the law. This is the Heideggerian truth of truth and, for Derrida, this is where literature begins, in the non-place of truth where we know neither who nor what is the law, das Gesetz. The position of nonknowledge produces the law from that space of the inaccessible, the secret place wherein there is no essence to be recovered. From this prohibition of law as nothing, the atopological place which we come before and are deferred from, the title of the story places it before the law in a relation that brings the non-place of literature into contact with that of the law and situates it as the site of that différance. In the identity of its non-identity, it renders those laws which it makes with respect to itself before another law. Derrida suggests this when he writes that the place from which Kafka’s texts tells us about those axiomatics of literature, the laws on which literature depends in 182

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Kho¯ra order to be formed as such, ‘cannot simply be interior to literature’ (AL 214). The law that guarantees it is historical and protective, comprised of the legal and political frameworks that constitute it but that remain themselves before the law. This protection, however, does not define the literature it protects, and literature can produce from its own effects a playing of the law, in Derrida’s phrase, one that itself makes law (AL 216); literature remains in a self-identity of différance whereby it exceeds definition.

Kho¯ra (ON 89, 117) We remain with the unpresentable, the unrepresentable; we remain with that which is not available to any thematisation. As has been argued, the history of Western thought has relied supposedly stable dualisms, such as presence/absence, speech/writing, nature/culture, sensible/intelligible, and so on. That Derrida’s text proposes the reading as well as offering a performative staging of an intervention in such a history suggests that, according to the logics of the trace, of writing, and of différance also, it must itself be understood as a project of reiteration – a project and also a projection of the play of the trace, the work of différance, the strange ‘movement’ of a writing. Always already having taken place, such events nevertheless remain to be read, to come. Yet, if writing is opened to a definition that escapes framing or determination, while accommodating the differantial of its spatial and temporal structuring, can it be said to have any form at all, consistent and homogeneous, stable in its form and available for representation? Obviously, the answer is no. How, then, do you describe that which has no form as such? Derrida attempts to do just that in a reading of the strange ‘figure’ of kho¯ra, in Plato’s Timaeus. Kho¯ra opens itself to a telling analysis by Derrida, apropos the relation between philosophy and literature or, to insinuate this binary otherwise, truth and writing. Derrida’s patient explication of the text of Plato offers a countersignature to that text. It traces faithfully the very contours by which Plato proceeds, providing ample evidence of Derrida as a good reader, a faithful correspondent of the other. In this correspondence, everything hinges on being the good reader, of reading that which remains unread in the text of Plato, as literature arrives at the limits of philosophy, in order to expose those limits. Pursuing the threads at which he pulls through the Platonic labyrinth, Derrida aims to illustrate how kho¯ra can be defined only 183

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Kho¯ra in ways pertaining neither to the sensible – that which has to do with feeling and emotion – nor the intelligible – that which is concerned with rationality and intellect. If, therefore, Kho¯ra ‘names’ it bespeaks the affirmation of an alterity resistant to naming, determination or containment according to any of the conventions or epistemological resources of ontology. Neither negative nor positive, there is kho¯ra. How does one speak of kho¯ra therefore? If at all, one must proceed by analogy. One must move according to the logic of difference, of displacement and deferral, and through apophatic illustration governed by an iterable necessity. If one is to speak of kho¯ra at all, then ‘in order to think kho¯ra, it is necessary to go back to a beginning that is older than the beginning, namely, the birth of the cosmos’ (K 126). Kho¯ra thus has to do with the arché- (that from which one starts, the beginning, the start, the chief, the principal or first in authority), as generally in architecture, architectonics, archeécriture or arche-writing. We are speaking of a beginning older than the beginning, then. However strange an idea that might be, it needs to be thought through. A beginning older than the beginning: that which, in effect, authorises and makes possible any genesis, starting point or a departure from some location, but which cannot be represented, which is not available to any positivist or negative representation. A beginning older than the beginning: as if that assumed inauguration were the first time, the inaugural moment. As if genesis were that which, being read retrospectively as such, obscures the prior beginning that makes the iterable inscription or articulation of a supposedly pure and undifferentiated origin possible in the first place (as it were). Derrida brings back to our view, he invents, the necessity of thinking the arché- the prior beginning. However, he does not assign this a simple, full, non-differentiated image, such as genesis or creation. Instead, as the idea of an architectonics implies, a beginning older than the beginning (and note in Derrida’s phrase the precision with which he chooses the definite and indefinite articles) must necessarily be thought as structural and therefore differantial. In the thinking of kho¯ra, Derrida continues from the commentary on beginnings, ‘in that which is formal about it, precisely, the analogy is declared: a concern for architectural, textual (histological) and even organic composition is presented’ (K 127). Histological, here associated with the textual and architectural as the linked analogical concerns, is the science of organic tissues, dealing with the minute structure of animal and plant tissue. Now, you’d be right in 184

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Kho¯ra observing that there is nothing obvious relating the architectural, the textual or the histological. Derrida inscribes a chain of relations where there is no relation, a series of figures approximating one another only at the level of complex structure. (One might pursue such figures across Derrida’s text, not least in the figure of text, hymen or fold, but also in the matrix, the weave, veil, Geflecht, network, knot, the proper name of Penelope or Ariadne, the gesture in knitting of the decrease or diminishing (V 24), the image of the silk worm, the teeth of a crane’s bucket scooping up material from the sea, the ‘inextricable’ interlacing (OS 30), and so on. As one place from which we can follow the clews back, I suggest you unpick the knot, with all its ‘guiding threads’ of either Geflecht or matrix in Of Spirit (OS 8–12).) What offers the thinking of relation is then only the analogy of radically different types of structure without shared resemblance or similarity beyond that of the formal constitution and institution of an identity. The implication then, apropos kho¯ra, is that because kho¯ra may be translated in a number of ways, it cannot finally be defined absolutely. Its meaning is always contingent, and no figure is any more justifiable than any other, except as an analogy for imagining the unimaginable. Unrepresentable as such, unavailable to any adumbration aiming at mimetic fidelity and irreducible to any appropriate representational modality, ‘kho¯ra is not . . . anything but a support or a subject . . . which would give place by receiving or conceiving, or indeed by letting itself be conceived’ (K 95). The language is estranging isn’t it? But then this gives place to the difficulty of thinking kho¯ra. How do we conceive kho¯ra if it is impossible to receive as an identifiable or stable form? Whatever it is or is not, it can only be thought in its resistance to conception, and yet it has already given place to that thinking, even as it is equally (anticipating the chapter on art) the subjectile on which reception or conception is staged or takes place. That Derrida offers us either as equally applicable, appropriate, suggests that any distinction between nature/ culture, organic/inorganic, ‘man-made’ (sic) or birthed is impossible to make: hence that earlier impossible series: architectural, textual, histological (and so on and so forth). This being the case, kho¯ra therefore names the deconstruction of, and taking place between, genders, and it must be added, genres and the idea of genus also. Giving place as the support for the ontological project instituted by the question what is (for example What is literature? What is art? What is deconstruction?), kho¯ra nonetheless escapes ahead of all determination any ontology, even as it haunts its possibility, possibly 185

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Kho¯ra as that which makes possible the thinking of ontology from some place before the in-the-first-place. One of the fundamental problems resides in the question of the taxonomical and epistemological resources and laws of determination. Kho¯ra, ‘which is neither “sensible” nor “intelligible”, belongs to a “third genus” ’: . . . at times the kho¯ra appears to be neither this nor that, at times both this and that, but this alternation between the logic of exclusion and that of participation . . . stems perhaps only from a provisional appearance and from the constraints of rhetoric, even from some incapacity for naming. You’ll have noted the frequency, the temporal pulsation marking the seemingly contradictory appearances of kho¯ra. Doubly contradictory or paradoxical, you say, and rightly so. For, not only is there the shuttle between both and neither, but, within this apparent polarity or binary, a doubling – this nor that, this and that – within the conceptual terminology of the logic. Yet even this is far from certain. Observe the vacillation in that perhaps – and on the very first page of the essay. There is to be read a matrix of sympathetic vibrations that take place as the event of writing and the experience of reading Derrida. Everything resounds harmonically, as the network of traces shake themselves apart. Definition, however provisional or tentative, unravels itself in the very moment that it is being, becoming, adumbrated. Without apparent confidence, the text proceeds to trace the impossible in response to that which the impossible, the undecidable and ineffable gives place to that seemingly hesitant temporary circulation. Derrida’s writing stages itself in a performative gesture, as if it were a provisional postage stamp, transmitted despite, and yet as witness to, the unavailability of any definitive issue. This is the impulse or semaphore of Derrida’s inaugural gambit in this essay. Descry, to use an archaism doubly indicative of observation and inscription, the traces, the clues, the fils conducteurs, of a web of traits and retraits: appears, alternator, perhaps, provisional appearance. As subjectile, kho¯ra gives place to the performative that takes place. Perhaps. We are suspended from the beginning, in any preliminary approach to a beginning before the beginning and as a response to this, in the experience of the aporetic. Kho¯ra thus remains to be read, resistant as it is to ‘the order of the “paradigm”, that intelligible and immutable model’ (K 90). While ‘kho¯ra, receives, so as to give place to them, all the determinations, but she/it does not possess any of them 186

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Kho¯ra as her/its own’ (K 99). As you can see from Derrida’s hesitance in translation, a hesitance dictated by the word itself, gender troubles the word. Certain translations of kho¯ra will give the word as ‘nurse’, ‘wet-nurse’. Others will suggest receptacle, or, imagine the context, womb. If there is the trace of a female spectre here, a ‘haunting which allows neither decomposition nor dissolution into the simplicity of a perception’ (OS 62), then the intimation is that the female precedes the male. There can be no beginning announced in logocentric or phallocentric narrative, no definitive starting point, from which some erectile or ejaculatory trajectory might be traced, without a beginning, a beginning qua matrix, which is always haunted by the possibility of a female. So, irrecuperable and wayward, troublesome even. This is kho¯ra, at least in the face of the demands of philosophy. She/it does, however, makes literature possible, and story-telling in general. There we might say, there is literature. Read this two ways at once. Over there, you see, displaced, spaced, spacing itself from any present or presentation, yet always already taking place invisibly, secretly. Over there in an other place, the place of the other, the gift of which is to give place. Irreducible to any ontology, literature takes place / there is literature. Though neither nothing nor something, kho¯ra makes it possible for the (always masculine) philosopher to hide the stories he must tell in the name of truth, borrowing without speaking of the rhetoric, the poetics, the narratives, the languages in which he stages his non-reflective reflections, and pretending not to indulge in representation while presenting, and representing, mimicking and re-presenting all the while. Don’t be in a hurry here, don’t rush to conclusions. If it’s not clear, in all that we have said of kho¯ra so far, here is Derrida on the gender of the philosopher, if not philosophy: ‘the figure of the philosopher is, for me, always a masculine figure. This is one of the reasons I undertook the deconstruction of philosophy. All the deconstruction of phallogocentrism…has always been linked to a paternal figure . . . A woman philosopher . . . would be a woman who thinks. Not a philosopher’ (D 97). Would kho¯ra be her name? Would kho¯ra name that thinking which Derrida opposes to philosophy, and which for Derrida is feminine or female? Are you kho¯ra, do you think? Are you kho¯ra? Do you think? And does the thinking of kho¯ra haunt you, remaining all the while impenetrable to the phallogocentric probings of the philosopher? 187

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Knots Write to me in your name, write to me namelessly, and we’ll keep the secret between us, giving place . . . to all the stories, ontological or mythic, that can be recounted on the subject of what she receives and even of what she resembles but which in fact takes place in her, kho¯ra herself, so to speak, [though she] does not become the object of any tale, whether true or fabled. A secret without secret remains forever impenetrable on the subject of it/her. Tell me – how should I think of you? P.S. Had I the time or space, I would be tempted to trace, perhaps weave, or one hopes, unpick an imagined, impossible relationship between the khora of Plato and the Geist of Heidegger (somewhere caught up in the knot between Geflecht and Geschlect), which ‘in the first place . . . is neither pneuma nor spiritus’ (OS 32).

Knots (N 28) Of words that assume a ‘strategic’ or provisional significance in the text of Derrida, many, deployed so as to complicate our involvement in the text, resist thematisation. They are immune to any quasitranscendental thinking, remain resolutely singular, and might be said to operate so as to defeat, discourage, disarm efforts at formalisation. The most obvious of these is deconstruction, though of course this resistance has not been noticed by a number of its appropriators, often those most hostile to it, their hostility revealing only the extent to which the word cannot be elevated, simplified, reduced or generalised into a thematic coherence, model or formal operation. To this extent, such words not only remain immune, uncontaminated, functional and on the move, in play, solely in a given, singular (con) text; they also retreat, re-mark themselves as a trait in the weave of the text, within the matrix of a process of thought in motion, which is also a re-trait. The knot may be said to be one such figure resistant to thematisation, a hypothesis borne out on two counts by the passage presently under consideration; though of course I hasten to add that the ‘two counts’ I am about to propose are no more than reflections on the surface structure of this passage, certainly not an attempt to extract particular strands in the weave so as to begin giving some definite form to a ‘thematic’ account for the knot. First count: the passage marks itself, acknowledging the knot, at first implicitly, less as a 188

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Knots subject or topic, than as the work of particular motions, which serves in such a way as to produce long-term effects, effects generated by the ‘knot’ of writing, a ‘knot’ that affects reading immediately and which is discerned in Derrida’s own reflection on the motif of writing through a multiplicity of rhythms and speeds in such a way that there is both an immediate effect and also a reserve. Taking the knot as our unthematisable trope here, we may say that the immediate effect is observed as ‘unusual’, noticeable in its not being completely ‘at home’ within any critical-philosophical discourse (unless ‘naturalised’ in writing as noticeably a metaphor); and its reserve is readable in its immunity to any generalised statement pertaining to thematic commentary or application. It is applied in a singular instance, but cannot be applied, nor can be applied to for a continuance of its work. This question of rhythm is then explicated as the motif of the knot moves from the arena of writing and reading to the question of the institution, whereby institution, that figure which serves in this passage as a substitution for the trope of the knot and which is therefore our ‘second count’. Like writing but differently, institution is that place, that ‘effect’, where something . . . responds in the present to an urgency and at the same time builds towards a future. I would read this not as a parallel but as an analogy, the tracing of a relation without relation, with the earlier definition of a writing that has immediate effect (. . . responds in the present to an urgency . . .) but which also holds something in reserve (. . . builds towards the future . . .). Also, as with writing, the institution is represented, if it can be represented at all in a single figure (and the same goes for writing, though again, singularly, with a difference to be borne in mind, if not accounted for here), in the image of a body made of rhythms . . . knotted in that body: one would need to be able to represent a body made up of knotted speeds or rhythms, of knotted differences of rhythm. A knot that represents the vibrations of different speeds. Such a figure is unpresentable, unrepresentable, naturally, it is not representable, but, nevertheless this unpresentable, unrepresentable representation, the impossible image of a knot, a nexus or matrix as constellated flows, rhythms, speeds, each one different from every other: an image in short, in place, but all the while in motion, endlessly and without a single pulse governing the others, uncontrollable or discernible according to a different speed. Such is the knot. Every institution is this. Language is this. A phrase is this. It is not a question that everything comes down to language, that there is nothing outside the text in the 189

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Knots facile, mistaken, patently ridiculous and wrong-headed misapprehension, no misreading that what Derrida has said is that everything is language and that there is no ‘reality’. This has always been a bêtise too far, from the very beginning. Rather, without being thematised, and unavailable to all but the most impossible representation, a representation of the unrepresentable, unpresentable, representation of nothing save for impossibility itself, the knot stands in momentarily for certain singular unthematisable situations or effects, praxes or combinatory motions taking place, and having momentary singular being in their taking place. Institution takes place, is there, is given, stages itself and comes into being through every singular knot-effect, where there is both immediacy and reserve, present effect and projection towards that which is to come. Language as the ungovernable entirety, the infinite totality of its systems, rhythms, idioms, combinations, tensions, interplays is also indirectly, apophatically apprehended, analogically appresented or apperceived in the figure of the knot vibrating, moving, through all its differences of speed and rhythm. And each phrase, every utterance, however commonplace, however seemingly self-evident, transparent in its comprehension or reception, is also just this. But, with this proviso – hence the affirmation of unrepresentability or the impossibility of thematisation – that the knot serves merely as the figure for a singularity that cannot be exemplified, every instance differing from every other, and is thus not a representation for a thematic discourse. Each ‘knot’ in this brief passage is different from those other knots, even as each of these knots is not merely polyrhythmic, but, and here this is to push the work of analogical apperception, perhaps to a breaking point, knot might just be apprehensible if thought as free form, free music, pure improvisation, or the fiction of this, in the instant of its momentary realisation, unavailable to capture. But as the example of this, and in order to show that the figure is felicitous and not merely, formally, rhetorically, fortuitous, Derrida extends the complication of thinking the knot. For, if it is a question of what is present, and what remains to arrive or to be read, the now of that present writing or institution and their respective receptions or unpredictable, unprogrammable futures – unprogrammable because the vibrations, resonances, speeds, velocities, rhythms, all of which might in turn generate sympathetic harmonies, dissonances, other rhythms to be heard, future resonances as yet undreamt of – are not the sole considerations, nor should they be the only concerns. For, it follows, if the knot as momentarily, presently constituted 190

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Knots – or at least perceived or apperceived – phenomenon allowing the interaction, the play, of vibrations of different speeds, and available only after the fact, after its having taken place through that always already belated reading of an event or reading given to one’s apperceptive consciousness; then that presently appresented now of the otherwise unrepresentable knot, in its seeming to be immediately legible or visible, has to have been enabled in a prior moment, also unavailable to consciousness as a past as such. What arrives, what is given to me to read now, what appears as that which is immediately legible or visible has to have been inscribed at another moment in order that the vibrations gather momentum in conjunction with one another, gathering speed, slowing elsewhere, resonating according to differing rhythms and harmonic oscillations, in order that a now, any now, be imaginable or possible as the legible or visible. The trait has to have been re-marked and become the re-trait, retreated from the visible, the legible, the inscriptible in order that, in its other times, the times of reading, the times of effect, it has a revenance for some other. And every phrase, in order for it to have operated, and to continue to vibrate, to transmit and have the possibility of an iterable communication, however wayward or unanticipated, must have itself been marked by vibrations always already underway in a phrase of Heraclitus . . . for example, to still vibrate today and to produce effects. In short, the matter of the knot, the unrepresentable, the unthematisable that figures indirectly in apprehension the already knotted speeds or rhythms, of knotted differences of rhythm [and] vibrations of speeds, is not merely a formal, rhetorical or poetic conceit, to stress this once more. It is instead, if we are to apprehend aright the very weft of the trace of historicity, and the fundamental possibility of historical transmission, however much the knot may be reworked, however much the rhythms and speeds develop, differentiate, die away, assume an increased energy, or in turn set up other oscillatory effects, or make possible effects to come and to be felt. Hence the signature, the proper name, itself an effect of the knot, and the mutability of the knot, as it is transformed in every periodic or occasional reception, non-reception, misperception and translation. Before announcing the knot as the provisional figure, Derrida is careful to qualify the matter of rhythm principally as a question, before anything, of ‘simply differences, multiplicities of rhythm’ that come together, as he puts it – thereby identifying the perception of the reading subject as significant here (though not simply phenomenological the trace of the phenomenological remains nonetheless 191

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Knots as a series of rhythms complicating the thought of difference) – ‘[i]n the phenomenon, or in what has the appearance of “at the same time” ’ (N 28). This appearance of temporal simultaneity announces the knot before its figure gives to the reader an apprehensible form, otherwise unavailable, making it briefly visible, accessible as the trace of the phenomenon in order that this might be communicated with a quasi-representational economy. Derrida plays therefore on the possibility of representation as that in the play of traces, the motion of ‘differences or rhythm, differences of speed’ (N 28), which come to articulate the givenness of the ‘at the same time’ in its illusory assumption. And it is not simply a neutral effect that differences of speed and rhythm come together, as if entirely by chance; Derrida is not suggesting a merely random process. Importantly he identifies the need for agency and intervention in the names of ‘political and institutional action’ (he is here referring, among other things, to GREPH). In such cases, ‘one must not only make several speeds cohabit with each other, one must also enable the multiplicity of speeds [more than two] . . . to be rendered not only possible but necessary and enable diversities to cohabit in an institution’ (N 28). The political and institutional are the models of the knot which therefore take precedence in Derrida’s thought in this instance. And with that there is clearly the recognition for a material and political intervention, that which has to happen in order to ‘enable’ any mode of ‘cohabitation’ as Derrida calls it, which is not merely a making of the other the same; rather enabling is the necessary political and ethical commitment here in its affirmation of difference if the institution, if the political is to develop beyond any simple undifferentiated ontological model. Differences are what make the hitherto unimaginable, that which is to come, possible. Thus it is, in order to illustrate this all the more effectively, that Derrida, having introduced the political and institutional, then turns generally at first to the writing and reading of the text; and from within this speculation as analogy for what takes place, where there is the possibility, however limited, of agency (in the forms of writing and reading, as distinct from political or institutional action), there is the revelation of the figure of the knot, as that which, unrepresentable as such, derives its metaphorical, poetic and rhetorical, analogical force from being that which gathers momentarily without erasing the differences of speed, velocity, rhythm and, therefore, transformation within the same. In both the short and the long run (N 28) the efficacity here is realised in ‘the multiplicity of rhythms 192

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Knowledge and speeds potentially assembled in as economical a space or time possible’ (N 28), whereby one can speak now, while leaving a trace or reserve making it possible ‘to say other things to others later on’ (N 28).

Knowledge (BS 278–9) By theorising animality in its relation to sovereignty, that of the subject and of the nation-state, in The Beast and the Sovereign Derrida supplements that concern of his late work with a consideration of knowledge, in particular as a deconstruction of sovereignty that is incumbent upon an unsettling of knowledge by itself; the ‘itself’ here turns upon its relation to ipseity and the relation of that ipseity to the structure of knowledge, where the claim of an absolute knowledge is read in the context not of whether it is possible to have attained such, but whether it is first possible to know, in the sense of being capable of thinking, knowledge. ‘Knowledge’, Derrida writes, ‘is sovereign; it is of its essence to want to be free and all-powerful, to be sure of power and to have it, to have possession and mastery of its object’ (BS 280). In the texture of the argument, absolute sovereignty is related to absolute knowledge and within this matrix the concept of knowledge is understood in terms of the power of possession, where sovereign appropriation is implied by knowledge and that appropriation is a dual one: it depends on the subject being understood as sovereign, that is of being willed as self-identical by an originary act of forceful self-possession, and then of that subject predicated as sovereign appropriating knowledge as something available to possession. The concept of absolute knowledge is here preceded by the fact that where knowledge is thought as appropriable through force, it is a priori understood within an economy of the absolute, where that term does not inflect knowledge with regard to partial or total understanding but refers to its seizure, presupposed upon a concept of the absolute and unconditional right to possession. In this way, where knowledge is thought in terms of the sovereign, it is always linked to the absolute. It is of the nature of knowledge, where knowledge is thought as presupposing its nature, to be both ‘free’ and ‘sure’ of power, and thus to ‘have it’, ‘to have possession and mastery over its subject’. Where sovereignty is synonymous with freedom, it is as the indivisibility of that sovereign freedom from unconditionality, the right to absolute power. It then follows that freedom is coextensive with being sure of 193

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Knowledge that power and therefore of possessing it; where knowledge is free and sure, undivided and unconditional, it thus possesses absolutely, in the theoretical sense, through that certitude of its own absolute power both to possess and then to have absolute possession of the object. Through discussing the question ‘What is man?’ to destabilise the limit between man and animal, a limit sustained in the presumed sovereignty of man who is proper to himself over the animal, Derrida extends this problematic of knowledge in the context of Heidegger and Celan. By considering that for Heidegger man comes to be himself by questioning himself, bringing the self forward as self through that questioning, he notes that therefore the self [Selbst] is a who prior to any determined self brought forth as ‘I’; the question of being is no longer what is man but ‘ “Who is man?” [Wer ist der Mensch]’ (BS 264). Tracing Heidegger’s reading of Antigone he then expounds on the relationship between the term deinon in that text, as that which is most proper to man, and Heidegger’s translation in Introduction to Metaphysics, ‘das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen’. Heidegger questions his own translation, wondering why deinon should be un-heimlich, and concludes that the unheimlich is what is most proper to man: the proper of man, his essence, is a foreignness within to all that can be self-identified, whether that be external or internal, or as Derrida writes ‘[w]hat is proper to man would be, basically, this way of not being secure at home (heimisch), even with oneself as with one’s proper essence’ (BS 265). Man thus exceeds the proper, and Derrida is careful to state that he is not only das Unheimliche but its superlative, das Unheimlichste, drawing the conclusion that man is the most unheimlich or the most sovereign of all unheimlich beings, where that sovereignty contains within it an element of foreignness which displaces the absolute self-identity that has defined the sovereign. It is in this context that he relates Heidegger to Celan, reading the latter’s ‘Meridian’ as a text that treats of the foreigner and, in doing so, charts a movement towards movement itself, ‘commands us to think poetry as a path’ and as the step [pas] of a coming and going, rather than a teleology towards essence (BS 268). Derrida herein reads poetry encountering its own unknowability as the place of the event to arrive from a foreign horizon; in doing so, he reads in Celan a deconstruction of the ipseity of the ego as it is thought in the lineage from Descartes to Kant and then to Heidegger. This undermining of the self-present ‘I’ comes from the alterity of the other who arrives 194

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Knowledge within that ‘I’ and disrupts it as a living present.103 The poem is then the figure of the withdrawal of knowledge, in that it cannot be thought in terms of knowledge and therefore gives another way for knowledge to be thought. It is an event that exceeds knowledge as it exceeds sovereignty, and one which Derrida writes may prepare, perhaps – the ‘perhaps’ signalling a retreat from the act of claiming knowledge that presupposes a knowledge that can be claimed – ‘some revolution in the knowledge of knowledge’ (BS 273). What form would this take? Derrida reads the dethroning of sovereignty in terms of a revolution of the history of knowledge, wherein what is brought under inquiry is the objectification of the animal to the gaze of the sovereign majesty or people; in this becomingobject, the corporeality of the animal, in the form of anatomical or zoological specimen, is made the object of knowledge and appropriation by that sovereign authority. This juridico-political formation of knowledge as scientific objectivity is projected towards the gaining of knowledge as access to ontological truth, by coming to know the essence of being. Derrida reminds us that ontology is a type of theoretical knowledge, ‘the supposedly rational discourse of a knowledge’ that appropriates the object through the act of seeing (BS 277); this leads him to ask what is meant by knowledge, or in other words what there is to know about it: What does ‘knowledge’ mean? What is it to ‘know’? Before the question of absolute knowledge [savoir absolut] and its substantive possibility comes the question of knowledge itself, of the ipseity of knowledge absolutely, in its absoluteness, as if to say, in general, before any other determination. In the French, the possibility of knowing knowledge and the experience of knowledge seem to be indivisible; as, in the language, to know [savoir] is identical to the structure of knowledge [savoir] – connaissance implying a familiarity with, and thus also containing the echo of the unheimlich – the political history of knowledge is of that elision. When asking the questions What does ‘knowledge’ mean? What is it to ‘know’?, Derrida appears to acknowledge the structure of thinking them synonymously, to have them appear as one question since, as we have traced it above, ‘to know’ is, de facto, presumed to be the experience of knowledge 103

Derrida distinguishes this arrival of the other from the Husserlian temporalisation of the ego, figured as a protention and retention that would insert another present into the living present of the self (BS 270). To this he counters the arrival of the wholly Other that would deconstruct the phenomenological temporalisation: this arrival of poetry, as what he terms the event, is a time proper to the Other that cannot be assimilated or otherwise made appropriable to the self.

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Knowledge in its possession: knowledge means to ‘have knowledge’, to ‘know’ according to a presupposition of possession. Yet these are in fact two questions, and Derrida insists that what it is to know cannot be thought contemporaneously with knowledge [savoir] in general. If knowledge were placed under inquiry as its own object, subject to the power of the sovereign gaze and subject to the jurisdiction of knowledge formed by the gaze, would it be possible to come to know it? To come to know knowledge [savoir], it would have to be separated from itself [savoir] and to make of itself the object of its own gaze. In so doing, knowledge becomes deferred from itself, for it is impossible that it should remain sovereign – thus indivisible – while also seeing itself. If knowledge can see itself, making of itself its own object of inquiry, it is divided from that ipseity that legislates the sovereign and allows it to have knowledge, in the sense of being able to appropriate it. Knowledge would thus be displaced from itself and from its selfidentical essence where the experience of knowledge is divided from its abstraction. As in the example of the beast and the sovereign, one must have power over in order to have, meaning to possess through knowledge. Knowledge cannot see itself, in that it cannot be both its own object and sovereign; in that unconditionality of its self-identity it divides sovereignty, which authorises it as knowledge, and divides unconditionality there too. Through that division at the authorising source, by allowing the political formation of the order of knowledge to be thought, ‘the beast and the sovereign’ can be considered an incitement, a provocation not only to know [savoir] but to know knowledge otherwise. The example would allow one to think knowledge [savoir], to determine it, and thus also to reconnoiter it and so know [savoir] its limits by thinking knowledge in a way that is determined otherwise than by this structure of knowledge. What could that mean, to know [savoir] the limits of knowledge [savoir]? In other words, how can knowledge be thought when it is not understood to be of the order of the absolute and unconditional, as predicated by the sovereign? Against the horizon of its limits, one which will border but also un-border because it will displace the order of knowledge from its own propriation, thereby exposing the unfamiliar that arrives within what is known, Derrida considers the event of poetry as the place of thinking that encounter with the Stranger. As he reads ‘Meridian’ as a dethroning of sovereign majesty, the place where the ‘I’ is ungrounded in the abyss [Abgrund], its thinking takes place in the gesture of a movement, that of the pas [step/not]. 196

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Literature Rather than moving towards an essence, the movement of the step is a gesture that consists in suspending . . . the order and authority of a sure knowledge [savoir] thought in relation to a sovereign subject; in this movement the subject is Unheimlichkeit, not-at-home in the self and therefore not sovereign, displaced by the encounter with the foreigner. Knowledge is sure of itself, determined and determining where it is authorised by that a priori potestas and constituted therein as unconditional or determined, thus able to determine in turn by thinking its object according to possession. In Derrida’s reading, to begin to think the order of knowledge and to understand that order as its delimitation is to think that, perhaps – another withdrawal from the presupposition of authority that legislated for the authority of knowledge – neither thought nor poetry was to be reduced to it [. . .] without remainder. By exceeding the delimitation of knowledge, its order, that remainder that consists of the thinking of the foreign within what has been hitherto thought as self-identical – therefore sovereign and unconditional – allows the limit of knowledge to be thought. It is in the knowing of knowledge that this limit can be located. The sovereignty of knowledge, as it is located in the cogito from Descartes onwards, is situated in the ability to claim self-possession; knowledge is presupposed upon and as an extension of that selfpossession. Where the limit of knowledge [. . .] and of the figure of knowledge . . . the ego cogito is opened up to the foreign and to the abyss, the subject can no longer be thought in terms of a sovereignty located in the temporalisation of the living present that claims to escape, precisely, in its absolute certainty, from the ‘perhaps’ and the ‘who knows’. For Derrida, those equivocations open the way to a revolution in knowledge through the advent of the event. It would allow the thinking of knowledge in order to know knowledge through exceeding its limits, to know knowledge as foreign to knowledge itself.

L Literature (EIRP 35) By formulating the concept of literature as a philosophical one, Derrida again returns to the ground that has continually occupied his 197

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Literature Rather than moving towards an essence, the movement of the step is a gesture that consists in suspending . . . the order and authority of a sure knowledge [savoir] thought in relation to a sovereign subject; in this movement the subject is Unheimlichkeit, not-at-home in the self and therefore not sovereign, displaced by the encounter with the foreigner. Knowledge is sure of itself, determined and determining where it is authorised by that a priori potestas and constituted therein as unconditional or determined, thus able to determine in turn by thinking its object according to possession. In Derrida’s reading, to begin to think the order of knowledge and to understand that order as its delimitation is to think that, perhaps – another withdrawal from the presupposition of authority that legislated for the authority of knowledge – neither thought nor poetry was to be reduced to it [. . .] without remainder. By exceeding the delimitation of knowledge, its order, that remainder that consists of the thinking of the foreign within what has been hitherto thought as self-identical – therefore sovereign and unconditional – allows the limit of knowledge to be thought. It is in the knowing of knowledge that this limit can be located. The sovereignty of knowledge, as it is located in the cogito from Descartes onwards, is situated in the ability to claim self-possession; knowledge is presupposed upon and as an extension of that selfpossession. Where the limit of knowledge [. . .] and of the figure of knowledge . . . the ego cogito is opened up to the foreign and to the abyss, the subject can no longer be thought in terms of a sovereignty located in the temporalisation of the living present that claims to escape, precisely, in its absolute certainty, from the ‘perhaps’ and the ‘who knows’. For Derrida, those equivocations open the way to a revolution in knowledge through the advent of the event. It would allow the thinking of knowledge in order to know knowledge through exceeding its limits, to know knowledge as foreign to knowledge itself.

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Literature thinking with regard to this ‘strange institution of literature’, as he describes it in an interview with Derek Attridge.104 The question of literature and its relation to philosophy has persisted not only as an abiding concern of the Derridean work, but also of his person; in his most self-reflective moments of discussion, the question of literature reappears with frequency and, by this yoking of literature to philosophy, seems to resonate in a way which suggests its inextricability from a consideration of his own position and thought. It might be said, rather than being oriented primarily toward either philosophical or literary writing, Derrida inhabits a place of différance with respect to both, a position that is complicated further by his interrogation of what is gathered under the name of ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’, suggesting that both are already co-implicated and, in so being, exceed the limits of those names.105 That what is named by ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ already is contaminated by the other, further implies as the issue of that infiltration that the parameters of discipline, their ostensible hermeticism and the de facto exclusion disciplinarity suggests – as well as interdisciplinarity, which presupposes the propriation of discipline – are a question for philosophical inquiry. By commenting on that hesitation between the two and his reluctance to abjure either, ‘perhaps seeking obscurely a place from which the history of this frontier could be thought or even displaced – in writing itself and not only by historical or theoretical reflection’ (AL 34), Derrida approaches the duality of both as a question formative of and inherent to each; the difference of literature to itself and of philosophy to itself, named as the difference of the other present in that self-identity and scissioning it from the beginning, is therefore already present in the articulation of the question, rather than as a question to be articulated. It can be thought ‘in writing itself’ because that writing is a reiteration in itself of that co-implication, rather than the expression of a reflection. Writing is philosophical as it is also literary; the literary is already philosophical even before it expresses. Similarly, philosophical inquiry, bound up for Derrida as it is with issues of topology and temporality, is implicated by a 104

105

‘ “This Strange Institution Called Literature”: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ (AL 33–75). Derrida insists that the doubling of disciplines is also a historical event, particular to a period in French history when the literary was bound to the philosophical and vice versa.

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Literature literariness which, as we will see, already occupies those positions in his thought. Since Derrida is preoccupied with and at the same time occupies neither one nor the other but both, this impulse is related to a view of his works as autobiographical, a genre which he sees as being between philosophy and literature; this is arguably a signifier of that other trace that goes through his work, towards alterity, in which it is not the work that is composed of the life but rather the life viewed in terms of the work as an autobiographical phenomenon, from a thinking of form that then constructs the subject as the subject of différance, extant in the space between literature and philosophy. For that reason, his subsequent and profound thinking of deconstruction, and of what it means in the context of his own life, is by necessity bound up in the question of those coexistent disciplines and in how their self-alterity through the other is both an exercise of the trace of deconstruction as well as already being involved in the trace. In speaking of his attraction towards the ‘space of literature’, a term that invokes Blanchot – a writer whom Derrida reads with particular regard to his literarity – Derrida figures it as an institution which, by deligitimising authority, at the same time ‘allows one to say everything, in every way’;106 it is a space both of ‘an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything’ (AL 36). As such, the question of the institution is related to that of writing and particularly that of literature, considered as part of writing; the answer, that there is no ‘literature’ in its essentiality because literature exceeds its own institution, means that it therefore eludes self-definition through not only occupying a remainder with respect to those limits but to the concept of the limit necessary to essentiality. It situates the space of literature as that which calls the concept of essence into question, both as that of an illusory essence of the discipline named as ‘literature’, and also with regard to essentiality as a category of knowledge and its granting of identity as self-identical with presence. In the sense that autobiography imposes itself on Derrida it is as a prism through which to regard life as a construct, a fictive discourse in ontology is anticipated and structured in advance by literature, ‘the outline’, he says, ‘of what was calling me or signaling to me in the situation I was living in 106

As Attridge notes, tout dire means to say anything and everything, where the latter evokes the sense of totality that Derrida speaks to when he discusses his desire for literature in terms of an ability to say ‘everything + n’ (AL 35).

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Literature at that time, familial and social’ (AL 39). He remained ambivalent about the force of literature to interrogate its own practice, suggesting that it was for philosophy to consider the questions of literature that literature itself bore but had not the political capability of posing. This is congruent with the historical period from which Derrida emerged, Sartre’s provocation ‘What is Literature?’ having located the literary within the philosophical realm and made it an object of inquiry, but what is, however, striking is that Derrida seems to acknowledge a certain fictionality inherent to philosophy when he employs the term in an unusual way to describe his interest, beyond narrative, in ‘a certain practice of fiction, the intrusion of an effective simulacrum or of disorder into philosophical writing’ (AL 39); this ambiguous use of the term, held between fiction and philosophy, suggests an understanding of fiction as the point of undecidability wherein deconstruction takes place, the disruption of philosophy but also the leverage of fiction upon philosophy. As early as 1989, Derrida relates it to what would later be developed as his idea of a democracy to come, and one can see there the links between what is liberated by the institution of literature – différance – and a concept of democracy that arrives denuded of sovereign power. The juridico-political authorisation of literature to say everything comes not, as it does to the sovereign self, from a licence granted by the force of law to an entity already guaranteed by a self-identical act of will; literature is without essence, and as such may begun to be thought in conjunction with Derrida’s later writing, especially in Rogues, of the democracy to come. That democracy, one which remains on the horizon though it must be sought now, offers an unconditional freedom divisible from the unconditional freedom that is sovereignty, located in the self whose ontological essence is achieved through and as a self-appropriation of power. If literature can be considered in light of this thinking – this phrase carries all the attendant echoes of the Enlightenment Derrida discusses in that text – then literature is philosophically important to the democracy to come as a political entity in and of itself. Offering a deconstruction of political philosophy, it assumes the right to say everything without essence and separated from sovereign violence, in the unconditional freedom that would define a political democracy that is yet to arrive; literature might be thus be thought a republic of letters that is not, in the absence of ontology, concerned with its own question – what is literature? – but that comes to bear upon philosophy precisely through that question. 200

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Literature In his multiple readings of literature, considering Shakespeare and Joyce, Mallarmé and Ponge, Kafka, Celan and Artaud among others, and in his discussion of the discipline, Derrida is alert to what disrupts the literary within them, to the infiltration of literature which may be refigured as the infiltration of discipline by discipline. This current runs throughout Derrida’s writing on literature, returning again and again, however, to the question of the literary and philosophical. As each is opened out to the other but cannot be defined by it, the institutions of literature and philosophy are opened out as the space of the other in a movement towards displacement of the proper rather than towards its essence; neither, however, are the literary and philosophical discourses to be thought as belonging to each other, in a gesture that would disrupt propriation of the self-identical only to enforce it through propriation. Derrida is also concerned within this movement of alterity as identity to mark that literature and philosophy, though not proper to their disciplines where that is thought in terms of essence, have a singularity that the other cannot appropriate. This dual disciplinarity figures the infiltration of discipline as a question in Derrida, particularly with regard to what is proper to philosophy; as such it might be considered that, rather than philosophy posing questions of literature, literature might be the subtextual means of posing the question ‘what is philosophy?’. By imposing upon itself a structure that accords it literarity, in the absence of an essence that would designate it as such, literature becomes such through that structuration which Derrida refers to as noematic (AL 44), and through a historical context that lends it a literary function: there’s no essence of literature, but there is a specific functioning of it. Thus literature is figured as a phenomenological experience rather than an essence, circumscribed by rules of its own production that allow it to be read within a performance of reading that is itself productive of the text in accordance with the historicity of the act; the text structures itself according to conventions of literarity and is read according to those conventions, thereby constituting it as a literary object through that specific functioning. That literature never offers itself independently of the text – ‘literature’ cannot be reached – means that it is encountered as the secret, a place of displacement where the literariness accorded by the function of the text and its reading is accessible as experience rather than ideal; the dissemination of meaning in the text resists furthermore a correlative representative function between the text and an exterior 201

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Literature referent. By deferring meaning in différance, literature participates, Derrida argues, in other discourses – though it is not identified with those discourses, even that of the philosophical – and by maintaining a continual deferral and displacement of meaning it exceeds the possibility of self-identity as literature because it is held in relation to those other discourses, in that by exceeding itself the text enters into a perpetual relationality. Ultimately, Derrida decides that his own relationship to literature and philosophy is suspended in a space between both because literature is that which does not only put its own essence but the very idea of essence into question; in this non-place of literature, he situates his interest at the crossing that therein takes place between literary and philosophical discourses (AL 48). When Derrida refers to himself as a ‘philosopher’, the placing of occupation within quotation marks is also a recognition of his own occupation by that site of différance that renders him dislocated from a disciplinary definition. The irony connoted by the marking in quotation of that identity re-marks language and its ability to deconstruct itself; to name oneself as philosopher is at the same time to enter into a metaphysical identity that is undermined by the very act of naming. It is apposite to recall here that Derrida, in the same interview on literature, registered his agreement with Paul de Man that all literary rhetoric is deconstructive, practising an irony that distances it from metaphysics even as it might seem to proffer that philosophy (AL 50). The use of quotation marks might here seem to mark an affinity with that irony proper to literary rhetoric that calls philosophy into being as its own undermining. In this context, the concept of literature is a philosophical concept both as philosophy is already within it and as it is always already philosophical. These might be the dual understandings of Derrida’s stating that it’s impossible to build this concept without some philosophy, but what remains undecidable in his discussion is whether literature is simply philosophical in that it is brought into relation with that discipline, or whether there is in the text an already philosophical structuration of its discourse that then comes into a relation with philosophy defined as such. The philosophical stabilized concept of . . . literature to which Derrida refers is therefore not at odds with a philosophical concept of literature, if the latter is thought of as a literature always already philosophical in its writing, though remembering that we cannot speak of a philosophy inherent to that which has no essence. Within this reading, a philosophical stabilized 202

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Love concept of . . . literature which accords it an essence can be resisted from within by a literature understood as having a philosophical function; the trace of writing would deconstruct, undermine or displace an identity given as such, while maintaining a relation between philosophy and literature.

Love (PC 8) Undecidability, not even raising the distinction yet between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’, is the sign, if not the law, of love, supposing for a moment that something so unavailable to deconstruction such as love might have a law. Between the I and the You, between self and other, between naming one’s beloved and affirming one’s love for the beloved other: everything takes place between but there is no between that can be defined save for the call, already a response and a naming, a declaration of love; only the other will have known. Calling the other ‘my love’ is to name the love one addresses to the other, love returns in the address, even though the answer as to where love is destined remains deferred, the answer not yet having arrived. To declare one’s love is not the same as announcing that the other is one’s love, that the other is the beloved who is addressed in the declaration of one’s love, a declaration that also, and at the same time, announces that one loves the other; but which declarationannouncement, affirmation-call-nomination, at the same time – or in the illusion, giving the appearance of a same time, such is the knot of rhythms, speeds and all their various uncountable differences for which love stands as the knot in this otherwise impossible to discern situation – when one declares, affirms, addresses, names, announces, one is also responding. The one is always already responding to, receiving the call, one would hazard a guess, nothing being less certain, of the other: declaration of the other, affirmation of the other, call of the other. Everything takes place between, where there is neither nothing nor something. In the aporetic experience of the undecidable, everything is risked then, in signs, in the name of love. So much is already taking place. To pause therefore, and begin with a problematic distinction. The question of the difference between the who and the what at the heart of love is a crucial departure point, a necessary reflection, and will serve here to introduce a detour through Lévinas, Heidegger (to a lesser extent) and Agamben. Here, Derrida on that difference: 203

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Love The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love, separates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart . . . The question of being is itself always already divided between the who and the what. Is ‘Being’ some one or some thing? . . . whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between this division of the who and the what . . . [But] fidelity is threatened by this difference between the who and the what. (DSEF/S 81)

This is where we find ourselves, between: in love, in love, in love: being-in-love. To love appears at first as if it means ‘to exist as if the lover and the loved one were alone in the world. The intersubjective relation of love is not the beginning of society, but its negation’.107 A hypothetical fiction is staged here as if two are as one, as if being were produced between beings, through the reciprocal transformation of lover and loved, in a single stroke, before one can even question the difference between the who and the what. Society negated, we are still left with a being-between-two as the experience of being-(alone)in-the-world. To love is this, and only this, whereby that infinitive verb is immediately annulled in the density of its infinitude in catastrophe, the troping turn, of finding onself as another, in love. I – the who – am translated into a topographical sign – the what – displaced, replaced, situated in this reciprocal structure, having become both lover and beloved, and viewing the both within myself and in the other (given this possibility at least) through anamorphic projection, as it were. The relation to Being, the becoming-visible-to-oneself that comes to be staged in question of the self and other in love, is thus staged. If Being is already a manifestation in itself to itself of a Being reflecting on its always already being-there, language gives to this the apprehension of that other (in both senses: on the one hand, I apprehend the other in my reflection on my being; on the other hand, the other apprehends me, and this gives rise to my apprehension – of my ‘self’, of the other, and so on . . .) that gives meaning, in reflection, to the subject. ‘To be’ opens one to one’s ontology; ‘to love’ opens one to one’s ipseity, from the place of the other, the who becoming, and becoming in this transmutation, the what. The affirmation of a ‘between’ that is between-two we appear to see announced through the still undecidable question of love is addressed by Lévinas thus: Love is the I justified by the thou, grasping in the other the justification of its being . . . The affective warmth of love is the fulfilment of the 107

Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-The-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 20.

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Love consciousness of that satisfaction, that contentment, that fullness found outside the self, eccentric to it . . . The society of love is a society of two, of solitudes, resisting universality. Its universality can be constructed only in time, by successive infidelities . . . All love is the love of the couple.108

Becoming aware of its groundedness, Being finds itself standing on the brink of an abyss, expelled from its own enclosure. For example, and a very singular example, singular on every occasion, one finds oneself ‘in love’, or, untranslatable when given voice, in love. One is – in love, even, especially, if one does know what is named, addressed, called, and so forth. (One is only, one might add, in being doubled, being’s being-becoming doubled, differed and deferred, strophic pulse of cata-strophic turning.) The self-consciousness is of a consciousness finding itself in the place of the other, in what we call love, to insist once more on this condition. Self-consciousness is the allergic reaction to the touch of the other. Once we have been interrupted by love, it is always a matter of turning back, of reflecting and reorientation. Whatever the subject, ostensibly, where love arrives as the sign of the experience of a certain singularity, such singularity announces the other in love as my title has it. But to continue, this re-encounter, this revenant experience is not only an abstract reflection. It informs the most immediate and materially grounded experiences of one’s subjectivity. Here is Giorgio Agamben, speaking of the encounter with another’s face and the taking place that goes by the strange name of love. ‘I look someone in the eyes’, confesses Agamben. To which gesture, which gaze, there is returned the, momentarily, equivocal response: ‘either these eyes are cast down . . . or they look back at me’.109 Agamben maintains the equivocation, and with that the maintenance of an opening in the glimpse of another before meaning is given, relation established, in hypothesising that, on the one hand, ‘they can look at me shamelessly . . . Or, they can look at me with a chaste impudence and without reserve, thereby letting love and the word happen in the emptiness of our gazes’ (emphasis added).110 Something takes place here in the blink of an eye. I am witness to, and the subject of, a transgression, literally a movement across the 108 109

110

Lévinas, Entre Nous, pp. 20–1. Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Political Essays, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 93. Agamben, Means, p. 93.

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Love boundaries of selfhood. What occurs, however, is not in one direction, solely, and which, moreover, is irreducible to, resists alignment with any thinking of desire or any erotics. The ‘endless joy of erotic experience’ of which Agamben speaks in Stanzas has nothing to do with love as such, its experience or passage. For such joy would belong to a recuperative and aggrandising economics of the selfsame. Such joy is the place where I can tell myself I master and so silence the breath of the other, where I engage in the ineluctability of the narcissistic loop, trapped always on playback. However, love opens one beyond this; there is a mutual experience of the other within the same, from either side. It happens – and I experience this happening, as it happens to me; I am not outside this experience that I observe – before I can articulate fully what has taken place, before I can name the experience or surround its nakedness and intimacy with the armature of an epistemology. There is in the experience the transgressive arrival of phainesthai before epistasthai. In this, love arrives, coming (venire) it surfaces within my consciousness, from beneath (sou-venir). This is perceived, as Agamben argues Heidegger perceived throughout the composition of Being and Time, ‘precisely because the mode of Being of an opening [which is given in the gaze and its circuitous reciprocation] . . . is more original than all knowledge (and takes place, according to Scheler and Augustine, in love)’.111 More original than all knowledge, this touch of the other, then – an originary interpellation befalls the subject, calling to him or her, in which call or interruption, there is the instauration of the phantasmic memory, a memory all the more spectral for having never been mine. The situation of opening in love as the singular condition of that originary coming to pass prior to knowledge is not to be ignored. The open return of the gaze, doubled and displaced, haunted in its very opening, once apprehended in this manner forces on one the recognition that ‘love can no longer be conceived as it is commonly represented, that is, as a relation between . . . two subjects. It must, instead,’ Agamben continues in his reading of Heideggerian Being, ‘find its place and proper articulation in the Being-already-in-theworld that characterizes Dasein’s transcendence’.112 Being is given, and gives place to the other in love, the other in love, an other 111

112

Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 187. Agamben, Idea, p. 187.

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Love which traverses the one and the other, leaving neither separate or untouched. The very idea of relation as stable is undone. The question of love is then, when truly considered, irreducible to the stasis of representation, specifically that of a relation between beings. Rather, as its unveiling through the passage between gazes makes manifest, the appearance or apparitioning of love has a temporal and spatial dimension, consisting in its showing of itself (phainesthai). Such ‘self-showing’ or seeming, as Heidegger has it ‘[Scheinen]’113 is at the same time revealed and yet remains veiled in the semblance or phainomenon of an other, materialised in the eidolon, in which, a correspondence having been sent and received, self and other remain themselves and yet other also, without correspondence, without relation. Love is what has been ‘let happen’ in Agamben’s phrase, whereby the reciprocity of the gaze, in opening the self to other, shows the self to itself as the other self-showing, in that self-showing of seeming and illumination, appearance as casting or shedding light. ‘Let happen’ marks the factical element in the phenomenology of love that Agamben is tracing, in which gesture he follows Heidegger, bringing to light that which remains for Heidegger the secret motivation in Being and Time. Love, as Agamben observes in a commentary on Heidegger’s Augustinian heritage, ‘is not natural’, for in ‘Latin, facticius is opposed to nativus’.114 And furthermore, there is no relation as such, much less anything that one can represent as being fixed in place in this giving-place that allows or lets love happen as a factical making. For the gazes are mutually, sympathetically, empty, it should be noted, as they fall into, enfolding, one another. Falling in love, as the commonplace has it is, in effect, far from common, for it causes to be made known, given out to the self that shows itself in the registration of the appearance of the other in the singular encounter with and experience of the other’s gaze, an fleeting apprehension of Being as fallen. Love is just the memory of the originary fallenness of Being, of one finding oneself in the world. Love is uncanny to the extent that it is the memory trace, the encrypted mnemotechnic of the very condition of Being in its facticity, its historicity. To come back to that troubling quasi-figure, the non-figure, 113

114

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 25. Agamben, Idea, p. 189.

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Love that which represents unrepresentability itself, and which serves as a ruse-name for love: between. All takes place between, or there is nothing. At the same time, however, it is not only love that the gazes let happen. It is also, before knowledge, the word. To phrase this another way, and in order to move on from this in following Agamben, after Heidegger: it is not a question of articulating a phenomenology of love – but rather that love is phenomenological in being experienced (and there is no love without the experience, without the singular encounter). If it can be seen, if it can be understood in its revelation as the semblance of that which the other lets happen, then this is as a phenomenology, a phainomenon and a logos.115 Love is just this correspondence and mutual coinage: the intimate touch between the phainomenon, the phainesthai and the logos, the word or communication that carries in it the phantom, phantasm or revenant of Being. For Agamben the idea of love comes down to the following experience: To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent – so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing remains forever exposed and sealed off.116

To live with someone implies a practice, a knowledge, a familiarity and understanding. However, Agamben maintains the unfamiliarity, the strangeness of intimacy in order to articulate all the more powerfully the ‘idea of love. Such an idea opens, once more, a space, a taking and giving place, which is in its staging or manifestation estranges, makes unquiet or unhomely the phantom effects of love. The other, reduced to a name, resides within that sign, that logos as supplement to the self, always exposed by, in, the phenomenological light of Being. The coming logos that love offers to countersign, itself being traced by the countersignature of the other, this is the only passage, the sole transgressive translation of an otherwise inexpressible existence, ‘pure Being . . . which is simply ineffable’, unless expressed, and thereby translated from potentiality to actuality, as the singular inscription of the self. In this formula, and in the ‘process 115

116

Heidegger first observes the intertwining of phainomenon and logos in the expression ‘phenomenology’ in Part II, § 7 of Being and Time, p. 24. Agamben, Idea, p. 61; emphases added.

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Love of acquiring knowledge’, love is the signature, logos, or ‘ “letter of which you are the meaning” ’.117 The experience of love perhaps, then, serves to open expression of, and to, the otherwise, the wholly other and the ineffable that is inscribed in the sign of love, a palimpsest and imprimatur of the opening of alterity. It gives place therefore to the naming of this experience, however indirectly, whereby the logos provides the semblance of what remains hidden, invisible or ‘sealed off’ is made, of what takes place and has place, as ‘the very taking place of language in the unspeakable experience of the Voice’.118 Such places, such topoi, wherein love is unveiled in its facticity are also lieux de mémoire, sites of memory as I have sought to establish. What comes back therefore in the illumination that arrives to the gaze in its being returned is love, once more, as revenant, as souvenir, the ghostly memory made from the touch between the eyes of an other. But this memory is unlike any other memory. For, as I have already implied, it is a memory that has never been my own, or, indeed, anyone’s. This is the disquiet of the scenario given above. To live in intimacy with one who returns one’s gaze, but to whom one remains as a stranger – here is a forceful dislocation in the affirmation of love. In this manner the self is opened, and uncovers as it discovers in itself an abyss, a radical alterity in love. The return of the gaze affords a taking place and a staging of place opening what is between us for the memory of the other – and what is more, the other in love. My eyes ‘find’ what was already exposed and sealed off, as do the eyes of the other in looking into mine. Thus, as Agamben argues apropos the Provençal troubadours, love (Amors), in being the name given by the poets to the ‘experience of the poetic word’, from which the word, logos, emerges, thereby giving place not to ‘psychological or biographical events that are successively expressed in words, but rather of the attempt to live the topos itself, the event of language as a fundamental amorous and poetic experience’.119 Logos then as memory of topos, in which place the revenant or phainesthai has seemed to appear, letting love happen. 117

118

119

Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed., trans. and intro. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 247. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Death, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 66. Agamben, Language, p. 68.

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Love Everything takes place between. A topology is mapped here, catastrophe produces parabasis in the singularity of an event between beings as each being becomes other through the touch of the other. Imagine therefore: a parenthesis, an interval or hiatus, two lovers curving towards each other so as to disambiguate, but never touching, never capable of touching one another even though the other reaches towards the other – except through sympathetic imagination. Imagine. Imagine then such a parenthesis presenting itself to you as the voice of the other, outside and yet inside simultaneously, a trace never wholly, never completely reconciled, except in its exile to an internal margin of sorts, and policed by those borders. Those curving lines demarcate but also signify. Here are the lovers ( ), touchingly separated though never touching. (Imagine: lovers separated for life. Wherever they may find themselves and each other. On the phone, through their voices and their inflection, timbre, and accent, through elevations and interruptions in the breathing, across moments of silence, they foster all the differences necessary to arouse a sight, touch, and even smell – so many caresses, to reach the ecstatic climax from which they are forever weaned – but are never deprived. They know that they will never find ecstasy again, ever – other than across the cordless cord of these entwined voices. A tragedy. But intertwined, they also know themselves, at times only through the memory they keep of it, through the spectral phantasm of ecstatic pleasure – without the possibility of which, they know this too, pleasure would never be promised. They have faith in the telephonic memory of touch. Phantasm gratifies them. Almost – each in monadic insularity. Even if the shore of a ‘phantasm’, precisely, seems to have more affinity with phainesthai, that is, with the semblance or shine of the visible.) (OT 112–13)

Almost – they touch, but never quite. Head to toe, top to tail, arching across a space, bodies the boundaries of the separation and the space across which they struggle, and which their arcs desire to annul, traverse, erase, each in the direction of the other, the other mirroring the other, forever without conclusion. Derrida, architect of the impossible relation, of relation-without-relation, hypothesises in the margin, a long-distance love. More than this, he performs it silently, graphically, and with those aching arcs, desiring diacritical marks. Kept apart, they gather together everything, the everything that in appearing between, specifies the singularity of their love, being-in-love that they are, while each remains to touch in ‘monadic insularity’. This is what appears to come to light, as there is traced 210

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Love that which fosters the differences between the pair. And what also comes to light is that tele-technological manifestation of the revenant love, knowledge passed between them of, as, memory, the souvenir d’amour. From beneath, below, this surfaces – between. Why though might love name otherwise the non-place that is the taking-place of between, not in some abstract fashion, but in the event of every singular taking place? A between, the trace of a difference, will have already taken place when I address my love. For, in recognising my love, the other will have addressed me, placing me in relation to an other, to whom I then address my love, which is an address, as Peggy Kamuf puts it, ‘without home, without the property of a subject from which it is sent and to which it returns.’120 Moreover, the disturbance of which we are speaking here is registered by the fact, in Alain Finkielkraut’s words, that the ‘ “you” of “I love you” is never precisely my equal or my contemporary, and “love” is the frantic investigation of this anachronism’.121 Love is comprehended therefore like the motif of between, after the fact. It leaves its mark after it has retreated into the invisible. Love announces and performs this haunting performativity in its passage across that non-place, between self and other, disturbing in its crossing the sense of self, of home: ‘love always brushes up against the uncanny, the unheimlich, the unhomelike. Love brings with it the unhomelike because it is the experience of the sudden or not-sosudden arrival of the other who expropriates address, which is to say appropriates it, exappropriates it: When I say ‘I love . . .’ it is always the declaration of the other at my address.’122 Thus, I am haunted by this apparition – between – which installs a radical instability at the heart of any identity, and which appears most forcefully in the name of love. That which frustrates any illusion of an autonomous self and auto-identification, it can be suggested, is to be read in the play with identity, between self and other, between interiority and exteriority, that is set in motion by the proper name and the ‘figure’ of love, and by the event of love’s arrival, which figure or event is, as Nicholas 120

121

122

Peggy Kamuf, ‘Deconstruction and Love’, in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 151–70, at p. 156. Alain Finkielkraut, The Wisdom of Love, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 37. Kamuf, ‘Deconstruction and Love’, p. 156.

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Love Royle suggests, a ‘condition of any deconstructive reading’.123 The ‘between’ is, arguably, nothing other than ‘love’. Derrida has expressed this in the following terms: ‘I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from the deconstructive point of view are texts I love, with that impulse of identification which is indispensable for reading’ (EO 87). Love takes place in the relation to another, in the space of the between. If love, situated here provisionally as one non-synonymous figure of between (and, reciprocally yet, without closing the circle, between might be said to figure an event of love, if such an event takes place), is what amounts to a condition of any deconstructive reading, the occasions of deconstructive reading are inevitably very much a matter of registering the occasion of an affair between identities which remains in play and is untranslatable. Such singular, idiomatic occasions, furthermore, leave in play their traits in any translation, as the sign of love between one identity and another, that uncanny address between and within French and English for example. Love, to cite Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘does not stop coming and going, never being simply present . . . it is always put into play farther off than everything that would have to qualify it.’ Such play, in turn, sets off resonances, dissonances, oscillations both percussive and repercussive; in short, nothing less than aural apparitions, phantasms of the other. Love. Between. Such motifs neither name nor identify a subject. A subject cannot be located. ‘I’ am not the source, ‘I’ have become the medium for a ghost writer. ‘I’ becomes this mark between, that which is the re-marking of an unstable in-between, between the sender and the addressee. ‘I’ names the unmappable in medias res of apparent locations, locations which are themselves undecidable because always relational and dependent on what takes place between a self and an other. ‘I’, in this case, is always already traced, not as a unified identity but as the phantom figure of a between which abides endlessly, but which is homeless, and which cannot be located as such. As Derrida suggests: The ‘I’ constitutes the very form of resistance. Each time this identity announces itself, each time a belonging circumscribes me, . . . someone or something cries: Look out for the trap, you’re caught . . . One ought to be able to formalize the law of this insurmountable gap. This is a little what 123

Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 56.

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Love I am always doing. Identification is a difference to itself, a difference with/ of itself. Thus with, without, and except itself. (PI 340)

‘I’ is thus both incisive and ex-cited, simultaneously the enunciation of relation and non-relation; it re-marks a certain cut or wound, while being also the gift of articulation from the other, the origin of which is undecidable. It announces and enacts a double location that is both interior and exterior, passing silently between these situations. ‘My’ identity, what I call ‘my identity’, is subject to events of resonant transference from incomprehensible addresses to unknowable destinations which leave their trace or mark on ‘identity’, and which determine the structuring of identity, while revealing that no identity is ever simply there but is always manifestly unstable and contingent on alterity. This very difficulty concerning the knowability or locatability of identity is enacted by Derrida’s texts, between those texts that are signed in his name, and those texts on which his writing operates. As J. Hillis Miller reminds us, ‘[t]he chief obstacle to a complete cartography of Derrida’s topographies . . . is not the extent and complexity of the terrain but the presence within any place on his map . . . that cannot be mapped.’124 So, to reiterate this point: between takes place but has no place that is proper to itself. A non–place, it takes place as the chance or event between different identities, and as the affirmative difference of identities. But what of love? Love is missed, it escapes identification; love is the figure for the in-between, a figure that is not to be captured. Love is also a mark on identity, a trace or cut which determines the self as never wholly itself. Indeed, Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas connects at a certain point circumcision and love (G 39–41). As Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, love is such that ‘one is shared and traversed by that which does not fix itself in any subject or signification . . . Whatever my love is it cuts across my identity.’125 Furthermore, love is always arriving, Nancy informs us, love always arrives, it is the arrival of the other, so much other, in fact, ‘that it is never made (one makes love, because it is never made) and so much other that it is never my love (if I say to the other “my love”, it is of the other, precisely that I speak, 124

125

J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 296. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 101.

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Love and nothing is “mine”).’126 Love is never completed, never finished, never done with. Love arrives to inform us that we are not ourselves; it comes to haunt identity, and one finds oneself obligated to respond to an opening in oneself brought about by the arrival of the other, and to that which takes place in the non-location between identities. As Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us, love ‘consists as much in taking as in giving.’127 However, we are involved, between us, in a paradox, if we bear in mind that commentary on love by Jacques Lacan, of which Derrida recalls to mind in a note from Given Time (GT 172, n. 32). We do not have love, love is not ours to give, nor does the other possess love. Love is not yours, not mine. Neither is it Jacques Derrida’s, nor Nicholas Royle’s, as he admits.128 And, furthermore, ‘Love’, writes Nancy, ‘is addressed to one alone singularly and infinitely . . . it always flies to pieces as soon as it is sent.’129 This is, it would appear, acknowledged implicitly throughout The Post Card, with its numerous sendings, dispatches, fragments even in the perplexity over the question of how love should be addressed. Yet love appears, in different guises, throughout. Love appears again, throughout ‘Aphorism Countertime’. I’ve no intention of pursuing a ‘reading’ of such appearances, such apparitions, except to note, along with Nicholas Royle, that love is ghostly;130 it is, noting as we must what has already been said, nothing other than that; it is ‘traced by the radically other (by death, in short).’131 Returning to or sending the proper name, let us ask, in the name of love or the name of the other: who, or what, might come to speak in the name of love, yet wholly otherwise? Do we hear a voice, a name, do we believe we glimpse a trace of love, one instance of a series of singular reiterations or multiple singularities? Can we help but acknowledge our responsibility to such a ghostly figure, each time it comes, returns or is sent to us, each time the first and the last? What might we hear? There can be no certainty concerning identity here; and, as Derrida tells us, we must fall back on the voice, since we cannot identify any speaker in all certainty (SM 7). We feel ourselves addressed, called in the name of love, and obliged to respond, to confess. There is there, occurring, both in and through the words, and exceeding the 126 127 128 129 130 131

Nancy, Community, p. 102. Nancy, Community, p. 101. Royle, After Derrida, p. 140. Nancy, Community, p. 109. Royle, After Derrida, p. 139. Royle, After Derrida, p. 139.

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Love words, being more, other, than the words, what a certain Derrida might call the ‘spectral errancy of words. The spectral return does not befall words by accident . . . The spectral return is partaken of by all words’ (SQ 67). Such errancy traverses and traces every incalculable between. But why do I write of ghosts and love, and the ghost of a love in language? Every trace of love, every note or aphorism, every postcard, reverberates, with someone, someone wholly other. Names are put on the line so that it can be seen how love marks, and is marked by, the other of/in identity. Love is traced – and traces – in the space between identities. Identity is never self-identical. This is a given. A ‘responsible reading’, Timothy Clark remarks, ‘is one attuned to affirm whatever in a text exceeds the closures of representation’ (Clark 1992, 186).132 Whatever: that which exceeds, that which opens to a certain crossing, that which is always responsible and which cannot be pinned down, which cannot be named as some identity or in the name of an identity. Love calls on us to be responsible in coming to map the unmappable, to be open to the possibility of the impossible, and the possibility of this impossible experience is that, in short, which is between us, and which remains: to come. Love is always just this exemplary passage between tongues, in what is foreign, other in the language one calls one’s own. Note the movement, as we return to our initial point of departure, almost: between. I wanted to write you, otherwise, but always with the same foreign language . . . (they don’t know how much a language is foreign) . . . and when I write you you continue, you transfigure everything (the transformation comes from behind the words, it operates in silence, simultaneously subtle and incalculable, you substitute yourself for me and right up to my tongue you ‘send’ it to yourself and then I remember those moments when you called me without warning, you came at night at the bottom of my throat, you came to touch my name with the tip of your tongue. Beneath the surface, it took place beneath the surface of the tongue, softly, slowly, an unheard-of trembling, and I was sure that at that second that it was not coming back, a convulsion of the entire body in two tongues at once, the foreign one and the other one. On the surface, nothing, a patient, applied pressure leaving everything in place, forcing no movement of the tongue: and then the tongue is all you hear, and we are alone I believe in receiving its silence. It never says a thing. Because we know how to love it, after our passage, without anything having changed 132

Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 186.

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Matter/Materialism in its appearance, it accepts no longer knowing who it is. It no longer recognizes its own, proper traits, it is no longer the law of its own house, it even has no more words. (PC 183–4)

M Matter/Materialism (P 63–5) What is the matter with materialism? Identifying particular proper names in the history of a certain form of ‘materialist’ discourse, Marx’s, Engels, or Lenin’s texts, received politically, Derrida complicates briefly both the reception of these texts and the question of reading. Resisting the reductive assumption implicit here that with political theory or philosophy there is simply the reception and subsequent application of the text in a given or current situation, Derrida insists that the misreading that insists on simple ‘application’ of said texts is to be challenged. Certainly, it is a mistake to assume that such texts are not to be read according to a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would seek out a finished signified beneath a textual surface. Assuming any reading is this procedure or method always operates mistakenly, according to absolute separations, polar, stable oppositions, and reduces reading to a more or less passive mode of production. When considered in overtly ‘political’ situations, or treating texts such as these as obviously ‘political’ and therefore operative only inasmuch as they offer a theoretical paradigm the sole purpose of which is to be applied, is to engage, if we read Derrida’s statement correctly, in a formalist manner that eschews or seeks to neutralise the work of reading, if not the text itself. However, reading is transformative; to read is to engage in a political act, an act that transforms the text, thought and possibly subsequent ways of perceiving or acting in the world. A number of things are significant here, not least Derrida’s refusal to treat or deal with a text, whether that of Marx, Engels or Lenin on the one hand, or Saussure, Freud or Bataille on the other, as if it were either simply to be ‘applied’ or were homogeneous. Indeed, Derrida makes the claim that his reading, and by extension any act of transformative reading, is or has to be focused on the destruction of the motif of homogeneity, which is the theological motif par excellence. The very idea of destruction in the process of transformation is 216

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Matter/Materialism in its appearance, it accepts no longer knowing who it is. It no longer recognizes its own, proper traits, it is no longer the law of its own house, it even has no more words. (PC 183–4)

M Matter/Materialism (P 63–5) What is the matter with materialism? Identifying particular proper names in the history of a certain form of ‘materialist’ discourse, Marx’s, Engels, or Lenin’s texts, received politically, Derrida complicates briefly both the reception of these texts and the question of reading. Resisting the reductive assumption implicit here that with political theory or philosophy there is simply the reception and subsequent application of the text in a given or current situation, Derrida insists that the misreading that insists on simple ‘application’ of said texts is to be challenged. Certainly, it is a mistake to assume that such texts are not to be read according to a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would seek out a finished signified beneath a textual surface. Assuming any reading is this procedure or method always operates mistakenly, according to absolute separations, polar, stable oppositions, and reduces reading to a more or less passive mode of production. When considered in overtly ‘political’ situations, or treating texts such as these as obviously ‘political’ and therefore operative only inasmuch as they offer a theoretical paradigm the sole purpose of which is to be applied, is to engage, if we read Derrida’s statement correctly, in a formalist manner that eschews or seeks to neutralise the work of reading, if not the text itself. However, reading is transformative; to read is to engage in a political act, an act that transforms the text, thought and possibly subsequent ways of perceiving or acting in the world. A number of things are significant here, not least Derrida’s refusal to treat or deal with a text, whether that of Marx, Engels or Lenin on the one hand, or Saussure, Freud or Bataille on the other, as if it were either simply to be ‘applied’ or were homogeneous. Indeed, Derrida makes the claim that his reading, and by extension any act of transformative reading, is or has to be focused on the destruction of the motif of homogeneity, which is the theological motif par excellence. The very idea of destruction in the process of transformation is 216

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Matter/Materialism as inescapably political in its orientation and affirmation as it is possible to be. For the motif of destruction, apropos the mode of reading (a mode which would produce a homogeneity that does not exist), aligns itself or is subsumed under the general mode of transformation. Such an act of reading is not wilful, but responsible, there are required protocols of reading, which protocols dictate that analysis centres on a heterogeneity, which has both a necessity, which would also be political, and rules for deciphering the heterogeneity. Having rejected formalist approaches, having complicated the text/context dualism, and having highlighted the politics implicit in a transformative critique, Derrida continues to propose that matter . . . designates . . . radical alterity. And from this proposition, Derrida remarks that if one accepts this designation of matter then what I write can be considered ‘materialist’. Reading carefully the opening two paragraphs then of the present extract, taken from one of the three interviews in Positions, the third with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, should make the ‘political’ engagement of Derrida’s work clear; it ‘should’ (though of course this has often been not the case), and I emphasise ‘political’ broadly here in order that it be understood that there is a ‘political’ or ‘materialist’, not to say a ‘historicist’ commitment in Derrida’s writing from the outset, in everything he writes, and that neither is he a formalist, nor is he someone who comes to the ‘political’ as if there were some ‘turn’ in a perceived ‘later’, as opposed to ‘earlier’ tranche of his publications or lectures. Two significant points at least emerge in these first two paragraphs: first, at the risk of repeating myself, there is a way of reading that is not just reading how one likes, but which also is irreducible to a methodology (whether one wants to term this ‘deconstructive’ or anything else for that matter). Next, in moving, through the format that an interview allows or encourages, in a more schematic and coded manner – this being signalled in the deployment of the proper name – Derrida announces that texts are not to be solely political or not political. Indeed, one might risk the argument that in coming finally to Bataille, questions of restricted or general economy and the question of Hegelianism, if not Hegel himself, all is gathered into the historicised, ‘materialist’ reading, and that it is the act of reading, not the text that aims to be ‘political’ or formalist, ‘apolitical’, or what you will. Furthermore, given the move from the overtly ‘ideological’ texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin, to Saussure and Freud, before Bataille, Derrida indicates, however rapidly or in passing, that language, structural linguistics 217

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Matter/Materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis are themselves materialist engagements with matters that are, or should be, inextricably intertwined with materialist conditions of Being and historicity. But, as you may imagine, things are not so simple, and therefore we have to pause and ask ourselves if we know what matter refers to, what ‘materialist’ means. For Derrida, the simple or simplistic notion of matter is that which is or has been defined as absolute exterior or radical heterogeneity. Matter is not simply that outside the text, outside the self, nor is it absolutely or radically other than the ‘amaterial’, such as thought for example. One cannot simply assign ‘matter’ on one side of the text/context divide any more than one can assume merely a mind/body dualism. To make such assumptions is to miss what Derrida does and the ways in which his thought and writing can be understood as materialist; it also demonstrates precisely the matter with a certain, limited thinking of ‘matter’, of materialism or materialist thought. The matter, in certain examples of materialist thought, is that particular manifestations of such thought do not think, but function according to a model of materialism, as if it were the only one. To think materialism or to think ‘matter’ in such a way is therefore problematic inasmuch as it either assigns the idea to a conceptual thinking or otherwise to unquestioned conditions (or more precisely the limited thinking concerning) apropos ‘empirical’ or ‘objective reality’. Thus, Derrida states unequivocally that he refuses to say that the concept of matter is in and of itself either metaphysical or nonmetaphysical. Though Derrida has already begun to complicate the question of the material, and raised implicitly the idea of a different materiality, in the second part of the extract he makes this much more explicit in a very direct manner, by challenging the idea of the materialist text. The emphasis on the definite article highlights Derrida’s suspension of acceptance of the term, and this is followed up by the interrogation into the assumption: is there such a thing, the materialist text? Merely by raising the question without directly offering an answer, Derrida offers what appears to be an opposition to the definite article – and by extension the interrogative parenthesis – with the identification of every materialist text. Not every materialist text defines or questions the concept of matter. Part of this problem for the ‘materialist’ critic or thinker – and there is not just one kind, there is more than one type of materialism even if a number of the expressions of such a materialism share a blindspot to the interpretation or interrogation of those key concepts such as ‘matter’ which are 218

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Matter/Materialism central to their assumptions – is that, often, if not always in the name of a political urgency or exigency, from the premise of a dialectical opposition to ideological modes of discourse and praxis at odds with their own, materialist criticisms fail to start from first questions, such as ‘what is matter?’ or ‘what is ‘materialism?’ We might even add the query, reminding ourselves of Derrida’s reflection, is there such a thing, the materialist text? As a result of the failure to reflect on, and so inaugurate and position fundamental interrogations into the composition of a concept and its genealogy, and with this the question concerning whether there is indeed a concept, whether a concept has been formulated, schematised, made coherent under some motif of homogeneity, the theological motif par excellence; as a result there is gathered a reserve. Such a reserve has resulted in the uncritical suspension of the idea – not yet a concept – of matter, which in the name of ideological exigency and dialectical resistance has been unquestioningly appropriated, and too often reinvested with ‘logocentric’ values, values associated with those of thing, reality, presence in general, sensible presence, for example, substantial plenitude, content, referent, etc. Derrida’s resistance to using the word is thus not the result of assuming a critical or philosophical position at odds with materialist discourse, but as a result of a wariness over the uncritical employment, which lack of judicial reflection results in a mirroring of the kinds of ‘logocentric’, ‘transcendental’, ‘metaphysical’ or ‘idealist’ modes of thought that rush to proclaim an opposition to those more ostensibly conservative discourses and ideological structures they would seek to transform. And it is precisely because they co-opt themselves into those modes that are ostensibly dialectically opposed to their own that the reading of ‘the materialist text’ (to imagine there is such a thing) is not transformative; or simply, just not reading. This dilemma is given focus when Derrida observes that [i]n short, the signifier ‘matter’ appears to me problematical only at the moment when its reinscription cannot avoid making of it a new fundamental principle which, by means of theoretical regression, would be reconstituted into a ‘transcendental signified.’ There is thus a classical logic operative in materialist as well as idealist thought, in radical as well as conservative thought. In order to think matter, and so open a materialist thought from within itself, it is first necessary to refrain from separating the matter from the work (P 65). In this, for Derrida there is a necessary ‘deconstructed field’ to be established wherein the ‘concept of matter must be marked twice’, in order to ‘overturn’ those classical 219

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Messianicity metaphysical oppositions, identified in passing by Derrida as ‘matter/ spirit’, ‘matter/ideality’, ‘matter/form’ and so on (P 65). In thinking what takes place, what is in play in that border or ‘interval’ between the apparent oppositions sketched here, a transformative reading arising from, a ‘positively displacing, transgressive, deconstruction’ might begin to emerge (P 66). On the understanding that such a reading might be possible, and through a rigorous rethinking of matter and materialism in which there is no longer assumed any ‘simple exterior limit’, there the problems of ‘meaning and reference’, and with this those of any ‘ “dialectics” of the same and the other, of outside and inside’, come under investigation (P 67). Thus one comes to a materiality of the text, rather than a reading that falls back into an idealism, a realism, an empiricism, in its assumptions of interior and exterior, meaning and reference, etc. And it does so, in identifying the materiality of the trace, the signifier, which is not a materiality comme les autres, but rather a materiality in that, irreducible to any support for phonic reference or representation ‘beyond’ the textual field, the signifier is understood materially in the singularity of its taking place, in this particular conjunction and no other, as the matter of a matrix, inextricably entwined within the general economy of the textual field (which cannot be circumscribed or limited according to concerns or assumptions about text/context, interior/exterior and so on, and so forth . . .).

Messianicity (DE 67–8) It is not a question of a Messiah, of the Messiah. Derrida insists, when speaking of the messianic that he is talking about the messianic as a general structure, as that which is not yet here, which might come to appear in the form of the one who arrives, who can always arrive – but whose arrival cannot be predicted, anticipated, programmed: If I could anticipate, if I had a horizon of anticipation, if I could see what is coming or who is coming, there would be no coming. So, absolutely without precedent or predictability, speaking of some structure informed by that which remains absolutely undetermined as the ‘to come’. And this one ‘who’ comes is not necessary a ‘who’. If something comes, or is to come, and we cannot be sure, then that which remains to come can always be what but also a who: L’arrivant as l’avenir, the arriving one, the unexpected guest, for instance, the ‘to come’. Moreover, the unanticipatable messianic event is not to be associated with a ‘value’; it is neither good nor bad, 220

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Messianicity it is not necessarily a good thing, the worst might be coming. And this is why messianicity is not a messianism; the messianic is not a matter of either a Messiah or Messianism. As a result, one cannot, Derrida cannot, will not, adamantly refuses to define, close or circumscribe this relation to the ‘to come’. Derrida’s distinction, finely drawn, has to do with the fact that what he terms ‘messianic’ serves to name one’s relation to a future that cannot be predicted. On the one hand such a relation implies the possibility of the unexpected taking place, that there will come a change, a transformation that is desired. On the other hand, such an ‘open structure’ is threatened by its own finitude. In order to think this from another perspective, the very idea of a Messiah, and that Messiah’s arrival, is teleologically oriented, marked in its possibility by an eschatological promise. Anticipated closure, the certainty of an end, finitude as the promise for present and past uncertainty, suffering, travail. Messianicity promises no such ‘end time’, merely the radical chance, which may never come, of an opening onto another future, another ‘to come’, the future, if you will, of the other, that which is absolutely other than any thinking of finitude, solution, goal and so forth. Nothing, no ‘healing’, no absolute truth, no final judgement or figure of authority is figured in the Derridean thinking of messianicity; there is no transcendence beyond the infinity of the supplement, of difference. Thus, while much has been made in the reading of Derrida concerning the impossibility of assigning origins, locating beginnings or sources, what is less understood, as the example of messianicity and its critical reception gives us to comprehend, is the impossibility of thinking finitude, thinking any end, other than that very personal end I call ‘my death’, but which end, as Derrida suggests, is not ‘my’ death properly speaking. Derrida’s messianicity is then ‘the opposite’ of what Emmanuel Lévinas has described as a future conversion of the ‘temporal into the eternal’, a ‘ “pure” messianic triumph’ proposed as the transcendent end to that ‘evil’ (again, Lévinas’ term) of an ‘endless temporality’, as Martin Hägglund proposes in a detailed comparative critique of the different ‘modes’ of messianicity in the thought of both philosophers.133 Though some might misread Derrida has having, or offering, no hope therefore, ‘hope’ is merely that implicitly contaminated 133

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 133. See Hägglund’s highly perceptive reading of messianicity in this volume, pp. 132–9.

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Messianicity concept, overdetermined in a Judeo-Christian theology, or any form or expression of metaphysical or transcendent thought, by which historicity, temporality and the proposed finitude of either is proposed. A Derridean messianicity is always marked by the imperative of that which remains to come, there must of necessity be an other time to come: ‘There is an “it is necessary” for the future. Whatever may be its indetermination . . . there is some future and some history . . . We must insist on this specific point precisely because it points to an essential lack of specificity, an indetermination [or an undecidability] that remains the ultimate mark of the future’ (SM 123). Such a necessity and the affirmation of it is far from a negation of the ‘false’ hope of a conventional messianism or a Lévinasian messianicity (however subtly distinguished that might be from any conventional or institutional thinking of the Messiah, or a second coming, for example). Instead, there is a radical, perhaps bleak ‘hope’, a different hope as well as a hope of, for difference – without the false or illusory expectation of that difference being necessarily good, positive, a progression, call it what you will – in which there is also marked a ‘necessary promise’; ‘ “it is necessary” is necessary’, observes Derrida, ‘and that is the law’ of a radically open, anti-transcendental messianicity (SM 73). That Derrida refers to the law of necessity that marks a messianicity without messianism or a messiah imposes a weighty ethical responsibility. While the Lévinasian theological model or other explicitly theological and eschatological modes of thought concerning messianism imply the abnegation of responsibility, a Derridean messianicity, informed by the stark demand of that law of necessity, insists on responsibility all the more. (To risk one Biblical example of such abnegation: ‘and the meek shall inherit the earth’ is a get-out clause in effect, for it says ‘just be patient, put up and shut up, and you’ll get yours in the end’. That you suffer, that you are oppressed, that you are marginalised, exploited, abused, all of that is OK because the false promise of an end that will come for everyone allows anyone who might have helped, opposed, resisted, ‘taken arms against a sea of troubles’ not to have to think about doing so.) Derrida’s thinking of messianicity therefore not only resituates an irrecusable ethical commitment grounded not a little on the fact that there is only one certain eschatology, one’s death (TS 23), it announces itself as an inescapably ‘materialist’ thought, ‘as the formal condition for all experience and all hope’, in which there is ‘necessarily some promise and therefore some historicity as future-to222

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Messianicity come’ (SM 73). Derrida, argues Hägglund, ‘can . . . be seen to invert the logic of religious eschatology. Instead of promoting the end of time, Derrida emphasises that the coming of time exceeds any given end’.134 Derrida’s messianicity, generated in part by the refutation of Fukuyama and remembrance of Kojève in Specters of Marx (SM 71–5), figures the necessity of a radical messianicity in the ‘becominghistorical’ of what he calls in these pages the assumption of one’s being or having become ‘post-historical’. To address the future in its undecidability therefore in terms of messianicity is to engage historicity differently, to rethink from certain events, particular moments of historical crisis, the ways in which the critical reader, the critical thinker, might find an agency that assumes the responsibility necessity and law impose, from this other perspective at odds with but emerging from within the conventional modes of teleological, eschatological, historical and historico-messianic thought. The necessity is urgent, inescapable because, remarks Derrida, ‘[t]here where man, a certain determined concept of man, is finished, there the pure humanity of man, of the other man and of man as other begins or finally has the chance of heralding itself – of promising itself’ (SM 74). In returning to Kojève in the conclusion of Specter’s second chapter, and from there opening the thinking of an other messianicity, as well as what I would like to describe here as a messianicity of the other (humanity), he opposes promise to specific programmes of thought. In doing this, he proceeds to connect, through a lengthy closing parenthesis, the matter of the other messianicity to an earlier ‘deconstructive procedure’ that had sought to read and so question the concept of history through Hegel, Marx and Heidegger. Such deconstructive work serves to show how: ‘another opening of event-ness as historicity . . . [permits] one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise . . . as promise and not as ontotheological or teleo-eschatological program or design’ (SM 75). Such programmes shut down and ‘cancel historicity’ properly thought (SM 74). Against the programme, promise, against design desire, therefore ‘emancipatory desire’ (SM 75). The human, the other of the human, is thus staged in promise and desire against the dead weight of institutional thought and practice. Or, to risk a strong reading here, promise and desire figure the trace 134

Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 134.

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Messianicity to come, they name the ‘to come’, a certain hopeful historicity focusing into the unprogrammable future, rather than the co-optative, coercive historicity of that past historical thought by which programme and design operate. Such desire, such promise has, Derrida demands, to be insisted on, and to be insisted ‘as the very indestructability of the “it is necessary” ’, which presages, prefaces and arrives to announce the ‘to come’ of the messianic in, and possibly as, the ‘condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political’ (SM 75). Might it be possible to illustrate this, or to illustrate at least a moment of crisis which opens itself to the possibility of what remains to come, even, especially if that crisis seems to be just the response to what could be taken in the historical event as moments of finality, closure, the end of history and the ‘vulgate of the capitalist paradise as the end of history’ (SM 74)? To risk one example, the spectre of the necessity to re-historicise, and with that the bleakest articulation of desire, for a messianic ‘to come’, in response to the finitude of a particular historical moment, is staged through Alan Bleasdale’s series of television plays Boys from the Blackstuff, first broadcast in 1982 when what has now come to be known as Thatcherism, in all its capitalist triumphalism, was proclaiming its own messianic ‘victory’. Each of the plays deals with the ramifications of the ‘capitalist paradise as the end of history’ through the stories of five working-class men in Liverpool, and the effects of unemployment on them and their families. But it is in the final play ‘George’s Last Ride’ that the necessity of hope, the desire for maintaining an openness, is announced. George, dying of cancer, is taken by Chrissie to the Albert Docks, an ironic remainder of a historical past that has led to the then present Thatcherite ‘end’. Looking at the now derelict docks, George recalls beginning work there ‘[f]orty-seven years ago . . . my dreams, those dreams, those dreams of long ago, they still give me some kind of hope and faith in my class . . . I can’t believe there is no hope, I can’t.’135 There is no answer of course, merely this affirmation of a refusal to believe in hope. In this there is the desire, and with that, effectively, the necessity to respond, to take responsibility in the midst of the undecidability of a future where a certain ‘end of history’ appears to have been inscribed indelibly. The play, George’s last words, demand a response which is also the promise spoken of by Derrida. ‘Promise and decision’ therefore, and it has to be said decision 135

Alan Bleasdale, Boys from the Blackstuff, ed. David Self (Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes, 1990), p. 253.

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Metaphor in the absence of any sign of what the future holds, absolute decision without the possibility of knowing whether one made the right choice until after the event; promise and decision, ‘which is to say responsibility, owe their possibility to the ordeal of undecidability which will always remain their condition’ (SM 75). Without these, and without understanding not only the hope but also that threat and fear, the latter expressed through disbelief by George, the radical messianic cannot be thought. Derrida’s messianicity is misread unless it is understood in terms of its openness, its necessity, its rethinking of historicity, through ‘the messianic opening to an undecidable future’;136 for an unconditional hope for an undecidable future cannot be thought without ‘simultaneously fearing it’, ‘threat and chance’ (PF 174) being the simultaneous possibilities in messianicity. It has to be remarked, however, in conclusion, that thinking the radical messianic, is not simply to abandon the past, to direct one’s efforts only to the undecidable that remains to come. For a Derridean messianicity must remember in the appropriate manner, and so bear in its thinking the traces of the past, as it moves into the future, not unlike Benjamin’s Angel of History.

Metaphor (DRWP 102–3) In this wandering tale of transportation, Derrida carries the metaphor of metaphor to the point of its breaking down. Since in Greek metaphora means ‘transport’, ‘carrier’, he transports his own reading between the literal and metaphoric as he is carried through the city, woven in and out of a landscape and discourse that bears all the landmarks of its history. Moving from digression to digression, he forces the metaphor to breaking point, but in doing so acknowledges being carried away by his travels past the point of stopping. I have consciously made figurative the literal in my own reading, acknowledging that [a]ny statement concerning anything that happens, metaphor included, will be produced not without metaphor. Yet in attempting to acknowledge the double bind in which I am already inscribed, and in which Derrida performed his own inscription, one might say his own metaphorisation, I am also unconsciously entered into metaphor, as a being structured through metaphor: not simply in the tradition of man as the carrier of an ontotheological presence made in the image of God, but also as a being structured through 136

Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 136.

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Metaphor a language that cannot escape metaphorisation as the effect of that presence. This reading of Derrida would itself be a metaphorical one, were it to elide the text in order to read it as a commentary on its own inescapable metaphoricity, the carrier of a meaning beyond its linguistic identity. In attempting to literalise a reading of the text, it would succeed only in making figurative beyond any performativity a reading of the scene into which Derrida has inserted himself by transporting it from one discourse to another, carrying over its conscious metaphorisation into another wherein it attempts to find the meaning carried in the Derridean text independently of the linguistic texture that both is that meaning and defers meaning. If one were to read the Derridean text as a metaphor upon metaphor, then to write upon it (in the sense both of a commentary and a stylistic superimposition) using metaphor, one would not be acknowledging the double bind but enforcing it by extracting the text from its language, reading that language as the vehicle of a meaning that is metalinguistic. Insofar as the crisis exists and persists in the language itself, it is because that language is viewed as a carrier of a unified and metalinguistic meaning. Derrida invites us to read his text as the carrier of a dilemma that is intrinsic to the discourse, rather than staged by it; it is the scene of metaphor and, in an important way, resists being read as metaphorical and excised from the problematic of language that one may be tempted to efface precisely as the vehicle of that problematic, by reading it as existing independently from language and as capable of being articulated as a presented problem, of being self-identical with the text that in such a view would not be the site of the problem but merely its vehicle to presentation. Insofar as that identity is non-identical because constructed in différance, a reading might remain alert to this temptation to reconstruct the plenitude of a signified meaning, the end of metaphor, by paying attention to that in the text which resists such an interpretation even as it invites it. Even where remaining conscious of linguistic stratagems designed to acknowledge a crisis of language and especially where those stratagems are acknowledged through their replication, as above, it enters into an aporia whereby its use is also its resistance. To effect such a resistance it is necessary to employ metaphor in order to undermine or to turn it back on itself. In so doing, the différance of meaning that divides the metaphoric relation in the word is extended to the metaphor itself; where the metaphor displaces itself, there cannot be either a metaphoric rela226

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Metaphor tion of the word to meaning or a self-identity of the metaphor, the identity of which resides in the co-implication of meaning into word. Even where such a claim could be sustained, where the metaphor can be seen to break down in its identity as an object as in the experience, it remains necessary not to extend the différance of the word to the deconstruction of the metaphor in différance, a movement that would itself be metaphoric in extending the word to meaning. This passage metaphorises the vehicle or metaphora, from which the concept is named, as metaphor itself. When Derrida writes that [m]etaphora circulates in the city, it conveys us like its inhabitants, along all sorts of passages and intersections, he is writing, both literally and metaphorically, the impossibility of escaping metaphor. By using the language of metaphor – the passages, the vehicle, the tenor – simultaneously in its denotative and metaphoric function, the conceptual dominance of metaphor as a means of subordinating language to the signified is made manifest: here, the language of metaphor is plural, both denotative and metaphoric, yet the passage becomes a metaphor of metaphor in that the language becomes overtaken and understood in accordance with the concept. Yet it is not simply metaphoric, nor only metaphoric to say that we inhabit metaphor and that we circulate in it as some sort of vehicle. The figure Derrida employs consists in changing the positions, places and functions; its constitution offers a perspective on metaphor from language. By making the writing subject the subject of the vehicle, in its linguistic sense, the subject becomes the content of the metaphor that carries him, displaces him at the very moment when this subject believes he is designating it, . . . driving it . . .: we circulate in it as some sort of vehicle. The subject is caught in the drift of the metaphor he is trying to address, carried away by its comprehension and entered into a metaphorical relation with metaphor itself. I skid and I drift irresistibly, Derrida writes, unable to resist its manner; for it is the manner of metaphor that governs its understanding. While Derrida attempts to speak about metaphor, to say something proper or literal on this subject, it is the metaphoric manner that returns the discourse to metaphor; that literally makes of metaphor its own subject through the vehicle of a word. It impels the subject to write of it in its own manner, to enter into it by understanding it for he cannot treat it . . . without dealing with it, . . . without negotiating with it . . . It is impossible to stop metaphor or to resist its force to make me speak, to ventrioloquize me, metaphorize me. As Derrida 227

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Metaphor writes, even if I had decided to no longer speak metaphorically about metaphor, I would not achieve it; in other words, unable to stop, he can brake only by skidding. Metaphor cannot, however, escape from its own operation, and [a]ny statement concerning anything that happens, metaphor included, will be produced not without metaphor. There cannot be a metalanguage for metaphor that would not enter through the concept of its own possibility, the possibility of a metalanguage exterior to and protected from language, into the presuppositions of metaphor that Derrida is trying to address. By entering into metaphor, however, the concept of the signified protected from language is made into a type of governing discourse that protects language from itself, creating it as a fiction of transparence to convey a unified meaning. This relation is already divided in that it relies on an initial plurality of language in order to elide language. Metaphor is predicated upon the word having a literal and a figurative signification; it first effaces the literal for the figurative and then effaces the word altogether by not only constituting it as a conceptual vehicle but also governing it by a conceptual understanding of its function. In ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, Derrida reminds us that the process of metaphorisation is that of metaphysics, that ‘[p]hilosophy would be this process of metaphorization which gets carries away in and of itself. Constitutionally, philosophical culture will always have been an obliterating one’ (MP 211). Yet the metaphor – and philosophy – is inscribed by this contradiction from the beginning; it relies for its conceptual constitution on the différance it suppresses to exist as a concept. In turn, that différance constitutes it as already subject to deconstruction. Such can be seen in the word metaphora as Derrida here employs it, performing a strange operation that, neither metaphoric nor a-metaphoric, has to enter into metaphor from within in order to make of it its own comment, opening out the movement of its own deconstruction in the vehicle of the word. In so doing, Derrida performs a strange operation in language; already in the catachresis where he changes vehicles like a pilot in his ship, the displacement is effected.137 The metaphor is emptied out by being literalised as its 137

That this allusion is to Descartes and his metaphor of the inhabitation of the body, returns to the question of Being that is opened in both ‘White Mythology’ and ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’. Where the former interrogates the way in which

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Metaphor own meaning. Derrida annuls the metaphor by metaphorising, and therefore re-literalising, it. By demonstrating how the metaphor is made one of a plurality of significations within the carrier of its own meaning, metaphora, he makes of the word a site for the evacuation of metaphor. The word is the place of the dissemination of meaning rather than the carrier of a unified content; metaphor relies on this correlation between the tenor and vehicle, the subject and word, and the concept relies on the effacement of the signifier in order to make it become the vehicle or transporter of a transparent meaning. What Derrida shows is that it is the word that deconstructs the concept: if metaphor relies on the transmissibility of a single and unified content in the vehicle of the signifier, the vehicle of the signifier, such as he writes it, demonstrates the impossibility of metaphor. What then appears to be an extended metaphor in Derrida is actually a reading of metaphorisation and its failure as such; what at first seems to be performative, a metaphor that shows the problematic of metaphor, is the very annulment of that performative, if it were to be predicated upon the success of showing the problematic status of the figure through a complex, though ‘readable’, metaphor. Where the passage succeeds is in showing the evacuation of metaphor in the syntagmatic use of the word, which should carry the concept, to disrupt the concept predicated upon the supposition of the function of that word within it. By literalising metaphora and thereby in the same movement employing the word as metaphorical, Derrida then is able to show a reserve of signification that exceeds metaphor.

Aristotle treats of metaphor through a thinking which is metaphoric, the latter, from which this extract is taken, examines the Heideggerian formulation of the trope. It is a return to an ‘old subject’, one that ‘occupies the West, inhabits it or lets itself be inhabited’ (DRWP 102). Metaphor, or philosophy, is both an old ‘subject’ and the metaphoric subject of the West: the word is given the literal and figurative meaning and the discourse inexorably returns to the inescapability of metaphor. When Derrida discusses metaphor in terms of the voyage – when he thus meta-metaphorises its linguistic movement – he is echoing Heidegger’s thinking. The retrait, both a return and a retracing, considers Heidegger’s withdrawal of Being in terms of a path where metaphor retreats; however, Derrida reads Heidegger as re-enfolding metaphoricity back into his thinking of its retreat.

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Mimesis

Mimesis (I:D/TMPP 25) The question of mimesis is a critical question – the question of criticism, in other words, of decision. Mimesis will direct us, leaving its mark on questions of literature, being and circularity, and from there to the matter of excess in writing as the excess beyond representation. It will do so first in terms of that which cannot be represented but which nonetheless demands reading. Second, it will direct our attention to that within representation and the present, as well as the presence that representation suggests as commensurate with the present, the traces of history. These arrive not as reminders of presence having passed, but as remainders of the historical, occluded in the aesthetic work of representation. It is not certain that one can even pretend to encompass so vast a topic as mimesis or represent it in a sketch such as this, not least because the history of its reception in Western philosophy is a history marked by avoidance. As Derrida comments, one cannot avoid missing mimesis as soon as one identifies it, and wants to decide on its truth value. The assumed and historically repeated relation between mimesis and truth put in place over and over again, as, for example, in Plato, Heidegger, and Girard . . . in very different, but finally analogous ways, testifies to how such avoidance takes place when one decides on this simulacrum of a relationship. The ‘concept’ of mimesis is as old as that of art itself. One figures the other like two shoes that are not necessarily a pair. But if one figures the other, there is no saying, no deciding on which comes first. Each becomes the other of the other, a figure of, for, the other. Yet before rushing to assume mimesis, we would do well to remind ourselves that one cannot properly define mimesis because, as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe cautions us on the subject, there is nothing proper to mimesis, it has no property of its own.138 One would not find it if one had not alrady missed it in looking for it. It cannot by definition be defined but can only be exemplified through singular manifestations of art, which are read as being mimetic, and which are read therefore as being faithful or true to mimesis, even as in circular or framing fashion mimesis as concept is what is taken to measure the representation of what is true in art. Mimesis does not exist there138

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, intro. Jacques Derrida, ed. Christopher Fynsk, ed. asst. Linda M. Brooks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 116.

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Mimesis fore. To wish to ‘identify’ mimesis is to miss fundamentally what it is and is not by attempting, mistakenly, to confer on it an essence or a property, a truth to be revealed. It is a phantom-discourse, a spectral support or subjectile on which the ‘truth in painting’ is wagered. Derrida writes ‘The Double Session’ as two halves, as a double response to two passages, one by Plato from the Philebus, the other from the work of Stéphane Mallarmé from a text titled Mimique. Of the two halves, Derrida comments at the outset of the ‘half’ printed in second place, that they exist ‘only through the fiction of a crease’ (D 227). By virtue of the hinge, then, the crack or bracket, the fold or brisure, is the text doubled. The two ‘sessions’ or scenes are not whole in themselves, Derrida confesses, nor together do they form a finished or symmetrical structure or presentation. In ‘The Double Session’ Derrida not only draws our attention to Plato’s marriage of art with mimesis, as though the two ‘halves’ did in fact form a whole, but also how, in a wedding which is more a welding, there takes place the instantiation of a tradition in Western philosophy of perceiving mimesis predominantly in terms of the idea of truth and the decision that essentialises, constituting its truth value. From mimesis and through his reading of the Philebus, Derrida coins the neologism mimetologism. He does so in order to illustrate the homohegemonic logic of the mimetic, as that which is already at work in the tension between the extracts from Plato and Mallarmé. On the one hand, what is staged is the extent to which the mimetologic has dominated literature throughout the history of Western culture. On the other hand, Derrida’s purpose is to demonstrate literature’s potential for calling into question this mimetologic demand and, we might suggest, its law. Beginning by disturbing the assumptions that underpin the ontological interrogation ‘what is literature?’ as a question destined by the desire for truth not dissimilar to the quest in the name of mimesis, Derrida illustrates through a deployment of figures of speech signifying the constructedness of a work of art, how literature stages a resistance to the demand for truth and the mimetologic imperative. He effects this not through dialectical opposition – for otherwise there would be re-established two implicit halves to a whole, with the binarism, truth/literature cemented in place – but through what we have already identified as a more affirmative resistance to the demand for truth. This affirmative resistance is carried out specifically through performative gestures of mimicry and imitation and through the insertion of ‘the poetic text into the very “process 231

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Mimesis of truth” which has always been philosophy’s exclusive concern’.139 In doing so, Derrida dismantles the frameworks that hold in place concepts of truth and fiction, illusion and reality, original and copy, and so on. At the same time, however – and as on so many other occasions – Derrida does not simply unhinge the frame, thereby effecting a structural undoing. He also erases the boundaries that keep in place concepts of presence and absence, present and past. In this manner, through the agency of Mallarmé’s prose poem, Derrida traces the deconstruction of philosophy by that which it has always sought to condemn or exclude.140 Having announced, apparently disingenuously, that this ‘double session’ is ‘concerned with the question what is literature’ (D 177) – a question that Derrida insists takes place ‘between literature and truth, between literature and that by which the question what is? wants answering’ (D 177) – he then proposes that the ‘mimetic system . . . as a system of illustration’ (D 183) is, itself, illustrated in this mode by Mallarmé’s Mimique, that short piece inserted by Derrida into Plato. If you pause for a moment to reflect on the internal parenthesis that I have inserted into the, admittedly, lengthy and somewhat circuitous sentence with which this paragraph begins, you might notice something. This interjection, which qualifies the question what is literature, folds into itself another quotation. The second citation is divided between two clauses. Derrida’s syntax is arranged in such a way that the initial ontological query is located not as an originary inquiry, but as itself already located between. The question therefore is a mark, the sign of an anterior postulation. The logic implicit here is that though the ontological question is conventionally understood as a founding question, and therefore an opening of the discourse on the way to truth, in reality, it arises belatedly. For it can only be asked if truth and literature are situated as opponents as if they were already in place in the first place, where the latter is either marginalised, condemned or excluded by the former. I say as if they occupied this a priori position, as though this were somehow established, a given, and not a convenient rhetorical illustration of a binarism for Plato. Truth on the one hand, and literature (and its more or less spectral cognates, fiction, lying, perjury) on the other, 139

140

Peggy Kamuf, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Chapter Seven, in P. Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 169–70, at p. 169. Kamuf, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, p. 169.

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Mimesis into the midst of which, belatedly, there arises the question what is literature. Derrida therefore unfolds, in his inaugural gambit, the folds of a structure conventionally assumed, in order to dismantle the convention, the habit and the institutional that haunts all such forms, forms which, as we shall see mark not only Plato’s text but ‘if one reconstitutes the system, the whole of a history . . . And this history, if it has any meaning, is governed in its entirety by the value of truth and by a certain relation, inscribed in the hymen in question, between literature and truth’ (D 183). Hymen might strike you as an odd word, and this would need reflection were there space.141 However, for now, we should continue with the parenthesis above, for what I have just described is not all that takes place. Returning to my cordoned citation, it will be observed that, having marked the between as the place on which the ontological question hangs, Derrida then unravels a further clause: between literature and that by which the question what is? wants answering. Truth is replaced here, the previous neat formula taken to pieces. The logic of what lies behind or before truth is thus unveiled in that that by which and what comes after it. Truth is therefore not assumed by Derrida, it is not accepted as a philosopheme, a self-evident, simple metalinguistic or universal, metaphysical concept. Instead, one is invited to step back before ‘truth’ to investigate the structure of this concept, what it includes, what it excludes. Although only at the beginning, Derrida proceeds through a necessary caution and rigour, and above all else perhaps a suspension, an interruption almost before one gets underway, of habits and assumptions of thought. A framework is being revealed here, as that same framework is being opened outwards beyond itself, into the figure impossible to represent directly, the mise-en-abyme. Much of what Derrida has to say of the relation between literature and truth though can also be thought in terms of art and truth, especially as this may be reflected through the category, the concept of 141

Hymen signifies a certain undecidability as Derrida appropriates the figure. While the term is an archaic or poetic synomym for marriage and therefore symbolic union it is also, obviously, that female bodily membrane that separates, for instance, virginity from its loss or the ‘absence’ of virginity, or, until it is broken inside from outside, and therefore perhaps self and other, in a strictly corporeal sense. (Derrida also employs the figure of the tympan, the membrane of the ear, in similar ways.) As a membrane that plays on the opposition between inside and outside, the figure of the hymen also traverses and so renders unstable any absolute distinction between the two.

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Mimesis mimesis, which ‘ “precedes” truth in a certain sense . . . destabilizing it in advance’ (I:D/TMPP 27). If I may risk a detour here, I would like to ask in the light of this statement, how does mimesis destabilise the truth which supposedly it proves, or by which ‘concept’ the philosopher supports his presentation of truth? Let me frame this for you. First, if mimesis is nothing as such but must always be exemplified and, second, if every example is singular and therefore differs from every other, it therefore follows that mimesis does not exist. It is not reducible to an ‘it-ness’, some stable, universal ipseity, which holds true each and every time, or from time to time. In order to equate mimesis with truth, the assumption has to proceed that mimesis is a stable a priori category or concept, having its own internally coherent truthfulness, to which it is always and equally faithful. So the concept of mimesis precedes truth in the philosopher’s construction of his aesthetic reflection on a work of literature or art, in order for that work to embody through its interpreted, allegedly illustrative mimetologism, the truth in painting, the truth in literature. Yet, the radical singularity and emptiness of the mimetic has to be comprehended as arriving before the truth only to destabilise the very idea or concept of Truth universally perceived as constant, as having its own internal coherence and conceptual, ontological or structural undifferentiated cohesion. Returning though to the discussion of this subject in ‘The Double Session’, there is at work a chain of words. These are easily missed, if one thinks of them as merely rhetoric, simply figures of speech, and so passes over them, or sees through them. Reading on the way to somewhere else, as though the sentence were a route map, you do not see necessarily what is being staged, how the presentation is being framed. Let me illustrate what I mean by picking up on some of Derrida’s intermittent stitches that hold the text together: ‘fold . . . outline . . . mark out . . . a few rough strokes, a certain number of motifs. These strokes might be seen to form a sort of frame, the enclosure or borders of a history that would be that of a certain play between literature and truth. The history of this relationship would be organized by . . . a certain interpretation of mimesis’ (D 183). The excerpt just cited comes before the extract already quoted and considered. In folding back on the passage, I want to draw your attention to the figural language by which Derrida both stages and frames his analysis of a particular history as interpretation, rather than being a history of mimesis represented as without support. Playing between the motifs of adumbration and the parergon, Derrida draws us an illustration of what is to come. He anticipates his own interpretative 234

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Mimesis illustration that is to be unfolded through the chapter. At the same time, he constitutes the frame into which the very same illustration, of which the frame is a part, not merely the marginal enclosure or border, is to be presented. The caution Derrida exhibits here doubles the framing gesture even as it opens or unfolds to a certain perspicacious gaze – as though from an angle of parallax – the ‘secret’ that mimesis understood as copy or illustration and therefore key to, representation of, truth, is always already inhabited, haunted, by interpretation, narrative, displacement and deferral. Mimesis cannot be represented as such, it must be explained and so, in recognising this, one sees how mimesis itself is not direct representation however much its mode of envisioning appears as a faithful copy of some displaced original no longer present. Instead, mimesis is anticipated in its interpretative role as a mimicry of the real, itself an interpretation, a translation and not the truth of some reality, some thing. Mimesis is a writing that exceeds in being sketched, drawn, framed, narrated, that to which it is taken as being a true and faithful copy. Derrida’s complication of his own phrasing is itself illustrative in its semantic as well as grammatical iterability. Reiterating itself, folding and unfolding itself through the cautionary reflux and variation of motifs, tropes and figures, it structures its form, framing and unframing itself, opening up the interpretative process in the gesture of anticipatory illustration. In so doing, there is maintained a certain distance from the semantic or signified content, the truth of its argument. However, simultaneously, there is apart from this distanciation that amounts to a framing, a performative dimension to the commentary also, for that performative amounts to the ‘interpretative’ aspect of framing that defines the illustration and provides its borders as being an illustration of something, it being a discourse of and on its subject. This ‘truth’ is therefore always already displaced, deferred, within the very folds of its unveiling. Never present or a presence but perceived indirectly through the work of writing and différance, truth as such is never available in any pure, simple form. Mimesis and, more importantly, mimetologism, or, at least, a certain history of mimetologic discourse, has always aimed to deny this differentiation through the logos of its truth, the truth in representation. Put simply: illustration is always already an interpretation. It is a mode of mediation that hides more or less skilfully the structures and framing devices of its translative powers. Having thus complicated the picture, we can proceed. Derrida announces and sets out four traits, thereby ‘framing’ what he takes to 235

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Mimesis be the crucial elements of the Philebus. The first trait is the observation that Plato proceeds by dialogue. The book ‘stands as a substitute for dialogue, as it calls itself’ (D 185). Writing is made to stand in as a mode of discourse for the silent soul. As representation of this, the model of dialogue seeks to bring what it imitates back to itself, giving back life and voice which are absent, deferred, displaced by the detour of writing. Dialogue thus operates as a mimetological substitute for presence. As a result of this, the second trait appears: ‘the truth of the book is decidable’ (D 185). Although the dialogue is an invention, a fiction belonging to the work of art, what it has to convey is truth. The book therefore serves truth, inasmuch as the author sets out in writing truthfully the truth of that which he seeks to represent, according to the ‘tribunal of dialectics and ontology’ (D 185). Writing is therefore judged according to its mimetic fidelity, according to ‘whether it is in conformity . . . to the true’ (D 185). Truth, the true, it must be seen in the Platonic dialogue is an absolute value. And it is over the question of value, the value of the book, that Derrida then identifies and traces the third trait. Writing ‘is neither good nor bad, neither true nor false’ in the Platonic context, its value is not intrinsic. The Platonic notion of the book, ‘which copies, reproduces, imitates living discourse, is worth only as much as the discourse is worth’ (D 185). In that writing is a dead and exterior form of voice, and therefore life and presence, it can never be worth more than the living discourse in its truthfulness, it can only be less in value. Writing is therefore always secondary, a debased if necessary modality, ‘interpreted as an imitation, a duplicate of the living voice or present logos’ (D 185). Derrida is quick to point out that writing in general is not literary writing. In the Republic, ‘poets are only judged and condemned for being imitators, mimes’ (D 186). Although historically what we think of as literature is a relatively recent historical invention having to do with a certain epoch in Western culture associated with particular legal rights and the concept of the individual subject, yet, as Derrida comments, from Plato on ‘the whole history of the interpretation of the arts of letters has moved and been transformed within the diverse logical possibilities opened up by the concept of mimesis’ (D 187). And finally, ‘a fourth trait, to finish out the frame of this text’ (D 187), playing still between interpretation and illustration, between the illustrative interpretation of the Platonic text, and the interpretative illustration that the Platonic text affords the interpretation of illustration, representation, and of course mimesis as representa236

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Mimesis tional modalities subordinated to the true. The book, already conceived as copy, is moreover taken to be a particular form of copy, an ‘image in general . . . the imaginary’ (D 187). In other words, writing illustrates, it serves to occlude its translative, copying powers, when put to work to produce the faithful image, identified as a ‘phantasm’ (D 187), as the truth, as phantasm of the true. However, if the book and the soul are compared to one another, then both imitate the other equally. Each is therefore read as a phantasmatic image, a likeness of the other (D 188). This has profound ramifications. If the soul resembles a book and vice versa, then the order of original/copy collapses. The book then, ‘reproduces the logos’ [i.e. the true, Truth, which implicitly remains unavailable to representation] and the whole is organized by this relation of repetition, resemblance . . . doubling, duplication, this sort of specular process and play of reflections where things . . . speech, and writing come to repeat and mirror each other. (D 188)

Far from stabilizing meaning, identity or truth, writing opens onto that hall of mirrors, as a mise-en-abyme. Painting and writing ‘can only be images of each other [in Plato and after him, as Derrida has it] to the extent that they are both interpreted as images, reproductions, representations, or repetitions of something alive’ (D 188). And as soon as one seeks to speak of the relation between literature or art and truth, one immediately opens up the possibility that truth or something alive, the living word or the living animal for the writer on the one hand or the painter on the other, is always already haunted by the possibility of doubling and division, spacing, duplication and ‘the enigmatic possibility of repetition within the [implicitly mimetic or mimetologic] framework of the portrait’ (D 188). Once again, Derrida draws on the metaphorical resources of mimetic art and its supports not merely to structure and present his argument, but also to perform the image of the counter-Platonic argument. Mimesis comes into play as the driving force, the ghost in the machine producing even as it undermines the classical model of mimesis as truth. A painting or image illustrative of a truth that is taken as mimetic and therefore faithful and truthful remain always copies, the sum of their traits, produced in distinction from whatever is held to be the original, as we have argued. They expose the inherently ineluctable iterability of the copy, and the signs of the copy within what is supposedly any ‘original’ or ‘unique’ meaning, destabilising in advance the truth. It therefore follows from this that the mimetic work, the 237

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Name text as copy, is, as we have seen, both a double and a displacement. The image precedes the original after a certain fashion, being both copy, duplication and memory of a past present and the image of an anterior ideal to come, always already a supplementary double, ‘the same as and different from what it duplicates’ (D 191). It always enters into this relation, and structure, in coming into being. Never the thing as such, in order to be read as mimetic it must be always already the composite or constellation of traits, which in the sheaf or mesh of their network signal the retreat of the original, the real, the true, in coming to appear as they do in a more or less mimetic form. Mimesis in the singular forms of its manifestations is therefore operative only through an identification of the other, however close the resemblance or representation, and so takes place through the force of what it ‘ruins, destabilizes, (de)constructs’ (I:D/TMPP 30). It is not that there is no mimesis. Rather, there is neither an essence [n]or a property; it is the very mimetic condition of mimesis that the radicality of what I would call the mimetic-performative disavows, ahead of and in resistance to all efforts to theorise finally mimesis as a codifiable and repeatable mimetologism. All the traits gathered and woven in the simultaneity of a formal ‘de/construction’ that is the possibility of a pictorial work of art such as a portrait therefore are a writing, not an undifferentiated representation. Any mimetic illustration is haunted by the motions of writing, the text that it stages and by which it takes place, by which the stage or scene is staged, giving to meaning or identity the very possibility of their projection, even in their undoing and ruination.

N Name (IS/LAN 1–5) Many of the texts gathered under the signature of Jacques Derrida, a name which was not in fact his by birth, are given to the question of the name. Even where that question does not arise explicitly, as it does for example in On the Name, it is implicit throughout the work. As the question of différance is that of deconstruction, and insofar as the latter does not exist and cannot be identified as such, it can have no name; any methodology or philosophy constituted through the proper name of ‘deconstruction’ is open to that which it is not, 238

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Name text as copy, is, as we have seen, both a double and a displacement. The image precedes the original after a certain fashion, being both copy, duplication and memory of a past present and the image of an anterior ideal to come, always already a supplementary double, ‘the same as and different from what it duplicates’ (D 191). It always enters into this relation, and structure, in coming into being. Never the thing as such, in order to be read as mimetic it must be always already the composite or constellation of traits, which in the sheaf or mesh of their network signal the retreat of the original, the real, the true, in coming to appear as they do in a more or less mimetic form. Mimesis in the singular forms of its manifestations is therefore operative only through an identification of the other, however close the resemblance or representation, and so takes place through the force of what it ‘ruins, destabilizes, (de)constructs’ (I:D/TMPP 30). It is not that there is no mimesis. Rather, there is neither an essence [n]or a property; it is the very mimetic condition of mimesis that the radicality of what I would call the mimetic-performative disavows, ahead of and in resistance to all efforts to theorise finally mimesis as a codifiable and repeatable mimetologism. All the traits gathered and woven in the simultaneity of a formal ‘de/construction’ that is the possibility of a pictorial work of art such as a portrait therefore are a writing, not an undifferentiated representation. Any mimetic illustration is haunted by the motions of writing, the text that it stages and by which it takes place, by which the stage or scene is staged, giving to meaning or identity the very possibility of their projection, even in their undoing and ruination.

N Name (IS/LAN 1–5) Many of the texts gathered under the signature of Jacques Derrida, a name which was not in fact his by birth, are given to the question of the name. Even where that question does not arise explicitly, as it does for example in On the Name, it is implicit throughout the work. As the question of différance is that of deconstruction, and insofar as the latter does not exist and cannot be identified as such, it can have no name; any methodology or philosophy constituted through the proper name of ‘deconstruction’ is open to that which it is not, 238

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Name a deconstruction which cannot be named except where that name remains under erasure and subject to the recognition that it is a legal fiction. Therefore Derrida associates deconstruction with différance, appearing to substitute its name for another; and yet in ‘Différance’ he states that différance, too, ‘is not a name’ (MP 26) and cannot be synonymic; it is important in terms of Derrida’s averral that neither has identity that they cannot be constituted as such through the proper name, nor by reference to each other. If neither has selfidentity, then the reference becomes to that disruption of identity in the aporetic movement of identification. It could then be considered that, in its fidelity to the work of différance, the Derridean oeuvre is implicitly always addressed towards the problem of the name. That would be to assume we can speak of a Derridean oeuvre, presuming first that the singularity of the work could be gathered together and then that this gathering could take place under the aegis of the proper name, homogenising and determining the work as such. This collecting under the name would also give to the corpus a unicity that would attempt, in totalising it through the proper, to lend it an identity both totalising and unique; it would encourage us to read the work according to an attempt to remove and protect it from discourse, giving it an identity that in the same movement of nomination constitutes the limits of the work as it guards it from infiltration. For these reasons Derrida refuses the lure of the book, choosing to read and expose the part of the whole in order to destabilise the work as whole. This act of reading that is already political is tied to the name and to the totality it calls into being as the work; ‘[d]econstruction’, Derrida writes, ‘mistrusts proper names: it will not say “Heidegger in general” says thus or so [. . .] I cannot treat a corpus, or a book, as a whole’.142 The name names death; it is structured by its survival after the death of being as it also names the structuration of being through death. Yet in moving beyond the dialectic of life and death, the name also structures survival as survivance; it ‘calls beyond presence’, ‘keeps [. . .] what is no longer present’ (AL 414–33, at 425). In addition, at the same time the name names being, it is dissociated from that being. The proper name ‘does not name anything which is human, which belongs to a human body [. . .] yet this relation to the inhuman only befalls man’ (AL 427). It befalls man because it is donated by man, who bestows upon his lineage this relation of the 142

‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’ (TS 3–92, at 9).

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Name inhuman to the human, given through the name. While the proper name gives no essence of the human to being, it is still necessitated by the human. Beyond this necessity there is also the signification held in the proper name; it is a double genitive, wherein the self-possession of the ego is signified in the name proper to that self while being given in that act of propriation. It signals, moreover, an extension of that belonging predicated upon the logic of propriation, signifying an inhabitation by but also within a lineage that is phallocentric, and to a world the anthropocentrism of which is founded within the possibility of self-possession, called as such and made unique in the name. Where the name is written, the mark of the grapheme both remarks the deferral of presence it signifies and inscribes the nominative signifier as the mark of that trace within identity, its différance to itself. Yet, as it is written, the name also inscribes itself in a testamentary relation to being, as it becomes the sign of that structuration of being through death and survival in the trace; left behind after the departure of the signatory, in its iteration the signature marks the possibility of survival at the same time it signifies the death that constitutes being, announcing it before the fact. Therefore while the name marks its survival after the death of the signatory who bears it, it marks too the survival of that signatory after death in the name. This radical dissociation of the self from the name institutes the subject from the beginning into a relation of différance that is not only symbolised but constituted in that dissociation. The fact that my name is not me but names me constitutes my self in a temporal disjointedness that cannot be recovered to presence, as I am called up in a name that is never in accordance with the time in which I am living; I am destined, according to Derrida, to seek ‘[r]endezvous with my name’ (AL 432) but to persist in a non-coincidental relation to it, therefore ultimately to a non-coincidental identity, irrecuperable to self as self-presence. Thence the aporia, for if the name does not signify an essence of the man or human, it simultaneously implicates the human into a relation of différance with the self that precludes an essence thought as self-identical. The protection from language – and therefore from a trace which would disrupt the possibility of sovereignty – that the proper name is called to effect through delimiting the self as unique is what implicates the self into the trace through language. In the extended quotation that provides this reading, taken from an article in which Derrida discusses the signature in the context of Heidegger’s eponymous reading of Nietzsche, it is yet still tempting 240

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Name to elide the first line and the name of Nietzsche. This in both a literal and figurative sense: [t]he . . . question concerns the name Nietzsche. A close reading should be attentive to the name Nietzsche, which is not synonymous with the man Nietzsche, nor with the work signed in that name. It is evidence, however, of the dominance of that identification within logic that reading attempts to efface the name in order to read it as such, in other words as identity. Where we read the name Nietzsche, we are conditioned to imagine that that name both insists upon itself and effaces itself; the former as it becomes the substitute for an essence that, as we have seen, it does not name, and the latter as it attempts to elide the difference in order to constitute it as other than the name – as identity and oeuvre, an extension of identity – though synecdochal identification. Derrida suggests that the elision that simultaneously conserves the name is bound to a metaphysical totality, both in Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche behind which one can glimpse the foundations of a general reading of Western metaphysics and in the question that reading gives rise to. If his reading of Nietzsche is as a totality which provides for a reading of philosophy as general totality, it may be because Heidegger’s interpretation of metaphysics in its totality and as a whole is itself governed by an interpretive decision about the unity or singularity of thinking. Such a choice would in and of itself be founded in that unity of thinking; therefore the decision to read Nietzsche according to a totalising system is not only born from a decision regarding the possibility of that system but from the system itself, within which the thinking of Heidegger can be seen to already be structured by the fact of the decision. Furthermore, Derrida asks to what extent this interpretation of metaphysics by Heidegger presupposes a decision about the ‘biographical,’ about the proper name . . . about the politics of signature? This question determines the prior decision, which would be made in accordance with the decision regarding the thinking of the name of Nietzsche. In discussing preliminarily Heidegger’s reading of ‘The Eternal Recurrence of the Same’ and ‘The Will to Power as Knowledge’, Derrida stresses that it is aimed towards ‘gathering together the unity and the uniqueness of Nietzsche’s thinking’, a ‘fulfilled unity’ representing the apogee of Western metaphysics and, it seems, a dual unity in that ‘Nietzsche would be [. . .] atop the peak of this fulfillment’ (IS/ LAN 1). This positing of a dual unity may seem tautologous, since if Nietzsche’s thinking is the zenith of that thinking then it follows that Nietzsche must be atop its peak; however, it appears that Derrida, 241

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Name in using the name of Nietzsche and, by doing so, tracing the conflation of the subject and work, may be inscribing the Heideggerian issue through the language of the proper name, which is as we know supposed to protect the holder from being marked by language. The question is both one of Heidegger’s thinking of the biographical and, as it is related, his thinking of Nietzsche’s work as it is already governed by that of the signature. The unity that Heidegger ascribes to Nietzschean thought is simultaneously thought to be its uniqueness, and in addition Derrida stresses the unifying act that Heidegger’s reading constitutes, an act that draws Nietzsche together as a unity but which is inseparable as an act of interpretation from that unity it ascribes to his thought and to metaphysics. In the first words of the preface then, the name is placed in quotation marks. [W]hat happens, Derrida asks, when a proper name is placed between quotation marks? For one who does not know the German text, it marks the unification of that thinker with his thought, not the being of the thinker but his proper name. The proper name would thus be considered in some way the authorising autobiography, the legislating signature, suggesting that the name of the thinker would thus be the cause of his thought; this is a paraphrase of this sentence as it appears in the translation of Klossowski. If we were to return, however, to the earlier discussion, we could also consider the placing of the name within quotation marks as a signifier of that which is already improper within the name and which remarks the dissociation of being from belonging. This reading is provided for in the notes to the translation, where cause [Sache] is justified by Heidegger in terms of a juridical metaphor wherein a case is described as the position of one party in relation to that of another. The use of cause here puts the name of Nietzsche into relation with his thought without authorising it as the effect caused by his proper name or instituting an act of reading governed by that thinking of the name whereby Heidegger’s text would become a book on the name Nietzsche and on the connections between his name and his thought. The question of the name, co-implying the question of the title by which it is named, undergoes a further revision in relation to the German text and its use of Sache, where ‘ “Nietzsche, the name of the thinker stands as title for die Sache seines Denkens,” the subject-matter [Sache] of his thought, for what he thinks’ (IS/LAN 6). Where cause is normally translated as Ursache, Derrida writes, it is distinguished from Sache, which means the thing put in question. When [Heidegger] says that the name of the thinker – ‘Nietzsche’ 242

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Name – stands as title ‘for the Sache of his thinking,’ he certainly does not intend to make the name the cause of an effect that would be the thinking. Rather, the genitive ‘of’ here designates the Sache (‘matter’) as his thinking. The name stands for the affair or matter [Sache] of his thinking, not as that thinking is synonymous with the name and generated from it. The removal of the name as cause is confirmed in the dissociation of the name from the individual, where it instead names or entitles his thought, and the thought is dissociated from him as individual – effecting a death of the author – in that movement. Once one considers the proper name not as that of an indvidual . . . it is the name of a thought. In turn, the unity of this thought as Heidegger thinks it, though as Derrida notes it is unique in being dislocated from the unity of a system, gives in return sense and reference to the proper name. The radical dissociation of the proper name from the individual as identity, where that identity then authorises others – such as the identity of a corpus – is brought about in that linguistic genitive wherein the proper name belongs not to the individual but is nothing other than the name of this thinking. The individual is then thought in relation to that thinking, rather than as its anterior guarantor. Derrida concludes by saying that two paths present themselves, one presenting a new approach to the problematic of the name that would be a type of Nietzschean approach separated from the life of the thinker and thought within the context of the eternal recurrence of the same. The alternative would be to determine the essentiality of the name from the ‘subject matter of thought,’ of thought itself defined as the content of theses, and to let fall into inessentiality the particular proper name. This thinking, as in the case of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, formalises the dissociation between the proper name and the essence of its bearer, letting the name itself fall into inessentiality as it pertains to the proper. The essence of the name would be given as the subject matter [Sache] of the thinking gathered under that name, so that the question of entitlement is also one of determination: ‘Nietzsche’, named according to this path, becomes ‘Who is Nietzsche?’, where that question is answered through the content – matter – of thought itself. The name is a question of thinking, in the double genitive; ‘Nietzsche’ is of his thinking.

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Origin

O Origin (MP 279–80) Suppose the impossible. This is what is called for in any thinking of, or search for, an ‘origin’: we find ourselves involved in a speculation on the possibility of the impossible, specifically in this guise of mapping or determining so-called ‘origins’. It is necessary to recognise though that such labour would have to proceed in the face of the unmappable, as though the inscription of every topographical coordinate invoked or implied countless others, in a constellation that, far from being exhaustible, would moreover enervate in the face of its own generative powers, around the idea of ‘origin’. Before – such a fantasy! – the location of any origin as such there would take place inevitably and inescapably multiplicity and multiplication, a fraying even as one seeks to tie together loose ends. One has, therefore, to turn back, to define the starting place of this chapter not as a starting point at all, but instead as a necessary response, a reaction, to the impossible injunction and the impossibility that the injunction addresses and comes to proliferate. Doubtless, there is more to say about this imaginary scenario, but to leave this for now, what can be offered is this: in any thinking of ‘origin’, the idea of ‘origin’ serves as an hypostasised concept, disguising its passage in thought as a supplement to any thinking of, or search for, ‘origin’. To hypothesise about or otherwise to inquire into the origins of ‘deconstruction’ is to repeat, whether intentionally or otherwise, the age-old metaphysical demand or desire for foundation, for Logos and, from such a location, to reiterate the desire for discernible order or progression as the historicity of that founding originary site or concept. Accompanying such an inquiry for an ideality, at once ‘supratemporal and omnitemporal’, would be the assumption of or search for an absent presence or identity, which, in itself, is comprehended as complete, undifferentiated, homogeneous, full, simple and self-sufficient. One behaves as though there were both beginnings and a traceable continuity between those beginnings and the point at which any such inquiry begins with the injunction to turn back, as though one could offer, in Jacques Derrida’s words, the reconstitution of ‘the pure tradition of a primordial Logos toward a polar Telos’ (EHOG 149). Derrida has in a number of places addressed the logic of a search such as the one just sketched, and, equally, its 244

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Origin fruitlessness. It is tempting to suggest that this ‘major concern of Derrida’s analysis’, as Arkady Plotnitsky sums it up,143 has been with Derrida from the beginning of his published works in 1962, with the ‘Introduction to The Origin of Geometry’. ‘The Time before First’ offers another example (D 330–40). While the motif of ‘origin’ or ‘origins’ as starting points appear to promise a beginning in being called to our attention, such a gesture only ‘ “begins” by following a certain vestige. I.e. a certain repetition or text’ (D 330). In ‘Qual Quelle’ (MP 273–306) the impossibility of assigning either origin or source is also considered, as Derrida responds to these motifs in relation to questions of identity and consciousness in the text of Paul Valéry. The source cannot be reassembled into its originary unity. In addition, we learn it is the philosopher, as exemplary representative of the laws of the institutional search outlined above, who (according to Valéry), always in search of the origin, of an originary voice or presence, voice as the guarantee of presence, reproduces what Derrida calls the ‘crisis of the origin’ (MP 291). The impossible attempt to consider the concept of origins, the origin, the very idea of an origin or origins for or of the notion of the origin (an origin, some origin) or, in fact, considering origins in all their impossibility, clearly becomes even more impossible when the question concerning the location of origins is linked to this strange word, deconstruction. It appears then that I am asked to think with supposition and with speculation, supposing for the moment supposition or speculation to be modalities of thinking rather than the suspension of thought narrowly conceived in favour of some process of projection or conception, and asking for some impossible answer. The answer is impossible, strictly speaking, because the very idea of an answer implicitly assumes a moment of finality. There is implicit, often all the more marked for being so tacit, in the idea of an answer the assumption of speculation, projection and conception as modalities of thought that are perhaps related to but not wholly consonant with the rigorous thinking of a concept. There is furthermore in the assumption of the speculative project the idea that its problems can come to rest so that, teleologically or hermeneutically, where one ends is the origin itself, unfolded and refolded onto itself, a supplementary doubling of what had been there all along. As though the end were the beginning, as though destination were origin. The 143

Arkady Plotnitsky, In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993), p. 238.

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Origin logic of circularity and the circularity of logic here inscribed are clearly haunted. And what haunts the effect of closing the circle is this phantom or phantasm of the origin, an origin, from the very elusiveness of which one must start all over again. What disturbs therefore is a barely submerged desire, all the more compulsive for being so caught up with the impossible and masquerading as some institutionally authorissed archaeological or archival retrospect, which aims to justify its teleological and theological goals through the ‘identification’ of ‘origin’. Believing one can begin at all reveals in any such inaugural gesture the call of the institution, and the subjection of subjection interpellated by that call. The very idea of the origin is thus that which arises inevitably and the search for the origin or origins belongs to a question or family of questions impossible to answer – what if? What if there were origins, say, for deconstruction (for example, to take the most impossible of ‘topics’), what if there were an origin or origins of deconstruction? But this meaning denominated as proper can appear for us within the element of familiarity only if we already know, or believe that we already know, what we are thinking concerning the idea of the origin, beginning, source or starting point. This is the phantasm of the starting point, the illusion of a beginning, and, it has to be added, a beginning all over again. Such a start, such an ‘origin’, begins and can only begin then as a response to a response, which in its recursive gambit, gesture or rhetoric acknowledges institutional or immemorial complicity with the meaning of the word origin. Such circularity concerning origin is observed, once again, by Heidegger, in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’.144 At the very beginning of the essay, Heidegger, stating that the ‘question concerning the origin of the work of art asks about the source of its nature’, offers the predictable answer – ‘the usual view’ – to that question: the artist.145 Immediately after, however, the question and answer are folded back on themselves, as Heidegger continues by pointing out that the determination of the artist as artist only arises as a result of the work: ‘The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist.’146 Thus ‘origin here means that from and by which something is what it 144

145 146

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and intro. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 15–89. Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p. 17. Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p. 17.

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Origin is and as it is.’147 On this understanding, no absolute origin is either possible or conceivable, given the enfolding and regenerative reciprocity of the structural schema proposed by Heidegger; a schema, I would add, which propels itself in a double act: that of a doubling of any singular locatable place of origin outside or before any event, and also a dismantling, not only of the traditional conceptualisation of origin, but also of the stabilising separatism of the binary calculation: artist/work. Interestingly, Heidegger’s gesture also disturbs the temporal priority on which any notion of origin is founded. More than this, however, there is in Heidegger’s instituting complication a performative element. Clearly displacing itself as a response to a question arriving from some other place, Heidegger’s beginning, in Dennis J. Schmidt’s words, ‘must not be taken as an excuse for an awkward or misfired beginning to the text but as a comment on the character of the beginning as such.’148 However, I would argue for risking a stronger reading than Schmidt’s: as just stated, Heidegger’s gambit works so startlingly precisely because he does not merely comment on his subject, as would the philosopher on the source, issuing what he or she believes to be a constative statement. Rather, the performative dimension has to be insisted on here. It is precisely this performativity which destabilises logical calculation from within, radicalising the thinking of origin from the start. And yet, of course, it is not so simple to decide on whether Heidegger’s argument or the way in which he states it are simply either performative or constative. For, similar to the suspensive operation at work in Heidegger’s scandalous assertions concerning a disseminative reciprocity between artist and work (or work and artist), so too, before any determination, his own discourse materially suspends the possibility of identification through its redoublings and divisions, especially in the first page, but also, arguably, throughout the entire essay. As J. Hillis Miller remarks apropos this suspension between the constative and performative, ‘[t]he tension between the two functions means that the performative 147 148

Heidegger, ‘Origin’, p. 17. Dennis J. Schmidt, The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 102. Schmidt’s reading continues in the same passage by pointing out how ‘Heidegger opposes the figure of circularity to the traditional metaphysical admiration for . . . syllogistic straight lines.’ Such straight lines, such unbroken linearity in general, are, doubtless, those that would trace the continuity between a discourse, subject or concept, and its origin.

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Origin aspect of the text makes it produce deceptive, illusory knowledge, or the illusion of knowledge.’149 But this is merely an illustration and a detour. If I attempt to imagine an origin or more than one origin, or even no more origins either for or of deconstruction, deconstructions, my response is then not a beginning as such (but this is already announced and is hardly original). I find myself entering into or, perhaps more accurately, locating myself within and in relation to a self-reflexive circularity which disrupts the certainty of the metaphysical demand, while engaging with the possibility that such an encircling ‘opens up its own conditions’. Origin, the idea in general, becomes the accomplice of metaphoricity. Reflexive engagement clearly identifies itself as a response to the call, the demand, the injunction to speculate. In turn, such an injunction arrives or arises, coming to be seen as not, itself, an instituting formulation but, rather, a response within itself, to the other in itself, to that speculative what if. Speculation hides itself and yet returns in, thereby exceeding the violence and logic (the violent logic) of institution and demand. This is where we are. Imagine though for the moment the impossible, imagine that this is the place to begin: that it is possible to start to speak of ‘origins of deconstruction’. One might start, cautiously and conventionally enough, with a quotation. Necessarily, since it [deconstruction] is neither a philosophy, nor a doctrine, nor a knowledge, nor a method, nor a discipline, not even a determinate concept, only what happens if it happens [ce qui arrive si ça arrive]. (DUG/EC 288)

It is perhaps noticeable that the bracketed French – and it seems that, if there is a history or even an origin, or origins, of deconstruction, one is always enjoined, silently, invisibly or otherwise, to bracket the French, to demarcate some boundary, some location or idiom – appears in other words in my title. As one beginning, I have let go the more normative, more conventional translation (what happens if it happens) in the title, in order to emphasise arrival, a certain unexpected yet inevitable phantom insistence, a certain idiomatic interruption or eruption of arrival, as though arrival, and, specifically, the arrival of an origin, never happened only once, for the first time, but could be spectralised, taking place over and over again, and in a 149

J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 153.

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Origin manner moreover irreducible to, uncontrollable by, any taxonomy or conceptualisation of arrival. Which, of course, takes place already in the name of deconstruction. The spectral figure of an unanticipatable arrival, the ghostly arrival of such a figure, might be said to figure – possibility of the impossible – origins-of-deconstruction. That which cannot be anticipated concerning the arrival thereby speaks of the undecidability of deconstruction/s, if I can say this, and therefore, perhaps, of ‘deconstruction’s origins’ (do deconstructions ‘originate’? do deconstructions cause origins to arrive, to happen or to come to pass? are deconstructions original?) even as origin takes place, in the chance of deconstructions. How do we do justice to this? In the face of the experience of the undecidable which the idea of the ‘origin’ names, it has to be recognised and stressed, again and again, that the very idea is enigmatic, auto-occlusive perhaps; all the more mystifying even, precisely because these names, origin, origins, are all too often deployed as though what was being named were blatant, all too obvious and self-evident, as though nothing could be clearer than the possibility of the origin. And also hieratic and encrypted. For the mere sign of an origin or origins blares the promise, the illusion, of a secret. And it is in such illusory certainty, a rhetoric, if not a hegemony, of certainty,150 that one encounters precisely the obscurity which is situated at the obscure heart of any notion of origin. Take the example and notion of tradition. Tradition both authorises and is authorised by origin. The one-and-only time of origin is what tradition (or racial purity, or the destiny of a nation) both needs and by which it keeps up the game. Influence, identity, succession, causality, resemblance, repetition, development, evolution: in short, the delineation of that which amounts to a genetic purity. This is the secret, a secret out in the open, promised by the idea of origin and yet also hidden by that very idea, which obscurity justifies the inquiry into origin, and which deconstruction arrives, if it arrives at all, to interrupt, and, in doing so, unveiling in the process 150

Not to sound too certain about this, but it is perhaps a feature of many ‘discussions’ of or, more accurately, polemics concerning origins (let us say, for example, those on the part of particular fundamentalist Christian constituencies) that certainty is hegemonic inasmuch as there is no place available for the possibility of discussion, debate, challenge, uncertainty, scepticism, speculation or, indeed, any form of discourse, dialectical or otherwise, which would be able, according to the laws and rules of the discourse on origin, to question or call into question any article of faith. Nothing perhaps is more certain about a discourse which asserts certainty when nothing could be less certain than origin.

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Performativity how proper meaning . . . is . . . the deported effect of a turn of speech, a return or detour . . .

P Performativity (LI 13–14; AtD/AiID 217–18) Performativity, the performative, have played an important role in Derrida’s work. The performative might be said to be at the heart of a certain deconstruction; or, perhaps that deconstruction, if there is such a thing, is always performative. Never a commentary on, but always an operation within, deconstruction takes place, staging an effect in its motions: deconstruction is not a doctrine; it’s not a method, nor is it a set of rules or tools; it cannot be separated from performatives. Derrida formalises a radical notion of the performative in addressing the instability of speech acts, even as he destabilises the separation of performative and constative as this is originally conceived. His analysis of the performative in ‘Signature Event Context’ arrives as a response to J. L. Austin who distinguishes between constative and performative or illocutionary utterances. The former is an ‘assertion’ or ‘description, while the latter is ‘an utterance which allows us to do something by means of speech itself’ (LI 6–7). To amplify this a little: in SEC’s second half, Derrida offers an extended discussion of Austin, particularly the idea of the performative as Austin opens this notion in How to Do Things With Words. In this, the Austinian distinction between constative and performative utterances is defined as a distinction between ‘descriptive’, ‘referential’ or ‘representational’ statements and those that ‘do things’ with words. Statements that are taken as representational or referential stand ‘outside’ their subjects, conferring on them merely a form of definition: the sky is clear of clouds. So, to use Michael Berube’s helpful distinction,151 while judges in courtrooms utter performative statements in passing judgement – their words have an active effect in the process of sentencing, for example – any report on this in the 151

http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/jacques_derrida_requiescat_ in_pace_and_may_his_work_trouble_us_all/ (Saturday, 9 October 2004; accessed 3 August 2012).

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Performativity how proper meaning . . . is . . . the deported effect of a turn of speech, a return or detour . . .

P Performativity (LI 13–14; AtD/AiID 217–18) Performativity, the performative, have played an important role in Derrida’s work. The performative might be said to be at the heart of a certain deconstruction; or, perhaps that deconstruction, if there is such a thing, is always performative. Never a commentary on, but always an operation within, deconstruction takes place, staging an effect in its motions: deconstruction is not a doctrine; it’s not a method, nor is it a set of rules or tools; it cannot be separated from performatives. Derrida formalises a radical notion of the performative in addressing the instability of speech acts, even as he destabilises the separation of performative and constative as this is originally conceived. His analysis of the performative in ‘Signature Event Context’ arrives as a response to J. L. Austin who distinguishes between constative and performative or illocutionary utterances. The former is an ‘assertion’ or ‘description, while the latter is ‘an utterance which allows us to do something by means of speech itself’ (LI 6–7). To amplify this a little: in SEC’s second half, Derrida offers an extended discussion of Austin, particularly the idea of the performative as Austin opens this notion in How to Do Things With Words. In this, the Austinian distinction between constative and performative utterances is defined as a distinction between ‘descriptive’, ‘referential’ or ‘representational’ statements and those that ‘do things’ with words. Statements that are taken as representational or referential stand ‘outside’ their subjects, conferring on them merely a form of definition: the sky is clear of clouds. So, to use Michael Berube’s helpful distinction,151 while judges in courtrooms utter performative statements in passing judgement – their words have an active effect in the process of sentencing, for example – any report on this in the 151

http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/jacques_derrida_requiescat_ in_pace_and_may_his_work_trouble_us_all/ (Saturday, 9 October 2004; accessed 3 August 2012).

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Performativity media is merely relay, that is to say, representing what has taken place. Of performative utterances such as the ‘I do’ of the wedding ceremony, ‘I name this ship’, and so on, ‘to utter the sentence . . . is not to describe my doing . . . it is to do it. None of these utterances is either true or false . . . When I say . . . “I do”, I am not reporting on a marriage: I am indulging in it’ (LI 6–7). This is Austin’s definition. However, Austin qualifies the definition, pointing out that some statements, while appearing to be performatives, do not necessarily fulfil that function. They are not felicitous. The example given by Austin is of an actor in a play. Were I in a play, film or television show saying ‘I do’ in a staged marriage, then this utterance would not be ‘true’ or serious (LI 22). It would be what he terms ‘parasitic’ on the real performative speech act, but is not performative itself because it operates as a special exception, subject to different language rules (those of fiction). Austin’s inflexible and ‘proper’ sense of the limits and contexts of a speech act are questioned by Derrida. ‘Is not’, asks Derrida, ‘what Austin excludes as anomalous, exceptional, “non-serious”, that is citation . . . the determined modification of a general citationality – or rather a general iterability – without which there would not even be a “successful” performative?’ (MP 325). I will come back on other occasions – I promise – to both citation and iterability. For now though, it is important, albeit ridiculous, not to mention impossible, that I stick to the subject of the performative. Returning to Derrida’s question, you might notice how it undoes Austin’s assumptions, especially when Derrida continues by asserting that a ‘paradoxical but inevitable consequence’ of the forces of citationality and iterability is that what might be considered from Austin’s perspective a so-called successful performative is in fact and ‘necessarily an “impure” performative’ (MP 325). It is ‘impure’ precisely because in operating according to a given rule, law, institution or structure of officially and properly inscribed utterances, it is not genuine but parasitical, even in those instances where it is supposedly genuine and unique. When I say ‘I do’ or ‘I promise’ (as in the statement on English banknotes ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of . . .’), I am citing, reiterating, a formula the authenticity of which can only be attested to through the possibility of its being institutionally repeatable, the same every time. This is what makes the ‘authenticity’ of the performative ‘impure’. As my parenthetical example of the statement on each and every banknote issued by the Bank of England 251

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Performativity (since 1833) shows, the promise is a performative of an act being carried out that the words anticipate and supposedly guarantee. Or let’s take Nicholas Royle’s example: ‘if I promise . . . to provide you, in due course, with an account of Derrida’s work . . . it is always possible that this promise will not be kept.’152 Royle might have died before finishing the book. You might die before finishing reading the book. I might die before I finish writing the book in which you will read this commentary on the promise. Royle might not have meant what he said. He may not have been lying exactly, but he may not have been entirely serious. In the promise – and by extension any performative – there must be necessarily the chance that it can always fail. Hence the words on the banknote, which function structurally in a manner similar to Royle’s, are merely the iterable citation of a fiction of deferred and generalised fulfilment. Neither true nor false, they still ‘do’ something, but their doing, their structural completion, is in fact haunted by the possibility that such an act might not be fulfilled and also by the fact that the statement can always be transferred outside some genuine or originary, unique context. Derrida explains this by asking a further question. Could a performative succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable statement, in other words if the expressions I use to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming to an iterable model, and therefore if they were not identifiable in a way as ‘citation’? . . . given this structure of iteration, the intention which animates utterance will never be completely present in itself and its content . . . One will no longer be able to exclude . . . the ‘non-serious’ . . . from ‘ordinary’ language. (MP 326–7)

Any utterance, sign or mark is always available to citation and iterability. This is the very premise of communication, whereby transmission sends beyond the supposedly ‘proper context’ of a unique event (such as writing my signature). Intrinsic to this possibility of communication, of sending or posting, is the opposite yet concomitant recognition that there remains even before I have sent a post card, published an article, spoken to you on the phone, ‘the possibility that any performance may fail’.153 This is a condition of any articulation. The problem is that the performative relies, in 152 153

Nicholas Royle. The Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 27. Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 65.

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Performativity Austin’s theorisation, on the presupposition of a ‘self-conscious “I” . . . In order for a performative to be felicitous, I must mean what I say, and must know what I mean and that I mean what I say, with . . . no unconscious motives or reservations’.154 As far as Austin is concerned, the performative must ‘be uttered by a fully self-conscious ego in complete possession of its wits and its intentions’.155 The question of irony arises, inevitably. Irony would not be considered felicitous by Austin. There’s a constant destabilising force in irony, marking it with a radically undecidable condition that puts the onus of interpretation on the person hearing, receiving the communication, reading the letter, email or book. So, the performative cannot depend on consciousness. It can always have the power to produce unforeseen effects in its arrival, over which I have no control. In order to be truly, radically performative, the performative must operate as ‘a “communication” which does not essentially limit itself to transporting an already constituted semantic content guarded by its own aiming at truth’ (MP 322). It is precisely, ironically, because irony relies on a certain parasitic citation or borrowing from seemingly antithetical statements, which logic would dictate cannot function simultaneously, that its performative force exceeds the limits of some proper form of communication and transport. And what goes for irony also goes, at least in principle, for all language. The performative is always already haunted therefore. ‘Spooky and perverse’,156 the performative is always already structured by the perverformative (PC 136). It acts perversely. It perverts intention. What haunts it is its failure, as I’ve said, but also its nonseriousness, its inability to guarantee fulfilling its intention, and also its failure, despite my best intentions, to remain felicitious, sincere, true to itself. Therefore, I know of no other way to begin than by repeating myself apropos ‘deconstruction’. A word associated with Jacques Derrida, it is moreover a word given in a number of contexts as a master term for ‘what Derrida does’. It thus becomes a determination and identification signalling a critical practice, an approach to the act of reading, interpretation and, therefore, a methodology. This is to a large degree a fallacious assumption and yet it persists. 154

155 156

J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 28–9. Miller, Speech Acts, p. 32. Royle, The Uncanny, p. 29.

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Performativity Deconstruction is conventionally recognised as a school or method of criticism. Equally conventionally – which in some cases means without thinking or avoiding thought – when thought of as a school, method or critical programme, deconstruction is (mis)understood to have been developed by Derrida. At the same time, where this misperception still persists, there is the occasional expression of a desire that ‘it’ (this assumed, so-called deconstruction) would vanish. The desire is not articulated directly but takes place as something of a performative commentary (it is performative to the extent that what it expresses is the desired state longed for beneath the seeming affirmation of fact). As it was put to me in March 2006, ‘now that deconstruction is moribund, what is the purpose of continuing to read Derrida’? Had the second part of the statement, the question, been asked on its own this would have elicited a very different kind of response to the one I gave, the one which, in some detail and with some elaboration I feel compelled to repeat. However, that I am repeating myself takes place because of that inaugural clause: now that deconstruction is moribund. Not a question but an assertion, its rhetorical mode is one of disingenuous bullying – or it would be if one felt bullied. Equally, one might say it sounds like a wish. The statement amounts to a performative. For it does not so much describe a situation merely (this would be a constative speech act, operating on its subject from outside, as in the statement, ‘the sky is blue’), as it takes on the form of an acting out or ‘doing’ – hence performative. It says, I wish or I want deconstruction to be moribund. It says that, however, from a quite stunning lack of comprehension. What it hides in its bluster of certainty is the anxiety of the person asking the question, someone who despite the desire to appear a good reader nonetheless wants to close the book on deconstruction. Resisting any positivist or constructivist tendencies implicit in the conventional critical determination of deconstruction, Derrida has this to say: You know the programme; [deconstruction] cannot be applied because deconstruction is not a doctrine; it’s not a method, nor is it a set of rules or tools; it cannot be separated from performatives . . . On the one hand, there is no ‘applied deconstruction’. But on the other hand, there is nothing else, since deconstruction doesn’t consist in a set of theorems, axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods. If deconstruction, then, is nothing by itself, the only thing it can do is apply, to be applied, to something else, not only in more than one language, but also with something else. There is no deconstruction, deconstruction has no specific object . . . Deconstruction 254

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Performativity cannot be applied and cannot not be applied. So we have to deal with this aporia, and this is what deconstruction is about. One the one hand . . . on the other hand . . . This formula is, it might be argued, that which formulates the law of undecidability. The undecidable is that which is irreducible to any determination, and Derrida’s oft-used formula is one that maintains the undecidable in the face of any demand for determination or identification. He situates the paradoxical within a particular model, thereby destabilising the truth or unequivocal value of that model, so: there is no applied deconstruction because deconstruction is not a method. At the same time, there is nothing other than deconstruction at work within any structure, form, meaning or identity. The only programme here is the refusal of a pro-gramme, a writing that arrives before (pro-), in advance or ahead of the act of writing (gramme), as a propaedeutic establishing in response to some other writing or text the need not to read those prior texts. Thus, when Derrida comments ‘you know the programme’, he is commenting ironically on the by-now programmatic nature of the response to the very idea, and the concomitant rejection, of deconstruction-as-programme, thereby operating ironically and performatively within the very kinds of utterance that programme deconstruction. Which brings us back to the relationship of the performative to deconstruction: if, remarks Derrida of the performative, it exists, it exists as that which, though neither strictly something or nothing, and not awaiting any human consciousness, takes place as a mode of ‘communication’ which is not strictly limited to the transference of a semantic content . . . be it the unveiling of what is in its being or the adequation-congruence between a judicative utterance and the thing itself. As throughout SEC, Derrida here ‘doubles’ and so opens to view, unveiling, the deconstruction taking place in the idea of ‘communication’, between verbal transfer and physical transfer (a bus, train, plane or car ‘communicates’ between one place and another). In this gesture, Derrida develops the critique of Austin, which shows up Austin’s assumptions in his analyses which ‘at all times require a value of context, and even of a context exhaustively determined’ (LI 14). In marking the work of the trace in ‘communication’, and showing how its function is not limited to a commentary describing something that exists outside of language and prior to it, Derrida illuminates the performative work of the trace or mark by which the example of communicating in the case of the performative . . . would be tantamount to communicating a force through the impetus . . . of 255

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Photography a mark. That Derrida uses the term impulsion signifies the idea of a ‘drive’, to borrow the psychoanalytic term. Before consciousness, within the unconscious’ movement of language – and it is important that we do not forget the significance of Derrida’s emphasis on movement and the production of an effect rather than the passage of a thought content – there takes place the graphematic mark, a movement effectively a writing, not a vocalisation, by which, in the work of the performative deconstruction read belatedly (as it must always be) through the signs of its effect, there takes place the dismantling of any static or controlled separation between true/false, constative/ performative, text/context or word/world.

Photography (RI n.p.; A 169) What do you see? We appear to be speaking of photography, of genre/gender simultaneously, though in French this bifurcation, this doubling, is always already implicit, yet in full view, in genre [gender/ genre]. Saying one you say the other, everything being poised, posed, suspended and suspensive, as Derrida says. An image neither says nor represents anything other than photography. Before we can even begin to imagine stories, we have to reside with form, with the photographic medium or apparatus that it itself is, a medium or apparatus having to do with time, with anachrony, contretemps, with the difference between presence and absence, life and death, all the differences in fact. So, imagine a fiction: or if you prefer, a hypothesis, the fiction as substrate on which to develop the idea of the photograph, of photography itself, that which arrives, and which tempts one to interpretation, while presenting everything which is there, and yet nothing as such. Photography as medium, speaking of specters, of ghosts and phantoms, like these images themselves, like any image in fact, acts of revelation, like a photographic apocalypse. Here, or rather there, is where the hypothesis supports the fiction, story of another who you see, the one you are addressing now, posing as a question of gender or genre. With the question comes generation, genesis of generation, around the question of gender. Or genre. The woman on whose behalf the narrator speaks is posing there as a question of genre. She does not pose the question, you will note, but poses as the question: the body of a woman posing as the question of genre. The body is everything, all there is, even if there is nothing other than the photograph, the body as photograph, as nothing other 256

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Photography than the medium. The body in the photograph is neither allegory nor the personification of the truth of genre. All she figures, says or represents is photography itself; hers, is a photographic body, perhaps the embodying of the truth of genre, the truth of photography, all else suspended or suspensive. So we find ourselves with questions, concerning what we see and how we respond to, addressing now, that which poses as the question. What is a photograph? How does it ‘tell’ the truth? How is the truth told when the photographer left? And to come back to a starting point, though approaching differently, why is ‘she’ truth? ‘The photographer left; he told the truth. It is she. She remains without witness save an invisible witness to attest that there is no more witness’ (A 169). Holding a photograph, there is no one there, either looking or being looked at. The photographer has gone, there is no longer a witness: absence on one side of the equation. On the other, the one who remains, she, without witness ‘nevertheless remains silent’ (A 169). In ‘Aletheia’, as in Rights of Inspection, Derrida places woman in relation to photography. Uninterested in the representation of women, but rather regarding the gender as it touches on the matter of genre, Derrida asks questions of how we perceive and receive photography. In ‘Aletheia’ Derrida relies on the feminine gender of the noun ‘truth’ in French (La verité), and Verity is also a woman’s name, like Aletheia, which is a Greek word for truth, but a truth revealed, remaining indirectly given. It signifies modalities of truth’s presentation or staging, modalities such as contingency, impossibility or necessity. Grasping the fundamental signification of photography as that trace (graph) that illuminates (photo), Derrida first of all draws our attention to the photograph as remains, as what remains when no one is there, when, it might be that the photographer is dead, the subject is dead, and that nothing other than the photograph unveils its own truth. Thus the truth of photography is the survival of the trace; it is a testament, an archive of truth, that has its own temporality, irreducible to a then and now, past and present. For the photograph an always be there now, without any of the witnesses who make its appearance possible. The photograph, as remains, is thus a trace of memory, but also a ruin, for it cannot bring together, nor can it serve to reassemble a prior present. Photography is thus a medium of loss, for presenting Being as loss. A photograph is less significant then for what it represents, or indeed that it represents at all. As Gerhard Richter argues after Derrida, photography is to be thought not 257

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Photography in terms of reproduction nor with an eye to the reproducibility of that which is said to exist already, but rather in terms of a force field of relations, that erratically thematize, always one more time [in the possibility of revenance that every photograph is endowed with], their own status as a relation, a relation that differs from and with itself [due in no small measure to its iterability and its strange temporal possibilities] even while suspending itself.157

It shows, exposes; it speaks without seeing and without saying anything directly; a photograph is always mute and yet expressive; therefore it does not merely represent – through that representation it comes to articulate something which you the viewer have to receive, see, listen to – in short ‘witness’, even though you are not there, and neither is the subject of the photograph. Is there a ‘there’, or is everything taking place in a place of absence, a place where absence haunts the very idea of presence and the present? Derrida thus, in a manner of telling a story, recounting what is going on, reveals how a photograph functions; it figures someone as if they were dead – you don’t need to be alive for someone to receive your image; the structural condition of a photograph – it takes place in a way that does not rely on the space or time of its initial having been taken; this, then, is the truth of photography, a truth which reveals itself in every photograph, even though the truth of photography, the truth in photography, is not necessarily directly what the photo represents; what is shown, in the example of ‘Aletheia’ is a young Japanese woman; but the photograph does not represent, revealing instead this truth of, in, the photographic text: that this woman poses as the question and so unveils indirectly in every frame through the singular temporality and ruined work of photography, photography’s truth, a truth concerning bearing witness impossibly, unveiling through modalities other than representation the truth of the medium itself in its relations to memory, archiving, ruins and remains, and our relation to each of these as the medium or manifestation of ghostly residues, traces – as, in turn, they themselves are traces of a given truth, Being constituted through the revenance of trace as that which is always already haunted by loss and absence. There is, then, a form of unveiling, revelation (ale¯theia), a bringing to the light, an enlightenment, an illumination, in the play of 157

Gerhard Richter, ‘Unsettling Photography: Kafka, Derrida, Moses’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 7: 2 (Fall 2007): 155–73, at pp. 156–7.

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Photography light and dark – when we speak of being enlightened, of being illuminated; when we use the figural image of a light bulb for an idea, a light is shed; we understand; and all this takes place while the photograph figures silently – there is no sound – and in silence. All the while, however, ‘a photographic work does not say a word’ observes Derrida in ‘Aletheia’ (A 169). Derrida utilises the relationships between the various modes of exposure – the woman exposes her body, a photograph is exposed, the truth of photography exposes itself like the woman, as if photography were a woman; but how does the woman ‘expose herself to death’? She leaves her image, leaves the trace of herself, as do we all, in the photograph, which can survive her as her trace, a light-trace (photography) that remains to expose and express itself though never her, as such. In this displacement that the trace engages, there is no one there, there is nothing being said, there is no presence. Photography is thus the most poignant of mediums because it is a medium of, for, spectres, phantoms, phantasms, ghosts, revenants and all the other iterable traces of Being. And photography is feminine because it gives birth, it serves, you’ll recall the words, as a genesis, it makes possible through its genre/ gender generation; it engenders an image. At the same time, though, nothing is explicit; everything, Derrida observes, is imminent, all is a matter of suggestion and, by that, suggestiveness – are the images innocent, do we read innocence, or are they something ‘perverse’ – whichever way we read the images, reading is not the image itself, it is after reception of the image and so not of the image (A 170). All is imminence: ‘[t]here is in fact only imminence in this photographic narrative where everything is sketched out, announced, and seems to prepare itself . . ., but nothing seems to come to pass’ (A 170). Everything is on the surface of the photograph, everything is on the verge, at the edge. What comes to light? On what do we alight? Derrida plays on this play, which he reads in the images, of light/enlightenment/ truth/illumination/ale¯theia/revelation and with that, in French léger/ femme, légère’/légèreté [lightness] (A 170) – images are insubstantial, and can work between light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, to reveal indirectly; hence the title, concerning naming an unknown woman but also indicating indirectly, through the foreignness what the OED terms ‘modalities of truth’; as well as illumination there is also a question of false image (which Derrida relates to economics – the false image is what sells, and has nothing to do with truth or otherwise, but a kind of proposition – in this all advertising, we 259

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Photography might conclude, is pornographic; why? What is the proposition); and then (A 171) allegory – the photo essay is not about itself, not about the woman, even though these are its representations; it exhibits or is on the edge of ‘seeming to exhibit something else, the work shows’, and is thus allegorical (light is not only illumination but related to weight; like the French, if I speak of light, I can in the instant equally be speaking of illumination or weight, or of knowledge; everything is suspended in the referent). So photographs play with light and dark, they play lightly, and reveal out of obscurity. For Derrida, one of the histories the photographs reveal indirectly has to do with the history of the philosophical question of truth itself, ‘an allegory of truth itself in its movement of veiling and unveiling’. Derrida’s ‘style’ here (if we can call it that) is deliberately playful; it plays around with language in order to keep at the edge of meaning what he wants to reveal; he is toying with us, playing with how we understand; language is itself a form for different modalities of revelation and unveiling from the obscurity. Obscurity and visibility are not opposites, one emerges from the other, each is the other of the other, but one is inseparable from the other, in the same way that light and dark in photographs belong to the image. Photography is a mode of tekhne¯ – a making appear (technology ‘makes’ something ‘appear’ out of parts, raw materials (A 172); it is thus the truth of the physical world; we make, we cause to appear things, commodities; but what does photography make appear? Images made of shadows, light and dark – in this it causes to appear an event no longer there, no longer with us; it gives us to see what we cannot otherwise see. But this involves holding back as much as causing to appear; what we see is on a boundary between the visible and the invisible. We also see an imminent relation, as a result of that suspended and suspensive ‘take’, the unfolding of the truth of photography’s play with reference which it ultimately suspends; or rather, say, with Derrida, in Rights of Inspection, ‘[n]ot that it suspends reference, but that it indefinitely defers a certain type of reality, that of the perceptible referent. It gives the prerogative to the other, opens the infinite uncertainty of relation to the completely other, a relation without relation’ (RI n.p.). Photography does not represent someone so much as it re-presents our relation without relation to the other, the trace of the other, always remaining before us and yet without witness, always having been, but no longer being as such. 260

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Photography However ‘intimate’ the image is, becomes or promises to become, this is only an illusion, and the woman remains other (A 173), alone, even as she figures truth, (the) truth of photography, in photography, in photography. This also is an allegory for the truth of photography – that it bears witness where there is no witness; I am not there, where the photographic even is/was, and she is not there, when I see the photograph; a double structure of displacement and absence; this doubling (A 174) is reduplicated because if the photograph gives birth to an image, to its truth, to the truth of its bearing witness and bearing its image as what is borne (given birth to/carried) then, in reading the image, I also give birth – Derrida here ‘deconstructs’ the basic masculine priority in understanding how one sees; in a representation such as a painting, I control, the eye is implicit (through perspective etc.) in its control and ‘mastery’ by its movement, its being placed as the centre, at the centre of the focal point; but photography presents rather than represents, and in this, it can cause to come to light with an immediacy not available to painting, a revelation on its own terms that we cannot control, and thus we give birth to meaning; taken by that which is posed, taken by the other, we are ‘feminised’ by the image. Thus ‘No work of art, outside of photography is so troubling’ (A 174). Every photograph implies a singularity, one time, alone, rather than duration. ‘The photograph marks a date’ (A 174). This belongs to ‘the photographic effect’, and the ‘unique existence of the referent’, and with that a confusion between the ‘actual existence of the “referent” or of the “subject” of the work, on the one hand, and the still, on the other, produces of itself what we would call . . . the unsettling, troubling desire that goes toward the other . . . promised through its double [the photographic double], the veil, the film, the membrane [pellicule] of the simulacrum’ (A 175) which veils as it reveals, and reveals ‘more than once but each time one time alone [une fois mais chaque fois une seule fois]’ (A 175). Thus the subject, this ‘she’, who does not speak, appears visible ‘but without witness, except for the eye that does not say “I” ’, the camera, or what Derrida calls the ‘excluded third between her and me’ (A 176).

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Reason

R Reason (EHOG 144–9) Following Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, the Derridean relation to the Enlightenment has been re-examined with particular attention being given to what has been cast as a reorientation of focus on the political and ethical; in view of this perception of what could be conceived in terms of a late addressing of political reason within the philosophical tradition, albeit that from the beginning the Derridean oeuvre is oriented toward that which within the tradition remains circumscribed by philosophy qua reason named as logos, Derrida writes in Rogues that ‘[t]here never was in the 1980s or 1990s, as has sometimes been claimed, a political turn or ethical turn in “deconstruction”, at least not as I experience it’. He continues by stressing that ‘[t]he thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political, of the contour and limits of the political’ (RTER 39). His use of the terms ‘experience’ and ‘limits’ in fact illustrate this point, returning the reader to his first published work, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, where Derrida begins a thinking of the political through difference in phenomenology; it is a thinking of how difference could be political that subsists to Rogues, which in its explicit address of reason draws on the thinking of difference as political begun in that first book.158 158

Derrida had not yet termed difference as différance, hence the temporal trace of the former here. It might be noted that Derrida thinks difference politically in at least two major ways in the first book: first as a deconstruction of origin in telos that is radically political in its implications for subject and anthropocentric world; the second as a way of marking history through that difference at origin that disrupts telos. It is strange that the late work perceived to mark the turn is seen in light of a fulfilment long deferred and delayed of this subject. Specters of Marx, Rogues and The Beast and the Sovereign could rather be read as overt readings of contemporary politics that make explicit what has always been theoretically political in the work with regard to its implications for ontology and world as well as the inscription of those readings by a position on language that can be argued to be itself political and ethical and to provide the already inflected foundation for those other readings. The so-called ethico-political turn regards politics explicitly in terms of a science of the state and its relations, rather than as the movement of différance that is already political. As such, it might be considered a delayed and deferred reading of Derrida.

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Reason Derrida there institutes in difference a reading of Husserlian phenomenology as metaphysical, not only marking a first deconstructive reading but marking it as a departure from that tradition, though he would maintain the opening of the closure. In this and his later work on Husserl Derrida considers phenomenology to have become an essentially historical methodology by virtue of Husserl’s decision to impose on it a teleological structure through temporal synthesis. As there could be no evidence in consciousness to support the choice, it both takes place outside of phenomenological process and authorises it – therefore imposing upon phenomenology an origin outside of the world – while structuring it within a temporality governed by the dialectic. Within that dialectic, the telos is the Logos, or reason, itself; it constitutes the origin of becoming according to an arche and a telos, a beginning and an end, and in reference to a transcendental origin and end outside of consciousness. The structure is temporally determined by the dialectic, into which the telos is inscribed; it does not determine temporality, Derrida insists, from the exterior. Therefore the idea of reason governs this understanding of history, but what is important is that it does not authorise it externally; rather, it is produced within history and its aim is towards a delayed presence. Reason is not some eternity at work in history, because there is no history without Reason. This means that there is no pure transmission of sense as the tradition of truth, because there can be no historical progression of sense without it being constituted through the transcendental subject. However, as Derrida would later show, within the temporality that constitutes Husserlian phenomenology as such there can be no sense that allows being to be understood within consciousness without there being prior anticipation of sense; in this way, reason is the genesis of becoming in that it provides for a sense that phenomenology locates prior to, and therefore exterior to, that consciousness and the reduction of meaning. As a corollary to that Husserlian logic, there is no reason without history . . . without the concrete and instituting acts of transcendental subjectivity, without its objectifications and sedimentations. Reason is inherent to the act of processing, which has its own essence, apart from the consciousness of the individual subject. This transcendental subjectivity is organised along two poles, the noematic – that which is thought – and the noetic, the act of thinking. If reason, the logos, is but the essential structure of the transcendental ego and the transcendental we, it is, like them, historical through and through. Reason and history are essentially co263

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Reason implicated. As the converse, historicity, as such, is rational through and through. Phenomenological being, however, is a ‘sense’ through which being is constituted as ‘movement’ (EHOG 145) rather than as determined presence, to be given to intuition; it is deferred as presence in that movement. As [t]he first philosophical act is only the sense-investigation of this historical rationality, it is already inscribed within that historical rationality. Reason cannot account for itself in the present where the presence of being as the object of inquiry is deferred; it is a project that is both historical and to come, but in marking the temporality of reason the sense-investigation of what was already there has awakened Reason to itself and made of it its own inquiry, thereby marking a rupture and consequently, a radical and creative origin . . . The question remains the place of the self in relation to reason. Derrida asks whether the logos, reason, traverses being in order to become present to itself in a Living present, removing the act of thinking as constitution from consciousness in order to make it only the place of reflexive articulation, wherein it mediates the Logos retaking possession of itself through this consciousness. As such, the sense of being would be guaranteed in advance by the logos, which is here named as God. Were historical transcendental subjectivity, the transcendental ego removed from individualism, to be deprived of the absolute of the Self, it would be an inscribed, rather than ideal sense, within a logos exterior to that self. [S]ince the logos always has the form of a Telos, the transcendence would then not be located within subjectivity but would be an atemporal and anterior a priori, the Ideal Pole for bringing about transcendental subjectivity itself . . . Derrida notes this complication in Husserl between the atemporal and historically constituted God: where [a]t times the Logos expresses itself through a transcendental history, at other times it is only the absolute polar authenticity of transcendental historicity itself. There is a slippage between Logos as foundational presence outside of history and as historical; if the latter, it is both inscribed in and gives transcendental historicity. ‘In the first case’, Derrida writes, ‘transcendental phenomenology would be only the most rigorous language of a speculative metaphysics or an absolute idealism’, whereas in the second ‘phenomenology as transcendental idealism’ would be borrowing metaphysical concepts to use in a merely indicative sense (EHOG 147). The ambiguity persists in language because, as Derrida’s thinking of Husserl will later demonstrate, the phenomenology of the sign cannot escape from language to delimit 264

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Reason phenomenology and its process outside of the conditions of language and in particular of différance that prevents teleological progression and the recovery of a Living Present on the infinite horizon. Here, it is an ambiguity between historically implicated Reason and the diahistoricity or meta-historicity of God as divine Logos; if the latter, the Logos is the origin of history that only traverses and goes beyond ‘Fact’ as the ‘ready-made’ of history, its anterior and guaranteeing a priori outside of the history of which it is the genesis. If the former, the Logos is but the pure movement of its own historicity and cannot be comprehended except within that movement. In this way, the sense of being of transcendental historicity would make itself understood . . . through that historicity, like the Logos which is at its beginning but does not, according to Husserl, exist as an idealism prior to it. Otherwise, Derrida implies, God would be the telos and arche¯ , the final fulfillment situated at the infinite, the name for the horizon of horizons; if that horizon is the restitution of incompleteness in the plenitude of a final fulfilment, then that Logos is both the ideal origin and the telos for which there is no phenomenological intuition in consciousness, and which therefore comes before phenomenology as a methodology. In order to think this situation of the Logos, we must consider it as analogous to every ideality, at once supratemporal and omnitemporal, which are also the characteristics of Time itself where Time is thought as the Living Present. The Living Present is then the synthesis of that which is above time – supratemporal – and that which is all-time – omnitemporal. The resolution of both in the Living Present demands that historicity be thought as the passage of Speech, where in that passage lies the Absolute; the Absolute is passage. The deferral of presence is recuperated through the movement designated as such. Speech, the pure tradition of a primordial Logos toward a polar Telos, formulates itself in that passage since phenomenology cannot admit of an anterior Being which has its sense outside the pure historicity of that passage. It demands that the Logos and Telos are nothing outside the interplay . . . of their reciprocal inspiration in order that the Absolute be constituted within that interplay and not as its animation. Here reason is identified with speech insofar as the latter, like reason, is the direction of the Logos, sense, towards the polar Telos, a delayed presence. Reason and historicity are again co-implicated within the Living Present. What is important here is that the logos, as Husserl has described it, is indivisible from history, and, as Derrida will show in The 265

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Representation Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, it is the temporal aspect that structures phenomenology through a metaphysical genesis in the logos. Where the decision to synthesise the Living Present through anticipation, figured as protention, is made, it is towards the opening of the structure in an infinite horizon where the future recovers the incompletion of the opening to the plenitude of infinity. The identification of reason with speech, of speech as the Idea in the Kantian sense with the logos, is a re-entering of phonocentrism into logocentrism through phenomenology. Phenomenology as Method of Discourse is . . . the free resolution to ‘take up one’s own sense’ (or regain consciousness . . .), in order to make oneself accountable, through speech. It is thus structured as a phonocentric methodology, the genesis of which is structured through the Logos of reason. As such, the method is not independent of the thought it engenders but constitutes thought itself in the consciousness of its complete historicity, which is speech. In his later writing on Husserl and in the debate with Foucault held in ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, Derrida continues to demonstrate how the thinking of reason is already structured by the thought of reason. With Rogues and The Beast and the Sovereign, he returns to the phonocentric implications of the logos by examining sovereignty in relation to reason. Sovereignty is therein figured as an initiatory self-possession of the auto-affective self, present in the immediacy of the internal voice and possessing the right to reason, in opposition to an unconditional rationalism Derrida invokes in the name of deconstruction. The rational basis for deconstruction would lie in the possibility of a suspension, through rationalism, of presupposition and of an unconditional critique of decision predicated upon a dialectic. Reason would thereby be selfdeconstructive, suspending decision, while in Derrida’s consideration of the question, ‘deconstruction, if something of the sort exists, would remain above all, [. . .] an unconditional rationalism’ (RTER 142). The last texts should thus be situated in the foundations prepared in the first book.

Representation (WM 148–9) If one were to consider a work of art a mimetic representation of something in reality, the space between reality and its rendering would be the space wherein the natural becomes artificial. If one were to consider Jacques Derrida’s words the immediate representation of his thoughts, the movement from what would therein be thought as 266

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Representation an unmediated interior monologue to its paper prosthesis would be the movement from the primary presence of speech to the secondary artifice of writing. If one were to consider these words as a representation of Derrida – though not of his words, a ventriloquism (speech returns when talking of this logic) that carries the charge of miming the mimetic – then they would represent a secondarity at one remove, writing on a writing. The space between becomes the representation itself of a movement from the present to the absent, the primary to the secondary, the natural to the artificial. From the earliest writings, Derrida situated philosophy in representation and undermined it there; destablising the relation of the object to perception in his work on Husserl, of the signifier to signified in Of Grammatology and of physis to tekhne¯ in mimesis through Dissemination, he disrupted the thinking of a present reality to be signified and a secondary and representative function of language. This consideration has treated of aesthetics – as in The Truth in Painting and in his reading of Louis Marin here discussed – as well as literary, phenomenological, epistemological and political representation. Referring to their grounding in metaphysics, Derrida notes in ‘Envoi’ that there is no transparent Greek translation for ‘representation’ and that ‘this is not a problem of translation, it is the problem of translation’;159 again the situating of representation as metaphysics and of deconstruction within that tradition is made explicit, if one recalls that Derrida describes deconstruction as translation in his ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ and insists on the refusal of a metalanguage in which to discuss language in the context of an anterior truth in relation to which it has a communicative function. In Of Grammatology, he addresses a common misperception of deconstruction, that it announces the end of metaphysics. Insisting that deconstruction outlines a historical closure of the age of the 159

Jacques Derrida, ‘Envoi’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. I (PIO I 94–128, at 101). This essay discusses the already multiple fields in which representation signifies –aesthetics, politics, philosophy – and represents a plurality that means that the term resists a unified determination because it cannot be reduced by an order of knowledge implicated by representation (and therefore itself not anterior to it). The essay continues to discuss the concept in terms of Vorstellung and the Heideggerian ‘sending’ of being through epochs, one of which is that of representation. By reading representation as a protection of an ostensibly prior unity that relies on the collapse of the imitated into the imitator in order to sustain it, Derrida demonstrates that the being is always already multiple.

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Representation sign, rather than an ending in finitude that would reinscribe both the sign and deconstruction back within that system that it attempts to ‘surround [. . .] with a careful and thorough discourse’ (OG 14), he states again that since these concepts are integral to the heritage they upset, they cannot be renounced. His desire to examine these symbols in order ‘to designate rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they permit’ (OG 14) is held in the discourse surrounding the sign; it is for Derrida ‘exemplary’ (OG 14) as a model for interrogating the representative relation in its capacity of structuring an a priori truth. By virtue of its dual opposition of signifier and signified, the sign is traditionally conceived to be the system whereby the truth of meaning constituted as and through the foundational presence of the logos – the basis of the signified – is represented by a secondary and derivative signifier, the word. Where the word is spoken, the presumed immediacy of speech and its contiguity with the self-identical and auto-affective interior monologue is considered the natural representative of that presence wherein there is no deferral of meaning between signifier and signified. Writing, in being thought to derive from speech as an artificial representation and thus to be a secondary signifier inserting lack into the plenitude of meaning, is conceived at a remove from that prior and legislating truth. Where Derrida shows that all signification is already implicated by writing, he suggests that the representative relationship is fallacious insofar as it is held to be a secondary signification of a prioritised presence and therefore to conceive of a plenitude outside and authorising the text. Of Grammatology argues, following Saussure but questioning his still phonocentric concept of the sign, that meaning is produced by the difference between signifiers, and insists that even in that differential relation meaning is never wholly present as presence, nor itself the phenomenal signified of a transcendentally signified presence within which it is produced, but is experienced plurally in the différance of the sign. Representation, then, can no longer be viewed as the derivative of a pre-existing presence; the signifier functions as the trace of a trace, that is to say as the trace of the différance that already structures presence at its origin and divides self-identity at its source. That Derrida writes in Of Grammatology that the sign hitherto has ‘never existed or functioned outside the history of (the) philosophy (of presence)’ (OG 14) makes evident that philosophy, such as it is conceived in the West, is the philosophy of presence; furthermore, that the sign remained ‘determined by that history’ (OG 14) indicates the impossibility of stepping outside the closure, 268

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Representation and more impossible still dispensing with the sign altogether. The structure of representation remains that of the signifier and signified, yet what is altered is the priority of the signified, where that priority is located in the truth of the logos that relegates writing to the representative function of the dead letter. The sign thus remains, but representation is no longer thought as the structured secondariness of a pre-ordaining presence; neither is the signifier a mediator of a presence occupied by the signified and ultimately located in the logos. Speech loses the priority granted through a perceived immediacy of pneuma to meaning, a nonmediatory signification in opposition to writing and one which elides the difference between signifier and signified, and meaning, hitherto founded in a guaranteeing logos, is produced through the disseminating play of signification. From the opposition of physis and tekhne¯ held in mimesis to the theology of the sign, ontology and the logos have been exterior to representation and the representative relation mimetic of that binary which philosophy upholds and in which it is upheld. By inscribing representation as a relation of infection wherein the referent is already infiltrated by an apparently posterior writing that does not then arrive, in the traditional sense given to infiltration and infection, from a putative outside but is already within what is ostensibly proper to its own identity and displaces that self-identity, in Derridean thought the referent is no longer understood to have a plenitude of meaning outside of and discrete from the signifier which has been conceived as the secondary removal through representation of that plenitude and of the thing itself. Meaning is then accorded through the play of signification that, in the trace of the trace, follows the différance at the origin of meaning. The signifier does not constitute the meaning of the referent in that différance, removing it within the representative relation from a prior plenitude of presence; rather, it is shown to trace the already divided presence of the referent prior to representation, as it is traced by archi-writing. Representation is no longer to be thought as the secondary approximation of an original presence but as the trace of the trace of archi-writing that disrupts the idea of an original and natural presence located in the plenitude of Being. In turn, it disrupts a philosophy presupposed upon that presence and reliant on sustaining it through the binary logic instituted by representation and signified in the correlative distanciation of that presence, a distanciation which protects it from the tekhne¯ of the signifier upon which it relies at the same time to maintain presence in the creation of a putative exterior. 269

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Representation In speaking of the death of Louis Marin, a philosopher of the image, and in the context of discussing an imagery or portraiture of the dead, Derrida relates death to the image in a formulation whereby he again challenges the traditional mimetic concept of the image thought ‘as a weakened reproduction of what it would imitate’ (WM 147), suggesting instead that representation consists in the force of the image ‘to resist, to consist, and to exist in death’ (WM 147). This resistance of the signifier to a mimetology wherein it would itself represent the death of presence is simultaneously a consisting in death of the signifier in that it no longer stands in relation to the presence of being.160 A displacement of the point of view, therefore . . . concerning that which founds the foundation and institutes the institution of power in a certain logic of representation, one in which the power is founded not in a being-towards-life but in a being-towards-death.161 This would necessarily go beyond the metaphysical logic predicated in the life-death opposition and situate the image within that beyond of the trace, where death names inscription and return rather than absence and finitude. Insofar as representation no longer is thought to consist in a thetic relation of unified meaning between the thing itself and its secondary signifier, the work becomes mobile, virtualised, a plural network that constructs its textuality as the essence of the work, a nonessential essence, since it is an essence that remains possible as such. Where the sub-classification of those images which represent the dead hitherto might be thought of as staging the death represented in and by the signifier through a dual literalism of the image of the dead, in this Derridean argument the force of the signifier gains power in death. This discussion takes place in the context of Marin’s last book, Des pouvoirs de l’image: Gloses, a text that addresses, as Derrida cites, ‘the modalities of a work of mourning of the absolute of “force” ’ (WM 143). This study of the work of mourning through the image represents a break for Derrida in Marin’s thought of representation, and a paradox consequent upon that interruption. As the work of mourning attains a force, it does so as a law according 160

161

Mimetology is discussed at length in Dissemination, in the context of the opposition physis/techne¯ and the concept of mimesis it supports; any consideration of representation in Derrida should take into account the disruption of mimesis effected in ‘The Double Session’ as a questioning of the relation between art and truth. It should here be noted that Derrida explicitly refuses the Heideggerian implications of this phrase; see WM (147).

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Representation to which the greatest force does not consist in continually expanding ad infinitum but develops its maximal intensity, so to speak, only at the mad moment of decision, at the point of its absolute interruption . . . A moment of infinite renunciation as the potentialization of the virtual work. At the moment of death and in the force of mourning, the work gains power in relation to [a] moment of infinite renunciation as the image takes its power from mourning and from death. To have death as the essence is to inscribe the essence of the essence – self-identical presence – with its other, and therefore to make it possible as a non-essential essence. The image in death no longer stands as the representative and paradoxical presence of death as the removal of presence; instead, it annuls its representative presence, there where, more precisely, the non-re-productive intensity of the reof representation gains in power what the present that it represents loses in presence. Where representation removes the presence of the present, even where that present is already deferred and delayed, the iteration it marks obviates the representative presence of the image which, in being-towards-death, takes its force from that already extant detemporalisation of the present that it re-marks in the image. The image, Derrida suggests, comes before representation as such, for it already exists as a spectre in us, and it re-presents that spectrality in the image. Thus [i]t is in the re-presentation of the dead that the power of the image is exemplary. Where ‘re’ marks the substitutive value of the signifier for the signified and for the plenitude of presence, when it indicates at the moment when that which was present is no longer present and comes to be re-presented, Marin then takes the example of the disappearance of the present as death. Insofar as the signifier with the representative relation has a being-towards-death, he does so in order not only to track a re-presentation or an absolute substitution of representation for presence, but also to detect within it an increase, a re-gaining of force or a supplement of intensity in presence, and thus a sort of potency or potentialization of power for which the schema of substitutive value, of mere replacement, can give no account. This might appear at first to be contradictory to Derrida’s earlier treatment of representation, marking presence only in order to undermine it as already inscribed by the différance which the narrow writing of the signifier later represents, inserting a further différance within meaning in so doing. However, where he here accords with Marin it is in a situating of presence within death and mourning, taking force from death and mourning as a non-simple 271

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Story presence marked by its other. The schema of substitutive value can give no account of this representative relation since it does not simply interchange death with presence, nor does it understand death as the absence of presence. As in Of Grammatology, presence is understood only in relation to the other already within it. By gaining force from the mourning of death, presence is reinscribed into the signifier from which it derives its potency. Representation is here no longer a simple reproductive re-presentation; it is such a regaining of presence . . . that it allows lack to be thought, the default of presence . . . that has hollowed out in advance the so-called primitive or originary presence, the presence that is represented, the so-called living presence. The relation of representation to ‘reality’, previously thought as a reproductive relation in which ‘reality’ became impoverished in its removal from presence even as it was re-presented as such – thus maintaining the priority of reality in that re-presentation wherein it was established as presence by being removed from its plenitude – is now, not simply reversed, but displaced. The ostensibly living present of phenomenology is no longer re-presented as such by the image, but called forth as the non-simple presence that, divided from originary presence and the living present, allows the thinking of its other.

S Story (AL 34–5) Story gathers to itself, and in its name this is figured, the fiction of the seal, a seal the very idea of which signs and so reveals its signature as the experiences of memory, anamnesis and autobiography, but also, significantly, that ‘experience’, that ‘event’, which goes by the barely comprehensible notion of ‘literature’. Literature, or perhaps better say ‘the literary’, is not to be thought of in that gesture of objectivizing archivation, as simply one of the three principal discursive forms alluded to here – historical narrative, literary fiction, philosophical reflection – or belonging simply, unequivocally, to any of these ‘poor’ forms (poor because the definition of form itself does not account for the experience, or what happens, what takes place and comes to pass, in any act of reading, where the self finds itself in that place as if it were being traversed by a trace of all the voices); ‘story’, as the seal and signature of the experience or event of the literary, names 272

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Story presence marked by its other. The schema of substitutive value can give no account of this representative relation since it does not simply interchange death with presence, nor does it understand death as the absence of presence. As in Of Grammatology, presence is understood only in relation to the other already within it. By gaining force from the mourning of death, presence is reinscribed into the signifier from which it derives its potency. Representation is here no longer a simple reproductive re-presentation; it is such a regaining of presence . . . that it allows lack to be thought, the default of presence . . . that has hollowed out in advance the so-called primitive or originary presence, the presence that is represented, the so-called living presence. The relation of representation to ‘reality’, previously thought as a reproductive relation in which ‘reality’ became impoverished in its removal from presence even as it was re-presented as such – thus maintaining the priority of reality in that re-presentation wherein it was established as presence by being removed from its plenitude – is now, not simply reversed, but displaced. The ostensibly living present of phenomenology is no longer re-presented as such by the image, but called forth as the non-simple presence that, divided from originary presence and the living present, allows the thinking of its other.

S Story (AL 34–5) Story gathers to itself, and in its name this is figured, the fiction of the seal, a seal the very idea of which signs and so reveals its signature as the experiences of memory, anamnesis and autobiography, but also, significantly, that ‘experience’, that ‘event’, which goes by the barely comprehensible notion of ‘literature’. Literature, or perhaps better say ‘the literary’, is not to be thought of in that gesture of objectivizing archivation, as simply one of the three principal discursive forms alluded to here – historical narrative, literary fiction, philosophical reflection – or belonging simply, unequivocally, to any of these ‘poor’ forms (poor because the definition of form itself does not account for the experience, or what happens, what takes place and comes to pass, in any act of reading, where the self finds itself in that place as if it were being traversed by a trace of all the voices); ‘story’, as the seal and signature of the experience or event of the literary, names 272

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Story everything that is accessible and inaccessible, all that crosses one, or almost does so, all that happens or fails to happen, and then comes to be traced and to remark itself in both its accessibility and inaccessibility in those encounters with and reflections on, mediations of anamnesis and autobiography, without, of course, revealing itself as anything other than that strange name. The accessibility resides in part in that your experience will not be markedly different from mine. The inaccessibility lies in part in the fact that my experience is singular, as is yours, and is thus incommensurable, albeit in an iterable fashion, with your own. This is not even a case of reading different texts, but something that is, at one and the same time, far more fundamental and far more inexpressible, hence the idea that something almost takes place, or fails to happen. Whether situating itself or being situated in the reading as more on the side of the archive of the ‘real’ or the archive of ‘fiction’, ‘story’ – and we should note here, as elsewhere, that Derrida suspends particular words, marking them off for especial attention, or perhaps suspicion – is desired by Derrida as that which maintains the event, or what happens, through the maintenance of every trace by which ‘story’ is given form, even as those traces withdraw becoming invisible, leaving only the story (or drawing, or indeed any form presenting itself not as the concatenation of the trait withdrawn). Noting those quotation marks, we should note in passing that ‘real’ and ‘fiction’ are not simply accepted ‘as they are’; that is to say, that the idea of the ‘real’ and the idea of ‘fiction’ are not, for Derrida, unproblematic concepts. To receive them in this fashion would be to establish, unreflectively, the stable text/context, or inside/outside, presence/absence divisions and positions that arrive as what one might call ‘fictions of the empirical’ or ‘fictions of the ontological’ (and from there ‘metaphysical fictions’), which the trait and re-trait make possible through the différance that enables any thinking of concept, semantic value, ontological construct, identity, meaning and so forth. For the subject who desires story, the ‘real’ is never simply there, any more than there is a reserve marked or labelled ‘fiction’. Both are instituted, and as ‘archives’, inasmuch – at least – each is formed, inscribed in memory, on what is called a subject, through memory, desire, historicity, the archive being that which is given by the other. But what authorises this suspension of these categoremes, ‘real’ and ‘fiction’, and what conjoins even as it separates them in an archive that is at one and the same time shared and divided, doubled is ‘story’ itself, itselves – for there is no one story even as 273

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Story there is always more than one ‘story’. I am not merely suggesting that, quite obviously, there are lots of different stories. I am referring to the word ‘story’ as a place that is crossed and which crosses itself from one archive to another. Deriving from Anglo-Norman French, estorie, which in turn had been communicated by the Latin historia, and before that Greek, ‘story’ speaks simultaneously of ‘history’ (the ‘real’) and forms of tale-telling and narrative (‘fiction’). ‘Story’ is thus always already internally divided and doubled within itself, its two archives overlapping one another as much as they are determined externally as being separate. In reading Kafka’s Before the Law, Derrida turns to Kant’s categorical imperative, and particularly its ‘second formulation’, through which the figure of als ob (‘as if’) ‘introduces narrativity and fiction into the very core of legal thought, at the moment when the latter begins to speak and to question the moral subject’ (AL 190). He continues: ‘though the authority of the law seems to exclude all historicity and empirical narrativity, and this at the moment when its rationality seems alien to all fiction and imagination . . . it still seems a priori’ to harbour the two modes of narration, the historical and empirical on the one hand, and the fictive and imaginary on the other, by virtue of the analogising, opening and ‘progessive’ operation of the as if (AL 190). Kafka’s story figures the singular possibility of the as if in its space: story, in this instance, gives place to the question: ‘what if the law, without being itself transfixed by literature, shared the conditions of its possibility with the literary object’ (AL 191)? It is the force, the violent possibility of the as if that ‘story’ enables or engenders, generates, that sanctions the ‘what if’. Story makes possible an other thinking, that opens institution from within to that which is always already at work, deconstructively, from within. Effectively, to risk generalising from the specificity, the singularity, of the Kafka tale as this is read by Derrida, ‘story’ is that place, that motion, where the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, the ‘historical’ or legal and the narrative or ‘fantastic’ where a certain necessity of telling comes about, or has the possibility at least of occurring: ‘Whether or not it is fantastic, whether or not it has arisen from the imagination, . . . and whether it states or silences the origin of the fantasy, this in no way diminishes the imperious necessity of what it tells, its law.’ And to authorise this reading, Derrida cites Freud on the unconscious: ‘Freud stated [in 1897] his “certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect” ’ (AL 199). 274

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Story We are, we find ourselves, ‘in this net . . . you are captive in a network of language, writing, knowledge, and even narration’ (AL 281). There is a problem though apropos ‘story’, institutionally at least, one which is highlighted by Derrida in a reading of Joyce (in ‘Ulysses Gramophone’). Having spent some time in delivering an academic conference paper recounting stories (AL 281), and having stated that ‘we have verified that all this [the stories] had its narrative paradigm observed and was already recounted in Ulysses’; perhaps just a little provocatively Derrida continues to remark that ‘yes, everything has already happened to us with Ulysses and has been signed in advance by Joyce’ (AL 281). Not all ‘story’ does this but there is nevertheless the possibility. The problem though has to do with the potentially disruptive or subversive effect of telling stories in certain situations, or particular institutions, especially those institutions, such as universities where the ‘classical concept of competence supposes that one can rigorously dissociate knowledge . . . from the event that one is dealing with, and especially from the ambiguity of written or oral marks – let’s call them gramophonies’ (AL 281). The simple fact is – or am I merely telling a tale? Am I delving into the archive of the ‘real’ or that of ‘fiction’? How could you tell? Is that even possible? – that in the university, among academics, especially those in departments of literature, there are many who fear or dislike such ambiguity, who hold onto the ‘story’ of the ‘classical concept of competence, its separability from the text one deals with’, believing that ‘story’ to be a fact’. Such academics ground their reasons unreasonably in the groundless assertion of a metadiscourse that is ‘neutral and univocal with regard to a field of objectivity’ (AL 281). Most frequently, such efforts are directed, self-guided, by notions of ‘context’ and ‘history’, which add to the tale of objectivity the patina of authority in the guise of fact. (This at least is the story I wish to tell about the stories academics tell themselves when wanting to maintain, as if they were masters in their own houses, ‘story’ as a guest not shown full hospitality.) Derrida continues: Performances ruled by this competence must in principle lend themselves to a translation with nothing left over on the subject of the corpus that is itself translatable. Above all they should not be of a narrative type. In principle, one doesn’t relate stories in a university; one does history, one recounts in order to know and to explain; one speaks about narrations or epic poems, but events and stories must not be produced in the name of institutionalizable knowledge. (AL 282) 275

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Subjectile It is, though, perhaps a sign of the very power of story, and of the literary or fictive in general, that institutions seek to accommodate them, to be hospitable to a limit, calculating on the controllability and maintenance of the limit, on the one hand, while also maintaining the guest under strict house rules. What might be particularly troublesome is that story, the literary in general, not only is generative and progressive – or can be – because of the force of as if by which its chance occurs; it also is its own ‘institution’, ‘the institution that allows one to say everything [Tout dire, to say everything and anything], in every way. The space of literature is not only that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything.’ But, Derrida continues, ‘to say everything is also to break out of prohibitions . . . in every field where law can lay down the law. The law of literature tends, in principle, to defy or lift the law . . . It is an institution which tends to overflow the institution’ (AL 36). And that it defies, or lifts the law, has this possibility, and that it can do this, or can be read as doing this, takes place in that very refusal of story to allow itself to be consigned, constrained by the fiction of separable archives: of the ‘real’ on the one hand, and ‘fiction’ on the other. The experience of story for the good reader is this, and just this, hence the desire for story.

Subjectile (SAAA 63–5) What exactly is a ‘subjectile’? Narrowly defined, it is the material or material support on which a painting or engraving is made, a substrate, so the Oxford English Dictionary informs us. A little abstractly, the subjectile is that which is adapted to receive a ‘subject’ or picture. I say ‘abstractly’ because while reception can infer the material on which the painting is made having been prepared, there is also the sense that the subject, you or I, can become the subjectile. One is inscribed with memories, traces of events, experiences, the trace of the other, most neutrally, the trace of language and the ‘historical’ density of utterance; as a subject one is in some way lying below all that determines one’s subjectivity and identity. In this reading, transmission takes place. There is the sign of a sending or posting. Materially and technically, the subjectile is, writes Mary Ann Caws, ‘the underlying support of canvas, paper, text’ (SAAA xi), or that which makes the image, the text, the representation possible. It is that which makes the text, whether one speaks of words or pictures, appear and yet which, despite its materiality, is immaterial 276

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Subjectile in or to most conventional discourses on art. We might suggest that the subjectile, though in one sense material, is also therefore a ghost of sorts. Hovering in the background of any text, neither there nor not there, it belongs properly speaking neither completely inside nor outside any text, the text of the painting or photograph. It resides as the double border between word or image and world, between representation and the real, between the idea of an original and translation, between representation and interpretation, and of course between the living and the dead, presence and absence. The subjectile haunts that to which it gives a place of appearance. Derrida’s interest in the subjectile is focused on its aspect as what ‘underlies both language and art like a support . . . and which is not to be translated’ (Caws, in SAAA xii). In its liminal and only marginally visible location the subjectile cannot be assumed. That it ‘is something [which] is not yet a given . . . it does not constitute an object of any knowing’ (SAAA 63). Neither something nor nothing, an apparent neologism in the text of Artaud not yet having been received into dictionaries in the 1930s, subjectile arrives. Or rather, it returns from older sources in both French and Italian (SAAA 64). Derrida thus constructs the meaning from the archive of traces that the word re-presents, even as he unearths the buried ruins of its sources. The subjectile is both a substance, [and] a subject. It ‘belongs to the code of painting and designates’ what is in some way below (subjectum), occupying – perhaps being – a liminal place or, more accurately, a taking place. It names a process without proper place. It announces a becoming of the between, which both is and is not: between the beneath and the above, it is at once a support and a surface . . . everything distinct from form, as well as from meaning and representation, not representable (emphasis added). Neither representation nor representable as such, it nonetheless brings about, causing to take place, making possible and giving place to, representation. The term marks and remarks a certain crossing and recrossing of borders, even as it remains at the borders of legibility, being, remaining untranslatable, that is axiomatic. At once untranslatable, and yet, seeming to betray itself through that appearance of filiation with so many other words, subjectile emerges from the depths to haunt the supports, the substrata, and the substances. It institutes the very borders that it crosses, while having ‘no consistency apart from that of the between’ (SAAA 71; emphasis added). There is therefore no subjectile as such, even as the subjectile writes the possibility for the work of art to happen, as 277

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Subjectile it were. A secret that permits the possibility of meaning and representation, the subjectile appears untranslatable, that is axiomatic or, in every example, singular and so unavailable to determination in any general manner (SAAA 65). Such apparent paradoxes speak of the subjectile’s power to mark a text, to inform and make possible its taking place, while, in being marked by both a lack and excess, as well as being both excess and lack, the subjectile is irreducible to any stable location or meaning, other than to its own surface and support: the word ‘subjectile’ is itself a subjectile. Hence, ghost, neither ‘a subject . . . nor . . . the object either’ (SAAA 71). Lack and excess, being traced by such marks even as it leaves traces of itself only through the signs of its own lack and excess, the subjectile is not, in stricto sensu. Yet, though not an ‘it’, it is not a negative term: any address to the subjectile cannot be given in terms of a definition that is merely negative or positive, and therefore partaking of some ontological determination. One can no more say ‘it is’ any more than one can say ‘it is not’. Having no being, the verb of being will not hold when one attempts to ‘apply’ it to the notion, hardly a motif (SAAA 72), of the subjectile. Making possible the generation of meaning, of representation, of the image through its support, yet being unsupportable through any such act itself, other than through reference to itself, a subjectile belongs to the order of that which leaves its mark in having retreated from the scene of what it causes to appear. Having called into question the very possibility of the semantic and ontological stability of the term, Derrida admits that the figure is undecidable: ‘it doubtless no longer even belongs to being’ (SAAA 73), and this is so precisely because ‘the subjectile remains between . . . whether it constitutes its underlying element . . . or interposes itself’ (SAAA 75; emphasis in original). That there are remains, that the term remains as some untranslatable, undecidable, even unknowable remains: this remains all that we can say of ‘it’. What remains are the remains, the traces of that which remains in some future never to arrive to be translated or rendered in any final form. Here is the alterity, the haunting condition of the subjectile by which, in turn, one’s perception is haunted in seeking to come to terms with ‘it’. Subjectile names a spectral ‘motion’ (being nothing it assumes the movement of that which marks it, and so has momentarily that singular illusion of motion given by inscription, the play of traces, and so forth) akin to the work of writing, which supports meaning, which places meaning as its surface movements, its temporal and 278

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Subjectile textual structure, and yet which is never that meaning, never what is indirectly represented. In the subjectile and through the play of this impossible figure everything is played out in the work of difference as that which makes possible any representation, image, meaning or being at all. And this difference, this performative inscription is what makes possible the oscillation ‘between representation and its other’ (SAAA 96). Were I to move this discussion in a different direction, I would bring this discussion back to what is received in the response to the portrait, illustrated through the example of Derrida in the documentary Derrida, where the subject is confronted by a portrait in a gallery. I would be tempted to consider this in the following way. In the film, we see Derrida, ‘the original’ and apparently living Derrida, responding to the uncanniness of the image in its manifestation as a painting, a portrait. However, what one ‘sees’ in the film is not there of course. There is no Derrida there. There is no ‘original’. This is yet another ‘portrait’, in the case of film a writing in light, a trace on a substrate, archiving spectrally the ghost of the always absent figure; at the same time we appear to see a representation of the intellectual as both audience and subject of a particular experience, to which experience of being filmed looking at an image of oneself he is expected and invited to respond. There is no ‘true’ Derrida. There is only the painted image and the filmed image. Two competing traces exist only through the phantom-subjectile medium of projection for the times of representation, in that apparitional possibility that is endlessly iterable (at least in principle). The ‘subjectile’ in this case, film, produces the illusion of living, allowing through its spectral medium the uncanny experience for its audience of Derrida living on beyond death. This is a device on which the film plays repeatedly in different ways, as for example in the moments when a camera records one Derrida watching the recording of another Derrida (and on occasion yet another), or when the camera records a ‘blind’ Derrida who, though looking at his image in the mirror of the hair salon, is blind to being watched and does not see himself seeing himself. The film thus interprets representation even as it performs its representations and so represents interpretation. Folding into one another, a writing or inscription and an image, an image of the image, of what the image occasions on the occasion of the image. These reciprocate one another, a series of echoes of the other being staged in the erasure of narcissus. And this is only effected through the subjectile being at work. 279

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Subjectile But we should not rush to understand the subjectile merely as the motion, the rhythm of inscription, which traces the opening and revelation of that becoming which is also a between. It should also be remembered that the subjectile is that on which the subjectile comes to be remarked, though never as itself of course. This is what is seen in Derrida, it is what Derrida both represents and interprets, as Derrida intervenes in Derrida reflecting on Derrida, and the process of becoming the trait in Derrida. Derrida is written on by the act of filming, becoming the subjectile onto which the image of Derrida is projected, constructed. The subjectile is then, as Derrida says economically, both words and page (SAAA 114). Words, traces, brush strokes, pencil lines, light, projection: all are phantom projections and supports, movements and elements in a structure allowing for representation, and all the while not being that. At the same time, such marks, performing the representation, the image, the visual that they neither are nor are reducible to, require themselves a support, such as the page, the canvas, the photographic paper, the screen. Any image, any representation is only ever possible through such support, and through the violence of appearance and penetration, the weaving motion that is figured through the motif of writing. Whatever it is we think we mean when we talk of ‘art’, such discourse ‘always implies representation, reappropriation, reintegration, transposition, or figurative translation of the same’ (SAAA 116). Yet the excess of that which makes art and its implications possible is, in its force, its violence, not of art. Art is thus haunted by a writing, by a performative event that is not those elements defining art. The subjectile betrays. It translates and traduces the very art it upholds and makes possible. More than this, it may be affirmed that the subjectile just is traduction. Subjectile may be said to name the motion or becoming of traduction: transport, transfer, conveyance, derivation. In not being of that ‘art’, but in being a constant motion between the representation and its other, the subjectile announces that ‘Being is not, it is not present, it remains to be born’ (SAAA 128). Presence and the present are haunted by différance on which such notions rely for the illusion, the illustration or representation of their meaning. This is witnessed in Derrida. Support and instrument, a subjectile generates and enacts a matrix, taking ‘upon itself’ the ‘utero-phallic form of the father-mother’ (SAAA 132), even as ‘it’ escapes and exceeds this already impossible determination. Thus the subjectile figures the Other (SAAA 137) that we name spectre, ghost, phantom, phantasm. If ‘it’ is or can be said to be anything, ‘it’ remains as a 280

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Telephone trace without ground, a ‘figure of the unfigurable’ (SAAA 134). Being ‘never literally what it is’ (SAAA 139), the subjectile bears the trace, even as it bears witness to the traces of the constant un-sensing of meaning, of being, of stable representation, and therefore gives the lie to the promise of presence, and of full meaning that representational art would appear to guarantee.

T Telephone (DRBB 572–3) In the beginning, not the Word but a phone call.162 There must have been some phone call, the technological before the logos, the machine before nature, the prosthesis of the voice before speech, disordering the system structured on those priorities. A phone call, both a call made through the apparatus of the machine and at the same time the call of the phone, of techne¯; a call without destination other than the respondent on the other end, the other or the other of the self, yet one that travels down a party line from there to here attended by the possibility of its own misdirection. In the discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses from which this essay takes its starting point, the telephone constitutes the place of being-in-the-world, a being constructed as a techno-prosthesis of what has hitherto been considered the self and that which already occupies that being at its origin. In an essay on Derrida’s telephonic conversation with Hélène Cixous, Eric Prenowitz begins tracing the discourse between the two by insisting on the importance of their communication down the lines, a removal of the face-to-face encounter that places both in a hetero-affective relation to the self and other.163 Prenowitz reminds us, following Derrida, that the tele-technological structuration of communication exists before the telephone itself; or in other words, that telephony arrives avant la lettre and prior to its device. ‘This 162

163

As it occurs in Derrida’s reading of Joyce from which this excerpt is taken, he is referring to Bloom’s phone call in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, where he thinks about phoning up Keyes; Derrida reads the text as a telephonic call placed to God from Israel. The call is placed in both senses in the beginning, before the word. Eric Prenowitz, ‘Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone’, Discourse, 30: 1 and 2 (Winter and Spring 2008): 123–56.

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Telephone trace without ground, a ‘figure of the unfigurable’ (SAAA 134). Being ‘never literally what it is’ (SAAA 139), the subjectile bears the trace, even as it bears witness to the traces of the constant un-sensing of meaning, of being, of stable representation, and therefore gives the lie to the promise of presence, and of full meaning that representational art would appear to guarantee.

T Telephone (DRBB 572–3) In the beginning, not the Word but a phone call.162 There must have been some phone call, the technological before the logos, the machine before nature, the prosthesis of the voice before speech, disordering the system structured on those priorities. A phone call, both a call made through the apparatus of the machine and at the same time the call of the phone, of techne¯; a call without destination other than the respondent on the other end, the other or the other of the self, yet one that travels down a party line from there to here attended by the possibility of its own misdirection. In the discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses from which this essay takes its starting point, the telephone constitutes the place of being-in-the-world, a being constructed as a techno-prosthesis of what has hitherto been considered the self and that which already occupies that being at its origin. In an essay on Derrida’s telephonic conversation with Hélène Cixous, Eric Prenowitz begins tracing the discourse between the two by insisting on the importance of their communication down the lines, a removal of the face-to-face encounter that places both in a hetero-affective relation to the self and other.163 Prenowitz reminds us, following Derrida, that the tele-technological structuration of communication exists before the telephone itself; or in other words, that telephony arrives avant la lettre and prior to its device. ‘This 162

163

As it occurs in Derrida’s reading of Joyce from which this excerpt is taken, he is referring to Bloom’s phone call in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses, where he thinks about phoning up Keyes; Derrida reads the text as a telephonic call placed to God from Israel. The call is placed in both senses in the beginning, before the word. Eric Prenowitz, ‘Crossing Lines: Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous on the Phone’, Discourse, 30: 1 and 2 (Winter and Spring 2008): 123–56.

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Telephone telephony,’ he writes ‘that is full operational long before the technical conditions of its possibility are in place (“I am listening to you” even before “you call me”), is precisely what the telephony itself “does” or effects performatively: the call that calls itself into being’.164 His tele-textual reading refers to Derrida via another speaker, Avital Ronell, and her 1989 text The Telephone Book, where Ronell figures the apparatus as marking a site of absence, an absence of speech, of place, of the other and to the self. While discussing its psycho-corporeal implications, dialling into the systematics of the technology in a range of philosophers’ writings, including those of Derrida, Ronell commences from Heidegger as the theorist of the ‘call’, reading his call through the telephone.165 In Being and Time, Heidegger articulates his thinking of the ‘call of conscience’ (Gewissensruf), the experience whereby the subject is recollected through a call to conscience, issued from what seems to be an external voice but which is in actuality the voice of the self; the call to conscience comes from and towards Dasein, recalling Dasein to its self. That this experience seems to come from outside being and from the call of another is evidence of the structuration of conscience, whereby Dasein too is figured as the recollection of being through its alterity and in its orientation towards finitude. In What Is Called Thinking?,166 he takes up the dual meaning of the word in order to distinguish between call as nomination and as invitation; in the latter sense, the call of conscience is a reciprocity of Dasein with its self. It is the call that articulates the difference within Dasein, where it communicates from that difference: the call does not reconstitute the self as self-identical in a phenomenological reduction effected through interior monologue, hearing-oneself-speak, but rather arrives as the voice of the other already within the self. It is a silent call, in that it is without expressive content; in calling, it recalls the self to itself from the inauthenticity of the world. When Dasein calls to itself, the call both comes from and arrives at the self, and 164 165

166

Prenowitz, ‘Crossing Lines’, p. 144. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). See Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, Part II, Lecture I. Heidegger states that ‘[t]he question “What calls on us to think?” has already drawn us into the substance of the inquiry. We ourselves are, in the strict sense of the word, put into question by the question’ (p. 116). Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York, Evanston, IL and London: Harper & Row, 1968).

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Telephone it calls that self to a conscience; this conscience is figured as guilt, because Dasein is structured according to Being which is oriented towards lack, nothing. Dasein is thrown into the world, but the call of conscience returns it towards this formal structuration through guilt and to its own finitude. In the ‘To Speculate – On “Freud” ’ section of The Post Card, Derrida constructs a communication around the names of Heidegger, Nietzsche and Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a state of the debt – Schuld having the double meaning of guilt and indebtedness – with regard to these thinkers and their interrelation, in his work and their own. Referring to Freud’s avoidance of Nietzsche and reading it in terms of a disavowal of intimacy, he asks, calling up Heidegger as the third, ‘[h]ow to speculate on the debt of another coming back to, amounting to [à soi revenant] oneself?’ (PC 263). In ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, Derrida structures the call of conscience, the return of the other who amounts to oneself, as a telephone call. Circulating around the many instances of the call in Joyce, whose text is a ‘powerful network’ (DRBB 573), a telephonic exchange, he concentrates especially on those moments of hanging on the telephone, or waiting for a call.167 The telephone call in Joyce, which is also a coup de téléphone in its aleatory technicity, returns the call to Heidegger, and to the question of just who we are waiting for when we wait on the phone. Throughout Derrida’s reading of Joyce he persists in affirming by way of marking the affirmation of ‘yes’ in Ulysses through his own discourse; in this passage, the yes becomes the affirmation of being received in the call to conscience. There are several modalities of the telephonic, yes, but one of them [. . .] amounts to marking, simply, that one is there, present, listening, on the other end of the line. This silence of the listener who waits on the other is both towards the other being and towards the other in being. This is of the order of the collect call, where the request is placed by the self in order to recollect the self in the call to conscience. The telephone, for Derrida, appears to offer a proximity and immediacy of presence of being when in fact it is a spacing 167

In a network of technological affiliations, this text is also an ‘answering machine’ and, Derrida predicts, will provide the basis for ‘a giant computer’, speculating that ‘it remains to be seen if we could consult this computer on the word yes, and if the yes [. . .] can be counted’ (DRBB 583). Through the figure of the telephone he prefigures a cybernetic Joyce and, in particular, a hypertext of Joyce that has now come into existence as the Ulysses concordance in which it is indeed possible to count all the singular instances of yes.

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Telephone technology; the telephonic exchange is a simulacrum of presence through a tele-technological communication that offers the illusion of an externalised self-presence and its reception. The voice (phone¯) from afar (tele) takes the form not only of another’s voice but of the voice of the other within the self. Remembering that for Heidegger the call to conscience appears to come from an external voice but in fact comes from the voice of the self, from and towards Dasein and recalling Dasein to its self, Derrida structures it as a phone call. The voice seems to come from the other end of the phone, from a being outside oneself and from the call of another; this is the structuration of conscience, recalling Dasein to itself through its own alterity. Dasein, being, is a being-at-the-telephone, and being-there is a being-at-the-telephone, a being for the telephone. Derrida makes this explicit, stating that Heideggerian Dasein is also a being-called, it is always . . . a Dasein that accedes to itself only on the basis of the Call; Dasein is assimilated to itself in the form of the call to conscience. The phone call appears in an unmediated proximity of the voice to offer self-presence in an approximation of auto-affection, the interior monologue or hearing-oneself-speak wherein the self is given as self-identical, yet the relation of the voice to itself is distanced through the technicity of the call; it offers the experience of the self constituted in différance. Again being can be conceived according to this structure: the call is both nomination and invitation, where the reciprocal relation is with the other of the self. In the telephone call, the person at the other end is received in the silence of the listener, [r]eady to respond but not for the moment responding anything other than the preparation to respond; this relation is that of the self to the other in the call, where the other is received in silence. The invitation of the self to its other through the call is the articulation of difference within Dasein; therefore the call to conscience is tele-technological in that it structures being through and as difference rather than self-identity. Then in the beginning the telephone, yes. Being is constituted through a Heideggerian call that is already technological, a call which has come from afar, which does not necessarily use words, and which, in a certain way, does not say anything. The call to conscience is without expressive content, and arriving as the silent voice of the other in the self precludes Dasein being experienced in reconstitution as self-identical through the interior monologue. A silent phone call, then, arriving to the called one who is this Dasein . . . interpellated toward its possibility of being the most proper, in being reconstituted as Dasein through the telephone. 284

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Trait Finally, the discussion of Joyce in terms of a being structured technically from the beginning and even before or independently of the apparatus might recall us to another modernist phone call, that made between the narrator of In Search of Lost Time and his grandmother. In that call, he experiences simultaneously the proximity and distance of the grandmother, the telephone giving ‘the illusoriness in the appearance of the most tender proximity’.168 What appears to be proximate is spaced, what appears to be auto-affective, heteroaffective. The appearance of the ‘most tender’ closeness is but an illusion. To the narrator, the phone call announces the death of the grandmother to come, as if it had already taken place. As in Joyce, however, if thought in Heideggerian terms the trace of technicity does structure being in relation to death; Dasein is most proper when it is recalled through alterity in its orientation towards death, ‘a being for death of Dasein’ (DRBB 573). The telephone call is placed to return being to becoming in its own death.

Trait (DRWP 127–8; MB 53–4) The trait is an interesting and complex figure; neither there nor not there it separates as much as it joins, it is not seen even though it makes visible what is seen in any image or representation. Thus, the trait joins and adjoins only in separating, while resembling nothing so much as that which is only apprehended indirectly in the withdrawal of withdrawal. The term is related to trace and to other similar forms, such as tract, which shares a common root, trahere, meaning to draw or drag, to pull. Earliest uses in English forms acknowledge temporality, which is clearly heard in phrases such as ‘tract of time’, but the term tract also indicates spatial cognition, as in a tract of land, the figural image by which Thomas Hardy traces, draws out the image of, the landscape of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native: ‘the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment’.169 Hardy’s sentence is fascinating for the ways it insinuates the relation between pictorial representation and writing, form and content, space and time. Were this the only sentence in the chapter to do so, its remarkable 168

169

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: III, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 148. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Tony Slade, intro. Penny Boumelha (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 9.

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Trait and singular exemplification of the work of différance and writing would alone warrant our attention, as would its ‘institution’ of the scene and the implications for reading the trait therein. It exemplifies both the movement of différance as that which it indelibly marks and articulates the architectonics of representation and scene and the invisible motions that produce these images. What is all the more interesting though is that it condenses motifs and tropes that are to be observed throughout the chapter. As the chapter from Hardy’s novel illustrates and traces repeatedly, there is no subject, no consciousness in the work of différance and the multiple traits by which it weaves structure and image. Moreover, the consciousness of the narrator arrives belatedly to reinscribe what takes place, to receive and so take down the dictation of the other in its response, to what is always already on the move. The sentence and, by extension therefore, the chapter arrive, in effect, as tracts on the trait. In a gesture of adumbrating frames within frames, they perform what they describe, producing in the process a treatise on the illusory art of representation and the hidden graphic movements that make the absent visible. And, it has to be said, this chapter offers a tract on différance, and on literature itself as supplement and subjectile as the collective trait treating or presenting, staging, both a representation as absent, and a discourse on the différance of, in, representation qua illusion, illustration, image, of presence. The sentence stages itself as both representation and the support for the representation of repeated human actions time after time in their iterable recurrence. (Is it not this haunting revenance and iterability that the return of the title, The Return of the Native, announces as the inaugural coming to being, and what is always to come? Is it not the case that the economy and trait of the return dispels once more any discernible starting point or origin?) The sentence plays economically on the spacing of time and the time of spacing, implicating the tract or trait in his tracing of the land and the time of representation. Coming near the very start of the chapter, and therefore the novel, the sentence opens spacing and temporality through a tracing that follows the contours as much as it re-presents them in their absence, and so may be said to partake of a performative, rather than merely a constative, function. Additionally, the sentence, in its folds and motions, the spacing of its structure and the times of its reading and writing, anticipate the chapter as a whole. They inscribe and portray the place and its taking place, as the inaugural condition for the coming into being of both 286

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Trait life, initially inhuman or non-human existence, and the ‘being’ of the chapter itself. Or to put this differently as time moves in the scene so writing enacts a concomitant, analogous becoming. The chapter is interesting further in that it admits of no human form in its representation. However, that ‘representation’ or portrait of the land is bound up in a convoluted manner in that chapter with temporality. The writing of representation and its complex of interwoven traces is a matter of tracing and treating of spacing and time, specifically different passages, durations, the continuance and measures of time. Understanding this brings us back to tract. The point here is to acknowledge how representation in being constituted through traces, whether written or painted, or drawn, is, as any other writing, the production and effect of the motions of différance. If it is the movement of the trait or trace that undoes the apparent immediacy and stability of representation, what else can be said of the trait, apropos of art? As Peter Brunette and David Wills point out, ‘much of Derrida’s writing on the visual arts has concentrated on the trait . . . a word that is itself synonymous . . . with the term “writing”.’170 They continue: It is through the idea of the trait, referring to whatever is drawn, as well as more specifically in French to the brush stroke, that the graphic [as opposed to the phonic] emerges . . . there can be no purely pictorial line, any more than a purely verbal line – because the trait is always already a retrait, necessarily subject to repetition and subdivision.171

In an essay on metaphor, Derrida examines the metaphor as retrait,172 which may be translated as both retreat and also re-tracing, or, as I have given it above, withdrawal. The metaphor, a figure for something else, is only ever such a mark. It re-traces or reiterates, while not being a direct representation of the thing, subject or idea it figures. The metaphor’s arrival signals the deferral of and differentiation of presence and the present and thereby announces the temporal and textual network as being always already in place in the act of signification. However, Derrida cautions that in being nothing the trait is irreducible to metaphor, the latter is not the equivalent of the former. At the same time, the appearance of the trait also signals 170

171 172

Peter Brunette and David Wills (eds), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 4. Brunette and Wills, Deconstruction and the Visual Arts, p. 4. On the trait and its relation to the retrait, see also the discussion of retrait throughout Memoirs of the Blind.

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Trait that presence has retreated. It has left only this trait as the sign of its retrait, a retrait that is doubled, and redoubles, re-dividing itself in the trait as representation and interpretation. This is why there is neither a purely pictorial nor a verbal line. Nor is the trait secondary. It does not come after that which it traces. As we see with the example of Hardy, the trace precedes what it represents, its supplementarity arriving before the ‘original’. In what amounts to the a priori registration of withdrawal and non-appearance, it may be read that in inscription of the trait, as Derrida attempts to ‘articulate it in the trace or in difference, succeeds only in being effaced [n’arrive qu’à s’effacer]’ (DRWP 125; emphasis added). As might be apparent from the words of Brunette and Wills, the trait treats of both feature and mark, drawn line or brush stroke. Importantly, the trait makes appear, to use this already overworked formula, both that which is silent – the graphic – and which also spaces, displacing presence from within the totalising illusion of representation, even as such spacing, such seemingly invisible differing and deferring (this being a question of spacing and temporality, in that the eye takes time to read what it believes to be the immediacy of reception of any representation), makes such an illusion possible. That the trait is a mark, that is to say transmissible and available to reading (at least in principle), means that it is always already re-markable, even though within the work of art it is usually taken as unremarkable, unless recuperable within the architectonics of form and content, and therefore subservient to representation and ontology. The appearance of a trait is therefore always a re-trait, as we have said. Never appearing for a first time simply, any trait always implies repetition, of withdrawal or retreat, and return or re-markability. Its graphic condition thus attests to the trait’s identity as a writing, whether the trait is a pencil line or brush stroke, or indeed the play of light in a photograph or film. The trait is never itself, although it is not nothing. In its iterability, it is always already supplementary. Both replacement and addition, the trait is a figure of, even as it figures, ‘an indiscreet and overflowing insistence . . . an over-abundant remanence, . . . an intrusive repetition, always marking with a supplementary trait, with one more turn, with a re-turn and with a withdrawal (retrait) the trait that it will have left in the text itself’ (DRWP 104). An interruption and an excess beyond identity, the trait is that graphic reminder and remainder, which, irreducible to – other than – either form or content, representation or meaning, marks a passage between the visible and invisibility, 288

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Trait and thus has to do with the gaze, with vision. It is, I would aver, the agitation in trait which acts on, provoking anxiety in the viewer of his own portrait, the trait that in its passage of traduction recalls uncannily to the mind’s eye or to memory something of the subject, but as other than the subject who receives the mark in the confrontation with his image, as that image in turn intervenes in the blindness of self to cause one to interpret, to translate and so betray oneself. Vision is, perhaps obviously, central to all of Derrida’s writings on art, even though it is not the only subject. Vision, for Derrida, is implicated in reading. It is furthermore ‘about looking and the right to it’. This in turn ‘becomes solely a matter of lines of demarcation, marks or boundaries, limits, frames, and borders that leave traces of having overstepped the mark’ (RI xv; emphasis added). Notice how again overflow, overabundance, excess, are emphasised in relation to the trait and the border, the frame, and that in representation which cannot be contained in a closed system – in short, writing. I am tempted to hear in this remark what amounts to a virtual thesis on how to read the visual arts, how to see the difference by which art is made possible, without falling prey to a kind of readerly blindness or becoming blind to the necessary act of reading which has to begin again and again. Such blindness is called by Derrida the desire for restitution, to which, in their analysis of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh (Old Shoes with Laces) Derrida reads Martin Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro succumbing (TP 255–382). The essay is presented as a dialogue, or to be more precise a ‘polylogue’ comprising ‘n + 1 – female – voices’ (TP 356). Its interlocutors shuttling back and forth, weaving in and out of each other, moving between the essays by Schapiro and Heidegger. The painting depicts two shoes. Concerning the shoes, they cannot be reassembled as a pair, they cannot be assigned this meaning, pair. They are ‘detached, abandoned, unlaced . . .’ (TP 374). Inasmuch as the very idea of pairing is undone a ‘spectrum of possibilities of the possibilities of specters presents itself’ (TP 374). The dysymmetry of this may be glimpsed in the English translation, in the motion between spectrum and spectres, and of course in the overflow, the drift that is irreversible from one end of the sentence to the other, from the classical measurability of a spectrum to the possibility of the impossible that is named the spectral. But this becomes more pronounced, as meaning is rendered dysfunctional through Derrida’s use of le spectre for both possibilities. Thus the commentary retraces and performs semantically the dysymmetry and concomitant opening or unfolding already in 289

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Trait the painting’s double and differential image of the shoes. Each shoe is of course an interpretation and therefore marked by, even as it remarks, the trait of itself. But it is also the trait of the other. Each shoe figures its other in the painting, in an unfolding reciprocity that neither closes the gap between the two as iterable reminders of the other nor completes the circle in the presentation of an image that amounts to the notion of pair. In reading the opening of the closed system of pair within itself, Derrida acknowledges how each shoe is haunted by other shoes, not least those from which those represented are ‘amputated’, and therefore impossible to give restitution to, in returning to them the ghostly supplement that each shoe thus figures and by which it is traced. It is impossible here to paraphrase more of Derrida’s lengthy, complex commentary. However, we can say that both Schapiro and Heidegger’s commentaries produce meanings having nothing to do with the image as such, but with a misrepresention as to the possible contexts for the image. In this sense, both Schapiro and Heidegger desire a story that hides itself as story, as narrative subjectile, but which imposes itself as a border, a frame if you will by which the painting may be explained and contained. As Derrida points out, one cannot even assume that the painting is of a pair of shoes, just because there happen to be two shoes, let alone remark that the shoes belong to a peasant, as Heidegger does (TP 258–60). Misrecognition and with that misreading figure a kind of proleptic will to blindness, whereby ‘the desire for attribution is a desire for appropriation’ (TP 260). The perception of attribution as appropriation identifies the desire for stories and the projection of meaning as being the will to meaning-for-me. One produces and stabilises the meaning of a text by marshalling and economising on all the traits in order to situate a semantic totality in which difference is subordinated to the production of an identity that, after a fashion, is my identity, identity-forme. The meaning I read returns a reflection, a restitution that is at bottom an encoded narcissism. Seeing clear and true in the reading of the work of art involves a suspension of attribution, an interruption of one’s desire. It is thus to engage in the task of seeing what one does not see by habit. The interest in what one sees but which is understood as remaining mute in any conventional analytical construction of the visual concerns the graphic. How the graphic trait relates to sight and blindness, visibility and invisibility, appears very early on in the discussion between two voices in Memoirs of the Blind (MB 2–3). One 290

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Trait is afforded insight in the places concerning the self, identity, being, where one is most blind. The trait effects a hinge, but also a break in the binaries just mentioned, as well as forcing a passage that erases at least in part the presumed or assumed separability and autonomy of the component terms in each binarism. Once the breach or hinge is traced, the meaning on either side of the break can no longer be maintained. This text considers the structural dislocation or disjunction, the disorder or difference that must perforce take place in any act of self-portraiture and the assumption of auto-presence. There is a structural displacement between the making of the self-portrait and the necessary blindness that accompanies the production of the work. Put simply, if one looks at the line or stroke, the trait one is making in the act or performance of self-portraiture, one has to do so from memory, from a place that is blind. Conversely, if one looks at one’s reflection in order to commit the image to paper or canvas, one cannot observe the making of the line or stroke, which must proceed blindly. So, to reiterate the point, the trait is the demarcation, the spectral manifestation of différance. In ghostly fashion, the line read and the line to be drawn hovers as the phantasmic, (a)material trace of memory. It appears and retreats. It is the trait and retrait by which one sees without eyes. In perceiving this, we come to apprehend indirectly that there is a relationship between the representation of the ‘present’ self and the self’s temporal alterity. Put differently, the perception or insight opens to our view an all too often obscured relation between mimesis and mneme, representation or image and memory, image and interpretation. Understanding this relation, one begins to grasp the temporal dimension of identity, meaning, ontology, and the spacing inherent to such concepts. Once the temporal is apprehended, presence is placed in a relation to itself by which there can be no full or simple, undifferentiated presence. Presence is displaced from within itself by the trait that is the signal of a past that has never been present, an alterity irrecuperable and irreducible to the self-same. Nothing is seen as such then, but a certain revelation takes place in and as the temporal disjunction of the trait and its iterability, whereby there occurs ‘an unveiling that renders visible’ (MB 122). In this, and there, there, there is always already some supplementary phantom. The trait retreats. It is always already a retrait. Haunted by the retrait, it is ‘not then paralysed in a tautology that folds the same onto the same. On the contrary, it becomes prey to allegory [or analogy] . . . given over to the speech and gaze of the 291

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Trait other’ (MB 2–3). Comprehending the trait and its relation to seeing as thinking or reading (one says ‘I see’ when one means ‘I understand’), rather than to what blinds one to comprehension in being seen. (Arguably, in their non-receptive restitution of the text of Van Gogh, Schapiro and Heidegger see before seeing and therefore do not ‘see’, do not interrupt what Joyce calls in Ulysses the ‘ineluctable modality of the visible’ as the modality that maintains the illusion of presence and logocentrism (MB 31).) As Derrida remarks ‘in losing his sight man does not lose his eyes. On the contrary. Only then does man begin to think the eyes . . . he sees between and catches a glimpse of the difference . . .’ (MB 128; second emphasis mine). To fold back upon ourselves, and to unfold again this point from another perspective already implied in the response of Derrida to his portrait. This difference just announced, once caught in the blink of an eye as it were, we might name on this occasion the trait. Moving beyond the immediate frame of reference for this chapter, I would conclude this section by pointing to the fact that it is also, significantly, the difference by which we are known, and which survives us, as the proper name. For the proper name, the name you read here, Derrida, or the name on the cover of this book and which I sign elsewhere is what comes back to me as a trait which be-trays, surviving, living on beyond me. This is what the trait gives us to see and to think. And like that portrait with which we began, the proper name returns to us as this uncanny spectral trace. It returns and retreats as the future anterior ghost of ourselves. Our signature, our proper name, as trait guarantees and countersigns us as an other, which, as David Farrell Krell emphasises, mourns us.173 Supposedly the sign of a living being, the equivalent of living speech, this strange trait, the signature or the proper name is haunted. It is ghosted by its own iterability and transmissibility as trait. Amputated from us, the proper name improperly can only function seemingly paradoxically as the mechanically iterable signature of our singularity. For the signature to prove its ‘originality’ or uniqueness it must be repeatable. And to borrow from Krell once more, such technicity ‘means my death’ (2000: 11).

173

David Farrell Krell, The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 10–11.

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Unconditionality

U Unconditionality (RTER 132–4) In Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Derrida sets up a discourse surrounding the term unconditionality that refers to an aporetic and untraversible lacuna in reason between the competing demands of justice – owed to the just incalculability of dignity – and the indispensable calculation of law. The undecidability resides in the fact that both are equally rational, and yet if one must cede to the other reason cannot be served. Rogues sets up this undecidability beyond dichotomy in relation to unconditionality, a term which is itself poised in the differential space between two concepts of reason. On the one hand, Derrida writes, unconditionality remains, and in the name, in German translated from Greek, the ultimate recourse, the absolute principle of pure reason, for Kant as well as Husserl. Yet this concept of unconditionality vies with another; [o]n the other hand, unconditionality remains, and in this name, what binds practical reason to the theoretical reason it subordinates. It is the ultimate truth of an ‘interest of reason’. By being called up as unconditionality, the concept is conditionally divided according to the reason it presupposes and concomitantly divided as a concept. Rogues is an interrogation of the sovereign state and an outlining of the Derridean idea of a ‘democracy to come’. It is in the context of the sovereignty of the state, always in Derrida’s eyes a ‘rogue’ state [état voyou], that unconditionality is considered with particular regard to how it has been figured by philosophy. Unconditionality and sovereignty, he begins, are inseparable; it is impossible that they should be extricated one from the other and yet necessary for democracy to arrive. Unconditionality has heretofore always been considered in and as its relation to sovereign right, and specifically to the Enlightenment ideal, as it was conceived by Kant, of the right to think and to say everything. If the anthropocentric view of the universe was ratified in the Enlightenment, it was by elevating the rationality of man so that his selfhood was refigured in terms of sovereign power, and the man becomes the microcosm of the state, the state the macrocosm of the man. By being thought as an ipseity, a self-identical subject, man is founded in the sovereignty of the potestas, the self-appropriating force that lends itself its own law in the power of being able to say ‘I can’. This sovereignty of the subject as 293

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Unconditionality self-possession is simultaneously the granting of power to the subject through that primary act of self-appropriation, and the founding of the concept of sovereignty that then articulates itself as state sovereignty or democractic sovereignty, that of the people. In its two most important ideals, that of the rational self and that of democracy, the Enlightenment is located in a double bind reliant on the violence of force; there can be no unconditional democracy when its model is in the sovereignty of the subject, brought into being through an act of force and constituted as that power, a power of possession which must necessarily extend to the law of the state and to democracy itself. Thus the freedom of the self-determining individual: ‘[t]here is no freedom without ipseity and, vice versa, no ipseity without freedom – and thus, without a certain sovereignty’ (RTER 23). The unconditional freedom of the right to think everything is therefore one of the democracy to come, insofar as it is not granted by contemporary states, but also because unconditionality cannot be unconditional in the sense of a freedom that is heterogeneous to that of sovereignty if it remains indivisible from sovereignty. Unconditionality, the rational exercise of the freedom of thought, liberated from power, cannot be thought from a position of power that extends from the concept of the self to that of the state. The polarisation of sovereignty into divine right and the right of man remains traceable in Derrida back to a theological sovereignty from which the anthropo-ontological determination derives; for there to be a democracy, ‘a certain unconditional renunciation of sovereignty is required a priori’ (RTER xiv). This ipseity is the source of what Derrida names the ‘reason of the strongest’ – the democracy wherein we find de¯mos and kratos as well as kratein, the latter meaning ‘to be the strongest’, ‘to govern’, ‘to have the force of law’, ‘to be right [avoir droit]’ (RTER 22) – as ‘the right [droit] granted to force or the force granted to law’ (RTER 12). The principle of possession of reason is here understood as the possession of reason over, and the democratic state formed in this concept of power. The concept of reason, in its ethical and juridical forms as well as in its practical and theoretical ones, is here tied up with sovereignty and its unconditionality, both of which are absolute. In the name of recuperating the honour of reason, Derrida therefore proposes its rethinking in terms of the unconditional, as a rethinking which will remain rigorously within reason. He does so, first of all, to oppose a sovereign reason that by force of right constitutes a threat to the plural rationalities of a global world. These cannot be reduced to 294

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Unconditionality a Kantian regulative idea of reason, assumed through a unifying experience to an order of reason in a unified ‘world’. In their name and that of an Enlightenment to come, Derrida seeks to disrupt ‘the unity of the regulative Idea of the world that authorizes that world in advance’ (RTER 128) by deconstructing sovereignty, the right to reason, in the unconditional, so that the becoming of these plural rationalities means an Enlightenment to come constituted in a reason ‘that resists the teleological unity of reason, and the idea of an infinite task that presupposed, at least as its horizon, an organized totalization of truths’ (RTER 128). Derrida here reminds us that for Husserl, as for Kant, the division of theoretical reason and practical reason is null in that they are both recuperable to a priori reason and that theoretical reason particularly is subordinated to practical reason. For Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason, the unity of theoretical and practical reason, especially in the subordination of the former to the latter, is by virtue of their both being inseparable insofar as one reason judges a priori, for the purposes of both. For Derrida, this is where the ‘interest’ of reason is founded. For Husserl, naturalism and objectivism are critical perversions in their adherence to finitude, the risk being what links the ideality of the ideal object to exactitude, and thus to a certain type of calculability. Thus transcendental idealism is careful to provide for the fact that certain types of objects might . . . give rise to a rigorous knowledge . . . even though, in essence, this knowledge cannot and thus must not claim exactitude. This allowance for incalculability is not in opposition to rationalism but rather maintains it; [i]n renouncing calculability in this way, such knowledge actually loses nothing of its rationality or its indubitability. Husserl thus provides for incalculability as rationalism. This will be the path which will . . . lead us . . . outside the ‘as such’ of ontology and phenomenology. It will provide the means for thinking beyond idealism and its determination of being within the teleology, but here Derrida is first marking the possibility of an incalculability that is both provided for and rational as it comes out of that tradition. The next step in his argument is to note that in the Kantian sense, as it is outlined in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, dignity [Würde], belongs to this order of the incalculable; it is the concept of ‘a dignity that is incalculable and thus transcends the marketplace at all costs’ (RTER 133). The role it plays [in] the kingdom of ends . . . is opposed to what has a price in the market. From this it follows that [t]he dignity of a reasonable being . . . is 295

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Unconditionality incalculable as an end in itself. It is at once universal and exceptional. It is this unconditional dignity of being that Derrida seizes on as providing the basis for thinking unconditionality in relation to the contemporary political situation, the sovereign force of the nationstate, and the incompatibility of plural rationalities with a unified order of knowledge. This incalculable dignity, he argues, remains the indispensable axiomatic, in the so-called globalization [mondialisation] that is underway, in the discourses and international institutions concerning human rights and other modern juridical performatives. This is especially the case where the nation-state, threatened by its own autoimmunity, opposes those institutions that seek to reformulate politico-juridical relations according to a universal human rights and the constitution of that principle through law. The endangering of human rights to the reason of the strongest, the right to right, is most explicit in the relation between the nation-state and these supranational institutions that, by reason of that being without border, threaten sovereignty per se. Attendant on this question is a further postulation: [h]ow is one to relate this just incalculability of dignity to the indispensable calculation of law? This is the problem of how to think law, which must calculate, and justice, which by necessity is unconditional, when both are rational and the aporia is located in idealism. On the one hand, unconditionality remains [. . .] the ultimate recourse, the absolute principle of pure reason, for Kant as well as Husserl. However [o]n the other hand, unconditionality remains [. . .] what binds practical reason to the theoretical reason it subordinates. As such, [i]t is the ultimate truth of an ‘interest of reason’. What this means, as Derrida explains, is that, on one hand, philosophy requires that truth be unconditional, and therefore unconditionality becomes the truth of truth. On the other, and according to the Critique of Practical Reason, unconditionality is the truth of the interest of reason, which therefore requires the subordination of the theoretical reason, which is conditioned, to the practical, which is unconditioned. Derrida therefore provides a rational basis, insofar as phenomenology is classically rational, for unconditionality. He then proceeds to move away from transcendental idealism having done so, asking whether Kant and Husserl, who understand reason in terms of a historicity of the telos, can think an event. In this context, Derrida is speaking of the Enlightenment to come, the horizon of an event which is not structured by the telos and where unconditionality does not have to be thought in relation to it but to a reason other than 296

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Undecidability that which is present according to the Idea in the Kantian sense, the telos. To think such an event would require the separation of sovereignty from the unconditional, which bond philosophy holds to be inseparable because reason submits to unconditionality as it founds and goes beyond reason. Derrida insists not only that they can but must be separated, through the idea of the Enlightenment to come. As this concept is founded in unconditionality, one of the two poles of rationality, Derrida posits that deconstruction remains faithful to and reasserts rationalism in that postulation; deconstruction ‘never renounces’ reason, ‘precisely in the name of an Enlightenment to come’. Such reason would be unconditional in that it would suspend judgement as a fidelity to reason, a way of negotiating between the calculation of the law and the demand of justice; moreover, it would offer a thinking of reason, in the context of that event, that by suspending decision would avoid the reinscription of deconstruction into dialectical metaphysics. By thus avoiding what Derrida saw to be the fate of transcendental idealism which, founding its phenomenological experience in the decision for a telos that could not be known to that experience, thereby entered into dialectical reasoning, deconstruction can offer a thinking of reason without resort to the decision that would ground the unconditional in a logos outside of it. It is from that unconditionality that a deconstruction of sovereignty might take place; Derrida ends his thinking of the unconditional by positing some of the forms it had taken in his late work, forms of an unconditionality without sovereignty: that of hospitality, the gift, forgiveness. The Enlightenment to come remains an event on the horizon.

Undecidability (GGGG 15–18) The intimacy of literature and philosophy is felt keenly in this word, undecidability, which displaces any idea of the centre and every genesis. Deconstruction proceeds from undecidability, happens within it; neither rests on one meaning. By bringing forth the plurality of a word (its ‘meanings’: conceptual, philosophical, historical, carried in language), a deconstructive reading can unbind the dilemma it presents to reason; unbind, but never resolve, because the premise of such a reading is also to examine other readings which, seeking to resolve, make a choice to rest on one meaning where the only choice is to remain within the undecidability. In so doing, the privileging and closure of a single meaning functions as the signifier of an a 297

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Undecidability priori structure governing the reading, while at the same time being produced through that signifier and signified. Metaphysics is created, in that sense, by the installation of presence through decision. It rests on one meaning, and therefore on one unified reading and on one unified philosophy of reason (and philosophy as the philosophy of the unitary) – what we might call a genre of philosophy, genetically linked through a genealogy of genius.174 In a real sense, there is only one possible reading, as the act of reading becomes a repeated verification and production of that which is thought to precede it. Reading exists as a political strategy to veil and simultaneously manifest a structure: to veil and at the same time to make evident its premises as if they were produced from the reading and from the text. It is not in the texts of metaphysical philosophy, or those produced from it, that metaphysics lies. It is, rather, in the act of reading that presupposes and perpetuates that structure and with which the structure is not only complicit but reliant. If metaphysics teaches us how to read, and reading teaches us metaphysics, birthing each other in a twin maiuetics, then deconstruction also calls us to a reading. To read undecidability is to resist that other resistance which would efface it. By refusing this closure of language, a deconstruction – and deconstruction, inseparable and inexistent except in the singular – unfolds, and in turn unfolds metaphysics, exposing what is already within it. Facing the undecidability within a text such a reading makes it the subject of inquiry and becomes subject to it, surrendering a logical fallacy of mastery over reading;175 concomitantly, it opens out the logic of presence that necessitates the decision and the fact that the decision produces and affiliates that logic to itself, investigating how its presence is undermined by the undecidability. In the example of the pharmakon, which can mean either ‘poison’ or ‘cure’, Derrida shows that it is when reading it as both poison and cure – the one infiltrating the other – that the logic which governs the decision of meaning and operates through the hierarchy of terms breaks down. The surrender to undecidability moves the act of reading into a dynamic wherein it not only enacts, is mimetic of, or assists exposition as an articulation of, the problematic of metaphysics but is itself an ethics and politics. By this is meant that it is both a strategic harnessing of plurality – a 174

175

These words recall Derrida’s, writing on Hélène Cixous in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Geniuses: The Secrets of the Archive, the text from which the excerpt for this word is taken. Normally one would speak of a logical fallacy; here, a fallacy of logic exposed.

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Undecidability political strategy – in order to deconstruct a structural logic and the structures built up around that logic, and an answer of the call to and of the absolute other. One could argue that this ethics originates in the chain of terms – différance, writing – of which language is one (which destroys all traditional sense of origin). This is for two reasons: in that deconstruction gives itself up to the passivity of différance, to language – to undecidability – it recognises différance, language, and writing as the absolute Other176 to whom responsibility is engendered (itself an ethical obligation to practise in a certain way). This example is itself one of undecidability because différance, language and writing are not synonyms, but share with each other an underscoring by différance. Furthermore, if language has man and not vice versa, the other must be in ourselves, as it is also external to us.177 The call of the other – ethics – could be said to be first of all a call of language, ethics as a linguistic question. The other who makes me different to myself is the writing of consciousness that comes before and deconstructs the presumption of internalised immediacy to self through an inner monologue, and therefore self-presence. Language deconstructs ontology in this sense of being as self-presence and deconstruction, as understood in the Derridean sense, can then be argued to be immanently ethical, in that its concern, from the beginning, is towards a philosophical intervention into philosophy that through its deconstruction of ontology enjoinders an obligation towards the other in the same. The perceived turn towards ethics178 observed in the late work of Derrida can only then be viewed in terms of an overt philosophical discussion of ethics, and a cultural and political thematics, that both issue from what is already an ethics. To the extent that deconstruction 176 177

178

This is not coextensive, as some have misread, with a privileging of language. ‘[Différance] confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends upon the system of differences and the movement of différance, that the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral’ (P 25). This ‘turn’ is controversial. Some writers, such as Simon Critchley, have situated Derrida’s late work as explicitly ethical, and thus divergent from his early work. Others, most notable Martin Hägglund, argue that there is no ethical turn. It is important to note, however, that Derrida takes ethics into account from his earliest work, for example in his reading of Lévinas through ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. It could equally be argued that his early work is implicitly ethical with regard to archi-écriture.

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Undecidability ‘happens’, irrespective of ascertainment, a deconstructive reading is a close reading, in order to discern the moment of undecidability and the implications of the slippage; ‘deconstruction,’ Derrida has stated, ‘is nothing more, or less, than close reading’. Bearing in mind Barbara Johnson’s argument that close reading ‘is the only teaching that can properly be called literary’, the implication is of the literary into the philosophical and as its own singular ontology.179 Undecidability may refer to the impossibility of closure on one reading; if a poem were to be read by ten people, each of those people would produce a different reading, alert to what calls to them from the text. Each rereading similarly is another reading, opening out new possibilities within the plural text; for these reasons, any claim to divination of what a text is ‘about’ or to have ‘uncovered’ its ‘meaning’ is necessarily false, for it entails an ideological exclusion of plurality and its operation in order to advance a logic of unification that precludes the exclusion of other meanings. Undecidability may also refer to the moment of aporia, as in the example of the pharmakon; the suspension between, the radical impossibility, where to make a choice is to cheat the text, cheat meaning, and to cheat philosophy by basing inquiry upon an a priori premise. The aporia, as plurality, is not textual only in the written sense but can be perceived in many contexts: the example of the violence that founds a new social justice is one that Derrida writes of, an aporia in the sense that justice and violence coexist in the same instance.180 It is in these instances of undecidability that an exposition of a question then unfolds and a reading can take place, provided they are understood as undecidable: not as opposites or alternates, nor as problems to be resolved, but points at which a decision cannot be made. Two, or more, values must be held together at the same time and by refusing the lure of meaning in the form of a decision the undecidability then produces it in the form of a richness of a question that has given up the security of a tradition and a mode of inquiry, and therefore conclusion, indivisible from that tradition. The conclusion is foregone in the sense that the model of questioning can only produce in that mode. A close reading that deconstructs this structure by focusing on undecidability 179

180

Barbara Johnson, ‘Teaching Deconstructively’, in Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature, eds G. Douglas Atkins and Michael L. Johnson (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985), pp. 140–8, at p. 140. See ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’ (AR).

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Undecidability must be rigorous and is dangerous: from one word, a whole history unravels. It is the undecidability that undoes metaphysics, first in the deconstruction of the correlation between unitary signifier and unitary signified – for example, the pharmakon, the supplement – and also then in the binary opposition of terms that metaphysics puts into play in order to sustain itself; the undecidable intrudes into the binary and becomes dynamic within it, for example in the case of the supplement, where Derrida shows that its dual meaning as excess/ lack comes to disorder the binary wherein Rousseau refers to writing as the supplement to speech, and to show the ostensibly primary term of speech to be reliant on the ostensibly ‘secondary’ one of writing. Such is the reading situation into which we are thrown. To be a close reader is not to be indecisive, but to discern undecidability. To acknowledge that reading is always plural and non-exhaustive is compatible with attempting to read, and it is not correlative that, because there is no ‘right’ meaning in the sense of a unified and closed meaning, nor are there ‘wrong’ readings. Similarly, this stance does not negate truth as a value, but rather brings the value of truth into its inquiry. In a work of fiction, Derrida emphasises with reference to Hélène Cixous’ Manhattan, we are told . . . that what happened there happened in reality. But, he goes on, such is . . . the law of . . . Literature, that we are never allowed to decide . . . whether this ‘in reality’ hides a further simulacrum . . . it remains impossible to decide whether this ‘in reality’ is an immanence of the fiction . . . Literature offers a radical philosophical undecidability – and a philosophical stance, shared by deconstructive reading, from this undecidability – in its deconstruction of the limit between art and life. For Plato, mimesis reflects the privileging of reality over art, and the essential uselessness of the latter. Though Aristotle imputed a therapeutic purpose to art through the purgative faculties of catharsis, theories of mimesis predicate a subordination of artificial representation to reality.181 Reality is here, however, philosophically installed as a metaphysical concept, and representative art the binary opposition through which it is privileged. Where literature begins to deconstruct the foundations of that logic, and therefore the binary that maintains it, reality does not cede its stability to the oneiric but is shown already to be in and of itself a dreamlike state. Thus the affinity of literature and philosophy, which takes the appearance of a symbiosis where neither assumes an a priori, a theory from which the other would 181

For a reading of mimesis, see ‘The Double Session’ in Dissemination.

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Undecidability then manifest a practice or vice versa. Literature stages this undecidability within its pages, as in the example of Cixous’ novel, but is also the site of undecidability, there where it is impossible for the reader to decide between the fictional, the invented, the dreamt event, the fantasised event (including the phantasm of the event . . .) and the event present as ‘real’. This is the secret of literature, its power to hold silent and hidden within itself the meaning of what it says, to sustain the undecidable. Its power to maintain that silence, which is secret itself, is the secret of literature; the possibility of the secret – the hidden, the silent – is established as the secret place of literature, which is also the place it, literature as such, begins, the place of its genesis or of its genealogy, properly speaking. Beyond the example of undecidability it contains, literature proceeds from the undecidable, which is the deconstruction of the logos: that is its premise and that is also the place from which it takes place, the place of the secret. To be a close reader, to be thrown into this reading situation, is thus to be both literary and philosophical. Hence Derrida’s difficulty in distinguishing between the two, which might be read as a refusal to establish a position in which literature might be said to be philosophical, to contain philosophical premises, a position which would risk diminishing literature as the supplement to philosophy, a pseudophilosophy that is the posterior reflection – even if proleptically – of the anterior discipline. The use of ‘supplement’ is here deliberate, for it introduces into that logocentric position the undecidability that would undo it, and which literature contains and deconstruction reads. The great undecidability between literature and philosophy here takes place from the library, a topos of the secret and the place in which it is domiciled. The great library, the figure of the archive, is the site of a feverish remembering that is oriented always towards that which remains forgotten or hidden, even in the midst of a hypermnesic totalisation, a gathering together of sorts (genres) into a genealogy. The genealogy of the secret, given birth in the library, has an an-archic origin. Where Derrida writes of Cixous, whose singular genius challenges all genres and geneaologies, that [i]rreplaceable as it is for what happened there, the narrator [of Hélène Cixous’s Manhattan] tells us, ‘in reality’, this singular library, the Beinecke, is merely one example, but infinitely capacious, of the great allegorical Library, the library here is also, like the text, a site of infinite production. In reality, a reality that can no longer be structured as a known truth opposed to fiction and therefore must be rendered in marks, the library is an example of an allegory wherein non-knowledge is not 302

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Violence opposed to, but other than, knowledge. Reading happens in the place of the unknown, where the undecidable imposes a responsibility to the plural.

V Violence (WD 147) Pure violence is not of the same order as violence. It exists without the relationship between self and other characterised by Lévinas as the relationship of faces: I can see only the face of the Other, who can only see my face, and it is in that relation that the ethical obligation is born. Pure violence is not yet violence and it becomes so when the relationship to the Other is engendered. The face both provokes violence and institutes it as such, and thus only the face can impress the care of the Other necessary to arrest it. The distinction between being and Being, the question of Being (Sein) that allows ontology to be thought, is also that between violence and pure violence. If individual being, understood as the singularity of the Other as figured in the face, can only be opened out through thinking Being, it is through the question of Being that violence comes to be. The thought of Being, in its unveiling, is never foreign to a certain violence. The first explicit reading of this topic by Derrida comes in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, his discussion of Lévinas’ ‘first philosophy’ of ethics, expressed by the latter as the face-to-face relationship with the Other.182 The essay discusses a phenomenology of Being as it is signified by the metaphor of light, a metaphor that allows language and theory to function in accordance with phenomenology insofar as it is expressive of an unveiling of Being, and thus with a Greco-Christian metaphysical history. Locating violence as the foundation of that Being, it becomes for Lévinas the a priori exclusion of the Other and the reduction to the same that allows Being to be thought in terms of presence; his first philosophy of ethics attempts to establish that, prior to the violence that founds Being, there is an ethical obligation 182

For a geneaology of Derrida’s encounters with Lévinas, see Simon Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Lévinas, & Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 2009); Derrida himself addresses their intellectual history in his eulogy, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas.

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Violence opposed to, but other than, knowledge. Reading happens in the place of the unknown, where the undecidable imposes a responsibility to the plural.

V Violence (WD 147) Pure violence is not of the same order as violence. It exists without the relationship between self and other characterised by Lévinas as the relationship of faces: I can see only the face of the Other, who can only see my face, and it is in that relation that the ethical obligation is born. Pure violence is not yet violence and it becomes so when the relationship to the Other is engendered. The face both provokes violence and institutes it as such, and thus only the face can impress the care of the Other necessary to arrest it. The distinction between being and Being, the question of Being (Sein) that allows ontology to be thought, is also that between violence and pure violence. If individual being, understood as the singularity of the Other as figured in the face, can only be opened out through thinking Being, it is through the question of Being that violence comes to be. The thought of Being, in its unveiling, is never foreign to a certain violence. The first explicit reading of this topic by Derrida comes in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, his discussion of Lévinas’ ‘first philosophy’ of ethics, expressed by the latter as the face-to-face relationship with the Other.182 The essay discusses a phenomenology of Being as it is signified by the metaphor of light, a metaphor that allows language and theory to function in accordance with phenomenology insofar as it is expressive of an unveiling of Being, and thus with a Greco-Christian metaphysical history. Locating violence as the foundation of that Being, it becomes for Lévinas the a priori exclusion of the Other and the reduction to the same that allows Being to be thought in terms of presence; his first philosophy of ethics attempts to establish that, prior to the violence that founds Being, there is an ethical obligation 182

For a geneaology of Derrida’s encounters with Lévinas, see Simon Critchley, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Lévinas, & Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 2009); Derrida himself addresses their intellectual history in his eulogy, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas.

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Violence to the Other that can bring being, Dasein, into existence as an ethical subject constituted not through self-presence but responsibility to the Other. The violence of reduction from plurality to the same is violence per se, for [p]ure violence, a relationship between beings without face, is not yet violence . . . Only a face can arrest violence, but can do so, in the first place, only because a face can provoke it . . . For Lévinas, the encounter with the face arrests violence as it makes the self irreducible to the same, interrupting consciousness with the advent of the Other who divides the self from self-presence and makes subjectivity subject to radical alterity. Further, without the thought of Being which opens the face, there would be only pure violence or pure nonviolence. Therefore, the thought of Being, in its unveiling, is never foreign to a certain violence. Through the phenomenological unveiling of ontology, the thought of Being is understood as knowledge made apparent through manifestation; thought (and) (of) Being, in the sense that thought is produced on an ontological basis reduced to Being as its predicate, and that Being is then thought in these terms. The theorising of Being as a category of knowledge places it within history, which is to say within ontology, so in positing a Being that is beyond history Lévinas also places it beyond violence. The bringing forth of Being as a phenomenon is, however, Derrida argues, a type of originary violence that, since Being is history, means that Being dissimulates itself in its occurrence, and originally does violence to itself in order to be stated and in order to appear. The very thought of Being, a singular thought, is inseparable from the system of thought that produces it and is based upon Being. Philosophical thought, primarily ontology and phenomenology, is therefore violent in itself; to escape such violence, one would have to escape the discourse that structures thought and is inseparable from it. To be without violence is to be ahistorical, anessential, aphenomenal. In conceiving the wholly Other as an infinity – that which exceeds the I – Levinas posits a Being without violence, a Being which would occur outside the existent: nothing; nonhistory; nonoccurrence; nonphenomenality. To circumvent the thought of Being that structures it, such a Being would require freedom from language itself, into a language that would be liberated from determination, would be freed of statement, and would be disappropriated; no concept of sovereignty or propriation that would in turn enable determination, predication and propriation on the basis of the presence of Being could exist. A speech produced without the least 304

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Violence violence would determine nothing, would say nothing, would offer nothing to the other; it would bring nothing forth into phenomenal being, would show nothing. Instead it would welcome the advent of the other through the proper noun, radically dissociated from the philosophy domiciled in the verb ‘to be’. Only if there were no verb ‘to be’ could language be non-violent, for it would exceed the predication of Being, and Derrida acknowledges this when he writes that [i]n the last analysis, according to Levinas, nonviolent language would be a language which would do without the verb to be, that is, without predication. Predication is the first violence. Violence remains, according to Derrida, because it resides in language and in a linguistic drive towards Being where the latter is thought in terms of theory, the knowledge of Being; in this sense, Levinas is beholden through language to the phenomenology and ontology, the violence and light, that he attempts to circumvent. There can be no relationship to the Other in language that is outside of violence. In response, Derrida asks what language could ever escape this metaphorisation of language as light – as well as in light of light – and how the metaphysics of the face ‘as the epiphany of the other’ can be liberated from it: ‘[w]ho will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first being pronounced by it?’ (WD 114). ‘Light perhaps has no opposite’, he offers; ‘if it does, it is certainly not night’ (WD 114). This suggests that violence can only be countered, though not overcome, by an acknowledgement of that violence and an entrance into an economy which is like that of the economy of différance in order to lessen the reduction to the same. By opening itself to that which is within it, language can counter violence with a lesser violence; it remains, however, an economy in which violence cannot be overcome, a hermeneutics without the concept of an escape that would represent a further violence in its presupposition of a metadiscourse and position. The acknowledgement of the position, even as it is reinscribed, renders undecidable, and therefore economic, the Derridean reading of these two impossibilities, the metaphysical and its escape: as it remains within the metaphysical tradition it also acknowledges that remaining and through that acknowledgment and its aporetic suspension signifies its deconstruction, which is not the same as its escape, preventing a violent reduction to the same. The economy of violence is then the only route to acknowledging violence. In a further aporia, violence can also lead the way to justice, which is, for Derrida, the only transcendental signified. ‘Language 305

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Violence can only indefinitely tend towards justice’, he argues, ‘by acknowledging and practicing the violence within it’ (WD 145). In his reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, entitled ‘Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’, Derrida extends his reading of violence to examine the foundation of law in the rupture of violence. The irruptive violence that provides for a new order is justified as right (droit) after the fact through its becoming law (droit); it is the moment of justice that comes before the law that is not open to deconstruction. By suspending prior law in the name of a justice that is not yet codified as law, founding violence is also in opposition to the violence of the state in its enacting of the law. Derrida suggests that Benjamin’s separation of these two violences, the founding and the preserving, is itself contaminated by a slippage between the two, as the two types of violence are also co-implicated. Beyond this co-implication there is a further distinction made by Benjamin, that of the ‘mythical’ violence that he imputes to the Gods and the ‘divine’ violence of a Judaeo-Christian God who arrives in order to obliterate the structure of law, though Derrida rejects the messianic implications of this divine violence. If violence is the necessary abyss upon which to institute justice, justice remains to come. This non-history of violence – for history, as the disclosing of Being and knowledge, is the unfolding of a philosophy founded in violence – has its genesis in Of Grammatology, a divided origin signified in the différance of a letter. ‘The Violence of the Letter’ inscribes violence into writing, returning to the proper noun in a reading of Lévi-Strauss. Arguing that violence does not intervene within language, ‘a language that suffers the aggression of writing as the accident of its disease, its defeat and its fall’, Derrida counters that it is language that is the condition of originary violence and moreover ‘a language which is always already a writing’ (OG 106). The vocative call to the Other admits of a language in which there are only proper nouns, a non-violent language of pure invocation . . . proffering only proper nouns in order to call the other from afar. The ‘proper name has never been’, however. As soon as the subject is brought forth, ‘that is to say from the first appearing of the proper and from the first dawn of language’, it is also constituted by the trace of archi-writing that effaces the proper name; the proper name is never proper, ‘their production is their obliteration’, and language is never without violence (OG 109). Nevertheless, the vocative call to the Other is a way of heralding its advent without conceptualising alterity as an object of speech or a subject of discussion. The encounter with the Other 306

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Virus cannot be enveloped by a concept of that Other without reducing the Other; the vocative remains irreducible. This relationship of writing to violence continues into Derrida’s last works. It is inscribed in the concept of ‘the worst’, a violence ne plus ultra that reduces the plural to the one and alterity to the same, and ‘the worst’ structures many of Derrida’s late works implicitly, though it returns the thinking of violence to the discussion in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. If the Other cannot be thought except in language there is always the risk of reduction, even in the language that seeks to establish an ethics founded in that alterity, a foundational violence.

Virus (SA/DVA) Here Derrida performs a diagnostic reading, a self-diagnosis – I often tell myself, and I must have written it somewhere . . . that all I have done is dominated by the thought of a virus – that is also a diagnosis of the ailment his reading – a parasitology, a virology – traces, the virus being many things. The virus is given many names, being many things. All these are already contaminated from within, by what is already at work within their corpus as its own condition. Rather than an infiltration of dis-ease from a putative exterior, Derrida diagnoses the disturbance as an interior malady, one which, in disarranging interior and exterior, brings an axiomatics of the system into question. Within this pharmacological discourse, the contagion is at work. It imputes the system and structure, disrupting not only the system but the very idea of a systematics; the possibility of the virus is one which is built into the system, and therefore introduces disorder into the proposition of order at its origin, contaminating it before the fact and prior to its genesis. This figure of the virus is not merely an analogy or bio-onto-logical metaphor that would take us back into the system through a return to representation. It is inherent to that system, as its condition, meaning both its coming-into-being and its malaise. Derrida here names the virus doubly: it is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. As a parasite, it functions as a supplement to the system, its simultaneous excess and its fulfilment. The system is perceived to require the parasite in order to function, but it also destroys the structure, introducing disorder into communication. The normative function of the system is disarrayed, but the priority of the virus within the system – even as a parasite, it exists alongside the host rather than as 307

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Virus an infiltration – shows it to exist only in relation to that disorder that already is written into its functioning; the system is predicated upon the possibility of its disarray, and it cannot exist without that possibility, an archi-writing at the origin of its communicative function that disrupts the system as system: the plenitude of the logos of which it is the corporeal body is dependent on a difference that separates it from itself as an already doubly divided presence at the origin. That this virology, this parasitology, shares an etymology with the biological does not extend it to a metaphoricity with regard to biology, a positioning that would make the Humanities a type of parasite upon the sciences. Derrida is rigorous in this insistence when he states that [e]ven from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; the deliberate qualifying through the use of ‘even’ removes philosophy from an imputed dependence on science, one that would also reaffirm the logos upon which that relationship of dependence rests in that reinscription and would retain it in that metaphysical position through metaphoric language. From a biological standpoint, however, the corporeal viruses of the system share in that they detail a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding. The coding of the system is the writing of its function, the virus the archi-writing that disrupts it at its source. On the other hand, it is something that is neither living nor nonliving; the virus is not a microbe. Given that the drive of the corpus, the Derridean virology, is to move beyond the oppositional forces of life and death that contain within their conceptualisation and opposition the whole of metaphysics, that the virus is neither living nor nonliving situates it not outside but beyond life and death. The system contains its own deconstruction in that, exceeding the twin oppositions of living or nonliving, it is itself beyond its structuration. The viral parasite thus separates it from a whole host of logical oppositions that establish it as the host, an identity that relies on a prior ipseity of the hostes located in a self-presence undone by the parasite. The parasite, too, undoes its own logic by being supplementary; where the term infers both an addition to a whole and a supplement of a lack, and where the structure of plenitude and concomitant lack are shown no longer to be supportable from within, the logic of the parasite is disrupted by the virus itself.183 183

In this respect the work of Michel Serres, with particular reference to the ability of the parasite to disrupt modes of communication, is germane to this discussion though outside its present scope.

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Virus This discussion in Derrida takes the shape of two threads to be followed, or perhaps two strands.184 If you follow these two threads, he writes, you have the matrix of all that I have done since I began writing. This binding and unbinding the DNA of a Derridean corpus, a being with différance in place of the centre, traces back to The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy and from there to the double triads, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena in 1967; and Dissemination, Positions and Margins of Philosophy in 1972. Thus the contamination of genesis by its other from the beginning is also his own initiatory concern, a dis-seminal conception of the work; in addition, Derrida literally goes back to the beginning, in his reading of the logos as in his preoccupation with phenomenological and metaphysical tradition. In his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, another pharmacological text, Derrida isolates this logic of infection from the very beginning when he examines the figure of the pharmakon as one that contains, in its undecidability, both the poison and the cure. From its commencement until the last, his work is concerned, in a philosophical excavation beyond metaphor, with the idea of that which is already within and which, being so, renders the barriers of the internal and external porous. The virus is not a metaphor, but a figure; one of the several substitutions that take place in the thread of différance. As this formulation of the pharmakon is in Derrida only because it is in Plato – in other words, as metaphysics already contains its own deconstruction and deconstruction is not a methodology to be applied – so too the virus or parasite is already intrinsic to philosophy. This concern with the undecidable plurality of good and bad, host and guest, the perfection of plenitude and its infection from without, contains both these oppositions and their unsustainability; they are constructed on a logic of binaries which is itself infected from within, shown to be imperfect and thus unsustainable, predicated as it is on the a priori founding of any binary logic in the concept of logic that precedes it 184

The plural meaning of ‘suis’ in the title of L’animal que donc je suis, where it means both ‘the animal that therefore I am’ and ‘the animal that therefore I follow’ as the conjugated forms of être and suivre, captures in that duality Derrida’s undermining of the priority of anthropocentric homontology. There is the spectral echo of that dual meaning here when he alludes to following the two threads, where the suggestion of the DNA double helix – the written code of my being, or the ‘I am’ as writing – is made more explicit in the echo of the undecidability, in the first person at least, between je suis, I follow, and je suis, I am.

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Virus and is itself founded in an original binary, that between presence and absence. Where that logical ideal is deconstructed by the trace that comes not from outside but within and its infiltration by the other is shown always already to have taken place, there can be no infiltration of the other, since the other always exists within the same. Where Derrida’s thinking of the virus or parasite takes the shape of a twin-stranded argument, thus reflecting in its structure the duality that is already within that structure, it reflects too the strands of another structuration, that of the double helix. Where this semantic contiguity places the thinking of the virus and of the parasite alongside DNA, it recalls this thinking to the ontological question; which is to say, to the question of Being thought as self-presence in the auto-affection of the inner voice, and the disruption of that logocentric and phonocentric Being through the trace of archi-writing. The system, the structure, the internal and the self-sufficient are already infiltrated and displaced as such by their structuration in that trace. The dichotomy of internal-external is already made imperfect by the virus which arrives, not after and to the self as an external contagion, but as the condition of the self and its coming into being as Dasein. Thought of as that which comes after and makes the body its host – the parasite – or as that which can only arrive after the body, by necessity – the virus – Derrida here suggests, from the beginning, in the virology of his work, that the virus precedes the system and brings it into being. As the parasite deconstructs the logic of host and addition, so the virus disrupts the logic of chronology that creates the system as intact; by positing the virus as that which comes after, from outside, logic conventionally constructs the system as an a priori plenitude. It is reliant on this concept of the virus in order to constitute it; Derrida’s thinking of the virus both exposes this reliance, and shows that it is the virus, or trace, that precedes. The virus structures our being in the physical system, but it also shows the system to be susceptible from within itself. This is literally the case with viruses of the autoimmune system, and autoimmunity becomes one of the figures of Derrida’s work post 9/11 in order to theorise the state as rendered vulnerable to attack not from a putative and imagined exterior threat, but because of its interior conditions.185 185

See ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – a Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 83–136.

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Virus Autoimmunity can be considered within the matrix of a virology and traced in the intersection between AIDS – the biological autoimmune – and the computer virus, ‘two forces capable of disrupting destination’ (SA/DVA 12), through which we have the means to comprehend, not only from a theoretical point of view but also from the sociohistorical point of view, what amounts to a disruption of absolutely everything on the planet. Where power is encountered as force, it is an autoimmune or suicidal disruption; it issues from the state and its forces, including police agencies, commerce, the army, questions of strategy, therefore from what amounts to the structuration of the globe by the system of the nation-state. When these structures are threatened and that threat comes not from a fictive ‘outside’ of the state or ideology – when the threat is auto-infected, generated from the source of its own identity – it must turn upon itself in order to protect that identity, in a violence destined to failure. If destination is ultimately thought as a temporo-spatial telos constituted in the present of presence, the force of the virus to disrupt can be thought as an autoimmune dis-order that prevents the movement towards destination as well as the telos by displacing self-identity. Through the virus, these things encounter the limits of their control, as well as the extraordinary force of those limits, yet what is ‘extra’ takes place from within: the force which the state employs towards the threat from outside is in fact towards what has been produced by the actions of the state, an ‘external’ manifestation of itself conceived as the other. The limits of the state are breached from the putative interior, wherein the violence of its force as cast forth redounds upon it. These systemic issues virology traces demonstrate that the structure is already incomplete, that any infiltration is only the performance of an already intrinsic in-fection, upsetting the position of the host and the ipseity of the hospes. By moving between inside and outside, existing in the trace between infiltration and constitution, the virus destroys the internal/external divide by rendering it undecidable. It is, in a sense, the double of the pharmakon, and this deconstruction of logic effected by a Derridean virology is already evident in the biological example. Where the biological virus admits infection into an otherwise healthy body, it can do so in various modes and even as the pharmakon; it may either cause illness to that body or, in the case, for example, of the injection – where a virus is deliberately introduced in minimal doses in order that the body may contain and thus by doing so simultaneously reject the virus – act as a curative poison, leaving the illness behind in you in order to preclude it from 311

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Visitation entering. The autoimmune virus most clearly demonstrates Derrida’s thinking of the virology that dominates his thought, by arriving from within the body itself. The virus is that which disrupts from within, a parasite which disrupts destination. In this sense, disrupting writing, inscription and the coding and decoding of inscription, it intrudes on communication, and if Derrida’s own work can be thought a virology it is in that mode, as a writing, conceived erroneously as a parasite upon the philosophy it exposes as self-deconstructive – threatened from within – it disrupts that communication in order to undermine a parasitology or virology thought from the exterior. As deconstruction happens, for example, within the pharmacy of Plato, Derridean deconstruction happens within a tradition, opened to that which comes to disturb it not from outside but from its interior; the tradition is disrupted from the inside, its sovereignty divided by an autoimmunity within. This thinking issues from an idea of desinterrance, by which it is prescribed. For Derrida, this word situates the subject, removed from the traditional cogito and the presence of the ego, in a non-place. As the virus is in play between host and guest, dissolving the ontology of both as it dissolves the ontology that founds them, it proceeds from and is involved with this dis-location of the subject. According to J. Hillis Miller, the word ‘appears as a definition of what the qui casts forth or jets, namely, dispatches (envois) that are, perhaps, destined to err and to wander without ever reaching their goal’.186 In the letting loose of the virus, its location inside, the possibilities of its directions and misdirections, and the turning of the system upon itself, we see the deconstruction from within that allows Derrida to self-diagnose deconstruction; in a feint that might appear to link his name to that of a methodology, he distances himself again, insisting that only a reading of metaphysics will be a virology.

Visitation (CC/AP 23) To receive the ghost, is this not always to experience a visitation in the strictest sense? And does such a possibility not make of the event 186

In this movement of the casting forth or jet of the qui, the latter is thought as ‘no more than a baseless lieu de passage between a mysterious source that throws out or instantiates the who and an unpredictable goal that the who throws itself out toward’. See J. Hillis Miller, ‘Derrida’s Desinterrance’, Chapter 3 in For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), pp. 28–54, at p. 45.

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Visitation a ‘truth’? Furthermore, if the ghost, in its visitation – and this would extend as a general logic of spectrality – were to make truth available, what would that truth be? My starting point is a distinction made by Jacques Derrida between two modes of hospitality. On the one hand, there is the ‘hospitality of “invitation” ’. In this mode, I remain, Derrida observes, the master of the house: ‘Come, come to me, feel at home,’ and so on, ‘but you should respect my house, my language, my rules, the rules of my nation’ and so on. ‘You are welcome, but under some conditions.’ On the other hand, visitation of any kind implies that ‘absolute hospitality must be extended, because the visitation, what is, properly speaking, a visitation, has to come and be received unconditionally. It must, says Derrida, fall on me, or visit me . . . it falls upon; it comes; it is an intrusion, an eruption – and that is the condition of the event . . . For something to happen [for an event and the truth that it ‘makes’ to take place], it must remain unpredictable, that is . . . I should not see him or it coming in front of me, but it must fall on me. Here is the motion at least, the trait, and re-trait, the arrival and revenance that informs the ‘coming to pass’ of the spectral; here is, if not the ineluctable logic of the ghost, then the unveiling of the poetics of the ghost: in its unexpected visitation, which can always come, and which always has the possibility, even in the most impossible of scenarios, to come, once more. Visitation is everything with ghosts. Thinking about ghosts in general, for the sake of argument particular Oxonian ghosts, and, especially, one shade, whose disturbing motions here I like to call to mind, I would like to recall a postcard. I am less interested in what it represents or who is represented than using this to set in motion a small ghost, its trace at least, in the form of the memory of another who had, in purchasing an untold number of these cards, had made it visible to the academic world in a rather provocative way. The postcard is merely the occasion, the excuse, a subjectile or substrate that serves to set us off, a ruin that is also an archive, and which in memory now suggests more than could ever be written on its surface. The postcard, a postcard you understand, a ‘real’ an ‘actual’ postcard, not a book about postcards, a book titled either The Post Card or la carte postale; this postcard was, is, let me say this again, irrelevant as to its representation, or what it claims to represent to me, to us, directly. What was behind the postcard though, what remains for me behind this particular card, what – or who – remains invisibly there, authorising me, giving me carte blanche to write, and speak of ghosts, has greater relevance. However, even this shadowy figure I feel or imagine to be there is 313

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Visitation not as significant as a distinction I have introduced, a distinction to do with representation and what cannot be represented, and which distinction therefore admits the possibility of speaking about haunting beyond representation, where the visible fails, and haunting takes place all the more forcefully through memory and that which countersigns memory, always, already: loss. This is wonderfully illustrated in Fanny och Alexander, Ingmar Bergman’s meditation on passing generations, the transition or dialogue between theatre and film, memory, the porous membrane between illusion and reality, and, of course, ghosts. Ghosts in the film are associated with guilt, with what one cannot leave behind, but the ghosts which appear, appear repeatedly only (for the most part)187 to one person, Alexander, who, Hamlet-like ‘sees’ where others can only imagine. The question is raised and maintained throughout the film as to what constitutes haunting, individually, culturally and historically. Bergman’s movie also asks, without answering its own question, if there is an appropriate medium for the ghost, if there is a poetics of spectrality. Quite early on in the film though, on the night following the Christmas party, Bergman throws the audience something of a curve ball, in a comic moment of Grand Guignol and Gothic reference. The scene in question is that where Alexander tells a ghostly tale, with the aid of his lantern projector. Projecting the tale of a ghostly visitant for the other children – Alexander presents the entirely predictable tale, all the more predictable for the ‘ghost’ of the projection being visible, arriving from the horizon of visibility. What we, the ghosts of the audience witness, is that which the children do not, cannot see: the ‘visitation’ of one of their number as he creeps up behind them, shocking them suddenly, without warning. This short incident, seemingly apropos of nothing so much as the pleasures of haunting, the power of illusion and the imagination, the willingness or desire to believe in ghost stories, signals nothing so much, I think, than that a certain epoch of spectrality is coming to an end, passing away, to be supplanted with another. What is being exorcised here? Perhaps nothing so much as the idea that the spectre or phantom can be represented, is representable, for everyone in the same way. 187

In one scene from the extended, TV version of the film, the ghost of Alexander’s father does visit his own mother, Alexander’s grandmother, to speak of his concern for the children and his widow. However, for all the other characters, ‘ghosts’ are memory, conscience, the traces of mourning. The film does nothing so much as present itself as an archive of cinema as a spectral medium.

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Visitation If the phantom epoch is passing, one manifestation at least, it appears to be giving way, Fanny och Alexander tells us, to other epochs of the ghost, or just one epoch, which today we have not yet left behind; this epoch is one which has become markedly divided, sundered, the one incapable of speaking to the other. Bergman’s film, in looking back, anticipates the advent, the coming from the future in a cinematic, narrative and temporal sleight of hand, of the new double epoch: for, on the one hand, there is, from the arrival of cinema – which itself is not an origin, merely an increasingly technologised mode itself prefigured in the phantasmagoria or magic lantern show – the technologisation and mediatisation of the spectral; with this comes the proliferation of spectrality made manifest through the Internet and its related virtual modalities. On the other hand, there is the retreat, the unstoppable interiorisation of ghosts, announced if not first then certainly most audibly by Freud and Henry James. The ghost retreats inside us; withdrawing from the visible, from direct modes of representation, appearing barely, if at all, only here and there, to one or the other. Bergman shows us this through the film’s narrative. Phantoms of the father appear, mostly to Alexander alone, though there is a significant interruption by the dead father, who appears at a moment of crisis to his own mother. By the end of the movie, however, in its final scene, the ghost become ever more invisible save through cinematic technology and illusion, Alexander no longer sees his future approaching, a future always already haunted. As he walks the corridor of grandmother’s apartment, a hand unexpectedly, shockingly, slaps his head. Though he had seen nothing, he does feel the force of the slap coming from his dead stepfather, who in life was also a ‘father’ symbolically, a Lutheran Bishop, the death of this father for Bergman indicating perhaps another passing, but persistently ghostly epoch, that involving the ghost stories of religion and theology. Everything to do with ghosts comes down, in the end, but also from the start, with representation, its limits, and what Edmund Husserl distinguishes as re-presentation. Memory for Husserl is a realm not of representations but of representation. The hyphen that you hear is graphic testimony to the trace in memory that I want to suggest signifies the work of spectrality. You hear it, but do not see it as I speak. It cannot be figured, and so ‘represented’ directly. It is only ever a second order trait. Husserl argues that whatever the initial image recalled in memory for the subject, once the figure perceived becomes reflected on – and thereby synthesised or mediated through ‘memorial consciousness’ in some 315

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Visitation fashion in order that the ‘perception of the event’ or experience comes to correspond, or be analogous with, ‘an (actual or possible) memory of this perception’188 – once it returns it comes to us to be apprehended as constellated phantasmic figures projected by the work of memory. We do not ‘see’ directly, whatever it is we believe to be in ‘the mind’s eye’ as the phrase has it. In this way, the past returns, indirectly, as apparition, as spectral or virtual presence or present, and this is before, or aside from any psychological or psychoanalytic interpretation or filter. In turn, perception, ‘somehow’ to cite Husserl, ‘becomes modified into re-presentation of what was received’.189 Not representation, never simple or direct mimetic manifestation therefore, but re-presentation, memory as the mediated trace, trace of a trace already transferred, transcribed, through which past becomes temporalised space, spaced temporality, and the subject’s relation to and apprehension of thing, to place and event, to the other is structured. In following Husserl here, what I am seeking to pursue is a reduction of haunting, phenomenologically, to begin to come to terms with the taking place of the spectral through memory, and to apprehend this in relation to questions of loss. Despite reservations that Jean-Luc Nancy has regarding phenomenology’s being closed off, or attempting to close itself off, from an unconditional hospitality or a ‘letting-come’ as he puts it, and with that a concomitant ‘surprising of sense, and also . . . its letting-go’,190 there is the possibility of understanding the work of the ghost, the poetics that inform that work in a manner that abandons any investment in direct representation or its adequacy. For, even though Nancy would see phenomenology as too programmed, no one can be mindful of everything that arrives from a future that is unpredictable, and which can always arrive to address us, each of us, at different times, in any moment, at different moments for any of us. We cannot be prepared for what can always come, always haunt us, or hit us with the force of a dead man’s hand. That unprogrammable future, distinguished by Derrida as l’avenir, the to-come, as opposed to la future, the certain future of the sun’s rising, the 14th of April following the 13th, is where we cannot be prepared to ‘let-go’. The ghost makes us let go. 188

189 190

Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), p. 248. Husserl, Phantasy, p. 248. Nancy, Sense, p. 36.

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Visitation To extend briefly though this consideration of Husserlian re-presentation: the image I receive as memory of my past subjectivity and the site that gives ground to my memory of my past self in relation to the other is, in its apprehension, what he calls a ‘phantasy presentation’. It is this ‘ “image” appearance’, according to Husserl, which returns to me the earlier perception of an experience. In the distinction made here between perception – I perceive at a given moment, which is the now of my perception – and memory, the image of that perception returns as what the philosopher describes as ‘ “image” re-presentation of the earlier perception’ and which, in turn, is doubly constituted: on the one hand, it is the constellated image of particular phenomena, events and experiences; on the other hand, ‘its appearance is the image of the earlier perceptual appearance’.191 In the temporal distinction between perception and re-presentation, memory and the constitution of the subject take on – perhaps make visible is the more appropriate phrase – the poetics of re-presentation; that is to say, specifically a form, an architectonic construct or invention, of the there is arrives, and, with that, the subject for whom there is the there is, both in the re-presentation and to the subject who has consciousness of, and therefore narrates (if only to him- or herself), the memory in particular form, with particular effects and modes of apprehension. As a result, ‘the appearance of the event in memory is an “image” of the appearance of the same event in the earlier perception.’192 Concomitantly, the two times of perception and memory remain articulated through the spatial and temporal play, even as they threaten to engulf one another, through the inscription of difference – and, additionally, the différance – that informs re-presentation and the being of the subject whose presence is always caused to differ and defer itself from itself, divided by the haunting arrival between itself and its other selves. I am, therefore, always at a loss with myself. I find myself at a loss, constituted through this loss, by loss itself. In any consideration of Being, re-presentation has always already taken place. Re-presentation is opened in and to the subject, and from which there is no retreat, or before which there is, and can be, no sense of the world. All reading/writing amounts to such re-presentation: a ‘memorial presentation’, which, formulated as ‘intuitive presentation

191 192

Husserl, Phantasy, p. 233. Husserl, Phantasy, p. 236.

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Visitation of the event’193 through the place of the subject, takes the reader as if by surprise, as if for a first time – and thus, with the power of that authentic and originary revelation of the spectral, that touches one most closely. A question informs all I have just said and will remain at work throughout: how am I going to talk about the ghost? The question assumes I know what – or who – a ghost is, indeed, that it is; that to speak of ‘ghost’, ‘apparition’, ‘spectre’, ‘phantom’, ‘phantasm’, ‘revenant’, ‘spook’, ‘shade’, ‘poltergeist’, ‘eidolon’: to enumerate the various non-synonymous substitutions in the family of names by which we identify the effects of haunting; to assume haunting itself, spectrality in general – all such gestures begin with presumption and so avoidance. In each remark, commentary or statement, I avoid the condition of the ghost, of ghosting, haunting and the spectral by presuming that there is ‘ghost’, there is haunting. The assumption is that such ‘things’ take place, and that they are easily defined. An ontology is in place, a structure erected, a fortress to keep at bay unwelcome guests through a cordial behaviour founded on the pretence of a knowledge of the being of a thing which is not a thing, which is nothing as such; or rather say, which is neither something nor nothing, and which is, or appears to be. Appearance is everything here, as Bergman gives us to see. Everything comes down to what is between representation and re-presentation, what is given to be seen and what cannot be seen directly, beyond that threshold by which representation’s powers are defeated, and it must, as it were recursively, fall back on figurality, metaphor, analogy, substitution, mimesis in ruins. Appearance, apparition: these are words that name, tracing in themselves, that which comes into view. Parere signifies the visible; it tells us of that which comes into view; as with so many of our words for haunting, spectrality comes down, or seems to come down to the visible. The prefix, ‘ap-’, an intensifier signifying ‘towards’, emphasises the spatial and temporal dimensions of spectrality. This is important, for we predicate our apprehension of ghosts on what comes to us, what arrives, comes to pass, and which in this differential work in space and time, gives itself to be seen, to be visible. In this assumed visibility, there is equally an assumption of ontology. Concomitantly, with the presumption of ontology there is also another presumption that maintains our avoidance of asking more fundamental questions, and 193

Husserl, Phantasy, p. 236.

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Visitation so learning to distrust our visual sense. Optical evidence plus empiricism, we might say, equals stupidity or, at least a wilful suppression, stupefaction of the other senses. Sight, far from being reasonable, a basis for reasoning or logic, is in fact a narcotic; it causes the sleep of reason that produces monsters, and all those nightmares of history from which we might like to awaken. All of this visibility should be distrusted, however, at least when dealing with ghosts, revenants and anything of their ilk. The presumption of ontology, grounded in the visible world, has to do with representation, mimesis and, therefore, adequation. Less to do with what we see, more to do with us and how we wish to understand. For each of these terms – representation, mimesis, adequation – assume, once again, a puissance involving control, desire and conjuration: I desire the ghost but only on my terms; I want the ghost to appear directly to me, but only on the condition of a certain form; I, little God (to use John Banville’s happy phrase), make the ghost in my own image, thereby avoiding the more troubling questions. Representation, mimesis, adequation: all have to do, when thought in relation to control, desire and conjuration, with a mistaken investment in presence. We want to have it both ways, we want the presence of what is absent, we want the simulacrum of an immediacy, but only if we can keep that simulacrum at arm’s length – on the screen, say, where a remote control (what a phrase, what an idea) pauses, plays, rewinds, fast forwards, ends, begins the play of ghosts, all reduced to our spectral puppets; or on the Internet, on a computer – another screen, screens of all sizes then and, therefore, representation, mimesis, presence, adequation, imitation of life. With such technology, I create the illusion that I have sovereignty over the realm of ghosts, an empire of the spectral, and I do so, fooling myself in the process, by manipulating fake presences; we all do this, each of us a latter day Faustus. I want to step back therefore, to disappear for a moment, and give way to a ghost or two, in the visual, technological senses, which I have addressed in brief. What would follow, were you able to see this, would be a clip from a film by Dragan Kujundzic, The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller. I would have to pose immediately a question, thereby suspending what takes place, in lieu of any screening: what have we seen? Let me break this down, a little schematically, for the purposes of ‘showing’ here the otherwise unrepresentable, the untranslatability of a singular medium in the form or on the surface of another: (1) We see J. Hillis Miller, watching something, someone, 319

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Visitation we cannot see. The who and the what do not exclude one another, there is not a choice here. We hear a voice, a recording within a recording, first French, then translating itself to English, the idiom resistant to direct transport. To this Miller responds with laughter. (2) From this, there is a cross fade, from Miller to Derrida, Derrida ‘after’ Miller, the image ‘after’ the voice, apparently. Derrida ‘arrives’ without arriving, appearing, much as Plato appears after Socrates in that Post Card. We have seen Miller already of course, but as yet he has not spoken. Laughter at least does distinguish, for Rousseau at least, the human from the animal. We know we are watching a recording, we can see the laptop on which the recording is being shown. We can no longer see Miller watching. One can either watch the watcher or the watched, not both. There is a point of invisibility, a limit to visibility, much as there is a line one crosses and re-crosses, in drawing or painting a self-portrait. Invisibility, blindness, the difference of the trace, the difference that is the trait, trait of différance itself, not itself. There is thus a displacement, a disjunction, different times introduced, announced, a spacing which is also temporal; and with this, implicitly, the very idea of a difference before presence, of différance as that which makes all representation possible, but which gives the lie to any representation as being anything other than indirect, belonging to a relay and transfer of traces, the one always standing in for, supplementing and substituting the other, all the others. There is, in this, no absolute sequence. Speaking of a ‘before’ or an ‘after’ is to assume a logic that is both temporal and spatial, when what takes place is a constant interchange. Derrida is talking about wondering what it must be like to be, to feel like, to taste oneself as, to have the taste of, for J. Hillis Miller, of Miller’s taste of, for himself. In this too there is an edit whereby the laptop, the technological substrate disappears, giving us in the illusion, through the medium by which film is filmed, that we are no longer watching a film on a laptop, projection within a film, the subject of which is no longer visible but watching from elsewhere, like the ghost of himself that the film would make of him, regardless of whether he is alive (as is Miller) or dead (as is Derrida). One subject, always already absent, assumes a supplementarity for the other subject. These are all provisional positions and can always change. (3) From Derrida, to a letter. From Derrida on the screen, to a letter, on the screen, by virtue of another screen, one screen on the screen inside a screen, reproduced for the screen, yet another. The ‘original’ letter, transferred to a transparency and thus reiterated, 320

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Visitation placed on a projector, becomes yet one more in a tissue of traces, the thinnest of leaves overlaying one another, so thin, so seemingly transparent as to have no weight, no depth. Derrida has disappeared; he appears to have disappeared; he appears only to disappear (I say ‘appears to have disappeared’ because in all truth, he has never been there). He has been caused through the agency of tele-technologies, to retreat, becoming in the process his own retrait, that which implicitly he is already, if we suspend the narrow logic of representation, and with that its aesthetic-ontological economy in the service of the illusion of presence, and with that any metaphysics reliant on the idea of presence, undifferentiated, metaphysics as exorcism, to keep us, we the living, the survivors safe in the face of the other, in the coming of the spectral. Derrida is become, his proper name the trait we affix to the image, eliding the difference, the trait made manifest in this form, in this case the voice of a recording, the recording already not Derrida, even as this will not therefore have been J. Hillis Miller. Trace of a trace therefore, trace (film) of a trace (film) of a trace (voice) of a trace (person), inscribed within a trace (the film); but no, wait, I have got the order, the sequence wrong, even though I do not propose to reorder, to attempt to give order in the realm of the spectral, which disorders both temporally and spatially in the ghostly play of the trait, which conventional discourses of representation, mimesis and so forth would betray, in their translation. You see the dilemma if one has to come down to enumerating ghosts. The very idea, this is impossible. What we are thus ‘seeing’ so to speak is the impossible, representation of presence, when in fact what we are dealing with, what we must always account for, come to terms with, is that representation only ever represents the act of representation. To hold off from this though, coming back, allowing to return, the letter: this letter, a letter, read by Derrida, concerning a letter, the letter J. A different order, within the visible, introduces itself: Re-presentation supplementing representation, indirect figuring in the place of apparently faithful image, moving from mimesis and simulacrum to analogy, apophasis. This ‘represents’ without showing us, it re-presents, J. Hillis Miller. Miller is absent. There is no Miller as such. Derrida, reading the letter, and talking about the letter, and also the letter to which he turns his attention, the letter J having arrived before the letter, the simulacrum of which is being screened, signed by the letter ‘J’, about which though it does not matter, the author of that letter tells Derrida who tells us in telling his audience – and the writing is there, on the screen, the screen within and on 321

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Visitation another screen, and another, etc., et ainsi, und so weiter, and so on and so forth . . . – once again we are enmeshed in the skein of traces, until (4) Derrida returns to reassure his audience, not us, though we may take some comfort from this, that the letter will be in the archive. If my reading thus far has tended towards the febrile in its tenor, this is doubtless because I know that being told the letter (which letter?) is in the archive (to what archive are we referring? does an archive refer? can one refer to an archive?) is far from reassuring. The archive, its very idea, the phantom eidolon following in the wake but also presaging the material possibility of the archive, is always already haunted by the play of the trace on which the archive relies for its somewhat uncanny existence. But, suspending this torment, the final schema, last skein in the weave (5), the last path through this labyrinth, in which I have been doing my best to lose you. We return to Miller, who looking now in a different direction, is preparing, apparently, to respond to a question, off camera, issuing from another voice, yet another trace, which question is then doubled, trace of the trace once more, in a subtitle: ‘what comes to your mind when you see this picture?’ The idiom, the phrasing of the question, however unintended, unconscious, is telling, not least for its suggestion that the picture is implied as having the power to call up for the viewing subject, audience of the picture, something that ‘comes to mind’, which arrives as the invisible motion, spacing and temporalisation, of something other momentarily appearing to the subject, for the subject’s perception, but invisible, within the subject, unavailable to us except as a relayed trace possibly, re-presented, though not represented, in being treated to translation. Without any slander, Miller is invited to traduce, to lead us over or across, from the invisible to the visible, from the assumed coming of the spectre – what comes to mind – to a re-presentation of that, without the ghost having any appearance, any direct representation. A diminished chord, possibly a tri-tone, is heard as the question concludes, a musical punctuation, another momentary arrival, aural trait as if to emphasise the non-representability of ghosts. It is perhaps worth mentioning at this juncture that at certain moments in Fanny och Alexander, a not dissimilar dissonance is heard. There is even an instant when the ghost of Alexander’s father is seen sitting disconsolately at the piano, playing notes my memory wants to tell me are very close to those used in the documentary by Miller. Among the first of Miller’s comments is that the image of Derrida is ‘very 322

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Visitation moving’ because of Derrida’s then apparent ill-health. The ghost moves one; Miller confesses to having been moved; the revenant moves in us, revenance there is unseen, but everywhere felt, if felt at all. For Miller, there is not the taste, but the feeling of the ghost. There is, at the mention of death, another cross fade, Miller fades as he returns, shade of himself, almost in the same place, the one, again, supplementing, displacing, doubling, as it replaces, its own other. Is this a deliberate or accidental effect of the edit, was this planned, given to be read, or is this merely the revelation of my taste for the ghost, my feeling, the feeling I have, no more than this, the merest frisson, concerning the work of spectrality? That must remain undecidable. Another piano chord, and Miller begins to consider the teletechnological archive comparing this to the return of a ghost, his figure here being simile. As we know, Derrida has argued, in Specters of Marx and also, less directly elsewhere, Mal d’Archiv for example, that ghosts have proliferated in the age of tele-technologies. What Derrida fails to suggest is that we have created this world of representation, our tele-techno-mass-mediauratic empire, in order, I would argue, to control, programme, the ghost, not only in its representations but also in its coming. Far from simply living with the spectral, we fear the spectral, we fear the unconscious, memory, the unbidden past, the unexpected and unprogrammable future to such an extent that we want to protect our selves from the uninvited guest, the unexpected call, we want to screen all our ghosts, keep them at bay. Today we live with an archive of ghosts which is also, auto-co-immunisation, the incorporation of the spectral into our realities, as if this would exorcise them, banish them, keep them at the peripheries, to be called up, sent away, played back, played with, through the modes of representation we seek to control. This hypothesis must remain suspended for now, however, hovering, perhaps unwelcome, like Banquo’s ghost at the feast. Miller continues, after reference to the recordings of Glenn Gould playing Bach; he considers how the film-maker can fast forward, rewind, slow down, pause, play over and over again. The spectrotele-technological archive gives one the illusion of power over the living and the dead, although I have to say it does not appear to occur to Miller that even were he hearing Gould play live, Gould, or whichever pianist you prefer for your Bach, Schubert, or whoever, is, even in live performance, nevertheless acting as a medium, a conduit for the trace of the other. Again we are enchained; moving on, we remain 323

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Visitation in the snares of the trace, snares which, as I am suggesting, both problematise representation from within itself, while returning to us the Husserlian notion of a re-presentation that can always return to haunt from the future, and additionally serve to exceed and so erase or deconstruct the premise of a separation on which binaries such as ‘recorded/live’ ‘dead/live’, fort/da, here/there, presence/absence, and so forth are all predicated. As soon as we acknowledge the trace, there is the ghost in the machine; and the only real distinction to be made between a recording of a piece of music for example and a so-called live, but we must remember, programmed performance, is that the recording remains the same on the condition that the disc, the laptop, the file works, the technology is available, and none of the elements, or components, are damaged. The live performance can and may change, from performance to performance, within the same performance. What is not accounted for, what remains as it were on the side of the professional judgement, objective account, academic exercise, is the possible singularity of effect and what takes place when someone, you or I, become haunted. To risk a personal example: were it possible, you would hear, here, an extract of a recording, a particular recording of the final song from Schubert’s Winterreise. Were you able to hear this, would you hear it? That is to say, what remains as the translatable, at the limits of reception? Supposing, on this page, in this place, at ‘this moment’, upon reading, were you able to hear the recording, would you find that it moves you? Are you moved, touched, haunted, as I have had, and have, and I suppose will remain to have occasion to be? Can this ghost touch you in the same way? No, you can only understand at most indirectly, by force of analogical apperception as Husserl puts it. Thinking this voice, these voices: speaking here, but not here, as well as singing. I loved this voice, these voices, I love the voice. Loved, Love, which is it? When it comes back to me, as now it can only in memory or as a recording, is it in the past or present tense that I feel compelled to speak, to respond, to tell you how I loved the voice, how I love these voices. And I have to ask: what is it I love when I say I love the voice? What does it carry in it, in them, the more than one voice in any voice? What do I hear in that voice, no longer a voice, merely its trace, but more than one voice, which at other times I heard. What comes back? What can always come back, but which does not always return? Though I can rewind, fast forward, pause and so on, I cannot control that return, that which can always arrive from within and 324

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Visitation overflowing the technological, the revenance in the trace of the voice. I have this feeling that it remains in me touching me, to touch me when I am least aware. We love voices, as we love eyes, Susan Stewart asserts, because there is in these a ghostly ‘individuation . . . not synonymous with the individuation of the body as the site of experience’. Stewart, in the same passage, suggests that voices, like eyes, are ‘vessels of that presence we call the soul: to love the voice and the eyes is far different from loving the color of someone’s hair or even someone’s way of walking’.194 While I would concede the eye as a vessel perhaps, though not the look in the eye when the eye of the beloved looks at you, or when you look into the eye of the beloved, believing yourself to be the beloved of that other, the voice is more ephemeral, evanescent. Regardless of this minor difference though, what Stewart does capture is that sense of a differentiation between the Who and the What. Where I would take this argument would be to suggest that the look, the voice, perhaps especially the voice, can always return in memory, in unexpected ways, unanticipated moments, to touch one more intimately than one might have been touched when in the presence of the person to whom the eyes, the look, the voice belong. Listening to Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann’ is not always unbearable for me, let me reassure you. Sometimes it is, and this has less to do with the music or any particular performance than other aspects of spectrality, of one’s being haunted, and of haunting being intimately the experience and perception of loss. Not simply loss, wherein one experiences nostalgia, regret, that feeling of Sehnsucht; but much more immediately, touching one unconsciously, invisibly all the time, loss as inescapably the ghost at the heart of Being itself. Equally though, it has to be admitted, if we are to accept this tentative definition of Being, what can return unpredictably, beyond any programme, outside of my control to haunt me is not, not necessarily or at all, what haunts you, or you, or you. And of course, everyone can say the same thing; everyone’s experience will necessarily differ, the ways in which we represent to others the experience or perception of our being haunted will differ. Haunting cannot be represented directly because every example of haunting, in its singularity, singularity of event, singularity of experience and perception, not only from person to person but from time to time; every example 194

Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 107.

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Visitation will differ, which is why haunting, spectrality, ghosting cannot by example be exemplified, it cannot by definition be defined: you have to take it on trust, and see, if at all, only in the most indirect of ways, that what I am saying haunts me does, indeed, cause this experience, cause in me, for me and for no one else, the re-presentation of the spectral. This is why questions of the uncanny, anxiety, déjà vu are so problematic, unresolved. There is in each a matter of an irreducible singularity, a trait the uniqueness of which is irreducible to reproduction, even though the effect it produces is iterable, and this has to be taken into any account of spectrality in its representations; but for which, conversely, there is no accounting, no economic logic or control, no general principle by which one’s being haunted can be considered the same for everyone. So, returning to the video of Miller and Derrida, to conclude with the video clip, even if it proves not to have done with us: the limit of Miller’s reading is the limit of representation itself and the distinction that remains to be thought through between representation, a mode of human intervention or control (whether more or less technological), and that which is beyond all representation, within but inexpressibly other than representation: the trace, as I have been arguing today. Like justice, like love, the trace is unavailable to any deconstruction or any general theorisation or schematisation because on the one hand it can only ever be apprehended in the singular experience of its manifestation for someone at a certain time though not necessarily at others, while on the other hand, it cannot be rendered, made over into a generalised ontology, form, concept or, indeed, representation. Certainly, and to emphasise the point through reiteration, the kinds of complex technology we have just seen involved in what Miller calls the uncanny doubling of the ghostly would, from my side, seem to be precisely a technology of control, techno-management or techno-control of the spectral, in its ability to edit, sequence, giving the illusion of order, before and after, a stable manipulated temporality with a visual representation of narrative passage. In this representation conventionally understood cannot ‘show’ the spectral, its economy being one of imitation, direct figuring, transparency of medium in the service of the illusion of presence, manipulability on the part of the human. The trace though does not belong to, nor can it be made over into, such an order, such an aesthetic, even though everywhere and yet nowhere, the trace is that which makes any conventional aesthetic of representation possible. In order to move then, to continue toward a poetics of the spec326

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Visitation tral, or rather, perhaps a spectral poïesis, thereby indicating not a poetics by which the spectre, the ghost, the phantom are figured or represented, but rather to propose the work that revenants and apparitions cause to appear: we might think this in terms of a ‘bringingforth’, as Heidegger would have it in his understanding of poïesis, or that which is, for Jean-Luc Marion, the givenness of Being; so in moving towards a spectropoïesis as that which ghosts make, thereby clearing the way to shift the ground from representation to the Husserlian inflection of re-presentation, it is necessary to recall from among his earliest published writings, a few comments of Derrida’s on the trace, all from De la grammatologie (translations modified). I pursue these here because it is important that we apprehend the relation of non-relation between the ghost on the one hand and the trace on the other, as both within, and yet exceeding, other than and invisible within any form of representation conventionally understood. There is, says Derrida, an . . . irreducible absence within the presence of the trace . . . announced as such – without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance . . . within what is not it.

Neither something nor nothing, neither sensible nor intelligible, one cannot propose a representation or definition of the trace informed or inaugurated by a fundamental or first ontological interrogation beginning with the statement ‘the trace is . . . x’. To do so is to miss the point precisely of the availability of the trace, if such a thing exists, to representation. At best, we might provisionally propose the following formula, trace, there is, signifying spacing, that the trace is not available as or to presence, any more than it is to resemblance, identity, having no being properly its own. This, in effect, opens for us the notion of the ghost, invisible, irreducible to simple or full definition, and yet in its work, in this spectropoetic play, causing to bring to mind that which makes meaning possible. Derrida again, a few pages on: . . . it is in the specific zone of . . . this trace, in the temporalization of a lived experience . . . that differences appear . . . The unheard difference between the appearing and the appearance [l’apparaisant et l’apparaître] . . . is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces, and it is already a trace [emphases added].

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Visitation of the trace felt, indirectly apprehended, apperceived rather than perceived ‘in the temporalization of a lived experience’ within which differences are caused to appear, might move us toward the spectrality of the trace. The trace, Derrida observes, ‘opens appearance’, without being visible itself. Moreover, ‘[t]he concepts of present, past and future, everything in the concept of time and history which implies evidence of them . . . cannot adequately describe the structure of the trace’. Never simply temporal, or containable by reference to, representation through or definition by metaphysical concepts of time, any more than being a question of a mere structural spacing, the trace – ghostwork, ghostplay, spectropoetics itself – reintroduces that which haunts by its very unavailability to representation, reintroducing in the process, as Derrida says of the trace, ‘the problem of the deferred effect (Nachträglichkeit) of which Freud speaks’. To confess therefore: I love nothing better than memory. Memory, as trace, as ghost, as that which returns, experience, the event, become perception, the trace, then re-presented, trace of the trace, not represented. Here is Julian Barnes in a telling non-definition, which indirectly illuminates itself within by its spectropoetic work. But no: she didn’t mean that . . . Your first memory wasn’t something like your first bra, or your first friend, or your first kiss, or your first fuck, or your first marriage, or your first child, or the death of your first parent, or your first sudden sense of the lancing hopelessness of the human condition – it wasn’t like any of that. It wasn’t a solid, seizable thing, which time, in its plodding, humorous way, might decorate down the years with fanciful detail – a gauzy swirl of mist, a thundercloud, a coronet – but could never expunge. A memory was, by definition not a thing, it was . . . a memory. A memory now of a memory a bit earlier of a memory before that of a memory way back when.195

The idea of a first, through endless iteration, is made meaningless, the lie given to originary as nothing more than a chimera belonging to our fear of ghosts and our anxiety to fix, to control representation with teleological points of light, Barnes’ play of consonance, assonance and alliteration the careful unravelling of priority, the diminution of order and sequence. Memory is always, regardless of its subject, or whatever it may seem to represent directly or indirectly – and I would say in passing that memory is only ever indirect re-presentation – memory of loss, particularly memory of a loss, of those losses that inform, inscribe, who we are. More than this, let 195

Julian Barnes, England, England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 3.

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Visitation me say, as unequivocally and as affirmatively as possible: memory as loss. Singular trace itself, always the revenance of singular traces and the trait of singularity, Memory is loss, the trace whereby a past that can never return as such is figured in its having passed. Memory confesses to us; it gives to us, as the gift of the other, the revelation in re-presentation that which, in its constitution of our Being and the temporality of Being in its motion of always becoming, the trace that just is loss. Memory remains therefore the trace of the other, whether as the trace of my own alterity to myself or that of an other at once having been exterior but also incorporated in memory into me, though, poignantly as the sign that the other is never possessed, never possessable, never present, absolutely or directly to me, even though it, trace of the other, can possess, can haunt me. Trace of the other coming to pass, apparitioning, memory, always the memory of the singular, never merely memory in general, remains intimately close, impossibly far, touching me, touching on me, but otherwise uncontrollable, ungraspable. And in this, in the re-presentation of experience encrypted in the initial time of perception, in what remains through the phantom effects of re-presentation, wherein memory is apprehended as trace of the other, memory constitutive of the loss at the heart of Being, as that which remains, to which the ghost of anamnesis bears witness. Coming from what I call with too much ease a ‘past’, my own past, a historical past, memory is what remains, it is the remains, so to speak, but wildly anachronistic, it also remains this unpredictable future revenant, remaining to come. Memory can always arrive from what I have been describing the unprogrammable, from an unprogrammable future for example. It can arrive, remaining in its revenance beyond possession, as that which is unrepresentable as such, but yet as that which is given in re-presentation. If memory is always singular, always a memory for me, for no other, then loss too is singular; it is that which is apperceived, through a kind of memory work that is also at bottom a phenomenological reduction, only truly in what is given to my perception. I am, therefore I am haunted; to say ‘I am’ is to confess to the experience, perception and recollection, re-presentation of the singularity of every instant of an authentic spectrality, authentic because, violently anachronistic, resistant to all historical or temporal containment, the gift of haunting remains other than, and resistant to any mode of conventional, certainly visual, or let me qualify this, directly visual, visibly direct representation or mode of mimesis. 329

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Visitation This ghost, the experience of ghosting for which there is no representation; this arrival, the coming of the spectral, is never in doubt. It can always happen, take place, come to pass. However, such a moment of coming requires that we be open to the possibility of the impossible, this arrival of the trace of the other, not seeking to limit it, control it, corral it in the frames of representation. Any spectrality, if there is any, is only known, revealed, in a moment of unexpected, unanticpated Nachträglichkeit, that is re-presentation. Spectropoïesis is irreducible to any formalisation, to any ‘theoretical armature’ or method, to borrow from Walter Benjamin. Through its flows, energies, upsurges and returns, memory as singular trace of an equally singular experience and perception of the other, coming now, and re-presented in its always already being a loss, irretrievably other, other trace of the trace of the other, comes to be arrested in my memory through ‘a configuration pregnant with tensions, [giving] that configuration a shock, by which it crystalizes into a monad’.196 At the same time though, in exceeding mimetic and related modes of representation, such re-presentation also succeeds in making available to experience translated into archival memory work; with this, there can occur the return of the auratic experience for the subject, for my other self whose perception of experience arrives for me as my own other, and which has therefore been recorded in the anticipation of its iterability. In this manner, only if we understand the most intimate and most familiar aspects of memory’s touch in this way, without seeking to fix it in place, or fix it through representation or ontology, or to control its forces through the work of psychoanalysis, then we might imagine the idea of a haunting to come, whereby we can, to cite Giorgio Agamben in somewhat messianic vein, ‘reopen that breach in which history – in which life – suddenly fulfils its promise’. 197 Refusing to lay the ghosts to rest, we admit them; we admit their significance to our Being as all that touches us but which is no longer us. In conclusion: so, perhaps, and I do not say this lightly, perhaps Miller is, if not wrong exactly in his response to the tele-technological ghost, then not quite right either. For as the recording, that which can be played back is only ever a trace, it is different only in degree, 196

197

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 253–64, at pp. 262–3. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 42.

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Visitation rather than as one might at first believe, in kind. A prosthetised archive, memory denatured, made available through an othering, a non-human externalisation, the recording can always come back, but only on the condition that we understand it not as a representation, though it is this of course. Instead, we must see past the merely visible, the mimickry, the mimetic tendency of tele-technology to be, in its apprehension of the trace, simply representation. Within, other than the visible, the visual, beyond mere representation, the trace of the other is there, the trace in my relation to that trace remains singular. It can always arrive to touch me, because for me, if for no one else, it has about it that singularity phenomenally, by which the trace bears in it the ghost of a chance. This is most eloquently illustrated, I think, in the final scene of another film that treats of ghosts, personal and those of history, Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses Gaze. A GreekAmerican film-maker, having returned to Greece, journeys through the Balkans in search of three missing reels of film, thought to be the first film, the first ‘gaze’. Finally, in Sarajevo, he finds the film. We witness the film-maker watching the film, but we never see what he sees, by which he is moved to tears, to which he responds with words promising return, the narrative of an other, to which he gives voice. We can never witness the ghost directly. Though I cannot represent to you what is there in the loss I experience in encountering a trace that brings to me my own sense of Being’s loss, as well as the loss the of other, there being only captured in the trace; nevertheless, I find myself involved in, profoundly touched by, the other, the singular other, an alterity singularly for me, and for me alone; which comes, arrives, returns, and can always return in memory or through the prosthesis of tele-techno-mediatised auratic revenance. And in this is the possibility for the other to speak of, to, my Being, my Being alone, my Being as a sign, a haunted souvenir, of loss. Here then, is the work of the spectral, its ability to ‘make’ the truth, as Derrida has it; for I am never able to see the ghost coming, its visitation is always unexpected, even in the most programmed of possibilities. Remaining unpredictable, the visitation of the spectral is not to be seen, not to be anticipated. But in its coming, it ‘makes’ the truth of Being known, Being’s truth revealed in what is most nearly, most intimately at its heart; which is to say nothing other than the loss, to which the other attests.

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Voice

Voice (C 25–6) The technographics of a recording display the writing that comes before speech in the voice. By displacing the phonocentric, this phonographic act divides presence and shows it already to have been divided. Through the choices, some deliberate and some unconscious, that the speaking voice makes, the recorded speech allows the archi-writing of the voice to be heard, and the voice to be read. The polyphonic waves and tones become part of the timbre of another voice, which comes as a ghost from the future passed away in advance, a memory doubly present or a present doubly divided. The utterance thus betrays, it unveils what will have, one day, carried it away, between the divisions of all the voices or those into which the same voice divides itself. Derrida relates the voice as a fable of phonocentrism in Of Grammatology; by donating speech to Adam, God – who speaks without voice – inspires him directly with the wholeness of being, expressed in the voice. Adam must speak immediately in order to come to immediate self-presence because, as Derrida writes, voice is the first ordering, ‘the first convention, which would be related immediately to the order of natural and universal signification, would be produced as spoken language’ (OG 11); within this, the proximity of voice to being is the proximity of voice to presence – the logos – with all its subdivisions, including the presence of the rational faculty ‘the self-presence of the cogito, consciousness, subjectivity [. . .] intersubjectivity as the intentional phenomenon of the ego’ (OG 12). Speech determines presence to the mind and self through the phone¯ in the logos; it can therefore be deduced that it is this self-presence in speech which transfers secondary status to writing except in the book of God, where writing is self-present because it has effaced the graphic trace and, symbolically though not actually, archi-writing. In ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’ Derrida marks differences in the metaphor of God’s book, between the book of the universe and the later book of the subject, in which ‘good’ writing becomes divine inscription in the heart and soul and ‘bad’ writing is exiled in the body, traced in the reading of the Rousseauean supplement through writing and masturbation in Part II of the Grammatology. This schism is located in seventeenth-century rationalisms, where absolute presence becomes determined as self-presence in the cogito, and fallen writing represents non-self-presence. Divine inscription, God’s book, is carried within that sensible conscious332

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Voice ness – hence Rousseau’s description of God writing upon his heart – and fallen writing ‘exhausts life’ in the dead letter whereas natural writing represents it, is living and ‘equal in dignity to the origin of value, to the voice of conscience as divine law, to the heart, to sentiment’ (OG 17). This is because ‘natural writing is immediately united to the voice and to breath. Its nature is not grammatological but pneumatological’ (OG 17). Here Derrida refers to Emile, and the interior voice of God one hears when communing with oneself, ‘full and truthful presence of the divine voice to our inner sense’, written in the soul (OG 17). This is what is shown here in origin, before the mutation of the metaphor of the book into the inscription upon subjectivity: the original pneumatology, in the breath of God upon the air which is language completely effaced, and which then, in a further pneumatology, breathes speech into Adam in the moment of inspiration. It demonstrates what Derrida derives from a reading of the divine law in the conscience in Rousseau: ‘[t]here is much to say about the fact that the native unity of the voice and writing is prescriptive. Arche-speech is writing because it is a law. A natural law. The beginning word is understood, in the intimacy of self-presence, as the voice of the other and as commandment’ (OG 17). The originary pneumatological moment is the moment of good writing. As it is perceived by metaphysics to derive from speech, writing becomes the dead letter, the representation of nature through a secondary artifice; logocentrism is expressed through phonocentrism, the insistence of the priority of the phone¯ over techne¯. Where the phone¯ is prioritised, it follows that we have ontology without difference, pure auto-affection.198 The subject is contained in its relation to its own speech, and it is inner speech which allows the ti esti to be conceived even before articulation. The subject is always first in relation to itself, in its auto-affective relation; it is only from that subject position that it can then relate to the other in self-presence. In 1967, Derrida wrote, in Speech and Phenomena, of how autoaffection is figured in the voice.199 Through the so-called internal monologue, the self becomes thought as present to the self in that it is offered without mediation and in the plenitude of its being. The 198

199

Though an elaboration is beyond the limits of this entry, Derrida has insisted on the inference of the auditory into the oral; see, for example, The Ear of the Other. In the French, the title contains the voice that is lost to the English translation, carried away by the writing of speech.

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Voice figuring of self-presence as the immediacy of an internal speech then extends to the donation of that immediate plenitude to the voice. The voice, in offering speech, offers both the auto-affective self as the plenitude of the self and, therefore, the communication between voices as the exchange of that plenitude through a ‘natural’ medium. The whole of metaphysics is thus ordered around the voice. This maintains the distinction between indication and expression upon which, Derrida argues, Husserlian phenomenology depends. Where Husserl claims not to found phenomenology on metaphysics, Derrida maintains that the distinction between the concepts of expression [Ausdruck] and indication [Anzeichen] in the sign, wherein the latter indicates the presence of meaning and the latter its absence through deferral, is sustained by a concept of presence. Where the subject experiences himself through internal monologue, the voice (phone¯) is privileged as the presence of consciousness; Derrida deduces that the possibility of expression for Husserl ‘has an irreducible tie to the possibility of spoken language’ (SP 18). The meaning of the sign (Bedeutung) is tied to a meaning-to-say, that is, ultimately, to an expression of the inner consciousness that is made available to meaning through its own auto-affection. Though Husserl concedes that the two are co-implicated, he asserts that while expression is involved with indication, indication is not necessarily involved with expression, which can be maintained as ‘the unshaken purity of expression in a language without communication, in speech as monologue, in the completely muted voice of the “solitary mental life” [im einsamen Seelenleben]’ (SP 22). This hearing-oneself-speak as auto-affection maintains, for Husserl, the possibility of the ideal object and its presence from a ‘self-proximity’ that reduces the world to the interior consciousness. Derrida argues that the presence that interior represents, and the auto-affective relationship it institutes, is already divided from itself through the voice that is thought to sustain the expressive relation uninfected by language and communication. Where hearing-oneself-speak is, as Derrida argues that Husserl believes, coterminous and indivisible from the unmediated presence of that self to the self, then there is no contagion of language to divide meaning from itself. As such, phenomenology is involved in a ‘classical ontology’ and a metaphysics of presence (SP 26). For Husserl, Derrida argues, ‘the epoch of the phone¯ [is] also the epoch of being in the form of presence, that is, of ideality’ (SP 74). The priority of the voice in Husserlian phenomenology is as a carrier of expression, where secondary forms, such as writing, resort to indi334

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Voice cation; this expression derives from the prior non-mediated interior monologue, where ‘[w]hen I speak, it belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself [je m’entende] at the same time that I speak’ (SP 77). There is ostensibly no separation between myself and signification, no deferral or difference that would enter consciousness into a representative relationship to its self and therefore no exteriority. Derrida argues, however, that this ‘absolute proximity’ of the self to the self in voice is already constituted through différance as a non-presence that is always already there in the living present of phenomenology. The signifying relation creates consciousness as the trace of archi-writing and of différance already present and dividing presence, and produces the subject as a heteroaffective being. It does so because it contains within it a ‘retentional trace’ of the past that splits the living present and produces it as non-identical even as it constitutes it as presence (SP 85). By deferring presence from itself, it creates a lapse between the subject and signification that then produces the subject as a non-identical self; since the concept of the living present that retains the ideal object in the unmediated presence of the consciousness and in the priority of the voice is founded in that auto-affection of the subject, it is shown already to be divided by the trace of writing and meaning concomitantly deferred. That the interior monologue is inscribed by writing from within shows that expression is always implicated by indication, and internal speech is the mark of that alterity from the self rather than its preservation. In Cinders, the text from which the opening extract is excised, Derrida discusses this phenomenon of the voice as différance in relation to sound technology; when it was published, the text was accompanied by a companion piece, a cassette tape recording of the work. This now-outmoded medium accompanies the argument of the text as itself a spectral technology, a ghost in the machine. The text of Cinders is divided into two forms: on one side, the ‘Animadversions’ that gather in a sheaf the pro- and analeptic references to cinders that Derrida perceived to exist in his work between 1968 and 1980, and the 1982 prose poem of Cinders on the other, taking as its trace the phrase ‘il y a là cendre’, as it first appears in Dissemination in 1972. The heteroglossic and polyphonic drive of the argument, deriving from the teletechnologies of recording it addresses, are enacted as the performance of that phenomenon, and the logos is already divided by the voice which comes from afar as the différance of the voice itself, the division of auto-affection at its constituting source. 335

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Voice This hetero-affectivity is already contained in the voice that creates the self in the illusion of auto-affection, and in all the technologies of the voice – the gramophone, tape recorder and telephone of Derrida’s inquiry as well as the smart technologies of the twenty-first century, video messaging and MP3 – this division and deferral of presence, inherent to speech, takes place. The opportunity to record the text is also the presupposition – and the record – of a desire, ‘to breach a way into the voices at work in a body of writing’ (C 23). The dual media of the written word and the written voice are interlinked but heterogeneous, and the phonic act opens up the text to the multiplicity already designated within it as it confers upon the speaker the possibility of choice in the vocalisation – ‘too much freedom, a thousand ways’ (C 24) – that alter the text and in doing so set it in relation to its own alterity. By entangling itself in the decision imposed by these impossible choices, the spoken ‘recorded’ voice makes a reservoir of writing readable; it does so by rendering audible the archi-writing that imposes upon the voice, demonstrating in the various voices of the cassette tape the tonal and phonic drives, the waves . . . which are knotted or unknotted in the unique vociferation, the singular range of another voice. By elucidating the plurivocality that is already in any one voice, the voice of Derrida’s text, the multivocal tape both inscribes speech with writing and shows it already to be so inscribed, on a performative level; furthermore, it shows voice itself, and the subject whose sovereign self derives from its priority, to be already written upon, by bringing out the texture of the techne¯ that precedes the phone¯ in the already technological instrument of recording, where voices overlap and are divided from themselves as any individual voice is already divided. This voice . . . is then left to pass away, it has passed away in advance, doubly present memory or doubly divided presence. These words recall Derrida’s reading of Husserlian retention and the memory that divides the presence of the voice from itself, dividing living presence and implicating indication into expression. The alterity of the other’s voice stages the heteroaffection of the self that is constituted in that division, as the other traverses the self and divides it doubly – the other in the self and the other of the self – in the recording. What is involved, Derrida asks, in this phonographic act? The moment of choice, wherein at each syllable, even at each silence, a decision is imposed [. . .] not always deliberate, nor sometimes even the same from one repetition to the other. That moment of decision separates the voice from the text and, in doing so, separates the voice 336

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Writing as text by bringing it forth in the multiplicity of différance that modulates meaning and produces it at a distance, temporal and spatial, from itself. The voice does not act as a countersignature to reveal the experience of a text as its law or truth, it does not betray a text to revelation or, if it does so, does so in the sense that the betrayal is itself the revelation; for example, the restless polylogue that divides up each atom of writing, and by which it is rendered unavailable to reconstitution as the presence of an ideal object, the object of literature as it is disclosed to unveiling. The repetition of the text, always with a difference, is not that of the repeatable ideal object, made available by phenomenology to an interior consciousness that bypasses language in the voice. Here instead is the manifestation of the impossible truth on which it will have been necessary, at every instant, and despite repetitions, to decide once and for all. To choose one reading is to imply and to leave others, through a writing of the voice that leaves meaning open and incomplete, and to implicate that reading with those other, phantasmatic, voices and writings. The utterance thus betrays, it unveils what will have, one day, carried it away, between the divisions of all the voices or those into which the same voice divides itself. The utterance opens and is shown already to be opened to the non-presence within its presence, that which will carry it away, the truth of its phenomenological unveiling that is a Heideggerian truth without truth, which is the truth of truth.200

W Writing (OG 23) Where does one begin in Of Grammatology? The question of how to read, of reading protocols: reading is transformation . . . But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading . . . arises from (before) the start, and this is the most enigmatic of questions, the least answerable. There must be a kind of ‘reading experiment’, a process of construal through the various folds and turns of the text, which wagers everything on the possibility that something can be invented. What will I find, this time? Where will it lead? Perhaps nowhere, or to a place where 200

Cf. Derrida (AL 206).

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Writing as text by bringing it forth in the multiplicity of différance that modulates meaning and produces it at a distance, temporal and spatial, from itself. The voice does not act as a countersignature to reveal the experience of a text as its law or truth, it does not betray a text to revelation or, if it does so, does so in the sense that the betrayal is itself the revelation; for example, the restless polylogue that divides up each atom of writing, and by which it is rendered unavailable to reconstitution as the presence of an ideal object, the object of literature as it is disclosed to unveiling. The repetition of the text, always with a difference, is not that of the repeatable ideal object, made available by phenomenology to an interior consciousness that bypasses language in the voice. Here instead is the manifestation of the impossible truth on which it will have been necessary, at every instant, and despite repetitions, to decide once and for all. To choose one reading is to imply and to leave others, through a writing of the voice that leaves meaning open and incomplete, and to implicate that reading with those other, phantasmatic, voices and writings. The utterance thus betrays, it unveils what will have, one day, carried it away, between the divisions of all the voices or those into which the same voice divides itself. The utterance opens and is shown already to be opened to the non-presence within its presence, that which will carry it away, the truth of its phenomenological unveiling that is a Heideggerian truth without truth, which is the truth of truth.200

W Writing (OG 23) Where does one begin in Of Grammatology? The question of how to read, of reading protocols: reading is transformation . . . But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading . . . arises from (before) the start, and this is the most enigmatic of questions, the least answerable. There must be a kind of ‘reading experiment’, a process of construal through the various folds and turns of the text, which wagers everything on the possibility that something can be invented. What will I find, this time? Where will it lead? Perhaps nowhere, or to a place where 200

Cf. Derrida (AL 206).

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Writing I return to myself, though different, touched by a difference. I am sentenced to a reading, with which I will never have done, as I follow, sentence by sentence, sentence after sentence, feeling almost blindly through a labyrinth which promises to have already opened onto an abyss. Way of thinking, opinion, an authoritative decision or judgement: the ‘correctly ordered series of signs’ find themselves always already in deconstruction, and it is this, which, in directing reading, gives us to think, and so, perhaps, to read. A phrase to which I find myself returning repeatedly is ‘ “signifier of the signifier” [“signifiant du signifiant”]’ (OG 7) near the beginning of Of Grammatology, and the sentence of which it is a part. This phrase though small, orders disorder from within the sentence. It is idiomatic, perhaps axiomatic, in that, performatively, it stages not only its own radical instability, an instability, as I shall continue to explore below, arising out of, even as it constitutes and so projects, an undecidability; additionally, it also gives expression and place to the ‘truth’, if you will, of Derrida’s radically expanded conception of ‘writing’, summed up by Sarah Kofman, in the observation that ‘l’écriture est la différence, l’espacement orginaire de soi avec soi’ [‘writing is difference, the originary spacing of itself by itself’].201 It marks that which is, simultaneously, finite and endless, signalling, countersigning perhaps, as one phrase has it, the end of the book and the beginning of writing. Always already underway, always already interrupting, folding back, enfolding, unfolding and cutting into, even as it erupts out of, itself, ‘signifiant du signifiant’ marks that which just is writing, the articulation of disarticulation: ‘tissu de différences, [l’écriture] est toujours hétérogéne. Sans identité propre, ouvert sur son dehors’ [‘tissue of differences, writing is always heterogeneous. Without proper identity, open on its outside’].202 The work of doubling and iterability informs the phrase, but also disturbs logical or grammatical order, as well as sense, and could take up some time here. Doubled in its appearance, the phrase – operating in the manner of an idiom or axiom – maintains its doubling; doubling itself as it itself becomes redoubled before our eyes, it threatens to engulf or overwhelm, in a gesture which I would like to read as simultaneously enfolding and opening. I find myself ‘adrift in the threat of limitlessness’, and in this my experience doubles that of the simple, though enigmatic form. However, there is an initial sense 201 202

Sarah Kofman, Lectures de Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1984), p. 20. Kofman, Lectures de Derrida, p. 16

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Writing of paradox. For, while limitless, or its threat, leaves both reader and idiom ‘all at sea’, as it were, the expression remains within itself, folding back on itself. Simultaneously, then, it finds ‘itself recaptured within that play’ that also promises the erasure of limits, forcing reading to ‘economize on the abyss’, as Derrida has it somewhere; and so, in this recuperation, it appears ‘brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to disappear’ (‘inflation’, I am tempted to say, in a partial citation, and in an iterable gesture, ‘absolute inflation, inflation itself’ (OG 6)). Its doubling thus reduplicated, the perhaps axiomatic expression becomes replayed in a single page, and also ironised through the introduction of quotation marks, in the sentence where it appears, following the observation that ‘In all senses of the word, [and the word is writing, not logos] writing thus comprehends language’ (OG 7). Here is the sentence, again: ‘Not that the word “writing” has ceased to designate the signifier of the signifier [this is already the second appearance of the phrase, the first shortly before the line I am quoting, it being given in italics, its graphic and material condition emphasised], but it appears, strange as it may seem, that “signifier of the signifier” no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity’ (OG 7; emphasis added). There has been a graphic play on and of the words in their given form leading up to this particular sentence, thus: ‘By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing . . . no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier – is beginning to go beyond the extension of writing’ (OG 6–7). So, from ‘the signifier of the signifier’ (italics) to ‘signifier of the signifier’ (without quotation marks, no italics, shortly to be cited in the sentence that frames it), and, thence, to ‘ “signifier of the signifier” ’ (in quotation marks, in that sentence from which I have drawn the phrase in order to begin), none of the differences of which can be heard, save for the abandonment of that first definite article. In this movement, in that motion being mapped, taking place from place to place and so reiterating as there is displacement, this elegant and enigmatic phrase stages in miniature ‘the end of the book and the beginning of writing’. Everything – and all the rest – is performed, as there remains to be read that ‘beginning to go beyond the extension of writing’. This might direct us to a figure occluded in the English translation of Of Grammatology: Today [Aujourd’hui] (3 / 11). With a degree of circumspection all too necessary here, Derrida proposes a transformation in the signification 339

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Writing of the concept of writing, which, we should recall, is observed in 1967. The historical moment of inscription is worth noting, albeit in passing, given the sudden coming-to-appear, and frequency, of ‘aujourd’hui’ in the ‘exergue’, a frequency a little downplayed by Gayatri Spivak’s omission of the first reference to a today, and the world or planet today, at the end of the first paragraph (OG 3); and from here to the following page, ‘But today something lets itself appear as such, allows it a kind of takeover without our being able to translate this novelty into clear cut notions of mutation, explicitation, accumulation, revolution, or tradition. These values belong no doubt to the system whose dislocation is today presented as such . . . only within a logocentric epoch’ (OG 4). Of course, today appears and is always already problematised, erupting within any present moment. Which today is spoken (of) here? Today is a word that at one and the same time programmes closure, the finite, and opening, the infinite. Its apparent or, let us say, its surface certitude, its cerfinitude, pro-grammes, its own openness to the arrival of countless future todays. What would constitute the today that causes Derrida to pause with intense reflective concern about what is taking place, what is coming to take place within an epoch, which, presumably, encompasses that today even as, in not being specified, singular and yet without date, today is the trace of something excessive, overflowing the limits of (the thinking of) an epoch, or any thinking that is implied by the notion of epochality? In that sentence where signifier of the signifier appears, italicised, it does so no longer as the equivalent of the concept of writing conventionally and traditionally received or designated. Thus, today, it remains to be read, as the phrase par excellence, and ‘by a hardly perceptible necessity . . . to go beyond the extension of language’ (OG 6–7). In clearing the ground through the accumulation and signification of negation, in a supplementary multiplication, expansion, explication and slippage (as if we were, in fact, still the witnesses, as well as the heirs, of the generative effects of an insubstantial double), Derrida engages in the construction of a sentence in which writing appears to begin to go beyond mere extension, ‘accidental doubling and fallen secondarity’ (OG 7). What goes ‘beyond’ is, in practice and in effect, that which in the programme of writing finds itself remarked in this ‘today’, and in every ‘today’ where one comes to read. The sense of an extension beyond also does double work, for, on the one hand, it signifies the extension that writing just is in any 340

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Writing logocentric system, the extension or prosthesis of voice and presence, while, on the other hand, Derrida’s supplementary iteration extends writing or demonstrates writing extending itself beyond itself in a performative gesture of its own operation and excessive reduplication, without recuperation into a final signified, a presence, or some anterior presence or metaphysical concept. Thus begins the destabilising effects of a writing which, no longer just the signifier of some (transcendental or metaphysical) signifier, via the ruse or illusion of presence, comes into its own, through the iterable and graphic morphology – graphemorphology or grammamorphology – of the phrase ‘signifier of the signifier’. But, before I say any more about this operation, which in its performative play both invites commentary and hints at the exhaustion of that commentary without its having reached an end, this is what follows: ‘ “Signifier of the signifier” describes on the contrary the movement of language: in its origin, to be sure, but one can already suspect that an origin whose structure can be expressed as “signifier of the signifier” conceals and erases itself in its own production. There the signified always already functions as a signifier’ (OG 7). The question of that which is questioned implicitly under the sign of an ‘origin’ in this sentence aside (for the moment at least), it is of course both obvious and important that one reiterates a structural matter here, a matter which, while being initially or provisionally structural, is not simply, if ever, merely formal, a retreat into formalism, or symptomatic of any other such misreading. Clearly, ‘signifier1’, that is to say, the first mark on the page in the quasi-idiom ‘signifier1 of the signifier2’, or let us call it, for arguments’ sake, ‘A’, is, on the one hand, that which signifies ‘signifier2’, or, provisionally, B. On the other hand, A is also that which is being signified by B, signifier1 being the signified of signifier2, as if the phrase operated according to the logic of the double genitive. In effect, one could substitute the first for the second, supposing each to be so designated, and the work of expression remains apparently the same. So A signifies B but A is, momentarily in the two-way passage, the signified of B. The logic of the sentence does nothing to resolve the installation of such destabilisation. It cannot, for the destabilisation or explication, that motion by which the idiom unfolds itself, expanding beyond itself, while remaining in its own bounds, is always already there, and on which the most fundamental semantic coherence is dependent. Meaning is thus structured around the most disquieting and radical undecidability. Indeed, ‘signifier of 341

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Writing the signifier’, as formal phrase only serves to promote that which is, simultaneously, adrift and recaptured, limitless and finite. If, instead of referring to A and B, we refer to A1 and A2, this hardly helps, if one requires help in the sense of a reduction or simplification of the ineluctable motion that is at work. What might be done, however, is to pursue a certain mathematical work within language, that frees language from the assumptions of its representational subordination, while also reminding us of the valency of writing, and why, within the history of metaphysics, writing is read as threat, as dead, exterior, and so on. Logic cannot save us either, for in what might look like a parody of representation or a parodic meditation chez Badiou, mathematical logic only tends to the ‘end’ of proving – as if such a thing were possible – an arche-originary deconstruction as that which is writing, that which is in writing in a certain way, as its motif or motivation, that by which writing gets underway, so this is to acknowledge writing in the expanded Derridean sense; and, therefore there is that which haunts writing as the concept put to work in the service of metaphysics and logocentrism.203 203

Given the phrase ‘signifier of the signifier’: if the first (first here designated through the assumption of an unbroken linear progression dictated by the semantic and grammatical protocols of reading and writing) ‘signifier’ is A1 and the second ‘signifier’ (sequentially) is A2, then, in a movement that folds back on itself, and wherein = is the signifier of equivalence, then: A1

=

|| A2

A2 ||

=

A1

The figure is given as a square or phantom gnomon, rather than as a line or in imitation or representation of a sentence, in order to make clearer iterability and doubling, and the way in which, in the phrase, replication is caught up in and shadows explication. The first model appears closed. Thus, it is necessary to modify it in the following manner: A1

+ =

|| + A2

A2 + ||

= +

A1

which modification serves to signify both finite structure, within which we remain, and an endless motion or iterability, intimating an excess beyond repre-

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Writing Writing, far from being the double or instance of the fallen, of a ‘having always already fallen’, by which Being is re-marked as a being-there, extends itself, not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow but ‘today’ and ‘today’ and ‘today’ . . . But this is only a preliminary step, admittedly one by which we appear to travel not at all. If there is any meagre merit here it is that, for me at least, the performative work of the phrase inaugurates a double gesture of ravelling, of pulling at a thread, which one might sentation. For even as equivalence is seen to be staged, so one term or figure, being the double and supplement of the other, so addition is implied simultaneously to equivalence, for A1 + A2 equals both A1 and A2, and so on, and so forth . . . However, because one mark is neither the representation nor logical equivalent of the other, there is no true or absolute equivalence, other than in (the undecidability that informs) the operation of either term in a differential relationship, therefore (|| determining incomparability), leaving us with the possibility that: A1

||

= A2

A2 =

||

A1

Every figure, being both singular and iterable, it necessarily follows that no figure, while being a tropic double of every other figure, nonetheless is and remains in its singularity as incomparable with each and every other figure, no figure therefore being recuperable as an example, or exemplary of an economy of writing conventionally understood. Thus a distance (| . . . |) is implied and revealed, which distance qua spacing is also, simultaneously, a determination of a displacement, displacement itself, absolute displacement, and, at the same time and additionally, a deferral, which maintains both singularity and iterability; différance, marking both the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space, institutes a ‘norm’, both finite and endless, which is also the determinant of a matrix (| . . . |), thus: | | A1 = A2 | = | A1 ± A2 | | (equivalence in the first pairing signifying not absolute repetition but, instead, two possible and different values, as figured in the second pairing). The projection and working of the matrix is remarked on the understanding that what takes place between is irreducible to a determinable or fixable signification, other than the recognition of différance as an open interval, indicated thus (,) whereby { (A1, A2) = ] A1, A2 [ } signifies an irreducible undecidability as the work of différance, even as meaning takes place, because the figure signifies, on the one hand, an ordered pair and, on the other hand, an open interval, within and as a result of which representation and logic collapse into the abyssal taking-place that we name, provisionally, deconstruction (as in the work, and supplement, of the copula ‘of’, in the phrase ‘signifier of the signifier’, which points in more than one direction).

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Writing pursue throughout Of Grammatology (see, for example, though to remark the caution that Derrida issues regarding the problem of exemplarity early on, pages 17, 21, 23, 30, 36, etc.), undoing particular nodal points in a matrix, even as we weave a particular shape. Returning to the phrase, as will be equally obvious, language, that is to say spoken language and the privilege given that through phonocentric and logocentric assumptions, which seeks in what Derrida calls ‘our epoch’ to displace and debase writing, cannot escape that which it remarks – in short, saying aloud ‘the signifier of the signifier’ or ‘signifier of the signifier’ does not solve the ‘problem’ of which is which, which signifier signifies which signifier and is the supplement of the other, or indeed the other’s supplement, the other as supplement, supplement of the other. (In this, I would suggest, albeit with the benefit of hindsight, we might read an anticipation of the inscription of a much later phrase: tout autre est tout autre.) Every time I read the phrase aloud, every time I give voice to the phrase, I only serve to reintroduce writing, the structure and play of which comprehends language, grasping, encompassing, bringing together language in its own matrix, a matrix which reforms itself around the axis of the speaking subject, and constituting that subject in the process, to the finitude of a limitless matrix ‘at the very moment when the limits seem [about] to disappear’. Thus ‘origin’, which in the first sentence cited refers not to an absolute origin, or the possibility of thinking such a thing, but instead, an iterable ‘origin’ that appears every time there is language. Or to put this slightly differently, the axis that I name here ‘origin’ (an origin that takes place through the articulation I make and every time I do so) is constituted, comprehended, in and through the reformulation of the phrase expressed as ‘signifier of the signifier’. Clearly, there is a quite powerful and subtle performative at work in the opening, which one might trace back to the preface or ‘avertissement’, and the, for me, interesting phrase ‘theoretical matrix’ (une matrice théorique), from the first sentence (OG lxxxix). As Derrida remarks, tracing such a matrix ‘indicates certain significant historical moments’, and thus extends – something so often missed – beyond language, beyond ‘merely’ formal or semantic concerns. Or, say this differently, there is no formalism that is not, properly apprehended, implicated within and also announcing a radical materiality or historicity. As Derrida observes in a few brief sentences that for more than forty years appear to remain by many as yet unread, ‘I should mention that I have concerned myself with a structural 344

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Writing figure as much as a historical totality. I have attempted to relate these two seemingly necessary approaches, thus repeating the question of the text, its historical status, its proper time and space. The age already in the past is in fact constituted in every respect as a text, in a sense of these words that I shall have to establish’ (lxxxix–xc). As we all know there are both immediate and supplementary readings, transparent readings and strong readings to be mined or invented. The phrase ‘theoretical matrix’ is evidence of that, for, on the one hand, the ‘theoretical matrix’ may well be taken or mis-taken as one which Derrida will propose or draw (dessiner). On the other hand, while Derrida is about to embark on the constitution of a matrix, or at the very least, the invention of one, it is a matrix already in place, to be traced, generated by a constellation of theoretical models and paradigms. The gathering – or perhaps ‘ravelling’ is the better word, the bon mot or mot juste, given the simultaneity of knitting up and undoing that it doubly signifies – Derrida undertakes, maps an epoch, which remains ours (today), and with which we are not yet done (the todays to come). At the same time, while Derrida suggests that the critical concepts belong to the matrix, this is not, he cautions, to imply that these are examples, for the notion of the example leads one to think of relation. The example is exemplary of that which, greater than itself, can be deduced or adduced from it. There may be a non-synonymous relation, a ‘relation without relation’, but that is as much, if not more, a generation that is ours rather than being that which we can assign to another’s proper name, or historical moment, as in the phrase ‘the “age” of Hegel’. As Derrida cautions, an age already in the past is ‘in fact constituted in every respect as a text’; that is to say, a matrix is constituted through the assemblage or bricolage of reading, as it constitutes, shaping and perhaps, ‘gives birth to’ the reading. A certain ‘significant historical moment’ is given to be read in a today to come (in all the todays in which I begin, again and again, to attempt a reading of Of Grammatology), which ‘to come’ is always already anticipated and inscribed in extenso in the ‘today’ that Derrida undertakes to trace, and so re-mark, the theoretical matrix, with each of its historical moments, which has given birth to Of Grammatology. In the ‘avertissement’ then, or ‘preface’, neither inside nor outside the book as such, yet forming and informing, the matrix/matrice, the mother or womb, khora perhaps, registering, forming, giving shape to philosophy, history, linguistics. Not a philosopher herself, but 345

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Writing mother to philosophers, engendering a demand that ‘reading should free itself, at least in its axis, from the classical categories of history . . . and perhaps above all, from the categories of the history of philosophy’ (lxxxix). And this matrix, we might risk, gives birth, to what Derrida calls ‘L’être écrit’ (18–26/31–41). This phrase is both double and resolutely unresolvable through a translation. It’s all a matter of decision, of cutting the umbilicus, freeing meaning from the matrix, determining through decision: The written being or being written? Signifier of the signifier indeed . . . From this to pages 17 (‘it is non-self-presence that will be denounced’, ‘On the one hand . . . On the other hand’), 20 (‘the logos of being . . . is the first and last resource of the sign, of the difference between signans and signatum’), 21 (‘On the one hand, if modern linguistics remains completely enclosed within a classical conceptuality, if especially it naively uses the word being and all that it presupposes, that which, within this linguistics, deconstructs the unity of the word in general can no longer, according to the model of the Heideggerian question . . . be circumscribed as ontic science or regional ontology’), 22, (‘It is at once contained within it and transgresses it. But it is impossible to separate the two . . . being escapes the movement of the sign’), 23 (‘Heidegger occasionally reminds us that “being,” as it is fixed . . . within linguistics and Western philosophy . . . is still rooted in a system of languages and an historically determined “significance” . . . To question the origin of that domination does not amount to hypostatizing a transcendental signified, but to a questioning of what constitutes our history . . .’), and so on, reading an irregular sequence and extension, to the question of Being, the dismantling of the separation between linguistics and ontology, and the radical restaging of the question of Being (Heidegger), to the de-sedimentation of being as signifier, not signified, the moment of which is perceived as the work of the trace and writing through what Derrida terms différance204 . . . 204

In a footnote to his translation of Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (1973), David Allison provides a clear and succinct yet detailed definition of Derrida’s then-neologism: From the French ‘différance’ he derives the term . . . As in the Latin ‘differre,’ the French ‘différer’ bears two quite distinct significations. One has a reference to spatiality, as the English ‘to differ’ – to be at variance, to be unlike, apart, dissimilar, distinct in nature or quality from something. This is even more evident in its cognate form, ‘to differentiate.’ The other signification has a reference to temporality, as in the English ‘to defer’ – to put off action to a future time, to delay or postpone . . . différance [in French and in its English renderings by translators, with or without the accent over the first ‘e’] . . .

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Xenos If problems, onto-phenomenological problems to do with writing, historicity and so on, are, in a certain manner, always oriented towards, but disorientated by ‘problems of definition and beginning’ (OG 28), then a return to the phrase ‘signifier of the signifier’ and a turn around this phrase, which itself turns and returns, though never to the same place, illustrates, or better yet illuminates, for us, how we are always already in this problem, we are the problem and the question, subject to it, as subjects of its motion, the movement of its inscription and iterability. Inscribed within a theoretical matrix that it remains given to us to read, we remain to come to begin a reading of Of Grammatology today. Or to give the last word, here, to Derrida, last word as inaugural opening and invitation to read: In as much as it de-limits onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism, this last writing is also a first writing.

X Xenos (OH 5, 25, 27, 29) Starting from where our passage concludes, with a complication already at work implicitly in the idea of the Xenos, the foreigner: [b] asically, there is no xenos, there is no foreigner before or outside the xenia, which Derrida glosses as this pact or exchange with a group or . . . with a line of descent. This pact, conventionally understood as a incorporates the common origin of the two relevant English verbs, ‘to defer’ and ‘to differ,’ namely, the Latin, differre. (SP 82, n. 8)

Allison helpfully points the reader to the essay ‘Differance’ in the same volume (pp. 129–61), and also to the first paragraph of ‘The Supplement of Origin’, Chapter 7 of Speech and Phenomena, in which Derrida remarks: Thus understood, what is supplementary is in reality differance, the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and delay. Differance is to be conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay and differing as the active work of difference. Of course, this is inconceivable if one begins on the basis of consciousness, that is, presence, or on the basis of its simple contrary, absence, or nonconsciousness. It is also inconceivable as the mere homogeneous complication of a diagram or line of time, as a complex ‘succession.’ (SP, 88)

The essay ‘Différance’ is also to be found, in a different translation, in Margins of Philosophy (MP 1–29).

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Xenos If problems, onto-phenomenological problems to do with writing, historicity and so on, are, in a certain manner, always oriented towards, but disorientated by ‘problems of definition and beginning’ (OG 28), then a return to the phrase ‘signifier of the signifier’ and a turn around this phrase, which itself turns and returns, though never to the same place, illustrates, or better yet illuminates, for us, how we are always already in this problem, we are the problem and the question, subject to it, as subjects of its motion, the movement of its inscription and iterability. Inscribed within a theoretical matrix that it remains given to us to read, we remain to come to begin a reading of Of Grammatology today. Or to give the last word, here, to Derrida, last word as inaugural opening and invitation to read: In as much as it de-limits onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism, this last writing is also a first writing.

X Xenos (OH 5, 25, 27, 29) Starting from where our passage concludes, with a complication already at work implicitly in the idea of the Xenos, the foreigner: [b] asically, there is no xenos, there is no foreigner before or outside the xenia, which Derrida glosses as this pact or exchange with a group or . . . with a line of descent. This pact, conventionally understood as a incorporates the common origin of the two relevant English verbs, ‘to defer’ and ‘to differ,’ namely, the Latin, differre. (SP 82, n. 8)

Allison helpfully points the reader to the essay ‘Differance’ in the same volume (pp. 129–61), and also to the first paragraph of ‘The Supplement of Origin’, Chapter 7 of Speech and Phenomena, in which Derrida remarks: Thus understood, what is supplementary is in reality differance, the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and delay. Differance is to be conceived prior to the separation between deferring as delay and differing as the active work of difference. Of course, this is inconceivable if one begins on the basis of consciousness, that is, presence, or on the basis of its simple contrary, absence, or nonconsciousness. It is also inconceivable as the mere homogeneous complication of a diagram or line of time, as a complex ‘succession.’ (SP, 88)

The essay ‘Différance’ is also to be found, in a different translation, in Margins of Philosophy (MP 1–29).

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Xenos formal agreement, has, in Greek, to do also with the concept of hospitality or, as it is sometimes translated, ‘guest friendship’, displayed to the stranger, the foreigner, the Xenos. Xenia comprises a pact or bond of reciprocity as well as hospitality, because it stresses respect in two directions, from host to guest and guest to host; moreover, the concept of Xenia is constituted through an obligation of honour on the part of the host, who is to give a gift to the guest, on the guest’s departure. One must bear in mind therefore that hospitality and the foreign are not in opposition, conceptually, at least not in principle. Indeed it is in that arrival of the other, in the form of the foreigner, that hospitality finds itself a necessity of relation between self and other. Thus, as what reads as an injunction, Socrates, Derrida reminds us, announces that the Xenos is the one ‘. . . at least you would respect, you would tolerate his accent and his idiom’ . . . someone with whom, Derrida continues, you begin by asking his name; you enjoin him to state and to guarantee his identity, as you would a witness before a court. Hospitality to the foreigner is a form of legal requirement. It obligates the host to place the foreigner before a law of welcome that serves to define the foreigner according to the limits of ‘guest friendship’ and ‘pact’. But if we turn to the first commentary in the extract, we find that the arrival of the foreigner is defined by an act of interrogation, through a question that solicits, shakes up the threatening dogmatism of the paternal logos. There is in this ‘arrival’, whether by this term a ‘literal’ or ‘metaphorical’ arrival is signalled – and given that this is presented through narrative as an interruption, how can we say whether this story is marked exclusively either by the ‘real’ or the ‘fictional’? – an interruption of unquestioned order and institution. The foreigner is the one who, the foreign is that which, in his, her, its affirmation (arrival, question, interruption) exposes in its entry into institutional structure and operation, the limits of that institutional logic, economy and law. Thus the Xenos appears to contest ‘the power of hospitality’ in presenting himself as someone who ‘doesn’t speak like the rest’ (OH 5). This question of the place of the foreigner is also one, inextricably of the place of language, of what is a ‘proper’ or an ‘improper’ language. Language is never natural but a condition of place, subject to place as much as it takes place and comes to assume authority or as the bearer of law. What in effect and practice takes place in this Platonic dialogue between the Foreigner and host is an improper revelation to the host of all that the host is blind to, being accustomed, habituated to the 348

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Xenos paternal logos, the institutional hospitality or guest friendship of the pact named Xenia. While in the Sophist, ‘the paternal authority of the logos gets ready to disarm’ the Foreigner, the Foreigner’s ‘mad’ or ‘improper’ discourse, serves ‘to remind people of what ought to be obvious even to the blind!’ (OH 11). In a foreign tongue, truths are unveiled, as these pertain to the limits of institutional thought, logic, authority and law, which in the language, in the logos, of the master of the house are unavailable to thought and speech, or which, given the figure of vision, sight and blindness that is woven into Derrida’s close shadowing of the Platonic text, are, might be said to be, hidden in plain sight. The Foreigner sheds light on what is most invisible because most obviously there, and he does so as that figure who, arriving, causes a break with hospitality not from some subversive desire, but because the law of absolute hospitality commands this break. And the Foreigner obliges, in an act of honouring that law, breaking with it, and thus obeying the command, in being someone who doesn’t speak like the rest, someone who speaks an odd sort of language. Moving from the Sophist to the The Apology of Socrates, Derrida notes that it is the philosopher who speaks as the foreigner: ‘He declares that he is “foreign” to the language of the courts, to the tribune of the tribunals: he doesn’t know how to speak this courtroom language.’ From this arises the problem, Derrida points out, that ‘we are dealing with [someone who] . . . always risks being without defense before the law of the country that welcomes or expels him’ (OH 15). The problematic of the foreign and hospitality is never simply a matter of crossing one border, of being taken in to a country, a kingdom, a state, being made subject to that place through the conditional hospitality by which place keeps control of its house, blind to the very limits of its own hospitality. As Socrates shows, the problem is reproduced wherever there is law, wherever an institution operates its economy, and where it relies on its authority and the paternal logos by which it functions, and this then becomes confronted by the one who exposes himself to risk through being ‘foreign’, not only by identity, but also to the language of the specific institution. Thus the foreigner reveals in admitting his foreignness that which is implicit in the law of hospitality: that the foreigner must ‘ask for hospitality in a language which by definition is not his own, the one imposed on him by the master of the house, the host, the king, the laird, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc.’ (OH 15). Any such figure or institution, any authority that stands for 349

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Xenos the or is the representative of the state, nation and so forth, requires as a condition of hospitality that the foreigner translate himself ‘into their own language’ (OH 15). So, when Derrida asks of hospitality: does it begin with the unquestioning welcome or is it rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified . . .? It is taken that the question of hospitality only begins with this violent imposition. The foreigner thus becomes defined not only by speaking improperly; he is also marked out by speaking a language that does not share ‘everything that is shared with a language’ (OH 15). As already indicated, there is in the idea of hospitality a reciprocity inscribed that traverses the places of xenia and xenos. Derrida emphasises this through turning to a reading of Benveniste, while making the point that, of course, the foreigner ‘is not simply the absolute other, the barbarian, the savage absolutely excluded and heterogeneous’ (OH 21). This is being illustrated by Socrates when he says that he is ‘foreign’ to the ways and discourses of the court. That the foreigner is treated with civility, recognised through the extension of hospitality as being not absolutely other, suggests that pact already named, by which there is implied, if not a kinship, then at least some form of filial relation, some filiation in the proper or the family name (OH 24–5). Derrida summarises the distinction between the foreigner and the absolute other, with regard to the question of hospitality thus, saying of the foreigner: ‘[t]he absolute or unconditional hospitality I would offer him or her presupposes a break with hospitality in the ordinary sense, with conditional hospitality, with the right to or pact of hospitality’ (OH 25). The foreigner’s appearance, that arrival calling for or calling up hospitality, brings with it not only a foreign tongue, but also a paradox, a paradox always already at stake, if not at work in the concept of hospitality; for hospitality to be absolute it must always break the bonds of its own limits, by which mastery is maintained, the foreign other made subject to that. To put it ‘in different terms,’ argues Derrida, ‘absolute hospitality requires that I open my home and that I give not only to the foreigner . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them . . . without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact [the Xenia] or even their names’ (OH 25). As a result of this problematic of hospitality, which is also the problematic of the foreigner from Socrates through Kant to the present day, and to numerous political situations concerning passage across borders, the required learning of a particular language, the permission to wear or the prohibition against wearing, particular 350

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Xenos items of clothing based on theological teachings and interpretation distinct from the laws of Christian texts and so forth; this problematic grounded in the question of hospitality ‘is thus also the question of the question; but by the same token the question of the subject . . .’ (OH 29). That it is the foreigner who first makes possible the articulation of the question suggests, does it not, that everything we assume which ‘goes without saying’, as the idiom has it, along with everything we mistakenly pose as ‘common sense’, requires that they be thrown radically into doubt, through the raising of the question in an improper language. Might this not be a definition of one role Derrida has taken throughout his career? And might it not serve to explain certain of Derrida’s ‘choices’ of those he decides to comment on, to open to another reading, whether Valéry or Kafka, Joyce or Kant, Augustine or Lévinas? And finally, to pose one more question, do we not hear the foreigner speaking in that voice that says at the beginning of a text, ‘I only have one language; it is not mine’ (MO 1)? Hearing this statement properly, it should be noticed how the one who speaks is, says Derrida, ‘someone who would cultivate the French language’ and who, reciprocally, be cultivated by the same language, someone who is ‘a subject of French culture’ who one day ‘were to tell you in good French: “I only have one language; it is not mine” ’ (MO 1). If indeed there is no xenos, there is no foreigner before or outside the xenia, then the paradoxical reciprocity of the pact of hospitality cannot exist without the foreign; the tongue of the foreign other inhabiting the mouth of the master, one tongue in the mouth of another, speaking in the language of the master but in an idiom its own. As this statement of the French subject gives us to understand, to hear and to see, ‘exclusion and inclusion are inseparable in the same moment’ (OH 81). It is ‘as if’, in speaking and so bringing the blindingly obvious to light, the foreigner, the ‘stranger could save the master and liberate the power of his host’ (OH 123). In this, by this gesture, ‘[t]he guest becomes the host’s host. The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte) of the host (hôte)’ (OH 125).

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Yes

Y Yes (C 28–9) For all the mutterings, truncations, abbreviations, dwindling to mere approximations, standing in for an affirmation, there is no synonym for ‘yes’. If the word ethics leaves Derrida dissatisfied with its ambiguity, then yes poses no such dilemma, at least initially. It is both a signature and a countersignature, an affirmation that is affirmation itself. It is out of the question that he should infringe the law of accepting that which comes before him, which is more than an acceptance and constitutes a laying bare of the self and of the work, an opening out to that which is prior to his own work both chronologically and as it countersigns the Derridean oeuvre: one has no choice but to say yes to the work which makes your own, particularly when your own takes place within that work both as a historical continuation and complication of its tradition, and an excavation of that tradition. Such a call is an ethical call, and once answered, it constitutes in itself the ethics of the work. That would be to suggest there is a choice over whether to answer the call; there is no choice. It must be answered, for the call presumes the ineluctability of its demand. There is a complex dynamic at play here, between the law, the call of the work, the affirmation it demands and the ethics of writing. The affirmation is demanded and necessitated; there are, therefore, two orders of the signifier. Yes functions as a response to the demand, a countersignature, and also as both the law and the ethics from which writing unfolds. It is out of the question that that law should be infringed by the non-committal of the response because the response emerges from the law. At the same time it becomes the ethics of a writing, where the yes given is an instance of the general yes that is the ethical principle. Yes is therefore a signature and a countersignature, an ethics in theory as in practice, and to say ‘yes’ an iteration of that ethics through which it is always in the process of becoming, a replication in the ethical act of the general ethics from which it comes. The ambiguity of an ethics of writing is also an ambiguity in regard to yes; the ethics, called, such as it is, by a word that leaves Derrida a little dissatisfied because it is ambiguous, is an affirmation. The ambiguity resides in the synonymic quality of ethics with yes, and yes takes on an ambiguity that does not at first appear to attach to it in 352

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Yes the generosity that impels the statement, another affirmative, of the law it is out of the question I should infringe. What is called ethics is ambiguous, beyond any relative discourse of the term, because it signifies yes, while yes is given the name ethics. While the signifier shifts, and along with it the concept, history and whole tradition, the affirmation is unambiguous. The yes, the affirmation of writing, is to give affirmation – to say ‘yes’ – as a law. The countersignature of the ethical act, the yes that responds to the work, is in reply to the ethical act of the other, his or her yes that comes before . . . and will have been without; it too, a work that was already affirmed and signed with the other’s ‘yes’ is an instance of the general affirmation that is ethics, and importantly an ethics shared across time and space. It is a sort of blessing and (ring of) alliance, a shared understanding of affirmation as justice, and of writing as an ethical endeavour, moreover ethical in that it is an affirmation. Derrida can say that my own ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’ to the other’s ‘yes’ in both the specific instance and in the law: his work countersigns that of the other, a yes to their yes – for example, and explicitly, through his reading of Joyce in ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ – and stands also as a countersignature of the ethics that allow the instance of the yes to take place and that takes place in turn within it.205 As it is an ethics of writing, there would be no ethics without it; it is not an ethical understanding of writing – though it is that as well, but not of writing as part of a wider ethical programme – but ethics of and as writing. My own ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’ to the other’s ‘yes’ in that it ratifies the affirmation as the ethics of the work by appropriating it, and in that vision affirms the affirmation, making an ethical gesture – the ethical gesture – in so doing. The possibility of betrayal is not only part of respect for the law, but the genesis of respect; declaratively, it must be constitutive of respect for the law. If there were no possibility of betrayal, there could be no respect per se. Respect for the law can exist only where there is a possibility that the law can be broken, for the law operates and is instituted upon the a priori assumption of the individual free will. Without the possibility of breaking it, whether the law is a just or unjust law, emergent from a democracy or a dictatorship, there can be no respect. Where there is no possibility of betrayal of the law, 205

In ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, Derrida acknowledges that ‘[f] or a very long time, the question of the yes has mobilized or traversed everything that I have been trying to think, write, teach, or read’ (AL 584).

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Yes there is also no possibility of keeping it. Such a question can only arise where there is the freedom of decision, and where the decision to keep the law constitutes respect for it. Were there no possibility of decision, then the law exists as a dictate wherein the question of respect cannot be admitted, for there is no way in which to indicate that the choice to maintain the law is made and sustained through a respect for the law and for law, where there exists the possibility of breaking it at any time. It is an Edenic dilemma; only in offering the possibility of decision, which here comes down to that of betrayal or sustenance, can respect be given. Not freely given – that would be a logical fallacy, because the question of respect here is not of how it is elicited but predates that question – but given at all. That that entails the possibility and the reality of the act of betraying the law is in principle the freedom necessitated by the law and granted to its followers: to obey, to be faithful, it must be possible to betray, or else it would not be possible to obey. Again, this is not a semantic dilemma or even a question of obedience and betrayal as possibilities in a particular instance or conceptual abstractions. It is a principle whereby the possibility of one term cannot be admitted without the possibility, conceptually, of the other. With regard to betrayal of truth, Derrida outlines three possibilities in ‘Countersignature’. One is that truth, conceived as such, can be betrayed by a lie. The second is that truth itself betrays, while the third is that truth is betrayed, in the sense of being ‘unmasked’ as a logic of fiction, by the affirmation of a countersignature (C 7–8). The affirmation of yes is structured by this countersignature, a term Derrida countersigns by affirming that ‘there is a sort of love story . . . between that word and me’ (C 15–16). It is an iterable affirmation in that, by countersigning, the affirmation is repeated both in the act of affirming and in its possibility for iteration, as well as to further countersignature by the other. There is no signature without countersignature; even the original, or archi-signature takes place as an affirmation, because this iterability structures it. The doubling of the countersignature happens through the yes ‘being itself a countersignature, since the signature is constituted by a yes – as in a wedding’ (C 22). By being made subject to the law of the other, yes takes the form of an answer, Derrida writes, and moreover it is the answer to the other, ‘to the other’s question’ (C 22). It is this doubling of the yes that he takes up in ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ – yes to yes, ‘yes, yes’ – which is a countersignature to the ‘yes’ of the other and a performative act. Both a promise to the other, a yes to their yes, 354

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Yes it structures the first as already a countersignature, an affirmation that already has iterability inscribed within it; the first yes inscribes the second yes in itself. ‘The second “yes” is there before the first, so to say. Or, at any rate, as early as the first’ (C 22). The coming of the other then structures the affirmation, but the yes must be iterable rather than simply repeatable. Repetition would be a type of counterfeit, a mimicry without différance and therefore a response denuded of the force of the performative. It is out of the question that the law of affirmation should be infringed. What would constitute a betrayal of this law, an infringement of the ethics of writing? If the signature is already divided as an affirmation and thus as a countersignature, it invites a response. Where a writer signs their work, they are also countersigning it, opening it out to the coming of the other as reader and countersigner. Where Derrida chooses to write on the work of another – for example, in his engagement with Francis Ponge in Signsponge, which is a countersignature as it is also a reading of the countersignature – he is the other who arrives. As the countersigner, he is also responsible to the writer as the other who arrives in him. The idiom of that writer is a singular countersignature, an affirmation Derrida is called upon to affirm by his own singular countersignature. It would be incorrect to call this a response, for the term implies an infringement of the law that requires an event in affirmation of the other’s event, a reading that countersigns rather than receives and certainly a reading that respects the countersignature of the other – the affirmation of his singular idiom – without the implicit mastery of the chronologically posterior reply but rather with reciprocity. The work that comes before me and that will have been without me is a work that was already affirmed and signed with the other’s yes. It is signed by the other’s countersignature, the iteration that inscribes the signature and the affirmation, as it is also countersigned by the other’s writing which constitutes an affirmation of a call. What calls to Derrida in the writing of Ponge is not necessarily that which calls to Ponge. By affirming the work, one affirms the countersignature of the writer as the ‘yes’ in response to a call; the affirmation Derrida gives to Ponge is also a double ‘yes’ – ‘yes, yes’ – in that it affirms Ponge’s affirmation while distancing itself from it, by iterating the ‘yes’ as an affirmation in response to the other that can only be so by sharing in the structure but not in the idiom of the other. To repeat the other by sharing in his idiom, produced by the call of the other other, the other who calls to him, would be to betray the law of affirmation. My own ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’ to the other’s ‘yes’, a 355

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Yes sort of blessing and (ring of) alliance that does not betray the other by mimicry and mastery. My position is here iterated in Derrida’s words: who does ‘my’ refer to in the sentence above? It affirms those words by countersigning them, though as evidenced by their iteration they are already a countersignature; yes, yes. Yet to respect the law it must first be possible to betray it. The possibility of betrayal is part of respect for the law but not only that: [i]t must be constitutive of respect for the law. No law without the possibility of betrayal. Moreover, there is also a terrible law of betrayal . . . a terrifying law meaning that the more I betray (by writing differently, signing differently), the less I betray. The less ‘faithful’ I am to the signature of the other, the less I betray the law and ethics of writing; an affirmation can only take place through this betrayal, which is a respect for the idiom of the other and an affirmation of it as it is inscribed into my own ‘yes’. Were I to deny the singularity of the other by imitating his signature, I would be saying ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’ to it. Though a repetition may appear to be a form of flattery, it does violence to the irrecusable other by negating rather than affirming the signature of that writing. The less I betray (by repeating the same ‘yes’, by imitating, counterfeiting), the more I betray the ethics of writing and betray the structure of the countersignature. Imitation is a forgery rather than a countersignature, imposing the sovereignty of an idiom that becomes a mastery and a negation of idiom, the negation that such a thing can exist in the sovereignty of a universal idiom that then effaces itself in an ostensible confirmation by repetition and inserts in its place a meta-commentary on language. The aporia of the countersignature is that of the betrayal of truth as truth of betrayal. Faithfulness enjoinders betrayal in order to affirm. There is an impossibility in this act that means I must be faithful to the signature of the other, take responsibility for the reinscription of his work in mine, while also betraying it in order to remain faithful. It is doubly impossible when one acknowledges that the signature of the other is already divided as a countersignature inscribed by the possibility of iteration in itself. Derrida insists it is a ‘suicide’ and one there is no answer for. The signature and countersignature are inscribed by this suicidal logic, wherein the affirmation is necessary yet necessarily must be inscribed by failure. Inscribed within the aporia is a further opposing force, one that counters the countersignature with its destructive power; there is ‘complicity, contagion, contamination between these two “counters” ’ because the signature-countersignature is also the trace that survives the death of 356

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Yes the signatory and countersignatory. ‘The signatory, the signature is swept away and suicidal amnesia unites with the memory of the “yes yes” unable to avoid the deathly rigidity of mimetic or mechanical repetition’ (C 38–9). Moreover, the performative is inscribed by its own failure; were it to be otherwise, the performative would constitute mastery over the event that it is supposed to perform. The event of the coming of the other is heterogeneous to the performative and exceeds it, and in that sense the countersignature comes to mean for Derrida not the performative affirmation of a countersignature but the ‘yes’ that exceeds it, the event that constitutes the countersignature as ‘suicide itself’ in its effacement of the signature (C 39). Yes, yes. The law of writing inscribes these words as it effaces them on the page, where they exceed themselves. This countersignature obliterates my intention to affirm, in an affirmation that carries it away.

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WORDHOARD

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A Apartheid (PIO I 378–9) . . . no tongue has ever translated this name – as if all the parlances of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word, as if all the tongues were refusing to give an equivalent, refusing to let themselves be contaminated through the contagious hospitality of the word-forword . . . Apartheid: by itself the word occupies the terrain like a concentration camp. System of partition, barbed wire, crowds of squared-off solitudes. Within the limits of this untranslatable idiom, a violent arrest of the mark, the glaring harshness of abstract essence (heid) seems to speculate on another regime of abstraction, that of confined separation. The word concentrates separation, raises it to another power, and sets separation itself apart: apartitionality, something like that. By isolating being-apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation. In any case, like all racisms, it tends to pass segregation off as natural – and as the very law of the origin. Monstrosity of this political idiom . . . No racism without a language. The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word. Even though it alleges blood, color, birth or, rather, because it uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse, racism always betrays the perversion of a human ‘talking animal.’ It institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes. A system of marks, it designs places in order to assign forced residence or to close off borders. It does not discern, it discriminates.

Architectonics (EU 57–8) Kant206 tells us that architectonics is the art of systems . . . A system is that which converts vulgar knowledge into science. This also 206

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804).

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Arrivant • aporia defines the essential function of reason: to go beyond the aggregate, beyond rhapsody, to form the organized whole, and to give it a form (Bild) . . . Reason adds no content; it organizes a system, coordinates and provides the organic form; it totalizes according to an internal principle. Architectonics, the art of the system, is nothing other than the theory of the ‘scientificity’ of our knowledge, since this scientifically depends on systematic organicity. All this takes place . . . under the regime and the legislation of reason . . . To speak of the regime, government, or regency of reason is important when considering all of the following concepts together, in their essential relation to one another: the university, the Faculty of Philosophy, and State power. This is also a system of regulated relationships . . . This harmony, as regulative idea, as idea of reason, inspires all of the Kantian politics of the university. The system unifies the organization of various fields of knowledge under one Idea (in the Kantian sense). The . . . whole does not allow itself to be thought as Idea (in the Kantian sense, that is, in the sense of a certain inaccessibility), as rational concept of the form of the whole . . . Moreover, the fact that the idea is also that of an organic whole explains that this organic whole, in this case knowledge itself, grows like an animal, from the inside and not by the mechanical addition of parts . . . Architectonics plays a specific, acute, and irreplaceable role in the process of this development, in the fulfillment of the idea. One cannot think the university institution, as an institution of reason and place of the growth of rational science, without this role of architectonics. No university architecture without architectonics.

Arrivant • aporia (A 32–4) Let us ask: what takes place, what comes to pass with the aporia? Is it possible to undergo or to experience the aporia, the aporia as such? . . . Does one . . . pass through this aporia? Or is one immobilized before the threshold, to the point of having to turn around and seek out another way . . . ? What takes place with the aporia? What we are apprehending here concerning what takes place touches upon the event [of encountering a limit] as . . . possibilities of the ‘coming to pass’ when it meets a limit. [. . .] What is the event that arrives? What is the arrivant that makes the event arrive? . . . this word, arrivant . . . can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be here where s/he was not expected, 362

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Believing where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her without expecting it, without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for – and such is hospitality itself, hospitality toward the event. One does not expect the event of whatever, of whoever comes, arrives, and crosses the threshold . . . But if the new arrivant who arrives is new, one must expect . . . that . . . an arrivant affects the very experience of the threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light . . . What we would here call the arrivant . . . is whatever, whoever, in arriving, does not cross a threshold separating two identifiable places, the proper and the foreign, the proper of the one and the proper of the other . . . No, I am talking about the absolute arrivant . . . The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity . . . Since the arrivant does not have any identity yet, its place of arrival is also de-identified: one does not yet know or one no longer knows . . . the place . . . that welcomes the place that welcomes the absolute arrivant.

B Believing (HC 3–4) The word ‘believe’ is most enigmatic and most equivocal. Its meaning changes in French . . . For instance, I may ‘believe something’: I may believe the weather will be fine in a moment, whether I hope so or not, and what I believe then may well be possible, but without believing something. I may also believe what someone tells me – for instance that the weather will be fine in a moment, whether I hope so or not, and what I believe then may well be possible. These first two beliefs, even if they seem to have the same object, a certain ‘ina-moment’ . . . are radically different: one works through the other’s speech and the other does not. As for the other’s speech, I can believe it when it has to do with constative things . . . but it is yet another mode of believing when I must believe in the other’s word, believe the other and take his or her word for it; we are here dealing with a believing that has to do with the act of faith in the given word. This believing that believes in what the other says when he gives his word is radically heterogeneous to the two previous ones. It seems then that belief of ‘believing in someone’ is no less heterogeneous, beyond all the beliefs I have just enumerated . . . This apparent 363

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Bêtise homonymy between so many verbs meaning ‘to believe’ . . . (homonymy is the royal way of the untranslatable itself,207 and therefore of cryptography . . .) this homonymy gives us to think what ‘believing’ may mean, at the bottom of the abyss . . . Absolute belief is only truly itself . . . where it does not believe what is possible, and where it is possible to believe . . . The strong sense . . . of this word . . . no longer belongs to the order of the possible . . . to believe should then lie and only reside in this impossible faith in the impossible.

Bêtise (TSM/DDP 35–6, 45, 46) . . . everything will turn around two French words, a French lexicon, that I consider untranslatable: ‘bête,’ ‘bêtise.’ For reasons we could unfold for hours, there are no English words . . . that adequately translate ‘bête’ or ‘bêtise.’ Even within the borders of the French idiom, there is no stable semantic context that could univocally guarantee a safe translation from one pragmatic use of ‘bête’ or ‘bêtise’ in a given context into another one . . . Beyond sexual difference, the article ‘la/le’ – ‘la bête,’ ‘le souverain,’ the beast, the sovereign – very well indicates that it has to do with common names, common nouns, such that it does not have to do with adjectives or attributes . . . One would never say of La Bête that it is bête or bestial. The adjective, the attribute . . . is never appropriate to the animal or the beast. So bêtise is proper to man or to the sovereign as man. [. . .] . . . when [Gilles Deleuze208] excludes the question of error from the question of bêtise, which means that bêtise is not the relation of a judgment to what is, it’s not a modality of knowledge, it’s not an error, or an illusion, or a hallucination, or a mistake in knowing in general. One can be true, one can be in the truth, one can know everything, and nevertheless be bête. At the limit, there might be a bêtise in absolute knowledge . . . So bêtise, whatever it means . . . has nothing to do with knowledge or with the adequation of a determining judgment to truth or error . . . French usage of the word ‘bêtise’ implies not an error, not a bad judgment, but rather an inability to judge, a flaw in judgment, a defect in judgment. It’s not a nonrelationship to judgment the way 207

208

There is clearly in Derrida’s phrase, ‘the royal way of the untranslatable’, an echo of Freud’s well-known dictum that language functions as the royal way to the unconscious. Gilles Deleuze (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995).

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Betrayal we could say a stone doesn’t judge. But it’s a blunted, dulled faculty, a nonfaculty, but ‘non’ by some fault, by some secret perversion of a faculty that is not very well oriented, that is debilitated or diverted in judgment . . . Someone who is called bête lacks judgment there where the faculty of judging, of judgment . . . is altered, but altered in the sense of bêtise as a supposed permanent feature of character, an idiosyncrasy, to be distinguished from idiocy; it affects a certain quality of judgment there where the judgment . . . implies perception and knowledge . . . So, the precipitation to judge, the excess of the will over understanding, intellect, would be proper to man and would lead to bêtises, that is to say, stupidities out of precipitation, the precipitation of the will, which is disproportionate to the finitude of the understanding.

Betrayal (WA 172–3) For if I perjure myself, if I lie while making what is called a false testimony, I have perhaps already lied . . ., I have perhaps already lied by promising (seriously, it is understood) to tell the truth: I have already lied by promising veracity . . .). I have perhaps already lied by promising to tell the truth, lied before lying in not telling the truth. Thus we see the time of perjury is divided from the very first moment. When I accuse myself of perjury or when I accuse someone of perjury, this accusation can take one or two directions at once: I can accuse the other (or myself) of having betrayed, in a second moment, a sincere promise that would not have been kept, thus the betrayal follows, like a second original moment, a commitment that was first of all honest and in good faith, authentic; or else . . . I can accuse the perjurer, the other or myself, of having lied from the first moment, of having perjured by promising to tell the truth, thus by swearing an oath to begin with . . . One can thus perjure oneself after having sworn, but one can also foreswear by swearing. These two temporalities or these two structural phases seem after the fact to envelop one another. Hence the gulf of amnesia, the interruption, . . . the ‘Just imagine, I was not thinking about it.’ I can always say, whether or not one believes me, . . . ‘I sincerely promised to tell the truth, or I promised this or that, . . . I had to betray, But this betrayal comes about only in a second moment: when I promised-swore, I was sincere, in good faith, I was not perjuring myself. Not yet.’ These two moments are at once rigorously distinct and strangely indiscernible. 365

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Book

Book (PM 4–5) . . . the word book is as difficult to define as the question of the book . . . the question of the book, and of the history of the book, should not be conflated with that of writing, or the mode of writing, or the technologies of inscription. There are books, things that are legitimately called books. But they have been and still are written according to systems of writing that are radically heterogeneous. So the book is not linked to writing. Nor is it appropriate to conflate the question of the book with that of technologies of printing and reproduction . . . And the question of the book is not the question of the work. Not all books are works. On the other hand plenty of works . . ., works of written discourse, are not necessarily books. Finally, the question of the book should not be conflated with that of supports. Quite literally, or else metonymically (. . . we will continually be concerned with these figures of the book . . .), it is possible . . . to speak of books that have the most different kinds of support – not just the classical ones but the quasi immateriality or virtuality of electronic and telematic operations, of ‘dynamic supports’ with or without screens. We cannot be sure that the unity and identity of the thing called ‘book’ is incompatible with these new tele-technologies . . . What then do we have the right to call ‘book’ and in what way is the question of right, far from being preliminary or accessory, here lodged at the very heart of the question of the book? This question is governed by the question of right, not only in its particular juridical form, but also in its semantic, political, social, and economic form . . . And the question of the book . . . is also that of a certain totality. . . . the problematic of the book as an elaborate set of questions in itself involves all the [following] concepts . . .: writing, the modes of inscription, production, and reproduction, the work and its working, the support, the market economy and the economics of storage, the law, politics, and so on.

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Circle

C Call (PI 276) The origin of the call that comes from nowhere, an origin in any case that is not yet a divine or human ‘subject,’ institutes a responsibility that is to be found at the root of all ulterior responsibilities (moral, juridical, political), and of every categorical imperative. To say of this responsibility, and even of this friendship, that it is not ‘human,’ no more than it is ‘divine,’ does not come down to saying that it is simply inhuman. This said, in this regard it is perhaps more ‘worthy’ of humanity to maintain a certain inhumanity, which is to say the rigor of a certain inhumanity. In any case, such a law does not leave us any choice. Something of this call of the other must remain nonreappropriable, nonsubjectivable, and in a certain way nonidentifiable, a sheer supposition, so as to remain other, a singular call to response or to responsibility. This is why the determination of the singular ‘Who?’ – or at least its determination as subject – remains forever problematic. And it should remain so. This obligation to protect the other’s otherness is not merely a theoretical imperative.

Circle (GT 7–9) Now the gift, if there is any, would, would no doubt be related to economy. One cannot treat the gift . . . without treating this relation to economy . . . But is not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange? That which opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, and so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return? If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given . . .) must not come back to the giving . . . It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but that it must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness. It is perhaps in this sense that the gift is the impossible. 367

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Circumcision Not impossible but the impossible. The very figure of the impossible. It announces itself, gives itself to be thought as the impossible. [. . .] the circle . . . will encircle us. It will besiege us all the while that we will be regularly attempting to exit. But why exactly would one desire, along with the gift, if there is any, the exit? Why desire the gift and why desire to interrupt the circulation of the circle? . . . The circle has already put us onto the trail of time and of that which, by way of the circle, circulates between the gift and time. One of the most powerful and ineluctable representations, at least in the history of metaphysics, is the representation of time as a circle. Time would always be a process or a movement in the form of the circle or the sphere . . . [ . . . ] If one were to stop here with this first somewhat simplifying representation . . . [one could say that] wherever there is time, . . . wherever time as circle . . . is predominant, the gift is impossible . . . there could be a gift only at the instant an effraction in the circle will have taken place, at the instant all circulation will have been interrupted and on the condition of this instant. What is more, this instant of effraction (of the temporal circle) must no longer be part of time.

Circumcision (JD 59–60) . . . for years I have been going round in circles, trying to take as a witness not to see myself being seen but to re-member myself around a single event, I have been accumulating in the attic, my ‘sublime’, documents, iconography, notes, learned ones and naive ones, dream narratives or philosophical dissertations, applied transcription of encyclopedic, sociological, historical, psychoanalytical treatises that I’ll never do anything with, about circumcisions in the world, the Jewish and the Arab and the others, and excision, with a view to my circumcision alone, the circumcision of me, the unique one, that I know perfectly well took place, one time, they told me, and I see it but I always suspect myself of having cultivated, because I am circumcised, ergo cultivated, a fantastical affabulation.

Conjuration (SM 50–1) . . . in these times, a new ‘world order’ seeks to stabilize a new, necessarily new disturbance . . . by installing an unprecedented form of hegemony. It is a matter, then, but as always, of a novel form of war. 368

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Corpus It at least resembles a great ‘conjuration’ against Marxism, a ‘conjurement’ of Marxism: once again, another attempt, a new, always new mobilization to struggle against it, against that which and those whom it represents and will continue to represent (the idea of a new International) and to combat an International by exorcising it. Very novel and ancient, the conjuration appears both powerful and, as always, worried, fragile, anxious. The enemy to be conjured away . . . is, to be sure, called Marxism . . . . . . we will privilege this figure of conjuration . . . In its two concepts (conjuration and conjurement, Verschwörung and Beschwörung), we must take into account another essential meaning: the act that consists in swearing, taking an oath, therefore promising, deciding, taking a responsibility, in short, committing oneself in a performative fashion – as well as in a more or less secret [and thus public] fashion . . . where this frontier between the public and the private is constantly being displaced . . . And if this important frontier is being displaced, it is because the medium in which it is instituted, namely the medium of the media themselves (news, the press, telecommunications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity, that which . . . assures and determines the spacing of public space, the very possibility of the res publica and the phenomenality of the political), this element itself is neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death. It requires then, what we call, to save time and space rather than just to make up a word, hauntology. We will take this category to be irreducible and first of all to everything it makes possible: ontology, theology, positive or negative ontotheology.

Corpus (S/S 24–6) We always pretend to know what a corpus is all about. When we put the texts of [a particular author] on our program, we are assured, even if we dismiss the author’s biography, of knowing at least what the link is, be it natural or contractual, between a given text, a given so-called author, and his name designated as proper. The academic conventions of literary biography presuppose at least one certainty – the one concerning the signature, the link between the text and the proper name of the person who retains the copyright. Literary biography begins after the contract . . . after the event of the signature. All the philological fuss about apocryphal works is never bothered 369

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Death by the slightest doubt . . . The critic and the philologist . . . do not as such ask themselves a single question. They may wonder whether a certain piece of writing is indeed assignable to a certain author, but as regards the event of the signature, the abyssal machinery of this operation, the commerce between said author and his proper name, in other words whether he signs when he signs, whether his proper name is truly his name and truly proper, before or after the signature, and how all this is affected by the logic of the unconscious, the structure of the language, the paradoxes of name and reference, of nomination and description, the links between common and proper names, names of things and personal names, the proper and the nonproper, no question is ever posed by any of the regional disciplines which are, as such, concerned with the texts known as literary.

D Death (PF 22) And yet, out of a concern for fidelity, as you say, at the moment of leaving a trace I cannot but make it available to whomever: I cannot even address it in a singular fashion to someone. Each time, however faithful one might want to be, one ends up betraying the singularity of the other whom one is addressing. The same goes a fortiori when one writes books for a more general audience: you do not know to whom you are speaking, you invent and create silhouettes, but in the end it no longer belongs to you. Spoken or written, all these gestures leave us or begin to act independently of us . . . At the moment I leave ‘my’ book (to be published) – after all, no one forces me to do it – I become, appearing disappearing, like that uneducable specter who will have never learned how to live. The trace I leave signifies to me at once my death, either to come or already come upon me, and the hope that this trace survives me. This is not a striving for immortality; it’s something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, ‘proceeds’ from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing . . . one expropriates oneself without knowing exactly who is being entrusted with what is left behind. Who is going to inherit, and how. Will there even be any heirs? 370

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Deconstruction

Deconstruction (MPM 13–18) What is called or calls itself ‘deconstruction’ also contains, lodged in some moment of its process, an auto-interpretive figure which will always be difficult to subsume under a meta-discourse or general narrative. And deconstruction can impose its necessity, if at all, only to the extent that, according to a law that can be verified in many analogous situations, it accumulates within itself those very forces that try to repress it. But it accumulates those forces without being able to totalize them . . . Can we speak of ‘deconstruction in America’? Does it take place in the United States? . . . contrary to what is so often thought, deconstruction is not exported from Europe to the United States . . . As Umberto Eco209 [has] noted . . . deconstruction in Europe is a sort of hybrid growth and is generally perceived as an American label for certain theorems, a discourse, or a school . . . But is there a proper place, is there a proper story for this thing? I think it consists only of transference and of a thinking through transference, . . . and first of all . . . a transference between languages. If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical, and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d’une langue – both more than a language and no more of a language . . . [ . . . ] . . . there is no sense in speaking of a deconstruction or simply deconstruction as if there were only one, as if the word had a (single) meaning outside of the sentences which inscribe it and carry it within themselves . . . In order to speak of ‘deconstruction in America,’ one would have to claim to know what one is talking about and first of all what is meant or defined by the word ‘America’ . . . Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction . . . But we have learned from ‘Deconstruction’ to suspend these always hasty attributions of proper names. My hypothesis must thus be abandoned. No, ‘deconstruction’ is not a proper name, nor is America the proper name of deconstruction. Let us say instead: deconstruction and America are two open sets which intersect partially according to an allegorico-metonymic figure. In this fiction of truth, ‘America’ would be the title of a new novel on the history of deconstruction and the deconstruction of history.

209

Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 –).

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Democracy

Democracy (LLF 32–3) . . . because the quantification of singularities will always have been one of the political dimensions of friendship, of a becoming-political of a friendship which may not be political through and through – not originarily, necessarily or intrinsically. With this becoming-political, and with all the schemata that we will recognize therein – beginning with the most problematic of all, that of fraternity – the question of democracy thus opens, the question of the citizen or the subject as a countable singularity. And that of a ‘universal fraternity’. There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’ . . . without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two are irreducible one to the other. Tragically irreconcilable and forever wounding. The wound itself opens with the necessity of having to count one’s friends, to count the others, in the economy of one’s own, there where every other is altogether other. But where every other is equally altogether other. More serious than a contradiction, political desire is forever borne by the disjunction of these two laws.

Différance (MP 13) An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, . . . every being, and singularly substance or the subject. In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). And it is this constitution of the present, as an ‘originary’ and irreducibly nonsimple . . . synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions and protections . . . that I propose to call archi-writing, archi-trace, or différance. Which (is) (simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization.

Doors (AFFI 68–72) The affirmation of the future to come . . . is nothing other than the affirmation itself, the ‘yes,’ insofar as it is the condition of all prom372

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Doors ises or of all hope, of all awaiting, of all performativity, of all opening toward the future, whatever it may be, for science or religion [. . .] The same affirmation of the future . . . comes back at least according to three modalities, which also establish three places of opening. Let us give them the name of doors. The three doors of the future to come resemble each other . . . but they differ between themselves: at least in that they regularly turn on their hinges to open, one onto the other. Their topo-logic thus remains properly disorienting . . . What is a door doing when it opens onto a door? And above all onto a door one has already passed through, in the passage of what comes to pass, in the passage to come? [ . . . ] The last door [of Yosef Yerushalmi’s210 ‘Monologue with Freud’] . . . takes the form of a promise, the promise of a secret kept secret. What happens when a historian promises to keep secret on the subject of archive which is yet to be established? . . . How could the person who promises a secret to a specter still dare to say he is a historian? The historian speaks only of the past . . . Thus he is no longer a historian. Good sense tells us there is no history or archive of the future to come. A historian as such never looks to the future . . . But meaning something else altogether, is there a historian of the promise, a historian of the first door? The second door leaves a double definition open to the future: both that of Jewishness and that of science. Definition open to a future radically to come, which is to say indeterminate, determined by this opening of the future to come. Indetermination forcefully and doubly potentialized, indetermination en abyme. [The indeterminateness of a Jewishness to come ‘indetermines’ the indeterminateness of science to come, while the indeterminateness of science to come ‘indetermines’ the indeterminateness of a Jewishness to come.] [ . . . ] The third door is also the first, and we have already passed through it [and this is signaled by Yerushalmi through an experience of a Jewishness irreducible to Judaism] . . . Jewishness is interminable. It can survive Judaism . . . it is already given and does not await the future . . . the Jewishness that does not await the future is precisely the waiting for the future, the opening of a relation to the future, the experience of the future.

210

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (20 May 1932 – 8 December 2009).

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Exhaustion

E Exhaustion (ON 48–50) – Let’s start . . . from this proposition, if you like: ‘What is called ‘negative theology,’ . . . is a language [langage].’211 – Only a language? More or less than a language? Isn’t it also what questions and casts suspicion on the very essence or possibility of language? Isn’t it what, in essence, exceeds language, so that the ‘essence’ of negative theology would carry itself outside of language? – Doubtless, but what is called ‘negative theology,’ . . . is a language, at least, that says, in one mode or another, what we have just specified about language, that is, about itself. How does one leap out of this circle? – Consequently, to believe you, an admissible disputing [contestation recevable] of this proposition of the type S is P . . . could not take the form of a refutation. It could not consist in giving a critique of its falseness, but in suspecting its vagueness, emptiness, or obscurity, in accusing it of not being able to determine either the subject or the attribute of that judgment . . . The proposition . . . has no rigorously determinable reference: neither in its subject nor in its attribute, . . . but not even in the copula. For it happens that, however little is known of the said negative theology . . . [. . .] We come after the fact [après le fait]: and the discursive possibilities of the via negativa are doubtless exhausted, that is what remains for us to think. Besides, they will be very quickly exhausted; they will always consist in an intimate and immediate exhaustion [exhaustion] of themselves . . . We are in absolute exemplarity as in the aridity of the desert, for the 211

Elsewhere, Derrida has issued a cautionary note on the use of the phrase ‘negative theology,’ thereby signaling, for him, its problematic status, and the fact that such a term, in its nominal operation, should not be taken at face value: Each time I address the question of negative theology, I very cautiously put these words in quotation marks, in the plural. Especially in Sauf le nom, I transform the expression ‘what one calls negative theology’ or ‘negative theologies’ into a problematic entity. It is this expression that is for me a problem and not simply a reference. (OGD/ GGP 43)

To accept the phrase unthinkingly, as an epistemological and discursive nominative that signifies unproblematically might be understood as an example of ‘bêtise’ in relation to knowledge (see the discussion of ‘bêtise’ under that heading).

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Face essential tendency is to formalize rarefaction. Impoverishment is de rigeur. – . . . Then nothing remains for you, not even a name or a reference. You can speak of exhaustion [d’épuisement] only in the perspective of this complete formalization . . . [. . .] – . . . To say ‘what is called “negative theology,” . . . is a language’ is then to say little, almost nothing, perhaps less than nothing. – Negative theology means (to say) very little, almost nothing, perhaps something other than something. Whence its inexhaustible exhaustion . . .

Eyes (MB 126–7) Now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience . . . an essence of the eye . . . Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. And what they cause to surge up out of forgetfulness, there where the gaze or look looks after it, keeps it in reserve, would be nothing less than ale¯theia, the truth of the eyes, whose ultimate destination they would reveal: to have implication rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy or sadness rather than a look or gaze . . . What does the anthropo-theological discourse . . . say about this? That if the eyes of all animals are destined for sight . . . only man knows how to go beyond seeing and knowing [savoir], because only he knows how to weep . . . Only man knows how to see this – that tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. The essence of the eye is proper to man . . . The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness, the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears. It neither sees nor does not see: it is indifferent to its blurred vision. It implores . . .

F Face (AEL 110–12) It is as if the unicity of the face were, in its absolute and irrecusable singularity, plural a priori . . . The most general possibility of 375

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Family substitution [is] a simultaneous condition, a paradoxical reciprocity . . . of the unique and of its replacement . . . the placement of the singular as replaceable . . . Thus understood, substitution announces the destiny of subjectivity, the subjection of the subject, as host or hostage . . . As host or hostage, as other, as pure alterity . . . subjectivity . . . must be stripped of every ontological predicate, a bit like the pure I that [Blaise] Pascal212 said is stripped of every quality that, as pure I, as properly pure, it would have to transcend or exceed. And the other is not reducible to its actual predicates [the who irreducible to the what] . . . any more than the I is . . . [in] its infinitely exposed vulnerability . . . This absence of determinable properties, of concrete predicates, of empirical visibility, is no doubt what gives to the face of the other a spectral aura, especially if the subjectivity of the hôte also lets itself be announced as the visitation of a face, of a visage. Host or guest . . . the hôte would be not only a hostage. It would have . . . at least the face or figure of a spirit or phantom . . . It is necessary to welcome the other in his alterity, without waiting, and thus not to pause to recognize his real predicates. It is thus necessary, beyond all perception, to receive the other while running the risk that is always troubling, strangely troubling, like the stranger (unheimlich), of a hospitality offer to the guest as ghost or Geist or Gast. There would be no hospitality without the chance of spectrality. But spectrality is not nothing, it exceeds, and thus deconstructs, all ontological oppositions, being and nothingness, life and death – and it also gives . . . God without being, God uncontaminated by being – is this not the most rigorous definition of the Face of the Wholly Other? But is this not then an apprehension that is as spectral as it is spiritual?

Family (FWT 36–7) What is called ‘the family’? I would not say without hesitation that the family is eternal. What is inalterable, what will continue to traverse History, is that there is, or that there be, something of a family, some social bond organized around procreation . . . [. . .] I would therefore speak not of an ‘eternity’ of any family model but of a transhistoricity of the family bond. And the model referred to by Freud213 – and by so many others – is only that of a limited sequence. At once very long and very brief, according to the chosen 212 213

Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662). Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939).

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Forgiveness scale. Very long because it covers millennia, and very brief because, as we see quite clearly, it was instituted, and the moment will come, indeed is already being announced, when it will be if not deinstituted, at least diabolically complicated. It is already terribly overdetermined, and has been for a long time . . . Certainly, there will always be ‘something of a family,’ but what will its organization look like centuries or millennia from now? It is difficult to say.

Fold (WAP 36–7) The figure of the fold, explication, or complication214 often imposes itself upon us. It is not, we know, incompatible with that of a circular band or invagination.215 The right to teaching assumes the knowledge and teaching of right. The right to, as right of access . . . assumes the access to right, which assumes the capacity to read and interpret, in short, instruction. The circulation of this circle is inscribed in the . . . concept of ability [pouvoir]. It is indicated in the grammar and semantics of the verb can [pouvoir] . . . The word ‘can,’ the verb can in the third person singular of the present indicative, can and must be readable . . . linguistic and philosophical competence . . . is of course inscribed in the circle, but it is also the condition of the circulation of the circle. It is the becoming effective of right, as right to.

Forgiveness (OCF 27) In principle, there is no limit to forgiveness, no measure, no moderation, no ‘to what point?’ Provided, of course, that we agree on some ‘proper’ meaning of this word. Now, what do we call ‘forgiveness’? What calls for ‘forgiveness’? Who calls for, who calls upon forgiveness? It is as difficult to measure an act of forgiveness as it is to take measure of such questions, for several reasons which I shall quickly explain. In the first place, because it is the equivocal which is maintained, especially in today’s political debates which reactivate and displace 214

215

The ‘pli’ of ‘explication’, ‘complication’, and other such words (‘implication’, for example), derives from the Latin for fold, as Derrida explains and explicates (unfolds) in detail in Dissemination. As Derrida observes in a footnote at this juncture, he has sought to map what he calls the ‘topology’ of chiasmatic invagination in Parages.

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Frame this notion, the equivocal is maintained throughout the world. Forgiveness is often confounded, sometimes in a calculated fashion, with related themes: excuse, regret, amnesty, prescription, etc.; so many significations of which certain come under law, a penal law from which forgiveness must in principle remain heterogeneous and irreducible.

Frame (TP 60–1) The frame: a parergon like the others . . . What is incomprehensible about the edge, about the à-bord appears not only at the internal limit, the one that passes between the frame and the painting, the clothing and the body, the column and the building, but also at the external limit. Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates them not only . . . from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the space in which . . . the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced . . . No ‘theory,’ no ‘practice,’ no ‘theoretical practice,’ can intervene effectively in this field if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning . . . and (to) all the empiricisms of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question completely.

Future (l’avenir) (R 17–21) Since everything has to be said in two words, let us give two names to the duplicity of . . . origins. For here origin is duplicity itself, the one and the other . . . two names that are still ‘historical’, there where a certain concept of history itself becomes inappropriate . . . First name: the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future [l’avenir]216 or to the 216

The French insertion does not appear in the translation of ‘Faith and Knowledge’, but I have included it from the original text because Derrida elsewhere makes an important distinction between the two French terms for ‘future’, future and l’avenir. (See Jacques Derrida, «Foi et savoir. Les deux sources de la «religion» aux limites de la simple raison», in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, La religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo, ed. Thierry Marchaisse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), p. 27.) Derrida explains the difference in a voice-over at the beginning of the documentary Derrida: ‘In general, I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and

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Future coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming, when the other and death – and radical evil – can come as a surprise at any moment. Possibilities that both open and can always interrupt history, or at least the ordinary course of history . . . Interrupting or tearing history itself apart, doing it by deciding, in a decision that can consist in letting the other come and that can take the apparently passive form of the other’s decision: even there where it appears in itself, in me, the decision is moreover always that of the other, which does not exonerate me of responsibility. [. . .] The second name (or first name prior to all naming), would be chora, such as Plato designates it in the Timaeus217 . . . From the open interior of a corpus, of a system, of a language or a culture, chora would situate the abstract spacing, place itself, the place of absolute exteriority, but also the place of a bifurcation between two approaches . . . Bifurcation between a tradition of the ‘via negativa’ which . . . accords its possibility to a Greek . . . tradition that persists

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“l’avenir.” The future is that which – tomorrow, later, next century – will be. There’s a future that is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come), which refers to someone [or some thing] who [which] comes whose arrival [or the arrival of which] is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is areal future beyond this other known future, it’s this other unknown future, it’s l’avenir [the ‘to-come’] in that it’s the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival’ (Jacques Derrida, Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film, foreword Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 53). In the French text, Derrida observes in the second and third sentences of the paragraph beginning the discussion of the ‘first name’: Ce serait l’ouverture à l’avenir ou à la venue de l’autre comme avènement de la justice . . . La venue de l’autre ne peut surgir comme un événement singulier que là où aucune anticipation ne voit venir . . . (27; emphases added). Derrida works through the sentence employing an etymological family of words in order to re-enforce the possible arrival of some other, which ‘advent’ and event’ in English acknowledge, but which neither ‘future’ nor the verb ‘to come’ do not. While we still use ‘venue’ to signify place in English, such as theatre, the root, like that of its French counterpart, is in the Latin venire, meaning ‘to come’. Equally an ‘event’ in English does not fully register the temporality of the coming or arrival. For a full discussion of ‘chora’, as it is spelt in this passage, or ‘khora’, as another essay of Derrida’s has it, and a reading of Plato’s Timaeus, see Derrida, Khora, in his On the Name (ON 89–131).

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Genesis until Heidegger218 and beyond: the thought of that which is beyond being (epekeina tes ousias) . . . [. . .] Chora . . . would be . . . the name for place, a place name, and a rather singular one at that, for that spacing which, not allowing itself to be dominated by any theological, ontological or anthropological instance, without . . . history and more ‘ancient than all oppositions (for example, that of sensible/intelligible), does not even announce itself as ‘beyond being’ . . . as a result, chora remains absolutely impassible and heterogeneous to all the processes of historical revelation . . . chora never presents itself as such. It is neither Being, nor the Good, nor God, nor Man, nor History. It . . . will always have been . . . an utterly faceless other. . . . Chora is nothing (no being, nothing present), but not the Nothing which in the anxiety of Dasein would still open the question of being.

G Genesis (PGHP 145–6) It will be understood that it is at the price of the actual originality of becoming that the final form [qualified by Husserl219 as ‘a known structural form’,220 ‘form “object” ’, ‘form “spatial thing” ’, ‘cultural 218 219 220

Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976). Edmund Husserl (8 April 1859 – 26 April 1938). The italics are Derrida’s, in order to place the emphasis on this problematic phrase. The text cited by Derrida is Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. In a note to this text Derrida indicates that he is working with both the German and French versions, with occasional modifications to the French translation. The phrases given above are those cited in the English translation of The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology (trans. Marion Hobson), which takes the phrases from Dorion Cairns’ translation of Cartesian Meditations (Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), pp. 79–80). In his transformative translation of Husserl’s German, rendered here as ‘known structural form’, Derrida gives the phrase ‘structural forms of the known’, thereby clarifying and making more precisely available to knowledge the perceptual, ordered or logical phenomenological reception of what is known to the subject. Importantly, it is to be understood that ‘form’ is not a ‘given’, not natural; it takes the form that it does as a result of being structured but one’s

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Genesis Object’, ‘tool’] is not only ‘known beforehand’ but in a way that is even more precise and more complex . . . Husserl is interested only in the a priori and ideal form of the constituted project of genesis. It is from this form that he starts off. It is no longer here a transcendental act of genetic constitution that gives its sense to itself, but forms and conditions of a priori possibility that make genesis itself intelligible.221 Defined in these terms, genesis in its irreducible actuality is understood . . . in the form of an empirical genesis . . . which becomes possible and intelligible through the transcendental activity of a subject that, in the last analysis, is not actually engendered. ‘The structural forms of the known’ are perhaps themselves produced in Husserl’s eyes in a genesis, but they intervene in philosophical reflection and in eidetic description only at the moment when they can define a priori the sense of every possible genesis . . . Whatever may be the product of any genesis whatsoever, it will be comprehended and organized by the structural form of the known. That is to say this latter is universal and a priori. As such it is originarily taken out of genesis. Husserl would be able to reply that here the whole difference separating him from Kant is that the a priori is phenomenological, that is to say, concrete. [This a priori] is given to an intuition, and thus is distinguished from a form or category . . . But . . . [s]ince any concrete is constituted according to a temporality, it is originarily complicated with a priori and a posteriori, with

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perception of form gives to that form and receives that form on the basis of knowledge which is structured or ordered and which therefore orders knowledge to give to the form a perceptible structure, whereby the form is received as a presence, an apparently empirical given to the subject. While Husserl’s phrase, ‘known structural form’ remains readable as implying that the form is a structure materially and empirically in and of itself – I know that to be a table, the object there is known to me as a chair, and so forth – Derrida’s transformative reading of the phrase signifies more exactly Husserl’s sole interest in the ‘a priori and ideal form’; that before there can be the knowledge of a form known as ‘chair’, ‘table’, etc., I, the subject, has to be cognisant of what is known, let us say ‘culturally’; I have to have in structural form, particular knowledges, so that, in seeing the empirical object, I know in a structured manner, through the idea of a form, that what Husserl calls ‘form “object” ’ and ‘cultural Object’ is a chair, a table, a wardrobe, and so on. It is this a priori thinking that Derrida seeks to problematise. What is posed as a movement here, an abandonment from a ‘transcendental act’ in favour of ‘a priori possibility’ in its ‘forms and conditions’, is presented as a question by Heidegger in his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), pp. 15–86.

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Geschlecht truth and with being . . . The pure a priori . . . would have to define itself by an atemporality or an absolute temporal antecedence . . . So the very idea of an a priori intuition of essences, guiding principle of every phenomenology, must be profoundly transformed in the light of the dialectic . . . we are verifying . . .

Geschlecht (PIO II 28–30) We are going to speak of the word ‘Geschlecht.’ I am not going to translate it for the moment. Probably I will not translate it at any point. But you know that, according to the contexts that come to determine this word, it can be translated by sex, race, species, genus, gender, stock, family, generation or genealogy, or community . . . we had encountered the word Geschlecht in a very sketchy {preliminary} reading of Fichte222 [in his Reden an die Deutsche Nation (Discourses to the German Nation), where he speaks of ‘unsers Geschlechts’, ‘our Geschlecht’] . . . this Geschlecht is not determined by birth, native soil, or race, has nothing to do with the natural or even the linguistic, at least {not} in the usual sense of this term, for we were able to recognize in Fichte a kind of claim of the idiom, of the idiom of the German idiom. Certain citizens, German by birth, remain strangers to this idiom of the idiom; certain non-Germans have access to it since, engaged in this circle or this alliance [of which Fichte speaks, in the terms Kreis and Bund] of spiritual freedom, and its infinite progress, they would belong to ‘our Geschlecht’ . . . Geschlecht is a whole, a gathering . . . an organic community in a nonnatural but spiritual sense, one that believes in the infinite progress of the spirit through freedom. So it is an infinite ‘we,’ a ‘we’ that announces to itself from a telos of . . . freedom and spirituality, and that promises, engages or allies itself according to the circle (Kreis, Bund) of this infinite will. How is ‘Geschlecht’ to be translated under these conditions? . . . even if the word ‘Geschlecht’ acquires a rigorous content only from out of the ‘we’ instituted by that very address, it also includes connotations indispensable to the minimal intelligibility of discourse, and these connotations belong irreducibly to German, to a German more essential than all the phenomena of empirical Germanness, but to a certain German [à de l’allemand]. All these connoted senses are copresent . . . . they appear virtually in that use, but no sense is fully satisfying. How is one to translate? . . . One 222

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (19 May 1762 – 27 January 1814).

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality might also . . . judge the word to be so open and undetermined by the concept it designates, namely a ‘we’ as spiritual freedom engaged in the infinity of its progress, that the omission of this word does not lose much. The ‘we’ finally comes down to the humanity of man, to the teleological essence of a humanity announced par excellence . . . For here, the question is nothing less, I venture to say, than the problem of man, of man’s humanity, and of humanism.

Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality (MPM 64–7; OS 48–50; ET 115–17) Ghosts always pass quickly, with the infinite speed of a furtive apparition, in an instant without duration, presence without present of a present, which, coming back, only haunts. The ghost, le revenant, the survivor, appears only by means of figure or fiction, but its appearance is not nothing, nor is it mere semblance. And this ‘synthesis of the phantom’ enables us to recognize in the figure of the phantom the working of . . . the transcendental imagination . . . whose temporalizing schemes . . . are indeed ‘fantastic’ – are, in Kant’s phrase, those of an art hidden in the depths of the soul . . . the art of memory and . . . the memory of art . . . [which] is a thing of the past . . . a past which has never been present and will never allow itself to be reanimated in the interiority of consciousness [and which takes place, if it occurs at all] through writing, the sign, tekhnè, with that thinking memory, that memory without memory (MPM 64–7). *

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There is an Entmachtung of spirit . . . It renders spirit destitute by depriving it of its power or its force [Macht] . . . I shall translate Entmachtung by ‘destitution’ from now on, because spirit thereby loses a power which is not ‘natural.’ [. . .] This discourse on the destitution of spirit calls for some remarks of principle. [. . .] If Entmachtung dooms spirit to impotence or powerlessness, if it deprives it of its strength and the nerve of its authority . . . what does this mean as far as force is concerned? That spirit is a force and is not 223

Entmachtung, Ger. deprivation of power. In the seventh section of Of Spirit, Derrida cites at length Heidegger’s discussion of animals’ supposed ‘lack of world’ and absence of spirit. Heidegger chooses the example of the animal in order, Derrida tells us, to ‘elucidate this destitution of spirit’ (OS 59). Heidegger’s discussion is to be found in Einführung in die Metaphysik [Introduction to Metaphysics].

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Ghost • Haunting • Spectrality a force, that it has and has not power. If it were force in itself, if it were force itself, it would not lose force, there would be no Entmachtung. But if it were not this force or power, the Entmachtung would not affect it essentially, it would not be of spirit. So one can say neither the one nor the other, one must say both, which doubles up each of the concepts: world, force, spirit. The structure of each of these concepts is marked by the relation to its double: a relation of haunting. A haunting which allows neither analysis nor decomposition nor dissolution into the simplicity of a perception. And it is because there is doubling that Entmachtung is possible – only possible, since a ghost does not exist and offers itself to no perception. But this possibility is sufficient to make the destitution of spirit a priori inevitable [fatale]. *

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. . . the very thing one is deprived of, as much in spectrality as in the gaze which looks at images or watches film and television, is indeed tactile sensitivity. The desire to touch, the tactile effect or affect, is violently summoned by its very frustration, summoned to come back [appelé à revenir], like a ghost [un revenant], in the places haunted by its absence. In the series of more or less equivalent words that accurately designate haunting, specter, as distinct from ghost [revenant], speaks of the spectacle. The specter is first and foremost something visible. It is of the visible but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood. It resists the intuition to which it presents itself, it is not tangible. Phantom preserves the same reference to phainesthai, to appearing for vision, to the brightness of the day, to phenomenally. And what happens with spectrality, with phenomenally . . . is that something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood . . . Furthermore . . . once it has been taken, captured, [any] image [of us] will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here. We are already transfixed by a disappearance . . . which promises and conceals in advance another magic ‘apparition,’ a ghostly ‘re-apparition’ . . . believable . . . only by . . . an act of faith. Faith which is summoned by technics itself . . . And this is what makes our experience so strange. We are spectralized by the shot, captured or possessed by spectrality in advance. What has . . . constantly haunted me in this logic of the specter is that it regularly exceeds all the oppositions between visible and 384

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Hand invisible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal, a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance. The spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical. Like the work of mourning . . . all work produces spectrality.

H Hand (OT 174–80) There [is] a good reason for the choice of the ‘example’ of the hand . . . To wit, a certain exteriority is heterogeneous with regard to the sensing or sensible impression . . . and it partakes – that is, it (the exteriority perceived as real) must even partake of the experience of the touching-touched, and of the ‘double apprehension,’ . . . even in the case of illusions. Without an outside and its ‘real quality of a thing’ announcing itself in the sensible impression or sensing, already within its hyletic content, the duplicity of this apprehension would not be possible. This exteriority is needed . . . This detour by way of the foreign outside, no matter how subtle, furtive, and elusive, is at the same time what allows us to speak of a ‘double’ apprehension (otherwise there would be one thing only: only some touching or only some touched) and what allows me to undergo the test of this singular experience and distinguish between the I and the non-I, and to say ‘this is my body’ . . . For that, it is necessary that the space of the material thing – like a difference, like the heterogeneity of a spacing – slip between the touching and the touched, since the two neither must nor can coincide if indeed there is to be a double apprehension. No doubt, in the sensible impression or sensing, I – still I – am the touching and the touched, but if some not-I (material thing, real . . . space, extension . . .) did not come to insinuate itself between the touching and the touched, I would not be able to posit myself as I and ‘say’ . . . This is not I, this is I, I am I. And it is there, precisely because of extensio, because of visibility and the possibility at least for the hand to be seen . . . that manual touching – even just touching my other hand – cannot be reduced to a pure experience of the purely proper body . . . [. . .] 385

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Hospitality Hence the question: where does introjection begin? What is one speaking of, and how can one speak of it . . . ? Can there be a random, pure, immediate, not-spaced-out-in-itself phenomenological intuition, of this ‘thing’ that seems to defy any grammar? If there is some introjection and thus some analogical appresentation starting at the threshold of the touching-touched, then the touchingtouched cannot be accessible for an originary, immediate, and full intuition, any more than the alter ego. We are here within the zone of the immense problem of phenomenological intersubjectivity . . . shouldn’t a certain introjective empathy, a certain ‘intersubjectivity,’ already have introduced an other and an analogical appresentation into the touching-touched for the touching-touched to give rise to an experience of the body proper allowing one to say, ‘it is I,’ ‘this is my body’? [. . .] Hence our question: if this possibility of appresentative empathy, of indirect or analogical access, already partakes of the solipsistic ‘moment’ . . . how can it be said that it comes “then,” afterward, finding itself grounded in an intuitive and pure presence or co-immediacy? And thus if we assume the ‘interiority of psychic acts,’ isn’t it necessary . . . that visibility, being exposed to the outside, the appresentative detour, the intrusion of the other, and so forth, be already at work? . . . Mustn’t the intruder already be inside the place? Isn’t it necessary that this spacing . . . make room for . . . the metonymical supplement, and the technical? . . . Denying the possibility of a tactile experience of the touchingtouched is not the point; but in acknowledging what its manual or digital example implies . . . I ask whether there is . . . any pure, immediate experience of the purely proper body . . . that is living . . . Or if, on the contrary, this experience is at least not already haunted, but constitutively haunted, by some hetero-affection related to spacing and then to visible spatiality – where an intruder may come through, a host, wished or unwished for, a spare and auxiliary other, or . . . a pharmakon that already having at its disposal a dwelling in this place inhabits one’s heart of hearts [tout for intérieur] as a ghost.

Hospitality (DHR 210–11) . . . hospitality is opposed to what is nothing other than opposition itself, namely, hostility . . . the welcomed guest [hôte] is a stranger treated as a friend or ally, as opposed to the stranger treated as an enemy (friend/enemy, hospitality/hostility). The pair . . . hospital386

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Hymen ity/hostility, is in place . . . the patron [or] the host [hôte] . . . who receives [is] he . . . who is master in his house, in his household, in his state, in his nation, in his city, in his town, who remains master in his house – who defines the conditions of hospitality or welcome; where consequently there can be no unconditional welcome, no unconditional passage through the door . . . the one who as host [hôte] (as host and not as guest) receives, welcomes, offers hospitality . . . is, in the first instance and with reason, the master of the household . . . At bottom . . . a law of hospitality [would be that] which violently imposes a contradiction on the very concept of hospitality in fixing a limit to it, in de-termining it: hospitality is certainly, necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation, the greeting of the foreign other . . . as a friend but on the condition that the host . . . the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum remains . . . the master of the household, on the condition that he maintains his own authority . . . and thereby affirms the law of hospitality as the law of the household . . . the law of a place . . . the law of identity which de-limits the very place of proffered hospitality and maintains authority over it, maintains the truth of authority . . . thus limiting the gift proffered and making of this limitation, namely, the being-oneself in one’s own home, the condition of the gift and of hospitality . . . This is the principle, . . . of the constitution of hospitality . . . Hospitality is a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only . . . deconstruct itself . . . in being put into practice.

Hymen (D 212–15) Or hymen. The virginity of the ‘yet unwritten page’ opens up that space. [. . .] To repeat: the hymen, the confusion between the present and the nonpresent, along with all the indifferences it entails within the whole series of opposites (perception/nonperception, memory/image, memory/desire, etc.), produces the effect of a medium (a medium as element enveloping both terms at once: a medium located between The two terms) . . . What counts here is the between, the in-betweenness of the hymen. The hymen ‘takes place’ in the ‘inter-,’ in the spacing between desire and fulfillment, between perpetration and its recollection. [. . .] We are thus moving . . . to the logic of the hymen. The hymen, the consummation of differends . . . merges with what it seems to be derived from: the hymen as protective screen, the jewel box of 387

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I virginity, the vaginal partition, the fine, invisible veil which, in front of the hystera, stands between the inside and the outside of a woman, and consequently between desire and fulfillment. It is neither desire nor pleasure, but in between the two. Neither future nor present, but between the two. . . . With all the undecidability of its meaning, the hymen only takes place when it doesn’t take place . . . [. . .] The hymen is thus a sort of textile. [. . .] At the edge of being, the medium of the hymen never becomes a mere mediation of work of the negative; it outwits and undoes all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner of dialectics. It outwits them and . . . it envelops them, turns them over, and inscribes them.

I I (ATTIA 92–3) Kant emphasizes the fact that ‘I’ signifies the unity of a consciousness that remains the same throughout all its modifications. The ‘I’ is the ‘I think,’ the originary unity of the transcendental apperception that accompanies every representation . . . Power over the animal is the essence of the ‘I’ or the ‘person,’ the essence of the human . . . This presence to oneself, this self of the presence to itself, this universal and singular ‘I’ that is the condition for the response and thus for the responsibility of the subject – whether theoretical, practical, ethical, juridical, or political – is a power, a faculty that Kant is prudent or bold enough not to identify with the power to speak, the literal power of uttering ‘I.’ This personal subject is capable of its selfness, is capable of doing it without saying it . . . it can affirm itself in its selfness and in its dignity, which is to say its responsibility, its power to respond, to answer for itself, before others and before the law . . . ‘I’ . . . defines thinking itself as what gathers itself, there where it remains the same, gathered and present to itself through this power of the I, through the I can of this I, this I can I as an ‘I think’ that accompanies every representation . . . Every human language has at its disposal this self ‘as such,’ even if the word for it is lacking.

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Iterability

Identity (MO 14) Our question is still identity. What is identify, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and, in general, belonging? And before the identity of the subject, what is ipseity? The latter is not reducible to an abstract capacity to say ‘I,’ which it will always have preceded. Perhaps it signifies, in the first place, the power of an ‘I can,’ which is more originary than the ‘I’ . . .

Iterability (LI 7–8) A written sign is proffered in the absence of the receiver. How to style this absence? . . . this absence . . . [is] not merely a distant presence, one which is delayed or which, in one form or another, is idealized in its representation . . . this distance. divergence, delay, this deferral [différance] must be capable of being carried to a certain absoluteness of absence if the structure of writing . . . is to constitute itself. It is at that point that the différance [difference and deferral, trans.] as writing could no longer (be) . . . [a] modification of presence. In order for my ‘written communication’ to retain its . . . readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver . . . My communication must be repeatable – iterable – in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability (iter . . . comes from itara, other in Sanskrit . . . everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what type of writing is involved . . . A writing that is not structurally readable – iterable – beyond the death of the address would not be writing . . . writing is constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability in the absence . . . of every empirically determined ‘subject.’ The possibility of repeating and thus of identifying the marks is implicit in every code, making it into a network . . . that is . . . transmittable, decipherable, iterable . . . To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence . . . the possibility of the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark. 389

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Jealousy What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or producer . . . For a writing to be a writing it must continue to ‘act’ and to be readable even what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written . . .

J Jealousy (PIO I 187–8) I give and play ingratitude against jealousy. In everything I am talking about, jealousy is at stake. The thinking of the trace as put in seriasure by E[mmanuel] L[évinas],224 things a singular relation of God (not contaminated by being) to jealousy. He, the one who has passed beyond all being, must be exempt from jealousy, from all desire for possession, keeping, property, exclusivity, nonsubstitution. And the relation to Him must be pure of all jealous economy. But this without-jealousy [sans-jalousie] cannot not jealously keep itself; insofar as it is an absolutely reserved passed [passée], it is the very possibility of all jealousy. Ellipsis/ellipse of jealousy: seriasure is always a jalousie225 through which, seeing without seeing everything, and especially without being seen, before and beyond the phenomenon, the without-jealousy jealously guards itself and keeps itself, otherwise said, keeps-itself-loses-itself. By means of a series of regular traits and re-treats/re-traits: the figure of jealousy, beyond the face. Never more/no more jealousy, ever/never more zeal, is it possible?

Joyce (DN 25–6) It is already difficult to write on Joyce,226 but to speak on Joyce is even more difficult. Nevertheless, I will try to say something. A long time ago, in 1956–57, I spent a year at Harvard, and what I did there was to read Joyce in the Widener Library, which provided my encounter 224 225

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Emmanuel Lévinas (12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995). Here, as elsewhere, Derrida plays on the French jalousie, which can mean jealousy or refer to a kind of window, consisting of parallel louvres, which can be opened or closed together, permitting air to flow through, but obscuring vision, particularly from outside. James Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941).

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Joyce with Ulysses. Since then, Joyce has represented for me the most gigantic attempt to gather in a single work, that is, in the singularity of a work which is irreplaceable, in a singular event – I am referring here to Ulysses and to Finnegans Wake – the presumed totality, not only of one culture but of a number of cultures, a number of languages, literatures, and religions. This impossible task of precisely gathering in totality . . . the potentially infinite memory of humanity is, at the same time and in an exemplary way, both new in its modern form and very classical in its philosophical form. That is why I compare Ulysses to Hegel,227 for instance . . . as an attempt to reach absolute knowledge through a single act of memory. This is made possible by loading every sentence, every word, with a maximum of equivocalities, virtual associations, by making this organic linguistic totality as rich as possible. Of course, at the same time, this attempt reassembled the history of literature and inaugurated and produced a break in the history of literature. What I tried to show also in my work on Joyce is that, at the same time, the writing of these works functions as an injunction to . . . literary critics to come, to the institution of Joyce scholarship, to build a sort of beehive, an infinite institution of people working as interpreters and philologists, people deciphering Joyce’s signature as a singular signature. From that point of view I think that Joyce is a great landmark in the history of deconstruction ... In my first book . . . I tried to compare the way Joyce treats language and the way a classical philosopher such as Husserl treats language. Joyce wanted to make history, the resuming and the totalization of history, possible through the accumulation of metaphoricities, equivocalities, and tropes. Husserl, on the other hand, though that historicity was made possible by the transparent univocity of language. There is no historicity without the transparency of the tradition, Husserl says, while Joyce says there is no historicity without the accumulation of equivocality in language. It is from the tension between these two interpretations of language that I tried to address the question of language.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831).

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Kafka

K Kafka (AL 196, 198, 199–201, 206–8) In a certain way, Vor dem Gesetz [‘Before the Law’, a parable by Franz Kafka,228 the narrative of which reappears in Kafka’s novel The Trial] is the story of [an] inaccessibility, of this inaccessibility to the story . . . no method, no path to accede to the law, to what would happen here, to the topos of its occurrence. Such inaccessibility puzzles the man from the country, beginning with the moment he looks carefully at the doorkeeper, who is himself the observer, overseer, and sentry . . . [. . .] Event without event, pure event where nothing happens, the eventiality of an event which both demands and annuls the relation to its fiction . . . The structure of this event is such that one is compelled neither to believe nor disbelieve it . . . Demanding and denying the story, this quasi-event bears the mark of fictive narrativity (fiction of narration as well as fiction as narration . . .). It is the origin of literature at the same time as the origin of law . . . Whether or not it is fantastic . . . this in no way diminishes the imperious necessity of what it tells, its law. This law is even more frightening and fantastic, unheimlich or uncanny, than if it emanated from pure reason . . . If the law is fantastic, its original site and occurrence are endowed with the qualities of a fable, we can see that das Gesetz remains essentially inaccessible even when it, the law, presents or promises itself. [. . .] Did the man from the country wish to enter the law or merely the place where the law is safeguarded? We cannot tell, and perhaps there is no genuine choice, since the law figures itself as a kind of place, a topos and a taking place. At all events, the man from the country, who is also a man existing before the law . . . does not want to stay before the law, in the situation of the doorkeeper. The latter also stands before the law . . . This inscription ‘before the law’ is therefore divided . . . It . . . redoubles itself in what it says or describes: namely a division of territory and an absolute opposition in the situation with regard to the law. The two characters . . . are both before the law, but since in order to speak they face each other, their position ‘before the law’ is an opposition. [. . .] 228

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924).

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Knots The entitling event confers upon the text its law and its name . . . the event opens a scene, giving rise to a topographical system of law that prescribes the two inverse and adverse positions, the antagonisms of two characters equally concerned with it . . . Neither is in the presence of the law . . . [. . .] And if this concerns the essence of the law, it is that the latter has no essence . . . the law calls in silence . . . it forces an answer, it calls for responsibility and guarding . . . The story (of what never happens) does not tell us what kind of law manifests itself in its non-manifestation . . . Here, we know neither who nor what is the law, das Gesetz. This, perhaps, is where literature begins. [. . .] The law is silent, and of it nothing is said to us. Nothing, only its name, its common name and nothing else.

Khora (K 89, 117) . . . at times the khora appears to be neither this nor that, at times both this and that, but this alternation between the logic of exclusion and that of participation . . . stems perhaps only from a provisional appearance and from the constraints of rhetoric, even from some incapacity for naming. [. . .] . . . to all the stories, ontological or mythic, that can be recounted on the subject of what she receives and even of what she resembles but which in fact takes place in her, khora herself, so to speak, [though she] does not become the object of any tale, whether true or fabled. A secret without secret remains forever impenetrable on the subject of it/her.

Knots (N28) And when one writes a text . . . one tries to write in such a way that the reading is immediately affected by it, and also . . . in such a way as to produce long term effects . . . But what probably serves as my rule . . . is the attempt to have . . . the multiplicity of rhythms and speeds . . . To enable a phrase to have an immediate effect and also a reserve . . . What I am saying about a phrase also applies to an institution. This is what an institution is . . . an institution is something that responds in the present to an urgency and at the same time builds towards the future. Rhythms are knotted in a body: here, the body 393

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Knowledge of an institution in unimaginable, unrepresentable, unobjectivizable forms. If one wanted to give oneself an objective representation . . . one would need to be able to represent a body made up of knotted speeds or rhythms, of knotted differences of rhythm. A knot that represents the vibrations of different speeds. It is not representable, but this is what an institution is, nonetheless. Every institution is this. Language is this. A phrase is this. A phrase is a knot where, on the one hand, there is something that is immediately legible or visible, and on the other, there are already vibrations enabling a phrase of Heraclitus for example, to still vibrate today and to produce effects. I cite Heraclitus because his writing is aphoristic. But one could cite Plato.

Knowledge (BS 278–9) What does ‘knowledge/to know’ mean? What is ‘knowledge’/What is it ‘to know’?229 Before even pretending to think the possibility or not of an absolute knowledge [savoir absolut], don’t we have to know [savoir], absolutely, in its absoluteness, as if to say, in general, before any other determination, the meaning of the word or the experience that is so imperturbably called ‘knowledge’ [savoir]? Knowledge [savoir] in general? Whatever is it, to know [savoir]? And what if ‘the beast and the sovereign’ were not only one example among others . . . what if ‘the beast and the sovereign’ were primarily an incitement, a provocation not only to know [savoir] but to know knowledge [savoir]230 229

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Apropos the translation of savoir, Geoffrey Bennington points out that the word is both the infinitive of the verb and the noun. I have modified the translation in this particular instance to reflect this doubling, and therefore performative, destabilisation of knowledge, of knowing the meaning, of what is ‘meant’, what ‘one means to say’, which is on the move in these questions. It should be considered that the remainder of the passage also plays on, getting underway as a result of this motion. Wherever savoir is inscribed in the French, I have included it in brackets in the passage to indicate that which resonates and makes the final decision of translation impossible. I have also modified the translation silently in one or two other places. As awkward or as unidiomatic as it might seem, one might risk a translation here of the two instances of savoir which reads ‘. . . a provocation not only to know knowledge but to know knowledge otherwise . . .’ Bennington has translated the second instance as both verb and noun; but the former example of the two might be given, as I have just done, in the same manner; or, furthermore, one might, on the one hand, transpose the two forms – a provocation not only

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Knowledge otherwise or for the first time [savoir] or, more precisely, to think knowledge [savoir], to determine it, and thus also to reconnoiter it and so know [savoir] its limits. What could that mean, to know [savoir] the limits of knowledge [savoir]?231 Against the background of this general horizon, which will constantly border but also un-border, will exceed our procedure and proceeding [ . . . ] one of the movements or gestures that we have learned to recognize . . . on reading together [Paul] Celan’s232 ‘Meridian’ . . . [with] its thinking of the encounter . . . the abyss (Abgrund), Unheimlichkeit and the Stranger [the outsider, the foreigner], etc.) . . . was precisely the . . . movement of a pas [step/ not] that consists in suspending . . . the order and the authority of a sure knowledge [savoir], precisely, a knowledge sure of itself, determined and determining . . . [in order] to begin to think the order of knowledge [savoir], the delimitation of knowledge [savoir] – and to think that, perhaps, neither thought nor poetry was to be reduced to it [knowledge, the order of knowledge] without remainder [rest] . . . [which invited us] to go over the limit of knowledge [savoir],

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to knowledge but to know otherwise – or, on the other hand, to risk the strong reading of translation’s oscillations further, one might propose ‘a provocation not only to know but to knowledge otherwise’. With such echoes in mind, the translation might also continue, from the ‘otherwise’, thus: ‘. . . or for the first time to know [or, for the first time, knowledge {or for the first time to know knowledge}] or, more precisely, to think “to know” ’. It might also be noted that savoir is a homonym of two French words ça and voir, ‘that’ (or ‘it’) and (to) see. Thus what is heard in savoir is ‘there, see’, as if knowledge were always elsewhere than the subject or as if knowledge arrived, for the subject, from there, from some other. Le ça is also employed in French psychoanalytic discourse to signify the id, so, one might say, the other sees, the other understands. Derrida puts these homonyms in to work on a number of occasions, not least in Glas where ça resonates with SA for savoir absolut, absolute knowledge. The potentially abyssal condition that is opened, seemingly knowingly, in the, perhaps, undecidable use of savoir, appears to reach, if not a limit (how could one reach, or, indeed know if one has reached, the limit of an abyss?), then a wholly abyssal opening in the final sentence, which in French asks ‘Qu’est-ce que ça pourrait signifier, savoir les limites du savoir?’ What could that signify: knowledge the limits of knowledge [knowledge-the limits of the ‘to know’]. While not as obviously problematic to translate as the, by now somewhat familiar, phrase tout autre est tout autre, there remains, nevertheless, an undecidable residue within the interrogative, which, in this, might be said to turn on itself, and the limits of what can be asked of knowledge, the limits to which a conventional thinking of knowledge or knowledge of knowledge might go. Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel) (23 November 1920 – 20 April 1970).

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Literature to go over – were it only in order to know [savoir]233 and to know knowledge [savoir le savoir] – the limit of knowledge [savoir], and especially of that figure of knowledge [savoir] . . . the ego cogito . . . the living present that claims to escape, precisely, in its absolute certainty, from the ‘perhaps’ and the ‘who knows.’

L Literature (EIRP 35) I think that the concept of literature is a philosophical concept. At least it’s impossible to build this concept without some philosophy. Now at the same time, I would say that literature, some events in literature (I wouldn’t speak of simply all literature) . . . resist this philosophical concept of literature. That is, there is some invention or some events, some happenings, in what one calls ‘literature’ which constantly undermine or displace the philosophical stabilized concept . . . of literature. So that’s why I’m, as a ‘philosopher,’ interested in . . . this kind of literary displacement, a writing which displaces the philosophical assumptions about literature . . . For me there’s no essence of literature, but there is a specific functioning of it.

Love (PC 8) 3 June 1977 and when I call you my love, my love, is it you I am calling or my love? You, my love, is it you I thereby name, is it to you that I address myself? I don’t know if the question is well put, it frightens me. But I am sure that the answer, if it gets to me one day, will have come to me from you. You alone, my love, you alone will have known it. [. . .] when I call you my love, is it that I am calling you, yourself, or is it that I am telling my love? and when I tell you my love is it that I am declaring my love to you or indeed that I am telling you, yourself, my love, and that you are my love. I want so much to tell you.

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‘In order to know’ is a perfectly idiomatic translation of pour savoir, which, however, might be translated as for knowledge, with the suggestion that something is done for the sake of knowledge.

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Matter/Materialism

M Matter/Materialism (P 63–5) In what I have begun to propose, I attempt to take into account certain recent acquisitions or determined incompletions in the orders of philosophy, semiology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, etc. . . . Now, we cannot consider Marx’s, Engels’s or Lenin’s234 texts as completely finished elaborations that are simply to be ‘applied’ to the current situation . . . These texts are not to be read according to a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would seek out a finished signified beneath a textual surface. Reading is transformation . . . But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading . . . No more than I have dealt with Saussure’s text, or Freud’s235 or any other, as homogeneous . . . (the motif of homogeneity, the theological motif par excellence, is decidedly the one to be destroyed), I do not find the texts of Marx, Engels, or Lenin homogeneous critiques . . . Thus I will have to analyze what I consider a heterogeneity, conceptualizing both its necessity and the rules for deciphering it . . . It follows that, if, and in the extent to which, matter in this general economy [based on a reading of Georges Bataille236 in ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference] designates . . . radical alterity (I will specify: in relation to philosophical oppositions), then what I write can be considered ‘materialist.’ As you may imagine, things are not so simple. It is not always in the materialist text (is there such a thing, the materialist text?) nor in every materialist text that the concept of matter has been defined as absolute exterior or radical heterogeneity. I am not even sure that there can be a ‘concept’ of an absolute exterior. If I have not very often used the word ‘matter,’ it is not . . . because of some idealist or spiritualist kind of reservation. It is that in the logic of the phase of overturning the concept has been too often reinvested with 234

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Karl Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883); Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895); Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924). Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913); Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939). Georges Bataille (10 Steptember 1897 – 8 July 1962).

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Messianicity ‘logocentric’ values, values associated with those of thing, reality, presence in general, sensible presence, for example, substantial plenitude, content, referent, etc. Realism or sensualism – ‘empiricism’ – are modifications of logocentrism . . . In short, the signifier ‘matter’ appears to me problematical only at the moment when its reinscription cannot avoid making of it a new fundamental principle which, by means of theoretical regression, would be reconstituted into a ‘transcendental signified.’ It is not only idealism in the narrow sense that falls back upon the transcendental signified. It can always come to reassure a metaphysical materialism. It then becomes an ultimate referent, according to the classical logic implied by the value or referent, or it becomes an ‘objective reality’ absolutely ‘anterior’ to any work of the mark, the semantic content of a form of presence which guarantees the movement of the text in general from the outside . . . This is why I will not say that the concept of matter is in and of itself either metaphysical or nonmetaphysical.

Messianicity (DE 67–8) [L]et me say something about messianic structure . . . messianicity perhaps exceeds the space of consciousness. What I mean by ‘messianicity’ is the general structure of our relation to what is coming. Usually, we call this the future. This is an ambiguous name because, if by ‘future’ one understands a modality of the present, the present of tomorrow, then we would find again some reduction to the living present that I would like to avoid. So that’s why I say ‘to come’ rather than the future. ‘To come’ means, on the one hand, that which is not yet here, but which also might take the figure or the form of the one who arrives, not simply what but who – who comes? who is coming? This is what I call in French l’arrivant, the arriving one, the unexpected guest, for instance, the ‘to come.’ So, the messianic structure is the relation of consciousness, but also unconscious existence, to the unexpected surprise, to the unexpected. If I could anticipate, if I had an horizon of anticipation, if I could see what is coming or who is coming, there would be no coming. So we are open to what is coming, which is not necessarily a good thing, the worst might be coming. That is why the messianic – I often insist on the fact that this messianicity is not a messianism – is not determined by the way that, in the Bible, we define the Messiah or Messianism. The messianic is a general structure in which the ‘to come’ is absolutely undetermined, absolutely undetermined, and 398

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Metaphor of course I cannot close, I cannot circumscribe this relation to the ‘to come.’

Metaphor (DRWP 102–3) Metaphora circulates in the city, it conveys us like its inhabitants, along all sorts of passages and intersections . . . We are in a certain way – metaphorically of course, and as concerns the mode of habitation – the content and tenor of this vehicle: passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor. A strange statement to start off – you might say. Strange at least to imply that we might know what inhabit means, and circulate, and to transport oneself, to have or let oneself be transported . . . Strange too because it is not only metaphoric to say that we inhabit metaphor and that we circulate in it as some sort of vehicle . . . It is not simply metaphoric . . . Neither metaphoric nor a-metaphoric, this ‘figure’ consists singularly in changing the places and the functions: it constitutes the so-called subject (. . . the speaker . . . or the writer . . .) into the content or into the . . . tenor of a vehicle which comprehends the subject, carries him away, displaces him at the very moment when this subject believes he is designating it . . . driving it . . . ‘like a pilot in his ship.’ [. . .] We are not in metaphor like a pilot in his ship . . . Therefore I ought to decisively interrupt the drifting or skidding. I would do it if it were possible. But . . . I skid and I drift irresistibly. I am trying to speak about metaphor, to say something proper or literal on this subject . . . but through metaphor . . . I am obliged to speak of it more metaphorico, to it in its own manner. I cannot treat it . . . without dealing with it, . . . without negotiating with it . . . This is why just now I have been moving from digression to digression . . . from one vehicle to another without being able to brake or stop . . . I can brake only by skidding, in other words . . . At least, I can only stop the engines of this floating vehicle which is here my discourse . . . even if I had decided to no longer speak metaphorically about metaphor, I would not achieve it; it would continue to go on without me in order to make me speak, to ventriloquize me, metaphorize me . . . What is happening with metaphor? Well, everything . . . Any statement concerning anything that happens, metaphor included, will be produced not without metaphor.

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Mimesis

Mimesis (I:D/TMPP 25) A critical question – the question of criticism, in other words, of decision: one cannot avoid missing mimesis as soon as one identifies it and wants to decide on its truth value. One would not find it if one had not already missed it in looking for it; that is, if one did not have faith in its identity, its existence, or its consistency. This is what Plato, Heidegger, and Girard237 do in very different, but finally analogous ways . . . Girard would like to ‘appropriate’ or ‘identify’ mimesis. Thus, he fails to seize it; or rather . . . he betrays its essence precisely by conferring on it an essence or a property, a truth to be revealed.

N Name (IS/LAN 1–5) The . . . question concerns the name Nietzsche . . .238 [. . .] . . . if one can glimpse behind Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche the foundations of a general reading of Western metaphysics, then the question arises: To what extent does this interpretation of metaphysics in its totality and as a whole contain an interpretive decision about the unity or singularity of thinking? And to what extent does this . . . presuppose a decision about the ‘biographical,’ about the proper name . . . about the politics of signature? [. . .] First, the name is placed [by Heidegger] in quotation marks. Now what happens when a proper name is put between quotation marks? . . . to someone who simply opens this book without knowing the German text, such an approach could . . . [suggest that] the name of the thinker would thus be the cause of his thought! The thinking, then, would be the effect caused by his proper name! And here is a book on the name Nietzsche and on the connections between his name and his thought. [. . .] . . . when [Heidegger] says that the name of the thinker stands as title ‘for the Sache of his thinking,’ he certainly does not intend to make the name the cause of an effect that would be the think237 238

René Girard (25 December 1923 –). Friedrich Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900).

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Origin ing. The genitive ‘of’ here designates the Sache239 (‘matter’) as his thinking. Everything will confirm this once one considers the proper name not as that of an individual . . . it is the name of a thought . . . whose unity gives in return sense and reference to the proper name. ‘Nietzsche’ is nothing other than the name of this thinking . . . . . . two paths present themselves. One would consist in taking a new approach to the problematic of the name . . . The other path would be to determine the essentiality of the name from the ‘subject matter of thought,’ of thought itself defined as the content of theses, and to let fall into inessentiality the particular proper name . . .

O Origin (MP 279–80) . . . the source cannot be reassembled into its originary unity. Because – first of all – it has no proper, literal meaning. [. . .] But this meaning denominated as proper can appear for us within the element of familiarity only if we already know, or believe that we already know, what we are thinking when we say that the source is the origin of a body of water. If there were not an immemorial complicity with the meaning of the word origin, with the naked meaning of the word origin in general, could we ever come close to the determined origin that is a source . . . that is the so-called proper and unique meaning of the word source? Therefore we would already have to understand the meaning of the word origin when it designates something totally other than the welling up of a body of water, in order to gain access to that which nevertheless was proposed as the proper meaning of the source. One first would have to fix what origo means, the status of the origin or of the ‘source’ in general, of the departure or beginning of anything at all, that is of the departure as ab-solute . . . Therefore, we should not be surprised if generality (the origin in general) becomes the accomplice of metaphoricity . . . The proper 239

Sache (Ger.) object, thing, matter (material or concern, subject or question), case, business, affair, subject.

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Performativity meaning or the primal meaning . . . is no longer simply the source, but the deported effect of a turn of speech, a return or detour . . .

P Performativity (LI 13–14; AtD/AiID 217–18) The category of communication is relatively new. Austin’s240 notions of illocution and perlocution do not designate the transference or passage of a thought content, but, in some way, the communication of an original movement . . . an operation and the production of an effect. Communicating, in the case of the performative, if such a thing, in all rigor and all purity, should exist . . . would be tantamount to communicating a force through the impetus [impulsion] of a mark. . . . As opposed to the classical assertion, to the constative utterance, the performative does not have its referent . . . outside of itself, or in any event, before and in front of itself. It does not describe something that exists outside of language and prior to it. It produces or transforms a situation, it effects; and even if it can be said that a constative utterance also effectuates something and always transforms a situation, it cannot be maintained that that constitutes its internal structure, its manifest function or destination, as in the case of the performative . . . The performative is a ‘communication’ which is not limited to strictly to the transference of a semantic content that is already constituted and dominated by an orientation toward truth (be it the unveiling of what is in its being or the adequation-congruence between a judicative utterance and the thing itself). *

*

*

You know the programme; [deconstruction] cannot be applied because deconstruction is not a doctrine; it’s not a method, nor is it a set of rules or tools; it cannot be separated from performatives . . . On the one hand, there is no ‘applied deconstruction’. But on the other hand, there is nothing else, since deconstruction doesn’t consist in a set of theorems, axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods. If 240

J. L. Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960).

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Photography deconstruction, then, is nothing by itself, the only thing it can do is apply, to be applied, to something else, not only in more than one language, but also with something else. There is no deconstruction, deconstruction has no specific object . . . Deconstruction cannot be applied and cannot not be applied. So we have to deal with this aporia, and this is what deconstruction is about.

Photography (RI n.p.; A 169) – I see her, the one you are addressing now, posing as a question of gender or genre. – We would prefer to say a generic question, one concerning generation. We see the . . . ‘epochs’ of a story that is never told, called into question again by each new photograph. The latter is then analyzed by a ‘character’ and is thus suspended or suspensive . . . acting as the credits for a new generation of shots, for another photographic genesis . . . Each time, another time, a further cycle. Do the credits enframe or engender? Their revelatory character comes from this, like a photographic apocalypse. [. . .] – . . . the woman you are speaking on behalf of is posing there as a question of genre. . . . You have here, in front of your eyes, this suspended question, that of genre, but don’t look upon it as an allegory, don’t see it as genre in person, the truth of genre personified. No, it is posed, she is posed, and above all poses, in a photographic body. It neither says nor represents anything other than photography. On the contrary, when it seems to do so it is with the aim of insisting on the photograph medium or apparatus that it itself is. – I like the word ‘medium’ here. It speaks to me of specters, of ghosts and phantoms, like these images themselves. From the first ‘apparition,’ it’s all about the return of the departed. It is there in black and white, it can be verified after the fact. The spectral is the essence of photography. *

*

*

The photographer left; he told the truth. It is she. She remains without witness, save an invisible witness to attest that there is no more witness. We left; it is as if the two of us were dead, the photographer as well, after having spoken the truth – spoken with out seeing [voir], without knowing [savoir] and without being able [pouvoir]. It is as 403

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Reason if she were dead . . . But she remains, and she will have shown her name, on the verge of more than one language. It is (the) truth . . .

R Reason (EHOG 144–9) Reason is not some eternity at work in history: first because there is no history without Reason, i.e., no pure transmission of sense as the tradition of truth; then because (reciprocally) there is no Reason without history, i.e., without the concrete and instituting acts of transcendental subjectivity, without its objectifications and sedimentations . . . If Reason is but the essential structure of the transcendental ego and the transcendental we, it is, like them, historical through and through. Conversely, historicity, as such, is rational through and through. But being, which articulates Reason and History in relation to each other, is a ‘sense’ . . . . . . the first philosophical act is only the sense-investigation of this historical rationality . . . Teleological Reason already occupied civilizations . . . before the philosophical sense-investigation (a senseinvestigation which awakened Reason to itself) and announced the pure sense of historicity, i.e., the very sense of Reason, to history. The sense-investigation of what was already there marks a rupture and, consequently, a radical and creative origin . . . But what is the self . . . of this self-elucidation . . . ? Is human transcendental consciousness only the place of reflexive articulation, i.e., the mediation of a Logos retaking possession of itself through this consciousness? . . . historical transcendental subjectivity [cannot be deprived of] the absolute of the Self: because, since the Logos always has the form of a Telos, its transcendence would not be real transcendence but the ideal Pole for bringing about transcendental subjectivity itself . . . At times the Logos expresses itself through a transcendental history, at other times it is only the absolute polar authenticity of transcendental historicity itself. [. . .] Does the sense of transcendental historicity make itself understood . . . through that historicity, like the Logos which is at its beginning? Is God, on the contrary, only the final fulfillment situated at the infi404

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Representation nite, the name for the horizon of horizons . . . ? The dia-historicity or the meta-historicity of the divine Logos only traverses and goes beyond ‘Fact’ as the ‘ready-made’ of history, yet the Logos is but the pure movement of its own historicity. The situation of the Logos is profoundly analogous . . . to that of every ideality . . . Ideality is at once supratemporal and omnitemporal . . . Are not supratemporality and omnitemporality also the characteristics of Time itself? Are they not the characteristics of the Living Present . . .? [. . .] If there is any history, then historicity can be only the passage of Speech . . . the pure tradition of a primordial Logos toward a polar Telos. But since there can be nothing outside the pure historicity of that passage, since there is no Being which has sense outside of this historicity or escapes its infinite horizon, since the Logos and the Telos are nothing outside the interplay . . . of their reciprocal inspiration, this signifies then that the Absolute is Passage. . . . phenomenology as Method of Discourse is . . . first of all . . . the free resolution to ‘take up one’s own sense’ (or regain consciousness . . .), in order to make oneself accountable, through speech . . . This speech is historical, because it is always already a response . . . Method is not the neutral preface or perambulatory exercise of thought. Rather, it is thought itself in the consciousness of its complete historicity.

Representation (WM 148–9) A displacement of the point of view, therefore . . . concerning that which founds the foundation and institutes the institution of power in a certain logic of representation [in the work of Louis Marin241] . . . It concerns . . . a law according to which the greatest force does not consist in continually expanding ad infinitum but develops its maximal intensity, so to speak, only at the mad moment of decision, at the point of its absolute interruption . . . A moment of infinite reunciation as the potentialization of the virtual work. But the virtual work . . . is the essence of the work, a nonessential essence, since it is an essence that remains possible as such. And this is death . . . Here is death, then, there where the image annuls its representative presence, there where, more precisely, the non-re-productive intensity of the re- of representation gains in power what the present that it represents loses in presence. And this point, which also punctuates an 241

Louis Marin (22 May 1931 – 29 October 1992).

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Story entire way of thinking the temporalization of time, is evidently the point, not of death itself, but of mourning, and the mourning of an absolute force. If, therefore, the . . . images Marin proposes in order to make this power of the image visible and energetic . . . are images of the dead . . . .[i]t is in the re-presentation of the dead that the power of the image is exemplary. When Marin asks about this re- of representation, about the substitutive value that this re- indicates at the moment when that which was present is no longer present and comes to be re-presented, and when he then takes the example of the disappearance of the present as death, it is in order not only to track a re-presentation or an absolute substitution of representation for presence, but also to detect within it an increase, a re-gaining of force or a supplement of intensity in presence, and thus a sort of potency or potentialization of power for which the schema of substitutive value, of mere replacement, can give no account. Representation is here no longer a simple reproductive re-presentation; it is such a regaining of presence, . . . that it allows lack to be thought, the default of presence . . . that has hollowed out in advance the so-called primitive or originary presence, the presence that is represented, the so-called living presence.

S Story (AL 34–5) The idea of an internal polylogue . . . was first of all the adolescent dream of keeping a trace of all the voices that were traversing me – or were almost doing so . . . what happens – in other words, the unique event whose trace one would like to keep alive – is also the very desire that what does not happen should happen, and is thus a ‘story’ in which the event already crosses within itself the archive of the ‘real’ and the archive of ‘fiction.’ Already we’d have trouble not spotting but separating out historical narrative, literary fiction, and philosophical reflection. So there was a movement of nostalgic, mournful lyricism to reserve . . . in short to render both accessible and inaccessible . . . everything that occurs . . . or fails to . . . sealed . . . in its very signature . . . the discursive forms we have available to us, the resources in terms of 406

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Telephone objectivizing archivation, are so much poorer than what happens (or fails to happen . . .).

Subjectile (SAAA 63–5) With what other word could we have confused the drawing itself, that is, the graphic form of the ‘subjectile’? With ‘subjective,’ perhaps, the nearest possible treason. But so many other words, a great family of bits and snatches of words . . . Beginning by subjective, subtle, sublime, also pulling the il into the li, and ending with projectile . . . Emerging from the depths to haunt the supports, the substrata, and the substances . . . What is a subjectile? . . . A subjectile first of all is something to be called. That the subjectile is something is not yet a given. Perhaps it comes across as being someone instead, and preferably something else: it can betray. But the other can be called something without being, without being a being, and above all not a subject, not the subjectivity of a subject . . . At the very moment when it is born, when it is not yet . . . a subjectile calls and sometimes betrays. That’s what I can say about it to begin with . . . The notion belongs to the code of painting and designates what is in some way lying below (subjectum) as a substance, a subject, or a succubus. Between the beneath and the above, it is at once a support and a surface . . . everything distinct from form, as well as from meaning and representation, not representable. [. . .] A subjectile appears untranslatable, that is axiomatic . . . This can mean at least two things. First, the word ‘subjectile’ is not to be translated . . . Besides, a subjectile, that is to say the support, the surface or the material . . . will never be transported into another language . . . The word ‘subjectile’ is itself a subjectile.

T Telephone (DRBB 572–3) In the beginning, there must have been some phone call. Before the act or the word, the telephone. In the beginning was the telephone . . . this coup de téléphone . . . sets off within itself this yes . . . There are several modalities or tonalities of the telephonic yes, 407

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Trait but one of them, without saying anything else, amounts to marking, simply, that one is there, present, listening, on the other end of the line, ready to respond but not for the moment responding anything other than the preparation to respond . . . In the beginning the telephone, yes, in the beginning of the coup de téléphone. [. . .] being is a being-at-the-telephone . . . hooked up to a multiplicity of voices . . . being-there is a being-at-the-telephone, a being for the telephone . . . I am not playing with words when I say this: Heideggerian Dasein is also a being-called, it is always . . . a Dasein that accedes to itself only on the basis of the Call . . . a call which has come from afar, which does not necessarily use words, and which, in a certain way, does not say anything . . . The called one is precisely this Dasein . . . interpellated toward its possibility of being the most proper . . .

Trait (DRWP 127–8; MB 53–4) The trait is therefore nothing . . . it does not separate more than it unites. All the oppositions of value have their proper possibility in differance, in the between of its divergence which brings together as much as it demarcates . . . in this fraying of fraying, there will, necessarily have been a line divided furthermore, where the rhetorical determination will have encountered in the trait, that is to say, in its withdrawal (retrait) its own possibility (differentiality, divergence and resemblance) . . . When trait or retrait is said in a context where truth is in question, ‘trait’ is no longer a metaphor of what we usually believe we recognize by this word . . . the ipseity of the pronominal se (itself) by which it would be related to itself with a trait or line does not precede it and already supposes a supplementary trait in order to be traced, signed, withdrawn, retraced in its turn. Retraits thus writes itself in the plural, it is singularly plural in itself, divides itself and reassembles in the withdrawal of withdrawal. It is what I have elsewhere tried to name pas. *

*

*

– I’ll agree that, at its originary point, the trait is invisible . . . but what about afterwards, once the line has been traced? – Let’s now look at the second aspect . . . It appears, or rather disappears, without delay. I will name it the withdrawal [retrait] or the eclipse, the differential inappearance of the trait. We have been interested thus far in the act of tracing, in the tracing of the trait. 408

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Unconditionality What is to be thought now of the trait once traced? . . . A tracing, an outline, cannot be seen . . . there is nothing more to see, not even black and white, not even figure/form, and this is the trait, this is the line itself: which is thus no longer what it is, because from then on it never relates to itself without dividing itself just as soon, the divisibility of the trait here interrupting all pure identification and forming . . . only the surroundings of the trait appear – that which the trait spaces by delimiting and which thus does not belong to the trait. Nothing belongs to the trait, and thus, to drawing and to the thought of drawing, not even its own ‘trace.’ Nothing even participates in it. The trait joins and adjoins only in separating. Is it by chance that in order to speak of the trait we are falling back upon the language of negative theology or of those discourses concerned with naming the withdrawal [retrait] of the invisible or hidden god?

U Unconditionality (RTER 132–4) If naturalism and objectivism are critical perversions of reason, the risk that is run has to do with what links the ideality of the ideal object to exactitude, and thus to a certain type of calculability . . . Certain types of objects might . . . give rise to a rigorous knowledge . . . even though, in essence, this knowledge cannot and thus must not claim exactitude. In renouncing calculability in this way, such knowledge actually loses nothing of its rationality or its indubitability . . . For reasons that will . . . lead us . . . outside the ‘as such’ of ontology and phenomenology . . . I am simply situating at this point the possibility of an incalculable that is neither irrational nor dubitable. I am simply noting that . . . the rationality of the rational has never been limited . . . to calculability, to reason as calculation, as ratio, as account, as an account to be settled or an account to be given. The role that ‘dignity’ (Würde [in Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals242]) . . . plays [in] the kingdom of ends . . . 242

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor, intro. Christine M. Korsgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): ‘In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What

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Undecidability is opposed to what has a price in the market . . . The dignity of a reasonable being . . . is incalculable as an end in itself. It is at once universal and exceptional. . . . . this incalculable dignity . . . remains the indispensable axiomatic, in the so-called globalization [mondialisation] that is underway, in the discourses and international institutions concerning human rights and other modern juridical performatives . . . How is one to relate this just incalculability of dignity to the indispensable calculation of law? How is one to articulate together a justice and a law that are equally rational? . . . [. . .] On the one hand, unconditionality remains, and in the name, in German translated from Greek, the ultimate recourse, the absolute principle of pure reason, for Kant as well as [Edmund] Husserl.243 On the other hand, unconditionality remains, and in this name, what binds practical reason to the theoretical reason it subordinates. It is the ultimate truth of an ‘interest of reason.’

Undecidability (GGGG 15–18) Irreplaceable as it is for what happened there, the narrator [of Hélène Cixous’s244 Manhattan245] tells us, ‘in reality’, this singular library, the Beinecke, is merely one example, but infinitely capacious, of the great allegorical Library. Such is the reading situation into which we are thrown: in a work of fiction, we are told . . . that what happened there happened in reality. But, such is . . . the law of . . . Literature,

243

244 245

has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity . . . that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself has not merely a relative worth, that is, a price, but an inner worth, that is, dignity’ (42). Derrida is referring here to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)) and Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences (The Crisis of Human Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction, trans. and intro. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970)). In effect, Derrida is signalling an unconditional commitment to thinking unconditionality that marks an ‘epoch’, if it can be said in this way, in German philosophical discourse, from the 1780s to the 1930s, and subsequently, at least, in Derrida’s thinking. Hélène Cixous (5 June 1937 –). Manhattan. Lettres de la préhistoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002); trans. as Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory, trans. Beverly Bic Bardic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

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Violence that we are never allowed to decide . . . whether this ‘in reality’ hides a further simulacrum. In spite of the italics that seem to want to challenge the fictional . . . it remains impossible to decide whether this ‘in reality’ is an immanence of the fiction . . . [. . .] There, in this example of undecidability . . . there where it is impossible for the reader to decide between the fictional, the invented, the dreamt event, the fantasised event (including the phantasm of the event . . .) and the event presented as ‘real’ . . . lies the very secret of what one usually designates by the name of literature . . . [. . .] Therein lies literature’s secret, the infinite power to keep undecidable and thus forever sealed the secret of what it . . . says . . . The secret of literature is thus the secret itself. It is the secret place in which it establishes itself as the very possibility of the secret, the place it, literature as such, begins, the place of its genesis or of its genealogy, properly speaking. This is true of all literary genres.

V Violence (WD 147) Pure violence, a relationship between beings without face, is not yet violence . . . Only a face can arrest violence, but can do so, in the first place, only because a face can provoke it . . . Further, without the thought of Being which opens the face, there would be only pure violence or pure nonviolence. Therefore, the thought of Being, in its unveiling, is never foreign to a certain violence. That this thought always appears in difference, and that the same – thought (and) (of) Being – is never the identical, means first that Being is history, that Being dissimulates itself in its occurrence, and originally does violence to itself in order to be stated and in order to appear. A Being without violence would be a Being which would occur outside the existent: nothing; nonhistory; nonoccurrence; nonphenomenality. A speech produced without the least violence would determine nothing, would say nothing, would offer nothing to the other; it would not be history, and it would show nothing . . . . In the last analysis, according to Levinas, nonviolent language would be a language which would do without the verb to be, that is, without predication. Predication is the first violence. Since the verb to be and the predicative act are implied in every other verb, and in 411

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Virus every common noun, nonviolent language . . . would be a language of pure invocation . . . proffering only proper nouns in order to call the other from afar.

Virus (SA/DVA 12) I often tell myself, and I must have written it somewhere . . . that all I have done . . . is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things . . . The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus: it details a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding. On the other hand, it is something that is neither living nor nonliving; the virus is not a microbe. And if you follow these two threads, that of a parasite which disrupts destination . . . disrupting writing, inscription and the coding and decoding of inscription . . . you have the matrix of all that I have done since I began writing . . . If we follow the intersection between AIDS and the computer virus as we know it, we have the means to comprehend, not only from a theoretical point of view but also from the sociohistorical point of view, what amounts to a disruption of absolutely everything on the planet, including police agencies, commerce, the army, questions of strategy. All these things encounter the limits of their control, as well as the extraordinary force of those limits. It is as if all that I have been suggesting . . . is prescribed by the idea of destinerrance . . .

Visitation (CC/AP 23) What does it mean to ‘make’ the truth? If you make the truth in the performative sense . . . it is not an event. For the truth to be ‘made’ as an event, then the truth must fall on me, or visit me. That’s ‘visitation.’ Usually when I refer to hospitality . . . I distinguish between hospitality of ‘invitation’ and hospitality of ‘visitation.’ When I invite someone, I remain the master of the house: ‘Come, come to me, feel at home,’ and so on, ‘but you should respect my house, my language, my rules, the rules of my nation’ and so on. ‘You are welcome, but under some conditions.’ But ‘visitation’ is something else: absolute hospitality implies that the unexpected visitor can come, may come and be received without conditions. It falls upon; it comes; it is an intrusion, an eruption – and that’s the condition of the event. 412

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Voice Sometimes the event happens against the background of a horizon. I see the other coming; I see the event arriving; I foresee it; there is a horizon. That is a very indispensable axiom of phenomenology, ontology, hermeneutics – the . . . horizon of expectation. Whenever there is such a horizon of expectation, nothing ‘happens’ in this strict and pure meaning of the ‘event.’ For something to happen, it must remain unpredictable, that is, it must not come from the horizon. I should not see him or it coming in front of me, but it must fall on me . . . There is no horizon for an event, no temporal horizon. The event is the limit of the limit – because horizon means in Greek ‘the limit’ – the limit of the horizontal limit . . . This limit is precisely the condition of the event.

Voice (C 25–6) By entangling itself in impossible choices, the spoken ‘recorded’ voice makes a reservoir of writing readable, its tonal and phonic drives, the waves . . . which are knotted or unknotted in the unique vociferation, the singular range of another voice. This voice, to narrow the possibilities, is then left to pass away, it has passed away in advance, doubly present memory or doubly divided presence. What is involved in this phonographic act? Here’s an interpretation, one among others. At each syllable, even at each silence, a decision is imposed: it was not always deliberate, nor sometimes even the same from one repetition to the other. And what it signs is neither the law nor the truth . . . the voice does not betray a text. If it did it would be in the sense that betrayal is a revelation: for example, the restless polylogue that divides up each atom of writing. Manifestation of the impossible truth on which it will have been necessary, at every instant, and despite repetitions, to decide once and for all. The utterance thus betrays, it unveils what will have, one day, carried it away, between the divisions of all the voices or those into which the same voice divides itself.

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Writing

W Writing (OG 23) By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing . . . no longer designating the exterior surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of the signifier – is beginning to go beyond the extension of writing . . . Not that the word ‘writing’ has ceased to designate the signifier of the signifier, but it appears, strange as it may seem, that ‘signifier of the signifier’ no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity . . . ‘Signifier of the signifier’ describes on the contrary the movement of language: in its origin, to be sure, but one can already suspect that an origin whose structure can be expressed as ‘signifier of the signifier’ conceals and erases itself in its own production. There the signified always already functions as a signifier (OG 6–7; emphasis added) . . . In as much as it de-limits onto-theology, the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism, this last writing is also a first writing.

X Xenos (OH 5, 25, 27, 29) . . . in many of Plato’s dialogues, it is often the Foreigner (xenos) who questions. He carries and puts the question. We think first of the Sophist. It is the Foreigner who, by putting forward the unbearable question, the parricide question . . . puts in question the logos of our father Parmenides, ton tou patros Parmenidou logon. The Foreigner shakes up the threatening dogmatism of the paternal logos: the being that is, and the non-being that is not . . . The Foreigner . . . here resembles someone who basically has to account for possibility of sophistry . . . someone who doesn’t speak like the rest, someone who speaks an odd sort of language [. . .] absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. 414

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Yes The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right . . . [. . .] Now the foreigner, the xenos of whom Socrates says ‘him at least you would respect, you would tolerate his accent and his idiom’ . . . this foreigner, then, is someone with whom, to receive him, you begin by asking his name; you enjoin him to state and to guarantee his identity, as you would a witness before a court . . . [However,] does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name? . . . Does one give hospitality to a subject? . . . Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject . . . ? [Émile] Benveniste246 . . . inscribes the xenos in the xenia, which is to say in the pact, in the contract or collective alliance of that name. Basically, there is no xenos, there is no foreigner before or outside the xenia, this pact or exchange with a group or . . . with a line of descent.

Y Yes (C 28–9; LD/CIPSE 224–5; . . . ap/VISD 324) What I here call, with a word that leaves me a little dissatisfied because it is ambiguous, the ethics of my writing, the law it is out of the question I should infringe, is to say ‘yes’ to the work that comes before me and that will have been without me, a work that was already affirmed and signed with the other’s ‘yes’, so that my own ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’ to the other’s ‘yes’, a sort of blessing and (ring of) alliance. Not infringing this law thus means doing everything not to betray it, not to betray either the law or the other. But, firstly, the possibility of betrayal is part of respect for the law. It must be constitutive of respect for the law. To obey, to be faithful, it must be possible to betray. Someone who couldn’t betray couldn’t be faithful. Secondly, there is also a terrible law of betrayal, as in the declared friend-enemy we spoke of earlier, a terrifying law meaning that the more I betray (by writing differently, signing differently), the less I betray; and the less I betray (by repeating the same ‘yes’, by imitating, counterfeiting), the more I 246

Émile Benveniste (27 May 1902 – 3 October 1976).

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Yes betray. This means that perjury – or betrayal, if you prefer – is lodged like a double band at the very heart of the countersignature. That is the betrayal of truth as truth of betrayal. That is also, however terrifying it may seem, faithfulness. One must faithfully recognize it and be as faithful as possible to faithfulness. *

*

*

‘Is saying the event possible?’ In answer to this question, what I’d like to say is plainly and simply ‘yes.’ Not ‘yes’ to the event but ‘yes’ to saying that the event is possible. I would like to say ‘yes’ to you firstly as a sign of gratitude. Philosophy has always thought of itself as the art, experience, and history of the question . . . before the question, there was a possibility of a certain ‘yes,’ of a certain acquiescence . . . A contentment, and affirmation of sorts. Not the kind of dogmatic affirmation that resists the question. But ‘yes’ to a question being asked, to a question being addressed to someone . . . When you address someone, even if it’s to ask a question, before the question is formulated there must be an acquiescence, an ‘I’m talking to you, yes, yes, welcome . . .’ This ‘yes’ before the question – this ‘before’ being neither logical nor chronological – is embedded in the question itself. It is not a questioning ‘yes.’ There is, then, a certain ‘yes’ at the heart of the question, a ‘yes’ to, a ‘yes’ to the other, which may not be unrelated to a ‘yes’ to the event, that is to say, a ‘yes’ to what comes, to letting-it-come. The event is also what comes, what happens . . . We must ask ourselves first whether this ‘yes’ to the event or to the other, or to the event as other or as the coming of the other, is something that is said, whether this ‘yes’ is said or not . . . [Franz] Rosenzweig247 said that the ‘yes’ is an archi-original word. Even when the ‘yes’ is not uttered, it is there. There is a silent, unsayable ‘yes’ implicit in every sentence . . . So I’d like to make the question mark in ‘Is saying the event possible?’ contingent on this ‘yes’ . . . A first ‘yes’ and . . . then another ‘yes.’ *

*

*

Of a discourse to come – on the to-come and repetition. Axiom: no to-come without heritage and the possibility of repeating. No to-come without some sort of iterability, at least in the form of a convenant with oneself and of a confirmation of the originary yes. 247

Franz Rosenzweig (25 December 1887 – 19 December 1929).

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Yes No to-come without some sort of messianic memory and promise, of a messianicity older than all religion, more originary than all messianism. No discourse or address of the other without the possibility of an elementary promise. Perjury and broken promises require the same possibility. No promise, therefore, without the promise of a confirmation of the yes. This yes will have implied and will always imply the trustworthiness and fidelity of a faith. No faith, therefore, nor future without everything technical, automatic, machinal supposed by iterability . . .

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Appendix I: Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida

Alphabetical bibliography of books Acts of Literature. Ed. and intro. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Acts of Religion. Ed. and intro. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980; rptd Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. I. Eds Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. (With Peter Eisenman) Chora L Works. Eds Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Lesser. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997. Cinders. Trans. with intro. and notes Ned Lukacher. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. (With Catherine Malabou) Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Trans. David Wills. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. (With Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller) Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1987. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Ed. with a commentary John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. The Derrida–Habermas Reader. Ed. Lasse Thomassen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. 421

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The Derrida Wordbook Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. (With Bernard Stiegler) Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Oxford: Polity Press, 2002. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans. with preface and afterword John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy. Trans., ed. and commentary Peter Pericles Trifonas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2. Trans. Jan Plug et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. (With Elisabeth Roudinesco) For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Trans. Beverly Bie Brahic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; 2nd edn published as The Gift of Death 2nd Edition and Literature in Secret. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska, 1986. H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . Trans. with additional notes Luarent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. (And Maurice Blanchot) The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. (With Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings. Ed. Barry Stocker. New York: Routledge, 2007. Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars. Eds Paul Patton and Terry Smith. Sydney: Power Publications, 2001. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, bibliography Peter Krapp. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2007. Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber et al. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. with additional notes Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 422

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida Memoires for Paul de Man. Rev. edn, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf, trans. ed. Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001. Ed., trans. and intro. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Of Grammatology [1976]. Corrected edn, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, preface Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney. London: Routledge, 2001. On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr and Ian McLeod. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas, intro. Michael B. Naas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Parages. Ed. John P. Leavey, trans. John P. Leavey, Tom Conley, James Hulbert and Avital Ronell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Positions. Trans. and annotated Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Trans. Marian Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I. Eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II. Eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 423

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The Derrida Wordbook (With Gianni Vattimo, eds) Religion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Right of Inspection. Photographs by Mari-Françoise Plissart, trans. David Wills. New York: Monacelli Press, 1998. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. (With Paule Thévenin) The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Trans. and preface Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Signéponge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Eds Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. New York: Routledge, 1994. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison, preface Newton Garver. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. (With Maurizio Ferraris) A Taste for the Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis, eds Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. (With Hélène Cixous) Veils. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1. Trans. Jan Plug. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Without Alibi. Ed., trans. and intro. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. The Work of Mourning. Eds Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, biographical sketches Kas Saghafi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. Chronological bibliography of books 2011 The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. II. Eds Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Parages. Ed. John P. Leavey, trans. John P. Leavey, Tom Conley, James 424

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida Hulbert and Avital Ronell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. 2009 The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. I. Eds Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; 2nd edn published as The Gift of Death 2nd Edition and Literature in Secret. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II. Eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2007 Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings. Ed. Barry Stocker. New York: Routledge. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, bibliography Peter Krapp. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I. Eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2006 The Derrida–Habermas Reader. Ed. Lasse Thomassen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. Trans. Beverly Bie Brahic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . Trans. with additional notes Luarent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2005 On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Eds Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press.

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The Derrida Wordbook 2004 (With Catherine Malabou) Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Trans. David Wills. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2. Trans. Jan Plug et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (With Elisabeth Roudinesco) For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2003 The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Trans. Marian Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002 Acts of Religion. Ed. and intro. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge. (With Bernard Stiegler) Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Oxford: Polity Press. Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy. Trans., ed. and commentary Peter Pericles Trifonas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001. Ed., trans. and intro. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1. Trans. Jan Plug. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Without Alibi. Ed., trans. and intro. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2001 Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars. Ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith. Sydney: Power Publications. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, preface Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney. London: Routledge. (With Maurizio Ferraris) A Taste for the Secret. Trans. Giacomo Donis, eds Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press. (With Hélène Cixous) Veils. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. The Work of Mourning. Eds Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, biographical sketches Kas Saghafi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000 Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (And Maurice Blanchot) The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 426

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida 1999 Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1998 The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Of Grammatology. Corrected edn, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Balitmore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (With Gianni Vattimo, eds) Religion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Right of Inspection. Photographs by Mari-Françoise Plissart, trans. David Wills. New York: Monacelli Press. (With Paule Thévenin) The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Trans. and preface Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1997 (With Peter Eisenman) Chora L Works. Eds Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Lesser. New York: Monacelli Press. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Ed. with commentary by John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham University Press. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso. 1996 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1995 On the Name. Ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr and Ian McLeod. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. New York.

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The Derrida Wordbook 1993 Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (With Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992 Acts of Literature. Ed. and intro. Derek Attridge. New York Routledge. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas, intro. Michael B. Naas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. 1991 Cinders. Trans. with intro. and notes Ned Lukacher. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press. 1989 Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Trans. with preface and afterword John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Memoires for Paul de Man. Rev. edn, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and and Peggy Kamuf, trans. eds Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press. 1988 Limited Inc. Trans. Samuel Weber et al. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1987 (With Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller) Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida 1986 Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr and Richard Rand. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska. 1985 The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. 1984 Signéponge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia. 1982 Margins of Philosophy. Trans. with additional notes Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1981 Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Positions. Trans. and annotated Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980 The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. 1979 Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1978 Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge. 1976 Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1973 Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison, preface Newton Garver. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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The Derrida Wordbook Select bibliography of uncollected contributions in edited volumes, journals, etc. ‘A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’, trans. Gila Walker. The Late Derrida. Eds W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 223–44. ‘A Europe of Hope’. Epoche, 10: 2 (2006): 407–12. ‘A Testimony Given’, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Questioning Judaism: Interviews, Elisabeth Weber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 39–58. ‘ “Above All, No Journalists!” ’, trans. Samuel Weber. Religion and Media, eds Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 56–93. ‘Abraham, the Other’, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, eds Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, pp. 1–35. ‘Afterw.rds or, at least, less than a letter about a letter less’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Afterwords, ed. Nicholas Royle. Tampere, Finland: Outside Books, 1992, pp. 197–203. ‘All Ears: Nietzsche’s Otobiography’, trans. Avital Ronell, Yale French Studies, 63 (1982): 245–50. ‘An Idea of Flaubert: “Plato’s Letter” ’, trans. Peter Starr. MLN, 99: 4 (September 1984): 748–68. ‘. . . and pomegranates’, trans. Samuel Weber. Violence, Identity, and SelfDetermination, eds Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 326–46. ‘Artists, Philosophers, and Institutions’. Rampike, 3: 3 – 4: 1 (1984): 34–6. ‘ “As if I were dead”: an interview’. Applying: to Derrida, eds Julian Wolfreys, John Brannigan and Ruth Robbins. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, pp. 212–26. ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 85–136. ‘Back from Moscow, in the USSR’, trans. Mary Quaintaire. Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Mark Poster. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 197–235. ‘Becoming Woman’. Semiotext(e), 3: 1 (1978): 128–37. ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry, 15: 4 (Summer 1989): 813–73. ‘But, beyond . . . (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)’, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry, 13: 1 (Autumn 1986): 155–70. 430

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida ‘Canons and Metonymies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. Logomachia, ed. Richard Rand. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1992, pp. 195–219. ‘Coming into One’s Own’, trans. James Hulbert. Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1976– 77, ed. Geoffrey Hartman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978, pp. 114–48. ‘Composing “Circumfession” ’. Augustine and Postmodernism: Confession and Circumfession, eds John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 19–28. ‘Countersignature’, trans. Mairéad Hanrahan. Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004): 7–42. ‘Deconstruction and the Other’. Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004, pp. 139–56. ‘Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. Critical Exchange, 17 (Winter 1985): 1–33. ‘Deconstructions: the Im-Possible’, trans. Michael Taormina. French Theory in America, eds Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen. New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 13–32. ‘Derrida on Derrida: Q & A with Jacques Derrida’, Jacques Derrida, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film, directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, foreword Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 110–17. ‘Derrida: Screenplay’. Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film, directors Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, foreword Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Routledge, 2005, pp. 51–109. [Discussion on Fries], James G. Hughes, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Fries, Jean Bollack, Michel Deguy, Martine Broda, Henri Meschonnic, Bernhard Böchenstein, Wolfgagn Fietkau and Hans Hagen Hildebrandt, boundary 2, 11: 3 (Spring 1983): 155–67. ‘Et Cetera . . . (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.)’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000, pp. 282–304. ‘Excuse me, but I never exactly said so’. Interview with Paul Brennan, On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia), 1 (1983): 42. ‘Following Theory’. Life. After. Theory, eds Michael Payne and John Schad. London: Continuum, 2003, pp. 1–51. ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson. The Wolf-Man’s Magic Word, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. xi–il. ‘Foreword’. The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers. London: Routledge, 1994, pp. vii–xiii. 431

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The Derrida Wordbook ‘From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’, interview with Aliette Armel, trans. Ashley Thompson. New Literary History, 37 (2006): 1–13. ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 163–220. ‘How to Name’. Recumbents: Poems, Michel Deguy, trans. Wilson Baldridge. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005, pp. 191–222. ‘In conversation with Christopher Norris’. Architectural Design, 58: 1–2 (1989): 6–11. ‘Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions’, trans. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer. Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer–Derrida Encounter, eds Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 58–71; also published in Looking After Nietzsche. ‘Interview’, Kristine McKenna. Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film, directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, foreword Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 118–27. ‘Interview’. Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia and J. Hillis Miller, ed. Imre Salusinsky. London: Routledge, 1987, pp. 11–24. ‘Introduction’, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Selected Writings, Sarah Kofman. Ed. Thomas Albrecht, with Georgia Albert and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 1–34. ‘Jacques Derrida’, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth. Conversations with French Philosophers, Florian Rötzer. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995, pp. 43–57. ‘Justices’, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the Democracy to Come, eds Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundzic. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, pp. 228–61. ‘Let us not Forget – Psychoanalysis’. Oxford Literary Review, 12 (1990): 3–7. ‘Letter to John P. Leavey, Jr.’ Semeia, 23 (1982): 61–2. ‘Literature and Politics’. New Political Science, 15 (Summer 1986): 5. ‘Marx & Sons’, trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker. New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 213–69. ‘Memories of a Blind Man’. Art International, 14 (Spring/Summer 1991): 82–7. ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida. Ed. Peter Fenves. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 117–72. 432

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida ‘On Colleges and Philosophy’, with Geoff Bennington. Postmodernism: ICA Documents, ed. Lisa Appignanesi. London: Free Association Books, 1989, pp. 209–28. ‘On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium’. Research in Phenomenology, 17 (1988): 171–88. ‘On Rhetoric and Composition (Conversation with Gary Olson)’. Journal of Advanced Composition, 10: 1 (1990): 1–21. ‘ “On Responsibility”, an interview with Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Dronsfield, Nick Midgley & Adrian Wilding, May 1993’. PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997): pp. 19–36. ‘On the Gift: A Discussion between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, Moderated by Richard Kearney’. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, eds John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 54–78. ‘Onto-Theology of National-Humanism’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Oxford Literary Review, 14: 1–2 (1992): 3–25. ‘ “Perhaps or Maybe”, Jacques Derrida in Conversation with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ICA, 8 March 1996’. PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997): 1–18. ‘Play: The First Name’, trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Genre, 37: 2 (2004): 331–40. ‘Poetry of twilight in Collins’ “Ode to Evening” and in Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. By Jacques Derrida.’ Oxford Literary Review, 25 (2003): 5–37. ‘Point de Folie – Maintenant L’Architecture’, trans. Kate Linker. La Case Vide: La Villettte 1985, Bernard Tschumi. London: Architectural Association, 1986, pp. 4–20. ‘Preface: A time for farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou’, trans. Joseph D. Cohen. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, Catherine Malabou. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp. vii–xlvii. ‘Proverb: “He that would pun . . .” ’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Glassary, John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, pp. 17–20. ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, trans. Simon Critchley. Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe. London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 77–88. ‘Response to Bennington’, ‘Response to Moore’, ‘Response to Baldwin’, ‘Response to Mulhall’, Arguing with Derrida, ed. Simon Glendinning. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 52–6, 83–8, 102–8, 116–20. ‘Response to Daniel Libeskind’. Research in Phenomenology, XXII (1992): 88. ‘Sending: On Representation’, trans. Peter and Mary Ann Caws. Social Research, 49: 2 (Summer 1982): 294–326. ‘Some Questions and Responses’. The Linguistics of Writing, eds Derek 433

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The Derrida Wordbook Attridge et al. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987, pp. 252–64. ‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neo-Logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms’, trans. Anne Tomiche. The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. and intro. David Carroll. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 63–94. ‘Summary of Impromptu Remarks 58 minutes, 41 seconds’. Anyone, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. ‘Tense’, trans. David Farrell Krell. The Path of Archaic Thinking: Unfolding the Work of John Sallis, ed. Kenneth Maly. Albany: State University of New York Press,1995, pp. 49–74. ‘Terror, Religion, and the New Politics’. Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, Richard Kearney. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004, pp. 3–15. ‘The Becoming possible of the impossible: an interview’. Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus, ed. Mark Dooley. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003, pp. 21–33. ‘The Language of the Other: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman’, trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Genre, 37: 2 (2004): 319–29. ‘The Pocket-Sized Interview’, trans. Tupac Cruz. The Late Derrida, eds W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 171–205. ‘The Principle of Hospitality’. Parallax, 34 (2005): 6–9. ‘The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Jacques Derrida, Peter Brunette and David Wills, trans. Laurie Volpe. Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, eds Peter Brunette and David Wills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 9–32. ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp. New York: New York University Press, 1995, pp. 14–40. ‘The Transcendental “Stupidity” (“Bêtise”) of Man and the BecomingAnimal According to Deleuze’, ed. Erin Ferris. Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabrielle Schwab. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. ‘This Is Not an Oral Footnote’, trans. Stephen A. Barney and Michael Hanley. Annotation and Its Texts, ed. Stephan A. Barney. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 192–206. ‘Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer’, trans. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer. Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer–Derrida Encounter, eds Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 52–4. ‘Title (To Be Specified)’, trans. Tom Conley. SubStance, 10: 2 (1981): 5–22. ‘To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible’, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Questioning God, eds John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley and 434

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida Michael J. Scanlon. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 21–51. ‘Two Words for Joyce’, trans. Geoff Bennington. Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 145–60. ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’, trans. Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry, 27: 2 (Winter 2001): 174–200. ‘Who or What is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation’, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Discourse, 30: 1 & 2 (Winter and Spring 2008): pp. 22–53. ‘Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida’. Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. London: Routledge, 1987, pp. 189–204. ‘Writing Proofs’. PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997): 37–50. Alphabetical and chronological bibliography of principal works in French All books by Derrida and those to which Derrida’s name is assigned as coauthor or major contributor are listed below. Titles of English-language translations are given in parentheses following entry. For full bibliographical details of the translations, refer to the principal bibliography of works by Derrida in this volume, above. Alphabetical bibliography Adieu: à Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Galilée, 1997. (With Pierre-Jean Labarrière) Altérités. Paris: Osiris, 1986. L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée, 2006. (With Paule Thévenin) Antonin Artaud, dessins et portraits. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Apories: Mourir – s’attendre ‘aux limites de la vérité’. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Apprendre à vivre enfin: entretien avec Jean Birnbaum. Paris: Galilée, 2005. L’archéologie du frivole: introduction à l’Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines de Condillac. Paris: Galilée, 1973; Paris: DenöelGonthier, 1976; Paris: Galilée, 1990. Artaud le Moma. Paris: Galilée, 2002. Atlan Grand format: de la couleur à la lettre. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. (With Antoine Spire) Au-delà des appearences. Latresne: Le bord de l’eau, 2002. L’Autre Cap, suivi de la democratie ajournée. Paris: Minuit, 1991. Béliers: le dialogue ininterrompu: entres deux infinis, le poème. Paris: Galilée, 2003. La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. Cartouches. Exhibition Catalogue, Exhibition March 1 – April 10, 1978, 435

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The Derrida Wordbook Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978. Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. Présenté par Pascale-Anne Brault et Michael Naas. Paris: Galilée, 2003. (With Jürgen Habermas) Le concept du 11 septembre: Dialogues à New York (octobre–décembre 2001) avec Giovanna Borradori. Paris: Galilée, 2004. (With Simon Hantaï and Jean-Luc Nancy) La Connaissance des textes: Lecture d’un manuscript illisible. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Cosmopolites de tous le pays, encore un effort! Paris: Galilée, 1997. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question. Paris: Galilée, 1987. (With Anne Dufourmantelle) De l’hospitalité: Anne Duformantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Demeure, Athènes’. Jean-François Bonhomme. Athènes à l’ombre de l’acropole. Athens: Olkos, 1996, pp. 39–64. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Paris, Galilée, 1998. (With Elisabeth Roudinesco) De quoi demain . . . Dialogue. Paris: Fayard/ Galilée, 2001. Déplier Ponge: Entretien avec Gérard Farasse. Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée 1999. Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie. Paris: Galilée, 1991. Le droit à la philosophie du point du vue cosmopolitique. Paris: Verdier, 1997 (With Marie-Françoise Plissart) Droit de regards. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Du droit à la philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1990. D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1983. (With Bernard Stiegler) Échographies: de la television. Paris: Galilée, 1996. (With Jos Joliet) L’enfant au chien-assis, précédé de ocelle comme pas un. Paris: Galilée, 1980. L’Écriture et la différance. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la géométrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962; rev. 2nd edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974. Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche. Paris: Flammarion, 1978. (With Wanda Mihuleac) Erridad. Paris: Galerie La Hune Brenner, 1996. États d’àme de la psychanalyse: Adresse aux États Généraux de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Galilée, 2000. Et cetera (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc. Paris: L’Herne, 2005. (With Vincent Descombes et al.) La Faculté de juger. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Feu la cendre. Paris: des Femmes, 1987; new edn, 2001. 436

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida Fichus. Paris: Galilée, 2002. Foi et savoir, suivi de Le Siècle et le Pardon. Paris: Seuil, 2000. Force de loi: le fondement mystique de l’autorité. Paris: Galilée, 1994. Forcener le subjectile. Étude pour les Dessins et Portraits d’Antonin Artaud. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie: Les Secrets de l’archive. Paris: Galilée, 2003. Glas. Paris: Galilée, 1974. H. C. pour la vie, c’est-à-dire . . . Paris: Galilée, 2000 (trans. as H. C. for life, that is to say . . .). Heidegger et la question: de l’esprit et autres essais. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. Histoire du mensonge, Prolégomènes. Paris: Herne, 2005. L’Idiomes, nationalités et deconstruction. La Tour d’Aigues: de L’Aube, 2005. (With Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. (With Catherine Malabou) Jacques Derrida: La Contre-allée. Paris: Quinzaine Littéraire-Louis Vitton, 1999. Khôra. Paris: Galilée, 1993 (trans. as Khora, published in On the Name). Limited Inc. Paris: Galilée, 1990. Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne. Paris: Galilée, 1995. Marges – de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. (With Marc Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Vincent) Marx en jeu. Paris: Descartes & cie, 1997. Marx & Sons. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Mémoires d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990. Mémoires: pour Paul de Man. Paris: Galilée, 1988. (With Micaëla Henich) Mille e tre, cinq/Lignées. Bordeaux: William Blake & Co., 1996. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Moscou aller-retour. La Tour d’Aigues: de l’Aube, 1995. (With Wanda Mihuleac) Or. Paris: Éditions Signum, 2000. L’Oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions: Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida, eds Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald. Montreal: VLB, 1982. Otobiographies: L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Galilée, 1984. (With Jean Baudrillard, René Major and Alain Greisch) Pourqoui la guerre? Paris: Galilée, 2004. Papier machine: Le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986. 437

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The Derrida Wordbook Passions. Paris: Galilée, 1993, 2006. Points de suspension: Entretiens. Paris: Galilée, 1992. Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994. Positions: Entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta. Paris: Minuit, 1972. (With Nadine Gordimer et al.) Pour Nelson Mandela. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, tome I (nouvelle édition augmentée). Paris: Galilée, 1998. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, tome II (nouvelle édition augmentée). Paris: Galilée, 2003. Qu’est-ce que la poésie? (quadrilingual edn). Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1991; augmented edn, with Wanda Mihuleac. Paris: Éditions Signum, 1996. (With François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt) Le Rapport bleu: les sources historique et théoriques du Collège International de Philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. (With Gianni Vattimo) La réligion. Paris: Seuil, 1996; augmented edn, including interview with Michel Wieviorka, ‘Le Siècle et le pardon’. Paris: Seuil, 1998. Résistances de la psychanalyses. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Sauf le nom. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée, 1986. Signéponge. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Seminaire La Bête et la souverain: Tome I, 2001–2002. Paris: Galilée, 2008. Seminaire La Bête et la souverain: Tome II, 2001–2002. Paris: Galilée, 2010. Spectres de Marx: L’Etat de la dette, le travail, du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Sur parole: Instantanés philosophiques. La Tour d’Aigues: de l’Aube, 1999. Surtout pas de journalistes! Paris: Herne, 2005. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée, 2000. (With Safaa Fathy) Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film. Paris: Galilée and Éditions Arte, 2000. Valerio Adami: Le voyage du dessin. Paris: Maeght, 1975. La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1978. (With Hélène Cixous) Voiles. Paris: Galilée, 1998. La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967; 2nd edn 1998; 3rd edn 2003. Voyous: Deux essaies sur la raison. Paris: Galilée, 2003. 438

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. L’université sans condition. Paris: Galilée, 2001. Chronological bibliography 2010 Seminaire La Bête et la Souverain: Tome II, 2001–2002. Paris: Galilée. 2008 Seminaire La Bête et la Souverain: Tome I, 2001–2002. Paris: Galilée. 2006 L’animal que donc je suis. Paris: Galilée. 2005 Apprendre à vivre enfin: entretien avec Jean Birnbaum. Paris: Galilée. Déplier Ponge: Entretien avec Gérard Farasse. Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Et cetera (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc. Paris: Herne. Histoire du mensonge, Prolégomènes. Paris: Herne. L’Idiomes, nationalités et deconstruction. La Tour d’Aigues: de L’Aube. Surtout pas de journalistes! Paris: Herne. 2004 (With Jürgen Habermas) Le concept du 11 septembre: Dialogues à New York (octobre–décembre 2001) avec Giovanna Borradori. Paris: Galilée. (With Jean Baudrillard, René Major and Alain Greisch) Pourqoui la guerre? Paris: Galilée. 2003 Béliers: le dialogue ininterrompu: entres deux infinis, le poème. Paris: Galilée. Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. Présenté par Pascale-Anne Brault et Michael Naas. Paris: Galilée. (With Elisabeth Roudinesco) De quoi demain . . . Dialogue. Paris: Flammarion. Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie: Les Secrets de l’archive. Paris: Galilée. Psyché: inventions de l’autre: 2. Nouv éd rev. et augm. Paris: Galilée. Voyous: Deux essaies sur la raison. Paris: Galilée. 2002 Artaud le Moma. Paris: Galilée. (With Antoine Spire) Au-delà des appearences. Latresne: Le bord de l’eau. 439

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The Derrida Wordbook Fichus. Paris: Galilée. Marx & Sons. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 2001 Atlan Grand format: de la couleur à la lettre. Paris: Gallimard. (With Simon Hantaï and Jean-Luc Nancy) La Connaissance des textes: Lecture d’un manuscript illisible. Paris: Galilée. (With Elisabeth Roudinesco) De quoi demain . . . Dialogue. Paris: Fayard. Foi et savoir, suivi de Le Siècle et le Pardon. Paris: Seuil. Papier machine: Le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses. Paris: Galilée. L’université sans condition. Paris: Galilée. 2000 États d’àme de la psychanalyse: Adresse aux États Généraux de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Galilée. H. C. pour la vie, c’est-à-dire . . . Paris: Galilée. (With Wanda Mihuleac) Or. Paris: Éditions Signum. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée. (With Safaa Fathy) Tourner les mots: Au bord d’un film. Paris: Galilée and Éditions Arte. 1999 Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée. (With Catherine Malabou) Jacques Derrida: La Contre-allée. Paris: Quinzaine Littéraire-Louis Vitton. Sur parole: Instantanés philosophiques. La Tour d’Aigues: de l’Aube. 1998 Demeure: Maurice Blanchot. Paris: Galilée. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, tome I (nouvelle édition augmentée). Paris: Galilée. (With François Châtelet, Jean-Pierre Faye and Dominique Lecourt) Le Rapport bleu: les sources historique et théoriques du Collège International de Philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (With Gianni Vattimo) La réligion. Augmented edn including interview with Michel Wieviorka, ‘Le Siècle et le pardon’. Paris: Seuil. (With Hélène Cixous) Voiles. Paris: Galilée. 1997 Adieu: à Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Galilée. Cosmopolites de tous le pays, encore un effort! Paris: Galilée. Du droit à la philosophie du point du vue cosmopolitique. Paris: Verdier. (With Anne Dufourmantelle) De l’hospitalité: Anne Duformantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. 440

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida (With Marc Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Vincent) Marx en jeu. Paris: Descartes & cie. 1996 Apories: Mourir – s’attendre ‘aux limites de la vérité’. Paris: Galilée. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Demeure, Athènes’. Jean-François Bonhomme. Athènes à l’ombre de l’acropole. Athens: Olkos, pp. 39–64. (With Bernard Stiegler) Échographies: de la television. Paris: Galilée. (With Wanda Mihuleac) Erridad. Paris: Galerie La Hune Brenner. (With Micaëla Henich) Mille e tre, cinq/Lignées. Bordeaux: William Blake & Co. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine. Paris: Galilée. (With Gianni Vattimo) La réligion. Paris: Seuil. Résistances de la psychanalyses. Paris: Galilée. 1995 Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne. Paris: Galilée. Moscou aller-retour. La Tour d’Aigues: de l’Aube. 1994 Force de loi: le fondement mystique de l’autorité. Paris: Galilée. Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée. 1993 Khôra. Paris: Galilée. Passions. Paris: Galilée. Sauf le nom. Paris: Galilée. Spectres de Marx: L’Etat de la dette, le travail, du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Galilée. 1992 Points de suspension: Entretiens. Paris: Galilée. 1991 L’autre cap, suivi de la democratie ajournée. Paris: Minuit, 1991. Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie. Paris: Galilée, 1991. (With Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Qu’est-ce que la poésie? (quadrilingual edn). Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1991; augmented edn with Wanda Mihuleac. Paris: Éditions Signum, 1996. 1990 Du droit à la philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1990. Heidegger et la question: de l’esprit et autres essais. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. 441

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The Derrida Wordbook Limited Inc. Paris: Galilée, 1990. Mémoires d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990. Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. 1988 Mémoires: pour Paul de Man. Paris: Galilée, 1988. Signéponge. Paris: Seuil, 1988. 1987 De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Feu la cendre. Paris: des Femmes, 1987; new edn 2001. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. 1986 (With Pierre-Jean Labarrière) Altérités. Paris: Osiris, 1986. (With Paule Thévenin) Antonin Artaud, dessins et portraits. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Forcener le subjectile. Étude pour les Dessins et Portraits d’Antonin Artaud. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986. (With Nadine Gordimer et al.) Pour Nelson Mandela. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée, 1986. 1985 (With Marie-Françoise Plissart) Droit de regards. Paris: Minuit, 1985. (With Vincent Descombes et al.) La Faculté de juger. Paris: Minuit, 1985. 1984 Otobiographies: L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. Paris: Galilée, 1984. 1983 D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1983. 1982 L’Oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions: Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida, eds Claude Lévesque and Christie V. McDonald. Montreal: VLB, 1982.

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Bibliography of principal works by Jacques Derrida 1980 La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. (With Jos Joliet) L’enfant au chien-assis, précédé de ocelle comme pas un. Paris: Galilée, 1980. 1978 La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1978. Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche. Paris: Flammarion, 1978. Cartouches. Exhibition Catalogue, Exhibition March 1 – April 10, 1978, Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978. 1975 Valerio Adami: Le voyage du dessin. Paris: Maeght, 1975. 1974 Glas. Paris: Galilée, 1974. 1973 L’archéologie du frivole: introduction à l’Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines de Condillac. Paris: Galilée, 1973; Paris: DenöelGonthier, 1976; Paris: Galilée, 1990. 1972 La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Marges – de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Positions: Entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta. Paris: Minuit, 1972. 1967 L’écriture et la différance. Paris: Seuil, 1967. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967; 2nd edn 1998; 3rd edn 2003 (trans. as Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs). 1962 Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la géométrie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1962; rev. 2nd edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974.

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Appendix II: Contents pages

The following contents pages are taken from the principal volume publications. Details are also given of original French publications, and can be cross-referenced with Appendix II, which lists principal French publications in both alphabetical and chronological order. Derrida’s English-language publications, including all books listed here and in the Abbreviations table, as well as those articles and essays not collected in volumes by Derrida, are included in the bibliography of works by Derrida. It should be noted that in a few cases, contents of English translations do not match exactly with the French versions. Psyché, originally a one-volume publication in France, was expanded into two volumes and the English editions correspond with the augmented editions. Du droit à la philosophie is a one-volume publication in France, its English-language counterpart in two volumes; On the Name, though published as a single volume in English, comprises three essays published originally in French as separate monographs. Also, occasionally, particular volumes have been published first in English and subsequently in French, and these are noted accordingly. Regarding two volumes (Du droit, Papier Machine) the contents pages of the French editions have been given after the English translation’s contents pages. The reason is that while Du droit has been split in translation into two volumes, as remarked above, Papier Machine’s publication is a little more complicated, a number of the interviews included in the French volume having appeared in Negotiations, while the remaining essays appear in Paper Machine. Thus details of contents have been provided to facilitate comparison for the reader. Last, where essays, addresses, articles, etc. are printed in a different French volume by Derrida, details of these are given following chapter entry, if a single volume is published only in English (as yet), as, for example, in the case of essays in The Work of Mourning, or where the provenance of pieces comprising a collection such as 444

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Contents pages Sovereignties is complex, and involves previous, partial volume publication in French.

2 Acts of Literature. Ed. and intro. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Prefaces Acknowledgements Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature, Derek Attridge 1 ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida 2 ‘. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .’ 3 Mallarmé 4 The First Session 5 Before the Law 6 The Law of Genre 7 Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce 8 From Psyche: Invention of the Other 9 From Signsponge 10 From Shibboleth: For Paul Celan 11 Aphorism Countertime A Selected Bibliography of Derrida’s Writing Index

ix xiii 1 33 76 110 127 181 221 253 310 344 370 414 435 443

2 Acts of Religion. Ed. and intro. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002.

1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction: ‘Once More, Once More’: Derrida, the Arab, the Jew, Gil Anidjar Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone Des Tours de Babel Interpretations at War, Kant, the Jew, the German The Eyes of Language: The Abyss and the Volcano Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ Taking a Stand for Algeria

1 40 102 135 189 228 299

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The Derrida Wordbook 7 8

A Silkworm of One’s Own (Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil) Hostipitality Bibliography Permissions Index

309 356 421 427 429

2 Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. (Adieu: à Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997).) Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. § 1 Adieu § 2 A Word of Welcome Notes

1 15 127

2 The Animal That Therefore I Am. (L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006).) Trans. David Wills. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Foreword, Marie-Louise Mallet 1 The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) 2 ‘But as for me, who am I (following)?’ 3 And Say the Animal Responded? 4 ‘I don’t know why we are doing this’ Notes

ix 1 52 119 141 161

2 Aporias. (Apories: Mourir – s’attendre ‘aux limites de la vérité’ (Paris: Galilée, 1993).) Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. § 1 Finis § 2 Awaiting (at) the Arrival Notes

1 43 83

2 446

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Contents pages The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. (L’archéologie du frivole: introduction à l’Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines de Condillac (Paris: Galilée, 1973; Paris: Denöel-Gonthier, 1976; Galilée, 1990).) Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. I – the fractured frame, the seduction of fiction, John P. Leavey, Jr. 1 Abbreviations 25 1 The Second First – Metaphysics 31 2 Genius’s Deferred Action [L’Apres-coup] 51 3 Imagining – Conceptual Stand-in and the Novel of Force 69 4 A Marginal Note or Remark – The Two Loose Pages 89 5 Introduction to An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge – Frivolity Itself 115 Index 137

2 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. (Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995).) Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Note Exergue Preamble Foreword Theses Postscript Translator’s Note Works Cited

vii 7 25 33 83 97 103 113

2 Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme. (Demeure, Athènes (Paris: Galilée, 2009).) Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. List of Illustrations Translators’ Note

vii ix 447

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The Derrida Wordbook Athens, Still Remains Notes

1 73

2 The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I. (Seminaire La Bête et la Souverain: Tome I, 2001–2002 (Paris: Galilée, 2008).) Ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 2009. First Session December 12, 2001 Second Session December 19, 2001 Third Session January 16, 2002 Fourth Session January 23, 2002 Fifth Session January 30, 2002 Sixth Session February 6, 2002 Seventh Session February 13, 2002 Eighth Session February 20, 2002 Ninth Session February 27, 2002 Tenth Session March 6, 2002 Eleventh Session March 13, 2002 Twelfth Session March 20, 2002 Thirteenth Session March 27, 2002

1 32 63 97 136 164 187 206 236 250 276 305 335

2 The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. (Seminaire La Bête et la Souverain: Tome I, 2001–2002 (Paris: Galilée, 2010).) Ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 2011. First Session December 11, 2002 Second Session December 18, 2002 Third Session January 22, 2003 Fourth Session January 29, 2003 Fifth Session February 5, 2003 Sixth Session February 12, 2003 Seventh Session February 26, 2003 Eighth Session March 5, 2003 Ninth Session March 12, 2003

1 31 62 93 119 147 172 202 231

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Contents pages Tenth Session March 26, 2003 Index of Names

258 291

2 (With Peter Eisenman) Chora L Works. Ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Lesser. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997. Venice/Cannaregio Drawings 2 Transcript One, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Jeffrey Kipnis, Thomas Lesser, Renato Rizzi 7 Chora, Jacques Derrida 15 Transcript Two, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Alain Pelissier, Renato Rizzi 33 Drawings 1–7 37 Model 1 44 Transcript Three, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman 46 Drawings 8–18, 27–38, 46–49, 51–53 50 Transcript Four, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Thomas Lesser 69 Drawings 54–62 74 Transcript Five, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Thomas Lesser 77 Correspondence 81 Model 2 86 Transcript Six, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Jeffrey Kipnis, Thomas Lesser, Renato Rizzi 90 Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books, Jacques Derrida 95 A+U Drawings 102 Transcript Seven, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Jeffrey Kipnis 104 Introduction, Bernard Tschumi 125 Parc de la Villette Drawings 126 Separate Tricks, Peter Eisenman 132 Twisting the Separatrix, Jeffrey Kipnis 137 Letter to Peter Eisenman, Jacques Derrida 161 Afterword, Jacques Derrida and Jeffrey Kipnis 166 Pourquoi Peter Eisenman ecrit de si bons livres, Jacques Derrida 173 449

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The Derrida Wordbook A+U Drawings Letter to Peter Eisenman, Jacques Derrida Correspondence Post/El Cards: A Reply to Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman Chora, Jacques Derrida Paris/La Villette Drawings

180 182 186 187 190 208

2 Cinders. (Feu la cendre (Paris: Des femmes, 1987; new edn, 2001).) Trans. with intro. and notes Ned Lukacher. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Introduction: Mourning Becomes Telepathy Prologue Animadversiones/Animadversions Feu la cendre/Cinders Notes

1 21 30 31 78

2 Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. (‘Die Fotografie als Kopie, Archiv und Signatur: Im Gespräch mit Hubertus von Amelunxen und Michael Wetzel’, Theorie der Fotografie IV, 1980–1995, ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2000).) Ed. with intro. Gerhard Richter. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Acknowledgments Between Translation and Invention: The Photograph in Deconstruction, Gerhard Richter Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, with Jacques Derrida Notes

vii ix 1 55

2 (With Catherine Malabou) Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. (Jacques Derrida: La Contre-allée (Paris: La Quinzaine Littéraire-Louis Vuitton, 1999).) Trans. David Wills. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. 450

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Contents pages Note to the Reader xviii Preface 1 • Istanbul, 10 May 1997 3 Pathway 1: Reversal I.i. Tropics 1 Foreword 39 Map 39 Itinerary 40 • Cerisy-la-Salle, 15 July 1997 41 Pathway 2: Traversal 2 Foreword Map 47 Itinerary 48 • Villefranche-sur-Mer, Meina (Lago Maggiore), 4 September 1997 54 Pathway 3: Version (‘Non-Arrival’) 3 Foreword Map 59 Itinerary 60 4 From One Catastrophe to Another (Amazon-Paris) 64 Reading ‘The Writing Lesson’ 64 The ‘Innocence’ of the Namikwara 66 Epigenesis and Ethnocentrism 67 The ‘Imitation of Writing’ 69 Reading ‘On the Line’: There is No Society ‘Without Writing’ 70 5 Of Algeria 75 First Traverse 75 Childhood and Fear 77 Dissociation of Identity 78 Algerian without Arabic 79 Jewishness minus Jewishness 81 French without Citizenship 83 ‘My Mother Tongue’, for Others 86 (No) More than One Shore 89 The Other Side of the Mediterranean 89 The Other Shore of Judaism 90 Neither . . . Nor 91 6 The Time of the World: Peril and Promise 93 ‘The World is Going Badly’ 93 The Dominant Discourse 94 451

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The Derrida Wordbook The Plagues of the Earth The New International • Villanova, 26 September 1997 • New York, 2 October 1997 7 The Greek Delay 8 Cities The City of Asylum Strasbourg, ‘This Generous Border City’ Paris as Capital Prague, De/Re-Constructed City Los Angeles and the ‘Post-Political Age’ Geneva and the Becoming-Postal of the Museum Bordeaux and the Becoming-Museum of the Postal Unknown Antwerp Amsterdam and the Floodgate of Its Tympan Athens and Photography: A Mourned-for Survival ‘The New York Thread’ ‘Am I in Jerusalem?’ Pathway 1: Reversal I.ii. ‘Envoyage’ and ‘Setting Out’ 9 Foreword Map Itinerary The Sense of the ‘Withdrawal [Retrait] of Being’ in Heidegger Cutting a Path Derrida’s Envoyage 10 ‘We Can’t Bypass Freiburg’ 11 The Khora-Nuclear Catastrophe Khora ‘in Which Country?’ • Turin–Pisa, 25 November 1997 The Hypothesis of a ‘Remainderless Destruction of the Archive’ The Future of Truth 12 The Postal Principle ‘In the Beginning Was the Post’ Epochs of the Postal 13 Italy and the Countertime of Love 14 In the Field ‘There is No Outside to the Text’ ‘Wherever We Are’

98 98 95 101 103 109 109 112 112 112 114 116 117 118 118 118 119 120

125 125 126 128 129 131 134 142 143 145 148 150 152 152 156 160 162 162 163

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Contents pages

15 16

17

18

19

The Porousness of Borders Shibboleth Collapse of the Edges and Accosting the Other The Unpresentable Approach The Step Not [pas] Spur Surround Margin The Prague Affair Correspondences Telegram Stamp Postcard Telephone Fax Telepathy ‘The Oxford Scene’ The Event that Reverses Accident-Apocalypse Seen from the Back: ‘Reversibility Goes Mad’ Destinerrance Voyage and Paralysis The Dénouement • London–Brighton, 29 November–1 December 1997 The Last Voyage The Cape The Verdict The Accident ‘You’ll End Up in Imminence’ The ‘Metaphoric Catastrophe’ (Heliopolis) • Porto, 4–5 December 1997 The Odyssey of Metaphor The Transport Company The ‘Continuist Presupposition’ Usure Metaphor and Heliotrope ‘We Are Not in Metaphor Like a Pilot in His Ship’ ‘What is “Inside” and What is “Outside”?’ The Place of Language Metatelerhetoric

164 166 167 167 168 169 170 170 172 176 176 176 178 180 182 183 184 184 185 188 192 195 198 199 200 200 202 204 205 206 209 210 210 212 212 213 215 215 216 217

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The Derrida Wordbook 20 Deconstruction is America? East and West: Biographical Reference Points More than One Deconstruction The Deconstruction Jetty and its Resistance to Theory Deconstruction is/in America: The Time of Mourning 21 Saint Monica 22 The Other Heading The Absolute Arrivant and the Messianic ‘Something Unique is Afoot in Europe’ • Cracow, Katowice, Warsaw, 9–14 December 1997 The Ethics of Responsibility 23 Japan Insularity and Imminence Future-Architecture Tokyo Basements To a Japanese Friend 24 Island, Promised Land, Desert Aporia ‘There Where Every Other is Every (Bit) Other’ Rational Faith Island Always More than One Source Promised Land and Desert The Undeniable Possibility ‘Come’ Does Not Derive from Coming • Athens, 18–21 December 1997 25 Portrait of the Traveler as Hedghog The Poematic Catastrophe • Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, 11 January 1998 The Unconscious of the Retreat • Fribourg, 26 January 1998 • Tunis, 19–22 February 1998 Accident without Sacrifice • Baltimore (Johns Hopkins), 31 March 1998 • Laguna Beach, 8 May 1998 Conclusion: A Trio of Ways [A trios voies] Appendices Stops Works Cited Index of Place Names

219 220 222 224 226 230 234 234 236 237 239 241 241 242 243 245 249 249 251 252 252 253 254 257 258 259 261 261 263 266 267 267 270 274 276 280 289 295 301

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Contents pages Contents (Logical Order) Text Credits Notes

304 307 309

2 (With Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller) Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1987. Preface 1 The Breaking of Form, Harold Bloom 2 Shelley Disfigured, Paul de Man 3 Living on • Border Lines, Jacques Derrida 4 Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth, Geoffrey Hartman 5 The Critic as Host, J. Hillis Miller Contributors

vii 1 39 75 177 217 255

2 Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Ed. with a commentary John D. Caputo. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Acknowledgements Abbreviations Part One. The Villanova Roundtable A Conversation with Jacques Derrida Part Two. A Commentary: Deconstruction in a Nutshell 1 Deconstruction in a Nutshell: The Very Idea (!) The Aporetics of the Nutshell The Axiomatics of Indignation (The Very Idea!) Apologia: An Excuse for Violence Nutshells, Six of Them 2 The Right to Philosophy Of Rights, Responsibilities, and a New Enlightenment Institutional Initiatives Between the ‘Department of Philosophy’ and a Philosophy to Come 3 Khora: Being Serious with Plato A Hoax Deconstruction is Serious Business

ix xi 3 31 31 31 36 44 47 49 49 60 69 71 71 74

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The Derrida Wordbook An Exorbitant Method Khora Two Tropics of Negativity Différance: Khora is its Surname 4 Community without Community Hospitality Identity without Identity An Open Quasi-Community 5 Justice, If Such a Thing Exists Doing Justice to Derrida Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice The Gift Dike: Derrida, Heidegger and Dis-junctive Justice 6 The Messianic: Waiting for the Future The Messianic Twist in Deconstruction Faith Without Religion The Messianic and the Messianisms: Which Comes First? When Will You Come? 7 Re-Joyce, Say ‘Yes’ Between Husserl and Joyce The Gramophone Effect Joyce’s Signature Inaugurations: Encore A Concluding Amen Bibliography Index of Names Index of Subjects

77 82 92 96 106 109 113 121 125 125 129 140 151 156 156 164 168 178 181 182 184 189 198 201 203 209 213

2 A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Preface Introduction: Reading Between the Blinds, Peggy Kamuf Part One: Difference at the Origin 1 From Speech and Phenomena 2 From Of Grammatology 3 From ‘Différance’

vii xiii 3 6 31 59

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Contents pages 4 ‘Signature Event Context’ 5 From ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ Part Two: Beside Philosophy – ‘Literature’ 6 ‘Tympan’ 7 From ‘The Double Session’ 8 From ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’ 9 ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’ Part Three: More than One Language 10 From ‘Des Tours de Babel’ 11 From ‘Living On: Border Lines’ 12 ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ 13 From ‘Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing’ Part Four: Sexual Difference in Philosophy 14 From Glas 15 From Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles 16 ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’ 17 From ‘At This Very Moment in this Work Here I Am’ 18 From ‘Choreographies’ Part Five: Tele-Types (Yes, Yes) 19 From ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’ 20 From ‘Envois’ 21 From ‘To Speculate – on ‘Freud’’ 22 From ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’ Bibliography of Works by Jacques Derrida Selected Works on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction Index of Works by Jacques Derrida Index

80 112 143 146 172 200 221 241 243 254 269 277 313 315 353 378 403 440 459 463 484 516 569 601 613 617 619

2 The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Preface vi Acknowledgements vii Justifying the Unjustifiable: A Supplementary Introduction, of sorts, Julian Wolfreys 1 1 Scribble (writing-power) 50 2 The Battle of Proper Names [from Of Grammatology] 74 3 The Originary Metaphor [from Of Grammatology] 88 4 The Retrait of Metaphor 102 457

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The Derrida Wordbook 5 6 7 8 9

The Time before First [from Dissemination] From Specters of Marx From Memoirs of the Blind Logic of the Living Feminine [from Otobiographies] Qual Quelle: Valéry’s Sources [from Writing and Difference] 10 Khora 11 Economimesis Bibliography

130 140 169 184 196 231 263 294

2 The Derrida–Habermas Reader. Ed. Lasse Thomassen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Acknowledgements Introduction: Between Deconstruction and Rational Reconstruction Part I Philosophy and Literature Introduction 1 Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature, Jürgen Habermas 2 Is There a Philosophical Language? Jacques Derrida 3 Habermas, Derrida and the Functions of Philosophy, Richard Rorty Part II Ethics and Politics Introduction 4 An Allegory of Modernity/Postmodernity: Habermas and Derrida, Richard J. Bernstein 5 Frankfurt Impromptu: Remarks on Derrida and Habermas, Simon Critchley 6 Performative Powerlessness – A Response to Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida 7 How to Respond to the Ethical Question, Jürgen Habermas 8 Democracy and Difference: Reflections on the Metapolitics of Lyotard and Derrida, Seyla Benhabib Part III Identity/Difference: Rights, Tolerance and Political Space Introduction 9 Dead Rights, Live Futures: On Habermas’s Attempt to Reconcile Constitutionalism and Democracy, Bonnie Honig 10 ‘A Bizarre, Even Opaque Practice’: Habermas on Constitutionalism and Democracy Lasse Thomassen 458

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Contents pages 11 Religious Tolerance: The Pacemaker for Cultural Rights, Jürgen Habermas 12 Hostipitality, Jacques Derrida 13 Between Deliberation and Deconstruction: The Condition of Post-National Democracy, Martin Morris Part IV Beyond the Nation-State: Europe, Cosmopolitanism and International Law Introduction 14 For a Justice to Come: An Interview with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida and Lieven De Canter 15 February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida 16 Between Hope and Terror: Habermas and Derrida Plead for the Im/Possible, Martin Beack Matustík Afterwords Introduction 17 Honesty of Thought, Jacques Derrida 18 A Last Farewell: Derrida’s Enlightening Impact, Jürgen Habermas Bibliography Copyright Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Index

2 Dissemination. (La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972).) Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Translator’s Preface vii Outwork, prefacing 1 Plato’s Pharmacy 61 I 1 Pharmacia 65 2 The Father of Logos 75 3 The Filial Inscription: Theuth, Hermes, Thoth, Nabû, Nebo 84 4 The Pharmakon 95 5 The Pharmakeus 117 II 120 6 The Pharmakos 128 459

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The Derrida Wordbook 7 8 9

The Ingredients: Phantasms, Festivals, and Paints The Heritage of the Pharmakon: Family Scene Play: From the Pharmakon to the Letter and from Blindness to the Supplement The Double Session I II Dissemination I 1 The Trigger 2 The Apparatus or Frame 3 The Scission 4 The Double Bottom of the Plupresent 5 wriTing, encAsIng, ScreeNing 6 The Attending Discourse II 7 The Time before First 8 The Column 9 The Crossroads of the ‘Est’ 10 Grafts, a Return to Overcasting XI The Supernumerary

134 142 156 173 175 227 287 289 290 296 306 313 324 330 330 340 347 355 359

2 The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. (L’Oreille de l’autre: Otobiographies, transferts, traductions: Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida (Montreal: V1b Editeur, 1982).) Ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. Preface, Christie McDonald Translator’s Note I Otobiographies:The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name, trans. Avital Ronell II Roundtable of Autobiography The Internal Border, Rodolphe Gasché Reply, JD From One Genre to the Other, Christie McDonald Reply, JD

vii xi

1 41 46

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Contents pages A Third Logic, Eugenio Donato Reply, JD Play, Work and Beyond, Patrick Mahony Reply, JD That Incredible Terrible Thing Which Was Not, Claude Lévesque Reply, JD The Ear of the Heart, Eugene Vance Reply, JD Discussion III Roundtable on Translation Introduction, Claude Lévesque Transformations and Patricidal Deconstruction, Patrick Mahony Reply, JD The Operator of Difference, Rodolphe Gasché Reply, JD The Passage into Philosophy, Christie McDonald Reply, JD Specular Translation, Eugenio Donato Reply, JD False Sense, François Péraldi Reply, JD Translation in the Past Perfect, Eugene Vance Reply, JD The Exile in Language, Claude Lévesque Reply, JD Discussion IV Interview: Choreographies Works Cited The Contributors

54 59

71 80

93 94 110 116 126 130 135 142

163 187 189

2 (With Bernard Stiegler) Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. (Échographies: de la television (Paris: Galilée, 1996).) Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Oxford: Polity Press, 2002. List of Illustrations Translator’s Note

vi viii 461

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The Derrida Wordbook Artifactualities, Jacques Derrida Echographies of Television, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler 1 Right of Inspection 2 Artifactuality 3 Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology 4 Inheritances – and Rhythm 5 The ‘Cultural Exception’: The States of the State, the Event 6 The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence 7 Phonographies: Meaning – from Heritage to Horizon 8 Spectrographies 9 Vigilances of the Unconscious The Discrete Image, Bernard Stiegler Notes

1 29 31 41 56 68 73 82 100 113 135 145 164

2 Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. (Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la géométrie (Paris: PUF 1962; rev. 2nd edn, Paris: PUF, 1974).) Trans. with preface and afterword John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Acknowledgements Preface: Undecidables and Old Names, John P. Leavey Undecidables and Deconstruction Derrida’s Introduction to The Origin of Geometry Deconstruction and the Science of Old Names Translator’s Note Introduction to The Origin of Geometry I The Sense of Sense-Investigation: Responsibility, Consciousness, and Existence II The Historical Reduction and the Necessity for Return Inquiry (Rückfrage) in Reactivation III The Ego as Fundament and the Reduction of Factuality IV Objectivity, Historicity, and Intentionality V Language, the Possibility of Transcendental Historicity VII The How of Ideality: Writing and Univocity as the Telos of Reactivation VIII Horizon: the Absolute of History, and Imaginary Variation IX The Suspension of Ideality: Scientific Study of the LifeWorld (Lebensweft)

v 1 1 7 18 20 23 27 34 51 62 66 76 87 107

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Contents pages X

Geography, Infinitization, and the Idea in the Kantian Sense XI The Historicity of the Idea: Difference, Delay, Origins, and the Transcendental Appendix: The Origin of Geometry, Edmund Husserl, trans. David Carr Coda: contrapunctus and translation, John P. Leavey Index of Passages Cited from Husserl Index

122 141 155 181 193 197

2 Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy. (Paris: Unesco, 1997.) Trans., ed. and commentary, Peter Pericles Trifonas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Prologue ix 1 The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View (The Example of an International Institution) 1 2 Roundtable Discussion 19 3 What Comes Next? Or, After Difference: Meditations on the Debt and Duty to the Right of Philosophy 57 Index 107 About the Author and Editor 111

2 Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2. (In Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 281–663.) Trans. Jan Plug et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Translator’s Foreword ix Transfer Ex Cathedra: Language and Institutions of Philosophy If There Is Cause to Translate I: Philosophy in its National Language 1 (Toward a ‘licterature en françois’) If There is Cause to Translate II: Descartes’ Romances, or the Economy of Words 20 Vacant Chair: Censorship, Mastery, Magisteriality 43 Theology of Translation 64 463

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The Derrida Wordbook Mochlos: Eyes of the University Mochlos, or The Conflict of the Faculties Punctuations: The Time of a Thesis The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils ‘In Praise of Philosophy’ The Antinomies of the Philosophical Discipline: Letter Preface Popularities: On the Right to the Philosophy of Right Appendices ‘Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?’ (1980) Letter to François Mitterrand to Greph (1981) Titles (for the Collège International de Philosophie) (1982) Sendoffs (for the Collège International de Philosophie) (1982) Report of the Committee on Philosophy and Epistemology (1990) Notes

83 113 129 156 165 175 185 194 195 216 250 283

2 Du droit à la philosophie. (The following contents include those essays translated and reprinted in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy I.) Privilège. Titre justificatif et Remarques introductives 9 1 «Droit de . . .», «droit à . . .»: la presupposition institutionelle 15 2 L’horizon et la fondation, deux projections philosophiques (l’exemple du Collège International de Phillosophie) 24 3 Le nom «philosophie», l’intérêt pour la philosophie 36 4 La démocratie à venir: droit de la langue, droit à la langue 41 5 Passage de la frontière: declarer la philosophie 55 6 D’un «ton populaire» – ou de la philosophie en (style) direct (directives et directions: le droit, le rigide, le rigoureux, le rectilinéaire, le régulier) 71 7 Ne s’autoriser que de soi-même – et donc, derechef, de Kant 81 8 Le hypersymbolique: le tribunal de dernière instance 89 9 Objectivité, liberté, vérité, responsibilité 102 I. Qui a peur de la philosophie? Où commence et comment finit un corps enseignnant 111 464

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Contents pages Appendice: Avant-Projet pour la constitution d’un groupe de recherches sur L’enseignement philosophiques Modes de fonctionnement du Greph (statuts) La crise de l’enseignement philosophique L’âge de Hegel La correspondence entre Hegel et Cousin L’héritage de Hegel et l’avenir de son établissement Les principes du droit à la philosophie La philosophie et ses classes La philosophie refoulée Les défenses de la philosophie L’âge de la philosophie Le front aujourd’hui Les corps divisés Philosophie des États Généraux Appendice: Appel pour les États Généraux de la Philosophie Un Tableau Noir Pour commencer États Généraux de la Philosophie (communiqué) II. Transfert Ex Cathedra: le language et les institutions philosophiques S’il y a lieu de traduire. I. La philosophie dans sa langue nationale (vers une «licterature en françois») S’il y a lieu de traduire. II. Les romans de Descartes ou l’économie des mots Chaire vacante: censure, maîtrise, magistralité Théologie de la traduction III. Mochlos: L’Œil de l’université Mochlos – ou le conflit des facultés Ponctuations: le temps de la these Les pupilles de l’Université. Le principe de raison et l’idée de l’Université «Éloge de la philosophie» Les antinomies de la discipline philosophiques Popularités. Du droit à la philosophie du droit IV. Annexes «Qui a peur de la philosophie?» (1980) Titres (pour le Collège International de Philosophie) (1982)

146 152 155 181 185 194 211 229 230 232 233 237 239 253 271 273 276 278

283 311 343 371 397 439 461 499 511 525 539 551

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The Derrida Wordbook Coups d’envoi (pour le Collège International de Philosophie) (1982) Rapport de la Commission de Philosophie et d’Épistémologie (1990)

577 619

2 (With Elisabeth Roudinesco) For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue. (De quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard and Galilée, 2001).) Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Foreword 1 Choosing One’s Heritage 2 Politics of Difference 3 Disordered Families 4 Unforeseeable Freedom 5 Violence Against Animals 6 The Spirit of the Revolution 7 Of the Anti-Semitism to Come 8 Death Penalties 9 In Praise of Psychoanalysis Notes

ix 1 20 33 47 62 77 106 139 166 197

2 Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. (Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie: Les Secrets de l’archive (Paris: Galilée, 2003).) Trans. Beverly Bie Brahic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Foreword Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive Translator’s Notes

v 1 89

2 The Gift of Death. (Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée 1999).) Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; 2nd edn published as The Gift of Death 2nd Edition and Literature in Secret 466

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Contents pages (Paris: Galilée, 1999). Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Translator’s Preface 1 Secrets of European Responsibility 2 Beyond: Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death 3 Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know) 4 Tout autre est tout autre 2nd edn Translator’s Preface to the 2007 Edition The Gift of Death 1 Secrets of European Responsibility 2 Beyond: Giving for the Taking, Teaching and Learning to Give, Death 3 Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know) 4 Tout autre est tout autre Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation 1 The Test of Secrecy: For the One as for the Other 2 Father, Son, and Literature 3 More Than One

vii 1 35 53 82

vii 1 35 53 82 121 130 143

2 Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. (Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Paris: Galilée, 1991).) Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Note on References vii Foreword ix 1 The Time of the King 1 2 The Madness of Economic Reason: A Gift without Present 34 3 ‘Counterfeit Money’ I: Poetics of Tobacco 71 (Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life) 4 ‘Counterfeit Money’ II: 108 (Baudelaire and the Story of the Dedication) ‘Counterfeit Money’, Charles Baudelaire 172

2 467

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The Derrida Wordbook Glas. (Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974).) Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska, 1986. Note to the translation Glas

1

2 H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . (H. C. pour la vie, c’est-à-dire . . . (Paris: Galilée, 2000).) Trans. with additional notes Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Translator’s Preface: Taking Sides in Translation Author’s Note H.C. for Life, That Is to Say… Notes

ix xiii 1 161

2 (And Maurice Blanchot) The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994); Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris, Galilée, 1998). Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. § §

The Instant of My Death, Maurice Blanchot 1 Demeure: Fiction and Testimony 13 Reading ‘beyond the beginning’: or, the Venom in Letters’: Postscript and ‘Literary Supplement’ 104 Notes 111

2 (With Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida. (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ‘This book presupposes a contract’ Derridabase, Geoffrey Bennington With Time Remark

1 3 8

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Contents pages The Beginning The Sign Writing Husserl Différance Context Beyond The Proper Name Time and Finitude Metaphor The Unconscious The Signature Translation Babel Literature The Gift Sexual Difference The Mother: Chora Femininity Politics The Title The Institution The Series (Quasi-) Transcendental Questions The Closure The Jew Striction Being and the Other The Machine Envoi Circumfession Acts (The Law of Genre) Curriculum Vitae Bibliography (including list of abbreviations of Derrida’s works cited in text) Supplemental Bibliography Illustration Sources

15 23 42 64 70 84 98 104 114 119 133 148 166 174 179 188 204 207 212 228 241 258 267 284 292 297 302 311 316 3–315 317 325 355 411 417

2

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The Derrida Wordbook Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars. Eds Paul Patton and Terry Smith. Sydney: Power Publications, 2001. Introduction 1 I Deconstructing Vision, Sydney Town Hall, August 12, 1999: Jacques Derrida in conversation with Terry Smith 1 In Blind Sight: Writing, Seeing, Touching 13 2 The Artist, the Projectile 31 3 Specters of Media 43 II Affirmative Deconstruction, Seymour Center, University of Sydney, August 13, 1999: Jacques Derrida in conversation with Genevieve Lloyd, David Wills, Paul Patton and Penelope Deutscher 1 Time and Memory, Messianicity and the name of God 57 2 Affirmative Deconstruction, Inheritance, Technology 71 3 Justice, Colonialism, Translation 81 4 Hospitality, Perfectibility 93 5 Open Discussion 105 Notes on Contributors 121

2 Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview: An Interview with Jean Birnbaum. (Apprendre à vivre enfin: entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Le Monde/Galilée, 2004).) Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Bibliography Peter Krapp. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2007. Introduction. Bearing Loss: Derrida as a Child, Jean Birnbaum Learning to Live Finally Translators’ Note Notes Selected Bibliography

9 21 55 61 69

2 Limited Inc. (Limited Inc. (Paris: Galilée, 1990).) Trans. Samuel Weber et al. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Editor’s Foreword Signature Event Context

vii 1 470

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Contents pages Summary of ‘Reiterating the Differences’ Limited Inc a b c . . . Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion

25 29 111

2 Margins of Philosophy. (Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).) Trans. with additional notes Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Translator’s Note Tympan Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology The Ends of Man The Linguistic Circle of Geneva Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy Qual Quelle: Valéry’s Sources Signature Event Context

vii 1 29 69 109 137 155 175 207 273 307

2 Memoires for Paul de Man. (Mémoires: pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galilée, 1988).) Rev. edn, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf. Translations edited by Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Editorial Note Preface to the Revised Edition Preface to the French Edition In Memoriam Preface 1 Mnemosyne 2 The Art of Mémoires 3 Acts 4 Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War

vii ix xi xv xxi 1 45 89 155

2 471

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The Derrida Wordbook Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. (Mémoires d’aveugle. L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Réunions des musées nationaux, 1990).) Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Translators’ Preface Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins List of Illustrations

vii 1 131

2 Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. (Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine (Paris: Galilée, 1996).) Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin Epilogue Notes

1 70 77

2 Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001. Ed., trans. and intro. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Introduction: Inheriting the Future, Elizabeth Rottenberg Part I. Negotiations Negotiations Letter to Jean Genet (Fragments) Declarations of Independence What I Would Have Said . . . Economies of the Crisis Events? What Events? ‘Pardon me for taking you at your word’ The Deconstruction of Actuality Taking Sides for Algeria For Mumia Abu-Jamal Open Letter to Bill Clinton Derelictions of the Right to Justice

1 11 41 46 55 69 74 77 85 117 125 130 133

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Contents pages Part II. Thinking at its Limits Politics and Friendship The Aforementioned So-Called Human Genome Nietzsche and the Machine ‘Dead Man Running’: Salut, Salut Part III. Ethics and Politics Today Ethics and Politics Today On the ‘Priceless,’ or the ‘Going Rate’ of the Transaction The Right to Philosophy from a Cosmopolitan Point of View As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits’ . . . Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism Notes

147 199 215 257 295 315 329 343 371 387

2 Of Grammatology. (De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967).) Corrected edn, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Acknowledgements vii Translator’s Preface ix Preface lxxxix Part I Writing before the Letter 1 Exergue 3 1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing 6 The Program 6 The Signifier and Truth 10 The Written Being/The Being Written 18 2 Linguistics and Grammatology 27 The Outside and the Inside 30 The Outside Is the Inside 44 The Hinge [La Brisure) 65 3 Of Grammatology as a Positive Science 74 Algebra: Arcanum and Transparence 75 Science and the Name of Man 81 The Rebus and the Complicity of Origins 87 Part II Nature, Culture, Writing 95 Introduction to the ‘Age of Rousseau’ 97 1 The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau 101 The Battle of Proper Names 107 473

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The Derrida Wordbook Writing and Man’s Exploitation by Man 2 ‘. . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .’ From/Of Blindness to the Supplement The Chain of Supplements The Exorbitant. Questions of Method 3 Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages I The Place of the ‘Essay’ Writing, Political Evil, and Linguistic Evil The Present Debate: The Economy of Pity The Initial Debate and the Composition of the Essay II Imitation The Interval and the Supplement The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism The Turn of Writing III Articulation ‘That Movement of the Wand . . .’ The Inscription of the Origin The Neume That ‘Simple Movement of the Finger.’ Writing and the Prohibition of Incest 4 From/Of the Supplement to the Source: The Theory of Writing The Originary Metaphor The History and System of Scripts The Alphabet and Absolute Representation The Theorem and the Theater The Supplement of (at) the Origin Notes Index

118 141 144 152 157 165 165 167 171 192 195 195 200 216 229 229 242 247 255 269 270 280 295 302 313 317 355

2 Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. (De l’hospitalité: Anne Duformantelle invite Jacques Derrida à répondre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997).) Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Translator’s Note Invitation, Anne Dufourmentelle

ix 2

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Contents pages Foreigner Question Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality Notes

3 75 157

2 Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. (De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987); rptd as Heidegger et la question: de l’esprit et autres essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1990).) Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Translators’ Note Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Notes

vii 1 7 14 23 31 47 58 73 83 99 115

2 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. (‘On Cosmopolitanism’ first published as Cosmopolites de tous le pays, encore un effort! (Paris: Galilée, 1997); ‘On Forgiveness’ first published as ‘Le Siècle et le pardon’, published in volume form in the augmented edition of La Réligion (Paris: Seuil, 1998); the present translation is an edited version of that text.) Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. Preface Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney. London: Routledge, 2001. Series Editors’ Preface Part One: On Cosmopolitanism Part Two: On Forgiveness

vii 1 25

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The Derrida Wordbook On the Name. (orig. pub. as three volumes: Sauf le nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993); Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993); Passions (Paris: Galilée, 1993).) Ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr, and Ian McLeod. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Translating the Name? Thomas Dutoit Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering’ Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum) Khora Notes

ix 3 35 89 131

2 On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000).) Trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Foreword ix Translator’s Preface xi ‘When our eyes touch . . .’ Signing a Question – from Aristotle 1 Part I: This is – of the Other § 1 Psyche ‘Around her, with such exact and cruel knowledge’ 11 § 2 Spacings The Incommensurable, Syncope, and Words Beginning with ‘ex-’ 20 § 3 This Is My Body Points Already: Counterpoint, Mourning Psyche, and the Hand of . . . 36 § 4 The Untouchable, or the Vow of Abstinence The Exorbitant, 1 – Tact ‘beyond the possible’ – Stroking, Striking, Thinking, Weighing: Mourning Eros and the Other Hand of. . . 66 § 5 Tender This Is My Heart, ‘the heart of another’ 92 § 6 Nothing to Do in Sight: ‘There’s no “the sense of touch’ Haptics, ‘techne,’ or Body Ecotechnics 111 Part II: Exemplary Stories of the ‘Flesh’ § 7 Tangent I Hand of Man, Hand of God 135 § 8 Tangent II ‘For example, my hand’ – ‘The hand itself’ – ‘For example, the finger’ – ‘For example, “I feel my heart” ’ 159 § 9 Tangent III The Exorbitant, 2. ‘Crystallization of the impossible’: ‘Flesh,’ and again, ‘For example, my hand’ 183 §10 Tangent IV Tangency and Contingency, 1: The ‘question of technics’ and the ‘aporias’ of Flesh, ‘(contact, at bottom)’ 216 476

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Contents pages §11 Tangent V Tangency and Contingency, 2: The ‘merciful hand of the Father,’ with which he thus touches us, is the Son . . . the Word that is ‘the touch that touches the Soul’ (toque de la Divinidat . . . el toque que toca al alma)’ Part III: Punctuations: ‘And You.’ §12 ‘To self-touch you’ Touching – Language and the Heart §13 ‘And to you.’ The Incalculable Exactitude, Punctuality, Punctuation Salve. Untimely Postscript for Want of a Final Retouch Salut to you, salut to the blind we become, Jean-Luc Nancy Notes Index of Names

244 263 281 300 313 317 375

2 The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Paris: Minuit, 1991). Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas, intro. Michael B. Naas. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992. Introduction: for example, Michael B. Naas vii Today 1 The Other Heading: Memories, Responses, and Responsibilities 4 Call it a Day for Democracy 84 Notes 111

2 Paper Machine (Papier Machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001); Fichus originally published separately (Paris: Galilée, 2002).) Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Translator’s Note 1 Machines and the ‘Undocumented Person’ 2 The Book to Come 3 The Word Processor 4 ‘But . . . No, but . . . Never . . ., and Yet . . ., as to the Media’: Intellectuals. Attempt at Definition by Themselves. Survey 5 Paper or Me, You Know . . . (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)

ix 1 4 19

33 41

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The Derrida Wordbook 6 The Principle of Hospitality 7 ‘Sokal and Bricmont Aren’t Serious’ 8 As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits’ 9 My Sunday ‘Humanities’ 10 For José Rainha: What I Believe and Believe I Know 11 ‘What Does It Mean to Be A French Philosopher Today?’ 12 Not Utopia, the Im-possible 13 ‘Others Are Secret Because They Are Other’ 14 Fichus: Frankfurt Address Notes

66 70 73 100 109 112 121 136 164 183

Papier Machine contents (where essays do not appear in the English translation but in other English language volumes, these are indicated). Les machines et le «sans-papiers» 9 Matière et mémoire (Bibliothèque nationale de France: lectures) Le livre à venir Le ruban de machine à écrire (Limited Ink II) L’avant-dernier mot: archives de l’aveu L’événement nommé: «ruban» pouvoir et impouvoir Le «seul monument sûr». D’une materialité sans matière Papier journal (journaux et revues: réponses) La machine à traitement de texte (La Quinzaine Littéraire) «Il courait mort»: salut, salut. Notes pour un courier aux Temps Modernes (Les Temps Modernes) (trans. as ‘ “Dead Man Running”: Salut, Salut’, in Negotiations) Pour Mumia Abu-Jamal (Les Temps Modernes) [trans. as ‘For Mumia Abu-Jamal, in Negotiations] Parti pris pour L’Algérie (Les Temps Modernes) [trans. as ‘Taking Sides for Algeria’ in Negotiations, and ‘Taking a Stand for Algeria in Acts of Religion] «Mais . . ., non mais . . ., jamais . . ., et pourtant . . ., quant aux médias». Les intellectuals. Tentative de definition par eux-mêmes. Enquête (Lignes) Le papier ou moi, vous savez . . . (Nouvelles speculations sur un luze des pauves) (Les Cahiers de médiologie) Le principe d’hospitalité (Le Monde) «Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux» (Le Monde) Comme si c’étrait possible «within such limits». . . (Revue

15 33 33 65 105

151

167 215

219

229 239 273 279

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Contents pages internationale de philosophie) (trans. as As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits’ . . . in Negotiations) Mes «humanités» du dimanche (L’Humanité) Pour José Rainha. Ce que je crois et crois savoir . . . (L’Humanité) «Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire d’être un philosophe français aujourd’hui?» (Le Figaro Magazine) Non pas l’utopie, l’im-possible (Die Zeit) «Autrui est secret parce qu’il est autre» (Le Monde de l’éducation)

283 321 333 337 349 367

2 Parages (Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986).) Ed. John P. Leavey, trans. Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey and Avital Ronell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Editor’s Note List of Abbreviations Introduction trans. John P. Leavey Pace Not(s) trans. John P. Leavey Living On trans. James Hulbert Title to Be Specified trans. Tom Conley The Law of Genre trans. Avital Ronell Notes

viii ix 1 11 103 193 217 251

2 Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994. (Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galilée, 1992).) Ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans., Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Foreword to the English Translation, Peggy Kamuf Introduction: Upside-Down Writing, Elisabeth Weber Between Brackets I Ja, or the faux-bond II

vii 1 5 30

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The Derrida Wordbook ‘The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable’ Choreographies Of a Certain Collège International de Philosophie Still to Come Unsealing (‘the old new language’) ‘Dialanguages’ Voice II Language (Le Monde on the Telephone) Heidegger, the Philosophers’ Hell Comment donner raison? ‘How to Concede, with Reasons?’ ‘There is No One Narcissism’ (Autobiophotographies) Is There a Philosophical Language? The Rhetoric of Drugs ‘Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject Che cos’è la poesia? Istrice 2: Ick bünn all hier Once Again from the Top: Of the Right to Philosophy ‘A “Madness” Must Watch Over Thinking’ Counter-Signatures Passages – from Traumatism to Promise Two ‘Affairs’ Honoris Causa: ‘This is also extremely funny’ The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company Do Business) Notes Works Cited Bibliography of Other Interviews with Jacques Derrida

78 89 109 115 132 156 171 181 191 196 216 228 255 288 300 327 339 365 372 399

422 457 489 495

2 Politics of Friendship. (Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994).) Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Foreword vii 1 Oligarchies: Naming, Enumerating, Counting 1 2 Loving in Friendship: Perhaps – the Noun and the Adverb 26 3 This Mad ‘Truth’: The Just Name of Friendship 49 4 The Phantom Friend Returning (in the Name of ‘Democracy’) 75 5 On Absolute Hostility: The Cause of Philosophy and the Spectre of the Political 112 480

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Contents pages 6 7 8 9 10

Oath, Conjuration, Fraternization or the ‘Armed’ Question He Who Accompanies Me Recoils ‘In human language, fraternity . . .’ ‘For the First Time in the History of Humanity’

138 171 194 227 271

2 Positions. (Positions: Entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta (Paris: Minuit, 1972).) Trans. and annotated Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; 2nd English edn with new introduction, London: Continuum, 2002. (Note: Contents pages for both the Chicago and the Continuum edition are given below; page references in the concordance are keyed to the second edition.) Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta Notes

1 15 37 97

Derrida’s Positions, Thirty Years On: Introduction to the Second English Language Edition. Christopher Norris ix Notes to Introduction xxxvii Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse 1 Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva 15 Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta 35 Notes to Interviews 79

2 The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. (La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).) Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Translator’s Introduction: L before K Glossary Envois To Speculate – on ‘Freud’

vii xiii 1 257

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The Derrida Wordbook 1 Notices (Warnings) 2 Freud’s Legacy 3 Paralysis 4 Seven: Postscript Le facteur de la vérité Du tout

259 292 338 387 411 497

2 The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. (Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990).) Trans. Marian Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Translator’s Note vii Preface to the 1990 Edition xiii Preface to the 1953/54 Dissertation vii Introduction 1 Part I The Dilemmas of Psychological Genesis: Psychologism and Logicism 1 Meeting the Problem 9 2 A First Recourse to Genesis: Intentional Psychologism 16 3 The Dissociation. The Abandoning of Genesis and the Logicist Temptation 34 Part II The ‘Neutralization’ of Genesis 4 Noematic Temporality and Genetic Temporality 53 5 The Radical ’Εποχη and the Irreducibility of Genesis 70 The Reduction and the Idealist Exclusion of Genesis 71 Genesis of Perception: Hylé and Morphé 83 Noetic Temporality. Insufficiency of a Static Constitution 90 Part III The Phenomenological Theme of Genesis: Transcendental Genesis and ‘Worldly’ Genesis 6 Birth and Becoming of Judgment 103 7 The Genetic Constitution of the Ego and the Passage to a New Form of Transcendental Idealism 130 Appendix 149 Part IV Teleology. The Sense of History and the History of Sense 8 The Birth and Crises of Philosophy 153 9 The First Task of Philosophy: The Reactivation of Genesis 161 10 The History of Philosophy and the Transcendental Motive 170 482

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Contents pages Notes Bibliography List of Husserl Translations Used in This Edition Index

179 215 219 221

2 Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I. (Psyché: Inventions de l’autre; rptd in two, augmented volumes (Paris: Galilée, 1987/1998 and 2003).) Eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Editors’ Foreword Author’s Preface § 1 Psyche: Invention of the Other § 2 The Retrait of Metaphor § 3 What Remains by Force of Music § 4 To Illustrate, He Said . . . § 5 Envoi § 6 Me – Psychoanalysis § 7 At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am § 8 Des tours de Babel § 9 Telepathy §10 Ex Abrupto §11 The Deaths of Roland Barthes §12 An Idea of Flaubert: ‘Plato’s Letter’ §13 Geopsychoanalysis ‘and the rest of the world’ §14 My Chances/Mes chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies* §15 Racism’s Last Word §16 No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives Notes Sources Index of Proper Names * Essay added to augmented French edn, vol. I (1998)

ix xii 1 48 81 90 94 129 143 191 226 262 264 299 318 344 377 387 411 432 435

2 Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II. Eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. 483

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The Derrida Wordbook § 1 Letter to a Japanese Friend § 2 Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference § 3 Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II) § 4 The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration § 5 No (Point of) Madness – Maintaining Architecture § 6 Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books § 7 Fifty-two Aphorisms for a Foreword § 8 Aphorism Countertime § 9 How to Avoid Speaking: Denials §10 Désistance §11 A Number of Yes §12 Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German* Notes Sources Index of Proper Names * Essay added to augmented French edn, vol. II (2003)

1 7 27 63 87 104 117 127 143 196 231 241 299 328 331

2 (With Gianni Vattimo, eds) Religion. (La religion (Paris: Seuil et Laterza, 1996); rptd as augmented edn, including interview with Michel Wievorka, ‘La Siècle et le pardon’ (Paris: Seuil, 1998).) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Circumstances, Gianni Vattimo 1 Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone, Jacques Derrida, trans. Samuel Weber 2 The Trace of the Trace, Gianni Vattimo 3 Thinking Religion: the Symbol and the Sacred, Eugenio Trías 4 Religious Experience as Event and Interpretation, Aldo Gargani 5 Desert, Ethos, Abandonment: Towards a Topology of the Religious, Vincenzo Vitiello 6 The Meaning of Being as a Determinate Ontic Trace, Maurizio Ferraris 7 Dialogues in Capri, Hans-Georg Gadamer

ix

1 79 95 111 136 170 200

2 484

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Contents pages Resistances of Psychoanalysis. (Résistances de la psychanalyses (Paris: Galilée, 1996).) Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. § 1 Resistances § 2 For the Love of Lacan § 3 ‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis

1 39 70

2 Right of Inspection. Photographs by Mari-Françoise Plissart. (Droit de regards (Paris: Minuit, 1985).) Trans. David Wills. New York: Monacelli Press, 1998. Translator’s Preface Right of Inspection

105 107

2 Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. (Voyous: Deux essaies sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003).) Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Acknowledgments Preface: Veni Part I: The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?) § 1 The Free Wheel § 2 License and Freedom: The Roué § 3 The Other of Democracy, the ‘By Turns’: Alternative and Alternation § 4 Mastery and Measure § 5 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or, How Not to Speak in Mottos § 6 The Rogue That I Am § 7 God, What More Do I Have to Say? § 8 The Last of the Rogue States: The ‘Democracy to Come,’ Opening in Two Turns § 9 (No) More Rogue States §10 Sending

ix xi

6 19 28 42 56 63 71 78 95 108

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The Derrida Wordbook Part II: The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, and Sovereignty) § 1 Teleology and Architectonic: The Neutralization of the Event 118 § 2 To Arrive – At the Ends of the State (and of War, and of World War) 141 Notes 161

2 (With Paule Thévenin) The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. (Antonin Artaud, dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).) Trans. and preface Mary Ann Caws. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Preface: Derrida’s Maddening Text: ar-tau, Mary Ann Caws The Search for a Lost World, Paule Thévenin To Unsense the Subjectile, Jacques Derrida

ix 1 59

2 Signéponge/Signsponge. (Signéponge (Paris: Seuil, 1988).) Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia, 1984. Greenwood, Richard Rand Signsponge/Signéponge Translator’s Notes French Sources

ix 2/3 157 159

2 Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. (Paris: Galilée, 1986, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005; full details follow each essay.) Eds Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. To Receive, to Send: A Note on the Text, Thomas Dutoit 1 Shibboleth: For Paul Celan Schibboleth: Pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilée, 1986) 2 Poetics and Politics of Witnessing ‘Poétique et politique du témoignage’ (Paris: Galilée, 2004)

ix 1 65

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Contents pages 3

Language Is Never Owned: An Interview ‘La langue n’appartient pas’ (Paris: Galilée, 2001) 4 Majesties 5 Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, the Poem Béliers: le dialogue ininterrompu: Entre deux infinism le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003) 6 The Truth That Wounds: From an Interview Part of ‘La vérité blessante’ (Paris: Galilée, 2004) Appendix: The Meridian, Paul Celan, trans. Jerry Glenn Notes

97 108 135

164 173 187

2 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. (Spectres de Marx: L’Etat de la dette, le travail, du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993).) Trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg. New York: Routledge, 1994. Editors’ Introduction Note on the text Dedication Exordium 1 Injunctions of Marx 2 Conjuring – Marxism 3 Wears and Tears (tableau of an ageless world) 4 In the Name of the Revolution, the Double Barricade (impure ‘impure impure history of ghosts’) 5 Apparition of the Inapparent: the phenomenological ‘conjuring trick’ Notes Index

vii xiii xv xvii 3 49 77 95 125 177 197

2 Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. (La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967; 2nd edn 1998; 3rd edn 2003).) Trans. David 487

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The Derrida Wordbook B. Allison, preface Newton Garver. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Preface, Newton Garver Translator’s Introduction, David B. Allison Speech and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl’s Phenomenology Introduction 1 Sign and Signs 2 The Reduction of Indication 3 Meaning as Soliloquy 4 Meaning and Representation 5 Signs and the Blink of an Eye 6 The Voice that Keeps Silence 7 The Supplement of Origin Other Essays Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language Differance Index of Passages Cited from Husserl Index

ix xxxi

3 17 27 32 48 60 70 88

107 129 161 163

2 Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. (Éperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).) Trans. Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Coup sur coup: Préface à Éperons / Coup upon Coup: An Introduction to Spurs, Stefano Agosti 2/3 Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche / Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles 34 / 35 La question du style / The question of style 34 / 35 Distances 36 / 37 Voiles / Veils 46 / 47 Vérités / Truths 54 / 55 Parures / Adornments 62 / 63 La simulation / Simulation 66 / 67 «Histoire d’une erreur» / ‘History of an error’ 70 / 71 Femina vita 82 / 83 Positions 94 / 95 Le regard d’Œdipe / The gaze of Oedipus 100 / 101 488

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Contents pages Le coup de don Abîmes de la vérité / Abysses of truth «J’ai oublié mon parapluie» / ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’ Notes

108 / 109 118 / 119 122 / 123 146 / 147

2 (With Maurizio Ferraris) A Taste for the Secret. (Rome: Gius. Laterza and Figli Spa, 1997). Trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Secretaire, Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’ What is There? Maurizio Ferraris Bibliography

vii 1 93 159

2 The Truth in Painting. (La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978).) Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. List of Illustrations Translators’ Preface Passe-Partout 1 Parergon I. Lemmata II. The Parergon III. The Sans of the Pure Cut IV. The Colossal 2 + R (Into the Bargain) 3 Cartouches 4 Restitutions Index

vii xiii 1 15 17 37 83 119 149 183 255 383

2 (With Hélène Cixous) Veils. (Voiles (Paris: Galilée, 1998).) Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 489

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The Derrida Wordbook Savoir, Hélène Cixous 1 A Silkworm of One’s Own: Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil Notes

17 93

2 Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1. (in Du Droit à la philosophe (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 9–279; for contents of this, see entry following Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2.) Trans. Jan Plug. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Translator’s Note Privilege: Justificatory Title and Introductory Remarks Where a Teaching Body Begins and How it Ends The Crisis in the Teaching of Philosophy The Age of Hegel Philosophy and its Classes Divided Bodies: Responses to La Nouvelle Critique Philosophy of the Estates General Notes

ix 1 67 99 117 158 164 173 193

2 Without Alibi. Ed., trans. and intro. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Preface: Toward the Event, Peggy Kamuf Provocation: Forewords, Jacques Derrida Introduction: Event of Resistance, Peggy Kamuf 1 History of the Lie: Prolegomena 2 Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) 3 ‘Le Parjure,’ Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying 4 The University Without Condition 5 Psychoanalysis Searches the States of its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty (originally published as Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 2000) Notes

xi xv 1 28 71 161 202

238 281

2 490

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Contents pages The Work of Mourning. Eds Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, biographical sketches Kas Saghafi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Acknowledgments Editors’ Introduction: To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning 1 Roland Barthes (1915–80) The Deaths of Roland Barthes (1981; first volume publication in Psyché (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 273–304) 2 Paul de Man (1919–83) In Memoriam: Of the Soul (First French publication in Mémoires: Pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 13–19) 3 Michel Foucault (1926–84) ‘ “To Do Justice to Freud”: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis’ (edited version; 1992; First volume publication in Résistances de la Psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 1996], 89–146) 4 Max Loreau (1928–90) Letter to Francine Loreau 5 Jean-Marie Benoist (1942–90) The Taste of Tears 6 Louis Althusser (1918–90) Text Read at Louis Althusser’s Funeral 7 Edmond Jabès (1912–91) Letter to Didier Cahen 8 Joseph N. Riddel (1931–91) A demi-mot 9 Michel Servière (1914–91) As if There Were an Art of the Signature 10 Louis Marin (1931-92) By Force of Mourning 11 Sarah Kofman (1934–94) . . . . . . . . 12 Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) I’m Going to Have to Wander All Alone 13 Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) Adieu (First French publication, Adieu: A Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997], 11–27) 14 Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) All-Out Friendship. Lyotard and Us Bibliographies, Kas Saghafi

vii 1 31

69

77 91 105 111 119 125 133 139 165 189

197 211 243

2 Writing and Difference. (L’écriture et la différance (Paris: Seuil 1967).) Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 1978. 491

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The Derrida Wordbook Translator’s Introduction 1 Force and Signification 2 Cogito and the History of Madness 3 Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book 4 Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas 5 ‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology 6 La parole soufflée 7 Freud and the Scene of Writing 8 The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation 9 From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve 10 Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences 11 Ellipsis Notes Sources

ix 3 31 64 79 154 169 196 232 251 278 295 301 341

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