Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction 9781472546418, 9780826498939

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Dedicated to the memory of Jacques Derrida

Acknowledgements

This collection of essays stems from a series of papers that were originally presented at the `Counter-Movements: Institutions of Di¡erence' conference, held at the University of Portsmouth in July 2006. The editors would like to thank all those who participated in the event. Thanks, too, to colleagues at Portsmouth University for their help in organizing the conference, in particular Bran Nicol. The conference was sponsored by the British Academy, and by the Centre for European and International Studies Research at Portsmouth University, and this support is gratefully acknowledged.

Contributors

Geo¡rey Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy. He has translated many of Derrida's works into English. He is the author of several books including Lyotard: Writing the Event (1988), Jacques Derrida (with Jacques Derrida, 1991), Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (1995), and Interrupting Derrida (2000). Karyn Ball completed a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at the University of Minnesota in 1999 and is currently Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. She edited a special issue of Cultural Critique (2000) on `Trauma and Its Cultural Aftere¡ects', an issue of Parallax (2005) on `Visceral Reason', a volume of essays entitled Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of A¡ect in and Beyond Psychoanalysis (forthcoming 2007) and, with Susanne Soederberg, a special issue of Cultural Critique on `Cultures of Finance' (forthcoming 2007). Her articles on critical theory, cultural studies, and the Holocaust have appeared in Cultural Critique, Research in Political Economy, Women in German Yearbook, di¡erences, and English Studies in Canada. Her book Disciplining the Holocaust will be published in 2008. A current project focuses on ¢gures of loss in recent cultural theory. Ivan Callus is Lecturer in English at the University of Malta, where he teaches contemporary ¢ction and literary theory. He is the editor of Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)resisitbility of Theory (with Stefan Herbrechter, 2004), and PostTheory, Culture, Criticism (with Stefan Herbrechter, 2004). Stefan Herbrechter is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Analysis at Trinity and All Saints College, UK, where he teaches courses in Cultural Studies, Critical and Cultural Theory and Literature. He is the author of Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity (1999) and the editor of Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and Practice (2002), Discipline and Practice: The (Ir)resisitbility of Theory (with Ivan Callus, 2004), Post-Theory, Culture, Criticism (with Ivan Callus, 2004), Metaphors of Economy (with Nicole Bracker, 2005), Returning (to) Communities (with Michael Higgins, 2006) and The Matrix in Theory (with Myriam Diocaretz, 2006). He has published articles and essays on a number of issues including cosmopolitanism, masculinity, deconstruction and cultural studies,

Contributors

xi

comparative literature, and postmodernism and ¢lm. Together with Ivan Callus he is currently completing the ¢rst monograph for their new series `Critical Posthumanisms' (forthcoming in 2007). His co-translation (with Laurent Milesi) of Jacques Derrida's H.C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . appeared in 2006. Joanna Hodge is Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and is the author of Heidegger and Ethics (1995) and Derrida on Time (2007). She has published numerous articles on the work of Husserl, Levinas, Nancy and Benjamin, and is currently working on an analysis of Husserl's transformation of transcendental aesthetics as a return to Aristotle. Peggy Kamuf is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, USA. In addition to translating many of Derrida's works into English, her publications include Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988), The Division of Literature: or the University in Deconstruction (1997), and Book of Addresses (2005). She is also the author of `Event of Resistance', the introduction to Derrida's Without Alibi (2000). J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Research Professor in Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in the areas of Victorian literature, modern English and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparative literature, and literary theory. Alongside many essays and reviews, Hillis Miller has published numerous books, including Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels, The Disappearance of God, Poets of Reality, The Form of Victorian Fiction, Fiction and Repetition, The Linguistic Moment, The Ethics of Reading, Hawthorne and History, Ariadne's Thread, Illustration, Victorian Subjects, Tropes, Parables, Performatives, Theory Now and Then, New Starts, and Topographies. Among his more recent publications are Reading Narrative, Black Holes, Speech Acts in Literature, Others, and Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. Patience Moll earned her BA in Philosophy from Yale University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine, for which she wrote a dissertation entitled Inscriptions of the Multitude in Hegel, Heidegger and Plato. In addition to teaching as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, she has contributed essays on Hegel, physiognomy, Paul de Man's pedagogy, and catastrophe and dialectic to the volumes Hegel's PhÌnomenologie des Geistes Heute, Otherwise than Philosophy: Deconstruction and Politics, and the forthcoming Tickle Your Catastrophe. Her current project, Literatures of Multiplicity, examines the motifs of embodiment and multiplicity in French, German and British literature and philosophy from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor of English at the University of Portsmouth. His books include Rethinking the University: Leverage and Deconstruction

xii

Contributors

(1999), Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading (2003), and Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (2006). He is also the editor, with Gary Hall, of Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (2007). He has written numerous essays for journals such as Diacritics, New Literary History, Cultural Critique, Textual Practice, New Formations and Parallax, and is currently writing a book on the work of Giorgio Agamben. Tom Toremans is a post-doctoral researcher at the Catholic University of Brussels. He has published on Victorian prose (especially on Thomas Carlyle), Scottish literature and contemporary literary theory. His main interest is in post-Romantic critiques of materialism and aesthetic ideology. William Watkin teaches twentieth-century literature and literary theory at Brunel University. His books include In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (2001) and On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (2004). He is currently writing a new book on British and American postmodern poetry. Allison Weiner is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Yale University, where she is completing a dissertation on ethics, community, and textual interchange in Henry James and Maurice Blanchot, entitled `Refusals of Mastery: Ethical Encounters in Henry James and Maurice Blanchot'. Her research interests include intersections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and French literature, French postwar thought, particularly that of Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, and trauma studies. Samuel Weber is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, Director of Northwestern's Paris Program in Critical Theory and co-Director of its Program in Comparative Literary Studies. He is the author of numerous books including The Legend of Freud (1982/2000), Institution and Interpretation (1987/2001), Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (1991), Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (1996), Theatricality as Medium (2004), and Targets of Opportunity (2005), and is currently completing work on a new book, entitled Benjamin's -abilities. Shane Weller is Reader in Comparative Literarure in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent. His principal research interests lie in the ¢elds of modernism, postmodernism, and literary theory. Two major strands in his recent research have been theories of aesthetic value and the relation between literature and ethics. His publications include A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005), Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006), and Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The Uncanniest of Guests (forthcoming in 2008). He is also the co-editor of a collection of essays on modern French literature and ¢lm entitled The Flesh in the Text (forthcoming in 2007). His current research projects include a book on the twentieth-century reception of Friedrich HÎlderlin and a bilingual variorum edition of Samuel Beckett's Footfalls.

Introduction Allison Weiner and Simon Morgan Wortham

Despite the striking variety and diversity of essays found in this collection, its indebtedness to a speci¢c occasion ^ the event that made it possible ^ is not all that permits such a gathering-together here, or indeed that sanctions the unforeseeable encounter each piece of writing may undergo in relation to every other throughout the pages of this book. Most of the contributions started out as papers to be presented at the `Counter-Movements: Institutions of Di¡erence' conference, held at the University of Portsmouth, England, in July 2006. The event itself aimed to commemorate the life and work of Jacques Derrida, that singularly compelling philosopher whose proli¢c inventiveness and ceaseless adventuring in thought is nevertheless marked, as Geo¡rey Bennington himself notes in this volume, by a `curious kind of coherence . . . for which there is no doubt no good working model'. Derrida died in October 2004, leaving behind him a wealth of writings that touched upon nearly every aspect of the philosophical enterprise, publishing an enormous body of texts that crossed ^ and reinvented ^ a host of disciplinary ¢elds, authoring essays and books which, in brilliantly powerful fashion, read and conversed with an overwhelming number of other writers and thinkers, pushing thought itself into new regions and, indeed, into the realms of new experience. Yet, far from seeking to look backwards in order to promote a shared feeling of nostalgia, loss, lament, melancholia, or even fond recollection (although of course such sentiments inevitably arose among the conference participants, many of whom were lucky enough to count themselves among Derrida's friends), the impetus for the gatheringtogether in Portsmouth of colleagues from a variety of backgrounds around the world came instead from a desire to renew ^ and perhaps even transform ^ our sense of what deconstruction might yet come to mean to us, today and tomorrow. Indeed, to the extent that the atmosphere of the entire conference seemed at times highly charged, inspiring emotionally complex feelings of shared endeavour, strong intellectual purpose, profound individual engagement, and uncertainty of (future) direction ^ the experience, indeed, of a certain event ^ , all those who participated seemed compelled ¢rst and foremost by the question of the claim that deconstruction may yet have upon us, the call it may still come to make, the signi¢cance it might ^ perhaps unexpectedly ^ acquire, today and, for that matter, tomorrow.

2

Encountering Derrida

Throughout the conference, Derrida was to be celebrated for the role he played, onwards from the time of his participation in debates concerning the proposed reform of philosophical training in France during the 1970s and 80s, in setting up a number of national and international counter-institutional initiatives. These included the Greph, the Estates General, and the International College of Philosophy ^ all in di¡erent ways embarked upon as responses to the declining fortunes of philosophical education in France. Further a¢eld, Derrida also played a decisive role in the setting-up of the International Parliament of Writers, which he co-founded alongside Salman Rushdie, Edouard Glissant, and Pierre Bourdieu. This was an initiative closely connected to Derrida's vision of a network of cities of asylum, and very much related to his own ideas about the urgency ^ and yet complexity ^ of a new international politics of refuge and hospitality. Derrida was also closely involved in founding the Jan Hus Association, whose intention was to defend the rights of dissident Czech writers. However, what inspired the call for conference papers, and indeed many of the responses it attracted, was not merely a desire to answer as decisively as possible those long-standing critiques of deconstruction's elitism, narrow textualism or apoliticism. Those who participated in the event were also called to think about the contre in Derrida more widely, not just in terms of its a¤liation to Derrida's own thinking about counter-institutions in their numerous concrete guises. Rather, it might be better to say that together we raised ^ and raided ^ the question of the contre in terms that we hoped would deepen our understanding of the conditions of possibility and the speci¢c force of such potential institutional set-ups. The `counter' or contre, then, became for us a kind of token for thinking `counter-wise' (as Peggy Kamuf puts it here) about the complex movement of deconstructive thought, and the very singular strategies, negotiations or actions in which it might result, not least in the `here-now'. In a later text, Derrida professed his love for this word contre: I would like to say a word about the word `counter' in countersignature, that can be an adverb and/or a preposition. The word `contre', counter or against, can equally and at the same time mark both opposition, contrariety, contradiction and proximity, near-contact. One can be `against' the person one opposes (one's `declared enemy', for example), and `against' the person next to us, the one who is `right against' us, whom we touch or with whom we are in contact. The word `contre' possesses these two inseparable meanings of proximity and vis-a©-vis, on the one hand, and opposition, on the other. Clearly in countersignature, the word has the meaning of proximity and vis-a©-vis. It is what is facing us, beside us. We shall of course come back to this double meaning of the word `contre' that summarizes what is at stake in this discussion . . . If I might add a very quick note, before returning to the text, I would say that, even beyond my love for the word and the abyssal thing called `countersignature', it happens that for a long time I have `cultivated' or `allowed to be cultivated' in numerous texts the formidable ambiguity of this `contre', as

Introduction

3

determined in the French idiom. The word `contretemps', for example, designating exhibition less than time-lag, anachrony; the word `contrepartie' [counterpart], that marks not so much opposition as exchange, the equivalence of a gift and countergift; the word `contre-exemple' [counterexample] that, like an exception, challenges the generality of the law. All these words recur in many of my texts, often to designate the relation between me and me, as close as possible to the authenticity, the authentication of my own signature. Here and there, I have had occasion to say that I am at the wrong time [a© contretemps], or that I am my own counterexample or counterpart.1 Given the fact that this word `counter' has attracted sparse commentary in scholarly works seeking to evaluate deconstruction's key critical vocabulary, some might ¢nd it surprising that Derrida wished to identify his entire project (or series of projects) with what in another text he calls the `permanent motif ' of the counter-institution.2 If, in the above quotation, it is the `counter' that draws as close as possible to Derrida's own signature, the former term is not reducible to the status of a mere adjunct, a part-term of the countersignature itself (the latter being a celebrated Derridean `concept'). Instead, the `counter' is ^ as Derrida's own re£ections abundantly illustrate ^ singularly reproducible in a variety of other settings, all of which ^ despite a certain `curious kind of coherence' ^ retain an irreducible element of idiomaticity, trenchantly resisting subsumption under any single master term. It is, indeed, precisely in this sense that the counter perhaps designates, for Derrida, `the relation between me and me, as close as possible to the authenticity, the authentication of my own signature'. Close and yet closer still, yes ^ but by dint of a movement away, another movement at any rate, movement of another kind, between me and me. And it is this thinking ^ the thinking to which the contre, like deconstruction, calls us ^ that gives rise to wholly variegated outgrowths of Derrida's `signature', such as are found in the several contributions to this book. Thus it is, however, that that the force, value, currency or rhythm of the `counter' requires careful thinking, of the kind that may only derive from the perspective of the contre itself. This contre, as Derrida himself notes, idiomatically forces together ^ and yet refuses to fuse ^ proximity or the vis-a©-vis, on the one hand, and a certain kind of contrariety, on the other. Here, in the vicinity of this unstintingly non-static and non-self-identical contre, one is always and irreducibly moving `with-against': `with-against' institutions (`[i]n abstract and general terms, what remains constant in my thinking . . . is indeed a critique of institutions, but one that sets out not from a wild and spontaneous pre- or noninstitution, but rather from counter-institutions. I do not think there is, or should be, the ``non-institutional''. I am always torn between the critique of institutions and the dream of an other institution that, in an interminable process, will come to replace institutions that are oppressive, violent and inoperative'3); but also `with-against' literature, literature as institution (`[n]o more than philosophy or science, literature is not an institution among others; it is at once institution and counter-institution, placed at a distance from the institution,

4

Encountering Derrida

at the angle that the institution makes with itself in order to take a distance from itself, by itself [s'e¨carter d'elle-meªme]'4); or, for that matter, `with-against' philosophy, philosophy in its institution (`the philosophical as such, which is not meta-institutional, is nevertheless a very paradoxical institution, whose space has to be administrated without a symmetrical contract';5 `[h]ow is it that philosophy ¢nds itself inscribed, rather than inscribing itself, within a space that it seeks but is unable to order? . . . How is one to name the structure of this space?'6). One such possible response to this question of how we might name this `space' which stands both apart from and within the (dis)order of the institution may be found in Shane Weller's ` ``Rather than Nothing'': Derrida, Literature, and the Resistance of Nihilism', an early essay in this collection. Tracing a series of misreadings which produced the earliest charges of deconstruction as a nihilistic practice, charges which continue today to question the value of deconstruction's ethico-political interventions, Weller examines deconstruction's response to such attacks as a `resistance of nihilism', a phrase which must be read as operating under the law of both a subjective and objective genitive in order to understand the full logic of deconstruction's refusal to call itself nihilistic. But it is neither a simple case of a¤rmation or denial, and one must also consider deconstruction's de¢nition of itself not only against philosophy and literature, but within these `strange institutions' as well. Here it is the name of literature which emerges as the event-horizon of one such possible `space' of deconstruction, one possible future which bears the legacy of that which it counters, and thus names within itself. In opening the volume, meanwhile, Geo¡rey Bennington's `Foundations' begins with his own desire to discover some point of founding or grounding, a moment of originary insight for Derrida's thought. This desire, however, forces Bennington to recollect that all of Derrida's thinking disputes a `simple' conception of the `origin': that is, `origin' construed in terms of an original presence found at some indivisible point (in other words, the metaphysical conception of `origin'). This metaphysical construal is challenged by Derrida's insight that such a concept of `origin' was only ever the product of instituted traces ^ or of what he himself calls `writing'. And this insight concerning origins leads us towards what is perhaps most fundamental in Derrida's thought, namely a thinking about the founding gesture ^ the very institution ^ of institutions. Here, whether one is talking about the institution of language or of the university, it is the pre-legal violence of the founding act that leaves its mark, opening up a strange diremption within institutions between the desire to conserve and defend an established set-up, and an unavoidable exposure to what is unpredictable. Thus, the institution su¡ers an auto-immune disorder which leaves it caught undecidably between life and death ^ although in the case of L'Universite¨ sans condition, this indelible scar of the institution's institution leads to the chance of a¤rmation, and ultimately to the possibility of life over, after or in death: in other words, survival. Mining the resources of deconstruction, further essays included in the volume extend this concentration on what, for Bennington, is the critical question of

Introduction

5

institutions. For example, Peggy Kamuf 's `Accounterability' traces the notion of `accountability', especially in its favoured use lately in US discourses about higher education. Advocates of measures that would make universities more `accountable' promise to put an end to `faith-based' evaluation of the relative worth of universities, which is read here as the attempt to sever the relation between numbers and narrative, accountancy and recounting, calculation and incalculability. Turning to Derrida's analyses of testimony, the essay emphasizes the irreducible place of belief `as soon as one enters into relation with the other', thus, in every testimony as distinguished from proof. Kamuf concludes by insisting on the testimonial and therefore `faith-based' nature of any testing of the value of a university education. Meanwhile, in J. Hillis Miller's essay, ` ``Don't Count Me In'': Derrida's Refraining', the injunction found in `I Have a Taste for the Secret' ^ `Don't Count Me In' ^ is taken as perhaps the most striking expression anywhere in his writings of Derrida's refusal to be included as a paid-up member `in any community, group, or institution (counter or otherwise) whatsoever', as Miller puts it. However, while it perhaps attests to the (testimonial) singularity or idiomaticity of the deconstructive intervention, this rejection of belonging in any simpler sense needs to be treated with care, not least in terms of its rhetorical sophistication. The complicated histories of Derrida's institutional and political activism ^ including, as Miller himself notes, Derrida's involvement with an array of counter-institutional initiatives ^ warn us not to confuse this injunction with a straightforward demand to `count me out', if that phrase were understood in too basic a fashion. Miller's essay remains attentive to this complication, to the extent that it traces in Derrida's writings precisely a `with-against' relationship to institutions of all kinds, including academic ones, and furthermore to the traditions of philosophy as an academic discipline. Thus, Derrida's thought is always accompanied by a style or gesture of refraining which nevertheless makes possible ^ and urgent ^ the ethical relation to the other, however impossible this may be. Lastly, Samuel Weber's `Reading Over a Globalized World' engages with the question of the institution by charting the signi¢cance philosophy has enjoyed in France for more than two centuries, and in particular examining the threats posed to French philosophical education in recent decades. For Weber, the continuing value of philosophy might be less in its defence of a homogeneous and universally valid national or ideological programme, than in its response to a heterogeneity that resists such an ideal. (And, indeed, such an insistence perhaps resonates with Miller's emphasis on an ethically oriented style of refraining.) Indeed, in the midst of debates about the possible decline of the very concept of `nation', Weber explores how the current use of `globalization' ^ a word or name about which Derrida had real misgivings ^ tends to e¡ace the incommensurable singularity often associated with the word `world'. That the history of words is however always more complex than any individual use is demonstrated through a reading of scenes from Chaplin's ¢lm, The Great Dictator, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, both of which suggest other memories, and potentialities, of the word `globe'. The survival of a

6

Encountering Derrida

quasi-discipline such as comparative literary studies in a `globalized world' may be welcomed, argues Weber, to the extent that it inherits `the task of the philosopher', which, as Derrida describes it, `resides speci¢cally in defending a certain imperative of ``universalisation'' ' while at the same time remembering the `e¡ects of inequality' and `hegemony'. From this perspective, comparative literary studies, in its intersection with the `task of the philosopher', might then concern itself with a certain `opening to the world' ^ one in which the levelling and discriminatory e¡ects of `globalization' are powerfully countered. If literature indeed emerges as the event-horizon of one possible `space' of ^ or for ^ deconstruction, then `Counterchange: Derrida's Poetry', by William Watkin, also recognizes the complex series of movements that produce the singularity of an event, in this case also a literary one, that of the poetic, out of `familiar conventions', if these conventions are invoked only to be unsettled. It is not, however, that Derrida continues a seemingly conventional, postHeideggerean valorization of poetry in order to leave behind the impasse of the end of Western metaphysics, a philosophical tradition which also has been accused of reducing itself to poetry in the attempt to do so. Poetry and philosophy are not exchanged commensurably, but rather continue to mark a relation of their own, once again, `strange institution' together. For the highly inventive term `counterchange' has to do with a kind of textual interchange, one thing for, but also against, another, as Watkin shows through his own series of counterchanges, readings that perform not only textual interplays of philosophy and the poetic, but also mark out, quite literally, a new space for deconstructive work to come. Thus, to return to the question of Derrida's highly sophisticated institutional `politics', as perhaps one measure of his thinking of the `other' (a thinking that deeply informs his involvement with counter-institutions internationally), it is therefore crucial that we seek to observe this `with-against' movement in the broadest possible way. In other words, one must try to think contre Derrida, in the complex sense this phrase now begins to acquire. Not only is such an e¡ort evident in the essays that this book collects together (Derrida is placed `withagainst' Marx, Nietzsche, Blanchot, de Man, Badiou, Agamben, and others; and his writings are interrogated `with-against' various understandings of the disparate ¢elds of philosophy, poetry, and language, and so forth). More than this, the demand made of us by this contre, Derrida's contre, profoundly complicates any stance of simple `opposition' to deconstruction itself. It is from the marginalia of a discussion on materiality that Tom Toremans' `Disagreement as (Possible) Event, Derrida contre de Man' takes issue, thinking over the ways in which this concept has seemingly divided deconstruction (deconstruction contre deconstruction) between Derrida and de Man. In reading through Derrida's acts of reading de Man, Toremans locates (possible) moments of diversion in some of the founding texts of deconstruction, thinking through strategies of the contre, then, in relation to notions of inheritance and legacy within the discourse of deconstruction itself. It is to these themes that Allison Weiner's essay also speaks, tracing the ways in which inheritance

Introduction

7

leaves its own complicated burden of betrayal and ¢delity, belonging and interruption. `The Counterpromise: Derrida on the Instant of Blanchot's Death' o¡ers a reading of Derrida's memorial text following Blanchot, in which a promise Derrida makes to remain faithful to Blanchot's legacy reveals a series of intricate moves and calculations meant to reckon with the di¤culty of pledging ¢delity in the ¢rst place, particularly `after' a friend. Weiner explores themes of friendship, mourning, and death both within Derrida's memorial text and throughout his larger oeuvre, thus contemplating the ways in which countersignatures, and `counterpromises' in this case, allow us to open up legacies of critical thinking within deconstruction to future inheritance. On the subject of a complex and divided inheritance, Joanna Hodge's essay, `Derrida's Transcendental Contraband: Impossible Acts', develops the suggestion made by Derrida in Glas concerning a structure in common between, on the one hand, an inheritance of transcendental philosophy, and, on the other, the operations of contraband, the double movement of smuggled goods. Here, the conceptual work of determinacy is undone and displaced by a ¢ctional work of the imagination, manufacturing connections which are not to be secured in any other fashion. The hypothesis put forward by Hodge, then, is that a notion of transcendental contraband might itself be fabricated as a description of the link joining and disjoining the enquiries of Edmund Husserl and Immanuel Kant to those of Jacques Derrida. The `impossible acts' of Hodge's subtitle are the pure acts of intuition, invoked by Husserl in the articulation of his theory of meaning. This notion of an impossible act is then redeployed by Derrida in the registers of the impossible acts of promising and, subsequently, in the analyses of forgiving. Karyn Ball also considers the impact of legacies, this time namely those of Marxism, on deconstruction, and what, in turn, deconstructive practices have meant in the aftermath of Western violence and injustice. In `The Entropics of Discourse: The ``Materiality'' of A¡ect Between Marx and Derrida', Ball seeks to account for recent demands, including her own, for a more `material' a¡ect in critical receptions of trauma, a `value' lacking due perhaps to deconstruction's refusal of a concrete, direct referentiality and the ensuing `entropy' that such a refusal causes: a pervasive melancholic attitude marked by closed economies of meaning, without potential for change. Ball traces notions of the material from Marx through Derrida, and in so doing reveals the ways in which the academic institution has much to do with critical anxieties over a loss of a¡ective value. Thus we begin to see how deconstruction's encounter with the academy may actually allow us to think against the institutions we have inherited, even as much as we must continue to work within them. A similar attention to institutions marks Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter's `The Grammar of Deconstruction', in which a performative series of moves and gestures disrupt everything we may have been taught about the impossible encounter of grammar and deconstruction. It may be easy enough to make claims towards a `deconstruction of grammar', but if deconstruction has refused the idea of a coherent, uni¢ed system of rules such as grammar entails, how then does one begin to account for the loaded implications of Callus and Herbrechter's title?

8

Encountering Derrida

The authors deftly show, however, that to think through this complicated promise of their title is to in fact think through new ideas about grammar, and indeed, deconstruction itself. Callus and Herbrechter remind us that it is in revisiting what seems most counter-intuitive to deconstruction that we might begin to think of what is most possible for its futures. Over the past decade or so, a number of key European critical thinkers have emerged (or at any rate have gained a degree of recognition in the AngloAmerican world), whose intellectual signi¢cance and direction has in part developed on the basis of an implicit critique of Derrida's work. Put di¡erently, the importance of these ¢gures cannot be separated from the fact that their thought frequently proceeds on the strength of forceful reconsiderations of the deconstructive problematic as it has been pursued by Derrida himself. One could count among their number Slavoj Z­iz­ek, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, all of whom now enjoy strong critical interest. Points of engagement with Derrida in the work of these writers (sometimes explicit, sometimes less so) range from ethics to ontology, from philosophy to politics, from religion and messianism to language, literature and theory. This gives rise to a central question. Has Derrida been superseded by a more recent (or, at any rate, more recently acknowledged) generation of thinkers, all of whom seek to challenge deconstruction's various conceptions of language, literature, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, politics, di¡erence, the other, and the future? Are we in the midsts of an epochal turning away from deconstruction, not simply on the part of those who wish to proclaim the end of `theory', but within the movement of continental philosophy itself ? Or do the engagements with Derrida point not so much towards the passing of deconstruction as a critical `trend' or `fashion' (as Z­iz­ek has it) and, on the contrary, rea¤rm the encounter with Derrida as itself part of the very experience of contemporary thought? It is to such questions that the ¢nal essay in this volume speaks. Patience Moll's `Dislocating Derrida: Badiou, the Unthought and the Justice of Multiplicity' starts from Badiou's claim that Derrida's work is emblematic of the general trend of a `postmodern philosophy' which denies the possibility of historical `greatness', and thus promotes indi¡erence, and even guilt, in its impossible, irreducible multiplicity. But Moll, in reading through a complex series of other `dismissals', dislocations and dispersals in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and ¢nally Plato, performs her own dismissal of Badiou, allowing for an ethics of plurality to emerge in the many detours of Western thought leading up to Derrida and Badiou, and back again. The idea that Moll must ultimately locate Badiou's claims against Derrida, even as she dislocates them, in order to trace this complicated lineage is, of course, exemplary of the way in which thinking contre Derrida is necessarily to think with, albeit through many turns. This volume thus brings together a number of international scholars working at the forefront of new studies on Derrida, all of whom are engaged in the most up-to-date rereading of deconstruction's vast body of texts, often producing surprising new accounts of this challenging critical thinker alongside signi¢cant engagements with other seminal ¢gures, both of the recent and more distant

Introduction

9

past, as well as of the present. Indeed, reinterpreting Derrida for a new generation, what these essays do share in common is an unwillingness to accept received notions about deconstruction, notions which perhaps all too frequently inform those critiques of Derrida's writings found in the work of some of the intellectual ¢gures mentioned above. In di¡erent ways, then, the various contributions to this book all re£ect complexly on ^ in other words, they rethink and transform ^ the contre relation to (and of ) deconstruction.

Chapter 1

Foundations Geo¡rey Bennington

Since Jacques Derrida died in October 2004, during what for me has been a nameless process of mourning, or rather of melancholia, `militant melancholia' as I ¢rst called it, of half-mourning or demi-deuil as he often said1 (that demi-deuil that would traditionally begin one year after the loss, that one year being the period of grand deuil ) ^ since that day in 2004, I have found myself thrown back to something like my own `childhood memories' of Jacques, and more especially of my `early' reading of what one might call his `early' work.2 Not for the ¢rst time, I have been tempted (tempted perhaps almost in a religious sense), tempted by the thought that somewhere, if I looked and worked hard enough, I would ¢nd the starting point or the origin of his thought. In the curious kind of coherence that marks Jacques Derrida's thinking, for which there is no doubt as yet no good working model, no satisfactory representation, it is as though I were searching for an origin-point, a point of founding or grounding, a moment of originary insight in which Derrida would have seen, if only perhaps in some embryonic or otherwise undeveloped form, what was to come, a moment that would provide the foundation for an edi¢ce of thought, or perhaps be the ¢rst call for that `institution of reading' called for, according to Jacques Derrida, by every text,3 and be simultaneously the beginning of the structure of legacy and inheritance that he taught us (especially in Spectres de Marx) is just part of being, and that has come more starkly into view since his death. Such a (more or less lucidly desperate) search for an origin rapidly ¢nds of course that Derrida's `originary' insight, if there were such a thing, would be something like that there is no origin (and therefore, perhaps, no founding insight). Put more correctly, Derrida says that there is complexity at the origin. From his very early Master's thesis on Husserl, in which he writes of an `originary dialectic', and an `originary synthesis', it seems that his thinking turns around the thought that the origin is not simple, and that a non-simple origin has immeasurable consequences for thought. One of the many ways in which these consequences appear throughout his work is in a thinking about institutions, and more especially about the founding gesture of institutions, the very instituting or the institution of institutions.

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Let me ¢rst brie£y establish the argument about complex origins. This argument is, as they say, `well known', but it is nonetheless often misrepresented, as for example a proposal or project or programme. Derrida's most general argument is that what he calls `metaphysics' attempts to derive complexity from simplicity, and more especially from an origin which always comes down to some form of presence. Even if we now ¢nd ourselves in a situation of complexity, and even of negativity and evil, that situation has arisen (so metaphysics says) on the basis of a presence that (perhaps only ideally, in some sense of `ideal') came before it as its origin. Very di¡erent stories can then be told about how the original presence or plenitude came to fail, or fall, or be lost, but they all share a common structure. And this `archaeological' dimension to metaphysics is often (probably always) mirrored by a `teleological' dimension in which current complexity can be (perhaps only ideally again, in some sense of `ideal') directed towards some ¢nal, perhaps redemptive, state of presence. This archaeo-teleological schema is in fact de¢nitive of what Derrida means in general by `metaphysics'. Derrida wants to argue that any such `presence' is not really originary at all, but at best a secondary e¡ect that must emerge from an `earlier' state that he famously calls (among other names) di¡e¨rance. Simple, present origins are always in fact projected (or, rather, retro-jected) on the basis of a situation in which they are already lost: retro-jecting them as origins is an attempt to overlook or avoid the fact they never really come ¢rst, but are only said to come ¢rst from a situation that precedes that retro-jective saying or naming of that origin. The supposedly simple and present origin itself has an origin in something else, and that something else, the origin's origin, is not an origin in the normal sense at all, because it cannot be simple or simply present. For many of us, the most perspicuous way to think about this `earlier' moment, what precedes the origin, is in terms of the trace, which Derrida most clearly develops in his reading of Saussure, but which he famously says in the Grammatology combines in one and the same possibility, `and without it being possible to separate them other than by abstraction, the structure of the relation to the other, the movement of temporalisation, and language as writing'.4 Broadly speaking, what Derrida is able to show is that Saussure's insight concerning language as a `system of di¡erences without positive terms' entails a thinking of identity in which any element in a plurality is identi¢able as the element that it is only insofar as it in some way bears the `trace' of all the elements that it is not. This `trace-structure' means that apparently `present' elements are never simply present (because to be what they are they are necessarily bearing the trace of all the `absent' elements that they are not) and that the apparently `absent' elements cannot be simply absent, in that their `absence' is somehow present (but present as absence, as a trace of absence, precisely) as a condition of the apparently `present' elements being `present' at all. This complication of presence and absence, derived here from a description of language, but rapidly proposed by Derrida as a matrix for thinking about e¡ects of identity in general, is what justi¢es Derrida's claim that

12

Encountering Derrida

di¡e¨rance precedes even what Heidegger calls the ontico-ontological di¡erence, and indeed Being more generally, and is what will give rise in his later work to the thematics of ghosts and haunting, and the more sweeping proposal, in Specters of Marx, to rethink ontology as hauntology. The trace, which allows things to emerge as apparently `present', while being itself never simply present, is in this sense more originary that anything one might have wanted to think was at the origin, and is thus the origin and possibility of the origin itself. The trace is the origin of the origin. Derrida is quick to point out, however, that `trace' cannot in fact be thought of in traditional terms as an origin, precisely because `origin' has traditionally entailed just the value of presence that we have seen `trace' disrupt. The trace is `originary' in such a radical sense that it disrupts the very concept of an origin. At the origin of the origin is something non-originary, what Derrida sometimes refers to as a kind of radical or absolute past which was never present. This radical or absolute past is `past' in a sense that the normal sense of `past' (as past present) cannot capture, and so is arguably in excess of the very concept of time itself, at least insofar as time is thought by metaphysics, or insofar as time itself is (as Derrida at least once famously suggests) an irremediably metaphysical concept.5 And a similar (though not entirely symmetrical) argument can be developed around the future, so that just as the thought of the trace gives rise to an `absolute past', it also secretes a kind of `absolute future' (what Derrida sometimes, often in political contexts, calls an a©-venir rather than an avenir) which never will be present. I shall return to this strange kind of futurity a little later. These points are now no doubt somewhat familiar, even if `familiarity' is just what they most obviously and immediately unsettle. The trace can never really be familiar, whence the importance of rehearsing these points, each time. It is, however, striking in our context here that in the course of the very dense and di¤cult pages from Of Grammatology in which he lays out the thought of the trace, Derrida already has recourse to the concept of institution. This is perhaps not so very surprising, in that Saussure, who is of course Derrida's main reference in this discussion, already has some quite complicated and interesting things to say about language as an institution, and even as a `pure' institution, by which he seems to mean that language is, precisely, an originary institution that makes all others possible, the institution to begin and end all institutions, the institution without which there could be no other institutions. (This is what separates Saussure's view of language from the kind of traditional conventionalism with which it is sometimes confused.) Once language is up and running, as it were, other institutions can come into being by conventional or contractual means: but the institution of language itself is radical, and `pure' in Saussure's sense, in that it cannot have come about this way ^ the traditional conventionalist account of the origin of language (according to which people at some point agree on what words to use for what things or what ideas) must in fact presuppose a language already in existence, a problem which Saussure recognizes when he says that I do not consent to the language-system within which I speak, but receive it like the law.6

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Saussure's own remarks about the institutionality of language are complex and, not unusually, a little inconsistent. Let me cite a few of these comments, not only to show Saussure struggling to isolate the speci¢city of language in this respect, but also because his re£ections have recourse to a political and juridical language that will be of interest to us in a moment. For example (all emphasis mine): . . . for Whitney, who assimilates language to a social institution just like any other, it is by chance, for simple reasons of convenience, that we use the vocal apparatus as the instrument of language: men might just as well have chosen gesture and employ visual instead of acoustic images. No doubt this thesis is too absolute; language is not a social institution in all points like others; what is more, Whitney goes too far when he says that our choice fell by chance on the vocal organs; they really were in some ways imposed on us by nature. But on the essential point the American linguist seems to us to be right: language is a convention, and the nature of the sign agreed upon is indi¡erent. The question of the vocal apparatus is thus secondary in the problem of language.7 [The language system] is the social part of language, external to the individual, who alone can neither create it nor modify it; it exists only in virtue of a kind of contract passed between the members of the community.8 With respect to the linguistic community which uses it, [the signi¢er] is not free, it is imposed . . . the mass itself cannot exercise its sovereignty [note this reference to sovereignty, which will return as a problem] on a single word; it is bound to the language system as it is.9 Language can therefore no longer be assimilated to a contract pure and simple, and it is precisely from this angle that the linguistic sign is particularly interesting to study; for if one wants to show that the law admitted in a collectivity is something one su¡ers and not a rule freely consented to, it is indeed language that o¡ers the most striking proof of that.10 Language . . . is at every moment everybody's business; dispersed in a mass and handled by that mass, it is something that all individuals use all day. On this point, one can establish no comparison between language and other institutions. The prescriptions of a code, the rituals of a religion, maritime signals, etc., only ever occupy a certain number of individuals at once and for a limited period; in language, on the contrary, everyone participates at every moment, and this is why it ceaselessly undergoes the in£uence of all. This capital fact su¤ces to show the impossibility of a revolution. Language of all social institutions is the one that o¡ers the least purchase for initiatives.11 The other human institutions ^ customs, laws, etc. ^ are all founded, to diverse degrees, on the natural relations of things; there is in them a necessary ¢t between the means employed and the ends pursued. [. . .] Language, on the contrary, is in no way limited in the choice of its means, for one cannot

14

Encountering Derrida

see what would prevent any given idea being associated with any given sequence of sounds. To bring out clearly that language is a pure institution, Whitney quite rightly insisted on the arbitrary character of signs, and in so doing has placed linguistics on its true axis. But he did not go far enough and did not see that this arbitrary character radically separates language from all other institutions.12 In Derrida's terms, this `pure' institutionality of language shows up in the thought that language, which we have already seen to entail the trace, consists in instituted traces. As instituted trace, language will, in due course, be better described, says Derrida, as writing, in part just because of this institutional character: `If ``writing'' signi¢es inscription and primarily durable institution of a sign (and this is the only irreducible nucleus of the concept of writing), then writing in general covers the whole ¢eld of linguistic signs'.13 It is no doubt this radically inaugural or `pure' sense of institution that leads to Derrida's later, more thematized re£ections on institutions and their institutionality. For example, in `Mochlos or the Con£ict of the Faculties', commenting more especially on the institution of the University: The question of the right of right, of the founding or foundation of right is not a juridical question. And the reply to it can be neither simply legal nor simply illegal, neither simply theoretical or constative nor simply practical or performative. It can take place neither inside nor outside the University that the tradition has bequeathed to us. This response and this responsibility as to the basis [fondement] can only take place in terms of foundation. Now the foundation of a right is not more juridical or legitimate than the foundation of a University is a university or intra-university event. If there can be no pure concept of the University, if there can be within the University no pure and purely rational concept of the University, this is quite simply, to say it a little elliptically [. . .] because the University is founded. An event of foundation cannot simply be understood in the logic of what it founds. The foundation of a right is not a juridical event. The origin of the principle of reason, which is also implied at the origin of the University, is not rational, the foundation of a University institution is not a university event. The anniversary of a foundation might be, not the foundation itself. Although it is not simply illegal, such a foundation does not yet come under the internal legality it institutes. Although nothing appears more philosophical than the foundation of a philosophical institution ^ be it the University, or a school or department of philosophy ^ the foundation of the philosophical institution as such cannot be already strictly philosophical.14 Or again, in Force de loi: The origin of authority, the foundation or basis [ fondement], the positing of the law being unable by de¢nition to lean ¢nally on anything but

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themselves, they are themselves a violence without basis. Which does not mean that they are unjust in themselves, in the sense of being `illegal' or `illegitimate'. They are neither legal nor illegal in their foundational moment. They exceed the opposition of the founded and the unfounded, as of any foundationalism or anti-foundationalism. Even if the success of performatives that found a right (for example and it is more than an example, of a State guaranteeing a right) ^ even if that success presupposes prior conditions and conventions (for example in the national or international space), the same `mystical' limit will reemerge at the supposed origin of those conditions, rules or conventions and of their dominant interpretation.15 This paradox of the foundation, whereby the act of foundation (the act of instituting the institution, the institution of the institution) cannot ever quite be understood within the logic of what is founded by the act of foundation, opens the institution from the start to an ongoing relation to the violence in and against which the foundation took place, so that in a Hobbesian, Rousseauian, or even Kantian view of politics, the founding contract that is supposed to get us out of the intolerable violence of the state of nature would, on this reading, remain marked or haunted by the violence of the context from which it supposedly emerged. The pre-legal, a-legal if not yet strictly illegal, violence of the founding act, whereby the institution comes to be, persists as something like the `essence' of the political as such, or at least something without which there would be no politics or institution, but only nature. The full measure of this paradox16 can be gauged from the thought that the founding act itself is neither legal nor illegal, just because it precedes the institutional law to which it gives rise, but the repetition of that act (which no institution can do without, if only because of the analytic relation between law and repetition17), just because it takes place within the institution thus violently and pre-legally founded, is both legal and yet illegal, con¢rming the legality of the institution, the legitimacy of its institution, just as it shows up its illegitimacy. Whence the fact that institutions indeed are institutions (and not just nature), and whence too the fact that institutions are constantly subject to contestation, modi¢cation and overthrow, or to the very violence against which they were instituted in the ¢rst place, i.e. what we usually call `nature' (but that in the tradition has other names, such as `civil war' in Hobbes). Institutions by de¢nition mark a break with nature, yet insofar as their founding moment can never be fully integrated and institutionalized, but remains as a kind of traumatic memory of their nonlegal foundation, they remain haunted by a nature they have never quite left behind (I want to say [I'm not sure if Derrida would agree] that that's just what nature is18), and which can always re-emerge to destroy them (this is a constant theme in Rousseau's political thought, for example, where the very fragile cohesion of the State is always on the verge of breaking and dispersing back into nature). Institutions thus `live' in a kind of constitutive dissension or even permanent revolution that a¡ects every institutional act or event imaginable, and explains their constitutive shiftiness and inevitable tendency to corruption.

16

Encountering Derrida

Institutions, we might say, are `corrupted' and made fragile from the start by the violence of their institution, of their foundation, which is also however the only measure of their legitimacy. This is why, among other things, it is possible for language to change and new things to get said, even though the institution of language tends also to secrete sub-institutions (academies, dictionaries, etc.) the job of which is to attempt to prevent, or at least to restrain, change. Just as every act or event that takes place within an institutional framework both con¢rms the institution within which it takes place and simultaneously opens up the perspective of that institution's demise ( just because it is an act or event, and as such not quite totally within the grasp of the institution that nonetheless made it possible), so every act of parole (in Saussure's sense) both con¢rms the langue which makes it possible (so that everything I say here in English cannot fail to con¢rm the English language in its Englishness, so to speak) and, insofar as it is an event at all, makes something new happen, and however minutely changes the very langue it also con¢rms. This disconcerting logic opens up a strange diremption within institutions between what it is tempting to call a transcendental dimension (the apparently immutable practices of the institution itself, its capacity to repeat itself or reproduce itself as itself, its tendency to acquire a kind of timeless or immemorial quality, whereby things are done a certain way just because that is the way they have `always' been done, and nobody can do anything about it), and what it is tempting (but certainly inadequate) to call an empirical dimension, whereby the transcendental is both con¢rmed and challenged by the events that come about, always with a measure of contingency, and without which the institution (which insofar as it is not natural in the usual sense, is always, ex hypothesi, historical) would not exist. This `empirical' or contingent dimension is then what Derrida would call the chance of the institution, and simultaneously the constant threat to its survival, the permanent possibility of its ruin. I think I can show this in political thinking by again taking the example of Rousseau. According to Rousseau's theory of the social contract, the `sovereign' produced by the founding contract itself is necessarily perfect: `The Sovereign, by the very fact of being, is always all it should be' (Oeuvres comple©tes, III, p. 363), but in fact the social body as merely or purely sovereign is also atemporal and powerless, living in an atomistic succession of pure present moments, unable to establish any temporal link to past or future because in so doing it would compromise its sovereignty. (This is, incidentally, the point at which what Rousseau calls `sovereignty' looks surprisingly similar to what Bataille calls `sovereignty'.) The purity of the institution is its sovereignty, but that sovereignty is nothing (least of all an institution) unless it ¢nds a way to exist and maintain itself in time. In Rousseau's terms, this means that it must give itself a government in order to be sovereign, but as Rousseau shows remorselessly and rigorously, the government, which cannot simply coincide with the Sovereign in some kind of radical democracy (a people of gods, says Rousseau, would govern itself democratically, but that would be a `government without government' and the same

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as no politics at all)19 ^ the government cannot fail to usurp the sovereignty of the sovereign and lead to the eventual ruin of the social body itself. The institution can interpose between itself and this inevitable ruin any number of intermediate bodies, but the most that can be hoped is that they can delay what is an absolutely inevitable process. The outcome of that process is a return to a (`natural') violence that the social body was formed to guard against. Rousseau says this, in what I'm tempted to describe as a `fabulous' account of the demise of the institution: The Sovereign People wills by itself, and by itself it does what it wants. Soon the inconvenience of this concourse of all in everything forces the Sovereign People to charge some of its members with the execution of its wishes. After having ful¢lled their charge and reported on it, these O¤cers return to the common equality. Soon these charges become frequent, and eventually permanent. Insensibly a body is formed that acts always. A body that acts always cannot report on every act: it only reports on the principal ones; soon it gets to the point of reporting on none. The more active the acting principle, the more it enervates the willing principle. Yesterday's will is assumed to be today's; whereas yesterday's act does not dispense one from acting today. Finally the inaction of the willing power subjects it to the executive power; the latter gradually renders its actions independent, and soon its will: instead of acting for the power that wills, it acts on it. There then remains in the State only an acting power, the executive. The executive power is mere force, and where mere force reigns the State is dissolved. (Lettres e¨crites de la montagne, in Oeuvres comple©tes III, p. 815) Of course we are not obliged to accept the narrative-historical account that Rousseau gives of this process on its own terms: rather the point would be to recognize that it is a structural description in which the aspects that we have isolated are clearly visible. Similarly, I have tried elsewhere to show in some detail how a similar problem besets Kant's political theory, even as Kant is arguably more lucid than most about the violent nature of the foundation of the state. In the Doctrine of Right, part of the doctrinal text Metaphysics of Morals, Kant recognizes that the factual origin of the state is most probably (almost certainly) a violent one, and to that extent marked with illegitimacy: but transcendentally speaking, the state must be considered legitimate, just because sovereignty is necessarily right, as we saw Rousseau saying. (The form of the argument about sovereignty's necessary rightness is disconcertingly simple: to argue that the sovereign was illegitimate or wrong would imply adopting a position of sovereignty above sovereignty, which is either contradictory (it would mean that there were two sovereigns), or else resolves into the same necessary rightness at the level of the `new' sovereign. Sovereignty is not so easily escapable, and indeed, as Spinoza points out, it is part of sovereignty to interpret sovereignty and decide what it is.) Kant's solution to the problem is to say that subjects must therefore not even inquire as to the origin of the state, in that any investigations they might undertake would tend

18

Encountering Derrida

to undermine the transcendental legitimacy of the sovereign just by insinuating that the sovereignty of the sovereign might have been founded on an act of violence (rather than on an act of contractual agreement, which is the transcendental truth of the matter). The factual truth of the origin of the state must therefore remain a secret, and that secret is always a secret about violence. Kant's idea (which of course he violates in the very fact of formulating it in a published work) is that what we might call the violence of politics (the violence without which there would be no politics at all, what I am here assimilating to the foundation of institutions in general) can be managed only by containing it as a sort of secret enclave or crypt (as Derrida sometimes used to say on the basis of Abraham and Torok) within the state itself. This conversion of founding violence into something secret or unspeakable would then be a fundamental feature of institutions as such. If we had time, we could pursue this logic in what Derrida says more speci¢cally about the institution of the University. For although the most general level at which the question of foundations can be asked is that of the institution in general (and perhaps especially the so-called `pure institution' of language, as we suggested), there is a speci¢city to the institution of the University (and indeed this is already hinted at in the paradoxical fact that Kant, in an essentially `university' context, as we have just seen, argues for the legitimacy of secrecy in the State in a way that ipso facto opens that secret). In L'Universite¨ sans condition, Derrida argues that the University should be a place of absolute, unconditional resistance, where in a sense nothing need be secret, where everything can be said (and, crucially, said publicly, published), and that this opens it to a kind of responsibility that is not the same as that of other institutions: as an institution, the University must subject the institution in general, the very institutionality of institutions, to a kind of questioning that institutions in general can hardly fail to want to repress according to the kind of logic we just saw in Kant. The University (and more especially, says Derrida, the `Humanities') have a responsibility to foster events of thought that cannot fail to unsettle the University in its Idea of itself. For this to happen, the special institution that the University is must open itself up to the possibility of unpredictable events (events `worthy of the name', as Derrida often says, being by de¢nition absolutely unpredictable) in a way that always might seem to threaten the very institution that it is. On this account, the University is in principle the institution that `lives' the precarious chance and ruin of the institution as its very institutionality. In the last ten years or so of his life, Derrida increasingly turned to a language of immunity and auto-immunity to describe this kind of situation and to pursue the deconstruction of sovereignty. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that this recourse, which can sometimes appear a little puzzling, £ows directly from the early questions directed to Saussure, and notably from the complex concept of `instituted trace' that I mentioned earlier. Derrida himself says several times in that context that a meditation on writing ought to unsettle the opposition between nature and institution, physis and nomos (G, p. 66) that he

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suggests is `everywhere' and particularly in linguistics, used as though it were self-evident.20 It now seems that the logic of foundation itself entails a troubling of that opposition, given that an institutional foundation must, as we have seen, retain or secrete within it a pre-institutional moment, a moment of `nature', which then inhabits the institution as the permanent haunting possibility of its violent collapse or overthrow. Something like a nature, then, always to some extent encrypted or secret, secreted within the institution that was erected against it, not only threatens the institution, but gives it a chance of being, as it were, alive, in the sense that life entails an openness (a `hospitality', perhaps, to use another late-Derridean concept) to alterity and event, which is also an openness to the possibility of instant death and destruction (for a life that did not involve this openness would not be a life worthy of the name `life'). As Derrida shows in his repeated use of the concept of auto-immunity ^ whereby the e¡orts of an organism (literal or analogical) to secure its own immunity lead it to turn on itself and even destroy itself after the fashion of auto-immune disorders ^ a measure of auto-immunity is in fact a condition for there to be an event at all. For example, in the second essay collected in the book Voyous: If an event worthy of the name is to happen, it must, beyond all mastery, a¡ect a passivity. It must touch a vulnerability that is exposed, without absolute immunity, without indemnity, in its ¢nitude and in a non horizontal fashion, where it is not yet or already no longer possible to face up to, to put up a front, to the unpredictability of the other. In this respect, auto-immunity is not an absolute evil. It allows for exposure to the other, to what is coming and to who is coming ^ and must therefore remain incalculable. Without auto-immunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen again. One would no longer wait, expect, expect oneself and each other, or any event at all.21 `Auto-immunity' is the last in the long series of `quasi-transcendental' terms that Derrida introduced, beginning with trace, archi-writing, di¡e¨rance, dissemination, and so on. It attempts, perhaps more clearly than some of those others, to capture a certain undecidability of life and death (including the `life' and `death' of institutions), but to do so on the side of life, as it were. (The much earlier Derridean development of `lifedeath' is perhaps more concerned to stress death as a way of questioning the metaphysical concept of life as, essentially, presence.) Deconstruction is, so Derrida often says, essentially an a¤rmation, and an a¤rmation of life: whence too his expressions of reserve and even revolt (for example in his last interview with the journalist Jean Birnbaum) against the old philosophical presentation of philosophy as `learning [how] to die'.22 All the early work's e¡orts to ¢nd something like death at work `in' presence, and in na|« ve conceptions of life as essentially presence, lead to the idea that these e¡orts, deconstruction itself, take place in the interests of a life that would be `worthy of its name', which is a life that involves death in itself as part of its a¤rmation. Life, including the life of institutions (but it would probably not be di¤cult to show that life in this sense always involves a certain institutionality

20

Encountering Derrida

or institutionalization) a¤rms itself as life just by a¤rming its exposure to the absolutely unpredictable event that is, as it were, the life of life, the chance of life, just as it always might end life at any instant. Only thus would life have any future, in the radical sense I mentioned at the beginning, but this is now a future that comes from no `horizon of expectation', and indeed no horizon at all, and can hardly be thought of within the traditional philosophical terms available for thinking about time. Here's a passage from the same late text in which these strands come together quite clearly, and indeed explicitly go back to the early work on Husserl: It could be shown that the ultimate `reason', in the sense of cause or ground, the raison d'eªtre of this transcendental phenomenological auto-immunity, is to be found lodged in the very structure of the present and of life, in the temporalisation of what Husserl calls the Living Present (die lebendige Gegenwart). The Living Present produces itself only by altering and dissimulating itself. I do not have the time, precisely, to go down this route, but I wanted to mark the necessity of it, in the place where the question of becoming and thereby of the time of reason appears indissociable from the immense, ancient and quite new question of life (bios or zoe), at the heart of the question of being, of presence and the entity, and therefore the question of being and time, of Sein und Zeit ^ a question this time accented on the side of life rather than the side of death, if that still makes ^ as I am tempted to believe it does ^ a certain di¡erence.23 Derrida increasingly related this thought to his call for an unconditionality without sovereignty. We might recast this now by saying that sovereignty (as we saw brie£y in Rousseau, but as we could verify in more detail in Bodin, or conversely, from the other direction, as it were, in Bataille or Schmitt) is just the attempt at immunity that would be a kind of death through foreclosure of any possibility of event, the kind of `living death' we often experience as institutional or political paralysis, the sense that nothing can happen; the unconditionality referred too here involves exposure to the absolutely unexpected event as a condition of anything like `life'. This is the only chance of institutions, but one against which they also necessarily guard themselves. And this is why it is probably no accident that Derrida's death leaves no organized institution of deconstruction whatsoever, no department or school or institute, no institution of deconstruction, and at most, at best, but it is best, institutions in deconstruction, something along the lines of what he sometimes called the `New International', something that certainly involves the plurality of languages that deconstruction also always a¤rms, plus d'une langue ^ one of his `de¢nitions' of deconstruction, meaning both `more than one language' and `no more of (only) one language' ^ a `New International' that will certainly never be achieved, but which we nonetheless embody here and now, today, for the moment, in this our fragile and precious institutionality, thanks to his legacy, and thanks to your hospitality.

Chapter 2

`Rather than Nothing': Derrida, Literature and the Resistance of Nihilism Shane Weller

1.

Reading, Misreading, Not Reading: Deconstruction as Nihilism

During an interview with Derrida in 1984, Richard Kearney remarked that deconstruction has been read by some critics as a `strategy of nihilism'. Derrida's response was at once vehement and unreserved: `I totally refuse the label of nihilism which has been ascribed to me and my American colleagues. Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other.'1 In an interview with Kristine Mckenna ¢rst published in November 2002, Derrida was asked what he considered to be `the most widely held misconception' about him and his work. His response echoed and elaborated upon the one given to Kearney two decades earlier: That I'm a skeptical nihilist who doesn't believe in anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, a text has no meaning. That's stupid and utterly wrong, and only the people who haven't read me say this. This misreading of my work began 35 years ago and it's very di¤cult to destroy. [. . .] Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on a¤rmation and faith, and that I'm full of respect for the texts I read.2 These two responses not only take us to the very heart of deconstruction, but also facilitate a thinking of deconstruction within the history of the concept of nihilism. Derrida's response to the perceived accusation of nihilism is striking for at least three reasons: 1. He dates the misreading of his work as nihilist back 35 years; that is to say, to 1967, the year in which his ¢rst three books ^ Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and Writing and Di¡erence ^ were published in France.3 In other words, the misreading of Derrida as a nihilist would date back to the ¢rst deployment in book form of the term `deconstruction' (translating

22

Encountering Derrida

and reinscribing Heidegger's Abbau), as though nihilism were in some sense deconstruction's shadow or most hostile other. 2. He con£ates this particular act of misreading with the act of not reading. To misread Derrida as nihilist is the same as not reading him at all. As we shall see, the di¡erence between misreading and not reading is not the only di¡erence that Derrida will ¢nd it necessary to negate in the interests of deconstruction, but in itself it helps to clarify something that is only rarely acknowledged, namely that the case for di¡e¨rance can be made only through what might be termed an indi¡erentiation of certain di¡erences intimately related to the thinking of nihilism. 3. He makes it clear that deconstruction stands squarely opposed to nihilism. In an irony the calculation of which would be far from easy to accomplish, the misreading/not reading of deconstruction as nihilism would itself be the nihilistic gesture par excellence. It is precisely this nihilist misreading/not reading that, according to Derrida, deconstruction must itself `destroy' in an act of counter-violence, even though this destruction will be `very di¤cult'. Deconstruction is anti-nihilist for three principal reasons: (1) because it is ultimately a¤rming rather than negating; (2) because it exhibits faith; and (3) because it is respectful. We shall have reason to return to each of these characteristics ^ a¤rmation, faith, and respect ^ since they are crucial to an understanding of Derrida's own conception of nihilism, which is in fact rather di¡erent from the concept of nihilism as he de¢nes it in his response to Mckenna. There, he is referring to what might be described as the common or even the journalistic concept of nihilism, namely the belief that nothing has `meaning', that all texts and indeed existence itself are quite simply meaningless. To be meaningless is, of course, very di¡erent from being meaning-free, and, unsurprisingly, the concept of nihilism as a belief in meaninglessness is almost always deployed as an accusation. Indeed, Derrida is objecting here to what he takes to be an attack on deconstruction that comes from beyond its borders. Even before asking what concept of meaning might be operative in such a philosophy of meaninglessness, one may observe (although Derrida himself does not) that there is a very obvious contradiction in nihilism thus conceived: indeed, this version of the nihilist is a walking self-contradiction, being someone who, on the one hand, does not believe in anything, and, on the other hand, believes in nothing, believes in the truth of non-meaning. The nihilist, then, is a classic case of what Derrida terms `auto-immunity', but an auto-immunity that remains unaware of itself, blind to its own perpetual war with itself, na|« vely dreaming that it is safely at one with itself. Prior to undertaking an analysis of Derrida's own concept and deployment of nihilism, it is perhaps worth re£ecting a little further on his claim concerning the long-standing misreading of his work as nihilist. In fact, the reading of deconstruction as a form of nihilism is considerably less common than Derrida's responses might lead one to imagine. Among such readings, that by Gillian

Derrida, Literature and the Resistance of Nihilism

23

Rose in Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (1984) no doubt warrants attention. No less ambitious, however, is Conor Cunningham's chapter on Derrida in his Genealogy of Nihilism (2002), a work in which Cunningham undertakes a critique of what he sees as a long tradition of nihilistic or `meontological'/`meontotheological' thinking originating in Plotinus, and in which he proposes a Trinitarian theology as the only feasible `overcoming of nihilism'.4 According to Cunningham, Plotinus is the origin of nihilism as meontotheology because he (not Plato) is the ¢rst thinker to posit non-being (or the One beyond being) as the ground of all being: Meontology is evident in the work of Plotinus when he places the One beyond being, which means that being is grounded in non-being (meon). When Deleuze grounds thought in what he calls `nonthought' he appears to place his philosophy within a meontotheological legacy. The same goes for Heidegger when he speaks of Being by speaking of das Nicht [sic]. This tradition does not, therefore, evoke the notion of the ultimate something employed by ontotheology. Instead, the ultimate nothing governs its logic. In contrast to ontotheology, questions are not asked by one ¢nal answer: the something. Rather, there is but one question asked an in¢nity of times by the nothing.5 Now, Derrida would belong to this meontotheological tradition because he too posits a `foundational nothing'.6 In Derrida, this nothing is that which is beyond or outside the text. As is often the case when Derrida is charged with nihilism, Cunningham's reading is based not on the analysis of any speci¢c work of Derrida's but rather on what, for better or worse, has become perhaps Derrida's most well-known claim, namely that `There is nothing outside of the text',7 which Cunningham takes to mean that beyond language there is only the nothing. In a twist that constitutes both the originality and the risk of his reading, Cunningham proceeds to argue that, for Derrida, not only is the nothing outside language, but it is also inside it, as that which language says: `language does not say something, but instead says nothing as something'.8 It is this rendering of nothing as something that would tie Derrida's thinking to that of Plotinus, in both of which one ¢nds what Cunningham terms the `realized logic of nihilism'. Just as Plotinus grounds being in the One beyond being, so Derrida `grounds the Text in the Nothing, which is said to reside outside it'.9 As that which precedes both presence and absence, di¡e¨rance and the trace are both instances of the `nothing as something'. The Derridean trace is essentially the Plotinian trace (ikhnos) of the One (as non-being). If Derrida's thinking is dualistic in its founding distinction between the text (as language) and the nothing (as that which is outside language), this dualism is ultimately superseded by a Plotinian monism: language is itself nothing. It is for this reason that, in Derrida, `all di¡erence is the same di¡erence and for this reason that it is indi¡erent'.10 It should be clear from the above summary of Cunningham's argument that in order to make the case that deconstruction is nihilist (or meontotheological) in its positing of a `foundational nothing', Cunningham has to take dubious

24

Encountering Derrida

advantage of the fact that Gayatri Spivak's English translation of De la grammatologie has a substantivizing e¡ect on the `nothing' that the original French does not. The French text reads `il n'y a pas de hors-texte' (there is no outside-text), not `il n'y a que le rien hors du texte'. Furthermore, Cunningham's capitalization of the words `Text' and `Nothing' is a clear act of aggression not only against both the original French and the English translation but also against Derrida's justi¢cations for the very absence of such capitalization. These, however, are far from being the only instances of hermeneutic violence in Cunningham's reading of Derrida. Despite Derrida's repeated insistence that when he refers to text (texte) he does not mean language (langage), Cunningham immediately con£ates the two, claiming that `Derrida argues that language cannot have an outside.'11 Cunningham attempts to justify this move on the grounds that Derrida's thinking of language is `post-linguistic', and that by `text' he means language in a post-linguistic sense. More dubiously still, Cunningham fails to engage with Derrida's thinking of the ¢nite beyond the principle of identity, claiming that, for Derrida, `language is always itself, language is always language. Consequently all signi¢cation is inside. Only nothing is outside language'.12 One would certainly look in vain for any such statement in Derrida, for whom, in accordance with the principle of auto-immunity, nothing is ever quite itself, and certainly not `the nothing'. Indeed, Derrida insists that it is precisely beyond language that would be located that `other' towards which deconstruction directs all its attention, and which, as we shall see, would ultimately justify it on ethical grounds: Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the `other' of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the `other' and the `other of language'.13 This is not to say, however, that Cunningham's claim that deconstruction is the `realized logic of nihilism' is simply an instance of not reading. Rather, in an irony that is characteristic of the fate of the concept of nihilism, in rede¢ning and redeploying this concept in the interests of a critique oriented towards the `overcoming of nihilism', Cunningham's `genealogy of nihilism' inscribes itself within the very tradition to which it would consign deconstruction. This inscription is owing to a failure on Cunningham's part to take account of the strange fate of the concept of nihilism in modern European philosophy, and, in particular, Nietzsche's epochal role in the thinking of nihilism. In a notebook fragment dating from 1885^86, Nietzsche announces nihilism's arrival thus: `Nihilism stands at the door; whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?' (Der Nihilismus steht vor der ThÏr: woher kommt uns dieser unheimlichste aller GÌste?).14 Now, this uncanniness manifests itself in various ways, not the least of which being the tendency of any critique of nihilism to ¢nd itself caught within the very tradition from which it would take its distance. In fact, far from demonstrating that deconstruction is simply a new form of nihilism, an

Derrida, Literature and the Resistance of Nihilism

25

analysis of Derrida's own redeployment of the concept of nihilism, and his departure not only from the common or journalistic concept of nihilism (as the belief in meaninglessness) but also from existing philosophical conceptions of nihilism (including both Nietzsche's and Heidegger's), reveals that deconstruction in fact exhibits two crucial marks of allegiance to a thinking of nihilism that ¢nds its explicit point of departure in Nietzsche but has yet to take account of that uncanniness to which Nietzsche himself ¢rst draws our attention. Deconstruction may be de¢ned, then, not as the `realized logic of nihilism' (as Cunningham argues) but rather as the resistance of nihilism, a phrase in which both the subjective and the objective genitive are operative, indicating that Derrida's total refusal of the nihilist label will have to be weighed very carefully.

2.

The First Mark of Allegiance

`Nihilism' ¢nds its way into the discourse of Western philosophy only at the very end of the eighteenth century. That it is possible to date the word's entry into the philosophical lexicon is one of the few points upon which Theodor Adorno is in explicit accord with Martin Heidegger; for both, the ¢rst `philosophical use' of the term `nihilism' occurs in an open letter from Friedrich Jacobi to Johann Gottlieb Fichte ¢rst published in 1799, Jacobi stating in this letter that he deplores Fichtean idealism as nihilism (Nihilismus).15 That said, it is with what Adorno describes as Nietzsche's adoption of the term in the mid-1880s, `presumably from newspaper accounts of terrorist acts in Russia',16 that nihilism becomes a master concept, being deployed as a catch-all for Western philosophy since Plato and, above all, for Christianity as the `moral interpretation of the world'. Nihilism, as Nietzsche determines it, is to be understood as devaluation (Entwertung). As Gilles Deleuze points out, this devaluation has two major phases: the positing of higher values (`negative nihilism') and the devaluation of those values (`reactive nihilism').17 This second phase is inaugurated by that event ¢rst announced in The Gay Science as the `death of God'. If Christianity is the most extreme form of nihilism, Nietzsche's own a¤rmation of the eternal recurrence of the same is that consummation or perfection of nihilism which would also be the moment of its self-overcoming (SelbstÏberwindung or, more rarely and with a more Hegelian in£ection, Selbstaufhebung). In a twist that is characteristic of the strange fate of the concept of nihilism since its ¢rst deployment within philosophical discourse and cultural critique, and that is one of the principal ways in which its uncanniness is exhibited, in the mid-1930s Heidegger identi¢es Nietzsche's own determination of nihilism (as devaluation) as itself nihilist. Taking the concept from Nietzsche, Heidegger proceeds to redetermine and redeploy it. For Heidegger, nihilism is not devaluation ^ indeed, it is not even to be thought in terms of values, since evaluative thinking is itself nihilist through and through ^ but the forgetting or oblivion of Being (Seinsvergessenheit), the reduction of Being to a mere nihil; in short, the collapsing of the ontological di¡erence.

26

Encountering Derrida

Derrida's ¢rst mark of allegiance to this tradition is, then, his adoption, redetermination, and redeployment of the concept of nihilism. The key to this redetermination is to be found in his response to the question regarding misconceptions of his work. Within deconstruction, however, nihilism will be determined not ontologically, as the forgetting, radical killing, abandonment, or default of Being, but rather within an ethical frame as what Derrida terms `brutality' or `bad violence'. But what is `bad violence', and how is it to be distinguished from `good violence'? Perhaps the clearest and most economical articulation of Derrida's distinction between these two fundamental kinds of violence is to be found in `I Have a Taste for the Secret' (2001), in which he argues that `bad violence' is violence directed against the `other' and against that future (as a© venir) from which this other would come. Nihilism, then, is absolute disrespect for the other, the reduction to nothing of di¡erence or alterity. As that which stands opposed to nihilism thus conceived, deconstruction a¤rms the other, has faith in the other, exhibits `respect for the other' in its absolute alterity.18 This a¤rmation would be closely akin to Nietzsche's Bejahung, although not of the eternal recurrence of the same but rather of the singular coming of the other. Whereas nihilism would close down any future, deconstruction would work to keep that future open, making space for the other in its `im-possibility', which is to say beyond what Derrida sees as the classic metaphysical opposition between the possible and the impossible.19 Deconstruction, then, is ¢rst and foremost that which resists nihilism, and its distinction between `good' and `bad' violence is not simply a facilitating principle but deconstruction's very justi¢cation. For, ultimately, as Derrida himself acknowledges, deconstruction is faced with the question `Why deconstruct?' If it is not to be merely one among other operations, deconstruction must be underwritten by a value that is `indeconstructible'. That there is indeed such an indeconstructible for deconstruction is made clear in Force of Law (1994), in which Derrida argues that, unlike law, justice is `not deconstructible'20 and that this indeconstructible justice is quite simply `the experience of absolute alterity'.21 According to Derrida, justice thus conceived is `Invincible to all skepticism'22 and proof that deconstruction `would not at all correspond (though certain people have an interest in spreading this confusion) to a quasi-nihilistic abdication before the ethico-politico-juridicial question of justice'.23 What becomes clear in `I Have a Taste for the Secret', however, is that this indeconstructible value of the other will never take the form of the nothing as no future or the non-event. In short, the other cannot take the form of no other. Beyond the logic of auto-immunity, the other resists what might be termed the other other: I must have had occasion to say, for example, that it's better that there be a future [de l'avenir], and that I move in the direction of deconstruction because it is what comes [qui vient], and it's better that there be a future, rather than nothing. For something to come there has to be a future, and thus if there is a categorical imperative, it consists in doing everything for the future to remain

Derrida, Literature and the Resistance of Nihilism

27

open. I am strongly tempted to say this, but then ^ in the name of what would the future be worth more than the past? More than repetition? Why would the event be preferable to the non-event? Here I might ¢nd something that resembles an ethical dimension, because the future is the opening in which the other happens [arrive], and it is the value of the other or of alterity that, ultimately, would be the justi¢cation. Ultimately, that is my way of interpreting the messianic. The other may come, or he may not. I don't want to programme him, but rather to leave a place for him to come if he comes. It is the ethic of hospitality.24 At the heart of deconstruction, then, would be the conviction that `it's better that there be a future, rather than nothing'. Deconstruction as an ethic of hospitality is justi¢ed by the indeconstructible `value of the other' which comes from the future as that which is not merely other than, but better than, `nothing'. The violence of deconstruction is `good violence' because it resists another violence, de¢ned as `brutality', `unre¢ned violence', `bad violence', a violence which is `impoverishing, repetitive, mechanical, that does not open the future, does not leave room for the other', that `homogenizes and e¡aces singularity'.25 This other violence is nihilism as another kind of event, antithetical to the event of deconstruction: namely, the event of no other or of the other as nothing at all. This (non)-event of the other as nothing at all, as no future (even beyond the thought of the future in its im-possibility), is, then, on the threshold of deconstruction, as that without which deconstruction cannot survive, if only as that against which it musters all its powers of resistance. Deconstruction is haunted, and not just de facto, by nihilism as its other other, that without which it would lose all force and yet that against which it musters all its force. Where deconstruction might be said to outwit Cunningham's Trinitarian theology and its dream of overcoming nihilism is in the former's registering of a preference (one of Derrida's cardinal points of reference is Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener), its insistence that the `categorical imperative' governing deconstruction remains hypothetical, which is to say an `if ' (as `perhaps') and even the `as if ' of another kind of discourse, towards which we are now heading. This outwitting is countered, however, from within deconstruction, and in the interests of deconstruction as `justice', by Derrida's indi¡erentiation of another di¡erence, namely that between necessity and obligation in the thinking of the future as, on the one hand, that which cannot be closed down (di¡erence is irreducible) and, on the other hand, that which must be kept open (di¡erence should be saved in accordance with an ethic of hospitality). The other as that which is irreducible and yet for which one is obliged to resist the nihilism that would reduce it to nothing; the other as that `rather than nothing' in which all value is irreducibly located and yet from which nihilism would strip all value: if deconstruction would have us treat as ethical that which cannot be avoided, if it would have us a¤rm the unavoidable, then the very distinction between the ethical and the non-ethical, and between good and bad violence, may be said to have been subjected to a principle of indi¡erentiation.

28

Encountering Derrida

3.

The Second Mark of Allegiance

It is the privilege granted by deconstruction to the `as if ' in its attempt at a selfjusti¢cation that constitutes the second mark of Derrida's allegiance to that tradition which ¢nds its point of origin in Nietzsche and which I have termed the resistance of nihilism. A clue to this second mark of allegiance is to be found in one of Derrida's own deployments of the term `nihilism'. In an interview with Derek Attridge in April 1989, later published under the title `This Strange Institution Called Literature', Derrida argues that there is a `certain nihilism' which has to be thought as divided, at once inside and outside metaphysics, and that the singularity of the works of Samuel Beckett lies precisely in the fact that `these two possibilities are in the greatest possible proximity and competition'. Beckett, he argues, is both `nihilist and not nihilist'. Derrida goes on to assert that the non-nihilist element in Beckett is located not at the level of the thematic, philosophemic, or ideological, but in `The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seem the most ``decomposed'', that's what ``remains'' ¢nally the most ``interesting'', that's the work, the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted.'26 In other words, the resistance of nihilism in Beckett is located in that which would make it literature, for which any content (not least the philosophical) would be possible and, for that reason, of no value in the determination of Beckett's (or indeed any other writer's) texts as literature. That there is a privileging of a certain kind of literary practice in deconstruction, precisely as a form of resistance to nihilism, is clear from the manner in which the literary is de¢ned elsewhere by Derrida. In his relatively early essay on Artaud entitled `The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation', Derrida argues that Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty is to be radically distinguished from the theatre of representation, the latter being theatrical nihilism: All theater that privileges speech or rather the verb, all theater of words, even if this privilege becomes that of a speech which is self-destructive, which once more becomes gesture of hopeless reoccurrence, a negative relation of speech to itself, theatrical nihilism [nihilisme the¨aªtral], what is still called the theater of the absurd. Such a theater would not only be consumed by speech, and would not destroy the functioning of the classical stage, but it would also not be, in the sense understood by Artaud (and doubtless by Nietzsche), an a¤rmation.27 The theatrical event as an a¤rmation, then. But an a¤rmation of what? A faith in what? A respect for what? For Derrida, the answer to each of these questions will be the same: the other in its value as other. Certainly, the very category of literature has ¢rst to be thought deconstructively, and this Derrida undertakes relatively early, in his reading of Mallarme¨ in Dissemination (1972). As Timothy Clark observes, Mallarme¨ is not simply one writer among others for Derrida; indeed, `The name of Mallarme¨ serves to mark the emergence of literature in Derrida's limited, specialised sense'.28

Derrida, Literature and the Resistance of Nihilism

29

And, as Clark goes on to point out, in taking Mallarme¨ as the decisive ¢gure in the emergence of literature in a new sense, Derrida follows Blanchot, even if Derrida's reading operation on Mallarme¨ is quite distinct from Blanchot's in The Space of Literature (1955) and The Book to Come (1959). The concept of literature that Derrida traces back to Mallarme¨ is one that makes it a `privileged guiding thread' in the modern period. This privilege lies in literature's `revealing power', in its having the capacity to grant an insight into `writing in general', which is to say into di¡e¨rance: it is quite possible that literary writing in the modern period is more than one example among others, rather a privileged guiding thread for access to the general structure of textuality [. . .]. What literature `does' with language holds a revealing power which is certainly not unique, which it can share up to a point with law, for example with judicial language, but which in a given historical situation (precisely our own, and this is one more reason for feeling concerned, provoked, summoned by `the question of literature') teaches us more, and even the `essential', about writing in general, about the philosophical or scienti¢c (for example linguistic) limits of the interpretation of writing.29 If literature in this new sense stands at a distance from itself, it is also the place in which `philosophical language [. . .] produces and presents itself as alienated from itself '.30 For Derrida, as for Blanchot before him, then, it is with Mallarme¨ that literature turns back upon itself, asking after its own essence, the privilege of literature in this new sense lying precisely in its pursuing-evading the question of essence, truth, and being. As Derrida puts it in `The Double Session': `If this handbook of literature [Mallarme¨'s Mimique] meant to say something, which we now have some reason to doubt, it would proclaim ¢rst of all that there is no ^ or hardly any, ever so little [a© peine, si peu de] ^ literature; that in any event there is no essence of literature, no truth of literature, no literarybeing or being-literary of literature.'31 This view of literature is still very much in place two decades later, in the 1989 interview with Attridge, in which Derrida elaborates on the residual possibility for literature retained in that `hardly any, ever so little', which takes the form of the literary event as a certain practice of writing on the `im-possible' margin: `the existence of something like a literary reality in itself will always remain problematic. The literary event is perhaps more of an event (because less natural) than any other, but by the same token it becomes very improbable, hard to verify.'32 Here, we have the absolute privilege of the literary event, expressed as a hypothesis, under the governance of a `perhaps': the literary event is that event which is `perhaps more of an event (because less natural) than any other'. Paradoxically, then, the essence of the literary event would lie in its resistance to the question of essence. And yet, this resistance does not entail the mere disappearance of literature. Rather, it is literature's very chance. There remains

30

Encountering Derrida

for Derrida `something irreducible in poetic or literary experience',33 but this irreducibility lies precisely in literature's singular capacity to suspend (rather than simply annul or free itself from) `thetic referentiality'.34 For Derrida, as for Mallarme¨ and Blanchot before him, this `suspended relation to meaning and reference' constitutes the singularity of literature.35 This suspension is a turning back on itself of the literary, a self-referentiality to be sure, but one that results in the displacement of the literary event's identity with itself, not in its hermetically sealed coincidence with itself. Kafka's `Before the Law' (1919) is, as Derrida reads it, a literary event in just this sense: [`Before the Law'] points obliquely to literature, speaking of itself as a literary e¡ect ^ and thereby exceeding the literature of which it speaks. But is it not necessary for all literature to exceed literature? What would be a literature that would be only what it is, literature? It would no longer be itself if it were itself.36 In accordance with this logic, whereby there are in fact two very di¡erent forms of non-self-identity or being at odds, just as there are two very di¡erent kinds of violence, this suspension of reference through its turning back upon itself makes of literature that which `perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself '. Again, in `Che cos'e© la poesia?' (1990), Derrida attempts to counter Heidegger's conception of poetry as Dichtung by thinking poetry (la poesia) as that event in which `The other sign(s)', in which we experience the `language of the other' in its singularity: the poem is that which, in relating to itself, departs from itself, opening the space of and for the future: `it [the poem] never relates back to itself, it never moves by itself like those other machines, bringers of death [ces engins porteurs de mort]'.37 If the poem, as Derrida thinks it, is radically opposed to the death-bringing violence of the machine or the programme, it is no less opposed to Heidegger's conception of the work of art (Kunstwerk). As he¨risson or istrice (hedgehog), the poem takes its distance from both the pure (rein) and the truth (aletheia): `Most of all do not let the he¨risson be led back into the circus or the menagerie of poiesis: nothing to be done ( poiein), neither ``pure poetry'', nor pure rhetoric, nor reine Sprache, nor ``setting-forth-of-truth-in-the-work'' '.38 Crucially, however, for all his distantiation of la poesia from Heideggerian Dichtung, Derrida remains tied here to Heidegger precisely in his thinking of the poem as that which stands against nihilism as what he terms `those other machines, bringers of death'. That, for Derrida, as for Heidegger before him, a certain form of literature is to be thought as the privileged form of resistance to nihilism is put perhaps most clearly in `This Strange Institution Called Literature', when Derrida describes the literary event as the `nothing-ing of nothing'.39 Literature in this new, deconstructive sense is, then, the negating of that nothing which would be the hostile other of the other in its value. Although there is not the space to undertake this analysis here, it would certainly be possible to show that Derrida's readings of a sequence of modern writers after Mallarme¨, including Artaud,

Derrida, Literature and the Resistance of Nihilism

31

Joyce, Blanchot, Ponge, Celan, and Cixous, are all, in their di¡erent ways and beyond the sense of Mallarme¨ found in each of these writers, orientated towards demonstrating that the literary event is precisely the `nothing-ing of nothing'. To give just one example of this, in his late book on Cixous, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (2006), Derrida argues on the basis of Cixous' own writing that literature is `the absolute place of the secret [. . .] as experience of the law that comes from the other, of the law whose giver is none other than the coming of the other [la venue meªme de l'autre]'.40 This coming of the other is precisely the `nothing-ing of nothing', the countering of that reduction to nothing of the other that, for Derrida, is nihilism. Not the least striking aspect of Derrida's thinking of nihilism is how close it comes in certain key respects to the conception of nihilism found in Jacobi, the ¢rst to deploy the term in philosophy. According to Jacobi, Fichtean idealism is nihilism because it negates the very possibility of anything alterior to knowledge conceived as Wissenschaft and because it is governed by the `identity-drive'.41 While Derrida would no doubt take issue with Jacobi's own identi¢cation of the alterior as God or the true, and while he certainly retains elements of Nietzsche's thinking of nihilism as devaluation (Entwertung) and of Heidegger's thinking of nihilism as the radical killing (das radikale TÎten) of Being,42 it is arguably with Jacobi's conception of nihilism as the reduction to nothing of the absolutely other that Derrida shares most.

4. The Anethical Indi¡erentiation of the Other Towards the end of his life, in `Fichus', the speech he delivered on being awarded the Adorno Prize in 2001, Derrida declared publicly his sense of his a¤nities with Adorno. Among these a¤nities ^ the nature and implications of which I have sought to explore elsewhere43 ^ the one that Derrida ¢nds least problematical is an `interest in literature': What I shared most easily with Adorno, even took from him [Ce que j'ai le plus facilement partage¨ avec Adorno, voire rec° u de lui], as did other French philosophers ^ although again in di¡erent ways ^ is his interest in literature [inte¨reªt pour la litte¨rature] and in what, like the other arts, it can critically decenter in the ¢eld of university philosophy.44 As we have seen, however, for Derrida (as indeed for Adorno), literature can do more than merely decentre things in the ¢eld of university philosophy. Indeed, the literary event becomes the privileged form of resistance in `our historical situation' to the brutality of nihilism de¢ned as that force which would close down all possibility of the future as the `to come' (a© venir). As the `nothing-ing of nothing', the literary event is that non-programmable and singular `good violence' which acts in the interests of the other in its value. But here we are returned to the uncanniness of nihilism in the very resistance of nihilism; for, in order to respect the other in its value, the literary event has, as

32

Encountering Derrida

we have seen, to be a violence that is directed at another, hostile other, namely the reduction to nothing of the other. The strange logic whereby the resistance of nihilism (subjective genitive) becomes the resistance of nihilism (objective genitive), and vice versa, in a scene of uncanny reversibility, does not return us, however, to Cunningham's critique of deconstruction as the `realized logic of nihilism'. Rather, it points us in the direction of a thinking that (via deconstruction, which is to say both with and against deconstruction) would be characterizable neither as nihilism (de¢ned as absolute disrepect for the other) nor as anti-nihilism (de¢ned as absolute respect for the other in its value and an unconditional preference for the `rather than nothing'); in other words, a thinking that would no longer be governed by the double genitive of the resistance of nihilism. Were I to hazard a formulation for such a thinking, then it would be thinking in the most general sense (beyond any distinction between conceptualization and imagination, or Denken and Dichten, or even `good' and `bad' violence) as the anethical indi¡erentiation of the other. That such an anethical indifferentiation of the other is to be found in deconstruction, despite its radicalization of the value of the other, testi¢es to the fact that deconstruction is itself deconstructible, no less than is the value of that other upon which it rests, if only in the form of the `perhaps' or the `as if ', and in defence of which it would have taken place.

Chapter 3

Accounterability Peggy Kamuf

We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections. The American people listened to di¡erent assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me. George W. Bush In this `it is necessary to believe me', the `it is necessary', which is not theoretical but performative-pragmatic, is as determining as the `believe'. At bottom, it is perhaps the only rigorous introduction to the thinking of what `believe' can mean to say. Jacques Derrida I believe that a topic has never caused me so much uncertainty as has the approach to this question of the `counter'.1 My uncertainty, even my confusion, is at least in part my own doing, and thus my undoing. Without su¤cient calculation, recklessly therefore, I gave in to the temptation to smuggle `counter' into the midst of another word, under cover of homonymy, and then accepted the curious result as a title: accounterability. Too clever by half, this meddling with the word accountability (whose fortunes the OED documents no further back than 1794) adds still greater confusion to what is already a place of overdetermined crossing between calculation and narration, between count, account, and recount. As you know, this family of words derives from computare, as do the French homonyms, both the verbs compter and conter and the nouns compte and conte, with an orthographic di¡erence in French, however, that bids to prevent the two threads of calculation and narration from tangling with each other to the extent they are liable to in English. In practice, of course, syntax or other elements of context usually manage to keep the two senses out of each other's way, as do conventional habits of usage. Thus, although accountability might very well be used to mean narratability, that is, the possibility of accounting for something through narrative, one has almost no chance of making that intention understood given the inertia of habitual usage. Narrative accounting and computational accounting are even commonly thought to stand in a rough opposition to each other, the former occupying a pole in the vicinity of an act of witnessing or testimony, called, very loosely, subjective, while the latter lies at or close to the pole of what counts as objective fact, evidence, or even proof.

34

Encountering Derrida

`Numbers do not lie', `Read the numbers, the numbers tell the story', which is to say, the story of no story to tell; numbers, we believe, do not narrate, interpret, invent, or make up the ¢gures ^ unless they do sometimes, which is why one is well advised to run the numbers again, check and double-check them. Veri¢cation is always possible, at least in theory. Another more patently ironic dictum advises: `Put your faith in numbers', in other words, in that which presumably makes no claim on faith or belief, except, of course, the belief that numbers, counting, or quanti¢cation triumphs over belief. The semantico-pragmatic range of `accountability' has perhaps always displayed a tendency to harden its connections to hard numbers, to the accounting of accountancy, and to let its other more narrative, more `subjective' connections be subsumed and reduced to arithmetic ¢guration. This tendency can aptly be compared to what is called `bottom-line thinking', a phrase that already in itself bespeaks the will, or rather the wish, to replace thinking by counting, to displace the responsibility of decision and judgement from the `subjective' place of thought to the balance sheet of summary numbers that, as we also say, `speak for themselves'. As if numeric representation had the greatest gravity, density, or solidity: it would be what is left at the bottom of the testing container once all other super£uous, £oating matter ^ language, discourse, narrative, testimony, belief and unbelief ^ has been poured o¡ and discarded. In this downward pull, the term `accountability' has moved to take over the semantic ¢eld of `responsibility', resulting in a certain overlay that shows up, for example, in the redundant names or titles of public organizations, institutions, and o¤ces. A quick Googling of the aims and undertakings of organizations calling themselves, I cite at random, Centre for Corporate Accountability, the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, or the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative, among others, turns up no signi¢cant pattern governing the choice of the one term over the other. (Perhaps that is because it little matters: corporate responsibility or accountability remains elusive regardless of what you call it.) Similarly, judicial institutions and institutions of democratic government are held indi¡erently accountable or responsible by a variety of public interest groups. Wikipedia provides here an interesting comment that bids to discriminate between the terms: In politics, and particularly in representative democracies, accountability (sometimes known as transparency) is an important factor in securing good governance. It constrains the extent to which elected representatives and other o¤ce-holders can willfully deviate from their theoretical responsibilities, thus reducing corruption. In other words, accountability, a.k.a. transparency, constrains responsibility, at least in theory. There is, however, one public interest domain where this seemingly redundant overlay or overlap appears to have sorted itself out clearly in favour of accountability over responsibility, and that is the domain of education.

Accounterability

35

By virtue of its insistent application to the purview of this institution, especially in the US and over the last ten years, the notion of accountability has acquired a certain number of speci¢c, de¢ning traits that seem destined to determine its future use. I'm going to take a few moments to enumerate several of these traits, but, as one cannot rely on numbers alone to tell the story, I will also have recourse to bits of narrative and critical, counter-analysis. Indeed, the interest of this exercise, if any, is to ¢nd an opening in calculating, accountable logic, to locate a space for other articulations between our accounts and our abilities, the space precisely of a free space or free play that can be taken into account only in the ¢gure of the unknown, the factor of uncertainty, a factor of X, or, as it happens, of a certain ^ er ^ that, falling at the point of exact bisection of accounterability, sounds a pause, a brief hiatus, a little time to think, to stop calculating and listen at another rhythm for something else, for an incalculability and unforeseeability that cause the accountability programme to stammer or stutter: account, er, ability. What one would be attempting to con¢gure thereby is, if it needs to be said, not the space of a word or of word-play, but rather the premises of a counter-practice to the numeric evaluation that assumes a prevailing place in public discourse: as if it went without saying, as if it were self-evident, and therefore irresistible in its logic. A counter-institution of resistance to the irresistible logic of accountability: that is the virtual space I will try to conjure in the space remaining. In calling it virtual, by the way, I understand neither unreal nor unrealizable. I will return in my conclusion to the distinction of the virtual and the factual, which Jacques Derrida will help us discern with his analysis of testimony in its di¡erence from what is called proof. Before launching this enumeration, I must invoke at least one caveat. The principal context to which I will be referring is that of a prevailing discourse about the institution of higher education in the US. This is not to overlook the fact that a very similar discourse has taken hold elsewhere, notably in Canada, Britain, and doubtless in other predominantly Anglophone societies with large public university systems such as Australia. And there are many signs of its progressive establishment among the rest of the European Union states, in France, for example. But as far as I can tell, and for the moment at least, it is primarily the US version of the discourse that has taken as its overall rallying cry our key word `accountability', to the point that one may now commonly hear reference there to an `accountability movement'.2 No doubt, the auditing and assessment exercises mandated in Britain share many assumptions about the quantitative measurability of the value of research and teaching; despite that, the parallel is almost never drawn with the British experience by the American movement's advocates, whether because of ignorance, lack of curiosity, good old American arrogance about what makes us so special and di¡erent from the rest of the world, or the indisputable fact that higher education in the US is `organized' like no other in many respects. Whatever the reasons, the accountability discourse has emerged largely as the product of a speci¢cally US context, although it is clearly positioned for export to the world market.3

36

Encountering Derrida

By invoking this language of the market, you may be sure that I am not merely yielding to a facile analogy. One of the central questions, as I see it, is precisely whether or not there is analogy between the university and the market; consequently, whether or not there subsists a space of non-assimilable di¡erence and thus of resistance, of accounterability, between them. I believe that this question has come to a head and to the fore in the US in ways it could not have done elsewhere by reason of at least two determining features that set the US higher education `system' apart from almost every other. First, there is the not insigni¢cant matter of the cost or price of postsecondary education, which varies greatly but averages much higher in the US than almost anywhere else in the industrialized world. This cost is borne disproportionately by the students themselves, most of whom are thereby obliged to remain dependent on the ¢nancial support of parents and family. Besides marking the accountability discourse with an unmistakable paternalism, as authorized by this prolonged dependence, the predominantly private billing of postsecondary degrees regularly permits the discourse to divert attention from the elephant-in-the-room problem of unequal access to those degrees.4 The second determining feature is the fact that there is no one deciding, controlling, funding, governing, or regulating agency with purview over the entire system. It is thus precisely not a system but a dispersion without rational direction, an immense proliferation of disconnected sites, not all of which even have geographic coordinates, thus, a phenomenon approaching the bad in¢nity of always one more and then another and then another. This great dispersion and diversity of American higher education institutions (by one count, there are close to four thousand of them) is, to be sure, a strength to the extent it allows wider access than many more uniform, centralized, state-supported university systems. However, even to speak of `the' university in the US is to commit something like a category mistake, to substitute a nominal category for what has no distinct essence. Unless `the' US university or the sector of socalled higher education is essentially a market, its near-in¢nite dispersion reined in, contained, and regulated by nothing other than the forces that also direct capital and commercial markets. Here, then, is where the question of analogy, or not, arises most pertinently: in the place of the centre or agency of the non-system left vacant by the state or other representatives of shared public interest. For the accountability movement, it is a matter of staking out, by rendering concrete, the market's claim to this empty control centre, which means essentially closing the gap kept open by any residual analogy. It is, in other words, not a question of merely reinforcing by repeating the analogy between the university and the marketplace, but of dispensing with it altogether so as to close down a residual space of di¡erence. The university must be said, must be found, in other words, must be made to occupy a space not just like that of a market, but one which simply is the market for a speci¢c commodity, the post-secondary diploma. It must be: the force of this logic would be that of the market's own drive to saturate every domain of possible experience without

Accounterability

37

remainder, to translate all di¡erence into itself, as the universal value equivalent. In the US this translation is largely complete. Only pockets of resistance remain, here and there, notably in `the' university. Now it is time to close these down. This is, as I read it, the aim and the purpose of the accountability movement.5 One could say that the movement, at least in its current guise, was o¤cially set in motion on 19 September 2005 when the current US secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, announced the formation of a federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education. `We don't ask a lot of questions about what we're getting for our investment in higher education', said Secretary Spellings on this occasion. `And as a result, we're missing some valuable information to help guide policy . . . And parents have a tough time getting answers about the way it all works . . . [I]t's time to examine how we can get the most out of our national investment.'6 How to get the most for one's investment ^ that of government, that of parents ^ is the question for which accountability is the answer. Consequently, the charge to this commission, which is due to submit its ¢nal report in September 2006, is clear: devise measures for rendering the university more accountable to its investors. It's time to examine more closely what is meant by accountability. To do so, I am going to rely on selected passages from documents produced principally by the movement's proponents. And to begin this enumeration, I'll turn right away to the question of quantitative measure, of numbers. At the core of the concept of accountability is what educational market managers call `valueadded assessment', `which attempts to measure what a particular college or university contributes to its students' knowledge and capabilities during their four or ¢ve years', in the words of Richard H. Hersh who is one of the principal advocates of this new form of testing.7 This `what' ought to be expressible, Hersh believes, in the form of hard data. To this end, he has headed up the Collegiate Learning Assessment Project that has devised a longitudinal test for university students to be administered at the beginning and the end of their programmes of study. Test results from di¡erent institutions may then be compared to determine which one added more value relative to cost or, in a phrase that regularly returns in this context, which institution gives the most bang for the buck. Even though the test designers insist that it is not a matter of measuring, as one commentator puts it, `the particular facts students have memorized but how well they have learned to think',8 the evaluation is meant to provide a clear metric that boils `thinking' down into data. There would be much more to say and to think, of course, about what is being counted here as thinking, so I will try to return at least brie£y to that question later. To be accountable to investors means to be able to produce evidence of value added. By `evidence', Hersh and his fellow accountabilists would have one believe they are promising the contrary or rather the neutralization of, precisely, belief. Writing for The Atlantic Monthly, Hersh stages a typical scene in which the demand for such a neutralization is addressed by the sceptical,

38

Encountering Derrida

potential investor, in other words, `the parent', to the accountable, answerable o¤cer of the institution, its president (and Hersh is also staging here his previous experience as a university president): `What makes your college worth $35,000 a year?' It's a hard question for a college president to answer, especially because it's usually raised at gatherings for prospective students and their anxious, check-book conscious parents. But it also provides an opportunity to cast one's school in a favorable light ^ to wax eloquent about admissions selectivity, high graduation rates, small classes, and alumni satisfaction. The harder question, though, comes when someone interrupts this smooth litany: `But what evidence is there that kids learn more at your school?' And as I fumble for a response, the parent [notice it's a question of `kids' and that the questioner is assumed by this scenario to be `the parent' rather than any one of the `prospective students' who are in the room from now on only as infantilized objects of this exchange between adults] presses on: `Are you saying that quality is really mostly a matter of faith?' The only answer is a regretful yes. Estimates of college quality are essentially `faith-based', insofar as we have little direct evidence of how any given school contributes to students' learning. Having confessed to this regretted reliance on faith, Hersh then draws the lesson from his little narrative: `This £ies in the face of what most people believe about college . . .'. Which is to say, most people believe that it is not a matter of belief. But in fact, and although they might not want to believe it, what they believe is belief. Hersh and the accountabilists, however, claim to be able to o¡er the end of belief, if you can believe that. `Believe us', they say, `we're not asking you to believe us'. In other words, belief supports and gives credence to what passes for non-belief, here called `evidence'. Now, when jurists or scienti¢c experimenters speak of `evidence', they patently do not mean `proof', that which compels assent and procures an epistemological or theoretical certainty. Evidence, however, remains within the circle of belief to the extent that any possible or probable meaning attributed to it depends on one's faith in an interpretation.9 In speaking not of proof but of evidence, nevertheless, the accountability discourse begins to slide towards irrefutable certainty, on to the ground of the sure thing, which is, I suppose, what every market investor dreams of. One hears this slide in the reference not just to `evidence' but to `direct evidence', which promises a non-mediation, a direct path towards the end-user ^ in accountability discourse, the consumer or potential investor ^ who need not question the provenance, production, or packaging of said evidence. It is thus an appeal to credulity in the face of the highly complex process that would have to go into designing, administering, and evaluating the said test for the said evidence, a complexity that the accountabilists themselves readily admit. Before leaving this scene, I want to mention one more of its details which can be read on to a larger stage with larger stakes. The expression `faith-based' is

Accounterability

39

used in quotation marks and recalls thereby its particular use in recent American political discourse.10 The term began to resonate most loudly on 29 January 2001, when Bush delivered his ¢rst State of the Union Address and announced his administration's intention to pursue a `Faith-based Initiative'. This new FBI is, as Bill Berkowitz puts it, primarily aimed at reducing the size ^ but not the spending ^ of government by shifting the responsibility for delivering a host of services from governmental agencies to faith-based organizations. A central point the [Bush] administration has argued from the outset is that faith-based organizations had been discriminated against historically, and it was going to do all in its power to level the playing ¢eld, giving religious groups the opportunity to apply for and receive government grants.11 From the outset, this FBI has been understood, on both the right and the left, as a gloves-o¡ move to tear down the remaining defences around the concept, never very secure in the US, of the separation between, as one says, church and state, state and religion. Now, with this in mind, consider again Hersh's unmistakable nod in the direction of the language of Bushite neoconservatism: it is certainly misleading in its apparent impulse to disavow whatever is `faith-based' in the assessment of the quality of an institution, and I'm even tempted to think it is quasi-intentionally so, a quasi-deliberate misdirection or miscue. For the accountability movement does not only accommodate and even favour the aims of the so-called faith-based initiative; the two ideas trace their impulse to the same source. The current resident of the White House could even claim a certain paternity, that is, not only of the new FBI but of the accountability movement, which had its test run in the University of Texas system when President Bush was then Governor Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was his Senior Advisor overseeing what her o¤cial biography refers to as `the nation's strongest school assessment and accountability system'.12 (Thus, when I earlier said that the accountability movement o¤cially began in 2005 with the appointment of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, I was not taking into account this prior history in Texas.)13 Here, then, is a further reason to be sceptical when an advocate of accountability-for-the-university promises relief from `faith-based' estimates of the quality or e¤ciency of these institutions. Just as the FBI was meant to correct, in the words of Bill Berkowitz cited a moment ago, the historical `discrimination . . . against faith-based organizations' ^ meaning essentially their containment to the private sector ^ so too, and in basic accord, the accountability movement works to correct a perceived discrimination within the university against `kids', i.e. students, whose views are `faith-based' and/or conservative ^ meaning, essentially, to correct an alleged predominance on university faculties of leftleaning `liberals'. This articulation is rarely made explicit by those who assert the bene¢ts of value-added assessment. And yet, it would be credulous indeed, I

40

Encountering Derrida

believe, to overlook the numerous conjunctions between, on the one hand, the accountability discourse, which gives itself the cover of so-called objective measurement and `direct evidence', and, on the other, the discourse mounted against this alleged bias of faculty in US universities, which gives rise to a distressingly vitriolic display of resentment, when it is not merely inane or ignorant (but, alas, the two attributes demonstrate a regular a¤nity for each other), and which has found eager reception among numerous rightwing-dominated state legislatures that have ultimate authority over their public university systems.14 The appeal to what I earlier described as a neutralization of belief by the accountabilists should be re-evaluated, therefore, in this other, larger context of the ongoing pressure to dismantle the faith-neutral policies of public agencies, including those with purview over education in general, higher education in particular. If, as I believe one should argue, the two e¡orts have a mutually reinforcing e¡ect, if they are on a trajectory of convergence, even if they are not, at least for the moment, being advanced by the same players under a same banner, then accountabilism deserves to be countered in the name of the oldest principles of the post-Enlightenment, non-faith-based university. It deserves to be ^ that is, it ought to be, it should be, and I believe it must be. These imperative modalities invoke an order of necessity: here, the necessity of a countering resistance. Such an invocation, however, seems to be immediately suspended if one adds, as I just did, `I believe'. The necessity of necessity should not, ought not to be a matter of anyone's belief, we believe. Necessity should not merely invite or encourage belief but compel it and therefore eliminate it. To speak of a necessary belief, for example, is to cross, it seems, two orders that ought to remain utterly heterogeneous with each other. And yet, this contradictory mode of necessary belief is that of a common, even pervasive experience: the experience of testimony. A witness, as Derrida has written, is whoever speaks, writes, or otherwise testi¢es in the space opened up by the imperative: you must believe me, it is necessary to believe me. I cite here at greater length the passage from which was drawn my second epigraph: It is necessary [Il faut] to hear and understand this `you have to believe me' [`vous devez me croire']. `You have to believe me' does not have the meaning of theoretico-epistemological necessity. It is not presented as a probative demonstration to which one has no choice but to subscribe to the conclusion of a syllogism, in the course of an argumentation, or indeed to the display of a thing present. Here, `you have to believe me' means `believe me because I tell you to, because I ask you to' or as well `I promise you that I will tell the truth and be faithful to my promise, and I undertake to be faithful'. In this `it is necessary to believe me', the `it is necessary', which is not theoretical but performative-pragmatic, is as determining as the `believe'. At bottom, it is perhaps the only rigorous introduction to the thinking of what `believe' can mean to say . . .

Accounterability

41

`What is believing', what are we doing when we believe (which is to say all the time, and as soon as we enter into relation with the other): this is one of the questions that cannot be avoided when trying to think testimony.15 I'm introducing this thinking of testimony at a countering crossroads with what I've been calling the accountability movement or discourse (but perhaps the better word is `culture', since this movement irrigates and is irrigated by a very broad swathe of other formations, institutions, practices, and beliefs)16 for at least two sets of reasons, which I will try to lay out, necessarily schematically, in the space remaining. First set of reasons: if it is a matter of calling up a possible accounterability, then its leverage would have to pivot around what situates the experience of belief beyond any institution or `faith-based organization'. In the face of the convergence to which I've just pointed (between accountabilism and faithbased politics, with, don't forget, the blessing of a market that stands to saturate one of the last hold-outs to the calculations of its bottom line), it will perhaps be seen as counter-intuitive for the post-Enlightenment university to seek leverage in such an opening to belief, that is, to the thinking of belief as the ground, the groundless ground of experience of every kind in the world with others. If so, however, then must one not also conclude that what long appeared to be the principal countering thrust of Enlightenment has run aground on the shoals of the religious faith that is resurgent not only in North, Central, and South America, the old New World, but throughout post-communist Eastern Europe, the new Old World? Whereas for large parts of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the South Paci¢c region, it is patently inaccurate to speak of a `resurgence' or `return' of religion, as if it had undergone there some eclipse or interruption.17 This leaves the relatively small territory of northwestern Europe, the cradle of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, where this inheritance is now being put to the test of a migration, as driven by marketplace globalization, from the `unenlightened' rest of the world, with a result that is not only potentially explosive but has already produced deadly explosions. The point and the question is: if Enlightenment, as the historical counter-force to `faith-based' social and political institutions, is in retrenchment, under siege, or simply at a standstill throughout the world, doesn't this signal that the encounter is still to come, not between belief and unbelief, but rather within the general space that Derrida sees de¢ned by the performativo-pragmatic imperative `you must believe me'? A new Enlightenment, a second (or third or fourth or nth) Enlightenment would seek to think this groundless ground of belief as the conditioning limit on every possible encounter with another, every act of testimony given or received. But, precisely, what is called thinking? This question can take us to a second set of reasons to invoke the problematic of testimony. As I mentioned earlier, the accountability discourse tags as its principal aim the assessment of `thinking', `critical thinking', which is usually not speci¢ed any further than by way

42

Encountering Derrida

of contrast to `factual knowledge'. For example, here is another typical formulation by the authors of the `Issue Paper' on `Accountability/Assessment' written for the Future of Higher Education Commission: The economic demand for a better-prepared workforce has never been greater. The college education needed for the competitive, global environment in the future is about far more than speci¢c, factual knowledge and traditional approaches. College education must address the capability and capacity to think and develop and continue to learn. It is essential to achieve a new set of skills for a new century, such as: problem solving, critical thinking and written communication skills.18 Now, no doubt this list of so-called `new skills' is at least surprising, but let us disregard the absurd insinuations that universities have somehow neglected these `skills' up until now. Let us instead sketch a brief analysis of these performative assertions, which, I admit, could be endless. They begin by drawing the clear inference that the university's principal task, and what is here being demanded of it, is to transmit, foster, and augment `the capability and capacity to think'. Such a capacity or capability is, therefore, the measurable value that ought to be added by the university experience. This, we are told, is our responsibility in the university and that for which we should be held accountable. Fine. Let's say we accept and endorse that responsibility (or rather, rea¤rm it) and, what is more, let's say we're ready to demonstrate our willingness to be held accountable to that responsibility right here in the encounter with this very text or test.19 And to do so, we could simulate the sort of test of `critical thinking' that the accountabilists hope to see generally adopted, once what they invariably identify as the `resistance' of university faculty and administrations has been overcome.20 As a sign of goodwill, we would demonstrate, on the contrary and in a counter-move, our commitment to `critical thinking' and to our responsibility by responding as critically as possible to the sample argument just cited and even by submitting to an evaluation of how well we do on the test. For the purpose of this simulation, then, we'll put ourselves in the place of an imaginary test-taker who might have been one of our students. Pencils ready? Begin. Test instructions: `Analyse the above excerpt and write a brief essay in which you agree or disagree with its arguments, explaining the reasons for the positions you take.' Response: `First, I note the assumption that, according to this statement, my university education ought to have been a preparation for the global, competitive workforce. This is not said in so many words, but that would be precisely what signals it as an unexamined assumption. I do not share this assumption and my university experience has, I believe, been the richer for it; moreover I believe this despite the fact that, in another sense, I am now far poorer

Accounterability

43

because my parents refused to continue subsidizing my studies ever since I changed my major to the Programme in Critical Thinking. No doubt like the author of these assertions, they were willing to invest in my university degree only so long as I promised an appreciable return of marketable skills. Nevertheless, I believe that my programme of study, and this will be my second point, has de¢nitely enhanced my ``capability and capacity to think and develop and continue to learn'', aims that, I agree, should motivate university teaching, learning, and research. To adduce some evidence of my enhanced ability, I might apply to the excerpt something I learned to recognize when I read for one of my courses, among many other remarkable works, Jacques Derrida's essay ``Plato's Pharmacy''.21 When the statement distinguishes ``critical thinking'' from ``speci¢c, factual knowledge'', it is in fact repeating (and very uncritically I might add) an ancient opposition between what Plato called the living memory that animates logos, and hupomnesis, two ancient Greek words that mean roughly thought, speech, reason, on the one hand, and rote memorization and repetition, on the other. And what I've read about the similar distinction Rabelais made, about 2000 years later, between the teªte bien pleine and the teªte bien faite helps me to recognize another variation on ``factual knowledge'' vs. ``critical thinking''. Thus, when I read this call to ``a new set of skills for a new century'', I am able to respond critically (having also along the way picked up a little ``factual knowledge'') rather than be fooled by an appeal to newness that goes no deeper than the repetition of the word ``new''. Likewise, the term ``skills'' draws my critical attention because its use in this context disturbs considerably the apparent, but very vague distinction being drawn. This disturbance raises questions, such as: if critical thinking is called a ``skill'', then how is it di¡erent from those other, technical skills acquired by rote memorization and the repetition of ``factual knowledge''? Can one acquire this so-called skill by bypassing the said factual knowledge and the exercise of memory's techniques, which is perhaps what the author means here by the impossibly vague reference to ``traditional approaches''? No, I don't believe so. I call as a witness, once again, Plato, who was after all such a clever guy that people are still studying his works almost 2500 years later: he too thought he could draw a line between logos and hupomnesis, so as, in e¡ect, to measure and evaluate the former by itself in distinction from the latter. He ran all manner of tests on his disciples, but ¢nally could never adduce anything like a proof or even convincing evidence that his teaching of logos produced better critical thinkers than did the techniques of the Sophists. So what is the answer? Which is the better, even the best education? I believe . . .' Time's up. Stop! So, how do you think our imaginary testee did? Who will answer that question for the future, that is, and I quote the test statement again, for `the college

44

Encountering Derrida

education needed . . . in the future'? This is not at all a rhetorical question since someone certainly will come forward to perform the evaluation, and most likely someone who believes he or she already knows how to calculate the future and which future to prepare for. Before being cut o¡, however, our imaginary student had perhaps started to give a di¡erent answer, or rather a di¡erent testimony. Like every testimony, this one says: you must believe that I am telling you truthfully what I believe to be true. It takes responsibility for this belief in response to all the testers who are asking for evidence, if not proof, of what has been added, or not, by years of study, who demand a metric to determine if our testi¢er gained or wasted an education, produced pro¢t or loss on an investment. How will `critical thinkers' of the future respond to this demand? These questions put to the test our thinking of belief and faith, testimony and proof, calculation and the incalculable. And, therefore, perhaps above all, what is called, more and more facilely, more and more mechanically, `critical thinking'. You may of course take all the time you like to think about your answers, but be aware that the test is already in progress.22

Chapter 4

`Don't Count Me In': Derrida's Refraining J. Hillis Miller

Simon Morgan Wortham's admirably penetrating and comprehensive Counterinstitutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University1 has traced in detail Jacques Derrida's complex relations over the years both to the institutions in place with which he has been associated and to the counter-institutions of various kinds that he was involved in founding. As Wortham shows, a contradictory `with-against' movement has always characterized Derrida's relation to academic institutions, to institutions generally, and to the traditions of philosophy as an academic discipline. The `third', or neither/nor, or both/and, is a fundamental feature of Derrida's thought or, better put, of his characteristic style, if one may speak of such a thing in a multitudinous writing that is so heterogeneous in styles. The opening pages of A Taste for the Secret, for example, give several examples of this in rapid-¢re sequence. Derrida begins by saying that `there is an injunction to the system that I have never renounced'.2 He then immediately goes on to say that `deconstruction, without being anti-systematic, is on the contrary, and nevertheless, not only a search for, but itself a consequence of the fact that the system is impossible'.3 Odd syntax! What is the object of `search for'? Search for what? Search for systematic coherence or search for proof that system is impossible? The sentence seems to want to say both things at once. (I have been unable to consult the original French, or the Italian, to see if they have the same ambiguity.) In the next paragraph, Derrida simultaneously asserts his allegiance to doing philosophy, even `systematic philosophy', and his non-allegiance, his commitment to doing something that `exceeds' the philosophical: `Mine, then, is an excessively philosophical gesture: a gesture that is philosophical and, at the same time, in excess of the philosophical.'4 Two paragraphs later, he de¢nes his interest in the question of imagination in Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, as resulting from the way imagination is two things at once: `there is something about it that has made it a threat to truth, intellect, and reality ^ yet a resource as well'.5 Derrida goes on immediately to generalize this as an interest in the `third' as something that both participates and does not participate, both at once, in any system: And in the end everything we have said about the system comes down to a question of the `third'. This third term, can be taken as the mediator that

46

Encountering Derrida

permits synthesis, reconciliation, participation; in which case that which is neither this nor that permits the synthesis of this and that . . . [T]he third of neither-this-nor-that and this-and-that can indeed also be interpreted as that whose absolute heterogeneity resists all integration, participation and system, thus designating the place where the system does not close.6 The third is a dialectical Aufhebung that does not sublate, but rather prohibits sublation. Some readers are driven up the wall by such formulations. If you have a taste for Derrida you must, on the contrary, like such formulations, be inspired to further thought by them. This ¢rst segment of the ¢rst interview in A Taste for the Secret ends with one more example in remarks about the way time is out of joint, aus den Fugen, and about the way this undoes any periodization in the history of philosophy and makes our so-called contemporaries, that is, philosophers since Hegel, `non-contemporary' either to us or to one another, since `this dislocation of the present . . . renders the present non-contemporary to itself '.7 All these X-not-X formulations occur in the ¢rst ¢ve pages of the ¢rst interview in A Taste for the Secret! Another large-scale example, only touched on brie£y in A Taste for the Secret, is what Derrida has to say about friendship, in La politique de l'amitie¨. On the one hand, Derrida was a touchingly loyal friend, for example in my unclouded friendship with him over almost forty years. On the other hand, a leitmotif of La politique de l'amitie¨ is a sentence from Montaigne, often attributed to Aristotle, that says, `O mes amis, il n'y a nul amy'.8 (`O my friends, there is no friend.'9) The book can be de¢ned as a deconstruction or making extremely problematic of the usual idea of friendship. On the ¢rst hand, again, Derrida, in the inscription in the copy of this book he gave to me, has crossed out `Politiques de' and made it read: `pour Dorothy,/pour Hillis/l'amitie¨, l'a¡ection/et l'admiration de/Jacques'. My citation about the `third' also exempli¢es another somewhat exasperating feature of Derrida's style (if `style' is the right word for it). This might be called the continually displaced middle. Lost in the scintillating abundance of Derrida's writings, the reader, this reader at least, seeks a solid rock or anchor in the £ux, something around which the `whole', if it is a whole, even a nonsystematic whole, may be organized. Derrida appears to give us such anchors, as when he says, `And in the end [in the end? Why say that? When do we get to the end? Where is the end?] everything we [we? Who is this we? Is Derrida a plurality, other to himself, heterogeneous to himself, a divided or ¢ssioned signature? He often says so, as in A Taste for the Secret: `Every time there is a name ^ by which we mean proper name ^ the word can remain the same while naming something new each time. The very possibility of the name is iterability: the possibility of repeating the same, but each time to name an other or to name the same otherwise'10] . . .' Let me begin the citation from A Taste for the Secret again, after this inordinate interpolation: `And in the end everything we have said about the system comes down to a question of the third.'11 That seems to give the reader solid ground to stand on, a fundament. The problem is that

`Don't Count Me In': Derrida's Refraining

47

before long Derrida is o¡ering yet another quite di¡erent centre around which his writing may be organized, as when, in a later interview in A Taste for the Secret, he says, `I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time . . . And at bottom it is what commands everything ^ what I do, what I am, what I write, what I say'.12 Well, which is the bottom, the third or death? I would like to know. The series of interviews of Derrida by Maurizio Ferraris and Gianni Vattimo of 1993^95, collected in A Taste for the Secret, from which I have been citing, have here and there statements by Derrida that succinctly summarize his `withagainst' relations to institutions and counter-institutions over the years. These relations are a salient example of Derrida's `third'. Simon Morgan Wortham's book patiently ¢lls out the details about these relations. On the one hand, Derrida repeatedly, in many places in his writing, pledges his ¢delity to the academic institutions already in place and especially to the European philosophical tradition and to the protocols for studying and teaching those in France, even though no French university ever appointed him a professor. He taught always at prestigious but somewhat marginal institutions, the E¨cole normale and the E¨cole des hautes e¨tudes en sciences sociales. At the former he was, at least initially, an `agre¨ge¨-re¨pe¨titeur'. `A repeater, the agre¨ge¨-re¨pe¨titeur', Derrida tells us, `should produce nothing, at least if to produce means to innovate, to transform, to bring about the new. He is destined to repeat and make others repeat, to reproduce and make others reproduce: forms, norms, and a content.'13 The mind boggles at the thought of Derrida as a `repeater'. Much later, after promotions at the E¨cole normale, he became `Director of Studies' at the E¨cole des hautes etudes. He chose `Philosophical Institutions' as his topic of research and teaching. `My principal interests', he says in A Taste for the Secret, `have tended towards the great canon of philosophy ^ Plato, Kant, Hegel, Husserl', to which Nietzsche and Heidegger must surely be added.14 An immense proportion of Derrida's seminars over the years focused on careful, slow, patient readings of passages or texts by Heidegger, as for example the reading, in the very last seminars, of 2002^03, entitled La beªte et le souverain (deux), of a few passages from Heidegger's seminars of 1929^30, Die Grundbegri¡e der Metaphysik: Welt^Endlichkeit^Einsamkeit.15 More than once Derrida asserted his continued commitment to the Husserlian phenomenological procedures, the epoche¨ or transcendental reduction, and so on. In `The time of a thesis: punctuations', he says he still, today, sees Husserlian phenomenology as `a discipline of incomparable rigor'.16 In A Taste for the Secret, Derrida speaks of his ¢delity to the French tradition of microscopic reading as a way of identifying the systematic hanging together of philosophical writings (`the way the text works'17). He learned this, he says, at the E¨cole normale, especially from a certain Martial Gue¨roult: `Even if I protested against that discipline, against the unspoken norms of the discipline of reading, it's true that they continue to inspire in me an ineradicable respect. Those models of philological, micrological, I'd even say grammatico-logical demands, for me have never lost their irrecusable authority.'18

48

Encountering Derrida

Derrida's interest in counter-institutions would appear to go counter to this commitment to the institutions already ¢rmly in place. `The idea of a counterinstitution, neither spontaneous, wild nor immediate', says Derrida in A Taste for the Secret, `is the most permanent motif that, in a way, has guided me in my work'.19 (Here is yet another assertion of what forms the centre of Derrida's work, to be added to death and the third. Altogether too many centres!) Nor was the counter-institution just an `idea' for Derrida. As Simon Morgan Wortham has shown in detail, and as Ferraris in one of his questions to Derrida in A Taste for the Secret succinctly summarizes, Derrida was directly involved in the setting up at least four counter-institutions: Greph, the Groupe de recherche¨ sur l'enseignement philosophique (1974); the Estates General of Philosophy, held at the Sorbonne, 1979; the Jan Hus Association (1981), which got him arrested in Prague when he went there to run a clandestine seminar; the foundation in 1983 of the Colle©ge internationale de philosophie, of which he was the ¢rst director. Four features of these counter-institutions can be identi¢ed: 1. They are not so much `counter' in the sense of wholly di¡erent, subversive, revolutionary, unfaithful, as an attempt to put the institution of philosophy study back on track, so to speak, to make it more faithful to a tradition which the institutions then in place were, in Derrida's view, being unfaithful to, were betraying. 2. Derrida never remained associated with these counter-institutions for long. Though he was the ¢rst director of the Colle©ge internationale, he soon gave that up. His relation to this, as to the other counter-institutions he helped found, tended to become more and more marginal as time passed. 3. None of these counter-institutions has had much in£uence or has changed institutional organizations all that much in France or elsewhere. `[A]ll of them', says Derrida in A Taste for the Secret, were `counter-institutions with original and paradoxical ideas (albeit unrealized) on the subject of counterinstitutionality'.20 The operative word here is `unrealized'. 4. In a strange way, Derrida moved counter to the institutions to which he belonged by ful¢lling to the letter the protocols of interpretation he had been taught by those institutions themselves, by Gue¨roult, Hyppolite, and others of his teachers, for example. Something of the same sort, to compare the lesser with the greater, can be said of my own movement from American New Criticism to the rhetorical criticism I now practice. I just did what the New Critics told me to do: `Read closely. Ask questions of the text: Just why is this or that feature there? What is its function? What does it do? Do not say anything about a text that cannot be supported by the actual words on the page.' Strange things happen, as I discovered, when you do that conscientiously and with as open a mind as possible. In Derrida's case, the age-old assumption that a great philosopher's works form a system, plus the exhortation to micrological reading, led him to try to ¢t everything in. Behold! He found that you cannot do that.

`Don't Count Me In': Derrida's Refraining

49

The distance between trying honestly and patiently to ¢t everything in and a taste for aspects of a given philosopher's work that turn out not to be capable of being ¢tted in is so narrow as to be almost nothing. After having said that his interests have tended towards the great canon of philosophy, from Plato to Husserl, Derrida in A Taste for the Secret goes on to say, `but, at the same time, towards the so-called `minor' loci of their texts, neglected problematics, or footnotes ^ things that can irritate the system and at the same time account for the subterranean region in which the system constitutes itself by repressing what makes it possible, which is not systematic'.21 Well, is that being faithful to Gue¨roult's micrological reading or not? As any schoolboy knows, nothing can be more insolent or subversive than a slightly ironic exact repetition of what someone else has said. Derrida, as an agre¨ge¨-re¨pe¨titeur at the E¨cole Normale was supposed to perform such iteration in his teaching. He was supposed to avoid thinking for himself, and just to repeat what Plato, Hegel, Kant, or Husserl had said. As Derrida tirelessly demonstrated, under the aegis of what he called `iterabilite¨', every repetition both iterates and alters, at a minimum in the sense that the same words are uttered in a di¡erent socio-institutional context and at a di¡erent historical time. Though Derrida never defended himself so irresponsibly or with such abdication of responsibility as to say what I am about to say, I think he would nevertheless have been justi¢ed in saying: `I have been an obedient student. I have done exactly what you told me to do. I have remained faithfully inside the institution or discipline of philosophy. I have repeated exactly and micrologically, and look what happened! The ``system'' disarticulated itself, deconstructed itself before my very eyes. My obedient reading revealed what the system depends on but that cannot be incorporated in the system, for example the pharmakon in Plato.' I conclude that for Derrida the opposition between institution and counterinstitution is not really an opposition. It is rather a question of supplementarity. The counter-institution supplements the institution by more adequately ful¢lling its goals, that is, the goal of collective working-together on the basis of some kind of consensus. At the same time the counter-institution brings into the open what keeps the institution from ever ful¢lling its goals. No doubt the counterinstitutions Derrida founded or helped found were, not so secretly, attempts to institutionalize deconstruction and its basis in respect for the otherness of every other, as in the formula, so important for Derrida: tout autre est tout autre, every other is wholly other. Nevertheless, a counter-institution is still an institution, with its own destined incompletion. That may explain why Derrida tended to remain for so short a time in each of his counter-institutions. Everything I have said so far still follows from the `on the one hand' on page 47. I have not yet got to the other hand. I hope my readers have noticed that and have been waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. On the other hand, then, Derrida remains, in spite of his allegiance to institutions and counter-institutions, deeply suspicious of any form of collectivity or togetherness, any institution, however `counter'. His most deep-seated and

50

Encountering Derrida

spontaneous reaction to invitations to join something is what William Faulkner, using a Southernism or at least a `Faulknerism', calls `refraining'. This is, for example, the violent gesture made by a horse when it rears back, rolls its eyes, arches its neck, and resists being put in a truck or corral. The resistance to saying X without also immediately saying not X, or, at the same time Y, is the stylistic marker of this refraining. Why is this? Why all this rearing back? What is the logical or illogical or logical-illogical basis of this refraining? A full answer would take a more or less interminable reading of all Derrida's work, including all the unpublished seminars. Nevertheless, a sketch or hypotyposis of an answer may be given in the space remaining to me. I begin this sketch by looking at a paragraph about community in A Taste for the Secret. It is characteristically double, with and against, taking away with one hand what it has given with the other. In response to a question by Ferraris about whether he would still be willing to subscribe to `a community of interpretation and allegoresis', Derrida begins by saying that he has no problem with using the word or the concept of community to name those associations of people described in such recent works as Giorgio Agamben's La comunita© che viene, Jean-Luc Nancy's La communaute¨ de¨soeuvre¨e, and Maurice Blanchot's La communaute¨ inavouable, to which I would add Alfonso Lingis' The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. As the two paragraphs on community develop, however, Derrida radically puts in question the use of this word to name such associations: `Why call it community?' he asks. Just to conform to what certain of our friends have attempted to do, to Blanchot's `unavowable' community or Nancy's `inoperative' one? I have no qualms about these communities; my only question is, why call them communities? If I have always hesitated to use this word, it is because too often the word `community' resounds with the `common' [commun], the as-one [commeun] . . . [Blanchot's communism] is a communism where the common is anything but common: it is the placing in common [mise en commun] of that which is no longer of the order of subjectivities, or of intersubjectivity as a relation ^ however paradoxical ^ between presences. Everything we have been saying here is a certain way of questioning community in the classical sense, and intersubjectivity as well.22 Derrida's allegiance to Blanchot, beyond almost all his other French contemporaries, is, by the way, evident here. Well, just what is wrong, for Derrida, with community in the classical sense or with intersubjectivity in the usual sense of the word, that is, as a name for the interaction between two subjectivities, present to themselves in the present, which have some sort of access to one another? Why does he recoil or refrain from using these words or concepts? The answer is that everything in Derrida's thought follows from the fundamental assumption that every self or Dasein is absolutely isolated from all the others. I have discussed elsewhere a remarkable passage on this topic in Derrida's last, so far unpublished, seminars, but must

`Don't Count Me In': Derrida's Refraining

51

cite it again here for its stubborn, iterated, intransigent, refusal to allow for any sort of communication between one so-called subjectivity and another: Between my world, the `my world'; what I call `my world', and there is no other for me, every other world making up part of it, between my world and every other world, there is initially the space and the time of an in¢nite di¡erence, of an interruption incommensurable with all the attempts at passage, of bridge, of isthmus, of communication, of translation, of trope, and of transfer which the desire for a world and the sickness of the world (mal du monde), the being in sickness of the world (l'eªtre en mal de monde) will attempt to pose, to impose, to propose, to stabilize. There is no world, there are only islands.23 This passage, if I may say so, says a mouthful, as they say. Its iterative phrasing, of words in apposition, such as the late Derrida was wont to use, saying the same thing over and over in slightly di¡erent terms, seems calculated to make sure the reader or listener does not think the slightest chink out of my windowless monad exists as anything other than an ideological phantasm. As Derrida says just a moment before the passage cited above, `the community of the world [is] always constructed, simulated by a group of stabilizing positings [dispositifs], more or less stable, therefore also never natural, language in the broad sense, codes of traces being destined, with all the living, to construct a unity of the world always deconstructible and nowhere and never given in nature'.24 What this implies for the question of Derrida's belonging, in any serious way, to any institution, counter or otherwise, is a devastating negative, since it asserts clearly enough that both any institution and any counter-institution are fragile, spectral, constructs, always deconstructible, never based on any other than a phantasmal community, or on any true intersubjective communication between the members of the institution. Nor is this an isolated formulation. A passage in A Taste for the Secret, for example, says the same thing, somewhat less hyperbolically, with a signi¢cantly different twist, but just as ¢rmly. Here is one of the relatively few places where Derrida uses the word `God' more or less a¤rmatively, pro¡ering and withdrawing it at the same time. Someone might be tempted to say, `Ah ha! Derrida has come out of the closet. He really does believe in God. We can recuperate him within one form or another of traditional theology, perhaps so-called ``negative theology'', perhaps even within some institutionalized religion or other'. That `someone' would do well to be wary, however. It is true that Derrida was fascinated by the question of religious faith and wrote often about it, for example in `Foi et savoir',25 or in the admirable prolonged discussion of Kierkegaard's interpretation of the Abraham and Isaac story in Donner la mort,26 or in the investigation of negative theology in `Comment ne pas parler: De¨ne¨gations' (`How to Avoid Speaking: Denials'),27 or in what he has to say about the religious basis of ideology in Spectres de Marx.28 `In the end', nevertheless, Derrida always refrains. He always says, once more, `I refuse to answer that question'. In `Comment ne pas parler' Derrida argues forcefully that deconstruction is not

52

Encountering Derrida

a form of negative theology. The title suggests that the whole essay is an evasive refusal to answer, though, as the reader of Derrida may have come to expect, the title has a double meaning: `Between the two interpretations of ``Comment ne pas dire . . . ?'' [``dire'' rather than ``parler'' was apparently Derrida's ¢rst formulation ( JHM)] the meaning of the uneasiness thus seems to turn again: from the ``how to be silent?'' (how to avoid speaking at all?) one passes ^ in a completely necessary and as if intrinsic fashion ^ to the question, which can always become the heading for an injunction: how not to speak, and which speech to avoid, in order to speak well?'29 About refusing to speak as a form of refraining I shall say more below. Derrida can hardly be said to a¤rm straightforwardly any sort of religious faith. Far from it. `Foi et savoir', for example, sees religious faith as a basic feature of that strange structure of `auto-co-immunity' that leads every community to turn its self-protective mechanisms, its immune system, against itself in that terrifying reversal called `auto-immunity'.30 In Spectres de Marx, Derrida follows Marx, as I have said, in asserting that all ideological aberrations are built on the basic spectral and baseless mysti¢cation of religious belief. And yet . . . And yet . . . Derrida does believe in the solicitations of a nameless something he calls `le tout autre'. If `tout autre est tout autre', if every other is wholly other, according to the formula Derrida proposes and comments on at length in Donner la mort,31 then nothing more can be said about it, in spite of the urgent and irresistible demands that wholly other makes on me. The word `Dieu', `God', in the passage I am about to cite must ultimately appear as just one more catachresis for what has no proper name, along with `Jehovah', or `Jaweh', `Elohim', `le secret', `le don', `la justice', and `l'autre' itself. Derrida's reading of the Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis, original moment, according to him, of the three great religions of the book, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, is de£ected in Derrida's reading to become a story of the secret demand made on the singular individual by the wholly other. I turn now to the passage in A Taste for the Secret. Just as Derrida says in `The time of a thesis: punctuations' that in 1957 `it was then for me a matter of bending, more or less violently, the techniques of transcendental phenomenology to the needs of elaborating a new theory of literature',32 so in this passage he bends Leibnizian monadology more or less violently to the needs of elaborating a new theory of the absolute singularity and isolation of every `I' or ego. The passage begins with an assertion that most people can accept: each of us sees the world di¡erently from the way anyone else sees it. What is unusual, perhaps, is the claim, in A Taste for the Secret, that this di¡erence is `absolute': `the eyes meet, and what one sees is absolutely other than what the other sees'.33 Also a little peculiar and a little surprising, at least to me, is the corollary Derrida derives from this absolute otherness. It is because I am so absolutely di¡erent from my neighbour, enisled in my own ego, that I can understand you and that you can understand me. Just why this is the case, Derrida does not explain, but he insists on its necessity:

`Don't Count Me In': Derrida's Refraining

53

What I see at this moment has no relation [he does not say it is somewhat di¡erent, but that it has no relation whatsoever] to what you see, and we understand each other: you understand what I'm saying to you, and for that to happen it is necessary, really necessary, that what you have facing you should have no relation, no commensurability, with what I myself see facing you. And it is this in¢nite di¡erence that makes us always ingenuous, always absolutely new.34 Why is this the case? It seems counter-intuitive. It would seem that each person understands what his or her neighbour says because the two have something, quite a lot in fact, in common, a common language for example. It would seem that this, in turn, turns on the way you and I both go on being the same person from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Derrida, however, insists that I am always, each moment, ingenuous, like a newborn, always new. He insists, paradoxically, moreover, that it is just because we are in¢nitely di¡erent that we understand one another. Why is that? A hint at an answer is given in Derrida's assertion that I am not only wholly other to my neighbour, but am also wholly other to myself. I hide a secret from myself. I am radically heterogeneous to myself. On the ground of these rather strange assertions, Derrida brings in Leibniz and relates what he says so forcefully in the later passage from the last seminar, already cited, to what he calls `a Leibnizianism without God, so to speak'. `So to speak'? What reservation lurks in this refraining? Here is Derrida's description of what he de¢nes as our Godless monadism, though God, says Derrida, is `there where he is not there': Call it monadology ^ the fact that between my monad ^ the world as it appears to me ^ and yours, no relation is possible: hence the hypothesis of God, who thinks of compossibility, pre-established harmony, etc. But from monad to monad, and even when monads speak to one another, there is no relation, no passage. The translation totally changes the text. From this point of view, it is a question for me of a Leibnizianism without God, so to speak, which means that, nevertheless, in these monads, in this hypersolipsism, the appeal of God ¢nds place; God sees from your side and from mine at once, as absolute third; and so there where he is not there, he is there; there where he is not there, is his place.35 This quite extraordinary passage is a hyperbolic example of taking away with one hand what it gives with the other, and then giving it back again. On the one hand, Derrida asserts that each person's isolation within his or her windowless monad is absolute. `No relation is possible', no trope, transfer, bridge, isthmus, or translation. No translation carries anything over from the original text. God is a baseless Leibnizian hypothesis to provide an escape from this truly desperate situation, the situation of a hypersolipsism, a Leibnizianism without God. On the other hand, in a formulation that says `both/and' or `this and that',

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Derrida recognizes the `place' of `the appeal of God'. `Only a God can save us', Heidegger, notoriously, said in that late interview in Der Spiegel. The word `place' (presumably `lieu' in Derrida's original French, which I have not been able to see) is crucial here, along with the twice-italicized word there, as is the reappearance of that non-dialectical third that, as I have shown, Derrida says, earlier in A Taste for the Secret, is essential to his way of thinking, his way of making way. God is, after all, there where he is not there. That is his place. I suppose Derrida means by this that even if a God exists as the absolute third who sees from your side and my side at once, he is not there as a presence available to either of us as a bridge to the other. Therefore we are left in our solitude, as islands or windowless monads. Though Derrida appeals here to Leibniz, he makes clear in many other passages in his work that the section on our `analogical apperception' of the other transcendental ego in Husserl's `Fifth Cartesian Meditation' is the crucial reference for Derrida's assumption that each singularity has no direct access whatsoever to the interiority of any other singularity.36 Each singularity is an island. We can only guess, by analogy and by a perception without perception, an apperception, that the other has an interiority like my own. I claim that it is on the basis of this double postulation, the postulation of the radical isolation and singularity of each `I', and the postulation of a wholly other, a `God' who is `there where he is not there', that Derrida asserts, in an earlier passage in A Taste for the Secret, that he is not one of the family, that he refrains from belonging to any institution, regular or counter. He also tells us why he refrains. He tells us what precious value, a price beyond price, is protected by this non-belonging, this refraining. My entire essay so far has been working towards the citation of this remarkable passage and towards saying a few words about it in conclusion. Ferraris has asked Derrida why he is fond of echoing Gide's indictment of the family and why he gives as his `own private translation', `I am not one of the family' (`je ne suis pas de la famille'): . . . let me get back to my saying `I am not one of the family'. Clearly, I was playing on a formula that has multiple registers of resonance. `I'm not one of the family' means in general, `I do not de¢ne myself on the basis of my belonging to the family', or to civil society, or to the state; I do not de¢ne myself on the basis of elementary forms of kinship [an ironic reference here to Le¨viStrauss and structural anthropology]. But it also means, more ¢guratively, that I am not part of any group, that I do not identify myself with a linguistic community, a national community, a political party, or with any group or clique whatsoever, with any philosophical or literary school. `I am not one of the family' means: do not consider me `one of you', `don't count me in' . . .37 `Don't count me in'! This is the most violent and total expression of Derrida's fundamental gesture or speech act or refraining that I know anywhere in his writings. Not only is Derrida an island, a windowless monad without access to God as third (if God does indeed exist as more than a placeless place or

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an unprovable hypothesis). He also wants, and must want, to be an island. He de¢nes himself as an island by refusing to belong to any community, group, or institution (counter or otherwise) whatsoever, including, for example, the community of deconstructionists, or that famous `Gang of Four', the so-called Yale Ma¢a. Like Melville's Bartleby, Derrida just says no, or rather he says no without saying no, or yes either. `He doesn't say no and he doesn't say yes', says Derrida of Bartleby. Derrida says, like Bartleby, politely but ¢rmly, `I would prefer not to'.38 In Passions, Derrida expresses the concept of an absolute right not to answer, associated by him especially with democracy and with its concomitant, literature, in its modern sense as the right to say or write anything and not be held responsible for it.39 Passions was written to ful¢l an obligation to respond to a whole book of essays about Derrida's work. Derrida conspicuously refrains from doing that, though he says it is impolite to do so. `Comment ne pas parler: De¨ne¨gations' shows, perhaps, how to talk without talking, without saying anything. In L'Universite¨ sans condition,40 Derrida projects a utopian university that allows putting everything in question, even the right to put everything in question. I claim that Derrida is this multiple and many-layered gesture of refraining, through and through. To express this total refraining in terms of not belonging to his family, as a synecdoche for all the other forms of not belonging ^ disciplinary, political, and institutional ^ makes it all the more violent and even improbable. How can I not be a member of my own family? Derrida's presupposition is that even this most intimate and apparently irrefutable form of belonging is an illusion, an ideological assumption. Each man or woman is an island, cut o¡ entirely, without any bridge or isthmus to any other island, even to members of his or her family. Moreover, he or she ought to want this separation. Derrida therefore chooses his enisled separation. He desires it. He prizes it above all else. Why? The rest of the passage from A Taste for the Secret cited above explains why: . . . I want to keep my freedom, always: this, for me, is the condition not only for being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others. When someone is one of the family, not only does he lose himself in the herd, but he loses the others as well; the others become simply places, family functions, or places or functions in the organic totality that constitutes a group, school, nation or community of subjects speaking the same language.41 Derrida's logic here is clear enough. He presumes that what I really am is that always renewed, always di¡erent, always ingenuous, newborn, always singular, windowless monad. All other people are like me in being absolute singularities. True ethical relations must be between these monads, de¢ned as my response to the demand made on me by that version of the wholly other each other person is. It is my in¢nite responsibility to respond without reservation to that demand.

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The model for this responding is religious, not, strictly speaking, ethical. This model is Abraham's response to the wholly other in the form of Elohim's demand that he sacri¢ce his beloved son Isaac. God says, `Abraham', and Abraham answers, `Here I am.' Abraham is ready to respond without re£ection to what Jehovah commands. The elaborate analysis of Kierkegaard's analysis of the Abraham and Isaac story in Donner la mort (The Gift of Death) is the fullest exploration of this exigent ethical theory. Ethical relations in the ordinary sense, my relations to other persons, are modelled on Abraham's responsible response to Jehovah, as many texts by Derrida make clear. The Gift of Death, for example, argues that `paradox, scandal, and aporia' characterize the way I owe an absolute and unquali¢ed obligation to the demand made on me by each other singularity: `I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, even the love of another without sacri¢cing the other other, the other others.'42 It follows that as soon as I am one of the family, a member of any group or institution, or see others as such members, I become `one of the herd'. The others also become herdlike. I lose myself, but I lose the others as well. Only by retaining my separate singularity, outside of any family or institution, can I respond to other singularities as forms of the wholly other. In what follows this passage in A Taste for the Secret, Derrida relates his resolute refraining from any belonging to his `unusual family history', his situation, as he puts it in Circonfession, as `un petit Juif noir et tre©s arabe' (`a little black and very Arab Jew')43 who did not feel that he belonged to any of his local communities, not to the Arab one, not to the French one, that always all his life treated him as an outsider, and not to the Jewish one either: `The fact is that I have a predisposition to not being one of the family, it wasn't just my choice. I am a Jew from Algeria, from a certain type of community, in which belonging to Judaism was problematic, belonging to Algeria was problematic, belonging to France was problematic, etc. So all this predisposed me to not-belonging; but, beyond the particular idiosyncrasies of my own story, I wanted to indicate the sense in which an ``I'' does not have to be ``one of the family''.'44 It would be a mistake, in my judgement, and a cop out, to seize on this autobiographical explanation and conclude, `Well, that explains it. It is special to Derrida's subject position. I can heave a sigh of relief and belong with a clear conscience to my family, my nation, my university, my group of like-minded scholars'. No, we are, in Derrida's view, all in some form or other of his situation. His situation was no more than a singular form, his form, of the general human situation of not having to be one of the family, of having an urgent obligation not to be one of the family. My obligation to respond without mediation to the wholly other means I must refrain from responding to any institution's demands. I must respond rather to an in¢nite demand for justice, as opposed to right or law. This call comes from no existing institution or counter-institution. While taking account of the context in which I ¢nd myself, my response enters the context to change it in response to a call from the future, the tocome, `l'a©-venir'. Derrida calls this `un messianisme sans religion, un messianique, meªme, sans messianisme' (`a messianism without religion, even a messianic

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without messianism'), and a ¢delity to the `democracy to come'.45 One important feature of his or her context, for an academic, is the circumambient institutions already in place, including counter-institutions that have been installed. The latter then become also part of the context. I must, with the utmost urgency, refrain from belonging to any of these. This gesture of refraining, I claim, is Derrida's fundamental and de¢ning act, his ground without ground.

Chapter 5

Reading Over a Globalized World Samuel Weber

I have long been convinced that one of the decisive institutional conditions responsible for the emergence of what has been called `French Theory' has been the fact that for almost two centuries philosophy has been an obligatory subject of instruction in the last year of the lyce¨e. This tradition, unique in Europe if not in the world, has exposed a large segment of the French population to an instruction that addresses in a systematic manner problems and questions that are excluded from the specialized disciplines that make up the bulk of the curriculum, not just in secondary schools but in `higher education' as well. As a result, people from all walks of lives: economists, physicians, publicists, technicians and even businessmen, often ^ not always, to be sure, but more often than elsewhere ^ retain a certain interest in, and respect for problems that could not be easily addressed from within the established disciplines, a respect that includes the sense that those problems have a long, complex and rich history, one which can provide an indispensable context for understanding the contemporary world and for situating oneself in it. But precisely because such a history and the problems it treats are not easily integrated into the existing academic division of labour as institutionalized in the traditional disciplines, much less into technical and professional training, there is a tendency on the part of those whose intellectual horizon is entirely de¢ned by those disciplines and training to relegate such problems to a realm deemed to be beyond the pale of rational, historically codi¢ed investigation and discussion. In many American bookstore chains, `philosophy' is either absorbed into the section entitled `religion' or is entirely absent. In France, the obligatory instruction of philosophy in high school has been contested almost from its inception (in the 1840s), but increasingly in the past few decades. In 1975, the government of Giscard d'Estaing reduced the importance of this instruction ^ the number of hours taught, as well as its obligatory status ^ under a plan known by the name of the then Minister of Education, as the `Re¨forme Haby'. This proposal was at the time defeated, in part due to the e¡orts of the newly founded Research Group on Philosophical Teaching (GREPH), in which Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Sarah Kofman and many others participated. But although this particular attempt was abandoned, the project of `reforming' the high school curriculum so as to either

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reduce or entirely eliminate the teaching of philosophy as an obligatory subject has never been abandoned, and indeed has in the intervening years succeeded in vastly diminishing its importance for the newer technical, scienti¢c and economic tracks. As a result, each year at the time of ¢nal examinations for the baccalaure¨at, discussion of the value of philosophy for secondary school education resurfaces. This year has been no exception. A few days after the French hopes of repeating their victory in the World Cup were dashed, Le Monde headlined its third page with the question: `A quoi sert l'e¨preuve de philo?' ^ `What Good Is the Philosophy Exam?'. In case any reader might still harbour doubts as to the thrust of the question, the following subhead made things unmistakably clear: `Truth, Culture, Happiness, Justice: Monday, June 12th, 516,000 candidates spent an entire morning struggling with grand philosophical concepts. This distinctively French practice lives on stubbornly (a la vie dure).' Despite the leading question, the article itself turned out to be more nuanced and complex. To be sure it began with the predictable dismissal of philosophy on the part of several students, mainly from technical tracks. These students found philosophy either irrelevant to their future concerns, or at best overvalued in importance. But the article did not stop there. Indeed, most of the article then turned out to consist in a defence of philosophy, albeit on the part of students enrolled in the `literary' track `L'. Although this track comprises only 11 per cent of French high school candidates for the `bac', that still adds up to about 52,000 people each year, a by no means insigni¢cant minority. One of these students, 17-year-old Marion Lepage, spoke with enthusiasm about the exam question she had chosen to write on: `Does it make sense to want to escape from time?' She recounted how her attitude towards philosophy had changed by virtue of the instruction she had received: At the beginning of the year, I thought that philosophy was an abstract subject, full of concepts that had to be digested simply in order to pass the exam. I was wrong: it's applicable to all kinds of situations in everyday life. For example, should one always indulge one's desires, or should one learn to control them. This winter I found myself in a situation where I had to decide if I was going to give in to temptation. At the same time, we were studying the notion of desire in our philosophy class. That helped me organize my ideas. I understood that to give in is the easy way, but not necessarily a way to happiness.1 Somewhat less practically inclined, but no less positive were the remarks of another student, Elie Salleron: I always have had lots of ideas and was often carried away by my thoughts, persuaded that they were unique and brilliant. Through our classes, I became aware that all of them had already been thought through by many others, who had often explicated the issues much better than I could.2

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One of the philosophy teachers at the high school where these students attend, Alain Lie¨geon, gave a series of responses to the question, `What good is philosophy?' He began by conceding that measured in the short-term, philosophy is pretty much useless: `it's like art'. But from a longer-term perspective, its significance appears in a di¡erent light: `It's the basis (socle) of general education (culture ge¨ne¨rale). And such general education permits young people to better ¢nd their place (s'installer) in professional life.' If I have had di¤culty in translating the French phrase, `culture ge¨ne¨rale', it is, I believe, because in the English-speaking world today, and perhaps especially in the United States, there is less consensus than ever before not just about what `cultural literacy' should be, but whether it is a desirable social and pedagogical goal for a society that deems itself `multicultural', since, when phrased, as here, in the singular: culture ge¨ne¨rale, it implies that such `culture' can be `general' only by being uni¢ed, one and the same. But is that the only way of understanding such `generality'? Must a `generality' that begins by distinguishing itself from the specialized pursuits of knowledge which otherwise de¢ne the academic world, necessarily be homogeneous and self-same? Or might not its generality presuppose a certain form of sharing that implies a departure from self-evidence as the evidence of an unchanging self ? I take this to be the implicit question raised by Elie Salleron's discovery, already quoted, that most if not all of the ideas he had previously considered to be his private property, so to speak, had `already been thought' by many others, and indeed better, more elaborately, than he had been able to do himself. If this constitutes a lesson in `modesty', as the journalist of Le Monde observes, it is not simply humility that it teaches, but rather the sense of sharing, indeed of inheriting, thoughts that have a long, complex and rich history, from which one can learn ^ and to which one can then respond. I take this to be in part at least one of the implications of Professor Lie¨geon's response to the question, `What good is philosophy?' and whether it should continue to be a required subject of instruction in the last year of high school. His response comes, to be sure, couched in the history and tradition of the French educational system, which from the time of Victor Cousin until today has seen its principal mission to be that of educating young people to become productive citizens of the French republic. Thus, when he elaborates on how the study of philosophy can help students to ¢nd their place in professional life, the example that he gives is the competitive civil service examination: All things being equal, the di¡erence between two candidates will depend on their degree to which they are open to the world (leur degre¨ d'ouverture au monde) and for that, philosophy is irreplaceable. Before becoming a teacher, I worked with the long-term unemployed. There as well, in a recruitment interview, among persons with equal quali¢cations the one who is chosen is the one who is better able to situate himself with respect to the world.3 The apparently innocuous reference to `the world', and in particular, to that `opening' that gives access to it, is what interests me in all of this. There is an

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anecdotal reason for my interest, but one that is perhaps not only anecdotal. In 1998, when I was translating Jacques Derrida's essay on religion, `Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of `Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone',4 I was relieved to be able to render the French neologism that Derrida introduced in that text, `mondialatinisation' into English as globalatinization. My relief, however, was quickly tempered by Derrida's dissatisfaction with this translation, which, he said, tended to e¡ace the di¡erence between the two very di¡erent words, `world' and `globe'. At that point in time, Derrida had not yet ^ to my knowledge at least ^ elaborated this distinction as fully as he was to do a year later in an address at the Parisian Headquarters of UNESCO entitled, in French, `La mondialisation, la paix et la cosmopolitique'. The English translation of this title, `Globalization, Peace and Cosmopolitanism', both illustrates and con¢rms Derrida's concern that the distinction between the two words, `world' and `globe' is rapidly disappearing. In this talk he explains why he regards that as a signi¢cant loss: If I maintain the distinction between these concepts [monde, mondialisation] and the concepts of globalization or Globalisierung (and it should be noted that the word globalization is itself becoming global to the point of imposing itself more and more, even in France, in the rhetoric of politicians and the media), it is because the concept of world gestures toward a history, it has a memory that distinguishes it from that of the globe, of the universe, of Earth, of the cosmos even (at least of the cosmos in its pre-Christian meaning, which Saint Paul then Christianized precisely to make it say world as fraternal community of human beings, of fellow creatures, brothers, sons of God and neighbours to one another). For the world begins by designating, and tends to remain, in an Abrahamic tradition (Judeo-Christian-Islamic but predominantly Christian) a particular space-time, a certain oriented history of human brotherhoods [. . .]5 The subsumption of the notion of world, `monde' ^ world ^ under that of globe thus e¡aces the memory of the essentially Christian heritage ^ so Derrida believes ^ that determines the notion of `world' not just as `a particular spacetime', but more precisely as `a certain oriented history of human brotherhood . . .'. But nothing can repress a memory better than another memory. What Derrida does not do, at least not in this text, is to discuss those other memories that inform the notion of `globe' and that have positioned it to become the heir and perhaps the gravedigger of the notion of `world', but that also, perhaps, have endowed it with a potential power of resistance to the Christian heritage of `fraternity' and sovereignty on which Derrida so insists. The history of the word as recorded in the OED, for instance, stresses both its geometrical and physical uses, associated on the one hand with the sphere, and on the other with bodies ^ although by no means exclusively or even primarily with human bodies. Rather, the various meanings of `globe' de¢ne a space in which the human and the non-human converge. I am reminded of two instances

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in which globes are put into play in what for me has remained an unforgettable manner. The ¢rst is the scene in `The Great Dictator' where Charlie-Adenoid Hynkel-Adolf Hitler turns the globe into a ball that he tosses into the air like a balloon and then dances with, bouncing it o¡ his foot, his head, his rear, to the accompaniment of Wagnerian strings, until ¢nally, suddenly, the globeballoon bursts and Charlie-Hynkel is left holding but the threads. The globe is thus treated as an object of play, but also of control and domination (and indeed, the OED reminds us that the word has been used to designate the golden orb, which together with the sceptre symbolizes sovereignty). A selfcontained object of will, power and play, but which ¢nally blows up and self-destructs: the globe of the Great Dictator. The second scene, although occurring in a vastly removed time and place, reveals an unexpected a¤nity to the Chaplin ¢lm, which it precedes by over three centuries. For it too concerns a ruler, or more properly, the heir to a kingdom that he cannot and will never rule. Here is the relevant passage, which in the light of Derrida's remark about the importance of memory seems unusually prescient: (I cite it out of all context, but I trust that many of you will recognize it instantly): O all you host of heaven! O, ¢e! Hold, hold, my heart, And you my sinews, grow not instant old, But bear me sti¥y up. Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter.6 Again, it is a question of sovereignty, of legitimate and illegitimate rule, of will and the power to control, or at least to act e¡ectively. But above all, it is a question of memory ^ of responding to the ghost's parting supplication ^ or is it a command? ^ `Adieu, Adieu, Adieu. Remember me'. Hamlet's response seeks to parry the impact of those words ^ however spoken, however understood ^ by bracing himself, and in the ¢rst instance his body, so that he may `hold' o¡ the irresistibly transformative force of time: `And you my sinews, grow not instant old . . .'. This is to be accomplished by memory, or rather by a certain use of it. Memory is construed as the overcoming of time, as a `table', from which everything alien is to be purged so that ¢nally `thy commandment alone shall live/Within the book and volume of my brain . . .'. As `my brain', the `globe' is to be purged of everything that has hitherto `distracted' it ^ and that, we will see, shall continue to do so throughout the play, with ever more lethal

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e¡ect. The e¡ort to make the globe into a single-purpose space, dedicated to revenge, presupposes the elimination of all distraction from memory, the reduction of `all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past' to the unique and unadulterated `book and volume of my brain'. In short, the `globe', by being purged of all distraction, is to become homogeneous, uniform and pure. But it can become all of this only `whiles memory holds a seat/In this distracted globe'. The globe, as both word and referent, is `distracted' from itself: it is both the globe of Hamlet's head, site of his brain, and thus ostensibly of his memory; but it also names the theatre in which Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed. In this double sense it is precisely not uni¢ed or self-contained, but split and open to an indeterminate outside, an unpredictable time and space. Hamlet, who tries to use such a space to pursue his purpose and above all to establish certainty, is rewarded by unforeseen events that undo all his plans and projects. The plot is derailed by the space in which it takes place. At the end, Horatio sums this up unequivocally: And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world How these things came about. So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on th' inventors' heads.7 Thus, the `globe' in English at least also has its memories: the light-hearted balloon that ¢nally explodes in the hands of its `inventor'; and the stage on which memory only `holds' a seat for a limited time. The e¡ort to deny this movement and its rami¢cations `falls' back `on th' inventors' heads' and more often than not, with lethal results. For if the globe contains the memory, or rather the desire and phantasm of a certain self-su¤ciency, like that of the sphere, that memory never succeeds in coming full circle, however much it seeks to eliminate everything that seems foreign and extraneous to it, and yet upon which even and especially a `globe' depends. In Hamlet, this globe both occupies and describes a space that exceeds it and bounds it at once, a space in which sovereignty will no longer be determined by the patrilinear continuity of a single family, but rather by unexpected traversals and violent interventions. This is something that Hamlet comes to recognize, although he is ill equipped to turn it to his favour.8 The space in which this `globe' takes place is paradoxically both smaller and larger than it, in ways that the following exchange between Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can only begin to suggest: HAM. [. . .] What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither? GUIL. Prison, my Lord?

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HAM. Denmark's a Prison. ROS. Then is the world one. HAM. A goodly one, in which there are many con¢nes, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst.9 The `world' does not fare very well in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The few mentions I have come across are generally all negative, and mostly made by the King, as he increasingly feels himself being closed in upon.10 But although this dialogue does not simply break with the general tendency, Hamlet still insists on the possible di¡erence between the prison of Denmark, and the world: if the latter is also a prison, as Rosencrantz asserts, it is nevertheless `a goodly one', and goodly, in contrast to Denmark, because in it `there are many con¢nes, wards and dungeons. Denmark being one of the worst'. The slight hope that the world holds out for Hamlet resides in its diversity ^ not one prison but many, di¡erent in quality as well as in intensity. And even where Hamlet seems to condemn the world, as in an exchange with Polonius ^ `Ay, sir, to be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand',11 it is still of a particular world, of `this world', and not `the' world that he speaks, as though reserving the possibility of other worlds, less nefarious. When Jacques Derrida recalls the `predominantly Christian' heritage that dominates `the concept of world and all the ethical-political-juridical concepts that tend to regulate the process of globalization [mondialisation]', it is not simply in order to reinforce such predominance as something that must be accepted passively, but rather to remember those aspects within it that undercut its domination and open it to change; a certain tendency to universalize thus emerges as that which both strives for hegemony and also undercuts it: The universal, universalizing exigency, the properly revolutionary exigency that tends irresistibly to uproot, to de-territorialize, to dehistoricize this ¢liation, to contest its limits and the e¡ects of its hegemony (all the way to the theological-political concept of sovereignty that is experiencing a sea change [. . .]). Therefore, one must not give up rediscovering [. . .] what is already there potentially, namely, in this ¢liation itself, the principle of its excess, of its bursting outside itself, of its auto-deconstruction.12 It is in view of this need for both recognizing, rea¤rming, and in so doing altering and even expropriating a certain Euro-Christian heritage that Derrida determines `the task of the philosopher'. This task resides speci¢cally in defending a certain imperative of `universalization', by taking into account [. . .] what in this heritage of the concept of world and in the process of mondialisation makes possible and necessary [. . .] an actual universalization, which frees itself of its own roots or historical, geographical, national state limitations at the same moment that, out of faithfulness (and faithfulness is an act of faith), it implements the best memory of this

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heritage and ¢ghts against the e¡ects of inequality and hegemony, of homohegemonization that this same tradition did and can still produce.13 To return to the article in Le Monde, Derrida's account of the task of the philosopher helps to interpret that `opening to the world' that the lyce¨e professor de¢ned as the major or most desirable e¡ect of the teaching of philosophy in high school, and also to indicate certain of its limitations. These in turn will allow me, all too brie£y, to situate what I take to be the most signi¢cant potentiality of `comparative literary studies' today. The strength but also danger inherent in the `task of the philosopher', and indeed of philosophy, as described by Derrida, relates to its power and penchant to generalize, indeed: to universalize. This potentiality of generalization, however, must confront the question of the relation of the `world', in the multiple and ambivalent sense we have been discussing the term, to the `universe' implied in every project of universalization? Since my time is limited, I will have to sketch rapidly the direction in which I believe a response to this question leads. The Euro-Christian heritage that Derrida sees as informing the notion of world is one that claims to reconcile the universal with the individual ^ and in particular, with the individual living human being, and this in a `global' manner. Its universalization thus must always claim to include and comprehend, but not simply transcend, the individual. Ever since the Reformation, at least, the Christian eschatological narrative meant to bridge the gap between individual and universal has been profoundly challenged, both from within and from without. One result of this challenge ^ or is it one cause? ^ has been the emergence of a notion of the singular that in no way can be reduced to or equated with that of the individual. For unlike the individual, the singular is de¢ned not by its continuity with the universal, but by its separation from it. `Faith' rather than `good works' has emerged as one enigmatic attempt to construct a new bridge between the two; another such attempt, related but not identical, as Max Weber argued a century ago,14 emerged in the Calvinist notion of the `calling', often identi¢ed with the `profession' or `career'. Professional success thus came to be a sign of election, of distinction, or of what today would be called `excellence'. It promised to achieve what the contested `good works', the rites and sacraments of the Catholic Church, no longer could provide: a ¢rm and widespread conviction of the possibility of survival beyond the limitations of a world in which singular living beings are doomed to perish. And even today, it is precisely a certain lack of `professionalism' that distinguishes `philosophy' as it is taught in the lyce¨e, from the academic discipline as taught in the universities: each is both more and less `general' than the other, but one is far more `elect' and `select', and thus, in this perspective, more graced. But even for the high school teacher in France, a certain professional success is also invoked to justify the more `general' teaching of philosophy in which he is engaged. However, the ways in which such e¡ectiveness is construed can be very di¡erent. To the extent that professional success is understood as the attainment of

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goals that can be isolated, focused upon, targeted, the `world' of professions resembles the `globe' that Hamlet hopes to purge of its distractedness (not to mention of all theatricality). And to this extent, also, `general culture' is understood as an inventory of knowledgeable objects that can be equally isolated, possessed and appropriated, because they are deemed to be meaningful and self-contained. However, it should be noted that in all such cases, we are dealing ultimately neither with `globalization' nor `mondialisation' per se, since both globes and worlds are never simply one and the same, unequivocally self-identical but rather always both more and less than themselves. And this is why their `becoming' ^ as in the su¤x, `-isation' ^ can never trace a trajectory to a single, ¢xed and self-contained goal. In Being and Time, Heidegger seeks to deploy a concept of the worldliness of the world that suggests why and how something like literary studies, comparative but also di¡erential, may be uniquely positioned to do justice to globalizing worlds ^ which is to say, to keep the `opening' to those worlds as open as possible, without neglecting either the necessary delimitation required to bound a world, or a globe, or the fact that both are only part and parcel of a `universalization' that inevitably exceeds that determination. What constitutes the `worldliness' of the world, according to Heidegger, is a context of referring, in German: a Verweisungszusammenhang.15 Verweisung, in this sense, suggests a process of pointing away from where one is, referring, signifying, relating. The question that Being and Time leaves hanging is just what `holds together' and thereby de¢nes and limits the process of referring: the Zusammenhang of signifying relations that constitute a world: the question, in short, of just how its de¢ning and enabling limits are to be construed. And it is here, to be brief, that I believe the study of literary texts has a distinctive contribution to make, one that perhaps cannot be made in the same manner by the study of what is generally called philosophy (although precisely the overlap and hybridization of `literature' and `philosophy' tends to mark many of the most interesting texts and programmes in both `¢elds'). Since my time is up, let me just very brie£y gesture to one of these texts. In the ¢rst book of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the word `world' occurs frequently and almost always in extremely suggestive contexts. The guiding thread that runs through most of these occurrences is the relation of life and death, or rather, the inseparability of birth and death. One of the most conspicuous, because it involves pages written in French, is the `Memoire presente¨ a© Messieurs les Docteurs de Sorbonne', dealing with the di¤cult question of whether unborn children can be baptized in the womb, and thus saved, even though they will never be born. The response begins by citing the principle that `baptism, which is a spiritual birth, supposes a primary birth: one must be born into the world in order to be reborn in Jesus Christ'.16 However, after laying out this basic and accepted principle, the Council of the Sorbonne then proceeds to undermine it in every way possible, which ¢nally includes calling into question the authority of its own conclusions:

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However, as it would be a matter of changing a universally established rule, by authorizing the proposed practice [to wit: inserting a small nozzle into the womb and baptizing the unborn embryo by injection ^ SW], the Council believes that he who consults ought to address himself to his bishop and [also] that it would be necessary to have recourse to the Pope who has the right of explicating the rules of the church and of modifying them [and hence] the Council could not approve it without the agreement of these two authorities. [. . .] Moreover, the Council, in deeming that it could be used, believes however that if the infants in question come forth into the world, contrary to the expectation of those who would make use of this same method, it would be necessary to baptize them conditionally [. . .]17 The words and worlds of Tristram Shandy are always putting themselves into question by butting up against each other without ever fusing into one. The shocks they produce reveal them to be singular in all the senses of that word, ¢rst and foremost, that of `odd': not ¢tting in. The borders and enabling limits of these words and worlds are always in movement, both with respect to what they appear to contain and with respect to what they appear to exclude. And one of the primary names by which this movement is negotiated is none other than reading. In the passage quoted, the very insertion of the foreign body and foreign language of the Memorandum of the Professors of the Sorbonne into the text of the novel is, it should be remembered, a response and a challenge to the `inattentiveness' of the reader, who when going through the previous chapter failed to `make wise re£ections and draw curious conclusions' as she went along, due to `a vicious taste which has crept into thousands besides herself ' ^ again the insertion, interruption, contamination, and corruption of the inside by a certain outside. This `vicious taste' consists in nothing more or less than `reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them'.18 To expose oneself to the words and worlds of Tristram Shandy ^ to words that are worlds and worlds that are words ^ is to learn to `read over' ^ which we do all the time, only without recognizing its complexities and fecundity so as not to distract ourselves from our goal: that of proceeding `straight forwards' to the desired target. Reading over repeats without returning to its point of departure. Perhaps such reading over, without ever coming full circle, can suggest how `comparative literary studies' can help to recall that even and especially in a globalized world, there are more than ever `curious conclusions' to be drawn from words that are events that never entirely ¢t in nor leave the world unchanged. And the study of philosophy can remind us, that those events, precisely in their singularity, can only happen by virtue of the histories they displace and undo.

Chapter 6

Counterchange: Derrida's Poetry William Watkin

When it comes to poetry, Derrida is a conventional philosopher. His conception of poetic singularity is locatable within a twentieth-century tradition of philosophical appropriations of the poetic so established that Timothy Clark calls it a `school of singularity' founded by Heidegger and including Gadamer and Blanchot amongst its ranks.1 Moreover, he is part of a contemporary tendency to valorize poetic singularity as somehow capable of leading modern philosophy out of the impasse of Heidegger's melancholic attempt to `end' Western metaphysics.2 Thus one can trace poetic singularity in the idea of the sublime event in Lyotard,3 the ability of the singularity of poetic events to make holes in knowledge to be found in Badiou,4 poetry as the event of human singular being through the suspension of language in Lacoue-Labarthe,5 and ¢nally poetry as the singular coming to presence typi¢ed by the idea of natality in Nancy.6 Then there is, of course, Rorty's assertion that all modern philosophy is part of a wider poetic tradition of edi¢cation and self-making commencing with European Romanticism, which argues that Derrida and his peers are not merely turning to poetry but that their work aspires to turn into poetry.7 All of which suggests that Derrida's poetry is not his alone and, further, that Derrida's philosophy is, in some ways, partly reducible to his work on poetry and his wider investigation of the constructive (im)possibility of singularity for a philosophy that comes after Heidegger. It is not merely from within a well-established philosophical context that Derrida seems to speak of poetry. When Derrida makes occasional, direct, categorical-sounding statements on poetry they seem to come from the very context of a European, modern/Romantic aesthetic ideal of poetry that Rorty both outlines and is subject to. In interview in Sovereignties in Question, for example, speaking of the `as-suchness' of language or its `spectral errancy' Derrida says `I call ``poet'' the one who gives way to events of writing that give this essence of language a new body and make it manifest in a work'.8 In the ¢nal essay of that book he concludes, `Once published, the poem must be respected as unique. It takes place only once'.9 In the interview `Others are secret because they are other' he exhorts: `No critic, no translator, no teacher has, in principle, the right to touch the literary text once it is published . . . this is a sacred inheritance, even

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if it occurs in an atheistic and so-called secular milieu. You don't touch a poem!'10 Perhaps the culmination of this high, Romantic regard for the poem is to be found in `Che cos'e© la poesia' when he talks of the poem's uniqueness in relation to the heart: `I call a poem that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, ¢nally, the word heart seems to mean . . .'11 Such ideas, that poets are the gatekeepers of language's essence, that the poem is a unique moment that competes with nature in its lack of purposive ¢nitude,12 that the poem body is perfect and thus untouchable, and ¢nally that poetry speaks the language of the heart, are familiar to anyone schooled in modern, Romantic aesthetics. It does not seem unfair to say that inside of Derrida's work on poetry's singularity there is a softness, a tendency towards a valorization of poetry emanating from the tradition of Romantic aesthetics, an aesthetics of which he is also a devastating reader.13 One can sense a preference here for a certain sort of poetry that, if laid before any number of the contemporary poetic avant-garde, the kind of resistant voices Derrida would seem naturally to adhere to,14 would be anathema. Poetry, for Derrida, is close to the source of language,15 secretive,16 breath-bound,17 embodied,18 internalized,19 unique, irretrievably other;20 simply special. This £urry of qualities registers a not unfamiliar, late-Romantic, quasi-sacrilization of the poetic that is partially performed each time Derrida's poetry is staged. Derrida's poetry is ostensibly limited to Celan, Ponge and Mallarme¨, the poets Derrida likes to read. Yet Derrida is also an inventive thinker on poetry, a fact still relatively unacknowledged. Poetry and memorability, the poematic, and poem as event in `Che cos'e© la poesia'; poetry and the date, poetry and testimony, the shibboleth of the non-translatable mark, and the cut of the word in the caesura in `Shibboleth'; the countersignature of the poem, the idiom of a poet's oeuvre or timbre, and poetry and philosophy in `Signs[e¨]ponge'; the hymen, the turn of the poetic line, gaps and spacing, and the title and the law in `The Double Session'; this is also Derrida's poetry and it is often un-recognizable in detail when compared with contemporary literary criticism's poetry. This is not the place to pursue this issue but certainly we are on the cusp of a second generation of deconstructive literary criticism no longer committed to the consideration of issues of signi¢cation and metaphysics, the summarizable Derrida gleaned from a familiar core of texts, but instead considering a diverse yet interrelated set of concepts pertaining to the issue of singularity, an encyclopaedic Derrida traceable across the dizzying array of Derrida's works now readily available. Looking across these works, Derrida's overall commitment to poetic singularity may be conventional, re£ective of the institutional, national and disciplinary contexts from which he writes, but his localized, idiomatic path to poetic singularity is anything but predictable, revealing a number of fresh inroads for the critical establishment to reassess the oldest of all literary forms. Soft on the inside but jagged and uncompromising without, like the hedgehog of `Che cos'e© la poesia', this is Derrida's poetry.21

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1.

Counterchange: To Exchange Against or For Another

If Derrida's work is to be conceived of as, as Clark demands, an integral part of a post-Heideggerian school of singularity, the result of a particular way of conceiving poetry to be found in philosophy but with echoes from the Romantic literary tradition, perhaps it makes sense to read Derrida's poetry as not his at all but rather part of an exchange of views on the topic of poetic singularity. Derrida's poetry; no more entirely his than Wordsworth's poetry or Celan's. In fact Clark's work is of course also not entirely his own, it being not only a patient exegesis of the philosophical work of others, but part of a growing interest in singularity which he plots through the 1990s, culminating in a £urry of very recent works such as Gary Peters' Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas and Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature. As Clark tells it, Attridge's book is almost a countersignature of Derrida's,22 and it is certainly true that many of the features of Derridean singularity are to be found there. This shared singularity has something of the white heat of invention about it: `never does an invention appear . . . without an inaugural event . . . So we are speaking of the singular structure of an event.'23 It is not to be located in the text object per se: `Literarity is not a natural essence, an intrinsic property of the text.'24 Singularity is not pure but born of an essential, impossible impurity: `while there is always singularization, absolute singularity is never a given fact . . . absolutely pure singularity, if there were one, would never show up'.25 It constitutes an event and thus its temporality is of the instantaneous: `something that enables poetic language to occur, that is to say, to be an event that marks language'.26 The singular is always marked by the law of its iterability which then stages an event in the reading of the work, which itself can be a reencounter of the work's singularity: `So we are considering the singular structure of an event that seems to produce itself by speaking of itself . . . at the same moment as it also names and describes the generality of its genre . . . sustaining our memory of the tradition . . .'27 Finally, a singular work of art is not unique, but is rather a staging of conventions or norms in such a way as to destabilize them and open a space for a unique moment of thinking beyond said conventions, which includes its own conventions: `The deconstruction I am invoking only invents or a¤rms . . . insofar as, while a performative, it is not only performative but also continues to unsettle the conditions of the performative.'28 Singularity, therefore, expressed here in `Psyche: Inventions of the Other', is the means by which one can encounter otherness through the staging of the familiar conventions of the literary institution in such a way as to destabilize them momentarily and bring on the event of invention. As I said before, in terms of singularity Derrida is a thinker of convention. Counterchange: what happens to us as we read, how our ideas become almost interchangeable with those that our work re-iterates. Their singularity becomes our generalization, which in turn become our own singularity of encounter. In this formulation of AttridgeDerrida, the role of singularity is primarily philosophical in that it stages conventions so as to question them through a

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self-consciousness of those conventions, which also allies it very closely with deconstruction, as we have seen. This literary-philosophical singularity is the royal road to the other, albeit a route down which one passes hesitantly, one step forward two steps back. As you follow this route through Derrida's work, perhaps with Attridge as your guide, you realize the road taken is a switch-back, a circle, a single point of natality and ¢nitude, not a road at all but an aporetic, uncrossable limit, which you must always impossibly traverse. This is the remarkable conception of singularity one ¢nds across Derrida's work, brilliantly read by Attridge as part of a decades-long counterchange of ideas between the two men, but this is not the singularity of poetry. When it comes to poetry Attridge and Derrida seem to part ways, or perhaps more accurately Attridge is more con¢dent in going forward down that road, leaving his companion to lag behind, uncertain. Poetry, after all, is Attridge's territory, a land in which Derrida, the philosopher, is a stranger. With many caveats, Attridge is still fairly happy to `isolate' poetic singularity as follows: `The verbal singularity that is performed by the reader includes a sense of its real-time unfolding . . . what is performed is not just a linear sequence of speci¢c words, but their happening in an experience of temporality. In order to perform a poem in real time I need to read it aloud.'29 Poetry is marked here by the event of a performative real-time e¡ect controlled and facilitated by measure. The experience of this control equals the event of poetic singularity, if it exists. While an empirically brilliant insight into poetry, this, I would contend, is a conception almost unrecognizable in Derrida's work on poetry. Attridge takes a risk here as a Derridean scholar by proposing a de¢nitive statement on the essence of poetry, a presupposition to take with us into every subsequent reading, dictating that we read the singularity of poetry always, in the ¢rst instance, as a generalized example of the law of poetic singularity. It is a problem he is well aware of from Derrida's own consideration of the aporia of the literary reading of genre in `The Law of Genre' included in Acts. This risk is one Attridge is prepared to take, I presume, based on a life-long study of poetics beyond anything one will ever ¢nd in Derrida or his fellows in the school of singularity. It is also a risk he is required to take as a literary critic. What is literature; what is poetry? These are the ontological demands of the discipline of criticism, so similar in discourse, form and intent to philosophy, and yet, somehow, not exchangeable for philosophy, resulting in that strange institution called literary theory, demands that Attridge, in the end, has no choice but to succumb to in The Singularity of Literature. Derrida's poetry: maybe a reference here to something I remember reading in Bennington's book on Derrida to his early poetry which he disowned. Didn't the poet Lyn Hejinian once tell me Derrida's son was an accomplished poet? As I asserted, Derrida and Attridge part ways over the issue of singularity when it comes to the temporality of the poem. This temporality, in Derrida, is marked by the instant of the event of its singularity becoming re-iterated, and these re-iterations, including my own countersignature of the author's signing of the work as uniquely theirs, becoming singular once more. Derrida returns to

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this idea more than once but its most cogent and controversial occasion is in his essay on Celan, `Shibboleth'. Reading Celan's tendency to date his poems within the poem body, Derrida considers the logic of singularity-iterability. The date is singular, it happened once, but is also iterable, the date marks the event making it available for future, illimitable encounters. He says: The mark that one calls a date must nonetheless be marked o¡, in a singular fashion, detached from the very thing that it dates, and must, in this demarcation, in this very deportation, become readable . . . It is necessary that in the date the unrepeatable repeat itself, e¡acing in itself the irreducible singularity that it denotes.30 The date, in Celan, comes to reveal for Derrida a rhythmical temporality of impurity, alterity and singularity. Dating marks o¡ the impossibility of marking the instant of the encounter with the event, its otherness in this regard, the potential for every event to be repeated when marked, and the potential for this mark, which makes the singular event impure and thus non-singular, to bring a future reader into contact with otherness in the event of their reading/counterdating. This second event both counters and changes. What are countered, the argument goes, are pre-established norms. The critical or resistant side of Derrida's view on poetry is very clear. What can never be the same again is our idea of the date. Thus the state of the poem itself changes at this juncture from poetry to, momentarily, philosophy. The result is that in `Shibboleth' the changes rung are not con¢ned to the literary norms of reading poetry. Something, rather, about how we mark o¡ time is altered there. In comparing Attridge and Derrida, therefore, we can see how one cannot simply swap one thinker for another, one reading of poetry for another. Derrida's poetic time does not move forward through time but arrests time in what he calls the cut of the date. Attridge's poetry moves ahead while Derrida's tends to lag behind. Derrida's description of the recursive and yet arrested moment of the poem is recognizable in Attridge's general commitment to the idea of literary singularity, but just as Derrida's institutional cross-dressing as he lapses into literariness disallows him the correct institutional moment to answer the question of poetic singularity, simultaneously Attridge's own tendency to wear philosophical drag means he cannot resist presupposing the poetic based on his own empirical knowledge of poetry, to my mind second to none in the world, and answering the question that poetic singularity demands one does not answer.

2. Counterchange: A change which is the counterpart of another; Esp. in design, a pattern which systematically employs contrasting e¡ects where pattern and background are of the same shape; to interchange, to chequer. Moving away from the agreements and controversies amongst the members of the school of singularity, I want to return in detail to that which Derrida

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considers, in relation to poetry, is most intrinsic to poetic singularity as a form of signed, and thus performed, semantic ¢nitude. To that end here are extracts from three poems, which, for reasons that will become apparent, I need to present against the conventions of academic scholarship. John Ashbery, from `Litany'31

Rachel Blau duPlessis, from `Draft 5: Gap' in Drafts 1^38, Toll32

Charles Bernstein, from `this poem intentionally left blank'33

The rhythmical interchange of mark and space observable in chequered patterns is, as we can see here, a notable e¡ect in poetry, or some poetry, which always seems to become, for philosophy, all poetry in its uniqueness. The gestalt of the chessboard in fact possesses a singular material strangeness that it shares with poetry and with which Derrida commences `The Double Session'. Referring to a number of extracts he is presenting in the seminar, which was the ¢rst performance of the text, he explains:

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These quotations on the blackboard are to be pointed to in silence. So that, while reading a text already written in black and white, I can count on a certain across-the-board index, standing all the while behind me white on black. In the course of these crossings, it will always be a certain way of writing in white that should be remarked.34 Derrida's poetry: a certain way of writing in white that should be re-marked. In the ¢rst performance of this text I too pointed to a board in silence ^ in this instance it was a projection of my quotations on to a whiteboard ^ so now, as I did then, let me say one or two things about these singular quotations. These three extracts, two extracts indeed as the third is an impossibly complete poem, commence along an interesting way towards questions as regards what can still be held under the category poetry. Not least they raise the issue of citability versus singularity. Can one quote from the poem? Is the poem singular within its boundaries? Where is the poetry of the poem? Is there a direct relationship between poetry and the material present-ness of the actual marks that make up the poem? On this ¢nal Heideggerean point, picked up by Derrida more than once, does the present-ness of the graphic/phonetic object here called a poem equate to its presence or does the very inability to match present-ness with presence ^ say by the possibility of citability, the role of the title and book as framing devices, or issues pertaining to authorization, signing and countersigning the poem ^ actually designate the presence of the poem? Reading such citations in a traditional sense is, of course, impossible. These semiotic markings contain no content that could be determined semantic and thus cannot submit to the norms of reading. Certainly, within their material and convention-bound contexts they perform something which is meaningful, but within the literary arts their singularity is determined precisely by their lack of the very thing which surely must be a foundational, quasi-transcendental necessity for literature: words. Where would Mallarme¨'s performance of blanc be without the words bracketing the spacings and indeed without the multivalenced dissemination and dissipation of reference contained in the multiple instances of the sign blanc? What is white when it is not written out, and yet how can white be white if it is marked-up, written upon? Contained within this paradox is, surely, the very singularity of poetry that modern philosophy has sought. It is also a paradox on which the presuppositions of the de¢nition of poetic singularity we found in Attridge founder. I have no time to pursue this here and it is somewhat oblique to my main concerns but none of the above works can be de¢ned as poetic if one takes their temporal presence as primary; there is no unfolding in time here. Ashbery's `Litany' is a poem written in two columns for two voices to be read simultaneously. The section I have quoted comes from the left-hand column and signi¢es a period when one voice is silent. What is notable here is how the gaps of poetry, its spacing, su¡er an anamorphic transformation wherein they become actual space. The space frame of the poem is no longer around the work,

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marking its limits, but a part of the work, problematizing the very concept of delimitation. In citing Ashbery's `Litany' one is faced with precisely the paradox of the white on white of the poem as a practical concern. One has to decide if one should place the blank in inverted commas and thus inscribe it not just as a blank page but as a blank page within a poem. As I composed this piece I asked myself how much of the blank I should cite. Questions arose pertaining to how big a blank is, how wide, what are the boundaries of blank and its quanti¢cation, a blank, some blanks, an in¢nite dispersion of illimitable blanks. The staging of the particularity of space in poetry is matched, in DuPlessis, by a staging of the particularity of the poetic mark. In `Gap' the issue of how to read pure mark is raised through the total non-performativity of the column-form black blocks. In contrast to the act of staying silent in `Litany', a mode of reading albeit an attenuated one, the black blocks, however alliterative o¡ the tongue in description, cannot be read.35 (The columns of `Gap' and of `Litany'. The double essay of `The Double Session'. Derrida's poetry is also written in columns.) This non-readability is accentuated by the way the blocks are linear and yet beyond or independent of poetic lineation, the inarticulate articulating gap between them, and the presence of the black blocks within the white space of their framing margins.36 If `Litany' performs an aporia relating to the presence of spacing within the poem body, and `Gap' the mute articulation of pure mark, Bernstein's work raises a related problem as to how to mark out the limit and ¢nitude of the poem body, how to use space to establish the boundary between the inside and outside of the text. This issue of parergon, also the name of a famous work by Ashbery, excites Derrida in relation to the presence of the frame in painting, but framing also pertains directly to the graphematic necessity of the poetic as he conceives of it. What would he make of this work without a frame? Where does the work begin in this instance and where end? Is the title the whole work ^ precedents for this exist in contemporary poetry such as Ashbery's lists of titles without poems and Koch's `Collected Poems' ^ and if not how much of the blank is contained within the framing borders of the poem? In its ¢rst manifestation in the collection With Strings the blank occupies the rest of one page, but in this collection, as is the norm in poetry collections, if the poem ends before the end of the page the rest of the page is left blank and a new work commences on a fresh pagespace. Yet where precisely does `This poem intentionally left blank' end ^ on the word blank, or just after in the performance of blank? This third extract by Bernstein ^ not an extract at all but a whole poem if one can speak of completion in this case ^ consists of a clearly articulated relationship between the mark, which is thetic and non-poetic, and the blank, which is purely semiotic. The poem marks the blank, and in doing so blanks out the mark. Between the semantic generality of the title and the semiotic purity of the poem body is the very concept of poetry according to another key member of the school of singularity, Giorgio Agamben.37 More importantly we have performed here what Derrida terms in `The Double Session' the hymen.

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To repeat: the hymen, the confusion between the present and the nonpresent, along with all the indi¡erences it entails within the whole series of opposites . . . produces the e¡ect of a medium (a medium as element enveloping both terms at once; a medium located between two terms) . . . A folding back once more: the hymen . . . is located between present acts that don't take place. What takes place is in the entre, the place, the spacing . . . At the edge of being, the medium of the hymen . . . outwits and undoes all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner of dialectics.38 To repeat: the hymen, indi¡erence towards serial oppositions, a medium located in the pocket of a fold between presence and absence, a location at the edge of being that cannot be thought by philosophy; this is Derrida's poetry. What I hope the quotation shows is a certain way of writing in white, an essential graphicality of the poetic which means that the poem can never escape writing into phonetics but which, however, is not purely graphematic or entirely reducible to the material support of spacing by the medium of the written-upon page. Each is a performance of an element of the medium of the hymen, a performance that cannot be voiced and yet which is not simply written either. Marks and spacing within a square frame, the play of the black, the white, this too is Derrida's poetry.

3. Counterchange: Equal or Equivalent Return; Requital, Reciprocation For example, philosophy for poetry. When one writes the phrase `Derrida's poetry' one initiates a whole host of possibilities, but primarily one realizes a disciplinary incommensurability. Derrida, the name acting here as a metonymical stand-in for a certain type of philosophy perhaps called deconstruction,39 and poetry, not a proper name but a generic/formal/medium category operating outside of poetry in the ¢eld of a minor branch of pre-suppositive philosophical thinking called literary criticism, should not appear on the same bill together. This simple imposition of titular law asserting that what is to follow on below this opening line and superior spatiality, above and somehow outside of and preceding the text proper,40 instigates an instance of exchange of one thing against another. Not merely that of the sign for something, some other thing the sign could, in both instances, neither refer to or encompass ^ as we learn from Derrida a name can never reproduce being although it can in part perform it,41 a category never fully encompass all the instances of that category42 ^ but also of one institution, philosophy, for another, poetry. For it is of philosophy and poetry that I want to speak here in closing, want to speak because Derrida already spoke about it, often but obliquely, and need to speak because this theme, itself not reducible to a thematics in that instead it is a dynamism of interacting, incommensurable and yet totally related terms, this strange relation between philosophy and

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poetry, is such an urgent exchange of views for both categorical and singular thinking as we enter a new millennial, post-Derridean age. As this post-Derridean age is very much in its nascent stage, one comes upon it in the form of a £urry of questions. Is it or can it ever be of equal or equivalent return, this attempted exchange of philosophy for poetry that one ¢nds enacted in this dense conception of ours of singularity? Will we ever reach a state of requital, an entropic point of total intellectual reciprocation such that philosophy and poetry need no longer to be exchanged, for all their grievances have been met, their conversations exhausted, all that is unknown between them unearthed; so that they are no longer two terms swapping concepts at the border but become one? This is the great challenge of Derrida's poetry, not to understand what he means by and for poetry, but whether one can talk of poetry in the words of philosophy. The issue is even if one should one be allowed, ethically, to exchange that which is counter to, either opposed or at the least heterogeneous to, something else. More fundamental than that is a clari¢cation as to, when speaking of Derrida's poetry, what exactly it is we are attempting to do: a form of textual exegesis, or an act of literary theory? Also Derrida's prose poetry such as Glas and Cinders, would one include `Envois'? Returning to my title, `Derrida's Poetry', the ¢rst and most logical presupposition is a rereading of the core texts by Derrida on poetry, these being `The Double Session', `Signs[e¨]ponge' and `Shibboleth', concluding with a generalized, weak philosophical summary placed midway between this lengthy work and my succinct titular law. Reading these three works in isolation one might come away with a de¢nition or at least general thematization of what Derrida thinks poetry is, summarized by three terms: the hymen, the signature, and the date, although the hermeneutic method employed by Derrida ought to warn against such readings. Perhaps it goes without saying that these are not the traditional generic markers or traits of prosody, nor are they meant to be, instead they are localized, quasi-singular, performative, quasi-mimetic, readings (Derrida prefers countersignatures) of the work of speci¢c poets. Yet the problem arises that each of these three essays is an example of a performative reading that mimes the formal signatures of each poet in question, Mallarme¨, Ponge and Celan respectively, leading Bennington to conclude that in `The Double Session': `It would not be di¤cult to ¢nd evidence in Derrida's text for a more or less marked mimicry of Mallarme¨. This does not of course mean that Derrida is somehow simply repeating Mallarme . . .'43 These are not, in any strict sense, readings at all but singular textual performances resulting in general presuppositions that are, by de¢nition, radically destabilized. Further, if one were to unpack slightly the terms employed here, each the result of issues particular to the poets themselves, one would be forgiven for suggesting that in reading poetry Derrida has replaced literature with philosophy thus betraying the very singularity his mimetic methodology, one presumes, was developed to protect. The hymen originates from Mallarme¨'s poetics certainly, but in Derrida's performance it comes to describe a

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liminal undecidability in referential meaning brought about by the irreducible graphicality of writing and its dependence on the inscription of space. Similarly the signature refers less to the role of individual style in Ponge than the lack of idiomatic signature in philosophy and the status of our countersigning of a work when we come to think about it in generalized fashion. Finally, the date ¢nds Celan's work within the mainstream of postwar ethics with the idea of the impossible singularity of the poem, best described as a one-o¡ that must however be repeated, just as the date is a commemoration of a speci¢c event so as to enter it into generality and repeatability, easily dissolving into Derrida's wider philosophical concerns as regards alterity and how to respond to the other.44 In addition, this conception relocates Derrida back within the school of singularity with similar readings of Celan's ethics of alterity to be found in LacoueLabarthe.45 Derrida's speci¢c readings of poetry are not to be mistaken for statements on the nature of poetry as a whole such as we highlighted in Attridge, but are rather singular responses to the work of poets. In this way they could be termed occasional instances of literary criticism although do not expect a thematic overview of Mallarme¨'s poetry but rather learn to live with the stylistic response of Derrida's countersignature.46 Nor should one make the mistake of thinking that his primary interest is an understanding of poetry, rather, like most philosophers in the loose school of singularity it is what poetry can do for philosophy by way of the idiom that is his main concern. As he says in `Signs[e¨]ponge', talking early on of the importance, for the poet, of signing their work as unmistakably theirs: in order to sign, one has to stop one's text, and no philosopher will have signed his text, resolutely and singularly, will have spoken his own name, accepting all the risks involved in doing so. Every philosopher denies the idiom of his name, of his language, of his circumstance, speaking in concepts and generalities that are necessarily improper.47 Philosophy at the limit has ever been the task of deconstruction and it has become increasingly obvious that this limit is literature,48 not literature as institution of which Derrida speaks at times,49 but that other literature which is the signed singular work of literature which has come to be known as poetry. This signed work is notable primarily due to its imposed ¢nitude. It is an arrested textual body that does not go out into the world in the manner of philosophy, true for all time for all people. And although we have identi¢ed a twentiethcentury tendency to think philosophically about poetry, Derrida sees this tendency, typically, as ancient: `Philosophy has always insisted on this: thinking its other. Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its de¢nition, its production.'50 This statement is itself written against an arti¢cially imposed limit in `Tympan', one of a number of Derrida's texts written within a poeticized pagespace, in this instance utilizing two columns. Here, as in Glas and elsewhere, Derrida uses columns to both impose and arti¢cially arrest the non-linear prose line, and also to set up a limit within the text in the

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form of a gap, a `limit/passage',51 indeed, as the right-hand column operates as a second voice or a second hand writing against the intentions of the ¢rst. Derrida describes this as a desire to `luxate the philosophical ear'; `Tympan' concerns the singularity of music but with direct relevance to the singularity of poetry, `to set the loxos in the logos to work'.52 Indeed we are luxated here, works on poetry that seem primarily concerned with philosophy are placed in one column in our minds against a second column of works of philosophy that, either through stylistic mimesis or the use of poeticized semiotics, aspire to a literary singularity. It would seem then that one cannot easily counterchange philosophy and poetry in Derrida's work as he seems to blur the boundaries between them at every given occasion. This disjointed, luxated, philosophical writing is returned to much later by Derrida in conversation. Responding to a rather banal question as to why Derrida did not write literature, especially considering the manner in which his philosophy is subject to a `quivering, or vacillation', he ruminates: When faced by people who suggest that this quivering means I must be taking literature for philosophy and philosophy for literature, I protest . . . Without mixing them up, I put the question of the frontier between the two of them, and it's not a slight question . . . The limit interests me as much as the passage to the limit ^ going to the limit ^ or the passage of the limit. That presupposes multiple movements. Deconstruction always consists of making more than one movement at a time, and writing with two hands . . .53 Suitably chastened and dutifully returning to the columnular text-body of `Tympan', we can clearly see this desire performed in the semiotic presence of the words in pagespace, a poeticized moment wherein Derrida writes philosophy at the limit which simultaneously questions the limit in general, that is non-signed language: `Under what conditions, then, could one mark, for a philosopheme in general, a limit, a margin that it could in¢nitely reappropriate?'54 At the same time he writes with his other hand in this profoundly ambidextrous performance: `The insect whose principal work is to gnaw on the inside of fruit pits in order to take subsistence from them.'55 This insect, a strange and uncomfortable bedfellow of the poetic hedgehog, is of course the earwig demonstrating a second poetic e¡ect here to go with the articulation of philosophical prose by an imposed break: that of thought association. We have here performed the hymen of `The Double Session', a disruptive articulation of referentiality by ¢rst, a semiotic inscription of space, and second a permanently excessive constellation of references. Yet this is not poetry, nor could it ever be; rather, as Derrida is clear to stipulate, it is philosophy at the limit or better a philosophy of the limit. Gnawing on the inside of the very discipline whose role it has been to impose that key philosopheme inside/outside which allows the very idea of the limit to be chewed: `Can one then pass this singular limit which is not a limit, which no more separates the inside from the outside than it assures their permeable and transparent continuity?'56 In `Tympan' Derrida

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assures us that `beyond the philosophical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, a weave of di¡erences of forces without any present centre of reference'.57 This busy margin is, we can now state, poetry, and it behoves upon us from this point on to move beyond the limit of how we have been thinking about Derrida, deconstruction and literature, into a new territory of thinking Derrida, singularity and poetry.

4.

Antimetabole: A Recursive Conclusion

Associated with counterchange is the rhetorical term antimetabole, a ¢gure in which the same words or ideas are repeated in inverse order: `a sentence inverst, or turn'd back' as one J. Smith in the OED has it. So much could be said at this juncture about Derrida's poetry and antimetabole, the role of the fold in the hymen, the turn and return of the date, how antimetabole bears an uncanny similarity to the strategic reading procedures of deconstruction. If poetry is a certain way of writing in white, is whiteness not the erasure of writing into poetry? If poetry is the event of real time unfolding, is not the unfolding of time a poetics resulting from its arrest by the now of the event? If poetic singularity is the performance of the general truths of philosophy, is not philosophy simply what we have to say about poetry? Derrida's poetry is to be found at the heart of this ¢nal antimetabole. What he has to say about poetry, as a philosopher, is his philosophy, all philosophy, which does not, of course, mean to say that he confuses the two institutions but that in traversing the boundary between the two he not only comes across the limitations of their di¡erentiation, but is also able to think performatively the concepts of limitation and di¡erence. Without poetic singularity, it would seem, there can be no deconstruction. Derrida's poetry is also a poetry to come. His is an incomplete project on poetics that is left as a legacy for future thinkers. How to think the recursive fold of verse, how to read the (theoretically) unreadable idiomaticity of poetry, how to think the cut of the dated single instance of the poem's coming to being and retain its power through the necessary betrayal of its repetition. At the beginning of the second session of `The Double Session' Derrida says: Like Mimique, the double session has no middle. It is divided into two halves only through the ¢ction of a crease. Yet each session is no more whole or symmetrical for all that, being but the rejoinder or application of the other, its play or its exercise. Together they are neither more nor less than two hemitropic crystals; never, in sum, a ¢nished volume. Never making a complete turn, for lack of presentation.58 How to exchange one thing for another. The poetics of that, the ethics of that. Like mimique, like a mime, Derrida's reading of Mallarme¨'s poetry is a mime of a mime, of miming as such. Which makes this reading here a mime of a mime of a mime of miming as such. A mime is a counterchange of sorts. When it comes

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to reading another's work your countersignature of their work at times becomes imperceptible from the original, and after that your reading becomes inseparable from what you read. Therefore Derrida's poetry is somehow, for a few seconds more, and also now for all time, my poetry, and yours, and yours . . . We are at the ¢nish line. There is no turning back now. These thoughts must ¢nd their stop. As is ¢tting, I will end in a performative rather than categorical fashion; will counterchange here the paper on poetry for poetry on paper. Here is a poem I wrote, a work in progress. You might be able spot some of its in£uences. William Watkin, from `Counterchange'

Chapter 7

Disagreement as (Possible) Event: Derrida contre de Man Tom Toremans

In his response to Specters of Marx,1 Frederic Jameson compellingly renegotiates the contract between Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Jameson locates in Derrida's reading of Marx a displacement of `the previous prominence of the Heideggerian narrative' by `Benjaminian constellations' and argues that this displacement is indicative of a certain repression of `materialism' as a problem in Derrida's earlier work.2 Commenting on `the relation of spectrology to materialism', Jameson claims that `it is the absence of the problem of materialism' in these early works `which generates the ¢gure of the specter'. After having emphasized that `materialism [. . .] ought to be the place in which theory, deconstruction and Marxism meet',3 Jameson hints at a possible divergence between Derrida and de Man. First, referring to the fundamental di¡erence between the European and the American polemics on spectrality and idealism, Jameson underscores that `it is crucial to grasp the degree in which Derrida's own philosophical moves have to be grasped as ideological or rather anti-ideological tactics' and that `[t]his will be the moment [. . .] to return to the formal issue of ``idealism'', as opposed to the various materialisms of Marxism, deconstruction, and even Paul de Man's version of deconstructive literary procedures'.4 Jameson's second reference to de Man raises the stakes, and repositions the latter's work towards Derrida's. Paul de Man [. . .] was always more open in his deployment of materialist positions than Derrida, at least in part because that particular philosophical strategy tended to undercut the high-spiritual apologia of his literary adversaries in the old New Critical establishment; it could also be argued that his own return to literature [. . .] stood somewhat in contradiction with this more explicitly anti-aesthetic prise de position. Meanwhile, it could also be argued [. . .] that the more open endorsement of materialism as such in de Man's writings tended rightly or wrongly to raise complicating issues of a materialist philosophy or ontology of the kind Derrida has always been careful to elude [. . .].5

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As if to respond to Jameson's suggestion, Derrida undertook an extensive and openly critical reconfrontation with de Man's work in his 1998 lecture `Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (``within such limits'')'.6 If, in his early review of Derrida's reading of Rousseau in De La Grammatologie, de Man had urged `to reverse the interpretative process and start reading Derrida in terms of Rousseau rather than vice versa',7 Derrida in `Typewriter Ribbon' turns the tables and reads de Man in terms of Rousseau. Signalling a remarkable turn in Derrida's engagement with de Man's work, `Typewriter Ribbon' contains the outlines of a decisive renegotiation of the relation between both protagonists of deconstruction. As will be argued, the key terms conditioning de Man's and Derrida's turning around Rousseau are those of performativity, irony and Romanticism. Haunting this incessant turning is the possible event of a disagreement between both `versions' of deconstruction that might be particularly instructive with regard to the question as to what is to happen `after deconstruction' ^ both temporally after it and after its example.8

1.

Matter and Memory

In his review of Derrida's reading of Rousseau in De la Grammatologie, de Man had famously claimed that `[t]here is no need to deconstruct Rousseau'9 and that, while Derrida's deconstruction was theoretically valid (and even `£awless'), it was directed at the `wrong object'.10 The implications of this early disagreement should not be underestimated, as is indicated by the private correspondence between de Man and Derrida, quoted by Derrida in the third of his Wellek Library Lectures at Irvine ^ written in the weeks after de Man's death in 1983 and published as Memoires: For Paul de Man in 1986. In letters de Man sent Derrida in 1970 and 1971, the former announces that he is still working on Rousseau (which would result in the essays on Rousseau published in Allegories of Reading in 1979) and points out that `there is no disagreement between us about the basis of your thinking but a certain divergence in your way of nuancing and situating Rousseau'.11 At the same time, however, de Man emphasizes that `the polemical convention adopted in [``The Rhetoric of Blindness'']' results from the fact that `your version of Rousseau operates [. . .] from the opposite extreme'. This initial partial disagreement will be, in Derrida's words, `what we have never ceased writing about ever since, as if to prepare ourselves to speak of it again one day, in our very old age'.12 Further on in the Memoires, Derrida's responds to de Man's criticism by stipulating that he was `rather in agreement with this interpretation',13 yet the main question that emerges from the review is `what is happening [. . .] in Paul de Man's work when the word ``deconstruction'', which could have or should have been erased by itself, since it only designates the explication of a relation of the work to itself, instead of erasing itself inscribes itself more and more'.14 Derrida's response to this question develops as a corrective reading of de Man

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aimed `to denounce the sinister ineptitude of an accusation ^ that of ``nihilism'' '. This charge of nihilism derives from a misreading of de Man's comments on the trope of irony and might forever haunt the reception of his work: Underlying and beyond the most rigorous, critical, and relentless irony, within that `Ironie der Ironie' evoked by Schlegel [. . .], de Man was a thinker of a¤rmation. By that I mean ^ and this will not become clear immediately, or perhaps ever ^ that he existed himself in memory of an a¤rmation and of a vow: yes, yes.15 Without rehearsing Derrida's reading in detail, it is interesting to observe Derrida's designation of this de Manian `yes' in terms of materiality. In a parenthesis, Derrida interrupts his reading of de Man's `Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetic' and counterbalances the negativity of deManian irony with materiality and memory work. ([. . .] There is a theme of `materiality', indeed an original materialism in de Man. It concerns a `matter' which does not ¢t the classical philosophical de¢nitions of metaphysical materialisms any more than the sensible representations or the images of matter de¢ned by the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Matter, a matter without presence and without substance, is what resists these oppositions. [. . .] Despite all his suspicions of historicism or historical rhetorics blind to their own rhetoricity, Paul de Man constantly contended with the irreducibility of a certain history, a history with which all one can do is to undertake its `true mourning'. Let us recall: `Generic terms such as ``lyric'' . . . as well as the pseudo-historical period terms such as ``romanticism'' or classicism are always terms of resistance and nostalgia, at the furthest remove from the materiality of actual history'. [. . .] De Man continues: `True ``mourning'' is less deluded. The most it can do is to allow for non-comprehension, and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say prosaic, or better historical modes of language power.' Matter of this sort, `older' than the metaphysical oppositions in which the concept of matter and materialist theories are generally inscribed, is, we might say, `in memory' of what precedes these oppositions. But by this very fact [. . .] it retains an essential relation with ¢ction, ¢gurality, rhetoricity. Matie©re et Me¨moire is the title I could have given to this long parenthesis [. . .])16 Not only does this parenthesis corroborate Jameson's claim about a certain de Manian engagement with materialism that has long eluded Derrida, it also performs the literal marginalization of the terms of Romanticism and materialism in Derrida's reading of de Man. If the notion of materiality is abandoned in the remainder of the Memoires, the relative absence of Romanticism (which here occurs in a quotation of de Man, itself embedded in a parenthesis) is all the more emphasized by Derrida's remark, further on in the same lecture, that

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`[o]ne cannot understand this privileging of allegory ^ I was long puzzled by it for this very reason ^ if one is not familiar with the internal debates of AngloAmerican criticism concerning Romanticism'.17 Instead of pursuing the materialist argument, Derrida highlights the presence of irreducibly aporetic and non-dialectical oppositions in de Man's works as the basis of the `ironic allegory of messianism' contained in the latter.18 As primary examples of such disarticulating oppositions, Derrida refers to `allegory and irony, the performative and the constative' and adds that each time, the aporia provokes a leap of memory and a displacement of thinking which leads us back not just toward a new thinking of the disjunction [. . .] whose structure is wholly other, forgotten or yet to come [. . .] and always presupposed by the opposition. We have caught a glimpse of this through the couple allegory/irony in relation to `The Rhetoric of Temporality'. It is clearer yet in the most recent texts in terms of the couple performative/ constative. And aporicity evokes, rather than prohibits, more precisely, promises through its prohibition, an other thinking, an other text, the future of another promise. De Man's promise, then, derives from his memory work in the face of aporetic oppositions, whereby the aporia in question `evokes [. . .] the place of evocation through an act of memory'.19 Without further exploring this evocation in terms of materiality, Derrida concludes the Memoires by promising to read the ¢nal chapter of Allegories of Reading ^ which `[l]ike all of Paul de Man's work [. . .] still awaits us, in advance of us'.20

2. Arche-performative While it does not arrive at reading this ¢nal chapter, `Typewriter Ribbon' continues the pursuit of an a¤rmative promise in de Man. At the same time, however, Derrida decisively departs from his earlier argument by adopting an outspokenly critical perspective. At two occasions, Derrida criticizes de Man's straightforward mutilations of Rousseau's text in Allegories of Reading. Importantly, these mutilations allow Derrida to reformulate the de Manian promise in terms of materiality (this `invention [. . .], almost a ¢ction'21). As indicated by the original title of the lecture, this reformulation occurs in a terminology of `Archival Intervention' and `Virtual Futures' ^ an `intimidating banner that [Derrida] would never have dared to wave [himself ]' and that sets him before an `impossible task'.22 Especially de Man's second act of mutilation has far-reaching consequences, `possibly inducing or translating a misinterpretation in the mind of the reader or in de Man's own mind'.23 Derrida is alluding to the occurrence of the word `excuse' at the end of the second book of the Confessions. The original French sentence reads: `Mais je ne remplirois pas le but de ce livre si je n'exposois en meªme temps mes dispositions inte¨rieures, et que je craignisse de m'excuser

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en ce qui est conforme a© la ve¨rite¨.' When quoting this passage, de Man ¢rst adds to Rousseau's sentence an expletive `ne' between brackets and subsequently translates it into English as purely negative `not'. De Man's translation thus becomes: `But it would not ful¢ll the purpose of this book if I did not reveal my inner sentiments as well, and if I did not fear to excuse myself by means of what con¢rms to the truth.' Derrida stresses this mutilation as indicative of a misreading on the part of de Man, emphasizing that `the moment of knowledge, truth, or revelation, already depends, from the ¢rst line of the book, on a performative promise, the promise to tell the truth'. This is essential to Derrida's argument, since it demonstrates, against de Man's reading of the excuse, that `the scene of the oath not to betray, of the performative promise not to perjure or abjure, seems to me more important than the theoretical or constative dimension of a truth to be revealed or known'.24 This, then, is the crux of Derrida's criticism of de Man: the disjunction of the performative and the constative in Allegories of Reading is too narrowly de¢ned in purely epistemological terms and is misconstrued as a temporal passage from one to the other. Instead of passing from the constative intention of the revelation of truth to the performative deconstruction of this intent, Derrida argues that this performance has always already taken place, and inheres in Rousseau's text even before it actually starts. Exemplary for this misreading is de Man's passage in Allegories of Reading from the Confessions to the Reªveries, that is, from the avowal to the excuse. De Man, according to Derrida, incorrectly insists on the disjunction between the avowal (which has an extraverbal referent, an event that has to be confessed, revealed) and the excuse (which is a strictly verbal process). This distinction `often leaves [him] perplexed'25 and de Man's argument `does not always seem clear and convincing', primarily because de Man here seems to `insist ¢rmly on a distinction that he will later have to suspend, at least as regards [. . .] Rousseau, but in my opinion throughout'.26 De Man's unwarranted disjunction of constative and performative linguistic acts in purely epistemological terms, according to Derrida, is symptomatic of his neglect of a logic of archival intervention and of an incisively religious element in Rousseau. For Derrida, de Man's radical distinction between an epistemic and an apologetic moment is highly problematical as it disregards Rousseau's performative commitment to the future, which contains an essentially religious moment: Commitment to the future, toward the future, promise, sworn faith [. . .], these gestures present themselves as exemplary. The signatory [. . .] declares himself to be at once singular, unique, and exemplary, in a manner analogous to what Augustine did with a more explicitly Christian gesture. Rousseau also addresses God, he invokes God [. . .]. He addresses his fellow men through the intermediary of God, he apostrophises them as brothers: sons of God. The scene of this virtual `sooner or later' remains fundamentally Christian.27

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Rousseau's confession is based on `the virtually in¢nite oath that assures the performative condition of truth'28 and, as such, it is preceded by an `archeperformative' that concerns the materiality of the archive itself and that conditions `our whole relation to time, to the future and to survival, to the work [. . .] and to the work of time'.29 `The archive', Derrida argues, is not only `as precarious as it is arti¢cial', it is also `transformable, alterable, even destructible or, in a word, falsi¢able'. Its actual integrity is threatened in advance and, consequently, Rousseau's ` ``I beseech you'' not to ``annihilate'' this ``cahier'' ' is `the performative eve of the ¢rst performative, an arche-performative before the performative'. Beyond de Man's epistemological critique of the trope, then, the `arche-performative' concerns `the very body of the event' and it `adjures one to save the body of the inscriptions'.30 On several accounts, `Typewriter Ribbon' thus appears to mark an important event in Derrida's engagement with de Man's work. On the one hand, Derrida's charging of de Man with the misreading and unwarranted mutilation of Rousseau's text gains considerable force in the context of his insistence on the materiality of the archive document. On the other hand, Derrida decisively repositions his corrective reading of de Man against radically negative and formalist moments in the latter's own texts. Derrida concludes his reading of de Man in terms of Rousseau by turning de Man's texts into `political-autobiographical texts [. . .], at once confessional and apologetic, with all the traits that he himself [. . .] trains on this object that o¡ers itself and that is called [. . .] Rousseau'.31 In the end, then, `Typewriter Ribbon' leaves us with the outlines of a further reading of de Man's materiality along the lines of archival intervention and virtual futures.

3. Wordsworth's (Sur)face Derrida's recon¢guration of de Manian materiality opens up a critical space from within which to reinterrogate the deconstructionist critique of philosophical and literary (theoretical) traditions in speci¢cally political and ideological terms. As a beginning of such an interrogation, it should be observed that de Man's turn towards materiality occurs as an autocritical event that to a considerable degree anticipates Derrida's criticism. At the same time, this autocritical turn substantially conditions this criticism, as a reconstruction of the emergence of the notion of materiality in de Man's work in the speci¢c context of its continued engagement with the Romantic tradition and the trope of irony will demonstrate. A useful point of entry into this recontextualization of de Man's materiality is provided by `Wordsworth and the Victorians', the self-confessedly `all too hasty' essay included in The Rhetoric of Romanticism as a deceptively programmatic shorthand version of the close readings pursued in some of the other essays included in the volume.32 De Man's argument in `Wordsworth and the

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Victorians' centres around the localization of a hidden and unnamed threat inherent in Wordsworth's poetry and the subsequent defensive gestures that have persistently shaped its reception. The history of Wordsworth's critical reception fails to deliver the comfort of historical progression, since it displays `the lack of a proportionate liberation from the nineteenth-century standards by which Wordsworth is to be understood and evaluated', these standards being `moral and religious and so, for all their re¢nement, they have remained, with very few and local exceptions, till today'.33 If this pattern of repeated defensive gestures derives from Wordsworth's elusion of `the most carefully drawn distinctions between analytic rigor and poetic persuasion', `[t]rying to state why this is so is to suggest an alternative to the canonical reading which has dominated the interpretation of Wordsworth from Victorian to modern times'. While the ¢rst part of the essay focuses on the reception of Wordsworth as the non-historical (uneventful) succession of aestheti¢cations of Wordsworth's diction, the second part provides a revaluation of the Wordsworthian sublime in rhetorical terms by producing a counterreading that `begins to reveal the break that has always been hidden in [Wordsworth's poetry]'.34 Wordsworth's threat, according to de Man, derives from the emergence in his poetry of two incompatible linguistic models. The key ¢gure marking this emergence is that of the `speaking face' in The Prelude. Quoting the lines from book V, `my mind hath look'd/Upon the speaking face of heaven and earth', de Man immediately counters an anthropomorphic reading that would reduce the `speaking face' to `the locus of speech, the necessary condition for the existence of articulated language', and instead stages it as itself a product of ¢guration (`[m]an [. . .] has a face only because he partakes of a mode of discourse that is neither entirely natural nor entirely human'). As such, the lines emphatically do not present a dialogue between mind and nature but `a mute scene of looking, the mind gazing upon a speaking face'.35 The `speaking face' thus ¢gures language in a passage that `designates a prior encounter of which the [. . .] later exchanges between men are derived', since `[o]ne can speak only because one can look upon a mode of speech which is not quite our own'. Read as a ¢guration of language, the lines consequently rhetorically substitute `speaking' by `looking' as irreducibly prior to the former. Staging the opening lines of Book II of The Prelude (`Blessed the infant babe') as `Wordsworth's essay on the origins of language as poetic language', de Man dwells on the absence of the `face' in these lines as one all the more emphasized by the appearance of the `eye' as the unexpected displacement of the mother's breast: The Babe, Nurs'd in his Mother's arms, the Babe who sleeps Upon his Mother's breast, who, when his soul Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his Mother's eye!36 The exchange of gazes between the child and the mother occurs not as `a shared awareness of common humanity', but as `an active verbal deed, a claim of

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`manifest kindred' which is not given in the nature of things'.37 The `face', in other words, is both the necessary condition for language and a product of language, i.e. a ¢gure.38 The child's `gathering passion' from his mother's eye occurs not as a natural event, but as the construction of the ¢gure of the face, which functions as a linguistic performance (a verbal claim) on which all subsequent processes of totalization are modelled. De Man subsequently juxtaposes two other occurrences of the `face', in which the totalizing power of the trope `is shown at work in a process of endless di¡erentiation correctly called perpetual ``logic'', of which it is said that it ``Could ¢nd no surface where its power might sleep'' '. De Man concludes that `[t]he face, which is the power to surface from the sea of in¢nite distinctions in which we risk to drown, can ¢nd no surface. How are we to reconcile the meaning of face, with its promise of sense and of ¢lial preservation, with its function as the relentless undoer of its own claims?' (p. 92) The question as to the reconciliation of the meaning and the function of Wordsworth's `face' is a rhetorical one, since it is precisely the impossibility of such reconciliation that turns Wordsworth into a paradigmatic post-Romantic text. De Man's counterreading elicits from Wordsworth's poetry the performative linguistic event of position that, as an act that precedes and eludes metaphorization, is radically distinct from and incompatible with a tropological linguistic model. While it is all too easy ^ in fact inevitable ^ to read this performance erroneously in anthropological terms (i.e. as the act of the poet, rather than of language), it is also dangerously na|« ve to think that performative is simply the negation of the tropological and allows for a nihilistic reading of Wordsworth's poem. Instead, the relation between tropological and the performative linguistic models is one of radical incompatibility. What does emerge from de Man's reading, however, is the irreversibility of the passage from trope to performance, leaving us with the surface of Wordsworth's language as the event that allows for a confrontation of a sheerly linguistic con£ict. What is actually and materially historical in Wordsworth's poetry is its surface, which radically conditions the totalizing power of the trope.

4.

Tranquil Juxtaposition

`Wordsworth and the Victorians' counts as an important precursor moment to de Man's readings of Kant's critical philosophy in the early 1980s. In fact, Wordsworth's `speaking face', allowing for a discourse of address, resurfaces in the context of his reading of Kant's aesthetic vision, which emphatically leaves `no room for address'.39 De Man's reading of Kant locates at the centre of the Critique of Judgment `a deep, perhaps fatal, break or continuity', in that it `depends on a linguistic structure (language as a performative as well as a cognitive system) that is not itself accessible to the powers of transcendental philosophy'. The burden of the essay is to localize more precisely `where this disruption [. . .] becomes apparent

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in the text' ^ emphatically not `as an explicit paradox' but as `the apparently tranquil, because entirely unre£ected juxtaposition of incompatibles'.40 This incisive disarticulation of the continuity between language and transcendental philosophy occurs in the emergence of `material vision' at the precise moment in the third Critique when one would have expected the emergence of `a phenomenalized, empirically manifest principle' which would provide the necessary causal link between `a purely conceptual and an empirically determined discourse' that would ultimately guarantee the architectonic unity of Kant's transcendental philosophy. Instead of providing this empirically manifest principle, however, this sublime and aesthetic vision ends up as `purely material' and `purely formal'.41 This notion of materiality is introduced in the mode of catachresis and posits a future task, rather than a celebration of the achievement of de Man's critique of aesthetic ideology: `materiality' is `the only word that comes to mind', to which de Man adds that `how this materiality is to be understood in linguistic terms is not, as yet, clearly intelligible'.42 From the observation that `[i]t is easier to say what the passage excludes and how it di¡ers from others than to say what it is', de Man proceeds by enumerating what Kant's architectonic vision is not like. Interestingly, the enumeration starts o¡ with a threefold reference to Wordsworth. Kant's vision, according to de Man, is not like the nest-robbing episode in The Prelude because the latter still associates the destabilized sky (`The sky was not a sky/Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds!') with shelter and Kant's poet who sees the heavens `does not see in order to shelter himself ' and `the link between seeing and dwelling [. . .] is teleological and therefore absent in pure aesthetic vision'.43 Neither is it like the `sense sublime' of the `round ocean' of `Tintern Abbey', because `Wordsworth's sublime is an instance of [. . .] the chiasmic transfer of properties between the sensory and the intellectual world that characterizes his ¢gural diction' and `no mind is involved in the Kantian vision'. And, thirdly, `Kant's architectonic world is not a metamorphosis [. . .], nor [. . .] a trope or a symbol that substitutes for the actual entities' and, consequently, it is `previous to any understanding, to any exchange or anthropomorphism which will allow Wordsworth to address [. . .] the ``speaking face'' of nature'.44 If Wordsworth's language, as argued in `Wordsworth and the Victorians', deferred the discursive di¡erence between poetry and philosophy and if Kant's philosophical designation of the materiality of aesthetic vision is said to occur before Wordsworth's anthropomorphized face, how should this di¡erence between Wordsworth and Kant be understood? This question forces de Man's argument in `Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant' into a ¢nal phase that substantially complements his reading of Wordsworth as paradigmatic post-Romantic text. If Kant's material vision presents `the apparently tranquil, because entirely unre£ected juxtaposition of incompatibles',45 the passage in which it emerges itself stands in a relation of incompatibility to another paragraph in the third Critique, namely to the section on the eventual articulation of the imagination with reason that would achieve the phenomenal representation or incarnation

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of the sublime. The initial terror (Verwunderung) generated by the sublime is domesticated into a feeling of tranquil superiority (Bewunderung) through the harmonious cooperation between pure reason and the imagination. By means of an avowedly `uninspired [. . .] paraphrase' of this articulation as the tragic sacri¢ce of the imagination to pure reason, de Man observes that this sacri¢ce is `less authoritative' than the `tight analytical argument' of the initial distinction between transcendental and metaphysical principles and that we are instead dealing with `a story, a dramatized scene of the mind in action', an anthropomorphization of the faculties turning the latter into tropes in allegorical scenes of sacri¢ce that `are not actually descriptions of mental functions but descriptions of tropological transformations'. What makes this uncontrollable intrusion of the tropological remarkable is that it stands `almost in juxtaposition to the passage on the material architectonics of vision, [. . .] with which it is entirely incompatible'.46 The allegorical tale of the sacri¢ce of the imagination occurs as a reinscription of material vision into a tropological linguistic model that would resuscitate the dead materiality of the Kantian architectonic. At the heart of Kant's critical enterprise is located a double designation of the architectonic, in which the ¢rst version ^ the non-teleological, non-tropological, non-Wordsworthian, material `building' of nature ^ is o¡set against the organic de¢nition of the architectonic in the chapter on `The Architectonics of Pure Reason' (in the ¢rst Critique) as `the unity of miscellaneous cognitions brought together under one idea'. The confrontation of both versions occurs as one between the organic metaphor of the unity of modes of cognition as a body of articulated limbs that grows from the inside in, on the one hand, and the materialism of the aesthetic vision of the ocean and the heavens, on the other. In the ¢nal instance, then, the emergence of material vision in the third Critique marks not only the material disarticulation of sublime nature, but also of language as an organic and articulated body: `[t]o the dismemberment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of language, as meaning-producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or ¢nally letters'.47 The dismemberment of language ends in `the prosaic materiality of the letter and no degree of obfuscation or ideology can transform this materiality into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment'.48

5.

Super-performative Irony

The reconstruction of the catachrestic introduction of the notion of materiality in de Man's work with speci¢c reference to his reading of Wordsworth generates a number of motifs of this materiality that substantially complicate Derrida's argument in `Typewriter Ribbon'. In the ¢rst place, the question arises as to the speci¢c modality of de Man's notion of performativity and its proximity to the radical negativity that Derrida

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aspires to inscribe into an `ironic allegory of messianism'. If de Man's messianism derives from the aporetic and/or misconstrued distinction between constative and performative linguistic models, it should be noted that a somewhat di¡erent scheme emerges from de Man's engagement with the Wordsworthian sublime. In `Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant', the passages between respective linguistic models is clari¢ed by de Man's repeated invocation of Wordsworth. Referring to his rhetorical readings of Wordsworth's poetic diction and Kant's material vision and its reinscription into an allegory of the sacri¢ce of the imagination, de Man states that `whenever [. . .] the articulation is threatened by its undoing, we encountered a passage [. . .] that could be identi¢ed as [. . .] a shift from trope to performance'. Importantly, however, the emergence of the `material' model involves `a somewhat di¡erent pattern'.49 The di¡erence between Wordsworth and Kant in this de Manian scheme of passages is indicative of a shift from imposition to juxtaposition. The surface that Wordsworth prohibits us from reaching ^ yet that at the same time presents itself as the locus of the moral and religious agency of his poetry ^ is what is left after its incisive critique of the tropological model as depending on a violent, performative act of imposition that eludes the anthropomorphic totalization of tropological substitution. If this incompatibility between two linguistic models leaves us with the unattainable surface of Wordsworth's poetic diction, what is allowed to be addressed in the Kantian text is the materiality of this surface, i.e. the actual and historical locus of the passage from trope to performance. From imposition to juxtaposition, de Man's emphasis shifts from violent imposition to the tranquil and static opposition of incompatibles. As such, what occurs in the third Critique is the actuality of material history beyond its reinscription into a phenomenalist aesthetic ^ an event that demands counterreading against its inevitable avoidance and reinscription. It is interesting in this respect to note Andrzej Warminski's argument in the opening essay of Material Events. In `As the Poets Do It', Warminski supplements his de Manian analysis of the material sublime with a postscript on `the Super-performative'. Warminski o¡ers a compelling plea against the `overvaluation of the performative' in de Man,50 and warns against the temptation to bypass the moment of reading. De Man's rhetorical reading, according to Warminski, can indeed be considered as partly based on the repeated demonstration of the disjunction of tropological and performative linguistic models ^ the `upshot being that the text issues in the performative and that the text as performative disrupts the text as cognitive, as trope'.51 This systematic passage from trope to performance, however, is always conditioned by the formal materialism emerging from the Kantian text, which `is very explicitly not to be identi¢ed with the performative or the performative dimension [. . .] of the text'.52 The material event, in other words, is radically foreign to the `system of truth, virtue, and understanding' and its economy of constative and performative linguistic models: it does not function `within an established juridicopolitical system [. . .]' but constitutes `the inaugural act of positing that puts

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such a system into place in the ¢rst place'.53 Warminski stages de Man's reading practice as primarily epistemologically driven and suggests the term `Superperformative' for this `violent, groundless and ungrounded, inaugural act'. Warminski's `Super-performative' thus designates the passage from trope to performative ^ which, he insists, is `not a temporal progression but an event'54 ^ in terms of a radically negative moment that can only be addressed or seen at work in and through the act of critical-linguistic reading. It is interesting to note that Derrida's `Typewriter Ribbon' and its argument on the `arche-performative' concludes the volume on Material Events by implicitly referring to Warminski's opening essay. If Derrida's `arche-performative' allows for a messianic reading of de Man in terms of archival intervention, Warminski provides a slightly di¡erent constellation in terms of an epistemological critique of the trope and material inscription. In the end, it is a matter of emphasis, but it is precisely in this region of rhetorical reading that the slightest shift in emphasis takes on considerable critical and theoretical proportions. The further exploration of Derridean and de Manian notions of materiality and performativity in this context will have to take into account the intricate position of the trope of irony in de Man's work and Derrida's reading of the latter. Derrida's claim that a `thinking of the materiality of the letter already silently marks [. . .] Allegories of Reading'55 raises the question to which extent de Man's later readings of Wordsworth and Kant are continuous with the argument of Allegories of Reading and his earlier readings of Romanticism. In fact, against Derrida's assumption of a relative continuity between `The Rhetoric of Temporality', Allegories of Reading and the essays collected in Aesthetic Ideology, the emergence of the notion of materiality in the latter can be said to constitute an actual event in de Man's work, certainly when considered in the broader perspective of his theorization of the trope of irony from the late 1960s onwards.56 In the context of Derrida's critical reading of de Man, it would be particularly interesting to investigate more closely the shift in de Man's work from the study of `the structure of the trope [of irony] itself '57 to the observation on the ¢nal page of Allegories of Reading that `[i]rony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions' that `enforces the repetition of its aberration'.58 It is no coincidence, moreover, that de Man returned to the trope of irony in his 1977 lecture on `The Concept of Irony' in an overtly autocritical mode. As the lecture starts by putting into question three interrelated ways to defuse irony ^ irony can be `absorbed into a general theory of aesthetics', it can be reduced to `a dialectic of the self as re£exive structure' or to a `dialectics of history' ^ de Man makes the following comment on the second approach, which he had pursued in `The Rhetoric of Temporality': Another way in which irony can be dealt with, and can be in a sense defused, is by reducing it to a dialectic of the self as a re£exive structure. [. . .] [Irony] sets up re£exive structures, and irony can be described as a moment in a

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dialectic of the self. It is in this way, to the extent that I have written about the subject, that I have dealt with it myself, so what I have to say today is in the nature of an autocritique, since I want to put in question this possibility.59 `The Concept of Irony' subsequently substantially revises the argument of `The Rhetoric of Temporality' by means of a close reading of the Fichtean notion of subjectivity as constitutive of an `epistemology of tropes'.60 In its establishment of the self and its progression towards in¢nity, Fichte's system in fact narrates `the anamorphosis of tropes', i.e. the generation of the system of tropes out of an original act of catachrestic positing. In other words, Fichte's system is an allegory, i.e. `the narrative of the interaction between trope on the one hand and performance as positing on the other hand'. Importantly, the allegorical deferral of the incompatibility between both linguistic models is explicitly o¡set by the disruptive force of irony. As such, the actual historicity of the material event ^ the ultimate passage towards the juxtaposition of incompatible linguistic models that resists linguistic inscription ^ is reformulated in terms of irony. In order to name this threat de Man turns to Schlegel's conception of irony as `permanent parabasis': `[t]he allegory of tropes has its own narrative coherence, its own systematicity, and it is that coherence, that systematicity, which irony interrupts, disrupts'. In de Man's subsequent formulation of the far-reaching implications of irony as the master trope, the latter emerges as a notion closely related to the material event and the irreversible passage towards it. First, in asking himself `in what linguistic element [. . .] this parabasis occur[s]',61 de Man locates ironic disruption `on the level of the play of the signi¢er' in Schlegel's essay `Ûber die UnverstÌndlichkeit' and provides examples similar to those exemplifying the prosaic materiality of the letter in Kant (the plays on `stehen and Verstehen, stellen and verstellen, of verrÏcken (insanity), and so on').62 Secondly, as irony disrupts the dialectic and re£exivity of allegorical narration, it marks the emergence of actual history as the dismemberment of language and the defensive appeal to organic history as allegorical reinscription, exempli¢ed by the repeated invocation of `history as hypostasis as a means of defense against this irony'. De Man's revaluation of the trope of irony as material event and as generative of a machine-like textuality decisively repositions it towards allegory and presents itself as a key event `in between' Allegories of Reading and `Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant'. As such, de Man leaves literary theory with the task of further exploring the relation between irony, temporality and performative rhetoric after him, as when he states about Schlegel's plea for the value of non-understanding that it `makes it very di¤cult to conceive of a historiography, a system of history, that would be sheltered from irony' and concludes with the suggestion that `[i]rony and history seem to be curiously linked to each other'. This particular topic, however, will `only be tackled when the complexities of what we could call performative rhetoric have been more thoroughly mastered'.63

Chapter 8

The Counterpromise: Derrida on the Instant of Blanchot's Death Allison Weiner

How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth . . . Vainly do we try to maintain, with our words, with our writings, what is absent . . . Everything we say tends to veil the one a¤rmation: that everything must fade and that we can remain loyal only so long as we watch over this fading movement, to which something in us that rejects all memory already belongs. Maurice Blanchot, `Friendship'1 Friendship without memory itself, by ¢delity, by the gentleness and rigour of ¢delity, bondless friendship, out of friendship, out of friendship for the solitary one on the part of the solitary. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship2 The `law' of genre, Derrida teaches us by way of Blanchot, is one of excess, of over£ow, one which allows `participation without belonging'.3 The Blanchovian re¨cit, here The Madness of the Day, of which Derrida is so attentive a reader, is hardly exemplary of any kind of generic whole, writes Derrida. It is, rather, what he calls counter-exemplary. No order but the impossible order of madness, no end but at the beginning, no beginning but at its interruption. The possibility of literature, already on the borderline, without belonging to either itself or to its other. Such is the possibility that arises from impossibility, as impossibility, in Blanchot, whose writing does not belong to any particular genre or movement, but participates movingly nonetheless under its own `law', a law which refuses its own pre-scription. From the earliest of his engagements with Blanchot, then, Derrida is aware that to write about (sur) Blanchot is to necessarily write on him, on and over the borderlines between genre that mark his texts, and thus his complicated place in literature and philosophy. Even as Derrida's texts on Blanchot (that is, both those explicitly addressing his work and thought and those which bear the mark of a tremendous ^ even when unmarked ^ inheritance) begin to form a genre of their own, it is by this `law' that Derrida seems to abide, watching eyelessly over, and on, the borderline.

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But despite Blanchot's lifelong warnings `against all the laws of genre and circumstance', especially those of the funeral oratory, with its own dangerous impulse towards the biographical, Derrida inscribes Blanchot's work, his life and his death ^ for all three are inextricably linked ^ into precisely this category, a genre of mourning, on mourning, and perhaps even in mourning for the impossibility of its own work.4 Entering Blanchot among the series of friends, among the names of Barthes, de Man, Levinas, and Lyotard, whom he must survive and memorialize, Derrida yet insists on Blanchot's singularity with the following declaration of his institutional independence: [Blanchot wrote and thought] with no institution, no university, not even one of those groups or gatherings to which certain powers are occasionally granted, sometimes even in the name or under the names of literature, publishers and the press. The sometimes invisible radiance of his oeuvre, in all that he disturbed and transformed in our ways of thinking, writing, or acting ^ I don't think one can de¢ne that by words like `in£uence or disciples'. Blanchot did not start a school, and he said what there was to say about pedagogic language and training. Blanchot did not have what we call in£uence over disciples. It is a matter of something quite di¡erent. The inheritance he leaves us has left a graver and more inward mark: inappropriable. He has left us alone, he leaves us more alone than ever with limitless responsibilities. Some of those involve us already in the future of his work, of his thinking, of his very signature. The promise that I, for my own part, made to him regarding this, will remain unfailing, and I am certain that many here will share this ¢delity.5 So Blanchot neither started nor belonged to an established `school' of thought, and thus Blanchot's legacy, for Derrida, is one that must refuse the language of `inheritance' and `in£uence'. What Blanchot leaves instead is the `inappropriable' mark of his work and of his signature, to which Derrida bears witness, with a promise to remain faithful to that which refuses allegiance. What this essay intends to explore, then, is the act of this promise to Blanchot, which in its very refusal of institutional ¢delity, remains faithful despite itself. For if the signature, as Derrida writes in `Countersignature', is what remains, then this eulogy (no less than what remains to be said for those who can no longer speak) countersigns for Derrida in its promise. And as such this countersignature can only maintain its di¡erence and respect Blanchot's anti-institutional singularity by remaining faithful to it (what amounts, in `Countersignature', to the `terrible law of betrayal', that is to say, that one ends up being faithful by betraying, by signing di¡erently).6 But Derrida's countersignature to Blanchot in this memorial text is a complicated one, betraying in yet another way through a remark on the other instant of Blanchot's death, to which both the title of Blanchot's re¨cit and the personal account on which it is based refer. Derrida inscribes both events ^ that of the text and that of the biographical ^ in his essay, but the latter in particular haunts his pages, in the form of an intrusive refrain from a

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letter Blanchot supposedly wrote to Derrida ¢fty years to the day of his missed encounter with death by ¢ring squad in Occupied France, thus `confessing' the autobiographical link to The Instant of My Death. In closely reading these moments, we may ¢nd that Derrida betrays Blanchot's truth after all, this time perhaps literally. What this essay will argue, however, is that Derrida's promise to countersign against Blanchot's legacy has much to do with our being able to arrive at the counter-institutional promise of Blanchot's thought in literature and philosophy, and thus, at its promise for Derrida himself. I will arrive at this singular promise to Blanchot shortly, but ¢rst I must say a few things regarding the nature of the promise, of legacy, and of mourning in Derrida. The promise ^ as the promise of the future, that is ^ comes from the future as much as it is pledged to it, and turns on the modality of the `perhaps'. For within each promise, within its possibility of committing itself in the a¤rmative to an act of ¢delity, lies its own ruin, the impossibility of its certainty as event. `This experience of the ``perhaps'' ' ^ itself a promise as much as it determines one, writes Derrida in `As If It Were Possible', would be that of the possible and the impossible at the same, of the possible as impossible. If only what is already possible arrives, what can thus be anticipated and expected, it does not make an event. An event is only possible when it comes from the impossible. It arrives as the coming of the impossible, where a `perhaps' deprives us of all assurance and leaves the future to the future.7 Thus the impossible is the condition of the possible, what stands not in dialectical opposition to the possible, but rather what `opens' it, leaving its mark as both `chance and threat'. Possibilization is haunted by the chance of its not arriving, but this is a consequence with which it must reckon so as to avoid what would constitute a bigger loss: that of not inviting the spectral, of not letting what is other arrive, thus risking the future itself, and with it, the possibility of survival, of living on, in the ¢rst place. The condition of the possible must allow itself to be contaminated, rendered impure, not unlike the way in which Derrida describes the law of genre in Blanchot: inscribed as over£ow, madness, and already at/on the borderline. And so this is the work, to a certain extent, of failure. And such is the unworking (what Blanchot would call de¨soeuvrement), at work, of the promise. Derrida states accordingly in `As If It Were Possible' that: The law of this spectral contamination, the impure law of this impurity, this is what must be constantly reelaborated. For example, the possibility of failure is not only inscribed as a preliminary risk in the condition of the possibility of the success of a performative (a promise must be able not to be kept, it must risk not being kept or becoming a threat to be a promise that is freely given, and even to succeed; whence the originary inscription of guilt, of confession, of the excuse and of forgiveness in the promise). The possibility of failure must continue to mark the event, even when it succeeds, as the trace of an impossibility, at times its memory and always its haunting.8

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Thus the very condition of a promise to the future is already inscribed with the language of mourning, and of legacy. One always inherits tradition, as in the case of Blanchot, both its own name and against it. `Again the possibility of the impossible', writes Derrida: `A legacy would only be possible where it becomes impossible . . . This is one of the possible de¢nitions of deconstruction ^ precisely as legacy.'9 Elsewhere, in `The Deconstruction of Actuality', Derrida explains that `there is legacy only where assignations are multiple and contradictory, secret enough to defy interpretation, to carry the unlimited risk of active interpretation. It is here that a decision and a responsibility can be taken. Without double bind, there is no responsibility. A legacy must retain an undecidable reserve.' Through this aporetic act of inheriting, we assume responsibility; we a¤rm and decide. For we choose to inherit, and to thus interpret, one ghost over another, and we determine from what we inherit what we will take as legacy. `One makes selections, one ¢lters, one sifts through the ghosts and through the injunctions of each spirit', writes Derrida.10 A promise to keep a legacy, to commit it to the future, then, is doubly given over to the impossible, possible as it may be through what is left as trace, as spectrality. What further complicates Derrida's commitment to Blanchot, however, is once again a question of genre. The memorial texts of Derrida, each written following the passing of a friend (a relationship determined already, at its very inception, by the possibility of having to survive the other, and thus marked, before a friendship even begins, by mourning), turn on their own di¤cult question of ¢delity. Derrida, in these texts, and we, by extension of reading them, face several aporetic situations. How does one speak in a language unique enough to preserve the particular singularity of the individual's life and death while still ¢nding recourse to universal words of mourning? And thus how do we resist betraying this singularity if each death of a friend in some way leads to iterability, to a series of deaths? Such a series operates no less under the name of The Work of Mourning, in which a number of Derrida's memorial texts are gathered. Blanchot's death would come later, after this book ¢rst appears (though we might be tempted to say that Blanchot's death ^ actual or otherwise ^ had always already occurred, even without necessarily happening), but Derrida's previously written memorial texts provide a generic legacy when it comes to thinking `after' Blanchot.11 The question remains, once more, of preserving singularity, of not substituting one death for another, even as we invoke these prior works of mourning. As Derrida asks in his essay on Roland Barthes ^ the ¢rst such commemorative text which, for Derrida, risked performing, in its very act of being written, the most unthinkable kind of betrayal ^ should we speak like the departed, out of a mimetic gesture, out of, so we might think, duty? Or does this dutiful deed simply pay back the debt of friendship too fully, when the debt must be left unpaid in order to preserve the aneconomic structure of the gift? Do we open, then, the work of mourning on to something di¡erent, on to something other, even when this might imply a troubling narcissism, a taking of the last word for ourselves when its leave must never be taken? It is in the midst of these aporias, in the realm of the third (for Blanchot, the

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neuter), and not of the one or the other, that we must ¢nd a way to mourn. As in the work of mourning in psychoanalysis, we must interiorize the other, to let the dead speak only `in' us. Our task is one of speaking of the dead ^ that is, not `of ' as object, but as from, from the place where the other has always already been interiorized within. This is an interiorization that must refuse a total incorporation, however. And the work of mourning here is without ¢nite limits, rather akin to Blanchot's own restless work of de¨soeuvrement. The law of mourning must give itself over to the impossible possible. As Derrida writes in a memorial text following the death of Louis Marin: `For this is the law, the law of mourning, and the law of the law, always in mourning, that it would have to fail in order to succeed. In order to succeed, it would have to fail, to fail well . . . And while it is always promised, it will never be assured.'12 But even this impossible trace of mourning, even this interiorization that resists appropriation, will not let us completely avoid the threat of in¢delity. This, for Derrida, a most loyal friend, is especially troubling. He writes in Memoires for Paul de Man: Is the most distressing or even the most deadly in¢delity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is that of the impossible mourning, which leaving the other his alterity, respecting thus his in¢nite remove either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?13 In Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas' excellent introduction to The Work of Mourning, they suggest that the act of citation, as Derrida uses it, allows for such interiorization and yet preserves the text of the other as other; that is, it allows for alterity to arrive within the text.14 This is a kind of participation without belonging, as it were, a gesture of letting the dead speak from within, but of letting such citation signal interruption, and thus mark a space to come. This notion of citation as one which implies both ¢delity and betrayal, preservation and interruption, returns us to Derrida's commemorative text on Blanchot, with its promise of ¢delity, and in fact, invitation to ¢delity, as Derrida summons his fellows mourners. We return to the question of the countersignature as citation, and recall the `terrible law of betrayal' that maintains ¢delity by way of signing, or here perhaps, citing, di¡erently. And we return to that `other' instant of Blanchot's death. For the event that Blanchot's re¨cit recounts, and which Derrida invokes on the occasion of Blanchot's `actual' death, is perhaps the very incident that Blanchot encountered in 1944 at Quain, when soldiers (thought to be Nazis, but who were, in actuality, Russians) ravaged the French countryside in the ¢nal days of the Occupation. Sentenced to death for being in possession of `suspect' papers (which were most likely, as Blanchot's biographer points out, the manuscript, ironically enough, of L'Arreªt de mort [Death Sentence, also translatable as the halt, or cessation, of death]), Blanchot is able to £ee at the last minute because of the confusion of battles from the Resistance erupting around them.15 The soldiers, in life as in the text, ¢nd

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recompense for the escaped prisoner by killing three innocent farmers and setting the homes of the commoners on ¢re. Blanchot thus writes that he was saved from his own death by the death of an other, `prevented from dying by death itself and perhaps the error of injustice'.16 Such is the `encounter of death with death', the experience of the untranslatable remainder of a lightness that is, Blanchot writes, `death itself, or to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance [toujours en instance]'.17 In Demeure, his critical commentary on The Instant of My Death, Derrida inscribes a fragment of a letter he received from Blanchot, the letter, as mentioned earlier, which supposedly marks the anniversary of a death which arrived without actually transpiring. Derrida cites here only from its ¢rst two lines: `July 20. Fifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death.'18 Derrida cites from this personal testimony at risk, he states, of being `violent toward Blanchot', for in citing from the letter as such, Derrida explains that he has committed an act formerly thought unspeakable, much as he wrote on the act of remembering Barthes.19 Here Derrida avows in Demeure: I will dare to do what I think I have never done before in my life, but what I judge to be necessary here for the reading I would like to attempt, in order to place an allegedly non-literary and non-¢ctional testimony in relation to a testimony presented in a literary mode . . . This letter does not belong to what we call literature. It testi¢es, as I am testifying here, in a space supposedly unrelated to ¢ction in general and the institution of literature in particular. But it says the same thing.20 The inscription of Blanchot's letter into the space of Derrida's commentary heralds two interruptions, then. The ¢rst has to do with this violence in citing directly from Blanchot, and the second has to do with the nature of the citation itself. Though this letter supposedly asserts a truth from the space of non-¢ction, Derrida maintains that the event The Instant of My Death relates resists precisely such a dialecticization of non-¢ctional testimony and literary ¢ctionalization, remaining [demeurant] on the borderline between evidence and literature, itself always already haunted by the possibility of its being other than itself. `I do not know', Derrida insists, `whether this text [that of The Instant of My Death] belongs, purely and properly and strictly and rigorously speaking, to the space of literature, whether it is a ¢ction or a testimony, and, above all, to what extent it calls these distinctions into question or causes them all to tremble.'21 For it is not a question, we ¢nd, of either/or: either testimony or ¢ction, either incontrovertible evidence and proof or inventive falsehood. Testimony is already implicated within the ¢ctive, within the possibility of literature itself, and thus comes to work as testimony precisely because of its impurity and excess. As Derrida elaborates in Demeure: There is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of ¢ction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury ^ that is to say, the possibility of literature, of the innocent or perverse literature that innocently

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plays at perverting all of these distinctions. If this possibility that it seems to prohibit were e¡ectively excluded, if testimony thereby became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted. It must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, the possibility, at least, of literature. We will try to remain [demeurer] on this undecidable limit.22 As with the law of genre, we here encounter the language of non-certitude, of the borderline; participation without belonging. Literature, as that which makes testimony possible in its impure impossibility, itself rests on this limit. To `belong' to the space of literature, whether bound by the generality of ¢ction or the particularity of its institution, is to already be situated elsewhere, everywhere, in fact, and to be able to say everything without saying it all.23 Thus Blanchot cannot testify from a space that belongs, `properly speaking', to literature, and neither can Derrida himself, testifying as he does from the space of this commentary on behalf of his friend, for his friend. But why, then, would Derrida insist on the opposite: that Blanchot's letter, unlike the `literary' testimony given as the narrative of The Instant of My Death, is `non-literary' and `non¢ctional', despite, ultimately, `say[ing] the same thing'? Of course, Derrida seemingly participates without belonging to his own assertion, using language of the borderline to determine these categories; the letter is only `allegedly' a non-literary testimony and it testi¢es from a space `supposedly' without relation to literature. And it is not likely that Derrida would mistakenly overlook the fact that Blanchot writes his letter in the passe¨ simple (`Fifty years ago, I knew [ je connus] the happiness of nearly being shot to death'), especially when he calls attention to Blanchot's postscript to The Instant of My Death for being rendered in the same tense, here heralding the use of the passe¨ simple as a `return to literature'.24 So, why, then, would Derrida make such a strange claim; why insist on a categorizing of this letter as non-¢ction, when non-¢ctional testimony should always tremble with the possibility of literature, which itself always feels the tremor, from within, of what is outside? Such a claim may have to do with a certain `confession' on Derrida's part, which comes just after the citation from the letter in Demeure, and which continues to dwell on the violence of having included the citation in the ¢rst place. At the risk of performing a similar violence towards Derrida in citing so broadly, I nonetheless quote here the entirety of the following passage, for its interest in the implications of Blanchot's autobiography for ¢ction: My gestures are of a great violence; I know this, I confess it. It is obvious that Blanchot is publishing this, I would not dare say at the end of his life, for he is describing to us the instance of his death from the moment he was still this young man. But he is publishing it very late in his life. This suspension has lasted ¢fty years; his letter says so. But at a moment when his testimony and his attestation have become more testamentary than ever, like all of his texts

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and all of his letters, he can always be suspected of making public this testimony in a political space in which for some time, as we know, trials, accusations, and even verdicts on the subject of his political past have been multiplying. At this moment, he could be suspected of the abuse of a ¢ction, that is, of a type of text whose author is not responsible, not responsible for what happens to the narrator or the characters of the narrative, not answerable before the law for the truthfulness of what he says. One might insinuate that he is exploiting a certain irresponsibility of literary ¢ction in order to pass o¡, like contraband, an allegedly real testimony, this time not ¢ctional, coming to justify or exculpate in a historical reality the political behavior of an author it is easy to identify with both the narrator and the central character. In this space, one can put forward the hypothesis that Blanchot intends ¢nally to mark, by means of a ¢ction so obviously testimonial and autobiographical in appearance (autothanatographical in truth), that he is someone the Germans wanted to shoot in a situation where he would visibly have been on the side of the Resistance ¢ghters. One can always call into question the purity of this testimony and sense calculation in it. I am not convinced that calculation is not simply absent. How could it be? And in the name of what would one want to require that it be absent, forcing oneself thus to deprive it of any justi¢cation or explanation of itself ? It is therefore probably not unjusti¢ed, but there is this calculation and we must take it into account in our reading. Such a calculation may be extremely complex and di¡erentiated. On the one hand, non-literary testimony is no more a proof than is testimony in the form of a literary ¢ction. On the other hand, the author of the two, always the sole witness to that of which he speaks, may speak truly or falsely, speak truly here and falsely there, interweave a series of interpretations, implications, re£ections, unveri¢able e¡ects around a woof or a warp objectively recognized and beyond suspicion. We will study the meshes of the net formed by the limits between ¢ction and testimony, which are also interior each to the other. The net's texture remains loose, unstable, permeable. Historical through and through, this texture is the texture of literature and all of the passions it su¡ers and sustains, to which it testi¢es as its truth without truth, all of the passions with which it is swollen or which catch themselves in it.25 So Derrida calls our attention to the possibility of calculation on Blanchot's part, but not without, as we shall see, revealing a degree of it on his own as well. There is the possibility, as there is always possibility, of an `abuse' of ¢ction, if ¢ction itself quali¢es as an abuse in its e¡ort to dissimulate or to pretend to truth. But this belies a larger possible abuse of ¢ction, that is, the way it may be taken as truth, as pertaining to the events of life, of autobiography, or in this case, autothanatography. That ¢ction could reveal, or `betray',26 the truth, precisely because of the fact that it does not lay claim to it, and that such a disclosure of what would otherwise remain outside of the ¢ctional frame could actually be used to testify to or to account for some historical reality is what

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might seem troubling, especially in a case such as Blanchot's, where events about his past may be under question and may need `proving'. It is this possibility which Derrida raises and does not entirely dismiss. `One can always call into question the purity of this testimony and sense calculation in it', writes Derrida, at the same time reminding us that testimony is never pure and uncalculated. After all, `non-literary testimony is no more a proof than is testimony in the form of a literary ¢ction'. The genre of the testamentary no more belongs to history than it does to the literary. So Derrida's inscription of the letter from Blanchot, this alleged piece of non-¢ction, may serve precisely to complicate any such charges of possible abuses of ¢ction. There is thus calculation on Derrida's part. It as if Derrida wants to protect Blanchot by invoking the evidentiary claims of the letter, as if to `prove' the validity of Blanchot's allegiances with the Resistance and his victimization in the war. But Derrida, like Blanchot, knows that testimony is never a matter of simple proof, and so Derrida too `may speak truly or falsely, speak truly here and falsely there, interweave a series of interpretations, implications, re£ections'. Derrida, by insisting on the non¢ctional status of the letter at the same time that he declares the impossibility of such a category, thus performs in his own text the very undecidability of the one to which he bears witness. The citation which seems such a violent betrayal of Blanchot remains, in fact, ¢ercely loyal to Blanchot, testifying not as evidence or as ¢ction, but from and on the borderline itself, thus opening up the possibility of a literature, and a testimony, unbound by the institution. That this net `formed by the limits between ¢ction and testimony' retains a texture `historical through and through', however, raises the question of what the interests of history have to do with testimony at the moment it refuses its own claims to the evidentiary. What does it mean to speak of history at the instant of Blanchot's death, that is, at each and every instant of his death that happens, or does not happen, that occurs in ¢ction or in life, both in his and in ours? For Derrida inscribes this same letter into his commemorative essay following Blanchot's death, originally given as a speech at the service held after Blanchot's cremation and which ¢rst appeared in print in Libe¨ration on 25 February 2003 under the name of `A Witness Forever' [`Un Te¨moin de toujours'].27 Here Derrida reveals that Blanchot's letter accompanied the package containing the manuscript of The Instant of My Death, attesting, then, to a possible physical division between non-¢ctional and literary testimony, though Derrida refuses to di¡erentiate between this citation and the numerous passages he quotes from Blanchot's literary texts. Derrida does, however, add the complication of an additional line, to which we are not given access in Demeure. The fuller citation from the letter thus reads: `July 20. Fifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death. Twenty-¢ve years ago, we set foot on the moon.'28 So Blanchot has himself inscribed his impossible death into a historical continuum, seemingly suggesting that the singularity of his death can only remain so against another event, one that happens to be collective.29 And Derrida, strangely enough, follows Blanchot, for while he insists on Blanchot's singularity, especially as it concerns his relation to the institutions of literature and

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philosophy, Derrida places Blanchot in this essay among friends, friends who are also colleagues, a name, then, among others: Bataille, Char, Antelme, des Foreªts, Laporte. Derrida trembles, he writes, before `the name that is more alone now than ever', but Blanchot exists, for Derrida and the readers whom he addresses, within the span of `two or three generations', a writer and thinker `of this time, not just of this country'.30 Is such a situating of Blanchot on Derrida's part one which invokes a notion of participation without belonging, then? And once again, we have the inscription of a date, punctuating what resides outside of history with history: Maurice Blanchot, as far back as I can remember, during my whole adult life, since I began reading him (more than ¢fty years ago) and especially after I met him, in May 1968, while he has continued to honor me with his trust and his friendship, I became used to hearing it, this name, di¡erently from the way I would hear the name of that other person: the incomparable author who is quoted and who inspires us; I heard it di¡erently from the way I heard the great name of a man whom I admire both for his power of exposition, in thought and in life, and for his power of withdrawal, his exemplary modesty, a discretion unique in this age.31 So Derrida separates the name from the literary ¢gure, renders it distinct from the man, already singular in his refusal, his withdrawal from the public realm. To this name alone Derrida owes a trust and friendship apart from what he owes Blanchot the man. And yet, the name violently rejoins its bearer in a historical spectrum. Derrida here invokes a date of his own: I just noticed the date of our ¢rst meeting, May '68, without reviewing the course of the occasion of this personal encounter, which began with a problem of an ethical and political nature that concerned us. I will just emphasize that at the same time, in May '68, Blanchot was, with entire being, body and soul, in the street, radically involved, as he always was, in what was turning out to be a revolution.32 Twice, then, the naming of a date: an event, singular and collective at once: May '68. And what of participation without belonging, after all? To envision Blanchot being involved in something, even that of the events of May '68, `with entire being, body and soul' ^ is this the most faithful of betrayals or the most counterfeit of debts? Why has Derrida dared to do what should have been refused, at all costs? Why has he given us more than the name before which we must tremble ^ indeed, why has he given us all of Blanchot, `body and soul'? And still, perhaps one more betrayal, one which comes immediately after the citation of Blanchot's letter in `A Witness Forever', which goes in this text, unlike in Demeure, without reckoning, account, or interpretation. But here Derrida alerts us to his possible in¢delity ahead of time: `Among the most worthy warnings that I must for an instant pretend to forget or betray, there are those, memorable, ones of friendship itself.'33 And Derrida means, in fact,

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Blanchot's friendship, invoking the name of which honours above all distance, strangeness, separation in common, before the common.34 Derrida also gestures at the same time to the text of Blanchot which bears the same name. In a section also entitled as such, Blanchot struggles with the impossible task of memorializing his friend Georges Bataille, and it is here, quite literally in the name of friendship, that Blanchot insists that even the incidents and events of Bataille's life that we can call responsible `belong to no one. There is no witness.'35 The books `remain', but we cannot call forth what, or whom, does not. Such should be the warning: we cannot bear witness to Blanchot's letter, non-¢ctional as it may be, or so Derrida calculates on our part, and on Blanchot's. And ¢nally, one more act of citation, elsewhere. This time in the ¢rst text of mourning Derrida would write, the one for Roland Barthes, the text which seemed like such an unthinkable transgression at the time. In this text appears the very passage on Georges Bataille from Friendship which will act as a betrayal when it comes time to mourn the friend that is Blanchot himself. And again, Derrida invokes the passage without giving further commentary. But here there is perhaps a reckoning, after all. Derrida asks himself, in the lines following this citation from Friendship, from where his desire to place a date (14^15 September 1980) comes. He writes: The date ^ and this is always something of a signature ^ accentuates the contingency or insigni¢cance of the interruption. Like an accident and like death, it seems to be imposed from the outside, `on that day', (time and space here given together, the conditions of a publication36), but it no doubt also indicates another interruption. Though neither more essential nor more interior, this interruption announces itself in another register, as another thought of the same one.37 Thus we begin to see that these citations from Friendship and from Blanchot's letter ^ those that appear in the complicated genre of these memorial texts on friendship, these seeming acts of betrayal to, and in the name of, a friend, including that of Maurice Blanchot, to which Derrida has pledged ¢delity ^ act as another kind of interruption, the interruption of death itself, cutting across time and event. For these citations act as trace, the trace perhaps of the impossible, of the future, of the promise itself. What, Derrida writes in `As If It Were Possible', `makes [the possible] to come . . . makes it turn either according to an anachronic temporality or according to an incredible ¢liation ^ which is, moreover, also the origin of faith. For it exceeds knowledge and conditions the address to the other, inscribes all theorems into the space and time of a testimony.'38 Such is the testimony which Derrida inscribes within his promise to Blanchot, a promise that runs counter to itself at every possible ^ and thus impossible ^ moment of betrayal, countered ¢nally by a ¢delity to Blanchot, to the institutions of literature and philosophy in which Blanchot participated, but did not, at last, belong, and to the act of testimony, on which turns the promise of Blanchot's, and yes, Derrida's, futures, even with, and against, its insistent call from the past.

Chapter 9

Derrida's Transcendental Contraband: Impossible Acts Joanna Hodge

One can follow, if one knows how to read in contra/band (a term borrowed here from the code of blazons, that is, from heraldry), the spiral chaining of the circle of circles. And the logic of the anniversary: the imposition of the curve on the angle. (Glas, 244^5a)1

1.

Preliminary Orientation: Concerning the Epigraph

My epigraph here is taken from Glas: What Remains of Absolute Knowledge (1974). It indicates Derrida's preoccupation with the shape of thought, called by him elsewhere a concern for topolitology. Here, the angles of a three-place relationship, imaged in Hegelian dialectics, is complicated by a movement of iteration in the annual cycles and repetitions of time, and of the sun, conjured up in the notion of an anniversary. Local human time of days and years imposes on the abstract form of logic and geometry, and this curve of time disrupts the straight lines and closed spaces of Euclidian geometry. The text Glas or The Death Knell is overtly concerned with the encounter between G. W. F. Hegel and Jean Genet, between the hypothesis of an absolute knowing and its incarnation in the Holy Family, on the one side, and the inverted hierarchies of the family lives of Genet's prison inmates, on the other. By this juxtaposition, Derrida neatly overturns the Hegelian claim to completeness. Glas is also by implication concerned with the return within philosophical texts of the disruptive work of the imagination, as exempli¢ed in the writings of Genet. This disoeuvrement, or unworking, of theoretical conceptuality by the inventions of writing might be thought to be a central tenet of Derrida's intervention in philosophy. A destabilizing of concepts by the e¡ects of imagination and its writing will return in the later parts of this discussion. First, however, I shall address myself to the theoretical issue of an implied disruption of Hegelian dialectics by a reversion to transcendental philosophy. For this remark as given in my epigraph is preceded by an analysis of the `loser

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wins' structure of attempts to refute transcendental claims, whereby the very claim to delimit and refute transcendentalism is taken by the transcendentalist to con¢rm rather than refute the position in question. This analysis runs: The (con)striction ^ what is useful for thinking the ontological or the transcendental ^ is then also in the position of transcendental trans-category, the transcendental transcendental. All the more because the (con)striction cannot not produce the philosophical e¡ect it produces. There is no choosing here: each time a discourse contra the transcendental is held, a matrix ^ the (con)striction itself constrains the discourse to place the non-transcendental, the outside of the transcendental ¢eld, the excluded in the structuring position. The matrix in question constitutes the excluded as transcendental of the transcendental, as imitation transcendental: transcendental contraband. The contra-band is not yet dialectical contradiction. To be sure the contra-band necessarily becomes that but its not yet is not yet the teleological anticipation, which results in it never becoming dialectical contradiction. The contra-band remains something other than what, necessarily, it is to become. (Glas, 244a) I shall look more closely at this juxtaposition of contraband and the contradiction of dialectics in the last part of this essay. While Derrida at this epoch is inclined to run together a discussion of Hegelian dialectics and of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, I shall rather emphasize other considerations adduced by Derrida for keeping them separate. There is con¢rmation that it is indeed Husserl, rather than either Hegel or Kant, who is here in view, when Derrida invokes this alternative geometry, in an imposition of the curve on the angle. For geometry plays an exemplary role in Husserl's demonstration of the function of historical a prioris, in the essay `On the Origin of Geometry', from 1935, as read by Derrida in his 1962 Introduction to it.2 Historical a prioris are invented by Husserl to mark up a distinction between his own thinking and that of both Kant and the neo-Kantians with whom he was in discussion in the early years of the last century. Their status remains a matter of dispute, as do the respective claims of Kant and of Husserl to delimit the scope of a transcendental philosophy.

2.

Outlines of some Arguments

The main diagnosis under development here is of a secret complicity between on the one hand Derrida's declining to take up the thematics of the ideality of the literary object, proposed as a possible dissertation topic in 1957, as reported on in the essay `The Time of the Thesis: Punctuations' (1980), and on the other, an under-articulated strand of transcendental philosophy, cutting through his work, the `transcendental contraband' of my title.3 This transcendental contraband, as a set of thematics, takes place, as it were, behind the back of the explicit

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direction of the writing, which performs an exploration of the ideality of the literary, while renouncing the feasibility of such an enquiry. There is a continuous linking from a suspension of claims on truth, in literature, and the suspension of claims on truth in the Husserlian epoche¨, the bracketing of ontological commitment, in the course of describing the procedures of phenomenological reduction. The result is a logic of singularity, in which an alterity, in the form of an arrival of the non-¢nite in the ¢nite, is revealed to be intrinsic to both autoa¡ection and the distinctive literary e¡ect. Transcendental contraband thus provides a hidden line of continuity between Derrida's early preoccupation with Husserl, from 1953 to 1967, and his return to Husserl, under the impact of preparing his 1953/54 dissertation for publication, in 1990, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy.4 The publication of On Touching: Jean Luc Nancy, in 2000, reveals an ongoing engagement with the reception of Husserl in France, if not so much a reopening of an engagement with Husserl himself.5 The intervening twenty years, 1970 to 1990, thus are not so much a move away from phenomenology, as a series of tangential engagements with the legacy of Husserl, via readings of Heidegger, of Blanchot, of Levinas, and via repeated returns to Kant and to Freud. These last two are important for Derrida, because of their enquiries into the limit conditions for making sense of phenomena, the former in terms of the conditions for critical delimitation and the analyses of the beautiful and the sublime; and the latter in the analyses of the pathologies which shake Husserl's presumption about abnormal functions and modes of givenness, as parasitic on what he calls normal functioning. Across this twenty-year gap, Derrida's objections to Husserl's phenomenology remain threefold. The ¢rst objection is that it takes for granted the availability of a language in which to articulate its enquiries and results. This is an objection in part derived from a reading of Eugen Fink, as remarked in Speech and Phenomenon (1967), and footnoted in Derrida's Introduction to Husserl's `On the Origin of Geometry'.6 This objection is developed in Speech and Phenomenon (1967) into the objection that genuine or authentic meanings are supposed by Husserl to be available rather in the mode of silent soliloquy than in actual language use, where they might be subject to the constraints of intersubjective communicability. This mode of silent soliloquy for Husserl has the virtue of bracketing dependence on any speci¢c natural language, but reveals a hesitation with respect to actualizations of pure meanings in language use. This silent soliloquy is the mode of address in which Abraham responds to the commandment of his God, as discussed by Derrida, responding to Kierkegaard, in the essay appended to the second edition of The Gift of Death, `Literature in Secret: Impossible Filiation'.7 In the closing pages of this essay, Derrida remarks: Whereas the supposed ¢ctional structure of every work lets the signatory o¡ from responsibility, before either political or civil law, for meaning or for reference (of what the inside of the text intends and aims at, exhibits or encrypts, so that it is always unable to refrain from positing no meaning and

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no referent, that is to want to mean nothing at all) while all the time intensifying in the same measure up to in¢nity the responsibility for the singular event that each work constitutes (empty and in¢nite responsibility like that of Abraham). (p. 206) For Derrida, all language use is dependent on a deployment of legitimating ¢ctions, and is thus strictly intent on meaning nothing at all. Thus Derrida reverses Husserl's suggestion, that meaning occurs truly only in silent soliloquy, by intimating that no actual language use is informed by the intimated transcendental meaning conditions. Derrida's second line of objection to Husserl is to the supposition that the method of moving from empty to ful¢lled intuitions can also work for determining meanings for the most basic elements for a constitution of time. This objection is intensi¢ed by the suspicion that the structure: primordial impression, retention and protention, as deployed by Husserl, assigns a privilege, presumed in advance and not arrived at by analyses of givenness, of a self-givenness of pure intuition, in a privileged living present. The principle of all principles announced in Ideas One section 24, concerning originary givenness, thus requires a modi¢cation, in order to permit demonstration of how pro¢lings of time, other than that of the present, might render Husserl immune from the critique that he assumes here what he must rather prove.8 This indeed is undertaken by Husserl in the volumes ¢lling out the practice of phenomenology to which the formal account of Ideas One is a preliminary introduction. The di¤culty here is that only the ¢rst volume of Ideas One has the authority as published by Husserl himself. Conversely, if the method of intuition can be stretched to include the necessarily open-ended structure of any such thinking of a ful¢lment of time, then the canonical status of the notion of givenness has become distended by its dependency on the in¢nite future projections, provided by the notion of the idea in the Kantian sense, or, as Marion, or indeed Levinas would have it, by implicit invocation of the bountiful giving of a divinity, beyond being. The Husserlian project one way or the other thus becomes dependent on nonHusserlian, non-intuitive notions, borrowed from their delimitation not in intuition but either in Kant's text, or in the writings meditating on the mysteries of divine manifestation.9 The third objection is related and remarks how it is not obvious how the hierarchies of presenti¢cation and presentation, founded mode and primordial impression, and of real components of ideal meanings and partial components of actual impressions can be held in place, without precisely reinstating the presupposition about presence which was rather to be demonstrated, and indeed displaced in the analyses of time consciousness. The problem in short is the persistence of presupposition, which the method of bracketing was supposed to neutralize. This last is the level on which Derrida makes out the claim that Husserl, for all his sophistication with respect to analyses of time, nevertheless signs up to a metaphysics of presence. For there is some privileged framework within which presenti¢cation, primordial impression and the real, or rather reell, components of ideal meanings can be thus

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privileged, and this is the domain of transcendental consciousness, access to which is achieved by completing the series of reductions. The possibility of such completion is put in doubt by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the famous preface to his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), but it is already marked out for discussion by Husserl who surmises that the series is only in principle completable, having the structure again of the idea in the Kantian sense, which holds in place the idea of an in¢nite task. Of this idea, Husserl writes in Boyce Gibson's translation, in the concluding sections of Ideas One: `The idea of an in¢nity essentially motivated is not itself an in¢nity; the insight that this in¢nity is intrinsically incapable of being given does not exclude but rather demands the transparent givenness of the Idea of this in¢nity' (Ideas One, Section 143).10 This notion of motivation is taken up for discussion in Ideas Two, where its status as an operative concept is transposed into that of a thematic concept.11 Derrida adduces considerations derived from his ¢rst set of objections to Husserl's phenomenology, concerning meaning and language, to put in doubt the possibility of such a programme of reduction even making sense, in the strict sense required for Husserl's proposed rewriting of a notion of transcendental logic as an account of the constitutive genesis. His reading of Husserl in The Problem of Genesis turns on a demonstration that at each stage of the developing line of Husserl's enquiries, the attempt to delineate a sense of genesis, as required to suspend the naturalizing presuppositions of psychology and to install a transcendental consciousness, is unpicked by the need to have operative in that account a genesis of sense. The supposition that this critique might be met by attention to Husserl's account of motivation in Ideas Two must be here put to one side, to make way for the surmise that Derrida's own performance of a singular stylistic unity is itself held in place by an ideality, as mutually sustaining processes of a sense of genesis, an unanticipated but determinate outcome for meaning intending, and a genesis of sense, the meaning intending itself. Thus Derrida's writing practice exempli¢es the availability of a genesis of sense which does not subvert the status of a sense of genesis as given in the designation `one of Derrida's texts'.

3.

Derrida Reading Nancy

This suspicion with respect to the viability of the Husserlian programme, and with respect to the move of nonetheless taking the parameters of Husserl's enquiries as the horizon for philosophical enquiry, brings the enquiries of Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy into proximity with one another.12 However, in the course of attempting to discern the scope and limits of such agreement, the Kantian in£ection in Nancy's version of a transcendental philosophy comes into view.13 By contrast to this, there takes place for Derrida a certain vindication, at least of a certain Husserl with respect to a certain Kant. Where Nancy arrives at an account of a transcendental touch, which uni¢es the evidences of the senses, in the absence of any a¤rmable content to the notions of either

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world, or horizon, as thought by either Kant, or Husserl, Derrida seems the more inclined to explore the possibilities of some new geometry of the spirit, in order to make sense of the relative stability of meanings, and of the iterabilities which constitutes the continuity of any intellectual enquiry, whatsoever, even his own. I thus surmise that underpinning the deviations and excursions of Derrida's writings, there is a kind of Husserlianism still at work, if of a highly unorthodox stripe. Nancy goes down the route of formalizing sensibility, thereby opening Kant up for a reinterpretation beyond the sphere of the positivisms of the neoKantians. In On Touching ^ Jean Luc Nancy, Derrida analyses the touch which does not touch as some kind of transcendental condition for the possibility of coordinating the evidences of touch, of sensibility, and of forming images and concepts out of the series of perceptions, given to the senses. This appears to take place for Nancy within a domain of enquiry which continues to accept the Kantian distinctions between sensibility and its a priori conditions, given in intuition, and between understanding and its a priori conditions, as given in the table of categories. Husserl however would point to a slippage between these two notions of givenness, and to a need to specify the di¡erences between these distinct modes of givenness in these distinct domains. The failure to demonstrate the commonality, or the di¡erences, between the givens of intuition and the givens of understanding prompts Heidegger to hypothesize that they are both given in a domain opened up in the a¤rmation of a primordial status for imagination. This intervention in Kant studies has had its critics and its supporters, but this is not the route taken by Husserl, who analyses these processes rather in terms of transcendental logical functions, eschewing the remnants of a faculty psychology. Derrida, too, cuts loose from any such reinterpretation of the status of the faculties. From the invention of di¡e¨rance, to the strategies of circonfessional reading and tangential construction, the latter developed to articulate his encounters with the thought of Nancy, he appears to be seeking to reopen the delineation given by Kant of a transcendental aesthetics: that is, rethinking the permutations of relations between conceptions of space and time, and a staging of an enquiry into their meaning. Thus, what is at stake between Derrida and Nancy is the interpretation and reception to be given to transcendental philosophy. My diagnosis is that Nancy here inclines towards the original Kantian formulations, accepting a distinction between the domains of responding to artworks, of ethical analysis, and the domains of natural scienti¢c enquiry, whereas Derrida is more engaged by Husserl's recastings of Kantian transcendental philosophy, and especially of transcendental aesthetics. For Derrida, there is no domain of epistemology and metaphysics to be secured in advance of ethical considerations and responses to the exigencies of writing. For Husserl, transcendental aesthetics can be thought to trace the relations of interdependence and mutuality between ideal objects and meanings, as given in speci¢c actual intending acts.14 The term marks up a domain in which a description can be given of the temporal dimensions of primordial impressions,

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which are never fully present, their protentional and retentional dimensions, and the distinct temporal phases of acts, of meanings and of the meant in meaning, all in their interrelations as thought, and as components of idealities. When an individual thinks for example about the di¡erences between twelve noon and twelve midnight, there is the duration of their thinking, there is the temporal duration implied in the thought content, the time which elapses between the two intimated clock times, but there is also the temporality of working out quite what is meant in meaning such a di¡erence, and this of course might last a lifetime. Thus transcendental aesthetics permit, or rather they propose, a tracing out of the connections and their temporalities, within which an articulation of meaning takes place.

4.

Contesting the Transcendental

There are then three key elements in Husserl's transformation of Kant's transcendental philosophy. There is a recasting of the notion of synthesis, such that it is no longer a description of the formal unity of apperception, but is rather constitutive of all the domains of being given, as regional ontologies, also providing the linkages between them. Synthetic a prioris are transposed into historical a prioris. There is thus a correlative expansion of the notion of the apriori, such that each regional ontology has its a prioris; and there is a disruption of the line of demarcation between an analysis of a transcendental aesthetic and an analysis of a transcendental logic. For Husserl, transcendental aesthetics articulates the conception of transcendental life, which is both the process of constituting the sphere of absolute immanence, and that sphere itself, in which a self-givenness of the phenomena can be thought to take place. This then reveals that Husserl's notions of world and of horizon are already attempts to recon¢gure the accounts of space and time, as captured and immobilized by Kant, as the forms of an intuition, held as an invariant absolute space/time con¢guration, in terms of which the observations making up the natural sciences can be arranged. These, for Husserl, for all their supposedly purely formal status, are nevertheless naturalized notions of space and time which fail to consider the question of the giving of meaning to such forms, the very issue which the suspension of the natural attitude and the performance of the reductions is supposed to open out. The analysis of the manner in which a na|« ve natural attitude turns into a faux na|« ve naturalistic attitude is pursued by Husserl through the early years of the last century, from Logical Investigations (HUA 19 and 20), to the 1908 lectures Idea of Phenomenology (HUA 2), and into the drafts for Ideas Two (HUA 3). This is done through the invention of the notions of a bracketing of the natural attitude and its naturalizing presuppositions, and the performance of the reductions, such as to strip away the imposition of theory-laden interpretations on the raw data of primordial impressions. Derrida, of course, doubts the possible success of this manoeuvre, while accepting Husserl's reasoning for supposing it

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to be necessary. Hence the diagnosis of transcendental philosophy as necessary impossibility. Derrida's surmise is that this Husserlian manoeuvre cannot assure for itself anything more than the status of a legitimating ¢ction, along the lines of the construct identi¢ed by him in relation to political order, via this telling phrase borrowed from Michel de Montaigne.15 In the course of his analyses of what in Logical Investigations must be modi¢ed, as a result of the introduction of the notion of categorial intuition, Husserl develops a contrast between perception of entities, given in what might be thought of as the natural world, and image consciousness, which is contained within the domain of consciousness.16 This work on the di¡erences between thought contents which are immanent to consciousness and those which are transcendent of it plays a critical role in the move from analyses of the processes of empirically given consciousness, in Logical Investigations, to those of transcendentally secured consciousness in Ideas One. The shift is marked in a famous footnote to Investigation Five, as given in the second edition of 1913: Now I must freely admit that I am quite unable to ¢nd this primitive I as a necessary centre of relatedness. In the meantime I have learned how to ¢nd it, that is learned by means of careful consideration, no longer to let myself be misled by the development of a metaphysics of the I in the pure grasping of the given. (Fifth Inv., Chapter One, Section Eight)17 While rejecting any such notion of a transcendental ego, Derrida can be thought to follow Husserl in supposing that some privilege may be accorded to analyses of image consciousness, or, read broadly, of writing, over those of the evidences of perception, since the former gives the whole image in consciousness, whereas the latter must make do with partial pro¢lings. In the case of the former, the gap between what occurs in consciousness according to empirical psychology and what occurs in transcendental constitution is not so great. Similarly there is no appeal from the domains of writing to an independently constituted realm of meaning. The Husserl text most cited in On Touching: Jean Luc Nancy is not Husserl's Ideas One, already published in 1913, but Husserl's Ideas Two, ¢rst published in 1952. This was available to Merleau-Ponty in the later thirties in a manuscript circulated by Ludwig Landgrebe, one of Husserl's assistants, and plays a role in his rethinking of phenomenology, before its formal publication. In that text, Husserl demonstrates the increasing sophistication and di¡erentiation of modes of description required for moving from the stance of the natural sciences, in relation to their data, through analyses of animal life, in which the physiology of sensibility and the structures of motivation emerge for attention, to a third layer, called by Husserl the domain of spiritual life, but which may rather be called that of intelligibility, in which these sensory apparatuses and structures of self-a¡ection become not simply the object of study but the means through which objects of attention come available for attention. This provides the basis for developing the account of intentionality as noetic noematic

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correlations, already introduced formally in Ideas One. Ideas Two thus shows how the theoretical attitude is achieved, through which to arrive at the results presented in Ideas One. For Husserl a theoretical attitude is the result of the cultivation of certain dispositions, and of the acquisition of certain techniques through trial and error. The resulting correlations may be thought to constitute the outlines for a geometry of the spirit, which will vary in accordance with the availability of the various historical a prioris. At this point it becomes possible to identify the transcendental status for Husserl of the structures of association, and free variation, of motivation, and directed attention, towards prominences in the ¢eld of givenness, which present themselves for attention, and the transcendental status of delimitating these activities as the sphere of transcendental life. In a footnote to Supplement Twelve, to Ideas Two, Section Three, `The Constitution of the Spiritual World', Husserl writes, in the translation of Rojcewicz and Schuwer, under the title `Transcendental Clari¢cation': To personal or human science however does not pertain the constituting life which unfolds `in' the persons. But there is still more: human sciences, historically descriptive and the eidetic always have their factual (or possible) world of the spirit as pre-given just as in the `nature' attitude, nature is presupposed. The natural attitude in general is: to have the natural world of the spirit pregiven and to it the nature attitude and nature itself as theme of knowledge are subordinated. ^ Now however I can exercise the epoche¨; if I do so with regard to the world of the spirit, then consequently also with regard to physical nature, and then to nature in a larger sense, what remains? I am the ego that has my personal ego as a phenomenon and with it the whole personal world ^ And then I arrive at what is new, at absolute transcendental subjectivity and the universe of its phenomena. But if I do not execute the epoche¨, then I attain only a human science and a human scienti¢c psychology on the natural soil of the world of spirit, parallel to natural psychology. (Ideas Two, pp. 379^80) By executing the epoche¨, the ego arrives at `the essential structure' of a world that remains intuitive, is enduring and is valid for everyone: the `transcendental-aesthetic world' (Ideas Two, Supplement 13, p. 386). This world is of course to be distinguished from a notion of world as given in a natural attitude or indeed in critical philosophy. Where Kant has a formal analysis of the cognitive faculties, of reason and understanding, of intuition and sensibility, of judgement and imagination, through which the transcendental unity of apperception is to be deduced, Husserl proposes analyses of constituting constitution, in transcendental life, which, for empirical consciousness, is encountered as its own lived experience. This is the mode of experience which is aware of its implication in shaping and registering its sensations. Where Kant has the ideas of soul, freedom and God through which to think the di¡erences between phenomenal and noumenal world, Husserl works by piecemeal protention, retention and constitution.

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The constitution of the spiritual or intelligible world is thus not just a region among regions but the analysis of the givenness of a domain of immanence, in which all other meaning contents become available, and through which all other regions may be analysed as in process of constitution. Now it might seem as though the ideality of the literary object is a topic to be located within the sphere of cultural life, as a regional ontology within the wider enquires conjured up by Husserl. This series of regions are then to be located within the framework delineated by the distinctions and correlations between formal apophantics, the logics of predication and judgement, and the speci¢cation of formal ontology. However, this distinction, between formal apophantics, concerning forms of judgement, or structures of language, and formal ontology can be shown to reveal how the question of the ideality of the literary object also has two aspects: a question about the ontology and identity conditions of artworks, and a question about the rules according to which they are put together. An analysis of the techniques constitutive of speci¢c artworks, for poetry the formulation of a distinctive poetics, or for painting an analysis of the brushstrokes distinctive say of Cezanne's explorations of the truth in painting, reveal the relevance of a thinking in terms of correlations between noetic activity and noematic determination. Thus in the analyses of the ideality of the literary object and more broadly the analysis of the ontology of artworks, there is again a matching of the evidences on the two sides, called by Husserl in Ideas One the noetic, that through which the act of meaning intending takes place, and the noematic, that which is determinate in that meaning intending. Thus Cezanne's paintings just are the result of his performance of that distinctive technique of painting. Insofar as a painting presents not Cezanne's vision but a view of Mont St Victoire, the painting has failed as an artwork, which proposes a way of seeing, rather than determinately presenting a determinate content for inspection, one which pre-exists the invention of that way of seeing. In place of a classi¢cation of a sub-group of artworks, made possible perhaps by an analysis of the ideality of the literary, Derrida produces a new kind of writing, leaving to his readers the puzzle of how to think the identity conditions for identifying a text as Derridean. It is of course in the prefatory remarks for the Doctorat d'Etat defence, `The Time of the Thesis: Punctuations' (1980) that Derrida speaks of the signi¢cance for him of the notion of the ideality of the literary as a possible topic for the Doctorat d'Etat, which he never wrote: The ideality of the literary object: this title was somewhat more comprehensible in 1957, in a context that was more marked by the thought of Husserl than is the case today. It was then for me a matter of bending, more or less violently, the techniques of transcendental phenomenology to the needs of elaborating a new theory of literature, of that very peculiar type of ideal object that is the literary object, a bound ideality Husserl would have said, bound to so-called natural language, a non-mathematical or non-mathematizable object, and yet one that di¡ers from all of the examples privileged by

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Husserl in his analyses of ideal objectivities. For I have to remind you, somewhat bluntly and simply, that my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed towards literature, towards that writing which is called literary. (p. 37) It was to turn out that such a study of the literary, in the genuine sense, requires the development of a mode of givenness which is the distinctive mode of Derridean questioning. This pins together his interest in James Joyce and the writings of Edmund Husserl, making sense of the otherwise ba¥ing invocation of Joyce, in passing, in `The Origin of Geometry' (p. 103). It pins together his juxtaposition in the essay `Aphorism Countertime' (1986) of Romeo and Juliet with themes from Husserl's phenomenology.18 It makes itself evident in the deployment of a reading of Blanchot to unpick Levinasian certainties, of a reading of Levinas to unpick Heideggerian certainties, and of Heidegger to unpick Hegelian certainties.

5.

On Transcendental Contraband

As remarked, the surmise concerning transcendental contraband which precedes my exergue runs as follows: The (con)striction ^ what is useful for thinking the ontological or the transcendental ^ is then also in the position of transcendental trans-category, the transcendental transcendental. All the more because the (con)striction cannot not produce the philosophical e¡ect it produces. There is no choosing here: each time a discourse contra the transcendental is held, a matrix ^ the (con)striction itself constrains the discourse to place the non-transcendental, the outside of the transcendental ¢eld, the excluded in the structuring position. The matrix in question constitutes the excluded as transcendental of the transcendental, as imitation transcendental: transcendental contraband. The contra-band is not yet dialectical contradiction. To be sure the contraband necessarily becomes that but its not yet is not yet the teleological anticipation, which results in it never becoming dialectical contradiction. The contra-band remains something other than what, necessarily, it is to become. This is taken from the closing pages of Glas, from Glas 244a, which draws together and disperses again the upshot of the readings performed there in relation to the impossible thematics of absolute idealism, as inclusive of all possible thematization. This remark may be designed as a commentary on the preservation of transcendental critique, within the idealism of Hegel and indeed within the literary inventions of Genet, but it seems to me it is also a commentary on the preservation of transcendental critique as phenomenology in Derrida's own writings, including those not yet written in 1974. The juxtaposition of contradiction and contraband here is plain enough, and it must here su¤ce in place of an argument about how Derrida is engaging with

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a notion of the transcendental, which is not to be subordinated and taken up within the Hegelian model of absolute knowing. The logic of contradiction is of course the structuring principle for the development of Hegel's thought, one which Husserl's insistence on non-communicating levels of analysis and on description does much to throw into question. In opposition to a logic of contradiction, Husserl a¤rms a logic of predication, of pre-predicative judgement and its explication. By way of hypothesis, I propose to take this notion of contraband as a concealed principle of order and consistency threading through Derrida's writings. It provides a formal if unarticulable principle of identity for them. In this remark, Derrida announces an anticipation which remains outside the closed anticipations of Hegel's dialectics of being and becoming. By contrast to those of Hegel, the anticipations of Husserl's protentions, based on previous impressions and retentions, are open to two outcomes: ful¢lment and disappointment. The hypothesis of the historical a priori suggests that at a certain point in history, a mode of conception arrives which could not have been anticipated, since it permits the opening of a previously inconceivable regional ontology. These conditions may then be independently reactivated elsewhere and at other times. There is then a shift here from formal teleologies, and a closed circuit of futurity, within which that formal teleology is to be made actual, and an open circuit of self-forming anticipation, where outcomes are not preinscribed. However, the contra-band is also the second column in the text, as running commentary, subverting any claim to all-inclusiveness of a ¢rst column. If the text, set up as the de¢nitive text, all the same requires a secondary text, even if only in the form of a series of interruptive footnotes, indicating use made of sources, the stability and priority of the main line of argument is disrupted, and the order of its considerations shaken by a need to return to those sources, to check if they are adequately taken up, or distorted in the process of their citation. Husserl's citation of Kant, in relation to the idea in the Kantian sense, has precisely this e¡ect. Derrida's citation of Husserl's citation and my citation of Derrida's citation of Husserl's citation merely intensi¢es and parodies the initial destabilization, whereby for example what Kant may intend by `idea' is subjected to torsions dislocating the term from its contexts of deployment. There is then no determinate textual context in which its meaning might be ¢xed. I suggest that the relation of theoretical text to literary text replicates that of perception and image consciousness: perception cannot present all aspects of a given entity, given as real in intersubjectively constituted space-time, and similarly the theoretical reconstruction of say Derrida's thinking, or Husserl's phenomenology, is always open to dispute and supplementation. By contrast a distinctively Derridean sentence, a short story by Blanchot, or the Ulysses of James Joyce are not put in question by any amount of scholarly apparatus. Indeed such apparatuses rather impose a distortion on the unity of the entity to which they are attached, rather than constituting necessary adjuncts to it. The contrast between a logic of literary writing and a logic of theoretical commentary becomes questionable, however, when the naming function `Husserl's

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phenomenology' picks out all and only the writings of Husserl, as having some kind of canonical status, where the imposition of sentences not written by Husserl into Husserl's text shifts the status of the written work from that of the ideal unity of the literary, to the ideal unity of an empirically given manifold, on which Husserl, like any other personalist ego, might have had a view. The need to specify whether or not a text is canonical reveals the work of the legitimating function of the pre¢x `Husserl's' in the expression `Husserl's text'. In his analyses of friendship, Derrida remarks that there is a temporal instability in the bounds of friendship, since one friend must survive the other, and conversely, one must pre-decease the other. On Touching is marked by the structure of the survival of the one who is written about. This then can be read as a foil to the structure of survival of the Memoires for Paul de Man, which marks the death of Paul de Man, and is written by the one still living. It ends with the following paragraph, concerning anticipatory temporality, thought as the impossible ful¢lment of the promise: A promise cannot be kept, it cannot even be made in all its purity. As if it were always linked to the departed other, as if it were therefore not linked. But consequently this is because a promise pledges only to what is mortal. A promise has meaning and gravity only on the condition of death, when the living person is one day all alone with his promise. A promise has meaning and gravity only with the death of the other. When the friend is no longer there, the promise is still not tenable, it will not have been made but as a trace of the future it can still be renewed. You could call this an act of memory or of a given word, even an act of faith; I prefer to take the risk of a singular and more equivocal word. I prefer to call this an act, only an act, quite simply an act. An impossible act, therefore the only one worthy of its name, or rather which in order to be worthy of its name, must be worthy of the name of the other, made in the name of the other. (p. 150) The anticipatory temporality of the impossible promise marks out Derrida's departure from Heidegger's death analysis. For the death of the other is the occasion for marking this other impossibility, it takes precedence over the analyses privileged by Heidegger of the self-attestation, of the modality of ¢nitude, made available in the analyses of being towards death. The strange modality of a possible impossibility of Dasein is transposed into this impossible possibility of promising. What is important about the impossible possibility is that despite its impossibility, it happens and is made sense of. This temporality of impossible possibility also marks a departure from Husserl's notion of transcendental life, which for Derrida must be marked up by these asymmetries. This is a third determination of time emergent in Derrida's encounters with the texts of Husserl, alongside the time of a double dating of texts and of the long duree of his serial engagement with Husserl. The double dating marks Derrida's texts, especially The Problem of Genesis but also in evidence for Memoires for Paul de Man. Double dating marks up the conceptual structure that there is always a

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series of unintended e¡ects of any piece of writing, and a lack of symmetry in any exchange between those who have once been living. The theme of temporality is the one which both binds and disjoins Derrida's enquiries from those of Husserl, who, in conclusion to Ideas One, announces the possibility of a doctrine of time as the most inclusive level of phenomenological enquiry. I argue that Derrida continues and develops such a doctrine of time. I shall suggest that the supposed repeating aporia of phenomenology converted into a structure of iterative variation works a retrieval and transformation of transcendental philosophy. The analysis of Husserl might appear to conform to a dominant line of Husserl reception, which supposes that there is a choice to be made between an empiricism, with respect to psychology, association and sensation, and an idealism with respect to logic, meaning and justi¢cation. This choice tends to pit the early Husserl of the Logical Investigations against the later Husserl of The Crisis and of historical a priorism. Despite appearances to the contrary, the early text by Derrida can also provide reasons for supposing that Husserl's texts must be read as a single programme of enquiry, and that assessing the success or otherwise of the enquiry turns on the availability of a reinterpretation of transcendental philosophy, as neither idealist, nor empiricist, but as inventing a new realism. My unlikely attribution here then is of a new realism emergent in the exchange between Derrida, de Man and Husserl, complementing the return of the transcendental and indeed resulting from it. And the decisive feature of it is a rethinking of time. Le Toucher is a masterly conjugation of at least three genres. It presents a history of a friendship, as mutual appreciation, provocation, and grieving. It presents a history of a speci¢cally French reception of Husserl's phenomenology, and it presents a genealogy for a reworking of transcendental philosophy, for which I seek to use this term transcendental contraband. What remains in short is transcendental contraband: for Husserl is quite clear that transcendental subjectivity does not die. On Touching is a history of a friendship, with the surprising form of an inversion of David's lament for Jonathan, for the one who is praised is the one who is still living. It thus has the form, which is beginning to become familiar, through a growing appreciation for how Derrida's writing works, of his own funeral oration, in advance of the death. This anticipatory temporality puts in place a horizon of non-simultaneity by which all the works of human beings are marked, and it imposes the necessity to reconsider exactly what Husserl intends with his notion of a horizon for meaning determinacy, the scope and status of which appears to shift depending on the domain of enquiry, be it a regional or general, ontical or ontological, transcendental or lebenswelt enquiry. The third strand of Le Toucher which I ¢nd the more congenial and to which I have therefore attended most, is the less emphasized and thus the more in need of attention. This strand reveals an analysis of a transmission of transcendental philosophy, in writing, as a re¢guration of image consciousness, through the assertively anti-transcendental reception of phenomenology, to be found in Merleau-Ponty's insistence on a phenomenology of perception. The line to be

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traced out, then, is of a transposition of a pure act, or pure intuition, as thought by Aristotle, in De Anima, and as a¤rmed by Kant, in the forms of pure intuition at the start of the Critique of Pure Reason. This pure act is then retrieved by Husserl, in an actualization of a transcendental role for such intuition, and by Derrida, in this impossible act of promising. In French phenomenology, there is a development of the dispute about how to think the connection between perceptions of states of a¡airs in the world, and the role of categorial intuition, in a thinking of the status of intimations of alterity, ¢rst as the transcendence of entities in a world, and then as the originating of intuitions from sources external to empirical consciousness, but internal to a transcendental domain, thus constituting an other in me. This domain, with Derrida, is no longer to be called transcendental consciousness, or transcendental life; it is now to be called writing, e¨criture.

Chapter 10

The Entropics of Discourse: The `Materiality' of A¡ect Between Marx and Derrida* Karyn Ball

This essay takes issue with a claim I made in 2000, when I argued that the emergence of trauma studies in the 1990s indicated a structure of feeling among those of us trying to recuperate a notion of the experiential subject in the wake of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of a metaphysical con£ation between truth and presence.1 At stake in this con£ation was an `ontotheological' idealization of full presence as an abiding substance that, like `the eternal God', precedes and transcends the £ux of representation. Derrida's re£ection on the spatiotemporal `detour' of the sign that takes the place of the `thing itself ' not only disarticulated an opposition between presence and absence in conceptions of truth, reference, and meaning; it also overturned an age-old metaphysical prioritization of identity as a protracted and originary essence over di¡erence as a negative or `merely' phenomenal e¡ect. My contention in 2000 was that the post-humanist aspect of Derridean deconstruction planted seeds of anxiety among those of us who fancy ourselves to be good people, which is to say, people who care about other people. This caring is institutionally organized as politicized agendas among cultural critics concerned with tracing the impact of violence and persecution and the disavowal that surrounds them. My own interest in trauma studies at that time stemmed from an anxiety about securing the moral force of genocide's impact on bereaved communities against revisionists who diminish or deny it. Trauma studies in the 1990s looked to be a potentially viable arena for such a pursuit because it seemed to have struck a compromise with poststructuralist critiques of identity and reference in con¢guring memory as a belated signi¢cation of a (prior) experience shaped by its successive enunciations in di¡erent contexts. In that compromise, a¡ect seems to have displaced presence as a foundational concept, particularly in theories of subject formation that draw on psychoanalysis. At stake in this compromise, or so I claimed, was a desire to grant traumatic a¡ect a materiality on the model of psychoanalysis as a science of the irrational, * I am grateful to Allison Weiner and Simon Morgan Wortham for their constructive feedback on previous drafts and to Mark Woytiuk for his research assistance and help in preparing this essay for publication.

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which endowed the traces of unassimilated wounding events with an intelligibility in discourse. By endowing the impact of collective persecution with the less ephemeral status of a given that persists beyond signi¢cation, the attribution of materiality appeared to ful¢l a longing for certainty that the intangibility of a¡ect belies. J. Hillis Miller recently remarked in conversation that, in contrast to Paul de Man, Derrida did not see himself as a theorist of materiality, a term he associated with vulgar Marxism.2 Neither can it be said that Derrida's analysis of signi¢cation follows certain phenomenological and psychoanalytic conceptions that locate materiality in the positionality or libidinal registers of the body. Nevertheless, his work over time continually attests to his keen interest in deconstructing the metaphysical binaries that have determined various recourses to the concept of materiality.3 Derrida's sustained attention to the opposition between speech and writing in Of Grammatology recasts the latter as a supplement, which adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it ¢lls, it is as if one ¢lls a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [supple¨ant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place [tient lieu]. The place of the supplement `is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness'. It indicates the notion, or perhaps more precisely, the hope that `Somewhere, something can be ¢lled through sign and proxy'.4 The concept of the supplement thus undermines regimes of value disguised as logics of causality that grant one domain of production a more originary and thus a more apparently material power of determination than its `dependent' other. This logic of priority is one of the principal targets of Derrida's critique in his early writings of the privileging of speech as the site of language proper and as the object of semiological study in opposition to writing in the notes comprising Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics.5 In his groundbreaking 1968 essay, `Di¡e¨rance', Derrida's spotlight on the silent agency of the written letter a that distinguishes di¡e¨rance from di¡erence disarticulates this arbitrary prioritization.6 For if there is an intelligible di¡erence here, then it must be seen (and believed) to be heard. The essay `Di¡e¨rance' famously opens with his announcement: `Je parlerai, donc, d'une letter. De la premie©re, s'il faut en croire l'alphabet et la plupart des speculations qui s'y sont aventure¨es' [`I will speak, therefore, of a letter. Of the ¢rst, if it is required to believe in the alphabet and most of the speculations that have ventured into it'].7 Here, Derrida ironically remarks the di¡erence of the letter a that demarcates di¡e¨rance from mere di¡erence, but then de£ects its status as a ¢rst letter through the conditional if. The letter a is the ¢rst in the alphabet if we believe in it because it is a commonplace, a given. Yet those `speculations that have ventured into it' are retroactive insinuations that trouble a required belief in the alphabet; the syntax thus performs the equivocation

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between di¡erentiation and deferral that constitutes di¡e¨rance and governs the logic of the essay as a whole. The opening statement of `Di¡e¨rance' coyly makes belief in the ¢rstness of the letter a an issue at the very start. It makes it an issue on the ground of the very sort of given that we might normally grant as a pre-given: its value as the ¢rst letter does not brook any substitutions. Derrida thereby compels us to take distance from the conventionality of such a valuation as an ideological horizon established by repetition. No matter where it appears, the letter a is always preaccepted as the ¢rst letter of the alphabet. Hence while its sound might vary in each instance, our belief in its singularity as the ¢rst letter does not. The written letter is Derrida's seemingly concrete departure point for illuminating the disposition of reference as a provisional intelligibility determined by belief. I emphasize seemingly because the issue is not that the letter's appearance is merely subjective, but that we come to believe in its materiality as a function of its graphic iterability. While Jacques Lacan's revision of Saussure's sign highlights the occulted role of the unconscious and desire in mobilizing metonymic associations between contiguous elements, Derrida formalizes this role as the supplemental agency of writing. Desire as a form of a¡ect hereby assumes an implicit agency in the mode of (persuasive) force. The force of the subject's desire for presence serves as the supplement of the supplement that fosters an attribution of materiality as a truth-e¡ect of the letter's repetition across various instances.8 Derrida's `Di¡e¨rance' opens up the constitution of value in and beyond Saussure's structuralism by volatilizing the referent whose identity at any given moment depends on its positively or negatively di¡erential a¡ective value for us. Value so conceived re£ects the £ux of interpretation, which is dynamic rather than statically and thus consistently present. This de¢nition refuses the assumption that di¡e¨rance precipitates a loss of presence (and value thereby). I suspect that reactionary responses in the 1980s and 90s from the arena of identity politics to Derridean deconstruction may have been gripped by this false assumption, which subsequently permeated contemporary criticism in the form of an anxiety about the `lost materiality' of experience. What follows is an attempt to re-examine my preoccupation with the materiality of a¡ect as a symptomatic by-product of the intellectual developments that led up to it and the institutional forces that currently saturate and con¢gure it. Why did my concern with the representation of collective trauma spur me to pursue a relationship between a¡ect and materiality and why do I seem to share this symptom with others at this moment?

1.

The `Entropics' of Discourse

The agenda to give a¡ect a materiality is symptomatic of a melancholic understanding of the relationship between the historicity of experience and the fragility of reference. It is melancholic because it misrecognizes an absence of

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self-certainty about the provisional status of a referent as a loss. This idea of loss is then sublimated and unconsciously enjoyed through various intellectual preoccupations that mirror a sense of unful¢lled longing. I employ the term entropics to designate a rhetoric of loss and degradation as the principal symptom of this melancholic sensibility that presupposes a closed economy of e¡ective signi¢cation and action. In writing about the novelist Thomas Pynchon, critics such as Anne Mangel and David Seed have foregrounded his recourse to the thermodynamic sense of entropy as a measure of unused energy in a closed system.9 They also cite its links to communications theory to designate a proliferation of the quantity and simultaneity of information that degrades the capacity to assimilate it intelligibly. Entropy in this context signi¢es an irreversible inverse relation: as the elements in the system multiply, they lose their di¡erentiation, which is why, for Joseph Slade, `it is possible to speak of entropy as a measure of disorganization and unpredictability, and also as a measure of sameness and conformity'.10 My use of the term entropics draws inspiration from Pynchon's ¢gurative link between a melancholic `climate' and the degeneration of the Enlightenment ideal of historical advancement through critical reason. The epigraph to his early story `Entropy' (1960) is a report o¡ered by the `weather prophet' Boris from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer: ` ``The weather will continue to be bad'', he says. ``There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere . . .'' '11 Pynchon's portrayal of entropy in this early story evokes Miller's imagery of a depressive cultural `climate' which is linked to `inclement weather'. This imagery suggests that historical energy is running down, a metaphor Pynchon borrows from The Education of Henry Adams. Beyond Pynchon's self-consciously ¢gurative admixture of various concepts of entropy, it is worth recalling that the term emerges from the history of the development of the second law of thermodynamics in the research of Rudolph Clausius, Ludwig Boltzmann, Willard Gibbs, James Clerk Maxwell, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Max Planck among others. In classical thermodynamic theory, entropy comes to be de¢ned as a measure of the amount of energy unavailable for thermodynamic work because it is given up as unusable heat to the environment in the course of the system's operations to equalize di¡erences in pressure and temperature. In this respect, entropy is a measure of the seepage of energy in the form of heat from inside to outside that results from systemic action towards equalization. A corollary of this de¢nition is that entropy as a measure of the internal state of a closed system increases over time, thereby ushering it towards an inevitable breakdown. The concept of entropy has also been applied in cosmology in the pessimistic proposition that the universe is doomed to an eventual `heat death' when work energy is no longer available because thermal energy has been homogenized in all sources. Von Helmholtz facilitated the translation of thermodynamic entropy into cosmological and social terms when he proposed in a lecture on dissipation that the universe would eventuate in a state of eternal rest.12 In The Mathematical Theory of Communication,

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Claude E. Shannon extended Leo Szilard's proposition that the process of perception is associated with an increase in entropy to the ¢eld of information.13 Shannon's theory focused on the degree of information (in place of energy) carried by a particular event in a communication system. Each transfer of information involves a dimension of randomness or `excess' information that does not enable the transfer because it does not signify and it is not expression: it is already predetermined by the system. Entropy thus refers to the measure of randomness in a given transmission of information; it thus represents `play' in the system. The extension of the idea of entropy to other areas of inquiry beyond classical thermodynamics raises the question as to whether such applications also presume that entropy necessarily increases over time.14 This assumption could be very problematic for studies of the media and the university as venues of knowledge production and dissemination. I call such applications `entropical' because they trans¢gure the concept of entropy into metaphors and beliefs about political economy and society. Entropical rhetoric registers the following anxiety-imbued motifs: ¢rst, it may signal the assumption that representation is always inadequate and histories of violent antagonism are a¡ect-charged referents belatedly constituted at a loss. A wounding past must be reactivated to remain intelligible and yet its a¡ective and thus moral force is presumed to be deadened by successive iterations. My argument is that this depletion is not logically necessary; it is not intrinsic to reference, which is constituted through repetition, but rather to the potentially alienating e¡ect of the public sphere on any concern. Second, on a socio-economic level, the critical captivation with motifs of loss may indicate demoralization among humanities scholars struggling for funding and prestige in an increasingly corporatist university, which must increasingly draw on private funding as federal support dwindles. Such `free market' forces recon¢gure research agendas and the time of scholarship to the extent that they reward what Jean-Franc°ois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition has called the performativity criterion which `demands clear minds and cold wills' in the pursuit of e¤cient and pro¢table production.15 This system exposes the `homeostatic' aims of the university and scienti¢c hierarchy in suppressing radical moves in the `institution of knowledge' that would too suddenly transform the rules of its game.16 Third, there is, then, a real scarcity issue that arises as universities draw on soft money to match corporate grants that fund pro¢table research in the sciences, but ¢nd themselves strapped when it comes to sustaining infrastructural support for less lucrative pursuits including humanities teaching. This actual scarcity contributes to a demoralized climate among scholars in which the ideal of non-alienated labour is increasingly experienced as a lost object. The criterion of productivity drives a high-pressure publication schedule that has been institutionalized in some departments as a two-book requirement for tenure. Moreover, if class sizes at public and some private universities are tending to increase, researchers struggling to evaluate the work of more and more students become increasingly alienated from the social dimension of disseminating knowledge as

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a `product' of intellectual labour. Fourth, a sense of descending prestige, or the value of what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic and cultural capital, registers among humanities scholars as a mode of disciplinary lack that some might seek to o¡set by bestowing their objects with a materiality that would place them on a more level ¢eld with the hard sciences. This strategy accommodates as much as it resists the alienating conditions that fuel it. This brings me to my ¢fth point. On an intellectual-historical level, entropical rhetoric re£ects a melancholic response to poststructuralist critiques of the metaphysics of identity and reference. The poststructuralist emphasis on the rhetorical and contingent dimensions of signi¢cation disarticulates metaphysical hierarchies of identity, essence, experience, and truth as protracted `substances' that somehow pre-exist their representations. It also formalizes the principal challenge to the subjectively empirical methods of investigation carried out by humanities scholars who constitute their objects of inquiry through interpretations, which may themselves become a focus of study and contestation. The post-metaphysical and post-humanist dimensions of poststructuralism have compelled critics to rethink pivotal assumptions about the ideal of human dignity while introducing a certain anxiety into cultural criticism devoted to revising disciplinary canons and paradigms in light of the domestic and international legacies of oppression as well as the experiences and memories they have generated. The vocabulary of cultural criticism in the 1980s and 90s mirrors the ways in which this anxiety translated into a moral injunction to produce an intelligibility for these experiences that would vouchsafe a reality for them in discourse while not capitulating to the metaphysics of presence that deconstruction trained us to renounce. What I have referred to here and elsewhere17 as a longing for materiality has divided cultural theory into two camps whose apparent opposition might be reductively caricatured as follows. A `materialist' standpoint with a Marxist lineage equates materiality with historical and cultural speci¢city: only a critical analysis of the forces that produce the interrelated details of a context will realize the complex referents of socio-economic exploitation and marginalization. The true believers in this camp place themselves on the side of history versus universality, which sometimes leads them to criticize their `bourgeois' poststructuralist-psychoanalytic other for presenting psychoanalytic categories as transcendentals. Those materialists invested in this opposition see their own work as more critical and politically valuable than the ilk of theorization carried out by members of the postructuralist-psychoanalytic camp. This camp locates a¡ect in texts and other practices that perform an imagined body. The ideal body is conceived as a composite of introjected norms and values that shape negotiations between the expression and inhibition of desire. The materialist presumption of political value arises in part from a concept of materiality that refracts the very forces of rationalization and alienation it is intended to supersede. The historical density of materialist materiality is presented as less likely to poeticize, obfuscate, and thus degrade the intelligibility and moral-a¡ective force of domination and struggle in the public sphere.

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Ultimately, this construction is itself a by-product of entropical assumptions about the scarcity of public energy available for attending to the piles of wreckage left behind by the storm winds of progress. As a contribution to an e¡ort to move beyond such methodological narcissism, I am going to extrapolate possible relations between concepts of materiality and a¡ect in writings by the usual canonical suspects, Marx and Derrida, in order to shed light on how their de¢nitions touch upon yet also go beyond the horizon of a critical praxis that presupposes an inevitable running down of energy in a closed economy.

2. The Metalepsis of the Concrete Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster (2006) have recently examined the ways in which Marx's analysis of capitalist production and exploitation `is thoroughly infused with a metabolic-energy perspective on human labour, one informed by a close engagement with natural science'.18 They cite Marx's declaration in Capital that `Labour-power is a natural object, a thing, although a living, conscious thing' and that it is `above all else, the material of nature', the energy transferred by means of nourishing matter into a human organism.19 One of Burkett's and Foster's aims is to consider `the extent to which opensystem energy and entropic considerations are incorporated into Marx's Capital ' in order to dispute criticisms of his allegedly closed-system perspective on political economy.20 They point out that both Marx and Engels had studied the works of many of the leading scientists involved in research on thermodynamics such as Hermann von Helmholtz, Justus von Liebig, Sadi Carnot, Rudolf Clausius, William Thomson, Peter Guthrie Tait, James Clark Maxwell, and Ludwig Bolzmann as well as the English physicist, John Tyndall, who advocated the ideas of J. R. Mayer, a co-discoverer of the ¢rst law of thermodynamics dealing with the conservation of energy, Ludimar Hermann's Elements of Human Physiology on energy £ows in human labour, and Sir William Grove's On the Correlation of Physical Forces, which explores chemical changes that take place in labouring bodies.21 Clausius, as Burkett and Foster note, introduced the term entropy `from a Greek construction meaning ``transformation'' ' in 1865, two years before the publication of Capital in 1867, when his Mechanical Theory of Heat appeared.22 Burkett and Foster criticize the Ukrainian socialist, Sergei Podalinksy (one of the founders of energetics), for committing the `logical error' of directly applying Sadi Carnot's idealized `perfect machine' concept, which is applicable only to a closed isolated system, `to the more complex reality of far-from equilibrium, non-isolated, non-closed systems such as life in general and human society/ labour more speci¢cally'. Carnot's model is conceived `as an isolated thermodynamic system (closed to transfers of matter and energy)'.23 It consequently ignores factors such as friction and, in Burkett's and Foster's words, `the natural materiality of labour, along with the inherently biochemical or metabolic nature of the human labouring organism and its interaction with the natural

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environment'.24 Marx's analysis of the value of labour power is, in contrast, `clearly more sensitive to the complex and entropic nature of the labour process' and the role of friction within it.25 In his thermodynamically `consistent' view, `capitalism's incessant pressure to produce as much surplus value as possible within any given time period caused it to violate the metabolic conditions for sustaining the productive vigour of land and labour power'.26 Burkett and Foster write with the understanding that the human economy is `a dissipative system that both draws upon (in fact mines) and dumps waste back into its natural environment. Hence, ``each economic process can be regarded as an irreversible transformation'', i.e. one that ecologically speaking never ``returns to the same conditions'' '.27 In correcting the fallacious view that Marx's `combined metabolic-energetic approach to capitalism' elides interactions with the environment, their examination enunciates his sense of the `irreducible biochemical character of human labour and its products' that renders use-value qualitatively not reducible to pure energy as well as the interface between his metabolics of labour power and ecological concerns.28 While Burkett and Foster distinguish this theory from standpoints that `con£ate Marx's class-based theory with a Smith-Ricardo (that is, crude materialist) ``embodied labour'' approach to value',29 my own reading stresses both the rhetorical and embodied dimensions of Marxian entropics. This reading is indebted to Geo¡rey Waite's recent philology of the equivocal relationship between viscerality and reason, beginning with Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian discourse and leading up to Nietzsche's reading of the Prometheus myth.30 The signi¢cance of Waite's philology for my interpretation of Marx stems from his identi¢cation of the `metaleptical and sacri¢cial operation whereby the human labour power, which is the ``cause'' or ``reason'' of capitalism's political economy-and-culture (surplus value), remains ¢gured as if merely one among capital's purportedly pluralistic and equally distributed ``e¡ects'' '. What is thereby restricted, according to Waite, `is labour power's revolutionary potential to recognize itself as the ``cause'' or ``reason'' and kill those ``e¡ects'', in part because capitalism incorporates this restriction into itself ^ rendering it ``visceral'', paranoic even'.31 What I want to demonstrate in this section is that Marx's main rhetorical strategy is to enact a critical form of `visceral reason' in order to counter the entropical e¡ects of capitalist metalepsis, which substitutes the objecti¢ed e¡ect of wage labour for its living cause. This strategy involves reanimating living labour with the power to a¡ect his readers. Among the myriad notions of the material that traverse Marx's writings is the ¢gure of a prior nature, which is incrementally depleted of vital force through the history of capitalist development. Entropical connotations are at play in references to an originary non-individuated `species-being' [Gattungswesen] with an immediate relation to the use-value of work that has been `deadened' or sapped of meaning by a sedimentation of abstractions that cover overexploitation. Marx's dialectic between productive nature and an alienating industrial process that accelerates and thus ruins the conjoined metabolic systems of soil and worker calls for a historicization that revises Hegel's master^slave dialectic

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to recover the embodied, creative, and socially meaningful force of labour from the power relations that negate, abstract, and metaleptically invert it. In The German Ideology, Marx asserts that the ¢rst premise of human existence, and, therefore, of all history, is `that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ``make history'' '. Material life is identi¢ed with the `¢rst historical act' of producing the means to satisfy the need for food, shelter, and clothing, `which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be ful¢lled merely in order to sustain human life'.32 Marx hereby identi¢es materiality with the production of life and labour, but also as the fundamental condition of history itself. The social dimension of the material emerges in the cooperation between industry and exchange that determines the nature of society and the `history of humanity' as such. This social dimension of production trips Marx in The German Ideology into a consideration of the history of consciousness despite his desire to outstep it. Here it is worth noting along with Burkett and Foster that `Marx's concerns with both biochemical and energetic conditions of production is on full display in his analysis of agriculture, where it is obvious that ``matter matters'' '. His approach not only `emphasizes the unhealthy circulation of matter generated by capitalism's urban industry and industrial agriculture [which] vitiates the combined metabolic reproductive capabilities of human labour power and the land'. It also `traces environmental crises to the class separation of workers from the land and from other conditions of production [. . .]'33 Hence the ¢rst `loss' of the most literal and immediate of grounds ^ when the one-time serfs leave the country soil behind for towns ^ is echoed throughout the narrative. Starting with the shift from the feudal and agrarian country to towns and cities, through the formation of guilds that anticipate the aggregation of wage labourers in factories, Marx charts the trajectory of an ever-widening distance between workers and the land, the use-value of their own activity, and the materials and machines with which they produce commodities whose value is realized only in the sphere of exchange. Wage-labour as `indirect forced labour' further dissociates the worker from his or her materials as well as from the machines that may ultimately render qualitative skills obsolete as a mere mode of ¢lling clocked time.34 In addition, the reserve army of the unemployed keeps wage labourers on their toes while facing them o¡ against those who could displace them. This competition ¢nalizes the domination of an individualist ethos over community and binds workers in their isolation to the structures of their objecti¢cation. Labour alienation is at once reinforced and occluded by the translation of the quality of di¡erent activities into a quantity of homogenized hours and then again in the relation between variable and ¢xed capital: to maximize pro¢ts, the labour hour can only be expanded so much while the pay is levelled down before new exploitation fronts can be ¢tted out. In addition, the obsolescence of machines must be anticipated and even planned to ensure prices that expand surplus value. Marx's analysis of `objective' labour excavates the antagonism between socially necessary labour and the capitalist's appropriation of surplus value

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that compels the worker to expend more hours of force than is required to reproduce his means of subsistence. This asymmetrical extraction is to no small extent vexed by the division between mental and material labour that critically enunciates Marx's own performative contradiction. For it is this division that lends itself to the `empty talk of consciousness' that ceases only when `positive science begins', which is to say, where speculation ends ^ in the representation of the practical activity and development of labouring people as real living individuals ¢rst with consciousnesses second that re£ect their particular circumstances.35 Marx's rhetoric of beginnings and ends, and of nature versus its sociohistorical deformation, troubles his delimitation of a positive science, which must historicize consciousness to construct a departure point from it. It is problematic, too, that a capitalist historical consciousness constitutes the horizon of his own endeavour. From a capitalist standpoint, Marx writes, the `prebourgeois phases appear as merely historical, i.e. suspended presuppositions', while `the contemporary conditions of production likewise appear as engaged in suspending themselves and hence in positing the historic presuppositions for a new state of society'.36 To remove these presuppositions from suspension, Marx takes care to distinguish his materialist standpoint from the bourgeois economists `who regard capital as an eternal and natural (not historical) form of production'.37 Marx undercuts this ideological construction of nature by painstakingly breaking down the process through which labour loses its moral and embodied force as a beginning when it is dead-ended through abstract expropriation.38 The general laws of property preempt any transformation except via revolution that must nevertheless transpire from within.39 To recover real labour conditions as a `positive' object of science, this `objective' law will need to be exposed as subjectively enforced relations of production. Marx's inversion of the laws of property is elaborated in the Grundrisse in the opposition between `subjective' or `living' and `objective' or `dead' labour, which alienates it from its `real objective conditions'. Marx observes that once living labour is structured as wage labour, it becomes `a mere means', from the standpoint of capital, `to realize objecti¢ed, dead labour, to penetrate it with an animating soul while losing its own soul to it'.40 Socially necessary labour is distended by abstraction into homogeneous clock time as the presupposed condition of exchange value. The force of living labour will hereby be held in suspense as the spectral ground of objecti¢ed labour, which usurps the former's appearance of life. From this standpoint, then, the exchange and appropriation of pro¢t e¡ects seems to become the condition of possibility for hiring workers and extracting their labour in the ¢rst place. Capital thereby posits the alienated product of abstracted labour as the enabling condition of living labour. The killing objecti¢cation is metaleptic because it con¢gures the extraction of life from living labour as a mere accessory to objecti¢ed labour, which depends on it in fact rather than the other way around. In `Wage Labour and Capital', Marx foregrounds the abstraction of wage labour as the disappearing foundation for the capitalist's realization and

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accumulation of surplus value. The task of rendering subjective labour visible again will involve reversing its metaleptic construction as a vanishing point. Yet the metalepsis that Marx delimits, but cannot move beyond is the logic of rei¢cation itself: the way in which capital naturalizes its accumulation of surplus value by negating, abstracting and aggregating hours of extracted life force and then presenting it as a dead thing. This logic magically seems to multiply the exchange value of the proletariat's alienated product for the capitalist at the expense of the cohesion and value of work for the labourer.41 Marx's aim is to demystify the black magic that sacri¢ces living labour in order both to resurrect and restore it to its causal locus as `a sententious injunction', to borrow Derrida's phrasing, that can do more than merely feign to speak for the just.42 The category that restores the force of presence to the `spectre' of occulted labour is what Marx in the Grundrisse designates as the concrete: The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration [Zusammenfassung] of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation (intuition) [Anschauung] and conception (presentation) [Vorstellung].43 Marx's attempt to de¢ne the concrete is enmeshed in the rhetoric of ends belatedly recognized as beginnings, and departures posited as destinations. What I want to enunciate here is the way in which this delimitation of the concrete as the material pivot of a dialectical analysis must then, in keeping with his standards, acknowledge its own enslavement to the rei¢ed horizon of intuition and presentation. Notably, the syntax of this de¢nition mimics the very metaleptic structure of capitalist disavowal that takes the result of objecti¢cation as a departure point and condition of its own becoming. The repetition of the word concrete in the ¢rst sentence is at once a rhetorical £ourish and a stylistic stutter. It already equivocates what it would de¢ne as a concentration of diverse determinations, which appears as a process in thought, but as `a result, not a point of departure [Ausgangspunkt]'. This equivocation anticipates Marx's mid-sentence reversal to proclaim that the concrete is in reality a point of departure [Ausgangspunkt] for the very method he is performing. It is also important that Marx employs the word Anschauung, which is translated as observation here, but is more typically and not altogether happily translated as intuition while Vorstellung is usually translated as presentation. If intuition is substituted for observation, then the implication is that the concrete is the basis for creating concepts before they are presented. The translation that places observation before conception thus repeals Marx's syntactical about-face that posits the concrete as a `real' departure point immediately after denying it. Materialist demysti¢cation traces the process of abstraction that metaleptically substitutes an objecti¢ed expropriated value for its subjective cause (living labour). Marx's own thought process is thus a case in point since it

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imitates the very logic that abstracts and suspends an inaugural negation of living labour. The `out of joint' work of critical historicization is hard pressed to avoid repeating the petrifying form of rei¢cation. Marx's delimitation of the concrete as the endpoint of a dialectical process of concentration therefore reverses mid-sentence. It is almost as if he catches sight of himself in a performative contradiction ^ in the act of perpetrating the mode of abstraction to which his science is opposed, one that turns the concrete into the petri¢ed `result' rather than the prerequisite of any critical thought process unfolding under the horizon of capital ^ in other words, at the very moment when he risks sti£ing force under a logical form that chokes its own transformative aims. Marx's method of historicizing must reverse the apparent destiny of its own syntax to reinaugurate the concrete as the `real' departure point for his own determinations. Not surprisingly, this turnabout prompts a renewed repudiation of Hegel's idealist illusion, which conceives `the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself '. Marx contrasts this idealism with a `method of rising from the abstract to the concrete' as the `only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind'.44 The materialist method for Marx thus balances on this paradox of the concrete, which is somehow perceived before it is conceived, yet can only be recognized retroactively by thought. In his 1996 essay, `Mattering', Pheng Cheah exposes a confusion between logical priority and historical causality in the context of debates about materiality in the 1990s.45 These debates negotiated an alternative understanding of the body from between the Scylla of essentialized nature and the Charybdis of radical constructionism.46 He notes that if `nature' and `the given' are not highly valued terms in cultural-political theory, such concepts remain, for Cheah, `the contested sites around which any theory of political transformation is organized'.47 His reappraisal illuminates the critical horizon of a discourse that ¢nesses the nature^history dichotomy by construing phenomenological and hermeneutical intelligibility as an e¡ect of the relationship between the body and language. This de¢nition elides the question of a di¡erence between discursive intelligibility and the ostensible givenness of the material that abides whether or not it is interpreted. Cheah's intervention sheds light on the task that Marx faces in de¢ning the concrete as the `matter' of a materialist science. His equivocal metalepsis of the concrete suggests that the exploitative extraction of surplus labour force from a worker's body loses its intelligibility, its givenness for us, in its trans¢guration into abstract value. What is at stake for Marx is, thus, to revitalize a given that has lost its intelligibility as the basis of history and life. As Derrida observes in Specters of Marx, religion `was never one ideology among others for Marx' since capital functions through a `theologizing fetishization'.48 Indeed, Marx castigates the apologistic tendencies of bourgeois economists, who attribute the form of an autonomously abiding natural substance to expropriated surplus value, which is then presented as a basis rather than a result of wage labour. Rei¢cation as `thingi¢cation' [Verdinglichung] refers to

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the alienated by-products of the relations of domination, coercion, and exploitation that structure wage labour, which makes the surplus value obtained from living workers seem more alive than the workers themselves. Marx sees capitalist rei¢cation as a mode of primitive thinking because it infuses the commodity with the vitality it usurps from living labour so that the former obtains the magical appearance of independent life. A¡ect is thus `material' for Marx because it is commensurate with the metabolic energy of a labouring body and the persuasive force of a materialist argument that aims to demystify the role of exploitation in a capitalist economy. Yet while seeking to disinter the real conditions of energy extraction, Marx's own style brims with animist gestures aimed at reawakening the spirit of buried labour as a transformative force.49 These gestures would eviscerate the metaleptic form of rei¢cation that substitutes the e¡ects of labour alienation for its subjective, living cause. The implication is that a history of capitalist exploitation and appropriation is parasitic: it progresses by sucking its `£esh and blood' host to death. The extraction of vital force from a worker's body coupled with a market-driven degradation of labour's primacy is, thus, the visceral content of this metaleptic form. Marx's strategy involves reanimating this content ^ the proletariat's negated £esh ^ through his rhetoric so that the prospect of a revolution can become more than a bloodless spectre. To breathe life into the dead, to make cold £esh warm again, is to make the vitality/dignity of a worker's body intelligible as a given in the very same discourse that negates and abstracts it. The pulse of labour must be quickened so that it might reassert its force as a revolutionary power within and beyond expropriation. It is Marx's rhetorical trick of breathing life into a murdered and negated given that provides me with a bridge into a reading of ¢gures of death in Derrida's disarticulation of a con£ation between the immediate givenness of the material and a metaphysical ideal of full presence. Derrida's analysis of signi¢cation highlights the interrelationship among repetition, contiguity and a¡ect in producing intelligibility as a contextually speci¢c meaning `for us'. To the extent that death is the only closure Derrida would admit for the appropriation of relations between signi¢ers that are themselves provisional and thus ¢nite, his diverse formulations of di¡e¨rance further a critique of metaphysics as a deathdriven mode of production that abstractly homogenizes the `labour' of signi¢cation and desires `death' under the rubric of consistent presence. This is to say that Derrida's di¡e¨rance allows for a potentially proliferative as well as an entropical agency in signi¢cation. His paradoxical performances of di¡e¨rance nevertheless do not override the ontological premises that shape psychoanalytic understandings of a divided subject's desire for presence, as the a¡ective impetus of any attempt to stall the slippage of signi¢ers by congealing it into a proper form. As he notes in `Force and Signi¢cation', `To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by ¢nding it'.50 Form is both a gain and a loss according to Derrida because it concentrates and petri¢es the force of becoming as an integrated result. This characterization of form echoes Marx's understanding of rei¢cation, which describes a process

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of capitalist abstraction that expropriates, alienates, and disavows the corporeal force of living labour. Marx's rhetoric employs the visceral metaphors of life and death in order to reverse capital's leaching of the vital force of the worker's immediate and originating presence. Derrida's analysis of the linguistic signi¢er as a kind of `verbal body'51 provides a heuristic for giving this force a transformative £exibility in interpretation without reinvoking its metaphysical status as a deadened, lost, or degraded presence. The task that my return to Marx by way of Derrida sets up for cultural criticism is how to read the vicissitudes of this `energy' in contemporary critical discourse, which is itself overdetermined by labour alienation. One of the many insights that Derrida carries forward from Hegel's dialectic (even as he attempts to mark his distance from it) is that the trace of the negated other in the same retains a constitutive agency in the creation of identity, which must therefore be re-envisioned as the provisional e¡ect of an interpretative act. The non-present agency of the trace also occasions a hope that di¡erence cannot be neutralized, even when it has been buried, which is why an inheritance for Derrida, `is never gathered together, is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to rea¤rm by choosing'.52 If we examine our own inheritances, then the emergence of trauma studies might be viewed as a symptomatic reaction to the changing experience of academic labour. In this context, the aim to protract the moral meaning of violence by `hardening' a¡ect betrays a sense of disciplinary lack among humanities scholars who would shore up our methods in relation to the hard sciences. We de£ect this lack by transcendentalizing a¡ect and then con£ating it with the form of `materiality' that makes our objects appear `given' rather than constituted. Unfortunately, this impetus to stave o¡ science envy by shoring up our belittled objects and methods of a¡ect recovery reinforces alienation by mimicking a technological rationale that favours mechanically reproducible and commodi¢able research over less concretely pro¢table methods of investigation. The form of the material ideally ¢nalizes and thus capitalizes an empirical £ux, thereby endowing the variable capital of academic labour with the apparent ¢xity of concept machines. Ultimately, then, it rationalizes a¡ect on both the subject and object sides of interpretation. This rationalization collaborates with a hegemonic corporatist attitude that negates the value of academic labour in humanities teaching and research, empties out their useand exchange value, and foments ressentiment among us. The longing for the material shares Marx's impetus to return the force of labour to its source once it has been occulted by the formal logic of power. Yet to the extent that the discourse of cultural criticism re£ects the anxious motility of market forces, it is also caught up in a death-driven urge to ossify concepts by converting them into inorganic things. The term materiality operates metonymically to ascribe the qualities of physical objects to less tangible objects of interpretation, to recode them as abiding things in order to protect them from the enervating impact of an anti-intellectual climate that denigrates

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open-ended, temporally intensive, but not necessarily pro¢table research. The association between a¡ect and materiality thus constitutes a meta-rei¢cation that would preserve an a¡ectively charged intelligibility by locking it into the ostensibly invariable form of a given. The dynamism of interpretation bridles against such stasis even as it feeds a longing for certainty that would still its anxious force. The presupposition that public respect for our labour is `scarce' is an `entropical' inheritance because valuation is a¡ective, malleable, and qualitative; it is not a `quantity' or `substance' comparable to crude oil that can run out. Such a quantitative assumption nevertheless has implications for how cultural critics conceptualize the possibilities for e¡ective social transformation since all such changes would be seen as depending on the `energy available for work within the system', where work encompasses research and teaching on one side and its e¡ective reception on the other. Are the £eeting prospects for transformation neutralized by the speed and quantity of information (because subjects in information societies cannot produce su¤cient or sustained intelligibility for these £ashes of promise against a barrage of stimuli), by democratic forces that accommodate them in `diluted' form, or by free market forces that counteract them? It is a matter of argument whether or not the intersecting circuits of cultural, social, economic, and political production should or must be understood as `closed' in keeping with thermodynamic de¢nitions of entropy. The question that guides the larger project to which this essay relates is how the topos of a closed system a¡ects the moods of theory and criticism. For the time being, I would like to limit myself to a preliminary speculation that certain melancholic tendencies in cultural criticism might re£ect entropical assumptions about the `scarcity' of energy for change that subjects critics to a law of diminishing returns ^ an eventual `heat death' for hopes and dreams about empowering representations of oppressive pasts to change the present. This ¢gure of scarcity is often simply transplanted as a kernel of implicit common sense that blurs various notions of political, socio-economic, cultural, and psychic economy. Its unacknowledged operation calls for a consideration of how a predilection to think in terms of a closed economy circulates in readings of theory that inform critical praxis. Conversely, we must not blind ourselves to actual forms of scarcity that may determine scholarship as a form of labour and a venue of sociocultural production. Finally, Derrida's attention to the proliferative potential of the signi¢er suggests that anxiety about the persisting integrity of our concepts in the wake of deconstruction might be misplaced: occluded traces of inherited ideas may be activated by interpretation so as to inaugurate new possibilities. What changes, rather, is the degree of investment in the possibility of possibility itself, an a¡ective basis for hope, which is circumscribed or de£ated by particular knowledge regimes. From an entropical perspective, the alienation of objects and methods of inquiry as products and modes of labour respectively will be experienced as a depletion of scarce energy. This alienation a¡ects research agendas and, more

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speci¢cally, de¢nitions of terms that translate among economic and scienti¢c hierarchies and conceptual registers. The mood of my agenda to endow a¡ect with a `materiality' is, in such a context, melancholic: it partly re£ects an experience of the demoralizing conditions of academic labour in the humanities and, beyond this local situation, a general pessimism about the agency of researchers in countering the rationalizing impact of free market forces that neutralize residual notions of freedom and dignity ^ notions I cling to despite my `deconstructive self '.53 Yet my melancholy is not merely ideological or `immaterial' since it refracts a socio-economic devaluation of my authority and, with it, the rhetorical e¤cacy of my `expert' speech acts. The question is whether a critical apparatus that stems from wounded authority can or should repair it.

Chapter 11

The Grammar of Deconstruction Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus

Above all, this [compulsive demand for a purity of language] remains so in£exible that it sometimes goes beyond the grammatical view, it even neglects `style' in order to bow to a more hidden rule, to `listen' to the domineering murmur of an order which someone in me £atters himself to understand, even in situations where he would be the only one to do so, in a teªte-a©teªte with the idiom, the ¢nal target: a last will of the language, in sum, a law of the language that would entrust itself only to me.1

1. Introduction: Is a Grammar of Deconstruction Possible? `The Grammar of Deconstruction': the title is promising, but runs counter to some of deconstruction's instincts. One of the reasons for this is deconstruction's suspicion of grammar's totality, apparent in Paul de Man's suggestion that `grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means, however extensively conceived'. De Man's reservations are further explained in the view that `no grammatical decoding, however re¢ned, could claim to reach the ¢gural dimensions of a text. There are elements in all texts that are by no means ungrammatical, but whose semantic function is not grammatically de¢nable, neither in themselves nor in context.'2 The point is clear enough, even though it emerges from an essay where deconstruction is not mentioned as such, though it is not expressed by the arch-deconstructor himself, Jacques Derrida, and though the punctiliousness that is grammarians' forte might insist on an explanation of why de Man should be regarded as a deconstructionist. The suggestion, quite simply, is that deconstruction is sensitive to those aspects of texts that might remain opaque to grammar, and it hinges on acceptance that the protocols of grammar and the strategies of deconstruction might be irreconcilable. It highlights an incompatibility between grammar's intent on `de¢nition' and deconstruction's propensity to draw attention to what eludes de¢nition. It is therefore interesting that in `The Supplement of Copula' (1971), where Derrida re£ects on certain grammatical and philosophical questions surrounding the verb to be, he should choose to witness Heidegger's Letter on Humanism

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(1947) articulating the opportunity cost of grammar's overweening capacity for control: `Metaphysics, which very early on in the form of Occidental ``logic'' and ``grammar'' seized control of the interpretation of language. We can today only begin to descry what is concealed in that occurrence. The liberation of language from grammar into a more original essential framework is reserved for thought and poetic creation.'3 Consequently to invoke `the grammar of deconstruction' risks not only a contradiction in terms, imposing concerns of description and prescription on a discourse that is minded more towards the fact that `Language . . . has within it an illogical element, metaphor' (SC, p. 178), but potentially a cutting down to size of deconstruction's power. There is another reason why the phrase `the grammar of deconstruction' might be incongruous. It has to do with the possessive case within grammar, with the relation of the of. The implied problematic of the proper is what is at issue there. Deconstruction takes the nature of the proper seriously but often does so, perhaps paradoxically, in texts where perceptions of singularity or of any singular appertaining to someone or something are problematized. There is, indeed, a very basic question to consider when thinking about the possessive case ^ about the issue of the of ^ in relation to deconstruction. It is the following: is there any aspect of the language of deconstruction ^ indeed, any aspect of anything about deconstruction ^ that could be viewed as being peculiarly, singularly, uniquely deconstructionist? And might such an aspect involve an aversion, within deconstruction, to grammar's procedures: even to its `spirit' and `genius'? The question would of course not be a keen one were it not for the obvious and commonsensical objection that, excepting the procedures of fous litte¨raires and arguably not even then,4 no discourse could possibly con¢gure itself without grammar (an issue considered further below). There are, however, two further considerations which ought to be mentioned here. Firstly, of is a preposition which at an uncomplicated and commonsensical level signals co-implicated belonging and possession; secondly, familiarity with Derrida's thinking through of the question of the proper in the texts which we invoke below prompts acknowledgement that any singular `belonging and possession' becomes particularly thinkable in contexts informed by deconstructionistinclined perspectives, or at any rate deconstructionist-tolerant outlooks. So to focus on the of relation in the context of a consideration of grammar, which is what articulates the relation of the proper in the ¢rst place, and to be doing that while pondering a grammar speci¢c to deconstruction ^ this discourse which famously constructs its sense of the proper (including what is proper to itself ) only in respect of and with respect to the other5 ^ becomes a very fraught enterprise indeed. Consequently `The Grammar of Deconstruction', as a title, appears to promise more than could be delivered. It cues a discussion that must ¢nd itself uncomfortably positioned between two contrary styles or procedures. Deconstructive argumentation is typically marked by nuance, re£exivity, and selfawareness. These are key to an understanding of what deconstruction might

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be, what could pertain to it, what might `belong' to its `possession'. Yet grammar, on its part, is hardly nuanced. It names, classi¢es, structures, describes, and prescribes. Additionally, and unlike deconstruction, it tends to articulate rather than undo, so that in this glib sense it is not radical. Rather, it tends to respect the value of the `correct' over the ethic of the `counter'. For these reasons, as well as others we shall consider below, to speak of a grammar of deconstruction is to be already in the quandaries of contra-diction. The nature of that contra-diction is further complicated by the need not to lose sight of the fact that to identify attributes of deconstruction is not necessarily to discern characteristics unique to this eccentric and ex-centric discourse. Of course, however, `belonging and possession' are most interesting when most idiosyncratically proper, so that it ought then to be asked whether there is anything within deconstruction, and more speci¢cally within the grammar of deconstruction, that is so peculiar to it that it takes on the nature of a signature. Yet how can something grammatical ^ and hence something determined by the order of the rule ^ `sign', unless it is truly unique? It is here that it becomes opportune to recall that when Derrida writes about the proper he tends to do so in the context of a consideration of language and its e¡ects and/or on the basis of a re£ection on the question of the signature. Certain obligatory references can be invoked here as self-evident indications of the issue of the `signing proper-ties' of deconstruction: that is, of the relation of the of articulated in a manner uniquely constitutive of a discourse which is, as it happens, attentive to the potential for `de-constitution' within texts, a discourse which tends to undo, to de-construct, to work from the inside to reveal what is other to the self-same, what disturbs `belonging and possession', and thereby what is most threatening to what might be de¢ned by the of relation. Hence, for instance, `Signature Event Context' (1972), or Signe¨ponge (1983), or Schibboleth ^ pour Paul Celan (1986), or `Countersignature' (2004), but also The Other Heading (1991), a work which thinks through the di¤cult relation between the example and the universal, a relation fundamental to grammar and its operations. If we move on from these texts, merely mentioning them rather than reading them, it is not on the basis of that safe appeal, `lack of space' (always a curious escape-clause where what is in question is grammar, which must aim towards an extreme comprehensiveness), but because some important preliminaries to any review of the grammar of deconstruction must be completed. Accordingly, it bears repeating that deconstruction, which proceeds so often on the basis of the study of style(s) (as of Nietzsche, for instance6) or of attention to rhetoric or tone (as of philosophy, say7), might well be found to have been very canny in its recalcitrance to linguists' (as distinct from tropologists') protocols, and to their attempts to ¢nd within it any patterns of usage that might be regarded as speci¢c to deconstruction. There is an irony there, of course. For if one deconstructively takes language `literally', not in the form of `linguisticism' of the `prison-house-of-language'-kind, of which deconstruction has so often been accused, but as an ontological plane with a dynamic of its own, as always

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being `other' or `of the other', might it not mean that one is then ¢rst and foremost a `linguist'? Might we not even say a `philologist', in the literal sense of a `student' or admirer of language and of its inner workings, rules, and grammar(s)? Deconstruction would then be a speci¢c `way of speaking', arguably a discourse about discourse. It would be unusually aware that every speaking `about' language must happen in (a) language. Deconstruction thereby becomes a speaking about language, about a language. On these grounds, the temptation for the analogy with grammar is almost irresistible. The analogy would suggest that there is no fundamental irreconcilability between grammar and deconstruction after all. Yet it is also a little too beguiling, not least if one remembers that in deconstruction as in translation, where the law of plus d'un intrudes, `there is no metalanguage'. That makes it all the more important to proceed in a manner aware that the propensity to counter the proprieties of grammar is one of deconstruction's proper-ties. Indeed, it is one of deconstruction's signature-e¡ects. That awareness is needed all the more badly if it is thought that it might be possible to individuate a grammar of deconstruction, one that somehow impossibly lies outside what is generally comprehended as grammar and/or within grammar, and hence that it might be possible to approach that grammar as a legitimate and discrete object of study. It is an awareness that must also acknowledge the pertinence of an obvious move. This would involve initially considering what might be gained by speaking of a `deconstruction of grammar' rather than a `grammar of deconstruction'. That move need not necessarily require extensive reconsideration of deconstruction's early phase and of the importance a¡orded to concepts of structure or, indeed, to grammatology, which is not feasible here. There are other ways of approaching the issue, as demonstrated below.

2.

The Deconstruction of Grammar: Some Considerations Based on `Grammars'

In remarking more directly the (im)possibility of individuating a grammar of deconstruction, the encounter with one French example, or with the example from French ^ Grevisse's Le bon usage (1986) ^ becomes both instructive and intriguing. This, arguably the standard text on the grammar of French ^ the language, so to speak, of deconstruction ^ establishes in its introduction language (langage) as the outstanding means of human communication. It goes on, in true `phonocentric' fashion, to de¢ne language through sounds as `translatable' into letters, before elaborating on linguistics and grammar and their underlying systems. The study of the rules of distribution of linguistic elements leads to other approaches, notably Noam Chomsky's generative or transformational grammar. This is linked to two further approaches, one culturalist and socio-political, the other psychological and cognitive. Grevisse completes the de¢nitional aspect of its introduction with further distinctions involving phonetics or spelling, lexicology/etymology or lexicography, and morphology and

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syntax. Finally, it lists three descriptors of linguistic `reality': semantics, stylistics, and pragmatics (cf. pp. 1^9). The phrase `the grammar of deconstruction' ^ a phrase haunted by the shadow of a pointed inversion in its seeming double, `the deconstruction of grammar' ^ prompts a number of questionings in relation to each of these three aspects. Thus, and to generalize: would a grammar of deconstruction be normative? Would it benchmark how to speak-write `properly' as a deconstructionist (i.e. as a member of deconstruction's `linguistic community'), based on a genealogically historical or diachronic study of pure and original use, `¢liation', and `inheritance' ^ everything that belongs to an `idiom'? Or would it be purely descriptive, working towards a `structure' of deconstructive speaking, laying bare characteristic and shaping elements (within the lexicon, morphology, syntax, stylistics, etc.) in any given deconstructive text or utterance? Would it do this with a view to establishing the generative rules underlying acceptable sentences or statements by the community of deconstructionists? Would that be based on a shared idiom between deconstructionists, even a `culture', a `politics and ethics', a `frame of mind and behaviour', `cognitive processes', etc. ^ perhaps in view of arriving at underlying `universals' (so that the `grammar of deconstruction', as part of a `universal grammar', becomes perceivable ^ some fancifulness may be permitted here ^ as an innate, maybe even genetic `predisposition' within humans?). Finally, would a grammar of deconstruction be predominantly interested in semantics, syntax, or stylistics? We cannot be serious, it could well be objected at this point. Surely no one would take deconstruction or the question of its grammar so literally. But a square approach to the issue is not without its insights, and it is worth persisting a little longer with this. The equivalent of Le bon usage in and for English is probably Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985). In true `Anglo-Saxon' fashion the introduction is already less prescriptive than Grevisse and starts, pragmatically, from actual usage.8 It adds a few interesting dimensions, namely the question of exclusion, identity, and the necessarily `unconscious' operation of grammar within the increasingly problematic category of `native' speakers. Grammar, in a sense, is for the `foreign learner': `the native speaker . . . does not feel the rules of his own language ^ rules that he has acquired unconsciously ^ to be at all constraining; and if ever he happens to be called on to explain one such rule to a foreigner he has very great di¤culty' (p. 13). The second aspect of pragmatic awareness arises out of the question of the subject, `authority', and power (or the `cultural politics of grammar', its normativity and its `subjects-supposed-to-know'). Studying the grammar of a foreign language (or indeed one's own language as if it were `foreign') makes it clear that grammar is not (only) something that is `inherent' or `immanent' within a language, but (also) is something that is imposed by grammarians, by social institutions, codes and practices, or by `tastes' and mechanisms of social `distinction' and the production of `cultural capital', in Bourdieu's sense. This latter point is important, and will emerge more prominently below.

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Meanwhile there is another intriguing point worth making here. The OED in its lemma on `grammar' recalls that the Latin etymon used to refer, via the Old French, simply to `letters, literature, letter, written mark'. Only `postclassically' was grammar dissociated from philology (the methodological study of literature and language) and reserved for the `linguistic portion' of philology, before ¢nally acquiring its modern meaning: That department of the study of language which deals with its in£exional forms or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing these in accordance with established usage; usually including also the department which deals with the phonetic system of the language and the principles of its representation in writing. Other historical remainders of the semantics of grammar are `the art of speaking and writing a language correctly', and `the fundamental principles or rules of an art or science'. It also lists two now `rare' verbs: `to grammar' (used either intransitively to mean `to discuss grammar', or transitively to mean `to ground or classify'); and `to grammarize' (`to give a certain grammatical structure to'). What consequences, then, ought to be drawn from these grammars and from the lexicon's clari¢cations? We would like to draw attention to three considerations above all. Firstly, a `grammar of deconstruction' would cut across many of the concerns envisaged above. Derrida's occasionally cold and super¢cial reception within his own `linguistic community', France and la francophonie, is arguably due to the `auto-immunity' e¡ect of a language he describes so well in The Monolingualism of the Other (1996), and which seems to be all about a certain prescriptiveness in `national' grammars. Who has the right to claim ownership over a language, to exclude usage on the basis of social and/or linguistic `tastes', etc.? As was anticipated above, when the reference to Bourdieu was being made, there is a battle waging within every language about norms and normativity, fought out through grammar amongst grammarians who protect the apparent essence of any language because of its problematic and unconscious relationship to culture and identity. Perhaps it is because deconstruction unsettles this appropriation process at work in any given language, because it makes grammar conscious or `foreign', that the idea of a `grammar of deconstruction' appears so implausible. Isn't deconstruction precisely what resists (any given) grammar? Deconstruction, in the rare senses excavated by the OED, is not easily `grammared' or `grammarized'. It is not easily grounded or classi¢ed (indeed, it makes a point of its capacity to elude the attempt) and it is not easily given structure (this being one of the ¢rst notions it pitched as `deconstructible'). It can only be `grammared' in the most neutral sense contemplated by the OED: that designating a discussion of the grammar of, in this case, deconstruction (so that in that sense this essay would itself be `grammar-ing'). Secondly, it is true to say that the issue of foreignness, understood in the key of the `unnatural', bears heavily upon the grammar of deconstruction. As is well

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known, deconstruction's articulations often work contrarily to what is `natural' to language and grammar, and to what follows the rules. This cannot, of course, be the place to discuss the whole question of Derrida's notion of writing as developed since Of Grammatology, but any `grammar of deconstruction' would have to position itself within the question of the `rule' (i.e. not only the problematic of `sovereignty' of any given language, as outlined above, but also its virtuality and iterability, the mark, the trace, the spectre, etc.) and of `identity' (i.e. the idiom, the untranslatable, the `genius', the `proper' of any given language). Maybe, ¢rst and foremost, it would need to ask in which language to talk about (the grammar of ) deconstruction. All that almost suggests that deconstruction not only contrives a language of its own, but in some respects becomes a language of its own ^ certainly a discourse apart ^ with its own protocols and practices. By a rich irony deconstruction would thereby render itself amenable to becoming `grammarized' as well as `grammared'. In other words, deconstruction's resistance to aspects of its language being comprehended within grammar's protocols, its singularity as a form of discourse, its readiness to work through and against grammar (abidingly and subversively, concurrently): all this is actually, and paradoxically, what makes analysis of the grammar of deconstruction, in all its counters to grammar's `correctness', both possible and worthwhile. Perhaps then there is no escaping grammar, even for deconstruction. Thirdly, the question asked earlier about whether deconstruction's language would be approached in terms of its semantics, syntax, or stylistics can be revisited to indicate that scrutiny of the work of Derrida (we are bracketing here the issue of how coextensive that can be seen to be with the work of deconstruction more generally) has predominantly been levelled not through attention to the grammatical (and sometimes agrammatical) underpinnings of the locutions of deconstruction, but on the basis of an engagement with its key `concepts' or `¢gures'. This point was made as early as 1981 by Barbara Johnson in her `Translator's Introduction' to Dissemination (1972), where she explained that with `Derrida's writing . . . it is all too tempting to focus on certain ``key'' terms and to compile them into a static lexicon'. More relevantly for any study of deconstruction's grammar, she then goes on to mention Derrida's `syntax', `allusions', `fading in and out', `multiple coherences', and `non-binary logic' as the main aspect of `Derrida's Styles'.9 This is in keeping with the fact that it probably remains true that introductions to deconstruction proceed through a collection of key words (`lexemes') £agging concepts and ¢gures like di¡e¨rance, supplement, hymen, phonocentrism, pharmakon, (phal)logocentrism, event, destinerrance, arrivant, hauntology, spectropoetics, monolingualism, mondialatinisation, and many others. There is of course a lot of merit in that approach, as in recent attempts by Charles Ramond or Niall Lucy to establish a Derridean `vocabulary', a conceptual `semantics of deconstruction', so to speak.10 However the deconstructive angel's ways of doing things with texts and words might well reward enhanced attention to idiosyncrasies of, say, syntax or morphology. And it certainly would not do to forget Rodolphe Gasche¨'s remark that the

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letter of Derridean deconstruction has always set out to `prove the irreducible excess of syntax over semantics', or his view that Derrida's is a `complex continuation of Husserl's project in Logical Investigations of a universal and a priori, in short, ``pure logical grammar'' '.

3. Towards a Grammar of Deconstruction Gasche¨'s remark is intriguing. However, this essay's concern is not with Husserlian perspectives or any universal, aprioristic, transhuman-yet-all-too-human dimensions to a grammar that might be shown to be amenable to Derridean revisitation. The issue of a pure, logical grammar is relevant, of course, but we are working here at a more exploratory level. We must also warn, in what is the midpoint of this essay, that we do not address other very cogent models of grammar, for instance Wittgenstein's or Chomsky's. This essay o¡ers instead some prefatory considerations assisting in moves towards a grammar of deconstruction. It concerns itself with what an attention to the grammar of deconstruction might reveal about: 1. the possibility of identifying a grammar proper to deconstruction at all; 2. the coextensiveness of such a grammar with Derridean strategies involving style, rhetoric, tone, etc.; 3. the manner in which a grammar of deconstruction could be seen to run counter to any `straightforward understanding of grammar'; and hence, 4. the extent to which it might then almost as a consequence force through a rethinking of what needs to be encompassed and reconceived within grammar, and the inevitability of grammar being reconceptualized as a consequence of the encounter with deconstruction. The ¢rst of the four points above has already been broached in the above section; we therefore move on to the second point. The correspondences of a putative grammar of deconstruction with questions of style, rhetoric, tone, etc. References to grammar in guides to deconstruction and studies of Derrida's work are relatively uncommon, and unsustained where they exist. This is the case even in a number of otherwise excellent studies on Derrida's style and rhetoric, which all more or less try to capture and analyse Derrida's `tone' and `voice' ^ if not `syntax'. For Rudy Steinmetz, for instance, Derrida's work is a `rewriting of metaphysics' which exploits `the neglected resources of language'.11 The plurality of `styles' in Derrida's writings constitutes a `composite ensemble of playful writing' (p. 8). As a self-professed `geneticist', Steinmetz brings together the individual's `style' (his `genetic' ^ not to be misunderstood in a purely biological, evolutionary or deterministic sense ^ biography of a particular `subject') as it `intervenes' in the language system, all the while being de¢ned in turn by the space language opens up to this intervention (p. 11).12 Steinmetz's notion of `styles' is thus to be understood

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as dynamic in the sense of linguistic and discursive `transformations' within the metaphysical tradition of writing which problematize the traditional primacy of thought over language. Instead Derrida's stylistics is based on a `plurality' that oscillates `at the very heart of the subject and the always unstable relation it has with its ``own'' experience of language' (p. 13). However, according to Steinmetz a diachronic dimension also comes into play. He argues for the existence of three di¡erent stylistic phases in Derrida's writing, which nevertheless remain true to the same founding principle: `the originary di¡e¨rance under whose guidance writing obeys the double principle of repetition and transformation' (p. 13). These three phases are an early `programmatic' period dominated by a `neutral' style governed by an `ethics of decision' (p. 14); a second more `ludic' phase dominated by an `aesthetics of dissemination'; and a third, `nostalgic' phase, whose style is governed by a `poetics of invocation' (p. 14). As powerful as this description and classi¢cation of Derrida's writings may be, Steinmetz's study remains pitched at a relatively conceptual and philosophical level of analysis. This is quite extraordinary for a work on `style' or even `styles', for any overt concern with stylistics and indeed grammar is underplayed. This reproach also applies to the otherwise impressive study by Marcos Siscar, which is a lot more technical and rhetorical in its vocabulary but which still privileges description of how Derrida's and deconstruction's conceptual content corresponds to formal actualization through the trope of `necessity' (i.e. the argument that holds that what Derrida has to say could only have been `expressed' through a speci¢c style . . .).13 The other exception to the conceptual-semantic focus on Derrida's work can be found in Marian Hobson's Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (1998), which analyses `the relation of argument to mode of writing' (p. 2). Hobson's claim is that a pure lexical approach ^ the focus on Derrida's `lexemes' ^ needs to be supplemented with a syntactical study. The meaning of Derrida's philosophical argument is not just lexically expressed but depends on syntactical choices and patterns. Two tests can be used to prove this, namely `translatability' (i.e. to what extent is Derrida's peculiar and often subversive use of French an intrinsic aspect of his argument, thereby becoming, strictly speaking, untranslatable as such?) and `summarizability' (i.e. to what extent do Derrida's arguments lend themselves to summarizing? Or does their complexity necessitate almost repetitive commenting, as for example is usually the case in explanations of di¡e¨rance?). Hobson calls these `articulating patterns' in Derrida's writings his `syntax'. It is these patterns that constitute the network-like coherence in Derrida's work. It is a coherence she also locates in `a repeated form of one element of Derrida's discourse, one philosophical problem, with another' (p. 3)). In her syntactical analysis of some of Derrida's key texts Hobson then focuses on what she calls `the relation between the empirical and the transcendental' (or genesis ^ matters of event and act ^ as opposed to structures, which form our mode of knowing what we know (p. 7)); `duplicating strategies of writing', such as `irony and quotation' (or `replications' which account for the high degree of re£exivity and spectrality in Derrida's writing); `singularities'

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(which arise out of the question of repetition, identity and iterability); and the use of `negatives' (usually combined with a double bind, aporia or `stricture' around the `possible-impossible'). It would be impossible here to engage in great detail with Hobson's notion of `syntax', something already begun by Geo¡rey Bennington. We would however like to point out, with Bennington, that the clear distinction between `lexemes' and `syntax' that Hobson claims does not necessarily apply, and particularly so in Derrida's writing.14 A Derridean `lexeme' like di¡e¨rance, for example, is not con¢nable to any semantics but also immediately puts to work a pragmatics, i.e. it `says' something at the same time as it `does' something (and in its particular case the relation between saying and doing, di¡ering and deferring, maybe constitutes its `singularity' but also undermines the distinction between lexical and syntactical meaning). It could be contended, therefore, that speci¢c instances of conceptual undecidability and aporia in Derrida's writings might be approached through an enhanced focus on grammar. The relation between the tropology of deconstruction and its syntax would then become a central concern. The scope for that arises from the fact that underlying and modulating deconstruction are subtle syntactical elements that undermine any easy conceptual `packaging', e.g. contre, plus d'un, or, entre, comme si and many others. These others include conjunctions, adverbial phrases, pronouns, a¤xes, etc., sometimes referred to as `syncategoremata'.15 They also include punceptuality, portmanteau words, and word formation through morphemic aggregation. What is curious, of course, is that many of these strategies are practically `untranslatable'. In fact, they contribute to the core problem of translation in general and of any translation of Derrida's writings and thought in particular. They contribute also to the cliche¨, not without its pertinence, that the grammar and language of deconstruction deliberately stand outside the commonplace. The `grammar of deconstruction', it can therefore be argued, is what makes the genius of Derrida's texts fundamentally true to the problem of articulating what is only singularly communicable. In that respect, Siscar's concern with the `necessity' for deconstruction's language, and hence its grammar, being what it is takes on increased relevance. The suspicion arises that the grammar of deconstruction has to be di¡erent, di¡e¨rance-aware, and counter to grammar `straightforwardly understood'. That recalls the third point £agged earlier, to which we now turn. The manner in which a grammar of deconstruction could be seen to run counter to any `straightforward understanding of grammar'. In addressing this issue it is probably wise to follow the common, if problematic, distinction of the various aspects that linguistic grammar entails: among others, an abstract system of rules; a lexicon (or the paradigmatic axis of any language system); and syntax (the syntagmatic axis). To each of these aspects we shall connect an `example', as either discussed by Derrida or present as usage in Derrida's texts: idiom, homonymy, and what could be called `shifters' (embrayeurs). This list is of course far from complete. Further obvious syntactical and grammatical peculiarities of Derridean deconstruction would include interlingual `puncepts' (the Joycean `he war', or `oui [we], nous', or the discussion of He¨le©ne Cixous' `or'); word formation

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(compounds and a¤xes like `carno-/phallo-/logo-/centrism' or `archi-', etc.); portmanteau words (like `destinerrance' or `animots'), etc. All of these are linked by what we advance as the underlying `grammatical' principle of deconstruction, namely the `possible-impossible translation'. But let us proceed with consideration, in turn, of idiom, homonymy, embrayeurs. Hence, deconstruction's (grammatical) understanding of language is of course neither descriptive nor normative. It is `idiomatic'. One of the best texts to clarify what Derrida means by `idiom' is probably a short interview with E¨velyne Grossman. Starting from the idea that language cannot be appropriated, Derrida says: `What I try to think is an idiom (and the idiom, precisely, means the proper, what is proper to) and a signature in the linguistic idiom that at the same time causes one to experience the fact that language can never be appropriated.'16 What is here said in relation to Celan's radically `idiomatic' use of the German language resonates with Derrida's analysis of his own problematic relation to his monolanguage in Monolingualism of the Other. It is a caringly deconstructive resistance to the appropriation of the idiomatic by cultural political forces and ideologies like institutions and nationalism. At the same time it is a kind of `grammar' that wishes to protect the singularity of what is most idiomatic of a language, not in a normative, but rather in the opposite sense: of linguistic `genius' and maybe the poetic `event'. Derrida refers to Celan's `scarring' or `wounding' of the German language: `within the German language, he welcomed a di¡erent kind of German, or other languages, or other cultures . . . an ``inhabiting a language'' where one knows both that there is no home and that one cannot appropriate a language . . .' (p. 100). Ironically, what is most `proper' to a language, most idiomatic of a language, is its radically speci¢c openness to other languages, or its `unappropriability': `what is most idiomatic, that is to say, what is most proper to a language, cannot be appropriated' (p. 101). It is also what resists translation and hence constitutes the singularity, the (un)grammatical `essence', or `the signifying body' (p. 102) of a language. What could be called the singular understanding of `grammar' within deconstruction refers to this `political di¤culty': `how can one be in favor of the greatest idiomaticity . . . while resisting nationalist ideology?' (p. 102). Deconstruction could thus, in fact, be understood as a speci¢c form of philology, namely one that advocates a `love' of what resists translation without `yielding to nationalist policies'. It is, without a simple understanding of loyalty or `¢delity', a cultivation of the singularity of the idiom and, because of that singularity, the impossibility of its appropriation or belongingness. The experience of a `grammar of deconstruction' then involves what Derrida calls the `spectrality' of language: `There is a sort of spectral virtualization in the being of the word, in the very being of grammar' (p. 104). The focus thereby falls on how gain of identity through loss, singularity, and iterability is the inheritance, the condition of being born into a language or languages, which a grammar of deconstruction would `regulate' or rather `generate'. Within the parameter of this problematic idiomaticity, there is thus the question of an impossible `¢delity', undecidability, or aporia, both at the lexical and

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the syntactical level, as Derrida explains in a conversation between him and He¨le©ne Cixous.17 `Oui, au commencement il y a le mot. A© la fois nomination et vocable . . . Tout me revient, mais depuis la langue ^ qui se passe de moi en passant par moi [Yes, in the beginning there is the word. As a name as much as a term . . . Everything is mine/comes back to me, but from language ^ which passes me by (does without me) by passing through me].' Starting from a `tre¨sor lexical et syntaxique . . . Ce qui me guide, c'est toujours l'intraductibilite¨ : que la phrase s'endette a© jamais aupre©s de l'idiome. Le corps du mot doit eªtre a© ce point inse¨parable du sens que la traduction ne puisse que le perdre [a lexical and syntactical treasure . . . What guides me is always untranslatability: let a sentence forever be indebted to the idiom. The body of the word must be so inseparable from meaning that translation cannot but lose it].' It is this that Derrida calls `homonymy' (which in Derrida's usage contains both homophony and polysemy, the plural relationship between one signi¢er and its many possible signi¢eds). The homophonies within a language, one could say, are what constitute its idiomaticity, singularity, and untranslatability, but not in view of any `purity' but `always already' in translation (e.g. within `one' language). Again, there are countless examples in Derrida's texts where a homonymy is used as a kind of (lexical or syntactical) `shifter' [embrayeur, strictly speaking, `clutch', i.e. `the changing of gear'], to highlight a `necessary' undecidability, an impossible coincidence of meanings which calls for a `¢de¨lite¨ a© plus d'un'. `Plus d'un' ^ the irreducible `homonymy' of `no longer one' and `more than one', of impossible identity and uncountable plurality ^ is Derrida's non-sensical, counter-intuitive `de¢nition' of deconstruction: `plus d'une langue'.18 In terms of grammar, which whether descriptive or normative is normally about the system of rules that `protects' the identity, correct usage, purity etc. of a language, this de¢nition of `plus d'une langue' is impossible or non-sensical (a `contresens'). How to imagine a grammar that would do justice to the idiomaticity and singularity, the `genius' of one language while at the same time allowing for the resistance to appropriation, the being shot through with other languages, the more than one, the impossible identity of a language to itself and its community? Or, put di¡erently, a `babelized' grammar which would nevertheless protect the most intimate `mark' of the idiom, a grammar as translation and idiom? A grammar of the `plus d'un', it would surely be `plus d'une grammaire' and would require the kind of impossible `double a¤rmation' at work in a `¢de¨lite¨ a© plus d'un'. The only ¢delity in the face of a double bind of the kind of the `plus d'un' is the ¢delity towards this in¢delity, the double imperative, the double a¤rmation, the `yes, yes'. On the other hand, this impossible grammar would also be the most universal and the most politically `just' approach to the question of translation, whether linguistic, cultural, or otherwise: Je cherche toujours, dans le respect `sacre¨' de l'idiome, une chance politique universelle, une universalite¨ qui ne soit pas l'e¨crasement de l'idiome. Est-ce possible? Cela ne pourrait eªtre possible que si on accorde de¨ja© a© l'idiome

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ce que vous avez rappele¨ de l'eªtre avec. L'idiome n'est jamais le propre ou l'identite¨ a© soi du propre, il est de¨ja© di¡e¨rent de lui-meªme, il n'est qu'en diffe¨rence. [I always seek, in the `sacred' respect of the idiom, a universal political chance, a universality that would not crush the idiom. Is this possible? This can only be possible if one already grants the idiom what you recalled about the being with. The idiom is never peculiarity/property or the selfsameness of the proper, it [the idiom] is already di¡erent to itself, it is only in di¡erence.]19 Strictly speaking, shifters or embrayeurs, after Jespersen, Jakobson, and Benveniste, are elements within language whose meaning only arises out of the reference to a speci¢c utterance, a speci¢c context. Usually these linguistic elements are pronouns (like I and you), possessives (my, your, etc.), spatial and temporal adverbs (here, now), or the devices of modality (e.g. expressed through modal verbs or tenses or adverbs that re£ect the speaker's or narrator's `attitude' to the utterance). What makes shifters such a fascinating and indispensable linguistic category is that they normally guarantee extralinguistic reference. They are anchoring points that are supposed to disambiguate statements by contextualizing them in some given identity or presence. Of course, they cannot guarantee this. The classical case is the pronoun I, whose singularity (it can only ever refer to the ¢rst-person speaker of the statement) is nevertheless dependent on its necessary generalizability (in order to speak as a subject one has to be an `I'). The structure of an `I' is therefore a paradoxical `generalsingular'. All shifters are structured in this way because that is their main function. In referring to a here-and-now, a present self-identity that is never fully actualized, their grammatical status is thus a kind of `spectrality'. They momentarily allow subjects to link themselves into and phase themselves out of a linguistic context. It seems that Derridean usage of homonyms, the untranslatability of the idiom, is an attempt at accumulating and forcing this shifting process and its spectrality. If that holds, a grammar of deconstruction cannot be about the universal applicability of some kind of method, or the sum of any deconstructive lexicon or syntax. Deconstruction is not predictable and not subject to rules or regulations. In that sense it advances by being ¢rst of all the deconstruction of any given grammar. Nevertheless, it also knows that the universal arrives through the singular. Justice, for example, as undeconstructible `universal',20 must pass through the singular and unappropriable idiom. The event, or change, happens both in and to (a) language, or, as Derrida says, `to make revolution, language, vocabulary and grammar must be changed'.21 This connects with the fourth issue raised previously, i.e. the extent to which deconstruction might almost force through a rethinking of what might need to be encompassed and reconceived within grammar, and the inevitability of grammar being re-conceptualized as a consequence of the encounter with deconstruction. The point cues our conclusion. For after all the evidence above it is surely not too abrupt to say simply, in conclusion, that the grammar of deconstruction is the untranslatable but

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universal grammar of plus d'une langue: against grammar but all for it, an entirely other grammar, a counter-grammar. Indeed, it is tempting to end precisely there, and leave it at that. There would be a certain appropriateness in such a close, especially in a collection like this one where the title sets up such a neat ¢t in terms of deconstruction's `countergrammar' corresponding to generalized patterns of countering in Derrida's work. However, it is worth specifying a little more precisely ^ almost as a grammarian might, pour ainsi dire ^ what the intellectual gains of considering the grammar of deconstruction might be. At its most straightforward, such consideration creates an evident opportunity to analyse certain aspects of deconstruction's discourse which, as indicated above, have remained relatively undercommented. In a moment like the present, where after Derrida's death there is a poignant timeliness to seeking to understand more deeply those devices and aspects of his writing most directly responsible for making his work so momentously challenging to discourses like philosophy or literary theory, that opportunity is all the more welcome. It is worth noting that in the end deconstruction's challenge to `disciplinarity' depends on a disciplined taking of liberties with the most disciplining dimensions of language, grammar. For that reason, to work towards a grammar of deconstruction is to build up highly developed regimens of awareness of deconstruction's embeddedness within philosophies and codi¢cations of language it occasionally recognizes and occasionally counters: `[I]f we consider the history of philosophy as one great discourse, a powerful discursive chain, is not that history immersed in a reserve of language, the systematic reserve of a lexicology, a grammar, a set of signs and values? And once this is so, is not the history of philosophy limited by the resources and organization of that reserve?' (SC, p. 177). More crucially still, such a grammar would foreground the inevitability of coming up against deconstruction's engagement with, and deployment of, language's capacity to subvert the understanding of the proper understood in the twin and potentially con£icting senses of correctness and singularity ^ for there can be no understanding of the logic of plus d'une langue, or indeed of plus d'une grammaire, without the appreciation that deconstructions of grammar proceed, always already and de facto, according to a grammar of deconstruction. It is to understand better the manner of that `according', and in order to gauge whether a de jure dimension to that might counter-intuitively be glimpsed, that it makes sense to work towards a grammar of deconstruction. That cannot be attempted without losing sight of what is most proper in all this not to deconstruction but, it could be said, to Derrida himself, to his person. The epigraph to the essay cues the insight. It is an insight that has something to do with the idea that `Transcendental means transcategorial' (SC, p. 195). The epigraph suggests that the way to the proper lies through going beyond `the grammatical view'. It involves responding to `the domineering murmur of an order' proceeding from language. Countering sense, that murmur is in the nature of a call to what is most singular within the self-same. This idea of a `law', the proper, entrusting itself `only to me', interpellating what is most

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individuatingly proper in the self-same, is what articulates the linguistic space for the paradox of being beyond any `grammatical view', for being instead in a countering view beyond generality or rule, where what o¡ers itself to the rarest, most singular discernment is the possibility of a `he' who `£atters himself ' to understand the other, the idiom of language's `last' and most uniquely summoning `will', before which even grammar's discrimination in regard to the proper is discountenanced.

Chapter 12

Dislocating Derrida: Badiou, the Unthought and the Justice of Multiplicity Patience Moll

What, in any case, does it mean to dismiss a work ^ by which I mean a legitimately probing and self-critical articulation of thought? In the context of reading or citing a work, whether or not one intends to instrumentalize its `content' for the purpose of meeting a stated aim, one still needs to consider the justice of dismissal, and whether it is truly possible to dismiss a genuine work, idea or insight. One needs to interrogate the status of dismissive acts when they seek to annul signi¢cant theoretical work, as if one could successfully e¡ace their uncontrolled borders and covert e¡ects. Can thought, even when disrupted by its own rhetorical support systems or external review committees, be simply rendered nonviable? . . . A disagreement does not amount to a gesture of wholesale dismissal, however, and is fair game in the politics of scienti¢c and philosophical inquiry. Avital Ronell, The Test Drive (2005)1

1.

Introduction: Badiou/Derrida

In his 1999 paper `The Desire of Philosophy and the Contemporary World', Alain Badiou names Jacques Derrida and Jean-Franc°ois Lyotard as representatives of what he calls a `postmodern philosophy' which, in distinction from both Heideggerian hermeneutics and analytic philosophy, has produced a mere rhetoric of multiplicity inadequate to the needs of contemporary society. As Badiou tells it here, the thesis of this postmodern philosophy is that the `great constructions' of the nineteenth century ^ the ideas of revolution, progress, humanity and science ^ have become outdated; `that we live in the multiple, that there are no great epics of history or of thought; that there is an irreducible plurality of registers and languages in thought as in action; registers so diverse and heterogeneous that no great idea can totalize or reconcile them'.2 The association of Derrida with an irreducible and irreconcilable multiplicity seems to contradict the version of his legacy presented in Badiou's earlier, 1989 book Manifesto for Philosophy. There he is mentioned as belonging to a larger, coherent, postwar mentality that, if characterized by a `fetishism of literature',

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ultimately is comprehensible in terms of a prior reaction to the Holocaust. In an introductory chapter that brings Derrida together with Lyotard, Deleuze, Lacan and Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou argues that this group is characterized by a misguided belief that the Holocaust ^ like all historical events ^ can be `determined philosophically'. Along these lines, he proposes that a secret `Hegelianism' in fact motivates these `anti-dialecticians' and their shared if only implicit presumption that there is `one' essentially determining `spirit' of the times, a Zeitgeist which it is the object of philosophy to `capture' and `concentrate'3: on account of the traumatic, unthinkable nature of the twentieth century's Zeitgeist, its e¡ect was to sound the death knell of purely philosophical thought. While the implicit rejoinder of the 1999 essay is a call for a return to `greatness', the rejoinder here is a call for a break from historicism or the belief that history can be determined philosophically.4 The apparent contradiction between the depiction of Derrida as a secretly unifying Hegelian who along with this contemporaries turned to literature in response to the trauma of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and as a rhetor of multivalence, on the other, might be resolved ^ as it is to some extent in the Manifesto ^ by a historical narrative that would connect the initial, philosophically suicidal response to the Holocaust to the later, nihilistic, `postmodern' turn towards literature as the only appropriate means left for stating the `disorientation of our epoch'. Such a reliance on historical narrative however ^ along with the presentation in the Manifesto of Derrida as ¢rst and foremost a member of the cohesive, postwar generation ^ itself attests to the Hegelian belief in a Zeitgeist with which Badiou charges his contemporaries and their shared, historically determined lack of enthusiasm for the philosophical as such. The redoubled ambivalence of Badiou's argument that Derrida's work is no longer appropriate to the times thus itself recommends a consideration of what Avital Ronell calls the `justice of dismissal' in this case, and a reading or `interrogation' of the status of the `dismissive acts' being performed here. The attribution of what I will describe as Derrida's philosophy of literary criticism (subjective genitive) to a historical cause such as the Holocaust, itself goes outside of Derrida's work in order to charge it with an inherent ine¤cacy. Such an act says more about itself than Derrida's work, and in what follows I will be calling into question the general gesture, which certainly extends beyond Badiou, that immediately associates a recognition of multivalence with the acceptance of an indi¡erent, irreducible cacophony, as if multivalence and ine¤cacy were one and the same. Rhetorically speaking, the status of Derrida's dismissal in the Manifesto can be understood in terms of the procedures of synecdoche ^ the taking of the speci¢c for the general ^ and personi¢cation ^ the taking of the inanimate as animate. First of all, Derrida is subsumed under a group, for which LacoueLabarthe is then singled out as the representative, the speci¢c representative that is of a larger group of which Derrida has already been declared a part. Apparently inspired by Lyotard's statement, which he cites, that LacoueLabarthe produced the `¢rst philosophical determination of Nazism', Badiou focuses on Lacoue-Labarthe as the one who, in the name of philosophy, most

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directly `pleaded guilty' to the crimes of the twentieth century. In spite of an opening allusion to La ¢ction du politique (1988)5 and its call for a refusal of the `desire' to philosophize, the emphasis is on Lacoue-Labarthe's name and its symbolic function with respect to a generational gesture, not on the actual, lengthy analysis of Heidegger's `secret mimetology' and its alleged repetition of Plato. Insofar as Lacoue-Labarthe's concern is not with `determining philosophically' the events of the Holocaust per se so much as determining Heidegger's relation to them, the reduction of an (inanimate), complex text, textual analysis, and set of multitextual relations to a proper name seems particularly marked here. The implied personi¢cation enables Badiou to speak of the name as interchangeable with a series of others (Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.), and in the process claim to be talking about speci¢c texts and interpretive procedures as well. The problem with the personi¢ed, synecdochic status of Badiou's account of his contemporaries is that it obscures Derrida's own, slightly earlier description of a certain `unitarianism' informing Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis of Heidegger, and Derrida's association of this unitarianism with a speci¢cally historicist mode of philosophical criticism. Badiou's account of Derrida in the Manifesto at least can be called a dismissal, then, and not a disagreement, insofar as it is marked, in various ways, by a non-reading of or non-encounter with Derrida's work. This very non-reading however ^ the obfuscating repetition of an earlier gesture by Derrida ^ itself points us, readers of Badiou and Derrida, towards a reading of Derrida's gesture and its reinscription within Badiou's Manifesto. In this way it points us also towards a consideration of what Ronell calls the politics of philosophical inquiry and its investment in nominal di¡erences as opposed to textual overlaps.

2.

Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger

The gesture occurs in the essay `De¨sistance', published originally in the 1987 collection Psyche¨: Inventions de l'autre, and translated into English as the introduction to the 1989 collection of Lacoue-Labarthe's essays, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics.6 Nine pages into the essay, Derrida abruptly interrupts an extended, parenthetical paraphrase of Lacoue-Labarthe's concept of `desistance' and of the desisting subject. He announces an earlier temptation on his part to have avoided the introductory convention of proleptic, unifying paraphrase, and to have begun instead with the single statement by LacoueLabarthe that had got under his skin, a statement against which he `could not help reacting in protest' and whose e¡ect he compares to that of de Man's `daring' claim that Rousseau's text bore no `blind spot'. The statement provoked, in Derrida, the `impatient' reaction of `Oh really? How is that? Is such a thing possible? . . . How can one dare to write such a sentence? By what right? And is there any sense in advancing such a proposition about anybody? What is the meaning of this provocation?'7 He proceeds to describe these questions in terms of a `resistance', explaining that `resistance, for it was on my part a

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resistance, often indicates the sensitive place (le lieu sensible) in a reading, the point of incomprehension that organizes it'.8 Although he explicitly identi¢es the resistance as his own ^ (`for it was on my part a resistance'), a sudden shift from an ongoing autobiographical discourse of the `I' to an impersonal discourse describing reading in general, makes that which is supposed to be indicated by the resistance more ambiguous. While the emotive rhetoric indicates that the `sensitive' point of incomprehension is Derrida's own, one can just as well read the sentence as referring to a resistance (on Derrida's part) to a sensitive place or point (point) within Lacoue-Labarthe's reading (in this case, of Heidegger), a sensitive, which is to say noticeable, perceptible or tangible ^ (all appropriate translations of the French sensible) ^ place or `point of incomprehension'. This interpretation of the sentence emphasizes (1) that the text being read is itself a reading of another text, and (2) that the resistance which is part of the act of reading ^ and which Derrida will describe as the moment at which reading becomes a reading of the self 9 ^ occurs as the encounter with the phenomenality or palpability of the text being read. To read a text (LacoueLabarthe's `Typography' for example) means, eventually, to resist that place in it which becomes manifest or tangible as a `point' around which the rest of the text has been organized.10 In fact, it is this latter sense of the sentence that Derrida proceeds to develop: what he resists within `Typography' is an uncomprehending yet organizing recitation or inscription of Heidegger's words about a thinker's `unthought', in his book What is Called Thinking? It takes many pages, however, for the resistance to be unfolded in this way. Derrida begins, ¢rst of all, by quoting the sentence that immediately had got under his skin, Lacoue-Labarthe's assertion, that `(in any case, Heidegger never avoids anything)'.11 He responds that, on the one hand, Lacoue-Labarthe means this in a direct, literal sense of paying tribute to the rigour of Heidegger's thought: even that which Heidegger does not directly face, he `faces' (or to borrow Lacoue-Labarthe's terminology, `manoeuvres') in other ways, on account of his rigour as a thinker. Then, Derrida remarks upon the irony of the statement and its placement, within parentheses, in the middle of an extended analysis of precisely what Heidegger does avoid in his reading of Nietzsche. (This analysis occurs in the ¢rst part of `Typography', as an explicit resumption of the more detailed analysis of Heidegger's relation to Nietzsche, which took place in the earlier essay `Obliteration'12). He accounts for the irony by proposing that a concept of `denegation' is at stake in Lacoue-Labarthe's claim that Heidegger never avoids anything as well as in Lacoue-Labarthe's overall analysis of Heidegger. The claim appears ironic by virtue of its placement within a discussion of the three elements of Nietzsche's text that Heidegger does avoid. The irony can be understood in terms of denegation, insofar as LacoueLabarthe argues that the three elements of Nietzsche avoided by Heidegger ^ the Darstellung or presentation of Zarathustra, the `dispersion' of Nietzsche's text, and Nietzsche's madness ^ are in fact one and the same: they all amount to a question `of the subject'. In this context, Derrida cites the following sentence from `Typography':

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These three questions are really one, or more exactly, they all gravitate around a single, central question (une seule question centrale), one that is always in view (envisage¨e) at the same time that it is always pushed aside (repousse¨e) ^ (and that is constantly proposed in terms of being inadmissible to thought, metaphysically marked and as such constantly condemned, without `appeal') ^ and this is the question of the subject. The question of the `subject of enunciation', let us say, or of `writing', nothing, in any case, that might be simply, that is, immediately assimilated or identi¢ed with the subject of the `metaphysics of subjectivity', under any form whatsoever.13 Lacoue-Labarthe's statement that Heidegger never avoids anything takes place in an analysis devoted to showing that Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche is organized by the constant avoidance/envisioning of a single question ^ namely, the question of the subject. If Heidegger can reject the subject by appeals to metaphysics, he cannot do so when it comes to questions of language and literacy; he cannot void his thought of the subject's linguistic dimension, (de)constitution, or `desistance'. This argument relies, for its own coherency, on an aestheticizing rhetoric that can claim that no matter what Heidegger might say, he always has the subject `in view (envisage¨e)', and that whether or not he speaks of it, the subject is always there, repressed or pushed aside (repousse¨e). Derrida addresses the implicit denegation by focusing not on the rhetoric of envisioning and repression, however, but on the more basic rhetoric of uni¢cation and centralization. As indicated by Lacoue-Labarthe's phrasing une seule question centrale, this rhetoric casts `the one' in terms of a subsumption of singularity (la seule) under centralization. This question of the subject, as LacoueLabarthe describes it, is not singular to Heidegger; nor is the way he asks (or avoids) the question of the subject singular. The question of the subject is, rather, Heidegger's `only' question, as the centralizing, centrifugal force around which all the errors or `eliminations' of his relation to Nietzsche can be organized. Its `unity' or `unicity' is the unity of sameness, the one understood as the commonality of di¡ering elements. (Derrida expresses his own, individual hesitation with respect to the unifying procedures within Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis by questioning the latter's identi¢cation, in the passage cited above, of `enunciation' and `writing'). He points out that this rhetoric of uni¢cation is both explicit in Lacoue-Labarthe's argument, and implicit in the concept of denegation as such, which ascribes intentionality to a gesture that would unite consciousness and the unconscious in the identity of a proper name (`Heidegger') or of the expressive `I' (`It's not that I don't want to speak of the subject, I just don't want to think it . . .'). By emphasizing the rhetoric of uni¢cation in Lacoue-Labarthe and relating it to the concept of denegation and its positing of a consciousness, Derrida's argument connects synecdoche (the reduction of the three questions to the one question of the subject) and personi¢cation (the `animation' of Heidegger's writings on Nietzsche via a rhetoric of `envisioning' and repression and its implication of a consciousness or denegation), thereby indicating how discourses of intention, along with their implied concept of justice,

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always rely upon a centralizing logic of the one. In this way `Desistance' indicates a disjunction between the politics of philosophical inquiry and the `justice' of its dismissals, gesturing towards a justice that would not rely on the positing of personhood but that would instead call out for procedures of philosophicalliterary criticism.14 By pointing out how Lacoue-Labarthe's positing of a Heideggerian denegation is punctuated by allusions to Heidegger's writing on the unthought, Derrida suggests what such a criticism would have to contend with. At one point, Lacoue-Labarthe cites the relevant passage from What is Called Thinking? within a footnote and without commentary. Derrida uses this uncomprehended ^ which is to say not explicitly grasped, conceptualized, or commented upon ^ inscription of the passage from Heidegger within the text penned by Lacoue-Labarthe, to compare what is said in that inscription to the concept of denegation implied by the unifying analysis of `Typography'. He argues that what Lacoue-Labarthe describes as Heidegger's denegation of the subject occurs in fact in a thought concerned with thinking, besides the meaning of an onto-theology without which the very concept of denegation could not have been formed, the unthought itself. Concerned with thinking not just this or that unthought, but the structure, the possibility, and the necessity of the unthought in general, its quasi-negativity (the un-thought is un-thought, Heidegger reminds us), which, whatever he says, I'm not sure gathers together each time in the unity of a single place (d'un seul lieu), as if there were only one unthought in which each `great' thought ^ and this precisely would account for its greatness ^ would ¢nd its secret law. But I will return to this shortly.15 Derrida's ¢rst mention in this passage of the word `unthought', in italics, recalls ^ as he explicitly remarks in the parenthesis ^ the way in which Heidegger himself relies on the technique of italics in What is Called Thinking? in order to describe the unthought. He reminds us that Heidegger presents the quasi-negativity of the unthought in terms of a shifting of emphasis from the negative or the `un'- (of the unthought) to the `thought' of the unthought. The unthought is not the opposite or the simple negative of thought ^ it cannot be simply that which is `not thought' by a thinker, or that which is lacking in a thinker's thought. The unthought is, instead, that aspect of thought that becomes apparent through a shifting of a shifting of type. The shifting from the unthought towards the unthought initiated in What is Called Thinking? and repeated by Derrida indicates that the negativity of the unthought is not to be found outside of thought, but rather inhabits `thought' itself. Heidegger's `unthought' is located in a part of thought that is not immediately recognizable as what we call `thought'. The fact that this negativity is presented in terms of a typographical shifting from the un- to the -thought suggests that that element of thought which is not immediately recognizable as thought is the imprinting or actual, active embodiment of thought. The unthought thus can be understood as that which is written,

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pronounced or in some way passed o¡ as `thought', without explicitly being re£ected upon, or without presenting itself as `what we call thought'. The unthought then would be nothing that is recognizable to `us', have nothing to do with `what' we call, but would lie within the calling, and within the materiality of the calling, that is thought. It is not a unifying place then, but that `sensitive place' touched upon by readers who are not preoccupied by questions of `greatness', and who thereby embark upon thought's multiplication. By addressing thought's typography, Derrida con£ates the philosophical with a literariness that cannot be aestheticized, and thereby challenges an overall con£ation of `language, literature, writing' and poetry that characterizes Badiou's Manifesto. In the chapter `Platonic Gesture', for example, Badiou identi¢es himself as the true heir to Plato by distinguishing himself from that `modern, linguistic, aestheticizing, democratic sophistry, [which] exercises its dissolving function, examines the impasses, draws the portrait of that which is contemporary to us', namely the world's disorientation.16 Derrida's interrogation of Heidegger's unthought, however, does not aestheticize or `fetishize' the literary in order to re£ect the world, but rather addresses the letter of thought in order to describe a materiality that is in fact philosophically productive (and not merely dissolving), and that is productive precisely because it refuses a rhetoric of the one, of greatness, and of personi¢cation. The literariness of philosophical speech cannot be aestheticized precisely because it is characterized by an irreducible multiplicity and by procedures of multiplication17: Lacoue-Labarthe proceeds as though the manner in which Heidegger determines the un-thought of Nietzsche or the un-thought in general, for its part implied nothing less than a sole and unique un-thought, that around which or out of which the Heideggerian thought would organize itself. But is this not to repeat, with respect to Heidegger, that of which Lacoue-Labarthe himself accused Heidegger, namely a privileging of a `primary destination of the unthought' ^ that of Nietzsche for Heidegger, and that of Heidegger for Lacoue-Labarthe? But what if, on the other hand, the unthought of Heidegger (for example) was not one, but plural?18 Derrida's o¡-handed `which, whatever he says' in the earlier passage ^ (`[Heidegger's thought is] concerned with thinking . . . the necessity of the unthought in general, its quasi-negativity . . . which, whatever he says, I'm not sure gathers together each time in the unity of a single place . . .') ^ while it seemed to signal a critique of Heidegger, appears in fact to have been directed at LacoueLabarthe's reading of what Heidegger says, and at the conversion of singularity into centralization that takes place there. The passage continues: `And what if [Heidegger's] unthought was believing in the unicity or in the unity of the unthought? I will not make a critique out of my concern, because I do not believe that this gesture of gathering is avoidable. It is always productive and philosophically necessary.' Borrowing the typography used by Heidegger to de¢ne the unthought, Derrida describes Heidegger's own unthought (as opposed to his

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unthought) in terms of belief. If Heidegger associated unity with the unthought, that association took place, Derrida is suggesting, on the level of belief and not of thought. But if the unicity of the unthought occurs in Heidegger's text as the legibility of a possible belief (in the one, expressed in terms of the `unique'), this leaves open the possibility that Heidegger's actual unthought ^ along with the unthought in general ^ itself occurs as plurality. And if Heidegger's own unthought is plural, then it cannot be submitted to the kind of decision for which Lacoue-Labarthe prepares in `Typography' and which he sets forth in Fiction of the Political, a decision regarding `the' relation of Heidegger's thought to his biography, and which would unify thought and life under the aegis of a proper name whose content then could be repeated, paraphrased, and thereby forewarned against. Lacoue-Labarthe may successfully describe a `secret mimetology' inherent in Heidegger's writing on aletheia, but, given the unthought of that writing, such a description could not unify it in a ¢nalizing, juridical way. In this way Derrida's `hesitation' regarding Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis of Heidegger indicates a revision of justice understood in terms of the category of personhood, into a justice understood in terms of the multiple materiality of what has been done, said, or thought. This revision both pre¢gures Badiou's calls for a philosophical break from history and, I would say, re-historicizes philosophy by inscribing a literary materiality within that break. Philosophy is not the re£ection or `determination' of history, but is itself a historical process, and as such is neither dead, of the past, nor external to procedures of justice. In fact it is precisely the historical potential of philosophical thought that is at stake in Heidegger's description of the unthought. In What is Called Thinking? he appeals to the concept of the unthought in order to explain that `proper thinking' takes place as historical production or movement and as a break from re£ecting or merely `viewing history': People still think that what is handed down by tradition (das Ûberlieferte) is something that lies behind us, when in fact it comes toward us in so far as we are handed over to its mercy or destiny (wir ihm ausgeliefert und in es geschickt sind). The merely historical view (historische Ansicht) of tradition and of the movement of history (Geschichtsgang) belongs to that widespread self-deception in which we will remain stuck as long as we have not yet begun to think properly (so lange wir noch nicht eigentlich denken). This selfdeception about history (Geschichte) prevents us from hearing the language of thinkers. We mishear this language because we take it to be mere expression (Ausdruck), in which the views of philosophers are announced. But the language of thinkers says what is. To hear this language is in no case easy, and requires something of which we are rarely capable, namely, recognition (Anerkennen). Recognition consists in allowing a thinker's thought to come to us as something in each case unique (Einziges), never to recur, and inexhaustible, and in allowing this in such a way that the unthought in his thought shakes us up (uns bestÏrzt). The unthought in a thought is not a lack clinging

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to the thought (ein Mangel, der dem Gedachten anhaftet). The un-thought is in each case only as the un-thought.19 To recognize a thinker's language as something other than mere `expression (Ausdruck)' is to let it arrive as unique (Einziges) and as something that cannot be reproduced, exhausted or paraphrased. `Whatever Heidegger says', then, it is not that the unthought is one, or centralizing, but that it is unique, in the sense of a singular event that cannot be mastered by our own, familiar procedures of thought, and above all cannot be organized according to a linear, `merely historical view of tradition'. This uniqueness is de-centralizing insofar as it `shakes us up' both psychologically and historically. Derrida's gloss on this passage indicates that not only is the materiality of a thinker's thought plural, but also the singularity of that thought's event or happening should be understood as plural. And both the materiality and the singularity of a thinker's thought are plural insofar as they by de¢nition inscribe a multivocal, non-linear response as their legacy. As Heidegger explains a few pages earlier, in the context of how to read Plato: All true thought . . . remains . . . multivalent (mehrdeutig). This multivalence is never merely the residue of a still unachieved formal-logical univocity (formallogischen Eindeutigkeit) that actually should be aimed at but has not been reached. Multivalence is much rather the element in which thinking must move in order to be strict thought. Metaphorically spoken: for the ¢sh, the depths and expanses of the water, its currents and pools, its warm and cold layers are the element of its varied mobility (vielfÌltige Beweglichkeit). If the ¢sh is deprived of the fullness of its element, if it is dragged onto the dry sand, then all that is left to it is to wriggle, thrash about, and come to an end (verenden). This is why we always must seek out thinking and its thought in the element of its multivalence; otherwise, everything remains closed to us.20 If Derrida's reading of the passage on the unthought implies an appreciation of this passage, the question to ask, with respect to Badiou's critique, is why thought's multivalence does not amount to an indi¡erent multiplicity, why it is not the mere `residue of a still unachieved formal-logical univocity which should be aimed at but has not been reached'. For one thing, the multivalence need not be understood in terms of an abstract, failing, £ailing movement towards indi¡erence in the face of no `one'. Multivalence can be taken to name the communal or political context of actual thought, i.e. the fact that thought does not take place in and as one voice, but rather as the voices of many. That thought takes place in this way does not mean that no agreements, consensus, or reconciliations are possible, but rather that such acts of agreement themselves always take place, provisionally, against a larger backdrop of ongoing or `mobile' multiplicity. Thus the metaphor to which Heidegger appeals emphasizes both an environmental situation and a drama of survival. For Heidegger, there is no survival, for the ¢sh, for thought or for `us', that does not occur in a situation of multivalence and mobility.

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In a footnote to his analysis of Lacoue-Labarthe, Derrida also casts his proposal regarding the unthought's plurality in situational terms, which is to say in terms of a dislocation of the locus or place as such: This is what Lacoue-Labarthe respects perhaps a bit more than I do: . . . unicity, and the a¤nity between this unicity and thought itself. On this point, my slight respect or that which torments my respect can signify two things: either that I do not know (how to recognize) what thought is authentically and am not su¤ciently concerned about it, or else that I do not exclude some residue of an un-thought in this Heideggerian determination of the un-thought, which still holds too much to the unique place (lieu) of gathering. And what if one called thought (but perhaps another name would be needed) the dislocation, even the desistance, of this unicity or this unity, of this gathering place? For one could show that this question regularly traverses Heidegger's topology of Being and everything he gathers under the words Ort and ErÎrterung: that is to say, gathering as such.21 Responding to the charge that he does not know or su¤ciently care about what thought is, Derrida proposes that what is `lacking' (and at the same time determinate) in Heidegger's description of the unthought is precisely a restriction of the unthought ^ and therefore of `thought' ^ by a concept of localization. This directly challenges Badiou's description of Derrida's understanding of `language, literature [and] writing' as the only possible `representatives' of an `a priori determination of experience' and as containing or marking the `preserved place of a clearing of Being'.22 It supplements the description, in the main body of `Desistance', of the material unthought or `sensitive place' of reading as inherently plural, with the suggestion that, on account of this inherent plurality, thought itself can be understood in terms of a dislocation of the one and of the uni¢ed `place'. By describing both thought and Lacoue-Labarthe's `desistance' as dislocation, Derrida (1) avoids the psychological rhetoric of subjectivity that emerges in `Typography', and (2) casts the emphasis on multiplicity in terms of a mobile, active, relation to place. Dislocation, in other words, names the mobility and not the erasure of `place', implicitly retranslating place into something like `situation': according to Derrida's proposal, `thought' would not re£ect or be re£ective of place, and place would not serve as a re£ection of identity; place instead acts as an inscription of the unthought.23 Reading Derrida with Heidegger, we can say that thought is to follow ^ or become dislocated by ^ the inscription (as opposed to the canonical paraphrase) of an other's thought and by the pluralities inherent in that inscription. To think is to become dislocated, from any identi¢able site, process of gathering or of uni¢cation, whether this be canonical instruction, cultural identity, or the culturally agreed upon imperative of locating a thinker within the alleged coherency of a certain space and time. As (situational) dislocation then, thought is also a matter of survival, and as such in itself initiates certain imperatives, such as a discourse on justice. Plato's description in the Republic of the problematization of justice helps to explain why.

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3.

Dislocating dike

But, one will say, to whom would an obligation of justice ever entail a commitment . . . to whom and to what if not to the life of a living being? Is there ever justice, commitment of justice, or responsibility in general which has to answer for itself (for the living self) before anything else, in the last resort, than the life of a living being, whether one means by that natural life or the life of the spirit? Indeed. The objection seems irrefutable. But the irrefutable itself supposes that this justice carries life beyond the present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on (sur-vie), namely a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any actuality. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them. One cannot not have to, one must not not be able to reckon with them, which are more than one: the more than one/no longer one (le plus d'un). ( Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 1993)24 Derrida's emphasis on the non-aesthetic literariness of philosophical thought, its inherent multiplicity and dislocating historicity reiterates the concept of justice that emerges in the ¢rst book of Plato's Republic ^ a book that has been submerged by the interests of literary critics (who along with Lacoue-Labarthe tend to focus on the topic of mimesis) and philosophers (who tend to focus on the theory of the state) alike. If the Heideggerian unthought and its multiplicity is the `sensitive . . . point of incomprehension' around which `Typography' is organized ^ or within which it becomes disorganized ^ part of this (dis)organization is a similar, un-comprehended inscription of what Heidegger has to say about the meaning of dike or `justice' in Plato's Republic. By simply reciting Heidegger's translation, in the Nietzsche lectures, of dike as FÏgung or articulation, Lacoue-Labarthe subtly asserts that Plato, along with Heidegger, understands dike as ordering, and more speci¢cally, as the totalized e¡ect of an act of ordering, as the system that results from the act of `putting together' (sus-histanai). In a passage from the Nietzsche lectures that is cited in both `Typography' and in The Fiction of the Political, Heidegger argues that Plato's Republic aims to show that the sustaining ground and determining essence of all political being consists in nothing less than the `theoretical', i.e. in essential knowledge of dike and dikaiosyne. One translates this Greek word as `justice (Gerechtigkeit)' and thereby misses its proper sense, in so far as what then is named is transposed immediately into the realm of the moral or even the merely `legal (Rechtlichen)'. Dike however is a metaphysical and not an originally moral concept; it names Being with respect to the articulation of all being in terms of essence (er nennt das Sein hinsichtlich der wesensmÌssigen FÏgung alles Seienden). It is true that dike enters the twilight of morality precisely on account of Platonic philosophy; this makes it all the more necessary however

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to hold fast to the metaphysical sense, since otherwise the Greek backgrounds of this discussion about the state do not become visible. Knowledge of dike, of the laws of the articulation of the Being of being, is philosophy (Das Wissen von der dike, den FÏgungsgesetzen des Seins des Seienden, ist die Philosophie). The decisive insight of the entire discussion about the state thus reads: dei tous philosophous basileuein (archein); it is essentially necessary that philosophers be the rulers. (Cf. Politeia, Bk. V, 473)25 When Lacoue-Labarthe recites or alludes to Heidegger's translation of dike as FÏgung, he in fact presents his own translation of this translation, one that understands articulation or ordering as the-order-that-results. This enables Lacoue-Labarthe to oppose dike-as-order (rather than the polis-as-order) to his own concept of mimesis as primarily performative and destabilizing. Whereas Socrates expels mimesis from his state (polis), for Lacoue-Labarthe this amounts to severing of mimesis and dike: `. . . what is at stake in the expulsion of mimesis is dike . . . the just installation and joining (FÏgung) of being in its totality: systematization itself '.26 Since the mimesis^dike opposition also comes to be cast in terms of the opposition between a desisting subjectivity and an unjust state, however, Lacoue-Labarthe's argument ultimately, implicitly recuperates justice on the side of the subject. Indeed, Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis of Heidegger, if it does not explicitly lay claim to a concept of `justice', does so implicitly, at least by way of addressing the injustice in Heidegger's biography. And the subtlety of the manoeuvre in `Typography' becomes apparent in Fiction of the Political, whose rhetoric of ¢nality implicitly returns to a concept of justice as putting into order, or settling of accounts. The rapid con£ation of dike and the state that Lacoue-Labarthe ¢nds in Heidegger as a re£ection of what occurs in the Republic, however, obscures the complexity of the way in which the political discussion in Plato's text is contextualized by Socrates' initial revelation of dike as above all a problem for thought or, to borrow Derrida's terminology, as an experience of dislocation and survival. This contextualization is both ignored and highlighted by Heidegger's insistence in the Nietzsche lectures that we understand Plato's discussion of art in this text speci¢cally as a discussion of art within the context of politics, and that the discussion of politics in turn must be understood as a discussion of politics within the context of knowledge. While mimesis clearly is approached in terms of politics in Plato's Republic, politics is introduced as a means of resolving a fundamental incomprehensibility or theoretical breakdown with respect to dike. According to the course of the narrative, dike is the main topic of this text, with politics appearing as a secondary term that is invoked as a provisional, allegorical solution for what the interlocutors fail to understand about `dike itself '. Within Plato's Republic, the political does not, as Heidegger argues, consist in or result from a knowledge of dike.27 Instead, it is a knowledge or theorizing of politics, a staging of the organization of a state-made-of-words, that somehow is supposed to maintain a relation to an ever elusive, unknowable `justice'. The intervention of Derrida's `Desistance' into the debates surrounding Heidegger

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and Heidegger's relation to Plato thus obliquely raises the following questions. How is it, in fact, that dike becomes a topic of discussion, that Socrates retranslates it from a self-evident allusion (made by the aging patriarch Cephalus) to an irresolvable problem (for the next generation)? And how is it that Socrates appeals to political theory or a vision of the polis in order to resolve the problem? Plato begins the narrative that transforms dike from a word into a concept by depicting, ¢rst of all, a series of dislocations. The ¢rst, a simultaneously geographical, political and cultural dislocation, is announced in the ¢rst sentence, in which Socrates relates that he `went down yesterday to the Peiraeus', and in his ensuing description of what will turn out to be an endless day-trip he made with Glaucon outside of Athens ^ the state seat ^ to the liminal, port city, in order to observe the style of a new (or again liminal) kind of cultic celebration.28 A few sentences later we read of Socrates' dislocation from his own, intentional movement; upon leaving the Peiraeus to return home, he feels a tug from behind, made by the slave of Polemarchus, who then sets about convincing Socrates to change his plans and stay there for the evening. Their exchange itself is characterized by a kind of physiognomic dislocation in which jest and camaraderie always threaten to masquerade as battle ( polemos) and compulsion. This staging in turn gives way to the discussion between Socrates and Cephalus, Polemarchus' father, in which Socrates challenges the concept of dike invoked by this representative of Greek tradition. In response to Socrates' inquiry into the greatest advantage of his vast wealth, Cephalus describes dike in terms of a settling of accounts, the purpose of which is to overcome what he calls the otherwise `mortally wandering judgement (thnaton polustrophon gnoman)', the judgement or mind that strays anxiously and increasingly as it comes closer to its own death.29 According to Cephalus, the greatest advantage of his wealth is that it enables him to face death and inhabit its `threshold' knowing he will not be punished in the afterlife for having left behind unsettled debts or uncorrected wrongs (adikemata).30 His wealth thereby enables him to believe, both retrospectively and proleptically, that he has led his life piously and justly (dikaoios).31 Socrates challenges this understanding of dike by e¡ectively replacing Cephalus' individualistic, totalizing model of dike with a non-totalizable, relational one.32 The challenge is e¡ective insofar as it apparently causes Cephalus to leave the room and return to ritual prayer, handing the conversation over to the next generation. Socrates does this by invoking the example of the friend (ho philos), a ¢gure whose £eshand-blood, physiognomic phenomenality irreducibly challenges Cephalus' accounting-ledger model of justice and its power to ward o¡ the spectre of death. Socrates asks, what if a friend lent you his weapons, and, between asking for them back, went mad? Would it be just then to return them, or even, to speak the truth? `Speaking of this very thing, justice, are we to a¤rm thus without quali¢cation that it is truth-telling and paying back what one has received from anyone, or may these very actions sometimes perform ( poiein) justice and

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sometimes injustice? I mean, for example, as everyone I presume would admit, if one took over weapons from a friend (para philou) who was in his right mind and then the lender should go mad and demand them back, that we ought not to return them in that case and that he who did return them would not be acting justly. Nor would he who chose to speak nothing but the truth to one who was in that state be acting justly.' `What you say is correct' [, Cephalus] said.33 With this example, Socrates e¡ectively displaces the question of dike from the ¢gure of an isolated individual taking care of his accounts (for which the relevant question would be something like, `what is the best way to manage one's accounts?') to an interrelational situation characterized by the physiognomic ambiguity staged in the earlier encounter between Polemarchus and himself. Cephalus' model of justice recommends a fairly simple formula for ethical behaviour: the easiest way to keep one's a¡airs in order is to maintain enough wealth to do so. Socrates' response on the other hand points to the implication within each other of justice, power and friendship, or what he later will refer to as a situational, not-yet-theorized, pre-politicized `living-together (xynoikia)'.34 According to Socrates, the ethics of accounting are complicated by the fact that the possibility of deception and confusion is inscribed eternally within the very phenomenality that draws us to the friend (ho philos) and that makes the latter distinct from a simple, abstract concept of the law or of `right'. Deception, in other words, is inscribed in the phenomenality of justice. To borrow Heidegger's terminology, the friend, in his or her materiality, bears the multiplicity of the unthought along with the dislocating consequences of that multiplicity. To live in the world ^ as opposed to beyond it, in solipsistic reclusion ^ is to experience the possible transformation of friends into enemies, discourse into madness, and the fact that statements of morality and the intellect are informed by imbalances in power. Rather than a question of personal accounting, putting one's mind to sleep, and warding o¡ the negativity of death, then, dike for Socrates is a question of one's open-ended or multiple relations to others and of the critical examination that multiplicity requires. By the time Socrates declares at the end of book 1 that he does not know what dike is, he has nevertheless e¡ectively transposed it from a rhetoric of stability and isolated individuality or individualized being-towards-death, to a question of how one should relate to one's fateful FÏgung, to one's articulation to a certain space and time and to the many others, `living' and `dead', who happen to be articulated there as well.35 The dialogue continues into a second book because, although Socrates is content with this quasi-negative thought of justice, of the madness within friendship and the invisible within the visible, his younger interlocutors are not. Having had Socrates e¡ectively take the self-evidence of dike away from them, they demand, at the beginning of book 2, that he return it to them in some, coherently phenomenal form. The dialogical agon that ensues for nine more books is one in which Socrates o¡ers a series of coherent images, each of which becomes undone by procedures of examination or `thought' that by

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de¢nition refuse to accept the self-identity of form. This goes for the overriding image of the polis as well. In the second book of the Republic, Socrates proposes that the larger size of the polis might make dike legible, unlike the meagre individual, which by this point is explicitly recognized as an insu¤cient model. At the same time however, Socrates makes clear ^ as he does throughout the dialogue ^ that the polis here serves an allegorical, and not a mimetic, re£ective or simply theoretical function. Both the extension and the intellectual risks of this allegorical method are described in the following passage from book 4: `The proper functioning of the money-making class, the helpers and the guardians, each doing its own work in the state . . . would be justice and would render the city just.' `I think the case is thus and not otherwise,' he said. `Let us not yet a¤rm it so ¢xedly,' I said, `but if this form when applied to the individual man, is accepted there also as a de¢nition of justice, we will then concede the point ^ for what else will there be to say? But if not, then we will look for something else. But now let us work out the inquiry in which we supposed that, if we found some larger thing that contained justice and viewed it there, we should more easily discover its nature in the individual man. And we agreed that this larger thing is the state, and so we constructed the best state in our power, well knowing that in the good state it would of course be found. What, then, we thought we saw there we must refer back to the individual and, if it is con¢rmed, all will be well. But if something di¡erent manifests itself in the individual, we will return again to the state and test it there and it may be that, by examining them side by side and rubbing them against one another, as it were, from the ¢re-sticks we may cause the spark of justice to £ash forth, and when it is thus revealed con¢rm it in our own minds.' `Well,' he said, `that seems a sound method and that is what we must do.'36 If Glaucon considers this a sound and compelling method, Socrates' description indicates a complexity and danger inherent in the search for a phenomenal version of justice. Socrates' `sound' pyrotechnic method implies that this phenomenalization may very well result in the immolation of the two terms upon which it depends ^ that of the individual and that of the `good state'. His description of this method at the same time shows how any `vision' of dike requires understanding it as in between the images of the polis and the individual. The rhetoric that situates justice in between the polis and the individual, phenomenalization and speech, possibility and actuality, also appears in the famous passage from book 5, which, rather than claiming directly and simply that philosophers must rule, as Heidegger puts it, casts the idea of politieia ^ the narrative's title ^ as irreducibly in between knowledge and power:37 `If,' I said, `philosophers do not become kings in our cities or those whom we now call kings do not have the power to knowingly and su¤ciently philosophize, and if these things ^ power, politics and philosophy ^ do not coincide, and the many (hai pollai) natures of men who pursue each one of these apart

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from the others are not compulsorily excluded from our cities, there can be no rest from evils, Glaucon my friend, neither in our cities, nor for the human race as such. Nor, until this happens, will this citizenship (politeia) we are now describing in words come to be possible and see the light of day (phos heliou idei ). But this is what has, for a long time, kept me from speaking out, as I knew it would be to speak against prevailing opinion. For it is di¤cult to see that there is no other way to achieve happiness, either for the individual or for the public.'38 What Heidegger in the Nietzsche lectures expresses as an imperative, Socrates expresses as a desire, and more speci¢cally, as the desire for achieving happiness by attaining rest from the di¤culties that go along with the actual disjunction between philosophy and power, mind and phenomena, a disjunction represented here by the personi¢ed ¢gures of the philosopher on the one hand and the ruler on the other. Moreover, Socrates does not express this desire in straightforward, positive terms. He expresses it in a doubly negative formulation which puts more emphasis on the impossibility of the articulation of knowledge and power, and on the impossibility of the phenomenalization of the politeia or citizenship under discussion, than on its necessity or even possibility: if philosophical thought and political power are not brought together, there will be no happiness, no rest from the bad. This description of the articulation of philosophy and political power in the extreme terms of e¡ectively ending the experience of evil or of the bad as such for the entire human race (toi anthropinoi genei ), for ever, indicates the fantastic status of the idea, and that the happiness with which Glaucon is concerned is a temporally suspect and inherently impossible concept. This passage names politeia, in other words, as the permanent disjunction between philosophy and power, and does so with the phenomenalizing rhetoric of `the light of day': politeia or citizenship is that which will never see the light of day, although it can be described in terms of the disjunction of philosophy and power, or the multiple ways in which each is dislocated from the other (appearing in this passage as `the many natures of men who pursue each one of these apart from the others'). Citizenship, in other words, becomes actual as the description of the multiple ways in which philosophy and power become disjunct. Read together, this passage along with the earlier ones from books 1 and 4, indicate that Plato's Politeia, rather than advocating (or simply critiquing) the rule of politics by philosophy, demonstrates the way in which dike, and more speci¢cally, a discourse on justice, also becomes legible via a re£ection on the irreducible disjunction of knowledge and power. These passages indicate that justice is impossible, that is, as long as we understand it in terms of balancing, equating, and settling accounts, in terms of, as both Heidegger and Derrida would say, the merely legal or `right'. But the very thought of justice in fact becomes possible, precisely because such procedures of settling accounts always remain to some extent undone, historically, materially, and multiply. Justice becomes `visible', that is, in its historical impossibility, which is at the

168

Encountering Derrida

same time the possibility of its thought. As Derrida writes at the beginning of Specters of Marx, justice is indeed concerned with the value of life, but this value becomes a concern only on account of the death that inhabits life and makes life into a question of survival. To conceive the survival that is thoughtful living or, one might say, `living well', and that is implied in the concept of justice, one must speak in terms of plurality, and of a politics of the `more than one'. For both Derrida and Socrates the emergence of multiplicity coincides with that of `justice', and as such is by de¢nition not indi¡erent. Derrida's interest in the multiplicity of the `unthought' does not imply that the ideas of revolution, progress, humanity and science are outdated, but instead initiates the interrogation of their `dating', in time and in the world, and the way in which such ideas remain in con£ict but also at play with the multiplicity such `dating' implies. If Derrida developed a philosophy of literary criticism, a philosophy of thought's dislocation from its material conditions, of what has been at play in the work of literary critics for millennia, going back to Socrates and his interrogation of Cephalus, it was not at the expense of thought or a `concern' for thought, but in order to account for the complexity of thought's production, generation, or multiplication. Instead of associating his work with the `postmodern' idea that there is an `irreducible plurality of registers and languages' so diverse that `no great idea can totalize them or reconcile them', I would argue that Derrida's reading of Heidegger, and its emphasis on material multiplicity, rejects the value of `greatness', but not the processes of provisional totalization and reconciliation which are necessary to survive. It is the rhetoric of `greatness', on the other hand, that e¡aces the material multiplicity within which provisional, necessary acts of reconciliation take place, and that e¡aces the situational fact of evaluations such as `greatness' and the fact that such evaluations are always themselves part of dramas of survival ^ or, to put things slightly less dramatically, part of the `politics of scienti¢c and philosophical inquiry'. While Derrida's philosophy of literary criticism may imply attention to the non-great, the small, and the very small, its linking of multiplicity to the imperatives of justice and of survival ultimately exclude it from the status of a merely dissolving, `postmodern' discourse.

Notes

Introduction 1. 2.

Derrida, J. (2004), `Countersignature'. Paragraph 27 (2), 7^42. See 17^19. Derrida, J. (2001), `I Have a Taste for the Secret'. In Derrida, J. and Ferraris, M., A Taste for the Secret (eds) Donis, G. and Webb, D. London: Polity Press. See pp. 50^1. 3. Ibid. 4. Derrida, J. (1992) `A ``Madness'' Must Watch Over Thinking'. In Points . . . Interviews 1974^1994, ed. E. Weber, trans. P. Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 346. 5. `I Have a Taste for the Secret', p. 50. 6. Derrida, J. (2004), `Punctuations; The Time of a Thesis'. In Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. J. Plug et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 113^ 28. See p. 123.

Chapter 1: Foundations 1.

See for example `Circonfession', in Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), period 32. 2. This paper was originally written for the conference `Derrida: pasiones institucionales', held in Mexico City, November 2005. A revised version was presented at the University of Pe¨cs (Hungary) in November 2006. 3. See `Mochlos, ou le con£it des faculte¨s', in Du droit a© la philosophie (Paris: Galile¨e, 1990), pp. 397^438 (p. 422), and `Ulysse Gramophone: l'oui-dire de Joyce', in Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galile¨e, 1987), pp. 94¡. 4. De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 69. My translation. 5. Marges, p. 73. 6. Here as elsewhere in Derrida, it is interesting to compare these insights with what is to be found in Rousseau: in the latter's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau presents an interestingly sceptical account of the relation between the origin of language and the origin of society, and puts the problem of the origin of the institution of language thus: The ¢rst language of man, the most universal and energetic, and the only one he needed until he had to persuade an assembly, is the cry of nature. As this cry was dragged out only by a kind of instinct on occasions of urgency, to implore help in great danger, or relief in violent pain, it was not of any great use in the ordinary course of life, when more moderate sentiments reign. When men's ideas began to

170

Notes spread and multiply, and a tighter communication was established among them, they sought for more numerous signs and a more extensive language: they multiplied the in£exions of the voice, and joined to it gestures that are by their nature more expressive, and whose meaning depends less on an anterior disposition. So they expressed visible and mobile objects by gesture, and those that strike the hearing by imitative sounds: but as gesture can scarcely indicate any but present objects, or ones easy to describe, and visible actions; and as it is not always of use, since darkness or the interposition of a body render it useless, and as it demands attention rather than exciting it; one came round in the end to substituting for it vocal articulations which, without having the same relation to certain ideas, are better able to represent them all, as instituted signs [my emphasis]; a substitution that can only happen with common consent, and in a manner di¤cult to realize for men whose coarse organs had as yet not been exercised, and more di¤cult still to conceive for itself, since this unanimous agreement had to be motivated, and speech seems to have been very necessary to establish the use of speech. ( Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres comple© tes, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1958^96), III, pp. 148^9; my translation)

7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique ge¨ ne¨ rale, ed. T. de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1976), p. 26 (all translations mine): D'abord, il n'est pas prouve¨ que la fonction du langage, telle qu'elle se manifeste quand nous parlons, soit entie©rement naturelle, c'est-a©-dire que notre appareil vocal soit fait pour parler comme nos jambes pour marcher. Les linguistes sont loin d'eªtre d'accord sur ce point. Ainsi pour Whitney, qui assimile la langue a© une institution sociale au meªme titre que toutes les autres, c'est par hasard, pour de simples raisons de commodite¨, que nous nous servons de l'appareil vocal comme instrument de la langue: les hommes auraient pu aussi bien choisir le geste et employer des images visuelles au lieu d'images acoustiques. Sans doute cette the©se est trop absolue; la langue n'est pas une institution sociale en tous points semblable aux autres; de plus, Whitney va trop loin quand il dit que notre choix est tombe¨ par hasard sur les organes vocaux; ils nous e¨taient bien en quelque sorte impose¨s par la nature. Mais sur le point essentiel le linguiste ame¨ricain nous semble avoir raison: la langue est une convention, et la nature du signe dont on est convenu est indi¡e¨rente. La question de l'appareil vocal est donc secondaire dans le proble©me du langage. 8. `[La langue] est la partie sociale du langage, exte¨rieure a© l'individu, qui a© lui seul ne peut ni la cre¨er ni la modi¢er; elle n'existe qu'en vertu d'une sorte de contrat passe¨ entre les membres de la communaute¨' (CLG, 31). 9. `Par rapport a© la communaute¨ linguistique qui l'emploie, [le signi¢ant] n'est pas libre, il est impose¨ . . . la masse elle-meªme ne peut exercer sa souverainete¨ sur un seul mot; elle est lie¨e a© la langue telle qu'elle est.' 10. CLG, 104: La langue ne peut donc plus eªtre assimile¨e a© un contrat pur et simple, et c'est justement de ce coªte¨ que le signe linguistique est particulie©rement inte¨ressant a© e¨tudier; car si l'on veut de¨montrer que la loi admise dans une collectivite¨ est une chose que l'on subit, et non une re©gle librement consentie, c'est bien la langue qui en o¡re la preuve la plus e¨clatante.

Notes

171

11. CLG, 107^8: La langue . . . est a© chaque moment l'a¡aire de tout le monde; re¨pandue dans une masse et manie¨e par elle, elle est une chose dont tous les individus se servent toute la journe¨e. Sur ce point, on ne peut e¨tablir aucune comparaison entre elle et les autres institutions. Les prescriptions d'un code, les rites d'une religion, les signaux maritimes, etc., n'occupent jamais qu'un certain nombre d'individus a© la fois et pendant un temps limite¨; la langue, au contraire, chacun y participe a© tout instant, et c'est pourquoi elle subit sans cesse l'in£uence de tous. Ce fait capital su¤t a© montrer l'impossibilite¨ d'une re¨volution. La langue est de toutes les institutions sociales celle qui o¡re le moins de prise aux initiatives. 12. CLG, 110: Les autres institutions humaines ^ les coutumes, les lois, etc. ^ sont toutes fonde¨es, a© des degre¨s divers, sur les rapports naturels des choses; il y a en elles une convenance ne¨cessaire entre les moyens employe¨s et les ¢ns poursuivies . . . La langue, au contraire, n'est limite¨e en rien dans le choix de ses moyens, car on ne voit pas ce qui empeªcherait d'associer une ide¨e quelconque avec une suite quelconque de sons. Pour bien faire sentir que la langue est une institution pure, Whitney a fort justement insiste¨ sur le caracte©re arbitraire des signes, et par la©, il a place¨ la linguistique sur son axe ve¨ritable. Mais il n'est pas alle¨ jusqu'au bout et n'a pas vu que ce caracte©re arbitraire se¨pare radicalement la langue de toutes les autres institutions. 13. `Si ``e¨criture'' signi¢e inscription et d'abord institution durable d'un signe (et c'est le seul noyau irre¨ductible du concept d'e¨criture), l'e¨criture en ge¨ne¨ral couvre tout le champ des signes linguistiques' (De la grammatologie, p. 65). 14. Du droit a© la philosophie, pp. 434^5: La question du droit du droit, du fondement ou de la fondation du droit n'est pas une question juridique. Et la re¨ponse ne peut y eªtre ni simplement le¨gale ni simplement ille¨gale, ni simplement the¨orique ou constative ni simplement pratique ou performative. Elle ne peut avoir lieu ni dans ni hors de l'Universite¨ que la tradition nous a le¨gue¨e. Cette re¨ponse et cette responsabilite¨ quant au fondement ne peuvent avoir lieu qu'en termes de fondation. Or la fondation d'un droit n'est pas plus juridique ou le¨gitime que la fondation d'une Universite¨ n'est un e¨ve¨nement universitaire, intra-universitaire. S'il ne peut pas y avoir de concept pur de l'Universite¨, s'il ne peut y avoir au-dedans de l'Universite¨ un concept pur et purement rationnel de l'Universite¨ c'est tout simplement, pour le dire de fac°on un peu elliptique en raison de l'heure et avant qu'on ne ferme les portes ou ne le©ve la se¨ance, parce que l'Universite¨ est fonde¨ e. Un e¨ve¨nement de fondation ne peut eªtre simplement compris dans la logique de ce qu'il fonde. La fondation d'un droit n'est pas un e¨ve¨nement juridique. L'origine du principe de raison, qui est aussi implique¨ a© l'origine de l'Universite¨, n'est pas rationnelle, la fondation d'une institution universitaire n'est pas un e¨ve¨nement universitaire. L'anniversaire d'une fondation peut l'eªtre, non la fondation elle-meªme. Bien qu'elle ne soit pas simplement ille¨gale, une telle fondation ne rele©ve pas encore de la le¨galite¨ interne qu'elle institue. Bien que rien ne paraisse plus philosophique que la fondation d'une institution philosophique ^ qu'il s'agisse de l'Universite¨, d'une

172

Notes e¨cole ou d'un de¨partement de philosophie ^ la fondation de l'institution philosophique en tant que telle ne peut eªtre de¨ ja© strictement philosophique. Nous sommes ici en ce lieu ou© la responsabilite¨ fondatrice passe par des actes ou des performances ^ qui ne sont pas seulement des actes de langage au sens strict ou e¨troit, et qui, pour n'eªtre e¨videmment plus des e¨nonce¨s constatifs re¨gle¨s sur une certaine de¨termination de la ve¨rite¨, ne sont peut-eªtre pas plus simplement des performatifs linguistiques; cette dernie©re opposition (constatif/performatif ) reste encore trop intimement programme¨e par la loi philosophico-universitaire ^ autrement dit par la raison ^ qu'il s'agit ici d'interroger. Une telle interrogation n'appartiendrait plus simplement a© une sce©ne philosophique, ce ne serait plus une question the¨orique de type socratique, kantien, husserlien etc. Elle serait inse¨parable de nouveaux actes de fondation.

15. Page 34: L'origine de l'autorite¨, la fondation ou le fondement, la position de la loi ne pouvant par de¨¢nition s'appuyer ¢nalement que sur elles-meªmes, elles sont ellesmeªmes une violence sans fondement. Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'elles sont injustes en soi, au sens de `ille¨gales' ou `ille¨gitimes'. Elles ne sont ni le¨gales ni ille¨gales en leur moment fondateur. Elles exce©dent l'opposition du fonde¨ et du non-fonde¨, comme de tout fondationnalisme ou de tout anti-fondationnalisme. Meªme si le succe©s de performatifs fondateurs d'un droit (par exemple et c'est plus qu'un exemple, d'un E¨tat comme garant d'un droit) supposent des conditions et des conventions pre¨alables (par exemple dans l'espace national ou international), la meªme limite `mystique' resurgira a© l'origine suppose¨e desdites conditions, re©gles ou conventions ^ et de leur interpre¨tation dominante. 16. In the only example of which I am aware of Derrida himself using the syntagm `institution de l'institution', this `paradox' is clearly linked to the later thematics of messianicity, justice, faith and the performative. See Foi et savoir, ½½21^2, and especially the following: `Premier nom: le messianique, ou la messianicite¨ sans messianisme. Ce serait l'ouverture a© l'avenir ou a© la venue de l'autre comme ave© nement de la justice, mais sans horizon d'attente et sans pre¨ ¢guration prophe¨ tique . . . Un invincible de¨ sir de justice se lie a© cette attente. Par de¨ ¢nition, celle-ci n'est et ne doit eªtre assure¨e de rien, par aucun savoir, aucune conscience, aucune pre¨ visibilite¨ , aucun programme comme tels . . . Cette messianicite¨ de¨ pouille¨ e de tout, comme il se doit, cette foi sans dogme qui s'avance dans le risque de la nuit absolu, on ne la contiendra dans aucune opposition rec° ue de notre tradition, par exemple l'opposition entre raison et mystique. Elle s'annonce partout ou©, re¨ £e¨ chissant sans £e¨ chir, une analyse purement rationnelle fait appara|ª tre ce paradoxe, a© savoir que le fondement de la loi ^ la loi de la loi, l'institution de l'institution, l'origine de la constitution ^ est un e¨ve¨nement û performatif ý qui ne peut appartenir a© l'ensemble qu'il fonde, inaugure ou justi¢e. Tel e¨ ve¨ nement est injusti¢able dans la logique de ce qu'il aura ouvert. II est la de¨ cision de l'autre dans l'inde¨ cidable.' [First name: the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic pre¢guration . . . An invincible desire for justice is linked to this expectation. By de¢nition, it is and should be certain of nothing, through no knowledge, no consciousness, no foreseeability, no programme as such . . . This messianicity stripped of everything, as it should

Notes

173

be, this faith without dogma that moves forward in the risk of absolute darkness, will not be contained in any received opposition of our tradition, for example the opposition between reason and mysticism. It announces itself everywhere that, re£ecting without wavering, a purely rational analysis shows up this paradox, namely that the foundation of the law ^ the law of the law, the institution of the institution, the origin of the constitution ^ is a `performative' event that cannot belong to the set of events that it founds, inaugurates or justi¢es. Such an event is unjusti¢able in the logic of what it will have opened up. It is the decision of the other in the undecidable. (My translation)] 17. `La loi est toujours la loi d'une re¨pe¨tition, et la re¨pe¨tition est toujours la soumission a© une loi [Law is always the law of a repetition, and repetition is always subjection to a law]', La dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 141. 18. See my Frontie© res kantiennes (Paris: Minuit, 2000), chapters 1 and 2. 19. More radically still: `If it were possible that the Sovereign, considered as such, should have the executive power, right and fact would be so confused that one would no longer know what is law and what is not, and the body politic would soon fall prey to the violence against which it was instituted' (Ibid., p. 432). Politics, we might want to say, lives and dies in the separation of fact and right. 20. Cf. too: Tout cela renvoie, par-dela© l'opposition nature/culture, a© une opposition survenue entre physis et nomos, physis et techne© dont l'ultime fonction est peut-eªtre de de¨ river l'historicite¨; et, paradoxalement, de ne reconna|ª tre ses droits a© l'histoire, a© la production, a© l'institution, etc., que sous la forme de l'arbitraire et sur un fond de naturalisme. Mais laissons provisoirement cette question ouverte: peuteªtre ce geste qui pre¨side en ve¨rite¨ a© l'institution de la me¨taphysique, est-il inscrit aussi dans le concept d'histoire et meªme dans le concept de temps. [All of this refers, beyond the nature/culture opposition, to a supervening opposition between physis and nomos, physis and tekhne the ultimate function of which is perhaps to derive historicity; and, paradoxically, to recognize the rights of history, production, institution, etc., only in the form of the arbitrary and against a background of naturalism. But let us leave this question provisionally open: perhaps this gesture that in truth presides over the institution of metaphysics is also inscribed in the concept of history and even in the concept of time.] (p. 50) Also: Cette explication de l'`usurpation' n'est pas seulement empirique dans sa forme, elle est proble¨matique dans son contenu, elle se re¨fe©re a© une me¨taphysique et a© une vieille physiologie des faculte¨s sensibles sans cesse de¨mentie par la science, comme par l'expe¨rience du langage et du corps propre comme langage. Elle fait imprudemment de la visibilite¨ l'e¨le¨ment sensible, simple et essentiel de l'e¨criture. Surtout, en conside¨rant l'audible comme le milieu naturel dans lequel la langue doit naturellement de¨couper et articuler ses signes institue¨s, y exerc°ant ainsi son arbitraire, cette explication oªte toute possibilite¨ a© quelque rapport naturel entre parole et e¨criture au moment meªme ou© elle l'a¤rme. Elle brouille donc les notions de nature et d'institution dont elle se sert constamment, au lieu de les conge¨dier de¨libe¨re¨ment, ce qu'il faudrait sans doute commencer par faire. [This explanation of the `usurpation' is not only empirical in its form, it is problematic in its content, referring to a metaphysics and an old physiology of the

174

Notes sensory faculties which is constantly belied by science, as it is by the experience of language and of the body proper as language. It imprudently makes of visibility the sensory, simple and essential element of writing. Above all, by considering the audible as the natural milieu in which language must naturally carve out and articulate its instituted signs, thus exercising its arbitrariness in that milieu, this explanation removes all possibility of any natural relation between speech and writing at the very moment that it asserts it. It thus scrambles the notions of nature and institution that it uses constantly, instead of deliberately dismissing them, which one should no doubt begin by doing.] (pp. 62^3) And, most trenchantly perhaps: Si `e¨criture' signi¢e inscription et d'abord institution durable d'un signe (et c'est le seul noyau irre¨ductible du concept d'e¨criture), l'e¨criture en ge¨ne¨ral couvre tout le champ des signes linguistiques. Dans ce champ peut appara|ª tre ensuite une certaine espe©ce de signi¢ants institue¨s, `graphiques' au sens e¨troit et de¨rive¨ de ce mot, re¨gle¨s par un certain rapport a© d'autres signi¢ants institue¨s, donc `e¨crits' meªme s'ils sont `phoniques'. L'ide¨e meªme d'institution ^ donc d'arbitraire du signe ^ est impensable avant la possibilite¨ de l'e¨criture et hors de son horizon. [If `writing' signi¢es inscription, and ¢rst of all durable institution of a sign (and this is the only irreducible nucleus of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the whole ¢eld of linguistic signs. In this ¢eld there can subsequently appear a certain species of instituted signi¢ers, `graphic' in the narrow and derived sense of this word, ruled by a certain relation to other instituted signi¢ers which are, then, `written' even if they are `phonic'. The very idea of institution ^ and thus of the arbitrariness of the sign ^ is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. (p. 65)

21. Voyous, p. 210: Si un e¨ve¨nement digne de ce nom doit arriver, il lui faut, au-dela© de toute ma|ª trise, a¡ecter une passivite¨. Il doit toucher une vulne¨rabilite¨ expose¨e, sans immunite¨ absolue, sans indemnite¨, dans sa ¢nitude et de fac°on non horizontale, la© ou© il n'est pas encore ou de¨ja© plus possible de faire face, et de faire front, a© l'impre¨visibilite¨ de l'autre. A© cet e¨gard, l'auto-immunite¨ n'est pas un mal absolu. Elle permet l'exposition a© l'autre, a© ce qui vient et a© qui vient ^ et doit donc rester incalculable. Sans auto-immunite¨, avec l'immunite¨ absolue, plus rien n'arriverait. On n'attendrait plus, on ne s'attendrait plus, on ne s'attendrait plus l'un l'autre, ni a© aucun e¨ve¨nement. 22. Partially published as `Je suis en guerre contre moi-meªme', Le monde, 19 August 2004. The full text of the interview was subsequently published as a booklet: Apprendre a© vivre en¢n: entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galile¨e, 2005). 23. Voyous, pp. 178^9: C'est la raison qui met la raison en crise, de fac°on autonome et quasi auto-immunitaire. On pourrait le montrer, l'ultime `raison', au sens de la cause ou du fondement, la raison d'eªtre de cette auto-immunite¨ phe¨nome¨nologique transcendantale, elle se trouve loge¨e dans la structure meªme du pre¨sent et de la vie, dans la temporalisation de ce que Husserl appelle le Pre¨sent Vivant (die lebendige Gegenwart). Le Pre¨sent Vivant ne se produit qu'en s'alte¨rant et en se dissimulant. Je n'ai pas le temps, pre¨cise¨ment, de m'engager dans cette voie mais je voulais en

Notes

175

marquer la ne¨cessite¨, la© ou© la question du devenir et donc du temps de la raison parait indissociable de l'immense, vieille et toute neuve question de la vie (bios ou zoe), au coeur de la question de l'eªtre, de la pre¨sence et de l'e¨tant, donc de la question `eªtre et temps', de Sein und Zeit ^ question accentue¨e cette fois du coªte¨ de la vie plutoªt que du coªte¨ de la mort, si cela fait encore, comme je suis tente¨ de le croire, une certaine di¡e¨rence.

Chapter 2: `Rather than Nothing': Derrida, Literature and the Resistance of Nihilism 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

Jacques Derrida, `Deconstruction and the Other', in Richard Kearney, ed., Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 124. Jacques Derrida, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 121^2. The interview was ¢rst published in LA Weekly in November 2002. Derrida's long introduction to, and translation of, Husserl's Origin of Geometry was ¢rst published in 1962, but it was only in 1967 that deconstruction came to the attention of a wider audience as a result of the three books published by Derrida in that year. Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Di¡erence of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 163. Ibid., p. xiii (Cunningham's emphasis). Ibid., p. 162. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 158. Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism, p. 156. Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., p. 162 (Cunningham's emphasis). Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 156 (Cunningham's emphasis). Derrida, `Deconstruction and the Other', p. 123. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 7. See Friedrich Jacobi, `Open Letter to Fichte', in Ernst Behler ed., Philosophy of German Idealism (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 136. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4: Nihilism, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 379. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 148. Jacques Derrida, `I Have a Taste for the Secret', in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 63. On Derrida's distinction between `impossibility' and `im-possibility', see Jacques Derrida, `As If It Were Possible: ``Within Such Limits'' . . .', trans. Benjamin

176

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Notes Elwood and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971^ 2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 361. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The `Mystical Foundation of Authority', trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 243. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid. Ibid., p. 247. Derrida, `I Have a Taste for the Secret', pp. 82^3. Ibid., p. 92. Jacques Derrida, ` ``This Strange Institution Called Literature'': An Interview with Derek Attridge', trans. Geo¡rey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 61. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Di¡erence, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), pp. 243^4 (Derrida's emphasis). Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 17^18. Derrida, ` ``This Strange Institution Called Literature'' ', pp. 71^2. Derrida, `Deconstruction and the Other', p. 109. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p. 223. Derrida, ` ``This Strange Institution Called Literature'' ', p. 73. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid. Ibid., p. 215. Jacques Derrida, `Che cos'e© la poesia?', trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Points . . .: Interviews, 1974^1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 291, p. 299. Ibid., p. 297. Derrida, ` ``This Strange Institution Called Literature'' ', p. 47. Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 48. Jacobi, `Open Letter to Fichte', p. 135. Martin Heidegger, `Nietzsche's Word: ``God is Dead'' ', in O¡ the Beaten Track [Holzwege], ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 196. See my `When the Other Comes Too Close: Derrida and the Threat of A¤nity', Kritikos 3 ( June 2006), 1^15. Jacques Derrida, `Fichus: Frankfurt Address', in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 180.

Chapter 3: Accounterability 1. See Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). My uncertainty is occasioned, more speci¢cally, by the ingenious title, `Counter-Movements', under which Simon Morgan Wortham convoked the colloquium at which this paper was ¢rst presented. It is, nevertheless and despite my discom¢ture, without hesitation

Notes

177

that I thank Simon for his generous gifts of space and time to think together counterwise. His own work on counter-institutions will have been the provocation to take rigorous account of a countering drive that Derrida's thought engages at every turn. He has thus done the remarkable and di¤cult thing of countersigning that oeuvre across the very counter it extends towards a reader capable of a thinking-with that comprehends a thinking-against, that is to say, counter. 2. The latest advocates of this `movement' ^ not surprisingly ^ show a near total lack of awareness of its history, as if it had sprung up like a mushroom. For a concise reconstruction of this history in both the US and British contexts, see Romuald Normand, `De l'accountability aux standards: la traduction europe¨enne des politiques de la performance' (http://ep.inrp.fr/EP/r___a__venir/r___eval___pol/i18nlayer. 2005^09^19.5980046756/fr/document___view). Notice that Normand, writing in French, does not even attempt to translate the term `accountability' even as he is concerned to trace the e¡ective translation of the `thing' into the European context. 3. In `Creating a Higher Education Accountability System: The Texas Experience', which is the text of remarks read before the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education and dated December 2005, the author, Geri H. Malandra, touts repeatedly the inevitable spread of accountability, which she e¡ectively likens to a disease: `Accountability is catching' (p. 6), `Accountability is contagious' (p. 7). Malandra is Associate Vice Chancellor for Institutional Planning and Accountability at the University of Texas. See http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/ hiedfuture/2nd-meeting/geri-malandra.pdf 4. See Doug Bennett, `Deaf and Dizzy Lawmakers' (Inside Higher Education, April 6, 2006 [http://www.insidehighereducation.com/views/2006/04/06/bennett]): `Accountability, not access, has been the central concern of this Congress in its ¢tful e¡orts to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The House of Representatives has especially shown itself deaf to constructive arguments for improving access to higher education for the next generation of young Americans, and dizzy about what sensible accountability measures should look like'. See also the same Web journal, April 15, 2005, `College Access: Comparing Countries' [http://www.insidehighereducation.com/news/2005/04/15/intl]. On a¡ordability, the US ranks thirteenth out of sixteen industrialized countries; on access it was ranked fourth out of thirteen, a relatively good showing that is probably accounted for by the inclusion of non-bachelor-degree institutions in the category of US higher education. 5. Although it is certainly not just a question of language, the drive to close the gap between the market and the university also depends on carrying over a vocabulary from the experience of consumerism. Here is Charles Miller, the chair of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in his Issue Paper titled `Accountability/Consumer Information': `Any number of excellent consumer shopping sites could serve as models for the revised college search site. While shopping for a postsecondary institution is not exactly the same as shopping for a car, many on-line shopping sites embody extensive £exibility that allows consumers to specify their needs and interests and to compare products that meet criteria set by the consumer. A system that allows comparison of postsecondary institutions could give consumers the ability to eliminate inappropriate schools . . .' (http://www.ed.gov/ about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports.html). When is the admission of `not exactly the same' tantamount to enforcing, all the same, a sameness of the compared terms? For a trenchant analysis of such reductive parallels to `market

178

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

Notes discipline', see Mike Sosteric et al., `The University, Accountability, and Market Discipline in the Late 1990s', in Electronic Journal of Sociology (1998). `A National Dialogue: Commission on the Future of Higher Education', http:// www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2005/09/09192005.html `What Does College Teach?', The Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 2005. Jay Mathews, `Measure by Measure', The Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2004. `The evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in which conviction creates what is obvious'. This is Proust's narrator mulling over the problem of how to know whether or not Albertine is lying to him about the nature of her relations with a lady friend. The phrase translated as `evidence of the senses' is `te¨moignage des sens', the witness or testimony of the senses. For a reading of Proust's analysis of this `testimony' in its connections to jealousy, see the chapter `Jealousy Wants Proof ', in my Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Hersh repeats the phrase, also in quotation marks, at the end of his essay: `Nonetheless, value-added assessment o¡ers an excellent place to start, and a chance for higher education to demonstrate that ``faith-based'' answers about quality are no longer acceptable'. For a very similar gesture, see Charles Miller and Geri Malandra, `Issue Paper: Accountability/Assessment' (http://www.ed. gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/miller-malandra.pdf ): `Today, most people must ``take on faith'' what college quality might be because there is a lack of reliable ways of documenting and assessing what students learn, and how their experiences compare among institutions' (p. 4). Bill Berkowitz, `A quiet ¢fth anniversary for Bush's faith-based initiative', in Media Transparency, March 2, 2006, http://www.mediatransparency.org/story. php?storyID=113 See http://www.ed.gov/news/sta¡/bios/spellings.html?src=gu; the same biography recalls that she has a daughter in university and that she `is the ¢rst mother of school children [sic] to serve as US Secretary of Education'. See again Malandra's report `Creating A Higher Education Accountability System'. It should also be noted that this Commission's chair, Charles Miller, was previously Chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and was, in Malandra's words, the `instigator' of `a system-wide accountability framework'. Spellings' commission is thus quite clearly stacked in favour of the accountabilists. For a recent broadside from this camp, see the `report' issued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization founded by Lynne Cheney (Dick's wife and former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Bush I regime), which is a self-described defender of `intellectual diversity [sic] on campus'. Titled `How Many Ward Churchills?', the document purports to provide evidence of `liberal bias' in US university curricula. (Ward Churchill was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado who published an infamous and deplorable comparison between the victims of the attack on the WTC Twin Towers and the engineers of the Nazi genocide, calling them `little Eichmanns'. He was recently ¢red from his tenured position for research misconduct.) For this document, see: http://www.goacta.org/publications/reports.html. As for actions in state legislatures, there have so far been hearings and/or legislation introduced in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and doubtless other state capitals. Derrida, `Poetics and Politics of Witnessing', in Sovereignties in Question, pp. 76^7; trans. modi¢ed.

Notes

179

16. Miller and Malandra, for example, assert (that is, perform while appearing merely to refer to) a `national culture of evidence and assessment' (op. cit., p. 7). 17. On this question of the return of the religious (rather than religion), see Derrida, ` ``Above All, No Journalists!'' ', in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds) Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 61 ¡. 18. Miller and Malandra, `Issue Paper: Accountability/Assessment', p. 3. 19. The reduction of text to test is perhaps one way to measure what is at stake; see Miller and Malandra's paper for a slip from the former to the latter, which at least on one occasion appears to be inadvertent: `In the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) survey, less than one-third of college graduates could demonstrate an ability to read complex tests [sic] and make complicated inferences' (p. 2). 20. Hersh (op. cit.) writes, for example: `To date academe has o¡ered little in response, apart from resistance in the name of intellectual freedom and faculty autonomy. These are legitimate professional prerogatives, but unless the academy is willing to assess learning in more rigorous ways, the cry for enforced accountability will become louder, and government intervention will become more likely'. For a quite di¡erent assessment of the chances of resistance, see A. Bradney, `Accountability, the University Law School and the Death of Socrates', Web Journal of Current Legal Issues (2002). 21. Given the experience being testi¢ed to here, what would our imaginary test-taker have responded if the test statement had included this other unquali¢ed assertion, found elsewhere in Miller and Malandra's document: `College courses are not designed to foster critical thinking' (p. 5). By what known measure could that be judged a responsible a¤rmation? 22. Avital Ronell, in The Test Drive, poses essential questions to and about this testing regime (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For a provocative resistance more speci¢cally aimed at the RAE, see Nicholas Royle, `Night Writing', in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 112^14; see also, Simon Morgan Wortham's chapter in Counter-institutions titled `Auditing Derrida', pp. 85^118.

Chapter 4: `Don't Count Me In': Derrida's Refraining 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 3. Originally published in Italian as Il Gusto del Segreto (Roma-Bari: Gius. Laterza and Figli Spa, 1997). Ibid., p. 4. Ibid. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Ibid., p. 7. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitie¨ (Paris: Galile¨e, 1994), p. 11. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London, New York: Verso, 1997), p. 1.

180 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Notes Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, p. 68. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 88. Jacques Derrida, `Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends', in Who's Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 75. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, p. 4. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. This is vols 29/30 of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Monte¢ore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 38. For the French original see `Ponctuations: le temps de la these', Du droit a© la philosophie (Paris: Galile¨e, 1990), p. 444: `une discipline de rigueur incomparable'. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, p. 45. Ibid., pp. 42^3. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., pp. 4^5. Ibid., pp. 24^5. From personal computer ¢les, used with permission of Marguerite Derrida, my translation. Here is the original, with a bit more of Derrida's French added at the beginning: . . . ni les animaux d'espe©ce di¡e¨rente, ni les hommes de culture di¡e¨rente, ni aucun individu animal ou humain n'habite le meªme monde qu'un autre, si proche et si semblable ces individus vivants soient-ils (humains ou animaux), et la di¡e¨rence d'un monde a© l'autre restera toujours infranchissable, la communaute¨ du monde e¨tant toujours construite, simule¨e par un ensemble de dispositifs stabilisants, plus ou moins stables, donc et jamais naturels, le langage au sens large, les codes de traces e¨tant destine¨s, chez tous les vivants, a© construire une unite¨ du monde toujours de¨constructible et nulle part et jamais donne¨e dans la nature. Entre mon monde, le `mon monde'; ce que j'appelle `mon monde' et il n'y en a d'autre pour moi, tout autre monde en faisant partie, entre mon monde et tout autre monde, il y a d'abord l'espace et le temps d'un di¡e¨rence in¢nie, d'une interruption incommensurable a© toutes les tentatives de passage, de pont, d'isthme, de communication, de traduction, de trope et de transfert que le de¨sir de monde ou le mal du monde, l'eªtre en mal de monde tentera de poser, d'imposer, de proposer, de stabiliser. Il n'y a pas de monde, il n'y a que des |ª les.

24. My trans., from computer ¢les. 25. Jacques Derrida, `Foi et savoir: Les deux sources de la ``religion'' aux limites de la simple raison', La Religion, ed. Thierry Marchaisse (Paris: Seuil, 1996), pp. 9^86. In English: Jacques Derrida, `Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ``Religion'' at the Limits of Reason Alone', trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 42^101. 26. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Galile¨e, 1999), pp. 79^157. In English: Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 53^115. 27. `Comment ne pas parler: De¨ne¨gations', Psyche¨: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galile¨e, 1987), pp. 535^95. In English: `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials', trans. Ken

Notes

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

181

Frieden, Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 73^142. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: l'E¨tat de la dette, le travail du deuil, et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galile¨e, 1993), p. 236. In English: Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 148. `How to Avoid Speaking: Denials', p. 85. Jacques Derrida, `Foi et savoir', pp. 68^9; in the English `Faith and Knowledge', p. 87. See Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort, p. 114 ¡.; in English p. 82¡. Derrida, `The time of a thesis: punctuations', p. 37. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 70^1. For an example see Jacques Derrida, Be¨ liers: Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux in¢nis, le poe© me [Paris, Galile¨e, 2003], pp. 75^6. In English: Jacques Derrida, `Rams', in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 161. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, p. 27. Ibid. Jacques Derrida, Passions: `L'o¡rande oblique' (Paris: Galile¨e, 1993), p. 47, pp. 65^7. In English: `Passions: ``An Oblique O¡ering'' ', trans. David Wood, in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 19^20, 28^9. Jacques Derrida, L'Universite¨ sans condition (Paris: Galile¨e, 2001). In English, `The University Without Condition', trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 202^37. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, p. 27. The Gift of Death, p. 68; Donner la mort, p. 98: `Je ne peux re¨pondre a© l'appel, a© la demande, a© l'obligation, ni meªme a l'amour d'un autre sans lui sacri¢er l'autre autre, les autres autres.' Jacques Derrida, `Circonfession', in Geo¡rey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 57. In English: Jacques Derrida, `Circonfession', trans. Geo¡rey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 58. Derrida, A Taste for the Secret, pp. 27^8. Spectres, p. 102, pp. 110^11; Specters, p. 59, pp. 64^5.

Chapter 5: Reading Over a Globalized World 1. Le Monde, 14 June 2006, p. 3. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds), Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 1^78. 5. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971^2001, ed., trans. and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 374^5. 6. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v, 92^104.

182

Notes

7. V, ii, 358^63. 8. Ham. `Sir, in my heart there was a kind of ¢ghting/That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay/Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly ^ /And prais'd be rashness for it: let us know/Our indiscretion sometime serves us well/When our deep plots do pall . . .' Hamlet, V, ii, 4^9. 9. II, 2, 232^9. 10. See IV, i, 41 and especially III, iii: But O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn? ``Forgive me my foul murder''? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those e¡ects for which I did the murder ^ May one be pardoned and retain th' o¡ence? In the corrupted currents of this world O¡ence's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

The `world [. . .] below', corrupted by money, is contrasted with that which is `above' it, and which presumably is not a `world' any longer. II, ii, 177. `Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism', in Negotiations, pp. 375^6. This notion of `auto-deconstruction' is then elaborated, in Derrida's later writings, under the rubric of `auto-immunity', a sombre but nevertheless by no means simply self-destructive perspective by which established systems open themselves to transformation by debilitating their mechanisms of self-protection. I hope to deal with this problem more extensively elsewhere. Ibid., p. 376. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992). Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (TÏbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), p. 88. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, I. 20 (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1980), pp. 42^5. Ibid. Ibid., 41

Chapter 6: Counterchange: Derrida's Poetry 1. See Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 1^9. 2. Perhaps controversially in this context considering the disastrous misreading of Derrida therein, I would still refer the reader to Habermas' reading of our postHeideggerian age in JÏrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (London: Polity, 1987), pp. 131^60, along with Clark's reading of Heidegger in Poetics of Singularity, pp. 33^60. 3. See Jean-Franc°ois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Re£ections on Time, trans. Geo¡rey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

Notes 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

183

See Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 69^88. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 41^70. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 1^4 and pp. 279^392. See also my own consideration of Nancy and natality in William Watkin, `Melancholia, Revolution and Materiality in the Work of Julia Kristeva', Paragraph 26 (3) (2003), 93^8. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); for more on the turn to poetry in modern philosophy also see Gerald Bruns, Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature and Ethical Theory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999). Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, eds Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 105^6. Ibid., p. 168. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 142. Jacques Derrida, Points . . .: Interviews, 1974^1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 295. For an astonishing intervention on the origins of Western metaphysics in Kant's conception of beauty as being beyond ¢nitude, which also ¢gures as a subtle critique of Lyotard's reliance on the idea of the sublime for the construction of his own philosophical schema, see Derrida's essay `Parergon', in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geo¡ Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 15^148. Not only does this essay totally resituate modern aesthetics and poetics, but it is also part of a complicated rereading of Lyotard's most important work on the postmodern sublime and essential therefore for any student of postmodern culture. Again see `Parergon', especially where Derrida demonstrates how, in the Third Critique, Kant imports the architecture of judgement to frame his conception of re£ection and thus inscribes an impossible, foundational supplemental Parergon at the heart of his conception of beauty, pp. 69 and 73; also the radical deconstruction of Kant's idea of beauty as being without ¢nality, how this relates beauty to a form of vagrant errancy, and the destabilizing e¡ect this has on the conception of subjectivity as being both impossibly adherent and errant, pp. 86^118. For more on Derrida's commitment to the aesthetics of the literary avant-garde as a privileged conception of literary singularity see Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 41^8. See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), pp. 290^9. See Derrida, Sovereignties, pp. 95^6 and p. 164. Derrida, Sovereignties, pp. 109^10. Ibid., p. 69 See Derrida, `Che cos'e© la poesia', in Points, p. 293. Ibid., p. 96 and pp. 120^1. Before I progress, a digression if I may, along with an explication of method. This article was originally a paper written in response to an institutionalized request to consider `the counter' in Derrida's work and presented at the conference `CounterMovements: Institutions of Di¡erence' held by Simon Morgan Wortham at the

184

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Notes University of Portsmouth in July 2006 (many thanks are due to him for presenting this opportunity). Thus the organization of the argument that follows, as a series of responses to the semantic demands of the term counterchange, as well as the performative moments of article, result from this initial request. I have chosen, rather than to occlude this history, to retain both elements in that the term counterchange led my investigations into Derrida's poetry along unexpected and ultimately fruitful byways, while the more performative elements not only remain in keeping in relation to Derrida's own performative prose when he chooses to write on poetry but are also true to the role of performativity in the formulation of poetic singularity. Clark calls Attridge's book `a schematisation' of Derrida's work on singularity (Clark, p. 2). Derrida, Acts, pp. 316^17. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 68. Derrida, Sovereignties, p. 99. Derrida, Acts, p. 317. Ibid., p. 342. There seems little point in summarizing a schematization any further so I refer the reader to Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 63^78 and pp. 86^97 for the origins of most of these ideas. Also worth consideration is Attridge's ¢rst formulation of the schematization in question, although, as I go on to show, this is an overly dismissive reading on Clark's part that fails to note signi¢cant divergence between Attridge and Derrida (in Derek Attridge, `Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of Literature', in Derrida, Acts, p. 129). Attridge, through his choice of essays and the small, but always perceptive, introductions he provides in this volume, completes an architectural base of Derrida's double sense of literature, as an institution with a history running parallel to that of Romantic modernity and easily deconstructible, and more significantly as a form of permanently destabilizing singular writing. Here in 1992 Attridge actually makes a bid for the second generation of deconstructive criticism based around the idea of this second form of literature and attained by a deconstructive critique of the ¢rst form to which I have already alluded. Perhaps then it is more accurate to say that The Singularity of Literature is as much a schematization of Attridge's own work on Derrida as it is of Derrida's work. Attridge, p. 71. Derrida, Sovereignties, p. 15. John Ashbery, As we Know (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 58. Rachel Blau Duplessis, Drafts 1^38, Toll (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), p. 31. Charles Bernstein, With Strings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 121. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone Press, 1981), p. 177. As the poem continues beneath the right-hand black block: `under a black square / cannot be read or found' (DuPlessis, p. 31). It is worth noting here that the black blacks of the poem are radically decontextualized here. Within the larger body of the sequence of poems called Drafts there are clear indications that the blackout sections refer to the censorship of the letters of the radical American poet George Oppen in the ¢le held on him by the FBI, and a

Notes

37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

185

wider issue to do with the blacking-out of material within historical documents. Additionally, underneath the left-hand block in the original there is the following text: `even/metal link-/knot's unfathomable/ecliptic//swerving//stars^//Call that point `R' on some / scroll of unrolling:' (ibid.); yet another example of the ethical problem of poetic citation in other words. `No de¢nition of verse is perfectly satisfying unless it asserts an identity for poetry against prose through the possibility of enjambement . . . we shall call poetry the discourse in which it is possible to set a metrical limit against a syntactic one.' Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 39. Agamben's work on poetic singularity is, to my mind, the most important recent incursion into the ¢eld although his work is ignored by Clark and Attridge. As the interactions between Derrida and Agamben are so controversial, involved and important I will refrain from tackling them here in a brief form that cannot possibly do them justice. Ibid., p. 212, p. 214 and p. 215. What Derrida terms `The rebus signature, the metonymic or anagrammatic signature . . . the double bind of the signature event', Acts, p. 368. For the role of law within the convention of the title in the literary work see `Before the Law', in Acts, pp. 181^216 and, as already mentioned, `The Double Session', pp. 171^9; and more generally as a parergon for the work of art Truth in Painting, p. 24. In particular how the act of signing the proper name in the poem monumentalizes the work so that it exists outside of subjective intention (Acts, pp. 362^4), and how this performs a wider truth of being in the name wherein in signing one confers one's presence to the thing yet at the same time in signing one's self one wishes to retain the very presence of idiomatic and singular being that is carried away or signed o¡ as soon as one writes one's name (Acts, p. 368). The most famous instance of this logic is to be found, of course, in the essay `Signature Event Context' (see especially Margins, p. 328). The discussion of the status of categories in Derrida is the crux of the controversy between Derrida and Agamben. The most famous discussion of the status of the `category' in his work remains the essay `Di¡e¨rance', in Derrida, Margins, pp. 3^27. Geo¡rey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 58. The number of `late' texts by Derrida concerning the issue of ethics and alterity is almost overwhelming. A good introduction would consist of reading Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), `Psyche: Invention of the Other', in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsey Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 25^65, and of course the various essays on Levinas. See the aforementioned Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience. For a full reading of the complex interchange of theme and performance in Derrida's reading of Mallarme¨, see Bennington, pp. 51^8. Derrida, Acts, p. 351. Derrida famously stated in his 1980 thesis defence that `my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed towards literature, towards that writing which is called literary' (Derrida, Acts, p. 33). Derrida clearly has a bifurcated sense of literature when he di¡erentiates as follows: `Literature as historical institution with its conventions, rules, etc., but also this

186

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Notes institution of ¢ction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules . . .' (Derrida, Acts, p. 37). Derrida, Margins, p. x. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., p. xv. Derrida, Paper, pp. 142^3. Derrida, Margins, p. xv. Ibid. Ibid., p. vxi. Ibid., p. xxiii. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 227.

Chapter 7: Disagreement as (Possible) Event: Derrida contre de Man 1. `Marx's Purloined Letter' was ¢rst published in New Left Review (New Left Review 209 (1995), 75^109), and republished in Ghostly Demarcations. 2. Jameson, `Marx's Purloined Letter', p. 35. 3. Ibid., p. 36. 4. Ibid., p. 50. 5. Ibid., p. 51. 6. The lecture was originally held at a conference at the University of CaliforniaDavis on `Culture and Materiality: A Post-Millenarian Conference ^ a© propos of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology ^ to consider trajectories for ``materialist'' thought in the afterlife of theory, cultural studies, and Marxist critique' and was published in 2001 as the concluding essay of Material Events. 7. Paul de Man, `The Rhetoric of Blindness', p. 123. De Man's critical review ^ originally published in 1970 and extensively rewritten for Blindness and Insight as `The Rhetoric of Blindness' ^ insists on the facts that `although Derrida can be ``right'' on the nature of literary language and consistent in the application of this insight to his own text, he remains unwilling or unable to read Rousseau as literature' (p. 138) and that `what happens in Rousseau is exactly what happens in Derrida [so that] Rousseau's text has no blind spots: it accounts at all moments for its own rhetorical mode. Derrida misconstrues as blindness what is instead a transposition from the literal to the ¢gural level of discourse' (pp. 138^9). De Man also adds that `the established tradition of Rousseau interpretation, however, stands in dire need of deconstruction. [. . .] [I]nstead of having Rousseau deconstruct his critics, we have Derrida deconstructing a pseudo-Rousseau by means of insights that could have been gained from the ``real'' Rousseau' (p. 141). For an instructive discussion of de Man's criticism of Derrida, see Bernasconi. 8. It is beyond the scope of the present essay to discuss Derrida's engagement with de Man from the mid-1980s onwards. While we will focus exclusively on the Memoires and `Typewriter Ribbon', it might be noted that Derrida's increasingly critical stance towards de Man is legible in a number of interviews that he gave over the years. In a 1994 interview (the year of publication of Specters of Marx) Derrida says about de Man's insistence on the self-deconstructive agency of Rousseau's text:

Notes

187

I remember having put this question to Paul de Man in the form of a virtual objection [. . .]. Deconstruction is not a memory which simply recalls what is already there. The memory work is also an unforeseeable event, an event that demands a responsibility and gestures, deeds. This act is caught, however, in a double bind: the more you remember, the more you are in danger of e¡acing, and vice versa. Deconstruction cannot step out of this aporia, of this doublebind, without di¤dence. (`Zeugnis, Gabe') In a more recent interview, Derrida expresses his concern about this nagging problem [. . .] that in de Man's work [. . .] one ¢nds statements to the e¡ect that the ethical moment in reading [. . .] is ¢rst and foremost one that results from a certain linguistic predicament [because] [s]uch statements can very easily be taken to espouse an extreme textualist or anti-realist position which denies the reality of past events. (life.after.theory, pp. 22^3) In the same interview, Derrida ^ while admitting that `still today [de Man] remains absolutely enigmatic to me' and that `[s]ometimes in his texts [. . .] I don't know him' (p. 35) ^ refers to `Typewriter Ribbon' as a decisive attempt `to locate the possible disagreement' between himself and de Man: I disagree with him on a number of points. I didn't say so immediately during the de Man a¡air because, strategically, if I had said at that moment in 1987, `Well, you know, Paul de Man, the way he handles deconstruction is not exactly my way', that would have been terrible, terrible. People would have exploited this. So I didn't say that, but I knew, and he knew too, there were di¡erences between us and now slowly, slowly, I'm trying to say this. And there is a long text which was published last year and which I republished in French [. . .] in which I raise this question of confession in Rousseau, and there are a number of points at which I try, while being as friendly as possible, to locate the possible disagreement. [. . .] In a certain way, I betrayed him, but out of ¢delity. (p. 29) 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

De Man, `The Rhetoric of Blindness', p. 141. Ibid., p. 139. Jacques Derrida, Memoires: for Paul de Man, p. 130. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 145. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 149. Jacques Derrida, `Typewriter Ribbon', p. 353. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 338. The ¢rst mutilation concerns de Man's neglect of `scenes of inheritance and inventory' in the Marion-episode and his omission in his synopsis of the episode of the words `de¨ja© vieux' in the phrase `un petit ruban de couleur rose et argent de¨ja© vieux' (Allegories of Reading, p. 279). In this way, according to Derrida, de Man extracts the phrase from its context, which leads him to the question `Why

188

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Notes does he cut the sentence, mutilating or dismembering it in this way, and in such an apparently arbitrary fashion?' (`Typewriter Ribbon', p. 316). Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid., p. 311. Ibid., p. 340. Ibid., p. 342. Ibid., p. 344. Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., p. 349. In `Lurid Figures', Neil Hertz describes the essay as `either an intense trial run or a rapid glance over hard-won ground, both sketchier and more abrupt than the other [. . .] essays in its deployment of similar arguments and ¢gures' (p. 83). Hertz's essay provides a quite unique close reading of `Wordsworth and the Victorians' in relation to other key texts of the de Manian corpus. As also remarked by Hertz, the essay especially `reads as a more developed companion piece to [. . .] ``Shelley Dis¢gured'' ' (p. 91). In this respect, it interesting to note de Man's remark in the preface to The Rhetoric of Romanticism that the latter essay is `the only place where I come close to facing some of these problems about history and fragmentation' and he signi¢cantly adds: `[h]ow and where one goes on from there is far from clear, but certainly no longer simply a matter of syntax and diction' (p. ix). Paul de Man, `Wordsworth and the Victorians', pp. 84^5. Ibid., pp. 85^6. As Neil Hertz has noted, the simultaneous occurrence of both the dissolution of di¡erence (between philosophy and poetry) and the a¤rmation of di¡erence (the location of the break in Wordsworth's poetry) is puzzling and constitutes the double aim of de Man's reading, which is at once anti-canonical and rhetorical. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 91. On the ¢gure of the face, see ^ besides Hertz ^ Cynthia Chase's `Giving a Face to a Name' and Cathy Caruth's Empirical Truths (esp. pp. 44^57). Paul de Man, `Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant', p. 82. The lecture was delivered on 1 March 1983 and published in Aesthetic Ideology. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 83. This material vision emerges in the following passage in the concluding section of the Analytic of the Sublime: If, then, we call the sight of the starry heaven sublime, we must not place at the foundation of our judgment concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings and regard the bright points, with which we see the space above us ¢lled, as their suns moving in circles purposively ¢xed with reference to them; but we must regard it, just as we see it [wie man ihn sieht], as a distant, all-embracing vault [ein weites GewÎlbe]. Only under such a representation can we range that sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment ascribes to this object. And in the same way, if we are to call the sight of the ocean sublime, we must not think of it as we ordinarily do, as implying all kinds of knowledge [. . .]. To ¢nd the ocean [. . .] sublime, we must regard it as poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], merely by what the eye reveals [was der Augenschein zeigt] ^ if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded

Notes

189

by the heavens; if it is stormy, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything'. (Quoted by de Man, `Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant', p. 80) 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., pp. 81^2. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 89. Warminski, p. 25. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 28. Derrida, `Typewriter Ribbon', p. 351. In the preface to the second edition of Blindness and Insight, published in the year in which `Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant' was delivered, de Man isolates `The Rhetoric of Temporality' as the event of `a change, not only in terminology and in tone but in substance', yet one that remained stuck in a terminology that was `still uncomfortably intertwined with the thematic vocabulary of consciousness and of temporality that was current at the time'. Although, as de Man states, he was `not given to retrospective self-examination', it is nevertheless the case that the contaminated terms of allegory and irony `return at times to [. . .] haunt me like a guilty conscience', after which he concludes by suggesting that `the possibility of confronting these pieces with later work may prove enlightening to some' and is `itself of some theoretical interest' (p. xii). De Man, `The Rhetoric of Temporality', p. 211. De Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 301. De Man, `The Concept of Irony', pp. 169^70. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 184.

Chapter 8: The Counterpromise: Derrida on the Instant of Blanchot's Death 1.

Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 289. 2. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso Press, 2005), p. 295. 3. Derrida, `The Law of Genre', in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 221^52 (p. 227). 4. Derrida, `A Witness Forever', in Kevin Hart, ed., Nowhere Without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2003), pp. 41^9 (p. 48).

190

Notes

5. Ibid., pp. 48^9. 6. Derrida, `Countersignature', Paragraph 27:2 (2004), 7^42 (29). 7. Derrida, `As If It Were Possible, ``Within Such Limits'' . . .', trans. Benjamin Elwood with Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Elizabeth Rottenberg, ed. and trans., Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971^2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 343^70 (p. 344). 8. Ibid., p. 362. 9. Ibid., p. 352. 10. Derrida, `The Deconstruction of Actuality', trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Negotiations, pp. 85^116 (p. 111). 11. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). 12. See `By Force of Mourning', in The Work of Mourning, p. 144. 13. Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 6. 14. See the editors' introduction, `To Reckon With the Dead: Jacques Derrida's Politics of Mourning', to The Work of Mourning, pp. 1^30, especially p. 28. 15. See Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Parte¨naire Invisible: Essai Biographique (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), pp. 228^32 and pp. 581^3. 16. Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 3. 17. Ibid., p. 11. 18. Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 52. All citations will refer to the translated text unless otherwise noted. 19. See `The Deaths of Roland Barthes', in The Work of Mourning pp. 31^68, in which even the title in its seemingly violent plurality is meant to reckon with the di¤culty of preserving singularity, and where to speak of the person beyond the name marks the cruelty of a wound always opening anew: Even if I wanted or was able to give an account and speak of him as he was for me . . . even if I tried to reproduce what took place, what place would be reserved for the reserve? . . . To go on speaking of this all alone, after the death of the other, to sketch out the least conjecture or risk the least interruption, feels to me like an endless insult or wound ^ and yet also a duty, a duty toward him. (p. 55) Here, in this ¢rst memorial essay, Derrida mentions a personal note he received from Barthes, one which, despite this insistence on leaving something for the reserve, intrusively interrupts as remainder nonetheless (see p. 64). Similarly, Derrida will invoke a personal letter from Paul de Man in his Memoires for Paul de Man, though here he goes as far as to disclose part of the content, making clear though his reservations all the while: In order to let Paul de Man have the say, I will permit myself to quote, if this is not too indiscreet ^ once will not make it a habit ^ a fragment from the letter that I received in answer to mine. This will, in this way, be much more interesting than what I was able to or would be able to say. Believe me, I have hesitated a great deal before doing this, and I hesitate once again now; is it not abusive, violent, or indiscreet to quote from such letters, in however fragmentary a fashion? Is it su¤cient to omit here, for the moment, everything that comes from personal memory,

Notes

191

whether his or mine, and to limit oneself strictly, if this is possible, to what concerns a public exchange, here a certain reading of Rousseau? (pp. 126^7)

20. 21. 22. 23.

That what was mentioned in this letter concerning Rousseau `was written in 1971 and . . . never again spoken of . . . at least in the mode of conversation, direct discussion, or even of correspondence' (p. 131) makes what is precisely public about this communication di¤cult to locate, and that this will not, of course, be the one time Derrida will seemingly betray a friend by citing from a personal letter suggests the way in which we have to consider such acts as countersignatures, or perhaps even counterpromises, which betray only in as much as they bear ¢erce ¢delity to the friend. Both of these examples, coupled with the letter from Blanchot which I discuss in this essay, speak to a complicated `politics of friendship' that necessarily crosses genres of mourning both privately and publicly. Demeure, p. 52. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 29. As Derrida writes in Demeure: `The possibility of literary ¢ction haunts so-called truthful, responsible, serious, real testimony as its proper possibility. This haunting is perhaps the passion itself, the passionate place of literary writing, as the project to say everything ^ and wherever it is autobiographical, that is to say, everywhere, and everywhere autobio-thanatographical' (p. 72). It is this very concept of `everywhere' to which Derrida speaks in `Passions: ``An Oblique O¡ering'' ', one which suggests that it is from this generality of the singular that we begin to access the testamentary, implied as much in the literary as the literary is in it: Literature is only exemplary of what happens everywhere, each time that there is some trace (or grace, i.e. each time that there is something rather than nothing, each time that there is (es gibt) and each time that it gives [ca donne] without return, without reason, freely, and if there is what there is then, i.e. testimony, bearing witness) and even before every speech act in the strict sense. The `strict' sense is, moreover, always extended by the structure of exemplarity. It is beginning from these undecidabilities or from these aporias, across them, that one has a chance of being able to accede to the rigourous possibility of testimony, if there is such a thing: to its problematic and to the experience of it.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

See `Passions: ``An Oblique O¡ering'' ', trans. David Wood, in Thomas Dutoit, ed., On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 143^4. See Derrida, Demeure: Maurice Blanchot, (Paris: Editions Galile¨e, 1998), p. 62. I would like to acknowledge and thank Peggy Kamuf for calling my attention to Blanchot's use of the passe¨ simple in the original French text of the letter. See Demeure (trans.), p. 98 for Derrida's note of the use of the passe¨ simple in Blanchot's postscript. Demeure, pp. 55^6. See `Countersignature', p. 8. Reprinted as `A Witness Forever', in Kevin Hart, ed., Nowhere Without No: In Memory of Maurice Blanchot (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2003), pp. 41^9. Ibid., p. 47. That the moon landing of 1969 not only evokes an event considered to be one of the most historically signi¢cant of its time but also one marked by some sentiments of scepticism or doubt, both then and now, suggests that Blanchot may invoke these

192

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Notes dates to mark the way in which the occurrence of his `death' takes place at once incontrovertibly and unsubstantiatably. I thank Simon Morgan Wortham for raising such a consideration to me. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid. Ibid., p. 47. See Blanchot, `Friendship', in Friendship, pp. 289^92, in which Blanchot articulates that it is through distance and separation that we maintain proximity: Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an in¢nite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. (p. 291)

35. Friendship, p. 289; cited in The Work of Mourning, p. 62. 36. In his preface to Memoires for Paul de Man, Derrida justi¢es his decision not to revise his memorial essays in light of recent publications of Paul de Man's work that had appeared after he ¢rst composed them, stating the need to leave `these lectures in their original if somewhat rough state' and the `press[ing]' demand to `leave these texts with the special accent of their date, commanded by the fervor of bereaved friendship' (p. xii). 37. The Work of Mourning, p. 62. 38. `As If It Were Possible', p. 361.

Chapter 9: Derrida's Transcendental Contraband: Impossible Acts 1. Jacques Derrida, Glas: What Remains of Absolute Knowledge (1974), trans. John P. Leavey, Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). My essay might be thought to be an extended footnote to the analyses begun by Rodolphe Gasche in his pioneering text, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Re£ection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). I am grateful to him for a comment on an earlier version of this paper. 2. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's `Origin of Geometry': An Introduction (1962), trans. John P. Leavey, Jr (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978). 3. Jacques Derrida, `The Time of the Thesis: Punctuations' (1980), trans. in Alan Monte¢ore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 34^50. 4. Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (1990), trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 5. See Jacques Derrida, On Touching ^ Jean Luc Nancy (2000), trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 6. See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's `Origin of Geometry', op cit., footnote, pp. 69^ 70, and Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1978), pp. 7^8.

Notes 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

193

Jacques Derrida, Donner la Mort (Paris: Galile¨e, 2001), pp. 163^209. This is available in non-citable translation on the web, courtesy of Adam Kotsko. My translation is a mildly modi¢ed version. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913), trans. William Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), p. 92. It is of course entirely consistent with the displacement from a notion of a givenness, within a domain of human experience, to a notion of manifestation, originating in a divine intending, that Michel Henry's study has the title Essence of Manifestation (1962), trans. Gerard J. Etzkorn (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1973). Edmund Husserl, Ideas General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913), p. 397. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book (HUA 3: 1952), trans. Richard Rojewicz and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). This was circulated in manuscript already in the 1930s and indeed was available to Heidegger in 1925, and to Merleau-Ponty in the 1930s. For these purposes perhaps the most relevant texts by Nancy are The Gravity of Thought (1993), trans. Franc°ois Ra¡oul and Gregory Recco (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997) and The Sense of the World (1993), trans. Je¡rey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For a discussion of Nancy on touch, see Joanna Hodge, `Why Aesthetics Might be Several: On Nancy and Technics', in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Special Issue: On the Ends of Aesthetics, ed. Gary Banham, 7 (1), 53^67. For Husserl on transcendental aesthetics, and its relation to the use of the term by Kant, see Cartesian Meditations (1931), trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1978), section 61, and Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijho¡, 1969), especially the Conclusion, pp. 291^2. See Jacques Derrida: `Force of Law: On the Mystical Foundations of Authority', in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Religion ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 240. This takes place in the third part of the lectures from 1904^05, and is published in HUA 23, of which the lectures on internal time consciousness (HUA 10) are part four. See Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Recollection (1989), trans. John Barnet Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005). See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations I (1900, 1901, 1913), trans. J. F. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1978), vol. 2. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 414^41.

Chapter 10: The Entropics of Discourse: The `Materiality' of A¡ect Between Marx and Derrida 1. 2.

Karyn Ball, `Introduction: Trauma and its Institutional Destinies', Cultural Critique 46 (2000), 1^44. In The Shape of the Signi¢er: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), Walter Benn Michaels invokes Paul de Man's' `material vision', which radically repudiates the ideology at stake in con£ating the text's meaning and the reader's belief as evinced in her interpretation. According to Michaels,

194

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

Notes the issue for de Man `is not to decide what was done on purpose and what was done by accident but to treat the object as if nothing were done on purpose, as if everything were accidental' (p. 7). This asceticism is a strategy that exposes the `illusion of meaning' and, as Michaels represents it, seeks `to identify an alternative to that illusion (what ``actually happens'') with what he calls ``history'' ' de¢ned as `the emergence of a language of power out of cognition' (p. 9). De Man's asceticism is thus the `deep truth' of the `sentimental celebration of di¡erent experiences of the same text' and vice versa since `the claim that the text means nothing will turn out to have exactly the same cash value as the claim that it means di¡erent things to di¡erent people' (p. 8). Michaels cites commentators such as Andrzej Warminski (2001) for whom de Man's material vision empties out the meaning of the text. Warminksi's view is telling because it links de Man's material standpoint with an entropical depletion of meaning. Michaels connects this idea of lost meaning to Francis Fukiyama's `End of History' where he declares the end of the Cold War as the obsolescence of ideological dispute. In contrast, Michaels de¢nes `our period as one in which the question of dispute ^ are our clashes ideological, cultural, economic? ^ has become central' (p. 12). See Andrzej Warminski, ` ``As the Poets Do It'': On the Material Sublime', in Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller and Andrzej Warminski (eds), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 3^31. I am by no means the ¢rst to remark how Derrida's critique of ontotheological constructions of truth as presence serves a post-Marxist re-evaluation of the `vulgar' dictum that the base determines the superstructure `in the last instance'. In Derrida's words, `The sign is always the supplement to the thing itself '. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 145. De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les E¨ditions de Minuit, 1967), p. 208. Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1966), p. 122. The Course also privileges synchrony over diachrony, auditory over visual di¡erence, and the linear time of enunciation over the space of its occurrence. Derrida, `Di¡e¨rance', Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1^27. Ibid., p. 3 (translation modi¢ed). `La Di¡e¨rance', Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Les editions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 1^29 (p. 3). It is signi¢cant for Derrida that Lacan de¢nes the `letter' as `the material medium [support] that concrete discourse borrows from language' (`The Instance of the Letter', p. 139). `Of course', Lacan writes, `as it is said, the letter kills while the spirit gives life.' Yet he asks, `how the spirit could live without the letter. The spirit's pretensions would nevertheless remain indisputable if the letter hadn't proven that it produces all its truth e¡ects in man without the spirit having to intervene at all'. It is this revelation that `came to Freud', as Lacan reminds us, `and he called his discovery the unconscious' (p. 150). In `The Purveyor of Truth', Derrida questions Lacan's recourse to a notion of lack to indicate the subject's impossible desire to ascertain its truth as a mode of presence for others and for itself. Though Lacan's notion of lack is meant to be critically post-Cartesian, in Derrida's view, it reinstalls the metaphysics of presence as a transcendental condition of subject formation. Yet it is di¤cult to see how Derrida goes beyond Lacan's theses on the letter and lack. In Of Grammatology, Derrida

Notes

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

195

stipulates that the desire for being as presence `carries in itself the destiny of its nonsatisfaction'. For it is in this sense that di¡e¨ rance `produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible' (Of Grammatology, p. 143; de la Grammatologie, p. 206). To put this paradox in terms that echo Derrida's own critique of Husserl, a subject's longing for consistently present referents retroactively projects idealized essences as pre-existent guarantees for the integrity of their successive iterations. Since such idealities become compensatory objects of a desire that stems from lack in Lacanian terms, this ontological anxiety could be said to underwrite belief in the materiality of a given on the basis of its apparent iterability. See Jacques Lacan, `The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud', E¨crits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2002), pp. 138^68, and Derrida, `The Purveyor of Truth', in John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (eds), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 173^212. Anne Mangel, `Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49', in George Levine and David Leverenz (eds), Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), pp. 87^99 and David Seed, `Order in Thomas Pynchon's ``Entropy'' ', The Journal of Narrative Technique 11 (2) (Spring 1981), 135^53. Joseph W. Slade, ` ``Entropy'' and Other Calamities', in Edward Mendelson, ed. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cli¡s, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), pp. 69^86 (p. 77). Thomas Pynchon, `Entropy', Slow Learner: Early Stories by Thomas Pynchon (Toronto: Bantam, 1984), pp. 63^87 (p. 65), citing Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961). Hermann von Helmholtz, `Ûber die Wechselwirkung der NaturkrÌfte und die darauf bezÏglichen neuesten Ermittlungen der Physik' (Lecture delivered on 7 February 1854 in KÎnigsberg), published in PopulÌre wissenschaftliche VortrÌge (2nd edn) (Brunswick, 1876), pp. 91^136. See Leo Szilard, `Ûber die Entropieverminderung in einem thermodynamischen System bei Eingri¡en intelligenter Wesen', Zeitschrift fÏr Physik 53 (1929), 840^56, and Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971). Another prominent example is Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which incorporates thermodynamic theses from von Helmholtz among others to speculate on the disordering e¡ects of external and internal pressures upon the psychic system aiming towards homeostasis. The pleasure principle regulates the amount of tension in the psychic economy, where pleasure is de¢ned as the relief of excess pressure. In the instance of trauma, post-traumatic self-preservative anxiety mobilizes compulsive repetition: successive acts of symbolization that would represence the source of anxiety actually desensitize it over time. This defusion is required for the psychophysical system to neutralize excessive tensions that overwhelm it. The overcoming of the traumatic past is thus achieved through the levelling o¡ of its visceral animus. Yet for Freud, compulsive repetition reveals a radical register of the death drive in serving a primal instinct to void all tension, autoa¡ection, and vitality itself ^ to revert, in other words, to a state of inorganic calm. Hence the pressures of self-preservation and sexual desire are intertwined with a primal destructive urge that points to a primary masochism beyond the pleasure principle. For Freud, it would seem the very energies that make us live also make

196

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Notes us want to die as if our phylogenetic purview recoils against evolution itself. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XVIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 7^71. Jean-Franc°ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geo¡ Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 62. Ibid., p. 63. On the melancholic disposition of a¡ect recovery, see my reading of Walter Benjamin's con¢guration of materiality through a dialectic between messianism and primitivism in `The Longing for the Material', di¡erences 17 (1) (2006), 47^87. Paul Burkett and John Bellamy Foster, `Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx's Critique of Political Economy: Beyond the Podolinksy Myth', Theory and Society 35 (2006), 109^56 (110). Ibid., p. 120, citing Marx's Capital (three vols), Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 310 and p. 323. Burkett and Foster, p. 117. Ibid., p. 112, p. 121 and p. 122. See also Ludimar Hermann, Elements of Human Physiology (¢fth edition) (London: Smith and Elder, 1875) and Sir William Grove, On the Correlation of Physical Forces, in Edward L. Youmans, ed., The Correlation and Conservation of Forces (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1864), pp. 1^208. Burkett and Foster, p. 122. Ibid., p. 115. Burkett and Foster are also criticizing Elias L. Khalil's more recent `Entropy Law and Exhaustion of Natural Resources: Is Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen's Paradigm Defensible?', Ecological Economics 2/2 (1990), 163^78 for its adherence to Carnot's model. In this connection, see also Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen, Energy and Economic Myths (New York: Pergamon, 1976). Burkett and Foster, pp. 114^15. Ibid., p. 124 and p. 132. Ibid., 128. Ibid., p. 115 citing C. Biancardi, A Donati and S. Ulgiati, `On the Relationship Between the Economic Process, the Carnot Cycle and the Entropy Law', Ecological Economics 8/1 (1993), 7^10 (10). Burkett and Foster, p. 135. Ibid., p. 118 and p. 116. Geo¡rey Waite, `A Short Political Philology of Visceral Reason (A Red Mouse's Long Tail)', Parallax 36 (2005), 8^27. Ibid., pp. 9^10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd edn), ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978), pp. 155^6. Burkett and Foster, p. 111. Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1993), p. 326. Ibid., p. 155. Ibid., p. 461. Ibid., p. 460. Marx goes on to decry these metaleptic `attempts at apologetics' which `demonstrate a guilty conscience, as well as the inability to bring the mode of appropriation

Notes

197

of capital as capital into harmony with the general laws of property acclaimed by capitalist society itself ' (ibid.). 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 461. Marx adds: . . . and having produced, as the end-product, alien wealth on one side and [, on the other,] the penury which is living labour capacity's sole possession ^ then the matter is simply this, that the process itself, in and by itself, posits the real objective conditions of living labour (namely, material in which to realize itself, instrument with which to realize itself, and necessaries with which to stoke the £ame of living labour capacity, to protect it from being extinguished, to supply its vital processes with the necessary fuels) and posits them as alien, independent existences ^ or as the mode of existence of an alien person, as self-su¤cient values for-themselves, and hence as values which form wealth alien to an isolated and subjective labour capacity, wealth of and for the capitalist. (ibid.) 41. Marx, Reader, p. 209. 42. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xviii. 43. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101. `Das Konkrete ist konkret, weil es die Zusammenfassung vieler Bestimmungen ist, also Einheit des Mannigfaltigen. Im Denken erscheint es daher als ProzeÞ der Zusammenfassung, als Resultat, nicht als Ausgangspunkt, obgleich es der wirkliche Ausgangspunkt und daher auch der Ausgangspunkt der Anschauung und der Vorstellung ist' [Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Úkonomie (Marx/Engels: AusgewÌhlte Werke, Digitale Bibliothek 11, Band 13 [CDROM]) 632]. 44. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101. The discussion of money by way of example will conclude by restating one of Marx's major theses: `the path of abstract thought, rising from the simple to the combined, would correspond to the real historical process' (ibid., p. 102). 45. Pheng Cheah, `Mattering', Diacritics 26 (1) (Spring 1996), 108^39. 46. The anti-essentialist vigilance against biologistic notions of gender and sexuality sometimes slips into an under-theorized understanding of the `extra-discursive' as a way of retaining a status for the body and a¡ect beyond representation. 47. Cheah, p. 108. 48. Derrida, Specters, p. 42. 49. In his manuscript, Magical Criticism (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press, 2007), Christopher Bracken highlights an anthropologistic slippage in nineteenth-century theories of culture between metaphor and reference as an alternately inadvertent or strategic style of `primitive' reading. 50. Derrida, `Force and Signi¢cation', Writing and Di¡erence, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 3^30 (p. 26). Derrida's description of the relationship between force and form reconvenes a Heideggerian disarticulation of truth as a provisional `comportment' rather than a substance or essence and as a contextually motivated revealing that also conceals. See Heidegger's `On the Essence of Truth', Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 113^41. 51. Derrida, Specters, p. 50. 52. Ibid., p. 16.

198

Notes

53. `In this sense', as Lyotard observes, `the system seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it, dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a di¡erent level of normative capacity' (p. 63).

Chapter 11: The Grammar of Deconstruction 1. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 47. 2. Paul de Man, `The Resistance to Theory', in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 15^16. 3. Jacques Derrida, `The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1972), p. 179. Page references to this essay will henceforth be prefaced by `SC' within the text. 4. On this issue, see Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (London: Routledge, 1994), and Andre¨ Blavier, Les fous litte¨ raires (Paris: Cendres, 2004). 5. On this point see, for instance, Monolingualism of the Other, or Schibboleth pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galile¨e, 1986) ^ but the issue resurfaces frequently in Derrida's work, not least in the context of his commentaries on Levinas, and referencing it comprehensively is impracticable here. 6. See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles/E¨perons: Les Styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 7. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, `Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy', trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, Oxford Literary Review 6 (2) (1984), 3^37. 8. See Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geo¡rey Leech and Jan Svartvik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), 12¡. 9. Barbara Johnson, Translator's Introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. xv^xviii. 10. See Charles Ramond, Le Vocabulaire de Derrida (Paris: Ellipses, 2001), and Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 11. Rudy Steinmetz, Les Styles de Derrida (Brussels: De Boeck-Wesmael, 1994), p. 7. 12. For an introduction to genetic criticism, see Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden (eds), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 13. See Marcos Siscar, Jacques Derrida ^ Rhe¨ torique et philosophie (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998). 14. See Geo¡rey Bennington, in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 180^96. 15. Rodolphe Gasche¨, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Re£ection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 244. 16. Jacques Derrida, `Language Is Never Owned: An Interview', in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 99. 17. Jacques Derrida and He¨le©ne Cixous, `Du Mot a© la vie: un dialogue entre Jacques Derrida et He¨le©ne Cixous', ed. Aliette Armel, Magazine litte¨ raire 430 (April 2004), 22^9; see particularly 26^7.

Notes

199

18. See Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 19. Jacques Derrida, `Fide¨lite¨ a© plus d'un ^ me¨riter d'he¨riter ou© la ge¨ne¨alogie fait de¨faut', Cahiers Intersignes 13 (Autumn 1998), 224. 20. See Jacques Derrida, `The Force of Law: The ``Mystical Foundation of Authority'', in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3^67. 21. Jacques Derrida, `Countersignature', trans. Maire¨ad Hanrahan, Paragraph 27 (2) (2004), 24.

Chapter 12: Dislocating Derrida: Badiou, the Unthought and the Justice of Multiplicity 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 30^1. `The Desire of Philosophy and the Contemporary World' was presented in Sydney in 1999 and appears, under the revised title `Philosophy and Desire', as the ¢rst essay in the collection In¢nite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (eds) (London: Continuum 2003), p. 44. Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: E¨ditions du Seuil, 1989), pp. 9^10. Unless otherwise noted, and excepting `Philosophy and Desire', all translations in this essay are my own and all page numbers refer to the original-language version of the text in question. Cf. Conditions: `Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says that History ^ he is thinking of Nazi barbarism ^ henceforth forbids us the desire of philosophy. I cannot grant him this, for such a conviction puts the philosopher right away in a position of weakness with respect to modern sophistry. Another way out is possible: to desire philosophy against history, and to break with historicism'. (Paris: E¨ditions du Seuil, 1992), pp. 77^8. The title of the standard English translation is Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political; throughout this essay I will refer to it simply as The Fiction of the Political. In their extremely lucid and helpful introduction to Badiou's work, Feltham and Clemens also cite this text as representative of Derrida and of `poststructuralism' generally, insofar as it presents the argument that `the subject is nothing other than a perpetual movement of translation' (In¢nite Thought, pp. 4^5). In order to read this paraphrase critically, one would have to ask about the meaning and evaluative implications of the phrase `nothing other'. Such a reading is recommended also by the way in which the editors introduce the originality of Badiou's work in opposition to what appears at times as a merely straw-man version of poststructuralism, which they describe for example as having `gleefully proclaimed' the `death' of philosophical tradition (p. 4). `De¨sistance'. In Psyche¨ : Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galile¨e, 1987), p. 606. Ibid., p. 610. `Impatience is never justi¢ed. It should incite one to take the time and submit oneself to the experience of that which is not self-evident ^ without avoiding it' (`De¨sistance', p. 610). Cf. Ronell's account of Friedrich Schlegel: `Perhaps he predicted the emergence of readers, not mere interpreter-digesters but those who take pleasure in the reading

200

11. 12.

13. 14.

Notes of incomprehensibility and who understand understanding as just one form of reading' (Stupidity [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002], p. 156). `Typographie'. In Mimesis des articulations (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975), p. 189. While appearing in the later volume La Sujet de la philosophie (1979), `L'Oblite¨ration' was originally published in Critique 313 ( June 1973). In `Typographie', Lacoue-Labarthe refers to the essay as part of a work-in-progress on Heidegger (p. 189). `Typographie', p. 189. On personhood as a metaleptical act of position, see Paul de Man's `Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric': `Anthropomorphism' is not just a trope but an identi¢cation on the level of substance. It takes one entity for another and thus implies the constitution of speci¢c entities prior to their confusion, the taking of something that can then be assumed to be given. Anthropomorphism freezes the in¢nite chain of tropological transformations and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes all others. It is no longer a proposition but a proper name, as when the metamorphosis in Ovid's stories culminates and halts in the singleness of a proper name, Narcissus or Daphne or whatever. (In The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984], p. 241)

15. `De¨sistance', p. 607. 16. Manifeste, p. 80. 17. De Man describes the necessary relation between the rhetoric of uni¢cation and the category of the aesthetic in his essay `Hegel on the Sublime'. In Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 110^11. 18. `De¨sistance', p. 616. 19. Was Heisst Denken? (TÏbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1954), pp. 71^2. 20. Ibid., p. 68. 21. `De¨sistance', p. 616. 22. Manifeste, p. 39. Emphasis added. 23. An excellent example of what this means in terms of place is Orhan Pamuk's presentation of the always mobile, unthought and multiple dimensions of `his' city in Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), especially in chapters 23^31. 24. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. xix^xx. Translation modi¢ed. 25. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Erster Band (Pfullingen: GÏnther Neske, 1961), pp. 193^4. 26. `Typographie', p. 227. 27. Nietzsche, p. 193. 28. Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 327a. All translations of the Republic in this essay are my modi¢cations of Shorey. 29. Ibid., 331a. 30. Ibid., 328e^330e. 31. Ibid., 331a.

Notes

201

32. He does this ¢rst of all by initiating a process of literary-critical activity: to each of Cephalus' literary or anecdotal citations, Socrates responds by suggesting an alternative interpretation of the citation. (In the course of the discussion, Cephalus invokes for example statements by Sophocles, Themistokles and Pindar) (328e^331b). 33. Ibid., 331c^d. 34. Ibid., 369c. 35. Ibid., 354c. 36. Ibid., 434c^435a. 37. Politieia is, of course, the Greek title of what has been Latinized and rei¢ed in the public thing of res publicum. The su¤x -eia indicates an abstraction of the word polites, which names a citizen or member of the polis. Politeia designates what it means to belong to a polis, and therefore, as E¨tienne Balibar has suggested, indicates a state of relations more accurately re£ected by the English word `citizenship' than `republic', since the latter implies a positive `thing' (res) belonging to yet distinct from the publicum. Peri dikaios (`on', `about', or `around justice') is the narrative's subtitle, which some scholars maintain was attached by later scribes. 38. Ibid., 473c^e.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor 25, 31 Agamben, Giorgio 50, 75, 185n.37, 185n.42 Antleme, Robert 104 Aristotle 45^6, 120 Artaud, Antonin 28, 30 Ashbery, John 73^5 Attridge, Derek 28^9, 70^2, 74, 184n.22, 184n.28, 185n.37 auto-immunity 18^20, 22, 24, 26, 52, 174^5n.23, 182n.12 Badiou, Alain 68, 152^4, 158^61, 183n.4, 199n.4, 199n.6 Balibar, E¨tienne 201n.37 Barthes, Roland 96, 98, 105, 190n.19 Bartleby (Melville) 27, 55 Bataille, Georges 16, 20, 104^5 Beckett, Samuel 28 Benjamin, Walter 82, 196n.17 Bennington, Geo¡rey 71, 77, 146, 173n.18, 185n.46, 198n.14 Benveniste, E¨mile 149 Bernasconi, Robert 186n.7 Bernstein, Charles 73, 75 Bident, Christophe 190n.15 Birnbaum, Jean 19 Blanchot, Maurice 29^31, 50, 68, 95^105, 108, 116^17, 191n.24, 191^2n.29, 192n.34 Blavier, Andre¨ 198n.4 Bodin, Jean 20 Bordieu, Pierre 126, 141^2 Bracken, Christopher 197n.49 Brault, Pascale-Anne 99, 190n.14 Bruns, Gerald 183n.7 Burkett, Paul 127^9, 196n.23

Caruth, Cathy 188n.38 Celan, Paul 31, 69^70, 72, 77^8, 147 Ce¨zanne, Paul 115 Char, Rene¨ 104 Chase, Cynthia 188n.38 Cheah, Pheng 132 Chomsky, Noam 140, 144 Churchill, Ward 178n.14 citation 74^5, 84, 99, 101, 103, 105, 117, 152, 185n.36 Cixous, He¨le©ne 31, 146, 148 Clark, Timothy 28^9, 68, 70, 182n.1, 182n.2, 184n.22, 184n.28 community 50^2, 54^6, 148, 170n.8, 180n.23, 185n.37 confession 87, 97, 101, 187n.8 contradiction 22, 45, 107, 116^17, 130, 132, 138^9 counter-institution see also institution[ality] 33, 35, 45, 47^9, 51, 54, 56^7, 97, 177n.1 countersignature see also signature 69^71, 74, 77^8, 80, 96^7, 99, 191n.19 Cunningham, Conor 23, 27, 32 date

69, 72, 77^9, 103^5, 118, 168, 192n.36 Deleuze, Gilles 25, 153^4, 175n.17 Derrida, Jacques (works) `Above all, no journalists' 179n.17 Acts of Literature 71, 183n.14, 185n.39, 185n.40, 185n.48, 185^6n.49, 193n.18 `Aphorism Countertime' 116 `As If It Were Possible' 97, 105, 175n.19 `Before the Law' 185n.40

212

Index

Derrida, Jacques (works) (continued ) Be¨ liers 181n.36 `La beªte et le souverain' 47 `Che cos'e© la poesia?' 30, 69, 183n.19 Cinders 77 `Circonfession' 56, 169n.1 `Comment ne pas parler: denegations' 51^2, 55 `Countersignature' 96, 139, 191n.26 `The Deconstruction of Actuality' 98 Demeure 100^2, 104, 191n23, 191n.24 De¨ sistance 154, 163, 199n.9 `Di¡e¨rance' 122^3, 185n.42 Dissemination 28, 143, 173n.17 `The Double Session' 29, 69, 73, 75, 77, 79^80, 185n.40 Edmund Husserl's `Origin of Geometry' 116, 192n.6 `Envois' 77 `Faith and Knowledge' 51^2, 61, 172^3n.16 `Fichus: Frankfurt Address' 31 `Force and Signi¢cation' 133, 199n.50 `Force of Law' 14, 26, 172n.15, 193n.15, 199n.20 Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius 31 The Gift of Death 51^2, 56, 108, 181n.42, 185n.4 Glas 77^8, 106, 116 `Globalization, Peace, Cosmopolitanism' 61, 64^5, 182n.12 `I Have a Taste for the Secret' 26, 45^52, 54^6 `The Law of Genre' 71, 95 Margins of Philosophy 183n.15 Memoires for Paul de Man 83^5, 99, 118, 186n.8, 190^1n.19, 192n.36, 199n.18 `Mochlos; or, the Con£ict of Faculties' 14, 169n.3 The Monolingualism of the Other 142, 147, 198n.5 `Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy' 198n.7 Of Grammatology 11^12, 21, 24, 83, 122, 143, 171n.13, 173^4n.20, 194n.4, 194^5n.8

On Touching ^ Jean-Luc Nancy 108, 111, 113, 118^19 The Other Heading 139 `Parergon' 183n.12, 183n.13 `Passions' 55, 191n.23 `Plato's Pharmacy' 43 Politics of Friendship 46. 95 The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy 108, 118 `Psyche: Invention of the Other' 70, 154, 185n.44 `The Purveyor of Truth' 195n.8 Right to Philosophy [Du droit a© la philosophie] 171n.14, 180n.16 Schibboleth 69, 72, 77, 139, 198n.5 `Signature Event Context' 139, 185n.41 Signesponge 69, 77^8, 139 Sovereignties in Question 68, 183n.16 Specters of Marx 10, 12, 51^2, 82, 132, 162, 168, 186n.8 Speech and Phenomena 21, 108, 192n.6 Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles 198n.6 `The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics' 137 `The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation' 28 `The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations' 47, 52, 107, 115, 180n.16 The Truth in Painting 185n.40 `Tympan' 78^9 `Typewriter Ribbon' 83, 85, 87, 91, 93, 186n.6, 186^7n.8, 187^8n.23 Ulysse gramophone 169n.3 `The University Without Condition' 18, 55 Voyous 19, 174n.21, 174^5n.23 `A Witness Forever' 103^4 The Work of Mourning 98^9, 190n.12, 190n.14, 190n.19 Writing and Di¡erence 21 `Zeugnis, Gabe' 187n.8 Derrida, Maguerite 180n.23 de Man, Paul 82^94, 96, 99, 118^19, 122, 137, 154, 186n.7, 186^7n.8, 187^8n.23, 188n.32, 189n.41, 189n.56, 190^91n.19, 192n.36, 193^4n.2, 200n.14, 200n.17

Index de Montaigne, Michel 113 de Saussure, Ferdinand 11^13, 16, 18, 122^3, 170n.7, 170n.8, 170n.9, 170n.10, 171n.11, 171n.12, 194n.5 de Vries, Hent 179n.17 des Foreªts, Louis-Rene¨ 104 di¡erence 11^12, 19, 22^3, 29, 122^3, 133, 143, 145^6, 195n.8 du Plessis, Rachel Blau 73, 75, 184n.35, 184^5n.36 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams) 124 epoche¨ 47, 108, 114 ethics 26^7, 55^6, 78, 111, 141, 145, 165, 185n.36, 185n.44, 187n.8 event 18^19, 26^7, 29^31, 70^2, 79, 83, 89, 92^4, 97, 99, 103^4, 109, 147, 149, 160, 174n.21, 185n.39, 187n.8 Faulkner, William 50 Ferraris, Maurizio 47, 50, 54 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 25, 31, 94 Fink, Eugen 108 Foster, John Bellamy 127^9, 196n.23 friendship 46, 95, 98^9, 104^5, 118^19, 165, 191n.19, 192n.34, 192n.36 Freud, Sigmund 108, 194n.8, 195^6n.14 Fukiyama, Francis 194n.2 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 68 Gasche¨, Rodolphe 143^4, 192n.1 Genet, Jean 106, 116 Gide, Andre¨ 54 globalization 41, 64, 66^7 globalatinization [mondialatinisation] 61, 143 Great Dictator, The (Chaplin) 62 Grevisse. Maurice 140^1 Grossman, Evelyne 147 Groupe de Recherches sur l'Enseignement Philosophique [GREPH] 48, 58 Gue¨roult, Martial 47^9 Habermas, JÏrgen 182n.2 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 62^4, 66, 182n.8, 182n.10 haunting 12, 15, 27, 96^7, 100, 143, 191n.23

213

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 25, 45^7, 49, 106^7, 116^17, 128, 132, 134, 153 Heidegger, Martin 12, 22^3, 25, 30^1, 47, 54, 66, 68, 74, 82, 108, 116, 118, 137^8, 152^67, 182n.2, 193n.11, 197n.50, 200n.12 Hejinian, Lyn 71 Henry, Michel 193n.9 Hersh, Richard 37, 178n.10, 179n.20 Hertz, Neil 188n.32, 188n.34, 188n.38 Hippolyte, Jean 48 Hobbes, Thomas 15 Hobson, Marian 145^6 Holocaust 153^4 hospitality 19, 27 Husserl, Edmund 10, 20, 47, 49, 54, 107^19, 144, 172n.14, 174^5n.23, 175n.3, 193n.11, 193n.14, 193n.16, 193n.17, 195n.8 inheritance 68, 95^6, 98, 134^5, 141, 147^8, 187n.23 institution(ality) see also counter-institution 10, 12^16, 18^20, 34^41, 45, 47^9, 51, 54^8, 69^70, 72, 76, 78, 80, 96, 100, 103, 105, 141, 147, 169n.6, 170n.7, 171n.11, 171n.12, 171n.13, 172n.16, 177n.4, 177n.5, 178n.10, 183n.21, 184n.28, 185^6n.49 Jacobi, Friedrich 25, 31, 175n.15 Jakobson, Roman 149 Jameson, Fredric 82^4 Jespersen, Otto 149 Johnson, Barbara 143 Joyce, James 31, 116^17, 146 justice 26^7, 52, 56, 100, 148^9, 153, 156^7, 159, 161^8, 172^3n.16, 173^4n.20, 201n.37 Kafka, Franz 30 Kamuf, Peggy 191n.24 Kant, Immanuel 15, 17^18, 45, 47, 49, 89^94, 107^12, 114, 117, 120, 172n.14, 183n.12, 183n.13, 188^9n.41, 193n.14 Kearney, Richard 21 Kierkegaard, SÖren 51, 108

214

Index

Koch, Kenneth 75 Kofman, Sarah 58 Kotsko, Adam 193n.7 Lacan, Jacques 123, 153, 194^5n.8 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 68, 78, 153^9, 161^3, 183n.5, 185n.45, 199n.4, 200n.12 Landgrebe, Ludwig 113 Laporte, Roger 104 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 198n.4 Leibniz, Gottfried 52^4 Levinas, Emmanuel 96, 108^9, 116, 185n.44, 198n.5 Lingis, Alfonso 50 Lucy, Niall 143, 198n.10 Lyotard, Jean-Franc°ois 68, 96, 125, 152^4, 182n.3, 183n.12, 198n.53 McKenna, Kristine 21^2 Malandra, Geri 177n.3, 178n.10, 178n.13, 179n.16, 179n.19, 179n.21 Mallarme¨, Ste¨phane 28^31, 69, 74, 77^8, 80, 185n.46 Marin, Louis 99 Marion, Jean-Luc 109 Marx, Karl 52, 82, 127^34, 194n.3, 196^7n.38, 197n.40, 197n.43, 197n.44 marxism 122, 126 material[ity] 74, 82, 84^5, 87, 89^94, 122^3, 126^7, 129^34, 136, 158^61, 165, 168, 193^4n.2, 194^5n.8, 196n.17, 197n.40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 110, 113, 119, 193n.11 messianism 56, 85, 92^3, 172n.16, 196n.17 Michaels, Walter Benn 193^4n.2 Miller, Charles 177n.5, 178n.10, 178n.13, 179n.16, 179n.19, 179n.21 Miller, Henry 124, 195n.11 Miller, J. Hillis 122 mourning 10, 84, 96^9, 119, 191n.19 Naas, Michael 99, 190n.14 Nancy, Jean-Luc 50, 58, 68, 110^11, 183n.6, 193n.12, 193n.13

negative theology see also religion 51^2 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24^6, 28, 31, 47, 128, 139, 155^6, 158, 162^3 nihilism 21^8, 30^2, 84, 153 Oppen, George

184n.36

Pamuk, Orhon 200n.23 Peters, Gary 70 Plato 23, 25, 43, 47, 49, 154, 158, 160^7 Plotinus 23 plurality 46, 144^5, 148, 159^61, 168, 190n.19 politics 15, 17^18, 26, 41, 55, 61, 87, 147^8, 163^4, 166^8, 173n.19 Ponge, Francis 31, 69, 77 promise 40, 85^6, 96^8, 105, 118, 120 proper name 76, 138^40, 143, 147, 150, 156, 185n.41 Proust, Marcel 178n.9 psychoanalysis 99, 121^2, 126, 133 Pynchon, Thomas 124 Rabelais, Franc°ois 43 Ramond, Charles 143, 198n.10 religion see also negative theology 13, 25, 51^2, 56, 61, 65, 86, 92, 108 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 116 Ronell, Avital 152^3, 179n.22, 199^200n.10 Rorty, Richard 68, 183n.7 Rose, Gillian 23 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15^17, 83, 85^7, 154, 169n.6, 173n.19, 186n.7, 186n.8, 191n.19 Royle, Nicholas 179n.22 secret 18, 31, 52^3, 69 Schmitt, Carl 20 signature see also countersignature 28, 46, 74, 77^8, 96, 99, 105, 139^40, 147, 185n.39, 185n.41 singularity 27, 30^1, 52, 54^6, 65, 67^80, 86, 96, 98, 103^4, 108^9, 123, 138, 145^51, 156, 158, 160, 183n.14, 184n.21, 184n.22, 184n.28, 185n.37, 185n.41, 190n.19, 191n.23

Index Siscar, Marcus 145^6, 198n.13 Socrates 163^8, 172n.14, 201n.32 sovereignty 16^18, 20, 61^4, 170n.9, 173n.19 spectrality 52, 82, 97^8, 143, 145, 147, 149 Spellings, Margaret 37, 39, 178n.13 Spinoza, Baruch 17 Spivak, Gayatri 24 Steinmetz, Rudy 144^5 supplement 49, 122^3, 143, 194n.4 survival 27, 87, 98, 118, 160, 162, 168 trace 11^12, 14, 18^19, 23, 105, 118, 134, 143, 162 translation 131, 145^8, 163, 199n.6 testimony 33^5, 40^1, 44, 69, 100^3, 105, 178n.9, 191n.23 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 66^7 trauma 15, 121, 123, 134, 153, 195n.14

215

university 14, 18, 31, 35^42, 47, 49, 55, 96, 125^6, 136, 171n.14, 177n.4, 177n.5 Vattimo, Gianni 47 violence 15^18, 22, 26^7, 30^2, 92^3, 100^1, 103, 121, 134, 172n.15, 173n.19, 178n.10, 178n.13, 178n.14, 179n.19, 179n.20, 179n.21, 190n.19 von Helmholtz, Hermann 124, 127, 195n.14 von Schlegel, Friedrich 84, 94, 199n.10 Waite, Geo¡rey 128 Warminski, Andrzej 92^3, 194n.2 Weber, Max 65 Weber, Samuel 179n.17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 144 Wordsworth, William 70, 87^93 Wortham, Simon Morgan 45, 47^8, 176^7n.1, 179n.22, 183^4n.21, 192n.29