Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work 0415942683, 0415942691, 9780203724453, 9780415942683, 9780415942690

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Later Derrida

Also by Herman Rapaport

The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse Is There Truth in Art? Between the Sign and the Gaze Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language Milton and the Postmodern

Later Derrida Reading the Recent Work

herman rapaport

Published in 2003 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Transferred to Digital Printing 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 0-415-94268-3 — 0-415-94269-1 (pbk.)

Contents

Preface

vii

c h a p t e r 1 : Deconstruction’s Other

1

c h a p t e r 2 : Monolinguism and Literature c h a p t e r 3 : Archive Trauma c h a p t e r 4 : Subjectilities

Notes

139

References Index

147

153

75 97

25

Preface

In terms of discussing the so-called later Derrida (later from today’s vantage point), I make no attempt to be all-encompassing or definitive, because the fact is that Derrida has been working simultaneously on a large number of multiple fronts that are not only complex, but in a state of strategic incompletion or suspension. He has published well over twenty books since 1990 and contributed major essays to a large number of other volumes. In addition, he has given many interviews that are often very significant in terms of adding insights or providing direction to his various itineraries. Of course, it is well known that Derrida has made an ethical turn in the 1980s that has focused on the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas and that during the 1990s Derrida has increasingly emphasized ethical themes like hospitality, donation, friendship, testimony, secrecy, responsibility, pardon, and forgiveness. Many readers have noticed a theological and even mystical dimension to this turn, something that John D. Caputo has developed at length in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (1997). And Derrida himself has recently admitted to being an existentialist thinker of sorts in an interview with Maurizio Ferraris (2001). At the same time, during the 1990s Derrida has deepened his earlier work on the question of undecidables (in Khôra and Aporias). He has furthered the lengthy interlocution he has had in the past with the work of Martin Heidegger (in The Politics of Friendship) and has furthered his thinking on law and performativity via Walter Benjamin in “Force of Law.” Closely allied is Derrida’s interest in language and performativity, hence his interest in the gift, forgiveness, and pardon.

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On another track, Derrida has developed his earlier interest in dissemination by means of talks on questions of media (Échographies de la télévision). And, too, at least since the 1980s, there has been an interlocution under way with Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings that culminated in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Meanwhile, back in the 1980s Derrida developed some thoughts on the philosophical distinction between humans and animals in Of Spirit and the interview “Eating Well.” And this also is part of a larger project, though much of it as yet forthcoming. Then, too, there are works of the 1990s that go back in time to earlier projects held in suspension. Archive Fever, for example, is one of The Post Card’s phantom limbs. The Other Heading develops a footnote in Of Spirit. Other projects would include Derrida’s inquiry into questions of truth (see “History of the Lie”), his open-ended interest in Artaud (Artaud le Moma), unfinished business with Paul de Man (“Typewriter Ribbon”), and so forth. If one views the various Internet servers that catalogue current French books that vendors hold in stock, one will notice there is something in the neighborhood of two hundred books that one could purchase that are either by, in collaboration with, or on Jacques Derrida. This suggests that, contrary to what has often been said, Derrida is not a marginal figure in France itself. He is easily the most important living French intellectual today and has been a significant participant in many colloquia and projects that involve many scholars from many disciplines. I think that what makes Derrida’s work particularly attractive to his collaborators is not only its immense creativity, but the fact that much of it leaves considerable room for others to make their own contributions. At least, that is how I prefer to think of the way in which my own writing fits in with his. The outer two chapters of my book consider Derrida’s work mainly in the late 1980s, which is a most creative and transitional period in his career, whereas the inner two chapters consider Monolinguism of the Other (1996) and Archive Fever (1995), which represent some of his strongest work of the ’90s. Each chapter covers quite a bit of ground in terms of referring to a constellation of works by Derrida, and all the chapters, either overtly or obliquely, stress Derrida’s relevance in terms of cultural studies. Chapter 1 focuses on a missed interlocution between Derrida and Trinh T. Minh-ha in order to suggest some itineraries for deconstruction – viii –

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other than the ones either imagines. This speaks to some windows of theoretical opportunity that opened up in the late 1980s and early 1990s that now appear to have closed. Chapter 2 attempts to sort out Derrida’s sociology, which appears to be bundled up with a not incontestable theory of what he believes literature to be. I situate this discussion in the larger framework of literary study as we have known it over the past few decades and develop an issue that was stressed under other rubrics in chapter 1, namely, that of face-to-face small communities. This chapter includes an analysis of Derrida’s approach to Maurice Blanchot’s short narrative “The Instant of My Death.” Chapter 3 focuses on the question of truth and madness in the context of what I call archive trauma, something that was at issue, too, in the Blanchot narrative. In part, the aim of this chapter is to discuss the Destruktion (the term is Heidegger’s) that is part of deconstruction, something that I am implicitly counterpointing to the nonviolence of deconstruction in chapter 1. Chapter 4 has two missions. The first is to explore yet another of Derrida’s constructions of Heidegger, this one based on the conviction that we can’t dismiss the existential Heidegger of Being and Time. This is surprising, given the position Derrida took up in the late 1960s when he discredited precisely such a view. The second mission of this chapter is to link this change in direction with Derrida’s essay on Artaud, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” which I think fits very well, in many respects, with the revaluation of Heidegger, Derrida’s recent interest in the concept of the animal, and also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” An aim of this chapter is to disclose yet another way of understanding the subject that I think Derrida shares with Spivak, an understanding that, unfortunately, hasn’t been much recognized between them and that represents the outer limits of how one might theorize the subject. I would like to record my gratitude to Jonathan Culler, Mary Jacobus, Sabine Gölz, Nikolai Popov, Alexander Gelley, Anthony Yu, and to the copyeditors, Norma McLemore and Teresa Jesionowski; the proofreader, Katie King; and, of course, to my editor, Bill Germano. I also wish to thank Peggy Kamuf for her helpful responses and critiques. Part of the book was written while I was a fellow at the Society for Humanities at Cornell University. I’m grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to republish “Deconstruction’s Other: Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jacques Derrida,” Diacritics 25: 2 (1995): 98–113; and “Archive Trauma,” – ix –

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Diacritics 28: 4 (1998): 68–81; to the University of California Press for permission to quote from “Elegy” by Aimé Césaire which is translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith in Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, copyright 1983, and to Faber and Faber Publishing to quote from “The Waste Land Limericks” from Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, by Wendy Cope, copyright 1986. London 2002

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chapter 1

Deconstruction’s Other

In thinking about the difference between deconstruction and cultural studies, one often runs into the question of there being an antagonism between the two. The familiar reproach to deconstruction’s lack of a coherent political agenda, let alone the pragmatic means to carry such an agenda out, was well established by the late 1980s and had as one of its sources the acrimonious debate in Positions between Jacques Derrida and two Marxists closely associated with the Tel Quel group—Guy Scarpetta and Jean-Louis Houdebine. Alternatively, critics influenced by deconstruction had taken a dim view of the then relatively recent infatuation with identity politics and the return to agency, seeing it as a backslide into what Derrida during the 1960s called “anthropologism.” At around this time, Trinh T. Minh-ha published Woman, Native, Other (1989) which raised precisely this kind of confrontation. What will concern us, however, is not so much the outright political clash between mutually opposed positions, but another notion of antagonism discussed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. We may recall that for Laclau and Mouffe the word contradiction is reserved for an opposition between two fully formed or completed paradigms, while antagonism defines “the presence of an Other who prevents me from being totally myself.” As Laclau and Mouffe put it, “The [antagonistic] relation arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution.” In other words, where one has antagonism, one does not have fully objectified constructions and relations. Instead, what one has are precarious and partial objectifications –1–

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whose differences are overdetermined precisely because they are unstable. According to the authors, “If language is a system of differences, antagonism is the failure of difference: in that sense, it situates itself within the limits of language and can only exist as the disruption of it” (1985, 125). They argue further that it is precisely when these failures of difference—what in Derrida might be called différance— become legion that the experience of the Other is called upon to intervene as a response to the crisis created. Trinh’s Woman, Native, Other is, in my view, antagonistic in precisely this way. Her book is especially interesting in that it does not try to present the Other as a monolithic totality but, rather, as that which is partially realized and itself necessarily mediated by what Laclau and Mouffe were calling the failures of difference and the limits of discourse. The analyses that follow are to be thought of as complementary to Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of antagonism and are intended to remember a recent historical moment in critical writing when Trinh opened up some possibilities for thinking about deconstruction that passed by quite unnoticed. • Readers of Trinh Minh-ha and Jacques Derrida might agree that they make an odd couple. After all, Trinh’s work is not shy about appropriating metaphysical modes of thinking in what might seem to be a relatively uncritical and enthusiastic manner. Her melodramatic effusions, wholesale identifications with exotic culture, and rough-cut appropriations of French theory are hardly the stuff of which deconstruction is made. However much she situates herself between cultures, Trinh’s eclecticism or bricolage looks at first glance as if it is based on the assumption that mixing up Julia Kristeva with Audre Lorde, and Leslie Marmon Silko with Claude Lévi-Strauss, is somehow going to liberate us from the prison house of Eurocentric thinking. Behind Trinh’s cutand-paste techniques appears to be the assumption that she is a multicultural subject who can write her way into a brave new epistemology that stands apart from and exceeds what Lorde has called “the master’s house.” This, of course, would be a direct challenge to Derrida who, like Heidegger, has dedicated himself to dismantling the house of Being with the tools of metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is because of this apparent clash between their critical practices that I would like to ask whether a book like Woman, Native, Other reveals a destiny of deconstruction other than the one Derrida –2–

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may have had in mind. That is, I am wondering if Trinh’s book reveals a destiny that breaks with a law of critical conflict, the difference, precisely, between what is and is not deconstruction. In this she would differ considerably from someone like Rodolphe Gasché, who in The Inventions of Difference laments the fate of deconstruction in America by means of insisting upon its difference from all those things that are not deconstruction. In thinking about this, I want to ask whether Trinh’s book reveals proximities to deconstruction in which the difference between theories—perhaps the difference-of-theory itself—is dismantled even as alterity or Otherness is retained. After all, Trinh’s discourse takes for granted a certain deconstructive agenda even as it rejects those aspects of deconstruction that set themselves apart from phonologism, existentialism, and metaphysics. This setting aside or standing apart, which characterized the early Derrida of texts like Positions, is still significant for deconstruction, since it will not tolerate a letting go of rigorous critical positions and discourses intended to filter metaphysics out. In Trinh’s work, however, the exclusionary principle of deconstruction is insouciantly transgressed, so much so, in fact, that a work like Woman, Native, Other could be considered hostile to deconstruction and, as such, considered to be deconstruction’s Other. In Woman, Native, Other many passages take the side of deconstruction by condemning totality, the author principle, the voice of knowledge, and logocentrism. But the book also rejects deconstruction’s agenda as a theory or method by incorporating a number of metaphysical and spiritualist references gathered from numerous cultures. That is, Trinh has intentionally put deconstruction’s operations into brackets as the precondition for a postmodern theoretical construction—or reassemblage—that allows us to understand why we might be well advised to think more globally than Derrida has in a letter to a Japanese friend about a new way of grasping the disposition of theory. Separability has given way to multiplicity, coalition, hegemony, collaboration, and hybridization. Consequently, there is in Trinh’s work a breakdown of theoretical containment or separability that is antithetical to deconstruction. This is evident, for example, in the tactic of appropriating other people’s theories in aggressively eclectic and even fragmentary ways without necessarily citing sources or defining where her own voice ends and other voices begin. Yet these appropriations establish critical or theoretical reference points even if they are abruptly collaged –3–

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together with incompatible approaches whose theoretical foundations may not mesh. In that sense, Trinh specifically points to the partially realized aspects of precarious objectifications, the overdeterminations of difference, and the underdevelopment of the Other. What may appear as theoretical slam dancing demystifies the inviolability of theory as a master narrative and antagonistically challenges critical differences by pointing to their limits or failures. This is what Trinh has called the “voiding” of theoretical categories. Far from attempting a totalizing disarticulation of categories, if not to say, the deconstruction of the subject per se, Trinh’s often violent appropriation of other people’s ideas serves her own autonomy as an author or subject who does not want to abide by the rules of schooled critical reception. That is, even while she condemns the author principle, she sets herself apart as a multiply interpellated author by opposing any notion of scholarship that would imagine a stable or certain relation between what is said and what is spoken about. Writers who subscribe to scholarly protocols, she says, are conformist and lose sight of the “radicalness of writing and theorizing” (Trinh 1989, 42). Trinh, therefore, antagonistically practices theory in ways that appear highly idiosyncratic if not vulnerable. The risk of running into a head-on collision with deconstruction is evident when one compares Trinh’s writings to the classical reading and writing protocols of Derrida, who is enormously well schooled and not at all sloppy about how he reads his critical sources. Incisiveness, accuracy, rigor, competence, mastery, gravity, and authority are fundamental to the Derridean text, whereas looseness of association, blurred distinctions, non sequiturs, theoretical misreadings, critical pastiche, and melodramatic outbursts occur with some noticeability in Trinh’s prose. For those, like Gasché, who have been brought up with the expectation that theory should be conceptually rigorous in the Derridean sense, a book like Woman, Native, Other may come as a shock, since it could be argued that Trinh’s writing characterizes what Roland Barthes once called a sociolect, a discourse “thick” with stock phrases and catechistic declarations. Such a text, Barthes would have argued, is not meant to be read at the level of the sign, but rather at the level of citation, referent, and stereotype (Barthes 1977, 168). It is here, of course, that deconstruction and cultural studies come into sharp relief.1 Of course, Trinh is aware that her writing may well be problematic for the critical theorist, who is likely to think in terms of contradiction –4–

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rather than antagonism. However, a sympathetic reader should see that her reliance on a sociolect functions to stress the partial realization of various articulations and those points at which the failure or giving way of differences takes place. To be sure, it is not accidental, given Laclau and Mouffe’s orientation, that she invokes the speech of the Other by addressing storytelling in a non-Western context in which all ends are loose ends and theory can be picked up and dropped at will. In her exergue, “The Story Began Long Ago,” she writes: Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter. For the heart of the matter is always somewhere else than where it is supposed to be. To allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes. (1989, 1)

While in this passage an event of something like deconstruction is not present, its effects are nevertheless to be felt, for example, in reference to displacement, postponement, emergence, and destinerrance, not to mention the subjectless or collective releasement from what is called “the heart of the matter.” In further alluding to a rural scene of villagers who have gathered to speak on matters of importance at the marketplace, she continues: Time and space are not something entirely exterior to oneself, something that one has, keeps, saves, wastes, or loses. Thus, even though one meets to discuss, for example, the problem of survival with this year’s crops, one begins to speak of so-and-so who has left his wife, children, family, and village in search of a job in the city and has not given any news since then, or of the neighbor’s goats which have eaten so-and-so’s millet. The conversation moves from the difficulties caused by rural depopulation to the need to construct goat pens, then wanders in old sayings and remembrances of events that occurred long ago. . . . A man starts singing softly and playing his lute. Murmurs, laughter, and snatches of conversation mingle under the moonlight. Some women drowse on a mat they have spread on the ground and wake up when they are spoken to. The discussion lingers on late into the night. By the end of the meeting, everyone –5–

— Later Derrida — has spoken. The chief of the village does not “have the floor” for himself, nor does he talk more than anyone else. He is there to listen, to absorb, and to ascertain at the close what everybody has already felt or grown to feel during the session. (1989, 1–2)

Such a scene of conversation or storytelling is one in which we might say numerous threads are dropped and picked up again as it pleases the villagers. The story, Trinh says, never stops beginning or finishing. It has no origin, no telos, no destiny, even though important matters are being raised and listening is taking place. This conforms rather well to Walter Benjamin’s account of the storyteller who in olden times did not have to do much explaining or connecting, since the material was epic in scope and was not reducible to the mere closure of information. Benjamin reminds us of the role of memory and how it is the listener who controls what gets picked up or not by the sheer fact that he or she remembers one thing and not another. Trinh accepts this account of the story as a partially realized objectification and even radicalizes Benjamin’s notion of story when she says: “It appears headless and bottomless for it is built on differences. Its (in)finitude subverts every notion of completeness and its frame remains a non-totalizable one. The differences it brings about are differences not only in structure, in the play of structures and of surfaces, but also in timbre and in silence” (1989, 2). Here, of course, recent French theory and, in particular, deconstruction can be said to have suddenly become operative. In fact, deconstruction is specifically marked. After all, concepts like nontotalizability, difference, and play are all part of a very familiar vocabulary that is being used, in Trinh’s context, to address an ethnographic encounter in which language has to be understood as deconstructed in advance. And yet, matters are not so simple as having found a thesis in the dark. For as we shall see, these Derridean passages are not allowed to arrogate much thetic power but pass by as if they were allowed to come without actually arriving. And certainly we are left to ask what event, operation, or entity this deconstructive language delimits. Of what does it speak? This is, however, the question that Trinh’s text does not resolve, since the deconstructive moment, if we may call it that, is there at the cost of not being present to itself as deconstruction

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but, rather, as a symptom of a difference that has given way or failed. Trinh emphasizes this as she glides into her next sentence. We—you and me, she and he, we and they—we differ in the content of the words, in the construction and weaving of sentences but most of all, I feel, in the choice and mixing of utterances, the ethos, the tones, the paces, the cuts, the pauses. The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. (2)

Here deconstruction does not come to fulfillment, because something other has emerged, namely, the idea of multiplicity. A reader might conclude that, after all, Trinh Minh-ha has merely confused deconstruction with polylogue, Derrida with Kristeva. However, in place of such a contradiction, Trinh has actually established an antagonism in which the destiny of deconstruction has been interrupted by the trajectory of other discourses with the result that deconstruction is prohibited from becoming one with itself as an objectifiable ensemble or totality that can be associated with highly developed institutional practices. Indeed, Trinh’s nostalgic scene of villagers picking up and dropping the threads of stories interrupts deconstruction by refusing a dismantling of certain metaphysical horizons; for Trinh’s villagers dwell tranquilly within a house of language whose inmixing of tones, voices, paces, and pauses reflects an aboriginal or primordial rhythm that is continuous with the generational cycles of the people themselves, for whom the gift of telling is quite literally prehistorical. It is, as Trinh says, “a gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness” (2). That is to say, the gift is a gift of the folk in whose difference the spirit of a people becomes palpable as something that is inexhaustible and stays within its own limits. This is what Trinh will develop in a metaphysical lexicon that includes reference to the great mother, tradition, total knowledge, the heritage of power, Thought Woman, storyteller, homeland, memory, generational continuity, voice, the oral, and the Word. In fact, it is the call of this spirited lexicon that brings Trinh into telepathic correspondence with these villagers, a harking back to earth, prehistory, and oral tradition, which for Trinh occupies the margin outside of what she calls the master’s house.

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For Trinh this suggests that practical or instrumentalized reason, even in its very sophisticated and deconstructive French variants, must be rejected in favor of the call to storytelling, which brings people together in the faraway village of Trinh’s exergue, a call that summons us from beyond the events or operations of not just such theories but theory in general. This is why the pragmatic is so quickly subordinated by the villagers to what we might call idle talk and the lapse into retelling old stories, the singing of old songs, and the villagers’ drowsy sharing of one another’s company, which eventually falls into a disuse and quiet in which the resonance of an accord can be felt. Was it for the sake of this ground tone of being that the villagers were called together? If so, the call could be considered an inaugural event that grounds and determines everything that is to happen in this ab-original scene, although, of course, the call is itself but a part of the customary folkways. Not unlike Derrida’s characterization of deconstruction in the “Letter to a Japanese Friend” (1988), it is a reflexive performative that cannot be attributed to an ego or consciousness but resides in and as that part of a structure which has the capability of instituting or inaugurating something that resounds silently in the quietude of the villagers’ company. We are very close here to Martin Heidegger’s notion of the ground tone in his lecture on Hölderlin’s “Germanien” and to the silent call of the earth in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in which Heidegger describes a peasant woman’s shoes. This, too, is a story about or of spirit—de l’esprit—of that which is assumed to be Other to deconstruction, or, if you like, deconstruction’s Other. In Woman, Native, Other, Trinh switches codes a bit by invoking a mise-en-scène analogous to Heidegger’s peasant woman that occurs in the context of African village life. And this requires us to ask whether the spirit she is invoking and the lexicon she has formulated are identical with Heidegger’s silent call of the earth. In other words, by means of repetition and displacement Trinh may be alerting us to a failure or crisis of difference in which we must ask ourselves if there is something metaphysical beyond or outside deconstruction, on its margin, so to speak, that is (1) not identical to itself and (2) not even taking place as an event that is singular, unified, or, to use a Heideggerian term, appropriable. In other words, is this event of which Trinh speaks a call that calls the same thing that is being called in Heidegger? Moreover, does this call ever call the same as such? Is there not a plurality of difference that –8–

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overflows the fixing of such a call as a full positivity, a determinable objectification? Certainly, one wonders whether a surplus of difference does not inhere in Trinh’s orientation to metaphysics that poses a threat to deconstruction’s reduction and trivialization of the metaphysical as merely logocentric and, as such, governed by the predictable laws of differentiation which are said to rule structure, sign, and play. Trinh is therefore not reluctant to invoke metaphysical thinking when she says that in the call to storytelling something is necessarily postponed, avoided, denied, and kept in abeyance. In the villagers’ silence, she suggests there is a tribute to how the event of speaking bears the enigma of the unsaid or the deferred. That is, she asks us to bear in mind that the silence vouchsafes or guards an origin that the villagers will never know, an arché‚ or ab-originality, that is structurally inaccessible and, finally, not even sought after. The stories, after all, are not an analysis or archaeology. They have no methodological instrumentality as such, and they are probably not reducible to any singular or recoverable event. Their pragmatic applicability is, to say the least, undetermined. So even here, a metaphysics structured around an absent center turns out to be more inoperative or unrealized than deconstruction might lead us to suspect. This, I think, is also quite characteristic of the whole of Woman, Native, Other, something the exergue is trying to suggest. For the entire book asks to be read in the manner of the stories that have always been told and that have been destined to reach Trinh who, in remembering and retelling them, herself becomes a figure akin to what some Native Americans have known as Thought Woman. As such, she is precariously objectified, however, since she is quite self-evidently not of these people, their ways, and, they might add, of their spirit. It is in this sense that Trinh incorporates discourses in such a way that they manifest themselves even without taking place as such. That is, just as Trinh gives voice to the very Thought Woman who she is not, deconstruction comes about as something else or other than deconstruction. Indeed, this something “other” is the destiny of a metaphysics that is outside of or marginal to deconstruction, a metaphysics that is the heteronomous, multicultural, and pluralized effect of deconstruction that has the capacity of antagonistically putting deconstruction under erasure by destabilizing its determinations and decisions. That a trait or trace of deconstruction is sent on its way is what makes this suppression so effective in Trinh’s work, since the trace is being carried by that Spirit –9–

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which deconstruction has been programmed to avoid, deny, or postpone. In this sense, Trinh channels or directs deconstruction to a destination to which it has not been disposed to go. Put another way, she has interfered—or intervened as Other—with what Derrida might think of as the disposition of deconstruction, the term “disposition” referring to something like availability, openness to, mood, or attitude toward. • Given the already long and complex history of deconstruction, it was inevitable that it would become methodologically divisible and not easily constructed as a self-identical approach or theory. Back in the late 1960s Derrida had been thinking of deconstruction as a violent confrontation directed against strategic targets: texts that inherently but not explicitly provided the means by which to invalidate the coercive strategies of metaphysics. In Positions Derrida refers to a “grammatological practice” and sketches its methodology. “Grammatology must pursue and consolidate whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure” (Derrida 1981c, 36). Such imperatives leave no doubt that a determinate critical subject or agency is operative and is producing an event, though not, as Derrida cautions, any event that can be perceived as final or absolute. Moreover, he speaks of grammatologically inscribing, loosening, marking, and exceeding structural limits. In “Force and Signification” (1967/ 1978), Derrida inserts a programmatic account of deconstruction, which has become known as “the reverse and displace technique.” In addressing the overturning of oppositions like form and force or duration and space, Derrida seeks an economy that would escape a system of metaphysical oppositions. If we appear to oppose one series to the other, it is because from within the classical system we wish to make apparent the noncritical privilege naively granted to the other series by a certain structuralism. Our discourse irreducibly belongs to the system of metaphysical oppositions. The break with this structure of belonging can be announced only through a certain organization, a certain strategic arrangement which, within the field of metaphysical opposition, uses the strengths of the field to turn its own stratagems against it, producing a force of dislocation that spreads itself throughout the entire system, fissuring it in every direction and thoroughly delimiting it. (Derrida 1978, 20) – 10 –

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In “The Ends of Man” (1968/1982a), a more elaborate but fundamentally similar program is advanced with the added point that the critic stands at once within and outside of a metaphysical structure and makes it tremble or quake until it ruptures. Derrida specifies, “This trembling is played out in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other, whether a ‘linguistic’ relationship . . . , or ethnological, economic, political, military, etc.” (134–35). It was imaginably with a postcolonial attitude that Derrida suggested that the program for deconstruction required the critic to inhabit the role of an intellectual activist confronting a dependency on Western institutions, which in Laclau and Mouffe’s vocabulary would be called contradictory. In the mid-1980s, however, Derrida suggests a new way of defining deconstruction in his “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” first published in Psyché in 1987. Deconstruction was no longer to be considered an aggressive method or program used by someone in opposition to something else, but rather was a critical event that cannot be reduced or localized to a given or discernible happening in the history of ideas. It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be reduced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures. Nor will it do to claim that each deconstructive “event” remains singular or, in any case, as close as possible to something like an idiom or a signature. It must also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an operation. Not only because there would be something “patient” or “passive” about it. . . . Not only because it does not return to an individual or collective subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme, etc. Deconstruction takes place. (1988, 3–4)

For those aware of the connections between the thought of Derrida and that of Heidegger, this definition seems to be quite indebted to the Heideggerian notion of Ereignis, the appropriative event that is always in arrival wherein disappropriation is a constitutive element. But in Laclau and Mouffe’s vocabulary Derrida’s definition suggests a movement from contradiction to antagonism, from the confrontation of objectified entities to the antagonism between partially realized ones. In the “Letter” Derrida claims that deconstruction is not appropriable as something (that is, objectively determinable) and cannot be reduced to – 11 –

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the protocols of essentialistic thinking. No doctrine, manifesto, program, explanation, or outline, he is saying, would be sufficient to represent deconstruction, since deconstruction is that event which takes place as something other than an object, text, theme, act, or theory. Here, too, relations arise not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their being constituted. In another short piece collected in Psyché, titled simply “Envoi,” Derrida considers Heidegger’s use of the word Vorstellung (showing, performance, presentation, idea) in terms of the gesture or act of placing something before us. The prefix Vor- means “faire tenir debout devant soi, . . . installer devant soi, . . . garder . . . sa disposition, . . . localiser dans la disponibilité‚ de la préposition” [to hold up in front of oneself, to set before oneself, to have at one’s disposition, to restrict to the availability of the preposition] (1987a, 121). It is a question of how something is disposed to be represented in a manner that does not reflexively bear on a subject or event that decides, acts, or determines how something is to be installed, set up, placed, represented, structured, positioned, constructed, constituted, or framed. As in the “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” Derrida is concerned that such a Vorstellung not be reduced to a technology, craft, or method of presentation; that it not be considered in terms of a practice, a set of rules, or of a transposable procedure. In other words, he does not want to consider such representation in terms of a critical subroutine or tool ready to hand. Moreover, he resists the idea of such a representation being a performative act or event that draws its authority from a signature or name, for example, deconstruction, but, one might add, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, or feminism. Instead, Derrida prefers to think of representation in the Heideggerian context of dis-position. By way of Trinh Minh-ha, however, one may wonder if not only deconstruction but other critical orientations necessarily have dispositions that avoid or deny their recovery as instrumental methods or self-identical critical acts. In other words, not only deconstruction, but other critical orientations might well be in step with Derrida when in the “Letter to a Japanese Friend” he announces a nonrepresentational mode of critical exegesis. Indeed, such a nonrepresentational criticism might well share Derrida’s disposition to question what it means to speak of or about something. Once more, we see a movement from the establishment of objective relations to precarious – 12 –

— Deconstruction’s Other —

or partial ones, as in, for example, Heidegger’s various encounters with the word Spirit. Here I want to digress a bit by expanding our view to include some other theorists. For example, one could ask whether Julia Kristeva really ever meant to talk about Chinese women in Des chinoises. And if not, of what was she speaking? Although this is not a question that was entirely thinkable in, say, 1974 when her book was first published by Des femmes, it is not inappropriate to ask it retroactively today. Indeed, this kind of question was overtly legitimized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in “Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse” began with a startling disclaimer: “This essay is not necessarily an attempt to illuminate To the Lighthouse and lead us to a correct reading” (1987, 30). In other words, her essay is intended to be exemplary of a critical thinking that is nonreferential or nonrepresentational insofar as the text is not about the announced subject, a critical examination of or confrontation with Woolf’s novel. Spivak’s essays often collage such nonrepresentational critical analyses with very literal accounts of personal experiences, hence splicing together the mimetic and the antimimetic. Indeed, we encounter perhaps an even more aggressive practice of antirepresentational scholarship in Avital Ronell’s booklength study of Madame Bovary’s crack wars. “The structure of addiction, and even of drug addiction in particular, is anterior to any empirical availability of crack, ice or street stuff. This structure and necessity are what Flaubert discovers and exposes” (1991, 103). Supposedly about Flaubert’s famous novel, this book is clearly about something else.2 In large part, Ronell asks questions about the text’s own disposition with respect to drugs, since it is a literature “on” drugs—that is, literally about drugs and figuratively turned on by drugs. With that in mind, she wonders how drug dependency interferes with our dependency on scholarship, a discourse attached or addicted to an empirical or positivistic notion of the real, which is to say an objectively determinable totality. To consider the disposition of the text, then, in terms of addiction is to embrace an antagonistic form of analysis in which only partial and precarious objectifications are allowed. This is repeated in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” in which the queer disposition of the author (one that escapes the Vorstellung as such) is fateful for the very partial if not fleeting objectification of an addiction to masturbation in Sense and Sensibility. – 13 –

— Later Derrida —

Calling the disposition of one’s subject matter into question is crucial to Trinh’s work, as well, when she condemns anthropologists for adopting a dependency upon anthropology as a universalizing science or Vorstellung, “a study of the nature of the human s-p-e-c-i-e-s” (1989, 55). Like Derrida before her, Trinh rejects anthropologies that take mimesis for granted and imagine they can speak of an other culture. Though she speaks to this overtly in Woman, Native, Other, she approaches Derrida’s critique of Vorstellung when responding to the following characterization of her own film Surname Viet Given Name Nam. In The Framer Framed, an interviewer remarks: “One of the centers of the film is the set of interviews that were originally recorded in Vietnamese by someone else, and then translated into French, and are finally reenacted in your film by women who have come to the United States from Vietnam” (1992, 130). Trinh deflects and disrupts this characterization by talking about the reception of another film, Naked Spaces, and why it was wrong for viewers to think of this film in terms of a successful prior model, namely, the film Reassemblage. It was wrong, Trinh says, for viewers to think of Naked Spaces in terms of some prior model, presumably the same way it may have been wrong of the interviewer, Scott MacDonald, to think of those transpositions or transculturations in Surname Viet as translations from one model into another. If that is the case, however, then one is left with the understanding that the film Surname Viet Proper Name Nam may not be any more “of” or “about” Vietnam than Ronell’s crack wars are “of” or “about” Madame Bovary. This would mean that the connections among the transpositions in Trinh’s film suggest a break with dependent relationships so that a film like Surname Viet no longer is anaclitically staged in relation to a homeland whose proper name is Nam. To recover from the addiction to the Nam is precisely what Trinh’s interviewer missed when he watched the film. This means, furthermore, that the film’s translation out of Vietnam is no more determinable than, say, a Japanese translation of deconstruction. “To be very schematic,” Derrida writes in “The Letter,” I would say that the difficulty of defining and therefore also of translating the word “deconstruction” stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this – 14 –

— Deconstruction’s Other — definition or to that translation, are also deconstructed and deconstructible, directly or otherwise, etc. And that goes for the word, the very unity of the word deconstruction. (1988, 4)

Such statements go against the political grain of Anglo-American critics who think these formulations end in self-defeating pulverizations of meaning. To rescue criticism from self-destruction, Terry Eagleton starts out nihilistically enough, in Literary Theory: An Introduction, by asserting that “methodologically speaking, literary criticism is a nonsubject.” Careful not to take a deconstructive turn, however, Eagleton concludes that “it is not a matter of starting from certain theoretical or methodological problems [i.e., philosophical questioning]: it is a matter of starting from what we want to do”(1983, 210). Whereas critics like Derrida, Trinh, Spivak, and Ronell are willing to view the rhetorical disposition or attitude of the text as something that should resist certain mimetic or metaphysical protocols, Eagleton seizes the opportunity to attach the “non-subject” he calls literary criticism to a performative Vorstellung that is an a priori political agenda for what needs to be done. Having surveyed numerous approaches to literary theory, Eagleton concludes, “Any method or theory which will contribute to the strategic goal of human emancipation, the production of ‘better people’ through the socialist transformation of society, is acceptable” (211). For Eagleton, as for so many who share his convictions, by definition all critical theories have the same dispositions because they are merely tools ready to hand. Their Vorstellung, after all, is that of a cartouche, a model or method that can be loaded into an argument much like a program can be loaded into a computer or a bullet into a pistol. This disposition presumes that all theories are, like soldiers, more or less rhetorically interchangeable and on call, which is to say, ready for active duty. In “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” Cornel West holds a similarly militaristic view: criticism should be treated as a weapon that is supposed to be used in a culture war with society’s various powers. The shortcoming of Derrida’s deconstructive project, West says, is that it “tends to preclude and foreclose analyses that guide action with purpose.” Not surprisingly, West finds deconstruction unsuitable for all-out cultural confrontation. “[Derrida’s] works and those of his followers too – 15 –

— Later Derrida —

often become rather monotonous, Johnny-one-note rhetorical readings that disassemble texts with little attention to the effects and consequences these dismantlings have in relation to the operations of military, economic, and social powers” (1990, 30). One subtext of West’s essay is that Derrida lives up to the Jewish stereotype of passive victim, the weakling who thinks too much and whose ideas are therefore far too involuted and self-reflexive for an effective cultural politics of difference. This cultural politics must enlist African Americans and other minorities into an understanding of change in terms of violent direct critical action, which presupposes a model of all-out cultural war upon established social institutions. Though we may be wise to contextualize this in terms of an African-American history sensitive to what has resulted from pacification and accommodation, it remains true that in taking his stand against deconstruction, West contributes to an antipathetic view of Jewish intellectualism that he reinforces by self-consciously censoring any acknowledgment of remarks by Derrida in which he invokes a rather aggressive, combative, and even highly pragmatic and sharply directed role for deconstruction.3 As Derrida himself has said many times, his critics have conspicuously and carefully avoided reading him. Since I have explored the predispositions to avoid reading Derrida elsewhere,4 I will move on and point out that to some extent it could be said that Derrida in his “Letter to a Japanese Friend” intentionally draws fire from his political opponents by emphasizing deconstruction’s passive or nonviolent dispositions. It is not so much that Derrida has actually recanted earlier remarks concerning an aggressive deconstructive challenge to Western tradition, but that he sees this kind of attack as having to necessarily dismantle the opposition between the violent and the nonviolent, what has been questioned by Foucault and others under the rubric of the will-to-power. To return to a quotation above from the “Letter,” “it must also be made clear,” Derrida says, that deconstruction is not even an act or operation. Not only because there would be something “patient” or “passive” about it (as Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to activity). Not only because it does not return to an individual or collective subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme, etc. Deconstruction takes place; it is an event that does not await the

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— Deconstruction’s Other — deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs it-self. It can be deconstructed. (1988, 3–4)

Here the passivity, or passive voice of deconstruction, takes place instead of method or criticism, both of which are predicated on the notion that small analytical events culminate in a singular critical event of rupturing, overturning, or transforming something preestablished in a more or less forceful or violent event, act, or operation. In the “Letter” Derrida implies that deconstruction’s passivity is so passive that even passive resistance would be too active and too militaristic, since it organizes itself around a collective subject or agency. Therefore, even this kind of political passivity would not be appropriate for deconstruction’s nonviolence, which is very other than the willful or organized nonviolence that stands in opposition to violence. Here, of course, the notion of antagonism as Laclau and Mouffe understand it is itself subjected to deconstruction. This is a view not entirely alien to Trinh Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other. There is no such thing as a “coming face to face once and for all with objects”; the real remains foreclosed from the analytic experience, which is an experience of speech. In writing close to the other of the other, I can only choose to maintain a self-reflexively critical relationship toward the material, a relationship that defines both the subject written and the writing subject, undoing the I while asking “what do I want wanting to know you or me?” (1989, 76)

By invoking Lacan, Trinh develops Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of antagonism by insisting that the approach of the Other prevents the real from being disclosed as merely something in itself. Also, the “I” undergoes deobjectification. The Other, after all, is not “a positive differential moment in a causal chain,” and therefore is not a full presence for or to itself. Laclau and Mouffe put this as follows: “Insofar as there is antagonism, I cannot be a full presence for myself. But nor is the force that antagonizes me such a presence: its objective being is a symbol of my non-being and, in this way, it is overflowed by a

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— Later Derrida —

plurality of meanings which prevent its being fixed as full positivity” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 125). Trinh calls this “undoing the I.” Instead of putting this in Marxian language, however, Trinh turns to Zen Buddhism wherein language is “a process constantly unsettling the identity of meaning and the speaking/writing subject, a process never allowing I to fare without non-I” (1989, 76). As in Derrida, here too we discover a passivity beyond passivity, a nonviolence that goes beyond the differences between what is active and what is passive, since one cannot ever come face to face once and for all with something other, say, your enemy, your adversary, your counterpart. Whatever our disposition may be to know the other, the real, the world, the thing, the enemy, we must acquiesce to a suspension that yields to what Trinh calls “non-knowledge.” “In Buddha’s country,” she says, “one arrives without having taken a single step” (76). This, of course, is entirely alien to what Cornel West has called for as a new cultural politics. In fact, Trinh’s critical bearings move quite apparently in the direction of a disposition that avoids representationality. To arrive without having taken a step suggests that we reach the other without having to set up a critical event, analysis, or representation. Those who have read Zen texts know that in this tradition the narration of enlightened realizations often points to an event whose performativity or Vorstellung is nowhere to be found, since it really cannot be reduced to or located within the scene of teaching or of an encounter wherein subjects confront one another. In the Zen tradition(s) those scenes are not, strictly speaking, part of the enlightenment, but merely supplementary. In this context it is appropriate to recall that it is a letter to a Japanese friend that Derrida has written. And that in this letter it is also the disposition of deconstruction, much like the disposition of Zen, to arrive without having taken steps (“deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique”).5 Not only that, but like the Zen teachings, deconstruction in the letter is disposed to be nonviolent; its scene of teaching is one in which the event or act of knowing or enlightenment is disposed in such a manner that it cannot be recuperated as any thing in particular, whether it be a method, object, theme, or belief. Nor can it be recovered as polemic, debate, argument. In that sense, deconstruction resists representationality insofar as there can be no language in which its antagonism can be performed in and of itself. There is no proper moment, then, which one could label deconstruction in the same sense that in – 18 –

— Deconstruction’s Other —

Zen there is no proper moment which one could say embodies the act of enlightenment, since that act is, like deconstruction, a disposition which cannot be captured, represented, shown, objectified, or instrumentalized. Deconstruction is not an education, but a waiting for something to happen, for something to arrive without having taken a step. • Of all the major Zen writings, none is more significant, perhaps, than the Pi Yen Lu or Blue Cliff Record. It was brought from China to Japan in 1227 by Kigen Do¯gen Zenji, founder of the Soto School of Japanese Zen. It was an incomplete text, though one of the few extant texts that had not been altogether destroyed by Chinese monks who felt that its wisdom made the path to enlightenment too easy. Originally composed by Yuan Wu in 1128, it contained verses by Hseuh Tou. A treasured book of koans, the Pi Yen Lu contains one hundred cases, which are broken down into sections: a pointer, a case, notes, commentary, a verse, and then a commentary on the verse. The twenty-fifth case is especially relevant: The hermit of Lotus Flower Peak held up his staff and showed it to the assembly saying, “When the ancients got here, why didn’t they consent to stay here?” There was no answer from the assembly, so he himself answered for them, “Because they did not gain strength on the road.” Again he said, “[I]n the end, how is it?” And again he himself answered in their place, “With my staff across my shoulder, I pay not heed to people—I go straight into the myriad of peaks.” (Yuan Wu 1977, 164)

In this koan the hermit addresses a Taoist conception of the Path. At least, this is how the commentary contextualizes the hermit’s remarks. “After they had attained the Path, the ancients would dwell in thatched huts or stone grottoes, boiling the roots of wild greens in broken legged pots, passing the days.” The hermit is one of these ancients who asks each traveling monk the same question, “When the ancients got here, why didn’t they consent to stay here?” For some twenty years he has asked this question without anyone being able to reply. Hence he answered for them. The commentators are especially interested in the fact that the hermit never ceased asking the same thing. One commentator wonders, “When did he ever lose – 19 –

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the essential meaning?” It is at this point that we are made aware of the significance of always asking the same question. Quoting one of the ancients, a commentator says, “When you receive words you must understand the source: don’t set up standards on your own.” What is meant is that to understand the source is to preserve the essential meaning; to think on one’s own is to forget and drop by the wayside what enlightenment one has attained. Though for us Westerners this may suggest simplemindedness, it speaks to the question of disposition which concerns the position or proximity of the question to both the hermit and those to whom he speaks. The question itself is answered performatively by the hermit who places his staff across his shoulder and pays no heed. “I go straight into the myriad peaks,” he says. The commentators, for their part, see this as a judgment in which the hermit turns his back on the unenlightened who have simply failed the test. However, what we discover in reading the scripture is that, in fact, there are no conditions under which the adepts could have passed. And that, it appears, is the real answer to the koan, “When the ancients got here, why didn’t they consent to stay here?” The answer is that they didn’t have the strength to fail—to get beyond being right or wrong. Beyond this is the perception that one really needs to get beyond words altogether because, as the ancients comment, “[T]he Path is fundamentally without words” (Yuan Wu 1977, 165–67). But how can one dwell on Lotus Flower Peak without holding on to something whereby the essential meaning of the source of enlightenment is not forgotten or lost? This is where the ancient Buddhist tradition has much to teach us, because apparently in each of the cases we encounter from the Blue Cliff Record that essence concerns the disposition of the koan which, we learn, is undecidably binding and nonbinding with respect to how it frames the relation of master and student. Moreover, this disposition is undecidably violent and nonviolent in that the turning away of the hermit leaves everyone entirely to themselves while laying waste to what they think they have attained by following the Path to Lotus Flower Peak. There are, of course, many conclusions one can derive from this, among them the obvious point that enlightenment is not to be found at the end of the Path. Hence the ancients saw no reason to stay. Doing so would only be paying heed to people whose admiration one seeks as master. In this we can see how the outlines of Western teaching come into – 20 –

— Deconstruction’s Other —

stark relief against a Buddhist tradition where the koan is not considered to contain knowledge even as it preserves an essential meaning. Even as an act of enlightenment, the koan is usually treated by the commentators as an echo of even more venerable acts; yet, the act is, however admirable, always considered in itself to be somewhat foolish and eccentric. No one interpretation dominates the others, and, in fact, there is no clear sense of agency. In Woman, Native, Other one may have to be alert to the possibility that Trinh Minh-ha is less concerned with how the sentences contain meaning than in how they reflect upon a disposition that leaves aside the question of correctness, of what it means to pass. Like the hermit of Lotus Flower Peak, who pointed out that the ancients didn’t stay because they either failed or passed, Trinh’s work suggests that one may not consent to stay with deconstruction because there too both failing and passing its tests take you elsewhere. The stakes are significant in that by failing or passing I am referring to the question of metaphysics and whether we need to become dependent on Derrida’s view that we can put writers to the test by assessing the extent to which they embrace metaphysics or metaphysical thinking. Indeed, this matters, not only because it is relevant to Derrida’s corpus, but because Derrida’s thesis about the objectionableness of metaphysical terms, structures, and idioms has been taken up more or less symmetrically by a number of disciplines. For example, in film studies the Hollywood film is often considered a metaphysical Gestalt that gets deconstructed by directors like Jean-Luc Godard or Michael Snow; in postcolonialist studies we are told by many researchers that metaphysics is the reigning paradigm of colonial thinking; and, for some decades now, feminists have argued that patriarchal writing is inherently metaphysical and/or phallogocentric. In each case an antimetaphysical ideology has been extirpated from deconstruction, and its polemical force is that of a test that distinguishes between correct and incorrect thinking. Jacques Derrida himself has questioned the wisdom of such dependency on litmus testing. In Derek Attridge’s anthology, Acts of Literature, Derrida shows annoyance with the politically correct when they test for metaphysics as if it were a toxin. “Metaphysical assumptions” can inhabit literature or reading . . . in a number of ways which should be very carefully distinguished. They aren’t faults, errors, sins or accidents that could be avoided. Across – 21 –

— Later Derrida — so many very necessary programs—language, grammar, culture in general—the recurrence of such “assumptions” is so structural that it couldn’t be a question of eliminating them. (Derrida 1992c, 49)

Later in the very same response, Derrida adds, “A work laden with obvious and canonical ‘metaphysical’ theses can, in the operation of its writing, have more powerful ‘deconstructive’ effects than a text proclaiming itself radically revolutionary without in any way affecting the norms or modes of traditional writing” (50). We have seen the plausibility of counting Trinh Minh-ha among those whose metaphysical theses can have powerful deconstructive effects. However, what Derrida elides in the interview with Attridge is the possibility that deconstruction might be put under erasure by its other in a way that does not merely recuperate metaphysics as the antithesis to deconstruction but, instead, abandons the difference as a kind of ridiculous test or bad dependency. Trinh reminds one of how those who fail the hermit’s koan of Lotus Flower Peak have attained the realization that part of getting to the peak means one has to consent to leave it or put it behind. That metaphysics may abide in the releasement of deconstruction’s undecidable aporias is not necessarily to be seen as a victory for metaphysics and a defeat for deconstruction, but as an overcoming or surpassing of deconstruction and metaphysics as the alternatives of enlightenment or truth. Coda

Yet what does it mean that in the last chapter of Woman, Native, Other one encounters the streaming in of stories attached to mother figures? What does it mean that in having put deconstruction aside, Trinh reintroduces a figure we might call a contradiction: the Great Mother, a highly objectifiable Jungian figure who has long been discredited by theorists skeptical of monomyths? As if to underscore the primal significance of the maternal bond of the Great Mother, Trinh even includes film stills of breast feeding in Africa, and surveys numerous non-Western cultures in which the Great Mother as storyteller is the custodian of a knowledge that is fertile, therapeutic, protective, and binding. Although her stories are as much about unlearning as they are about learning, undoing as much as about doing, they are, nevertheless, stories that spiritually dwell among the voices of maternal – 22 –

— Deconstruction’s Other —

ancestors. If anything, what Trinh calls “Grandma’s story” is certainly the Other of deconstruction, but also, of that constructivist, antiessentialist mentality whereby one negotiates or performs one’s identity within a heterogeneous social body. In her incarnation as grandmother, the primal mother introduces a critical difference or position that insists that woman, native, and Other are not socially negotiated constructions, but belong to an ab-original collective identity passed along from the beginnings of time. As we discovered in the exergue, the story told long ago circulates like a gift and is built on multiplicity. Yet, toward the end of Trinh’s book we discover that this gift is nevertheless regulated by a nonnegotiable anaclitic relation between mother and child which is foundational for notions of family, clan, race, ethnicity, and gender. The gift, in short, is unassimilable and alien to both deconstructionism and constructionism, let alone to the existential demands brought to such theories by critics like Eve Sedgwick and Donna Haraway. For the gift is inherently outside, exterior to, or beyond any scene of teaching or self-mastery, much like the myriad peaks to which the Buddhist hermit travels. Indeed, it is in dwelling on the primal mother that Trinh performs the single-mindedness of Buddhist hermits: “When you receive words you must understand the source: don’t set up standards on your own.” A conservative view that speaks from the standpoint of received tradition, its function in Trinh’s text may well accord with Derrida’s suggestion that a work laden with obvious and canonical “metaphysical” theses may have more powerful effects than a text proclaiming itself radically revolutionary. The extent to which Trinh’s discourse can be viewed from a non-Western perspective, such as that of Zen, could help position the originary figure of the Great Mother in such a way that telling her story of long ago puts deconstruction under erasure by destining its determinations and decisions according to a scene of teaching in which the source is achieved at that moment everything is dropped or let go. This, after all, is the teaching of the hermit who stays at the source and never strays from asking his fateful question about releasement and insight. In asking the question about why the ancients did not consent to stay on Lotus Flower Peak, he not only rests or abides within the essential, but posits a certain restlessness unknown to Westerners for whom intellectual decamping is usually seen as part of a critical teleology, a sequential abandoning of old posi– 23 –

— Later Derrida —

tions and their replacement with new ones. In contrast, Trinh has allowed herself to put deconstruction aside without being tempted to invent some new and improved theory in its place. And to that extent, she has allowed for something to come in the wake of deconstruction that others have not seen, namely, a return of metaphysics on the hither side of deconstruction’s critical dismantlings. That this metaphysics is and is not identical to the one deconstruction had initially critiqued and condemned is perhaps central to how Trinh has articulated her conception of theoretical discourse in general and the Great Mother in particular, something that is brought together in the chapter titled “Grandma’s Story.” Moreover this may be but one of the futures for deconstruction which Derrida has not been eager to imagine, an overdetermined future, in fact, that has been latent in deconstruction all along in terms of what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe would call the surplus of deconstruction’s differences. It is in this surplus, of course, that the return of metaphysics occurs not only as and in the divisibility of metaphysics itself, but as a divisibility in which the totality of the Great Mother and the partially realized objectifications of her story of long ago are expressions of the failure or giving way of difference, which one might identify with the limits of language. It would be hard to deny, in any case, that without deconstruction the specific alterity of Trinh’s prose would be unimaginable. Perhaps one could say that the trace of Trinh’s metaphysics has always already been carried in the letter of Derrida’s grammatology, “an asymmetry existing between a growing proliferation of differences . . . and the difficulties encountered by any discourse attempting to fix those differences as moments of a stable articulatory structure” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 96). Indeed, as the following chapters will show, during the 1990s Derrida did in fact take up the surplus of deconstruction’s differences in ways hardly incompatible with some of Trinh’s metaphysical speculations, in particular, in contexts having to do with community, hospitality, language, and alterity.

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chapter 2

Monolinguism and Literature

Many of Jacques Derrida’s readers have noticed that in addition to being a philosopher, he is also a literary talent who has been enormously creative with the styles and forms that essays can take. Indeed, over the past three decades he has reinvented the academic essay as a literary form and has written, dare one say, “masterpieces” that show us the vast creative potential of academic essay writing that had previously been overlooked. “Plato’s Pharmacy,” “The Double Session,” “The White Mythology,” and “Restitutions,” as well as the tandem essays that constitute Glas, are well-known representatives of this achievement. It is therefore not surprising that by the 1980s Derrida’s stature enabled him to call attention to the significance of his revitalization of the essay form by publishing some of his essays separately as monographs—among them, On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, Schibboleth, and Of Spirit. During the 1990s, more of his essaymonographs were published, among the most notable being The Other Heading, Force de loi, Archive Fever, Monolinguism of the Other, Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, and Demeure. Given Derrida’s enormous output, it is also not too surprising that some of these essay-monographs have done double duty as sketches for books that may well have been quite a bit longer. That is, some of the essay-monographs have tended to outline extremely interesting projects that elicit future supplementation, either by Derrida or his readers. No doubt, this has had the positive effect of constellating essays and books around an open-ended project for which completion is always deferred, hence providing opportunities for bringing many – 25 –

— Later Derrida —

people into conversation with Derrida’s ongoing work. However, there is a liability as well, something that became noticeable in Of Spirit in which a sketchy analysis of Heidegger’s vocabulary did not take Heidegger’s collected works (the Gesamtausgabe) fully into consideration. The result was an essay that overlooked material that may well contest its major historical claims. Similarly, The Other Heading was a schematic foray into a complex of issues that really deserved to be far more developed within the context of the EU and its history, something that Derrida hadn’t quite taken on board. Even one of Derrida’s longer books, Specters of Marx, didn’t richly elaborate the unholy alliance that it was quietly making between Heidegger and Marx, thereby overlooking the potential for a bifocalized deconstructive reading of them. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s complaint that the book failed to sufficently think through the conception of the International is another case of broad outlines calling for more detail and development (Spivak 1995). Starting in the 1990s, Derrida’s tendency to write in outline became even more pronounced as he delivered bits and pieces of a thesis on hospitality that one had to glean from a number of different texts. In fact, it started to become apparent that Derrida was working on elements of a number of different ethical themes that were keyed to concerns in Emmanuel Lévinas, among them the themes of responsibility, hospitality, testimony, obligation, perjury, secrecy, forgiveness, and pardon that were scattered within a number of different texts, some of them in interviews. Significant in relation to this ethical turn has been Derrida’s interest in religion, which resurfaced in the mid1990s with the publication of “Faith and Knowledge,” as well as his remarks on literature, parceled out within a number of different texts that were in correspondence with the thinking on religion. In the midst of all this, Derrida published one of his most intriguing essay-monographs, Monolinguism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, that like some other books of the 1990s was more explicitly organized around a formalized rhetoric of paradox than writings of previous decades. While an earlier full-length book, The Politics of Friendship (1994, 1997), negotiated the contradiction that by definition the friend is someone who is and isn’t our friend, a later book, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000), explored the touch as a paradox in which touching does and does not occur, since it is at once conjunction and disjunction. In – 26 –

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Monolinguism, Derrida introduced the paradox that formed what he called a rule of language. We only ever speak one language . . . (yes, but) We never speak only one language. (1998b, 10)

What distinguishes Monolinguism are the many unexpected contrary overdeterminations that its paradox triggers and releases. In addition, Derrida’s essay touches on the rather vexed issue of how he defines or, at least, thinks of literature, despite the fact that he doesn’t explicitly say anything about literature, this being one of those missed opportunities for discussion that cries out for elaboration. It is because Derrida himself had not developed this kind of interface that I see the need for a commentary that fills in and explicates his elusive accounts of literature, as well as the potential for thinking about the condition of literature at the present time. The conceptual architecture of this chapter is essentially an expansion of the distinction between monolinguism and polylinguism that is fundamental to Monolinguism. On the one hand, I look at the distinction between the literary versus the extraliterary, a subset of the monolinguism/polylinguism distinction; and, on the other hand, I consider a more embracing distinction, the sociological difference between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), of which both of the prior distinctions are themselves subsets.1 Obviously, when taken as simple binary oppositions these distinctions are inadequate. However, it can be shown that they work according to a complex interplay of implicative differences that expose some of the vexed attitudes and understandings of literature within which Derrida’s views are to be situated. It is for this reason that I take Monolinguism as my model, since in that text Derrida shows the overdetermined differential structures that are latent in even very basic oppositions. Moreover, by looking at Derrida’s more recent accounts of literature, one will gain a better understanding of what has been at stake in the “ethical turn” upon which his writings of the 1990s were built. • In Monolinguism of the Other Derrida says at the outset that it ought to be read in terms of two contrary propositions that form a rule or law that is “a bit crazy.” For example, this law would instantiate the condi– 27 –

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tion of translation in which one both and at the same time speaks only one language and never just a single or singular language. For we are always alert to the possibility of speaking otherwise, a speaking differently that is the condition of the essence of speaking one language properly. So that when in France there is uproar over something called Franglais, we already encounter a doubly divided law that says we both speak only one language and more than one. As Derrida knows, you don’t have to be a philosopher to realize the impossibility of monolinguism. For even as conservative a science as philology, when its sights are set on linguistic pedigrees, argues that the native tongue is made up of foreign elements that, over time, have not only become incorporated into the native language but have been so incorporated as to become indistinguishable from native soil. Philology, then, also asserts that one only speaks a single language—(yes, but)—one never speaks one language alone. However, if Derrida reaffirms a belief held even by the most conservative scholars that concerns the difficulty of establishing a hard and fast difference between the native and the foreign, the interior and the exterior, the singular and the plural, the essential and the inessential, he does so with the awareness that the traditional rules of hermeneutics also presume that texts are monolingual structures with sharply defined edges that differentiate interiority from exteriority, like from unlike, text from nontext, and that it’s hard to escape this monolinguism. Monolinguism of the Other differs from Derrida’s early work of the 1960s in that instead of focusing chiefly on how the indeterminacy of the border affects the question of écriture, Derrida’s attention has shifted to the simultaneity of contrary constructions—in particular, with respect to questions of the social relation insofar as it is predicated on the social contract of language. In recent years this social contract has been thematized in terms of hospitality which bears on questions of rights. In ancient Athens, Derrida writes in Of Hospitality, “the foreigner had some rights.” There the threshold of the host’s domain establishes a social relation by delimiting the difference between those who are and are not of Athens. As in the case of language, there is a law of the social relation that distinguishes between sameness and difference, which is itself monolingual and that, therefore, extends its hospitality on its own terms and not those of the foreigner. In this sense, as far as the law of hospitality is concerned, “il n’y a pas de hors texte.” Indeed, – 28 –

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the concept of hospitality necessarily contains the concept of the other or foreigner within it, since hospitality requires, a priori, a concept of the outsider. In Of Hospitality Derrida will argue that hospitality is therefore conditional in the sense that the outsider or foreigner has to meet the criteria of the a priori other. The implication is that hospitality is not given to those who are absolutely unknown or anonymous, since there is no idea of how they will respond; one doesn’t know “who” they are. Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights. (2000b, 25)

Of course, the concept of an absolute hospitality dictated by a law that exceeds the social contract of hospitality is central to the thinking of Emmanuel Lévinas. He is mindful of Martin Heidegger’s statement in “The Letter on ‘Humanism’” that “language is the house of Being,” the house representing, in the context of Lévinas, a shelter or protection of our being. Back in the early 1930s, Heidegger himself was making this point, though en passant. “The word for Being is—and already in everyday speech—ousia: Haus und Hof, Anwesen” (1982, 55). If the phrase Haus und Hof is related to the German word, Anwesen (presence, but also property), the point is that, philologically, Anwesen reveals a more primary layer of meaning that has to do with the sheltering or housing of being, a sheltering that Lévinas and Derrida take up from the perspective of hospitality to the other. In Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida endorses Lévinas’s view that absolute hospitality requires a letting be of the Other as Other. It does not make a demand of the Other that would force the Other to reciprocate by way of imposing an obligation. In terms of language this would mean that if language shelters the Other, it does not incorporate or assimilate the Other into itself. This means that language as sheltering is not appropriative, in the commonplace as well as the Heideggerian sense, since then it would not be a sheltering of Otherness. This relates, as well, to the Husserlian notion of intentionality (in – 29 –

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the French philosophical context, “vouloir-dire” or wanting-to-say) which, as Lévinas had noticed early on, is disappropriative, since it avoids the reifications of synthesis. Hence Derrida writes in Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas: Because intentionality is hospitality, it resists thematization. Act without activity, reason as receptivity, a sensible and rational experience of receiving, a gesture of welcoming, a welcome offered to the other as stranger, hospitality opens up as intentionality, but it cannot become an object, thing, or theme. Thematization, on the contrary, already presupposes hospitality, welcoming, intentionality, the face. The closing of the door, inhospitality, war, and allergy already imply, as their possibility, a hospitality offered or received: an original or, more precisely, pre-originary declaration of peace. (1999, 48)

Again, there is a paradox at work, because this promissory hospitable declaration of peace is pre-originary, which means that in order to be understood, it has to be, a priori, inherently and universally understandable to everyone. This means, in turn, that we are encountering a communication that is, by definition, monolingual. However, Derrida is also in accord with Lévinas’s other view in Totality and Infinity that “language does not take place in front of a correlation from which the I would derive its identity and the Other his alterity” (Lévinas 1969, 215). In other words, despite a pre-originary monolinguism concerning not only the archetrace of a declaration of peace but an instantiation of the feminine that Lévinas associates with gentleness—a receptivity to the vulnerability of an other that as feminine keeps itself apart—Lévinas nevertheless argues that speech between self and other cannot presuppose unification or accord. “In accomplishing its essence as discourse, in becoming a discourse universally coherent, language would at the same time realize the universal State, in which multiplicity is reabsorbed and discourse comes to an end, for lack of interlocutors” (217). Crucial as a pre-originary condition for the occurrence of language as such, the concretization or realization of monolinguism in language would also be the death of language, because it would herald the end of difference. Not surprisingly, it is this relational/nonrelational impasse of the monolingual moment that Derrida will vex in the hope that it will usher in a new philosophical moment that can follow from Lévinas’s preparatory work. – 30 –

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In Monolinguism, hospitality is often seen from the punitive side of what is called a politics of language within which the monolingual is imposed as a precondition for the kind of hospitality Derrida was noticing in Athens where the foreigner is welcomed according to the duties and obligations that appropriate the foreigner in advance within Athenian law. This is a sovereign law that belongs to Athens, certainly, but that as in the case of all monolinguisms seems to originate from somewhere else, since even the Athenian native subject is always striving to appropriate it to himself or herself in the name of becoming the perfect and most native of citizens. First and foremost, the monolingualism of the other would be that sovereignty, that law originating from elsewhere, certainly, but also primarily the very language of the Law. And the Law as Language. Its experience would be ostensibly autonomous, because I have to speak this law and appropriate it in order to understand it as if I was giving it to myself, but it remains necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at bottom, the essence of any law. The madness of the law places its possibility lastingly [à demeure] inside the dwelling of this auto-heteronomy. (1998b, 39)

We do and do not belong to the monolinguism of our native tongue for the simple reason that this language isn’t ever entirely masterable to perfection; therefore, one always senses that one is, however slightly, a stranger or foreigner to it. This self-perception of being alien or foreign despite one’s native status is what Derrida calls autoheteronomy. Of course, what makes the identification with one’s native tongue so important is that being a native speaker signs for one’s political identity and the legal rights that are a consequence. Speaking a language, therefore, is a means of dwelling or remaining within one’s political identity even when one is a foreigner abroad. One is, as it were, protected by the politics of language, since it is this politics that prepares the way for hospitality in the Athenian sense, in which citizens and foreigners are both known quantities with formal contractual relations of hosting and guesting. Yet, as Derrida reminds us, the law under which we gather ourselves to that language, and that gives us our political identity and security, isn’t as hospitable as one might like to imagine, precisely because it is political (i.e., polemical). In Monolinguism Derrida asks what happens if immunity or protection is legally rescinded. Derrida – 31 –

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raises this question when he talks about the withdrawal of his French citizenship that was enacted into law by the Vichy government during the Second World War. Even though Algeria was not formally occupied by the Germans, the French government decided independently of the Nazis to rescind French citizenship to Algerian Jews, a withdrawal that implied the French language and the Algerian Jews did not belong together. What concerns Derrida is the withdrawal of the shelter of language as a preliminary step to putting a group outside the protection of a society’s legal rights in order to make it politically vulnerable. Here the legal construction of apartheid makes one an absolute other with respect to one’s own native tongue. This sudden disenfranchisement whereby one no longer belongs to the French language or its literature touches on a politics that refigures what Heidegger was calling the house of Being by supplying a dimension Heidegger left out of his famous account, namely, the question of the hospitality of this house of language in terms of the politics of determining who is officially invited to enjoy its political and cultural shelter. That it is possible, more or less overnight, to separate an ethnic group from the language that is native to it—that it is possible to politically disenfranchise a people in such a way that they are thought to exist outside of the common language, no matter how proficient they may be—is one of those junctures at which we can see an incredible blind spot in the ontologization of language, given that language is, first and foremost, given in advance as a political relation, or relation of law. This, in fact, will become fundamental to Derrida’s understanding of the literary: that it is first and foremost a political relation, or relation of law, predicated on the hospitality of the law. But for literature to be an effect of hospitality, it had to be legalized and legitimized in terms of a certain right to speak out, something that in Demeure Derrida tells us is particular to ancient Rome which can be said to have been the originator of the concept of literature in the sense that we know it today—as the freedom to testify. In Greece there is still no project, no social institution, no right, no concept, nor even a word corresponding to what we call, stricto sensu, literature. . . . In spite of [a] theoretical or philosophical limit to [E. R.] Curtius’ remarks [in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages], one may find it – 32 –

— Monolinguism and Literature — interesting that he links literary experience to a juridical institution, to acquired rights, and this from the outset in the Roman figure of citizenship, of civitas. (2000a, 23–24)

According to Derrida, foundational to litteratura is the freedom to say, accept, receive, suffer, and simulate anything. That under the Romans this freedom is given as something that is always just about to arrive, that it is a promise of a certain opening of language, say, its own law of hospitality, insofar as it is a disclosure that takes the witness under its wing, defines the literary, according to Derrida, in terms of a right that becomes fundamental to European civilization and that remains alien to some other cultures, among them, Islamic cultures for whom the right of literature to be heard is a totally alien concept that isn’t countenanced. • In his inaugural lecture of 1977 at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes defended the place of literature in the academy. “Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge . . . historical knowledge, a geographical, a social (colonial), a technological, a botanical, an anthropological knowledge.” He continued, “If, by some unimaginable excess of socialism or barbarism, all but one of our disciplines were to be expelled from our educational system, it is the discipline of literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences are present in the literary monument” (1983, 463). Whether this makes literature the grandest form of monolinguism or the best example of polylinguism makes little difference, given that, in the end, it would be so hard to distinguish between the two options. In fact, what counts most is the fact that for Barthes “literature” is the umbrella term hospitable to many different knowledges. This is a hospitality, according to Barthes, that no other disciplinary discourse shares. In that sense literature is unique, given that its difference from all the other disciplines is its hospitality to the foreign—that is to say, to what is often considered to exist outside the literary per se. Of course, what Barthes observes about literature is, in fact, true of literature departments, particularly in American universities. These departments are extremely hospitable to all sorts of knowledges that exist beyond the study of literary language per se. Psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, history, and philosophy are just a few of the fields – 33 –

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that such departments shelter, and particularly aspects of those fields that are cast off within those disciplines themselves. I am thinking, for example, of the study of Freud in literature as opposed to psychology departments, the study of Heidegger in literature as opposed to philosophy departments, and so on. Yet despite this fact, it is well known that in recent years the welcome mat has been increasingly withdrawn for the literary study of literature. Given Barthes’s statement above, it is paradoxical that if literature is indeed the most hospitable discipline, those who are literary critics have become increasingly inhospitable toward it even as they have become more hospitable to fields identified with the social sciences. Of course, there is no reason why English departments, for example, have to be essentially tied to the teaching and dissemination of literary works. And perhaps one day people will wonder that literature should ever have been central to the workings of an English department. However, one might ask if there isn’t reason to think that English departments should at least be more charitable to the teaching and formal critical explication of literature, given literature’s own hospitality to the faculties. It may seem odd that our growing inhospitality to literature should so suddenly have followed upon the idea, articulated by Barthes and others, that literature is hospitable enough to be considered a discipline of disciplines. And yet, not long after Barthes gave his speech, many Anglo-American scholars had come to precisely the opposite conclusion, which was that official literature, as it was canonized in the university, was to be considered monological and hence inhospitable to texts that didn’t conform to normative criteria of form and content. Hence the term “literary” functioned as a means of suppressing, say, the study of popular writings possessed of literary qualities that were difficult to praise, but with moral messages that were historically relevant to us. Those committed to a politics of diversity embraced the polylingual as a politics of openness and heterogeneity that is allergic to the idea that literature is a particular type of discourse with defined rules, conventions, and modes that characterize all literary expression; for, whatever the literary is, progressive critics in support of diversity realize that it cannot be something we could ever formalize in any exhaustive sense. Of course, even the New Critics were careful to ensure that something within the literary could be set aside as beyond analysis, – 34 –

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something in excess that offers itself to future readers. In fact, Paul de Man’s conception of the impossibility of reading is in accord with such a view, because it disavows the possibility of total interpretive coverage or mastery, hence leaving something unassimilated to one side. Neither hermeneutics nor text is conceived of in terms of a monolinguism, a totalizing system, and hence favors what Julia Kristeva has called polylogue (1977). This resistance to the appropriation or assimilation of the text within literary interpretation—which is to say, the literary in and of itself as a monologism—is, perhaps paradoxically, indicative of a desire to conserve literature, to preserve it for future generations by a refusal of total assimilation. Notions of literary or discursive heterogeneity or diversity, particularly in terms of a global perspective, see to it that a conservation of the text is ensured by way of a radical inappropriability, something that often plays itself out by way of alterity politics, global studies, and so on. Conservation is, of course, much more conspicuous from an inclusionist perspective. If we return to Barthes’s remark about literature being a discourse of discourses, we should notice that literature is being defined in terms of a conservation of discourse: if professors of literature can get away with studying texts that are often glaringly extraliterary, it is because these texts are being conserved by a law of the literary that says, in effect, that since literature is a discourse of discourses, all discourses are, a priori, being appropriated as literary. Whether they display formal literary traits or not is quite irrelevant. Thus when Barthes reads women’s fashion as a complex semiotic system of signification, this fashion, however foreign it may be to literature, is being gathered up into the discourse of discourses where it is being conserved under the auspices of literature. Derrida works in a similar direction when in the 1990s he situates testimony in relation to the literary in ways that show the extent to which the literary conserves other discourses that, strictly speaking, are inappropriable by the literary but that are conserved under its rubric, just the same. Apparently if there is a law of literary conservation, it is divided by way of one of those paradoxes that Derrida calls a little bit crazy, namely, that if conservation requires the rule of a discourse of discourses (identity), it also requires a rule of inappropriability (difference). Here monolinguism and polylinguism are rather less simply opposed than some progressive critics may have generally assumed. – 35 –

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The issue of conserving literature, however, touches on a question that is currently on many people’s minds: Is literature on the verge of extinction? There are many signs that point in the direction of an end to literary study because of a precipitous decline in literary appreciation among even those with degrees in English and the modern languages. This general disaffection, on the rise since the 1970s, seems to have replaced what for a long time was an anxiety about the exhaustion of literature through the industry of literary study itself (i.e., too much exegesis, too much historization, too much categorization). This speaks to an underlying issue about the conservation of literature and the literary, a conservation that we implement by reserving or putting aside something excessive that is always to be deferred for later study: the search for features of the work, such as its freedom, that do not encourage appropriability or understanding. Certainly, “theory” has been viewed as inhospitable to conservation as a setting aside insofar as it threatens to become an all-consuming, demystifying form of analysis. Among those who have threatened to systematically expose all of literature’s secrets have been Claude LéviStrauss, whose Mythologies was a bold attempt to do just that. It’s no small wonder, given Derrida’s later views, that we see a repudiation of Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology where the matter of the scientific is treated with considerable ambivalence. While Lévi-Strauss was at work on his vast structuralist anthropological project, there were also a number of literary critics who held out for the hope that narratology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxist sociological critique might lay literature bare for the kind of dispassionate inspection that would liberate literary texts from impressionist criticism. Even during the heyday of the New Criticism, there was some hope that anthropology in the guise of comparative religion and mythology might reveal for once and for all that literature is but an aspect of a vast “monomyth,” hence explaining what had for so many centuries remained such an elusive art. Today, no critical moment of the relatively recent past is as much derided as archetypal analysis, not least because of its universalism and putative antidiversity. Yet, Freud’s onetime colleague and confidant Carl Jung used to be very respectable in literary critical circles, so much so that Princeton University Press had his complete works translated into English. Whether, in retrospect, Jung was any less problematic – 36 –

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than some other intellectuals interested in primitive mythology and religion—say, for example, someone like Georges Bataille, whose interest in ritual sacrifice was not without its own fascist overtones—could be argued. Moreover, only the most blinkered reader could fail to take stock of Jung’s enormous appetite for diverse cultural sources and peoples, in particular, his interest in non-Western cultures. In his work, as well, it is likely that one will quickly notice the invagination of the diverse and the homogeneous, an invagination that was constitutive of psychoanalytical anthropology generally, including Freud’s. Not unlike Lévi-Strauss, Jung had an interest in systematization because he too suspected that there must be an invariant deep structure to the human psyche, an idea that also appears in the work of Jacques Lacan, who hedged his bets by stripping away those invariants of specific content (hence mottos like “the unconscious is structured like a language”). Whereas Lacan was actually quite careful not to make universalist cultural pronouncements too conspicuous, Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s wellknown writings are de facto universalizing theoretical applications of Lacan’s teachings that explain everything from Shakespeare to Stephen King, Blow-Up to Terminator, and Stalinism to McGlobalization. Oddly, no one seems to notice how much this emulates the Jungian manifest destiny of turning psychoanalytical theory into a universalizing anthropology or world philosophy. Although the drive toward systematization is perpetually rejuvenated in some form or other, given that the university is still essentially a rationalistic institution (in all the worst senses), the threat of systematization to literature was perhaps greatest in the late 1950s when there weren’t a vast array of critical-theoretical “approaches” that one could play off against one another. Indeed, it’s my sense that a genuine threat surfaced within the Anglo-American literary establishment when the enormously gifted critic Northrop Frye published The Anatomy of Criticism, which by way of Jung delivered a severe blow to those who would have us believe that literature is fundamentally allergic to science and hence cannot be codified according to an exhaustive monolingual all-knowing symbolic formalism that could be used as a “method of literary analysis.” When such methods turn out to be powerfully explanatory—in detailing elements of literary language that prior researchers had clearly misunderstood or not understood well at all—they also become – 37 –

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extremely threatening because they raise the specter of a final answer to the “What is literature?” question. This is somewhat analogous in science to finding a cure for a disease; once a cure has been found, almost everyone has to pack up their analytical expertise and move on to something else. Of course, literature and the arts in general are by definition not supposed to succumb to that kind of methodological demystification, since they are not specimens that one simply describes and analyzes to the point of epistemic exhaustion as a prerequisite to depositing them in archives where they can be stored away, in case one should ever need to return to them. Given an epidemic fear of such forensic closure, fields like archetypal analysis, semiotics, structuralism, speech act theory, reader response theory, certain forms of feminist analysis, hermeneutics, and deconstruction were all proclaimed dead long before they had a chance to develop beyond much of their initial formulations. And one may well have reason to think that at the very least this mass die-off of supposedly monological methodologies has suggested that the identity of literary studies has clearly been troubled by the specter of a premature end. The paradox here is that if there are those who have jumped the gun that sounds the end by abandoning literature in order to embrace cultural studies, these very same investigators still elect to play the diversity option which has the destinal effect of ensuring that literature will be something that is as yet to come as different or other. In short, a place is always being kept open for literature by the very same people who appear to be abandoning it. This “place” has to do with a destinal arrival of the literary that many now think ought to be coming not from the heart of Western civilization but from its margins, or even better yet, from its orients. Literature should reveal itself, then, as something as yet unexperienced that has already been written by someone from very far away, but whose message is only now just reaching us. This, then, would be a veiled instantiation of what is still fundamentally an eschatological Christian view: the idea that something is about to arrive over here from the beyond, something that is both uncannily different and familiar and that therefore exceeds the limits of a scientific investigation based on a sharply defined distinction between identity and difference. Such a distinction is reinstantiated in the trafficking – 38 –

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between the literary and the extraliterary, for here, too, there is a movement of dispatching something into the beyond of the literary, which then comes back as a revelation. For example, Eve Sedgwick, in “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” noticed something in Sense and Sensibility that she sent off to the world of gay and lesbian experience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries just long enough that it could be returned to the Austen text as a revelation concerning something that couldn’t be seen there before: female autoeroticism. That this autoeroticism was the future of Austen’s legacy, and that it returned to Austen from the future, which at that time in Sedgwick’s career was queer theory, follows rather well the kind of eschatological logic that Derrida has in mind and that also owes a certain debt to Freud—retroaction. Sedgwick’s example shows how certain textual elements can, and even must be, manipulated by exportation and reimportation. In fact, if one surveys fields like semiotics, speech act theory, narratology, cultural studies, new historicism, postcolonialism, and, of course, deconstruction, it is evident that various positions—let’s provisionally call them the subject positions of theory—have been taken up along the border of the literary and the extraliterary, so that semiotics sees literature as a secondary modeling system, speech act theory treats literature as ordinary language, cultural studies is willing to transpose literaryaesthetic categories into the realm of the social text, and new historicism is prepared to collage literary and nonliterary texts together into a web in which it doesn’t necessarily matter if the seams show. All of these positions ensure that literature will return to us from elsewhere, but as something different from what we initially thought it to be. These various returnings indicate that the positionings along the borderline between the literary and the extraliterary have the function of postponing essentialization and the triumph of monolinguism by means of not only a certain movement in which the literary returns to us as something other, but in terms of pluralizing the thing that returns, as well as announcing and deferring what one thinks of as a literary science to come. In other words, once more the question of the destinal has to be acknowledged as an eschatology that necessarily haunts literary criticism. Border struggle, therefore, is not only a strategy, if not a play, of deferral and conservation—deferral and conservation of the end of literature and the literary—but a faith in the idea – 39 –

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that one day something will come back to us from the beyond of literature that will really and truly constitute a revelation and not another false dawn. And it is to this “Other” that one is supposed to be most receptive and hospitable. • Given the prominence of cultural studies at the time when Derrida published Monolinguism, it is quite ironic that his book is not so much an attack on the narrowness of monolinguism as it is a recognition that monolinguism is more hospitable to otherness than we might at first assume. One of the book’s major points is that the monolingual conforms to a logic of the eternal return in which difference is reinscribed. Try however we might to make the monolingual go away, it comes right back at us in the very polylinguism of its destruction. This contradicts the utopian ideology, founded upon readings of critics like Mikhail Bakhtin, that polyglossia can deliver us from the paralyzing closure of monolinguism (Bakhtin 1990). To the contrary, Derrida argues that there is always a strategic return of the monolingual that forgets polyglossia and hence closes it up in such a way that what one thinks one speaks is, in any case, going to be a homogeneous or homogenized language. Indeed, monolinguism is always a given that works in the wake of polyglossia to produce a homogeneous structure that is hospitable to a people whose identity is predicated on the possibility of there being a monolinguism—call it a general literacy always as yet to come, the fulfillment of literature as art, the standardization of different linguistic practices within a culture—that grounds society. If we consider Homer, for a moment, we may recall that his epics brought what we know as Ancient Greek into being as a language we associate with a particular people and culture. This is not to say that the epics are monolingual in any narrow sense—for one can find polyglossia in such works, given that Homeric Greek wasn’t Attic Greek or, in fact, any Greek that any native speaker spoke. For, as the classicist Oliver Taplin points out, Most of [Homer’s] word forms are variants drawn from the dialects of different places and periods, but never spoken together in any one time or place. Some of the forms are even, it seems, completely artificial, the wordforging of poets, especially under metrical pressure. Philologists are largely agreed that, while the basic dialect of Homeric Greek is that of – 40 –

— Monolinguism and Literature — Ionia in the archaic period, there are many features quite foreign to that time and place . . . [for example] the Greek of the Mycenaeans some 500 years before Homer. (1986, 69; italics mine)

Yet remarkably Homer did open up a horizon within which the monolingual comes to pass as a synthetic and unifying limit within which literary Greek is inscribed, a Greek at once within and outside of, say, the world of Attic Greek. Judging from Plato and others who refer to Homer, it would appear that the Greeks came into being as a certain folk or people with a determinate telos or historical if not national purpose at that moment they were circumscribed or bounded by a monolingual literary moment, however artificial and, in actuality, linguistically polylingual. Without the illusion of dominant monolingual constructions, a people, a culture, a tradition, or a nation become unthinkable—not only in the sense that they would be unimaginable, but in the sense that without this monolinguism which has taken so much under its wing, thinking as a collective or archival act cannot take place. That language is not just the house of Being but the house of the being of a people with a philosophical (i.e., thinking) destiny is something that Heidegger had spoken of in the 1930s. In his well-known seminars on Hölderlin, Heidegger speaks of a literary synthesizing principle as the intuition of a ground tone of being that calls a people into being as a historical entity that has existential drive and purpose. The great poet is someone who names, calls, and destines a people into being as a historical people by means of heeding the call of language, a hospitable call with obvious origins in a people that hospitably destines that language to become as uniquely philosophical as it is to become generally usable by all those who are, given their birth into that language, destined to speak it. To be born into a language is to be thrown into a signifying environment that constructs and identifies us as particular social beings with an identity that is particular and, in part, marked by the language that these people speak. Without the horizon or limit of the monolingual there could be no moment in which such a language could claim to be identical to itself, nor could there be a moment in which that language could be claimed by anyone for the sake of being heard by establishing a linguistic if not historical identity. To be heard—to testify before – 41 –

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others—requires a hospitable common language. In this sense language and literature require the horizon or limit line of the monolingual, which is why it becomes problematic to invoke polyglossia as if it could be thought to replace monolinguism in the utopian hopes of breaking social boundaries and political habits that delimit prejudicial conflicts and hostilities. Just as it would be very difficult to take a step that takes one beyond metaphysics, it is similarly difficult to make a critical move that simply pushes one out beyond the monolingual. This point is central to the question of genre. Literary works, which in so many cases are less monological than ordinary language, are not so internally differentiated as to lose self-identity tout court. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Pound’s Cantos, and the “language poetry” of figures like Charles Bernstein and Clark Coolidge are not ever entirely beyond genre, since they manifest horizons of identity, very much on their own terms, that sign for the identity of a type of writing for which one eventually invents labels such as “language poetry,” “avant-garde writing,” and so on. Certainly, terms like “postmodernity” insist upon a monologism of the work insofar as it is thought to be other than what came before. Genre studies, of course, has anthologized, typed, codified, conventionalized, and canonized for the sake of policing the borders between one epoch and another, if not borders between genres and the division between what is and isn’t to be considered literature. Criticism and theory have been typed in this way, too, as is evident by the recent Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent Leitch et al. (2001). Yet, paradoxically, among the theorists it is almost universally held today that genre study is a thing of the past. However, rather than chuck genre studies out the window, it is useful to look back at this past and in particular the year 1957 when Northrop Frye published the greatest and most compendious genre study ever, his famous anatomy of literature. (It has recently been republished by Princeton University Press with new foreword by Harold Bloom.) The Anatomy of Criticism, as Frye misnamed it, set up such a convincing genre system that it seemed to explain almost everything we could want to know about literature. If The Anatomy had one major strength, it was that Frye decoded the language of literature in such a way that one was left with little doubt that he had done for literature what the science of anatomy had done for study of the human body. As Bloom is quite aware, Frye’s great Aristotelian achievement – 42 –

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was to demonstrate that there was a literary anatomy that could demonstrate that literature wasn’t just “discourse,” let alone a jumble of imaginary writings littering the highways and byways of history. Whatever criticisms one might have of Frye, he successfully demonstrated formal intertextual patterns whose symbolism delineated literary texts to such an extent that they could be definitively typed as literary, something that was opposed to less rigorous notions like rhetoric or discourse. In fact, Frye had so successfully read the Rosetta Stone of literature that he more or less reached that point of closure in which literature became a “case closed.” In the years that followed the book’s publication, Frye’s own inability to match the insights of The Anatomy suggested that even he had been inhibited by his incredible success. This suggests that in the late 1950s The Anatomy must have been quite an intimidating book from the point of view of literary study, given its compendious scope and its full scale decryption of the literary tradition. All that aside, The Anatomy made a rather fundamental point that not everyone noticed back in the 1950s and ’60s. Frye’s system of literary genres was grounded in Gemeinschaft—in Frye’s case, a notion of preindustrial society predicated on agrarianism. Hence, Frye’s representation of women within a literary context later turned out to be politically conservative and, not surprisingly, offensive to feminists, given the fact that his archetypal patterns were based on a preindustrial social outlook that was blatantly inhospitable to social differences (among them, sexual, racial, and ethnic differences). One might say that for Frye the monolingual or archetypal horizon for the reception of all literature was a notion of a European society that by Shakespeare’s time was already waning. Again, I’m stretching if not abusing the word monolinguism. But I hope one can catch my drift: for Frye literature was monolingual insofar as it was based on fixed genres that corresponded to a Gemeinschaft predicated on cyclical changes such as the seasons and the circle of life that is focused on what Shakespeare knew as the seven ages of man. It was unproblematic, therefore, for Frye to imagine romance as springlike, comedy as summery, tragedy as autumnal, and irony as wintry, a cycle that had its direct correspondences in Christianity and, as Sir James Frazer had shown, in its religious antecedents. It was also unproblematic for Frye to link these genres to questions of identity. In a collection of essays called Fables of Identity, Frye wrote, “In – 43 –

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the solar cycle of the day, the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life, there is a single pattern of significance, out of which myth constructs a central narrative around a figure who is partly the sun, partly vegetative fertility and partly a god or archetypal human being” (1963, 15). Frye argued (albeit in a very different manner than Lévi-Strauss) that mythology is a “total structure” (i.e., a monolinguism) which defined “the religious beliefs, historical tradition, and cosmological speculations of society” (1963, 33). In other words, like Jung and Frazer, Frye believed that the identity of our society and of individuals within that society was mirrored in mythology. That myth draws from nature is important, since only by way of the analogy of nature to human forms of existence is mythological wisdom expressed. Our identity is not socially self-constructed, then, but derived from the fact that we have a nature that finds its hospitable correspondences in the natural order of things. In other words, it is in terms of the hospitality of nature as the house of human being that this analogy between the human and nature holds good. More to the point, perhaps, it is the hospitality of Gemeinschaft that is at issue, given that Gemeinschaft is itself the social expression of this analogy whose consequences for art are crucial. Certainly we can begin to see the extent to which Frye’s genre criticism takes a very different position on literature from someone like Barthes who sees it mainly in terms of a desocialized discipline of disciplines. Unlike the watchdogs of the postmodern divide, Frye showed that a determinate relation between social and literary forms existed and that canonical literature is the expression of not just any society, but of Gemeinschaft. This means that literature is, by definition, alien to the postmodern condition of everyday life and by extension, to us. Therefore, if a certain monolinguism of literature, as Frye depicts it, is predicated on the welcome and hospitality of Gemeinschaft, we know that it is precisely this Gemeinschaft that from today’s perspective is literature’s most foreign or alien element, given that we are the children of Gesellschaft. As Anthony Giddens (1992) has argued, we cannot easily imagine ourselves within a Gemeinschaft, in which person-to-person relations are so different from those alienated experiences we experience via e-mail, answering machines, fax machines, and the like. In short, Frye’s monolinguism has to be viewed from our perspective as precisely that Other—that monolinguism of the Other—which we are incapable of incorporating into our thinking, given that the world in – 44 –

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which we live finds very little resemblance to that in which myth and, later, literature threw down their roots. From that perspective, literature—if it is in essence the expression of Gemeinschaft, something Frye more or less proves—would be precisely that cultural construction most foreign or other to us. For someone like Martin Heidegger back in the 1930s, this specter of city life taking over the rural rhythms of the countryside around the Black Forest was still a threat having to do with an inhospitality to existence, which Heidegger associated with Gesellschaft. Of course, German rural society’s association of the Jew with Gesellschaft speaks to the inhospitality of country folk to strangers, generally, something that was philosophically translated in terms of the outsider being accused of having no connection with authentic being, the outsider having been relegated in the country dweller’s mind to the cities, which represent an inferior way of life. Here we encounter the great divide that has turned us against Gemeinschaft: its narrow-minded hostility to social differences of all kinds (physical and mental disabilities; nonnormative sexual orientations; ethnic differences; nonnormative gender roles [i.e., women’s liberation]; and so on). This intransigent inhospitality, it is well known, is the appallingly illiberal side of Gemeinschaft that Frye managed to entirely overlook in his Anatomy. Yet, this doesn’t necessarily invalidate his thesis or his analytic; rather, it may well indicate that literature itself is objectionable. In fact, the reason that in some parts of the world English departments have been fleeing traditional notions of literature, as if they were the least interesting topics that one could study, is that traditional literature is fundamentally illiberal for all the reasons we can see in Frye’s Anatomy. This means that if Frye was right, he was so at the cost of revealing literature’s irrelevance or objectionability to those of us who have lived in a Gesellschaft of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in which the political expression of Gemeinschaft is as unacceptable and dead ended as it is historically retrograde. Therefore, not only does Frye present us with a final analytical solution to the question of what literature is, hence exhausting some of the futures of literature, but he demonstrates just how alienated we are from the lost and illiberal world of Gemeinschaft that may well be literature’s authentic home. Of course, it is curious that even as late as the 1960s the Gemeinschaft model still made sense to many academics as a universal ground – 45 –

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for literary speculation on the nature of human behavior (recall, for example, William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” a canonical mainstay during the 1960s in American English departments). The contrast between that recent identification and our current disidentification should interest us as a political and structural borderline between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that determines how we consider literature. However, there is a problem, for this borderline is both clearly delimited and muddled, depending on point of view. From the perspective of Frye’s book, the division between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft instantiates a division between the literary and the nonliterary, something Frye was noticing when he found that in the twentieth century, major literary works tended toward irony, satire, and pastiche—those types of literature (from the world of Gesellschaft) proclaiming a parasitical relation to the past (Gemeinschaft), with the implication that the end of literature may have already come about. One might think that typical of such parasitical writing (and the end of literature) would be Wendy Cope’s “Waste Land Limericks” (1986). Flat parodies of T. S. Eliot (representative of high “literature”), they reflect the distance between our time and his. In April one seldom feels cheerful; Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful Clairvoyantes distress me, Commuters depress me— Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

The fifth and last limerick ends as follows: No water. Dry rocks and dry throats Then thunder, a shower of quotes From the Sanskrit and Dante. Da. Damyata. Shantih. I hope you’ll make sense of the notes.

Not only the mythos of Gemeinschaft, but academic culture comes under parodistic attack; apparently, so-called high literature was stupid stuff that can now be exposed in the cool hindsight of a historical era aware of how defunct and bogus the cultures of Gemeinschaft really – 46 –

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were. This disillusion with the past and all its literary and academic claptrap—“Da. Damyata. Shantih”—speaks to a collapse in the legitimacy of a sociality based on what were, in fact, precapitalist communities that from today’s political perspectives seem to have been nothing but brutal patriarchies that have used culture as an alibi for their crimes against humanity. However contemporary with us, this critique still makes common cause with that radical break between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that I think is endemic to Frye. That said, Cope’s poem also undermines this break. For the irony is that the limerick is itself a popular verse form we identify with Gemeinschaft. Hence a social notion of community is turned on itself: on the one hand, we’re treated to oppressive hokum from the past that negates our identification with Gemeinschaft (Eliot, like Heidegger, was excoriating the inauthenticity of city life), while using a verse form that binds us to the lost world of Gemeinschaft, nevertheless (i.e., folk poetry). Here the break between past and present, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, becomes vexed, since we can’t identify entirely either with or against them, since, truth to tell, they are quite interlaced: it is the idea of Gemeinschaft that has to do the ideological work of enabling us to tolerate the evils of Gesellschaft. This troubling of the difference is precisely Fredric Jameson’s point in The Seeds of Time, in which an understanding of Gemeinschaft/ Gesellschaft is situated within a global sphere wherein the oppositions are multiply valorized to the point that it becomes impossible to imagine a simple, unambiguous opposition. This is not to say that poets like Cope aren’t trying to impose clear-cut polarities in order to call the legitimacy of canonical literature into question. Or that the mavens of postmodernity haven’t been trying to put literature on life support by simply flipping the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction around in order to set up putative postmodern genres of literary writing. For the fact is that however multiply inflected this division has become, the act of making the divisions seems to be what is mainly at issue. For example, it is significant that for some, postmodern literature defines itself as what Gemeinschaft is not (not organic, not totalizing, not mythological, not metaphysical, not explanatory, etc.). However, if this is an affirmation of postmodernity, it is also the revival of a traditional prepostmodern form of genre studies that relies on strict divisions to preserve literature by characterizing it as a dominant cultural – 47 –

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activity performing the postmodern episteme. Indeed, even Jameson’s famous definition of pastiche and his discussion of Bob Perelman’s poem “China” in his seminal “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” does this. Such postmodern redefining of the literary is further troubled by the accompaniment of, say, ethnic studies wherein Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft have to be reapportioned and revalorized differently by fields like Native American literary study that don’t share the same culturalist-historical assumptions so foundational for enthusiasts of postmodernism. In other words, the question of nativism and its preindustrial cultures and values, raised by Trinh Minh-ha and others, brings about a different understanding of Gemeinschaft than the one advanced by postmodernists, or the one advanced by Frye. Trinh, for example, doesn’t see Gemeinschaft entirely in terms of the monological symbolic forms described by Frye, though she does, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, embrace some of its archetypes to an extent. Again, her filmic situating of Vietnamese immigrants within America further destabilizes the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft divide, because the two are overcoded and not separable. This, however, is where Jameson’s point about multiply articulated interfaces of Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft becomes more evident. To show this somewhat further, consider that even though we may think Gemeinschaft is bunk, it still underwrites the popularity of novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (both were made into films), if not to mention the lengthy popularity of the Star Wars movies, or Disney’s Lion King (in both cinematic cartoon and musical venues). This requires us to admit that if we think Frye is obsolete, we, as part of our popular culture, have never ceased reembracing textbook examples of archetypalism writ large. After all, Beloved exploits the “terrible mother” archetype; The Color Purple exploits the whore of Babylon archetype, which runs rampant in the novel’s rural Gemeinschaft; while Star Wars and Lion King are cases in which we have to suspect that Northrop Frye’s account of Romance was followed to the letter as a recipe for box office success. Hence the despised world of Gemeinschaft, so odious to social activists, may not be so much a thing of the past as it might seem, hence denying us our postmodern view that a yawning chasm exists between Gemeinschaft/ Gesellschaft. When Jameson distinguishes historically between Van Gogh’s picture of peasant shoes and Andy Warhol’s glitter shoes, it – 48 –

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may well be a false historical distinction in that the one hasn’t culturally superseded or supplanted the other, for the reality is that recent Disney films are full of such peasant shoes, should you care to look for them in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and elsewhere. Apparently, our repression or splitting off of the very archetypalism that we have deeply cathected is part of the embedding of precapitalist and late capitalist moments that, as Jameson notes, come in the place of a historical notion of supercession. Jameson asks, can heterogeneity “mean anything suitably subversive until homogeneity has historically emerged”? (1994, 24). And, isn’t that emergence of homogeneity a projection into the past that is historically fallacious, since it was never the case that the past was as homogeneous a foil for difference as one’s ideology would lead one to imagine? Is contemporary heterogeneity as heterogeneous as we like to think? For isn’t it too a conceptual doctrine, ideology, or genre of thinking to which many intellectuals conform out of a certain political and theoretical correctness (or, more precisely, doctrine)? This, of course, is where Jameson and Derrida were thinking along parallel lines in the mid-1990s, the point being that heterogeneity is situated as a horizon within homogeneity and vice versa. Whereas the conceptual differentiation between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft appear to be quite distinct, in practice the cultural borderlines that differentiate them are not, since they reflect considerable ambivalence about giving up Gemeinschaft and embracing Gesellschaft, as well as considerable instability of where and how different contemporary societies (ethnic, racial) draw the line. In this context, literature has been divisible according to a law of difference that is a little bit crazy in that it cannot stabilize the position or meaning of the border between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, even though from certain perspectives that borderline appears to be quite fixed and absolute. No doubt, we may well ask: Is it not in terms of this instability that the question of literature’s essence is continually deferred and its final reckoning thereby infinitely postponed? And would this be but another strategy for conserving literature, a conserving that is indicative of hospitality—our hospitableness to the literary both in terms of its embodiment of Gemeinschaft (Frye, Steven Spielberg, Toni Morrison) and its concurrent negation of it (Sartre, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Benn Michaels)? If all of this appears to be wide of Derrida’s concerns, we’ll see that it is, in fact, most relevant. – 49 –

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• In approaching Derrida’s thoughts on literature, we ought to bear in mind that implicitly he, too, has been considering the differences between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Whereas Frye considered this distinction mainly from a diachronic point of view—something he shares with figures as diverse as Weber, Lukacs, Benjamin, Heidegger, Habermas, and Giddens—Derrida has taken a synchronic perspective in which he notices the coexistence of these two notions of sociality from antiquity onward. It is absolutely crucial to point out that if Derrida never invokes the terms Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, his writings more or less require them in order to be comprehended. Although we hear nothing about Gemeinschaft as such, it is selfevident that Derrida has been writing numerous texts on small communities within society and that these communities are, in fact, microcommunities of alterity (Maurice Blanchot has called them “negative communities”) in which individuals are to be thought of in terms of singularities that are, strictly speaking, private and unknowable.2 And yet such individuals are not without relation to one another, for example, the relation we know as responsibility. (Derrida’s The Gift of Death on Abraham and Isaac would be paradigmatic.) The catch, however, is that in Derrida’s view responsibility (like forgiveness, hospitality, etc.) is incalculable: nonappropriable, nonidentifiable, nonsubjectifiable. One way to think about this would be to say that Derrida is trying to set up a negative theology of Gemeinschaft: community predicated upon the deconstruction of all those foundational concepts we usually invoke to imagine community. In Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money Derrida lays out much of the logic that will be of relevance to a negative theology of the microcommunity, specifically, how a social relation between two people is predicated upon the giving of a gift (recall that in the contexts of his other writings hospitality and forgiveness are gifts, too) whose law of donation is not obeying any principle of reason but is (deconstructively speaking) without foundation. The gift would be that which does not obey the principle of reason: It is, it ought to be, it owes itself to be without reason, without wherefore, and without foundation. The gift, if there is any, does not even belong to practical reason. It should remain a stranger to morality, to the will, – 50 –

— Monolinguism and Literature — perhaps to freedom, at least to that freedom that is associated with the will of a subject. It should remain a stranger to the law or to the “il faut” (you must, you have to) of this practical reason. It should surpass duty itself: duty beyond duty. If you give because you must give, then you no longer give. . . . A law or a “you must” without duty, in effect, if that is possible. If one pursues the consequence of these strange propositions, and if one holds that the gift shares with the event in general all these conditions (being outside-the-law, unforeseeability, “surprise,” the absence of anticipation or horizon, the excess with regard to all reason, either speculative or practical, and so forth), one would have to conclude that nothing ever happens by reason or by practical reason. In any case, no event could be testified to. But it is the question of the witness that is posed to us every time a “duel” marks the inviolate secret of a scene. (1992b, 156)

All of this requires us to imagine a relation of the nonrelation, something that Derrida is associating with the literary examples of Charles Baudelaire, since it is in literature that the lawless law of the social relation is most highly elaborated in opposition to, say, the social science of someone like Marcel Mauss who is determined to find the law of the gift as something that can be precisely calculated and rationalized in each instance according to an economy. (It’s here, of course, that Derrida is indebted to Georges Bataille’s critique of economy as a self-conserving system, a relay that shadows so much of Derrida’s thinking.) If we can pull back from this sort of detailed analysis, we will see that Derrida is discussing the gift in terms of community relations that are interpersonal and, hence, typical of Gemeinschaft, in which face-toface relations do occur. In The Politics of Friendship Derrida counterpoints the small community that is formed by friendship (Aristotle’s “O Friend, there is no friend”) with the larger social question posed by the political philosopher Carl Schmitt of friends and enemies in the social sphere of the nation and its political apparatuses. In that text, Derrida has been exploring what we might consider Gemeinschaftliches (i.e. communitarian) social phenomena within a world dominated by the totalitarianism of Gesellschaft, something that explains his fascination with Schmitt’s point that the abstract politics of a Gesellschaft has to be mediated by the face-to-face politics of Gemeinschaft if it is to be – 51 –

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considered an authentic politics at all. One can also see the Gemeinschaftliches concern with microcommunities in Archive Fever, in which Derrida considers the microcommunity of those who are the intellectual guardians of the Freud archives in London, and in Of Hospitality in terms of the interrelationship between the sovereignty of hosts and the special rights accorded to foreign guests. In Demeure, Derrida not only touches on the instituting of literature in the context of social hospitality, but upon Maurice Blanchot’s “The Instant of My Death” wherein Gemeinschaft comes into contact with nation-states at war (Gesellschaft). Of course, it is important not to forget Derrida’s much earlier exploration of the communitarian challenge to society in Glas, the more accessible analysis being that of Jean Genet’s writings in which a homosexual prison community is at issue. What interested Derrida, not surprisingly, was the borderline of the homo/hetero and how it interpellated the social difference between Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft. Indeed, one could say that in Glas the homosexual community of men was that monolinguism of the other in which one does and does not speak only one language. However, prior to Glas we can read “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in which the gift of the father is donated within a community of kin. But, as in Given Time: I, the gift is undecidable and incalculable: “if, consequently, one got to thinking that writing as a pharmakon cannot simply be assigned a site within what it situates, cannot be subsumed under concepts whose contours it draws, leaves only its ghost to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as logic arises from it— one would have to bend [plier (i.e. fold)] into strange contortions what could no longer even simply be called logic or discourse” (1981b, 103). The microcommunity of Socrates is implicated here, as well, insofar as Socrates’s teachings are of the order of the pharmakon. No doubt, one could revisit Derrida’s critique of the primacy of speech and the logocentric understanding of the book as a critique of what he is later going to call monolinguism. Given the famous attack on “voice,” he had been implicitly involved in a critique of Gemeinschaft in its most traditional sense of face-to-face relations. Yet it is to some form of Gemeinschaft that Derrida would return in the 1990s from the hither side of its deconstruction. Obviously, a vast chasm separates Northrop Frye and Jacques Derrida with respect to how they approach matters of Gemeinschaft, yet it is important to note that, not unlike Frye, Derrida also contextualized this approach in terms of bringing literature into – 52 –

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relation with religion, albeit Jewish religion as conceptualized by Lévinas. And though it would be anathema to accuse Derrida of archetypalism, there is an argument to be made for the repetition of a miseen-scène whose terms may change, but whose logic is repeated: the giving of the gift that reveals the undecidable and incalculable relation/nonrelation of donor and recipient. For Derrida, literature is the setting up of such a mise-en-scène and, as such, has a generic specificity. If one has any doubts about this, one could read Derrida on Plato, Sophocles, Montaigne, Baudelaire, Genet, Kafka, and Blanchot. In fact, Derrida will even come around to giving a name to the archetypal genre he has in mind when in the 1990s he invokes the word “Passion.” • For reasons that are not entirely clear, Derrida’s reflections on passion are uncharacteristically elusive and oftentimes frustrating. This is why it is helpful to recall an important precedent in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “What Is Writing?” in which literature is defined as the impassioned freedom to say anything. Sartre’s idea that literature is the consequence of an arrogation of freedom by the author, which is often illegal (given that the act of writing is by definition a negation of the status quo), is revised by Derrida in such a way that literature is a discourse that is allowed to speak freely by democratic society. Literature would never exist, Derrida argues, if there weren’t a juridicopolitical social contract that brings it into being as a privileged discourse within which everything can and must be said. For this we can thank the Romans, for whom the passion to tell all is fundamentally a passion for public disclosure that individual authors have to assume (Derrida, 2000a). Yet, Derrida fundamentally agrees with Sartre that the writer’s passion spurs us to recognize a truth for which we must take responsibility. “It is in love, in hate, in anger, in fear, in joy, in indignation, in admiration, in hope, in despair, that man and the world reveal themselves in their truth” (Sartre 1949, 23). Hence, “the writer has chosen to reveal the world and particularly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may assume full responsibility before the object which has been thus laid bare” (24). “Passion,” according to Sartre in “Why Write?” is an ethical appeal made by the writer by way of the story. And this appeal “is a Passion, in the Christian sense of the word, that is, a freedom which resolutely puts itself into a state of passivity to obtain a certain transcendent effect by this sacrifice.” The reader, for his or her part, has – 53 –

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to be willing to put faith into this passion. Indeed, “the characteristic of aesthetic consciousness is to be a belief by means of engagement, by oath, a belief sustained by fidelity to one’s self and to the author, a perpetually renewed choice to believe” (50). Here Sartre touches on the important Derridean theme of obligation which is tied to matters of receptivity and hospitality. The reader must be hospitable to the passion of the author, because it is through this passion that the author reveals, in Sartre’s phrase, “man to other men,” in order that obligation, debt, and responsibility may be assumed by the witness. This is in basic agreement with Sartre’s remarks that “there is no art except for and by others” (43). If Sartre recognized the religious implications of the term “passion,” Derrida develops them at more length. In the summit meeting on the Isle of Capri that included a small number of philosophers, Hans-Georg Gadamer among them, Derrida gave the talk “Faith and Knowledge” (1998a), in which he meditated upon Emile Benveniste’s philological observation that re-ligion means, among much else, a re-tying, or rebinding, or re-turning toward. Passion, then, is what sets a person apart and makes the person exceptional as the precondition for a returning and rededicating of oneself to others. As in Sartre’s discussion of passion, the crucifixion of Christ immediately comes to Derrida’s mind. For the setting apart of Christ on the cross—his passion—is a precondition for his return to the side of God as well as for his second coming or return to humankind. Christianity observes this passion as an exception and a mystery suffered by one who was treated inhospitably as a stranger. Even if the crucifixion was witnessed, what has happened becomes clear only retroactively, a clarification that requires more than direct observation of a few people, namely, a community (Gemeinschaft) of witnesses who can interpret what they saw and heard. Death in this instance is the suffering of a horror that is nevertheless survived by means of resurrection: a re-binding, returning, coming back to, or re-ligion. Of course, there are many secular analogies that have to do with traumatic suffering. The war veteran who has suffered unspeakable trauma is exceptional to the point of being excepted, strange, and outcast. This person has suffered a passion, and it is society’s responsibility to listen to what has happened, to listen to that person’s testimony. Analogously, the one who has undergone such a – 54 –

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passion has the ethical duty to make the attempt to rededicate himself or herself to the world. In this way one can return to the land of the living; survival, in other words, depends upon the capacity to be born again. Testifying, which often comes to us in the form of something written, is part of this reconnection (or rebirth) and, for Derrida, is constitutive of what he believes is the juridicopolitical contract that social democracy has established in order to found the concept of the literary. Indeed, the literary would be exemplary of what in a Roman context would be a hospitality to the return of the outsider to society. Yet, is it not the case that within that society the outsider really comes back to us by way of a community that hears the testimony, let’s say, even a community of readers? Moreover, are these readers not going to be bound, connected, related together by narratives like the passion which return them again and again to their faith? It is here that Derrida’s thoughts on literature are not entirely remote from those of Frye, which recognize the significance of the repetition of symbolic patterns, since the repetition of a pattern binds us to something to which we are already attached or bound. For Frye (1957) it is ritual that turns symbol into archetype; that is, the repeatability of symbolic patterns makes up a re-ligion by way of what Frye calls the cyclical and the recurrent. Frye makes the disarmingly simple observation that recurrence and the cyclical are part of life and that everything fundamental to our existence is bound up with repetition (eating, sleeping, waking up, etc.). What this means, for Frye, is that literature gathers us to it by means of symbolically expressing the meaning of life in terms of its “total form,” the architecture of which owes so much to cyclicality. Of course, this gathering is an appropriative moment in which literature reveals itself as intrinsically linked to all members of community and, beyond that, of society. Derrida, by contrast, sees literature as a disappropriative phenomenon that reveals the singularity and apartness of, say, a Jean Genet, Francis Ponge, or Maurice Blanchot because literature is thought of first and foremost not as a formal structure but as a testimony or response that takes exception. Characteristic of Derrida’s view is that in Passions he speaks of response as a testimony that marks an impossibility and a setting apart. With Blanchot and Lévinas in mind, Derrida asks what it would mean to give a response. Can one respond to the others? Should one respond? Is a response really a response or something else, such as an – 55 –

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avoidance or a denial? Is there such a thing as a direct response, or are all responses oblique? So far, these critical moves are akin to warm-up exercises. But in the course of asking these questions, Derrida will gravitate toward Christianity by noting that a response is an offering to someone else that comes at the price of a personal sacrifice. In Passions there is even an allusion to crucifixion: “In one and the same place, on the same apparatus, I have my two hands tied or nailed down” (1995a, 22). Derrida is referring to the fact that he has offered himself up and therefore sacrificed himself to his commentators/ critics/crucifiers. The offering of his life’s work is, he says, a sacrifice for which he will have to pay by testifying—surviving the responses or commentaries of others and resurrecting himself in order that he may return to the critics and rededicate and re-bind himself to what he will refer to as his apostles. Elsewhere, this scene of sacrifice will be played out in terms of direct reference to the Last Supper. Again, we are given a well-known literary archetype that instantiates an allegorical complex of tropological and anagogical themes. Passion, of course, refers to the offering/sacrifice and is constitutive of all the aporias of responsiveness that Derrida discovers. This passion is thematized in terms of the response as a testifying and as a testament which one must link to a “religious sociality” that thrives on the disruptive effects of testament, since religious communities actually require a vulnerability of doctrine and faith that they must survive in order to return to the sacrificial offering or response, as if its divisiveness were a source for social unification rather than social disruption. Still, Derrida finds testament radically disunifying in that it is a response that leaves something unsaid. In other words, there is always something that testament either does not conserve or leaves unconserved for the sake of the future. Thus there is always something that haunts the testimony as that which does not answer and that remains foreign to speech. Derrida calls this the il y a là du secret, the troublesome remainder that cannot be spoken about, let alone responded to. At the very end of his speculations in Passions, Derrida confesses that he has never really liked literature (“not that I like literature in general” [1995a, 27]), but that if there is something he has liked about it, it is the fact that literature occupies the place of the secret, that literature is the il y a là du secret. Literature, therefore, instantiates the nonresponse of a response: however much critics try to get the text to – 56 –

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speak to us, there is always something that literature will never say, because its response is both response and nonresponse. In Demeure, Maurice Blanchot’s story “The Instant of My Death” exemplifies Derrida’s point about inappropriability. Passions is introductory to Demeure in that it already presumes a connection between religion and literature in terms of the problematic of response that bears on offering, sacrifice, testimony, testament, and the secret. This text is also introductory to “Faith and Knowledge” in that it opens up the question of religious society whose rituals are shared by secular communities, like the faithful group of Derrideans addressed in Passions that has contributed essays to Derrida: A Critical Reader. In such instances, it is a Gemeinschaftliches community that Derrida addresses, the implication being that religion and literature are both to be considered the products of this type of community, which is, in essence, foreign to Gesellschaft. In contrast to the earlier discussion of Frye in which one is tempted to presume the end of literature with the end of Gemeinschaft as a historical phenomenon that couldn’t survive the emergence of the nation-state, capitalism, and globalization, Derrida’s exploration of Gemeinschaft presupposes its survival in terms of numerous small societies, among them various academic groups, associations, and institutions that are part of Gesellschaft. What ensures the life of the literary is that it is precisely within these small communities or social cells (the Ltd. Inc.) that something is confessed and held back, that, to use Heidegger’s vocabulary, the literary work un-conceals itself, the hyphen pointing to the undecidability of the difference it marks. This means that literature both appropriates and disappropriates by way of responding/not responding; hiding/showing; or holding back/sending onward. Also of importance is that if the future of literature rests with the small society, this has to be seen in contrast to the community of the university, in which departments of literature regard the literary work as an object of research, which is to say, as a thing to be anatomized and demystified. Hence these departments are by definition inhospitable to secrecy, and by logical extension, to literature itself, as Derrida understands it. • In The Inclusion of the Other, Jürgen Habermas looks at the politics of society in terms of (1) a conservative impulse to encourage public – 57 –

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rights of participation and communication, since these address civic freedoms that promote civic involvement, and (2) the liberal impulse to stress freedom of private beliefs and conscience that are not answerable to the public at large. Conservatives champion public rights. Liberals champion subjective rights, among them, the right not to conform to majority beliefs and the right not to privilege a state’s official languages. Whereas Habermas contextualizes these differences in terms of contemporary political party views, Derrida looks at them from the perspective of what has been outlined as the difference between a limited community (Gemeinschaft) and society as a whole (Gesellschaft). Moreover, Derrida thinks in terms of a passion that is endemic to both the conservative’s passion for a right to open participation, which requires free expression, and the liberal view that champions subjective rights. Thus Derrida views passion as key to both the identitarianism of full participation and the alterity of subjectivity. However, in the essay-monograph “Force of Law” (1992a), Derrida considered the incommensurability of right and justice, a difference that is fundamental to the incommensurability of the right to speak out that is socially participatory and the subjective right to a conscientious objection or exception to general participation. Whereas Habermas theorizes this polarization in terms of two rights that both have legitimacy, Derrida’s writings require us to see the conservative position as a right, whereas the liberal position would exemplify justice. Rights can be calculated, justice cannot. Law [droit—right, rectitude, reason] is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments in which [des moments où] the decision between just and unjust is never ensured by a rule. (1992a, 16)

That Habermas’s conservative/liberal poles cannot be rationalized into a coherent political world order would be precisely Derrida’s point, since the passion that they both share is internally and incommensurately divided and hence a bit mad. A word that actually constellates a great number of meanings, “passion” is defined (here in very truncated form) by Derrida in Demeure as (1) the civic passion to tell all within – 58 –

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the history of rights, the state, modern democracy; (2) the telling of everything to an other in order to avow desire, as in the case of a lover’s confession; (3) a radical passivity that is not assimilable within the active/passive dyad; (4) liability, indebtedness, responsibility; (5) suffering that has been undergone; (6) testimony; (7) the endurance of an undecidable limit. To all of these definitions can be added yet another: passion is literature (as in Sartre). This is evident in Derrida’s testimonial, “Circumfession,” where the literary has to be pardoned or excepted, because its truth is the truth of a testimony that cannot ever be verified or held to standards of droit (uprightness, reason, right, law). If literature’s truth has to be pardoned in advance, it is because this truth is indicative of justice which, according to Derrida in “Force of Law,” is “undeconstructable” (Derrida’s word), since justice exceeds the law and hence has to be excepted. This, then, emulates and radicalizes the famous distinction in Hegel between morality and ethics. [The] making [of] truth has no doubt nothing to do with what you call truth, for in order to confess, it is not enough to bring to knowledge, to make known what is, for example to inform you that I have done to death, betrayed, blasphemed, perjured; it is not enough that I present myself to God or you, the presentation of what is or what I am, either by revelation of any adequate judgment, “truth” then, having never given rise to avowal, to true avowal, the essential truth of avowal having therefore nothing to do with truth, but consisting, if, that is, one is concerned that it consist and there by any, in asked-for pardon, in a request rather, asked of religion as of literature, before the one and the other which have a right only to this time, for pardoning, pardon, for nothing. (1993b, 48–49)

If the passion of testimony is literary, this is because it is no longer being bound to and by the truth, let alone matters of reason or right (droit, moral code, etc.). The result is a stream of writing that earlier in “Circumfession” Derrida associated with the spurting out of blood, as if testimony were a sacrificial act, one that cuts into the self at the expense of giving up truth. It is in terms of this circumvention of the truth that Derrida will testify about his circumcision, the idea being that the phallus of truth is, already within Jewish tradition, being circumcised – 59 –

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(cut around) or sacrificed within a rite that is both exemplary of religion and of literature, namely, a rededication to faith that requires the sacrifice of blood to mark the sacrifice or loss of truth. Here, too, Derrida’s recent emphasis upon the concept of pardon also needs to be taken into account, since a testimony requires us to exempt or except the testifier, by separating or cutting out the testifier from the community. One has to beg pardon because everything that one says is exceptional in terms of not being capable of being tallied or judged. Derrida, for example, wasn’t present as a capable witness at his own briss, so one has to pardon whatever he says, since it cannot be verified by him except by hearsay. Whatever else it is, the pardon is a plea for acceptance at the expense of cutting around the truth, a sacrifice that is itself a passion. According to Derrida such pardon is constitutive of religious discourses and of literary fiction, something that makes us wonder if we can ever decide their difference. Of course, “Circumfession” is itself exemplary of a writing that is at once fiction and religion, and in this it shares much with St. Augustine’s Confessions, which Derrida cites at length. Such writings require us to pardon the author for not telling the truth, since literary and religious texts can be written only if the truth—that is to say, the literal truth—is sacrificed in advance. Such texts, therefore, are to be considered a circumnavigation of an excision, a circumnavigation that has to do with a circumcision and not a castration. This leaves us with the recognition that the phallus is that instrument of passion that has been cut into but not cut off.3 In Derrida’s later writings, resurrection, coming back, or return implies the idea of exception—that even in sacrifice something is excepted, spared, or left out of it. Just as the phallus is excepted and hence saved from its own decapitation in circumcision, the truth is excepted from its excision in fiction and testimony and returns all the stronger as justice, a right beyond right. What is sacrificed returns as something that has been spared and saved; yet, it has also undergone destruction. One must wonder, of course, whether this isn’t a very Christological and archetypal setup, one that is at issue in Maurice Blanchot’s short testimonial “The Instant of My Death,” which exemplifies a certain purification (really, a punishment) that cannot be rationalized or avowed in terms of truth and rights.

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What we shouldn’t lose sight of is that in turning to the thematic of justice in Blanchot (an ethics beyond morality, or, more precisely, beyond good and evil), Derrida negates the democratic idea of rights of inclusion, typical of democratic Gesellschaft, and affirms a community of exception (Gemeinschaft) that embraces Blanchot’s unavowability. What is striking from a political perspective is that it is in terms of aligning testimony, truth, sacrifice, literature, and justice that we exceed a purely democratic horizon and, in particular, the democratic nation-state, though such a Gesellschaft is required for enabling the possibility of testimony, literature, and justice. In this there is both reciprocity and incommensurability. Of the many literary examples that Derrida could have chosen to develop in Demeure he chose to write a lengthy interpretation of Blanchot’s “The Instant of My Death” in which there is a question of the verifiability or truth of Blanchot’s story and the extent to which that truth has been excepted. For is it not the case that the title sacrifices the truth as a precondition for the testimony that will follow, since the author hasn’t, in fact, died? Here, then, we have what for Derrida defines the literary: the excepting and setting aside of truth as the precondition for its disclosure. Derrida will read this as a setting aside by someone who, in an instant, experiences a passion that is the instantiation of his death, namely, “a Dasein that announces itself to itself in its own being-for-death.” It is in this sense that the testimony cannot be considered entirely to be a perjury. Let us come now to The Instant of My Death. In it Blanchot recounts otherwise how at the end of the war—and we know this precisely from testimonies, different and varied testimonies—during an episode recounted to us by the text, the author himself was stopped by the Germans. He was placed before a wall to be executed. He was going to be executed and death had already arrived, had already been decided, decreed; death was imminent and inescapable in a certain way, just as it was for Dostoyevsky—we will return to the specter of Dostoyevsky later on, for there is a Russian dimension to this story. At this instant, he escapes execution. He slowly gets away, without fleeing, under conditions that are barely believable. He is telling the story, and it happened. (2000a, 51–52)

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That the story can be substantiated rests on a letter Derrida received from Blanchot, “July 20. Fifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death [je connu le bonheur d’être presque fusillé]” (52). It is this happiness or bonheur that instantiates a moment before death that has been experienced as a passion or a being-for-death. Thus the testimony of a “strange event,” as Derrida calls it, has been published as a literary fiction that testifies to the event in “a way that is abyssal, elliptical, paradoxical, and, for that matter, undecidable” (53). This is a story about surviving the inappropriable, something whose truth can’t be known, because it can’t be gathered. In fact, much of Derrida’s analysis of this narrative appears to be about the inability to gather (to collect, appropriate, put together) the story, even if something is gathered, in any case. There are some obvious Heideggerian parallels that are familiar to both Derrida and Blanchot, namely, the account of Logos in which the relation of appropriation and disappropriation (Ereignis/Enteignis) is deconstructed and hence no longer reducible to a dialectic. One of the consequences of this deconstruction is that for Heidegger there is something not conserved in appropriation and something that is not destroyed in disappropriation, a principle that appears to be upheld in various of Blanchot’s fictional works, and, in particular, the narrative of his death. Derrida has translated this disappropriation into the context of survivance (1979), the idea that something always survives nonsurvival (in Derrida’s Feu la cendre (1982), the cinders of the incinerated victims of the Nazis) and that something is always lost in survival (obviously, the things one has lived beyond). But another way of thinking about appropriation/disappropriation is in terms of the Passion. If one wanted to speak here of resurrection through the experience of a Christlike passion (the Germans would be the Romans, this time), there would be no Christology, no speculative Good Friday, no truth of religion in the absolute knowledge of Hegel, whose spectral shadow will not be long in passing. But all of this—the Passion, the Resurrection, absolute Knowledge—is mimicked, repeated, and displaced. (2000a, 63)

Even if Christology is disappropriated, it survives and is being conserved, nevertheless; hence, one always returns to it. In Blanchot’s narrative, “The Instant of My Death” is a moment of radical disappro– 62 –

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priation in which something eschatological is still appropriated and disclosed as a passion, something Blanchot reveals to Derrida when he sends the letter that speaks of his happiness. This joyful appropriation is not distinguishable from the instant that was lived as a radically disappropriative interruption that, years later, Blanchot would attempt to recount, though Derrida’s point will be that in this very recounting or recollecting—its testimony—the story discloses itself as disappropriative. This instant is perhaps a fictional representation of a Heideggerian disappropriative temporality that manifests a divisibility of the instant that cannot be logically reconstructed to make up a unified or coherent history. Of course, Blanchot is not alone in writing such a narrative, because Proust, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Duras have independently explored this narrative disappropriation of time, something that has its many corollaries in film, as in, for example, the cinematic work of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. But for Derrida, Blanchot’s “The Instant of My Death” is privileged because it enables him to explore autoaffection, since it is mainly in terms of this autoaffection that the question of passion is being posited in Blanchot’s story as an affect that is not identical to itself, despite the fact of its repeatability and communicability. But as what is this affect repeatable? The word demeure strongly suggests that the passion is something that resides with a certain authoritativeness in testimony, which is to say, in the telling of “The Instant of My Death.” Is not the story, then, the house of passion’s existence? And is not the impulse to tell this passion—or passion’s passion— one that necessarily returns to itself as something that dwells or resides in a testimony and that has to be respected in its integrity as a selfdisclosure of words that houses or contains an experience? Does not passion, too, have to admit, “I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. The monolingualism in which I draw my breath is, for me, my element,” and so on (1998b, 1)? Contrariwise, must we not also take into account Derrida’s maxim “I only have one language; it is not mine” (1998b, 1)? Therefore if the passion belongs to or is a part of the narration and, as any psychoanalyst might venture to guess, even motivates that narration, it is also never really part of this narrative and cannot be reduced to it, let alone protected or sheltered or housed by it, since by definition the passion is – 63 –

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extrinsic and, as such, an alterity. Here the paradox of monolinguism is quite exposed: (1) the one who testifies speaks a monolinguism that only the testifier can speak—only Blanchot can authorize the testimony as his own, whereas his redactors, critics, and translators can claim only a proprietoriality that no one can ever take entirely seriously—and (2) the one who testifies is himself alien to the testimony (and the passion) because the two never quite coincide, the one being at least somewhat alien to the other. Therefore, it is not easy to assume that “The Instant of My Death” could adequately testify to the passion that one detects in it, that the biography of the writer and the writings are homologous, the one residing comfortably within the other. After all, is the writer chez lui within the work? Blanchot’s “The Instant of My Death” testifies to a moment supposedly in the author’s life—the “supposedly” is something Derrida takes quite seriously—when the experience of a terrifying inhospitality is endured, the inhospitality of being evicted from one’s house, given a death sentence, and then being lined up for execution. Of cardinal importance to the narrative is the division between the arrival of the moment for execution and the delay or reprieve of the action that gives that moment its temporality in terms of what Georges Poulet once called “human time.” What Blanchot experienced, if he actually experienced it, was the coming of an inhuman time, a moment stripped away from an event that would define it in human terms by means of the difference between life and death. By suspending the actual execution, the subject undergoes the moment of death without the corresponding execution, which deprives the moment of its authoritative temporality as “instant of my death.” To restore this dimension of temporality that has been put “under erasure,” Blanchot writes the narrative of it. Apparently, Derrida is of the view that what authorizes the narrative as a true testimony is the fact that Blanchot preserves the heteronomy of this appropriative moment in which time is disappropriated. “What will happen will have opened another time” (2000a, 61). The whathas-happened, the what-has-always-already-happened, the what-ishappening, the what-will-happen, and the what-will-have-happened are all happening at “the instant of my death.” Given that these temporalities are all disadjusted (heteronomous), they do not converge around a self-identical subject. This is why, Derrida says, the narrative – 64 –

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cannot quite reconcile the differences between first-, second-, and thirdperson pronouns, since it appears that the moment of death has brought them out of logical relation. The same has to be said for the relation between what, in traditional terms, we would call the narrator and the protagonist, for these persons within the narration are more like horizons of locution that defy identity and difference. The linguistic tone, too, is radically discontinuous. There is, for example, a change of tone in the soldiers who evict the protagonist and his family from their home, from normal French to an animalistic howling ferocity, from hospitality (receptivity) to inhospitality (persecution). This parallels the radical indeterminacy of the decision to shoot the protagonist wherein the moment of the decision comes due without the action that would define it as such. Hence there is the arrival of an anachrony that shatters the subject to the extent that later there can be no adequate testimony, because “what was me is no longer me,” the “no longer me” being now unable to speak for the “what was me.” Consequently, the monolingual condition of the self is broken up and not, Blanchot tells Derrida, without the experience of a certain pleasure. In the letter to Derrida, however, Blanchot reappropriates the I into a coherent self-same subject who can say, perhaps monolinguistically, “Fifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death.” In this sentence Blanchot has presented the subject as if it had always enjoyed its sovereignty as an individual, that enjoyment being related to the affective enjoyment of an unaccountable passion that only a living subject can authorize. But one wonders whether this subject isn’t concealing its inadequation to that which it is testifying to. In “Gloire de l’infini et témoigne,” Emmanuel Lévinas writes that “testimony [bearing witness] doesn’t thematize what it is a testimony of, and, as such, there can only be a testimony [witnessing] of the infinite.” Testimony is an exception even to the rule of being: “In it, the Infinite reveals itself without appearing, without showing itself as Infinite.” Throughout the discussion of testimony, Lévinas considers the inadequation of speaking to being as exemplary of passion. From a Derridean point of view, this suggests that testimony would be something other than what the Romans called literature, since, as Horace argued in “The Art of Poetry,” literature is predicated on the adequation of speaking and being. Literary criticism has persistently argued – 65 –

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for a successful translation of nature into culture, being into speaking, whereas Derrida’s Jewish antecedents argue for passion as the inadequation of speaking to Being, the inadequation of an interlocution between self and other, given that this interlocution always opens onto the interruption of the sacred and the messianic. “The glory of the Infinite is anarchy for the subject who is flushed out of hiding without possibility of escape. It speaks itself in the sincerity that makes a sign to the other for whom I am responsible. This way of being routed out— this ‘here I am’—is a Saying of which the Said consists of saying ‘Here I am!’—and of which this glory is testimony [a witnessing]” (Lévinas 1993, 224–25).4 Testimony is closely related to the fact that one is present not simply to oneself but to an other. Infinity, which in Lévinas’s vocabulary speaks to an exceeding of totality (logocentricism, closure, adequation), creates havoc (Heideggerian disadjustment) for the subject who would like to hide and dwell in finitude—for example, in all one’s trivial day-to-day circumstances. The ‘here I am’ or ‘me voici’ of the prophets is precisely a moment of reckoning with the Infinite whose glory is passion—both ecstasy and suffering—and that in and of itself is what Lévinas calls testimony: the showing forth of passion in the exception of the me voici. Indeed, it is the revelation of this passion (itself utterly exceptional) that is always on the way in the disclosing of the “here I am.” If this passion and this testimony are shown in and as glory, it is a glory that is always “to be shown” and, as such, a glory that belongs to the future—a messianic glory. Still, this revelation belongs to “an impossibility of adequation: an exceedence over the present” (Lévinas 1993, 223) that is singular, particular, and inimitable to the one who undergoes it. So, one may well ask, what glory was revealed to Blanchot at the instant of his death? And what is revealed to us in his telling us about it? To look for a specific object of revelation would entirely miss the point, because, as Derrida notices, what makes this narrative peculiar is the immeasurability of its terms. For example, there is an impossible measure of time. “In reality, how much time had elapsed?” (2000a, 81) Similarly, there is an impossible measure of where reality leaves off and where fiction takes over. We also can’t measure place too well. Where was the protagonist standing in relation to the firing squad? How, in purely physical terms, did he get to safety? What kind of château is the – 66 –

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château Blanchot is talking about? Is it real, mythical, a compilation of imaginary châteaus? How can we take any measure of these phenomena that the text is talking about? This, then, may well relate to the inadequation Lévinas is talking about in his essay on the glory of testimony, since glory—or, in Blanchot’s terms, happiness—is revealed in if not as the immeasurability of phenomena, the exceeding of the phenomenon beyond the measure of all things, life and death included. Perhaps it should be evident by now that testimony is what speaks to the immeasurable, to an event of opening up (let’s say, to be brief, a Heideggerian Ereignis) in which immeasurability is revealed in terms that are even apocalyptic. “Finally he left. Everything was burning, except the Château. The Seigneurs had been spared.” As Derrida himself puts it, this is a Last Judgment. And the protagonist has been spared the flames. But, he asks himself, was it fair, this exoneration from the flames? This narrative-testimony is also a complaint and an accusation. Blanchot, or at least the narrator, is in some sense complaining about, bringing an accusation—injustice, error and injustice—against his having been saved and his residence’s having been saved for an impure, unavowable, socially suspect reason, shameful thus for a reason that calls all the more for an urgent confession; and this narrative of self-justification is also, inversely, the confession of the unavowable. (2000a, 85)

How is one to measure this complaint? Against what rule of justice or fairness could it be adjudicated? The young man was saved and his castle spared because, according to a Nazi code, the nobles were to be spared, while the farmers, their supposed tenants, were rascals who should be put to death. What kind of rule or measure is this? And how can the man whose life has been spared measure himself in terms of this unjust rule, this unjust last judgment? Everything happens as if he had to attempt the impossible redemption of a sin or a temptation which was also that of others, yes, the suffering of a sort of Passion. A non-redeeming passion, a passion that would not only suffer for salvation, forgiveness, or redemption, but first a passion as transgression of a prohibition. The Step Not Beyond says it in other words, in a sentence that could attend to our encounter: “Transgression – 67 –

— Later Derrida — transgresses out of passion, patience, passivity.” Transgression is thus not a decision, certainly not a decision as activity of the ego or voluntary calculation of the subject. (87)

In short, there is no rule at work here. No law. And the young man, Blanchot’s protagonist, survives this lawlessness where there is no measure, though in doing so he himself has become immeasurable, a life without a life, a death without death. Derrida: “Life has freed itself from life; one might just as well say that life has been relieved of life. A life that simply stops is neither weighty nor light. Nor is it a life that simply continues. Life can only be light from the moment that it stays dead-living while being freed, that is to say, released from itself.” Here, by way of a very long detour, we have returned to the question of exception, what Derrida calls a “logic without logic . . . of the ‘not’ or of the ‘except,’” as in, he’s dead except he’s not dead, it’s true except it’s not true, or, as Derrida also puts it: neither the one nor the other (2000a, 89). And this, Derrida tells us, is the core of all Blanchot’s work, the crux of his passion as a writer. According to Derrida, this passion is connected with the passivity of being caught in the proposition of the neither/nor that defies calculation or measure (one can’t be neither dead nor living). If there is an event on the horizon of such an impossible logic, it must necessarily be incalculable, something that is felt as a passion: “exposure to what one does not see coming and could not predict, master, calculate or program. It is this passion . . . that upholds philosophy and makes possible speculative logic” (2000a, 91). This is the passive passion that is fundamental to testimony, and very much in Lévinas’s sense wherein the incalculable is related to glory. No doubt, one could apply much of this to Christ’s Passion, the fact that he is neither wholly man nor god, neither transgressive nor untransgressive. Moreover, one might have to ask in that context how it is possible to be hospitable to such a passivity where so much remains beyond calculability and measurement? • Blanchot begins La communauté inavouable with an epigraph that quotes Georges Bataille: “the community of those who have no community.” It is a phrase that could well be the motto for “The Instant of My Death” as well as for many other texts by Blanchot, though one could also imagine this phrase in the contexts of Samuel Beckett’s and – 68 –

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Marguerite Duras’s novels and plays, since there too one encounters what appears to be a community of those who have no community. In the context of such authors, passion bears a sacrifice with a deep structure that appears to be that of a Judeo-Christian martyrdom. Not surprisingly, Derrida has been interested in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Franz Kafka, in whose works relations between community and sacrifice are enormously vexed in religious terms. No doubt, these writings can be characterized in terms of a genre that can easily be located within the analyses of a literary critic like Northrop Frye. However, such an interpretation requires that we consider passion or sacrifice as a characteristic by means of which the genre can be defined. In fact, Frye has typed sacrifice within the genre he calls tragedy so that he could make generic distinctions between various forms that tragedy can take, whereas Derrida’s point, in contrast, is that passion/sacrifice is an excision, circumnavigation, and exception that pertains to testimony, and that in excepting it repeals any universal principle of access to generic comprehension. This would have troubled Frye and other New Critics for whom a hermeneutical universality of access was fundamental. Frye’s interest in Gemeinschaft was, precisely, its transparency: that it was universally understood and that everyone (even urbanites) inherently belonged to it as an idea of community whose symbolic forms could be shared generally as the most authentic ground for human experience. However, whereas Frye’s understanding of Gemeinschaft returns us to the organic spontaneity of an existence that makes transparent sense, it overlooks the fact that passion/sacrifice is itself a sacrificing or excision of sense, understanding, and determinability that radiates out from an event that circumnavigates comprehensibility, reason, and truth. Nature does not exist in order to supply us with the symbolic repertoire for internalizing and comprehending the incomprehensible, and literature is not the symbolic interface that makes the unintelligibility of life intelligible. For literature itself undergoes sacrifices in its attempt to communicate the incommunicable—the kind of sacrifices that Paul de Man described in Allegories of Reading (1979) wherein the community of readers is threatened by various aporias of reading that could be thought of in terms of passion as the endurance of an impossible limit, perhaps even of readerly/critical responsibility; for example, the capacity to allow “language to say the other and to speak of itself while – 69 –

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speaking of something else; the possibility of always saying something other than what it gives to be read, including the scene of reading itself” (Derrida 1986a, 11). In short, de Man obeyed the law of monolinguism that states one speaks only one language, but that one never speaks only one language alone. It is a view that in Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida applies to deconstruction itself: “plus d’une langue—both more than a language and no more of a language” (1986a, 15). This division or splitting constitutes our passion to speak, to participate, to be in language, even as it marks our failure to communicate transparently within those genres that would map out our thoughts and experiences for us in advance. But most important, this division or splitting is fundamental to the idea that the community of readers is itself a negative community or community without community. For isn’t Blanchot’s purpose in quoting Bataille to suggest, at least on one register, that it would be naïve to assume that a community of readers is anything if not a community without community, a relation without relation, a participation without participation? In fact, this is the condition of community that Blanchot reproduces in the fictional dialogue of texts like L’attente L’oubli. —You know everything already. —Yes, I know everything. —Why are you obliging me to speak about it to you? —I would like to know it from you and with you. It’s something we could only know together. —She reflected. But won’t you risk knowing it a little less? —He thought in his turn: That’s irrelevant. It’s necessary that you say it: once, a single time; that I hear you say it. —If I say it once, I will always say it. —Yes, that’s it, always. (1962, 33)

Perhaps one could read this as an allegory about community in which everyone knows everything already and yet needs to hear it spoken, from someone as well as with someone. It’s in this division between the from (which is a preposition announcing distance, obscurity, difference) and with (a preposition proclaiming nearness, transparency, companionship, identity) that the possibility of community is both offered and withheld, that the relation/nonrelation is established. Moreover in – 70 –

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telling the thing that is already known, there is the division between making that thing more and less comprehensible. Hence the inherent genre (the type of thing we expect to hear) is being effaced by its being performed. But in the end this matters less than that one (in this case, the female voice) be obliged to testify, something that, if it were done, would lead to the possibility that “if I say it once, I will always say it.” This means that the listener who is witnessing must be prepared to take on the burden of the other’s being, that the testimony itself will convey by means of an endless saying, the “Yes, that’s it, always.” This is the burden, one whose weight the interlocutor will feel without being able to comprehend, a burden that will be borne by the other as pain. Hence the one who obliges the other to speak will come to know a language that is and isn’t his, will come to feel the pain of an other that will be experienced someday as a self-sacrifice: a giving up of one’s own happiness for the sake of an other’s suffering that one has elected to take on and become, despite its inappropriability (identity without identity). Here something is not transmitted but circumnavigated, excepted, put aside, despite the fact that “if I say it once, I will always say it.” Moreover, if this I is the I of the one who has undergone a terrible passion, it is also the I of a literary text that is always proclaiming it, the I who is arraigned by readers who must assume the burden of the I’s passion if they are to receive its communication, one that, in any case, will lack the kind of transparency that puts one’s mind at ease but that speaks monotonously and monolinguistically of an unendurable endurability, spoken right through to the end, if not beyond it. That something secret is held back, and cannot ever be unveiled or veiled, given that it exceeds the play of dissimulation/revelation, means that such a conversation “does not belong therefore to the truth, neither to the truth as homoiosis or adequation, nor to the truth as memory (Mnemosyne, aletheia), nor to the given truth, nor to the promised truth, nor to the inaccessible truth” (1995a, 26). For the truth of literature is this secret monolinguism of the Other whose unendurable endurability will remain unspeakable. That we choose to wait in anticipation of its traumatic testimony is the noble futility of which Blanchot has so often written: the literary moment to come. • Because the little community—of the informal reading club, the poet’s circle, the writer’s conference, the not-for-profit literary institute or – 71 –

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organization, museum, library, or archive—is bound to what Derrida imagines as a law of the relation/nonrelation, it may express an unconditional hospitality to a monolinguism of the other that is not circumscribed by conditions of truth or (in the context of Blanchot’s narrative) of measurability. As Derrida notices in Archive Fever, it is the measurability of the master’s (Freud’s) legacy that cannot ever be ascertained with any certainty, because this legacy is, in fact, a sort of monstrosity that cannot be reduced to a rule or measure of the truth. If we speak the monolinguism of Freud, there will always be something about it that will be foreign, secret, and unassimilable. As Derrida notes, this is emphasized by the community of Freudians themselves in terms of a certain undecidability between measurability and unmeasurability, accountability and unaccountability, truth and fiction. Blanchot’s narrative, of course, is exemplary of this, too. But if this is so, don’t the intellectual communities that celebrate these figures hearken back to the sort of mystery cults that characterized the circle of Stefan George? Don’t they raise specters of unaccountability, such as tyranny of the poet over his little band of followers, any one of them, as in the case of George, being subject to a certain cutting off or casting away without reason or explanation? And what about the seances with the dead conducted not only by George, but by W. B. Yeats, his contemporary, and the strange goings-on with the world of Madame Blavatsky? What about Hermann Hesse’s notion of the artist as fellow of a secret community whose accountability lies beyond reason, or Jung’s view of the artist as alchemist whose symbols of transformation open up a form of unmeasurable psychoanalysis practiced, even today, by that gnostic community known as the Jungians? Or think about Thomas Mann’s tuberculosis patients in the Swiss Alps debating the futures of European culture, with their fortune-tellers in tow. Aren’t these real and imagined communities related to the kind of thing Derrida is talking about in Archive Fever, where we learn that reputable researchers (including Derrida himself) have been engaging in a seance with Freud’s ghost in order to answer a mysterious question concerning whether psychoanalysis is a Jewish science? No doubt there is something a little bit crazy about all of this, something a bit feverish in the circle or little group in which a certain monolinguism of the unspeakable comes to pass, this monolinguism of

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the secret, that requires us to make an exception accountable to no one as a prerequisite for a truth to come that may never arrive. Monolinguism takes exception to others; it elevates itself above the hoi polloi; it doesn’t explain itself because it assumes a knowledge that can’t be spoken; and, it refuses to be accountable to others. In this there is a certain instability between extreme hospitality and extreme inhospitality: either you accept there can be a seance with the dead Freud (or the dead Emily Dickinson, or the dead Virginia Woolf, etc.) or you’re an outsider who must be dismissed. Either you accept the unconscious on Freud’s terms, or Lacan’s terms, which are by and large unaccountable in certain respects, or you’re kicked out of the group. For those of the fold, there is to be an audience or visitation that exists beyond the horizon of truth as homoiosis or adequation (mimesis), a reception that takes exception to such a horizon of truth by circumnavigating it. And it is in this exceptionality that a hospitality is extended to those who are willing to acknowledge it, though the basis on which we do this acknowledging is more like a leap of faith than an act of reason. Derrida, I think, has made a strong case for saying that we cannot simply reject monolinguism outright for political reasons having to do with diversity, because the monolingual operates, in any case, where testimony is given or works of art are advanced, since they obey a law of exceptionality. Moreover, it is the monolingual moment that in its exceptionality (its otherness) requires one to make a decision about committing to a community or not on the basis of some kind of faith. For the monolinguism of the other, as Derrida calls it, is a law unto itself, a law of exception, that is, of the circle or cult that won’t avail itself to skeptical inspection and callous audit. One might say that the law of exception is the law of faith to that exception, or exceptionality, and of the knowledge, however mystagogic, that it circumscribes (in circumnavigating it). And as such, this kind of law separates itself from the law of the common. “Seldom did we leave the auditorium,” the lucid Catherine Clément wrote in her memoir of her heyday as a passionate Lacanian, without some aphorism capable of stimulating an almost indescribable state of meditative euphoria, which lasted for a good long while afterward. Little by little, hour by hour, week by week, there was woven in us an

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— Later Derrida — implacable mesh of language, unconscious but effective, that had the property of rendering all other modes of thought obsolete. Lacan’s speech was slow, halting, marked by fleeting passages of brilliance, trenchant statements uttered in a low voice, word play that revealed a cutting sense of humor. His mind was curious and obsessed with myths. All this produced a frightful obscurity. We thought about what he had said but even more about the enigma of what he might have meant. In the end we forgot Lacan’s thought and thought Lacan. (1983, 13)

She herself was the first to admit exceptionality. “There is something monstrous about this, but it is the way the seminar worked. . . . Sure, it was love. . . . But this love went the way of all the others. One day you don’t show up for an appointment—something else seems more important. You feel guilty. It takes a long time to come to the moment of final separation” (1983, 13–16). And yet, even though the tie seemed broken, there was something about this exceptionality of having been part of his circle that couldn’t be refused: “When the pamphlet attacking him came out, I refused to join the chorus. François George, the author of L’Effet ’yau de poêle, wrote to me then: “I am happy to see he’s found a champion” (21).

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Chapter 3

Archive Trauma

The occasion for Archive Fever (Mal d’archive) was a conference held at the Freud archives in England and the society that it serves. Throughout his lecture, Derrida returns to a number of problematics that he had considered earlier in his career with respect to writing, and in particular, issues raised in The Post Card that concern the destiny of the letter as legacy. No doubt, the postcards, such as Derrida had considered them, were already a fascicle or archive of some sort, a sheaf of papers burning with some kind of fever or madness. So, for example, on September 7, 1977, one of the envois, as if cut to ribbons, reads in part as follows. And yet— No literature, yes, but still. Our delinquency, my love, we are the worst criminals and the first victims. I would like not to kill anyone, and everything that I send you goes through meurtrières [murderesses; fortification openings for weapons]. As for the children, the last ones I might touch, the holocaust has already begun. We have never yet seen each other. Only written. (1987b, 68)

What exactly has Derrida archived here? Toward the back of the fascicle of cards Derrida will admit “that I will die without having understood anything” (247). One wonders: Is this inevitable failure to understand constitutive of archive fever? Let’s start again. There is misunderstanding in the archive. It’s inevitable. And moreover, we have archives—we preserve archives— – 75 –

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because there is something in them that defies understanding but that we want to grasp. In the archive that is Derrida’s fascicle of missives, the matter that defies understanding is as conspicuous as it is feverish. There is, for example, a rampant death wish that cannot decide whether to act or be acted upon, hence the wish not to kill and yet the wish to shoot something through the meurtrière. This, by way of verbal association, links up with the sending of something by way of a murderess. And, then, the fragment of yet another fantasy, the holocaust of children and their being touched—by way of the murderesses? The malicious missives or orders that the subject has passed on to them? The kindness of the one who fantasizes and nostalgically holds on to them before the end? Obviously, one could speculate at length; indeed, we are supposed to speculate at length. Then, the final scrap, “We have never yet seen each other. Only written.” Does this refer to the desk murderer and his accomplice? Or something more benign? Consider The Post Card to be the displaced main act of Archive Fever. As such The Post Card may well be Archive Fever’s phantom limb, something essential that has been cut off and that haunts the text. What sets Archive Fever apart, however, is that whereas the envois of The Post Card were, in essence, staged as a private correspondence inhospitable to onlookers, the Freud archives are being thought through from the perspective of a public institution or apparatus that houses and is hospitable to that which it capitalizes upon, namely, the memory of something that would otherwise be lost. Still, as Derrida reminds us, perhaps with Archive Fever’s phantom limb in mind, archives occur at that moment when there is a structural breakdown in memory. This contrasts rather sharply with Michel Foucault’s view in The Archaeology of Knowledge that archives are, in essence, the textual systematization of their own enunciability and that, as such, they are predicated upon mnemonic reliability. Derrida’s archive is mnemonically unreliable insofar as it is somewhat feverish, hallucinatory, fragmentary, and, as in the case of The Post Card, somewhat sick (“as for the children . . . the holocaust has already begun”). In short, where there is regularity and efficiency in Foucault’s archive, there is trauma in Derrida’s. This trauma in the archive is what, I think, Derrida is referring to when he speaks of there being a mal d’archive. After all, among the translations we might give this phrase is “malice in the archive,” say, the kind of malice Ernst Jones insisted wasn’t there when he told – 76 –

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colleagues that the Freud/Fliess correspondence didn’t contain anything that one couldn’t glean from the excerpts that wound up in the Standard Edition. Yet, contrary to what Jones said, there was a certain evil in the archive, an evil that the archivist Jeffrey Masson reconstructed in The Assault on Truth, namely, that of medical malpractice in the case of Emma Eckstein. However, mal d’archive also suggests the feverish hunt to find something in an archive that has presumably been lost or that has been kept secret. So that we might ask with what kind of archive fever or high did Masson write The Assault on Truth? And with what sort of archive fever did Ortwin de Graef inform Derrida of the articles that Paul de Man wrote for Le Soir in the early 1940s? Here, evil in the archive is a bit hard to separate, sometimes, from the archivist’s being Schadenfroh—his or her gloating after having uncovered something malicious that burns into us when we read it. Then consider that mal d’archive is also reminiscent of mal de mer, suggesting a kind of archive sickness or nausea. The Holocaust survivor who found the SS’s step-by-step report on her family’s deportation and final destruction within an archive published the little parcel of evidence under the title The Auschwitz Album. No doubt, she could tell us a thing or two about experiencing mal d’archive. “As for the children, the last ones I might touch . . . ,” it is a mal that relates directly to Derrida’s spectral archive of the 1970s. Yet, it is a holocaust we could and probably should associate with the burning down of archives, and not just of Jewish books in Nazi demonstrations of the 1930s, but of archives like the Library at Alexandria, that, for Western civilization, is perhaps paradigmatic of archive trauma. Still, even here we are not quite at the nadir of our darkest ruminations because what is worse than the destruction of the archive by those who want to liquidate culture is their desire to archive their evil, to painstakingly record the physical destruction of the very people they execrate in order that future generations may inherit the legacy of their evil as evil. Here, again, we encounter the specter of Lili Meier’s Auschwitz family album. (I’ll not speak of it again.) All this talk of archive sickness is crucial if we are to understand why it is that Derrida decided to address the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and his book Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. In that book, Yerushalmi asks the interminable question of whether psychoanalysis is a Jewish science, something Derrida returns – 77 –

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to repeatedly because he detects a repetition compulsion in asking a question that has unsettling associations, among them, the interminable instantiation of a death drive coupled with the desire to inherit a terminal unitary trait from Freud that will bind one to a community that is, in essence, Jewish. That death, inheritance, and community are related comes as no big surprise to us. What may be surprising, however, is the fact that an archive is involved in which something is burning and that what brings death, inheritance, and community into relation is fire. Not only that, but Derrida expects us to make the associative leap, already prepared for in the phantom archive of the postcards, that if one were to supply an unconscious meaning to the phrase mal d’archive, one might well supply it by suggesting the word “Holocaust.” Of course, when I say “one might well supply it . . .” I realize that the ”one” who does the suggesting is not just anyone, but one who belongs to a community or Gemeinschaft of like-minded people for whom the suggestion is always already there, as if it were perpetually waiting to be discovered even in texts yet to be written in order to leave its historical, but also psychological, philosophical, political, and religious calling card—as if to say, en ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici (at this very moment in this work here I am).1 That a traumatic fever or malady that is a little bit crazy pertains to the Freud archives is built into the very founding or instituting of the archive in England where Freud occupies the subject position of the one who even after death always says in advance of any reading, “en ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici,” even as he binds himself to that of the “me voici” of Holocaust. Which is to say, he binds the Holocaust to himself in advance of its having taken place, his expulsion from Nazi-occupied Austria (the “me voici” of Freud in England) being the occasion for strange ruminations on the fate of the Jews (the “me voici” of Holocaust). So that it is not just Freud who is in his work at “this very moment,” but also something fiery and malicious that is as yet “to come” (à venir). Though Derrida is keenly aware of this clairvoyance, he never quite refers to the diasporic condition of the archive itself (its founding being a consequence of exile), even if he makes quite a bit out of the fact that an archive is a gathering together of topos and nomos. As “topo-nomology” the archive represents a monolinguistic (in this case, Freudian) address guarded by citizens or archons at whose hospitable residence the archive has been originally founded (1996a, 2). – 78 –

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When one speaks of there being a “Freud house,” one is instituting a person’s achievements as if they not only constituted a specific language (we speak of “Freudian terminology,” “Freudian concepts,” a “Freudian worldview,” etc.) but belonged to a specific place, in this instance, a house or archive that pledges allegiance to the name Freud, a name that is, in this case, politically inflected as a name that can lay claim to a place. In this way, the archive as house establishes a political identity that frames a certain social and cultural identity to which the papers of Freud now belong. For Derrida, the archive’s unification, identification, and classification relate directly to consignation—the assigning of residence (demeurance), shelter, and hospitality to that which belongs within the archive as well as to what is called a gathering together of signs. “The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together” (1996a, 3). Once the Freud archives are founded, it is this archontic principle that will play a major role in establishing lines of institutional authority pertaining to the legacy of Freud and what it means to call oneself a Freudian, to sign oneself with the signature Freud. That many schools of Freud—including the Cause Freudienne—would like to ensconce themselves within the very archive that would legitimize them as Freud’s heirs is a wellknown story that has played itself out in terms of reinterpreting those portable archives that we know as the Standard Edition. Here, of course, the conflict of a landed and landless archive becomes visible, a conflict Derrida does not address, but that we can already see as a diasporic element with a certain Jewish cultural identity, namely, the settlement of patriarchs in exile and the existence of portable archives that spawn a rich conflict of interpretations and schools. Now it turns out that Derrida’s major concern with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism touches on diaspora insofar as one has to consider a people in exile seeking shelter in a land that they can call their own and the creation of a portable archive whose five books will have been said to have been written by one named Moses. In other words, the little Gemeinschaft of the archive is never entirely separable from what one might call religion, in this case, the biblical story of Exodus that serves as yet another phantom limb or archive that haunts the archontic construction of a Freud house. If Derrida takes account of this traumatic experience, it is by way of Freud’s so-called fictional rumination on why it is the Jews have been persecuted. Freud’s Moses is a question – 79 –

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of literature in that Freud’s account of what we could well call a holocaust to come takes place largely in terms of an elaborate fantasy or fiction that is, strictly speaking, unverifiable and, as such, not part of any prior archive, despite the fact that Freud will detect archival evidence supporting his claims. In one of his drafts, Freud specifically refers to his work as a historical fiction, one that readers familiar with Totem and Taboo will recognize as a fictionalized archaeology of historical trauma; it is a trauma that even if not exactly true is true enough to serve as a plausible arché. Given this prosthetic phantasm (or prosthesis of the Other), Yerushalmi will wonder what kind of science psychoanalysis is. Recall that in Moses and Monotheism Freud wonders why a community of people known as the Jews still exists in name and substance, given all the misfortunes and ill treatment it has had to sustain. “The Jewish people is almost the only (ancient people) which still exists in name and also in substance . . . it has developed special charactertraits and incidentally has earned the hearty dislike of every other people.” The Jews, Freud continues, have a particularly high opinion of themselves,” and “regard themselves as more distinguished, of higher standing, as superior to other peoples—from whom they are also distinguished by many customs” (1953, vol. 23: 105). Freud will note further that this standing apart as a group is grounded in monotheism and the idea, imposed by a foreigner, the Egyptian Moses, that the Jews are the chosen people of the one God. Here, of course, monotheism implies a certain monolinguism that derives from an attachment to a Father. According to Freud, Moses monolinguistically created a people known as the Jews by convincing the Jews they were God’s chosen and that their essence as a people was determined by this election. What Freud doesn’t mention, however, is that there is a spectral accompaniment here, namely, the idea that Moses was something of a Führer type (builder of the master race or people), and like der Führer a foreigner, though not absolutely (Hitler as Austrian, not German). Freud simply notes that the special Jewish relation with God is problematic. “If one is the declared favorite of the dreaded father, one need not be surprised at the jealousy of one’s brothers and sisters, and the Jewish legend of Joseph and his brethren shows very well where this jealousy can lead” (33: 106). But there is something besides jealousy of the unchosen that explains hatred of the Jews, for, according to Freud, there is something detestable about the Jews that is elusive, though, as – 80 –

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Moses and Monotheism sets out to demonstrate, it is the “knowledge” (however unconscious) that Jewish community is founded on the basis of a trauma that relates to the murder of the father. But this too relates to der Führer, who was detestable, one who founded his rhetoric on spiritual election and historical trauma (of German defeat in World War I), and who was also intent on killing the fathers (say, of Germany’s children, its culture, its religion) if not the Fatherland itself. Was this the spectral “acting out” of a Jewish story? Was it in any way taken into account by Freud’s speculations? As Susan Handelman (1982) has noted, the Jews are the chosen ones of the father who also slay the father, and if one looks into the archives one will find evidence of mal d’archive, a trauma of betrayal in the archive (again, note the National Socialist ideological parallel) that records the slaying of Moses and the repression of the crime. Was it this that Hitler was implicitly addressing? This evil trauma has the status of a hypothesis or fiction in Freud that even if unverifiable has to be considered a missing piece of archaic evidence that explains the history of the Jewish people as a hated people. Freud saw it as a trauma in the archive that had obliterated its own tracks. But was Freud the only one to recover it? Didn’t the Nazis uncover it too? This is what Derrida doesn’t engage: the Nazi discovery of the trauma and its acting out in some incredibly horrible and distorted form that for most was unthinkable. In other words, what we have here is a double strand, one having to do with the archive of Freudian psychoanalysis and, in particular, the ruminations of Moses and Totem and Taboo, but the other having to do with fascism. Hitler aside, consider the George Circle, which in the late nineteenth century had, in part via Alfred Schuler, adopted the swastika as its insignia and had experimented with historical telepathizing in a way reminiscent of Freud’s historical fictionalizations. The circle’s archival seances were sometimes overtaken by a certain anti-Semitic fever, or mal d’archive, that was a significant precursor to National Socialism, when it came on the scene in the 1920s and ’30s, though George himself, curiously enough, never crossed the anti-Semitic threshold. My point, of course, is that here too one could find important spectral parallels to Moses, parallels that Derrida doesn’t pursue (Norton 2002). To resume: according to Freud, the essential trait of the Jew is an untenable relation to the Father (a profound antiauthoritarianism that can be found in the rabbinic tradition itself) that serves as the basis for – 81 –

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the hatred of the Jews by Gentiles, who find themselves doubly negated by the Jews. On the one hand, the Gentiles are not the chosen of God; and, on the other hand, the very Father that the Gentiles have taken over from the Jews has been slain by the Jews. Lastly, if Jews haven’t been totally exterminated, it is because Christianity is itself determined by a relationship to the Jews that cannot afford to either totally embrace them or reject them. Rather, Christianity preserves the Jews even as it reenacts the murder of God by persecuting them. And this, Freud imagines in 1934, is why Jews are much better off under the Catholic Church (of which he speaks at some length) than under National Socialism (not mentioned by Freud) which doesn’t find itself in quite the same logical impasse with respect to killing the Jews. This is because Christianity imagines a foundational connection with the Jews, antipathetic to Nazism, which could mount a mythological defense or break with the trauma of betrayal associated with the Jews, while the Nazis could invoke Wagner’s account of Norse mythology that reserved no place for understanding or forgiveness. (In Wagner’s worldview, violence and destruction substitute for understanding.) • Recall that Freud’s working title for the Moses study was Der Mann Moses, ein historischer Roman. The title indicates that the “study” is a literary phantasy, meaning that, as Freud well knew, it cannot be considered part of the historical archive because we do not have certain evidence that the phantasy isn’t merely speculation. Yet, in retrospect, given what happened to the Jews during the Second World War, it is hard not to inscribe Freud’s text in the historical record as if it were a profound prognostication, if not a scientific explanation, of an unimaginable traumatic event whose own archival dynamics render ambiguous the distinctions between fantasy and reality. Moreover, even if it is a fiction or phantasy, Moses and Monotheism is proven in advance by the history or science that is psychoanalysis, that is, by all those case histories that verify Freud’s speculations on group psychology and the father. Having admitted that, however, must we not take into account that Freud was, in fact, surrounded by a fascist ideology that amounted to very much the same story, that the historical/political context for his fiction was the daily fiction of anti-Semitism? In considering Yerushalmi as historian, Derrida notices that Yerushalmi actually reperforms Freud’s mode of historical fictionalizing by way of – 82 –

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writing a monologue in which the specter of Freud is queried. In this sense, Yerushalmi is a bit like Hamlet querying Yorick, getting the skull to say, “me voici.” Consider, however, that there is a scene like this in Sieberberg’s Our Hitler and similar parallels in the theater of Heiner Müller, in which the Hitler/Hamlet connection is quite strong and the specters of history run rampant in a way reminiscent of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, a text that knows more about mal d’archive than it is willing to admit, namely, Unfug (disorder) in Heidegger, Heiner Müller, George Tabori, Elfriede Jelinek, Ingeborg Bachmann, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Alfred Schnittke, and many others. Derrida, who wonders what kind of science Yerushalmi is considering, concludes that it must be an “archive effect”: “(Yerushalmi’s) apostrophe is addressed to a dead person, to the historian’s object become spectral subject, the virtual addressee or interlocutor of a sort of open letter. Another archive effect. In its very fiction, this apostrophe enriches the corpus it claims to treat but which it enlarges and of which, in fact, it is henceforth a part” (40). According to Derrida, the monologue violates the logic of the archive as a house that can determine the difference between what is and is not proper to it. However foreign to the archive, Yerushalmi’s monologue will become identical or homogeneous with what is inside, for it will trick the dead Freud into signing for it—into, in effect, countersigning the historian’s unverifiable, fanciful, if not literary speculations. Indeed, the trick is an old one that was practiced with much more elegance by writers like Petrarch, who interviewed ghosts of the past, St. Augustine among them. With respect to Yerushalmi’s own book—his own scrupulous archival research—the monologue is literary and, as such, quite unprofessional for a historian. Still, if it is unprofessional, it is mimetic in that it models itself on Freud’s own “unprofessional” speculations in Moses: If the “Monologue with Freud” resembles a last chapter of the book, one can also note two other structural singularities about its relationship to the book which, at least according to the editorial convention of its bibliographic archivization, contains it within itself. In the first place, this fictitious “Monologue” is heterogeneous to the book, in its status, in its project, in its form; it is thus by pure juridical fiction that such a fiction is, in effect, bound in the same book signed by the same author, and that it is classified under eight “scientific” rubrics (nonfictional: neither poetic – 83 –

— Later Derrida — nor novelistic nor literary) in the bibliographic catalogue whose classical categories are all found at the beginning of the work. In the second place, this postscript of sorts retrospectively determines what precedes it. It does it in a decisive fashion, marking it indeed with an essential indecision, namely the umbilical opening of the future, which makes the words “Jew” and “science” indeterminate at the very least—or in any case accedes to their indetermination. (1996a, 39–40; italics added)

If Yerushalmi’s “Monologue” is trumped up, artificial, and merely some sort of gimmick, it nevertheless does work, since it manages to speak from the standpoint of others who have spoken in advance of Yerushalmi and who, as such, are factotums of the archive. Indeed, they include specters like Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Jakob Freud (the archpatriarch of psychoanalysis and Sigmund Freud’s grandfather), all of whom are spoken for in advance by a monologue that repeats and houses what they have already spoken. It is as if Yerushalmi’s text takes these figures in and gives them shelter like some good host. Conversely, Yerushalmi’s text is given shelter by the archive of the Freud clan. The Freud archive houses Yerushalmi’s text and protects it by setting it apart. Let’s not forget that in Derrida’s text we’re talking about a little community of hospitality-givers brought into social relation not only by the history of psychoanalysis but by the history of Judaism and, in particular, by the history of the Jews in Europe. This is explicitly referenced by Yerushalmi when he writes: “Professor Freud, at this point I find it futile to ask whether, genetically or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science” (37). Given that the ‘monologue’ with the specter of Freud is “heterogeneous to (Yerushalmi’s) book, in its status, in its project, in its form,” it puts itself apart from all else in making its address to Freud the Father of Psychoanalysis. Is it going to be Yerushalmi’s fate to reenact the traumatic murder of Moses by positing the question of whether Freudian psychoanalysis is going to turn out to be a Jewish science? It would be, of course, if it turned out that by Jewish science one was speaking of a bogus intellectual enterprise founded by a charlatan, Sigmund Freud, who in National Socialist terms promoted talmudic and hence hermeneutically convoluted texts with unverifiable and illogical claims and counterclaims that have no general veracity and certainly no scientific status. It would be, as well, – 84 –

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if by Jewish science one was speaking of what Handelman called rabbinical interpretation, which she sees as endemic to seemingly all modern Jewish intellectuals, Freud and Derrida included. To put this another way, what kind of science is it that could be justified only on identitarian terms? Imagine a gay science—for example, in the form of a cultural criticism. But to return to my German thread, imagine an Aryan science of race. Or simply a Christian science. Derrida, for his part, sees the advent of a Jewish science as what he calls the “umbilical opening of the future,” an interminable opening, which, according to him, makes the words “Jew” and “science” indeterminate. After all, Freud wanted to present his book on Moses not only as a fiction but as an effort toward “a new concept of truth, that is, under the name of ‘historical truth,’ a truth that scholarship, historiography, and perhaps philosophy have some difficulty thinking through” (41). Because Freud had not thought this through, he is called retroactively to speak as a witness to Yerushalmi’s speculations. Even so, Yerushalmi responds for Freud and won’t let him speak. “In what is at issue here, indeed has been so all along, we both have, as Jews, an equal stake.” As Derrida notes, Freud, being dead, can only acquiesce: He cannot refuse this community at once proposed and imposed. He can only say “yes” to this covenant into which he must enter one more time. Because he will have had to enter it, already, seven or eight days after his birth. Mutatis mutandis, this is the situation of absolute dissymmetry and heteronomy in which a son finds himself on being circumcised after the seventh day and on being made to enter into a covenant at a moment when it is out of the question that he respond, sign, and countersign. Here again, the archive marked once in his body, Freud hears himself recalled to the indestructible covenant that his extraordinary performative engages—“I shall say ‘we’”—when it is addressed to a phantom or newborn. (1996a, 41)

This passage, of course, reprises much of the argument of “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’” in The Post Card, and certainly this suggests that, once more, the phantom limb of that book is very much active in Archive Fever. If there is something new in Archive Fever it is the fact that at issue now is not the Freud family but the construction of a community that can say “we.” Yerushalmi, Freud, Derrida—they all – 85 –

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belong to this “we” whose communality is violent because imposed on those who have no capacity to engage in redress. Staying clear of Derrida’s remarks on how Yerushalmi symbolically recircumcises Freud, let’s just say that at issue throughout is an act of traumatic (if not talmudic) violence directed at the father of psychoanalysis, setting him apart as the patriarch upon whom a society and a science (of the “we”) can be based. It is traumatic, of course, not because of the violence simply, but because that violence is directed at a patriarch and, as such, repeats (perhaps interminably) the traumatic and terminable violence done to a figure like Moses in the distant past. The performance of Yerushalmi’s monologue is at the same time only a reperformance (again, interminable) of Moses itself, a binding or cleaving to Freud in which there can never be any doubt that it is really Freud himself who is the actual source and signatory for the language that he has fathered—let’s say, even a certain monolinguism or terminability of the “we” known as psychoanalysis. Still, is there enough distance between Yerushalmi and Freud to wonder whether this monolinguism—this Jewish monotheism—is a fiction or a science? To put this more strongly, is it madness or truth? This is a question, of course, that can be raised whenever “suggestion” is at issue, whether it be psychoanalytical suggestion or the kind of suggestion I noted earlier in the case of a community of individuals (Jewish; anti-Jewish) who would, each in his own way, supply the word Holocaust “en ce moment même dans cet ouvrage … ” However, instead of interrogating what it might mean to think of the “me voici” of trauma at the undecidable limit of this distinction, Derrida encourages us to wait; and should we be so bold as to ask for what it is we’re waiting, Derrida will have us know that it is for nothing less than a messiah. That trauma is waiting for us at this pass is left unmentioned. For Derrida speaks only of Yerushalmi’s affirmation of a “future to come,” the condition of the promise of psychoanalysis (itself interminable) that it disclose its true (terminable) nature at some time in the future. Science, like religion, depends on the opening toward a future which, Derrida says, is the condition of all performativity. And this opening, in Yerushalmi, takes three forms, which Derrida calls “doors.” “In naming these doors,” Derrida writes, “I dream of Walter Benjamin . . . he designates the ‘narrow door’ for the passage of the Messiah, ‘at each second.’ And he recalls also that ‘for the Jews the – 86 –

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future to come nonetheless does not become a homogeneous and empty time.’ What could he have meant?” Derrida’s answer is that the end is never anything other than a repetition of the end in which each moment is and is not identical to the others. The first door in Yerushalmi is the promise not to disclose what Freud whispers as to whether psychoanalysis is a Jewish science. The second door stands for a “future radically to come . . . indetermination en abyme.” And the third door promises that there will be a future for Jewishness, if not Judaism, even if this future is by no means a predictable one. We could say that in terms of these three doors, the language of psychoanalysis is undermined by a horizon of futuricity that is heteronomous. It is also at this horizon that the chosenness or difference of the Jews is not a foregone conclusion. Whatever we might today associate with a Jewish community may not be at all the case in the openness of a future to come. Given that the future holds open no guarantee, the future of psychoanalysis is in doubt—as is the future of Jewishness and hence the Jews (1996a, 69–73). What remains conspicuously unstated in Derrida’s invocation of the messianic is Freud’s foreknowledge of a future to come that differs quite considerably from that of Benjamin. In fact, Freud, without somehow being in full possession of it, knows Benjamin’s kind of fate insofar as it is a fate Benjamin will share with many other European Jews. To put this another way, Freud knows of a prior wounding or harming that is also and always part of the openness of a future to come, a future at the crossroads of truth and madness, a return to something traumatic that has happened in the past and that will come back at some time in the future. In addressing the poetry of Paul Celan, Derrida has considered the annular (interminable) structure of destruction in terms of Celan’s dating of his poems, his marking a singular (terminal) date that will have anniversaries in the openness (perhaps of an Unfug) of a future to come. Even in the poems of Celan that mark a singular date, the poem becomes readable only to the extent that it carries off this date, that this date itself no longer signifies this or that date, that the poem is given in some way to any reader whatsoever who must appropriate the date at the point of also effacing it, in a certain way, in any case of effacing the absolute singularity within it. (1995b, 379) – 87 –

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The date, in other words, is archived: it is put down in order to be put away and, to some extent, effaced and forgotten. Certainly the poem that carries the date does not choose to announce what the date is a date of, as if the poem were itself supposed to be doing a certain work of erasure. Yet, the annular structure of that date, the fact that the date will have its regular and predictable anniversaries, will do a certain repetitive work of remembrance, as well, that is traumatic. It is here, of course, that the poetry as “analysis” confronts Yerushalmi’s concern with the terminable (singular) and the interminable (repetitive), something that in Celan is never too far away from the question of science and the physical sciences in particular. • In the interview in Points, from which I have already quoted “Passages—from Traumatism to Promise” (1990), Elizabeth Weber suddenly asks Derrida, “And do you think there is a date, a traumatic incision, so to speak, that leads you to philosophize?” Derrida responds, as if caught off guard, “Me?” Weber: “For example . . . ” Derrida: “No, the question should be addressed in general, does a philosopher . . . ” (1995b, 380). Then the text breaks off. The discussion is even temporarily derailed before Weber deftly picks up again by focusing on Derrida’s Schibboleth. Of course, one could make much of Derrida’s denial or negation of the interviewer’s question pertaining to a traumatic motivation that could be called Derridean. That is, one is tempted to interpret the unwillingness of Derrida to self-consciously share Celan’s wound, to dissociate himself, at this very moment, from what we could consider a Jewish “we” and the experience of trauma, if not the “me voici” of Holocaust. Rejected, for example, is an empathic moment in which a transferential contamination of trauma might come about—what some people in the area of trauma studies might well call “secondary trauma.” Apparently, from a Derridean perspective, one does not simply inherit or share the trauma of others; one encounters trauma as something that is Other on a horizon that is and is not predictable. “A philosophical discourse that would not be provoked or interrupted by the violence of an appeal from the other, from an experience that cannot be dominated, would not be a very questioning, very interesting philosophical discourse. That said, a discourse can also be destroyed by the traumatism.” Derrida adds, “When the discourse holds in some way, it is at once because it has been – 88 –

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opened up on the basis of some traumatizing event, by an upsetting question that doesn’t let one rest, that no longer lets one sleep, and because it nevertheless resists the destruction begun by this traumatism” (1995b, 381). To go back to the messianic, it could be said that the openness of a future is itself always interminable (à venir) and terminable (apocalyptic, final), the undecidability of their difference being what opens upon a messiah as well as upon something quite Other that might go under the name of trauma. Like the messiah, trauma requires a watchfulness or vigilance that does not let one rest. As such, the eventfulness of trauma as something “to come” has an effect on the present both as something that has already happened—the terminable “me voici” of malice in the archive, evidence of a prior coming to pass—and the interminable advent of a coming once more, a second coming. Philosophy, as Derrida puts it, has to “deal,” so to speak, with the traumatism. At the same time discourse repeats it—when one repeats a traumatism, Freud teaches us, one is trying to get control of it—it repeats it as such, without letting itself be annihilated by the traumatism, while keeping speech “alive,” without forgetting the traumatism totally and without letting itself be totally annihilated by it. It is between these two perils that the philosophical experience advances. (1995b, 382)

Now mal d’archive is, among other things, a repetition of the trauma that is repeated in such a way that the trauma can be mastered. No doubt the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C., is proof of that repetition, if nothing else. But in addition, mal d’archive concerns a forgetting or obliteration of the trauma that the trauma itself instantiates in its being repeated as discourse. That is, not only is the discourse in danger of being effaced—obviated, censored, silenced—but the trauma itself is susceptible to self-destruction as if it were a suicide. For all its visibility, the trauma doesn’t want to know about itself, cannot confront itself, won’t speak itself, and refuses to declare itself. That is, the trauma is in flight from itself at the very instant it posits itself as trauma. This is why when one suggests the word “Holocaust” as if it were countersigning for the past as well as the future, one may obliterate the trauma by putting a study or knowledge of something in its – 89 –

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stead. In this, the Jews practice the opposite strategy of the National Socialists: they resort to understanding, not liquidation. For Derrida, the issue of trauma is never one of simple recollection, given that trauma disconcerts all our usual understandings of forgetting and memory. “Memory is not just the opposite of forgetting . . . to think memory or to think anamnesis, here, is to think things as paradoxical as the memory of a past that has not been present, the memory of the future—the movement of memory as tied to the future and not only to the past, memory turned toward the promise, toward what is coming, what is arriving, what is happening tomorrow” (1995b, 383). We’re not very far here from Archive Fever’s ruminations on Freud, for Moses and Monotheism is precisely about self-obliterating trauma as well as the remembering of something that is to happen tomorrow—a future anterior recollection of a messianic, apocalyptic, or traumatic memory that defies the arrow of Aristotelian time. It is a defiance that students of trauma studies have not yet recognized (Cathy Caruth among them), given that they lack the prognosticative horizon of a speculative or intuitive time that belongs to the openness of the future, say, a messianic openness that resists Caruth’s aporetic structures (1996). Given that, as Sandra Bloom’s informative book Creating Sanctuary (1997) shows, trauma studies are in large part beholden to behavioral, biological, and criminological models of adaptation to stress, such studies are also hostage to a scientific understanding that is, in essence, blind to the kind of trauma and science that Derrida is considering, since for Sandra Bloom and her colleagues in the applied sciences, the future stakes its claim on very finite pragmatic discoveries that are meant to bring trauma and its social history to closure: the extermination or eradication of trauma. That there is the repetition of an interminable death wish should not escape notice.2 Of course, when Derrida thinks about trauma, he is already close to the idea of a Jewish science that does not extricate itself from a notion of futuricity that has an extremely ambivalent if not undecidable horizon, namely, the undeterminability of trauma, messianism, apocalypse, but also Holocaust as distinct moments or futures. Indeed, an analogous and not unfamiliar opening in this horizon is suicide, something that ended the lives of both Benjamin and Celan. That trauma and suicide have a filiation on this horizon of the open future is even

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something that Derrida is suggesting when he speaks of trauma as selfannihilating. This is developed somewhat enigmatically in Feu la cendre (another of Archive Fever’s phantom limbs, given that it is an archive that lists and houses Derrida’s remarks on Holocaust) where the cinder is the trace of self-annihilating trauma, the remainder of the destruction of memory. The cinder, as Derrida puts it, is itself a performative: the incineration of the cinders. Again, in the interview with Weber, in which Derrida tries to make Feu la cendre more accessible, he notes: But from the moment this concept of cinders becomes the figure for everything that precisely loses its figure in incineration and thus in a certain disappearance of the support or of the body whose memory is kept by the cinders, at that moment cinders is no longer a determined concept. It is a trope that comes to take the place of everything that disappears without leaving an identifiable trace. The difference between the trace “cinder” and other traces is that the body of which cinders is the trace has totally disappeared, it has totally lost is contours, its form, its colors, its natural determination. Non-identifiable. And forgetting itself is forgotten. Everything is annihilated in the cinders. (1995b, 391)

The main point of this passage is not just that memory is obliterated, but that this is an obliteration of the word that nevertheless leaves behind a trace of its annihilation, that trace being the cinder. While a resisting reader could always insist that the word “cinder” remains, in fact, a bona fide word—a verbal something—this would keep us from imagining the cinder as a term orphaned from language, a term so defaced or obliterated that, like ash, it is only a residue of language and, as such, nonidentifiable. Here, of course, we ought to be reminded of the German neo-Expressionist painter Anselm Kiefer, whose impressive leaden and ashen archives appear to have been torched by acid and flame.3 Not entirely unlike Derrida, Kiefer has pondered what it would mean to communicate historical trauma from the hither side of having set everything on fire, even to the point of obliterating the obliteration: brûler la cendre. But if, in Derrida, “feu la cendre” suggests a locution like “burn the ashes,” it is also intended to suggest the “late or departed Cinder,” as if Cinder were a proper name, and as if that proper name had suicided itself (“at this very moment in

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this work [of suicide] here I am”). In Kiefer’s paintings this reemergence or Aufhebung of the proper name occurs, as well, with the invocation of names like Brünhilde, Siegfried, Shulamite, and Margarete. By now, we should be aware of how the double session of anti-Semite and Jew is losing its differentiatedness, the idea of obliteration functioning here as an undecidable. For example, in both Derrida and Kiefer, this double reference to the cinder enables one to think of it both in terms of what “the text (Feu la cendre) names, for example, the crematoria or genocides by fire” and what is called Cinder by way of a proper name. In witnessing this Cinder in either of its senses, Derrida claims that “we are witnesses of a secret, we are witnesses of something we cannot testify to, we attend the catastrophe of memory” (1995b, 392). The cinder, then, marks the place for the proper name, that is to say, the advent of the proper name’s future as something that has undergone destruction by fire, hence, the Cinder as Cinderella (as Derrida claims) but as Brünhilde, too. Does the proper name, then, suicide itself? Is the cinder/Cinder to be considered that paranomasic repetition in which self-immolation is inherently inscribed, say, the self-immolation of Kiefer’s Brünhilde, if not to say that of Nazi Germany itself? “An incineration celebrates perhaps the nothing of the all, its destruction without return but made with its desire and with its cunning (all the better to preserve everything, my dear), the desperately disseminal affirmation but also just the opposite, the categorical ‘no’ to the laborious work of mourning, a ‘no’ of fire” (1991, 55). The cinder is the interminable trait and the remainder of trauma, a suicide or termination that celebrates the nothing of the all, its destruction without return. The cinder marks the trait of the end of mourning, the openness of a future in which mourning and all its apparatuses are annihilated, effaced from memory, and, as such, made inaccessible to witnessing and to history. In the case of Kiefer’s well-known artist-books, “Zweistromland (1984–1989)” among them, mal d’archive is inseparable from feu d’archive, a self-immolation of the archive and of Germany as a historical moment that is the suicide of Germany—Germany’s historical, cultural, and social Untergang. Was this, one wonders, the secret passion of Nazism? Didn’t Hitler, in fact, win the war, if by winning the war one means something like total selfdestruction? (The point was once made by Adorno.)

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— Archive Trauma —

That this sort of death wish is “given” yet once more in the letter of philosophy after two world wars is noticeable in Derrida’s envois in the phantom archive of the post: And if you now asked me to burn the book (I am not only saying the letters, this is decided), I would do it in a second. Nothing is easier, whatever you might think. . . . I am putting these crosses on the passages to be kept, I mean to be thrown outside the fire, I am checking them off before transcribing, again going through the alleys of the cemetery in order to pick out epitaphs. . . . I no longer know what I am doing, and how I am “scratching,” if I am erasing or writing what I am “saving.” . . . Imagine a book reduced to testamentary sentences (strophes, vignettes, cartouches), the last words of a whole collection of guys before their suicide, the time to eclipse themselves. (1987b, 229)

One could cite many other phantom texts of this sort in The Post Card, the point of interest being that however else one wishes to define deconstruction, this definition would have to include Destruktion in the incendiary sense of an open future that is capable of welcoming a moment of suicide: a traumatic event of destruction that is hailing one in advance of its having happened. Perhaps we are quite close to Martin Heidegger’s invocation of fire in his wartime seminars. The sites of trauma have all been obliterated in advance by the deconstruction of the very metaphysics that would be necessary to recognize that a traumatic event had, in fact, taken place or that it might very well be something that will occur in the open horizon of a future moment; yet, that being said, Heidegger welcomes the destructiveness of fire with a suicidal aura of invincibility that takes the high ground of Heraclitean fire. That philosophy cannot disentangle itself from a nihilistic trait of suicidal Destruktion is something that we have not been encouraged to contemplate, given that as humanists we prefer to see philosophy take to the side of life and human happiness. That philosophy is at some level bound to that trait that vouchsafes a traumatic self-destruction, the sort of thing one notices again in Ferdinand

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Céline’s Nord, is precisely what many of the passages in The Post Card are hinting at. That this trauma-to-come is speculative, fugitive, if not quite mad (folle) is itself part of what one could think of as a philosophie en effet. It is recognition of this sort of madness, by no means entirely separable from what Adorno called Nazi masochism, that Derrida has noticed not only in Nietzsche, but in writers like Leiris, Bataille, Genet, Artaud, and Freud. It is a folie d’archive that is quite pronounced in not only Freud’s Moses but in Yerushalmi’s “unprofessional” interview with Freud’s ghost, a seance whose madness is the accompaniment to thinking. Quite frankly, I was surprised that when Elizabeth Weber asked Derrida whether his work wasn’t the expression of trauma he responded with a “who? me?” reaction. As if trauma had nothing to do with him or as if he could not allow himself to lay claim to the trauma Weber was referencing. Perhaps it was too intimate a question. Perhaps. But consider, too, that for Derrida the odd thing about trauma is not how it is passed on directly from one person to another but how it is relayed, as if by remote control, through technologies of writing. That is, crucial for Derrida is the logic of the “post” as postal carrier but also postscript, as a writing of a future in which there is something violent as yet to come, say, the destinal trait of a trauma or violence that has always already happened—call it the trait or symptom of an archive fever. To conclude: Derrida is a philosopher who refuses to ignore the fact that he too is infected with mal d’archive in all the senses I have touched upon. That this malady of the archive is the malady of a certain sickness or madness, and hence of a certain traumatic experience, is of central importance to what Yerushalmi wants to call a Jewish science, one that shares suicidal impulses with its Other, fascism. It is telling that in the case of one like Foucault, it is precisely this mal d’archive that is missing in his account of bureaucratic archives, university libraries, and the like. What science routinely censors in its quest for rational explanation is precisely the kind of archival infection that not only has an effect on how we think but to some extent structures our thinking and thereby destines it to imagine things monstrous, sickening, and traumatic. Whereas figures like Edward Said and Catherine McClintock have tried to devise postcolonial analyses of archives as programmed sites of prejudicial inquiry and performativity – 94 –

— Archive Trauma —

reducible to strategies of domination and subjection and are therefore, morally questionable, Derrida’s understanding of fire-in-the-archive dwells on a certain insanity that defies all pragmatic and ethical explanation. It is an insanity that defies anything like an essentialist (but also constructivist) explanation, an insanity that in the arts burns on the surface of canvases by Anselm Kiefer and in the works of Francis Bacon, whose studies of Van Gogh in the 1950s draw on an archival photograph of an incinerated painting by Van Gogh—destroyed in Dresden by fire bombing. It is this mal d’archive that functions as the basis for a series of variations in which Van Gogh’s madness is not to be dissociated from a holocaustic annihilation whose aftermath the figure of Van Gogh survives as a cindery, mutilated, displaced person. In “Time’s Cinders,” I noted that the Derridean notion of the cinder is incapable of preserving or sheltering—that it is, as I put it here, the antithesis to the house of the archon and that therefore it cannot be properly thought or mourned, given that the cinder is an inappropriable, inhuman trait of that which has come to pass in a flash of fire that is privative and nihilistic. As in Bacon’s Van Gogh studies, or Kiefer’s artist-books, one cannot mourn the cinder. And one cannot lay claim to it as trauma. In the analogous Heideggerian vocabulary, this inappropriability is the early trait of Being which is, from a human perspective, mad and monstrous. It is the early predicative trait of a flash of fire whose horror is alien to everything we know as the human and for which no therapy, psychoanalytical or otherwise, could ever be adequate. Archive Fever speaks to this inadequacy by way of its phantom textual limbs even while it invokes Freud’s Moses as the condition of a science perhaps as yet to come that, from what we know of trauma studies, is still largely an unheard science whose madness burns in the ashes of archives.

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Chapter 4

Subjectilities

But my intention was certainly not to draw away from the concern for existence itself, for concrete personal commitment, or for the existential pathos that, in a sense, I have never lost. Rather, what I did stemmed from my critical reflections on the reading of Husserl and Heidegger advanced by certain French existentialists such as Sartre and Marcel; and my dissent did not mean, of course, that I turned my back on existential questions. In some way, a philosopher without this ethicoexistential pathos does not interest me very much. —J. Derrida, I Have a Taste for the Secret

In “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Derrida poses the question of how a human being might be encountered or regarded by an animal, since philosophers have always assumed that animals cannot recognize humans in Hegelian or Lévinasian terms. “How can an animal look you in the face? That will be one of our concerns” (2002a, 377). Then, too, from a Heideggerian perspective, Derrida wonders how Mitsein (or being-with) could be conceptualized if one thought of it in terms of one’s being in the presence of one’s cat, an example Derrida addresses at some length. Does one come alongside, near, or after the animal? What sort of proximity or being-with would we be talking about in relation to the animal? Would we be talking about “being-pressed, the being-with as being strictly attached, bound, enchained, being-under-pressure, compressed, impressed, repressed . . . ” (380)? The list destabilizes biblical, classical, and scientific assumptions about how “man” comes after the animal, as if man were to be defined as that latecomer (creationist or evolutionary, it

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— Later Derrida —

doesn’t matter) whose historical position is constitutive of his essence, which he himself defines as a superiority to what is “animal.” To repeat: what does it mean to allow oneself (who is human) to be seen through the gaze of the animal? What are the “stakes” that these questions raise? “One doesn’t need to be an expert to foresee that they involve thinking about what is meant by living, speaking, dying, being and world as in being-in-the-world or being-towards the world, or being-with, being before, being behind, being-after, being and following, being followed or being following, there where I am, in one way or another, but unimpeachably, near what they call the animal” (380). Some paragraphs on, Derrida will speak of this as the “abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself” (381). Derrida will later explain that this abyssal limit is a rupture, though it isn’t that of a linear break with two edges, man versus animal. Rather, the border or frontier is frayed, multiple, and heterogeneous, destabilizing classical scientific categories such as organic/inorganic, life/death, human/nonhuman, man/animal. This has prompted him to ask the question “Who? But, Who then? For I no longer know who I am (following) or who it is I am chasing, who is following me or hunting me, who comes before and who is after whom? I no longer know where my head is. Madness . . . ” (379). This is enough context, perhaps, for making the following three observations: (1) Derrida’s essay is devoted to the question of subalternity of which the animal (not its figure, as he is careful to point out) is paradigmatic; (2) the essay is centrally concerned with the question “What is Man?”; and (3) the essay elaborates what now appears to be a major thread in Derrida’s thinking that concerns the “ends of man,” both in terms of questions of proximity, which he explored in the essay “The Ends of Man” (1968, 1982a), and apocalypse, which he discussed in “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy” (1983). In “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” Derrida will even bind proximity to apocalypse by interjecting, “I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am (following) the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict. . . . I identify with it by running behind it, after it, after its whole zoo-logy” (381).

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— Subjectilities —

I begin with this rather recent text in order to expose a connection with an earlier moment in Derrida’s thinking on the ends of man that comes more or less midway between “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy” and “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” the latter written presumably as a pendant to the apocalypse essay. In particular, I want to focus, first of all, on an interview from 1988 titled “Eating Well” (Derrida and Nancy 1991), which is indicative of an important shift of emphasis in Derrida’s thinking: the recovery of existentialism on what is presumably the hither side of its deconstruction. Moreover, I want to tie this interview in with an essay on Artaud of the same period titled “To Unsense the Subjectile” (1998c; originally published in 1986), because this essay instantiates aspects of “Eating Well” (this interview already broaches the animal/man difference) in terms of subalternity, a theme that Derrida doesn’t name as such, but that is existentially significant for these and later writings and specifically “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” Of course, I am well aware that the invocation of existentialism will put off readers who assume that deconstruction is, if anything, a rejection of existentialism. In “‘Il courait mort’: salut, salut—Notes pour un courier aux Temps Modernes,” a missive on Jean-Paul Sartre written to Claude Lanzmann and published in Les Temps Modernes to celebrate the journal’s fiftieth anniversary in 1996, Derrida himself reiterates his rejection of existentialism by taking Sartre to task for his absolutism, something that pertains even to the title of Les Temps Modernes, since it denies the heterogeneity or dislocations of time by affirming the absolutism of an epochal present. If Sartrean existentialism is flawed, it is because of a certain hubris of address, an engagement that forgets about difference, disaccord, heterogeneity, nonsimultaneity, and disadjustment. Yet, in various passages Derrida also rehabilitates Sartre by means of disassembling him, for example, in terms of opposing Sartre to his fictional double, Roquentin (the protagonist of Nausea), in ways that resist synthesis and decision (2001b, 176). For Derrida an absolutist rejection of existentialism is just as much out of the question as would be its affirmation. What interests him, therefore, are the interminable ramifications of what follows from the various “distances”: movements of agreement and disagreement, of disquieting questions, differences of style, gesture, and place. In short, what concerns Derrida

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— Later Derrida —

are the proximities of difference, something that was on his mind, as we have seen, in his essay on animal and man. No doubt, one would have to be in denial not to notice that “The Animal That Therefore I Am” rather explicitly takes up what Sartre’s Being and Nothingness called “concrete relations with others,” a chapter that many French thinkers including Lacan and Lévinas have rewritten, knowingly or not. Whereas Sartre, Lacan, and Lévinas have emphasized face-to-face encounters between humans, Derrida supersedes them by asking how an animal (such as his cat) regards him naked in the shower. The point, of course, is that whatever Derrida may think of existentialism, he is still taking up an existential problematic (that of recognition) and focusing very centrally upon it, his previous writings on the name, the signature, and difference (all discussed in “The Animal That Therefore I Am”) being brought in as a means of revising a philosophy of “concrete relations” pertinent to Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Lévinas, and Irigaray. No doubt, one might well ask whether this undermines or betrays earlier works (Of Grammatology, Margins, Glas) or whether Derrida has in fact developed aspects of the earlier work that were generally overlooked in the heyday of Yale School deconstructionism. Alternatively, is Derrida’s existential drift so deconstructive in its manner (say, with respect to the dismantling of “man”) that one cannot properly invoke the term existentialism with impunity? My position is that this is something for the reader to decide, if it can be decided at all. Hence I advance the view that like the animal of which Derrida speaks, existentialism has always already accompanied deconstruction, though whether it has come before or after or alongside deconstruction may not be an answerable question. Like the cat of which (or whom) Derrida speaks—a cat who happens to be privileged in being the philosopher’s cat—it can be said that existentialism surrounds the philosopher in its being-before, being-after, and being-around, and that like the cat on the mat, existentialism hasn’t been allowed to regard or encounter deconstruction, given its status as bête noir: presophisticated, predeconstructive, and pre-Derridean. Yet, there are moments in Derrida’s thinking when he opens himself to the possibility that existentialism may well be the abyssal limit of deconstruction. In my view, one of the most striking and most fateful of these moments occurs in the late 1980s when this abyssal limit has – 100 –

— Subjectilities —

to do, yet once more in Derrida’s estimation, with what cannot be surpassed in Heidegger, that is to say, the limit that is Heidegger’s in even his most existential mode in Being and Time. It is at such moments— achronic, unsynthesized, disadjusted—that existentialism simultaneously recurs both before and after its deconstruction, a recurrence whose coincidence is divided, estranged, perhaps even a bit deranged. • To begin again: During the 1980s there was a gradual sea change in Derrida’s thinking that corresponded with some directions taken in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community and those related texts by Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe collected in Retreating the Political. In the background there was the influence of the Oeuvres Complètes by Georges Bataille, some writings by Maurice Blanchot—in particular, The Unavowable Community—and the increasing influence of Emmanuel Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity. Arguably this change was already under way in the colloquium “Les fins de l’homme” of 1980 in which JeanLuc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were hinting at the question of the political in terms of the end of man, which is to say, in terms of the end of the presupposition that man is the ground upon which a conception of the political necessarily rests. Behind the skepticism of political anthropocentrism lay the more wide-ranging questioning of politics in terms of identification (national, ethnic), figuration (symbolism), mise-en-scène (public demonstrations), mythology (historical revisionism), and language (national versus foreign), issues that were to become more prominent in later years.1 At the conference “Les fins de l’homme,” Derrida gave a paper titled “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” which showed how the withdrawal or end of man is foundational for a politics of an ever expanding sect or secret society whose message is unthinkable and unrepresentable precisely because it bears on the end or disappearance of man. Derrida will not repudiate the mystagogues who raise the tone of philosophy in order to hermetically seduce their audience. Given that they speak of the end of man—of the end of the concept of man and the end of a politics of man—they rhetorically anticipate deconstruction, which is itself rhetorically contaminated in the sense that it does not foreclose the kind of mystagogic strains that were anathema to Kant and the Enlightenment tradition. It is as if the essay on apocalypse announces future mystagogic writings on negative – 101 –

— Later Derrida —

theology (especially “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” from Psyché), the messianic (Archive Fever), confession (“Circonfession”), and religion (“Faith and Knowledge”). Indeed, the essay on apocalypse suggests that “the end of man” is a limit that rests undecidably between reason and unreason, the philosophical and counterphilosophical, atheism and faith, sanity and madness, a limit that isn’t stabilizable by scholarly inquiry or philosophical method. But does such a limit also threaten the distinction between the end and continuation of man? In their opening remarks to the “Fins de l’homme” conference, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argued that like Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bataille, Derrida shared the interrogation of the “nonessentiality or impropriety of man. That is to say, at least potentially, to the interrogation of an impropriety or of a non-essentiality of essence in general” (1981, 14). Moreover, they credited Derrida’s concern with “writing” and “difference” as an “interrogation of the proper” (i.e., essence). Hence for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe écriture in its technical antimetaphysical sense was the key to demystifying the essentialism of man, something that, they told us, Derrida had demonstrated by way of literary analyses. That Derrida provides us with a theory of the proper characterized by the sign or trace—the semiotic deferral of essence, properness, or coming into ownness—is what Nancy and LacoueLabarthe related to the question of the destination, place, and the advent of man. “As everyone here knows, this is the ultimate point of what one calls deconstruction” (14). This determination reveals just how wide Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were of the mark, given that “On a Newly Arisen Apocalpytic Tone” wasn’t a grammatological destruction of the essence of man, but rather a holding open of the possibility that the end of man isn’t the end in any final or complete sense. If we now fast-forward to 1988, we will notice a telling encounter between Nancy and Derrida in the interview titled “Eating Well.” The interview is important in terms of confirming a shift in Derrida’s work wherein certain existential and humanist dimensions became more and more pronounced. Essentially, “Eating Well” is a brainstorming session with Jean-Luc Nancy that spins off into a number of different directions, cannibalism among them. Despite the interview’s numerous centripetal splittings, it would be correct to say that the overall issue is the difference between animal and man, something that arose in the then very recent Of Spirit as one of the four main – 102 –

— Subjectilities —

Heideggerian topics of long-standing interest to Derrida. Whereas in the context of Heidegger, the human/animal distinction focuses on the human hand in distinction to that of primates like the chimpanzee, in “Eating Well” Derrida anticipates an interest in the mouth (say, in Le toucher [2000c]) as an undecidable “organ” (affectionate/aggressive, autoaffective/alteraffective, erotic/alimentary, human/nonhuman). Already in the context of “Eating Well” it is this mouth that transgresses the difference between the animal and the human in such a way that a deconstruction of that difference comes immediately to mind. But instead of taking off in this deconstructive direction, Derrida dwells on the question of “eating well” as communion or sharing—a “giving-theother-to-eat.” This opens onto ethical (humanist?) questions of hospitality, generosity, responsibility, addressing the other, comradeship, giving succour, and so on. Indeed, the whole interview points in the direction that many of Derrida’s writings will take in the 1990s and after: an existential ethical emphasis that includes works like The Politics of Friendship, which puts the familiar concept of the friend into question; Of Hospitality, which examines the figure of the host; and Le toucher in which the phenomenology of touching is foundational for an existential ethics. In fact, more striking than the ending of “Eating Well” and its strange title is the front matter, which is almost an invitation to imagine deconstruction as a humanism. Here it has to be said that Jean-Luc Nancy is quite taken aback by Derrida’s speculation that humanism is constitutive of all philosophy, no matter what kind of philosophy it is. Indeed, Derrida’s suggestion represents more than an about-face in which he welcomes the very subject that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe had earlier excommunicated from their political philosophy, for Derrida appears to be turning rather suddenly against the whole of la pensée soixante-huit with its demystification of anthropology. In fact, if we now return to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s remark about deconstruction being ultimately all about the dismantling of the essence of the proper by means of grammatology, we can see how odd Derrida’s suggestion must have been to Nancy in “Eating Well.” After all, had one come all this way, from Sartre through Lévi-Strauss to the thought of Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, only to be told in the late 1980s that we’ve never gotten beyond a humanism that has been so detestable to a whole generation of major French intellectuals and – 103 –

— Later Derrida —

their students? Was Derrida, in fact, taking up the sort of position articulated by New Philosophers like Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, Alain Finkielkraut, or André Glucksmann, all of whom are skeptical about the political consequences of deconstructing the subject? No less striking for Nancy must have been Derrida’s remark that the concept of Dasein in Heidegger’s Being and Time is a dead ringer for the Cartesian cogito. After all, had it not been Derrida who once chided French philosophers for not having put the idea of Dasein as Cogito into question, since in Derrida’s view this was indicative of how Heidegger was being completely misread and misinterpreted? It is a view, of course, advanced by Heidegger’s own remonstrance to Sartre back in 1946–47. So how is it possible that Derrida can say in 1988 that even Heidegger’s “existential analytic” of Being and Time “still retains the formal traits of every transcendental analytic”? Or that Heidegger is locked into the same transcendental analytic that Hegel, Kant, and Descartes struggled with, albeit in different ways? “Dasein . . . comes to occupy, no doubt displacing lots of other things, the place of the subject, the cogito or the classical ‘Ich Denke’” (Derrida and Nancy 1991, 98). Remarkably, Derrida is saying that we can call the subject whatever we like, but it’s still the subject and no amount of fancy philosophical footwork can prove otherwise. So that if we read Marx, Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan, who are all masters of having decentered or liquidated the subject, we will find that even they cannot get out of having to ask the question of “Who?” or of “Who or what ‘answers’ to the ‘question’ ‘who’?” (98). Nancy must have wondered whether Derrida’s comment on Heidegger wasn’t meant as a criticism of him, given that one would have expected Derrida to return to his earlier position with respect to phenomenology generally: that for all their meticulous analyses and scrupulous care in order not to wind up in the trap of metaphysics, thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger simply fell short of the mark. Indeed, such failure is destined to happen, given the overwhelming power of metaphysics to reinstall itself within the very programs that are designed to wipe it out. For quite different reasons, it might have seemed strange for Nancy to see Heidegger not being attacked, since by 1988 Derrida’s interlocution with Heidegger had hit its nadir in “Geschlecht II,” which alluded to Heidegger’s raised hand during the

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— Subjectilities —

Nazi period, and in Of Spirit, in which Derrida suggests that the history of Heidegger’s philosophical writings after the publication of Being and Time is more politically chequered than Heidegger’s supporters have admitted. In fact, such views were well on the way to approaching Emmanuel Lévinas’s conviction that after Being and Time, Heidegger had become politically and philosophically corrupt and that Being and Time is to be excepted. Of course, the setting aside and privileging of Being and Time has a history of its own, and Lévinas isn’t the only philosopher to give Heidegger’s treatise a grudging reprieve. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in an interview, once remarked that Heidegger really had written only one book, Being and Time, and that everything else was lecture transcription (Gadamer 1992, 5). The more moderate general view, however, is that Being and Time is the most wide-ranging and systematic study by Heidegger and that it therefore presents Heidegger’s entire philosophy, even if parts of it are not completely worked out. This reception of Heidegger’s oeuvre, typical in postwar Germany, but also in AngloAmerican universities, is what Derrida repeats in “Eating Well,” but not for conservative reasons (systematicity, totalization, etc.). Rather, he excepts Being and Time because he is returning to a historical moment of Heidegger’s reception in France just after the Second World War when existentialism was still in its ascendancy and is reminding us of the time when at least a few of the brightest philosophical minds recognized to what extent Being and Time was the furthest outpost in terms of what was philosophically conceivable. Hence Derrida writes, Under the heading of Jemeinigkeit, beyond or behind the subjective “self” or person, there is for Heidegger a singularity, an irreplaceability of that which remains nonsubstitutable in the structure of Dasein. This amounts to an irreducible singularity of solitude in Mitsein (which is also a condition of Mitsein), but it is not that of the individual. This last concept always risks pointing towards both the ego and an organic or atomic indivisibility. The Da of Dasein singularizes itself without being reducible to any of the categories of human subjectivity (self, reasonable being, consciousness, person), precisely because it is presupposed by all of these. (Derrida and Nancy 1991, 107; some italics added)

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— Later Derrida —

Here Derrida ascribes the concept of singularity—which he usually associates with the work of Lévinas and Maurice Blanchot—to Heidegger. By implication Derrida is saying that we should not forget the extent to which the work of Blanchot and Lévinas is actually predicated on Heidegger’s Being and Time. This in turn means that Being and Time is foundational for Derrida in that all contemporary problematics of the subject necessarily lead back to this immense philosophical watershed. Of course, it’s one thing for a text to be major, another for that text to be the furthest outpost of what can be thought at the present time. This, it turns out, is really the main thesis of “Eating Well,” the very same thesis that dawned on a very small number of French philosophers around 1947. This makes one wonder if, in fact, despite all the critical elaborations and intellectual movements that have taken place in recent decades, we haven’t gotten past the furthest outpost of the thinkable that Heidegger titled Being and Time. Indeed, if this is what the interview with Derrida suggests, it is a view that is surprising, given what we have always thought to be true about deconstruction, namely, that it surpasses and improves upon the work of Heidegger by means of deconstructive strategies. By invoking the “who” of Dasein in “Eating Well” (this “who” reiterates the last line of “The Ends of Man”: “But who, we?”), Derrida appears to be qualifying this aspect of his career—the very one that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe noted in the quotation above when they spoke of the ultimate point of deconstruction. But if Derrida has done this, why? • There’s an argument to be made that if Heidegger is foundational for Derrida, so is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’)” (2001c), Derrida goes back to Rousseau via Paul de Man in order to study various rhetorical performatives that escape “properness”: self-identity, determinability, fixed position, recoverable eventfulness, and so on. Without going into a reading of this lengthy essay, it should be said that much of its importance lies in how it comes back to Of Grammatology by way of previous work on performativity, the upshot being that Derrida is able to link his later concerns with existential problematics like pardon, forgiveness, confession, fault, and the telling of the truth with questions of rhetoricity, – 106 –

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language, and textuality. This is where Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe were right on target with respect to identifying the ultimate point of deconstruction: the critique of essence by way of radicalizing linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis. However, there came a point in the late 1980s when Derrida began looking more overtly at the decentering of the subject that he had insisted upon, for example, in “Structure, Sign, and Play.” Already in 1968 Derrida had sketched out the rudiments of various reservations concerning the feasibility of an end of the subject in philosophy. In “The Ends of Man” he spoke of the end of man as a double movement in which the very subject that comes to an end is nevertheless reappropriated (relifted) in that very moment. Even Heidegger, whose “existential analytic had already overflowed the horizon of a philosophical anthropology,” was still fussing around with the “proper of man” (1982a, 124). Hence, It is in the play of a certain proximity, proximity to oneself and proximity to Being, that we will see constituted, against metaphysical humanism and anthropologism, another insistence of man, one which relays, relieves, supplements that which it destroys. (1982a, 124)

Deconstruction would threaten the rhetoric of proximity in Heidegger. At least, this is how one had to read the passage’s intent during the 1970s when deconstruction was synonymous with the decentering of the subject. Is not this security of the near what is trembling today, that is, the co-belonging and co-propriety of the name of man and the name of Being . . . such as it is inscribed and forgotten according to the history of metaphysics, and such as it is awakened also by the destruction of ontotheology? (133)

Read from the perspective of “Eating Well,” however, “The Ends of Man” can be read as a defense of Heidegger and not a criticism of him for lapsing into old-time metaphysics. For at issue is what Derrida calls a historicophilosophical structure that in the context of the French reception of Heidegger takes us back to the years immediately following the Second World War—to Sartre’s existential appropriation of Heidegger and the rejection of this appropriation by his counterexistential critics, among them Georges Bataille, Blanchot, and Lévinas. – 107 –

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In fact, Derrida says precisely this in “The Ends of Man.” Speaking of the anthropologism of French existentialism (“of Heidegger, whose projects for a philosophical anthropology or an existential analytic only were known or retained [Sein und Zeit]”), Derrida reflects, “Of course, here I am picking out the dominant traits of a period. The period itself is not exhausted by these dominant traits. Nor can one say in absolutely rigorous fashion that this period started after the war, and even less that it is over today” (1982a, 117; italics mine). To get a quick overview of some of the philosophical debates in the immediate postwar period that are of relevance to us, one should consider Georges Bataille’s review article “De l’existentialisme au primat de l’economie,” which was published by Critique in 1947. In it he discusses Lévinas’s De l’existence à l’existant, Julien Benda’s Tradition de l’existentialisme, ou les Philosophies de la vie, Jean Wahl’s Petite histoire de ‘l’existentialisme’” suivie de Kafka et Kierkegaard, Commentaires, and Guido Da Ruggieri’s Existentialism (published in English). Among the details in a lengthy footnote by Bataille is his recollection that a certain Madame Claude-Edmonde Magny wrote a badly informed article on existentialism that lumped Sartre, Camus, Blanchot, and Bataille together as existentialist thinkers. Of course, looking back, one may now wonder if Madame Magny hadn’t gotten the matter precisely right, even if for all the wrong reasons, since Bataille and Blanchot certainly could and probably should be regarded (along with Lévinas, whom she didn’t mention) as existentialists of another feather. Let us recall that around the year 1947 many commentators were trying to work out for themselves just what existentialism was, and books like those by Benda and Ruggieri were quick to moralize on the death of a philosophical tradition that was threatened by the advent of existentialism. To such authors, existentialism was seen primarily in terms of a disgust for life (cf. Nausea) and was to be considered nihilistic. These authors concluded that existentialism was a degeneracy of the spirit, abetted by atheism and a perversion of taste, and that it poisoned the soul of modern man. This attack on existentialism hearkened back to French fascist thinking, as exemplified by Charles Maurras and others who had previously decried the nihilism of modern philosophical thinking in line with the National Socialist rejection of modernity tout court. – 108 –

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Jean Wahl, under whom Derrida would one day teach general philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne, put matters more neutrally when he said in his book of 1947 that existentialism was the death of the philosophy of existence. This is the predecessor to our “death of metaphysics” slogan and reveals the extent to which deconstruction isn’t entirely divorced from a philosophical past that it had disowned in the 1960s. Also telling is that Bataille’s view of Heidegger was still quite in line with the German debate back in the 1930s concerning whether Being and Time is a brilliant theological salvage operation or an insult to theology and morality. Hence Bataille wrote, “Heidegger requires admiration for the synthesis that he had successfully made of traditional religious experience and a philosophical school associated with atheism: his teachings proceed from the most sensible investigation that has been made of the profane and sacred spheres, of the discursive and the mythic, and of the prosaic and the poetic” (1988, 285). But Bataille also recognized that Heidegger’s intense inquiries into l’être negate éxistence and that the philosophical interest in Being is the intentional ruination of the metaphysics of existence. Wahl himself could ask, “Doesn’t the existentialist ‘risk destroying the very existence that he wishes above all to preserve?’” (285). Bataille’s response to this is that if this is what the existentialists are about, then we may as well go back to Hegel, who was far more radical, because he destroyed the difference between the universal and the particular precisely by means of going through the anxiety and suffering of subjectivity which figures like Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Sartre later developed. The pushing of universality and particularity to their limits “is a destruction which scandalizes, which suffocates, even if reason requires and takes account of it.” Indeed, what we’re left with is “une image de mort et d’achèvement”—an image of death and completion. Eventually, it will become clear that already here Bataille is inching his way toward what Derrida and Nancy would later call singularity, of “[what] is merely alien to that which destroys it” (1988, 287). Souls (esprits) like Van Gogh simply can’t survive their own intensity, and when they die they don’t undergo any conscious revelation or reach anything that we could call the universal. They simply die in a particularity that we falsely universalize after the fact by means of imagining for them an oeuvre that denies and hence destroys their particularity (288). To get this far, however, Bataille took a route similar to Sartre’s in that he revised – 109 –

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Heidegger by going back to Hegel and, in particular, the Hegel of Alexandre Kojève. Of course, Bataille’s account of Hegel doesn’t share the self-reflexive dialectical minutiae that Sartre worked up in Being and Nothingness, but dispenses with the phenomenological interplay of identity and difference that reflexivity sustains in order to expose the limits of the dialectic (its unworkability) as an all-appropriating process. In turning to Lévinas’s De l’existence à l’existant, Bataille admitted that he wasn’t really sure how to pose Lévinas vis-à-vis Heidegger, though he surmised that whereas Heidegger shows that nothingness is actually constitutive of being, for Lévinas anxiety is constitutive. Furthermore, Bataille argues that Lévinas has attempted a static account of the relation between existence and existents that repudiates dialectics, reversals, and, ultimately, any relations. That is, for Lévinas existence is irremissible; it’s not something that gets mediated, converted, or otherwise worked on—say, by the dialectic of reflexive consciousness. Hence existence doesn’t respond to us. It can’t communicate anything to us through discourse, because it’s not transmissible in and as discourse. Bataille also notices that Lévinas opposes Heidegger’s idea of Sein zum Tod—being for death—because it converts the irremissibility of an unappeasable and implacable death, the existence of the corpse, into something that can be mediated, comprehended, and hence taken over by human subjectivity in ontological terms. Rather, Lévinas would preserve the irreconcilable and absolute difference between life and death, which for him are two kinds of materiality (living materiality [Dasein]; inert materiality [Sein]) that don’t really intersect or relate. This critique of Heideggerian death is also something Derrida will later take up in the monograph essay Aporias (1993a), in which Heidegger’s existential analytic is rehabilitated along the lines set forth in “Eating Well,” the result being that one would have to read Being and Time in a way not so far apart from what Bataille may have had in mind in 1947: “as an event that, at least in the final analysis, would no longer simply stem from ontological necessity or demonstration. It would never submit to logic, phenomenology, or ontology, which it nonetheless invokes. Nor would it ever submit to a ‘rigorous science’ . . . not even to thought (Denken) as that which parallels the path of the poem (Dichten)” (1993a, 32). As for Bataille, after discussing Lévinas’s concept of the “there is” (or “il y a”) as the horror of existence whose universality exceeds the – 110 –

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dialectic of universal/particular, he declares that Lévinas’s style is without doubt existential and that, in the end, his little book is about the communication of an ineffable experience. “The il y a is apparently the ineffable of the mystics” (Bataille 1988, 296). A bit later he comes closer to the truth when he calls it the unintelligibility of what is: existence or impersonal being in opposition to the existent or the isolated, singular being who is in a state of hypostasis. However, Bataille’s most important remark, for our purposes, is the one he drops at the very end of his article when he tells the reader that as a philosophy of existence, existentialism has posed subjectivity in a way that its positioning necessarily implies the “ruin of the subject.” Lévinas, in particular, has uncovered a way of talking about existence in the absence of the subject, such that this existence is laid bare at the very moment that intimacy is put into play. It’s the epistemology of the subject that is eclipsed here. In principle the method poses the impossibility of knowing the instant, with which intimacy is identified: what is outside is only given to knowledge because of its belonging to those things having duration. Hence it leaves open a chance to experience: poetry or ecstasy (ravissement), which are not given in anxiety, suppose the downfall and suppression of knowledge. This is the sovereignty of poetry. At the same time the hatred of poetry [la haine de la poésie]—since it is not inaccessible. (1988, 306)

Apparently Bataille is correlating poetry with Lévinas’s notion of existence as the il y a, hence depriving poetry of the subject or cogito as its ground. His point is therefore that if the poem (and by this he probably means art in general) has sovereignty, it is because the poem concerns an intimacy in relation to which epistemology has been bracketed. The hatred of poetry probably refers to the burden of its being which (following Lévinas’s argument) we would feel as something very unpleasant, despite our capacity to understand consciously what it is exactly we’re experiencing. As a whole, Bataille’s review doesn’t accept or reject existentialism, though in places Bataille radicalizes aspects of the existential adventure by disabling its Cartesianism and its dialectics for the sake of embracing concepts that are quite alien to the kind of reflection theory that Sartre called phenomenology. In Bataille’s view, it is Lévinas who merits attention as a counterexistential existentialist, because Lévinas is – 111 –

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considering the existential as the weight or burden of a Being that isn’t assimilable and therefore not knowable. In contrast to Sartre’s optimism about being able to engage the world, if only through the affirmation of saying no and of resisting it so that others may learn by example, Lévinas argues that existence is painful and imponderable in ways that no knowledge or act is going to model or fix. Hence, in that context, the humanist subject is a mystification that gets in the way of the truth of what cannot be known, a truth that has its parallels in Heidegger’s rhetoric of concealedness [Verborgenheit] that is mentioned in the “Letter” and can be traced back to Being and Time, if not earlier. This is where notions of withdrawal, defiguration, silencing, and subalternity are compressed. Maurice Blanchot represents yet another attempt to demystify and decontaminate existentialism, one far more influential than that of Bataille. In his manifesto “Literature and the Right to Death” (1947, 1995), Blanchot challenges just about every statement in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Why Write?” and makes the argument that literature “is my consciousness without me.” This corresponds rather well to Bataille’s favoring an existentialism that presumes a subjectivity without the subject. Moreover, Blanchot is in accord with literature as a sovereignty in terms of its intimacy to something in relation to which epistemology is irrelevant, namely, death. For according to Blanchot, to gain from death the possibility of speaking is the “essence” of literature. Much later in the same essay, Blanchot will speak of an interminable “resifting of words” that is actually not divorced from “a silence that is speech empty of words” (1995, 332). But, as it turns out, this silence is not nothing, but being that can’t be expressed. Literature is thus “the impossibility of emerging from existence” and its “being . . . is always flung back into being.” In a footnote to these remarks, Blanchot cites Lévinas’s De l’existence à l’existant. “Emmanuel Lévinas uses the term il y a to throw ‘light’ on this anonymous and impersonal flow of being that precedes all being, being that is already present in the heart of disappearance, that in the depths of annihiliation still returns to being, being as the fatality of being, nothingness as existence: when there is nothing, il y a de l’être” (1995, 332). As in the case of Bataille, one senses a counterexistentialist existentialism at work insofar as Blanchot is specifically addressing the condition of the writer’s experience as writer, a condition that he – 112 –

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existentially calls into question by ruining the subject and positing the intimacy with being as something for which we couldn’t have an epistemology, let alone the kind of engaged thinking proposed by Sartre. “God had created living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had disappeared; only instead of beings (êtres), and, as we say, existents (existants), there remained only being (l’être), and man was condemned not to be able to approach anything except through the meaning he had to create” (1995, 323). Such a view, of course, is not Heideggerian; rather, it reflects a certain via negativa that pushes beyond Sartrean nothingness, especially in its dialectical framework. The result is a heteronomy of the author (the author’s explosion), the author being an effect of absolute contradictory commands that cannot be integrated. This, no doubt, reflects strong affinities with Bataille and looks forward, too, to Derrida’s analysis of Paul de Man’s “war” in “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell.” “How did he live this unliveable discord between worlds, histories, memories, discourses, languages?” (1989a, 129). It is a question pertinent to Heidegger, as well. • Shortly after the end of the war, Jean Beaufret, who had read and admired Being and Time, visited Heidegger. He posed some questions to the German philosopher that indirectly encouraged him to consider Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Heidegger responded by writing what is arguably the key text for the French reception of Heidegger in the postwar period, “The Letter on ‘Humanism.’” Most of what we associate with the later Heidegger is there in the letter, though to what extent anyone could have comprehended these advances in the late 1940s would be hard to second-guess, even if we can see Lévinas, Blanchot, and Bataille making a beeline for the “il y a” that Heidegger intones in French.2 Presumably, Heidegger’s “Letter” was published to take issue with Sartre in order to clear up some major misconceptions promoted by Being and Nothingness. But one cannot help suspecting that Heidegger was doing some self-promotion within the most viable philosophical community in Continental Europe of the time, and that he had jumped into what was certainly the most au courant philosophical movement. In short, Sartre had made Heidegger topical and “modern.” – 113 –

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For his part, Heidegger was giving his French audience directions for how to retroactively read Being and Time and to that extent was insisting upon the idea that his later work (always already on the way) was in direct correspondence with the earlier work and a deepening of it. Was Heidegger using Being and Time to “launder” the writings of the Nazi period? Was he trying to relaunch Being and Time as a means of saving his academic neck? Was he trying to change the course of philosophy by appealing to the Paris intelligentsia? The “Letter” is certainly unsettling in its capacity to mislead the reader. First, when Heidegger insists that his opposition to humanism “does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and advocates the inhuman, that it promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of the human being” and that “humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of the human being high enough” (Heidegger 1998, 251), one has only to read Heidegger’s attacks on humanism and the ethics of human rights of the wartime seminar on Heraclitus to see that this appeal to common decency deviates somewhat from the past. Second, if Heidegger attacks Sartre for having profoundly misread Being and Time, the fact is that Sartre had some good reasons for coming to the conclusion that he did. I am referring to the famous passage in which Heidegger accuses Sartre of having superficially reversed the essence/existence dualism. The passage in question is the first page of part 1 following the introduction to Being and Time. If one reads this page, it’s clear that Heidegger himself was using Wesen (existence/ essence) in such a way that one has to conclude he meant that existence takes priority over essence. “The ‘essence’ [Wesen] of this entity [Joan Stambaugh translates this as ‘this being’] lies in its ‘to be’ [Zusein].” This means that not only that essence follows in the wake of Zusein, but that the existence itself lies in its Zu-sein. In the next sentence we read, “Its Being-what-it-is [Was-sein] (essentia) must, so far as we can speak of it at all, be conceived in terms of its Being (existentia)” (42). Or, if one prefers the more idiomatic translation by Joan Stambaugh, “The whatness (essentia) of this being must be understood in terms of its being, insofar as it can be understood at all” (42). In other words, existentia takes priority. When Heidegger reaffirms that “the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” or that characteristics of entities are possible ways for them to be, not essentialistic invariants, – 114 –

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what was Sartre to make of it, if not that Heidegger was saying that existence comes before essence? The fact that Heidegger proclaimed this as a thetic statement in the text led Sartre to assume that the treatise was fundamentally trying to work out this idea. The problem, of course, is that Sartre didn’t read further, in some sense. Or that he didn’t think he needed to, given that he may have wanted to stay with this insight. Third, the “Letter” encourages us to imagine that Heidegger’s later philosophy is continuous with his earlier philosophy and that we can read his later thoughts as an exposition of what Being and Time always already says. Close readers of Heidegger have been quite divided about this, their debate focusing on the so-called turn from Dasein to Sein in Heidegger’s thought, a turn that inverts and transvalues Heidegger’s philosophical project(s). In the “Letter” Heidegger himself tries in advance to manage this turn for his readers. French readers of Heidegger such as Merleau-Ponty and Lacan took the liberty of privileging the later work and performing the turn in precisely the opposite way that the “Letter” prescribes, which is to say, as a departure from Being and Time, a way that Heidegger himself had secretly taken, as is made evident in his letters to Hannah Arendt in the 1950s. “The Letter,” therefore, is curious from the standpoint of ascertaining what really is the case. Is it, in fact, the case that Heidegger was as close to Being and Time as he claimed? Or had he actually radicalized that project to the point that one couldn’t really go back there? Was Heidegger still working within the framework of a humanism or not? And had the early Heidegger of Being and Time repudiated Sartre’s existence-before-essence thesis, or had he, in fact, stated it at the outset and derived his analyses from it? What are we to make of Heidegger’s omitting mention of even a text well known to some French philosophers, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in which we can read: “Man is he who he is, precisely in the affirmation of his own existence.” And “the affirmation of human existence and hence its essential consummation occurs through freedom of decision” (Heidegger 1949, 274). Wasn’t Heidegger, at least in some of his writings, an existentialist philosopher, too? How are we to reconcile these divergent interpretations? Certainly, this could be thought of as Heidegger’s “war” insofar as there is a polemos or struggle or fight among his own works for dominance, a struggle that the author lives and cannot reconcile. – 115 –

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• In his 1968 essay “The Ends of Man,” Derrida turned to Heidegger’s “Letter” as a fundamental reference point that speaks to the question of humanism and the end of man. In the section “Humanism or Metaphysics” Derrida goes back to the later 1940s: “After the war, under the name of Christian or atheist existentialism, and in conjunction with a fundamentally Christian personalism, the thought that dominated France presented itself essentially as humanist” (1982a, 115). Derrida continued that if one is charitable enough not to summarize Sartre under the slogan existentialism is a humanism, “the major concept, the theme of the last analysis, the irreducible horizon and origin is what was then called ‘human-reality.’ As is well known, this is a translation of Heideggerian Dasein. A monstrous translation in many respects . . . ” Derrida notes that “human reality” was Henri Corbin’s translation, authorized by Sartre, and that it has to make one wonder “about the reading or the non-reading of Heidegger during this period, and about what was at stake in reading or not reading him in this way” (115). But, as we have noticed, in “Eating Well” it is this so-called nonreading of Heidegger that Derrida appropriates, in however modified a form, by invoking the “who” as the trait of Dasein, as that signifier that anticipates the particularity or singularity of Dasein allergic to being substituted for. The who, in other words, is precisely that subject we could never subsume under any philosophical rubric of the subject, whether we call it cogito, self, transcendental ego, or Dasein. Put another way, the who is the early deictic trait of a subject of which that trait is not a part, hence an element of a set that cannot subsume it. As it happens, the who is spoken of at some length by Heidegger himself in the “Letter,” something that Derrida may have thought we should know on our own, since he doesn’t reference it. The sentence “The human being ek-sists” is not an answer to the question of whether the human being actually is or not; rather it responds to the question concerning the “essence” of the human being. We are accustomed to posing this question with equal impropriety whether we ask what the human being is or who he is. For in the Who? or the What? we are already on the lookout for something like a person or an object. But the personal no less than the objective misses and misconstrues the essential unfolding of ek-sistence in the history of being [das Wesende der – 116 –

— Subjectilities — seinsgeschichtlichen Ek-sistenz]. That is why the sentence cited from Being and Time (p. 42) is careful to enclose the word “essence” [Wesen] in quotation marks. This indicates that “essence” is now being defined neither from esse essentiae nor from esse existentiae but rather from the ek-static character of Dasein [aus dem Ek-statischen des Daseins]. As ek-sisting, the human being sustains Da-sein [steht der Mensch das Da-sein aus] in that he [in dem er] takes the Da, the clearing of being [Lichtung des Seins], into “care” [die Sorge]. But Da-sein itself occurs essentially as “thrown” [Das Da-sein selbst aber west als das “geworfene.”]. It unfolds essentially [Es west] in the throw of being [im Wurf des Seins] as a destinal sending [als des schickend Geschicklichen]. (Heidegger 1998, 249)

First, notice that Heidegger is saying that the who that comes to mind misconstrues the essential unfolding of ek-sistence. Thus the “who” cannot be equated with Dasein. For Heidegger this obviously means that the “who” would introduce the kind of individuality of the person that would psychologize and reify Dasein as a typical social subject. But for Derrida this appears to mean quite the opposite, because the who isn’t in line with the essential unfolding of existence; that is, according to Derrida the who is not of this appropriating movement of unfolding but falls out of this process, something that is quite close in conception to what Bataille had in mind when he thought about the ruin of the subject: that some particular would fall out that cannot be reintegrated into the system. The who is precisely this alien element. Second, if Heidegger attacks Sartre for having profoundly misread Being and Time, the fact is that Sartre had some good reasons for coming to the conclusion that he did. I am referring to the famous passage in which Heidegger accuses Sartre of having superficially reversed the essence/existence dualism. The passage in question is the first page of part 1 following the introduction to Being and Time. If one reads this page, it’s clear that Heidegger himself was using Wesen (existence/ essence) in such a way that one has to conclude he meant that existence takes priority over essence. “The ‘essence’ [Wesen] of this entity [Joan Stambaugh translates this as ‘this being’] lies in its ‘to be’ [Zusein].” This means that not only that essence follows in the wake of Zu-sein, but that the existence itself lies in its Zu-sein. In the next sentence we read, “Its Being-what-it-is [Was-sein] (essentia) must, so far as we can speak of it at all, be conceived in terms of its Being (existentia)” – 117 –

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(42). Or, if one prefers the more idiomatic translation by Joan Stambaugh, “The whatness (essentia) of this being must be understood in terms of its being, insofar as it can be understood at all” (42). In other words, existentia takes priority. When Heidegger reaffirms that “the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” or that characteristics of entities are possible for them to be, not essentialistic invariants, what was Sartre to make of it, if not that Heidegger was saying that existence comes before essence? The fact that Heidegger proclaimed this as a thetic statement in the text led Sartre to assume that the treatise was fundamentally trying to work out this idea. The problem, of course, is that Sartre didn’t read further, in some sense. Or that he didn’t think he needed to, given that he may have wanted to stay with this insight. Third, it is the case, however, that der Mensch (one could translate this as “the person”) steht . . . das Da-sein aus: sustains Dasein, but also endures or weathers it. So that it appears Derrida is right after all in that Heidegger is here recruiting der Mensch as hypokeimenon or basis that sustains, preserves, endures this Da-sein (ek-stasis, rupturing). Not only that, but der Mensch takes this clearing of being into “care” because, as we will learn, “the human being is the shepherd of Being” (“Der Mensch ist der Hirt des Seins”) (252). Again, the person is the support of Being insofar as the person is the one who gathers and disperses it; shepherds it. This suggests there really is a who that comes after the subject. Yet there is a fourth point as well. Heidegger just referred us to page 42 of Being and Time, that famous page that follows the introduction. Its opening sentences are: “We are ourselves the entities to be analysed. The Being of any such entity is in each case mine [ist je meines].” John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson even remind us in a translator’s note that the Being that belongs to Dasein is of the kind that “any of us may call his own.” “Us” obviously refers to real flesh-and-blood people, like the reader: the who that is reading the text. The main point of all this is that in the “Letter” Heidegger is actually invoking a number of different constructions or interpretive accounts of the subject, so that, in fact, it is disingenuous of him to chide Sartre, as if there were something definitely incorrect about Sartre’s interpretation. In reality Sartre, with his Cartesian Dasein, and Derrida, with his deconstructed Dasein of his earlier work of the ’60s and ’70s, are both advancing legitimate constructions, even though for Being and Time to make sense, any one of these constructions has to give way to the – 118 –

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other. So the issue of how matters stand in the treatise is not a matter of which position is really the case, but of learning to live with all of them without any rule as to how they are to be apportioned in the text, that is to say, without any absolute idea as to when one version should be applied and not the other. It’s this very problem of illogicality (of what Derrida calls aporia in Heidegger) that the work of the later Heidegger may have tried to resolve by turning to language and literature, since then one can talk about words in the absence of the subject. But didn’t Derrida at one time make this same move? Certainly, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe made it in the remark about the grammatological deconstruction of the subject. Of course, it’s this linguistic turn that Derrida was moving against in the late 1980s. So that by 1996 Derrida can even say in an interview with Maurizio Ferraris, Responsibility cannot be other than the responsibility of someone. Formalizing this to the extreme, I would say that for me the great question is always the question who. Call it biographical, autobiographical or existential, the form of the question who is what matters to me, be it in, say, its Kierkegaardian, Nietzschean, or Heideggerian form. Who? Who asks the question who? Where? How? When? Who arrives? It is always the most difficult question, the irreducibility of who to what, or the place where between who and what the limit trembles, in some way. It is clear that the who withdraws from or provokes the displacement of the categories in which biography, autobiography, and memoirs are thought. Abyssal question of the signature, but also signature of the question, the pledge pledged in the question. (Derrida and Ferraris 2001, 41–42)

Notice that in this passage the “who” isn’t some unassimilable trait of Dasein, but more like what Henri Corbin was calling “human reality.” In other words, this is the existential “who” in all its authenticity as someone who is responsible for another, my point being that this is a far cry from the kind of linguistic deconstruction of the subject Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe associated with Derrida in the Fins de l’homme conference. Yet this is but one view of the who. In “Eating Well,” we get others. For example, the who is not some person we must recognize as someone in particular, but some attribute or relation of Dasein that precedes the objectification Dasein proper; hence, Derrida’s reference to – 119 –

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Heideggerian “as suchness,” “thrownness,” “being-with,” “ownness,” and “calling.” There is also the who as proximal entity, such as that spoken of in the essay, “Ends of Man.” There is also the grammatological view in which the who is the singularity of the signature or akin to what Derrida for a short time in his earlier career called the gram or mark: “neither a signifier, nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither a presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation . . . it marks an irreducible and generative multiplicity” (Derrida 1981c, 43, 45). In other words, the “who” is the archetrace of a “différance” between various alternative philosophies of the subject that proliferate in the face of their undecidability, if not on account of it. Given this dispersion of ways in which the subject is to be considered, we might say that the subject has been “exploded” and “disseminated.” Among the bits is the humanist subject, the subject as gram, the subject as Dasein, the subject as who, and so on. This differs markedly from Heidegger’s earlier writings, which attempted to rationally narrate and hence synthesize all of the various accounts (thrownness, the as such, being unto death, resolution) in order to define Dasein as a coherent theoretical construct. After all, Heidegger’s Dasein was supposed to be fundamentally logocentric insofar as it was presumed to logically own all of its parts. In contrast, Derrida really has no overall theory of the subject at all, because the truth is that Heidegger hasn’t got one either, as we’ve seen above from his contradictory remarks. Derrida therefore develops accounts that are aspects of the problematic of the subject that aren’t going to fit into a coherent schema, because they don’t obey a logic, given that they are ungrounded. In returning to Heidegger, Derrida shows that Heideggerian Dasein isn’t the logocentric theoretical triumph we’ve been led to expect, because the philosophical preconditions needed to establish such an idealist entity are logically impossible and therefore aporetic. This means that all debates on the subject after 1947, including all those that belong to recent cultural studies in various Anglo-American settings, are simply mystified in the sense that they debate with the assumption there are fixed positions to debate from, when in fact there is no viable ground or structure upon which to predicate these debates. What we have, then, is, on the one hand, the absence of the subject qua subject (given that it’s ungrounded) and, on the other hand, an excess of bits of the subject—the subject as person, as other, as signature, – 120 –

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as existential trait, and so on. Such a “subject”—and here I’m speaking of something that really doesn’t come to pass as such—is a dissemination or scattering of bits (supposedly of the subject) that occurs in the absence of any determinate grounding of the subject. Who, therefore, would be the relative pronoun that fills in for this unstable activity of the subject-in-bits-and-pieces. • If one were to locate an essay in which Derrida explores the subject-inbits-and-pieces, it would be the essay published in 1986 titled “To Unsense the Subjectile” (1998c), which focuses on Antonin Artaud. I think it would be fair to say that in many respects this essay reflects the outer limits of Derrida’s thinking with respect to the question of the subject. Although the essay is clearly related to concerns in The Truth in Painting (which belongs to the period of the 1970s) and could be seen as an addendum to this book, it speaks obliquely, though very forcefully, to the question of the who in the context of Being and Time, though this may not be immediately apparent. Furthermore, Derrida’s piece relates not only to “Eating Well” on the who, but relates strikingly well to the famous essay published in 1988 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak titled “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—the upshot being that the who may, in certain respects, be indistinguishable from the subaltern. After all, the subject of “To Unsense the Subjectile” is no stranger to subalternity nor to the question of whether such a subject can speak; for the Artaud whom Derrida is talking about is mad and has been hospitalized. This Artaud, it seems, comes after the subject who was Artaud. In short, this Artaud is the who who comes after the subject who was. But who is this who? Is it not the name or signature Artaud that gathers unto itself a certain thinking or theorizing by way of what one could call an abuse of language, a speaking we might associate with subalternity, and of what in Artaud le Moma Derrida associates with the quasinormality of words: the mômo as village idiot, madman, buffoon, mummy, money, spirit, and so on. (2002b, 44–46). It’s the kind of abuse that one sees in Heidegger’s work, as well, an abuse that brought ridicule down on him—from Günther Grass, for example, in Hundejahre (note the animality)—the point being that such abuse was deemed typical of crudity or subalternity (Heidegger le mômo). An abuser of language himself, Derrida brings Artaud and Heidegger into proximity. He finds in Artaud another word, perhaps a much better, – 121 –

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albeit cruder word, for Dasein: le subjectile. It is a word that not only names the subject and subjectivity, but subjection and projection. As does Heidegger, Artaud imagines the Geworfenheit of the subject, its “dissemination” in terms of the force of throwing, scattering, dismembering, and exploding. The French title, “Forcener le subjectile,” suggests a forcing (putting force behind) the projectile which is sexual, though not that alone. One can make many more associations, as Derrida will, but of course we must always come back to the fact that “subjectile” wasn’t an official word of the French language (or any language) when Artaud first used it. For example, it was not to be found in dictionaries, though one could find it (rarely) in print. (Even today the Emile Littré Dictionary lists “subjectile” only in its Supplément.) Yet Derrida can nevertheless footnote an article that “Artaud seems to have read” by Tristan Klingsor on Pierre Bonnard, published in 1921. “The use of a subjectile so rarely used before, that is, cardboard, facilitates [Bonnard’s] work,” writes Klingsor (1998c, 64). But are we sure that Artaud did read it or that he did actually remember it, if he did? This is where circumstantial speculation leaves us in the lurch. However, even if we can’t know what Artaud really read and remembered, we can say, all the same, that the word “subjectile” is always already around somewhere, that it preceded, accompanied, and perhaps followed Artaud, not unlike the philosopher’s cat in “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” Moreover, the subjectile, being in the margins of French, is marginal and, as such, subaltern. Orphaned from the dictionary, it is a splitoff bit of French that is only quasinormal, something that Artaud takes in from the cold as mot mômo, that is to say, as mummified, infantile, scathing, and mad. Le subjectile: le mot mômo, a mo-mo-mo that doesn’t or won’t speak except by way of babbling perseveration and maladresse. In other words, the mot mômo (or mo-mo-mo) is the subjectile of the subjectile, the bête that comes before, comes after, or comes alongside, perhaps like the philosopher’s cat (Derrida) or dog (Heidegger’s Hundejahre). Sub-ject-ile. Couldn’t one translate it as “he, the subject”? Or would it mean something more like a sub’s torpedo? Such reworkings (and there could be a series, as Derrida shows) speak to a certain perseveration, though on the side not just of sound, but sense, as if one were always sensing the subjectile and not simply unsensing it. Here, I – 122 –

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think, there is a bit of that animal/man difference that Derrida will encounter in “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” the borderline between sensing/not sensing, making sense/not making sense. Perhaps most significant is that as in the essay on the animal, there is in the work on Artaud a decision to try to speak in place of or for the subaltern. That is, at some point Derrida finds himself in the position of having to speak for le mômo, for le subjectile, for Artaud, for the cat, for all animals in the abbatoir, and so on. Like it or not, a certain humanization is coming about insofar as someone is speaking for the subaltern, since it does not quite speak for itself, even if there are les mots mômo or sounds in the animal world like moo moo moo. Despite Derrida’s protestation in the essay on the animal that Lacan gets it wrong when he insists in the Rome Discourse that bees communicate but don’t have language, it would appear that Derrida’s speaking for the subaltern actually proves Lacan’s point. The “subjectile” as it is enlisted into Artaud’s writings is subaltern and doesn’t speak in terms of Lacan’s parole pleine (full speech) until someone, here Derrida, speaks for it, given that otherwise this speech is just mômo (mad). We have now come back to the question of the “end of man,” if not to the limit that rests undecidably between reason and unreason, the philosophical and the counterphilosophical, a limit that, as in Nietzsche’s writings, is not stable or stabilizable, since it is precisely there that exists a Heideggerian “Satz vom Grund,” a projection, throwing, or leaping over the ground of reason which is itself part of the rule of this reason. This, I think it would be correct to say, is the aporetic limit at which the subject that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called the “subaltern” comes into view. Of course, the question of its being able to speak has everything to do with the limit at which language comes to pass in terms of its general comprehensibility—its citizenship, let’s say, within a preestablished language or community that is recognized: socially, culturally, and politically. In Derrida’s context, this immediately raises the status of writing and painting by the insane and what sorts of “speaking for” the insane have to happen in order for the “sane” to imagine that the subaltern are not just silent or locked up within themselves. In short, what kind of speaking for subalterns has to occur in order for them not to be thought of or treated as autistic beings? (This, of course, is the question Derrida will later ask with regard to the animal – 123 –

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as autistic or self-enclosed being, a being that, as Heidegger tells us, isn’t “open” to Being.) Let’s dwell on the term “autism” for a moment. The autistic person is the one who, rightly or wrongly, we may experience as “unsocializable,” a person who may appear to suffer from some kind of “empathy deficiency.” Such a person may appear to have thrown aside his or her social self and to exist more or less like an automaton: like someone who has somehow either not found his or her humanity or has perhaps lost it, in other words, someone who has reached “the end of man.” By definition such persons cannot speak. And by definition, in extreme cases they are not capable of being part of any community, not even that of the family; or, if you will, the “dyad,” as the British psychoanalytical community calls it. This autism might not be just a local psychological category for a certain type of mental illness, but could be imagined as a much more general notion that we project onto a wide variety of peoples with whom we don’t think we can communicate effectively because they’re not socializable in terms of our usual understanding of what this entails. Autism, in other words, could be a geopsychological term. For example, we might consider terrorists to be autistic, since they speak to us only by way of explosions and disasters, something that is not entirely unrelated to what the psychotic patient is thought to do in terms of his or her violent outbursts.3 To some extent, the signature Artaud signs for such a subject. And it is Artaud who has re-minted the word “subjectile,” which Derrida will speak for. Like so many crusaders for the insane in the past, Derrida speaks for madness in a way that brings its language into the realm of the neologism and the technical term for something that always already exists in a framework that is considered to be quite sane, Heidegger’s Being and Time. By way of this contextualization, this throwing of Artaud’s term into the thick of Dasein, Derrida manages to get the subjectile to speak to us. But what interests Derrida, most of all, is the fact that this speaking will never exceed a certain autism, that, in the context of Artaud, the term will never become transparent, but will remain veiled, remote, silent, inchoate, unreasonable, and unstabilizable—in a word, ungrounded, abyssal, unreasoned, and unsocial. In its retrait (its autism), the term refuses correspondence, connectivity, community, even as it throws itself at philosophy—or, if one prefers, is thrown by Derrida at philosophy—with the result that, despite its – 124 –

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autism, it is going to speak to the problematic of the subject in such a way that it actually interposes itself as a useful or helpful clarification, even as an advance that pushes further the kind of thinking that Heidegger had attempted to develop. There is a sense in which this is happenstance: there happened to be a strange word in the writings of Artaud during the period of his “insanity” that was picked up by a major philosopher decades later that was then brought into correspondence with a certain thinking relevant to Heidegger which resulted in an explanation of something in Heidegger’s philosophy to which we otherwise would not have had access. However, it’s the appropriation or picking up of the word that is happenstance (Derrida might never have come across this term or thought to question what it might mean); yet, once the appropriation occurs by way of Derrida’s having made a leap (from Artaud to Heidegger), the whole process appears to be quite reasoned, even determinate. It is here, of course, that the “end of man” (the end of Artaud the sane writer) reaches a limit whereby the rehabilitation (or relifting, to use one of Derrida’s terms from the 1960s) of that very same man (the sane, brilliant genius of a man) comes to pass. It’s the limit at which the subaltern trembles as a rigid category and loses its insignificance, its self-enclosedness (whether raving or silent, both being indicative of an uncommunicability). • To come around to Derrida’s definitions of the subjectile, it is useful to realize that they are part of a constellation of disseminated or split-off bits that radiate out like so much radioactive material.4 1. “For Antonin Artaud doesn’t speak of the subjectile, only of what is called by this name. To take account of the calling, and what is called. A subjectile first of all is something to be called. That the subjectile is something is not yet a given. Perhaps it comes across as being someone instead, and preferably something else: it can betray. But the other can be called something without being, without being a being, and above all not a subject, not the subjectivity of a subject. Perhaps we don’t know yet what ‘is called’ like this ‘the subjectile,’ the subjectility of the subjectile, both because it does not constitute an object of any knowing and because it can betray, not come when it is called, or call before even being called, before even receiving its name” (1998c, 63). – 125 –

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2. “A subjectile is not a subject, still less the subjective, nor is it the object either, but then exactly what is it, and does the question of ‘what’ have any meaning for what is between this or that, whatever it is? Perhaps the interposition of a subjectile is what matters, in this matter of drawing by hand, in this maneuver or meddling [manigances] . . . But if a subjectile is never identified with the subject or the object even when it occupies their place and being, is it the same as what Artaud so often likes to call a motif? No, it would prevent the motif, but the very counterforce of this prevention sets up an extreme tension” (71–72). 3. “Besides, a subjectile, that is to say the support, the surface or the material, the unique body of the work in its first event, at its moment of birth, which cannot be repeated, which is as distinct from the form as from the meaning and the representation, here again defies translation. It will never be transported into another language” (65). 4. “And this experiment [Artaud’s throwing himself into a description of Van Gogh’s painting] is the traversal of this jetée, its trajectory. I am calling spurt [but also leap] or jetée the movement that, without ever being itself at the origin, is modalized and disperses itself in the trajectories of the objective, the subjective, the projectile, introjection, objection, dejection, and abjection, and so on. The subjectile remains between these different jetées, whether it constitutes its underlying element, the place and the context of birth, or interposes itself, like a canvas, a veil, a paper ‘support,’ the hymen between the inside and the outside, the upper and the lower, the over here or the over there, or whether it becomes in its turn the jetée, not this time like the motion of something thrown but like the hard fall of a mass of inert stone in the port, the limited of an ‘arrested storm,’ a dam. Giving himself over entirely to this, hurling himself into the experience of this throwing [jetée], Artaud could enter the realm of relationship with Van Gogh” (75). 5. “The subjectile: itself between two places. It has two situations. As the support of a representation, it’s the subject which has become a gisant, spread out, stretched out, inert, neutral (ci-gît). But if it doesn’t fall out like this, if it is not abandoned to this downfall or this dejection, it can still be of interest for itself and not for its representation, for what it represents or for the representation it bears. It is then treated otherwise: as that which participates in the forceful throwing or casting, but also as what has to be traversed, pierced, penetrated in – 126 –

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order to have done with the screen, that is, the inert support of representation” (76). 6. “Between laying down and throwing, the subjectile is a figure of the other toward which we should give up projecting anything at all” (78). This is a far cry from what Klingsor had in mind when he wrote about Bonnard. And these quotations are but a sampling of what crops up when a genetically modified word is sown or broadcast onto fertile philosophical soil. Suddenly, what was en retrait or autistic or subaltern or null becomes prominent, discursively prolific, and authoritatively pathbreaking. Certainly, much of what Derrida writes in the passages above is in direct interlocution with “Eating Well” wherein the “who” is posited, the subjectile being this who that is “called” in the absence of its being given. As Derrida puts it in passage (1), the subjectile is perhaps a someone. Whether a something or someone (the difference here is inchoate, meaning there is no essence posited yet), the subjectile can betray. This means that as an autistic entity (precommunicative, presocial, pregiven), this subjectile has the capacity to offend and to act in a way that is unethical. That is, the subjectile is what is always capable of “turning” against me, having once been on my side. This “turning” prior to there being agency therefore does the turning. Given Derrida’s interest in Lévinas, note that Artaud is engaging in “first philosophy,” in ethics before ontology that seems based on the idea that in the beginning there was betrayal, and that this betrayal exposes the being of the subjectile as something that is not “with” or “of” me. Not only is the “turning” constitutive of subalternity, but the other is something without a being that is “of” or “related to” me. Therefore the other is inaccessible and hidden, however much there. Withdrawn (autistic), it is a subjectility that is also subalternity. At least, this is the equation I am suggesting. Not a subject, not a subjectivity, not having quidditas, the subjectile/subaltern occupies their place in example (2) in which the subjectile is neither subject nor an object; hence the who is autistically en retrait. In example (3) the subjectile is thought to function as the ground of the work of the subaltern (the entity signed Artaud). Is it désoeuvrement in Maurice Blanchot’s sense? The nonworking of the work as work? Is this subjectility the Ab-grund (or abyss) in Heidegger’s sense (in, for – 127 –

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example, Beiträge zur Philosophie) wherein the ground and its groundlessness surpass categorical differentiation? This subalternity of the subjectile as ground suggests that it supports without being able to support. Consider subaltern populations who also support/cannot support, who are there/not there, who are not working/working, and so on, the limits in all these cases being undecidable in the complex sense of being heteronomous and unsynthesizable. That they will “never be transported into another language” would be a rough translation of what Derrida is thinking into the politics of subalternity. In example (4) we move to the disseminative capacity of the subaltern to “-ject” or thrust itself into some medium. Hence we get projection with ob-jection, ab-jection along with intro-jection, and so on. The subjectile is the throwing or thrusting that interposes. It is the dropping or interposition of the veil of the subaltern that from a Western perspective withdraws from sociality (face-to-face communication), that interposes itself between one culture and another in such a way that one culture questions the other’s morality (for example, Westerners considering veiled women to be victims of an illiberal fundamentalist religious perspective, or Middle Easterners questioning the ethics of societies in which women are allowed to physically reveal themselves too much), the result being a failure to communicate and relate. Admittedly I am allegorizing, but it is a start in terms of trying to imagine the subjectile as the throw of something not given (not objectifiable, not negotiable) that is considered from a Western existential perspective to be inert, arrested, autistic (self-enclosed, undiscursive, uncommunicative, impenetrable). In terms of Islam, one may wonder whether this doesn’t have to do with the unrepresentable, with what cannot or mustn’t be shown or said: a being in the absence of a certain disclosure. To come back to the veil, it also follows the logic of what Derrida once called the hymen in that it is impenetrable, despite the fact that literally it can be penetrated. This speaks to the inaccessibility of the “who,” its dignity as that which is unreachable and therefore untouchable. But, of course, all this is from the perspective of a Western subjecthood that presupposes its own desubalternization as normative. In example (5) we see how the thinking about the veil concerns the kind of partitioning that implies a double session: a being between two places. The subjectile is like a cinema screen, the support for the – 128 –

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representation which isn’t really anything more than what has been spread out underneath it. A sheet would do. Yet, if one asked why a sheet and not a chemically treated surface with a silver coating, then the support itself becomes topical. Of course, one might ask this of a people who support a society or culture without being taken into account as constitutive of that society or culture. After all, isn’t subalternity precisely this? I’m thinking, for example, of migrant workers in California in the 1960s whose presence in many areas often wasn’t noticeable (the way a movie screen isn’t noticeable), despite the fact that the agricultural industry projected its economic success upon these very people. The work of labor organizer Cesar Chavez, of course, gave a voice and a presence to this subalternity, though it didn’t resolve the fact that illegal immigrants necessarily find themselves in the position of needing to withdraw into the invisibility of screening the economy’s success. How this screening is spread across the California economy is something one could interrogate from a number of double sessions which, of course, critics with an eye toward the issue of borderlines could enumerate. In (6), Derrida may be speaking to such issues by saying that the other (the subjectile as subaltern) should not be used as a screen, shouldn’t be projected upon at all. But one might wonder, following in the footsteps of Melanie Klein and her school, whether projective identification isn’t inevitable, something that relates to, say, subaltern studies itself. • In Derrida’s case the subjectile speaks in the place of the subaltern subject. Does it therefore speak of, to, or for the subaltern subject? Derrida writes: “I am first of all this force: captured, expropriated, stolen, persecuted, turned away, in search of its body, of a body martyred in the name of god. We have to take the body back from something that still resembles a subjectile, with a face like a subjectile, ‘the unfathomable abyss of the face, of the inaccessible surface level’” (1998c, 92). Surprising, of course, is that the subjectile can say I and that this I has a name, Artaud. For god in his true name is named Artaud, and it’s the name of this kind of unnameable thing between the abyss and nothingness, / which has something of the abyss and nothingness, / and that is neither called nor named; / and it appears that it is a body too, / and that Artaud is a body too, / not the idea, but – 129 –

— Later Derrida — the fact of the body / and the fact that what is nothingness should be the body, / the unfathomable abyss of the face, of the inaccessible surface level through which the body of the abyss is revealed . . . the abyss-body. (92)

Notice that in this italicized passage the subaltern is speaking, that Derrida is quoting Artaud himself, and that it is the case therefore that the subaltern himself can speak, because “god in his true name is named Artaud.” Moreover, this subaltern being will insist, in Derrida’s own words, that “I have been robbed, not of this or that, but myself robbed of myself, in the very stuff of myself” (93). Here Derrida is speaking for or as the subaltern, so that not only does the subaltern speak, but the subaltern is spoken for by the philosopher who is the subaltern’s representative or perhaps even the subaltern’s double. Has Derrida thrown himself into the role of the subaltern? Or into subalternity as such? And what does it mean for a thinker to throw himself at a figure like Artaud? For the philosopher to take up the cause and interests of the subaltern? Or is the subaltern being ventriloquized in such a way that it is made to take up the cause and interests of the philosopher? It would then be the philosopher who is being represented by its representative, the subaltern. Who is representing whom? For if Derrida lends Artaud a voice that enables his work to communicate to a world of intellectuals, doesn’t Artaud give a word to Derrida that works in the interests of Derrida’s thinking and writings in the 1980s? In other words, isn’t Artaud throwing himself at Derrida? Isn’t each working on behalf of the other’s interests? Don’t they throw themselves at one another for their mutual benefit? Hence aren’t we necessarily having to consider throws and counterthrows, what Derrida calls impostures, substitutions, thefts? “I have been robbed, not of this or that, but myself robbed of myself, in the very stuff of myself.” Of course, any explication du texte is eventually going to end up speaking for someone else, and even Spivak does this when she says of Derrida, “Derrida is hard to read; his real object of investigation is classical philosophy. Yet he is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” (1988, 292). In such passages it is evident that for Spivak the subject is not deconstructable or effaceable: it is there and has to be taken into account as such. Moreover, this thereness is inextricably bound up with the question of – 130 –

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representation, since the subject that explicates or lets the other speak uses the other as the ground or screen for that explication or letting speak. Moreover, this ground isn’t neutral ground, but motivated and interested in political, psychological, and other ways that could well be contradictory. Such a ground is a foreign subject, as Derrida puts it, a reactive subject that isn’t assimilable and that may even be venomous. Who is to say that, in the place of this other, one will not be greeted with a curse? This is what Derrida risks in throwing himself at Artaud —that he will be cursed for his trouble. Not that such a curse would be totalizing; rather, it would be part of some sort of combat that works either beneath or above the surface of sense, as but one of several locations, supposed by representation but never objectified as such. Silence, madness, curses, anger, disaffection . . . these are all instances of what lies beneath or above the ground that one might assume can be appropriated in good faith: “a whole Kabbala and which shits at the other, which shits on the other” (Derrida 1998c, 117). That “Kabbala” turns up in Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in terms of the South Asian texts upon which the practice of widow burning is predicated, since these texts offend the other who in this instance is Eurocentric. The colonialist do-gooder who is out to rescue South Asian women from what is considered an inhumane practice is cursed for doing so by that which is unassimilable and unfathomable: the subjectile of sati-suicide. This is at issue at the very end of the essay when Spivak mentions Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a woman of sixteen or seventeen who hanged herself in an apartment in 1926 in North Calcutta. The suicide “perhaps rewrote the social text of sati-suicide in an interventionist way.” The “perhaps” is crucial because sati-suicide is a social context that one can use or not, depending upon how one intends to interpret the young woman’s suicide, which ambivalently straddles the divide between being a political act (“She had finally been entrusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the task and yet aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself”) and the expression of a private passion (“Bhuvaneswari had known that her death would be diagnosed as the outcome of illegitimate passion”) (1988, 307). Therefore, one is left with the question of whether the political is the ground of the personal or the personal the ground of the political, or whether the political and the personal are, in fact, related at all. Spivak notes that – 131 –

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superficially “her act became absurd, a case of delirium rather than sanity,” not least because it cross-references itself with sati-suicide in ways that don’t quite make sense; for example, Bhuvaneswari had waited for the onset of menstruation so that no one would imagine she had been illicitly pregnant, but also—perhaps—because this would cross-reference with the “interdict against a menstruating widow’s right to immolate herself” (1988, 308). Bhuvaneswari’s act of suicide is subjectile insofar as it doesn’t constitute an object of knowing anything definite and because it can, in Derrida’s words, betray; not come when it is called. After all, her sati-suicide is always displaced, as Spivak argues, and therefore is never quite what it is. Moreover, as Spivak demonstrates, sati-suicide is never to be identified as subject or object entirely, even when it occupies their place. Of course, there is the question of sati-suicide as motif. Is it a cultural/social motif, or is it itself a counterforce to that? The discussion of Bhuvaneswari appears to bear out Derrida’s point that the subjectile cannot be reduced to theme or motif, something that it threatens to do even in a postcolonial discourse. In other words, it’s important that the motif not become the subject, that it not suppress and efface the subjectile. Then, too, there is the question of the woman’s body as the support, surface, or material that in its self-denying act cannot be repeated and cannot be ascribed to meanings and representations that could be translated or transported into some other language, say, that of a critical analysis (Western or not). This body, too, could become a motif, subject, or topos that effaces subjectility. Spivak, of course, is careful to show the gaps and impediments to translatability, and not only into Westernized discourses, but even within South Asian discourse. Hence when Spivak interviews someone through family connections about the young woman, she gets the response that one would be better off dealing with the more successful sisters of this unfortunate young woman and that, besides, it was all just a matter of illicit love—which is to say, that the subjectile entirely escapes (or betrays) recognition even by those who might be more likely to detect it. “The subjectile,” to quote Derrida above, “[is] itself between two places. It has two situations.” But, as Spivak shows, these places can be multiplied, the subjectile not being reducible to any of them, because, as Derrida suggests, the subjectile is precisely that which “has no story, – 132 –

— Subjectilities —

no history” (1998c, 99). In other words, the subjectile is the supposition that operates “under the surface between the surfaces of the subject or the object, offering a stubborn and clever resistance to the hand. It detours the hand toward the wrong destination, sending it literally to the wrong address, if I can put it like that” (104). The context here is Artaud’s drawing with the hand, but it relates to what the sati-suicide of Bhuvaneswari does: it sends one to the wrong destination, it forces one’s hand, so to speak, in a way that will result in a miscalculation or miscarriage. Hence one is fated to say all the wrong things insofar as the subjectile is that which betrays us—which sees to it that we’re going to err: misinterpret, misrepresent, say things awkwardly and stupidly, and so on. Derrida speaks of the subjectile as “a difference of substance or of support,” as “a departure from language,” his point being that the subjectile doesn’t speak, precisely because it is separation, moving away. Artaud himself wrote, Ten years ago language left, and in its place there came this atmospheric thunder, this lightning . . . (quoted in Derrida 1998c, 121)

This atmospheric thunder, this lightning—is it not akin to the satisuicide of Bhuvaneswari? Is it not that at some sudden stroke language left and in its place there came something else? A sudden act? Supportable/unsupportable? If Spivak’s essay has a single main point, is it not that everything she is talking about is unsupportable (or “unacceptable,” as the British say when they’re really angry)? This would extend to her well-known criticism of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault in her essay, as much as it would to her readings of Marx, Derrida, and, later, the colonialist authorities in the British Empire. Everything in this essay is unsupportable to the extent that all the analyses, even the good ones, fail the test of the reality of the subaltern, which itself isn’t supportable (domestically, politically, philosophically, religiously, culturally, etc.). This is not to say that such a reality isn’t perpetuated, only that it is unsupportable, an unsupportability that the colonialist rulers wish to make supportable, which is, in no small part, what Spivak’s article is critiquing. – 133 –

— Later Derrida —

• To come back to the “who” that comes after or before the subject: Is it not the case that this who ought to be defined as that which is both supportable/unsupportable? And isn’t Heidegger’s philosophy implicated in the pincers of this distinction? Consider the discussion of the ground of Dasein in section 58 of Being and Time. Being the ground [Grund-seiend], that is, existing as thrown [als geworfenes existierend], Da-sein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its ground, but only from it and as it. Thus being the ground means never to gain power over one’s ownmost being from the ground up. This not belongs to the existential meaning of thrownness. Being the ground, it itself is a nullity of itself. (Stambaugh translation, 284)

Nullity [Nichtigkeit] is a not that constitutes the being of Da-sein in terms of its thrownness. This, I take it, is the linkage with Heidegger that Derrida may have had in mind when he theorized the subjectile in Artaud—that there is a NOT in the existential meaning of thrownness (pro-jection). And that the ground never enables one’s ownmost being to gain power from the ground up. In what seems to be a momentary lapse back to a far more Aristotelian way of thinking, Heidegger writes that “as potentiality for being, [Da-sein] always stands in one possibility or another; it is constantly not other possibilities and has relinquished them in its existentiell-project.” This even sounds quite Sartrean. However, Heidegger will immediately add: “As thrown, the project is not only determined by the nullity of being the ground but is itself as project essentially null.” This speaks to the “being of projecting” (Stambaugh translation, 285). In the midst of this analysis by Heidegger one also finds the primordial trait of the subjectile, which I think Derrida has in mind throughout “To Unsense the Subjectile.” Being a self, Da-sein is the thrown being as self. Not through itself, but released to itself from the ground in order to be as this ground. Da-sein is not itself the ground of its being, because the ground first arises from its own project, but as a self, it is the being ofws ground. The ground is always ground only for a being whose being has to take over being-theground. (Stambaugh translation, 285)

It’s this “being released to itself from the ground in order to be as this ground” that I think Derrida implicitly equated with the subjectile, at – 134 –

— Subjectilities —

least, judging from his remarks in “Eating Well,” the interview he gave at around the time the piece on Artaud was published, as well as judging from “To Unsense the Subjectile” itself. Of course, the larger framework for Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time is primordial guilt which Dasein experiences in terms of the not or lack (or, to put it crudely, feelings of inadequacy). Contextually this relates to the question of responsibility that turns up in Derrida’s “Eating Well” where the “call from nowhere,” from Nichtigkeit, “institutes a responsibility that is to be found at the root of all ulterior responsibilities (moral, juridical, political), and of every categorical imperative” (Derrida and Nancy 1991, 110). In other words, responsibility—and ethics generally—is given in what Heidegger calls “the nullity of being the ground.” Moreover, the “who” spoken of by Heidegger himself in the “Letter” “unfolds essentially [Es west] in the throw of being [im Wurf des Seins].” In short, the “who” in “Eating Well” is also the mark of Nichtigkeit that is constitutive of responsibility (related in Heidegger as conscience, guilt, care, etc.). But, of course, it is also the term for what Derrida calls the subjectile, which has to do with subalternity in “Eating Well” in terms of a brief discussion of the animal that “has a world in the mode of a not-having . . . a having (world) without having it” (111). From my perspective, this too touches on a certain autism, which could be defined as having a world without having it. We could say that from animal, to who, to Da-sein, to person (Mensch), to friend, to Other we have a number of metaleptic reinscriptions of autism, which in Heidegger’s terms concerns the primordial Nichtigkeit or nullity-of-being-the-ground, a Nichtigkeit, moreover, that reinscribes the difference (let’s even say, the différance) between what can and can’t be supposed, had and not had. • Whether we could call Derrida’s return to Heidegger’s Being and Time some sort of existentialist recovery of deconstruction is debatable, though the argument can certainly be made that Derrida does return to existential problematics in Heidegger for the sake of revisiting, and in some ways undermining, earlier positions on the subject that were taken by the generation of ’68 in the 1960s and ’70s. In fact, Derrida’s writings of the mid- to late-1980s are far closer to Spivak’s enterprise in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” than her own citations of Derrida would suggest, these being to the earlier Derrida of the 1960s. – 135 –

— Later Derrida —

Incipiently, Derrida’s work on Artaud revises Heidegger in such a way that we can see an opening for where one might be able to situate subalternity in Being and Time’s project, something Heidegger, of course, did not do. And Derrida’s writings on Artaud make some bridges (without knowing it, apparently) to Spivak’s seminal if not celebrated essay on subalternity, insofar as Spivak also manages a rhetoric of projection (of thrownness, the jeté), of which widow burning is but one example. Of course, Nichtigkeit is central to Spivak’s piece, though she characterizes it in the existential context of silence or of not being heard, something that makes Westerners feel guilty and that spurs certain projective fantasies and attempts to speak for the Other, attempts that never quite escape miscalculation and “incorrectness.” Most important, I think I have shown that, strictly speaking, there is and isn’t a theory of the subject at work in all this. Rather there are bits and pieces of a theory of the subject, fragments or shards of such a theory, and one of the more important of them has to do with Heideggerian Nichtigkeit and ground in section 58 of Being and Time, a distant echo of which resounds in the “Letter.” Evidently, we’ve been dealing with a fairly loose assemblage that still requires sorting out, something that I don’t think will necessarily be forthcoming from Derrida or Spivak themselves, though the possibility is always there. Derrida has given us some very powerful pointers in the absence of a thorough working through of Being and Time, and in that sense he has replicated an important dimension of the French reception of Heidegger in the 1940s, which has been to intuit and notice striking opportunities for philosophical incursions and analysis in the absence of projects that actually bring these to a stage of development that goes far beyond Heidegger’s treatise of 1927. Spivak, who doesn’t make the connection of the subaltern with the subjectile in even the later revision of her essay, chapter 3 of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, also hazards the kind of systemless theory of the subject that we encountered in some of Heidegger’s writings.5 Certainly one could see this as a “weak theory” of the subject that is required to negotiate complex political and social divides, and certainly both Spivak and Derrida have refrained from resolving the question of the subject in a way that would be more of a hindrance than a help. In that sense, the who keeps one’s options open. Yet, this has been more or less what has been the case since around 1947 when Heidegger was being taken up – 136 –

— Subjectilities —

as a potentially radical thinker who served as the occasion for numerous interventions and incursions in the absence of an analytic that would or could go beyond the suggestiveness of Being and Time’s prescient speculations. Derrida’s point that Being and Time is an enormously rich philosophical text, the problematics of which we have not yet begun to explore in any significant depth, is a view that actually defers analysis and ends up keeping Heidegger’s treatise in reserve as always yet to come on the horizon of a certain philosophical radicality at which the question of who comes after the subject can be endlessly elaborated—as it is, yet again, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” Insofar as this elaboration can break open the horizons of Heidegger’s writings by means of introducing the subjectile and the subaltern (i.e., the animal), there is a case to be made that in some sense one is also always already in advance of Heidegger. In this sense, if one would be catching up with Heidegger, whose treatise is always thought to be the omega or furthest outpost of what can be thought, one would be far ahead of him too. It is in the division of this double Heideggerian session and its temporalizations (coming before, coming after, coming alongside) that Derrida has seized the opportunity to remind us that we are still of that moment in the postwar period when Heidegger, Bataille, Lévinas, Blanchot, Wahl, and others took pause to notice the remarkability of Heidegger’s thinking—that the horizon of this (chronological/achronological) moment hasn’t entirely passed and that deconstruction is, whatever else it is, of this moment, too. Moreover, in writing about Artaud, whose notebooks and drawings of precisely this period (circa 1947) are of so much interest, Derrida locates in what we might well call the Heideggerian moment of 1947 something monstrous that is quite unforeseen: the forcing about of a different kind of being or entity . . . like an opaque spot in the text, that squirts out . . . a sub-ject born in the jaws of cruelty and maladresse . . . Artaud’s miserable little specimen . . . a sewer drilled with teeth . . . a plague to which has been given a tongue,6 and licks it amorously until the first blood savagely appears on the abrupt open claws of DISASTER7 – 137 –

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Here I am following Robert B. Ray’s insight that much contemporary theory could be thought of as sociolect (1994, 279). 2. This being about something else is apropos of my own Milton and the Postmodern (1983), where I retroactively posit a number of virtual and disparate portraits of Milton in place of the synoptic one institutionalized by Miltonists. Here, too, there is an attempt to break with a mimetic critical tradition. 3. On the same page (30), notice the following: “And given Derrida’s own status as an Algerian-born Jewish leftist marginalized by a hostile French academic establishment (quite different from his reception by the youth in the American academic establishment), the sense of political impotence and hesitation regarding the efficacy of moral action is understandable— but not justifiable.” West’s conclusion that Derrida—one of the founders of a new French university, and extremely active in the politics of education reform in France—has been politically impotent because he is an “Algerianborn Jewish leftist” is clearly objectionable. This statement reinforces the suspicion either that there may be some sort of anti-Semitic stereotype informing West’s remarks or that West wasn’t very familiar with Derrida’s work and career at the time he made this statement. 4. For some of Derrida’s repeated complaints about not being taken seriously or read sufficiently, see the lengthy list of epigraphs at the beginning of my book The Theory Mess (2001). 5. Notice Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s remark in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999): “It is a curious fact that many so-called ethno-philosophies (such as the Tao, Zen, Sunyava¯da, the philosophy of Na¯ga¯rjuna, varieties of Sufi, and the like) show affinities with parts of deconstruction. This may relate to their critique of the intending subject. . . . Insofar as they locate – 139 –

— Notes to Chapter 2 — agency in the radically other (commonly called ‘fatalism’), the ex-orbitancy of the sphere of work in the ethical as figured by Derrida has something like a relationship with them” (429).

Chapter 2 1. The distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) was made by Ferdinand Tönnies in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) and later reworked by Max Weber in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922). Weber rightly saw that some social relations are predicated upon “community” (family, kinfolk, close knit ethnic groups) to which people feel an emotional tie and an obligation to serve (i.e., blood runs thicker than water); but some social relations also depend upon “society” whereby a population is willing to give up the exercise of individual will for the common good, which has particular aims and objectives. Whereas people have a personal and sentimental association with community (i.e., a concrete relation), they have an instrumental and administered relation with society (an abstract relation). The social subject belongs to both community and society, and, ideally from the perspective of the nation state, will subordinate the allegiance to the former to the objectives of the latter. In Toward a Rational Society, Jürgen Habermas replaces the term Gemeinschaft with “traditional Gesellschaft.” This fulfills the need to distinguish between small groups (i.e., tribes) and precapitalist societies that are considerably more complex in terms of social and labor stratification. I preserve the older terminology and prefer to stretch the meaning of the term Gemeinschaft to include all community groups where the social relation is personal and emotional rather than administrated and abstract. In talking about the historical transition from the hegemonic dominance of Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft I take Habermas’s description as definitive: What [occurs] is a level of development of the productive forces that makes permanent the extension of subsystems of purposive-rational action [that] thereby calls into question the traditional form of the legitimation of power. The old mythic, religious, and metaphysical worldviews obey the logic of interaction contexts. They answer the central questions of men’s collective existence and of individual life history. Their themes are justice and freedom, violence and oppression, happiness and gratification, poverty, illness, and death. Their categories are victory and defeat, love and hate, salvation and damnation. Their logic accords with the grammar of systematically distorted communication and with the fateful causality of dissociated symbols and suppressed motives. (1970, 96) – 140 –

— Notes to Chapter 2 — By distorted communication Habermas is referring to “literary” as opposed to “rational” communication. It is interesting in this context that monolinguism would be characteristic of Gesellschaft with its rationalist legitimation of all operative procedures, whereas polylinguism would be more typical of Gemeinschaft, in which expression is distorted and predicated on authoritarian or traditionalist assumptions that invoke truths more or less by fiat (fiction). But, of course, it is just as easy to argue that rational communication is, as Kafka once taught us, irrational when mediated by a social bureaucracy. Literature of the absurd teaches us that Gesellschaft is mad. There’s also a commonplace view that claims Gemeinschaft is far more sensible and transparent than Gesellschaft and that we can, in fact, work out a very rational understanding of its symbolic forms via archetypal analyses. My point is not to adjudicate which of these valorizations is correct; rather, I wish to call attention to the fact that the difference can be valorized differently and that these valorizations cannot transcend contestation. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, oppositions like society/ community are thought to follow in the tracks of dubious oppositions such as nature/culture, authentic/inauthentic, ken/stranger, and so on. Hence Nancy dismisses the distinction as worthless. However, note Fredric Jameson’s The Seeds of Time in which he sees the need for some such distinction, given the “commodification of the countryside” and the penetration of First World Gesellschaft into Third World Gemeinschaft and the many political paradoxes and contradictions that creates. Jameson’s point seems to be that the polarities of Tönnies’s distinction are particularly difficult to sort out when one moves from ideology to economy and back within a global perspective. Despite Nancy’s caveat, Derrida’s later work actually bears out Weber’s point about community and the sentimental investment that its members have in it, given that Derrida will align himself in terms of community by invoking passion and ethical terms of obligation that do not make considerable sense within an administrated world of Gesellschaft, or what Habermas calls “rational society.” Hence I think we need to preserve Tönnies’s general distinction if we are to discuss Derrida’s recent itineraries. 2. The major precursor is Georges Bataille in whose Oeuvres Complètes one finds a number of examples of the microcommunity of alterity, among them Tristan and Isolde, whose passion marks a relation/nonrelation with society as a whole, given that this passion sets them apart and in opposition to social relations (king and queen) while it founds the community it takes distance from upon the principle of love and faithfulness: Liebestod. Something entirely outside the social system is what is most internal and intimate to it. Lévinas makes a somewhat similar move in terms of his understanding of the Other, and Blanchot will complement these analyses with his fiction and self-reflexive critical commentaries. – 141 –

— Notes to Chapter 3 — 3. See Glas (1974) for a number of variations on this theme keyed to Genet. The flower as antherection, for example. 4. Translations are mine. I did consult Bettina Bergo’s English version, God, Death, and Time (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Chapter 3 1. In referring to Derrida’s “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici” from Psyché, I am giving his discussion of Emmanuel Lévinas a somewhat different slant that touches on Derrida’s opening remark, whispered by Lévinas himself: “Il aura obligé.” These are words that Derrida says are “overflowing with discretion.” The phrase “he will have obligated” is one whose “edges . . . remain drowned in a fog.” Again, “the shore is lacking, the edges of a phrase belong to the night.” Here one might argue that reference to “night” and “fog” alludes to the coming to pass of a recognition of Holocaust within a phrase or fragment of a discrete obligation. It is here that Holocaust announces itself as the “here I am” within the “very moment” of “this (very) work.” 2. In my view, the field of trauma studies is untenably divided between two rather incompatible groups. First, there are applied scientists, psychiatrists, and social workers who look upon trauma largely within a behavioral model of psychology. For them, trauma concerns the effects that violence, either physical or mental, has on individuals and the various psychological disturbances associated with that violence in the long term. Psychiatrists and applied scientists have drawn up complex hierarchical charts designating universal coping strategies with trauma during and after its administration or accidental occurrence. Blows to one’s head are deemed more traumatic over time than, say, watching someone else being tortured. As Sandra Bloom’s Creating Sanctuary demonstrates, trauma is looked upon by mental health practitioners as a social ill that threatens the well-being of society when such trauma is widespread throughout a community or communities. In other words, there are political reasons why mental health practitioners are being trained as trauma specialists, particularly in the international arena. Again, Bloom’s book suggests that if tried and true methodologies can be found that will alleviate what is known as “post-traumatic stress,” contemporary societies will be better able to clean up the psychological effects of social violence and, in particular, war—the very wars these societies perpetrate. Here I think a sinister motive asserts itself: the better society can manage trauma after the fact, the less society has to be guilty about traumatizing victims. The idea that human beings are essentially not very different from laboratory rats in terms of traumatized behavior

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— Notes to Chapter 3 — (Bloom’s analyses often revert back to such animal experimentation) obviously depersonalizes and de-psychologizes trauma from a psychoanalytical point of view. Not only that, but the idea that we can better manage traumatic stress by means of psychopharmacology—another mainstay of Bloom’s interests—involves a certain “push button” mentality that is crudely mechanist and utilitarian in conception. The second group of trauma specialists concerns those who are strongly allied to theories of representation, narration, and memory that draw considerable support from critical theory (literary, philosophical, historical) and, of course, the field of Freudian psychoanalysis. This group is loosely clustered around the problematic of representing the unrepresentable and, unlike the applied scientists, rely heavily on what Freud called the “talking cure.” Cathy Caruth’s well-known work on trauma as “unclaimed experience” considers trauma to be akin to a blind spot that eludes capture and demystification. At issue is the inappropriability of trauma and how that is constitutive of traumatic remembering. In Caruth’s anthology Trauma, Henry Krystal, who is somewhat closer to the world of psychiatry, argues that trauma is characterized by emotional dissociation and deadening, whereas Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart return to the work of Pierre Janet in order to make the claim that traumatic memory is constituted in terms of a peculiar amnesia that both forgets and acts out (repeats) the trauma. In such work, “unclaimed experience” is also clearly at issue. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub consider “unclaimed experience” in terms of the question of testimony and witnessing, and Laub, in particular, has stressed the importance of empathy as a precondition for reviving or laying claim to buried memories. The historian Dominick LaCapra, who works independently of those mentioned above, has also made a significant contribution to trauma studies in Representing the Holocaust by using Freud’s distinction between “acting out” and “working through” in the context of the historical transmission of traumatic facts. LaCapra favors “working through” or terminability and rejects the interminable repetition compulsion of a certain acting out, say, the “me voici” I’ve mentioned above, since LaCapra is of the view that it is healthier for societies to work through their traumas rather than repeat them after periods in which they lie dormant or latent. In considering the divide between applied science and applied humanities, it is evident that both groups are far apart in their thinking. To make a bald contrast at the risk of considerable oversimplifying, many in the applied sciences are tempted by mechanistic or somatic models that are grounded in British empiricism, and some in the applied humanities risk a classical Cartesian paradox central to seventeenth-century French reflection theory concerning the inappropriability of the subject’s experience in its very self-apprehension. That said, the best practitioners in both camps are

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— Notes to Chapter 3 — quite sensitive to these pitfalls and do nuance their approaches to a considerable extent. 3. Among Anselm Kiefer’s works, “Zweistromland (1985–1989)” is especially relevant here. One version of the work is an archive of Western civilization that comprises approximately two hundred lead books in two steel bookcases; it includes copper wire and glass, 14 ft × 26 ft × 3 ft. Anne Seymour’s description of this piece runs as follows: Physically the work consists of two vast steel bookcases, thirteen feet high [sic], standing end to end at a slight angle to one another, like the pages of an open book. Each bookcase is filled with massive lead books, some of them empty, some containing images and substances which record the reality of our time. There are photographs—often taken from the air—of its continual flux, of its conurbations and communications, of its skyscrapers and villages, of bridges and factories and railways, often disused, decomposing, demolished. There are pictures of the Middle East, of farmland in Germany, and studio interiors. . . . The focus sweeps from close-up to great distance, from lightness to heaviness; from the weight of lead and the tangibility of collaged substance—the local red earth of the Odenwald, human hair, and dried peas—to the soft light cloudscapes of aerial photography. . . . On the topographical and historical level (“Zweistromland”) is a reference to the ancient land of Mesopotamia, traditional cradle of civilization bounded by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, site at Nineveh of the great library of antiquity, land of the Deluge where water is the primordial element. . . . The books can be opened and read. Their substances are part of their meaning. . . . All the lead books on the steel shelves are closed. Their size and weight—each takes several men to lift it—precludes easy access by the ordinary mortal. (Seymour 1989, 9–11) On the pages following Seymour’s description there are artists’ photographs of another version of the archive, now fully developed as a series of metal shelves in a vast loft containing the debris or ashes of an archive that once was. This pulverization of the archive is represented in terms of photographic negatives which are themselves of leaden and ashen color. Some of the shelves appear to contain piles of ashes akin to what one might expect in looking at the remains of burned bodies. The loft space is itself a ruin and one of the negative prints shows a brick floor (or what appears to be a brick floor) with sinister-looking drains. In the catalogue of “Zweistromland,” Book 97 is particularly striking with its abject tufts of human hair. It is very difficult not to cross-reference this with the Holocaust. Indeed, the whole installation is overdetermined as a “double seance” in which Holocaust (contemporary Europe) and Deluge (biblical catastrophe in the ancient – 144 –

— Notes to Chapter 4 — Middle East) are intertwined. That the archive is meant to symbolize the destruction of ancient libraries—at Nineveh but also Alexandria—is paramount. No doubt, if one had the inclination, it would not be hard to map Kiefer’s “Zweistromland” onto Freud’s Moses and Derrida’s commentaries in Archive Fever. That Derrida himself has not made the connection is perhaps unfortunate, given the immediate relevance of Kiefer’s project to Derrida’s.

Chapter 4 1. See Retreating the Political, wherein the “Political Seminar” from the Fins de l’homme conference is translated. Other short papers by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe speak to the larger issue of the “end of community” and the “end of politics” in terms of identification, figuration, miseen-scène, and so on. 2. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s course script of 1959, “Philosophy Today,” which used the “Letter” and later texts of the 1950s in order to reread Being and Time. Surprisingly compatible with some of Derrida’s later readings of Heidegger (Merleau-Ponty explores the notion of the retrait), it is, for that time, a remarkable reading that sets the stage, as it were, for a later generation of French Heideggerians of whom Derrida could be counted as one. Of course, by 1959 Merleau-Ponty had context to work with, notably, The Principle of Reason and “Of the Question of Being” (see Notes de cours [1959–1961], 66–149). Curiously, Dominique Janicaud, in the Heidegger en France, 2 vols. (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), doesn’t appear to have referenced this course or its significance for the French reception of Heidegger. (Janicaud more or less casts Merleau-Ponty as anti-Heideggerian.) Volume 2 contains interview sessions with Derrida (in 1999) that detail his engagements with Heidegger since his student days. (There’s no suggestion that Merleau-Ponty’s course influenced him, or that Derrida even knew about it.) 3. Of course, autism here is being used as an analogy or metaphor, though not entirely so. 4. Let’s say that the subjectile is part of an open series that exceeds closure. See 100 Years of Cruelty for essays that attempt to come to grips with the subjectile in Artaud. 5. See Spivak’s “The Setting to Work of Deconstruction” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999, 423–431) for an update of how she reads the later Derrida. It should be clear from her summation that she doesn’t notice Derrida’s revision of positions taken in the essay, “The Ends of Man,” and that she too quickly lumps many of the later writings together as investigations of impossibility and aporia. She notices that when Derrida speaks of Algeria in the 1990s, it is the colonialist Algeria of his youth that he – 145 –

— Notes to Chapter 4 — addresses, not postcolonial Algeria. Exactly what would have to take place for Derrida to opine on the postcolonial situations of Algeria with any authority is a question she doesn’t answer, however. 6. See 100 Years of Cruelty. 7. See Aimé Césaire, “Élegie,” in The Collected Poems, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 235.

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References

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Index Compiled by Neill Bogan

academic departments and literature, 33–40, 45, 57 Acts of Literature (Attridge), 21–22 Adieu to Emanuel Lévinas (Derrida), 29–30 Allegories of Reading (De Man), 69–70 alterity, microcommunities of, 50–53 Anatomy of Criticism, The (Frye), 37, 42–47, 69 animal, subalternity of, 98, 103, 122–24, 137 “Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (Derrida), 97–101, 137 anthropocentrism, political, 101 anthropology, 36–37 anti-Semitism, 80–84, 86 apocalypse, 98–99, 101–102 appropriation/disappropration, 62–63 Arendt, Hannah, 115 Archeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault), 76 archetypal analysis, 36–37, 43–47, 55 Archive Fever (Derrida), viii, 52, 72, 75–79, 85–86, 90, 96 Artaud, Antonin, viii, ix, 99, 121–31, 133–34, 136–37 Artaud le Momo (Derrida), viii, 121

Assault on Truth, The (Masson), 77 Athenian law, 31–32 Attridge, Derek, 21–22 Auschwitz Album, The (Meier), 77 author principle, 4 autism, 124–25 autoheteronomy, 31 Bacon, Francis, 95 Barthes, Roland, 33–35 Bataille, Georges, 101, 107–13 Beaufret, Jean, 113 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 100, 110, 113–15 Being and Time (Heidegger), ix, 101, 104–6, 109–15, 117–18, 124, 134–37 Benjamin, Walter, 86–87, 90 Bhaduri, Bhuvaneswari, 131–33 Blanchot, Maurice, ix, 52, 55–57, 60–68, 70-71, 101, 106, 107, 112–13 Bloom, Sandra, 90 Blue Cliff Record (Yuan Wu), 19–22 Brünhilde, 92 “Can the Subaltern Speak” (Spivak), ix, 121, 130–33, 135–36

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— Index — Caputo, John D., vii Celan, Paul, 87–94 Céline, Ferdinand, 93–94 Chavez, Cesar, 129 Christianity: and the Jews, 81–82; and literature, 43, 60–63; and passion, 54, 62 cinder, the, 88–95 “Circumfession” (Derrida), 59–60 citizenship, 32–33 Clément, Catherine, 73–74 Color Purple, The (Walker), 48 communitarian social phenomena, 51–52 community, 54–56, 70–74, 86 Cope, Wendy, 46–47 Corbin, Henri, 116 Creating Sanctuary (Bloom), 90 criticism: literary, 15–18, 36–38, 42–47, 65–66; nonrepresentational, 12–15; systemization in, 36–38, 42–43 Critique of Postcolonial Reason, A (Spivak), 136 crucifixion, the, 54–56 cultural studies: deconstruction and, 1–24; Derrida and, viii–ix Dasein, 104–6, 110, 114–21, 124, 134–35 deconstruction: and cultural studies, 1–24; defining, 10–12; and existentialism, 100–101; passivity of, 16–18; vs. polylogue, 7; of the subject, 119–20; what is and is not, 2–3 De l’existence à l’existant (Lévinas), 110–12 “De l’existentialisme au primat de l’economie” (Bataille), 108–12 De Man, Paul, viii, 35, 69–70, 77, 113

demeure, as term, 63 Demeure (Derrida), 32–33, 57–59 Derrida, Jacques: Artaud and, 121–35; authority of, 4; and Blanchot, 60–68, 70–71; and Celan, 87–94; and Dasein, 104–6, 114–21, 124; defining of deconstruction by, 10–12; and essay form, 25–26; ethical turn of, vii, 24, 26–27; and existentialism, vii, 99–115, 135–37; and Freud, 77–90; and Frye, 52–53, 55; and Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft border, 50–53; and Heidegger, ix, 26, 105–6, 110, 116–25, 134–37; and man, 102; and monolingualism, 40; on passion, 53–57, 68–69; rejection of metaphysics, 10–11, 21–24, 93; and Sartre, 99–100, 103–4; Spivak on, 130–31; on the subject/subjectile, 120–37; and Trinh, 1–24; on trauma, 90–95; and West, 15–16, 18 Derrida: A Critical Reader, 57 Des Chinoises (Kristeva), 13 Destruktion, suicidal, 92–95 diaspora, 79–80 die-off of methodologies, 38 disappropriation, 62–63 Disney movies, 48–49 “Eating Well” (Derrida/Nancy), 99, 102–7, 119–20, 121, 127, 135 Eckstein, Emma, 77 écriture, 102 Eliot, T. S., 46–47 “Ends of Man, The” (Derrida), 11, 98, 107–8, 116–21 “Envoi” (Derrida), 12 Ereignis (appropriation), 11, 62–63, 67 essence/existence dualism, 114–21

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— Index — ethical turn, vii, 24, 26–27 existentialism: and humanism, 116–21; recovery of, vii, 99–115, 135–37 exportation and reimportation of textual elements, 39–40 Fables of Identity (Frye), 43–44 “Faith and Knowledge” (Derrida), 26, 54–55 Ferraris, Maurizio, vii Feu la cendre (Derrida), 62, 91–92 “Force and Signification” (Derrida), 10 “Force of Law” (Derrida), 58–59 Foucault, Michel, 76, 132 Freud, Sigmund: archive of, 75–79, 84, 93, 95; family of, 84; Judaism and, 77–90; legacy of, 72; and retroaction, 39 Freudian school, 79 Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (Yerushalmi), 77–78, 82–88 Frye, Northrop, 37, 42–48, 52–53, 55, 69 Gasché, Rodolphe, 3, 4 Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft border, 27, 43–52, 57–58, 61, 69 Genet, Jean, 52 genre studies, 42–47, 69 George, Stefan, 72, 81 gift, the, 50–53 Given Time I: Counterfeit Money (Derrida), 50–52 Glas (Derrida), 52 “Gloire del’infini et témoigne” (Lévinas), 65–67 Graef, Ortwin de, 77 Grass, Günther, 121 Great Mother figure, 22–24 Greek, ancient, 40–41

Habermas, Jürgen, 57–59 Hegel, G. W. F., 109–10 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau/Mouffe), 1–2, 6, 11, 17–18 Heidegger, Martin: Artaud and, 121–22; on Dasein, 104–6, 110, 116, 118; Derrida and, ix, 26, 104–6, 110, 113, 116–25, 134–37; on Ereignis, 11, 62; on fire, 93; and Gesellschaft, 45; on ground tone, 8–9; and house of Being, 28, 32, 41; on the human, 107, 113–21; in Nazi period, 114; postwar French reception of, 107–19, 136–37; on Vorstellung concept, 12–14 Hesse, Hermann, 72 Hitler, Adolf, 80–81, 83, 92–93 “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (Heidegger), 114 Holocaust, the, 77–78, 86, 88–91 Homer, 40–41 hospitality: Lévinas on, 28–34; to literature, 33–35, 49; and monolingualism, 72–74; of nature, 44 Hseuh Tou, 19–22 humanism, 113–21 identity: and genre, 43–47; and language, 41–42; politics of, 1, 34–35, 101; and science, 84–88; unsettling of, 18 il y a (“there is”) concept, 110–13 Inclusion of the Other, The (Habermas), 57–59 Inoperative Community, The (Nancy), 101–7 “Instant of My Death, The” (Blanchot), ix, 52, 57, 60–68 intentionality, 29–30 Jameson, Frederic, 47–49

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— Index — “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” (Sedgwick), 13, 39 Jones, Ernst, 76–77 Judaism: circumcision in, 59–60; and citizenship, 32–33; and intellectualism, 16; and monotheism, 80–81, 86; and psychoanalysis, 72, 77–90, 94–95; rural German view of, 45 Jung, Karl, 36–37, 72 justice, thematic of, 60–68 Kafka, Franz, 69, 109 Keirkegaard, Søren, 69, 109 Kiefer, Anselm, 91–92, 95 koan, the, 19–22 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 13, 35 Lacan, Jacques: and monolingualism, 73–74; and Sartre, 100; and systemization, 36 Laclau, Ernesto, 1–2, 6, 11, 17–18 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 101–3, 106–7, 119 language: and social identity, 41–42; withdrawal of shelter of, 29–33 Lanzmann, Claude, 99 Le Soir, 77 Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida), viii, 26–27, 103 “Les fins de l’homme” colloquium, 101 Les Temps Modernes, 99 “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (Heidegger), 28, 113–21 “Letter to a Japanese Friend” (Derrida), 8, 10–17 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 36–37 Lévinas, Emmanuel: and ethical turn, vii, 26; and Heidegger, 105–7, 110–13; and hospitality, 28–30; il y a (“there is”) concept of, 110–13; and response, 55–56;

and Sartre, 100; on testimony, 65–68 literary, the: academic departments and, 33–40, 45, 57; vs. the extraliterary, 32–43; and political/social relation, 32–33, 44, 51–54 literature: conservation of, 35–39, 49; genre in, 42–47; inhospitality to, 33–35; monolingualism of, 44–45; Roman origin of concept, 32–33; and social relation, 44, 51–54 “Literature and the Right To Death” (Blanchot), 112–13 MacDonald, Scott, 14 Magny, Claude-Edmonde, 108 mal d’archive, 76–77, 83, 89, 92–95 man, nature and end of, 98, 101–2, 116–21 Masson, Jeffrey, 77 Meier, Lili, 77 memory, 90–94 messiah, the, 86–87, 89 metaphysics: Derrida’s rejection of, 21–24, 93; escape from oppositions of, 10–11; return of, 24 Mitsein, 97 monolingualism: Freudian, 78–79; and hospitality, 72–74; and literature, 44–45; and passion, 63–64; and polylingualism, 27–32, 40–43; pre-originary, 30 Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida), viii, 25–26, 31–33, 40 monotheism, 80–81, 86 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 79–90, 93, 95 mother figure, 22–24 Mouffe, Chantal, 1–2, 6, 11, 17–18 Mythologies (Lévi-Strauss), 36–37

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— Index — Naked Spaces (Trinh), 14 Nancy, Jean-Luc, viii, 99, 101–7, 119 Nazism, 62, 67, 77–78, 80–84, 92–93, 108 New Critics, 34–36, 69 “New Cultural Politics of Difference” (West), 15–16, 18 New Philosophers, 104 Nichtigkeit, 134–35 nonrepresentational criticism, 12–15 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 106–7 Of Hospitality (Derrida), 28–29, 52, 103 Of Spirit (Derrida), viii, 25–26, 103 “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy” (Derrida), 98–99, 101–2 oral tradition, 7–8 “Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger), 8–9 Other, the: and hospitality, 28–30; and monolingualism, 31–33, 44–45; Trinh and, 17–18 Other Heading, The (Derrida), 25–26 paradox, rhetoric of, 26–27 “Passages—From Traumatism to Promise” (Weber), 88–91 passion, 53–68 Passions (Derrida), 55–57 Path, Taoist conception of, 19–22 Politics of Friendship, The (Derrida), 26, 51–52, 103 polyglossia, 40–42 polylingualism: and monolingualism, 27–32, 40–43; and politics of diversity, 34–35 polylogue, 7, 35 Positions (Derrida), 1, 3, 10 Post Card, The (Derrida), viii, 75–76, 93–95

postcolonialism, 94–95, 133, 136 postmodernism, 47–49 Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Caputo), vii Princeton University Press, 36 psychoanalysis: and Judaism, 72, 77–90, 94–95; and literature, 36–37 relation/nonrelation, 70–71 re-ligion, 54–55 responsibility relation, 50 rights: and language, 31–33; public vs. subjective, 58–60 Ronell, Avital, 13–15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 106 Sartre, Jean-Paul: Derrida and, 99–100, 103–4; and existentialism, 107, 109; and Heidegger, 112–15, 117–19; and Lévinas, 111–12; on passion, 53–54 Schibboleth (Derrida), 88 science, identitarian, 84–88, 90 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky, 13, 39 Seeds of Time, The (Jameson), 47–49 separability, breakdown of, 3–4 singularity concept, 106, 109 social relation: in community, 54–56, 70–74difference in, 28–29; and language, 29–54 Socrates, 52 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 83 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: ix; on Derrida, 26; and Trinh, 13, 15; and the who, 121, 130–33, 135–36 Standard Edition (Freud), 77, 79 Star Wars (Lucas), 48 storytelling, 5–9 subaltern, the, 98, 121–36

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— Index — subject, the: deconstruction of, 119–20; Derrida on, 120–37; and existentialism, 111–13; Heidegger on, 116–21, 134–35; and the subjectile, 121–37 subjectile, the, 121–37 suicide: and Destruktion, 92–95; in sati, 131–33 Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh), 14 survivance, 62 Taplin, Oliver, 40–41 testimony, 55–57, 59–71 themes, ethical, vii, 24, 26 Thought Woman figure, 9 “To Unsense the Subjectile” (Derrida), ix, 99, 121–35 trauma, 76–77, 86–94 Trinh T. Minh-ha, viii–ix, 1–24, 48 “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (‘within such limits’)” (Derrida), 106–7

“Unmaking and Making To the Lighthouse” (Spivak), 13, 15 Van Gogh, Vincent, 95, 126 violent vs. nonviolent, opposition between, 16–17 Vorstellung concept, 12–14, 22 Wahl, Jean, 108, 109 Walker, Alice, 48 “Waste Land Lyrics” (Cope), 46–47 Weber, Elizabeth, 88–91, 93 West, Cornel, 15–16, 18 “What Is Writing?” (Sartre), 53–54 “who” of Dasein, 105, 116–21, 121–37 Woman, Native, Other (Trinh), 1–10, 14, 17–18, 21–24 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 77–78, 82–88, 94 Yuan Wu, 19 Zen Buddhism, 18–22

– 158 –