The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning: On Responsibility in Eulogy 9781472575142, 9781472594495, 9781472575166

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning

Also Available From Bloomsbury Deconstruction without Derrida, Martin McQuillan The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida, Sean Gaston Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Nicole Anderson

The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning On Responsibility in Eulogy Timothy Secret

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury and the Diana logo are registered trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Timothy Secret 2015 Timothy Secret has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-47257-514-2 PB: 978-1-35005-093-8 ePDF: 978-1-47257-516-6 ePub: 978-1-47257-515-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Secret, Timothy. The politics and pedagogy of mourning : on responsibility in eulogy / Timothy Secret. pages cm. – (Bloomsbury studies in Continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4725-7514-2 (hardcover) 1. Suffering. 2. Bereavement. 3. Grief. 4. Eulogies. I. Title. BJ1409.S43 2015 128'.5–dc23 2014032284 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For Claudia

Rear the tomb, ye friends of the dead. Close it not till Colma come. My life flies away like a dream. Why should I stay behind? Here shall I rest with my friends, by the stream of the sounding rock. When night comes on the hill; when the loud winds arise; my ghost shall stand in the blast, and mourn the death of my friends. The hunter shall hear from his booth; he shall fear, but love my voice! For sweet shall my voice be for my friends: pleasant were her friends to Colma. – Ossian Be absolute for death; either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter – Shakespeare

Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Preface – ‘The Proffered Abode of the Dead’ Why psychoanalysis? Politics and pedagogy The structure of the argument 1

On Hemlock and Becoming Mortal 1.1 ‘A discourse of mourning and the denial of mourning’ 1.2 The anticipation of death The end of Being-there Reading Heidegger Three points about death

xi xii xvi xvi xxii xxvii 1 1 6 6 10 14

2 Articulation 2.1 A serious discussion Before deconstruction sits a gatekeeper ‘An excessively philosophical gesture’ The puzzle Articulating meaning 2.2 Hinges and pivots Beyond comprehension Derrida’s terms The sheaf The trace as a hinge

27

3

63

The Ethics of Vulnerability 3.1 A wounding of language The challenge of Levinas The ethics of ethics Il, Tu, Je, Tu, Il 3.2 Death in the order of exposition Je: The nausea of being

27 27 31 38 40 48 48 51 56 58

63 63 69 72 80 80

x Contents

4

5

6

Tu: Beyond constitution Ça: The trace of the other Il: Justice for the dead

86 91 100

The Scene of Writing 4.1 The psychographic metaphor The friend of psychoanalysis Freud’s angle Surprises from the dead 4.2 Psychic sketches The project Inside/outside The Freudian trace

109

Mourning or Melancholia 5.1 Psychoanalysis and mourning Was heißt Trauer? Ferenczi’s introjection 5.2 The ghosts of Budapest La théorie trans-phénoménologique dialogique de l’archè Three ways to eat the dead What is a crypt?

141

The Address of Eulogy 6.1 Tracing a path between two catastrophes The most common of experiences The simplest thing In memoriam I appear before him The world is gone

177

Conclusion – Closing the Tomb Notes Selected Bibliography Index

109 109 115 120 123 123 132 134

141 141 150 158 158 160 165

177 177 182 190 195 198 207 211 249 257

Acknowledgements As with any extended project, there are far more people who have influenced this work and who deserve thanks than I could possibly list. As this work is based on my doctoral thesis, I must begin with the immeasurable debt owed to my supervisor David McNeill, without whose guidance and patience this project would either not exist or would be much less than it is. I only hope that in future publications I will be able to do justice to the many themes that emerged in our discussions that I could not include here. Along with the rest of the current and former faculty members and administrative staff at the University of Essex, I would like to give particular thanks to Peter Dews, Patrice Maniglier, Wayne Martin, Beatrice Han-Pile and Dan Watts, all of whom assisted directly or indirectly with early draft material for this work. I must also offer special thanks to Étienne Balibar and Steve Gormley for their very helpful comments when examining my thesis, a few of which I hope to have responded to in this book. I would also like to thank that fantastic student body at Essex, both those I studied alongside and those I taught, who have all helped to make this a far richer work. Beyond Essex I would like to extend particular thanks to friends and colleagues at Winchester, Sussex, Kingston, UCL, KCL, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, L’école normale supérieure, L’institut catholique de Paris and the extended denizens of Stokie – in particular to Paulo Gonçalves, Annette-Carina van de Zaag, Christos Hadjioannou and Noah Gabriel Martin. I would like to offer thanks to the team at the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and BBC Radio 3 Freethinking (formerly Night Waves) for allowing me to give a public airing to some of the ideas finally expressed in full here. I would also like to thank the AHRC and Erasmus for funding in relation to my original thesis research. I would also like to thank all those at Bloomsbury, particularly my wonderful editor Liza Thompson for dealing with my many obscure queries. The highest thanks of all must go to my wife and the family members whose patience has been the stuff of legend: to Gillian, Robert and Benjamin Secret; to Claudia, Giovanni, Angelina and Morris Mancini. Lastly, it would seem entirely inappropriate to fail to acknowledge some of the dead whose voices can perhaps be heard between the lines of this text – in particular Fred and Freda Hoare, Helen Osler, Ed Hyde, Stephen Bicknell and Simon Cross.

Abbreviations See the Selected Bibliography for the full reference details of the texts below. Works by Jacques Derrida (D:A)

Aporias

(D:AEL) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (D:AL)

Acts of Literature

(D:AR)

Acts of Religion

(D:ASR) Athens, Still Remains (D:ATA) The Animal That Therefore I Am (D:BS2)

The Beast and the Sovereign, volume 2

(D:D)

Dissemination

(D:EO)

The Ear of the Other

(D:EU)

Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2

(D:F)

‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’

(D:IOG) Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (D:LI)

Limited Inc.

(D:MO)

Monolingualism of the Other

(D:MP)

Margins of Philosophy

(D:MPM) Mémoires: For Paul de Man (D:N)

Negotiations

(D:OG)

Of Grammatology

(D:ON)

On the Name

Abbreviations

(D:P)

Positions

(D:PC)

The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond

(D:PF)

The Politics of Friendship

(D:PG)

The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy

(D:PM)

Paper Machine

(D:Pts)

Points … : Interviews, 1974–1994

(D:PV1) Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume 1 (D:PV2) Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume 2 (D:RP)

Resistances of Psychoanalysis

(D:S)

Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche

(D:SP)

Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs

(D:SM)

Specters of Marx

(D:SQ)

Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan

(D:TS)

A Taste for the Secret (with M. Ferraris)

(D:WA)

Without Alibi

(D:WD)

Writing and Difference

(D:WM) The Work of Mourning (D:WT)

For What Tomorrow … : A Dialogue (with E. Roudinesco)

Works by Emmanuel Levinas (L:BPW) Basic Philosophical Writings (L:EE)

Existence and Existents

(L:EN)

Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-other

(L:GDT) God, Death, and Time (L:HO)

Humanism of the Other

xiii

xiv Abbreviations

(L:IRB)

Is it Righteous to Be?

(L:OB)

Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence

(L:OE)

On Escape: De l’évasion

(L:OGM) Of God Who Comes to Mind (L:OS)

Outside the Subject

(L:TI)

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority

Works by Martin Heidegger (H:BT)

Being and Time

(H:FCM) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (H:PM)

Pathmarks

(H:WCT) What is Called Thinking Works by Sigmund Freud All quotations from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey are referenced by ‘F:’ followed by the volume number in Roman numerals. For example, (F:XIV, 5) would signify page 5 of volume 14 of The Standard Edition. Works by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok These thinkers’ major published works are collected in volumes that include articles, editorial introductions and amendments written by various combinations of them. There are also major differences between the material included in the French and English editions of their works. One particular cause of this discrepancy is that L’écorce et le noyau was to be translated in two volumes in English with extensive additional material; however, since only the first volume was published a significantly different work was produced. To meet these particularities, we will first designate the writer or writers responsible for a particular passage by using the first initial of their surname – A, T, R, A&T, A&R or T&R – followed by an initial designating the text itself – C for The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy [Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’homme aux loups], SK for The Shell and its Kernel: Vol. 1 [L’écorce et le noyau]. For these

Abbreviations

xv

two major works, reference will cite the page number in the English edition followed by the French reference in brackets. In cases where there is no corresponding passage in the French or English editions we use ‘~’. For example, the reference (A&T:SK, ~ [320]) would refer to a passage co-written by Abraham and Torok in the French edition of L’écorce et le noyau but not included in the English edition. We have frequently retranslated passages from the French text ourselves. We will refer to the text translated in English as The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy using its subtitle Cryptonymie, resembling its original French title.

Preface – ‘The Proffered Abode of the Dead’ Why psychoanalysis? On the eleventh of August 1924, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the following lines to Countess Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck: I am, I say, convinced that these manifestations do not correspond to a false curiosity in us, but in fact indescribably concern us and (if one were to exclude them) would still be capable of making themselves repeatedly felt at some place. Why shouldn’t they, like everything not yet recognized or indeed recognizable, be an object of our effort, our amazement, our perturbation and reverence? I was for a while inclined, as you now seem to be, to assume ‘external’ influence at these experiments; I am no longer so to the same degree. Extensive as the ‘external’ is, it scarcely bears comparison, for all its sidereal distances, with the dimensions, with the depth dimensions of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be in itself almost immeasurable. If then the dead, if then those to come are in need of an abode, what refuge should be more pleasant and more proffered to them than this imaginary space?1

Although private thoughts addressed to a friend, Rilke’s remarks on séances gesture towards one of the least acknowledged or discussed Copernican revolutions of the twentieth century. Although we tend to associate a passion for spiritualism among the ‘respectable’ classes with nineteenth-century figures such as Abraham Lincoln or Charles Dickens, the great popular flourishing of séances actually came in the wake of the Great War: ‘For the war stimulated a desire, almost a desperation, in the general public to know whether those who were absent, fighting, were alive or dead, and if dead, to establish contact with them again.’2 This was also a period in which a series of scientific breakthroughs suggested the possibility of a concrete method of communication with the spirit realm: one that not only bypassed the clergy but was detached from any established religious perspective. From Thomas Edison to Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell to John Logie Baird, almost all of the major pioneers in the field of early telecommunications technology made attempts at extending the range of



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their capacity to receive and communicate pulses, sounds and images beyond spatial distances and into the realm of the dead. Baird even claimed to have been contacted in Morse code by Edison’s ghost who, from his home on the astral plane, was still working on recording technology to facilitate communication between the realms. It was perhaps inevitable that when a public thirst willing to pay a hefty sum for good news from the beyond collided with serious intellectual scrutiny, ever more cases of occult charlatanism were exposed. While remaining popular with the public throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the field rapidly lost its status as a respectable area of scientific and theoretical research after the Great War. Among philosophers, a group rarely slow to dismiss a popular craze, the two major lines of thought born during the interwar period firmly rejected such beliefs as metaphysical speculations that should be passed over in silence, or judged them an inauthentic evasion of the finitude of temporal existence. Indeed, what might strike us as peculiar today is not that philosophy turned away from the occult but that earlier twentieth-century philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James had taken these manifestations seriously at all. After all, had not the young Spinoza dismissively placed ‘that ghosts appear in mirrors’ alongside men turning into stones, talking trees and gods becoming beasts in his list of fictitious ideas that can only even be imaginatively entertained by those who have failed to understand nature?3 Yet perhaps we can partly attribute the dwindling of serious interest in a concrete method of communication with external spirits to another source. As we have seen, Rilke maintained his interest in occult phenomena while suggesting that the dead – rather than persisting in a spiritual space beyond the limits of physical space or within physical space as a subtle form of matter as Edison proposed – might dwell within the ‘depth dimensions of our inner being’. Under such a hypothesis, instruments like the pointer on a Ouija board remained legitimate instruments for receiving messages from the dead. Rather than being driven by the quasi-physical presence of an airy spirit blowing the delicately held pointer, such messages would come about through involuntary muscular spasms in the living who, unknowingly carrying the dead within the vast compass of their inner space, bring forward messages otherwise inaccessible to their conscious minds. To begin to understand Rilke’s inspiration, it suffices to recall his affair with the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé and through this his friendship with Sigmund Freud.4 If at the turn of the century ever more sensitive recording and telecommunication technology had suggested the possibility of contact with the

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externally conceived dead through devices such as Edisonian spirit phones, the emergence of what we might call psychoanalytic technology brought a similar promise of contact with an internal or internalized dead.5 Indeed, both might be seen as technologies of amplification: the spirit phone amplifying the minuscule physical impacts of a ghostly entity’s subtle matter to an observable scale just as the psychoanalytic technique drew attention to the previously unnoticed details of dreams or slips of the tongue through which a hidden internalized material manifests itself. What this amplificatory technology might offer for scientific study would itself constitute a form of technology: the natural quasi‑mechanical processes of the spatially extended psyche that originally inscribed the dead as independent and active agents within the hidden folds of their proffered abode. While more traditional accounts of human psychology would reduce any notion of the persistence of the dead within the living to an archived series of inert, broadly accessible and transparent memories of past times spent together, the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious suggested far more dynamic possibilities with regard to the dead or absent other’s survival within the living. By the time Freud published The Ego and the Id in 1923, a melancholic internalization of the absent that rendered them an independent voice within the psyche had become the basis of ethical conscience and the restrainer of otherwise rampant desires. The original account of pathological, failed mourning thus became the precondition of civilization and its concomitant discontent: binding the inauguration of ethical conscience to the inauguration of political society. Furthermore, as Judith Butler has forcefully argued, even the most basic pole of reflective conscious self-identity – the imaginary Ego that we take ourselves to be – is constructed through a gesture of turning back upon the self through mourning and imitating lost objects of libidinal attachment.6 Thus, according to psychoanalysis, both the Ego and the accusatory voice of conscience (the Super-ego) that holds it to account are patched together in a Frankensteinian manner from identifications, introjections and incorporations of absent others who, if not actually dead, are at the very least internalized through the mechanisms Freud first outlined in his account of mourning. In a related but distinct manner, we will find in Jacques Derrida’s account that the internalized dead – those who clearly no longer exist in themselves as they did when alive yet who cannot simply be reduced to a narcissistic fantasy within a properly closed subjectivity – persist in a manner that ‘so marks the self of the relationship to self ’ that the Ego’s self-relation ‘becomes the coming of the other’ (D:MPM, 21–2). That is to say, to obey the Delphic injunction at the heart of philosophy and ‘know thyself ’ we must go by way of our dead. To reflect on one’s self would



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not be a matter of relating to the snap-shot temporality of a transparent cogito or the lived experience of a present material body, it would rather be to grapple with an opaque transgenerational inheritance that is anything but dead. Indeed, to ‘know thyself ’ becomes a task that increasingly resembles what occurs on the psychoanalyst’s couch. No matter how hard Freud attempted to legitimize psychoanalysis as a medical discipline through an account of pathological conditions, symptoms and cures modelled on physiological disorders, the underlying schema of his account of psychic disorders and their treatment retains an uncanny resemblance to the occult disturbances found in ghost stories. A traumatic, unresolved event from the past returns after a period of latency as an intang­ible yet disruptive symptom that ‘haunts’ the living: it continually makes itself known in the present through uncontrollable, repetitive and apparently meaningless events; subjected to analysis, it is revealed that these events hold a secret significance relating to the narrative of their origin whose unresolved tension they have symbolically encoded; this significance might point towards a debt that demands resolution, often itself rooted in a thwarted desire held by one who is now lost yet whose due continues to manifest its claim through the living; laying this ‘ghost’ to rest will demand the painstaking investigation of a nocturnal and almost inaccessible realm; and this investigation can only hope to succeed if guided by an expert in such ‘hauntings’ who, through a combination of natural gifts, training and experience, has learnt to hear and interpret signs coming from this shadowy realm that others simply fail to perceive. For psychoanalysts this coincidence would certainly not indicate that Freud illegitimately imposed on clinical material a model lifted from the ghost story. Rather, the folk-traditions themselves would have encoded in these fantastical tales the accrued wisdom of centuries of observations of the causes, consequences and cures of what we today recognize as mental traumas.7 That dangerous consequences follow on from a failure to do our duty to the dead and that a process such as reinterring a corpse with correct burial rites may be required to stop bursts of unfathomable irrationality and suffering are recurring themes in folktales across cultures and time-periods, yet it is arguably only with an account of the internalization of the dead within the living that this becomes compatible with the modern ontological stance embodied in Spinoza’s contempt for externally conceived spirits. Of course, even if such accounts of the internalization of the dead were accepted (whether construed in terms of a medical or ghostly vocabulary) and if we furthermore came to accept that a psychological account of the origin of

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ethical conscience and political society makes essential reference to such losses and internalizations (as would be suggested by Freud’s account of the Superego), we might still question whether these investigations are relevant topics in ethics or political theory. While a genealogical account of the emergence of our actually experienced moral conscience is clearly relevant for the discipline of moral psychology, there is no obvious way in which it will tell us anything about what the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ decision might be – or even what the terms of such an evaluation should be.8 While psychoanalysis might offer a narrative account of why a particular individual, group or nation has a conscience that is excited by one issue rather than another, this remains detached from what they ought to be concerned with. For example, we can imagine a society where scenes of brutal slavery evoke no response, yet people torture themselves over minor breaches of courtly etiquette. In short, even if the Super-ego is the psychological moral faculty and it is constituted through loss, it is not necessarily moral. Indeed, perhaps it is as irrelevant to philosophical ethics as the ontogenesis and biochemical composition of the retina is to the philosophy of perception. There are three points that would immediately count against such a position. First, we might wonder whether the mechanism of our actual, experienced conscience – however prone to perversion and constrained by one’s culture and upbringing it might be – is really so detached from the ought. In our earlier example of a community whose members are unmoved by the sight of slavery, we might nevertheless anticipate that their conversion would unavoidably involve an appeal to their conscience. There would seem to be something lacking in a conversion based purely on economic calculations and that opens the possibility that the call of conscience is more than an expression of local cultural prejudice.9 Even if they are not ultimately the same question, some connection between the ethical question ‘What ought I do?’ and the transcendental-anthropological question ‘What is Man?’ seems crucial. Many would find an account of ethics incomplete unless it delineates postulates of practical reason that make our actual attempts to do our duty reasonable; alternatively, they might focus on realized structures of concrete ethical life [Sittlichkeit] in our society rather than abstract, formal ideals. Indeed, even those who deny the common doctrine that ‘ought implies can’ and who insist that ethics makes essential reference to an unachievable and even inhuman ideal normally maintain this stance in light of the consequences in concrete reality of striving for that impossible ideal. Thus, without reducing ‘what we ought to do’ to ‘what our historically developed conscience tells us we ought to do’, there are strong reasons to maintain that the mechanisms and development of our actual conscience must be worked within ethical or political theory.



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Secondly, entering the psychoanalytic conceptual field might help us to grasp certain intuitions about ethical and political situations that cannot easily be explained in terms of our common-sense ontological picture of the world. In particular, it seems reasonable to suggest that a psychoanalytic account of the quasi-material internalization of the dead within the living would make the specific obligation that we continue to feel towards them more readily intelligible. Perhaps the peculiar feeling of responsibility to the dead themselves that we experience when called upon to give an act of eulogy – the feeling of standing before them, of still being looked at by them and called by them to do justice to them – can only be rendered rationally intelligible through psychoanalysis. Lastly, as Rilke suggested, perhaps our curiosity with regard to occult phenomena is not a ‘false curiosity’ since if we were to ignore them they would still be capable of making themselves ‘repeatedly felt at some place.’ A common motif in both ghost stories and psychoanalytic case studies is that those who bullishly ignore the mechanisms of the hidden realm – even if they do so in the name of pursuing a noble cause – inflict a heavy price on themselves and those around them. Are we not ethically obliged to understand and work with our actual psychic constitution? In many ways this is at odds with the philosophical tradition. If the everyday use of saying that someone ‘takes things philosophically’ still points towards the model of a Stoic sage who remains resolutely focused on the present and the achievable – sublimely indifferent to a past that cannot be altered and that should not be uselessly dwelt on – then we might oppose to this a ‘psychoanalytic’ way of taking things characterized by attentively working over and working through past traumas.10 The Freudian gamble is that the apparent self-mastery proclaimed by the model Stoic makes for an ideal breeding ground for slavery to unknown symptoms and passions, perhaps leading to the irrational and destructive repetition of past patterns of behaviour.11 For the psychoanalyst, in so far as we can hope to freely enjoy the present, our angle of approach must be indirect – we must first pay our debts (a task that first requires establishing what those debts are and that presents particular problems if some of them are unpayable). Not only would this indirect ‘psychoanalytic’ life be opposed to a certain conception of the ‘philosophical’ life, it would also be opposed to those attempting a quick exorcism of their haunted past through psychoactive medication or medical techniques that focus on eliminating symptoms rather than their underlying causes.12 However theoretically and historically questionable this simplistic opposition between a direct ‘philosophical’ approach to life and an indirect ‘psychoanalytic’ approach might be, we can nevertheless discern across these three points a loose

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trajectory for how contemporary psychoanalytic research might shift the focus of mainstream philosophical work on ethics and politics. If we have provided some reasons for philosophers becoming interested in the themes of mourning and haunting as they emerge in psychoanalysis, the question remains of whether we should interpret Freud’s work as the blazing light of Enlightenment reason penetrating the shadowy realm of the occult to reveal its phantoms as the illusory epiphenomena of complex brain processes, or, on the contrary, whether we should take psychoanalysis as a sophisticated account of the being and behaviour of ghosts?

Politics and pedagogy The ontological question we just ended on can be easily avoided by practising psychoanalysts. They have no need to make a decision over whether their use of ghostly vocabulary constitutes positing or eliminating ghosts. Their vocabulary can be justified purely in terms of its appropriateness in modelling the phenomena and the effectiveness of the therapeutic actions and interactions it facilitates. This would seem to be broadly the trajectory of the psycho­ analysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. In their works we encounter a rich gothic tapestry of haunted intrapsychic crypts and transgenerational phantoms; however, they would clearly not be committed to any direct assertion one way or the other as to whether the phantoms they struggle with ‘exist’. It is quite possible that the terms ‘crypt’ and ‘phantom’ bear no more relation to actual crypts or phantoms than ‘hysteria’ does to the womb. However, the influence of Abraham and Torok’s theories on several philosophers’ works, most notably the vocabulary’s adoption by Derrida in his most explicitly political works, means that the question of this vocabulary’s usage and meaning is not simply a matter for psychoanalysis. If we look at a text such as Derrida’s Specters of Marx, with its long subtitle The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, we can immediately see that it is steeped in a psychoanalytic vocabulary of ghosts, inheritance, debt and mourning. Indeed, as Derrida states near the beginning of this, his most famous political text: ‘First of all, mourning. We will be speaking of nothing else’ (D:SM, 9). Freud’s ‘work of mourning’, reformulated through Abraham and Torok’s spectral vocabulary, is not only a central reference in this major rereading of Marx, it is also placed at the heart of his tentative plans for the creation of a



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‘New International’ – a task that many in his wake have attempted to take up as a practical political project that aims at the concrete achievement of certain ambitions inherited from the Marxist tradition. Not only is this vocabulary prevalent throughout this particular text, a similar interweaving of an account of ethical responsibility drawing on Emmanuel Levinas and the psychoanalytic account of mourning occurs in almost all of Derrida’s texts that explicitly focus on political matters: from The Politics of Friendship and The Other Heading to Rogues and Philosophy in a Time of Terror. If the broad project that is called the ‘New International’ amounts to the construction of a new politics with a new model of political agency and organization, then what does mourning construed through a vocabulary of spectres allow us to do and to think that would be impossible, or at least more difficult, without it? One of the major purposes of this book is to undertake important preliminary work towards that goal. We refer to this work as preliminary because what we will endeavour to address is not ‘the politics of deconstruction’ as it is developed in the works already mentioned. Instead, we intend to focus on the call of responsibility that opens the threshold of that politics. In particular, it will be a matter of expanding on some of the stakes and mechanisms at work in the opening ‘Exordium’ to Specters of Marx that are not directly addressed in that text. It is here that Derrida writes of how ‘it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this, the spectral, is not. Even and especially if this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such’. It would be a matter then of learning to ‘live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly’ (D:SM, xvii–xviii). It is in this context of learning to live more justly with the spectral, even and especially if the spectral is not and is never present as such, that Derrida made the following rather grandiose assertion that underlies this entire book: No justice – let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws – seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political, or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning

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those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question ‘where?’ ‘where tomorrow?’ ‘wither?’ (D:SM, xviii)

Despite the obvious importance of these opening passages for the project of Specters of Marx, none of the works we have referred to as ‘explicitly political’ offer a particularly direct account of the processes that would allow one to stand ‘before the ghosts’ of the dead. If we want to get a solid grasp then on what Derrida’s political works might offer the ‘where’ of ‘tomorrow’, we would suggest that we must first establish how the account of a just ‘commerce without commerce’ with the dead unfolds in the other major portion of Derrida’s works where Abraham and Torok’s spectral vocabulary is at stake: his explicit acts of eulogy.13 It is in these texts that we most clearly witness an always singular articulation14 of the call of an infinite, radical and rupturing responsibility (such as was formulated in Levinasian ethics) with the psychoanalytic technology of the mourned other’s psychic inscription (as found in Freud and expanded on in the works of Abraham and Torok). We will endeavour to show that, in his eulogies, Derrida’s task of doing justice to the singularity of the dead other – a private and painful labour that initially appears to be a question of ethics rather than politics – is not merely analogous to the justice and responsibility called for in political action but already opens onto the field of recognizably political responsibility. While what this means will only become clear in the course of our investigation, we might pre-emptively suggest that in Derrida’s varied articulations of the discourses of ethics and psychoanalysis we are already forced out onto the wider, fractured and aporetic field of responsibility and inscription, negotiation and decision – a field that itself already merits the title ‘politics’ as that term will come to be understood in this text. The second ambition of this book is to draw attention to the education one can hope to derive through exposure to finely crafted examples of doing justice to a singular other in eulogy. In each case a unique set of aporias or ‘double binds’ is encountered, endured and broken with. The double binds that interest Derrida are not positive binds, as when one is torn between a duty to tell the truth and a duty to protect a friend, but negative binds when either option constitutes a catastrophe and one is compelled to trace an impossible middle path: as Odysseus did, losing many men, in struggling to chart the least-worse failure between Scylla and Charybdis.15 Following the title of Derrida’s collection of political interventions and interviews, we will call this an art of negotiation.16



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Without implying that Derrida was an ethically exemplary individual or saintly figure, we will argue that he displayed a particularly nuanced sensitivity in the concrete examples he has left us of handling the responsibility of eulogy. In these highly self-referential texts he guides us through the painful process of attentively negotiating a double bind – the moments of endurance, decision and failure at stake in the production of the eulogistic text itself. In reading these works we are presented with a training analogous to that offered by a master craftsman: one in whose apprenticeship we can hope to learn skills such as measure and sensitivity to the material medium being worked with, skills whose relevance stretches far beyond the art of eulogy. The education that these texts offer does not amount to a set of rules for ‘good’ eulogy. This training would instead resemble the development of taste in the Kantian account of art where good works constitute a body of distinct examples without binding principle or law. In learning to appreciate poetry one encounters and learns to appreciate the singularity of each poem, each of whose quality is not determined by their conformity with any particular rule since each makes use of quite different structures, metres and rhythmic techniques. However, we increasingly discover that the choice of structure, metre and technique was not picked arbitrarily by the poet but was called for and even necessitated by the singular subject the poet was responding to.17 While studying well-crafted eulogies will no more necessarily lead to one becoming a good eulogist than reading the poetic canon makes one a good poet, it is quite shocking how little effort most of us make to study what is at stake in good eulogy considering it is a form of expression we will all likely be called on to offer at pivotal moments in our lives – moments at which most people find themselves entirely unprepared and overwhelmed. What is at stake more broadly here is an education in the negotiation of the aporetic ‘double binds’ that confront and stall us so often in political decisionmaking. One might argue that we negotiate with such ‘double binds’ in many other forms of writing. We will see Derrida himself draw close parallels between the pressures of doing justice in writing a eulogy and in translating a poem. However, while many of us will never translate a poem or will do so without experiencing an overwhelming sense of responsibility, eulogy is the one discourse whose duty can and probably will strike every one of us and that we will simply not be able to take lightly. Eulogy is not unique, though it offers itself as paradigmatic and as an ideal site for the training for political society that will be referred to as ‘civility’.18 As a further justification of our focus on eulogy, we will see across this text that Derrida expands mourning and eulogy from events that fall on us in the

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aftermath of an actual death to being structures that mark the entire processes of love and friendship, discipleship and internal dialogue. It will be shown that in every friendship, and for Derrida ‘the things of friendship and of thought’ cannot be separated (D:WM, 137), we are already involved in what he will call originary mourning or pre-originary mourning. Mourning and eulogy are thus permanent states that we are already involved in and already learning from. In becoming attuned to the responsibility we are bearing and how we are bearing it in our daily lives, we find that the endurance and decision that is offered in an exemplary manner in the crafting of a eulogy is always already being engaged in. This training in civility is unavoidable, permanent and ongoing across friendship and thought, yet it can be welcomed or rejected, repressed or accelerated. As we will see, it is a matter for Derrida of learning how to experience and endure the ‘passion’ of a double bind such that when one inevitably breaks with the impossible pressures exerted on us – through negotiating an ultimately unjustifiable productive path between them – one does so in a state of maximal vigilance, awareness and ‘bad conscience’. Derrida’s broad claim about such double binds is that they cannot be assumed triumphantly, ‘one can only endure it in passion. Likewise, a double bind cannot be fully analyzed: one can only unbind one of its knots by pulling on the other to make it tighter, in the movement I have called stricture.’ Yet, while such double binds can only be experienced or endured in passion, they can be ‘endured in a thousand different ways’. It is ‘never one and general but is the infinitely divisible dissemination of knots, of thousands and thousands of knots of passion’ where ‘without this double bind and without the ordeal of aporia that it determines, there would only be programs or causalities, not even fated necessities, and no decision would ever take place. No responsibility, I will go as far as to say no event would take place’ (D:RP, 36–7). We can glimpse in this last claim the manner in which the politics and pedagogy of our title come together. If we are interested in the political question ‘where tomorrow?’ from the perspective of events and decisions that cannot be reduced to programmatic calculation or the causal unfolding of being – events whose justness might interrupt that unfolding precisely by drawing on a commerce with a spectral that is not – then we must learn to recognize, endure and break with aporetic double binds in the right way: the right way always being as unique as that which we have learnt to vigilantly respond to. In summary, through turning towards Derrida’s eulogies we aim to suggest both how these texts already open up onto the political domain and how they help to train us for the political domain.



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The structure of the argument Since we are advancing the claim that each of Derrida’s eulogies functions in a unique manner through responding to the singularity of the dead, it is tempting to get quickly stuck into close readings of those works. After all, if they are exemplary at displaying what is at stake in mourning and politics, along with training us for civility, surely focusing on them is the point. This is certainly a seductive option since they are beautiful, powerful and infinitely rich texts to work on. The major danger of this pathway would be that the very force of this seduction would lead to mere paraphrase and summary of points far more richly made in the source material. The major alternative would be to focus on laying the groundwork that is at stake in these texts by engaging in a detailed elaboration of the strands of twentieth-century thought on death that are being woven together in the eulogies, along with the method and drive of that weaving. The obvious danger with this approach is that a project we have partly justified as a preparatory labour for turning to Derrida’s explicitly political works would become doubly preparatory, only preparing the reader for the eulogies. Although we engage in both approaches, that the emphasis of this text falls on the latter option must be justified. One major factor in this decision was the desire to produce a text on certain themes – death, mourning, haunting and eulogy in relation to politics, responsibility and decision – rather than to produce a work on Derrida. That we have not only found Derrida’s eulogies exemplary but also produced a text that is structured around his claims should not be taken to immediately categorize this as a piece of Derrida scholarship. Indeed, it is partly out of fidelity to the importance of his thinking on these themes that we have deliberately sought to produce a text that cannot be readily pigeonholed under his proper name. In so far as philosophical interventions can nevertheless not avoid being filed under proper names, we strongly believe that the arguments offered here will be of at least as much interest to scholars focused on Levinas or psychoanalysis. Another simple factor that led us to focus on an elaboration of broader theoretical structures and mechanisms at work in the philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions that culminates in Derrida’s eulogies was an acute awareness that there is already such a strong community of highly trained literary scholars engaging in meticulous close readings of his texts. By focusing on larger structures rather than the nuances of the written word, we are simply playing to our strengths rather than devaluing other approaches. After some time working on the themes of this text, the basic conceit for structuring, it presented itself. This was Derrida’s very brief reference

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in Aporias to what would be required for there to be a ‘serious discussion’ between the three key discourses on death in the twentieth century – Heidegger, Levinas and Freud. Although Derrida never asserted this directly, it became clear that precisely such a ‘serious discussion’ was occurring in an always singular manner in each of Derrida’s eulogies. While many other discourses would also be at stake in those eulogies, most obviously those of the dead themselves, the broad ‘angles of discourse’ that were metonymically referred to under those proper names Heidegger, Levinas and Freud were a constant factor. Indeed, it became clear that not only was a commerce without commerce with the ghosts of Heidegger, Levinas and Freud taking place here, but a commerce without commerce between them. The simple puzzle that this led to was how Derrida’s particular approach brought about such a commerce. Secondary texts on deconstruction have tended to focus on Derrida’s skill at showing the self-deconstruction of a particular textual body, yet this general model offered little explanation for how that process allows and even necessitates transdisciplinary articulations and contaminations. If Derrida’s eulogies are loci where discourse such as Levinas’s and Freud’s act on and transform each other, then how are we to account for that possibility? In this question of articulation and hinges, the graphic mark ‘trace’, and particularly ‘trace of a trace’, suggested itself as offering a way of accounting for contact between the time outside of time of Levinas’s immemorial past of the wholly other and the space outside of space of the dead’s proffered abode, the Freudian psyche with its crypts and spectres. In the first chapter we begin by considering the Western philosophical tradition’s original theme of learning to die and mourn, addressing the major concern of whether today we can still talk about ‘death’ in the singular without engaging in Eurocentrism. Should death be abandoned for deaths – the anthropological study of different cultural attitudes and practices of death? What unites the discourses of Heidegger, Levinas and Freud is that they refuse to give up death taken in the singular as a central theme for philosophy and psychoanalysis. In the second half of this chapter we address the reason Heidegger turned to death, showing how this has almost nothing to do with predictable motivations such as anxiety about one’s own mortality, even if death is encountered through anxiety. We then address the manner in which we should read Heidegger before turning to three points about death in his works: the shift from death to Being-towardsdeath, the relation between the sciences of death and the existential analysis of death, and Heidegger’s argument that the other’s death cannot give us access to death as such.



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In the second chapter we address deconstruction, primarily asking how Derrida’s work can function to bring about a dialogue between discourses. This will lead us to offer a rudimentary account of the production of meaningeffects on the field of presence from textual material’s articulation. Having given an outline of how textual systems are constructed and deconstructed on the ‘general text’, we will turn in more detail to the notion of hinge-words allowing contact between discourses. We will elaborate in some detail an account of Derrida’s technical terminology in its graphic rather than logical dimension, leading to a discussion of the articulation of separate graphics beneath a single mark in the account of the sheaf from the essay ‘Différance’. With this in place, we will close with a discussion of the ‘trace’ as a particular graphic mark. In the third chapter we turn to Levinas, focusing at first on how his genetic phenomenological method that begins from a political given leads to his account of ethics and egoism, rather than seeing him as a thinker of ethics who turns to politics as an supplementary afterthought. We then address the motivations that led Levinas to his concern with alterity, namely the key notion of escaping Being, and how ethics in Totality and Infinity finally offered such an escape. Turning to the fundamental reformulation of infinity offered in ‘The Trace of the Other’, we will show how the concept of the ‘trace’ allows Levinas to move the other beyond Being, using the notion of an immemorial past as a designator for a space beyond the spatio-temporal constitution of the transcendental ego, such that any question of the wholly other’s real ‘existence’ is inappropriate. Lastly, in a key argument, we will show how this reformulated ethics, focused on the excessive emotion evoked by the mortality of the singular other whose death would close us within Being, cannot account for an ethical duty to the dead. In the fourth chapter we turn towards the model of the extended psyche in Freud and the mode of intrapsychic writing that takes place within it. Focusing on Freud’s early ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, we give an elaborate picture of the baroque neuronal model that continued to implicitly mark his later work. The focus of this chapter is an account of how the Ego itself, along with particular memory objects, is a written construction ‘traced’ on the psyche. In the fifth chapter we turn specifically to the Freudian account of mourning and melancholia as extended by Abraham and Torok. To account for Abraham and Torok’s distinctive use of introjection and incorporation, we will return to Sandor Ferenczi’s original account of introjection that was (perhaps productively) misread by Freud. Against this concept of the healthy introjection of projected drives encountered in the world, we will show how Abraham and Torok’s notion of failed mourning or incorporation establishes the dead within

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a crypt in the psyche. The structure of this notion of the crypt as an encryption machine will be explored by turning to Derrida’s major text on the crypt, ‘Fors’, which we would also argue to be his first explicit act of eulogy. It will be argued that, taking into account our Levinasian pledge to the wholly other, both introjection and incorporation constitute catastrophic failures that a singular path must be negotiated between – a path exemplified in the production of eulogy. In the final chapter we will address further eulogies by Derrida, showing how a singular and unique articulation of the Levinasian ethical demand and Freudian intrapsychic writing is at stake in these works. We will focus on these particular texts: ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, Mémoires for Paul de Man, ‘By Force of Mourning’ and ‘Rams’.

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1.1  ‘A discourse of mourning and the denial of mourning’ Two strong contenders for the title of the oldest and thus perhaps the original cliché would surely be that ‘To philosophise is to learn how to die’ and that ‘Philosophy begins in wonder’ – claims whose early formulations can be traced back to Plato’s Phaedo and Theaetetus respectively.1 One slightly perverse way of connecting these apparently distinct claims would be to feel wonder at the very fact that there does indeed seem to be ‘something’ right about the claim that the activity of philosophical reflection itself – despite tremendous variations in its methodology and practice, its fields of concern and objects of attention, its institutions and pedagogy, not to mention the extremely divergent assumptions and aims that have driven it in different periods or simply in the activity of different thinkers – teaches us ‘something’ about our relation to death. Is it not truly a thing of wonder, in the sense of being a cause of puzzlement and perplexity, that activities as diverse as defining the nature of art, questioning the legitimate limits of state sovereignty, specifying induction’s justification in the scientific method or determining the semantic function of demonstrative adjectives, would all somehow be united in producing a kind of education with regard to dying? Does this hypothetical education arrive simply as a by-product – the secretion of a certain type of rational mental exercise even when the question of death is not posed in the investigation? Alternatively, is there some manner in which our temporal finitude is always implicitly posed and worked over in philosophical activity? Furthermore, is a certain ‘philosophical’ relation to death the true endpoint, goal or telos of all the various branches of philosophical activity (whether that destination be a Spinozistic focus on life or a resolute Heideggerian appropriation of mortality – assuming these are genuinely distinct positions); or is it that our mortal nature is the

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origin, opening or precondition of philosophical reflection itself – whose goals might then be multiple, varied and constantly reformulating themselves on death’s ground? Perhaps, however, our original claim was excessive. Despite the sagacious nodding of heads we are likely to elicit by declaring the entirity of philosophy to descend from Socrates’ deliberations before the hemlock, if we actually try to pin down the relation between Willard Quine’s ‘New Foundations for Mathematical Logic’ and death or to judge what Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit can teach us about dying, then we are in great danger of falling into the very pitfall the latter text set out to define. Is it not a quintessentially romantic extravagance to refer, with Derrida, to ‘all of philosophy’ following Socrates as ‘a discourse of mourning and of the denial of mourning’ focused on ‘the exercise, care, or practice of death’ (D:ASR, 31)? Indeed, is this extravagance not damaging to philosophy: to its purity, its diversity and its capacity to change? What advantage could be hoped for from imposing a static criterion on such a historically fluid discipline – defining in advance its borders and concerns in parallel with the temporal borders and concerns of human life? Would the underlying claim be that such a thanato-pedagogical function is a necessary or a sufficient condition for a work claiming the title ‘philosophy’ or at least ‘philosophical’? If sufficient, then what if such an educative function also emerged from art criticism or theoretical physics? If necessary, then would texts that failed to function as existential therapy lose their philosophical status?2 Even if we did not allow such a function to define the essence or borders of the discipline, would the defender of such a doctrine not at least be committed to evaluating the quality of philosophical works in accordance with this controversial thanato-pedagogical criterion: ranking certain philosophers and their works as superior to others in accordance with the teaching (explicit or implicit) that they offer on death?3 Lastly, defending this position would seem to place us in the unenviable position of having to insist to philosophers who flatly deny that their work has any connection to mortality that it is nevertheless a major focus of their thought – whether as its hidden wellspring or its unexpected destination? Yet despite the legitimacy of this barrage of questions, there might be an even greater danger in accepting that they are decisive too quickly. If the rigid connection between philosophy and learning to die survived the two millennia that stretch between Socrates and Montaigne, then we might be concerned by any contemporary trends that render the philosophical investigation of death an idiosyncratic concern or even an eccentricity. Can philosophy continue



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unscathed in an agora that is more ‘market’ than ‘place’: one where death is simply an entry on a long list of more or less legitimate philosophical debates to which one might hope to contribute an argument or two? More hyperbolically, can philosophical reflection survive in a milieu where questions about that most fundamental human trait and underlying cause of anxiety, our mortality, have come to be regarded as somewhat illegitimate, morose and arcane? Can we simply endorse an attitude that sees reflection on death as a pathological and metaphysical obsession; a concern better left to the poets and playwrights, quite separate from the ‘serious’ work of modern academic philosophy? Of course, if this last image is offered as a characterization of the contemporary situation, it is dramatically overblown. There have clearly been many interesting and well-received reflections on death in recent times. It seems unlikely that philosophers will ever truly abandon the whole topic of mortality as metaphysical. Nevertheless, philosophy’s relation to death became significantly more complicated across the twentieth century due to one particular growing concern – the concern that its confident and masterful discourse on death constituted a form of Eurocentrism. Can we really talk about ‘death’ (as a singular, identifiable ‘thing’ or ‘event’ with a particular, universally defined structure of which Western thought has not only gained access but can offer universally applicable guidance on how anyone, anywhere at any time ought, if they are ‘reasonable’, to relate to it) within the context of human ‘life’ (again taken in the singular) without doing violence to other ways of living and dying? To contemporary ears ‘versed in continental philosophy’ the notion that philosophers have something universally applicable to say about the human as such might have that same ‘filthy aura’ that Ed Pluth records feeling when first exposed to Lacan: ‘Could Lacan be anything other than ahistorical, Eurocentric, and imperialist in his attempt to say something about “the human” (man!) as such?’4 Is traditional philosophy with its ‘learning to die’ blind to the common-sense wisdom that the prospect of death is different for the contemporary Christian, Hindu or atheist, let alone for the ancient Spartan or Mayan?5 Certainly one does not need to be a full-blown cultural relativist to have strong concerns about exporting our image of ‘the good death’, with its particular historical development and cast of heroes and villains, as a pertinent model for other cultures. On the one hand, regardless of the personal faith of the philosopher, the compulsion to provide a rational account of how one ought to relate to death has produced a characteristically secular discourse starting from Socrates and the hemlock: one whose very lack of assumptions about death itself constitutes a set of deeply questionable assumption.6 Even

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if the encouragement to engage argumentatively with Socrates means that philosophers are not simply acting as missionaries when they bring the good news of his good death, the implicit policing of what counts as a philosophically relevant point means that a very particular model of the relevance (or rather irrelevance) of beliefs about the afterlife in the supposedly wise man’s reasoning about death is imposed. Simultaneously, the contemporary form of this inherited Greek discourse stripped of its gods – a discourse in which to all intents and purposes academic thought proceeds within a horizon where death is ‘the end’ – nevertheless maintains an essential and ineradicable inheritance from the meditations on death in the Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity.7 Caught between the poles of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy’s discourse on death seems the apogee of Levinas’s infamous claim that ‘the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing’ (L:IRB, 149). Against such a singular discourse on death, must we not begin from Derrida’s play on Pascal that the ‘relation to death is not the same on this side of the Pyrenees as it is on the other side’ – after all, that there are ‘cultures of death’ and a ‘history of death’ would be ‘overwhelming, well-known, and immensely documented’ (D:A, 24).8 The urge to not only tolerate but also respect cultural diversity might therefore inhibit discussion of ‘death’ (in the singular) and silence any lessons with universal pretensions coming from the Western philosophical tradition on ‘learning to die’. Let us stress that the question hanging over such a silencing is whether ‘philosophy’ and the model of ‘the philosopher’ can survive the jettisoning of ‘learning to die’ – are we still dealing with philosophy if ‘the exercise, care, or practice of death’ exhibited by Socrates becomes merely an exemplar of a possible local attitude towards death, akin to a discussion of ancient Greek table manners or the ideal mixture of wine and water for an Athenian drinking party? If we pursue this path, then it seems that the only legitimate discourse on death would be that of a ‘comparative anthropo-thanatology’.9 We would be called to the patient investigation, recording and mapping of variations in practices and attitudes towards death; perhaps striving to determine if despite tremendous diversity there remains a shred of common ground or a set of rules that govern structural variations between cultures. Of course, it is notoriously difficult for such a descriptive enterprise to then produce normative claims. Even if we discovered that there was some common core of properties that characterized ‘the good death’ across varying times and cultures, it would remain questionable that these practices have anything to do with how we



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ought to relate to death. Socrates himself was certainly not merely exhibiting or promoting the standard Athenian relation to death of his time or what he took to be the way most living humans on earth related to death, quite the opposite. Nevertheless, we should certainly not assume that such empirically oriented investigations are philosophically insignificant. For one thing, such a project might lead to the investigator’s progressive detachment from their own culture’s blinkered relation to death, which might itself constitute a kind of education in ‘learning to die’. Anthropology might even step forward in this manner as the true inheritor of the philosophical tradition, realizing some of the ambitions put forward by Rousseau.10 Without detracting from the importance of such comparative anthropothanatological undertakings, the major thinkers that we will focus on in this book maintained that – along with death being something more than one item on a list of possible subjects for philosophical analysis – death was not exhausted by cultural variation. With the debatable exception of Derrida himself, they have stated that there is a core meaning (perhaps even an essence) of death that is cross-culturally ubiquitous since it is pre-cultural: serving as a transcendental condition for the emergence of distinct cultures, along with their varying understanding of and religious convictions about death. We might say that, excluding Derrida, they believed in the possibility of a meta-language about death irrespective of charges of Eurocentrism. The three major proponents of such views that we will focus on are Heidegger, Levinas and Freud – thinkers who we might preliminarily distinguish in accordance with the primary focus of their attention falling respectively on one’s own dying, the other’s dying and the other’s being-dead.11 Derrida has referred to these three proper names as designating ‘the three most determinant angles’ or ‘types’ of discourse on death in the twentieth century (D:A, 61).12 What we will increasingly point to in Derrida’s works, particularly his eulogies, are the moments in which he attempted to establish ‘a serious discussion among these discourses’ (D:A, 38). Such a ‘serious discussion’, which we have already referred to as their articulation and whose structure will be addressed in the following chapter, is certainly not equivalent to uniting them to form a single, correct and coherent master discourse. While Derrida indicates that in his own works he goes beyond the conceptual horizons of these three thinkers’ thought – for example by taking ‘into consideration a sort of originary mourning, something that it seems to me neither Heidegger, Freud, nor Levinas does’ (D:A, 39) – it remains clear that even this account of ‘originary mourning’ (also referred to as pre-originary mourning) is built on a ‘mutual contamination’ or ‘articulation’ of

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concepts drawn from these three ‘determinate angles’. In the briefest summary, Derrida’s relation to these three discourses is to use each of them to disturb the borders of life and death in the others, showing how where one discovers life there is death and where one discovers death there is life. Through this, Derrida’s texts replace the oppositional figures of the living and the dead with a more ambiguous cast of ghostly revenants and survivors who ‘live-on [sur-vivre]’ without a world after ‘the end of the world’ that is the other’s death. Due to its focus on mourning, it is unsurprising that the major axis of this book will fall on the articulation of the border between Levinas’s and Freud’s discourses on death – the other’s dying and the other’s being-dead – discourses that we will be looking at in more detail in the following chapters. However, it is important to begin with Heidegger’s account of ‘Being-towards-death’ and his well-known dismissal of the philosophical importance of the other’s death. This is relevant for several reasons, including the fact that Levinas’s own position on death directly responds to Heidegger’s work and that Derrida’s reflections on Levinas move in a complex middle-ground between Levinas and Heidegger’s opposed positions.

1.2  The anticipation of death The end of Being-there At the very centre of the completed portion of Heidegger’s Being and Time comes the famous analysis of Being-towards-death [Sein zum Tode], summarized neatly if unfairly by Theodor Adorno as ‘the exegesis of the futile joke: Only death is free and that costs your life’.13 Simon Critchley gives a more sympathetic (if implicitly rather Sartrean) interpretation of this analysis when he introduces the interest of Heidegger’s text in terms of the idea that ‘if death is not just going to have the character of a brute fact, mortality is something in which one has to find a meaning. In the vocabulary of Heidegger’s Being and Time, death is something that one has to project freely in a resolute decision.’14 Critchley distinguishes this from philosophy’s traditional discourse on ‘learning how to die’ through its embodiment of the Nietzschean maxim “Werde was du bist!” – one must not simply learn one is mortal or acknowledge the fact of death, one must become mortal through an act of ontological transformation or rebirth. The self must be ‘invented or created through a relation with death, in which death becomes the work of the subject’.15



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Heidegger denies that Being-towards-death means a morbid ‘dwelling upon the end’, as would be in the case when ‘one “thinks about death,” pondering over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized’ (H:BT, 305). Such ‘brooding over death’ even constitutes a ploy for evading death – like a prisoner who through endlessly fantasizing about how old they will look when released from jail avoids really facing up to the cost of their custodial sentence to their life. The mere certainty of death is equally irrelevant to Heidegger since ‘everydayness concedes something like a certainty of death. Nobody doubts that one dies’, yet this very ‘not doubting’ can itself be another trick that covers up the relation to death as truly one’s own (H:BT, 299).16 Of course, in advance we have no guarantee that the non-theoretical relation towards death that Heidegger promotes constitutes a philosophical advance – in Adorno’s words: ‘Reflection about death is anti-intellectually disparaged in the name of something allegedly deeper, and is replaced by “endurance,” likewise a gesture of internal silence.’17 To judge whether Heidegger’s move is really ‘anti-intellectual’ and whether that is a fault, we must begin by considering why Heidegger turns to death in Being and Time at all. In Heidegger’s broader project, that which is unique and proper to Dasein (the type of Being that we ontologically are) is its capacity to ask the question of ‘Being as such [Sein als solches]’: that is, to embark on a ‘fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise’ (H:BT, 34). This is not only a critical investigation into the foundation of the sciences or the justification of humanly practised investigative methods, it is an investigation into the underlying processes at work in the very distinction between regions of Being themselves: processes that allow different types of entity to emerge in presence as objects for specific sciences. That Heidegger connects regions of Being and their distinct sciences with time is a classical philosophical gesture – physical, mathematical and divine entities have long been distinguished by whether and how they are subject to and emerge within time – yet through the suggestion of a fundamental ontology that would root the regional ontologies in the lived temporality of the questioning entity, Heidegger established his early project as a distinctive interpretation of phenomenology. Heidegger argued that, because ‘the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s Being’, that is, to Dasein’s finite, mortal temporality (H:BT, 270). This is arguably the most radical claim in Being and Time, that against a philosophical tradition that has viewed human finitude as what limits access to truth (from neo-Platonism’s ladder of Being through to Descartes’s account of man’s infinite will but finite faculty of judgement that leads us into error and

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sin, from Immanuel Kant’s denial of intellectual intuition that limited man’s knowledge to German Idealism’s triumphant claim that the absolute knowledge of an infinite intellectual intuition was achievable), for Heidegger our finitude is essential to truth’s disclosure. Fundamental ontology is thus put forward as a preliminary labour without which any other investigative activity with regard to any particular genus of Being remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim.18 It seems reasonable to tentatively link this reference to blindness to Kant’s famous assertion that: ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.’19 For Heidegger, as for Husserl, the bringing together of compatible intuitions and concepts in true judgements depends on a capacity to trace their genetic co-development from the sending of Being (for Husserl, from the flux or absolute subjectivity), without which the conceptual discourses of the sciences would be detached from lived intuition and be sent into crisis. Dasein’s unique capacity to question Being derives from it being a type of entity that always already comports itself towards Being.20 Dasein has a pre-ontological understanding of Being: it is already within the hermeneutic circle of Being’s questioning through its possession of a fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception of Being ‘as such’.21 The totality of these presuppositions, referred to as the hermeneutical Situation, must ‘be clarified and made secure’ (H:BT, 275). Therefore, before we can address Being ‘as such’ – which would have occurred in the unwritten ‘Division Three’ of Being and Time – the clarification and securing of the hermeneutic presuppositions of that analysis demand that we investigate the questioning entity itself (Dasein) in its active questioning and comportment towards Being. Dasein must be interpreted ‘primordially in itself with regard to its Being’ (H:BT, 274). While the ‘preparatory analysis of Dasein’ that makes up ‘Division One’ of the text revealed that Dasein’s everyday mode of Being is ‘care [Sorge]’, in ‘Division Two’ Heidegger moves to a deeper level of analysis that aims to uncover Dasein’s authentic or proper [eigentlich] Being. The primordiality of this analysis consists in having an ‘explicit assurance that the whole of the entity which it has taken as its theme has been brought into the fore-having’ and that our fore-sight does not ‘miss the unity of those structural items which belong to it and are possible’ (H:BT, 275). Heidegger claims that no such explicit assurance was available for the existential analysis in ‘Division One’ since, by only addressing Dasein in its undifferentiated or inauthentic everyday existence, it worked without a clarified fore-having of Dasein as a totality or fore-sight of Dasein’s unity. Thus, one key issue for surpassing the first division’s preliminary analysis will be to reformulate



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the investigation with a secure fore-having of Dasein as a totality, which in turn requires forcing ‘the whole of Dasein – this entity from its “beginning” to its “end” – into the phenomenological view’, as the analysis of ‘Division One’ has only given access to Dasein’s everydayness ‘“between” birth and death’. Of this ‘end’, Heidegger directly asserts that: ‘The “end” of Being-in-the-world is death’ (H:BT, 276–7). At this point Heidegger wonders whether an existential analysis of Dasein is even possible: Not only has the hermeneutical Situation hitherto given us no assurance of ‘having’ the whole entity: one may even question whether ‘having’ the whole entity is attainable at all, and whether a primordial ontological Interpretation of Dasein will not founder on the kind of Being which belongs to the very entity we have taken as our theme. (H:BT, 276)

Surely for a futurely oriented being such as ourselves – characterized by qualities such as freedom, eccentricity, possibility and projection – it will always be the case that as ‘long as Dasein is, there is in every case something still outstanding, which Dasein can be and will be’ and that cannot be predicted in advance (H:BT, 276). Belonging to this always outstanding (and thus apparently inaccessible as still free and undefined) part is what an analysis would apparently need to grasp if it is to be primordial – Dasein’s ‘end’ or ‘death’. Heidegger is effectively repeating the classical philosophical solution to the problem of death as the genuine problem of death. An empirical or phenomenological method can never access death since, as it was famously put in Epicurus’s letter to Menoeceus, ‘when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist.’22 To avoid admitting the impossibility of a primordial analysis of Dasein (and thus the impossibility of securing our analysis of Being as such and rendering all the sciences ‘blind’), Heidegger needs to offer an account of how the ‘phenomenological view’ can nevertheless access Dasein’s ‘end’ or ‘death’.23 Heidegger concludes that, since for any Dasein, considered as a particular ontic being, death never is in the form of an actual existentiell state of Being-dead, death only ‘is’ as a present existentiell state of Dasein in Being-towards-death, a possible state for Dasein due to the underlying existential structure of Dasein’s temporal mode of existence. Being-towards-death is ‘the ontologically constitutive state of Dasein’s potent­ iality-for-Being-a-whole’ (H:BT, 277). If we have gone into some detail here with regard to the framing of Heidegger’s turn towards death, it is to show that for Heidegger death was never merely a particular theme that a philosopher might or might not choose to address in

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning

accordance with their personal interests. Heidegger did not idiosyncratically decide to write about death as a philosopher might decide to write about ‘philosophy and theatre’ or ‘philosophy and food’. At no point is Heidegger’s philosophical turn towards death justified through a typical set of claims about how death is the great mystery or how humans are, by their very nature, anxious and puzzled by their mortality, and yet philosophy has something important to say.24 Instead, the analysis of death is put forward as a necessary prerequisite for any rigorously grounded scientific activity – without it the hermeneutic situation within which any questioning takes place would not have been clarified and the sciences would stand blind and in crisis. Philosophical activity, though Heidegger tries to avoid this label, thus has the analysis of death as both its prerequisite and its goal (though not the final goal). It remains a goal since the clarification and securing of Dasein’s ‘end’ itself involves a questioning activity premised on our access to Being, pushing us into the familiar structure of a hermeneutic circle (we would need to address attunement, mood and comportment to see how this circle is first entered). At the same time, it is not only a theoretical questioning since to move beyond an analysis of our everyday existence we must bring about the phenomenal realization of a lived state of Being-towards-death – we must not only learn what we are but also become what we are.

Reading Heidegger One major problem faced by any text that attempts to address Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s phenomenological access to its ‘end’ in Being-towards-death is the extremely divergent readings these passages have produced. To give just a small indication of this plurality, in his ‘Foreword’ to Carol White’s Time and Death Hubert Dreyfus distinguishes eight distinct accounts that have been offered of what ‘death’ means in this section of Heidegger’s text.25 However, not only does such patient classificatory work by one of the world’s leading Heidegger scholars still only cover a small sample of the diverse interpretations of ‘death’ that have been offered in the secondary literature, even within this sample Dreyfus’s divisions are far from uncontroversial. For example, while he sharply distinguishes his own view from William Blattner’s, even placing them under distinct general categories, Havi Carel, writing after the publication of Dreyfus’s ‘Foreword’, makes reference to the ‘Dreyfus/Blattner view’ as if they were in fundamental accord.26 Carel’s reading is particularly illuminating for clearly displaying the underlying scholarly assumptions that are prevalent in distinguishing a ‘good’



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interpretation of Heidegger’s account of death (such as, for Carel, the Dreyfus/ Blattner view) from a ‘bad’ one (such as, according to Dreyfus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s). The Dreyfus/Blattner view is supported by Carel for offering ‘the strongest and most coherent interpretation of the difficult passages on death’.27 To be guided by the aim of strength and coherence is, of course, a fundamental premise of the ‘interpretative charity’ central to traditional philosophical commentary. Carel nevertheless determines that the Dreyfus/Blattner view is not the strongest interpretation possible of these passages, since it leaves inexplicable certain emphases that are clearly present in Heidegger’s text on the subject of temporal finitude. This leads Carel to suggest an addition to the Dreyfus/Blattner view ‘to fill in the missing dimension’ of this account.28 Without wanting to doubt the indispensability of such interpretive approaches, we might nevertheless worry that, if left unchecked, this drive to produce ever stronger and ever more coherent accounts of what Heidegger ‘means’ risks producing readings that turn a blind eye to properly irresolvable complexities in the text itself. What if the text – regardless of charitable hypotheses about Heidegger’s underlying intentions or what he might have meant or wanted to say – essentially functions through exposing the reader to a series of conflicts that are themselves native to the domain being explored? Perhaps the principle of interpretive charity, through its assumption that something strong and consistent is (and ought) always to be being said in any philosophical text, is itself not always charitable. Indeed, all of the quite reasonable accounts of what Heidegger ‘meant to say’, as referred to and summarized by Dreyfus, arguably leave as an inexplicable remainder the actual difficulty of Heidegger’s text. The tortuous prose and peculiar assertions such as ‘the closest closeness […] as far as possible from anything actual’ (H:BT, 306–7) are effectively reduced to a failure on Heidegger’s part to express himself clearly – perhaps to be explained through his excessive genius or as a consequence of his, essentially disposable, poetic or mystical inspiration. For such readings there is nothing, or at least nothing philosophically valuable, that cannot be more neatly expressed through paraphrases that involve no such linguistic contortions. Anyone stating otherwise would risk being charged with reducing Heidegger’s philosophy to mysticism or poetry. Such interpretive machinery broadly assumes one of three possibilities: (a) that Heidegger produced what Derrida would call a system ‘in the strong sense’ characterized by a continuity of all statements and the syllogicity of logic, where the interpreter’s job is to show this harmonious totality such that it can be taken in in a single snapshot or Augenblick; (b) Heidegger failed to produce such a

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total coherence, though we can supplement and patch up his work with some extra (or fewer) propositions so as to produce such a coherent assemblage; or (c) that Heidegger’s account of Being-towards-death is fatally inconsistent and should be regarded as a failure, though perhaps one that he progressed beyond in his later work. What is not considered in any of these interpretive options is the extent to which Heidegger’s work puts in question precisely such a model of the ‘system’ based on the syllogicity of logic, a temporal privileging of the present and a technical interpretation of thinking. In applying to thinking about Being and death the same criteria as would be expected in a scientific document within a particular regional ontology, these interpretations risk missing what is distinctive about Heidegger’s move away from philosophy as ‘metaphysics’: Not to be a science is taken as a failing that is equivalent to being unscientific. Being, as the element of thinking, is abandoned by the technical interpretation of thinking. ‘Logic,’ beginning with the Sophists and Plato, sanctions this explanation. Thinking is judged by a standard that does not measure up to it. Such judgment may be compared to the procedure of trying to evaluate the essence and powers of a fish by seeing how long it can live on dry land. For a long time now, all too long, thinking has been stranded on dry land. Can then the effort to return thinking to its element be called ‘irrationalism’? (H:PM, 242)

It is at this point that the French tradition of reading texts ‘selon l’ordre des raisons’ descending from Martial Gueroult offers a different angle of approach. Although still oriented by the principle of charity in its attempt to put forward the argumentative coherence of a text, the focus falls firmly on how the writing itself functions. The object to be investigated is not the breath but the letter in its literality: the ‘how’ of its textual expression is placed firmly before the ‘what’ of its supposed meaning.29 This focus on the text’s functioning as ‘philosophical technology’ means that the major discussion of Being-towards-death in Derrida’s Aporias bears little resemblance to most secondary scholarship on Heidegger. Rather than trying to establish what Heidegger ‘means’ by death, Derrida will track propositions such as ‘death is the possibility of being-able-no-longer-to-be-there’ through Heidegger’s text, noting its differently modalized forms and how at a certain moment the ‘text imperceptibly moves from the possibility as possibility of the impossibility to the simple possibility of impossibility’ (D:A, 71). For Derrida, the purpose of this approach is to discover precisely where the ‘work exceeds itself ’, since ‘if the event of this work exceeds its own borders, the borders that its discourse seems to give to itself (for example, “those of an existential analysis



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of Dasein in the transcendental horizon of time”), then it would do so precisely at this locus where it experiences the aporia’ (D:A, 32). The moments of aporia that emerge in Heidegger’s text would not be seen as personal lapses of the author’s attention or argumentative rigour, such that we might patch them up to produce a better account of death that remains within the borders of the existential analysis. Instead, Heidegger’s text would be seen as functioning through exposing its reader to the aporias human reason encounters when it turns towards death. No complete theoretical untying of the knots of Dasein’s existential temporality through charitable secondary commentary on what Heidegger ‘meant to say’ is to be hoped for. Adorno would have been essentially correct in saying that mere reflection about death ‘is anti-­ intellectually disparaged’ to be ‘replaced by “endurance,” likewise a gesture of internal silence’;30 however, the point is that this lived state of anxiously enduring the aporia in silence is the very ground that renders Dasein open to Being as such: bringing forward the realm of objects, grounding the intellectual sciences and opening speech. This becomes clearer in the period directly following Being and Time when Heidegger moves to discussing anxiety before ‘the nothing’ – ‘an outrage and a phantasm’ to scientific thinking – in place of death.31 In closing let us acknowledge that there are many established and respected scholars in the field of Anglophone Heidegger studies who are attentive to the text in the manner we have described. For example, we might think of Stephen Mulhall’s claim that: Division Two does not simply illustrate the hermeneutic insight that, no matter how much we say about Dasein’s Being, there is always more to be said; it, rather, enacts the thought that there is something inherently enigmatic about the Being of Dasein – something necessarily beyond the grasp of that being itself, and hence necessarily beyond the grasp of any existential analytic of its Being.32

It is certainly not the case that a commentator such as Mulhall is perversely seeking out enigmas in preference to coherence, declaring the text a performative enactment to avoid scholarly labour over its actual content, or that he is recklessly reading philosophical texts as if they were literary texts – charges frequently levelled at Derrida when he comes to a similar conclusion. Indeed, the enigmas of the text can only emerge, for Mulhall or Derrida, on the basis of a reading that rigorously seeks the text’s coherence. The key difference is that ‘being charitable’ to the text encompasses appreciating those moments when Heidegger’s text is not operating in accordance with the ‘logic’ that begins with

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the Sophists and Plato, and for good reason since it is a matter here of precisely that which comes prior to the logos as its ground.

Three points about death To facilitate moving ahead as rapidly as possible, we will offer the remaining claims about Heidegger’s account of death that we need to establish in three points. (1) As was noted earlier, there is an important shift in Heidegger’s discussion where he moves from the ‘end’ of Dasein being conceived of as a future event that will always remain outstanding for Dasein (as, when death is no longer outstanding, Dasein will no longer exist), to the resolution that Dasein-as-awhole can be forced into our fore-having through Dasein’s lived anticipation of its ‘end’ in Being-towards-death. This might strike us as a trick. There is perhaps a convincing argument that we can only have access to the whole of an entity once it has been fully determined and offered to view: as in the wisdom of Solon that we should call no man happy until he is dead. It is far less obvious that any kind of anticipatory relation to death – even when this is actively taken up through a lived heroic acceptance of finitude and a fundamental reorientation of the projection of one’s future possibilities in the light of death’s certainty – will actually constitute access either to death as such or more broadly to Dasein’s Being-in-the-world-as-a-whole.33 Heidegger defends this shift by asserting that our original common-sense conception of the ‘not-yet’ grasped by our fore-having ‘inadvertently posited that Dasein is something present-at-hand, ahead of which something that is not yet present-at-hand is constantly shoving itself[.] Have we, in our argument, taken “Being-not-yet” and the “ahead” in a sense that is genuinely existential? Has our talk of the “end” and “totality” been phenomenally appropriate to Dasein?’ (H:BT, 280). What is questionable here is that Heidegger clearly played on the common-sense temporality of present-at-hand entities in asserting that ‘Division One’ had only gained access to Dasein’s everydayness and that, to access its ‘totality’, we needed to grasp its ‘not-yet’ understood as its ‘end’ or ‘death’. If ‘not-yet’, ‘end’ and ‘totality’ hold different meanings when they apply to Dasein as opposed to Heidegger’s other examples – a debt that is being paid (where totality is a sum), the moon that is waxing (where totality is an issue of attaining a full perceptual grasping of what already exists) or a fruit that is ripening (where totality is a becoming modelled in terms of fulfilment) – then



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perhaps these are no longer the relevant terms, or at least the only relevant terms, for a primordial analysis of Dasein’s temporal structure. Heidegger would risk not being radical enough through his underlying assumption that, despite the need to reformulate these terms, their basic structural arrangement remains appropriate for capturing Dasein-as-a-whole. As a further issue, the claim that anticipation, even a lived anticipation, could reveal the whole of Dasein seems premised on a highly questionable argument. Heidegger writes that the ‘anticipation of the possibility which is not to be outstripped [that is, death] discloses also all the possibilities which lie ahead of that possibility’, such that ‘this anticipation includes the possibility of taking the whole of Dasein in advance in an existentiell manner.’ Yet can anticipation of a single possibility, even one that is not to be outstripped and that liberates one from ‘one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one’, actually disclose ‘all the possibilities that lie ahead’? (H:BT, 309, 308). Heidegger makes claims for Being-towards-death that seem only appropriate for Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Despite having claimed that one ought to allow Heidegger’s text to confront us with enigmatic aporias, it is worth stressing once again that this is no excuse for simply avoiding hermeneutic labour when encountering difficult passages. It seems clear that Heidegger is offering an account of a complex conceptual assemblage that, if we understand its terms in a manner that is ‘genuinely existential’ and ‘phenomenally appropriate to Dasein’, will fit together such that we can intuitively grasp how the anticipation of a specific possibility discloses all the possibilities that lie ahead without this amounting to a quasi-mystical vision of future possibilities. Clearly Being-towards-death allows access to Dasein-asa-whole in a manner that is very different from the way in which we should call no man happy until he dies. For Heidegger, that which is ‘not-yet’ in the case of Dasein is not ‘still outstanding’; instead, it already belongs to Dasein since ‘Dasein as thrown Being-in-the-world, has in every case already been delivered over to its death’ (H:BT, 303). If we begin from this argument, then we can offer a far more convincing explanation of how ‘anticipation of death’ and ‘wholeness’ are related through the theme of individuation. The key word here is that Dasein is delivered over to its death – a death that is its ownmost in such a manner that a particular Dasein only exists as defined by that limit. For Heidegger, Dasein’s essence [Wesen] is translated as ‘its ownmost inner possibility [seine eigenste innere Möglichkeit]’ (H:PM, 110), meaning that Dasein’s death is its essence (with the proviso that ‘essence’ functions here quite differently from its traditional philosophical use).34 Nevertheless, references

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning

to the ‘ownmost’ can be quite misleading in that they imply a hierarchical relationship of ownership (particular emphasized in the French term propre) between two separable things: Dasein and its death. However, Heidegger reverses such a distinction (death ‘does not just “belong” to one’s own Dasein’ but if anything it is its death that ‘lays claim’ to ‘an individual Dasein’ (H:BT, 308)), while simultaneously denying there is a relationship between two things at all: death as one’s ‘ownmost possibility is non-relational’. A ‘relation’ could only exist between two (at least conceptually) distinguishable things, whereas Dasein is only demarcated as an individual Dasein by its death. It is death that lifts Dasein out from the ‘they’ – ‘As the non-relational possibility, death individualizes’. (H:BT, 309) Central to the argumentative force of this assertion is the claim that Dasein cannot have someone else die their death for them – there can be no proxy in death. Of course someone can ‘go to his death for another’, but this never amounts to taking ‘the Other’s dying away’ (H:BT, 284). It is by individualizing Dasein from out of the ‘they’ that death gains the range of features that make it so important for Heidegger’s overall position. Levinas summarizes its importance for Heidegger in terms of four features: death is: MM

MM

MM

MM

the most proper, or ownmost possibility; a possibility in which the proper as such is produced; an untransferable possibility; a possibility that consequently is ‘me’ [moi], or ipseity; an isolating possibility, since it is a possible that, as my ownmost, cuts all my ties with other men; an extreme possibility that surpasses all others and next to which all the others grow pale; a possibility by which Dasein sets itself off from all other possibilities, which then become insignificant. (L:GDT, 51)

Once again, a circular structure emerges. On the one hand, Dasein only exists as always already individuated by having been thrown into existence as a ‘being delivered to its own death’; on the other hand, for the most part Dasein is in an active state of fleeing from its death into the ‘they’ and does not exist as individuated. That is to say, the disclosure of Dasein’s temporal structure to an existential analysis if the questioning entity exists in its common existentiell state of fleeing is a set of false possibilities taken from the ‘they’. The totality of possibilities that actually corresponds to the individual Dasein would only be disclosed to a Dasein that is not fleeing and that therefore has a true appreciation of its possibilities. We can see then that this disclosure of the true



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totality of possibilities appropriate to an individual Dasein is not equivalent to a phenomenal revelation of the totality of future moments that stretch out between Dasein’s present and its death. At this point we can see that the claim from Critchley that we began this chapter with – that the self must be ‘invented or created through a relation with death’ – is both accurate and misleading since this creation is equally a rediscovery. Placing the emphasis on ‘creation’ would arguably push Heidegger towards a Sartrean or Blanchotian reading. Taking into account where Heidegger’s argument moves in later sections of Being and Time that discuss Dasein’s Being as historical – relating Dasein’s true futural possibilities to ‘what-has-been-there’ such that the disclosure of its true possibilities comes through repetition – Adorno captures the practical tone of the text better in stating that the ‘highest maxim of such an attitude [towards death] results in saying that “it is so,” that one has to obey – or, in positive terms, that one has to adapt oneself ’ – though for Heidegger one is adapting oneself to one’s true self.35 Levinas offers a similar analysis to Adorno when he connects Heidegger’s position with the themes of personal fate and collective destiny rather than the kind of individual freedom he associates with Henri Bergson. (2) Heidegger emphasizes that we must distinguish Dasein’s ‘going-out-of-theworld in the sense of dying’ from ‘the going-out-of-the-world of that which merely has life’ – referring to the latter as ‘perishing [Verenden]’. As we have already seen, the existential analysis of Dasein calls for constant vigilance against the danger that ‘substructures of entities with another kind of Being (presence-at-hand or life)’ might ‘thrust themselves to the fore unnoticed, and threaten to bring confusion to the Interpretation of this phenomenon’ (H:BT, 284–5). At the same time, Dasein can certainly ‘be considered purely as life. When the question is formulated from the viewpoint of biology and physiology, Dasein moves into that domain of Being which we know as the world of animals and plants’ (H:BT, 290). Heidegger famously refuses the model of Cartesian dualism that would ontologically distinguish between two separate substances in man: the body as a living animal and the free subjectivity of rational thought. This refusal means that it is the same entity that can be taken as Dasein or as living – ‘Dasein as such’ or ‘Dasein as a living animal’. Despite being the same entity, Dasein genuinely ‘comes into presence’ in one way or the other in accordance with the mode of questioning. That is to say, when Heidegger refers to Dasein moving into the domain of animals and plants when questions are formulated from the

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viewpoint of biology or physiology, we should take him quite literally. In so far as we are engaging in scientific discourse, it is not only that we are isolating and treating Dasein as if it were only a living animal, but Dasein will come forward as an object in that investigation as an animal – an animal caught up in a world whose entities captivate it rather than announcing themselves. For example, if we measure the percentages of people within particular demographic groups who respond positively to a political advertisement, or we try to model the pattern of spectators leaving a stadium using fluid dynamics, then within these questioning activities Dasein genuinely comes forward as a living animal. Heidegger’s later themes of technology as the modern Gestell, the need for poetic language that allows beings to announce themselves, along with his claim that ‘science itself does not think, and cannot think’, are already implicitly announced here (H:WCT, 8). Heidegger nevertheless does not fully identify the dying of ‘Dasein as a living animal’ with the deaths of other living animals, reserving the term ‘demise [Ableben]’ for Dasein’s death as an ‘intermediate phenomenon’ distinguished from animal perishing. That ‘Dasein never perishes’, even if it ends ‘without authentically dying’, shows that Dasein has a unique relation to its mortality even when fleeing into the ‘they’ (H:BT, 291). This distinction implies that Dasein’s ending as a living animal (an event that will happen at some point in the future, yet will never be experienced) remains somehow related to its proper ‘end’ – as unveiled in lived anxious anticipation of death – even if that state is not actually unveiled. This peculiar connection where Dasein’s biological demise is ‘codetermined’ by its Being-towards-death – and how either of these relate to Heidegger’s references to death as Tod or eigentlich sterben – remain some of the most puzzling sections in Being and Time. As a text that has gone to great lengths to deny that taking into our fore-having Dasein-as-a-whole through anticipation of death has any connection to the biological last moments of life (since the existential ‘not-yet’ of Dasein is unrelated to the ‘still-outstanding’ of a present-at-hand entity), Heidegger nevertheless attempts to reconnect the two through a hierarchy where Dasein’s biological death depends on and is explicated through Being-towards-death. This connection would not be necessary if Dasein merely perished, since we have a perfectly adequate account of animal perishing that is unconnected to dying. Thus the addition of the ‘intermediate phenomenon’ of demise is thus not simply a piece of terminological vocabulary; it introduces a major puzzle as to how biological demise connects to the death that Dasein, as thrown Being-in-the-world, has in every case already been delivered over



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to. It is around this reconnection that we can see that Dreyfus may have been too quick to dismiss Sartre, James Edwards and Herman Philipse’s ‘simplest and most clearly mistaken way to understand Heidegger’ that equates death with demise. Heidegger specifies that the foundational status of the existential analytic with regard to the ‘sciences of death’ depends on this connection between Beingtowards-death and demise. It is through this connection that Heidegger can claim that ‘the existential analysis [of death] is superordinate to the questions of a biology, psychology, theodicy, or theology of death’, that it ‘takes precedence over any biology or ontology of life. But it is also the foundation for any investigation of death which is biographical or historiological, ethnological or psychological’ (H:BT, 292, 291). A hermeneutic difficulty arises here since we have already seen that all the sciences are subordinate to an existential analysis of Dasein that must include the analysis of death, so it is unclear if anything specific about the ‘investigation of death’ is at stake here. Nevertheless, many commentators have found it productive to assume that Heidegger is setting out specific claims about such investigations. In either case, having a closer look at these claims about investigations of death will help us to judge whether a universal and singular account of Being-towards-death constitutes a form of secular Eurocentrism. Derrida will argue that comparative historical, ethnological and anthropological texts on death (such as those by the thanatologists Philippe Ariès and Louis-Vincent Thomas) leave beyond their borders the philosophical questions Heidegger engages with such as ‘What is death in general?’ They implicitly assume that ‘everybody knows what one is talking about when one names death’, thus illegitimately offering their works as if there were no problem when we try to ‘identify, recognize, select, or delimit the objects’ of such an inquiry (D:A, 25–7). Through this lack of theoretical precaution they are, in Heidegger’s terms, blind. What we encounter here is what Derrida refers to as ‘a logic of presupposition’ – all these investigations that analyse death from a particular methodical perspective assume a pre-understanding of death, a capacity to recognize cases of death, that only an existential analysis could properly grant them. In this manner: the delimitation of the fields of anthropological, historical, biological, demographic and even theological knowledge presupposes a nonregional ontophenomenology that not only does not let itself be enclosed within the borders of those domains, but furthermore does not let itself be enclosed within cultural, linguistic, national, or religious borders either, and not even within sexual borders, which crisscross all the others. (D:A, 27)

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The existential analysis, if it is to be pure, requires great vigilance as we pursue the superordinate research into the universal temporal structure of anticipatory Being-towards-death without contaminating that analysis with assumptions about death that derive from the contemporary science, religion, art or culture that we are immersed in. We will only be able to turn to these subordinate researches (at least in a manner that is not blind) once the superordinate investigation is complete. Derrida’s intervention here is to argue for the necessity and the impossibility of such a project: While the richest or most necessary anthropo-thanatology cannot found itself in any other way than on presuppositions that do not belong to its knowledge or its competence, and while these presuppositions therefore constitute a style of questioning of which Heidegger, Freud, and Levinas are remarkable witnesses, conversely this fundamental questioning cannot protect itself from a hidden bio-anthropo-thanato-theological contamination […] this contaminating contraband […] insinuates itself through the idiom of the existential analysis. (D:A, 79)

We have here our first example of the kind of aporia that Derrida’s deconstructive readings draw our attention to. It might appear that Derrida is merely transforming the ‘logic of presupposition’ with its superordinate (existential) and subordinate (scientific) discourses into a hermeneutic circle. Due to the hidden bio-anthropo-thanato-theological contamination of our concept of death, we cannot first engage in a universally applicable existential analysis of death as such (unmarked by our own cultural background and beliefs), then engage in scientific investigations of death’s particular manifestations. Instead, at first glance we seem to enter a circle in which a progressive scientific clarification of our local beliefs might purify our universally pertinent existential analysis of its prejudices, while the existential analysis in turn clarifies which objects are to be identified and analysed in the local investigations. However, if we reflect on this structure, we quickly realize that no such harmony can be guaranteed. It is entirely possible that, rather than a circular pattern of mutual clarification and enriching, we will enter a chaotic spiral in which a series of deepening mutual distortions leads us ever further from the truth. To give a parallel example, one might argue that we can only investigate ‘English nationalism’ on the basis of a superordinate discourse that would establish what ‘nationalism in general’ is. The problem is that, as an Englishman, my attempt to address this superordinate question begins from within the



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partial perspective of my particular national identity’s take on nationalism: distorting my analysis with hidden ‘contaminating contraband’. If I ignore my prejudices and offer a general theory of nationalism, I risk producing a discourse that universalizes and takes as a priori those local prejudices; however, if I jump straight into investigating English nationalism, I can never be certain that I am correctly identifying the proper object of such a discourse (that the phenomena I evaluate are all and only examples of nationalism, that they can be opposed to parallel phenomena in other nationalisms, etc.). Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that a movement that alternates between these two types of questioning would lead to a progressive refinement of one by the other rather than the opposite. Our situation is that of an aporia or double bind. Clearly discourses on nationalism are nevertheless produced and ought to be produced; the point is that they cannot be the unfolding of a justified programme and will always involve an act of decision and a troubled conscience. With no starting place legitimated in advance or method guaranteed to move in the right direction, one must endure the aporia in silence; except that one does not, as, since the production of a discourse is required, one breaks with that unproductive stalling through a moment of decision. No degree of precaution or theoretical vigilance over how one begins or carries out the investigation can exorcise the possibility of the investigation harbouring prejudice, doing violence and only leading us further from the truth. Any account of nationalism is therefore an event in Derrida’s sense – it requires a decision for which one must accept responsibility. For a powerful investigation of how to approach this particular aporia see Balibar’s ‘Ambiguous Identities’.36 Returning to death, what Derrida shows then is not simply that we must also engage with empirical investigative research in order to reach an adequate conception of death as such; rather, Derrida shows that we cannot establish any kind of investigative relation to death as such or even know it exists. As he suggests, what if there is only ‘a vulgar concept of death?’ (D:A, 14). In so far as death as such remains operatively necessary (the sciences of death would have no stability or structure without this central notion), it functions as an illusion, fantasy or fiction that cannot be isolated or investigated in its purity. There is no mode of questioning in which death as such can be known to come forward. It is less that the sciences are blind, as in Heidegger, than that the discourses of the sciences involve a constitutive blind spot – their condition of possibility reveals itself as a condition of impossibility. Once again, we clearly may decide in favour of what we judge with good reason to be a better rather than a worse way of establishing an adequate concept

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning

of death as such. Perhaps we embark on a rigorous genealogy of the concept of death in a wide range of cultures that would allow us to unveil much of our own hidden contraband that would have contaminated our discourse; however, since we would unavoidably have identified the objects of those investigations in accordance with our prior and possibly fatally compromised conception of death as such, we can never be certain that we are making progress rather than getting entangled in error. Choosing the method is a decision that we are responsible for. None of this means that the ontically prejudiced ontological investigations of Heidegger, Freud and Levinas or the ontologically prejudiced ontic investigations of Ariès and Thomas are simply worthless. Nor does the absence of a harmonious hermeneutic circle linking these discourses mean that we should not anticipate interesting material being produced through a mutually critical contact or articulation between the texts of Heidegger and those of a thanatologist such as Thomas. The point is only that these acts of textual production are events based on decisions rather than the unfolding of a programme, whether that programme be the scientific method or the existential analytic. It is important to notice then that all of the thematics of the event, decision, endurance, vigilance and responsibility that mark Derrida’s account of ethics are as much at stake in producing theoretical discourse as in practical action: [G]ood conscience as subjective certainty is incompatible with the absolute risk that every promise, every engagement, and every responsible decision – if there are such – must run. To protect the decision or the responsibility by knowledge, by some theoretical assurance, or by the certainty of being right, of being on the side of science, of consciousness or of reason, is to transform this experience into the deployment of a program, into a technical application of a rule or a norm, or into the subsumption of a determined ‘case.’ All these are conditions that must never be abandoned, of course, but that, as such, are only the guardrail of a responsibility to whose calling they remain radically heterogeneous. (D:A, 19)

(3) At the point in the text where Heidegger has acknowledged that Dasein has no access to the moment of its death, yet before turning to anticipatory Being-towards-death, Heidegger first considers how ‘the Death of Others’ is experienced and whether it might allow us to bring the whole of Dasein into our fore-having. Heidegger’s denial of this possibility remains one of the most controversial points in Being and Time and is frequently taken as an ethical failure on Heidegger’s part. In Adorno’s words: ‘Only a solipsistic philosophy could acknowledge an ontological priority of “my” death over and against any



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other. Even emotionally, someone else’s death is easier to experience than one’s own.’ It is this thought that leads to Adorno’s memorable characterization of Heidegger’s work in terms of ‘that grinding of the teeth which says nothing but I, I, I.’37 While this kind of ethical criticism is commonly associated with Levinas, his actual comments on Heidegger’s account of death are rather more nuanced than the accusation of solipsism. Nevertheless, as we will see in Chapter 3, Levinas maintains against Heidegger that: ‘The death of the other: therein lies the first death’ (L:GDT, 43). Heidegger’s short discussion of the death of others is notable for its complex repetitive structure. In his initial phenomenological account Heidegger suggests that what we experience at the moment of Being-with a dying other is simply ‘that remarkable phenomenon of […] the change-over of an entity from Dasein’s kind of Being (or life) to no-longer-Dasein. The end of the entity qua Dasein is the beginning of the same entity qua something present-at-hand’ (H:BT, 281). However, this initial portrayal of the event for the witness as the instantaneous transformation from Being-with another Dasein to being near a present-athand corpse is dramatically refined through two steps. In the first step, Heidegger notes that the corpse is not merely a lifeless thing but is ‘something unalive, which has lost its life’, illustrating this by the fact that it is still a potential object for the student of pathological anatomy – a science oriented towards the idea of life. The second refinement is more fundamental, stating that the deceased has been ‘torn away’ from those who remain behind. The corpse has become ‘an object of “concern” in the ways of funeral rites, interment, and the cult of graves’. The corpse has a mode of Being for Dasein that is not that of being present-at-hand or ready-to-hand – the mourners who ‘tarrying alongside […] are with him, in a mode of respectful solicitude’. Heidegger fleshes this out with the rather contradictory phenomenological description that: ‘The deceased has abandoned our “world” and left it behind. But in terms of that world [Aus ihr her] those who remain can still be with him’ (H:BT, 282). Heidegger thus moves from an initial description that was put forward in terms of the rigid categories of the three basic types of Being found by the questioning entity in Being and Time (ready-to-hand, present-at-hand and Dasein – all of which are encountered in the world), to a refinement of the experience of Being-with the dying that adds enigmatic complications to the notions of ‘world’ and ‘Being-with’ while blurring the borders between the different types of Being. The corpse is ‘no longer Dasein’, yet neither does it belong to any other categories of Being. There is no longer any entity

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning

that is Da-sein [Being-there], yet we are still Being-with the entity that was Being-there as for us they are still-a-Dasein [Nochdaseins]. They have stopped Being-in-the-world, yet we still encounter them (not merely their corpse as an object) in the world. What Heidegger has described with perfect lucidity here is precisely the kind of complex phenomenological material that arises in mourning and that ought to put in question the ontological system he has constructed. Even if there are many perfectly reasonable explanations for why we might feel obliged to concernedly respect a corpse as if the other remained – for the sake of their loved ones, to uphold community values, because it is how we would like our own corpse to be treated, because of respect for what they once were in the past, because evolution has made us wary of corpses due to various diseases, for fear of the Erinyes, etc. – none of these reasons explains the lingering capacity to actually be-with the dead in a situation where they are both no-longer-Dasein and yet still-a-Dasein-for-us. It is precisely the uncanny possibility of still standing before the dead themselves, as experienced in eulogy, that Heidegger almost offers. We can almost see what Derrida would call hauntology emerging from and disturbing ontology. However, instead of seeing the paradoxical status of the corpse as a challenge to his system, Heidegger argues that his doubly refined phenomenological description actually shows even more plainly that in ‘Being-with the dead, the authentic Being-come-to-an-end [Zuendegekommensein] of the deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience’ (H:BT, 282). In the initial formulation of Being-with someone at the moment of death, we did indeed seem to be phenomenologically encountering a rigorously definable ‘end’ of Dasein (along with the beginning of something else: the corpse as present-athand). In the doubly refined description, however, those who tarry alongside the dead encounter no such ‘end’ – for us the relation of Being-with is broadly unchanged. While we experience a personal loss, we do not directly experience anything on the order of an ontological change in their Being – our loss has nothing to do with the ‘loss-of-Being’ that ‘the dying man “suffers”. The dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense; at most we are always just “there alongside”’, meaning that the other’s death ‘cannot give us, either ontically or ontologically, what it presumes to give’ (H:BT, 282–3).38 Having reached this point, and perhaps still sensing that the uncanny status of the corpse might be a challenge to his system, Heidegger effectively scraps this entire analysis. He dismisses the previous phenomenological investigation of Being-with the dying as resting on ‘a presupposition which demonstrably fails



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altogether to recognize Dasein’s kind of Being’ – that presupposition being that Dasein can be substituted for another. It is in this context that Heidegger makes the assertion that ‘No one can take the Other’s dying away from him’; that by ‘its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it “is” at all’ (H:BT, 284).39 A notable feature of the rhetoric in this second section of the argument is Heidegger’s highly uncommon and blunt references to ‘facts’. The false presupposition of substitution ‘demonstrably fails altogether’, while once having asserted there is no possibility of representation by another in ‘ending’, he declares: ‘These are the facts of the case existentially’ (H:BT, 284). Whether from the perspective of classical rhetoric, psychoanalysis or deconstruction, the sudden insistence on the brute ‘existential facts’ might make our ears prick up over Heidegger’s actual confidence in these propositions. In summary, in his phenomenological analysis of the experience of the death of others Heidegger catches the edge of something that would threaten his entire project and then rapidly endeavours to cover it over. This dismissal sets the tone for his entire philosophy in which the only relation to death as such is the relation to one’s own death. Heidegger’s dismissal of the possibility of the death of the other allowing us to force the whole of Dasein into our fore-having certainly does not mean that he writes nothing about mourning, although the assumption that it might mean that is rather prevalent in the wake of the works of Adorno and Levinas. David Krell responds quite beautifully to this assumption when he says: Homer and Hölderlin would have taught Heidegger that the ability to die also implies the capacity to share a peculiar kind of pain – the capacity to mourn. Readers may think that because I mention mourning I am writing about someone other than Heidegger. I am writing about Heidegger.40

Indeed, in the context of discussing Hölderlin and Rilke the theme of mourning frequently arises in Heidegger’s texts. For example, he states that ‘Mourning pervades the Ister, the river proper to the home of the poet, that is, it pervades the poet himself in his poetic essence. Yet this sadness is “holy mourning” and as such is an originary knowing of the poetic vocation of this poet’ – such sacred mourning is even referred to as the fundamental tone of our epoch.41 Jacob Rogozinski goes as far as to say that Heidegger is the first thinker of mourning: ‘In order for mourning to become an issue for thought, we have to wait for Heidegger’.42 Nevertheless, that which evokes sacred mourning in our epoch is something of the order of the departure of the gods, not the death of a loved human being.43

2

Articulation

2.1  A serious discussion Before deconstruction sits a gatekeeper In our discussion of Heidegger’s account of death we have already made several references to Derrida’s short work Aporias. This text, composed of two lectures given at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1992, is interesting not only because of its focus on Heidegger and death, but also because it summarizes and connects many of Derrida’s previous interventions while containing some of his most programmatic statements. Furthermore, it is the text in which Derrida puts forward the claim that Heidegger, Levinas and Freud constitute the three ‘determinate angles’ on death in twentieth-century thought, along with referring to what would be necessary in order to establish a ‘serious discussion among these discourses’ (D:A, 38). In this chapter we will temporarily turn away from the themes of death, mourning and eulogy to address some key features of Derrida’s broader philosophical enterprise. The aim is to establish how the type of intervention characteristically associated with the name ‘Jacques Derrida’ – which we will refer to under the moniker ‘deconstruction’ despite his misgivings about the popularity of this term – could function to bring about a discussion among incompatible textual fields. As has already been indicated, we will offer an account of this transdisciplinary contact modelled in terms of acts of ‘articulation’: referring to discourses as ‘pivoted’ around certain ‘hinge words’. It is of course understandable if some readers choose to skip this chapter due to its extensive involvement with a series of famously difficult texts and its lack of direct connection to the questions guiding this work. It is nevertheless our strong belief that the series of terms discussed in this chapter – the graphic, the general text, meaning events, différance, etc. – although never referred to directly in Derrida’s eulogies, remain absolutely essential for understanding the way in which those texts function.

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It is tempting to begin by directly addressing the question ‘What is deconstruction?’ We might even follow the formulation of a Cambridge journalist who once asked Derrida, ‘in a nutshell, what is deconstruction?’ John Caputo offered a famous self-destructive response to this formulation, stating that ‘cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is. In a nutshell.’ That is to say, if deconstruction shows that ‘texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices […] do not have definable meanings and determinable missions, that they are always more than any mission would impose’, then it would constitute a failure, or at least a limitation on the scope of deconstruction, if we could successfully capture and convey the meaning or mission of Derrida’s texts, particularly ‘in a nutshell’.1 Assuming Caputo’s characterization of deconstruction in terms of this excessive overflowing of definable meanings and determinable missions is accurate, it seems that we must either (a) follow Caputo in producing a self-defeating definition of deconstruction (which is in a sense to produce nothing); or (b) produce a successful definition of the meaning and mission of deconstruction and thereby limit deconstruction’s claim to only applying to some texts and practices. Despite the paradoxical twist of self-denial in Caputo’s ‘definition’, we must acknowledge that nevertheless something seems to have been divulged about deconstruction’s concerns in the very process of being told that those concerns cannot be divulged. This process of disclosure despite withdrawal is itself characteristic of Derrida’s writing and of the writing he appreciates. At the same time, the justifiable caution that marks so many secondary texts on Derrida might prove as damaging to deconstruction as any reckless and doomed attempt to offer a positive account of what deconstruction is. It is certainly not unreasonable to demand that a thinker or movement should be able to give a coherent picture of itself before expecting scholarly interest, particularly when it is a matter of very difficult texts that will require a long and committed engagement. As Derrida himself later asserted with reference to the journalist’s question: ‘sometimes it may be useful to try nutshells’.2 We certainly cannot ignore Derrida’s strongly worded warning that: All sentences of the type ‘deconstruction is X’ or ‘deconstruction is not X’ a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts ‘deconstruction’ is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S is P. (D:Pv2, 5)

Nevertheless, this does not stop Derrida himself making assertions ranging from ‘Deconstruction is justice’ to ‘America is deconstruction’ (D:AR, 243,

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D:MPM, 18). Even if these assertions are ‘at least false’, it may nevertheless be strategically justifiable to risk them. If this book itself aims to show that Derrida’s eulogies offer a pedagogy in the breaking of double binds – on enacting a decision that breaks with the silence of an endured aporetic conflict by setting out to do the impossible in the full knowledge of the task’s inevitable failure – then it would be particularly catastrophic if we were unable to answer for deconstruction. Indeed, would it not be a sign of the general failure of his writings if, despite all of Derrida’s works on the need to take responsibility for unavoidably risky writing events that are acts of decision undertaken in bad conscience, the actual product of Derrida’s texts was a limp collection of theorists endlessly hesitating on the verge of actually saying something? Indeed, is this not the tragicomic figure of the ‘deconstructionist’ that so frequently evokes ridicule? One might think here of Terry Eagleton’s memorable parody of Derrida’s style in his review of Specters of Marx: ‘What is it, now, to chew carrots? Why this plural? […] Could one even speak of the “chewing” of a carrot, and if so how, why, to whom, with what onto-teleo-theological animus?’3 Fredric Jameson, despite stating that Derrida himself avoids this problem, reflects nevertheless on the general difficulty of accounting for how ‘content can be generated in an exercise otherwise so seemingly fruste and barren as one thus vigilantly policed and patrolled by the intent to avoid saying something.’4 We might also think of Mladen Dolar’s amusing claim, when challenged with writing on the difficult subject of the relation between Freud and politics, that the ‘temptation is great to adopt a deconstructivist rhetoric – instead of speaking about the topic, speaking about the impossibility of speaking about the topic. I will very much try to resist this temptation.’5 The quintessentially Derridean response at this point is to state that the appearance of stalling and a struggle to get underway is to be already well underway. Although it may seem that since this chapter began we have been engaged in a series of preliminary considerations before turning to what deconstruction actually is, we are already engaging in deconstruction’s disclosure. Derrida’s texts, along with many of the best secondary texts on his work, follow the same structure as David Foster Wallace’s account of ‘the really central Kafka joke’: ‘That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.’6 Although we will argue for the singularity of each of Derrida’s eulogies, what unites almost all of them is their continual reflections on the impossibility of the eulogy about to be undertaken. This can easily make it appear that the eulogy

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning

has not yet begun. With each page a potential reader will anticipate that Derrida will soon finish his preliminary remarks and finally get to the substance of the actual eulogy, an expectation that is maintained right up until the moment when the reader realizes the eulogy has ended. The assumption that the real text had not yet begun means that such a reader is destined to be as disappointed as one who approaches Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ in the belief that they will finally get to the heart of the parable once the man has somehow got past the incidental issue of the many gates and gatekeepers to enter the inner sanctum of the law itself. The ‘central Kafka joke’ is that the secret of the law they are awaiting is already being displayed precisely through the man’s repeated attempts to get past the first gatekeeper. Anyone who finishes reading the parable wondering ‘but what actually was behind the gate’ has missed the point. In ‘Legs de Freud’ Derrida demonstrates a similar structure in the second chapter of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. Freud’s attempt to suggest a content that cannot be explained by the pleasure principle (PP) moves through a series of repetitive failures, denials and dismissals – what Derrida calls in an untranslatable French idiom its ‘pas de thèse’. Even though the content of all of Freud’s suggestions fails, even the famous description of Ernest’s fort/da game being dismissed as possibly bearing ‘a yield of pleasure’ (F:XVIII, 16), and even though we ‘have not advanced one step’ at the end of the chapter, nevertheless ‘if these determined repetitions do not suffice to dethrone the PP, at least the repetitive form, the reproduction of the repetitive, reproductivity itself will have begun to work without saying anything, without saying anything other than itself silencing itself, somewhat in the way it is said on the last page that the death drives say nothing’ (D:PC, 296). According to Derrida, the performative textual enactment of the death drive was not a rhetorical choice. Freud was not faced with a decision over whether to state his thesis as content or to show his thesis through textual form. Instead, what Freud is addressing when he discusses the death drive is not a ‘thesis’ that could be put forward but an ‘athesis’. Freud is forced to ‘write in the mode of the athesis’, offering an ‘athetic writing’ that presents nothing: ‘a text without content, without thesis, without an object that is detachable from its detaching operation’, a demarche or de-monstration that unfolds in taking back its unfolding – refuses to move, work or show (D:PC, 295–6). Derrida will even say that the death drive does not exist, which should not be understood as criticism but rather as a gesture of proximity since, as we will see below, most of Derrida’s own technical vocabulary will be referred to as not ‘existing’. We encounter throughout this the same kind of textual structure that we will see

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Derrida admire in Levinas’s writing – a via negativa in which the movement of neither this nor that produces a ‘wounding of language’ that allows ‘experience itself ’ to be ‘silently revealed’ (D:WD, 112). As Michael Naas has recently pointed out, Derrida regularly invites his readers to pay similar attention to the structural form of his texts – his own pas de thèse – a gesture that is particularly clearly displayed in an untranslated 2001 interview on Artaud: when I write something, even the most classical of philosophical texts, what is most important to me is not the content, the doctrinal body, but the mise-enscène, its spatial arrangement [la mise en espace]. I have the impression that someone is reading me well when he or she reads the most university-like or most academic of my texts by taking an interest in the spatial arrangement, in the mise-en-scène. Such readings are rather rare, but believe me, that’s what interests me and is most important to me.7

In line with these reflections Derrida stated in his final interview that there were perhaps only ‘a few dozen’ good readers of his work in the world, ‘people who are also writer-thinkers, poets’.8 Yet, where can we move next after a philosopher’s scandalous confession that the content of his texts is less important to him than their form? Particularly a philosopher who claims to dislike colloquiums because what ‘tends to prevail are theses, positions, position takings, positionings. I’ve never much liked these things, and I’ve rarely stopped to consider theses, which is not only a question of taste. It is nothing less than the question of philosophy, of what is accorded there to the thesis, to positionality’ (D:RP, 40).

‘An excessively philosophical gesture’ By beginning a new section, we seem to let the reader know that our preliminary ‘athetic’ remarks on the challenge of presenting deconstruction have drawn to a close. The duty of a confession of the impossibility of the task has been disposed of and we can finally set about the work of providing substantive content. Indeed, not wanting to entirely disappoint such expectations, we will turn to some of Derrida’s most programmatic statements about deconstruction. An obvious starting point is the fact that if there is to be a ‘deconstruction’ there must first be a ‘construction’. A deconstructive work always has a target – what we call here interchangeably a construction, system or book. Since the completed deconstructive work is itself a constructed textual body, it can always become the object of a further deconstructive intervention. What a

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deconstructive textual construction does with a targeted textual construction is simply to make its ‘constructed character appear as such’. Although deconstruction aims to carry out this task with regard to all of the constructed systems ‘that make life or existence possible’, it is certainly not the ‘destruction’ of those things since, if it were, ‘nothing would be possible any longer’. For example, the deconstruction of the value of presence ‘does not prevent us from counting on it at all times’ – without presence the ‘least desire, the least language would be impossible’ (D:N, 16): One cannot imagine oneself alive renouncing all consciousness, all presence, all ethics of language: and yet this is precisely what must be deconstructed. One must try to think what it is that makes us unable to ‘do without.’ Thus, on the one hand, the very menacing character of deconstruction. But, at the same time, it does not threaten anything because it is not a question of destroying what there is to deconstruct. Although phantasmatic, the threat is not, however, imaginary, and this explains the affective charge, the terrorized violence of the resentment and reactions against ‘deconstruction’. (D:N, 16)

Deconstruction shows the constructed character of that with which we are nevertheless unable to ‘do without’ – playing on the recent work of Quentin Meillassoux, it too shows the ‘the contingency of necessity’.9 Though such constructions are commonly referred to by Derrida as ‘texts’ and the deconstruction of those texts as acts of ‘reading’, he will emphasize the broadness of those terms. First, deconstruction also ‘performs its exercises on bodies of work that are not literary, philosophical, or religious texts but writings on the law, or institutions, norms, and programs. I have said it too often – the writing that interests deconstruction is not only the writing that libraries protect’ (D:PM, 138). Derrida claims that over time he ‘came to understand better to what extent the necessity of deconstruction […] was not primarily a matter of philosophical contents […] but especially and inseparably meaningful frames, institutional structures, pedagogical or rhetorical norms, the possibilities of law, of authority, of evaluation, and of representation in its very market’ (D:EU, 123). Yet even this expansion is inadequate to what he states might appear to be an ‘abusive deformation’ or merely ‘metaphorical’ use of ‘writing, text, or trace’ – his expansion of these terms being an ‘unbounded generalization’ (D:EU, 119). To understand the almost unlimited scope of this ‘unbounded generalization’ of what counts as a textual construction, we should not only think of Derrida’s infamous assertion from Of Grammatology – ‘There is no outside-text’ (D:OG, 158) – but also think of his provocative rejection in Speech and Phenomena of

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any non-textually mediated perception: ‘There never was any “perception”’ (D:SP, 103). Derrida fleshed out this rejection of perception in the discussion following his presentation of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ at Johns Hopkins University: Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference. And I believe that perception is interdependent with the concept of origin and of center and consequently whatever strikes at the metaphysics of which I have spoken strikes also at the very concept of perception. I don’t believe there is any perception.10

Understanding the origin of this claim in Speech and Phenomena would depend on a detailed discussion of Derrida’s reading of Husserl’s account of the temporal constitution of the living present; we might nevertheless very brutally summarize his position by stating that he assigns a fundamentally textual (and thus deconstructable) status to the retentions and protentions involved in the constitution of the scene of presence.11 Thus, anything that presents itself in the present – not only perceptual objects but thoughts, memories, feelings, etc. – can be deconstructed in so far as its presentation depends on a prior construction of differential marks. Derrida effectively imposes a structuralist mindset on phenomenology: one spontaneously cured of colour blindness could not have a meaningful experience of ‘redness’ simply by perceiving a red object, one must develop an underlying system of references (experiences of other colours) against which the presented object’s redness takes its meaning. If everything that offers itself in the scene of presence can be deconstructed, the obvious follow-up question would be whether everything should be deconstructed. A particularly emphatic answer to this question emerges in the interviews published surrounding the film Derrida. When asked what contemporary works of the past couple of years demanded deconstructive reading, Derrida responded: Everything! Everything requires deconstruction. Not only texts in the narrow sense, but everything. Deconstruction is not something that you just apply. Deconstruction is already at work – ‘always already’ as you say – always already at work within the thing to be deconstructed. When you deconstruct, you don’t use a tool to deconstruct something. You find, in the thing itself – the text itself, if you want – something already self-deconstructing. And nothing can escape this, in terms of politics, philosophy, every day [sic] life.12

The evangelical claim that everything not only can but should be deconstructed must be understood in this context where everything is always already inevitably

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning

self-deconstructing. The value of this ‘should’ is not the assertion of a task but the attestation that it is to be welcomed that everything is self-deconstructing – like ‘children should ask questions’ or ‘love should hurt’. Deconstruction is to be embraced and accelerated rather than conservatively fought against. Since deconstruction does not destroy, reject or even devalue constructions, it is to be welcomed as readily and warmly as the truth itself. At the same time, despite the fact that everything is already self-deconstructing, the deconstructive thinker must still produce a new text that is the deconstruction of a particular construction. In this sense they are still called on to decide where to intervene and, effectively, what should be deconstructed. Even if deconstruction does not destroy or reject, that there is a responsibility to strategically deconstruct a certain structure at a certain moment shows that it has a disruptive force. That which is exposed troubles what we might call the construction’s ‘self-image’ as a closed, consistent, self-identical, stable and grounded whole. This has already been seen in the last chapter where Derrida was shown looking for those points in Being and Time where the ‘work thus exceeds its own borders, the borders that its discourse seems to give to itself (for example, “those of an existential analysis of Dasein in the transcendental horizon of time”)’ (D:A, 32). One of Derrida’s most programmatic sets of assertions about deconstruction comes at the beginning of A Taste for the Secret. Derrida begins by distinguishing a minimal and a strong sense of ‘system’. Minimal systems, characterized by a ‘sort of consequence, coherence and insistence – a certain gathering together’, are inevitable and something Derrida has ‘never renounced, and never wished to’. The strategic targets of Derrida’s deconstructive interventions would instead be constructions characterized by the stronger ‘philosophical’ notion of system: ‘a continuity of all statements, a form of coherence (not coherence itself), involving a syllogicity of logic, a certain syn which is no longer simply that of gathering in general, but rather of the assemblage of ontological propositions’ (D:TS, 3–4). In earlier works Derrida refers to the strong system as ‘the (necessarily closed) minor structure’ (D:WD, 194). Deconstruction occurs and is always already occurring as a consequence of what Derrida refers to as the impossibility of such strong systems or necessarily closed minor structures. If such systems are indeed impossible, then there must be some moment in the construction of any supposedly closed philosophical system – characterized by a ‘continuity of all statements’ and ‘syllogicity of logic’ – that betrays it. The point or points in the system’s construction where there is a breakdown of continuity or ‘the structurality of an opening’ would be the system’s constitutive blind spots – ‘perhaps […] the unlocatable site in which philosophy takes root’ (D:WD, 194).

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Despite the many problems that come from trading on mathematical metaphors, with regard to the impossibility of the strong system one might think of the comparisons that have been offered between deconstruction and Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem. This states that any axiomatic system powerful enough to formalize truths about formal provability and that includes a statement of its own consistency is inconsistent – the statement of consistency would be the system’s self-image as necessarily closed.13 Clearly Derrida cannot offer a general proof of the order of Gödel’s proof. Since no such proof is possible, it is difficult to judge the status and argumentative basis of Derrida’s assertion of ‘the fact that the system is impossible’ (D:TS, 4). Derrida certainly seems to regard this ‘fact’ as more than the result of inductive reasoning – that every supposed closed and stable system considered so far has shown itself to be open and self-deconstructing. Later in this chapter we will touch on the strongest candidate for supporting Derrida’s general claim, his account of the play of différance on the ‘general text’ that produces weak systems of differential marks, yet never allows them to be fully constituted; however, it is highly questionable that we can or ought to read these claims as amounting to a proof of the impossibility of strong systematicity since Derrida cannot offer a science of the ‘general text’ or its graphic movements. At the same time, a formal proof of the fact of the impossibility of a strong system is not necessarily desirable since it would seem to open the possibility of deconstruction becoming programmatic (in the manner that Gödel’s proof could, in principal, be reduced to a set of pre-formulated rules applicable by a computer). One response then is to say that, lacking a general proof and properly unentitled to the universal claim that ‘the system is impossible’, deconstruction can only advance through addressing particular textual bodies and ‘making appear – in each alleged system, in each self-interpretation of and by a system – a force of dislocation, a limit in the totalization, a limit in the movement of syllogistic synthesis’ (D:TS, 4). Deconstruction does not simply glimpse what exceeds or resists the system; it produces a new text that remarks: that what has made it possible for philosophers to effect a system is nothing other than a certain dysfunction or ‘disadjustment,’ a certain incapacity to close the system [… T]his dysfunction not only interrupts the system but itself accounts for the desire for system, which draws its élan from this very disadjoinment, or disjunction. […] Basically, deconstruction as I see it is an attempt to train the beam of analysis onto this disjointing link. (D:TS, 4)

Driven by the underlying and unavoidable desire to present a system characterized by closed, rigorous ‘consequence and coherence’, philosophers have offered

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a series of systems that initially present themselves as having achieved the goal of harmonious ‘syllogicity’. However, assuming the truth of the impossibility of such systems, each of these constructions can only have achieved that appearance through failing to acknowledge or directly repressing some ‘disjointing link’ that a deconstruction will draw out and re-mark. The use of the term ‘repression’ is not accidental as it is precisely a matter of ‘[r]epression, not forgetting; repression, not exclusion’ – Derrida even claims that this ‘logocentric repression’ that produces a system’s systematicity is itself the basis of the possibility of the Freudian notion of repression rather than the reverse (D:WD, 246–8). The illusion of closure and stability that governs a particular system cannot be maintained in an environment characterized by investigators with the genuine desire for rigorous systematicity, meaning that all such ‘systems’ inevitably unmask themselves in time – we might call this a ‘return of the repressed’. Because it is the philosophical desire for ‘consequence and coherence’ that reveals the failure of systematicity in philosophical ‘systems’, Derrida characterizes his work in terms of ‘an excessively philosophical gesture: a gesture that is philosophical and, at the same time, in excess of the philosophical’ – remembering that we can find moments in excess of the philosophical in every major philosopher’s works (D:TS, 4).14 To flesh out this account with an example, perhaps the clearest expression of such an ‘excessively philosophical gesture’ comes in the tenth section of Derrida’s first publication, his Introduction to Husserl’s posthumous Origin of Geometry. Derrida first shows that the ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ assumes ‘diverse but analogous functions that are decisive at several points along Husserl’s itinerary’. He then argues that ‘Husserl never made the Idea itself the theme of a phenomenological description’: the Idea was never submitted to phenomenology’s ‘principle of all principles’ (D:IOG, 137).15 Furthermore this is ‘not by chance’, the ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ could never be submitted to this principle or indeed to phenomenological analysis in any shape or form: the Idea ‘cannot be given in person, nor determined in an evidence, for it is only the possibility of evidence […] the horizon for every intuition in general’ (D:IOG, 138). The impossibility of ‘a phenomenological determination of the Idea […] signifies perhaps that phenomenology cannot be reflected in a phenomenology of phenomenology, and that its Logos can never appear as such […] The Endstiftung of phenomenology (phenomenology’s ultimate critical legitimation: i.e., what its sense, value, and right tell us about it), then, never directly measured up to a phenomenology’ (D:IOG, 141). It is by upholding and submitting everything to phenomenology’s ‘principle of all principles’ more rigorously than Husserl himself did that Derrida shows

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the untenability of pure phenomenology. We can see that Derrida does not do anything here – he brings no external material or demand to phenomenology. The system itself – to meet its own ‘self-image’ as ‘the science of all sciences’ that derives all knowledge from, and only from, what is clearly seen – must submit everything to the principle of principles. We can see that the Idea was not forgotten or excluded, it plays a central role in Husserl’s work, but its status as alien to phenomenology was repressed. That the Idea cannot be submitted to the principle does not mean we should reject Husserl’s works or stop appreciating the value, productivity and importance of phenomenological methods in philosophy. All that is shown is that phenomenology cannot play the absolute grounding role that Husserl assigned to it. That phenomenology will still occur is why Derrida states in Of Grammatology that ‘the phenomenological reduction and the Husserlian reference to a transcendental experience’ become a ‘moment of the discourse’ of philosophy – a moment, not the whole or the ultimate foundation (D:OG, 61). Phenomenology cannot close on itself as a strong system that roots everything in a single origin: experience. The ‘self-image’ that it could play this foundational role, the feature that made it revolutionary in Husserl’s eyes, is shown to be inessential to phenomenological methods being used in philosophical investigation. At the same time, one might say that Derrida has shown ‘Phenomenology’ does not exist – it cannot be put forward as a system with a binding principal except on the basis of an act of repression. Furthermore, although it would be difficult to offer a rigorous proof of this claim, if this is not a contingent defect of Husserl’s particular formulation but a sign that any and every philosophy that attempts to ground all knowledge systematically in ‘whatever is clearly seen’ will require a non-intuitively originating infinite element in the production of ideality and experience, then direct intuition can never play the role of a pure origin. Any system that offers itself as grounding everything in experience will have an illegitimate ‘supplement’ or repressed ‘constitutive exception’. We should acknowledge that some account of systems being formed by a ‘constitutive exception’ forms a standard proposition in the structuralist milieu from which Derrida’s work emerges. In Gilles Deleuze’s ‘How do we Recognize Structuralism?’, the sixth criterion is the existence of an ‘empty square’ or ‘object = x’, referred to by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Pierre Faye as a ‘blind spot’, an ‘always mobile point which entails a certain blindness, but in relation to which writing becomes possible’: Christopher Miller’s ‘zero’, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘mana’, etc. Perhaps the clearest example is Roman Jakobson’s ‘zero phoneme’

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that ‘does not by itself entail any differential character or phonetic value, but in relation to which all the phonemes are situated in their own differential relations.’16 Derrida’s position comes particularly close to Lacan’s position after Lacan shifts in 1959 to asserting that ‘there is no Other of the Other’, which is equivalent to saying ‘there is no big Other’ and can be seen as a parallel to Derrida’s claim that strong systematicity is impossible.17

The puzzle A major puzzle emerges from the characterization of deconstruction offered so far. Indeed, it is a puzzle that remains among the least discussed and most poorly appreciated aspects of Derrida’s work. We can begin to present it through the common distinction between internal and external critique. In an external critique a position is questioned in accordance with a set of criteria that are alien to the original position. For example, one might dismiss Lacanian psychoanalysis on the basis of its failure to meet certain Marxist tenets. The limitation of such a critique is that it can only hope to convince people of a problem in the critiqued text if they accept the external position. An internal critique shows the untenability of a position in terms of its own criteria and evaluations. For example, one might take Hegel’s chapter on sense certainty in Phenomenology of Spirit to be an internal critique of naïve realism.18 The obvious advantage of internal critique is that it renders the original position untenable without requiring the prior acceptance of any particular position by the writer or reader. Indeed, a sceptic might offer or accept an internal critique without adopting any position at all. Despite not being a ‘critique’, a resemblance to internal critique seems to have emerged in our characterization of deconstruction. Derrida’s early reading of Husserl apparently involved applying Husserl’s own measure – phenomenology’s principle of all principles – to an essential item in Husserl’s system – the Idea. At least in this example, what distinguishes deconstruction from the kind of internal critique Hegel offers in Phenomenology of Spirit (and we should remember Derrida refers to portions of his work operating at ‘a point of almost absolute proximity to Hegel’ (D:P, 44)) is only that there is no moment of sublation or Aufhebung. That phenomenology cannot live up to its claimed status as ‘the science of sciences’ does not dialectically lead to a successor to phenomenology that would sublimate this conflict between its ambition and its actual achievements in the form of a new system; indeed, it does not even provide a motive for abandoning phenomenology. If ‘the system is impossible’,

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then phenomenology’s failure to meet the standard of systematic consistency and completion is no reason to stop phenomenologizing. This is not to say that there might not be some other arguments that provide a motive for abandoning phenomenology; however, such arguments would be separate from the activity of deconstruction itself. This also does not mean that Derrida himself never critiques or abandons a position: as if he were contractually obliged to only ever carry out deconstructive analyses or as if every single comment or commitment he ever made was automatically to be labelled ‘deconstructive’.19 What we have referred to as the major puzzle would be how deconstruction can bring about a ‘discussion among discourses’ when it appears closer to internal critique than external critique. If we are only submitting Husserlian material to a Husserlian measure, then how can this action connect phenomenology with other discourses? To put it more strongly, Derrida’s insistence that every text is always already self-deconstructing and that his strategic interventions only seek to draw out and re-mark this process implies there is no need for a reference beyond the isolated textual body being deconstructed. Indeed, making use of resources that are foreign to the original system not only would be unnecessary but would also falsify the manifestation of the original discourse’s self-deconstruction. As Derrida writes of his approach in Of Grammatology, ‘although it is not commentary, our reading must be intrinsic and remain within the text’ (D:OG, 159). In a later text he states that: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day; it is always already at work in the work; one must just know how to identify the right or wrong element, the right or wrong stone – the right one, of course, always proves to be, precisely, the wrong one […] [T]he disruptive force of deconstruction is always already contained within the architecture of the work. (D:MPM, 73)

To move beyond the puzzle of how deconstruction connects discourses we must begin from Derrida’s insistence that there is no such thing as an ‘isolated textual body’. The denial of the possibility of such an isolated body is what Derrida refers to in Of Grammatology as simultaneously the end of the book and the beginning of writing. To remain ‘within the text’ is not equivalent to remaining ‘within the book’, since the very ‘idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopaedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy […] against difference in general’ (D:OG, 18). To reveal a book as a text is, in a movement we are now familiar with, to

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show that what took itself to be a closed system is actually open and depends on textual elements beyond its self-conceived borders. The insistence that we must nevertheless remain ‘within the text’ does not mean sticking to claims that arise directly within a particular work, it means to not be ‘psychoanalytical, if by that we understand an interpretation that takes us outside of the writing toward a psychobiographical signified, or even toward a general psychological structure that could rightly be separated from the signifier’ (D:OG, 159). This reference to a general psychological structure separated from the signifier would encompass those modes of interpretive charity discussed in the previous chapter that try to construct what a particular thinker believed or ‘meant to say’. Crucially this movement of denuding strong systems or revealing books as texts already focuses on blind spots where the text trespasses its self-imposed borders and is already in contact with other systems. This is neatly illustrated by the incidental detail that the exception to Husserlian phenomenology’s closure is the Idea in the Kantian sense, an exception that wears on its sleeve the fact that it refers beyond the Husserlian system. At the very core of Husserlian phenomenology is a concept that not only breaks with phenomenology’s self-conception (by not having its origin in experience) but simultaneously does not belong entirely or simply to phenomenology.

Articulating meaning Through producing deconstructive readings of a diverse range of texts rather than positive theories, Derrida does not offer us anything like a functional ‘theory of meaning’. One might say that Derrida’s characteristic statement is not ‘it actually works like this’, but instead ‘it’s more complicated than that’. The most we seem to be able to say legitimately and without violence is that for Derrida ‘meaning’ is something that happens and that has various conditions. That no ‘theory of meaning’ would be possible follows from Derrida’s general stance on conditions, which: can only take a negative form (without X there would not be Y). One can be certain only of this negative form. As soon as it is converted into positive certainty (‘on this condition, there will surely have been event, decision, responsibility, ethics, or politics’), one can be sure that one is beginning to be deceived, indeed beginning to deceive the other. (D:OH, 80–1)

To give an example of this structure close to our project, we have seen Derrida claim that there would be no justice worthy of the name without justice ‘before

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the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead’ (D:SM, xviii). This negative form cannot be converted into the positive certainty that ‘if we take into account ghosts, we will have justice’. This is because there can always be one more condition – no justice without taking into account animals, gender, disability, colonial oppression, etc. Just as there is no total list of what or who needs to be taken into account for justice to occur, there can be no total account of meaning production since there is always the possibility of one more condition or complication. For example, in communication, what if the speaker is acting, is a habitual liar, is being sarcastic, etc.? These conditions will not necessarily mean that no meaning occurs, though the process of meaning production and the meaning produced would be different. As emerges clearly in Derrida’s conflict with John Searle, Derrida denies the tenability of first offering a theory of meaning in ‘serious’ cases – those characterized by a foundational simplicity where there is no lying, no acting, no sarcasm – and then moving on to offering accounts of progressively more complex cases.20 What cannot be done then is to produce a positive system that would account for the production of meaning from the raw materiality of language, such as is arguably at stake in Lacan’s ‘logic of the signifier’.21 Even in those moments when Derrida is closest to offering a positive account of meaning, he will specify that his ‘formulas are not absolute or absolutely formalizable’ and ‘cannot claim to be a metalanguage’ – what Lacan’s mathemes, at least apparently, offer themselves as (D:LI, 120). Nevertheless, in order to move ahead in this section we will temporarily throw caution to the wind and offer something apparently of the order of a positive ‘Derridean theory of meaning’. We do this in full knowledge of the fact that what is offered is based on many gross simplifications and will fail to do justice to the vast catalogue of complications that Derrida’s works on meaning, language, writing and context have brought to light. If this has the loose character of a ‘grammatology’, it is offered in full acknowledgement of Derrida’s claim that grammatology is impossible (D:RP, 52). One small move that might help would be to phrase this as a minimal theory of meaning – as with Derrida’s negative conditions, we are not saying what is required for meaning to occur, only that at least this is. That we proceed in this manner is partly justified by expediency in relation to reaching our central topic and partly by the fact that, even if this were a book on Derrida’s interventions on the question of meaning production, a strong way of beginning would be through offering a systematization that fails. This was Derrida’s own suggestion for reading another writer whose texts refuse systematization, Nietzsche:

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The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning [R]ather than protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps offer him up to it completely, underwriting that interpretation without reserve; in a certain way and up to the point where the content of the Nietzschean discourse being almost lost for the question of being, its form regains its absolute strangeness, where his text finally invokes a different type of reading, more faithful to his type of writing. (D:OG, 19)

Let us begin then with the example of a piece of written text. Although the text’s author might regard themselves as having encoded a certain meaning in their script, the produced text considered purely as a material body – some squiggly lines on a page – does not have that meaning. Derrida reserves ‘meaning’ for the ‘meaning-effects’ or ‘significations’ that arise in the living present of a subject’s conscious experience: significations are ‘elements appearing on the scene of presence’ and everything that appears on the scene of presence is a signification (since there is no pure perception that does not go by way of language and systems of reference) (D:MP, 13).22 Indeed, due to the textual status of retentions and protentions in the constitution of the living present, the ‘scene of presence’ itself is also an ‘effect’ – ‘one comes to posit presence – and specifically consciousness […] no longer as the absolutely central form of Being but as a “determination” and as an “effect.” A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but of différance’ (D:MP, 16). Whether it is a matter of the scene of presence (the temporal constitution of the living present) or of that which comes forward on that scene (the objects of intentional mental acts), a meaning-effect is only ever produced through the articulation of the differential elements that are ‘present’ in experience with differential systems that are, for want of a better term, ‘absent’. This claim is more mundane than it might appear. A written text is written in a particular language and within a certain historical and institutional context. Any subject wishing to have a meaning effect come forward in their conscious experience through encountering that textual body in an act of reading will require a minimal familiarity with the text’s language and context (or at least what they assume to be its language and context). Languages, contexts, traditions and institutions are themselves differential systems or ‘texts’ in Derrida’s broad sense. Unlike the written text that is present to the reader, we provisionally refer to textual bodies such as languages or contexts as ‘absent’ – this term is in scare quotes since, while the language one speaks is not an object on the scene of presence like the text being read, it is clearly not simply absent; indeed, one could argue that it is ‘closer’ to us than anything offered on the scene of presence and that, as Heidegger might put it, we dwell in our language.

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We can see then why the notion of an ‘isolated text’ is impossible since it produces no meaning-effect. For example, scripts written in Linear A or some other currently untranslatable language are, properly speaking, not written texts for us as we lack the background resources to take them as texts – we can look at them but we cannot read them. It would only be after the discovery or production of some other differential textual body or bodies – perhaps a new Rosetta Stone – that the text could come to be taken as a text and produce meaning-effects through reading. Without the appropriate ‘absent’ textual bodies, we cannot even be certain that the presented text is a text at all – perhaps what we assume to be a manuscript in an unknown language is an abstract picture or a series of random marks produced by nature or accident. Although a text was written in a language, the text considered in itself is not in a language – it has to be taken to be written in a particular language in order to produce effects. For example, the pure material written mark ‘manger’ is not in itself in any particular language; it is only when read by a subject who takes it to be in English and who articulates it with that textual body that the meaningeffect of ‘Christ’s crib’ comes forward, while if it had been taken to be in French the meaning-effect of ‘to eat’ would have come forward.23 Assuming then that I write something with the simple aim of communicating a message to you – such as a note on the fridge stating ‘buy some milk’ – I cannot simply place my intended meaning on paper such that it sits there waiting for your retrieval. Rather, when writing in a particular language I produce a series of in themselves meaningless graphical marks that I assume, on the basis of my knowledge of our shared relation to certain other textual bodies (the English language, cultural practices, etc.), you will identify as writing and articulate (quite spontaneously) with the appropriate textual bodies so as to produce roughly the meaning-effect on your scene of presence that I intended. Of course, I can never be certain that you will not take my note as a piece of abstract art. Equally, I cannot discount the possibility that the words I have written have a completely different meaning in another language that you speak and assume the note to have been written in. It is also possible that you will believe my message is a joke rather than a request. Furthermore, there is nothing I can add to my message to guarantee against such possibilities – even if I add ‘this is a written message, in English, it is not a joke’, it remains conceivable that you will take these additional marks as only further lines in the abstract image, they might have another meaning in the foreign language you happen to speak or they might be taken as evidence that I’m definitely being humorous.

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One of Derrida’s early projects was showing, against a traditional philosophical view that meaning can be conveyed directly in person, that the issues raised above with regard to written texts apply equally to the spoken word. As Ferdinand de Saussure argued, listening to the pure flow of a language we do not speak we cannot even be certain where the borders between the words fall: ‘When we listen to an unknown language, we are not in a position to say how the sequence of sounds should be analysed: for the analysis is impossible if one takes into account nothing more than the phonic side of the linguistic event.’24 It is possible that a flow of sound that appears to be speech in an unknown language is really just meaningless noise, as in Adriano Celentano’s song Prisencolinensinainciusol. Similarly, if you hear one of Ghil’ad Zuckermann’s Italo-Hebraic Bilingual Homophonous Poems then, depending on whether you speak Italian or Hebrew, you will cut the flow of sound at quite different points to produce entirely different meaning-effects. The same sound that an Italian hears as ‘ardent attention changed the reaction [calda attenzion he cambiato la reazion]’ would be divided into quite different units by one articulating it with Hebrew to produce ‘Light-minded, there is no Zion; The corner – his arrival at his friend’s is Zion!’25 Even assuming that one speaks and recognizes the language a statement is made in, failure to articulate the material with further differential systems would produce divergent meaning-effects. For example, one might run for the doors when a performer on stage screams ‘Fire!’ Of course, the person who is aware of the context that is ‘Western theatrical practices’ and who sits comfortably laughing at the naïve fleeing audience members might have an unpleasant surprise when they discover that the performer was genuinely trying to alert the audience to a fire. Once again, there is nothing the actor can say or do to guarantee that the audience member will take them seriously – even when grabbing their arm and shouting directly into the spectator’s face that: ‘There really is a fire! The play has ended and the fire-engines are coming!’, it remains quite possible for this to be interpreted as highly experimental immersive theatre. One important way in which things become more complicated than the simplified picture offered so far is that these apparently distinct textual bodies are involved in immanent, dynamic and interactive relationships. It is not simply a matter of decoding a presented material message through ‘absent’ decryption keys that would be independent, ideal and quasi-eternal (the English language, context, etc.). Rather, even the ‘absent’ texts are temporal and material; they are acted on in their articulation. To use a well-worn example, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is not only predominantly written in the English language (or

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perhaps ‘languages’ due to its plurality of idioms and dialects) and published at a certain historical and institutional moment with regard to the field of English, and indeed non-English, literature – it is also an active and transformative intervention in and within those fields. The English language does not merely decode the poem, it is itself transformed by it. The literary canon is also transformed, not only through the addition of a new entrant but because works such as Dante’s The Divine Comedy have their meaning retroactively altered (at least for some notion of the ideal reader). Despite his famous criticisms of structuralist authors and his doubts about the Saussurean terms signifier, signified and sign, in all of these claims Derrida is clearly committed to a broadly differential account of signification where ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms […] language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system’ (D:MP, 10–11): In the extent to which what is called ‘meaning’ (to be ‘expressed’) is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly ‘simple term’ is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority. It is always already carried outside itself. It already differs (from itself) before any act of expression. And only on this condition can it constitute a syntagm or text. Only on this condition can it ‘signify’ […] there is no signification unless there is synthesis, syntagm, différance and text. (D:P, 33)

What follows from the claim that any ‘presumed interiority’ is ‘already worked upon by its own exteriority’ is that the self-deconstruction of that which at first presents itself as an isolated work expands under deconstructive analysis into the self-deconstruction of multiple overlapping constructions founded upon what Derrida calls the ‘general text’. This notion of the ‘general text’ is not the actual totality or summation of all texts; it is not a unity and can never become an object of thought. As Critchley writes: ‘The general text is a limitless network of differentially ordered signs which is not preceded by any meaning, structure or eidos, but itself constitutes each of these. It is here, upon the surface of the general text, that there “is” deconstruction, that deconstruction takes place.’26 At the ‘graphic’ level of the underlying ‘general text’ – on the surface of which transitory differential textual systems are constructed, articulated and deconstructed – there is only a circulation of immanent elements without the possibility of articulation since (a) it is not an ordered system of differentially defined elements, and (b) there is no other textual body for it to be articulated

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with. Without any possibility being articulated and producing a meaningeffect on the scene of presence, the ‘general text’ is unknowable. If there is any kind of experience of the ‘general text’, it is not a coming to presence but only the continual breaking down of the tenability of the borders of any textual construction under the beam of deconstructive analysis – the fact that whenever one attempts to work on a delimited range of texts one finds oneself referred beyond them. Although Critchley’s summary does a good job at conveying what is at stake here, his reference to ‘differentially ordered signs’ is incorrect. It would be more appropriate to approach the ‘general text’ as a circulation of pre-significative material or ‘symbols’. These will only become ‘signs’ within a particular differential construction that is in turn articulated with another construction to produce a meaning-effect on the scene of presence – ‘what Saussure does not say would have to be said: there is neither symbol nor sign but a becoming-sign of the symbol’ (D:OG, 47). If all constructions exist on the surface of the ‘general text’, then once again we can see how the deconstruction of a specific textual system cannot be accounted for in terms of either ‘internal’ or ‘external’ resources or measures. That a text is always already self-deconstructing is not merely the assertion that there is inevitably some exceptional element within any purportedly isolated system that betrays the system’s self-image and closure. The constitutive exception or disjointing link inhabiting the system’s blind spot is also a member of other constructions that, since they define the term, the system depends on. That is to say, the exception to the system does not simply sit on the ‘general text’, it is differentially defined in its particularity (such that it can perform the work it needs to do within the system) by a whole network of other terms in some other construction that is thereby both necessary for and potentially incompatible with the construction that is being deconstructed. To illustrate all of this, we can give a brief snapshot of an example that would call for a full and detailed investigation. A deconstruction of contemporary secular liberal democracy might focus its beam of analysis on the disjoining link that is ‘sovereignty’. What deconstruction might show is that ‘sovereignty’ is defined by and involves essential reference to its development in Christian theology. The concepts in the political system cannot maintain their structure without the concept of sovereignty, yet the concept of sovereignty’s own definition involves essential reference to a complex differential structure of theological concepts. That this political system is always already selfdeconstructing would be caused by its reference to that network of theological concepts (concepts that differentially structure and define sovereignty) that it

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both cannot function without, yet simultaneously cannot openly acknowledge without losing its systematic, secular, political status. The range of theological concepts involved in defining sovereignty cannot themselves be isolated from the entire theological system that gives them in turn their meaning, and, furthermore, in tracing what defines those theological concepts we would undoubtedly run into concepts whose definition makes reference to still other textual constructions. We must also acknowledge that this movement would also apply in reverse – the meaning of sovereignty in Christian theology is itself partially defined by the terms used in the differential system that is secular liberal democracy. We can say then that the political and theological systems overlap on the ‘general text’ and depend on each other through their articulation around the hinge of sovereignty (and undoubtedly many other hinges). In another vocabulary one might refer to a term such as sovereignty as a parasite ‘at once accidental and essential. Like any good parasite, it is at once inside and outside’ (D:Pts, 234). We can see then that when politics invokes sovereignty it is neither a matter of a simple reference outside of the system’s conceptual terms nor a matter of an entirely internal resource that it has failed to master. It is on a limitless circulation of differentially ordered symbols that isolated systems claiming consistency and independence are constructed through the active repression of how key signs involved in those systems are actually differentially defined by other constructions beyond the system’s borders; those other constructions not only ruin the claim of the original system to closure but are very possibly incompatible with it. We can see why in Catherine Malabou’s words: ‘Derrida begins by disturbing the very concepts of opening and closing, interior and exterior. The difference between inside and outside is never given, it always remains to be produced’, and as produced or constructed it remains provisional.27 We cannot think without demarcated systems, disciplines and discourses: they are absolutely necessary (we are unable to ‘do without’ them) without being absolute – they always remain contingent, finite and mortal. What has been glimpsed through these reflections is how exposing the self-deconstruction of a particular textual construction leads to how it is articulated with other textual bodies through hinges or parasites that operate in and are defined by multiple (potentially incompatible) systems. The preliminary conceptual machinery is now in place then to understand how deconstruction might assist in the project of setting up a ‘serious discussion among discourses’ between the twentieth century’s three determinate angles on death, despite those discourses being incompatible and without the hope of forming them into

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a singular master-discourse. However, to flesh out this account we will need to offer a more detailed account of how Derrida brings about such a discussion through his distinctive use of writing.

2.2  Hinges and pivots Beyond comprehension One of the most immediately visible features of Derrida’s works is his vocabulary. A series of distinctive neologism, paleologisms, portmanteaus, abbreviations and acronyms marks his texts. Though the varied terms that arise in Derrida’s works merit individual attention, they nevertheless possess a peculiar substitutability. Derrida characterizes them as forming an ‘open chain’ without ‘taxonomical closure’, yet one that does not ‘constitute a lexicon’ (D:P, 40). In this section we will briefly address the renowned difficulty of Derrida’s writing before turning in more detail to the specific mode of functioning of this open chain of ‘terms’ (clearly very different from a series of distinct philosophical ‘concepts’).28 Finally, we will offer a preliminary introduction to the ‘trace’, which will be fleshed out in the following chapters when we turn to Levinas’s and Freud’s works on death. It is useful to begin by acknowledging that Derrida’s writing is unavoidably difficult. Todd May is not unfair in stating that: The elusiveness of Derrida’s writing makes it difficult to give an assessment of him. This tends to divide people into two camps: one more or less uncritically accepting his perspective, the other more or less uncritically rejecting it. In neither case is Derrida’s thought given a fair shake.29

With regard to those who more or less uncritically reject his work, we can distinguish two major groups. The first group claims that Derrida treats all texts as literary works to be addressed in terms of rhetoric rather than truth. At best such characterizations see Derrida as part of a ‘post-modern’ tradition that rejects any reference to the supposedly antiquated values of truth and reason because it discerns within such values the repressive forces of patriarchy, Eurocentrism, colonialism and instrumental-technological reason.30 This assessment focuses on a supposed intention that Derrida repeatedly rejected: ‘Those who accuse me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric (see, for example, the latest book by Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity) have visible and carefully avoided reading me’ (D:Pts, 218).

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The other group is even more hostile, suspecting that the strange words that Derrida’s texts pivot around are merely confused, argumentatively bankrupt verbal trickery: a nest of garbled category mistakes loaded with mystical, theological or poetic evocations that was written not to be understood but to be revered uncritically by disciples. Such assessments emerged with particular force in the so-called ‘Cambridge Affair’, such as in Barry Smith’s famous letter to The Times claiming: M. Derrida’s voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all – as every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do) – his works employ a written style that defies comprehension.31

The difficulty for those who might want to defend Derrida is that Smith is not simply incorrect here. Not only does Derrida indeed move beyond the recognizable limits of academic scholarship, he genuinely does, at times, produce sentences that defy comprehension. Derrida utilizes sentences that cannot be ‘read’ – sentences that in so far as they are understood have been misunderstood. Yet, rather than being gnomic, mystical assertions, what is at stake in these twisting and unreadable lines is the dynamics of the underlying materiality we have referred to as the ‘general text’ – the pre-logical and unpresentable processes of the ‘graphic’ that are the precondition for the emergence of the scene of presence with its meaning-effects, texts, institutions and everything else that then obeys the processes of ‘logic’. This aim to address the pre-logical ground of the logical or the unpresentable ground of presented meaning has a clear Heideggerian provenance: ‘Logic’ understands thinking to be the representation of beings in their being, which representation proposes to itself in the generality of the concept. But how is it with meditation on being itself, that is, with the thinking that thinks the truth of being? This thinking alone reaches the primordial essence of λόγος, which was already obfuscated and lost in Plato and in Aristotle, the founder of ‘logic.’ To think against ‘logic’ does not mean to break a lance for the illogical but simply to trace in thought the λόγος and its essence [… W]hat value are even far-reaching systems of logic to us if, without really knowing what they are doing, they recoil before the task of simply inquiring into the essence of λόγος? (H:PM, 265)

While Derrida would not refer to the graphic as the essence of the logical – arguing for a plural dissemination of incomplete textual constructions as the condition for logic’s emergence rather than a singular sending of being – there

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is nevertheless a clear inheritance of Heidegger’s concern here. As we will see in the following chapter, this inheritance is further transformed through Levinas’s account of the ethical origin of meaning. One claim that Derrida would certainly support is Heidegger’s assertion that those who regard themselves as the defenders of rigorous logic and clear academic discourse, denouncing investigations into the apparently absurd realm of the pre-logical, are themselves the defenders of irrationalism (or, as we saw in the previous chapter, of ‘blindness’), which rules ‘unnoticed and uncontested in the defence of “logic”’ (H:PM, 265). Trying to address this pre-logical and unpresentable ‘graphic’ will require ‘detours, locutions, and syntax’ that ‘resemble those of negative theology, occasionally even to the point of being indistinguishable from negative theology’ (D:MP, 6). This in turn creates the very real possibility of the uncritical acceptance of Derrida’s writing that was denounced by May: a quasireligious culture of avowed ignorance and cultivated non-knowledge before the intangible mysteries of différance. Surely the claim that Derrida cannot be read and is misunderstood in so far as he is understood can only encourage a mystical relation to his works? Against such a characterization, it is appropriate to stress that doing justice to Derrida depends on holding his writings to the most rigorous intellectual standards while making every reasonable effort to explain and justify his choices and motivations in as clear and accessible a manner as possible – in Albert Einstein’s words: ‘Everything should be as simple as possible, but no more so.’ It is worth quoting a lengthy passage here to hammer home what Derrida is trying to promote – although contemporary research in the sciences and humanities questions the ‘certainties and axioms of the Enlightenment’, it does this to think them better in the light of the Enlightenment of our time with its new demands: These difficult and refined research activities (of a scientific, philosophical, literary, or other type) thus make necessary questions on the subject of these very principles (the history and foundation of the principle of reason, the history and foundation of the value of truth, of the interpreted language as communication or as information, of the structure of public space, and so forth). Risky but indispensable, this work calls for transformations in the modes of writing and argumentation. It gives rise to texts that are more difficult to summarize, to translate, or to teach immediately in the larger public space and sometimes in the academic space itself. The shared obligation of the researcher and the journalist, or even of the professor who fulfills the role of journalist, is to make every effort to explain without betraying [… T]he duty, the categorical imperative, I would say […] is to mark humbly and clearly that things are still

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more complicated – and that the reader ought to be aware of that [… Readers] are called upon to work […] to verify the information that is proposed to them and not to take at its word what they are being told about a text or a fact. One must teach the reader as well as the student that the difficulty of a discourse is not a sin – nor is it the effect of obscurantism or irrationalism. (D:Pts, 428–9)

At least in his projected self-image, Derrida is certainly not demanding uncritical disciples. We have argued that his ‘transformations in the modes of writing and argumentation’ seek to address a pre-logical ‘graphic’ order that can never be made present, yet is the precondition or ground of ‘presence’ and ‘logic’. In so far as philosophy is logocentric (or to put it in Heideggerian terms, in so far as all metaphysics inherited the Aristotelian ‘vulgar’ notion of time and has always been a ‘metaphysics of presence’), philosophical writing is constitutively incapable of engaging with this unpresentable graphic order. We must turn then to modes of reading and writing that are non-philosophical or in excess of the philosophical, modes that might even be called literary. Does this confession of the literary character of Derrida’s readings and writings not prove that Habermas’s original assessment was correct: that Derrida reduces philosophy to literature and logic to rhetoric? Not at all. That Derrida follows Heidegger in the task of pursuing a rigorous account of logic that pushes into its pre-logical and non-philosophical ground does not involve reducing the former to the latter. Derrida is in no way committed to saying that a full and exhaustive understanding of the graphic, were it to be possible, would encompass a full and exhaustive understanding of logic. Similarly, an understanding of the material science of the grooves on a vinyl record will not help us to judge whether the music is good, it will not encompass the rules of harmony or a genealogy of the Western musical tradition, nor will it be a science whose statements are expressible in the form of musical notation; however, it might help us to realize why the record is skipping and how to get it back on track. In a psychoanalytic register, that pre-logical primary processes such as displacement and condensation underlie the very possibility of the emergence of secondary processes in the psyche, such as logical thought, in no way means that they offer an account of secondary processes or a motivation for rejecting them, if rejecting logical thought were even possible.

Derrida’s terms In his 1971 interview ‘Positions’, Derrida lists a small number of the ‘words’ or ‘concepts’ that had ‘imposed themselves’ on his analyses: from différance

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to ‘gram, reserve, incision, trace, spacing, blank […] supplement, pharmakon, margin-mark-march, etc.’ He introduces these as ‘not atoms, but rather focal points of economic condensation, sites of passage’ (D:P, 40). As he put it, roughly contemporaneously with this interview in ‘The Double Session’, these terms are not identical yet possess ‘a certain serial law’ as ‘points of indefinite pivoting’ – this metaphorical image of words as pivots or hinges that articulate surfaces plays a central role in our account (D:D, 230). One of the richest sources for statements about these ‘sites of passage’ or ‘points of indefinite pivoting’ is Derrida’s seminal essay of 1968 ‘Différance’, even if to appreciate this we must realize that the broad statements about différance, play and trace in this text apply to all other members of the chain. This is because différance ‘lends itself to a certain number of nonsynonymous substitutions, according to the necessity of the context’ (D:MP, 12). Derrida states that différance, as the play of differences, is ‘the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general’ (D:MP, 11). Différance thus refers to the graphic play that is at work in the construction, articulation and deconstruction of systems on the surface of the ‘general text’ – it produces systems, concepts and meaning-effects. However, since neither the general text nor its play can be presented, différance cannot really be said to ‘refer’ to this since it is not even a word, ‘that is, what is generally represented as the calm, present, and self-referential unity of concept and phonic material’ (D:MP, 11). Along with being the condition of possibility of differential systems, this play is also their condition of impossibility in that, as we have seen, Derrida claims it is impossible for a strong, stable and closed system to form on the ‘general text’. Différance promises but never delivers such a system – in accordance with one of the term’s roots, the system is always deferred. One can only believe that a system has arrived by turning a blind eye to some disjointing link around which a transitory construction is always already self-deconstructing. As the condition of the possibility of conceptuality, terms in Derrida’s open chain can be seen as aconceptual concepts ‘heterogeneous to the philosophical concept of the concept, a “concept” that marks both the possibility and the limit of all idealization and hence of all conceptualization’ (D:LI, 118). Derrida and his commentators make use of three major techniques for underlining that the terms in the chain are not concepts or even words: (1) the use of scare quotes, such as in referring to the ‘word’ or ‘concept’ of différance;32 (2) the use of a single member of the chain to refer to all of the other members of the chain, such as referring to them as traces or as marks; (3) to

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create a neologism or paleologism that refers to these terms in general – such as aconceptual concept, undecidables, quasi-transcendentals or infrastructures – each emphasizing a particular feature of the chains functioning and justified strategically.33 Up to this point we have mainly been practising the weaker technique of referring to them as ‘terms’: deliberately avoiding ‘word’ or ‘concept’ without committing ourselves to any of the above strategies. From this point onwards we will also use ‘undecidables’ and ‘marks’. All of Derrida’s marks relate to an active differentiating movement or play that is ultimately occurring at the level of the unpresentable ‘general text’, this play being the precondition for the emergence of meaning-effects, the textual systems that produce meaning-effects, and the very scene of presence on which meaning-effects arise. As we have seen, the precondition meaningful ‘elements appearing on the scene of presence’ (D:MP, 13) is a material text’s articulation with other textual bodies (languages, contexts, institutions, etc.). Thus, one side of the activity that Derrida uses marks such as différance, play and trace to gesture towards is the active construction of transitory differential systems (such as the English language), while another side would be the articulation of those systems that produces meaning-effects on the scene of presence. The easiest way to introduce the functioning of these terms is through their inevitable malfunctioning. As we have seen, these terms are not words since they are not characterized by the self-referential unity of a concept and a phonic material. Since any mark is clearly a ‘material element’ or ‘signifier’, what appears to be lacking is that material element’s unity with a concept. That ‘différance’ as a material mark on the page has no conceptual meaning can partly be explained by the fact that it is not a part of the French, or indeed any other, language. Derrida is not establishing a technical language or code in which it would have a ‘meaning’ – as would be the case when a philosopher creates concepts. Although we will have referred to this chain as a vocabulary, it is no more appropriate to regard Derrida as a producer of neologisms than to regard James Joyce as producing a technical vocabulary in Finnegans Wake. As the ‘possibility and the limit of all idealization’ (D:LI, 118), différance is properly meaningless. Furthermore, ‘it’ does not even exist: Now if différance is (and I also cross out the ‘is’) what makes possible the presentation of the being-present, it is never presented as such. It is never offered to the present. […] différance is not, does not exist, is not a present-being (on) in any form […] it has neither existence nor essence. It derives from no category of being, whether present or absent. (D:MP, 6)

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What is important for us is Derrida’s slightly paradoxical confession that, even though différance is the ‘unnameable’, the ‘play which makes possible nominal effects’ where ‘there is no name for it at all […] not even that of “différance”’; nevertheless, for us, ‘différance remains a metaphysical name, and all the names that it receives in our language are still, as names, metaphysical’ (D:MP, 26). To understand these claims we need to appreciate that, in the activity of reading, we cannot not take différance as a concept. Although there is différance as play in the constitution of meaning, we can never encounter this play since as ‘soon as it comes into being and into language, play erases itself as such. [… T]he game and the graphe are constantly disappearing as they go along’ (D:D, 115). The moment one reads différance as if it were a word in a sentence, rather than seeing it as a graphic ‘mark’ on the paper akin to an ink spill, a mistake has been made, albeit an inevitable one. In seeing différance as a word, the graphic mark has been articulated with various textual constructions to produce a meaningeffect, and so we are no longer dealing with the play of the ‘general text’ that is beyond the possibility of articulation or presence. The simplest example for illustrating this is Derrida’s famous discussion of the term pharmakon. This Greek word can be translated as ‘drug’, ‘remedy’ or ‘poison’ in accordance with context, yet taken as a pure graphic mark it is ‘ambivalent’ with regard to these various oppositions that it exceeds as the material medium that is their condition of possibility (D:D, 130). As a textual mark that is older than the opposed meanings that might emerge in presence on the basis of particular articulations of that mark with other textual bodies, it is ‘neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil’ (D:P, 43). What the original author might have intended a particular iteration of the mark to mean in a particular sentence, even if we were able to be in an ideal position to be absolutely certain of this, would have no relevance for the ambivalent status of the graphic mark when considered as a pure material mark. However, while at this material level the graphic mark is prior to these opposed meanings, we cannot read a sentence including ‘pharmakon’ (whether in Plato or in Derrida) without reading it in terms of one, some or all of those opposed meaningful values. We will always ‘read’ pharmakon either as a meaningful sign or as a densely packed plurality of conflicting meaningful signs, never as the meaningless graphic mark that is the precondition of the appearance and functioning of the range of opposed meanings. Even if we are somewhat capable of reading a sentence with our awareness open to the equivocal richness of an ‘either/or’ – perhaps suspending our judgement over whether the liquid is a remedy or a poison or perhaps flipping between the different possibilities as we might with Wittgenstein’s

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duck-rabbit – we cannot entertain an undecidability that is not ‘either/or’ but a simultaneous ‘neither/nor’ and ‘both/and’. As a helpful comparison, we might think of Schrödinger’s cat. It is not merely that while the box remains closed we do not know whether the cat is alive or dead and should avoid making an assumption either way. Rather, the cat is in the positive state of being both alive and dead while also being neither alive nor dead. This literally unimaginable positive state of life-death is annihilated by any act of observation, just as undecidability is annihilated in any act of reading. As such, Derrida states that these undecidables should be taken in ‘a rigorously Freudian sense’. They are ‘the unconscious of philosophical contradiction, the unconscious which ignores contradiction to the extent that contradiction belongs to the logic of speech, discourse, consciousness, presence, truth, etc.’ (D:P, 101 fn. 13). To attempt to read a sentence containing an undecidable as an undecidable would be akin to trying to draw a picture of the kettle in Freud’s joke that I never borrowed, that already had a hole in it when I borrowed it and that I returned intact. Despite being unpresentable and meaningless, phenomenologically speaking inexistent, and despite admitting ‘into their games both contradiction and noncontradiction’ and belonging ‘in a sense both to consciousness and to the unconscious’ (D:D, 230), this does not mean there is no kind of order to their play – if there were not then that play would not construct systems. Although Derrida clearly states that there is no science of writing – no ‘grammatology’ – there is a certain combinatory dynamics and movement that is referred to as ‘graphematics’. The peculiarity of graphematics is that any sentence that tries to record or refer to the processes of the graphic that are the precondition of logic and meaning can always be read and can only be read in terms of logic and meaning – normally appearing in the form of contradictory nonsense. In short, Smith was right: any reader who opens Derrida to (almost) any page will encounter a written style that defies comprehension. When approaching Derrida’s works it will be a matter of moving between reading (conceived as the extraction of either a univocal or an equivocal meaning that complies with the rigorous standards of logic and that emerges though articulating the text with other textual bodies) and the interruption of that reading through an attention to the pure graphics of the textual bodies at stake. This has been referred to as a practice of ‘double reading’: Derrida speaks of: ‘Two texts, two hands, two visions, two ways of listening’ (D:MP, 65). Such a double reading can be practised on any text from the metaphysical tradition, including Derrida’s own, in so far as they do not escape that tradition. Nevertheless, Derrida’s writing

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style attempts to produce a text that is self-aware, or perhaps one that is selfaware of the impossibility of textual self-awareness. With one hand he produces a commentary pointing to the text under discussion’s logocentrism while with the other he offers a commentary on the essential and unavoidable logocentrism of the commentary itself. A deconstructive work is thus a record of the rhythmic movement between reading and the interruption of reading, producing a text marked in its time and counter-time by the track of its own writing. We will only be able to read Derrida’s double readings through an act of double reading: this is partly why we must pay attention to what we have seen Derrida refer to as the mise-en-scène of his texts as much as their content or read meaning. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology: To see to it that the beyond does not return to the within is to recognize in the contortion the necessity of a pathway [parcours]. That pathway must leave a track in the text. Without that track, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be indistinguishable from it. (D:OG, 61)34

The sheaf We have already seen that pharmakon, taken as a graphic mark, is a material medium that is ‘older’ than the multiple and incompatible meanings that it is the condition of possibility for the emergence of. What we see in the essay ‘Différance’, however, is a single mark being the site of multiple and incompatible graphics. Introducing the essay, Derrida claims that: I would like to attempt, to a certain extent, and even though in principle and in the last analysis this is impossible, and impossible for essential reasons, to reassemble in a sheaf [faisceau] the different directions in which I have been able to utilize what I will call provisionally the word or concept of différance, or rather to let it impose itself upon me in its neographism, although as we shall see, différance is literally neither a word nor a concept. (D:MP, 3)

Derrida claims he will not undertake this task by describing the full history of his interventions ‘text by text, context by context’, but will instead be concerned with the ‘general system of this economy’. Nevertheless, that he promises he will fail in his task ‘for essential reasons’ testifies to a fundamental incompatibility in the ‘different directions’ in which he has utilized différance. This gathering as a sheaf will only be provisional, the glimpse of an assemblage that ‘has the complex structure of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different

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threads and different lines of meaning – or of force – to go off again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others’ (D:MP, 3). To point ahead, that fundamentally incompatible discourses can provisionally be held together in a produced text via a graphic sheaf, albeit one that necessarily fails, will be crucial to our account of Derrida’s eulogies as the sites of an always different interlacing of the three determinate angles on death in the twentieth century. The structure of ‘Différance’ – a broad recapitulation of Derrida’s previous interventions with regard to a series of different thinkers: notably Saussure, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger – makes clear that the incompatible uses of différance that he is provisionally holding together in a sheaf can each be associated with a proper name. Thus, the account of différance that emerges in Derrida’s discussion of Saussure is not the same graphical movement as that which emerges in discussing Freud.35 In so far as their respective conceptual systems are structured by very different differences (the differences between signifiers in Saussurian linguistics are of a quite different order and structure from the differences of facilitation between neurones in Freud’s ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, even if either in Saussurian terms is ‘a system based entirely on the contrasts between its concrete units’36), the graphic processes that produces those differential systems will be different. These different processes of differentiation demarcate textual systems on the surface of the ‘general text’ – it is therefore a matter of distinct ‘graphics’ rather than distinct ‘meanings’ (as was the case with ‘pharmakon’). As a rough analogy, we might say that différance is to ‘dance’ as the different movements of différance (movements that would produce systems such as Freud’s, Saussure’s, etc.) are to ‘waltz’ and ‘foxtrot’. Of course, one is never simply ‘dancing’, but always dancing a particular dance: there is no general différance, only the particular graphic play that produces a specific differential system.37 A rather peculiar property has emerged here: Derrida offers a series of different yet broadly substitutable terms to gesture towards the same incompatible plurality of graphics. Surely Derrida could have simplified matters by using one term (perhaps ‘différance’) for the graphic movement that is at work in producing the conceptual system associated with the proper name Saussure, another term (perhaps ‘trace’) for the movement at work producing Freud’s differential system, and so on. Would this not create a far clearer account than allowing a single term (yet also any single term: différance, play, trace, etc.) to cover all the various incompatible graphical movements that produce different systems? Assuming Derrida is not being intellectually perverse, there must be a

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justification for this decision. His general desire to avoid setting up any ‘unique word’ or ‘master-name’ and instead to offer an account of différance that is ‘not a pure nominal unity, and unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions’ does not seem to be a sufficient explanation (D:MP, 26–7). A justification of Derrida’s gesture as strategic rather than perverse will take place across this book through elaborating his account of the ‘trace’.

The trace as a hinge Among the most ubiquitous terms in Derrida’s vocabulary is ‘trace’ (Spur in German). While many of Derrida’s terms arise in several texts (dissemination, pharmakon, khōra, cinders) or dominate his works for a significant period of time only to later become occasional references (supplement, iteration, archiwriting, even différance itself), we would suggest that only ‘trace’ and perhaps ‘other’ play a central role throughout his oeuvre. Clearly one of the major strategic reasons that Derrida picks certain paleologism as the mark that he will use to re-mark the self-deconstruction of a text is that the word already plays a major role in that text – such as pharmakon in Plato’s Phaedrus. Trace’s ubiquity might be partially explained then by the central role it already plays in many of the texts that Derrida is interested in. Indeed, it is a particularly important term for our project because of the different roles the word already plays in the works of Heidegger, Levinas and Freud; though it is also clearly central to Saussure, Nietzsche, Husserl and many other thinkers and scientific discourses that Derrida discusses across his works. Nevertheless, it is not only the regular occurrence of ‘trace’ that leads to its suitability. Pharmakon was not chosen simply because it was already in Plato’s text – thousands of words would meet that criterion – but because it was the site of an equivocal (if taken as a word) or undecidable (if taken as a mark) play at a crucial point in that text. The reason that ‘trace’ occupies a similar position in different ways in a range of different thinkers is partly because of the word’s common meaning that the original authors are themselves playing on, occupying as it does a peculiar status between presence and absence. The common meaning of trace also suggests an obvious reason for Derrida’s interest in the term: a differential textual system is nothing other than the trace of the differentiating play of différance that produces it; simultaneously, in so far as ‘absent’ differential textual systems are articulated with presented material to produce meaning-effects, they inhabit those meaning-effects as a trace. In parallel to Derrida’s attempt in ‘Différance’ to form a sheaf of the different ways différance imposed itself on him in his past analyses – each broadly

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characterized by a proper name – the text simultaneously builds a sheaf of the different uses of trace in those thinkers’ works and in Derrida’s readings of those works. Derrida states this quite directly: And the concept of the trace, like that of différance thereby organizes, along the lines of these different traces and differences of traces, in Nietzsche’s sense, in Freud’s sense, in Levinas’s sense – these ‘names of authors’ here only being indices – the network which reassembles and traverses our ‘era’ as the delimitation of the ontology of presence. (D:MP, 21)

Belonging already to these varied discourses – discourses that in their very different ways already embody our era as an era of ‘writing’ – we might refer to ‘trace’ as a ‘hinge-word’ that articulates them.38 Once again, we can refer to the various unpresentable movements at stake in the different accounts of the trace as incompatible graphics. ‘Incompatibility’ here refers to the fact that they do not collapse into a harmonious whole – just as there is an incompatibility between fox-trotting and waltzing. There is no correct account of ‘trace’ that these different thinkers are approximating towards and that Derrida might finally access or produce. The statements of this text are thus completely opposed to Martin Hägglund’s recent attempt to produce a singular ‘understanding of the trace that informs deconstructive logic’ and that would be, for example, ‘radically different from Levinas’s understanding of the trace’39 The decision to not use different words for the different movements of différance that produce the Heideggerian, Levinasian and Freudian differential systems (remembering that différance is also their condition of impossibility – the movements fail to fully produce the systems that remain open and, in a sense, nonexistent) is that, by provisionally holding their graphics together in the sheaf of ‘trace’, the discourses can ‘affect’ each other. More properly, the sheaf is used in order to show that the discourses are always already affecting each other through their mutual dependence on the surface of the general text. Whether one chooses to conceive this ‘affecting’ as the productive opportunity for a ‘serious discussion among discourses’ through articulating them around certain hinge words, or, alternatively, as wrecking the discourses’ illusory consistency through exposing their contamination by parasites, would be a question of strategy and aim. Since our broad purpose is to account for the success of Derrida’s eulogies, we are interested in how he manages to articulate a Levinasian ethical demand with the Freudian machinery of mourning despite the impossibility of that task. If we were attempting to account for why Derrida refers to mourning as impossible,

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we would perhaps put forward our account in the more negative terms of contamination. One might nevertheless worry that the articulation of these discourses around the hinge word ‘trace’ is simply wilful on Derrida’s part. Even if such a juxtaposition produces some interesting and surprising material, can we really expect to form a serious discourse on the basis of playing on a common graphic mark in several different discourses when, within those different discourses, it has quite different meanings? Would Derrida’s practice not be equivalent to the most reckless conflation of terms, such as might be found in a text that assumes a common ground between Thomas Hobbes and Sir Isaac Newton on the basis of the fact they both use the word ‘force’? Showing that Derrida is not being wilful would depend on proving that these discourses are already mutually contaminating each other at this precise point. That is to say, we previously saw Derrida argue that Husserlian phenomenology makes an unavoidable reference to an exception to phenomenology, the Idea in a Kantian sense, which both allows phenomenology to function and disqualifies it from systematic status. Similarly then, on the border that most interests us (that between Levinas’s and Freud’s determinate angles on death), we would ideally need to show that Levinas’s system already depends on an unavowable Freudian postulate and that Freud’s system similarly depends on an unavowable Levinasian impulse, and that this moment of dependence in each discourse centres on their use of ‘trace’.40 Offering an irrefutable argument in favour of this claim would be beyond the scope of this book, though some hints will be offered as we move along that indicate this is not an absurd position to maintain. If this text allows itself to proceed without such an ideal proof of the existence of precisely the right mutual contamination in the original discourses for the use of trace as a hinge to be absolutely justified and completely without violence, it is partly because the problem addressed in this book is not whether Derrida was wilful or not in articulating the Levinasian and Freudian accounts of death around the hinge word ‘trace’, the problem is simply showing that this is indeed what he was doing. Before closing this chapter and turning to Levinas, it seems sensible to summarize what we have shown by offering a more detailed example of the kind of mutual contamination of discourses deconstruction allows. In Derrida’s essay ‘Before the Law’, he uses Kafka’s short story ‘Before the Law’ to investigate the articulation of literature and law. Very broadly, Derrida argues that the moral law in Kant can only maintain its authority by excluding ‘all historicity and empirical narrativity […] its rationality seems alien to all fiction and

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imagination.’ Nevertheless, through certain hints in the second formulation of the categorical imperative, Heidegger’s account of transcendental imagination and a reading of the killing of the primal father in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (which Freud himself offered as an explanation for the origin of Kant’s categorical imperative), the law is shown to make an essential reference to fiction that it is nevertheless compelled to deny. In a separate strand of the argument, Derrida shows that literature (in opposition to poetry, belles lettres, etc.), with its central object of the inviolable literary work, only came into existence relatively recently on the basis of certain conjunction of copyright laws, techniques of reproduction and various guardians (‘publisher, critics, academics, archivists, librarians, lawyers, and so on’). However, this recent birth and dependence on a transitory network of empirical, legal and social determinants cannot be admitted by literature without it losing the prestige that defines it as an eternal, spiritual calling and the literary work as a sacred unity. Instead of admitting its recent historical status, the advocates of literature have rather violently reinterpreted medieval and classical texts from Homer onwards as literature. We can see then that in their construction both law and literature depend on premises from each other that they must simultaneously disavow. Of course, the overlap is far from perfect and there is a certain textual violence in Derrida’s argument – the story of the killing of the primal father is a myth rather than ‘literature’, the moral law is only one type of law while others are more open to their historical status. Nevertheless, it becomes ‘necessary to think together, no doubt, a certain historicity of law and a certain historicity of literature’. Although this particular reading is not focused around a common hinge word, Kafka’s parable plays the role of this site of mutual contamination by exceeding literature through playing its own law. Derrida argues that through its content and structure the text ‘tells us about the laws of literature, the law without which no literary specificity would take shape or substance’, it thus exceeds literature and can perhaps in a sense judge itself as literary or non-literary. We might summarize this by saying that the mutual contamination of law and literature – which might at first seem to only leave us with a rather messy aporia relating to the chicken and egg question of which came first – grants Kafka’s text the possibility of its own particular existence as a literary work that plays its own law: that ‘points obliquely to literature, speaking of itself as a literary effect […] thereby exceeding the literature of which it speaks’ (D:AL, 181–220). This articulation has in no way produced a superordinate literary-legal discourse that resolves the occluded mutual dependence and conflict between these fields. Neither literature nor law can be expected to successfully integrate the manner in which

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their historical construction depends on the disavowed other – which would be equivalent to their destruction in so far as their ignorance of that historicity is constitutive of their existence (Derrida is not offering a critique of ideology in the hope that writers of literature in the future will operate without the illusions of timeless artistic calling or the sacred literary work). The product of the articulation is simply singular new texts, such as both Kafka’s and Derrida’s ‘Before the Law’, in which literature and law are held in a transitory sheaf that inevitably fail. It is the production of this new text that is the serious discussion among discourses allowed by deconstruction.

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3.1  A wounding of language The challenge of Levinas Due to the many shifts and changes that occur across Levinas’s long and prolific oeuvre – stretching from his first publication in 1929 to his final writings and interviews in the early 1990s – it would be impractical, if not impossible, to put forward a singular ‘Levinasian’ philosophical, ethical or political stance. Indeed, as Derrida asserted in his eulogy for Levinas, his oeuvre is ‘so large that one can no longer glimpse its edges’, setting a task of reading that Derrida predicts to last for centuries (D:AEL, 3–4). Not only is Levinas’s oeuvre vast, he exhibits a very particular fluidity with regard to the positions, allegiances and vocabulary he adopts, defends and utilizes; this makes even provisional academic divisions such as early, middle and late periods even more distortive than usual.1 Along with shifting evaluations of past philosophers,2 these shifts manifest through markedly different evaluations of concepts in his vocabulary: for example, the very different statements about ‘love’ in ‘The I and Totality’ (1953), Totality and Infinity (1961) and ‘Peace and Proximity’ (1984).3 Furthermore, even within a single work a term can radically shift meaning – such as in Totality and Infinity where ‘intentionality’ moves from designating the adequation of a finite thought to its finite object that presupposes a relation to the idea of infinity, to the relation to the idea of infinity itself.4 We are not claiming that Levinas contradicts himself or changes his opinion in these cases; rather, we would argue that his writing is not even attempting to progressively elucidate a rigorous lexicon of concepts ordered in a differential system. This is not necessarily a problem for Levinas, yet it leads to great difficulties for commentators if they attempt to pin down Levinas’s concept of ‘love’ or the relation between ethics and intentionality in Totality and Infinity. These difficulties are further increased by the fact

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that he only rarely wrote major monographs that offer even the pretence of presenting a consistent system.5 His writings are mainly short essays, lectures and lecture courses, frequently written for very specific audiences or in memory of particular thinkers. Furthermore, his writings are divided between philosophical texts and texts on Judaism – a division imposed by Levinas himself through using different publishers. It can seem that Levinas is closer to a poet or playwright than a philosopher – communicating various truths on topics such as love but without a theory of love – or at least that, despite the vast differences between their conclusions, his writing most resembles that of Nietzsche. As far as our project is concerned, all of these difficulties pale into insignificance in the face of the fact that Derrida’s interest in Levinas’s works is not a matter of its presented theses on love or intentionality, but rather an interest in what we have seen referred to as a text’s athesis. While we have already cited pieces of the following passage from ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, it is worth putting forward here in its entirety: Without intermediary and without communion, neither mediate nor immediate, such is the truth of our relation to the other, the truth to which the traditional logos is forever inhospitable. The unthinkable truth of living experience, to which Levinas returns ceaselessly, cannot possibly be encompassed by philosophical speech without immediately revealing, by philosophy’s own light, that philosophy’s surface is severely cracked, and that what was taken for its solidity is its rigidity. It could doubtless be shown that it is in the nature of Levinas’s writing, at its decisive moments, to move along these cracks, masterfully progressing by negations, and by negation against negation. Its proper route is not that of an ‘either this … or that,’ but of a ‘neither this … nor that.’ The poetic force of metaphor is often the trace of this rejected alternative, this wounding of language. Through it, in its opening, experience itself is silently revealed. (D:WD, 112)

The apparent ‘solidity’ or seriousness of a philosopher presenting a rigorous system of fixed concepts (‘by “love” I always mean …’) would be a ‘rigidity’ that is only one way of engaging in thought. For Levinas there is a ‘truth’ of the ‘living experience’ of ‘our relation to the other’ that is ‘forever inhospitable’ to the ‘traditional logos’ and thus cannot be ‘encompassed in philosophical speech’. In Levinas’s later vocabulary, this truth relates to the opening of saying that can never be encapsulated in a said content (I will continue to italicize these terms in so far as they are used in this Levinasian sense). It is not that this original ‘relation to the other’ or saying is simply absurd; rather, it is the opening of the very possibility of language and philosophy – the precondition for the



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emergence of Greek ‘philosophical speech’ dominated by the ‘traditional logos’. It is thus ante-logical rather than anti-logical – a position that, despite its differences, runs parallel to Heidegger’s attempt to investigate the ground of the logos and that is clearly another major influence on Derrida’s account of the graphic.6 Although it can never be put forward as a thesis, the unpresentable relation to the other can be gestured towards, to a limited extent, in the unsaying of the said that leaves the reader with the generally ignored experience of the saying or giving of the text itself. Without being presented, Levinas’s endless ‘neithers’ and ‘nors’ outline ‘a space or hollow within naked experience’ in which the relation to the other can resonate. This opening ‘is not an opening among others. It is opening itself, the opening of opening, that which can be enclosed within no category or totality, that is, everything within experience which can no longer be described by traditional concepts, and which resists every philosopheme’ (D:WD, 103). While this is all very well for Levinas, it presents great difficulties for projects such as this one. It seems we are forced either to Levinas’s writing style to bring about a similar wounding of language that would silently reveal the same experience of saying through its resonance (where, assuming Levinas’s texts are successful in doing this, such a repetition seems pointless), or to translate, or rather violently mistranslate, Levinas’s text into a series of theses or philosophically encompassed saids that comply with the ‘traditional logos’ and that can be assessed, critiqued, expanded or rejected. As with Derrida’s undecidables, if we simply read Levinas’s texts’ content we will inevitably misread him since what is at stake in those texts cannot be presented as part of their content, even if this ‘passage beyond language requires language or rather the text as a place for the trace of a step that is not (present) elsewhere’ (D:Pv1, 154).7 At the same time, any interruption of reading through paying attention to the pure giving of the text seems to leave us without a substantive content to evaluate or use. Derrida’s texts on Levinas are principally engagements with this Scylla and Charybdis of imitation or betrayal. In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Derrida negotiates a path between the poles of this ‘double bind’ by producing a text that exhibits precisely the kind of ‘articulation’ (or, as Derrida puts it here, the ‘reciprocal interrogation’ (D:WD, 104)) of discourses that we introduced in the previous chapter. Rather than simply repeating Levinas’s gesture towards a pre-logical opening or simply betraying it through reducing his text to a systematic doctrine, Derrida brings Levinas’s project into contact with the parallel project in Heidegger’s work around what we might call, drawing on

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Pascal and Foucault, their point of heresy.8 Heidegger also sought ‘to open the passageway to a former speech’; however, for him it was not a matter of a saying that originated outside the logos but of advancing ‘from within philosophy’ via the forgetting of the Pre-Socratics. Thus, in so far as Levinas and Heidegger both attempt to explicate ‘the history of Greek speech’ – one from within and one from beyond the logos – the possibility and tenability of their projects can be set against each other (D:WD, 102–3). The result of this mutual deconstruction is not, as is frequently believed, either the endorsement or rejection of Levinas’s project relative to Heidegger’s. Rather, Derrida asserts that neither Levinas’s nor Heidegger’s project can be defended in its purity. As put in the unanswerable rhetorical question that opens the essay’s final paragraph: ‘Are we (not a chronological, but a pre-logical question) first Jews or first Greeks?’ The unanswerability of this question is as disruptive of Heidegger’s ‘Greek’ project as it is of Levinas’s ‘Jewish’ one. Derrida closes the essay with the line from Joyce (‘perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists’) that ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet’ (D:WD, 192). Not only can neither project be maintained in its purity, under deconstructive analysis the projects pass into each other in a manner analogous to Being and Nothingness at the start of the Hegelian logic. However, even if ‘we must, for once, have faith in him [Hegel] who stands most accused in the trial conducted by this book [Totality and Infinity]’ (D:WD, 104), this passing into each other of philosophy and non-philosophy offers no Aufhebung. That is to say, if a history of Greek language (a task that amounts phenomenologically to rescuing the sciences from crisis) can neither take place entirely within the logos [Heidegger’s return to the pre-Socratics] nor entirely outside of it [Levinas’s account of ethics] since either project collapses into the other, this Hegelian realization with its ‘neither … nor …’ leads to no legitimate alternative method. In so far as Derrida clearly believes that Levinas is entirely aware of these perhaps irresolvable problems, what he draws out are not objections to Levinas’s project ‘but rather the questions put to us by Levinas’ (D:WD, 104). The apparent success of Derrida’s deconstructive ‘reciprocal interrogation’ of Levinas’s and Heidegger’s projects (what we might call establishing a ‘serious discussion among (incompatible) discourses’) with regard to navigating a path between the Scylla and Charybdis of imitating or betraying Levinas’s texts sets a strange precedent. It would be rather peculiar if it were near impossible to write about Levinas’s works directly, yet there were a legitimate way of writing about those works’ articulation with another thinker’s works. This appearance is false for two reasons. First, one could equally well deploy Derrida’s articulatory



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method to set in opposition two movements taken from within Levinas’s oeuvre and produce a text that navigates a structurally similar path without the ‘external’ reference to another thinker’s project. This is arguably what Derrida does in his second major essay on Levinas, ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, articulating Levinas’s ethical discourse with his discourse on the feminine through the hinge-word ‘Other’.9 Secondly, Derrida’s text is not simply ‘successful’: it has not avoided imitation or betrayal but proceeds through the knitting together of a series of self-aware lapses into one fault or the other. As Odysseus appreciated, there is no ‘successful’ solution to sailing between Scylla and Charybdis – there is only a path plotted so as to minimize losses. If a double bind could be solved, there would never have been a double bind that called for responsibility and the event of a decision, only the programmatic calculation of an unfolding. Hence, Derrida knowingly fails, just as he sees Levinas as knowingly failing: ‘Levinas is resigned to betraying his own intentions’ (D:WD, 189). Nevertheless, as with eulogy, to opt for silence in the face of an impossible task would also be a form of failure, perhaps the worst failure. As with Odysseus’s sailing, to trace a path of minimal violence, to ‘fail better’, is ‘the best’ we can do. That which is of paramount importance in negotiating such a path sensitively and responsibly would be constant vigilance, the permanently bad conscience that drives one to try to do justice to a singular other despite an impossible situation – an account of such vigilance is precisely the subject of Levinas’s texts and why he is so central to this project. Once one has appreciated the elegance of Derrida’s textual negotiation of this double bind in his major texts on Levinas, most other secondary texts appear clumsy in their attempts to pin down a Levinasian ethical or political system in doctrinal terms. If Derrida is correct in finding the real force of Levinas’s writing in its withdrawals, then any standard introductory approach to what Levinas means by ‘face’, ‘third’, ‘substitution’, etc. is at the very best a preliminary labour that must be undone (as in the already quoted claim from Of Grammatology that Nietzsche should first be absolutely submitted to the Heideggerian systematization in order that the strangeness of Nietzsche’s texts emerge in opposition to that violent reduction). Should we imitate Derrida’s texts on Levinas then: refusing to offer reified conceptual definitions of terms that are so fluid in Levinas’s own texts and moving instead straight to our own project of ‘reciprocal interrogation’ – that of the three ‘determinate angles’ on death? Although this option is tempting, there are strong reasons to begin our investigation by staying focused on Levinas’s works in a relatively classical scholarly manner. In this chapter we will point towards an important and

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rarely acknowledged problem that Levinas’s ethics faces and that pushes his system towards a Freudian supplement; if we were to expose this problem in the course of already articulating his works with psychoanalysis, this justification for turning to psychoanalysis would be obscured. We are forced then, by this strategic consideration, to address Levinas’s texts in a manner that is perhaps more ‘philosophical’ than is appropriate. Additionally, despite Levinas’s awkward relationship to technical vocabulary, there are certain definitions we nevertheless hope to draw from his texts – not least his distinctive use of ‘ethics’ and ‘politics’ that will be worked on and put in question in Derrida’s political works. More than theoretical vocabulary, it is Levinas’s characterization of the worldly situation of responsibility and conscience that we need to make claims in Derrida’s eulogies intelligible. This task necessitates certain textually violent reductions of Levinas’s claims to their said content in conformity with standard academic discourse. Furthermore, we cannot even claim that the violence we exemplify here is the kind of minimal violence that might be possible through adopting a more experimental writing style. We fully admit that this is a hermeneutically and rhetorically uncomfortable situation – only a classical academic writing style can draw what we need and convincingly show a problem in Levinas’s texts, yet that classical writing style simultaneously distorts those texts with a greater violence than is strictly necessary. Predictably, bearing in mind the aims of this text, our response can only be that there was a double bind that we broke with to produce this text through an ultimately unjustifiable decision for which we take responsibility in bad conscience. To indicate where our text is aiming towards in more detail, our basic contention will be that the relation between saying and death in Levinas’s works actually means that neither his ethics nor his politics contains the theoretical machinery required for understanding our phenomenologically manifest duty to the dead and unborn. While we only address the issue of the dead in this book, if we are to meet Derrida’s demand for a justice that recognizes ‘in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer’ (D:SM, xviii), then this will require turning towards one of the twentieth century’s other ‘determinate angles’ on death, psychoanalysis. However, we will see in the following chapters that, while the supplement of psychoanalytic machinery allows an expansion of the Levinasian call to the limits that it always demanded in its ‘self-image’, this does not take the form of a successful and compatible supplement.10 Rather, what is opened here is a mutual deconstruction of ethics and psychoanalysis that is only overcome (in so far as it can be overcome) through the ‘failing better’ of always singular acts of articulation in response to particular double binds



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where they are at stake. There is no system that unifies Levinas’s and Freud’s angles on death – there are only singular new texts that trace a particular articulation between them. Over the following chapters we will also see that, with the post-Freudian expansion of psychoanalytic technology, there comes a spectral relation to the dead that shows the untenability of Levinas’s distinction between politics and ethics – the ethical situation will be shown to be already political in his own sense of the term. Although we will argue below that Levinas is already aware of the non-existence of the ethical, that there is only the political, this rarely appreciated truth of the Levinasian system is given a supplementary nodal complication through the work of Abraham and Torok that will form the ground of Specters of Marx. In order to advance, we will focus on Levinas’s account of three different ‘situations’ or three differently structured ‘worlds’. We can refer to these worlds under the labels egoism, ethics and politics; distinguish them by their concern for enjoyment, responsibility and justice; by their focuses on the same, the other and the third; or simply through the personal pronouns je, tu and il (since elle takes on other meanings in Levinas’s works).

The ethics of ethics Before beginning this section it will prove useful to have a schema of the Levinasian model that we will expand on throughout this chapter. The quickest way to introduce Levinas’s distinction between egoism, ethics and politics is in terms of two interruptions. We begin with a single ego at home in the world it has phenomenologically constituted through the synthesis of temporality: an ego that is both freely enjoying the world and suffering nausea at the unending sameness of Being. This ‘world’ is interrupted by an encounter with the singular face of an other that puts the ego and its freedom in question by calling it to ethical responsibility and ‘human’ identity.11 However, this ethical election is itself immediately put in question by the presence of another other’s face – ‘the third’ – who calls the human from the infinite responsibility of ethics to the justice of politics. As we will see in the following section, this common presentation that runs from je to tu to il leads to some common misinterpretations.12 One important preliminary question is why are we turning to Levinas at all? Why when we use the word ‘ethics’ are we generally referring to ‘Levinasian ethics’ rather than the use of that word in Aristotle, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Mill, Kierkegaard, Habermas, Lacan, or numerous other thinkers? Perhaps even more controversially, why when we refer to ‘politics’ are we

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referring to something of the order of Levinas’s understanding of the political instead of discussing Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Adorno, Althusser or many other thinkers of the political? This second issue seems to be a particular limitation in so far as (a) we are using the word ‘politics’ in a way that makes little or no reference to the polis, state, class, government, sovereignty, law, economics, production, policing, discipline, nation, race, colonialism, ideology, alienation or numerous other major political themes; and (b) we are apparently endorsing a position that sees politics as an extension or complexification of a primary ethical situation by the ethical itself. Many political theorists would flatly deny that there is any relation between ethics and politics. Equally, many would claim that the relation between them runs in the opposite direction with ethics being determined by politics (such as in a traditional Marxist account of base and superstructure). Only a modicum of respite from such questions is offered by pointing out that Levinas’s account of ‘ethics’ bears as little resemblance to ‘ethical theory’ as his use of ‘politics’ does to ‘political theory’.13 The obvious approach to answering ‘Why Levinas?’ would be to show something important that his ethics or politics allows us to think or to do that the other thinkers listed above do not. Such a method seems particularly unsuitable in our case since we have already framed the overall arc of our argument in terms of showing that Levinas’s position cannot meet certain goals that it sets for itself, calling for its articulation with psychoanalysis. Another temptation would be to refer to a loose intuitive feeling that his account seems to have got something right: perhaps precisely the same thing that we immediately sense Derrida’s eulogies to have got right when we hear them and that merits investigation. This would be an acceptable justification for turning to Levinas’s works if it were not that a large number of thinkers simply find no such intuitive pull towards Levinas’s position or rhetoric.14 Another major problem would be that ethical intuitions are particularly weak evidence for a theory when rival theories, such as Marxism, provide strong reasons for being highly suspicious of ethical intuitions. One might feel there is something right about women staying home and doing housework – it is often such intuitions that are our greatest enemy in ethics and politics. We are driven then to the weakest of justifications for turning to Levinas. That is that, since it is our intention to address Derrida’s eulogies and it happens that the account of responsibility guiding those eulogies was inspired by Levinas, turning to his works is a necessary preliminary step. We could support the assertion of Levinas’s relevance through many quotations, such as



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Critchley’s assertion that ‘Derridean deconstruction can, and indeed should, be understood as an ethical demand, provided that ethics is understood in the particular sense given to it in the work of Emmanuel Lévinas’.15 Even if we advance under the banner of this weak justification, we would actually claim that in choosing Levinas we are excluding very little due to his work’s minimalist abstraction or formalism – precisely those features that might appear to be its weakness. It is well known that Levinas does not offer an ‘ethics’ in the traditional sense: It is true that Ethics, in Levinas’s sense, is an Ethics without law and without concept, which maintains its non-violent purity only before being determined as concepts and laws. This is not an objection: let us not forget that Levinas does not seek to propose laws or moral rules, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general. But as this determination does not offer itself as a theory of Ethics, in question then, is an Ethics of Ethics. (D:WD, 138)

Levinas’s ethics of ethics or meta-ethics does not specify any particular ethical system or laws. Even if Levinas maintains that the single law ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is announced by the other’s face, as Jill Robbins has shown this is less a particular law than a law that there be law.16 ‘The third’ can equally be taken to announce a single law that is ‘equality between persons’. If there is a problem here it is perhaps that the demand that we genuinely respond to the singularity of a particular other seems to render any reference to a fixed system a betrayal: ‘it is perhaps serious that this Ethics of Ethics can occasion neither a determined ethics nor determined laws without negating and forgetting itself ’ (D:WD, 138). An ethics of ethics would seem to both demand and deny the possibility of a stable ethics as law, a problem Derrida takes up in his famous account of the relationship of justice and law in ‘Force of Law’ (D:AR, 230–98).17 Nevertheless, this lack of determination means that other theories and theorists have not simply been rejected in favour of Levinas. While Levinas gives an account of the call to ethical responsibility that awakens a subject from egoism, whether a concrete act that answers that call would focus on encouraging virtuous flourishing, obeying duty or the act’s consequences remains open.18 Levinas is not providing an ethical theory among ethical theories; he is accounting for the existence of anything other than animal egoism. Levinas’s gambit is that there is something at stake in the drive to create, refine, obey and abandon ethical theories beyond the ego’s rational calculation of the personally accrued benefits and costs of a particular order such as might be recognized

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by Plato’s Thrasymachus – it is that beyond that he accounts for through the face and the third. The assertion that the demand for justice comes from ‘the third’ would be compatible with trying to deliver that justice by inaugurating a Marxist or a laissez-faire capitalist utopia. That this schema makes no specific reference to particular structures of polis, nation, economy, or other such political themes is precisely what allows it to operate as a description of what is at stake in the concerned drive to render justice whether one is an Amazonian tribal chieftain, the director of an international NGO or cutting the cake at a child’s birthday party. One might ask what a political theory gains from being articulated with Levinas’s minimal politics, but this is simply the wrong question. For Levinas the different political theories that have been formulated, assuming they are driven by an underlying drive to render justice understood in terms of the equality of persons, are already being driven by what his account of ‘the third’ seeks to elucidate whether they appreciate it or not. Of course, this minimal meta-political theory is not immediately compatible with all political theories in that some are not primarily oriented by ensuring justice understood as equality of persons. For example, followers of the early Marx might think that the basic drive at work in politics relates to a worker’s alienated relation to the product of their own labour rather than a concern to render justice to a third.19 The abstraction of Levinas’s schema, which would account for the whole of distinctively human existence in terms of an egoist animal encountering two faces, can also be appreciated as a poetic gesture. The particular kind of ‘truth’ that Levinas’s account holds resembles that of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is, which reduces human existence to four basic permutations – crawling in the mud alone, falling over someone and lying next to them in the dark, being abandoned and lying in the mud alone, being fallen on by someone else. It is in this spirit that we should appreciate the assertion of politics as the interruption of the face-to-face by a third face, rendering the essential tragedy at the heart of human history the brute physical impossibility of standing face-to-face with two people at the same time – that in turning to one we turn away from the other. The revelation offered through holding things in this way is clearly no more an actual display of the totality of politics than Beckett’s How It Is is a complete picture of all of the possibilities of human existence.

Il, Tu, Je, Tu, Il At the beginning of the previous section we offered a rapid yet standard summary of the three basic ‘worlds’ Levinas presents – moving from egoism to



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ethics and on to politics in accordance with the interruption of the other’s and another other’s faces. We also suggested that this method of exposition lends itself to certain distortions. Indeed, an extremely prevalent misunderstanding that arises from this presentation with regard to the political is responsible for his work being seen as significantly less intuitively convincing than it ought to be. Among the secondary texts that have recently been labelled as belonging to the ‘first’ and ‘second wave’ of Levinas scholarship, the political was frequently treated as a supplementary issue or afterthought.20 What was taken as the central Levinasian doctrine, what Critchley following Hilary Putnam called the ‘one big thing’ that Levinas knows, was that ‘ethics is first philosophy’.21 In this picture the egoism of ontologism – the self riveted to its Being and experiencing only the endless return of the same – is shattered by the encounter with the absolute alterity of the face that calls the subject from its enjoyment to properly human responsibility. In doing this it opens the very possibility of language, thematization, thought and even sensibility. Of course, things cannot be quite this simple since enjoyment in the world of egoism requires the possession of sensibility, language and thought – all of which Levinas claims are gifts from encountering the other. This means that the egoist must have always already encountered the face of the other; however, since awareness of this encounter would make egoism untenable, the encounter (like one’s death in Heidegger) must be susceptible to being actively forgotten or fled from. The subject thus needs to be called back to ethical responsibility. In Levinas’s terms, in so far as one is ethical one exists in a constantly renewed state of shameful expulsion from egoism. Perhaps inevitably, this schema of a lifelong conflictual dynamic between enjoyment and shame eclipses any discussion of the further complication of that dynamic by a third who disrupts the very possibility of the ethical relation.22 Thinkers in these first two waves tended to see Levinas himself as having engaged in a deliberate ‘political turn’ in his late works – implying that the early works had little to do with politics.23 Many texts such as John Drabinski’s ‘The Possibility of an Ethical Politics: From Peace to Liturgy’ have claimed that Levinas failed to accomplish the kind of politics that his own ethics demanded, producing the project of developing a proper Levinasian politics with something substantial to say about issues such as distributive justice.24 Matters are quite different with the recently inaugurated ‘third wave’ of Levinas scholarship, yet the ‘explicit attempt to situate and explore Levinas’s work within the context of the most pressing socio-political issues of our time’ carries its own dangers. Through focusing on the productivity of Levinas’s work

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– on what Levinas can do for or offer to ‘pressing’ contemporary issues – the difficulties of his writing itself are not merely overlooked but actively dismissed as ‘navel gazing’. Against all of these readings, we will argue that we ought to approach Levinas’s account of egoism and ethics, even in his earliest works, by starting from politics. To understand this rather counterintuitive claim we need to remember that Levinas is a phenomenologist. The connection between the three ‘worlds’ of egoism, ethics and politics must be grasped in terms of the backward and forward movements of enquiry and elaboration that define Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. The very title ‘genetic phenomenology’ already indicates something of this double movement: on the one hand, an account of the progressive ‘genesis’ of phenomena; on the other, a method that enacts a ‘genetic’ tracing of phenomena back to their source. For Husserl, as we have seen in our earlier discussion of ‘the principle of principle’, philosophy must begin from experience as it presents itself. That is to say, as becomes particularly manifest in his later works, we must begin from the temporally constituted, solid and richly furnished life-world. Launched from here, phenomenology’s various methodical steps (such as the transcendental and eidetic reductions) allow this rich experience to be interrogated with the aim of progressively penetrating the underlying constitutive processes that produced the active syntheses of intentional acts that Husserl began from. Not stopping there, phenomenology moves on to investigating the process of passive syntheses that produce the raw materials worked with in the active syntheses. We can refer to this movement then as the order of investigation. There remains a limit to these genealogical investigations as they can never grant access to the posited source of the living present – ‘the constituting flux of time’ that is ‘absolute subjectivity’ (D:PG, 65).25 Of course, when the phenomenologist wants to present genetic discoveries they narrate the constitutive processes in the reverse order from that of their investigation. One might begin from a reference to impenetrable absolute subjectivity, moving to an account of the role of association in producing passive syntheses, and only once a background of retentions, protentions and potential objects has been established move to a description of how that material is woven in active syntheses into conscious intentional acts.26 What we will call the order of exposition would match the underlying order of constitution, both move from the temporal flux or absolute subjectivity towards the world of actual experienced objects. In Derrida’s early words: ‘Every philosophy is condemned to work back along the actual itinerary of every becoming’ (D:PG, 138).



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Moving these reflections on the investigative, expositive and constitutive orders across to Levinas produces important consequences. Though once again the order of exposition will generally and justifiably follow the underlying order of constitution – from egoism to ethics and on to politics – the order of investigation must itself have penetrated into the depths of the constitutive process in the opposite direction. That is to say, as investigators we must always begin from our actual lived experiences, which are of a political world where the face of the other and the face of the third have always already intervened. Even if these interventions are capable of being evaded or forgotten, there is not only no pure lived experience of the enjoyment of egoism, there is no experience of the uninterrupted ethical relation either.27 What we actually experience is a political world in which we are called on to render justice. We only encounter ethics and egoism in so far as we investigate the processes that must have been involved in bringing such a world about. If we fail to pay attention to this and believe that Levinas is offering a phenomenological account of an actual lived experience of pure egoism that led to a further lived experience, at a certain moment in time, of infinite moral election, then we are certainly likely to find that our own daily experience fails to live up to Levinas’s descriptions. We are now in a position to understand the weakness of Žižek’s criticism of what he refers to as ‘the well-known fiasco’ of Levinas’s radio interview a week after the Sabra and Shatila massacres – the same interview that provoked Howard Caygill’s Levinas and the Political and with regard to which Caygill claimed ‘Levinas revealed a coolness of political judgement that verged on the chilling, an unsentimental understanding of violence and power almost worthy of Machiavelli. The ruthless political clarity […] was not what I expected from the philosopher I had been taught to regard as the thinker of ethical alterity and the subject of a growing body of sentimental criticism’.28 Having been asked whether ‘for the Israeli, isn’t the “other” above all the Palestinian?’, Levinas replied: The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. […] But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.29

Žižek’s problem with these claims is: not their potential Zionist anti-Palestinian attitude but, on the contrary, the unexpected shift from high theory to vulgar commonsensical reflections. What

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Žižek thus claims that ‘the Levinasian notion of the respect for Otherness […] is, against all appearances, totally inoperative at the political level.’31 This opinion is inevitable if we consider Levinas’s project only in terms of the progressive constitution of political experience. Following the order of constitution and exposition, a profound transformation occurred in moving from a primordial egoism that cannot recognize anyone as anything other than a resource to be exploited to being overwhelmed by an absolute, unconditional, unsubstitutable commitment to an unknown other even if they are a murderer or our torturer. This spiritual transformation will seem to have effectively collapsed with the disturbance of the ethical relation by a third that means we have to distinguish between friends and enemies and decide who to be concerned about. A very different picture emerges if we begin from the constituted political world. Let us imagine from this perspective that a normal person living a rich and varied existence who perceives a certain action, such as one neighbour attacking another. The cause for wonder that should provoke philosophical attention is that this person is not simply indifferent to this violence, nor is it seen as merely an opportunity for personal profit. Instead, the action is immediately and sensuously experienced as a possible act of injustice calling them to intervene. To render justice will involve all kinds of mundane activities – from fact-finding to determining motives, from deciding who is right or wrong to deciding whether in this particular case it is appropriate to personally intervene or better to simply walk away. It is quite appropriate that Levinas’s phenomenological account of politics would involve explaining our calling towards these activities since they are precisely the kinds of activity that people actually feel compelled to carry out in such circumstances. Once again, we must come to see the wondrous element here as why the person would feel called to engage in these activities rather than taking advantage of the situation for their own benefit; or, alternatively, why if they do simply take advantage of the situation, others will not praise their actions as rational but condemn them in turn as unjust; or, lastly, why if a society were to praise a subject for taking Machiavellian advantage of the situation, a hypothetical outsider to that society would have good cause for declaring the society sick, inhumane and even inhuman. It is this mystery that is the principle material to be explained by a genetic phenomenology of lived political experience that will lead back through ethics



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and egoism. Just as Husserl offered quite alien accounts of unconscious passive syntheses based on association (‘alien’ in the sense that these processes along with the very world in which they occur – a world floating between pure flux and not-yet-objects – bears little or no resemblance to the processes or contents offered in the familiar constituted world of objects that is the subject’s living present); similarly, according to Levinas, explaining the sense of justice that drives the mundane actions of our political world compels us to offer accounts of the quite alien enjoyments of a pure egoism alone in the world and the overwhelming shame of that egoism being awakened to an infinite ethical responsibility. So, Levinas is not ‘basically saying’ that ‘as a principle, respect for alterity is unconditional’ yet in concrete political reality that principle is tossed aside – there is no such ‘principle’. Rather, we cannot understand the texture of concrete political reality, of deciding who is an enemy and who is a friend and what to do about them, except in so far as we posit reality’s constitution having gone by the way of an ethical stage. Of course, in practice it may well be that most people make such judgements simply in accordance with the pursuit of their own ends: deciding who is right or wrong, friend or foe, in accordance with historical alliances or potential benefit in the future. However, that this is not always the case, that others protest when it does take place, and that shame and regret are at least possible in these circumstances calls for an explanation. While Levinas’s major texts have an order of exposition that follows the order of constitution, there are several shorter texts that follow the order of investigation. For example, the short essay ‘The Rights of Man and Good Will’ begins from the relatively recent establishment in law of human rights. What Levinas finds interesting is not the specific content of these legal rights but their ‘normative energy’: an energy involved both in their establishment and in their upholding. What is the force of the compulsion to create and respect rights guaranteeing the individual’s freedom? To respond to this, Levinas goes by way of another question: is there not a contradiction in rights in that they seek to establish the individual’s freedom yet constrain that freedom with regard to others whose freedom must be respected? Levinas considers the Kantian solution to this puzzle: first, that any rational free will would legislate the same universal laws and that therefore there is no conflict between freedom and constraint; secondly, that the experience of ‘normative energy’ can be explained by respect for the moral law that we recognize in others and that grants them their dignity. This respect would be an ‘intellectual feeling’ that does not proceed from sensibility: if it did, then ethics would be irrational and heteronomous rather than rational and autonomous, in turn undermining the dignity of moral agents that was the

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cause of the respect they were due. At this point, Levinas reveals himself to be sceptical that the Kantian account can offer an explanation of the phenomenological data of lived, political experience: ‘Does respect for formal universality appease the irrepressible part of spontaneity, which cannot immediately and conveniently be reduced to the impulses of passion and feeling?’ (L:EN, 135). Levinas judges that spontaneity actually offers more than merely heteronomous passions that can and ought to be repressed in favour of reason’s self-legislation; rather, it already contains an impulse towards goodness itself that has nothing to do with ‘intellectual feelings’ and is prior to reason, respect or dignity. Thus, in order to explain common impulses such as the drive to respect each other’s freedom through establishing and upholding systems of rights, Levinas is driven to the terms of his ethics: ‘the other as face, the other who “regards me” even when he doesn’t have anything to do with me, the other as fellow man and always as stranger.’ Furthermore, this ethical experience of the face can only be made sense of on the basis of a hypothesized prior stage of egoism: the face can only play its role as ‘an interruption or rupture of the perseverance of beings in their being, of the conatus essendi’ (L:EN, 135–6). Beginning from a text such as this, we can clearly see how, contra Žižek, the Levinasian notion of the respect for Otherness is operative at a political level. We can also find a response here to C. Fred Alford’s objection to Levinas: I cannot see any other way to read Levinas but as one who is concerned with real experiences. Not only is such an interpretation attentive to the origins of Levinas’ project in phenomenology, but it requires us to see his radical encounter with the world as an experience that can be right or wrong: or rather, a more or less accurate and complete account of how humans encounter the world.32

Alford moves from this assertion to stating that as a phenomenological description Levinas’s account of encountering the other is clearly wildly inaccurate. Even the most ethically charged face-to-face situations supposedly fail to live up to Levinas’s hyperbolic descriptions of being held hostage. However, what Alford fails to grasp is that the ‘experience’ of infinite ethical election is not something we consciously undergo in the living present; instead, it is a moment that Levinas’s investigation determines to have necessarily been the case at a certain stage in the constitution of any and every moment of our daily experiences, in which encounters with others are indeed far less hyperbolic. The major questions for Levinas now relate to the status of this investigation and the necessity of its results. Are we really unable to offer any other



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explanation for our daily political reality and our sense of justice? On what evidence might we judge that Levinas’s account of an unconditional, infinite ethical election disrupted by a third is the only (or at least the most convincing) way in which we can account for the fact that we are not simply guided by profit and realpolitik? Has Levinas offered enough to convince his readers that Kantian respect for the moral law cannot account for our common experiences of shame or the desire for justice? These questions would apparently lead us to seek to corroborate Levinas’s claims via phenomenological investigations of our own. Yet does his genetic phenomenological method promise to deliver us access to the actual experiences of ethical election or egoism against which we can check his account? If not, then, whatever their importance in offering a possible explanation for the texture of our concrete political experience, do they not become only stories, semi-literary fictions or dreams? Is Levinas’s account of egoism and ethics akin to Freud’s account of the killing of the primordial father in Totem and Taboo? To attest to ethical election’s or the primordial father’s mythical and constructed status would not be to reject them, since fantasies and fictions have genuine power, as in Derrida’s reflections on Freud that: The structure of this event is such that one is compelled neither to believe nor disbelieve it. […] Whether or not it is fantastic, whether or not it has arisen from the imagination, even the transcendental imagination, and whether it states or silences the origin of the fantasy, this in no way diminishes the imperious necessity of what it tells, its law. This law is even more frightening and fantastic, unheimlich or uncanny, than if it emanated from pure reason, unless precisely the latter be linked to an unconscious fantastic. (D:AL, 199)

Alternatively, if no direct experience of the stages of egoism or ethical election is possible, yet we refuse to view Levinas’s account as a mythical construct, to what extent might we be able to experience ‘traces’ of ethics and egoism in lived political experience? As a third option, perhaps we can experience these stages or ‘worlds’ after all. Granted that I can flee from both the call of justice and the call of ethical election and, in so far as I can dedicate myself to egocentric enjoyment, to what extent am I experiencing the same enjoyment that Levinas is talking about? If, then, at a certain point I catch the gaze of a singular other’s face and feel shame for my enjoyment, leading me ‘to give them the bread out of my own mouth’, to what extent am I experiencing in that moment an infinite ethical election prior to its disruption by the third? Does the shame directly experienced in such

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genuine moments of daily life bear only a limited, metaphorical relationship to the shame Levinas is trying to make us reflect on? Are the evocations of ‘enjoyment’ or ‘shame’, along with all other references to such concrete experiences that arise in daily life, only ladders to be tossed aside once ascended? We break off these reflections here as they would clearly call for extensive studies of their own. As is perhaps inevitable when dealing with the said content of a writer who simultaneously unsays that said – withdrawing their claims in a wounding of language – we end up uncertain whether we are dealing with an account of real experiences, with traces of experience locked in real experiences or with necessary fictions. Having established these points with regard to the order of investigation, we are now ready to return to the standard order of exposition in order to draw out some key features of Levinas’s account of the constitution of the ethical and political worlds in relation to death.

3.2  Death in the order of exposition Je: The nausea of being We have seen that Derrida believed Levinas to have expressed one of the twentieth century’s three ‘determinate angles’ on death. Derrida even claimed that ‘all of Levinas’s thought, from the beginning to the end, was a meditation on death, a meditation that diverted, disconcerted, and set beside everything in philosophy, from Plato to Hegel to Heidegger, that was also, and first of all, concerned with death, epimeleia thanatou, Sein zum Tode’ (D:AEL, 120). If Derrida is justified in claiming that all of Levinas’s writings were meditations on death, then reducing Levinas’s position on death to a quick slogan is rather absurd. Nevertheless, if we were to try to capture his determine angle in a single line, it would be: ‘We encounter death in the face of the other’ (L:GDT, 105). We have seen that according to Heidegger the investigation of Being, itself the ground of all scientific activities if they are not to be blind, depends on first clarifying and securing the hermeneutical situation of the questioning entity through a primordial interpretation of its mode of Being. This investigation’s primordial status depends on it including within its fore-having the entity’s ‘end’ or ‘death’. For Levinas seemingly then that ‘end’ would not be granted to the phenomenological view through anxious anticipation of one’s ownmost possibility of impossibility – Levinas states directly that ‘My death is insignificant’



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(L:OB, 3) – rather, it would come though encountering the face of the other in the ethical relation. This means that ‘ethics’, as the encounter with the face of the other that is simultaneously the encounter with death, would indeed be ‘first philosophy’ through securing our hermeneutical situation. If Levinas’s work from beginning to end was a meditation on death from this angle, then his entire oeuvre might be seen as the long unpacking of a different answer, §47 of Being and Time: ‘The Possibility of Experiencing the Death of Others, and the Possibility of Getting a Whole Dasein into our Grasp’. Although this simple summary functions quite effectively as an outline of the difference between the angles on death found in Levinas and Heidegger in Heideggerian terms, it completely misrepresents the significantly different function that death actually plays in Levinas’s works. The death of the other does not grant an experience of the limit or end of the questioning entity that might then, contra Heidegger, be substituted for one’s own death to primordially ground the ontological investigation. Instead of their measure, death testifies to a singular other’s beyond measure: ‘Time is not the limitation of being but its relationship with infinity. Death is not annihilation but the question that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced’ (L:GDT, 21). That death is not annihilation or nothingness, the denial of the alternative to be or not to be, takes its philosophical roots in Henri Bergson rather than religious faith.33 It was Bergson who dismissed the Leibnizian question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ as badly formulated.34 Bergson had argued that ‘to think nothingness is to think of being as crossed out. And it seems to us incontestable that nothingness is the work of a thinking essentially turned toward being’ (L:OE, 70). If we take this argument seriously, the consequence is not simply that we should remain agnostic with regard to whether death is nothingness or not; rather, we can be rigorously certain that death bears no resemblance to our concept of nothingness in that that concept is not itself simply nothingness – it is a mental construal of Being thought in terms of a particular logical operator. Levinas thus refuses the entire Heideggerian account in its assumption that death is ‘the passage from being to no-longer-being’, a position that can only be ‘understood as the result of a logical operation: negation’. Instead, death is a ‘departure toward the unknown, a departure without return, a departure “with no forwarding address.” Death – as the death of the other – […] is emotion par excellence, affection or being affected par excellence’ (L:GDT, 9). Of course this does not prove anything with regard to the genuine mystery of whether there is a continuation of consciousness after death. It is merely a

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quasi-Parmenidean argument that we cannot think non-Being, or rather can only think it on the basis of Being. However, that which is most distinctive about Levinas’s and Blanchot’s common view on this point is that there is no peace or reassurance offered by this argument that nothingness is a permutation of Being and therefore escaping Being is impossible. Instead, Being becomes a source of horror far more disturbing than mere anxiety before nothingness – ‘we must not decide too quickly that only nothingness is dreadful, as in a philosophy wherein man is a being who has to be, who persists in his being, without posing to himself the question of knowing what the dreadful and the dreaded are’ (L:GDT, 10). The horror of inescapable being will be dealt with by Levinas under the label of the ‘there is [il y a]’: Are not Being and nothingness, which, in Heidegger’s philosophy, are equivalent or coordinated, not rather phases of a more general state of existence, which is nowise constituted by nothingness? We shall call it the fact that there is. […] It is because the there is has such a complete hold on us that we cannot take nothingness and death lightly, and we tremble before them. The fear of nothingness is but the measure of our involvement in Being. Existence of itself harbors something tragic which is not only there because of its finitude. Something that death cannot resolve. (L:EE, 5)35

In claiming we encounter death in the face of the other, Levinas is not claiming that Heidegger was simply incorrect in his phenomenological analysis of Being-with someone who is dying. Indeed, he is quite right that we cannot know death through the death of the other: ‘The relation with the death of the other is not a knowledge about the death of the other, nor the experience of that death in its particular way of annihilating being (if, as is commonly thought, the event of death is reducible to this annihilation). There is no knowledge of this ex‑ceptional relation’ (L:GDT, 16). However, even if it is not of the order of knowledge, there is nevertheless an experience of this ex‑ceptional relation in: [a] purely emotional rapport, moving us with an emotion that is not made up of the repercussions on our sensibility and our intellect of a previous knowledge. It is emotion, a movement, a disquietude within the unknown [that is itself felt on witnessing] a process (of immobilization) whereby someone, who up until then expressed himself, comes to an end. (L:GDT, 16)

In this way the death of the other is not separate from a certain sense of ending. However, this has nothing to do with gaining phenomenological access to a limit that would allow a total comprehension of the entity. Instead, the ending of the other’s process of responding to us (or perhaps the prospect of that



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responding ending) calls forward an excessive and overwhelming emotional response – one sufficient to call us from egoism. In one of Levinas’s favourite examples, although ‘the whole intent of the Phaedo’ was to prove that ‘theory is stronger than anxiety over death’, there is nevertheless in this inaugural work of the philosophical tradition an ‘excess of emotion: Apollodorus weeps more than the others; he weeps beyond measure – and they must send the women away’ (L:GDT, 18). Indeed, Socrates is ‘the only one perfectly happy’, showing perhaps that it is ‘the spectacle of death [that] is not bearable’ – it is the other’s death that is a scandal rather than one’s own (L:GDT, 14). Before we turn to ethics as the encounter with death in more detail, we begin from the egoist world that lies prior to ethical election in the constitution of the living political present. A good way of approaching this, playing on the title of one of Robert Bernasconi’s essays, would be to ask ‘What is the question to which “ethics” is the answer?’ A footnote from ‘God and Philosophy’ offers a quick response: ‘It is the meaning of the beyond, of transcendence, and not of ethics that our study seeks. It finds this meaning in ethics’ (L:OGM, 200). The underlying continuity of Levinas’s oeuvre, at least from his 1934 essay on Hitlerism onwards, is not ethics for ethics’ sake but transcendence or escaping Being.36 Although texts such as 1947’s Existence and Existents include brief reference to the good beyond being and the face-to-face encounter, it was not until 1951’s ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’ that the response to the issue of escaping Being became explicitly a matter of ethics. Levinas even seems to have gone out of his way in the intervening 15 years to consider every possibility other than ethics as a pathway beyond Being – pleasure, games, eros, fecundity, death, etc. Although today his name is synonymous with ethical thought, Levinas is perhaps the most reluctant of ethical theorists: he took many years to decide ethics was his concern and repeatedly adopted non-ethical vocabulary to designate the ‘ethical’ relation (‘metaphysics’, ‘religion’, ‘intentionality’, ‘holiness’).37 As Bernasconi writes: ‘He insisted that he was not looking for ethics, but for the meaning of transcendence, and yet when he discovered the meaning of transcendence, it turned out that it was indeed ethics’.38 One might begin by asking what Levinas finds so objectionable about Being that he wants to escape it? However, a better starting point is how he believed things had changed with regard to Being such that the old answers to the conflict between philosophy and Being were no longer adequate. For, according to Levinas, Western philosophy has always been set against Being though the opposition of man and world: ‘The revolt of traditional philosophy against the idea of being originates in the discord between human freedom and the brutal

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fact of being that assaults this freedom’ (L:OE, 49). Western philosophy, encompassing the sciences, has been a force marshalled by ‘the bourgeois spirit’ that, in its desire for self-sufficiency and security, has set out to grasp, transcend, dominate and control Being. The bourgeois is ‘essentially conservative, […] concerned with business matters and science as a defense against things and all that is unforeseeable in them. His instinct for possession is an instinct for integration, and his imperialism is a search for security’ (L:OE, 50). Even when a philosopher focuses on the perfection of their own being rather than the transformation of the world, this remains within the horizon of establishing ‘a harmony between us and the world’ (L:OE, 51). Levinas rejects Heidegger’s philosophy as still remaining within what he calls the ‘audacious dreams of a restless and enterprising capitalism’ (L:OE, 50). Heidegger states in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ that: ‘Our inquiry concerning the nothing is to bring us face to face with metaphysics itself. […] Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings that aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp’ (H:PM, 93).39 The anxious relation to ‘the nothing’ acts as the foundation of the sciences that guarantees our grasp on the world – ‘a possibility for our own power, a possibility to seize’ (L:GDT, 51). All such graspings or seizings open onto the possibility of the intellectual and industrial domination of the world, of erecting a bourgeois security against hunger, shock or radical change, a possibility that depends on a first grasping that is Dasein’s heroic appropriation of its death. To whatever extent Heidegger argues against the modern world’s exploitative, technological relation to Being through notions such as Gelassenheit, Levinas questions whether he can renounce such a relation while founding all discourses on an original grasping of one’s ownmost property. For Levinas, that death is an inappropriable enigma rather than nothingness – ‘the impossibility of possibility’ rather than the ‘possibility of impossibility’ – means that such a heroic grasping of death is impossible.40 This means neither that the sciences are impossible nor that they are any less susceptible to being used in the service of the bourgeois spirit, only that their genealogical root in the openness of what Levinas will later call saying renders the ‘instinct for possession’ a secondary deviation from an original generosity. If Western philosophy, including phenomenology, maintained the conflict between man and world on the basis of a dynamic between man’s lack of and domination of Being, then what Levinas discovers in the ‘modern sensibility’ that ‘perhaps for the first time’ suggests ‘the abandonment of this concern’ is an account of ‘a defect still more profound’ than lack of Being – Being’s inescapable plenitude (L:OE, 51). The hints of this transformation are not discerned in



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philosophy but in literature: ‘The escape, in regard to which contemporary literature manifests a strange disquiet, appears like a condemnation – the most radical one – of the philosophy of being by our generation’ (L:OE, 51).41 This complaint against Being finds a forceful expression in Existence and Existents: Does Being contain no other vice than its limitation and nothingness? Is there not some sort of underlying evil in its very positivity? Is not anxiety over Being – horror of Being – just as primal as anxiety over death? (L:EE, 5–6)

In this ‘horror of Being’ that demands an escape from Being itself the focus turns from the confrontation between man and world or between ‘I’ and ‘non-I’ to an internal repulsion: it is the ‘I that wants to get out of itself ’. This is not simply a dislike for the particular self or for the structure of selfhood – it is not a drive towards another identity or a thirst for ‘innumerable lives’, nor is it a desire to escape from the existential pressure of freedom and decision. Instead, ‘it aspires to break the chains of the I to the self [du moi à soi]. It is being itself or the “one‑self ” from which escape flees, and in no wise being’s limitation […] Its preoccupations go beyond the distinction of the finite and the infinite – notions, after all, that could not apply to the fact of being itself but only to its powers and properties’ (L:OE, 55). Being a God would be as much of a burden as being a mortal – ‘there is a deep truth in the myth that says that eternity weighs heavily upon the immortal gods’ (L:OE, 71). Levinas will famously label the feeling of sickness at Being ‘nausea’, leading three years later to Sartre’s novel. Yet other than the attestation of malaise and mal du siècle in the contemporary literature of 1935 and Levinas’s repugnance for the philosopher of Being – Heidegger – having joined the Nazi party, what was the substantial motivation behind this diagnosis of a nauseous sickness towards Being felt even by the Gods? The peculiar movement of Levinas’s position is that the very thing that makes inescapable Being horrifying and the cause of nausea is its inescapability. Just as an unimaginably beautiful and endlessly luxurious prison cell would still be absolutely intolerable, especially if one’s sentence was endless, the persistence of Being that is inescapable even in death is unbearable in a manner that is completely independent of its contents. Yet, just as knowing the cell’s door to be unlocked would transform the prison we long to escape from into a wondrous palace that one never wants to leave, Levinas only needs to find a small chink in the unending persistence of Being to be freed from nausea. It is only 16 years later with his turn to ethics that he finds that chink.

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Tu: Beyond constitution ‘Section II – Interiority and Economy’ of 1961’s Totality and Infinity gives an apparently phenomenological description of the world of egoism in greater detail than any of Levinas’s other texts. The basic characterization of what the ego does in egoism is to enjoy the same. This image of enjoyment might seem rather peculiar bearing in mind that in the previous section the unending sameness of Being was characterized as unbearable nausea; however, two major things have changed. First, by the time of Totality and Infinity the unending monotony of Being has an escape route in the face of the other that calls us beyond Being. This in turn means that Being is no longer a source of nausea since, like our luxurious prison cell, it was only unpleasant in so far as there was no way out. The regime of the same now seems to be characterized as an Edenic bliss. Secondly, as our earlier reflections help us to understand, the reason that it seems like Edenic bliss is not because bliss was ever actually experienced by us at a certain moment in our past; rather, we discover the necessity of a stage of Edenic bliss when we interrogate the origin of ethical shame. The only explanation for this shame would be that we see ourselves as having been recklessly engaged in pure enjoyment – whether this claim is to be understood as a necessary fiction, as a trace of withdrawn experience within presented experience, or as something we can still experience in an impure manner in those moments when we flee from responsibility. Levinas states directly that the enjoyment he is discussing was never directly experienced: ‘The description of enjoyment as it has been conducted to this point assuredly does not render the concrete man. In reality man has already the idea of infinity, that is, lives in society and represents things to himself ’ (L:TI, 139). As we have seen, this statement that egoism was never concretely experienced (remaining a fiction, a trace or impure) would be equally true of ethics – what ‘the concrete man’ has is political experience since ‘in reality’ he has not only already ‘the idea of infinity’ but also the encounter with ‘the third’. What does it mean then to say that egoism enjoys an ‘imperialism of the same’? Levinas characterizes enjoyment or ‘living from …’ as alimentation. ‘Nourishment, as a means of invigoration, is the transmutation of the other into the same, which is the essence of enjoyment’ (L:TI, 111). This does not only include actual food, but everything we encounter is appropriated and integrated into our self in the manner of food: ‘We live from “good soup,” air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc.’ (L:TI, 110). ‘Enjoyment – an ultimate relation with the substantial plenitude of being, with its materiality – embraces all relations with things’ and



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accompanies ‘every utilization of things’, that is, all Husserlian intentional acts and all Heideggerian circumspective dealings (L:TI, 133). Although he is describing pleasure and the ‘permanent truth of hedonist moralities’, Levinas’s descriptions betray that the life of enjoyment has limited value in comparison with the far less pleasurable life that comes with ethical election: ‘In enjoyment I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. […] outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate – without ears, like a hungry stomach’ (L:TI, 134). Even if we will be thrust into a life of shame and service, of unending bad conscience and of taking on responsibility for all the sins of the world as recommended by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Zosima, this is better than the life of a hungry stomach that simply devours everything opposed to it unto the point of absolute knowledge. We can hear throughout Levinas’s description of enjoyment many of the themes from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly his account of life.42 We have already seen Derrida refer to Hegel as the one ‘who stands most accused in the trial conducted by’ Totality and Infinity (D:WD, 104), but the particular accusation of this trial would be that even the form of inter­ subjectivity established in the progress of the phenomenological consciousness beyond the processes of life through mutual recognition remains bound up with the alimentary model that characterizes life. We may abandon our empirical selves to identify with Geist, yet within this identification the other, the exceptional or the outside is always to be overcome and integrated into the totality of reason – even up to the point of absolute knowledge devouring God himself. Of course, all of these moments of integrating what offers itself as outside would really be the progressive appreciation that what is at stake was already inside – the recognition that there never was an outside of the totality or Notion [Begriff]. In Totality and Infinity’s terms, Hegel can only think interiority and enjoyment, never glimpsing the possibility of an infinite exteriority that cannot be intelligibly integrated into the systematic totality but can only be responded to. Levinas acknowledges his critique is drawn from Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, which describes the Hegelian system in terms of how the ‘one-and-universal character of knowledge, including everything without exception, is formally one-dimensional. The ever multiple appearance of being is absolutely dissolved in that unity as in something absolute.’ Against this, ‘a new concept of philosophy must arise’.43 Hegel’s grand claim that ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’44 would be the rallying call of the imperialism of the same since:

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‘Intelligibility, the very occurrence of representation, is the possibility for the other to be determined by the same without determining the same, without introducing alterity into it, it is a free exercise of the same’ – this sets Levinas against intelligibility: not in the sense of praising irrationalism but of acknowledging an exception to intelligibility and representation – the infinite (L:TI, 124). Hegel remains here only the paradigmatic example of what, for Levinas, has been true of all philosophers: ‘The ideal of Socratic truth thus rests on the essential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism. Philosophy is an egology’ (L:TI, 44). However, despite Hegel’s role as the principal accused, it is Husserl’s account of temporal constitution that allows us to grasp what is at stake in Levinas’s account of ‘the same’. We have already seen that for Husserl the original source from which the world is constituted is the unpresentable ‘flux’ that is identified with ‘absolute subjectivity’ or the ‘transcendental ego’. It is this identification of the raw stuff of existence with the transcendental ego, the absolute object with the absolute subject, that renders Husserl a strong idealist – although this idealism should not be taken to be in conflict with Tran Duc Thao’s influential work on Husserl’s materialism.45 By directing ‘our seizing and theoretically inquiring regard to pure consciousness in its own absolute being’, Husserl brackets the natural attitude’s positing of the transcendent existence beyond consciousness of ‘the whole world with all physical things, living beings, and humans, ourselves included’. Since these supposedly transcendent things were only ever posited on the basis of a modification of conscious experience, in bracketing the natural attitude ‘we have not lost anything but rather have gained the whole of absolute being which, rightly understood, contains within itself, “constitutes” within itself, all worldly transcendencies.’46 Absolute subjectivity thus constitutes from itself all mental and physical things, including living beings and other humans. While Husserl cannot prove that such things have no other existence than as correlates of conscious experience, we cannot even think the possibility of such a transcendent existence in our language since we have no access to a meaningful concept of what it would actually be for something to transcend the field of our experience – all concepts of transcendence having been produced within experience from experience.47 The temporal constitution of the living present is simultaneously the constitution of spatial extension.48 This makes thinking the existence of another subjectivity particularly challenging. Not only might we continue to entertain traditional sceptical worries about solipsism since the mental acts of others are forever inaccessible to us, there is not even an external extended world prior to



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or transcendent of ‘my’ constitution of space and time within which they might be. That is to say, if I analyse the place in which I assume other people dwell, I discover it is constructed from the flux by ‘my’ transcendental ego through a series of processes that phenomenological analysis gives me access to. Even the most basic evidence for a particular other’s existence in the form of encountering a fellow human body is the consequence of a series of ‘my’ constitutive processes – associations, retentions, protentions, etc. Husserl’s major response to this problem comes in his fifth Cartesian Mediation, a text that was translated into French by Levinas. Before presenting his solution in terms of the appresentation of the alter-ego, Husserl presents an image of existence very close to Levinas’s account of the imperialism of the same. The ‘reduction to my transcendental sphere of peculiar ownness’ produces a world very different from the natural attitude in which ‘myself and others’ are opposed. When we take things from the perspective of ‘the transcendental attitude’, what concerns us is: an essential structure, which is part of the all-embracing constitution in which the transcendental ego, as constituting an Objective world, lives his life. […] What is specifically peculiar to me as ego, my concrete being as a monad, purely in myself and for myself with an exclusive ownness, includes [my] every intentionality and therefore, in particular, the intentionality directed to what is other.49

As we will see, Levinas’s account of ‘the trace of the other’ as the trace of an immemorial past that has never been present is precisely an attempt to gesture towards a place for the other beyond the time and space that ‘I’ constitute and master – a relation to the other that is not an intentional relation constructed within the monad of exclusive ownness. The ‘imperialism of the same’ is not ‘the void of a tautology nor a dialectical opposition to the other, but the concreteness of egoism’ (L:TI, 38). Everything that is constituted, everything that presents itself or is represented as the object of a mental act, has its source in the flux that is identified with absolute subjectivity – it is part of the totality that I come to identify with. Levinas states that: ‘We call it “the same” because in representation the I precisely loses its opposition to its object’ (L:TI, 126). This is ‘the bipolar game of immanence and transcendence proper to being, where immanence always wins out over transcendence’ (L:HO, 40). We can refer to all of the processes that constitute a world to be enjoyed, devoured and ‘lived from’ the activity of Being.50 For Levinas, these processes remain driven by egoism as conatus – the will of the being to ensure its survival through an instrumental domination of the world around it. These processes are

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precisely what would provoke overpowering nausea if there were nothing other than them. This is why the contemporary urge to ‘escape Being’, an urge that can only be met by refusing traditional philosophy’s ontologism, is no longer the urge of an ‘I’ to transcend its dependence on an inhospitable world but rather one to escape the ubiquity of the transcendental activity of the ‘I’ itself. It is the threat of nausea at the unending return of the same that inspires the subject with a desire bordering on desperation for an encounter with the wholly other that cannot be reduced to the order of the same. Such an other could never be presented or represented in experience, not because of a polite desire to avoid reductively labelling them as ‘an x’ when they are an infinitely rich individual, but because in so far as I represent to myself a particular entity it is only a further example of the same: ‘the other would therein dissolve into the same: every representation is essentially interpretable as a transcendental constitution’ (L:TI, 38). Our desire would not be satisfied and Being would not be escaped by an encounter with an other who could be integrated into the system of the same: ‘The absolutely other is the Other. He and I do not form a number […] Over him I have no power. […] He is not wholly in my site’ – that is, the time and space ‘I’ have transcendentally constituted. Most crucially, ‘the relation between the same and the other – upon which we seem to impose such extraordinary conditions – is language’ (L:TI, 39). Naïve criticisms of Levinas frequently overemphasize the face as a visible object and thereby forget that the importance of the face is the face-to-face – the relation in which language occurs: ‘Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language’ (L:TI, 206). To point ahead then, to say one is face-to-face with the ghost of the dead in eulogy would not require the manifest hallucinatory image of dead, only a genuine situation of engagement in language. What is it about language that breaks with the system of the same? What we encounter directly in the face-to-face of language – breaking with the totality of the same, of temporal constitution or of the processes of Being – is infinity in the Cartesian sense of the third meditation. The ‘infinite’ is simply a designation for that which could not have been temporally constituted by and from absolute subjectivity, what must come from beyond Being. Although Levinas uses this term more rarely than his commentators, the simplest explanation of this infinity that would arise in language is that we are surprised by the other.51 The expressive face of the living other, encountered in language, responds to us in a way that cannot be anticipated – the other shatters the horizon of anticipation. The ‘cannot’ of this failure of anticipation is of a different order



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from any other failed anticipations. Following Husserl, every constituted object in temporal existence is presented on the basis of an anticipatory horizon (we could not encounter a table without the anticipation that it will remain in existence, will not transform into an eagle, etc.) and we can clearly be surprised by material objects when they behave in a manner that goes against our protentions – we might not anticipate how some potassium will behave when dropped into water, that we will never finish if we try to write pi, or the behaviour of a domestic animal – yet these examples of surprise are of a completely different order from the lack of the possibility of anticipation in the face-to-face of language. Only here can we attain ‘a vantage point from which man ceases to concern us in terms of the horizon of being, i.e., ceases to offer himself to our powers’; in the ‘invocation of a face’ that is ‘already speech’ we have ‘a relation with a depth rather than with a horizon – a gap in the horizon’ (L:EN, 8–9). Levinas takes this notion of the other as a gap from Sartre, who made ‘the striking observation that the Other is a pure hole in the world’ (L:HO, 39). We have seen then that in order to offer release from the nausea of Being the absolutely other must not ‘form a number’ with the self – ‘The face to face is not a modality of coexistence’ (L:TI, 305). There must be no totality in which both are included, including time and space as constituted by the transcendental ego that produces the regime of the same. The other can never be encountered, presented or represented. Nevertheless, the other is approached in conversation that welcomes ‘his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity’ (L:TI, 51).

Ça: The trace of the other Only two years after Totality and Infinity in 1963’s ‘The Trace of the Other’, Levinas introduces ‘the trace’ as a key piece of terminology that transforms the ethical encounter outlined so far. To see the importance of this concept it is useful to begin from the Kantian gesture of denying ‘knowledge in order to make room for faith’.52 Kant’s critical project did not merely aim to limit mankind’s knowledge claims to their legitimate borders (as finite beings without intellectual intuition); more radically, Kant argued that if ‘nature had here complied with our wish and given us that capacity for insight or that enlightenment which we would like to possess’, then practical reason would collapse. In particular, if we could

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have certain knowledge about the postulates of practical reason, then ‘God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes.’ The result would be that ‘most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, only a few from hope, and none at all from duty, and the moral worth of actions, on which alone in the eyes of supreme wisdom the worth of a person and even that of the world depends, would not exist at all.’ Man would become a mere mechanism: ‘as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but there would be no life in the figures.’53 The very possibility of non-pathological actions depends on our non-knowledge – on the postulates of practical reason’s equivocal status as only related to in the uncertainty of hope and faith. The twist is that if we could know an eternal reward waited for us, then there would be no eternal reward as man and the world would have been rendered worthless in ‘the eyes of supreme wisdom’. By introducing ‘the trace’, Levinas similarly renders the wholly other equivocal. It is not merely that in actual fact there can never be irrefutable evidence of the existence of the wholly other that is beyond Being, but that any such evidence would paradoxically reduce the wholly other to the order of the same. That the other can have had a transformative effect – leading the animal self from egoism to ethics and on to politics – does not occur despite the fact that we cannot prove the wholly other exists, it occurs because of it. This is a significant change from Levinas’s position in 1961 when, in the face-to-face encounter of language, we directly encountered something that simply could not have been temporally constituted – the idea of infinity in a Cartesian sense. Although the Cartesian infinity will continue to be invoked by Levinas, it will come to be reconceived in terms of an infinite subjective emotion aroused by the other’s mortality. To point ahead, the structure we are beginning to outline here will prove extremely important in our broader project of putting forward a psychoanalytic account of how the melancholic incorporation of the dead in an intrapsychic crypt renders the notion of standing before the dead, talking to them and doing justice to them intelligible. One might ask how we can know that the dead themselves are really preserved within a fracture in the unconscious, rather than there being nothing more there than a fracture in the unendingly narcissistic and closed unconscious. The answer, as we will see, is that we cannot know that the other is incorporated there at all. Furthermore, if we could know the dead were incorporated there, issuing demands, they would issue no demand. In Kantian terms, we do and must relate to the dead in faith and hope rather than knowledge. It is not a flaw but a virtue that we cannot, for essential reasons,



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say that spectres exist or the dead are melancholically incorporated within us – hauntology is not an extension of ontology. In order to investigate the ‘trace structure’ in Levinas, let us begin from a common claim about the use of ‘trace’ in Derrida’s work. This claim, seemingly originally formulated by Geoffrey Bennington, is that: ‘Every trace is the trace of a trace’.54 This assertion is offered in the context of structural linguistics: [I]f every element of the system only gets its identity in its difference from other elements, every element is in this way marked by all those it is not: it thus bears the trace of those other elements. […] These traces are not what a certain linguistics calls distinctive features, being nothing other than the traces of the absence of the other ‘element,’ which is moreover not absent in the sense of ‘present elsewhere,’ but is itself made up of traces. Every trace is the trace of a trace. No element is anywhere present (nor simply absent), there are only traces.55

Since this underlying activity of traces referring to other traces is the precondition for any present meaning effect to emerge on the scene of presence, this account can once again be referred to as a graphic of the trace: a particular dynamic of pre-logical, unpresentable play. However, this linguistic account only puts forward one graphic in the sheaf of uses ‘trace’ is put to in Derrida’s texts – the Levinasian trace would be another.56 Derrida states this quite directly in Of Grammatology: Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word? […] If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can justify one’s language, and one’s choice of terms, only within a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy […] The word trace must refer itself to a certain number of contemporary discourses whose force I intend to take into account. Not that I accept them totally. But the word trace establishes the clearest connections with them and thus permits me to dispense with certain developments which have already demonstrated their effectiveness in those fields. Thus, I relate this concept of trace to what is at the center of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology: relationship to illeity as to the alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence. […] This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse. And finally, in all scientific fields, notably in biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and irreducible. (D:OG, 70)

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Derrida is certainly not implying that there is a single concept, logic, or even graphic of ‘trace’ at work in these very different discourses; rather, the use of ‘trace’ in each is irreducible to its use in the others. That Derrida utilizes the single mark ‘trace’ as an undecidable term that is the precondition of these multiple, partially incompatible graphics is an apparently reckless move that, if it can be justified, can only be justified strategically in accordance with the goal Of Grammatology sets out to achieve. Derrida’s most direct statement of the strategic aim of the entire text occurs in the very same paragraph: ‘my final intention in this book’ is making ‘enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity,” “immediacy,” “presence” (the proximate [proche], the own [propre] and the pre- of presence)’ – it is for that task that the diverse movements of ‘trace’ producing different discourses (all of them bearing their particular ruptures with proximity, immediacy and presence) becomes essential (D:OG, 70). That the first part of Of Grammatology makes use of this articulation of Levinas, Nietzsche, Freud and contemporary science around the hinge-word ‘trace’ in order to cause certain disturbances in linguistics and semiotics certainly does not render this its Derridean use. When ‘trace’ appears in another text, such as the roughly contemporary Speech and Phenomena, the term does not necessarily articulate all and only the same discourses; indeed, here it plays on a Husserlian use in relation to the constitution of spatio-temporality, just as in ‘Différance’ Heidegger’s die frühe Spur of ‘The Anaximander Fragment’ is partly at stake. As we saw in Derrida’s introduction to the doomed project of forming a sheaf of the different ways différance had imposed itself upon him in his early texts, the notion of a sheaf allows for ‘the complex structure of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different threads and different lines of meaning – or of force – to go off again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others’ (D:MP, 3). In any particular text then the underlying graphics that are at stake beneath the material mark ‘trace’ may be quite different. These terms ‘do not simply turn back on themselves by means of an auto-affection without opening. Rather they spread out in a chain over the practical and theoretical entirety of a text, and each time in a different way’ (D:P, 11 (my emphasis)). What then is the particular graphic of ‘trace’ in Levinas’s writings? If we impose Bennington’s schema that ‘every trace is the trace of a trace’, how are we to characterize the first and second use of ‘trace’ is this statement – what we might refer to respectively as tracea and traceb? In language we encounter an expressive face – the processes of temporal constitution are interrupted by that which defies our anticipation and we



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experience a hole in Being. However, in opposition to the position of Totality and Infinity, we cannot deny that what is presented in that face-to-face encounter might just be a particularly mobile and noisy fleshy object constituted entirely by and from absolute subjectivity. Although our anticipation has clearly been defied as if by the wholly other, we cannot be rigorously certain that we are not dealing with a complex predictable machine that is not genuinely responsive. To reflective thought this will always be a possibility that no possible evidence could unequivocally count against; however, at the level of immediate sensation we have always already decided against such a possibility in favour of the wholly other (outside of psychosis, nobody in their lived existence takes solipsism seriously, even someone who theoretically endorses the position). In this rupture of Being, ‘the face solicits us’ from a beyond that is not an ‘other world’ behind the world but that is beyond world: ‘beyond all unveiling; like the One of the first hypothesis in Parmenides, transcending all knowledge, be it symbolic or signified. “Neither similar nor dissimilar, neither identical nor non-identical,” says Plato of the One, excluding it precisely from all revelation, even indirect revelation’ (L:HO, 38–9). The face itself is thus not even an indirect revelation of the other – from 1963 onwards in Levinas’s work the other is always and irrevocably ‘absolutely Absent’. Nor is the face ‘a concealing’ or ‘a hiding’ behind which this absolutely Absent might lie – it is not thrust forward by the other (L:HO, 39). If we were to take the face as a fleshy material object it would not even belong to the other: as a material part of my spatio-temporally constituted world, it is mine rather than theirs. The face engaged with in language is reconceived then as a material trace, in and a part of ‘my’ temporally constituted world, of the possible passing by of an other that has disturbed the order of my world. Although we might interpret this material trace as a direct sign of the other’s passing by, just as a ‘detective investigates everything that stands out on the crime scene as a revelatory sign of the criminal’s voluntary or involuntary work’; more properly the encountered material trace’s ‘original significance is designated in the imprint left by the one who wanted to erase his traces in an attempt, for example, to accomplish the perfect crime. The one who left traces while erasing his traces didn’t want to say or do anything by the traces he leaves’ (L:HO, 41). This is not to imply that the other is actively erasing the traces they have left in our temporally constituted world; rather, the material traces we encounter are not of the other but only signs of the other’s withdrawal: a ‘trace is sketched out and effaced in a face’ (L:OB, 12). Using our terminological division, alien to Levinas’s own work, what is at stake is a situation where (1) the traceb of the passing by of an other has always

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already been withdrawn (there is no sign of the other that would reveal them, not even indirectly), yet (2) the absolute withdrawing of the traceb itself leaves ambiguous tracesa that are encountered and perceived as disturbances in the spatio-temporally constituted world, although it is quite possible that these things I take for traces are nothing of the kind. Thus, what is phenomenally encountered in the face of another person when I engage in language is only a tracea of the withdrawal of a traceb. The latter, had it not been withdrawn, would have testified to the other having passed by; however, what we are actually offered is only the ‘equivocal trace’ – a disturbance that might or might not testify to an other’s withdrawal. As we have stated, this situation where every tracea is the tracea of a traceb is for the best. A direct traceb granting evidence of the wholly other would risk, paradoxically, reducing the other to the order of the same: [T]he glow of a trace is enigmatic, equivocal. […] It cannot serve as the point of departure for a demonstration, which inexorably would bring it into immanence and essence. […] The infinite then cannot be tracked down like game by a hunter. The trace left by the infinite is not the residue of a presence; its very glow is ambiguous. Otherwise, its positivity would not preserve the infinity of the infinite any more than negativity would. (L:OB, 12)

Traceb would have pointed directly towards ‘a past that has never been present’, the immemorial past of ‘an antecedence prior to all representable antecedence’ or a diachrony ‘without simultaneity’ – a beyond Being outside the transcendental ego’s constitution of ‘my’ space and time (L:OB, 12). That very pointing, if traceb were encountered, would constitute a representation of the antecedence that would place the immemorial past within spatio-temporal constitution. It would be intuitive to take this ‘other’, conceived as belonging to an entirely alien temporality outside of the transcendental ego’s constitutive processes, as another transcendental subject who is constituting their own time and space on the model of the accessible transcendental ego that I investigate in my own phenomenological interrogations. This would be the model of an alter-ego as posited in Husserl’s fifth Cartesian meditation. Levinas wants to avoid this possibility since it leads to a symmetrical model of the relationship between self and other in which we are both transcendental egos constituting our respective ‘worlds’ and encountering each other, a situation where the self is the other for the other. Once we accept such a model, it makes reasonable sense to ask why one ought to regard oneself as having an infinite and overwhelming duty to the other if they in response ignore or mistreat us. We would rapidly be pushed



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towards the struggle of the Hegelian account of intersubjective recognition. Such thoughts are of course quite common in our concrete political lives when we encounter other people; however, such thoughts must be entirely alien to the originary ethical encounter with the singular other since, were they not, the ethical encounter could not play its assigned role in constituting political reality – this can only have come from a nonreciprocal, asymmetrical encounter with the other that is in turn disturbed by the third. This is not to say that questions of recognition and reciprocal intersubjectivity cannot be of concern for a Levinasian, only that they would emerge within political existence rather than being its ground. So, we can see that, despite placing the other outside of transcendental subjectivity’s constitutive processes in an immemorial past, Levinas is not stating that the other constitutes their own order of temporality as a self who functions like me. As he replied to Eugène Minkowski: it is necessary to avoid the words neighbor and fellow human being, which establish so many things in common with my neighbor (voisin) and so many similarities with my fellow human being; we belong to the same essence. Transcendence is only possible with the Other (Autrui) with respect to whom we are absolutely different, without this difference depending on some quality. (L:BPW, 27)57

Not only would this assumption that the other is ‘like me’ impose a model of the alter-ego that stops them being wholly other (placing them within the order of ‘the same’), it would also serve to give the other a place and even a home. We could think of the other as doing perfectly well within the borders of their private transcendental constitution of time and space. Instead, in the equivocal trace of the other we find a situation that is ‘more tense than that of an image offered in the straightforwardness of an intuitive intention’ since: the absolutely other, the stranger whom I have ‘neither conceived nor given birth to,’ I already have on my arms, already bear, according to the Biblical formula, ‘in my breast as the nurse bears the nurseling.’ He has no other place, is not autochthonous, is uprooted, without a country, not an inhabitant, exposed to the cold and the heat of the seasons. To be reduced to having recourse to me is the homelessness or strangeness of the neighbor. It is incumbent on me. (L:OB, 91)

Levinas’s task is to give an explanation for the overwhelming sense of shame that is felt by egoism on encountering the face of the other – ‘shame is a movement in a direction opposed to that of consciousness, which returns triumphantly

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to itself and rests upon itself. To feel shame is to expel oneself from this rest’ (L:BPW, 17). To ‘expel’ oneself is to give up one identity and to take on another – to refuse the ‘instinct for possession’ of the ‘bourgeois spirit’ and to commit oneself to serving the other – what Levinas will refer to as becoming ‘human’. The overwhelming shame felt before the other is characterized by the feeling that, through constituting spatio-temporality, one has usurped the entire world and left the other homeless. As in the quotation from Pascal that becomes a mantra in Levinas’s later works: ‘“That is my place in the sun.” That is how the usurpation of the whole world began’ (L:OB, i). The other does not dwell in a past that has never been present, they have been consigned there by the processes of Being that the ego previously identified with and enjoyed and this is the cause of an infinite shame. Before moving ahead, let us briefly re-elaborate our account of the Levinasian trace. What is to be explained is the belief that a certain rupture in my anticipatory horizon is not merely caused by my having an inappropriate expectation but because it comes from a genuinely responsive other who cannot be anticipated. This encountered thing that defied my anticipation is not akin to a trace of direct evidence, like a fingerprint, but is instead akin to a total absence of fingerprints that might be a sign of someone having wiped their fingerprints away or might be a sign of nobody having been there at all. Objectifying this material we can call it a tracea. This tracea was produced and is encountered at specific times and in a certain place – its location along with the entire history of its production, maintenance and encounter is a story that takes place within the spatio-temporal world that ‘I’ constitute. Although the term is far from perfect, let us characterize this encountered material a ‘spatial trace’. Without ever constituting incontrovertible evidence for a beyond of Being, the expressive material can be taken as the tracea of the effacing of a traceb: the effacing of actual evidence of the passing by of an ‘other’ radically alien to my own temporal constitution whose place I have usurped. This traceb would have been evidence of a past that was never and could never have been present in the world ‘I’ constitute. Though once again an imperfect characterization, we might refer to this traceb as a ‘temporal trace’ – evidence of another temporality. Thus, we encounter a spatial trace in the world that points us towards the possible withdrawal of a temporal trace beyond Being. Although in rational reflection we can never have certainty about tracea constituting evidence for traceb, our overwhelming desire to escape the nausea of Being pledges us to this possibility – however slight its chance – as more valuable than any enjoyment that might be offered in the luxurious prison-house



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of the inescapable imperialism of the same. Furthermore, this pledge has always already been made in direct sensation – we all intuit that the wholly other exists and surprises us in language, that solipsism is not the case, and this is manifest not only in our concern for justice and capacity for shame but also in the very fact that we have been called to language and thought. For a phenomenology such as Levinas’s, the objective fact of whether there actually is a wholly other encountered in the face is not only unknown and unknowable, it is irrelevant. The difficulty at this point is to tie our account of the trace to death, since it is clear that the question of mortality has been absent for several pages. After all, isn’t the other’s capacity to surprise us or the shame we feel in perceiving ourselves to have usurped the other’s place enough for ethics and politics to emerge? Of course, once ethically elected the other’s mortality would then become an issue for us since we become ‘obsessed’ by the singular other – committed to preserving the one to whom we owe being elevated from the tragicomic realm of enjoyment to a dignified ‘human’ existence and without whom we would lapse back into the now unbearable egocentric condition of bourgeois Being. The ‘death of the other’ would certainly figure as a relevant concern within ethics, though it would not be the ground of ethics. Surprise or shame over usurpation would seem to be enough to found the law ‘Thou shalt not kill’, a law that is equally ‘I am responsible for the death of the other. I cannot leave him alone to die, even if I cannot stop it’, and an interdiction against ‘so many ways of being’ that ‘comport a way of crushing the other’ (L:IRB, 53). However, if this was the limit of the role of mortality in Levinas’s work, there would be little justification for seeing his work as one of the three ‘determinate angles on death’ in twentieth-century thought. Derrida’s assertion that ‘all of Levinas’s thought, from the beginning to the end, was a meditation on death’ would also seem incomprehensible (D:AEL, 120). Furthermore, we have seen Levinas himself directly assert that death is ‘the question that is necessary for this relationship with infinity, or time, to be produced’ (L:GDT, 21). The simple answer here is that it is only the other’s mortality that renders shame infinite. For Levinas the death of the other is characterized by an excess of emotion, as when in Plato’s Phaedo ‘Apollodorus weeps more than the others; he weeps beyond measure – and they must send the women away’. The death of the other is ‘emotion par excellence, affection or being affected par excellence’ – ‘a being affected by the beyond-measure’ (L:GDT, 18, 9, 15). If it is in responsiveness in language that we encounter the beyond Being, then the horror of the other’s death would be a matter of the corpse’s ‘non-response’ – of an expressive face becoming an unresponsive death-mask:

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Death is the disappearance in beings of those expressive movements that are always responses. Death will touch, above all, that autonomy or that expressiveness of movement that can go to the point of masking someone within his face. Death is the no-response. Those movements both hide and inform the vegetative movements. Death strips that which is thus covered over and offers it up to medical examination. (L:GDT, 9)

If the death of the other – or rather the prospect of that death since even in Apollodorus’s case it is not a corpse but an anticipated death of Socrates that provokes emotion – is necessary for the ‘relationship with infinity’, then this infinity (characterized as an idea whose ideatum overflows its measure) is now encountered emotionally, on the side of the subject rather than the object. It would be an emotion ‘without measure: as if humanity were not consumed or exhausted by measurement, as if there were an excess in death’ (L:GDT, 9). In short, for Levinas ‘being affected by death is affectivity’ where, since affectivity is a precondition for the opening of Greek language, the other’s death is ‘an a posteriori more ancient than any a priori’ (L:GDT, 15). This a posteriori is not finitude or mortality in general. The excess that shows ‘the spectacle of death is not bearable’ is testimony to Fink’s claim that each and every ‘death is a scandal, a first death; there is no genus for death, says Fink, no approach possible to the notion in general’ (L:GDT, 14, 90). For Levinas, the opening of language, meaning and logic as a precondition of thought and the capacity to be affected does not simply have its first birth in a primordial contact with the other – it is ever renewed in the discovery of a unique death in the face-to-face encounter with each particular other. One never simply acknowledges mortality, it is always a fresh scandal that this particular other will die, always the first and only death.

Il: Justice for the dead In this last section we will adopt a more critical attitude towards Levinas. Our basic contention that Levinas’s account needs to be supplemented by psychoanalytic machinery would not have been popular with Levinas himself, nor would our deconstructive gambit that this reference to psychoanalysis is already implicitly at work unravelling Levinas’s ethics. While the argument we are about to offer is not directly found in Derrida’s works, we believe it is implicitly at work throughout his reflections on death. A very loosely parallel argument is offered with regard to Levinas’s relation to animals. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida asks of ‘his’ cat (‘this cat that is perhaps not “my cat”’): ‘Is this cat a third [tiers]? Or an other in a face-to-face



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duel?’ (D:ATA, 9). This repeats John Llewelyn’s direct question to Levinas asking whether the animal has a face, to which Levinas reportedly replied: I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called “face.” The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if the snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A more specific analysis is needed. (Quoted in D:ATA, 107–8)

On the one hand there is a confession of ignorance, ‘I don’t know if the snake has a face’, yet on the other hand Levinas is absolutely confident that whether that animal does or does not have a face, the human face is ‘completely different’ and the animal face would come ‘only afterwards’. As Derrida writes: Levinas insists on the originary, paradigmatic, ‘prototypical’ character of ethics as human, the space of a relation between humans, only humans; it is for this that they are human. It is only afterward, by means of an analogical transposition, that we become sensitive to animal suffering. It is only by means of a transference, indeed, through metaphor or allegory, that such suffering obligates us. (D:ATA, 108)

One of the most characteristic traits of Derrida as a political thinker is his caution about such ‘analogical transportations’. He is extremely sensitive to the many dangers and possibilities of violence when one privileged group that has defined a certain system among themselves ‘generously’ extends what they enjoy to a larger group. That is not to say that many, if not most, of the major political advances of the last three centuries involved such movements, only that we must be very sensitive to the place where their apparent magnanimity breaks down. Derrida’s classic deconstructive response to such situations begins with a reversal. If in the phenomenal experience of the face-to-face relation with a human other we inevitably to some extent implicitly impose the model of an alter‑ego that renders them less than wholly other, then surely the phenomenal encounter with the wholly other par excellence is the encounter with the animal? If so, then in so far as we can find a fellow human other’s face wholly other, are we perhaps engaging in an underlying ‘analogical transportation’ from the impenetrable uncanniness of the face-to-face with an animal to the face-to-face with a human? In the second step the opposition itself is put in question: beyond the ‘factual’ question of whether the animal has a face, of whether it ‘responds’ or merely ‘reacts’, Derrida asks ‘not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means’ (D:ATA, 9, 8). It is not merely that we cannot tell whether the animal responds (like a human) or merely reacts (like a machine), but rather that in considering animals this distinction becomes increasingly

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enigmatic even among humans. Although this quite classical deconstructive argument does not even begin to offer an answer to the concrete questions of ‘animal rights’, what Derrida shows is that everything is at stake in the question of the animal. That is to say, the animal is not a peripheral, secondary concern added as a supplementary appendix to the serious business of inter‑human ethics. Instead, questions of the animal must be asked at the very beginning of establishing even an inter-human ethics.58 The point of these reflections is that a parallel situation emerges with respect to the dead. We might remember that, in the quote from Specters of Marx from which our work begins, Derrida refers to how there would be no justice worthy of the name that does not recognize ‘in its principle’ the respect for those who are not presently living – this reference to the dead and unborn factoring at the level of the ‘principle’ implies it cannot be a matter of producing an account of justice among the living that is then analogically transported to the dead. Of course, things are far more difficult here since with the dead, for Levinas, there is no question of whether they ‘respond’ or merely ‘react’ – the dead are precisely defined by the fact they do not ‘respond’. The death of the other is only this: ‘a process (of immobilization) whereby someone, who up until then expressed himself, comes to an end’ (L:GDT, 16). We do not merely witness a cessation of activities such as respiration and the beginning of decomposition; our overwhelming emotional response at the absolute scandal of the other’s death is ‘beyond biological processes’, it is that ‘a face […] becomes a masque’ and ‘expression disappears’ (L:GDT, 12). To anticipate a singular other’s death is to anticipate the face-to-face of language stopping forever and being plunged back into eternal egoism. This egoism is eternal since, within the context of the singularity of ethical election, the other’s death is the end of the world. In ethics, there is no other other’s face in existence that we could substitute for the dying other to give us a secondary escape from Being (we should stress once again that this entire account of the ethical is not a description of lived concrete experience, which is always political and negotiates between multiple faces). The threat of ethical election collapsing, of all language ceasing forever and the world ending, evokes an infinite emotion – Apollodorus’s weeping without measure. Crucially, this anticipation of being locked eternally within Being was precisely the force strong enough to first dedicate the self to the other – to break with the processes of egoism and give birth to the ‘human’. The force of the face and the seriousness of a better existence than egoism all comes from the unbearable anticipation of the scandal of the other’s face becoming a death mask: ‘in a responsibility for the other for life and death’, ‘the adjectives



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unconditional, indeclinable, absolute take on a meaning’ (L:OB, 124). This ethical commitment for the other’s life in a state of ‘being-for-another’ that interrupts the ‘for-oneself ’ of egoism is a total commitment to keeping the other alive ‘to take the bread from out of one’s own mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one’s own fasting’ (L:OB, 56). We have seen then that Levinas makes ‘the death of the other’ as an a post­eriori event – the singular death of a singular other rather than the death of others in general – the emotional overwhelming infinite relationship that is the foundation of the a priori: of all sciences, Greek language, meaning and thought. Yet this ‘death of the other’ is always the threat or anticipation of their death. Levinas’s ‘determinate angle’ on death is an account of the other’s beingtowards-death or dying rather than the other’s being-dead. If all of our sacrifices are aimed at keeping the mortal other responsive, in not losing this one chink in the imperialism of the same or the ubiquity of Being, then it is radically unclear that these considerations can be transferred – even in a manner akin to the ‘analogical transportation’ of the face from the human to the animal – onto the corpse. The corpse has no face, only a death mask. Furthermore, the corpse is not merely another kind of other, like the animal, who we might come to see as having a face: it is the anticipation of the corpse not having a face that is the very thing that gives the living face its force. Levinas states that in the living the responsiveness of the face hides ‘the vegetative movements’, yet death ‘strips that which is thus covered over and offers it up to medical examination’ (L:GDT, 9). We can recognize here Heidegger’s first reformulation of encountering the death of the other in §47 of Being and Time. In this formulation, Heidegger states that the corpse is not merely encountered as a present-at-hand object but as something ‘which has lost its life’, a potential object for the student of pathological anatomy (H:BT, 282). Levinas neglects Heidegger’s further reformulation in which we can still tarry alongside the loved one – where despite the deceased having abandoned our world ‘in terms of that world those who remain can still be with him’ (H:BT, 282). This return to the first reformulation is anything but a choice on Levinas’s part – it is not something we might ‘correct’ without putting in jeopardy ethics itself. If one can still phenomenally ‘be with’ the dead – even if they are no longer being-there themselves – the death of the other would no longer be experienced as an absolute scandal. Clearly the problem for our overall argument is that, if through the psychoanalytic account of the internalization of the dead we can still engage with them in language, then death would indeed be robbed of its scandal and it is unclear that ethics would have force.

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We do not doubt that, if he had been asked, Levinas would have wholeheartedly agreed with Derrida’s claim that no justice ‘seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility […] before the ghosts of those […] who are already dead’ (D:SM, xviii). Levinas’s dedication of Otherwise than Being to ‘the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confession and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same antisemitism’ (L:OB, 2). Nevertheless, is there any way such a ‘doing justice’ to the memory of the dead can be modelled on the structure of an encounter with the other and another other? Momentarily turning back to our earlier reflections, we have argued that for Levinas the experience offered in the living-present that becomes the material for an investigative analysis is always political. Although in the order of constitution we can trace ‘the entry of the third party into the relation to my neighbor, motivating thematization, objectification and knowledge’ (L:OS, 44), in actual lived experience one has always already been exposed to a third who is ‘other than the neighbor, but also another neighbor, and also a neighbor of the other’. In this abstract triangular situation – the minimally complex schema of a political world – the dissymmetrical infinite responsibility of the face-toface encounter in language is limited and becomes the administration of justice. This calls for the very actions Levinas’s ethics apparently outlawed: ‘comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, thematization, […] a copresence on an equal footing as before a court of justice […] the comparison of incomparables. It is the thematization of the same’ (L:OB, 157–8). The without-measure of a singular other’s death that renders them incomparable to any other being does not make this ‘comparison of incomparables’ simply impossible; rather, it is what makes the political judgements involved in such comparisons serious and substantial decisions and events – events for which we must accept a burden of responsibility rather than mere programmatic calculations that could be executed perfectly. The burden of an unconditional, indeclinable, absolute ethical duty to a singular other that cannot be passed on to anyone else is precisely what allows us to understand the torments of bad conscience evoked in negotiations in which we regularly decline the indeclinable and pass on our responsibility – in the process giving up our own uniqueness and election in the name of justice. This inevitable and unending bad conscience remains even when we pass on responsibility for what we believe to be the best of reasons. Thus, within Levinas’s account of political justice a precondition for a decision taking place is that it chooses between infinite duties owed to (at least)



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two others. If there were only one other, the subject’s responsibility towards them would be unlimited and indeclinable; however, as there are as a matter of fact always (at least) two faces, the responsibility towards either of them is limited. For Levinas, or at least within Levinas’s abstract schema, there is no decision, event or rendering of justice that is not choosing between others who are wholly other. There can be no political decision over whether to do justice to a living person or a stone since the stone is merely part of ‘me’ – of my temporal constitution. Although Levinas never addresses the issue directly, it seems reasonable to assume that while there could perhaps be a political decision between two ‘secondary’ faces – such as between two animals who we take to have faces on the basis of an analogical transportation from the case of the human other – if it were a matter of a political decision between a mortal human other and an animal, the human would carry an infinitely greater weight for Levinas by default. However, with the corpse we are not even in this situation since there is by definition no face-to-face with the unresponsive corpse – our duty to the living responding other will always trump our duty to the dead since the dead cannot be engaged with in language. While there may be political decisions in which we appear to choose an object, animal, principal or even a corpse over a living person, it seems these would only be genuine responsible decisions if there is some mortal human other or others further down the line for whom the decisions are taken – for example, I choose to give a eulogy rather than feeding the poor because the eulogy will help sooth the other mourners. If the decision cannot be accounted for in these terms, it can only be that I am fleeing my duty to a mortal other in pursuit of enjoyment and egoism – a choice that is not even a decision but only a lapse. In summary, we have suggested that, while it seems from some relatively subtle and occasional clues that Levinas might intend to offer an account of ethical and political inspiration that could arise from and before the dead, the account he offers – rooted in response, responsiveness and responsibility – can only draw inspiration from the living who are dying, as we all are, not the dead. It is of course possible that Levinas would have flatly denied Derrida’s claim that a justice worthy of the name must be able to take inspiration from a duty imposed by the dead or the unborn. Perhaps, as one of the few continental philosophers to never write on Antigone and in whose texts the word mourning [deuil] very rarely occurs, he would simply have embraced the claim that our infinite ethical responsibility is always towards the living for whom we can still do something tangible. It is notable that Levinas actively criticises Hegel for the

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fact that he ‘always focuses on death in an interpretation of the behaviour of the survivor’, as if focusing on the moments after rather than before the other’s death were a fault (L:GTD, 89). Against this position there are moments in his reflections on the Holocaust and the ‘guilt’ of being a survivor that seem to imply the dead can be a source of an overwhelming and distinctly ethical emotion – Levinas states that ‘starting from the Holocaust, I think about the death of the other man’ (L:IRB, 126) – yet even here we seem to deal with the deaths of the Holocaust rather than the dead of the Holocaust, and that itself leads to the deaths of those around us. The specific duty that arises and that demands publicly vocal eulogies and memorial works seems less about doing justice to the dead themselves than to meeting Adorno’s futurally oriented formulation of ‘a new categorical imperative’, imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind, ‘to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself.’59 As an exception to this – perhaps more notable for the rarity of its theme than for fully embracing a duty to the dead – Levinas refers to the Jewish practice of the ‘mercifulness of truth’, the burial of an unclaimed corpse. Levinas states that a high priest spotting such a corpse on his way to the Temple to celebrate at Yom Kippur ‘must not hesitate to “make himself impure” by contact with the corpse. The “mercifulness of truth” takes priority over the liturgy on the Day of the Pardon. A symbol of an absolutely gratuitous mercy’ (L:OGM, 186 n. 9). It is interesting to note, in this rare example of a duty with direct, practical consequences owed to a corpse, both that it is the corpse of a stranger and the duty it trumps is prayer rather than, for example, feeding a mortal other who might otherwise die. In closing, although it is not essential to our argument, let us testify to an intuition that Levinasian ethics, if not Levinas himself, wants to be able to account for a duty to the dead. We would even say its ‘self-image’ demands that it be able to render intelligible such a duty, even if only in the form of the kind of analogical transfer that is possible with animals, yet not with the corpse. This pushes Levinas’s position towards allowing for the psychoanalytic internalization of the dead, the possibility of language with ghosts. However, as we have seen, a relation of language with the dead places at risk the entire scandal of death that is the opening of the beyond Being. What psychoanalysis offers Levinasian ethics would be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the mechanism of melancholia might allow a dead other lodged within the psyche to continue to affect us and to be affected – even to surprise us in the face-toface of language; on the other hand, the infinite emotion of death will be put in question by this survival. In so far as this path is pursued by Derrida, we will



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find a very different picture in which there are many deaths and no death, a vast economy of spectres calling for decisions of inheritance and a whole ‘political’ realm already opened between two people prior to the third. As we will see, particularly in Derrida’s eulogy to Gadamer, actual death becomes peculiarly unimportant since it is perhaps not the central interruption of the saying between two friends that continues and always continued on a spectral level. Perhaps the moment of death in some cases is not even an interruption, but only a deepening of the conversation. In the words of the poet Kenneth Patchen: ‘There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death.’60

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The Scene of Writing

4.1  The psychographic metaphor The friend of psychoanalysis Before we turn to Freud’s ‘determinate angle’ on death, we will begin with a quick snapshot of the broader relation between deconstruction and psycho­ analysis. Derrida’s extended dialogue For What Tomorrow … with Elisabeth Roudinesco ends with the chapter ‘In Praise of Psychoanalysis’. As Derrida was involved in reworking the transcription of this dialogue to produce ‘a text in two hands’, we can be confident that this chapter title was approved by Derrida and that he believed that there was indeed something to praise about psycho­ analysis (D:WT, ix). This is unsurprising when we consider that Derrida’s wife Marguerite, along with many of his close friends and theoretical allies, are or were practising analysts. Nevertheless, the relationship between deconstruction and psychoanalysis has always been controversial; even in Derrida’s earliest works he felt the need to specify that despite appearances ‘the deconstruction of logocentrism is not a psychoanalysis of philosophy’ (D:WD, 246).1 Derrida claimed that he liked to put his relationship to psychoanalytic discourse in terms of ‘friendship’, a word that: evokes the freedom of an alliance, an engagement with no institutional status. The friend maintains the reserve, withdrawal, or distance necessary for critique, for discussion, for reciprocal questioning, sometimes the most radical of all. But like friendship, this engagement of existence itself, the engagement at the heart of experience, the experience of thought and experience tout court, assumes an irreversible approbation, the ‘yes’ given to existence or to the event. (D:WT, 167)

Indeed, one of Derrida’s most regular adjectives in reference to psychoanalysis is ‘irreversible’: ‘Psychoanalysis is ineradicable, its revolution is irreversible – and yet it is, as a civilization, mortal’ (D:WA, 260). What might strike many analysts

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as heretical in this statement is not the possibility of psychoanalytic civilization – conceived as a collection of practices and institutions – dying, but rather that their coming to an end or at least fading away (entirely possible with the increasing use of psychoactive drugs and cognitive behavioural therapy) would not constitute a reversal of the psychoanalytic revolution. The implication seems to be that a non-analysed non-analyst (as Derrida himself claimed to be)2 can nevertheless think in the wake of psychoanalysis.3 Indeed, it may be as much of an impossible struggle to not think in the wake of psychoanalysis as it would be to not think in the wake of Christianity, colonialism, Cartesian dualism or Darwinism.4 Thus we have two distinct claims related to the irreversibility of psycho­ analysis – first, that Derrida’s approbation for it is irreversible (a ‘yes’ given to its event); secondly, that the revolution of psychoanalysis itself is irreversible (albeit its practice mortal). This irreversible revolution is not simply a revolution in the sciences. In Of Grammatology, Derrida wrote about a general breakthrough that is occurring in the human sciences – particularly contemporary linguistics and psychoanalysis – that are ‘no longer simply ontic’ sciences, no longer having ‘anything regional about them’ (D:OG, 21): In as much as it touches the originary constitution of objectivity and of the value of the object – the constitution of good and bad objects as categories that do not allow themselves to be derived from a theoretical formal ontology and from a science of the objectivity of the object in general – psychoanalysis is not a simple regional science. (D:OG, 88)

Psychoanalysis, along with other contemporary sciences, would place in question any standard narrative in which a priori philosophy grounds the a posteriori empirical sciences. We have seen Derrida dealing with similar complications in his refusal of Heidegger’s subordination of the sciences of death to the ontological account of Being-towards-death. Once again, there is a contamination of methods and approaches since questions that were originally distinctively philosophical, such as the nature and constitution of objectivity, are now also questions engaged with by sciences (this does not mean that they simply become scientific questions, as when advances in physics meant that certain questions previously addressed speculatively by philosophers, such as the number of planets in the solar system, were entirely to be dealt with through empirical methods). This revolution is particularly relevant as a disturbance of genetic phenomenology; Husserl’s reductions and introspective investigations of the processes at work in the constitution of the scene of presence at least aspired



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to eventually penetrate to the pure flux, yet now entirely different methods and results that only emerge between two people in an analyst-analysand relationship would play a crucial role in that process. It is the breakthrough of the sciences that now address questions that were previously in the purely philosophical domain of philosophy that necessitates the development of a new model of philosophy capable of handling the contamination of a priori and a posteriori methods, such as deconstruction understood in terms of transdisciplinary articulation. Deconstruction is thus partly developed as an answer to the question of how philosophy and psychoanalysis (but also philosophy and linguistics, etc.) can engage with each other. While we might be legitimately concerned if Derrida’s ‘irreversible approbation’ of psychoanalysis was equivalent to an ‘unconditional love’, continuing regardless of whatever monstrosity institutional psychoanalysis might become, we have seen that the promise of that friendship consists of a reciprocal, radical questioning. It is in accordance with this aim of guiding and being guided by the future trajectory or trajectories of psychoanalysis, many of Derrida’s texts are not deconstructive readings of psychoanalysis’s theoretical texts but instead focus on institutional charters, bulletins and reports.5 In his institutionally focused texts, one of Derrida’s particular targets will be the analytic community’s cowardice with regard to addressing ethical, political and legal issues beyond the ‘analytic situation’ of two people meeting in a closed room with a couch. For example, in his reading of the ‘144th Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytic Association’ in 1981’s ‘Geopsychoanalysis “and the rest of the world”’, Derrida asks why the IPA cannot ‘take a position in the face of certain kinds of violence […] except with reference to a pre-­psychoanalytic and even a-psychoanalytic juridical discourse and even to the most vague and impoverished forms of this classical juridical discourse’ (D:Pv1, 329).6 This criticism of psychoanalytic institutions is a compliment to psychoanalysis itself – psychoanalysis ‘ought to have essential things to say – and to do’ on issues such as torture. Here, at the very least, ‘psychoanalysis ought to participate, wherever it is at work and in particular in its official representative structure, both national and international, in all the research under way on this subject. Does it do so? To my knowledge, no’ (D:Pv1, 333). Derrida claims that ‘no ethical discourse has integrated the axiomatics of psychoanalysis, likewise no political discourse’, a situation that psychoanalytic institutions have complacently allowed if not encouraged. Perhaps they have done this to avoid exposing psychoanalysis to criticism and ridicule or perhaps to maintain the detached dignity of a science, yet regardless their lack of

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engagement means that ‘paradoxically, the less integration there is between the psychoanalytic and ethico-political discourses, the easier it is for psycho­ analysis to be manipulated by political and police authorities, for psychoanalysis to be abused, and so forth.’ Against this, Derrida calls for an integration that ‘would not be a smooth appropriation; it would not happen without deform­ ation and transformation on both sides’ (D:Pv1, 330). It being impossible for psychoanalytic and ethico-political discourses to be rigorously held apart, their articulation ought to be addressed directly by those who are concerned about its future rather than being left for opportunists. It is by becoming political that psychoanalysis can protect itself against being politically manipulated as a tool or weapon. If it refuses this task: ‘if it does not analyze, does not denounce, does not struggle, does not transform (does not transform itself towards this end), will it not risk merely covering over a perverse and refined appropriation of violence’ (D:Pv1, 328). Derrida’s most direct assertions about the failure of psychoanalysis to engage with ethical and political matters come in his address to the States General of Psychoanalysis in 2000 – ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty’. Here, in one of Derrida’s last texts on psychoanalysis, Derrida states that although psychoanalysis alone does not allow us to know, think or treat cruelty – not only taking pleasure in another’s pain but also making oneself suffer for the pleasure of it (and we should note that from a psychoanalytic perspective this would be at stake in Levinasian ethical election) – ‘at least one could no longer anticipate doing so [knowing, thinking or treating it] without psychoanalysis’ (D:WA, 239). If there is an ‘irreducible thing’ in animate life that is the drive for cruelty then: no other discourse – be it theological, metaphysical, genetic, physicalist, cognitivist, and so forth – could open itself up to this hypothesis. They would all be designed to reduce it, exclude it, deprive it of sense. The only discourse that can today claim the thing of psychical suffering as its own affair would indeed be what has been called, for about a century, psychoanalysis. (D:WA, 240)

This cruelty would not only be a factor in violent acts ranging from the excesses of the Marquis de Sade and domestic abuse to ethnic genocide and state torture. The cruellest intrapsychic agency is the Super-ego – our moral conscience and the foundation of the possibility of civilization. In Freudian mythology, the Super-ego’s at times excessive cruelty corresponds to the vengeance-taking of the primal father for his cruel murder, itself a response to the cruelty of his dominion over the sons and producing a history of cruelty at the root of law, guilt and



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kindness.7 As creatures driven by the pleasure principle to satisfy our bodily needs, the fact that we can develop the capacity to take pleasure in specific forms of suffering, denial and non-satisfaction is central to breaking with what Levinas called egoism. The reality principle, although a break with the pleasure principle, offers only the drive for sovereign mastery and insurance against future risks: Levinas’s cruel bourgeois spirit. To be freed from pursuing direct satisfaction or mastery can only occur through another structure of cruelty, the death drive. This is this compulsive, repetitive drive that breaks with the economy of direct and delayed pleasure, itself in turn becoming sexualized such that its patterns – which might include asceticism and self-sacrifice – become a joy. Derrida’s interest is not in endorsing this ultimate horizon of cruelty but rather in asking if there might not be a beyond of cruelty – not merely beyond the pleasure principle but beyond the death drive. Irreducible to Freudian economy, topography or metapsychology, having ‘nothing to do with either drives or principles’, this further beyond would be an irreducible goodness – an ethical orientation that cannot be explained by the sexualization of suffering even if it works through it. Derrida suggests that whether there is such a beyond of cruelty that guides us remains undecidable; this is an a priori undecidability akin to the Levinasian trace of a trace that might always not be a trace of anything at all. Nevertheless, assuming such a thing was possible it could not be thought through today either without psychoanalysis or simply within psychoanalysis. In short, one cannot discuss justice without making essential reference to psychoanalysis. It is psychoanalysis that apparently explains everything without any need for goodness (at first some external power – family, society, religion – forces you repeatedly to give the other the bread out of your own mouth; this pressure is continued by the developing Super-ego that takes pleasure in punishing you if you fail to give; the negative feeling of hunger itself comes to be sexualized, and soon one is taking pleasure in deeds of saintly goodness through the perfect circuit of a sadistic Super-ego and a masochistic ego), and it is precisely this fact that makes it the discourse against which the ambiguous trace of a trace of goodness’s excess might show itself. This broad call for psychoanalytic discourse at the root of any account of justice lies in sharp contrast to its actual use: As I see it, psychoanalysis has not yet undertaken and thus still less succeeded in thinking, penetrating, and changing the axioms of the ethical, the juridical, and the political, notably in those seismic places where the theological phantasm of sovereignty quakes and where the most traumatic, let us say in a still confused manner the most cruel events of our day are being produced. (D:WA, 244)

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Not simply failing to produce thought on the ethical, political and juridical, but failing to use its thought to intervene in the world in a maximally effective manner, what the psychoanalytic institution itself lacks is the calling to ethical responsibility. In Levinasian terms, psychoanalysis itself is in a state of egoism dominated by the conatus to remain in existence – to survive and grow as a practice through its present institutions at all costs in a world that it sees as fundamentally hostile to it. This conatus has taught it to keep itself to itself, to ration its revolutionary impact to the face-to-face encounter between analyst and analysand in a closed room while declining to intervene in national and international dialogues on racism, cruelty and torture where it ought to have essential things to say, yet might make a fool of itself or open itself to attack. Although there were times when such a restrained attitude may have been strategically justified – such as when Freud was first establishing the discipline, training analysts and aiming to simply help patients while building up its theory – Derrida’s equally strategic assertion is that today this attitude is no longer appropriate and has developed into a culture of silence. This habitual non-intervention is not only ethically and politically questionable but may itself be placing a stranglehold on psychoanalysis’s potential to survive and grow while allowing it to be used for the most politically repugnant purposes. Derrida calls this an ‘autoimmune function’ – ‘a rejection of self, a resistance to self, to its own principality, its own principle of protection’ (D:WA, 244). In effect, psychoanalysis does not take itself seriously enough, does not believe in its own claims sufficiently, and thus its institutional bodies lack the confidence to step forward and declare on the global scene that they have something vitally important to say about ethics, politics and law. This is a rather peculiar argument to come from Derrida, whose interventions are normally associated with reigning in discourses from hubris. At the same time, even if psychoanalysis itself is driven by the bourgeois spirit to ensure its survival at all costs (a drive that has now dysfunctionally turned against its survival), the practising analyst is engaged in an activity that appears ethical in Levinas’s sense. Putting aside the fact that the couch is placed so as to avoid a face-to-face encounter, the pure relation of language in analysis has a dramatically Levinasian character. What takes place in the session is not a reciprocal relation between two speakers but one in which the analyst is dedicated to the other to the extent of being their hostage (albeit a rather well-paid hostage). Freud’s criticisms of Sandor Ferenczi’s ‘active technique’ and the dangers of breaking with the analyst’s neutrality through counter-transference show the extent to which traditional psychoanalysis demands totally abandoning the self to be for-the-other



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– the analyst’s own desires and needs are, in so far as this is possible, barred from the session. Furthermore, though psychoanalytic theory makes use of broad nosological categories (hysteria, perversion, obsession, etc.) with which it apparently labels the patient (reducing the singular other to the order of the same), to a greater extent than perhaps any other therapeutic discipline (at least in its selfimage) psychoanalysis is open to each patient’s unique symptoms having unique causes and demanding a unique cure. In Darian Leader’s words: If a patient says, ‘I’m depressed’, the analyst will not claim to know what this means or what would be best for them. On the contrary, it will be a question of unpacking what the words mean for that particular individual and exploring how their present problems have been shaped by their unconscious mental life.8

As we move ahead, it is through this underlying character of the analytic situation that we will at least glimpse how the Freudian textual field is already involved in a distinctively Levinasian notion of responsibility, remaking psychoanalysis for each patient much as one remakes mourning with each death. At the same time, there are limitations on the duties of language that psychoanalysis can recognize and respect. The analyst is committed to curing the patient, not to respecting the dead that inhabit them. To maintain itself as a therapeutic discipline that restores patients to mental health, psychoanalysis must judge melancholia to be an illness that is to be erased as quickly as possible, even if certain ethical principles already at work in psychoanalysis might question this judgement. We will see then that, in so far as psychoanalysis offers itself as a strong and consistent system (rather than just labelling a set of practices), it both depends on and represses its dependence on a recognizably Levinasian ethical intuition. Because of this, along with our earlier intuition that Levinasian ethics, if not Levinas himself, must encompass the possibility of a duty to the dead to meet its own ‘self-image’, both fields are already involved with each other – rendering their articulation more than simply ‘wilful’. As we have stated, we are not setting out to rigorously prove this mutual dependence, only to suggest that it is not an unreasonable position to hold and that Derrida’s eulogies implicitly make use of such an articulation.

Freud’s angle If we can very broadly characterize Heidegger’s ‘determinate angle’ on death in terms of the anticipation of one’s own death, and Levinas’s in terms of the anticipation of the other’s death, then Freud’s angle focuses instead on our relation to the dead.9 As such, Freud’s angle is of particular importance to us.

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Throughout this book we have referred to psychoanalysis as a mechanism or technology. Following Derrida we will characterize Freud as having offered a quasi-mechanical account of processes of inscription on the quasi-material medium of the psyche: an account of a kind of intrapsychic writing machine much as one might offer an account of the printing-press or the development of a photograph. In some of Freud’s earliest writings this is not a quasi-material inscription at all, since he began by attempting to offer a direct, if tentative, account of the functioning of actual material neurones and the tracing or ‘facilitation [Bahnung]’ (more literally ‘path‑breaking’) of networks between them. In terms of contemporary neuroscience, Freud’s picture of the psychic apparatus as a neuronal writing machine might be said to offer an early, speculative account of neuroplasticity. However, in Freud’s later works he expressly repudiates any attempt to move from an account of the psyche’s extended topography, as dealt with in psychoanalysis, to anatomic models of neuronal structures: every attempt to go on from there to discover a localization of mental processes, every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve-fibres, has miscarried completely […] Our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy; it has reference not to anatomical localities, but to regions in the mental apparatus, wherever they may be situated in the body. (F:XIV, 174–5)10

In the ‘Introductory Lectures’ this lack of reference to ‘anatomic localities’ becomes an imperative: ‘psycho-analysis must keep itself free from any hypothesis that is alien to it, whether of an anatomical, chemical or physio­ logical kind, and must operate entirely with purely psychological auxiliary ideas’ (F:XV, 21). Freud’s general although not consistently maintained refusal to be drawn on the direct correspondences between psychic topography and the brain’s anatomical topography does not mean Freud was open to there being anything more at stake than physico-mechanical processes. Unlike Jung’s, there was nothing spiritual or transcendent about Freud’s unconscious or conscious. Freud even opens his posthumously published ‘An Outline of Psycho-analysis’ (a summary of his life’s work put ‘dogmatically – in the most concise form and in the most unequivocal terms’) with a direct attestation of the psychic apparatus’s physical extension. One of psychoanalysis’s two basic assumptions, ‘the discussion of which is reserved to philosophical thought but the justification for which lies in its results’, is that we ‘assume that mental life is the function of an apparatus to which we ascribe the characteristics of being extended in space and



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of being made up of several portions.’ Without referring to specific anatomical localities, it is ‘the consistent working-out of a [spatially extended] conception such as this’ that is the major ‘scientific novelty’ offered by psychoanalysis. This means that the object of psychoanalysis and ‘scene of action’ is ‘the brain (or nervous system)’ (F:XXIII, 144–5). In focusing on the brain and inscription we are placing a particular emphasis on the material running from the account of neuronal ‘traces’ in Freud’s earliest writings to his famous essay ‘A Note Upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad”’. This trajectory was also the specific focus of Derrida’s first essay on psychoanalysis, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in which this metaphor of the psyche as a writing machine is developed: We shall let our reading be guided by this metaphoric investment. It will eventually invade the entirety of the psyche. Psychical content will be represented by a text whose essence is irreducibly graphic. The structure of the psychical apparatus will be represented by a writing machine. (D:WD, 250)

An account of this graphic machine is certainly not an account of the entirety of psychoanalysis. That we can discuss what Derrida calls ‘la métaphore psycho­ graphique’ with little direct reference to central psychoanalytic themes such as sexuality or neurosis, analytic technique or dreams, clearly shows we are not offering anything approximating a total picture of psychoanalysis. However, with regard to our basic theme of mourning and allowing ourselves to be guided by the metaphor of the psyche as a writing machine, we return to the lines from Rilke with which we began our investigation. If the dead are to exist within the depth dimensions of our inner being – the vast imaginary space that is their proffered refuge, from which they indescribably concern us and, if we ignore them, will make themselves repeatedly felt at some place – then we can conceive of their entrance into that space as an act of inscription. The imaginary space of this inscription would be the same space as Freudian topography – an entirely physical extension identified with the brain yet, for the present, not tied to any specific anatomical localities or processes. If reducing the dead to material inscriptions on a psychic medium seems to do them a disservice, we should remember that one’s own Ego is equally an inscription on this surface for Freud. For quite obvious reasons there can be no tangible experience of the other’s being dead without a psychic inscription of them – one must have a ‘memory’ of the other in order to recognize that there is no corresponding object in the world. If the other had left no trace in the psyche, then we would not be looking

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for them in the world and would not be disappointed. Freud calls this searching process ‘reality-testing’. What psychoanalysis offers is not only an account of the inscription of the other in the psyche and the reality-testing that fails when the correlate of an inscription is no longer found in the world, it also distinguishes between two very different responses to that disappointment. In terms of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, certain features of the way in which the other is inscribed in the psyche prior to their loss determine whether our response to their loss will be a ‘healthy’ mourning or an ‘unhealthy’ melancholia – normal or pathological. In the reformulation of this theory by Abraham and Torok, this becomes the healthy ‘introjection’ or unhealthy ‘incorporation’ of the lost object. In both terminologies, melancholia is fundamentally a refusal to mourn – against all evidence one maintains one’s current psychic economy and libidinal attachments. This refusal to change is anything but inactivity; the psyche has to undergo great conceptual and fantasmatic labours in order to preserve its current attachments in the face of a world that no longer contains the loved object. Throughout this chapter and the following one we will look at the psychoanalytic tradition’s account of these themes in greater detail. However, to indicate in advance the point towards which we are advancing, Derrida’s opening question to Abraham and Torok is to ask whether – taking into account an expanded Levinasian notion of doing justice to the other that includes doing justice to the dead – melancholia might not be more just than mourning. Is it not melancholia that through refusing the work of mourning allows the other to maintain their alterity? Would supposedly ‘healthy’ mourning not be a reduction of the otherness of the other to the imperialism of the same? Of course, it would be troubling if doing justice to the other demanded that – to the limited extent that we can control how we mourn – we adopt an unhealthy, pathological state. However, perhaps this is a false concern caused by the too quick application of a medical vocabulary of healthy and unhealthy judgements to loss. Without wanting to dismiss therapeutic practices that are carried out with the sincerest of intentions and have clearly helped many people coping with unbearable losses, perhaps contemporary culture has too readily embraced a medicalized conception of mourning – establishing a fixed model of normality with regard to which any deviation is pathological.11 In psychiatry, there has been much controversy over the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and its definition of ‘Complicated Grief Disorder’, applicable in cases when grief ’s common symptoms last longer than six months. This manual also removed the ‘bereavement exclusion’, which took mourning as



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a diagnostic criterion that excludes the diagnosis of depression for at least two months, thus in principle allowing the prescription of psychoactive drugs to treat symptoms that emerge immediately after a death.12 As is generally the case with Derrida’s writings on binary oppositions, the appearance of the reversal of a hierarchical valuation (considering whether melancholia might actually be better than mourning) is followed by putting in question the very border between the two. Derrida does not argue for the equi­valence of mourning and melancholia, but doubts that either can be engaged in purely. Furthermore, he sets up a negative double bind between these two poles – another Scylla and Charybdis: If to mourn and not to mourn are two forms of fidelity and two forms of infidelity, the only thing remaining – and this is where I speak of semimourning [demi-deuil] – is an experience between the two. I cannot complete my mourning for everything I lose, because I want to keep it, and at the same time, what I do best is to mourn, is to lose it, because by mourning, I keep it inside me. And it is this terrible logic of mourning that I talk about all the time, that I am concerned with all the time […] The psychoanalytic discourse, despite its subtlety and necessity, does not go into this fatality, this necessity: the double constraint of mourning. (D:Pts, 152)

What we come to through articulating psychoanalysis and Levinasian ethics is this ‘fatality’ or ‘double constraint of mourning’ that psychoanalytic discourse alone cannot think. This is what renders mourning impossible in the sense of there being no possibility of successful mourning. That Freudian discourse has avoided integration with the ethico-political means that it has remained blind to the call of responsibility for the dead, pursuing a notion of psychic health that, viewed in the light of the face of the internalized dead, can only seem narcissistic: the promotion of supposedly healthy mourning being the urge to be relieved of our debt to the dead as quickly, completely and efficiently as possible. As a further complication, clearly one cannot directly choose this ‘experience between the two’ – one does not consciously decide whether in response to a loss one will fall into mourning or melancholia, let alone what nuanced path to track between the two. In Derrida’s terms, how we mourn would be the decision of the ‘other’ – beyond our possibility or power to decide. Nevertheless, that we do not consciously choose our response does not mean we cannot cultivate our capacity to respond. Furthermore, the act of eulogy as a part of the work of mourning – one that expands far beyond the actual act of eulogy to all engagement in language with spectres – is a locus in which we do have some

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control over our mourning. As such, although it depends on the other’s decision within the self, we remain responsible for how we mourn.

Surprises from the dead Earlier we tentatively and with a troubled conscience put forward what we called a minimal Derridean account of meaning. In this account, writing technologies might allow an author who has access to certain textual bodies (languages, contexts, etc.) to transfer presently experienced meaning-effects onto a material medium as a series of in themselves meaningless marks; marks that when a reader articulates them with certain textual bodies that they can access (languages, contexts, etc.) bring about meaning-effects in their livingpresent – potentially, though never necessarily, the same meaning-effects as the author intended. This broad model translates surprisingly well to the Freudian analytic situation, where we might say that the repressed within the unconscious is a text that is not articulated with any other textual body and hence produces nothing on the scene of presence. This lack of articulation is not by chance, it is caused by a force of resistance that stops the unconscious text being articulated with other textual material since the psyche does not want the material repressed in the unconscious to come to presence as it is painful, if not unbearable. The psychoanalyst aims to sensitively offer further textual bodies (dream interpretations, etc.) that are articulated with the unconscious material in order to bring the repressed material slowly to conscious presence. In Freud’s terms, the unconscious material becomes connected with word-presentations.13 At an abstract level, ‘writing’ is what opens (without guaranteeing) the possibility that what was present and is now absent can return to presence – the repetition of meaning effects. Furthermore, it also allows the recognition of repetition: it is only through the intrapsychic writing of memory that one knows one has already read a certain poem and is now reading it a second time. Of course, since one will articulate the poem with a different range of textual bodies and the textual bodies one articulates it with will themselves change – languages themselves are always shifting, institutions are constantly in a state of becoming, any living being is always in a different mood, etc. – the meaningeffect produced in living presence is never entirely the same. In Bernard Stiegler’s example, one can never have the same experience of listening to the same song.14 Repetition is always different, a process of iteration producing new effects each time. Nevertheless, even though a piece of recorded material can always surprise us and produce new meaning-effects – a particular line



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of dialogue in Hitchcock’s Psycho might only strike us on the tenth viewing, casting the entire film in a different light – there is a distinction between this form of surprise and the surprise of encountering genuinely different material – the surprise for example of there being an entirely new scene in Psycho since one is unknowingly watching a different cut. Admitting that this opposition would be ripe for deconstructive analysis, we might nevertheless label these subjective novelty and material novelty. If the psyche can be taken as a material medium on which the experience of the other leaves inscriptions such that, when the other dies, we are left with only those inscriptions, then are those inscriptions passive or active? In Levinasian terms, does the inscription of the other have a face – can we engage in a relation of saying with it, can it respond to us, can we affect it and can it surprise us? Furthermore, if the inscription can surprise us, would such surprises be limited to a fresh take on old material – the subjective novelty of a new perspective on something the dead other once told you – or can material novelty arise – the dead producing something completely new as a response that is still from them? The metaphor of a writing machine leaving inscriptions would seem to imply the dead are limited to the passivity of subjective novelty. Since Plato’s Phaedrus (and despite the possibility of an irony at work in Socrates’ statement) writing has commonly been defined by its incapacity to respond. Written words are ‘as incapable of speaking in their own defense as they are of teaching the truth adequately’.15 If the dead are written on the psyche like words on a page, then the surprise they offer seems to be limited to the kind of surprise we have when we finally appreciate what an author meant. Nevertheless, we are dealing here with a very particular kind of inscription on a very special medium. Despite our regular use of a terminology of writing, graphic and text, we should not assume that this writing is akin to the writing on a page. It is quite clearly not the case that the others one has known are related to within the psyche simply as recordings of past times spent together – to think of them is not like entering an archive of papers or audio recordings. Indeed, even the living are thought of and interacted with on the basis of a horizon that consists as much of anticipations and counterfactuals as it does of remembrances. Certainly in dreams materially novel lines are attributed to the dead. In Freud’s famous example of the mourning father whose child comes to him and declares, ‘Father, can’t you see that I’m burning?’ (F:V, 509–10), this is not the recorded memory of a line that the child had once said to the father – it is novel material that responds to a new event in the world. Of course, one can easily deny that the line comes from

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the dead child, asserting instead that it comes from the properly closed psyche of the father himself and is merely imposed by his imagination on the child’s image. Nevertheless, in so far as the child’s words were not chosen by the father, surprise him and are not simply things that he would say, there is at least a sense in which the words come from the child as he has been recorded on the father’s psyche. As a description we might remember Nietzsche’s line ‘I am my dead father and my living mother. I am their crypt and they both speak to me’ (quoted in D:EO, 58–9). The Super-ego would be the most obvious example of an independent psychic structure that was inscribed on the psyche by the experience of others, yet that not only produces materially novel judgements but can also be engaged and argued with. Even at a very mundane level in philosophical practice one is not only envisioning what long-dead figures would say about contemporary developments or arguments, but also engaging with them and being surprised by them: as when quite involuntarily the Marx in one’s head shouts out his condemnation with all the forceful abruptness of Socrates’ daemon. It is perhaps partly with regard to these types of experience that Derrida in Specters of Marx states: ‘It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it’ (D:SM, xviii). Using the vocabulary that will emerge in the next chapter, Derrida refers to how the ‘incorporated dead, which one has not really managed to take upon oneself, continues to lodge there [in an intra-psychic crypt] like something other and to ventrilocate [sic] through the “living”’ (D:EO, 57–8). As we will see in Derrida’s eulogies, at times there may be an ethical obligation to give the dead one’s voice – to personally stand back and to allow the dead to speak through one. In Bachmann’s gloss, ghosts: might say something, through Derrida, that is absolutely foreign to him. A ‘truth’ might speak through him that – due to its radical otherness – neither he, Derrida, nor his ‘law,’ ‘Derridabase,’ can grasp. It is ‘not only our unconscious, but the unconscious of an other, that plays tricks on us, that talks in our place’.16

As with Rilke’s account of séances, in such possibilities there is no need to posit ‘external’ influences at work. We have suggested that having the dead speak a message through one that is radically foreign to oneself (that is, foreign to one’s Ego, not to one’s psyche where both self and other are lodged) is precisely the kind of possibility that psychoanalysis might allow us to think through without positing otherworldly entities; that is, assuming we can formulate a sufficiently dynamic model of intrapsychic inscription. One useful metaphor for doing this is not to think of this writing on the psyche as producing books or records but as producing localized machines.



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We might say that the psychic writing machine does not print text, but instead produces something of the order of printed circuit boards. A particular machine within the psyche would simply be a highly organized portion of the neuronal net of which we can say certain material goes in and certain other material comes out – resembling a mathematical function or ciphering device. The most fundamental of these machines would be the Ego itself – the pole of conscious identification. Another such machine would be the Super-ego, which is similarly a local structure of which certain material goes in and certain material comes out – although the processes that take place within this structure are a mystery, we can come to know it through characteristic patterns. However, what if within the larger network that is the extended psyche there are many other such local machines constantly being produced and constantly processing material? The image then is one of a graveyard of encryption machines that are also the crypts of the dead, crypts whose ghostly residents indescribably concern us and who if we ignore will repeatedly make themselves felt at some place. To move towards an account of such crypts in the following chapter, we might begin by considering the formation and functioning of the Ego.

4.2  Psychic sketches The project We have seen that Freud began his posthumously published ‘An Outline of Psycho-analysis’ with the quasi-materialist assumption of the psychic apparatus ‘being extended in space’ and ‘made up of several portions’ (F:XIII, 144–5). Freud’s last statements remain loosely faithful to the directly anatomical materialism of a text written almost 45 years earlier – his unpublished 1895 ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’. In this text, the ‘neurones are to be taken as the material particles’ while the energy that moves between them, Q, is ‘subject to the general laws of motion’ (F:I, 265).17 The highly speculative account of neuronal processes that is offered in this text has revealed itself to be peculiarly prescient. Several contemporary neuroscientists have acknowledged its similarity to recent accounts of hippocampal long-term potentiation.18 At the same time, Jean Laplanche has noted of Freud’s ‘Project’ that one ‘need barely modify or interpret it in order to see in it a kind of electronic machine, a computer functioning according to the principle of binary notation’.19 Of course, one might argue that the very fact this model can be

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seen as prescient both of contemporary neuroscience and of binary computing is evidence that one can find whatever one wants in Freud’s abstract network of concepts. More interestingly, Laplanche refers to the ‘Project’ as ‘the great Freudian text on the ego, a far more focused consideration of the question than any of Freud’s subsequent writings.’20 However, for Derrida it was Freud’s great text on memory that Freud only surpassed in the model of the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’. This text is of interest for our project not simply because we are clearly focused on memory, but because understanding the structure of the Ego and its construction in the psyche will help us to understand the structure and formation of other intrapsychic entities – not only the Super-ego but also, in the next chapter, the plural crypts of the dead. It is therefore well worth entering into the baroque formulations of Freud’s ‘Project’. In order to keep matters as simple as possible, we will centre our discussion on the neuronal diagram Freud offers in the ‘Project’. However, before offering this diagram we should stress that this neuronal model was put forward very tentatively in private correspondence with a friend – it is furthermore a work he had immediate misgivings about and later attempted to have destroyed.21 We are certainly not implying below that we believe this model of the psyche ‘works’ and even less that it should be taken as an account of how neurones are really organized in the brain. Instead, we will take it in Derrida’s terms as ‘a neurological fable’ – an implicit ‘framework and intention’ that he will perhaps ‘never abandon’ (D:WD, 251). At the same time, for all his immediate regrets, denials and attempts to destroy the work, it is worth remembering the moments of triumph that Freud felt in its composition: the barriers were suddenly raised, the veils fell away, and it was possible to see through from the details of the neuroses to the determinants of consciousness. Everything seemed to fit in together, the gears were in mesh, the thing gave one the impression that it was really a machine and would soon run of itself. The three systems of neurones, the free and bound conditions of quantity, the primary and secondary processes, the main trend and the compromise trend of the nervous system, the two biological rules of attention and defence, the indications of quality, reality and thought, the state of the psycho-sexual groups, the sexual determination of repression, and, finally, the determinants of consciousness as a perceptual function – all this fitted together and still fits together! Of course I cannot contain myself with delight. (F:I, 285)

What we see in this diagram, loosely sketched by Freud and slightly refined by Laplanche, is a tiny portion of the nervous system. We are offered a series



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of neurones: ‘discrete units, entirely distinct from each other and yet entirely identical’.22 In this sketch that identity takes the form of their common bifurcated Y shape, such that each neurone has a single entrance and two exits; however, having two exits seems to be only a minimally complex schema.23 Energy flowing into a neurone will not necessarily have sufficient force to be able to leave the neurone – the quantity of energy, ‘Q’, would thus be stored within a neurone ‘because at the boundary with the following neurones is established a kind of dike, a more or less impermeable or permeable “contact barrier”’.24 The storing up of energy occurs not only within a particular neurone but also within a demarcated structure of interconnected neurones. Such a structure would serve as the memory or psychic representative of a particular entity, or part of an entity, in the outside world. The energy (which for simplicity we will anachronistically refer to as libido) that is stuck at these dikes or circulating within a local structure, stored or economically invested in a particular memory, is referred to as a ‘cathexis’. The two major features of this model are determinism and plasticity. A quantity of energy circulating in this system travels through the neurone by a transmission that ‘is absolutely mechanical, entirely a function of what might be called a kind of natural slope of each neurone which forces the energy to flow down it’ in the form of a cascade.25 As with an electrical circuit, the path taken by Q as it flows from one neurone to another will be the path of the least resistance. This resistance is in turn decided by two factors. First, the energy most easily flows down paths that have had energy flow down them in the past. In Freud’s terms, the flow of energy is a ‘Bahnung’ – a ‘breaching’ or ‘pathbreaking’ – such that a particular path is ‘facilitated’ by the flow so as to flow along it more easily in the future. Secondly, the resistance at the contact-barrier between two neurones is reduced if the neurone towards which the energy is flowing is already cathected with energy.26

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On the basis of these two simple principles, a complex ‘writing machine’ is produced in which the individual ‘letters’ of the code are the differentials of resistance between facilitated pathways in a neurone or neuronal structure. As in Deleuze’s account of force in Nietzsche: ‘Quantity itself is therefore inseparable from difference in quantity.’27 What is relevant to the energy flow is not that Path A has a resistance of X, but rather the difference of resistance between two exits (Path A and Path B) from a single neurone. This inscribed differential only shows itself when energy is flowing through the neurone by the effects that are then produced. At the same time, the effects produced – how much of the energy flows along any particular pathway – further facilitates the pathways as another act of inscription. In effect we cannot separate the moments of reading and writing – what is already written only exists in so far as further energy is flowing and writing. It is unsurprising that this notion of a writing that works through leaving a mark of its passing through the psyche can be referred to as a trace [Spur]. If memory is nothing other than ‘a capacity for being permanently altered by single occurrences’ (F:I, 299), the larger network of neurones with its particular mode of differential inscription can be referred to as a mnemic system – one with ‘a remarkable characteristic: nothing qualitative is directly inscribed in it.’28 To us this is perhaps less remarkable – after all, nothing qualitative is directly inscribed in a computer’s memory. Any complex ‘memory image’ within this psychic apparatus will consist then of a constellation of connected neurones and their differentially graded facilitations: ‘The origin of memory, and of the psyche as (conscious or unconscious) memory in general, can be described only by taking into account the difference between breaches. Freud says so overtly. There is no breach without difference and no difference without trace’ (D:MP, 18). This concept of the psyche as a vast mnemic system should be understood as far more than simply a storehouse of objects. Since every structure within the psyche is produced by the tracing of energy flowing through an originally undifferentiated psychic medium and every action carried out by a living creature is produced by the diversions of this energy caused by the ‘knowledge’ accumulated through the paths of previous traces, there is nothing other than memory in the psyche: ‘Memory, thus, is not a psychical property among others; it is the very essence of the psyche: resistance, and precisely, thereby, an opening to the effraction of the trace’ (D:WD, 252). A sudden increase of energy in a region of the system causes a tension that will be called ‘unpleasure’, ‘pleasure’ being understood more awkwardly as either



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the absence of tension or the experience of its release. While the basic tendency of any particular neurone is simply towards ‘a complete discharge, to inertia, to a zero level’,29 when many neurones are networked together the same tendency of discharge will lead towards a state of maximum entropy – not exactly pleasure but a state without unpleasure equivalent to death, hence Freud’s many claims that psyche is oriented towards death. This ‘principle of neuronic inertia’ in so far as the basic tendency of cascading discharge seeks an even distribution of energy will be called the ‘pleasure principle’ – although in his early works Freud more properly calls it the ‘unpleasure principle’. However, this basic aim of entropy verging on death is constantly frustrated by the fact that the psychic apparatus is attached to an outside and has two sources of stimulation – external reality and the body itself. Returning to Freud’s sketch, a quantity of excitation enters neurone a from another neurone outside of the diagram. The original source of this excitation might be traced to the external world (as ‘when a strong light falls on the eye’) or it might have an internal somatic source (as when ‘an irritation of the mucous membrane of the stomach makes itself felt’ in hunger (F:XIV, 118)). We can see that the excitation could take one of two paths, either passing through the broader psyche to neurone b or entering the dense and complex nest of neurones distinguished in the diagram as the Ego. What we have between a and b is ‘a neuronic path […] along which the flow occurs freely, according to the primary process [or pleasure principle]’; however, this path is disrupted by a ‘lateral cathexis’ with ‘a circumscribed network in which a certain energy stagnates’.30 This stagnating energy of an original investment in the Ego diverts the excitation in a, regulating how much energy is passed to b: ‘if it were uninfluenced, it would pass to neurone b; but it is so much influenced by the side-cathexis a-α that it gives off only a quotient to b and may even perhaps not reach b at all. Therefore, if an ego exists, it must inhibit psychical primary processes’ (F:I, 323–4). Of course, in a sense there is still only primary process – the energy flow has simply followed the path of least resistance, which happens to be to a rather than b. To understand why Freud calls this an inhibition we must appreciate that flow b was leading directly along a highly facilitated path towards an idea that has previously given satisfaction for the type of stimulus that enters through a. For example, if this is a path leading from the stomach and the stimulus is ‘an irritation of the mucous membrane of the stomach’, then following path b would lead directly to the mental representative of a desired food. The triggering of this mental representative is equivalent to an act of hallucination that offers a kind of

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satisfaction of the hunger – one finds oneself, without any conscious decision, thinking about pizza. Although this hallucination is somewhat satisfying, since the actual bodily stomach is not receiving any food, the stimulus will continue to flow and increase in pressure.31 Since hallucination is not adequate for the living being’s survival, it is necessary for the stimulation to be diverted towards the complex structure of the Ego in which, through a coordination of perceptual and muscular movements, the body can procure for itself a satisfaction in reality that genuinely stops the flow of unpleasant energy. This diversion and coordination is referred to as the reality principle since it orients the body towards negotiating with reality for substantive satisfactions. Freud discovered that the interconnection and flows of energy at stake in the pure pleasure principle of the hallucinatory primary processes are not logical – in a dream one can simultaneously have one’s cake and eat it – but the reality principle functions through secondary processes that in their need to coordinate perception and action with existence must obey logic. This reality principle is also notable for always involving the delay of a promised satisfaction – while one could immediately enjoy the hallucination of a pizza, the reality principle promises satisfaction if we go into the kitchen and put one in the oven.32 Once again, at a strictly neuronal level what is taking place is precisely the same as in the primary process and is only primary process – energy is cascading through the system in accordance with the same rules as if the energy flowed to b. Nothing happens except the pleasure principle of neuronal discharge along the path of least resistance. However, since stimulus entering the dense and complex neuronal connections of the Ego produces quite different behaviour – action in the world, logical thought, delayed gratification – we can distinguish the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the primary processes and the secondary processes. With an Ego structure, because of its complexity and location, we are no longer simply a slave of immediate stimulus and we are no longer limited to hallucinatory satisfaction, even if we are now condemned to labour and delay. In all of this what is at stake are constellations of memory. All of the paths and resistance differentials are nothing other than a form of memory, writing or tracing – these terms do not immediately imply direct ideational correlates even though such ideational correlates are nothing more than complex structures of such differences. The Ego’s process of inhibiting certain energy flows can be re-described in terms of it introducing ‘into the circulation of fantasy a certain ballast, a process of binding which retains a certain energy […] preventing it from circulating in an absolutely free and mad manner. Such is



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the appearance of the secondary process.’33 Yet once again at the level of the neuronal mechanism there is only actually the discharge of primary process, this is why Derrida writes that: ‘every apparently rigorous and irreducible opposition (for example the opposition of the secondary to the primary) comes to be qualified, at one moment or another, as a “theoretical fiction”’ (D:MP, 18). The Ego then is just a dense, complex and highly charged structure of neuronal connections within a more dispersed sea of neuronal connections. It is formed by exactly the same processes of facilitation as take place between other neurones, and functions through precisely the same basic processes (or rather process). It is a net within a net that accumulates across infantile development like a puddle becoming a reservoir. Taking into account Freud’s surreptitious anatomical localization, within the originally undifferentiated neuronal structure a certain peripheral location comes to be highly stimulated due to its close proximity to the source of sensory stimulation – particularly the optic nerve – and it is simply due to this especially complex barrage of stimulation coming from this source that a patch of the network develops into the Ego: Under the influence of the real external world around us, one portion of the id has undergone a special development. From what was originally a cortical layer, equipped with the organs for receiving stimuli and with arrangements for acting as a protective shield against stimuli, a special organization has arisen which henceforward acts as an intermediary between the id and the external world. To this region of our mind we have given the name of ego. (F:XXIII, 145)

This dense structure is characterized by the easy circulation of energy between its neurones (since the process of facilitation has taken place so regularly here) and the high density of energy within it (energy inside this system will tend to remain there rather than crossing outside to regions that are far less facilitated). Although the core of this reservoir will come to be undifferentiated, the periphery will become highly differentiated from the rest of the system: inside the system of the ego, communications are good, whereas on the contrary, at its periphery, there exist barriers restricting exchanges: thus the ego appears as a kind of reservoir within which functions the principle of intercommunicating pipes, allowing the energy to be distributed at an equal level, whereas, in relation to the outside, a difference of level is maintained. [… T]his model of a form set off against a background evokes the relation of an organism to its surroundings, an organism which is defined by a limit circumscribing a region in which a certain energy circulates at a constant average level, an energy

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level higher than that of the external world in relation to which it is set off and against which it maintains itself.34

Thus, in proximity to the perception-consciousness system, entirely deterministic processes of discharge produce an area of such complexity and high energy that, with regard to the rest of the psyche, it is as if it were an independent organism set-off from its surroundings (all of this is roughly analogous to Derrida’s account of a particular textual construction forming on the ‘general text’, hence Derrida’s claim that Freud almost theorized différance). We can see from this model that the Ego has mobile borders that are capable of expanding or contracting. That is to say, any complex of neurones outside of the Ego (a memory‑image corresponding to some particular person, place or idea) can come to be brought inside the Ego. However, one does not necessarily absorb every loved object into the Ego in accordance with this model. In Freud’s later theory there is a distinction between identification and objectcathexis – in the former (particularly characteristic of the infantile, oral stage), what is loved is always taken into the Ego and thus identified with; in the latter, the relation is akin to an amoeba putting out its pseudopodia (as in the famous image of ‘On Narcissism’ (F:XIV, 75)). There is no rigid distinction here, yet one can intuitively see (since a path can never be un-breached) how energies cathected through such ‘adult’ pseudopodic object-cathexes would be more easily withdrawn or ‘cut‑off ’ from energy flow than when, through identification, a constellation has become part of the highly energetically charged Ego. In attachment then, a particular constellation of neurones – the memoryimage of a certain person or thing – has been cathected or invested with a quantity of energy. As such it will attract further energy flowing into the system, particularly from the sexual organs, through the reduced resistance at its external neurones’ contact‑barriers. The psyche has effectively ‘learnt’ through past iterations of experience that by directing stimulus to this particular memory-image (perhaps one’s regular sexual partner) in coordination with stimulating the Ego in various ways to action, one’s urges are generally satisfied by the corresponding real-world object, and unpleasant tension building in the system is regularly relieved and kept to a minimum. As long as encounters with the object corresponding to the memory-image continue to relieve the body’s needs and give respite from the pressure of bodily stimulus, the neuronal pathways leading from the sexual organs to the corresponding memory-image will become further and further facilitated. The body has learnt through the trace of writing a pattern or method for controlling the regular build-up of unpleasant



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stimulus originating from inside the body, yet at the cost of developing a kind of addiction to an object in the world that satisfies the body. In every bodily cycle, tension from the organs flowing to the memory‑image prompts the body to make use of its sensory organs and muscles to find the object in the world corresponding to the image that will relieve the body’s tension. The question of mourning then is what happens when the sensory organs in their reality-testing no longer discover the corresponding object in the world? The inscriptions on the psyche have recorded through past patterns of flow that there is a thing in the world that relieves painful tension. There is no way in which these inscriptions might be directly erased since particular energy flows can only further facilitate pathways rather than inhibit them – through its behaviour and particular mode of writing or learning, the psyche has no concept of death or loss. Thus, irrespective of the Ego’s conscious knowledge that the loved object is gone forever, the bodily stimulus continues to flow directly into the desired memory‑image in anticipation of relief. The Ego will have to engage in a long-term project of setting-up substitute memory-images of object that offer relief such that new paths become facilitated alongside the old ones, yet leading the energy to different structures. Food again offers an intuitive model here: if we imagine someone who loved sweet foods but due to medical reasons is no longer allowed them, it might take years of attempting to learn new habits and new associations before the hunger stimulus does not immediately produce the almost overwhelming thought of cake. Although there is much more to mourning a loved one than this, mourning involves a similar task of teaching the psyche that the loved one is not there in bed next to one through substitutive satisfactions that are quite independent of the conscious knowledge that they are gone. Although Freud soon abandoned referring to the elements of his extended psyche as neurones, as we move ahead we will continue to make use of this vocabulary. Of course, the word should certainly not be taken to refer to the actual neurones of neuroscience. Rather, we continue to use this word simply because the framework of the ‘Project’ (with its memory-images encoded through complex constellations marked by written or traced differences of resistance between their connections) constitutes a powerful vocabulary for stressing the material status of the networked structures in the extended psyche that are traces formed through tracing.

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Inside/outside Turning to Freud’s ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, one of the consequences of Freud’s strictly quantitative model of excitation in the psyche is the puzzle that a newly born creature can come to distinguish between the internal and the external. How would the Ego know whether a stimulus that reaches it originates in the externally oriented sensory organs or in the needs of the body? Let us imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless living organism, as yet unoriented in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance. This organism will very soon be in a position to make a first distinction and a first orientation. On the one hand, it will be aware of stimuli which can be avoided by muscular action (flight); these it ascribes to an external world. On the other hand, it will also be aware of stimuli against which such action has no avail […] the signs of an internal world. […] The perceptual substance of a living organism will thus have found in the efficacy of its muscular activity a basis for distinguishing between an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’. (F:XIV, 119)

It is not that this newly born creature already has an implicit notion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that it would be trying to discover a suitable method for aligning with its actual situation. Rather, at a neuronal level the system simply observes by trial and error that there are unpleasant stimuli that can be silenced through a certain impulse being sent to the muscles (further facilitating that path and meaning that the baby will similarly respond to such a stimulus to avoid it in the future) and unpleasant stimuli that cannot. It is only the infant’s existential situation that means the former correlates with external stimuli and the latter with internal stimuli. The slightly paradoxical basis of this structure is that it is the internal that we do not control – the baby can move away from fire, but it cannot yet do anything directly with regard to hunger. Freud refers to the stage of life in which this original establishment of the internal and the external takes place in accordance with stimuli’s response to the ‘sound objective criterion’ of the muscular capacity to avoid them ‘the original “reality-ego”’ – the child is literally forming the notion of a reality opposed to it. In the next stage of its development this changes into ‘a purified “pleasureego”’ (F:XIV, 136). In this new development the infant makes use of the newly established border between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ in order to introject into the internal world everything that it finds to be pleasurable and to project onto the external world that which it finds to be unpleasurable:



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the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical. If later on an object turns out to be a source of pleasure, it is loved, but it is also incorporated into the ego; so that for the purified pleasure-ego once again objects coincide with what is extraneous and hated. (F:XIV, 136)35

The motivation for this distribution is that the basic characteristic of the internal was that it could not be avoided while the characteristic of its external world was that it was easily avoided; twisting these definitions around, the pleasureego installs the objects that cause it satisfaction in the internal world where they cannot be lost while placing those objects that cause it upset in the external world where, in theory, they can be easily avoided. This stage of the pleasure-ego would be highly unstable since, in reality, the introjected objects are not really internal at all (they can be lost, fail to appear, etc.) nor the hated projections really external (they might be unavoidable, at least by simple muscular action). As such, the pressure of reality itself would rapidly lead to the complete collapse of this stage if the child was not tended to. However, assuming the child is attentively looked after by a mother-figure, they can remain in the stage of the pleasure-ego for some time – as Strachey puts it: ‘parental care of the helpless infant satisfies this second set of instincts, artificially prolongs the primary state of narcissism, and so helps to make the establishment of the “pleasure-ego” possible’ (Strachey in F:XIV, 134–5n. 2). As Freud writes in ‘Negation’, the original oral form of judgement associated with this stage can be reduced to ‘“I should like to eat this”, or “I should like to spit it out”; and, put more generally: “I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.” […] the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject form itself everything that is bad’ (F:XIX, 237). Thus, the child whose world is characterized by the active organization of the ‘pleasure-ego’ in the ‘oral phase’ believes that what we might call, following Klein, ‘the good‑breast’ is a part of themselves – something they effectively carry with them and that cannot be lost. Assuming the attentive mother gives the breast whenever it is desired, the child appears (as far as the flows in the psychic system’s learning or material memory is concerned) to be correct. Of course, there will inevitably come a day when the mother fails to respond to this request and the child begins to realize, through ‘reality-testing’, that the loved object is not there to relieve the growing unpleasure and the good-breast should be decathected – a first experience of mourning. Once the child has been exposed sufficiently to the notion that loved objects are not actually at the immediate beck and call of desire, they move to the stage of the ‘definitive reality-ego’. The concern is no longer simply governed by the pleasure principle but by the reality principle:

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In this stage of development regard for the pleasure principle has been set aside. Experience has shown the subject that it is not only important whether a thing (an object of satisfaction for him) possesses the ‘good’ attribute and so deserves to be taken into the ego, but also whether it is there in the external world, so that he can get hold of it whenever he needs it. (F:XIX, 237)

The Freudian trace With reference to Freud and Nietzsche, we have seen Derrida state in ‘Différance’ that the word ‘Différance appears almost by name in their texts, and in those places where everything is at stake’ (D:MP, 17). These would be those places where not only particular present meanings, but also the scene of presence itself is seen as an effect of a system of differences. In these places the thinkers at least partially break with the dominant form of the metaphysics of presence, even if in doing so they cannot simply avoid falling back into metaphysics. In Nietzsche, who himself stated that ‘the great principal activity is unconscious’, it will be a matter of an underlying field of forces where ‘consciousness is the effect of forces whose essence, byways, and modalities are not proper to it. Force itself is never present; it is only a play of differences and quantities’ (D:MP, 17). As in Freud’s ‘Project’, the underlying productive ground of constructs such as ‘the self ’ or ‘Ego’ would be an immanent field of flowing and interacting pure quantities without quality, meaning or the possibility of presence that produce through their unending flux the qualitative richness of experience. If Freud’s account is a ‘neurological fable’, then Nietzsche’s account of ‘the “active,” moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces’ is no less fabulous – as indeed is Derrida’s graphic (D:MP, 18). These forces can never be made present – they cannot be verified or examined, their behaviour cannot be studied, they have never been brought to light by an ‘investigation’ in any traditional sense of the term. Since the term différance plays on the ‘two apparently different values’ of differing and deferring – spacing and temporization – the moments in Freud that come closest to naming différance are those when the quasi-mechanical account of the processes that produce structures of differential inscriptions on the resistant field of the psyche encounter Freud’s complex account of temporality: ‘The two apparently different values of différance are tied together in Freudian theory: to differ as discernibility, distinction, separation, diastem, spacing; and to defer as detour, relay, reserve, temporization’ (D:MP, 18).



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As we have seen, in the ‘Project’ delay is caused by the inhibition of energy flows travelling through a chain of neurones in the psyche by a neurone’s lateral connection with the Ego – itself only a particularly dense, complex and highly cathected constellation of neurones within the broader psyche. However, with 1920’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle something other than the ‘theoretical fiction’ of a distinction between the primary and secondary processes enters Freudian theory. What the late Freud has picked up on is what Derrida will call ‘the point of greatest obscurity […] the very enigma of différance […] that which divides its very concept by means of a strange cleavage’. This cleavage would be between two types of detour or delay in Freud – first, the familiar economic detour of the reality principle that defers pleasure out of its calculation that greater pleasures will be offered through labour; secondly, the aneconomic detour of the death drive ‘as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible loss of energy […] as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy’ (D:MP, 19). As we indicated near the beginning of the chapter, if the economic detour of deferring pleasure seems to be an example of Levinas’s bourgeois spirit or conatus, then the aneconomic detour as a ‘relation to an impossible presence’ that ‘interrupts every economy’ resembles the breaking with Being and conatus that is Levinasian ethics. We have stated that for Derrida it is unknowable whether there is a beyond of the death drive – the good beyond Being or undeconstructable justice – orienting its sexualization of personal suffering to render it evidence of something more than the somewhat perverse sexualization of personal suffering. Put in terms of Derrida’s negative conditionals, we can only say that ‘goodness, if there is such a thing, would involve taking pleasure in something that is neither satisfaction nor the calculated delay of satisfaction’; never that ‘when there is taking pleasure in something that is not a satisfaction or the calculated delay of satisfaction, this is an example of goodness’. If what is psychically at stake in the being-for-another of Levinasian ethics that gives the food out of one’s own mouth is only the perverse sexualization of personal suffering (the circuit of the sadistic pleasure of the punishing Super-ego and the masochistic pleasure of the suffering Ego) then there is actually nothing more at work in the death drive than the pleasure principle and the distinction between them would only be another ‘theoretical fiction’ like its distinction from the reality principle. Once again this structure is highly Kantian – we can judge the categorical imperative has been obeyed, but never know that it was obeyed for non-pathological reasons. The possibility that there is no goodness in our world cannot be denied and no particular evidence of good deeds would count against it.

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What Derrida calls ‘the very enigma of différance’ is that we cannot rigorously distinguish between the purely economic or aneconomic movements within the différance that the Ego causes by diverting, deferring and sublimating energy: Contrary to the metaphysical, dialectical, ‘Hegelian’ interpretation of the economic movement of différance, we must conceive of a play in which whoever loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn. If the displaced presentation remains definitively and implacably postponed, it is not that a certain present remains absent or hidden. Rather, différance maintains our relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue, and which exceeds the alternative of presence and absence. A certain alterity – to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of the unconscious [… which is not] a hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence. (D:MP, 20)

This unconscious that is ‘woven of differences’ and that we can only be aware of through it apparently (though we can never be certain of this) sending ‘out delegates, representatives, proxies’ can itself never become present – it does not ‘exist’ in a phenomenological sense. In metaphysical terms we might say that it is the underlying active structure that produces meaning-effect along with the very presence in which meaning-effects occur, the successor of the neuronal model in the ‘Project’ and the precursor of Derrida’s ‘general text’. However, this very claim that the unconscious ‘is the underlying, active structure’ would present a false picture of it as a ‘hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence’. The unconscious, like the ‘general text’, is completely beyond the order of presentation or representation. Everything we have been presenting earlier in this section – neurones, facilitations, energy flows, etc. – would be a representation of the unrepresentable – a ‘neurological fable’ that ‘necessarily misconstrues’ it. Referring to the unconscious in terms of an irreducibility of delay leads Derrida to the formulation that: ‘The alterity of the “unconscious” makes us concerned not with horizons or modified – past or future – presents, but with a “past” that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a reproduction in the form of presence’ (D:MP, 21). The unconscious thus comes to be referred to in the temporal mode of the Levinasian trace – the immemorial past that in so far as we even imagine it as a past is reduced to the temporal constitution that it is the exception to. On the one hand, Levinas himself would clearly have opposed any account that found the immemorial past beyond the transcendental constitution of temporal existence anywhere other than in the responsive relation of language



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to a mortal other – particularly as it might be taken to open the possibility that we can escape beyond Being without ethics through the ‘radical alterity’ of the unconscious. In Derrida’s texts on the other hand, this move at first seems only to open up conceptual confusions: it will be impossible to know whether any reference to the ‘radical alterity’ of ‘a past that has never been present’ is a reference to Levinas or Freud, whether any reference to the ‘wholly other’ is to the wholly other of a mortal human or the wholly other of the unconscious. In the next chapter we will argue that there are very good reasons for this apparent conceptual confusion that relate to the ‘trace’ structure and the Kantian necessity of not knowing which other is at stake. It is this that will allow us to reconsider the relation between the other and the unconscious and with it the living mortal other and the interiorized dead other. However, before we turn to this, let us quickly consider the abstract schema of the Freudian trace through the slogan: ‘Every trace is the trace of a trace.’ Thus far in this chapter we have generally been using the word ‘trace’ in the context of the writing on the resistant material medium of the psyche caused by the flow of energy that leaves a traced path of reduced resistance. However, we have referred to this as a metaphysical fable – an image that is perhaps necessary as a framework for engaging with the unconscious, yet one that leads us to misconstrue it by rendering the unconscious something presentable – at least in our imagination and in diagrams, when it is actually the ground of presence and hence unpresentable: ‘In order to describe traces, in order to read the traces of “unconscious” traces (there are no “conscious” traces), the language of presence and absence, the metaphysical discourse of phenomenology, is inadequate’ (D:MP, 21). Despite Derrida’s claim that there are no ‘conscious’ traces – which remains valid in terms of the use of trace that is at stake in this passage – there is another use of ‘trace’ that is relevant in psychoanalytic practice and that is presented on the scene of presence. This would be the use of ‘trace’ that is roughly analogous to ‘evidence’. The patient offers the analyst a flow of speech; within this flow the analyst looks for traces that would indicate in themselves inaccessible unconscious processes. Indeed, the entire model of the psyche as a writing machine – its flows of energy and paths of least resistance along with the particular structures these flows demarcate within it such as the Ego – at least ‘ought’ to have been discovered and elaborated on the basis of such clinical material (whether it actually was or could be, or whether Freud engaged in speculation, would be a further question).

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We might say then that an analyst is listening in speech for the temporal tracea (perhaps a slip of the tongue, a hesitation before saying someone’s name, etc.) that would point towards an inaccessible spatial traceb (perhaps a blockage of the flow of energy causing unpleasure in a particular topologically defined portion of the psyche). At the same time, it is always possible for tracea to be misinterpreted – either due to a mistaken interpretation of the actual dynamic at work at the level of traceb or simply because tracea was actually not the trace of anything at all – a cigar was just a cigar. What we can discover through imposing this schema is a major similarity, an apparent difference and a major dissimilarity between the Levinasian and the Freudian trace. The major similarity is that in both cases we experience on the scene of presence material that we take to be a disturbance of the regular order of things, even if we can never be theoretically certain there actually is a disturbance. At the very least, in both cases there is nothing stopping us from taking this encountered tracea as a sign of traceb – the response of the other as the evidence of the beyond Being, the slip of the tongue as evidence of a libidinal blockage – though more strictly it is never even an indirect revelation of the beyond – traceb is not of the other but of their withdrawing, the representable libidinal blockage is not the unconscious but a fable. The apparent difference is that in Levinas, despite never knowing whether the rupture of our anticipation in a given response was genuinely a sign of the unanticipatable wholly other or merely that I had made a poor judgement about an ultimately predictable part of what is truly ‘my own’ temporal constitution (solipsism is theoretically possible), I am always pledged to the wholly other in lived experience (nobody is a solipsist in their behaviour). With Freud things are more difficult as we seem to have no lived orientation towards agreeing with him; indeed, Freud himself stated that everything about our lives would incline us to reject psychoanalysis. That we can never be certain of traceb would lead many to wield Occam’s razor and assume that the supposedly peculiar material we have encountered is not a trace of anything at all (slips of the tongue just happen, dreams are nonsense, etc.), rather than quasi-mythologically constructing the baroque realm of the unconscious. We must surely admit that no tracea alone could ever provide evidence for the complex unconscious realm of psychic writing that is traceb. Instead it seems to convince the doubting party we would need a library of tracesa (hundreds of dreams and slips of the tongue) along with evidence of how the assumption of tracesb on the basis of them has led to significant changes in a range of patients; only across such an accumulated weight of evidence might we convince people of the unconscious.



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If we have only called this an apparent difference, it is because one could equally argue that, on the contrary, in our actually lived behaviour we give strong evidence of believing in the internalized dead. To whatever extent someone theoretically believes that the dead are simply dead and gone, one could attempt to show that in their lived activity (particular when they engage in eulogy) they are actively engaging in language with their internalized dead. Although we make no attempt to prove this here, it would certainly be possible to argue that ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’ is equivalent to ‘I am a solipsist’. The major dissimilarity between the graphics of the trace outlined over the last two chapters is that, in our loosely applied distinction between spatial and temporal traces, we have the reverse structure. In Levinas we had a spatial tracea (the face encountered somewhere in the world) that pointed towards a temporal traceb (the immemorial past of the other); in Freud we have a temporal tracea (the disturbance in the flow of a patient’s speech) that points towards a spatial traceb (the inscriptions on the psychic medium). Although this schema remains our own invention and we accept that it is open to being queried in many ways, we will argue that what is at stake in Derrida’s use of the mark ‘trace’ in his eulogies and works on mourning is precisely a bringing into contact of Levinas’s temporal traceb and Freud’s spatial traceb. The most rigorously formulated model that allows for this possibility comes in Abraham and Torok’s account of failed mourning producing an intrapsychic crypt. It is therefore specifically to the psychoanalytic account of mourning that we now turn.

5

Mourning or Melancholia

5.1  Psychoanalysis and mourning Was heißt Trauer? One way to begin addressing the question of what mourning is and how it functions is through asking what calls for mourning. Although the direct discussion of mourning makes up only a tiny fraction of Freud’s textual archive, one could argue that the dominant subject matter of psychoanalysis is nothing other than how we cope with a sequence of losses. At a highly schematic level, every major change undergone in the passage from the womb to the final resolution of the Oedipus complex is centred on a loss that, within the course of ‘healthy’ development, leads towards independence. To adopt the vocabulary of the Hungarian analyst Imre Hermann, at birth there are not yet two independent beings but instead the ‘dual-relation’ of a ‘mother-child unity’. For Hermann, it is not only a psychological but an ontological truth that the distinct existence of two human persons (mother and child) does not occur simultaneously with the biological markers of the egg’s fertilization or its implantation in the uterus, nor the baby’s emergence from the womb or the cutting of the umbilical cord; rather, it will only be across a long and traumatic process of ‘de-clinging’ that two separate entities come to be. This imagery of clinging points to the theory’s roots in the study of mother–child dynamics among other great apes. Following Hermann, Derrida writes in close connection with mourning about ‘the theory of cramponnement, the clinging instinct, and a traumatic archi-event of dé‑cramponnement, de‑clinging, which constructs the human topical structure’ (D:Pts, 6). We can already see then how a certain traumatic letting-go of a loved one plays a productive role at the very opening of our existence. That said, even if the series of processes involved in crossing what Tolstoy referred to as the ‘appalling distance’1 from birth to the age of five (according to Freud the age that roughly corresponds in ‘healthy’ development to the

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closure of the phallic stage and progression to latency) can be modelled as losses (notwithstanding the fact that many of them involve concomitant substitutive gains), this does not mean that the losses are structurally analogous to each other. The loss of the mother’s breast in weaning is not the same as the loss of polymorphous perversity; the absence of the parental gaze that produces the independent Super-ego is not the same as the loss of the oceanic feeling that comes with the establishment of the external world. Alongside these universal developmental losses that mark the human condition as we are torn from the womb and then torn from the breast, there are of course the specific personal losses that mark an individual’s early childhood. For example, the long sequence of losses experienced by the Wolf Man, from the firing of his English governess and his parents’ long absences to, in later life, his sister’s and father’s suicides. We might ask then which of these many types of loss – and many others could be added to the list – constitutes grounds for ‘mourning’? It would be tempting to reserve the word for cases in which a loved one has actually died, such as the Wolf Man’s sister’s suicide; however, it is clear that Freud himself allows the term a far wider remit. First, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ he allows for losses where the mourned object is not dead but simply absent, giving the example of ‘a betrothed girl who has been jilted’; secondly, he allows that the mourned object is not necessarily a person, it may be ‘some abstraction […] one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (F:XIV, 245, 243). In ‘On Transience’, a short mid-war reflection on Freud’s pre-war walk with Rilke and Lou Andreas‑Salomé, what is mourned is a whole world and its Weltanschauung – from the beauty of the countryside and destroyed works of art to the pride of a civilization and the impartiality of science (F:XIV, 307). Freud explicitly stated that the motivation for turning to ‘the normal affect of mourning’ in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ is to throw ‘some light on the nature of melancholia’ (F:XIV, 243). Mourning is thus introduced by Freud as something apparently familiar, widely experienced and readily comprehensible. It, in turn, will allow us to understand a mysterious pathological disorder that most of us will fortunately never directly experience (just as most of us will never directly experience hysteria or psychosis, even if in dreams and occasionally in life we all experience hysterical and perhaps even psychotic episodes). While in later texts Freud will discover melancholic structures at the heart of normal development, such structures always remain distinct for him from the clinical condition of melancholia that we would today label depression. Turning to mourning to understand melancholia is justified through the same gesture then as Freud’s first turn to dreams, which have ‘served us as the prototype in



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normal life of narcissistic mental disorders’ (F:XX, 131). Nevertheless, Freud’s actual text becomes increasingly enigmatic about the supposedly familiar process of healthy mourning. First we are told that it is ‘really only because we know so well how to explain it [mourning] that this attitude does not seem to us pathological’. Two paragraphs later, Freud admits it is actually ‘not at all easy to explain’ why healthy mourning is not immediate and without pain: ‘It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us’ (F:XIV, 244–5).2 Of course, if it were immediate and without pain there would be no identifiable process of mourning at all, so Freud’s statement is equivalent to finding the entire state of mourning remarkable and not at all easy to explain. The dawning sense across the essay that healthy mourning is as unfathomable as melancholia puts in question the underlying methodology for raising it in the first place. Nevertheless, what remains true is that, for Freud, mourning is an experience we all endure and should accept while pathological melancholia is rare and calls for medical assistance. While it is quite correct to refer to Freud’s ‘melancholia’ as failed or unhealthy mourning, it should be stressed that this is a discovery that is achieved in the essay rather than how the term is introduced. Freud is attempting to address clinical depression, which frequently appears to have no connection with loss. Melancholia is therefore not raised in connection with mourning because of the prior assumption of a similar cause, but rather because of their similar symptoms: ‘painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity’ (F:XIV, 243–4). In the case of mourning, even if Freud admits that some of these symptoms are difficult to explain, he is at least confident about what is occurring at a metapsychological level: the psyche in response to reality testing is withdrawing libidinal cathexis from certain memory-images and re-cathecting that energy elsewhere (a substitute object or the Ego). This re-cathecting is equally a matter of producing new and wider pathways for energy flow, such that fresh demands entering the psychic system from the bodily organs will stop calling for objects that no longer exist in reality and can no longer satisfy us. As Tammy Clewell writes, the work of mourning takes place: With a very specific task to perform, the Freudian grief work seeks, then, to convert loving remembrances into a futureless memory. Mourning comes to a decisive and ‘spontaneous end’, according to Freud, when the survivor has detached his or her emotional tie to the lost object and reattached the free libido to a new object, thus accepting consolation in the form of a substitute for what has been lost.3

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Clewell’s term ‘a futureless memory’ gets to the crux of the matter. At the end of mourning one no longer expects any satisfaction in the future from the remembered object. As has been commonly pointed out, there is ‘something self-serving about his description of mourning as a process of detachment and consoling substitution’, even if Freud might have moved away from this apparently rather narcissistic account of object-love and object-loss in later works.4 An unpalatable implication of this account of mourning would be that it appears the best mourning is amnesia. At the very least, the most ‘healthy’ mourning is the complete, quick and painless withdrawal of an investment that we no longer expect any return on. For Freud, there is something bluntly irrational about the brain and nervous system guiding the body to seek satisfaction from something or someone that no longer exists in the world to satisfy it, and this irrationalism must be overcome. Although ‘being unpalatable’ is a regular characteristic of psychoanalytic revelations – from hidden incestuous desires to the sexual dynamics behind mankind’s highest achievements – here the psychoanalyst is not simply revealing an unpalatable truth but actively trying to bring it about. What becomes questionable through mourning is the very definition of ‘mental health’ and ‘flourishing’ that guides therapeutic practice. This was a challenge that was posed to Freud even during his lifetime. Ludwig Binswanger exchanged several letters with Freud on mourning in which Freud seemed to admit that at least some aspects of supposedly ‘unhealthy’ melancholia that refuses to accept the loved one is gone might be more appropriate responses to loss: ‘No matter what may fill the gap, if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be; it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.’5 This letter led Binswanger to the claim that ‘when compared with Freud’s discussion in his “Mourning and Melancholia,” [the letter] suffices by itself to show how far Freud the man surpasses Freud the scientist in largeness and depth of humanity’.6 Ester R. Shapiro provides several other examples of Freud actively working to encourage what would, according to his theory, be a strictly pathological response to loss. For example, talking to Doolittle of his daughter Sophia’s death: ‘“She is here,” he said, and he showed me a tiny locket that he wore, fastened to his watch-chain.’7 To affectionately carry one’s dead with one, to refuse to accept they are gone or to accept a substitute for them, and particularly to fasten their image precisely where it will be encountered daily – all of this cannot be seen as mentally healthy in terms of Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, yet it is precisely what he does.8



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While melancholia was originally brought forward in connection with mourning because of their shared symptoms, Freud soon asserts that ‘every’ case of melancholia actually involves object-loss and is a type of defective mourning – it is therefore unsurprising that they share symptoms (F:XIV, 248). Taking into account what we now know about depression and neurochemistry, the value of this ‘every’ seems questionable. However, not only could Freud as a doctor not be expected to anticipate these advances, it seems probable that when exposed to Freud’s analytic method most depressive subjects would indeed produce material about lost objects. Although in many cases today we would see a focus on loss as caused by depression rather than the cause of depression, or at least acknowledge the importance of a propensity towards depression, traumatic losses can certainly provoke clinical depression in those who have shown no previous propensity towards the state. What is particularly puzzling for Freud about melancholia, the singular symptom that distinguishes it from regular mourning, is a ‘loss of self-regard’ leading to ‘what is psychologically very remarkable […] an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.’9 Freud’s major ‘observation, not at all difficult to make’, is that the ‘various self-accusations’ of the melancholic seem inappropriate; indeed, they are ‘hardly at all applicable to the patient himself ’ though ‘with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves or has loved or should love’ – this is the justification for melancholia still involving object-loss even when no obvious object-loss has occurred (F:XIV, 243, 246, 248). As a slight inconsistency, Freud simultaneously makes the mischievously cynical claim that the melancholic has a ‘keener eye for the truth’ and often attains a true estimation of themselves: he describes himself as petty, egoistic, dishonest, lacking in independence, one whose sole aim has been to hide the weaknesses of his own nature, it may be, so far as we know, that he has come pretty near to understanding himself; we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind. (F:XIV, 246)

Yet Freud is clear that, regardless of their truth, ‘there can be no doubt’ that anyone who holds such a view of themselves, like Hamlet, ‘is ill’ (F:XIV, 246). The predicates, however true, are still rooted in a lost, loved other. For Freud, we are simply not the kind of animal who can attain a correct introspective appreciation of our own flaws. Freud offers the example of a melancholic woman who ‘loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife’ (F:XIV, 248–9). At first she does

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not appear to be mourning, whether healthily or pathologically, since nobody has died or abandoned her. What psychoanalysis unveils, however, is that she is actually in denial about the fact that her relationship has been shattered since her real husband does not correspond to her idealized image of him at all. The process of reality-testing ought to discover that there is simply no object in the world corresponding to the cathected image she holds of him, which should in turn lead to a withdrawal of libidinal investments that can be reinvested in other objects that might give her satisfaction. However, this would require the work of mourning and the acceptance of several unpleasant truths, such as that she has wasted years of her youth foolishly loving a worthless man. Instead, to avoid work through preserving her current libidinal investments, to account for the fact her needs are nevertheless unsatisfied by her daily situation and to give her some measure of pleasurable release of psychic tension, she discovers the rather elegant solution of transferring the hostile feelings she bears towards the real husband back onto herself. Two splits are involved in this move: first, establishing a ‘special agency’ within the psyche that takes pleasure in judging and punishing her Ego (what Freud will later call the Super-ego); secondly, this ‘special agency’ must identify in her own Ego the qualities of the actual husband that disappoint her. In this act of identification she will not merely incorrectly identify the real husband’s qualities in herself, she will warp her character towards them to prove the accusations against her to be true – becoming untrustworthy and uncaring (this is another reason why the true estimation of her character and behaviour attained in melancholia is nevertheless rooted in feelings towards a lost other). The refusal to shift her libidinal investments in the face of reality-testing, the refusal of mourning work, nevertheless leads to other types of labour. The psyche is engaged in a constant act of hallucinatory fantasy that allows her to continue to see the loved object as present in the world and failing to satisfy her only due to her own faults. For the psychoanalyst, bringing her out of this state of melancholia through leading her to appreciate that her idealized husband does not exist and that it is her real husband’s faults she is persecuting herself for will be extremely difficult since, from her conscious perspective, she encounters her idealized husband daily and experiences him as being as magnificent as he ever was. In Torok’s terms: ‘The object of pleasure being absent, incorporation obeys the pleasure principle and functions by way of processes similar to hallucinatory fulfillments’ (T:SK, 113 [237]). Failed mourning is inseparable from fantasy and hallucination – an immediate solution to loss that we will see Abraham and Torok refer to as ‘magical’. Here hallucination does not necessarily mean visions of the lost or dead walking



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among us, but rather a simple distortion of reality that allows one to avoid work and change. In loss the most obvious form of fantasy is the belief that the dead are still living in their former daily manner in some distant place where we will meet them again soon, the fond image that they are propping up the bar in Heaven with Ernest Hemingway. That such visions are a part of even the healthiest mourning shows that elements of hallucinatory melancholia form a part of every response to loss. We might say that such hallucinations are experienced as momentary, melting and fondly nostalgic in the healthy mourner, yet as literal and fixed in the melancholic. As we will see, this is a form of what Abraham and Torok refer to as demetaphorization, which means taking literally what is meant figuratively. The clearest way of understanding hallucination and fantasy more broadly is in opposition to ‘reality’, which is defined in Abraham and Torok’s account of psychoanalysis as what requires change: Granting our metapsychological definition of ‘reality’ as everything, whether exogenous or endogenous, that affects the psyche by inflicting a topographical shift on it, ‘fantasy’ can be defined as all those representations, beliefs, or bodily states that gravitate towards the opposite effect, that is, the preservation of the status quo. This definition does not address the contents or the formal characteristics of fantasy, only its function, a preventative and conservative function despite the highly innovative genius of fantasy. (A&T:SK, 125 [259])10

By the time of ‘The Ego and the Id’ in 1923, Freud had come to ‘appreciate the full significance of ’ melancholia, realising ‘how common and how typical’ those activities are that he first described in offering an account of pathological melancholia. We have already referred several times to how the distinct intrapsychic agency of moral conscience, the Super-ego, is itself a melancholic internalization of the simultaneously loved and feared parents: to all those whose moral sense has been shocked [by psychoanalysis] and who have complained that there must surely be a higher nature in man: ‘Very true,’ we can say, ‘and here we have that higher nature, in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative of our relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves.’ (F:XIX, 36)

Furthermore, the Ego’s own ‘character’ comes to be seen by Freud as largely constituted through a series of identifications. While in childhood this most obviously takes place in the form of ‘role-models’, we can see throughout adult life that people are constantly taking on the traits of lost or absent loved ones, including celebrities and fictional characters.11 Although one might object that

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we grow together and take on the traits of loved ones quite independently of loss, a great deal of anecdotal evidence would identify a distinctive form of identification that follows loss – we might think of the stereotype of the slightly timid boy in awe of his dominant father who, on his father’s death, becomes the very image of the father right down to the way he walks or his choice of drink. Freud presents a theory of such identifications in terms of the Ego attempting to seduce the Id – an apparently rather peculiar image that nevertheless corresponds quite well to the account of lateral cathexes in Freud’s ‘Project’: it may be said that this transformation of an erotic object-choice into an alteration of the ego is also a method by which the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its relations with it […] When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying: ‘Look, you can love me too – I am so like the object.’ (F:XIX, 30)

Returning to our underlying question of what constitutes grounds for mourning or melancholia, we can see that an ever-accelerating and almost ecstatic movement in Freud’s texts seems to increasingly paint everything in mourning’s colours. With the formulation of the death drive in 1920 and the attribution of the constitution of both the Ego and the Super-ego to melancholia three years later, it can seem that the post-war Freud has progressively shifted from saying ‘everything is ultimately about sex’ to saying ‘everything is ultimately about death’ – coffins seem to pop up everywhere in the manner that phalluses did in his earlier work. By the end of ‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud is finding the ‘same situation’ in the ‘fear of death in melancholia’ and in ‘the first great anxiety-state of birth and the infantile anxiety of longing – the anxiety due to separation from the protecting mother’ (F:XIX, 58). Where earlier death was only feared as a loss of sexual potency, now the original desire for the mother is rooted in a lost memory of the womb inseparable from the tomb. It seems then that all the varied losses in crossing the ‘appalling distance’ from birth to latency are describable in terms of these structures first raised to elucidate a rather rare pathological state in terms of a common experience. There are good reasons to oppose this universalization of mourning. Once we start addressing all of the different losses faced by a developing entity in terms of mourning and melancholia, we obscure the possibility of a distinct discourse addressing the particular dynamics and pathologies derived from mortality. We might worry there is a kind of violence towards the human condition itself when we see an infant being weaned as engaged in essentially the same process



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as a grieving mother, even if Freud is correct in saying that a similar energetic movement is at stake at a metapsychological level. Although Freud refers to other kinds of object-loss in terms of the vocabulary of melancholia, perhaps we should insist on the metonymical character of this formulation. For practising psychoanalysts it certainly seems useful to maintain the distinct nosological category of ‘the painful disorder of melancholia’ that specifically follows a human loved one’s death. The dominant Lacanian French psychoanalytic tradition seems to have gone down this path, generally saving the specific vocabulary of mourning and melancholia for what we might call ‘traditional loss’.12 Bearing in mind this tendency to limit the vocabulary of mourning and melancholia in French psychoanalytic thought to traditional loss, it is perhaps unsurprising that Butler – having pursued Freud’s suggestion that melancholia was at the basis of the constitution of character – claims that in approaching the question of the formation of gender identity we should not look to Lacan but to the ‘alternative perspective on identification’ that comes from Abraham and Torok.13 If Abraham and Torok are famous for replacing the distinction of mourning and melancholia with the more technical terms introjection and incorporation (as is seen in the title of their essay ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’), then in order to approach their alternative perspective it will be useful to first turn to Ferenczi’s original concept of ‘introjection’. Indeed, as Torok notes in ‘The Illness of Mourning’: Whoever approaches the problem of mourning or depression is required to muddle through a conceptual terrain studded with obstacles, for example ‘introjection.’ Ever since Sandor Ferenczi introduced the concept in 1909 – first Freud and then Karl Abraham took it up, handing it down to Melanie Klein and others – the term ‘introjection’ has undergone so many variations in meaning that its mere mention is enough to arouse in me the suspicion of confused ideas, not to say verbiage. The initial and rigorous meaning of this concept must be revived if we are to avoid such pitfalls. (T:SK, 110 [233–4])

The scholarly focus on Abraham and Torok’s reformulation of failed mourning as cryptic incorporation has largely occluded their return to Ferenczi’s rigorous meaning of introjection. It can even seem that Derrida himself pays extremely little explicit attention to this return to Ferenczi, proceeding largely in terms of Freud’s account of healthy mourning even when Abraham and Torok’s reformulation of unhealthy mourning is directly at stake. Although this leads to some terminological confusion, Derrida is clearly aware that Abraham and Torok develop a distinct concept of introjection that leads psychoanalysis towards

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the originary or pre-originary mourning that we have seen Derrida claim Freud failed to theorize (D:A, 39). As we will see in the following chapter, that Abraham and Torok nevertheless also fail to fully attain such an account turns on their emphasis on the exceptional and dispensable character of incorporation and the inevitably narcissistic character of introjection without incorporation.

Ferenczi’s introjection First mentioned directly by Freud in 1915’s ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, the concept of introjection was formulated by Ferenczi in 1909 as one of his earliest contributions to psychoanalysis. Although the question of originality and influence is always particularly murky between Freud and Ferenczi, we can tentatively assume that since they only met in 1908 this concept was formulated before their collaborative phase began.14 It is extremely unlikely that Ferenczi had, or indeed ever would have, directly encountered the neuronal speculations of Freud’s unpublished ‘Project’; nevertheless, in so far as the assumptions and questions of the ‘Project’ implicitly marked Freud’s work, we can see Ferenczi continuing to ask closely related questions about the Ego and its expansion. In establishing introjection, Ferenczi is interrogating the metapsychological flows of energy involved in the oral stage and that continue long beyond it, showing the extent to which the underlying model associated with the original pleasure-ego that sees everything in terms of ‘“I should like to eat this”, or “I should like to spit it out”’ (F:XIX, 237) remains in place throughout our affective lives.15 One of the notable features of Ferenczi among Freud’s earliest associates is his engagement with philosophy. In the face of the possible embarrassment that so many of the discoveries of psychoanalysis were already stated in Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies, Freud famously, repeatedly and perhaps even compulsively claimed to have read very little philosophy. He insisted that this was not so as to claim priority or originality, values that ‘are not among the aims that psycho-analytic work sets itself ’ (F:XVIII, 7); rather, he avoided philosophy in order to keep his mind free of the possible distortions that an implicit dogmatic framework might impose on clinical material. This led him to a studied policy of avoiding philosophical texts or at least to the public façade of such a policy (F:XX, 59–60). Ferenczi had no equivalent concerns, either with regard to contracting prejudices through philosophical reading or for the denunciations that admitting such influences might lead to with respect to the field’s scientific status. As Abraham writes with particular reference to



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bioanalysis, a certain modesty and prudence was required by Freud as ‘le chef de file’ that does not apply in the case of Ferenczi’s ‘impetuous faith of the disciple’ – ‘There, where the initiator is frightened by his own recklessness, the continuer finds it easier to move beyond.’ Abraham even jokes that Freud still carries from his medical studies a ‘scientific super-ego’ which he always tried to appease (A:SK, ~ [17–18]). These concerns will rarely arise in French psycho­ analysis where many of the major theorists – including J.-A. Miller, Laplanche and Abraham himself – were originally trained as philosophers or, as in the case of Lacan, heavily engaged in philosophical material and debates. Ferenczi’s major philosophical debt seems to be to Hegel. As Krell puts it, Ferenczi was ‘an inspired grandchild of Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel.’16 Krell is specifically referring to the project of bioanalysis launched in Ferenczi’s Thalassa, a natural heir to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, though it has also often been noted that the formulation of the analytic situation’s dynamic in ‘active technique’ evokes the quest for recognition in the Phenomenology’s account of master and bondsman (against the Freudian analytic situation that we described earlier as asymmetrical, almost to the extent of being Levinasian). While bioanalysis and active technique remain at the fringes of the Freudian movement, it is Ferenczi’s concept of introjection that, once it is taken up by Freud, comes to be seen as one of the greatest points of proximity between psychoanalysis and Hegel (at least for non-Lacanians). Derrida makes much of the proximity of Freudian introjection and Hegelian interiorization [Erinnerung] in texts such as Glas and Memories for Paul de Man, though the effective identity of these terms is perhaps most explicitly stated in The Ear of the Other: in normal mourning [introjection], if such a thing exists, I take the dead upon myself, I digest it, assimilate it, idealize it, and interiorize it in the Hegelian sense of the term. This is what Hegel calls interiorization which is at the same time memorization – an interiorizing memorization (Erinnerung) […] I kill it and remember it. But since it is an Erinnerung, I interiorize it totally and it is no longer other. (D:EO, 58)

We might say that, for Derrida, Hegel is a philosopher of mourning whose basic tenet is that melancholia does not exist or is at least passing. There is nothing real (since the real is the rational and the rational is the real) that cannot be mourned successfully, interiorized totally and devoured by Geist; furthermore, there is nothing that will not be devoured in the fullness of time.17 It is to the Hegelian account of life and desire, which we have already mentioned in connection with Levinasian enjoyment, that Jean Hyppolite turns when discussing Freud’s

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introjection in his presentation to Lacan’s seminar on Verneinung.18 Life had already been described by Hyppolite in Genesis and Structure in terms that would equally capture Freud’s use of introjection: ‘In the medium of life, all alterity is provisional, and the appearance of an other is immediately resolved into the unity of the self. Life, precisely, is this movement which reduces the other to itself and discovers itself in that other.’19 The parallel theorizing of Hegel and Freud on these matters has come to be commonly acknowledged. As Jon Mills writes, Hegel every bit as much as Freud ‘shows the ego’s progression from its immediate unconscious unity to its internal division, projection, and introjection as the ego punctures through to conscious awareness’.20 We can see once again from these quotations why Hegel is the principal accused in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. For Hegel we are presented with a totality without infinity, a field in which everything can be digested and assimilated such that ‘it is no longer other’ since ‘all alterity is provisional’. If Hegel proclaims the imperialism of the same with his account of Erinnerung, then what about Freud’s use of introjection? While the existence of failed mourning or melancholia testifies to there being alterities that we have difficulty digesting, it is unclear whether there is any truly indigestible alterity. At the level of the material account of the psyche in the ‘Project’, it seems there is once again an imminent field without transcendence: any particular memory-network or psychic representative of an object at least could be digested by the Ego (Abraham and Torok’s crypt will offer a rather different image on precisely this question). What is at least equally worrying from a Levinasian perspective is that Freud, like Hegel, actively endorses the reduction of the other to the same: to call mourning healthy and the failure of mourning pathological is to promote egoism over ethics. Whether there is a genuine infinite alterity or not, alterity is to be fought against in favour of sameness. As we saw earlier, it is only in private (such as the letter to Binswanger or the discussion about his daughter Sophia with Doolittle) that Freud seems to cherish something remaining indigestible in loss. It is unsurprising then that when Derrida turns to mourning, one of his first questions is whether healthy mourning – modelled by Freud on introjection and sharing its structure with the Hegelian account of Erinnerung – is not an unjustifiable act of violence. What is somewhat surprising then is that – despite Ferenczi’s connection to Hegel, his formulation of introjection, and introjection’s general assimilation to Hegelian Erinnerung in the post-Freudian tradition – the actual account of introjection Ferenczi offered is not as Hegelian as it might appear and might even be partly salvageable for Levinas.



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For Ferenczi, introjection can be described as fitting into the network of psychoanalytic conceptuality in two ways – as a broader name for transference21 and as the counter-concept to projection.22 This seems rather confusing since, intuitively, transference seems to be a form of projection – one ‘projects’ onto the analyst affects and fantasies properly relating to one’s parents. Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis directly state that Ferenczi’s account of introjection ‘might equally well be described as projection.’23 The conceptual vocabulary of psychoanalysis being embryonic at the time, it would certainly be unfair to assert any conceptual confusion when things fail to match contemporary definitions. What this does indicate, however, is that we must be cautious with regard to what Ferenczi himself means by offering ‘introjection’ as a concept opposed to ‘projection’. Ferenczi begins his essay by simply expanding the use of transference. Rather than reserve the label for the ‘creation of a peculiar sort of thought-formation, mostly unconscious’ that is part of the ‘productivity of the neurosis’ in the analytic situation itself, Ferenczi claims we can recognize ‘the psychoneurotic’s inclination to transference […] not only in the special case of a psycho-analytic treatment’ but ‘in all situations of life’. Thus, as a very general statement, all of ‘the excessive hate, love and sympathy of neurotics, are also nothing else than transferences’. From initially recognizing all of these as cases of transference, he takes a terminological step back to preserve the label ‘transference’ for this activity when it occurs in the psychoanalytic situation while inventing the term ‘introjection’ to cover precisely the same process when it occurs outside of the consulting room (still, at this point in the essay, in neurotics). For Ferenczi, the neurotic is specifically characterized by impressionability: their capacity ‘to feel in the most intense way for the experiences of others’. This is not simply empathy but ‘hysterical identification’ in which the neurotic copies the ‘symptoms or character traits of a person when […] he identifies himself in his unconscious with him’. A kind of ‘passion for transference’ is therefore ‘the most fundamental peculiarity’ of general neurotics.24 This hysterical introjection stands ‘in diametrical contrast’ to paranoiac projection: ‘Whereas the paranoiac expels from his ego the impulses that have become unpleasant, the neurotic helps himself by taking into the ego as large as possible a part of the outer world, making it the object of unconscious phantasies.’25 We are now in a position to understand what Torok points out as the distinctive feature of Ferenczi’s introjection that Freud, Karl Abraham and Klein misinterpret, leading the concept to become ‘muddled’ and even ending up with ‘entirely other, even mutually exclusive meanings’ (T:SK, 111 [235]).26

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For Ferenczi, introjection and projection are a matter of impulses, drives or desires rather than objects (although important distinctions between these terms emerge in the psychoanalytic tradition, the terms are used in a broadly synonymous manner by Ferenczi in 1909). Ferenczi’s contemporaries reduce introjection to ‘a single superficial aspect: taking possession of the object through incorporation, that is, by putting it into the body or the psyche’ (T:SK, 113 [236]). Without introjection of the repressed drives attached to an object, the mere incorporation or interiorization of an object in the Ego would in fact be the refusal of mourning. We might think of Ferenczi’s relation to objects in terms of Sartre’s slogan ‘the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me.’27 The object plays a mediating role between the conscious and the unconscious: introjection is ‘the process of including the Unconscious in the ego through objectal contacts [commerce]’ (T:SK, 113 [236]). What is puzzling is that if, for Ferenczi, the neurotic engaged in introjection is ‘constantly seeking for objects with whom he can identify himself, to whom he can transfer feelings, whom he can thus draw into his circle of interest, i.e. introject’,28 then introjection seems to be a process of investment or cathexis rather than of withdrawal of investment or de-cathexis – it seems to be the opposite of mourning. Indeed, as Torok writes, the ‘loss of the object will halt this process’ since it can no longer act as a mediator (T:SK, 113 [236]). The simple terminological equation of mourning and introjection, common among most thinkers writing in the wake of Abraham and Torok’s works, is thus inaccurate. The crucial point for resolving the apparent mystery of how introjection is cathexis (drawing into the circle of interests), rather than de-cathexis (withdrawal of interest), is that, when Ferenczi or Torok refer to an object ‘outside of the Ego’, they are not referring to an object ‘outside of the psyche’. To introject is not for the self to become emotionally attached to what would otherwise have been a mere indifferent thing encountered in spatio-temporal existence; rather, it is a work carried out within the psyche by the Ego as it attempts to recuperate the repressed drives already unconsciously invested in the psychic representative of the object existing within the psyche but beyond the Ego-structure: ‘it is not at all a matter of “introjecting” the object, as is all too commonly stated, but of introjecting the sum total of the drives, and their vicissitudes as occasioned and mediated by the object’ (T:SK, 113 [236]). The key to fitting all of this together is Jung’s famous line ‘everything unconscious is projected.’29 Indeed, although it is rarely acknowledged, Ferenczi’s focus on ‘broadening the ego’ holds an emphasis that is at least as close to Jung’s



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account of ‘individuation’ in ‘life’s afternoon’ as Freud’s ‘Where id was, there ego shall be’ (F:XXII, 80).30 Intro‑jection is at work when we deal with the world because we already have an unconscious, which is to say that (at least after the resolution of the Oedipus complex) we are always already pro‑jecting our unconscious onto the world. This projected, repressed material is constantly discovered (albeit in a disguised form) in the world around us where it can, in principle, slowly be worked over and introjected through language – the domain in which we can hope to clarify, correct and slowly accept, through connecting unconscious material with word presentations, what we formerly repressed. For example, I realize over the course of discussing the overwhelming and apparently unreasonable anger I feel at a friend’s financial miserliness that this irrational emotion is actually the projection onto them of the self-loathing I unconsciously harbour towards my own emotional miserliness, itself perhaps rooted in my infantile history and repressed feelings towards my parents. We can recognize here the basic structure of transference in the analytic situation – first, one projects onto the analyst repressed feelings towards one’s parents, then one engages in introjection through language to gain access to those repressed impulses and reintegrate the energy involved. Psychoanalysis will be called for when there is a block in this process. This back-and-forth (or more accurately forth-and-back) is not merely medicinal but an unveiling of truth on both sides of the inside–outside divide. On the one hand, we discover the truth about our internal world through coming to accept our repressed drives and remember our occluded history; on the other hand, by coming to accept those desires we purify the world of our projected unconscious and attain a more accurate view of things around us. This of course partly explains the need for the psychoanalyst to have a highly advanced level of introjection, entailing that they need to have been analysed, since otherwise they will project their own repressed unconscious onto the patient, distorting the analysis. Ferenczi’s introjection therefore has a rather complex relation to Hegelian interiorization. On the one hand, it involves the reduction of excessive emotional involvement in objects through language and the appreciation of the self ’s constitutive role in the production of the apparent infinity of the other; on the other hand, through introjection we gain an increasingly clear and accurate appreciation of the other qua other, independent of the projections and constructions we have foisted upon them. Depending on one’s perspective then, introjection either constitutes a reduction of the other to the order of the same through language or opens access to the other’s genuine alterity beyond the closed, narcissistic process of the transcendental ego’s spatio-temporal

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constitution. This latter possibility would be broadly compatible with the account of infinity and ethical election in Totality and Infinity; however, once infinity is reformulated by Levinas through the trace structure and is experienced in the form of an infinite emotional response to the other’s mortality, there can be no rapprochement between the positions. This is because, for Ferenczi, there is no possibility of the right kind of emotional involvement with the other qua other, only the other as projected onto. In Torok’s terms: When the process of introjection is complete, the object can descend from the imaginal pedestal where the ego’s need for nourishment has placed it. If there is death, the nature of the bereavement will be a function of the role the object played at the time of the loss. If the desires concerning it were introjected, no breakdown, no illness of mourning or melancholia should be feared. The libido invested in the object will be recovered eventually […] Surely, the work of mourning is a painful process even in these cases, but the ego’s integrity guarantees the outcome. (T:SK, 116 [240])

Just as, for Freud, excessive self-reproach was a sure sign of mental illness, excessive object-love is a sure sign of an unconscious projection in need of introjection. If the object is lost before that introjection can take place, then breakdown and mental illness are a definite possibility. We have seen then that introjection is not simply equivalent to healthy mourning – it happens all the time with no particular reference to death or mortality. The key connection between these terms is not on the positive side (the supposed identity of introjection and mourning), but on the negative side (the connection between the breaking down of the process of introjection and melancholia, reconceived as incorporation). For example, Freud’s hallucinating melancholic woman has reached an impasse or aporia in the process of reintegrating her unconscious. By denying the results of reality-testing and refusing the work of mourning in favour of a hallucinatory maintenance of the status quo, she preserves a particular state of projection beyond the domain of language, criticism, clarification and progress, including the projection onto herself of negative qualities. All of these drives that are brought back to the Ego originate in the repressions of early childhood: It has been found that in the ‘unconscious’ (in Freud’s sense) all the impulses are pent up that have been repressed in the course of the individual cultural development, and that their unsatisfied, stimulus-hungry affects are constantly ready to ‘transfer’ on to the persons and objects of the outer world, to bring these unconsciously into connection with the ego, to ‘introject.’31



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The subject thus uses objects in the world in order to develop themselves and conquer their unconscious – their stimulus-hungry affects are constantly ready to transfer onto what might help them to remove their repressions and grow. The Ego is essentially seeking wholeness: ‘in the course of its organization and also in transference, the ego makes use of the object (or the analyst) to achieve its libidinal awakening and nourishment’ (T:SK, 116 [240]). In life one already uses everyone and everything as one would use an analyst. This is why Ferenczi quotes Freud’s quip that, however we treat the neurotic, ‘he always treats himself psychotherapeutically’, as ‘introjections and other symptoms of the disease are really […] self-taught attempts on the patient’s part to cure themselves.’32 We can see once again the proximity of this account of an Ego that devours objects in order to grow and Levinas’s account of enjoyment as alimentation in which ‘We live from “good soup,” air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc.’ (L:TI, 110). Having discussed introjection and projection largely in terms of the patho­ logies in which they show themselves most clearly, Ferenczi makes his most important claim: When we revise the ontogenesis of the ego-consciousness on the basis of the new knowledge, we come to the conclusion that the paranoiac projection and the neurotic introjection are merely extreme cases of psychical processes the primary forms of which are to be demonstrated in every normal being.33

The implication of this universalized position is that ‘all later loving, hating, and fearing are only transferences, or, as Freud terms them, “new editions” of currents of feeling that were acquired in the earliest childhood (before the end of the fourth year) and later repressed.’34 We can see from this how limited the possibility of an access to the genuine alterity of the other qua other postintrojection would be, since all loving, hating and fearing is only a projection to be tamed and ‘an unconscious sexual element is at the basis of every sympathetic emotion’.35 Rather than the overwhelming emotion we feel for a particular other being a testament to their singularity, it is a testament to their sameness as ‘new editions’ where the ‘first “object-love” and the first “object-hate” are, so to speak, the primordial transferences, the roots of every future introjection.’36 Ferenczi’s text continues to be pushed on by a kind of delirium that moves to find that, whenever two people meet, ‘whether of the same or the opposite sex, the unconscious always makes an effort towards transference.’37 The basic nature of the desiring psyche – neurotic or healthy – is to introject everything it encounters since everything and everyone is already drenched in the repressed childhood desires the psyche endlessly projects and offers the chance

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to recapture what it has lost. It is against this field that the counter-concept of incorporation emerges.

5.2  The ghosts of Budapest La théorie trans-phénoménologique dialogique de l’archè We have already seen Torok claim that we must return to Ferenczi’s account of introjection. By failing to remain faithful to this rich concept – reducing it to merely the internalization of an object – she believed that Freud obscured the proper distinction between the process of healthy mourning (introjection) and the fantasy at stake in melancholia (incorporation). In Abraham’s work this tendency to return to Ferenczi is even stronger, his enterprise taking its inspiration from three spiritual masters: Freud, Husserl and Ferenczi (A:SK, ~ [25]).38 What renders Abraham’s works alien to other movements in psychoanalysis is his roots in Husserlian phenomenology. At the time Derrida and Abraham met, the attempt to bring about a serious discussion among discourses between Freud and Husserl was a task that (some short texts by Merleau-Ponty aside) was only being approached in late-1950s Paris with equivalent zeal by Derrida himself.39 As Derrida puts it, ‘Nicolas Abraham, who was, as they say, formally educated as a philosopher, extremely attentive to problems of aesthetics, language, translation, poetics and poetic translation, read Husserl as no one, it seems to me, was reading him at that time. As was his habit, gently, obstinately, and with a tranquil sense of irony’ (D:F, xxx).40 It is not difficult to see why Peggy Kamuf stated that ‘Derrida’s brief biographical sketch of the man he first met in 1959 has resonances of a self-portrait in the third person.’41 Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, Abraham was engaged in the phenomenological study of poetic rhythm and translation.42 It was around the problem of translation that Abraham began to see certain limitations in phenomeno­ logy’s account of language and meaning.43 Genetic phenomenology, based on using the reductions to offer a faithful description of presented experience and its constitution, could only tell part of the story when it came to the origin of material offered in the living present. In a posthumously published early essay that arguably plays an equivalent role in his work to Freud’s ‘Project’, ‘Le symbole ou l’au-delà du phénomène’ [1961], Abraham offered a new account of what we have been calling meaning effects. It is not a matter of purifying, stripping and varying phenomena, but of a genetic deciphering that offers interpretations



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posed in terms of clashes between properly unpresentable desires that can only be discerned on the field of presence through the meaning effects that are the solutions or compromises they put forward.44 As we will see later, for Abraham ‘the Thing’, the very concept of objectivity, ‘is to be thought starting from the Crypt, the Thing as a “crypt effect”’ (D:F, xiii), thus connecting the later account of cryptic mourning to Abraham’s earliest work on the unpresentable conflicts at stake in the emergence of meaning effects on the field of presence.45 Since psychoanalysis replaces genetic phenomenology’s attempt to reach the origin or archè of experience by going beyond the description of phenomena, it is trans‑phenomenological. This trans-phenomenology is simultaneously transobjective (the objectively given meaning effect is deciphered as having its genesis in the conflicts of an unpresentable ground whose forces can never themselves be the object of a mental act) and trans‑subjective (the deciphering is not done by the subject themselves through introspection, but comes in dialogue with another, the analyst, since one must be confronted with a truth that is not merely invisible but that one will inevitably do everything possible to avoid and reject). This then leads Abraham to the rather unwieldy title for a method of investigation that has the full philosophical pretentions of going not only beyond the phenomena but beyond phenomenology: La théorie trans-phénoménologique dialogique de l’archè, characterized by le point du vue trans-phénoméno-dialogique (A:SK, ~ [40]). What is at stake here is quite a unique attempt to establish the philosophical importance of psychoanalysis, one that has even today unfortunately failed to bear many fruits.46 For Abraham, ‘psychoanalysis stakes out its domain precisely on [the] unthought ground of phenomenology’ (A:SK, 84 [209]). Although neither Abraham nor Derrida uses these terms, we might say that if phenomenology aimed to be the science of sciences (the science of the constitution of the field of subjective living‑presence and the world of objects that can become the pole of intentional acts), then psychoanalysis is not simply a particular science subordinated to phenomenology but the science of the science of sciences. More properly, we should perhaps call it the non-science of the science of sciences, since there can be no ‘science’ of the unpresentable and unnameable unconscious, only an indirect discourse on ‘the transphenomenal Kernel of this nonscience’ (A:SK, 98 [226]). Of course, since psychoanalysis is also a scientific discourse among discourses, we end up with an uncanny mirroring situation where it is both subject to the science of sciences and the (non-)science of that science of sciences. As with the disturbance Derrida mapped between the ontological and ontic discourses on death, we have once again discovered the abyssal structure

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of a complication of origin where, in this case, neither phenomenology nor psychoanalysis is able to play the foundational role. In his programmatic essay ‘The Shell and its Kernel’, Abraham set out to prove that there could be no science of the unconscious. The entire constructed conceptual language of psychoanalysis (repression, negation, pleasure principle, etc.) was only a protective ‘Shell’, an ‘Ego’, that simultaneously rendered access to ‘the Thing itself ’ of psychoanalysis possible and impossible. This would be equivalent to a localized version of Derrida’s claim that there is no grammatology, only a graphematics. The Ego being what introduces secondary processes that impose delay and difference on the satisfactions of primary process, we can see then that psychoanalysis’s language is being taken in terms of différance.

Three ways to eat the dead We have seen that introjection takes place in language. Since ‘all that is repressed is Ucs.’, this transformation renders what is unconscious conscious (F:XIX, 18). More accurately, the important border is not to move a repressed drive from being unconscious (Ucs.) to being conscious (Cs.) (the focus of present mental attention), but to move it to being readily accessible to consciousness – what Freud calls pre-conscious (Pcs.): the real difference between a Ucs. and a Pcs. Idea (thought) consists in this: that the former is carried out on some material which remains unknown, whereas the latter (the Pcs.) is in addition brought into connection with word-presentations. […] The question, ‘How does a thing become conscious?’ would thus be more advantageously stated: ‘How does a thing become preconscious?’ And the answer would be: ‘Through becoming connected with the word-presentations corresponding to it.’ (F:XIX, 20)

The ‘talking cure’ (at least in the case of ‘transference neuroses’ where there is a ‘conflict between the ego and the id’ (F:XIX, 152)) consists then in the analyst offering interpretations that bring repressed material into connection with word presentations. This allows the repressed – what is censored yet constantly manifests itself in encoded form in dreams, through neurotic symptoms and projected onto a world it distorts – to be able to become conscious.47 We have already made several references to the Freudian ‘oral stage’ in which all love is characterized by the desire to take the loved object inside the body. To grasp Abraham and Torok’s account of healthy and unhealthy mourning as offered in ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ we must return to this orality. The pleasures of early infancy reduce to the filling of the ‘oral void’ – from the



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mother’s milk to the substitute thumb. When milk is not present, the baby comes to fill the void with sounds, with the tongue’s explorations, with ‘cries and sobs, delayed fullness’, and then, in time, with ‘calling, ways of requesting presence, language’. With the beginnings of language proper one adapts to ‘the novel satisfactions of a mouth now empty of that [desired] object but filled with words pertaining to the subject. The transition from a mouth filled with the breast to a mouth filled with words occurs by virtue of the intervening experiences of the empty mouth.’ This opening up of language originally occurs in a direct face-to-face relationship with the mother as the guarantor of meaning, the mother having ‘the permanence of Descartes’s God’; however, in time one moves beyond this relationship to a relation with the community at large – ‘Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation means channelling them through language into a communion of empty mouths.’ That the parent in an original face-to-face encounter perpetuated by the Super-ego is explicitly connected to the relation to Descartes’s God establishes a clear connection with Levinas’s account of the wholly other, even if, for most analysts, this is seen as a genuinely experienced state during infancy. It is on the basis of this early history that ‘the literal ingestion of foods becomes introjection when viewed figuratively’ (A&T:SK, 127–8 [262–3]). In a healthy relation to an other, the Ego makes use of language to nourish itself by recognizing in the object its own repressed investments. This does not erase those investments, one does not become ever less loving as one introjects, but renders emotion comprehensible, reasonable and fluid: hence Torok’s claim that the loss of an already suitable introjected loved one will not cause mental breakdown. In Torok’s terms, introjection’s ‘privileged instrument’ is simply ‘naming [nomination]’ (T:SK, 114 [237]). Put in Levinasian terms, through ‘denominative’ language we reduce the other to the same. As for unhealthy mourning or incorporation, expanding on one of Abraham and Torok’s images we might say that, if introjection is like the slow labour of learning a language, the failure of introjection or incorporation is like buying a dictionary and leaving it untouched on the shelf. This shortcut is called for when the process of introjection encounters a prohibitive obstacle in the mouth: Because our mouth is unable to say certain words and unable to formulate certain sentences, we fantasize […] that we are actually taking into our mouth the unnamable, the object itself. As the empty mouth calls out in vain to be filled with introjective speech, it reverts to being the food-craving mouth it was prior to the acquisition of speech. […] The crucial move away from introjection (clearly rendered impossible) to incorporation is made when words fail to fill

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the subject’s void and hence an imaginary thing is inserted into the mouth in their place. (A&T:SK, 128–9 [263–4])

Incorporation is seen then to involve a regression to a more infantile relation to the oral cavity, caused by language being unable to articulate a forbidden word connected to an unavowable drive associated with the lost object. The task of finding the correct word presentation for repressed material is not, then, simply a question of figuring out what ‘the right word’ is; instead, the repression was itself the forbidding of ‘the right word’ such that, as things stand, it cannot be said or heard correctly. The process of psychoanalysis slowly allows access to the repressed words by remoulding the subject’s language so as to render forbidden words sayable. In Freudian terms, the issue is not to simply confront the patient with an accurate interpretation but to engage in a slow process of ‘working through’ that allows them to accept the interpretation. Unlike introjection, which occurs constantly and has no particular relation to loss, the mechanism of incorporation ‘does suppose the loss of an object in order to take effect; it implies a loss that occurred before the desires concerning the object might have been freed’ (T:SK, 113 [237]).48 It is important to note that the unfree desires bound to the now internalized object are still a source of illicit pleasure, albeit pleasures that are entirely unfathomable and unknowable to the one who has incorporated the dead.49 As an example, a man who compulsively beats his wife, yet who phenomenally experiences great sorrow and remorse while doing so, is actually receiving an unavowable pleasure from the deed (as is seen from the way they become agitated if the wife is absent and they cannot experience this release for a period of time). This secret pleasure, along with the separate pleasure the Super-ego receives from punishing the subject with guilt after the event, might itself be a matter of a transfer of various repressed emotions involving an incorporated father-figure who was similarly violent. An idiosyncratic collection of defence mechanisms preserves the incorporated father beyond the possibility of introjection through language (perhaps through provoking excessive impatience and anger at the mere mention of his name), which would otherwise work to resolve the repressed drives concerning the internalized father-object. In such a case the psyche is not only refusing the painful work of mourning the father, with the various unpleasant home truths that would involve accepting, it is also preserving a pattern of actions, releases and pleasures that the psyche has found to be successful in its negotiation of the world. The substitution where the mouth empty of introjective words fantasizes eating the other’s image through incorporation is referred to as an ‘antimetaphor’



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or ‘demetaphorization’ – ‘not simply a matter of reverting to the literal meaning of words, but of using them in such a way – whether in speech or deed – that their very capacity for figurative representation is destroyed’ (A&T:SK, 132 [268]). Any act of incorporation, of eating the other’s image, is thus from another perspective the crushing between the teeth of forbidden words that are rendered meaningless. A common term that arises in connection with this act of incorporation is ‘magic’: an instantaneous achievement that avoids difficult work. Yet, as we learn from Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, when one attempts to use magic to evade a menial task, one often creates far more of a mess to tidy up than the original labour would have required. The forbidden word is excluded from language and becomes a meaningless, mute ‘word-thing’, a ‘magic word’. The magic word hides a secret desire that is both protected and we are protected from through the intrapsychic mechanism surrounding it, a mechanism of repression that bars the possibility of its meaningful articulation with other textual bodies. The word, reduced to a pure graphic mark, is simply not allowed to produce any effects on the field of presence. The intrapsychic mechanism that ensures this protection is a ‘ciphering’ or ‘encryption’, which we might once again imagine functioning within the psyche in a manner analogous to a printed circuit board. While this act of ciphering protects the magic word, what emerges from its action on the field of presence is a chain of what Abraham and Torok call ‘cryptophores’. The simplest example of such a process would be when a patient will, entirely unconsciously, perform the most extravagant linguistic contortions to avoid saying a certain word: the words they actually say would be a series of cryptophores produced by the mechanism and pointing the analyst to the word the psychic encryption method is avoiding. Matters are frequently more complex in actual analytic practice since a word may be literally sayable without being said, as in the case of a patient who talks freely about their father but only in a sarcastic manner; in so far as this is still a matter of an automated translation process that avoids a certain discourse, this is still a matter of encryption. As we will see in the following section, the re-reading of Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man, Sergei Pankejeff, would be a matter for them of tracing a series of cryptophores that constitute a ‘verbarium’ of transform­ ations revolving around the titular ‘Wolf Man’s Magic Word’. The incorporation of the dead, functioning through an encryption of language, establishes a ‘crypt’ around the object in the psyche that retains its unavowable drive. The crypt sits in the psyche as a disruptive memorial temple, disturbing the whole network of other words around it so as to keep what must not be said unsaid, and through that preserving the dead intact along with the

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patterns of secret pleasure derived from them. In principle the internalization of the object without the introjection of the drives attached to the object leaves them preserved inside for a later act of introjection. Instead of simply losing what we can gain from the other it is preserved for the future, yet the crypt is so inviolably strong that without the assistance of an analyst one is unlikely ever to speak the magic word and reintegrate the investments. Let us note here that one of the reasons Abraham and Torok avoid the word ‘melancholia’ is that many of these mechanisms that protect the secret pleasure are far from depressive in tone; indeed, their key essay ‘The Lost Object – Me’ specifically states that they are interested in ‘manic-depressive psychosis’ (A&T:SK, 140 [296]): Clearly the poetics born of the crypt gives rise to as many poems as there are individual cryptophores. A great many creations of a decidedly nonmelancholy appearance also turn out to come from the same school. ‘Melancholy,’ in fact, seems to occupy a rather limited area of the potential uses authorized by the concept of intrapsychic crypt and endocryptic identification. (A&T:SK, 142 [299])

We should be acknowledging as well that Abraham and Torok in their exploration of loss and orality offer a third way of eating the dead. Translating their thought into Lacanian terminology: if healthy introjection through language is a way of eating the dead symbolically (where through words what is discovered or rediscovered in them is integrated or reintegrated into the developing Ego) and unhealthy incorporation occurs when language is blocked and we regress to eating the dead imaginarily (where they lodge in the psyche as an indigestible word-thing, a word-become-image excluded symbolic articulation), then a third option is simply to eat the real dead. While incorporation was already a demetaphorization that took the need to fill the empty mouth with the other literally and, lacking words, ate their image; what Abraham and Torok call a ‘false incorporation’ is a further step of demetaphorization. Such an act would not necessarily involve cannibalism, although it certainly might.50 The psychoanalytically interesting claim is that one involved in cannibalism is avoiding mental illness: ‘Eating the corpse results in the exorcism of the survivor’s potential tendency for psychic incorporation after a death. Necrophagia is therefore not at all a variety of incorporation but a preventative measure of anti-incorporation’ (A&T:SK, 130 [265]). Despite their emphasis on the oral cavity, other measures that refuse to mourn, yet also keep the dead in a demarcated ‘outside’ rather than allowing them to haunt the psyche (even cannibalism, by placing them in the stomach, avoids them being in the psyche and thus keeps the dead ‘outside’),



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would qualify as movements of anti‑incorporation – for example, Freud’s locket with its image of his daughter Sophia. It is interesting to note that, despite the relatively recent invention of photography, a folk understanding of what is good or bad for mental health had already developed a method of preserving oneself against a pathological response to loss, one that Freud seemingly failed to notice or theorize despite practising.

What is a crypt? It is commonly stated, occasionally by Derrida himself, that Derrida’s first eulogy or memorial text was 1981’s ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’: ‘Derrida broke the silence, first in 1981, following the death of Roland Barthes, and thirteen more times between then and now.’ What I thought impossible, indecent, and unjustifiable, what long ago and more or less secretly and resolutely I had promised myself never to do (out of a concern for rigor or fidelity, if you will, and because it is in this case too serious), was to write following the death, not after, not long after the death by returning to it, but just following the death, upon or on the occasion of the death, at the commemorative gatherings and tributes, in the writings ‘in memory’ of those who while living would have been my friends, still present enough to me that some ‘declaration,’ indeed some analysis or ‘study,’ would seem at that moment completely unbearable. (D:WM, 49–50)

However, published in 1976 following Abraham’s death in mid-December 1975, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’ arguably merits the title of first eulogy since, particularly in the section entitled ‘Death’, the essay contains some quite traditional, yet clearly heartfelt, commemorative passages. Responding to Lacan’s claim that Derrida was in analysis with Abraham or Torok at the time of Cryptonymie’s publication, Derrida directly asserts the text’s memorial character: Lacan was ‘obviously unaware of the fact that one of the two, who was my friend, was dead by the time I wrote the preface in question, which was thus written to his memory, as homage, and in his absence’ (D:RP, 68). This means that as we turn to ‘Fors’ and Derrida’s untangling of its repeated question ‘What is a crypt?’, we are already engaging with a first example of the memorial texts that will be the specific focus of the next chapter. This first eulogy is itself a reading of a text co-written by the deceased focused on mourning – particularly on the blockage of speech that follows on an unbearable loss – and this tendency to centre the eulogy on the deceased’s own thoughts on loss will form a general pattern in many of Derrida’s eulogies.51 Not only tying these texts

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close to the thinker’s own works and allowing them a chance to speak, this focus on the dead’s own relation to death – whether to their own death, to the dying of another or to the other’s being dead – is part of what allows these texts to sail so close to our three determinate angles on death and to articulate them. While the contemporary theoretical movement going under the label ‘hauntology’ has drawn its major inspiration from Derrida, Abraham and Torok, it has been argued by Davis that ‘Derrida’s spectres should be carefully distinguished from Abraham and Torok’s phantoms.’52 In their actual texts this is clearly not a strict terminological distinction (Abraham and Torok often use the term ‘spectre’, Derrida uses ‘phantom’ both in an Abraham and Torokian sense and in his own sense while at other times rejecting both in favour of other terms, such as ‘revenant’ (D:WT, 231 n. 34)), yet what Davis is pointing to is a very specific use of phantom by Abraham. Although Davis is right that ‘phantom’ becomes reformulated as a very specific ‘metapsychological concept’ in a few of Abraham’s late works, it is ‘transposed’ into this new role from a prior use that largely complies with Derrida’s vocabulary: ‘Who among us is not battling with specters that implore Heaven and demand of us their due, while we are beholden to them for our own salvation?’ (A&T:SK, 140 n. 1 [297 n. 1], 139–40 [296]). More importantly, Derrida’s use of ‘spectres’ in a text such as Specters of Marx is clearly highly connected to Abraham and Torok’s work, even if it has a broader use than the strict ‘metapsychological concept’ at stake in an essay like Abraham’s ‘Notes on the Phantom’ (A:SK, 171–6 [426–33]).53 Certainly in Abraham and Torok’s clinically oriented texts both ‘crypt’ and ‘phantom’ on the one hand arise as nosological terms for violent and rare pathological conditions that call for specific therapeutic interventions.54 Derrida’s ‘spectres’ on the other hand become yet another entry in the chain of undecidables at stake in the graphic play that underlies all presence, meaning and ontology. Nevertheless, the claim that the erection of a crypt or phantom is a rare pathological event is only part of the story in Abraham and Torok. We might say that they broadly repeat Freud’s gesture with regard to melancholia: introduced as a clinical, pathological condition in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, by the time of ‘The Ego and the Id’ it is used to designate a common and necessary process in healthy individuals essential to psychic health.55 For this reason, when Derrida writes of the question ‘What is a crypt?’ that: The form of this question will henceforth precede those that, ever since philosophy began, have been called first: what, originally, is a Thing? What is called Thinking? The Wolf Man’s Verbarium indicates that the Thing is to be thought out starting from the Crypt, the Thing as a ‘crypt effect.’ (D:F, xiii)



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he is not bending a clinical nosological category to some alien philosophical purpose, he is continuing Abraham’s project of showing how psychoanalysis supplants genetic phenomenology. Once again, by coming prior to the structure of thinghood investigated by the science of sciences, the crypt is a matter of the (non)science of the science of sciences. Through their analysis of the crypt, ‘an entirely different graphology, an entirely other topology, an entirely new theory of the symbol’ is evoked (D:F, xliv). We can see then that ‘incorporation’ functions both as a terrible pathological condition and one of the most common and necessary occurrences in our psychic constitution. We would suggest that it is a failure to appreciate Abraham’s broader philosophical concerns (expressed mainly in texts that are still not translated into English) that has often led to misinterpretations of Cryptonymie, which see Derrida’s ‘Fors’ as an attempt to move beyond their work, rather than as a memorial text that draws out and problematizes the broader and occasionally unclear implications of their works. We can take Torok’s comments on ‘Fors’ in her short preface to the French edition of The Shell and its Kernel as testimony to the proximity, though certainly not the identity, of their accounts of spectrality.56 In turning to the crypt, it is worth citing at length one of the early descriptions of the crypt in Abraham and Torok’s works: The words that cannot be uttered, the scenes that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed – everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with his own topography. […] A whole world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and concealed existence. Sometimes in the dead of the night, when libidinal fulfilments have their way, the ghost of the crypt comes back to haunt the cemetery guard, giving him strange and incomprehensible signals, making him perform bizarre acts, or subjecting him to unexpected sensations. (A&T:SK, 130 [265–6])

Remembering that such directly presented imagery of ‘the other scene’ and its processes will be as much a fable as Freud’s neurological model, two key features of the crypt are revealed in this passage. First, the other is buried alive as a full-fledged person with their own psychic topography (that is, as a foreign Ego within the psyche); secondly, the original Ego comes to take on the role of a cemetery guard. With regard to the first point, the incorporated other is clearly far more than a set of memories, words, scenes or affects. Although the crypt is structured

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around an unavowable personal desire, what is incorporated in order to avoid addressing that desire is the full richness of a person who lives their ‘own separate and concealed existence’. Buried alive within an inaccessible fracture in the psyche, the encrypted other is of course nothing more than a particular ‘written’ material constellation – written as we have seen in the manner of a printed circuit board and functioning as a ciphering machine that transforms psychic material to protect its secret. It is only this, yet that is simultaneously to say that it is everything that the Ego is since it has an analogous (albeit smaller, less energized and less dense) structure. This new account of the Freudian ‘splitting of the ego [Ichspaltung]’ does not produce a rival Ego or lead to dissociative identity disorder since the foreign Ego is only a small pocket or cyst within the psyche. From this pocket the crypt plays the role of ‘a kind of “false unconscious,” an “artificial” unconscious lodged like a prosthesis, a graft, at the heart of an organ, within the divided self’ (D:F, xiii). On this model, the psyche becomes a cemetery littered with crypts. Constituted in the psyche by melancholic incorporation of the lost and absent, these multiple crypts are akin to both a plurality of unconsciouses and a plurality of Super‑egos, though the functional role played by a particular ‘ghost’ would not necessarily resemble the incorporated parental injunctions of the actual Superego. Derrida follows Abraham in describing this psychic topography in terms of a forum and of fors (vaults or safes): ‘the crypt constructs another, more inward forum like a closed rostrum of a speaker’s box, a safe: sealed, and thus internal to itself, a secret interior within the public square, but, by the same token, outside it, external to the interior […] That is the condition, and the stratagem, of the cryptic enclave’s ability to isolate, to protect, to shelter from any penetration’ (D:F, xiv). We are now in a position to understand the technical distinction that emerges in Abraham’s later works between a ‘crypt’ and a ‘phantom’. Put very briefly, a crypt is caused by the repression of one’s own unavowable desire towards a lost object while a phantom is an inherited crypt: ‘If the crypt is a secret psychic configuration arising from an individual’s own life experiences, the phantom represents the interpersonal and transgenerational consequences of the silence imposed by the crypt.’57 A phantom occurs with the mise en abyme structure of the incorporation of a psychic topography that is itself already fractured by a crypt with its own secret. We can judge then that the Wolf Man was haunted by a phantom since the topography he incorporated when his sister committed suicide was already riven by a crypt due to his sister’s troubled relationship to their father: ‘the Wolf Man was only vicariously a melancholic. His crypt



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did not in fact contain his own illegitimate object (as would be the case with a genuine “melancholic”), but someone else’s: his father’s daughter’ (A&T:SK, 148–9 [300–1]). To cure the Wolf Man, a task Freud never achieved, would have required the psychoanalysis of his internalized sister. As stated in the section of Cryptonomie entitled ‘Can the Wolf Man be Analyzed, and How?’: The analysis would have had to extend to the paternal grandparents and even to the great-grandparents, so that the Wolf Man could be situated within the libidinal lineage from which he was descended. Under such circumstances it is conceivable that the extreme emotional charge of the traumatic scandal would gradually have been diluted by the introjection of the stormy instinctual existence of his forebears. (A&T:C, 75–6 [224–5])

While clinically the phantom structure is far rarer than the crypt, akin to a lottery winner’s child winning the lottery, just as the crypt can also be seen as a common and even ubiquitous structure at stake in mental life, one can argue that every crypt contains phantoms, each with its own phantoms, and so on. One could see the phantom structure as a material-linguistic account of Freud’s otherwise Lamarckian assertions about the transgenerational inheritance of the murder of the primal father. Although Abraham’s technical concept of the phantom opens a fascinating account of a broader political realm of historical trauma and the sins of the father, with regard to a specific call to responsibility in eulogy we can never know if it comes from a crypt or a phantom. It is only in a therapeutic intervention that it becomes critical to know whether the secret being guarded is one’s own repression or the secret of the dead. The crypt is already an account of the kind of spectrality we are interested in in eulogy. As is clear from our earlier quote, there are ghosts of the crypt haunting the cemetery guard independently of whether they are themselves haunted in turn by phantoms. Living separately inside us yet still haunting us, we already have the rudimentary outlines in place of the mechanism in the psyche that justifies the experience of eulogy as one where we stand before the dead, addressing them and having them respond to us. That I experience myself as addressing the dead themselves in eulogy, troubled by a desire to do justice to them, would no longer be a mere fiction or absurdity, even if the real persistence of the dead within the psyche remains rooted as an act of fantasy: ‘to speak to her, to her, as one does without pretending to friends who have disappeared’ (D:WM, 172). We can see how these encrypted others would be entirely capable of what we earlier called ‘material novelty’ rather than simply ‘subjective novelty’. Nevertheless, it is

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crucial to appreciate that we would never know whether a disturbance truly has its origin in a crypt or whether what we take to be the manifestation of a certain dead other really ‘is’ them. We enter here into parallel doubts to those encountered with regard to the Levinasian account of the equivocal trace of a trace. Whether a particular trace actually is the trace of the wholly other is irrelevant since the effect of alterity (the guilt in the face of the other’s mortality that shocks the subject from animal egoism to human ethics, freeing us of the nausea of Being and committing us to the other and the permanent vigilance of bad conscience and political calculation) occurs in splendid indifference to the facts of the matter. The world is transformed by the wholly other even if there is no wholly other and only because we do not know whether there is a wholly other. Although theoretically it need not be, the very fact that we simply cannot be solipsists shows that we have already made this pledge in our lived existence. In the case of the crypt, while reflection on any particular unconscious manifestations can never provide evidence that one has truly incorporated within one’s psyche an other with their own separate existence and psychic topography, that it is actually them who is there, the lived experience we engage in through eulogy shows us that we have similarly already made that pledge in our lived existence. Although theoretically in eulogy I am uncertain whether I am really addressing the dead or merely talking to my fellow mourners, at the level of lived experience I show myself to be committed to them through the very pressure to do justice to them. This is simply what the crypt itself is – the refusal to accept that the dead are gone. If one did not believe they were still there, then there would be no crypt and there would be only a corpse equivalent to a table or chair, a perfectly rational position whose lived maintenance is almost as difficult as solipsism. What Abraham and Torok offer then is a mechanism through which we can render intelligible and reasonable the feeling that we are standing before the dead, tormented by the urge to do justice to them. Beyond this, we will see that however apparently baroque the mechanism of the crypt might at first appear, in Derrida’s works it becomes an account of common and even mundane experiences that rarely evoke wonder and philosophical analysis – most notably the internal dialogue with others that is a near constant feature of inner life. Once we have learnt the features of the crypt structure, we will find it is almost ubiquitous in Derrida’s eulogies, even when there is no direct reference to psychoanalysis and mourning: ‘the place to hold and the speech to be held or the word to be kept, the experience of what is twice held untenable, is at the same time the most common experience of friendship’ (D:WM, 171).



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We can already see that Abraham and Torok’s position combines the Levinasian and Freudian trace. There is a disturbance in presence that equivocally suggests its source in an unpresentable spatial topography (Freudian traceb) that is the encryption of the wholly other as other, an immemorial past (Levinasian traceb). Furthermore, although to simplify matters we have decided to avoid engaging with the Heideggerian account of the trace in this book, one could easily import Derrida’s reflections on die frühe Spur of ‘The Anaximander Fragment’ from ‘Différance’ here. In accordance with our formula that every tracea is the tracea of a traceb, Heidegger’s particular graphic involves an encountered tracea in language itself that points towards the traceb of an original revelatory experience that has withdrawn. For Heidegger, this is a matter of the forgetting of the ontological difference revealed to the pre-Socratics that has left a trace in the structure of language: ‘The “early trace” of difference is lost in an invisibility without return, and yet its very loss is sheltered, retained, seen, delayed. In a text’ (D:M, 24). While for Abraham and Torok it is a matter of one’s own language (rather than language itself) being marked by encryption, Heidegger’s trace captures something important about Abraham and Torok’s account of language that is quite alien to Freud. In structuralist terms, while for Freud the distortions of language by the unconscious take place at the level of parole – of particular utterances or acts of memory that are distorted or momentarily stalled – for Heidegger, Abraham and Torok there are distortions of langue that are investigated through translation and etymology. A fuller picture of the role of encryption in incorporation would thus call for the articulation of the graphics of the trace at stake in the thought of all three thinkers of the three determinate angles on death. One might even ambitiously attempt a rhetorical flourish that would map Derrida’s distinction of the three facets of the crypt in ‘Fors’ – topoi, death, cipher – such that topoi relates to the Freudian trace, death to the Levinasian trace and cipher to the Heideggerian trace. If our interest in ghosts follows on from Derrida’s claim that justice calls us to live in ‘the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts’ (D:SM, xviii), then Abraham and Torok’s account would run into severe limitations since the crypt is produced and defined by silence: while ‘Introjection speaks; “denomination” is its “privileged” medium. Incorporation keeps still, speaks only to silence or ward off intruders from its secret place’ (D:F, xvii). Even if incorporation allows the ghost to persist, to be addressed and to manifest, it seems that this could never create the situation of the face-to-face of responsive and responsible saying. Indeed, if introjection appeared to be the reduction of the other to the same through

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language while incorporation seemed to respect and preserve the other as other, was this preservation not a lie covering a simple refusal to address the other? Sealing the loss of the object, but also marking the refusal to mourn […] the paradox of a foreign body preserved as foreign but by the same token excluded from a self that thenceforth deals not with the other, but only with itself. The more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it excludes it. (D:F, xvi–xvii)

If, for a moment, incorporation seemed the more Levinasian path in opposition to introjection, it has now taken on the aspect of only being another kind of catastrophic failure of the other, producing the structure we have referred to as a negative double bind between Scylla and Charybdis. Returning to our second point with regard to Abraham and Torok’s earlier description of the crypt, even if it was only a poetic turn of phrase the Ego has been cast by them in a very specific role – that of a cemetery guard. Such a guard obsessively watching over a single crypt – making sure that it remains firmly sealed, wholly other, untouched by the outside – would perhaps be analogous to the elected of Levinasian ethics who are pledged to not reducing the other to the same. Similarly, once we consider the harassed cemetery guard trying to watch over an entire graveyard of such crypts – racing around after troublemakers, returning wandering ghosts to their homes, endlessly making calculations and forced to compare the incomparable debts owed to each individual crypt – then we have a reality analogous to the Levinasian account of a politics. On this front Abraham and Torok seem to offer a rather fantastical image of multiple incorporations within which a specifically Levinasian ethical duty to the dead, rather than only the dying, is conceivable – even if this is only produced through a fantasy that renders the dead quasi-living ghosts with particular needs who make demands on us. Nevertheless, in terms of the politics of mourning we are working towards we cannot defend this model of the Ego as a cemetery guard as superior to the Levinasian political subject. Through only being oriented towards the dead, the cemetery guard is as constrained in his ethical purview as Levinas was in his implicit limitation of ethical responsibility to dying others. We have seen that, for Abraham and Torok, incorporation demands loss and can only occur with the dead or absent. While we might imagine a cemetery guard with other distinct duties to living agents, it is inevitable that a subject with distinctly structured duties to the living and the dead will subordinate one to the other. Derrida gestures towards this in his assertion that justice must recognize ‘in its principle’ the respect for the dead – a justice worthy of the name



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in the initial structure of the call of responsibility must be indifferent to whether the other is living or dead. Of course, in the negotiations and bad conscience of political calculations that follow on from that call it may well be that in many or even all circumstances we decide in favour of fulfilling our duties to the living rather than the dead; however, what Derrida suggests as essential is that the underlying ethico-political account of the call of responsibility itself should not have decided in advance in favour of the living or the dead. If we judge that the needs of the living take precedence, it is through a particular decision that we are responsible for making and that we shoulder the burden for, rather than being because the nature of the duty itself arises from a different principle. A simple modification of the model of the cemetery guard seems to offer a rather different set of possibilities. If the fantasy of incorporation is not specifically attached to death but, like Ferenczi’s introjection, involved in an ongoing manner in every object-relation, whether it is with the living or the dead, then an alternative model of intersubjectivity is suggested: one in which we always engage with any other, living or dead, through an economy of crypts. On such a model of the intrapsychic cemetery, the call of responsibility felt by its guard would be splendidly indifferent to whether a particular crypt happened to encrypt an inhabitant who was alive or dead. If incorporation has always already taken place in parallel with the first beginnings of introjection, then we seem to have precisely the kind of general responsibility we are after. We could call this, following Derrida, originary or pre-originary mourning: ‘From the first moment, friends become, as a result of their situation, virtual survivors’, ‘the relation to the other (in itself outside myself, outside myself in myself) will never be distinguishable from a bereaved apprehension’ (D:WM, 171, D:A, 61). At the same time, however satisfactory such an account would be with regard to our ethico‑political aims, we cannot simply redefine an established psychoanalytic concept in accordance with what we would ethically like to be the case. If in the above reflections we have broadly followed a movement of reversing the hierarchy of the binary opposition between Abraham and Torok’s introjection and incorporation in favour of incorporation (introjection as nominative language being the reduction of alterity to the same), then the next stage of a stereotypical deconstruction would be to put in question the tenability of the border itself. As has already been hinted at above, both of the major puzzles outlined above (that the crypt cannot allow a language relation to the other since it is defined by silence and that incorporation only occurs after the loss of the other) would stand very differently if there were no such thing as pure introjection or pure incorporation – if the flow of introjection from the first

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contact onwards already involves an indigestible morsel that, stuck in the throat, is incorporated from the start. Of course, that Freudian mourning and melancholia are never pure is so commonly asserted that it has become a cliché. For example, in closing the edited volume Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Butler states that many of the essays in the book had showed that: ‘It may be that the distinction finally between mourning and melancholia does not hold, not only for the reasons that became apparent in Freud, but also because they are, inevitably, experienced in a certain configuration of simultaneity and succession.’58 What we are advancing with Derrida’s originary mourning however is clearly something rather different from this claim. It is not merely that, in loss, one’s response is neither pure mourning nor pure melancholia; rather, the claim is that all contact with others (living or dead) is already involved in both of these movements. We have seen that, faced with the choice between the processes of introjection that use denominative language to reduce the other to the same and the fantasy of incorporation that keeps the other ‘sauf en moi’ (‘safe in me’ but only, since unengaged with, anywhere, ‘save in me’), both options fail to engage with the other as other. This criterion of the ‘appropriation and safekeeping of the other as other’ when raised as ‘the deciding factor’ in choosing whether introjection or incorporation is more just to the dead would lead us to assert that both are catastrophic – one appropriating without keeping safe, the other keeping safe beyond engagement. Nevertheless, according to Derrida this very question by forcing us to consider introjection and incorporation in terms of their engagement with the other actually serves ‘to blur the very line it draws between introjection and incorporation, through an essential and irreducible ambiguity’ (D:F, xvii). All three subsections of ‘Fors’ – topoi, death and cipher – revolve around this blurring. While we cannot repeat all of Derrida’s extensive arguments here, what is established (remembering that this analysis was endorsed by Torok), is that not only ‘the conceptual boundary line’ but also ‘the topographical divider separating introjection from incorporation is rigorous in principle, but in fact does not rule out all sorts of original compromises’ (D:F, xvii–xviii). Derrida shows across his essay that the silence imposed by an incorporation is never absolute – ‘as if the ghostly bodies, the mere silhouettes, could go on floating past each other through the funereal silence of the grounds without ever exchanging a sign’ (D:F, xxxvi). Clearly a crypt would literally be nothing without crypt‑effects: the production of a chain of cryptophores that offer the possibility of their recognition and deciphering. A pure incorporation that



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offered only silence would have as much existence as the emperor’s new clothes. Instead, ‘the cryptophore, having taken the bite (the bit) without being able to digest it, forced to keep it in accessible and impossible reserve, must constantly betray the cipher that seals and conceals it’ (D:F, xxxix). It is not only in analysis that the crypt betrays itself, even in everyday life the very existence of the crypt in its mechanical encryption of forbidden material testifies to the possibility of that material being introjected. Indeed, despite being characterized by silence, Abraham indicates in Jonas that the repression of the crypt is not exempt from the Jungian principle that everything unconscious is projected and thus encountered in the world (albeit in ciphered form): ‘By grace of this subterfuge, the text of the drama that writes itself behind his inner safe [for intérieur], will play itself out in front, on the outer safe [for extérieur], if we dare say it.’59 Although incorporation imposes silence, ‘the incorporation is never finished. It should even be said: It never finished anything off. First, for the following general reason: It is worked through by introjection. An inaccessible introjection, perhaps, but for which the process of incorporation always carries within it, inscribed in its very possibility, the “nostalgic vocation”’ (D:F, xxi). This blurring of the borders responds well to what we referred to as our second puzzle – if there is no pure introjection, then the other has always already been incorporated and is encountered from the beginning through a crypt in pre-originary mourning – yet it seems to do little for our first puzzle. Although silence is not absolute, although incorporation never finishes off introjection’s possibility, the actual language that breaks through the cryptic ciphers amounts only to the reduction of the other to the same. We would seem to have not gained speaking but only a said content. In any moment of language, based on nomination and oriented by personal growth, we only attain Scylla over Charybdis as much as silence was Charybdis over Scylla. Nevertheless, that the crypt always allows ‘all sorts of original compromises’ means that any double bind can be ‘endured in a thousand different ways’ (D:RP, 36), allowing the possibility of plotting a unique path of compromise. If this negotiation of a compromise is guided by vigilant, responsible attention to the singular other, then perhaps this merits the title speaking? This model would not only apply to the lost other but to every other in so far as alterity is always encountered through crypts, that is, through inexhaustible secrets that orient us towards them: it is a question of love, indeed, but a love that appropriates what it loves to make to it the thing it loves […] We shall be wondering whether, in death and

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in mourning, things are not the same as they are in love, and whether loving, then, does not mean loving so as to make it one’s lovable thing, to the point of having it at one’s disposal, to love eating and drinking it alive, keeping it in oneself, burying or burning it to keep it living-dead in oneself or right up close to oneself, which can also be as far as can be from oneself. (D:BS2, 121)

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The Address of Eulogy

6.1  Tracing a path between two catastrophes The most common of experiences Over the course of this book we have worked to put in place a framework that will allow Derrida’s eulogies to open their riches to us. At a broad level, we believe the weakness of several texts focused on those eulogies has been an ignorance of the specificities of both introjection and incorporation in Abraham and Torok’s works, the relevance of which to Derrida’s eulogies can certainly not be circumscribed to those texts in which they, or even their technical vocabulary, is directly invoked. Beyond this, we have established five basic points that guide our approach. First, we have outlined the mechanisms at stake in the articulation of textual bodies on the general text that allow the self-unravelling of particular textual bodies to open the chance for a serious discussion among discourses. Secondly, we have seen how multiple unpresentable graphics are articulated beneath the sheaf of a single mark. In particular, we have suggested that an account of the graphically diverse ‘trace of a trace’ movements at stake in Levinas and Freud articulate to connect the past that has never been present of the wholly other beyond phenomenologically constituted spatio-temporality with a fable of preserved psychic writing centred on an encryption mechanism that keeps the other in the inaccessible vault of their tomb. Thirdly, an account of Levinas has been offered that shows him principally as a thinker of the constitution of lived political experience (the negotiation, vigilance and the permanent bad conscience that is native to our situation as agents constantly forced to calculate between incalculables) rather than a thinker of the overwhelming ethical encounter whose sublimation constitutes political reality. Fourthly, we have shown that Levinas’s position does not depend on the existence or reality of the wholly other and their infinite alterity. Instead, Levinas’s argument depends on

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a necessary theoretical ignorance with regard to whether the ambiguous trace is actually a trace of the withdrawn other, an ignorance that allows the encountered trace to nevertheless function as an escape beyond Being through the excessive emotion that the prospect of losing the other as the singular escape beyond Being evokes. This account runs into significant problems when it comes to the dead rather than the dying and, therefore, cannot offer an account of Derrida’s justice worthy of the name without supplement. Lastly, we have seen that Freudian psychoanalysis, as extended by Abraham and Torok, offers a detailed account of the psychic mechanisms at stake in the dead being preserved in the psyche as separate and active individuals with their own psychic topo­graphy through the repression of language, or at least how we can encounter what we will inevitably in our lived experience take to be such incorporated figures. The culmination of all of these strands is an account of pre-originary mourning in which the relation to the other, even the living other, goes by way of cryptic incorporation and can never be distinguished from a bereaved apprehension. It is important not to underplay the force of Derrida’s regularly invoked specifications ‘justice if there is such a thing’ and ‘justice worthy of the name’. It is not simply that justice is not truly or fully done if anyone meriting justice is ignored. If it were, then it is at least conceivable that some proof that the dead have no existence would render delivering justice to the living adequate since every entity with a genuine claim would be getting what it deserves. Instead, regardless of the physical or metaphysical structure of existence, prior to and beyond all ontology, the statement that justice worthy of the name would have to involve responsibility for the dead (‘[e]ven and especially if this, the spectral, is not’ (D:SM, xvii)) is a condition for there being justice at all: that is, for there to be an unconditional motivating force or categorical imperative rather than hypothetical imperatives adopted to attain certain optional ends. If we happen to live in a universe in which the dead are entirely annihilated and only the living have real claims on us, then one must either say that this is a universe without justice (rendering those supposedly ‘real’ claims invalid) or that we must do better than the universe. Of course, since in our actual living practices we are already oriented towards the dead, as experienced particularly directly when enduring the aporias of eulogy, we are already doing better than such a universe. This ‘doing better’ occurs irrespective of whether the dead actually persist in their proffered internal abode through an intrapsychic writing that preserves what is truly their topography and alterity, or whether there is merely the bare writing of private memories that we mistakenly take to be a trace of the other. Thought experiments posing ‘What if …?’ statements about the



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genuine nature of our situation are simply out of keeping with what it is to exist in a world not only where the answer to those questions is unknown and unknowable, but where knowledge either way would invalidate the very structures of responsibility at stake. What we have seen is that the ambiguous trace of the possibily internalized dead other must evoke a call demanding justice at the same principle level as that evoked by the living, which is possible precisely because the alterity of the living other is equally a matter of the glow of an enigmatic, equivocal and ambiguous trace rather than a positivity or a negativity (as it arguably was in Levinas’s earlier works such as Totality and Infinity) (L:OB, 12). What this indicates is that justice is not an issue of the administration of what is owed to that which is, even though it remains inseparable from responding responsively and responsibly to the singularities we encounter in the world in the mode of having already pledged ourselves to them as wholly other, irreplaceable and more essential to us than ourselves since, as we will see in more detail below, their death is not merely the end of their world but the end of the world. Before we turn to the eulogies, it is useful to see how embryonic thoughts of those structures that would become pre-originary mourning are at work in one of Derrida’s very first papers, 1963’s ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’. This paper begins with a discussion of what Derrida calls the unhappy consciousness of the disciple. Although incorporation and the crypt were years from being formulated, it is notable that this was the year when Abraham, Derrida’s close friend already for over six years, first turned to the theme of introjection in the unpublished ‘The “Crime” of Introjection’, a short text littered with guilt, internalized imagos and cannibalism (A:SK ~ [123–31]). Referring to his teacher Foucault, Derrida addresses the difficulty of beginning to speak in his own name and to criticize his master: to ‘articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple’ (D:WD, 36). The internalized voice of Foucault that Derrida is in interminable dialogue with inhibits independent speech, recalling the original raising of speech in relation to the parents when emerging from infancy. Derrida discusses how in such a situation: the disciple knows that he alone finds himself already challenged by the master’s voice within him that precedes his own. He feels himself indefinitely challenged, or rejected or accused; as a disciple, he is challenged by the master who speaks within him and before him, to reproach him for making this challenge and to reject it in advance, having elaborated it before him; and having interiorized the master, he is also challenged by the disciple that he himself is. This interminable

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unhappiness of the disciple perhaps stems from the fact that he does not yet know – or is still concealing from himself – that the master, like real life, may always be absent. The disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror, the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak. (D:WD, 37)

This description, coming at the very beginning of the talk, evokes a scene the audience is expected to relate to. This is a description of a common experience faced by any young academic beginning to write independently. The internalized voices reproaching the self are not part of an account of madness but of the most common of mundane experiences – the immediate though rarely mentioned fact that one’s stream of consciousness is not simply a monologue but involves dialogue with all kinds of absent internalized figures. At a certain point, this loved internalized voice that has previously enriched the self, pushing one ahead with warm paternal guidance even when the master was absent, must be silenced. To put forward his thoughts with regard to Foucault’s project as an independent voice that has learnt from Foucault yet is no longer simply a constructed reflection of him, a type of de‑clinging is required that might legitimately take the name ‘mourning work’. We can distinguish then between two processes, both of which can be seen as parts of one’s growth and development: the establishment of the internalized voice of the other as a guide and its overcoming to produce an independent act of speech that negotiates with that voice and others. The second process is certainly not a final silencing of the internalized Foucault – the dialogue with Foucault will continue throughout Derrida’s life and continue to enrich his work – though the partial mourning of starting to engage with Foucault leads to him becoming a significantly less overwhelming and inhibiting voice among voices within the psyche’s criss-crossing streams of thought. In Derrida’s eulogies we will find that Derrida’s ‘contemporaries’ (those who nevertheless have ‘times’ that ‘remain infinitely heterogeneous’ to the self ’s time, as in Levinas’s trace of an immemorial past) that ‘inhabit the zones most difficult to avoid are not authoritarian “superegos” with power at their disposal’. A more subtle, cryptic structure allows them a rather different ‘additional authority, an influence, radiance, or presence that leads their ghost to places where they are not and from which their ghost will never return. It is this, in short, that makes one always ask, more or less explicitly: What does he or she think about this? Not that one is ready to agree that they are right, a priori and in all cases’ (D:WM, 55–6). While the process establishing this inner-Foucault seems to lend itself to the label ‘incorporation’, it seems more difficult to understand it as ‘mourning’ and



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particularly ‘failed mourning’. A slightly peculiar thought experiment might assist here. If we imagine a world in which Foucault himself was constantly present in the flesh – actually engaging in dialogue as the dominant party offering critical commentary, peeping over Derrida’s shoulder whenever he wrote and aware of his deepest inner thoughts – in this rather fantastical situation there would be no need, nor even any opportunity, to establish an inner-Foucault. The construction of this internalized figure, particularly in his original and most inhibitory function, seems to depend on the fact that Foucault himself was, at least at some time and in some places, absent. This example is analogous to how the Freudian Super-ego as the voice of conscience would never be established if the father was permanently present in his role as judge and punisher, just as in Freudian mythology the band of brothers only begin to experience guilt after the father’s murder. Of course, even if Derrida is implicitly aware that his thought in 1963 is running parallel to Abraham’s turn to introjection, that such an internalized voice was a matter of pre-originary mourning, incorporation, crypts and secret words excluded from the possibility of articulation was all still to come. In now turning to Derrida’s eulogies, we must very briefly address the contentious issue of the selection of eulogies to be discussed. If our explicit intention were to prove that there is some set pattern that is common to all of Derrida’s eulogies, such that they all articulate our three determinate angles on death, it would be important to show this feature at work in those eulogies that appear least amenable to our reading; otherwise our claim could be disproved through raising a counter-example. On the other hand, if each eulogy produces its own unique structure of mourning in accordance with the singularity of the dead, it would be more important to find eulogies that clash with each other as evidence for the position. To give a small range of examples, we might point to how Derrida will address Lyotard in eulogy directly as ‘you [vous]’ though with Barthes he refers to the ‘good side’ of classical funeral oration being that it allows one ‘to call out directly to the dead, sometimes very informally [tutoyer]’; in his eulogy to Althusser he states ‘his voice within me is insisting that I not pretend to speak to him’ while in Kofman’s case Derrida talks of speaking ‘to her, to her, as one does without pretending to friends who have disappeared’ (D:WM, 215, 51, 117, 172). Pushing this line of thought further, perhaps we should not talk about a set of eulogies at all if the gesture that binds them into a collection of texts assumes some commonality between the losses – with Kofman, Derrida will refuse to talk about ‘mourning’ in general: ‘this incisive, singular, and unappeasable suffering that I simply could not bear, precisely out of friendship,

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to transfer onto someone else, and even less onto some conceptual generality that would not be Sarah’ (D:WM, 172). As a fourth option, if the eulogies suggested themselves for investigation because they are the point in Derrida’s oeuvre where the clearest image of certain key political categories such as responsibility, negotiation and decision are at stake, then we would seem to be justified in further selecting among them those texts that display such categories most intuitively and forcefully. No doubt all four incompatible purposes are at stake here, guiding our choice in contradictory directions. If we have prioritized the latter path, it is because we are particularly interested in the pedagogical dimension of learning something from Derrida’s eulogies that will be relevant to political civility, rather than simply making a point about Derrida’s texts. Of course, the difficulties above assume we can identify the eulogies within Derrida’s total collection of works, which itself seems difficult if ‘all work is also the work of mourning’ and one always ‘writes for a specific dead person, so that perhaps in every text there is a dead man or woman to be sought, the singular figure of death to which a text is destined and which signs’ (D:WM, 142, D:EO, 53). Despite this last difficulty, we can nevertheless refer to roughly 20 texts as ‘explicit’ acts of eulogy due simply to the context of their delivery – these are texts read at funerals, presented in newspapers or journals following a death, or speeches delivered at memorial conferences and similar occasions. Of course, any such definition of ‘explicit’ eulogy will encounter problems determining its limits, such as how well one has to have known the other ‘in real life’ for a tribute at a memorial conference to become an act of eulogy, or whether a text such as Badiou’s essay for his teacher ‘Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968)’ is still a work of eulogy when the memorial colloquium it was written for and presented at was held in 2006.1 The reader can hopefully sense how such preliminary discussions and justifications could run on for pages, so in the interests of brevity we will simply silence these debates through an act of largely arbitrary decision. In this chapter we will focus on the proper name in ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, the tracing of a path between catastrophes in Memoires for Paul de Man, the gaze of the dead in ‘By Force of Mourning, and the decision in ‘Rams’.

The simplest thing Turning to the text often referred to as Derrida’s first eulogy, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, we would like to begin by simply showing some of the ‘technology’ we introduced in the previous chapters at work in this eulogy.



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The first oddity that strikes the reader is the title’s playful pluralization of ‘deaths’, a title lacking solemnity to the point of risking disrespect: ‘the somewhat indecent violence of this plural’ (D:WM, 58). The form of the piece is also peculiar: a large set of isolated, independent paragraphs – some running for several pages and others just a few lines – each effectively starting to eulogize anew and clearly resembling the structure of Barthes’s final work Camera Lucida.2 These are simple examples of decisions that Derrida takes in responding to the singularity of Barthes without constituting a set of rules for good eulogy. These decisions respond to Barthes’s own style, irony and playfulness: ‘he did not like a certain pathos with which fidelity is so easily charged […] which so quickly becomes tired, drab, listless, stale, forbidding, unfaithful’ (D:WM, 67). It is Barthes himself who demands a eulogy that would be quite inappropriate for many other figures, just as a particular rhythm is appropriate in a poem on one subject but quite inappropriate in a poem on another. There is no single account in this text of the nature of the title’s plural. At times the deaths of Roland Barthes are those ‘of his relatives, those deaths that must have inhabited him, situating places and solemn moments, orienting tombs in his inner space’ or the plurality at stake in ‘everything he wrote on death’ (D:WM, 52). At other times, the plural refers to the two catastrophic deaths at stake in the impossible choice between incorporation and introjection: ‘to remain silent […] out of zealous devotion or gratitude’, to ‘be content with just quoting’ and ‘efface oneself ’ and ‘end up saying and exchanging nothing’, or, alternatively, to speak ‘avoiding all quotation’ such that ‘what is addressed to or spoken of Roland Barthes truly comes from the other, from the living friend’, which would also ‘risk making him disappear again, as if one could add more death to death’. Between these catastrophes we are left ‘with having to do and not do both at once, with having to correct one infidelity by the other. From one death, the other: is this the uneasiness that told me to begin with a plural?’ (D:WM, 45). Other pairs of catastrophes that pluralize Barthes’s death with different second deaths are also offered: ‘speaking of him, here and now, as one speaks of one of the living or of one of the dead. In both cases I disfigure, I wound, I put to sleep, or I kill’ (D:WM, 44). In yet another sense, the plural accounts for how ‘the other dead in us though other still’ is ambiguously ‘in me? In you? In us?’ where ‘these are not the same thing, already so many different instances’ with their different deaths (D:WM, 52, 35). As in Camera Lucida, the text itself has ‘this “air” that becomes more and more dense, more and more haunted and peopled with ghosts’ (D:WM, 66). The subversive force of this pluralization of deaths can partly be accounted for as a gesture opposed to Heidegger’s heroic seriousness in his epic account of

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death. Rather than the singular anxiety-provoking death that is one’s ownmost to the extent of individualizing Dasein against the ‘they’, a plurality of deaths fractures such self-identity and favours dissemination over gathering. We will see below that, if the other related to in bereaved memory – and we have seen Derrida say that the other is always related to in bereaved memory – is pluralized, then in a Levinasian sense the relation to a singular other is always a matter of politics rather than ethics. The plural deaths, ghosts and traces through which the other persists and is ambiguously encountered renders them their own third, even while they are alive. This does not merely mean we are always already negotiating and making decisions between facets of the singular other conceived in terms of fractured inheritances, it renders the force that compels negotiation problematic. It is here that the complexity of Derrida’s relation to Levinasian ethics would have to be interrogated. While we have seen Levinas as a genetic phenomenologist, in his work the (at least hypothetical) constitutive stages of egoism and ethics are required in order to account for lived political experience. However, the place, role and possibility of such stages becomes ever more intangible if even the hypothetical relation to a singular other is disturbed by a pluralization where they play the role of their own third. This fundamental problem is why there is no consistent post-psychoanalytic reformulation of the Levinasian position. Levinas’s discourse can only be articulated with psycho­ analysis within the tracing of a particular text, no new reformulated system is produced. Turning back to the eulogy itself, in the first paragraph Derrida produces a fresh iteration of one of his most famous and ubiquitous claims: the proper name ‘says death even while the bearer of it is still living […] the proper name alone and by itself forcefully declares the unique disappearance of the unique […] Death inscribes itself right in the name’ (D:WM, 34). The gap between a person and their name will be, for Derrida, one of the major sites of fracturing. While the proper name is a major focus of attention throughout Derrida’s oeuvre, we would like to draw attention to two major features that emerge in this discussion. On the one hand, a proper name not only continues to function in a person’s absence and even after their death, the name is apparently indifferent to whether its bearer is alive or dead. We use names perfectly well regardless of the referenced other’s current state or the broader ontological picture we happen to hold of a world in which the dead exist, persist or are simply and irrevocably annihilated. This is rather uncanny if we assume that a proper name functions as a pointing device: how can we effectively point at someone despite being



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entirely uncertain of their present mode of Being. For example, Abraham and Torok spent five years analysing the Wolf Man’s case study, only to discover he was still alive. The entity they had been perfectly effectively discussing using the proper name ‘Sergei’ was not merely a word designating traces in archived memory banks (whether psychic or published) but still an active agent in the world, one who went on to outlive Abraham. At the same time, when referring to anybody I believe to be living, yet cannot directly see, it is always unknowable whether the bearer of the name is still actually a subject living in the world or if they now only exist ‘in us’. In a world of finite beings it is through the gift of a proper name that a person principally persists beyond death – it is what they leave behind that is most proper to them and around which the legacy of their works and deeds is condensed. The material, mortal body is supplemented through the gift of the name with an ideal and apparently immortal secondary existence. The practical importance of proper names comes into focus if we try to imagine how a society might function without them, while their emotional importance in our psychic economy is testified to when we consider either what we commonly refer to as injuries to someone’s name (often experienced as piercingly as bodily injuries) or the role of tomb stones, war memorials or readings of lists of names of victims of major tragedies.3 It is also through the proper name, particularly in the form of a signature, that a person can charge others with fulfilling their desires across spatio-temporal distances and even beyond their death through a last will and testament. Of course, the name or signature can, like any trace, be effaced or ignored: its ideal immortality is illusory, as we see in dictatorships where the traces of historical figures are regularly erased from the history books. We might also consider the many wills that have gone unheeded, such as Kafka’s request to Max Brod that his papers be burnt, such that we see the fantasmatic status of the power we believe the name grants us when, in reality, we are delivered in death to the other: ‘absolutely without defense, disarmed, in their hands’ (D:BSv2, 126). On the other hand, against the above, surely the functioning of the proper name changes absolutely with death: When I say Roland Barthes it is certainly him whom I name, him beyond his name. But since he himself is now inaccessible to this appellation, since this nomination cannot become a vocation, address, or apostrophe (supposing that this possibility revoked today could have ever been pure), it is him in me that I name, toward him in me, in you, in us that I pass through his name. What happens around him and is said about him remains between us. (D:WM, 46)

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If we exclude the bracketed qualification, Derrida’s claim here would seem to be that the function of Barthes’s name has been entirely transformed with his death. From previously being an appellation to ‘him beyond his name’, it is now addressed to ‘him in me, in you, in us’. Even if the same sentence were uttered, it would have an entirely different referential structure at stake in it. It is the bracketed qualification that changes everything, putting in question the idea that there ever was a pure vocation, address or apostrophe. Derrida hints that ‘if his name is no longer his, was it ever? I mean simply, uniquely?’ (D:WM, 45). There is certainly an undeniable and important transformation in what we might call the ‘objective’ situation surrounding Barthes. From his death onwards everything involving him will always remain only ‘between us’ and the words we say (even those addressed to him) will never reach ‘he himself ’. That even words addressed to him, as in eulogy, ‘will no longer reach him […] must be the starting point of my reflection […] Barthes himself is no longer there. We must hold fast to this evidence, to its excessive clarity, and continually return to it as if to the simplest thing’ (D:WM, 35). Yet what if there was never any subjective orientation towards him, even while he was living, that was uncontaminated by the ‘him in me, in you, in us’? Derrida suggests that, in so far as we ever had a relation with ‘him beyond his name’, that only ever occurred by way of the other in the self. This is somewhat equivalent to Derrida’s claim that there is no such thing as perception: Mourning begins at this point. But when? For even before the unqualifiable event called death, interiority (of the other in me, in you, in us) had already begun its work. With the first nomination, it preceded death as another death would have done. (D:WM, 46)

This interiority is not simply a matter of introjection but of incorporation and the establishment of an enigmatic crypt. We always relate to the other – living or dead – through their crypt. As a second point about the proper name: it does not work or does no work. All predicative use of language works at the work of mourning, obscuring the absolute singularity of the other under the common properties of the same: ‘The work of mourning is not one work among others. All work involves this transformation, this appropriating idealization, this internalization that characterizes “mourning”’ (D:WT, 79). Only the proper name respects the other as other, refusing appropriating idealization at the cost of saying nothing and making no progress. The proper name is not properly a part of language: it ascribes no



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property, recognizing and reclaiming no unconscious investment. We might say then that the proper name respects an encrypted other’s secret. To understand our often ignored investment in proper names, we would have to launch a genealogy running back to James Frazer’s ‘savages’ who, supposedly unable ‘to discriminate clearly between words and things’, believed in ‘a real and substantial bond which unites’ a person and his name. It was this that allowed magic to ‘be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person.’4 Related material emerges in Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of the Nambikwara in Tristes Tropiques. Forbidden from making use of proper names, they refer to each other using imposed nicknames: ‘Either Portuguese names, like Julio, Jose-Maria, Luisa; or sobriquets such as Lebre, hare, or Assucar, sugar.’ Lévi-Strauss’s famous account of persuading the young girls of the tribe to reveal the proper names of the adults forms a major point of discussion in Of Grammatology (D:OG, 110–15). We can see then the basic demand, supposedly located at the beginning of human history, for the pronom or nickname. This produces a characteristic split between the daily proper name that is used and the secret properly proper name that, if known, would grant the other unimaginable power over the self. In a related context we might think of the discussion of the taboos on the proper names of the dead in Totem and Taboo; Freud discusses tribes in which to speak the name of the dead was believed to cause the dead spirit to exact violence on the living, leading members to give the dead a new substitute name that allows them to talk about the dead without the dead knowing (F:XIII, 57–8). This violent gesture of anti-eulogy, barring the tribe members from addressing the dead directly, would work to protect the incorporated other from introjection. In a more modern context we might think of the social force in terms of group cohesion offered by secret names, such as Derrida’s Jewish name ‘Elijah’.5 As these properties of the proper name pile up – a word‑thing that is outside of language, a bearer of magical power, secret yet always surreptitiously revealed – the gap between the ‘proper name’ and the ‘magic word’ at the heart of the incorporated crypt becomes less and less clear. When we devour a singular other, incorporating their psychic topography through establishing an intrapsychic encryption machine around the unavowable magic‑word of a desire, we might say that we are eating the other’s secret properly proper name. Derrida states this directly of the Wolf Man: ‘Something like his proper name is what his cryptonyms kept secret. Cryptonymy is said first of his proper name’ (D:F, xlv). All of the given names that served to identify him – ‘Sergei’ from his parents, ‘Pankejeff ’ from civil society, ‘The Wolf Man’ from Freud – would only be

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ciphers for the repressed magic word or properly proper name around which his psychic economy is structured – the idiom of his desire. Unfortunately, although this is Derrida’s clearest account of the connection between the crypt and the proper name, the Wolf Man’s case is complicated by the fact that he is haunted by the phantom of his sister. The secret name at the core of his psyche is not his own cryptic incorporation but the properly proper name of his sister, the magic word ‘tieret’: ‘The Thing (tieret) would perhaps be the Wolf Man’s name if there were any such thing here as a name or a proper name’ (D:F, xlv). Of course, it is only for Sergei that the true name of his sister was ‘tieret’ and ‘Anna Pankejeff ’ only a ciphered pronom. The crypt’s magic word is an unavowable desire caught between the psyche and its object, it is relation and encodes not a unique other but a unique relationship to a unique other. While a distinctive topography is established within the psyche that lives independently of the Ego, it is clearly constructed from that particular psyche’s perspective. In Kantian terms, what we have referred to as the properly proper name does not relate to a hypothetical ‘other in themselves’, it is the name of the other who is of the order of appearances, albeit in withdrawing from that order. All of this means that, assuming Abraham and Torok’s analysis is correct and that the ingested ‘tieret’ served for Sergei as the unavowable proper name of his sister – the crypt through which he related to her and that came to affect and infect everything else in his psyche – for another person who incorporated Anna there would be a distinct cryptic structure based around an entirely different magic word. This means that, within a community, the proper name Anna is more proper to Anna than a properly proper name like ‘tieret’ that refers to a singular relationship. The common proper name ‘Anna’ suffices since ‘it alone and by itself says death, all deaths in one’, functioning as the mark beneath which multiple graphic crypts play (D:WM, 34). Matters become even more complex when we consider the plurality of relationships we bear to each other; if each focuses on a distinct psychic crypt, then Anna becomes pluralized: there are many Annas, each one playing beneath the common name Anna as a cipher for some particular cryptic structure with its unique magic word. A ghost would always be plural, hence Barthes’s deaths and Marx’s spectres: we intend to understand spirits in the plural and in the sense of specters, of untimely specters that one must not chase away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back. And of course, we must never hide from the fact that the principle of selectivity which will have to guide and hierarchize among the ‘spirits’ will fatally exclude in its turn. (D:SM, 109)



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In Derrida’s account it is the secret of the other, their secret name in us, that serves as the incorporated pole around which introjection takes place. Although the following arises in an account of reading literature (literature offering an exemplary account of the secret), it would apply to our relation to any other: A poetic or fictional sentence, which detaches itself from its presumed source [the author] and thus remains locked away, when there is no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret behind the surface of a textual manifestation (and it is this situation which I would call text or trace), when it is the call of this secret, however, which points back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself that keeps our passion aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us. Even if there is none, even if it does not exist, hidden behind anything whatever. Even if the secret is no secret, even if there has never been a secret. (D:ON, 29–30)

Once again, we see that the actual existence of a secret, ‘hidden behind anything whatever’, is not only unimportant but irrelevant. The secret has its effect, impassioning us, regardless of whether there is a secret. As with the wholly other in Levinas’s trace structure, knowledge that there really is a secret (a secret that is one, definite, determinable, solvable, resolvable) would imperil the passion in which the rupture of responsibility emerges. We might try to imagine a universe in which a written poem was not detached from authorial intention and where the poem’s author insisted it contained precisely two determined ‘secrets’ that should be interpreted and where all other interpretations were false – in such a universe there would be no literature, no passion and no secrets. We have seen then that, if mourning has always already begun and is never pure, then, in so far as one relates to an other, one has already established a crypt: there is always something indigestible, an unspeakable secret, even if that secret does not exist.6 It is tempting to offer a sanitized and noble account of what this secret would be: that what is unspeakable is the absolute scandal of the other’s unique death already announced in their proper name. We would suggest that a common fault among those writing on Derrida’s account of mourning is this assumption that mere horror at the magnitude of a particular loss would be enough to cause introjection to stall. This tendency is encouraged by the fact that most of Derrida’s works on mourning are public works of mourning – acts focused on commemorating the dead themselves rather than suspicious and critical investigation of the underlying libidinal dynamics of the relationship. Rather than the eulogies, it is in texts such as Politics of Friendship that friendship and enmity are shown to be entangled.7 The question emerges of

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whether we are ‘sure we can distinguish between death and killing’ and where friendship occurs between ‘incriminations and recriminations, between these forms of grief in which accusation mingles with mourning to cry out from an infinite wound. […] The infinite abysses of imputability open on to mourning in the shadow of each and every event of death’ (D:PF, x). One of the major lessons of psychoanalysis is that object attachment is always ambivalent and this is part of why object-loss is always partly melancholic: even if we hypothesize the most passionate love, the one who feels it will resent the loved one on some level for the power they hold over them. Thus, that mourning is barred is not only due to the simple unavowable passion of a love, but also to the unavowable strands of hatred and resentment that always accompany it.

In memoriam The four texts found in the original edition of Memories for Paul de Man – the eulogy ‘In Memoriam: On the Soul’ and the three lectures ‘Mnemosyne’, ‘The Art of Memories’ and ‘Acts’ delivered in French at Yale University in March 1984 and then again in English as the Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine a few weeks later – constitute Derrida’s most substantial act of eulogy. The theme of the proper name addressed in discussing Barthes’s eulogy is also at stake here: ‘What constrains us to think (without ever believing in it) a “true mourning” (if such there be) is the essence of the proper name’ (D:MPM, 48). Here this theme is reconceived through de Man’s reading of Hegel’s account of memory. We have already seen in Chapter 5 that Hegel’s interiorizing memory or ‘Erinnerung’ is commonly associated with introjection, yet Hegel also refers to another form of memory that is ‘Gedächtnis’. Gedächtnis is not the living interiorization of thought but the mechanical or technical form of memory at stake in memorizing a poem or in the act of writing, where Hegel will state ‘one knows a text by heart [or by rote] only when we no longer associate any meaning with the words’ (quoted in D:MPM, 54). Derrida claims that this disconnection from meaning shows that memory as Gedächtnis is ‘of the order of the name’ (D:MPM, 54). Introjection and incorporation thus repeats the Hegelian distinction of a meaningful interiorizing appropriation based on understanding and predicative language against a form of memorization detached from meaning that preserves what is at stake perfectly as a proper name. For Hegel these two forms of memory form a dialectical pair, Gedächtnis internalizes and preserves material while Erinnerung acts on that



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internalized otherness in the manner of digestion – Gedächtnis is thus the only preservative memory: The name, or what can be considered as such, as having the function or power of the name – this is the sole object and sole possibility of memory […] This means that any name, any nominal function, is ‘in memory of ’ – from the first ‘present’ of its appearance, and finally, is ‘in virtually-bereaved memory of ’ even during the life of its bearer. (D:MPM, 54)

What Derrida discovers in de Man’s work is a twist on Hegel’s system where ‘the relation between Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, between memory and interiorizing recollection, is not “dialectical,” as Hegelian interpretation and Hegel’s interpretation would have it, but one of rupture, heterogeneity, disjunction’ (D:MPM, 56). What is at stake is a traditional deconstructive gesture that first involves reversal with regard to the philosophical tradition that ‘always opposes good (living) memory to bad memory (mechanical, technical, on the side of death): Plato’s anamnesis or mneme to hypomneme’ and which ought then ‘to displace the structure’ so as to show ‘the essential mutual implication of thought and of what the tradition defines as “bad” memory, the technique of memory, writing, the abstract sign’ (D:MPM, 70–1). When Derrida then points enigmatically to ‘a memory already “older” than Gedächtnis and Erinnerung’ (D:MPM, 71), this is not to some other, original mode of interiorization, ‘this singular memory does not lead us back to any anteriority. There never existed (there will never have existed) any older or more original “third term” that we would have to recall’. Instead it is a matter of ‘memory without anteriority, memory of a past which has never been present, a memory without origin, a memory of the future’ (D:MPM, 137–8). We can see then that the recognizable terms of Levinas’s wholly other must be recalled as the origin without origin at work in the act of eulogy that decides between moments of incorporation and introjection, Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, and in doing so enacts an ‘oscillation of undecidability’ that ‘goes back and forth and weaves a text; it makes, if this is possible, a path of writing through the aporia. This is impossible, but no one has ever said that deconstruction, as a technique or a method, was possible’ (D:MPM, 135). The particular theoretical complexity of this movement is that the memory without origin prior to the opposition of Gedächtnis and Erinnerung must itself relate to Gedächtnis as the medium in which the dead are ambiguously preserved as meaningless traces or proper names: ‘what resists the non-dialectizable opposition, what “precedes” it in some way, will still bear the name of one of the terms and will maintain a rhetorical relation with the

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opposition. […] It will have the figure of opposition and will always let itself be parasited by it’ (D:MPM, 137). It is worth stopping here to orient our reading against a rival position that we believe to be quite mistaken. For this purpose we will use Marko Zlomislić’s short discussion of Memories in Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics: In Memories for Paul De Man, Derrida links deconstruction with mourning. Derrida is not interested in possible mourning which interiorizes the other who somehow ‘lives in us’ but in impossible mourning which leaves ‘the other his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove (that) refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within the self.’8

Although Zlomislić does not refer to psychoanalytic vocabulary, this simple opposition of possible mourning clearly has the properties of introjection while impossible mourning is incorporation. Although he is quoting Derrida directly, the simple distinction between the other who is taken ‘in us’ and the alternative of being ‘incapable of taking the other within the self ’ lacks precision. In either case, as Zlomislić himself admits, the ‘friend who is physically no more exists in us and between us as a memory and as a memoire’, how then can they not be within the self?9 Without a firm grasp of the psychoanalytic background material we cannot make sense of this implicit distinction between taking the other into the Ego through introjection and incorporating them in the broader psyche. A second terminological problem emerges from Zlomislić beginning with this clear distinction between the very different processes of possible and impossible mourning, only to drop the specifying predicate such that the reader has to guess whether any particular assertion about mourning relates to its possible or impossible variants. For example, when Zlomislić refers to how ‘Mourning teaches us the impossible’ (itself out of keeping with Derrida’s assertion in this text ‘I do not know if death teaches us anything at all’ (D:MPM, 31)), we might assume he is referring to impossible mourning; however, when he tells us ‘[m]ourning consists of taking the other into ourselves’ it seems that, within his simplified terms, he must be referring to possible mourning.10 Beyond these imprecisions that largely follow from failing to pay attention to the role of Abraham and Torok’s formulations on mourning that are essential to the background of this text, the principle problem with Zlomislić’s reading is the driving claim that Derrida is ‘not interested in’ one type of mourning and is ‘interested in’ the other. Although the description of possible and impossible mourning is largely a direct quotation of introductory remarks from page 6 of



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Memoires, on that page Derrida directly claims that the question of which type of mourning is more faithful to the other ‘will not cease to haunt us’ rather than suggesting it is decided one way or the other (D:MPM, 6). It is certainly possible to believe it comes to be decided in the text if one looks at later claims about impossibility, such as the quotation we offered earlier about the back and forth oscillation that breaks with aporia to weave a text that is impossible (D:MPM, 135), yet here the notion of ‘impossible’ has a completely different sense. The term possible mourning also takes on entirely different values within the text, such as referring to the possibility of future mourning that haunts friendship with the living (D:MPM, 34). So, in short we would say that Derrida is not ‘interested in’ one mourning over the other, but in breaking with aporia to produce a text. While Zlomislić himself is explicitly focused on what he calls Derrida’s ‘aporetic ethics’, for him this aporia can only be the demand that we mourn in the impossible manner rather than lapsing into possible mourning. Ethics, here, would simply be a matter of respecting the singularity of the other by maintaining their alterity, and responsible mourning always consists of choosing incorporation and obeying the basic Levinasian injunction never to reduce the other to the same. What cannot be right about this claim is that the best way to truly respect the other’s infinite remove is silence or to simply offer the proper name and dates, yet Derrida is himself delivering a eulogy. Zlomislić complicates matters by introducing the further somewhat overlapping distinction of successful and failed mourning, which is then further complicated through Derrida’s enigmatic claim that successful mourning fails and failed mourning succeeds (neglecting to quote the opening of the following paragraph in which Derrida states ‘Can we accept this schema? I do not think so, even though it is in part a hard and undeniable necessity’ (D:MPM, 35)). Zlomislić introduces successful mourning in the following terms: One must mourn. Mourning consists of taking the other into ourselves, grieving for what was, for what has happened and for what will no longer be. For mourning to be successful, the other must not be interiorized but ejected. The other who is mourned must be birthed. But this ejection is a betrayal to the memory of the one we have loved.11

It seems Zlomislić wants to understand what Derrida refers to as the ‘aporia of mourning and of prospospeai’ on this basis. However, it is unclear how Zlomislić understands the distinction between interiorization and ejection: is ejection caused by the refusal of interiorization (equivalent to impossible mourning, yet put forward here as betrayal) or is the other first interiorized and then ejected

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(as ‘ejection’ seems to imply)? Does this ejection or birth allow the other to speak in the manner of prospospea, yet if so why would this be a betrayal of memory?12 Although there would be clear solutions to this last question, rather than resolving such puzzles through putting forward a consistent schema in which these claims might fit together, at this crucial point Zlomislić lapses into a series of declarative utterances that appear to openly embrace the analysis’s lack of clarity – ‘Mourning is a form of madness’, ‘In mourning the accounts cannot be balanced’, etc.13 – followed by a series of general quotes and statements about aporia. We are told that the undecidability of the aporia is ‘not the paralysis of choosing between two alternatives because such a choosing is already a calculation. Undecidability is deciding for an order that cannot be calculated’.14 This is broadly correct in that, rather than simply choosing Erinnerung or Gedächtnis, one must pledge oneself to the incalculable wholly other of the immemorial past. However, this wholly other is preserved in Gedächtnis in a manner that only manifests in the world through the production or weaving of a text that chooses between the sides of the aporia in a process that cannot be entirely detached from calculation, even if it is entered into and driven by the incalculable and involves ultimately unjustifiable acts of decision. While Zlomislić generally progresses through quotations and glosses, his apparent failure to understand the background mechanisms at work in Derrida’s text results in claims that have no obvious source in that text and that are even in direct conflict with it. One particular issue is a failure to appreciate the structure of pre-originary mourning. Zlomislić claims that: ‘The death of the other changes us in a way that living-with the other never could.’15 On this point Derrida maintains precisely the opposite position: The selbst, the soi-même, the self appears to itself only in this bereaved allegory, in this hallucinatory prosopopeai – and even before the death of the other actually happens, as we say, in ‘reality.’ The strange situation I am describing here, for example that of my friendship with Paul de Man, would have allowed me to say all of this before his death. It suffices that I know him to be mortal, that he knows me to be mortal – there is no friendship without this knowledge of finitude. (D:MPM, 28–9)

In this quotation, the moment of death is doubly dismissed though italics and scare quotes: ‘the death of the other actually happens, as we say, in “reality”’. We should note that this dismissal of the moment of death is not a consistently maintained position in Derrida’s eulogies but precisely something that emerges



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from an articulation of the three determinate angles on death in response to the driving, incalculable singularity of de Man himself. We can almost hear de Man’s own legendary irony, italics and scare-quotes at work here. The relation to death echoes de Man’s own peculiar ‘serenity’ in his last letter to Derrida: ‘All of this […] seems prodigiously interesting to me and I’m enjoying myself a lot. I knew it all along but it is being borne out: death gains a great deal, as they say, when one gets to know it close up’ (D:MPM, xix). We do not want to be unfair to Zlomislić, who would clearly not pretend to have done justice to Memoires in his short discussion. The conflicting and unclear statements that we have attempted to bring out above, rooted as they are in certain simplified distinctions and purposes, are offered as illustrative of how the method of close reading can easily go wrong if it is not accompanied by detailed attention to the underlying theoretical structures at work in the background of Derrida’s texts. What must be held at bay in particular is the final temptation, when faced with apparently conflicting claims, to declare mourning as a kind of madness and see in Derrida’s texts an expression of that delirium. Although such a eulogy might be appropriate to some singular others, there are no such moments in the eulogies Derrida actually produced. Against the choice of one impossible mourning over another possible one, we have seen that for Derrida there is only compromise – that there are no pure introjection and no pure incorporation. Yet while introjection and incorporation are impossible since there is only compromise, compromise is impossible in a very different way since it actually happens and actually fails. It can, however, fail better if it is guided by a vigilant pledge to the singularity of an incalculable alterity. Throughout the eulogy ‘impossible mourning’ develops from referring to one type of mourning to referring to the impossibility of tracing a successful path between catastrophes, just as Ulysses could not steer a path between Scylla and Charybdis without losing men.

I appear before him We turn briefly to the memorial text for Louis Marin, ‘By Force of Mourning’, because it is here that Derrida offers his clearest image of the experienced situation of delivering a eulogy. Near the start, Derrida directly denies the possibility of a theory of mourning: There is thus no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work. This is also why one should not be able to say anything about the work of mourning, anything about this subject, since it cannot become a theme, only

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another experience of mourning that comes to work over [venue travailler au corps] the one who intends to speak. (D:WM, 143)

That mourning can only be engaged with through and in another experience of mourning, never addressed as a general theme, means that one can only hold a discourse on mourning when partaking in it in a singular manner. There is no possibility of a text on mourning that is not a unique work of mourning; hence, in so far as there is an account of eulogy, it must come in eulogy. It seems that for Derrida the fact that mourning cannot be a theme except in mourning does not imply it cannot be a leitmotif, as it is in texts such as Specters of Marx or Politics of Friendship, and this is part of why we need to engage with the eulogies prior to the political works.16 The work of mourning is offered here not only as something one works at, it in turn is seen to work on one’s own body: a travail that is also suffering and a labour that is also birth. In mourning one is not only actively reshaping libidinal investments or fantasmatically establishing intrapsychic crypts, one is also passively exposed to an absolute force. Clearly, since mourning cannot become a theme, the only hope for our project is to see something of the variety of results that occurs each unique time the experience of mourning worked over a particular figure who intended to speak, in our case Derrida. The variation that emerges in this particular reflection on death and mourning is rare among Derrida’s eulogies for its focus on images rather than words. This is not surprising in that Derrida is responding to the singularity of Marin, primarily a philosopher of art, whose last work Des pouvoirs de l’image17 touched on the work of mourning itself. What is perhaps more surprising is how freely our established psychoanalytic themes of ‘idealizing incorporation, introjection, consumption of the other’ are offered here almost entirely without reference to language, reconceived in terms of a specular regime of images (D:WM, 159). Derrida states that the notion of the dead who only exist ‘in us’ leads to the model of an internal space, ‘a topology and tropology’, a ‘geometry of gazes, an orientation of perspectives’, superficially reminiscent of Rilke’s immeasurable depth dimensions of our inner being: What is only in us seems to be reducible to images, which might be memories or monuments, but which are reducible in any case to a memory that consists of visible scenes that are no longer anything but images, since the other other of whom they are the images appears only as the one who has disappeared or passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves ‘in us’ only images. (D:WM, 159)



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We should note that there is little in this that would resemble the hidden internal writing space of Freud’s ‘Project’: the account of this realm of images is a phenomenological description of the conscious field rather than an interpretative mapping of the other scene. Furthermore, the denial of any such thing as perception must mean that this realm of ‘only images’ cannot be as detached from language or writing as it might appear here at first. Nevertheless, the significant problem here is how this alternative way of holding the psychic economy in terms of images and a field of visibility would allow a place for the repressed, incorporated crypt. While the crypt had always played on a visual metaphorics – the image of the cemetery with its guard, the apparently impregnable stone tombs or fors marking out excluded spaces along with their inevitable leaks and cracks – yet this imagery was always ultimately reduced to the encryption of language and the distortion of communication at stake in psychoanalytic treatment. We would suggest that the implicit key to Derrida’s reformulation of incorporation in terms of the image in this text is a claim common in the French theory of the gaze, running at least from Sartre to Lacan, that ‘The Other’s look hides his eyes’. As Sartre explains, it is ‘never when eyes are looking at you that you can find them beautiful or ugly, that you can remark on their color.’18 The look or gaze of the other is not only associated with shame and judgement, eventually becoming internalized as the Super-ego in conscience, it also constitutes a blind spot in the field of vision as ‘our subjective speculation can no longer seize and appropriate this gaze before which we appear’ (D:WM, 161). Indeed, that the Super-ego cannot be tamed by the Ego is perhaps explicable through the fact that the gaze is that which we cannot seize – the point from which the subject is subjected. It is this fact that allows a facet of the visible image to take on the uncanny dimensions of the unpresentable crypt: ‘What this rhetoric of space, this topology and this tropology, miss […] is that the force of the image has to do less with the fact that one sees something in it than with the fact that one is seen there in it. The image sees more than it is seen’ (D:WM, 160). This would be commonly referred to in contemporary Lacanian film studies as ‘the objective gaze’, found on the side of the image, rather than ‘the subjective gaze’ of the audience.19 This account of the objective gaze that inhabits and disrupts the supposedly dead and controllable mental image allows Derrida to present his most distinctive account of the lived experience of delivering a eulogy: ‘Louis Marin is looking at me, and it is for this, for him, that I am here this evening. He is my law, the law, and I appear before him, before his word and his gaze. In my

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relationship to myself, he is here in me before me, stronger or more forceful than I’ (D:WM, 160). While on one hand this language of being looked at is ‘a mere rhetorical commonplace’, the experienced force of the dead other’s gaze incorporated within the psyche nevertheless utterly deprives Derrida of his own force. This leads to the recognizably Levinasian terms of ‘an absolute excess and dissymmetry […] an infinite transcendence’. It is he ‘for whom we are’ and, as could never be thought by Levinas himself, death has if anything ‘entrusted him, given him over, distanced him, in this infinite alterity’ (D:WM, 161). Rather than a divine or holy element behind the face or gaze illuminating it, as is at times implied by Levinas in his later works, it is ‘[o]nly death, which is not, or rather mourning, which takes its place in advance, [that] can open up this space of absolute dynamis: force, virtue, the possible as such’ (D:WM, 146). Although this power of the other ‘begins before death’, this is only because ‘death begins its work before death’ in both the proper name and the other’s gaze: ‘the power of the image as the power of death does not wait for death, but is marked out in everything – and for everything – that awaits death’ (D:WM, 164, 151). We can see then that pre-originary mourning, which has always already begun from the first encounter with the other, opens the force at stake in breaking out of egoism. The gaze of the other inside the self remains entirely inexpressible – to all intents and purposes inexistent – yet it has a fantastical power. Although in his eulogy he avoids addressing himself directly to Marin in the form of either ‘tu’ or ‘vous’, Derrida nevertheless states that he is there for Louis, who is experienced as looking at him at that moment. Although it ‘might be said that I came because other witnesses asked me to, because I appear also before those close to him’, it is the common state of being looked at by Louis that unites the mourners and without which he ‘would not have felt this imperative’: ‘We are all looked at, I said, and each one singularly, by Louis Marin. He looks at us. In us’ (D:WM, 160–1). Through this we can see that it is a reformulation of the cryptic structure that allows us to experience ourselves as still standing before the dead, driven by an infinite duty to do justice in language to the other ‘for whom we are’ (D:WM, 161).

The world is gone Having laid the theoretical ground, seen the machinery at work, discussed how a lack of understanding of this underlying machinery can lead close readings awry, and described the scene of eulogy, we can allow ourselves to step back from the density of our previous investigations and, in discussing a



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final example, adopt a somewhat lighter tone. One of Derrida’s final eulogies, the rather improbably titled ‘Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, the Poem’. begins with the following statement: ‘Will I be able to bear witness, in a just and faithful fashion, to my admiration for Hans-Georg Gadamer?’ Just as Sisyphus was challenged to bear the burden of his rock, when we bear witness, particularly when we bear witness to our admiration for one who has died, we are challenged to bear the weight of a heavy responsibility. Just as Sisyphus might falter under the continual, crushing weight of his task, there are many ways to err in this metaphorics of weight. Do we simply buckle, the boulder falling back to its starting place and calling us to renew our attempt from scratch? Do we only lose a little ground, setting us back a few steps to reformulate our path? Do we believe we have borne our burden to the peak, only to discover it is merely a minor ridge? Or did we perhaps begin our task inauthentically, putting on a show of carrying a great burden when we have secretly chosen a hollow stone, perhaps muttering justifications to ourselves that ‘ought’ accompanies ‘can’, rather than picking the just and faithful boulder irrespective of our evaluation of our finite powers. Perhaps of course we honestly do not know if we have selected the appropriate rock – we might reach the top, believing we have dispensed with our task, only to discover (or perhaps never to discover) that it was the wrong rock all along – and how would we ever know? Whether a debt is payable or not, if there is no way to know the size of the debt and whether it has been paid, we can never move on from paying it in good conscience. If we had an eternity to spare and no other others making demands, then we might be called by ethics to test an infinity of permutations to ensure we had done our duty; however, as we are finite and there is always a third, we find we have other tasks to attend to and we are condemned to move on: regretfully, uncertain and troubled. It is perhaps not an accident that the visual archetype of the mourner is a figure bent double like Atlas bearing the world on their back, since this is precisely how we are left in the wake of the other’s death – carrying their entire world now they are no longer there to carry it for themselves. From another perspective we find that our own world, the only world we have ever known, has been taken away forever and we are left without ground, before or beyond world, where the only solidity left is the traces of the other whose body we bear towards the future. As Paul Celan puts it in the last line of the poem ‘Vast Glowing Vault’, the text at the centre of this eulogy, ‘The world is gone, I must carry you [Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen]’.

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Although we have allowed ourselves to be carried away by connotations and images associated with the phrase ‘bear witness’ that we found at the beginning of Derrida’s text, this bearing is in fact Thomas Dutoit’s translation for the original French term ‘témoigner’ that holds largely unrelated connotations. We have allowed ourselves to follow Dutoit because this text is partly a meditation on the labour and accidents of translation and also because it is focused around weights and burdens: penser et peser, examination’s etymological root in the examen or arm of a pair of scales, to evaluate as soupeser and this theme of the weight of a whole world that is carried when we ‘porte le deuil’, which is perhaps to ‘porte l’autre’. In this eulogy the work of mourning is strangely doubled. It is both explicitly a work of eulogy for Gadamer, delivered as a public lecture in his memory at the University of Heidelberg in 2003, and also implicitly a work of mourning for the poet Celan, also a close friend of Derrida (this leads it to being published within Derrida’s Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan). This peculiarity might seem to put in question our account of how a eulogy responds to a particular other in their unique singularity. It is rapidly apparent, however, that in responding to the singularity of Gadamer, a thinker whose name is as synonymous with reading as Derrida’s, an engagement with how hermeneutics and deconstruction differ in approaching a poet and poem that was close to both of their hearts is entirely appropriate. Derrida finds an angle of approach that respects the theoretical humility and grace that he so admired in Gadamer’s texts: it is this feeling of appropriateness that, as when reading poetry, teaches us a practical lesson in the art of civility. The ‘between two infinities’ of the title would be a matter of the two very differently structured and conflicting tasks that we are called towards in responsible interpretation: on the one hand, the interminable, progressive hermeneutical task of context reconstruction; on the other hand, the respect for an interruptive aporia that refuses any progress and is the focus of deconstruction.20 One might say that, for Gadamer, interruption is a kind of tragedy; for Derrida, a gift. At the same time, we can already see that this distinction is analogous to the process of introjection and the silence of incorporation that we have been discussing. In his eulogy, Derrida recounts in some detail the famous failure of his first encounter with Gadamer: I spoke very little to him, and what I said then was addressed only indirectly to him. But I was sure that a strange and intense sharing had begun. A partnership,



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perhaps. I had a feeling that what he would no doubt have called an ‘interior dialogue’ would continue in both of us, sometimes wordlessly, immediately in us or indirectly, as was confirmed in the years that followed, this time in a very studious and eloquent, often fecund, fashion, through a large number of philosophers the world over […] who attempted to take charge of and reconstitute this still virtual or suspended exchange, to prolong it or to interpret its strange caesura. (D:SQ, 136)

It is the failure of establishing an actual dialogue that left Derrida with ‘an active and provocative trace, a promising trace, with more of a future ahead than if it had been a harmonious and consensual dialogue’ (D:SQ, 137). If this trace is a crypt in Derrida, an internalized psychic topography surrounding an unspeakable silence from which a voice speaking cryptophores emerges and continues to engage with Derrida throughout his life, then the possibility that the dialogue could continue in others – in ‘a large number of philosophers the world over’ – would be an example of a phantom. We can see then that this most common of academic labours, the continuation of a failed dialogue between two great thinkers, can be reconceived in terms of a phantomatic inheritance and the slow labour of constructing paths of introjection that might resolve the tension between them. That this trace is a crypt established by a pre-originary mourning becomes clear in Derrida’s account of a melancholy relation to Gadamer that stretches back long before his death: Death will no doubt have changed this melancholy – and infinitely aggravated it. Death will have sealed it. Forever. But underneath the petrified immobility of this seal […] I have a hard time distinguishing what dates from the death of the friend and what will have preceded it for such a long time. The same melancholy, different but also the same, must have overcome me already in […] our first encounter. (D:SQ, 135)

Throughout Derrida’s text we can see this topology of the crypt that has been established from the very first contact between them coming into play: ‘in order to attempt to address, or at least to make as if I am addressing, Gadamer himself, himself in me outside myself ’ (D:SQ, 141). When we began our discussion with the notion of ‘bearing’, this was a kind of ‘artefact’ in the scientific sense: a blimp that occurs due to the technē that intervenes between Derrida’s French and his English readers on the basis of a third party’s (hopefully) responsible and responsive decision. We deliberately began with such an artefact because translation, inseparable as it is from the two infinites of interpretation, is another field of responsibility – of waits and

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weights – standing in analogical relation to mourning. Gadamer himself wrote the famous essay ‘Reading is like translating [Lesen ist wie Übersetzen]’ and for both thinkers there is a paradigmatic experience of responsibility in the translation of poetry. As Gadamer writes, it is in poetic translation that one experiences ‘the ownness and the foreignness of language’, while for Derrida poetry gives ‘the best example of untranslatability’ – ‘The poem no doubt is the only place propitious to the experience of language, that is to say, of an idiom that forever defies translation and therefore demands a translation that will do the impossible’ (D:SQ, 137). The responsibility to a singular other in translating a poem would thus be analogous to eulogy, though the responsibility is perhaps not owed to the poem’s author but to the poem itself as a textual body. The ‘experience of language’ is here the experience of aporia that must be broken with in doing the impossible – the poem itself has a secret or secrets and it is not necessarily the poet’s secret. In interpretation, a part of any translation, hermeneutic responsibility compels us to make use of all of the solid methodological tools we can lay our hands on. These tools do not merely grant us subjective interpretative opinions or options, they offer objective, substantial and relevant factual material that is vital for adequately addressing the text. For example, in his extended discussion of Celan’s ‘Vast, Glowing Vault’ (D:SQ 147–53), one objective fact that Derrida notes is that, at least in the original German, all the verbs are in the present tense. This is not necessarily something we would notice on the first reading or even on the twentieth reading, it is not necessarily something Celan himself purposefully intended or even noticed, yet it remains an incontrovertible fact about the poem that has effects on its meaning, form and tone irrespective of whether we have paid it direct attention. Similarly, Derrida enumerates, tracks and traces the repetition of certain sounds, such as ‘sch’ and ‘wi’ in the German, and once again these are part of the poem’s objective tonal composition even if we had failed previously to pay attention to such repetitions explicitly. Derrida continues in this manner to engage with the poem in the manner of a hermeneutic scholar following on from Gadamer’s work: ‘This formal analysis can be taken very far. It must, in fact’ (D:SQ, 152). It is with the third and forth stanzas that Derrida raises problems: WoGegen Rennt er nicht an? Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen.21



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The third stanza is in the interrego-negative – ‘Into what does he not run?’ – leading one to ask whether the detached statement of the fourth stanza ‘The world is gone, I must carry you.’ is a reply to that question? Yet it is here that the methodical formal analysis reaches points that interrupt our objective and even scientific progress. There is simply no way to know whether the fourth stanza is a response to the question of the third stanza, whether the main body of the poem ends with the question and the last line plays the role of a moral encapsulating the entire poem’s meaning, or whether it bears some entirely different relation to the text: ‘one will never know, and no one has the power to decide’, not even Celan (D:SQ, 158). Derrida discovers then that it is while and only while obeying the duty of an infinite progressive task that one encounters another infinity – the infinity of a total interruption of the possibility of interpretative processes by questions that can never be answered. To give another basic example of such an interruption, when Celan writes ‘I must carry you’, who is this ‘I’ and who is this ‘you’? This is partly Gadamer’s question, since – as Derrida points out – his book on Celan is entitled Who am I and who are you? To take up one horn of this question, does ‘you’ refer to the reader, to all readers, to future readers, to past victims, to God, does it turn back on Celan himself, is it the ram or the stars mentioned earlier in the poem, etc.? There is no way of knowing the answer to this question, yet attempting to evade this problem by interpreting the poem in terms of an entirely generic and empty ‘you’ is as much of an interpretative decision as opting for the ram. In such an interpretation one is in a position of aporia: calculative reason and reliable methods can responsibly take us no further and there must be an act of decision. Rather than a simple double bind, one might say that with regard to interpreting this ‘you’ there are four basic options that would all constitute different forms of failure – first, one might refuse to take a risk and judge that we have gone as far as can reliably be gone with this material, tossing it aside in favour of other poetic material where objective, positive progress can be made through applying a rigorous method; secondly, one assumes that progress on this issue remains possible and attempts to move further by diligent scholarly work beyond the borders of the poem itself (comparing it with Celan’s other poems, poems by those who influenced him, one looks to letters or biographical material, hopes to find diary entries relating to it or to discover further details about the poem’s composition – in short, one refuses to take risks and assumes we simply lack positive information that at least could be out there to settle the issue); thirdly, one simply picks the interpretation that seems right and go as far

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with it as possible, acknowledging the right of other readers to make radically different assumptions about the interpretation of this ‘you’ and making no pretence that one’s own reading is final; or fourthly, one both stops making progress and refuses to turn away, reflecting on the experience of aporia or double bind itself. While any of these options alone constitutes a kind of minor catastrophe, in producing an actual text that responds responsibly and responsively to the singularity of the poem, one traces an oscillating path between these catastrophes that can at least ‘fail better’. What is crucial for Derrida is that if there were no such points of interruption – if there was no pronoun whose referent is ambiguous, if there was only material that could be reliably and completely processed through established rigorous methods – then interpreting the poem would be a matter of calculation akin to basic arithmetic. That the poem can be a source of passion derives from its secrets that cannot be calculatively responded to, and what can be shown here in an exemplary fashion in poetic interpretation, translation and eulogy would be true of all encounters with the other. It is perhaps quite right then that when two great philosophers encounter each other for the first time on stage with an audience expecting a dialogue, as Derrida and Gadamer did in 1985, the appropriate mode of the encounter is a catastrophic failure: the jarring and uncomfortable crash of poorly chosen words and misinterpretations. Gadamer himself later claimed he had been looking forward to a dialogue and yet there was what he called a ‘language barrier’ – a problem of translation. Yet for Derrida it was the fact of it being ‘a missed encounter’ that made it ‘more fortunate, if not successful’, for it was this unheimlich experience of missing each other on stage that left a provocative wound, the interruption of the failed encounter that began an ‘interior dialogue’ (D:SQ, 136–47). We might note here that Derrida specifies in the text that ‘dialogue’ is ‘foreign to my lexicon, as if belonging to a foreign language’. It is a word taken from Gadamer and in using it Derrida is ‘delighted to have already let Gadamer speak in me. I inherit’ (D:SQ, 136).22 This would be another example of how Derrida offers a quite different theory of mourning in a particular eulogy, even if in some sense it connects with the very early reflections on Foucault and discipleship. An interminable interior dialogue is offered as the foundation for the possibility of an exterior monologue in the wake of the other’s death – the act of eulogy. The introjective dialogue with the encrypted other is always cut off too soon since, the other’s alterity being infinite and their secret name or gaze indigestible, the project is unending. If one does not break with that infinite



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task, one would remain eternally silent: never allowing the original encounter to bear fruit through a labour of birth. In eulogy one always talks too soon, yet one must talk too soon as it will never not be too soon. We are finite, we cannot wait until the end of the infinite reliable hermeneutic method before we risk our interpretation of a poem or offer eulogy. That is to say, it is our own death that becomes the basis and justification for breaking away from an interior dialogue and that opens up the chance of a real encounter. At this point Heidegger’s determinate angle on death would become critically relevant – it is because we are a Being-towards-death that Levinasian duty and the Freudian crypt do not simply lock us in an endless interior dialogue with the encrypted other that would never manifest externally in breaking the silence. One is forced to break with the responsibility of an unending dialogue to produce a responsible work – the poem or eulogy always unfolds between two infinities. Between introjections and incorporation there is only compromise – every mourning traces a fresh path in a double bind between two catastrophes. Tracing this path, analogous to the interpretation or translation of a poem, would be a kind of art. The poem’s translator must himself be a poet, yet a poet that responds to the singular texture of his object. As Derrida puts it: ‘Whoever has an intimate, bodily experience of this spectral errancy, whoever surrenders to this truth of language, is a poet, whether he writes poetry or not’ (D:SQ, 105).

Conclusion – Closing the Tomb

We will not use this very short conclusion to summarize the work we have done and what we believe we have achieved since the previous chapter effectively encompasses such a summary, at least in so far as our attestation of unique theorizations of mourning in response to unique deaths might be subject to summary. Instead, we will use this as an opportunity to close with some broader reflections on our theme. We began this book with Rilke indicating to Countess Purtscher-Wydenbruck that there would be a price to pay if we ignore the demands of the dead. Psychoanalysis can certainly give us a heady account of the price of such non-engagement; however, we have argued that psychoanalytic ‘technology’ offers us more than merely a way of escaping the dead’s clutches – it plays an indispensable role in constituting an account of a justice worthy of the name. We take it that the central pillar of such a justice is that across certain constructed divisions, in this book the division between living and dead humans, the call of responsibility must function identically and indifferently. Neither living nor dead can be allowed to count in politics only by extension and analogy from the other: counting only in so far as they partake in the features of the privileged. That the call from a singular other is ‘abstract’ and ‘indifferent’ in this way does not mean that we must ignore such significant properties in our actual political negotiations, only that any decision that negotiates between the demands of one and the demands of the other must be an act of decision that we personally bear the weight of responsibility for, rather than being decided in advance by the supposed ontological facts of existence. In the latter situation there would be no future and no responsibility, only an unfolding of Being. Whether from or for the living or the dead, the rendering of justice is the giving of what we do not have since it involves the beyond Being – a spectrality that ‘is not’, or more properly is ambiguous with regard to the very opposition of ‘is’ or ‘is not’. There would of course be many other divisions that are as ripe for deconstruction as that between the living and the dead – divisions that society desperately needs to appreciate as fields of active responsibility where the right decision is not programmatically determined in advance in such a way as to let

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us off the hook provided we calculate well. If we believe that it is nevertheless right and proper that the opposition between the living and the dead come first, it is simply because the existence of eulogy as a fact within most contemporary societies forms the ideal illustration of and training ground for such responsibility. Eulogy is responsibility par excellence: responsibility stripped down to a core that is already infinitely rich. Although it has infinite ways of being resolved, it is the simplest form of negotiation as it only involves the singular dead other and two infinite responsibilities, where any other political situation would be significantly more complicated. Although there are no limits on the variety of forms of betrayal that can arise in eulogy – especially among intellectuals with the inevitable chance to get the last word in or to misrepresent those who are no longer there to offer a corrective response – it is also the medium where those betrayals stand out most sharply precisely because the dead are at the total mercy of the eulogist. The eulogy is almost inescapable and indeclinable: to not speak is a way of responding to the demand of eulogy, sometimes perhaps the best way though frequently the worst. Furthermore, not only does eulogy offer and preserve the image of aporia, it does so in as near a timeless and ubiquitous manner as possible: in a world where fields of responsibility with their particular rhythms, scales and relevant concerns are constantly emerging (global warming, biological weapons, human cloning, etc.), transforming (what is it to fight for ‘the worker’ today: who is ‘the contemporary worker’?) or becoming incomprehensible and unmanageable for even the supposed experts (capitalism in its various contemporary crises); eulogy possesses a relative constancy. Of course, this claim is openly naïve as there is clearly a myriad of transformations in the relation to the dead across cultural borders and temporal distances that would call for encyclopaedic anthropo-thanatological study – from Ancient Greek funeral games to Totem and Taboo’s tribes that refuse to say the dead’s name, not to mention the simple but profound differences between funeral customs of cultures that openly weep and gnash their teeth, cultures of Stoic polite resolve and cultures that joyfully celebrate in the face of death – yet what we find at the core of mourning is neither universality nor difference but singularity. More accurately, in eulogy there is a coming together of the universal (the thing that is common to every sister who loses a brother across history and that allows Antigone to speak to us today, even to those of us without sisters) and the different (the particular cultural practices of a place and time that allows us to see different possibilities and renders our own practices a ‘variation’ rather than a ‘standard’) around that



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which is singular (every death is a unique scandal and every relation to the other a unique crypt, even before their death). We hope that across this book we have shown something of how this singular element imposes itself at the root of our language, transforming each time in a new way the universal and the different just as, according to Derrida, the demand of singular justice must transform established law in every just legal decision. While we do not need to develop a morbid taste for eulogy in order to develop taste in eulogy, perhaps it is necessary to get rid of our entirely understandable yet entirely disposable distaste for eulogy. This distaste works to stop us from encountering the chance of a certain kind of pedagogy: a training in vigilance and bad conscience whose relevance stretches into every political domain. What we have called, appropriating Balibar’s term with our own twist, an art of civility. Whether the dead watch over us or not is unknowable; what matters is that we feel that they do and we actively respond to their call. Perhaps, as Derrida suggested in ‘Psychoanalysis Searches’, there is no actual orientation towards ‘justice’, only the cruelty of a perverse Super-ego guided by particular circumstances to inflict a very particular form of compulsive cruelty on the Ego in accordance with the arbitrary internalized judgements of the society we have grown up in. Perhaps the very impossibility of mourning, the double bind we have been describing and have endured many times, is itself a kind of trick that has been established so as to make sure the Super-ego always gets its illicit pleasure – a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ that leads us to always fail and merit the torments of our vigilant cackling self‑punishment. Perhaps when we judge that this is nevertheless ‘better’ than the alternative of an ethics that ignores the dead or that asserts mourning is possible and our accounts with the dead can be reliably settled, it is actually only that perversion speaking through us. Even if all of this were the objective facts of our situation, we can still simply affirm the being that we are, a being that is, as Derrida said, ‘first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. And that, as Hölderlin said so well, we can only bear witness to it’ (D:SM, 68). What Derrida shows in his eulogies is not only someone who has learnt to stand before ghosts and accept a tormented responsibility, he has also shown us the model of someone who has learnt to enjoy their company and to thrive in it. We close with the following passage from ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’: I like to think of him in spite of the sadness as someone who never renounced any pleasures [jouissance] but, so to speak, treated himself to them all. And I feel certain – as families in mourning naively say – that he would have liked

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this thought. Or to put it differently, the image of the I of Barthes would have liked this thought, the image of the I of Barthes that Barthes inscribed in me, though neither he nor I is completely in it. I tell myself now that this image likes this thought in me, that it rejoices in it here and now, that it smiles at me. (D:WM, 36)

Notes Preface  ‘The Proffered Abode of the Dead’ Rilke, M. R. (1947), Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2: 1910–1926. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. p. 342. 2 Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. (2006), Ghosts: A History of Phantoms, Ghouls and Other Spirits of the Dead. Stroud: Tempus Publishing Limited, p. 216. 3 Spinoza, B. (2002), Complete Works. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, p. 16. 4 Although the period of Rilke’s affair with Andreas-Salomé only lasted from 1897 to 1901 and Andreas-Salomé met Freud in 1912, the close connection between Andreas-Salomé and Rilke lasted for many decades and there are many letters discussing Freud in their correspondence. It is well established that in Freud’s famous essay ‘On Transience’, in which he recounts a walk in the countryside just before the outbreak of the Great War with ‘a taciturn friend and […] a young but already famous poet’, he is referring to Andreas-Salomé and Rilke (F:XIV, 305–7). 5 Throughout this book I will generally refer to psychoanalysis as a ‘technology’ or ‘technique’ instead of a therapy, practice, science, art or craft. The intention is to keep psychoanalysis in close proximity to the analysis of technē in the philosophical tradition and the various recording, amplification and communication technologies and processes of inscription, encoding and repetition at stake in them. This decision will be further justified in Chapter 4. 6 In The Ego and the Id, Freud attributes to melancholic substitution, whose ‘full significance’ was not appreciated as psychoanalysts did not appreciate ‘how common and how typical it is’, ‘a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its “character”’ (F:XIX, 28). For Judith Butler, melancholia follows the ‘figure’ of a ‘turning back upon itself ’ which is a founding trope of the psyche from Hegel and Nietzsche to Althusser: ‘This seduction of reflexivity seems to founder logically, since it is unclear that this ego can exist prior to its melancholia. The “turn” that marks the melancholic response to loss appears to initiate the redoubling of the ego as an object; only by turning back on itself does the ego acquire the status of a perceptual object’ (Butler, J. (1997), The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 168). 7 Freud himself gives many examples of fledgling knowledge of unconscious 1

212 Notes mechanisms being encoded in traditional beliefs and tales. His essay ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’ claims that the neuroses of early times emerged ‘in demonological trappings’ (F:XIX, 72). 8 Throughout this text I will make no significant use of the distinction between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’. Although I will generally prefer the term ‘ethics’, when phrases such as ‘moral faculty’ or ‘moral sentiment’ emerge I am not pointing towards anything beyond or other than the ethical. 9 Of course, one can argue that such concrete transformations are reducible to the calculations of a society’s productive self-interest: that slavery was only abandoned when the practical benefits and costs of maintaining slavery were trumped by an alternative system due to changes in the systems of production. However, even if mere ethical sentiments are politically ineffective without the changing circumstances of capitalism, that some individuals were inspired to stand up against their society and face death fighting to overcome slavery would remain a phenomenon calling for an explanation, particularly as such interventions became a major part of the economic cost of slavery. 10 With regard to the Stoic, we might thing of Marcus Aurelius’s claim that one must not let ‘the picture which imagination draws of your whole life disturb you’, nor let ‘your mind concern itself with all the kinds of troubles which are likely to have happened in the past’. To do this, one should constantly remind oneself that ‘it is not the future or the past which weighs upon you, but always only the present’, a present in which everything ‘is as you think it to be, and the thinking is within your control’. Thus, a present where you are free to save yourself by simply throwing out any unwelcome idea: ‘And who can prevent your throwing it out?’ (Marcus Aurelius (1963), The Meditations. Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts Press Inc. VIII, 36; XII, 22; XII, 25). The Freudian account of the unconscious is arguably an account of the ‘who’ or ‘what’ that can stop you simply ‘throwing out’ unwelcome ideas since the past truly does ‘weigh upon you’. 11 We do not mean to imply that all ancient moral philosophies go along with this quick caricature of Stoicism, nor that there might not be a strong distinction between the aim of the Stoic – that one is fundamentally free from one’s past and should never dwell on its troubles – and the concrete practices of Stoicism – rooted in the techniques of ‘care for the self ’ famously investigated in Michel Foucault’s late works. For example, in Fearless Speech Foucault discusses the section of Seneca’s De ira that relates to a daily practice of solitary self-examination before sleep. Nevertheless, it remains questionable if this reflection on past actions has any relation to psychoanalytic self-analysis. Foucault himself denies this, claiming that: ‘Seneca does not analyze his responsibility or feelings of guilt […] Rather, he engages in a kind of administrative scrutiny which enables him to reactivate various rules and maxims in order to make them

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more vivid, permanent, and effective for future behavior’ (Foucault, M. (2001), Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 149–50). Julia Kristeva on the other hand traces both Freudian and Marxist notions of interpretation back to ‘an epistemological and ethical attitude [that] began with the Stoics’ (Kristeva, J. (1982), ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’. Critical Inquiry, 9, (1): 79). Notably cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), commonly deemed by psychoanalysts ‘a cosmetic treatment that targets surface problems and not deep underlying ones’ (Leader, D. (2008), The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. London: Hamish Hamilton, p. 20). In France there have been particularly strong clashes between psychoanalysts and those who promote psychoactive medication or CBT (CTT in French). For a brief summary of these debates see the first part of Roudinesco, É. (2009), Pourquoi la psychanalyse? (Paris: Champs essais), pp. 13–61, or for a detailed compilation of articles see Meyer, C. (ed.) (2005), Le livre noir de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions des Arènes) and Miller, J.-A. (ed.) (2006), L’anti-livre noir de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Once again we use this term ‘explicit’ since, just as there is no clear way of separating those texts that are political from those that are not political (it is unclear whether any text is simply ‘not political’), there is no clear and uncontroversial demarcation of those works that are and are not eulogies. We will address this at the beginning of Chapter 6. ‘Articulation’ will be a key term throughout this book. It will always be used in the sense of articulation that would designate a hinge or pivot between two discourses. Such a hinge allows two discourses to relate to each other without allowing them to collapse into identity – a hinge both connects and holds apart two surfaces. Although it is always used in this sense, we will occasionally play on the word’s other meaning as the ‘articulation’ of an act of speech. We might state in advance that it is only in and across the articulation (production) of a particular speech or writing act that two incompatible discourses can be articulated (hinged). It is worth noting in advance that the texts of both Derrida and Levinas are littered with references to ‘doing the impossible’ that some readers might find paradoxical. It is important to read the terms possible and impossible in the light of Levinas’s claim that ‘I have always thought that possibility implies a human power’ (L:IRB, 122). Thus, when Derrida asks the Blanchotian question ‘Is my death possible?’ (D:A, 21), this was never the kind of question that might be answered by an armed Samuel Johnson. While Levinas and Derrida are playing on a logic with roots in the theological notion of grace, it will be shown that these moments of ‘doing the impossible’ through ‘the decision of the other in the self ’ can be understood through the psychoanalytic account of the material internalization of the other as involving no spiritually transcendent reference.

214 Notes 16 Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in their excellent introduction to Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, refer to this pedagogy under the label of learning to ‘reckon’ (Brault, P.-A. and Naas, M. (2001), ‘To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning’ in (D:WM, 1–30)). 17 Of course, the fact that a certain structure or technique was ‘called for’ by the subject the poem responds to does not mean that a radically different work could not have been produced that would also ‘do justice’ to it. 18 In referring to this as ‘civility’ we draw on Étienne Balibar’s term for ‘the politics which takes as its “object” the very violence of identities’. Derrida’s pedagogy would contribute to the emergence of a ‘civility from below’, conceived as an ‘art’ that can act as ‘a remedy for the state’s impotence in respect of the two faces of cruelty’ corresponding to exclusive ‘blood and soil’ and floating ‘post-modern’ identifications (Balibar, É. (2002), Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso, pp. 21–35).

On Hemlock and Becoming Mortal 1

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‘I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.’ ‘For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else’ (Plato (1997), Complete Works. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 64a, 155d). Historically this is certainly not an unprecedented position. Most of the major figures of Hellenic philosophy would have expected philosophy to serve such a function, as in Epicurus’s statement that a philosopher’s argument ‘by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated’ is empty. Many contemporary philosophers advocate returning to such a therapeutic model of philosophy, even if they might not want to directly exclude texts that do not serve such a function; e.g., Nussbaum, M. (1996), The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This tendency is particularly marked in those who deny death as a philosophical theme, such as Alain Badiou. We might think of his praise for the philosopher of mathematics and resistance fighter Jean Cavaillès who, as a Spinozist, was ‘[u]nburdened of any reference to himself ’ rendering death ‘no more than one possible and neutral conclusion’ (Badiou, A. (2009a), Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Pantheon. London: Verso, pp. 5–13). Badiou will broadly divide philosophers between those who follow Spinoza or Heidegger (whose account of Being-towards-death will be addressed later in this chapter), arguing that ‘Every politics of emancipation rejects finitude, rejects “being towards death”’ (Badiou, A.

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(2004), Theoretical Writings. London: Continuum, p. 156). At the same time, these apparently divergent accounts of finitude and infinitude have more in common than might at first appear. For Heidegger, the idealized figure of how we ought to relate to death was also a war hero executed by the enemy for sabotage: Leo Schlageter. Indeed, it was Badiou’s early Theory of the Subject that pointed towards this proximity, locating courage at the point of anxiety and proclaiming the need to ‘go past the threat of death’ in order to make ‘life out of death itself ’ such that ‘the unity of opposites between anxiety and courage literally produces the subject’, a position broadly equivalent to resolute acceptance of Being-towards-death (Badiou, A. (2009b), Theory of the Subject. London: Continuum, pp. 294–5). Pluth, E. (2007), Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. New York: SUNY Press, p. 1. Although there would be much to say on the topic, I will not engage here with the apparently fixed and universally applicable biological-medical definition of the death of the human as a living organism. This definition of death has itself been reformulated many times over the centuries and offers a far less clear and unambiguous definition than might at first appear. This need not necessarily take the form of the direct assertions identifying philosophy and atheism that were pronounced by thinkers such as Friedrich Jacobi in the ‘Atheism Dispute’. The theologian John Milbank has argued forcefully that even philosophers who identify themselves as guided by Christian religious faith, such as Jan Patočka and Jean-Luc Marion, in their philosophical writing depend on an account of the highest ethical gesture as a self-sacrificial offering without expectation of return, a notion that Milbank claims to be inconsistent with Christian theology (Milbank, J. (March 1999), ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’. First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life. As a more simple example, we might think of the inappropriateness of any references to an afterlife in responding to a philosophical case in ‘applied ethics’ – the existence of an afterlife is not explicitly denied but is entirely put out of play as a relevant concern in the characteristically ‘philosophical’ discussion of issues ranging from Philippa Foot’s ‘Trolley Problem’ to capital punishment or euthanasia. For example, it would be seen as quite inappropriate to hinge our response to a thought experiment on whether the hypothetical victims had been baptized, lived good lives and thus stood a good prospect of a joyful or painful eternity. It would be very difficult to justify why a member of a culture that has never conceived of death in this stripped-down manner ought to do so, and particularly how that would exhibit a higher order of ‘rationality’ than the alternative. In the case of Heidegger’s analysis of death, we might think of Derrida’s assertion that: ‘Despite all the distance taken from anthropo-theology, indeed, from Christian onto-theology, the analysis of death in Being and Time nonetheless

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repeats all the essential motifs of such onto-theology, a repetition that bores into its originarity right down to its ontological foundation […] neither the language nor the process of this analysis of death is possible without the Christian experience, indeed, the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic experience of death to which the analysis testifies. Without this event and the irreducible historicity to which it testifies. The same could be said for Freud’s and Levinas’s thought, mutatis mutandis’ (D:A, 80). The clear irony in Pascal’s original claim, even more apparent if we turn to its source in Montaigne’s Essays, shows that things are clearly not as simple as this assertion might imply. This term, appropriated by Derrida, is taken from Louis-Vincent Thomas’s Anthropologie de la mort (D:A, 26–8). Rousseau, J.-J. (1987), The Basic Political Writings. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, pp. 95–101, n.10. While this claim is relatively uncontroversial with respect to Heidegger and Levinas, with Freud one could argue that his primary engagement with the theme of death centres on the death drive rather than mourning and melancholia. It is possible to produce a rather different (and significantly more compatible) comparison of Heidegger and Freud on death if we begin from the death drive, as Havi Carel does in Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (Carel, A. (2006), Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger. New York: Rodopi). We will frequently treat these proper names as ‘metonymies’ that refer to broad ‘types of discourse’ on death rather than as references to particular individuals or their works. In the context of discussing Heidegger’s analysis of death, Derrida referred to ‘two major types of concurrent discourses on death in this century, which could be identified by the names or metonymies of Freud and Levinas’ (D:A, 38). Thus, Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic work on mourning and melancholia would still constitute part of the ‘determinate angle’ on death that is signified metonymically by the proper name ‘Freud’. This is the case despite the fact that they make claims that are incompatible with some of Freud’s assertions, remembering Freud was far from systematically consistent with himself. We will see that it is precisely where these discourses fail to close on themselves as systematic wholes that they encounter one another. Adorno, T. W. (2003), The Jargon of Authenticity. London: Routledge, p. 125. Critchley, S. (2000), ‘To Die Laughing’, in Morra, J., Robson, M. and Smith, M. (eds), The Limits of Death: Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Critchley’s vocabulary, characterizing the becoming-mortal of the subject as a ‘work’, owes a lot to Blanchot’s rather idiosyncratic reading of Heidegger: ‘It does not suffice for him that he is mortal; he understands that he

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has to become mortal, that he must be mortal twice over: sovereignly, extremely mortal. That is his human vocation. Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes the source of our activity and mastery’ (Blanchot, M. (1982), The Space of Literature. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, p. 96). 16 We might think of the famous lines from Tolstoy in which Ivan comes to appreciate that not only does everyone die but he will die: ‘That Caius – man in the abstract – was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite separate from all others’ (Tolstoy, L. (2004), The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Montana: Kessinger Publishing, p. 33). Heidegger refers directly to this moment in a footnote of Being and Time: ‘In his story “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” Leo Tolstoi has presented the phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having “someone die”’ (H:BT, 495n. xii). 17 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 107. 18 ‘The question of Being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical science and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task’ (H:BT, 31). 19 Kant, I. (1999), Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A51/B75. 20 In Heidegger’s later philosophy this will be reversed into our being ‘at the disposal of the gods’ through ‘the pervasive disposedness of the human being by being itself ’ (Heidegger, M. (2012), Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 16, 369). 21 The continual invocations of ‘this enigmatic “as”’ in Heidegger’s texts are crucially important (H:FCM, 274). As he will state in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, we can distinguish ‘questioning which is concerned with beings in themselves, just as they are […] ontic truth’ and ‘questioning which is concerned with beings as such, i.e., which inquires solely about what constitutes the being of beings […] ontological truth’ (H:FCM, 360). It is in this context that the stone that is ‘without world [Weltlos]’ can never ‘sense this earth as such, even as it lies upon it […] everything present around it remains essentially inaccessible to the stone itself ’. From this example Heidegger defines worldlessness as ‘having no access to those beings (as beings) amongst which this particular being with this specific manner of being is’ (H:FCM, 197). The animal as a being that is ‘poor in world

218 Notes [Weltarm]’ can be distinguished from the stone through having access to beings in themselves, just as they are, as in Heidegger’s example of a lizard who seeks out a certain rock where it bathes in the sun. However, despite being engaged in purposeful relations to beings the lizard has no access to beings as such – to ‘the rock as rock’. The rock does not disclose itself to the lizard: ‘The animal in principle does not possess the possibility of attending either to the being that it itself is or to beings other than itself […] the animal finds itself suspended, as it were, between itself and its environment, even though neither the one nor the other is experienced as being’. While ‘it is certain that all instinctual behaviour is a relating to … it is just as surely the case that in all its behaviour the animal is incapable of ever properly attending to something as such’ (H:FCM, 278, 249). What the animal lacks is the distance of language: the world-forming capacity of Dasein. The animal is always directly ‘captivated’ by beings: ‘the light-seeking behaviour always already serves to orient the creature and constantly to make possible such orientation. Consequently the light never has the opportunity to announce itself as such for the animal’ (H:FCM, 251). From here we can understand what Heidegger means by ‘world’ in the sense that Dasein and only Dasein fully has world – ‘We must say that world does not mean the accessibility of beings but rather implies amongst other things the accessibility of beings as such’ (H:FCM, 269). However, even Dasein ‘at first and for the most part does not properly know of world as such’, that is to say, in most daily activities we are as captivated by beings (and therefore as unfree) as animal (H:FCM, 270). 22 Inwood, B. and Gerson, L. P. (1998), Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. A4.125. In Heidegger’s words: ‘As long as Dasein is as an entity, it has never reached its “wholeness”. But if it gains such “wholeness”, this gain becomes the utter loss of Being-in-the-world. In such a case, it can never again be experienced as an entity’ (H:BT, 280). 23 Let us note that on the basis of the same reflections one could easily come to the conclusion that life simply has no end or limit, as in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement: ‘Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. […] Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits’ (Wittgenstein, L. (1972), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 6.4311). 24 At least in terms of Heidegger’s presentation of his thoughts, we would agree with Levinas’s claim that ‘Heidegger is not interested in the signification of human existing for itself. The human dimension [l’humain] does not come up in his thought except in so far as being is in question in the epic of being. […] The way in which Heidegger goes toward death is entirely determined by the ontological preoccupation. The meaning of man’s death is dictated by this preoccupation of being in its epos’ (L:GDT, 33–4). Heidegger’s project is totally removed from

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the kind of task that motivates Critchley when he says ‘if death is not just going to have the character of a brute fact, mortality is something in which one has to find a meaning’ (Critchley, ‘To Die Laughing’, p. 7). This does not mean that Heidegger’s work might not assist with finding such a meaning, only that it is not his concern. 25 Dreyfus positions these eight positions under four broad categories and orders them in terms of their plausibility, modestly placing his own previous position within the third category at position number five. (1) There is death understood as an event that ends human life, first as the equation of death with demise that he sees as the ‘simplest and most clearly mistaken way to understand Heidegger’ attributed to Sartre, Edwards and Philipse, then as the more sophisticated but still repudiated view that dying gives life seriousness and narrative structure attributed to Michael Zimmerman and Charles Guignon. (2) That death is not demise: either seeing it as the closing down of possibilities (Taylor Carman) or as readiness for anxiety (William Blattner). (3) The view that Heidegger formalizes death and dying as structural features of human life, whether as a condition that identity that can always be lost and the heroic acceptance of this possibility (Hubert L. Dreyfus), or through seeing human beings in general as worlddisclosures and identifying with this general feature that survives one’s individual death (Julian Young). (4) Lastly, there are the views where death is equated with world collapse, whether through staking everything on one’s current world while remaining aware of its vulnerability (John Haugeland), or through seeing world collapse as a readiness to sacrifice the world when confronted with anomalous practices that portend the arrival of a new cultural world (Carol White) (Dreyfus, H. L. (2005), ‘Foreword’, in C. J. White, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, p. xxx). In each view ‘death’ has a very different reference, producing in turn very different accounts of what kind of activity would constitute an authentic lived relation to death. We have no interest in this text in choosing one of these readings and defending it against the others. 26 Carel, Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger, pp. 81–4. 27 Ibid., p. 81. 28 Ibid., p. 82. 29 Derrida refers to his generation as inspired by a ‘very French model of philosophy à la Guéroult […] In Guéroult’s model, then, there was a respect for the way the text works, for the logic of the philosophemes without taking the author into account, and a concern with reconstructing the greatest coherence possible in a systematic arrangement of philosophemes as well as an attention to the way the text works formally; it was not a question of subscribing or not subscribing to a thesis or of philosophizing for its own sake, but of seeing how things worked – a sort of philosophical technology. At the same time, there was an attention to the

220 Notes letter, to literality: not to the breath that breathes through a text, to what it means, but to its literal working, its functioning’ (D:TS, 45). This is extracted from a larger passage in which Derrida takes his distance from Guéroult’s method, having testified to its great value, necessity and legitimacy. 30 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 107. 31 In ‘What is Metaphysics?’ we are presented with an account of science that ‘wants to know nothing about the nothing’ (H:PM, 84). Nevertheless, it is only ‘because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein [that] the total strangeness of beings [can] overwhelm us’, in turn rendering it possible that we can ‘in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground things’ (H:P, 95). We will see that the fact that the ground of science and meaning is that which overwhelms us becomes a major theme in Levinas through anxiety in the face of the other’s mortality rather than one’s own. 32 Mulhall, S. (2005), Heidegger and Being and Time (second edn). London: Routledge, p. 211. 33 Heidegger is certainly not shy of referring to Dasein as having access to ‘death as such’. Even in much later texts such as On the Way to Language, Heidegger’s account of the fourfold defines mortals in terms of such access: ‘Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought’ (Heidegger, M. (1971), On the Way to Language. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 107–8). 34 ‘Essence’ typically designates the property a group has in common, as in the case of man as the collection of all entities with the property ‘rational animal’, yet death is precisely not a common property since each death is unique to a Dasein and distinguishes it from all others. 35 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 125. 36 Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, pp. 56–74. 37 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 123, 125. 38 Taken literally, it is quite inappropriate for Adorno to refer to Heidegger’s position as ‘solipsistic’. It is precisely due to others existing with a distinct world of their own that my experience of them dying can be entirely unrelated to their dying. There even seems to be something ethically appropriate about acknowledging limitations on the extent to which we can empathetically access others’ traumas. 39 It is in response to this that Levinas makes ‘substitution’ the central term of his developed ethical system in Otherwise than Being (L:OB, 99–130). 40 Krell, D. F. (1992), Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 105. 41 Heidegger, M. (1996), Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 163.

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42 Rogozinski, J. (2005), Faire Part: Cryptes de Derrida. Paris: Éditions Lignes & Manifestes, p. 18. 43 Heidegger wrote memorial addresses for individuals, such as Albert Leo Schlageter and Conradin Kreutzer, although he had never met either in person. While there is the memorial text for Husserl on the thirtieth anniversary of his death along with a short dedication to Eugen Fink in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and to Hermann Niemeyer in ‘My Way to Phenomenology’, these remain rather scattered examples and there is very little source material or secondary scholarship on Heidegger as a mourner.

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Derrida, J. and Caputo, J. D. (1997), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 16, 32, 31. Ibid., p. 16. There is good reason to be critical of Caputo’s derisive mocking of the questioner’s ‘journalistic haste and impatience’ in the supposedly ‘ridiculous demand put by someone who has never read a word of Derrida’s works’ (Ibid., p. 31). As Caputo admits, if Derrida’s works have shown anything it is the general impossibility of adequately encapsulating any thinker within a neat, programmatic summary. If Derrida and his texts have no particular privilege with regard to this general impossibility, then the truism that a serious labour of reading and interpretation is required in order to grasp any and every philosopher’s thought surely cannot entail that anyone who asks for a quick encapsulation of why they should first dedicate themselves to a particular thinker’s texts is making ‘a ridiculous demand’. Furthermore, the refusal to encapsulate Derrida’s position in any kind of nutshell has led to a situation where, at least among many Anglo-American continental thinkers, his work is seen as heterogeneous to his contemporaries, in turn leading to a ghettoization of ‘Derrida studies’ far removed from the productive debate between those working on other thinkers of Derrida’s generation. Eagleton, T. (2008), ‘Marxism without Marxism’, in M. Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. London: Verso, p. 85. Jameson, F. (2008) ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in M. Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations, p. 33. Dolar, M. (2008), ‘Freud and the Political’.Unbound, 4, (15): 15–29 (p. 15). Wallace, D. F. (2008), ‘Laughing with Kafka’. Harper’s Magazine, January, p. 26. Derrida: ‘Artaud, oui …’, quoted in Naas, M. (2012) Miracle and Machine: Jacques

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Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media. New York: Fordham University Press, p. 7. Derrida, J. and Birnbaum, J. (2007), Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 34. Derrida is perhaps playing on Nietzsche’s desire in Ecce Homo for ‘a reader such as I deserve, who reads me the way old philologists read their Horace’ (Nietzsche, F. (2012), Ecce Homo; The Antichrist. New York: Algora Publishing, p. 45). Meillassoux, Q. (2008), After Finitude. London: Continuum. Derrida, J. (1972), ‘Discussion following “Structure Sign and Play”’, in R. Macksey and E. Donato (eds), The Structuralist Controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 272. When Derrida claims that ‘there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks’, he is not stating that all experience is an experience of differential marks but that, in so far as there is any present identity, it only comes forward on the basis of chains of differential marks (D:LI, 10). There is no pure presence or pure presentation of an object independently of language taken in a broad sense. Derrida, J., Kirby, D. and Ziering-Kofman, A (2005), Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 110. There are several examples of this comparison in the secondary literature, for example Karatani’s claim that: ‘deconstruction, if formalized, is tantamount to Gödel’s proof. Yet this implies neither the dominance nor the impotence of mathematics. Gödel’s proof presents us with a case wherein the attempt to architectonize mathematics results not in mathematical foundation but in the impossibility of mathematical foundations’ (Karatani, K. (1995), Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money. Boston: MIT Press, p. xxxiv). Simon Morgan Wortham presents a similar account at the beginning of The Derrida Dictionary: ‘far from turning its back on systematic thought, deconstruction tries to think the “systemic” in the most rigorous way possible. One of Derrida’s principal insights is that no system can ever be fully complete and self-sufficient. Instead, every system depends, basically, on non-systematizable elements which in fact produce and maintain the system’s very possibility’ (Wortham, S. M. (2010), The Derrida Dictionary. London: Continuum, p. 22. The most famous formulation of this principle is as follows: ‘No conceivable theory can make us err with respect to the principle of all principles: that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there. We see indeed that each [theory] can only again draw its truth itself from originary data’ (Husserl, E. (1982), Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a

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phenomenological philosophy, first book. The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff Publishers, §24, pp. 44–5 (subsequently Ideas I). Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts 1952–1974 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 186. For a particularly clear account of this shift in Lacan see Chiesa, L. (2007), Subjectivity and Otherness. Boston, MIT Press, pp. 105–38. Westphal, K. R. (2000), ‘Hegel’s Internal Critique of Naive Realism’. Journal of Philosophical Research, 25: 173–229. There would of course be many problems with trying to divide Derrida’s claims into those that are ‘properly deconstructive’ and those that are critical, philosophical, literary or where he is merely chatting. Using one of Derrida’s own examples, there is no simple way to categorize the scrap in Nietzsche’s Nachlass stating ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’ (D:S, 129–39). ‘[A] theory can never authorize itself, as Searle’s does, to “ignore” anything in “real life” and least of all “marginal, fringe and partially defective promises …,” “promises made by elliptical turns of phrase, hints, metaphors, etc.,” “parasitic forms of communication such as telling jokes or acting in a play …,” “and all sorts of marginal cases within each family of speech acts …” […] a theory of nonmarginal cases is only possible, interesting and consistent if it can account, in the structure of those cases said to be nonmarginal, for the essential possibility of cases interpreted as marginal, deviant, parasitical, etc.’ (D:LI, 126). For example, the formulas for metaphor and metonymy in ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’ (Lacan, J. (2006), Écrits. London: W. W. Norton & Co, pp. 428–9). We can see ‘meaning’ has a far wider compass than the communicative sense we are beginning with here. Another simplification involved here is that by focusing on meaning effects on the scene of presence we are excluding the question of ‘the other scene’: the whole field of ‘unconscious meaning’. One of the most violent simplifications we are imposing on Derrida’s work at this point is that we are treating a language as if it were a single, identifiable and shared textual structure. One of Derrida’s major thematic concerns was the plurality of languages within ‘a’ language. We can see how our account would become significantly more complicated, if not entirely untenable, if we took into account Derrida’s claims in Monolinguism of the Other that ‘we are justifiably obliged to say at once that “we only ever speak one language,” and “we never speak only one language” or “I only speak one language, (and, but, yet) it is not mine’ (D:MO, 26–7). To give a more mundane example, everyone who speaks English has a different English (there are words I do not know, words I misunderstand, words that have idiosyncratic connotations for me due to past events, etc.) and this inevitably leads to the production of different meaning effects in each of

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us in response to the same given material. If meaning only occurs and exists in the consciousness or particular subjects who are engaging in the articulation of presented material with their own partial version of the language, then is there any such thing as the actual or correct meaning of a text? Would it be a matter of the meaning effects produced in an average or the ideal reader? How would we define an ideal reader? These questions show how Derrida’s work opens from structuralism onto reader-response theory, though we only offer them to reinforce our point that Derrida does not have a positive theory of meaning. Saussure, F. de (2005), Course in General Linguistics. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co, p. 102. Zuckermann, ‘Italo-Hebraic Bilingual Homophonous Poem’, www.zuckermann. org/print/bilingual_print.htm (accessed 2014). Critchley, S. (1999), The Ethics of Deconstruction (second edn). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 38. Malabou, C. (2004), Counterpaths: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 162–3. In his eulogy to Deleuze, ‘I’m Going to Have to Wander All Alone’, Derrida states that, despite feeling closer to Deleuze than any other thinker of his generation, one of the two slight objections he had about Deleuze’s work was ‘about the idea that philosophy consists in “creating” concepts’ (D:WM, 193). May, T. (1997), Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, p. 103. Perhaps the most famous reading along these lines is Jurgen Habermas’s ‘Levelling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature’ in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Boston: MIT Press, 1987). Habermas’s reading remains influential despite his rapprochement with Derrida that led to the co-authored ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together’, the dual-interview text Philosophy in a Time of Terror and other works (including Habermas’s memorial text for Derrida, ‘A Last Farewell: Derrida’s Enlightening Impact’), several of which are included in The Derrida – Habermas Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Smith, B. (1992), ‘Letter to The Times (Saturday, May 9, 1992)’. The Times (London). Derrida states in Limited Inc. that ‘I put “concept” between quotation marks because if the concept of “concept” depends upon the logic deconstructed by the graphics of remainder, the remainder is not a concept in the strict sense’ (D:LI, 53). Such as Rodolphe Gasché’s justification of infrastructure – ‘Infrastructures, a word used by Derrida on several occasions in reference to these quasi-synthetic constructs, seemed to represent the most economical way to conceptualize

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all of Derrida’s proposed quasi-synthetic concepts in a general manner. “Undecidables” would have been an alternative, yet “infrastructures” has the supplementary advantage of allowing for a problematization of Derrida’s debate with structuralism and with the Platonism that it has inherited from conservative strata in Husserlian phenomenology’ (Gasché, R. (1986), The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 7). 34 This is akin to Eugen Fink’s claim that one can only read Husserl’s phenomenological investigations through the activity of the phenomenological reduction. To a neo-Kantian reader the texts would simply appear to be rather substandard works of critical philosophy (Fink, E. (2000), ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism’, in R. O. Elveton (ed.), The Phenomenology of Husserl. Seattle: Noesis Press). 35 This does not necessarily mean that there is only one Saussurian différance, one Freudian différance, etc. 36 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 105. 37 It is worth specifying that, while Derrida’s vocabulary here is quite novel, since Hegel’s Logic many thinkers have attempted to think through the unique processes at work in the production of differential systems of concepts. While in Hegel those dialectical processes were themselves logical and knowable, for many later thinkers they were not. As Derrida puts it with regard to Freud and Nietzsche: ‘Différance appears almost by name in their texts, and in those places where everything is at stake’ (D:MP, 17). 38 We take the specific notion of a ‘hinge-word’ from Of Grammatology, where it is in the section entitled ‘The Hinge [La brisure]’ that Derrida first discusses ‘the irreducible notion of the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse. And finally, in all scientific fields, notably in biology’ (D:OG, 70). In French, the paleologism ‘mots charnières’ would be particularly suitable. 39 Hägglund, M. (2008), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 79. 40 Here these proper names are being used as metonymies for determinate angles on death. There is no implication that Freud read Levinas (especially as Levinas’s first texts that dealt with ethics were published some time after Freud’s death) or that Levinas seriously addressed Freud.

The Ethics of Vulnerability 1 In Levinas and the Political, Howard Caygill shows that by the time of his first publication that was not a commentary (1935’s On Escape), Levinas had already

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shifted his predominant theoretical allegiance from the University of Strasbourg’s ‘radical republican’ dedication to the ‘principles of “89”’, with its mixture of Léon Brunschvicg, Émile Durkheim and Bergson, to Husserl, to Heidegger, back to Husserl and possibly even back to Bergson (Caygill, H. (2002), Levinas and the Political. London: Routledge, pp. 7–48). For example, in Totality and Infinity Levinas implies that Plotinus weakened what was revolutionary in Plato’s good beyond being: ‘Plotinus returns to Parmenides when he represents the apparition of the essence from the One by emanation and by descent’ (L:TI, 103); however, in other texts he sees Plotinus as remaining true to a good beyond being: ‘Plato and Plotinus, who dared to pose, against all good sense, something beyond being’ and even puts Plotinus forward as the original thinker of the trace (L:BPW, 21, 63). Incidentally, Derrida also traces a fundamental question of his philosophy back to Plotinus: ‘Heidegger poses basically the same question as Plotinus before him, and Lacan afterwards – how can one give what one does not have? Which is to say: how can that which is disadjusted render justice, or, more precisely, jointure, Fugen?’ (D:TS, 7). A form of this question is at the heart of this project where the ghost that is beyond Being plays an essential part in rendering justice within Being. ‘The real “thou” is not the loved one […] the society of love itself is in the wrong’ (L:EN, 18); ‘The metaphysical event of transcendence – the welcome of the Other […] is not accomplished as love. But the transcendence of discourse is bound to love. We shall show how in love transcendence goes both further and less far than language’ (L:TI, 254). “[T]he relation with the unique and the other – a relation designated by the general term love’ (L:BPW, 166). ‘Hence intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. All knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is pre-eminently non-adequation’; ‘To metaphysical thought, where a finite has the idea of infinity […] we have reserved the term intentionality’ (L:TI, 27, 299). Indeed, even his two major monographs have a rather problematic status. Otherwise than Being can be viewed as collections of essays: the central chapter ‘Substitution’ for example was given as a lecture in 1967, reworked as an essay for La Revue Philosophique de Louvain in 1968, and then reworked once again as the central chapter of Otherwise than Being for publication in 1974. Totality and Infinity has a notoriously strange relation to its ‘Preface’ (although Peperzak has convincingly shown it is not as alien to the text as it might at first appear (Peperzak, A. T. and Levinas, E., To the Other: An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), pp. 121–30) and to its ‘Section IV’ (whose content was not referred to at all in the thesis summary Levinas submitted to the University of Paris (translated and included in

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Peperzak, A. T. (1997), Platonic Transformations: With and After Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 120–1). 6 Despite differences, there is a loose isomorphism between Heidegger’s account of the sending of Being that is not itself a being, yet is always forgetfully taken as a being in metaphysical texts and that calls for poetic ‘thinking’; Levinas’s account of the opening of language in a saying that can never be said, yet can only be philosophically addressed through being falsified in said statements that must be experienced in their unsaying, and Derrida’s account of différance that is not a word and yet will always be read as a word and thus calls for texts that trace its movement through the experience of interruptive double-reading. These are all thinkers struggling with finding an appropriate way of expressing the ante-logical ground of the logical, just as Freud is in his investigation of the unconscious. 7 This leaves open the question as to why Levinas is compelled to write multiple texts, like a negative theologian who claims that nothing can be said about God and yet who writes hundreds of texts about God. Levinas’s multiple texts as collections of said assertions offer increasingly sophisticated entanglements of language in which the said content works to point out the withdrawal of the text’s saying that takes place in any writer’s writings. As Derrida puts it: ‘He does not simply make knots and interruptions in his text, as everyone does, as the state, philosophy, medicine do. I say as everyone does, since if there is interruption everywhere, there are knots everywhere. But in his text there is, perhaps, a supplementary nodal complication, another way of retying without retying’, and it is through this ‘supplementary nodal complication’ that Levinas ‘will have, wholly otherwise, obligated you to read what one is not obligated to read’, where in other texts you are ‘never forced to read or recognize this trace’ of withdrawal (D:Pv1, 165). 8 Of course, in so far as Levinas’s work is itself already a response to Heidegger, there is no irony in Derrida’s claim that ‘the route followed by Levinas’s thought is such that all our questions already belong to his own interior dialogue’ (D:WD, 136). 9 ‘I am interrogating the link, in the Work of EL, between sexual difference – the Other as other sex, otherwise said as otherwise sexed – and the Other as wholly other, beyond or before sexual difference’ (D:Pv1, 179–80). 10 In this sentence we use the word ‘supplement’ in a non-Derridean sense. That it is not a compatible and successful supplement is precisely because it is a supplement in the Derridean sense. 11 As inheritors of French anti-humanism, we find Levinas’s use of ‘human’ is highly problematic, far more so than his uses of terms such as religion and God that offer more or less secular interpretations. As it is unavoidable in his writings, we will accept it throughout this book although there would be much to be said here. 12 We also fully acknowledge that this summary, although it is offered in certain

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texts by Levinas himself, leaves many important stages from his more detailed investigations aside; for example, the role of the feminine, work and the dwelling in the movement from egoism to ethics as presented in Totality and Infinity. Our implicit belief that the feminine can simply be put aside as supplementary to the really important core of Levinas’s work merits deconstruction. The above comments are limited to Levinas’s abstract schema of the political arising from the third. In his actual oeuvre there are extensive engagements with the political themes listed above, particularly in connection with Judaism (in books such as Difficult Freedom, In The Time of Nations and Beyond the Verse), through his extensive engagements with the Marxism of Ernst Bloch and in short texts that deal directly with themes such as money, such as ‘The I and the Totality’ in Entre Nous (L:EN, 11–33). We might note in this context that Levinas’s 1934 article ‘Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’ was ‘one of the first, if not the first, serious attempt to understand the philosophical underpinnings of National Socialism’ (Manning, R. J. S. (2001), Beyond Ethics to Justice through Levinas and Derrida: The Legacy of Levinas. Quincy: Franciscan Press, p. 8). One might think here of C. Fred Alford’s protestations: ‘Does anyone really want his partner to become his hostage[? …] Don’t we really want mutuality? Sharing? […] Wouldn’t the other rather have someone to play with than a hostage? Wouldn’t you?’ (Alford, C. F. (2002), Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis. London: Continuum, p. 23). Even if Alford misinterprets Levinas, the very prevalence of such misinterpretations weakens any claim that Levinas captured a basic ethical intuition. Critchley, S. ‘Lévinas’, in J. Reynolds and J. Roffe (eds), Understanding Derrida. London: Continuum. Of course, this position would need to be defended against those scholars who insist Derrida’s work is not ethical in a Levinasian sense, such as Hägglund in Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, and also those who would argue for the equal importance of thinkers such as Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx or Benjamin in Derrida’s ethical and political reflections. ‘As the previous analysis of “thou shalt not kill” suggested, the other’s command is not necessarily a categorical prescription. It is more like what Jean-François Lyotard calls “a prescription that there be prescriptions.” There is, in other words, something deliberately general and empty about the other’s speaking command’ (Robbins, J., ‘Introduction’ in (L:IRB, 5)). It would be wrong to see this work as simply Levinasian in origin. In his fascinating study of Derrida’s school essays written at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand prior to attending the École normale supérieure (ENS), Edward Baring has shown interesting parallels between Derrida’s relatively late reflections on justice and law and one of the major focuses of his school period: René le Senne’s distinction between morale and moralité: ‘Morale for le Senne was the set of determined

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moral laws that exist at any particular point and time. Moralité was the attitude by which that morale was adjusted in the light of a higher undetermined good in changing situations’ (Baring, E. (2011), The Young Derrida and French Philosophy 1945–1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 54). Of course, there remains a profound gap between the Catholic existentialist notion of a ‘higher undetermined good’ and Derrida’s account of justice before singular others. 18 This does not imply that one can simply be an Aristotelian-Levinasian, a KantianLevinasian or a Millian-Levinasian, since all of those thinkers have their own meta-ethical reflections that are in conflict with Levinas’s stance. For example, to Kant the Levinasian call to responsibility with its denial of autonomy would seem pathological, even if it leads one to do the right thing. For Levinas, Kant’s account of the categorical imperative is very important (Levinas quotes its second formulation regularly), yet Kant himself failed to appreciate the structure of the call that led him to formulate that imperative and that gives it force. 19 Levinas in fact believes Marxism to be a politics in his sense of the word because he recognized in it a generosity and openness to the other, even if he remained disillusioned about its potential to bring about utopia: ‘The end of socialism, in the horror of Stalinism, is the greatest spiritual crisis in modern Europe. Marxism represented a generosity, whatever the way in which one understands the materialist doctrine which is its basis. There is in Marxism the recognition of the other; there is certainly the idea that the other must himself struggle for this recognition, that the other must become egoist. But the noble hope consists in healing everything, in installing, beyond the chance of individual charity, a regime without evil. And the regime of charity becomes Stalinism and [complicitous] Hitlerian horror. That’s what Grossman shows, who was there, who participated in the enthusiasm of the beginnings. An absolutely overwhelming testimony and a complete despair’ (L:IRB, 81). 20 This image of successive waves of scholarship has been produced by those thinkers who regard themselves as contributing to a new third wave: ‘The first wave of scholarship was concerned predominantly with commentary and exposition, and focused mostly on Totality and Infinity’. Derrida inaugurated ‘what would become a second wave’ characterized by ‘an intense bout of navel gazing in which Levinas scholarship turned inward on itself, focusing on Levinas’s catachrestical language in, for example, his second magnum opus Otherwise than Being, which was itself interpreted as a response in part to Derrida’s essay. Throughout all of this the wider practical and applied dimensions of Levinas’s work, including its possible significance for progressive moral and political thought, were mostly ignored or eclipsed.’ The third wave is characterized as ‘concerned primarily with exploring progressive sociopolitical issues both as they derive (positively) from Levinas’s thought and lead (critically) to a confrontation and interrogation of his work’

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(Atterton, P. and Calarco, M. (2010) ‘Editor’s Introduction: The Third Wave of Levinas Scholarship’, P. Atterton and M. Calarco (eds), Radicalizing Levinas. New York: SUNY Press, p. x). Critchley S. (2002), ‘Introduction’, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6. Putnam adopted Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, itself from Archilochus, that divides thinkers into foxes (who know ‘many small things’) and hedgehogs (who know ‘one big thing’), judging that Levinas is a hedgehog (Putnam, H. ‘Levinas and Judaism’, in S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. New York: SUNY Press, p. 58). To give one symptomatic example of this relegation of Levinas’s account of the political, we might look at Critchley’s ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. After 23 pages detailing Levinas’s project without reference to ‘the third’, a final two-page section turns to the ‘relation between ethics and politics’. Critchley rapidly claims that Levinas has much to say here, that far from ‘this being a blind spot in his work, one finds – and with an increasing insistence – an attempt to traverse the passage from ethics to politics’ (Critchley, ‘Introduction’, p. 24). Yet, despite the claim that politics is not a blind spot, the remaining texts in the Companion contain only a few scattered references to the political. The sense that Critchley’s few comments on politics were merely tagged onto the ‘Introduction’ proves itself to be justified by the fact that they are a slightly modified copy of his editorial introduction to the essay ‘Peace and Proximity’ in Levinas’s Basic Philosophical Writings (L:BPW, 161–2). It is perhaps unsurprising then that only a few years after re-expressing his claim that the political was not a blind spot in Levinas’s works, Critchley published the essay ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of the Political’ in which he claimed politics was ‘the critical point or even the Achilles’ heel of his [Levinas’s] work’ (Critchley, S. (2004), ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them’. Political Theory, 32, (2): 172–85, p. 173). As is exhibited in the title of William Simmons’s essay: Simmons, W. (1999), ‘The Third: Levinas’ Theoretical Move from An-Archical Ethics to the Realm of Justice and Politics’. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 25, (6): 83–104. Drabinski, J. (2000), ‘The Possibility of an Ethical Politics: From Peace to Liturgy’. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26, (4): 49–73. The aporetic intricacies of Husserl’s relation to an ‘originary impression’ of temporality or subjectivity form a focus in Derrida’s very early The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Near the conclusion, Derrida refers to how ‘Husserl asks himself whether, since time and being are always passively preconstituted, pretemporality (Vorzeit) and preexistence (Vorsein) are not beyond any possible experience (unerfahrbar) and any possible discourse (unsagbar)

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for the “phenomenlologizing I”’, regarding this as a motivation to move from transcendental idealism to Heideggerian ontology (D:PG, 147). We will see in Chapter 5 that similar thoughts drive Abraham from Husserlian phenomenology to psychoanalysis. 26 The number of stages involved in Husserl’s theory of the synthetic activities that constitute the living present remains a controversial issue. For a powerful recent contribution to this debate see DeRoo, N. (2011), ‘Revisiting the Zahavi-Brough/ Sokolowki Debate’ in Husserl Studies, 27, (1): 1–12. 27 We will return below to the question of whether there can be ‘impure’ experiences of these states, such as the experience of enjoyment had by one fleeing their political and ethical duty or the experience of ethical election by one neglecting the face of the third. 28 Caygill, Levinas and the Political, p. 1. 29 Levinas, E. (2001), The Levinas Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 294. 30 Žižek, S. (2004), Organs Without Bodies. New York: Routledge, p. 106. 31 Ibid. 32 Alford, Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis, p. 25. 33 ‘“To be or not to be” is not the ultimate alternative, in any case, not the ultimate nor the most urgent question […] To be sure, to speak of questions of life and death is to speak of urgent questions. But is life and death as a pair reducible to being and not being? Is it not a metaphor?’ (L:IRB, 125). 34 For a strong account of Bergson’s argument see Deleuze, G. (1991), Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, pp. 17–21. 35 Arguably the greatest literary thinker of the horror of the unending persistence of Being is not Blanchot but Beckett. As the relation between Malone Dies and The Unnamable shows, despite Malone’s hopes one can never be freed from ‘the great cunt of existence’ (Beckett, S. (1994), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder Ltd, p. 285). In Richard N. Coe’s words: ‘Not a waiting for death, but literally a waiting for Nothing. Beyond death, there is not “Nothing,” but simply more waiting. The purgatory of earth is merely transformed into another, of stranger and sadder dimensions – the purgatory of The Unnamable’ (Coe, R. N. (1964), Beckett. London: Oliver and Boyd Ltd, p. 68). 36 Although Levinas was famously dismissive of non-Abrahamic religions – claiming that ‘Buddhism can be said just as well in Greek’ (L:IRB, 138) – it is perhaps unsurprising that many scholars closely associated with Levinas, most notably Alfonso Lingis, have written extensively on eastern philosophy and religion. 37 ‘The word ethics is Greek. More often, especially now, I think about holiness, about the holiness of the face of the other or the holiness of my obligation as such’ (L:IRB, 49).

232 Notes 38 Bernasconi, R. (2005), ‘No Exit: Levinas’ Aporetic Account of Transcendence’. Research in Phenomenology, 35, (1): 101–17, p. 101. 39 In this early work the word ‘metaphysics’ still has a positive value for Heidegger. 40 ‘You go toward death, you “learn to die,” you “prepare” yourself for the final event; but in the last quarter of an hour – or the last second – death is there, travelling its part of the route alone and ready to surprise. […] Heidegger calls the extreme possibility of death the possibility of impossibility. Without wishing to play on words, I have always thought that possibility implies a human power, whereas dying is unassumable: it is rather “an impossibility of possibility”’ (L:IRB, 122). 41 The extent to which Levinas’s approach is rooted in literature is rarely commented on. In describing the key thesis that distinguishes his position from Buber, Levinas said ‘The human, in the highest, strictest sense of the word, is without reciprocity. I didn’t discover that, Dostoevsky did’ (L:IRB, 89). 42 Hegel, G. W. F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 104–10. 43 Rosenzweig, F. (1971), The Star of Redemption. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 104–5. 44 Hegel, G. W. F (1967), Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 10. 45 Derrida’s earliest work sought to show that this identity at the source of the absolute object (flux) with absolute subjectivity was an untenable a priori synthesis: a complication at the origin that calls for dialectical resolution through putting transcendental idealism into articulation with ontology. Despite the clear inspiration of Tran Duc Thao thought on this account of dialectic in Husserl, Derrida distinguishes the dialectic he believes to be called for from Thao’s, referring to the latter as a worldly dialectic that leaves us prisoners of metaphysics (D:PG, 211 n. 8). Derrida’a appreciation of the impossibility of such a dialectic is arguably the origin of deconstruction. 46 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 113. 47 ‘The genuine concept of the transcendence of something physical which is the measure of the rationality of any statements about transcendence, can itself be derived only from the proper essential contents of perception or from those concatenations of definite kinds which we call demonstrative experience.’ (Ibid., p. 106). 48 Naturally stating that ‘I’ constitutes time, space and the objects of experience does not imply that our constituted empirical subjectivity has any power over what is offered to it – one can still die of starvation. That ‘I’ carries out the processes is a matter of accessibility rather than control. In order to encounter a table, the pure manifold of the given must be ordered and individuated in accordance with a complex series of associations, retentions, protentions, projects, traditions, cultural

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values, etc. To say ‘I constitute the table’ is to say that, through phenomenological investigation, I can access and elucidate all of these processes, prior to or outside of which there is no such thing as ‘an object’, let alone ‘a table’. Since I can also access the various processes that constitute the ‘empirical I’ that I take myself to be, the standard distinction between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ breaks down with both included within a larger field or flux of transcendental subjectivity’s constitution of the world. 49 Husserl, E. (1999), Cartesian Meditations. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 93–4. 50 Such an apparently incautious leap from a Husserlian to a Heideggerian vocabulary is Levinas’s own. This should not be understood as simply identifying Husserl’s and Heidegger’s projects but as the far broader claim that all philosophy is ontologism, even if many thinkers have moments in their texts that step beyond ontologism. 51 This is only part of Levinas’s account. In his later texts he emphasizes the subject’s own exposure in saying rather than the surprise of the other’s response. It is a matter of ‘an exposure without holding back, exposure of exposedness, expression, saying. This exposure is the frankness, sincerity, veracity of saying. […] In sincerity, in frankness, in the veracity of this saying, in the uncoveredness of suffering, being is altered’, we will see that this theme of uncovered suffering is connected to an emotional response to the other’s mortality (L:OB, 15). 52 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. xxx. 53 Kant, I. (1996), Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257–8. 54 Bennington, G. and Derrida, J. (1993), Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 75. We are not necessarily convinced that this assertion is true of all of Derrida’s uses of the term trace. However, it will prove a useful schema for the graphics of the trace that are at stake in our project. 55 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 56 Here we set ourselves explicitly against the view that there is a singular ‘logic’ of the trace in Derrida’s work. In particular, we are clearly opposed to Hägglund’s claim that ‘the understanding of the trace that informs deconstructive logic is radically different from Levinas’s understanding of the trace’ (Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 79). Our claim is not that Derrida’s ‘understanding’ of the trace or the use of it in ‘deconstructive logic’ is actually similar to the Levinasian understanding; instead, we would claim that Derrida’s use of ‘trace’ (beneath which plays a sheaf of different, incompatible graphics lifted from different discourse) does not commit Derrida to having a personal ‘understanding’ of the trace at all. Alternatively, if there is a specifically ‘deconstructive logic’ of the trace, it is not a particular account of the trace to be opposed to Levinas’s, but rather

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the logic of the sheaf structure that underlies and exceeds Levinas’s usage and articulating it with other discourses to produce new transdisciplinary connections and chances. One of the most critical arguments in Derrida’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ is that in order to have an ethical duty to the other, Levinas would have posited the other as alter-ego and lost the notion of a wholly other: ‘It is difficult to see how the notion of violence […] could be determined rigorously on a purely ethical level, without prior eidetic-transcendental analysis of the relations between ego and alter-ego in general, between several origins of the world in general’ (D:WD, 160–1). Equally one cannot first produce a doctrine of human rights and only then add an appendix on gender, on race, on disability, etc. For Derrida these questions must be posed at the very outset, just as he rejected Searle’s attempt to form an account of ‘serious’ communication that would then be supplemented by accounts of how this is modified when lying, acting, joking, etc. Adorno, T. (1973), Negative dialectics. New York: Seabury Press, p. 365. Patchen, K. (1967), Collected Poems. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, p. 69.

The Scene of Writing 1

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One reason for the appearance of proximity between Derrida’s and Freud’s texts would be a matter of how, as we have already mentioned, both deal with: ‘Repression, not forgetting; repression, not exclusion’. At the same time, ‘logocentric repression is not comprehensible on the basis of the Freudian concept of repression; on the contrary, logocentric repression permits an understanding of how an original and individual repression became possible within the horizon of a culture and a historical structure of belonging’ (D:WD, 246). Without systems constructed on the general text through logocentric repression of disjoining links, there would be no possibility of apparently distinct textual bodies whose articulations produce meaning effect calling for repression. ‘The fact that I have never been in analysis, in the institutional sense of the analytic situation, does not mean that I am not, here or there, in a way that cannot be easily toted up, analysand and analyst in my own time and in my own way. Like everyone else’ (D:RP, 68). This is in conflict with Freud’s own stance. As stated in the ‘Introductory Lectures’, since Freud could never render the audience present at a psychoanalytic treatment: ‘You can only be told about it; and, in the strictest sense of the word, it is only by hearsay that you will get to know psycho-analysis. As a result of

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receiving your instruction at second hand, as it were, you find yourselves under quite unusual conditions for forming a judgement’ (F:XV, 18). The danger is not merely that most who learn about psychoanalysis through hearsay will reject it as extravagant, perverse and absurd, there is equally the inevitability that anyone who finds psychoanalysis intuitively convincing must have misunderstood a revelation that the self ought to find almost unbearable and to do everything it can to reject or obscure. As Freud states in his introduction, ‘I will show you how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought are inevitably bound to make you into opponents of psycho-analysis, and how much you would have to overcome in yourselves in order to get the better of this instinctive opposition’ (F:XV, 15–16). Of course, this does not make us Christians, colonialists, Cartesian dualists, Darwinists or endorsers of psychoanalysis; it does not even imply we know more than superficialities about them. Rather, it indicates that one’s inheritance is not simply known or simply chosen. As Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx: ‘That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. And that, as Hölderlin said so well, we can only bear witness to it’ (D:SM, 68). Derrida was involved in the future of psychoanalysis in France through his key role in the ‘Confrontations’ seminar that fostered discussion among the four Parisian psychoanalytic societies. Rousinesco rather bombastically claimed that, ‘through the encounter between SPP dissidents and the thesis of deconstruction, a true Derridian school of psychoanalysis was created in France’; however, it remains highly questionable that there has or could ever be a truly Derridean psychoanalysis, should such a thing even be desirable (Roudinesco, É. (Fall 1995– Winter 1996), ‘Lacan and Derrida in the History of Psychoanalysis’. Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 2). The statement Derrida focuses on and that was to ‘be circulated to various concerned international organizations’ was on the topic of human rights: ‘The International Psycho-Analytic Association wishes to express its opposition to the use of psychiatric or psychotherapeutic methods to deprive individuals of their legitimate freedom; to an individual’s receiving psychiatric or psychotherapeutic treatment based on political considerations; to the interference with professional confidentiality for political purposes. The IPA also condemns the violation of human rights of citizens in general, of scientists and of our colleagues in particular’ (D:Pv1, 326). Although one would have to refer to several texts to make this case, it forms a major strand of ‘Civilization and its Discontents’: ‘It can also be asserted that when a child reacts to his first great instinctual frustrations with excessively strong

236 Notes

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aggressiveness and with a correspondingly severe super-ego, he is following a phylogenetic model and is going beyond the response that would be currently justified; for the father of prehistoric times was undoubtedly terrible, and an extreme amount of aggressiveness may be attributed to him. […] We cannot get away from the assumption that man’s sense of guilt springs from the Oedipus complex and was acquired at the killing of the father by the brothers banded together. On that occasion an act of aggression was not suppressed but carried out; but it was the same act of aggression whose suppression in the child is supposed to be the source of his sense of guilt’ (F:XXI, 131). Leader, D. (2008),The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. London: Hamish Hamilton, p. 18. As has been mentioned, a rather different image of Freud’s contribution could be offered focusing on the death drive rather than mourning and melancholia. Freud’s ‘for the present’ marks how he never gave up hope for major scientific advances in these areas. Furthermore, Freud will prove incapable of avoiding making numerous claims about anatomical localizations despite his awareness of the dangers. It seems that Freud found speculation on neuronal structures and anatomical localities productive, provided one was aware of their provisional and rudimentary status; however, since the critics of psychoanalysis would jump on any disproved assertions about neurones or anatomy as evidence that the entirety of psychoanalysis was incorrect, these speculations with their catalytic role were to be kept private. A problematic dialectic emerges over the question of loss. Of course, everyone must surely admit that in some people there are responses to particular losses that are profoundly unhealthy and that desperately call for psychotherapeutic interventions. Having confessed that there are such ‘unhealthy’ losses it is natural to label all other responses ‘healthy’. However, it is then easy to reverse the structure and to start listing the properties of ‘healthy’ mourning against which other responses are ‘unhealthy’. The slip that occurs in this movement is analogous to moving from the fact that there are some very bad ways to live one’s life to the assertion that there must be a good way to live life against which these others are defective. See Hughes, V. (17 May 2011), ‘Shades of Grief: When Does Mourning Become a Mental Illness?’. Scientific American. Available online at https://www. scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shades-of-grief (accessed 2012). It is worth noting that the decisions of the DSM do not only have effects on medical practice, they also determine such issues as whether treatment will be paid for by insurance companies. As Freud writes near the beginning of ‘The Ego and the Id’, the ‘real difference between a Ucs. and a Pcs. Idea (thought) consists in this: that the former is carried

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out on some material which remains unknown, whereas the latter (the Pcs.) is in addition brought into connection with word-presentations. […] The question, “How does a thing become conscious?” would thus be more advantageously stated: “How does a thing become preconscious?” And the answer would be: “Through becoming connected with the word-presentations corresponding to it.”’ (F:XIX, 20). 14 ‘Consciousness has altered between two subsequent experiences of a melody, and this is why the same primary memories selected from the first hearing are not selected in the second, the object being the same, the phenomenon being different’ (Stiegler, B. (2011), Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 18). 15 Plato, Complete Works, 276c. 16 Bachmann, M. (2008), ‘Staging Spectral Sincerity: Derrida on Film’, E. J. van Alphen, M. G. Bal and C. Smith (eds), The Rhetoric of Sincerity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 222. 17 French psychoanalysis has a particularly strong tradition of returning to the ‘Project’. To give just a few examples, it is one of the four texts that Lacan insisted everyone had to read from ‘cover to cover’ in his second seminar; it is discussed in great detail in Laplanche’s first book: Laplanche, J. (1976), Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. As has already been mentioned, it is one of the three texts focused on in Derrida’s first text on psychoanalysis ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’. 18 See for example Centonze, D., Siracusano, A., Calabresi, P. and Bernardi, G. (2004), ‘The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895): a Freudian anticipation of LTP-memory connection theory’. Brain Research Reviews, 46, 310–14. 19 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 57. Contra Laplanche, Freud’s machine operates as an analogue rather than a digital (binary) computer, with hundreds of multiple overlapping connections being actively forged between its elements and the distinct communication of quantity and period. Even if we adopt the simplified Y shape of the connected neuronal elements in the diagram, the neurones function quite differently from a transistor with its base, collector and emitter. Nevertheless, the analogy of a computer can be helpful for understanding the intuitive disbelief Freud’s ‘Project’ is likely to evoke. Imagine trying to convince someone from a century ago, using only a simple account of brute electrical energy flow and a manageable diagram of three or four connected transistors, that such a system merely scaled up to a larger degree of complexity would be able to land people on the moon or produce a photo-realistic fantasy world in which people from around the world can meet each other. We are even in a worse situation if we hope to convince anyone that the simple mechanics of libidinal flow combined with a sketch of the simplified connections between

238 Notes a few neurones, as offered in the ‘Project’, would convince an audience that this is all that is required for sensation, memory, decision and other such functions. Nevertheless, Freud’s ambition produces a basic framework whose repercussions are felt throughout psychoanalysis. 20 Ibid., p. 54. 21 As Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess very soon after sending him the ‘Project’: ‘I can no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched out the “Psychology”; I cannot make out how I came to inflict it on you’ (F:I, 285). We have already seen Freud’s judgement 20 years later that ‘every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve-fibres, has miscarried completely’ (F:XIV, 174). The ‘Project’ as a part of the ‘Fliess papers’ was only discovered and preserved through their purchase by Princess Marie Bonaparte and her refusal to allow Freud to destroy them. 22 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 55. 23 ‘Every ψ neurone must in general be presumed to have several paths of connection with other neurones – that is, several contact-barriers. On this, indeed, depends the possibility of the choice that is determined by facilitation’ (F:I, 301, my emphasis). Thus, in contrast to the assumption of many of his readers, Freud seems to have been well aware that, in contemporary terminology, the bulblets of a single neuron have synapses with the dendrites of dozens or even hundreds of other neurons. 24 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 55. 25 Ibid. 26 Thus, although the path to neurone α might be more facilitated than the path to neurone β, if neurone β already has a large cathexis of energy from other sources it will attract more Q than it would otherwise. This increased flow towards β will in turn facilitate that path, meaning the differential grading between the path towards α and the path towards β will be transformed and energy will flow more readily towards β in the future. This provides a model for how we might slowly come to reduce the energy flowing to an object’s psychic representative despite the fact that paths cannot be un-breached, this being for Freud precisely what is at stake in mourning. 27 Deleuze, G. (2006), Nietzsche and Philosophy. London: Continuum, p. 40. 28 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, pp. 56–7. For a more detailed account of how the different types of neurone outlined in the ‘Project’ and the ‘period’ or ‘rhythm’ of excitation might begin to explain differences of quality within this system, see Glick, B. (1966), ‘Freud, the Problem of Quality and the ‘Secretory Neuron’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 35: 84–97. 29 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 57. 30 Ibid., p. 63.

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31 Assuming an attentive mother comes to feed it, an infant longing for milk has no need for the intervention of the Ego or secondary processes since the bodily stomach is satisfied without coordinated perceptual or muscular action. Although this is a simplification, the child does not even distinguish between hallucination and satisfaction until they have experiences of frustration when the mother does not deliver the bodily satisfaction they desire. 32 These terms are frequently loosely extended in psychoanalysis to describe any distinction between a more immediate and a more delayed satisfaction – one who seeks casual sex as following the pleasure principle against the delayed yet secure gratification of the one who pursue marriage – though strictly any coordination of perception and muscular movement to seek bodily gratification in the real world is an example of the reality principle, even masturbation. 33 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 63. 34 Ibid., pp. 62–3. 35 Although this is not true for Freud in the later stages of the Ego’s development, at this stage he is in agreement with Ferenczi’s robust claim that in principle ‘man can love only himself; if he loves an object he takes it into his ego’ (Ferenczi, S. (1994), Final Contributions to the Problem and Methods of Psycho-analysis. London: Karnac Books, pp. 316–17). We will investigate Ferenczi’s account of introjection in more detail in the following chapter.

Mourning or Melancholia 1

‘For the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance’, quoted in Becker, E. (1973), The Denial of Death. London: Collier Macmillan, p. 25. 2 It will only be ten years later that Freud finally believes he answers the question of why mourning is painful, openly stating that he had ‘failed to discover why it [mourning] should be such a painful thing’ in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (F:XX, 131, 169–72). 3 Clewell, T. (March 2004), ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’. JAPA: Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52, (1), 43–67, p. 44. 4 Ibid., pp. 44–7. 5 Quoted in Shapiro, E. R. (1996), ‘Grief in Freud’s Life: Reconceptualizing Bereavement in Psychoanalytic Theory’. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 13, (4), 547–66, pp. 559–60. 6 Ibid., p. 560. 7 Ibid.

240 Notes 8

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As we will see, Abraham and Torok’s theory of ‘false incorporation’ allows an alternative perspective on Freud’s locket in which it functions as a way of avoiding melancholia. This claim was offered several years before the formulation of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, after which this fact is arguably less remarkable. Let us note that this account of fantasy is in sharp distinction to Torok’s early paper ‘Fantasy: An Attempt to Define Its Structure’. This paper, not included in the French edition of The Shell and its Kernel, was placed as the opening paper in the English edition and sets a rather unfortunate tone for the work through establishing a very narrow definition of fantasy that is in sharp contrast with the terms use in the rest of the book. In French this article appears in Torok, M. (2002), Une vie avec la psychanalyse. Paris: Aubier, pp. 76–91. Freud records the slightly sexist observation that ‘In woman who have had many experiences in love there seems to be no difficulty in finding vestiges of their object-cathexes in the traits of their character’ (F:XIX, 29). It is notable that in the entire 878 pages of the English translation of Écrits the words ‘melancholic’, ‘mourning’ and ‘mourn’ each appear only once, and none of them in the context of Freud’s account of mourning. Of course there are exceptions to this general silence – five references to ‘deuil’ and one to ‘mélancolie’ in Autres Écrits, the discussion of Hamlet and mourning in the sixth seminar or Antigone in the seventh – but they are few and far between. Lacan arguably sets a precedent here that in turn leads to the very short, isolated entry on ‘The Work of Mourning’ in Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1988), The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac, pp. 485–6. It can be argued that this apparent lack of interest is actually a direct theoretical opposition. As Žižek has repeatedly claimed, for Lacan the key issue is ‘lack’, which is only retrospectively misinterpreted as ‘loss’: in assuming one has lost something that once was present and could be present again, one refuses to accept that human existence is fundamentally structured by lack (see Žižek, S. (2001), Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London: Verso, pp. 141–89). Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, pp. 91–3. In his obituary for Ferenczi, Freud mentions that prior to The Great War they spent the autumn holidays of ‘many successive years’ together in Italy and that a number of papers that ‘appeared later in the literature under his or my name took their first shape in our talks there’ (F:XXII, 227–8). Indeed, during the war in the key period when Freud was writing texts such as ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and analysing the Wolf Man, Freud told Ferenczi ‘You are now really the only one who still works besides me. The others are all militarily paralyzed’ (Freud, S. and Ferenczi, S. (1996), The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi,

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Vol 2: 1914–1919. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 74). A complete genealogy of introjection in relation to all of its surrounding terms (incorporation, identification, inclusion, internalization, etc.) is impractical and unnecessary for our purposes. For a thorough tracing of the path from Ferenczi’s introjection to Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, its reformulation in ‘The Ego and the Id’ and then onwards to Abraham and Torok’s ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ and beyond, see the excellent first chapter of Landa, F. (1999), La Shoah et les nouvelles figures métapsychologiques de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok. Paris: l’Harmattan, pp. 19–92. Krell, D. (1998), Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, p. 212. There are other ways of reading Hegel on this question that emerge around the importance of ‘Gedächtnis’ against ‘Erinnerung’; these will be addressed briefly in the following chapter. See Lacan, J. (1991), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, pp. 289–97. Hyppolite, J. (1974), Genesis and Structure in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 153. Mills, J. (2002), The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. New York: SUNY Press, p. 87. ‘Transference’ itself remains a very poorly defined term, one that ‘is burdened down more than any other with each analyst’s particular views on the treatment’, even if there is a good discussion of its range of usage in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, pp. 455–62. One common view is that the term transference only includes attachment or sexual desire towards the analyst. According to Ferenczi, however, it includes not only ‘the transference of conscious feelings of sympathy and unconscious erotic phantasies, the original objects of which were the parents’ but also, if the analyst gives to the patient ‘one less friendly remark, reminding him of a duty or of punctuality’, it can easily lead to the analyst incurring ‘all the patient’s hate and anger that is directed against moralising persons who demand respect (parent, husband)’ (Ferenczi, S. (1952), First Contributions to Psychoanalysis. London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 41–2). The opposition of introjection and projection arises in psychoanalysis in at least four different ways, the first two of these being at stake in Ferenczi. First, in pathological cases where introjection is the characteristic mental movement of neurotics and projection is characteristic of paranoiacs (Ferenczi’s first concern). Secondly, in normal developmental functioning where introjection is the dominant characteristic of all mental self-constitution following projection (which will become his and our focus). Thirdly, in normal developmental

242 Notes functioning where the dynamic of introjection and projection is dominant (as in Klein’s production of good and bad objects or in the picture of the pleasure-ego offered by Freud that both eats and spits out). Fourthly, there are those who deny a symmetrical opposition, such as Lacan for whom projection takes place in the imaginary and introjection in the symbolic. 23 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, p. 230. They also state that Freud himself ‘never describes transference in general as a projection’, referring to it instead as a ‘displacement’. On this point many analysts have not followed Freud, referring to ‘transference as a purely spontaneous phenomenon – a projection on to the screen constituted by the analyst’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, ibid., pp. 351, 461). 24 Ferenczi, First Contributions to Psychoanalysis, pp. 35–7, 45. 25 Ibid., p. 47. 26 ‘Given that they make use of Ferenczi’s term “introjection,” we might think that neither Freud nor K. Abraham would stray far from Ferenczi’s original conception. Yet this initial impression fades as we examine Freud’s interpretation of the concept […] We will see that completely different ideas inspired Ferenczi’s concept’ (T:SK, 111–12 [235]). 27 Sartre, J.-P. (1956), Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library, p. 222. 28 Ferenczi, First Contributions to Psychoanalysis, pp. 47–8. 29 Jung, C. (1990), Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. London: Routledge, p. 197 (my emphasis). 30 In 1909, Jung was still regarded by Freud as the crown price of psychoanalysis; this was the same year that Freud, Ferenczi and Jung travelled to America together. For Jung, there is a psychology of life’s morning and a psychology of life’s afternoon – the former involves repressing material in order to attain independence, yet in doing so developing an unconscious that is projected onto the world; the second stage of life involves the now independent adult introjecting this projected material though various encounters with objects in order to overcome the repressions early life necessitated (Jung, C. (1993), The Practice of Psychotherapy: Second Edition. London: Routledge, pp. 39–41). Where Ferenczi remains closer to Freud is that, after Jung’s split with Freud, the Jungian concept of individuation will move further and further from the directly sexual emphasis of Freud and Ferenczi. The sexual character of introjection is clear from Ferenczi’s return to Freud’s Dora: ‘In the course of the analysis, incomplete as this was, it turned out that her sexuality had not remained indifferent to a single person in her environment. The husband and wife of the family K, the governess, the brother, the mother, the father: all excited her “sexual hunger.” […] Dora, however, is not exceptional, but typical. As her analysed mind stands before us she

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gives a true picture of the inner man in general’ (Ferenczi, First Contributions to Psychoanalysis, p. 66). Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 65. Although Abraham and Torok are both Hungarians who reformulated certain Freudian themes through the work of major thinkers of the Hungarian School (notably Ferenczi and Hermann), both only became interested in psychoanalysis after they had escaped Hungary for Paris due to fascism (in Abraham’s case at the age of 19 in 1938) and communism (in Torok’s case at the age of 22 in 1947). They had no direct analytic genealogical connection with the Hungarian School, most of whom had escaped fascism and outlawing of psychoanalysis under communism by fleeing to Britain (the Bálints, E. Gyömrôi) or the US (Franz Alexander, Thérèse Benedek, Sándor Lóránd, Margaret Mahler, Sándor Radó, David Rapaport, Géza Róheim, René Spitz). It is questionable whether Abraham and Torok’s influence in Paris, through their publications, analyses and, after Abraham’s death, the Confrontations seminar, amounts to a new school. To mention a few of the analysts and theorists who have been inspired by their work: René Major, Judith Dupont, Pascal Hachet, Claude Nachin, Serge Tisseron, Jean Claude Rouchy and Fabio Landa. Derrida and Abraham met for the first time on 31 July 1959 at Cérisy-la-Salle, where they gave papers on the same day. Abraham found that his afternoon paper connected so well with Derrida’s morning paper that he claimed he would only be prolonging the discussion began in Derrida’s paper (A:SK, ~ [77]). These papers, along with the discussion including the questions and responses between Abraham and Derrida, are included in the conference’s proceedings (de Gandillac, M., Goldman, L. and Piaget, J. (eds) (1965), Entretiens sur les notions de Genèse et de Structure. Paris: Mouton & Co.). After Abraham’s death, Derrida wrote that: ‘Nicolas Abraham rejected, without letting himself be turned off by, what was then taking over as a dogma, a facile answer, an oversimplification: the incompatibility of Husserlian phenomenology with the discoveries of psychoanalysis. How could transcendental idealism, phenomenological reduction, or the return to the original givens of conscious perception, it was asked, possibly have anything in common, or anything reconcilable, with psychoanalysis? The question was not illegitimate, but it hardened into a slogan and into a misapprehension. Nicolas Abraham sought on the contrary, patiently, an effective passageway through phenomenology,

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a rigorous determination of what lay beyond it, a reinterpretation of its content (notably that of genetic phenomenology, through the themes of intersubjectivity, time, iteration, teleology, the original hulé, etc.) and of its method (intentional analysis, transcendental reduction, the discounting of already constituted theses and objects, the return to the actual constituting operations, etc.)’ (D:F, xxx). Unfortunately, since the majority of Abraham’s independent texts remain untranslated in English, the names Abraham and Torok are synonymous in Anglo-American thought with their theory of mourning, without any great appreciation of the parallel work Abraham undertook with regard to the relation of psychoanalysis, phenomenology and language or its relation to their theory of mourning. Kamuf, P. (1979), ‘Abraham’s Wake’. Diacritics, 9, (1): 32–43, p. 34. Some of this very early material has been collected and published as Abraham, N. (1995), Rhythms: On the work, translation, and psychoanalysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. The theme of translation is not only dominant in Abraham’s largely pre-psychoanalytic Rhythms but also in Abraham, N (1999), Jonas et le cas Jonas. Paris: Flammarion. This translation from Hungarian into French of Michael Babits’s poem The Book of Jonas was originally produced prior to Abraham turning to psychoanalysis and was later republished with a detailed psychoanalytic commentary (an additional volume of Abraham’s poetic translations was planned but never published). Derrida writes with reference to Jonas and Abraham’s account of translation that ‘poetic translation is not an application [of psychoanalysis], nor a verification, a follow-up; it belongs to the process of analytic deciphering in its most active, inaugural, groundbreaking phase’ (D:F, xxxiii). The central text of this focus on translation is certainly Cryptonymie – the re-reading of Freud’s famous case study of the Wolf Man in terms of a project of inter-linguistic translation between the various languages he encountered in infancy. The culmination of this text, ‘The Wolf Man’s Verbarium’, takes the form of a chart of meanings and homophones – words in English, Russian and German, rhymes, distortions and the ‘archeonyms’ that these peculiar chains of words drawn from descriptions of dreams encode (A&T:C, 109–13 [240–5]). Beyond all of these examples, Abraham’s pivotal programmatic text ‘The Shell and its Kernel’ is itself an account of psychoanalysis in terms of translation where psychoanalysis conceptuality (in the form of Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis) is itself submitted to psychoanalysis. One facet of this text is the sheaf of different meanings operating within the single graphical mark ‘pleasure’, evoking its normal meaning, its phenomenologically reduced meaning and its anasemic psychoanalytic use, distinguishing pleasure, “pleasure” and Pleasure as translation within a language.

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44 In Abraham’s example, the fantasy, meaning‑effect or presented ‘symbol’ of a terrifying serpent clutching a patient is used. This given experience could be subjected to a genetic phenomenological analysis that would show processes involved in the fantasy image’s construction – animality, touch, serpenthood, objecthood, fear, etc. This descriptive analysis would reduce the experience to its basic constituents and constitutive processes without explaining why this fantasy has been produced in consciousness. Abraham insists that such symbolism is poorly accounted for in a simplistic model of psychoanalysis that works by a translation such that one thing – ‘phallus’ – is presented in a symbolic language by a more acceptable substitute – ‘serpent’. Rather, the symbol emerges as a compromise between underlying conflicting desires that can only be offered in interpretative dialogue: the desire to touch a phallus and its repression through horror at the idea of touching the phallus. These conflicting functions work on quite different levels since the desire to touch the phallus is a tactile, bodily ‘motor gesture’, while the horror at doing so is an imago, a picture that evokes disgust and bars any conscious contemplation of the tactile desire. The symbol of being grasped by a terrifying serpent satisfies both the repressive mechanism of the imago (it remains as something horrifying) and the bodily desire (since the body itself is nevertheless experiencing the tactile experience it wants). Thus, ‘the symbol here substitutes for a forbidden action a discourse that satisfies at the same time the desire and the imago.’ Symbolization is not the substitution of one thing for another but the resolution of a conflict at a new level where the incompatible terms find a symbol that, through its ‘in-determination’, harmonizes the conflicting forces and gives the subject a permanent Pleasure, albeit a Pleasure that is experienced as an obsessive and recurrent horror (A:SK, ~ [27–30]). Abraham’s later project of psychoanalysing the shell that is presented as psychoanalytic terminology in order to access the kernel of psychoanalysis will equally offer an interpretation of an unpresentable conflict that causes the discourse of psychoanalysis to emerge. 45 We can see a strong parallel here with some of Derrida’s reflections on the film Ghost Dance. In this film, discussing Abraham and Torok’s works, Derrida offered the formula: ‘Cinema + Psychoanalysis = the Science of Ghosts’. Commenting on this claim several years later, Derrida claimed that: ‘Of course, upon reflection, beyond the improvisation, I’m not sure I’d keep the word “science”; for at the same time, there is something which, as soon as one is dealing with ghosts, exceeds, if not scientificity in general, at least what, for a very long time, has modelled scientificity on the real, the objective, which is not or should not be, precisely, phantomatic’ (Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002), Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 118). 46 As Derrida records, Abraham never gives up this project even if it is subject to a

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51 52

53

54

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56

‘general restructuring’: ‘This “transphenomenology” called for in 1961 is still at the heart of the project of arch‑psychoanalysis defined by the “Introduction to Hermann” [1972]’ (D:F, xxx–xxxi). Although for Freud melancholia is not a transference neurosis, being rooted in a conflict between the Ego and Super-ego, the crypt structure produced in incorporation stands somewhere between these two structures. Why incorporation supposes loss is actually a question that neither Abraham nor Torok give a very satisfactory answer to; indeed, it is precisely this that Derrida will deny. We should remember that the anasemic term Pleasure relates to the release of pent-up tension in the extended psychic system, which may or may not be accompanied by a phenomenal experience of pleasure (A:SK, 84–6 [209–11]). Abraham and Torok give the example of a man they saw in a restaurant who ordered two meals: ‘This man, who was clearly hallucinating the presence of a departed loved one, did not, however, have to resort to incorporation. We can surmise that the shared meal allowed him to keep the dear departed outside his bodily limits and that, even as he was filling the mouth’s vacancy, he did not actually have to “absorb” the deceased. “No,” he seemed to be saying, “the loved one is not dead, she is still here as before, with her wonted tastes and favourite dishes”’ (A&T:SK, 129 [264–5]). For example, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’ partly revolves around a reading of Barthes’s text of mourning for his mother, Camera Lucida. Davis, C. (2005), ‘État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’. French Studies, LIX, (3): 373–9, p. 376. Davis offers a detailed account of the division among literary theorists between Nicholas Rand’s and Esther Rashkin’s orthodox accounts of phantoms and Nicholas Royle and Jodey Castricano’s Derridean hauntology (ibid., pp. 373–9). Derrida first discusses ‘le fantôme de Marx’ in direct connection with Abraham and Torok’s work in the film Ghost Dance, ten years before writing Specters of Marx. For example: ‘Even when denied introjection, not every narcissistic loss is fated to incorporation. Incorporation results from those losses that for some reason cannot be acknowledged as such. In these special cases the impossibility of introjection is so profound that even our refusal to mourn is prohibited from being given a language, that we are debarred from providing any indication whatsoever that we are inconsolable’ (A&T:SK, 130 [265]). The parallel move in Abraham and Torok would be between the accounts of incorporation in ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ (1972) and in ‘The Lost Object – Me’ (1975). In this preface, Torok warmly endorses ‘Fors’ as a text that can function as the

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preface to the French edition of The Shell and its Kernel as well as to Cryptonymie, for which it was written. Indeed, ‘Fors’ is such a good preface that she feels there is no need to write more than three short paragraphs guiding the reader towards it: ‘In fact, the step to traverse the threshold of this work has already been made […] the important introductory preface by Jacques Derrida ‘Fors’ can serve as a guide for the reader not only to Cryptonymie that it precedes but also for the present work in its entirety. In his footsteps, the reader will easily cross this psychoanalytic and transphenomenological space’ (T:SK, ~ [9]). 57 Schwab, G. (2010), Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 56. 58 Butler, J. (2003), ‘Afterword: After Loss, What Then?’, in D. Eng and D. Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 472. 59 Abraham, Jonas et le cas Jonas, p. 105.

The Address of Eulogy 1 Badiou, Pocket Pantheon, pp. 36–53. 2 Barthes, R. (2000), Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. 3 With the tombstone, anything more than the proper name and some dates that locate the individual in time and distinguish them as a particular bearer of that name can easily seem an unnecessary platitude, reducing their singularity to stock phrases such as ‘a loving husband’. In Ris-Orangis, a simple plain stone states only Jackie Derrida 1930–2004. Much might be said about Derrida’s decision to return in death to the name of his birth. 4 Frazer, J. G. (1963), The Golden Bough: Abridged Edition. London: Macmillan, pp. 321–2. 5 ‘And even if it were true, and even if, yes, it is true, you would not believe me if I told you that I too am called Elijah: this name is not inscribed, no, on my official documents, but it was given me on my seventh day’ (D:AL, 284). 6 At this point one might ask what specific relationships are at stake. Are there only incorporated secrets between loved ones or also between enemies? Is there a secret in our relation to celebrities or politicians? What of the cashier behind the till at our local supermarket? It seems that the psychoanalytic answer would be that whenever there is projection there is the possibility of introjection and with it an act of incorporation, though this produces an uncomfortable tension between the continuous scale of minor projections and introjections and the binary question of whether a set word has been incorporated in a particular intrapsychic crypt. The best solution to this problem seems to be that in cases such as the supermarket

248 Notes cashier, in so far as we use them as a medium to project and introject unconscious drives, we are identifying them with past cryptic structures (perhaps through their similarity to an authority figure from infancy). In this case we are not relating to the singularity that they are, but to another singularity through them. The possible moment when we come to relate to the cashier as a singular other rather than a substitute would be simultaneous with an act of incorporation. 7 With reference to Blake, Derrida claims ‘The two concepts (friend/enemy) consequently intersect and ceaselessly change places. They intertwine, as though they loved each other, all along a spiralled hyperbole […] if he desires my death, at least he desires it, perhaps, him, mine, singularly. The declared friend would not accomplish as much in simply declaring himself a friend while missing out on the name: that which imparts the name both to friendship and to singularity’ (D:PF, 72). 8 Zlomislić, M. (2007), Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics. Plymouth: Lexington Books, p. 229. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., pp. 229, 230. 11 Ibid., p. 230. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 231. 15 Ibid., p. 229. 16 The alternative approach would be to declare that if ‘in every text there is a dead man or woman to be sought’, these texts need to be interrogated as acts of singular eulogy as well. (D:EO, 53). 17 Marin, L. (1993), Des pouvoirs de l’image. Paris: Seuil. 18 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 258. 19 See McGowan, T. (2008), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. New York: SUNY Press. 20 This does not simply mean we align Gadamer with progress and Derrida with interruption – Derrida specifies that he particularly admires the respect Gadamer shows for ‘indecision’ – yet there is clearly a difference of emphasis in their work around this opposition (D:SQ, 145). 21 Celan, P. (1996), Selected Poems. London: Penguin, p. 274. 22 This is similar to how, in ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, Derrida states that ‘I just capitalized Nature and History. He used to do it almost all the time’ (D:WM, 37). We can see in these movements one particular stratagem of Derrida’s eulogies that allows the other to speak and that takes pleasure in this.

Selected Bibliography Abraham, N. (1999), Jonas et le cas Jonas. Paris: Aubier Flammarion. Abraham, N. and Torok, M. (1976), Cryptonymie : le verbier de l’homme aux loups. Paris: Aubier Flammarion. —(1986), The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —(2001), L’écorce et le noyau. Paris: Aubier Flammarion. Abraham, N., Torok, M. and Rand, N. (1995), Rhythms: On the Work, Translation, and Psychoanalysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1994), The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Adorno, T. W. (2003), The Jargon of Authenticity. London: Routledge. Adorno, T. W. and Horkheimer, M. (1997), Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Blackwell Verso. Alford, C. F. (2002), Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Psychoanalysis. London: Continuum. Atterton, P. and Calarco, M. (eds) (2010), Radicalizing Levinas. New York: SUNY Press. Badiou, A. (2009), Pocket Pantheon. London: Verso. Balibar, É. (2002), Politics and the Other Scene. London: Verso. Baring, E. (2011), The Young Derrida and French Philosophy 1945–1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, E. (1973), The Denial of Death. London: Collier Macmillan. Benjamin, W. (1999), Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Bennington, G. (1994), Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction. London: Verso. —(2011), Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bennington, G. and Derrida, J. (1993), Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bernasconi, R. (2005), ‘No Exit: Levinas’ Aporetic Account of Transcendence’. Research in Phenomenology 35: 101–17. Bernasconi, R. and Critchley, S. (eds) (1991), Re-Reading Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —(2002), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blanchot, M. (1982), The Space of Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. —(1997), Friendship. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

250

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Brault, P.-A. and Naas, M. (2001), ‘To Reckon with the Dead: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Mourning’, J. Derrida, The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. —(1997), The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Canguilhem, G. (1978), On the Normal and the Pathological. London: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Carel, H. (2006), Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger. New York: Rodopi. Caygill, H. (2002), Levinas and the Political. London: Routledge. Chanter, T. (2001), Time, Death, and the Feminine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cheah, P. and Guerlac, S. (eds) (2009), Derrida and the Political. London: Duke University Press. Clewell, T. (2004), ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’. JAPA: Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52, (1): 43–67. Critchley, S. (1999), Ethics – Politics – Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso. —(1999), The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (second edn). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. —(2004), ‘Five Problems in Levinas’ View of Politics’. Political Theory 32, (2): 172–85. Davis, C. (2005), ‘État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’. French Studies, LIX, (3), 373–9. De Gandillac, M., Goldman, L. and Piaget, J. (eds) (1965), Entretiens sur les notions de Genèse et de Structure. Paris: Mouton & Co. Derrida, J. (1973), Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. —(1981), Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —(1982), Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —(1985), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. New York: Schocken Books. —(1986), ‘“Fors”: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. —(1986), Mémoires: for Paul de Man. New York: Columbia University Press. —(1988), Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. —(1987), The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —(1989), Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An introduction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. —(1992), Acts of Literature, London: Routledge.



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—(1993), Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1995), On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1995), Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1997), Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. —(1998), Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1998), Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1999), Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2001), Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. —(2001), The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —(2002), Acts of Religion, New York: Routledge. —(2002), Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2002), Without Alibi, Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2003), The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —(2004), Dissemination. London: Continuum. —(2004), Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2004), Positions. London: Continuum. —(2005), Paper Machine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2005), Politics of Friendship. London: Verso. —(2005), Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. New York: Fordham University Press. —(2006), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge. —(2007), ‘Penser ce qui vient’, in R. Major (ed.), Derrida pour les temps à venir. Paris: Éditions Stock. —(2007), Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume I. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2008), Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume II. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2008), The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press. —(2010), Athens, Still Remains. New York: Fordham University Press. —(2011), The Beast and the Sovereign, volume II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. and Birnbaum, J. (2007), Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Derrida, J. and Caputo, J. D. (1997), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, J. and Ferraris, M. (2001), A Taste for the Secret. Malden: Polity Press. Derrida, J., Habermas, J. and Thomassen, L. (2006), The Derrida-Habermas Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, J., Kirby, D. and Ziering, A. (2005), Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

252

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Derrida, J. and Olson, G. (1990), ‘Jacques Derrida on Rhetoric and Composition: A Conversation’. JAC, 10, (1): 1–21. Derrida, J. and Roudinesco, É. (2004), For What Tomorrow …: A dialogue. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002), Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Cambridge: Polity Press. Descartes, R. (2000), Philosophical Essays and Correspondence. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Dolar, M. (2008), ‘Freud and the Political’. Unbound, 4, (15): 15–29. Drabinski, J. E. (2000), ‘The Possibility of an Ethical Politics: From Peace to Liturgy’. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26, (4): 49–73. Eng, D. L. and Kazanjian, D. (eds) (2003), Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ferenczi, S. (1934), ‘Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 3: 200–22. —(1952), First Contributions to Psychoanalysis. London: The Hogarth Press. —(1994), Final Contributions to the Problem & Methods of Psycho-analysis. London: Karnac Books. Freud, S. (2001), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud in 24 volumes. London: Vintage. Gardiner, M. (1973), The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gasché, R. (1986), The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ghent, E. (1990), ‘Masochism, Submission, Surrender – Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender’, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26: 108–36. Glick, B. S. (1966), ‘Freud, the Problem of Quality and the “Secretory Neuron”’. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 35, 84–97. Habermas, J. (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Boston: MIT Press. Hägglund, M. (2008), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1967), Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. —(1971), On the Way to Language. New York: Harper & Row. —(1976), What is Called Thinking? New York: Perennial. —(1995), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Solitude, Finitude. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. —(1996), Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. —(1998), Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2012), Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hodge, J. (2007), Derrida on Time. London: Routledge.



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Husserl, E. (1966), The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. —(1970), The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. —(1982), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff Publishers. —(1999), Cartesian Meditations. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Inwood, B. and Gerson, L. P. (1998), Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Johnson, L. (2000), ‘Tracing Calculation [calque calcul] between Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Derrida’. Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism, 10, (3). Kamuf, P. (1979), ‘Abraham’s Wake’. Diacritics, 9, (1): 32–43. Kant, I. (1996), Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(1999), Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, M. (1975), Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945. London: Virago Press. Kristeva, J. (1982), ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’. Critical Inquiry, 9, (1): 77–92. Lacan, J. (2006), Écrits. London: W. W. Norton & Co. Landa, F. (1999), La Shoah et les nouvelles figures métapsychologiques de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok – Essai sur la création théorique en psychanalyse. Paris: l’Harmattan. Laplanche, J. (1976), Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1988), The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Lawlor, L. (2002), Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —(2003), Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Leader, D. (2008), The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. London: Hamish Hamilton. Leiter, B. and Rosen, M. (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, E. (1969), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. —(1990), Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. —(1991), ‘Wholly Otherwise’, R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. —(1994), Outside the Subject. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1996), Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

254

Selected Bibliography

—(1998), Of God Who Comes to Mind. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(1998), Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. —(2000), God, Death, and Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —(2001), Existence and Existents. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. —(2001), Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2001), The Levinas Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. —(2003), Humanism of the Other. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —(2003), On Escape: De l’évasion. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —(2006), Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-other. London: Continuum. Macksey, R. and Donato, E. (eds) (1972), The Structuralist Controversy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Major, R. (ed.) (2007), Derrida pour les temps à venir. Paris: Éditions Stock. Malabou, C. (2004), Counterpaths: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Manning, R. J. S. (2001), Beyond Ethics to Justice through Levinas and Derrida: The Legacy of Levinas. Quincy: Franciscan Press. Mills, J. (2002), The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. New York: SUNY Press. Moran, D. (2005), Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. London: Polity Press. Morra, J., Robson, M. and Smith, M. (eds) (2000), The Limits of Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mulhall, S. (2005), Heidegger and Being and Time (second edn). London: Routledge. Naas, M. (2012), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media. New York: Fordham University Press. Obholzer, K. (1982), The Wolfman: Conversations with Freud’s Patient Sixty Years Later. London: Continuum. Peperzak, A. (1997), Platonic Transformations: With and After Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Peperzak, A. T. and Levinas, E. (1993), To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Plato (1997), Complete Works. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Prochnik, G. (2006), Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. New York: Other Press. Reynolds, J. and Rolf, J. (eds) (2004), Understanding Derrida. London: Continuum. Rilke, M. R., Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 2: 1910–1926. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Rogozinski, J. (2005), Faire Part: Cryptes de Derrida. Paris: Éditions Lignes & Manifestes. Rosenzweig, F. (1971), The Star of Redemption. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Roudinesco, É. (Fall 1995–Winter 1996), ‘Lacan and Derrida in the History of Psychoanalysis’. Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 2.



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—(2009), Pourquoi la psychanalyse ? Paris: Champs essais. Saussure, F. de (2005), Course in General Linguistics. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Schwab, G. (2010), Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. Secret, T. (2012), ‘Il n’y a pas de la trace’. Les Temps Modernes, 671. Shapiro, E. R. (1996), ‘Grief in Freud’s Life’. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 13: 547–66. Simmons, W. (1999), ‘The Third: Levinas’ Theoretical Move From An-Archical Ethics to the Realm of Justice and Politics’. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 25, (6): 83–104. Smith, B. (1992), ‘Letter to The Times (Saturday, May 9, 1992)’. The Times (London). Smith, R. (1995), Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spinoza, B. (2002), Complete Works. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Sprinker, M. (ed.) (2008), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. London: Verso. Squires, C. (2003), ‘Attachment and Infantile Sexuality’, in D. Widlocher (ed.), Infantile Sexuality and Attachment. London: Karnac Books. Stiegler, B. (2011), Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Torok, M. (2002), Une vie avec la psychanalyse. Paris: Aubier. White, C. (2005), Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Wortham, S. M. (2010), The Derrida Dictionary. London: Continuum. Žižek, S. (2001), Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? London: Verso. —(2004), Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge. —(2012), Less Than Nothing. London: Verso. Zlomislić, M. (2007), Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics. Plymouth: Lexington Books.

Index Abraham, Nicolas and Derrida 158–9, 243n. 39 Jonas et le cas Jonas 175, 244n. 43 ‘Le «crime» de l’introjection’ 179 ‘Le symbole ou l’au-delà du phénomène’ 158–9, 245n. 44 ‘Notes on the Phantom’ 166 and phenomenology 158–60, 230–1n. 25, 245–6n. 46, 243n. 39 ‘Présentation de «Thalassa»’ 151 ‘Réflexions phénoménologiques’ 243n. 39 Rhythms 158, 244n. 43 ‘Shell and the Kernel, The’ 159–60, 244n. 43, 246n. 49 Abraham, Nicholas xxii–xxiv, 118, 139, 146–7, 149–52, 154, 158–76, 177–9, 181, 185, 188, 192, 216n. 12, 240n. 8, 243n. 38, 246nn. 48, 50, 55 see also Torok, Maria anasemia and demetaphorization 147, 162–4, 244n. 43, 246n. 49 crypt xxii, 92, 122–3, 124, 139, 149, 152, 159, 163–76, 177–81, 186–9, 196–8, 201, 204–5, 209, 246n. 47, 247–8n. 6 ‘Lost Object – Me, The’ 164–9 magic and fantasy 146–7, 163–4, 167, 169, 172–4, 187–8, 240n. 10, 245n. 44 ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ 147, 161–3, 164, 167, 246nn. 50, 54, 55 phantom xxii, 166–9, 188, 201 Wolf Man’s Magic Word, The 169, 244n. 43 Adorno, Theodore 6, 7, 13, 17, 22–3, 25, 106, 220n. 38 Alford, C. Fred 78–9, 228n. 14 Andreas-Salomé, Lou xvii, 142, 211n. 4 anthropo-thanatology 4, 5, 18–22, 208, 215–16n. 7,Badiou, Alain 182, 214–15n. 3

Balibar, Étienne 21, 209, 214n. 18 Baring, Edward 228–9n. 17 Barthes, Roland 165, 182–90, 209–10 Beckett, Samuel 72, 231n. 35 Bennington, Geoffrey 93–4, 223n. 54 Bergson, Henri xvii, 17, 81, 225–6n. 1, 231n. 34 Blanchot, Maurice 82, 216–17n. 15, 231n. 35 Brault, Pascale-Anne 214n. 16 Butler, Judith xviii, 149, 174, 211n. 6 Caputo, John 28, 221n. 2 Carel, Havi 10–11, 216n. 11 Caygill, Howard 75, 225–6n. 1 Celan, Paul 199–204 cognitive behavioural therapy 110, 213n. 12 Critchley, Simon 6, 17, 45–46, 71, 73, 216–17n. 15, 218–219n. 24, 228n. 15, 230n. 22 Davis, Colin 166, 246n. 52 death, three angles on xxviii, 5–6, 22, 27, 47, 57, 60, 67–9, 80–1, 99, 103, 115–20, 166, 171, 181, 195, 205, 216n. 12, 225n. 40 Derrida, Jacques Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 63, 80, 99 Animal That Therefore I Am, The 100–2 aporia xiv–xxvi, 13, 15, 20–1, 61, 178, 191, 193–4, 200–4, 208 see also double bind Aporias xxviii, 4, 5, 12–13, 19–22, 27, 34, 150, 213n. 15, 215–16n. 7, 216nn. 9, 12 articulation xxiv, xxx, 5–6, 22, 27, 42–5, 47, 52–4, 60–2, 65–70, 94, 111–15, 120, 163–4, 171, 177, 181, 195, 213n. 14, 223–4n. 23, 232n. 45, 234n. 1

258 Index ‘At This Very Moment in this Work Here I Am’ 65, 227nn. 7, 9 Athens, Still Remains 2 bad conscience xxvi, 21–2, 29, 67–8, 87, 104, 170, 173, 177, 199, 209 Beast and the Sovereign, The 175–6 ‘Before the Law’ 60–62, 79 ‘By Force of Mourning’ 182, 195–8 ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ 179–80 Deaths of Roland Barthes, The’ 165, 180–2, 182–90, 209–10, 248n. 22 deconstruction xxviii, 20, 27–40, 45–8, 52, 56, 58–62, 66, 68, 71, 93, 100–2, 109–11, 173, 191–2, 200, 208, 222nn. 13, 14, 223n. 19, 224n. 32, 232n. 45, 233n. 56, 235n. 5 Derrida (film) 33 ‘Différance’ 42, 45, 50, 52–9, 94, 126, 129, 134–7, 225n. 37 différance 27, 35, 42, 45, 50, 51–9, 94, 130, 134–6, 160, 225nn. 35, 37, 227n. 6 double bind xxiv–xxvi, 21, 29, 65, 67–8, 119, 172, 175, 203–5, 209 ‘Double Session, The’ 52, 55 ‘Ear of the Other, The 122, 151, 248n. 16 Echographies of Television 245n. 45 Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction 36–8 ethics xiv–xv, 22, 40–1, 59–60, 68–9, 70–1, 79, 100–7, 111–15, 119, 122, 135, 137, 152, 156, 170, 172–3, 177, 184, 193, 199, 209, 228n. 15, 234n. 57 For What Tomorrow 109, 166, 186 ‘Force of Law’ 28, 71 ‘Fors’ 158–9, 166–75, 187–8, 243–4nn. 39, 43, 245–6n. 46 ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ 36, 109, 117, 124, 126, 234n. 1 general text 27, 35, 45–7, 49, 52–4, 57, 59, 130, 136, 177, 234n. 1 ‘“Genesis and Structure” and Phenomenology’ 34 ‘Geopsychoanalysis “and the rest of the world”’ 111–12, 235n. 6 Ghost Dance (film) 245n. 45, 246n. 53

graphic xv, 27, 35, 43, 45, 49–52, 54–5, 56–60, 65, 93–4, 117, 121, 134, 139, 163, 166, 171, 177, 188, 224n. 32, 233nn. 54, . 56, 244n. 43 ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ 28 Limited Inc. 41, 52, 53, 222n. 11, 223n. 20, 224n. 32 mark 33, 35–6, 39, 43, 45, 51–4, 56, 58, 60, 94, 120, 139, 163, 177, 188, 222n. 11, 244n. 43 Mémoires for Paul de Man xviii, 39, 190–5 Monolingualism of the Other 223–4n. 23 Negotiations 32 Of Grammatology 32, 37, 39–40, 42, 46, 56, 93–4, 110, 187, 225n. 38 On the Name 189 Paper Machine 32 ‘Pit and the Pyramid, The’ 55 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ 54–5, 58 Points 47, 48, 51, 119, 141 Politics of Friendship, The 189–90, 248n. 7 Positions 38, 45, 48, 52, 54–5, 94 Post Card, The 30–1 Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, The 74, 230–1n. 25, 232n. 45 ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul’ 109–10, 112–14 ‘Punctuations’ 32 ‘Rams’ 198–205, 248n. 20 Resistances of Psychoanalysis xxvi, 31, 41, 165, 175, 235n. 2 Specters of Marx xxii–xiv, 29, 40–1, 68–9, 102, 104, 122, 166, 171, 178, 188, 196, 209, 235n. 4, 246n. 53 Speech and Phenomena 32–3, 94 Spurs 223n. 19 Taste for the Secret, A 34–36, 219–20n. 29, 226n. 2 trace 32, 45, 48, 52–3, 57–62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 79, 93–9, 113, 126, 137–9, 156, 170–1, 177–80, 184, 185, 189, 191, 199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 225n. 38, 226n. 2, 227n. 7, 233nn. 54, 56 ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ 247n. 5 ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ 30–31, 34, 64–67, 71, 87, 227n. 8, 234n. 57

Index Work of Mourning, The xxvi, 165, 169, 170, 173, 180–90, 209–10, 214n. 16, 223n. 28, 248n. 22 Deleuze, Gilles 37, 126, 224n. 28 Descartes, René 7–8, 17, 89, 90, 92, 96, 110, 161 Dolar, Mladen 29 Dostoyevski, Fyodor 87, 232n. 41 Dreyfus, Hubert 10–11, 19, 219n. 25 Eagleton, Terry 29 Epicurus 9, 214n. 2 eulogy xxi, xxiv–xxvi, xvii–xviii, 5, 24, 27, 29–30, 57, 59, 63, 67–8, 70, 90, 105–7, 115, 119–20, 122, 139, 165, 169–70, 177–205, 207–10, 213n. 13, 224n. 28, 248nn. 16, 22 eurocentrism 3, 5, 19 Ferenczi, Sandor 114–15, 149, 150–8, 173, 239n. 35, 240n. 14, 241nn. 15, 21, 241–2n. 22, 242n. 26, 242–3n. 30 Fink, Eugen 110, 221n. 43, 225n. 34 Foucault, Michel 179–81, 212–13n. 11 Freud, Sigmund Autobiographical Study, An 150 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 30, 135, 150, 240n. 9 Civilization and its Discontents 235–6n. 7 and death see death, three angles on ego xviii, 117, 122–3, 124, 127–31, 132, 134–7, 143, 146–8, 150, 152, 154, 156–7, 160, 161, 164, 167, 168, 172, 188, 192, 197, 209, 239nn. 31, 35, 246n. 47 Ego and the Id, The xviii, 147–8, 160, 166, 211n. 6, 236–7n. 13, 240n. 11, 241n. 15 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety 142–3, 239n. 2 ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ 132–3, 150 Interpretation of Dreams, The 90 Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis 116, 234–5n. 3 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ 118–19, 141–9, 166, 174, 239n. 2, 240n. 14, 241n. 15

259 ‘Negation’ 133–4, 150 New Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis 155 ‘On Narcissism’ 130 ‘On Transience’ 142, 211n. 4 Outline of Psychoanalysis, An 116–17, 123, 129 ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ 57, 123–32, 237n. 18, 238nn. 21, 23 ‘Sandor Ferenczi’ 240n. 14 Seventeenth–Century Demonological Neurosis, A 211–12n. 7 super-ego xviii, xx–xxii, 112–13, 122–3, 124, 135, 142, 146–8, 161, 162, 168, 180–1, 197, 209, 235–6n. 7, 246n. 47 Totem and Taboo 61, 79, 187, 208 trace xxviii, 57–60, 117, 126, 130–1, 134–9, 171, 177, 184, 225n. 38 ‘Unconscious, The’ 116, 238n. 21

Gasché, Rodolphe 224–5n. 33 ghosts xvi–xix, xxi, xxii–xxiv, xxviii, 6, 40–1, 90, 92–3, 104, 106–7, 119–20, 122–3, 139, 164, 166–9, 171–2, 174, 180, 183–4, 188, 209, 226n. 2, 245n. 45, 246n. 53 Guéroult, Martial 12, 219–20n. 29 Habermas, Jürgen 48, 51, 224n. 30 Hägglund, Martin 59, 228n. 15, 233–4n. 56 Haunting see ghosts Hegel, G. W. F. 38, 66, 87–8, 97, 105–6, 136, 151–2, 155, 190–1, 225n. 37, 241n. 17 Heidegger, Martin 5, 6–25, 27, 42, 49–50, 51, 61, 65–6, 67, 73, 80–5, 94, 110, 115, 171, 183–4, 205, 214–15n. 3, 226n. 2, 227nn. 6, 8, 232nn. 39, 40, 233n. 50, Being and Time 6–25, 103, 215–16n. 7, 217n. 18, 218n. 22 Being-towards-death 6–12, 14–18, 20, 22, 110, 205, 214–15n. 3, 219n. 25 see also death, three angles on death of the other 22–5, 81, 82, 103, 221n. 43 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, The 217–18n. 21

260 Index ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ 12, 49–50 ‘On the Essence of Ground’ 15 What is Called Thinking 18 ‘What is Metaphysics?’ 84, 229n. 31 Hermann, Imre 141, 245–6n. 46 Husserl, Edmond 8, 94, 158, 225n. 34, 243–4n. 39 absolute subjectivity 8, 74, 88–91, 95, 230–1n. 25, 232n. 45 alter ego 89, 96–7, 234n. 57 genetic phenomenology 33, 74, 76–7, 88, 110–11, 158–9, 167, 231n. 26, 245n. 44 idea in a Kantian sense 36–40, 60 principle of principles 36–40, 74, 222n. 15 Hyppolite, Jean 151–2, 182 impossibility xx, xxiv, xxvi, 20–1, 29, 31, 32, 34–6, 38, 41, 43, 52, 56, 59, 67, 80–1, 82, 84, 104, 110, 112, 119, 135, 137, 160, 165, 175, 183, 191–5, 202, 209, 213n. 15, 221n. 2, 222n. 13, 232nn. 40, 45, 246n. 54 inscription or internalisation of the dead xviii–xxii, 103, 106, 116–18, 119, 121–2, 126, 131, 134, 139, 147, 158, 162, 164, 169, 175, 179–81, 184, 186, 190–1, 197, 201, 209–10, 211n. 5, 213n. 15, 241n. 15 Joyce, James 53, 66 Jung, Carl 116, 154, 175, 242n. 30 Kafka, Franz 29–30, 60–2, 185 Kant, Immanuel xxv, 8, 60–1, 77–9, 91–3, 135, 137, 188, 229n. 18 Karatani, Kojin 222n. 13 Klein, Melanie 133, 149, 153, 241–2n. 22 Krell, David 25, 151 Lacan, Jacques 3, 38, 41, 149, 151–2, 164, 165, 197, 223n. 17, 226n. 2, 235n. 5, 237n. 17, 240n. 12, 241–2n. 22 Landa, Fabio 241n. 15, 243n. 38 Laplanche, Jean 123–4, 151, 237nn. 17, 19 Laplanche, Jean 153, 240n. 12, 241n. 21, 242n. 23, 244n. 43 Leader, Darian 115, 213n. 12

Levi-Strauss 37, 187 Levinas, Emmanuel death see death, three angles on egoism / enjoyment 69, 71, 72–3, 74–80, 83, 86–7, 88, 89, 92, 97–8, 99, 101, 102–3, 105, 113, 114, 152, 157, 170, 184, 198, 227–8n. 12 Existence and Existents 82, 85 face 67, 69, 71–3, 75, 78, 79, 80–4, 86, 90–2, 94–6, 97, 99–103, 104, 105, 106, 114, 119, 121, 139, 161, 171, 198, 220n. 31, 231n. 37 God, Death and Time 16, 23, 80–4, 99–100, 102, 103, 218–19n. 24 ‘I and Totality, The’ 226n. 3, 228n. 13 Is it Righteous to Be? 4, 99, 106, 213n. 15, 228n. 16, 229n. 19, 231nn. 33, 36, 37, 232nn. 40, 41 ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’ 91 On Escape 81, 84–5 On God who Comes to Mind 83, 106 ontologism see egoism Otherwise than Being 80–1, 95–8, 102–4, 179, 220n. 39, 233n. 51 Outside the Subject 44 ‘Peace and Proximity’ 226n. 3, 230n. 22 and phenomenology 66, 69, 74–6, 78–9, 80, 82, 84, 86, 89, 96, 99, 177, 184, 233n. 50 ‘Rights of Man and Good Will, The’ 77–8 ‘Signification and Sense’ 89, 91–5 the third 69, 71–2, 73, 75, 76, 79–80, 86, 97, 100, 104, 107, 184, 199, 228n. 13, 230n. 22, 231n. 27 Totality and Infinity 86–91, 157, 226n. 2, 226n. 3, 226n. 4 trace xxviii, 57–60, 79–80, 86, 89, 91–100, 113, 137–9, 156, 170, 171, 177–9, 184, 189, 226n. 2, 233n. 56 ‘Transcendence and Height’ 97–8, 226n. 2 waves of scholarship 73–4, 229–30n. 20 Lyotard, Jean-François 181, 228n. 16 Malabou, Catherine 47 Marxism xxii–xxiii, 38, 70, 72, 213n. 11, 228n. 13, 229n. 19

Index May, Todd 48, 50 Milbank, John 215n. 6 Mulhall, Stephen 13 Naas, Michael 214n. 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 41–2, 57–9, 64, 67, 93, 94, 122, 126, 134, 150, 222n. 8, 223n. 19, 225nn. 37, 38 Pascal, Blaise 4, 98, 216n. 8 Plato 1, 12, 14, 49, 54, 58, 71–2, 95, 99, 121, 191, 214n. 1, 226n. 2 Plotinus 226n. 2 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 153, 240n. 12, 241n. 21, 242n. 23, 244n. 43 revenants see ghosts Rilke, Rainer Maria xvi–xviii, xxi, 25, 117, 122, 196, 207, 211n. 4 Robbins, Jill 71, 228n. 16 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 109, 213n. 12, 235n. 5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 5, 216n. 10 Sartre, Jean-Paul 6, 11, 17, 19, 85, 91, 154, 197, 219n. 25 Saussure, Ferdinand de 44–6, 57, 58 Scylla and Charybdis xiv, 65, 66, 67, 119, 172, 175, 195 Seneca 212n. 11 Smith, Barry 49, 55 Solon, the wisdom of 14–15 spectral xxii–xxiv, 69, 107, 167, 169, 178, 205, 207

261

spectres see ghosts Spinoza, Benedict xvii, xix, 214–15n. 3 Stiegler, Bernard 120, 237n. 14 Stoicism xxi, 208, 212n. 10, 212–13n. 11 technique and technology xvi–xviii, 12, 18, 22, 48, 52–3, 61, 69, 84, 116, 120, 190–1, 201, 207, 211n. 5, 211n. 6, 219–20n. 29, Tolstoy, Leo 141, 217n. 16 Torok, Maria 167, 174 246n. 56 and Abraham, Nicholas xxii–xxiv, 118, 139, 146–7, 149–52, 154, 158–76, 177–9, 181, 185, 188, 192, 216n. 12, 240n. 8, 243n. 38, 246nn. 48, 50, 55 ‘Illness of Mourning, The’ 146, 149, 153–7, 161–2, 242n. 26 Une vie avec la psychanalyse 240n. 10 unconscious xviii, 55, 77, 79, 92, 115, 116, 120, 122, 126, 134–8, 152, 153, 155–7, 159, 160, 167–8, 170–1, 187, 211n. 7, 212n. 10, 223n. 22, 227n. 6, 241n. 21, 242n. 30, 247–8n. 6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 54–5, 218n. 23 Wolf Man 142, 163, 166, 168–9, 185, 187–8, 240n. 14, 244n. 43, Wortham, Simon Morgan 222n. 14 Žižek, Slavoj 75–6, 78, 240n. 12 Zlomislić, Marko 192–5 Zuckermann, Ghil’ad 44, 224n. 25