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Perspectives of Nietzsche, Kant and Derrida

2010-07-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

In making a study of this novel-The Tree of Man-my goal is not to see the exact relationship between the events occur in the novel and Christianity but I rather concentrate on the God, and the protagonist’s Christ like coming in the text. The context of myths, thus, will provide a broader. In making a study of this novel-The Tree of Man-my goal is not to see the exact relationship between the events occur in the novel and Christianity but I rather concentrate on the God, and the protagonist’s Christ like coming in the text. The context of myths, thus, will provide a broader prospective (for Nietzsche, Kant, and Derrida) and later on myths transform into a structured spiritual script.

Patrick White’s Tree of Man is a mythical novel and the author establishes a myth which is concerned with the relationship of man to God, and God to man. Along with the relationship runs a series of natural conflicts-flood and fire, and we see human desires are frustrated by non-human powers. Thematically, the novel follows an old proverb-“Man proposes and God disposes”. Hostile human desires and distorted consciousness make this novel a story of birth, passion, and defeat by death which is ultimately the results of all human’s common fate-either good or bad. Patrick White does not give a moral lecture as the novel sets in a forest where the cultivation of man and nature occur side by side.

The first trait which characterizes Christianity is that it is faith in an event. In Old Testament, it was the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ. This event constitutes an ellipsis of manhood; the intervention of God not only drastically changes the consciousness of man but also brings a new vision towards novelty. The agents of both the situations-God and Stan Parker (the protagonist)-come with their tools, though their tools vary in a sense that one uses language to break the silence and on the other hand another uses an axe to make a sound. The similarity between the two remains common on the ground of not what they do but what they think. Their decisions are straight forward and hence lack insignificant assertions.

Then the man took an axe and struck at the side of a hairy tree … … … The silence was immense. It was the first time anything like this had happened in that part of the bush.
(The Tree of Man, P.9)

The break of silence becomes his first communication with nature especially

when nature is so close that the isolation turns into a solitude to this young Australian man. Stan demonstrates his psychical harmony to nature by closing the eyes in night to sleep and opening them for the daylight. The daily work makes him so tired that he doesn’t persuade sleep but the natural sleep takes him over. In this mode Stan works through out his life and died eventually a peaceful death as an old tree fall after giving plenty fruits and seeing significant seasons throughout year.

The four sections of the book document the four seasons and four phrases of Stan Parker, and his woman’s four phrases with contemplation on daily duties that are essential for the survival of the fittest in the wilderness of nature. Stan shows power to dominate things that need physical strength like the sap raises in the tree. He lives in a Nietzschean manner as if God were dead or he was the son of god like Christ who ultimately knows how to lead his life with contrary situations. The hero doesn’t believe in any freedom for himself as he knows that he is also a part of larger ordering. He wants to play the man’s role in the creation. For this reason he is always ready for hardships as it gives him strength to firth back for the survival cause.

Post-modern suspicion of “why ness” never touches his sturdy soul. Like Nietzsche, Stan Parker responds differently to the nihilism that he has diagnosed. He has lost ‘the real world’ and ‘the apparent world’, he thinks, and it follows from the eerie situations like: he succumbs to the potency of his imagination, falling into Madeleine with Amy’s way of seeing the world as lit by human desires- a hazy, immaterial, sinuous and seductive orgasmic force. Stan’s pseudo ignorance to his wife’s adultery, daughter’s in articulation to his situation and son’s squalidity towards him claims his God power-whether imagery or real is immanent. He realizes that there is no absolute being and a being is always becoming; and he remains in the process of fluid than fixity.

Embracing the Kantian logic of heavenly world, Stan knows that it is to be approached so much by faith as by morality: we can have no theoretical knowledge of the deity, and the best we can do is act morally, as though we knew there was a god. Stan doesn’t perplex on the issue whether God exists or not but internally realizes that the supreme value for life unexpectedly set in motion the inevitable decline in the idea of value. In keeping with this, as the man’s power wither and fade so too do the manifestations of a purpose in everything. The state of the old Parker, blinking into the light, unable to fasten his mind, his last feeble powers of awareness on anything, certainly proclaims that man is mortal as Christ was (Christians believe that the second person of Trinity became a human being and died for their sins), and that he is born to crumble back into dust. The force that works through him must flicker and go out, only the coming of full strength of another Stan Parker, of other simple good men.

The centrality of Stan and his woman is maintained by the other characters like Doll Quigley, Ray, Thelma, O’ Dowd and Bub and so on and so forth. This centrality establishes Stan Parker as the sun among planets. He lives, works, and dies for another Stan Parker who will restore the radiance. The God-power is lying within and behind and working out through the efforts of the man. And thus the last sentence provides evidence for his continuity. The last sentence goes like:

So that in the end there was no end.

The remains in the fluid like Stan Parker. He will pass his radiance to another man, and an unending session will go hereafter. This perspective which affirms a plurality of force centers an affirmation. This is pronounced by Derrida as an endless process of becoming. Derrida masterfully claims that ‘sign is a sign of another sign’. The otherness prevails and hence The Tree of Man is not a tree but a biological evolutionary process that remains as a continuum and for eternity.

-------------
Mr. Amitabh V. Dwivedi
Faculty in English & Linguistics
SMVD University, Kakryal, Katra, Jammu, India

References

-- Derrida, J. (1982) ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ in J. Wolfreys (eds), Literary Theories, London: Edinburgh University Press.

-- Harrland, R. (1987) ‘Derrida and Language as Writing’ Superstructuralism, London and New York: Methuen.

- Green, K. and Bihan, L.(2000) Critical Theory and Practice, London: Routledge.

- Selden I. Raman (1988) ‘Structure and Indeterminacy’ The Theory of Criticism from Plato to the Present-A Reader UK: Longman.

- Wolfreys,J. (1999) ‘Introduction: ‘What remains unread’, Literary Theories, London: Edinburgh University Press.

source: www.articlesbase.com

Post-Derrida: the complex legacy of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers.(Cooper's Last)

2008-05-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

Publication: Arena Magazine
Publication Date: 01-DEC-04
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Cooper, Simon

Article Excerpt
To confirm the cultural significance of the recently deceased philosopher Jacques Derrida, you need go no further than register the number of jokes that have arisen questioning whether he had died at all--jokes which in their own way rely on the language and concepts of Derrida's work for their effect. Hence the use of quotation marks to sceptically announce Derrida's 'death', or statements that he finally seemed to have 'deconstructed' (but had he really?) and so on. The sheer number of these rather feeble lines on the Internet and in the newspapers represent the final shot for many of those who were at one time frustrated by efforts to grasp the significance of this influential but notoriously difficult thinker. Indeed, the rather mean-spirited quality of many of the obituaries for Derrida was perhaps motivated by the fact that, despite the best efforts of the 'culture wars' of the 80s and 90s to diminish Derrida (and more generally what has come to be known as 'theory'), he had a profound influence in virtually all fields of scholarship.

As supporters of Derrida have pointed out, it is important to distinguish the philosopher from caricatures of his work. Hence Derrida the cautious thinker engaged with the whole western tradition can be distinguished from the nihilist who sought to undermine the tenets of classical education and the...

source: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3597592/Post-Derrida-the-complex-legacy.html#abstract

Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes (1964)

2008-05-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

Source: Elements of Semiology, 1964, publ. Hill and Wang, 1968

In his Course in General Linguistics, first published in 1916, Saussure postulated the existence of a general science of signs, or Semiology, of which linguistics would form only one part. Semiology therefore aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification. There is no doubt that the development of mass communications confers particular relevance today upon the vast field of signifying media, just when the success of disciplines such as linguistics, information theory, formal logic and structural anthropology provide semantic analysis with new instruments. There is at present a kind of demand for semiology, stemming not from the fads of a few scholars, but from the very history of the modern world.

The fact remains that, although Saussure's ideas have made great headway, semiology remains a tentative science. The reason for this may well be simple. Saussure, followed in this by the main semiologists, thought that linguistics merely formed a part of the general science of signs. Now it is far from certain that in the social life of today there are to be found any extensive systems of signs outside human language. Semiology has so far concerned itself with codes of no more than slight interest, such as the Highway Code; the moment we go on to systems where the sociological significance is more than superficial, we are once more confronted with language. it is true that objects, images and patterns of behaviour can signify, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture. Where there is a visual substance, for example, the meaning is confirmed by being duplicated in a linguistic message (which happens in the case of the cinema, advertising, comic strips, press photography, etc.) so that at least a part of the iconic message is, in terms of structural relationship, either redundant or taken up by the linguistic system. As for collections of objects (clothes, food), they enjoy the status of systems only in so far as they pass through the relay of language, which extracts their signifiers (in the form of nomenclature) and names their signifieds (in the forms of usages or reasons): we are, much more than in former times, and despite the spread of pictorial illustration, a civilisation of the written word. Finally, and in more general terms, it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language: to perceive what a substance signifies is inevitably to fall back on the individuation of a language: there is no meaning which is not designated, and the world of signifieds is none other than that of language.

Thus, though working at the outset on nonlinguistic substances, semiology is required, sooner or later, to find language (in the ordinary sense of the term) in its path, not only as a model, but also as component, relay or signified. Even so, such language is not quite that of the linguist: it is a second-order language, with its unities no longer monemes or phonemes, but larger fragments of discourse referring to objects or episodes whose meaning underlies language, but can never exist independently of it. Semiology is therefore perhaps destined to be absorbed into a trans-linguistics, the materials of which may be myth, narrative, journalism, or on the other hand objects of our civilisation, in so far as they are spoken (through press, prospectus, interview, conversation and perhaps even the inner language, which is ruled by the laws of imagination). In fact, we must now face the possibility of inverting Saussure's declaration: linguistics is not a part of the general science of signs, even a privileged part, it is semiology which is a part of linguistics: to be precise, it is that part covering the great signifying unities of discourse. By this inversion we may expect to bring to light the unity of the research at present being done in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis and stylistics round the concept of signification.

Though it will doubtless be required some day to change its character, semiology must first of all, if not exactly take definite shape, at least try itself out, explore its possibilities and impossibilities. This is feasible only on the basis of preparatory investigation. And indeed it must be acknowledged in advance that such an investigation is both diffident and rash: diffident because semiological knowledge at present can be only a copy of linguistic knowledge; rash because this knowledge must be applied forthwith, at least as a project, to non-linguistic objects.

The Elements here presented have as their sole aim the extraction from linguistics of analytical concepts, which we think a priori to be sufficiently general to start semiological research on its way. In assembling them, it is not presupposed that they will remain intact during the course of research; nor that semiology will always be forced to follow the linguistic model closely.' We are merely suggesting and elucidating a terminology in the hope that it may enable an initial (albeit provisional) order to be introduced into the heterogeneous mass of significant facts. In fact what we purport to do is to furnish a principle of classification of the questions.

These elements of semiology will therefore be grouped under four main headings borrowed from structural linguistics:

I. Language and Speech.
II. Signified and Signifier.
III. Syntagm and System.
IV. Denotation and Connotation.

It will be seen that these headings appear in dichotomic form; the reader will also notice that the binary classification of concepts seems frequent in structural thoughts as if the metalanguage of the linguist reproduced, like a mirror, the binary structure of the system it is describing; and we shall point out, as the occasion arises, that it would probably be very instructive to study the pre-eminence of binary classification in the discourse of contemporary social sciences. The taxonomy of these sciences, if it were well known, would undoubtedly provide a great deal of information on what might be called the field of intellectual imagination in our time.

read this article at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htm

Earn money from blogging

2008-05-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

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The Derrida Phenomenon

2007-10-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

By Domenica-Antoine Grisoni
Literary magazine n° 196 - June 1983.

Jacques Derrida caricatured by Pancho for the literary Magazine.

A coterie carrying an authentic philosophical step. At the head, Jacques Derrida: that which gives its name. And also, which gave the tone. A machine to crush the texts. A Master of reading.

Eh yes, there is a Derrida phenomenon well. At the hour of the great crisis of the models of the thought, of the which gallops intrusion of subjectivity in philosophy, of the confirmed death of the Master-thinkers, at the moment even where we will pour in the third millenium, imbus of revival and "post-modernism", some that the last intellectual archaisms are in process of resorption, there is still, with same the body of the French philosophy (or this which holds place of it), a kind of outgrowth vieillotte and insolente, an effect of group, a vault: derridiens. Philosophers à.la.mode old, who follow all evenly the work of a Master, stick to its steps, miment its tics, steal its words and coil their reflexion in thinnest meander of his.

Seen outside, the coterie often starts the laughter, and sometimes stimulates the humour of his detractors. The ones make fun what they name its logorrhée, or joke the "logology" (speech on the speech) which swells and tends to slip towards a "logologology" without end. Others scoff what they judge being a revival of the philosophical clericalism. Others finally see only the version there Xxe century of Invaluable ridiculous; but did these, the laugher-prosecutors, read work which they disparage? If you ask them the question, they will answer that obviously not, then that they are perfectly "illegible".
Critical easy, too convenient, which makes mine regulate an account, but do not regulate it. Also I will risk another assumption. That of a current derridien carrying an authentic philosophical step. Of a which been obstinated work, obscure and ungrateful. Of a rigorous, radical work in its expression because it does not aim anything less than definitively to sap the protective base of the Western speculative speech.
At the head thus, Jacques Derrida: that which gives its name. And also, which gave the tone. A machine to crush the texts. A Master of reading.
Almost the totality of sound œuvre in progress is appeared as comments. Plato, Rousseau, from Saussure, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, and well from others passed to the moulinette, "déconstruits" the ones after the others. With a simple and acknowledged aim: in finishing, through them, with traditional philosophy. To break the vicious circle of the illusions of truth which let believe that there are criticisms destroying. To further go that Nietzsche, for example, which proclaims the death of the metaphysics, which among the first carried the hardest blows to him, but which will never cease living with its phantom, of speaking its language and to reorganize its images. Or that Heidegger, another destroyer of this same metaphysics, which will not really arrive, in spite of its efforts, to get rid of its presupposed. It is with this trap, of the mode to think, which registers in the same mental space for and it against, back and its place, which Derrida wants to escape. Then it changes tactic. It inaugurates a strategy of the variation. It moves the glance. Either outside, but from now on inside the texts. The œil philosopher is inserted in the flesh of the concept, detects the most negligible articulations which hold welded the opposed couples, raison/déraison, présence/absence, etc i.e. what constitutes the architecture of the metaphysical spirit, and finishes by doing everything to explode. Illegible Derrida? Thus let us go: Derrida is a Devil, a Malignant philosopher. And read Of an apocalyptic tone adopted at one time in philosophy : you will find there in a luminous language the application of what I have just presented. The subversion of the texts by the œil and the ear. The philosophical one, strictly speaking.
Behind the Master: the close relations, the disciples, those which adopt its stakes, marry its engagements. A group whose members produce work of unequal interest. But from which Sarah Kofman is detached clearly. A philosopher who has a cast: œil right on the left phillosophie, œil on the psychoanalysis. All its books until now made fly. Readings without concessions, iconoclasts. The enigma of the woman : Freud just as it is, misogynist, working out his theory around a massive retention of femininity. Or the respect of the women : a comparative study of the systems of constraint and in the long term, negation of the female fact, through the speeches of Rousseau and Kant. And today, two short texts. Pugnacious. Aggressive. How to leave itself there? A question put with Plato, the examination of philosophy like poros (in the myth exposed in the Banquet, Poros is the god of ingeniousness, the success), i.e. like stratagem to reach the light. Simple translation of the metaphor: how to make that philosophy helps with knowledge? Then, slope psychoanalyses: An impossible trade. Reading of a writing of Freud going back to 1937, therefore among the last, Constructions in analysis. Malicious reading. Where it is learned that the Master of Vienna was until the end a quite bad lot, fixed on his capacity of analyst and eager to bequeath it intact to his successors. Here still which will not arrange the businesses of the French analysts.
An ultimate mention with Jean-Luc Nancy, who gathered in collection a series of articles disseminated through the reviews. It does not touch with morals, says it, but it scans some of its bases. And it is instructive.
With the assessment, Derrida, the derridiens: a free philosophical work, which continues in spite of the movements and the doubts. One can think of them what one wants. But that exists and that advances.

Quoted books
Of an apocalyptic tone adopted at one time in philosophy, Jcques Derrida. ED. Gallilée
The Categorical imperative, Jean-Luc Nancy. ED. Flammarion
How to leave itself there? Sarah Kofman. ED. Galileo
An impossible trade, Sarah Kofman. ED. Galillée

The Politics of Jacques Derrida

2007-09-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

this is the section 2. read the previous page

From this point of view it would seem that all Western political ideologies--fascism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism--would be equally unacceptable. That is the logical implication of Derrida's attack on logocentrism, and sometimes he appears to accept it. In Specters of Marx and The Other Heading he denounces the new liberal consensus he sees as having ruled the West since 1989, lashing out hysterically, and unoriginally, at the "New International" of global capitalism and media conglomerates that have established world hegemony by means of an "unprecedented form of war." He is less critical of Marxism (for reasons we will examine), though he does believe that communism became totalitarian when it tried to realize the eschatological program laid out by Marx himself. Marx's problem was that he did not carry out fully his own critique of ideology and remained within the logocentrist tradition. That is what explains the Gulag, the genocides, and the terror carried out in his name by the Soviet Union. "If I had the time," Derrida tells his undoubtedly stupefied Russian interviewers in Moscou aller-retour, "I could show that Stalin was 'logocentrist,"' though he admits that "that would demand a long development."

It probably would. For it would mean showing that the real source of tyranny is not tyrants, or guns, or wicked institutions. Tyranny begins in the language of tyranny, which derives ultimately from philosophy. If that were transformed, or "neutralized" as he says in Politics of Friendship, so eventually would our politics be. He proves to be extremely open-minded about what this might entail. He asks rhetorically whether "it would still make sense to speak of democracy when there would be no more speaking of country, nation, even state and citizen." He also considers whether the abandonment of Western humanism would mean that concepts of human rights, humanitarianism, even crimes against humanity would have to be forsworn.

But then what remains? If deconstruction throws doubt on every political principle of the Western philosophical tradition--Derrida mentions propriety, intentionality, will, liberty, conscience, self-consciousness, the subject. the self, the person, and community--are judgments about political matters still possible? Can one still distinguish rights from wrongs, justice from injustice? Or are these terms, too, so infected with logocentrism that they must be abandoned? Can it really be that deconstruction condemns us to silence on political matters, or can it find a linguistic escape from the trap of language?

4.

Readers of Derrida's early works can be forgiven for assuming that he believes there can be no escape from language, and therefore no escape from deconstruction for any of our concepts. His achievement, after all, was to have established this hard truth, which was the only truth he did not question. But now Jacques Derrida has changed his mind, and in a major way. It turns out that there is a concept--though only one--resilient enough to withstand the acids of deconstruction. That concept is justice.

In the fall of 1989 Derrida was invited to address a symposium in New York on the theme "deconstruction and the possibility of justice." His lecture has now been expanded in a French edition and published along with an essay on Walter Benjamin.7 Derrida's aim in the lecture is to demonstrate that although deconstruction can and should be applied to the law, it cannot and should not be taken to undercut the notion of justice. The problem with law, in his view, is that it is founded and promulgated on the basis of authority, and therefore, he asserts (with typical exaggeration), depends on violence. Law is affected by economic and political forces, is changed by calculation and compromise, and therefore differs from place to place. Law is written into texts and must be interpreted, which complicates things further.

_________________

7 The original lecture appears in Drucilla Cornell, et al., editors, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Routledge, 1992).

Of course, none of this is news. Our whole tradition of thinking about law, beginning in Greek philosophy and passing through Roman law, canon law, and modern constitutionalism, is based on the recognition that laws are a conventional device. The only controversial issue is whether there is a higher law, or right, by which the conventional laws of nations can be judged, and, if so, whether it is grounded in nature, reason, or revelation. This distinction between law and right is the foundation of continental jurisprudence, which discriminates carefully between loi/droit, Gesetz/Recht, legge/diritto, and so forth. Derrida conflates loi and droit for the simple reason that he recognizes neither nature nor reason as standards for anything. In his view, both are caught up in the structures of language, and therefore may be deconstructed.

Now, however, he also wishes to claim that there is a concept called justice, and that it stands "outside and beyond the law." But since this justice cannot be understood through nature or reason, that only leaves one possible means of access to its meaning: revelation. Derrida studiously avoids this term but it is what he is talking about. In Force de loi he speaks of an "idea of justice" as "an experience of the impossible," something that exists beyond all experience and therefore cannot be articulated. And what cannot be articulated cannot be deconstructed; it can only be experienced in a mystical way. This is how he puts it:

If there is deconstruction of all determining presumption of a present justice, it operates from an infinite "idea of justice," infinitely irreducible. It is irreducible because due to the other--due to the other before any contract, because this idea has arrived, the arrival of the other as a singularity always other. Invincible to all skepticism . . . this "idea of justice" appears indestructible.... One can recognize, and even accuse it of madness. And perhaps another sort of mysticism. Deconstruction is mad about this justice, mad with the desire for justice.

Or again in Specters of Marx:

What remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction, is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice--which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights--and an idea of democracy --which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.

There is no justice present anywhere in the world. There is, however, as Derrida puts it, an "infinite idea of justice," though it cannot and does not penetrate our world. Yet this necessary absence of justice does not relieve us of the obligation to await its arrival, for the Messiah may come at any moment, through any city gate. We must therefore learn to wait, to defer gratifying our desire for justice. And what better training in deferral than deconstruction? If deconstruction questions the claim of any law or institution to embody absolute justice, it does so in the very name of justice--a justice it refuses to name or define, an "infinite justice that can take on a 'mystical' aspect." Which leads us, without surprise, to the conclusion that "deconstruction is justice."

Socrates equated justice with philosophy, on the grounds that only philosophy could see things as they truly are, and therefore judge truly. Jacques Derrida, mustering all the chutzpah at his disposal, equates justice with deconstruction, on the grounds that only the undoing of rational discourse about justice will prepare the advent of justice as Messiah.

5.

How seriously are we meant to take all this? As always with Derrida it is difficult to know. In the books under review he borrows freely from the modern messianic writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin.8 But whatever one makes of these two thinkers, they had too much respect for theological concepts like promise, covenant, Messiah, and anticipation to throw these words about cavalierly. Derrida's turn to them in these new political writings bears all the signs of intellectual desperation. He clearly wants deconstruction to serve some political program, and to give hope to the dispirited left. He also wants to correct the impression that his own thought, like that of Heidegger, leads inevitably to a blind "resolve," an assertion of will that could take any political form. As he remarked not long ago, "My hope as a man of the left, is that certain elements of deconstruction will have served or--because the struggle continues, particularly in the United States--will serve to politicize or repoliticize the left with regard to positions which are not simply academic."9 Yet the logic of his own philosophical arguments, such as they are, proves stronger than Derrida. He simply cannot find a way of specifying the nature of the justice to be sought through left-wing politics without opening himself to the very deconstruction he so gleefully applies to others. Unless, of course, he places the "idea of justice" in the eternal, messianic beyond where it cannot be reached by argument, and assumes that his ideologically sympathetic readers won't ask too many questions.

___________________

8 Derrida has had a long-standing interest in Levinas, to whom he recently devoted a short volume called Adieu (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1997). On Benjamin's messianism, see my article, "The Riddle of Walter Benjamin," The New York Review, May 25, 1995.

9 "Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism," in Chantal Mouffe, editor, Deconstruction and Pragmatism.

But politics on the left, no less than on the right, is not a matter of passive expectation. It envisages action. And if the idea of justice cannot be articulated, it cannot provide any aim for political action. According to Derrida's argument, all that remains to guide us is decision, pure and simple: a decision for justice or democracy, and for a particular understanding of both. Derrida places enormous trust in the ideological goodwill or prejudices of his readers, for he cannot tell them why he chooses justice over injustice, or democracy over tyranny, only that he does. Nor can he offer the uncommitted any reasons for thinking that the left has a monopoly on the correct understanding of these ideas. He can only offer impressions, as in the little memoir he has published in Moscou aller-retour, where he confesses to still being choked with emotion whenever he hears the Internationale.

This nostalgic note is struck time and again in Specters of Marx and Moscou aller-retour, which deserve permanent places in the crowded pantheon of bizarre Marxist apologetics. In the latter book Derrida declares that "deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism." Not, of course, that he wishes to defend anything Marx himself actually wrote or believed. He declares Marx's economics to be rubbish and his philosophy of history a dangerous myth. But all that is beside the point. The spirit" of Marxism gave rise to a great heritage of messianic yearning, and deserves respect for that reason. Indeed, in a certain sense, we are all Marxists now simply because Marxism, well, happened.

Whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism. That is, as we were saying a moment ago, they are heirs of the absolute singularity of a project--or of a promise--which has a philosophical and scientific form. This form is in principle non-religious, in the sense of a positive religion; it is not mythological; it is therefore not national --for beyond even the alliance with a chosen people, there is no nationality or nationalism that is not religious or mythological, let us say "mystical" in the broad sense. The form of this promise or of this project remains absolutely unique....

Whatever one may think of this event, of the sometimes terrifying failure of that which was thus begun, of the techno-economic or ecological disasters, and the totalitarian perversions to which it gave rise, . . . whatever one may think also of the trauma in human memory that may follow, this unique attempt took place. A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs.

With statements like these Jacques Derrida risks giving bad faith a bad name. The simple truth is that his thinking has nothing to do with Marx or Marxism. Derrida is some vague sort of left democrat who values "difference" and, as his recent short pamphlet on cosmopolitanism shows, he is committed to seeing Europe become a more open, hospitable place, not least for immigrants. These are not remarkable ideas, nor are they contemptible. But like so many among the structuralist generation, Derrida is convinced that the only way to extend the democratic values he himself holds is to destroy the language in which the West has always conceived of them, in the mistaken belief that it is language, not reality, that keeps our democracies imperfect. Only by erasing the vocabulary of Western political thought can we hope for a "repoliticization" or a "new concept of politics." But once that point is achieved, what we discover is that the democracy we want cannot be described or defended; it can only be treated as an article of irrational faith, a messianic dream. That is the wistful conclusion of Politics of Friendship:

For democracy remains to come; this is its essence in so far as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it never exists.

6.

Things have changed in Paris. The days when intellectuals turned to philosophers to get their political bearings, and the public turned to intellectuals, are all but over. The figure of the philosophe engage promoted by Sartre has been badly tarnished by the political experiences of the past several decades, beginning with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's books, then the Cambodian horrors, the rise of Solidarity, and finally the events of 1989. For structuralism in all its forms, it was the disappointments of le tiers monde that did most to call into question the philosophers' notion that cultures are irreducibly different and men simply products of those cultures. To their credit, some of the French intellectuals who became structuralists in the Fifties began to see that the vocabulary they had once used to defend colonial peoples against Western tyranny was now being used to excuse crimes committed against those peoples by homegrown, post-colonial tyrants.

Their abandonment of structuralism and deconstruction was not philosophically motivated, at least at first; it was inspired by moral repugnance. But this repugnance had the hygienic effect of reestablishing the distinctions between, on the one hand, pure philosophy and political philosophy and, on the other, committed engagement. There is today a new French interest in rigorous moral philosophy, epistemology. philosophy of mind, and even cognitive science. The tradition of political philosophy, ancient and modern, is also being studied intensively for the first time in many years, and there is some original theoretical.work being done by younger French political thinkers who are no longer contemptuous of politicians or the state. This all could change tomorrow, of course. But it is difficult to imagine the French stepping into the structuralist river twice.

The persistent American fascination with Derrida and deconstruction has nothing to do with his current status in French philosophy, which is marginal at best. This raises a number of interesting questions about how and why his work has been received with open arms by American post-modernists, and what they think they are embracing. Derrida is often asked about his American success and always responds with the same joke: "La deconstruction, c'est l'Amerique." By which he apparently means that America has something of the decentered, democratic swirl he tries to reproduce in his own thought. He may be on to something here, for if deconstruction is not America, it has certainly become an Americanism.

When continental Europeans think about questions of cultural difference and the Other, they are thinking about many deep and disturbing things in their own past: colonialism, nationalism, fascism, the Holocaust. What makes these historical events so difficult for them to grapple with is that there is no moderate liberal intellectual tradition in Europe that addresses them, or at least not a vigorous and continuous one. The continental philosophical tradition makes it difficult to think about toleration, for example, except in the illiberal terms of Herder's Romantic theory of national spirit, the rigid French model of uniform republican citizenship, and now, most improbably, the Heideggerian messianism of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction .

When Americans think about these issues of cultural difference they feel both pride and shame: pride in our capacity to absorb immigration and shame in the legacy of slavery that has kept black Americans a caste apart. The intellectual problem we face is not that of convincing ourselves that cultural variety can be good, or that differences should be respected, or that liberal political principles are basically sound. These we absorb fairly easily. The problem is in understanding why the American promise has only been imperfectly fulfilled, and how we should respond. About this we are clearly divided. But the fact that some political groups, such as those claiming to represent women and homosexuals, portray their moral enfranchisement as the logical extension of the social enfranchisement given to immigrants and promised, but never delivered, to American blacks, speaks volumes about the social consensus that exists in this country about how to think and argue about such questions.

In light of these contrasting experiences, it is a little easier to understand why the political reckoning structuralism faced in France during the Seventies and Eighties never took place in the United States. The souring of the post-colonial experiments in Africa and Asia and the collapse of Communist regimes nearby induced enormous self-doubt in Europe about the ideas that reigned in the postwar period. These same events have had no appreciable effect on American intellectual life, for the simple reason that they pose no challenge to our own self-understanding. When Americans read works in the structuralist tradition today, even in its most radicalized Heideggerian form in deconstruction, they find it difficult to imagine any moral and political implications they might have. People who believe it is possible to "get a new life" will not be overly concerned by the suggestion that all truth is socially constructed, or think that accepting it means relinquishing one's moral compass. That the anti-humanism and politics of pure will latent in structuralism and deconstruction, not to mention the strange theological overtones that Derrida has recently added, are philosophically and practically incompatible with liberal principles sounds like an annoying prejudice.

No wonder a tour through the post-modernist section of any American bookshop is such a disconcerting experience. The most illiberal, anti-enlightenment notions are put forward with a smile and the assurance that, followed out to their logical conclusion, they could only lead us into the democratic promised land, where all God's children will join hands in singing the national anthem. It is an uplifting vision and Americans believe in uplift. That so many of them seem to have found it in the dark and forbidding works of Jacques Derrida attests to the strength of Americans' self-confidence and their awesome capacity to think well of anyone and any idea. Not for nothing do the French still call us les grands enfants.

The Politics of Jacques Derrida

2007-09-28T16:40:00.000-07:00

Mark Lilla

Source: Hardcopy The New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998, pp. 36-41.

The history of French philosophy in the three decades following the Second World War can be summed up in a phrase: politics dictated and philosophy wrote. After the Liberation, and thanks mainly to the example of Jean-Paul Sartre, the mantle of the Dreyfusard intellectual passed from the writer to the philosopher, who was now expected to pronounce on the events of the day. This development led to a blurring of the boundaries between pure philosophical inquiry, political philosophy, and political engagement, and these lines have only slowly been reestablished in France. As Vincent Descombes remarked in his superb short study of the period, Modern French Philosophy (1980), "taking a political position is and remains the decisive test in France; it is what should reveal the ultimate meaning of a philosophy." Paradoxically, the politicizing of philosophy also meant the near extinction of political philosophy, understood as disciplined and informed reflection about a recognizable domain called politics. If everything is political, then strictly speaking nothing is. It is a striking fact about the postwar scene that France produced only one genuine political thinker of note: Raymond Aron.

The list of important French philosophers who protected their work from the political passions of the day is short but contains some significant figures. One thinks of the Jewish moral philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the misanthropic essayist E. M. Cioran, both of whom have recently died, and the Protestant thinker Paul Ricoeur, now ninety-five, who are all being rediscovered today. One also thinks of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, a claim that may surprise American readers, given the ideologically charged atmosphere in which Derrida and his work have been received on our side of the Atlantic. Unlike so many of his fellow students at the Ecole Normale Superieure in the Fifties, Derrida kept clear of the Stalinized French Communist Party (PCF), and later adopted a skeptical attitude toward the events of May '68 and the short-lived hysteria for Mao. Over the next decade, as Michel Foucault became the great white hope of the post-'68 left, Derrida frustrated all attempts to read a simple political program into deconstruction. He declared himself to be a man of the left but refused to elaborate, leaving more orthodox thinkers to wonder whether deconstruction reflected anything more than "libertarian pessimism," as the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton once charged.

As Derrida's star began to fall in France in the 1980s, it was rising in the English-speaking world, where questions about his political commitments were raised anew. This must have been awkward for him on several counts. Derrida's thought is extremely French in its themes and rhetoric, and is difficult to understand outside the context of long-standing Parisian disputes over the legacies of structuralism and Heideggerianism. In the United States, however, his ideas, which were first introduced into literary criticism, now circulate in the alien environment of academic postmodernism, which is a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines like cultural studies, feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies, and post-colonial theory. Academic postmodernism is nothing if not syncretic, which makes it difficult to understand or even describe. It borrows notions freely from the (translated) works of Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva--and, as if that were not enough, also seeks inspiration from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other figures from the German Frankfurt School. Given the impossibility of imposing any logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument. What appears to hold it together is the conviction that promoting these very different thinkers somehow contributes to a shared emancipatory political end, which remains conveniently ill-defined.

In America, Derrida is considered a classic of the postmodern canon. But as recently as 1990 he still declined to explain the political implications of deconstruction. Occasionally a book would appear claiming to have cracked the code and discovered hidden affinities between deconstruction and, say, Marxism or feminism. The Sphinx just grinned. But now, at long last, he has spoken. During the past five years Jacques Derrida has published no fewer than six books on political themes. Some are no more than pamphlets and interviews, but three of them--a book on Marx, one on friendship and politics, another on law--are substantial treatises. Why Derrida has chosen this particular moment to make his political debut is a matter of speculation. His thoughts could not be more out of season in France, and his six books met bafflement when they appeared there. But given the continuing influence of postmodernism in the United States, where Derrida now spends much of his time teaching, his interventions could not be more timely. They give us plenty of material for reflection about the real political implications of deconstruction and whether American readers have quite grasped them.

1.

On or about November 4, 1956, the nature of French philosophy changed. That, in any case, is what the textbooks tell us. In the decade following the Liberation, the dominant presence in French philosophy was Jean-Paul Sartre and the dominant issue was communism. Sartre's L'Etre et le neant (1943) had earned him a reputation as an existentialist during the Occupation, and his famous lecture of 1945, "L'Existentialisme est un humanisme," brought his message that "man is the future of man" to a wide European audience at war's end. Yet within a few years of having spoken out on behalf of absolute human liberty, Sartre became an obedient fellow traveler. In his infamous tract "Les Communistes et la paix," which began to be serialized in 1952, he dismissed reports of the Gulag, and after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1954 declared in an interview that "the freedom to criticize is total in the USSR." Having once extolled man's unique capacity for free choice, Sartre announced a decade later that Marxism was the unsurpassable horizon of our time.

But in 1956 (so the story goes) the myth of the Soviet Union was shattered in France by Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Party Conference in Moscow in November, and the suppression of the Hungarian revolt. This brought an end to many illusions: about Sartre, about communism, about history, about philosophy, and about the term "humanism." It also established a break between the generation of French thinkers reared in the Thirties, who had seen the war as adults, and students who felt alien to those experiences and wished to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the cold war. The latter therefore turned from the "existential" political engagement recommended by Sartre toward a new social science called structuralism. And (the story ends) after this turn there would develop a new approach to philosophy. of which Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are perhaps the most distinguished representatives.

The problem with this textbook history is that it vastly overstates the degree to which French intellectuals stripped themselves of their Communist illusions in 1956. What it gets right is the role of structuralism in changing the terms in which political matters generally were discussed. Structuralism was a term coined by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to describe a method of applying models of linguistic structure to the study of society as a whole, in particular to customs and myths. Though Levi-Strauss claimed inspiration from Marx, he interpreted Marxism to be a science of society, not a guide to political action.

Sartre's engaged Marxist humanism rested on three basic presuppositions: that history's movements can be understood rationally; that those movements are determined by class relations; and that the individual's responsibility was to further human emancipation by assisting progressive class forces. Levi-Strauss drew two very different principles from reading Marx in light of the French sociological tradition (especially the works of Emile Durkheim) and his own anthropological field work. They were that societies are structures of relatively stable relations among their elements, which develop in no rational historical pattern, and that class has no special status among them. As for man's existential responsibilities, Levi-Strauss had nothing to say. It was a provocative silence. For if societies were essentially stable structures whose metamorphoses were unpredictable, that left little room for man to shape his political future through action. Indeed, man seemed rather beside the point. As Levi-Strauss put it in his masterpiece Tristes Tropiques (1955), "The world began without the human race, and it will end without it."

Today it is somewhat difficult to understand how this austere doctrine could have appealed to young people caught up in the cold war atmosphere of the Fifties. It helps to realize how profoundly Levi-Strauss was attacking the defining myth of modern French politics. Beginning in the Third Republic there developed a shaky political consensus in France, to the effect that the Declaration of the Rights of Man pronounced in 1789 reflected universal truths about the human condition which France had been anointed to promulgate to the world. After two world wars, the Occupation, and Vichy, this myth of universalism in one country struck many young Frenchmen as absurd. Levi-Strauss's structuralism cast doubt on the universality of any political rights or values, and also raised suspicions about the 'man" who claimed them. Weren't these concepts simply a cover for the West's ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide, as Levi-Strauss charged? And wasn't Sartre's Marxism polluted by the same ideas? Marxism spoke of each nation's place in the general unfolding of history; structuralism spoke of each culture as autonomous. Marxism preached revolution and liberation for all peoples; structuralism spoke of cultural difference and the need to respect it. In the Paris of the late Fifties, the cool structuralism of Levi-Strauss seemed at once more radically democratic and less naive than the engaged humanism of Sartre.

Besides, structuralist concern with "difference" and the "Other" also had a strong political effect in the decade of decolonization and the Algerian War. Levi-Strauss's most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals. Sartre was much engaged in anti-colonial politics and saw in Third World revolutions the birth of a "new man," as he put it in his passionate preface to Frantz Fanon's Les Damnees de la terre (1961). Levi-Strauss never engaged in polemics over decolonization or the Algerian War. Nonetheless, his elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be European. Using the rhetorical gifts he learned from Rousseau, he evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. And though Levi-Strauss may not have intended it, his writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left that grew up in the Sixties that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance--reason, science, progress, liberal democracy--were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference.

As François Dosse shows in his useful new study of structuralism, the movement had a lasting impact on French thought and intellectual politics, even though its doctrines were quickly misunderstood and misapplied in the next generation.1 For Levi-Strauss, structuralism was a scientific method for studying differences between cultures, in the hope of one day achieving a more genuinely universal understanding of human nature. For the tiers-mondistes he inspired, and who were radicalized by the Algerian War, this scientific relativism degenerated into just another primitivism that neutralized any criticism of abuses within foreign cultures. (Not to mention the crimes of Communist totalitarianism, which now could be excused on culturalist rather than Stalinist grounds.) As the Sixties progressed, the children of structuralism came to forget Levi-Strauss's skepticism about the French revolutionary myth and began promoting the Other as an honorary sans culottes. All that was marginal within Western societies could now be justified and even celebrated philosophically. Some followed Michel Foucault in portraying the development of European civilization as a process of marginalizing domestic misfits--the mentally ill, sexual and political deviants--who were branded and kept under surveillance through the cooperation of social "power" and 'knowledge." Others turned to psychology, searching for the repressed Other in the libido or the unconscious.

_________________

1 This next generation is usually called "post-structuralist" in English to mark the break with structuralism's original scientific program. This term is not used in French, however, and Dosse employs "structuralism" to refer to the entire movement. I follow him in this.

By the mid-Seventies the structuralist idea had declined from a scientific method informed by political and cultural pessimism into a liberation anti-theology celebrating difference wherever it might be found. In one sense, then, little had changed since 1956. French intellectuals still thought of themselves on the Dreyfusard model, and philosophers continued to write thinly veiled political manifestoes. But the structuralist experience had changed the terms in which political engagements were conceived philosophically. It was no longer possible to appeal to a rational account of history, as Sartre had, to justify political action. It was not clear that one could appeal to reason at all, since language and social structure loomed so large. One could not even speak of man without putting the term in quotation marks. "Man" was now considered a site, a point where various social. cultural, economic, linguistic, and psychological forces happened to intersect. As Michel Foucault put it in the closing sentence of Les Mots et les choses (1966), man was a recent invention that would soon disappear, like a face drawn in the sand.

That surely was not what Levi-Strauss had in mind when he spoke of creation outlasting man, but the die was already cast. What this radical anti-humanism would mean for politics was not altogether clear. For if "man" was entirely a construct of language and social forces, then how was homo politicus to deliberate on and justify his actions? Whatever one thought of Sartre's political engagements, he had an answer to that question. The structuralists did not.

2.

François Dosse describes Jacques Derrida's doctrine of deconstruction as an "ultrastructuralism." This is accurate enough but does not tell the whole story. In France at least, the novelty of deconstruction in the Sixties was to have addressed the themes of structuralism--difference, the Other--with the philosophical concepts and categories of Martin Heidegger. Derrida's early writing revived a querelle over the nature of humanism which had set Heidegger against Sartre back in the late Forties and had many political implications. Derrida sided with Heidegger, whom he only criticized for not having gone far enough. And it is to that decision in favor of Heidegger that all the political problems of deconstruction may be traced.

The Sartre-Heidegger dispute followed Sartre's 1945 lecture on humanism, which Heidegger read as a travesty of his own intellectual position. Sartre had appropriated the Heideggerian language of anxiety, authenticity, existence, and resolution to make the case for man as "the future of man," by which he meant that man's autonomous self-development should replace transcendent ends as the aim of all our striving. In a long, and justly famous, "Letter on Humanism" (1946), Heidegger responded that his aim had always been to question the concept of man and perhaps free us from it. Ever since Plato, he wrote. Western philosophy had made unexamined metaphysical assumptions about man's essence that disguised the fundamental question of Being--which is the meaning of Being apart from man's comprehension of the being of natural entities--and placed man himself at the center of creation. All the scourges of modern life--science, technology, capitalism, communism--could be traced back to this original "anthropologization" of Being. This was a heavy burden, which could only be lifted through the dismantling (Destruktion) of the metaphysical tradition. Only then could man learn that he is not the master but rather the "shepherd" of Being.

Deconstruction was conceived in the spirit of Heidegger's Destruktion, though Derrida had no intention of making man the shepherd of anything. In a remarkable lecture in 1968, "The Ends of Man," Derrida pointed out that by anointing man the "shepherd of Being," Heidegger had returned to humanism "as if by magnetic attraction." He then claimed that the metaphysical tradition could only really be overcome if the very language of philosophy was "deconstructed," a language in which even Heidegger was snared. At the root of the metaphysical tradition was a naive notion of language as a transparent medium, a "logocentrism," as Derrida dubbed it. The Greek term logos means word or language, but it can also mean reason or principle--an equation of speech with intentionality that Derrida considered highly questionable. What was needed was a radical "decentering" of the implicit hierarchies imbedded in this language that encourage us to place speech above writing, the author above the reader, or the signified above the signifier. Deconstruction thus was described as a prolegomenon to--or perhaps even a substitute for--philosophy as traditionally conceived. It would be an activity allowing the aporias, or paradoxes, imbedded in every philosophical text to emerge without forcing a "violent" consistency upon them. The end of logocentrism would then mean the end of every other wicked "centrism": androcentrism, phallocentrism, phallologocentrism, carnophallologocentrism, and the rest. (All these terms appear in the books under review.)

As a specimen of normalien cleverness, Derrida's attack on his intellectual forefathers could hardly be bettered. He accused both structuralists and Heidegger of not having pushed their own fundamental insights far enough. Structuralists destabilized our picture of man by placing him in a web of social and linguistic relations, but then assumed that web of relations-- structures--to have a stable center. Heidegger's blindness to his own language led from the Destruktion of metaphysics to the promotion of man as the "shepherd of Being." Derrida's contribution, if that is the correct term, was to have seen that by pressing further the anti-humanism latent in both these intellectual traditions, he could make them seem compatible ways of addressing logocentrism.

But having done that, Derrida then found himself bound to follow the linguistic principles he had discovered in his campaign against logocentrism, especially the hard doctrine that since all texts contain ambiguities and can be read in different ways (la difference), exhaustive interpretation must be forever deferred (la differance). That raised the obvious question: How then are we to understand deconstruction's own propositions? As more than one critic has pointed out, there is an unresolvable paradox in using language to claim that language cannot make unambiguous claims.2 For Derrida coping with such evident paradoxes is utterly beside the point. As he has repeatedly explained, he conceives of deconstruction less as a philosophical doctrine than as a "practice" aimed at casting suspicion on the entire philosophical tradition and robbing it of self-confidence.

_________________

2 See, for example, John Searle, "The World Turned Upside Down" The New York Review, October 27, 1983.

Anyone who has heard him lecture in French knows that he is more performance artist than logician. His flamboyant style--using free association, rhymes and near-rhymes, puns, and maddening digressions--is not just a vain pose (though it is surely that). It reflects what he calls a self-conscious "acommunicative strategy" for combating logocentrism. As he puts it in the interview published in Moscou aller-retour:

What I try to do through the neutralization of communication, theses, and stability of content, through a microstructure of signification, is to provoke, not only in the reader but also in oneself, a new tremor or a new shock of the body that opens a new space of experience. That might explain the reaction of not a few readers when they say that, in the end, one doesn't understand anything, there's no conclusion drawn, it's too sophisticated, we don't know if you are for or against Nietzsche, where you stand on the woman question....

It also might explain the reaction of those readers who suspect that the neutralization of communication means the neutralization of all standards of judgment--logical, scientific, aesthetic, moral, political--and leaves these fields of thought open to the winds of force and caprice. Derrida always brushed aside such worries as childish, and in the atmosphere of the Sixties and Seventies few questions were asked. But the Eighties proved to be trying times for deconstruction. In 1987 a Chilean writer named Victor Farias published a superficial book on Martin Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis and its alleged roots in his philosophy. While the book contained no revelations, it was taken in France and Germany to confirm the suspicion that, to the extent that philosophy in the Sixties and Seventies was Heideggerian, it was politically irresponsible. Jacques Derrida rejected these associations out of hand, as readers of this paper will recall.3

But that same year it was also revealed that the late Yale professor Paul de Man, a leading champion of deconstruction and close friend of Derrida's, had published collaborationist and anti-Semitic articles in two Belgian newspapers in the early Forties. These might have been dismissed as youthful errors had Derrida and some of his American followers not then interpreted away the offending passages, denying their evident meaning, leaving the impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you're sorry.4 It now appeared that deconstruction had, at the very least, a public relations problem, and that the questions of politics it so playfully left in suspension would now have to be answered.

_________________

3 See Thomas Sheehan, "A Normal Nazi," The New York Review, January 14, 1993, as well as letters from Derrida, Richard Wolin, and others in The New York Review, February 11, March 4, and March 25, 1993.

4 For a full account, with references see Louis Menand, "The Politics of Deconstruction," The New York Review, November 21, 1991.

Yet how would that be possible? Derrida's radical interpretations of structuralism and Heideggerianism had rendered the traditional vocabulary of politics unusable and nothing could be put in its place. The subjects considered in traditional political philosophy--individual human beings and nations--were declared to be artifices of language, and dangerous ones at that. The object of political philosophy--a distinct realm of political action--was seen as part of a general system of relations that itself had no center. And as for the method of political philosophy--rational inquiry toward a practical end--Derrida had succeeded in casting suspicion on its logocentrism. An intellectually consistent deconstruction would therefore seem to entail silence on political matters. Or, if silence proved unbearable, it would at least require a serious reconsideration of the anti-humanist dogmas of the structuralist and Heideggerian traditions. To his credit, Michel Foucault began such a reconsideration in the decade before his death. Jacques Derrida never has.

3.

The most we are ever likely to learn about Derrida's understanding of strictly political relations is contained in his most recently translated work, Politics of Friendship--the only one of his books with the word "politics" in the title. It is based on a seminar given in Paris in 1988-1989, just as Europe was being shaken to its foundation by the rapid collapse of the Eastern Bloc. As it happens, I attended this seminar and, like most of the participants I met, had difficulty understanding what Derrida was driving at. Each session would begin with the same citation from Montaigne--"O mes amis, il n'y a nul ami" ("O my friends, there is no friend")--and then veer off into a rambling discussion of its possible sources and meanings. The published text is much reworked and gives a clearer picture of what Derrida has in mind.

His aim is to show that the entire Western tradition of thinking about politics has been distorted by our philosophy's peccatum originarium, the concept of identity. Because our metaphysical tradition teaches that man is identical to himself, a coherent personality free from internal difference, we have been encouraged to seek our identities through membership in undifferentiated, homogenizing groups such as families, friendships, classes, and nations. From Aristotle to the French Revolution, the good republic has therefore been thought to require fraternite, which is idealized as a natural blood tie making separate individuals somehow one.5 But there is no such thing as natural fraternity, Derrida asserts, just as there is no natural maternity (sic). All such natural categories, as well as the derivative concepts of community, culture, nation, and borders, are dependent on language and therefore are conventions. The problem with these conventions is not simply that they cover up differences within the presumably identical entities. It is that they also establish hierarchies among them: between brothers and sisters, citizens and foreigners, and eventually friends and enemies. In the book's most reasoned chapters, Derrida examines Carl Schmitt's conception of politics, which portrays the political relation as an essentially hostile one between friends and enemies.6 Derrida sees Schmitt not as a mere Nazi apologist with a thirst for conflict, but as a deep thinker who made explicit the implicit assumptions of all Western political philosophy.

_________________

5 In case the reader failed to grasp the real target of Derrida's campaign against the idea of fraternite, in Politics of Friendship he emphasizes that "this book set itself up to work and be worked relentlessly, close to the thing called France. And close to the singular alliance linking nothing less than the history of fraternization to this thing, France--to the State, the nation, the politics, the culture, literature and language."

6 On Schmitt's concept of politics, see my article, "The Enemy of Liberalism," The New York Review, May 15, 1997.

Living On (Happily) Ever After: Derrida, Philosophy and the Comic

2007-09-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

Robert S. Gall

Originally published in Philosophy Today 38 (1994):167-180

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other -- since there are no kings -- messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.Franz Kafka(1)

In reading the texts of Derrida, one easily notes how they repeatedly exhibit the frivolous and joking character of writing (AF 125-127; D 93)(2) through puns, double entendres, and turns of phrase that, like jokes, are often untranslatable. Taking a closer look, we also recognize occasional allusions to the conventions and strategies of comedy in these texts. For example, Derrida's call for a kind of thinking at the end of philosophy that is affirmed "in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance" (MP 27; cf. WD 136) recalls the feast and reconciliation typical of the end of comedy. One also cannot help but notice how Derrida, either as commentator (AT 30; EO 141; Ltd 82) or signatory (WD 300: "Reb Derrisa," a homonym of "Reb de risée", the "rabbi of the laugh" or the "laughing rabbi"), frequently reminds us of the comic implications of his texts. Add to that their playful and performative nature (which suggests a comparison with literary- dramatic forms) and their labyrinth of forms and styles that is reminiscent of comic texts, and it is no wonder that there are frequent references to the genres of comedy and the comic in characterizing the texts of Derrida.(3)

However, despite the frequent references to a comic quality in the texts of Derrida, little has been done to show what this means for understanding those texts. That is, commentators (including Derrida) use the trope "comedy" and the "comic" to suggest/promote an understanding of philosophy and a comportment toward the world that is "comic" in some larger sense, but they tend to leave that comic quality unexplored. It is, however, just this comic quality, and the larger sense of "comedy" that it implies, that I wish to explore in an effort to distinguish the texts of Derrida. Noting this comic quality and the comic strategies employed by Derrida will, I suggest, prove helpful for suggesting how we might better understand the texts of Derrida, their relationship to the philosophical tradition and such traditional concerns as ethics, politics, and religious thought.

* * *

It is difficult to find unanimity on the subject of comedy and the comic. As one critic has put it, not only comedy but its criticism is a labyrinth. Yet a labyrinth is an order as well as a tangle,(4)and we can take note of a number of features and strategies that are important, if not absolutely necessary, for characterizing the comic, and which are echoed in the texts of Derrida.

(1) The Arbitrary and Discontinuous. A variety of critics have noted that a common feature of comedy and the comic is an emphasis on discontinuity and the arbitrary.(5) On the one hand, this means that comedy usually represents the dominant society or practices of its play as operating according to arbitrary laws. The dominant order is a matter of chance, not necessity. For instance, Aristophanes attempts to show his countrymen in Lysistrata that war between Athens and Sparta is not necessary; another order (i.e., peace between Athens and Sparta) is not only possible but beneficial. So too Molière, in The School for Husbands, by contrasting the way in which two brothers treat their wards (and intended brides), shows that the traditionally 'proper' way to raise a faithful wife is not the only way and can in fact (does, in fact, in the play) fail. Figaro, in the 5th act of Beaumarchais' play, challenges his master by pointing out that his master's position is only an accident of birth. On the other hand, this emphasis means that the accidental and the discontinuous tend to dominate the comic rhythm. As far back as Aristotle, it was noted that plot was not very important for comedy. Comedy tends toward the episodic -- witness the comic strip, or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. There is sometimes a jumping back and forth in time, as in Billy Pilgrim's "progress" through Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. Chance encounters are the rule, rather than the exception. Magic and fantasy are not uncommon, as is the case when a magician enables a humanities professor at CCNY to become a character in Madame Bovary in Woody Allen's short story "The Kugelmass Affair."(6) Even the magic is chancy; Puck's magic is less than certain in Midsummer Night's Dream, and Kugelmass accidentally ends up trapped in a remedial Spanish textbook, chased ever after by the verb tener ("to have").

Of course, Derrida takes the arbitrariness of the sign acknowledged and repressed by Saussure as one of the starting points for his deconstructive enterprise of/from grammatology (OG 44ff; cf. MP 10f, AF 110-112). Since "the thing itself" is a sign, and what is represented is always already a representatum (OG 49, 50), the presumed necessity of any system of signs -- which assumes the priority of one sign as signified and others as properly or improperly signifying that signified -- is subverted. Since what is signified always already implies a sign that points to it, what is signified is itself a sign, a trace, the trace of a presence (an absolute origin) that never was there. By showing the interconnectedness and con-textual nature of sign/signified and all other metaphysical binary oppositions, deconstructive discourse, like comedy, shows that the presumably absolute, categorical authority of a law (BL 190ff; cf. Par 249-287) assumes an authority it does not have.

But then, like comedy, Derrida also shows this arbitrariness by enacting it. His texts often take their point of departure from accidental or incidental features, correlations or correspondences in language and texts. A footnote in Sein und Zeit (MP 31ff), an incidental piece by Kant (AT), an isolated comment by Nietzsche (SNS 123ff) become starting points for his analyses. The "mute irony" of substituting an "a" for an "e" creates the nonconcept différance (MP 3ff); the unheard accent grave changes a feminine pronoun into a place in Cinders. Seemingly incongruous commentaries are laid side by side in Glas and "Survivre" (Par 119-178). The writing is telegraphic, as postcard dispatches punctuate The Postcard, and aphorisms (even the less than aphoristic) leave their mark on Roland Barthes and architecture, and mark time in Romeo and Juliet (Ps 273-304, 509-518, 519-533). Seemingly odd associations are made, and concepts transformed: différance becomes the trace becomes hérisson (a hedgehog, also reminding us of hérisser, "to spike"; CCP), or fire and ashes (C; OS). The texts of Derrida are like the harlequin's costume -- patchwork and piecemeal -- showing us the pretense of our presentations to the world.

(2) Repetition and Reproduction. The arbitrariness of laws leads to the arbitrariness of ends in comedies and in Derrida. On the one hand, this means that since the established order has no point or purpose, repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy (Frye 168; et. al.). Comedy reveals that the dominant society is caught in obsessive, repetitive behavior that accomplishes nothing. Abbott and Costello's comic routine "Who's on First[?]", in which each participant asks the 'proper' questions and gives the 'proper' answers about the players on the new baseball team, over and over, to no avail, is a classic example of this point. "The Roadrunner" cartoons, where the predator (Wile E. Coyote) quite 'properly' pursues the roadrunner, over and over, even attempting, like a proper American coyote, to employ modern technology in his quest, would be another example. On the other hand, since there is no point, the end, i.e., the finish, of comedies likewise often enact this arbitrariness; they interrupt something that will go on ever after (happily or not). The Taming of the Shrew, at first glance, seems to end, happily, but Kate's submission is suspect (and is usually played so that we are not convinced she has submitted); we have the sneaking suspicion that the agon of this marriage (and all marriages) will go on indefinitely. Molière, much to the chagrin of drama critics, is often blatantly arbitrary, ending Tartuffe with the miraculous intervention of the king, for example, or rather incredibly tying together all sorts of loose ends in The Miser. And exactly how could you end the "Who's on First[?]" routine, or "The Roadrunner" cartoons, except arbitrarily?

It is much the same with deconstructive discourse. Derrida sees philosophical discourse ruled by a desire, an obsession, namely, a desire and obsession for "meaning", i.e., "wanting to say" (vouloir dire) something -- a full and unspoiled presence, a foundational and/or constant arche or telos. Yet this desire is infinitely deferred and comes to nothing. Why? There could be no meaning, no communication, without the absence of what is meant, and without the iterability of words and meanings. Hence all presentations (of meaning) are always already (possible) re-presentations. The purity of the origin or end is disrupted "from the start"; mimesis, imitation, 'rules' something like philosophy. But a mime (e.g., a philosopher) does not do anything (D 216), does not accomplish anything. Hence philosophy -- which thinks that it is going somewhere, from somewhere, i.e., that it has an absolute telos and/or arche -- is ultimately unable to justify its beginning or end (e.g., AF 108-109, 118-119; D 182n, 271). Meaning -- the burning desire and obsession of philosophy -- entails a wandering from sign to sign, trace to trace, deferring infinitely the presence it desires.(7)

The desire and obsession in comedy that is reproductive rather than productive often turns, not surprisingly, on sex. Old comedy such as survives in the work of Aristophanes included wearing huge artificial phalluses and telling obscene jokes. Ever since, from high comedies of manners to the low comedy of farce, whether it is women getting the better of men, youth overcoming obstacles to their desire, or the cuckold winning his horns, comedy has usually had something to do with sex. It is not hard to see why. Being perhaps the lowest common denominator among human beings, sex is a natural focus for a genre concerned with the common interests of mankind. Thus sex can serve as a great equalizer and leveller, an ideal focus for showing that the rich, the powerful, the unique, are really no different, no better, than anyone else. Likewise, if you wish, as comedy does, to show the impotence of the old order, there seems no better way to do that than by reference to sex.

Derrida and deconstruction have had recourse to much the same strategy, noting the "phallo-centrism" of "logocentrism" (= "phallogocentrism"; see, e.g., D 48-49 & n.47; Gl 113a, 188a; PSF 477ff) and the (intellectual) "masturbation" of trying to erect a philosophical system (OG 141-164). Deconstructive reading therefore involves castration -- "always at stake" (D 302) -- that cuts into the columns of text that are the erection of philosophy to note the gaps, the fissures, the openings (as in a woman) -- i.e., the radical alterity ("woman") -- on which philosophy depends, and which it therefore does not control. Deconstruction takes note of the feminine phantom haunting the smoke (and mirrors) of philosophy (C 33) and thereby seeks to think as a woman, "woman being one name for the untruth of truth" (SNS 51; cf. Gl 126a, 126bi, 187a; PSF 442ff). To think as a woman would not be to erect a philosophy but to be fertile in another way -- by playing, affirming an endless substitution that is neither signified nor signifier, presentation nor representation, showing nor hiding (P 86-87).

(3) The Ironic. The arbitrariness, discontinuity, and mimicry in comedy make meaning and self a tricky matter. Comedy usually deals in characters (a Falstaff, a Groucho Marx, Chaplin's Tramp) that fit any number of situations and therefore come across as representative figures, general "types" rather than "individuals." As representative figures, they do not evolve or change. But in order to maintain themselves in a hostile world, we find that comic characters need to show wide variances in their appearance and their language. Their persona become fluid and multiply; puns, double meanings, and the disguises of language proliferate. Thus Euripides, in Aristophanes' The Poet and the Women, appears in various parts from his plays (Menelaus, Perseus, Echo) in an attempt to save his once-disguised father-in-law Mnesilochus. Groucho Marx plays with language to say the unspeakable, i.e., to attack an enemy, or make lecherous advances toward a woman, all the while remaining Groucho. Woody Allen's Zelig is a "human chameleon" so as to fit in the world around him. The incongruity between character and mask, word and meaning, is ironic, and evokes laughter. In addition, as the designation of Zelig indicates, this duplicity often goes to the point of breaking the bounds of humanity, mixing (with) the divine, the bestial, or the mechanical. Many of Aristophanes' plays, with their bestial titles (The Birds, The Wasps, The Frogs), point to this breakdown between man and beast, as do stock comic figures like the cuckold (who grows horns), the shrew (as in The Taming of the Shrew), or the often inhuman babel of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Likewise, the mechanization of comic characters by reducing them to the physical -- with emphasis on their predictable desires for food, shelter, and sex, or their routine bodily functions -- emphasize these breakdowns. Humanity is shown to be but one more mask. Indeed, everything is turned into mask and revealed as mask in comedy; everything reduces to pure surface and inessential appearance.

This masking in comedy is the truth of deconstruction, a truth that will not be pinned down by truth, a truth that is no truth because it plays at dissimulation, ornamentation, deceit, and artifice (SNS 55, 59, 67, 69; cf. WD 263). Here the self is a trace, i.e., "the erasure of selfhood, of one's own presence" (WD 230; SP 66, 85), disrupting the proximity of self-presence necessary for self-identity and identification by "the proper word and the unique name" (MP 27; cf. OG 107ff). The self always exceeds the récit (story) it tells (itself) (Par 272-273), because it is not what it is unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated (of being a re-citation). As a result, the self withdraws in the supplement (e.g., its name) that presents it (D 168). Such is the "anonymity" of the trace in which the possibility of being repeated makes one's "own", "proper" name (e.g., one's signature) available to anyone (D 143-144; Ltd 29ff). The "democracy" of writing (D 144) that comes at the end of history, whereby the individual is 'lost' in the Dionysiac mirror-play of language, thereby marks the end of man and humanity (MP 111-136; cf. the inhumanity of the name, Ps 528). Thus Derrida too, like comedy, breaks the bounds of humanity, writing in a language that is monstrous, bringing forth monsters from the tradition (DO 123): Francis Ponge/sponge, or Hegel/eagle, or the death that haunts one's name, the Geist of humans reduced to fire and ashes.

(4) U-topia. Much of what has been said so far in characterizing the comic comes into focus with regard to what we may call the comic u-topia -- what others have called the argument or the discussion, reminding us of the links between philosophy and comedy since the (anti-tragic) dialogues of Plato.(8) Comedy aspires to, or culminates in, or takes its perspective from, a u-topia, literally, a "non-place" free of the constraints of the everyday world, detached from the old or dominant order and outside of time, a ludicrous context marked by the lack of (conventional) rationality, morality, and/or work in which the comic character is not threatened. Such a u-topia takes many forms. It might be the traditional, festive end of comedy, that "bliss beyond time" in which everyone lives happily ever after, or simply the carnivalesque atmosphere of a pilgrimage such as we find in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It might be a safe haven in the midst of the world -- the parlor (where women rule) in domestic comedies, the forests of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, the Boar's Head Tavern where Falstaff presides, the hospital ward where Yossarian finds refuge in Catch-22. It might simply be a different, detached perspective on things that is neither inside nor outside the comedy. A comedy of shifting perspectives like Thackeray's Vanity Fair that recognizes the universal folly of human being would be one such example; the ironic discussions that take place between author and reader in such works as Cervantes' Don Quixote or Fielding's Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews would be other examples. Whatever form it takes, the detached perspective of the comic u-topia thoroughly informs the play, for what is at stake is the conservation and survival of the comic, whatever his or her point.(9)

Correspondingly, Derrida has characterized the task of deconstruction in terms of a search for the non-place, the non-lieu, the non-site or u-topos from which to interrogate philosophy (DO 108, 112) (or any other dominant order). Deconstruction tends to what is neither inside nor outside, what does not 'take place' (n'a pas lieu), is not an 'event,' or is an event (événement) whose advent (avènement) is to come (à-venir). On the one hand, this involves constant reference to what are called "undecidables" or "quasi-transcendentals." Undecidables (non-concepts such as pharmakon, supplement, gram, etc.) are unities of simulacrum that inhabit but are not included in a system, resisting and disorganizing it instead (P 43; cf. 101n13). Undecidables might be described as u-topias of language, holes in the fabric of the text, punctures that punctuate the text and give it its texture (cf. Ps 274, 278-280). These "non-places" then are not resources and reserves of meaning, but mark a mise en abyme/abîme, an abysmal staging and setting of meaning, a simultaneous creation and ruination of meaning. On the other hand, what is 'accomplished' by Derridean deconstruction is not some new system but "undecidability" (D 93, 127, 219ff; S 64). In other words, it seeks in its writing to inhabit and enact a u-topia, a "non-place" of alterity and otherness that marks the end of history, the closure of the history of meaning and being.(10)

The way in which this u-topia shows itself and is inhabited, however, is crucial to understanding the debates surrounding the texts of Derrida. We might make this clarification by taking a closer look at comedy, and to a distinction made by Charles Baudelaire between the significative comic (le comique significatif) and the absolute comic (le comique absolu).(11)The significative comic includes comedy that has some sense of utility about it; for instance, it serves as a moral critique and corrective to whatever dominant society, order or practice is depicted. Its critique favors those (either a character in the play and/or the audience) who, in one way or another, inhabit the dominant society depicted in the play but are nonetheless marginal and left out by that society. To do this, it focuses on those interests common to all men (civic and private concerns such as making money, getting a mate, etc.) and, with regard to these interests, applies a standard that is perceived to be the social norm and mean (or should be the norm and mean).(12) In Aristophanes' satiric comedies, for example, the famous (Socrates in The Clouds, Euripides in The Frogs) or the powerful (government officials or armies in The Knights and The Acharnians) are shown to be ridiculous and thus the cause for the troubles of the heroes (Demos ["the people"] in The Knights, Dikeopolis ["honest citizen"] in The Acharnians). In comedies of manners, gentlemen and ladies of high and sophisticated society (and who thereby presumably sets standards for society) -- because of their foolishness and/or violations of social norms (that they have established) -- are shown to be really no different or better than anyone else. So the drama critic hero of Arsenic and Old Lace learns that he is a bastard and, indeed, exults in the fact, for it allows him to get the girl. In romantic comedies (such as are common with Shakespeare), the true lovers are prevented for a time from coming together by an often patriarchal figure and/or society that reveals itself as old-fashioned, stuffy, conventional -- but their love survives these threats. What is accomplished in all this, as Frye notes (169), is a movement "from a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the old characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom." In the 'end,' everyone gets together and is brought together. In its classic form, comedy 'ends' in a feast or banquet, often attendant upon a marriage, from which even those characters who served as obstacles to the comic hero's desire are not excluded. Taking its cue from its utopian perspective, significative comedy administers the quintessential pharmakon -- the laughter of comic relief -- which is both deadly to the old order or perspective, and therapeutic in providing a new, inclusive perspective on things.

Is the utopian perspective of the texts of Derrida to be understood along the lines of a significative comedy, with its celebration of conversation and community? Is there some ethical/political point to its practice? Some have thought so.(13)Such a view has its source not only in his apparently political "attacks" against racism and nuclear proliferation (Ps 353-362, 363-386, 453-475) or in the apocalyptic tone of some of his early essays, but also in the apparently subversive nature of the texts of Derrida. For instance, Derrida's deconstructive strategy, like that of comedy, places a great deal of emphasis on the marginal. Indeed, Derrida is almost obsessed with margins, evidenced not only by his investigations of titles, frames, signatures, and footnotes, but also by his continual writing in the margins. This margin(al) writing is sometimes extensive, as when seven page footnote dominates the text and contains a key to the entire text(14) or when a borderline text runs along the bottom margin of a main text (JD, Par 119-218). Sometimes this margin(al) writing is exclusive, as in The Truth in Painting, which Derrida notes is composed entirely of writing "around painting" (9), or Glas, which can be seen as a text of two margins, side by side (with additional writing inscribed in these margins), or the recently published Jacques Derrida, in which Geoffrey Bennington's account of the thinking of Derrida ("Derridabase") is accompanied throughout by a co-text from Derrida ("Circumfession"). Margins are important for Derrida because they are neither inside nor outside the system of meaning which they enclose and thus indicate that the system does not have the self-control that it thinks it has (MP xff; P 40). Margins are "loose ends" that provide deconstructive discourse with a way of inhabiting the structures it seeks to demolish, whereby it can use the logic of the system to unravel it and thereby subvert and overturn its logic. This subversion, as in comedy, is accomplished by overcoming the paternal/patriarchal obstacles put in its way (by 'castrating' them, i.e., showing their impotence). So Derrida cuts into the texts of philosophy through imitation (of their desire for presence) and, looking for presence, does not find it. He thereby cuts down the "transcendental signified", Logos, God the Father (D 76-78) -- which seemingly had stopped "play" -- and thereby accomplishes the play (irony) that was always already there (e.g., in philosophy) by affirming it.

This affirmation is an affirmation of freedom and the future -- freedom from the unrealizable and illusory desires and obsessions that bound the past, freedom for the future and "an entirely different logic" (Ltd 157n) which is radically other, unfettered, and undefinable (by current standards). So we find Derrida speaking frequently in and of the future perfect, e.g., when he notes that the phrase il y a là cendre "says what it will have been" (C 35), or when he mulls over the phrase "He will have obligated" (il aura obligé; Ps 159ff), or when he disclaims any intention to present a work by saying: "This therefore will not have been a book" (D 3). Derrida, like comedy, gives priority to the future, the future that always already will have been perfect(15) -- perfect in that it is always already privy to the imperfection (the "dead time", "le passé absolu"; OG 66, 68) of the present (and the past). Moreover, just as this movement toward the future in significative comedy is a move toward greater inclusiveness and integration, so it is with Derrida. The value of truth is not contested or destroyed, but reinscribed within a wider context (Ltd 146). Past thinkers like Hegel and Plato are not ignored and dismissed but read over and over (P 77; EO 87). The thing attacked in the deconstructive 'attack' is not ruined but monumentalized (S 4; cf. Gl 1b); past thinkers are erected (relevé), elated, raised up, put into relief and relifted (relève) in the affirmative comic relief (relève) of deconstruction that shows that there always already was play (irony), and nothing but play (irony). As a result, speaking of ourselves and others "in a deconstructive vein is precisely to unfold their absolute sociability, their constitutive entanglement in alterity and difference."(16)

However, there is reason to doubt an ultimately significative reading of the texts of Derrida, just as there is reason to doubt that comedy has any ultimately significative function. The doubt arises from the double bind in which both comedy and Derrida are caught. The double bind of comedy is that if one defines one's u-topian perspective, it is no longer a u-topia: defined, it is placed within the oppositional order of the dominant society, and is appropriated into that society. Comedians and comic characters are aware of this and, since part of what animates them is a desire to be free of any appropriation, their attitude tends to be that of Groucho Marx: they do not want to belong to any club that would have them as members. As a result, the comic immediately turns against the goal toward which he seemed to work. The comic is only comfortable as the loyal opposition. This is hardly the basis for an ethical or political program, which may be why Prince Hal had to abandon Falstaff and the Boar's Head Inn in order to govern, and one reason why so much of comedy avoids making ethical or political points altogether. Indeed, when you come right down to it, one may forcefully argue that comedy does not lend itself to making ethical points; at best one can say that comedy can influence conduct in one way or another, which is to say that it could serve to deprave and corrupt just as easily as reform and elevate.(17)

Derrida, like a (good) comic, is also conscious of his double bind. All too aware of the trap of becoming entangled in the order of metaphysics, he insists that he opposes nothing to the oppositional logic of philosophy (Ltd 117; PSF 259f); any apocalyptic tone he has taken in the past is "ironic," and does not try to lead or conduct (AT 30, 33ff). In addition, this irony is not the traditional sort of irony that masks some secret knowledge or presence (as the "good" irony or play in Plato presumably does). There is no secret knowledge (C 41, BL 205), no law behind the representation (BL 207ff); this is why Derrida works so hard sometimes to distance himself from negative theology (Ps 535-595; cf. MP 27). The texts of Derrida supplement rather than supplant, mimicking the desire of philosophy by continuing to desire, to play, endlessly. Put another way, one always begins again, one is always beginning; "the whole does nothing but begin" (Par 275; cf. Ps 649-650). So Derrida's 'hope' is not to erect another truth in the place of metaphysics (which would only re-establish an opposition), but simply to neutralize the system by laughing at it. But even that is not quite right, for the subversions playing about the law that he shows us do not mock or transgress the law; these games would not be possible, would have no force, without the instance of the law they seem to defy. There is no reason for Derrida's "play" unless he draws reason from the law, unless he provokes it. Hence he must produce the desire of philosophy in twisting it; he must demonstrate the madness of philosophy rather than oppose it from the outside with another madness (Par 246; cf. Par 285-286). As castration and mimesis (P 84), transgression and affirmation (WD 274), the double reading (writing/bind/science) of deconstruction might be either conservative or revolutionary, depending upon how it is deployed (Ltd 141). Or, put another way, despite whatever ethical/political stance it takes, Derrida's theory of deconstruction "leaves the world as it is and was," though "our grasp of why it is and must be left as it is and was" has changed.(18)

(5) Living On. This seems to completely deconstruct Baudelaire's distinction between the significative and absolute comic, and return us to the singular purpose of any and all comedy: to go on, to survive. As W.D. Horwath has put it (6),

comedy may be said to be 'moral' if it is based on a wholesome, positive attitude to life. Though it does not normally set out to change men's attitudes, nevertheless its effect is to reinforce our acceptance of a viable social order, a norm of behavior based on an unwritten compact between the playwright and the audience. The misfits, the social schemers, those who would upset the order of things are rendered harmless; if they are not converted to a right way of thinking, at least they are excluded from the social microcosm that the dramatist has created. The tricks and deceits, the moral turpitude of the rogues and villains, become part of a larger scheme which flatters the spectator's need for security and sends him home reassured.

In other words, comedy in its many forms is a celebration and affirmation of life, of living on, of conserving oneself and/or society. The fertile imagination of the comic ironist is put in the service of securing the comic and/or his view of the world. This is the case from the simplest fairy tale, where everyone (all the "good" people, anyway) lives (happily) ever after, to the grandeur and abstractness of life everlasting in Dante's Divine Comedy (where both the good and bad live on ever after, both happily and unhappily), from philosophy's escape into the magical forest of the Academy and Plato's dialogues, where Socrates lives on to play the fool who makes the wise seem foolish as he carries on endless discussions that espouse a multiplicity of views (and hence no particular view) of no one in particular, to Kierkegaard's "transcendental buffoonery" (Simon, 78ff) that parodies systematic philosophy (and even his own work) from behind pseudononymous masks. Ethics is incidental or irrelevant to the ultimate task of salvation, of being saved in order to live on.

So too the Derridean u-topia seems to consist of a comedy of ever-shifting perspectives that refuses to take a stand, or takes a stand "to be specified," because it is self-conscious that every stand is always already contaminated by what it is not, every point of view no view (point de vue; PSF 442, 459) with the goal of making us more self-conscious of the games we play, including the fact that there is nothing else but games. What lives on with Derrida? The text, including the text of philosophy, lives on, like some inhuman hypertext on computer that goes on being written from semester to semester in contemporary university writing classes.(19) Or, more precisely, what lives on is the law and desire of texts, and of philosophies. Indeed, Derrida wants it to live on, for if it were to reach its goal, its telos (a conclusive thesis), the desire of philosophy, and its telos, would disappear, become paralyzed, immobilized, die (Ltd 129; Par 119ff; PSF 285). Hence deconstruction strives to keep the discussion going, living on, open (Ltd 111,116); that is the ethics of this discussion, this u-topia. As a result, we can see Derrida as the end of philosophy in the sense that philosophy attains its goal in Derrida: to go on, to survive and continue in a world that is especially hostile to it.

Nevertheless, it is far from clear that we should rejoice in this prospect, for there is much despair in comedy, a despair that comes from the recognition that the repetitive, obsessive, foolish behavior depicted in the comedy will go on and on, indefinitely. In Stanley Kubrick's black comedy "Dr. Strangelove," Joint Chief of Staff "Buck" Turgidsen relishes the future life underground proposed by Dr. Strangelove (complete with numerous women for every man!) to the point of worrying about a shelter gap; the film then closes with shots of mushroom clouds accompanied by the song "We'll Meet Again." In Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo," the heroine (Cecilia), having foresaken the ideal man come to life from the screen for the "real" actor (who played the ideal man), only to be dumped by the actor, returns to her escape into the movies. In both cases, nothing has been accomplished, nothing has been learned; both stories begin again. Or, as Derrida says, we are always beginning; the arche-originary "yes" with which we "begin" and "end" can only be a fiction, a fable, hearsay (Ps 647-648; UG 57ff). We are given over to affirming an endless recitation of ourselves that never takes place (Par 243, 266ff).

Walter Kerr puts an escapist twist on this theme, suggesting not only that "within comedy there is always despair," but also adding that it is "a despair of ever finding a right ending except by artifice and magic."(20) Comedy is an escape-aid; its celebration and affirmation of life requires a triumph of fantasy and imagination over the realities of life (and death). One must rise above (beyond) the 'real' world, without gravity -- one must detach oneself from the way things are -- in order to accomplish one's desire. Comedy's triumph of life involves a triumph over life. But detachment, distance, tends to make one insensitive. This is certainly true of comedy, where we laugh at the faults, foibles and injuries of others. Comedy is the original theater of cruelty, the comic the original assassin whose highest aspiration is "to kill the audience." Horace Walpole's famous line -- "The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel" -- rings true.

Since Derridean deconstruction works on the basis of, and directed toward, an undecidable, undefinable, all-inclusive u-topia of endless re-presentation and re-production, with a faith that, at bottom, it all comes to the same thing (a will-to-presence, "wanting to say") and the superior, comprehensive view that "one politics is always being played against another (Ltd 135), it is not surprising that the detachment, violence and insensitivity of comedy shows itself in the texts of Derrida as well. We can see it in the lack of feeling for Romeo and Juliet (Ps 519-533) or for the country man denied access to the law (BL). We can see it in the priority given to freedom, to the unfettered future rather than the limited past, for in giving the future priority, Derrida would seem to exhibit the revenge that characterizes metaphysics, the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was'. 'It was,' the imperfect: that is "the fundamental trait of time in its authentic and entire unfolding as time,"(21) whereas the future is "the incognito of the eternal which is incommensurable with time" (Caputo, 15). To be is to be in time and therefore imperfect or, shall we say, questionable and questionworthy. Dissatisfied with such 'imperfection', such "questionable-worthiness" [frag-würdigkeit], Derrida and comedy seek to suspend time and achieve the perfection of some transcendental archilimbo ("neither inside nor outside") that exceeds the grasp of history though it is only realized within the context of history (Ps 648). Everything is contretemps (Ps 521). Or, as pointed out before, for Derrida "the whole does nothing but begin", such that history is mastered in a total and present resumption (Par 275; IOG 103). Such a suspension of time is revenge against time -- and that is the project of philosophy (metaphysics).

From its superior, u-topian perspective, comedy thrives on representation; caricature, for instance, is a staple of comedy. Derrida shares this strategy with comedy; Derrida in fact finds representation, as a posited image, to be the necessary character of all presentations (Ps 120, 123). However, in this Derrida would seem to repeat the slippage that takes place in Aristotle whereby all being is something produced, reproduced, ultimately, in the modern era, by man himself.(22) The world then becomes how I see it, how I produce it, how I want to represent it, since there is no authority other than the representer (D 195). So Derrida (like comedy) claims to be free of destiny; all sendings are messages without message or destination (see "Envois" [PSF 3-256]; cf. AT 34-35; Ps 391-392, 519ff). What, for example, is left of Hegel? Just quotations (Gl 1a), quotations which, like aphorisms and names, can be quoted infinitely out of any context (Ltd 65; MP 316-317; Ps 520) -- which is exactly what Derrida does in a text like Glas (196bi-198b; see his comments in AT 30) or the whole of Cinders. Everything is thus at the deconstructionist's disposal (AF 118, 134). Derrida's will to control is on display in several areas: his effort to control the 'undecidability' of language by intending (like Joyce; see IOG 102) the ambiguity of various signifiers in his texts, in his desire (like Plato and others) to choreograph a multiplicity of voices (EO 183-184; see, e.g., Cinders), and, most recently, in his refusal to allow his thought to be characterized without having a say (JD). This even goes so far as to affirm an "active forgetfulness" (MP 136; WD 247, 265; cf. Ps 649-650) whereby one tries to control one's forgetfulness and oblivion, at least a little -- by affirming it. The result of all of this would seem to show deconstruction as manipulative and frivolous as philosophy, but self-consciously so, a willful dissemination of fictions and constructs by which one is aware of being the fool.

Indeed, the self, characterized as a network of traces, a tele-phone exchange (UG 84), or (like Plato) a post-master (PSF 200, 207; Ps 271), is not attached to others but to a multiplicity of disembodied voices and languages. As a result, for all the apparent sociability of the comic-Derridean u-topia, an isolated, narcissistic individualism seems to prevail here. This, not surprisingly, is in keeping with what Frye notes as the final stage of comedy: the comic society collapses and disintegrates such that "the social units of comedy become small and esoteric, or even confined to a single individual," with "the love of the occult and the marvelous, the sense of individual detachment from routine existence" becoming more prominent (185; my emphases). Such a para-sitical individualism -- constantly subjecting all others who profess even a provisionally unified meaning to continual analysis and criticism that it always already will have been inadequate (whereby the other does not speak to deconstruction) -- coupled with a self that is no self, unbound by limits that would define it and give it responsibility, makes for the ultimate u-topia. It constitutes an escape into a faith that grants that "kind of certainty which is safe even in the uncertainty of itself, i.e., of what it believes in."(23) With Derrida, that faith is an affirmation of the innocence of becoming that aspires to the immortality of Dionysus (who survives, though torn to pieces, and who is the technician of and spectator to tragedy [e.g., in Euripides' Bacchae]) rather than mortal participation in the play of the world, an affirmation of fantasy and imagination over reality.(24) One puts on the mask of Kierkegaard's knight of faith, or Zen Buddhism's laughing Buddha, safe and secure behind an ironic smile.

To conclude. In conjuction with the comic, we have seen that the task of delimitation as set forth in the texts of Derrida is u-topian in the radical sense of the word, attempting to breach the very limit that it marks. Unravelling the texture of philosophy and its obsession for a presence infinitely deferred, Derridean deconstruction laughs at the old order, breaking the rules as it defines them, marking the end of authority, of history, of the self. Freed from constraint, deconstruction affirms the irony and play that is always already there, scattering meaning to the winds in an infinitely repeatable dissemination of significance. But this, as Derrida shows us, is what philosophy always already has been doing. Thus philosophy lives on in the texts of Derrida, for better or for worse, in the hands of couriers from a king that was never present, (doubly) bound by their oaths of service. On the one hand, there is the apparent duty and desire to be significant, to matter, to be relevant, to be useful, to impart a secret knowledge, even if that secret knowledge is only knowing that one does not know, that no one knows. On the other hand, there is a desire for freedom, bound not to be bound by the past, or even the desire for significance. One longs to retreat from politics in the streets to the magic forest of the Academy, from the world to the labyrinth of the (cogito's) imagination. Such is the double bind of comedy, of Derrida, of philosophy.(25)
NOTES

1. "Couriers," in Parables and Paradoxes, bilingual ed. (1958; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 175.

2. The abbreviations of the texts of Derrida cited in this article:

AF Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans. trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987).

C Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).

CCP "Che cos'è la poesia?", trans. Peggy Kamuf in A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 221-237.

BL "Before the Law," trans. A. Ronell and C. Roulston in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 183-220.

DO "Deconstruction and the Other," in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

D Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

EO The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf (1985; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

IOG Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

Gl Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

JD Jacques Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Ltd Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

MP Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

AT "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy," trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Oxford Literary Review 6 (1984), pp. 3-37.

OG Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

OS Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Par Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Three of the four essays in this text ("Survivre," "Titre à préciser," "La loi du genre") have appeared in English translation in various books and journals.

P Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

PSF The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Ps Psyché: Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Most of the essays in this text have appeared in English translation in various books and journals.

Sb "Shibboleth," trans. Joshua Wilner in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sandford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 307-347.

S Signéponge/Signsponge, bilingual ed., translated by Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

SP Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

SNS Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, bilingual ed., translated by Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

TP The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

UG Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987). The two essays in this book, named in the title, have been translated separately in collections of essays on Joyce.

WD Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

3. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 24 and passim notes the constant "jesting" and "comedy" of Derrida's texts, and Eve Tavor Bannet refers to the way in which Derrida "parodies traditional forms of scientific discourse in the humanities" in Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 225, while Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 267, makes reference to the wit and possible recovery of the comic in Derrida. David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), p. 151, hints at the comic character of Derrida's though by noting its playful (almost silly) nature, and John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 195, 291-293 notes the comic nature of Derrida's thinking as characteristic of one side of postmodern thought. While Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 15, 158-168, makes reference to the "levity of comedy" that results from a deconstructive a/theology that exploits the insights of Derrida, and Candace D. Lang, Irony/Humor. Critical Paradigms (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 3-4, 55-58, and passim refers to Derrida's "humorous" (i.e., postmodern ironical) critical strategies, Stephen W. Melville hints at the laughter of deconstruction in the title of his book, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

4. Richard Keller Simon, The Labyrinth of the Comic (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985), pp. 8, 10.

5. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 169; Maurice Charney, Comedy High and Low: An Introduction to the Experience of Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 5 and passim; Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys. An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 20.

6. Side Effects (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 41-55.

7. See, e.g., SP 50, 52, 57, 67, 99 and MP 162-163, regarding the issues of "meaning", "wanting to say", representation, repetition and "nonproductive re-production." See also "Différance", "Signature Event Context" (MP 3-27, 309-333), Ltd 29-110, Par 173-174, 241, concerning these matters. Regarding the desire of philosophy, see AF 119, 129-131, 133-135, and DO 126.

8. See Levin, pp. 29-39, regarding the comic ethos as "the argument," and George McFadden, Discovering the Comic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 35ff and passim, regarding the comic ethos as "the discussion". Regarding the anti-tragic character of Plato's dialogues, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 122-135; regarding the figure of Socrates as comic, see, e.g., Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. & trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 129, 152, and Wylie Sypher, "The Meanings of the Comic" in Comedy. ed. Wylie Sypher (1956; rpt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 215, 229-230.

9. W. Moelwyn Merchant, Comedy (London: Methuen and Co., 1972), p. 82. Regarding the superiority, detachment and comprehensive vision of comedy, see also Horwath, p. 6, Ricoeur, p. 323, and Kern, p. 8, 19, 37 and passim. Regarding the definition of the comic context as "ludicrous", see Neil Schaeffer, The Art of Laughter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

10. Regarding "undecidables" and "undecidability," see also Ltd 116, 145, 148-149. Regarding "quasi-transcendentals", see, e.g., Ltd 127, 152; Par 273; Ps 640ff. See D 183-184; MP 63f; P 56ff; SP 68, 102; WD 165-168 regarding the 'concept' of time and the end of history in deconstruction. For references to, and play on, the "en abyme/abîme", see, e.g., Gl 137bi, 151a, 257a; PSF 488; TP 17, 24. The u-topian character and aspirations of deconstruction (i.e., "no place", not taking place, not having a place, an event to come) emerge in a variety of ways and contexts; see, e.g., AT 33f; BL 205-206, 208-209; EO 14, 168-169; Gl 56b, 232ai; MP 22, 24; Par 150-151, 181, 234, 244-245; P 6-7; Ps 15-16; PSF 274; Sb 335; SNS 61, 63; and A. J. Cascardi, "Skepticism and Deconstruction," Philosophy and Literature 8 (1984), p. 4.

11. See "De l'essence du rire" in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1961), pp. 985-986; translated by Jonathan Mayne as "On the Essence of Laughter," The Mirror of Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 143-144. Edith Kern has made use of this distinction to explore the comic genre in her book The Absolute Comic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

12. Herbert J. Muller, The Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 15. See also W. D. Horwath, "Introduction: Theoretical Considerations" in Comic Drama: The European Heritage (London: Methuen and Co., 1978), pp. 2-3, and W. G. McCollom's discussion of comedy in terms of The Divine Average: A View of Comedy (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1971), p. 7 and entirety.

13. E.g., Christopher Norris, What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Caputo, pp. 257ff ("An Ethics of Dissemination"), 293; Lang, p. 66; Melville, pp. 154-155. Bannet, pp. 184-227, locates Derrida within the "logic of dissent" of structuralism in post-war France. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), attempts to find an ethical demand in Derridean deconstruction via the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

14. In De l'esprit, nearly 8 pages (147-154) are dominated by a footnote, a textual matter that is obscured in the English translation, Of Spirit. What is even more remarkable is that the footnote in many ways ties together much of what Derrida is trying to bring to light in the "main body" of the text, and is therefore hardly "mariginal" in the sense of "unimportant."

15. See Andrew J. McKenna, "Postmodernism: It's Future Perfect" in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 228-242. Cf. David Farrell Krell's "The Perfect Future: A Note on Heidegger and Derrida" in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 114-121.

16. Melville, p. 154. Cf. WD 118-119 and the "community" of the question(s) (of philosophy).

17. A parallel between the comedian's attitude toward utopia and philosophy's can be seen in Plato: Plato excluded himself from his dialogues, and excluded all philosophers of his type (i.e., "poets") from the utopia he portrays in The Republic. And, of course, the Platonic dialogues have been used in a variety of ways politically.

Regarding the unclear formulation of the 'conclusion' of comedy, see Frye, p. 169. Regarding the ethics of comedy, see Charney, p. 145, and Levin, p. 22.

18. Joseph Margolis, "Deconstruction; or The Mystery of the Mystery of the Text" in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, p. 149.

On deconstruction's inhabiting the text, see, e.g., OG 24; WD 194, cf. 284-285. Regarding the nonoppositional character of deconstruction, see, e.g., D 3ff; MP 329; P 40-42; MP 27, 136; WD 252, 256-257; cf. D 201; Gl 187a-188a, 232ai.

See DO 120 on how Derrida's political stances are detached from his intellectual project of deconstruction. See also WD 274, Ltd 141, Christie MacDonald's comments in questioning Derrida at EO 174, and Hartman, p. 24, regarding the conservative nature of Derrida's deconstruction.

19. It is interesting in this regard to note the following prefatory remark in JD: "The guiding idea of the exposition comes from computers: G.B. would have liked to systematize J.D.'s thought to the point of turning it into an interactive program which, in spite of its difficulty, would in principle be accessible to any user."

20. Walter Kerr, Tragedy and Comedy (1967; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1985), p. 79.

21. Martin Heidegger, "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" in Nietzsche, Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 224.

22. For an account of this slippage, see Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 83, 86, 97-105, 255f.

23. Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 23.

24. See Merchant, pp. 79-82 ("The Metaphysics of Comedy") and Clifford Leach, Tragedy (London: Methuen and Company, 1969), p. 77, regarding the ultimate attitude of comedy. See also, Kern, pp. 13, 41-49, 114-15 and passim, regarding the triumph of fantasy and imagination over reality that occurs in comedy. See Hartman, p. 24, regarding the forced nature of Derrida's jesting, Schürmann, p. 321n.44, regarding Derrida's apparent regret over the loss of the One, and the readiness of some Christian theology to take up deconstruction (see, e.g., note 3), all of which suggest these conclusions. Carl Raschke, "The Deconstruction of God" in Thomas J.J. Altizer, et. al., Deconstruction and Theology, (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp. 29-30, suggests the link between deconstruction and the immortality of Dionysus.

25. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Boston, MA in October, 1992. My thanks to Jim Walter at Sinclair Community College, who read a draft of this paper and provided helpful suggestions. Some of the work for this paper was done while attending an NEH Summer Seminar during 1991 at the University of California-Riverside, "Postmodern Postures: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty." My thanks go to the NEH and especially the seminar director, Bernd Magnus, for their support.

[After Post-Modernism Conference. Copyright 1994 by the author.]

Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean Interview

2007-08-03T17:08:00.000-07:00

On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia), no. 1/1983: p. 42

In 1982, Paul Brennan spoke to Jacques Derrida at the Collège de France. He specified his questions to issues arising out of Derrida's De la grammatologie.

P.B.: How would you respond to the assertion that you are trying to set up a kind of literary science?

J.D.: It's not really a science in the traditional sense. It's strategy for interpreting sciences, and philosophy also... to deconstruct them, to look at them from many points of view (but of course also from a political point of view) and to show the implicit limits of sciences. For instance, language sciences are the dominant models of science on the French scene.

P.B.: What can a grammatologist do that other philosophers and linguists can't do?

J.D.: First I must say [laughs] that since grammatology is not a positive science... nor a philosophy, there is no "grammatologist". The book on grammatology is not a book for grammatology; it's also a book which insists on the limits of grammatology.

P.B.: You talk about living languages, where the written language closely reflects the spoken language. And you talk also about dead languages, where the written language has no connection with the spoken language. If you look around the world at the hundreds of languages which exist at the moment, which ones would you say are very much alive and which ones are approaching death?

J.D.: Excuse me, but I never said exactly so. I never said that there are totally living languages and that there are dead languages. I think that there is a part of death in every language. And the opposition of life and death in language is a false opposition. The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language. And this is what I'm fighting against. So, I would not engage myself in saying that there is a hierarchy of more or less living languages today. There are more or less powerful languages - on for instance the technical level, on the economic, or scientific or military level. There are some languages - for instance, English, Russian, Chinese - which are spoken not only by more and more people, but by people and nations which are, for the moment, more powerful than others. But I wouldn't draw the consequence that they are more "living" than the others.

P.B.: You do make a contrast between spoken language and written language and the relationship between them...

J.D.: Ah... it's not an opposition. What I've been doing in the last few years is to extend I mean to give an absolute extension to - the concept of writing so that even the spoken language is written in some way. I mean, there is what I call an "arche-writing" (arche-écriture) which is implied within the spoken language, which implies that the concept of writing is transformed, of course. So there is no opposition between them. For instance, tape recordings are writings in some sense.

P.B.: You've suggested we should stop thinking about various media - speech and writin - that we should stop thinking about them ethically and that the two media of language are beyond good and evil. This obviously puts you at variation with someone like Marshall McLuhan who talks about the medium in very ethical terms - "the microphone created Hitler" and so on.

J.D.: Mm... I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with, because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to... let's say Plato, Rousseau... And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension - the overwhelming extension - of writing. At least in the new sense... I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too.

P.B.: You end your book with a quotation from Rousseau, who has written about writing as a kind of dreaming. He says:

The dreams of bad nights are given to us as philosophy. Younwill say that I too am a dreamer. I admit this. But I do what others fail to do. I give my dreams as dreams and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.

My question to you is: are you allowing me to interview in much the same spirit - as a dream to be taken as the listener or reader wishes?

J.D.: Yes, but if I were to indulge in saying so, I would imply that I am totally awakened while dreaming, and I have no illusion about that.

----------------------------------
*this article is officially published at http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/so.html

Derrida Interview with Robert Maggiori

2007-08-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

appeared in:
Le more cahier livres de Libération, Jeudi, 24 novembre 1994, pp. I-III

Translated by Hans-Peter Jaeck

Q: After year Spectres de Marx you publish at the same time with Politiques de l'amitié a still much more political text: Force de loi (dt.: legal power, 1991). called is that, you wants for the rumor an end to prepare, whereafter the Dekonstruktion before questions of the ethics, the social one and the policy resigns as it were nihilistically?

A: No, primary intention is not the retort or the final speech. Since beginning before nearly 30 years has itself my work under the indication, says we, a ethical-political affirmation developed. It concerned itself first with the question of the political one, the moral one, the fair one and the right. One of the manuals will have been the problem of the nationalism. This topic gewidmteten seminars Politiques de l'amitié prepared, particularly for the topic of the Autchtonen, the birth and the fraternity. That is only one example. It actually concerns the responsibility generally - since years the topic of my instruction meetings. A new experience to make with the ethical-political responsibility, to which we are called, i.e., itself the collateral and conceptualnesses too entaeussern, which have an old and tough history: that is a painful experience, thus a dangerous and a Unabschliessbares. The vibrations of our current time make these unimpaired collateral many faster homeless than all dekonstruktiven discourses. The entrance to these requirements after responsibility runs over critical ways, over an obviously destructive, destructive Negativitaet, which like a shade also still the allerverantwortungsbewussteste Affirmation accompanies, the unabschliessbare Affirmation Gerechtigkeit/des of right. One may stop never times to shift the dominating term of the democracy in unrest: the sympathetic, republican and universal fraternity can let the symbolic of the blood return at any time, the nation, the Ethnie or the sublimated Anthrozentrismus. On the other hand one will not react appropriately to these necessities, if one thinks not in other way and writes for not exercising thus without any force opposite thoughtless readings and withdrawn paths of the legitimacy. Particularly in the area of the policy, where one believes, who sloping courses follow, which justify simplifying and p;after bereinstimmung looking for Rhetorik, to be allowed to demand from the reader or the voter not too much trouble.

Q: One does not hesitate today to explain the ideal of the emancipation and release for outdated. They do not support such an explanation. Why not? And does one have to have in order to animate, the Moeglihkeiten of the justice, the right think such ideals again again, at the risk, shows that Gerechtigkeit/das right requires from the outset for force?

A: They know very well that I was never, even as it usual fashion, something against the ideal of the emancipation and release (sexually, culturally, linguistically, socially, economically, politically) said or along-talked also only in such a way. I remain progressistic in my kind. Let us nevertheless steadily continue, the classical inheritance of the clearing-up, the Metaphysiken of consciousness, the subject, the liberty, to ask the property or the reappropriation of the cultural tradition again. To do without but without on other clearing-up. And by, more than before, arguing from different control rooms for the Emazipation or release, even, where a certain Heteronomie can be unavoidable - and to be may! Instead of throwing these slogans on the garbage: why them a new value in use don't give, recalling the power of their reliability? That may appear impossible, but without this other language it will not give politics, which are worth the trouble. Above all also no justice. Not the right is it, then one could say, which demands the force (the right must remain disarmed and a rule-free and term-free respect erheischen, an infinite respect for the singularity), but the obligation, the justice as much as writing possible into the calculable public of a law. This obligation is difficult to think and in the work set: the justice becomes never outside of the shape of a law effective, outside of a legal power, which exceeds it however nevertheless. One calls that the policy or history.

In Politiken of the friendship you grant much place, which defines the policy over the distinction of friend and enemy to Carl Schmitt. Meanwhile you add a long note here, in order to hold at least an unavoidable ambiguity within limits. Were you that one would make you - like already before some theoreticians extreme linking - responsible for the rehabilitation of this philosopher, afraid you of its anti-Semitic affect, which had accepted extreme an extent, remind, and of which you say, he had remained probably also after that time, when he explained himself openly as it, Nazi?

Rehabilitate in no case! The word and the gesture frighten me. I referred unambiguously to the Nazi mash and the Antisemitismus Schmitts. It dedicated chapter are from me consciously wanted minutioese questioning of its venture, its Vorannahmen, its diskursiven strategy, its anchorage in the European right, its oppositional logic, its dezisionistischen thinking, the sovereignty and the state of emergency. Briefly said, I believe, one must Schmitt, like Heidegger, again read - and also what takes place between them. If one decided the watchfulness and the daring courage of this reactionary philosopher seriously takes, straight, where it is on restoration out, one can estimate its influence on the left one, in addition, at the same time the disturbing affinities - to Leo bunch, Benjamin and unites others, which do not suspect that. To understand and not formalize the law from these paradoxes - is that not a good introduction to the political tasks from tomorrow? When sleepless guard saw Schmitt me coming or as scouts with the siege its fear courage, what the European order, its political theology, their international right, their state -, war and technique terms, their term of the parliamentary democracy and the media threatens. It is not easy to dismantle the schmittianischen discourse if one wants to do that honestly, and even that is not even sufficient; but I ask myself, whether ies is not one of the useful exercises, in order new political thinking, new thinking of the policy to sharpen.

Q: The Aristoteles awarded sentence - O my friends, it does not give a friend - is the red thread of their reading. At one point you set in addition, what he states over the friendship or the friend to translate into terms of the love but you leave the dissolution in the schwebe. What does he say about the love?

A: I believe, the book act particularly of the love. Tacitly, in the Gleichnis or secretly perhaps - however with each sentence a restrained singing reminds it of the magic transmission, from which you stated evenly, would remain in the schwebe. There is by the way one point perhaps, where everything remains in this book in this dangerous, Nietz coming thinking adds and to which I, as you know, gave much attention. A paper over the love must be a dear act, an act: an explanation and an endorsement, the answer give to the love in the right name, in order to use another word here Nietz. This triftigkeit excludes neither the deceit picture nor the verruecktheit. With respect to the reason I could never differentiate between the love and the friendship, nor want. But over a friend or a friend -I love you to say to be able and for amour fou one must cross so many historical gates into the own body, an immense forest of interdictions and distinctions, code, Scenarien, positions. Perhaps in order to animate again the voice magnetizing loving, which before all distinction between loved and are loved, of a love and a friendship, Eros and Philia, Eros and Agape, a mercy, a fraternity and a next love sounds. This singing lures us on the soil of a labyrinthischen and and-codable, seductive and desperate history. I risk there gladly a step, I may also lose themselves there, to me the time take lose me there. But this Chnace can do us also, strength of word, one moment, a jealous view or a Liebkosung assigns to become. Perhaps that occurs, but without or the other one to betray or the others one cannot do of it account placing.

Q: In order to update your analyses, you did consciously without illustrations, which you the political or medium "Aktualitaet" infer would have can and which would have ordered a canvas to reflection. That is disappointing. One would e.g. gladly have seen, what from the definition its would have become, which says Kant, not only regarding the philanthropist, but also regarding the people friend, on the humanitarian or concerning the process of the fraternal humanization, which you analyze.

A: I hope nevertheless that these "current" purchases one come there into the sense, where I mean allusions not unfold cannot still also do must. The question of the humanitarian one is an example under thousand others. By so many geopolitical tragedies through the interventions in the name of the humanitarian one are inclined to multiply itself it require today, then I, after a new right, assume a more appropriate name, another term of humans - and of the alive one at all. These interventions mark first, then it seems me, the daily confirmed border of the states and the international institutions. Neither their power nor its right, neither their political discourses nor the interpretation of humans or the human rights, who justify it, are on the height its that we, if one may say in such a way, expect from us, in view of the new world-wide disasters, the hunger emergencies, the foreign trade indebtedness, the genocides, the mafia, the inequality before death and before the science, the nameless wars, the crimes against the humanity, apart from all the war crimes and the political crimes. Even, where Kant differentiates the people friend more clearly from the philanthropist, this cannot be we no more humans of the Philsophie or the human, still also the Kanti subject, from which I try to show that it remains still all too very like brothers, clarified male, familial, ethnical or national etc.. But I try to become fair other possibilities of the kantischen discourse which it resumes or shifts. Permit me to point out at least once clearly that it is difficult at the many different in this point as also to speak balanced about it.

Q: They take off with all canonical discourses over the friendship on the exclusion of the friendship between women and that the friendship between a man and a woman. In it does the outstanding feature of the history of the friendship lie? And which were thereby the influences on the constitution of political models e.g. the democracy?

A: It does not concern mind you, to denials that a friendship between women or between man and woman is not possible, completely in the opposite. It goes to a certain extent and all only into Europe around analyzing history through the shape of the friendship - the pair of friends and its testamentischen federation -, phallozentrische through, controlling, canonical became and alone a legal claim on political, philosophical and literary archiving kept. The interpretation of this archives is not easily, rather an endless affair, but it opens to material history (it is now diskursiv or not), de for this model to the political supremacy help. I began to follow to this so rich and so distorted motive of the fraternity: by Greek and Christian representations through, in the process and after the French revolution - so had trouble with the eddy around this into many eyes so Christian word. And despite the intensive effort of the Vergeistigung, sanctioning, the Universalisierung the ideal meaning of the fraternity - and even those the praised and sworn fraternity - remains verwurzelt in the family or in the birth (and thus in its national nature: Blood, soil, Autochtonie) and in the maleness, in the virtue of the sons, the heroes and the soldiers. Thus the topic appears in its Klassizitaet: the virtue, in particular the political virtue, the virtue of the love and the necessity to entreissen this virtue their and RON trichloroethylene mash peculiar vorvaeterlihen. The civilian, civic equality between the men and the women, which is in its kind, particularly with us, only newer date, remains, in order to mark out here only this aspect, still another affair furthermore future. The Brueerlichkeit was helpful to the democratization and her even their range give could, but this horizon marks also a border. No historical break will have become with this Fraternalismus finished, about whose meaning we have to think today, particularly regarding a future democracy: neither the circulation from the Greek to the Christian world (whose usual interpretation I denies in this point), still the post office-revolutionary republic (you look yourselves the exciting writings of Michelet or from Hugo - by through I the little bit a French epoch of these Fraternisierung pursue), still the revolution of the psychoanalysis, still also the today's time, and straight that is the one which can be estimated at most, also at most disturbing section of this book: the writings of those, for which the authority of this greco Christian paradigm is no longer natural: Nietz and still many more ueberfeinerter, more quietly, Maurice Blanchot or Jean Luc Nancy. The fraternity, so legend I sometimes, is worried it perhaps not too much.

Q: Jacques Derrida, who are your friends? Not: whose friend are it, but whom love you, since now times the first gentleman-out-rising up moment of your history of the friendship points out with Platon or Aristoteles that one should prefer it, to even love, instead of being friend?

A: My friends and my friends! Even if time and space were left us in addition, I would be silent here. The public answer to this question would be located in my book, sometimes between the lines, sometimes (toward end) in certain names. Those do not designate lle, but they state enough over it that all - male and womanlike - could be called only in the Singular, in the irreplaceable Vokativ. As you see, everything hangs on the Frge the singularity and the number: can one have more as a friend, more than one friend? How many? And where with the equality, the otherness one and the justice in this relationship? Perhaps with this "more as one" and "more than one" the policy begins. The sensitivity and the perseverance, which one spends on the investigation of this place of the Aporien, make perhaps ready and sensitively to the friendship, as I it love. It gives her more opportunity, but all that is never a condition. The friendship does not place conditions, it expects no rueckerstattung: Equality without reciprocity or symmetry. And everywhere, where also only a friendly thought is gently the brother authority, and it those of the idealized brother, asks, it shifts, to worry can, resembles this friendly thought, if he writes himself down, perhaps the thought of a friend; but why not, if the sister is not any more a special case of the brother?

Q: The most beautiful sides of the Politiques de l'amitié are in my opinion those, which dedicate you to Maurice Blanchot. But its term of the friendship seems nevertheless - indivisible and unreversible friendship, for which one leaves, without traces too, a permeable-passive answer for the Nichtpraesenz unknown quantities permits, or: Appeal to dying, coinciding with the separation - not possibly, untenable. Can this term entrance into a policy of the friendship find?

A: No, and the whole problem lies there. No, if one limits the policy - or the democracy - to its today identifiable or unangezweifelten forms. I dream to also always be about a policy, which remains an effective policy, without the possibility of this friendship, so improbably it may do force beyond the mutual cooperative, the neighborly proximity, the identification. Briefly, a policy, which does not do to this friendship opposite wrongly. Is that bare a dream? Perhaps. Still one would have to give one day to it: which seems impossible, already one promised and remains thus conceivablly. We keep it in thinking memory of everyone times, if we love, if we pass the words on love or friendship transferred and. If we it, the love and the friendship make each mark. Perhaps at the origin of the policy this endorsement confessed, even if at this point - inkommensurabel with the secret - a policy remains inadequat and must remain.

This article was translated from German to English. Below is the original text in German that taken from http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/force.html

Derrida zum Freundespreis

erschienen in:
Le cahier livres de Libération, Jeudi, 24 novembre 1994, pp. I-III

Übersetzt von Hans-Peter Jäck

Q: Ein Jahr nach Spectres de Marx publizieren Sie gleichzeitig mit Politiques de l'amitié einen noch viel politischeren Text: Force de loi (dt.: Gesetzeskraft, 1991). Heißt das, Sie wollen dem Gerücht ein Ende bereiten, wonach die Dekonstruktion vor Fragen der Ethik, des Sozialen und der Politik gleichsam nihilistisch abdankt?

A: Nein, primäre Absicht ist nicht die Erwiderung oder das Plädoyer. Seit Beginn vor fast 30 Jahren hat sich meine Arbeit unter dem Zeichen, sagen wir, einer ethisch-politischen Bejahung entwickelt. Sie beschäftigte sich zunächst mit der Frage des Politischen, des Moralischen, des Gerechten und des Rechts. Einer der Leitfäden wird das Problem des Nationalismus gewesen sein. Die diesem Thema gewidmteten Seminare haben Politiques de l'amitié vorbereitet, besonders die zum Thema des Autchtonen, der Geburt und der Brüderlichkeit. Das ist nur ein Beispiel. Tatsächlich geht es um die Verantwortung im allgemeinen - seit Jahren das Thema meiner Unterrichtsveranstaltungen. Eine neue Erfahrung zu machen mit der ethisch-politischen Verantwortung, zu der wir aufgerufen sind, das heißt, sich der Sicherheiten und Begrifflichkeiten zu entäußern, die eine alte und zähe Geschichte haben: das ist eine schmerzvolle Erfahrung, also etwa Gefährliches und Unabschließbares. Die Erschütterungen unserer heutigen Zeit machen diese ungestörten Sicherheiten viel schneller heimatlos als alle dekonstruktiven Diskurse. Der Zugang zu diesen Ansprüchen nach Verantwortung verläuft über kritische Wege, über eine offenkundig zerstörerische, destruktive Negativität, die wie ein Schatten auch noch die allerverantwortungsbewußteste Affirmation begleitet, die unabschließbare Affirmation der Gerechtigkeit/des Rechts. Man darf niemal aufhören, den dominierenden Begriff der Demokratie in Unruhe zu versetzen: die sympathische, republikanische und universelle Brüderlichkeit kann jederzeit das Symbolische des Blutes wiederkehren lassen, die Nation, die Ethnie oder den sublimierten Anthrozentrismus. Andererseits wird man auf diese Notwendigkeiten nicht angemessen reagieren, wenn man nicht in anderer Weise denkt und schreibt, also nicht ohne irgendwelche Gewalt gegenüber leichtfertigen Lektüren und ausgetretenen Pfaden der Legitimierung auszuüben. Besonders auf dem Gebiet der Politik, wo man glaubt, den abschüssigen Bahnen folgen, die vereinfachende und nach p;bereinstimmung suchende Rhetorik rechtfertigen, dem Leser oder dem Wähler nicht allzuviel Mühe abverlangen zu dürfen.

Q: Man zögert heute nicht, das Ideal der Emanzipation und der Befreiung für veraltet zu erklären. Sie unterstützen eine solche Erklärung nicht. Warum nicht? Und muß man, um solche Ideale neu zu beleben, die Möglihkeiten der Gerechtigkeit, des Rechts neu denken, auf die Gefahr hin, zeigen zu müssen, daß die Gerechtigkeit/das Recht von Anfang an nach Gewalt verlangt?

A: Sie wissen sehr gut, daß ich niemals, selbst als es gängige Mode war, etwas gegen das Ideal der Emanzipation und der Befreiung (sexuell, kulturell, sprachlich, sozial, ökonomisch, politisch) gesagt oder auch nur so dahergeredet habe. Ich bleibe auf meine Art progressistisch. Laßt uns doch beständig fortfahren, das klassische Erbe der Aufklärung, die Metaphysiken des Bewußtseins, des Subjekts, der Freiheit, des Eigentums oder der Wiederaneignung der kulturellen Tradition neu zu befragen. Aber ohne auf andere Aufklärungen zu verzichten. Und indem wir, mehr als zuvor, von verschiedenen Warten aus für die Emazipation oder die Befreiung streiten, selbst da, wo eine gewisse Heteronomie unvermeidbar sein kann - und sein darf! Statt diese Parolen auf den Müll zu werfen: warum ihnen nicht einen neuen Gebrauchswert geben, eingedenk der Macht ihrer Glaubwürdigkeit? Das mag unmöglich erscheinen, doch ohne diese andere Sprache wird es keine Politik geben, die der Mühe lohnt. Vor allem auch keine Gerechtigkeit. Nicht das Recht selbst ist es, so könnte man sagen, das die Gewalt fordert (das Recht muß entwaffnet bleiben und einen regelfreien und begriffsfreien Respekt erheischen, einen unendlichen Respekt für die Singularität), sondern die Pflicht, die Gerechtigkeit soviel wie möglich in die kalkulierbare Allgemeinheit eines Gesetzes einzuschreiben. Diese Pflicht ist schwer zu denken und ins Werk zu setzen: die Gerechtigkeit wird niemals außerhalb der Gestalt eines Gesetzes wirksam, außerhalb einer Gesetzeskraft, die sie aber dennoch überschreitet. Das nennt man die Politik oder die Geschichte.

In Politiken der Freundschaft räumen Sie Carl Schmitt viel Platz ein, der die Politik über die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind definiert. Indes fügen Sie hier eine lange Anmerkung an, um wenigstens eine unvermeidbare Zweideutigkeit in Grenzen zu halten. Fürchteten Sie, daß man Sie - wie schon zuvor einige Theoretiker der extremen Linken - für die Rehabilitierung dieses Denkers verantwortlich machen würde, an dessen antisemitischen Affekt, der ein extremes Ausmaß angenommen hatte, Sie erinnern, und von dem Sie sagen, er sei wahrscheinlich auch nach jener Zeit, als er sich offen dazu erklärt hat, Nazi geblieben?

Auf keinen Fall rehabilitieren! Das Wort und die Geste erschrecken mich. Ich habe unzweideutig auf den Nazismus und den Antisemitismus Schmitts hingewiesen. Die ihm gewidmeten Kapitel sind eine von mir bewußt gewollte minutiöse Infragestellung seines Unterfangens, seiner Vorannahmen, seiner diskursiven Strategie, seiner Verankerung im europäischen Recht, seiner oppositionellen Logik, seines dezisionistischen Denkens, der Souveränität und des Ausnahmezustands. Kurz gesagt, ich glaube, man muß Schmitt, wie Heidegger, neu lesen - und auch das, was sich zwischen ihnen abspielt. Wenn man die Wachsamkeit und den Wagemut dieses entschieden reaktionären Denkers ernst nimmt, gerade da, wo es auf Restauration aus ist, kann man seinen Einfluß auf die Linke ermessen, aber auch zugleich die verstörenden Affinitäten - zu Leo Strauss, Benjamin und einigen anderen, die das selbst nicht ahnen. Das Gesetz aus diesen Paradoxien heraus zu verstehen und zu formalisieren - ist das nicht eine gute Einführung in die politischen Aufgaben von morgen? Als schlafloser Wächter oder als Späher bei der Belagerung hat Schmitt mir seinem Furchtesmut kommen sehen, was die europäische Ordnung, ihre politische Theologie, ihr internationales Recht, ihre Staats-, Kriegs- und Technikbegriffe, ihren Begriff der parlamentarische Demokratie und der Medien bedroht. Es ist nicht leicht, den schmittianischen Diskurs zu demontieren, wenn man das ehrlich tun will, und selbst das ist noch nicht einmal ausreichend; aber ich frage mich, ob ies nicht eine der nützlichen Übungen ist, um ein neues politisches Denken, ein neues Denken der Politik zu schärfen.

Q: Der Aristoteles zugesprochene Satz - O meine Freunde, es gibt keinen Freund - ist der rote Faden ihrer Lektüre. An einem Punkt setzen Sie dazu an, das, was er über die Freundschaft oder den Freund aussagt, in Begriffe der Liebe zu übersetzen, doch Sie lassen die Auflösung in der Schwebe. Was sagt er denn über die Liebe?

A: Ich glaube, das Buch handelt vor allem von der Liebe. Stillschweigend, im Gleichnis oder insgeheim vielleicht - aber bei jedem Satz erinnert ein verhaltener Gesang an die magische Übertragung, von der Sie eben behauptet haben, sie bliebe in der Schwebe. Es gibt übrigens einen Punkt, wo alles in diesem Buch in diesem gefährlichen vielleicht verharrt, das Nietzsche dem kommenden Denken zurechnet und dem ich, wie Sie wissen, viel Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt habe. Eine Abhandlung über die Liebe muß ein Liebesakt sein, ja ein Akt: eine Erklärung und eine Bürgschaft, die Antwort gibt im rechten Namen der Liebe, um ein anderes Wort Nietzsches hier zu verwenden. Diese Triftigkeit schließt weder das Trugbild noch die Verrücktheit aus. Im Grunde habe ich nie zwischen der Liebe und der Freundschaft unterscheiden können, noch wollen. Aber um einem Freund oder einer Freundin -ich liebe Dich- sagen zu können und für amour fou muß man bis in den eigenen Körper so viele historische Gatter durchschreiten, einen immensen Wald von Untersagungen und Unterscheidungen, Codes, Scenarien, Positionen. Vielleicht um die Stimme einer magnetisierenden Liebe neu zu beleben, die vor aller Unterscheidung zwischen lieben und geliebt werden, Liebe und Freundschaft, Eros und Philia, Eros und Agape, Barmherzigkeit, Brüderlichkeit und Nächstenliebe ertönt. Dieser Gesang lockt uns auf den Boden einer labyrinthischen und undechiffrierbaren, verführerischen und verzweifelten Geschichte. Ich riskiere dort gerne einen Schritt, ich mag mich dort auch verlieren, mir die Zeit nehmen, mich dort zu verlieren. Aber diese Chnace kann uns auch, kraft eines Wortes, eines Moments, eines eifersüchtigen Blicks oder einer Liebkosung zuteil werden. Das kommt vielleicht vor, aber ohne den einen oder den anderen, das einen oder den anderen zu verraten, kann man davon nicht Rechenschaft ablegen.

Q: Um Ihre Analysen zu aktualisieren, haben Sie bewußt auf Illustrationen verzichtet, die Sie der politischen oder Medien-"Aktualität" entnehmen hätten können und die der Reflexion eine Leinwand geboten hätten. Das ist enttäuschend. Man hätte z. B. gerne gesehen, was aus der Definition dessen geworden wäre, was Kant sagt, nicht nur im Hinblick auf den Philanthropen, sondern auch im Hinblick auf den Menschenfreund, auf das Humanitäre oder bezüglich des Prozesses der brüderlichen Humanisierung, den Sie analysieren.

A: Ich hoffe doch, daß diese "aktuellen" Bezüge einem selbst dort in den Sinn kommen, wo ich meine Anspielungen nicht entfalten kann, noch das auch tun muß. Die Frage des Humanitären ist ein Beispiel unter tausend anderen. Durch so viele geo-politische Tragödien hindurch neigen die Interventionen im Namen des Humanitären dazu, sich zu vervielfältigen, sie verlangen heute, so vermute ich, nach einem neuen Recht, einem angemesseneren Namen, einem anderen Begriff vom Menschen - und vom Lebendigen überhaupt. Diese Interventionen markieren zunächst, so scheint es mir, die alltäglich bestätigte Grenze der Staaten und der internationalen Institutionen. Weder ihre Macht noch ihr Recht, weder ihre politischen Diskurse noch die Deutung des Menschen oder der Menschenrechte, die sie begründen, sind auf der Höhe dessen, was wir, wenn man so sagen darf, von uns erwarten, angesichts der neuen weltweiten Katastrophen, der Hungersnöte, der Außenhandelsverschuldung, der Völkermorde, der Mafia, der Ungleichheit vor dem Tode und vor der Wissenschaft, der namenlosen Kriege, der Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, neben all den Kriegsverbrechen und den politischen Verbrechen. Selbst dort, wo Kant deutlicher den Menschenfreund vom Philanthropen unterscheidet, kann dieses wir nicht mehr der Mensch der Philsophie oder des Humanismus sein, noch auch das Kantische Subjekt, von dem ich zu zeigen versuche, daß es noch allzu sehr brüderlich, verklärt männlich, familial, ethnisch oder national usw. bleibt. Aber ich versuche, anderen Möglichkeiten des kantischen Diskurses gerecht zu werden, die er weiterführt oder verschiebt. Erlauben Sie mir, zumindest einmal deutlich darauf hinzuweisen, daß es in diesem Punkt wie auch an den vielen anderen schwierig ist, ausgewogen darüber zu sprechen.

Q: Sie heben bei allen kanonischen Diskursen über die Freundschaft auf den Ausschluß der Freundschaft zwischen Frauen und dem der Freundschaft zwischen einem Mann und einer Frau ab. Liegt darin das Hauptmerkmal der Geschichte der Freundschaft? Und was waren dabei die Einflüsse auf die Konstituierung politischer Modelle wie z.B. der Demokratie?

A: Es handelt sich wohlgemerkt nicht darum, zu leugnen, daß eine Freundschaft zwischen Frauen oder zwischen Mann und Frau nicht möglich sei, ganz im Gegenteil. Es geht gewissermaßen und allererst in Europa darum, die Geschichte zu durchleuchten, durch die hindurch die phallozentrische Gestalt der Freundschaft - des Freundespaares und ihres testamentischen Bundes - beherrschend, kanonisch geworden ist und allein einen Rechtsanspruch auf politische, philosophische und literarische Archivierung behalten hat. Die Interpretation dieses Archivs ist nicht leicht, vielmehr eine endlose Angelegenheit, doch sie öffnet sich zur realen Geschichte (sei sie nun diskursiv oder nicht), de diesem Modell zur politischen Vorherrschaft verholfen hat. Ich habe begonnen, diesem so reichhaltigen und so verzwickten Motiv der Brüderlichkeit nachzugehen: durch griechische und christliche Darstellungen hindurch, im Verlauf und nach der Französischen Revolution - die sich so schwer tat mit dem Wirbel um dieses in vieler Augen so christliche Wort. Und trotz der intensiven Anstrengung der Vergeistigung, der Sanktionierung, der Universalisierung bleibt die ideale Bedeutung der Brüderlichkeit - und selbst die der gelobten und geschworenen Brüderlichkeit - verwurzelt in der Familie oder in der Geburt (und damit in seiner nationalen Natur: Blut, Boden, Autochtonie) und in der Männlichkeit, in der Tugend der Söhne, der Helden und der Soldaten. So erscheint das Thema in seiner Klassizität: die Tugend, insbesondere die politische Tugend, die Tugend der Liebe und die Notwendigkeit, diese Tugend ihrem eigentümlich vorväterlihen Androzentrismus zu entreißen. Die zivile, staatsbürgerliche Gleichheit zwischen den Männern und den Frauen, die in ihrer Art, besonders bei uns, erst neueren Datums ist, bleibt, um hier nur diesen Aspekt anzureißen, noch eine Angelegenheit ferner Zukunft. Die Brüerlichkeit war der Demokratisierung dienlich und hat ihr sogar ihre Reichweite geben können, aber dieser Horizont markiert auch eine Grenze. Kein geschichtlicher Bruch wird mit diesem Fraternalismus fertig geworden sein, über dessen Bedeutung wir heute nachzudenken haben, besonders hinsichtlich einer zukünftigen Demokratie: weder die Umwälzung von der griechischen zur christlichen Welt (deren gängige Interpretation ich in diesem Punkt bestreite), noch die post-revolutionäre Republik (schauen Sie sich die aufwühlenden Schriften von Michelet oder von Hugo an - durch die hindurch ich ein wenig verbissen eine französische Epoche dieser Fraternisierung verfolge), noch die Revolution der Psychoanalyse, noch auch die heutige Zeit, und gerade das ist der am meisten zu schätzende, auch der am meisten beunruhigende Abschnitt dieses Buches: die Schriften derer, für die die Autorität dieses greco-christlichen Paradigmas nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist: Nietzsche und noch viel überfeinerter, leiser, Maurice Blanchot oder Jean-Luc Nancy. Die Brüderlichkeit, so sage ich mir manchmal, beunruhigt sie vielleicht nicht allzu sehr.

Q: Jacques Derrida, wer sind Ihre Freunde? Nicht: wessen Freund sind Sie, sondern wen lieben Sie, da nun mal das erste herrausragende Moment Ihrer Geschichte der Freundschaft bei Platon oder Aristoteles aufzeigt, daß man es vorziehen sollte, selbst zu lieben, statt Freund zu sein?

A: Meine Freunde und meine Freundinnen! Selbst wenn uns Zeit und Raum dazu gelassen wäre, würde ich hier schweigen. Die öffentliche Antwort auf diese Frage würde in meinem Buch stehen, manchmal zwischen den Zeilen, manchmal (gegen Ende) in bestimmten Eigennamen. Die benennen nicht lle, doch sie sagen genug darüber aus, daß alle - männlich und weiblich - nur im Singular genannt werden könnten, im unersetzbaren Vokativ. Wie Sie sehen, hängt alles an der Frge der Singularität und der Zahl: kann man mehr als einen Freund, mehr als eine Freundin haben? Wieviele? Und wohin mit der Gleichheit, der Andersheit und der Gerechtigkeit in dieser Beziehung? Mit diesem "mehr als einer" und "mehr als eine" beginnt vielleicht die Politik. Die Sensibilität und die Ausdauer, die man für die Erkundung dieses Ortes der Aporien aufwendet, macht vielleicht bereit und empfänglich für die Freundschaft, so wie ich sie liebe. Sie gibt ihr mehr Gelegenheit, aber all das ist niemals eine Bedingung. Die Freundschaft stellt keine Bedingungen, sie erwartet keine Rückerstattung: Gleichheit ohne Reziprozität oder Symmetrie. Und überall, wo auch nur ein freundschaftlicher Gedanke sanft die Bruder-Autorität, und sei es die des idealisierten Bruders, befragen, verschieben, beunruhigen kann, ähnelt dieser freundschaftliche Gedanke, wenn er sich niederschreibt, vielleicht dem Gedanken einer Freundin; aber warum nicht, wenn die Schwester nicht mehr ein Sonderfall des Bruders ist?

Q: Die schönsten Seiten der Politiques de l'amitié sind meiner Ansicht nach die, die Sie Maurice Blanchot widmen. Aber doch scheint sein Begriff der Freundschaft - unteilbare und unumkehrbare Freundschaft, für die man, ohne Spuren zu hinterlassen, eine durchlässig-passive Antwort für die Nichtpräsenz des Unbekannten zuläßt, oder: Appell ans Sterben, zusammenfallend mit der Trennung - unmöglich, unhaltbar. Kann dieser Begriff Eingang in eine Politik der Freundschaft finden?

A: Nein, und da liegt das ganze Problem. Nein, wenn man die Politik - oder die Demokratie - auf ihre heute identifizierbaren oder unangezweifelten Formen begrenzt. Ich träume von einer Politik, die eine wirksame Politik bleibt, ohne der Möglichkeit dieser Freundschaft, so unwahrscheinlich sie auch immer sein mag, Gewalt anzutun, jenseits der wechselseitigen Genossenschaft, der nachbarlichen Nähe, der Identifizierung. Kurz, eine Politik, die dieser Freundschaft gegenüber nicht unrecht tut. Ist das bloß ein Traum? Vielleicht. Noch müßte man ihm einen Tag vorgeben: was unmöglich scheint, ist schon versprochen worden und bleibt also denkbar. Wir behalten es in denkender Erinnerung jedes mal, wenn wir lieben, wenn wir die Worte Liebe oder Freundschaft übertragen und weitergeben. Jedes Mal wenn wir sie machen, die Liebe und die Freundschaft. Am Ursprung der Politik hat vielleicht diese Bürgschaft gestanden, selbst wenn an diesem Punkt - inkommensurabel mit dem Geheimnis - eine Politik inadequat bleibt und bleiben muß.

Cardozo Law School interview: An Interview with Jacques Derrida

2007-08-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

Famed philosopher and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida is a professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Socials in Paris and has visited Cardozo regularly for the past 10 years. He holds the title of Cardozo Distinguished Scholar and often lectures at the Law School as part of the Law & Humanism Speakers Series, which is co-sponsored with the New School University. When Professor Derrida visited in October, Michel Rosenfeld, Sydney L. Robins Professor of Human Rights, talked with him about his relationship to law and his thoughts on current international political events.

ROSENFELD: Thanks very much, Jacques Derrida, for agreeing to talk to us for publication in Cardozo Life.

I note that Cardozo and you have now had a relationship for 10 years. You first came here when we organized the "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice" conference, which still ranks as one of the greatest conferences that we have held here. At that time, you delivered a paper, "The Force of Law," which was subsequently published in Cardozo Law Review (vol. 11, 1990).

I want to ask you about your relationship to law. When did you start getting interested in law as a topic of inquiry?

DERRIDA: My interest in law as an academic discipline started very early, although I never studied law in the strict sense. I first became interested in the question of law as it pertains to literature . . . the legal constraints that have to do with the name of the author, the copyright, etc. Once, a long time ago, I gave a seminar at Yale on copyright-on the Droit d'Auteur (the rights of the author), and on the history of copyright. Of course they're superficially similar. At that time, I studied both the French and English history of copyright. I was particularly interested in the relationship in the 17th century between the King, the librarian (the "Librairie" we call it), and the owner of the copyright and the changes that then occurred with the French Revolution.

I also became interested in the affinity between literary work and the legal production of law. When a number of ethical and judicial questions impacted on deconstruction, I felt summoned to respond to such questions as I did at the "Possibility of Justice" conference, which for me was a very memorable, precious occasion to address legal scholars on the relationship between constructing law and justice. So, I have had this ongoing interest in law. However, I never acted on my dream to really study law.
Cardozo is for me the place where I can learn, where I can discuss what interests me in the law.

ROSENFELD: I think we at Cardozo are unique among law faculties in that we always have had a great deal of inter-disciplinary interests with training in philosophy, literature, political theory. Many of us had looked at deconstruction to see to what extent it could help us in our legal analysis and legal theory, so it was a particularly important occasion to have you come to talk to us.

DERRIDA: The hospitality at Cardozo has been precious to me. In the last 10 years, all the seminars I gave-and we have mentioned only the one-have brought me close to legal colleagues and have-I just realize-always dealt with the general question of responsibility. The seminars on the secret, on testimony, on hospitality, and now today's on forgiveness-all have to do with a question of responsibility of one person to another.

ROSENFELD: May I suggest that perhaps your own interest in explicit questions of law and justice may have derived from your deconstructive theory? It seems to me that there has been a growing interest in law, legal issues, and legal justice by philosophers in the last 15 or 20 years. Do you agree with that, and if you do, to what do you attribute this interest?

DERRIDA: I remember the first time I addressed the question of the law in a lecture on Kafka's "Before the Law." I made a distinction between the law in general and the law in the strict sense or legal justice-in French, le droit and la loi. In French when you speak of the law (la loi), you do not necessarily refer to legal issues.

Now to go back to your question. What we see in Western democracy today is the increasing importance of the legal authority on politics-sometimes in an abusive fashion, as is the case in Italy, France, and in this country too. We have a feeling that today the independence of justice is the crucial test for democracy. So a philosopher interested in ethics and/or politics must come back to the question of the law. With democracy becoming truly global, philosophers must be, can't escape, really, looking at law and justice.

ROSENFELD: Your relationship with Cardozo dates back a decade. Can you characterize this relationship that makes us so fortunate to see you every year? Do you have relationships with other law schools?

DERRIDA: It is me who is fortunate. First of all, my relationship with Cardozo is unique. Perhaps I don't have to mention that at Cardozo I find colleagues who are well-known legal scholars and are also interested in literature, in biblical scholarship, philosophy, and so on and so forth. So for me, these are very rich occasions for discussion. I have worked infrequently with other law schools. Once while I was teaching at Yale, which I did for 12 years, I was invited by a law school to discuss a paper that I had given on Kant. Then, just yesterday, I was invited by Larry Kramer at NYU Law School to organize a workshop. I have been teaching at NYU for 10 years, and this is the first time that I have had an invitation from the law school.

In France we tried to organize conferences, discussions, and debates with a few interested people from the faculty of law, but these efforts didn't succeed as far as I can tell. So Cardozo is for me the place where I can learn, where I can discuss what interests me in the law.

When I read what you write and what Arthur Jacobson writes, this is very important to me. Over the course of the 10 years, there has been growing familiarity and common premises. From my narrow point of view, things are changing at Cardozo and for the best.

ROSENFELD: I don't know if it is well known that you were born and grew up in Algeria as a member of the Jewish community. Could you tell us generally how that experience has influenced your intellectual development?

DERRIDA: Perhaps one of the many things which made me sensitive to law is that I belonged to a minority in a colonized country. The Jewish community in Algeria was there long before the French colonizers. So on one hand, Algerian Jews belonged to the colonized people, and on the other they assimilated with the French.

During the Nazi occupation, there were no German soldiers in Algeria. There was only the French and the Vichy regime, which produced and enforced laws that were terribly repressive. I was expelled from school. My family lost its citizenship, which is a legal event. Even when you're a child, you understand what it means to lose your citizenship. When you're in such a marginal and unsafe and shaky situation, you are more attentive to the question of legal authorization. You are a subject whose identity is threatened, as are your rights.
... the fact that Clinton allowed himself to be trapped suggests that he failed in his responsibility.

ROSENFELD: I know that you have visited South Africa and familiarized yourself with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the work that it has done. Can you tell us how you got interested in the subject of forgiveness and mercy?

DERRIDA: Last year I started a seminar on forgiveness and mercy, a subject which has several legal dimensions to it. Then, last summer I went to South Africa, at which time the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was just beginning to write its report. Discussion on the work of the Commission was everywhere. I gave a number of lectures on forgiveness and reconciliation and read a lot on the subject. I had the opportunity to meet many people who were on the Commission, and I was introduced to many aspects of the process: the way it was instituted, the way it became controversial (no one on either side totally agrees with it), the way this Commission had to solve problems which could have at any moment really destroyed relations between the A.N.C. and the white government. The Commission was really an agreement between the A.N.C. and the white government to resolve the situation through amnesty rather than revenge.

I became especially interested in the process they called "healing away," which was a form of political therapy. I became interested in how and to what extent such a political therapy was compatible with the idea of pure forgiveness. I had the opportunity to meet and hear from witnesses from both sides, as well as members of the Commission. So I learned a lot, and I learned about the history of South Africa.

In South Africa, as you know, there are 11 languages that are officially recognized by the Constitution. Anyone speaking before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could choose to speak any one of the official languages. This presented a huge problem since the testimony was then translated into English, a Christian and Western language. For example, I was told that the word "forgiveness" has no strict equivalent in a number of the officially recognized languages. So people challenged the use of just one particular language for the final translation. I became very interested in the linguistic issues presented by the Commission and the idea of a language of repentance. What does it mean when I say, "I beg your forgiveness" or you respond, "I forgive you"?

ROSENFELD: This is fascinating. So as an English-speaking person, I may understand the Commission's findings and testimony in a way that is totally or slightly different from the way one of the native language speakers may understand it.

DERRIDA: Exactly. It was primarily black people who were the victims in South Africa, but the A.N.C. had also to appear before the Commission. The black people were disappointed with the Commission because they were not interested in forgiveness-they wanted justice or, at the very least, to know what happened to their loved ones. They wanted to go on with the work of mourning. While the Commission was in session, the regular judicial courts continued to work. Although people were granted amnesty for political misdeeds, criminal offenses were not forgiven. So people appeared before the Commission and would often argue that since it was a political war and they were given and then acted on orders, they were not guilty.

ROSENFELD: Is it fair to say that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission allowed each person, for different personal reasons, the ability to have closure on this part of South African history?

DERRIDA: That's obviously the goal-closure. To put an end to what might be otherwise an endless process of revenge; to put an end to the mourning and to get on with the future. Mandela and his associates and his allies wanted South Africa to survive. They understood that if they wanted to live together-black and white-both groups had to share the work of mourning in order to share a common destiny.

ROSENFELD: You mentioned Nelson Mandela, and I wonder if you would comment on what you think his role has been in all of this. He was a prisoner, a victim of the apartheid regime, and then became the country's leader. Was it through example or through persuasion that he played his particular role? Was he a unique figure? Might this healing process not have been possible had there been a leader other than Nelson Mandela?

DERRIDA: This is a good question and I have no short answer. Of course, the individual Nelson Mandela played a major role. What would have happened without him, I don't know. But the fact is that this man, who had been in jail for 27 years, left jail without any visible resentment. It was he who decided that reconciliation should be the goal of the Commission. I read that at some point he disobeyed his own group, his own party, when he started negotiating with the government. He did this without the approval of his colleagues. He lent a strong individual signature to the proceedings.

ROSENFELD: Now may I bring you to a more mundane subject which is arousing a lot of interest, commentary, and debate in the United States. I refer here to the issues concerning President Clinton, impeachment, and the president's responsibility for his actions. As someone from a different country, a different culture, and looking at this philosophically rather than politically, do you have some insights into this American phenomenon?

DERRIDA: This would require a long time. However, let me give a couple of quick answers. The first is my spontaneous reaction-shared by many outside of the United States, particularly in France-one of outrage and disgust with the politicization of, and the attention from the press to, the sexual parts of the story. We found it to be not only outrageous, but so obviously orchestrated by the Independent Counsel and organized by a larger group of politicians. In Europe, we never thought that this kind of thing could happen in the United States.

Then, I would pay attention also to a more complicated issue: the question of perjury in the Paula Jones case. There, the question seems to be not simply one of sexual privacy but the idea of sexual harassment. Harassment really is about the dignity of the human person. Also, the fact that Clinton allowed himself to be trapped suggests that he failed in his responsibility.

Additionally, the fact that the president had to testify and confess not only in front of American citizens but in front of the world is indication of the new globalization, and our entering a new phase in international law and the rights of man.

ROSENFELD: Before we close, I want to ask you generally about your current work on forgiveness. Are you planning to write a book on the subject?

DERRIDA: You know, each time I give a seminar, in a certain way I write everything and there is material for a possible book. But I don't have enough time to revise or to write. I would love to if I have time, but I have no current plans to do so.

ROSENFELD: I want to thank you very much and let you know that the Cardozo Law Review would be eager to publish any of this material.

DERRIDA: Thank you, and let me take advantage of this situation to thank Cardozo formally and officially and sincerely for the hospitality. I am very grateful.

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*This compilation © Peter Krapp 1994 - 2004
*http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/law.html

Jacques Derrida: The Sacrifice

2007-08-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

Editions of the Difference
National theatre Lille Tourcoing Area North-Not of Calais

This text is the transcription of an intervention made by Jacques Derrida on October 20, 1991 with (the Metaphor) during a meeting entitled: The unstageable one, the secrecy, the night, the foreclosed one. It is published jointly by the review Lieux extremes.

Philosophy and the theatre are dependent in a turbulent affinity and insistente: don't these two experiments privilege a certain authority of the presence and visibility? Authority of the glance, authority of optics, authority of eidetic, the theôrein, the theoretic one. This privilège of the theory which one associates régulièrement, wrongly or rightly, philosophy, it is to see it, contemplate it, look at it. From the Platonic eidos to the object or modern objectivity, philosophy can be read - not only but easily - as a history of the visibility, interpretation of the visible one. Here is thus a destiny that philosophy divides since its origin, in a conflict way sometimes très, with arts of visible and with a certain theatre.

But if, since always the invisible one the visible one works, if for example the visibility of the visible one - what makes visible the visible thing - is not visible, then a certain night comes to dig of abyss the presentation even the visible one. It comes to leave place, in the representation of oneself, the repetition of oneself, with this word essentially invisible, come from the lower part of visible, like the Jew of Marie Tudor in the setting in scène of Daniel Mesguich, who, in the place of the prompter, came to blow to put fire at the visible one. It would thus be a question of leaving the place with invisible in the heart of visible, with the nonthérisable in the heart of theoretical, nontheatrical - as with the blow of theatre - in the heart of the theatre.

From this authority of the glance, of what it underlies, we could follow a series of analogies between theatre and philosophy. In this respect Daniel Mesguich proposes, as well in his book the eternal éphémère as in his theatre, of the places of resonance where to hear and think the relationship between the theatre and philosophy.

First of all, Mesguich is one of these paradoxical inventors who can make book, or of a book, a sc&egravene, "a theatrical volume"; and constantly () to recommend and in a complicated way the book. It plays an alliance of the theatre and book: against the image, a certain interpretation of the image. Its theatre is iconoclast in this direction, it plays against the image. Rather against the images which, in a media form, seize a certain public space today. Naturally the book about which it speaks is not a closed totality, but it is necessary already to be attentive so that this alliance of the theatre and the book can generate reversals of prospects, in the idea that we have relationship between theatre and philosophy.

In the eternal éphémère, Daniel Mesguich outlines and, there, of manière more easily locatable, two partial analogies between theatre and philosophy. The première, we can hear it dasn the trace of what I suggested at the beginning, i.e. of a certain authority of the glance:

The paradox is with the theatre by no means contingent, it is - the impurity of its ingredients there obliges - essential and necessary. If philosophy ets bein a thery of all the theories, it is also a theory of itself, says one. If the theatre is well a setting in scène of all the settings in scène, then it is also a setting in scène of itself.

Daniel Mesguich underlines this paradox which links the theatre and philosophy - all while losing them vertiginously - by which one and the other try to think and to represent themselves, of métaphoriser. Philosophy in and of philosophy, theatre in the theatre, theatre exhibant the theatre then concealing thus its own visbility, burning it and consuming it, so to speak.

The second of these analogies would relate to the compared orders of the philosopher and the man of theatre:

... the philosopher, the writer, the painter the sculptor, even the scenario writer leave a work. They can be allowed not to be "men of the siècle". The theatre which plays, if one neut, between journalism and the work which lasts, does not allow, or so much indirectly that that becomes negligible, of speaking "at tomorrow". Like the philosopher, the man of theatre is not the man of the siècle. But it is not, him, man of work. Because it is only listening of that of the others, there remains with orée of work: it is après and before it.

It would be necessary here to agree on the term of work, to hear the spacing that this word produces in itself according to whether it indicates the act of the implementation, to work it, or the opus which results from it, in remainder or falls down about it. Because one could be tempted to say the opposite: the philosopher is not as a such man of work, and on the other hand the man of theatre implements the work, which does not exist out of its setting in scène, i.e. implemented.

For my part, acting of theatre and philosophy, and a certain divorce whose repercussion will have perhaps been all the history of the Occident, its philosophy and its theatre, I would like "ici-maintenant métaphoriquement" to retain only one hearth, which a scène or an act of this long dramatic, I would like to make it because of the one of the thèses which gave me to think more in the book of Daniel Mesguich, namely the question of the sacrifice.

Since Nietzsche, at least, one often repeated that philosophy started with the end of a certain tragedy. As if Socrate and Plato had driven out Sophocle, Eschyle and Euripide, as they "had driven out the poète of the city". The philosophical speech would have killed the scène and energy even tragedy, it would have alleviated it, which returns to the mêeme. I cannot engage in this immense debate. I would like only at the same time to narrow it and complicate it around the reason for the sacrifice. With him, we will join for a share one of the titles of this meeting: "the night, the secrecy, the foreclosed one". The "foreclosed" term does not only indicate excluded, not dissociated, which is put at lécart, with the outside, or which cannot return, but also often sacrificed, the scapegoat, which one must put at death, expel or draw aside, like the absolute foreigner whom one must put outside so that the inside of the city, the conscience or ego identified in peace. It should be driven out the foreigner so that membership, identification and appropriation are possible.

In this direction, the sacrifice is constitutive of tragic space. And one could think that in his war with the theatre, the philosophical speech put an end to the tragedy, drove back in any case, thus inaugurating, like that was often said, the comedy or the novel. Or, thing more complicated but by no means excluded, sacrificed the sacrifice, i.e. made the economy of the sacrifice. To put an end to the sacrifice is however not très simple. One can put an end to the sacrifice by sacrificing the sacrifice, while making him undergo und change or an additional interiorization, and so that some can be tempted to think that the sacrificial structure remains nevertheless dominant in the speech more dominating of the philosophical tradition. Far philosophy put an end to the sacrifice, or precisely because it believed to put an end to it in the Greek tragedy, it would have done nothing but carry in it, in another form, the sacrificial structure.

However on this Mesguich point two thèses proposes. The première: The tragedy does not take place with the theatre but it is brought into play. It would have to be taken again the distinction that it makes between two kinds of events: one, like have-place, the other, like setting concerned. Daniel Mesguich writes this:

Tragedy
Tragos, goat, and ôidê, song.
Was the tragedy the beautiful song which accompanied the ritual sacrifice by a goat to the festivals of Dionysos, or the atrocious song of this goat at the time when the weapon transpierced it? Or the impure agreement of the two songs? Side of the Greeks it had only symbol there; side of the goat...
The tragedy, it is losque one, torture victim, really howls "NOT!", whereas others, spectators, hear only the mélodieux slope of "NOT!", dance on this "music", or applaud. The true tragedy never takes place with the theatre. At the theatre, the tragedy is brought into play.

The tragedy would not take place with the theatre, it would not be the thing of the theatre, the present of the theatre, in any case it would not be the event like have-place. The other thèse - and chacque thèse determines a type of theatre, a theatrical school - supports that there would be an enormous difference between the sacrifice and the theatre. This thèse theatrical, the blow of theatre of this thèse interests me because it opère a chiasmatic kind of inversion with philosophy. Previously, we regarded philosophy as the end of the tragic sacrifice; it would remain more sacrificial than it in general is said; now, on the contrary, it is the theatre thus interpreted, bringing into play the sacrifice, which achève the sacrifice itself. The sacrifice which one assigned with the theatre passes on the side of philosophy and the roles are thus reversed. Daniel Mesguich opens on this subject an interesting way in a titrated passage:

Even the lamb
The actor, offered, is not however a Christ who, filling "with her body the failures of the written law", achieves it, the achève finally, finishes it. With the theatre, it is infinitely temporarily that the body is involved in the faults of the writing: there for the actor it is finished, nobody does not die, it was for laughter, it will be necessary to return, incessament.
The theatre is "confrontation erotic" but nonfinal, nonsuicidal, nonchristic, "between the body of the Son and the law of Père". The actor not like expiatory victim, scapegoat, but as that which plays the victim; who plays, in front of everyone, with the law. That which monkey the goat. With the theatre, at the end, Isaac, Abraham and the lamb relèvent themselves and greet.

This suspense of the sacrifice, this setting concerned in the place of what takes place, supposes a strange institution, which at the same time ensures the setting concerned, puts itself concerned and désinstituionnalise, each time, each day, with each première. It is one of the differences with philosophy, at least with this philosophy which, since the XIXe siècle, defines the concept of Western University. The question of the institution, which is dissociable among all those that we have just seen, is also considered by Mesguich:

The theatre, like the University, holds a speech, proposes an interpretation but, with the difference of the University, is never held, does not leave it there, y adhère only provisiorement. For a certain University, it is the supreme crime.

Further, Mesguich will evoke a double constrainte, the double law which binds the setting concerned theatrical to the institution, and thus with the authorities. It is necessary á the time to be warned against the institution and to keep it; it is necessary to keep the memory but to give unceasingly concerned the erection which it constitutes. The institution has dependent part with the memory, with what is kept, it is a reserve of time, certainly, but also what fossilizes or reduces, is simplified, condensed, hardens and set up.

There is several manières to think the unstageable one of the theatre. It is initially the night, the visibility of the visible one. The visibility is night, the diaphanous one is not seen, it through what one sees, which burns the visible one. There is however another manière to think the unstageable one, not simply in the form of what, making possible the representation, is not presented, but as what is excluded, marginalized, censured, repressed or driven back forever. We should not forget that repressed (with the political direction) or censured (within the meaning of unconscious repression) only one topic displacement undergoes; the censure, with the direction psychoanalytic of the term, aneantit not the memory, it moves of a place in another, it puts in reserve, it métaphorise and métonymise but it does not destroy. However we could wonder whether there is not a radical destruction of the memory, a fire which would come to incinerate the memory without leaving traces. Then the unstageable one or the imprésentable any more what is excluded or prevents from being lá, simply would not be moved or is off-set, but what is imprésentable because absolutely flaring by fire.

In the eternal éphémère Mesguich proposes what it calls a spectacle of repression, with all the directions of the term, political repression as well as psychic, a spectacle which would not only come to raise this repression, but which would deliver a presentation, a connection or a representation of repression. That appears paradoxical and impossible, but it is a theatre of the paradox which it proposes to us. In the stage performance, the nonrepresentable one, the rreprésentable, because driven back, would come to remember. It is acted as a direction of a theatre of repression.

But if the art of the theatre were that of warping as much that that of devoilement [ thus of the truth like not-truth, or truth of the not-truth ]? And if it also éait with the spectacle of the repression which one invited the City?

Repression á work; the "quoted" term comes to stress that it is indeed a political stake in this monstration without monstration of repression. This setting in scène of repression is not a simple lifting of repression, a simple release, a setting á naked of what is imprésentable. It acts of a paradoxical presentation of the imprésentable "like such". "as such" phenomenologic must be affected here of an essential modification.

There is in the work of Mesguich an interpretation of theatrical temporality, i.e. present or of what règle not over the present, a call with a kind of theatrical moment which of some manière does not belong to temporality.

This report/ratio at time is described in various forms throughout the eternal éphémère. One is often tempted to think the theatre like art of what, undoubtedly prepared by the repetitions, takes place only once properly. That is to say at the same time a première and a derni&egravere time; what gives him this double at the same time morning face, Eastern or archaeological and autumnal, melancholic person, Westerner, twilight or eschatologic. One of the most provocative aspects of the theatre of Mesguich, it is - with counter-current of the doxa - to think that the theatre has as a gasoline a certain repetition. Not the repetition which prepares the première, but a repetition which divides, which digs and makes emerge the single present of the première time. The presentation not like representation of a modèle present elsewhere, like would be an image, but the presence a première and single time like repetition.

Far from weakening it, this structure of repetition intensifies on the contrary the experiment of irreplaceable the première time, of the single event which occurs each time on the plate a setting in scène implements and that occurs the theatrical act.

This strange experiment of the repetition is memory; however all appears new, inaugural to with it, inanticipable; almost as surprised and surprising as an event. It is the event as repetition which we must think of the theatre. How a present in its freshness, in its irreplaceable crudeness of "ici-maintenant", can be repetition? What has to be the time of the experiment and the time of the theatre so that that is possible? In a vocabulary borrowed from Levi-Strauss where the vintage sometimes gives to understand cruelty, Daniel Mesguich describes the things as follows:

The only believed thing, with the theatre, it is that it takes place in front of you; all the remainder, it is heated. The theatre returns the past at the present, and, at the same time, it makes hear all that, in what we held for the present, was repetition. The theatre tightens us, in what occurs for the première time, which was already occurred. And, of this gift, this tended present, this offer in tension, it makes a spectacle, vintage and already cooked...

And elsewhere in a titrated passage:

Cruelty does not exist
Never there is theatre if there are only one time. The theatre, always, is given in series - and that, even if the actors play only one representation of the piéce. In each representation its essential repetition vibrates. In any representation sing all the representations, its themselves passed and to come. Each one is running away, continuation and variations, resumption, creepage distance in front of that which it précède, derrière that which follows it. A theatrical demonstration and only one - orgy, crudeness: cruelty - would imply totality, plenitude, the irreversibility. A theatrical demonstration and only one would not be theatre: it would take place.

To think the theatre is then to avoid all the cooked speeches, i.e. nothing to sacrifice what makes our single and singulière presence, while presenting to it the memory, the otherness, the show, the répetition, the repetition which constitutes it and which die-presents it by representing it in advance. To think on the plate means this incredible space where the knowledge cannot decide on what is the present. Of what is present on the scène under its coat of visibility. Similar in that in Marie Tudor and Jane Talbot in the work of Victor Hugo, incompetents to distinguish as for the subject which they saw or believed to send to death.

All the pièce of Victor Hugo, as we could yesterday evening admire it in the setting in scène of Daniel Mesguich, is also the metaphor of the theatre itself. Like if the outside of the theatre, leréférent theatre - not what he says or shows of the Policy, the Religion, the History, the Love, etc. - was structured like a theatre and thus already a repetition, whose return in abyme on the plate does not prevent nor does not attenuate the tragic singularity of acute and single the première time.

The other manière to formulate the question of time to the theatre in the work of Mesguich is announced in a lexicon particular to through categories of furtive or urgency. All must quickly be made très with the theatre, the actor is in a hurry as if it flew, as if it etait in a situation of transgression and fraud; he is a robber, and that formed part of the time of theatre; the category of furtive or clandestine means that the essential moment of the theatre is not let integrate into general temporality, it is stolen in the time, and it is also a moment of presentation of the law and thus of the transgression of the law. It is one abnormal moment, which exposes the law like repression.

The impression should be always given press, urgency (...), one raised of tomb stones, an excavation of the mother tongue...
I always tend to think that the theatre is like instantaneous; perhaps this instantaneous is spread or analyzed in two hours or in four, it does not matter, but it does not have vériable duration, only effects of duration (...) That the actor plays quickly, that it seems in a hurry, indicates, as, there as it does not have the right to be, that the scène is not to him an authorized place, that it is there in fraud.

On the contrary philosophy would be, in this hypothèse: attention has patience of the teaching speech to the presentation, the identification, the institution, etc. For my part, I would plead rather pure a theatrical dimension in philosophy in order to scramble the opposition a little, was it chiasmatic, between theatre and philosophy. There is in the philosophical thought, in the pre-institutionelle philosophical thought, of the moments which resemble this furtive urgency, clandestine, unauthorized and insane, which puts philosophy in margin. I believe that there are blows of theatre in philosophy, moments which resemble so that Kierkegaard described when it said: "the moment of decision is a madness". These moments appartiennement indissociablement with the theatre and philosophy, philosophy in the theatre or the theatre in philosophy. There is no theatre but theatres, there are works which in comparison with repression, identification or belief in the theatre make work differemment . Just as one will be able to always interpret - and that remains infinitely suspended - the setting concerned of the sacrifice, the identification, the belief, repression or the preclusion, like sacrificial surenchères or identificatoires, sacrifices of the sacrifice, in the same way nothing will be able to never ensure us as these economies are not brought into play at the same time. Mesguich quotes in the eternal éphémère a très beautiful sentence of Mannoni with which I would like to conclude:

A mask of wolf does not frighten us with the way of the wolf, but with the way of the image of the wolf which we have in us

. And Mesguich to continue: In the theatre one believes neither one does not believe, one does not look at nor one never listens directly; one looks at or one listens to the child or the idiot in us who believes. Even if what Mannoni says is strong and true, a question remains. Nobody believes in the mask of the wolf. When we go to the theatre we are not easily deceived, we know that it is an illusion or a show. However the power of the emotion or the identification is due to the fact that if one does not believe in the wolf that there is derrière the mask, one believes in the interior psychical reality that this mask awakes in us and consequently the emotion is right to believe in what is thus really with-inside us. There is a kind of interiorization by the psychoanalytical speech of this credit which one brings to the theatre. But what is to believe? Here is the put question, it is put in scène or fire by the theatre.

The comment of Mesguich brings another dimension which however does not betray the psychoanalysis: one looks at neither one never listens directly, one does not believe nor does not believe and at this time, to look at the child or the idiot who believes in it, it is to jointly look at the identifying memory and absolute separation. One looks at the starting point and the division, at the same time like what one divides within the meaning of the participation and what dissociates. The suspension between the two aspects of the division remains absolutely indefinite and irreducible. What an act of faith in the theatre? Why is it necessary to believe in the theatre? It is needed. Why is it needed?

This article is translated from French to English by babelfish.altavista.com. Below is the original text in French taken from http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/sac.html

La Métaphore (Revue) n.1 - printemps 1993.
Jacques Derrida: Le Sacrifice
Éditions de la Différence
Théâtre National Lille Tourcoing Région Nord-Pas de Calais

Ce texte est la transcription d'une intervention faite par Jacques Derrida le 20 octobre 1991 à (La Métaphore) au cours d'une rencontre intitulée: L'irreprésentable, le secret, la nuit, le forclos. Il est publié conjointement par la revue Lieux extremes.

La philosophie et le théâtre sont liés dans une affinité turbulente et insistente: ces deux expériences ne privilégient-elles pas une certaine autorité de la présence et de la visibilité? Autorité du regard, autorité de l'optique, autorité de l'eidétique, du theôrein, du théorétique. Ce privilège de la théorie auquel on associe régulièrement, à tort ou à raison, la philosophie, c'est le voir, le contempler, le regarder. Depuis l'eidos platonicien jusqu'à l'objet ou l'objectivité moderne, la philosophie peut être lue - non seulement mais facilement - comme une histoire de la visibilité, de l'interprétation du visible. Voilà donc une destinée que la philosophie partage depuis son origine, de façon parfois très conflictuelle, avec les arts du visible et avec un certain théâtre.

Mais si, depuis toujours l'invisible travaille le visible, si par exemple la visibilité du visible - ce qui rend visible la chose visible - n'est pas visible, alors une certaine nuit vient creuser d'abîme la présentation même du visible. Elle vient laisser place, dans la représentation de soi, dans la répétition de soi, à cette parole par essence invisible, venue du dessous du visible, comme le juif de Marie Tudor dans la mise en scène de Daniel Mesguich, qui, à la place du prompteur, venait souffler pour mettre le feu au visible. Il s'agirait donc de laisser la place à l'invisible au coeur du visible, au non thérisable au coeur du théorique, au non théâtral - comme au coup de théâtre - au coeur du théâtre.

A partir de cette autorité du regard, de ce qu'elle sous-tend, nous pourrions suivre une série d'analogies entre théâtre et philosophie. A cet égard Daniel Mesguich propose, tant dans son livre L'éternel éphémère que dans son théâtre, des lieux de résonance où entendre et penser les rapports entre le théâtre et la philosophie.

Tout d'abord, Mesguich est l'un de ces inventeurs paradoxaux qui sait faire du livre, ou d'un livre, une sc&egravene, "une volume théâtral"; et constamment (se) recommander et de façon compliquée le livre. Il joue une alliance du théâtre et du livre: contre l'image, contre une certaine interpretation de l'image. Son théâtre est iconoclaste en ce sens, il joue contre l'image. Plutôt contre les images qui, sous une forme médiatique, s'emparent aujourd'hui d'un certain espace public. Naturellement le livre dont il parle n'est pas une totalité close, mais il faut déjà être attentif à ce que cette alliance du théâtre et du livre peut engendrer de retournements de perspectives, dans l'idée que nous avons du rapport entre théâtre et philosophie.

Dans L'éternel éphémère, Daniel Mesguich esquisse et, là, de manière plus facilement repérable, deux analogies partielles entre théâtre et philosophie. La première, nous pouvons l'entendre dasn la trace de ce que je suggérais au début, c'est-à-dire d'une certaine autorité du regard:

Le paradoxe n'est au théâtre nullement contingent, il est - l'impureté de ses ingrédients y oblige - essentiel et nécessaire. Si la philosophie ets bein une thérie de toutes les théories, elle est aussi une théorie d'elle-même, dit-on. Si le théâtre est bien une mise en scène de toutes les mises en scène, alors il est aussi une mise en scène de lui-même.

Daniel Mesguich souligne ce paradoxe qui unit le théâtre et la philosophie - tout en les perdant vertigineusement - par lequel l'un et l'autre tentent de se penser et de se représenter eux-mêmes, de se métaphoriser. Philosophie dans et de la philosophie, théâtre dans le théâtre, théâtre exhibant le théâtre dérobant alors ainsi sa propre visbilité, la brûlant et la consommant, pour ainsi dire.

La seconde de ces analogies concernerait les ordres comparés du philosophe et de l'homme de théâtre:

... le philosophe, l'écrivain, le peintre le sculpteur, même le cinéaste laissent une oeuvre. Ils peuvent se permettre de ne pas être des "hommes du siècle". Le théâtre qui joue, si l'on neut, entre le journalisme et l'oeuvre qui dure, ne permet pas, ou tellement indirectement que cela devient négligeable, de parler "à demain". Comme le philosophe, l'homme de théâtre n'est pas l'homme du siècle. Mais il n'est pas, lui, homme de l'oeuvre. Parce qu'il n'est qu'écoute de celle des autres, il reste à l'orée de l'oeuvre: il est après et avant elle.

Il faudrait ici s'accorder sur le terme d'oeuvre, entendre l'écartement que ce mot produit en lui-même selon qu'il désigne l'acte de la mise en oeuvre, l'oeuvrer, ou l'opus qui en résulte, en reste ou en retombe. Car on pourrait être tenté de dire le contraire: le philosophe n'est pas en tant que tel un homme d'oeuvre, et en revanche l'homme de théâtre met en oeuvre l'oeuvre, qui n'existe pas hors de sa mise en scène, c'est-à-dire mise en oeuvre.

Pour ma part, s'agissant de théâtre et philosophie, et d'un certain divorce dont le retentissement aura peut-être été toute l'histoire de l'Occident, de sa philosophie et de son théâtre, je voudrais métaphoriquement "ici-maintenant" ne retenir qu'un foyer, qu'une scène ou un acte de cette longue dramatique, je voudrais le faire en raison de l'une des thèses qui m'a donné le plus à penser dans le livre de Daniel Mesguich, à savoir la question du sacrifice.

Depuis Nietzsche, au moins, on a souvent répété que la philosophie a commencé par la fin d'une certaine tragédie. Comme si Socrate et Platon avaient chassé Sophocle, Eschyle et Euripide, comme ils avaient "chassé le poète de la cité". Le discours philosophique aurait tué la scène et l'énergie même du tragique, il l'aurait apaisée, ce qui revient au mêeme. Je ne peux m'engager dans cet immense débat. Je voudrais seulement à la fois le rétrécir et le compliquer autour du motif du sacrifice. Avec lui, nous rejoindrons pour une part l'un des titres de cette rencontre: "la nuit, le secret, le forclos". Le terme "forclos" n'indique pas seulement l'exclu, le dissocié, ce qui est mis à lécart, au dehors, ou qui ne peut pas revenir, mais aussi souvent le sacrifié, le bouc émissaire, ce qu'on doit mettre à mort, expulser ou écarter, comme l'étranger absolu qu'on doit mettre dehors pour que le dedans de la cité, de la conscience ou du moi s'identifié en paix. Il faut chasser l'étranger pour qu'appartenance, identification et appropriation soient possibles.

En ce sens, le sacrifice est constitutif de l'espace tragique. Et on pourrait penser que dans sa guerre avec le théâtre, le discours philosophique a mis fin à la tragédie, l'a refoulée en tout cas, inaugurant ainsi, comme cela a souvent été dit, la comédie ou le roman. Ou bien, chose plus compliquée mais nullement exclue, sacrifié le sacrifice, c'est-à-dire fait l'économie du sacrifice. Mettre fin au sacrifice n'est pourtant pas très simple. On peut mettre fin au sacrifice en sacrifiant le sacrifice, en lui faisant subir und mutation ou une intériorisation supplémentaire, et si bien que certains peuvent être tentés de penser que la structure sacrificielle reste néanmoins dominante dans le discours le plus dominant de la tradition philosophique. Loin que la philosophie ait mis fin au sacrifice, ou justement parce qu'elle a cru y mettre fin dans la tragédie grecque, elle n'aurait fait que porter en elle, sous une autre forme, la structure sacrificielle.

Or sur ce point Mesguich propose deux thèses. La première: La tragédie n'a pas lieu au théâtre mais elle est mise en jeu. Il faudrait reprendre la distinction qu'il fait entre deux sortes d'événements: l'un, comme avoir-lieu, l'autre, comme mise en jeu. Daniel Mesguich écrit ceci:

Tragédie
Tragos,bouc, et ôidê, chant.
La tragédie était-elle le beau chant qui accompagnait le sacrifice rituel d'un bouc aux fêtes de Dionysos, ou le chant atroce de ce bouc au moment où l'arme le transperçait? Ou bien l'accord impur des deux chants? Du côté des Grecs il n'avait là que symbole; du côté du bouc...
La tragédie, c'est losque l'un, supplicié, hurle vraiment "NON!", alors que d'autres, spectateurs, n'entendent que le versant mélodieux du "NON!", dansent sur cette "musique", ou applaudissent. La véritable tragédie n'a jamais lieu au théâtre. Au théâtre, la tragédie est mise en jeu.

La tragédie n'aurait pas lieu au théâtre, elle ne serait pas la chose du théâtre, le présent du théâtre, en tout cas elle ne serait pas l'événement comme avoir-lieu. L'autre thèse - et chacque thèse détermine un type de théâtre, une école théâtrale - soutient qu'il y aurait une énorme différence entre le sacrifice et le théâtre. Cette thèse théâtrale, le coup de théâtre de cette thèse m'intéresse parce qu'elle opère une sorte de renversement chiasmatique avec la philosophie. Précédemment, nous considérions la philosophie comme la fin du sacrifice tragique; elle resterait plus sacrificielle qu'on ne le dit en général; maintenant, au contraire, c'est le théâtre ainsi interprété, mettant en jeu le sacrifice, qui achève le sacrifice lui-même. Le sacrifice qu'on assignait au théâtre passe du côté de la philosophie et les rôles sont ainsi renversés. Daniel Mesguich ouvre à ce sujet une voie intéressante dans un passage titré:

Même l'agneau
L'acteur, offert, n'est pas un Christ pourtant qui, comblant "avec son corps les manquements de la loi" écrite, l'accomplit, l'achève enfin, la termine. Au théâtre, c'est infiniment provisoirement que le corps s'immisce dans les failles de l'écriture: pour l'acteur ce n'est pas fini, personne ne meurt, c'était pour de rire, il va falloir y revenir, incessament.
Le théâtre est "affrontement érotique" mais non définitif, non suicidaire, non christique, "entre le corps du Fils et la loi du Père". L'acteur non comme victime expiatoire, bouc émissaire, mais comme celui qui joue la victime; qui joue, devant tout le monde, avec la loi. Celui qui singe le bouc. Au théâtre, à la fin, Isaac, Abraham et l'agneau se relèvent et saluent.

Ce suspens du sacrifice, cette mise en jeu à la place de ce qui a lieu, suppose une étrange institution, qui à la fois assure la mise en jeu, se met elle-même en jeu et se désinstituionnalise, chaque fois, chaque jour, à chaque première. C'est l'une des différences avec la philosophie, du moins avec cette philosophie qui, depuis le XIXe siècle, définit le concept d'Université occidentale. La question de l'institution, qui est dissociable de toutes celles que nous venons d'apercevoir, est aussi envisagée par Mesguich:

Le théâtre, comme l'Université, tient un discours, propose une interprétation mais, à la difference de l'Université, ne se tient jamais, ne s'en tient pas là, n'y adhère que provisiorement. Pour une certaine Université, c'est le crime suprême.

Plus loin, Mesguich évoquera une double constrainte, la double loi qui lie la mise en jeu théâtrale à l'institution, et donc aux pouvoirs publics. Il faut á la fois se mettre en garde contre l'institution et la garder; il faut garder la mémoire mais remettre sans cesse en jeu l'érection qu'elle constitue. L'institution a partie liée avec la mémoire, avec ce qui se garde, elle est une retenue du temps, certes, mais aussi ce qui se fossilise ou se réduit, se simplifie, se condense, se durcit et s'érige.

Il y a plusieurs manières de penser l'irreprésentable au théâtre. C'est d'abord la nuit, la visibilité du visible. La visibilité est nocturne, le diaphane ne se voit pas, ce au travers de quoi l'on voit, ce qui brûle le visible. Il y a toutefois une autre manière de penser l'irreprésentable, non pas simplement comme ce qui, rendant possible la représentation, ne se présente pas, mais comme ce qui est à jamais exclu, marginalisé, censuré, réprimé ou refoulé. Nous ne devons pas oublier que le réprimé (au sens politique) ou le censuré (au sens du refoulement inconscient) subit seulement un déplacement topique; la censure, au sens psychoanalytique du terme, n'aneantit pas la mémoire, elle déplace d'un lieu dans un autre, elle met en réserve, elle métaphorise et métonymise mais elle ne détruit pas. Or nous pourrions nous demander s'il n'existe pas une destruction radicale de la mémoire, un feu qui viendrait incinérer la mémoire sans laisser de traces. Alors l'irreprésentable ou l'imprésentable ne serait plus ce qui est exclu ou empêche d'être lá, simplement déplacé ou déporté, mais ce qui est imprésentable parce qu'absolument brûlé par le feu.

Dans L'éternel éphémère Mesguich propose ce qu'il appelle un spectacle du refoulement, à tous les sens du terme, refoulement politique aussi bien que psychique, un spectacle qui ne viendrait pas seulement lever ce refoulement, mais qui livrerait une présentation, une mise en présence ou une représentation du refoulement. Cela paraît paradoxal et impossible, mais c'est un théâtre du paradoxe qu'il nous propose. Dans la représentation théâtrale, le non représentable, l'rreprésentable, parce que refoulé, viendrait se rappeler. Il s'agit en un sens d'un théâtre du refoulement.

Mais si l'art du théâtre était autant celui du voilement que celui du devoilement [donc de la vérité comme de la non-vérité, ou de la vérité de la non-vérité]? Et si c'éait aussi au spectacle du refoulement que l'on conviait la Cité?

Refoulement á l'oeuvre; le terme "cité" vient souligner qu'il s'agit bien d'un enjeu politique dans cette monstration sans monstration du refoulement. Cette mise en scène du refoulement n'est pas une simple levée du refoulement, une simple libération, une mise á nu de ce qui est imprésentable. Il s'agit d'une présentation paradoxale de l'imprésentable "comme tel". Le "comme tel" phénoménologique doit être ici affecté d'une modification essentielle.

Il y a dans le travail de Mesguich une interprétation de la temporalité théâtrale, c'est-à-dire du présent ou de ce qui ne se règle pas sur le présent, un appel à une sorte d'instant théâtral qui d'une certaine manière n'appartient pas à la temporalité.

Ce rapport au temps est décrit sous diverses formes tout au long de L'éternel éphémère. On est souvent tenté de penser le théâtre comme l'art de ce qui, sans doute préparé par les répétitions, n'a proprement lieu qu'une seule fois. Soit en même temps une première et une dernière fois; ce qui lui donne ce double visage à la fois matinal, oriental ou archéologique et automnal, mélancolique, occidental, crépusculaire ou eschatologique. L'un des aspects les plus provocants du théâtre de Mesguich, c'est - à contre-courant de la doxa - de penser que le théâtre a pour essence une certaine répétition. Non pas la répétition qui prépare la première, mais une répétition qui divise, qui creuse et fait surgir l'unique présent de la première fois. La présentation non pas comme réprésentation d'une modèle présent ailleurs, comme le serait une image, mais la présence une première et unique fois comme répétition.

Loin de l'affaiblir, cette structure de répétition intensifie au contraire l'expérience de l'irremplaçable première fois, de l'unique événement qui se produit chaque fois que sur le plateau une mise en scène met en oeuvre et que se produit l'acte théâtral.

Cette étrange expérience de la répétition est mémoire; cependant tout y paraît nouveau, inaugural, inanticipable; presque aussi surpris et surprenant qu'un événement. C'est l'événement comme répétition que nous devons penser au théâtre. Comment un présent dans sa fraicheur, dans sa crudité irremplaçable d'"ici-maintenant", peut-il être répétition? Que doit être le temps de l'expérience et le temps du théâtre pour que cela soit possible? Dans une vocabulaire emprunté à Levi-Strauss où le cru donne parfois à entendre la cruauté, Daniel Mesguich décrit les choses ainsi:

La seule chose crue, au théâtre, c'est qu'il a lieu devant vous; tout le reste, c'est du réchauffé. Le théâtre rend le passé au présent, et, du même coup, il fait entendre tout ce qui, dans ce que nous tenions pour le présent, était répétition. Le théâtre nous tend, dans ce qui advient pour la première fois, ce qui était déjà advenu. Et, de ce don, de ce présent tendu, de cette offre en tension, il fait un spectacle, cru et déjà cuit...

Et ailleurs dans un passage titré:

La cruauté n'existe pas
Jamais il n'y a théâtre s'il ne se produit qu'une fois. Le théâtre, toujours, se donne en séries - et cela, même si les acteurs ne jouent qu'une seule représentation de la piéce. En chaque représentation vibre sa répétition essentielle. En toute représentation chantent toutes les représentations, ses elles-mêmes passées et à venir. Chacune est fugue, suite et variations, reprise, ligne de fuite devant celle qui la précède, derrière celle qui la suit. Une manifestation théâtrale et une seule - bacchanale, crudité: cruauté - impliquerait la totalité, la plénitude, l'irréversibilité. Une manifestation théâtrale et une seule ne serait pas du théâtre: elle aurait lieu.

Penser le théâtre c'est alors éviter tous les discours cuits, c'est-à-dire ne rien sacrifier de ce qui fait notre unique et singulière présence, tout en y présentant la mémoire, l'altérité, le simulacre, la répetition, la répétition qui la constitue et qui la dé-présente en la représentant d'avance. Penser sur le plateau signifie cet incroyable espace où le savoir ne peut décider de ce qu'est le présent. De ce qui est présent sur la scène sous son manteau de visibilité. Pareil en cela à Marie Tudor et à Jane Talbot dans l'oeuvre de Victor Hugo, incapables de discerner quant au sujet qu'elles ont vu ou cru envoyer à la mort.

Toute la pièce de Victor Hugo, comme nous avons pu l'admirer hier soir dans la mise en scène de Daniel Mesguich, est aussi la métaphore du théâtre lui-même. Comme si le dehors du théâtre, leréférent du théâtre - non pas ce qu'il dit ou montre de la Politique, de la Religion, de l'Histoire, de l'Amour, etc. - était structuré comme un théâtre et donc déjà une répétition, dont le retour en abyme sur le plateau n'empêche ni n'atténue la singularité tragique de l'aiguë et unique première fois.

L'autre manière de formuler la question du temps au théâtre dans le travail de Mesguich s'annonce dans un lexique particulier au travers des catégories du furtif ou de l'urgence. Tout doit se faire très vite au théâtre, l'acteur est pressé comme s'il volait, comme s'il etait dans une situation de transgression et de fraude; il est un voleur, et cela fait partie du temps de théâtre; la catégorie du furtif ou du clandestin signifie que l'instant essentiel du théâtre ne se laisse pas intégrer à la temporalité générale, il est volé au temps, et c'est aussi un moment de présentation de la loi et donc de la transgression de la loi. C'est un moment anormal, qui expose la loi comme refoulement.

Il faut donner l'impression toujours de la presse, de l'urgence (...), une soulevée de pierres tombales, une fouille de la langue maternelle...
J'ai toujours tendance à penser que le théâtre est comme un instantané; cet instantané se déploie ou s'analyse peut-être en deux heures ou en quatre, peu importe, mais il n'a pas de durée vériable, seulement des effets de durée. (...) Que l'acteur joue vite, qu'il semble pressé, indique, aussi, qu'il n'a pas le droit d'être là, que la scène ne lui est pas un lieu autorisé, qu'il y est en fraude.

Au contraire la philosophie serait, dans cette hypothèse: attention patiente du discours pédagogique à la présentation, à l'identification, à l'institution, etc. Pour ma part, je plaiderais plutôt pur une dimension théâtrale dans la philosophie afin de brouiller un peu l'opposition, fût-elle chiasmatique, entre théâtre et philosophie. Il y a dans la pensée philosophique, dans la pensée philosophique pré-institutionelle , des instants qui ressemblent à cette urgence furtive, clandestine, non autorisée et folle, qui mettent la philosophie en marge. Je crois qu'il y a des coups de théâtre en philosophie, des instants qui ressemblent à ce que Kierkegaard décrivait quand il disait: "l'instant de decision est une folie". Ces instants-là appartiennement indissociablement au théâtre et à la philosophie, à la philosophie dans le théâtre ou au théâtre dans la philosophie. Il n'y a pas de théâtre mais des théâtres, il y a des oeuvres qui au regard du refoulement, de l'identification ou de la croyance au théâtre font oeuvre differemment . De même qu'on pourra toujours interpréter - et cela reste infiniment suspendu - la mise en jeu du sacrifice, de l'identification, de la croyance, du refoulement ou de la forclusion, comme des surenchères sacrificielles ou identificatoires, des sacrifices du sacrifice, de même rien ne pourra jamais nous assurer que ces économies ne sont pas en même temps mises en jeu. Mesguich cite dans L'éternel éphémère une très belle phrase de Mannoni avec laquelle je voudrais conclure:

Un masque de loup ne nous fait pas peur à la façon du loup, mais à la façon de l'image du loup que nous avons en nous

. Et Mesguich de poursuivre: Au théâtre on ne croit ni on ne croit pas, on ne regarde ni on n'écoute jamais directement; on regarde ou on écoute l'enfant ou l'idiot en nous qui croit. Même si ce que dit Mannoni est fort et vrai, une question demeure. Personne ne croit au masque du loup. Quand nous allons au théâtre nous ne sommes pas dupes, nous savons que c'est une illusion ou un simulacre. Or la puissance de l'émotion ou de l'identification tient au fait que si l'on ne croit pas au loup qu'il y a derrière le masque, on croit à la réalité psychique intérieure que ce masque réveille en nous et par conséquent l'émotion a raison de croire à ce qui est ainsi réellement au-dedans de nous. Il y a une sorte d'intériorisation par le discours psychanalytique de ce crédit que l'on apporte au théâtre. Mais qu'est-ce que croire? Voilà la question posée, elle est mise en scène ou en feu par le théâtre.

Le commentaire de Mesguich apporte une autre dimension qui ne trahit pourtant pas la psychanalyse: on ne regarde ni on n'écoute jamais directement, on ne croit ni ne croit pas et à ce moment-là, regarder l'enfant ou l'idiot qui y croit, c'est regarder conjointement la mémoire identificatrice et la séparation absolue. On re-garde le point de départ et le partage, à la fois comme ce que l'on partage au sens de la participation et ce qui se dissocie. La suspension entre les deux aspects du partage reste absolument indéfinie et irréductible. Qu'est-ce qu'un acte de foi dans le théâtre? Pourquoi faut-il croire au théâtre? Il le faut. Pourquoi le faut-il?

Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida

2007-08-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

Villanova University, October 3, 1994

Question: Perhaps we can start today's discussions by talking about what we are in fact doing here now at this moment, which is this event being held to inaugurate an academic program in philosophy. That is a rich event and it suggests a lot of things and things that in many ways over the years you have been addressing in your work. Many people whose impression of deconstruction has come from public media might think that this is an odd thing for you to do, as in this country one thinks of deconstruction as the end of philosophy and here we are beginning something new in philosophy, and many associate deconstruction with a kind of destructive attitude towards texts and traditions and truth and the most honorable needs of the philosophical heritage. Furthermore, there are people who might think that deconstruction would be the enemy of academic progress; that you can't institutionalize deconstruction, that deconstruction resists the very idea of institutions, is anti-institutional, that it resists academic programs, it deconstructs them, it knocks them down, it can't accommodate itself to institutionality. Finally, you have often spoken about the very notion of the irruption of something new, and we are trying today to irrupt, and we would be interested to know what your reflections are on the inaugural moment.

Derrida: Yes...first of all I want to apologize for my awful English. I have to improvise here and this is a very difficult task for me and I hope that it passes. Before starting to answer the question I would like to thank the President and the Dean for their kind words...and to thank all of you for being present here. Of course it's an honor for me to be part of this exceptional moment in the history of Villanova University and I'm very proud of sharing with you this experience, especially because it's the inauguration of a philosophy program. I think it's very important to try and say something, some words about what I think this means, but before I do that I would emphasise the fact that the institution of such a program is not only important for you and for this university, it is important for the community of philosophers in this country and even abroad. ...

Space for them is reduced more and more in our, let's say, 'industrial societies', and I myself in my own appropriate way try as far as I can to struggle in order to impart a space for philosophy teaching and for philosophical research. It's important for your university, it's important for the country, it's important for other philosophical communities in this world first of all because at this university the philosophers who are running this program are already well known in this country and in Europe... I assure you that they are very, let's say, important philosophers for us, very precious thinkers and the fact that they are running this program is a guarantee for the future of this program - and we knew this in advance. Then, a moment ago I met for one hour with many of your students, graduate students, students who will work within this program, and I will release without any convention - not out of politeness - I will tell you that they are very bright students and I was very happy to discuss with them for one hour of intense, intense philosophical debate. They are very well informed, very organized, and it makes me very optimistic about the future of this program. So I will attempt to congratulate you and all of their colleagues who decided to have this program built and wish you the best.

Of course...hopefully, deconstruction - and I will be very, let us say, 'sketchy', for we don't have time to get into a very detailed analysis - but deconstruction, what is called deconstruction has never opposed institutions as such, philosophy as such, discipline as such. Of course, as we rightly say, it is another thing for me to be doing what I am doing here because however affirmative deconstruction is, as we recalled a moment ago, it is affirmative in a way which is not simply positive - that is, it is not simply conservative, it is not simply a way of repeating the given institution or the lack of an institution on the part of which we are able to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future. The paradox in the instituting moment of an institution is that it continues something, is true to the memory of a past, to a heritage, to something we receive from the path of the assessors of the culture and so on, but if an institution is to be an institution it must break with the past and at the same time keep the memory of the past and inaugurate something absolutely new. So I am convinced that although this program looks to some extent like other similar programs there is something absolutely new and the indication of this can be found not simply in the status of the structural organization of the program but in the work, in the content of the work of the ones who will run this program, teach the new themes. The faculty for instance, the colleagues who inscribe in their programs things such as 'Heidegger and Deconstruction' or new themes indicate that they are not simply reproducing, they are trying to open something new and something original, something which hasn't been done in that way in other similar university programs. So the paradox is that the instituting moment in an institution is violent in a way, violent because it cannot guarantee, although it follows the premises of a past, it starts on the cusp of the new and this newness is not only a risk, something risky - it has to be something risky - it's violent because cannot be governed by any previous rule. So at the same time you have to follow a rule and to invent a new rule, a new norm, a new criterion, a new law. That's why the moment of the institution is so dangerous at the same time.

One should not have an absolute guarantee, an absolute law, we have to invent the rules and be sure that the responsibility taken by the students implies that they give themselves the new rules. There is no responsible new decision without this inauguration, this absolute break. That is what deconstruction is about - not a mixture but a tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something of something which has been given to us, and at the same time heterogeneity, something absolutely new. The condition of this performative success, which is never guaranteed, is the blindness of these two rules. That's why - I am coming to the question of the program - in France, we have for a long time been confronted with similar issues... I have at the same time said two things which sum up the issue. On the one hand, I was - and I won't hide this here - I was fighting, I was opposing the rigid definition of programs, disciplines, the borders between disciplines, the fact that in my country philosophy was taught only at the university or in the last grade of the high school, so we founded another institution in 1975, a movement called the Group for the Research of the Teaching of Philosophy [GREPH, Groupe de recherche sur l'enseignement philosophique] which opposed the dominant institution, which tried to convince our colleagues and our presidents that philosophy should be taught earlier than in this last grade of the high school, that is, earlier than at [a student's] sixteen or seventeen years, that there should be philosophy across the borders - not only in philosophy proper, but in all fields such as law, medicine, so on and so forth. To some extent this struggle was a failure but I am still convinced that it was right, 'a good war', so to speak. But at the same time I was emphasizing the necessity of a discipline, that is, of something specifically philosophical that shouldn't dissolve philosophy in order to... that we need at the same time the interdisciplinarity, crossing the borders, establishing new themes, new problems, new ways or new approaches to new problems but while teaching the history of philosophy, the techniques, the rigor of the profession, what one calls discipline. I think we shouldn't choose between the two. We should have philosophers trained as philosophers as rigorously as possible and at the same time audacious philosophers who cross the borders and discover new connections, new fields; not only interdisciplinary research, but [research on] themes that are not even interdisciplinary.
If you allow me to refer to another institution I have been involved with in France - I mentioned GREPH in '75 - but in '82, some friends and I founded a new institution called the International College of Philosophy, in which - and we inaugurated this in 1983 - in which at the same time we tried to teach philosophy as such, as a discipline, and to discover new themes, new problems which had had no legitimacy, which were not recognized as such in the given universities. That was not simply interdisciplinarity because interdisciplinarity implies that we have given identifiable proper identities - we had a legal theorist, we had an architect, a philosopher, a literary critic, and they joined, they worked together on a specific type of academic object - that's interdisciplinarity. When you discover a new object, an object which up to now hasn't been identified as such or has no legitimacy in terms of any academic media or academic field you have to invent a new campus, a new type of research, a new discipline. The International College of Philosophy granted a privilege to such new themes, new disciplines which were not up to then recognized or legitimated in other institutions. So you see, at the same time I am a very conservative person. I love institutions and I spend a lot of time, let's say, sharing the interest of my work with institutions which sometimes do not work and at the same time trying to dismantle not institutions but some structures in the given institutions which are too rigid or are dogmatic or which work as an obstacle to any future research.

2nd Question: I'd like to ask you a question that's very much related to the material that you've just been discussing. It's a question really also about beginnings and inauguration. Specifically, I wanted to ask you about the relationship between your work and the Greeks as the inaugurators of the western tradition. This semester we're reading your essay on Plato [Plato's Pharmacy] in our class on Greek philosophy, and as a matter of fact this program in Continental philosophy is very much also a program in the history of philosophy, so I wonder how you might characterize the connection between your work, or the work of deconstruction which is a task of reading inherited texts from the tradition already established. Specifically, postmodernism is often situated at the end of this tradition and is often characterized as having the task of dismantling the founding texts such as those of Plato and Aristotle, yet in many ways your reading of the Phaedrus is so attentive to the structural integrity and composition; so I would like to ask you whether this is characteristic of your philosophy, this tension between disruption on the one hand and attentiveness on the other. How would you suggest to us as people of this age, what strategies would you suggest we employ in reading these texts?

Derrida: Thank you. First of all I will say yes, this tension as a tension is characteristic of the work I try to do. Now, at risk of being, let's say, a little oversimplifying - and we have to be simple simply for lack of time - at the risk of being too simple I will say I will take this opportunity to really reject, criticize a commonplace prejudice which has widely surfaced about deconstruction that is not only among journalists, you know, bad journalists, but among, let's say, the people of the academy who behave like... not much like journalists, for I have the deepest respect for good journalists, but like bad journalists, always repeating, repeating stereotypes without reading the texts. That's really something... perhaps we'll come back to this problem later on. This has been from the beginning a terrible problem for me; not only for me - the caricature, the lack of respect for reading and so on and so forth... because as soon as you approach a text - not only mine, but many of the texts of people close to me - you see that of course the respect for these great texts, not only the Greek ones but especially the Greek ones, is the condition of our work. We are constantly trying to read and understand Plato and Aristotle and I have devoted a number of texts to them and...if you will allow me this self-reference, the book which will appear tomorrow or the day after tomorrow in France on friendship is mainly a book on Plato and Aristotle on friendship. So I think we have to read them again and again and I feel however old I am, I feel that I am on the threshold of reading Plato and Aristotle. I love them and I feel that I have to start again and again and again; it is something, it is a task which is in front of me, before me.

Now, nevertheless, the way that I try to read Plato, Aristotle and others is not a way of, let's say, commending or repeating or conserving this heritage. It is an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking works or doesn't work, [an analysis] of the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity within their own corpus, as well as the law of this self-deconstruction. Deconstruction is not a method or a tool that you apply from the outside to something, deconstruction is something which happens, which happens inside. There is a deconstruction at work within Plato's work, for instance. As my colleagues know, each time I study Plato I find, I try to find some heterogeneity in his own corpus, and to see how, for instance, the Timaeus - within the Timaeus the theme of the chora is incompatible with his so-called 'system'. So to be true to Plato, and that is a sign of love, of respect, I have to analyze the functioning, this functioning of his work, and I would say the same for the whole of Greek philosophy. Now, of course the Greek tradition is essential to philosophy; 'philosophy' is a Greek word and its legacy is reflexive. But as soon as philosophy as such appeared under this name in Greece there was a potential opening, a potential force which was ready to, let's say, cross the borders of Greek language, Greek culture, and I would say the same for democracy, although the concept of democracy is inherent in the Greek heritage.

This heritage is the heritage of a model, not simply a model, but a model which self-deconstructs, deconstructs itself so as to uproot, to become independent of its own ground, so to speak, so that today philosophy is Greek and is not Greek. In this book on friendship I try to analyze what happened to the Greek thought with the Christian event, the Christian happening; it has to do especially with the concept of brotherhood. The way the Christian concept of brotherhood transformed the Greek concept of brotherhood was at the same time something new, an integration, a mutation, a break, but this break at the same time was developing, was something which was potentially inscribed in the Greek tradition. So we have to go back to the Greek origin, not in order to cultivate the origin or in order to protect the etymology, the etymon, the philological purity of the origin, but in order first of all to understand where it comes from and then to analyze the history, the historicity of the breaks which have produced our current world out of Greek tradition, out of Christianity, out of the Greeks meaning out of this origin, and thanking or transforming this origin at the same time. So there it is, this tension. Speaking of or going back to my own, let's say, tendency of taste or idiosyncratic 'style', I love reading Greek. It is difficult, this thing, a very difficult task, and when I read Plato I enjoy it, and I feel, if anything, it's difficult; I think it's an infinite task. The project is not behind me, Plato is in front of me. That's why today among so many stereotypes and prejudices that circulate about deconstruction I feel it's painful to see that many people about the question of the canon think they have to make a choice between reading Plato or the 'great white males' and so on and so forth and reading Black Woman writers. Why should we choose? Even before the question of the canon became so visible, even before then, no one in the university could be simultaneously a great specialist in Plato and in Aristotle and in Shakespeare; the choices have to be made and that is the distinction of our conditions. Nobody can at the same time be an expert in Plato and in Milton, for instance, and we accepted this, it was commonsensical. Why, today, should we choose between 'the great canon', i.e., Plato, Shakespeare or several texts of Shakespeare and Hegel, and others on the other hand?

The academic field is a differential field. Everyone can find his or her way and make choices and a program as such of course can become, let's say, specialized, but this doesn't mean that there cannot be other programs with no exclusivity which would specialize in other fields, and that is why I don't understand what's going on with 'the question of the canon'. At least as regards deconstruction, deconstruction at the same time is interested in what is considered 'the great canon' - the study of great works, western works - and open to new work, new objects, new fields, new cultures, new languages, and I see no reason why we should choose between the two. That is the tension in deconstruction.

3rd Question: If I might, I'd like to follow up on the remark you made about international philosophy in the sense of your founding of the International College of Philosophy and also what I take to be in your book Specters of Marx perhaps a new call for a new form of internationalism. Recently a distinguished American historian said apropos of the American motto 'E Pluribus Unum' that today in the United States we have "too much pluribus and not enough unum''. Now I've always considered deconstruction to be on the side of the 'pluribus', that is, as deconstructing totalities, identities in favor of loosening them up in terms of diversity, disruptions, fissures. I think that's a lesson we've all learned from deconstruction. What I'd like to ask regards any deconstructive salvaging of the 'unum'; that is, can the 'pluribus', can the diversity itself become too dangerous? What does deconstruction say, if anything, in favor of the 'unum' of community? Is there a place for unity in deconstruction? What might it look like?

Derrida: Thank you for your question. Let me say a word first about this 'internationality' you referred to at the beginning. The internationality I referred to in this book, it was, since Marx was the main reference of the book - this internationality was supposed to be different from what was called in the Marxist tradition internationality or internationalism. I think that today there are wars through a number of classes in the world upon which the international organizations such as the United Nations for instance have to intervene and cannot intervene in the way they should. That is, international rights, international law - which is a good thing - nevertheless is still on the one hand rooted - in its mission, in its axiom, in its languages - rooted in the western concept of philosophy, the western concept of state, of sovereignty, and this is a limit. That is, we have to deconstruct the foundations of this international law not in order to destroy the international organization - I think it is something good, something perfectible and something necessary - but we have to think, to rethink the foundations, the philosophical foundations of this international law and these international organizations. That's one limit.

The other limit, which is connected to the first one, has to do with the fact that these international organizations are in fact, in fact governed by a number of particular states which are the only which provide these international organizations with the means to intervene - the military power, the economic power - and of course the United States plays a major role in this. Sometimes it's a good thing but it is at the same time a limit. So, that is, the universality of this international law is in fact in the hands of a number of powerful, rich states, and this has to change and it is in the process of changing through a number of disasters, crises, economic inequalities, injustices, so on and so forth. The 'international' I think is looking for its own place, its own figure; it is something which would go beyond the current stage of internationality, perhaps beyond citizenship, beyond the belonging to a state, the belonging to a given nation-state. And I think that today in the world a number of human beings are secretly allying in their suffering against the hegemonic powers which protect what is called 'the new world order'. So that is what I meant by 'the new international', not a new way of, let's say, associating citizens belonging to given nation-states, but a new concept of citizenship, of hospitality, a new concept of a state of democracy - in fact, it's a new concept of democracy, a new determination of the concept, the given concept of democracy in the tradition of the concept of democracy. Now, having said this - again, very simply, in words which are too simple - I think we don't have to choose between unity and multiplicity. Of course, deconstruction - that was its strategy up to now - insisted on not multiplicity for itself but insisted on the, let's say the heterogeneity, the difference, the dissociation which is absolutely necessary for the relation to the other but disrupts the totality.

What disrupts the totality is the condition for the relation to the other. The privilege granted to unity, to totality, to organic ensembles, to community as a homogenized whole - this is the danger for responsibility, for decision, for ethics, for politics. That is why I insisted upon what prevents the unity to close itself, to be closed up. And this is not only a matter of description, of saying what is, the way it is, it's a matter of accounting for the possibility of responsibility, of a decision, of ethical commitment. For this you have to pay attention to what I would call similarity, and similarity is not unity simply, it is not multiplicity. Now this does not mean that we have to destroy unity, all forms of unity wherever they occur. I have never said anything like that. Of course we need unity, some gathering, some configuration and so on and so forth. You see, the pure unity or the pure multiplicity are synonyms of death. There is only death when there is only totality or unity and when there is only multiplicity or dissociation. What interests me is the limit which every attempt to totalize, to gather, versammeln - and I'll come to this German word in a moment because it's important for me - to this unifying, uniting movement, the limit that it had to encounter because the relationship of the unity to itself implies some difference.

To be more concrete, let's take the example of a person of a culture. We often insist nowadays on cultural identity, for instance national identity, linguistic identity and so on and so forth and sometimes the struggles under the banner of cultural identity, national identity, linguistic identity are noble fights, but at the same time if the people who fight for their identity don't pay attention that the identity is not the self-identity of a thing - a glass for instance, or this microphone - but implies a difference within the identity, that is, the identity of a culture is a way of being different from itself... a culture is different from itself, a language is different from itself, a person is different from itself; once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you refer, you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, it is open to the identity of the other and it prevents totalitarianism, nationalism, ethnocentrism and so on and so forth. That is what I tried to demonstrate in a book called The Other Heading, that the identity in the case of cultures, persons, nations, languages is a set different item, it is identity as différance from itself, that is, within an opening within itself, a gap within itself. That's not only a fact, a structure, but it's a duty, it's an ethical and political duty to take into account this impossibility of unifying, of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak for the other, that I can address the other, which is not a way of avoiding responsibility; on the contrary, it is the only way for me to take responsibility and to make decisions... [One] recurrent critique of deconstructive questions has to do with the privilege Heidegger grants to what he calls, for example, this gathering; gathering is always more powerful than dissociation. I would say exactly the opposite. Once you grant some privilege to gathering and not to dissociating then you leave no room for the other, for the radical otherness of the other, for the radical similarity of the other. I think that separation, dissociation is not an obstacle to society or to community, it is the condition.

This dissociation, the separation is the condition of my relation to the other. I can address the other only to the extent that there is a separation, there is a dissociation, that the other is not the other, that I cannot replace the other and vice versa. That's what some French-speaking philosophers such as Blanchot and Levinas call the rapport sans rapport, relationless relation... that's the structure of my relation to the other; it's a relation without relation - it's a relation in which the other remains absolutely transcendent. I can't reach the other, I cannot know the other from the inside. That is not an obstacle, that is the condition of love, of friendship - of war too - it's a condition of the relation to the other. This dissociation is the condition of community, the condition of any unity as such. So a state - to come back to the state - a state in which there will be only 'unum' will be a terrible catastrophe, and we have unfortunately had a number of such experiences. So a state without 'pluribus', without plurality and the respect for plurality, would be first either a totalitarian state... it's a terrible thing, it doesn't work, we know that it doesn't work, it's a terrible thing and doesn't work; and finally it wouldn't even be a state, it would be like... a what... a stone, if you like, a rock. So a state as such must be attentive as much as possible to the plurality... of what... of people, languages, cultures, ethnic groups, persons and so on and so forth, and that's the condition for a state.

4th Question: I have a very simple question, actually, and it follows somewhat the remarks you've just made on the nature of community, of the impossibility of ethical right, the impossibility of justice as being one of the conditions of justice. In some of your more recent work the topic of justice has certainly grown more explicitly, more clearly, even though we might argue, one might argue that it's been there all the time; and I'd like to ask you to elaborate a bit more on the nature of justice... You speak, for instance in the Marx book, of a sense of justice that's so strong, so powerful that it shatters every calculus, every possible economy and can only be described in terms of the gift. In a number of little texts that you have... Passions, Sauf le Nom, the Chora text, you say that these texts together form a sort of essay from you, and then you say that this essay has been least understood from those other dimensions as political, as truth. So if you could elaborate a little more on the meaning of this justice that can only be described as a gift, that can't be linked to any calculus, to any kind of...no dialectic, no set of exchanges going on, impossibility of vengeance, of un-punishment, if you could say - and that might be an impossible question - but if you would say a little bit more about that, and if you would say something about that in relation to the question of the name of singularities, the ones you just made a response to in answering your question.

Derrida: Yes, all right. You see, before I start trying to answer this question I will again say this, that, as you see, these questions cannot be really dealt with in such a forum because they are difficult... really, to do justice to them you have to read texts, to revise a number of conditions, so it's very imprudent to address this question in such a way and if I were, let's say, more responsible I would simply say 'No, I won't play this game'. Nevertheless I think sometimes it's not a bad thing, at least sometimes, if you don't do that too often, it's not bad that we try to encapsulate 'in a nutshell' so that, one day, let me try... one day, I was in Cambridge three years ago. There was this terrible honorary degree crisis in Cambridge and a journalist said, 'Well, could you tell me, in a nutshell, what is deconstruction?' So sometimes, of course, I confess, I was able to do that, and sometimes it may be useful to try 'nutshells'. So what is this problem of justice...'in a nutshell'? It is true that all of the problem of justice has been all the time in my mind and in previous texts; its only relation here is that I address this problem thematically. And it was in a context in which, reading, at the moment of a conference in a law school on 'Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice' I had to address a text by Benjamin on violence and I find it, I found it useful to make a distinction between law and justice, what one calls in French le droit, that is, 'right', or Recht in German, and Gesetz... in English when you say 'law' you say at the same time 'right' and 'law', le droit et le loi; in French we distinguish between le droit et le loi, so there is a distinction between the law - that is, the history of right or legal systems - and justice.

Following Benjamin and at the same time trying to deconstruct Benjamin's text or to show how Benjamin's text was deconstructing itself I made this statement 'in a nutshell', that the law could be deconstructed. There is a history of legal systems, of rights, of laws, of political laws, and this history is the history of the transformation of laws. That's why you can improve law - you can replace laws by other ones, there are constitutions, there are institutions, this is a history and a history as such can be deconstructed. Each time you replace a legal system by another one or a law by another one or you improve... it's a kind of deconstruction, a critical deconstruction. So the law as such can be deconstructed, it has to be deconstructed; that is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics and progress. But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive, the movement to improve the law - that is, to deconstruct the law. Without a call for justice we wouldn't find any interest in deconstructing law. So that's why I said that the condition of possibility for deconstruction is a call for justice. Justice is not reducible to the law, to a given system of legal structures. Which means that justice is always unequal to itself, it's non-coincident with itself.

Then in the book on Marx I went back again to the Greeks, to the word dike, to the interpretation of this word which is translated by 'justice' and I protested the interpretation by Heidegger on dikh and injustice and I tried to show that justice again implied non-gathering dissociation, heterogeneity, non-identity with itself and, less an adequation, infinite transcendence. That's why the call for justice is never, never, let's say, fully answered. That's why no one can say 'I am just'. The one who does you injustice, you can be sure that he or she is wrong because being just is not a matter of theoretical determination. I cannot know whether I am just. I can know that I am right; I can say, well, I act in agreement with norms or with the law; I stop at a red light, I am right, there is no problem, but this does not mean that I am just, which is to say that justice is not a matter of knowledge or theoretical judgement. That's why it's not a matter of calculation. You can calculate the law, the right; a judge can say, well, this misdeed deserves according to the code ten years of imprisonment and so on and so forth; that may be a matter of calculation but the fact that it's rightly calculated does not mean that it is just. Now a judge if he wants to be just cannot content himself with applying the law, he has to reinvent the law each time. That is, if he wants to be responsible, to make a decision, he has to not simply apply the law as a coded program to a given case but to reinvent in a singular situation a new judgement relationship. Which means that a law, that justice cannot be reduced to a calculation of sanctions, punishments or rewards. That is already right or in concurrence with the law, but it's not justice.

Justice - if it has to do with the other, the infinite distance of the other - is always unequal to the other, is always uncalculatable; you cannot calculate justice. Levinas says something like that - his definition of justice is a very minimal one which I love, which I think is really rigorous - he says, 'Justice - that is the relation to the other'; that's all. Once you relate to the other as the other then something incalculable comes in which cannot be reduced to the law, to the history of the legal structures. And that is I think what gives deconstruction its movement, that is, constantly to suspect, to criticize the given determinations of a culture, of institutions, of the legal systems not in order to destroy them or simply to cancel them but to be just, give justice, to respect this relation to the other as justice. Yes... I missed the last point of your... not only that, but also the last point of your question about politics. Indeed as you had mentioned I tried to read in a number of texts - mainly in a text by Plato, the Timaeus, in which the question of the place, the chora which disturbs and undermines the whole Platonic system - all the couples or positions which build the Platonic system - this reflection on chora is part of a political discussion and I tried to reconstitute this political scenario in order to suggest - and that's all that I can say here without reopening the text, Plato's, for instance - in order to suggest that if you take into account this strange structure of the chora, of the place which is the opening for any inscription, for any happening, for any event, then you have to not only deconstruct the traditional concept of politics but to think of another way of interpreting politics that is the place for the place, the place for hospitality, the place for the gift, and to think politics otherwise.

So that's part of a number of gestures I've tried in the recent years, to deconstruct the political tradition not in order to depoliticize but in order to interpret differently the concept of the political, the concept of democracy and so on and so forth and to try and articulate this concept of the political, this concept of democracy with what I said about the gift, about singularity, a gift. The gift, which is... that's the only thing that I will say about the gift, this is an enormous problem... but the gift is precisely - that is what it has in common with justice - something which cannot be reappropriated; a gift is something which never appears as such and is never equal to gratitude, to commerce, to compensation, to reward. When a gift is given, first of all it cannot be... no gratitude can be proportionate to it. A gift is something that you cannot thank for. As soon as I say 'thank you' for a gift I start cancelling the gift, I start destroying the gift by proposing an equivalence that is a circle and circumscribing the gift in a movement of reappropriation. So a gift is something that goes beyond the circle of reappropriation, beyond the circle of gratitude. A gift shouldn't even be acknowledged as such. As soon as I know that I give something, because I can say, well, I'm giving you something, I just cancel the gift and I'm just starting to congratulate myself or to thank myself for giving something and then the circle has already started to cancel the gift. So a gift should not be rewarded, should not be reappropriated, and should not even appear as such. As soon as the gift appears as such then the movement of gratitude has started to destroy the gift. So a gift - if there is such a thing, I'm not sure, but is there assurance that there is a gift, that a gift is given? - If the gift is given then it should not even appear to the one who gives it and the one who receives it, not appear as such. That is paradoxical but that's the condition for a gift to be given. So that is the condition the gift shares with justice. A justice which could be, could appear as such, that could be calculable, if you can calculate what is just and what is not just, let's say, well, what has to be given in order to be just and so on and so forth, it is not justice, it's just social security, it's just economics, it's just... So justice and gift should go beyond calculation, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't calculate, we should calculate it as rigorously as possible but there is a point or a limit beyond which calculation must fail and we must know it and must fail. And so what I tried to think or to suggest is a concept of the political and of democracy which would be compatible, which could be articulated with these impossible notions of the gift and justice. If a democracy or a political system which would be simply calculatable without justice and gift could be, it is often this horrible gift, this terrible thing.

Question: Can we talk a little bit about theology?

Derrida: We have started...

Question: You have written... I don't know how many of us, how many of our audience know this, but you have written a book called Circumfessions which is constantly drawing an analogy to St. Augustine's Confessions. You were raised in the Rue Augustin, and born there, were you not?

Derrida: No, I wasn't born there... three months after I was born I went back to the house in which was in Algiers, which was on the Rue Augustin.

Question: And so like St. Augustine you were born in North Africa. Circumfessions draws a constant analogy... and one of the things that appears in the Confessions that you single out is that like St. Augustine your mother was worried about you and she thought that you were... she was worried about whether you still believed in God, you said, and that she wouldn't, she didn't ask you about it but she was asking -

Derrida: - Never.

Question: - She was afraid to ask you... so she asked everyone else. And you go on to say that you quite rightly passed for an atheist but that the constancy of God in your life was called by other names. Now I've always been interested in the way in which figures like Heidegger... my earliest work was on the relationship between Heidegger and the religious tradition... and one of the things that has fascinated me about your work and which comes back to me again as I listened to your answer to the previous question about justice is how much what you say about justice reminds me of the Biblical tradition of justice about singularity rather than the philosophical one where justice is defined in terms of universality, the blind... the blindness of justice. Now, the question that interests me, and you come back to this again in the Marx book where you make a distinction - you talk about the messianic, all this thematic of 'a venir' , 'viens', all of that is... you describe it as the impossible future, it is the messianic in which you distinguish a kind of quasi-atheistic messianic from a more garden variety messianic... if a messianic can have a garden variety... or the organic messianic. So here is the question: What does Judaism and the Biblical tradition, the prophetic tradition of justice, what does that mean for you, for your work, and how do, how can religion and deconstruction commune with each other? Could they do each other any good? Are they on talking terms?

Derrida: First of all, I'm really intimidated here not only by this question but by this reference to St. Augustine. The way that I refer to St. Augustine is really not very orthodox, not very... it's rather... let's say... it's a sin. I have to confess that my relation to St. Augustine is something strange. If I had to summarize what I did with St. Augustine in this text you refer to, Circumfession, I would say this: on one hand, I played with some analogies, that is, the fact that he was coming from Algeria, that his mother died in Europe, and my mother was dying when I was writing this, my mother was dying and so on and so forth... so I was constantly playing figures of mine off this and quoting sentences from the Confessions in Latin, but trying through my love and admiration for St. Augustine, because, say, I know I never met St. Augustine, but to ask a question to Augustine... it's a number of accidents, not only in these confessions but in their context. So there is, let's say, a love story and a deconstruction between us. But I won't insist on St. Augustine here, it's too difficult, and the way that this text is written cannot begin to account for such and such. See... so, to address more hurriedly the question of religion - again, in a very oversimplifying way - I would say this: first, I have no stable position as to the texts you mentioned - the prophets, the Bible and so on. For me it's an open field and I can at the same time receive the most necessary provocation from these texts as from Plato and others.

In Specters of Marx I try to reconstitute the link between Marx and some prophets and Shakespeare, through Shakespeare. This doesn't mean that I'm simply a, let's say, a religious person or that I simply, unscrupulously believe. For me, the concept we think of, the 'religion' within what one calls religions - Judaism, Christianity or other religions - there are again tensions, heterogeneities, disruptive 'volcanoes', so to speak, in the text - even, especially in the prophets - which cannot be, let's say, reduced to an institution, to a corpus, to a system. So I want to keep the right to read these texts in a way which has to be culturally reinvented. It is something which can be totally new at every moment. Then I would distinguish between - with what I told you before about this tension - I would distinguish between religion and faith. If by religion you mean a set of beliefs or dogmas or institutions, church and so on and so forth, I would say that religion as such can be... not only can be deconstructed but should be deconstructed, sometimes in the name of faith. For me Kierkegaard is here as a minimum a great example that is some paradoxical way of contesting the religious discourse in the name of a faith which has no...no... that can't be simply mastered or domesticated or taught or logically understood... paradoxical, paradoxical faith.

Now what I call faith in this case, this has something to do with justice and the gift, it is something which is presupposed by the most radical deconstructive gesture. You cannot address the other, speak to the other without an act of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you testify, when you attest to something? You address the other and ask belief. Even if you lie, even if you are in a perjury you are addressing the other and asking the other to trust you. This 'trust me, I'm speaking to you' is of the order of faith. It cannot be reduced to a theoretical statement, to a determining judgement; it is the opening of the address to the other. So this faith is not religious, strictly speaking. At least, it is not, it cannot be totally determined by a given religion. You find it - that's why this faith is absolutely universal. And this attention to the singularity is not opposed to universality - I wouldn't oppose as you did universality to singularity, I would try to keep the two together - and the structure of this act of faith I was just referring to is not as such conditioned by any given religion. That's why it is universal. Which doesn't mean that in every given religion, determined religion you do not find a reference to this pure faith which is not either Christian nor Jewish nor Islamic nor Buddhist nor anything. Now I would say the same with the messianic. When I insisted in the book on Marx on messianicity - which I distinguished from messianism - I wanted to show that the messianic structure is a universal structure, that as soon as you address the other, as you are open to the future, as you are, have temporal experience, you are waiting for the future, you are waiting for someone to come...that the opening of the experience, someone is to come... is now to come, and justice, peace will have to do with this coming of the other - with a promise.

Each time I open my mouth I am promising something; when I speak to you I am telling you I promise to tell you something, to tell you the truth - even if I lie. Even if I lie, the condition of my lie is that I promise to tell you the truth. So the promise is not a speech act among others; every speech act is permanently a promise. So this universal structure of the promise, of the expectation for the future, for the one, the coming, the coming, and the fact that this expectation of the coming has to do with justice - that is what I call messianic structure. And this messianic structure is not limited to what one calls messianisms, that is, Jewish, Christian, or Islamic messianisms with a determined figure, a determined form of the messiah. As soon as you reduce the messianic structure to messianism then you are reducing the universality and this has big political consequences; then you are, let's say, accrediting a tradition among others, the notion of elect people, of a given ritual language...and so on and so forth. So that's why I think that the difference however subtle it may appear between the messianic or messianicity and messianism is very important. So...on the side of messianicity there is faith. There is no society without a faith, without a trust in the other. Even if I abuse this, if I lie or if I commit perjuries, even if I am violent because of this faith, there is no...even on the economic level, no society without this level of faith, this minimum act of faith. The credit, what one calls credit in capitalism, in 'capital', in the economy, has to do with faith; one knows this. The economists know that faith. This faith is not and should not be reduced or defined by religion as such.

Now... and I will end with this point here... now the problem remains, and this is really a problem for me, an enigma, whether what one calls 'religions', let's say for instance the western religion of the book, whether the religions where specific examples of this structural, general structure of messianicity there is a general messianicity as a structure of experience...and on this modest ground there have been revelations of a history which one calls Judaism and Christianity and so on and so forth, so that's a possibility; and then you would have, in a Heideggerian gesture or style you would have to go back from these religions to the ontological or phenomenological condition of possibility of religions to describe a general structure of messianicity on the modest ground of which religions have been made possible. That's one hypothesis. The other hypothesis - and I confess I hesitate or oscillate constantly between the two possibilities - the other possibility is that the event of revelations in Biblical or Jewish traditions, Christian traditions, Islamic traditions, have been absolute events, irreducible events which have unveiled this messianicity. We wouldn't know what messianicity is without messianisms, without these events which were of Moses, Abram, Jesus Christ and so on and so forth. So in that case singular events would have unveiled or revealed this universal possibility and it's only on that condition that you can describe this, the messianicity. Between these two I must confess I oscillate and I think some other schema has to be constructed to at the same time do justice to the two possibilities. That's why - and perhaps it's not a good reason, perhaps one day I will give up this - that's why for the moment, the time being I keep the word 'messianic' because the word 'messianic', even if it's different from messianism, it's a reference to the word 'messiah'; it doesn't simply belong to a certain culture, a Jewish/Christian culture. I think that for the moment being I need this word to...I wouldn't say to teach but to convince and to make people understand what I am trying to say when I speak of messianicity, but in doing so I still keep the singularity of a single revelation, that is, the Jewish/Christian revelation with its reference to the messiah. It's a reinterpretation so to speak of this tradition of the messiah. Let me tell you just... a story, something I read, I reread recently and which I quote in the book on friendship which will be published in a few days. It's Blanchot, Maurice Blanchot tells this story.

When the messiah in a sort of soiled robe was not recognized, was walking in... ah, quelle chose?... he was poorly, poorly dressed and so on and so on... and a young man recognized him, recognized that he was the messiah and came to him and addressed him and asked the question, 'When will you come?' I think it's a very profound reading which means that something, some inadequation between 'the now' and now that he is coming now... the messianic doesn't wait for... It's a way of waiting for the future, but right now; and the responsibilities which are assigned to us by this messianic structure are responsibilities for here and now. So the messiah is not some future present, it's imminent. It's this imminence that I am describing when I talk in the name of this messianic structure. Now there is another possibility I imagine also in this book... that the messiah is not simply the one, the other that I am waiting for constantly - there would be no experience without the waiting of the coming of the other, the coming of the event and justice - the messiah might also be the one I expect while I don't want it, him, to come. There is this possibility that my relation to the messiah is that I won't like it to come. I hope that he will come, that the other will come as other; that will be justice, peace, and revolution because in the concept of of messianicity there is revolution - not revelation, but revolution - but at the same time I'm scared. I don't want what I want and I would like the coming of the messiah to be infinitely postponed. And the reason, this desire... that's why the man who addresses the messiah said 'When will you come?' It's a way to say that, well, as long as I speak to you, as I ask you the question 'When will you come?' at least you're not coming, and that's the condition for me to go on asking questions and living and so on and so forth. So that is this ambiguity in the messianic structure. We wait for something we wouldn't like to wait for. That is another name for that.

[The panel conversation is closed and questions are invited from the floor.]

Question from the Floor: I'd like to ask you about your work on literary texts and the reverse - in particular, about your works on James Joyce, where the influence seems to go from him to you and to you to back from him, so you're deconstructing Joyce while Joyce is deconstructing you.

Derrida: No... I mean, what is the question?... You're right, but what is the question?

Question from the Floor: ... Expand.

Derrida: Expand... It's already very difficult to write on Joyce, but to speak on Joyce is an even more difficult task, but I'll try to say something. First of all, since the Dean referred to the time a long time ago when I spent one year in Harvard, in '56, what I did at Harvard was read Joyce in the library, what I encountered was Ulysses, and since then Joyce has been reserved for me... the most gigantic attempt to gather in a single work, that is, in the singularity of a work which is irreplaceable, that is a singular event, to gather - I'm referring here to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - to gather the totality, the presumed totality not only of one culture but of a number of cultures, a number of languages, literatures, religions and so on and so forth. And this impossible task of decided gathering in a totality, in a potential totality, the potentially infinite memory... is at the same time for me exemplarily new in its modern form and very classical in its philosophical form. That's why I have often compared Joyce's Ulysses to Hegel's, for instance, Hegel's Encyclopedia or Hegel's Logic. It is an attempt to read the absolute knowledge through a single act of memory; this being possible only by loading every sentence, every word with a maximum of equivocalities, of possibilities, of virtual associations, that is, by making this organic linguistic totality as rich as possible.

Of course this at the same time reassembled the history of literature and inaugurated and produced a break in the history of literature, and what I tried to show also in the texts you are referring to is the fact that at the same time the writing of these works functioned as an injunction to the canon, that is, to the common literary critics, to the institutions of Joycean scholarship, to build a sort of beehive, an infinite institution of people working as interpreters, people deciphering Joyce's signature as a singular signature. From that point of view I think that Joyce is a great landmark in the history of deconstruction; that's why the reference to Joyce is involved with me... In a book on Husserl, my first book on Husserl, I tried to compare the way Joyce treated language and the way classical philosophers...also treated language. Joyce wanted to make history and the resumption, the totalization of history possible through the accumulation of equivocalities, of metaphoricities, tropes and so on and so forth whereas Husserl thought that historicity was made possible by the transparent univocality of language, that is, scientific, mathematical language, pure language. There is no historicity without the transparency of the tradition, Husserl says, and there is no historicity without this accumulation of equivocalities in language, as Joyce has said, and it's from that tension between the two interrelations of language that I try to address questions of language.

I would mention only two other points in Joyce in reference to our current discussion. One has to do with the question of the 'yes'. In my short essay on Joyce I tried to deal only with the word 'yes' as it was...performed, so to speak, in Ulysses; and I tried to show how all the paradoxes which are linked to this question of the 'yes'...this has to do with the fact that deconstruction is a 'yes', is linked, is an affirmation. When I say 'yes' - as you know, 'yes' is the last word in Ulysses - when I say 'yes' to the other in the form of a promise or an agreement or an oath, the 'yes' must be absolutely inaugural. In relation to the theme today, inauguration is a 'yes', I say 'yes' as a starting point, nothing precedes the yes, the yes is the moment of the institution, the origin; it's absolutely originary. But when you say 'yes', if you don't imply that the moment after that you will have to confirm the 'yes' by a second 'yes' - when I say 'yes', I immediately say 'yes, yes' - I commit myself to confirm my commitment in the next second, and tomorrow and after tomorrow and so on, which means that the 'yes' immediately duplicates itself, doubles itself. You cannot say 'yes' without saying 'yes, yes', which implies memory in the promise; I promise to keep the memory of the first yes and when you, in a wedding for instance, in a performative, in a promise, when you say 'yes, I agree, I will' you imply, 'I will say 'I will' tomorrow and I will confirm my promise', otherwise there is no promise. Which means that the 'yes' keeps in advance the memory of its own beginning. That's the way it's a different word. If tomorrow you don't confirm that you have founded today your program you will not have any relation to it.

Tomorrow, perhaps next year, perhaps twenty years from now we will - if today there has been any inauguration; we don't know yet, we don't know, we can't today, where I am speaking... who knows? So 'yes' has to be repeated, and immediately, immediately it implies what I call 'iterability', it implies the repetition of itself. Which is a threat, which is threatening at the same time because the second yes may be simply a parody or a record or mechanical repetition; it may say 'yes, yes' like a parrot, which means that the technical reproduction of the originary 'yes' is from the beginning threatening to the living origin of the 'yes', which means that the 'yes' is hounded by its own ghost, its own mechanical ghost, from the beginning. Which means that the second 'yes' will have to reinaugurate, to reinvent the first one. If tomorrow you don't reinvent today's inauguration... it will have been dead. Every day the inauguration has to be reinvented. So that's one thing.

The second thing I would select here has to do with what Joyce calls at some point the legal fiction of fatherhood. This is a very Christian moment - I am referring to this text; I cannot quote it here - but that's when Stephen says, well, 'Paternity is a legal fiction', and he refers to Christian texts, the Biblical text. Why is it so? Because one is supposed to know who the mother is; there is a possibility of bearing witness to who the mother is, whereas the father is only... only sort of reconstructed, inferred. The identification of the father is always resounding in a judgement - you cannot see the father. And I think that today we experience that not only is the father a legal fiction from which it draws and it has drawn its authority, and before I confirm this by saying, well, patriarchy has been a progress in the history of mankind because the father... to determine who the father is you need reason; for us to determine who the mother is, you only need sensible perception. I think he is wrong and he has always been wrong but we don't... there is not only this paternal preterite because the mother is also a legal fiction from that moment, that is, the motherhood is something which is interpreted. The theme of a reconstruction of an experience - what one calls today surrogate mothers for instance, with all the enormous problems that, you know, attest to the fact that we do not know is who is the mother - who is the mother in the case of surrogate mothers? And when we realize that the motherhood is not simply a matter of perception we realize that it has never been so, that the mother has always been a matter of interpretation, of social construction and so on and so forth, and this has enormous political consequences. We don't have time probably to deal with this but I would, if we had time I would try to show what the political consequences may be of this fact that the situation of the mother is the same as the one of the father in that respect.

[The conversation is brought to closure.]

Transcribed by J. Christian Guerrero; this interview is now in print in John D. Caputo, ed.: Deconstruction in a nutshell, Fordham UP 1997. Contact the webmaster fort details.

::source: http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/vill4.html

Excerpt from the Frontiers seminar at the University of Sussex: Session I of Frontiers

2007-08-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

Electronic volume of the 26 extant sessions of the Frontiers seminar held at the University of Sussex, 1989-92. About 500 pp. in normal view (140,000 words).
ISBN 0-9717625-6-2

We're going to be on the frontier for the next three years. Or at the border, on the edge, at the limit, in the margin, on the boundary, perhaps in no-man's land - maybe at the barrier or on the barricade, or even on the fence (let me remind you that 'fence' is the everyday sense of the French word clôture, now systematically translated 'closure'): and especially, perhaps, on the frontier (or border, edge, limit, margin, boundary, barrier, barricade or fence) between these various, non-synonymous words or concepts. But even though we'll be on the frontier for three years, we'll take things term by term.

One of the questions I'd like us to follow as literally as possible is that of how frontiers or boundaries happen. More naïvely or traditionally, we might ask, what is the nature of a frontier or a boundary? One of the texts we'll certainly be looking at sooner or later is the comment in Marx about exchange beginning accidentally at the frontiers of natural communities. (In due course we'll need to read this against Aristotle's analysis of exchange in the Politics, where this value of the 'accidental' as opposed to the 'natural' also plays a vital role in the argument about exchange.) We might want to wonder what a 'natural community' is, and whether natural communities have so-called 'natural boundaries' (where exchange begins accidentally). It's quite common to talk of coasts, rivers or ranges of mountains as 'natural boundaries': but we might wonder whether there are or ever could be natural boundaries, or whether natural boundaries are only ever called boundaries by analogy with non- natural ones, once they have been crossed. Or are all boundaries natural boundaries in the sense of being boundaries of nature, boundaries to nature, lines where nature ends, the transition or transgression point of nature into one of its others (culture, law, tekhné, politics, etc.)? Maybe every frontier also divides nature and culture.

Here's one description of a frontier happening, or not quite happening:

Remus, the story goes, was the first to receive a sign - six vultures; and no sooner was this made known to the people than double the number of birds appeared to Romulus. The followers of each promptly saluted their master as king, one side basing its claim upon priority, the other upon number. Angry words ensued, followed all too soon by blows, and in the course of the affray Remus was killed. There is another story, a commoner one, according to which Remus, by way of jeering at his brother, jumped over the half-built walls of the new settlement, whereupon Romulus killed him in a fit of rage, adding the threat, 'So perish whoever else shall overleap my battlements'. (Livy, I,6)

From which let's hold on at least to the suspicion that frontiers are constructed against prior violence or discord, and that their construction involves their being crossed before they can prevent crossing, all still in violence. Tracing a frontier is here a violent move in a violent context, and invites the further violence of jealousy, jeering, revenge and threat. Later on, reading Lyotard's The Wall of the Pacific, we'll come back to Rome and its frontiers, and wonder to what extent it can be taken as paradigmatic of frontiers in general.

Here's another, more recent description of a frontier happening, or not quite happening:

Wherever two regions are about to form a boundary (...), the third region (...) establishes a chain of outposts. In order that these outposts do not form bilateral borders with their neighbours, they in turn are surrounded by chains of islands in a structure which is repeated down to infinitely small dimensions...

What may seem almost impossible as a boundary between three 'countries' can be extended without any mathematical difficulty to situations with 4,5,6... competing domains. The boundary is made up entirely of points where 4,5,6... countries meet. (Peitgen and Richter, The Beauty of Fractals, p. 19).

This is from a popularising book about 'fractals'. One of the attractions of fractal geometry has been that it promises mathematical descriptions or models of 'natural' phenomena (coastlines and clouds, roots and branches, weather and turbulence) that had previously looked chaotic from the point of view of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian or even quantum mechanics. And although I hope we might one day look with due modesty at the strictly mathematical aspects of fractals, let's just note here the uncontrolled mixing in this description of 'natural' and 'political' language: there's talk of 'islands' but also of 'countries', of 'competing domains' involving borders with 'neighbours', and more than a suspicion of teleology in the mysterious 'In order that these outposts do not form bilateral borders...'. Where does the competition come from, and what force is preventing bilateralism in the name of a more complex plurality? Perhaps the boundary between the natural and the political here could itself be described in fractal terms, but let us beware of a covert metaphysics informing these descriptions, and the desire we may have to appeal to 'scientific' description as a final arbiter of our problems to come.

I started with a list of related words or concepts - or let's call them terms: frontier, boundary, edge, limit, border, margin. One thing I expect we may spend some time on is pretending to do some 'ordinary language philosophy' around these terms, or trying to establish their 'grammar', in Wittgenstein's sense. We can, I suppose, already invoke Derrida's handy notion of 'non-synonymous substitutions', though we need to recognise that this is also the name of a problem (what determines the substitutions if the terms are not synonymous - i.e. interchangeable salva veritate, in Leibniz's definition?). There seems to be good reason to think of Derrida here, not only in that he makes abundant use of this vocabulary, but because these words or concepts or terms (frontier, border, etc.) seem to share with others, such as difference, the complication involved in also saying something about what it is to be a concept, a word or a term. The term 'term', at any rate, means just that: boundary, border or frontier of territory: a term can be a stone or post (traditionally carved with the image of Jupiter terminus, god of boundaries) marking the limit of possession of a piece of ground. In one conception of philosophy at least, it would be our task to establish as precisely the possible the frontiers between these various concepts - and the establishment of precise frontiers between them would be a condition of their conceptuality. Frege famously suggests that if a concept does not have precise boundaries then it is simply not a concept:

The concept must have a sharp boundary. If we represent concepts in extension by areas on a plane, this is admittedly a picture that lay be used only with caution, but here it can do us good service. To a concept without sharp boundary there would correspond an area that had not a sharp boundary-line all round, but in places just vaguely faded away into the background. This would not really be an area at all; and likewise a concept that is not sharply defined is wrongly termed a concept. Such quasi-conceptual constructions cannot be recognised as concepts by logic; it is impossible to lay down precise laws for them. The law of excluded middle is really just another form of the requirement that the concept should have a sharp boundary. Any object Δ that you choose to take either falls under the concept or does not fall under it; tertium non datur. E.g. would the sentence 'any square root of 9 is odd' have a comprehensible sense at all if square root of 9 were not a concept with a sharp boundary? Has the question 'Are we still Christians?' really got a sense, if it is indeterminate whom the predicate 'Christian' can truly be ascribed to, and who must be refused it? (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. 2, par.56: Translations, p. 139)

And Wittgenstein equally famously contests this necessity, typically enough by pursuing Frege's analogy or 'picture' (which Frege has said 'may be used only with caution', and to which he himself could not accord conceptual status - Frege's passage is a non-conceptual description of what a concept is or must be): here, for example, in par.71 of the Philosophical Investigations:

One might say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges. - 'But is a blurred concept a concept at all?' - Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?

Frege compares a concept to an area and says that an area with vague boundaries cannot be called an area at all. This presumably means that we cannot do anything with it. [You'll remember that Frege actually complains about an impossibility of laying down the law for it] - But is it senseless to say: 'Stand roughly there'? Suppose that I were standing with someone in a city square and said that. As I say it I do not draw any kind of boundary, but perhaps point with my hand - as if I were indicating a particular spot.

Or again, a little earlier:

I can give the concept 'number' rigid limits in this way, that is, use the word 'number' for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier. And this is how we do use the word 'game'. For how is the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a game and what no longer does? Can you give a boundary? No. You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word 'game'.)

'But then the use of the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregulated'. - It is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too. (68)

And, finally for now:

If I tell someone 'Stand roughly here' - may not this explanation work perfectly? And cannot every other one fail too? But isn't it an inexact explanation? - Yes; why shouldn't we call it 'inexact'? Only let us understand what 'inexact' means. For it does not mean 'unusable'. And let us consider what we call an 'exact' explanation in contrast with this one. Perhaps something like drawing a chalk line round an area? Here it strikes us at once that the line has breadth. So a colour-edge would be more exact. But has this exactness still got a function here: isn't the engine idling? And remember too that we have not yet defined what is to count as overstepping this exact boundary; how, with what instruments, it is to be established. And so on. (par.88)

We shall need to come back to these texts in detail. Let me pick out for now the perception that 'the line has breadth' (whereas the (colour-)edge has none), and the persistent linking, in Wittgenstein at least, of these questions with questions of pointing, of pointing out (in the immediate vicinity of these remarks, 'A rule stands there like a sign-post' (par.85)), and therefore of deictics ('Stand here, stand there'). We shall need to see whether this association of questions of boundaries and questions of pointing is accidental, or whether the two (boundary-posts - terms, as we were saying - , and sign-posts) always go together or get confused. To do this, we shall not only follow all the paradoxical sign-posts and pointing fingers in Wittgenstein in the Tractatus as well as the Philosophical Investigations, but also in the Philosophical Grammar and in On Certainty (though by doing that I think we shall be able to establish some perhaps surprising links between the early and late Wittgenstein), but wonder why the first two examples Heidegger gives of 'signs' in par.17 of Being and Time should be 'signposts' and 'boundary-stones', precisely, or why the one example he chooses for detailed analysis in the same section should be that of an 'adjustable red arrow' sometimes (apparently) fitted to motor cars, so that they can indicate to others which way they are going at a cross-roads (where no doubt there is a signpost to help the driver make up his mind), and why the preliminary examination of the sense of logos in the introduction to Being and Time should stress so much Aristotle's notion of 'apophantic' discourse as 'making manifest in the sense of letting something be seen by pointing it out'. And these questions will rapidly lead us into a detour via Lyotard and Derrida, in an attempt to clarify their apparent conflict over the interpretation of deictic terms, especially in Husserl.

More surprisingly, perhaps, we shall have to take account of arguments in Derrida's new 'Afterword' to Limited Inc, around the status of conceptual boundaries, which we have just seen Wittgenstein suggest need not be rigid or precise. Searle accuses Derrida of hanging on to the Fregean assumption (which Searle rather sarcastically associates with logical positivism, using that well-known anti-deconstruction line which begins 'I find it rather ironic that...') of a need for rigid distinctions, and Derrida retorts in a way which may give us pause:

How can one make the demand for 'rigorous and precise' distinction the property of any one school of thought or of any one philosophical style? What philosophers ever since there were philosophers, what logician ever since there were logicians, what theoretician ever renounced this axiom: in the order of concepts (for we are speaking of concepts and not of the colors of clouds or the taste of certain chewing gums), when a distinction cannot be rigorous or precise, it is not a distinction at all. If Searle declares explicitly, seriously, literally that this axiom must be renounced, that he renounces it (...), then, short of practising deconstruction with some consistency and of submitting the very rules and regulations of his project to an explicit reworking, his entire philosophical discourse on speech acts will collapse even more rapidly. (pp. 123-4)

and only a little later:

I confirm it: for me, from the point of view of theory and of the concept, 'unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn't really a distinction'. Searle is entirely right, for once, in attributing this 'assumption' to me. I feel close to those who share it. (p. 126)

This is part of a general attack on Searle's concern always to aim for the 'centre' of concepts (of the promise, for example) and leave the margins to look after themselves. As this is a general tendency in much so-called 'analytic' philosophy, we shall have to look at it seriously. The problem is made more acute by the fact that Derrida himself seems on occasion to resort to the same procedure - in 'Signature, Event, Context', for example, he seems happy to isolate 'essential' features of the concept of communication, and elsewhere talks of concepts having a 'nucleus' or core. And even though there is an immediate difference between Derrida's reading off central features of a classical concept (including the classical concept of concept) before doing something else, rather than attempting to establish a legality of a concept for future use, and even though the very concept of 'centre' is famously read in this way in 'Structure, Sign and Play', there is here a difficult set of relationships between what are and are not concepts, what is and is not philosophy, which involve the whole question of deconstruction and which we shall have to treat with care to avoid many current misunderstandings.

Kant and Hegel beckon to us here too. Kant's philosophy is all about drawing frontiers and establishing the legality of territories. In the 'Introduction' to the third Critique, for example, there is a rather more complex use of the spatial analogy we've just seen in Frege:

Concepts, so far as they are referred to objects apart from the question of whether knowledge of them is possible or not, have their field [feld], which is determined simply by the relation in which their Object stands to our faculty of cognition in general. - The part of this field in which knowledge is possible for us, is a territory (territorium) for these concepts and the requisite cognitive faculty. The part of the territory over which they exercise legislative authority is the realm (ditio) of these concepts, and their appropriate cognitive faculty. Empirical concepts have, therefore, their territory, doubtless, in nature as the complex of all sensible objects, but they have no realm (only a dwelling- place, domicilium), for, although they are formed according to law, they are not themselves legislative, but the rules founded on them are empirical, and consequently contingent. (Eng. tr. p. 12)

This quite complex topology is related to a pervasive Kantian language of territory, which is certainly not innocent. Here, for example, from the first Critique, is the opening of Chapter III ('The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in general into Phenomena and Noumena') of Book II ('Analytic of Principles') of the First Division ('Transcendental Analytic') of the Second Part ('Transcendental Logic') of the first main section ('Transcendental Doctrine of Elements'):

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth - enchanting name! - surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion. Before we venture on this sea, to explore it in all directions and to obtain assurance whether there be any ground for such hopes, it will be well to begin by casting a glance upon the map of the land which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether we cannot in any case be satisfied with what it contains - are not, indeed, under compulsion to be satisfied, inasmuch as there may be no other territory upon which we can settle; and, secondly, by what title we possess even this domain, and can consider ourselves as secured against all opposing claims. (Eng. tr., p. 257)

There is much at stake in this language of boundaries, mapping and possession. We should try to follow it not only in Kant, but in Lyotard's recent readings of Kant (and notably perhaps, in Le différend, his extension of Kant's island analogy to that of the archipelago of discursive genres). Hegel's critique of Kant, for example, is crucially concerned to undermine the legitimacy of this boundary-language, seeing it as the culprit for the diremption in Kant between understanding and Reason and eventually between the concept and the law. Both in the Phenomenology and in the Greater Logic, there are powerful arguments against this Kantian set-up. Gillian Rose's reading of this nexus - including Kant's late distinction between boundary and limit - in her Hegel and Sociology will help us here, and also, perhaps, to explore some of the (bad) arguments about law and post-structuralism put forward in her Dialectic of Nihilism.

This general problem of conceptual boundaries (or frontiers, or edges, or limits) may seem preliminary to any investigation at all of our problem. It looks as though we ought to clarify the conceptual boundaries of the concept of boundary before we try to clarify problems with 'real' boundaries. But I'd like to suggest that we postpone it - probably until next year. Doing this postponement, which implies that we can get along fine for the time being without that clarification, almost certainly commits us to something like the Wittgensteinian argument outlined above. I suggest this partly for 'pragmatic' reasons (the 'Afterword' to Limited Inc also has some interesting remarks about pragmatics), but partly in the spirit of the deconstructive argument (which we shall rehearse in due course) against the possibility of absolutely justifiable starting-points. According to the Grammatology, we must start 'somewhere where we are, in a text already...', and move on following our noses to see where we might be going. Wittgenstein says at the beginning of the 'Lecture on Ethics' that the problem resides in the fact that 'The listener is unable to see both the road he is being led to take and the goal to which it leads' (in this case - but in fact in general - this is true of the speaker as well as the listener): here that necessary contingency pushes me to return rather more literally to Wittgenstein's and Kant's language of spaces and areas with or without frontiers - in other words, to a language of territory. Standing in a city square and saying 'stand roughly there' was one of Wittgenstein's scenarios I just quoted. This suggests problems of space and place which might inspire us to read Heidegger's explication of those terms in 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking', but might also point us toward a whole set of questions we might entitle 'Architecture and postmodernism'. Remember Jameson's distress at the experience of space (and the need for signposts) in the foyer of the Bonaventura hotel, for example. Or, in Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, something of a precursor text for architectural postmodernism, a comment on 'residual space':

Residual space in between dominant spaces with varying degrees of openness can occur at the scale of the city and is a characteristic of the fora and other complexes of late Roman urban planning. Residual spaces are not unknown in our cities. I am thinking of the open spaces under our highways and the buffer spaces around them. Instead of acknowledging and exploiting these characteristic kinds of space we make them into parking lots or feeble patches of grass - no-man's lands between the scale of the region and the locality. (p. 80)

Residual space communicates with the vague boundaries of Wittgenstein's persistent analogy - but rather than pursue the phenomenological flavour of this talk of region and locality, I'd like to exploit its own lack of conceptual clarity by picking on its links with a geo-political sense of region, which rapidly requires clarification of the notion of country and all that that implies - as in the analogical terminology used in the unreflected way I quoted from the authors of book on fractals. Can we separate this geo-political dimension from the most apparently 'abstract' reflection on concepts and the nature of philosophy, once the language of frontiers and borders seems inescapable? (This question will confirm Hegel's identification of a link between boundaries and/or limits and the 'ought' of morality). It also involves the problem of the frontier between 'philosophical' and 'ordinary'(?) language which will again haunt our discussion of Derrida and Searle: in 'La Double Séance', for example, Derrida writes:

When a writing marks and re-marks this undecidability, its formalising power is greater - even if it is apparently 'literary' or seems to come from a natural language - than that of a proposition in logico-mathematical form still short of this type of mark. Supposing that the still metaphysical distinction between natural language and artificial language is rigorous (and here we are no doubt touching on the limit of its pertinence), there would be texts in so-called natural language whose formalising power would be greater than that accorded to certain apparently formal notations. (p. 251)

Note that the metaphysical distinction seems to break down at a limit, which suggests a continuing problem around border-terms. But this will also allow us some literary readings of frontiers, and especially perhaps Kafka's 'Great Wall of China'.)

Deleuze and Guattari, at any rate, seem prepared to claim a priority of the geo-political over the conceptual, at least in its traditional self-conceptualisation:

Thought would in itself already conform to a model borrowed from the State apparatus, fixing it aims and paths, conduits, channels, organs, a whole organon. There would, then, be an image of thought covering the whole of thought, which would be the special object of a 'noology', and which would be like the State-form developed in thought. And this image has two heads which refer precisely to the two poles of sovereignty: [on the one hand] an imperium of true-thinking, which operates by magical capture, grasp or bond, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (mythos); [and on the other] a republic of free spirits which proceeds by pact or contract, constituting a legislative and juridical organisation, bringing the sanction of a foundation (logos)... Remaining with this image, it is clear that it is not a simple metaphor, each time there is talk of an imperium of the true and a republic of spirits. It is the condition of constitution of thought as principle or form of interiority, as a stratum. (Mille Plateaux, pp. 465-6)

And everything they write about territorialisation and de-territorialisation, about nomadism and sedentarism, about smooth and striated spaces, and especially perhaps about war-machines, will concern us too. But let's start with borders and frontiers in this apparently 'literal' sense. Deleuze and Guattari say themselves that 'the most important thing is perhaps frontier-phenomena, where nomad-science exerts a pressure on State science, and where, conversely, State science appropriates and transforms the data of nomad science' (Mille plateaux, p. 449). This isn't just a tribute to 1992, when our three years will be up, but let's pretend that it is for the moment. Nor is it an attempt simply to follow a recent interest in France in questions of nationalism and internationalism, of cosmopolitanism and racism, though we should at least keep an eye on that too. What I propose we do for this year is to look at some of the major texts of the tradition of political philosophy with an eye to frontiers and border-crossings, international relations, war, invasion, foreigners and cosmopolitanism. This should not be essentially a historical investigation (and it certainly won't be exhaustive) - there's no reason to feel that we would be competent to do that - but, in more philosophical vein, more like an attempt to work out some conditions for any such historical approach to get started. If this remark has a good old Kantian-transcendental flavour to it, maybe that's because the two texts I'd like to start with are indeed by Kant: on the one hand the 'Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View' of 1784, and on the other, 'Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch', of 1795-6. And to introduce those texts in a way which suggests that the link with Kant's territorial analogy for the divisions of reason is not innocent, here's a passage from the Metaphysics of Morals (which we should remember is a doctrinal rather than a critical text) which introduces many of the themes that with concern us in the immediate future:

A country (territorium) [the same Latin word used in the Introduction to the third Critique for that part of the general field of Reason accessible to knowledge] whose inhabitants are fellow citizens of one and the same commonwealth by the very nature of the constitution (i.e. without having to exercise any particular right, so that they are already citizens by birth) is called the fatherland of these citizens. Lands in which this condition of citizenship does not apply to them are foreign countries. And a country which is part of a wider system of government is called a province (in the sense in which the Romans used this word); since it is not, however, an integrated part of an empire (imperii) whose inhabitants are all fellow-citizens, but is only a possession and subordinate realm of the empire, it must respect the territory of the ruling state as its motherland (regio domina). (Kant's Political Writings, p. 160)

And as the problem of sexual difference will emerge as a complexity not always addressed and certainly not clarified in the texts we shall read, here is a little more on the maternal and the paternal, from Kant's essay 'On the Common Saying: "This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice"' (1793):

The only conceivable government for men who are capable of possessing rights, even if the ruler is benevolent, is not a paternal but a patriotic government (imperium non paternale, sed patrioticum). A patriotic attitude is one where everyone in the state, not excepting its head, regards the commonwealth as a maternal womb, or the land as the paternal ground from which he himself sprang and which he must leave to his descendants as a treasured pledge. (p. 74)

As this maternal womb will not fail to remind some of you of recent work around the notion of chora in Kristeva and Derrida, let me end today by recalling that in Greek one of the primary senses of that word (which does not mean womb) is, precisely, territory, country, homeland. Thus Orestes, his crime finally absolved by Apollo at the end of Aeschylus's trilogy the Oresteia (to which we shall return), pardoned on the grounds that his killing his mother, Clytemnestra, for killing his father, Agamemnon - you remember the story - that this is a lesser crime than was hers in killing his father because a mother's womb is no more than a receptacle for the child who is essentially the work of the father, mother and child being essentially in a relation of stranger to stranger or foreigner to foreigner [xeno xene: there seems every reason in the context to maintain a metaphor of international politics], thus Orestes, who had been deprived of fatherland [gaias patroas] leaves Athens where the trial has taken place, to return to Argos, whence he had been chased by the furies after his crime, to return home [pros domos], but not before pledging a pact of peace, indeed of perpetual peace, for the oath is for 'the fullness of all time to come [apanta pleistere kronos]' between Argos and Athens, your land, your chora.

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Interview in LA Weekly: The Three Ages of Jacques Derrida

2007-08-03T16:15:00.001-07:00

WHEN PEOPLE TALK ABOUT CRAZY FRENCH INTELLECTUALS and esoteric superstars, when they stumble across the word deconstructionism in Entertainment Weekly and wonder what it could possibly mean, when college kids around the world are forced to figure out what it means, as they have been for the last 20 years -- it all goes back to Jacques Derrida. One of the reigning figures of intellectual life of the last quarter-century, Derrida is the father of Deconstructionism, a controversial system of analysis designed to dismantle language and reveal the biases and false assumptions embedded within it. Rooted in the belief that language is freighted with things we're either unable or unwilling to bring to full consciousness, Deconstructionism is a flexible methodology applicable to any and all texts -- and indeed, the impact it's had on literary criticism is equal to, if not greater than, the mark it's left on philosophical discourse.

Born in 1930 to a family of assimilated Sephardic Jews in what was then French Algeria, Derrida began questioning intellectual prejudice at the age of 10, when Algeria was overrun by France's collaborationist Vichy regime. At that point Derrida was expelled from school after being informed by a teacher that "French culture is not made for little Jews." He went on to a career as a disruptive, inarguably gifted student, and at 19 he moved to Paris to study philosophy at the Ècole Normale Supérieure. It was there he met Marguerite Aucouturier, a psychoanalyst, whom he married in 1957. Attending the school from 1952 through 1956, Derrida focused primarily on the works of the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and his writings on their work led to a scholarship to Harvard in 1956. Returning to Paris in 1960 to teach philosophy at the Sorbonne, Derrida declared his independence as a philosopher two years later with a translation of Husserl's Origin of Geometry, appended with a book-length introduction that dwarfed Husserl's essay. In 1967 he laid out his central ideas with the publication of three seminal books -- Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology -- which catapulted him to the center of the philosophical discourse. The author of 45 books that have been translated into 22 languages, Derrida was appointed a visiting professor at the University of California at Irvine in 1986. And in a major coup for the university, Irvine began acquiring the Derrida archive in 1990.

Derrida spoke with me recently in his modest office at Irvine. Given the fearlessness and ambition of his work, he's surprisingly approachable in person, and his ideas seem considerably less daunting in conversation than they do on the page. He's a very charming man, and his charisma comes across clearly in Derrida, a documentary directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman that opens this week.

L.A. WEEKLY: Why did you agree to be filmed for Derrida?

DERRIDA: I didn't immediately agree to it. I proceeded with deep reservations that had to do with the discomfort I've always felt about my image in photographs. I succeeded in publishing for almost 20 years without a single image of myself appearing in connection with my books, and there were two reasons for that. First, I had what you might describe as ideological objections to the conventional author photograph -- a head shot, a picture of the writer at his desk -- because it struck me as a concession to selling and to media. The second reason was that I've always had a difficult relationship with my own body and image. It's hard for me to look at myself in photographs, so for 20 years I gave myself permission to erase my image on political grounds. Over the last decade that became increasingly difficult, because I was constantly appearing in public spaces at conferences attended by journalists, many of whom took pictures. It finally became impossible to control, and as I felt it was time to overcome this resistance, I finally let it go. And I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by how successfully the film intertwines the private everyday life of family with things less private -- a trip I took to South Africa during the filming, for instance -- and reflections on big subjects. The film has a consistent through line in that it continually questions the biography of authors. Should a philosopher have a biography?

How could a philosopher not have a biography?

Of course he has a biography, but the question I raise is whether we should publish it. Should he himself narrate his own biography? Should he let his own life be public and be interpreted?

How can you separate a philosopher's writing from his life?

I don't know if you can, but most classical philosophers did try to separate them, and some of them succeeded. If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.

In the film you're asked: If you could listen to the philosophers you've admired talk about anything, what would you like to hear them talk about? You reply, "Their sexual lives, because it's the thing they don't talk about." But when the interviewer then asks you about your own sexual life, you decline to answer. Why is this territory off limits?

I declined to answer not because I think these things must be hidden, but because I don't want to disclose the most personal aspects of my life while improvising in front of a camera in a foreign language. If I'm to discuss such things, I prefer to sharpen my own tools -- my writing. If you read me, you'll find there are many texts where I address these questions in my way. Glas [published in 1974], The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond [1980], and Circumfession [1991] are autobiographical, and my own life and desires are inscribed in all of my writing.

Can you recall the moment when you first realized that god, as the word is conventionally understood, was a notion you couldn't embrace?

To discuss this, we must insist on that definition of god -- as the word is conventionally understood. But yes, I can recall it. While I was growing up, I was regularly taken to a synagogue in Algiers, and there were aspects of Judaism I loved -- the music, for instance. Nonetheless, I started resisting religion as a young adolescent, not in the name of atheism, but because I found religion as it was practiced within my family to be fraught with misunderstanding. It struck me as thoughtless, just blind repetitions, and there was one thing in particular I found unacceptable: that was the way honors were dispersed. The honor of carrying and reading the Torah was auctioned off in the synagogue, and I found that terrible. Then when I was 13, I read Nietzsche for the first time, and though I didn't understand him completely, he made a big impression on me. The diary I kept then was filled with quotations from Nietzsche and Rousseau, who was my other god at the time. Nietzsche objected violently to Rousseau, but I loved them both and wondered, how can I reconcile them both in me?

In an interview he gave shortly after World War II but ordered withheld from publication until after his death in 1976, Heidegger said, "Philosophy after Nietzsche could offer neither help nor hope for mankind's future. All we can do is wait for a god to reappear. Only a god can save us now." Do you agree?

I wouldn't use the term "a god," but what interests me in this statement is that Heidegger was anti-religious. He was raised Catholic, but he vehemently rejected Christianity, so the god he refers to is not the god we know. He refers to a god who not only hasn't come yet, but perhaps doesn't exist. He gives the name of god to the one who is hoped for, and implies that the one who'd come and save us will have the name of god. I don't agree with this if it encourages hope for salvation, but if the statement means that we're waiting for the arrival of an unpredictable one, and that we must be hospitable to the coming of this one, then I've got no objection. This is a form of what I'd describe as messianicity without messianism, and we are by nature messianic. We cannot not be, because we exist in a state of expecting something to happen. Even if we're in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come. If that's what Heidegger meant, then I agree with him.

Did you fear for your life as a child growing up during World War II?

No. My experience during the war was difficult, but it couldn't be compared with what happened to the Jews in Europe. There was terrible anti-Semitism in Algeria, but there were no Germans in the country, no concentration camps, no massive deportation of Jews. But the traumas occurred nonetheless. When you are expelled from school without understanding why, it marks you.

In Ron Rosenbaum's book of 1998, Explaining Hitler, he suggests that meaning itself was Hitler's ultimate victim, because coherent meaning cannot be found in the Holocaust. Do you agree?

I'll go very slowly here. I know there are philosophers who think that what was absolutely new in the genocide of the Holocaust was that it had no sacrificial structure. It was cold, rational, industrial, and it was given no sacrificial meaning. I'm not sure that's true. I'm not prepared to answer that question without a good deal more thought.

What are the central questions philosophy came into existence to answer?

First of all, how to handle one's life and live well together -- which is also politics. This is what was addressed in Greek philosophy, and from the beginning, philosophy and politics were deeply intertwined. We are living beings who believe we have the capacity to change life, and we place ourselves above other animals. I'm critical of the question of the animal and how it's treated in philosophy, but that's another issue. Still, we think we're not animals and that we have the ability to organize our lives. Philosophy poses the question: What should we do to have the best possible lives? I'm afraid we haven't made much progress in arriving at an answer to this question.

What's the difference between knowledge and wisdom?

They aren't heterogeneous, and you can know lots of things and have no wisdom at all. Between knowledge and action there is an abyss, but that abyss shouldn't prevent us from trying to know as much as possible before making a decision. Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Philia is love and sophia is wisdom, so the duty to be wise is what philosophy is. Nonetheless, decisions don't depend exclusively on knowledge. I try to know as much as possible before making a decision, but I know that at the moment of the decision I'll make a leap beyond knowledge.

Did arriving at the set of understandings you presented in your books of 1967 bring you greater happiness?

I wouldn't say it made me happier, but it gave me the strength to continue. I lead a very active, exhausting life, and if someone had told me when I was 20 that I'd be doing what I do now at the age of 72, I wouldn't have believed it. I was more physically fragile then, and I would've collapsed from doing a fraction of what I do now. The reception of the work gives me this energy. People are generous with me and my work, and I'm sure I would collapse without that generosity.

Why aren't there any female philosophers?

Because the philosophical discourse is organized in a manner that marginalizes, suppresses and silences women, children, animals and slaves. This is the structure -- it would be stupid to deny it, and consequently there have been no great women philosophers. There have been great women thinkers, but philosophy is one very particular mode of thinking among other modes of thinking. But we're in a historical phase when things like this are changing.

Would you describe yourself as a feminist?

This is a huge problem, but in a way, yes. Much of my work has dealt with the deconstruction of phallocentrism, and if I may say this myself, I was one of the first to put this question at the center of the philosophical discourse. Of course I'm in favor of ending the repression of women, particularly as it's perpetuated in the philosophical groundings of phallocentrism, so in that regard I'm an ally of feminine culture. But that doesn't prevent me from having reservations about some manifestations of feminism. To simply invert the hierarchy, or for women to appropriate the most negative aspects of what's conventionally viewed as masculine behavior, benefits no one.

What's the most widely held misconception about you and your work?

That I'm a skeptical nihilist who doesn't believe in anything, who thinks nothing has meaning, and text has no meaning. That's stupid and utterly wrong, and only people who haven't read me say this. It's a misreading of my work that began 35 years ago, and it's difficult to destroy. I never said everything is linguistic and we're enclosed in language. In fact, I say the opposite, and the deconstruction of logocentrism was conceived to dismantle precisely this philosophy for which everything is language. Anyone who reads my work with attention understands that I insist on affirmation and faith, and that I'm full of respect for the texts I read.

With sufficient understanding of the Other, could the impulse to kill be erased?

The drive to kill will never be erased, because it's part of the human animal. The human animal has a capacity for cruelty, and to make the Other suffer can be a source of pleasure. That isn't eradicable, but it doesn't mean we have the right to kill -- and this is one of the crucial functions of philosophy and thinking, to handle this irreducible drive. Cruelty and aggression are always there, but they can be transformed into things that are beautiful and sublime. When I write, there's an element of aggression in that activity, but I attempt to transform that aggression into something useful. Aggression can be transformed into something more interesting than killing -- and of course, you can kill without killing. I can kill the Other without putting an end to his or her life, and can be aggressive in a way that's not despicable.

Concepts of territory and ownership seem to be at the root of much human conflict; where did these ideas originate, and why do we cling to them?

For many centuries, the city was a crucially important center of commerce, but with new technology that's no longer the case, and the politics of owning a place are different. Nevertheless, the place remains important. A friend of mine recently said there are two things today that can't be deterritorialized or virtualized: They are Jerusalem -- nobody wants virtual Jerusalem, they want to own the actual soil -- and the other thing is oil. The capitalistic nation states live on oil, and although that could be changed, the whole society would collapse if it did. That's why oil is a problem. It's more of a problem in America than it is in Europe, but we share the same concerns. Everything is always more in America, for obvious reasons.

Is the past more apt to be a source of pain or pleasure for people?

This differs from one person to the next, but I'm fortunate in that I have a happy relationship with the past -- I even keep happy memories of difficult parts of my life that I know were terrible. I'd like to repeat my life, and would accept that everything be repeated endlessly, exactly as it happened. The eternal return.

What's important to you today?

How can I answer such a question? Many things private, public and political are important to me, but I think of all these things with a constant awareness that I'm aging, I'm going to die, and life is short. I'm constantly attentive to the time left to me, and although I've been inclined this way since I was young, it becomes more serious when you reach 72. So far I haven't made my peace with the inevitability of death, and I doubt I ever will, and this awareness permeates everything I think. It's terrible what's going on in the world, and all these things are on my mind, but they exist alongside this terror of my own death.

At what point did you become an adult?

This is an intriguing question. I've always believed everyone has more than one age, and I carry three ages within myself. When I was 20 I felt old and wise, but now I feel like a child. There's an element of melancholy to this, because although I feel young in my heart, I know objectively that I'm not young. The second age I carry is my real age of 72, and every day I'm confronted with signs that remind me of it. The third age I carry -- and this is something I only feel in France -- is the age I was when I began to publish, which was 35. It's as if I stopped at 35 in the cultural world where I work. Of course that's not true, because in many circles I'm considered an old, well-known professor who's published a lot. Nonetheless, I feel as though I'm a young writer who just started publishing, and people are saying, "Well, he's promising."

::this article is compilation of Peter Krapp 1994 - 2004. Visit the website http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/laweekly.html

Derrida's correspondence: "An e-mail to Freud"

2007-08-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

We will not commence with the commencement, if I have your consent, nor even with the archive. But rather with the word *archive* and with the archive of so familiar a word. Arkhé, as you know, names at once the commencement and the commandment. We have here, apparently, two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, where things commence (physical, historical or ontological principle), but also the principle according to the law, where command, authority, social order are exercised, the place from which order is given (nomological principle).

There are two orders of order here: sequential and jussive. From this point on, a series of cleavages will incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon. Already in the Arkhé of the commencement, I alluded to the commencement accroding to nature or history, introducing surreptitiously an entire chain of belated and problematic oppositions between physis and its others, thesis, tekhné, nomos etc., which are found to be at work in the other principle, the nomological principle of the Arkhé, the principle of the commandment. All would be quite simple if there were one principle or two principles, and if the physis and each one of its others were one or two. As we have suspected for a long time, it is nothing of the sort, yet we are forever forgetting this. There is always more than one and more or less than two. Both in the order of the commencement and in the order of the commandment. The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name Arkhé. It's sheltered by and from this memory, which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.

[...]

And the theory of the archive is a theory of this institutionalization, that is to say of the law, of the right which authorizes it. This right imposes or supposes a bundle of limits which all have a history, a deconstructible history, and to the deconstruction of which psychoanalysis has not been foreign, to say the least. In what concerns family or state law, the relations between the secret and the non-secret, or, and this is not the same thing, between the private and the public, in what concerns property or access rights, publication or reproduction rights, in what concerns classification and ordering (what comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? what comes under system? under biography or autobiography? under personal and intellectual anamnesis? in so-called theoretical works, what is worthy of this name and what is not? should one rely on what Freud says about this to classify his works, and believe for example that it has to do with a novel when he speaks of a "historical novel", etc.?), in each of these cases, the limits, the borders and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept, no implementation of the archive, can be sheltered. Not a single order.

[...]

As the death drive is also, accroding to the words Freud himself most stressed, an aggression and a destruction drive, it incites not only forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mnemé or anamnesis, but also the radical effacement of that which can never be reduced to mnemé or to anamnesis, and of which I would like to speak tonight, that is the archive, consignment, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, is neither memory nor anamnesis as spontaneous experience, alive and internal experience. There is no archive without a place of consignment, without a technique of repetition and without a certain exteriority. There's no archive without outside. Allow me to stress this Greek distinction between mnemé or anamnesis on the one hand, and hypomnema on the other, a distinction which has occupied me at length elsewhere. The archive is hypomnetic.

[...]

In what way has the whole of this field been determined by a state of the technology of communication and of archivization? One can dream or speculate about the earthquakes which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to telephonic credit cards from MCI or AT&T, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences and above all E mail. I would like to have devoted my whole lecture to this retrospective science-fiction, and to imagining with you the scene of that other archive after the earthquake. As I am not able to do this, on account of the ever archaic organization of our colloquia, of the time and space at our disposal, I will limit myself to a remark: this archival earthquake would not have limited itself to the secondary recording, to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis; it would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, as writing, prosthesis or hypomnestic technique in general is not only the stockroom and the conservatory for archivable contents of the past which would exist in any case, and just the same, without the archive.

No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable contents even as it comes into existence and its relationship to the future. This means that in the past psychoanalysis would not have been what it was (no more so than many other things) if electronic mail, for example, had existed. And in the future it will no longer be what Freud and so many psychoanalysts have anticipated now that E mail, for example, has become possible. One could find many clues other than E mail. As a technological postal system, this example undoubtedly merits privilege because of the major and exceptional role played in the psychoanalytic archive by a handwritten correspondence of which we have yet to finish discovering and processing the immense corpus, in part unpublished, in part secret, and, perhaps, in part radically and irreversibly destroyed - for example by Freud himself, who knows? And one must consider the historical and nonaccidental reasons which have tied such an institution, in its theoretical and practical dimensions, to postal communication and to this particular form of mail, to its substrates, to its average speed: a handwritten letter takes so many days to arrive in another European city, etc. But the indicative value of E mail is privileged in my opinion for a more important and obvious reason: because electronic mail today, and even more than the fax, is on the way to transfroming the entire public and private space of humanity, and first of all the limit between the private, the secret, and the public or phenomenal. This is not only a technique: this instrumental possibility of production, of printing, of conservation and of destruction of the archive is inevitably accompanied by juridical and thus political transformations which affect property rights, publishing and reproduction rights, etc.

[...]

In an enigmatic sense which will clarify itself perhaps (perhaps, because nothing can be sure here, for essential reasons), the question of the archive is not, I repeat, a question of the past, the question of a concept dealing with the past which already might either be at our disposal or not at out disposal, an archivable concept of the archive, but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know tomorrow. Perhaps. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and like religion, like history, like science itself, this ties it to a very singular experience of the promise.

Selected and consigned to this archive in 1995

Derrida Speech: Forgetting by heart

2007-08-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

Glas, 195-196b
by Jacques Derrida

"I forget, in a certain way, everything I write, doubtless also, in another way, what I read. Save this or that sentence, some sentence morsel, apparently secondary, whose lack of apparent importance does not in any case justify this sort of resonance, of obsessive reverberation that guards itself, detached, so long after the engulfing, more and more rapid, of all the remain(s), of all the rest. One ought to touch there (coagulation of sense, form, rhythm) on the compulsional matrix of writing, upon its organizing affect. From what I have written, I have never retained 'by heart', almost, anything but these few words, on the basis of which I am doubtless becoming infatuated here with the genetic 'first verse' and some others. They are: 'l'exergue et le gisant esoufflé de mon discours' ('the epigraph and breathless sarcophagous of my discourse') and 'en pierre d'attente. Et d'angle comme on pourra, par chance ou récurrence, le recevoir de quelques marques déposées' ('protruding like a toothing-stone, waiting for something to mesh with. And like a cornerstone as it can, by chance or by recurrence, be gathered from the registering of certain trade-marks'). Without a comma [virgule] after angle. Angle is always, for me, a tomb's edge. And I understand this word, angle, its gl, at the back of my throat as what at once cuts off and spirits (away) from/in me all the remain(s).
I forgot. The first verse I published: 'glu de l'étang lait de ma mort noyée' ('glue of the pool milk of my drowned death')."

Summary of Impromptu Remarks

2007-08-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

58 min 41 sec
from ANYONE, ed. Cynthia Davidson, 1991, p. 39-45

(The following remarks were presented in an improvised translation. They have since been transcribed, edited, reedited, and so forth. Therefore, caveat lector.)

We do not have much time, so I will limit myself to some points. I will make some points, as you say in the language that remains foreign to me and to which I remain foreign. But, in any case, how can one make a point? And as I try to say something on the subject of the point and the point of the subject, I must also ask something of the stranger and the foreigner. What do strange and foreign mean? What, from the point of view of architecture, are a stranger and a foreigner?

The first point: At this conference, the point is the subject. Traditionally, the point is very determined, marking the one, the unity, the identity, the singularity. At the same time, however, the point is the least determined unity, identity, or singularity, that one can represent.

One can present a point of view. There is as well a point of departure - a point of departure for a line, which is also the point of departure for a surface, for a volume, and ultimately for time - time being the truth of space for Hegel. Whether in the language of Hegel or Klee the derivation point, line, plane, volume, time is the normal form of derivation and of the construction of space and within space. Not much rhetorical effort is required to argue that the question of points links all the questions of architecture to the question of the subject, the self, the identity, the one of anyone. In this sense, the point is very determined.

At the same time, the point is so undetermined, so anonymous, so unnameable, that it lends itself immediately to substitution - even sacrificial substitution. A point - en vaut un autre, I would say in French - is equivalent to another, is exchangable for another, and is worth another. Likewise, the subject, the self, the signature, and man, to the extent that they are representable by points, are at one and the same time calculable and replaceable, determined and undetermined. As such, each defines a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of the access of the individual (the individual as indivisble resembles a point) to law, to rights, to equality, to electoral democracy, to parrliamentary regimes, to individual property, and, therefore, to capitalism. Il faut du point - one must have a point, the point is necessary. The indivisible point is indispensable to the maintenance of all these institutions, to their holding up or standing together. This determination of the point has two serious implications. First, that the point is indivisible and, therefore, does not relate to itself, the relation to self (without which there is no self) supposing internal difference - fold, reflection, division - even if it is notself-consciousness. This implies, then, that a point can be one but on the condition of not being a self (selfsame).

Second, to the extent that it remains absolutely undetermined in its determination, the point has no singularity, no simple unicity. It is replaceable; it cannot constitute a signature, even less a work or an event. It cannot have a proper name. And what is true of the point is true of a multiplicity of points, of ones as points.

Kojin Katarani has mentioned the cogito. One of the characteristics of that cogito - as well as the tradition of the law, the theories of rights, and the architecture that presupposes this cogito - is that this cogito essentially requires a god (a god as creator, rather than as demiurge architect) in order to assure the certitude of the relation to self. This is a god of continuous creation, since without him there could be no account of a world, of a time, of a history made up of instants, of points. None of these singular points could derive from another without the intervention of the great theological Subject.

One must never forget that the cogito is an instantaneist and punctualist theology. And that Cartesianism, with its abundant architectural metaphors (Descartes speaks very often of foundation, fundaments, roofs, cities - these are classical topoi for professional philosophers), that this important stage in the constitution of the modern subject is accompanied by a philosophy, which is also a theology, of the individual point, of the instant, and of time as a series of instants.

To go quickly, too quickly: What is true of Descartes will remain true of all modern philosophies of the subject, including its dialectical Hegelian and neo-Hegelian forms. The positive consequences and the limits of this could also be drawn for politics, for a certain concept of democracy and law - and for architecture. What is rather curious is that, although architectural metaphors proliferate in these architectonics or these systems of the subject (architectonics is the art of the system for Kant), although it is a metaphor, a model, a pedagogy, and a rhetoric, architecture is not essentially a place of habitation, a habitat. Whereas when Heidegger attempts to deconstructs this epoch of the subject (that is, the interpretation of Dasein as subject, consciousness, but also as present thing - vorhanden - dominated by the privilege of the instant and the present), he will recall the co-essentiality of Dasein, dwelling, building, thinking, wohnen, bauen, denken. And he does so in a space, in a context in which the values of reappropriation, authenticity, the opposition between heimlich and unheimlich, and a certain nostalgia or homesickness reappear in the definition, in the description of Dasein.

Now, if I were forced to stope here and to say what the architecture of the next millenium should be, I would say: in its type, it should be neither an architecture of the subject nor an architecture of Dasein. But then, perhaps, it will have to give up its name of architecture, which has been linked to these different, but somehow ccontinuous ways of thinking. Indeed, perhaps it is already losing its name, perhaps architecture is already becoming foreign to its name.

Second point: I must say a word about what is like me (or for someone like me) foreign and a foreigner, whether that is with regard to the country, the language, or architecture - the strangeness within the one. Here I need to make two or three subpoints.

When I tried to translate anyone into French and into some other languages with which I am less familiar, the difficulties I encountered seemed to me very interesting from two points of view. First, the grammatical and semantic differences between anyone and everyone are so subtle that one cannot simply restitute or restore the difference in another language. Consider the difference in French between n'importe qui and chacun, tout un chacun. N'importe qui draws toward the indeterminate and anonymous - toward a levelling-off, Heidegger would say, toward the one as on, das Man, and as they. Whereas chacun - everyone, each one - would more easily welcome the right of every singularity. But neither captures the movements of anyone.

If I have mentioned that I am a foreigner here, it is not in order to underline a signature but to put the emphasis on two schematic issues. First, this series of conferences, which will take us into the next millenium, is dominated in its program, if there is one,its title (a lexical and sysntactic problem, 10 times any-, which is not purely formal), its hosts, guests, means, and so forth by one language and two nation-states. I do not want to exploit here the political arguments which are well-known and easy, though not simpl worthless. These conferences, and this will be true for the future of architecture as well, will not be dominated by just anyone. We know that. Anyone is not just anyone.

I do not believe that one can think about the future of architecture without taking into consideration not only the phenomenon of linguistic and capitalist hegemony in their classical forms but also and especially in the new forms, predictable or not, that these hegemonies will take precisely from an architectural point of view in the relationships between nations and states the mobility of the new trajectories of capital, and the evolution of international law. We have seen this in the terrible and as yet unfinished experience which is called the Persian Gulf War. That event demonstrates, among other things, that so-called international law - whatever its value may be - remains an interstatic, interstate law dominated by Western powers and concepts. This "international" law waits for and calls for decisive improvements.

At the same time, I hesitate to elaborate upon these rough indications as if they could be simply located under the general category of politics. On the one hand, we should not forget the classical problems - economic, juridical, ethical, and political - in their stable or evolved forms. One must remind architects of them as well as all those who negotiate decisions that bear upon space, ecology, demography, justice, and so forth. Such responsibilities remain and become even more acute in the third world than in the richer, industrial capitals.

One should not be content with inventing new, sophisticated forms, a la pointe, on the cutting edge of the avant-garde, while abandoning the terrain, to anyone, to any economic or political power, under the pretext that this is the "old" space, the old limits od architecture or urbanism in the premodern or modern form. One cannot be satisfied, for instance, with the Heideggerian argument that, if there is today a housing shortage (he was talking about the conditions before and after the war), it is rooted in a metaphysical essential, in the sense of dwelling and not of habitation. Whatever value we grant this argument, we cannot be satisfied with it.

On the other hand (and we remain still at the level of watchwords), the necessity of recalling and exercising the traditional responsibilities of political philosophy and architecture should not authorize a critique of inventive, adventurous, more or less solitary experimentation and research. The assault of the so-called "individual signature", with all its accusations of narcissism, elitism, solipsism, and so on, under the pretext of the "good political conscience," seems to me disastrous. Not only because one does not make good politics with bad architecture, or without architectural research and experimentation, but because, it seems to me, every new architectural writing is already motivated by a though of the political. Architectural writing tries either to displace the given political categories or to anticipate or follow the evolution and deep mutations of the political.

We should not forget that all of the different categories of political philosophy, classical or modern, have been built around the concept of the unity of the one, around the units called polis, city, state, and so forth. And to the extent that what is happening at this fin de siecle (and especially in cities like Los Angeles) is a passage to what has been called the post-city age, a transition that is also a transition toward great mutations in the relations among states, nations, civil societies, and so forth, architectural theory and praxis cannot look for their prescriptions in what is still called the political - the thinking of the polis or the city - or in a democracy which would still be measured by these concepts of the political. These concepts as well as the opposition between public and private are in the process of being deconstructed.

This does not mean that one must simply abandon the political terrain and democracy. Rather, one must negotiate between democracy in its given model, the familiar, demographic model founded on the one as a calculable subject, and the democracy to come. This negotioation, which is a double bind, must divide the one who is architect, and there is as a rule no program for handling such division. And the traces of this division, and even the division of its self, constitute the signature, the paradoxical event of a signature which is never one, never one with itself.

If I recall that I am here a stranger, remember that it is not to underline a signature but to recall two themes. I have just touched on the first. The other one let us call language, tongue, discourse, theory, philosophy, everything that apparently requires words. On a few occasions I have been lucky enough to have worked with architects in relationships which were both aleatory and necessary. In all these collaborations I have apparently been on the side of non-architecture, and consequently was provoked to analyze better the relation between architectural construction and, let's say, language, tongue, discourse, or non-architectural events.

It is a very complicated story, of course, but, as a very brief summary of my thoughts of these experiences, I would say that the displacement that is occurring today and that I believe will be confirmed more and more in coming years, consists in over- determining, against all the hierarchies and even against the concept of art, not to speak of such concepts as spirit and expression, the co-implications between the non-architectural arts - music, literature, history, and philosophy, for example - and the architectural arts. As a result, new writings of memory and utopia will intervene in architectural works, the signature of which will be more and more singular, or, more precisely, more and more singularly collective.

Now here we have to be very simplistic. We are presented with the problem of determining what "building" will mean in these new works. I remember recently hearing Daniel Libeskind say, "Architecture for me does not consist in building. I have not built many things so far, and what I do - writing, drawing, publishing projects - is what interests me. Perhaps I am not an architect. I have no architectural license; I am not very interested in architecture." This is very interesting. It shows that today many arts and practices are not so much integrated as inscribed. Even if Libeskind or Peter Eisenman or other architects never built, nevertheless what they publish is legitimized as architectural, as belonging to architecture, as implying the possibility of building.

It is this possibility that today we have to analyze. What does this possibility mean? In this space or place which is not simply an indeterminate dream, even if it si not built, research will concern the modality of this possibility. Here, the signature is a divided one, a divided One. In these experimentations and productions of the divided signature, all of the aesthetic, economic, and political problems are at stake.

A final point. A word about this perspective of the event we call the work and the signature of the architect. For the sake of economy, I will make this point by evoking the name Ulysses and his return trip home, his suffering from homesickness. His round trip describes the very circle of the oikonomia, the law of the house, the return home. Evoking the name Ulysses, I would insist on that which distinguishes singularity from individuality, and from the totalizing circle.

An event, whether it be a work, a trace, or a signature - or the work as signature - an event must always be singular, be one. But the one of the event is not necessarily, I would say, especially not, individual and indivisible. The singularity of the event does not consist in a unity of a recollection or gathering with itself, but in the sealed mark of division, of the double bind that we have already mentioned in terms of political responsibility. One cannot be responsible as such without experiencing contra- dictions, contradictory duties. Confronting a problem free of contradition or undecidability requires no responsibility.

The sealed mark of the division, the double bind, is the double obligation requiring the most inventive architects to proceed, to attempt the impossible while at the same time not abandoning the terrain of their traditional responsibilities - the city, demography, homelessness, and so forth - to people who are not just anyone, who "know how to handle the problem", to people who are therefore without responsibility. This double bind must be sealed in the signature. I would say it is precisely this sealed double bind that holds together in the singular, nonpunctual, unstable strife of the work or the signature.

This tension within the signature leaves its mark on the dominant forms of many works today which, though different from one another, nevertheless have something in common: a dislocation, a disassociation which tries to hold together things that do not easily hold together.

As I consider these questions, why do I name Ulysses, the proper name, Ulysses? Ulysses means two things: first, regarding the one - here I am following the Anyone program - Ulysses means the circle of return, nostalgia, dwelling, the oikonomia. From this perspective, I would say that the architect of the next millenium - and of today aready - will not be a Ulysses, even if he or she must take into account and inscribe the political and economic dimensions of dwelling in his or her work.

But Ulysses means something else. Recall the passage in the Odyssey when he encounters the Cyclops Polyphemos. Trying to disguise himself, to hide himself, Ulysses calls himself Outis - nobody, no man, personne. Here, in a strategy of simple erasure, the Subject masks his singularity behind no one, das Man (here in a sense that does not depend on the Heidggerian distinction between the authentic Dasein and the inauthentic das Man). In French, Outis is translated as personne, meaning no one, no particular subject.

I think the architects of tomorrow will not be personne; they will not be anonymous, the singular signature will not be erased. The proper name, that which cannot be reappropriated, is here simply the seal of the singularity of the event that cannot gather itself into itself as itself. Singularity does not mean an identity with oneself. It is another experience of the name, other than the one which has dominated Western philosophy as well as Western architecture, and it does not mean the simple indivisibility of the identity of the work with itself.

Here, the signature may continue to mean unique as Heidegger said: the unique is not the identical, not the same. It is difference. We must distinguish here among one, self, same, unique, singular, individual, and so on. The one is the difference. We can accent the one so that it does not mean identity with itself but rather the difference that holds together the singularity and its difference.

Thus, the anyone will have to decide, to hesitate, to choose between the negative indeterminacy, the calculable structure of the anonymous, the indivisible and encircled individual, circled in its monumental specularity on the one hand and, on the other, the anyone who, beyond authenticity and inauthenticity, beyond a certain ethics, beyond das Man and man, would sign the experience of the impossible, of the double bind that makes a possible ruin of every architecture and an originary signature of every ruin. At that moment, architecture will have perhaps lost its name, its unity; it will perhaps become a stranger to itself, foreign to itself. And that will be good. Perhaps this has already begun today. Perhaps architecture will, as I have tried to do today by treating these points otherwise, move from anyone to anything.

::source: http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/sum.html

Derrida's correspondence: "Letter to a Japanese Friend"

2007-08-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

10 July 1983
Dear Professor Izutsu,

At our last meeting I promised you some schematic and preliminary reflections on the word "deconstruction". What we discussed were prolegomena to a possible translation of this word into Japanese, one which would at least try to avoid, if possible, a negative determination of its significations or connotations. The question would be therefore what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be. I underline these words "possible" and "ought". For if the difficulties of translation can be anticipated (and the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation, and of the language of concepts, of the conceptual corpus of so-called "western" metaphysics), one should not begin by naively believing that the word "deconstruction" corresponds in French to some clear and univocal signification. There is already in "my" language a serious [sombre] problem of translation between what here or there can be envisaged for the word, and the usage itself, the reserves of the word. And it is already clear that even in French, things change from one context to another. More so in the German, English, and especially American contexts, where the same word is already attached to very different connotations, inflections, and emotional or affective values. Their analysis would be interesting and warrants a study of its own.

When I chose the word, or when it imposed itself on me - I think it was in *Of Grammatology* - I little thought it would be credited with such a central role in the discourse that interested me at the time. Among other things I wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heidggerian word Destruktion or Abbau. Each signified in this context an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. But in French "destruction" too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer perhaps to Nietzschean "demolition" than to the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading that I proposed. So I ruled that out. I remember having looked to see if the word "deconstruction" (which came to me it seemed quite spontaneously) was good French. I found it in the Littré. The grammatical, linguistic, or rhetorical senses [portees] were found bound up with a "mechanical" sense [portee "machinique"]. This association appeared very fortunate, and fortunately adapted to what I wanted at least to suggest. Perhaps I could cite some of the entries from the Littré.

"Deconstruction: action of deconstructing. Grammatical term. Disarranging the construction of words in a sentence. 'Of deconstruction, common way of saying construction', Lemare, De la maniére d'apprendre les langues, ch.17, in *Cours de langue Latine*. Deconstruire: 1. To disassemble the parts of a whole. To deconstruct a machine to transport it elsewhere. 2. Grammatical term... To deconstruct verse, rendering it, by the suppression of meter, similar to prose. Absolutely. ('In the system of prenotional sentences, one also starts with translation and one of its advantages is never needing to deconstruct,' Lemare, ibid.) 3. Se deconstruire [to deconstruct itself] ... to lose its construction. 'Modern scholarship has shown us that in a region of the timeless East, a language reaching its own state of perfection is deconstructed [s'est deconstruite] and altered from within itself according to the single law of change, natural to the human mind,' Villemain, *Preface du Dictionaire de l'Academie*."

Naturally it will be necessary to translate all of this into Japanese but that only postpones the problem. It goes without saying that if all the significations enumerated by the Littré interested me because of their affinity with what I "meant" [voulais-dire], they concerned, metaphorically, so to say, only models or regions of meaning and not the totality of what deconstruction aspires to at its most ambitious. This is not limited to a linguistico-grammatical model, let alone a mechanical model. These models themselves ought to be submitted to a deconstructive questioning. It is true then that these "models" have been behind a number of misunderstandings about the concept and word of "deconstruction" because of the temptation to reduce it to these models.

It must also be said that the word was rarely used and was largely unknown in France. It had to be reconstructed in some way, and its use value had been determined by the discourse that was then being attempted around and on the basis of *Of Grammatology*. It is to this value that I am now going to try to give some precision and not some primitive meaning or etymology sheltered from or outside of any contextual strategy.

A few more words on the subject of "the context". At that time structuralism was dominant. "Deconstruction" seemed to be going in the same direction since the word signified a certain attention to structures (which themselves were neither simply ideas, nor forms, nor syntheses, nor systems). To deconstruct was also a structuralist gesture or in any case a gesture that assumed a certain need for the structuralist problematic. But it was also an antistructuralist gesture, and its fortune rests in part on this ambiguity. Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented (all types of structures, linguistic, "logocentric", "phonocentric" - structuralism being especially at that time dominated by linguistic models and by a so-called structural linguistics that was also called Saussurian - socio-institutional, political, cultural, and above all and from the start philosophical.)

This is why, especially in the United States, the motif of deconstruction has been associated with "poststructuralism" (a word unknown in France until its "return" from the States). But the undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting of structures, in a certain sense more historical than the structuralist movement it called into question, was not a negative operation. Rather than destroying, it was also necessary to understand how an "ensemble" was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end. However, the negative appearance was and remains much more difficult to efface than is suggested by the grammaar of the word (de-), even though it can designate a genealogical restoration [remonter] rather than a demolition. That is why the word, at least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourse. It is difficult to effect it afterward because, in the work of deconstruction, I have had to, as I have to here, multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts, while reaffirming the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure. Hence, this has been called, precipitately, a type of negative theology (this was neither true nor false but I shall not enter into the debate here).

All the same, and in spite of appearances, deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique and its translation would have to take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. These values, like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to deconstruction. No more is it a critique, in a general sense or in Kantian sense. The instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the essential "themes" or "objects" of deconstruction.

I would say the same about method. Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be tranformed into one. Especially if the technical and procedural significations of the word are stressed. It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological "metaphor" that seems necessarily attached to the very word deconstruction has been able to seduce or lead astray. Hence the debate that has developed in these circles: Can deconstruction become a methodology for reading and for interpretation? Can it thus be allowed to be reappropriated and domesticated by academic institutions?

It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be reduced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures. Nor will it do to claim that each deconstructive "event" remains singular or, in any case, as close as possible to something like an idiom or a signature. It must also be made clear that deconstruction is not even an act or an operation. Not only because there would be something "patient" or "passive" about it (as Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to activity). Not only because it does not return to an individual or collective subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a theme, etc.

Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs itself. It can be deconstructed. [Ça se deconstruit.] The "it" [ça] is not here an impersonal thing that is opposed to some egological subjectivity. It is in deconstruction (the Littré says, "to deconstruct itself [se deconstruire]... to lose its construction"). And the "se" of "se deconstruire," which is not the reflexivity of an ego or of a consciousness, bears the whole enigma. I recognize, my dear driend, that in trying to make a word clearer so as to assist its translation, I am only thereby increasing the difficulties: "the impossible task of the translator" (Benjamin). This too is meant by "deconstructs".

If deconstruction takes place everywhere it [ça] takes place, where there is something (and is not therefore limited to meaning or to the text in the current and bookish sense of the word), we still have to think through what is happening in our world, in modernity, at the time when deconstruction is becoming a motif, with its word, its privileged themes, its mobile strategy, etc. I have no simple and formalizable response to this question. All my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question. They are modest symptoms of it, quite as much as tentative interpretations. I would not even dare to say, following a Heideggerian schema, that we are in an "epoch" of being-in-deconstruction, of a being-in-deconstruction that would manifest or dissimulate itself at one and the same time in other "epochs". This thought of "epochs" and especially that of a gathering of the destiny of being and of the unity of its destination or its dispersions (Schicken, Geschick) will never be very convincing.

To be very schematic I would say that the difficulty of defining an therefore also of translating the word "deconstruction" stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are also deconstructed or deconstructible, directly or otherwise, etc. And that goes for the word deconstruction, as for every word. *Of Grammatology* questioned the unity "word" and all the privileges with which is was credited, especially in its nominal form. It is therefore only a discourse or rather a writing that can make up for the incapacity of the word to be equal to a "thought". 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.

The word "deconstruction", like all other words, acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely called a "context". For me, for what I have tried and still try to write, the word has interest only within a certain context, where it replaces and lets itself be determined by such other words as "ecriture", "trace", "differance", "supplement", "hymen", "pharmakon", "marge", "entame", "parergon", etc. By definition, the list can never be closed, and I have cited only names, which is inadequate and done only for reasons of economy. In fact I should have cited the sentences and the interlinking of sentences which in their turn determine these names in some of my texts.

What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course! I do not think, for all these reasons, that it is a good word [un bon mot]. It is certainly not elegant [beau]. It has definitely been of service in a highly determined situation. In order to know what has been imposed upon it in a chain of possible substitutions, despite its essential imperfection, this "highly determined situation" will need to be analyzed and deconstructed. This is difficult and I am not going to do it here. One final word to conclude this letter, which is alread too long. I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original languag or text. And as "deconstruction" is a word, as I have just said, that is essentially replaceable in a chain of substitution, then that can also be done from one language to another. The chance, first of all the chance of (the) "deconstruction", would be that another word (the same word and an other) can be found in Japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other), to speak of deconstruction, and to lead elsewhere to its being written and transcribed, in a word which will also be more beautiful. When I speak of this writing of the other which will be more beautiful, I clearly understand translation as involving the same risk and chance as the poem. How to translate "poem"? a "poem"?...

With my best wishes,

Jacques Derrida

::Derrida and Differance, ed. Wood & Bernasconi, Warwick: Parousia Press 1985, p. 1-5

Derrida and Deconstruction

2007-08-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

Heidegger meant by "the end of philosophy" the end of a philosophy rooted in metaphysics. He argued that the only real philosophical questions have to do with "being" (ontology) and that "transcendental" questions were meaningless. By the sixties, the notion of the "end of philosophy " had developed into the notion that philosophy was nothing other than the ideology of the western ethos. The liberal humanist tradition presented a de facto situation (its own pre-eminence) as a de jure situation (its truth). In other words, it presented its traditional privilege as a natural superiority. Such a position is ideological.

Derrida argued that Heidegger had not escaped transcendentalism, that his "Being" was as transcendental as any other "Transcendental Signified." He also argued that even if the charge against philosophy as ideology were true, the charge was levelled in the language of philosophy, which can not be escaped. All that was really being asked was that the dominant ideology (philosophy = the ideology of the western ethos) be replaced by another broader or at least different ideology such as Marxism (philosophy=discourse of the ruling class), Freudianism (philosophy =sexual symptom), anti-Freudianism (philosophy =phallocratic ideology). In the end, he argued, the order of reason is absolute, "since it is only to itself that an appeal against it can be brought, only in itself that a protest against it can be made; on its own terrain, it leaves us no other recourse than to stratagem and strategy."

Derrida did not quarrel with Heidegger's position that history, as perceived in the philosophic tradition was over; only that Heidegger himself had not escaped it. Derrida raised the question of what there was to say after philosophy was over (but ironically still in place, because reason is absolute and can only be questioned in its own terms). The strategy he chose was duplicity, the playing of a double game. He would operate in the language of reason, since there was no other, but try to lay traps for it by posing it problems it could not answer, exposing the inherent contradictions in apparently reasonable positions. He called this strategy deconstruction, after Heidegger's term destruktion.

For Heidegger, destruktion was essentially, the history of the inquiry into history. Dasein , the individual's being in the world, is often trapped by the everyday ordinariness of life into interpreting itself in terms of the world it knows and the tradition it inherits. This condition Heidegger calls fallenness, and the individuals who have fallen into it das man (the they). Anyone who wishes to live authentically must escape from the average everyday ordinariness of life and contemplate his/her own death (non-being, or nothingness). This is done through the agency of angst , a kind of generalized suffering caused by the fear of dying, and the intellectual exercise of destruktion. Destruktion, then is a combination of a negative analysis of "today," the average everyday world and a positive analysis of history that tries to achieve authenticity through the rigorous questioning of accepted authority. Often this means breaking a word into its component parts in order to trace its history.

Derrida's deconstruction is a more limited but even more rigorous form of interrogation. Since the "speaking subject," when he/she speaks, must speak the language of reason, there must exist some silent region where the double agent deconstructor can sort out his stratagem against the Logos, the rules of reason. In order for this to be possible, two conditions must maintain:
1. In order for the double game of duplicity to be played, the language of philosophy must already be full of duplicity (both in its sense of doubleness and its sense of hypocrisy or lying.)
2. The strategist (speaking subject, deconstructor) must resist the power of Logos (reason) by maintaining a indefensible position of empiricism, erasing the distinction between truths of fact and truths of reason. This will be accomplished through différance.

For Heidegger, difference was the result of temporality. Since history and language precede the self and help construct the self, the self can never step outside itself and see itself outside of history and language. The self (in Heidegger's language dasein) can only conceive an historically past self, different from the existential self experiencing the world in the present. In that sense, the self (as subject) is always different from the self (as object).

Derrida's concept la différance contains two notions: difference and deference, a separation of identity and a separation in time. Derrida came to his notion through an attempt to show the impossibility of Husserl's promise of a "phenomenology of history" by deconstructing the notion. He showed that a phenomenology of history would have to answer the question "how is a truth possible for us?" But if a truth is to be truth, it must be absolute, independent of any point of view(unless, of course, we are God, in which case the question is meaningless). Phenomenology seeks the origin of truth, and it locates this origin in an inaugural fact which by definition can only occur once.

The phenomenologist argues that only the present exists. The past is retained in the present through the present ruins of a civilization that is absent. The future is mooted, or predicted, but only in the present. But in order for the past to be retained in the present and the future to beannounced in the present, the present must not only be present. It must also be a present that is still to come (future) and a present that is already past (past). At this point difference appears. The present is not identical with itself.

This difference raises again the problem of the inaugural fact Suppose we have the trace of some inaugural event, say the stone foundations at L'Anse aux Meadows. Out of our present we may for ourselves assume these to be Viking remains, though we cannot with certainty know what meaning they had for their makers. We cannot make our meaning coincide with their meaning, yet we know that when that past was a present, it had all the properties of a present. That other must also be a same. Again, this failure of the past to coincide with itself is a source of différance.

If we are to develop a phenomenology of history we must posit what Husserl called "a principle of principles." This principle is that history is meaningful, and however confused or in need of mediation, it can be transmitted from generation to generation. It is univocal, even though it can never be articulated at any moment. Being and meaning can never coincide except at infinity, so meaning is always deferred. The de jure situation (what is right) and the de facto situation (what is fact) can also never coincide. The reason for this is that there is an originary difference between fact and right, being and meaning.

Another necessary but paradoxical concept is the idea of originary delay. Derrida argues that a first is only a first by consequence of a second that follows it. The first is only recognizable as a first and not merely a singular by the arrival of the second. The second is therefore the prerequisite of the first. It permits the first to be first by its delayed arrival. The first, recognizable only after the second, is in this respect a third. Origin, then is a kind of dress rehearsal, what Derrida calls la répétition d'une première, in terms of the theatre, a representation of the first public performance which has not yet occurred. The original, in that sense, is always a copy. In this way, Derrida deconstructs Husserl's principle of principles which always relied on being able to distinguish the original from later copies.

If we apply the same analysis to signs and things in the "real" world we come to the paradoxical situation that the sign precedes the referent. The sign "dog," precedes the four-legged barking creature because the creature is only recognizable as that after the sign "dog" has been applied to it. Derrida has shown that, contrary to Husserl's notion of a pure origin, consciousness never precedes language,, and we cannot see language as a representation of a silently lived through experience.

This is the core of deconstructive thinking. We can only understand the priority of the sign by an enquiry into writing. Earlier, we looked at graphemes (the units of writing) as a second-order sign system. Derrida sees the relationship between these signs as semiological. The graphic sign stands in for the phonemic sign. It is therefore "the sign of a sign," while the oral sign is the "sign of the thing." Writing is then supplementary. (Even the oral sign is supplementary, since it exists as supplement to the "real world." The graphic sign of writing is particularly supplemental since it is a supplement to a supplement, a sign of a sign.) In Off Grammatology Derrida argues that writing should not be subordinated to speech, and this subordination is nothing more than an historical prejudice. He argues further that to define a graphic sign is to define any sign. Every sign is a signifier whose signified is another signifier. Think of looking up signifiers in a dictionary. What you get is a list of other signifiers. Meaning is always deferred.

The idea of the supplement raises some interesting questions. We can think of the origin as a place where there is no originary, only a supplement in the place of a deficient originary. It is deficient for this reason. We can think of the supplement as a surplus, something extra added to the whole and outside of it. But if the whole is really the whole, then nothing can be added to it. If the supplement is something and not nothing, then it must expose the defect of the whole, since something that can accomodate the addition of a supplement must be lacking something within itself. Derrida calls this "the logic of the supplement."

In the same way, the present is only present on the condition that it allude to the absence from which it distinguishes itself. Metaphysics, Derrida argues, is the act of erasing this distinguishing mark, the trace of the absent. We may now define trace as the sign left by the absent thing, after it has passed on the scene of its former presence. Every present, in order to know itself as present, bears the trace of an absent which defines it. It follows then that an originary present must bear an originary trace, the present trace of a past which never took place, an absolute past. In this way, Derrida believes, he achieves a position beyond absolute knowledge.

Derrida distinguishes between a meditating on presence, which he defines as philosophy, and the possibility of meditating on non-presence. How can these two kinds of thinking, one of which takes issue with the other co-exist? Derrida argues that philosophy is always already there (not that it has always been.) Philosophy can only be a thinking of presence, since experience is lived and tested in the present. The other kind of thinking which is not philosophical cannot therefore appeal to individual empirical experience. Instead it appeals to a general experience.
At the level of text, then, the appeal is to writing in general. Every text is a double text. It is philosophical and and understood by classical interpretation at one level of its reading. But it also contains traces and contradictions, indications of the second text which a classical reading can never uncover. No synthesis is possible. The second text is not an opposite which can be reconciled. It is what Derrida calls its counterpart, slightly phased. It requires a deconstructive reading of the difference (what Derrida calls a double science or double séance).

The meditation on non-presence is a meditation on the self as other. Every metaphysical text is separated from itself by what Derrida calls a "scarcely perceptible veil." A slight displacement in the reading of the text is sufficient to collapse one into the other, to make comedy wisdom or vice versa. Derrida's duplicity splits the metaphysical text in two, revealing its inherent contradictions. Derrida's analysis insists on the undecidability of words, their unresolvable contradictions.

One of the most important concepts in Derrida's analysis is the idea of "sous rature," (under erasure.) Heidegger often crossed out the word Being (Being) and let both the word and its erasure stand. He felt the Being was prior to and beyond signification or meaning, and hence to signify it was inadequate, though there existed no alternative. Derrida extends this practise to all signs. Since any signifier has as its signified another signifier, it always defers meaning and it always carries traces of other meanings. It must therefore be studied as defective, incomplete, under erasure.

A few (over-simplified) definitions:

Grammatology: The science of writing. Derrida proposes to move beyond traditional models of writing that describe its history and evolution to develop a theory of writing, to apply that theory and to move in the direction of a new writing. The difficult in doing so is the result of the relationship between writing and metaphysics.

The metaphysics of presence. The assumption that the physical presence of a speaker authenticates his speech. Speaking would then precede writing (the sign of a sign), since the writer is not present at the reading of his text to authenticate it. Spoken language is assumed to be directly related to thought, writing a supplement to spoken language, standing in for it. This is the result of phonocentrism the valorization of speech over writing.

Logocentrism: "In the beginning was the word." Logocentrism is the belief that knowledge is rooted in a primeval language(now lost) given by God to humans. God (or some other transcendental signifier: the Idea, the Great Spirit, the Self, etc;) acts a foundation for all our thought, language and action. He is the truth whose manifestation is the world. He is the foundation for the binaries by which we think: God/Man, spiritual/physical, man/woman, good/evil. The first term of the binary is valorized, and a chain of binaries constitutes a hierarchy.

Binary Oppositions: The hierarchical relation of elements that results from logocentrism. Derrida is interested more in the margins, the supplements, than in the centre.

The supplement: Derrida takes this term from Rousseau, who saw a supplement as "an inessential extra added to something complete in itself." Derrida argues that what is complete in itself cannot be added to, and so a supplement can only occur where there is an originary lack. In any binary set of terms, the second can be argued to exist in order to fill in an originary lack in the first. This relationship, in which one term secretly resides in another, Derrida calls invagination.

Originary lack: Some absence in a thing that permits it to be supplemented.

Metonymic chain: Derrida argues with Saussure's notion that signs are binary. (signifier, signified) The signified, he says, is always a signifier in another system. As a result, meaning cannot be in a sign, since it is always dispersed, deferred and delayed. (dictionary analogy). In terms of a text, then, all signifiers must be seen as defective. A signifier always contains traces of other signifiers.

Trace: The indications of an absence that define a presence. (The present is known as the present only through the evidence of a past that once was a present.) The traces of other signifiers in any signifier means that it must always be read under erasure.(sur rasure).

Erasure: The decision to read a signifier or a text as if its meaning were clear, with the understanding that this is only a strategy.

Difference (Différance) A pun on difference and deference. Any signifier (or chain of signification, ie. text) must infinitely defer its meaning because of the nature of the sign (the signified is composed of signifiers). At the same time, meaning must be kept under erasure because any text is always out of phase with itself, doubled, in an argument with itself that can be glimpsed through the aporias it generates.
Deconstruction: an attempt to dismantle the binary oppositions which govern a text by focussing on the aporias or impasses of meaning. A deconstructive reading will identify the logocentric assumptions of a text and the binaries and hierarchies it contains. It will demonstrate how a logocentric text always undercuts its own assumptions, its own system of logic. It will do this largely through an examination of the traces, supplements, and invaginations in the text.

::source: http://130.179.92.25/Arnason_DE/Derrida.html

Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

2007-08-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

BYLINE: BY MITCHELL STEPHENS; Mitchell Stephens is chairman of the journalism and mass-communication department at New York University.

Jacques Derrida has death on his mind. He often does. But the death in question at this moment is one that holds little terror for him: the reported death of deconstruction -- the "theory" or "method" (he prefers "experience") to which Derrida gave birth.

"The structure of the statement 'It is dead' is an interesting one," mused the French philosopher and writer during an extended visit to New York this fall. "It claims to describe a fact, but in a number of cases it is a form of wishful thinking. You say something is dead in order for it to die."

Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction's demise -- if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it. This is, after all, a subject that has a reputation for being rather difficult.

Derrida has tried to explain -- many times, in many ways, not always with success. He hazarded a characteristically hesitant definition in a paper he presented recently at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."

This may provide a start. To deconstruct a "text" (a term defined broadly enough to include the Declaration of Independence and a Van Gogh painting) means to pick it apart, in search of ways in which it fails to make the points it seems to be trying to make. Why would someone want to "read" (defined equally broadly) like that? In order to experience the impossibility of anyone writing or saying (or painting) something that is perfectly clear, the impossibility of constructing a theory or method of inquiry that will answer all questions or the impossibility of fully comprehending weighty matters, like death. Deconstruction, in other words, guards against the belief -- a belief that has led to much violence -- that the world is simple and can be known with certainty. It confronts us with the limits of what it is possible for human thought to accomplish.

This experience was widely sought after in American graduate schools in the 1970's and 1980's. In fact, no intellectual movement in the last third of this century created more of a fuss on the campuses than deconstruction (not "deconstructionism," a term that makes it sound too much like an ideology), and no thinker had as much influence and caused as much controversy there as Jacques Derrida. (By 1990 his name had appeared in the title of at least 54 books.) But now arbiters of academic fashion, with a finality usually reserved for tie widths, have taken to pronouncing deconstruction "dead."

Derrida is not convinced. "If one were to analyze the signs," he asserts, "the number of publications that mention deconstruction, the number of conferences that are being held, the number of people who are referring to it, if only to say that it is dead, one could draw exactly the opposite conclusion."

In the past few years, however, most of the academic journals and hiring committees that were once enamored of deconstruction have clearly lost their ardor. And anxious assistant professors have been searching for a new theory, method or experience to which they might consecrate themselves.

"It is not like it was in the 1970's," Derrida does admit. "A certain fashion has probably waned. But," he adds, taking another tack, "psychoanalysis has taught that the dead -- a dead parent, for example -- can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts."

There is no doubt that deconstruction continues to haunt large numbers of students and faculty. They have packed auditoriums and lecture halls at New York University, the Cardozo School of Law and the New School for Social Research in which Derrida has been speaking during his annual monthlong stay in New York.

And off campus the name and spirit of deconstruction continue to be invoked -- with varying degrees of reverence and understanding -- in architecture, art, literature, criticism and even fashion. Thomas Keenan, who teaches English at Princeton, calls all this "the subversive afterlife of deconstruction."

"Deconstruction is dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead," declares Stanley Fish, a literary theorist at Duke, who is far from a Derrida disciple. "It is everywhere."

JACQUES DERRIDA occupies a distinguished position in the cultural world. "He is the French philosopher," says Annie Cohen-Solal, author of a biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and a distant cousin of Derrida's. "He is the last of a line that includes Sartre, [Michel] Foucault and [Roland] Barthes." But, she notes, Derrida has never fit comfortably into that role.

Derrida was, to begin with, an outsider. He grew up not in Paris, or even the provinces, but in Algeria, as a Jew. Even now Derrida writes and lives in the suburbs -- how un-Sartre-like -- with his wife of 36 years, Marguerite. He commutes by car to his office at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris.

For the past two decades Derrida has also -- in another uncharacteristic move for the French philosopher -- been "commuting" back and forth between France and the United States. He's here for a couple of months each year, giving seminars, participating in numerous conferences and presenting his still formidable legions of American fans and friends with new texts to puzzle over. More than 20 of his books have been published in English translations.

"It's not like he goes to America as a Roman Catholic missionary goes to Japan," notes Anselm Haverkamp, director of the Poetics Institute at New York University. "He loves it here." New York in particular. "When I first arrive here each time, I experience a kind of jubilation," Derrida reports.

While in New York, Derrida teaches a graduate seminar at N.Y.U., the subject of which, for the past two years, has been "the secret." Derrida is trying to help his students experience what is "impossible" about secrets -- the way, for example, they have to be revealable in order to be concealed. The reading list for this seminar includes, as Derrida's reading lists often do, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, but the class has also been discussing the story "Bartleby the Scrivener," by Herman Melville. Derrida's romance with America now extends to its literature.

Bartleby -- an "inscrutable scrivener," Melville calls him -- is a clerk who when asked to perform certain expected tasks replies, simply, "I would prefer not to." Derrida -- whose dense, experimental, paradox-laced writings have made him appear something of an "inscrutable scrivener" himself -- loves this phrase. Why does Bartleby "prefer not to"? Melville's character never says.

Bartleby, Derrida tells his students, "was an expert in secrets." Their teacher has learned quite a bit about them, too.

Derrida recently wrote an autobiographical essay, focused on his mother's death, in which he remembers himself as "a child about whom people used to say 'he cries for nothing.' " For nothing? Derrida was born in 1930. About 10 months earlier, an older brother had died in infancy. About 10 years later, a younger brother got sick and died. Derrida makes clear that his mother, "whose anxiety I perceived each time I was ill," made sure these lessons on the frailty of life sunk in. Derrida's first secret may have been a precocious awareness of mortality.

The formidable world of Parisian intellectuals certainly held its secrets, when this young man from Algeria attempted to find a place in it. Knowl- edge of them came at a price. There were scenes of failed or uncompleted examinations and even nervous collapse before Derrida succeeded in gaining entrance to, graduating from and eventually teaching at France's most prestigious college, the Ecole Normale Superieure.

Inspired by the anti-institutional spirit of 1968, the man who was already establishing himself as the French philosopher preferred not to defend a doctoral dissertation until 1980 -- when he turned 50. Inspired by what he calls an attachment to "the image of the non-image," he had preferred not to be photographed for publication until 1979. Even his appearance became something of a secret.

At the end of one of Derrida's N.Y.U. classes, a student asks him where his discussion of secrets is heading. Derrida stares at a point above the crowd packed three or four deep around the seminar table. "What is really at stake in this seminar," he states, seeming for a moment every bit the Gallic philosopher, "is the death of the other or my own death."

Derrida's students, though they're politely nodding their heads, look perplexed. However, this portentous statement is not as impenetrable as it may seem. For Derrida, death -- because it is impossible for us to understand fully, because something singular and impossible to share dies with us -- is wrapped up in secrets.

DERRIDA IS EASY TO SPOT at a conference. His buoyant, almost pure-white hair grabs more than its share of the available light. "The Lenny Bernstein look" is what Naomi Schor, a professor of romance literature at Duke University, calls it. Derrida's halo of hair is set off by dark, Mediterranean skin -- not "the clammy white skin of the library bound" in which novelists, John Updike in this instance, tend to encase characters who practice deconstruction.

In fact, Derrida is usually the most elegant man in the room. As he steps to the podium to deliver the keynote address at a recent Cardozo conference, he wears a well-tailored, soft-blue suit and a patterned light gray tie that carries on a complicated dialogue with his hair. Derrida's body is compact and trim, his face square and handsome -- though he is also now, at age 63, often one of the oldest people in the room. He begins his talk by suggesting, "I deserve less than ever to give a 'keynote address,' because I want to recall that a 'key' can always get lost and an 'address' always fail to reach its 'address.' "

Such plays on words are serious business for Derrida. Although he is often accused of being an apostle of meaninglessness, what is truly disturbing about Derrida is that he finds too much meaning lurking in the roots, etymologies, connotations and sounds of words. His readings focus on these excesses of meaning and the ways the points we are trying to make invariably get tangled up in them, leading to contradictions and misunderstandings -- statements that reach the wrong addresses or fail to open the proper locks.

And an odd thing happens when our culture is read with an eye for such tangles: "Hierarchies" that had been taken for granted -- that speech is more central than writing, to choose an example that has been crucial for Derrida -- get upended. These hierarchies are tripped up by the swarms of meanings that circle around the words used to support them. The now classic example, pounced upon in Derrida's book "Dissemination," is a declaration Plato once made. Attempting to state the advantages speech has over writing, Plato proclaimed that oral discourse "is written in the soul of the listener." Written? Yes. This is only a metaphor, but Plato's reliance upon it, Derrida argues, demonstrates the essential impossibility of the distinction he is trying to make.

This is the sort of aggressive, contradiction-uncovering reading for which deconstruction is known. It has imbued some philosophers with a new humility, made many literature professors wary of expounding on such things as an author's intent, alerted some law professors to cracks in the foundations of law and inspired groups of architects, artists and fashion designers to create works that display and make a virtue of contradictions in the way they were constructed.

This sort of reading, however, is now supposed to be dead.

"It had a problem," notes Leo Damrosch, the chairman of Harvard's English department. "It's hard to do it well. What it wants is a kind of intense struggle with a text to dig out things the text doesn't know it's saying. People with average imaginations and no particular fascination with literature couldn't do it. You have to be really smart."

It helps, too, if you know your way around Western culture. Derrida's address at Cardozo includes references to Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Husserl, G. W. F. Hegel and, of course, Heidegger. In the audience is a graduate student who has traveled down from Yale -- once the center of deconstruction in the United States. When Derrida's talk ends, the student confesses to the person sitting next to him, "I understood maybe 10 percent of what he was saying." That's a common reaction.

Cynthia Chase, an old friend of Derrida's who teaches English and comparative literature at Cornell, is one of the more accomplished of deconstruction's practitioners. Her half brother is a successful movie star and a failed talk-show host. "The kinds of things she's written," Chevy Chase told an interviewer last summer, "I just can't understand." Derrida and his friends and disciples have produced works, rich and important as they may be, that cannot easily be understood by every "reader of nice perceptions," to borrow another phrase from Melville. You have to do some homework.

In 1987 it was discovered that Paul de Man, an English professor at Yale and one of deconstruction's foremost American proponents, had written a series of articles as a young man for two collaborationist newspapers in wartime Belgium. Despite the fact that Derrida was himself a victim of anti-Semitism during the Nazi era and did not conceive of deconstruction until decades later, these revelations made it easier for some academics to dismiss the movement.

Deconstruction had another problem: the widely held belief that reading in search of contradictions and misunderstandings is foolish, if not insidious. John Updike has attacked what he has called "deconstruction's fatiguing premise that art has no health in it." Critics on the right are outraged by the implication that there is something tangled or "impossible" about such important concepts as "reality" and "truth," which they are committed to extricating from the grip of quotation marks.

"Derrida's influence has been disastrous," Roger Kimball, a conservative critic and author of "Tenured Radicals," proclaims. "He has helped foster a sort of anemic nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of imitators who no longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth, who would find that notion risible."

Though Derrida considers himself a member of the democratic left, critics on the left haven't necessarily been any kinder. Some have charged that all this emphasis on the "impossible," on what we can't know, threatens to leave us paralyzed, "standing" -- like poor Bartleby -- "mute and solitary" before the world's injustices. Derrida's response -- "needless to say, one more time" -- is that if the world were as simple, untangled and uncontradictory as his critics on both the left and the right want it to be, political and ethical decisions would be so straightforward as to have no interest or meaning. Tangles, in other words, are the health of politics -- and the health of art, too, deconstructionists would argue.

CERTAINLY, DERRIDA himself has not been paralyzed. He was active, for example, in the struggle against apartheid as well as the struggle before 1989 to help dissident Czechoslovak intellectuals. Words like "responsibility," his critics might be surprised to learn, come up often in Derrida's talks. "Sometimes you have to do what you prefer not to," he says, smiling. "That is what is meant by a 'duty.' "

The latest fashion in literature departments -- "cultural studies" -- is, as Roger Kimball is quick to note, more overtly political than deconstruction is. Many of its practitioners admit to communing with the ghost of deconstruction, but their emphasis is on the relationship of works of literature to other, less elite, forms of culture and to social movements. Academic departments that in the 1980's might have been looking to recruit a specialist in deconstruction now might be trying to outbid one another for some well-credentialed expert in "gender studies" or "gay studies."

Derrida seems able, for the most part, to watch the turnings of academic fashion with equanimity. "The fact that other methods have appeared is simply normal," he says. "Why not? But" -- and this is the key point Derrida wants to make about the reported death of deconstruction -- "I don't think deconstruction can be reduced to simply a method or even a theory. I think there is some element in deconstruction that belongs to the structure of history or events. It started before the academic phenomenon of deconstruction, and it will continue with other names."

When Derrida looks at historical events, particularly after World War II, he sees contradictions and tangles popping up all over. He sees "hierarchies" -- European over non-European, male over female -- being "disturbed," if not overturned. He sees political and economic systems growing unstable -- being revealed as "impossible." And he sees scientific and technological change causing such "deconstructions" to occur at an accelerating rate.

"I was in Russia three years ago," Derrida recalls, "and some of my colleagues there told me that the best definition for perestroika, which was a way of dismantling and at the same time democratizing a previously rigid system, was 'deconstruction.' And, you know, such phenomena are today happening everywhere. The academic phenomenon -- what we call 'deconstruction' -- is only a symptom of this."

JACQUES HAS THE MOST extraordinary eyes I've ever seen!" exclaims Naomi Schor. "When he's really concentrating and serious, they're piercing." Enunciating sentences in front of Derrida, consequently, can seem a bit like placing a 1040 form in front of an I.R.S. agent; you wonder what contradictions he's going to spot. New acquaintances approach with a certain wariness.

But Derrida is known for being gracious and kind. That piercing gaze is aimed at himself more than others -- particularly on the frequent occasions when his thoughts turn to mortality. Peggy Kamuf, who has translated a number of Derrida's books into English, stresses that this preoccupation with death is not so much "a quirk of his psychological makeup" but a major philosophical concern.

But is it also a psychological quirk? "Probably," Kamuf concedes.

Once the word "quirk" is explained to Derrida -- his English is strong but not perfect -- he concurs: "It is true that I'm obsessed with death. I am at every minute attentive to the possibility that in the following hour I will be dead, and the person I am with will say, 'I was just in the room with him, and now he is dead.' This film is constantly in front of my eyes. Each time I drive back home, which is about once a day, I watch my car getting into an accident, as if I am at a movie theater, and I hear them say, 'He just left the crossroad, and then he. . . .' I can't avoid watching it.

"It is something in me," he says, with echoes of a young boy's voice faintly audible in his tentative, melodic English, "that I try to understand but I don't understand."

Is Derrida plagued by similar movies on the death of deconstruction?

"When I think of finitude, of the fact that it will all have an end -- and I have no illusions about that -- then deconstruction is not the thing the end of which makes me most anxious," he responds. "But I am wondering what shape all that will someday take in the view of historians of ideas." His eyes twinkle for a moment. "That is one of my movies."

The more personal of Derrida's mental movies about mortality cause him, he says, "deep anxiety." It would be unfair to suggest that all of deconstruction, with its many permutations, is a response to that anxiety, but it certainly has helped motivate Derrida's own explanations of the tangled and contradictory.

"All my writing is on death," he acknowledges. "If I don't reach the place where I can be reconciled with death, then I will have failed. If I have one goal, it is to accept death and dying."

Might that, for someone whose eyes see what Derrida's see, be impossible?

(another article by Mitchell Stephens on Jacques Derrida)

Deconstruction: Derrida, Theology, and John of the Cross

2007-08-01T16:35:00.000-07:00

[Yahweh Elohim] brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
Genesis 2:191

"But," he said, "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live."
Exodus 33:20

The structuralism for which Jacques Derrida has written an epitaph is a movement in linguistics that insists on the division of sign into signifier and signified. The signifier is "the set of sounds, or written marks, that is taken to designate an idea or concept" (Jacobs 1991: 173), and the signified the idea of the concept itself; "shoe," for example. The connection between the signifier "shoe" (in English) and the signified (the thing itself) is wholly relative to culture. That is, "shoe" could instead be:

"Plox" if we so desired, as long as we kept two things in mind: (1) there would need to be general agreement within the linguistic community that "plox" indicated this concept, and (2) the signifier "plox" must be distinguishable from all other signifiers, for the meaning of any given signifiers lies only in its difference from others. (Ibid. 173-174).

It is from this point that Derrida has criticized Western philosophy. This criticism is an attempt to show the violation of its own rules that Western thinking commits, and thus to dismantle, or deconstruct, it.

It must first be acknowledged that "deconstruction as an intellectual movement in the American academy has not remained within Derrida's control or subject to his direction" (Ibid. 173). Likewise, there are, or have been, other leading proponents of deconstruction in Europe itself; for example, Lyotard and even Foucault. And certainly Derrida's own thought has developed to a degree since the publication of his first major work, Of Grammatology. Nonetheless, it is necessary to encounter Of Grammatology to begin an understanding of Derrida. From Derrida, then, will come an understanding of deconstruction. And in the midst of it all, American writers, and the Derrida of a 1984 interview, will aid our understanding and discussion.

Still, it must be stated that such a focus on one man and one of his earliest works will bring an awareness that is quite provisional, an outline, temporary. That granted, then, some basic analysis will be offered, followed by a mitigated integration.

* * *

. . . there the LORD confused the language of the whole world.
Genesis 11:9

Words are trivial
Pleasures remain
So does the pain
Words are meaningless
And forgettable
--Depeche Mode, "Enjoy the Silence"

In discussing Derrida, it is necessary to understand his terms. This endeavor can become like grasping water, for the deconstructionist uses language in the sparkling dance of play. The deconstructionist uses language to show its contradictions, to erode the confidence that words do indeed reveal the wor(l)d behind them. Understanding, then, comes by keeping one foot in the logic system being deconstructed and one foot in the maze. But since there is that connection with the system, there is the possibility of understanding.

The key terms to explore are: differance, sous rature, trace, and logocentrism. Though these each carry varying importance, and though other terms provide helpful insight into Derridean deconstruction, under our present limitations, we can only approach the most significant terms in the most basic way.

Differance is the key Derridean term. It is a play on the French, "an economic concept designating the production of differing/deferring" (Derrida 1976:23). In fact, it is "the source of linguistic value" (Ibid. 52). That is, a word means because it is different from other words, and that meaning only arises out of the difference. As a result the presence of meaning is pushed further along beyond the edges of definition.

The foundation for this is based in the contradictions in Western metaphysics. In spoken discourse, the speaker and the hearer are immediately present to one another. Meaning and understanding are facilitated by means of presence. When discourse becomes written, however, the speaker/author is no longer present, and meaning is then hindered by absence.

It would seem, therefore, that as long as speaker and listener could always be present to one another, meaningful discourse could occur. But Derrida will not even allow this. He wrote Of Grammatology to show that writing's entire theory and form (including its technical aspects) infects and found human speech from its very origins.2

There is, then, even in speech, a presence and an absence in a sign's meaning. "[M]eaning is not immediately present in a sign. Since the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, its meaning is always in some sense absent from it too" (Eagleton 1983:128). That is "shoe" means shoe both because it has some culturally fixed reference to the thing itself, and because it does not mean, for instance, cat.

Since "the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or referrent" (Derrida 1976:69), words must be written sous rature, or "under erasure." For what meaning is present in them is present by its very absence. "There is no sign as such. Either the sign is considered a thing, and it is not a sign. Or it is a reference, and thus not itself" (Ibid. 204). "Differance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible" (Ibid. 143). This putting a word under erasure is designated thus: sign. It allows the presence of the sign at the same time that it forbids that presence. The meaning/being of the sign is not present, but that very absence calls to mind the presence we are assuming.

So there is left in the sign something called trace. Contained in our words is something other than what they "mean." Differance "makes the opposition of presence and absence possible" (Ibid. 84). Thus we have contained in a sign/word as much its absence of meaning as the presence of the other from which it differs/defers: the trace. But the "trace itself does not exist" (Ibid. 167), and is "the unity of a double movement of protention and retention" (Ibid. 84). For Derrida, Western metaphysics, as expressed in philosophy, has forgotten this. It has assumed that absence excludes presence: A is not non-A. Calling this overpowering assumption "logocentrism," he observes, "The logocentric longing par excellence is to distinguish one from the other" (Ibid. 167). What this distinguishing attempts is the location of meaning in the sign. This, then, subsumes/subverts all language under/by that exclusion. And Derrida questions that subversion.

* * *
I have spoke with the tongue of angels
I have held the hand of the devil
It was warm in the night
I was cold as a stone
--U2, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"

* * *

Since Derrida himself admits, "the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work" (1976:24), it would not seem amiss to expose its own problems. Given that Derrida denies that Western metaphysics has satisfied the yearning for the "Sign which will give meaning to all others--the 'transcendental signifier'--and for the anchoring, unquestionable meaning to which all our signs can be seen to point (the 'transcendental signified')" (Eagleton 1983:131)--nonetheless, Derrida does not attempt to destroy meaning per se. Rather, he asserts that meaning has not been found in Western thinking. Another locus, different from exclusionary presence, must be found, no matter how provisional. "Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the other" (Derrida 1984:124), and an attempt "to discover the non-place or non-lieu which would be [that] 'other' of philosophy" (Ibid. 112).

Meaning is "out there," it is simply that it is impossible for Western metaphysics to get around/behind textuality. "There is nothing outside of the text" (Derrida 1976:158). The sign does not allow the experience of the being/thing. "The play of the supplement is indefinite. References refer to references" (Ibid. 298). Transcendence has been put under erasure by immanence. A new center must be found if meaning and presence/absence are to be woven together.

In Derrida's forcing apart of immanence and transcendence, deconstruction paves the way for a(n) a/theology which takes deconstructionism to its final end. "A/theology is, in large measure, a critique of the notion of the transcendent God . . ." (Taylor 1984:104). "The disappearance of the transcendental signified closes the theological age of the sign and makes possible the free play of a/theological writing" (Ibid. 106). That free play imprisons the incarnate word, and incarnation, then, "is not a once-and-for-all event, restricted to a specific time and space and limited to a specific individual" (Ibid. 104). Rather, Taylor goes on to draw this conclusion: "Radical christology is thoroughly incarnational. . . . The body of the incarnate word marks the negation of the transcendence that is characteristic of God, self, and history" (Ibid. 168).3

Clearly, then, Christianity stands to lose much if it, too, is bound to the Western metaphysics under deconstruction. If logic is, indeed, only metaphor after all; if everything in language is only arbitrary substitute (as per Derrida 1976:235); if, as Derrida asserts, the subject is imprisoned in language (see 1984:125), then truth is impossible of signification (see 1976:10). In fact, the search for a new center becomes the arena for the exercise of a fascist will to power as each provisional non-lieu makes way for its more powerful successor.

Also, Derrida's argument notwithstanding, an important distinction must be kept in mind: "For deconstruction to work, one must presume a uniform ignorance that blindly embraces the signifier as the signified, and vice versa. In short, the indissolubility of the signifier and signified must be presumed in order to separate them" (Zornado 1992:123). Likewise, Osborne acknowledges the gap between signifier and signified. Nonetheless, he questions "whether it is as insurmountable a gap as Derrida argues" (1991:385).4 He goes on to assert that given time, meaning can be reached in/by context (Ibid.).

Winquist, along similar lines, helps preserve meaning by pointing out: "It is always difficult to determine when we espouse a crisis of meaning whether we are referring to a relational deficiency or to our own inability to discern relationships in the linguistic transformation of the complex of events that are the original objects of thinking" (1986:4). That is, all our talking, even thinking, about an event, person, truth, etc., is derivative: therefore, "presence" will never be complete in human discourse. Or as he says (emphasis his): "Our problem is not the absence of God but the presence and reality of the concept of God" (Ibid. 7). The question then becomes, given a fallen language, given that meaning is "out there," is it possible for humans to enjoy the presence of the other, of meaning, no matter how imperfectly?

Even by deconstruction's own terms, by excluding transcendence, they open the door for it. Immanence cannot be thought without the trace of transcendence. Really, what deconstruction hath wrought, is a realization of language's fallenness, and thus an announcement of the provisionality of all our God-talk.

But if God-talk is provisional, are we not back where deconstruction left us, without any guides? Surprisingly, the answer is no. We do have guides, ancient though they may be.

* * *
Take the space between us
And fill it up some way
--The Police, "O My God"

* * *

Our help here will come from writing and thought which predates Derrida by centuries. It is often called apophatic or negative theology.

Apophatic theology, like poststructural notions of text, demonstrates a radical skepticism regarding metaphor, and it holds that nay truth claims relying on metaphor as a vehicle are, at best, provisional. The reader looking for truth . . . Should not confuse metaphor, iconography, symbolism, liturgy, and the like with the ineffable mystery they attempt to signify. (Zornado 1992:118)5

Winquist echoes:

The work of theology has usually been a web of meaningful connections and saying what can be said about the relationship of common events and foundational principles. What could not be said, the surplus of meaning in even the most rationalistic theologies, fell into spaces of silence within and between systems and thereby constituted a presence that is an absence, a mystery and shadow for theological understanding.

If we are to initiate a new excavation, it must choose as its terrain the silences of experience, those suspicious areas of unintelligibility that have haunted the theological achievements of past enlightenments. (1986:32).

Zornado adds: "Apophatic thought provides a kind of key to those moments of silence, not that we might fill them in but rather that we might more fully experience the gaps between vehicle and tenor, between signifier and signified, as a silence related to that which contemplative monks desire" (1992:119).

In light of that, it appears that there is one author in particular who can help us in this pursuit: St John of the Cross. His work Ascent of Mt Carmel deals specifically with approaching God in the suspension of the bodily senses.6

Book 2 of the Ascent is the formative section on St John's position relating human knowledge through experience and talk of God, with God's real essence. And chapter 8 of book 2 is the succinct summary of that position. Take, for example, these words: "Nothing in this life that could be imagined or received and understood by the intellect can be a proximate means of union with God. In our natural way of knowing, the intellect can grasp an object only through the forms and phantasms of things perceived by the bodily senses" (1991:175). In fact, he says it this bluntly: "[I]ntellectual comprehension of God through heavenly or earthly creatures is impossible; there is no proportion of likeness" (Ibid. 174). Therefore, if humans are to understand God and his ways, however imperfectly, he "must speak doctrine to them from his own mouth, and not theirs, and in a tongue other than theirs" (Ibid. 216).

This is not to say that St John of the Cross7 was a proto-deconstructionist. Zornado points out important differences between apophatic theology and deconstruction: apophatic theology is not an escape from orthodoxy (and thus from truth and meaning expressed in sign), and it is firmly grounded in Christ crucified (a recognition deconstruction does/can not share) (see Zornado 1991:122).

Nonetheless, given that deconstruction cannot be simply taken at face value, that Derrida indeed has a priori assumptions which he brings to his critique of metaphysics, yet his decentering of Western philosophy provides a helpful corrective to Christendom. Theology is expressed in fallen language. Philosophy can never attain complete knowledge. Therefore when it comes to God-talk, reverence and humility seem the safest attitudes. Theology needs always to be in encounter with the unsaid, even if only to contradict/correct the said. God is necessarily larger than our understanding of him--and certainly of our ability to speak accurately of him.

But in more practical terms, what are the areas affected by an affirmation of mitigated deconstruction? At least these three: the practice of unity, the empowerment of interpretation, and the union of theology and mysticism.

Since language is such an imperfect vehicle for God-talk, clearly only divinely inspired language can hold any power. That human language can carry meaning has not been disproved. But since it is so imperfect, an attitude of humility can be the only right one. Therefore, all divisions in Christianity, while not completely worthless, nonetheless cannot be held with any real passion. Such openness toward other provisional texts can do much to cultivate the unity for which God incarnate prayed.

Also, a mitigated deconstruction can reinstate the power of Christian allegorical interpretation to imprint the mind. A structured, channeled playfulness in the sacred can do much to bring about the desire for the text Derrida (1984) and Taylor (1984) both say deconstruction feeds.

Finally, though the insight is not new, theology, if humble, must necessarily be mystical. The absence of mysticism must always recall the presence of theology and vice versa. Radicalize either and the other can only be indeed lost. But both held in tension can provide renewal, each for each. It seems to me that this was the genius of the medieval Western church.

* * *

They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Acts 2:3-4

. . . [W]e were eyewitnesses of his majesty. . . . We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.
2 Peter 1:16, 18

1 All Scripture citations are taken from The NIV Classic Reference Bible: New International Version, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988.

2 This is especially brought out in Of Grammatology's second part which deals with Rousseau and his understanding of language with its cultural origins. See especially Part II, chapters 2 and 4.

3 Though Taylor follows deconstruction past the point I'm willing to go, yet I found his Erring to be among the most beautifully written postmodern theologies I've encountered. Particularly his chapter 6, "Markings," on the self. Relating the Christian death of self to nihilism: "Nihilism becomes fully actual when death, or more precisely, the death of the self, is no longer passively suffered and reluctantly conceded but is actively affirmed and willingly embraced. . . . At this critical point, nihilism undergoes an unexpected reversal . . ." (1984:140).

4 John M. Ellis, in Against Deconstruction, argues along similar lines, as he tries to reinstate structuralism. I am not familiar enough with his book to intelligently evaluate his thesis. But I have at least two initial hesitancies. I do think Derrida's arguments indicate enough weaknesses in structuralism that it would be less than enticing to return to it. I also think that Derrida's decentering of Western philosophy is a good warning to Christendom not to tie faith with any one system.

5 Deconstruction asserts that even logic and mathematical formulae are indeed metaphor. Thus all language becomes metaphoric.

6 His companion work Dark Night of the Soul deals with the suspension of the spiritual senses. Night must always be held together with Ascent in any understanding of St John of the Cross, but for our purposes Night's similarities are not close enough to warrant reference.

7 I cannot but heartily recommend the little volume of collected works put out by the Institute for Carmelite Studies (see bibliography). The Kavanaugh/Rodriguez translations is incredibly accessible and portable. It should, of course, be weighed against the E. Allison Peers translations.
.

Bibliography of Sources Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976.

________. "Jacques Derrida." In Dialogues with contemporary Continental thinkers. Tr. and ed. by Richard Kearney. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Jacobs, Alan. "Deconstruction." In Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal. Ed. by Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Tr. by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington: ICS Publications, 1991.

Osborne, Grant R. The Hermeneutical Spiral. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1991.

Taylor, Mark C. Erring. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Winquist, Charles E. Epiphanies of Darkness: Deconstruction in Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986.

Zornado, Joseph. "Negative Writings: Flannery O'Connor, Apophatic Thought, and Christian Criticism." Christianity and Literature. Vol. 42, No. 1 (Autumn 1992):117-140

© 1994 Clifton D. Healy
http://www.geocities.com/chealy5/Deconstruction.htm

Deconstructin(g) Jazz Improvisation: Derrida and the Law of the Singular Event

2007-08-01T16:32:00.000-07:00

Sara Ramshaw, Queen’s University Belfast

"It was the music. […] It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law."
Toni Morrison (Jazz 58)

"[E]very invention should make fun of the statutory."
Jacques Derrida (“Psyche” 45)

Paris, July 1997. Famed jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman has just invited French philosopher Jacques Derrida to share the stage with him at the Paris La Villette jazz festival for an improvised jazz-text collaboration (Nettelbeck 198). Coleman “blows” while Derrida “read[s]” 2 (Stein). The audience members, “intolerant of this unaccustomed form,” (Nettelbeck 198) drive Derrida off the stage before he can “get into his stride” (198). 3 His contribution to the event is “pathetically foreshortened” (198) and Derrida is left shaken by the “painful experience” (qtd. in Stein). 4

Of particular interest to this article is the willingness of Derrida to collaborate with Coleman in this manner – especially when his arguments against the possibility of “spontaneity, improvisation and unmediated expression” (Gartside, qtd. in O’Reilly) are often cited in order to critique jazz and jazz improvisation (O’Reilly). Coleman, in contrast, attempts everything Derrida says is impossible in relation to improvisation: “Breaking out of the prison bars of rigid meters and conventional harmonic or structural expectations” (Goldman); resisting “hierarchical distinctions between improvisation and inscription” (Nettelbeck 200). His “harmolodic” 5 (Goldman) musical form taunts the laws governing the system of Western tonal music, “encourag[ing] the improviser to be freer, and not obey a pre-conceived chord-pattern according to set ideas of ‘proper’ harmony and tonality” (Williams 3). Throughout his performances, “harmony becomes melody becomes harmony” (Goldman) and the division between the melodic and harmonic forms 6 is effectively ignored, transgressed. 7 As Coleman is quoted as saying in the liner notes of his Free Jazz album: “Let’s try to play the music and not the background” (qtd. in Williams 3). By “background,” Coleman is referring to the “general framework of jazz improvisation which had established itself soon after the birth of jazz as a more or less incontestable norm” (Jost 17). This “framework,” Jost claims, “consisted of a code of agreements which made up […] the ‘musically universal’ in jazz, and remained constant throughout the years of jazz evolution, while the ‘musically particular’ changed” (17).

Driving this discussion is a deep scepticism, fuelled by Derrida, as to whether jazz improvisation can actually transgress or ignore the “background” of which Coleman speaks. Can it, borrowing from Haldar, “properly” (Haldar 7) escape jazz’s law, the law of jazz, which “hums in the background” (Haldar 1)? Or, far from “bring[ing] down the law” (5), is improvisation “nothing more than the law of law” (5), “nothing more than the repetition of man’s vertical aspirations?” (5). 8

Before attempting to answer these questions, I must briefly address a preliminary matter about which many readers may be curious, namely what is this “law of jazz” mentioned above? Or, more pointedly, what is “law”? Although the aim of this article is to locate it not as unity, but as “irresolution” (Fitzpatrick Mythology 2), law persists in the West as a unified subject, a subject that is “‘out there’, perfectly formed, complete and coherent, waiting to be discovered” (Douzinas et al x). It persists, at least in its generic sense, as “a body of rules of action or conduct prescribed by controlling authority, and having legal binding force” (Black 884). The ideal of the rule of law in Western democratic society means that “everyone is bound by the law” (Pue 17, emphasis omitted): “the very nature of law is that it applies to us all” (“Head-to-head”). Moreover, it is “presume[d] that before citizens’ liberties and freedoms are restricted, the full protection of constitutional rights and the political protections provided by our parliamentary system of government will be brought into play” (Pue 17, emphasis omitted). Determinations of what is and what is not lawful remain under the control of the democratically-elected legislature; police are employed to enforce these laws and courts adjudicate any alleged infractions or disputes over meaning (17).

In keeping with this dominant view, Western law must eschew all spontaneous or unpredictable elements. This can be starkly contrasted to the prevailing perception of jazz in the West as that which is founded solely upon pure spontaneous improvisation. Both conceptions are, when deconstructed, ultimately found wanting. This article therefore aims to critique the positioning of Western law and jazz in relation to improvisation by reading Derrida’s work on law and justice 9 in tandem with his views on invention 10 and then applying the consequent observations to the topic of jazz improvisation. While improvisation 11 and invention 12 are by no means identical, they do share certain qualities that become extremely relevant when explored through a deconstructive framework. 13 Both concepts describe “event[s] without precedent” (Derrida “Psyche” 43), “unique situation[s]” (60), which are constituted in their “singularity” (28). This singularity, albeit contested, can be starkly contrasted to the dominant conception of Western law, which privileges generality and universality over unpredictability and arbitrariness.

In his writings on law and invention, Derrida unpacks the “problematic relation between the singular and the general” (Attridge “Before the Law” 181) in order to challenge the pure presence of singularity in invention, along with the universality, which is said to propel occidental law. His observations, when applied to the critical study of jazz improvisation, confront the prevailing understanding of improvisation as sheer spontaneity and thereby challenge its exaltation in jazz and concurrent condemnation in law. A deconstructive reading reveals that improvisation so defined can be neither total in jazz nor totally absent in law. Instead, the singular event exists solely as aporia in both fields. This unpacking of the aporetic nature of singularity reveals not only the inevitability of legal invention, but also the necessity of the “jazz form” 14 (Finkelstein 71). Beyond this, however, and perhaps shedding some light on Derrida’s participation in the “improvised” event described above, there exists an openly responsive dimension to both jazz and law. This dimension, although never complete or absolute, glances towards the singular other 15 and keeps alive the possibility of creativity, ethics, democracy and justice in Western law and society.
Irresolution in Jazz and Law

When asked “What is jazz?” Louis Armstrong purportedly replied, “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know” (qtd. in Hyman 3). 16 This celebrated response has become authority for the position that there is “no single workable definition of jazz, no single list of essential characteristics” (DeVeaux 6, emphasis in original; see also Townsend 162). Imagined here is a jazz that is “know”-able only to the extent that it has no definite or determinate meaning. It is music defined solely by its un-define-ability, by its inability to be tied down, contained or fixed in content. This understanding of jazz is undoubtedly linked to its supposed “deliberately improvisatory form” (Levinson and Balkin 1623; see also Hall 1599; Finkelstein 71; Hentoff “Jazz” 95): “Improvisation is always changing and adjusting, never fixed, too elusive for analysis and precise description” (Bailey ix). Any attempt to define or describe jazz improvisation is thus said to constitute “a misrepresentation, for there is something central to the spirit of voluntary improvisation which is opposed to the aims and contradicts the idea of documentation” (ix; see also Nachmanovitch 12). 17

To equate jazz so fully and inevitably with improvisation is not without its problems. Not the least of which is the impoverished view, dominating the West, regarding the techniques of improvisation. To the uninitiated, improvising jazz musicians “seem to be making all of it up as they go along” (Gabbard 315; see also Stewart 96; Demsey 788). This perception is not only decidedly incorrect it has “racist” (Derrida “Play” 332) undertones. Improvisation, in accordance with this understanding, is envisaged as “primitive” (Gilroy 294; Gabbard 300), “instinctive” (Townsend 8), “unconscious” (Finkelstein 17; Gabbard 301); “compensation for a deficiency (the inability to read written music), or […] a freakish kind of gift (the jazz musician as the spontaneous, innocent, ‘natural’ player)” (Townsend 8). Despite the enormous “skill and devotion, preparation, training and commitment” (Bailey xii), which go into jazz improvisation, listeners continue to regard the improviser as an “ego-driven mystic who is unable to describe his or her own creative process” (Lewis “Afterward” 170).

While attentive to this dilemma, it is also the case that certain types of jazz have, in the past, focused largely on improvisation, thereby contributing to this vision of jazz as “largely improvisational in nature” (Hall 1599). Take bebop for example. Developed between 1939 and 1941 in after-hours jam sessions at Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, bop adopted the improvisational focus of the jam session – “where the paramount concern was unbroken momentum” (DeVeaux 377) – and in so doing “radically revised the prevailing definition of jazz” (202; see also Jones 64). Musicians who gathered in these Harlem venues after an evening of playing in a large orchestral swing band would concentrate on “learn[ing] new techniques” (Belgrad 180) and practicing solo improvisation, a musical process that had little place in swing performances (180). This attentiveness to spontaneous invention greatly contributed to bebop’s standing as “an aggressive, esoteric music, difficult to understand or to play, and deliberately so” (Chevigny 45). Bop was labelled “mad, wild, frantic, crazy” (Hughes 118) and was lauded as “revolutionary” (Chevigny 45; Ross 257; Ellison 201; Green 39): a “music of revolt, revolt against big bands, arrangers, vertical harmonies, soggy rhythms, non-playing orchestra leaders and Tin Pan Alley; against commercialized music in general” (Allsop 33).

Many other factors contributed to bebop’s “wild” and “revolutionary” reputation. Perhaps the most significant was the “black character of the revolution” (DeVeaux 18): “black musicians [such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, to name a few] dominated bop in a way that they had not dominated other forms of jazz since the early days” (Collier 209). Many argue that bop was developed in order to prevent the parasitic appropriation and exploitation of jazz by white musicians, musicians who had, in the past, “stole” swing (and ragtime) and who were then offered all the best recording contracts and live performances (Allsop 33; Green 39; Hentoff “Race Prejudice” 73; Ellison 212; Hore). It has also been suggested that bop began as “a militant demonstration against ‘Uncle Tomism’” 18 (Allsop 33; see also Beyer 542) and was a “political” attempt to turn jazz into an art music (Green 39), to make it “a music meant for listening and not for dancing” (Belgrad 187).

No matter what the reason for bop’s emergence, in their refusal to cultivate a stage persona or to entertain (white) audiences, bebop musicians were met with much racial antagonism. As one observer remarked, having seen the Parker-Gillespie quintet perform:

That [bebop] sounded arrogant, uppity. […] [When I] saw Bird’s combo, what struck me even more than the music was the attitude coming off the bandstand – self-confident, aggressive. It was something I’d never seen from black musicians before. (qtd. in DeVeaux 435, emphasis in original)

Bebop was accordingly positioned in violation of not only the laws of melodious musicality, but also the rule of law in Western society. It was constituted either as “arrant foolishness, a farrago of nonsense syllables and noisy, incomprehensible music” (440) or as “an underground of drug users, antisocial deviants, and racial militants” (440; see also Allsop 34). “Both impressions,” notes DeVeaux, “were informed by racially grounded stereotypes” (440).

Another influential factor in the construction of bebop as “wild” and transgressive was its connection to the after-hours jam session, that seemingly lawless space, which brought bebop into being and gave it its improvisational focus. As a product of the jam session, bop was considered as “structure-less or chaotic” (Alterhaug 103) as the sessions themselves. The dominant perception of the jam session as eschewing all law is influenced to a large degree by the fact that it offers “few clues to the uncontexted outsider” (DeVeaux 203) regarding its nature and structure. No written music is evident and there is “certainly no rehearsal” (203). No stable or definitive “house band” exists and musicians “come and go as they please, even during the middle of the number” (203). The performances are without “frame” (203) and there are “no spoken introductions or attention-getting silences” (203): “Hardly a word is exchanged beyond a few cryptic phrases – ‘blues in B-flat,’ ‘rhythm changes,’ a quick countdown to set the tempo – and they are off, into a performance that may last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour” (203). All the musicians in the jam session seem to “know what to do without being told” (203) and “[t]he listener is left face to face with the mystery of improvisation – an alchemy that creates music out of nothingness” (203, emphasis added).

It is the “mystery of improvisation” (203), which best lends itself to the transgressive positioning of jazz within Western society. As unique and “unforeseen” 19 (Lewis “Improvised” 145), jazz improvisation is meant to eschew all law, convention, structure or form. It is constituted as “pure spontaneity” (148) to the exclusion of “history or memory” (147; see also Panish 120). Many musicologists and musicians criticize this understanding of improvisation. Wynton Marsalis, for instance, is quoted as saying: “Jazz is not just, ‘Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.’ It’s a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study” (qtd. in Berliner 63). 20 Improvisation is thus not simply “a process of creation that emphasizes freedom and spontaneity” (Panish 123). To improvise well requires an attention to “discipline” (Lewis “Improvised” 153), “technical knowledge” (153), as well as “background, history, and culture” (153).

A tension consequently exists between the “spontaneous” conception of jazz improvisation and the more context-driven model. This tension is intrinsic to jazz improvisation itself. Improvisation can be neither purely spontaneous nor completely determined by the musical structures with which it engages. It must be both responsive to otherness and have some stable or determined dimension in order to endure as jazz improvisation. Thus, quoting saxophonist Steve Lacy, improvisation sits “on the edge – in between the known and the unknown and you have to keep pushing it towards the unknown otherwise it and you die” (Bailey 54).

Western democratic law holds similar contradictions. The dominant, or what George Lewis calls the “Eurological” 21 (Lewis “Improvised” 133), view of improvisation positions it as utterly spontaneous in opposition to a stable and determinate set of laws and practices governing Western music. The same dichotomy underlies the conception of Western law. Following Hobbes (1651), Rousseau (1762) and, somewhat later, Freud (1913), the tale of law’s founding is almost always told in relation to a violent uncertainty or “state of nature” from which “we” allegedly escaped (Manderson “From Hunger to Love” 88). Unpredictability is thence constituted as something external to Western law, as that which must be reined in or controlled. Far from being improvised or unforeseen, law is said to furnish “us moderns” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 8) with “a haven of certainty in an uncertain world” (8). Asserted again and again is the idea that law “provided and provides an imperative certainty and predictability” (8), especially in relation to “transitions to modernity, and in the sustaining of modern economic relations in particular” (8). What is more, it is these “pre-announced rules that are clear and intelligible in themselves” (MacCormick 12), which “we most often expect from the law” (Deutscher 97).

The rule of law in Western society thereby demands that any inventive or unpredictable qualities be strictly managed or denied. As the argument goes, if law could simply be invented in “each act of decision” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 87), it would hold “no set and enduring truth” (87). Any invention of law by judges or others must be determinately contained or restricted through, inter alia, the device of legal precedent or stare decisis. 22 Precedent, in its reliance on past legal decisions, assures that “like cases will be treated alike, and that similarly situated individuals are subject to the same legal consequences” ( Rehnquist 347). As a guard against the “arbitrary and capricious” (Nitta 798), precedent “provides certainty in the law” (797) and “allows citizens to arrange and conduct their affairs with stability and predictability” (798).

This seemingly straightforward account of precedent nonetheless belies the rather complex relationship of law to invention. For every lawyer or legal theorist who condemns judge-made law or judicial activism (Bork), there are others, such as legal realists (Frank) or critical legal theorists (see, for example, Bucholtz; Margulies; and Silbey and Ewick), who applaud any inventive techniques in law. This lack of consensus as to the role invention plays actually flows from the very nature of the legal decision. Every judicial act is, in “a trivial sense” (Dworkin 6), a species of invention. As no two actions can be exactly the same, judges “make new law” (qtd. 6) every time they are asked to decide a case. Law can thus neither dispense with, nor be completely determined by, the device of precedent (Deutscher 98). The legal decision instead lies on the “horizon” (Fitzpatrick “Breaking the Unity” 58), the border between “what it is” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 89) and what it otherwise could be (89). While bebop jazz, for example, must mask its structured elements 23 in order to continue as a revolutionary and creative art form, the inverse is true for law: the inventive dimension of law must be subordinated to tradition and precedent in order to endure as authoritative and commanding in Western society. The “most popular opinion” (Dworkin 8) thereby remains that judges should simply find or discover the law that “already is” (6) and those who invent or “make new law” (qtd. 6) are viewed to be “bad judges, the usurpers, destroyers of democracy” (8; see also Cohen 25).
Derrida and Music

The conceptualisation offered above envisages an improvisation that is venerated in jazz, an invention degraded in law, but neither being able to subsist solely “as such” in either field. An irresolution thus exists as to the role of improvisation and invention in law and jazz, one that is simply confirmed by the dissident voices rising up from both disciplines. In order to fully understand this irresolution, Derrida’s work on law and invention becomes most instructive. As a prerequisite to this discussion, though, I must engage briefly with the question of whether Derrida’s thoughts can in fact be applied to the musical genre of jazz. The philosopher himself is of little assistance here for, despite being an avid jazz fan (O’Reilly; Stein), nowhere in his discussions on invention does Derrida mention jazz or jazz improvisation (or any form of musical invention to be exact). 24 This omission does not necessarily negate the possibility of deconstructing music. In fact, Derrida himself reportedly endorsed the attempt, remarking to Rose Subotnik that he “would be interested to see what resulted” (Subotnik 39) from her deconstruction of a Chopin prelude (39-147). Notwithstanding this endorsement, however, a brief exploration into whether one can apply a deconstructive framework to the topic of jazz improvisation needs to be undertaken.

For this inquiry, we return to Paris. This time the exact date is unknown. 25 Pop star, Green Gartside, lead singer and composer for the pop band, Scritti Politti, has just been invited to meet with the philosopher after writing a song entitled “Jacques Derrida” (Rough Trade Records 1982), which Derrida’s students played for him (O’Reilly). When Gartside was asked years later what he and Derrida spoke about at that meeting, he answered with the following:

Oh, music! […] As I remember, he likes jazz, which was pretty neat ‘cause I had it in me to ask him some things. Half-jokingly, I said, “Well, isn’t it true that jazz is valued for its spontaneity and improvisation, the idea that it represents the moment of self-present expression and meaning? But isn’t that all somewhat suspect?” (qtd. in Chang)

Derrida’s reply to this query remains undocumented. However, Gartside plays an important role in this discussion for, despite being well-versed in deconstructive theory, he remains convinced that there is something unique to music, which positions it “outside the limits of language and logocentrism” (qtd. in Hoskyns). Its “meaning or its sense,” in other words, is not “determined by language” and cannot be found “innately residing within four beats to the bar” (qtd. in Hoskyns).

Gartside is nevertheless not blind to the metaphysical limits of music: “no one musical phenomenon is ever going to transcend beat or repetition, nor is it ever going to transcend the history of criticism and the industry” (qtd. in Hoskyns). Despite this admission, however, he does believe that “[i]t is possible, but again only in a metaphysical way, to think and talk about music as something that undoes” (qtd. in Toop, emphasis in original). Quoting Gartside:

When I met Derrida he said that what I was doing was part of the same project of undoing and unsettling that he’s engaged in. He’s written that what sets the musician apart is the possibility of meaninglessness. That unsettling has always been my experience of pop, from the earliest moments – pop is the abuse of language. (qtd. in Reynolds)

Musicologist Marcel Cobussen disagrees with Gartside’s assertion that music is meaningless: “Of course (pop) music has meaning; it has political, economic, social, cultural and psychological meaning (and I am not only referring to its lyrics here). In this sense, we can approach music through language, through all kinds of discourses on music” (Cobussen “Scritti Politti” para. 5). However, he admits that Gartside “points to something, a non-localizable place, where music transgresses the power of language” (para. 5). Cobussen writes:

We cannot understand music the same way we understand language. Music is a language, music is text, but it is not the same as a spoken or written language. Because something in music always escapes comprehension, understanding. Language fails to make music completely transparent. Music appeals to something that exceeds the semantic part of language; it appeals to non-discursive sonority. (Para. 5)

Unfortunately, we are unable to look to Derrida for answers to this dilemma. As noted above, he never really engaged with the topic of music in his work. 26 When asked by Gartside why he never wrote a book expressly on the subject, Derrida replied that to do so was “the most difficult thing” (qtd. in O’Reilly). Instead, his “loftiest aim” was to give his texts “the condition of musicality” (qtd. in O’Reilly; see also Roberts). In one interview he is quoted as saying: “music is the object of my strongest desire, and yet at the same time it remains completely forbidden. I don’t have the competence. […] I am even more afraid of speaking nonsense in this area than in any other” (Brunette and Wills 21).

Derrida’s refusal to write on the topic of music cannot be relied upon as evidence of its inability to signify. However, his silence on the subject has led some theorists to argue that he simply “stays closely connected to the philosophers he criticizes” (Cobussen “Derrida’s Ear” para. 4) and that “[h]is deconstructive practices do not reach the sonorous domain, the domain of music” (para. 4). Musicologists such as Cobussen, however, defend the deconstruct-ability of music and argue that Derrida touches on the idea of sonority in his treatment of “words,” which he likens to “non-discursive sonority” (Cobussen “Justification” para. 6). As Derrida asserts in an interview with Brunette and Wills:

And if I love words it is also because of their ability to escape their proper form, whether they interest me as visible things, letters representing the spatial visibility of the word, or as something musical or audible. That is to say, I am also interested in words, paradoxically, to the extent that they are nondiscursive, for that’s how they can be used to explode discourse. (Brunette and Wills 20)

Although Derrida does not go so far as to call this non-discursive sonority music(al), according to Cobussen, his treatment of “words” in this manner “opens a way to connect Derrida’s thoughts to music” (Cobussen “Justification” para. 6).

This is a debate to which I, a lawyer, have nothing personally to add. 27 Instead, I defer to Cobussen and insist on the possibility of a Derridean critique of jazz improvisation. My deference may irritate some musicologists. Ingrid Monson, for instance, has held that deconstruction “may make sense in the context of debates in Western philosophy” (Monson 209), but “it has done considerable damage to understanding the ways in which music as a sonic phenomenon and human agency participate in the construction of social and cultural meaning” (209). While ever mindful of the limitations of deconstructive theory, especially in relation to the Western metaphysical tradition within which it operates, I find myself unconvinced by her argument. Deconstruction is found wanting by Monson in that it “values writing over speech and grounds the decentering of the subject” (209). What her interpretation ignores, however, is that, for Derrida, no concept can ever be so fully secured with determinate meaning such that it could become so privileged. Moreover, while Derrida may have “no interest in defining subjectivity” (Morgan), he does not “want merely to get rid of the subject in a nihilistic fashion” (Morgan). Thus, not having been persuaded to the contrary, I align myself with those who regard the application of Derrida’s thought to music as a viable and promising endeavour (see, for example, Subotnik) and I proceed to critique, deconstructively, the established conception of improvisation as “the essence of” (Collier 25) jazz and the nemesis of law. 28
The “Mystical Foundation” of Jazz Improvisation 29

"When you’re just learning jazz, everything is mystical."
Wynton Marsalis (qtd. in Berliner 2)

Unpacking the “mystical” founding of improvisation requires, perhaps surprisingly, an initial attentiveness to Derrida’s work on law and justice. Of particular relevance is the consideration given in both “Before the Law” and “Force of Law” to the “difficult and unstable distinction between justice and law” (Derrida “Force” 250), which can be likened to the “problematic relation between the singular and the general” (Attridge “Before the Law” 181; see also Derrida “Before the Law” 187) or the “antinomy between the general and the particular” (Belay 125). In a move that mirrors their dominant conceptualization in Western society, Derrida positions justice as singularity in opposition to a more generalized law. For Derrida, “justice” – “infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and heterotropic” (Derrida “Force” 250) – “always addresses itself to singularity, to the singularity of the other, despite or even because it pretends to universality” (248). Phrased slightly differently, as “[e]ach case is other, each decision is different” (251), justice “requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely” (251). Law, in contrast, is described as “a system of regulated and coded prescriptions” (250, emphasis added). It is constituted solely in terms of its “generality” (245) and “universality” (245), as that which always follows pre-existent and “given” (253) rules. For Derrida, the issue then becomes how to reconcile the “event” or “act of justice” (245) with the rules, norms or imperatives that “necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case” (245).

Upon setting up the dichotomy between law and justice, Derrida proceeds to dismantle it: “Everything would still be simple if this distinction between justice and law were a true distinction” (“Force” 250). He makes evident that not only does law claim to “exercise itself in the name of justice” (251), but “justice demands for itself that it be established in the name of a law” (251). Justice, as “unlimited responsiveness to the other” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4), exists solely as “an experience of the impossible” (Derrida “Force” 244). It can only be made “possible, in the sense of becoming existent, and given operative force” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4) through law. The aporia of justice “demands decision” (Beardsworth 5). Each judicial act of deciding thereby “cuts into and enacts justice, even whilst denying justice as illimitably responsive” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4; see also Fitzpatrick “Dominions” 144). Justice, in other words, is “dependent on the determinate presence effected by the legal decision” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4). As Derrida explains: “No justice is exercised, no justice is rendered, no justice becomes effective nor does it determine itself in the form of law, without a decision that cuts and divides” (Derrida “Force” 252).

Not only is law “necessary for justice” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4), so too is justice, as the “undecideable” (Derrida “Force” 253), “necessary for law” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 4): “The undecideable remains caught, lodged, as a ghost at least, but an essential ghost, in every decision, in every event of decision” (Derrida “Force” 253, emphasis added). Peter Fitzpatrick 30 explains. Law, he writes, “cannot be […] enduringly ordered and predictable” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 8). If it were, “there could be no call for decision, for determination, for law” (9). Instead, for law to endure, it requires a simultaneous “responsiveness” (9), an “attunement and attentiveness to what is beyond” (9). Law, argues Fitzpatrick, must be able to “change and adapt to such other things as ‘society,’ or ‘history’” (9; see also Fitzpatrick “In the End” 464). And this responsiveness to the other of law is “essential for law” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9, emphasis added).

A similar irresolution exists in relation to invention. In “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” Derrida critiques the “traditional and dominant value of invention” (44), which must, “by definition” (Derrida “Psyche” 41), “break with convention” (41); it must “overflow, overlook, transgress, negate” (41) that from which it comes. So too must it “transgress” (41) or break with law. As Derrida writes: “every invention should make fun of the statutory” (45) and every invention “always presupposes some illegality, the breaking of an implicit contract” (25). However, “true” invention, or what Derrida calls the “invention of the other” (55), is impossible because there can be no invention “without a prevailing statutory context” (45). Stated differently, invention exists solely on the condition that it transgresses the “status” (41) with which it is supposed to comply. This “status,” like law, is constituted as “stable, established, and legitimated by a social or symbolic order in an institutionalizable code, discourse, or text” (45).

Returning to the “problematic between the singular and the general” (Attridge “Before the Law” 181), the singular “event” of invention demands its simultaneous capture within a “system” of conventions that will ensure its position more generally in culture and society ( Derrida “Psyche” 28). Thus, whilst the event of invention “can take place only once” (51), invention more generally must be “essentially repeatable, transmissible, and transposable” (51); “to take place as an event, it must already compromise its singularity with the conditions of recognisability that take the form of structures of repeatability or iterability” (Bennington “Double Tounging,” emphasis in original). It is therefore a paradox or aporia that “invention is constituted by its originality […] and yet wholly dependent on recognition and legitimation (and therefore subject to codes and laws)” (Attridge “Psyche” 310). It remains forever captured within the “order of the calculable” (Derrida “Psyche” 55), the “order of the same” (55), which is, for Derrida, the order of law (Derrida “Force” 244). To be otherwise would make its recognition as invention impossible.

Invention thus needs to be with law in order to be inventive. Its originality can only be “display[ed]” (Derrida “Psyche” 27), can only be brought into presence or made present, through law, through the “values of form and composition” (27); and law is “necessary not only for it to be recognized, identified, legitimized, institutionalized as invention (to be patented, we might say), but for invention even to occur, or, let us say, for it to come about” (44, emphasis in original).

Just as invention needs law, so too does law need invention in order to remain properly commanding in Western society. As revealed by Derrida in “Force of Law”:

To be just, the decision of the judge, for example, must not only follow a rule of law or a general law [loi] but must also assume it, approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if, at the limit, the law [loi] did not exist previously – as if the judge himself invented it in each case. Each exercise of justice as law can be just only if it is a “fresh judgment”. (Derrida “Force” 251, emphasis added)

The impossible but “utter responsiveness” (Fitzpatrick “Law Like Poetry” 287) of invention consequently becomes the “undecideable” (Derrida “Force” 253), which haunts the legal decision and ensures that law never becomes completely or “perfectly stilled” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9; Fitzpatrick “Breaking the Unity” 58). In its concern for the other, invention effectively sustains the need for decision, sustains the need for law (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9; Fitzpatrick “Breaking the Unity” 58).

The “undecideable relation between the general and the singular” (Beardsworth 25), “between universality and singularity” (25), subsequently demands that law and invention exist solely as “aporia” (Derrida “Force” 244). The aporetic nature of invention, for instance, rests on the fact that “true” invention would “appear” only “in terms of an entirely open responsiveness to the other” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 3), which would of course be impossible. To exist in such singularity (Derrida “Force” 248) would mean that it would have to stand “opposite the universal [law] in its completeness” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 63). If this were so we would “be deprived of all relation with it” (Nancy 60) and could not know it as invention. Equally, if law’s content was completely non-inventive or “perfectly stilled” (Fitzpatrick “Access” 9) “it would cease to rule the situation that would inexorably change around it” (9). Law can thus not be “merely or fixedly determinant” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 6); it must instead remain “responsive to historical change, or to the needs of the nation, or to the development of society” (Fitzpatrick “No Higher Duty” 236). In stark contrast to its purported fixity and stability, law “will have accommodated changing facts, all coming from beyond it” (236).

In their deconstruction of “absolute singularity” (Derrida Deconstruction Engaged 90), Derrida’s writings on law and invention become extremely relevant to this study of improvisation – for it is the “ideal of singularity” (Maras), which most often activates notions of improvisation in Western society. A deconstructive reading of jazz improvisation thus exposes the “social repressiveness of the traditional concept” (Attridge “Psyche” 310) and reads improvisation likewise as aporia. To help explain: the singularity of the improvised act must be an “inaugural event” (Derrida “Psyche” 28), a “first time ever” (qtd. 28). Yet, this “first time,” in order to be a completely original and “unique moment” (29), must also be a “last time” (29; see also Derrida “Shibboleth” 2). It must be singular, complete and containable. To be so “totally present” (Birmingham 131), however, would make it “not the same” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 43) and “completely different to us” (43). If this were the case “there would be no possibility of adequate relation to it in order for us to know it” (43). The “singularity” of improvisation must thus be understood as “original repetition” (Birmingham 131), as “iterability” (Derrida “Psyche” 51), in which the “instituting act” (Birmingham 131) only gains meaning through “the repetition of an origin with which it cannot coincide, since it is of the very essence of the origin to be pure anteriority” (131). The “singular, creative event” (131) is accordingly “marked by the lack of self-presence” (131) and it is this “repetition” (Derrida “Psyche” 51), as the “law of the singular event” (Derrida “Last Interview” 8), which makes the originality of improvisation possible in the first place (Birmingham 131).

Law and jazz thus coalesce in the irresolution of the improvised act. The “aporetic relation between (the failure of) generality and (the failure of) singularity” (Beardsworth 43), “between the law and the singular” (41), requires “some subsisting relation and thence some commonality” (Fitzpatrick Modernism 59) between the responsiveness that is privileged in jazz and the determinacy deemed essential to law. Law cannot subsist without jazz’s responsive “opening onto all that lies beyond” (59) just as jazz requires “some” determinacy in order to endure as a “contained, distinct being” (59), to endure as jazz. It is therefore “the necessity yet impossibility” (Fitzpatrick “Cause of Law” 464) of both pure determinacy (law) and pure responsiveness (jazz), which “iteratively impel[s]” (464) both law and jazz “into existence” (464). The “originary repetition” (Beardsworth 32) of improvisation becomes its law (32, 35) and without such improvisation could not exist.
The Necessity of Improvisation’s Impossibility 31

Revisiting the Coleman-Derrida collaborative engagement, if jazz music, even that as “radically improvisational” (Soules 270) as Ornette Coleman’s, can never be truly inventive or properly escape the “clammy grasp of law” (Haldar 7), what so moved Derrida to join Coleman on stage at the 1997 Paris Jazz Festival? Expressed more generally, “why, exactly, does improvisation matter” (Heble “Editorial” 1) to deconstruction and, by extension, to law and jazz? The answer to all these queries lies, I believe, in différance, 32 in the “formal play of differences” (Derrida Positions 26), “of traces” (26), which “forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself” (26, emphasis in original). Improvisation “of some inaugurality” (Derrida Monolingualism 66) may be “the impossible itself” (66), but the différance of improvisation ensures that its impossibility is “not the opposite of the possible” (Beardsworth 26, emphasis in original). Instead, it “supports” (Derrida Paper Machine 91) and “releases the possible” (Beardsworth 26, emphasis in original).

It follows then that Derrida is “not against the impossible” (Caputo 20), not against improvisation. Quite the opposite. As he stated in one interview: “I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it’s impossible” (Derrida “Unpublished Interview”). Improvisation, as Derrida posits in relation to deconstruction, “loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible” (Derrida “Psyche” 36). It is instead “possibility” which hinders and constrains – for possibility contains “the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches” (36). It contains the danger, if you will, of becoming fully determined law. It is thus the impossibility of improvisation (Derrida Monolingualism 66), which gives it “hope and possibility” (Fischlin and Heble 11). For if improvisation were truly possible, in the sense of being wholly improvised or original, there would be no call for spontaneous invention or, by analogy, for jazz. It is therefore “the attempt at such an improvisation, necessarily failing,” (Bennington “Double Tounging”), which “leaves a trace or a mark that can be seen as a promise of such an inaugurality” (Bennington “Double Tounging”, emphasis in original). In its failure, improvisation survives. “Affirmez la survie”. 33

Improvisation thus matters to Derrida because “[d]econstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all” (Derrida “Psyche” 42); and it is “not just inventive, it is called by the other” (Bernasconi 118). The “‘inventive’ side to Derrida’s philosophy” (Beardsworth xiv) thereby aims to “reinvent invention” (Derrida “Psyche” 44) in order to “make a space for an inventiveness open to the wholly other” (Attridge “Psyche” 310). This openness of improvisation towards the other, “towards the unknown” (Bailey 54), not only sustains jazz as a creative art form, it also nurtures the possibility of “improvised musicking” 34 (Fischlin and Heble “Other Side” 26; see also Fischlin 10) as that which links jazz to ethics (Heble Landing 200), resistance (Siddall 10; Fischlin and Heble “Other Side” 2, 4; Fischlin and Heble Rebel Musics) and democracy (Beyer 552).

Similarly, the responsively open dimension of improvisation matters to Western law for, without such, “we might not associate a legal decision with justice, even if it were fully in conformity with the law” (Deutscher 98). The openness, which accompanies any invention in law, “protects the possibility of radical transformation within an existing legal system” (Cornell 167) and enables us to “resist or rise up against an iniquitous law” (Bennington “Derridabase” 194). It ensures, in other words, that “law cannot inevitably shut out its challengers and prevent transformation” (Cornell 165, emphasis in original). As Bennington writes: “In this opening of the other (toward the other, called by the other), without which the same would not be, there is a chance of something happening” (Bennington “Derridabase” 14-15, emphasis added). This openness to the other thus becomes an “openness to transformation” (Cornell 166) within law, within society.

Such is the promise of the “law of the singular event”: “endless revolution” (Derrida “Last Interview” 8) and hope of reform, “otherwise determined” (8).
Acknowledgements

This article owes much to the support, guidance and intellectual inspiration of Professor Peter Fitzpatrick. Deep appreciation must also be conveyed to Bhaljit Dhadda, Andrew Laking, George Laking, Sundhya Pahuja and my colleagues at the Birkbeck School of Law Postgraduate Student Conference 2005, all of whom were invaluable in their feedback and encouragement. Lastly, this work would not have been possible without the stimulating comments and direction offered by the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal.
Notes

1 This title gestures towards Henry Louis Gates’ concept of “Signifyin(g)” as a model of improvisation that is “‘nothing more’ than repetition and revision” (Gates 63-64). Placing Gates and Derrida in close proximity is purposeful and hints at potential parallels between Gates’ theory and Derrida’s understanding of improvisation as “iterability” (Derrida “Psyche” 51), as the “invention of a law of the singular event” (Derrida “Last Interview” 8). This “law of the singular event” arises out of Derrida’s last interview (Le Monde, 19 August 2004) in which he is quoted as saying: “If I had invented a writing it would have been as an endless revolution. Each situation demands the creation of a suitable mode of exposition, the invention of a law of the singular event…” (8, emphasis added) [“Si j’avais inventé mon écriture, je l’aurais fait comme une révolution interminable. Dans chaque situation, il faut créer un mode d’exposition approprié, inventer la loi de l’événement singulier…” (21)].

2 As a young man, Coleman was distressed about having to make his living playing in gaming houses and brothels (Nettelbeck 199). He told his mother that he no longer wanted to play jazz music as it was “adding to all that suffering” (Murphy 323). His mother’s response – “you want somebody to pay you for your soul?” (qtd. 323) – liberated him from the “world of commerce and corruption” (Nettelbeck 199) and led him to “make music with and for his soul” (199). This anecdote, recounted by Coleman before the concert (see Murphy), inspired Derrida to recite the following onstage:

Soul and the music of the soul, what is it? What does it mean? How do we recognise it, soul? Beyond all the psycho-theologico-spiritualist discourse? By the fact that it can’t be sold or turned into capital pre-emptively; it’s the failure of capital, it’s the ultimate revolution, it’s unsellable from birth, when it happens, when it’s created, and when it’s not calculated, and when it suddenly shifts its ground in a blast of saxotelephone of which neither the eye nor the ear had warning, even though so much work, as with Coleman, had gone into writing […]. (qtd. in Nettelbeck 200; for the full text, see Derrida “Play”)

3 Bruce King admits to being “a member of that audience booing Derrida to shut up” (King). He defends his actions by stating: “Derrida was not listed on the programme, he was not announced, and I paid my money to hear Coleman” (King).

4 Derrida recalls: “His [Coleman’s] fans were so unhappy they started booing. It was a very unhappy event. It was a very painful experience” (qtd. in Stein).

5 Harmolodics: “Harmony, Motion and Melody” (Lake). According to Steve Lake, writer for Wire magazine:

[…] harmolodics in practice means this: You solo all the time and you stay out of the other guy’s way. The source for this improvisation is of Ornette’s notating but the charts are only there as raw source material. You don’t necessarily play the note that’s written on your sheet music, Dewey Redman once said, you just have to hold in your mind the way in which Ornette might play it.

Once the head of the melody is negotiated, and that too may be placed quite approximately, the musician is free to play on any of the melody’s centres. A certain note sequence might set up its own momentum when explored more thoroughly. Or, more vaguely still, the player might choose to focus on what he considers the feeling of the melody. (Lake, emphasis in original)

6 For a critique of this division, see Chapter 3 of Derrida’s Of Grammatology.

7 The rigid dichotomy constructed as between Derrida and Coleman, while productive for this enquiry, is actually somewhat misleading. It is not Coleman, but those “on the outside” (Murphy 320), who view free jazz as music without law. In an interview with Derrida on 23 June 1997, Coleman explains:

[…] like when I was doing free jazz, most people thought that I just picked up my saxophone and played whatever was going through my head, without following any rule, but that wasn’t true.

[…]

What’s really shocking in improvised music is that despite its name, most musicians use a “framework [trame]” as a basis for improvising. […] it’s totally improvised, but at the same time it follows the laws and rules of European structure. And yet, when you hear it, it has a completely improvised feel [air]. (Murphy 320-21)

8 L’Amour Fou – “mad love” – is Haldar’s subject. This doctrine, which found its form in the 20th century surrealist technique of “automatic writing,” “forces us to think of a moment of pure passion as a literary experience that properly escapes the clammy grasp of law” (Haldar 7). Haldar questions whether we can actually say that automatic writing “brings down the law?” (5). His answer? “Clearly not. Indeed automatic writing fully expresses Bataille’s idea of an Icarus complex. That is, what looks like mad love, is nothing more than the law of law; it is nothing more than the repetition of man’s vertical aspirations” (5).

9 See, for example, “Before the Law” (1992) and “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (2002). For the purposes of this article, all references to “Force of Law” will be from the Acts of Religion (2002) version, which revised the 1989 translation in order to “include the changes made in the latest French edition of the text, published in 1994” (Anidjar 229).

10 See Derrida “Psyche”.

11 According to The Oxford English Reference Dictionary (OERD), to “improvise” is to “compose or perform (music, verse, etc.) extempore” (OERD 710, emphasis added).

12 Invention is defined as the “creation of something which did not exist before” (Black 824).

13 The caution is now customary when positing a methodological orientation that is deconstructive in nature. Not only was Derrida extremely suspicious of the title “deconstruction” (Critchley 27), to call it a “framework”, “method”, “theory” or even a “reading” shamefully belittles the complexities of deconstructive thought (Beardsworth xv). Borrowing from Jacqueline Rose: “it would be a grave error to describe [deconstruction] as system or school of thought because it has seized schools and systems by their very nerve endings, leaving nothing as it was before” (Cixous and Derrida “The Language of Others” 1). One may be obliged to employ such words when describing deconstruction, but the spectre of this warning necessarily haunts each use.

14 The “jazz form” references an improvisation that is not “structure-less or chaotic” (Alterhaug 103), but instead requires some sort of framework or pre-determined form or structure (Murphy 321).

15 Cobusen explains the importance of the “other” to deconstructive theory:

Especially in his later works, Derrida often speaks of “l’invention de l’autre,” where “l’autre” (“the other”) may be regarded as that which remains unthought, that which escapes the grip of our concepts. The other is whatever resists, escapes definition whenever definition is put in place. Recognition of the other opens the ethical dimension of deconstruction which consists in opening, uncloseting, destabilizing foreclusionary structures so as to allow passage toward the other. No culturally based directive, but the other appealing to me very concretely. No laws of tolerance, hospitality or acceptance but my singular relationship to a singular other. Deconstruction can be thought of as a reading and writing strategy that takes notice of traces of the other, of the unthought, the invisible, the unheard without absorbing, assimilating or reducing it to the same (to the cognitive power of the knowing subject or self-consciousness). (Cobusen “Music, Deconstruction, and Ethics” para. 3)

16 Variations on this response have also been attributed to “Fats” Waller and Duke Ellington (Townsend 162).

17 Michael Jarret makes a similar argument:

The entire history of jazz can be heard as one colossal improvisation defining what improvisation can be: jazz is one answer to the question, What is improvisation? Getting this definition into words, however, or between the covers of a book requires either trickery or violence. When we write about improvisation, what are we really writing about? (Jarrett 321)

18 The “Uncle Tom” caricature, derived from the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowes’ novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), has become a “slur used to disparage a Black person who is humiliatingly subservient or deferential to White people” (Pilgrim).

19 The word “improvisation” is derived from the Latin improvisus, which “refers to the ‘unforeseen’ or that which occurs ‘on the spur of the moment’” (Alterhaug 98).

20 This sentiment is backed by musician Andrew Laking:

One question I thought of is: why are so many listeners being fooled? Probably because they don’t understand the music well enough (and who could blame them). Perhaps also because most people seem to think that jazz musicians are naturally talented, but certainly not hard working; it’s something you do for fun. This belief would make it hard for people to realise that it’s less about spontaneous creation and improvisation, but more about hard work and long term commitment. (Personal Communication, 20 June 2005)

21 Lewis adopts the terms “Eurological” and “Afrological” in order to “refer metaphorically to musical belief systems and behavior that […] exemplify particular kinds of musical ‘logic’” (Lewis “Improvised” 133). The “Eurological” view sees improvisation as “pure spontaneity” (148) unmediated by “history or memory” (147). This is compared to the “Afrological” approach, which emphasizes “personality” (156), “discipline” (153), “technical knowledge of music theory and of one’s instrument” (153) and a “thorough attention to the background, history, and culture of one’s music” (153).

22 Precedent, defined as an “adjudged case or decision of a court, considered as furnishing an example or authority for an identical or similar case afterwards arising from a similar question of law” (Black 1176), is by no means the only device utilised by law in order to control invention. However, it will be the sole focus here.

23 One way the “accomplished improviser” (Gabbard 315) can disguise the “jazz form” (Finkelstein 71) is by “learn[ing] the codes that connote freshness, looseness, and a feeling of spontaneity” (Gabbard 315, emphasis added). Such learned procedures can “create a pattern so complex that we get an illusion of randomness” (Nachmanovitch 27).

24 Derrida restricts his discussion of invention in “Psyche” to what he views as the “only two major types of authorized examples for invention” (Derrida “Psyche” 32, emphasis in original): invention of “stories (fictional or fabulous)” (32, emphasis in original) and invention of “machines, technical devices or mechanisms, in the broadest sense of the word” (32, emphasis in original).

25 The best estimate I can give is sometime between 1982, the year Scritti Politti released the song “Jacques Derrida,” and early 1988 when Gartside mentions in a 5 March 1988 interview in Melody Maker that he had “met Derrida” (Reynolds). No mention is made of this meeting in any interviews I have read prior to this date.

26 Writes Cobussen: “In spite of the fact that Derrida’s deconstruction of a text by Rousseau (in Of Grammatology) deals with the hierarchical relation between melody and harmony, this can by no means be called a musical deconstruction or a deconstruction in music” (Cobussen “Justification” para. 5).

27 For a view, which opposes Cobussen, see Jacques Attali’s Noise:

To my mind, the origin of music should not be sought in linguistic communication. Of course, the drum and song have long been carriers of linguistic meaning. But there is no convincing theory of music as language. The attempts that have been made in that direction are no more than camouflages for the lamest kind of naturalism or the most mundane kind of pedantry. The musical message has no meaning, even if one artificially assigns a (necessarily rudimentary) signification to certain sounds, a move that is almost always associated with a hierarchical discourse. (Attali 25)

28 For two engaging and insightful critiques of the opposition of law to music more generally, see Desmond Manderson’s Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice (2000) and Peter Goodrich’s “Operatic Hermeneutics: Harmony, Euphantasy, and Law in Rossini’s Semiramis” (1999).

29 Here I am borrowing from the title of Derrida’s pioneering article, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” which will be discussed in detail in this section.

30 Fitzpatrick adeptly captures the aporetic nature of Western law through his unpacking of the relation between the “responsive” and “determinate” dimensions of law in modernity. For quite a comprehensive and accessible summary of Fitzpatrick’s philosophy, see his interview with Jill Stauffer in The Believer (Fitzpatrick “In God We Trust”).

31 This is taken from Derrida’s essay “As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits’” in which he discusses the “Necessity of Impossibility” (Paper Machine 87).

32 Derrida takes a certain “revenge” (Bennington “Derridabase” 71) on speech through his “invention” (71) of the “witticism” (70, 71) différance, which inserts an “a” in place of the “e” in order to capture the “dual movement” (Smith 44) of difference and deferral (Attridge and Baldwin). Vengeance is unleashed in the fact that the difference between the two words is “only marked in writing” (Bennington “Derridabase” 70-71) (both différance and différence are pronounced the same way in French), obliging speech “to take its own written trace as its reference” (71) if it wants to “say this difference” (71, emphasis added).

33 This imperative, translated into English as “Affirm the survival”, was among the “few lines” (Butler 25) left by Derrida to be read by his son Pierre at his funeral in October 2004 (25).

34 The concept “musicking,” coined by Christopher Small and referenced in Fischlin and Heble, recognizes that improvisation is not necessarily or essentially ethical, resistant or democratic. Not all improvised music, in other words, aligns itself “with antihegemonic resistance or critical strategies of alternative community building” (Fischlin and Heble “Other Side” 2). However, there does exist an “identifiable and radical form of improvisational practices” (2), which activates “critical modes of resistance and dialogue” (2) and orients us towards the other, towards “the other side of nowhere” (Sun Ra, qtd. 1).
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Judith Butler's Obituary of Derrida: Lamenting the failure to communicate

2007-08-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

I received an obituary of Jacques Derrida authored by Judith Butler in an email. The subject line is "Judith Butler on Derrida for the German newspapers." I don't know whether it has already appeared in the papers yet, or where it is likely to come out.

I'm only excerpting the first paragraph, out of respect for the LRB. I like this piece by Butler because she's taking stock of Derrida on his own terms and in his own tone -- a tone I call Derrida's perpetual lament. And, contrary to what is commonly thought, that tone did not first appear in the last few years, though it did become more urgent then. It's there even in the early, major works in the 1960s and 70s.

Q: What was he lamenting? A: Fundamentally -- sort of -- the impossibility of communication. Communication is impossible because of the opacity of language itself as a medium (which is nevertheless inevitable), because of the opacity of subjectivity, and because of the inevitability of death. We never understand each other just right, his argument goes, and therefore we never really understand each other at all. Sometimes Derrida is talking not about the communication attempted between and amongst individuals (whether in private or in public; the two were always intimately intertwined in Derrida's writing), but other times he is talking about a philosophical abstraction referred to as the Other. In his essays, Derrida slipped back and forth between the two.

I myself only saw Derrida speak once, at the American Academy of Religion conference in Toronto in the fall of 2002. Derrida's recent turn to "religion" elicited considerable interest and excitement amongst religious studies scholars, led by a Villanova theologican named John Caputo (who has written two impressive books on Derrida). The room was packed -- probably upwards of 1000 people were there. I responded probably the way most people responded -- intense interest, curiosity, and occasionally a sense of awe. But he went on too long, and was too confusing. I couldn't stay focused; people began filtering and then streaming out of the lecture.

And Derrida sidestepped (would we expect anything else?) Caputo's repeated questions (the "lecture" was technically an "interview") about his -- JD's -- personal relationship with God, and with "faith." It seemed that Derrida was saying that deconstruction and theology are simply not compatible methods of thought; he would not accept God as an ontologically whole entity with whom human beings can "communicate" (and I mean that in the Catholic as well as the linguistic sense). Indeed, to have done so would have been profoundly incongruous with his philosophical project of nearly 40 years. The work of deconstruction is simply not -- and cannot be -- the work of theology, even negative theology.

I should also mention that I taught a class called "How to Read Deconstructively," where I assigned a few Derrida classics, including Of Grammatology and Limited Inc. A bare-bones syllabus is here. I tried to structure it so that students who had had no previous exposure (initiation?) to deconstruction could enter into the arguments. I assigned Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Austin, and even a little Cavell.

* * * * *
So then, here is Judith Butler on Jacques Derrida:

"How do you finally respond to your life and your name?" Derrida raised this question in his final interview with Le Monde, published in August 18th of this year. If he could apprehend his life, he remarks, he would also be obliged to apprehend his death as singular and absolute, without resurrection and without redemption. At this revealing moment, it is interesting that Derrida the philosopher should find in Socrates his proper precursor, that he should turn to Socrates to understand that, at the age of 74, he still did not quite know how best to live. One cannot, he remarks, come to terms with oneâs life without trying to apprehend oneâs death, asking, in effect, how a human lives and dies. Much of Derridaâs later work is dedicated to mourning, though he offers his acts of public mourning as a posthumous gift, for instance, in The Work of Mourning published in 2001. There he tries to come to terms with the death of other writers and thinkers through reckoning his debt to their words, indeed, their texts; his own writing constitutes an act of mourning, one that he is perhaps, avant la lettre, recommending to us a way to begin to mourn this thinker who not only taught us how to read, but gave the act of reading a new significance and a new promise. In that book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes who died in 1980, Paul de Man, who died in 1983, Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, and a host of others, including Edmund Jabes (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1998). The last of the essays, for Lyotard, included in this book is written six years before Derrida's own death. It is not, however, Derridaâs own death that preoccupies him here, but rather his "debts." These are authors that he could not do without, ones with whom and through whom he thinks. He writes only because he reads, and he reads only because there are these authors to read time and again. He "owes" them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because he could not write without them; their writing exists as the precondition of his own; their writing constitutes the means through which his own writing voice is animated and secured, a voice that emerges, importantly, as an address.

::source: http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/10/judith-butlers-obituary-of-derrida.html

LETTER BY JUDITH BUTLER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

2007-08-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Kandell's vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher's death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time. Why would the New York Times assign the obituary to someone whose polemics are so unrestrained and intellectual limitations so obvious? There are reasonable disagreements to have with Derrida's work, but there were none to be found in Kandell's obituary. If Derrida's contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics, and politics made him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of his thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect on moral and political responsibility. Kandell reports that Derrida disparaged the classics and jettisoned notions of truth, but Derrida made his name through reading Plato and Rousseau, among others, and anyone who has read his work in the last years know that questions of truth, of meaning, of life and death - the perennial questions of philosophy - are the ones that claimed him most. This most outrageous obituary fails to demean Derrida only because his work will continue to be read unabated, but it does cast a shadow on those who wrote and published it. Why would the NY Times want to join ranks with American reactionary anti-intellectualism precisely at a time when critical thinking is most urgently required?

Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California at Berkeley

B. Jacques Derrida
Judith Butler

'How do you finally respond to your life and your name?' Derrida raised this question in his final interview with Le Monde, published on 18 August this year. If he could apprehend his life, he remarked, he would also be obliged to apprehend his death as singular and absolute, without resurrection and without redemption. At this revealing moment, it is interesting that Derrida the philosopher should find in Socrates his proper precursor: that he should turn to Socrates to understand that, at the age of 74, he still did not quite know how best to live. One cannot, he remarks, come to terms with one's life without trying to apprehend one's death, asking, in effect, how a human learns to live and to die. Much of Derrida's later work is dedicated to mourning, and he offers his acts of public mourning as posthumous gifts. In The Work of Mourning (2001), he tries to come to terms with the deaths of other writers and thinkers through reckoning his debt to their words, indeed, their texts; his own writing constitutes an act of mourning, one that he is perhaps, avant la lettre, recommending to us as a way to begin to mourn this thinker, who not only taught us how to read, but gave the act of reading a new significance and a new promise. In that book, he openly mourns Roland Barthes, who died in 1980, Paul de Man, who died in 1983, Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, and a host of others, including Edmund Jabès (1991), Louis Marin (1992), Sarah Kofman (1994), Emmanuel Levinas (1995) and Jean-François Lyotard (1998). In the last of these essays, for Lyotard, it is not his own death that preoccupies him, but rather his 'debts'. These are authors that he could not do without, ones with and through whom he thinks. He writes only because he reads, and he reads only because there are these authors to read time and again. He 'owes' them something or, perhaps, everything, if only because he could not write without them: their writing exists as the precondition of his own; their writing constitutes the means through which his own writing voice is animated and secured, a voice that emerges, importantly, as an address.

In October 1993, when I shared a stage with Derrida at New York University, I had a brief, private conversation with him that touched on these issues. I could see in him a certain urgency to acknowledge those many people who had translated him, those who had read him, those who had defended him in public debate, and those who had made good use of his thinking and his words. I leaned over and asked whether he felt that he had many debts to pay. I was hoping to suggest to him that he need not feel so indebted, thinking as I did in a perhaps naively Nietzschean way that the debt was a form of enslavement: did he not see that what others offered him, they offered freely? He seemed not to be able to hear me in English. And so when I said 'your debts', he said: 'My death?' 'No,' I reiterated, 'your debts!' and he said: 'My death!?' At this point I could see that there was a link between the two, one that my efforts at clear pronunciation could not quite pierce, but it was not until I read his later work that I came to understand how important that link really was. 'There come moments,' he writes, 'when, as mourning demands [deuil oblige], one feels obligated to declare one's debts. We feel it our duty to say what we owe to friends.' He cautions against 'saying' the debt and imagining that one might then be done with it. He acknowledges instead the 'incalculable debt' that one does not want to pay: 'I am conscious of this and want it thus.' He ends his essay on Lyotard with a direct address: 'There it is, Jean-François, this is what, I tell myself, I today would have wanted to try and tell you.' There is in that attempt, that essai, a longing that cannot reach the one to whom it is addressed, but does not for that reason forfeit itself as longing. The act of mourning thus becomes a continued way of 'speaking to' the other who is gone, even though the other is gone, in spite of the fact that the other is gone, precisely because that other is gone. We now must say 'Jacques' to name the one we have lost, and in that sense 'Jacques Derrida' becomes the name of our loss. Yet we must continue to say his name, not only to mark his passing, but because he is the one we continue to address in what we write; because it is, for many of us, impossible to write without relying on him, without thinking with and through him. 'Jacques Derrida', then, as the name for the future of what we write.

It is surely uncontroversial to say that Jacques Derrida was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century; his international reputation far exceeds that of any other French intellectual of his generation. More than that, his work fundamentally changed the way in which we think about language, philosophy, aesthetics, painting, literature, communication, ethics and politics. His early work criticised the structuralist presumption that language could be described as a static set of rules, and he showed how those rules admitted of contingency and were dependent on a temporality that could undermine their efficacy. He wrote against philosophical positions that uncritically subscribed to 'totality' or 'systematicity' as values, without first considering the alternatives that were ruled out by that pre-emptive valorisation. He insisted that the act of reading extends from literary texts to films, to works of art, to popular culture, to political scenarios, and to philosophy itself. This notion of 'reading' insists that our ability to understand relies on our capacity to interpret signs. It also presupposes that signs come to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can constrain in advance through intention. This does not mean that language always confounds our intentions, but only that our intentions do not fully govern everything we end up meaning by what we say and write.

Derrida's work moved from a criticism of philosophical presumptions in groundbreaking books such as Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Dissemination (1972), Spurs (1978) and The Post Card (1980), to the question of how to theorise the problem of 'difference'. This term he wrote as 'différance', not only to mark the way that signification works - one term referring to another, always relying on a deferral of meaning between signifier and signified - but also to characterise an ethical relation, the relation of sexual difference, and the relation to the Other. If some readers thought that Derrida was a linguistic constructivist, they missed the fact that the name we have for something, for ourselves, for an other, is precisely what fails to capture the referent (as opposed to making or constructing it).

He drew critically on the work of Emmanuel Levinas in order to insist on the Other as one to whom an incalculable responsibility is owed, one who could never fully be 'captured' through social categories or designative names, one to whom a certain response is owed. This conception became the basis of his strenuous critique of apartheid in South Africa, his vigilant opposition to totalitarian regimes and forms of intellectual censorship, his theorisation of the nation-state beyond the hold of territoriality, his opposition to European racism, and his criticism of the discourse of 'terror' as it worked to increase governmental powers that undermine basic human rights. This political ethic can be seen at work in his defence of animal rights, in his opposition to the death penalty, and even in his queries about 'being' Jewish and what it means to offer hospitality to those of differing origins and language.

Derrida made clear in his short book on Walter Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to come. This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in this life, and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us only in another life. He was clear that there was no other life. It means only that, as an ideal, it is that towards which we strive, without end. Not to strive for justice because it cannot be fully realised would be as mistaken as believing that one has already arrived at justice and that the only task is to arm oneself adequately to fortify its regime. The first is a form of nihilism (which he opposed) and the second is dogmatism (which he opposed). Derrida kept us alive to the practice of criticism, understanding that social and political transformation was an incessant project, one that could not be relinquished, one that was coextensive with the becoming of life and the encounter with the Other, one that required a reading of the rules by means of which a polity constitutes itself through exclusion or effacement. How is justice done? What justice do we owe others? And what does it mean to act in the name of justice? These were questions that had to be asked regardless of the consequences, and this meant that they were often questions asked when established authorities wished that they were not.

If his critics worried that, with Derrida, there are no foundations on which one could rely, they doubtless were mistaken. Derrida relies perhaps most assiduously on Socrates, on a mode of philosophical inquiry that took the question as the most honest and arduous form of thought. 'How do you finally respond to your life and to your name?' This question is posed by him to himself, and yet he is, in this interview, a 'tu' for himself, as if he were a proximate friend, but not quite a 'moi'. He has taken himself as the other, modelling a form of reflexivity, asking whether an account can be given of this life, and of this death. Is there justice to be done to a life? That he asks the question is exemplary, perhaps even foundational, since it keeps the final meaning of that life and that name open. It prescribes a ceaseless task of honouring what cannot be possessed through knowledge, what in a life exceeds our grasp. Indeed, now that Derrida, the person, has died, his writing makes a demand on us. We must address him as he addressed himself, asking what it means to know and approach another, to apprehend a life and a death, to give an account of its meaning, to acknowledge its binding ties with others, and to do that justly. In this way, Derrida has always been offering us a way to interrogate the meaning of our lives, singly and plurally, returning to the question as the beginning of philosophy, but surely also, in his own way, and with several unpayable debts, beginning philosophy again and anew.

Judith Butler teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender have both been published this year.