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

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.

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

Selengkapnya....

Derrida Interview with Robert Maggiori

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.

Selengkapnya....

Cardozo Law School interview: An Interview with Jacques Derrida

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

Selengkapnya....

Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida

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

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