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

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

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

Selected and consigned to this archive in 1995

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

10 July 1983
Dear Professor Izutsu,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be very schematic I would say that the difficulty of defining an therefore also of translating the word "deconstruction" stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are also deconstructed or deconstructible, directly or otherwise, etc. And that goes for the word deconstruction, as for every word. *Of Grammatology* questioned the unity "word" and all the privileges with which is was credited, especially in its nominal form. It is therefore only a discourse or rather a writing that can make up for the incapacity of the word to be equal to a "thought". All sentences of the type "deconstruction is X" or "deconstruction is not X" a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts "deconstruction" is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S is P.

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

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

With my best wishes,

Jacques Derrida

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

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LETTER BY JUDITH BUTLER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jonathan Kandell's vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher's death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time. Why would the New York Times assign the obituary to someone whose polemics are so unrestrained and intellectual limitations so obvious? There are reasonable disagreements to have with Derrida's work, but there were none to be found in Kandell's obituary. If Derrida's contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, the theory of painting, communications, ethics, and politics made him into the most internationally renowned European intellectual during these times, it is because of the precision of his thought, the way his thinking always took a brilliant and unanticipated turn, and because of the constant effort to reflect on moral and political responsibility. Kandell reports that Derrida disparaged the classics and jettisoned notions of truth, but Derrida made his name through reading Plato and Rousseau, among others, and anyone who has read his work in the last years know that questions of truth, of meaning, of life and death - the perennial questions of philosophy - are the ones that claimed him most. This most outrageous obituary fails to demean Derrida only because his work will continue to be read unabated, but it does cast a shadow on those who wrote and published it. Why would the NY Times want to join ranks with American reactionary anti-intellectualism precisely at a time when critical thinking is most urgently required?

Judith Butler
Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature
University of California at Berkeley


B. Jacques Derrida
Judith Butler

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

In October 1993, when I shared a stage with Derrida at New York University, I had a brief, private conversation with him that touched on these issues. I could see in him a certain urgency to acknowledge those many people who had translated him, those who had read him, those who had defended him in public debate, and those who had made good use of his thinking and his words. I leaned over and asked whether he felt that he had many debts to pay. I was hoping to suggest to him that he need not feel so indebted, thinking as I did in a perhaps naively Nietzschean way that the debt was a form of enslavement: did he not see that what others offered him, they offered freely? He seemed not to be able to hear me in English. And so when I said 'your debts', he said: 'My death?' 'No,' I reiterated, 'your debts!' and he said: 'My death!?' At this point I could see that there was a link between the two, one that my efforts at clear pronunciation could not quite pierce, but it was not until I read his later work that I came to understand how important that link really was. 'There come moments,' he writes, 'when, as mourning demands [deuil oblige], one feels obligated to declare one's debts. We feel it our duty to say what we owe to friends.' He cautions against 'saying' the debt and imagining that one might then be done with it. He acknowledges instead the 'incalculable debt' that one does not want to pay: 'I am conscious of this and want it thus.' He ends his essay on Lyotard with a direct address: 'There it is, Jean-François, this is what, I tell myself, I today would have wanted to try and tell you.' There is in that attempt, that essai, a longing that cannot reach the one to whom it is addressed, but does not for that reason forfeit itself as longing. The act of mourning thus becomes a continued way of 'speaking to' the other who is gone, even though the other is gone, in spite of the fact that the other is gone, precisely because that other is gone. We now must say 'Jacques' to name the one we have lost, and in that sense 'Jacques Derrida' becomes the name of our loss. Yet we must continue to say his name, not only to mark his passing, but because he is the one we continue to address in what we write; because it is, for many of us, impossible to write without relying on him, without thinking with and through him. 'Jacques Derrida', then, as the name for the future of what we write.

It is surely uncontroversial to say that Jacques Derrida was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century; his international reputation far exceeds that of any other French intellectual of his generation. More than that, his work fundamentally changed the way in which we think about language, philosophy, aesthetics, painting, literature, communication, ethics and politics. His early work criticised the structuralist presumption that language could be described as a static set of rules, and he showed how those rules admitted of contingency and were dependent on a temporality that could undermine their efficacy. He wrote against philosophical positions that uncritically subscribed to 'totality' or 'systematicity' as values, without first considering the alternatives that were ruled out by that pre-emptive valorisation. He insisted that the act of reading extends from literary texts to films, to works of art, to popular culture, to political scenarios, and to philosophy itself. This notion of 'reading' insists that our ability to understand relies on our capacity to interpret signs. It also presupposes that signs come to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can constrain in advance through intention. This does not mean that language always confounds our intentions, but only that our intentions do not fully govern everything we end up meaning by what we say and write.

Derrida's work moved from a criticism of philosophical presumptions in groundbreaking books such as Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), Dissemination (1972), Spurs (1978) and The Post Card (1980), to the question of how to theorise the problem of 'difference'. This term he wrote as 'différance', not only to mark the way that signification works - one term referring to another, always relying on a deferral of meaning between signifier and signified - but also to characterise an ethical relation, the relation of sexual difference, and the relation to the Other. If some readers thought that Derrida was a linguistic constructivist, they missed the fact that the name we have for something, for ourselves, for an other, is precisely what fails to capture the referent (as opposed to making or constructing it).

He drew critically on the work of Emmanuel Levinas in order to insist on the Other as one to whom an incalculable responsibility is owed, one who could never fully be 'captured' through social categories or designative names, one to whom a certain response is owed. This conception became the basis of his strenuous critique of apartheid in South Africa, his vigilant opposition to totalitarian regimes and forms of intellectual censorship, his theorisation of the nation-state beyond the hold of territoriality, his opposition to European racism, and his criticism of the discourse of 'terror' as it worked to increase governmental powers that undermine basic human rights. This political ethic can be seen at work in his defence of animal rights, in his opposition to the death penalty, and even in his queries about 'being' Jewish and what it means to offer hospitality to those of differing origins and language.

Derrida made clear in his short book on Walter Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to come. This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in this life, and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us only in another life. He was clear that there was no other life. It means only that, as an ideal, it is that towards which we strive, without end. Not to strive for justice because it cannot be fully realised would be as mistaken as believing that one has already arrived at justice and that the only task is to arm oneself adequately to fortify its regime. The first is a form of nihilism (which he opposed) and the second is dogmatism (which he opposed). Derrida kept us alive to the practice of criticism, understanding that social and political transformation was an incessant project, one that could not be relinquished, one that was coextensive with the becoming of life and the encounter with the Other, one that required a reading of the rules by means of which a polity constitutes itself through exclusion or effacement. How is justice done? What justice do we owe others? And what does it mean to act in the name of justice? These were questions that had to be asked regardless of the consequences, and this meant that they were often questions asked when established authorities wished that they were not.

If his critics worried that, with Derrida, there are no foundations on which one could rely, they doubtless were mistaken. Derrida relies perhaps most assiduously on Socrates, on a mode of philosophical inquiry that took the question as the most honest and arduous form of thought. 'How do you finally respond to your life and to your name?' This question is posed by him to himself, and yet he is, in this interview, a 'tu' for himself, as if he were a proximate friend, but not quite a 'moi'. He has taken himself as the other, modelling a form of reflexivity, asking whether an account can be given of this life, and of this death. Is there justice to be done to a life? That he asks the question is exemplary, perhaps even foundational, since it keeps the final meaning of that life and that name open. It prescribes a ceaseless task of honouring what cannot be possessed through knowledge, what in a life exceeds our grasp. Indeed, now that Derrida, the person, has died, his writing makes a demand on us. We must address him as he addressed himself, asking what it means to know and approach another, to apprehend a life and a death, to give an account of its meaning, to acknowledge its binding ties with others, and to do that justly. In this way, Derrida has always been offering us a way to interrogate the meaning of our lives, singly and plurally, returning to the question as the beginning of philosophy, but surely also, in his own way, and with several unpayable debts, beginning philosophy again and anew.

Judith Butler teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender have both been published this year.

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