Derrida and Antiquity 9780199545544

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: ‘Today, on the Eve of Platonism…’
Jacques Derrida, ‘We Other Greeks’
PART I: DERRIDA AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION
1. Earmarks: Derrida’s Reinvention of Philosophical Writing in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’
2. Derrida and Presocratic Philosophy
3. Negative Theology and Conversion: Derrida’s Neoplatonic Compulsions
PART II: ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY
4. Derrida between ‘Greek’ and ‘Jew’
5. Derrida’s Impression of Gradiva: Archive Fever and Antiquity
PART III: A POLITICS OF ANTIQUITY
6. Derrida’s Dying Oedipus
7. Possible Returns: Deconstruction and the Placing of Greek Philosophy
8. Derrida Polutropos: Philosophy as Nostos
PART IV: THE QUESTION OF LITERATURE
9. Aristotle’s Metaphor
10. Writing before Literature: Derrida’s Confessions and the Latin Christian World
PART V: PLATONIC BODIES
11. The Platonic Remainder: Derrida’s Khôra and the Corpus Platonicum
12. Eros in the Age of Technical Reproductibility: Socrates, Plato, and the Erotics of Filiation
References
Index
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K
L
M
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Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Derrida and Antiquity Edited by MIRIAM LEONARD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Oxford University Press 2010 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–954554–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to colleagues for the support I received at the University of Bristol, the Stanford Humanities Center, and University College London while this book was being conceived and put together. I would like to thank Ann Bergren, Marc Cre´pon, John Henderson, John Sallis, and Phiroze Vasunia for their input at various stages. A particular thanks to Jim Porter both qua series editor and more generally for his intellectual companionship as well as to Lorna Hardwick and Hilary O’Shea for their editorial advice. The advice of the anonymous reader has also been invaluable. Thanks too to Jackie Pritchard for her expert copy-editing. This project has been a collaborative effort from the start and I am extremely grateful to the contributors for their cooperation. Finally, I owe a great debt to Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas for agreeing with such generosity to translate the Derrida essay which opens this volume. Thank you to E´ditions du seuil for permission to translate and reprint the essay by Jacques Derrida ‘Nous autres Grecs’, from Nos Grecs et leurs modernes: les strate´gies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’Antiquite´, textes re´unis par Barbara Cassin, # E´ditions du seuil, 1992. M.L.

akg - images / Marion Kalter

Contents Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction: ‘Today, on the Eve of Platonism . . . ’ Miriam Leonard Jacques Derrida, ‘We Other Greeks’ translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

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PART I: DERRIDA AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION 1. Earmarks: Derrida’s Reinvention of Philosophical Writing in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ Michael Naas 2. Derrida and Presocratic Philosophy Erin O’Connell 3. Negative Theology and Conversion: Derrida’s Neoplatonic Compulsions Stephen Gersh

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PART II: ANTIQUITY AND MODERNITY 4. Derrida between ‘Greek’ and ‘Jew’ Miriam Leonard 5. Derrida’s Impression of Gradiva: Archive Fever and Antiquity Daniel Orrells

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PART III: A POLITICS OF ANTIQUITY 6. Derrida’s Dying Oedipus Rachel Bowlby

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7. Possible Returns: Deconstruction and the Placing of Greek Philosophy Andrew Benjamin 8. Derrida Polutropos: Philosophy as Nostos Bruce Rosenstock

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PART IV: THE QUESTION OF LITERATURE 9. Aristotle’s Metaphor Duncan F. Kennedy 10. Writing before Literature: Derrida’s Confessions and the Latin Christian World Mark Vessey

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PART V: PLATONIC BODIES 11. The Platonic Remainder: Derrida’s Khoˆra and the Corpus Platonicum Paul Allen Miller 12. Eros in the Age of Technical Reproductibility: Socrates, Plato, and the Erotics of Filiation Ika Willis References Index

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List of Contributors Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics and Director of the Research Unit in European Philosophy at Monash University. His books include: The Plural Event (1993), Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997), Philosophy’s Literature (2001), Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (2004), and Of Jews and Animals (2010). He is also editor of Post-Structuralist Classics (1988) and the series Walter Benjamin Studies (Continuum Books). Rachel Bowlby is Northcliffe Professor of Modern English at University College London. Her books include Just Looking (reissued 2010), Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992), Shopping with Freud (1993), Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997), Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000), and Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy, Modern Identities (2007). Her translations include Derrida’s Of Hospitality and Paper Machine. Stephen Gersh is Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His books include: Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition (1986), Concord in Discourse: Harmonics and Semiotics in Late Classical and Early Medieval Platonism (1996), Plato in the Middle Ages: A Doxographical Approach (with Maarten J. F. M. Hoenen) (2002), and Neoplatonism after Derrida (2006). Duncan Kennedy is Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism at the University of Bristol. His publications include The Arts of Love (1993) and Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualisation of Nature (2002), and many articles on Latin poetry and literary theory. Miriam Leonard is Lecturer in Greek Literature and its Reception at University College London. She is author of Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (2005) and How to Read Ancient Philosophy (2008). She has also written several articles and essays on Derrida’s engagement with Plato, Aristotle,

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and Sophocles. She is co-editor with Vanda Zajko of Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (2006). Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (1994), Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (2004), and Spiritual Practices: The Reception of Plato and the Construction of the Subject (2007). He is also co-editor of Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity (1998). Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at De Paul University. His books include Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy (1994), Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (2003), and Derrida From Now On (2008). He is co-editor of Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (2000) and has co-translated many of Derrida’s works including: The Other Heading (1992), Memoirs of the Blind (1993), Adieu (1999), and Rogues (2004). Erin O’Connell is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Utah. Her recent publications include Heraclitus and Derrida: Presocratic Deconstruction (2006), ‘Homer and Rap: Epic Iconographies’ (in Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman, New Academia Publishing, 2007), and ‘Black Oedipus? Slavery in Oedipus Tyrannus and The Darker Face of the Earth’, Text and Presentation, 25 (2004). Daniel Orrells is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Warwick. His forthcoming book for Oxford University Press, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity, examines the history of the understanding of ancient and modern sexualities between 1750 and 1930. He is also co-editor of a forthcoming volume with OUP, African Athena: New Agendas, and is writing Sex: Antiquity and its Legacy (IB Tauris/OUP, 2010). Bruce Rosenstock is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of two mongraphs, New Men: Converso Religiosity in the Fifteenth Century (Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 2003) and Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig, and

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Beyond (2010, Fordham). He has published articles in ancient philosophy, biblical studies, and contemporary political theology. Mark Vessey is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Christian Latin Writers in Late Antiquity and their Texts (2005) and co-editor of History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of God (1999) and Augustine and the Disciplines: From Cassiciacum to Confessions (2005). He is also co-editor of a forthcoming volume entitled The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a BiblicalHistoric Present. Ika Willis is Lecturer in Reception at the University of Bristol. She is author of articles and essays on Latin literature, slash, and the theory of reception. From 2001 to 2004 she was one of the editors of the cultural studies journal parallax. She is currently completing a book entitled Now and Rome which will come out with Continuum.

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Introduction ‘Today, on the Eve of Platonism . . . ’ Miriam Leonard

[These] works share, amongst other things, what I would call, for lack of a better word, a ‘relationship’ to the ‘Greek thing’, and that in this respect some among ‘us’ might say ‘we’, ‘we and the Greeks’.1 (Jacques Derrida, ‘We Other Greeks’)

More than ten years after its first appearance, Nietzsche published a new edition of The Birth of Tragedy prefaced by ‘An Attempt at SelfCriticism’. Nietzsche’s retrospective reflection on his youthful work is launched by an ironic exploration of the original circumstances of its composition: ‘While the thunder of the battle of Wo¨rth rolled across Europe, the brooder and lover of riddles who fathered the book was sitting in some corner of the Alps, utterly preoccupied with his ponderings and riddles and consequently very troubled and untroubled at one and the same time, writing down his thoughts about the Greeks.’2 Almost a century later in May 1968 as the Paris students mounted their assault on the Sorbonne, the young philosopher Jacques Derrida was to be found sitting in his own corner busy reading Plato. For some, Derrida’s immersion in antiquity as the academy was being engulfed by a popular movement which would

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Derrida, see this volume, 20; (1992d), 254. Nietzsche (1999), 3.

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proclaim, if nothing else, the urgency of the present is symptomatic of his more general resistance to being ‘troubled’ by events ‘rolling across Europe’ and beyond. Derrida’s aloof attitude to the social movement of 1968 would be just one instance of his reluctance to engage directly in the political activism. To follow this critique, Derrida’s behaviour in 1968 is fully in line with the politically bankrupt movements of structuralism and post-structuralism. As the slogan famously put it: ‘structures do not march in the streets.’ One might just as easily substitute the words ‘professors of classical philosophy’ for the more catchy ‘structures’. The paradox, however, is that Derrida had consistently argued that the urgency of the now can best be addressed by the painstaking analysis of the past. For him, and for a number of his contemporaries, an engagement in antiquity was fully constitutive of a new vision of philosophy—a philosophy grounded in a radical rereading of the foundational texts. Just as the feminist theorist Luce Irigaray was unable to formulate her break with Freud and Lacan before she worked out how she felt about Plato, Derrida finds out, for instance, that we are helpless in resisting contemporary xenophobic discourse on immigration without first settling our scores with the Greek philosophical legacy which still haunts the political vocabulary of the new Europe. This project of rewriting the tradition is common to a wider movement of contemporary French philosophy. As Paul Allen Miller has argued: ‘a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the understanding of classical antiquity and its relationship to postmodern philosophical enquiry.’3 In ‘We Other Greeks’, the text with which I have chosen to launch this volume (appearing here for the first time in a specially commissioned English translation by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas), Derrida argues that a certain relationship to the ‘Greek thing’ might be the element which holds this movement (if such a movement exists) together. A certain affinity to ‘la chose grecque’ has made it possible for some French philosophers ‘belonging more or less to the same “e´poque”’ to say ‘we’. And yet, while Derrida sees it as ‘one of the tasks of

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Miller (2007), 1.

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Enlightenment of our time’ to understand these resemblances and ‘commonalities’, the affinities and relationships which allow us to say ‘we and the Greeks’, he also insists on a certain ‘limit of these analogies’.4 Derrida’s Greeks, as he is keen to point out, are not the same as Deleuze’s or Foucault’s. After all, as Derrida reminds us with the ultimate post-modern slogans which could be traced back at least as far as Nietzsche—‘to each according to his Greeks’. But in marking his differences from his contemporaries and compatriots, Derrida is equally keen to extend this affinity beyond national boundaries. It would not be possible to understand Derrida’s Greeks any more than it would be possible to understand Foucault’s without reference to a wider philosophical dialogue with antiquity—or as Derrida puts it elsewhere, without reference to ‘the two Greeks named Husserl and Heidegger’.5 One could add a different couple to whom Derrida also refers in this essay: those other Greeks Nietzsche and Freud whose hold over the post-war French philosophical tradition would certainly rival that of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, in speaking of ‘his’ Greeks, Derrida is confronted with their inescapable mediation: ‘I no doubt have “my Greeks” . . . But the spectre of these Greeks roams perhaps less in these texts devoted to Plato or Aristotle than in certain readings of Hegel or Nietzsche, of Husserl and Heidegger, of Mallarme´, Artaud, Joyce, Levinas (especially) or Foucault—sometimes revolving around words or themes that are obviously Greek (a limit which is difficult to pin down), and sometimes beyond, therefore, the obvious.’6 Derrida’s Greeks are suffused into the very fabric of modernity and his probing of the classics is integral to his investigation of what it is to be modern.7 This preoccupation with antiquity, then, constitutes much more than a mandatory reckoning with the foundational texts of philosophy. Far from treating these texts as originary and inert they are actively mobilized in an ongoing dialogue of the present. The Greeks, for Derrida, ‘silently fissure the configuration of the contemporary’. 4

See this volume, 21; Derrida (1992d), 255. Derrida (2001a), 103. 6 See this volume, 20; Derrida (1992d), 254. 7 Perhaps the most exemplary instance of this mediation through especially the German philosophical tradition would be Derrida’s masterful discussion of Hegel’s reading of the Antigone in Glas, Derrida (1986b; 1974a) on which see Leonard (2005). 5

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In fact, it is in respect to the ‘so-called Greek thing’ that Derrida has been able to negotiate and renegotiate his relationship to the great thinkers of modernity. Rather than simply receiving an inherited tradition, Derrida’s confrontation with the Greeks explodes the traditions of both antiquity and modernity. It is, as Derrida argues, ‘precisely with regard to the so-called Greek thing’ that he has been able to formulate a ‘more suspicious or unfaithful’ relationship to Nietzsche, to Heidegger, and to Freud. By creating this fissure in the fabric of modernity the classical past opens up the possibility of selfcritique. Who, then, are Derrida’s Greeks? Derrida’s seminal essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ marks the beginning of a long dialogue with antiquity which extends from 1968 until 2004 when Derrida concluded his conversation with Plato in his last interview in Le Monde: ‘To be a philosopher is to learn how to die.’8 Derrida seems to inscribe a relationship to Plato into the very texture of deconstruction.9 By placing an analysis of Plato at the core of his early exploration of logocentricism, Derrida makes the project of deconstructing the metaphysics of presence indissociable from an exploration of Greek thought. But far from being restricted to his early preoccupations with logocentrism, Derrida’s engagement with the ancient world spans the many ‘phases’ of his career and intersects with nearly all the important concepts in his work from diffe´rance to ‘unconditional hospitality’. Although Derrida engages most extensively with the Greek tradition, and in particular with Plato and Aristotle, his interests extend to Cicero, Augustine, the Neoplatonists, and beyond.10 The relationship to Rome which he develops, particularly in his later works, acts, on the one hand, as an extension of Derrida’s interest in

8 Derrida lists his works which engage most directly with ancient thought in footnotes 2 and 3 of ‘We Other Greeks’, see 19. Of his later works written after this essay I would highlight Politics of Friendship, on which see Rosenstock in this volume, Of Hospitality examined by Benjamin and Bowlby, and ‘Rogues’ which is discussed by Naas. I would also add ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ and Glas, explored by Leonard, and The Post Card, discussed by Willis, which are not mentioned by Derrida. 9 Derrida’s perhaps most influential essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ is explored by Naas. 10 Augustine and the Neoplatonist are discussed by Gersh and Vessey. O’Connell discusses his affinity to pre-Socratic philosophy and Orrells and Vessey explore his important although less explicit relationship to Rome.

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Greece. Derrida very often uses the phrase ‘Graeco-Roman’ in a rather undifferentiated fashion. On the other hand, this extended notion of antiquity forms the basis of a more critical attitude to the construct of antiquity as such. The antiquity which emerges from Derrida’s analyses of Rome often appears more heteroglot, more internally conflicted, more explicitly politicized. The confrontation with Christianity which lies at its core sets the scene for a very different sort of encounter. Indeed, a profound questioning of the limits of the Western classical tradition has always been at the core of Derrida’s dialogue with antiquity. For Derrida, it is the ‘non-Greek’, the Barbarian, the Egyptian, the Jew, and the Christian, who ultimately come to define the contours of the Hellenic legacy of philosophy. One of the most distinctive contributions of Derrida’s has been his ability to formulate a sustained critique of the Western philosophical tradition while at the same time acting as one of its most enlightening and respectful readers. If there is a single unifying concept which emerges from Derrida’s antiquity it would have to be ‘the idea of difference’. The idea which Ian Balfour has called ‘Derrida’s most insistent preoccupation’11 takes on a specific, and one might even say foundational role, in his reading of Greek philosophy: It is not only the non-Greek that attracted me in/to (chez) the Greek (it’s a question of knowing in short what chez means), not only the other of the Greek (the Egyptian, the Barbarian or whoever is determined by the Greek as his other, and so is excluded-included, posed as opposable), but the wholly other of the Greek, of his language and his logos, this figure of a wholly other that is unfigurable by him. This wholly other haunts every one of the essays I have devoted to ‘Greek’ things and it often irrupts within them: under different names, for it perhaps has no proper name.12

For Derrida, it is the figure of the excluded who is central to his understanding of antiquity, drawn, as he is, to the margins of all things classical. Starting with the Egyptian in his reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida’s strategy has been to read the texts of ancient philosophy from the perspective of the other which they have worked 11 12

Balfour (2007), 213. See this volume, 25; Derrida (1992d), 260.

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so hard to exclude. Derrida thus practises what he calls elsewhere a ‘bastard reading’, a reading which, in Plato’s phallogocentric terms, would not have its father to protect it. But this illegitimacy is troped by Derrida not in Plato’s patrilineal vocabulary but rather in national and ethnic terms. Derrida is interested in philosophy as a construct which is both linguistically and ethnically determined by its Greek ‘origin’. The Greekness of philosophy, that is, the hegemony of the Greek definition of philosophy, thus becomes a problem for all those who have thought as its margins. But as Derrida argues, he has not confined himself to examining those whom the Greeks themselves have designated as their ‘others’; he has rather sought out the element within Greek thought itself which remains alien. Derrida calls this ‘le tout autre’, the ‘wholly other’. By isolating a word or concept in Greek thought which turns out to be inconceivable within its own terms, Derrida acts to unsettle the self-identity of philosophy itself: Consider, for example, the resistance of the pharmakon and its semantic oscillation. It is not only that of the simulacrum or of the phantasm—whose repetition would come to disorganize dialectic . . . This resistance interested me in particular at the point where it limits the possibility of the system or of the corpus, of the complete, controllable, and formalizable self-identity of a set or a whole, be it that of a system, of Plato’s oeuvre (such as it would be governed by a unifiable meaning-to-say), of the Greek language, of Greek society (and very concretely it is also a matter of the place—exclusion included, so to speak—of the pharmakos in it), thus of the identity of the Greek in general.13

The pharmakon becomes in Derrida’s analysis the figure of the undecidable, the undecidable which short-circuits the system of Platonic philosophy. But through his relentless probing of this single Greek word, Derrida seeks nothing less than the destabilization of the ‘identity of the Greek in general’. The pharmakon is figured by Derrida as the ‘wholly other’, that element within the system which opens it up to its own negation. It is the ‘figure’ which irrupts into the text and leaves the system (of language, of philosophy, of Greekness) powerless to control its figuration. But is there not a tension 13

See this volume, 26–7; Derrida (1992d), 261–2.

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between the ‘singularity’ of the concept and its ability to threaten the ‘identity of the Greek in general’? As Michael Naas phrases it in his essay in this volume, the pharmakon ‘might be . . . compared to what Derrida will later call an absolute singularity, that is, a singular inscription, the trace of a singular event that at once calls out for and resists translation and repetition’. In Derrida’s oeuvre, however, this figure of the ‘wholly other’ is all too prone to repetition. In his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus written almost twenty-five years after ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ it is almost as if the notion of Khoˆra bursts into the Platonic text to take the place of the pharmakon. As Paul Allen Miller argues in his essay: ‘Khoˆra, therefore, functions as an incomplete totalization of the non-spaces, non-concepts, that had earlier been delineated by Derrida’s mediations on the problems of the pharmakon, difference, aporia, and the “unlimited”.’ In analysing Derrida’s investment in antiquity, this time a different antiquity, a Judaic antiquity, Ian Balfour has commented on the paradox of this absolute repeatability which haunts Derrida’s notion of ‘absolute singularity’: ‘Derrida’s concern here is for singularity, absolute singularity, which we might think of as the most different of differences . . . . Far from being an utterly discrete event shrouded in the mists—or misty texts—of antiquity, the sacrifice of Isaac, seemingly so singular an event, can almost against all odds, be repeated.’14 Balfour wonders whether this is an effect of language itself ‘relentless in its generality’. But language for Derrida, of course, exists precisely on this cusp of the absolutely singular and the infinitely general. It is both context laden and context free. And the Greek language in particular, the language after all of philosophy, is perhaps the most paradigmatic in this respect. We cannot help but repeat Plato, but we can never control his meaning. It is with this example that one feels, for essential reasons, originarily dispossessed of the Greek, of the Greeks, of ‘one’s Greeks’. And this dispossession must have also happened to them as well, already from the origin, that is to say, before and outside the originarity that some (sometimes Nietzsche or Heidegger) dream about in relationship to them, even before the latecomers who we are can even seek—though always in vain—to

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Balfour (2007), 214.

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reappropriate them for ourselves. If we are still or already Greeks, we ourselves, we others (nous autres), we also inherit that which made them already other than themselves, and more or less than they themselves believed. ‘Themselves?’ Who, ‘they’?15

So the ‘wholly other’ which Derrida insists haunts his reading reveals the Greeks as already ‘other than themselves’. The reception of Greek thought, then, does not just pit ‘us’ against ‘them’. It is not only that we are the other of the Greeks, separated as we are from them by history, culture, and language, it is that the Greeks were always already other to themselves. The process of appropriation that Derrida initiates merely brings to light the same experience of dispossession that the Greeks felt in relation to themselves. Derrida’s account of the difficult legacy of antiquity in this passage should remind one of the problems of filiation that form such a central preoccupation of The Post Card. Here again, it is the relationship between two Greeks, this time Socrates and Plato, which, Ika Willis argues in this volume, comes to stand at the origin of the long and contested history of the transmission of antiquity. This conception of ancient thought as divided against itself can seem at odds with the overly conventional image of antiquity that sometimes figures in Derrida’s writing. Too often, Graeco-Roman thought appears as an entity which stands supreme in its selfconfidence, immune to any sense of self-contradiction until it is touched by Derrida’s deconstructive gaze. And yet, despite what Derrida has himself acknowledged as his ‘naı¨ve and uncultured’ relationship to antiquity, he has produced some of the most powerful readings of ancient texts in the last fifty years.16 From ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ via ‘White Mythologies’ and his extended discussion of Antigone in Glas, to his late works on friendship and hospitality, his readings of Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles again and again bring to light insights ignored by professional scholars in the field. Derrida has an uncanny knack of uncovering the uncanny in these most familiar of familiar texts. So while Derrida has found himself at the receiving end of the 15

See this volume, 27; Derrida (1992d), 262. So, for instance, no recent major work on Plato’s Phaedrus has avoided an engagement with ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. See Ferrari (1987), Griswold (1986), Burger (1980). See also Shankman (1994), Neel (1988), and du Bois (1984). 16

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polemics of contemporary ancient philosophers hostile to what they see as the project of deconstruction per se, as a reader of classical texts, paradoxically, Derrida has much in common with the classical scholar. Derrida’s practice of subjecting whole works and especially individual words to obsessive scrutiny is perhaps especially suited to the study of an antiquity whose legacy is so incontrovertibly textual. As he himself has argued, far from wanting to dethrone classical philosophy, Derrida has shown an excessive reverence for its writings: ‘As soon as one examines my texts . . . one sees that respect for the great texts, for the texts of the Greeks and of others, too, is the condition of our work. I have constantly tried to understand Plato and Aristotle. . . . I think we have to read them again and again and I feel that, however old I am, I am on the threshold of reading Plato and Aristotle.’17 Moreover, Derrida’s conviction that reading Plato and Aristotle still matters marks a powerful resistance to the relentlessly presentist preoccupations of most disciplines in the humanities today. But the question of what and how things ‘matter’ to Derrida has always been a source of controversy, and this is no less true of his relationship to antiquity. The difficult transition between the practice of reading and the practice of the political has always been one which has preoccupied Derrida and his readers. A difficulty perhaps best encapsulated by the coincidence of Derrida’s project of dismantling Plato’s ‘metaphysics of presence’ with the movement of social and political upheaval of 1968. In another essay published in that same year, Derrida makes mention of this coincidence: ‘The Ends of Man’ is prefaced by a reflection on the events in 1968 on both sides of the Atlantic from the student riots in Paris to the anti-Vietnam protests in the USA. Both are juxtaposed with a further interrogation of democracy and its ability to absorb and deflect criticism from within. Derrida’s ground-breaking anti-humanist tract is framed by the classic self-positioning of the committed intellectual embarking on political critique which ends nevertheless in deconstructive aporia. Recent attempts to periodize his work highlight the fact that while political and ethical preoccupations do appear in his early works, Derrida’s attitude towards them remains decidedly circumspect. The

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Derrida in Caputo (1997), 9.

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political events of 1968 may act as a striking framing device for Derrida’s investigations but they never become the subject of his analyses as such. His simultaneous preoccupation with Platonic metaphysics would only lend support to this image of Derridean disengagement. W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that ‘the early Derrida was perceived as a radical whose deconstruction of Western metaphysics was an alternate pathway to the disappointed revolutionary hopes of the sixties generation, and the middle Derrida was upstaged by the more explicitly political and historically minded Foucault’, however, ‘the late Derrida . . . became a writer on politics, ethics, religion, not just as philosophical topics, but in relation to urgent issues of the day’.18 Derrida objected to such attempts to periodize his work: ‘I have in fact never been concerned with anything but problems of actuality, with problems of institutional politics or of politics period.’19 Moreover, he has explicitly argued against a vision that would see his work on classical texts as divorced from the wider political implications of deconstruction: Even beyond what explicitly links the problematics of writing, in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (though also elsewhere), to the problem of power, democracy, and democratization, this essay is from start to finish, and this can be seen on every page, at every step, a political text on Greek politics and institutions, as well as on the political in general. I would want to claim that this is also true of ‘Kho¯ra’, which can be read as a text on the politeia . . . on the state and on war . . . on the possibility or difficulty of ‘speak[ing] at last of philosophy and politics’, according to Socrates’ more or less ironic request, where the entire frame is at once fictive, political, philosophical, and so on.20

But if Derrida’s texts on the Greeks have something to tell us about ‘the political in general’ and what is more, about the ‘and’ of ‘philosophy and politics’, this is not just because these are questions which preoccupied the philosophers of antiquity themselves; it is also because we have not developed a vocabulary for discussing these issues today which is not implicated in these ancient debates. If we are, as Derrida hesitates, ‘all Greeks’, it is perhaps especially in our

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Mitchell and Davidson (2007), 5. Derrida and Stiegler (2002), 9. See this volume, 29–30; Derrida (1992d), 265.

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politics that this legacy needs the most careful self-interrogation. And for Derrida this process inevitably begins with the idea of difference: If the legacy of the thought (of truth, of being) in which we are inscribed is not only, not fundamentally, not originarily Greek, it is no doubt because of other convergent and heterogeneous filiations, other languages, other identities that are not simply added on like secondary attributes (the Jew, the Arab, the Christian, the Roman, the German, and so on); it is no doubt because European history has not simply unfolded what was handed down to it by the Greek; it is especially because the Greek himself never gathered himself or identified with himself: the discourses whose archives we have on this subject (statements such as: we are exemplary Greeks, we know what the true Greek or the true Athenian is, and those are the others, the Barbarians, the Egyptians, and so on) are but a supplementary testimony to this worry and this non-self-identity.21

But as Balfour worries, ‘the epistemological realization or recognition of difference does not necessarily lead to politics, and even less necessarily to good politics’.22 Critics such as Caputo have argued that Derrida’s engagement with antiquity ‘wants no part of Heidegger’s “Greco-” and “Euro-centrism,” which goes hand in hand with Heidegger’s concomitant mythologizing and theologizing of the “homeland” of Being, of Being’s mother tongue, and of Germansas-Heirs-of-the Hellenes, the master myth (and the myth of masters) that steered much of Heidegger’s thought and abominable politics’.23 And yet, wanting no part in Heidegger’s abominable politics of antiquity does not necessarily provide Derrida with an alternative vision. In his explorations of ancient texts from ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ to Politics of Friendship and Of Hospitality, Derrida would want us to believe that his texts on antiquity have been political ‘from start to finish’. In Circumfession Derrida recounts a dream in which he discussed the question of responsibility with the renowned French Hellenist Jean-Pierre Vernant.24 Vernant, resistance fighter, committed Marxist, and champion of a vision of Greece marked by its 21

See this volume, 31; Derrida (1992d), 267. Balfour (2007), 215. 23 Caputo (1997), 76. 24 See Derrida (1991b), 296; this scene from Circumfession is discussed by Gersh in this volume. 22

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anthropological difference, is a constant reference in Derrida’s works from the footnotes of the ‘Pharmacy’ to the dedication to Khoˆra. For Vernant the study of antiquity always carried with it a sense of responsibility. A responsibility to the past but perhaps even more acutely to the political horizon of the present. Although they have little in common politically, Vernant shared Nietzsche’s vision of classical studies: ‘I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of time to come.’25 Perhaps this is the vision Derrida had in mind when one spring day in 1968 he mused: ‘we are today on the eve of Platonism.’26 The essays in this volume chart Derrida’s dialogue with the ancient world in the context of the central concerns of his work. The individual contributions address such questions as: Can there be philosophy without Plato? How do we understand the Roman empire’s legacy of ‘globalatinization’? Can a ‘democracy to come’ be rescued from its classical heritage? Should Oedipus’ experience at Colonus act as a blueprint for immigration and asylum? How does the question of Europe relate to the classical past? Is Derrida a ‘Greek’ or a ‘Jew’? Can we disturb the genealogies of reception? Prefaced by a previously untranslated essay of Derrida’s, the volume is divided up into five thematically linked parts. The opening part sketches out the main lines of Derrida’s engagement with ancient philosophy. Ranging from the pre-Socratics to Augustine and the Neoplatonists the essays explore how Derrida posits his own philosophy as both a continuity with, and a radical challenge to, this tradition of thought. It has a dual focus on Derrida as a reader of ancient philosophy and on the project of reading ancient philosophy after Derrida. The first chapter explores what is undoubtedly Derrida’s most seminal essay on antiquity: ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Naas’s close reading not only illuminates Derrida’s complex analysis of the Platonic text, it also shows how Derrida’s reading 25

Nietzsche (1997), 60. See this volume, 35; Derrida (1992d), 272. Originally from Derrida (2004), 110; (1972d), 133. 26

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of Plato ultimately grounds his wider project of the critique of metaphysics. O’Connell explores Derrida’s uncanny relationship to Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics. Unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger who championed the pre-Socratics at the expense of Plato, Derrida’s writings only deal obliquely with this body of thought. And yet, Derrida shares with the pre-Socratics a fascination with ‘linguistic signification’ and ‘differential play’. Gersh concludes this part with a chapter on Derrida and the early Christian rewritings of Plato. He explores how Derrida inscribes the concept of ‘negative theology’ ‘within the syntax of differance’. By exploring the relationship between Neoplatonic writings and the concepts of ‘the trace’ and ‘Conversion’ in a number of Derrida’s essays Gersh uncovers the tensions between Platonic and deconstructive languages. The next part explores the relationship between antiquity and the construct of modernity. The essays investigate the complex mediation of Derrida’s vision of antiquity refracted as it is through the prism of countless modernities. My own essay explores Derrida’s precarious positioning between the poles of Hellenism and Hebraism. In Glas Derrida shows how a struggle between ‘Greek’ and ‘Jew’ animates the debates between Kant and Hegel, the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment and his most powerful critic. By highlighting its stake in the most pressing ethical and political debates of the Enlightenment, Derrida reveals how the self-identity of European culture is founded on the conflict between ‘Greek’ and ‘Jew’. Orrells explores the central role that Freud has played in Derrida’s dialogue with history. Exploring the phenomenon of the recovery of Pompeii, Orrells argues that Derrida’s reading of Freud provides a profound meditation on the role of the archive in preserving and disturbing the memory of the classical past. Orrells’s essay does not just uncover Derrida’s relationship to antiquity via Freud but also reveals as an illusion the whole project of reading the past without reference to the present. Just as it is impossible for Derrida to read Pompeii without reference to Freud, to read the Greeks today without reference to Derrida would be to deny the imbrication of all classical scholarship in the projects of modernity. The third part explores Derrida’s intervention into the politics of the past. Derrida’s essays on political and ethical themes are often written against the background of the political landscape of Greece

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and Rome. From the relationship between writing and democracy explored in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ to that between fraternity and the Republic investigated in the Politics of Friendship, it is the political systems of antiquity which constantly inform Derrida’s critique of the ideologies of modernity. Bowlby opens this part with a reading of Derrida’s ‘dying Oedipus’ in Of Hospitality. If the final chapter of Oedipus’ life becomes in Derrida’s hands a parable of exile and asylum, Bowlby’s essay explores how the ‘globetrotting Oedipus’ can also provide a commentary on the problems of globalization and the predicament of women. Benjamin’s chapter continues the exploration of Derrida’s Oedipus but this time in relation to Heidegger. The role of Greek philosophy in their respective writings opens on to a political interrogation of the concepts of ‘strangeness’ and hospitality. The final chapter looks to Derrida’s two close engagements with Aristotle at the beginning and end of his career. Rosenstock follows Derrida’s reading of Aristotle from a ‘metaphorics of light’ to a ‘metaphorics of friendship’ and examines how this analysis involves a rethinking of the relationship between East and West, Greek and Jew, and friendship and democracy. Part IV focuses on the literary legacy of antiquity. Derrida has famously challenged the boundaries between literature and philosophy, but what role have ancient conceptualizations of language and literature played in this project? From Plato’s exclusion of the poets from his ideal Republic to Aristotle’s banishment of figurative language from philosophy, ancient thought has repeatedly staged a conflict between literature and philosophy. Kennedy explores the rhetoric of philosophy in Derrida’s reading of Aristotle. He shows how reason attempts to marginalize language in its desire to become independent from the ambiguities of figurative speech. Vessey’s essay questions the very practice of tracing a genealogy of literature back to ancient Greece. He argues that the institution of literature is firmly grounded in a distinctively Latin tradition. Through the term Mondialatinisation, Vessey shows how Derrida links the Latin legacy of literature to the imperial aspirations of the Roman and Christian worlds. The concluding set of essays explore Derrida’s commentary on the conflict between idealism and materialism. Plato’s Cave famously reduced the material world to a mere screen onto which the real world of ideas was projected. In his philosophy the sensible is

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repeatedly subsumed to the intelligible and Plato has often been held to account for the denigration of the body in the history of philosophy. Miller’s essay shows how Derrida’s analysis of the Khoˆra poses a challenge to the concept of disembodied reason in Plato. He argues that Derrida’s reading of the Khoˆra provides the blueprint for a new philosophy of space which sidesteps the traditional opposition between the material and the ideal. Willis’s essay extends this discussion of Platonic materialism by exploring the erotics of philosophy. She highlights Derrida’s explicit sexualization of the relationship between Socrates and Plato and argues that the scandal of the father–son pairing exposes the erotics of our own relationship to antiquity. Nietzsche identified his ‘obsession’ with the Greeks as the central component of his own youthful pathology. But this self-diagnosis hardly prevented this obsession saturating his later writings. Indeed, most scholars would probably agree that any attempt to understand Nietzsche without his Greeks would be severely impoverished. For Nietzsche, the Greek is not just the antitype to the modern, it is rather the Greek which shows modernity what it is to be modern. This relationship to the past is constitutive of Nietzsche’s own modernity. But where Nietzsche was certainly alive to the revolutionary potential of the Greeks, Derrida takes his cue from a more unlikely prophet of modernity with his own peculiar ‘compulsion for antiquity’.27 In a well-known passage from the Eighteenth Brumaire, Karl Marx famously formulates the role of Rome in the French Revolution as an instance of history repeating itself: Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under circumstances existing, given from the past. Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And it is just when they appear to be revolutionising themselves and their circumstances, in creating something unprecedented, it is in just such epochs of revolutionary crisis, that they nervously summon up the spirits of the past, borrowing from them their names, marching orders, uniforms, in order to enact new scenes in world history.28

27 28

I take this phrase from Armstrong (2005). Marx (2002), 19–20.

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This is why, according to Marx, ‘the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, achieved in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases the task of their time’. In Specters of Marx, Derrida reflects on what he calls Marx’s attempt to pull ‘time out of joint’: ‘No time is contemporary with itself, neither the time of the Revolution which finally never takes place in the present, nor the times that follow or follow from it.’29 If ‘no time is contemporary with itself ’ the notion of ‘one’s own time’ is nothing but illusion. No generation is truly in possession of its own temporality. Even at the moment of revolutionary crisis, even in the midst of violent struggle, the past enters the conflict between the present and its future. In the Derridean reading of Marx: ‘Untimely, “out of joint”, even and especially if it appears to come in its due time, the spirit of revolution is fantastic and anachronistic through and through.’30 Perhaps this is why Derrida’s own intellectual revolution could never take place in the present, for as he knew so well, ‘the new is not so much that which occurs for the first time but that “very ancient” dimension which recurs in the “very modern”’.31 29 30 31

Derrida (1994a), 111; (1993a), 182. Id. (1994a), 112; (1993a), 184. Derrida in Kearney (1984), 112.

‘We Other Greeks’1 Jacques Derrida Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

I have no clear recollection of the remarks I ventured many months ago after the excellent presentations of E´ric Alliez and Francis Wolff. Those remarks were not really responses and did not deserve to be recalled for their own sake, only for the admiration and gratitude that inspired them. These feelings have only grown in reading these two texts. Unable to rely, then, on my recollection, I will nonetheless try to give the modest reflections that follow the pace, brevity, and rhythm that would have been appropriate for remarks being improvised at the end of a conference session. To begin at the greatest and poorest level of generality, let me admit straightaway that I have always felt my relationship to ‘the Greeks’ or to something like ‘Greece’ to be somewhat naive or uncultured, seriously limited by my philological and historical Derrida’s essay ‘Nous autres Grecs’ appears here for the first time in an English translation which has been specially commissioned for this volume. The essay has its origins as an oral response given at a conference in 1991 organized by Barbara Cassin which was later published in an edited book entitled Nos Grecs et leurs modernes. Derrida is responding to two contributions by E´ric Alliez and Francis Wolff who addressed the question of Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault’s relationship to Greece. The essay constitutes, in part, a specific engagement with the themes they raise but can also be read as one of Derrida’s most extensive and explicit reflections on the role of antiquity in his work. Footnotes have been kept in their original format. 1 The original French title, ‘Nous autres Grecs’—with quotation marks—can be heard in at least three ways: (1) as a common, idiomatic way to say simply, ‘we Greeks, we who are Greek’; (2) as a way of affirming one’s belonging to the category of Greeks, ‘we Greeks, we too are Greeks’; (3) as a way of claiming a difference within the category of Greeks, ‘we Greeks of another kind, we other Greeks’.

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incompetence. This concern has always fed another, one that is no doubt more radical and that in the end I would probably have difficulty distinguishing from the first. I will speak of this later; it concerns nothing less than the identity of a referent properly named ‘the Greek’, ‘the Greeks’, or ‘Greece’. Each time I venture to speak of so-called ‘Greek’ things (other things as well, of course, but especially in this case), I tremble when I think of the readings genuine experts might offer—experts whose names I often refer to, and in France these are sometimes the names of friends. Of course, this unavowable and yet avowed lack of culture is never, as we know, alas, pure or natural, pristine or complete: it always remains exposed to ‘culture’, that is, to conventional and inherited representations, prevailing translations, institutional sedimentations, to teaching, to the circulation of dominant and dogmatic interpretations that are taken to be self-evident. (Let me say in passing that these dominant hermeneutic protocols can sometimes be of a critical, even a ‘deconstructive’ type, and I believe I have been a bit more suspicious about such things than Alliez and Wolff claim: I am thinking obviously of Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Freud, and precisely with regard to the so-called Greek thing, if there is any. With regard to these three, I have been more suspicious or unfaithful—in a regular and systematic fashion—than one would gather from listening to Alliez or Wolff. But I will no doubt have occasion to return to this.) Now, mixed in with this (unfortunately justified) feeling of incompetence, there is also a critical and no doubt self-interested concern about competence itself, about the way it is formed, about the presuppositions, distinctions, and disciplines that institute it. One would find signs of this paradox (but is it a paradox?) in each of the texts I have written in the direction of ‘the Greeks’. I neither can nor want to run through all of them here; but if these signs converge in one place, or it would be better to say in a non-place (non lieu), in a process of dislocation, it is ‘there’ where the horizon of the Greek thing itself is no longer assured, that which gives rise or place (donne lieu) to it and opens it up by delimiting it: neither as a place or system of language, nor as a politico-geographical place, nor as a spiritual figure (‘Husserl’) or historial figure (‘Heidegger’). Not to mention those places identified under the name of a corpus or system (‘Plato’ or ‘Aristotle’, for example). Each of the essays referred to by Alliez and

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Wolff shows this,2 as do others that, understandably, could not be taken into account in this context.3 And even more so the essays (almost all, this time) which, without making ‘Greek’ things their main theme, cannot avoid taking up, whether directly or not, the ‘Greek question’. I no doubt have ‘my Greeks’ (‘To each according to 2

I am alluding not only to the other Egyptian, to whom I frequently refer in what I believe to be certain necessary places in these texts, but more generally to an intrusion of the other, of the wholly other, who forces the limits of identification and the relationship of language, the corpus, or the system to itself. It is thus a question of locating the traces of this intrusion (traumatism, inclusion of the excluded, introjection, incorporation, mourning, and so on) rather than defining some essence or self-identity of the ‘Greek’, the originary truth of a language, corpus, or system. See, for example, ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, in La Disse´mination (Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 1972), 146–53 and passim [‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 128–34 and passim], ‘Khoˆra’ (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1993), 69–70, 83–4, 92–104 [‘Khoˆra’, trans. Ian McLeod, in On the Name (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 114, 120, 125–7]. As for ‘Khoˆra’, and on the subject of Khoˆra, allow me to refer also to ‘Comment ne pas parler: de´ne´gations’, in Psyche´: inventions de l’autre (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1987), 562ff. [‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume ii, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 167ff.]. What is at stake in all these attempts, in a word, is the question of knowing if, in what sense, and to what extent pharmakon and kho¯ra, for example, are (1) ‘in’ (2) ‘Plato’ (3) ‘Greek words’ (4) that designate ‘Greek things’ (significations or realities). 3 One should not read into this the slightest regret and even less a reproach. Alliez and Wolff have offered such attentive and generous readings of the texts they have cited that I wouldn’t dream of criticizing them, defending myself, or objecting. But, out of gratitude and because I take seriously the discussion with which they have honoured my work, because the polite response that would consist in not referring to oneself or explaining oneself might serve as an excuse for a kind of haughty detachment, I would rather venture here and there, in the limits of this space, to return to what I have written, to offer some clarifications or displace somewhat the place of the analysis. For example by recalling certain of my essays left out of their presentations (perhaps because in these essays Plato was not central and because Alliez and Wolff, or at least this is my hypothesis, have themselves privileged Plato). These essays are more concerned with Aristotle, or else the ‘Greek materialists’ (‘Ousia et Grammeˆ: note sur une note de Sein und Zeit’, ‘Le Supple´ment de copule: la philosophie devant la linguistique’, ‘La Mythologie blanche: la me´taphore dans le texte philosophique’, in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: E´ditions de Minuit, 1972) [‘Ousia and Grammeˆ: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, ‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)], and ‘Mes Chances: au rendez-vous de quelques ste´re´ophonies e´picuriennes’, in Confrontation, 19 (1988), 19–45 [‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, volume i, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 344–76].

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his Greeks’, as Eric Alliez recalls by taking up the expression of Barbara Cassin (p. 11)). I no doubt have some difficulty freeing myself from a reading that is still too accepted, too naive in this regard (with a naı¨vete´ that does not have the double dignity conferred upon it by Wolff in his first series of questions: to read the Greeks ‘without the mediation of Nietzsche, and as if they could speak the truth . . . ’). But the spectre of these Greeks roams perhaps less in these texts devoted to Plato or to Aristotle than in certain readings of Hegel or Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, of Mallarme´, Artaud, Joyce, Levinas (especially), or Foucault—sometimes revolving around words or themes that are obviously Greek (a limit that is difficult to pin down), and sometimes beyond, therefore, the obvious; and the silhouette of this spectre, in the very naı¨vete´ of this experience, no doubt wanders between very mobile figures, too difficult to identify here without a patient and micrological rereading of all the texts involved. Having recalled these generalities (which are a bit too programmatic, I admit, but are in keeping with the time and space that have been accorded us here), I am going to try to isolate somewhat arbitrarily certain points so as to situate the place of a possible discussion.

I 1. The project of putting into the same configuration certain French philosophical works belonging more or less to the same ‘epoch’ is surely necessary and makes sense. And the fact that the works under consideration share, among other things, what I would call, for lack of a better word, a ‘relationship’ to the ‘Greek thing’, and that in this respect some among ‘us’ might say ‘we’, ‘we and the Greeks’, is more obvious than ever after the very convincing demonstration that has just been made. I am convinced, in particular, like Alliez and Wolff, that one must never give up on analysing and explaining the resemblances, the ‘common genre’, the analogies and commonalities. There must indeed be reasons, I mean causes of all kinds (and not only those in the order of philosophical discourse, but also in what is called— and I am intentionally using here these conventional words—society, history, politics, the macro- and micro-economies of passions and

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desires), to explain this fact: at a particular moment, in a given country, a certain number of philosophers belonging more or less to the same generation, working in very similar institutions, broadly speaking in the same one, and who are publishing more or less at the same time, say things that resemble each other. To explore the nature of these resemblances, what explains them in ways that are known or unknown to the ‘authors’, is no doubt one of the tasks of the Enlightenment of our time, even if it is not the most important or the most urgent; and even if (I must say it in a rather quick and thus dogmatic way) the methods, axioms, and categories we have inherited in order to take up again and name these ‘configurations’ and these ‘analogies’ are radically insufficient. This task appears to me just as imperative as the law that also orders us to take into account the limits of these analogies, those that forbid us from saying ‘we’, ‘we (others) (nous autres)’, those that fracture and anachronize the ‘we’, the ‘we and the Greeks’. The same law orders us especially to analyse the presuppositions that govern the principle of reason or the etiology in this domain, and the very thing that in fact seems to come to us from the ‘Greeks’ each time we explain, interpret, assimilate, root, derive, configure (to put it all too quickly: logos, analogia, phusis, thesis, nomos, aitia, arkheˆ, riza, mimeˆsis, and so on: I leave ousia and aleˆtheia for later). One might have got the more or less confused impression that a configuration imposed itself, that a series or set of works tended to say ‘we’ and ‘the same’ (and this is thought more often abroad than in France, and from a certain distance: the truth of a homology or of an analogy is often best imposed through, or I mean by going through, little differences or little concurrences that blur one’s vision). The fact remains that this ‘same’ often has the figure of a chiasm that programmes or releases strange permutations, as Wolff too suggests. Moreover, within the apparent unity of an epoch, abyssal dissynchronies or anachronies can silently fissure the configuration of the contemporary, promise completely other filiations, reveal contracts, affinities, or complicities that have nothing to do with the sharing of a time or a language. To signal this in just a word or by means of just one glaring sign (there would be many others), the fact that, unlike Foucault and Deleuze, I constantly had to thematize an explication vis-a`-vis Heidegger (and from the beginning a deconstructive explication—interior and exterior, and

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thus always folded-onto itself (sur-plie´e))—having to do in particular with his ‘epochal’ framing of the history of philosophy and of the history of being, his interpretation of Nietzsche,4 of Aristotle,5 his way of situating the Greek and the Greek language,6 theos and theion,7 the principle of reason,8 mimeˆsis (and thus also truth,9 and, most especially, khoˆra),10 that is what indicates at least potentially certain reservations or deviations that would be difficult to integrate into a configuration. I’m not saying ‘unintegratable’, but it would be necessary to elaborate differently the schema of this supposed configuration (neither an ‘epoch’, in the Heideggerian sense, which, as I said, I never considered legitimate, nor a paradigm, nor an episteˆmeˆ, nor themata11). Other protocols of reading and writing 4 At least since De la grammatologie (Paris: E´ditions de Minuit, 1967), 31ff. [Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 18ff.], E´perons: les styles de Nietzsche (1972) (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 67ff. [Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 83ff.], and no doubt elsewhere—and often. 5 Marges de la philosophie, 58–9 and 70ff. [Margins of Philosophy, 51–2 and 60–1ff.]. 6 See in particular De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1987), especially 110ff. [Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), especially 69ff.]. 7 ‘Comment ne pas parler: de´ne´gations’, in Psyche´: inventions de l’autre, 584ff. [‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ii. 186ff.]. A quasi-‘autobiographical’ note (562 [309 n. 13]) responds perhaps in its own way to the question of ‘to each his own Greeks’. 8 See in particular ‘Les Pupilles de l’Universite´: le principe de raison et l’ide´e de l’universite´’, in Du droit a` la philosophie (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1991), 461–98, especially 476 [‘The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils’, in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press), 129–55, especially 139]. 9 This can be seen in ‘La Double Se´ance’, in La Disse´mination, 199–318 [‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, 173–285], most explicitly on p. 294 [262]. Everywhere it is marked, which is to say more or less everywhere (the references would be too numerous to list here), the margin between polysemy and dissemination can be interpreted, and this would hardly be a stretch, as an ‘objection’ both to Aristotle and to Heidegger. See also ‘La Mythologie Blanche’, in Marges de la philosophie [‘White Mythology’, in Margins of Philosophy] (especially 295ff., 317 [247–8ff., 265–6]). 10 ‘Khoˆra’, 58–9, 82–3, 101–2 [‘Khoˆra’, in On the Name, 109, 120, 147–8]. On all the points I have just mentioned, and on the relationship of the ‘French philosophical scene’ (in particular Foucault and Deleuze) to Heidegger, see ‘De´sistance’, in Psyche´, 613 [‘De´sistance’, in Psyche, ii. 210, 317 n. 8]. 11 ‘Epokheˆ’ (Heidegger), ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn), ‘episteˆmeˆ’ (Foucault), ‘themata’ (Holton): why, in this century, has one regularly chosen Greek words to name these ‘historical’ ‘formations’ (there where the word ‘history’ itself becomes problematic

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would be necessary to give some breathing room to all the quasiidioms, differences, and differends. Even more so when we consider that the supposed configuration is obviously gathered, as has often been noted—which does not, of course, mean it is false—under the sign of difference, and of a difference, like a simulacrum, that is nondialectizable. Alliez recalls quite rightly (214f.) this resistance, I would almost say this allergy, but not this opposition, this obstinate response (differential, non-dialectical) to dialectic. This is common not only to Deleuze and me, as Alliez notes, but also to Foucault, Lyotard, and others. This was won, one might even say wrested away—and always without end—from an inherited dialectism. What it displaced or deformed, rather than reversed, was not only the Hegelian, neo-Hegelian, or Marxist dialectic but first of all the dialecticity of Platonic origin—and in the end all the former on the basis of this latter. What these ‘thoughts of difference’, as they have been called, paradoxically have in common is thus also that which resists, like difference, the analogy of a certain community or contemporaneity: whatever in the configuration cannot be configured, or whatever lends to the configuration the figure or face of the mask or of the simulacrum, one might even say of the lure (leurre). And this figure is perhaps no longer simply Greek or non-Greek. What Alliez rightly says (p. 214) about the simulacrum and the mask will endlessly cause doubt, in any case the

and where it is a question of a ‘history’ that also engages thought, knowledge, and language)? Why, especially, has one often chosen to keep the original form of these Greek words in order to name these enigmatic or improbable groupings, totalities, or configurations, in order to nickname (surnommer) them, in truth, there where the nameable is less assured than ever in its identity, limits, meaning, truth, and its very historicity? Like the Latin word in Kant, the Greek word provides more than one form of legitimization. It indicates several powers at once: (1) the invention of the new, namely, a concept that is irreducible to those circulating in everyday language; (2) the supposed invention of the new as archeological rediscovery: restoration, reactivation, or liberation of an occluded or even a forbidden memory; (3) finally, the authority attached to the use of rare words or of ancient languages considered to be learned languages. Now, if the presumed unity of the concept that has been named in this way shows itself to be lacking, and a fortiori the very thing being referred to by it, all these powers would be but simulacra. But let us not forget that simulacra can produce events, even if they do not always do so; they can be interesting, useful, fertile—and can provoke thought, even if they do not always do so. Whence, sometimes, the power.

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vigilance of a certain skepsis or epokheˆ before all identification, analogy, continuity, filiation. 2. I have absolutely no objection to what E´ric Alliez has written, no reservation to register, and he is no doubt right to talk of a ‘Nietzschean doubling’ and of so many other shared differences, if I may say this, between Deleuze and myself. But he well knows that if in ‘Diffe´rance’ (18 /17) I cite Nietzsche and Philosophy with regard to a differential of force, the modest reading of Nietzsche that I have attempted here and there, as well as my debt toward Nietzsche, and in particular on the subject of debt, remains very heterogeneous to that of Deleuze. It differs in its style, its translations, in the treatment of the text and of language, because of an insistent passage through Heidegger, and through ‘critical’ questions posed to Heidegger, to Heidegger’s ‘Nietzsche’—in Of Grammatology, as Alliez rightly notes (p. 218 n. 17), but elsewhere as well, and more and more so—and to the ‘Greeks’ of Heidegger. Moreover, among all the possible guiding threads for the analysis of the differences that traverse these phenomena of configuration, it would be necessary to follow the role, form, meaning, and time of the reference to Heidegger in all these so-called ‘thoughts of difference’. One would perhaps be better able to formalize the play of differences: beyond the disagreements that are in the end, to my mind, not very interesting, it seems to me that the most fortunate differences are perhaps those that are without end or basis (sans fond), more insurmountable than those that separate each of these thoughts from the others. This could be shown in detail, but I neither can nor wish to impose such a task here. In the end, Alliez himself situates, as if there were nothing to it, the limit of what he calls a common ‘vein’, namely—and nothing less than, nothing else but!—ontology, this thing, which could not be more Greek, called ontology. I have nothing against ontology, but I have never had toward that which presents itself under this name anything but questions, reservations, very conditional hypotheses, interminable parentheses. Now Alliez himself rightly emphasizes, without however noting the serious difference I myself would want to retain, the ‘profoundly ontological response of Deleuze to a question’ that I had once formulated (p. 217). He is quite right to speak elsewhere of a ‘Deleuzian ontology’ (p. 217 n. 13). What one might call, to speak quickly, this difference of ontology leads to so many others! And who

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would believe that this does not say something, perhaps even something essential, about the relation each of us has to ‘his Greeks’? It is no doubt a question of the manner of determining the ‘other of language’ (p. 222) and the simulacrum, but also infinite alterity. I must limit myself here to just a suggestion: it would no doubt be enlightening to pursue the analysis of this problematic configuration (thanks to what has been initiated so well by Alliez and Wolff, and well beyond what I can improvise in the course of these short remarks) by granting a certain privilege to the epekeina teˆs ousias (whether that of Plato or of Plotinus), to which I believe I must always return, to its strange tradition and to what within it uproots at the same time every possible tradition, and in particular that of ontology and metaphysics. What destiny, what interpretation does one reserve for it? Who speaks of it (like Heidegger, very early on, or Levinas, for example, and in their wake, whether one ‘follows’ them or not)? Who never speaks of it? I would wager that the most significant differences would become more apparent. This question also intersects that of the remainder, the remaining (restance) of the remainder, the relationships between being, beings, and the remainder, and a certain irreducibility, it seems to me, of what I have called the remaining of the remainder of all ‘ontology’. This heterogeneity and the law of contamination between the wholly other of this heterogeneity and its regular reappropriation (inclusion/exclusion, economic redialectization, and so on) is no doubt what has most constantly concerned me in my readings, notably my reading of the ‘Greeks’ (Plato and Aristotle, for example). But it is also what has prevented this reading from identifying or determining a self-identity, a self-immanence of the Greek, as well as, in fact, any other linguistic, discursive, systemic, or textual corpus. It is not only the non-Greek that attracted me in/to (chez) the Greek (it’s a question of knowing in short what chez means), not only the other of the Greek (the Egyptian, the Barbarian, or whoever is determined by the Greek as his other, and so is excluded-included, posed as opposable), but the wholly other of the Greek, of his language and his logos, this figure of a wholly other that is unfigurable by him. This wholly other haunts every one of the essays I have devoted to ‘Greek’ things and it often irrupts within them: under different names, for it perhaps has no proper name.

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3. With regard to the ‘other of language’, an expression that can be taken in very different directions, I am particularly grateful to Alliez for emphasizing that ‘non-discursive forces’ were from the beginning, and in a determining fashion, taken into account or taken seriously by a deconstruction of logocentrism that is never more misunderstood than when it is seen as a theory of language, of writing, or of the text in the narrow and strictly conventional sense of these terms. If I recall this rather massive fact, it is because it anticipates one of Wolff ’s questions to which I will return; but also because it gestures again, already, toward the ‘Greek’ thing that concerns us: nothing less than logos—and its Heideggerian interpretation which always inclines it in the direction of gathering (Versammlung), toward the One and the Same. Alliez rightly specifies that ‘the general strategy of deconstruction is tirelessly to repeat the text while altering it, by “adding” to it, to the point of producing the genealogy of the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition’ (p. 215). To be sure, but this is not done only by favouring, as Alliez again puts it, ‘the irruptive emergence of nomadic concepts or undecidable concepts’. If these latter ‘correspond to whatever has always resisted the former organization of forces, which has always constituted the remainder and is irreducible to the dominant force that organized the hierarchy’ (p. 215), it is because this non-discursive remainder exceeds at once the simulacrum (whose possibility retains, to be sure, the trace but to which it is not a question of simply opposing being or the truth), pure and simple conceptual undecidability, as well as language and the text in the ordinary sense of these terms. Alliez notes precisely this (p. 225). Consider, for example, the resistance of the pharmakon and its semantic oscillation. It is not only that of the simulacrum or of the phantasm—whose repetition would come to disorganize dialectic (a problem I tried to address not so much in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ as in texts such as ‘The Double Session’, ‘White Mythology’, or ‘Economimesis’, where the formidable question of mimeˆsis is taken up). This resistance interested me in particular at the point where it limits the possibility of the system or of the corpus, of the complete, controllable, and formalizable self-identity of a set or a whole, be it that of a system, of Plato’s oeuvre (which would be governed by a unifiable meaning-to-say), of the Greek language, of Greek society (and very concretely it is also a matter of the

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place—exclusion included, so to speak—of the pharmakos in it), thus of the identity of the Greek in general. It is with this example that one feels, for essential reasons, originarily dispossessed of the Greek, of the Greeks, of ‘one’s Greeks’. And this dispossession must have also happened to them as well, already from the origin, that is to say, before and outside the originarity that some (sometimes Nietzsche or Heidegger) dream about in relationship to them, even before the latecomers who we are can even seek—though always in vain—to reappropriate them for ourselves. If we are still or already Greeks, we ourselves, we others (nous autres), we also inherit that which made them already other than themselves, and more or less than they themselves believed. ‘Themselves?’ Who, ‘they’? (Wolff says ‘they’, and I will say in a moment why I have trouble understanding what this means.) Perhaps we must resolutely resist this pure and simple alternative: either we are, ‘we ourselves’, ‘we others’, still Greeks, governed, whether we want it or not, by the law of inheritance (the origin of philosophy would be Greek through and through, the founding concepts would speak Greek in us, before us, and the history of metaphysics itself would be but the unfolding of this origin which it would be necessary to reactivate right up to its very eve or inception) or we are, ‘we ourselves’, ‘we others’, wholly other than the Greeks, having broken with this origin, this language, this law, and so on. Who can take this alternative seriously? By insisting regularly upon the fact that the unity of the history of metaphysics itself was but a domestic representation or economic reappropriation,12 and thus impossible, immediately contradicted by the fact, pragmatically expropriated and so subject to denegation; by insisting upon the deconstruction at work in the ‘origin’ and already from the ‘origin’ itself, upon the deconstruction of the origin, I tried to suggest that this alternative was in fact borne by another ‘history’ (for which the name ‘history’ is no longer self-evident), a ‘history’ much more impure, with a play that is more unstable and more destabilizing of the tradition and of rupture, of memory, mourning, and incorporation: we are still Greeks, certainly, but perhaps other Greeks, we 12

Rather than multiply here the references to this leitmotif, I will just refer to Marges de la philosophie, for example, ‘Tympan’, i–xxv, and 274 [Margins of Philosophy, ‘Tympan’, ix–xxix, and 230].

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were not born from just that Greek send-off; we are certainly still other Greeks, with the memory of events that are irreducible to the Greek genealogy, but other enough to have not only, also, altered the Greek in us, but to bear within us something wholly other than the Greek.

II In the course of a patient and friendly discussion, Wolff poses me a series of daunting questions. Without at all claiming to measure up to them in a few lines, I will only indicate the direction of a possible work or possible discourse. First series of questions. It is perhaps best to cite here in extenso: ‘Can’t one read the Greeks naively? Naively in two senses: without the mediation of Nietzsche, and as if they could speak the truth in the sense they claimed. What prevents them from speaking the truth for us? What allows us to speak the truth about them? With what concept is one’s suspicion [mine—J.D.] armed—if it is not with the Will to Power, for example?’ (Wolff ’s emphasis). This sequence of questions seems to be stretched between two propositions. Are they compatible? On the one hand, Wolff maintains that Greece would be for us, for me, as for Foucault and Deleuze, ‘constituted by texts’ (as opposed to ‘political or social institutions’, ‘aesthetic productions’, or ‘history’), and more precisely, ‘constituted’ by ‘texts that aim at declaring truths.’ On the other hand, I am being asked if it is not possible (contrary, we are to hear, to what I do or to what Wolff thinks I do) to read the Greeks ‘naively’ ‘as if they could speak the truth in the sense they claimed’: ‘What prevents them from speaking the truth for us?’ (Indeed, nothing at all. Which is why I never said that the Greeks did not speak the truth. I even insisted on the contrary, all the while indicating—and this is probably what Wolff regrets—that this was not my question or my main concern. I ask rather under what conditions they are not prevented from speaking the truth in the

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sense they claimed, and what this truth of truth signifies, how it is produced, and at what cost.) How are we to reconcile Wolff ’s two propositions? Of course, Wolff is quite right to recall—and to say the contrary would go against common sense—that, like Foucault and Deleuze, I grant an enormous privilege to what are commonly called ‘texts’, and even socalled philosophical texts ‘that aim at declaring truths’. By no means did I want or was I able to do the work of a historian, anthropologist, socio-politologist, or, of course, that of an expert on Athenian society. But Wolff will grant me that I constantly problematize this concept of text, its closure or its reduction to the dimension of writing or even discourse, and especially the limit between what is called the philosophical text and others. But isn’t it this problematic, this de-limitation of the concept of text or of writing, though also of the ‘philosophical’ as such, that is constantly at issue in (for example) ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, ‘Ousia and Grammeˆ’, ‘White Mythology’, or ‘Khoˆra’? What Alliez recalled with regard to my insistence upon the ‘field of non-discursive forces’ gives the principle of the answer I would develop, if space permitted, to Wolff ’s first question. Of course, and I again grant him this, it is not enough to mark the opening in principle of the text and of the philosophical onto ‘the social and political institutions’ of Greece; once these preliminaries or these essential principles are readable (but when? have they ever become so?—it’s doubtful), all the work is done elsewhere or remains to be done. But the manner in which these preliminaries or these principles are elaborated can also, and this has always been my hope, not remain external to what is called ‘positive’ work but can have certain repercussions on it, and require restructurations of knowledge and of the discipline. Moreover, even beyond what explicitly links the problematics of writing, in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (though also elsewhere), to the problem of power, democracy, and democratization,13 this essay is from start to finish, and this can be seen on every page, at every step, a political text on Greek politics and institutions, as well as on the political in general. I would want to claim that this is 13

De la grammatologie, 59 or 73 (on Plato), 128 and passim [Of Grammatology, 39 or 50 (on Plato), 86 and passim], ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, 165 and passim [‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 143 and passim].

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also true of ‘Khoˆra’, which can be read as a text on the politeia (see, for example, 77–8 [117–18], 103 [149], et passim) on the state and on war (103–4 n. 8 [149 n. 8]), on the possibility or difficulty of ‘speak [ing] at last of philosophy and politics’ (85 [121]), according to Socrates’ more or less ironic request, where the entire frame is at once fictive, political, philosophical, and so on. To go straight to the letter of Wolff ’s ‘first series of questions’, I believe that I read the Greeks naively, I already said this, but no doubt in another way than the one he seems to want. Because, on the other hand, I do not believe one can read them with absolute naı¨vete´, or, as Wolff says, ‘in two senses’: first without mediation (one never reads anything without mediation; as for the mediation of Nietzsche, I could easily demonstrate, I think, though I cannot do it here, that this mediation is not decisive and certainly not constant in ‘my’ reading of the ‘Greeks’. For this reading is carried out sometimes without him, sometimes against him, sometimes through a sort of dialogue or irony that is too difficult to analyse in the style of these remarks.14 And then ‘as if they could speak the truth in the sense they claimed’. ‘What prevents them from speaking the truth for us? What allows us to speak the truth about them?’ Unable to answer these questions here, because they are too difficult, I will simply say that these questions are the very ones that preoccupy all the readings I have attempted, and in particular of the Greeks. These questions, which are questions of truth, of course, and of the truth of truth, are the most and the least naive of all. They strip us of all assurance regarding what ‘naive’ means, in one, two, or more than two senses. If I thought that something prevented the Greeks (or whomever) from speaking the truth for us, I would not be interested in them for one second. As for saying ‘what allows us to speak the truth about them’, I do not have a single set answer. What we have here is a form of question that I would like to question in turn: ‘truth’ (but of what sort? what is it exactly?) ‘about’ (on the subject of this object, the Greeks, which we would not be, or no longer be, and about whom we 14 Allow me to refer again to ‘La Mythologie blanche’, 313 [‘White Mythology’, 262–3] and La Carte postale [The Post Card] (which, I don’t know exactly where, speaks very ironically of Nietzsche’s Socrates, as well as of the Greeks and particularly the Plato of Freud, this other ‘master of suspicion’, as one used to say.)

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would speak from some metalinguistic vantage point—possibilities that no one can seriously believe in) ‘them’ (who, ‘them’? as for identifying them, see above: them without ‘us’, in opposition to us, to ‘we ourselves’, ‘we others’?). Since all the questions (and the question of the question) that have interested me, in all these texts, are precisely those of truth, identity, and so on, since the formation of these questions is essentially indebted to the ‘Greeks’, the enigmatic fact that, in a certain way, ‘they’ indeed speak ‘the truth for us’, that nothing can ‘prevent’ them from doing so, and that not only can I do nothing about it but it fascinates me, intrigues me, and pushes me to ask questions, the fact also, and as a result, that they also allow us to ‘speak the truth about them’ only deepens, makes tremble, or places in abyme (one can choose the metaphor one wants) the status of the truth of truth implied here. Questions of ontology, we said earlier, questions of the truth of truth now, though these are perhaps not exactly the same thing. The question of the question (addressed in Of Spirit to Heidegger, between Heidegger and the Greeks). It is in this fragile ‘of ’, in this unstable genitive, this obscure or oblique genealogy, that we (‘we’ others) deliberate and struggle ((nous) de´battons). If the legacy of the thought (of truth, of being) in which we are inscribed is not only, not fundamentally, not originarily Greek, it is no doubt because of other convergent and heterogeneous filiations, other languages, other identities that are not simply added on like secondary attributes (the Jew, the Arab, the Christian, the Roman, the German, and so on); it is no doubt because European history has not simply unfolded what was handed down to it by the Greek; it is especially because the Greek himself never gathered himself or identified with himself: the discourses whose archives we have on this subject (statements such as: we are exemplary Greeks, we know what the true Greek or the true Athenian is, and those are the others, the Barbarians, the Egyptians, and so on) are but a supplementary testimony to this worry and this non-self-identity. It would be necessary to embark here on a long discourse on hospitality, war, the excluded of the city— and the place of the Stranger in philosophy. As for the ‘truth’ of the Greeks, the one that they would be speaking ‘for us’, that we would say ‘about them’, I wonder whether one can ask such questions in philosophy (ontology, logic, phenomenology, ethics, physics, and even politics), in the history of philosophy, or even in the human sciences

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(anthropology, history, and so on) as such. And I wonder if the approaches most urgently required by this ‘truth’, under the guise of this or that institutional discipline, this or that genre of knowledge, have not of necessity already crossed over these boundaries. For my part, I believe myself to be on this point very disarmed: since so many weapons and so many stratagems have been used up or are out of use, I do not have the impression in any case of being, to take up Wolff ’s words, ‘armed’ with any ‘suspicion’, with any ‘concept’, especially not some new one, especially not the Will to Power. Why? Unless one translates into ‘suspicion’ all possible modalities of the question, of ‘seeking to know’ or ‘giving an account’, of reading in a vigilant, critical, or active way, I don’t see why one would privilege here the reference to suspicion. I have never done so, and I have always found confusing the way in which, in the 1960s, the press grouped together into the same discourse of suspicion all thought referring to Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud. Outside of my teaching and unpublished works, I don’t believe I have ever referred to Marx in relationship to the Greeks. I did refer to Freud in a very critical way in The Post Card. And as for Nietzsche, I am more or less certain that I never cited him in any of the works we are discussing (‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, ‘Ousia and Grammeˆ’, ‘Khoˆra’, ‘The Supplement of Copula’, ‘The Double Session’). One might then say: that does not prove that his inspiration was not decisive, indeed it might just prove the contrary. And yet I believe this, I believe that the gestures made in these texts owe nothing decisive or very specific to Nietzsche, especially not to the Nietzsche of the Will to Power.15 Contrary to what one might believe in going too fast or in looking at my texts in a 15 First of all, I have always preferred to speak of force, and thus of a difference of force, of differential force, rather than of a will to power. There are many reasons for this, which I present here schematically: (1) so as not to give in to some voluntaristic metaphysics, (2) because the theme of force (on the subject of which, moreover, I often expressed some worries) is inseparable from the theme of the differential; (3) because, as a result, it is more open to the paradoxes and aporias that transform the greatest force into the most disarmed of weaknesses, even into non-violence. (See, for example, ‘Force et signification’, ‘Violence et me´taphysique’, and ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’, in L’E´criture et la diffe´rence (Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 1967) [‘Force and Signification’, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, and ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)]. With regard to these texts, I wonder whether the question of the ‘Greek’ is

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macroscopic way, my readings of Nietzsche are often not only very ‘suspicious’ with regard to him, to take up a word that is not mine, but ironic, critical, or ‘deconstructive’.16 This is just as true for my readings of Heidegger. In any case, without being able to enter here into the question in all its complexity, it is never a matter of borrowing from X some conceptual arm to be turned against Y who is suspected of doing Z. Before each of the entities named by these letters and these words, I feel myself very disarmed. In the texts we are speaking of, I especially sought to read ‘Greek’ words (it was already rather difficult, indeed impossible, to read and to translate, and this impossibility cannot but leave one restless), that is to say, words working in sentences, in scenes of discourse and writing, in works that, for this very reason, could not be closed upon themselves (neither in the Greeks, nor in philosophy, nor in the book, nor in a system, and especially not in language) and thus had already been marked by the irruption of the other (the non-discursive real, the non-Greek, etc.). The ‘words’, more or less than words, with which we have been invested rather than ‘armed’, without power and without knowledge (words given or assigned as a legacy before any initiative on the part of the one receiving them), these words which I could not use insofar as they are unstable and cannot be appropriated, are often, most often, Greek words (or perhaps the simulacra of words): pharmakon, pharmakos, or pharmakeus, but also hymen, as well as parergon, which we haven’t discussed.17 There is perhaps not addressed more directly in a certain reading of Levinas than in texts on Plato and Aristotle. The same could be said for the debate with Foucault over a Greek hubris or logos that would have ‘no contrary’ (‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, in Writing and Difference). On force, power, and potentiality, see also La Carte postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 430, 432, 436 [The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 403, 405, 408] and Limited Inc (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1990), 275ff. [Limited Inc (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 149ff.]. The limit of violence is there also discussed. 16 See especially E´perons: les styles de Nietzsche [Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles] and Otobiographies: L’Enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1984) [‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name’, trans. Avital Ronell in The Ear of the Other (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 1–38]. 17 See especially La Ve´rite´ en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978) [The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987]. It is not simply a question of words (and to this list one would have to add

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something significant about the fact that undecidability or a certain discourse on undecidability found its privileged examples in these ‘Greek’ words, in philosophy, on its borders, that is, beyond its confines. (This has been the case, at least, for me, since one does not need to be too terribly learned to know that there is no shortage of such possibilities in other languages. There is too much to say here, for example about undecidability—the condition and necessary passage for the decision—but let’s leave that aside.) Before moving on to Wolff ’s second question, one clarification. It is indeed true that, like Foucault and Deleuze, I have ‘privileged in many ways’ the Platonic corpus, and for reasons that Wolff explains very well. Nevertheless, without returning to what I recalled earlier regarding the non-identity or the non-self-closure of this corpus, and still less of this system, and without claiming to go beyond the very modest limits of the texts I have oriented toward all these authors, I believe that a reference to Aristotle will have played for me (in ‘Ousia and Grammeˆ’, ‘The Supplement of Copula’, ‘White Mythology’, and even ‘Khoˆra’) a role that is just as indispensable (or let’s say symptomatic, to use Wolff ’s word). And, despite the paucity of explicit references to them in my work, and the incompetence which I admitted at the outset, a few discreet signs suggest how much the Greek ‘materialists’ or Plotinus (whom Heidegger almost never cites18) matter to me. Especially—since I subscribe up to a certain point to what Wolff emphasizes with regard to history and narrative (p. 235)—what I attempt to show in ‘Khoˆra’ is a structure utterly resistant to historical narrative, not eternal or ahistorical like an intelligible idea, but radically foreign to all oppositions and to all dialectics that make history or narrative possible, and heterogeneous even to that beyond of being or to a certain interpretation of the epekeina teˆs ousias (that of the Republic or of a certain hypothesis from the Parmenides concerning the One that does not participate in the long procession of words whose connections are taken into account in ‘White Mythology’), but of syntax and of sentences, that is, of refe´rance and diffe´rance, of a ‘signifying apparatus’ (‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, 112 [‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 99]). And since Wolff often evokes suspicion and symptoms, one must not forget to make reference to the discourse of Epicurus, for example, on the fall, the clinamen and the symptoˆmata (cf. ‘Mes Chances . . . ’, 22ff. [‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, 348ff.]). 18 ‘Mes Chances . . . ’, 26 [‘My Chances/Mes Chances’, 352–53].

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any way in being [oudamoˆs ara to hen ousias metekhei, 141e], of the Plotinian or Neoplatonic tradition) which gives rise to histories, narratives, or myths, and opens a reference to the Good, to God, to some event. I am alluding here to so many different types, which must certainly be rigorously distinguished, but which all appeal to a certain beyond of being: certain discourses about revelations (Jewish or Christian), apophatic theologies or mysticisms (at least insofar as they are essentially articulated, as is almost always the case, upon the Scripture whose language they speak), metaphysics or ethics (beyond ontology), in the sense given to these by Levinas, the theology projected by Heidegger (where the word ‘being’, as he says, would not appear) or his discourse on being under erasure as crossed out (kreuzweise Durchstreichung), or else what Marion calls God without being (one).19 I have tried (in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’) to interpret, between that which is situated or projected epekeina teˆs ousias and khoˆra, a slight difference or fragile limit, sometimes barely perceptible, which would separate a certain event from the non-event, and would distinguish, on the one hand, all the types of narratives I just named in a much too elliptical way without however assimilating them all to one another, and, on the other hand, a place or a taking-place that is an-ontological and an-anthropo-theological. This limit is also the limit of the self-interpretation of the Platonic discourse and of all the interpretative schemas it has engendered.20 How can Wolff reconcile what he says in the first place (p. 235), namely, that for Deleuze, Foucault, and myself ‘Platonism has come to an end (either so as to take note of this end or to contribute to it)’, something I believe I have never thought or said, whether in this form or in another, and what he recalls in the second place (p. 244), namely, as I wrote one day in a certain mode, we are ‘today on the eve of Platonism’?21 In speaking then of the ‘eve of Platonism’ ‘today’, I 19

‘Comment ne pas parler: de´ne´gations’, 584ff. [‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, 186ff.] 20 Khoˆra, 23ff. [‘Khoˆra’, 93]. 21 ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, 122–3 [‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 107–8]. It is impossible to reconstitute here the context, premisses, or folds of this assertion in the form of a light provocation. Allow me at least to reconstitute here the immediate setting for it: ‘In many ways, and from a viewpoint that does not cover the entire field, we are today on the eve of Platonism. Which can also, naturally, be thought of as the morning after

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had to have been implying a historical figure that is more complicated than one that would simply be stretched between two points: the beginning and the end. It’s here that I would most hesitate to follow Wolff, particularly when he attributes to me, as well as to Foucault, to whom I would be, according to him, closer than to Deleuze, the theme of an ‘end of metaphysics’. Not only do I not believe in such a thing, but I often insisted on the difference, which is to my eyes decisive, between end and closure,22 on the non-selfidentity of something like metaphysics itself (la me´taphysique).23 To speak, as I did, of a ‘dominant structure’ in the history of metaphysics is already to suggest that this history is a process, and thus an unstable play of forces whose very conflictuality prohibits it from relating in a serene and straightforward way to its identity. (The ‘one differing from itself ’, the hen diapheron heautoˆi of Heraclitus— that, perhaps, is the Greek heritage to which I am the most faithfully amenable and the one that I try to ‘think’ in its affinity—which is surprising, I concede, and at first glance so improbable—with a certain interpretation of the uninterpretable khoˆra.) It is a question of the very (meˆme) event of the same (meˆme), of the itself (soi-meˆme), of the relation to self, and it is under this sign that I had once tried to speak of a diffe´rance that is not the ontological difference in which it nevertheless can leave its trace.24 That is one of the points where

Hegelianism. At that specific point, the philosophia, the episteˆmeˆ are not “overturned”, “rejected”, “reined in”, etc., in the name of something like writing . . . ’ 22 Among the many places, see De la grammatologie, 14 and passim [Of Grammatology, 4 and passim] and D’un ton apocalyptique adopte´ nague`re en philosophie (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1983) [‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 117–71]. 23 For example, Marges de la philosophie, pp. xxff., 274 and passim [Margins of Philosophy, pp. xxivff., 230 and passim]. 24 ‘Perhaps this is why the Heraclitean play of the hen diapheron heautoˆi, of the one differing from itself, the one in difference with itself, already is lost like a trace in the determination of the diapherein as ontological difference’ (Marges de la philosophie, 23 [Margins of Philosophy, 22]). Such references to the hen diapheron heautoˆi are numerous. A certain difference between diffe´rance and the ontological difference of which Heidegger speaks is emphasized in many places. Among the most recent, see Me´moires, pour Paul de Man (Paris: E´ditions Galile´e, 1988), particularly with regard to technology, science, and literature, 110ff., 135ff. [Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 109ff., 139ff.].

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my relation to Heidegger is most obviously (an obviousness often denied, it is true, for reasons that are sometimes clear and sometimes obscure, if not obscurantist) extremely complicated, unstable, and hardly orthodox, to say the least; I will return to this in a moment. In any case, it is enough to say (I am perhaps responding here to Wolff ’s second question) that, on this point as on so many others, ‘deconstruction doesn’t make a big to-do of it (n’en fait pas un drame)’ (assuming I understand the connotations or the modality of this expression). I even tried to describe in a somewhat formalized and ironic way all the programmes of these discourses on the end and on (the) death (of metaphysics among other things) in ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’. Now, there are perhaps many ways to make or not make ‘a big to-do’, and more than one twist to this expression. We would have to pursue this conversation in order to understand each other better on this subject. If by ‘making a big to-do’ what is meant is taking seriously (just as I am taking Wolff ’s questions seriously here) that which is happening today, in a singular, acute, irreplaceable way, in philosophy, for example, between the closure and the end, and which does not consist in continually unfolding, in developing, the history initiated by certain Greeks under the name of philosophy (or of logic, ontology, phenomenology, ethics, politics, and so on) then, yes, I believe that this (not me) ‘is making a big to-do’, and it needs no one, especially not a discourse on deconstruction, to make more of them. Finally, I don’t think I can respond in a few words, or even begin to respond, to the final series of questions concerning the ‘Heideggerian mediation of Greek texts’ (p. 239 n. 21). It’s simply too difficult. The reading of Heidegger has given me to think, and will never cease to do so, I am certain, in the most abyssal and unforeseeable way. Having often acknowledged this, I prefer venturing just a few remarks (very insufficient and too preliminary, to be sure) on what concerns us here. Most of my questions, reservations, perplexities, criticisms before Heidegger’s text, at one moment or another, concern in the end the Greek thing. Whether it is a question of epochalization, of science and technology, of animality and of the hand, of sexuality and life, of the question as the originary form or ultimate dignity of thought, of the reading of Nietzsche, of the principle of reason, of the interpretation of the Khoˆra, of the relationship to language (German/Greek), of the

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ontological difference, of logos as gathering (Versammlung), and so on, the ‘Heideggerian mediation’, as Wolff calls it, seemed to me more than problematic, and I have noted this in an explicit fashion for a very long time now.25 I have never trusted it, but it is also true that I always do my utmost not to avoid it or ignore it. ... I am hastening things a bit at the end of a non-response that is at once too short and too long. One question in order to give the impression of ending, therefore, and in order to confide a few things as naively as possible, as in the beginning, more naively even than Francis Wolff seemed to want—in the most naive and sincere way possible. Here is the question. How would one answer someone who says to you, for example: 1. ‘You know, I am (there is someone in me who feels) fascinated by the “Greeks”, amorous, demanding, indebted, overwhelmed, exasperated, awaiting always more from their reserve, hanging on the enigma of their word.’ 2. ‘And yet, or perhaps precisely because of this, I am (there is in me someone who feels) foreign, radically insensible or impervious to the “Greeks”, uncomprehending, stunned, deaf before their word, incompetent, incapable of understanding them or of translating them, as if they figured for me the wholly other.’ 3. ‘And at the same time, or perhaps precisely because of this, I am (there is in me someone who feels) allergic to the “Greeks”, allergic to this little people so sure of itself and so domineering, as General de Gaulle once said, if I remember correctly. At once unable and unwilling to bear witness for them, and still less to call them to bear 25

These themes are gathered together and these references connected to one another in De l’esprit, 24ff. [Derrida (1989b), 9ff.] and in the two essays devoted to Heidegger in Psyche (‘Geschlecht I: diffe´rence sexuelle, diffe´rence ontologique’) [‘Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’, in Psyche, ii. 8–26] and ‘La Main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)’ [‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’, Psyche, ii. 28–62]) or in Heidegger et la Question (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). I don’t have much to say about the triad and the Oedipal schema with which Wolff concludes. Let me simply refer yet again to the ‘difference’ I tried to situate between castration and an Oedipal dialectics, on the one hand, and dissemination, on the other, between the three and the four, and so on. (See Dissemination or Glas [Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)].

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witness, to hold them for the ultimate witnesses, I always feel within me a tendency to contest them, I would almost say to detest them.’ This question perhaps goes in the direction of what Wolff will have said so much better in his concluding pages. But how to respond to it? And ‘who’ would be able to respond? Certainly not me. As incompatible as they may appear, these three movements— which, I am persuaded, leave detectable ‘symptoms’ in everything I write or have just said—intersect and intertwine in ‘me’. But they do not presuppose any other assured identity (the Jew, the Christian, the African, the non-Greek in general). They are to be taken seriously, and they dramatically traverse (even if one must not ‘make a big todo of it’, as Wolff would say) every experience of identification: to oneself, one’s language, one’s culture, one’s provenance. They are serious enough to make the quotation marks around the ‘Greeks’, around ‘me’, around ‘we others’ (around every ‘auto-definition’ or ‘auto-position’, every autos, every hen) something other still, something other than a playful coquettishness or the simulacrum of a signature.

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Part I Derrida and the Classical Tradition

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1 Earmarks Derrida’s Reinvention of Philosophical Writing in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ Michael Naas

Let us begin with the verdict, or at least a verdict, with one of the more candid and unequivocal judgements ever passed on what I have called Derrida’s ‘reinvention of philosophical writing’. Though the criticism here is rather crude and the terms less than nuanced, it is a judgement that has been echoed by others elsewhere and it has the virtue of spelling out pretty clearly the principal charges of the indictment and, thus, the challenges faced by anyone, like me, who wishes to defend Derrida’s writings today: M. Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and the puns ‘logical phallusies’ and the like, and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.1

In what follows I would like to confront head on these charges against Derrida’s philosophical writing by returning to a text in which Derrida himself explicitly takes up the philosophical tradition’s 1

Letter of 9 May 1992 from Professor Barry Smith and others protesting the proposed granting of an honorary degree to Derrida at the University of Cambridge. Cited in Honoris Causa: ‘This is also extremely funny’, in Weber (1995), 420.

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critique of writing and where his own writing may indeed appear at first glance to be susceptible to the very charges levelled against it in the passage above. Rather than being simply defensive, therefore, or rather than defending Derrida’s work by minimizing the significance of what were called back in 1992 in the letter protesting Derrida’s honorary degree at the University of Cambridge an elaborate series of jokes, puns, tricks, and gimmicks, that is, rather than claiming that what is truly significant in Derrida’s work is not these playful uses of language but the more serious philosophical claims and arguments his work makes, I would like to demonstrate that such claims and arguments are in fact inseparable from the language in which they are made and that this is in fact one of the great lessons or central tenets of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. My claim here will thus be that Derrida himself was not just being defensive or flippant in his final interview in 2004 when he not only did not downplay the importance of these playful uses of language in his work but vigorously defended them and even attributed to them a certain necessity. Arguing that many continue to read him ‘in confusion’ because ‘they fail to recognize [the] properly logical necessity’ of those conspicuous ‘grafts of poetry onto philosophy’ in his work, a certain use of ‘homonyms’ and the ‘undecidable’, in short, all the ‘ruses of language’, Derrida claimed that these were all part of ‘a pedagogy aimed at forming its reader’.2 All the way up to the end, therefore, Derrida maintained not only the usefulness or strategic value but the logical and pedagogical necessity of the very things the Cambridge letter characterizes as frivolous puns, jokes, and gimmicks. Perhaps it is time, then, either to justify this claim or show its emptiness once and for all. And what better place for this than ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, the text in which Derrida shows most clearly the very origins of the philosophical tradition’s critique of writing?3 My intention is thus to return to a text that, in its letter, risks remaining largely unread even today so long as these ruses or artifices of writing are not shown to be essential to both the stylistic innovations and the argumentative structure of that text. Though I know 2

Derrida (2005d), 32; (2007), 31. Derrida (1972d; 1981b). Page references will be given throughout to both editions, the French followed by the English. 3

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I run the risk of appearing as frivolous and philosophically irresponsible as the author of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, I will take seriously Derrida’s practice of philosophical writing in this essay by attempting to read, interpret, and explain what might still appear to some to be shining examples of precisely the kind of puns or gimmicks the signatories of the Cambridge letter thought to be more appropriate to poetry than to serious academic philosophy. For the signatories of the Cambridge letter, who neither cite nor mention a single Derrida text or a single figure he treats, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ would have to be one of the worst examples—and thus, for me, one of the best—of Derrida’s penchant for turning serious philosophy into an elaborate series of jokes and puns. Written and published in 1968—the headiest of those ‘heady days of the 1960s’— ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ is a text Derrida not only never eschewed but referred back to on numerous occasions, and right up to the end, in relation to all the issues that interest me here, namely, writing, reading, and interpretation.4 Even more, even better, though none of the examples I will look at from ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ could rightly be called ‘logical phallusies’—a pun, I note in passing, that is not Derrida’s but the letter writers’, as evidenced in part by the fact that it works only in English and not in French—all the homonymic and homophonic plays I will focus on here will indeed have to do with the production of sema and the sowing of meaning, in a word, with dissemination, and all of them, as we will see, will have their origin in Plato. By opening up a series of differences—what I have called in my title ‘earmarks’—between writing and speech, the written trace and the verbal one, between two different registers of meaning, one natural and one technical, such poetic graphs onto the philosophical

4 If the status of interpretation or hermeneutics is more visible and explicit in Derrida’s debates with Gadamer and Ric
ur over the nature of reading or metaphor, it plays a discreet but no less decisive and organizing role in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, from the significance given to Theuth—the Egyptian counterpart of Hermes, whom Derrida calls ‘the God (of the) signifier,’ of writing and of difference (Derrida (1972d)/(1981b), 100/88; see 105/93)—to the way hermeneutics, as Derrida understands it in this text, attempts to reduce the fundamental ambivalence of meaning, of the pharmakon, for example, to a regulated polysemy that is itself then always animated by a drive toward univocity. See also on this point the very late text Derrida (2003c), 39–40, 54–5; (2005d), 146–7, 152–3.

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text enabled Derrida both to argue for a new hermeneutics and conception of meaning, dissemination rather than polysemy, and display a new practice of reading and writing in line with that hermeneutics. But to make such a case one will first have to return to and reread as carefully as possible this seminal text of 1968 for the views and positions it takes and the arguments it makes with regard to writing and reading, hermeneutics and meaning. Only then will we really be prepared to read this text in its letter—right down to its most seemingly frivolous puns. Because ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ is—as both its detractors and its admirers will acknowledge—a dense, difficult, and demanding work, I shall take the risk of betraying the power and movement of this work and more than just a bit of its textual strategy by separating into five distinct steps or stages an argument or reading that, more like a web than an organism—and I will return to this opposition later—does not move in some organic way from beginning to end, or head to tail, but weaves the end already into the beginning, thereby disrupting the organic body or linear development of the argument. I shall thus unjustly and contrary to Derrida’s mode of exposition try to order things from beginning to end or head to tail so as to lay out the ‘argument’ that is developed and that runs through the body of the essay. In a first step, then, Derrida begins by reading on its own terms, so to speak, the critique of writing advanced at the end of Plato’s Phaedrus, that is, he begins with what Socrates, and perhaps, though we must recognize the dangers of saying this, Plato, meant to say about the dangers of writing at the end of that dialogue. Notice, then, Derrida’s strategic entry point into Plato; as the ‘inventor’, we might say, of grammatology and the theorist of e´criture, he begins with a myth about writing offered by Socrates at the end of the Phaedrus, a myth, then, rather than a philosophical argument, on a subject that would appear to be rather ancillary to the great philosophical themes in Plato’s work. In that myth, you will recall, the Egyptian god Theuth presents to his King Thamus his most recent invention of writing. Called a pharmakon by its inventor, that is, touted as a curative elixir or remedy for forgetting, the pharmakon of writing is presented to the king, who then reinterprets it—as will Socrates after him—as having the opposite effects and values of those attributed to

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it by Theuth. Writing, say King Thamus and Socrates, is not a remedy for memory but a bane or a poison for it, since men will come to rely on it rather than their living memories. Writing is thus condemned by Socrates in his commentary on the myth because it is cut off from the living breath or the self-present thought of its author. It is a dangerous pharmakon because it can give the impression, the illusion, of being knowledgeable in the absence of any real knowledge. When asked a question or asked to defend a claim, the written text, like a painting, remains silent, or else can do little more than mechanically and unthinkingly repeat itself, that is, repeat what it has already unthinkingly said. Writing thus constitutes a dead or hollow repetition of the signifier, forever cut off from the signified.5 Divorced from knowledge and truth, sterile and unproductive, it leads to forgetting, non-truth, barrenness, and ignorance.6 Even when administered with good intentions, the pharmakon of writing—like all pharmaka—is artificial and thus essentially dangerous, a threat to nature and to life.7 The best that can be hoped for is that it will not be taken seriously but treated as a mere pastime by the one who already knows, as a form of mere play, supervised by an ethics, a politics, and a philosophy. If writing is beneficial at all, a pharmakon in the good sense of the word, it is as a mere reminder and not at all as a genuine means of recollection. Whereas speech or logos stays close to the living breath of the speaker, can defend itself when attacked, remains rooted in a homeland, whereas it supports and is itself supported by the law, by a nomos in conformity with logos,8 and whereas it can be passed on from father to legitimate son in a controlled, pedagogically mastered, aristocratic manner, writing has no fixed place of residence and makes itself available to anyone in a dangerously democratic way.9 Like the democratic man, it resembles everything and is itself nothing. Cut off from the father, from any animating voice or intention, it wanders like a sophist, or, barely alive, like a ghost, or, indeed, like an

5 6 7 8 9

Derrida (1972d); (1981b), 155/135. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 119–20/105. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 112–13/99–100. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 168/146. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 166–7/144–5.

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outlaw who threatens the order and authority of the state—that is, says Derrida in 1968, anticipating, it almost seems, his work some thirty-five years later, like a voyou, like a hooligan, vagrant, or rogue.10 Whereas speech, logos, is thus the living, legitimate offspring of the speaker, writing is the illegitimate, barely living, and yet dangerous and parricidal offspring. These are just some of the many problems with writing, just some of the many reasons why, in the myth that Socrates offers in the Phaedrus and in Socrates’ commentary on that myth, writing must be indicted, judged, and kept out of the polis, or else kept under the strict surveillance of the king. You cannot even count the counts against writing. Wherever it is hatched, writing is a very bad egg. That’s part one of Derrida’s analysis, laying out the terms and oppositions established, we might say, ‘explicitly’ by Plato, or at least by Plato’s Socrates in the Phaedrus. Step two is to show how the critique of the pharmakon of writing, this seemingly marginal notion in Plato’s dialogues next to the theory of forms, anamnesis, the philosopher king, and so on, is inseparable from Plato’s entire ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Writing has less being than speech (and so is ontologically inferior), it is barely an object of knowledge (and so is epistemologically inferior), it is a form of imitation or representation (and so is already, as the Republic puts it, three removes from reality), it is morally corrupting (and so must be mastered by dialectic), and it exhibits democratic tendencies (and so must be curbed for the good of the polis by an aristocratic or philosophical sovereign). Less real, less true, less beautiful, less legitimate, and less useful than speech, writing left to itself is as ignorant, indiscriminate, and unruly as the deˆmos itself. Guided by the interpretative principle that none of the terms and oppositions within the Platonic corpus mean anything when isolated from the others, Derrida demonstrates how the critique of writing in the Phaedrus is inseparable from a general structure or system that extends not only throughout the entire Platonic corpus but well beyond. Platonism is thus not first and foremost a series of claims and propositions about the forms or the nature of the soul but the

10

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 165/143. See id. (2003d); (2005f).

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name given to this general structure or system of relations, oppositions, and analogies that runs throughout Plato and that informs not only what we take to be the explicit arguments and propositions of the Platonic text but its very form and writing. Hence Derrida in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ speaks not of explicating some Platonic doctrine that opposes soul to body or speech to writing but of exposing certain ‘structural laws’ that ‘govern and articulate these oppositions’;11 he speaks of a ‘structural analogy’ or ‘structural resemblance’, or of a ‘more deeply buried necessity’, that relates these terms and oppositions to one another in Plato’s philosophy and in the Greek language more generally.12 These oppositions—these now infamous ‘binary’ oppositions— between, for example, speech, life, legitimacy, presence, interiority, on the one hand, and writing, death, illegitimacy, absence, exteriority, on the other, are thus, for Derrida, inextricably linked in a system, and in order to understand one it is necessary to invoke the others. Derrida’s habit of linking words or parts of words with hyphens is meant to be indicative of this textual network or structure. When Derrida thus speaks, or writes, of the ‘basileo-patro-helio-theological’ he is not just trying to be clever or to win some prize for the longest word in the French language but is invoking a structural relation in Plato’s myth at the end of the Phaedrus between the position of the king (the basileus), the father, the sun, and divinity; and when Derrida writes ‘Plato-Rousseau-Saussure’ it is with the intention of showing that this textual network that associates writing with death, exteriority, and supplementarity extends well beyond Plato, indeed, despite all the differences, right up to Saussure.13 Read in this way, the Platonic text no longer simply situates its own oppositions but is itself situated within a much larger context by them. Platonism is, then, not a set of propositions or doctrines but this entire network of terms, relations, and oppositions, along with, let me now emphasize, the hierarchies among them. For in this system called Platonism, the play of differences or oppositions must ultimately be 11 12 13

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 96/85. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 97/86. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 154/134, 126/110.

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‘stopped’ (arreˆte´s), decided, the oppositions stabilized, mastered, and hierarchized. As Derrida puts it, the pharmakon must be ‘“caught” by philosophy’,14 the play of diffe´rance mastered by a series of hierarchically ordered differences, speech over writing, the soul over the body, being over becoming, reality over appearance—we all know the drill. In this Plato, Socrates will thus attempt to transform the negative value of the pharmakon—of the hemlock, for example—into a good through contemplation of the eidos and the immortality of the soul, the death of the body becoming in fact the condition of a more complete access to knowledge and truth, to episteˆmeˆ and aleˆtheia, in the end, to a more complete life in the life of the soul.15 In this Plato, the fear of death is chased away by dialectic, by the eidos as that which ‘can always be repeated as the same’, that is, repeated meaningfully by speech, by the good repetition of speech, rather than mechanically and thoughtlessly reproduced by the likes of writing.16 In this Plato, two forms of repetition or memory are opposed, one over the other, the meaningful repetition of the signified over the meaningless repetition of the signifier, mneˆmeˆ or the anamensis of the eidos over hypomneˆsis and the repetition of the written signifier.17 Platonism is, then—at least on the one hand—the name of this textual structure and the strategies associated with it that privilege speech over writing to the point where philosophy would dream of a speech without any writing at all, where it would dream of a memory without sign, supplement, or pharmakon,18 where all mythos would be oriented by or transformed into logos,19 where all discourse— indeed, where the sowing of any seed—would submit to logos and the law, where writing would be reappropriated and appropriately mastered by speech,20 where whatever is playful and non-serious in the

14

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 145–6/127–8. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 137/120, 140–1/123. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 141/123. 17 Derrida writes: ‘This opposition will appear to us to form a system with all the great structural oppositions of Platonism. What is played out at the boundary line between these two concepts is consequently something like the major decision of philosophy.’ Derrida (1972d); (1981b), 126/111; my emphasis. 18 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 124/109. 19 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 154/134. 20 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 178/154. 15 16

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pharmakon would be rehabilitated through dialectic, where the mere reminders (hypomneˆmata) of writing would be put ‘at the service of dialectics’ and genuine memory.21 In short, Platonism would be that system in which all the dangers of the pharmakon have been neutralized by philosophy, neutralized or naturalized into its fatherland, taught to speak its mother tongue. And yet, as you will have heard, there is another hand to come, a second hand that forms a pair with the first—whence the necessity of that very common Derridean gesture, ‘on the one hand . . . on the other hand’. This is the third step in Derrida’s argument. After laying out the terms of Plato’s critique of writing and then showing how these form a system with all the other hierarchized oppositions of Platonism, Derrida demonstrates the instability of this system and the possibility of reversal for each hierarchical opposition. If Platonism is indeed this enormous system that includes such oppositions as speech and writing, life and death, signified and signifier, or—and this is important—interiority and exteriority, inside and outside, the inside being always related to speech and to life, to what is close to the living breath, to the signified, and the outside being related to writing and death, to the signifier, then there is no ‘outside’ of the system, no ‘meaningful’ outside of this system of meaning, that would allow these oppositions and hierarchies to be firmly established and hermetically sealed off from one another. Because speech, life, and presence ‘make sense’ or ‘have meaning’ only in relation to one another and their opposites, these other terms and their opposites mark one another, inscribe, or, as Derrida would say, contaminate one another. The exemplary term for demonstrating this instability of values is, now famously, the word pharmakon, the word used by Plato in the Phaedrus to describe writing. As Derrida points out, though he was hardly the first to do so, this word appears to mean—and so is translated—in different and even opposing ways in various Greek texts and even in the Platonic corpus. In some contexts, what is clearly meant by the speaker of the word pharmakon is something positive, good, or advantageous, that is, a ‘remedy’, while in others

21

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 179/155.

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what is meant is something negative, bad, or disadvantageous, that is, a ‘poison’. Either remedy or poison, either good or bad, advantageous or not, but never both at once. And yet what would stabilize this opposition if not a theory of reading, interpretation, or translation that considers what is essential about a term to be its meaning, its signified, what is meant by the speaker in a particular context, rather than its signifier or its material sign, that is, rather than what is actually said? In other words, what is considered meaningful about an inscription of the word pharmakon would be what is consciously or voluntarily or knowingly meant, what is on the inside, therefore, close to the living breath of the speaker, what can be explained by the speaker, and so on, rather than what is unknowingly, involuntarily, or perhaps unconsciously repeated, mechanically or artificially reproduced. But these are, notice, precisely the terms with which Plato or Socrates in the Phaedrus values speech and devalues writing. It is as if, in translating or even understanding the term pharmakon— whether in the Phaedrus or anywhere else—as either remedy or poison, one had already adopted the Platonic perspective, or the perspective of King Thamus and Socrates, the perspective where oppositions are stabilized and hierarchized, the signified over the signifier, the one separate from and outside the other. But if there is no meaningful outside of this system, no meaning outside the play of difference, then we might begin to wonder about the legitimacy of such an interpretative act. For if words have meaning only insofar as they are related to other terms in a textual network—synonyms, antonyms, analogies, and the like—then a word like pharmakon may indeed mean remedy or poison in a given context and yet also inscribe within it, in a much more general and far-reaching citational play, all those terms that are at once related and opposed to it in that vast textual network that Derrida associates with Platonism. In other words, if we temporarily resist the Platonic temptation or perhaps even injunction to translate the text according to an intentional structure or a vouloir-dire, a structure of meaning that always turns the pharmakon in one direction or another, as one thing or its opposite, then we might begin to catch a glimpse of what exceeds or precedes or in any case escapes philosophy insofar as it ‘means’ or ‘says’ both remedy and poison at once, good and bad

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simultaneously—a shameless violation, to be sure, of philosophy’s sovereign law of non-contradiction. As Derrida understands it, the translation or even interpretation of the Greek word pharmakon as either remedy or poison is already an attempt to control or neutralize the citational play of the text, to neutralize, as Derrida calls it, the ‘anagram’ or ‘the very textuality of the translated text’.22 Once the system of oppositions, analogies, and so on is no longer simply assured, once it is shown, for example, that the signified is never radically outside or beyond the signifier, the analogical structure of Platonic discourse is resituated within a more comprehensive anagrammatical web, where the word pharmakon, which might indeed mean remedy in a particular passage, is nonetheless in communication with those passages in which it means poison. In this anagrammatical writing, where relations of citation and contamination extend throughout the Platonic corpus and even beyond, the same signifier can come to have different, even contradictory, valences.23 Hence the logocentric ‘content’ of the text must now be read in its ‘anagrammatical texture’.24 Derrida thus does not simply reverse all values and hierarchies so as to claim, for example, that writing is superior to speech, or death to life, since that would simply leave the analogical structure intact. Rather, he tries to displace or resituate this structure within an anagrammatical texture that at once makes possible and undermines or undercuts the analogies of Platonism (for example, as we will see shortly, the analogy between logos and a zoon, that is, living speech and a living animal) and the hierarchies these sustain. The question to ask with regard to the pharmakon is thus no longer first and foremost the philosophical question ‘what is it?’ or ‘what does it mean?’ but ‘how is it inscribed?’— within Plato’s text, to be sure, but also beyond. ‘In a word’, writes Derrida, ‘we do not believe that there exists, in all rigor, a Platonic text, closed upon itself, complete with its inside and its outside.’25

22 Derrida (1972d); (1981b), 111/98. Derrida returns to this language of ‘neutralization’ in (1993b), 83–4; (1995b), 120–1. 23 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 111/98. 24 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 183/158. 25 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 149/130.

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Derrida thus moves in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ from the as-structure of analogy to the irreducible-as of the anagram, that is, from a philosophically determined concept of analogy where what is essential is the meaning or signification of analogy, to a notion of the anagram that is no longer governed by the hierarchically oriented opposition between the signifier and the signified. The anagram—which ‘is’ at once signifier and signified insofar as the former is no longer reducible to the latter—opens up and then keeps open the difference between signifier and signified, writing and speech, expression and meaning, that is, it keeps in play and at the centre of philosophy a notion of writing that only seems to have been excluded out of hand by that philosophy. In other words, the irreducibility of writing, of language and structure, in short, of the anagram as opposed to analogy, happens not only in or because of Derrida’s commentary on Plato but already in the text he is reading, and so in this case, already in Plato. The question of what the word pharmakon means in a certain context or place in Plato’s corpus thus cannot be simply determined by asking about Socrates’ or Plato’s intentions or voluntary or conscious meaning.26 Though still operative, such meanings are now inscribed within a much larger textual network or web where signifiers have relations that exceed intentional or conscious meaning. For Plato too, Derrida claims, whether he knew it or not, or to whatever degree he was conscious of it, had to have been subject to the constraints of language and the law of difference.27 Though Platonism tries always to regain the upper hand by transforming a fundamental ambivalence or uncontrolled ambivalence into a rationally controlled polysemy, though it tries always to reimpose its reign of analogy, Derrida shows that at the level of the pharmacy such mastery is always an illusion or, indeed, a royal phantasm, which does not, of course, make the power wielded by that phantasm any less real or less effective. Derrida’s analysis of the word pharmakon—a remarkably ambivalent word in Greek, to be sure, but one that is nonetheless exemplary of the instability and potential reversibility of all oppositions—at 26 27

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 108–9/96. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 147/128–9.

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once demonstrates the infrastructure of Platonism and brings to light the pharmaceutical reserve in which it is plunged. Platonism, or perhaps it would be better to say Plato’s text, is now both this system of hierarchically ordered oppositions and this more general citational play. Here’s a good example of that famous ‘on the one hand . . . on the other hand’ of Derridean deconstruction: On the one hand Plato decides in favor of a logic that does not tolerate such passages between opposing senses of the same word . . . And yet, on the other hand, the pharmakon . . . constitutes the original medium of that decision, the element that precedes it, comprehends it, goes beyond it, can never be reduced to it . . . 28

The word pharmakon thus both calls for and defies any attempt to translate it—or first of all to understand it—as one thing or the other, as remedy or poison. As such, it resists all philosophemes, being instead ‘nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance’.29 As such, then, the pharmakon has no as such, no identity of its own, defying all philosophical appropriation and all attempts to give it a single or univocal meaning.30 Unable to be turned in one direction or another, it is ‘itself ’ the milieu or pivot point where such opposites as soul/body, good/bad, inside/outside, memory/forgetting, speech/writing, and so on come to oppose one another, play off and reverse one another.31 If the pharmakon is thus the ‘original medium’ of a decision that opposes two different meanings of a word, or that opposes speech to writing, life to death, inside to outside, and so on, then we begin to see that this decision, cut, or line of demarcation is fundamentally unstable, and that the very thing that Platonism cannot tolerate— namely, ‘the passage between opposing senses of the same word’—is precisely the danger that Platonism will constantly court. Though philosophy may think it can always regain control of this fundamental ambivalence and this textual play, though it may think it can repress or neutralize them for good, Derrida has led us to suspect through his analysis of the pharmakon that philosophy is never really

28 29 30 31

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 111–12/98–9. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 79/70. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 109–10/97. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 145/127.

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able to pull this off, that wherever philosophy dares to touch upon these pharmaceutical analogies it is certain to get burned, or, better, knocked right on its as. We are now at step four of Derrida’s argument in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Having shown the general system of hierarchically oriented oppositions and the way in which these oppositions become destabilized in their anagrammatical play, we are now prepared to understand why Plato, with astonishing consistency, borrows analogies taken from the bad side of his system of values, and from writing in particular, in order to characterize the good side. Though the Platonic text will always try to convince us that these borrowings are ‘mere’ analogies, we are now prepared to see that they just might well be the irreducible analogies—or anagrams—that at once impose and undercut the Platonic system. As Derrida demonstrates, it is absolutely remarkable just how frequently Plato borrows from the lexicon of the pharmacy—from the lexicon of the very thing that supposedly threatens philosophy— in order to make his case for philosophy. Hence dialectic, which is supposed to master and control all pharmaka, is sometimes characterized in the dialogues as itself having a pharmaceutical force and Socrates the dialectician is portrayed as an enchanter or a magician, indeed, as a kind of pharmakeus.32 Dialectic would be not only an anti-pharmakon, the opposite of a pharmakon, but a good pharmakon, a counter-incantation, the antidote to ignorance and the childish fear of death.33 It would be the pharmakon that is called on to exorcize or purge the bad effects of the pharmakon of writing, ontological knowledge becoming the pharmaceutical force required to counteract the pharmaka of imitation.34 As Derrida puts it, ‘it is pharmakeus against pharmakeus, pharmakon against pharmakon’.35 Even if the Platonic text attempts always to ‘precipitate out one pharmakon by bringing it in contact with another pharmakon’, that is, even if it attempts always to stabilize the opposition between good pharmaka and bad, this borrowing of terms from the devalued 32 33 34 35

Id. Id. Id. Id.

(1972d); (1972d); (1972d); (1972d);

(1981b), (1981b), (1981b), (1981b),

134/117. 138–9/121–2. 158/137–8. 142/124.

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side of an opposition to characterize the valued side seems to obey another logic.36 This other logic becomes most apparent in Plato’s many analogies of writing, which are multiplied in the Platonic text in spite of, and often in striking proximity to, a consistent and unwavering critique of writing. Wherever it is a question in Plato of difference or diacriticity, of a multiplicity between the one and the infinite, writing inevitably comes on the scene. Wherever ‘the intuition of sensible or intelligible presence happens to fail’, writes Derrida, ‘structure is read as a form of writing’.37 Hence the image or analogy of writing— of combining letters—is used in the Sophist to speak of dialectics, in the Timaeus to describe the way elements combine in the cosmos, and, incredibly, in the Phaedrus—just after the long and devastating critique of writing—to characterize thought or inner speech, the good and legitimate speech of the one who truly knows. When Socrates thus wishes to characterize the permanence, presence, and availability of thought or speech within the soul, he chooses a ‘metaphor’ that seems to bring along with it the opposite values of impermanence, absence, and abandonment: ‘writing in the soul’. ‘Good’ writing within the soul can thus be designated, it seems, only through a ‘metaphor’ borrowed from ‘bad’ writing outside the soul, that is, from what we call writing in the ‘literal’ sense. According to the same necessity, when the Stranger of the Sophist wants to explain the relationship between being and non-being so as to allow for false speech and the possibility of discourse about objects of imitation, he turns to the examples, the analogies, of letters and weaving, that is, instead of the living organism with its naturally articulated parts, writing and the symplokeˆ. Writing thus appears in Plato to be not just a ‘mere’ analogy or mere example but the necessary example. Derrida writes: ‘The play of the other within being must needs be designated “writing” by Plato in a discourse which would like to think of itself as spoken in essence, in truth, and which nevertheless is written.’38

36 37 38

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 136/119. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 187/162. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 189/163.

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So recurrent is this recourse to scriptural metaphors that even the eidos, that which should be most free from the contamination of writing, is referred to as a typos, a word used to name a graphic impression. This too is no coincidence or mere contingency. For in order for the eidos to be recognized as what it is, that is, as the same, as such, it must appear as repeatable within a differential series of signs whose best image would be writing.39 No repetition is thus possible, writes Derrida, ‘without the graphics of supplementarity’.40 The repetition of what is eternal—the eidos—requires the time and space of repetition. What Derrida elsewhere calls iteration is here seen to be the very condition of all repetition. Even if Plato might have thought all these graphic references to be ‘mere’ images or ‘analogies’, that is, controllable by the intentional structure of the text, by a regulated, philosophical parasitism of terms, Derrida’s analysis demonstrates that such images or analogies borrow of necessity from the anagrammatical structure of the text.41 It would thus appear that Platonism needs what it condemns. It needs pharmaka to exorcize pharmaka. While the Platonist might claim that Derrida has been a very bad student or reader of Plato, that he has a very bad ear and an oversensitive eye, since all these examples, metaphors, and analogies are, for the one who knows how to read them, ‘mere’ examples, metaphors, and analogies that allow Plato to oppose good pharmaka to bad ones, real pharmaka to artificial ones, a metaphorical writing in the soul to the literal writing of the sophists and rhetoricians, writing as a kind of legitimate sowing of seed on the inside to writing as an unproductive spilling of seed on the outside, dialectic as an authentic didactics or maieutics to the false and dangerous practices of sophistry and rhetoric, Derrida’s analysis shows that the signifying bodies of these analogies can never simply be precipitated out without remainder, that each brings along with it an irreducible anagrammatical structure, a signifying structure or texture that can never be reduced to its signified meaning. Though Plato’s purpose in using all these analogies and 39

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 124–5/109. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 194/168. 41 There is perhaps no better emblem of this than the fact that the Socratic mission to ‘know thyself ’ is prescribed by the inscription of the Delphic oracle. 40

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metaphors of writing may indeed be merely strategic, pedagogical, or rhetorical, philosophy can never be purged of its rhetorical excess, or analogical meaning of its anagrammatical body. Writing as a differential system of signs—something that seemed in Platonism to be inscribed within the system, caught by the system— now turns out to be what opened up the relation between inside and outside in the first place. The supposed secondariness or supplementarity of writing now appears to be ‘the very origin and possibility of logos itself ’.42 Hence logos, insofar as it too is a differential system of signs, is now itself a product of writing, a species even of what Derrida calls archeˆ-writing. Rather than being situated by the system, the system now seems to be situated by it. Analogy as a structure of resemblance—that is, of resemblances that can be reduced to a common meaning—now appears to have been made possible by an irreducible anagram (‘writing in the soul’) that at once opens up and undercuts every as such, as if, and as. If what is being dreamed of or dreamed up with the analogy of ‘writing in the soul’ is the phantasm of a kind of natural, non-artificial, good writing that can do without the supplement of difference, an analogy that tries to grow, suture, or weave together into one body the physis of organism and the techneˆ of writing, Derrida draws our attention to this hybrid body, to the anagrammatical structure or texture that at once imposes and undercuts the analogical phantasm—that is, the phantasm that there is a language that is natural, at once language and a body of meaning that goes beyond language, at once the logos that is produced by a speaking father and the father himself. It is time to take our fifth and final step in laying out so unjustly the argument of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ as if this text were, precisely, a living being organized from start to finish or head to tail by an authorial intention. What we must now do is relate the above claims about the supplementarity of writing to an exemplary analogy, an exemplary resemblance, the question of the relationship or resemblance in Plato between a speaker and a father. For among all the analogies Derrida focuses on in his reading of the Phaedrus in order to expose what we

42

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 100/88–9.

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might call the reign of analogy in Plato, none is more highly charged than those surrounding the family scene. Recall that in the myth of writing in the Phaedrus and elsewhere in Plato the speaker is said to be a father of his logos.43 If, as Plato goes on to argue in Phaedrus, the logos is a zoon, that is, an animal, an organic body, then that is because the speaker is to his speech what a father (and not, notice, a mother) is to his son (and not, notice, his daughter). Derrida thus speaks of the ‘permanence of a Platonic schema that assigns the origin and power of speech, of logos, to the paternal position’.44 Now, in the myth of the Phaedrus, this paternal position is occupied by a father who is also a king and a god, since it is Thamus, not Theuth, who will ultimately pass judgement—spoken judgement—on the value of writing. It is thus ultimately up to the father-king-god who does not write, who does not need to write, and who should not write in order to maintain his ‘sovereign independence’,45 his status as the ‘origin of all value’, to put writing in its place.46 As father-king-god, Thamus—and, just after him, Socrates—will thus attempt to master the ambivalence of the pharmakon by placing it in a series of oppositions that, as we have seen, are coextensive with Platonism itself. He will attempt to stabilize and hierarchize the relations between speech and writing, life and death, good and bad, but also, now, king and servant, father and son, the legitimate son that is writing in the soul and the abandoned or bastard son that is writing. But as we saw earlier, all these distinctions and oppositions can— indeed must—be read against the backdrop of the anagrammatical web as the products of writing and difference. As Derrida puts it, such ‘“metaphors” must be tirelessly questioned’,47 for perhaps, as Joyce—cited in an exergue of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’—once said and Derrida frequently cited, even ‘paternity is a legal fiction’, which means, I take it, that paternity, that the father, is himself always the 43

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 87–8/78. Id. (1972d); (1981b), 86/76. 45 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 86/76. 46 Because the Cambridge letter repeats so many of the charges made against writing in the Phaedrus, it can be read not just as an external critique of Derridean writing but as a critique that is already being taken up and addressed in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. 47 Derrida (1972d); (1981b), 87/78. 44

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effect of discourse, of logos, the very thing that is presented in Plato as being the son or offspring of a living, speaking father. The expression ‘father of logos’ is thus not a simple metaphor, Derrida argues, for if ‘the father is always father to a speaking/living being . . . it is precisely logos that enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity’.48 In other words, it would be from the son, from logos, from the supplement, from the position of writing as a system of differences, that the father would be able to be called a father, that the father would come to be identified as a father.49 What makes the inscription of the father possible in a system is, in a word, his son, his supplement, the one who comes after him, who thus threatens not just to supplement him but to supplant him, and who, in a system that links writing to the son, first opened up the difference between these generations and the possibility for the father to speak in the first place. In the myth of the Phaedrus, this servant or this supplement, this son, is Theuth, the inventor of writing and, in the Philebus, of grammar. He is the one who serves, supplements, and threatens to supplant Thamus, the father, king, and sun-god. ‘God-doctor-pharmacist-magician’, Theuth is thus not just a servant but a kind of joker whose property is impropriety, who at once supplements, imitates, and risks supplanting the position of the father-king-god—just as writing at once supplements, imitates, and risks supplanting speech.50 Whence the need on the part of the king to keep his subject or his son on a pretty tight leash and to pass sovereign judgement on his inventions. The supplement always risks supplanting: the son always risks replacing the father, usurping his sovereign position, just as writing always risks contaminating and replacing speech, becoming the place now of a new kind of productivity and life, one that is located no longer in the living breath but in the dead letter and is related no 48

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 91/80–1. Though nothing might seem to be more natural than the father–son relation— even if it is not always obvious who the father is—Derrida has the temerity to ask: ‘But what is a father? Should we consider this known, and with this term—the known—classify the other term within what one would hasten to classify as a metaphor?’ (id. (1972d); (1981b), 90/80). 50 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 102/90. 49

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longer simply to nature and the living organism but to technology and the machine. That is the risk that Platonism always runs and, I think Derrida ultimately argues in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, the necessity to which it must always yield, the law—the law of the supplement—it cannot but obey. For that too is part and parcel of Platonism—the father must give way to the son: the good, the beautiful, and the true must be supplemented and supplanted by logoi.51 The system—if we still want to call it that—thus now includes both the withdrawal of the father and the hierarchies that withdrawal makes possible, both this sovereign absence of a father beyond being and the reign of analogy it imposes, along with the patricide-regicide-deicide that replaces the father-king-god by his son, that contaminates all these hierarchies by their opposites, and that thus ushers in not another reign of analogy with the son rather than the father in power but a series of irreducible analogies of and in writing. We are, finally, prepared to look at some of Derrida’s own analogies—or, better, anagrams—in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, anagrams that might appear at first glance to be but ‘puns and gimmicks’, as the Cambridge letter put it, but whose meaning, value, and, indeed, necessity, should now be more evident as a result of the foregoing reading of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. The first thing to note about all the anagrams I will look at here is their radical contingency and historical origin. If they all make some reference to organic nature, organic bodies, and generation, to the sowing of seed and production of meaning, in a word, to dissemination, that is because all these terms and thus all these anagrams have their origin in Plato. Recall again 51 Socrates in the Phaedo says that because he is unable to look at reality directly for fear of being blinded, he must take refuge in logoi, logoi that, he says in an analogy, would be like images that reflect and protect us from the real: just as one may look at the midday sun only through images or reflections of it, so one may approach the ideas and particularly the idea of the Good only through logoi. Logos, says Derrida, is what shelters us from the Good in a way that is analogous to the way images shelter us from the sun (Derrida (1972d); (1981b), 93/83–4). The impossibility of a full intuition of the truth (or of the sun), the withdrawal of the father-sun-good, is thus the condition of all difference and all writing, of all discourse whether true or false (id. (1972d); (1981b), 194–5/168–9). What Derrida calls ‘diffe´rance’, that is, ‘the disappearance of any originary presence’, is thus ‘at once the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the truth’ (id. (1972d); (1981b), 194/168).

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the analogy developed in the Phaedrus and elsewhere of speech as a living, natural, organism, that is, the analogy of logos as a zoon, of speech as a living being as opposed to the dead, unnatural product of writing. Initially we might be tempted to read this as a ‘mere’ analogy based on the shared relationship between a speaker and his speech, on the one hand, and a father and his son on the other, a relationship that might be understood in both cases as a form of production. But if it is logos, the son, that first gives meaning to the father, it is logos that also gives meaning to the very notion of production. Because there is no outside of the system to give us some objective or literal or nonmetaphorical meaning of production, we are left having to understand production by means of these very same analogies—and thus by means of terms such as organic and inorganic, physis and techneˆ, passivity and activity, maternal bearing and paternal begetting, and so on. The analogy between speech and organism, the logos as a zoon, is thus, in the final analysis, an irreducible analogy or an anagram that has to be read in a series of relations to life, nature, legitimacy, and their opposites. One cannot simply hear the analogy as meaning something beyond these relations; one must instead read it along with all these family resemblances. As Derrida argues, ‘What we are provisionally and for the sake of convenience continuing to call a metaphor thus in any event belongs to a whole system.’52 Logos as a zoon, that is, logos as a living, engendered organism: this trope can no longer be reduced to a ‘mere metaphor’ whose literal meaning might be distilled out from its metaphorical wrapping as Plato, or the Platonic reader of Plato, might have wished—or one day dreamed.53 So let’s now look at just a couple of the scores of analogies or metaphors that Derrida himself uses in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Consider, for example, the very first analogy of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, the first one on the very first page, where Derrida, before unfolding the analogical structure of Plato’s text, speaks of the text as a ‘woven texture’ whose rules are not immediately visible to the reader, a ‘woven texture’

52

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 89/79. In an early text on Edmund Jabe`s, Derrida speaks of ‘an animality of the letter’, something that would be quite different, however, perhaps even the opposite, of logos as a zoon. Id. (1967b), 108; (1978b), 72. My thanks to Len Lawlor for pointing me to this reference. 53

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whose web might ‘take centuries to undo . . . reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissues behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading’.54 I think we can now begin to see why Derrida might begin with this analogy and not some other. First, it is an analogy that is already found in Plato—rule number one of deconstruction: begin with the terms and tropes you are given, that is, with those you have inherited (including, obviously, all the terms and tropes of inheritance), since that is the only way to make an effective intervention within the tradition. If deconstruction involves a kind of reading that would also be a rewriting, it does not proceed by adding just anything to the textual web. The suture has to hold, the stitch must be just right. But, second, the analogy of discourse as web is already being juxtaposed here by Derrida to the analogy of discourse as a living and wellproportioned organism. Anticipating the analysis to follow, Derrida juxtaposes two analogical relations or two metaphors that will be in real tension in Plato’s dialogues and that will bring a whole series of oppositions into play: on the one hand, speech as a living organism, animated and natural, legitimately conceived and begotten, able to defend itself when attacked and explain itself in a meaningful way when questioned, able to present itself in a coherent and ordered way in a discourse that, as Socrates says at Phaedrus 264c, will have a head, members, and feet, a clearly defined and dialectically controlled beginning, middle, and end, and then, on the other hand, the text as a manmade web, as a symplokeˆ, the object of a certain techneˆ, with no discernible beginning or end, a horizontal texture rather than an upright organism, with no up or down, no discernible centre, and no hierarchy between its parts, a web of death and forgetting, a bastard form of discourse, illegitimately begotten and abandoned by its father, unable to defend itself when attacked and condemned to an endless, senseless repetition. With these two now irreducible analogies—or anagrams—Derrida is anticipating the entire Platonic critique of writing in the Phaedrus with its extended analogy between the logographical and the biological or zoological, most succinctly and powerfully condensed in the notion of a logos as a zoon. Derrida

54

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 71/63; my emphasis.

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thus writes later in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’—and we must listen closely here both to what he says and, at the very end of the passage, to the idiomatic way in which he says it: Logos, a living, animate creature, is thus also an organism that has been engendered. An organism: a differentiated body proper, with a center and extremities, joints, a head, and feet. In order to be ‘proper’, a written discourse ought to submit to the laws of life just as living discourse does. Logographical necessity (anankeˆ logographikeˆ) ought to be analogous to biological, or rather zoological, necessity. Otherwise, obviously, it would have neither head nor tail (elle n’a plus ni queue ni teˆte).55

According to Plato, only spoken discourse obeys this biological or zoological necessity, whereas writing, which in its ‘essence’ is not an organism and is in no way like an organism, can only approximate this zoological necessity by imitating this biological structure: ‘otherwise, obviously, it would have neither head nor tail’. Now the French here, elle n’a plus ni queue ni teˆte, can be translated literally, as Barbara Johnson has done, by ‘having neither head nor tail’, or, as an idiom, by ‘makes no sense’, ‘is meaningless’. This is one of those idiomatic plays in the French language to which Derrida owes much of his infamy, one of those clever lines that, on the most generous of interpretations, the Cambridge letter may have been referring to as a pun or gimmick. But let us consider the strategic if not the graphic necessity—and notice I do not say biological or zoological necessity—of this play. Because we are forced to hear this little phrase n’a plus ni queue ni teˆte in two different ways and in two different times, neither reducible to nor able to take precedence over the other, it is impossible to say just what the authorial intention is here, what meaning is in the service of what, and which of the two meanings can be precipitated out without an essential loss in the meaning to the text. Because writing, unlike speech, is not an organism, it has neither head nor tail; because it is not animated by a speaker it makes no sense, has no meaning. The phrase seems to mean both at once, which really comes down to meaning neither. This is indeed the kind of phrase one finds more commonly in poetry than in philosophy, as the Cambridge letter rightly says. But notice, first, that it was Plato 55

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 89/79.

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who started it, Plato who set out all the terms for the metaphor, even if unwittingly, and, second, that this phrase is used by Derrida in an essay that demonstrates the essential inseparability of philosophical language from its others (poetic, rhetorical, sophistical, and so on). The phrase n’a plus ni queue ni teˆte itself now n’a plus ni queue ni teˆte; it no longer makes sense or no longer only makes sense—that is, one sense that might be determined by context as the main, guiding, or dominant sense. With neither head nor tail, with no way to set the literal meaning over and above the idiomatic one or vice versa, the phrase makes too much sense to be booked into a single present, too much sense for a theory of interpretation that aims at univocity, too much sense for a Platonic way of reading. The little phrase is thus itself now much less like a living organism oriented from head to tail by a single meaning than an anagram that multiplies and divides, much less like a logos walking upright in a human form than a worm (perhaps a silkworm) whose multiple registers are crossed and woven together in the anagrammatical web. By questioning the Platonic analogy between discourse and organism, by trying to think a more general structurality or symplokeˆ within which analogies are developed, Derrida shows that at the heart of the living organism, within a speech that would pretend to be present to itself, there is a principle of irreducible difference: difference between the terms of the analogy, difference within language, but also, now, difference between languages since one has to choose in English or in other languages as one does not in French between the literal and the idiomatic reading, thereby neutralizing to some extent the play between them.56 Derrida’s analogies or anagrams thus attempt to make apparent the textual web that, in Platonism, tends to be overlooked by a Platonic reading or translation of the dialogues that subordinates one meaning to another. No longer controlled by a context that would try to reduce all kinds of differences in the name of a pedagogical or dialectical purpose, the phrase now retains its idiomatic, signifying body, its head and its tail. As a phrase that means ‘to have 56 One must choose, for example, in English between ‘has neither head nor tail’ and ‘makes no sense’. Even if one might be tempted by an English translation such as ‘Otherwise, obviously, one would be unable to make heads or tails of it’, the plural of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ already complicates things, as does the change in verb.

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no meaning’, it gives the impression that it can do without its material inscription, but as an idiom that demands to be read in two different ways in two different times, it retains its irreducible relation to the French language, and thus, when translated, undergoes a necessary and irreducible violence. What is here called the anagram might thus be compared to what Derrida will later call, in too many contexts to name here, an absolute singularity, that is, a singular inscription, the trace of a singular event, that at once calls out for and resists translation and repetition. While analogy always promises the possibility of repetition and translation without any essential loss of meaning, the anagram demonstrates the ineluctable and irremediable loss of meaning and signification in every interpretation, translation, or reinscription. For if what analogy promises is always the repetition of meaning outside any signifying body, the anagram demonstrates the irreducibility of the unique, signifying body (the ‘head’ and the ‘tail’ of the example under consideration), the loss, then, of absolute singularity in every interpretation, translation, or reinscription, though also, of course, the possibility through reinscription and translation of new meanings in new bodies. This single example could be confirmed and multiplied from one end of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ to the other. Take, for example, the homophone diffe´rance, whose difference from difference can be seen or read but not heard, a word—what I am calling here an ‘earmark’—that enacts the difference between speech and writing, or else the homonymic but not homophonic play between fils, son or sons, and fils, threads, that is, once again, and there is no coincidence in this, a play between what is considered natural and organic, the product of a kind of non-technical production, and the non-living product of a techneˆ. Derrida is suggesting through this homonym that when we read Plato we must follow both fils at once, the legitimate son that is speech as well as the illegitimate son that is writing, as well as the threads of a symplokeˆ or writing that sustain and undercut these relations.57 We must follow both at once in order not to be taken in by the idea that these are ‘mere’ metaphors or analogies (the ‘mere’ 57

Derrida writes, for example (and Barbara Johnson translates with both precision and inventiveness): ‘We will let these yarns of suns and sons spin on for a while’ (Laissons courir ces fils) (Derrida (1972d); (1981b), 95/84).

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here being but the ruse, chimera, or phantasm of philosophical language), by the idea that a fils or a son, to say nothing of a father, a king, or a living law, is ever something simply natural. If the Platonic gambit is to weave a discourse that will give rise to the royal phantasm that there is a language that is at once artificial and natural, natural to the extent that its meaning conforms to what is, organic to the extent that this meaning is structured like a living being, then the Derridean thread is sewn or sutured on in order to show that this putatively natural language always requires an artificial supplement, one that will have opened up the possibility of this socalled natural language in the first place. Let me conclude with one final play on words, one last ‘pun’ or ‘gimmick’ from the end of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. Instead of a homonymic word like fils that can be read, pronounced, and interpreted in two different ways so as to have two different meanings, we here have another kind of earmark, a homophonic phrase that seems to mean only one thing when read but a couple of different things when heard. Once again, as one might have suspected by now, generation is at issue, as well as the animal—and let me note in passing that the word earmark is, of course, more commonly used to designate not a mark discerned by ear but a mark, tag, or brand put on the ear of an animal as a way of marking, identifying, and claiming it as one’s own.58 Here, then, is the example, which comes from the next to last page of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’: Le logos s’aime lui-meˆme. This is a real beauty, a genuine find of philosophical writing that can be heard in no fewer than three different ways, with no one subordinate or reducible to the others and all of them programmed, in some sense, by the Platonic text. First, the phrase can be read rather straightforwardly as meaning ‘logos loves itself ’, that is, in perfectly good Platonic logic, logos loves itself and tries always to stay close to itself, in the interiority of a living present without difference, distance, exteriority, or otherness.59 But the phrase le logos s’aime luimeˆme can also be heard as saying—as if Derrida wanted to show that difference, that writing, is now at the heart of speech as well, the 58

Hence the sense of an earmark as a budget line or appropriations measure marked out for a specific purpose. 59 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 196/170.

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earmark now lodged within the ear—le logos se`me lui-meˆme, that is, ‘logos sows or seeds or scatters itself ’. Now, one can always try to rein this reading too back into the Platonic orbit: logos loves itself and so sows or seeds itself in order at once to grow beyond itself and draw back into itself its legitimate offspring, that is, the traces and marks it counts as its own. As Derrida expresses this Platonic view a few pages earlier, ‘The seed (la semence) must thus submit to logos.’60 Logos, the product of a loving, knowing father, would thus love itself and wish to return to itself, to say and sow itself without any necessary relation to an external other, loving and sowing itself with no being, no power, and no love lost. But the irreducible polysemy of this phrase, readable on one register and hearable on another, with neither taking priority over the other, indeed with one actually opposing in some sense the other, already suggests that meaning has got out of hand, that the seed has been scattered or broadcast beyond all possible reappropriation, that a regulated polysemy has given way to dissemination. Through this single homophone, we can hear how the Derridean anagram ultimately wins out over or destabilizes the Platonic analogy, for in this phrase we hear the logos precisely not staying close to itself, loving itself to the point of not straying from itself, but dispersing its seed, multiplying its meanings, deferring or differing its meaning in two different and irreconcilable directions. But even more, because the verb semer, to sow or seed, has the idiomatic meaning of ‘to lose’ or ‘to shake off ’, for example, to lose someone in pursuit, someone who is tracking or tailing you, the phrase le logos se`me lui-meˆme can be heard to mean that logos loses or shakes itself, that is, in sowing, seeding, or dispersing itself, it loses its tail, and because the tail here is itself, it loses its head. Already getting away from itself, from the control and sovereignty of an authorial intention, this homophonic phrase can be read or heard as both a claim about dissemination and an exemplary inscription of it. Sure it

60 Id. (1972d); (1981b), 178/154. In Glas, the text that performs perhaps most radically the grafting of poetic language onto philosophy that I have been tracing here, Derrida writes in the context of a passage that brings the Phaedrus together with the Timaeus: ‘the god wants his product to resemble him.’ Id. (1974a), 239a; (1986b), 213a.

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can be parsed out, as I have tried to do here, but this multiplicity within the phrase itself can no longer be reined in by a meaning-tosay or a vouloir-dire—and that is precisely Derrida’s argument about writing throughout ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’. If the written sign, if writing in general, is no longer completely under the empire of speech, if expression is no longer completely subjugated to meaning, then we must think of writing—and even philosophical writing—as no longer completely under the control of a vouloir-dire or a meaning-to-say whose telos would always be univocity. This is what allows Derrida to say on the third page of a more than hundred-page essay on Plato, ‘To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say’ (A tre`s peu pre`s, nous avons de´ja` tout dit de ce que nous voulions dire).61 And it is why he can go on for another hundred pages to explain what he means by that. Le logos s’aime lui-meˆme: in order to inscribe these differences, in order to earmark them for philosophical consideration, they had to be written, inscribed, and then read and interpreted, given over not just to a regulated polysemy—guided always by a horizon of univocity—but to dissemination.62 As Derrida puts it in ‘The Double Session’, the text in Dissemination that immediately follows ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, ‘It is this hermeneutic concept of polysemy that must be replaced by dissemination.’63 From a regulated polysemy or planting of legitimate seed into the soul of a philosophical disciple, that is, into a son—a fils—made in the image of the father, to an unregulated dissemination of seed to no matter whom—that is the difference at stake in this one homonymic phrase. It is playful, to be sure, but it is no joke, and it could not have been expressed otherwise—or, rather, it could only have been expressed otherwise, rather than practised, enacted, performed, or inscribed, that is, in a word, earmarked. Le logos s’aime lui-meˆme: in a first moment, it is a phrase that expresses or paraphrases Plato’s views on language—in line with what I characterized as the starting point of every deconstructive

61

Id. (1972d); (1981b), 73/65. Derrida speaks of a ‘regulated polysemy’ that allows one to ‘translate’ pharmakon as remedy or poison (id. (1972d); (1981b), 80/71). Indeed it is often in ‘translation’ that the horizon of univocity appears most visibly in the reading of polysemic words. 63 ‘Double Session’, id. (1972a), 294; (1981a); 262; see also (1972d); (1981b), 172/149. 62

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reading; there is nothing more Platonic than to say that logos loves itself and tries to remain with itself. But in a second moment—the moment where the hierarchies are questioned and provisionally overturned—the phrase suggests that despite Plato’s best intentions logos seeds itself, distances itself from itself, and thereby loses itself, disrupting every full and present intention and every univocal meaning. In the end, then, this phrase begins to detach itself from the Platonic context altogether and to act on its own—like a little animal (one of Derrida’s little animots perhaps), a loose thread, a microchip, or a nano-machine, anything but an organism whose words are forever tethered to a vouloir-dire. No longer simply commentary on Plato or explication or critique of him, the phrase comes to have a life of its own in the French language, a life that no longer has some living breath behind it, some singular intention, but that, as a singular invention, calls out for reinscription by being read, replicating itself and transforming itself with every graft. Le logos s’aime lui-meˆme—and it does so even in the author’s absence, and even after his death. I would thus like to think that such a phrase makes a bit more sense—and gives much more to think—if it is not dismissed out of hand as an elaborate pun or gimmick but read, as Derrida put it in his final interview, as part of a ‘pedagogy aimed at forming its reader’.64 So it was, we might say in a myth of our own, that more than forty years ago now a young philosopher, still barely known, and certainly not for his work on Plato, came to the heart of the Me´tropole (to Paris, France, the Egyptian Thebes of the day) to present his reinvention of philosophical writing and to remind the powers-that-be that inscribed in every living word is the power of death and forgetting, though also, he would go on to argue, the very possibility of the trace 64

Derrida ends ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, or rather, the non-fragmentary part of it, before the final coup de the´aˆtre, with this observation: ‘But Theuth, it should be noted, spoke not another word. The great god’s sentence went unanswered’ (id. (1972d); (1981b) 195/169). ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ would be, in some sense, the belated response of Theuth, or, perhaps, that of another Egyptian, the response of ‘Derrida, an Egyptian’ (to cite the title of Peter Sloterdijk’s 2006 essay on Derrida), as I have tried to argue, to the Sun-King Thamus, not a more insistent emphasis on the benefits of writing, but a displacement to another scene.

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and of survival, and so the possibility and structural necessity of living on (always) without him. For that is exactly what he said, what he wrote, long ago in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’: They will represent him even if he forgets them; they will transmit his word even if he is not there to animate them. Even if he is dead, and only a pharmakon can be the wielder of such a power, over death but also in collusion with it.65 65

Derrida (1972d); (1981b), 119/104.

2 Derrida and Presocratic Philosophy Erin O’Connell

In 1967 Jacques Derrida appeared on the philosophical scene with three books that fixed a critical gaze upon the implicit, foundational logic of certain canonical literary and philosophical texts.1 When he subjected this logic to his deconstructive analysis and went on to propose diffe´rance as an essential feature of language and thought, his work was widely received as innovative, unorthodox, and subversive of the status quo of Western philosophy and its venerable past. Although Derridean thought may represent a leading edge of contemporary philosophizing insofar as it destabilizes and reframes the status of the classical Western metaphysical paradigm in novel ways, his approach also echoes the radical point of view and subject areas first introduced and theorized by the sixth- and fifth-century bce presocratic philosophers, who challenged the authority of established accounts of the universe in proposing their innovative theories.2 In light of the progression of Western philosophy since its beginnings over 2,500 years ago, it is startling indeed to discover such commonality 1 De la grammatologie, La Voix et le phe´nome`ne, L’E´criture et la diffe´rence. Some of the material in this chapter originally appeared in my book Heraclitus and Derrida: Presocratic Deconstruction (2006). I am grateful to the publisher for allowing me to draw from this previously printed material. 2 For the purposes of this study ‘presocratic’ refers collectively to the traditional group of the so-called ‘Presocratic’ philosophers as well as to those figures conventionally identified as the Older Sophists, most of whom are chronologically pre-Platonic, pre-Socratic, or at least sufficiently contemporary with Socrates that it is not likely that their intellectual contributions were especially influenced by his thought (e.g. Protagoras and Gorgias, both twenty years older than Socrates).

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between the first philosophers and a major modern philosopher in approach and subject area. The similarities between Derrida and his ancient predecessors become even more compelling in that the work he produced over a forty-year period has provoked the same sort of critical response received by many of the presocratic philosophers, ranging from welcoming embrace to vehement denunciation. How is it possible that Jacques Derrida, a philosopher and critic who has caused such a stir in traditional philosophical circles, could also have much in common with the first philosophers of the Western tradition? Understanding this confluence has much to do with appreciating the extent to which the post-socratic trend pursued a vision of philosophy based on Parmenidean, Platonic, and Aristotelian models for making sense of the cosmos and of man’s place in it— models that received overwhelming cultural and institutional support, and which necessitated the abandonment of certain presocratic questions and claims. In addition to the fact that the response to the presocratics is similar to the response to Derrida, there is substantial overlap in the core ideas of the early Greek and twentieth-century French thinkers. Indeed, some presocratic topics endure as topics of dispute in contemporary philosophy and have become crucial points of reference in orienting philosophical identity, such as the objectivity of human knowledge (especially regarding metaphysical theories), the limits of linguistic discourse, and the effects of these concerns on philosophy. After a brief account of the general correspondences between Derrida and some of his presocratic antecedents, this essay focuses on the similarities between the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus and Derrida in the content of their contributions, which demonstrate a like-minded intellectual approach in handling particular queries, as well as a striking resemblance in their accounts of structure and order, which are informed by a linguistic model of making meaning. The standard view that the Presocratic philosophers were the first to assert a scientific, rational account of the nature of the universe begins with Plato and Aristotle, who view the Presocratics as natural philosophers (physikoi or physiologoi) focused on explaining the cosmology of the physical world in a strict, meteorological sense. The Presocratic philosophers seek a more rational and less mythological account of the sources of things, and of structure—whether it

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be the structure of the cosmos or of philosophical discourse. Aristotle and others will distinguish the Presocratic philosophers by the single primary cosmogonic substance, the material archeˆ (‘beginning’, ‘first cause’) that each is seen to propose (e.g. water, air, fire) and which will associate them with a paradigm of material monism. To the extent that the Presocratics do theorize the fundamental material elements of the cosmos, this specific focus reflects a concern with determining the forces that account for stability and change in the world. However, a review of the full range of content in the numerous treatises entitled Peri Phuseoˆs ‘Concerning Nature’ indicates that the examination of ‘Nature’, or the cosmos (‘world order’), is not limited to the origin of the universe and the dynamic principles of meteorological and natural phenomena, but includes the human soul, which is regarded as being subject to the same cosmological forces as the rest of the physical universe. The Presocratic examinations of nature also address the origin and nature of conceptual structures in general, especially those pertaining to metaphysics, philosophy, and literature, and questions regarding epistemology, human subjectivity, reason, rationality, language, and the possibility of ‘Truth’ in human discourse. Literary criticism of previous authorities such as the poets Homer and Hesiod is a common element of presocratic discourses, and these rationalist critiques of mythological and theological accounts of cosmic order show an interest in the relationship between language and thought, and the power of language to mislead and deceive, as well as be truthful. An increasingly self-conscious philosophical discourse evolves out of the preceding archaic epic and lyric narratives, and this broader, more complex conversation is made possible by the increase in writing and availability of the written word (poetry and prose). Included among the subjects discussed is the topic of discourse itself, which appears implicitly in some of the Presocratic philosophers, but explicitly for the first time in Heraclitus, an event noted in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, where Heraclitus is listed as ‘the first Greek writer to inquire what discourse is and how it can be true’.3 Indeed, many presocratic thinkers declare an abiding

3

Hammond and Scullard (1970), 501, s.v. ‘Heraclitus’.

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scepticism about human accounts of cosmic and metaphysical order, born of the insight that there is a difference between appearance and reality, and they show how one’s understanding of the nature of truth depends on one’s understanding of the relationship between language, thought, and experience.4 They note that the theoretical and methodological problems that arise when attempting to deal satisfactorily with human subjectivity present significant stumbling blocks. Like his presocratic precursors, Derrida employs an unorthodox and subversive approach to treating conventional philosophical topics of his day, and thinks from a perspective that does not assume the authority of the classical ontotheological paradigm and the metaphysics of presence. Correspondingly, the range of subjects treated by Derrida is quite broad, as if to demonstrate the considerable impact of a different way of thinking. He also shares with the presocratics a preoccupation with certain crucial decisions made in the early stages of Greek philosophizing, and his frequent focus upon archaic and classical philosophical terms shows that he belongs to the continuity of Greek thought.5 If the practice of Western philosophy begins with presocratic critiques, enquiries, and claims, it can be said to begin again in Derrida’s like-minded approach to the question of philosophy, and the work of the philosopher. Derrida’s philosophical enquiries concern the origins and structures of fundamental systems of order—in his case, with respect to the question of discourse, the topic that Heraclitus has been credited with introducing. While this particular correspondence between ancient and contemporary philosophy is perhaps unexpected, it is not coincidental. Derrida typically develops his most important ideas by interpreting the texts of earlier thinkers, and the genealogy of his philosophical orientation can be traced back to Presocratic thought through Nietzsche, and Heidegger, both of whom published on the topic of early Greek thinking and who were clearly influenced by the Presocratic philosophers in particular. Nietzsche and Heidegger specifically link some of their key formulations to the Presocratic 4

e.g. Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, the Older Sophists. e.g. to on, archeˆ, physis, ousia, poros, aporia, theorein, krinein, polemos, khoˆra, pharmakon, techneˆ. 5

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accounts of elemental processes, and are in accord with the Presocratic critique of the rush toward philosophical and metaphysical closure, though they critique it in their own distinctive ways. In turn, Derrida, whose writing is influenced by theirs in both content and style, takes up questions, concerns, and perspectives that are characteristically presocratic.6 A cursory comparison shows that Derridean philosophizing has an antecedent in Nietzsche’s iconoclastic and provocative approach to knowledge and truth, his plural style, his fondness for switching of perspective, his ironic tone and jest. Derrida is also sympathetic to Heidegger’s account of the interdependence of opposed terms, his critique of the conventional meanings of ‘Being’, and shares Heidegger’s interest in exploring the premisses of fundamental linguistic theory as well as close analysis of etymological imagery. More particularly, Derrida’s notion of diffe´rance is linked to Nietzsche’s ‘differentiation of force’ and Heidegger’s ‘ontic-ontological difference’, both of which are grounded in each author’s engagement with Presocratic thought. Our understanding of Derrida, then, is illuminated by appreciating the ways in which his perspective is linked to this ancient intellectual tradition, which provides a context and orientation for some of his most important arguments and diction. Similarly, our appreciation of presocratic thought—that of the aphoristic and enigmatic Heraclitus especially—can be illuminated by Derrida’s more discursive elaborations. One of the key images that appears in both presocratic and Derridean accounts of order is that of separation—by which things are divided, distinguished, and thus defined. The isolation of two or more distinct entities by the act of separation is a frequent starting point for presocratic assertions about the birth and organizing principle of the cosmos. Even before the speculations of the Presocratic philosophers we find such imagery in writers such as Alcman, who was active at the end of the seventh century bce, and is traditionally classified as an archaic lyric poet, but also called a mixed theologian because he speculates as to the nature of the cosmos without relying 6

Derrida’s analysis, critique, and adaptation of Heidegger and Nietzsche’s perspectives can be found, for example, in Derrida (1967b), (1967a), (1967c), (1972b), (1972c), (1978a), and (1982a).

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on the traditional mythological paradigm. Alcman portrays images of matter being arranged such that a ‘means of passage’ (poros) comes into being, which in turn enables the setting of a ‘limit’ or ‘goal’, making a ‘mark’ (tekmoˆr).7 This notion of matter arranged in such a way as to create the possibility of a defined thing, marked by its particular arrangement, will continue to be the model articulated by Presocratic philosophers, and appears in Derrida’s deconstructive analyses of signification as well. The first Presocratic philosophers advance the depiction of separation in their common belief that the motion of the cosmic order is produced by the interactions of four physical elements (water, earth, air, fire) which transform into and out of one another.8 Anaximander, however, the oldest Greek prose writer and traditionally identified as the earliest philosophical author, proposed a fifth element as a founding resource for the activity of the four opposed elements: to apeiron, usually translated as ‘the boundless’ in the sense of ‘infinite’ or ‘limitless’ and ‘indefinite’.9 The etymological resonance of this term connects the images of boundaries and crossing boundaries, and additional linguistic cognates and ideas associated with these words will appear as central to the discourses of Heraclitus and Derrida, including poros and aporia. The first fragment of Greek philosophy comes to us from Simplicius quoting Theophrastus (the italicized words representing the standard view of the actual text of Anaximander): Of those who say that [the principle] is one and in motion and unlimited, Anaximander . . . said that the unlimited (apeiron) is both principle (archeˆ) and element (stoicheion) of the things that exist, being the first to introduce 7 Kirk, Raven, and Schofield (1983), 47–8. We also see movement towards a rudimentary science in Hesiod’s sixth-century epic poem the Theogony, when he describes the first two cosmogonical figures: Chaos and Eros. For Hesiod, Chaos is a physical space—a ‘yawning gap’ where nothing exists—and Eros is a cosmic principle, representing the productive impulse that generates the universe by the act of separation. 8 Thales (b. 620), Anaximander (b. 610), and Anaximenes (b. 560). 9 The etymology of this word is disputed: historically it has been understood as coming from peras (‘limit’) with the alpha-privative supplying the translation as given above; but some have recently argued that the term comes from the cognate verb peraoˆ (‘traverse’) with the alpha-privative, meaning ‘untraversable’. Barnes (1982), 36.

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this name of the principle. He says that it is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but some other unlimited nature, from which all the heavens and the worlds in them come about; and the things from which is the coming into being for the things that exist (ta onta) are also those into which their destruction comes about, in accordance with what must be. For they give justice (dikeˆ) and reparation to one another for their offence (adikia) in accordance with the ordinance of time—speaking of them thus in rather poetical terms.10

It seems that for Anaximander ‘the boundless’ is the unobservable but fundamental reality that affords the cosmic order and its processes. Derrida’s proposal of diffe´rance as a founding resource for the possibility of linguistic expression echoes Anaximander’s concept of originative stuff insofar as he discovers the necessity of something indeterminate, indefinite, and ‘unlimited’ between elements that is credited with enabling and distinguishing those elements, and facilitating their world-making interactions. We notice that for both Anaximander and Derrida, separation through differing (spatial) and deferring (temporal) is a key function of the organizing principle, and the state of ‘beings’ relies on something that possesses none of the distinguishing characteristics of the particular elements, yet whose activity is inexhaustive and limitless, and perhaps ‘untraversable’. Anaximander’s notion that ‘the things that exist’ are both created and destroyed by their source ‘in accordance with what must be’, is echoed in Derrida’s view that the linguistic sign is simultaneously created, distinguished, and disseminated by the necessary conceptual relation to what it is not. Born roughly forty years after Anaximander and thirty years before Heraclitus, Pythagoras proposes a very different sort of philosophy from his Milesian predecessors yet his discussions and investigations also concern the structure of the physical world, and the generation of the sensible universe. Like that of Anaximander, the fundamental doctrine of Pythagoras does not name a material element as the founding cosmological resource but proposes that it is number and mathematical proportion that limit and give shape to matter and the nature of things. Understanding cosmic order as a

10

Barnes (1982), 29.

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harmony produced by proportion again reflects the view that the cosmic order of things is not produced by one material element but in the arrangement of things. The Pythagorean view holds that the unity of the cosmic pattern is hidden behind the apparent variety of nature. This notion of the hidden aspect of the way things are is central to Heraclitus’ view, and Derrida also proposes that his deconstructive analyses expose what has always been the case, but which has either gone unnoticed or has been artfully ignored. It is a common trope among some of the presocratic thinkers to argue that scientific enquiry is impossible, and then go on to present their own accounts of the nature of things, with the implications of their disclaimers creating a significant obstacle to simple acceptance or denial of the proposed account. Xenophanes, a contemporary of Pythagoras, adopts this pose and is the first extant philosopher to express scepticism about the possibility of human knowledge. Though only incidentally interested in cosmogony and cosmology, Xenophanes critiques Homer and Hesiod’s portrayal of anthropomorphic gods from a rational and ethical point of view: ‘Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other.’11 When he further establishes the anthropological insight that different races describe the appearance of the gods in accordance with their own particular appearance, and speculates that animals would do the same if they had hands to draw them, he promotes an insight about cultural relativism that will be instrumental in undermining the authority of the mythic accounts of the Greek gods as well as other traditional cultural values, especially among some of the Sophists.12 Xenophanes characterizes the limitations of theological understanding when he claims: No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of; for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not; but seeming is wrought over all things.13

11 12

Kirk, Raven, and Schofield (1983), 168. 13 Ibid. Ibid. 179.

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Derrida too is relentless in bringing attention to the overly ambitious aims of philosophy and the limitations of human subjectivity at the same time that he attempts to philosophize well. Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Protagoras express their scepticism about the limits of human knowledge regarding accurate understanding of the gods and metaphysical issues, and after Plato this view will become a standard philosophical reservation.14 Only Heraclitus will extend his scepticism, in a certain way (to borrow a phrase from Derrida), to all knowledge.15 In what remains of his version of Peri Phuseoˆs, Heraclitus treats many of the topics that are typical of the Presocratic accounts ‘Concerning Nature’, and, according to Aristotle and Theophrastus, posits fire as the material archeˆ of the cosmic processes. More recent scholarship acknowledges that his ‘ever-living fire’ is not presented as a generic Milesian archeˆ, that the monism of Heraclitus does not assume a single primary cosmogonic material or substance.16 Kahn writes: ‘Heraclitus’ aim is not to improve the Milesian cosmology by altering a particular doctrine but to reinterpret its total meaning by a radical shift in perspective.’17 Heraclitus proposes instead a representation of the unity of things in which cosmic structure is considered primarily in terms of a force, or a continuous process. This force causes reality to be both stable and subject to change. While it is common for the Presocratic philosophers to consider the human soul (psycheˆ) as equally subject to the first principles of cosmic order, Heraclitus appears to be the only Presocratic philosopher who explored the implications of his proposed dynamic principle in both cosmic and psychological terms. Both Heraclitus and Derrida are interested in the history of philosophy, its past and its future. Each analyses the philosophical and metaphysical thought of his day, finds fault with the same sort of inherent presumptions and conclusions, and each goes on to propose a positive programme for a more rational approach to philosophical enquiry, an approach that predicts its own replacement by another 14 15 16 17

e.g. Plato’s Timaeus. Derrida (1976), 24; (1967a), 39: ‘d’une certaine manie`re.’ Wheelwright (1959), Prier (1976), and Kahn (1979). Kahn (1979), 23.

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path of enquiry—whether implicitly (in Heraclitus) or explicitly (in Derrida). Both thinkers conduct philosophy by considering origins and foundational assumptions, both wish to articulate the provenance and epistemological status of human knowledge, and both are of the opinion that these subjects cannot be rationally discussed without first acknowledging the relations between epistemology, language, and meaning. It is here, in theorizing and negotiating the intersections of these three topics, that Heraclitus and Derrida resemble each other most keenly. When Derrida describes his own theoretical matrix in Of Grammatology, he writes that concepts relating to ‘the lineage of the logos . . . in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense’ are ‘indispensable for unsettling the heritage to which they belong’.18 His use of these concepts resembles that of Heraclitus, whose texts participate in the paradigmatic language and thought common to the Presocratics, yet also question the rationality of these very paradigms, in particular the frames, structures, and norms of meaningful representation. Derrida describes what we can recognize as a Heraclitean mode when he writes: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.19

Heraclitean thought not only prefigures contemporary debates about language, reason, and poetics, but Derridean deconstruction in particular, and many of the philosophical insights which stem from this mode of analysis, including diffe´rance, dissemination, and ‘the economy of the same’, among others. Derrida refers to the Presocratics occasionally and there are a few references to Heraclitus in his body of work, two of which bear 18 19

Derrida (1976), 10, 14; (1967a), 21, 25. Id. (1976), 24; (1967a), 39.

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mentioning here. In a discussion that took place immediately after the original presentation of his paper ‘La Diffe´rance’ in January of 1968 at the Sorbonne, Derrida said: ‘Yes, there is much of the ancient in what I have said. Everything perhaps. It is to Heraclitus that I refer myself in the last analysis.’20 A key term in the Heraclitean corpus, the verb diapherein, appears in his essay ‘Diffe´rance’. There Derrida attempts an ‘approximate semantic analysis’ of his neologism diffe´rance, in the course of which he discusses the Latin verb differre and the Greek verb diapherein—both of which mean ‘to differ’ and sometimes ‘to defer’.21 In his analysis Derrida refers to the use of diapherein in a passage from Heraclitus and suggests that this ancient passage already contains the idea that he is proposing: Since Being has never had a ‘meaning,’ has never been thought or said as such, except by dissimulating itself in beings, then diffe´rance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) ‘older’ than the ontological difference or than the truth of Being. When it has this age it can be called the play of the trace . . . . Perhaps this is why the Heraclitean play of the hen diapheron heautoˆi, of the one differing from itself, the one in difference from itself, already is lost like a trace in the determination of the diapherein as ontological difference.22

The fragment he refers to is one of the best-known sayings of Heraclitus, the enigmatic meaning of which is further clarified by other extant fragments that reiterate this image of the harmony of the logos consisting of a tension of oppositions, whereby unity is constituted and preserved by the very thing that also threatens its unity: They do not comprehend how differing it agrees with itself. Harmony is backward turning, like that of the bow and the lyre. (Fr. 51)23

20 Wood and Bernasconi (1988), 93; Bulletin de la Socie´te´ Franc¸aise de Philosophie, 62 (July–Sept. 1968). 21 Derrida (1982b), 7; (1972b), 7. Derrida claims that the Greek verb diapherein does not possess the temporal aspect of deferring, though I have argued, based on the evidence of Heraclitus’ river fragments, that the verb does include this aspect; O’Connell (2006), 71–4. 22 Derrida (1982b), 22; (1972b), 23. 23 The designation ‘Fr.’ refers to the fragment number assigned by the Diels– Kranz text (1952), the source for Heraclitean quotations which is generally accepted as standard. Unless otherwise marked, all translations of Heraclitus are my own.

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Before examining the correspondences between their critical perspectives in more detail, it is relevant to note that both philosophers express their insights in a range of rhetorically elaborate poetic demonstrations that are designed to further demonstrate their meaning. This rhetorical density strengthens their work, but also asks their audiences to read differently. Both have been characterized as having a difficult and obscure writing style, both have been accused of deliberate obfuscation, of writing in such a way that their work might only be understood by elite intellectuals.24 Conversely, many scholars who have acknowledged the difficulty of reading them have demonstrated that this difficulty is philosophically serious.25 Both Heraclitus and Derrida are serious about philosophizing in a similar way: each takes up a self-consciously ironic position with respect to his own content and style, knowing that he cannot completely transcend the systems of logic that he critiques, and that he must use language to question language. The seeming irreverence and eccentricity about the serious business of human wisdom accounts for a good deal of their sometimes hostile reception. Because Heraclitus’ texts are poetically dense and fragmentary— not only because of the vagaries of transmission but also by design— a greater sense of his meaning is discovered by reading his writing as one would construe a literary text, and by giving weight to the subtler tropes of communication that are not found in the other Presocratic authors. Interpretation based upon a literary analysis attentive to the repetition of image and theme, etymological resource and metaphor, reveals a strikingly modern and sophisticated philosophy. The rhetorical style and the content of both philosophers’ commentary on the production of meaning indicate their shared view that meaning cannot be separated from the language that expresses it. Because Heraclitus and Derrida find the unifying structure of the apprehensible world in the differentiating function of language systems, they each indicate how the effect of such linguistic norms order and make sense of the world, and in so doing, enable and mediate the attempts at articulation of the nature of reality. Both argue that these norms, while necessary and to a certain extent unavoidable, are only 24 25

See Freeman (1962), 6; Smith et al. (1992); Chomsky (1995). e.g. Rorty (1989); Gasche´ in Sallis (1987), 3–4.

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provisionally axiomatic. In bringing attention to the unacknowledged tensions that arise in the production of meaning they complicate and put into question conventional concepts associated with a logocentric metaphysics of transcendental presence: the signification of identity, origins, and—above all—‘Truth’. Each philosopher proposes a revised account of change and difference in terms of ‘flux’ and ‘play’, which profoundly reconfigures the status of logocentric conceptual structures.26 Heraclitus’ sceptical view of human epistemology is based on his view that there are two major obstacles to understanding: in addition to the significant difficulties in cognition from the side of the subject, one must also contend with the difficulties in cognition from the side of the object. When Heraclitus advises: ‘if one does not expect the unexpected, he will not discover it, being undiscoverable (anexereuneˆton) and pathless (aporon)’, he uses aporos to justify this counterintuitive strategy for understanding the unspecified object of enquiry (Fr. 18). Literally understood as ‘without means of passage’, aporos indicates that the object of enquiry is immune to traditional ways of knowing. Here Heraclitus could be interpreted as asserting that one will never arrive at the ‘expected’ or ‘hoped for’ point of destination; there is no poros, no ‘means of achieving’ the desired end, no ‘contrivance’ or ‘device’ that will enable the philosopher to be present at the expected site of unity and to articulate it. Philosophical and scientific knowledge is only attainable, then, if one theorizes in an untraditional way, in an ‘unexpected’, seemingly unlikely way. When Heraclitus claims that ‘Nature loves (philei) to hide’ (or ‘likes to hide,’ ‘is wont to hide’) he indicates a tendency, not an undiscoverable mystery (Fr. 123). The central importance of a rigorously self-conscious approach to understanding is evident in the longest extant quotation from Heraclitus’ book (assumed to be the proem), where he argues that most people are mistaken in their understanding of the logos. 26 Though the logocentric point of view was not yet systematically developed in the sixth century, it is clear that Heraclitus is responding to a typical, predictable, and already established habit of mind that will be codified in Aristotle. Presocratic thinkers organize spatial and temporal structures into opposed dualities, and portray the movement between them as having a certain dialectical and hierarchical quality, which leads to the logocentric bias. Cf. Prier (1976).

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And of this account (logos), which is the case always human beings do not comprehend, both before they hear it and once they have heard it. For although all things come about in accordance with this account (logos) people are like the inexperienced, when they experience such words and deeds as I recount by distinguishing [interpreting] each thing according to its nature and telling how it is. But other people are forgetful of what they do when they are awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep. (Fr. 1)

This passage presents a good example of some of the central tenets held by Heraclitus regarding the cosmic logos (it is eternal), and human understanding of it (which is deeply flawed). Establishing this latter point is more important to him at the outset of his treatise than declaring his account of the cosmic principle.27 He also characterizes the form of his own philosophical contribution, announcing it as a logos in which he describes in detail the nature of his own words and deeds, as well as, presumably, the deeds of the cosmic logos. Along with ten occurrences of the word in the extant texts, the thematic subject of logos resonates in associated diction occurring elsewhere in the fragments.28 Modern interpreters agree that logos in Fr. 1 refers both to Heraclitus’ particular ‘account’ that follows (i.e. his understanding as it is composed in his own words), and to the account or ‘principle’ of the cosmic order itself, what he calls elsewhere to sophon, ‘the wise’, ‘the learned’, or ‘the wisdom’ about the nature of the cosmos.29 For Heraclitus the two definitions of logos form its meaning: the topic of his discourse concerns the structure of

27 Heraclitus expresses his critique of human subjectivity and its unnecessary excesses in numerous fragments, e.g. ‘The many are not thinking such things in the way that they encounter them, nor learning (them) do they know (them), but what seems best (to them)’ (Fr. 17); ‘Not comprehending, they hear like the deaf. The saying is witness for them, (though) present they are absent’ (Fr. 34); ‘Not understanding how to listen, neither do they understand how to speak’ (Fr. 19); ‘It is difficult to battle against passion (thymos), for whatever it wants it buys at the expense of the soul’ (Fr. 85; trans. Kahn 1979, 77); ‘Dogs bark at whatever they don’t recognize’ (Fr. 97). 28 Commonly used in Ionic prose to refer to one’s own ‘word’, ‘language’, ‘report’, or ‘discourse’, logos also has an abstract metaphysical sense, used by the Presocratics to refer to the organizing principle of the universal cosmos. 29 Frs. 32, 41, 50, 108.

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the cosmic logos itself and how human beings account for it. The proem announces that the problem of understanding is complex and manifold, and prefigures Derrida’s demonstrations of ‘undecidability’ and the methodological limits of philosophical discourse. In the proem and throughout the fragments Heraclitean diction repeatedly emphasizes structuralizing images of separation and relationship in the process of establishing knowledge.30 For example, the use of apeiros (in apeiroisin eoikasi: ‘people are like the inexperienced’, Fr. 1) brings with it a powerful and resonant field of etymological reference. Here Heraclitus uses the same substantive adjective that Anaximander used to describe the primary source of cosmic order. The traditional translation of apeiros in the proem is the only one that appears to make sense but comes from the alternative verbal source for the term (again with the privative prefix) meaning ‘without trial or experience of a thing, ignorant’, rather than ‘without limit, boundless, infinite, inextricable’. These two different meanings for the same word belong to a family of cognates related to the verbs peraioˆ (attempt’, ‘make proof of a thing’) and peraoˆ (‘traverse, ‘penetrate), and the nouns poros (‘means of passing’, ‘passageway’, ‘means of achieving’, ‘contrivance’, ‘device’) and peras (‘limit’, ‘boundary’).31 In the context of Fr. 1, the literal etymological resonance of apeiros brings with it a conception of human understanding as a process by which human beings produce (or fail to produce) a means of ‘crossing over’ from apprehension to comprehension. Because Heraclitus views the movement from experience to understanding as neither direct nor immediate, but indirect and mediated (by an ‘attempt’ and by ‘a setting together’), his approach for understanding this movement from experience of cosmic phenomena to more accurate

30 Heraclitus also emphasizes this organizing image in Fr. 1 when he uses two verbs of selecting to describe his mode of analysis regarding physis (nature): diairein: ‘to take one from another’, ‘to divide into parts’, and phrazein: ‘to point out’. See also Heidegger’s etymological analysis of logos in his essay on Heraclitus’ Fr. 50, where he notes that the noun logos comes from the verb legein, the primary meanings of which are ‘to bring together’, ‘gather’, ‘collect’; along with ‘say’ and ‘tell’. (1954), 59–78. 31 The adverbial and adjectival forms of this root (pera, and peraios) refer specifically to ‘the other side’.

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understanding of it requires a conscious acknowledgement of the means (poros) by which understanding is produced.32 Not only does Heraclitus demonstrate that linguistic differentiation tends to have the effect of overdetermining the accounts of cosmic order that precede him, but he also (like other Presocratic philosophers) presumes a universal consistency between the logos of the elemental processes of the physical world and the logos of the human cognitive processes. For Heraclitus, both cosmic and cognitive systems utilize the same process by which linguistic signs are produced, making neither system metaphysical in the classical sense. Derrida’s argument about diffe´rance also claims that the system of thought and meaning is organized by the movement of linguistic signification that marks a difference. Familiar Heraclitean imagery appears in Bennington’s description of the concept: ‘diffe´rance attempts to name . . . the differentiality or being-different of those differences, their “production,” the “force” that maintains the system gathered in its dispersion.’33 Deciding what a thing is, where to mark its defining lines, is informed by the role of the human perceptive faculties, which is brought to the fore in Heraclitus’ assertion in Fr. 107: ‘Bad witnesses are eyes and ears for men having barbarian souls.’ Kahn writes that this fragment is ‘apparently the first time in extant literature that the word psycheˆ (“soul”) is used for the power of rational thought’.34 With this momentous development in the definition of the term psycheˆ, we can see how Heraclitus indicates a two-part argument in a group of related quotations. First, he asserts that sensory apprehension and linguistic comprehension of worldly phenomena are the initial sources of rational knowledge, and that the comprehension of perceived phenomena can be misconceived. The notion of senses as ‘witnesses’ reinforces the idea of the essentially aporetic quality of human understanding.35 ‘Eyes and ears’ are naturally limited in the 32 e.g. Fr. 75: ‘[Those who are asleep I think Heraclitus calls] laborers and coproducers of what happens in the universe’ (Fr. 75); trans. Robinson (1987), 47. 33 My emphasis; Bennington and Derrida (1993), 72. 34 Kahn (1979), 107. Claus also makes the argument that in Heraclitus, psycheˆ is used to express the ‘life-force’ as well as the psychological intellect. (1981), 126–7, 138. 35 See Fr. 45: ‘Going, you would not discover the limits [boundaries] of the soul, traveling every road, so deep is its logos,’ and Fr. 123: ‘Nature loves to hide.’

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scope of what they witness because of their particular modes of apprehending information (visual, aural), and it is the soul, portrayed as the rational capacity, that mediates and translates the experience into a linguistically articulated understanding. Thus those who are ‘deaf’ to the language of the logos (to whom he refers in Fr. 1) are not participating in rational thought. This point of view, which sees understanding as contingent upon language and language as contingent upon understanding, distinguishes Heraclitus from his Presocratic peers and accounts for his highly self-conscious and tightly crafted discourse. His emphasis on the necessary textuality of meaning also corresponds with Derrida’s understanding of ‘writing’ (e´criture), his interest in patterns of language and methods of reading, and his iconoclastic claim that there is no referent outside the text whether ‘metaphysical, historical, or psychobiographical, etc’.36 Derrida’s controversial statement that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (il n’y a pas de hors-texte) first appears in the context of analysing the implications of the word ‘supplement’ as it appears in Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions (1782). Derrida develops his claim in relation to two aspects of Rousseau’s thought: his ambivalence about the way in which the subject is dislocated by speech and writing, and the characterization of the woman (The´re`se) who is the object of his desire as a necessary substitute (supplement) for an absent presence (whether for his beloved Madame de Warens—called ‘mamma’, and who is herself a substitute for Rousseau’s mother whom he never knew—or Nature itself, among other things). Derrida sees in Rousseau’s text the recognition that ‘we are dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it’.37 He goes on to demonstrate that substitution, or the concept of supplementarity, is essential to the economy of the sign system because any referent, content, or meaning—including absolute presence—is only available through the differential sign system, which substitutes a word for a thing. The word is understood to refer to the thing, but is not the thing itself. Derrida sets this commonplace of Platonic philosophy adrift from its classical moorings when he asserts that there is, then, no reality 36 37

Derrida (1976), 158; (1967a), 227. Derrida (1976), 141; (1967a), 210.

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outside the text ‘whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to the word, outside of writing in general’.38 This observation echoes the insight underlying Heraclitus’ comment about the problem of establishing a proper name for the unifying principle of the cosmos: The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus. (Fr. 32)39

When Heraclitus and the other presocratic writers offer numerous names for the organizing force of the logos, never settling on one in particular but substituting one for another, the variety suggests the authors’ awareness of the inadequacy of a single master term. Derrida elaborates further upon a similar sentiment when he argues that . . . there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the ‘real’ supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature, that which words like ‘real mother’ name, have always already escaped, have never existed; that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.40

Derrida’s account of Rousseau’s observations and their implications reveals a link to the Heraclitean view of the necessity of ‘hearing the language of the logos’, or rather, not being ‘deaf ’ to it; here Derrida’s ‘reading’ is Heraclitus ‘hearing’: the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.41

38

Id. (1976), 158; (1967a), 227. Kahn has noted that instead of the more usual nominative construction, the word for Zeus is in the genitive case, which gives greater stress to the word onoma ‘name’. (1979), 269. 40 Derrida (1976), 158–9; (1967a), 228. 41 Id. (1976), 158; (1967a), 227. 39

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In his analysis of Rousseau, Derrida also brings attention to the separation and structuring that necessarily takes place in the process of substitution. He writes of a ‘partition’ between Rousseau’s desire and the substitute for it, and again brings attention to structure when he notes that ‘the play of maternal presence or absence, this alteration of perception and imagination must correspond to an organization of space’.42 When Derrida characterizes thinking and writing in this way, he links Rousseau’s sense of ‘Nature’ to Heraclitus’ account of physis: both can only be retrieved and restored by language and its unending chain of separations and supplements. Heraclitus makes a significant and underappreciated contribution to philosophical thought when he shows how knowledge organized by the principle of radical binary opposition is misleading, unnecessarily reductive, and heedless of the complexity of complementary and fluid relationships. He shows how the methodological reliance upon structural opposition enables a provisional comprehension and articulation of the logos but also—when coupled with the hierarchizing bias—distorts the resulting characterization of cosmic order. In his unorthodox argument about the Unity of Opposites, Heraclitus proposes that recognizing the congruence and dependence between binary oppositions is, at the very least, equally important for understanding the unity of the logos as is determining their differences: The teacher of most is Hesiod. They know him as knowing most, he who does not recognize day and night: they are one. (Fr. 57) The way up (and) down (is) one and the same. (Fr. 60)43

In the numerous texts which consistently collapse typical oppositions and rejoin the opposed subjects, making a claim for their ‘oneness’, Heraclitus does not reject differentiation per se, rather he points to the degree of investment in radically separating and valuing one over the other, the uses to which divisions are put, and the effects on the account of cosmic order. His frequent claims that opposed features

42

Id. (1976), 152; 153; (1967a), 221. English words in parentheses indicate words not appearing in the Greek but which clarify the idiomatic reading. Heraclitus frequently takes advantage of the option in ancient Greek literary practice to leave out ‘and’ as well as forms of ‘to be’ with the standard expectation that the reader supplies the missing words. 43

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are ‘one and the same’ and that ‘all is one’ indicate his belief that it is more empirically accurate, more rational, and therefore more philosophically useful to recognize the organization and unity of the cosmos as inclusive rather than exclusive of differences. The god (is) day (and) night, winter (and) summer, war (and) peace, satiety (and) hunger; it alters (alloioutai) [becomes other] just as whenever it is mixed with spices, it is named according to the pleasure of each. (Fr. 67)44

The strength of the rhetorical effect of such statements comes from the bold reduction of the most conventional dualisms to a monism— but a monism different from the kind conceived by Heraclitus’ predecessors and contemporaries. For Heraclitus, it is not that the two terms are identical, but that the full nature of each term is only accurately understood with reference to its constant and contingent ‘other’. Often in Heraclitus, the pair of terms refers to the larger process of which they are two definitive stages, but whether the conceptual difference is temporal or perspectival it belongs to an ‘economy of the same’. Note how closely Derrida echoes the Heraclitean discourse: The same, precisely, is diffe´rance . . . as the displaced and equivocal passage of one different thing to another, from one term of an opposition to the other. Thus one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the diffe´rance of the other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same.45

Derrida’s elaborations on this ‘equivocal displacement’ take up Heraclitus’ account of the economical and cyclical relationships between oppositions. ‘Displaced’ describes the deferring to one another that takes place in the cyclical or successive patterns of change represented by certain oppositional pairs. ‘Equivocal’ refers to the different names given to a thing depending on the perspective or interpretation of the subject (‘ . . . named according to the pleasure of each’, Fr. 67), as well as the ambivalence about committing to a proper name. 44 Cf. Fr. 62, which also collapses oppositions in both content and form: ‘Immortals (are) mortal, mortals (are) immortal, living the death of the others, being dead in the life of others.’ 45 Derrida (1982b), 17; (1972b), 18.

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Insofar as Heraclitus offers a positive account of cosmological order, it can be found in the fragments that describe the unity of the logos in terms of a harmonious tension between oppositions. He illustrates this harmonious tension by offering multiple figures, including the dynamics of war, the flux of a river, the analogy of fire, the prevailing force of Heraclitean justice, and the gnoˆmeˆ, or ‘plan’ that ‘steers all through all’.46 Like the lord at Delphi who does not ‘tell’ (legei) but ‘indicates with a sign’ (semainei, Fr. 93), Heraclitus does not assign a proper name but rather describes how the logos works with multiple verbs describing differentiation. Together, these Heraclitean figures will reframe the relevance of distinguishing oppositions, and demonstrate cosmic order in terms of an endless cognitive process, one whose economy is measured but unlimited. We come upon a major crux of the Heraclitean philosophical perspective when we notice that, with one exception (Fr. 54), some form of the verb diapherein accompanies every mention of the word harmonieˆ (‘a joining’, ‘agreement’, ‘harmony’). Insofar as we can isolate such a key term in the Heraclitean fragments, diapherein names the principle of cosmic order. Literally meaning ‘to carry over or across; to carry from one to another; to put in motion’, secondary meanings include ‘to go through’ (time), ‘to support or sustain’; ‘to carry different ways’; ‘to tear asunder’; ‘to differ, make a difference’. Instead of a noun or adjective describing an essential stasis, the principle of Heraclitean cosmic order is a verb denoting process. Appreciation of the significance of this particular verb is fundamental to understanding his claim that cosmic unity is produced by the ongoing process of a diversity of forces interacting in space and time, and links his perspective to Derrida’s concept of diffe´rance. The pairing of participial forms of diapherein (‘carrying apart’) with sumpherein (‘bringing together’), often in the middle voice, is repeated in three fragments, and diapherein also appears in the ancient commentators’ glosses of Heraclitean thought:47

46 Heraclitus refers to the supreme principle of cosmic unity in a range of ways, each of which identifies the cosmos ‘that is common to all’: ‘the wise one alone’, ‘Justice’, ‘Zeus’, ‘war’, ‘fire’, ‘river’. 47 e.g. in Fr. 72 Marcus Aurelius paraphrases Fr. 17 and echoes Fr. 10: ‘ . . . and they differ from (diapherontai) that with which they most constantly associate.’

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What is opposed (sumpheron) brings together, and from what is separated (diapherontoˆn) (comes) the most beautiful harmony and everything comes into being according to strife. (Fr. 8) Graspings, wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent (sumpheromenon diapheromenon), consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all. (Fr. 10)48 They do not comprehend how differing (diapheromenon) it agrees with itself. Harmony is backward turning, like that of the bow and the lyre. (Fr. 51)

Heraclitus portrays the balanced tension of diverging forces, opposed yet bound to each other, as comprising a functioning whole. Unity is the result of forces that are literally and simultaneously ‘carrying together’ and ‘carrying apart’; it is constituted and preserved by the very thing that also threatens its unity. There is again a trace of Heraclitean imagery in Derrida’s diction concerning his interest in the ‘tension of liaison and deliaison, of stricturation and destricturation’, and of ‘gathering and dispersion’.49 While the word diapherein is central to Heraclitean discourse, his portrayal of the nature of unity is further indicated in his repeated reliance upon other verbs that also begin with the prefix dia-. Primarily meaning ‘through’, dia is a preposition used in the contexts of space, time, and causality. As a preposition and a prefix it connotes separation, whether in terms of difference—‘in different directions’, ‘at variance’, ‘asunder’—or in terms of mutual relation—‘one with another’, ‘between’, and ‘partly’. In Heraclitus’ extant texts it appears thirteen times in ten fragments: once as a preposition, most often as a prefix to a variety of verbs of separation that demonstrate the full range of its connotations.50 The repeated emphasis on the differentiating that takes place in the ordering process of both cosmos and 48 Trans. Kahn (1979), 85. Alternatively, see Barnes’s translation: ‘Conjunctions are wholes and not wholes: what is converging, what is diverging; what is consonant, what is dissonant: from everything one and from one thing everything’ (1982), 60. As Kahn has noted, the term syllepsis (‘graspings’, ‘conjunctions’) is also used to specify ‘the cognitive act of collecting together, comprehending, or summing up’. (1979), 282. Its use here reiterates the notion that the selecting or separating that occurs in making sense of the phenomena is a cognitive act that becomes a conventional paradigm for organizing knowledge. 49 Bennington and Derrida (1993), 309. 50 Frs. 1, 7, 8, 10, 31b, 51, 72, 86, 125, 41.

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cognitive function brings attention to that line or space that is created ‘through’ or ‘between’ things being distinguished and defined.51 The verbal force of dia describes a movement that structures and arranges as it abstracts. Like poros and gnoˆmeˆ, dia is a ‘means of knowing’ and marks the ‘passageway’ to the naming and definition of a thing, or the expression of a concept. The wise is one, knowing the plan (gnoˆmeˆ) by which it steers all things through (dia) all things. (Fr. 41)

What is ‘wise’, then, is knowing that the cosmic logos is located not in a material archeˆ but in a gnoˆmeˆ, in the ‘conceptual orientation’ that perceives a particular dynamic force, ‘steering all through all’, and in so doing, structuring the processes of the cosmos and human cognition. For Heraclitus it is wise to acknowledge the passage that diadiction effects, the signification of ‘what is’. Examining his arguments about the harmony of the logos together with his characterizations of river and fire shows that Heraclitus presents an account of unity-amidst-change and a cosmic theory of flux that relies upon the differentiating action that dia describes. In the river fragments, Heraclitus demonstrates the nature of flux by bringing attention to the appearance of the ‘other’: As they step into the same rivers other and still other (hetera kai hetera) waters flow upon them. (Fr. 12)52 It is not possible to step into (embainein) the same river twice. (Fr. 91a)53

In Fr. 12 Heraclitus uses the same word twice to mean different things, and this double mention of ‘other’ reinforces the emphasis on difference throughout the fragments.54 While fire is traditionally opposed to water, the fire fragments of Heraclitus emphasize the 51 In addition to the etymology of logos, see related diction such as krinei (Fr. 66); kechoˆrismenon (Fr. 108); aporos (Fr. 18); tropai (Fr. 31a), termata, antion (Fr. 120). 52 Trans. Kahn, who notes that the sound and rhythm of the fragment suggests the incessant movement of the river (1979), 53. 53 Conceptually, the image of embainein in Fr. 91a resonates with the other fragments that use similar imagery of ‘going’ as well as other references to roads or passages, which joins this fragment to his discourse on thinking (e.g. Frs. 2, 11, 12, 18, 45, 60, 71, 117). 54 Especially in Fr. 67, where the verb alloioein, ‘to alter’, ‘become other’, figures importantly.

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flowing aspect of flame that retains its unity of form and process while its content is in constant motion. Like the river, the identity of fire is preserved in its changes.55 One of the most significant additions that the fire fragments bring to Heraclitus’ positive doctrine about the logos is the claim that the process of fire is a measured exchange observable in space and time: All things are an equal exchange for fire and fire for all things. (Fr. 90) The cosmos, the same for all, no one of gods or men has made, but it always was and is and will be. It is a fire ever-living, being kindled in measures and being put out in measures. (Fr. 30)

Fire is presented as an archetypal analogy: the logos is like fire, it is fiery. The emphatic statement of an unending presence of a fiery process over time is followed by the claim that this ever-living fire is not only continuously kindled but is continuously extinguished. The paradox that something ‘ever-living’ would also extinguish itself (the verbs for kindling and extinguishing are in the middle voice) is handled by the idea of metra (‘measures’), a word whose meaning relies upon the boundaries created by the force of dia. The measures are identified by the differentiations of the ever-living cycle of kindling and extinguishing, not unlike the ‘other and still other waters’ of the river in Fr. 12.56 The diction of another fire fragment resonates in ways that allow us to construe more general claims regarding the similarity of logos and fire: Fire coming upon all things will separate (krinei) and catch up with them (kataleˆpsetai). (Fr. 66)57

55

Cf. also Fr. 84a: ‘Changing, it rests.’ While the comparison with Derrida on this matter relates primarily to his characterization of diffe´rance and dissemination, it is interesting to note that Derrida writes of fire and its identity in very similar terms when he reasons that fire must burn itself and lose itself in order to be itself, and notes that in losing itself it becomes other than itself, it becomes its opposite. See Derrida (1974a) and (1987c). 57 This fragment also corresponds with Heraclitus’ portrayal of the nature of cosmic justice (Dikeˆ), though that is not discussed here. See O’Connell (2006), 75–84. Note how the choice of definition affects the translation: ‘Fire [he says], having come suddenly upon all things, will judge and convict them.’ Robinson (1987), 45; ‘Fire, having come upon them, will distinguish and seize all things.’ Sweet (1995), 29. 56

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The meaning of krinei, also commonly understood as ‘discern’, ‘choose’, and ‘judge’, reiterates what Heraclitus says he does in his own logos in the proem.58 Significantly, the cognitive sense of ‘discernment’ in distinguishing and naming a particular thing portrays fire as ‘thinking’ and ‘deciding’. This diction allies the movement of fire with the action of the psycheˆ and gives an intelligent and presumably systematic force to the cosmic logos.59 Taking all of this into account allows us to see the many ways in which the logos of Heraclitus prefigures that of Derrida. Both philosophers describe a process of differences in motion, a self-reflexive motion in the middle voice, a play that is at war with itself, a unity constituted by the very thing that also threatens its unity.60 For both philosophers, logos is primarily a linguistic and philosophical phenomenon—it reveals itself directly through language. By joining these two aspects of logos as a linguistic-philosophical production and a fiery-polemical exchange, we see that for Heraclitus there is an irreducible and reciprocal relationship between the differentiating function of language and ‘strife’ (eris), or flux, and for Derrida there is an irreducible and reciprocal relationship between the differentiating function of language and ‘play’ or ‘dissemination’.61 Insofar as Heraclitus proposes a Presocratic archeˆ, his first principle appears in this carefully wrought account of a fiery flux, and it finds a match in Derrida’s conception of archi-e´criture, a writing that is non-finite and non-teleological in its effects, a writing made possible by the activity of diffe´rance. For both philosophers their world-ordering archeˆ is a writing that not only makes meaning possible, but also exceeds its singular aims. Both Heraclitus and Derrida uphold what is best and what is left of the classical logocentric paradigm after their intensive scrutiny of the presuppositions and laws of its formal structures. Because the Fr. 1: ‘ . . . words and deeds such as I set forth (dieˆgeumai) distinguishing (diaireoˆn) each thing according to its constitution, pointing out (phrazoˆn) how it is.’ 59 This argument about the cognitive aspect of fire is supported by related texts of Heraclitus that associate the thunderbolt of Zeus and justice with the dynamic principle of fire. See also Fr. 113: ‘Thinking is shared by all.’ 60 See discussion of middle voice in O’Connell (2006), 152–6. 61 Fr. 80: ‘It is necessary to know that war is common and justice is strife, and everything becomes [happens] according to strife (erin) and necessity (chreoˆn).’ 58

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logocentric bias is invested in forgetting its prephilosophical resources, both philosophers consistently stress the importance of remembering the crucial incoherencies of that heritage, as well as the implications for the status of the truth that the system purports to discover. Derrida frequently writes of the difficulty of the doubleedged task of remembering the philosophical significance of diffe´rance. He exhorts his readers to keep it in mind, to bring it to bear, especially in our readings of Western metaphysics: ‘as rigorously as possible we must permit to appear/disappear the trace of what exceeds the truth of being.’62 In both content and form, the discourses of Heraclitus and Derrida exemplify this aim of permitting such insights to ‘appear/disappear’.63 Each observes and preserves the system of signification as he understands it. Derrida formulates this conclusion about his own deconstructions: ‘thereby the text of metaphysics is comprehended. Still legible; and to be read. It is not surrounded but rather traversed by its limit, marked in its interior by the multiple furrow of its margin.’64 Like the logos of flux or diffe´rance, the work of reading is an activity of deciphering relationship and motion; as Derrida has said, ‘one must reconstitute a chain in motion, the effects of a network and the play of a syntax.’65 The image of a ‘chain in motion’ indicates no clear or absolute beginning or end. For Heraclitus the ‘chain in motion’ is the natural state of things, both in physis and in his description of the psycheˆ, whose cognitive function is ever-increasing and without limit: To the soul there is a logos that increases itself. (Fr. 115) Going, you would not discover the limits (peirata) of the soul, traveling every road, so deep is its logos. (Fr. 45)

62

Derrida (1982b), 22; (1972b), 23. See Heraclitus’ wordplay in Fr. 48, where the archaic word for ‘bow’ is identical to the word for ‘life’ (bios), and only distinguishable by the written placement of the accent, which was not yet a practice in Heraclitus’ day: ‘The name of the bow (toxoˆi) is life (or “bow”), its work is death.’ Though not precisely the same sort of wordplay (here the distinction can only be heard, but not seen), the purposeful resonant ambivalence of the word poses a similar problem and philosophical point to Derrida’s neologism diffe´rance (where the intended meaning can only be seen, but not heard). 64 Derrida (1982b), 24; (1972b), 25. 65 Id. (1981a), 194; (1972a), 221. 63

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Not surprisingly, the format and style of their expositions—mirroring and demonstrating the order and disorder of meaning-making— disrupt the traditional presumptions that protect the logocentric paradigm. What appears fragmentary, illogical, enigmatic, and maddeningly elusive is offered by both authors as an accurate portrayal of what is ‘always already’ (toujours de´ja`) the case in the signified expression of meaning. Finally, each philosopher brings to the project of philosophical thinking an affirmative view of its open-ended undecidability, even to the point of imagining that their own speculations could be or will be, in the words of Heraclitus, ‘come upon suddenly, seized and convicted’ (Fr. 66). Heraclitus’ image of the logos as constantly ‘kindling in measures and extinguishing in measures’ is often interpreted as implying an ekpuroˆsis (conflagration) on the grand scale, which would transform everything into something new or different. In a similar vein, Derrida makes a distinction between the predictable future and the unexpected future—the unanticipated ‘coming of the other’.66 Bennington’s description of Derridean deconstruction echoes the nature of the Heraclitean logos: If deconstruction had a goal or a regulating idea, it would be: that something come about, that something happen, that there be some event: an ‘institution’ ruled according to this idea . . . ought in some sense to make a void to welcome this event. Such an institution would have to be, on the one hand, autonomous enough to recognize the fundamental alterity that . . . makes possible and impossible the foundation of an institution in general . . . but, on the other hand, sensitive enough to the event of this alterity to undo itself and reconstitute itself at a very rapid rhythm.67

While both Heraclitus and Derrida destabilize the very structure of philosophy that they simultaneously inhabit, it is clear that each is dedicated, in idiosyncratically rigorous and original ways, to thinking philosophically. When we examine presocratic philosophy we examine the beginnings of Western philosophizing, and encounter a collection of thinkers who do not isolate or limit the fields, disciplines, and 66 67

i.e. l’avenir, ‘the future’, and l’a` venir, ‘the “to come” ’. Bennington and Derrida (1993), 264.

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methods that we now routinely distinguish in accounts of human thought and knowledge. Presocratic thought is working towards a rational view of cosmic order but does not settle into certainty. What certitude it does possess is just as disruptive as it is productive because of a central preoccupation with the question of language and the problem of naming. When Derrida famously asserts ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, that ‘there is nothing outside the text’, he gives new expression to the ancient insight that understanding is contingent upon words, words whose references cannot be located outside of language, and whose meanings cannot be contained. While an understanding of the presocratic sub-text is essential to appreciating the intellectual history of the ideas that inform Derrida’s work, and while Derrida’s confession of the necessity of textuality is an exegesis of the presocratic approach, it is also fair to say that his much more detailed, discursive elaborations advance—in a characteristically presocratic way—the project of identifying the forces that facilitate order. Thanks to Derrida’s efforts, the order of discourse is more comprehensible—after a fashion, in a certain sense, ‘d’une certaine manie`re’. Surprisingly, it is a return to antiquity that affords, for the moment, the unexpected increase to a philosophical future.

3 Negative Theology and Conversion Derrida’s Neoplatonic Compulsions Stephen Gersh

The fact that Jacques Derrida cultivated a relationship with Neoplatonism throughout his writing career is indicated by comments made in numerous seminars and interviews. On one occasion he was questioned about his reasons for adopting St Augustine as a philosophical interlocutor in Circonfession, and replied that he did not remember the reasons for his decision at the time.1 He added that he had always maintained an interest, albeit a superficial and discontinuous one, in Augustine and that, after starting on the project, everything else followed. Now Derrida was here at the same time striking a rhetorical pose of modesty and underlining the event-character of his own writing, since his previous dealings with writers embodying or influenced by Neoplatonism indicate more than a superficial acquaintance with that tradition. Only a measure of genuine insight could have permitted him to inscribe its so-called ‘negative theology’ within the syntax of diffe´rance in such a manner as to provoke the irritated response of a prominent modern theologian.2 This response was made in the name of pseudo-Dionysius. It subsequently became the primary stimulus behind Derrida’s own discussion of the same question some years later within a more historically contextualized treatment of Platonic, Christian, and Heideggerian thought. 1 2

See Caputo and Scanlon (2005), 30 (response to Mark Vessey). Cf. Derrida (1972f), 6 and Marion (1977), 318.

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But what is the relation between Derrida and Neoplatonism in precise philosophical terms?3 This question can perhaps be answered by establishing a relation of analogy and opposition between, on the one hand, Plato’s understanding of reality as a structure of principles, involving a being-transcendent and the distinction between nontemporal and temporal terms, and as an implicit monism, according primacy to the logical universal and to propositional utterance—a prime example of what is termed ‘onto-theology’—and on the other, Derrida’s approach to discourse as a structure of the trace, involving the transition between transcendent and non-transcendent terms and a becoming-temporal, and as an explicit non-monism, questioning the primacy of the logical universal and of propositional utterance. Neoplatonism performs the conceptual function of reinforcing this analogy and mediating this opposition between Plato and Derrida through its notions of dialectic and emanation. The question raised above can also be answered by comparing individual readings of Plato’s doctrines by Derrida. Important among these are his readings of the Epekeina teˆs ousias (‘beyond being’) of Plato’s Republic in which a metaphysical first principle is replaced by the general structures4 of deconstruction as a group, and of the Khoˆra (‘place’) of Plato’s Timaeus in which a metaphysical first principle is converted into one general structure of deconstruction in particular. In the former case, Derrida emphasizes the onto-theological character of the first principle in the Neoplatonic manner, although in the second case he denies it. The question raised above can again be answered by considering individual readings of Neoplatonic doctrines by Derrida. Of particular importance is his reading of the Negative Theology of pseudo-Dionysius’ On Divine Names in which a metaphysical 3 We must here establish some clear conceptual guidelines before proceeding any further. Ithas becomerelativelycommonamong‘post-moderntheologians’inrecentyears to confront Derrida’s actual writing or some idea of deconstruction with Neoplatonic Christian writers like Augustine and pseudo-Dionysius. Unfortunately, these confrontations are often as philosophically imprecise as they are historically disembodied, since neither the relation of Augustine or pseudo-Dionysius to Neoplatonism nor the nature of Neoplatonism as doctrine and tradition is adequately grasped. 4 By ‘general structure’—a term avoided by Derrida himself in his later work but suggested by him in some of his earlier writings and also utilized by some exponents of his thought—one means such things as ‘trace’, ‘supplement’, ‘diffe´rance’, ‘writing’, etc. These might also be called quasi-concepts (although not concepts in any psychological sense).

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dialectic is read in counterpoint with the various general structures of deconstruction. In this case, Derrida brings into relief the dialectical character of the Neoplatonic doctrine but leaves its emanative foundation completely out of the picture. In order to understand the relation between dialectic and emanation that is at issue here, some further preliminary remarks are necessary. In particular, we must note the pervasive occurrence in both Neoplatonism and Derrida of a fundamental dialectical-emanative structure consisting of (1) a positive term (affirmative seme a, negative seme b), (2) a combined term (affirmative seme a, affirmative seme b), (3) a negative term (negative seme a, affirmative seme b), and (4) a neutral term (negative seme a, negative seme b)—when this structure occurs in Derrida we will call it the ‘trace-structure’ or the ‘fourfold structure’.5 In Neoplatonism and Derrida alike, the structure may be considered as closed or conjunctive with respect to form— since it embodies a symmetrical arrangement of four affirmations and four negations—and also as open or disjunctive with respect to content—since the neutral term falls outside the remaining threefold structure in certain cases.6 In applying this structure, certain further criteria must be established—(i) the selection of the semes, (ii) the logical relation between the semes (contradictory, different, correlative, etc.), (iii) the number of terms, (iv) the order of the terms, (v) the combination of structures, and (vi) the logical relation between the structures (contradictory, different, correlative, etc.)—for these criteria influence the relationship between Neoplatonism and Derrida.7 5 According to Derrida’s own criteria, it might best be termed a ‘supplementary structure’. For a detailed discussion of this topic see Gersh (2006), 42–52, 64–80. It may be suggested that threefold structures are more typical of Neoplatonism—the impact of ‘Trinitarian’ thinking being significant in the case of Christian Neoplatonism—and one must admit that this argument is true to a limited extent. However, even within structures that are overtly threefold, the relations between the terms are usually governed by the fourfold logic. To take some ready examples from Augustine—God the Son is begotten but not proceeding, God the Holy Spirit not begotten but proceeding, and God the Father neither begotten nor proceeding; likewise, Body is both temporal and spatial, Soul temporal but not spatial, and God neither temporal nor spatial. 6 This always happens when the semes are contradictories. 7 The question regarding the extent to which the organization of these structures involves violation of the principle of non-contradiction will be reserved for the conclusion of this chapter. See pp. 130–1.

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In Neoplatonism with respect to (i) the semes include ‘unitary’, ‘affirmative’, and ‘causing’, and with respect to (ii) the semes may be contradictories like ‘unitary’ þ ‘multiple’, differences like ‘affirmative’ þ ‘universal’, or correlatives like ‘causing’ þ ‘caused’. We may associate the resulting structures particularly with the concept of ‘Negative Theology’. In Neoplatonism with respect to (iii) and (iv), a negative term may be followed either by a combined term, or by a neutral term, or by both combined and neutral terms in a sequence. These resulting structures may be associated especially with the concept of ‘Conversion’. In Derrida with respect to (i) the semes include ‘marked’, ‘present’, and ‘this’, and with respect to (ii) the semes may be contradictories like ‘marked’ þ ‘unmarked’, or differences like ‘present’ þ ‘future’, or correlatives like ‘this’ þ ‘that’. In Derrida with respect to (v) and (vi) a first structure may be combined with a second structure contradictory to it, or a first structure may be identified with the combined term of a second structure and then contrasted with the latter’s neutral term. We may identify the resulting structures with the process of ‘Deconstruction’ itself.8 It should be noted that in speaking of Neoplatonism and Derrida in all these instances, we are contrasting a Neoplatonism analysed in a typically immanent manner with three phenomena which are ultimately inseparable: namely, Derrida’s description of the trace,9 Derrida’s description of Neoplatonism, and Derrida’s enactment of the trace with respect to Neoplatonism.10 The first and second phenomena are inseparable because Derrida cannot describe the trace without referring to an intertext, and the second and third phenomena are inseparable because Derrida cannot describe Neoplatonism without performing a deconstruction.11 8

The first type of combination occurs when Derrida reverses the axiological priority of a marked seme over that of an unmarked seme in order to begin a deconstruction, the second type of combination when he says that a deconstruction evades the logic of the ‘both . . . and’ and the ‘neither . . . nor’. 9 On the ‘trace’ see n. 4. 10 The reference to enactment is important, since in contrasting Neoplatonism and Derrida we are contrasting a philosophical world-view which is theoretical with a discoursive activity which is simultaneously theoretical and practical. 11 A final point with respect to the contrast between Neoplatonism and Derrida concerns their respective attitudes to ‘God’. It should be noted that, in speaking above of the selection of semes by Neoplatonism, the term ‘God’ was not included.

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The fact that Derrida’s relationship with Neoplatonism is well articulated emerges clearly from a group of works published between the late 1980s and early 1990s. These are his essay ‘Comment ne pas parler: de´ne´gations’ published in the volume Psycheˆ: inventions de l’autre (1987),12 the text Circonfession: cinquante-neuf pe´riodes et pe´riphrases published in the volume Jacques Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (1991),13 and the essays ‘Passions’, ‘Sauf le nom’, and ‘Khoˆra’ published in separate covers but forming three chapters or steps in an Essai sur le nom (1993).14 Any project of understanding Derrida’s relationship with Neoplatonism must primarily depend upon these items. Since the present writer has already discussed the other works at some length in his book Neoplatonism after Derrida: Parallelograms,15 the analysis to be pursued here will be based exclusively on ‘Comment ne pas parler’ and Circonfession. The dialogues between Derrida and Neoplatonism in these two essays will be considered both separately and in their interrelation, while the Neoplatonism of ‘Negative Theology’ and that of ‘Conversion’ will be seen as the specific issues of the first and second essays respectively.16

This was because such a concept is necessary to the derivative Christian Neoplatonism but not necessary to the original non-Christian type—which generally confines itself to speaking of ‘the One’, or ‘the Good’, or ‘the First’. On the other hand, when speaking of the selection of semes by Derrida in reading Neoplatonism, the term ‘God’—implied by the notion of onto-theology—tends to occur via the Heideggerian intertext assumed. See n. 16 below. 12 Derrida (1987b), 535–95. For English translation by Ken Frieden see Coward and Foshay (1992), 73–142—this translation had been published earlier in Budick and Iser (1989), 3–70. In the remainder of this chapter, we will cite the pages of the English translation as republished in 1992 followed by the pages of the French original after a semi-colon. 13 Derrida (1991a). For English translation by Geoffrey Bennington see id. (1993d). In this chapter, we will cite the paragraphs which are identically numbered in the English translation and the French original. 14 Id. (1993d) (all three items). For English translations by David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLoed in a single volume see Dutoit (1995). 15 See n. 5. 16 In these essays and elsewhere, Derrida tends to read Neoplatonism together with certain modern intertexts, the most important by far being Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. On Derrida’s intertextual readings of Neoplatonism see Gersh (2006), 29–38. For Husserlian implications of Derrida’s reading of Neoplatonic doctrine see Marion (1999), 20–53—and especially 39–41; for Heideggerian implications see Malabou (2005), 127–43.

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NEOPLATONISM AND DERRIDA’S ‘HOW TO AVOID SPEAKING: DENIALS’ This essay in the form of a lecture originally given in Jerusalem is formally divided by the author himself into two sections numbered I17 and II,18 the second section containing three subsections labelled A,19 B,20 and C.21 The main discussion of ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ I applies what one might term an ‘ethical’ and a ‘linguistic’ version of the tracestructure to Negative Theology, the reference to something that is as necessary as it is impossible showing that the trace-structure is to be understood here in both its conjunctive and disjunctive forms.22 The ethical version occurs in Derrida’s numerous references to his promise to speak about Negative Theology: a promise which precedes the discursive event,23 already belongs to the time of the parole,24 and has seized the ‘I’ which will speak to the ‘other’.25 This promise which both precedes the event and constitutes the event of speaking about Negative Theology is described as the ‘singular anteriority of the obligation’ which will be the main theme of Derrida’s essay.26 That 17 Coward and Foshay (1992), 73–96; Derrida (1987b), 535–58. The division given here does not include the important notes added to the essay. The majority of these deal with a controversy over the meaning of Negative Theology between Derrida and Marion. 18 Coward and Foshay (1992), 96–131; Derrida (1987b), 559–95. 19 Coward and Foshay (1992), 100–8; Derrida (1987b), 563–9. 20 Coward and Foshay (1992), 108–22; Derrida (1987b), 569–84. 21 Coward and Foshay (1992), 122–9; Derrida (1987b), 584–92. The volume Caputo and Scanlon (1999) contains several essays dealing with questions raised by ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’. However, the notion of ‘gift’ exploited in several of the contributions associates Negative Theology with catholic theology and with Husserl rather than with Neoplatonism. The Neoplatonic analogue of the gift, which does not seem to enter into any of these discussions, would of course be ‘emanation’. 22 Coward and Foshay (1992), 84; Derrida (1987b), 547. 23 Coward and Foshay (1992), 82; Derrida (1987b), 545. 24 Coward and Foshay (1992), 82–3; Derrida (1987b), 545–6. 25 Coward and Foshay (1992), 84; Derrida (1987b), 547. 26 Coward and Foshay (1992), 73; Derrida (1987b), 535 singulie`re ante´riorite´ du devoir. The ethical version of the trace-structure is developed more fully in some of Derrida’s other writings. See especially Derrida (1991c)—translated in Kamuf (1992)—and Derrida (1992b)—translated in Wills (1995). See especially Kamuf (1992), 24–31; Derrida (1991c), 39–48; Wills (1995), 40–52; Derrida (1992b), 63–78.

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the ethical structure of the trace is inseparable from the linguistic structure is indicated by Derrida’s comments that in being always about to speak of Negative Theology he has already been speaking of it in two stages (temps),27 and that in supplying the title ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ in advance of his lecture the trace of his speaking will have preceded that speaking.28 The main discussion of section I also relates Negative Theology closely to the structure of this present text and the structure of its address. The structure of the text is delineated by the progressive establishment of the essay’s title in which the author shifts from a first formulation of his topic: That he will speak of Negative Theology;29 to a second formulation: That he will avoid speaking of it;30 and then—replacing the statements with questions—from a third formulation of his topic: How will he speak of Negative Theology?;31 to a fourth formulation: How will he avoid speaking of it?32 The structure of the address is marked out in passages where the author speaks of Negative Theology or avoids speaking of it to certain earlier critics of his writing,33 or else to the audience at his lecture in Jerusalem,34 and where this Negative Theology is described as something of which Dionysius spoke or avoided speaking to his disciple Timothy35 or of which Meister Eckhart spoke or avoided speaking to the Inquisitors at Avignon.36 The main discussion of ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ I also clarifies the notion of Negative Theology by making important semantic distinctions within the notion of ‘not speaking’ as such.

27

Coward and Foshay (1992), 77; Derrida (1987b), 539–40. Coward and Foshay (1992), 86; Derrida (1987b), 548–9. 29 Coward and Foshay (1992), 73; Derrida (1987b), 535. 30 Coward and Foshay (1992), 82; Derrida (1987b), 545. 31 Coward and Foshay (1992), 83–4; Derrida (1987b), 546–7. 32 Coward and Foshay (1992), 85; Derrida (1987b), 547–8. In these formulations Derrida alternates between French (Comment ne pas dire . . . ) and English expressions (How to avoid speaking . . . ). 33 Coward and Foshay (1992), 75–6, 88–9; Derrida (1987b), 537–8, 551. 34 Coward and Foshay (1992), 73, 84; Derrida (1987b), 535, 547. 35 Coward and Foshay (1992), 116–17; Derrida (1987b), 578–9. Derrida begins the citation of various texts by (pseudo-) Dionysius and Meister Eckhart early in his essay. However, the most important citations occur in part II. 36 Coward and Foshay (1992), 113–14; Derrida (1987b), 576. 28

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Most of these occur in the passage where Derrida first states the title of his essay in its final form.37 Here, he observes that not speaking can be understood as signifying a not speaking or saying altogether— a linguistic sense which might perhaps be labelled sigetic. Next, he mentions a second linguistic variety of not speaking: namely, not speaking or saying in the sense of deferral. There is also a not speaking associated with situations where one must not speak or say something. This represents a kind of ethical sense of not speaking or saying through obligation. He further notes that not speaking can be understood as signifying a not speaking/saying x—a logical sense which might perhaps be labelled predicative. In another passage, Derrida mentions a second logical variety of not speaking: namely, not speaking or saying in the sense of denial (de´ne´gation).38 This sense of not speaking or saying—a negation which denies itself—is simultaneously a speaking or saying. Finally, the main discussion of section I emphasizes the singularity of the discourse about Negative Theology. Derrida notes that this singularity concerns place in that he is speaking of his chosen subject at a colloquium in Jerusalem,39 and time in that he is speaking of it finally after many deferrals.40 The inseparability of this place and this time in the taking place of the event gives the discussion of ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ a definite autobiographical character. As we shall see, this autobiographical character is further revealed in the tension between Derrida’s discussion of the Christian paradigms of Negative Theology later in the essay and his silence with respect to negativetheological tendencies in the Jewish and Islamic traditions.41 Section I of ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ also contains a detailed account of the relation between what the Neoplatonists call ‘Negative Theology’ and what deconstruction calls ‘trace’. This can be followed through two preliminary notes42 and an insert in the main 37

Coward and Foshay (1992), 85; Derrida (1987b), 547–8. Coward and Foshay (1992), 94–5; Derrida (1987b), 557. Derrida himself does not apply technical terms to what we have here called ‘sigetic’ and ‘predicative’. 39 Coward and Foshay (1992), 73, 83, 97; Derrida (1987b), 535, 546, 559. 40 Coward and Foshay (1992), 82/545. 41 Coward and Foshay (1992), 122; Derrida (1987b), 584. Cf. Coward and Foshay (1992), 108; Derrida (1987b), 569–70. 42 Coward and Foshay (1992), 73–4; Derrida (1987b), 535–6. 38

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argument of section I.43 The preliminary notes provide some historical contextualization and a general definition of Negative Theology respectively. The insert replies to critics who had accused him of resifting the procedures of Negative Theology in his implementation of the deconstructive project.44 Derrida here provides statements of how his critics had incorrectly identified Negative Theology and the trace45 and of how Negative Theology and the trace should actually be distinguished from one another.46 As we are now informed, he had always wanted to speak of the ‘network of questions set up in too hasty a manner under the rubric of Negative Theology’.47 We may perhaps summarize what Derrida says about the relation between Negative Theology and the trace in the preliminary notes and the insert. First, there is a quasi-definition of Negative Theology. This characterizes it as an attitude towards language and, more specifically, to the act of definition or attribution or to semantic or conceptual determination which assumes that every predicative language is inadequate to the essence of God, and that only a negative attribution can claim to approach God and prepare us for a silent intuition of him.48 The argument of Derrida’s critics that trace-structure is equivalent to Negative Theology is reported briefly. This states that (a) deconstruction imitates the mechanical technique of Negative Theology, that (b) it constitutes a purely rhetorical activity, and that (c) it transforms all discourse into theology.49 The argument of Derrida himself that trace-structure is not equivalent to Negative Theology is given at greater length. This states that (1) Negative Theology depends on utterances ‘of strictly propositional form’,50 (2) concerns (a) an object which is ‘a being beyond being’, and (b) a ‘movement towards

43

Coward and Foshay (1992), 74–82; Derrida (1987b), 536–45. Coward and Foshay (1992), 74–5; Derrida (1987b), 537. Coward and Foshay (1992), 75–7; Derrida (1987b), 537–9. 46 Coward and Foshay (1992), 77–82; Derrida (1987b), 540–5. 47 Coward and Foshay (1992), 77; Derrida (1987b), 539 le re´seau de questions qu’on noue de fac¸on trop haˆtive sous le titre de ‘the´ologie ne´gative’. 48 Coward and Foshay (1992), 74; Derrida (1987b), 536. 49 Coward and Foshay (1992), 75–6; Derrida (1987b), 537–8. 50 Coward and Foshay (1992), 77; Derrida (1987b), 540 forme strictement propositionnelle. 44 45

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super-essentiality’,51 (3) concerns (a) an object which is determined by ‘presence’, and (b) ‘the promise of that presence’,52 and (4) balances affirmative and negative utterances,53 whereas none of these features belong the trace. Finally, there is a quasi-definition of the trace. This characterizes it as an ‘X’—for example, diffe´rance, hymen, supple´ment, pharmakon, parergon—which is neither a concept nor a name although it lends itself to a series of names, which exceeds the structure of predicative discourse, which is neither a ‘this’ nor a ‘that’ nor a ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung), which calls for an alternative syntax, and which ‘is’ not although it ‘will have been’.54 Of course, Derrida does not simply contrast Negative Theology and the trace on the basis of these quasi-definitions. This is because an explicit project of Negative Theology cannot be attributed to any thinker, and the unity of its ‘archive’ (archive) is difficult to delimit.55 Also according to Derrida, there is indeed a ‘more or less tenable analogy’ between Negative Theology and the trace.56 The nature of this analogy is not specified in Section I of the essay, although an initial impression of it can be gained from a further insert in the main argument.57 This insert is explicitly described by Derrida himself as a digression on what he terms the ‘secret’ (secret). It performs the important textual function of developing certain implications of the title ‘How to Avoid Speaking’—namely, the affirmation of a secret as such which, as affirmation, is the secret shared within an esoteric social group58—and also of establishing the presuppositions of the 51 Coward and Foshay (1992), 77–9; Derrida (1987b), 540–2 un eˆtre au-dela` de l’eˆtre . . . mouvement vers l’hyperessentialite´. Derrida also introduces the relevant Greek terms: hyperousios, -oˆs, -ousioteˆs. 52 Coward and Foshay (1992), 79–81; Derrida (1987b), 542–4 la pre´sence . . . la. promesse de cette presence. 53 Coward and Foshay (1992), 81; Derrida (1987b), 544. Derrida indicates the last point by referring to a ‘paradoxical economy’ (e´conomie paradoxale). Points 1 and 4 of this account particularly emphasize what Derrida sees as the ‘formalistic’ aspect of Negative Theology. See further the concluding remarks of this chapter on pp. 131–2. 54 Coward and Foshay (1992), 74, 79, 81; Derrida (1987b), 536, 542, 544–5. In these passages, Derrida comes close to presenting a classical formulation of the ‘trace-structure’ analysed earlier. See pp. 103–4 and n. 9. 55 Coward and Foshay (1992), 73–4; Derrida (1987b), 535–6. 56 Coward and Foshay (1992), 74; Derrida (1987b), 536 une analogie plus ou moins soutenable. 57 Coward and Foshay (1992), 86–96; Derrida (1987b), 549–58. 58 Coward and Foshay (1992), 86–9; Derrida (1987b), 549–51.

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subtitle ‘Denials’—namely, the denial of a secret as such which, as denial, is the secret shared by Derrida and his allies59—the entire argument showing clearly that Derrida’s secret is not something having a unitary presence. In the course of this digression—which contains numerous allusions to Negative Theology60—several important further points are made. First, the secret is associated with a place (lieu) in the sense of a disjunctive trace-structure embracing the individual who possesses a secret and the individual from whom it is withheld.61 Secondly, the secret is said to be the modality (modalite´)—indeed the only modality—in which the name of God can be uttered.62 Third, the individual who withholds a secret from another within the disjunctive trace-structure is said to employ a double theological language of concealment and demonstration.63 In connection with these points, Derrida introduces various motifs which will be developed in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ II. These are: place in the sense of promise,64 place in the sense of rhetorical symbols or allegories,65 and place in the sense of event.66 In the same context, he also adumbrates certain themes of the later part of the essay: for example, the identification of place with Khoˆra and with the seal. ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ II consists of an introduction stating that this part of the essay will study Negative Theology in terms of place, and in three stages (e´tapes, temps),67 and a main discussion dealing with these three stages—also called signs (signes), paradigms (paradigmes), and places (lieux)—in sequence.68 Given that place has now clearly become the privileged expression of the 59

Coward and Foshay (1992), 95; Derrida (1987b), 557–8. Coward and Foshay (1992), 90–1, 95–6; Derrida (1987b), 552–4, 558. Coward and Foshay (1992), 91; Derrida (1987b), 553–4. 62 Coward and Foshay (1992), 95; Derrida (1987b), 558. 63 Coward and Foshay (1992), 94–5; Derrida (1987b), 557–8. Derrida discusses the ‘secret’ in several other texts written around the same time. See especially the treatment in the essay ‘Passions’. On this point see Gersh (2006), 183–96. 64 Coward and Foshay (1992), 92–3; Derrida (1987b), 555. 65 Coward and Foshay (1992), 93–5; Derrida (1987b), 556–8. 66 Coward and Foshay (1992), 95–6; Derrida (1987b), 558. Derrida here speaks of ‘an event, that which takes place’ (un ´eve´nement, ce qui a lieu ou ‘takes place’). 67 Coward and Foshay (1992), 96–100; Derrida (1987b), 559–63. 68 Coward and Foshay (1992), 100–29; Derrida (1987b), 563–92. 60 61

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trace-structure, we can detect an important shift in Derrida’s argument at this point. Having explained how Negative Theology was incorrectly identified with the trace and how Negative Theology and the trace should actually be distinguished from one another in part I, he now turns to an explanation—or rather, an exemplification—of Negative Theology within the trace-structure in part II.69 Our comments on this part of the essay will focus upon what is said about place as such in the introduction and about the relation between the three stages or paradigms and place in the main section. In the introduction to part II, Derrida has much to say on the question of place as such. One of the main aims of this section is clearly to distinguish place in the sense of rhetorical figures,70 in the sense of what we termed the ‘ethical’ and the ‘linguistic’ versions of the trace-structure in part I, and in the sense of event.71 Most of the new developments occur in connection with the linguistic version of the trace-structure which the writer comes close to articulating in its most complete form. This consists of (a) the being older than, the preceding, or the rendering possible of the linguistic act, (b) discourse in general, the distinction between meaning (sens) and reference (re´fe´rence), specific forms of discourse like proposition or prayer, and the question ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ itself, and (c) the trace of the other or the call of the other, language before language, the assumed origin of speech, and what is ‘other than being’ (autre que l’eˆtre).72 Among these moments (a) corresponds to the negative term, (b) to the positive term, and (c) to the neutral term within the trace-structure. Derrida now introduces a further semantic structure in contrasting (a) the possible absence of a referent, and (b) reference to the other, or the other as referent, reference and truth, and (c) absolute reference (re´fe´rent absolu), or first and last reference—these moments corresponding within the trace-structure to the negative, positive, and neutral terms respectively. Derrida also introduces an analogous theological structure in contrasting (a) the effect of, the proceeding from, or

69 This ‘recursive’ structure of exemplification will be developed further in ‘Circumfession’. See our discussion on pp. 125–6 below. 70 Coward and Foshay (1992), 97; Derrida (1987b), 559. 71 Coward and Foshay (1992), 97–8; Derrida (1987b), 559–61. 72 Coward and Foshay (1992), 97–8; Derrida (1987b), 559–61.

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the gift of something, (b) the power of saying or not saying this. or the power of speaking or not speaking at all, and (c) what can be called God, Cause, or Gift, and the name of God (le nom de Dieu)—these moments again corresponding within the trace-structure to the negative, positive, and neutral terms respectively. The introduction to How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ II also considers the relation between the three stages or paradigms of Negative Theology and place.73 First, Derrida describes the character of these stages or paradigms. He explains that they are not phases in a dialectical or teleological process and not the moments of a history,74 and notes that they are somewhat akin to ‘architectural models’.75 He then turns to the interrelation between the stages or paradigms. Here, he notes that they surround ‘a certain void, the place of a desert, a resonant space of which nothing or almost nothing will ever be said’.76 These arguments continue in the main section of part II where Derrida shows that the three stages or paradigms of Negative Theology will be based on (A) Plato, (B) pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, and (C) Heidegger. In the transition between stages or paradigms A and B, he characterizes the interrelation between the stages or paradigms as an ‘event’. Here, he explains that what happens between these stages is not a history of influences, structures, or relations but rather the ‘event of the event’ or the thought of ‘an essential having-taken-place’.77 In the introduction to stage or paradigm C, he inserts the stages or paradigms into the trace-structure by noting that the first paradigm will be Greek, the second Christian without ceasing to be Greek, and the third neither Greek nor Christian.78

73

Coward and Foshay (1992), 96, 100; Derrida (1987b), 559, 562–3. Coward and Foshay (1992), 100; Derrida (1987b), 562. 75 Coward and Foshay (1992), 100; Derrida (1987b), 563 mode`le[s] de construction. 76 Coward and Foshay (1992), 100; Derrida (1987b), 562–3 un certain vide, le lieu d’un de´sert. . . . un espace de re´sonance dont il ne sera jamais rien dit, presque rien. 77 Coward and Foshay (1992), 109; Derrida (1987b), 570 l’e´ve´nement de l’e´ve´nement . . . un ‘avoir-eu-lieu’ essential. Also: ‘eventuality’ (e´ve´nementialite´). 78 Coward and Foshay (1992), 122; Derrida (1987b), 584. Within the tracestructure, these paradigms or stages obviously correspond to the positive term, the combined term, and the neutral term respectively. 74

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In the main discussion of part II, Derrida shifts his discussion of the relation between the three stages or paradigms of Negative Theology and place from the argument that the three stages or paradigms are delimited by place or event to a demonstration that each stage or paradigm itself defines a place or event. Thus, paradigm A based on Plato begins with a discussion of the transcendent super-essence of the Republic and the notion of Khoˆra (‘place’) in the Timaeus, the second term being the Greek word for ‘place’ converted into a proper name. Paradigm B climaxes with a discussion of pseudo-Dionysius’ notion of the place of God and Eckhart’s notion of a place in the soul. Paradigm C based on Heidegger begins with a discussion of the movement of transcendence in Vom Wesen des Grundes and the notion of khoˆrismos (‘separation’) in Was heisst Denken?, the second term being a verbal echo of the corresponding item in the first paradigm. The Platonic paradigm A,79 in that it raises questions about the ontological status and about the structure of address with respect to both the Good beyond Being and to Khoˆra, exhibits a certain parallelism. Regarding the ontological status of the Good, Derrida concludes that what is beyond being remains a being in Plato’s eyes at least in the sense that its causality is assumed.80 He also notes that Plato entertains the possibility of addressing the Good at one point in his text.81 Regarding the ontological status of Khoˆra, Derrida notes that Plato speaks of this principle in ‘two concurrent languages’ (deux langages concurrents): the one underlining the relation to metaphysics by associating it with participation, allowing the neither/nor to become both/and, inserting it anachronistically into the history of philosophy, and expressing it in metaphors, the other mapping it onto a trace-structure by denying all these features.82 79

Coward and Foshay (1992), 100–8; Derrida (1987b), 563–9. Coward and Foshay (1992), 102–3; Derrida (1987b), 564–5. Strictly speaking, Derrida argues that other things ‘draw from the Good’ (tiennent . . . du Bien) their being and their being-known. This entire discussion raises the important question of Plato’s ‘onto-theology’. See our discussion on p. 129 below. 81 Coward and Foshay (1992), 103; Derrida (1987b), 565. 82 Coward and Foshay (1992), 104–6; Derrida (1987b), 566–8. This passage provides a very clear instance of the contrast between Plato’s and Derrida’s different articulations of the trace-structure. Here, Derrida enacts the trace with respect to Plato by taking the first (Platonic) language and then identifying it with the combined term and contrasting it with the neutral term of the second (deconstructive) language. 80

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Derrida also argues that Khoˆra is primarily not something that exists but something that is addressed.83 The relation to Neoplatonism emerges more clearly in Derrida’s treatment of paradigm B.84 Here, a close reading of various passages in On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, On Divine Names, and On Mystical Theology of pseudo-Dionysius and in the sermons ‘Like a MorningStar’ and ‘Be Renewed in Spirit’ of Meister Eckhart enables the writer to articulate the relation between Negative Theology and the tracestructure with considerable subtlety. The reading of pseudo-Dionysius focuses first on the text’s exploitation of prayer. According to Derrida, prayer is a linguistic form having as its most important characteristics (a) that it establishes the objective referent of Negative Theology, (b) that it is a non-predicative language of address to the Other—in this respect it is similar to but different from encomium which represents a mixture of non-predicative language of address to the Other and predicative language of statement about the Other—(c) that it prepares the union between subject and object sought by Negative Theology.85 The reading of pseudo-Dionysius then takes up the question of place. When pseudo-Dionysius prays to God, and then addresses his disciple Timothy, quoting his prayer, Derrida argues not only that there is a place in which these addresses occur, but that the places of prayer, quotation, and apostrophe are inseparable.86 The reading of Meister Eckhart focuses on the text’s ‘multiplication of voices and discourses’ (de´multiplication des voix et des discours). According to Derrida, the logical opposition between negative and affirmative predicates applied to God can be understood as a hermeneutic opposition between meanings or voices, this opposition being simultaneously with respect to the terms interpreted—for example, the phrase ‘being without being’ used by Augustine—and the interpreters of the terms—for example, Meister Eckhart himself and the Hermetic source of his teaching.87 The reading of Meister Eckhart also takes up the question of place. When Meister 83 Coward and Foshay (1992), 107; Derrida (1987b), 569. Derrida discusses khoˆra in several other texts written around the same time. See especially the treatment in the essay ‘Khoˆra’. For more detailed discussion see Gersh (2006), 125–37. 84 Coward and Foshay (1992), 108–22; Derrida (1987b), 569–84. 85 Coward and Foshay (1992), 109–12; Derrida (1987b), 570–5. 86 Coward and Foshay (1992), 116–18; Derrida (1987b), 578–81. 87 Coward and Foshay (1992), 113–16; Derrida (1987b), 575–8.

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Eckhart describes God’s creation of a hidden power in the soul capable of achieving union with the super-essential Being of God, Derrida notes that the use of the term receptacle for this hidden power recalls Plato’s use of the same term for the principle of Khoˆra.88 The Heideggerian paradigm C89 is perhaps most notable for the manner in which it connects semantic distinctions within the notion of ‘not speaking’ with the notion of place. Here, Derrida selects for comment Heidegger’s device of placing the word ‘being’ under erasure (sous rature)90—i.e. where a special written form Being having both the negative sense of not being a being and also the affirmative senses of being readable, being divisible into four regions, and being a point of maximal intensity is introduced into the discussion—and also Heidegger’s proposed exclusion of ‘being’ from theological enquiry.91 Although Derrida argues that the German writer’s arguments are often hard to follow, he notes that place is clearly at issue in both these instances.92

THE STRUCTURAL RELATION BETWEEN DERRIDA’S TWO READINGS OF NEOPLATONISM Derrida’s engagement with the metaphysical tenets of Neoplatonism in ‘Comment ne pas parler: de´ne´gations’ is complemented by his similar approach in Circonfession: cinquante-neuf pe´riodes et pe´riphrases. In fact, his readings of pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine may be seen as complementary from a structural viewpoint, although the extent to which this relation was consciously promoted by the author is a matter of speculation. In terms of mode of approach, the relatively theoretical and generic response to the subject matter of ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ may be compared and contrasted with the relatively practical and singular response to the same issues in 88 89 90 91 92

Coward Coward Coward Coward Coward

and and and and and

Foshay Foshay Foshay Foshay Foshay

(1992), (1992), (1992), (1992), (1992),

120; Derrida (1987b), 583. 122–9; Derrida (1987b), 584–92. 125–6; Derrida (1987b), 588–9. 126–8; Derrida (1987b), 590–2. 125–6; Derrida (1987b), 589–90.

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‘Circumfession’.93 With respect to this subject matter, the conception of the relation between the three paradigms and Negative Theology as place or event in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ may be compared and contrasted with the conception of the relation between the fiftynine compulsions and Conversion as place or event in ‘Circumfession’.94 Moreover, the conception of the relation between the deconstructive and the Platonic languages implied by the Greek term Khoˆra in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ may be compared and contrasted with the conception of the relation between circumcision and confession implied by the portmanteau-word CirconþFession itself.95

NEOPLATONISM AND DERRIDA’S ‘CIRCUMFESSION’ Derrida’s ‘Circumfession’ consists of fifty-nine paragraphs of one convoluted sentence each—the ‘periods’ or ‘periphrases’ of the subtitle—written in the margin of Geoffrey Bennington’s book about Derrida entitled ‘Derridabase’.96 The work differs radically in style from the one previously considered in a number of ways. Perhaps most obviously, it is articulated from the start in terms of its explicit intertextual relations—or non-relations—on the one hand to Augustine’s Confessions and on the other to Bennington’s treatise. In addition to this, the expression-plane and the content-plane of 93 Perhaps we should not overemphasize the distinction between the two texts. In an important note attached to his account of the three paradigms in Derrida (1987b), the author describes his text as ‘the most “autobiographical” ’ (le plus ‘autobiographique’) he has ever risked. He explains this by saying that he has been engaging in a process of self-presentation through a discussion of the negative theology of others, and that he has so far been unable to speak of what his birth should have made closest to him: the Jew, the Arab (Coward and Foshay (1992), 136 n. 13; Derrida (1987b), 562 n. 1). The obviously ‘autobiographical’ aspect of the ‘Circumfession’ can therefore be seen as fulfilling the promise of ‘How to Avoid Speaking’. 94 As we shall see demonstrated below, Negative Theology and Conversion may be understood as complementary realizations of the trace-structure or fourfold structure. 95 On the ‘two languages’ of Khoˆra see pp. 114–15 above. 96 On this work see the recent collection of essays Caputo and Scanlon (2005).

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Derrida’s discourse are designed to reflect one another in keeping with his interpretation of the Augustinian notion of ‘making the Truth’.97 Consequently, the text deliberately avoids—and indeed explicitly sets out to question—the systematical organization of a logical argument. In order to analyse it here, we shall reuse the conceptual structure deduced from the earlier essay. ‘Circumfession’ as a whole utilizes both the ‘ethical’ and ‘linguistic’ versions of the trace-structure. The ethical version of the tracestructure is stated most fully in the author’s report of his dream of conversing with Jean-Pierre Vernant in an underground place about the principle of taking responsibility for a crime that one has not personally committed.98 When Derrida refers to the subject constituted by the category of the accepted accusation, the hiatus finally circumscribed, and the subject configured by the knife of the economy, he shows once again that the trace-structure is to be understood in both its conjunctive and its disjunctive forms. The linguistic version of the trace-structure is articulated throughout ‘Circumfession’ but is perhaps presented most graphically in a passage where Derrida meditates on the French word escarre meaning (a) (in anatomy), the scab on some part of the body and (b) (in heraldry), the compartment of a shield formed by a square enclosing one of the corners, and connecting metonymically with the English word ‘scar’, etc. Here, the motif of his mother’s bedsores—and his own facial paralysis—is associated with the notion of writing itself, and Derrida explains that he loves words because he has no words of his own but only escarres: traces of other texts and genealogies en abıˆme.99 ‘Circumfession’ also discusses the structure of its own text and the structure of that text’s address. The structure of the text is at issue in passages where Derrida states a kind of theory of self-citation using the figure of circumcision, for instance where he argues that in this process he is tearing off his own skin while reading others like an 97 Derrida later modified his interpretation of ‘making the truth’ in order to make the sense of its event-structure more radical. However, the modification tends to reinforce rather than undermine the interpretation of his authorial intentions proposed here. See Derrida (2005a) and especially at 20–1, 23, 26. 98 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 56. 99 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 18. Derrida’s references to the escarre and mise-enabıˆme allude to possible visual depictions of the fourfold trace-structure.

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angel,100 and in passages where he implements the practice of selfcitation in association with the same figure, for example where he quotes his own earlier notebooks for a projected Livre d’E´lie on the topic of circumcision.101 The structure of the address is at issue in passages where Derrida speaks variously of his relation to the Other: namely, as a relation to ‘what I call “God” in my language’,102 as a relation to Geoffrey Bennington who never quotes exactly from Derrida’s corpus,103 as a relation to his mother who does not recognize him, or is silent towards him, or does not read him,104 as a relation to you whom Derrida will never completely know,105 and as a relation to sA ¼ saint Augustin or savoir absolu.106 ‘Circumfession’ as a whole places considerable emphasis on the notion of singularity, as indicated in the complex interplay of Derrida’s readings of Augustine’s writing, of Derrida’s comments on his own writing, and of Derrida’s readings of Augustine’s life, punctuated with many individual dates and locations.107 To cite a few instances: Derrida reads Augustine’s writing singularly when, having quoted the latter’s insistence on the distinction between things in the firmament and bodily works, he comments that he will never write like sA since he has more than these two languages—the figural and the other—and at least four rabbis.108 In fact, he constantly opposes the universality of Bennington’s book about him to the singularity of his own writing of ‘Circumfession’, noting that G ¼ Geoffrey wishes to produce a generative grammar of his writing—a ‘theological program’ (the´ologiciel) of absolute knowledge—and thereby deprive him of his events, but that he—whose writing cannot be pre-constructed Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 45. Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 11, 14 ff., 52. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 30 ce que j’appelle Dieu dans mon langage. 103 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 5. 104 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 5, 7, 12, 27, 34, 44, 51. 105 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 41. 106 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 10–11, 20, etc. It is notable that many of these passages utilize what we have termed the sigetic sense of not speaking or saying in combination with a trace-structure which may be understood in both its conjunctive and its disjunctive form. 107 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 3, 29, 49, 52, etc. 108 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 47. This is another reference to the fourfold structure of the trace. 100 101 102

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from a matrix and admits the un-anticipatable singularity of the event—will always destabilize or disconcert it.109 The singularity of Derrida’s own writing is stated in the notebook mentioned above to be where its principle of thematic or formal selection is no longer two columns of text, the letters Gl, or the number 7 used in certain earlier works, but the idiom that makes or lets him write,110 and in the ‘Circumfession’ itself to be where the writing is no longer trying to rediscover itself according to some regular or ‘geologically programmed’ (ge´ologicielle) relation between chance and necessity but leaves itself to be invented by the other.111 Derrida reads Augustine’s life singularly when, having described a facial paralysis which deprived him of the respite of Augenblick and forced him to speak the truth sideways, he proposes this surprise of an event happening to himself in which he is no longer himself as a reading of Augustine’s famous ‘conversion’.112 The absolute singularity of this event is indicated by its association with a specific place and date: a clinic at Neuilly—from which Derrida telephones Bennington, as though telephoning God, before going into a tomb-like X-ray scanner—on 29 June 1989.113 ‘Circumfession’ has much to say about the relation between the deconstructive ‘trace’ and metaphysical thinking—the latter including whatever might loosely be termed ‘Neoplatonism’, or ‘Negative Theology’, or ‘Augustinism’—Derrida’s main purpose being to demonstrate the non-equivalence between the trace-structure and such metaphysical notions. We might summarize the main points of difference as follows. Deconstruction (a) is an activity which ‘makes the truth’114—rather than a truth which is uncreated—(b) is both

Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 3, 5–6, 28, 51. The letter G also signifies Derrida’s mother Georgette (who is therefore substitutable with Geoffrey). 110 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 52. 111 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 55. The term ge´ologiciel has a metonymic relation with the´ologiciel (both terms suggesting a computer program (logiciel)). 112 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 24–5. 113 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 19. 114 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 9, 11, 27, 36, 53 veritatem facere ¼ faire la ve´rite´. With respect to the eight points of difference to be listed here, Derrida only states the properties of the trace-structure explicitly. However, the contrasting properties of metaphysics can easily be deduced. 109

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‘example’ and ‘counter-example’115—rather than purely exemplary—(c) depends on the future116—rather than on the present— and (d) is a ‘truth of non-knowledge’117—rather than a truth which is knowable. In addition, deconstruction (a) is a series of ‘compulsions’118—rather than the unity of a consciousness —(b) is an activity of ‘writing’119—rather than an activity of thinking—(c) is a confession which ‘gives beyond the circle’120—rather than a confession limited by the circle—and (d) is an ‘experimentation of one’s possible survival’121—rather than a conviction regarding one’s definite survival. Of course, Derrida does not simply contrast the deconstructive trace and metaphysical thinking but implements the deconstruction of metaphysics throughout the text of ‘Circumfession’. This practice can be illustrated by several important passages which defy summary for obvious reasons. One such passage deconstructs Negative Theology in terms of winning and losing, by connecting references to his mother’s inclination towards poker and to his own game-playing relation to Bennington with the indefinite referral, so-called negative theology, the play with the names of God, and the substitution of one bank for another.122 Elsewhere, Derrida deconstructs the simultaneously transcendent and immanent relation between God and the Soul—where the One has always been more intimate to Jackelie than himself—by writing of the four-stage escarre of God, the wound of circumcision in which Derrida returns to himself, gathers himself, and colonizes hell, and the escarre as sponge absorbing and expressing blood.123 Another passage deconstructs Negative Theology in terms of selection by the other, by making what happened at the rue Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 36 exemple . . . contre-exemple. Cf. } 50. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 28. 117 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 28 ve´rite´ de [ce] non-savoir. 118 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 25 compulsions. 119 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 28 e´xriture. 120 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 45 donne au-dela` du cercle. Cf. }21. 121 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 36 l’expe´rimentation . . . de [ma] survie possible. 122 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 8. This passage again emphasizes what Derrida sees as the ‘formalistic’ aspect of Negative Theology. See further the concluding remarks of this essay on pp. 130–2. 123 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 20–1. Derrida’s four-stage escarre at the same time constitutes a trace-structure and substitutes for Augustine’s Trinitarian God. 115 116

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saint-Augustin between 1929 and 1934—Derrida’s birth as substitution for his dead brother Paul Moı¨se—the object of his non-knowledge in the night of learned ignorance.124 These deconstructions of metaphysics are implicit examples of theology in what he termed elsewhere the modality of the ‘secret’.125 In ‘Circumfession’, this structure is simultaneously a secret as such, in the form of a sealed text or an indecipherable letter which is understood neither by Derrida nor by anyone else,126 and also a secret shared within a social group, as exemplified by Derrida’s name of E´lie which had been transferred to him without his knowledge from his great-uncle Abraham and his uncle Euge`ne.127 Among explicit examples of theology in the modality of the secret the following are particularly noteworthy. In one passage, Derrida deconstructs the fourfold model of Jewish exegesis: 1. Pshat: literality, 2. R’Emez: allegory, secret, diverted word, 3. Drash: morality, and 4. Soud: profundity, cabbalism, by identifying it with a beehive sponge of secrets.128 Elsewhere, he deconstructs the omnipresence of God by saying that it is neither a transcendent law nor an immanent schechina, but the properly theological hypothesis of a blank sacrifice sending the bidding up to infinity, and also that the secret from which one is excluded is this circulation of God among the un-avowable as he remains un-avowable in himself.129 Another passage deconstructs the Christian notion of confessing oneself to God by identifying it with certain inherited secrets of which one knows nothing but for which one confesses others: for example the familial relation between Esther and the two E´lies.130 In addition to the structural parallels between ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ and ‘Circumfession’ which we have been silently exploiting during the last few pages, the relation between the

Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 52. See pp. 110–11 above. Derrida (1991b); (1993d), }} 48, 58. 127 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 35. The fourfold Jewish exegesis constitutes a tracestructure. It may also be intended to correspond to the Christian fourfold exegesis. 128 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 21. 129 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 30. Schechina is a cosmological principle in the cabbalistic system. Its mention constitutes a rare reference to Jewish Neoplatonism in ‘Circumfession’. 130 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 36. 124 125 126

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paradigms A, B, and C introduced in part II of the earlier essay and the periods 1–59 seems important enough to require a more extended analysis at this point. This analysis will be focused on three primary questions: the relation of the periods to ‘Circumfession’ as a whole, the structures of exemplarity and substitution and of the fourfold place-event, and the relations of prayer and of multiplication of voices to the periods. Although it is easy to collect passages dealing with the relation of the periods (pe´riodes) to ‘Circumfession’ as a whole—they are clearly marked by the recurrence of the number 59 together with a term connoting circularity such as jar, band, pivot, circumference, rotation131—it is more difficult to determine what the passages tell us about that relation. However, the connection between Derrida’s statements that he must learn to ‘read himself from his compulsions’,132 of which there are fifty-nine, and that ‘each one is an Augustinian cogito’133 seems significant. Given the nature of the Augustinian subject as a circular movement to the self (and God), Derrida seems to be proposing a mode of reading the latter which is both circular and numerical and both unique and generic. The circular aspect of the reading seems to be exemplified by Derrida’s account of seeing the word ‘cascade’ for the first time and turning around it in an experience which is like the birth of a love affair and the origin of the earth134—clearly a unique occurrence—and also by his statement that it is enough to pivot the six words: ¸ca n’arrive qu’a` moi (‘It only happens to me’) to have the whole of this ‘Circumfession’135—a

Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 27, 47, 49, 50–1, 53, 58. Derrida also calls them prayers and conjurations in }} 49, 51. 132 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 24 me lire depuis les compulsions. At } 58 Derrida speaks of his ‘repetition compulsion’ (compulsion de re´pe´tition) and therefore links compulsion with the process of reading. 133 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 25. 134 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 50. 135 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 58. Or: it is enough to pivot one word six times. Bennington masks the sense of this passage by translating the French 6 mots with the English ‘5 words’—a change which is of course justifiable in terms of the different syntaxes of the two languages. However, Derrida’s reference to 6 is intended to recall the six words uttered by God ¼ six days of creation in Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis. In this manner, we can understand the event-structure of the ‘Circumfession’ as a deconstruction of the logos-structure of the biblical cosmology. 131

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reference to the general structure of the work. The numerical aspect seems to be illustrated by Derrida’s apparent reference to the yearly and weekly cycles in suggesting that 59 can be understood as 52 þ 7— a further reference to the general structure of ‘Circumfession’136—and also by his statement that he was 59 years old when he experienced the facial paralysis of Lyme’s disease,137 was visiting his bedridden mother in Nice,138 and embarked on the writing of ‘Circumfession’139—clearly another unique occurrence. If Derrida is indeed proposing a mode of reading the Augustinian subject which is both circular and numerical and individual and generic in this fabric of interwoven motifs, it becomes possible to explain a further connection that is implied. This is between the statements that he ‘has to learn to read the “conversion” while his mother is still alive’140— there being only one of these—and that he must learn to ‘read himself from his compulsions’. If our interpretation is plausible, the relation of the periods to ‘Circumfession’ as a whole is reflected in the connection between compulsion, the Augustinian cogito, and conversion which is simultaneously 59-fold and one-fold.141 Now the passage where Conversion is explicitly associated with the facial paralysis shows clearly that we are dealing with both a place and an event in the deconstructive sense of those terms. Derrida describes the visual effect of this paralysis as a dislocation in which one has ‘more places than one should have . . . the topology here both being and not being a figure’ and then goes on to speak of the paralysis as ‘the surprise of an event happening to “myself” who am therefore no longer myself’.142 Given that the relation of the periods to ‘Circumfession’ as a Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 50–1, 53. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 23. Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 27, 29. 139 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 49. 140 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 24 ‘conversion’ . . . il me faut apprendre a` la lire pendant que ma me`re vit encore. 141 It should not be forgotten that both the title of the whole work (circon (!circonfession)) and the subtitle referring to the constituent parts (pe´ri (!59 pe´riodes et pe´riphrases)) exploit the notion of circularity. Circularity is therefore the feature connecting the two levels of structure. 142 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 24 plus de lieux qu’il ne faut . . . la topologie e´tant et ´ n’etant plus ici une figure . . . la surprise d’un e´ve´nement m’arrivant a` ‘moi-meˆme’, qui ne le suis donc plus. 136 137 138

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whole is reflected in the nature of Conversion and therefore constitutes a simultaneously 59-fold and one-fold place or event, Derrida’s later statements to the effect that each of the 59 periods encircles ‘a Nothing in which God reminds Derrida of himself’,143 represents a ‘counterexample’ or ‘counter-truth’ of himself,144 and contains four ‘synchronistic’ or ‘anachronistic’ moments,145 take on a special significance. The structure of exemplarity and substitution which appears here in ‘Circumfession’ parallels the structure of the paradigms in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’.146 In this structure, the exemplary is the ‘X’ which may be postulated as the primary example within a series of related terms, whereas the substitutive is any ‘X’ which may be postulated as any example or counter-example within a series of related terms, the structure being recursive in that the contrast between the exemplary and the substitutive itself can be stated in both exemplary and substitutive terms. The exemplary normally corresponds to the sphere of the transcendent, the logically necessary, and the universal, and Derrida here associates it specifically with the God who knows everything147 or the distinction between mind and body.148 The substitutive normally corresponds to the sphere of the non-transcendent, the logically contingent, and the particular, Derrida associating this specifically with the God who stands for anybody149 or the distinction between himself and his counter-examples or counter-truths.150 The structure of exemplarity and substitution may, in principle, be combined with the structure of the fourfold place-event.151 Here, the ‘X’ Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 51 un Rien ou` Dieu se rappelle a` moi. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 48 contre-ve´rite´s . . . contre-exemplarite´s. 145 Compare Derrida (1991b); (1993d), } 21 synchroniser les quatre temps . . . with } 29 l’anachronisme . . . quatre ´epoques distinctes. Cf. also } 25. 146 Compare the reference to the 59 periods as encircling a Nothing (n. 143) with the three paradigms encircling a Nothing (n. 76). 147 Cf. Derrida’s first quotation from Augustine in }1 reads cur confitemur Deo scienti ? For the topic of divine omniscience cf. Derrida (1991b); (1993d), }} 9, 11, 15, 42. 148 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 48. 149 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }32 150 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }48. Derrida discusses the structure of exemplarity and substitution in several other texts written around the same time. See especially the treatment in the essay ‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)’ [¼ id. (1993e)]. For further discussion see Gersh (2006), 88–92. 151 Or what we have termed the ‘trace-structure’. See the discussion on pp. 103, 106–7, 111–13, 118. 143 144

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which has been postulated as the primary example within a series of related terms may be understood as the neutral term of the fourfold structure, whereas the ‘X’ which has been postulated as any example or counter-example within a series of related terms may be understood as either the negative, or the combined, or the positive term of that structure. When the structure of exemplarity and substitution occurs in its basic form, its combination with the structure of the fourfold place-event in a disjunctive mode is possible, but when the structure of exemplarity and substitution occurs in its recursive form, its combination with the structure of the fourfold place-event in a conjunctive mode is also possible. Derrida organizes much of his ‘Circumfession’ on the basis of these structures. In an important sequence, the front page of a notebook for the Book of E´lie constituting a textual and visual representation of the structure is shown.152 This leads to descriptions of the escarre—a recursive version of the structure in which the emphasis falls upon the static aspect of place153—and of the sponge—another recursive version of the structure in which the emphasis falls upon the dynamic aspect of event.154 Descriptions of the methods of Jewish exegesis constituting a textual form of the structure,155 and of Derrida’s facial paralysis constituting a visual form of the structure,156 then follow. Several later passages in the text can also be associated with this sequence. In one such passage, El Greco’s painting The Burial of Count Orgaz is described and shown157—the visual structure contained there is said to be an anachronism presenting four epochs in one place. In another passage, Derrida’s notebook for the Book of E´lie is described158—the visual and textual structure contained there is said to consist of four columns and of four discursive levels. The reader of ‘Circumfession’ will perceive that the macro-structure of these passages is of the same exemplary-substitutive and fourfold type as the microstructure within each passage.

152 153 154 155 156 157 158

Derrida (1991b); (1993d), 17. Id. (1991b); (1993d), 18. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 20. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 21. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 24. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 29. Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 51.

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The relation of prayer to the periods can be clarified on the basis of several passages.159 In general, Derrida associates prayer with the ethical version of the trace-structure—for example, when he says that writing as such implies asking for pardon for the evil that one has committed160—this trace-structure representing the thread of confession running through ‘Circumfession’ as a whole.161 Prayer in the strict sense of prayer—i.e. as a non-predicative language of address to the Other—is characterized on the one hand by its direction of address and on the other by its semantic content. The former is indicated when Derrida asks pardon from his mother or from God who are capable of mutual substitution,162 the latter when he notes that Bennington could not adequately describe to anyone how or why Derrida prays.163 Prayer in the sense of encomium—i.e. as a mixture of non-predicative language of address to the Other and predicative language of statement about the Other—is sometimes contrasted with prayer in the strict sense. In one passage, Derrida juxtaposes Augustine’s prayer which asks specifically why something is the case with his own prayer which does not even know what its words mean.164 Closely related in linguistic form to prayer is apostrophe. Derrida introduces this at important points in his writing: e.g. after deconstructing the sponge-image in Augustine’s Confessions VII. 7. Here he addresses to Bennington the words ‘Measure the difference’.165

159 At id. (1991b); (1993d), } 49 Derrida describes each period—combining the notions of prayer and circularity—as a ‘prayer-band’ (bande de prie`re). 160 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 9, 46, 56. This sense of prayer is particularly associated with the notion of ‘making the truth’ discussed earlier. See n. 114. 161 Recent interpreters of ‘Circumfession’ have tended to see confession as the primary motif of ‘Circumfession’—see the editors’ remarks in Caputo and Scanlon (2005), 1–15—a tendency reinforced by some of Derrida’s own comments made in Villanova. However, confession is only one thread within the polysemous fabric of ‘Circumfession’ and—outside the context of committed Christian readership— perhaps not the most provocative one from the philosophical viewpoint. 162 Derrida (1991b); (1993d), } 32. 163 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 36. 164 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }11. Encomium is not explicitly discussed in ‘Circumfession’ as it was in ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’. However, the structure of this concept seems to be present also in the later text. 165 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 20 mesure la difference.

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The relation of multiplication of voices to the periods can be clarified on the basis of other passages.166 Sometimes there is a multiplication of voices which might be expressed in the form: ‘Derrida/Augustine’. For example, Augustine’s instruction to the reader of his confessional writing to take any truth which might seem to be suggested by his words rather than the single truth that was consciously expressed in them is quoted at one point. Derrida sees this as a central feature of his important notion of ‘making the truth’.167 Elsewhere, he reads Augustine’s discussion of the origin of evils, and employs the motif of the sponge to interweave the metaphysical structures implied there—of God’s transcendence and immanence and of the soul’s return to God—with his own trace-structure. Derrida describes the Augustinian passage as ‘this sublime chapter’.168 At other times the multiplication of voices might be expressed in the form: ‘Derrida 1/Derrida 2’. The notebooks which had been accumulating in Derrida’s attic—containing iconography, learned and naive notes, dream narratives, philosophical dissertations, and transcriptions on the topic of circumcision169—are quoted throughout his text. Other previous works of Derrida are quoted from time to time: for example, Glas on the topic of circumcision as interpreted by Hegel and Genet, and also on the use of the two columns, the letters Gl, and the figure 7 as a structural selector.170 Bennington’s logocentric Database, by contrast, never quotes the actual writings of Derrida.171

CONCLUSION Derrida’s encounter with Neoplatonism in the specific forms of the structure of Negative Theology and the structure of Conversion 166 Derrida introduces the notion of semantic depth by describing each period as a ‘secret’ at id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 47–8 and as a ‘repetition’ (repetition) at } 58. 167 Id. (1991b); (1993d), } 44. 168 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 20–1 ce chapitre sublime. 169 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 11, 52. 170 Id. (1991b); (1993d), }} 36 (with illustration) and 52. 171 See id. (1991b); (1993d), } 5.

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provides a good example of his reading of the text of philosophy in general. But how does his encounter with Neoplatonism differ from an immanent reading of that philosophy? 1. One of the main tasks in section I of ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ was to explain the distinction between Negative Theology and deconstruction. Derrida here focused particularly on the notion of hyper-essentiality—the being beyond being of pseudo-Dionysius or the being without being of Augustine and Meister Eckhart—and on the notion of presence typical of Negative Theology.172 This distinction was further illuminated by Derrida’s discussion of the first component of paradigm A of Negative Theology—the notion of the Good as ‘beyond being’ in Plato’s Republic—in section II of the same essay. Here, attention was drawn to the fact that all other things derive not only their existence but also their being known from the Good.173 In these passages, Derrida associates Plato—and the Neoplatonists, by implication—with a discursive practice in which certain privileged negative utterances are held to refer to an ‘X’ which both is—albeit in a non-determinate manner—and causes. The treatment of this ‘X’ reflects the preoccupation with ‘onto-theology’ or ‘metaphysics of presence’ which Heidegger’s hermeneutic of being and time had identified as symptomatic of Western philosophy since the end of antiquity. Now, one must concede that Derrida’s historical interpretation is accurate at least in its main tendency. Despite the attempts to deprive it of any determinative or indeed meaningful sense of ‘being’ through negation which are so well known, the X which is the object of the Negative Theologians’ philosophical quest invariably remains a cause of some kind although not necessarily a cause in some specific Aristotelian sense. This is true of the entire tradition from Plotinus to Nicholas of Cusa, and beyond. No belief in ultimate monism, whether Christian or non-Christian, is possible without it.174

172

Coward and Foshay (1992), 77–81/Derrida (1987b), 540–4. Coward and Foshay (1992), 102/Derrida (1987b), 564–5. 174 The arguments of Jean-Luc Marion (for example in Marion (1999)) against Derrida’s position on this question are skilful but not really convincing. For some comments on this question see Gersh (2006), pp. ix–xii. 173

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2. In the introductory section of the present essay, we noted the pervasive occurrence in both Neoplatonism and Derrida of a fundamental dialectical-emanative structure—the ‘trace-structure’ or the ‘fourfold structure’—based on some configuration of positive, combined, negative, and neutral terms. In our main discussions of ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ and ‘Circumfession’, several explicit references to this fundamental structure—for example, in the sequence connecting the escarre to the facial paralysis, and in the descriptions or graphic depictions of The Burial of Count Orgaz and the notebooks for the Book of E´lie—as well as numerous implicit references—for example, in the treatments of the secret and of place, and in the relations between the paradigms A, B, and C of Negative Theology—were identified. Now although Derrida’s references to this structure are here connected primarily with his account of the deconstructive trace, it is obvious that he also understands Negative Theology and Conversion with reference to this structure, the difference between these two applications depending on the semantic content and on the selection or order of the four terms. But more precisely, how does he understand this structure? Derrida’s application of the fourfold structure to Negative Theology and to Conversion seems to be a partly conscious and partly unconscious (quasi-) conceptualization. Although he clearly employs it more consciously in his description of Negative Theology, and in his enactment of the trace with reference to Negative Theology, but less consciously in his description of Conversion, and in his enactment of the trace with reference to Conversion, he actually mentions it more in connection with Conversion.175 That the quasi-conceptualization of this structure is partly unconscious seems to be indicated by Derrida’s reference to his ‘four-stage compulsion’ (compulsion a` quatre temps).176 Despite the undeniable intellectual subtlety of Derrida’s analyses, certain limitations are readily apparent. In particular, although he 175 Of course, he employs the fourfold structure most consciously in his description of the trace. 176 Derrida (1991b); (1993d), } 25. It corresponds to the ‘repetition compulsion and destiny neurosis’ (la compulsion de re´pe´tition et la ne´vrose de destine) of } 58.

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seems to have understood the application to Negative Theology and to Conversion of a static version of the fourfold structure in which the positive, combined, negative, and neutral terms are based on fixed semantic values, he shows little awareness of the importance of applying to Neoplatonic doctrines a dynamic version of that structure in which the various configurations of affirmative and negative semes are based on shifting values. However, the second application is as important as the first and inseparable from it. This is because, when the pairs of semes are logically related to one another as contradictories, the combined term involves a denial of the principle of non-contradiction—a situation which must be remedied by rethinking the dialectical relation between the terms either as a temporal evolution, or as a semantic shift, or as both of these. The result is first, the non-discursive thinking which Neoplatonism applies to the principle of Intellect (nous, intellectus) superior to Soul (psycheˆ, anima) or to the process of intellection (noeˆsis, intellectio) superior to reasoning (dianoia, ratio) within the Soul and secondly, the same non-discursive thinking as representing if not the whole of Negative Theology at least Negative Theology in its highest form and if not the whole of Conversion at least Conversion in its final stage. There are many indications that Derrida does not understand how this dynamic version of the fourfold structure functions within Neoplatonic doctrine. One particularly striking indication is his mistaken idea that Negative Theology differs from the trace in depending on utterances in propositional form and in balancing affirmative and negative utterances—two features implying the static conception177—whereas in reality both Negative Theology and the trace can frequently elude the propositional form of statement and the symmetry of affirmative and negative predication. In conclusion, we can say that Derrida’s application of the fourfold structure to Negative Theology and to Conversion—the two main forms of his so-called ‘compulsion’—is more successful in the former than in the latter case. Negative Theology, although dynamically dialectical on a deeper level, does possess a superficial formalism.

177

See our discussion above on pp. 109–10.

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The developed notion of Conversion, on the other hand, cannot fail to be dynamic. From his public statement a few years after ‘Circumfession’ to the effect that Conversion is a very enigmatic concept whose history remains to be written we can perhaps surmise that he was aware of this situation.178 178

See Derrida (2005c), 46.

Part II Antiquity and Modernity

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4 Derrida between ‘Greek’ and ‘Jew’ Miriam Leonard

Now Hegel’s philosophy is not only a sustained critique of Kant’s thought, but a thought which, when it comes to moral law, at least, puts Kant in the position of the Jew. Not only is Derrida Jewish, but he follows these moments very closely in Hegel’s text, and this situation cannot fail to engage with something too with respect to Heidegger and Levinas. Nothing is symmetrical here, but we must note the fact that Hegel places Kant in the position of the Jew, the better to criticize his thought, and Levinas (with respect to whom Derrida says he never has any objection) puts himself in the position of the Jew to criticize Heidegger’s thought.1

‘What I call “deconstruction”’, affirmed Jacques Derrida in the last interview he gave to Le Monde just a few weeks before he died, ‘even when it is directed against something European, is European, is a product of Europe, a reflection of Europe on itself as an experience of radical otherness. Since the days of the Enlightenment, Europe has been in a permanent state of self-critique, and in this tradition of perfectibility there is a hope for the future.’2 Derrida has repeatedly insisted that his philosophy is essentially related to the geo-political space of Europe, a Europe which has itself always paradoxically been identified in his work with a relationship to antiquity. In Derrida’s writing, Europe’s identity has simultaneously been bound up, on the one hand, with a certain promise of the Enlightenment, and on the 1

Bennington (1991), 293.

2

Derrida (2007), 45.

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other, with a complex of ancient classical and biblical traditions. Of course, this geo-political landscape has been mapped onto more metaphysical questions in Derrida’s work. More often than not, this has taken the form of a questioning of the European roots of philosophy and an affirmation that philosophy has revealed a European identity which is intrinsically fissured. This fissure was given a name by the philosopher Richard Kearney when he asked Derrida to situate himself ‘in relation to the two major intellectual traditions of Western culture—the Hebraic and the Hellenic’.3 He replied: While I consider it essential to think through this copulative synthesis of the Greek and Jew, I consider my own thought, paradoxically as neither Greek, nor Jewish. I often feel that the questions I attempt to formulate on the outskirts of the Greek philosophical tradition have as their ‘other’ the model of the Jew, that is, the Jew-as-other. And yet, the paradox is that I have never actually invoked the Jewish tradition in any ‘rooted’ or direct manner. Though I was born a Jew, I do not work or think within a living Jewish tradition. So that if there is a Judaic dimension to my thinking which may from time to time have spoken in or through me, this has never assumed the form of an explicit fidelity or debt to that culture. In short, the ultimate site (lieu) of my questioning discourse would be neither Hellenic nor Hebraic if such were possible. It would be a non-site beyond both the Jewish influence of my youth and the Greek philosophical heritage during the academic education of the French universities.4

Kearney’s terms are borrowed from Derrida who in his 1967 essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ had already undertaken a long analysis of two of his most important philosophical influences Emmanual Levinas and Martin Heidegger under the sign of what he called the ‘historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism’.5 In this seminal essay Derrida characterized Levinas’s thought as one which sought an exit from the ‘Greek domination of the Same and the One’ in Hebraic alterity. To paraphrase Derrida, by adopting the position of the ‘Jewas-other’, Levinas tries to put problems to philosophy, problems which philosophy cannot resolve. But Derrida argues insistently that Levinas’s attempts to escape the Greek logos are doomed to failure. 3 4 5

Kearney (1984), 107. Derrida in Kearney (1984), 107. Derrida (2001d), 192; (1967d), 228.

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The very language of philosophy compels even Levinas to speak Greek. Ventriloquizing Heidegger, Derrida asserts: ‘the entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. . . . It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium.’6 Greek philosophy has the power to co-opt even its most recalcitrant other. Any open affront to its hegemony is futile. Derrida advocates a more underhand tactic. Describing the challenge posed by Levinas, Derrida himself borrows from a Platonic story. When Levinas calls on us ‘to break with Parmenides’ and his commitment to unity at the expense of plurality, Derrida responds: ‘Levinas exhorts us to a second parricide.’7 Invoking the discussion between ‘the Stranger’ and Parmenides in Plato’s Sophist, Derrida envisions Levinas’s relationship to the Greek logos as a murderous one: The Greek father who still holds us under his sway must be killed; and this is what a Greek—Plato—could never resolve to do. . . . But will a non-Greek ever succeed in doing what a Greek in this case could not do, except by disguising himself as a Greek, by speaking Greek, by feigning to speak Greek in order to get near the king. And since it is a question of killing a speech, will we ever know who is the last victim of this stratagem? Can one feign speaking a language? The Eleactic stranger and the disciple of Parmenides had to give language its due for having vanquished him: shaping non-Being according to Being, he had to ‘say farewell to an unnameable opposite of Being’ and had to confine non-Being to its relativity to Being, that is to the movement of alterity.8

As Michael Naas puts it: ‘Derrida asks, in short, whether one can be welcomed or taken in by the Greek language, by the language of philosophy, without oneself becoming in some sense Greek, without giving oneself over to the Greek terms, concepts and oppositions— for example, the oppositions between inside and out, same and other, master and disciple, the Greek and the Stranger.’9 For Levinas to ‘do violence’ to the Greek philosophy, he must at the very least feign 6 7 8 9

Id. (2001d), 100; (1967d), 120. Id. (2001d), 110; (1967d), 132–3. Id. (2001a), 110; (1967d), 133. Naas (2003), 96.

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Greekness. Derrida reveals how even the status of being a stranger is circumscribed by a Greek conceptual apparatus. Where Levinas sees the otherness as the preserve of the ‘Jew’, for Derrida even ‘otherness’ is Greek. In ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, then, it could be argued that Derrida plays the Heideggerian Greek to Levinas’s Jew. And yet, Derrida’s essay is not so much a refutation of Levinas as a sympathetic act of identification. Levinas, is, after all, the figure with whom Derrida has claimed he never disagrees. The dynamic of complicity and resistance which Derrida describes in Levinas’s ‘second parricide’ could just as well characterize his own work. As Derrida’s answer in the Kearney interview indicates, his own project treads a precarious path between collaboration and dissent. Moreover, despite Derrida’s claims about the ubiquity of the Greek philosophical idiom, others have repeatedly typified his work—his later work, in particular—as an attempt to oppose the ethical thought of Judaism to a Greek metaphysics. Insofar as Derrida’s project has been read as challenge to the hegemony of Western metaphysics, this reading has rested (at least implicitly) on a conflict between Hebraism and Hellenism. If Derrida’s encounter with philosophy has been troped as a struggle between the figures of ‘the Greek’ and ‘the Jew’, such a configuration is not just a result, as Derrida suggests, of his own biography, but is rather the overdetermined product of a much longer historical narrative. This narrative is given a specific genealogy in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. The analysis of Heidegger and Levinas is framed between two powerful quotations, one from Matthew Arnold and one from James Joyce. ‘Hellenism and Hebraism: between these points of influence moves the world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; it ought to be, though it never is, evenly balanced between them,’10 begins the essay. Derrida thus not only situates this twentieth-century conflict in a historical perspective which extends back to the nineteenth century, he also locates it in a cultural context which strays well outside of the traditional habitus of continental philosophy: patrician Victorian England. Moreover, Arnold’s quote in itself assumes the broadest possible of historical and

10

Derrida (2001d), 97; (1967d), 117. Quoted from Arnold (1994), 95.

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cultural scopes. Arnold’s is the grandest of grand narratives, Hellenism and Hebraism ‘move the world’. The conflict between ‘Greek’ and ‘Jew’ is so entrenched a Weltanschauung that it would give Greek metaphysics itself a run for its money. When Derrida closes the essay under the banner of ‘the most Hegelian of modern novelists’, James Joyce, we might appear to be on more familiar ground: ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.’ But as Derrida places this phrase in its context: ‘Women’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew,’ the difference between Greek and Jew becomes as entrenched as the opposition between the sexes. I have argued elsewhere that the decision to discuss the relationship between Heidegger and Levinas under the sign of Arnold’s irenic plea for a ‘balance’ between Hellenism and Hebraism had a certain disingenuousness. The immediate historical context of Levinas’s encounter with Heidegger had transformed Arnold’s willfully metaphorical opposition between ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hebraism’ into the all too concrete reality of the murderous struggle between ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semite’. Derrida’s refuge in the world of abstraction in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ had the effect of dulling the political impact of his analysis of a cultural opposition which, even in Arnold’s time, had a profound ideological dimension. Derrida, in other words, sacrifices the violence of the immediate historical context of Levinas’s dialogue with Heidegger to the metaphysical pretensions of Arnold’s cultural catchphrase. But if Derrida perversely erases the political backdrop to this mid-twentieth-century encounter, he unexpectedly foregrounds it in a conflict between a more unlikely pair who will come to assume the mantle of ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Hellene’. The Greek/Jew opposition which had preoccupied Derrida in his 1967 essay would return as a persistent thematic in 1974 in his extended commentary on Hegel: Glas. Derrida explores how an antithesis between the Greek and the Jew structures Hegel’s account of the family and its role in the development of Spirit. By systematically opposing the Hellenic world view to its Hebraic other, Hegel constructs a vision of world history in which the Jew is repeatedly represented as a stumbling block to be overcome in the relentless march of the (Greek) Spirit. But Derrida sees Hegel’s moral vision coming into conflict with the most powerful ethical thought of its time. In order to establish its hegemony Hegel himself has to overcome the influence of Kant’s

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moral and political thought. Derrida examines how Hegel repeatedly positions Kantian philosophy on the side of Judaism in an attempt to discredit his moral doctrines. In this process Hegel Hebraizes Kant in order to better Hellenize himself. Kant becomes not so much ‘l’Allemand’ as ‘le Juif ’. In this essay I argue that it is this conflict between Hegel and Kant rather than the encounter between Heidegger and Levinas which constitutes Derrida’s most compelling analysis of the Greek/Jew opposition. By showing how this struggle animates the debates between the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment and his most powerful critic, Derrida reveals how this antithesis remains lodged in the philosophical discourse of the West. Moreover, by highlighting its stake in the most pressing ethical and political debates of the Enlightenment, Derrida reveals how the self-identity of European culture is founded on the conflict between the ‘Greek’ and the ‘Jew’. As Derrida’s late work returns obsessively to the question of Europe and its troubled relationship to the legacy of the Enlightenment, this early exploration of the Greek/Jew antithesis seems to haunt his discussions about the role of religion, immigration, democracy, and the new Europe.

HEGEL: BETWEEN SOCRATES AND CHRIST For Hegel, and for Derrida, it all begins with Jesus. ‘No doubt’, Derrida writes in Glas ‘the speculative family achieves its destination only with Christ.’11 But while Derrida claims that he ‘cannot feign to begin with the chronological beginning, pretty much with The Life of Jesus’,12 that is exactly where Hegel and I will begin. For, as Derrida acknowledges, ‘the youthful works on Christianity’ could be read ‘as the teleological performation of the completed system’.13 Hegel’s early writings from the so-called Berne and Frankfurt periods set in

11 13

12 See Leonard (2006). Derrida (1986b), 5; (1974a), 11. Id. (1986b), 21; (1974a), 28.

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place a dialectic between Hellenism and Hebraism which will guide his philosophy of history.14 Although Christ may be the destination of Hegel’s early writings, he arrives at him via a lengthy detour through the world of GraecoRoman antiquity. Hegel’s juvenilia are an extended paean to the Greeks: ‘In everything great, beautiful, noble and free they are so much our superiors that we can hardly make them our examples but must rather look up to them as a different species at whose achievements we can only marvel.’15 Despite their ostensible concern with the rise of Christianity, Hegel’s early writings expose a compulsive interest in paganism. Paradoxically, far from the triumph of Christianity, Hegel’s essays chronicle the unlikely success of a religion which is repeatedly characterized as a decline rather than a progression from its Graeco-Roman counterpart. From ‘The Life of Jesus’ to the ‘Spirit of Christianity’ it is the Greeks who emerge as the real heroes of Hegel’s youthful writings. One Greek, in particular, stands out: Socrates who lived in a republican state where every citizen spoke freely with every other and where a splendid urbanity of intercourse flourished even among the lowest orders, gave people a piece of his mind in the most natural manner imaginable. Without didactic tone, without the appearance of wanting to enlighten, he would start an ordinary conversation, then steer it in the most subtle fashion toward a lesson that taught itself spontaneously.16

Even in his earliest writings, Hegel’s Socrates stands on the threshold of a new conception of reason. As Glenn Most has argued, ‘in the long history of attempts to open the black box, Hegel’s interpretation of the figure of Socrates is perhaps the only one that can be compared to Plato’s’.17 But Hegel’s Socrates draws on a long history of representations of the Athenian sage. For Most, Hegel’s Socrates can only be understood in his difference from the Socrates of the eighteenth century. The Socrates of the Enlightenment had become the embodiment of the Kantian autonomous subject. The Athenian philosopher subjected his interlocutors to the court of reason where all were called upon to give an account of themselves which went beyond the lazy 14

For a fascinating analysis of Hegel’s early writings along complementary lines to Derrida see Hamacher (1998). 15 16 17 Hegel (1984), 153. Ibid. 59. Most (2007), 2.

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dictates of public opinion and superstition. Socrates in the age of reason was the principled self-governing individual who stood bravely against both Church and State. Hegel’s Socrates is a different sort of individual. His teachings are still seen as ‘enlightenment’ but this is enlightenment by stealth. Socrates’ lesson needs no court of reason, rather it is ‘a lesson that taught itself spontaneously’. Already in this early formulation, Hegel’s Socrates has taken on the attributes of his later incarnation in the History of Philosophy: Consciousness had reached this point in Greece, when in Athens the great form of Socrates, in whom subjectivity of thought was brought to consciousness in a more definite and more thorough manner, now appeared.18

Socrates’ ‘subjectivity of thought’ stands in opposition to the universality of Enlightenment reason. Socrates may have introduced the ‘infinitely important element of leading the truth of the objective back to the thought of the subject’,19 but his trajectory should not be confused with simple individualism. Indeed, one of the most striking elements of Hegel’s characterization of Socrates is that he is deeply embedded in the social fabric. His method is represented as a reflection of the prevailing social order. Socrates’ dialectics are, for Hegel, an expression of republicanism. Enlightenment thinkers had been prone to distance Socrates from the oppressive society that surrounded him, to see him in a sense as an enlightened martyr of an unenlightened age. Hegel, on the other hand, represents Socrates as an extension of the existing civic structures. As he puts it in the History of Philosophy, Socrates ‘did not grow like a mushroom out of the earth . . . he stands in continuity with his time’.20 Hegel’s journey with Socrates in his career is a journey towards the formulation of his own philosophy. Socrates is a constant companion from his fragmentary juvenilia to his posthumously published lecture notes. But despite the continuities in Hegel’s depiction of the Athenian, these early preoccupations with the philosopher should be examined against the background of his youthful explorations of politics and religion. The specificity of Socrates’ dual identity in

18

Hegel (1974), 384.

19

Ibid. 386.

20

Ibid. 384.

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Hegel as the originator of ‘the subjectivity of thought’ and the embodiment of harmony between individual and state has wider resonance in Hegel’s writings from the Berne and Frankfurt periods. Hegel’s Socrates is fully implicated in his meditations on the shortcomings of Christianity and the ‘beautiful totality’ of the Greek state. The immediate context of this depiction of Socrates as the happy republican conversationalist pits the Greek ideal against the cacophonous dystopia of the synagogue. The passage quoted above continues: The Jews on the other hand, in the tradition of their forefathers, were long accustomed to being harangued in a far cruder fashion by their national poets. The synagogues had accustomed their ears to direct instruction and moral sermonizing, and the squabbles between scriptural authorities and the Pharisees had inured them to a much coarser mode of refuting one’s opponents. Hence to their ears a harangue that began ‘You serpents and breed of vipers,’ delivered even by someone who wasn’t a Pharisee or Sadducee, sounded less harsh than it would have done to Greek ears.21

The ‘splendid urbanity’ of democracy is opposed to the ‘traditions of the forefathers’ as free speech is contrasted to ‘crude harangue’. Just as Socratic dialectics are openly assimilated to a republican politics, Jewish sermonizing is implicitly equated with despotism. The reptilian violence of Jewish persuasion could not be further from the benign surreptitiousness of Socratic instruction. But Hegel’s meditations on Socrates and the rabbis soon give way to the more familiar dyad of Socrates and Christ. Here Hegel uses not Christ himself but his followers to extend the theme of the radical disparity between Judaeo-Christian and ancient Greek modes of sociality: Christ had twelve apostles, and this number stayed the same despite the fact that the number of his disciples was far larger. And the apostles alone enjoyed his intimate acquaintance, divesting themselves of all other ties in favor of his companionship and instruction, striving to become as totally like him as possible, and seeking to gain, by virtue of his teaching and living example, eventual possession of his spirit. How narrow-mindedly Jewish, how utterly worldly were their initial expectations, their hopes, their ideas. How slow they were to lift their gaze and their hearts from a Jewish messiah 21

Id. (1984), 59–60.

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who would found an empire complete with generals and assorted high officials. How hard they found it to rise above the selfishness that always thinks of ‘me’ first, and to enlarge their perspective to encompass the ambition of becoming mere fellow citizens of the Kingdom of God.22

In Hegel’s denunciation of Christ’s relationship to the apostles he draws on many of the established tropes of the Enlightenment representation of Judaism: ‘How narrow-mindedly Jewish, how utterly worldly . . . ’ The condemnation of the exclusionary nature of Judaism is here allied to a critique of its materialist aspirations. In line with Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and Kant, Hegel represents Judaism as a polity, ‘an empire complete with generals and assorted high officials’. But unlike Kant, at this stage in his career, Hegel stresses the profound continuity between Judaism and Christianity. Christ is a ‘Jewish messiah’ with a quintessentially Jewish ‘selfishness’, and his disciples share the Jewish predisposition to ‘always think of me first’. Hegel’s Judaism may be a politics, but it is a politics which cannot see beyond the individual to his ‘fellow citizens under god’. Jewish (and Christian politics) are no rival to their Greek counterpart. It seems an irony that it is Socrates whom Hegel elects as the prototype of the happy civility of the classical polis: Socrates, on the other hand, had disciples of all sorts—or rather he had none at all. He was merely a teacher and a master, just as every individual who distinguishes himself by means of exemplary integrity and superior reason is a teacher for all. While he was bent on instruction, on enlightening and enlivening the people regarding matters that ought to awaken their most intense interest, one did not hear him speak ex cathedra or preach from a mountain top—indeed, how could it ever have occurred to him to preach in Greece?23

Socrates’ pedagogy is the pedagogy of the Republic. Hegel contrasts the sermonizing of Christ and the rabbis to the gentle enlightenment of the Athenian sage. Greece with her innate predisposition to freedom would not tolerate the condescension of a preacher. ‘Among the Greeks’, Hegel puts it simply, ‘he would have been an object of laughter.’24 Socrates may have set himself up as an opponent of the democratic state, but the method of his instruction could not 22

Hegel (1974), 61–2.

23

Ibid. 62.

24

Ibid. 63.

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have been more in tune with its fundamental principles. Hegel’s Socrates is a profound egalitarian. In Hegel’s so-called ‘Berne Fragments’ we see the genesis of his complex relationship to Socrates, to Moses, and to Christ. Hegel’s early theological writings repeatedly return him to the conflicted intersection of the Graeco-Roman world and the development of Judaeo-Christianity. Throughout this period, Hegel seems to be involved in a precarious balancing act between the intellectual precepts of the Enlightenment and the formulation of its critique. In his contrast with Christ, Socrates still seems to possess all the attributes of the Kantian autonomous subject. Socrates’ independent search for reason contrasts with the depiction of Christianity as a series of moral strictures imposed from the outside. On the other hand, it is the very ‘subjectivity’ of Socratic thought which directs it away from the Enlightenment’s relentless appeal to universality. By leading the thought of the subject back to the self, Hegel’s Socrates liberates reason from the oppressive externalism of the categorical imperative. Socrates, to use Hegel’s vocabulary, opposed ‘positivity’. It is in his essay ‘The Positivity of Christianity’ that Hegel sought to answer the question of why Christianity had encouraged its followers to be guided by external authority rather than the exercise of reason. Like Kant, Hegel wanted to strip religion bare of all its institutional trappings, its myth, ritual, and ceremony, and return it to its state of nature. In analysing the genesis of religion’s enslavement to ‘statutory laws’, Hegel like Kant, is driven inexorably to Judaism. Since Judaism for Hegel, is the religion of pure positivity: The Jews were a people who derived their legislation from the supreme wisdom on high and whose spirit was now [in the time of Jesus] overwhelmed by a burden of statutory commands which pedantically prescribed a rule for every casual action of daily life and gave the whole people the look of a monastic order. As a result of this system, the holiest of things, namely the service of God and virtue, was ordered and compressed in dead formulas, and nothing save pride in this slavish obedience to laws not laid down by themselves was left to the Jewish spirit.25

25

Ibid. 68.

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The moribund religion of the Jews is characterized by its legalism. The spirit of Judaism was being crushed beneath the weight of the law. The Jews’ complicity with an unquestioned adherence to the dictates of external authority condemned them to slavery. But for Hegel, Judaism had already reached the moment of its own exhaustion. An incipient current within Judaism could already glimpse a beyond: In this miserable situation there must have been Jews of a better heart and head who could not renounce or deny their feelings of selfhood or stoop to become lifeless machines, there must have been aroused in them the need for nobler gratification than that of priding themselves on this mechanical slavery, the need for a freer activity than an existence with no self-consciousness, than a life spent in monkish preoccupation with petty, mechanical, spiritless, and trivial usages. Acquaintance with foreign nations introduced some of them to the finer blossomings of the human spirit.26

Some Jews, then, Hegel surmises, must have been able to rouse themselves from this mechanistic existence. But such an awakening to self-consciousness was, of course, not self-generated. Jesus, who was concerned till manhood with his own personal development, was free from the contagious sickness of his age and his people; free from the inhibited inertia which expends its one activity on the common needs and the conveniences of life. . . . He undertook to raise religion and virtue to morality and restore to morality the freedom which is its essence.27

Jesus has to turn his back on the sickness of his people to reach such a moment of self-realization. It is qua Greek that he comes to understand the ‘essence’ of religion. Ironically it is Jesus’ individualism which saves him from the collective contagion of his people. Like Socrates, Jesus sees the care of the self, the ‘subjectivity of thought’, as the root to his own enlightenment, but unlike Socrates, Jesus must conduct this self-scrutiny in absolute isolation from his own community. In his bid to rid himself of the corrupting ‘positivity’ of Judaism, Jesus’ moral teachings must take their inspiration from paganism. For if Judaism represents the religion of pure positivity, classical paganism provides its most potent antidote: 26

Hegel (1948), 69.

27

Ibid.

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Greek and Roman religion was a religion for free peoples only . . . As free men the Greeks and Romans obeyed laws laid down by themselves, obeyed men whom they themselves appointed to office, waged wars on which they had themselves decided, gave their property, exhausted their passions, and sacrificed their lives by thousands for an end which was their own. They neither learned nor taught [a moral system] but evinced by their actions the moral maxims which they call their very own. In public as in private and domestic life, every individual was a free man, one who lived by his own laws.28

As Luka´cs puts it, ‘Hegel’s central ideological problem is . . . what he calls subjectivity in contrast to positivity. . . . The freedom and independence of the people is the source of the non-positive, nonfetishized, non-objective character of classical religion.’29 Jesus achieves his moment of self-consciousness by removing himself from the Jewish community and turning his thoughts towards himself. But what Jesus finds when he begins to contemplate himself turns out already to have been there in the pagan culture which surrounded him. Socrates’ programme of internalization far from turning its back on the wider community is actually fully in tune with the instinctive ‘subjectivity’ of Greek and Roman thought. When Jesus turns himself inwards he discovers the Greek that he already was. It is by identifying himself as a Greek and repudiating his identity as a Jew that Jesus could become a ‘teacher for a purely moral religion, not a positive one’.30 Hegel’s initial strategy, then, is to make of Judaism the repository of positivity in order to absolve Christ of this charge. If Christianity retains the burden of positivity it is because Jesus’ followers were not as successful in overcoming their Judaism as he was: ‘how narrowmindedly Jewish . . . ’ But as the essay develops, Hegel renounces this position and actually locates the moment of Christianity’s turn to positivity in Jesus’ own lifetime. Despite his early promise, Hegel argues that Christ increasingly corrupted his rational moral religion by giving it an authoritative form. It was Jesus’ decision to reject the Socratic model and to teach ex cathedra which divested Christianity of its moral core and eradicated its predisposition to freedom. Christ’s intention may have been to liberate monotheism from its

28

Ibid. 154.

29

Luka´cs (1975), 47, 48.

30

Hegel (1948), 71.

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Jewish externality, but through his teaching he unwittingly reintroduces into Christianity the ills of its Judaic predecessor. As Yovel phrases it: ‘At this point the young Hegel demonstrates the quasidialectical pattern that was to characterize his future writings— namely the opposition between content and form, between an essence and its actual shaping. Here we observe the ironic opposition between Jesus’ intention and what it had produced. Such incongruity of intention and meaning was typical of what the mature Hegel saw in the pattern of history.’31 In Greek religion, or in any other whose underlying principle is a pure morality, the moral commands of reason, which are subjective, were not treated or set up as objective rules with which the understanding deals. But the Christian religion has taken the subjective element in reason and set it up as a rule as if it were something objective.32

Christianity, then, in Hegel’s Positivity, has the content of Hellenism but the form of Judaism. In this respect, Christianity shares the same shortcomings as Kantianism: ‘Reason sets up moral, necessary, and universally valid laws; Kant calls these objective . . . Now the problem is to make these laws subjective.’33 For Hegel to move beyond Kant he had first to move beyond positivity. ‘Kantianism’, as Derrida has provocatively argued, ‘is, in this respect, structurally a Judaism.’34 As Derrida speculates elsewhere, paraphrasing the Jewish Kantian Hermann Cohen: ‘Who is Kant? He is the holiest saint of the German spirit, the deepest innermost inner sanctum of the German spirit, but he is also the one who represents the innermost affinity with Judaism.’35 In stripping Christianity of its formal and abstract morality, Hegel simultaneously expels the spectre of Judaism from world history and the spectre of Kant from his moral philosophy. Christ’s return to Socrates depends on Hegel exiling the figure whom Derrida calls the ‘German Moses’ from his thought. For Christianity to realize its Hellenism, Hegel must first emancipate himself from the Jewish Kant. 31

32 33 Yovel (1998), 29. Hegel (1948), 143. Ibid. 143–4. Derrida (1986b) 34; (1974a), 42. On which see Critchley (1998), 202, 212–14. 35 Derrida (1991d), 58. Derrida responds to the irony of Kant’s Judaism by arguing somewhat unconvincingly that ‘the fact that the Anthropology from a Practical Point of View includes at least one properly anti-Semitic note (literally antiPalestinian) is not incompatible with Kant’s quasi-Judaism’. Derrida (1991d), 69. 34

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THE SPIRIT OF HELLENISM AND THE JEW Hegel’s ‘Spirit of Christianity and its Fate’ enacts precisely such an exorcism. In this essay, as Derrida asserts, ‘the opposition between the Greek and the Jew is pursued precisely regarding the family’.36 Hegel launches his narrative with the story of Noah and the flood. For Derrida this first natural cataclysm is a family drama. The flood represents the loss of the state of nature: ‘No longer his mother, nature has taken back or poisoned all the resources of protective belief . . . The mother turns against man, dismantles herself, causes havoc.’37 The Jews’ only response to the adversity of the natural world is to cultivate a violent intellectualism: ‘In order to control maternal nature’s hostility in her unleashed waters’, Derrida writes ‘she had to be thought, conceived, grasped. Being thought is being controlled. The concept marks the interruption of the first state of love.’38 In an unexpected reversal of a Levinas-inspired Greek/Jew opposition, it is the Jew and not the Greek who turns out to represent the thought of the logos: ‘Noah is the concept. By a bad wordplay, Jewish-Greek, a` la Joyce, and mixing in a little Gallicism (Noe´), one would say noesis.’39 Noah’s reaction to the flood, for Hegel, becomes a parable of the Enlightenment notion of reason and the Kantian conception of ethics. Man’s submission to a conceptual ideal (God) is reproduced in his deferral of ethical responsibility to a regime of law and abstract command. Where Noah sees intellectual mastery as the safeguard against his mother’s hostility, Nimrod resorts to more conventional means. Nimrod erects ‘a warlike tower’ to protect his people from the aggressions of nature: ‘he unleashes in his turn a tyrannical violence, distrust, war; he founds a society united by force, and the law of the living is the law of the strongest.’40 Hegel thus represents the advent of Judaism simultaneously as a violent break with the natural order, and a refuge in domination both as a mode of intellectual endeavour and as a practice of sociality. ‘To this warlike, rigid avenging apotropaic, 36 38 40

Derrida (1986b), 40; (1974a), 49. Id. (1986b), 38; (1974a), 47. Id. (1986b), 39; (1974a), 48.

37

39

Id. (1986b), 37; (1974a), 46. Id. (1986b), 38; (1974a), 47.

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Hegel already opposes the Greek response to the flood: not a forced peace but a peace of harmonious friendship, reconciliation. And this peace is not imposed by a leader, but by a happy couple.’41 The happy and beautiful couple that Hegel holds up as an exemplum are Deucalion and Pyrrha. Confronted with the same disaster, this pair see it as their task to reconcile man with his world, to renew the broken ties between the mother and her son. Deucalion and Pyrrha, as Hegel reminds us, ‘made a peace of love’ and ‘were the progenitors of more beautiful peoples, and made their age the mother of a newborn natural life which maintained its bloom of youth’.42 The Greek couple not only restore the bonds of the family, they inscribe this family reconciliation in the very fabric of their people. The ‘peace of love’ is not just a phenomenon of post-diluvian calamity, it is the guiding principle of their race, the life blood and vitality of the happy Greeks. ‘As interpreted by Hegel, the Greek flood has more affinity than the Jew with the spirit of Christinity,’ Derrida concludes, ‘reconciliation, love, and the founding of the family.’43 Deucalion and Pyrrha are an odd pairing for Noah and Nimrod. Hegel opposes the familial couple to two figures who are not a couple at all. If the Greek family has more in common with its Christian counterpart, it is because Hegel grafts the familial model onto the very narrative of the survival of the Greek people. Deucalion and Pyrrha are a happy couple, but they are also the progenitors of their race. They are mother and father writ large. Nimrod, on the other hand, is all patriarch and no father. He is the monarch, but he is a ruler who defines his political power against the family. Hegel’s domineering Jews’ struggle is animated by a struggle within the family. They opposite political might to the harmony of familial love. The dice are loaded. The Jews are leaders and, thus, cannot be family men; the Greeks are good leaders by virtue of their familial inclination. In Hegel’s analysis of the family the political dimension is key. And if the Jews fail as family, their failure in the political sphere is all the more complete. As Derrida remarks: ‘The Jew cannot become, as such a citizen: he cannot have any true laws of state.’44 ‘Whence’, Derrida asks, ‘the 41 43

Id. (1986b), 39; (1974a), 48. Derrida (1986b), 40; (1974a), 49.

42 44

Hegel (1948), 184–5. Id. (1986b), 51; (1974a), 61.

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political accusation hurled at the Jews?’45 At this point in the essay Hegel enters a dialogue with a prominent proponent of Jewish emancipation, Moses Mendelssohn, himself an associate of Kant’s. Mendelssohn had written the most influential work of Jewish political philosophy since Spinoza. In his masterwork entitled Jerusalem, Mendelssohn had argued that the ancient Jewish city could provide a model for an enlightened polity. In a complex argument which turned many of the prejudices of the Enlightenment representation of Judaism on its head, Mendelssohn makes the argument that Judaism should be considered not as a revealed religion but rather as a revealed legislation. Arguing that Judaism does not command certain beliefs but certain moral actions, Mendelssohn made Judaism a powerful political force. It was an extremely partial reading of Mendelssohn which lies behind Kant’s famous proclamation that ‘Judaism is not really a religion at all.’ ‘The Jewish faith’, he argues, ‘was, in its original form, a collection of mere statutory laws upon which was established a political organization. . . . That this political organization has a theocracy as its basis . . . and that therefore the name of God, who after all is here merely an earthly regent making absolutely no claims upon, and no appeals to, conscience, is respected— this does not make it a religious organization.’46 To Kant the external character of Jewish moral commandments bars Judaism from the realm of ethics. Judaism is not a religion but a system of legislation. And since moral actions are performed in accord with the external demands of the law rather than through internal ‘appeals to conscience’ there is, in Judaism, no recourse to the all important autonomy of practical reason. Kant ‘unmasked the essence of Judaism as a form of politics’.47 But there is, of course, an irony in Kant’s vision of Judaism as a practice of the political. For it was political subjectivity which was precisely what the Jews of Kant’s own day were excluded from. It was the Jews (in)capacity for citizenship which was at stake in the Enlightenment’s ‘Jewish Question’. Hegel shares Kant’s scepticism about the ethical content of Judaism. But for Hegel, if Judaism was found lacking with respect to morality this was a fortiori true in respect to politics. Hegel precisely condemns Judaism for its inability to progress from a moral 45 47

Id. (1986b), 51; (1974a), 61. Mack (2003), 23.

46

Kant (1998), 130.

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order to a civic order. And for Hegel, it is Judaism’s Kantianism, as it were, its inability to internalize an ethical code, which condemns it to its political redundancy. As Derrida phrases it: ‘The Jews have no political obligation because they have no concept of freedom and of political rationality.’48 But Hegel’s condemnation of the Jews’ inability to convert a moral code in to an effective practice of the political is paradoxically constructed on an analogy with the Greeks. Discussing the Jewish restrictions on property rights, Hegel finds an echo of the laws established by Solon in Athens and Lycurgus in Sparta. Both Greeks had sought, like the Jews, ‘to put an end to the inequality of riches’:49 In order to avert from their states the danger threatening to freedom from the inequality of wealth, Solon and Lycurgus restricted property rights in numerous ways and set barriers to freedom of choice which might have led to unequal wealth.50

But ‘once more’, Derrida sighs, ‘the analogy between Greek and Jew is limited to appearance’.51 The appearance in the letter conceals a profound disparity in ‘spirit’. The two laws may at first sight seem to signal a common concern for equality, a common desire to preserve freedom through an attempt to ‘neutralize’ disparity. ‘But the same literality will have, according to Hegel, a completely different spirit in the Greeks: and first of all a spirit and nothing else, an inner sense animating the law of the inside.’52 Once more, it is the Jews’ ‘positivity’, their exteriority which prevents them from accessing real ethical (and political) consciousness. Where the Jews have the letter, the Greeks have the spirit, where the Jews have commandments, the Greeks have freedom: In the Greek republics the source of these laws lay in the fact that, owing to the inequality which would otherwise have arisen, the freedom of the impoverished might have been jeopardized and they might have fallen into political annihilation; among the Jews, in the fact that they had no freedom and no rights, since they held their possessions only on loan and 48 50 52

49 Derrida (1986b), 52; (1974a), 62. Id. (1986b), 52; (1974a), 62. 51 Hegel (1948), 197. Derrida (1986b), 52; (1974a), 62. Id. (1986b), 53; (1974a), 63.

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not as property, since as citizens they were all nothing. The Greeks were to be equal because all were free, self-subsistent; the Jews equal because all were incapable of self-subsistence.53

The Jews command equality because they are all equally impoverished with respect to their land. Quoting Leviticus and the practice of the ‘Jubilee’ to support him, Hegel reveals how the Jews do not actually own their land, they have it merely as a loan from their God. As such, they have no concept of family property. ‘The Greek process founds right and politics, constitutes family subjects as citizens. The Jewish process, on the contrary scoffs at right and politics.’54 The Jews are stuck in the same double bind which has marred their existence since Noah. They are incapable of being citizens because they are incapable of being a family, incapable of being a family because they lack the political rights of the citizen. In the end, for Hegel, the Jews cannot be citizens because they are not Greeks. The commands of Moses may mirror the laws of Solon and Lycurgus but the essence of politics was foreign to the Jews; it was inextricably linked to the Greek experience. In denying a concept of the political to the Jews, Hegel again founds his difference from Kant on a distinction between Greeks and Jews. Kant’s (albeit highly unfavourable) characterization of Judaism as politics accords the Jews a degree of consciousness which Hegel reserves exclusively for the Greeks. If the connection to the contemporary situation of the Jews remains implicit in Kant’s discussion of Judaism in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, in Hegel’s ‘Spirit of Christianity’ it becomes increasingly explicit: The subsequent circumstances of the Jewish people up to the mean, abject, wretched circumstances in which they still are today, have all of them been simply consequences and elaborations of their original fate. By this fate—an infinite power which they set over against themselves and could never conquer—they have been maltreated and will be continually maltreated until they appease it by the spirit of beauty and so annul it by reconciliation.55

53 55

Hegel (1948), 198. Hegel (1948), 199–200.

54

Derrida (1986b), 52; (1974a), 62–3.

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For Hegel, the model of citizenship to emerge from the political battles of the late eighteenth century may have been unique to modernity but it was a model that was forged in a sustained dialogue with the polities of democratic Athens and republican Rome. In debating the extension of citizen rights to the Jews, the revolutionaries were confronted with the question of how much like a Greek (or a Roman) a Jew can be. Hegel’s answer is resolute: the Greek and the Jew are incommensurable. In his portrayal of ‘the subsequent circumstances of the Jewish people’, Hegel at one and the same time opens the door to salvation and simultaneously shuts it. He offers the promise of ‘reconciliation’, but it is a ‘reconciliation’ which can only be achieved through complete self-denial. Ultimately, the Jews will never be able to survive the dialectic. In their opposition to the Greeks they cannot hope for recuperation in the synthesis. For Hegel defines Judaism as precisely incapable of synthesizing: ‘Moses’ failure has not reached the Jews. Judaism is constituted starting from it, as the impossibility of Moses to raise his people, to educate and relieve (erheben and aufheben) his people.’ As Derrida surmises, ‘the Jew is incapable of this in his family, his politics, his religion, his rhetoric. If he became capable of it, he would no longer be Jewish. When he will become capable of it, he will have become Christian.’56 Derrida shows how Christianity, then, is not the fusion between the Hebraic and the Hellenic. Christianity’s triumph is to liberate itself of Judaism by revealing itself as always already Greek. Just as Deucalion and Pyrrha discover in their reaction to the flood that they were already Christians, Christ realizes that he is still a Greek. The horizon of the present makes itself felt in Hegel’s essay written only five years after the debates in Assemble´e Ge´ne´rale about the extension of citizen rights to the Jews. Despite the revolutionaries’ decision to grant equal rights to the Jews, for Hegel, citizenship remains a Christian privilege. To be citizen is to be a Christian by virtue of having been Greek. To conclude with Derrida, citizenship ‘was first a Greek event from which Christianity would have developed an outer graft’.57

56

Derrida (1986b), 54; (1974a), 65.

57

Id. (1986b), 56; (1974a), 67.

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ATHENS, ROME, JERUSALEM, AND THE NEW EUROPE Difficult to say ‘Europe’ without connoting: Athens–Jerusalem– Rome–Byzantium.58 (Jacques Derrida)

In the same interview with Richard Kearney with which I began this essay, Derrida is pressed to comment on the ‘radical alterity’ of Judaeo-Christianity from the Graeco-Roman civilization which preceded it: ‘Judeo-Christianity’, he replies, ‘is an extremely complex entity which, in large part, only constituted itself qua Judeo-Christianity by its assimilation into the schemas of Greek philosophy. Hence what we know as Christian and Jewish philosophy today is a cultural ensemble which has already been largely “Hellenized”.’59 Despite being placed in the position of the Jew by Hegel, Kant’s Judaism is already Hellenized. Hegel can only redeem Christianity from Kant’s Judaism in a philosophical language which is borrowed from the Greeks. But the alternative perspective is perhaps even more pertinent: Hegel can only play the Greek to Kant’s Jew in a context which is thoroughly Christianized. The philhellenic effusions of German philosophy, far from marking a radical break with Christianity, emerged from a context in which Christianity was a given. Derrida explores this question through another reading of Kant ‘Faith and Knowledge’—a different formulation, perhaps, of the Greek/Jew opposition. The subtitle of this essay, ‘Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, with its explicit homage to Kant’s great work on religion, seeks to explode a simple dichotomy between the Enlightenment and the concept of ‘Religion’. In his exploration of the so-called ‘return of religions’ in contemporary society, Derrida investigates the continued legacy of Kant’s classic reconciliation of reason and religion. ‘What would a book be like today’, Derrida asks, ‘which, like Kant’s, is entitled, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone?’60 But as Derrida reveals, any close reading of 58 60

Id. (2002b), 45; (2000c), 13. Derrida (2002b), 48; (2000c), 17.

59

Derrida in Kearney (1987), 116.

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Kant makes such a project appear perilous in the extreme. For this project would soon be confronted with what Derrida calls the ‘historicity’ of both concepts: ‘reason’ and ‘religion’, the concepts which Kant attempts to bring together. For in examining the possibility of a rational religion, Kant defines religion in a way that excludes any belief system which doesn’t conform to his vision of a ‘reflecting faith’. ‘Are we to measure without flinching the implications and consequences of the Kantian thesis?’ asks Derrida: The latter seems strong, simple and dizzying: the Christian religion would be the only truly ‘moral’ religion; a mission would thus be reserved exclusively for it and for it alone: that of liberating a ‘reflecting faith’. It necessarily follows therefore that pure morality and Christianity are indissociable in their essence and in their concept. If there is no Christianity without pure morality, it is because Christian revelation teaches us something essential about the very idea of morality. From this it follows that the idea of a morality that is pure but non-Christian would be absurd; it would exceed both understanding and reason, it would be a contradiction in terms. The unconditional universality of the categorical imperative is evangelical. The moral law inscribes itself at the bottom of our hearts like a memory of the Passion. When it addresses us, it either speaks the idiom of the Christian—or is silent.61

Where Hegel makes the categorical imperative a constitutive feature of Kant’s Judaism, Kant himself could not be more explicit about its allegiance to Christianity. If there is a religion which could be conceived within the limits of reason, Kant is emphatic that it would have to be a Christian one. Judaism, then, is not just ‘not a religion at all’, incapable as it is of an access to ‘pure morality’, it also ‘exceeds both understanding and reason’. Kant’s Judaism turns out to have no more substance to it than Arnold’s Hebraism. Derrida, then, seems to be repeating the same refuge in abstraction which had marked his earlier exploration of the Greek/Jew opposition in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. By making Kant the unlikely representative of the ‘le Juif ’ in the ideologically charged battles over the ownership of the Enlightenment, Derrida seems to be shortchanging the ‘real’ Jews who were fighting for emancipation at this time. What is more,

61

Id. (2002b), 50; (2000c), 21.

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Derrida puts into question the very concept which would and did enable the Jews to have a voice in the debate. For Derrida reveals not only the unashamedly Christian idiom of Kant’s Aufkla¨rung, he uncovers the inescapable Christian semantics of the very notion of tolerance: For the concept of tolerance, stricto sensu, belongs first of all to a sort of Christian domesticity. It is literally, I mean behind this name, a secret of the Christian community. It was printed, emitted, transmitted and circulated in the name of the Christian faith and would hardly be without relation to the rise, it to too Christian, of what Kant calls ‘reflecting faith’—and of pure morality as that which is distinctively Christian. The lesson of tolerance was first of all an exemplary lesson that the Christian deemed himself alone capable of giving to the world, even if he had to learn it himself. In this respect the French Enlightenment, les Lumie`res, was no less essentially Christian than the Aufkla¨rung.62

It was in the name of tolerance that the Revolutionaries in France would successfully advocate the extension of citizen rights to the Jews. But the admission of Jews into civil society was enacted within in a political discourse which was marked on the one hand by the language of the Graeco-Roman Republic and on the other by the idiom of Christianity. The ‘essentially’ Christian identity of the ‘les lumie`res’ in France, the ‘Aufkla¨rung’ in Germany, was bolstered by a Hellenic vocabulary which had already learnt to speak the New Testament dialect: a Christianity already Hellenized and a Hellenism profoundly Christianized. The ‘theologico-political graft between the Greek and the Christian worlds’, Derrida writes in The Politics of Friendship, has dominated the ‘construction of models and the political discourse of modern Europe’.63 ‘Greco-Christian, Pagano-Christian Europe’64 voices its most cherished ideals in a hybrid tongue which brings together Athens and Rome at the expense of Jerusalem. If Emmanual Levinas once despaired, ‘there is nothing to be done, philosophy speaks Greek’,65 Derrida affirms, ‘We are already speaking Latin.’66 Explicitly referencing his earlier comments on the thesis of Kant he explains the link between the universalizing aspirations of 62 64 66

Id. (2002b), 59; (2000c), 36. Id. (2002b), 51; (2000c), 22. Derrida (2002b), 64; (2000c), 47.

63 65

Id. (1997c), 233. Levinas (1988), 85.

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the categorical imperative and the global reach of Christian Latinity: ‘By which should be understood, beyond a question of “language and culture”, the strange phenomenon of Latinity and of its globalization.’ ‘Globalatinization’ he later glosses: (essentially Christian to be sure): this word names a unique event to which a meta-language seems incapable of acceding, although such a language remains, all the same, of the greatest necessity here. For at the same time that we no longer perceive its limits, we know that such a globalization is finite and only projected. What is involved here is a Latinization and, rather than a globality, a globalization that is running out of breath, however irresistible and imperial it still may be.67

‘We are not far from Rome, but are no longer in Rome,’68 Derrida concludes. Even if Kant can, in the end, only speak Latin perhaps even his role as a figurative Jew reveals the self-critical promise of the Enlightenment and its vision of a Europe to come: ‘It is necessary to make ourselves the guardians of an idea of Europe, of a difference of Europe, but of a Europe that consists precisely in not closing itself off in its own identity and in advancing itself in an exemplary way toward what it is not, toward the other heading or the heading of the other, indeed—and this perhaps something else altogether— toward the other of the heading, which would be the beyond of this modern tradition, another border structure, another shore.’69 If it is impossible to name Europe without speaking in Latin, without acknowledging a Graeco-Romano-Christian heritage allied to the imperial pursuit of capital, it might also be possible, Derrida hopes, to dream of l’autre cap, another heading, ‘not far from Rome’ but ‘no longer Rome’. ‘This Mediterranean shore also interest me—coming as I do from the other shore, if not from the other heading.’70 Standing on the other side of the Mediterranean, perhaps Derrida can imagine a Europe which would find place not just for Athens and Rome but for Jerusalem and Byzantium too.

67 69

Id. (2002b), 67; (2000c), 48. Id. (1992c), 29; (1991e), 33.

68 70

Id. (2002b), 44; (2000c), 12. Id. (1992c), 35; (1991), 38.

5 Derrida’s Impression of Gradiva Archive Fever and Antiquity Daniel Orrells

It is a triumph of wit to be able to represent . . . delusion and truth in the same expression. (Freud)

After the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the middle of the eighteenth century, archaeology (classical and otherwise) became concretized as a professional academic discipline, whose scientific status evolved through the nineteenth century as methods in excavation, recording, and cataloguing improved. Sigmund Freud was developing his theories of psychoanalysis at a historical moment when classical archaeology had asserted a confident self-image both inside and outside the academy. Schliemann’s sensational ‘discoveries’ at Troy and Mycenae caught the imaginations of the general public as well as specialized archaeologists. By the end of the nineteenth century one of the ways, if not the way, to imagine and conceptualize any sort of relationship between the ancient and the modern was through obviously archaeological metaphors of ‘excavation’, ‘disinterment’, and ‘unearthing’. So much of archaeology was involved with the uncovering of burial sites that it seemed that the past could in some way be resurrected and brought back to life.1 The site of Pompeii arguably epitomized all that archaeology could 1 On the centrality of classical archaeology in the cultural and political imagination of nineteenth-century Europe, see Gere (2007) with further bibliography.

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promise an expectant public and a professional archaeologist, precisely because Pompeii and its inhabitants had been buried alive after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Pompeii represented an ideal engagement with an archive of the past: as if perfectly preserved and recorded, visitors felt that they were stepping back in time. The site of Pompeii did what an archive should do.2 We should not be surprised, then, by Freud’s own interest in classical archaeology and his comparisons of psychoanalysis with the by-then highly respected university discipline. Indeed several scholars have discussed this aspect of Freud’s thought and writing.3 Freud was not, however, just another amateur archaeologist jumping on the bandwagon. Archaeology was not simply a metaphor for the methods of psychoanalysis. His 1907 psychoanalytic critique of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy (1903) was profoundly concerned with why we invest so much of ourselves in thinking about our relationship with the past. Freud’s Delusion and Dream was quite simply one of the first texts to consider theoretically what was at stake in modernity’s engagement with classical Pompeii, the archaeological site that had come to epitomize (and often still does) what one might mean by an archive or a record of the past. It seems, then, that there is no possibility of engagement with the ancient archive without a prior engagement with Freud’s own engagement precisely because it is Freud’s Delusion and Dream that has set much of the agenda for what it means to construe a relationship (be it historical, political, ethical . . . ) between antiquity and modernity. It is certainly not without good reason when Richard Armstrong writes: ‘Norbert’s example [in Gradiva] is not only a convenient model for how we might view Freud’s compulsion for antiquity as part of a longer history of confrontations with the ancient archive. It was the model Freud chose for his first extended essay on a literary work from the psychoanalytic point of view. This concerns the double narrative I am explicating—the narrative recounting the European

2

On the history of excavation and reception of Pompeii, see Cooley (2003). On Freud and archaeology, see Bernfeld (1951), Kuspit (1989), Hake (1993), Bergstein (2003), Armstrong (2005), and, of course, Derrida (1996b), which will be considered here. On Freud and his collection of antiquities see Gamwell and Wells (1989) and Forrester (1994). 3

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investment in antiquity coupled to that of Freud’s unfolding psychoanalytic enterprise.’4 Here Freud is exemplified amongst (and compared to) several other thinkers that were compelled to think of Greece and Rome. Not only is he a model, but Delusion and Dream is taken to be the model for the model’s ‘confrontation with the ancient archive’. This essay argues that it is precisely Derrida’s Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (1995) that exemplarily considers what was at stake in Freud’s own exemplary interrogation of what it means to unearth and archive classical antiquity for modern eyes and ears. This essay seeks to uncover a different sort of intellectual history from the one that establishes a traditional paradigm of producer and inheritor of ideas. Most scholarship on Freud and archaeology is interested in depicting how Freud’s allusions to archaeology were designed to bolster and glamorize the credibility of psychoanalysis as a science. The scientificity of psychoanalysis had always been a concern to both psychoanalysis’s apostles as well as its critics. This essay will take a somewhat different route, however. We shall see how we cannot avoid reading Derrida’s reading of Freud’s reading of what it means to engage with antiquity, if we are interested in considering what is at stake in the reception and archiving of the past in the present. For Derrida, as we shall see, it will be Freud’s delineation of what can and cannot be included in an archive that now must be confronted before any straightforward ‘confrontation with the ancient archive’ is possible. In its investigation of the way in which for Derrida the only way to consider antiquity is through the mind of Freud, this essay will consider those aspects of Jensen’s modern, literary tale about ancient Pompeii that cannot be integrated into Freud’s psychoanalytical archive. Paradoxically it will be that which remains outside of the archive—outside of what is archivable—that will define for us what we mean by the terms ‘archive’ and ‘archivization’. Without further introduction, then, let us turn to Freud’s reading of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva.

4

Armstrong (2005), 22–3.

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There was only one element of Jensen’s story that Freud found unrealistic—the fact that the copy should precede the original. That is to say, Freud could not conceive how the ‘real’ Zoe¨ could have resembled the ancient bas-relief, or put the other way round, the ancient bas-relief, the very facsimile or copy of Zoe¨, should precede the existence of the living woman: ‘More fantastic (phantastischer), and originating solely in the author’s arbitrariness (Willku¨r), seems the first supposition which brings in its train the detailed resemblance of the cast to the living girl, where moderation might have limited the conformity to the one trait of the position of the foot in walking.’5 There is another supposition of Jensen’s which Freud finds troubling—the coincidence of Norbert meeting Zoe¨ in Pompeii. However, as Freud says, ‘it asks aid only of chance, which undeniably plays a part in so many human fates’.6 The resemblance of Zoe¨ to Norbert’s cast of the bas-relief and, therefore, the precedence of the ancient bas-relief over the existence of the modern living Zoe¨ in the story, however, is inexplicable in psychoanalytic terms for Freud. All Freud can conclude is that ‘as . . . we have not access to the psychic life of the author, we leave to him the undiminished right of building a thoroughly valid development on an improbable (unwahrscheinlich) supposition’.7 Interestingly, Freud’s mentioning of Jensen’s ‘arbitrariness’, his ‘Willku¨r’, echoes Jensen’s own repeatedly used description of Norbert as doing something ‘unwillku¨rlich’ and ‘mechanisch’. Norbert went to Italy without really knowing why; he attempted to swipe away the fly from Zoe¨’s hand again without knowing why. His actions in the story are often presented as involuntary, yet Freud detects a repressed desire behind his actions of seemingly no volition. Analogously, Wilhelm Jensen seems to have built his story on an ‘improbable (unwahrscheinlich) supposition’, as if at random. Although Freud might feel able to interpret the arbitrary decisions of Hanold, that of Jensen, however, will remain irreducible to explanation. Interestingly, later in the essay Freud will say that not a single element

5

Jensen and Freud (2003), 199.

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid. 200.

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of the story was written ‘idly and without purpose (mu¨ssig und absichtslos)’.8 So Zoe¨’s resemblance to an ancient bas-relief will be the one and only aspect of the story that remains outside the grasp of psychoanalysis. It will be the only feature that for Freud cannot be contained within the psychoanalytic archive. There is a more telling point to be made about the single element of the story that Freud admits to being unable to interpret. Although he cannot accept the possibility that an artistic representation of a woman could anticipate the existence of a real woman, Freud is nevertheless content with claiming that an artistic representation of the operations of psychoanalysis, such as the novella Gradiva, should come about before the existence of real, live psychoanalysis such as Freud’s essay Delusion and Dream. Although it might seem surprising to Freud’s readers, Freud can declare seemingly without amazement that the literary author (Jensen is an example) ‘was always the precursor of science and of scientific psychology’.9 ‘Wilhelm Jensen has given us an absolutely correct study in psychiatry.’10 The burial of Pompeii in the story bears ‘a striking resemblance (eine treffliche ¨ hnlichkeit)’ to the dynamics of repression.11 Freud can also write: A ‘Thus the author cannot yield to (ausweichen) [‘avoid’, ‘shun’] the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist to the author, and the poetic treatment (Behandlung) of a theme from psychiatry may result correctly without damage to beauty.’12 The author and the doctor, it seems, cannot help but bump into one another; their intellectual collision was inevitable. And the literary author’s version of events is paradoxically cast as ‘a poetic treatment’—‘Behandlung’ can indeed be a medical treatment—whereas the description of psychiatric knowledge borrows from literary-critical terminology—the poetic handling ‘of a psychiatric theme’. Notably, Zoe¨ is depicted by Freud as Norbert’s ‘doctor’, his ‘Arzt’.13 This may not seem too controversial, since Jensen causes Zoe¨ to be seen as an archaeologist who digs up and revivifies the dead Norbert Hanold (see Jensen and Freud (2003), 116–17, 125, 139), and the archaeological process is seen to mirror that of Freud’s analytic method. However, Jensen never pictures Zoe¨ as a physician and 8 11

Ibid. 242. Ibid. 213.

9 12

Ibid. 201. Ibid. 202.

10 13

Ibid. 200. Ibid. 273.

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ironically, the identification of Zoe¨ as a medical practitioner is Freud’s own metaphor. In Jensen’s story, apart from the suggestion she could be a kind of an archaeologist, she is also explicitly described as a ‘school-teacher’ (Lehrmeisterin).14 Freud’s so-called scientific discourse at this crucial point is nothing but the figurative rhetoric of literary interpretation. Nevertheless this does not prevent Freud from pushing harder for the closeness of fit between Zoe¨ and the psychoanalyst. Her curative treatment ‘shows a considerable resem¨ hnblance, no, complete agreement, essentially (eine weitgehende A ¨ lichkeit, nein, eine volle Ubereinstimmung im Wesen), with a therapeutic method which Dr J. Breuer and the present writer introduced into medicine in 1895’.15 The only (significant) difference is that Zoe¨ already knows her patient’s past, whereas the psychoanalyst is not in such an ‘ideal’ (ideal) position.16 Freud emphatically continues to claim that ‘yes, the conformity with the therapeutic process pictured by the author in “Gradiva” reaches its height, when we add that even in analytic psychotherapy, the reawakened passion, whether love or hate, chooses the person of the physician as its object every time’.17 So just as the analysand transfers their love or hate to the analyst, so Freud has transferred onto Zoe¨ the status of analyst rather than that of the love-object in the story. The psychoanalytic treatment comes to resemble a fictionalized love story, whereas the love story comes to resemble a real-life psychoanalytic treatment. The very nature of the relationship between Jensen’s literary text and Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation is at stake. After discussing Jensen’s ‘improbable supposition’ that is elemental to his story; after pronouncing the literary author as the true ‘precursor’ to the psychologist; and after claiming that poetic discourse can (medically?) treat the (literary?) themes of psychiatry, Freud begins his scientific study of Jensen’s story by saying: ‘Norbert Hanold’s condition is called a “delusion” often enough by the author in the story, and we have also no reason to reject this designation.’18 Perhaps Freud was too right when he wrote in the preceding paragraph to this that he 14

Jensen and Freud (2003), 128. Ibid. 276. See also ibid. 176, 178, 180 for Freud, in his summary of the story, on Zoe¨ as physician. 16 17 18 Ibid. 277. Ibid. 278–9. Ibid. 202. 15

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would be proceeding ‘with the technical expressions of our science’, because Jensen never once uses the word ‘Wahn’ (‘delusion’) in his story. Is Freud being deliberately deceptive here? Might Freud be ‘deluded’ into seeing a ghostly trace of his word in Jensen’s story? Freud claims to be borrowing or even appropriating the word ‘delusion’ from Jensen’s novella so that the word might be shifted from a poetic to a scientific discourse in Freud’s text. The word ‘delusion’, however, is merely a metaphor conjured up by Freud himself to describe the mental state of Norbert, meaning then that the word really shifts in Freud’s interpretation from any intended scientific sense to ironically rather a more poetical rendering of Jensen’s prose. That is to say, the moment Freud strives to re-present the novella scientifically, he ends up representing it figuratively.19 But what are we to make of Freud’s bizarre reading? What implications does it have for the writing of intellectual history—for the relationship between antiquity and (Derridean) modernity, our concern here? What does it mean to say that (artistic) copies of psychoanalysis could be said to exist before the real psychoanalysis, just as the stone bas-relief existed before Zoe¨ herself?

THE ORIGINAL READING OF GRADIVA Freud has often been viewed, outside the Freudian establishment, as an incompetent literary critic at best. Delusion and Dream omitted to discuss numerous aspects of the story;20 it was itself a daydream of an ambitious young thinker;21 it transformed a literary tale of rich, lively imagery into a lifeless allegory of psychoanalysis;22 it was not even a true piece of psychoanalysis but a PR campaign to encourage new

19 Rohrwasser (1996), 28, also highlights Freud’s mistake about the word ‘delusion’. He adds: ‘wenn Freud vom Verdacht des Lesers spricht “dass wir fu¨r den Sinn des Dichters ausgeben, was nur unser eigener Sinn ist” [Freud (1973), 153; translation in Jensen and Freud (2003), 268], so hat er unwillentlich eben diesen Verdacht verifiziert.’ 20 Kofman (1991); Rohrwasser (1996). 21 22 Vogel (1996). Ibid.

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readers of The Interpretation of Dreams;23 for one critic, Freud did not even manage to dig as deeply into the unconscious as the literary author did!24 There has been a concerted effort to relegate Freud’s interpretation because it missed the obvious fact that Gradiva should be read as literature rather than a pamphlet advertising psychoanalysis. Although these readings have lampooned Freud’s claim that the psychoanalytic method was already present in literature even though psychoanalysis appeared chronologically later than the literary archive into which it delved, these literary critics, however, have themselves missed the irony in their claim that their readings might be able to install themselves, as it were, before psychoanalysis. That is to say, the readers, who are so critical of Freud for making the seemingly ludicrous claim that psychoanalysis was already at work in literature before the scientific discovery of psychoanalysis, themselves write as if their own readings of Gradiva can remain uninfluenced by psychoanalysis, as if they can right the wrongs of Freud’s interpretation and can thereby return to the text as if before psychoanalysis could initiate a century of misreading. Strangely enough, then, the history of reading that lampoons Freud for reordering the history of ideas in placing psychoanalysis before that which it analyses, itself claims to precede the psychoanalytic interpretation it actually comes after. If Freud’s facsimile of a literary interpretation anticipates true literary interpretation, then yet again we are witness to the copy coming before the original. Now no literary critic would dare claim that they had read Gradiva without already having read Freud’s essay. One cannot read Gradiva without already having read Freud: the latter made the former well known and the story itself is now never printed without Freud’s study. In fact the standard German edition is entitled Der Wahn und die Tra¨ume in W. Jensens Gradiva mit dem Text der Erza¨hlung von Wilhelm Jensen. This edition originally appeared in 1973 (see Freud (1973) in the References), and has been reprinted several times since. Jensen’s novella was originally published in 1903, but never landed on the bestseller lists and was never reprinted without Freud’s essay. Conversely, the psychoanalyst’s piece went through seven

23

Rohrwasser (1996).

24

Pongs (1933).

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German editions between 1907 and 1969, and was translated numerous times from 1917 onwards. (Even if one were to read Gradiva without reading Freud, one would have to have already made a quite conscious decision about what it means to read Gradiva without already reading the Freudian critique.) In other words, readers of Gradiva have only been able to read despite Freud because of him. What such readers neglect to discuss, however, is the extremely obvious fact that because of Freud every reader of the story already knows that the ghost of Gradiva is really a modern, living woman. Interestingly, Freud’s synopsis of Jensen’s novella not only summarizes the plot but also replays the ‘original’ reader’s response to the tale. And what is noteworthy is Freud’s insistence that the original reader of Gradiva precisely does not know whether Norbert is seeing a ghost or not. ‘It is the privilege of the author of “Gradiva” to leave us in such a quandary.’25 Freud asks: ‘Is it a hallucination of our deluded hero, a “real” ghost, or a corporeal person?’26 When Norbert discovers that Gradiva is indeed flesh and blood, the sense of utter surprise is apparently re-enacted by the reader: ‘What an embarrassment for us, the readers! Thus the author of “Gradiva” has made sport of us and decoyed us . . . into a little delusion . . . ’27 For Freud, Jensen’s talent lies in his ability to leave the reader in suspense as to the very genre of fiction they are reading. Indeed the title of the tale (Gradiva: Ein pompejanisches Phantasiestu¨ck) certainly offers no clues as to whether this novella is going to be a story of fantastical ghosts and ghouls or of fantastical love. For Freud, then, the original reading would have precisely questioned whether what it was reading in the story was ‘really there’: do I know what I think I am reading and seeing in Gradiva? Interestingly, Freud’s crucial observation has fallen on utterly deaf ears, for it would only really be possible to turn back to the text and rescue it from any psychoanalytic misinterpretation, if one could erase one’s memory of the story’s plot, and thereby not know whether Gradiva were a spectre or not. Ironically this desire (even fantasy) of returning to the text before psychoanalysis is a desire for origins that Freud himself analysed 25 26 27

Jensen and Freud (2003), 154. Ibid. 159. Ibid. 162.

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most obsessively throughout his professional career. One of psychoanalysis’s central contentions, of course, is that it is impossible for the analysand to re-experience the trauma, that is the first time, the original moment, as such, but through transference. Freud’s unsettling theory of trauma redrew precisely what could be recalled and remembered. His 1895 work ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’, which is often taken to be the beginning of Freud’s officially psychoanalytic writings as he shifts his focus from neurology to psychology, is one of the first places where he sets out the relationship between the trauma and the transference.28 Here Freud tells us the story of ‘Emma’, who as a child was sexually seduced by an adult. As a traumatic event, it is buried deep in the child’s unconscious. Indeed what makes the event a trauma is precisely the child’s nonunderstanding of the nature of the event since it does not have a mature (post-pubescent) comprehension of sex and sexuality. It is not that sexual abuse of a child is traumatic in itself for Freud, but that such an event cannot even be registered by the child’s consciousness. Much later in time (when ‘Emma’ is older) a seemingly banal, innocent event awakens deep feelings of shame and anxiety. It is only some apparently minor insignificant resemblance between this latter event and the original seduction that causes that original seduction to be introduced into ‘Emma’s’ consciousness. And it is only with the occurrence of the second, later event that the sexual significance of the first scene is first comprehended, and the second scene produces within ‘Emma’ sexual feelings. As Freud writes: ‘Here we have an instance of a memory exciting an affect which it had not excited as an experience, because in the meantime changes produced by puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered . . . The memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action.’29 As Cynthia Chase has written upon Freud’s account of ‘Emma’, ‘the peculiar status of the traumatic moment, the sexual factor, stems from the impossibility of locating it in either scene’.30 28 See Wilson (2003), 323–4 on the issues of taking Freud’s ‘Project’ as an origin to the psychoanalytic enterprise. 29 Freud (1895), 410. 30 Chase (1979), 57.

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Freud implicitly presents the original experience of reading Jensen’s Gradiva in the guise of a trauma. If the original experiencing of trauma is precisely not quite being able to experience it as such, then the original reading of Gradiva is also incapable of understanding precisely what is being seen (or rather read). The experiencing of trauma is ghostly from the beginning: it is both present and absent in consciousness as well as neither of these possibilities. Similarly, Gradiva begins as a figure whose very realness is in question: her very corporeality is at issue. Reading Gradiva as if before psychoanalysis came upon the scene would be like re-experiencing the trauma, that is, experiencing the ghostliness of the first time, which is at the same time precisely to experience an event one is not certain one is experiencing. The possibility of re-experiencing the first time of reading Jensen’s Gradiva before Freud could get his hands on it would be, then, strictly impossible, not simply because we cannot time-travel back to 1903 before Freud could write his essay, but because such a first reading would already be questioning whether what it was reading was what it was reading.

DERRIDA ON FREUD AND THE GHOSTLINESS OF TRUTH Derrida, in Mal d’archive, is Jensen’s and Freud’s only reader to address this ghostly issue in Freud’s interpretation. Indeed he restages the ‘original’ reader’s quandary: Norbert, notes Derrida, ‘monologues with Gradiva’s ghost’ and so ‘we ask ourselves in the first place, we the readers, who it is, for we have first seen her in the form of a stone statue, and then of a fantastical image (Phantasiebild)’.31 As Derrida observes, Freud’s reader of Gradiva asks, ‘Is she a “real” ghost?’32 By placing ‘real’ in quotation marks, Freud subtly shifts the question asked by the reader away from ‘is Gradiva a ghost or not?’ towards ‘are ghosts real or not?’ For the reader, the truth of 31 32

Derrida (1996b), 85. Jensen and Freud (2003), 159–60, quoted in Derrida (1996b), 86.

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ghosts is at issue, and ‘not that we need to believe in ghosts’, to ask these questions, as Derrida notes Freud’s noting. The question ‘is a phantom “real” (wirklich) or not?’ is one that the reader of Jensen’s story will ponder whatever their beliefs.33 What is perhaps most interesting in Freud’s interest in this issue is that Freud never pronounces a simple belief or disbelief in spirits in Delusion and Dream, and the question of the reality of such spirits is never straightforwardly answered. Instead Freud uncovers a truth about the problem about the truth of phantoms. That is to say, there is a truth to be told about this question of the truth of spirits, and this is what concerns Derrida. When Freud discusses Norbert’s so-called delusional belief in the ghost of Gradiva, he turns to how Norbert’s mental condition is reflected in the analytic situation. The patient’s faith in the delusion surprisingly does not derive from a deficiency in the subject’s psyche, but from the fact that ‘in every delusion there lies a little grain of truth (ein Ko¨rnchen Wahrheit); there is something in it which really deserves belief, and this is the source of the conviction of the patient, who is, to this extent, justified. This true element (dieses Wahre), however, has been repressed for a long time; if it finally succeeds in pushing into consciousness (this time in disfigured form (diesmal in entstellter Form)), the feeling of a conviction clinging to it, as if in compensation, is overstrong and now clings to and protects the disfigurement substitute of the repressed true element (Entstellungsersatz des verdra¨ngten Wahren), against every critical impugnment.’34 In Norbert’s case, his love for Zoe¨ was long ago repressed and it only reached consciousness in the distorted form of his seemingly irrational interest in knowing whether the figure of Gradiva was a ghost or not. Freud elucidates his understanding of the epistemological status of delusion more succinctly only a page further on: ‘All our convictions [in a delusion] lie in thought contents in which the true and the false are combined (vereint) and they stretch over the former and the latter (und lassen sie vom ersten aus sich u¨ber das letztere erstrecken).’35 For Derrida, the problem about whether to believe in ghosts or not is never 33 34 35

Derrida (1996b), 86. Jensen and Freud (2003), 262. Derrida also quotes this passage. Ibid. 263. The emphasis is Downey’s and does not appear in Freud’s German.

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straightforwardly answered quite simply because the truth itself is spectral: ‘Freud recognizes it himself . . . there is a truth of delusion, a truth of insanity or of hauntedness. It [the truth] returns (revient) [cf. revenant, French for ‘ghost’] . . . Delusion or insanity, hauntedness is not only haunted by this or that ghost, Gradiva for example, but by the specter of the truth which has thus been repressed. The truth is spectral, and this is its part of truth which is irreducible by explanation (voila` sa part de ve´rite´ irre´ductible a` l’explication).’36 The truth (of the delusion) is itself ghostly; it haunts the delusion, absent and present, visible and invisible, manifest and unseen. Freud himself made ghostliness a possibility, since the kernel of truth, the truth about the truth (of a delusion), is that it is ghostly. That is to say, without ghostliness, without the possibility of being haunted, there could be no truth of (or in) the delusion. And as Derrida says, ‘this is its [the truth’s] part of truth which is irreducible by explanation’. The truth about truth (the true part of the truth)—that it is spectral, the fact that it is to be spectral—is never elucidated or explained away by Freud. It is an unsettling element of truth that Freud leaves without either even explicitly mentioning or condemning any belief in hauntedness, just as the trauma itself seemed so ghostly, not to be located as it was in either the first or the second event. Indeed even though Freud seemed quite certain that literary fiction could have anticipated the realities of psychoanalysis, it does not stop him from seeing at the same time the ghost of psychoanalysis haunting literature. It is this haunting by the truth that is inexplicable to Freud—all he can do is ask: ‘How did the author come upon the same knowledge as the physician, at least upon a procedure which would suggest he possessed it?’37 But how does this ghostliness help us to understand the relationship between archaeology and psychoanalysis as well as what it means to conceive of an intellectual relationality between antiquity and modernity in general?

36

Derrida (1996b), 87. Jensen and Freud (2003), 220. In a letter to another author, Arthur Schnitzler (see Timms (1988), 72), Freud wrote (in 1906): ‘I have often asked myself in astonishment how you came by this or that piece of secret knowledge which I had acquired by painstaking investigations.’ 37

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Freud’s archaeological analogy is often quoted by scholars: ‘There is no better (keine Bessere) analogy for repression . . . than the burial which was the fate of Pompeii.’38 It has led many to believe that Freud could not imagine psychoanalysis without thinking of archaeology. The implicit comparison between the disciplines enabled Freud, it seemed, to bolster and glamorize the credibility of psychoanalysis as a science. For Freud the analogy must have seemed too good to miss. Jensen very obviously depicts Zoe¨ as an archaeologist. On more than one occasion Norbert is viewed by Zoe¨ as an archaeological find as if ‘excavated from the ashes’ by his beloved.39 This, however, is only half the story as archaeology is repeatedly depicted by Jensen as a dead and useless science: ‘an old Trappist’;40 ‘an old, dried up, boresome aunt, dullest and most superfluous creature in the world’.41 Despite having a ‘faultless memory’ everything for Norbert in the ancient site of Pompeii begins to lose all significance.42 He is also unable to read the Latin graffiti on the city’s walls, which he had ‘possessed a certain skill in deciphering . . . He had a feeling that he did not understand any Latin.’43 What his science ‘taught was a lifeless, archaeological view and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological language. These helped in no way to a comprehension with soul, mind and heart (mit der Seele, dem Gemu¨t, dem Herzen).’44 Freud picks up on Norbert’s feelings towards his discipline: ‘All this knowledge of antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft) appears to him . . . as the most purposeless and indifferent matter in the world.’45 It is surprising, then, that any ambivalence of tone in Freud’s famous analogy is never noted. To say that ‘there is no better analogy for repression . . . than the burial . . . of Pompeii’ might

38 Jensen and Freud (2003), 196. See Bernfeld (1951), Kuspit (1989), Hake (1993), Forrester (1994), Armstrong (2005). 39 Jensen and Freud (2003), 139. 40 41 42 Ibid. 44. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 47. 43 44 45 Ibid. 54–5. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 164–5.

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indeed suggest that there was an excellent fit between the state of the human mind and the state of Pompeian geology. Yet to say this also implies that Freud had somewhat reluctantly resigned himself to such a comparison: it is merely provisional. According to Freud, this two-sided depiction of archaeology is crucial if one is to unravel the meaning of the story. Norbert ‘has no interest in the living woman; science, which he serves, has taken this interest away from him and transferred it to women of stone or bronze . . . it is really the basis of the story, for one day it happens that a single such bas-relief claims for itself all the interest which would otherwise belong only to the living woman, and thereby originates the delusion.’46 For Freud, the archaeological metaphor explicitly refers to the psychoanalytic method, yet on the other hand, archaeology is also seen to fall short of the Freudian cure. Archaeology seems to promise to uncover some lost secret in an archive (that is, Norbert’s repressed love for Zoe¨), yet archaeology also actively covers over that secret. The ambiguity of the archaeological leitmotif in Jensen’s Gradiva informs Freud’s theorization of repression and delusion formation. Freud quotes an ‘old Latin proverb’ (der alte lateinische Spruch), that goes: ‘naturam furca expellas, semper redibit.’ Helen Downey translates it: ‘You may drive out natural disposition with a two-pronged fork, but it will always return.’47 But this saying only partly expresses Freud’s understanding of the return of the repressed: ‘the very thing which has been chosen as a means of repression—like the “two-pronged fork” of the proverb—becomes the carrier of the thing recurring; in and behind the agencies of repression the material repressed finally asserts itself victoriously.’48 The (literary) artist ‘seems to have known that the thing repressed proceeds, at its recurrence, from the agency of repression, itself ’.49 Freud can reason, then, that ‘if Norbert Hanold were a living person, who had, by means of archaeology, driven love and the memory of his childhood friendship out of his life, it would now be legitimate

46 47 48

Ibid. 205, my emphasis. Ibid. 189. See Freud (1973), 114, for the Latin. 49 Jensen and Freud (2003), 189. Ibid. 190.

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and correct that an antique relief should awaken in him the forgotten memory of the beloved in his childhood’.50 Derrida understands that this double-sidedness of archaeology (it buries just as much as it digs up) was not some attractive literary paradox for Freud, but reflected a paradox at the heart of what it means to exhume the past. Derrida observes: ‘As we have noted all along, there is an incessant tension here between the [psychoanalytical] archive and archaeology. They will always be close the one to the other, resembling each other, hardly discernible in their coimplication, and yet radically incompatible . . . Freud was incessantly tempted to redirect the original interest he had for the psychic archive toward archaeology . . . The scene of excavation, the theater [sic] of archaeological digs are the preferred places of this brother to Hanold.’51 Derrida implies that we have here a case of sibling rivalry. Although Freud was very much attracted to the archaeological metaphor, we have seen not only that it might seem limited in its uses but also that the archaeological archive does not reveal as much as it might claim. ‘In the outbidding [of archaeology] he wants to be an archivist who is more archaeological than the archaeologist’ himself.52 ‘He wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint than the one the other archaeologists of all kinds bustle around, those of literature and those of classical objective science.’53 Derrida does not discuss Freud’s interpretation of Norbert’s dreams, but Derrida’s account of Freud’s outbidding of archaeology is clearly informed by Freud’s thoughts on Norbert’s first dream, in 50 Jensen and Freud (2003). Ironically Freud’s ‘proverb’ that expresses the expressivity of repression is a misquotation of Horace’s Epistles 1. 10. 24 (‘naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret’). If Freud’s Latin is meant to signify the inevitable return of the repressed in a distorted (entstellt) formation, is this misquotation a deliberate or unconscious slip of the pen? Perhaps Freud knew that his readers would see his ‘mistake’ and remember Horace’s line, thereby ensuring that the reader’s ‘correction’ of him would enact the return of Horace’s repressed line. Or does Freud’s ‘mistake’ that represses Horace’s original text nevertheless reproduce the sense of that text only in different words? The question of what it means to express literally the truth of the archive will concern us presently. 51 Ibid. 92. 52 Ibid. 97. See also ibid. 92 and 94 on Freud’s ‘outbidding’ of archaeology. 53 Ibid. 97–8, emphasis original.

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which he dreams he is witnessing the volcanic eruption of 79 when Pompeii was buried under layers of lava. Interestingly, Freud does not offer up the following observation when he interprets the dream in detail, but it only appears at the very end of Delusion and Dream. Here Freud implicitly alludes to what Derrida will discuss as the ghostliness of the archive: ‘In Norbert Hanold’s first dream, two wishes occur in producing the dream, one capable of consciousness, the other, of course, belonging to the unconscious, and active because of repression. This was the wish, comprehensible to every archaeologist, to have been an eyewitness of that catastrophe of 79. What sacrifice would be too great, for an antiquarian, to realize this wish otherwise than through dreams! The other wish and dream maker is [sic] of an erotic nature: to be present when the beloved lies down to sleep, to express it crudely.’54 For Freud, then, it is not the dream of archaeology to revivify and relive the ancient past, but to witness its death and therefore its moment of archivization. Archaeology dreams of setting eyes on the archivization of the event. What archaeology desires, according to Freud, is being the first to read the first archive, thereby institutionalizing that archive. As Derrida says, ‘the admirable historian’ is the one who ‘institutes the archive as it should be, that is to say, not only in exhibiting the document but in establishing it’.55 It is Freud’s contention that we can now no longer think about archaeology without already thinking about psychoanalysis. For Freud’s hypotheses about memory, trauma, transference, and repression show that the original event is locatable in neither its ‘original’ nor its reproduced moment. Freud’s revolutionary rethink of archivization means, as Derrida puts it, that one can ‘recall and archive the very thing one represses, archive it while repressing it (because repression is an archivization), that is to say, to archive otherwise, to repress the archive while [simultaneously] archiving the repression; otherwise . . . than according to the current, conscious, patent

54

Jensen and Freud (2003), 283–4, my emphasis. Derrida (1996b), 55. Interestingly, Jensen describes Norbert at a ‘Psychopompos’, leading a soul to Hades. This is the ultimate dream of archaeology—to witness the death of the living (Jensen and Freud (2003), 76–7). 55

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modes of archivization’.56 Archaeology is not simply a metaphor for the problematization of what it means for an archive to express and to repress. Rather archaeology is itself an archive, a mode of archivization, and as such prone to such problematization. It is Derrida’s point that since Freudian psychoanalysis, it is impossible to simply disprove the absence of evidence in an archive since that evidence might very well be there, but only in a repressed, or distorted, form, just as it is impossible to prove the presence of evidence in an archive since that evidence might not be that evidence but the expression of repressed material again in an distorted format. And not only that: at the moment of archivization, the recorder of the material will not be completely aware of what is even being archived, since our unconscious will speak, as it were, without our knowledge—it will ghost or haunt the recording without the recorder even noticing.57 Fundamentally, for Derrida, Freud asks: ‘What did he [the subject] conceal [in the archive] even beyond the intention to conceal, to lie, or to perjure?’58 Despite coming chronologically later, psychoanalysis haunts archaeology from the start, not only because it seeks to locate a moment in time prior to that which archaeology might claim to uncover, but also because Freudian psychoanalysis shows how the archive never simply reveals nor conceals, and it is a lesson that archaeology can now no longer remember not to remember. That is, archaeology must remember the very limits of its memory. And if archaeology can remember that it can only struggle at remembering the origins, its own origins, its own archive of what it is, perhaps it will remember that it cannot remember the necessary, prior possibility of the deconstruction of the archive, embodied in Freudian psychoanalysis that somehow haunts it and is therefore repressed within its own archive. For Derrida, it is precisely to surmount these problems that we even make and conserve archives in the first place. 56

Derrida (1996b), 64. As we have already discussed, Freud’s attachment to the metaphor of archaeology is ambivalent. That is to say, in Delusion and Dream, that which is meant to excavate the secret hidden in the archive (here Norbert’s love for Zoe¨) is actually the method for concealing that secret. But not only that: it is through that method of concealment (Norbert’s interest in archaeology) that the secret hidden in the archive is nevertheless revealed although in a distorted form. 58 Ibid. 101. 57

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As Hermann Rapaport has written on Derrida’s concern, ‘we have archives—we preserve archives—because there is something in them that defies understanding but that we want to grasp’.59 Despite his apparently proto-deconstructive intentions, Freud nevertheless repeats the fantasy of archaeology, that is Hanold’s fantasy of witnessing Gradiva making her impression on the ground, as Derrida observes, ‘an impression that is almost no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin . . . an archive without an archive’.60 Derrida notes: ‘Each time he [Freud] wants to teach the topology of archives, that is to say, of what ought to exclude or forbid the return to the origin, this lover of stone figurines proposes archaeological parables.’61 Freud dreams of a ‘nearly ecstatic instant’ ‘when the very success of the [archaeological] dig must sign the effacement of the archivist: the origin then speaks by itself . . . Anamneˆsis without hypomneˆsis! The archaeologist has succeeded in making the archive no longer serve any function.’ The origin ‘present[s] itself in person . . . Without even the memory of translation, once the intense work of translation has succeeded.’62 Derrida quotes from Freud’s early work ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1892): ‘If his [the archaeologist’s] work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory . . . Saxa loquuntur!’63 And even though Freud seems to imply that the discoveries will somehow telepathically communicate themselves to the psychoanalyst, Freud prefers not to rationalize the ghostly, mysterious way in which the truth emerges. We have already seen how the spectrality of truth in Freud’s writings is not explained. Paradoxically, Freud ‘believes that one cannot not believe in them [that is, ghosts] and that one ought not to believe in them’.64 ‘He believes he has exorcized them [ghosts] in the instant he lets them talk, provided that these specters [sic] talk, he believes, in the figurative. Like stones, nothing but that . . . ’65 That is to say, the moment that Freud mentions the truth about the truth, that is truth’s spectrality, it is expressed figuratively (‘saxa loquuntur’). If the repressed truth can only be expressed in a ‘distorted’ 59 62 64

60 61 Rapaport (2003), 75–6. Ibid. 97–8. Ibid. 92. 63 Ibid. 92–3. Freud, quoted in Derrida (1996b), 93–4. 65 Derrida (1996b), 94. Ibid. 95.

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manner (entstellt is the term Freud uses so often), then the repressed truth of the repressed truth (the part of the repressed truth that Freud prefers not to talk about and therefore represses) can only be expressed distortedly: no mention, then, of ghosts, but merely the metaphor of rocks speaking, and one cannot (not) imagine anything other than that. Interestingly, then, it becomes impossible to write a classical history of ideas when it comes to considering the intellectual-historical relationship between Classical Archaeology and Freudian psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic deconstruction of what is archivable haunts archaeology from the start, in its ‘revelation’ that the truth was always already spectral, although this ghostliness can only be expressed through the archaeological metaphor of saxa-loquuntur. As Ika Willis perceptively observes, at the end of the story Hanold desires to see Zoe¨ walk as Gradiva.66 Interestingly Freud does not discuss how Hanold’s ‘desire “to be there when the girl he loved lay down to sleep” is present alongside the archaeological desire’.67 The desire for the archaeological archive is never fully effaced. What finally gives Hanold pleasure is seeing Zoe¨ imitate Gradiva, the real girl copying the bas-relief. Not dissimilarly, for Derrida, Freud’s real and first-rate archive of psychoanalysis cannot help imitating and drawing upon the image of an archive, Classical Archaeology.

DERRIDA’S IMPRESSION OF GRADIVA We have been tracing a strange but recurring pattern in which a copy has chronologically anticipated the original which it copies: the basrelief of Gradiva before the real, living Zoe¨; the (literary-artistic) representation of psychoanalysis before psychoanalysis itself; the psychoanalytic facsimile of literary interpretation before the literary interpretation of proper literary critics; and finally the archaeological archive cannot be read without already considering psychoanalysis although the latter appeared chronologically later in the history of ideas. And to make things still more bewildering, Freud’s positioning 66

Willis (2007), 227.

67

Ibid. 229.

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of psychoanalysis as a truer archive than that which Classical Archaeology conserves can only be expressed using archaeological metaphors. Through the prism of a classical understanding of intellectual history, it would be commonsensical to say that the chronologically latter item somehow imitates (or is at least somehow influenced by) the former. Here, however, each time the former is a pale copy— indeed a ghost—of the latter. What is still more curious is that Derrida’s own impression, his notion, of what the archive is sounds very much like an impression (an imitation) of Zoe¨ Bertgang herself. It seems that Zoe¨, a merely fictional character, anticipates what Derrida, a real man, was going to say. He summarizes the archive and its fever thus: ‘we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument itself.’68 In Jensen’s novella, after it has dawned upon Norbert that Gradiva is actually Zoe¨ Bertgang and he says, ‘“Yes, now I recognize you—”’ she interrupts him to say, ‘“That a person must die to become alive again; but for archaeologists that is of course necessary.”’ Norbert ignores this statement to offer his philological explanation that ‘Bertgang’ signifies ‘the one splendid in walking’.69 In Freud’s essay Delusion and Dream, Zoe¨’s is one of only a very few sentences that Freud cites more than once, that is in his summary and then again in his analysis. In the first instance, in his summary, Freud writes ‘he [Norbert] finds something else most strange—’, and at this point in his prose, by marking it with a dash, Freud allows Zoe¨ to interrupt, as it were, his own voice, precisely to say, ‘“That a person must die to become alive again,” says the girl, “but for archaeologists, that is, of course, necessary.”’70 Freud simply interprets this as irritation on Zoe¨’s part at Norbert, and then he goes on to quote Norbert’s philological analysis of the girl’s name. Now Freud of course directly quotes from Zoe¨’s and Norbert’s speeches frequently in the course of his essay, but never does a voice of a fictional 68

Derrida (1996b), 12. Jensen and Freud (2003), 131. 70 Ibid. 191. Note that the interruption, marked as a hyphen, appears in Freud’s original German text (see Freud (1973), 116). 69

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character from Gradiva quite simply interrupt and break into Freud’s own narrative. It is as if Zoe¨ is (be)coming alive in Freud’s text. The interruption permits us to ask, who is speaking here, Zoe¨ or Freud, Zoe¨ as Freud, Freud as Zoe¨? The second time Freud cites this line is in the context of his discussion of Zoe¨’s deliberately ambiguous language. According to Freud, the ambiguity of language in Gradiva ‘must [have] be[en] striking to every reader’.71 The ingenuity of Jensen’s text is certainly not lost on Freud: ‘It is a triumph of wit to be able to represent that delusion and truth in the same expression.’72 This second time he cites Zoe¨’s statement about death being a prerequisite to coming back to live, Freud remarks she is speaking ‘as if to give us the key to her ambiguous speeches.’73 Despite saying that this is the ‘key’ to her language, Freud offers, however, no explanation as to how this might work, but simply continues to offer his favourite example about eating bread two thousand years ago.74 To state that, for archaeologists, death is necessary for the emergence of life, sounds suspiciously similar to what Freud implicitly says about the prior necessity for the ghostly trace of difference, which itself is not alive, but nevertheless facilitates the possibility of memory-making and therefore any experiencing of life in his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) where he originally sets out his theory of memory-preservation. Not only this, it echoes Freud’s evasive comments about the ghostly emergence of truth through the delusion as well as the ghostly experiencing of truth in both the trauma and the transference. And, as just suggested, Zoe¨’s statement is of course reflected in Derrida’s account of the archive that installs the necessary risk of forgetfulness and even destruction in the heart of the archive, which nevertheless ensures the very existence of the archive. It seems, then, that Derrida does an impression of Freud doing an impression of Zoe¨ who is merely an impression of Jensen’s. But are Zoe¨ Bertgang, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida all saying the same thing using different language? How could we tell? Indeed (how) can we write an intellectual history that has a memory of this necessity for archaeologists, this death drive, this archive fever—this 71

72 73 Jensen and Freud (2003), 268. Ibid. 269. Ibid. 270. As Freud notes, Zoe¨ says, ‘it seems to me as if we have already eaten our bread thus together once two thousand years ago’ (ibid. 270; see also ibid. 111). 74

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impossible meta-archive—that itself would not be susceptible to forgetfulness and miscomprehension like every other archive? Derrida is of course fully aware (or as aware as one can be) that there is no other way to express the truth about the archive than to express it in ambiguous language, in language that is to be constitutively misread. Derrida’s rhetoric shows (as much as it can show) that it is impossible to archive the forgetfulness that conditions the possibility of the archive. To put it in other words, it is impossible to express in language unambiguously, that is in an unforgettable mode, that a certain statement should be taken ambiguously, that its meaning is constitutively forgettable. Indeed Gradiva’s truth, ignored by Norbert the archaeologist—that is, it never seems to enter his consciousness but nevertheless allows him to interpret the archaeology of her name—appears straight after the dissolution of Norbert’s ‘fancy’ (in Jensen’s words) or his ‘delusion’ (in Freud’s), but this so-called ‘key,’ as Freud sees it, is in ambiguous language itself. Perhaps Freud was himself aware of this when he wrote, ‘she continues after the solution of the delusion as if (wie) to give us the key to her ambiguous speeches’ (my emphasis). It is merely something that resembles (or does an impression of) explanation.

AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF ARCHIVAL AMBIGUITY Derrida offers another way of expressing (and therefore archiving) the paradoxes that have afflicted the notion of the archive since Freudian psychoanalysis. He notes Norbert Hanold’s desire to uncover the ‘traces’ of Gradiva in ‘the literal sense (im wo¨rtlichen Sinne); for with her peculiar gait she must have left behind an imprint (Abdruck) of her toes in the ashes distinct from all the rest.’75 Derrida comments upon this archive fever: ‘The possibility of the archiving trace, this simple possibility, can only divide the uniqueness. Separating the impression from the imprint. Because this uniqueness is not even past present. It would have been possible, one can only dream

75

Jensen, quoted in Derrida (1996b), 99.

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after the fact, only insofar as its iterability, that is to say, its immanent divisibility, the possibility of its fission, haunted it from the origin. The faithful memory of such a singularity can only be given over to the specter [sic].’76 This imprint is ‘like a signature’.77 As Geoffrey Bennington has succinctly expressed it: ‘A signature marking the uniqueness of an event must be repeatable as the signature that it is in order validly to mark the singularity of an event that it marks.’78 The originary, first time is always already ‘haunted from the origin’ by the second time, its reproduction, its repetition, which facilitates the very possibility of a memory of the first time, which nevertheless will itself remain merely a ghostly (not-present-to-itself) memory. There is quite simply no possibility of an event, of a memory as event, without the trace of that event, without the prior possibility of its repetition, which itself is not (‘if Being is determined as ousia, presence, essence/existence, substance or subject’79), and therefore cannot be archived as such, and we, therefore, remember that we cannot fully remember the prior necessity of originary iterability. But even to say this does not escape linguistic ambiguity, as Derrida knew too well. On the one hand, the ‘haunting from the origin’ of originary iterability suggests that the event of original archivization, the very original act of archiving, is merely a ghostly experience; it is only with the archive’s reproduction, replication, and reiteration that it can be actually experienced as real. In a similar manner, the bas-relief of Gradiva is the original archival, yet ghostly, trace of the real, live woman Zoe¨; literary representation such as Jensen’s Gradiva originally archives the real, scientific finds of psychoanalysis; the discipline of Classical Archaeology originally archives what it means to archive in such a way that it looks pale in comparison to the truths about archivization that psychoanalysis can exhume and preserve; Freud himself explicates his theories of trauma and transference, repression, and the death drive well before Derrida attempts to explore and verbalize clearly and explicitly the full implications of these theories such as he does in Mal d’archive so that they might be ‘properly’ archived; and finally, Zoe¨, a literary character, a mere representation, can articulate the paradox of 76 78

77 Jensen, quoted in Derrida (1996b), 100. Ibid. 99. 79 Bennington (2000), 189. Derrida (2001a), 255.

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archivization before the real, living Derrida can in a book (Mal d’archive) that purports to archive philosophical facts about archives. On the other hand, Derrida’s ‘haunting from the origin’ also suggests that the reproducibility and iterability of the archive was already a prior necessity for the possibility of the ‘original’ archiving trace to be made. That is to say, originary difference or iterability, in itself neither present nor absent, and as such ‘ghostly’, is required for the ‘original’ archiving trace to be recorded in the ‘first’ place. In a similar manner, Zoe¨ already haunts the bas-relief of Gradiva; psychoanalysis already haunts literature and Classical Archaeology; and the words of Derrida already haunt Zoe¨’s. Or to express this otherwise, there is now no way of viewing the bas-relief of Gradiva without already seeing the ghostly image of Zoe; there is now no way of reading and interpreting literature (such as Gradiva) and thinking about the archive that Classical Archaeology has established without already thinking about the concerns of Freudian psychoanalysis; and there is now no way of listening to Zoe¨ without already hearing the words of Derrida. It is hardly surprising, then, that Freud was unable to integrate the fact that the bas-relief already resembled Zoe¨ into his archive of psychoanalysis, an archive represented here by Delusion and Dream. We have found that this fact is literally unarchivable, that is, it must remain outside of the archive although it defines what the archive is: for what would be the literal way (the wo¨rtliche Sinn) to archive the relationship between the bas-relief and Zoe¨, literature and psychoanalysis, Classical Archaeology and psychoanalysis, and finally Zoe¨ and Derrida, without that archive looking as if it were deluded or dreaming? It is the specificity of Freud’s reading of Jensen’s account of Hanold that helps us to consider these archival paradoxes. Or to put this more precisely still: it is the non-archiving by Freud of Jensen’s account of Hanold. As Derrida puts it: ‘Now here is a point which is never taken into account, neither in Jensen’s reading nor in Freud’s, and this point confounds more than it distinguishes: Hanold has come to search for these traces in the literal sense (im wo¨rtlichen Sinne). He dreams of bringing back to life . . . Of reliving the singular pressure or impression which Gradiva’s step, the step itself, the step of Gradiva herself, that very day, at that time, on that date, in what

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was inimitable about it must have left in the ashes.’80 Gradiva’s making an impression in the ashes is both a historical event and an archive of that event at the same time. It is an event that is also the archiving of that event. It is the event as archive, archive as event. What Hanold ‘desires is to be there at the moment when history and archive coincide’.81 This is the very point that Freud does not account for in Delusion and Dream, the point that ‘confounds more than it distinguishes’, as Derrida says: the desire for a real historical event that is indistinguishable from its archivization, the desire for a real historical event that is already its archival replication and reproduction. Ancient Pompeii, the city that was buried alive, represents and embodies this desire. Ancient Pompeii produces for Hanold the desire to witness this example of originary iterability, Gradiva’s step—the event as its archivization, the archivization as its event, Gradiva impressing her footprint in the ashes. It is Derrida’s contribution to show us that because of the example of Gradiva’s step we cannot any longer avoid confronting the ghost of originary iterability that haunts the uniqueness of the event from its origin. Furthermore it is Freud’s difficulty in accounting for this ghostliness that nevertheless already haunts his text that permits Derrida to make this analysis. That is, what allows Derrida to attend to the paradoxes of archiving is Freud’s archiving of his inability to archive Jensen’s observation that the bas-relief could already resemble the real woman, that the replica or copy could be just as original as the ‘original’ itself. If we want to engage with the ‘earlier’ archive of antiquity, we must first negotiate Derrida’s archiving of Freud’s archiving of Jensen’s confounding of the historical event and its archivization, Gradiva’s step, in ancient Pompeii. 80 Derrida (1996b), 98–9, my emphasis. See also the perspicacious comments of Willis (2007), 227–9, who is presumably influenced by Derrida’s point here. 81 Willis (2007), 239.

Part III A Politics of Antiquity

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6 Derrida’s Dying Oedipus Rachel Bowlby

In the two seminar papers of Derrida’s which were published in 1998 as De l’hospitalite´, the work that receives most attention, amid talk of Plato, Pierre Klossowski, Algerian citizenship laws, mobile phones, and much else, is Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. In these seminars, and especially in relation to this play, the question around which Derrida repeatedly circles and to which he repeatedly returns is that of the foreigner or foreignness, marked in relation to a further issue of gender: he specifies his subject as being not just the foreign, but (also or specifically) the woman foreigner: ‘la question de l’e´tranger—de l’e´trange`re.’ The category of foreign woman, at once an extension and also, potentially, a subverting supplement in relation to the apparently primary question of the foreigner tout court or in general, is personified or expressed in relation to one particular ‘foreign woman’. The Antigone of Sophocles’ final play is indeed an exile in Colonus, as is her father; but Derrida’s identification of her with the foreigner question is associated not so much with that situation as with her feelings about her father’s death and about her absence from its taking place—from both the event itself and the site. This, for Derrida, is the closest approach to the question of the foreign (woman). It is as close as can be, and at the same time riven by the pain of a distance and separation: Here is the question that is being wept through the tears of Antigone. It is more than a question, for questions don’t cry, but it is perhaps the origin of

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all questions. And it is the question of the foreigner—of the foreign woman (la question de l’e´tranger—de l’e´trange`re).1

Thus the foreigner question, the foreign woman question, becomes what Derrida describes as an impossible mourning—Antigone’s mourning of the mourning itself that she has been disallowed, since she is not permitted to see the site of her father’s death and burial. In a foreign country—Colonus is a village outside Athens, and Antigone and her father are exiles from Thebes—Antigone and her sister Ismene are kept, by their father’s own instructions, from being with him in his last place of rest. And soon, those two will go back home to Thebes, and Antigone, in the future that the tragedy’s spectators already know and that Sophocles has already represented in his earlier play about her, will be once more engaged in a kind of excluded mourning as she tries to secure the proper burial rites for another close male relative, her brother Polyneices.2 Derrida lays emphasis on the bonding between Oedipus and Theseus, the ruler of Athens. It is to Theseus alone that Oedipus entrusts the secret of the place where he is to die and remain. Theseus is enjoined to tell no one—not even Oedipus’ own daughters—until, when the time comes, his own successor. Oedipus calls his protector philtate xenoˆn: ‘dearest of strangers’ (or foreigners), but also ‘dearest of friends’, the word xenos also being used to denote the alliance that is semi-formally established when, as has happened

1 Derrida (1997a), 101; (2000a), 113. The seminars took place in Paris in January 1996; they were two of a year-long series on the topic of hospitality which had begun the previous October. 2 In this sense Oedipus at Colonus is the prequel to the earlier Antigone. Polyneices knowingly alludes to Antigone’s subsequent role when he asks her to see to his burial in the event of his death (Sophocles (2004), ll. 1409–13). In the case of Derrida too, but without the temporal twist, there is an anticipation or promise of the work to come. A few years before the seminars on hospitality, he had spoken about the idea that there should be a conference on ‘language, nationality, and cultural belonging by death, this time, by burial, [and beginning] with the secret of Oedipus at Colonus: all the power this “foreigner” wields over the “foreigners” in the most secret secret of his final place, a secret he keeps, or entrusts to the keeping of Theseus, in exchange for the safety of the city and the generations to come—a secret he nonetheless refuses his daughters, depriving them even of their tears and a just “work of mourning”’ (Derrida (1996a), 30).

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here, two men become linked by the tie of hospitality (xenia). Derrida is particularly interested in the oath of secrecy that Oedipus demands of his host. There is also Oedipus’s own promise that, in return for the right to die where he must, he will become the protector of the city of Athens. Derrida, however, interprets this as something more akin to a threat.3 Readers of Derrida, particularly readers of his later works, will recognize in Of Hospitality’s analysis familiar themes of friendship, mourning, and the secret, all of which are exemplified and developed at the end of Sophocles’ tragedy. But readers of Sophocles may be surprised at how little, relatively, Derrida says here about the play’s own preoccupation with issues of foreignness, exile, and hospitality—the very questions of Derrida’s seminars. You begin almost to wonder if Derrida could not see for looking—could not see these Derridean things for looking; or perhaps, whether he could not see them through his tears. For part of his reading of the end of the play involves an impassioned interjection, a parenthesis in the midst of a citation of the passage in which Oedipus says he cannot reveal his deathplace even to his nearest and dearest. Oedipus is saying to Theseus, in the passage that Derrida is quoting (with commentary in passing), that he will find out the secret of the place, which is sacred and not ‘moveable in words’ (Sophocles (2004), l. 1526), ‘when you go there alone: since I would not declare it to one of the townspeople here, nor to my own children, much as I love them’ (Sophocles (2004), ll. 1528–9), and Derrida comes in: [‘much as I love them’: as though loving were finally just what had to be conveyed in this ultimate proof of love that consists in letting loved ones know where one dies, where one is dead, where one is: dead, where one is once dead, and as though Oedipus were deprived of the right of giving that ultimate proof of love to those to whom he vows his love and whom he loves, his daughters and his sons, here his daughters, Antigone and Ismene; and deprived as he is of revealing to the ones he loves the place of his death,

3 Derrida writes: ‘Oedipus then asks that he not be forgotten. He begs to be looked after in his death. He requests it, he begs it, but this plea is an injunction, it raises the suspicion of a threat, it prepares the way for or announces a piece of blackmail. At any rate, it looks uncannily like it’; and in the next sentence he refers to ‘this threatening plea’ (Derrida (1997a), 105–7; (2000a), 97).

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where he is dead, where he is, dead, once dead, dead once dead, dead only once once dead once and for all, it is thus as though he were deprived of the daughters he has, as though he had no daughters, as though he no longer had any or had never had any.]4

The mourning enacted here is not so much an elaboration of Oedipus’s declaration as an identification with the complaint of Antigone—who cries out against her exclusion. Oedipus’ death, to himself, is something else.

ORIGINS AND ENDING In Oedipus the King, Oedipus discovers that his origins are other than those he knows; that he is not, in fact, from Corinth as he thought but ultimately from his present home city of Thebes. The change of place is perhaps the only normally narratable element in this history of someone who discovers himself to be the son of a man he killed and of the mother of his four children. By the time of Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus has been thrown out from his native country not just once but twice over—first when he was born, when his parents sought to prevent the fulfilment of the father-murdering oracle by having him exposed to die; and second, some time after the revelation of his accidental crimes of parricide and incest. He has had no say in or control over who he is or what he has done. His death, however, is something within his grasp: it is the settling side of the oracle that he himself heard when he was young, beyond and after the prophecy of murder and incest (see Sophocles (2004), ll. 86–93). Arriving with Antigone at Colonus, Oedipus says that he recognizes the place that is destined for him to die (the grove belongs to the Erinyes); he also, later, when thunder is heard, recognizes the sign of the time. For the first and only time, therefore, Oedipus the foreigner, the one who was always an exile already, is finding a kind of lasting home. Theseus promises that he will make him empolis (cf. Sophocles (2004), l. 637), which is to say he will give him a place within the city: 4

Derrida (1997), 97–9; (2000), 91.

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Who then would reject (ekbaloi) this man’s goodwill, when in the first place there is the shared hearth of an ally (doruxenos) for him? And secondly, he has arrived here as a suppliant (hiketeˆs) to our gods and is giving no small reward in return to this country and to me. In respect for these things, I will never reject (ekbaloˆ) his favour, but will settle him as a citizen in the land (empolin). (Sophocles (2004), ll. 631–7)

Oedipus has explained that his presence in the land after his death will help to protect Athens against its enemies. He is being offered hospitality (the hearth or hestia) as a military ally, guest, foreigner, and friend (xenos, in relation to hospitality, spanning all these senses). The verb ekballein, to throw out, is used repeatedly both in this play and in Oedipus the King to refer to the two ejections of Oedipus himself—first, as a baby, by his parents (seeking to avert the fulfilment of the oracle that their son would murder his father) and later, after the discovery of what is by now his murderous history, by the city of Thebes. Here, as if making amends for what has been the story of Oedipus’ life of rejection, taking him in as a benefit, not as a source of pollution, Theseus promises never to make an exile in this way of Oedipus and his promised future favours. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in an essay that focuses on Oedipus at Colonus, discusses at length the significance here of the word empolin (it appears in this accusative form and is in fact a conjecture, not attested by any of the manuscript sources but accepted by Sophocles’ principal editors). Empolin gives Oedipus a status that is properly acknowledged as being part of the city, and yet is not the same as that of a full citizen. The Greeks were familiar with such partial positions, as with the ‘metics’—metoikoi, ‘living among’—who were in effect resident aliens, though without the negative connotations sometimes associated with that name in modern times. In Oedipus the King, Teiresias describes the (as yet unidentified) murderer of Laius as having been at Thebes a xenos logoˆi metoikos, ‘a foreigner, in theory a foreign resident’—a guest metic (Sophocles (1927), l. 452). Drawing on later evidence, from the Hellenistic period, Vidal-Naquet specifies the category of empolis as being equivalent to that of the metic, making a distinction between ‘citizens in the full sense of the word and those who are in the city without however being of the city’; ‘de la cite´’ also includes

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the sense of being ‘from’ the place: the citizen belonged in no other place in the past.5 Oedipus is also between two positions in his movement from the figure of pollution and abhorrence, the negative pharmakos, to that of a saviour, who is posthumously to take on the role of a kind of protective deity for Athens, his adopted and adopting country. The word soˆteˆr is used, just as it was in Oedipus the King, for Oedipus’ past and present role as actual and potential ‘saviour’ of the city of Thebes suffering from plague. That protective function was then cut short by its revealed inversion: Oedipus was no rescuer, but the source of pollution. In relation to the current situation, Rush Rehm speaks of ‘Oedipus’s metamorphosis from a pitiful wanderer into a soteric force grounded in the soil of Attica’.6 Oedipus does not become, or metamorphose into, a full citizen; his new status is beyond the ordinary categories of citizenship or foreignness, categories which, in any case, cannot be restricted to a simple opposition between the citizen and the non-citizen. Oedipus’ newfound status will not, for one thing, be passed on to his descendants.7 So when Derrida speaks not of Oedipus’ reception into Attica, but rather of a renewed and exaggerated foreignness, really his words have meaning only in relation to the daughters’—or rather to one particular daughter’s—lament. The following sentences come directly after the crying question passage cited above: And it is the question of the foreigner—of the foreign woman. Those tears, who has ever seen them? We are going to hear it. These tears wept by Antigone, she weeps them as she weeps for the death of her father in a foreign land and in a foreign land where, what is more, he has to remain hidden in his death, thereby becoming an even more foreign foreigner [or ‘an even stranger stranger: ‘un e´tranger encore plus e´tranger’]. This death is the becoming-foreign of the foreigner, the absolute of his becoming-foreign.8 (Derrida (1997a), 113; (2000a), 101)

But on his side, unlike and apart from Antigone—and her sister— Oedipus has in fact found a home and a place; he is no longer a foreigner or an exile. His arrival in Attica puts an end to his life of 5 6 7 8

Vidal-Naquet (2001), 195. Rehm (2004), 38. Vidal-Naquet (2001), 204. Derrida (1997a), 113; (2000a), 101.

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wandering by giving him, for the first and the final time—once and for all, ‘une fois pour toutes’, to use a phrase that Derrida loved to linger on—a kind of fixed address. He is now ‘from’ Athens, ‘of’ Athens, ‘in’ Athens: empolis. Antigone, on the other hand (and her sister with her), will go back, at least provisionally, to the home she does have in Thebes, with an end now to her own ancillary life of shared exile with her father. Oedipus’ entering into a kind of sacred new ‘life’ after life has its counterpart in his human arrival at a respite and resting place. He knows that he is going to die and he is happy to die. At the start of the play, when he has first realized that he has arrived at the intended place for his death, he prays to the presiding goddesses: Do not be unkind to Apollo or to me; Apollo, when he prophesied those many bad things, spoke of this as a rest (paulan) for me after a long time, coming to this land as an end, where I should find the holy ones’ seat and shelter for strangers, and finish off my wretched life; a source of benefit, as having lived there, for those who received me, but of destruction for those who sent me away, who drove me out. (Sophocles (2004), ll. 86–93)

There is a long-term balance or compensation implied here, as the promise of this different ending goes back all the way to Oedipus’ first hearing of the oracle that also told him his double fate in relation to his parents, and caused him to exile himself from Corinth, which he then believed to be his home country and place of origin. Oedipus has come as a suppliant, seeking both protection and hospitality, and he is able to give back an equally sacred privilege in his posthumous presence. The final line maintains, however, his human retaliation against Creon and his own sons, which will also figure significantly later in the play. After an altercation with his son Polyneices, who has turned up himself at Athens to try to beg Oedipus to support him in his battles against his brother, Oedipus curses his two sons as doomed to kill each other. As Rush Rehm and others have noted, it is difficult to reconcile this persistently vengeful, angry Oedipus with the figure of civic protection. Vidal-Naquet stresses the different registers to which he and others are bound: ‘Impossible to enclose a tragic character in a single network of meanings. If the impasse we have reached at the moment has any sense, it is to remind us of that simple truth.’9 9

Vidal-Naquet (2001), 198.

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Oedipus’s status as xenos—stranger, foreigner, and ultimately associate—is amplified by his designation and self-identification as a wanderer. As such, ton planeˆteˆn Oedipoun, ‘wandering Oedipus’, as he designates himself right at the start (Sophocles (2004), l. 4), now seeks and finds a kind of home, a point of fixity; movement and aimlessness are answered and ended by a destination and an arrival. Additional features of Oedipus’ state have been his situation as a beggar or ptoˆchos and as an outcast, the exile ‘thrown out’ by his own state. The beggar, the wanderer, and the exile come together in the person of the suppliant or new arrival, the hiketeˆs, as Oedipus finds himself at the start of the play, asking for permission to remain in the place he has come to. John Gould has eloquently described the constellation of practices and everyday rituals associated with this commonplace situation in Greek literature and culture of the xenos who turns up somewhere and asks to be given help.10 In Oedipus at Colonus, every other character seems to claim an identification with Oedipus as a fellow outsider of one sort or another. Oedipus’ son Polyneices attempts (and fails) to bond with his father on the grounds that they are both of them exiles and both driven out of their homeland;11 Theseus makes the same fellowexile connection, in his case as a means of being tactful to the man whose shocking story is known to all: he speaks of himself as someone ‘who knows that I was brought up as a foreigner myself ’ (Sophocles (2004), l. 562).12

10

See Gould (2001); the article, ‘Hiketeia’, was first published in 1973. See Sophocles (2004), ll. 1292, 1330. 12 Theseus was raised in his mother’s country, Troezen, without knowing that his father was Aegeus, king of Athens; Oedipus was raised in Corinth without knowing that his parents had adopted him or that his native city was Thebes. Another similarity between Theseus and Oedipus, with good reason not one that Theseus brings up, is that Theseus unwittingly caused his father’s death (he forgot to show the white flag meaning all is well when his ship returned from Crete after he had fought the Minotaur, and his father, watching from the cliffs, jumped into the sea in despair); Oedipus killed a man on the road whom he did not know to be his own father. 11

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That Oedipus arrives at Colonus rather than in the centre of Athens reinforces the sense of particularity and locality. This is not the big city but a semi-rural space outside it, with its own special religious sanctity. Colonus was also, as it happens, Sophocles’ own local deme, the division of Athens he belonged to.13 The generalized, global roaming—Oedipus is planetary, planeˆteˆs, in the modern sense too—comes to a halt in this most intimately local of places. I think that the non-identification of Oedipus’ ultimate resting place has the effect of reinforcing this special quality. The place hidden away within the groves of Colonus can be shown (to the one chosen other man) but not told, its position not mapped or described; there is no third person, no representation of it, and thus it remains beyond or before the common world of language and communication. Derrida remarks that Antigone mourns for her mourningless state, given a father dead in a foreign land ‘and what is more, buried in a place that is foreign (e´tranger) to any possible localization’.14 True, once again, for her—and for Ismene. But in other respects the non-identifiability of this local place is precisely what makes it unique in a positive sense for Oedipus who has no country. It is where it is, but it cannot and may not be sought or found according to the normal parameters that relate a given place topographically to its surroundings or coordinates, its place in relation to other places. What Derrida treats as Antigone’s quasi-exemplification of the foreign woman, or the question of the foreign woman, is gnawingly present in her role as the guide and support of the exiled Oedipus. The typical life of the Greek woman itself involved a kind of exile, one from which men were exempt, whereby in the normal course of life she would typically move—physically as well as symbolically—from

13 Studies of Oedipus at Colonus in recent years have stressed the significance of Colonus being the site of the special Athenian assembly of 411 BCE that (temporarily) abolished the democracy, replacing it with an oligarchy of 400 men. It is possible that Sophocles was one of those who took part in the ‘election’ of the oligarchs, and that Oedipus at Colonus, a decade later, at the very end of a long life, and situated in the place that has all the personal and political associations of that charged time, may have been intended and received as a kind of peacemaking or reconciliation. See Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson (2007), 197–203. 14 Derrida (1997a), 111; (2000a), 101.

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one family to another at the time of marriage.15 Antigone, on the other hand, has been precluded from this usual second life of the woman in exile by her faithful tending of her father on the road; she has been deprived of the habitual kind of household existence, and she has had, unnaturally, to sustain a father without means and forever on the move. Here are Oedipus’s own words in gratitude for his daughter’s sacrifice of her other possible life: Antigone, ever since the time when she ceased to need young nurturing (tropheˆs) and grew strong in her body, has constantly been an old man’s guide, wandering (planoˆmeneˆ) with me, poor thing, often roaming (aloˆmeneˆ) hungry and barefoot through the wild wood, often struggling with rains and hot sun, wretched girl, but putting home living in second place, as long as her father had sustenance (tropheˆn). (Sophocles (2004), 345–52)

The daughter’s plight is lamented as her having had to forgo what would have been her home, represented for a woman in domestic rather than political terms. Antigone is kept from domesticity, rather than from her country; she has to live rough and mobile, rather than have the security of an oikos; having gone through her own period of being looked after, she has become the nurturer not, as in the normal way, of her children (and husband), but instead of only her father. Oedipus goes on to praise Antigone’s sister Ismene in contrasting but complementary terms. She too has had to depart from the usual order of things, in her case by acting as a kind of spy back home, reporting back to Oedipus and Antigone about developments in Thebes; that is what she has just arrived to do in the present time of the play. But the homage to Antigone’s extra-domestic nurturing takes on a different colouring in the light of the lines which precede it. Oedipus has just asked about his two sons, Antigone and Ismene’s brothers; but rather than wait for the full answer, he jumps the gun:

15 A point made from a slightly different angle by Ranjana Khanna in ‘Frames, Contexts, Community, Justice’: ‘The daughter of the foreigner, Antigone, is more of a melancholic. She does not know what secret Theseus holds, and is condemned to carry the phantom of that secret within her language. Antigone’s complicated filiations and affiliations are singular. And yet, she is like all women who function within a patrilinear society. Filiation is mutable, and a relationship to the representative teleologies of group or state affiliation is tenuous’ (Khanna (2003), 27).

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Oh, those two are completely copying the customs of Egypt in their disposition and their daily sustenance (biou trophas). There, the men sit weaving in the house while their wives are the ones who go out to provide for daily sustenance (biou tropheia). But for you two, my children, those who should be doing that job stay at home keeping house like young girls, while instead it is you who endure my hard burdens, wretched as I am. (Sophocles (2004), ll. 337–45)

Aside from its caricature and its orientalizing disparagement, Oedipus’ conjecture is wrong: as he will shortly learn from Ismene, the men are engaged in the most conventionally virile of pursuits, not staying at home but fighting—and fighting each other as well. The contrast between the dutiful daughters deprived of domesticity and the warring fre`res-ennemis is heightened by the symmetry of the double pairing, two of each; it is more apparent too in the Greek, where Oedipus here (and elsewhere) uses the distinctive dual form: ‘you two’, ‘those two’, with corresponding verbal and adjectival endings,16 thus making these sibling pairs, whether united or at odds, into joint subjects, the couple and counter-couple of the girls and the boys. The symmetry is further emphasized by the lack of moral differentiation within each pair. As Mary Whitlock Blundell has pointed out, the history of the brothers’ dispute presented here, unlike other versions of the legend, does not lay more blame on one of the two.17 And in this play, unlike Antigone in which Ismene initially fails to support Antigone’s determination to defy Creon’s decree and give their brother a burial, there is no quarrel between the sisters. The daughters, here, are torn away from the otherwise natural developments of their lives: that is the peculiarity of Antigone’s exile, tending and sustaining but in the wrong places (they are in exile, she has no household of her own) and for the wrong relation (an aged father, not a husband and children). The sons or brothers (they stand in both these relations to Oedipus, just as the girls are both daughters and sisters) are jointly estranged, from each other and from their

16 The English ‘both’ is like a vestigial dual, usable as it is in an additional pronominal form that further specifies the normal plural: ‘we both’, ‘you both’, ‘they both’. In the absolute, without a supporting pronoun, ‘both’ stands for the third person (dual) plural: ‘Both went out’ has to be translated by ‘they’, not ‘we’ or ‘you’. 17 See Blundell (1989), 244.

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father (or half-brother). As against Antigone’s optimistic generalization that parents indiscriminately love their children, toˆi tekonti pan philon (Sophocles (2004), l. 1108), Oedipus calls Polyneices ‘hateful’ and curses him to future fatherlessness—‘without a father in me (apatoˆr emou)’ (Sophocles (2004), l. 1383). Derrida says that in guiding his daughters (and Theseus) towards the place where he is to die (as far as he does take them, that is), Oedipus ‘reverses the roles’.18 This is true insofar as Antigone’s habitual guidance of her father, rather than the other way round, has become like (second) nature; the new positions finally restore a long-gone earlier state of filial relations when Antigone and Ismene might naturally have followed their father’s lead. Thus roles have been reversed and inverted all along, with the differently unconventional acts of the sisters (one of them in particular) and the brothers (again, one of them in particular). More profoundly, all along, in Oedipus’ unique history, every one of the ‘roles’ (though the word becomes far too bland) of age and kinship has been upside down or confused, often unknowingly, in ways that have paralleled the different moments of his exiles, known and unknown, from Thebes, from Corinth, and finally from Thebes again.

PARENTALITIES Before Oedipus at Colonus appears on the scene of the seminar, Derrida quotes a well-known passage from Plato’s Crito when the laws of Athens, in person, engage in ironically Socratic dialogue with Socrates (‘We’ve heard you like this kind of conversation, right?’). Derrida quotes quite a long extract, part of which is this: Suppose the laws came along and said this: ‘Socrates, was this what was agreed between us and you, or was it that you would abide by whatever judgements the state made?’ If we were surprised when that was said, perhaps they would say ‘Socrates, don’t be surprised by these words but answer, since you are used to engaging in question-and-answer sessions. Come on then,

18

Derrida (1997a), 103; (2000a), 93.

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what is the charge against us and the state that makes you try to destroy us? Wasn’t it we who were your first parents (se egenneˆsamen heˆmeis), and through us your father married your mother and had you (ephuteusen se)?” (Plato (1900), 50c4–d2)

The issue the laws are arguing about is one of prosecution and exile: does Socrates, found guilty by the state and its laws, have the right to leave the country? Socrates will go on to argue, in the person of the laws, that he does not, that in effect an adult has had the chance to refuse the citizenship of his country if so he wishes, and in not doing so has thereby implicitly accepted its terms and its judgements. The appeal to parenthood, however—or at least to fathering—quite specifically situates the laws not only over the subject—the child—but over the parents who produce him. Never was paternity more clearly a legal fiction; but here, again never so clearly, the laws are the real parents, without whom the child has no civic existence (and without whom the parents don’t legally make him19 in the first place). Oedipus has an answer to this—as might be expected of the one whose birth was preceded by oracular damnation as well as by legal enabling, and whose own fathering (of his own children) was mistakenly enabled by a state that did not recognize his real identity that would manifestly have disqualified him for this particular union and begetting. He protests throughout Oedipus at Colonus that he did what he did unknowingly and unintentionally (he did not know Laius was his father when he murdered him, and he did not know Jocasta was his mother when he married and had children with her). And at one point he goes back a stage further in his denunciation: Because tell me, if some divine utterance was coming my father’s way by an oracle, that he was to die at his children’s hands, how could that rightly be cast as a reproach (oneidizois) against me, who did not yet have my father’s or my mother’s birth-engendering, but was unborn (agenneˆtos) at the time? (Sophocles (2004), ll. 969–73)

Where Socrates’ laws brought the subject into being and provided the means for making him a responsible citizen, Oedipus’ divine

19

‘Him’ alone, because in Athens there are of course no female citizens.

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injunction has deprived him of responsibility from even before his birth: since forever, he has had no choice. The language of Oedipus here, with its rhetorical question and its appeal to reasonable grounds of prosecution, is just as mock-judicial as the language of the laws in Plato. Indeed a little later in his angry riposte to Creon, Oedipus goes on to make even more of a defendant’s common-sense extreme-case point. He argues that if some guy came along and threatened to kill you, you wouldn’t, would you, before you struck back in self-defence, stop and ask him if he happens to be your father (Sophocles (2004), ll. 992–4)? But the intervening passage, just before this, is quite different in tone, coming close to the pitch of Derrida’s impossible mourning: For she gave birth to me (etikte), she gave birth to me, oh the horror of it, me not knowing, her not knowing, and she who had given birth to me (tekousa) had children with me, a shame (oneidos) upon her. (Sophocles (2004), ll. 982–4)

Far from the hyper-logical sarcasm, and anger, of the father-murdering instance, this is a cry of anguish, redundantly despairing in its uncontrolled multiplication of the same word and the same declaration, as if Jocasta had given birth to him three times over. And Oedipus does not make a parallel argument to the one about the hypothetical aggressor. He does not say, ‘And when you are about to be married to someone and have a family with her, you don’t think of saying, do you, “Do you happen to be my mother?”’ The emotional tone is quite different, as great as the difference between the two strikes of a road-rage encounter between strangers and the time out of time of the babe in the womb and the mother’s labour: etikte . . . etikte . . . tekousa, an intensity that becomes unbearable in the aftermath of the later long years of the other births and lives, their children together. To baby Oedipus’ long-ago legitimate arrival as the son of his parents has been transferred all the anguish of the four further children’s incestuous generation, ever since the fullness of time revealed the mother as always having been also the future wife and mother-of-his-children. Socrates’ garrulous laws go on to make the point that this citizen’s loyalty is further consolidated by his having had Athenian children of his own. But for Oedipus, that second engendering—his mother his

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children’s mother—is precisely what undoes his world and his place in it. As if seeking to make a separation, he does not use the same verb for Jocasta’s giving birth to their children together as he has three times used for her giving birth to himself. It is birth not death that is tragic for Oedipus—that is mourned or unmournable, unmournable as that which could not have been lived as a simple beginning. But Oedipus’ belated horror at the first of Jocasta’s maternities also draws attention to another, earlier scandal of the purest order: at his birth, his own parents themselves could not bear the life of their firstborn son and heir. They threw him out to die, thereby revealing the contingency of the hospitality that is supposedly a matter of course for the new child—the stranger who ‘enters’ the family.20

THE UNCHOSEN LIFE Oedipus makes an impassioned protest against the ineluctable fate that set him up, or brought him down, even before his earthly existence, to commit his appalling crimes; and throughout Oedipus at Colonus he argues, to a series of different interlocutors, that he did what he did akoˆn—against his will, without the intentions that would have made him guilty or responsible. Before even the possibility of choice, there were inexorable laws, or anti-laws, un-laws, that in his case determined what he could do or be, laying down the future destruction, and apparently by his own doing, of any liveable identity for him within the normal boundaries of kinship and state and subjecthood. After his death, Oedipus himself is to acquire a certain awesome power of imposing laws that cannot be refused. Derrida speaks at length of Theseus’ situation of being bound by the oath enjoining him to absolute secrecy as to Oedipus’ whereabouts. When

20 In Euripides, Freud, and the Romance of Belonging, Victoria Pedrick emphasizes the contingency of the taking up and acceptance of any newborn baby—a contingency that is usually and necessarily forgotten or repressed, both culturally and within families: ‘Parents either pick up their newborn or throw it out, to death or worse’ (Pedrick (2007), 32).

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his daughters ask him to see Oedipus’ tomb, Theseus says no, because, as Derrida puts it, he is ‘tied by the secret that has been given to him, confided in him, given to him to keep, that he must keep, from now on under an obligation to the law that falls upon him even before he has to choose to obey it’.21 This is in effect the return or repetition, but now in a protective not a destructive mode, of the position of Oedipus himself who was forced to do what he had not chosen to do. Theseus’ calm certainty and care for a civic future are very different from the mood of Oedipus the King, where the first shocks of realizing what he has unwittingly done lead Oedipus to seek to punish himself—by self-blinding and by exile. When Oedipus comes to Colonus, and by extension to Athens, it is the second time in his life that he has arrived as a foreigner or xenos at a new place where he subsequently acquires protective powers. (Or counting Corinth, where he grows up as the adopted son of the king and queen, it is the third, since he is invited during the action of Oedipus the King to return there as their ruler.) But at Athens, unlike at Thebes, there will be no reversal and ejection, and this time Oedipus knows what he is doing, and where, and for whom. Much of the dialogue of Oedipus at Colonus, however, goes over the old ground of Oedipus’ misspent life, as on various occasions he is himself prompted or goaded to tell it. To the Chorus he appeals (unsuccessfully) to their respect for tactful boundaries in the relations of host and guest: ‘In the name of your hospitality (xenias), do not open up the shameful things I have suffered’ (Sophocles (2004), ll. 515 f.); even here, in the passing allusion, Oedipus is careful to place what happened in the passive, not as what he actively did. As it turns out, he does yield to their demand to hear the true story, having prefaced his response to their questions by the general plea that ‘I have suffered the worst, strangers (xenoi), I have suffered without meaning to (aekoˆn), let the god be my witness, none of these things were chosen by me (authaireton)’ (Sophocles (2004), ll. 521–3). The same word, akoˆn (or aekoˆn), is used for his unwillingness to speak as for his unwillingness to do, when he did them, the things he now hates to speak about. There is the same suggestion of irresistible force

21

Derrida (1997a), 108–9; (2000a), 97.

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in the verbal pressure inflicted by the two hostile interlocutors, Polyneices and Creon. Oedipus accuses Creon of ‘forcing me to speak’ (Sophocles (2004), l. 979), and says that he is telling these things ‘against my will (akoˆn)’ (Sophocles (2004), l. 987). The identification between the unwilled deed and the unwilled reiteration of it is explicit, since in the very same line he says that he married Jocasta akoˆn—that is, not knowing he was her son. To Creon, Oedipus makes the further protest that he is being made to expose the family’s shameful history (Creon was Jocasta’s brother) to others as well. After defending himself in relation to both the crimes in relation to his parents, he says: ‘And you, since you are not a just man, but think it is fine to say everything, the words that should not be spoken as well as the words that should, you reproach (oneidizeis) me with these things in front of these people here’ (Sophocles (2004), ll. 1000–2). Oedipus is no psychoanalytic patient finding relief in the telling of his emotional history of victimization. Nor now, as he was at the time of Oedipus the King, is he the one who did not know what he did and must learn to acknowledge a different history from the one he has always imagined. Instead, it is as if Oedipus in the intervening period has put more of a distance between himself and the truth of his history. He cannot ‘move on’—or he can only move on to a life beyond that of the mortal Oedipus; but he also resists, as far as he is able, the demand to repeat the involuntary sufferings by recounting them. Oedipus was and remains a foreigner or outsider to his actions, as he had put it directly in Oedipus the King : ‘I say this as a stranger (xenos) to the story (logou) and a stranger to what happened’ (Sophocles (1927), ll. 219–20). He now rejects any suggestion that he should be brought to identify himself with those actions as if he belonged with them, as if in some sense they were his own. It should be remembered, too, that the happenings themselves—the road-rage incident and the marriage to Jocasta—were not in themselves traumatic ones (there is no reason to think that Oedipus was particularly exercised by his passing homicide); they only become so at the point where they take on new meanings in relation to those who turn out to have been his parents, and are thereby translated into a story of tragic destiny. That is the story that the first Oedipus play uncovers, and it is the story that, over and over again, the second Oedipus play

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retells—each time with an insistence on the pain and unfairness of that very retelling for the man who is subjected to the story he never chose, and to which he remains an outsider.

WORD TRAVELS When he is waiting with Antigone in the grove at Colonus, after their first encounters, Oedipus asks the chorus of old men whether the king will really make the trip from Athens to meet with ‘the blind man’ (Sophocles (2004), l. 299): Chorus: Definitely, as soon as he realises your name. Oedipus: But who is the person who could give him that information (toupos) [literally ‘word’]? Chorus: It is a long way. Plenty of travellers’ tales (epeˆ) will likely have drifted along (planaˆsthai), and when he hears them he will be here, you may be sure. (Sophocles (2004), ll. 301–5) Like the Fama—at once rumour and fame—of the Dido episode in the Aeneid,22 the words and the name have an independent wandering life, one that precedes and shapes the response to the man himself, detached as he is from his story. Oedipus, when he arrives at Colonus, is not just any old xenos, any old foreigner or stranger, stumbling into view and liable to the usual preliminary questions from the locals about who he is and where he is from. The question is asked, but Oedipus has to fall back on something like ‘You don’t want to know’: Chorus: Poor old man, since you are comfortable now, tell us, who are you? Who are you, much enduring, being guided as you are? What country, might we learn, is your homeland? Oedipus: Strangers (xenoi), I have no country. But don’t . . . Chorus: What is that you are forbidding, old man?

22

See Virgil, Aeneid, 4. 173–97, in which Fama carries the tale of Dido’s affair with Aeneas, beginning (l. 173): ‘Immediately Fama goes through the cities of Africa . . . ’

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Oedipus: Don’t, don’t ask me who I am and don’t pointlessly probe any further. Chorus: What’s this? Oedipus: A dreadful origin (physis). Chorus: Speak! Oedipus [to Antigone]: Oh my child, what am I to say? Chorus: Stranger, tell us what your lineage is on the father’s side? Oedipus: Oh me, what is to become of me, my child? Antigone: Tell it—since you are coming close to the brink. Oedipus: Well I will speak, since I have no hiding place (katakruphan). Chorus: You two are taking a really long time—hurry up. Oedipus: Have you heard of the son of someone called Laius? Oh . . . Chorus: Oh . . . Oedipus: And the family of the Labdacidae? Chorus: Oh god . . . Oedipus: And the wretched Oedipus? Chorus: So you are him? (Sophocles (2004), ll. 203–22) In Oedipus the King, there are similar passages of intense interrogation that lead to the progressive revelations about Oedipus’ past; at one point there too, when he has guessed the truth about Jocasta’s identity, Oedipus tries to call a halt to the questioning. But here, all parties know the story of Oedipus already. The Chorus is in the same position as the audience for the earlier play: the Oedipus story is one that they know only too well, and its shocking power is re-experienced every time it is rehearsed again. That power is evoked in the insistent repetitions of Oedipus at Colonus: Oedipus is made to go on telling the story he cannot bear to tell, and to tell it in front of ‘all these people’, who know it already; it will only be provisionally laid to rest when he finds the ‘hiding place’ that in this passage he is denied. Oedipus calls himself apoptolis (Sophocles (2004), l. 207). He is not the normal xenos, whose polis or home country can be simply stated, along with his name and family; instead, he is uniquely stateless, ‘without a city’, ‘out of the city’, and uniquely known already: he is Oedipus, Oedipus who did that, Oedipus all too familiar. Internationally famous—notorious—he has lost a life to call his own; his story is known to all and is not a story he ever had a choice in. Only

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as he moves towards his death does he begin to move away from his Oedipal fate. The dying Oedipus achieves some kind of end or closure or different beginning, of a recognizable type that had always been denied him before. But the pact or secret between the men, himself and Theseus, leaves outside an Antigone who will be condemned to go on mourning and go on suffering on behalf of the dead men of her family. It is to her distinctive fate, to her bereftness and her situation of foreignness so different from that of her father, that Derrida’s interest is primarily directed, not so much to the foreigner and exile whose death at last gives him a kind of life and home.

7 Possible Returns Deconstruction and the Placing of Greek Philosophy Andrew Benjamin

. . . nous sommes, encore des Grecs, certes, mais peut-eˆtre d’autres Grecs, nous ne sommes pas ne´s du seul coup d’envoi grec; nous sommes certes encore d’autres Grecs, avec la me´moire d’e´ve´nements irre´ductibles a` la ge´ne´alogie grecque, mais assez autre pour n’avoir pas seulement, aussi, alte´re´ le Grec en nous, mais pour porter en nous aussi du tout autre que le Grec. (Jacques Derrida. ‘Nous autres Grecs’)

I In an important attempt to situate philosophy—an act, which while providing a location for the philosophical is equally and at the same time an act of philosophy—Derrida argues that There are other ways for philosophy than appropriation as expropriation . . . Not only are there other ways for philosophy but philosophy, if there is such a thing, is this other way (mais la philosophie, s’il y en a, c’est l’autre voie).1

1

Derrida (1997d), 32–3 (my translation).

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After making this point Derrida questions any possibility of a return to Greek philosophy in a way such that the latter could be either a unique source or a singular origin. A Greek source could not be authentic nor could it authenticate. It is thus that . . . philosophy has never been the responsible deployment of a unique original assignation linked to a unique language or to the place of a single people. Philosophy does not have a single memory. Under its Greek name and in its European memory, it has always been a bastard, hybrid, grafted, multilinear, polyglot and it is necessary for us to adjust our practice of the history of philosophy and of the history of philosophy, to this reality which was also a chance and which remains more than ever a chance. What I am saying here of philosophy can also be said, and for the same reasons of law and of democracy.2

What then of Greek philosophy? This is of course not a question of the sentimentality in which original Greek formulations are thought, somehow, to harbour original truths such that the history of philosophy then becomes the history of their undoing. The question of Greek philosophy is the repositioning of the philosophical, perhaps starting with the Greek, such that it can be presented in ways that allow its presence as ‘bastard’, ‘hybrid’, etc, to be affirmed. Here, rather than concentrate on Derrida’s readings of either Plato’s Phaedrus or Timaeus or even the meticulous interpretation of Aristotle on time, no matter how central they are, emphasis will be given to his approach to Sophocles in the context of what was his developing work on hospitality.3 What a trajectory of this nature provides is a way of noting the place of Greek thought within his writings. Equally, it provides a way of returning to those writings. A way that will have been opened up by the potentialities already inherent within the complex plurality that is constitutive of Greek philosophical and literary thought. In the second of the two seminars that make up the volume De l’hospitailite´ Derrida identifies the role played in that specific work by texts by Plato and Sophocles.4 In this regard he argues that: 2

Derrida (1997d), 33 (my translation). The texts in question are ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’ in Derrida (1972d). The analysis of Aristotle occurs in ‘Ousia et gramme´’ in Derrida (1972c) and the extensive treatment of the Timaeus occurs in Derrida (1993b). 4 Derrida (2000a/1997a). Reference will be to the English followed by the French. The translations have at times been slightly modified. 3

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In letting ourselves be guided by sketched readings of texts by Plato (Crito, the Sophist, the Statesman, the Apology of Socrates) or Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus) we let ourselves be interrogated by certain figures of the Stranger/ Foreigner.5

The analysis continues immediately after with a detailed nuancing of that act of interrogation concluding that prior to the different forms such questioning takes there is ‘the question of the foreigner as question coming from the foreign’6 (Derrida’s emphasis). In other words, there is within the approach taken by Derrida a positioning of Greek philosophy in terms of a presence defined by the different senses in which ‘l‘E´tranger’ figures. (Presupposing thereby that what counts as the ‘foreign’ is always more than one.) This in turn allows for the complex position in which philosophy, especially Greek philosophy, becomes a site that refuses a moment of original synthesis (even if what were held together within it is a founding discord). Two points are being made here. The first is that whatever it is that is taken to constitute Greek philosophy, not only is it a site of original hybridization, it is also the case that inscribed within it, inscription as a form of self-constitution, is a founding relation of strangeness. Strangeness has a twofold presence. It is as much a relation to the outside as it is a form of self-estrangement. A self-estrangement not thought of as a founding act of betrayal but the affirmation of ‘hybridity’ (or ‘bastardry’, etc.) as an original condition. As a mode of thought therefore the Greek is both at home and distanced from itself. The primordiality of movement which in eschewing unity marks out a site of conflict as original. What this means is that plurality, conflict, and alterity (the latter as a form of self-defined otherness) work together. Indeed, they were only ever at work together. Such would be the nature of Greek philosophy. It would be present as a site of original conflict. Id. (2000a/1997a), 131/115. Derrida writes ‘l’E´tranger’. I have kept the capitalization in the translation. 6 Derrida’s original French is ‘la question de l’e´tranger en tant que question venue de l’e´tranger’ (ibid. 2000a/1997a). The difficulty of translating the term ‘l’e´tranger’ is that the final formaulation ‘venue de l’e´tranger’ brings a range of meanings into play. Central here is that ‘l’e´tranger’ is the stranger as foreign (though equally stranger as other): it is also a country that is external. Derrida is working with all of these semantic resonances. 5

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The second point is that to the extent that Greek philosophy occupies the position of the stranger/foreigner, then what persists as the primary philosophical question is what a relation of hospitality to that domain of thought is going to be like. (Hospitality has to be positioned against the threat of an imposed sense of unity and thus has to allow for the presence, and it will be a presence given within the act of interpretation of the arrival of Greek thought defined as that which is ab initio more-than-one.) Interpretation, specifically in this context the interpretation of Greek philosophical and literary presence, would then become a mode of welcoming and thus needs to be thought of in terms of hospitality. (The question that must endure concerns the quality of that to which hospitality is extended.) There are aspects of this approach that need to be maintained. The first concerns the question of how the relation that hospitality names is to be understood. The second involves holding to a structure of hospitality as already present, thus pertaining as a potentiality, prior to the moment of arrival and thus prior to the extension of hospitality. Not only will it be essential to return to this already present potentiality, it needs to be noted that what its presence also incorporates is the need to understand hospitality in terms of a potential for self-welcoming. Overall, it is not a question of merely accounting for the possibility of an original sense of the set-up staged by the stranger/foreigner/foreign. To account for it would be to domesticate the set of relations that are implicated in that arrival. Fundamental to Derrida’s argument is that what can be identified with the figure of the stranger/foreigner/ foreign must be allowed to endure as a present plurality. Though it should be added that the key point here is that what is entailed by holding to, thus maintaining, the strangeness of the stranger is always to be determined. (Allowing for the ‘always to be determined’ incorporates, it will be argued, the centrality of practice within the philosophical.) Domestication would involve their incorporation into a history and thus into a narrative in which the possibility of any yet-to-be condition of the stranger/foreigner would be effaced in the process. It is this location that will be taken up in relation to Derrida’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at

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Colonus.7 Central to that interpretation is Oedipus’ opening account in which he describes his presence along with Antigone in terms of ‘strangers’ (xenoi) (13). While it is not pursued directly by Derrida, of equal importance, though that importance will only emerge at a later stage, is Oedipus’ earlier description of himself as ‘the wandering Oedipus’ (ton planeˆteˆn Oidipoun) (5). (Moreover, this position would need to be set against the complex undoing of wandering—an undoing in which the blind Oedipus leads—that occurs towards the end of the play (lines 1544–55). This repositioning of Oedipus will be taken up at a later stage.)

II Derrida’s encounter with Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus that forms an integral part of the discussion of hospitality needs to be set against another encounter in which a fundamentally different sense of the philosophical on the one hand and Greek philosophy on the other is evoked. The second encounter occurs in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics.8 The citing by Heidegger of one line from Oedipus at Colonus—line 1224—occurs not long after he has provided his own extraordinary commentary on the first stasimon in the Antigone— the ‘Ode to Man’—and immediately after an engagement with Parmenides. What provides coherence to the interpretations of these differing texts is that what they gesture towards, for Heidegger, is the proposition that,

7 References to Oedipus at Colonus will be to Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s translation (Sophocles 1994). Reference to the play will be to the line number and will be provided in the body of the text. While not concerned with Sophocles another invaluable discussion of the position of the ‘stranger’ is to be found in Loraux (1996), 175–89. For an account that also brings philosophical concerns together with the historical in regards to the city see Hartog (2005). See in particular chapter 5 ‘Cite´ et alte´rite´’. 8 Heidegger (2000/1983). Subsequent references will be to the English followed by the German. The translations have at times been slightly modified.

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in the inception of Western philosophy (am anfang der abendla¨ndischen Philosophie) it is already clear that the question of Being necessarily includes the grounding of Dasein.9

The significance of this assertion is straightforward. To the extent that the question of Being defines the philosophical—a definition as self-definition and thus as the establishing of the essential—then this conception of Dasein, itself understood as the being of being human, is necessitated by such a specific conception of the philosophical. There is a necessary and hence ineliminable reciprocity between these two formulations. For Heidegger, this reciprocity—a set-up having original force— comes undone when ‘human being’ is repositioned such that what dominates is the equation of ‘human being’ with ‘the rational living thing’ (186/184). Part of Heidegger’s project is to show what he terms the ‘distance’ (Abstand) between this subsequent definition and what he continues to describe as ‘the inceptive opening up of the essence of Being human’. An essence that will have obtained originally. While that position will come to be undone, an undoing that for Heidegger can be chartered within the development of Greek philosophy itself, within its history thus constituting that history, it remains the case that at the ‘inception’, ‘Being human’ is grounded in the opening up of the Being of beings.10 There is therefore a positioning that is defined in terms of what can be described as an original self-inclusion. The move from the ‘essence’ to other expressions of ‘human being’, for example, the one already noted in which it is equated with the ‘rational living thing’, becomes a form of estrangement. In other words, distancing from the essence, its avowed refusal, is the moment at which, perhaps uncannily, the estranged emerges. This mode of emerging is intrinsic to Dasein. Nonetheless, it marks a fundamental form of betrayal. In the course of developing this position Heidegger draws a distinction between two forms of interpretation. The first is based on the ‘customary’ (u¨bliche), while the latter are often, he notes, dismissed as ‘Heideggerian’. (The formulation is Heidegger’s own.) Heidegger, it should be noted, is quick to acknowledge the problematic status of the 9

Heidegger 186/182.

10

Ibid. 187/185.

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claims he makes for Greek philosophy (this includes what he calls ‘Greek Dasein’.) After positing these two alternatives his next comment is of central importance. He asks: ‘which interpretation is the true one?’ (Welche Auslegung ist die Wahre?)11 The evocation of truth is by no means an attempt to link interpretation to epistemology. Nor is it the case that the choice is a mere matter of relativity. The position at hand is far more dramatic. A lot more is at stake in abandoning custom and norm than the mere countering of positions. The move is ‘a leap’ (ein Sprung). Moreover, it is the result of taking up a position—starting out on a ‘run’ (Anlauf)—that has an importance beyond the realm of mere interpretation. Heidegger writes, ‘Everything is decided by this run’ (An diesem Anlauf entscheidt sich alles). The ‘run’ implicates the runner. In addition, it indicates a point of origination. The ‘leap’ however is a severance that involves a recovery. What is recovered is the essential. Recovery and rectitude are implicated within the unity that such an approach delivers (delivers whilst sustaining). As Heidegger writes, ‘Only one who takes the right running start can leap.’12 There is therefore a ‘we’ that is both implicated and created by the propriety of the move. ‘We’ are involved and therefore so is a form of collectivity. ‘We’ form a part. Implicit in this move is not just the presence of a ‘we’. More significant is that this collectivity and thus its creation are a result of the decision. This decision does, of course, mirror that which has already emerged as such. For Heidegger that which pertains at the ‘inception’ (Anfang), namely ‘the opening up of Being human’, gives to Dasein a determining quality. Dasein’s emergence was itself ‘decisive’ (entscheidend). The specific determination of this opening is such that it necessitates that a decision is made in relation to it. As has been intimated this departure is not a chance occurrence. In Heidegger’s formulation—a formulation that ties together ‘necessity (Notwendigkeit)’ and ‘urgency (Not)’— It happens in and from historical necessity from the urgency of historical Dasein (in und aus geschichtlicher Notwendigkeit, aus der Not des geschichtlichen Daseins).13

11

Ibid. 187/184.

12

Ibid. 188/185.

13

Ibid. 188/185.

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The ‘we’ therefore is constructed as such through a form of interpretation—a decisive act that has itself the structure of a decision— and as such is inextricably bound up with a sense of historical exigency. Overcoming both norms and relativity is the result of a decision. However, it is not a decision that has an inbuilt sense of openness, rather it is a decision that accords with what has already been decisive. What this means therefore is that it is not a decision defined by a conception of the future that is itself given within the potentiality of the ‘to come’. After all, what for Heidegger has already emerged as central to Dasein is its capacity to refuse that which is decisive. (This does not affect the status of that which is decisive. Rather, it opens up what can be described as the failure to decide as a possibility for Dasein.) This forms an element of Dasein. Its enactment, however, must be understood as its own possibility while at the same time being the refusal of a sense of propriety. The possibility of inauthenticity is already present. The making of Dasein therefore acknowledges the incorporation of its own unmaking. This is of course why Heidegger positions human being as the ‘uncanniest’. At this point in his analysis the position is formulated in terms of a stark opposition. With its formulation what needs to be noted is the necessary singularity both of Dasein as essential and that which is essential to Dasein. In this regard Heidegger writes, for Dasein, withholding such openness towards Being means nothing other than giving up its own essence. (Aufgebens seines Wesens.) This demands that it either step out of being or else never step into Dasein.14

The choice is clear. There is a sense of propriety with its own intrinsic sense of necessity. While it is possible for Dasein to ‘withhold’ in regard to its relation to Being, doing so becomes a form of abandoning even if it is an act conditioned by the history of Being. Abandoning here, however, is not an opening towards, on the contrary it is a giving up, and thus a refusal of the sense of propriety that governs and determines Dasein’s relation to Being. Thus were it to have been Dasein’s decision to move in this direction then this would mean, as was indicated above, its giving up that which was essential to it. The other possibility—and it

14

Heidegger 188/185.

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is vital to note that there are only two possibilities—involves ‘openness’. However, this openness is not an openness that resists any form of conditionality. Not only is it conditioned in advance; precisely because the ‘we’ is unified within it (and by it) what cannot register except in terms of a founding inauthenticity is a conception of the ‘we’ as having to affirm a founding sense of self-estrangement; a self-estrangement that will brook no overcoming. Having made this point his next move is to cite line 1224 from Oedipus at Colonus—meˆ phunai ton apanta nikai logon—as the line, for Heidegger, stages precisely the predicament of the withholding of an openness towards Being. He translates the line thus: never to have stepped into Dasein triumphs over the gatherdness of Beings as a whole. (niemals ins Dasein getreten zu sein, obseigt u¨ber die Gesammelttheit des Seienden im Gazen.)15

While the viability of the translation hinges on the way phunai (which is to be understood in this context in terms of Heidegger’s own interpretation of phusis) and logos are understood, (and, it should be added, the non-registration of the opening strophe in which the tenor of the ode is set in terms of the relationship between, life, death, and measure (to meˆtrion)), what is of interest in this instance lies elsewhere. Indeed the argument here is not intended to call Heidegger’s translations or even the interpretations of Greek philosophy into question. That would be an important though different undertaking.16 Rather, the project is to show what conception of Greek philosophy figures within and thus grounds such interpretations and translations.

15

Ibid. 186/185–6. In his helpful and incisive overview of Heidegger and translation Markus Zisselsberger (2008) argues for the integration of Heidegger’s philosophical project with the detail and content of specific translations. Zisselsberger defines Heidegger’s conception of what occurred at the ‘beginning’ and that which takes place after in the following terms: ‘It is the earliest trace of the Being of beings. Later thinking, however, has become “alienated” from these beginnings and thereby becomes “distant” from what is thought’ (318). Heidegger’s translations are inextricably connected to this conception of the history of philosophy. Calling one into question is already to mark the limit of the other. The importance of Zisselsberger’s argument is to have demonstrated the necessary interconnection between the translations and a specific conception of philosophy. The interrelation defines the positioning, by Heidegger, of Greek philosophy. 16

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Fundamental to this undertaking is Heidegger’s insistence on that which is there at the ‘inception’ (Anfang). The interpretation of the line from Oedipus at Colonus works within the presupposition that what is staged pertains to Dasein. (It does not pertain to human particularity—i.e. individuated humans—but to Dasein as the being of being human and thus to being human as given within and thus only thinkable in terms of its relation to the history of Being.) As emerged from his analysis of the First Stasimon of the Antigone what defines Dasein is its inherent and perhaps inescapable capacity for a type of undoing. Within his translation, thus interpretation, the line from Oedipus at Colonus acquires a specific force. For Heidegger what stands opposed to Being as a whole is ‘never to have taken over Beingthere’.17And yet this state which is an act of violence within the ‘overpowering’ hold of Being—what has already been presented by Heidegger as ‘the gatheredness of beings as a whole’—becomes what it is and is therefore a possibility for Dasein, not due to caprice, but because of what it is that Dasein is. Thus what occurs is the moment in ¨ bergewalt which what is taken on is the ‘overpowering of Being’ (die U des Seins). A position staged by ‘Dasein’s highest violent act against itself ’ (der ho¨chsten Gewalt-tat gegen sich selbst).18 And note, that it is act, one defined in terms of violence, against itself. Dasein, and it is vital to underscore that what is staged here is historical Dasein, in this instance ‘Greek Dasein’, defeats Being, by taking over and being taken over by Being in such a way that what is undone is the propriety of each. Dasein’s predicament therefore is the impossibility of an openness that is properly its own. It is not as though these decisions occur outside the history of Being. The undoing, the refusal, and thus the withholding are part of the same history. Heidegger’s more general location of this position, a positioning that brings with it a type of inevitability, is the following: The essence of being human (das Wesen des Menschseins) opens itself up to us (ero¨ffnet sich uns) only when it is understood on the basis of this urgency that is necessitated by Being itself. Historical humanity’s being there (Dasein des geschictlichen Menschen) means: Being-posited (Gesetzt-sein) as the

17

Heidegger (2000/1983), 189/186.

18

Ibid. 189/186.

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¨ bergewalt des Seins) breaks breach into which the overpowering of Being (U in its appearing so that this breach itself shatters against Being.19

If a conclusion can be drawn here then it will involve the following considerations: even though the argument presented by Heidegger is grounded in the incorporation of Being into the work of Being’s history, that history has a necessity such that what occurs within it as part of the ‘shattering’ remains nonetheless within the hold of Being’s necessity. As such the possibility of an estrangement that cannot be overcome or an estrangement that must be held as distanced and in which distancing becomes the locus of safety emerges as an impossibility. Any sense of an outside held as such—held within the necessity of an impossible complete self-disclosure—will always be countered in the name of ‘historical humanity’s being-there’. While Greek Dasein encounters its limit it does so within a purview that will have to account for its having been subdued. What arises therefore is an effacing of distance and thus the subduing of risk. The possibility of an original sense of hybridization or bastardy comprising positions that would have to be lived with rather than being positioned in terms of the necessity for the effacing of their presence, marks the fundamental difference between Derrida’s and Heidegger’s conception of Greek philosophy.

III Derrida is, of course, not concerned with this line from the play. Though the nature of his specific project will allow a way back to Heidegger. What matters however is that a radically other sense of estrangement and the foreign is at work within his text. His approach to Oedipus at Colonus, as well as his positioning of Greek philosophy, are structured such that not only is hospitality one of the defining motifs governing the approach to the text, the interest in Oedipus at Colonus is in terms of the structuring of hospitality within it. While 19

Ibid. 174/171–2.

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Derrida’s arguments in these lectures form part of a broader project that is concerned with the question of hospitality and its relation to ‘unconditional hospitality’, a project that is also at work in his investigation of the relationship between law and a conception of justice as the ‘unconditional’, what matters in this instance is how Oedipus at Colonus figures within this complex of relations.20 The general proposition concerning hospitability can be delimited in terms of the relationship between hospitality as the unconditional and its being conditioned—perhaps conditioned as a necessity—by law. Derrida formulates this position in terms of an ‘insoluble antinomy’ between, on the one hand, The Law of unlimited hospitality (to give to the new arrival all of one’s home and oneself, to give him or her one’s own, our own, without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfilment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural) those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional, as they are defined by the Greco-Roman tradition and even the Judeo-Christian one, by all law and all philosophy of law up to Kant and Hegel in particular, across the family, civil society and the State. (Emphasis in the original.)21

This condition and thus the antinomy are themselves constitutive, as Derrida indicates, of the philosophical tradition. As a result this give rise to the project of thinking the possibility of unconditional justice and thus unconditional hospitability; a necessity that derives its force from the primordiality of the self/other relation that locates and defines as much the ethical as it does the location of human being, within the inevitability of its relation to the conditioned. Two points need to be made here. The first is that this relation is, in Derrida’s terms, not ‘symmetrical’. It involves a founding disequilibrium that structures relations of power (patriarchal power being the example that is the most relevant in the case of Oedipus at Colonus). Secondly, that the law as unconditioned necessitates the plurality of laws. However, to the extent that that they are necessitated then, in terms of Derrida’s analysis, the effect of the plurality of laws is that the unconditional is

20

The following analysis of both Derrida and Sophocles draws on a number of my pre-existing papers: Benjamin (2004), (2005), (2006), (2008). 21 Derrida (2000a/1997a), 77/73.

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threatened, denied, or perverted as a consequence.22 For Derrida this logic is inescapable. This is a move (and a related conception of inescapability) which is of central importance, since if there is a limit to Derrida’s approach then it lies in the way perversion and denial are bound up with what could be more generally described as finitude. In this context what counts as finitude occurs in relation to the antinomy that marks the law of hospitality. Within that setting there is a clear relation between the conditioned (finitude) and the unconditioned. The unconditioned, he argues, in the setting of that relation, is such that ‘La loi’ (The Law) as the unconditioned is above the laws. It is therefore illegal, transgressive, outside the law (hors la loi), as an anomic law nomos a-nomos, law above the laws and law outside the law . . . (comme une loi anomique, nomos a-nomos, loi au-dessus des lois et loi hors la loi . . . )23

While it will be essential to return to this configuration of the antinomy and thus the positioning first of ‘La Loi’ as transgressive as well as both ‘above’ (au-dessus) and ‘outside’ (hors) the law, since it renders problematic any sense of place and secondly because the equation of the ‘anomique’ with a certain designation of lawlessness would seem to ground the plurality of law in a extra-legal conception of the law, what needs to be taken up at this stage is that this configuration is what allows, in Derrida’s analysis, for the introduction of the figure of Oedipus. Oedipus appears with Antigone. As he make clear from the start, while he may not be aware of the particularity of his location he defines their arrival and who they are in the following terms: ‘we come as strangers (eˆkomen xenoi)’. And yet, that designation is located within a more complex formulation. The full line is: ‘for we have come as strangers and must learn from the citizens (astoˆn) and do as they tell us’ (12–13). Whether what is at stake here is the identification of the need to learn with the condition of being a ‘stranger’ or that the source of the learning is the ‘citizens’ and thus the obligation is defined in relation to the latter rather than the former, what is clearly the case is that the condition of being a ‘stranger’ is, within the context of Oedipus’ formulation, always 22

Ibid. 79/73.

23

Ibid.

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already conditioned. Moreover, it is a specific form of conditioning. Being present is conditioned within an openness not simply to the other as citizen but to the recognition of already being in a relation of instruction. And yet, Derrida’s interest is with the presence of Oedipus as stranger as though occupying such a position was not itself mediated from the start. The possibility of an original mediation and its connection both to the staging of the freedom of instruction and the question of finitude will need to be reintroduced. Derrida positions Oedipus in terms of the latter’s presence as ‘the outside-the-law’ (anomon) (‘le hors-la-loi’ (anomon)).24 Positioned as such Oedipus arrives. Having arrived he is presented as preparing himself to speak. This is taken to occur in the first thirty lines of the play. Of these lines Derrida comments that: The first moment is the arrival of the arrival (l’arrive´e de l’arrivant), Oedipus. A foreigner prepares himself to speak to the foreigner. Without knowledge. (Sans savoir.) Without the knowledge, the knowledge of the place, and the knowledge of the name of the place; where he is, where he is going. Between the profane and the sacred, the human and the divine. Isn’t this always the situation of the absolute arrival?25

For Derrida therefore what he identifies as ‘the situation of the absolute arrival’ is that which occurs without having been conditioned in advance. It is this formulation of the figure of Oedipus that is fundamental for Derrida. As a consequence, in terms of that analysis, Oedipus comes to fill the position of the unconditioned. The response by Thesus to the arrival of Oedipus is an exchange in which both assert the position of either having been or being foreign (thus present as the stranger or other). And yet, the very possibility of that exchange coupled to the etymological concern in which terms for foreigner and host have a potential identity and thus a necessary indeterminacy allows the question of what is the foreign to be posed by Derrida with greater acuity.26 If there is a way of beginning to question this formulation, i.e. the identification of Oedipus with ‘the absolute arrival’, then it is not just the ‘without (sans)’ governing the knowledge of place and direction 24 26

Derrida (2000a/1997a), 35/37. This occurs ibid. 43/39.

25

Ibid. 35/37.

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that for Derrida accompanies the arrival of Oedipus that needs to be taken up. The ‘without’ is not an extraneous element. This ‘without’ exists, indeed only exists, in relation to the function of the ‘absolute arrival’. The ‘absolute arrival’ brings the unconditioned into play. The ‘without’ therefore not only sustains that positioning. There is an important reciprocity. The ‘without’ moreover finds further expression in Derrida’s description of Oedipus as ‘the outside-the-law (anomon)’ (‘le hors-le-loi’ (anomon)). While Derrida also cites the very passage in which it occurs, nonetheless this positioning of Oedipus by Derrida needs to be set against Oedipus’ own description of himself as not ‘the outside-the-law (anomon)’ (135).27 (The entire line reads: ‘Do not look on me. I beg you, as a lawless one’.) The occurrence of this line in the play, the plea not to be considered thus, occurs prior to the attribution of identity. The Chorus return with the identification of ‘wanderer’. While it will be essential to take up the question of ‘nomos’—a term that opens up the complex relation between norm and law—the figure of Oedipus stands in need of further development. Central to this present concern is Derrida’s interpretation of the final part of the play in which Oedipus sets the conditions not only for his own death but also for how that death is to be received. For Derrida this death is intimately bound up with a secret. Not only is there the agreement between Oedipus and Thesus that the place of Oedipus’ actual death—his tomb—be kept a secret, it is also the case that the retention of the secret as a secret is fundamental to the survival of the state. The crypt and thus the encrypted Oedipus bring the logic of the secret into play.28 This aspect is unproblematic. The complication arises because the Oedipus in question, for Derrida, retains the designation of Oedipus as ‘hors-le-loi’ (anomos). Moreover, this particular designation and the secret are brought together such that the presence of one entails the presence of the other.

27

This position is developed ibid. 39/36. On the question of the secret in Derrida’s work see Derrida (1999). The French edition also contains another indispensable text ‘La Litte´rature au secret’ (163–209). While exploring it to different ends, Rebecca W. Bushnell (1988) also notes the importance of the secret in the play. See p. 105. 28

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Secret knowledge, secret about knowledge, secret about knowing, ultimately, where dies the great transgressor, the outside the law (la hors la loi), the blind anomos, who cannot even confide the secret that he enjoins upon other to keep about he place where he, the stranger/foreigner (l’e´tranger) will be able once upon a time to have died.29

That which will safeguard the city is the impossible secret that must be both retained as secret yet shared. The future of the city becomes linked to the impossibility that the stranger allows to be staged. Within the continuity of Derrida’s analysis the ‘stranger’ continues to be identified with the figure of the ‘anomos’. There is however more to Oedipus. An addition that rather than necessarily denying this particular reiteration of the logic of the impossible and thus of the unconditional complicates it. (Both elements are fundamental to Derrida’s approach.) What must still be kept in play is the question of the Oedipus that figures in one of the most dramatic reversals that the play stages. It occurs at line 1545. Up until that moment Oedipus had described himself as a ‘wanderer’, moreover he had been described as such, to which it should be added that such a position could not have been separated from his always already being in the position of the suppliant. (As is clear from line 14 he arrives as a suppliant.) However, whilst remaining a suppliant, there is an important reversal. Responding to that which has a divine source (touk theou paron 1540), the positioning that had defined him, defines him no longer. Not only does he insist that he remain untouched (meˆ psauet) (1545); with equal force he takes over the position of one who will guide other mortals. The blind lead. He asks his children to follow him. He then goes on to say: This way, thus, this way! For it is this way that I am led by the escorting Hermes and the goddess from below. (1547–8)

Having uttered these words he leads Antigone, Ismene, and Theseus from the stage. A few lines later, at 1560–2, the Chorus evokes the need for a clear path for Oedipus. He is named as the ‘stranger’: ‘I pray that the stranger may arrive at the plain of the dead (nekroˆn plaka).’ There is therefore an acknowledgement of his ensuing death

29

Derrida (2000a/1997a), 100–1/91.

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and thus a direct sense of removal; perhaps, more exactly, of his removing himself. A location, perhaps relocation, in which he moves from one place to another. The question to be addressed is who moves? Is it Oedipus the ‘wanderer’, the ‘suppliant’, the Oedipus who in an act of transformation takes over the responsibility of his location, thus relocation, or, finally, is it the Oedipus who refuses the identification of anomos? The question to be addressed is the following: how much does the argument advanced by Derrida depend upon the figure of Oedipus defined in terms of the ‘without’ and the anomos such that these terms would not simply limit Oedipus, they would fail to take up both the complexity as well as the consequences of his positioning and repositioning within the play? Here it is essential to begin with a more general question: What does it mean to be anomos? A question posed both by the play—insofar as it is a designation strenuously resisted by Oedipus—as well as by Derrida’s own analysis. The designation anomos, regardless of its original source, needs a setting. As the play opens, on first arriving, what is central to the position of Oedipus and Antigone is that they do not know exactly where they are. Oedipus’ opening question concerns the particular ‘region’ to which they have come. And yet, the actuality of place is never doubted. They do of course know who they are. Again this act of self-identification brings more into play than mere names. The play opens: Child of a blind man, Antigone to what region (tinas choˆrous) or to what city of men (tinoˆn androˆn polin) have we come? (1–2)

Hence blindness, the father/daughter relation, coupled to the recognition that they are in some place and thus in some city (note the repetition of the interrogative pronouns), open the play.30 They arrive therefore as always already in place: a place that is both a ‘region’ and a ‘city’, a place which while yet to be named nonetheless is designated in advance as ‘region’ and ‘city’. The play opens therefore 30 The use of interrogative pronouns continues as the next line begins ‘tis’ i.e. ‘who’ will receive Oedipus. What this reiteration suggests is an opening in which the presence of place and the other is assumed in the abstract. What remains to be given is particularity.

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by staging what can be described as being-in-place. Being-in-place is the identification of the always already placedness of human being. Being-in-place assumes that the location of human being is fundamental to the life of human being.31 Oedipus’ opening words, by assuming that there is a relation to place and thus what matters is the particularity of that relation, can be read as the affirmation of that situation. There is, however, more involved than the mere affirmation of place. Place as general location is evoked initially by the term ‘choˆros’. However, this is then followed by ‘polis’ (city). Moreover, the term ‘polis’ is qualified, though this is hardly necessary, such that the city is peopled from the start. If the evocation of place underlies being-in-place as is indicated by the interplay of polis and community, then the polis is always the site of human activity. Rather than emerging as a simple tautology the ‘polis’—a peopled polis—is presented as the site of the collectivity of human being. As such the polis becomes the place of being-in-common. Commonality is not linked to a quality intrinsic to human relations. Commonality is the being together and as such identifies a relation. This relation, and it is a relation amongst others, defines a specific register of being-in-common. The argument for this position can only be outlined here. It stems from an interpretation of Aristotle’s position in the Politics in which human being is described as a ‘zoˆion politikon’: i.e. a positioning in which the being of being human is explicable in terms of a polis-dwelling animal. In other words, the human is involved with place—the polis—though equally what can be described as the original placedness of human being necessitates a form of co-presence. The human is with its others. While taken simply within its Aristotelian context the conception of the zoˆion politikon has both limitations as well as strengths, nonetheless what it holds open is the possibility of a location of human being in terms of a primordial 31

It needs to be noted that place, understood as being-in-place, has specific philosophical force. What would need to be integrated into the recognition of the complexities inscribed with being-in-place is the specific determination that pertains to the Greek context. Fundamental here, as is clear from the play, is the relationship between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ places. In regard to this distinction see the important collection Alcock and Osborne (2001). Not only is there the already present sense of place that has already been identified; there is also a conception of memory that underpins place. To this end see Alcock (2002).

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relation to place and equally a primordial relation to others. What can be called being-in-place—itself a rewriting of an aspect of Aristotle’s formulation—involves therefore a type of relationality. The question that arises, however, is how the interplay between place, relation, and the ‘political animal’ is to be understood. Responding to this question necessitates recognizing that what is described by the formulation zoˆion politikon is not arbitrary. It is not as though the claim is that amongst other things human being can be expressed in this way. The claim has to be that the term zoˆion politikon describes the being of being human. Therefore, it needs to be read as the formulation of what it means to be a human being. As such the description has an essentially ontological character. The passage from Aristotle’s Politics in which this position is advanced is the following: that man is by nature (phusei) a political animal (zoˆion politikon); and so even when men have no need of assistance from each other they none the less desire to live together. At the same time they are also brought together by common interest (to koineˆi), so far as each achieves a share of the good life (tou zeˆn kaloˆs). (1278b)

While the passage warrants long and detailed commentary in its own right two moments within it need to be noted in advance for these current concerns. The first is the use of the term ‘nature’ (phusis) as the ground of the description of human being in terms of a ‘political animal’. The second is the further description of collectivity in terms of ‘the shared’ or ‘the common’ (to koineˆi). The use of ‘nature’ to qualify ‘political animal’ needs to be understood as reinforcing the ontological quality of the zoˆion politikon. (‘Nature’ is the ground of that which is being what it is.) Of equal importance is the attribution of a conception of the shared. This opens up two important questions. First, there is the quality of the shared itself. In the second, there is the question of with whom the shared exists. In regards to the questions arising from the presence of the ‘shared’, in the immediate context of Aristotle’s text, it is evident that what is shared and with whom that share occurs are others named under the heading zoion politikon. Nonetheless, what the presence of the shared and the common reinforces is the sense of an already present relationality. In other words, the ontological status of human being is not defined in terms of an originally singular entity but that which is, ab initio,

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part of a collectivity. Not a collectivity of singulars but of potential and actual relations. There is an original sense of the shared that allows both a singular as well as a general sense of ‘a good life’. Moreover, this particular location of the share is what gives the being of being human its original sense of place. Being-in-common therefore cannot be thought other than in regards to what has already been described as being-in-place. There is a co-implication since both involve the necessary presence of relationality. By holding both to the centrality as well as the inescapability of relationality as integral to the description of human being, the opening of Oedipus at Colonus can be read as the literal staging of the always already present status of being-in-place and being-in–common. The constructions, as staged above, of being-in-place and beingin-common are therefore implicated from the start. The play’s opening makes it clear that neither Oedipus nor Antigone simply arrives. The opening words turn what happens on the stage into the emphatic statement of the complex relations that define human being. It is within those relations, relations that pre-exist any form of particularity, that the presence of the stranger and the host would then need to be located. Moreover, it could be argued that being somewhere— (what has already been described as being-in-place) necessitates a twofold positioning. In the first instance there is a type of freedom involved in being-in-place. That they are able to arrive—that they appear—already indicates the possibility of movement and passage. The second is that being-in-place cannot be thought outside a conception of relationality. It could be therefore that Oedipus’ insistence that he not be thought in terms of the anomos is itself a plea to be thought in terms of the necessary relation between being-there and nomos itself. The nomos in question, however, is always regional and thus always depends upon the particularity of place. Hence, the importance of the question that pertains to where they are. An importance that is already clear when Antigone asks: ‘shall I go and discover what place (topos) it is?’ (26). The response, both direct and indirect, by the Chorus to the positioning of Oedipus is to indicate that he is on sacred ground. This is a possibility that is already acknowledged at the beginning of the play when Oedipus asks that they enquire whether they are on ‘profane’ or ‘sacred ground’ (10). The distinction is already clear. Indeed, being-in-place is defined

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from the start by this already understood sense of place. The Chorus responds to the question of place by underlining the relationship between place and nomos. If you have any word to say in converse with me stand away from the forbidden ground and speak where it is lawful for all (hina pasi nomos). (166–9)

Here the Chorus identify a place of speaking that accords with nomos. Nomos can be taken strictly to mean lawful—as indeed would be the case in regard to being on sacred as opposed to profane ground—equally nomos could be taken as identifying the place where the customs of the city prevail. (Both of these possibilities echo in the formulation ‘lawful for all’.) Moreover, the second sense of nomos is hinted at when Antigone, speaking of the place at which they had arrived, initially says, ‘the walls that surround the city look to be far off and this place is sacred’ (14–15). Within the walls conventions pertain. Within the walls and only within them is nomos king.32 The anomos is not just outside or beyond the realm of nomos. The anomos has a specific relation to place. In the Trachiniae Sophocles allows Hercules to describe Centaurs as ‘lawless’ (anomon). Moreover, in the Bacchae Euripides has the Chorus evoke Justice in counterposition to that which is anomos. In the latter the Chorus call on ‘Justice to appear’ (itoˆ dika phaneros) and in appearing to take a sword to those who position themselves ‘outside law, justice and God’ (ton atheon anomon adikon) (992). In both examples the state of being ‘anomos’ yields a response. In the first instance Hercules can describe the subsequent destruction of the centaurs by Zeus as occurring because of that designation; in the second, the state of being ‘anomos’ demands a response by Justice. That which is ‘anomos’ therefore occupies a position that is defined as such by that which secures nomos, namely the gods or Justice. What is secured, however, by the retention and rearticulation of nomos is place. Nomos occurs within and thus makes possible the complex of relations that define human being. The latter necessitates the polis understood as the place of being-in-common. The positioning 32 For a more detailed discussion of idea of Nomos as king, an idea that has its origins in Pindar, see Benjamin (2005).

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of that which is anomos therefore is only possible (a possibility that is present to be effaced) within a relation in which relationality itself is refused or threatened. The refusal cannot be incidental or inadvertent. The state of being anomos becomes the state in which violence refuses relationality: violence becomes the attempted undoing of the already present relation between nomos and place.33 What this amounts to is the claim, not that the anomos is either the ‘impossible’ or is that which is ‘outside the law (hors la loi)’, but that anomos is precisely that position which refuses the space of relationality itself. In other words, the anomos needs to be understood in terms of the inherent placedness of particularized nomos. If therefore the question of a form of original relationality is that which is identified by the term nomos then this will call into question the possibility of a law that is ‘outside the law (hors la loi)’. Precisely because what would need to be questioned is what the ‘outside’ means. What for Derrida is outside the law? In regards to what he identifies as the ‘unconditional’ he writes that This unconditional law of hospitality, if one can think that, will be therefore a law without imperative, without order and without obligation. In sum, a law without law (ce serait donc une loi sans impe´ratif, sans ordre et sans devoir. Une loi sans loi, en somme).34

The connection between this law and the actuality of law is outlined in Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! In terms of the opening of another conception of place, A historic place that occurs between The Law of unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to all others (offerte a priori a` tout autre), all those who arrive, no matter who they are, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality without which The Law of unconditional hospitality will risk remaining a

33

Insisting on an already present sense of relationality is intended to call into question the possibility of an argument that holds to the position that ‘a deconstructive approach to hospitality would look to what escapes political practices and contexts yet makes them possible’ (Naas (2003), 164). While the overall thrust of this position is correct it remains the case that transcendental conditions of possibility do not ‘escape’. On the contrary, they form an integral part, as will be argued, of the process of judgement itself. 34 Derrida (2000a/1997a), 81/77.

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pious desire, irresponsible, without form and without effect, indeed to pervert itself at every instant.35

What this identifies is a place—a city of refuge—though equally a different sense of relation. And yet, what does it mean to argue that laws have an outside, if what is termed ‘The Law of unconditional hospitality’ can be effective within the realm of the conditioned. Does that not assume that it is effective across a boundary or division? A similar form of argumentation occurs in Force de loi. Here the argument concerns the relation between justice and calculation. There is a future for justice and there is only justice to the extent that the event is possible which, as an event, exceeds calculation, rules, programmes, anticipations, etc. Justice, as the experience of absolute alterity, is unpresentable (impre´sentable), but that is the chance of the event and the condition of history.36

What is significant about these two formulations is that they posit the unconditional in terms of the ‘a priori’ in the first instance and the ‘unpresentable’ in the second. Moreover, in the second the possibility of justice, indeed its only possibility, lies in the presence of a conception of justice defined as that which ‘exceeds’ all forms of calculation. The logic of the argument repeats the structure that has already emerged with the position of Oedipus as the ‘absolute arrival’ and thus as the anomos. Within this setting that which is outside of the law sets the measure for law. This occurs to the extent that what sets the measure is always held apart from law’s actuality and therefore remains ‘unpresentable’. Moreover, were that which refuses all forms of disclosure to be allocated a form of presence in relation to the actuality of arrival then it would be there in terms of the ‘a priori’. The position of Oedipus rather than occupying a single or unitary designation can be used to begin to question the logic of these different forms of argumentation. (In this regard it should not be forgotten that Derrida has already argued that the presence of the plurality of laws—nomoi—is a denial, indeed a necessary denial, of the unconditional.) How is the arrival of Oedipus to be understood? As a beginning it should be clear that Oedipus does not arrive

35

Id. (1997b), 57 (my translation).

36

Id. (1994b), 61 (my translation).

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‘without’ (the ‘without’ (the ‘sans’), in other words, does not govern his arrival). In the first instance he arrives as an avowed ‘stranger’. He arrives, as is clear, already knowing that there is a pre-given relationship between ‘citizen’, ‘strangers’, and forms of ‘instruction’. To the extent that this set-up is acknowledged there is an always already present form of mediation that undoes—in advance—the very possibility of an ‘absolute arrival’ or any entity that would have been conditioned by the ‘without’. Since relationality in terms of both its potentiality as well as its actuality becomes the condition that occasions arrival, there cannot be arrival as such. To have arrived therefore is the staging of a relation. The arrival is of that which is already within a relation. The stranger, and Oedipus is ab initio a stranger, enacts such a designation: i.e. being a stranger. There is nothing prior to that enacting. What is enacted is an already present designation. The initial enacting is an acting out of relation. As has already been mentioned Oedipus and Antigone are able to enter. The situation they are in is sufficiently adaptable such that both voyage and entry are possible. On stage Oedipus is not simply present as a stranger; he announces at the same time that he is a ‘suppliant’ and in addition— an addition that causes consternation—that he will die in the place he has just entered. A death decreed by fate. The further addition is that Oedipus is open to instruction. An openness that presupposes a tacit but nonetheless real acknowledgement of yet another form of relationality. None of these elements is contingent, as though they were incidental predicates. They define what it is to be Oedipus. Moreover, there would not have been a moment when Oedipus was not defined by this complex of relations even though the definition is far from simple. (Complexity here arises because these relations are those that Oedipus lives out. They are not simply given.) As such, and even though he is a self-acknowledged stranger, the precondition for being identified in this way already presupposes, at the very minimum, certain structures of recognition. The presence of such structures once again attests to the hold of relations within which Oedipus is the continual after effect. If this is the case then there is an important distinction between particularity—the given set of relations that are themselves explicable in terms of nomos—and a more generalizable presence of nomos as pre-existing particularity. (This

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set-up which will take the form of distinction between the actual or specific on the one hand and the transcendental on the other is crucial to the overall argument.) A way into understanding how such a distinction works has already been provided by the Chorus. The Chorus has already suggested that what has been described as being-in-place is the space disclosed by the city wall. As such it discloses place and thus the location of being-in-common. This is the domain in which nomos pertains. However, the way in which it is present involves an important doubling. The wall discloses the particularity of nomos; particularity entails the possibility of conflict on the level of nomoi (hence, for example, the fact that while Oedipus is open to being instructed by ‘citizens’ what cannot be excluded is that such instructions may be the source of a genuine conflict). Particularity, therefore, is finitude insofar as a given nomos cannot be generalized or cannot be assumed to have universal generality or applicability. This why the position of the stranger involves continual negotiation. A negotiation in which the stranger’s position— positioned as the stranger and thus not as subject to differing processes of assimilation—is that which the city has to maintain. Within the context of the play this is the challenge to the city that is the result of Oedipus’ agreement with Thesus. (This has the emphatic consequence that the future prosperity of the city necessitates allowing for the presence of the stranger as secret. That is a presence that remains unmasterable.) The second aspect marking the doubling of nomos is more exacting. In sum it is the following: if the city wall always discloses the particularity of nomos and thus a specific form of place and commonality, then the city wall figures as integrated into that which accounts for the possibility of human sociality in general. In other words, there is more than mere finitude involved since the finitude that marks particularity presupposes another sense of nomos. In this instance it is a nomos without content and thus the nomos which is the transcendental condition for human sociality. It is precisely this state of affairs that is identified by the Chorus when they state that there is a place where nomos encompasses the totality of human being. Nomos is not just operative in the particular instance. The polis is itself the locus of nomos. This relation between nomos as a particular set of conventions and nomos as a transcendental condition

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provides the setting in which it is possible to return to Oedipus’ plea that he not be thought of as anomos. Indeed, what is entailed by the term ‘anomos’ can be reinterpreted in light of the distinction between finitude as the particularity of nomos and nomos as a transcendental guarantee of human sociality. What the identification of the anomos holds open is not the denial of nomoi; where the latter are understood as the plurality of conventions/laws that hold at a particular instance. They comprise no more than what counts as finitude. Rather, to be anomos would involve the refusal and thus the envisaged destruction of the conditions of human sociality itself. If this position is re-expressed in terms of Derrida’s initial formulations such that what is involved is the relation between the conditioned and the unconditioned, then the argument is the following: if there is the already conditioned then this means that the transcendental would have set the measure for the conditioned. In other words, the conditioned brings the transcendental into play. The transcendental has a necessarily disjunctive relation with the conditioned. The presence of a disjunctive relation, however, and this is a key point, is not the same as, nor does it give rise to, what Derrida identified namely a founding and ‘insoluble antinomy’. This is especially the case if the conditioned were then thought such that the process afforded an interconnection in which the disjunctive relation provided the conditions in regards to which the conditioned allowed for judgement. Judging the conditioned, or the judgement in relation to finitude, are themselves only possible if what is assumed is the presence of nomos as the transcendental guarantee of human sociality. Explicating what that sociality entailed and thus what would occur in regards to the judgement of particular nomoi would necessitate the continual movement between actuality, being-in-common, being-in-place, and this specific conception of the transcendental. If Oedipus had in fact staged the link between that which was taken to be outside the law itself (the latter always there in terms of particularity) and therefore came to embody (literally) the position of ‘the outside-the-law (anomon)’ (‘le hors-le-loi (anomon)’) then not only would judgement be impossible as a pragmatic act, judgement would not be possible philosophically. This is the case because judgement would have necessitated the presence of a complex of relations in which measure was itself possible. That which set the measure would be nomos as a condition intrinsic to sociality and thus being-in-common,

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while Derrida’s analysis holds open the necessary result that the city’s future depends upon maintaining the presence of the stranger as the unmasterable secret.37 Maintaining that presence entails holding to that which has to be lived out continually; a living out as noted above in terms of the continuity of negotiation. The identification of the stranger, and it would be the exemplary stranger as the figure of Oedipus as the ‘absolute arrival’, were it to be pitted against or simply to resist what could be called the primordiality of relation and thus the always already present sense of nomos, opens up the threat of the unconditioned as an act of founding violence. (Violent and founding because it is by definition outside the law.) To the extent that the unconditioned is maintained it continues to work against the possibility of relationality. There is therefore an implicit threat in Derrida’s analysis of Oedipus and law. While there is a sense in which he wants to hold to the real possibility that the ‘unconditioned’ can be effective, the necessity that there be an outside—and it should be remembered that the outside in question is not one that pertains to the particularity of nomoi, but to the presence of nomos as a transcendental condition and thus to the already present modes of relationality defined by being-in-common and being-in-place—cannot preclude the reciprocal necessity of the inscription of a founding act of violence as that which allows for law (where the latter will always be marked by forms of plurality and contestation). This opens up the possibility of a return to Heidegger. Indeed, the point of separation between Derrida and Heidegger emerges at this precise point. To the extent that Heidegger’s philosophical project aimed at an eventual taming of the risk and therefore of welcoming back that which had become unhomely, Derrida’s entails an opening up to the stranger in which the condition of welcoming and maintaining also involved the maintenance of a situation in which the stranger/other formed an integral part of the city. However, while that involved an opening in terms of infinite hospitality this occurred such that the unconditioned had to be allowed to set the measure for 37

This position has been developed by Derrida in relation to ‘cities of refuge’. For an informed discussion of this aspect of Derrida’s work, see Sean K. Kelly (2004), and Damai Puspa (2005).

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the inscription of the stranger/other. The inherent difficulty within such a positioning was that what it held open was not simply the possibility but the need for a form of originary violence which then becomes the condition for infinite hospitality. (Oedipus as anomos setting the condition.) As was argued the counter to this move does not abandon infinite hospitality nor moreover does it refuse the inscription of the stranger/other as thought within the structure of the unmasterable secret. The contrary is the case. Avoiding what emerged as the necessity for a form of structural violence—violence as the result of an operative philosophical structure—necessitates the recognition of an original sense of relationality. The impossibility of the outside opened up the potentiality at play within a reworking of the relationship between the transcendental and finitude. That reworking repeats the necessity to continue with the ineliminability of relationality. Moreover, once it is conceded that potentiality is operative then judgement which is itself occasioned by that reworking emerges as an activity. Judgement is staged. Justice can only become what it is, in its being acted out. Judgement therefore necessitates force precisely because justice must be enacted. What stands counter to the necessity of the interplay of justice and force is violence.38 Violence is not the refusal of justice. More emphatically, violence is the attempted undoing of the set-up that occasions justice. As such violence is inextricably linked to the positing of an outside that stands counter to the always already present set of relations, the relations that Oedipus acknowledges in his plea not to be thought of as anomos.

38

While it cannot be pursued in detail here this position is linked to the distinction drawn by Arendt between ‘violence’ and ‘power’ (see Arendt 1970). She sums up the distinction in the following terms: ‘Power and violence are opposites: where the one rules absolutely the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance’ (51). Power for an Arendt provides the essence of government. Moreover power is linked to a conception of human being that is positioned within a founding sense of collectivity. (Arendt’s word will be ‘concert’.) That sense is already the site of a founding legitimacy. In this regard Arendt writes that: ‘Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow’ (52). What is identified by Arendt in this passage as the ‘initial getting together’ can be read as an argument for both a founding sense of relationality and thus what has already been identified as being-in-common.

8 Derrida Polutropos Philosophy as Nostos Bruce Rosenstock

The turn of the sun is interpreted then as a specular circle, a return to itself without loss of meaning, without irreversible expenditure. This return to itself—this interiorization—of the sun has marked not only Platonic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and other kinds of discourse, not only the science of logic as the circle of circles, but also, and by the same token, the man of metaphysics. The sensory sun, which rises in the East, becomes interiorized, in the evening of its journey, in the eye and the heart of the Westerner.1

‘White Mythology’ (1971) and Politics of Friendship (1994) contain Derrida’s two most sustained reflections on the philosophy of Aristotle. In the first text, Derrida unchains the heliotropic metaphorics that Aristotle had attempted to bind and ‘interiorize’ within the ordered oikos of philosophy. In the later text, Derrida returns to Aristotle in order to attend to his discourse on friendship, a discourse that opens the oikos of philosophy to ‘irreversible

I would like to thank Ann Bergren for her help in revising an earlier draft of this essay. 1 Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, 268. The essay is found in Derrida (1984c), 209–71. It was originally published in Poetique, 5 (1971).

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expenditures’ in an exorbitance of loving hospitality beyond all economic rationality. In this essay I will trace Derrida’s philosophical journey from the Aristotle of ‘White Mythology’ to the Aristotle of Politics of Friendship. This philosophical journey, I will argue, enacts a Derridean nostos.2 Nostos or ‘return’ is usually understood as a homewardbound journey. But, just as in the case of Odysseus’ nostos, Derrida’s nostos is more than a simple retracing of an outbound path back to its point of origin. In the next section of the chapter, ‘Sailing with the Sun: White Mythology and the Myth of Return’, I will show how Derrida’s nostos, just like Odysseus’, involves a journey to a turning point where death and life, West (sunset) and East (sunrise), coincide. In the second section of the chapter, ‘Nekuia: Heidegger Psychopomp’, I will argue that Derrida is led towards this turning point—the point where the flames of the western sun decline—as he follows the track of Heidegger’s Geist in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987). Derrida survives his descent behind Heidegger’s Geist into the declining flames of the Occident and he makes his return—his nostos—to Aristotle in Politics of Friendship in the light of a newly promised dawn that ‘announces the day before the day before’.3 Every nostos is exposed to the unpredictability of a reception at home, like Odysseus’ on Ithaca, that may or may not be hospitable. It is always in question whether, upon returning, one will find friends awaiting. In the chapter’s final section, ‘Ethica: Friend, Penelope, Jew’, I will explore the theme of the ‘ecstatic’ temporality of messianic friendship (also called ‘lovence’) in Politics of Friendship. The lovence that joins friend to friend binds the past to the future (‘the day before the day before’) in a faithful expectation of the return and advent of the Other who opens the self to the risk of a journey beyond the division of East and West.

2 Derrida broaches the theme of nostos most explicitly in his essay on Joyce, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’ (Derrida (1992a), 253–309). He frames his text within a narrative of various encounters made on a journey from Paris to Tokyo and back. The argument itself constantly circles back upon itself. For a brief discussion of the framing narrative, see Nesselroth (2007), who calls the text Derrida’s ‘odyssey’. On the circularity of the argumentative structure, see Roughley (1999), 60–2. 3 Derrida (1989b), 94.

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SAILING WITH THE SUN: WHITE MYTHOLOGY AND THE MYTH OF RETURN In ‘White Mythology’, as in the earlier essay ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1969), Derrida applies his deconstructive method to Greek philosophic texts in order to expose reason’s inability to give birth to itself in self-illuminating and self-equivalent truth. Reason’s discourse— metaphysics—is ‘transported’ away from self-equivalent truth by the inescapable metaphoricity of language, but Derrida draws special attention to one metaphor in particular, a metaphor that is central to both Plato and Aristotle. This is the metaphor of the sun as a father (or as ‘sower’) of light. If the rays of light which the sun ‘sows’ are the sun’s seed and also the sun’s offspring, then the sun as the invisible source of light is (metaphorically speaking) a father who generates (without the aid of anything outside itself) a constant flow of new life. The sun is thus the image of self-regenerating paternity, of self-renewing dissemination. Derrida in both ‘White Mythology’ and ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ argues that the sun’s paternity is Western philosophy’s ur-metaphor. It is the metaphor of the production of new meaning (metaphor) without difference and without loss. It is the metaphor of the production of discourse in perfect possession of itself, a discourse that ‘signifies one thing, only the self-same thing forever’ (Plato, Phaedrus 275d8). Such discoursive production is the very opposite of writing as Plato describes it in the Phaedrus: the illegitimate child who escapes from the control of its paternal author.4 Unlike the seed patiently sown by the farmer in the autumn in expectation of the return of the sun’s warming rays, writing wastes its seed ‘for the sake of play’ in gardens of Adonis (Phaedrus 276b5). Writing grows a heterogeneous profusion of metaphors, illegitimate resemblances all. In virtue of its unceasing self-regenerative power, the sun is the (absolutely unique) sensible ‘offspring’ (ekgonos) of the Good itself (Plato, Republic 6. 506e7). (Recall that the sun was not considered to be just one among the many stars.) Appealing to the

4 For an extended discussion of the metaphorics of the ‘family scene’ of legitimate and illegimate sons in the Phaedrus, see ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Derrida (1981), 61–171.

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‘good’ metaphorics of the sun, Western philosophy seeks to master the (playful, sophistic) errancy of language and place it beneath the regime of one, pure, self-grounding Truth, the discourse of metaphysics. Although ‘white mythology’ is used by Derrida as a metaphor for Western metaphysics, what it literally refers to is the Indo-European myth of the sun’s death and rebirth. ‘White Mythology’ opens with a discussion of Anatole France’s reconstruction, via Indo-European philology, of the ‘Vedic’ myth5 underlying a typical sentence of idealist philosophy: ‘The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute.’6 Anatole France reveals the ‘white mythology’ behind this sentence by translating it back into its mythic form: ‘He whose breath is a sign of life, man that is . . . will find a place in the divine fire, source and home of life, and this place will be meted out him according to the virtue that has been given him . . . of sending abroad this warm breath, this little invisible soul, across the free expanse (of the blue sky, most likely).’7 For Anatole France, the ‘white mythology’ behind the idealist sentence is about man’s breath’s returning to its true home in the solar fire (‘the divine fine’) that rises in the East and consummates itself in the West after travelling ‘across the free expanse’. Summarizing Anatole France’s re-mythologizing of the philosophemes that constitute the sentence, Derrida writes: ‘Metaphysics—the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason.’8 This Indo-European mythology, however, does not only get sublimated into Western metaphysics. As I will explain in a moment, it also lies behind the epic narrative of the Odyssean nostos. In deconstructing philosophy’s ur-metaphor by tracking it back to Indo-European mythology, Derrida makes possible another 5 In the quotation offered from France’s Garden of Epicurus in ‘White Mythology’, Anatole France also says that his reconstruction ‘smacks of ancient Oriental mythology’ (213). Although ‘Oriental’ will be used by Derrida in ‘White Mythology’ to point beyond the Indo-European ‘white mythology,’ here in Anatole France the term is applied to what then was called the ‘Indo-Aryan’ cultural sphere, from India to Persia. 6 7 8 Derrida (1984c), 212. Ibid. 213. Ibid.

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trajectory for philosophy, one that would follow Odysseus rather than Parmenides (who, we will see, appropriates the Indo-European solar myth to authorize his ‘Way of Truth’). It is true that, apart from the quotation taken from Anatole France, the Indo-European (‘Vedic’) myth of solar death and rebirth never surfaces as an explicit theme in Derrida’s essay ‘White Mythology’. Nor does the Odyssean myth of nostos. But this hardly means that the themes are absent from or irrelevant to Derrida’s essay. It only means that we must read Derrida’s text as itself a piece of mythology, albeit not ‘white’ mythology. We must attend to the text’s own metaphorics. In my analysis of how the metaphorics at work in ‘White Mythology’ inaugurate deconstruction as a counter-metaphysical nostos, I will turn to the assistance of two classicists, Douglas Frame and Gregory Nagy. While Derrida deconstructs Western philosophy as white mythology, Frame and Nagy lay bare the Indo-European poetics of this mythology and its reconfiguration in the epic narrative of Odysseus’ homecoming. Let me approach this discussion of Derridean metaphorics and Indo-European poetics by turning first to an examination of one central passage from ‘White Mythology’. As I have said, Derrida’s argument in ‘White Mythology’ rests upon the claim that metaphor, what Aristotle identifies as a ‘transport of names’,9 is a journeying away from an origin (the ‘proper’ or ‘natural’ meaning of a name) whose itinerary philosophy cannot master. Of all the names that wander from their origin into the realm of metaphor, the one that philosophy most zealously seeks to return to its proper place is ‘sun’ (helios). Derrida quotes Aristotle’s example in the Poetics (1457b25– 30) of how the sun enters upon its metaphoric journey when the verb used for sowing seed is applied to the sun’s generation of light. In explaining how the sun is put into a metaphoric movement that unsettles philosophy at its origin, Derrida’s own text sets in motion the metaphorics of sailing: If the sun can ‘sow,’ its name is inscribed in a system of relations that constitutes it. This name is no longer the proper name of a unique thing which metaphor would overtake; it already has begun to say the multiple, 9

Ibid. 233.

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divided origin of all seed, of the eye, of invisibility, death, the father, the ‘proper name,’ etc. If Aristotle does not concern himself with this consequence of his theory, it is doubtless because it contradicts the philosophical value of aleˆtheia, the proper appearing of the propriety of what is, the entire system of concepts which invest the philosopheme ‘metaphor,’ burden it in delimiting it. And do so by barring its movement: just as one represses by crossing out, or just as one governs the infinitely floating movement of a vessel in order to drop anchor where one will. All the onomatism which dominates the theory of metaphor, and the entire Aristotelian doctrine of simple names (Poetics, 1457a) is elaborated in order to assure harbors of truth and propriety.10

The metaphorics of sailing—recall that metaphor itself is a kind of transport—complicate a discussion about the metaphorics of the sun’s generative power. Derrida’s deconstruction of Aristotle’s discourse on metaphor sets his own text sailing on a journey with mythic dimensions. ‘White Mythology’ weighs the anchor of Derrida’s vessel/text, setting it upon an ‘infinitely floating movement’— the movement of deconstruction—whose path is, I am claiming, that of a nostos. We will see that the movement of the vessel, infinitely floating as it may be, is always with the sun. In The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic, Douglas Frame showed that the Indo-European root *nes- lies behind the noun nostos and also behind the nouns nous (‘mind’) and noeˆsis (‘intelligence’).11 Frame argued that root *nes- refers not only to a return homeward, but specifically to a return to light and life. The solar provenance of the theme of ‘return to light and life’ is attested, Frame proposed, in Indic Nasatyau, a name, as Nagy tells us in summarizing Frame’s thesis, ‘of the Divine Twins who bring about sunrise after the night brought on by each sunset’.12 In Greek epic diction no´os retains its link to this Indo-European root. Especially as it is deployed in the Odyssey, no´os refers to the intellective power that makes it possible for the human to negotiate the passage from death to rebirth. Frame showed that the sun’s diurnal nostos is the mythic backdrop to Odysseus’ descent into the land of death in order to consult the prophet Teiresias, the only personage said by Homer to retain his no´os in the underworld (Od. 10. 494–5). 10

Derrida (1984c), 244.

11

Frame (1978).

12

Nagy (1990a), 218.

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Gregory Nagy in the essay ‘Seˆma and Noˆeˆsis’ developed Frame’s argument about the no´os/nostos connection in epic diction.13 Nagy showed that the intellective activity referred to by the term noeˆsis (‘intelligence’) consists in the ability to encode and decode signs (seˆmata), that is, to use objects to represent something other than what they are and to recognize when they are so used. A bird in flight may be more than a bird; it may be a seˆma (portent) of the future. Odysseus’ onion-thin tunic is a seˆma by which the hero may be recognized, as is also his scar. To recognize the seˆma is to know how it fits within a system of signs, a ‘code’ as Nagy insists. To read the scar as a sign of Odysseus is to know how Odysseus fits within a narrative about his adolescent hunting trip with his grandfather Autolykos; to read a bird in flight as a good portent is to know the code of positive and negative directionalities. A seˆma is not an indexical sign (like smoke in relation to fire), but a signifier within a system of signals (a code). The bird, the tunic, and the scar are recognized as being more than bird, tunic, and scar: they are interpreted as signifiers within a system of signs. It is no´os that accomplishes both the recognition of the seˆma as such and its decoding. Before I turn to Nagy’s brilliant exegesis of the relation between no´os and what is perhaps the central seˆma in the Odyssey, that of the oar, I want to situate Nagy’s seˆma within Derrida’s discussion of the metaphor in ‘White Mythology’. The seˆma involves taking one thing for another, but the relation is not that of metaphoricity. Rather, the seˆma involves the structure of what Derrida, following the nineteenth-century writer Pierre Fontanier, calls a forced metaphor, another term for the trope of katachresis (abusio in Latin).14 That is, the seˆma does not involve placing an already existing sign in a new signifying context, as when we call a courageous person a ‘lion’. The name ‘lion’ is already found within a 13

‘Seˆma and Noˆeˆsis: The Hero’s Tomb and the “Reading” of Symbols in Homer and Hesiod’, in Nagy (1990a), 202–22. 14 Derrida plays throughout ‘White Mythology’ with the abusive nature (or unnaturalness) of metaphor, showing that discourse about metaphor has always tried to see it as something other than a ‘displacement with breaks, as reinscriptions in a heterogeneous system, separations without origin’ (Derrida (1984c), 215). For an excellent discussion of the role of katachresis in Derrida and postmodern thought more generally, see Posselt (2005).

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bestiary code that assigns virtues to animals and thus permits a transfer of the name on the basis of its place in the code. With the seˆma, an object which otherwise seems insignificant and mute is interpreted as speaking a message that must be decoded. This movement from non-meaning to meaning is not a metaphoric transfer of already encoded meanings, but the opening of meaning itself as the ‘doubling’ or mimeˆsis of nature (physis) by the sign. Mute nature reveals itself as significant, as speaking to us in signs. The flight of a bird, to someone without noeˆsis, is never noticed as the bearer of possible significance. Derrida argues that the ‘forced metaphor’ of katachresis is the condition of possibility of metaphor, of taking something to have a meaning beyond its natural identity. Explicating Aristotle’s account of metaphor in the Poetics in which Aristotle seeks to make it a part of phoˆneˆ semantikeˆ (voiced sound with signification, i.e. the noun and the verb) as distinct from phoˆneˆ aseˆmos (voiced sound without signification, i.e. conjunctions and articles), Derrida explains that metaphor (later he will make it clear that it is the ‘forced metaphor’ of katachresis he has in mind) unsettles the boundary between meaning and non-meaning, significance and insignificance: Since the entire theory of the semantic, of lexis, and of the noun is implicated in metaphor, it is to be expected that the definition of metaphor would follow its exposition. This is the order of the Poetics. And that this definition should intervene immediately after that of the phoˆneˆ semantikeˆ and the phoˆneˆ aseˆmos, is the index not only of a necessity, but also of a difficulty. Metaphor does not just illustrate the general possibilities thus described [of using nouns and verbs beyond their ‘proper’ significance]. It risks disrupting the semantic plenitude to which it should belong. Marking the moment of the turn or of the detour (du tour ou du de´tour) during which meaning might seem to venture forth alone, unloosed from the very thing it aims at however, from the truth which attunes it to its referent, metaphor opens the wandering of the semantic.15

According to Derrida, signification always carries an object beyond its proper nature (physis). Metaphor begins as a wandering katachresis, the ab-use of mute (or, better, speechless) nature. We might say, then, that for no´os (‘mind’) or noeˆsis (‘intelligence’) to recognize 15

Derrida (1984c), 241; italics mine.

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a seˆma (‘sign’), it must be able to see (to read) objects abusively, katachretically. Odysseus, the man whose wanderings enabled him to learn the no´os of many men, is the paradigm of one who can both discern seˆmata and also (ab)use the power of mimeˆsis. Odysseus not only can force the speechless world to talk (as when he makes the shades in Hades speak), he can (ab)use speech to make it hide his true identity (as when he tells his ‘lying tales’). Nagy provides a stunning confirmation of Derrida’s argument that katachresis (abusio) is the mimetic supplement that semanticizes mute nature in his analysis of perhaps the most significant occurrence of seˆma in the Odyssey. When Teiresias (whose possession of no´os in Hades allows him to speak without needing to be revivified by the taste of blood) tells Odysseus that, after returning home, he must travel inland with an oar over his shoulder until someone asks him why he is carrying a ‘winnowing shovel’, we may say that he is sending Odysseus on a journey into a land where he must suffer from (as he once previously took advantage of) the ‘wandering semantics’ of katachresis. Odysseus, Nagy explains, must discern that ‘the same signal has two distinct messages in two distinct places: what is an oar for the seafarers is a winnowing shovel for the inlanders.’16 But the katachresis of an oar taken for a winnowing shovel does not end there. The misidentification of the oar by the inlanders is, Teiresias says, a sign (seˆma) that Odysseus must further decode. Nagy explains that when Odysseus plants his oar in the ground, as Teiresias tells him to do when he hears the question about the ‘winnowing shovel’ he is carrying, he is further challenged to recognize how his act of planting the oar serves as a seˆma in its own right. Nagy explains that Odysseus must see his act in the light of the significance that planting the winnowing shovel has for inlanders, namely, as a sign that the winnower’s work is completed. Just so is Odysseus’ struggle with the sea at its end, and now, ‘from the sea’, his death can come.

16 Nagy (1990a), 213. An oar looks very much like a (longer version of a) winnowing shovel, and only someone familiar with both would know the difference. An inlander without any experience of seafaring would mistake Odysseus’ oar for a winnowing shovel.

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The planted oar is a sign of the end of his life, and as such this abusive seˆma reacquires its most specific meaning in Greek, namely, ‘tomb’. Of course, the seˆma of the planted oar is not Odysseus’ ‘literal’ tomb. But no seˆma is a literal tomb except for one who is dead beneath it; the ability to discern it as a sign is proof that one is still alive. The sign of life is the ability to read (signs).17 Nagy shows that seˆma, even (especially) when it means ‘tomb’, is already a katachretic sign. The tomb is a seˆma that death is not what it seems, that it is not the terminus of life, but rather the turning point towards another, imperishable life. In the funeral games celebrated for Patroklos in Iliad 23, the turning point of the chariot race is the seˆma of ‘a man who died a long time ago’, and it is also the sign pointed out by Nestor (the *nes- root is found in his name) to his son when giving advice about how to win the race. Nestor tells his son that he must keep his eye upon the tomb as he calibrates the relative speed of his two horses. In the passage where Nestor and his son speak about the tactics (the semantics, we could say) of chariotry, not only does the verb noe´oˆ occur, but it is paired with its opposite, lanthanoˆ, ‘to escape notice’, whose root is also found in leˆtheˆ, ‘forgetfulness’, the opposite of no´os in epic diction.18 To be able to discern the sign of the tomb is to read the tomb katachretically and to not be forgetful of the promise of a new life. To be able to read the sign of the tomb is the mark of one who possesses no´os. To possess no´os is to remember, and especially to remember how to read, and to remember that one is oneself a signifying being. With memory, the journey of life can begin again. Life is always already haunted by death. When Odysseus reads the sign of the planted oar as his tomb, he also recognizes that his tomb holds the promise of immortality. Odysseus, Nagy reminds us, narrates the story of his descent to the underworld in the palace of a man named Alkinoos. Listening to the tale of the encoded sign of Odysseus’ promised immortality,

17 It is interesting to mention in this context that seˆmata (tombs) bearing inscriptions representing first person speech are thought to bring the dead to life when they are read aloud (transformed from mute signs to speech) by the passer-by. On the poetics of tomb inscriptions, see Svenbro (1993), esp. 8–44. 18 Frame (1978), 36–7; 75–6.

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Alkinoos represents all those who will (noetically) hear Odysseus’ song. The epic song itself, Nagy concludes, is the fulfilment of the promise of the hero’s seˆma: ‘the Greek poem is a seˆma that requires the noeˆsis of those who hear it.’19 To appreciate fully the sociopolitical dimension of epic song’s noetic poetics, we must recall that, as Nagy explicates elsewhere, ‘the audience of the poem is a community (comprised of phı´loi “friends”)’.20 Nagy’s community of noetic-poetic philoi is what Derrida discovers in Aristotle’s discourse on friendship. In Politics of Friendship, building upon the idea that the sign is always already a katachresis, Derrida will add that language as a system of signs holds the promise of katachresis, the promise of life as the katachresis of (dead) signs, of life as the resurrecting of/from the seˆma/tomb. For Derrida, this promise is haunted with the memory of the dead as much as it awaits their return. This promised katachresis is of (it promises and depends upon) future friends. But I am running ahead of myself. Derrida’s argument in ‘White Mythology’ is that Western metaphysics begins with an attempt to master the originary katachresis of the sign: ‘the twisting return toward the already-there of a meaning, production (of signs, or rather of values), but as revelation, unveiling, bringing to light, truth.’21 Douglas Frame’s analysis of the appropriation of the Indo-European poetics of no´os and nostos by Parmenides reinforces Derrida’s claim. Developing an interpretation that Eric Havelock had advanced some twenty years earlier, Douglas Frame demonstrates that the Proem to Parmenides’ philosophical poem draws from the same mythic repertoire that also informs Odysseus’ descent to the underworld through the gateway where the sun sets and rises.22 Without mentioning Frame’s argument about the connection between no´os and nostos in Parmenides, David Gallop’s commentary on the Proem provides independent confirmation of the Parmenides–Odysseus link. Gallop describes how Parmenides is brought to the House of Night in a journey that recalls that of Odysseus to the underworld:

19 21

Nagy (1990a), 222. Derrida (1984c), 257.

20

Id. (1979), 92; emphasis Nagy’s. Cf. Havelock (1958).

22

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Entry to it [the House of Night] is gained through the Gates of the Paths of Night and Day. . . . they are a point at which Night and Day meet, a place where opposites are undivided, and where the familiar contrasts of human experience can no longer be drawn. . . . Even the antithesis between Night and Day, which will later emerge as the foundation of all other mortal dualisms (8. 53–59, 9. 1–4), has there been transcended. In that region all is a single, undifferentiated unity. Hence the scene of Parmenides’ poetic ‘vision’ anticipates the conclusion of his philosophical argument. The setting of his ‘revelation’ neatly encapsulates its content.23

In what might be called the inaugural gesture of the West’s ‘white mythology’, Parmenides transforms nous as the discernment of the ‘wandering semantics’ of signs into the direct, unmediated vision of deathless Being. By identifying Being with noetic discerning, Parmenides dispenses with the mediation of the sign and thereby elides the need for any further journeying through the passage where life and death are inextricably linked. The ‘man of metaphysics’, as Derrida describes him in the epigraph to this chapter, has interiorized not only the sun, but his own tomb. The social-political dimension of noeˆsis is also elided: Parmenides’ journey is solitary from the outset, and it takes him beyond the human sphere where ‘helplessness directs the wandering no´os in their [mortals’, brotoi] breasts’.24 Frame does not carry the story of philosophy’s noˆos beyond Parmenides, but he enables us to see the supersession of myth in Aristotle’s nous. Nous for Aristotle is that aspect of the human psycheˆ that alone can survive death; it is that which allows for the furthest reach of the human ‘desire to know’ (recall that Odysseus, too, was driven by a passion to ‘know the no´os of men’), drawing the human beyond mortality and into the realm of a divine, eternally living nous.

23

Gallop (1991), 7. The single occurence in the Odyssey of the noun translated here as ‘helplessness’ (ameˆchanieˆ) describes Odysseus’ initial sense of doom in the cave of the Kyklops. Again, Parmenides’ no´os functions like that of Odysseus, to bring him out of the cave of oblivion. While for Parmenides, the ending of ‘helplessness’ leads him on a path that mortals do not tread, the encounter with Polyphemus inaugurates Odysseus’ struggle with Poseidon whose end, as Nagy indicates, points beyond itself to a community of noetic philoi, and, of course, to a homecoming to his most intimate noetic phileˆ, Penelope. 24

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The deathless eternality of the divine nous consists in thought that circles back upon itself without the need for any discursive materialization in spoken or written signs. We could say that Aristotle’s divine nous traverses a nostos without possibility of errancy. To drive Aristotle’s nous off course, to trouble (odysseuein) the perfect actuality of its always already having arrived at its goal, is Derrida’s deconstructive task in ‘White Mythology’. What Derrida shows in the essay is that the philosophic dream of a self-sufficient and self-reflexive noetic life is never free of errancy. The wandering metaphorics of the sun derails philosophy’s founding fantasy of thought’s safe return to its origin. Derrida concludes ‘White Mythology’ with a discussion of ‘two courses, which are almost tangent’.25 The first is the course pursued by metaphysics from Parmenides to Aristotle, Hegel, and Husserl. The metaphysical course tries to chart a path back to the safe harbour of self-recovery. The metaphysical course treats metaphor as ‘that which must be carried off to a horizon or a proper ground, and which must finish by rediscovering the origin of its truth’.26 The metaphysical course seeks to master the eruption or birth of metaphor as if it could master the rising of the sun in the East and direct its path to its ‘proper’ conclusion in the ‘interiorized sun’ of the ‘man of metaphysics’ in the West: ‘This is the irrepressible philosophical desire to summarize-interiorize-dialecticize-master-relever27 the metaphorical division between the origin and itself, the Oriental difference.’28 The other course that Derrida only gestures toward in the final paragraphs of ‘White Mythology’ is one that would not seek self-recovery but self-abandonment, an abandonment to the ‘Oriental difference’. Derrida calls this other course a submission to the ‘self-destruction of metaphor’. This other course forgoes any attempt at returning the sign to its proper origin, but rather yields itself to the wandering semantics of metaphor and, since ‘metaphor . . . always carries its death within itself ’,29 the other course is one that turns

25

26 Derrida (1984c), 268. Ibid. One of Derrida’s insistent points is that Hegel’s Aufhebung should be translated into French as rele`ve, ambiguously a noun or a verb, thus playing, among other things, on ‘raise up’ and ‘recover from [as from a mortal disease]’. 28 29 Ibid. 269. Ibid. 271. 27

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toward the sun and follows it beyond the horizon of life into the realm of shades. This other course follows the sun in its ‘sowing’ of both metaphor and death, yielding to the sun’s ‘nonmasterable dissemination’.30 The other course does not seek to relieve itself of the ‘Oriental difference’. This other course is that of Odysseus, but also of that latter-day Odysseus Leopold Bloom. In the next section I will describe how Derrida embarks upon this other course and submits to its most decisive trial: a descent into the land of shades. Derrida will be led by his psychopomp, Martin Heidegger, who takes him into the flames of the West, the crematoria of Nazi Germany. Will Heidegger lead Derrida to the end of both ‘courses’, the end of metaphysics but also the end of the wandering course of ‘Oriental difference’? This is the critical ‘question’ referred to in the subtitle of Derrida’s text, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question.

NEKUIA: HEIDEGGER PSYCHOPOMP In Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987), Derrida pursues Heidegger’s Geist—or rather, to put it prosaically, he traces the thematics of Geist, geistig, and geistlich—through Heidegger’s Rectorship Address of 1933 to his reflections on the poetry of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914) in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1953). Tracking Heidegger’s Geist from a speech calling for the ‘spiritual’ (geistig) reawakening of the German university under the banner of National Socialism to, twenty years later, an essay on the meaning of ‘spiritual’ (das Geistliche) in Trakl’s poetry, Derrida follows Heidegger into the flames of the setting sun, the flames of the West. Derrida quotes Heidegger’s oracular definition in his 1953 reflections on Trakl: ‘Der Geist ist Flamme’ (‘Spirit is flame’).31 Pursuing the ‘race or course of the sun’,32 Derrida follows the steps of Heidegger who, in turn, follows the figure of the ‘stranger’ (der Fremdlinge) and the ‘departed one’ (der Abgeschiedene) who in a poem of Trakl ‘plunges into the night of the spiritual twilight’.33 Spirit is that which takes 30 32

Ibid. 247. Ibid. 89.

31 33

Derrida (1989b), 84. Ibid. 90.

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the plunge into the night in order to become inflamed once more: ‘A flame which inflames, or which inflames itself.’ Derrida calls this self-abandoning, self-incendiary spirit a ‘spirit in-flames’.34 On the heels of Heidegger, Derrida submits to the risk of the flameextinguishing ‘plunge’ into the night. I cannot in the space of this essay do justice to Derrida’s close tracking of Heidegger’s Geist in the years between 1933 and 1953. Suffice it to say that Derrida discovers the centrality of the theme of revenance (which I am here identifying with nostos) in the trajectory of Heidegger’s texts from 1933 onwards, and especially in Heidegger’s reflections on the poetry of Ho¨lderlin: The words or the motifs which guide us in this trajectory turn out to be those speaking of the motif, the movement, the trajectory. We are always dealing with a thought not of the circle but of the return, of a turning of the Ru¨ckkehr towards the home (Heimat, heimisch, ‘nemlich zu Hauss’).35

Derrida describes the ‘impulsion to go out of oneself in order to return to onself ’ as ‘the essence of spirit’ in Ho¨lderlin, at least as Heidegger reads him. Derrida calls it a ‘nostalgia’ which contains within itself two possibilities, just like the two ‘courses’ he distinguished at the conclusion of ‘White Mythology’. One possibility is the very source of evil: it is the nostalgia which drives spirit to settle itself within its ‘proper’ (eigentlich) and ‘native’ (heimisch) homeland (Heimat). Derrida claims that Heidegger rejects this possibility in favour of another form of nostalgia, a desire to ‘return to oneself so as to go out of oneself ’. This self-abandoning ‘ex-appropriation’ of the spirit is, according to Heidegger, the essence of the poet’s spirit. It comes to expression in Ho¨lderlin’s line, one that Heidegger finds particularly important: ‘Kolonie liebt, und tapfer Vergessen der Geist’ (‘It loves the colony, and the valiant forgetting, Spirit’).36 The poet’s spirit, Derrida comments, ‘is never at home’.37 In finding an embrace of what might be called a ‘diasporic’ poetics in Heidegger’s readings of Ho¨lderlin, Derrida prepares the ground for his reading of Heidegger’s

34 36

35 Ibid. 84. Ibid. 80. 37 Quoted ibid. 80. Ibid.

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1953 reflections on Trakl’s poetry. Ho¨lderlin, according to Derrida, has pointed Heidegger away from the nativist ideology of National Socialism.38 The theme of self-abandoning, ex-appropriating spirit recurs in Georg Trakl’s poetry. It crosses another theme, the theme of spirit as self-inflaming fire, of ‘spirit in-flames’. After my earlier discussion of the Indo-European poetics of no´os and its connection with the myth of the sun’s diurnal death and rebirth, it is perhaps not surprising that the theme of the spirit as revenant has much to do with the spirit as flame.39 Heidegger (and Derrida who follows him) claims to find in Trakl’s poetry access to a poetics that precedes the transmutation of inflamed, dying-and-reborn spirit into the secure immortality of the ‘Platonic-Christian soul’. Heidegger will attempt to uncover this poetics through an etymologizing (back to Old German) explication of certain key terms associated with spirit or soul in Trakl, particularly ‘fremd’ (‘strange’), ‘Jahr’ (‘year’), and ‘wahnsinnig’ (‘mad’). In each case, and without reducing them to a single root, Heidegger will discover an originary significance of ‘being on the way to an elsewhere’.40 The journeying flame of the spirit moves from night to day, death to life, forgetfulness to memory. In discussing Heidegger’s interpretation of Trakl’s poem Fru¨hling der Seele (Springtime of the Soul), Derrida is led by Heidegger along a convoluted and labyrinthine path through Trakl’s poetry. Heidegger invokes another poem, Geistliche Da¨mmerung (Spritual Twilight), to explain the meaning of the phrase ‘geistlich da¨mmert Blau¨e’ (‘the 38 I should say here that I remain unpersuaded by Derrida’s interpretative move. For a very different reading of Heidegger’s continued commitment to a nativist understanding of Heimat in his reception of Ho¨lderlin, in contrast with that of Paul Celan, see the very fine essay of Samuel Todd Presner (2001). 39 Even more to the point is Gregory Nagy’s linkage of menos (‘strength, lifeforce’) in epic diction with Indic manas- (‘mindfulness’) associated with Agni, the ‘supreme model and guide of rebirth’ through the flames of cremation, Agni’s fire. See ‘Patroklos, Concepts of Afterlife, and the Indic Triple Fire’, in Nagy (1990a), esp. 111–13. 40 Derrida (1989b), 91. Douglas Frame argues that the Indo-European root *nescan be seen in Old English nerian and Old High German nerran, cognate with modern English ‘nourish’. In Old English, the verb meant ‘save’, and, from evidence in Beowulf, had the specific meaning of ‘return to life and light’. In Norwegian and a Swedish dialect, a cognate verb, no¨ra, is used to mean ‘kindle’. To be saved, to return to life, is to be (re)kindled.

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azure [of the sky] becomes crepuscular spiritually’) in Springtime of the Soul. At this point, Derrida takes a turn from the darkness toward the light. It is the turn that allows Derrida to return to Aristotle in Politics of Friendship. It is the turn which makes the Derridean nostos possible. Derrida writes, explicating Heidegger’s meditation on the Trakl poem Geistliche Da¨mmerung: On the basis of this crepuscule or spiritual night is determined the spirituality of the year (das Geistliche der Jahre) spoken of in another poem, Unterwegs. What is the year? The year, das Jahr, is a word of Indo-European origin. It apparently recalls the march (ier, ienai, gehen), insofar as it translates the race or course of the sun. It is thus this Gehen, this going of day or year, morning or evening, sunrise or sunset (Gehen, Aufgang, Untergang) which Trakl here determines under the word das Geistliche. Crepuscule or night, as geistlich, does not signify the negativity of a decline but what shields the year or shelters this course of the sun (ibid.). Spiritual is the gait of the year, the revolutionary coming-going of the very thing which goes (geht).41

In the turn of the year upon itself Derrida finds the chance of another spirituality that precedes the self-secure ‘soul’ of the ‘PlatonicChristian’ West. It is a spirituality that calls the self away from its home, on a journey that risks everything on a re-membering of the past that opens the promise of the future. This other spirituality is tied to another temporality, one which is not imprisoned in (as Derrida puts it in summarizing Heidegger) ‘the Aristotelian representation of time: succession, or dimension for a quantitative or qualitative calculation of duration’.42 Aristotelian temporality is the measure of movement from an origin to a destination; the other temporality has its origin only in memory. The other temporality begins before the punctual self-possession of the soul in the now; it begins before the dawn of the self-same day, in the night where what has not yet been born remains an incalculable futurity. Derrida, quoting Trakl, says that this ‘spiritual night’ holds the promise of a ‘more matutinal morning’ (die fru¨here Fru¨he).43 Drawing together

41

Derrida (1989b), 89.

42

Ibid. 92.

43

Ibid. 91.

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the threads of Heidegger’s exegesis of Trakl, Derrida describes the movement which this other temporality follows: A movement towards that more than matutinal Fru¨he, this more than vernal initiality, the kind which comes even before the first day of spring (Fru¨hling), before the principle of the primum tempus, comes the day before the day before (l’avant-veille). This Fru¨he as it were keeps vigil for (veille) the vernal itself; it is already the promise of the poem Fru¨hling der Seele (Sprigtime of the Soul).44

This ‘more matutinal’ temporality is the temporality of a vigil for one who has yet to return, for one who has promised to return. The vigil is a faithful remembering of the promise of return. If we have so far been tracing the Odyssean heroics of the journeytaking spirit, we now can see that there can be no nostos without the faithful vigil of memory, without, in other words, Penelope’s faithful night vigil, spent in unweaving the death shroud for Odysseus’ father in expectation of the day when Odysseus would return. Derrida gestures towards the latter-day Penelope, Molly Bloom, when he links the promise of the ‘more matutinal morning’ to the yes that precedes all language, the promise that opens all language.45 This yes is a consent to respond to the other, and an appeal to the other to speak, that is virtual within every ‘speech act’, even if it is often betrayed in reality.46 Indeed, Derrida suggests that this yes opens the possibility of a different configuration of male and female, a different construal of the active–passive division within the human race/gender Geschlecht.47 But before I can pursue this theme as it unfolds in Politics of Friendship, I must return to the ‘question’ of the Jew that has haunted the discussion so far. Derrida has taken the turn homeward, towards ‘the day before the day before’, towards the day before his plunge into the flames of the West. He has followed Heidegger towards a spirituality that is,

44

45 Derrida (1989b), 92. Ibid. 94. For Derrida’s most extensive discussion of the ‘yes’ and its relation to Joyce’s Ulysses, see ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, in Derrida (1992a), 253– 309. For a discussion of the thematics of the ‘yes, yes’ in Derrida, see Bennington and Derrida (1993), 203–7. 47 Derrida (1989b), 106–7. 46

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‘more originary . . . than the rising and setting of the sun, the Orient and the Occident’.48 In other words, Derrida believes that in following Heidegger’s Geist he has found a ‘more matutinal morning’ of the spirit that has not fallen for the risk of the worst, a spirit that is other than the evil (‘diabolical’) spirit of the 1933 Rectorship Address. We might imagine that Derrida would now claim that in passing through the flames of the West he has recovered a memory of what was promised in the East, of what he will call in Specters of Marx (1993) ‘messianicity’. But Derrida finds neither the memory of the Jew nor the Jewish vigil for the messiah in Heidegger’s text. Derrida notes this lacuna and briefly reflects upon it in the final chapter of Of Spirit. He says that Heidegger privileges the German word Geist over the Platonic-Christian terms pneuma or spiritus. In Geist, Heidegger thinks he can still hear the echoes of an older tradition, a tradition of the coming–going of the ‘spirit in-flames’. Derrida recalls, however, that the Hebrew term ruah (‘spirit’) can open ‘a whole tradition of Jewish thought as an inexhaustible thinking about fire’,49 and in a footnote he refers to Heidegger’s contemporary Franz Rosenzweig, whose Star of Redemption grows out of and brings to culmination this tradition. Derrida apparently does not fault Heidegger for the lacuna of the Jewish tradition of ruah in his texts. At one point, in an imaginary conversation between Heidegger and a Christian theologian, Derrida has Heidegger say about his attempt to find a temporality before the division of Orient and Occident: ‘I am opposing nothing, especially not Christianity, nor all the discourses of the fall, of malediction, of the promise, of salvation, of resurrection, nor the discourses on pneuma and spiritus, nor even (I’d forgotten that one) on ruah.’50 Heidegger, Derrida says, had ‘forgotten’ ruah. What a thing to forget! Could this be the ‘tapfer Vergessen’ (‘valiant forgetting’) that Ho¨lderlin had spoken of ? Is Derrida exculpating Heidegger for a (perhaps willful) loss of memory, or is he suggesting that he, Derrida, has remembered the way through the flames of the West, but that Heidegger has drunk too deeply of the waters of the river Lethe?

48

Ibid. 89.

49

Ibid. 101.

50

Ibid. 111.

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Perhaps a clue to answering these questions comes at the conclusion of Of Spirit where Derrida assumes the voice of ‘theologians’ who ‘would like to be authentic Christians’. In the name of these ‘authentic Christians’, Derrida concludes his book (originally delivered as a lecture, thus by now having held the audience into the late evening) by speaking about a vigil of Zweisprache held throughout the night ‘in the memory of a promise or the promise of a memory’. These ‘authentic Christians’ say to Heidegger: . . . from now on it’s enough to keep talking, not to interrupt—between the poet and you, which means just as much between you and us—this Zweisprache. It’s enough not to interrupt the colloquium, even when it is already late. The spirit which keeps watch in returning (en revenant) [as a ghost] will always do the rest. Through flame or ash, but as the entirely other, inevitably.51

In this night-time colloquium between two partners who do not wish their vigil for a ‘more matutinal morning’ ever to end, we may hear the call-and-response—the yes, yes, Derrida would say—of two people who pledge themselves to an endless conversation. I mentioned the theme of the yes which Derrida broaches in Of Spirit. Here is a passage from Derrida’s extended meditation on yes, the final word of Joyce’s Ulysses. I think we may hear echoes of the appeal to the endless Zweisprache which ends Of Spirit: With or without a word, taken as a minimal event, a yes demands a priori its own repetition, its own memorizing, demands that a yes to the yes inhabit the arrival of the ‘first’ yes, which is never therefore simply originary. We cannot say yes without promising to confirm it and to remember it, to keep it safe, countersigned in another ghost.52

Having taken the risk of following Heidegger’s ghost into the flames of the West, Derrida takes one further risk: to say yes to this ghost, to countersign his own yes to Heidegger’s yes. This yes, yes between Derrida, a Jew pretending to speak as an ‘authentic Christian’, and Heidegger, a German who has ‘forgotten’ Hebrew, is the sign and countersign of an uncanny conversation. Perhaps, however, such uncanniness is only what one would expect of a conversation taking 51

Derrida (1989b), 113.

52

Id. (1992a), 307–8.

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place after the ‘death of philosophy’, somewhere near the ‘gates of the paths of night and day’, near the flames of the West, the very place where Parmenides imagined his mortal journey had ended and his noetic immortality had begun. It is time now to follow Derrida home, to philosophy’s oikos. On this return journey from the place where West and East meet in the flames, Derrida is accompanied by many ghosts. Aristotle, now, awaits them all, ready to greet them as friends.

ETHICA: FRIEND, PENELOPE, JEW Politics of Friendship is a long and intricately argued book that is structured as a series of meditations on a single phrase: ‘O friends, there is no friend’ (O philoi, oudeis philos). This phrase—according to Diogenes Laertius it was one of the philosopher’s common sayings53— is at the centre of an ‘immense rumour throughout an imposing corpus of Western philosophical literature’ from Montaigne to Kant, Nietzsche, Blanchot, and beyond.54 In this tradition, the phrase, as Derrida interprets it, appeals ‘teleiopoetically’ to the reader to join a community of not-yet-defined friends. The phrase acts as a performative utterance that brings the new community into being as those who respond to its call. I have previously referred to Gregory Nagy’s interpretation of epic poetry as just such an appeal to a community of friends, and it is in precisely this sense that Derrida would take Aristotle’s remark. It is indeed strange for Aristotle—the philosopher par excellence of self-recovering nous—to give himself over to the risk of a future readership. We expect such performativity from a poet, or from a thinker like Nietzsche who deliberately addresses himself to ‘philosophers of the future’.55 But Aristotle? In ‘White Mythology’, Derrida drew a rather clear distinction between two ‘courses’. One course is that of the ‘man of metaphysics’—Aristotle paradigmatically—who seeks to master the wanderings of metaphor. The other course is the 53 54

Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Aristotle 5. 21. 55 Derrida (1997c), 27. Cf. ibid. 36–45.

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one I have identified as Odyssean, the course of the individual who submits to the travails of errancy. The first course evades the risk of plunging into the unknown futurity of the night, the second course gives itself over to the risk of death in the descent into the land of the shades. But what if metaphysics, no less than Odyssean wandering, somehow also depends upon a future community of friends to welcome its ever-precarious homecoming? What if metaphysics also calls upon a community to hear its voice and resurrect it from death? What if Aristotle’s corpus might yet show signs of life, if only they were recognized, even if it meant a certain katachresis of Aristotle’s words? Just as Odysseus’ return ultimately depended upon his recognition by Penelope, Derrida’s return—philosophy’s return from its deconstructive travails—will require that Aristotle acknowledge Derrida as a friend. Derrida must find in Aristotle’s text a voice that does not only speak to itself in the echo chamber of metaphysics, but a voice, perhaps never before heard, that addresses a word of love to the unexpected traveller from that ‘other course’, the course marked by an ‘Oriental difference’. Can Greek meet Jew in friendship? In a chapter of Politics of Friendship entitled ‘Recoils’, Derrida addresses the philological question: Did Aristotle ever really say ‘O friends, there is no friend’? Derrida accepts the overwhelming probability that the phrase reflects a corruption (a sort of katachresis) of a phrase that condenses the argument in Nicomachean Ethics ix. 10 concerning the number of friends one ought to have. Near the end of the chapter Aristotle states that ‘those who have many friends and who greet everyone with familiarity (oikeioˆs) seem to be friends to no one’ (NE 1171a15–16). Based upon this line, the closest one in Aristotle to the phrase offered by Diogenes Laertius, it is reasonable to emend ‘O friends, there is no friend’ to read ‘To him who has friends, there is no friend.’ The corruption of ‘To him who has friends’ to ‘O friends’ occurs when the rough breathing and the iota subscript are lost from the initial omega. The ‘original’ phrase behind the one that Diogenes Laertius attributes to Aristotle would mean that one who thinks he possesses (a plurality of) friends, really possesses no (authentic, single) friend. Derrida calls this the ‘recoil’ version of Aristotle’s saying. But even on the basis of this reading, Derrida audaciously claims to hear Aristotle calling to him as the singular, unique friend. Even though the recoil version reports that there is no

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friend if one has more than one friend, it calls out, it appeals, to someone to hear this report and, perhaps, become the friend: Even if, in the recoil version, you stick to the mere assertion of a report (for he [sic] who has friends, several friends, too many friends, more than one friend, for him there are no friends), it was indeed necessary that the assertion be addressed and that the address contain some performative force. We do not know to whom Aristotle is said to have said this or that, but it is not only the reader or auditor who is ‘entailed’ by the structure of the utterance. A minimum of friendship or consent must be supposed of them; there must be an appeal to such a minimal consensus if anything at all is to be said. Whether this appeal corresponds, in fact, to a comprehension or an agreement, if only on the meaning of what is said, appears to us secondary with regard to the appeal itself. The appeal is coextensive to the more reportive moment of the report. In short, there is indeed some form of silent interjection, some ‘O friends’, in the recoil version.56

No philological ‘fact’ can override the appeal to become the singular friend. Derrida goes so far as to say that he hears Aristotle appealing to him with tremendous urgency: ‘I love you, listen’; ‘I love you, do you hear me?’; and even ‘perhaps you can hear me in the night . . . ’.57 Derrida cannot be sure that it is he and he alone who is being addressed. In fact, this is just what it means to become a friend: to listen to the appeal without prior assurances that it is I who am being addressed and not someone else. I become the friend by deciding to hear the appeal, to step out from the mass of ‘friends’ and to become one friend. The decision to hear the other, and the decision of the other that she or he has been heard, does not depend upon confirming the truth of what is uttered in a report—‘there is no friend,’ for example— because the decision undoes the truth of the report. ‘The instant of decision must remain heterogeneous to all knowledge as such,’ Derrida explains.58 The signs by which friends recognize one another can never be public. ‘We have signs that we know but that are hidden from others,’ Penelope says to her son, speaking about how she will recognize whether the stranger who has arrived on Ithaca is indeed her husband (Od. 23. 109–10). The signs of friendship reveal the singularity of the other and do not fall within the regime of constative truth.

56

Ibid. 214.

57

Ibid. 218.

58

Ibid. 219.

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Aristotle’s ‘appeal to friendship’ in the phrase ‘O friends, there is no friend’ as well as in the phrase ‘To the one who has friends, there is no friend’ opens the oikos of philosophy to the possibility of an encounter with—the revelation of—the unique Other, shattering the security of the perfect friend who is, as Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘another self ’ (1170b11–12). ‘Is such a friendship still Greek?’, Derrida at one point asks in regard to the ‘friendship to-come’ opened by Aristotle’s appeal. ‘Yes and no,’ he answers.59 It is one of the recurrent motifs of Politics of Friendship that friendship harbours both self-equivalence and self-othering within itself. ‘We are here at a generative graft in the body of our culture,’ Derrida writes in one of his reflections on the impossibility of neatly bifurcating Greek philia from the biblical ‘love of the neighbour’.60 Friendship transcends the horizon of West and East. ‘Greekjew is Jewgreek. Extremes meet.’61 ‘There is no friend’ means, among other things, that there is no single definition of the friend, that every friend is both ‘greekjew’ and ‘jewgreek’. Every friend is both self and one more than the self. ‘To be a friend’ cannot define any Aristotelian self-identical substance (‘greek’) because the friend is always already riven by otherness (‘jew’). What Derrida achieves in his return to Aristotle is the opening of the oikos of philosophy to an unexpected xenia, to guest-friendship as messianicity. What makes this ‘greekjew, jewgreek’ xenia possible is the faithful waiting for the ‘friend to-come’ that informs Aristotle’s ‘O friends, there is no friend.’ The paradoxes of self–self-equivalence and self–otherness in friendship govern Derrida’s reading of Aristotle in Politics of Friendship. Aristotle’s attempt to find a measure that would allow for securely defining friendship as a symmetric or reciprocal relation between equals, according to Derrida, ultimately founders on an aporia. It will turn out that the concept of friendship in its ‘perfect’ (teleia) or ‘primary’ (proˆteˆ) form (the first characterization is found in the Nicomachean Ethics, the second in the Eudemian Ethics) is 59

60 Cf. ibid. 62. Ibid. 185. These words from Joyce’s Ulysses are quoted by Derrida at the conclusion of his essay on Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference (Derrida (1980), 153). 61

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conditioned upon an insuperable dissymetry: in loving (philein) the other person, the friend is haunted by the loss of the other. Perfect friendship is faithful vigilance for the return of the absent other. Perfect friendship can never be the mirroring of two equivalent selves. This vigilant friendship is what Derrida finds awaiting him when he returns to Aristotle. Awaiting him, keeping vigil in the oikos of philosophy, is the friend, Aristotle/Penelope/Jew. In what follows I want briefly to trace in somewhat more detail Derrida’s analysis of the aporia haunting Aristotle’s concept of friendship. I will conclude with some remarks about how the visage of the friend bears the features of both Penelope and the Jew. Derrida ruptures the appearance of self-equivalence in Aristotelian friendship by recalling that friendship as such always involves a fundamental dissymetry or inequality: friendship as an activity of loving is more choiceworthy than being loved.62 In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle chooses as his signal case (seˆmeion) of this dissymetry the way some mothers take joy from the unreciprocated activity of loving their children: ‘Some of them give their children away to be raised, and they love them though they only know about them; they do not want to be loved in return, if both things [knowing about the children and being loved in return] are not possible, but it is apparently enough for them if they see them doing well, even though they cannot reciprocate what is owed to a mother because she remains unknown to them.’63 Indeed, friendship’s perfection is revealed in the loving of one who is no longer capable of reciprocating: the love of the dead friend. Derrida connects the passage about mother-love in the Nicomachean Ethics with a similar passage in the Eudemian Ethics which leads to this conclusion: ‘This is why we praise those who love their deceased, for they love but are not known.’64 In loving the dead friend, the friendship is pure action, without any possibility of passivity: ‘Loving will always be preferable to being-loved, as acting is preferable to suffering, act to potentiality, essence to accident, knowledge to non-knowledge,’ Derrida writes in summarizing Aristotle’s argument.65 The friend who loves 62 64 65

63 Cf. NE 8. 8. NE 1159a28–33; trans. mine. Eudemian Ethics 1239a40; trans. taken from Derrida (1997c), 12. Derrida (1997c), 11.

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the deceased friend, Aristotle says, reveals the limit case of perfect friendship. Friendship for the deceased thus carries this philı´a to the limit of its possibility. I could not love friendship without projecting its impetus towards the horizon of this death. The horizon is the limit and the absence of limit, the loss of the horizon on the horizon, the ahorizontality of the horizon, the limit as absence of limit. I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death. Therefore, beyond life. I feel myself—and in advance, before any contract—borne to love the dead other. I feel myself thus (borne to) love; it is thus that I feel myself loving.66

Thus, as Derrida pursues Aristotle’s reflections upon the perfection of friendship as expressed in the love of the deceased friend, we see that friendship is always inscribed within the horizon of mourning: ‘The anguished apprehension of mourning’, Derrida writes, ‘insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning.’67 There is no friend who is not haunted by the ghost of his beloved. Every friend passes beyond the horizon of life to love the friend beyond death; every friend waits for the friend to return from that horizon to life. But the friend not only mourns while she or he waits. The friend is faithful in mourning. The friend does not forget the beloved, or seek to be done with the friendship, ‘to get on with life’ as the phrase goes. ‘The paradox of the grieving survival is concentrated in the ever-soambiguous value of stability, constancy and firm permanence that Aristotle regularly associates with the value of credence or confidence (pistis).’68 Derrida is aware that Aristotle never explicitly declares that unending mourning for the deceased friend is the only expression of perfect friendship. What Derrida is interested in showing is how Aristotle’s discussion of friendship seeks to separate this limit case from the essence of friendship without ever succeeding in doing so. Friendship, in order for it to be something more than an arrangement of convenience designed for pleasure or usefulness, exceeds the bounds of every economy. The friend does not even respect the boundary separating life from death, since to cease to love the friend 66

Derrida (1997c), 12.

67

Ibid. 14.

68

Ibid. 15.

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with his death is to show that the friendship required reciprocation, was predicated upon the give-and-take of some value beyond the activity of friendship itself. In perfect friendship, then, the equality that obtains between the two friends can only be the equality of two absolute singularities, an equality without a common measure and therefore an equality of incommensurables. If the friend who is mourned could be replaced by another with equivalent properties, even equivalent virtues, then the loving friend would feel no loss at the death of the friend. This, however, would reveal that what was loved was not a friend, but a set of replaceable and repeatable properties, and thus the perfect or primary friendship would collapse into baser kinds of friendship that exist only in the realm of contract and exchange relations. If there are many friends, if, in other words, friends are countable members of a species, then no one is a (singular, unrepeatable) friend. Here is the first meaning of the saying attributed to Aristotle, ‘O friends, there is no friend’: the friend is an absolute singularity and cannot be multiplied. But how is this thought to be reconciled to Aristotle’s claim that the friend is the same as myself, an alter ego? How can one double an absolute singularity? It is impossible, Derrida avers, unless ‘one would find the other in oneself, already: the same dissymetry and tension of surviving in self, in the “oneself ” thus out of joint with its own existence’.69 In this way, Aristotle’s friendship, although apparently based upon equality, shatters the identity of the self upon which equality would be based and opens the self to infinite loss, but also to infinite fidelity. And what is it that the friend hopes for in this faithful mourning, a mourning that inhabits friendship even before the death of the beloved friend? The friend hopes for the return of the beloved. The absolute singularity of the friend cannot be remembered if it is just one more among the many dead, equal in death to all others. Even death cannot equalize friends. Death does not annul the absolute singularity of the friend, and thus death does not annul the friend. The love of the friend awaits the return of the friend. ‘For to love friendship,’ Derrida writes, ‘it is not enough to know how to bear the

69

Ibid. 24.

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other in mourning; one must love the future.’70 The friend becomes a friend by recognizing that the beloved friend is always and ever the one who will return. The faithfulness of the friend is not to the past, but to the future as such. The faithfulness of the friend keeps open the impossible possibility of the absolutely singular event, the unexpected and incalculable event. Derrida writes of the ‘infinitely redoubled’ responsibility of the friend that ‘implicitly describes an intertwining of temporal ekstases’. The fidelity of the friend to the return of the beloved means that the presence of the friend is always already haunted by the friend’s absence. The ‘to-come’ of the friend, Derrida says, ‘precedes the present, the self-presentation of the present’.71 Recalling the temporality of the ‘more matutinal morning’ that informed Trakl’s poetry, Derrida describes the ‘to-come’ of the friend as ‘more “ancient” than the present, “older” than the past present’.72 The friend troubles philosophy’s fantasy, described in ‘White Mythology’, of returning to oneself, once and for all. The friend sends philosophy on a journey toward a futurity it cannot master. The haunting of the present by the past that also holds the possibility of a future resurrection/return is what Derrida calls ‘messianicity’ in Spectres of Marx, the possibility of an ‘anachronic disjointure’ that imposes an obligation to ‘the singularity of the other, to his or her absolute precedence or to his or her absolute previousness, the heterogeneity of a pre-, which, to be sure, means what comes before me, before any present, thus before any past present, but also what, for that very reason, comes from the future or as future: as the very coming of the event.’73 The Aritotelian oikos of philosophy opens to the East.

70

71 72 Derrida (1997c), 29. Ibid. 37–8. Ibid. 38. Derrida (1994), 33. It would be worthwhile to compare the temporality of friendship/messianicity with what Nagy claims is the temporal structure of what might be called ‘ephemerality’ in Pindar’s Pythian 8. 95–7: ‘It is as if we the living were the realization of the dreams dreamt by our dead ancestors’ (Nagy (1990b), 195–6). These dreams are not programmed in advance, but depend upon the conjunction of the light (aigleˆ) of Zeus and visionary power (the very power of the visionary, the mantis) in the presence of the athletic performance, which is nothing other than the performance of the present as the realization of the dreamt future. 73

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Let me now draw this discussion of Derrida’s reflections on Aristotle as friend and on Aristotelian friendship to a close. In the visage of Aristotle’s friend (and of Aristotle as friend), Derrida discovers the features of vigilant faithfulness to the absolute singularity of the Other. One can say, then, that Derrida finds in Aristotle’s friend the features of both Penelope and the Jew, of Penelope as Jew. I have mentioned before how Derrida appropriates the repeated affirmations of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, the yes, yes that both appeals for and responds to love, in order to name the appeal to listen and the promise of a response that precedes all language. In Politics of Friendship, Derrida reverts to this yes, yes, but now as the promise before all friendship, the promise to be open to the other: ‘This promise before friendships would be linked to the “yes, yes”, this promise of memory that we have attempted to analyse elsewhere. The double affirmation must remain essentially risky, threatened, open. Above all, it cannot allow itself to be defined or posited, it cannot be reduced to a determined position.’74 The stakes of Derrida’s nostos are nothing less than this: to let the yes, yes resonate once more within the oikos of philosophy. In Politics of Friendship, Derrida and Aristotle speak together through the night in expectation of a new dawn. The flames of the West will never cease to haunt philosophy, but Derrida has shown us that the memory of those flames shelters the promise of a community of friends beyond the division of West and East. This is the promise upon which nostos—the return to light and life—has always turned. 74

Derrida (1997c), 244.

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Part IV The Question of Literature

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9 Aristotle’s Metaphor Duncan F. Kennedy

One of Derrida’s key encounters with antiquity also constitutes one of his most important engagements with the Western philosophical tradition. ‘White Mythology’ was originally published in 1971 in Poe´tiques, and then reprinted in Marges de la philosophie in 1972; an English translation of the essay appeared in the journal New Literary History in 1974, and was one of the earliest attempts to mediate Derrida’s thought for the anglophone world.1 Marges de la philosophie (translated into English in 1982 as Margins of Philosophy) comprises a series of essays which, in the words of Christopher Norris, ‘argue their way through a rigorous and consequential treatment of the various blind-spots, aporias or antinomies that characterize the discourse of philosophic reason’.2 In ‘White Mythology’, the particular ‘blind spot’ is metaphor. From Aristotle to the present day, it is argued, metaphor has been theorized in the discourse of philosophy in such a way as to efface the role of figural language. However, as Derrida remarks, ‘[e]ach time that a rhetoric defines metaphor, not only is a philosophy implied, but also a conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted’.3 Thus, for all the attempts to exclude it, metaphor is only ever pushed to the ‘margins of philosophy’, and one of Derrida’s concerns is to explore at length 1

Derrida (1974b). Norris (1992), 181. Derrida’s preferred term is tache aveugle, which locates the ‘blind spot’ on the page rather than in the eye. 3 Derrida (1982b), 230; (1972b), 274; emphases Derrida’s. I shall signal my own emphases in quotations from Derrida by underlining. 2

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this repeated marginalization. The subtitle of ‘White Mythology’ is ‘Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, and the main weight of subsequent commentary on the essay has unsurprisingly been devoted to debating the impact of Derrida’s ideas on the discourse of philosophy.4 Although the concerns of that debate will inform my argument, I shall adopt a different approach. In accordance with his regular practice, Derrida builds his argument in ‘White Mythology’ through extended close readings of extracts from a variety of texts in which metaphor is a major concern, including Anatole France’s The Garden of Epicurus, Leibniz, Hegel, Marx, Fontanier, Gaston Bachelard— and, of course, Aristotle. According to Geoffrey Bennington, a ‘modest version’ of Derrida’s practice would be that ‘almost the whole of what Derrida has written consists in “readings” . . . of philosophical and literary texts from the tradition, rather than in a system of theses proper to him’, whilst an ‘immodest version’ would have him ‘forcing these same old texts to say something quite different from what they had always seemed to say’.5 The former version, he says, would be true, and the latter not false. Simon Glendinning attributes what he calls a ‘classical’ motivation to Derrida’s practice. The history of thought is not one of a simple linear progression, and one’s most relevant predecessor may be historically remote: for Derrida, ‘[t]exts are seen . . . as events (something that unfolds in time), not, as it were, meaning-objects. Great texts reverberate and make their way through passages of reading and writing. They are not over—they lie ahead of us.’6 This essay will offer a (for the most part) modest attempt to read Derrida reading Aristotle on metaphor, and seek to weave together a number of issues—on definition, exchange, synchronicity and diachronicity, and translation—that permeate his reading and remain inescapably alive. Derrida remarks that ‘[t]here is a code or a program—a rhetoric, if you will—for every discourse on metaphor: following custom, in the first place the Aristotelian definition must be recalled, at least the one 4 See in particular Ric
ur (1977), 303–71 with the direct response to him in Derrida (1978c); also Gasche´ (1986), Bennington in Bennington and Derrida (1993), 119–133, Harrison (1999), Stellardi (2000), Morris (2000), and Cooper (2008). 5 Bennington in Bennington and Derrida (1993), 6–7. 6 Glendinning in Glendinning and Eaglestone (2008), p. xx. On Derrida as a ‘reader’ see further Critchley (2008).

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in the Poetics (1457b). We will not fail to do so.’7 Derrida’s own emphasis points to a humorous play with one of the essay’s concerns, for it is only at this point—in the third (and hence central) of the five lengthy sections of ‘White Mythology’ (entitled ‘The Ellipsis of the Sun: Enigmatic, Incomprehensible, Ungraspable’/‘L’Ellipse du soleil: l’e´nigme, l’incompre´hensible, l’imprenable’)—that Derrida turns to Aristotle and explores the way in which the key distinction between the ‘metaphorical’ on the one hand and the ‘literal’ on the other is rooted in Aristotle’s definition of metaphor at Poetics 1457b6–9: Metaphor (metaphora) consists in giving (epiphora) the thing a name (onomatos) that belongs to something else (allotriou), the transference being either from genus to species (apo tou genous epi to eidos), or from species to genus (apo tou eidous epi to genos), or from species to species (apo tou eidous epi to eidos), or on the grounds of analogy (eˆ kata to analogon). La me´taphore (metaphora) est le transport (epiphora) a` une chose d’un nom (onomatos) qui en de´signe une autre (allotriou), transport du genre a` l’espe`ce (apo tou genous epi to eidos) ou de l’espe`ce au genre (apo tou eidous epi to genos) ou de l’espe`ce a` l’espe`ce (apo tou eidous epi to eidos) ou d’apre`s le rapport d’analogie (eˆ kata to analogon).8

As Derrida remarks, ‘Aristotle invented neither the word nor the concept of metaphor. However, he seems to have proposed the first systematic situating of it, which in any event has been retained as such with the most powerful historical effects.’9 These effects, to echo the words of Glendinning cited above, are not over—they lie ahead of us. Definition seeks to render systematic, abstracting from time and context, and does so by constructing boundaries (Latin fines), designating what lies ‘inside’ and what ‘outside’, and regulating the relations between them. Derrida will put under close scrutiny the 7

Derrida (1982b), 231; (1972b), 275. Derrida (1982b), 231; (1972b), 275. Alan Bass, Derrida’s English translator in this version, uses Ingram Bywater’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, Derrida the Bude´ translation of Garnier. Neither is unproblematic, and from a Derridean perspective, none would be: I shall be returning to the issue of translation later. 9 Derrida (1982b), 231; (1972b), 275. For a brief survey of pre-Aristotelian discussions of ‘changing something’s name’, see Stanford (1936), 3–4. The first documented use of the term metaphora is at Isocrates Evagoras 190D, on which see Kirby (1997), 523–8, who seeks to situate Isocrates’ use of the term in relation to Aristotle’s. 8

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imagery of boundaries and notions associated with them: of being ‘at home’ or an ‘immigrant’, of importation, of naturalization. However, the ‘first place’ accorded to Aristotle in ‘White Mythology’ is postponed, and I shall follow Derrida’s lead, not only to contextualize his reading of Aristotle, but to emphasize how we remain subject to the ‘most powerful historical effects’ of which he speaks. The opening section provides the source for the essay’s title in Anatole France’s The Garden of Epicurus (first published in 1895), from which Derrida quotes extensively. Towards the end of that philosophical miscellany is a short dialogue entitled ‘Aristos and Polyphilos on the Language of Metaphysics’. The metaphysician Aristos comes upon Polyphilos reading ‘one of those little works that bring the wisdom of ages within reach of your hand. It reviews all systems one by one, from the old Eleatics down to the latest eclectics, and it ends up with M. Lachelier,’10 from which he has plucked what Derrida himself describes as ‘a sentence of a particularly abstract and speculative appearance’:11 ‘The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute’ (L’aˆme posse`de Dieu dans la mesure ou` elle participe de l’absolu). Polyphilos is not concerned with ‘how much truth the sentence contained’ but only with its ‘verbal form’, and, as Derrida observes, he ‘undertakes an etymological or philological work which is to reawaken all the sleeping figures’.12 In response to Aristos’ objection that surely such a conclusion would be solidly founded in argument, Polyphilos responds by comparing metaphysicians to knife-grinders who, instead of knives and scissors, grind medals and coins so as to efface the exergue:13

10 France (1908), 193, cited in Derrida (1982b), 212; (1972b), 252. Jules Lachelier (1834–1918) would have been regarded at the time Anatole France was writing as one of those ‘latest eclectics’. 11 Derrida (1982b), 212; (1972b), 252. 12 Id. (1982b), 212; (1972b), 252. 13 A technical numismatic term which refers to ‘a small space on the reverse of a coin or medal, below the principal device, for the date, engraver’s initials, or the like’ (OED s.v.). Derrida uses the term as the title of the first section of ‘White Mythology’. The OED further conjectures an association with the Greek ex þ ergon, suggesting ‘outside the work’, and compares the French hors-d’œuvre, which has led Bernard Harrison to surmise that Derrida is once more playing with the themes of exclusion and marginalization. See Harrison (1999), 508.

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When they have worked away till nothing is visible in their crown-pieces, neither King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: ‘These pieces have nothing either English, German or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely.’ They are right in speaking thus. By this needy knifegrinder’s activity words are changed from a physical to a metaphysical acceptation. It is obvious what they lose in the process; what they gain by it is not so immediately apparent.14

Derrida latches on to this issue of loss and gain, and remarks that Polyphilos ‘seems anxious to save the integrity of the capital, or rather, before the accumulation of capital, to save the natural wealth and original virtue of the sensory image, which is deflowered and deteriorated by the history of the concept’.15 He remarks: ‘The rest of the dialogue confirms this: it examines, precisely, the possibility of restoring or reactivating, beneath the metaphor which simultaneously hides and is hidden, the “original figure” of the coin which has been worn away (use´), effaced, and polished in the circulation of the philosophical concept.’16 However, Derrida substitutes for this way of thinking a key image he introduces at the start of his essay: usure, a term which can suggest both usury and also deterioration through usage, simultaneously profit as well as loss. For Derrida, this happens whenever any word is used. Why this emphasis on coins? ‘In signifying the metaphorical process,’ Derrida comments, ‘the paradigms of coin, of metal, silver and gold, have imposed themselves with remarkable insistence . . . Inscription on coinage is most often the intersection, the scene of exchange between the linguistic and the economic.’17 The term usure, he says, ‘seems to have a systematic tie to the metaphorical perspective. It will be rediscovered wherever the theme of metaphor is privileged. And it is also a metaphor that implies a continuist presupposition . . . the 14

France (1908), 208–9, cited by Derrida (1982b), 210; (1972b), 250. Derrida (1982b), 210; (1972b), 250. 16 Id. (1982b), 211; (1972b), 251 (‘La suite du dialogue le confirme: elle interroge pre´cise´ment la possibilite´ de restaurer ou de re´activer, sous la me´taphore qui a` la fois cache et se cache, la “figure originelle” de la pie`ce use´e, efface´e, polie par la circulation du concept philosophique’). 17 Id. (1982b), 216; (1972b), 256–7. 15

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enterprise recurs to it every time it gives the metaphorical point of view the upper hand.’18 Derrida of course goes on to cite the famous words of Nietzsche: ‘What then is truth? A mobile marching army of metaphors, metonymics, anthropomorphisms . . . truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses, coins which have their obverse effaced and are now no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.’19 Following Saussure, Derrida suggests that ‘the question of metaphor derives from a theory of value and not only from a theory of signification’.20 Both economics and linguistics are, in the words of Saussure cited by Derrida, ‘concerned with a system for equating things of different orders—labour and wages in one, and a signified and a signifier in the other’.21 Economics and linguistics, trade and metaphor, are all concerned with what can be exchanged or substituted for what, and hence with the question of equivalence. As Steve Nimis has pointed out, Aristotle’s discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric is couched in language that is also used of financial exchange. He cites Rhetoric 3. 4. 4 (‘But in all cases the analogical metaphor should set up a reciprocal exchange (antapodidonai) between each of the two things of the same genus (homogenon); for instance, if the cup is the shield of Dionysus, then it is fitting for the shield to be called the cup of Ares’), and comments of the verb apodidomi that it can mean to give back, render, or simply exchange or sell. The extension of this word’s meaning to include the interpretation of one word by another (LSJ s.v. 11) suggests the establishment of a ‘rate of exchange’, a logos, between the semantic fields of two comparata. This parallel use of apodidomi for both the production of meaning and for the production of economic value is part of a larger network of words which serve double duty in these two semantic fields. In Greek, these include hermeneus: meaning an interpreter and a broker; logos: a meaning, an account, a ratio; nomizein: to ‘coin’

18

Id. (1982b), 215; (1972b), 256. Id. (1982b), 217; (1972b), 258. 20 Id. (1982b), 217; (1972b), 259. 21 Saussure (1959), 79, cited by Derrida (1982b), 217–18; (1972b), 259. For a (rather breathless) survey of theoretical work that seeks to link the economic and the linguistic, see Shell (1978), 1–10. 19

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a phrase or to ‘strike’ a coin; hypotheka: a counsel or a ‘down payment’; nomisma: an institution or a coin.22

The overlap is striking, and the historical emergence at the same time and in the same place of philosophical thinking and of coined money has long been a focus of enquiry.23 Most recently, Richard Seaford has argued that the emergence of coined money is a ‘precondition for the genesis and subsequent form of presocratic metaphysics’.24 Or vice versa? Both involve abstraction. The correspondences Seaford suggests between ‘money’ and ‘metaphysics’ are fascinating, but from a Derridean perspective, the search for priority or origins can blind us to the way that ‘money’ and ‘metaphysics’, rather than being viewed as the ‘proper names’ for certain things, are part of a network of terms which are mutually constitutive. Derrida suggests that for Polyphilos, the search for priority and origins through the etymological analysis of metaphysical terms (as concept gives one a thing ‘grasped’) supposes ‘that a purity of sensory language could have been in circulation at the origin of language, and that the etymon of a primitive sense always remains determinable, however hidden it may be’.25 Polyphilos sees the ‘physical’ as prior to, and the origin of, the ‘metaphysical’ and the passage from one to the other as one of ‘degradation’ with no gain. Polyphilos traces the issue back to Aristotle: Such is the general practice, so far as I have observed, of the metaphysicians—more correctly the Metataphysicians; for it is another remarkable fact to add to the rest that your science itself has a negative name, one taken from the order in which the treatises of Aristotle were arranged, and that strictly speaking, you give yourselves the title: Those who come after the Physicians. I understand of course that you regard these, the physical books, as piled atop of each other, so that to come after is really to take place above. All the same, you admit this much, that you are outside of natural phenomena.26 22

Nimis (1988), 216. Nimis goes on to explore Aristotle’s usage in relation to Marx’s theory of value. 23 See Shell (1978); Sohn-Rethel (1978); Rossi-Landi (1983); Goux (1990). 24 Seaford (2004), 11. Although Seaford mentions in a footnote (Seaford (2004), 8 n. 33) that language and money have been compared since antiquity, he does not pursue the theme. 25 Derrida (1982b), 210–11; (1972b), 250–1. 26 France (1908), 210.

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Aristotle’s system creates a boundary between physis (‘nature’), with a language that straightforwardly names the phenomena that belong to it, and what lies ‘after’ or beyond physis. He finally offers his ‘translation’ of ‘The spirit possesses God in proportion as it participates in the absolute’: The breath is seated on the shining one in the bushel of the part it takes in what is altogether loosed (or subtle), whence we easily get as a next step: ‘He whose breath is a sign of life, man, that is, will find a place (no doubt after the breath has been exhaled) in the divine fire, source and home of life, and this place will be meted out to him according to the virtue that has been given him (by the demons, I imagine) of sending abroad this warm breath, this little invisible soul, across the free expanse (the blue of the sky, most likely). And now observe, the phrase has acquired quite the ring of some fragment of a Vedic hymn, and smacks of Oriental mythology . . . I think I have at last made you realize one thing, Aristos, that any expression of an abstract idea can only be an analogy. By an odd fate, the very metaphysicians who think to escape the world of appearances are constrained perpetually in allegory. A sorry lot of poets, they dim the colours of the ancient fables, and are themselves but gatherers of fables. They produce white mythology.27

‘Poe`tes tristes, ils de´colorent les fables antiques, et ils ne sont que des assembleurs de fables. Ils font de la mythologie blanche.’ It is this extract that gives Derrida the title for his essay. Metaphysics as a ‘mythology’ that is ‘white’ is not only bled of its colour. Polyphilos’ version of his metaphysical statement ‘smacks of Oriental mythology’, mobilizing the racial associations that blanche can carry: metaphysics for Polyphilos is what the mythology of the West, of the whites, has ‘turned’ into. Blanchir in French can connote ‘bleaching’ or ‘whitewashing’, and so could suggest a systematic ‘cover-up’,28 though Polyphilos seems to believe that the chief victims of this cover-up are the metaphysicians themselves. In arguing from the other direction, that conceptual language cannot be reduced (i.e. ‘led back’ but also ‘diminished’) to metaphor as its definitive starting point, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has recently gone through a similar exercise in respect of the United States Declaration of Independence: 27 28

France (1908), 227–8, cited in Derrida (1982b), 213; (1972b), 253. See Harrison (1999), 508.

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When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.29

Pinker subjects the passage to a detailed ‘philological’ examination to demonstrate the ‘physical’ provenance of the terms used, even down to observing that the and that are derived from an ancient IndoEuropean demonstrative used in connection with pointing. Though he may sound more like Polyphilos than Aristos thus far, he stops short: ‘That leaves God, man, and people, which mean what they mean and have for a long time, and the quasi-logical terms and, equal, and cause.’ He concludes that ‘if language is our guide, the lofty declaration of abstract principles is really a story with a strange and clunky plot’. He ‘translates’ thus: Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers’ view of what forced them to do the cutting.30

Whilst Pinker is avowedly aiming at bathos in the service of his argument, it would be hard to deny that the Declaration of Independence has suffered some loss in this reverse ‘translation’. The wholeheartedly committed Polyphilos who is the target of Pinker’s critique (he ‘takes the idea a wee bit too far’, Pinker primly puts it31) is the cognitive linguist George Lakoff. For Lakoff and his collaborator Mark Johnson, metaphor is not primarily a linguistic construction, as has customarily been assumed in the Western tradition since Aristotle, but a conceptual construction, and plays a key role in the development of thought, not least abstract thought. For example, in the conceptual metaphor Love is a Journey, one conceptual domain

29 Derrida, as it happens, offers his own analysis of this text in ‘Declarations of Independence’: Derrida (2002a), 46–54. 30 Pinker (2007), 235–7; the cited material is on p. 237. 31 Ibid. 247.

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(journey, and the things associated with it, e.g. duration, destination, direction) is mapped onto another (love) so as to understand it (as in ‘we’ve come a long way together’); these are, in the title of their first book, Metaphors We Live By. The mind is ‘embodied’, and the abstract is derived from the embodied mind’s experience of the physical. ‘Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,’ they remark,32 and they argue that such key philosophical concepts such as causation, morality, or the mind flow from such metaphorical structures. Their project is nothing if not ambitious. In Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff and Johnson view the Western philosophical tradition from the time of the Greeks as fundamentally called into question by the findings of cognitive science. It is not an ongoing debate about knowledge, ethics, or truth, but a series of effaced conceptual metaphors: so Descartes’s philosophy is grounded in the metaphor Knowing Is Seeing, Kant’s in Morality Is a Strict Father, and so on.33 White mythology lives! This is all hugely entertaining, but Derrida introduces a note of caution. ‘To read within a concept the hidden history of a metaphor is to privilege diachrony at the expense of system’, he remarks of the kinds of etymological ploys used by Polyphilos et al.34 It would be possible, he suggests, to subject Aristotle’s definition of metaphor to such a process: If we went back to each term in the definition proposed by the Poetics, we could recognize in it the mark of a figure (metaphora or epiphora is also a movement of spatial translation; eidos is also a visible figure, a contour and a form, the space of an aspect or of a species; genos is also an affiliation, the base of a birth, of an origin, of a family, etc.). All that these tropes maintain and sediment in the tangling of their roots is apparent. However, the issue is

32

Lakoff and Johnson (1980), 3; my emphasis. Id. (1999), 391–439. Derrida’s hesitation about the mathematical text (‘which it is difficult to conceive as providing metaphors in the strict sense, since it is attached to no determined ontic region and has no empirical sensory content’, ((1982b), 227) is not shared by Lakoff and another of his collaborators, Rafael Nu´n˜ez (2001), for whom mathematics is another creation of the embodied mind that emerges from the way we function in the physical world—moving along a path and collecting, constructing, and measuring objects. 34 Derrida (1982b), 215; (1972b), 255. 33

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not to take the function of the concept back to the etymology of the noun along a straight line. We have been attentive to the internal, systematic, and synchronic articulation of the Aristotelian concepts in order to avoid this etymologism.

The danger with etymologism, as the reverse ‘translations’ of Polyphilos and Pinker graphically illustrate, is the belief that, somewhere back ‘along a straight line’, there is a pre-metaphorical moment, an originary point at which a word, on its own and divorced from any other words, simply designates something—something, moreover, generally conceived of (grasped) as ‘physical’ or sensory. The word takes on the status of a ‘proper name’, which, in the words of Geoffrey Bennington, ‘ought to insure a certain passage between language and the world, in that it ought to indicate a concrete individual, without ambiguity, without having to pass through the circuits of meaning’35—as God, man, and people do for Pinker.36 Derrida explains the etymological/philological mind-set thus: ‘The primitive meaning, the original, and always sensory and material, figure . . . is not exactly a metaphor. It is a kind of transparent figure, equivalent to a literal meaning (sens propre). It becomes a metaphor when philosophical discourse puts it into circulation. Simultaneously the first meaning and the first displacement are then forgotten. The metaphor is no longer noticed, and it is taken for the proper meaning. A double effacement.’ In this way of thinking, as a word makes its metaphorical ‘move’, so ta physica move to become ta metaphysica, the things that come after (meta) ta physica. ‘Philosophy’, he says, ‘would be this process of metaphorization which gets carried away in and of itself.’37 To confront this way of thinking, Derrida asks us to consider that metaphor is not divorced from other words but, as Bernard Harrison puts it, ‘like other metaphysical concepts, emerges from a network of such concepts, a system of terms whose meanings, in their relationships to one another, are mutually explicating’.38 So Derrida is at 35 Bennington in Bennington and Derrida (1993), 104. The ‘proper name’ is a recurring concern in the writings of Derrida, as Bennington makes clear (ibid. 104–14). 36 Derrida (1985a), in his reading of the myth of the Tower of Babel, argues that not even God’s name—the ‘best’ proper name according to Derrida (2002a), 51–2 in his discussion of God in the Declaration of Independence—can have a pure, selfidentical status as a proper name in language. 37 38 Id. (1982b), 211; (1972b), 251. Harrison (1999), 514.

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pains to emphasize that a term like metaphor is to be understood not ‘in itself ’ (as the ‘proper name’ for some thing) but as having meaning in what he repeatedly terms a ‘chain’, a series of interdependent concepts that links metaphora with other key terms in the Aristotelian ‘system of interpretation’ including metaphora, mimeˆsis, logos, and physis.39 The meaning of ‘metaphor’ thus has its synchronic aspect which must be acknowledged—though there is an equal and opposite danger of privileging system at the expense of diachrony in the interpretation of such concepts: Nevertheless, none of their names being a conventional and arbitrary X, the historical and genealogical (let us not say etymological)40 tie of the signified concept to its signifier (to language) is not reducible to contingency.41

As he has earlier remarked: ‘the concept of the concept cannot not retain the gesture of mastery, taking-and-maintaining-in-the-present, comprehending and grasping the thing as an object’ (‘le concept de concept ne peut pas ne pas retenir . . . le sche`me du geste de maıˆtrise, prenant-maintenant, comprenant et saisissant la chose comme un objet’).42 Derrida’s French here is packed with words for grasping, and the phrase ‘prenant-maintenant’ graphically demonstrates how the image of ‘holding in the hand’ suggests the notion of presence and an eternal ‘now’ (the most familiar sense of the French maintenant), which expresses the aspiration of philosophy to escape the diachronic, and to disown its own history. Hegel put it thus in the introduction to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: ‘The thought which may first occur to us in the history of Philosophy, is that the subject itself contains a contradiction. For Philosophy aims at understanding what is unchangeable, eternal, in and for itself: its end is Truth. But history tells us of that which has at one time existed, at another time has vanished, having been expelled by something else. Truth is eternal; it does not fall within the sphere of the transient, and has no history.’43

39 40 41 42 43

See Derrida (1982b), 232; (1972b), 276. Etymos calls us back to a self-present truth. Id. (1982b), 253; (1972b), 302. Id. (1982b), 224; (1972b), 267. Hegel (1892), 7–8.

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Derrida’s concern in ‘White Mythology’ is thus not to affirm Polyphilos’ claim that philosophy is a ‘white mythology’ of effaced or ‘dead’ metaphors on the one hand nor Aristos’ that philosophy is a discourse that can free itself of all metaphors on the other, but to deconstruct the way of thinking that binds together two ostensibly contrasting positions, that is, ‘to show the fundamental complicity linking the two camps here’.44 These complementary argumentative strategies rely on symmetrical ploys of attempted exclusion which, however, can only ever amount to marginalization. The one privileges ‘metaphor’ in an attempt to banish ‘concept’, the other ‘concept’ in an attempt to banish ‘metaphor’. Were we to follow Polyphilos’ position to its logical end, then, in the words of Rodolphe Gasche´, ‘if a general metaphorology that systematically investigates the metaphorical credentials of philosophy’s conceptuality must presuppose the concept of metaphor, then at least one concept, the concept of metaphor, necessarily escapes the enterprise of accounting for the metaphoricity of all philosophical concepts.’45 The awkward interloper, rather than being excluded, is banished to the margins, a philosophical banlieue where he might sink beneath the system’s notice. For Derrida, it is not enough simply to invert the relationship of centre and margin, as the arguments of Polyphilos and Aristos do. Bernard Harrison puts it thus: ‘For the contrast to be intelligible in terms of the vision of the relations between proper and metaphorical discourse which it incorporates, the terms concept and metaphor would themselves have to be terms in a proper language—a language, that is, whose terms acquire meaning independently of any relationship with one another, by standing in a one-to-one correlation with constituents of extralinguistic reality.’46 Derrida thus turns his attention to Aristotle in the third section of ‘White Mythology’ to explore the way in which he constructs a distinction between the ‘proper’ and the ‘metaphorical’ in his definition of metaphor in the Poetics—for it is in definition, as we have seen, that boundaries are established, inclusions and exclusions policed, and elements allotted their place in the system to ensure its 44 45 46

Bennington in Bennington and Derrida (1993), 124. Gasche´ (1986), 308. Harrison (1999), 514.

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smooth running. Without explicitly commenting on them, Derrida affixes as epigraphs to this section three passages from the Poetics in which Aristotle draws attention to the way the plot of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the King—Aristotle’s favourite—depends for its effectiveness precisely on the marginalization of the implausible: He may do [the deed], but in ignorance of his relationship, and discover that afterwards, as does Oedipus in Sophocles. Here the deed is outside the play (exoˆ tou dramatos). (Poetics 1453b29–32) There should be nothing improbable (alogon) among the actual incidents (en tois pragmasin). If it be unavoidable, however, it should be outside the tragedy, like the improbability in the Oedipus of Sophocles. (1454b6–8) A likely impossibility (adunata eikota) is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility (dunata apithana). The story (logous) should never be made up of improbable incidents (ek meroˆn alogoˆn); there should be nothing of the sort in it. If, however, such incidents are unavoidable, they should be outside the piece (exoˆ tou mutheumatos), like the hero’s ignorance (to meˆ eidenai) in Oedipus of the circumstances of Laius’ death . . . (1460a26–30)

Although Aristotle speaks of these implausibilities as being ‘outside’ the play or its action, they remain elements of it without which the plot would not make sense. They are not excluded, but their relegation to the margins makes the play, as a play, work as effectively as it does. This needs to be kept in mind as Derrida explores Aristotle’s definition of metaphor. Derrida repeatedly uses the image of ‘chain’ to describe Aristotle’s thought, ‘a system of interpretation joining together metaphora, mimeˆsis, logos, physis, phoˆneˆ, seˆmainein, onoma. In order to restore the movement of this chain, one must be attentive’, he emphasizes, ‘to the place of the discussion of metaphor, as much in the Poetics as in book 3 of the Rhetoric. The place reserved for metaphor is already significant in itself. In both works, it belongs to a theory of lexis.’47 Recall Polyphilos’ image of the pile of Aristotle’s books, with the Metaphysics coming after (meta) the Physics. ‘Pile’ is, however, too static an image; Derrida’s analogy of the Oedipus conjures up a coordinated and dynamic system in which everything, including the Rhetoric and the Poetics, has been assigned its ‘place’ in such a way as to make the system work as effectively as it 47

Derrida (1982b), 232; (1972b), 276.

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does. Thus ‘rhetoric’ with its associated terminology, including metaphor, does not give one a position ‘outside’ from which to mount a critique of metaphysics,48 for rhetoric is organizationally one part of a system, mobilized in the discursive distribution of material across the volumes, which produces a way of thinking in which truth and essence are of central importance.49 The concept of metaphor is not a concept that is ‘foreign’ to metaphysics, an immigrant or interloper from outside the boundaries. It is, inalienably, a metaphysical concept; Derrida terms it a ‘philosopheme’. Metaphor, we may recall, is described in terms of the ‘movement’ or ‘spatial translation’ of a ‘name’ (onoma). Derrida explains Aristotelian thinking thus: ‘A noun is proper when it has but a single sense. Better, it is only in this case that it is properly a noun. Univocity is the essence, or better, the telos of language’ (‘Un nom est propre quand il n’a qu’un seul sens. Mieux, c’est seulement dans ce cas qu’il est proprement un nom. L’univocite´ est l’essence, ou mieux, le telos du langage’).50 The notion of the ‘proper name’ in English looks towards this Aristotelian ideal. The English translation of ‘nom’ as ‘noun’ here is perhaps unfortunate. Derrida devotes some discussion to the way that the Aristotelian onoma cannot be confined to nouns, and asks us to think in terms of the ‘nominalisable’, i.e. that which can be made into a ‘name/nom’, as, for example, when the definite article is combined with adjectives (‘the beautiful’, ‘the good’, etc.).51 Along with this goes the assumption that the designation of the name remains ‘stable’ notwithstanding the process of metaphorical ‘transport’. The definition therefore suggests a contrast between using a word to pick out the entity which it ‘properly’ designates and using it ‘improperly’ of some other entity, in order to suggest a similarity or analogy between that entity and the one the word ‘properly’ designates. So, according to this way of thinking about language, after its ‘transport’, the ‘name’ returns ‘home’ freighted 48 On Derrida’s discussion in the second section of ‘White Mythology’ of the failings of specific attempts to offer putatively non-metaphorical classifications of Plato’s metaphors, see Harrison (1999), 515. 49 Note in passing how the term importance incorporates the figure of spatial translation ‘inside’. 50 Derrida (1982b), 233; (1972b), 277–8. 51 Id. (1982b), 247; (1972b), 295.

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with new literal meaning. This is not the only way one can construe the way language functions. Thus, the Saussurean distinction between signifier and signified invoked by Derrida makes the possibility of locating what a word may mean depend upon the relationships between that word and other words. Within such a view of language, no term is stable or foundational,52 or provides a fixed point from which one can order other terms, or back to which one can trace (‘reduce’) things that are thought to be derivative (recall Derrida’s reference above in his discussion of etymologism to ‘the straight line’); Derrida’s favoured term for this is ‘circulation’—within which the identification of any start-point (or end-point) for the sake of any argument does indeed matter, but is a contingent matter, at most, of convention, or just, of convenience, not of necessity. We should endeavour to avoid collapsing either of these ways of thinking about language into the (‘proper’, ‘only’, or ’sole’) way. For Derrida, the particular function assigned to language by Aristotle’s definition, that of ‘properly’ designating particular entities, makes it the ideal of language to bring to knowledge the thing itself. And so it comes about that ‘Univocity is the essence, or better, the telos of language. No philosophy, as such, has ever renounced this Aristotelian ideal. This ideal is philosophy.’53 Aristotle’s definition distinguishes four types of metaphor, and he goes on to furnish each with an example (Poetics 1457b10–25).54 Aristotle’s choice of examples of metaphors has often been criticized and even ridiculed,55 but Derrida raises the possibility that they may not be as haphazard as they may appear (‘The apparently unsewn series of examples perhaps might follow the basting of an entire narrative’),56 and he duly quilts them into his argument. Thus when citing Aristotle’s example to illustrate the first type (‘Transport 52 For Derrida’s discussion of the particular challenge posed by ‘the “archaic” tropes which have been given the determination of a “natural” language to the “founding” concepts (theoˆria, eidos, logos, etc.)’ of philosophy, see Derrida (1982b), 224; (1972b), 267. For a recent exploration of theoˆria see Nightingale (2006). 53 Derrida (1982b), 247; (1972b), 295. 54 The same classification is assumed in Rhetoric 3. 2. 7 (1405a3–6), which crossreferences the Poetics. 55 For an amusing collection of material, see Stanford (1936), 12 n. 1. 56 Derrida (1982b), 241; (1972b), 288.

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from genus to species: “Here stands my ship” [Odyssey 1. 185]. Instead of the word “stands”, the proper word would have been “anchored”, its species’), Derrida intervenes to gloss it as follows: ‘A traditional recourse to the ship, to its movement, its oars, and its sails, in order to speak figuratively of the means of transport that the metaphorical figure is.’57 He points to the way that a definition of metaphor in terms of transport will have ‘recourse’ to some means of transport for its illustration, not because that example is simply appropriate (or inappropriate, as the case may be)—the Aristotelian perspective on language in which names are ‘proper’. From the Saussurean perspective, the terms may be viewed as inscribed in a system of relations, as we have seen, but are also recursive in the sense that they turn back to repeat the terms in which the definition has been framed (transport, trade, added value, and so on). Derrida’s prize exhibit is the example which Aristotle deploys to explain how analogical metaphor, the fourth and most important of Aristotle’s types, can fill the gap where there is no ‘name’ for something. In Poetics 1457b25–30, Aristotle says that to cast forth seed corn is called ‘sowing’, but that the act of casting forth flame from the sun has no name; nevertheless, this nameless act stands in the same relationship to the sun as sowing does to seed, and thus you can have the expression ‘sowing a god-created flame’. Derrida remarks that if this analogy imposes itself on us (‘and it does’, he adds), it is not because we have ever seen the analogy between sunshine and sowing, but because the analogy is the product of ‘a long and hardly visible chain’58 of analogies, the first link of which it would be impossible for anyone, including Aristotle, to point to. Such analogies could therefore be viewed as ‘elliptical’. Ellipsis, which as we have seen occurs in the title of the third section of ‘White Mythology’, is, in its grammatical usage, ‘the omission of one or more words in a sentence, which would be needed to complete the grammatical construction or fully to express the sense’ (OED s.v.). What then of the ‘sun’ (or ‘seed’ or ‘sow’)? Do they, as God, man, and the people do for Pinker, ‘mean 57 Derrida (1982b), 241; (1972b), 288 (‘Recours traditionnel au navire, a` son mouvement, ses rames et ses voiles, pour figurer ce moyen de transport qu’est la figure me´taphorique’). 58 Derrida (1982b), 243; (1972b), 290.

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what they mean and have for a long time’, or are they too elliptical in Derrida’s use of the term, the product of an endless and now not visible chain? The Aristotelian distinction between analogical metaphor and proper names cannot, then, in the end be pressed. The sun in particular holds a privileged place in the imagery of the philosophical tradition:59 ‘There is only one sun in this system. The proper name, here, is the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor, the father of all figures. Everything turns around it, everything turns toward it.’60 But what if the sun (in Greek heˆlios) too is a ‘trope’? Aristotle’s definition of metaphor as the transport of a name accommodates itself to its role in his philosophical system ‘by barring its movement . . . just as one governs the infinitely floating movement of a vessel in order to drop anchor where one will. All the onomatism which dominates the theory of metaphor, and the entire Aristotelian doctrine of simple names (Poetics, 1457a) is elaborated in order to assure harbors of truth and propriety.’61 Aristotle’s examples are reinscribed so as to make them reveal the tenor of his argument, and for the sun, Derrida goes on to suggest a fresh ‘flower’ of rhetoric, the heliotrope, as a way of thinking about metaphor in the fourth section of his essay—with, however, a resounding note of caution: ‘But let us not hasten to make of this a truth of metaphor. Are you sure that you know what the heliotrope is?’62 In his definition of metaphor, Aristotle, as John T. Kirby puts it, ‘risks tautology, as both metaphora and epiphora stem from the same root pher-/phor-, “carry”’. However, Kirby points up the distinction the prepositional prefixes generate: Meta- as a prefix often indicates a change of some sort; it may mean ‘across’, so that metaphora is literally a ‘carrying across’ or transference from one point to another. Indeed the Latin transferre (supine translatum), from which our English transfer and translation are derived, seems an exact rendering of metapherein . . . With epiphora we are on slightly different

59 Derrida draws particular attention to its role in Plato’s Republic, where the sun is the counterpart to the Idea of the Good in the allegory of the cave: (1982b), 242; (1972b), 289. 60 Derrida (1982b), 243; (1972b), 290. 61 Id. (1982b), 244; (1972b), 291. 62 Id. (1982b), 251; (1972b), 299.

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ground. Epi- as a prefix may designate movement over or beyond boundaries. Too, it may have a sense of addition, or (as per LSJ s.v. epi G.I.4) ‘accumulation of one thing over or besides another’. Thus epipherein may mean to put, or pile, something on top of something else.63

Now, with its references to metaphora as ‘literally a “carrying across”’ and translation as ‘an exact rendering of metapherein’, Kirby’s analysis, with its reliance on notions of one-to-one equivalence and substitution, looks more to Aristotle than it does to Derrida, but it can nonetheless act to underline Aristotle’s appropriation (the term is not too strong) of metaphora, and to achieve further purchase on Derrida’s critique. Before Aristotle, Plato had used the verb metapherein of translating words from one language to another (Critias 113a), and that is the dominant usage of the term translation in current English. Aristotle’s definition uses the noun metaphora to designate a process that operates not across the ‘borders’ of languages, but within them, and a term that elsewhere is used of foreign or immigrant status (allotrios) is now harnessed to designate within the boundaries of a single language his distinction between a word used in its ‘proper’ sense—which Aristotle refers to with the adjective oikeios (Rhetoric 3. 2. 6), a word that, far from voyaging from port to port on its argosy accruing cargo, is ‘at home’, thoroughly domesticated in its own oikos—and a word used ‘metaphorically’. When considered in the context of the root pher-/phor- and the process of nominalization through the addition of Greek prepositional prefixes, Derrida’s ‘coinage’ diffe´rance (which gets an essay to itself early on in Margins of Philosophy)64 makes its force felt. Derrida associates it, through the French verb diffe´rer, with the Latin differre as combining two senses, to differ and to defer.65 Both senses are crucial. Aristotle elevates the perception of resemblance as peculiar to humans, and the 63

Kirby (1997), 532. Derrida (1982b), 1–27; (1972b), 1–29. 65 Though Derrida himself distances it from the Greek verb diapherein, which he asserts lacks the sense of deferral (‘For the distribution of meaning in the Greek diapherein does not comport [sic] one of the two motifs of the Latin differre, to wit, the action of putting off until later’, ‘Car la distribution du sens dans le diapherein grec et ne comporte pas l’un des deux motifs du differre latin, a` savoir l’action de remettre a` plus tard’, 1982, 8/1972, 8), Erin O’Connell suggests that in the texts of Heraclitus with which she is concerned, ‘the temporal aspect is often implied by the 64

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invention of metaphors a characteristic of genius.66 However, if Achilles is a lion, the predicative ‘is’ that characterizes metaphor can be cashed out as ‘is (like)’ but also as ‘is not’. Derrida turns our attention in the predicate to difference, but in such a way as to factor in time as well. Relating his term to Saussure’s theory of language, he says: ‘we will designate as diffe´rance the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted “historically” as a weave of differences.’67 Movement, therefore, across time as well as space, a dimension effaced in the Aristotelian definition, but movement without origin or telos, the values of which, he suggests, have always denoted being and presence (ousia and parousia).68 ‘Likeness’, by contrast, connotes synchronicity, as is evidenced in the stem the word simultaneous shares with the Latin similis (‘like’). Derrida’s critique is aimed not at philosophy tout court, since in discussing philosophy we do not escape the boundaries it has defined (diffe´rance, after all, is (like)/is not a ‘concept’),69 but at philosophy’s tendency to marginalize time and history in its regulation of movement so as to privilege non-movement, a phenomenon apparent in the prepositional prefixes of its nominalizations, from the Greek syn-/sym(synchronicity, system, and so on) and the Latin con- (cum) (concept, context, comprehensive, constitutive, and so on). As Geoffrey Bennington comments: ‘It follows that this “word” or “concept” (diffe´rance) can be neither a word nor a concept, naming the condition of possibility (and therefore impossibility) of all words and concepts.’70 Diffe´rance thus ‘destabilizes’, in the sense of revealing the occluded ‘movement’ of, all words and concepts otherwise assumed to be ‘stable’. It does not, of course, abolish them or supersede them, rather

verb’s context, in which differences are produced by the changes that inevitably occur over time’ (2006), 146. 66 Poetics 1457a5–7; discussed by Derrida (1982b), 244; (1972b), 291–2. 67 Derrida (1982b), 12; (1972b), 12–13 (‘nous de´signerons par diffe´rance le mouvement selon lequel la langue, ou tout code, tout syste`me de envois en ge´ne´ral se constitue “historiquement” comme tissu de diffe´rences’). 68 See id. (1982b), 9; (1972b), 10. Note again the role of the prepositional prefix in par-ousia, being ‘beside’. 69 Derrida twice states emphatically that it is ‘neither a word nor a concept’, (1982b), 7; (1972b), 7. 70 Bennington in Bennington and Derrida (1993), 73–4.

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questions the full ontological presence with which the Aristotelian notions of metaphor and the proper name would seek to endow them. As Derrida observes in passing,71 when Cicero comes to ‘translate’ Aristotle’s term metaphora into Latin, he adopts the term translatio,72 and Derrida is sensitive to the historical entanglement of the discourses of metaphor and translation in their shared figures of movement, and cautious about the equivalences asserted in acts of translation.73 Translation cannot be reduced to the simple substitution of one word for another or what John T. Kirby called ‘exact rendering’. As Kathleen Davis puts it, meaning ‘is an effect of language, not a prior presence merely expressed in language. It therefore cannot be simply extracted from language and transferred.’74 The received associations of equivalence—amongst the ‘powerful historical effects’ of Aristotle’s definition of metaphor to which Derrida alluded—occlude the trade-off that has been involved in any translation, the process of bargaining and haggling that establishes a rate of exchange whereby one term can be exchanged for another, both ‘within’ and ‘across’ the ‘boundaries’ of language.75 From a Derridean perspective, translation becomes an active transformation of potential rather than a passive transfer of meaning or ontological presence. Recall the curious effects produced by the substitutions in what I termed the ‘reverse’ translations of Polyphilos and Pinker: this is ‘translation’ without regard to the effects of diffe´rance. As a corollary, ponder on the powerful but usually tacit processes of domestication involved in the more familiar, ‘forward’, direction of the act of translation, which can naturalize such curious effects. 71

Derrida (1982b), 231 n. 36; (1972b), 275 n. 23. De Oratore 3. 39, translatio . . . similtudinis est ad verbum unum contracta brevitas (‘a metaphor is a simile abbreviated to one word’). 73 See for example Derrida (1982b), 237; (1972b), 282. Translation is an insistent theme in the work of Derrida: see especially Derrida (1985a), (1985b), and (2001b), and on the impact of deconstruction on translation theory, Davis (2001). Bennington in Bennington and Derrida (1993), 166 remarks that ‘Derrida . . . even goes so far to say that translation involves everything that is at stake in the passage to philosophy.’ 74 Davis (2001), 14. 75 As Davis (2001), 20 remarks: ‘The idea that a language or any structure can have such a clean-cut edge is precisely what deconstruction calls into question.’ Agreed, though ‘precisely’, with its etymological associations of a ‘clean-cut edge’, sits rather uncomfortably here. 72

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The neologism diffe´rance could be thought of as enacting an alienating forward transposition, especially if, as one might, one were to regard it as a ‘translation’ of metaphora, that is, a systematic reconfiguration of Aristotle’s arguments to express Derrida’s concerns. Derrida began his discussion of Aristotle’s definition of metaphor by emphasizing that it cannot be assumed to be transparent, and remarked that his own study ‘would lose all pertinence if it were not preceded, or in any event controlled, by the systematic and internal reconstitution of the text to be reinscribed’.76 As he cautions, commentary and analysis (his, or anyone else’s) are a reconstitution and reinscription of the text: ‘the issue already is one of an active interpretation setting to work an entire system of rules and anticipations.’77 The notion that the text, whether it be Aristotle’s or Derrida’s, has a ‘proper’ meaning is itself part of the syndrome that Derrida puts to the question in his essay; an appeal to Aristotle’s (or Derrida’s) ‘own’ meaning is just such an appeal to the ‘proper’. The pursuit of a pure or originary meaning involves just the sort of act of marginalization in the Western tradition of the processes of ‘translation’, signalled by the term diffe´rance, that Derrida invites us to confront. 76

Derrida (1982), 231; (1972), 275.

77

Id. (1982), 231; (1972), 275.

10 Writing before Literature Derrida’s Confessions and the Latin Christian World Mark Vessey

Contrary to what some people believe or have an interest in making believe, I consider myself very much a historian. (Derrida (1992a), 54) Si l’he´ritage de la pense´e (de la ve´rite´, de l’eˆtre) dans lequel nous sommes inscrits n’est pas seulement, ni fondamentalement, ni originairement grec, c’est sans doute en raison d’autres filiations croise´es et he´te´roge`nes, d’autres langues, d’autres identite´s qui ne sont pas seulement ajoute´es comme des accidents secondaires (le Juif, l’Arabe, le Chre´tien, le Romain, le Germain, etc.). (Derrida (1992d), 267)

After a lengthy stint between quotation marks, in italics, or under erasure, the word LITERATURE now routinely appears in Roman capitals again, even on the covers of academic monographs. Announcements of literature’s death were evidently premature.1 Certainly, few of those who fingered Jacques Derrida as one of the assassins would

1 Early notice of its resurrection and useful critical perspectives in Widdowson (1999), an essay squarely in the tradition of the British (Marxist) cultural-historicist approach to the ‘question of literature’ influentially expounded by Williams (1976), 150–4; (1977), and Eagleton (1996), 1–14.

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have predicted his later career in works by other scholars which, straight from their titles, reaffirm the centrality of literature and the ‘literary’ to current scholarly, educational, and cultural-political debates.2 While still not likely to be claimed for any establishment, Derrida is no longer so exorbitant a figure with respect to established discourses as he was once taken to be. In respect of literature as professed in anglophone universities, indeed, he is already a classic. To cite one authoritative instance: the recent Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, having conspicuously omitted the sometimes contested term ‘literary’ from its title, loses no time in enfolding Derrida in a long history of discourses of the same, (all but) beginning, as such anthologies typically have begun for the past century, with Plato.3 Thus, along with the usual passages of the Ion and Republic, the Norton editors insert the story of the invention of writing from the Phaedrus, for the sake of later excerpts from Derrida’s Dissemination (‘Plato’s Pharmacy’), touted in advance as possibly ‘the most significant encounter between a twentieth-century philosopher and Plato’. To similar effect, Derrida appears as chief sponsor of Gorgias of Leontini, who usurps the place that Plato would otherwise have had at the head of the volume, and whose ‘Encomium of Helen’ can now plausibly be held to offer ‘a classical rhetoric antithetical to Platonic poetics, one that anticipates JACQUES DERRIDA’s twentieth-century critique of PLATO’. By this means, da capo and with their first small caps. for proper names (the next are for AUGUSTINE, who naturally followed Plato against Derrida), the Norton anthologists short-circuit all constructions and deconstructions of the ‘Western’ tradition of rhetoric, poetics, and metaphysics. It is almost as if, writing of speaking of Helen of Troy, Gorgias already wrote to and for Jacques Derrida (and FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE and PAUL 4 DE MAN). 2

e.g. Kamuf (1997), Kronick (1999), Bissell (2002), Attridge (2004); respectful nods to Derrida in Wood (2005). In a genre that is harder to pin down, exposing the troubled category of ‘literature’, Coetzee (2003) concludes with a reprise of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ presumably inspired by Derrida’s 1982 lecture of the same title: Derrida (1992a), 183–220. 3 Saintsbury (1903), for an American market, and beginning with Aristotle, may be the founding exception. 4 Leitch et al. (2001), 29–30.

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It is an old trick. Derrida took it in The Post Card, when he read an image in a Bodleian Library manuscript, of Socrates ‘writing before Plato’, as a private missive destined for him. The emphasis in that case was more strictly on the ‘letter’ of the logos, yet there too the correspondents were to be folded in a single time, if not a single tome, namely the book that Derrida (beginning with Of Grammatology) would ‘have not written’: It remains that from Plato, who wrote to Dionysos in order to tell him that the young Socrates had written everything, to Freud, whose correspondence is part of his corpus . . . from Plato to Freud there is some letter (il y a de la lettre). It is the same world (le meˆme monde), the same epoch, and the history of philosophy, like literature, even while rejecting the letter into the margins, even while occasionally affecting to consider it a secondary genre, was reckoning with it (comptait avec elle), essentially.5

On this reading of the archive, the whole history of philosophy (which naturally begins with Plato), as likewise that of literature, if literature had a history (Derrida’s epistolary syntax is quite loose), would fall within the limits of a unitary metadiscourse of ‘letters’, imagined in ‘Envois’ both as a ‘history of the postal service’ (histoire des postes) and more grandiloquently as a totalizing account of ‘the Great Telematic Network, the worldwide connection’.6 Does literature have a history? Did it begin with the ancient Greeks? As the instance of the Norton anthology suggests, it is almost as easy nowadays as ever it was to treat the first of these questions as simple-minded and the second as merely rhetorical. Derrida, the ‘classic’ of Of Grammatology and Dissemination, is there to speak for the consensus. But what if Derrida, as both a classicist and a historian in his own fashion, could be discovered to have made a late (re)turn to the history of literature, and on fresh terms? What difference might that yet make? Despite having once planned to write a thesis on ‘The Ideality of the Literary Object’, Derrida like the Norton anthologists generally

5

Derrida (1987a), 62; (1980a), 69; translation modified in places. Id. (1987a), 27; (1980a), 32; italicized phrase already in English in the French original. 6

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avoided the terms ‘literary’ and ‘literature’ in his own titles. It is thanks to one of his English editors that we now refer to an anthology of his writings as Acts of Literature.7 This collection has come to be treated as a summa of Derrida’s reflections on the subject.8 Given his lifelong resistance to all genres and tropes of summation, we should not expect it to maintain that status for long. In truth, Acts of Literature was more a recasting than a recapitulation. Between the early 1990s and his death in 2004, Derrida returned repeatedly to the ‘question of literature’. He began formulating questions and theses about the history of ‘literature’ as a name, concept, and institution. In a post-Cold-War era of European reunification, looming American global hegemony, and rising religio-political tension, he drew attention to the relations—past, present, and to come— between ‘literature’ and Rome (and Europe), ‘literature’ and Christianity (and other scriptural monotheisms), ‘literature’ (hereafter usually without quotation marks) and the process that he untranslatably dubbed mondialatinisation. As used by Derrida, this last term evoked no Latinity that had ever been nor any world of antiquity that one would wish to reconstruct, even historically. Derrida’s late-life Latinizing was as free of nostalgia as it was of antiquarianism. Yet it was not altogether ahistorical. In confronting anew the mystery that had for him, from his youth onwards, always inhered in ‘letters’, he found himself frequenting a genre or quasi-genre (of confession) and projecting a scene (of witness almost unto death) that had their historical coordinates, as recognized by him, in the Weltanschauung of Christian, late Roman antiquity. This chapter will plot that other-worldly recourse of Derrida’s and begin to construe its lessons. First we review the sequence of Derridean text-events that leads via the re-encounter with a certain figure of ‘Augustine’ to a radical reopening of the question of literature in Acts of Literature (1992).9 Then we retrace the further stages of a journey that takes its way from a nearly transcendent Rome to an

7 Derrida (1992a). Cf. Kamuf (1991), 143–237; Bennington and Derrida (1993), 179–89. 8 Miller (2001) is exemplary. 9 For a closer and complementary engagement with Derrida’s ‘Augustine’ see Vessey (2005).

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earthly venue, if no resting place, in the northerly European frontier zone of Demeure (1998). A short coda extends the trajectory of enquiry beyond any specifically Derridean text or event to take in, by citation, one of the generically primal scenes of confession in the Western memory of writing.

CONFESSIO LIT TERARUM: DERRI DA AFTER DE MAN, ROUSSEAU, AND AUGUSTINE Professing faith in the humanities in a lecture given at Stanford University at the end of the 1990s, Derrida called for a new engagement with the history of literature: Not only what is commonly called history of literatures or literature themselves, with the great question of its canons (traditional and indisputable objects of the classical Humanities), but the history of the concept of literature, of the modern institution named ‘literature,’ of its links with fiction and the performative force of the ‘as if,’ of its concept of oeuvre, author, signature, national language, of its link with the right to say everything (or not to say everything), which founds both democracy and the idea of the unconditional sovereignty claimed by the university and within it by what is called, inside and outside departments, the Humanities.10

This was one of several interrelated ‘historical’ tasks that Derrida then set for the humanities to come. Nobody familiar with his writings from the early 1970s through the 1980s would have been surprised by the continuing insistence on performativity, the authorial signature, and the special right of ‘literary’ texts to speak and remain silent. By contrast, the summons to a new practice of the history of literature can now be seen as distinctive of Derrida’s thinking during the last decade and a half of his life.11 10 Derrida (2002c), 202–37, here 232. A slightly different English version, preserving other elements of the original title, appears in Cohen (2001), 24–57. 11 Note, however, the caveat entered by Derrida himself in Derrida and Ferraris (2001), 46: ‘in everything I’ve published there are always touchstones announcing what I would like to write about later on—even ten or twenty years later on . . . I have a feeling not just of continuity but of a sort of immobility, a movement sur place. The

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Derrida’s hospitality as a guest could be exceptional. On that occasion at Stanford, his hosts were two professors of comparative literature, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and—then just appointed, as if extra cathedram—the philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty, who was known to differ from Derrida in his sense of the vocations of philosophy and literature,12 introduced him that day. Gumbrecht, for his part, could have seemed to embody the science of vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft in the tradition of Romanistik mythically derived from Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur.13 The concept of ‘world literature’ is inseparable from Derrida’s reflections on the process that he saw shaping key discourses about humanity, democracy, and international law in the later twentieth century—a process awkwardly captured (at least in the published versions of his lecture) by the term ‘worldwide-ization’. That nonce-locution did embarrassed duty for a word that the speaker was apparently reluctant to render into the language of his North American hosts. ‘I am keeping the French word mondialisation in preference to “globalization” or Globalisierung,’ he explained, ‘so as to maintain a reference to the world—monde, Welt, mundus—which is neither the globe nor the cosmos.’14 Always alert to the importunities of translation, Derrida was anxious in this case to respect a particular register of Latinity, at once classical and Christian. What did it mean, after all, ‘to profess’ the humanities? Once again, Derrida turned first to the dictionary: This word of Latin origin (profiteor, -fessus sum, -eri; pro et fateor, which means to speak, from which also comes ‘fable’ and thus a certain ‘as if ’), to ‘profess’ means, in French as in English, to declare openly, to declare publicly. In English, says the OED, before 1300 it had only a religious sense. ‘To make one’s profession’ then meant ‘to take the vows of some religious order.’15

This ‘performative’ aspect of the act of profession—its character as a ‘speech act’ in the sense expounded by J. L. Austin—should not, question of writing was already announced in my higher-studies dissertation of 1954’; see n. 47 below. 12 e.g. Rorty (1989), 122–37; response by Derrida (1996c), 77–88. 13 Damrosch (2003), 1–36; Gumbrecht (2002). 14 Derrida (2002c), 203. 15 Ibid. 214.

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however, be mistaken for some sudden invention of medieval Christianity. The pledge or promise assumed by such acts, argued Derrida, was already implicit in the classical Latin idiom of ‘professing’, as shown by Cicero’s report of one who ‘gave himself out to be a master of grammar’ (grammaticum se professus).16 A profession was at all times a solemn engagement, made in view of some future reckoning: ‘The idea of [academic] profession supposes that beyond and in addition to knowledge, know-how, and competence, a testimonial commitment, a freedom, a responsibility under oath, a sworn faith obligates the subject to render accounts to some tribunal yet to be defined.’ Every profession was an act of faith. The modern forms of the obligation ought not therefore to be too quickly dissociated from the specifically religious history recalled by the OED’s earliest citations for the word itself. In fact, it was the express purpose of Derrida’s lecture ‘to articulate together Profession, the Profession of faith, and Confession’. Along with the new-style history of literature that he mandated for the humanities of tomorrow, there would need to be a ‘history of professing’ to take account of the history of ‘the premises or presuppositions (notably Abrahamic, biblical, and above all Christian)’ of a ‘worldwide-ized confession’.17 Literally understood, Derrida’s Stanford declaration of faith in ‘The Future of the Profession’ would be little more and nothing less than a programme for research into the long, conjoined histories—in the West, and in a widening world—of literature and confession. Fari, fabula/fateri, profiteri, professio. Speaking, professing, storytelling: these are acts requiring (in theory) no writing or reading at all, unless or until one professes oneself a grammarian, say, or a grammatologist. ‘I have never known how to tell a story,’ Derrida admitted at the beginning of his Memoires for Paul de Man.18 In the story that he nonetheless began to tell of himself, in speech and in print, in the decade or so after de Man’s death in December 1983, literature and confession were to be inextricably linked.

16 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2. 12. The real subject of the passage is philosophy as profession of the ‘art of living’ (ars vitae). 17 Derrida (2002c), 222, 205, 232. 18 Derrida (1989a), 3; (1988), 27.

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Although it can only be touched upon here, Derrida’s conversation with de Man—most crucially, with the posthumous oeuvre of de Man—is one of the clearest axes of his later thinking about literature. De Man had professed himself both grammarian and rhetorician. His own later criticism and theoretical writing consistently presented the ‘text’ under study as a site of ‘contradictory interference’ between the grammatical and the rhetorical, especially figurative, potentials of language, an interference that de Man held to be characteristic of all writing but most arresting in instances of it called (for that reason?) ‘literary’.19 The playing out of this programmatic tension between the literal and figurative properties of a text, through metaphor, metonymy, prosopopeia, or any combination of tropes, was what happened in reading. Such was the ‘textual event’—more often, in reality, a concatenation of events—that de Man’s later essays sought to frame and serialize in ‘scenes of reading’ (which included scenes of writing) taken or extrapolated from canonical works in German, French, and English from between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Among the most powerful demonstrations of his critical method were the chapters on Rousseau that made up the second half of Allegories of Reading (1979). Both in their overt use of a language of ‘deconstruction’ and in their reliance on a theory of ‘literary’ performativity adapted from Austin, these essays underscored the importance of Derrida’s work for de Man. Conversely, elements of the titles of the last three of them were to resurface in significant ways in the lexicon of Derrida’s work after de Man: ‘Allegory of Reading (Profession de foi)’, ‘Promises (Social Contract)’, ‘Excuses (Confessions)’.20 Many of Derrida’s sharpest interventions in the field of ‘literary theory’ were made on American university campuses. A (reversed) pair of instances will confirm the alliance with de Man and also hint at the genealogy of Derrida’s later discourse on literature. The latter instance first: in a lecture for a conference at the University of California, Irvine, held in 1998 to mark the publication of a ‘posthumous corpus’ of de Man’s writings, Derrida went back to de Man’s discussion of a scene from Rousseau’s Confessions, in order to 19 20

See esp. the title essay in de Man (1986). De Man (1979).

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prolong its analysis of that text as being at once ‘machine-like’ (programmed) and ‘performative’ (eventful). Unlike de Man, who ‘[did] not speak of Augustine’, at least not in connection with Rousseau, Derrida was ready to consider the textual-eventfulness of Rousseau’s narrative, which turned on his adolescent theft of a ribbon, in its relation to the workings of a greater machine or writing programme constituted by the ‘quasi literary genre’ of which Rousseau’s Confessions would have inscribed itself the second member after Augustine’s work of almost the same title. Here the Latinsounding ‘quasi’ (un nouveau genre quasi litte´raire) is an untranslatable ‘as if ’. According to Derrida, the status of writings of this sort ‘as works of literature remain[ed] to be decided’.21 On that point too he was treading close to de Man’s footsteps.22 As he recollected de Man, however, Derrida was at the same time advancing further in the ‘quasi genre’ of confessions than de Man ever had. The former instance: in a set of lectures given first at Yale and then at Irvine, within weeks of de Man’s death, Derrida recalled reflecting upon his friend’s predilection for the writings not only of Rousseau but also of Nietzsche, the other principal subject of Allegories of Reading: Rousseau-and-Nietzsche, then, and I said to myself that, curiously, this couple had always haunted me, me too, and well before I was in a position to refer to them in published works. Barely adolescent (here it comes, we are approaching the genre of ‘memoirs,’ in its worst form), I read them together and I confided my despair to a kind of diary: how was it possible for me to reconcile these two admirations and these two identifications since the one spoke so ill of the other? End of ‘memoirs’ for today.23

This final lecture in Memoires for Paul de Man (‘Acts’) focused on the penultimate chapter of Allegories of Reading (‘Promises’) and reserved the last chapter of that book, which was on Rousseau’s

21

Derrida (2002c), 71–160, here 84, 82, 80; (2001c), 33–147, here 46, 42, 48. Vessey (2006). 22 Cf. de Man (1984), 67–81, esp. 68: ‘Attempts at generic definition seem to founder . . . Can there be autobiography before the eighteenth century . . . ? Generic historians tend to think so, which raises at once the question of the autobiographical element in Augustine’s Confessions, a question which, despite some valiant recent efforts, is far from resolved.’ 23 Derrida (1989a), 128; (1988), 125.

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Confessions, for later treatment—at Irvine again, in the event (our former instance).24 But already in mourning de Man Derrida had begun to confide, if not to confess, on his own account. The ‘quasi genre’ of confessions, as he we have seen him subsequently describe it, was a machine set in motion by an author’s commission to writing of the tale of a nefarious act committed by himself at the age of 16.25 It would become plainer with time that, in Derrida’s own case, the scene of the original ‘crime’ (or ‘sin’) was likewise a scene of writing. Confessions, the worst form of memoirs?26 Nietzsche thought so, dismissing Augustine’s tale of the theft of pears in book 2 of his Confessions as ‘basically an undergraduate story’ (eine StudentenGeschichte) and pronouncing of the work as a whole: ‘Philosophical value zero!’27 Whatever qualms these judgements may have caused the young Derrida as a precocious reader of Augustine, they remained a secret to his own readers until the publication of his ‘Circumfession’ in 1991. (Where does Derrida ‘speak of Augustine’ before then?) The claimed occasion was the appearance from another hand of a text, not indeed of Derrida’s own ‘posthumous corpus’ (since hardly a word of it was his) but that aimed to supply the logic of everything he had written or might write in future. In ‘Derridabase’, Derrida’s friend Geoffrey Bennington had compiled, as it were, the machine code of Derrida’s entire output as a philosopher, without quoting verbatim from a single one of his signed works. In de Manian terms, he had stripped the grammar of the Derrida text of its figurative potential, disfigured Derrida, made ‘Derrida’ a programme without possibility of further event. Under contract to outwrite Bennington’s theo-logical reduction of his oeuvre, frantic to ‘make something happen’ that could unsettle his friend’s godlike mastery of his texts, Derrida resorted to the Latin letter of Augustine’s Confessions and to a hyperliteral transcription of his own notebooks from the period 1977–84.28 24

Id. (1989a), 149; (1988), 143. Id. (2002c), 71, 80–4; (2001c), 33, 42–8. 26 See Smith (1995), esp. 40–8. 27 Nietzsche, letter to Franz Overbeck, 31 Mar. 1885: Nietzsche (1969), 239–40; (1982), 34. 28 Bennington and Derrida (1991); (1993). See also Derrida (2005a). Quotations from ‘Circumfession’ below are keyed to the number (in bold) of the ‘period’ or ‘periphrase’ in question, which is the same in both French original and English translation. 25

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Confiteor tibi in litteris, Augustine had confessed in writing, addressing his god, speaking of himself as he was in the days immediately following his mother’s death: ‘I confess to you in writing.’29 Since childhood, claimed Derrida in turn, ‘I have followed the confessions of theft at the heart of autobiographies.’30 True to the form, his ‘Circumfession’ confesses a theft: ‘you did not know,’ he tells the all-but-divine Bennington, ‘that my first novel plot (complot de roman), when I was 15, already told, by being it (pour l’eˆtre), the theft of a diary and blackmail for its return.’31 Had Derrida, who also claimed never to have known how to tell a story, already plotted a novel in his teens? No. Or not certainly. Not unless the lost diary was in fact Derrida’s own, and narrated such a tale (re´cit) as well as supplying the object of conspiracy (complot). As indeed it may have done, as surely as it (or another like it) recorded his despair over Rousseau-and-Nietzsche. Who but Derrida could say? And how, short of finding his youthful diaries or notebooks in an archive, should we ever know if he were telling the truth—about them, let alone in them? Whereas Augustine called an omniscient God to witness, Derrida expected to have only readers. Having found the vein with Augustine in ‘Circumfession’, Derrida multiplied (his) confessions. As he was fulfilling his pact with Benningon for the book that became Jacques Derrida, he also gave the interview that would form the opening chapter of Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge.32 Other chapters provided a selection from Derrida’s writings from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, showcasing his analyses of more or less incontestably ‘literary’ texts by the likes of Rousseau, Mallarme´, Kafka, Joyce, and Ponge, illustrating in the process the power of such characteristically Derridean figures as

29 Augustine, Confessions 9. 12. 33, cited by Derrida in Bennington and Derrida (1991/1993), 9, 49. See also n. 37 below. 30 Bennington and Derrida (1991/1993), 31. 31 Ibid. 45. 32 The title page of Bennington and Derrida (1991/1993) gives the dates of composition for ‘Circumfession’ as ‘January 1989–April 1990’. According to the headnote in Derrida (1992a), 33, the interview with Attridge ‘took place in Laguna Beach’—where Derrida resided while fulfilling his duties as Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, and from where he signed and dated much of ‘Circumfession’—‘over two days in April 1989’.

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differance, supplement, remark, hymen, signature, affirmation, and invention. With the exception, however, of his lecture on a parable of Kafka’s, ‘Before the Law’, delivered to the Royal Philosophical Society in London in 1982, these texts said little explicitly about literature as concept or institution, and next to nothing that would count towards a history of literature in any ordinary sense of that phrase. Nor, for all its finesse, did Attridge’s introduction provide much textual evidence to support its claim that Derrida had long been ‘haunted’ by a question ‘which must be a central one for anybody committed to literary studies’ and that had ‘also—since Plato and Aristotle—repeatedly been asked within the Western tradition of philosophy’, namely: What is literature? 33 That Derrida had been so preoccupied is now beyond any useful doubt. The testimony was there and then about to come. As soon as he began to answer Attridge’s first question, Derrida confessed: At this moment, here, I’m trying, in a way that would commonly be called ‘autobiographical,’ to remember what happened when the desire to write came to me . . . In the moment of narcissistic adolescence and ‘autobiographical’ dream I’m referring to now . . . the first texts I got interested in were neither simply literary, nor philosophical, but confessions, [Rousseau’s] Reˆveries du promeneur solitaire, the Confessions, Gide’s Journal, La porte e´troite, Les nourritures terrestres, L’immoraliste, and at the same time Nietzsche . . . In the naive adolescent notebooks or diaries I’m referring to from memory, the obsession with the proteiform motivates the interest for literature to the extent that literature seemed to me, in a confused way, to be the institution which allows one to say everything [or ‘anything,’ tout dire], in every way. The space of literature is not only that of an instituted fiction but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything. To say everything is no doubt to gather, by translating, all figures into one another, to totalize by formalizing, but to say everything is also to break out of (franchir) prohibitions. To affranchise oneself (s’affranchir)—in every field where law can lay down the law . . . In any case, at the moment when I was beginning to discover this strange institution called literature, the question ‘What is literature?’ imposed itself upon me in its most naive form. Only a little later, this was to be the title [Qu’est-ce que la litte´rature? (1948)] of one of the first texts by Sartre I think I read after La nause´e . . . What is it? What

33

Attridge in Derrida (1992a), 1.

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‘remains’ when desire has just inscribed something which ‘remains’ there, like an object at the disposal of others, one that can be repeated? What does ‘remaining’ mean? This question subsequently took on forms which were perhaps a little more elaborated, but ever since the beginnning of adolescence, when I was keeping these notebooks, I was absolutely bewildered at the possibility of consigning things to paper.34

This passage supplies a plot or intrigue which, even if we could not otherwise have supposed it to run through Derrida’s prior oeuvre, clearly identifies a major theme of his writing from the late 1980s onward. No less than for its thematic interest, however, the passage is striking for its autobiographical and confessional character. Theme and genre (or ‘quasi genre’) are scarcely separable. This was, of course, a performative utterance. Derrida was professing, publicly giving himself out to be a person preoccupied from an early age— and directly, as a writer—with the question of literature. What he has to say about literature as an institution cannot be disentangled from what he claims to be able to remember about what obsessed him as an adolescent, which in turn is presented as the substance of private notebooks or diaries now accessible to him only in memory, as memorial ‘remains’ of what had formerly remained after an act of inscription. Interviewer-interrogator aside, why should Derrida be telling us this? Why should we even care? For all he knew, we might not. That is why he would also have called this profession a confession, meaning that it contained or implied a plea for forgiveness.35 Confiteor tibi in litteris. Augustine 34 Derrida (1992a), 34–7. Cf. the reminiscences culled by Bennington for the ‘Curriculum Vitae’ in Bennington and Derrida (1993), 327; (1991), 301: ‘1943–47: . . . J. D. dreams of becoming a professional footballer . . . At the same time, unease, maladjustment, withdrawal, “private diary,” intense reading (Rousseau, Gide, Nietzsche, Vale´ry, Camus) . . . 1947–48: Philosophy class at the Lyce´e Gauthier in Algiers (marked by reading of Bergson and Sartre). Thinks he has known for a long time that he must write (“literature,” rather (plutoˆt de la “litte´rature”)) and thinks of a job as a teacher (literature, rather (plutoˆt de lettres)) as the only possible, if not desirable, job.’ See also Derrida (1998b), 50. 35 Derrida (2005a), 24: ‘As soon as I write this, as I sign it and leave a trace . . . I’m already in a position to confess that I sinned, because I was guilty of leaving a trace, which is not distinct or accessible only to the unique one [i.e. the supposed personal addressee], be it God or anyone, a person, a man or a woman, even any living being, even what one calls an animal. As soon as I leave a trace, I have to ask forgiveness, because I imply, I assume, that it is interesting.’

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knew exactly who it was he was addressing in the first instance, and that he could tell god nothing that he did not already know.36 Yet even Augustine in his Confessions, as read by Derrida, was thinking of human readers too, and from the first.37 All Derrida could claim to know, in confessing his youthful self to Attridge with an eye to readers yet unknown, was that by yielding to the desire to write, and doing so under the special law of literature, he had transgressed the law behind all laws.38 The interview published under the title of ‘“This Strange Institution Called Literature”’39 as a preliminary chapter to Acts of Literature enacts the deconstructive logic of the ‘supplement’ or ‘prologue’ invoked elsewhere by Derrida. As Augustine’s Confessions furnished him with resources to outsmart the programme of Bennington’s ‘Derridabase’, so confession or autobiography served as the means to exceed, from the outset, the pre-assigned limits of an anthology published under his name. Like the reader who tried to decode ‘Circumfession’ according to Bennington’s programme, the reader of Acts of Literature who read beyond the editor’s introduction was in for a surprise.

36

See the very first periphrase of ‘Circumfession’ in Bennington and Derrida (1991/1993), on ‘Why we confess to God, when he knows’ (Cur confitemur Deo scienti). 37 Cf. Derrida (1995b), 40–1: ‘ . . . if [Augustine] confesses in writing (in litteris, per has litteras) (9. 12. 33; 10. 3. 4), it is because he wants to leave a trace for his brothers . . . This moment of writing is done for “afterwards” . . . But the address to God itself already implies the possibility and the necessity of this post-scriptum that is originarily essential to it.’ The passage occurs in a soliloquy entitled ‘Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum)’, composed by Derrida for the proceedings of a conference that he could not attend in Canada in 1991, and thus in close proximity to the other texts cited here. It is tempting to see Derrida’s intuition of the importance of the audience/public for the Augustinian sense both of confession and of conversion as partly inspired by de Man’s claims in ‘Autobiography as De-facement’ for the ineluctable specularity of all autobiography, if not of all signed texts; de Man (1984), 67–81. 38 Derrida, ‘Before the Law’ (1982), in id. (1992a), 183–220, narrowly pre-dating the confessional turn of Derrida’s late reflection on literature. 39 Id. (1992a), 33–75, containing the passage taken for the first epigraph in this chapter.

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ROME, CHRISTIANITY, EUROPE, MONDIALATINISATION Attridge had introduced Acts of Literature by placing Derrida in a line of philosopher literary theorists beginning with Plato and Aristotle. Within a few pages, Derrida tacitly queried the succession: The name ‘literature’ is a very recent invention. Previously, writing was not indispensable for poetry or belles-lettres, nor authorial property, nor individual signatures. This is an enormous problem, difficult to get into here. The set of laws or conventions which fixed what we call literature in modernity was not indispensable for poetic works to circulate. Greek or Latin poetry, non-European discursive works, do not, it seems to me, strictly speaking belong to literature. One can say that without reducing at all the respect or the admiration they are due. If the institutional or social-political space of literary production as such is a recent thing, it does not simply surround works, it affects them in their very structure. I’m not prepared to improvise anything very serious about this—but I do remember having used some seminars at Yale (around 1979–80) to look at the appearance of this word ‘literature’ and the changes which accompanied it. The principle . . . of ‘being able to say everything,’ the socio-juridico-politic[al] guarantee granted ‘in principle’ to literature, is something which did not mean much, or not that, in Graeco-Latin culture and a fortiori in a non-Western culture. Which does not mean that the West has ever respected this principle: but at least here or there it has been set up as a principle.40

The philosophical, literary theoretical, and literary historical background to these notions is complex, but certain emphases can be 40 Derrida (1992a), 40, italics added. Cf. id. (1995b), 1–31, ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering”’, at 28: ‘I have often found myself insisting on the necessity of distinguishing between literature and belles-lettres or poetry. Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything.’ Citing the passage from ‘Passions’, which was published in the same year as Acts, Miller (2001), 64, comments: ‘Here is an exigent historicizing if there ever was one. It is a historicizing of literature that would make big problems with current (and much older) attempts to universalize the Western concept of literature and study things called “Chinese literature” or “Indian literature” or “Native American literature.” It would also remind us that calling Homer’s Odyssey or Sophocles’ Oedipus the King or Virgil’s Aeneid or Dante’s Divine Comedy literature in our modern sense of that word is anachronistic.’

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elucidated.41 (We shall return to the hypothesis put here in italics, along a slope of Derrida’s own tilting.) In his refusal to identify literature straightforwardly with poetry, his association of literature with writing (in the ordinary, literal sense of that word), and the precision of his concern with specifically European or Western cultural traditions, Derrida clearly owed much to Heidegger, even as he pointedly marked his differences from him.42 Likewise, for his conviction that the current institutional supports of literature were of relatively recent date he could have referred, by then, to an impressive consensus among historians of several stripes.43 Given the new interest being taken by both anglophone and francophone scholars, by the late 1970s, in the history of ‘literature’ as a ‘name’, it would have been instructive to hear more about Derrida’s seminar at Yale at the end of that decade. By the time he was ready to improvise seriously on the subject, in any case, his personal lexicon of keywords for literature had significantly expanded. The most radical intuition in the paragraph just quoted is undoubtedly the one identifying literature with a right to say everything or anything (tout dire), including the right to say nothing.44 We have heard Derrida confess his desire to enjoy that right, and speak of the responsibility to an ulterior law or tribunal that he associated with it. On another occasion, he would call this strictly (that is, performatively) professional commitment ‘a passion without martyrdom’.45 For all the registers of thought and language that finally converged in Derrida’s discourse on the modern concept and institution of 41 See Miller (2001), 66–8, though there are difficulties with his anti-Husserlian derivation; Clark (1992); Kronick (1999). 42 See esp. Derrida (1989a), 151 n. 4; (1988), 111 n. 1; (1984b), 26–7. 43 After Wellek (1973), see esp. Williams (1976), 150–4; (1977), 46–7, excerpted in Leitch et al. (2001), 1569. Williams’s work was to be a key reference point for a Yale literary critic and historian of the time: Kernan (1982), 13–33; (1987). It would be influential for Guillory (1993), which included a polemical chapter on ‘Literature after Theory: The Lesson of Paul de Man’ (176–265), answered by Redfield in Redfield (2007), 93–126; important too for Siskin (1998). In French, Escarpit (1958) is foundational, while Barthes (1960) opened avenues that were to be explored in various works of the late 1960s and early 1970s by Michel Foucault, and more intensively by Bourdieu (1995). See also Jefferson (2007). 44 On the right to say everything as including the right to say nothing, see esp. Derrida (1995b), 3–31; Derrida and Ferraris (2001), 1–92. 45 Derrida (1995b), 31.

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literature, its prevailing idioms are ones that hark back to religious, especially Christian, modes of ‘testimony’ with their origins in Mediterranean (late) antiquity. Addressing audiences on American campuses or keyboarding from Laguna Beach in the face of Bennington’s mechanical god, Derrida lost no opportunity to evoke the hinterland of European philosophical and literary traditions that he had shared with de Man. Meanwhile, back ‘home’ in France and Europe, he found new resources for interrogating Europe’s sense of itself in a world increasingly dominated by American media and interests.46 ‘So, what is happening to us? So, what is happening to Europe?’ Those were questions that had formerly animated an ‘imaginary symposium’ or ‘invisible university’ where, between the aftermath of the First World War and that of the Second, ‘the greatest European minds [had] met’.47 Taking his cue from Vale´ry, Husserl, and Heidegger, Derrida began posing them again, for the present, in ways that also put in question the idea of a common European past. His subsequent writing on these subjects would simultaneously orbit and decentre the poles of language and religion. That would be the frame in which he made his first, late, and last(ing?) contribution to a future history of literature. Finding himself on Capri in 1994 for a seminar on ‘Religion’ that was to launch a yearbook of European philosophy for an Italian publisher, Derrida summoned the genius loci: We are not far from Rome, but are no longer in Rome. Here we are literally isolated for two days, insulated on the heights of Capri, in the difference between the Roman and the Italic, the latter potentially symbolizing everything that can incline—at a certain remove from the Roman in general. To think ‘religion’ is to think the ‘Roman’. This can be done neither in Rome nor too far from Rome. A chance or necessity for recalling the history of something like ‘religion’: everything done or said in its name ought to keep the critical memory of this appellation. Here, then, is a given whose figure at least, as limit, remains 46 For Derrida’s forced patriation within the ‘Graeco-Latino-Christiano-Gallic culture’ of his non-native France, see esp. Derrida (1998b), with Young (2001), 411–26. 47 Derrida (1989b), 124; (1992c). Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s ‘Vienna Lecture’ on ‘Philosophy in the Crisis of European Humanity’ (1935) begins in his 1954 dissertation, ‘The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy’: Derrida (2003b), 153–60.

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contingent and significant at the same time. It demands to be taken into account, reflected, thematized, dated. Difficult to say ‘Europe’ without connoting: Athens–Jerusalem–Rome–Byzantium, wars of Religion . . . 48

On the page only the memory of ‘religion’, preserved by its name, stands straight up in Roman type. Otherwise, Derrida’s discourse is angled, tilted, already ‘swerving’ under the impulse of the ‘chance or necessity’ that found him on Capri.49 Provoked, like the symposium that they inaugurated, by the perception of a general ‘return to religion’ among philosophers, his remarks can also be seen, if not to make, then certainly to corroborate a distinct turn in Derrida’s own writings.50 Within a few years, the Capri lecture would become the opening essay for an anthology of his texts entitled Acts of Religion.51 Here the articulation of Derrida’s oeuvre in English (‘acts of religion’ as publishing sequel to ‘acts of literature’) runs counter to what looks like the sequence of his own verbal discoveries. For Derrida himself, religio would point to the specifically Roman- and Latin-European heritage of literature. In talking to Attridge about the modern invention of literature, he had spoken of Graeco-Roman antiquity as if it were a cultural continuum, albeit discontinuous with later times in respect to the privilege of ‘literary’ authorship. Discoursing on religion on Capri, he disaggregated the ensemble of Athens–Jerusalem–Rome–Byzantium otherwise connoted by ‘Europe’. It was on Capri, or not far off its coast, that Derrida seems first to have measured the limits of the Latin-speaking Mediterranean world.52 ‘[W]e are already speaking Latin’, he would write in a ‘postscriptum’ (in Roman letters) to his performance at those proceedings, and ask—

48

Derrida (1998c), 4. The whole of the original lecture from Capri is printed in italics. 49 For Derrida’s theory of the clinamen (‘side-step’ or ‘swerve’), derived from Lucretius’ Epicurean cosmology, see Derrida (1984a); Johnson (1993), 133–41. 50 Caputo (1997); de Vries (1999). 51 Derrida (2002b). 52 But note already the circumspection of the passage taken for the second epigraph in this chapter.

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Does not ‘the question of religio’ quite simply merge, one could say, with the question of Latin? By which should be understood, beyond a ‘question of language and culture’, the strange phenomenon of Latinity and of its globalization (mondialisation). We are not speaking here of universality, even of an idea of universality, only of a process of universalization that is finite but enigmatic. It is rarely investigated in its geopolitical and ethical-juridical scope, which is precisely where such a power finds itself taken over, deployed, its paradoxical heritage revived by the global and still irresistible hegemony of a ‘language’, which is to say, also of a culture that in part is not Latin but Anglo-American. For everything that touches religion in particular, for everything that speaks ‘religion’, for whoever speaks religiously or about religion, Anglo-American remains Latin. Religion circulates in the world, one might say, like an English word that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States. Well beyond its strictly capitalist or politicomilitary figures, a hyper-imperialist appropriation has been underway now for centuries. It imposes itself in a particularly palpable manner within the conceptual apparatus of international law and of global political rhetoric. Wherever this apparatus dominates, it articulates itself through a discourse on religion. From here on, the word ‘religion’ is calmly (and violently) applied to things which have always been and remain foreign to what this word names and arrests in its history . . . Globalatinization (essentially Christian to be sure): this word names a unique event to which a meta-language seems incapable of acceding, although such a language remains, all the same, of the greatest necessity here. For at the same time that we no longer perceive its limits, we know that such a globalization is finite and only projected. What is involved here is a Latinization and, rather than a globality, a globalization that is running out of breath, however irresistible and imperial it still may be.53

As the translator points out, the word ‘globalatinization’ is at once literally false and performatively true to Derrida’s coinage of mondialatinisation. In converting a French neologism into the universalizing idiom of Anglo-American it obscures the word ‘world’—as distinct from ‘earth’, ‘universe’, or ‘cosmos’—that Derrida wished to clarify, as the vector of an important Christian history.54 ‘World’ in this context still bore traces of the Latin of the Vulgate (e.g., ‘My kingdom is not of this world’), even though the eschatological

53

Derrida (1999a), 29.

54

Ibid. 40; see above, n. 14.

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dualism of the Christian-Messianic idiom had long since been overwritten with other figures. Eschatology, at once and yet differentially Jewish-ChristianIslamic (‘Abrahamic’), was to be the primary medium of Derrida’s engagement with the ‘question of religion’. In time, he would bring literature fully under the same, professedly religious regime of anxious retrospection and hopeful expectancy.55 In his circling of Augustine’s Confessions and (for him) cognate texts, he was already beginning to do so.56 Critical to the process was a growing apprehension on his part, after Capri, of ‘the strange phenomenon of Latinity and of its mondialisation’. The most important single document of Derrida’s late thinking about literature, the indispensable postscript to the texts assembled in Acts of Literature, was written up in the aftermath of a conference held in 1995 in inland Europe, at the Catholic University of Louvain. For the occasion, Derrida retraced the linguistic and political borderline (limes) on which he stood, saluted the late Paul de Man in his native country, conjured an immense history from the names of Goethe, Napoleon, and Hegel, and chose for his text a brief, seemingly autobiographical narrative by Maurice Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort (1994), which relates—mainly in the third person—how a young Frenchman miraculously escaped execution at the hands of Nazi forces during the Second World War.57 The body of the lecture is a line-by-line exegesis of Blanchot’s re´cit, exposing the impossibility of ever calculating the respective parts of ‘fiction’ and ‘testimony’ in a text of this (‘literary’) kind or indeed, more tellingly, in any act of witness. To connect the analysis with the conference topic, 55 Derrida (1999), 161–209: ‘La Litte´rature au secret: une filiation impossible’, possibly the only major writing of Derrida’s to include the word ‘literature’ in its title. See also his remarks in Caputo and Scanlon (2005), 209–10. 56 Vessey (2005), esp. 193–205. 57 Derrida (1998a); (2000b). De Vries (1998) situates Demeure in Derrida’s long conversation with Blanchot, which included analyses of other re´cits by this author: Derrida (1986a). Blanchot is a key witness to the ‘question of literature’ as it was formulated in post-war France: Clark (1992). Jefferson (2007), 333–4, associates him, if only subliminally, with the rise of new practices of ‘le re´cit de vie, autofiction, biofiction, and (in English) “life-writing”’ in France between the 1960s and 1980s, in texts that can be seen ‘to work actively to restore the religious origins of the literary’ (340). See also Vessey (2007), 261–8.

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which (hospitably for him) was ‘Passions of Literature’, Derrida dilated for a while on the semantic history of the word ‘passion’ and its relations to literature. In doing so, as he said at the time, he was giving a further instance of a ‘certain mondialatinisation’ of which he had spoken the year before at Capri.58 ‘Passion’, he immediately recalled, was a word ‘burdened (surcharge´) with Christian Latinity’, a word that ‘[i]n memory of its ChristianRoman meaning . . . always implie[d] martyrdom, that is—as its name indicates—testimony’. His subsequent remarks provide a vital link between the confessional discourse on literature that he had been improvising since the 1980s and the claim that he was soon to make for the centrality of a history of literature to future professions of the humanities. Augustine, not incidentally, was his solitary witness at this juncture: A passion always testifies. But if the testimony always claims to testify in truth for the truth, it does not consist, for the most part, in sharing a knowledge, in making known, in informing, in speaking true. As a promise to make truth, according to Augustine’s expression, where the witness must be irreplaceably alone, where the witness alone is capable of dying his own death, testimony always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie. Were this possibility to be eliminated, no testimony would be possible any longer; it could no longer have the meaning of testimony.59

The reference is to an early sentence in book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions, one of a cluster of passages in which the writer expounds his sense of his own act of speaking and writing of himself (or of one whom any reader would be likely to take for Augustine) in the face of an all-knowing god: volo eam [sc. veritatem] facere in corde meo coram te in confessione, in stilo autem meo coram multis testibus (‘The [truth] is what I wish to make through confession in my heart before you, and in my writing before many witnesses’).60 Derrida had already written round this formula in his own sense in ‘Circumfession’ or, as he said there, in his own ‘case’. And since his was a case that might

58

Derrida (1998a), 25; (2000b), 25: ‘a certain universalization’. Derrida (2000b), 27; (1998a), 27. 60 Augustine, Confessions 10. 1. 1. Augustine’s facere veritatem echoes the Vulgate of John 3: 21, otherwise translated ‘he who does the truth comes to the light’. 59

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not ‘come under any religion, for reason of literature, nor under any literature, for reason of religion’, he was bound to ask pardon of both literature and religion, and even to ask for it in advance, ‘before (avant) the one and the other’, as if religion and literature were somehow still non-existent and yet to come.61 Remembering the earlier analysis of a re´cit of Kafka in ‘Before the Law’, an English reader of ‘Circumfession’ is likely to hear devant as well as avant in this ‘before’. There is a ‘law of literature’, in the presence of which (coram, as in Augustine’s coram [deo et] multis testibus) a writer should expect to be called to account. At the same time, as Derrida had argued in ‘Before the Law’, and would now more passionately maintain in the revived Romano-Christian language of Demeure, literature has itself always been subject to external laws, so much so that it has (as yet) neither self nor dwelling place (demeure). That, he suggested to his audience in Louvain, was the supreme ‘passion of literature’: There is no essence or substance of literature: literature is not. It does not exist . . . The historicity of its experience—for there is one—rests on the very thing no ontology could essentialize. No exposition, no discursive form is intrinsically or essentially literary before and outside of the function it is assigned or recognized by a right (droit), that is, a specific intentionality inscribed on the social body . . . [Literature’s] passion consists in this—that it receives its determination from something other than itself. Before coming to writing (avant sa venue a` l’e´criture) [i.e. before the name and status of literature is visited upon a text], literature depends on reading and the right conferred on it by an experience of reading. One can read the same text— which thus never exists ‘in itself’—as a testimony that is said to be serious and authentic, or as an archive, or as a document, or as a symptom—or as a work of literary fiction, indeed the work of literary fiction that simulates all of the positions we have just enumerated. For literature can say anything, accept anything, receive anything, suffer anything, and simulate everything . . . 62

Forever without resting place (demeure derives from Latin demorari, ‘to tarry’), literature has only venues. In Derrida’s formulation, the coming (venue) of literature to writing and the coming of writing to literature 61

Bennington and Derrida (1991/1993), 9; for the temporality of such passages, see Bennington (2005), 56–7. 62 Derrida (2000b), 28–9; (1998a), 29–30.

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are a single, as well as singular, event. All writing is originally before literature in time; only as individual readers determine it to be literature, according to protocols ‘inscribed on the social body’ and thus having their own distinct histories, does a given instance of writing enter into its rights as literature and ipso facto pass under the general law of literature. It is that always ulterior moment of quasi-divine readerly sanction, indissociable for him as for others from the idea of the ‘death of the author’ (since it confirms the incapacity of the latter to determine the future mode of existence of any text emitted with his or her signature on it) that Derrida in his later writings consistently anticipates in the figure of confession, testimony, passion just shy of martyrdom. Kafka’s story of the man from the country (‘Before the Law’) had formerly offered him a means of dramatizing the ways in which instances of writing, singularly read, became subject to a putatively universal law of literature, and of underlining the relative modernity and cultural specificity of the terms on which they did so.63 On a further pretext from Blanchot, he would now turn his long-held conviction of the historicity (singularity, performativity, eventfulness, datedness) of literature as an experience into a novel hypothesis on the history of literature as an institution. Once again, it is a prologue that gives room to Derrida the (literary) historian. The opening pages of Demeure, leading up to the sevenfold passionary that serves as an introduction to The Instant of my Death, are a meditation on the grammatical singularity of ‘literature’. Many passions, a single literature, according to the title of the event in Louvain. So, wondered Derrida aloud, ‘if there is only one literature, and if this literature is literature, does this mean that it remains particular or that it is already universal?’ Having recalled Goethe’s vision of a Weltliteratur or ‘world literature’, he then seized the given opportunity to ‘confess’, at once belatedly (echoing Augustine, Confessions 10. 27. 38: sero te amavi, ‘late have I loved you [god, truth, beauty]’) and prospectively, ‘that the name and the thing called “literature”’ and sometimes even more especially ‘the name without the thing’ were unfathomable enigmas to him.64 At another time, in 63

Derrida (1992a), 183–220. See esp. 214–15 on literature as a modern, European invention. 64 Id. (2000b), 20; (1998a), 17.

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another place (in London in 1982, for example), Derrida would have lingered over the Greek sense of ainigma as a story in need of interpretation.65 But not this time, not in Louvain. Here his theme was the (un)translatability of ‘literature’ itself: Literature is a Latin word . . . Whatever the diversity of our mother idioms here, when we say literature, if it can be supposed that we understand each other, we speak and make ourselves understood on the basis of a Latin root, in the constraining hospitality or the violent reception of a latinity . . . [E]verything that does not allow itself to be thus translated or received in this Latin word, everything that precedes or exceeds this history of latinity, cannot seriously and literally, since here it is a matter of letter (puisque c’est de lettre qu’il s’agit), be recognized as literature. And to take account of the latinity in the modern institution of literature—which would have to be distinguished from many other proximate things, like techniques, the arts or the fine arts, the other discursive arts such as poetry, epic or Greek tragedy, belles lettres, etc.—is not only to take account of Christendom as the Roman Church, of Roman law and the Roman concept of the State, indeed of Europe, although this history has counted greatly (bien que cette histoire ait beaucoup compte´) in the institution and constitution of literature, its relation to religion and politics. Does there exist, in the strict and literal meaning of the word, something like literature, like an institution of literature and a right to literature in non-Latin-Roman-Christian culture and, more generally, although things are indissociable in their history, nonEuropean culture? Nothing is less certain.66

The account-casting at this point in Demeure distantly but distinctly recalls that imagined for a history of philosophy—and also, if more obliquely, for a history of literature—in the passage that we cited earlier from The Post Card.67 There and then too it had been a ‘matter of letter’ or of ‘some letter’, and of the longue dure´e. Then, however, there had been no doubt that the ‘world’ or ‘epoch’ that defined itself over against the letter was one and the same from Plato to Freud and beyond. Here in Demeure, by contrast, the universe not only of writing but of all arts and discourses is made to appear as potentially

65 66 67

Id. (1992a), 187. Id. (2000b), 21–2, trans. slightly modified; (1998a), 17–19. Above, n. 5.

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two or more worlds, of which one alone would be reckoned Latin(ate) and host to literature, the other(s) not. This is the place where the post-scriptum that is Derrida’s later speculation on the history of literature most radically challenges both his own earlier fantasy of a universal histoire des postes and the scholarly canons that still routinely represent literature as part of the posterity of ancient Greece.68

POST SCRIPTUM: FROM AUGUSTINE TO FREUD AND BEYOND How should we ever test Derrida’s hypothesis of the literal nonexistence of literature outside ‘the European heritage of Christian Rome’? He himself gestured to one avenue of research, then declared it a blind alley. Curtius, whose European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages had already been an important reference point for Of Grammatology, and who in Demeure all but rejoined Derrida’s imaginary company of ‘great European minds’ debating the destiny of Europe in the early to mid-twentieth century, had called Homer the ‘founding hero of European literature’ and Goethe its ‘last universal author’. Derrida would allow neither judgement. He was particularly firm in dismissing the first: ‘In Greece’, he asserted, ‘there is still no project, no social institution, no right, no concept, nor even a word corresponding to what we call, stricto sensu, literature.’69 Classically trained Hellenists have sometimes made similar statements, especially in recent years. ‘That “literature” is not a category in the ancient world is clear enough,’ affirms Goldhill.70 ‘Even the Latin term litterae—“letters,” “writing”—with its sense of cultural production, has none of the 68 Vessey (2005), 190–3 (‘A Fold in the Letter’), traces the doubt or skepsis of this passage of Demeure as early as ‘Circumfession’. 69 Derrida (2000b), 23–5; (1998a), 21–4; see also the ‘Postscript’, answering a recent critique of his earlier use of Curtius’ work in Of Grammatology. 70 Goldhill (1999), 57. Cf. Whitmarsh (2004), 3–4. Both closely follow Williams and Eagleton (above, n. 1) in their understanding of the emergence of the modern category of literature. See further Schadewaldt (1973).

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Romantic gloss of “literature”,’ he goes on to say.71 Classical Latinists have presumably never been in much doubt about that either, though they too have continued to use the term as if it could denote some kind of transhistorical entity, if not a cultural universal.72 Curtius, who promised his readers that they would discover from his book ‘where the word literature comes from and what meaning it originally had’, muddied the waters for several generations of non-classicists by explaining that litteratura was used to translate the Greek grammatike (‘grammar’) and that, since the grammarian expounded the poets, the ancient litteratus was therefore one who ‘knew poetry’.73 In fact, litteratura in the sense of ‘grammar’ appears never to have been widely current,74 and it was only in the hands of Christian Latin writers that the word began to develop an implicit reference to a distinct body of writings, rather than denoting—as it routinely had—the plenary resources of literate culture in the Graeco-Roman world (litteratura ¼ litterae).75 Derrida, it is safe to assume, did not intend to suggest that litteratura could ever have signified ‘literature’ in the post-Romantic sense. By insisting on what he took to be the inalienable ChristianoLatinity of the modern word, he meant to unsettle the conclusions of prior histories, not only of that name but also of its associated concept(s) and institution(s). While it would be fruitless to conjecture where Derrida’s own researches might have led him, had he ever returned to the historical 71

Goldhill (1999), 58. Quinn (1979), 2–3, makes the essential point. Feeney (2005), 230, still relies on the givenness of ‘Greek literature’ to argue that ‘the Romans took over the prototypical forms of the institution of Greek literature as the basis for a corresponding institution in their own vernacular’ (230). A contrastingly radical view of the originary Latinity of the institution of literature is advanced, independently of Derrida, by Dupont (1999). 73 Curtius (1953), ix, 42. 74 Bower (1961) reviews the classical evidence. The word is used strategically in that sense by Augustine, but in a manner that suggests that the usage was uncommon in his time: Burton (2005), 147–8. 75 Tertullian, Apol. 18. 1 refers to the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Septuagint) as a divinely ordained instrumentum litteraturae, ‘organ of learning’ (?), then in the same breath calls Ptolemy Philadelphus omnis litteraturae sagacissimus, ‘well versed in all branches of learning’. The sense of litteratura in later Christian usage seems to have been gradually attracted to the more objective sense of scriptura(e), ‘writings’. 72

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problem of the ‘literality of literarity’ evoked in Demeure, the place at which he raised and let the question go is clearly enough marked to warrant a moment’s further pause there before we pursue any further enquiries of our own.76 It is a place, we have seen, circumscribed by the future reading by another of a text or testimony entitled ‘The Instant of my Death’, and the testimony (whether true or false, who can say?) is of a death-dealing stroke not dealt—at least not then, not in the story as told. (How could I ever bear witness to my own death, except as it were in the future perfect tense, by having left something in writing under or over my name?) Towards the end, however provisionally, Derrida came to describe the venue of literature as a scene of passion just shy of martyrdom. In the language of Latin-speaking and -writing Christians of Augustine’s time, the title of honour given to a man or woman who had suffered but not died for Christ was confessor. There may then be good literary historical reasons, even if he did not adduce them, for Derrida’s eventual and eventful choice of the quasi-genre of confession for his pronouncements on literature. Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions, the book (within the book) of Augustine’s ‘conversion’ by reading (8. 12. 29: ‘“Tolle, lege”’, ‘“Take, read!”’), opened with a scene of the public profession of Christian faith made at Rome, a generation earlier, by Marius Victorinus, renowned Platonist philosopher and rhetorician.77 Behind that scene of passion just shy of martyrdom lay others of the recent past, including one modelled on scenes of late Roman judicial torture, in which a highly proficient Latin litteratus had forsworn the temptations of Cicero, Virgil, and Horace for the sake of testimonies or writings (litterae, scripturae) proclaiming Christ’s eternal kingdom.78 The narrator of that re´cit, the ‘history of my misfortune’ as he styled it (meae 76 Derrida did return to the problem of defining literature but without reference to historical contexts more specific than that of ‘Abrahamic’ tradition(s) in the West: Derrida (1999a), 159–209. Thus he would assert, almost as a conclusion, ‘that literature . . . is the inheritor of a sacred history of which the abrahamic moment [Gen. 20] remains the essential secret’ (208), but never offers to explain how such an inheritance had been passed down. 77 Augustine, Confessions 8. 2. 3–5. 78 Jerome, Letter 22. 30. Adkin (2003), 283–97, points up the similarities with earlier accounts of the trials of Christian martyrs.

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infelicitatis historiae), though it could as well have been entitled ‘The Instant of my Death’, would later lay claim to authorship of a complete Latin version of the Christian Bible, the ‘Vulgate’ as it would one day be called, the Book par excellence of the Christian Latin world. Passional, confessional, traumatic, dangerous to pieties of long date, ambitious for others still to come, texts like these of Jerome and Augustine can be read as early symptoms of the ‘archive trouble’ (mal d’archive) diagnosed more generally by Derrida in a culture that derives its techno-speak for private and public memory mainly from the ‘classical’ repertoire of the Greeks and Romans. In making that diagnosis, Derrida rehearsed at length a scene recently made with Freud by another scholar, over an inscription addressed by Jakob Freud, ‘the father of the father of psychoanalysis’, in a copy of the Jewish ‘Book of books’ that he re-presented to his son on the occasion of his thirty-fifth birthday, in May 1891/Nissan 5651. The inscription claimed to recall how, as an infant, Sigmund had been addressed by the ‘Spirit of the Lord’, telling him: ‘Go, read my Book that I have written, and there will burst open for you the wellsprings of understanding, knowledge, and wisdom.’79 Now, thirty-five years later, the father called him back to the same book. And what would be—or indeed still might be—Sigmund Freud’s response to this summons? Where in the corpus of his writings, published or otherwise preserved in the archive, was it to be read? How, if it could be read or divined, might it yet disturb the economy of his oeuvre? These are some of Derrida’s questions. Not surprisingly, one of the places he looks hardest is Moses and Monotheism, written in the year of its author’s death and troublingly designated by him a ‘historical romance’. Troublingly, because the genre of ‘romance’ with its connotation of (etymologically, post-Roman) fantasy and fabulation sits ill with the classificatory principles of an opus such as that attributed to the founder of psychoanalysis.80 Like Freud’s letters, which were also ‘part of his corpus’,81 Moses and Monotheism had the potential to exceed from within, and thereby frustrate, the presiding logic of the 79 80 81

Derrida (1996b), 23; (1995a), 43–4. Derrida (1996b), 3–5, 87; (1995a), 15–16, 136. See the passage from The Postcard cited above, n. 5.

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archive as prosthetic memory and guarantor of an institution. Such potential for diffe´rance within a textual economy Derrida in his later writings associates with ‘the secret’ (in Latin secretum from secernere, to separate, mark off) and especially with literature. Literature is an archive too. It is even, although late coming, an archi-archive. In Derrida’s never-to-be-written book, lower-case literature conjures an uncataloguable array of texts-events contesting and confessing the supreme order of a Literature that has always aspired to stand in the place of a god-given Scripture (E´criture).82 Always—but since when? Whatever Moses may have owed to the Egyptians, his book was not the book of Thoth. As ‘Scripture’ in the literal sense, moreover, it was neither Hebrew nor Greek. In Derrida’s history, we have seen, Literature/literature is an inheritance of the Latin Christian world: the guardians or archontes of the scriptural regime are not Plato and company but Jerome, Augustine, and other reputed ‘fathers’ of the Latin Church. Part of the interest of the confessions of Jacques Derrida lies in their proximity to the repeated scene of reading-and-writing (the extended familial-historical romance?) in which a ChristianLatin-European consciousness of Scripture was formed. 82

See esp. Derrida (2001c), 15–31; (2003a).

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Part V Platonic Bodies

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11 The Platonic Remainder Derrida’s Khoˆra and the Corpus Platonicum Paul Allen Miller

In Khoˆra, Derrida offers his reading of one of Plato’s most fascinating and problematic texts. The Timaeus is central to the history of Western thought and wildly eccentric. Translated into Latin by Cicero and later by Chalcidius, it was for many centuries the only Platonic text available in the West. Its metaphysical speculations as interpreted through the lens of Augustinian Neoplatonism came to pass for Platonism tout court and were refined and elaborated by the monks at Chartres.1 Yet in point of fact the text is anything but typical of the Platonic corpus, consisting as it does of an introductory dialogue (17a–27b) followed by a long speech in which Timaeus of Locris, a presumed Pythagorean, tells the tale of how the Demiurge or divine craftsman created the universe through imitating a set of pre-existing eternal essences or forms (27c–92c). This chapter has benefited enormously from the feedback of my students and colleagues, more than I can name. A first version was presented at the 2007 meeting of the Southern Comparative Literature Association and a more complete version was given at the Derrida and the Classics conference in May 2008 at the Institute of Classical Studies (London). In addition, Chuck Platter and Jill Frank each read drafts of the essay and provided tremendously helpful and challenging feedback. The students in my fall 2007 Plato and Poststructuralism seminar were a constant source of probing questions and intellectual inspiration. Last, but certainly not least, Miriam Leonard’s insightful reading was crucial in bringing this chapter to its final form. All remaining blunders, of course, remain stubbornly my own. 1 Rivaud (1963), 3–5.

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Halfway through, however, the speech of Timaeus encounters a hiccup and our speaker must pause and begin again (47e). If the divine Demiurge creates perfect copies of the intelligible essences in the world of sense, then how would those imitations differ from the originals, and if they were indeed perfect copies—and why would a divine craftsman produce anything less?—then how are we to explain the manifest change and corruption of the world of our experience? Surely, these copies are not part of the world of intelligibles, which belong to the realm of being rather than that of becoming. A new beginning must be made, which accounts for this ‘wandering cause’ (
ºÆøÅ . . . ÆNÆ, 48a7) that limits and at the same time makes possible the Demiurge’s labour of reproducing the intelligible order in the world of sense.2 This ‘cause’ is the famous khoˆra, the mother or receptacle of creation (50a–51b). A second story of how the world was fashioned then follows and the dialogue ends. Any reader of Platonic dialogues will note that one element we have come to associate with the Platonic text is missing from the summary given above: Socrates. Now this absence is neither unique nor total. As is well known, in the Laws, Plato’s final dialogue, Socrates does not appear at all, nor does he have his accustomed prominence in the Critias, the sequel to the Timaeus, nor in the Sophist or Statesman. The last two dialogues, however, are characterized by direct and intense dialectical interchange, which recalls the more Socratic dialogues, while the Timaeus and the unfinished Critias alone feature neither a prominent role for Socrates nor any meaningful dialectical exchange.3 They are atypical in their organization and presentation. These issues of literary form and style of argument are never incidental to the interpretation of Platonic philosophy, as much recent Anglo-American scholarship, as well as an older French 2

Sallis (1999), 70; McCabe (1994), 175, 180–1. The locus classicus is Vlastos’s famous grouping of the dialogues into the categories of Socratic, Platonic, and late dialogues, in which the true Socratic dialectic or elenchus is only found in the early Socratic or aporetic dialogues (1991), 46–56, 115, 117. This view has never been widely accepted, at least in its dogmatic form, outside of the Anglo-American analytic tradition and today is questioned even there. See Miller (2007), chapters 4 and 5; Blondell (2002), 10–13; Annas (1993), 19; Wallace (1991), p. xv; Plato, Sophist 230a–d; Theaetetus 187b–c, 210a–d. 3

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tradition, have shown.4 To account for the strangeness of the Timaeus, then, is at least in part to account for the nature of the text itself. It is, in fact, an atypical dialogue that has been misread as a straightforward metaphysical treatise.5 Yet in many ways there is little that could be further from the concerns of Platonic dialogic practice and its fundamentally ethical form of enquiry.6 As such, the accidental centrality of the Timaeus in the transmission of Plato and Platonism has perhaps accounted as much as anything for the perceived dogmatism often thought to characterize the Platonic project. In fact, the dialogues themselves present less a set of unqualified assertions than an open and relentless field of experimentation and enquiry.7 In many ways, the Timaeus is a dialogue that wears its problematic nature on its sleeve. Read outside the Latinate theological framework that dominated its early reception, it bears countless signs that Timaeus’ speech is to be received with inverted commas. As Mary Margaret McCabe writes, The reader must take the Timaeus with several large pinches of salt. For here is a dialogue whose central section is a myth, presented to a Socrates, hilarious at completing the Republic, by Timaeus, the ‘expert’ in cosmology. Just that short description should be enough to make us worry about how to read the dialogue. After all, Plato is the writer who warns us against the deceptions of storytelling; and Socrates was the gadfly who never accepted the expertise of others. So we should be wary of the myth and its setting and attentive to the explicit epistemological background to Timaeus’s disquisition.8

Yet while McCabe’s cautions are well heeded by the wary reader, they are, if anything, too timid. They assume that Socrates’ references to the previous day’s conversation on the constitution of the ideal city allude to the Republic and that the Timaeus is thus to be taken as the sequel to the story found there. The present dialogue would provide

4 Hunter (2004), 22–7; Blondell (2002), 4–5, 42; Szeliza´k (1999), 85; Die`s (1966), p. xvi; Robin (1985), 60–1; Koyre´ (1962), 18. 5 Rivaud 1963: 38. 6 Blondell (2002), 42; Gadamer (1991), 2, 10–11; Hadot (1995), 102–6; Koyre´ (1962), 20; Festugie`re (1950), 42–3, 191. 7 Hunter (2004), 86–7. 8 McCabe (1994), 162.

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the metaphysical account for how the ideal city could be made flesh. Critias’ unfinished sequel on the myth of Atlantis would then represent a quasi-historical testing of these theses in the crucible of experience, or at least myth. Such a reading goes back to Proclus and is reflected in the manuscript tradition, where the Timaeus frequently appears immediately following the Republic in the codices.9 Yet, however venerable its provenance, this interpretation has been decisively refuted. First, it is impossible to reconcile the conflicting dramatic dates of the dialogues, so that the conversation referred to in the Timaeus cannot be that which took place in Polemarchus’ home in the Republic.10 Second, despite certain similarities, the content of the two visions of the ideal state cannot be reconciled. While there are numerous differences between the cities imagined in the Timaeus and the Republic,11 the most basic is that the city discussed in the Timaeus does not include anything mentioned after book 5 in the Republic. In short, the Timaeus presents the ideal city without the philosopher. This polis is a model of static harmony that remains within the cave and without the challenge and the science of dialectic to enlighten it.12 If, as everyone from McCabe to Rivaud recognizes, the Timaeus comes to us surrounded by hermeneutic cautions, then Timaeus’ speech is anything but a dogmatic set of metaphysical assertions that we are invited simply to accept. It is rather a story that selfconsciously labels itself as concerned with the world of appearance. It does not present certainties, but only a likely account (NŒ  º ª 29c, 30b, 44c, 48d, 54d, 68b) or tale (NŒ  FŁ 29d, 68d):13 for, as Socrates observes, poets and philosophers alike must take experience as the ground of their representations, and hence their descriptions of the ideal city of Socrates’ imagining will always fall short, for all are dealing in the realm of imitations and likenesses, not certainties (19d).

19 10 11 12 13

Sallis (1999), 21–2. Ibid. 22–3; Rivaud (1963), 19. Sallis (1999), 20–3; Rivaud (1963), 19. Sallis (1999), 23–4. Brisson (1998), 129–30; Rivaud (1963), 8, 11–13.

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Only the world of intelligible being in itself can produce certain knowledge. The realm of perception and likeness, of experience and becoming, whose genesis Timaeus ultimately describes, is also the world of seeming, appearance, or opinion ( ο,

Æ, ªÆ, 27d– 28a). Thus while formal proofs will be possible for those things which yield certainty, for creation the likely story will have to suffice: Timaeus: But if we should provide accounts no less likely than any other, it is necessary to welcome them, remembering that I, the speaker, and you, my judges, are merely human, so that it is proper that we accept the likely tale about these matters and seek nothing more definite than this. (29c7–d2)14 Thus Timaeus’ discourse far from constituting a set of unchanging truths, in fact, labels itself as at best a likeness, a tale, a poetic invention of the type Socrates compared his own imitative discourse to at the beginning of the dialogue. Moreover, it is a discourse that is prefaced by Critias’ own bizarre tale of how he has inherited from his grandfather a story of Athens’s ancient past, which his grandfather learned from Solon, who had in turn learned it from the Egyptian priests, who themselves had recorded it in their otherwise unintelligible hieroglyphs on the walls of a temple. Timaeus’ myth of creation is in fact merely to serve as a prelude to Critias’ retelling of this tale, which he had last heard in childhood, but has spent the previous night attempting to recover the memory of.15 In such a situation, why should we view Timaeus’ discourse any less sceptically than Critias’ own. At every moment, Plato frames Timaeus’ discourse with doubts and qualifications.16 14

All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. See Sallis (1999), 38. In the Critias, we learn that he in fact possessed a written copy. The Critias is generally considered unfinished so it is difficult to judge whether this inconsistency is the product of incomplete revision or is meant to reveal dishonesty on the part of Critias. 16 Berger (2005), 471–2. Berger’s acceptance of Proclus’ identification of Critias with the member of the Thirty is no longer generally admitted. The majority opinion favours Critias’ grandfather, who was also Plato’s ancestor. See Nails (2002), 106–11; and Sallis (1999), 32. In late antiquity, there clearly arose a desire to strip Timaeus’ speech of the quotation marks and create a straightforward dogmatic discourse in its place. Thus a spurious work ostensibly authored by Timaeus himself appeared, On the Nature of 15

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None of this means, however, that we should not take that discourse with great seriousness. Timaeus’ tale is far too long, far too elaborate, and far too technically based in the scientific and mathematical speculations of the day to be simply dismissed. Rather this text, with its multiple layers of quotation marks, its multiple cautions, its ironic self-comparison of Socrates to the poets and sophists themselves, requires us to undertake a double reading.17 Like the Demiurge himself, we as readers and lovers of wisdom must be mimetic artists (
ØÅ 28c3) who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both (28a6–b2).18 The cosmology of the Timaeus must then be taken simultaneously literally and figuratively: as a parody of its own dogmatic pretensions that also demands to be taken seriously.19 It requires the infinite labour of the reader who can never penetrate the last of the quotation marks nor can refuse the content therein.20 It is into this bottomless discourse, this mise-en-abıˆme of endless reflection, that Derrida’s reading steps. The Timaeus is, in fact, an unfinalizable dialogue in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation.21 As such, it is not unique, for this is the double labour that characterizes the Platonic dialectic as a whole from the Ion and the Apology to the Philebus and the Timaeus.22

I Written as a homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant, Khoˆra, like all of Derrida, seeks simultaneously to accept and go beyond the terms of the the Cosmos and the Soul. It poses as the original from which Plato supposedly cribbed his more baroque and ambiguous copy. For a good summary and analysis, see Sallis (1999), 146–50. 17 Sallis (1999), 30; Derrida (1993b), 59. 18 Derrida (1993b), 54–8; Sallis (1999), 51. 19 McCabe (1994), 176. 20 Zuckert (1996), 235. 21 Loraux (1996), 169–70; compare Derrida (1994c), 112. 22 Blondell (2002), 100; Hadot (1995), 110; Gadamer (1991), 4–5; Robin (1985), p. lxvii.

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text being read.23 In Mythe et socie´te´ en Gre`ce ancienne, Vernant had posited a fundamental opposition between muthos and logos, with the latter representing a discourse founded on non-contradiction, a quasi-Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, and the former being a narrative discourse that thrives precisely on ambiguity and indeterminacy. The key passage Derrida cites runs as follows: Thus myth puts into play a form of logic which could be called—in contrast to the logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers—a logic of the ambiguous, of the equivocal, of polarity. How can one formulate, or even formalize, these see-saw operations, which flip any term into its opposite whilst at the same time keeping them both apart, from another point of view? The mythologist was left with drawing up, in conclusion, this statement of deficit, and to turn to the linguists, logicians, mathematicians, that they might supply him with the tool he lacked: the structural model of a logic which could not be that of binarity, of the yes or no, a logic other than the logic of the logos.24

The doubleness discussed in this passage has recognizable structural affinities with the double movement of the Platonic dialectic in general, as described above, and with Timaeus’ own ‘likely’ discourse, which in various places is qualified now as muthos, now as logos. The attractiveness of such a position to a Derridean reading of the Timaeus, one which posits a double form of discourse in which binarity is both constituted and undermined, is too obvious to require extensive comment. Nonetheless, the opposition between muthos and logos that Vernant posits is only the first step in what Derrida stages as Plato’s deconstruction of Vernant, because it is precisely the Timaeus’ formulation of the khoˆra that will ultimately call this opposition into question. Khoˆra, as we shall see, stands as the prephilosophical, prenarrative moment that makes the construction of both muthos and logos possible, even as it reveals their essential complicity.25 It is that which neither participates in the intelligible essences per se nor 23

Derrida and Roudinesco (2001), 16–19. Vernant (1974), 250. I cite Vernant in the translation of Ian McLeod, where it prefaces the translation of Derrida’s Khoˆra (1995c), 88, as the original prefaces Derrida’s French (1993b), 14. 25 Derrida (1993b), 30. 24

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constitutes the realm of their mimetic instantiation. As such, it is neither being nor becoming, neither essence nor appearance, neither proof nor tale.26 This essay proceeds from the perspective of this ‘neither/nor’, which as we shall see is also a ‘both/and’, and which characterizes both Plato’s khoˆra and Derrida’s Khoˆra.27 It will argue three things: first, that Derrida’s reading of the Timaeus in Khoˆra is critical to our understanding of Derrida; second, that it is critical to our understanding of Plato; and third, that the ultimate subject matter of both Plato’s and Derrida’s khoˆra is not the validity of a particular metaphysical concept, but the constitution of philosophy per se as an ironic turning from the present and immediate to the deferred, and hence toward the possibility of difference and the event, in the fullest sense of the word.28 Let us go over these points in more detail before taking each in turn as the object of further investigation. First, the reading of the khoˆra in the Timaeus is critical to our understanding of Derrida because it contains certain clear homologies with his earlier readings of Plato as evidenced in ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’ and La Carte postale, among other texts. There is thus a Derridean reading of Plato, which Khoˆra allows us to see with unusual clarity, by drawing our attention to what in the Timaeus escapes both metaphysics and myth, and hence to what constitutes their simultaneous beyond and necessary precondition: We know it very well: what Plato designates under the name khoˆra seems to defy, in the Timaeus, this ‘logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers,’ about which Vernant speaks, this logic ‘of binarity, of the yes or no.’ Perhaps therefore it pertains to this ‘logic other than the logic of the logos.’ Khoˆra is neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘intelligible’; it belongs to a ‘third kind’ (triton genos, 48e, 52a). You can’t even say about it that it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that. It is not sufficient simply to recall that it does not name this nor that or that it says both this and that. Timaeus’

26

Derrida (1993b), 15–18, 68. ‘The oscillation that we have just spoken of is not one oscillation among others, an oscillation between two poles. It oscillates between two types of oscillation: the double exclusion (neither/nor) and the participation (at the same time . . . both this and that)’ (Derrida 1993b, 19). 28 Id. (1994c), 85–7, 247. 27

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embarrassment is shown in a different fashion: one moment khoˆra appears to be neither this nor that, the next, both this and that . . . . Khoˆra is foreign to the order of the ‘paradigm,’ this unchanging and intelligible model. However, ‘invisible’ and without sensible form, it ‘participates’ in the intelligible in a most embarrassing fashion, in truth in an aporetical fashion (aporoˆtata, 51b).29

Khoˆra names the ‘place’ that is no place (atopia)30 that allows place (defined logical space, topos) to take place (the possibility of its eventuality, and thus of the event).31 Khoˆra, therefore, functions as an incomplete totalization of the non-spaces, non-concepts that had earlier been delineated by Derrida’s meditations on the problems of the pharmakon, diffe´rance, aporia, and the ‘unlimited’.32 Khoˆra thus reveals not only the structure of Derrida’s recurring engagement with Plato, but the centrality of the Platonic corpus to the Derridean project. Second, to the same degree that Khoˆra reveals the centrality of the Platonic corpus to the Derridean project it also reveals the centrality of the corpus/corps of a certain unassimilable ‘materiality’ or ‘real’33 in Plato. It discloses the presence of a constitutive otherness or remainder in the Platonic text that can neither be subsumed into the purely intelligible nor reduced to the unintelligible, which is in fact a category of intelligibility. Rather, khoˆra names precisely that 29

Id. (1993b), 15–16, italics his. Socrates himself is frequently referred to as being atopos. In this context, the term seems to indicate on the one hand a certain outrageousness or even absurdity in Socrates’ conduct as seen by his fellow citizens, and on the other refers to his unclassifiability, his always seeming ‘out of place’ (Vlastos (1991), 1 n. 1; Hadot (1995), 57). The corollary of his atopia is precisely his ability to provoke aporia (Theae 149a). Because he does not occupy a classifiable space in the logic of ancient Athens, he therefore has the ability to provoke perplexity (aporia), that is literally to give someone no way out, no means of passage (poros) between the topoi that constitute Athenian life. 31 Derrida (1993b), 94–5. 32 I want to stress here the notion of incompletion. While khoˆra is related in its textual function to all these other terms and knits them into an overdetermined web of filiation, which gives a certain vantage on the Derridean project, it is never able to substitute for any one of them. None of these terms are concepts in the classical sense, but each is deeply textually embedded and so resists totalizing and closure while remaining open to the other. 33 I use the word here in its Lacanian sense as that which falls completely outside the bounds of signification. 30

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which necessarily precedes the opposition of the intelligible and the unintelligible.34 It is therefore that element in Plato that always resists its assimilation into Platonism35 and hence into a philosophical tradition that privileges the absolute self-presence of disembodied reason. Yet, as Diotima reminds us in the Symposium, the moment of pure self-presence is not only the end (in both senses of the term) of human life—only the gods possess the intelligible per se—but also the end of that desire (eroˆs) that is called philosophy. Thus, third, khoˆra as such names that ‘place’, the literal meaning of the word, that both exceeds philosophy and makes it possible. It is quite literally an atopic place, one that is not defined by the logic of the topos, a delimited area within a grid, but a form of clearing that opens the possibility of the object world and the space it de-fines.36 It is thus no accident, then, that Timaeus introduces the section in which the khoˆra is named as a ‘strange’, ‘out of the way’, ‘out of place discourse’ (atopos, 48d5). And it is for this reason, he says, that the god must be invoked to bring him and his listeners through safely to a discourse of likely appearance/opinion (
æe e H NŒ ø ªÆ, 48d5–6). In this final section of the essay, then, it is argued that the place which is no place (‘lieu sans lieu’),37 which is the khoˆra, is in fact the ‘space’ or non-space—the atopic moment—of Socratic irony per se, understood as the hinge point between a given statement’s denotative content and its figurative doubling. Khoˆra names, I contend, the clearing that makes the joining of these two levels of signification possible. Thus, while the khoˆra is a mythico-metaphysical philosopheme (i.e. a narrative deduction from the intelligible that functions in philosophical discourse but does not rise to the level of the concept)38 introduced in the late Platonic Timaeus, in fact, its function, as read by Derrida, is ultimately the same as that of Socratic irony itself: it names the space of the constitution of philosophy, defined as a form of discourse that is not simply a set of statements about those things which are the case. This last argument, in turn,

34

35 Derrida (1993b), 21, 37, 95–6. Id. (1993a), 81–3. Zuckert (1996), 235; Sallis (1999), 98, 121, 153–4. 37 Derrida (1993b), 59. Compare Leonard (2005), 213. 38 On the khoˆra as the deduction of a necessary ‘vide fugace’ inside a world of plenitude, see Rivaud (1963), 65–70. 36

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will be illustrated with a reading of the passage from the Apology where Socrates claims that he should in fact be brought into court and condemned to death if he abandons the post the god had assigned to him and ceases to philosophize.

II Derrida’s engagement with the Platonic corpus is long-standing. From his early response to Foucault’s Histoire de la folie (1967) to the now classic ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1972) through La Carte postale (1980) to Khoˆra (1993) and Politiques de l’amitie´ (1994), Derrida has always returned to the founding gestures of occidental philosophy and their simultaneous encoding and resistance in the Platonic corpus.39 Central to each of these interventions is a dramatization of reason or the logos’s engagement with its other.40 The question of the other, however, can never be posed in terms of that which reason defines as its opposite, because that would be the other as defined by and within reason. It must always be posed in terms of the absolute other. Only the absolute other that resists all gestures of dialectical recuperation can truly withstand the hegemony of calculating reason and thus simultaneously ground it and uncrown it. The question of the absolute other is also of central importance because it is only the presence (or better, the non-presence) of the absolute other that makes difference possible, that keeps the world as world from collapsing into the stasis of an idealist and totalitarian unity. Thus the possibility of meaning, action, decision, and history depends on that which eludes all possible totalization, i.e. the other in its radical difference from the same. This is the fundamental ethical commitment of Derridean philosophy, a commitment to a certain opening, to a beyond of repetition, to the yet-to-come (a`-venir). ‘This opening [which is a form of “not-knowing” but not of “ignorance”] must 39 See Derrida (1992d), 262–7; Derrida and Roudinesco (2001), 38; Miller (2007), chapter 5; Leonard (2005), 189–215; (2000); Loraux (1996), 169; Alliez (1992), 226; Wolff (1992), 235. 40 Derrida (1992d), 260, 269.

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preserve this heterogeneity as the sole chance of an affirmed, or rather reaffirmed, future. It is the future itself, it comes from it. The future is its memory.’41 In Khoˆra, this moment of openness to the absolute other is located in the conception of the khoˆra itself. On the most basic level, khoˆra is a Greek word that means ‘place’. In the dialogue, however, khoˆra functions as a sort of ground that makes human reason, creation, and ultimately the ontic itself possible. Yet, it can never be included within them. The khoˆra at once exceeds and fails to rise to the threshold of being, of having a defined existence. Thus when the divine Demiurge crafts the cosmos in the Timaeus, it takes the ideal forms of intelligibility and deploys them as if they were a set of stamps or typoi (50c), which it impresses on the formless as justice, goodness, tableness, chairness, etc. to produce the individual instantiations of the things of the world: i.e. a just act, a good man, a table, a chair. Khoˆra is the place in which this activity occurs. It at once precedes and exceeds the creation of the intelligible universe, because it is both that which receives the stamp of the intelligible and that which in itself remains unchanged by that stamp, like the base from which a perfume is made or the gold worked by a goldsmith (50b–e).42 The audacity [of this text] consists here in going back beyond the origin, beyond even birth, towards a necessity that is neither generative nor engendered and that brings philosophy, ‘precedes’ (before either the time that passes or the eternal time before history) and ‘receives’ the effect, the image of the oppositions (the intelligible and the sensible): philosophy. This necessity (khoˆra is its moniker) appears so virgin that it no longer even has the face of a virgin.43

Khoˆra is the condition of the possibility of the world as world, as cosmos, but it is always radically other from, and hence incomprehensible by, either the intelligibles per se or their mimetic instantiations (Derrida 1993a: 16, 28).

41 42 43

Id. (1993a), 68. Zuckert (1996), 236. Derrida (1993b), 94–5, italics his.

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Khoˆra is thus a third genos or type (48e–49a, 52a–b). It is at once self-identical and eternal—an attribute of being and the intelligible rather than of becoming and the sensible—yet in itself it remains impervious to reason per se (51a–b).44 At the same time, inasmuch as it is not the defined space of the Aristotelian topos nor of Cartesian extension, the space in which objects appear, but a kind of pre-ontic clearing that makes the topical possible, it cannot be apprehended directly through the senses.45 Plato has Timaeus state the paradox of its apprehension directly: The third genos, the always existing khoˆra, that does not receive destruction, but provides the seat for all things that come into being, this is not perceptible through sensation but by a certain bastard reasoning, which is scarcely credible, toward which we look in dreams. And we say that it is necessary that everything be somewhere in some place (topos) and occupy a certain khoˆra,46 and that which is nowhere on earth nor under heaven is nothing. Moreover, concerning all these things and those that are their kin, and concerning their true and waking nature, under the conditions of this dream state we are not able, when roused, to speak the truth and make distinctions, but use a likeness, since the thing itself does not come to be in that which is of its same nature, but is always said to be the image of some other thing, and it is therefore proper that it come to be in something else— if that nature is to have being in any way—or that it be completely nothing. As for what really exists in reality, the logos of exact truth is a support: to wit, so long as anything is one thing and something else another, neither ever becomes one thing in the other, becoming simultaneously the same thing and two. (52a8–d1)

This passage is one of the most important and most tortured in the whole dialogue. The khoˆra is only apprehensible in a state that is like a dream: i.e. a state that is neither that of pure sensation nor of pure reason, but a kind of hybrid, which is nonetheless more than just mixture of the two.47 The khoˆra is thus perceived through a form of apprehension in which the opposition between the categories of the 44 Sallis (1999), 98; Zuckert (1996), 236; McCabe (1994), 187; Wolff (1992), 245. On the third type and the khoˆra as the ground of Being and the good in the Republic (509–16), see Zuckert (1996), 240, and Sallis (1999), 404. 45 McCabe (1994), 181; Derrida (1993b), 58; Rivaud (1963), 66. 46 On this careful distinction, see Sallis (1999), 121. 47 Sallis (1999), 407–8.

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noetic and the fantasmatic qualities of sensation has not yet come to be.48 It is thus susceptible to neither logos nor muthos as modes of comprehension, but represents a third genos that makes their opposition possible, one which thus simultaneously precedes and exceeds them: ‘so long as anything is one thing and something else another.’ In this sense then, the deconstructive khoˆra functions in Derrida’s reading of the Timaeus in much the same way as the pharmakon does in his reading of the Phaedrus.49 It names that which eludes the logic of the same. Neither salutary medicine nor deadly poison, and yet both, the pharmakon names that moment of absolute externality on which the distinctions between speech and writing, love and lust, philosophy and rhetoric, dialogos and logographos, muthos and logos depend. It is the space that allows these binaries to arise. Yet, as the moment of the distinction that makes them possible, it cannot be absorbed into them. It can never occupy either position in a stable manner.50 By the same token, the apeiron or the ‘unlimited’ in Derrida’s reading of the Philebus in La Carte postale is that which is both prior to the imposition of the limit, i.e. that which makes the unit or entity possible (as well as the collection of those units into larger intelligible wholes), and that which is the beyond the limit, the infinite, the transcendental (24a–26d).51 The latter is the ideal telos of the logical process of collection, just as it is also the starting point for its opposite, the process of division (14a–20a). Division, according to Plato, moves from the intelligible one, which by definition can know no limit, to its smallest possible instantiation, and ultimately below the threshold of being to the realm of that which is before the limit itself.52 The unlimited is therefore that which both precedes and exceeds reason, just as the pharmakon precedes and exceeds the 48 Compare Timaeus 71e–72a on the relation of the dream state to prophecy and reason. 49 Derrida explicitly makes the analogy in La Pharmacie (1972d), 184–6. 50 Derrida (1972d), 96–8, 112–17, 127; Allen (2000), 85; Ferrari (1987), 207; Oudemans and Lardinois (1987), 88. 51 Compare Frede (1992), 428–9, 43; Gadamer (1991), 131; Hampton (1990), 44; Gosling (1975), 200; Die`s (1966), xxvii–xxviii. 52 See Gadamer (1991), 80–1, 120–1; Hampton (1990), 87–8; Gosling (1975), xiv; Die`s (1966), xix, xxv; Boussoulas (1952), 171.

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possibility of the binary, and the khoˆra precedes and exceeds creation itself.53 The apeiron is thus, as Derrida notes, the anticipation of Freud’s Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961). It names that which is beyond the libidinal accounting of the pleasure and the reality principles and which can only be conceived of as a form of non-existence or death.54 In the same way, the khoˆra both eludes the forms and their instantiations, both creator and created, to signify a form of non-existence that makes existence possible. It is the womb and tomb of the ontic.55

III The khoˆra thus conceived is not just central to the Derridean enterprise or to the latter’s reading of Plato, but to Platonic philosophy per se. This is a central point, for it has become common to conflate Plato with Platonism, i.e. with the doctrine of the forms as the telos of a Platonic system, and hence to read the khoˆra itself as merely an odd remainder, a bump in the road on the way to establishing the theory of abstract intelligibles. The khoˆra is thus the feminine (Tim. 50d– 51a),56 or a form of ‘bastard reasoning’ (Tim. 52b), that which must be surpassed with a certain embarrassment on the way to the erection of a cosmos, properly understood. But what I want to argue here is that this attempt to see the khoˆra as secondary, degraded, or somehow inessential is a fundamental misreading of the Platonic corpus: for the metaphysics of closure, while a necessary moment in the theory of forms as a totalizing unity of the self-identical, is also one that is deliberately and self-consciously deferred throughout the Platonic corpus.57 Indeed, it precisely the khoˆra’s status as neither eidetic form nor ontic imitation, but as a third type, that keeps the Platonic dialectic open (48a7). 53 Hampton (1990), 43; Gadamer (1988), 260. For a detailed list of textual parallels between the Timaeus and the Philebus, see Rivaud (1963), 21–2. 54 Derrida (1980a), 180–1, 425–7; Zuckert (1996), 233. 55 Compare Copjec (2002), 33 on the Timaeus’ anticipation of the death drive’s relation to the primordial mother. 56 57 Sallis (1999), 407. Castel-Bouchouchi (2003), 186–7.

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The irresolvable tension between these three moments—the same, its imitation, and the other that makes them possible but also limits them through the force of a necessity that cannot submit to pure reason—is not a dialectical hiccup to be surpassed in an ultimate gesture of recuperation, sublimation, and ultimately exclusion, as Irigaray would argue in her reading of the myth of the cave (1974), but one whose pursuit and preservation lies at the heart of the Platonic enterprise. Thus as Diotima, that supreme representative of the Platonic feminine, observes, the human participates in the divine and the self-identical, precisely to the degree that it is not identical with itself, that it is characterized by irreducible difference: What is called ‘careful attention’ (meletan) presupposes the transitory nature of knowledge: for forgetting is the departure of knowledge, but careful attention is its return, by implanting a new memory in place of that which has departed, it preserves knowledge so that it seems to be the same. In this manner, every mortal is preserved, not as wholly self-identical like the divine, but with the departing being replaced by something new, yet similar, left in its place. By this means, the mortal, both the body and everything else . . . partakes of the immortal; but immortality is something else. (Sym. 208a4–b4)

The telos of a truly philosophical desire, one that seeks wisdom, then, is not absolute self-presence but the recognition of its simultaneous impossibility and desirability for mortals. In the same way, Socrates in the Apology is the ‘wisest of men’ because he alone is both sophos and knows that he knows nothing. Likewise, coming to aporia, ‘helplessness’ or ‘perplexity’, as Socrates acknowledges in the Theaetetus, represents not the failure of philosophy, but the opportunity to recognize the limits of one’s thought, its own constitutive otherness, and hence the chance to think anew (Theae. 187b–c, 210a–d).58 This recognition presents itself on the level of form, not just content. It is no accident that Plato never wrote a treatise and that the dialogue remains central to his philosophical method from the Laches to the Timaeus.59 For the purpose and function of Socratic dialogue as presented in the Platonic corpus is not to transmit a 58 59

Blondell (2002), 124. Die`s (1966), xvi.

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bounded body of specific, reproducible, codifiable (and hence commodifiable) knowledge or techneˆ,60 but to induce Socrates’ interlocutors, and ultimately Plato’s readers, to scrutinize their own opinions in order to strive to rid themselves of false presumptions and self-contradictions (Soph. 230a–d), even as they recognize that these contradictions summon the soul to philosophia. The dialogue form thus both codifies the principle of otherness in the figure of the interlocutor and at the same time calls attention to its own fictive status through its dramatic form.61 The purpose of Socratic dialogue and Platonic storytelling then is not to produce an impossible selfidentity, which is both the province of the divine and, in its unchanging nature, indistinguishable from death, but to come to know the irreducible other at the very heart of our identity and hence induce a radically new practice of the self, which strives for the divine in the recognition of its impossibility. To that extent, the dialogue is the formal correlate of the aporia induced by Socratic questioning,62 and, as the moment of undecidability, it occupies the same logical non-space (atopia) as the khoˆra in the creation myth of the Timaeus.

IV The khoˆra as such names that place that both exceeds the desire named philosophy and makes it possible. As noted earlier, one reading, then, of the khoˆra is as the atopic space of irony, understood as a perpetual hinge point between a given statement’s denotative content and its figurative doubling. Khoˆra names the clearing that makes the joining of these two levels of signification possible and hence creates the opening necessary for the construction and deployment of philosophical concepts. Thus, khoˆra’s function is ultimately the same as that of Socratic irony: it names that which makes possible the constitution of philosophy as a form of discourse that is not simply a set of truth claims, but one that seeks transcendence and hence 60 61 62

Nightingale (1995), 49. Hunter (2004), 22–3. Blondell (2002), 42.

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transformation on what Deleuze and Guattari would call the plane of immanence.63 Clearly this is not irony as commonly understood, nor is it complex irony as defined by Gregory Vlastos—a statement that on one level is false but on another true.64 It goes well beyond that.65 Rather Socratic irony ultimately creates an opening that makes possible the interrogation of true and false, ironic and literal, and hence also serves as their ground and precondition. In Derridean terms, Socratic irony consists in the reflexive self-conscious deployment of the pharmakon, or the unlimited, or the khoˆra’s double-sided nature against itself: Socratic irony precipitates out one pharmakon by bringing it into contact with another. Or rather it reverses the pharmakon’s powers and turns its surface—thus taking effect, being recorded and dated, in the act of classing the pharmakon, through the fact that the pharmakon properly consists in a certain inconsistency, a certain impropriety, this nonidentity-with-itself always allowing it to be turned against itself.66

Philosophy, then, I would contend, at least as Plato understood it and as it is still understood today in many quarters, i.e. ‘the critical work that thought brings against itself . . . the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known’,67 is precisely the discourse that happens in this ironic, atopic space. To illustrate this point, let us examine a crucial passage in the Apology (29a2–4). Socrates, in response to the capital charge of atheism or impiety, responds that the real impiety would be to give up his philosophical vocation. Indeed, he should more properly be brought into court on such charges if he were to ignore the Delphic oracle’s statement that he was the wisest of men or should he cease his quest to understand what that statement means through the

63

Deleuze and Guattari (2005), 30–68. ‘In “simple” irony what is said just isn’t what is meant: taken in its ordinary commonly understood sense the statement is false. In “complex” irony what is said both is and isn’t what is meant: its surface content is meant to be true in one sense, false in another’ (Vlastos 1991, 31). 65 Nehamas (1998), 46–98. 66 Derrida (1981b), 119; (1972d), 136, emphasis his. 67 Foucault (1986), 9. 64

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interrogation of himself and others. ‘And it would be a terrible thing, and truly then someone should drag me into court on the grounds that I do not believe the gods exist since I would be disobeying the oracle, fearing death, and thinking myself to be something when I am not.’ Of course, it is precisely by adhering to his understanding of the oracle that Socrates has provoked these charges in the first place and been brought to trial for his life. Nonetheless Socrates, in this passage, not only skilfully turns around the accusation of Meletus and the other prosecutors, he also troubles the distinction between the merely literal and the simply ironic in important ways. Indeed, there are several difficulties with taking Socrates’ statement as literally true. First, if we are to accept the truth of Socrates’ assertion in this passage, then we must also accept as literally true that the god appointed Socrates to the mission of testing himself and others. Yet as Socrates emphasizes in the sentence immediately preceding this one, that appointment is merely Socrates’ interpretation of the Delphic oracle’s pronouncement to Chaerephon that he was the wisest of men. The latter was a statement that even Socrates found incredible and set out to disprove.68 Socrates, of course, ultimately does validate the claim of the god by demonstrating that he alone is aware of his own ignorance. Thus his statement that the god had assigned to him the mission of testing himself and his fellow citizens, through questioning their pretensions to knowledge, rests solely on Socrates’ construal of an oracular message that he himself finds incredible. Moreover, the core of that message, as Socrates understands it, is not a stable statement of fact, rather it is an ironic assertion that the wisest man is not he who has the most positive knowledge, but he who most profoundly recognizes his own lack of knowledge and can therefore begin, through a genuine care of the self, the unfinalizable pursuit of arete. Thus, even the most literal reading of the present passage is dependent in the last analysis on an ironic statement in which the normal meaning of the word sophos is converted into its seeming opposite. Second, a literal reading of the present passage presumes that Socrates believes that 68

Moreover, Chaerephon, it should be noted, is often portrayed in Plato as ‘a little mad’, so it is unclear how reliable a vehicle he is for relaying the will of the god (Nails (2002), 86).

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people should actually be dragged into court for the failure to follow their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the divine will. This is not only absurd on its face, but also finds no support elsewhere in the Platonic corpus. Nevertheless, none of this is to say that we are not to understand that Socrates means every word he says. It is quite clear that he does not see his choice of the philosophic life as arbitrary. It is his duty, and he is willing to die in the defence of it. As such, this duty transcends the scope of normal human life and is to that extent divine. Hence, it would be impious to flee or ignore it, in which case Meletus would have grounds for charging Socrates with failing to honour the gods. Consequently, Socrates’ statement at Apology 29a2–4 can be taken neither in a strictly literal, referential sense—it is not a proposition about the world—nor can it be understood as ironic in the common Greek sense of ‘shamming, meaning one thing and saying another’. It is both and therefore opens a space—a khoˆra—that can be fully assimilated to neither one of these positions, a space in which language does not merely reproduce the world of the given—be it facts or forms—but somehow radically precedes and exceeds both the given and its simple negation. It opens the world and our experience of it to a systematic interrogation and transformation. The recognition of this opening, one might argue, of this place without place, is the very origin of philosophy: the recognition of the plane of immanence in which the concept qua concept first comes to be.

V In sum, then, Khoˆra is no minor codicil to the Derridean testament, nor a mere remainder to that of Plato. It is central both to the legacy of deconstruction and to an ongoing genealogy of the present. In this work, Derrida not only shows himself to be a skilled interpreter of Plato but also demonstrates the continuing importance of the Platonic text to our own canons of self-understanding. Khoˆra reveals both the fundamental opening that is constitutive of Platonic

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philosophy and the very atopia or non-space that makes philosophy itself possible—not as the mere reproduction of the same, an endless series of imitations and legitimizations, but as the attempt to turn thought back on itself and so come to think differently. This ironic doubling does not so much seek to reproduce an original divine essence within the human realm of the sensible as to encounter what we have labelled the absolute other, but what Plato denominates as a force of necessity, a wondering cause, that makes possible the mimetic labour of creation performed by the Demiurge, the
ØÅ, in its necessary difference. In the khoˆra, then, in the third genos that is neither transcendental original nor empirical copy, the Timaeus presents the unassimilable remainder that is at once constitutive of, and foreign to, the corpus Platonicum. The philosopher (be she Socrates, Plato, Derrida, or us), on this understanding, seeks not so much to hold up a mirror to nature as to reflect on and through it so as to fashion it and ourselves anew. From this perspective, the Timaeus, and the mad Pythagorean discourse that constitutes its heart, functions less as a set of prescriptions for understanding the nature of creation, which is what it was for the monks of Chartres, than as a series of problems that enable the critical work of remaking the world as world to be begun at the most radical level possible, that on which the ontic itself comes into being. The Timaeus is not a legitimization but an interrogation. And it is only if we take up its challenge completely that we will not find ourselves playing the role of Critias, the slightly ridiculous aristocrat who presents a myth remembered from childhood as the history and foundation of a city frozen in the ideal and lacking the challenge that is philosophy.

12 Eros in the Age of Technical Reproductibility Socrates, Plato, and the Erotics of Filiation Ika Willis

Do people (I am not speaking of ‘philosophers’ or of those who read Plato) realize to what extent this old couple has invaded our most private domesticity, mixing themselves up in everything, taking their part of everything, and making us attend for centuries their colossal and indefatigable anaparalyses? The one in the other, the one in front of the other, the one after the other, the one behind the other?1 If people—for instance, artists, writers, leather players—are alive, working and creating at the same time on the same clock and the same calendar, no matter what their individual ages, they are all contemporary, because they work in the Culture of Here And Now. Larry Townsend is as pertinent as the boy he beats, and the boy he beats is as pertinent as Larry Townsend.2 I am grateful first to Miriam Leonard for inviting this chapter and for her helpful comments on its first draft; secondly to Camel Gupta and Aren Z. Aizura for procreating this project with me, via our immensely pleasurable online think-in in September 2006 around the leather theorizing of history and generation; and thirdly to Aren again, this time coupled (although they do not know each other) with Una McCormack, for challenging readings of, and helpful advice on, a draft of this chapter. 1 Derrida (1987a), 18–19; (1980a), 23. 2 Fritscher (2000), 19.

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INTRODUCTION: PLATO BEHIND SOCRATES ‘Quite stupidly’, writes Derrida near the beginning of ‘Envois’, the immense, fragmentary, epistolary preface to The Post Card, ‘one has to believe [that] Socrates comes before Plato, there is between them— and in general—an order of generations, an irreversible sequence of inheritance.’3 If the belief in an order of generations is ‘quite stupid’, then what is between Socrates and Plato? The question, Derrida suggests, is not a trivial one: indeed, it is ‘what we have been working on for twentyfive centuries’.4 Not Socrates or Plato, but what is between them, is the central problematic of ‘Envois’. The subtitle of The Post Card, ‘From Socrates to Freud and Beyond’, indicates the central motif of ‘Envois’: that (to put it too simply and hastily) the history of Western metaphysics from Socrates to Freud forms a unified conceptual system or epoch, and that what unifies that epoch is a ‘belief in the possibility of [a certain] type of correspondence, with all its technological conditions’.5 A unified epoch is formed on the basis of a particular set of beliefs about, and practices of, the post: that is, beliefs and practices which take or produce as their object ‘texts addressed, destined, dedicated by a determinable signer to a particular receiver’.6 ‘The post’ is the figure by which Derrida names, therefore, the epoch of logocentrism which understands writing as the transmission of determinable information from one determinable position to another, along determinable channels. Yet ‘by hiding this [postal and technological] condition from itself ’, he argues, ‘by living it as a quasi-natural given, this epoch guards itself ’.7 In ‘Envois’, Derrida gets under the guard of this epoch by refusing to participate in hiding its technological-conceptual conditions of possibility, by patiently thinking through the post as

3 4 5 6 7

Derrida (1987a), 20; (1980a), 25. Id. (1987a), 146; (1980a), 159. Id. (1987a), 62; (1980a), 70. Id. (1987a), 62; (1980a), 70. Id. (1987a), 62; (1980a), 70.

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that which is between Socrates and Plato—and therefore also that which is between Socrates and Plato and us. Figuring the central problem of ‘Envois’ as ‘the devil’,8 Derrida writes: ‘the devil is them, him, the couple Plato/Socrates, divisible and indivisible, their interminable partition, the contract which binds them to us until the end of time.’9 Once again, it is not Socrates or Plato (as content) that is the devil; it is ‘the couple Plato/Socrates’. The problem is the structure of their coupling: the conceptual/technological mediating system within which Socrates and Plato are coupled, connected, to one another; the postal or telephonic system10 which enables and structures their relationship and within which they circulate. And this postal system binds them, not (only) to each other, but ‘to us’: the chronological order which stipulates that ‘Socrates comes before Plato’ is an order also in the sense of a command: it ‘binds us to this order: this is how to orient one’s thought, this is the left and this is the right, march’.11 It is what is between Socrates and Plato which determines the orientation of our thought, which determines how we can read their texts (from left to right, from earlier to later, from Socrates to Freud): what is between Socrates and Plato, that which differentiates and connects them, is the postal system which positions us too on the circuit of transmission between them. In Derrida’s notation system, what is between ‘the couple Socrates/ Plato’ is a slash (/), the punctuation mark from which a genre of writing takes its name: slash fiction, which features a sexual and/or romantic relationship between already-existing characters (Blair/ Brown, Kirk/Spock, Achilles/Patroklos).12 Slash is a kind of writing

8 For which I read the Anti-Christ, the absolute—and absolutely necessary— Other of a closed system who is nonetheless the sign of the system’s irreducible outsidelessness, since the system’s coherence relies upon this Other. 9 Derrida (1987a), 97; (1980a), 107. 10 ‘Socrates writing, do you realize, and on a post card’ (id. (1987a), 12; (1980a), 16; ‘this great telephonic farce’ (id. (1987a), 146; (1980a), 159). 11 Id. (1987a), 20; (1980a), 25. 12 For some recent discussions of fan fiction, including slash, and a comprehensive bibliography, see Hellekson and Busse (2006).

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attentive to the circulation of eros in and across textual transmissions and receptions; as fan fiction, it is organized by modes of reading which regularly exceed or resist the most readily available or culturally legitimized conventions. This also describes the kind of writing that Derrida performs in ‘Envois’, where the relationship between Socrates and Plato is narrativized and sexualized.13 For the phrase ‘between them’ is legible within (and hence summons up) a colloquial and sexualized code, where the question of philosophy and of the post becomes the question of slash: what happened between these two men? What secret erotic connection underlies, explains, is deducible from, their visible relationship? What kind of story, what kind of love, what kind of relationship, accounts for what is between Socrates and Plato? And indeed Derrida gives us at least one version of their love story, characterizing this as ‘vulgar’ and ‘murky’:14 if Plato resented Socrates to death (this is certain, this is my premise, even if he loved him he could only resent him to death), it is that the latter, one day, one night, one morning, for example after some discussion following a banquet, must have inflicted an unpardonable affront upon him. I don’t know, a slap, one of those ineffaceable jests, a mockery that hit home, at the very spot that was not to be touched . . . Their liaison was embodied at that very moment (it always begins with a wound, and young Plato was virgin at the time, no one would have dared and he would have permitted no one), but very badly . . . Now, once upon a time, Plato, despite his love for Socrates, and even along with this love, has never again ceased to avenge himself, all the while defending himself against this (very sincerely moreover).15

The history of Platonism here becomes the fall-out from a lover’s quarrel, as Derrida narrates the production and transmission of the corpus platonicum as an act of revenge against Socrates on Plato’s part

13 These verbs in -ize are an awkward compromise, not intended to imply that there is in reality a non-narrative, non-sexual (Platonic?) relationship between Socrates and Plato prior to Derrida’s intervention. 14 He writes, after the account given below: ‘Nietzsche . . . had come to suspect some rather murky story. But he was not always vulgar enough, awakened enough to measure the entire vulgarity of the scene’ (Derrida (1987a), 146; (1980a), 159). 15 Derrida (1987a), 145–6; (1980a), 158–9.

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(‘So then Plato makes the big play: he deploys the entire corpus platonicum and affixes to it, for eternity, Socrates’ signature’16). The story is ‘vulgar’ and ‘murky’ because it reads the master/ disciple relationship between Socrates and Plato not in terms of the noiseless transmission of wisdom across the generations, but according to erotic codes. Derrida’s slash fiction traces the Platonic inheritance, but traces it circuitously, through all the Freudian vicissitudes of desire (‘it always begins with a wound’); it traces, that is, the circuits along which the Platonic inheritance takes place, the circuits which Platonism itself would seek to hide and to render natural. In slashing Socrates and Plato, Derrida routes their correspondence along different lines: the lines traced in an image reproduced on a postcard sold in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.17 ‘Envois’ reads this image over and over again, making multiple connections and telling multiple stories about and with it. The image, taken from a mediaeval fortune-telling book, shows ‘Socrates’ (so designated in a caption above his tall and wizardly hat) on the right of the picture plane. He is seated on a chair at a desk, with small implements in both hands. Behind him and to the left of the picture plane, the smaller ‘plato’ (captioned thus, all in lower case, above his flat and undistinguished hat) stands on tiptoe behind Socrates’ chair, indicating Socrates—or poking him in the back—with one index finger. Derrida’s readings of the image play first of all on the spatial ambiguity of the visual ordering of the two men. Refiguring ‘Socrates before Plato’ as ‘Plato behind Socrates’ (‘behind he has always been, as it is thought, but not like that’18), Derrida plays out multiple possibilities for this spatial order: ‘the one in the other, the one in 16

Id. (1987a), 146; (1980a), 159. The Bodleian postcard, of course, has a certain legitimate place in the Platonic post, and Derrida reads also the structures which legitimize its placing. As ever, Derrida’s refusal to obey a logocentric order in reading does not make his readings purely random, ‘subjective’, or senseless: in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ he writes that ‘the only chance of entering into the game’ is ‘risking the addition of some new thread’, but that ‘that person would have understood nothing of the game who, at this, would feel himself authorized merely to add on: that is, to add any old thing. He would add nothing: the seam would not hold’ (2004), 69–70; (1972), 71–2. In ‘Envois’ the same sort of concern is figured differently: ‘not just anyone buggers Socrates’ (1987a), 202; (1980a), 217. 18 Id. (1987a), 12; (1980a), 16. 17

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front of the other, the one after the other, the one behind the other.’19 His readings of the image also play on the generational difference between Socrates and Plato (‘Socrates, the grandfather . . . little plato, the grandson, already serious as a pope, turns around him’20); the sexual meanings which he quickly finds in Plato’s position behind Socrates (‘I tell you that I see Plato getting an erection in Socrates’ back’21); and the postcard’s injunction: ‘Reproduction prohibited’ (‘no child, inheritance prohibited, filiation interrupted, sterile midwives’22). These three figures—generational difference, sexual love, and reproduction—are worked together and against one another throughout ‘Envois’, in such a way as to disrupt and reconfigure the metaphor of filiation, through which time, history, and the transmission/reception of texts are submitted to an irreversible, linear, sequential chronology. Derrida insists that what is ‘between’ Socrates and Plato is not simply filiation understood as the guarantee of generational difference and unidirectional time, but ‘Eros in the age of technical reproductibility’,23 ‘Eros in generalized telephonic relation’.24 The question of filiation, of bodily reproduction, here becomes a subsection of the wider question of reproduction-asteletechnology: reproduction, in the sense of the gestation and production of a human infant as a consequence of the impregnation of a woman by a man through heterosexual intercourse,25 does not function as the ‘literal’ meaning governing and grounding the ‘metaphor’ of reproduction as it recurs across, for example, the Bodleian postcard’s prohibition, Socrates’ characterization of himself as a ‘midwife’, or Harold Bloom’s reading of the Oedipal structures of ‘influence’ (discussed below). Instead, the motive which would seek to define the literal meaning of ‘reproduction’ as the (hetero)sexual generation of 19

Id. (1987a), 19; (1980a), 23. Id. (1987a), 41; (1980a), 47. 21 Id. (1987a), 18; (1980a), 22. 22 Id. (1987a), 39; (1980a), 44–5. 23 Id. (1987a), 12–13; (1980a), 17. 24 Id. (1987a), 31; (1980a), 36. 25 Of course this is not the only way in which even ‘real’ babies are made: as I wrote the first draft of this chapter, there was—suddenly and rather belatedly, since Beattie is by no means the first (trans)man to have gestated and given birth to a child—a media furor about the existence of pregnancy in (trans)men, sparked, apparently, by an Advocate article by Thomas Beattie (see Beattie 2008). 20

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human infants becomes one—particular and interested—mode of closing down the differantial field of the term ‘reproduction’. Derrida’s insistence on intergenerational desire and the simultaneity of generations also disrupts the linear model of filiation, in which the son replaces the father. His readings of the Bodleian postcard produce a Socrates and a Plato who are no longer guarantors of an irreversible sequence of generation, but a couple in whose erotic relation ‘reversibility unleashes itself’,26 through whose erotic relation generational difference plays, and for whom neither sex nor reproduction is to be understood as natural, organic, and present as opposed to technologically instantiated through distance and absence.27 And so—in my own vulgar, murky story about this odd couple, Socrates and Plato—they are no longer father and son, but daddy and boy.

BETWEEN THE FATHER AND THE SON 2 8 Metaphors of filiation, descent, and inheritance structure much thinking and writing about textuality, time, and the relationship to antiquity. The implications of this generational order are generally left hidden: Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, however, begins to think them through explicitly, and in so doing begins to expose the mediating structures, and the irreducible erotics, which underpin and inhabit the order of generation. Moreover, the phrase ‘the anxiety of influence’ occurs, in English, at one point in ‘Envois’,29 lending the connection I make between Bloom and Derrida rather more legitimacy than others I make later in this chapter. In his book, Bloom elaborates a model of literature as structured by an Oedipal relation between literary generations. The literary past is called upon as the father who must be both imitated and overcome 26

Derrida (1987a), 13; (1980a), 18. For a much fuller, and beautiful, elaboration of the relationship between reversibility, filiation, technical reproductibility, and generation, see Wills (2008). 28 Derrida (1987a), 187; (1980a), 201. The phrase comes from a fragment which reads in its entirety: ‘The royal couple we have it here between the father and the son.’ 29 Id. (1987a), 200; (1980a), 215. 27

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by the son. Each new or young poet must achieve autonomy through an antagonistic encounter—figured according to high masculine codes as violent, up-close, and corporeal (the term ‘wrestling’ recurs several times)—with an individual precursor. Bloom’s use of an Oedipal model means that, for him, the difference which generates literature is both filial and erotic: the young poet is the ‘son’ to the prior poet’s ‘father’, but he30 is also the ‘ephebe’, a term which Bloom uses quasi-technically for a poet at a certain stage of his Oedipal process, and which figures the young poet as a boy of a certain age-class in the classical Athenian system (‘the young citizen of poetry, or ephebe as Athens would have called him’31). The term also— through its associations with a pederastic/pedagogical model of ‘Greek love’—positions the young poet in an erotic system where age, not sex, is the axis of sexual difference.32 Similarly, the language Bloom uses to describe the encounter between the poet and his precursor often blends the filial and the erotic: ‘Battle between strong equals’, he writes, for example, ‘father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the cross-roads; only this is my subject here.’33 The father/son relationship involves antagonism, but also an ephebic relation to an older mentor, teacher, or erastes, as the ephebe or ‘young citizen’ learns how to be an adult male—and also erotic desire.34 30 The masculinity of both terms is not accidental. This becomes apparent in Bloom’s deployment of femininity as against masculinity, through the figure of the feminine Muse and in the ordeal-by-femininity that produces strong poets: ‘Into . . . the Dark Intention that Valentinus called “strengthless and female fruit”, the ephebe must fall. If he emerges from it, however crippled and blinded, he will be among the strong poets’ (Bloom (1973), 14). As Derrida writes in ‘Envois’: ‘Not a daughter in the landscape, apparently, not a word about her in any event’ ((1987a), 61; (1980a), 69). 31 Bloom (1973), 10. 32 See, for example, Paul Veyne on the ‘Platonic love of adults for epheboi, for free-born youths’ (1985), 29. My emphasis on age as the axis of sexual difference here is not meant to imply that difference is the necessary condition for erotic attraction, i.e. that homosexuality is a mode of heterosexuality and that sameness cannot be eroticized: as could be shown through ‘Envois’ again, both sameness and difference, hetero- and homo-, play through the (erotic, telephonic, filial, reproductive) relation to the other. 33 Bloom (1973), 11. 34 Bloom’s language in an interview about his own practice similarly makes visible the eroticism of the father/son relationship: ‘In terms of my own theorizations . . . the precursor proper has to be Northrop Frye. I purchased and

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Bloom elaborates the father–son relationship as the master-figure for the normative mode by which cultural knowledge is transmitted from one masculine generation to the next via a relationship of eroticized antagonism. Like the Bodleian postcard, the Bloomian scene figures cultural transmission—and time itself—according to the order of generation. Further, though: if the post (as cultural transmission and as history) is Oedipally structured, then it is this eroticized, antagonistic mode of filiation which forms the ‘contract which binds [Plato and Socrates] to us until the end of time’; the contract which binds father to son, Plato to Socrates, Plato/Socrates to us, becomes an Old Guard leather contract. In so-called ‘Old Guard’ leather culture,35 a new member of the leather community, accorded the status of ‘boy’, would, through a

read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca, New York. It ravished my heart away. I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr. [Kenneth] Burke . . . but I don’t come from Burke, I come out of Frye.’ Salusinszky (1987), 62. 35 The locus classicus of ‘Old Guard’ leather is urban California in the 1950s. Its ‘oldness’ dates from the emergence, in the early 1990s, of ‘New School’ leather, which departed from hierarchies, ceremonies, and protocols, and embraced switching and reversibility. In his 1991 autobiographical account of his training in 1950s Los Angeles, Thom Magister, a self-identified Old Guard Master, identifies two main points of difference in contemporary leather practice: its refusal to properly distinguish between adulthood and childhood (‘What S/M men now call play we called work . . . children play and men work’ (2004), 98) and its eroticization of reversibility (‘What about the duality of role switching? What does a bottomman feel after he has surrendered and entrusted himself to a man he believed was a Master, only to discover this same man down on his knees kissing another man’s boots?’ (2004), 100). Leather history is, of course, as vexed as any other and the old/ new division is contested (the epigraph to this chapter, for example, comes from Jack Fritscher’s impassioned refusal of any division between leather generations). In what follows, I am reductively mapping ‘Old Guard’ and ‘New School’ roughly onto two different Platonisms: Old Guard valorizes what I am calling ‘the order of generation’ (both temporal sequence and authoritative command), while New School denaturalizes and resignifies it. Here I am once more indebted to Aren Z. Aizura, who wrote me an email in which he characterized ‘old guard culture’ as ‘a pretty homocentric and what’s more teleological theory of how sexual knowledge operates or should operate. So Derrida’s play with Socrates and Plato undoes the very thing that daddy/boy is (originally) premised on: an [old guard] reading of philosophy that does understand daddy/boy as always intergenerational in the same way, in a way that is in fact modelled on reading Socrates/Plato queerly to begin with. (The wrong way, though.)’.

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formal contract, be apprenticed to one or more Masters for training in and through BDSM practices. No one could attain the status of Top, Master, or Daddy without first being a bottom, slave, or boy. Such contracts thus enabled the formally coded sexual knowledges of the culture to be transmitted from one generation to the next, through an openly eroticized and antagonistic pedagogy. Old Guard leather codes disallowed ‘switching’ between Top and bottom, Daddy and boy, and valorized adult masculinity as the telos of sexual becoming: they were premised on a strict distinction both between Top and bottom and between boy and man, ephebe and citizen. This is an erotics organized around the order of generation—sometimes explicitly so, as when Pat Califia, writing about the way that ‘Daddy . . . threatens to eclipse Master as an honorific’ in the early 1990s, writes: Daddy–boy relationships come out of a deep need to mend the fragile connection between older and younger gay men. They are one aspect of a healthy and vital desire to pass on the stories, experiences, sexual skills, and erotic wisdom that the larger society would be happy to disown and destroy . . . Daddy–boy relationships are a form of mentoring.36

Look at the Bodleian card again: Socrates and plato are in a leather bar. Their names are written according to Old Guard leather convention: the Top’s name, pronoun and titles are granted an initial capital, while those of the bottom are not. plato’s finger writing on Socrates’ back is reinscribing the public scene by which Thom Magister acceded to Master status and to full membership of the leather community in Los Angeles in the 1950s: With my right index finger I began to draw a pattern on his back . . . I had imbedded a razor-sharp scalpel into the fingertip of my glove . . . The gasps of wonder and amusement in the room were my reward. I had begun the evening as a lanky kid but now I had earned my place among serious men.37

Socrates, older, strapped to a frame, joyfully exposes his back to plato, his boy, his big son, who, serious as a pope, shows his daddy what he has learned: plato’s finger is the organ of his (serious) 36 37

Califia (1994a), 15, 16. Magister (2004), 103.

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manhood, and Socrates’ back is both writing surface and site of erotic pleasure. And all this takes place in public, in a masculine space organized around drinking and erotic exchange, in the leather bar of the Symposium, the banquet where Socrates’ and plato’s liaision was first embodied, beginning with a wound, here where the erotics of the transmission of knowledge and of generation are played out. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates, asked to give a speech in praise of Eros, responds by recounting a conversation that he had with Diotima, ‘the one who taught me the ways of Love’,38 who argues that the aim of erotic desire is ‘reproduction’,39 ‘giving birth in beauty both in body and in mind’:40 she draws a distinction between men who reproduce bodily, with women, and men who reproduce ‘in mind’ with other men (the latter explicitly figured as pedagogical).41 David Halperin, in his now-classic essay on Eros and male pregnancy and childbirth in the Symposium, ‘Why Is Diotima a Woman?’ couples Socrates-Diotima’s discourse with male initiation rituals in Papua New Guinea in order to argue that ‘Diotima’s feminine presence at the originary scene of philosophy . . . endows the paedagogic processes by which men reproduce themselves culturally—by which they communicate the secrets of their wisdom and social identity, the “mysteries” of male authority, to one another across the generations—with the prestige of female procreativity’.42 Halperin reads Plato via Papua New Guinea—at first sight an inefficiently indirect postal circuit—because only via this route can he find in ‘Plato’s Erotic Theory’ (the subtitle of the section of his essay from which these citations come) an a priori, transhistorical and transcultural, division of reproduction into masculine-culturalpedagogy and feminine-natural-procreation.43 What his reading 38

Plato, Symposium 201d; Gill (1999), 37. Plato, Symposium 206e; Gill (1999), 44. 40 Plato, Symposium 206b; Gill (1999), 43. 41 See Plato, Symposium 208e–209e; Gill (1999), 46–7. 42 Halperin (1990), 144. 43 Of course I similarly route Plato via a long detour—in my case to 1950s California—to suit my own purposes, seeking (and therefore finding) the daddy/boy relation to the past; and in fact, 1950s California is already hyperlinked to Halperin’s 39

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loses along the way, however, is the erotic: the disruptive, excessive, and above all intermediary force of the erotic, through which procreation is made possible. Making the aim and end of Plato’s erotic theory into ‘the continual reproduction of universalizing discourse in the male culture of classical Athens’, Halperin effaces the queer eroticism of the place where he began (the initiation of Socrates by a woman into intergenerational masculine-homosexual Eros): the queer erotic disappears into the ‘universal’ homosociality of ‘male culture’, as the scene of masculine reproduction is read via ‘male initiation rituals’ which (as Halperin—becoming here perhaps less queer than Bloom—is careful to note) may or may not involve sexual activity.44 Luce Irigaray’s reading of the Symposium, by contrast, restores the erotic to Plato’s erotic theory by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the teleological eroticism which reduces erotic desire to the instrument of cultural reproduction and, on the other, another form of Eros, which she calls ‘mediumistic’. ‘Eros’, she writes, ‘. . . is therefore an intermediary in a very specific way . . . He is between the one and the other.’45 She goes on: Love is fecund prior to any procreation. And its fecundity is mediumlike . . . Procreation and generation in beauty—this is the aim of love . . . Fecundity of love between lovers—the regeneration of one by the other, the passage to immortality in and through each other—this seems to become the condition of procreation.46

Eros loses ‘its divinity, its mediumistic, alchemical qualities between couples of opposites’ when ‘love is no longer the intermediary’ and instead ‘the child plays this role’.47

archaicized Papua New Guinea. See, for example, Hopke’s essay ‘S/M and the Psychology of Gay Male Initiation’, in which he argues that ‘the rituals being enacted in gay male S/M had remarkable parallels to the kind of initiation rites described by Arnold van Gennep in his anthropological classic Rites of Passage’ (2004), 68. 44 Halperin (1990), 143, nn. 193 and 194 specify that the initiation rituals he cites are ‘not necessarily linked with paederasty’ and ‘featur[e] pseudo-procreative imagery (but not necessarily sexual contact between men and boys’). 45 Irigaray (1993), 22–3; (1984), 29. 46 Irigaray (1993), 25–6; (1984), 32. 47 Irigaray (1993), 27; (1984), 33.

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A mediumistic Eros; a coupling premised not on the secure distinction of two terms, nor on a teleology of sexual activity, but rather on the erotic possibilities of the between; what might this look like? As Old Guard leather tips into the New School48 and reversibility (switchability) unleashes itself, C. Jacob Hale’s account of daddy/ boy practices in leatherdyke communities gives us a glimpse of such an eros, an eros which does not reduce or refuse its (pro)creative power but which is premised on the between rather than on the child-as-telos. In his essay ‘Leatherdyke Boys and their Daddies: How To Have Sex without Women or Men’,49 Hale sets out to trace what he terms the ‘queer resignifying practices’ of ‘leatherdyke cultures’. What these practices resignify is precisely the strict Old Guard reading of Plato, insofar as this is premised on a secure differentiation between daddy and boy, and between women and men (that is, between literal-bodily and metaphorical-cultural reproduction). In particular, Hale identifies two major points of difference from Old Guard daddy/boy: both age and sex are denaturalized, becoming effects of reading and recognition rather than naturally given attributes of physical bodies. ‘Daddy may be younger than her boy,’50 Hale writes, and ‘leatherdykes resignify sexed bodily zones’:51 bodily zones which have a sexed meaning in mainstream culture may be mutually recognized and 48 Old Guard and New School are themselves, of course, a couple of opposites whose opposition is undone in and through the disruptive excess of Eros. Magister, cited above, is in fact significantly younger than his slave (‘I was still only a boy being trained to Master an older, stronger, and wiser man’, (2004), 98), inverting the order of generations; and Larry Townsend, the Old Guard’s Old Guard and author of the seminal The Leatherman’s Handbook (first published 1972), writes of the leather novel The Real Thing: ‘William Carney has given us a detailed view of the highly structured, purist approach to leathersex. His is a philosophy combining the eloquence of Grecian idealism with the lusty expositions of de Sade . . . In the early stages of training I have . . . seen it used successfully. In most practical situations it simply does not apply . . . A guy’s eager, lust-filled testicles will inevitably prevent his abiding by the purist’s standards’ (2000), 38. The force of Eros exceeds and disrupts Grecian idealism. The much-romanticized certainties of the Old Guard thus appear retrospectively not as origin but as reaction-formations, defences against the irreducible threat of reversibility and anachrony. 49 Hale (1997), 230. 50 51 Ibid. 224. Ibid. 230.

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experienced as non-sexed or differently sexed in the play of leatherdyke signifying practices. The leatherdyke practices that Hale recounts are practices of erotic reading that do not take sex as the literal of the body, dissembling the cultural mode of relation under the naturalizing figure of filiation: they are practices that foreground the post, the processes and practices of signification and resignification, making clear the ‘relationality of gender’: that is, a daddy and a boy become daddy and boy not because of their conformity or otherwise to a fixed standard of daddyhood or boyhood, but because of what is between them. ‘When I was a boy with my dyke daddy’, Hale writes, in that culture of two I was a boy. I was not an adult woman52 playing a boy’s role or playing a boy . . . Daddy’s participation was necessary for me to be a boy with her. I was a boy with her by engaging in a gender performativity53 that made sense to both of us as a boy’s gender performativity . . . For my performativity as boy to be legible to Daddy, I had to cite gender codes she understood as a boy’s, though I was not limited to only those boyish codes she had already encountered.54

In his insistence that ‘I was a boy’, and the long passage glossing it, Hale draws attention to the technologies, the codes enabling and governing legibility, the practices of citation, the conceptual/ technological—that is, postal—system which couples him and his daddy. This daddy/boy coupling, refusing to obey a naturalized order which would, quite stupidly, have us believe that the being of boy is only a metaphorical play on the surface of the literal, female, ground 52 At the point in time Hale is writing about here, he identified as a lesbian and had ‘a fairly unambiguous female body’ (223). His involvement in leatherdyke daddy/boy play became ‘part of a process of self-construction in which [he] became more masculine, in embodiment, in self-presentation, and in identification’ (229), and he now identifies as male. 53 Hale does not seem to be using ‘performativity’ in its Austinian/Derridean sense here, but—perhaps influenced by Judith Halberstam’s (mis)reading of Judith Butler in Female Masculinity—as closer to ‘performance’. For him, ‘a performativity’ is legible or not legible, rather than felicitous or infelicitous: moreover, it appears that a performativity is decidably legible or illegible. In what follows, therefore, I am trying to allow Derridean deconstruction and adestination to complicate Hale’s model of daddy/boy. 54 Hale (1997), 229.

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of the body, queers the relationship between subject and predicate,55 exposing the copula (‘I was a boy’) not as a declaration of identity of terms but as a coupling technology, a postal or telephonic network on which Hale and his daddy take up their positions, becoming boy and daddy through a mutual recognition which is itself enabled by the complex circuits of meaning and desire on which they find themselves. Pleasure here is in the post, in the mode by which daddy and boy produce, create, and recognize one another in an endless, non-teleological, process of perpetual becoming, (re)generating one another through the mediumistic, daimonic practices of Eros. The daddy makes the boy, but the boy makes the daddy: before she has a boy, before she is recognized by her boy, she cannot be a daddy. This is an erotics of the medium, an eros in the age of technical reproductibility. What might a mediumistic Eros look like? Look again at the Bodleian card. Socrates and Plato are a daddy and a boy, their relationship invoking yet undoing the order of generation and the sexual difference which underpins the Bloomian-Halperine reading of the Platonic contract, the Platonic corpus. And if you can’t see it, you can read it in Derrida, via Hale: it is Hale who insists that ‘daddy may be younger than her boy’,56 but Derrida who traces out the complicated age-play of Socrates and p/Plato, their ‘incredible chicanery of filiation’: ‘Plato . . . indicates, with his finger, Socrates in the course of writing. And young, as is said in the Letter, younger than Plato, and handsomer, and bigger, his big son, his grandfather or his big grandson, his grandson.’57 It is Hale who argues that ‘leatherdykes resignify sexed bodily zones’,58 but Derrida who refuses to allow grammatical or other laws of gender to determine once and for all the meaning or ‘truth’ of individuals, bodies, or organs (‘Socrates is 55 ‘Subject’ and ‘predicate’ are among the terms through which Derrida reads the Socrates/plato (S/p) couple in ‘Envois’: ‘when he writes, when he sends . . . S is p, finally is no longer totally other than p (finally I don’t think so at all, S will have been totally other, but if only he had been totally other, truly totally other, nothing would have happened between them . . . ) pp, pS, Sp, SS, the predicate speculates in order to send itself the subject’ (1987a), 30; (1980a), 35. 56 Hale (1997), 224. 57 Derrida (1987a), 61; (1980a), 68. 58 Hale (1997), 230.

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having his period’; ‘to reach the conclusion from the fact that I say “it’s nice that you are back (revenue)” that I am certainly writing to a woman; this would be as daring, in your case, as using it to infer the colour of your hair’59). Throughout ‘Envois’, Socrates and p/Plato take up reversible positions as writer and reader, dictator and transcriber, sender and recipient, father and son, master and disciple, legator and legatee: they form a same-sex, different-generation couple in which Oedipal violence is only one of the multiple modes through which daddies and boys encounter and mutually constitute one another, procreating in the beautiful both in body and spirit, undecidably in body and in spirit, in a mode of reproduction which comes before the determination into female/body and masculine/ spirit. Succeeding in taking pleasure in the between, in the tele.60

TURNING ONE’S BACK ON REPRODUCTION: HOW TO HAVE CHILDREN WITHOUT WOMEN OR MEN In the last third or so of ‘Envois’, Derrida begins to write more and more about his desire to write a preface to ‘a book about Freud, about the Platonic inheritance, the era of the posts, the structure of the letter and other common goods or places’.61 In this book, he writes, ‘everything will consist in describing Socrates with Plato making him a child in his back, and I will retain only the lexicon required for every line in the drawing’.62 The scene on the Bodleian postcard is here invoked as the organizing principle of ‘Envois’—the passages ‘retain[ed]’ in ‘Envois’, which is staged as the fragmentary remnants of a correspondence between Derrida and one or more unnamed recipients, are only those which constitute ‘the lexicon required for every line in the drawing’. It is at this very point that the scene is described for the first time as ‘Plato making [Socrates] a 59

Derrida (1987a), 133; (1980a), 145; (1987a), 79; (1980a), 88. ‘How to succeed in taking pleasure from t.e.l.e.?’, Derrida asks ((1987), 155; (1980), 168). 61 Id. (1987a), 175; (1980a), 190. 62 Id. (1987a), 187; (1980a), 202. 60

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child in his back’.63 The scene, when it comes to be the governing ‘lexicon’ of ‘Envois’, does so as a scene of reproduction: what is between Socrates and Plato is a child. As I have indicated, this making of a child is not ‘metaphorical’, as compared to the ‘literal’ making of a child through heterosexual intercourse, gestation in a female body, and the labour of childbirth. Derrida refuses to allow our ‘knowledge’ of the femaleness or maleness of individual bodies or bodily zones to determine their function in the scene of reproduction, transmission, and inheritance:64 he refuses to allow reproduction to dictate the ‘truth’ of bodily sex. He refuses, too, to distinguish a priori, not only between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ insemination, but between genetic reproduction and writing, between gestation and transcription, and the term ‘child’ operates as a switching point between those two registers of reproduction: I would like to be your secretary. While you were out I would transcribe your manuscripts of the night before or the tapes on which you would have improvised, I would make several discreet interventions that you alone would recognize, I would watch the children that you would have given me . . . I would even breast-feed them, and almost permanently would hear the next one breathing in my belly.65

There are several passages in ‘Envois’ in which Derrida writes about Plato’s reproductive desire; in one, he reads the Bodleian scene as one of artificial insemination:

63 The idea of reading philosophy as a process of impregnation a tergo appears also in Deleuze, who writes of his study of philosophy: ‘I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery, or (it comes to the same thing), immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ (1995), 6. Derrida’s treatment of more or less the same scene, however, takes place in a register which is not structured, as Deleuze’s is, around the grotesque or the surreal, and which does not play to the same extent on the equation of assfucking with pathic humiliation. 64 Again, an analogous example is provided by leatherdyke practices. Hale gives an example of a practice of butt-fucking which could, in certain highly specified conditions, produce a ‘real’ child: ‘a leatherdyke boy pleading, “Please, Daddy, fuck my butt!” may be asking daddy to fuck the same orifice into which a physician would insert a speculum to perform a pap smear.’ Hale (1997), 230. 65 Derrida (1987a), 70; (1980a), 78.

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Now make the image move, with lateral movements, pass yourself the film. Himself, he wants to issue seed (he talks about it all the time, right?), he wants to sow the entire world, and the best lever at hand, look, is S., the sterile midwife. So he sends him to himself, he sends himself a child via him, an ekgonon, an offspring or an interest. You can see the pickup of the multiplied levers, the big and little syringes.66

The passage multiplies recording and reproductive technologies. The technology of film is anachronously used to mobilize the Bodleian image, to render visible a new set of codes and signs within its arrangement of lines.67 The implements in Socrates’ hands, often in ‘Envois’ read as writing implements, here become levers and/or syringes for the transmission of semen; the languages of writing, sending, sowing, mechanics, and economics all participate in, but none of them governs, the scene of reproduction. Even the Greek word that Derrida uses for ‘child’, ekgonon, refers undecidably both to a new human creature and to interest on an investment (‘increase’ might be an English translation). Plato’s desire to ‘sow the entire world’ (the world here being the inert ground on which men produce ‘increase’) is a high masculine technofantasy of disembodiment, which understands sperm as the motor, the coding machine, which writes (produces/reproduces) everything. Derrida invokes and displaces this fantasy in the scene quoted above, through the multiplication of languages and codes (levers and pickups), which refocus attention on the play of mediating structures—on the ‘between’—which enables this high masculine fantasy in the first place, rather than allowing these structures to remain hidden, humming away just below the threshold of audibility like the hum of a PC or a cable modem, and to be the unnoticed support system for an understanding of semen as the magical code generating the universe-as-matrix. He invokes and displaces this fantasy, too, when he conceives of human reproduction as a technological system for the transmission 66

Derrida (1987a), 101; (1980a), 111. Derrida is playing on practices of reading which apply modern technologies to ancient texts—analytic techniques like philology and linguistics, or electronic techniques like multiple spectral imaging—yet aim to recover immediacy (this is how the text really was, or how it really worked) rather than to attend to mediation. 67

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of sperm, which functions like the postcard (a public/private message circulating among positions and along channels which are determined by networks of state power). He writes: Imagine the day, as I have already, that we will be able to send sperm by post card, without going through a check drawn on some sperm bank, and that it remains living enough for the artificial insemination to yield fecundation, and even desire.68

The possibility of such a technology is not the effect of a historically specific development, Derrida takes care to point out: it is ‘old as Methuselah, older than our most upsetting techniques’.69 Rather, the sending of sperm and the sending of postcards are both to be understood in the demystified, denaturalizing terms of the distancing which is within every sign, mark, or trait. Within every sign already, every mark or every trait, there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another, another than you or me, and everything is messed up in advance, cards on the table.70

‘The post’ is ‘what there has to be so that [the sign] is legible for another’: it is the impossibility of direct address, of address which could guarantee to reach a single specified recipient directly, without having to be routed through language, through the generality which means that any message which can be read by a single recipient must also be able to be read by another. Derrida, elaborating on this quality of the post, defines the post and the child in congruent terms: Would like to address myself, in a straight line, directly, without courrier, only to you, but I do not arrive, and that is the worst of it. A tragedy, my love, of destination. Everything becomes a post card once more, legible for the other, even if he understands nothing about it. And if he understands nothing . . . it might always arrive for you, for you too, to understand nothing, and therefore for me, and therefore not to arrive, I mean at its

68

Id. (1987a), 24; (1980a), 29. Or at least the burden of proving that it is not as old as this falls on the reader/ recipient of ‘Envois’: the sentence cited here begins ‘But, dear friend, prove to me that this is not . . . ’ (id. (1987a), 24; (1980a), 29). Coming up with such proof turns out to be much harder than one might think. 70 Id. (1987a), 29; (1980a), 34. 69

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destination . . . What has betrayed us, is that you wanted generality: which is what I call a child.71

The child, in Derrida’s most direct and brief definition, is ‘generality’: the structure of language as detour, deferral, distance, or differance which makes private, direct communication impossible. In the relation between the child and the post as figures of generality in ‘Envois’, Derrida refuses to reduce the child to the status of metaphor, making no ethical demands in its alterity (‘A child is what one should not be able to “send” oneself. It never will be, never should be, a sign, a letter, even a symbol’72). Importantly, though, he also refuses to allow the ‘child’ to accede to a status as real or literal which would place it outside, and protect it from, the tragedy of adestination. In this way, he avoids setting up the queer daddy/boy network of filiation in ‘Envois’ as against—antagonistically differentiated from—the ‘real’ of heterosexual reproduction. ‘Envois’ thus comes to legibility as a response to the call in Lee Edelman’s influential book No Future to think the relation between the queer and the child in relation to the social structures which connect us to generality and (hence?) to the future. Edelman’s book opens with a resonant call to refuse the order to be on the side of the children which, he argues, structures and delimits the horizon of possibility in the realm of the political—and to perform that refusal in the name of the queer, since ‘queerness’, he insists, names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’.73 I am highly sympathetic to that call, but in the end I think that Leo Bersani’s back-cover endorsement of the book reverses itself in the reading, becoming a chilling condemnation: ‘Edelman’s extraordinary text is so powerful’, he writes, ‘that we could perhaps reproach him only for not spelling out the mode in which we might survive our necessary assent to his argument.’ The argument, in other words, requires queers to assent to something which offers us no mode for survival: to our eradication.

71 72 73

Id. (1987a), 23; (1980a), 27–8. Id. (1987a), 25; (1980a), 30. Edelman (2004), 3.

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Edelman, as I have said, argues that politics is closed on and by the figure of the Child, which invokes the future both as the repetition of the present (social) order and as that for which the present must be sacrificed, especially insofar as the present involves pleasure (understood as anti-social). ‘Politics’, he writes, ‘however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child.’74 Edelman’s Child is reproduction as repetition, as the reproduction and transmission of a same (the social order’s future Child is [the same as] its inner Child), which, moreover, is authenticated through its very reproduction. Through the figure of the Child, the future is appropriated as nothing more or other than the affirmation of the (present) social order, and this forecloses any resistance to that order in the present, which becomes mere ‘enslavement to the future’.75 A short fragment in ‘Envois’—two half-sentences between the fifty-two-space gaps which indicate a lacuna in the correspondence—incorporates Edelman’s project within Derrida’s system. The fragment reads, in full: ‘doom, always to prefer the child. The child in itself, in oneself.’76 It comes soon after a passage on ‘historical teleology . . . that letter that always arrives at its destination’, in which Derrida writes: ‘The “course of history” is not far off . . . As soon as it arrives at its destination, history will have had a course . . . its “proper” course.’77 Connecting the two passages is the temporality of reproductive futurity. Here, the child ‘in itself ’, as Edelman also sees, is the child ‘in oneself ’, the future as the perfectible reproduction of the present, the child as the regulation of the ‘proper course’ of history according to a generational model of irreversible historical sequence. This generational model is the ‘order’ to believe that ‘Socrates comes before Plato’. As the determination of daddy/boy into the narrow structure of father/son filiation, this is also the order to

74 76 77

75 Edelman (2004), 3. Ibid. 30. Derrida (1987a), 145; (1980a), 157. Id. (1987a), 144–5; (1980a), 157.

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subject ‘sexual meaningfulness’ to a naturalized figure of heterosexual procreation, as Edelman also sees: sexual practice will continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving the machinery of sexual meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations.78

However, Edelman’s haste here to allow ‘heterosexual procreation’ to be a ‘biological fact’ (a truth, a reality, outside and beyond of technology) points to the difference in orientation between himself and Derrida in their approaches to the problem of meaning-production, sexual practice, and reproduction. Edelman sets up the problem of the Child—of the organization of meaning-production around heteroreproductive futurity—in a way which might at first appear to be congruent with the project of ‘Envois’. For example, in a reading of Baudrillard’s essay ‘The Final Solution’, Edelman exposes the uselessness, meaninglessness, and mechanicity which Baudrillard finds in sex after the technological development of ‘automatic or biotechnological reproduction’ as being inherent in all sexual practices, writing: ‘heterosexuality, stripped of its ancient reproductive alibi, must assume at last the despiritualized burden of its status as sexual function . . . it must recognize the “extraneous” element in sex that is never extraneous to sex’.79 However, he is insistent that this can only come about when the ‘ancient reproductive alibi’ has been stripped away, reinforcing the divide between reproductive and non-reproductive sex and reserving the scene of heterosexual procreation as the primal site of reproduction. This reservation comes about in part through the distinction Edelman draws between fucking and reproduction. He defines reproduction as the absence of fucking (‘the child of the two-parent family 78

Edelman (2004), 13. Ibid. 64. The sentence continues with a citation from Derrida—the only one in No Future—which Edelman deploys in order to connect sex-as-useless-function with differance and the death drive: I read this citation—from ‘Differance’—as a hysterical displacement, or a disinheritance, of ‘Envois’. It signals the point of connection between Derrida’s thought and Edelman’s, but also Edelman’s refusal to route his argument through the queer child of ‘Envois’. 79

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thus proves that its parents don’t fuck’80). Fucking is on the side of the queer: it is undecidably sex (the term is glossed as ‘sensory experience . . . pleasure of the flesh’81) and violence (‘fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net . . . fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop’).82 In drawing this distinction, however, as was already becoming clear in the citation above (‘politics . . . works to . . . authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child’), Edelman reserves heteroreproductive futurity as a noiseless and perfect transmission machine, a machine which makes and authenticates copies with no degeneration, a machine which cannot be used for counterfeiting. Against this impossible machine, Edelman pits what he calls sinthomosexuality, which, he writes, ‘would assert itself against futurity, against its propagation, insofar as it would designate an impasse in the passage to the future and, by doing so, would pass beyond, pass through, the saving fantasy futurity denotes’.83 For Derrida, on the other hand, no transmission machine can authenticate, can guarantee the authenticity of what it transmits. In another reading of the scene on the Bodleian postcard—in which, elsewhere, Socrates and Plato are read as being in the process of counterfeiting money84—Derrida sees, not a scene of inheritance in which the Platonic order is transmitted to the future in the form of the child, but ‘this incredible chicanery of filiation and authority, this family scene without a child in which the more or less adoptive, legitimate, bastard or natural son dictates to the father the testamentary writing which should have fallen to him’.85 Edelman, no doubt, would see in this scene of the son as dictator to the father only the ‘fascism of the baby’s face’, ‘the

80

Edelman (2004), 41. Ibid. Ibid. 29. Derrida’s refusal in ‘Envois’ of this conflation of (queer) sex with violent damage, humiliation and harm provides another reason for preferring his account of the erotics of generation to No Future’s. 83 Ibid. 33. Derrida responds dryly: ‘As long as you don’t know what a child is, you won’t know what a fantasy is, nor of course, by the same token, what knowledge is’ (1987a), 39; (1980a), 45. 84 Derrida (1987a), 36; (1980a), 42. 85 Id. (1987a), 61; (1980a), 68–9. 81 82

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embodiment of futurity collapsing undecidably into the past, the image of the Child as we know it: the Child who becomes, in Wordsworth’s phrase, but more punitively, “father of the Man”’.86 In Derrida’s daddy/boy romance, however, the child’s becoming father (or rather, daddy) to the man takes place in more modes than the simply punitive (and indeed the punitive is itself no longer simple). Through the simultaneity and reversibility of generations in the Socrates/Plato scene, as I have argued, the child as figured in ‘Envois’ is not that which comes to replace the parent; child and parent exist at the same time, and insofar as the child is the parent’s relation to the future, it is only so as generality, as differance, deferral, and deviation—as that which divides the present from itself. As generality, the child is not only the ‘doom’ of the eternal return of the Same (‘the child in itself, in oneself ’) and of the ‘proper course of history’; the child is, also or instead, ‘the impasse in the passage to the future’, the tragedy—which is also the hope—of adestination. Edelman’s model of reproductive futurity as ‘the fascism of the baby’s face’ gives us what is indeed a terrifying vision of politics and the future as proceeding implacably through the irreversible sequence of the generations. Yet this is precisely the generational model that is so comprehensively, and pleasurably, fucked with in ‘Envois’, through the disruptive force of Socrates’ and Plato’s daddy/ boy romance. Moreover, that romance, as I have argued above, undoes in advance the distinctions that Edelman tries to draw between fucking as ‘meaningless’ (or violent) sex, the site of the queer/ the death drive, and the child as the conservatism of politics. In other words, No Future and ‘Envois’ can be coupled in that they both take on the problem of the interrelated figures of filiation, reproduction, meaning-production, sexual practice, chronology, and the future. Both embody a queer resistance to a filial order which generates meaning around heterosexual procreation as the ‘real’—the natural, the organic, the non-artificial and non-technical site—of reproduction. Edelman’s emphasis, however, is on the ordering force of the metaphor of filiation: he calls us, as queers, to disobey the order

86

Edelman (2004), 151, 10.

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which appropriates reproduction for the project of heterosexual procreation, and which does so in the name of a future which is only the repetition-as-authentication of the present social order. But he calls upon us to disobey this order by obeying it,87 by ‘pronouncing at last the words for which we’re condemned should we speak them or not: . . . that the Child as futurity’s emblem must die; that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past’.88 Derrida, by contrast, quietly and devastatingly traces all the conceptual-technical machinery and chicanery which produces the scene of heterosexual procreation as the truth of reproduction—and hence exposes the artificiality of that scene, displacing it from the position in which it sought to govern the discursive field. Where Edelman, by acceding to a social order which means that ‘we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’, allows the force of the filial order to deprive the future of queerness, Derrida insists that ‘everything begins, like the post card, with reproduction’,89 that there is no ‘original’ to be reproduced as the Same, and that the future—which, we remember from Of Grammatology, ‘is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality’ and can only be conceived not as the Child but as ‘a sort of monstrosity’90—is adestination, deviation, deferral . . . and, therefore, disobedience to the order of filiation. What does this have to do with ‘Derrida and Antiquity’? Well, let me suggest that the daddy/boy romance of Socrates and Plato, together with the deployment of a figure of reproduction which governs both the production of children and the transmission of postcards, allows us to read the conjoining ‘and’ in a particularly (and queerly) productive way. What ‘Envois’ gives us is to think 87 It is unclear why the queer repetition of the social order subverts it whilst straight repetition authenticates it, much as it is unclear why queer violence against children subverts the social order while straight violence against children subtends it, but this is what Edelman implies at several points in No Future. His argument relies on and reinstates the a priori distinction between queer jouissance and straight reproduction that ‘Envois’ elegantly demolishes. 88 Edelman (2004), 31. 89 Derrida (1987a), 63; (1980a), 70. 90 Id. (1976), 5; (1967a), 14.

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reading—even wilful misreading, as in The Anxiety of Influence—not as violent antagonism, or even as unmediated dialogue, but as coupling.91 An erotic relation, to be sure, but—as the mechanical metaphor in ‘coupling’ makes legible—an eros in the age of technical reproductibility. This improper coupling is not governed by a filial chronology or a historical-literary code which restricts the adestining field of ‘correspondence’ and allows for transmission only through proximity or direct contact. It is the mode of coupling which, towards the end of ‘Envois’, Derrida imposes upon Freud and Heidegger, writing: Freud and Heidegger, I conjoin them within me like the two great ghosts of the ‘great epoch’. The two surviving grandfathers. They did not know each other, but according to me they form a couple, and in fact just because of that, this singular anachrony. They are bound to each other without reading each other and without corresponding.92

The coupling of Freud and Heidegger, Derrida writes, is possible ‘in fact just because of . . . this singular anachrony’. The very ‘anachronism’ which is ‘unleashed’ in the Plato/Socrates relationship through Derrida’s patient slashing in ‘Envois’ is what enables the coupling Freud/Heidegger to take the place of ‘the couple Plato/Socrates, divisible and indivisible, their interminable partition, the contract which binds them to us until the end of time’. Such a coupling seeks no alibi. It does not seek to hide its own postal and technological conditions of possibility from itself; it is not ‘living’ a certain determination of the post and of filiation ‘as a quasinatural given’. Instead, it takes responsibility for its taking place within me, according to me, the reader, and for the anachronistic force that this necessarily entails, such that the apparatus of mediation within which the two are coupled is no longer the invisible, legitimate, naturalized order of generation, but itself becomes an irreducible, and even an erotic, element in the coupling of two texts, two thinkers, two people.

91 The undecidability between one and two, female and male, heterosexual and homosexual, which plays through ‘Envois’ indicates the possibility—which I have not explored in this chapter—of extending the practice beyond the couple. 92 Derrida (1987a), 191; (1980a), 206.

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Such anachronistic couplings thus no longer legitimize or naturalize themselves via the order of generation: rather they unleash the reversibility, the switchability, of a daddy/boy romance. Rather than seeking to reduce distance and to legitimize themselves through proximity, contact, presence, such couplings take pleasure in the apparatus of mediation itself, in the irreducible t.e.l.e. which divides and connects Plato and Socrates, Freud and Heidegger, Hale and his daddy, Derrida and antiquity—and which, for Irigaray, is Eros itself. Such couplings do justice to the queer pleasures of reading. The and which so queerly couples Derrida with antiquity in the title of this collection thus marks the possibility of a relationship with antiquity which partakes in the anachronistic force of eros which always already threatens the order of generation, figured as the disciplined transmission of legitimized knowledge across masculine generations, from within. Such a relationship can (I hope) produce readings of texts from antiquity which exceed the order of generation, while necessarily accounting for, taking responsibility for, their implication in the erotics of filiation.

CONCLUSION: IT TAKES A GOOD B OY TO MAKE A GOOD DADDY 9 3 In a 1999 interview in Culture Machine, Sue Golding (johnny de philo) writes of Derrida’s feminism: His work suggests that he could do otherwise, but what he actually does is what I call SOS: same old stuff . . . an attempt to be feminist by posing women as glorious or horrible, or perhaps a lack . . . The Post-Card is the same when he talks about being submissive, but what he means by this is being female . . . There is this new cartoon called Chicken and Cow. It is the first lesbian, or maybe transgender, cartoon I’ve seen . . . Sometimes Cow calls Chicken a girl, sometimes Cow calls Chicken a brother. The cartoon offers a whole layer of different female possibilities, from rolling around in a

93

This is the title of a short story by Pat Califia (1994b).

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pig pen to playing in a rock band, which escapes the philosophers like Derrida.94

Although I agree with Golding’s reservations about Derrida’s use of the term ‘woman’ in general,95 through my reading of the layering of gendered terms and relations in ‘Envois’, I begin to recognize something like the possibilities of Chicken and Cow in Derrida’s Plato and Socrates. Perhaps such a reading means that I am not faithful to Derrida in my relation to this text of his, this text which ravished my heart away when I first encountered it nearly ten years ago. And certainly, as Golding could rightly point out, there is still ‘no daughter in this landscape’. But precisely as an unfaithful or disobedient boy, I engender Derrida as a better daddy to me than he could ever otherwise have been. 94 95

Golding and Zylinska (1999), n.p. See my reading of ‘The Double Session’ via Irigaray (Willis, 2009).

References 1. Works by Jacques Derrida 1967a. De la grammatologie, Paris. 1967b. L’E´criture et la diffe´rence, Paris. 1967c. La Voix et le phe´nome`ne, Paris. 1967d. ‘Violence et me´taphysique’, in Derrida (1967b), 117–251. 1967e. ‘Cogito et Histoire de la folie’, in Derrida (1967b), 51–97. 1968. ‘La Diffe´rance’ Discussion, Bulletin de la Socie´te´ Franc¸aise de Philosophie, 62.3, July–Sept., Paris. 1972a. La Dissemination, Paris. 1972b. Marges de la philosophie, Paris. 1972c. Positions, Paris. 1972d. ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’, in Derrida (1972a), 79–196. 1972e. ‘Ousia et gramme´’, in Derrida (1972b). 1972f. ‘La Diffe´rance’, in Derrida (1972b), 1–29. 1973. Speech and Phenomena, Evanston, Ill. 1974a. Glas, Paris. 1974b. ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History, 6: 5–74. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore. 1978a. E´perons: les styles de Nietzsche, Paris. 1978b. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago. 1978c. ‘Le Retrait de la me´taphore’, Poe´sie, 7: 103–26 ¼ ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’, trans. Frieda Gasner, Biodun Iginla, Richard Madden, and William West, Enclitic, 2.2: 5–33. 1979. Spurs, Chicago. 1980a. La Carte postale: de Socrate a` Freud et au-dela`, Paris. 1980b. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago. 1981a. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago. 1981b. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Derrida (1981a), 61–171. 1981c. Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago. 1982a. L’Oreille de l’autre: otobiographies, tranferts, traductions; textes et de´bats avec Jacques Derrida, Montreal. 1982b. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago. 1984a. ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies’, trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Joseph H. Smith

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and William Kerrigan (eds.), Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature, Baltimore, 1–32. 1984b. ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’, Diacritics, 14: 20–31. 1984c. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago. Orig. pub.: Marges de la philosophie, Les E´ditions de Minuit, 1972. 1985a. ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in Graham (1985), 165–207; 209–48. 1985b. The Ear of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Lincoln, Nebr. 1986a. Parages, Paris. 1986b. Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rorty, Lincoln, Nebr. 1987a. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago. 1987b. ‘Comment ne pas parler: de´ne´gations’, in Jacques Derrida, Psycheˆ: inventions de l’autre, Paris, 535–95. 1987c. Feu la cendre, Paris. 1988. Me´moires pour Paul de Man, Paris. 1989a. Memoires for Paul de Man, rev. edn., trans. Cecile Lindsay et al., New York. 1989b. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Chicago. 1991a. Jacques Derrida, in collaboration with Geoffrey Bennington, Paris. 1991b. Circonfession: cinquante-neuf pe´riodes et pe´riphrases, in Bennington and Derrida (1991a). 1991c. Donner le temps I: la fausse monnaie, Paris. 1991d. ‘Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German’, New Literary History, 22: 39–95. 1991e. L’Autre Cap, Paris. 1992a. Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge, New York. 1992b. ‘Donner la mort’, in L’E´thique du don: Jacques Derrida et la pense´e du don, Paris. 1992c. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas, Bloomington, Ind. 1992c. ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, in Coward and Foshay (1992), 73–143. 1992d. ‘Nous autres Grecs’, in Cassin (1992), 251–76. 1993a. Spectres de Marx, Paris. 1993b. Khoˆra, Paris. 1993c. Jacques Derrida, in collaboration with Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago. 1993d. Circumfession: Fifty-Nine Periods and Periphrases, in Derrida (1993c). 1993e. [Essai sur le nom ¼] Passions, Sauf le Nom, Khoˆra, Paris.

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1994a. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, New York. 1994b. Force de loi, Paris. 1994c. Politiques de l’amitie´, suivi de L’Oreille de Heidegger, Paris. 1995a. Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne, Paris. 1995b. On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford, Calif. 1995c. ‘Khoˆra’, in Derrida (1995b), 89–130. 1996a. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre, Paris. 1996b. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago. 1996c. ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, London, 77–88. 1996d. ‘Foi et savoir’, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds.), La Religion: se´minaire de Capri, Paris. 1997a. De l’hospitalite´, Paris. 1997b. Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!, Paris. 1997c. Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins, London. 1997d. Le Droit a` la philosophie du point de vue cosmopolitique, Vendoˆme. 1998a. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot, Paris. 1998b. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, Calif. 1998c. ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds.), Religion, Stanford, Calif., 1–78. 1999a. Donner la mort, Paris. 1999b. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus, Bloomington, Ind. 2000a. Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Stanford, Calif. 2000b. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. [as a sequel to Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of my Death] Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, Calif. 2000c. Foi et savoir; suivi de Le Sie`cle et le Pardon, Paris. 2001a. Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, London. 2001b. ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’, Critical Inquiry, 27: 174–200. 2001c. Papier machine: le ruban de machine a` e´crire et autres re´ponses, Paris. 2001d. ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Derrida (2001a), 97–193. 2001e. Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, New York. 2002a. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed., trans., and introd. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, Calif. 2002b. Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, New York. 2002c. Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf, Stanford, Calif. 2003a. Gene`ses, ge´ne´alogies, genres et le ge´nie: les secrets de l’archive, Paris. 2003b. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson, Chicago.

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Index Notes: Bold page numbers indicate chapter extents. As the entire text concerns Derrida, there is no separate entry for him. Works by Derrida are indexed alphabetically by title. Abraham (Derrida’s great-uncle) 122 absolute other 331 absolute repeatability 7 absolute singularity 7, 67 Adkin, Neil 315n Aegeus, King (father of Theseus) 194 Aeneid (Virgil) 204 Aizura, Aren Z. 342n, 350n Alcman 77–8 Alcock, Susan E. 224n Alkinoos, palace of 244 Allen, Danielle S. 334n Alliez, Eric 17 & n–20 & n, 23–4, 25, 26, 331n analogies/analogia/anagrams 21, 67 abstract ideas as 274 anagrammatical texture 53 irreducible 56, 62, 63, 64, 66 neutralization of 53, 54, 103 and opposition 102 anamnesis 48 Anaximander 78–9 anima see soul animots 71 Annas, Julia 322n anomos (outside the law) and anomon 21, 47–8, 227–8, 231–3 Antigone 188 Antigone (Sophocles) 8

and father Oedipus 190, 192–3, 195, 206, 222–3, 230 devotion to 196–8, 205 anti-humanism of Derrida (Ends of Man) 9 Anxiety of Influence (Bloom) 348, 367 apeiron/apeiros (infinite/indefinite/ boundless/unlimited) 78 & n, 79, 87, 334–5 Apology (Plato) 336, 338–40 archaeology 159–61 of archival ambiguity 181–4 double-sidedness of 174–5 fantasy of 177 metaphor 174–6 & n archeˆ 75, 78, 81, 95 writing/archie´criture 21, 59, 97 archives/archivization 175–7 ambiguity, archaeology of 181–4 Arendt, Hannah 234 & n ‘Aristos and Polyphilos on Language of Metaphysics’ 270 , 279–80 Aristotle 3, 4, 8, 9, 14, 18, 19n, 20, 34, 74 Eudemian Ethics 258, 259 and friendship 259 hospitality 208 & n, 224–5 metaphor, Derrida’s reading of 267–88 see also ‘White Mythology’

388

Index

Aristotle (cont.) Nichomachean Ethics 258 Poetics 242, 269, 282 Politics 225 Rhetoric 272 temporality 251 Armstrong, Richard 160–1, 172n Arnold, Matthew 138–9, 156 Athens 155–8, 202 atopia/atopos (‘out of place’) 329 & n, 330, 337–8 Attridge, Derek 299, 300, 302, 303, 306 Aufkla¨rung 157 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 4n, 101, 102n, 103n, 115–20 passim, 123n, 127, 128, 129, 317 Confessions 117–18, 297n, 298 & n, 299n, 302, 309 & n, 311, 315 on origin of evils 128 prayer of 127 Austin, J. L. 294, 296 Autolykos (grandfather of Odysseus) 241 autre que l’eˆtre 112 Babel, Tower of 277n Bacchae (Euripides) 227 Bachelard, Gaston 268 Balfour, Ian 5, 7, 11 Barnes, J. 4n, 78n, 79n Barthes, Roland 304n Bass, Alan 269n ‘bastard reading’ 6 Baudrillard, Jean: ‘Final Solution’ 363 BDSM practices see daddy/boy Beattie, Thomas 347 & n being ‘beyond’ 102

Good ‘beyond’ 114 , 129 hermeneutics of 129 in-common 226 in-place 223–5 nature of see ontology non-being shaped according to 137 ‘other than’ 112 as ousia 32, 34, 286 and remainder 25 of writing/e´criture 48 Benjamin, Andrew 4n, 14, 207–34 Bennington, Geoffrey 88, 94n, 99 & n, 105 & n, 119, 123n, 127, 135n, 182, 268, 277 & n, 286, 287n, 292n, 298, 299 & n, 302, 305, 310n Beowulf 250n Berger, Harry, Jr. 325n Bergren, Ann 235n Bergstein, M. 160n Bernasconi, R. 88n Bernfeld, S. C. 160n, 172n Bersani, Leo 361 Bertang, Zoe¨ (in Gradiva) 179–80, 182–3 binary oppositions 49 bird, flight of 242 birth see maternity Bissell, Elizabeth B. 290n Blanchot, Maurice 308 & n, 311 blindness 223 Blondell, Ruby 322n, 323n, 326n, 336n, 337n Bloom, Harold 347, 349n Anxiety of Influence 348, 367 Blundell, Mary Whitlock 197 Bodleian postcard 346 & n, 350, 357, 364–5 body and mind distinction 125 boundless see apeiron

Index Bourdieu, Pierre 304n Boussoulas, Nicolas–Isidore 334n Bower, E.W. 314n Bowlby, Rachel 187–206 Brault, Pascale–Anne 2 ‘We Other Greeks’ translation 17–39 Brisson, Luc 324n Bude´, F. 269n Budick, Sanford 105n Burger, Ronna 8n burial sites 159 Burton, Philip 314n Bushnell, Rebecca W. 221n Busse, Kristina 345n Butler, Judith 355n Byzantium 155–8 Califia, Pat 351, 368n Cambridge degree (1992), protests about 44–5, 62 Caputo, John D. 11, 101n, 106n, 117n, 127n, 306n, 308n Carney, William 354n Carte Postale, La (Derrida) 328, 334 Cassin, Barbara 17n, 20 Castel–Bouchouchi, Anissa 335n categorical imperative 158 causation/causes 20–1 as metaphor 276 of semes 104 cave, myth of 336 Chalcidius 321 Chaos 78 Chase, Cynthia 168 children 359 boy poet (‘ephebe’) 349 & n “father of the Man”, Child as 364–5 inner Child 362

389

pregnancy in (trans)men 347 procreation 353, 363 son see daddy/boy and under father temporality of reproductive futurity 362 Chomsky, Noam 84n Christ/Christians and Hellenism 154, 157 imaginary conversation with Heidegger 253 and Socrates, Hegel between 140–8 see also God Cicero 287, 295 & n, 315, 321 circumcision 119, 128 Circumfession (Derrida) 11–12, 101, 105, 117–28, 130 and confession 127 & n Clark, Timothy 88n, 304n, 308 Claus, D. B. 88n Coetzee, J. M. 290n Cohen, Tom 293n Colonus, Oedipus at see under Sophocles ‘Comment ne pas parler’ (Derrida) 105, 125, 129–30 Section I 106–11 Section II 111–17 compulsion, four-stage 130 confessions 122 Cooley, A. 160n Cooper, David E. 268n Copjec, Joan 335n cosmos/cosmic order (world order/ universe) 76, 79, 81, 92, 93 cosmogony (study of origin of universe) 80 cosmology (astronomical) 80, 86 Cosmos and Soul, on Nature of 325n–6n

390

Index

cosmos/cosmic order (world order/ universe) (cont.) and elements 78 eternal 96 & n and soul 75 Zeus as unifying principle 90 see also natural philosophy Coward, Harold 105n Creon 197, 200, 203 Critchley, Simon 148n, 268n Critias (Plato) 322, 325, 341 Crito (Plato) 198–9, 200 cultural relativism 80 Curtius, Ernst Robert 313, 314 daddy/boy (‘leatherdyke culture’) 348–51, 354 & n–8 & n, 361–2, 365–6 Damrosch, David 294n Davidson, Arnold 10n Davis, Kathleen 287 & n de Man, Paul 295, 296–8, 302, 308 de Vries, Hent 306n death 49, 51 of friends and love after 259–62 necessity of 180 rebirth after 238, 239, 240, 244 deception 75 Declaration of Independence (United States) 274–5 deconstruction 10, 21–2, 26, 64, 82, 104, 237 and ‘Circumfession’ 120–1 Derridean, Bennington’s description of 99 and Europe 135–6 and nostos 240 ‘on one hand. . . . on other hand’ 55 Heidegger and Introduction to Metaphysics 211–17

deferral 79 language as 361 deicide 62 Deleuze, Gilles 338, 358n ‘We Other Greeks’ 17n, 23, 24, 28, 29, 34–6 passim Delusion and Dream (Freud’s criticism of Jensen’s Gradiva) 160–81, 184 ghostliness of truth 169–71 psychoanalysis and outbidding of archaeology 172–8 de´mos 48 Descartes, Rene´‚ 276 diachronicity/diachrony 268, 276 dialectics 23, 57, 103 Die`s, Auguste 334n, 336n diffe´rence/diffe´rance 3, 7, 36, 50, 62n, 67, 101, 285–8, 317 and presocratic philosophy 77, 79, 82, 83, 88, 92, 93, 98 and sex-as-useless-function 363n sign of 23 differential force 32n, 77 differential sign system 89 Diogenes Laertius 255, 256 Diotima 336, 352 disciple/master relationship 115, 346 discourse 75, 76, 112 as structure of trace 102 as web 64 dissemination 237 see also sema Divine Names, On (pseudo– Dionysius) 102–3, 115 ‘Double Session, The’ (Derrida) 32 doubleness 327 of archaeology 174–5 Downey, Helen 170n, 174

Index Du Bois, Page 8n Dupont, Florence 314n Dutoit, Thomas 105n–17n passim, 129n Eaglestone, Robert 268n Eagleton, Terry 289n, 313n earmarks 45, 68, 70 Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, On the (pseudo-Dionysius) 115 Eckhart, Meister (Eckhart von Hochheim) 107 & n, 113–16 passim ‘Be Renewed in Spirit’ 115 ‘Like a Morning–Star’ 115 ‘economy of same’ 82 e´criture see writing Edelman, Lee: No Future 361–3 & n, 365–6 & n Egyptian god see Theuth El Greco: Burial of Count Orgaz 126 Eleactic stranger 137 elements 78 see also fire E´lie, Book of 126, 130 ‘Emma’, Freud’s psychoanalysis of 168 encomium 115, 127 ‘The Ends of Man’ (Derrida) 9 Enlightenment 3, 135 ‘Envois’ (Derrida) 343, 344–8, 349, 357, 361–9 passim ‘ephebe’ (boy poet) 349 & n Epicurus 34n eris (strife) 97 Eros as cosmic principle 78 see also sexual love Escarpit, Robert 304n escarres (scars) 118, 126

391

and facial paralysis 130 of God 121–2 Eteocles 197 eternal return myth 236, 237–49 see also Frame, Douglas etymologism 277 see also metaphor under Aristotle Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle) 258, 259 Euge`ne (Derrida’s uncle) 122 Euripides: Bacchae 227 Europe as Athens–Jerusalem– Rome–Byzantium 155–8 roots of philosophy see Greek and Jew evils, origin of 128 exchange and metaphor 268, 272 exemplarity 69–70, 123, 125–6 exergue (on coins) 279 & n exteriority-interiority opposition 49, 51 facial paralysis of Derrida 124–5, 126 Fama (rumour/fame) 204 fantasy of archaeology 177 father/paternity king-god 46–7, 61, 62 patricide 62, 194n self-regenerating 237 and son 8, 67 erotics of filiation 342–69 as inadvertent killer 194n sexual relationship with see daddy/boy speaker and father resemblance 59–71 as victim of Oedipus (Laius) 199, 200, 203, 205

392

Index

Feeney, Dennis 314n femininity see women Ferrari, G. R. E. 293n, 304n, 334n Festugie`re, A. J. 323n filiation erotics of 342–69 see also daddy/boy; father/ paternity fire 253 as analogy 95–6 & n as archeˆ 81 cognitive aspect of 97n and logos/logoi 96 flame, spirit as 248–9, 250, 253 flux, logos of 98 Fontanier, P. E. 241, 268 force cosmic structure as 81 differential 32n, 77 non-discursive 26 foreigner (allotrios) 285 forms and theory of 48, 103 Forrester, J. 160n, 162n Foshay, Toby 105n Foucault, Michel 17n, 22n, 23, 28, 29, 33n–6 passim, 304n, 331, 338n fourfold structures 123, 125, 130 Frame, Douglas: on early Greek epic 239, 240, 241, 245, 246 & n, 250n France, Anatole Garden of Epicurus 268 and ‘White Mythology’ 238 & n–9, 268, 270 & n–1n, 273n, 274n France (country) 9 education 136 Jews in 157 philosophy 2–3 Revolution 15

Frede, Dorothea 334n Freeman, K. 84n Freud, Jakob 316 Freud, Sigmund 3, 13, 18, 30n, 32, 30n, 32, 291, 316, 355, 357, 367, 368 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 335 Derrida on 159–184 dreams, interpretation of 166 ‘Emma’, psychoanalysis of 168 on Gradiva (Jensen) 159, 160, 165–7, 182, 183 and Heidegger as couple 367 Interpretation of Dreams 166, 174–5 Moses and Monotheism 316 ‘Project for Scientific Psychology’ 168, 180 see also Delusion and Dream and under Gradiva Frieden, Ken 105n friendship/philoi 245 alter ego, friend as 26 death and mourning 259–62 definitions of 258 and love 236, 259–62 perfect 261 see also Politics of Friendship Fritscher, Jack 343n, 350n, 353n Frye, Northrop 349–50 future heteroreproductive futurity 363 yet-to-come (a` venir) 331–2 Gadamer, Hans–Georg 323n, 326n, 334n, 335n Gallop, David 245–6 Gamwell, L. 160n Garden of Epicurus (Anatole France) 268 Gasche´, Rodolphe 268n, 279

Index gay relationships see homosexuality Geist (Heidegger) 249, 253 ‘Geist ist Flamme, Der’ (‘Spirit is flame’) 248–9, 250, 253 ‘generality’, child as 361 generations 343, 346–7 Genet, J. 128 Gennep, Arnold van 353n genos, khoˆra as third 333–4 Gere, C. 159n Gersh, Stephen 101–32 Geschlecht 252 ghostliness of Truth 169–71 Gill, Christopher 352n Glas (Derrida) 4n, 8, 13, 69n, 128, 139, 140 Glendinning, Simon 268, 269 ‘Globalatinization’ see Mondialatinisation gnoˆmeˆ 95 God as Cause/Gift 113 gods 80 name of 111, 113 omnipresent 122 place of 114 six words uttered by 123n who knows everything 125 see also Christ/Christians; master Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 292, 313 Goff, Barbara 195n Goldhill, Simon 313 & n–14 Golding, Sue: Derrida’s feminism 368–9 Good ‘beyond being’ 114, 129 Gorgias 77n Gosling, J. C. B. 334n Gould, John 194 Goux, J.–J. 273n

393

Gradiva (novel by William Jensen) 159–84 archival ambiguity, archaeology of 181–4 copies and originals 162–5 Derrida’s impression of 178–81 and Freud 159, 160, 165–7, 182, 183 and ghostliness of truth 169–71 see also Delusion and Dream psychoanalysis and archaeology outbidden 172–8 Grammatology (Derrida) 366 graphics of supplementarity 58 Greece, Greeks and Hellenism 1–4, 25 and absolute singularity 7 education about 136 and France 11–12 Germany as heir of 11 gods 80 Graeco–Roman thought, concept of 8 and Hebraism 138–9 language 137–8 materialists 34 philosophy 2, 3, 6, 136 spirit of 138–9, 148–54, 157 Greek and Jew 135–58 Europe as Athens–Jerusalem– Rome–Byzantium 155–8 Hegel 137, 139–40, 155, 156 between Socrates and Christ 140–8 Hellenism, spirit of, Jew and 148–54 Griswold, Charles 8n Guattari, Fe´lix 338 Guillory, John 304n

394

Index

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 294 Gupta, Camel 342n Hadot, Pierre 323n, 326n, 329n Hake, S. 160n, 172n Halberstam, Judith 355n Hale, C. Jacob 354, 355 & n, 356, 358n, 368 Halperin, David 352 & n–3 & n Hamacher, Wolfgang 141n Hammond, N. G. I. 75n Hampton, Cynthia 334n, 335n Hanold, Norbert (in Gradiva) 181 Harrison, Bernard 268n, 270n, 277, 279, 281n Hartog, Franc¸ois 211n Havelock, Eric A. 245 Hegel, Georg W. F. 3 & n, 13, 128, 137, 139–40, 155, 156, 247, 268, 278 between Socrates and Christ 140–8 Derrida on see Glas Hellenism, spirit of 149–54 on Jews 153–4 and Kant 155–6 Heidegger, Martin 3, 4, 7, 13, 14, 105n, 113, 114, 115, 116, 129, 215 & n, 233, 304, 305 and Christians, imaginary conversations with 253–4 Introduction to Metaphysics 211–17 Psychopomp 236, 248–55 and Eros 367, 368 and Freud as couple 367 Geist 249, 253 and Greece Greek texts 31, 37 and Jews 136, 137, 138, 139 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ 44

‘We Other Greeks’ 18, 22n, 33, 35, 36n, 37–8 and Levinas 139 helios see sun Hellekson, Karen 345n Hellenism see Greece hemlock 50 Heraclitus 36 & n, 74–99 passim Hercules 227 hermeneutics 45, 129 Hesiod 75, 80, 81 Theogony 78n heteroreproduction 363–4 hierarchies of Platonism 49–50 Ho¨lderlin, Friedrich 249–50 homecoming see nostos Homer 75, 80, 240, 313 homophones 45, 68, 69–70 play, fils (son/thread) of 67 homosexuality see daddy/boy Hopke, Robert H. 353n Horace 174n, 315 hospitality Aristotle and 208 & n, 224–5 Oedipus at Colonus and 208–10 ‘unconditional’ 3 Of Hospitality (Derrida) 3, 4n, 11, 14, 228–9 ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ (Derrida) see ‘Comment ne pas parler’ Hunter, Richard 337n Husserl, Edmund 3, 105n, 247, 305 immigrant (allotrios) 285 Indo–European mythology 238–48 inequality in friendship 259 infinite/indefinite see apeiron initiation rites 352, 353n inscription 52 exemplary 69–70

Index intelligence/intellectio see noesis interiority-exteriority opposition 49, 51 Irigaray, Luce 2, 336, 353, 368 irony, Socratic, atopia of 337–8 Iser, Wolfgang 105n Ismene (daughter of Oedipus) 188, 195, 196, 197, 222 Isocrates 269n iteration see under repetition Ithaca 257 Jabe`s, Edmund 63n Jefferson, Anne 304n, 308n Jensen, Wilhelm, novel by see Gradiva Jerome, Saint 315n, 316, 317 Jersualem: Athens–Jerusalem– Rome–Byzantium, Europe as 155–8 Jerusalem (Moses Mendelssohn) 151 Jesus Christ see Christ Jews see Greek and Jew; Judaism/ Jewishness Jocasta (mother and wife of Oedipus) 199, 200–1, 203, 205 Johnny de Philo (Sue Golding) 368–9 Johnson, Barbara 65, 67n Johnson, Christopher 306n Johnson, Mark: Metaphors We Live By 275–6 jokes and puns 45 Joyce, James 138, 139, 236n, 252n, 254, 258n ‘Jubilee’ 153 Judaism/Jewishness 253 antiquity of 7 of Derrida 136 equality 153

395

ethical thought opposed to Greek metaphysics 138 exegesis and fourfold model of 122, 126 ‘Jew-as-other’ 136 and spirit of Hellenism 138–9, 148–54, 157 see also Greek and Jew justice, cosmic 96n Kafka, Franz 290n, 311 Kahn, C. H. 81, 86n, 88n, 90n, 94n, 95n Kamuf, Peggy 106n, 290n, 292n Kant, Immanuel 276 Aufkla¨rung 157 ‘Faith and Knowledge’ 155 and Hegel 155–6 on Jews and Greeks 139–40, 144, 145, 148, 151, 153, 155–6, 157 katachresis 243, 256 ‘forced metaphor’ of 242 sign, seˆma as 241, 244 Kearney, Richard 136, 138, 155 Kelly, Sean K. 23n Kennedy, Duncan F. 267–88 Kernan, Alvin B. 304n Khan, Charles H. 81, 88, 90n, 94n, 95n Khanna, Ranjana 196n khoˆra 7, 10, 12, 12–15, 102, 11, 114 & n, 116, 326–41 centrality of 340–1 Derrida’s long-standing engagement with 328, 331–5 described 326–31 function of 337–40 Platonic system and 335–7 as third genos 333–4 and system 335–7

396

Index

khoˆra (cont.) and ‘We Other Greeks’ 22, 30, 34, 37 see also under Plato Kirby, John T. 269n, 284–5, 287 & n Kirk, G. S. 78n, 80n Kofman, S. 165n Koyre´, Alexandre 323n Kronick, Joseph G. 290n, 304n Kuspit, D. 160n, 172n Labdacidae 205 see also Oedipus Lachelier, Jules 270 & n Laius (father of Oedipus) 199, 200, 203, 205 Lakoff, George: Metaphors We Live By 275–6 & n language 7 and deception 75 linguistic comprehension 88 origin of 73 ‘other’ of 26–8 and strife (eris) 97 and thought 75 see also Latin; logocentrism Lardinois, A. P. M. H. 334i Latin 153, 157–8 see Mondialatinisation law 322 Laws (Plato) 322 outside (anomon) 232–3 Lawlor, Len 63n ‘leatherdyke’ culture see daddy/boy Leavey, John P., Jr. 105n Leibniz, Gottfried 268 Leitch, Vincent B. 290n, 304n Leonard, Miriam 321n, 330n, 331n, 342n between Greek and Jew 135–58 introduction (on Derrida) 1–16

letters see postal system; postcards Levinas, Emmanuel 20, 25, 35, 105n Greek and Jew 135, 136–8, 139, 157 Leviticus 153 life 49, 51 see also death ‘Life of Jesus’ (Hegel) 140 light see sun limitless see apeiron linguistics see language literature 75 see also metaphor; writing Livre d’ E´lie 119 Lloyd–Jones, Hugh 211n logocentrism 4, 26, 53, 343–4 and muthos 327–8 presocratic philosophy and Derrida 85n, 98 logos/logoi 21, 26, 50, 59, 62 & n, 83, 85, 278 abstract sense 86n centrality of see logocentrism cognitive 88 engagement with ‘other’ 331 and fire 96 of flux or diffe´rance 98 as gathering (Versammlung) 35 Heraclitean 99 logographos and dialogos 334 as meaning/account/ratio 272 murderous relationship with 137 and muthos 327–8, 334 and nomos 47–8 self-loving 68–9, 70–1 self-seeding 71 of soul 98 as zoon 53, 60, 63, 65 see also logocentrism; speech Loraux, Nicole 211n, 326n, 331n

Index loss 253, 259, 271 see also death love after death 259–62 between friends 236, 259–62 as journey 275–6 Platonic 349n see also sexual love Lucretius 306n Luka´cs, Georg 147n lust see daddy/boy; sexual love Lycurgus 152, 153 Lyme’s disease 124 McCabe, Mary Margaret 322n, 323–4, 326n, 333n McCormack, Una 342n Mack, Michael 151n McLeod, Ian 105n, 327n Magister, Thom 350n, 351, 354n mail (postal system) 344, 360–1 see also postcards maintenant (eternal ‘now’) 278 Mal d’archive (Derrida) 161, 169–184 passim Malabou, Catherine 105n Marcus Aurelius 93n Marion, Jean–Luc 35, 101n, 105n, 106n, 129n Marius Victorinus 315 Marx, Karl 268 Eighteenth Brumaire 15 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 16, 253 masculinity see men mask and simulacrum 23–4 master /disciple relationship 115, 346 myth 11 see also God maternity see mothers

397

mathematics 276n meaning (sens) and expression 54 and reference distinct 112 -to-say (vouloir-dire) 52, 70, 71 of words 59 memory 175, 244 loss 253 men/masculinity 349n see also daddy/boy; father/ paternity Mendelssohn, Moses 144, 151 messianicity 253, 262 metaphor 63, 164, 272 archaeological 174–6 & n Aristotle’s see under Aristotle birth of 247 as conceptual construction 275–8, 279 definitions 268, 287, 288 Derridean metaphorics and Indo–European poetics 239–48 effaced/dead 279 forced and unnatural 241 & n four types of 282–8 of katachresis, forced 242 ‘Metaphor in Text of Philosophy’ see ‘White Mythology’ Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson) 275–6 morality as 276 Platonic 65–6 privileged 279 of sailing 29–40 of sun as father of light 237 metaphysics 10, 36, 70, 98, 237 deconstruction of 121 Greek 138 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger) 211–17

398

Index

metaphysics (cont.) Metaphysicians 273–4 and money 273 of presence 129 ‘White Mythology’ as 238–9 metoikoi (‘metics’) 191 Miller, J. Hillis 292n, 303n, 304n Miller, Paul Allen 2, 7, 15, 321–41 mimeˆsis 21, 22, 26, 241, 278 mind 125 see also nous/noos Mitchell, W. J. T. 10 Moı¨se, Paul 122 Mondialatinisation of Rome, Christianity and Europe 14, 158, 303–13 money and metaphysics 273 monism 129 Morris, Michael 268n Moses 153 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 316 Most, Glenn 141 mother/maternity 63, 199, 200–1, 203, 205 mourning death of friends 259–62 muthos and logos/logocentrism 327–8, 334 Mycenae 159 Mystical Theology, On (pseudo– Dionysius) 115 myth/mythology cave 336 death and rebirth of sun 238, 239 of return 236, 237–49 see also ‘White Mythology’ Naas, Michael 2, 5n, 43–72, 137, 228n ‘We Other Greeks’ translation 17–39

Nagy, Gregory 239, 240–6n passim, 243 & n, 250n, 262n Nails, Deborah 325n, 339n Nasatyau (Divine Twins) 240 National Socialism 250 natural philosophy 74–5 see also presocratic philosophy nature see physis Nazi Germany 248 Neel, Jasper 8n Negative Theology 4n, 11n, 13, 101–32 and conversion 102, 113, 114, 129 denials and how to avoid speaking 106–16, 129–30 exemplarity 123, 125–6 khoˆra and 111, 114, 116 Neoplatonism 116–17 and ‘circumfession’ 117–30 and place 115–16 three paradigms of 114–15 Nehamas, Alexander 338n Neoplatonism 35 see also under Negative Theology Nesselroth, P. W. 236n Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 256, 258, 259 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 3, 4, 7, 13, 15, 18, 20, 24, 27, 38, 30 & n, 32–3, 76–7, 297, 298 & n, 299, 300, 301n, 255, 345n on Truth 272 ‘We Other Greeks’ 18, 20, 24, 27, 28, 30 & n, 32–3 Nightingale, Andrea 282n, 337n Nimis, Steve 272, 273n No Future see Edelman noeˆsis/intellectio/intelligence 131, 240, 241, 242, 245 nomos 21, 47–8, 227–8, 231–2

Index non-being 137 noˆos see nous Norris, Christopher 267 & n Northrop Frye, Hermann 349n nostos (homecoming/return), philosophy as 235–63 myth of eternal return (‘ White Mythology’) 236, 237–49 Nekuia and Heidegger 236, 248–55 ‘Nous Autres Grecs’ see ‘We Other Greeks’ nous/noˆos (mind), Aristotelian 240, 241, 242, 244, 246–7 ‘now’, eternal (maintenant) 278 Nu´n˜ez, Rafael 276n oar 241, 243 & n O’Connell, Erin 285n, 73–100 see also presocratic philosophy Odysseus 239, 243–4 grandfather of (Autolykos) 241 Odyssey 240, 241 in underworld 245 return from, Penelope and 246n, 252 Oedipus 194–5, 205 daughters of 196–8 see also Antigone; Ismene and deconstruction of Greek philosophy 210–11, 215–34 dying Oedipus, Derrida’s 187–206, 209–11, 217–34 see also death; Oedipus; Oedipus under Antigone early rejection by parents 201 father and victim of see Laius mother and wife of (Jocasta) 199, 200–1, 203, 205 Oedipus at Colonus see under Sophocles

399

Oedipus the King 191, 205 see also Sophocles and Theseus 194, 198, 201–2, 206, 220, 222 unaware of killing father and marrying mother 199 as wanderer 194–8, 204–6 ‘Old Guard’ leather culture 350 & n–1, 354 ‘onto-theology’ 102, 129 ontology (nature of being) 24–5, 31, 77 of khoˆra 114–15 opposites 51, 53 unity of 83, 91, 93–5 organism discourse as 64 language as 68 origin of evils 128 Orrells, Daniel 4n, 13 Gradiva, Derrida’s impression of 159–84 Osborne, Robin 224n ‘other’ absolute 331 communicating with see prayer concept of 6, 8, 95 God as 119, 127 of language 26–8 logos’s engagement with 331 as referent 112 ‘than being’ 112 see also ‘We Other Greeks’ Oudemans, T. C. W. 334n ousia, being as 32, 34, 286 ‘Ousia and Grammeˆ’ (Derrida) 32, 34, 82 outside and inside 51 Papua New Guinea: male initiation rites 352

400

Index

parenthood see father/paternity; mother/maternity parergon 33 Parmenides/Parmenides 34–5, 137, 239, 245–6 parousia see presence paternity see father/paternity patricide 62, 194n Pedrick, Victoria 201n Penelope 236, 246n, 252, 255–63 Peri Phuseoˆs (‘Concerning Nature’) 75 Periodization of Derrida’s work 10, 122–3 Phaedrus (Plato) 5–6, 8 & n, 49, 51, 59–60, 61, 63, 69n, 334 illegitimate sons 237 & n Socrates in 46–7, 48, 50, 52, 56, 57, 62n, 64 pharmakon/pharmaka 6–7, 26, 27, 192 ambivalence of 60 defined and described 51–3, 55–6 inseparable from Plato’s entire ontology 48–51 negative value of 50 organic/inorganic 63 pharmakeus 33, 56 philosophical writing in 45–57 and Platonic remainder 334–5, 338 Philebus (inventor of grammar) 61, 334 philia see love philoi see friendship philosophy French 2–3 Greek 2, 3, 6 history of 278 philosopher king 45

and rhetoric 272, 334 writing reinvented see ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ phusis see physis physicians 273–4 physis (nature) 21, 24, 225, 242, 274, 278 and presocratic philosophy 63, 91 Pinker, Steven 277, 283–4, 287 Declaration of Independence translated 274–5 place 224 -event, fourfold 123, 125–6 and Negative Theology 115–16 and positioning (being-in-place) 223–5 that is no place see atopia; khoˆra Plato/Platonism/Platonic 3, 4, 9, 102, 113, 114, 129, 321–41, 344 analogies/anagrams 66–7 Apology 336, 338–40 on Bodleian postcard 364 borrowings from 56–9 Cave of 14–15 critique of 51 Crito 198–9, 200 dialectics 23 end of 35 erotics of filiation 342–69 hierarchies of 49–50 Laws 322 love 349n metaphor 65–6 metaphysics 10, 36 Republic 48, 102, 114, 129, 237, 324 and Socrates see under Socrates Sophist 137, 139 Statesman 332 Symposium 352

Index Timaeus 7, 57, 69n, 114 Theatetus 336 ‘We Other Greeks’ 18, 19n, 20, 23, 25–7 passim, 29, 34 & n, 35 & n see also khoˆra; Neoplatonism; Phaedrus; ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’; Timaeus ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (Derrida) 7, 8, 10, 12–13, 26, 43–72, 74, 209, 237 pharmakon, meaning of 51–6 resemblance between speaker and father/father-and-son 59–71 see also Plato/Platonism/ Platonic Plotinus 25, 34, 35 Poetics (Aristotle) 242, 269, 282 poetry and poets 44, 239–48, 349 &n poison, pharmakon as 53 Polemarchus 324 ‘polis’ 224 politics activist, Derrida lack of 2 political being, human as 224–5 Politics (Aristotle) 225 Politics of Friendship (Derrida) 4n, 11, 14, 157, 235–6, 245, 251–63 passim passim Polutropos 235–63 see also nostos Polyneices 193, 194, 203 Polyphemus 246n Polyphilos 287 see also ‘Aristos and Polyphilos’ polysemy 46, 70 & n Pompeii 159–60, 163, 172–3, 175, 184 novel about see Gradiva

401

Pongs, H. 166 Poseidon 246n postal system 344, 360–1 postcards 360–1 Bodleian 346 & n, 350, 357, 364–5 Post Card, The 32, 343, 368 Post-structuralism 2 prayer 115, 127 pregnancy in (trans)men 347 presence (parousia) 286 -absence opposition 49 metaphysics of 129 Presner, Samuel Todd 250n presocratic philosophy 4n, 13, 73–100 diffe´rence/diffe´rance 77, 79, 82, 83, 88, 92, 93, 98 separation 77–9 see also Anaximander; Heraclitus; Pythagoras; Xenophanes Prier, R. 81n primary substance see archeˆ procreation as aim of love 353 as ‘biological fact’ 363 production of signs 245 understanding 63 Protagoras 73n, 81 pseudo–Dionysius 101, 102n Divine Names 102–3 and Negative Theology 113, 114, 115, 116 psycheˆ 97, 246 see also soul psychoanalysis 159, 163, 171 outbidding of archaeology 172–8 see also Freud; Gravida

402

Index

Puspa, Damai 233n Pythagoras and Pythagoreans 79–80, 81, 321–2 ‘queerness’ see homosexuality Quinn, Kenneth 314n Rapaport, Hermann 174 Raven, J. E. 78n, 80n reason 22, 237 discourse of see metaphysics reasoning (dianoia/ratio) 131 rebirth after death 238, 239, 240, 244 Redfield, Marc 304n referent/reference 112 regicide 62 Rehm, Rush 192, 193 relativism, cultural 80 religion see Christ/Christians; God; Judaism; Negative Theology remedy, pharmakon as 53 repetition 182 absolute repeatability 7 and iteration 5 of signifier 47 of speech 50 reproduction, human 347–8, 359 & n–60 heterosexual nature of 363–4 sperm as motor of 359–60 temporality of 362 Republic (Plato) 48, 102, 114, 129, 237, 324 resemblance 21, 285–6 return eternal myth of 236, 237–49 from underworld 246n, 252 as homecoming see nostos of sun 240

revenance see nostos rhetoric 272, 334 Ric
ur, Paul 268n riots of 1968 9–10 Rivaud, Albert 321n, 323n, 324, 330n, 333n, 335n Robin, Le´on 323n, 326n Robinson, T. M. 88n, 96n ‘Rogues’ (Derrida) 4n Rohrwasser, M. 165n, 166n Rome 14, 155–8, 303–13 Rorty, Richard 294 Rosenstock, Bruce 4n, 14, 235–63 Rossi–Landi, Ferruccio 273n Roudinesco, Elisabeth 327n, 331n Roughley, A. 236n Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 49, 89, 90, 91, 296, 297, 299, 300 ruah (spirit) 253 sailing, metaphorics of 29–40 Saintsbury, George 290n Sallis, J. 322n, 324n–6n, 330n, 333n, 335n Salusinszky, Imre 350n Saussure, Ferdinand de 49, 272, 282, 286 Scanlon, Michael 101n, 106n, 117n, 127n, 308n scars see escarres scepticism 81 Schadewaldt, Wolfgang 313n Schliemann, Heinrich 159 Schnitzler, Arthur 171n Schofield, M. 78n, 80n ‘Scientific Psychology, Project for’ (Freud) 168, 180 Scullard, H. H. 75n Seaford, R. 273 & n

Index sema/sowing/dissemination 69, 70, 82, 243–5 ability to read 244 abusive 244 affirmative 104 causing 104 contradictory 104 encoding and decoding 241–2 instead of polysemy 46 katachresis as 241, 244 of meaning 50 self-seeding 71 seˆmata (tombs) 244n and sunshine, analogy between 283–4 unitary 104 sens see meaning senses 88–9 separation 77–9 sexual love 334, 346, 347 and procreation 353, 363 see also daddy/boy; Eros Shankman, Steve 8n Shell, Marc 272n, 273n signature, repeatable 182 signifier/signification 242–3, 272 repetition of 47 and signified 50, 51, 52, 54 sign(s) of difference 23 system, differential 89 writing as 59 see also sema Simpson, Michael 195n simulacrum/phantasm 23–4, 26 simultaneous 286 singularity, absolute 7, 67 Siskin, Clifford 304n six, significance of 123 & n–4 slash writing 345 & n Sloterdijk, Peter 71n

403

Smith, Barry 43n Smith, Robert 298n Socrates/Socratic 8, 10 Apology 336, 338–40 Athens’ dialogue with 198–9 as atopos 329n before see presocratic philosophy on Bodleian postcard 364 erotics of filiation 342–69 Hegel on Christ and 140–8 irony 337–8 in Phaedrus 46–7, 48, 50, 52, 56, 57, 62n, 64 and Plato 343–8, 351–2, 366, 367 dialogues 322 & n–6, 329n, 331, 336–41 Theatetus 336 Sohn–Rethel, Alfred 273n Solon 152, 153 son see under father Sophist (Plato) 57, 322 Sophocles 188, 268 Antigone 8 and hospitality 208–10 see also Oedipus Oedipus at Colonus 191, 194–5 & n, 202, 210–11, 215–34 Oedipus the King 191, 205 Trachiniae 227 soul (anima) 131, 250 and cosmos 75 logos of 98 as psycheˆ 88 ‘writing in the’ 59 sowing see sema Spectres of Marx (Derrida) 16, 253, 262 speech avoiding 106–16, 125, 129–30 ontologically superior to writing 48

404

Index

speech (cont.) origin of 112 repetition of 50 and writing see under writing see also logocentrism; logos/logoi Spinoza, Baruch 144 Spirit/spirit as flame 248–9, 250, 253 of Hellenism 138–9, 148–54, 157 renewal in 115 spirituality of year 251 Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Derrida) 31, 248, 253, 254 Stanford, W. Bedell 269n, 282n Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig) 253 Statesman (Plato) 322 Stellardi, Giuseppe 268n strife (eris) 97 structuralism/structurality 2, 116–17 symplokeˆ 57, 64, 66, 67 structure closed 103 conjunctive 103 cosmic 81 disjunctive 103 forms of 103 fourfold 123, 125, 130 ‘general’ 4 & n open 103 trace 112, 114 & n, 127, 130 as writing 57 subjectivity 81, 86n substitution (supplementarity) 58, 89, 123, 125–6 sun -god see Thamus death and rebirth myth 238, 239 as father of light 237 interiorized 235

return of 240 sunshine and sowing, analogy between 283–4 supplement graphics of supplementarity 58 law of 61–2 ‘Supplement of Copula’ (Derrida) 32, 34 supplementarity 58, 89, 123, 125–6 Svenbro, J. 244n Sweet, D. 86n symplokeˆ (man-made web) 57, 64, 66, 67 Symposium (Plato) 330 Szeliza´k, Thomas A. 323n techneˆ 63 technofantasy, disembodiment 359 Teiresias, prophet 240, 243 telephonic system 344 temporalilty see time Tertullian 314n texts Greece constituted by 28–9 supremity of 89, 100 Thamus (father/king/sun-god) 46–7, 60, 61, 62 Thanatos 335 Thebes 191, 202 theology see Christ/Christians; God; Negative Theology Theophrastus 78, 81 theos and theion 22 Theseus and Oedipus 194, 198, 201–2, 206, 220, 222 Theuth (Egyptian god/inventor of writing) 45n, 46, 60, 61, 71n Timaeus (Plato) 7, 57, 69n, 114 Khoˆra 321–37 passim 341

Index time/temporality hermeneutics of 129 of reproductive futurity 362 Timms, E. 171n Timothy (disciple of pseudo– Dionysius) 115 toujours de´ja` 99 Townsend, Larry 343, 354n Trace-structure 112, 114 & n, 127, 130 Trachiniae (Sophocles) 227 Trakl, Georg 248, 251–2, 258, 262 Fru¨hling der Seele 250 Geistliche Da¨mmerung 251 transcendence 102, 114, 125 transference 175 translation/translatio 268, 285, 287 see also ‘We Other Greeks’ trauma 175 ‘Trinitarian’ thinking see ‘Comment ne pas parler’ Troy 159 Truth 22, 31, 245 ghostliness of 169–71 making 118 Nietzsche on 272 and reference 112 speaking 28 spectral 171 unexplained 177–8 unconditional hospitality 3 undecidability 44, 99 underworld 240, 245, 246n, 252 United States 9 Declaration of Independence 274–5 universality 104, 125 universe see cosmos unlimited see apeiron

405

Valentinus 349n Vale´ry, Paul 305 value, theory of 272 Vernant, Jean–Pierre 11–12, 118, 326–7, 328 homage to see khoˆra Versammlung (gathering) 26, 35 Vessey, Mark 289–317 Vesuvius eruption (AD 79) 160 Veyne, Paul 349n Vidal–Naquet, Pierre 191–2, 193 Vietnam war, protests against 9–10 violence 234 ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (Derrida) 4n, 136, 138–9, 156–7 Virgil 204n, 315 Vlastos, Gregory 9n, 322n, 329n, 338 & n Vogel, J. 165n Vulgate 316 Wallace, Robert W. 322n wanderer, Oedipus as 194–8, 204–6 ‘We Other Greeks’ (Derrida) 17–39 configuring philosophical works 20–4 Deleuze, Derrida’s relationship with 24–5 Greece and Greeks, Derrida’s relationship with 17–18, 28–34 incompetence, feeling of 18–20 ‘other of language’ 26–8 see also under Wolff web discourse as 64 man-made (symplokeˆ) 57, 64, 66, 67 Weber, Elizabeth 43n

406

Index

Wellek, Rene´ 304n Wells, R. 160n Wheelwright, P. 81n ‘White Mythology’ (Derrida) 34, 235, 262, 267–70, 279 Anatole France and 238 & n–9, 268, 270 & n–1n, 273n, 274n blanche/whitewashing 274–6 and eternal return myth 236, 237–49 Whitmarsh, Tim 313n Widdowson, Peter 289n Williams, Raymond 289n, 304n, 313n Willis, Ika 4n, 8, 15, 178, 184n, 342–69 Wills, David 106n, 348n Wilson, E. A. 168n Wolff, Francis: and “We Other Greeks’’ 17 & n–21, 25–39 questions to Derrida 28–32, 34–7, 37–9 women/feminine Female Masculinity 355n femininity versus masculinity 349n feminism of Derrida 368–9 having children without 357–68 mothers 63, 199, 200–1, 203, 205 secondary, khoˆra as 335 Wood, David 88n, 105n Wood, Michael 290n

Wordsworth, William 365 world order see cosmos writing/e´criture 89 being of 48 god of see Theuth invented 46–7 ontologically inferior to speech 48 and reading as new practice 46 and speech distinct 49–51, 54, 334 meaningless without speaker 65 structure as 57 Xenophanes 80, 81 yes, meditation on 254 yet-to-come (a` venir) 331–2 Young, Robert J. C. 305n Yovel, Yirmiyahu 148 Zeus 90, 227 Zisselsberger, Markus: on Heidegger 215n zoˆion see zoon zoon (living organism) and logos 53, 60, 63, 65 zoˆion politikon (human being as) 224–5 Zuckert, Catherine H. 326n, 330n, 332n, 333n, 335n Zylinska, Joanna 369