Theory after Derrida: Essays in Critical Praxis [2 ed.] 9781138599086, 9780429485954

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Jacques Derrida’s Legacy: Democracy to Come
2 Quoting Time: Notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’
3 Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction
4 ‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? Derrida and Bourdieu, Ethical Subjectivity and the Gift
5 Before and After Glas: Approximations to the Cognitio Vespertina
6 Perhaps the Impossible, therefore, Will have been Necessary: Reflections before Friendship
7 Cosmopolitanism after Derrida: City, Signature and Sovereignty
8 The Generation of the I
9 Derrida and Religious Reflection in the Continental Tradition
10 On Following without Following: Deconstructing a Notion of Faithfulness in Church Practice
11 Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies
12 Is Translation a Mode?
13 Derrida Elsewhere: A Mnemocultural Dispersal
Editors’ Note to the Second Edition
Postscript: The Philosopher That Therefore He Has to Be
Index

Citation preview

Theory after Derrida

A

critical anthology that re-­examines Jacques Derrida’s thought by way of theory and praxis, this volume reflects on his striking legacy and the future of theory. Among contemporary thinkers, Derrida challenges not only our ways of thinking but also hitherto methods of inquiry. This book captures how Derrida renovates and re-­ energises philosophy by questioning the fundamental assumptions of Western philosophical thought. By doing so, he exposes the intricate lie behind binaries, such as speech/writing, nature/culture, male/female, black/white, literature/criticism, etc., which have continued to shape our worldview, where a hegemonic centre is always already in place dominating or marginalising the ‘other’. A significant contribution to literary theory, this book explores not only the status of Derrida’s contribution as a critical thinker but also the status of critical theory as such in the contemporary milieu. The central question that it asks is whether we should dismiss Derrida as a thinker who espoused an extreme form of relativism, bordering on nihilism, or has he something fundamental to contribute to the future of theory. Could it be that deconstruction is not destruction but a possibility that casts doubts on whether the present can have faith in future? This second edition includes a new Postscript and addresses some important concerns of our times, such as religious practice, art and aesthetics, translation, sociology of philosophy, and democracy. Scholars and researchers of English literature, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies will find this work particularly interesting. Kailash C. Baral is currently Professor of India Studies in the Department of Comparative Literature and India Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. Prior to this, he was Professor of English and Director at the English and Foreign Languages University, Shillong, Meghalaya. He has authored Sigmund Freud: A Study of His Theory of Art and Literature (1994), and edited J. M. Coetzee: Critical Perspectives (2008); Humanities and Pedagogy: What is Needed Now? (2002); and Interpretations of Texts: Text, Meaning and Interpretation (2002). Some of his

co-­ edited volumes include U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskar: A Critical Reader (2005); Reflections on Literature, Criticism and Theory (2004); Theory and Praxis: Curriculum, Culture and English Studies (2003); and Identities: Local and Global (2003). His edited anthology Earth Songs: Stories from Northeast India (2006) has been translated into Kannada, Hindi and Bengali and is a prescribed text at Sikkim and other universities. His articles have appeared in international journals such as Pedagogy, South Asian Review and International Journal of Baudrillard Studies among others. R. Radhakrishnan is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is also affiliated with its Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and is a core member of the Department of African American Studies and the PhD programme in Culture and Theory. Along with more than a hundred essays in academic journals and edited collections, he is the author of Diasporic Mediations (1996), Theory in an Uneven World (2003), Between Home and Location: The Cultural Politics of Theory (2007), History, The Human and the World Between (2008), and Edward Said: A Dictionary (2012). He is the editor of Theory as Variation (2007) and coeditor (with Susan Koshy) of Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-­Diaspora (2008). Winner of numerous awards including the Fulbright, he is a published poet both in English and Tamil with a book of poems in Tamil and is a translator of contemporary Tamil fiction into English. He is currently working on a series of essays on humanism and post-­humanism.

Theory after Derrida Essays in Critical Praxis Second Edition With a New Postscript

Edited by Kailash C. Baral and R. Radhakrishnan

Second edition published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Kailash C. Baral and R. Radhakrishnan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kailash C. Baral and R. Radhakrishnan to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published in India by Routledge 2009 British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-­1-­138-­59908-­6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-­0-­429-­48595-­4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Acknowledgements Acknowledgements Introduction Kailash C. Baral Introduction Kailash C. Baral 1 Jacques Derrida’s Legacy: Democracy to Come 1 Fred Dallmayr Jacques Derrida’s Legacy: Democracy to Come Fred Dallmayr 2 Quoting Time: Notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’ 2 Bernard Sharratt Quoting Time: Notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’ Bernard Sharratt 3 Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction 3 Gordon Hull Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction Gordon Hull 4 ‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? 4 Derrida andover Bourdieu, Ethical‘Artifi Subjectivity and the Gift ‘Sociology Philosophy’? cial Paradoxes’? Jon Baldwin Derrida and Bourdieu, Ethical Subjectivity and the Gift Jon Baldwin 5 Before and After Glas: Approximations to the 5 Cognitio Vespertina Before and After Glas: Approximations to the Silvano Facioni Cognitio Vespertina Silvano Facioni 6 Perhaps the Impossible, therefore, Will have been 6 Necessary: ections before Friendship Perhaps theRefl Impossible, therefore, Will have been Peter Zeillinger Necessary: Reflections before Friendship Peter Zeillinger 7 Cosmopolitanism after Derrida: City, Signature and 7 Sovereignty Cosmopolitanism after Derrida: City, Signature and Puspa Damai Sovereignty Puspa Damai

vii xi vii 1 1 24 24 47 47 74 74 100 100

129 129

151 151

174 174

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8 The Generation of the I Gianfranco Dalmasso 9 Derrida and Religious Reflection in the Continental Tradition Eric Boynton 10 On Following without Following: Deconstructing a Notion of Faithfulness in Church Practice Natalie Roberts 11 Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick

200

220

236

264

12 Is Translation a Mode? R. Radhakrishnan

280

13 Derrida Elsewhere: A Mnemocultural Dispersal D. Venkat Rao

302

Editors’ to the Second Edition Notes onNote Contributors Index Postscript: The Philosopher That Therefore He Has to Be R. Radhakrishnan

332 332 336 333

Index352

Contributors Jon Baldwin teaches at the London Metropolitan University. He has published on the works of Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Derrida, as well as on political economy, gift exchange, the anthropology of religion, ethics, and science fi ction cinema. He is Co-­editor of Film-­philosophy and Subject Matters. Eric Boynton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Allegheny College in Western Pennsylvania, USA. His interests include the intersection of the philosophies of art and religion as well as the question of evil. He has published articles on the Continental philosophy of religion and aesthetics, and has served as guest editor for an issue on evil for the journal Janus Head. He has co-­edited two books: Saintly Influence: Texts for Edith Wyschogrod (2008) and The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifi ce (2002). Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He holds a doctoral degree in law from the University of Munich and a PhD in political science from Duke University. His main research fields are modern and contemporary political philosophy, Continental philosophy, and comparative philosophy. Among his recent publications are: In Search of the Good Life (2007); Small Wonder: Global Power And Its Discontents (2005); Dialogue among Civilizations (2002); Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (2001); Alternative Visions (1998); Beyond Orientalism (1996); and The Other Heidegger (1993). Gianfranco Dalmasso is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bergamo. In 1968, he introduced Jacques Derrida’s thought in Italy with the Italian translation of La voix et le phénomène and in 1970 he translated into Italian De la grammatologie. His recent publications include Chi dice io: Razionalità e nichilismo (2005) and La verità in effetti: La salvezza dell’esperienza nel neoplatonismo (1996).

viii    Contributors

Puspa Damai is Lecturer in English at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. Currently he is completing his PhD in English and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He has published a number of articles in journals such as The Atlantic Literary Review, CR: The Centennial Review and Discourse. Silvano Facioni is Research Fellow of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Calabria. He has translated, into Italian, works of Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel de Certeau and Jacques Derrida. He has published on French and Jewish Philosophy. His most recent publications include La cattura dell’origine. Verità e narrazione nella tradizione ebraica (2005). He is currently completing a volume on Georges Bataille and has a forthcoming book entitled Derridario (with F. Vitale and S. Regazzoni). Julie Elaine Goodspeed-­Chadwick is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University-­ Purdue University in Columbus, Indiana, USA. Her work is published in Semiotica, Atlantic Literary Review, and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture among others. Gordon Hull is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA. He has published several papers on contemporary Continental philosophers, early modern philosophy, and the reception of Spinoza in Continental thought. D. Venkat Rao is Professor of English at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. His most recent publication is the English translation of a Telugu intellectual autobiography entitled The Last Brahmin (2007). He has a full-­length work on ­literary–cultural criticism in Telugu titled, Samskritika Chanakyalu (2005). In addition to these, he has edited books and published several articles in national and international journals. He is one of the editors of U. R. Anantha Murthy’s Samskara: A Critical Reader (2005) and Reflections on Literature, Criticism and Theory (2004). His areas of interest include literary and cultural studies, hypermedia, internet research, image studies and mnemocultures. He has designed several courses interfacing culture, technology and literary and cultural studies.

Contributors   ix

Natalie Roberts is a Communication graduate from Monash University, Malaysia, where she taught courses including Media Studies, and Nationality, Ethnicity and Conflict. She currently lives and works in New Zealand as freelance researcher and writer. Bernard Sharratt is currently Honorary Senior Research Fellow, School of English at the University of Kent. He has previously taught at the Universities of West Indies, Bogazici and Krakow. During 30 years of teaching at the University of Kent at Canterbury, he pioneered several degree programmes in film studies, drama, psychoanalysis, multimedia computing and images studies. His publications include The Literary Labyrinth (1984); and Reading Ralations: A Dialectical Text/Book (1982); and the co-­ edited volume Performance & Politics in Popular Drama (1980). Apart from having published essays on John Skelton, John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Williams, Robert Tressell, and others, he regularly reviews for the New York Times. Peter Zeillinger teaches at the Department of Foundational Theology at both University of Vienna and University of Austria. His research interests include French theory, contemporary political philosophy, and the new political theology of Johann Baptist Metz. He has authored Nachtraegliches Denken [Retroactive Thinking: A Close Reading of Jacques Derrida] (2002); and co-­edited (with D. Portune) Jacques Derrida A Genealogical Bibliography of his French, German, and English Works (2005); and Nach Derrida: Dekonstruktion in zeitgenössischen Diskursen [After Derrida: Deconstruction within Contemporary Discourses] (2006).

Acknowledgements

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he editors acknowledge with gratitude the support received from several people in the preparation of this book. Professor Prafulla C. Kar of the Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda has been always a source of inspiration and this book is partly his vision. Professor Sura P. Rath of Central Washington University, USA has been a driving force in his guidance and intellectual support. We thank all the contributors to this volume for their cooperation and patience. The following essays have been reprinted with the permission of the authors and we are thankful to the editors of the journals for allowing us to republish these pieces: D. Venkat Rao’s article in the Borderlands, 6 (3), 2007; Julie Elaine Goodspeed-­Chadwick’s essay in Reconstructions: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 6 (2), 2006; and R. Radhakrishnan’s article in the European Journal of English Studies, 12 (1), 2008. Thanks are due to Professor D. Venkat Rao of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad; Professor Bijay K. Danta of Tezpur University, Tezpur for their productive suggestions; to Nishat Kazi of the Centre for Contemporary Theory Library for bibliographic information. Finally, we would like to thank Dr Nilanjan Sarkar, formerly Publishing Manager, Routledge India, Taylor and Francis Group, for deciding to publish the book and taking personal interest at every stage. Ms Rimina Mohapatra, Publishing Manager, Routledge India, deserves our deep appreciation for her sensitive understanding and meticulous editorial interventions.

Introduction Kailash C. Baral

J

acques Derrida died on 8 October 2004. Controversies surrounded him while he was alive and dogged him even after his death. An obituary of Derrida by Jonathan Kandell (2004) in the New York Times entitled ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’ provoked an unprecedented response from academia across the United States. If controversies have a way of signifying something besides arguments and counter-arguments, they certainly underscore the importance of the person about whom they are made. The fact remains that Jacques Derrida is an extraordinary thinker, philosopher and theorist of our times; indeed, he is ahead of his time. In his densely imbricated writing, among other things, Derrida has relentlessly pursued the dismantling of the Western philosophical tradition. His method of dismantling, called ‘deconstruction’, challenges prevailing knowledge systems, unraveling their claims and methods, their authority and authenticity with regard to ontological, metaphysical and epistemological issues.1 In its multiple narratives, signifying that every example of deconstructive reading differs from every other example, deconstruction has remained problematic in its refusal to be limited in its possibility and purpose in yielding to attempts at defining it. However, to Derrida, a definition of deconstruction is not a bother; as a method of reading, however, it is certainly important, for it seeks to unearth contradictions and paradoxes in the apparently logical structures of philosophical and literary writing. Thus, deconstruction follows a negation of logic and reason in a mode of ontological delimitation as it does not possess the ‘thingness’ or an objective identity of its own. In his ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, Derrida clarifies deconstruction’s ‘different connotations, inflections, and emotional and affective values’ (1988a: 1). He goes on to point out how a deconstructive reading makes possible for us to recognise ‘something which happens’ in conflictual tensions, in a groundless grounding of our inquiries without ever allowing us a conclusive anchorage resulting only in aporia: the way things are uttered, written and come to mean or produce meanings, whether linguistic or cultural.

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From St. Augustine to Nietzsche to Heidegger, if deconstruction’s genealogy ties Derrida with the Western tradition of thought, it also marks his difference from that tradition. He interrogates and ruptures that tradition while adding to and going beyond it. Time, a ceaseless temporality as repetition and alteration, constitutes Derrida’s concepts of différance and alterity within deconstruction’s horizon of inquiry. Différance is Derrida’s tool of engaging with totalising knowledge in order to dismantle its assumptions of centrality and selfpresence. Différance signifies how writing in its graphic representation inscribes spacing — one that is spatial as well as temporal without the grasp of which no reading and production of meaning that is differentiated, and ceaselessly deferred, is possible. Being anterior to the practice of deconstruction, différance underlines the ‘future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior there is yet no exergue’ (Derrida 1976: 4–5). There is no exergual, the anteriority is the force, a calling of the future; a future of the past; an ‘after’ that is always already a ‘before’, a signature on the aporia of time. There is something spectral about Derrida’s death. Controversies apart, there were mournings, eulogies, and memorial lectures — critical and befitting as they were — that his death generated; a ‘foretelling’ by Derrida himself that was borne out in his essay ‘As if I were Dead’ (1996). Death terminates life and evacuates all its possibilities and promises: ‘One has to give it to oneself by taking it upon oneself’ (Derrida 1995: 45). In giving it to or taking it upon oneself, death marks the singularity of that ‘oneself’, its identity (la meme) as the mortal self. Death becomes exceptional in its repetition in giving it to or taking it upon oneself; it repeats the sameness of the self to itself, to other selves and to other deaths. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1999) and The Work of Mourning (2001b), works of Derrida, thematise ‘death’, the end of life, the becoming silent of the person, only to be spoken of/about by friends, colleagues, those who are alive and attend to the ritual of mourning. Death, to Derrida, is not simply an exit, a departure, a termination of life, an allegory or metaphoric play but is an inevitable given; the telos of the story of life that produces mourning, eulogy and memorial services, acts that perk up memory, or set in motion remembrance while we relive the deceased’s works. We follow the traces left behind, the footprints on the sands of time, the presence of an ‘absence’, the spectral. Adieu Derrida and The Late Derrida published in 2007

Introduction ? 3

following Derrida’s death underline the point that I am trying to make here on ‘presence/absence’: these are tributes to Derrida on his ‘death’; a finality that ‘life’ attends to/ends in. The title ‘Adieu Derrida’ (Douzinas 2007) is borrowed from Derrida’s Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1999), an iteration that signifies ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’; a discontinuity always already inscribed in continuity that is anterior to writing, speech, thought and life. Adieu Derrida begins with Derrida’s moment of mourning for Levinas: ‘What happens when a great thinker becomes silent . . .?’ (cited in Douzinas 2007: 1), and the editor reiterates Derrida’s words for us: ‘What becomes when Derrida, a great thinker, becomes silent’ (ibid.)? The silence in both cases assumes significance, for a divide obtains between the person and his works; while the works are there, the person is silent forever. The person speaks through the works left behind and does not speak to us as a person; hence the spectrality, a presence in absence. Death manifests a ‘necessary dislocation between the person with his name(s)-always to-come and the textual archive bearing the name between Derrida and ‘Derrida’ . . . Death removes the named from the name, the referent from the sign, splits spirit and letter’ (ibid.: 9–10). The dead is remembered in multiple signatures of one name ‘applied’ to the person that stands for the ‘totality of a life’ and to the wholeness of the person’s oeuvre.2 Adieu Derrida, through the contributions of some of the great thinkers of our times, who have worked with Derrida, followed his works and applied his method of deconstruction, marks the ‘[a]bsence of the addressee, presence of the name’ (ibid.: 11). Death signifies the power of the name even though it empties everything that life stands for. The presence of the name will continue; it will make ‘Derrida “Derrida” for ever’ (ibid.). As Douzinas points out, the name is both central to and outside of eu-logos, for eulogy becomes an elegy: ‘All writing mimics the eulogy, it predicts, foreshadows and acts out the death of its author. “Readability bears this mourning . . . This mourning provides the first chance and terrible condition of all reading”’ (ibid.). The ‘terrible condition of reading’ is the challenge, as it is separated from the presence of being, for it carries the improbable signature in its act of communication. It is in the operations of deconstruction that communication seeks to materialise meaning: what is not there, what is not that. W. J. T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson, editors of Critical Inquiry, mourned Derrida’s death in a special volume of the journal entitled The Late Derrida that was later on published as a book

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in 2007 (see Mitchell and Davidson 2007). ‘Late Derrida’ is not a borrowing as in case of Adieu Derrida but punning and playing upon/ with ambiguities associated with ‘lateness’. The letter from Critical Inquiry for the call for papers put as its theme: ‘death’, its various manifestations and the very idea of ‘lateness’. The editors maintain: ‘We would also hope for (in fact count on) a deconstruction of the very idea of lateness, lastness, finality, finitude, and, of course, death itself — the entire problematic of the “post-” and various “ends” or “deaths” — of theory, of history, of humanism, of deconstruction itself, that marked the final decades of Derrida’s life’ (ibid.: 2). Do all these ‘deaths’, including the ‘death’ of theory, alluded to by Mitchell (ibid.), signal termination of theory, a stage of irrevocable finality or is there some possibility of its ‘renewal’? Although the volume focuses mostly on Derrida’s works of the last decade (1994–2004), it also deliberates on the margins of some of the themes that are important in a post-Derrida scenario, in particular, the future of critical theory, of deconstruction and of academic inquiry. In fact, deconstruction itself underpins various ‘deaths’ as well as ‘beginnings’, and ties together the ‘after’ and the ‘before’ in a trajectory of critical disjuncture signifying open-endedness. Our volume Theory after Derrida is about the implications and applications of Derrida’s thought in a post-Derrida scenario. The after that sits in the middle of the title is qualified as something that ‘arrives’ belated, follows the legacy of ‘Theory’ and inter-connects to post-Derrida academic engagements. The idea of this volume on Derrida was born and took shape at the Forum on Contemporary Theory’s Summer School at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati in 2005, and was followed up as an after- (thought, effort), an endeavour that resulted in the present work. The after-is inscribed in the critical engagements that constitute this volume, expanding on Derrida’s thought into plural praxis within and beyond deconstruction’s theoretical horizon. Derrida’s texts have been the contexts of rereading, reiterating and revisiting, a moving to other headings, other margins and again returning to ‘Derrida’. The underlined spectrality — the presence of the absence — visits these essays that tease us to an ‘after’ that resonates in and imbricates a ‘before’. The argument that has foregrounded our intent is that Derrida is not only important in the context of the West but also of the non-West in many ways. Hence, a work on Derrida should be able to reflect on/meditate upon his world-wide legacy. Even though

Introduction ? 5

this volume is not anchored in a theme as The Late Derrida and is not a singular gesture toward remembrance and mourning as Adieu Derrida, nonetheless, it is concerned with theory and its praxis after the assumed decline of high theory (of deconstruction), for some thinkers have noted such a decline not only with the passing away of Derrida, but of a whole generation (Lacan, Lyotard and Deleuze, among others, died before Derrida). When ‘death’ or decline of theory is noted, it raises questions: has theory a life of its own? And how is life after theory? Life and theory imitate each other in surviving deaths, getting over the ‘after’. To Derrida, ‘after’ in theory means to try and be consistent, and living life ‘after’ means to be consistent with/according to theory: ‘“After” means “according to” theory or simply after theory, breaking with theory means as if life was something irreducible to theory’ (Derrida 2003: 7–8). Surviving theory does not mean theory’s redundancy but to follow it as an ‘acolyte’, a companion to speak to, not necessarily blindly following it, but implying the ‘anacol’, not following while following. The pursuit of theory or a life with or after theory hinges on a process of ‘following without following’. In this sense, theory has remained for us an endless problematising of our beliefs and practices, of our suspicions and mistrusts, of lived life and its contradictions, thereby becoming inexorable. Having this premise as a trigger, one may legitimately ask: what then is theory’s future? Can our mistrusts and suspicions coexist with theory with a vision for the future? In answering these questions, one may suggest that deconstruction has the potential to move into and inhabit a future. Theory after Derrida thus provides a connecting thread across the essays in the form of bringing Derridean thought into multiple critical analyses that underline and signify the relevance of Derrida not only in a post-Derrida scenario but in an effort to recover a future for critical theory. As John D. Caputo puts it: ‘If there were no theory, there would be no future, just the endless repetition of the same . . . What deconstruction will have done, and the way that it will live on, after Derrida, after deconstruction itself, lies in its insistence on the future, on what is coming, and on the courage it takes to keep the future open’ (2003). The gap that Douzinas talks about between the name and the text that the reader is caught in, is in the ‘play’ that Derrida not only identifies with language and its rhetorical characteristics but also with life and death. Writing and reading have the characteristics

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of a funeral oration; the reader is caught in the gap between the name and the text (Douzinas 2007: 11). Is there then a possibility to overcome the gap or sink into the abyss? Before we sink, swim or remain afloat, the challenge that Derrida has thrown up needs to be explored seriously. Derrida has exposed the lie behind binaries such as speech/writing, nature/culture, male/female, black/white, literature/philosophy, and so on, that have shaped the structures of our thought in that a hegemonic centre is always premised, dominating and marginalising the ‘other’. Challenging all forms of origin claims and authenticity, Derrida invests deconstruction with an anti-essentialist mode of enquiry that envisages the very method as plural: There is no one, single deconstruction … Deconstruction, in singular, is not ‘inherently’ any thing at all that might be determinable on the basis of this code and of its criteria. It is ‘inherently’ nothing at all; the logic of essence . . . is precisely what deconstruction has from the start called into question . . . Deconstruction does not exist somewhere, pure, proper, self-identical, outside of its inscriptions in conflictual and differentiated contexts; it ‘is’ only what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place (Derrida 1988c: 141).

Deconstruction is what it does and what is done with it. Following deconstruction as a method, critical practices have marked its singularity as well as its plurality of operations in order to expose the inherent instability of codes and logic that organise structures into coherence. Although Derrida’s influence on literary criticism is well known and his method of deconstruction has been practised by many literary critics, the roots of his thought are more philosophical than literary. Derrida’s re-evaluation of philosophical foundations of human sciences, both conceptual and historical, is an important aspect of his thought. Derrida is influenced by many but he shares with Heidegger an interest in renovating philosophy to allow it to examine fundamental matters of critical concern. Initially, and in a very basic way, although he was influenced by Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, he moved beyond all of them. This moving beyond makes Derrida, what Derrida is — fascinating and special — for we have to recognise the fact that ‘[d]econstruction implies that institutions, practices, texts and so on do not have determinate or selfpresent meaning and that meaning is always “to come”’ (Thomas 2006: 21).

Introduction ? 7

Critics have taken different routes and applied different methods to historicise Derrida’s legacy. Questions such as (there could be many more): does the early or later Derrida engage more professionally with theory and make a powerful impact on European thought; is deconstruction political or apolitical; is Derrida’s legacy appropriate and applicable beyond deconstruction’s linguistic and textual practice to other domains are still debated. The debates keep on growing while adding to further complication of our understanding of Derrida. As we know, most of Derrida’s works are produced on the margins of others’/other works. Commenting on Rorty’s statement on Derrida’s work after the publication of Glas — ‘Derrida’s work divides into earlier, more professional period and later period in which his writings become more eccentric, personal and original’ (Ferguson 2007: 96) — Frances Ferguson maintains that it is really difficult to divide Derrida’s career, for Derrida is less chronological but more rigorous in his interrogation of Western metaphysics, ‘at positions that had earned a place in the time table of philosophical history’ (ibid.: 97). The tradition of Western philosophy has been overtly linear as it has emerged from reason’s own necessity to ‘classify and clarify’ all phenomena. Derrida himself has been against the Enlightenment format of classifying a thinker’s career and making chronological divisions. However, for academic purpose such a division is necessary in order to bring in some sense of order and coherence to our approach to Derrida. Mitchell’s division of his career into ‘canonical periods’ — early, middle and late — are acceptable although Derrida’s critical concerns overlap texts and contexts. The early Derrida, starting with ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (2001a), followed by Of Grammatology (1976), Margins of Philosophy (1982), Dissemination (1983), and so on, began the practice of deconstruction in interrogating the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘logocentrism’, the very core of the philosophy of reason in contextualising the problematic relation between ‘speech’ and ‘writing’. This radical phase brought ‘deconstruction’ into prominence. For Derrida, language as an unstable domain cannot be equated with logos for its inconsistencies disrupt the very claim of textual stability. Rejecting the claim of a controlling agency or a central intelligence in the structures that language creates, Derrida negates the very claim of ‘presence(s)’ that supposedly controls the production of ‘meaning’. Imbued with a self-critical stance,

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deconstruction interrogates the reductive stance of structuralism, the very ‘structurality of the structure’ in sharpening the hermeneutics of suspicion. To Derrida, différance constitutes the very condition of interpretation that prevents a sign from gaining self-presence; it signifies neither a word nor a concept, and captures the ceaseless movement of meaning that is simultaneously differential and deferred. Claiming that différance is not negative but regenerative, Derrida says: Différance points to a relationship (a ‘ferance’) — a relation to what is other, to what differs in the sense of alterity, to the singularity of the other — but ‘at the same time’ it also relates to what is to come, to that which will occur in ways which are inappropriable, unforeseen, and therefore urgent, beyond anticipation: to precipitation in fact. The thought of différance is also, therefore, a thought of pressing need, of something which, because it is different, I can neither avoid nor appropriate (1994: 31).

The radical possibility that différance unfolds prompts Alain Badiou to consider it as a marker of the ‘inexistent’ that implies the ‘vanishing moment’, a sliding between being and existence. Following Derrida, Badiou proposes to use ‘inexistance’ as a parallel to ‘différance’ for marking the vanishing point. The vanishing point, the perpetual sliding in language marks the relation between being and existence, affirmation and negation, and for Badiou, Derrida’s act of explaining ‘différance’ implies ‘[w]e are naught, let us be’ (Badiou 2007: 46). Différance remains the most enduring concept, the vanishing present that marks the unforeseen, the unanticipated not only in textual and linguistic practice, but also in personal life. The ‘de Man Affair’ which dominated the second phase of Derrida’s career is one such unanticipated event, but Derrida dealt with the ‘unanticipated’ with character and candour. This period, besides being identified with the ‘de Man Affair’, is also a period when deconstruction faced its greatest academic challenge, for ‘a number of people found the excuse they were looking for to say that Derrida was finished and deconstruction was dead’ (Mitchell and Davidson 2007: 4). Derrida’s response to the allegations has opened other windows for deconstruction’s sustained interrogation of the project of Enlightenment in exploring reason’s limits. Starting with his discussion on the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche in his essay ‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche

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and the Politics of Proper Name’ (1988d) to de Man’s intellectual legacy in ‘Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War’(1988b) and ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’ (1989), Derrida accentuates de Man’s commitment to Heidegger’s ethical renewal that underlines the logic of exemplarity and respect for the alterity of the other (Thomas 2006: 124), while deconstructing extreme forms of nationalism and xenophobia. The second phase, if defensive to Mitchell, to me, is productive in the sense that Derrida’s thoughts of this period deepen his engagement with ethics and politics that take us to the third phase in his restless quest for justice. Even if the third phase, as Rorty has remarked is ‘eccentric and personal’ in some ways, it is certainly original in many ways. This phase in Derrida’s career was highly productive as he wrote extensively on politics, ethics and religion, responding mostly to contemporary issues. As Mitchell notes: ‘Then there is the third period; let’s call it the late Derrida . . . This is the moment of mov-ing to the borders of deconstruction, to the edges of the conditional and unconditioned, the pure, the absolute, and ideal — in short, the undeconstructible, to which sometimes he gave the name justice’ (2007: 4). This period is rich for Derrida’s meditations on a wide array of themes such as ‘democracy’, ‘hospitality’, ‘gift’, ‘friendship’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘animal rights’, ‘the university’, and so on, with a vigorous ‘return’ to deconstruction’s ethical turn in empowering his writing with a vision of a future to come. Is that ‘future to come’ apocalyptic or could it be assumed to be in fact so? The messianic inscribed in the yet to arrive is not a mystification of deconstruction’s ability in looking forward to a future to come but an attempt to deconstruct the Kantian concept of the ‘mystagogic’. Derrida recognises that he is accused of being an ‘obscurantist’ and explains his position by saying that ‘everything that is no longer identifiable starting from established codes, from both sides of a front, will necessarily pass for mystagogic, obscurantistic, and apocalyptic’ (1984: 30). He points out that this line of thought is present throughout the 20th century that has claimed many ends among them, most importantly, of man, of religion, of Christianity, of morals, of the subject, of the West and so on hence ‘Apocalypse Now’. After the deaths and the ends what remains as a vision inscribed in ‘a future to come’ is the question from where and how a beginning shall begin or shall turn up. If indeterminacy inveighs all beginnings and

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undermines truth claims it also recognises the disembodied arrival of another truth that leans on the indestructible ‘justice’ and unveils itself as the beginning of the end, the truth of truth: Truth itself is the end, the destination, and that truth unveils itself as the advent of the end. Truth is the end and the insistence of the last judgment. The structure of truth here would be apocalyptic. And that is why there would not be any truth of the apocalypse that is not the truth of truth (Derrida 1984: 24).

Starting with the ‘de Man Affair’, deconstruction willy-nilly becomes political or politicised. The political or politicised deconstruction has moved between an avowed critical position of deconstructing the ‘political’ as a discourse, on the one hand, and, on the other, being political itself. Whereas critics from the Left feel that deconstruction is not radical enough for politics, some feminists argue that it does not speak enough for alterity, while traditionalists feel that Derrida has gone too far. Apart from the misgivings or charges against deconstruction, it has received widespread recognition as a post-phenomenological, avant-garde intellectual movement. However, in the present context, Derrida’s influence has gone beyond this perception. In fact, deconstruction has almost invaded all disciplines of human sciences — theology, law, fine arts, gender studies, architecture, post-colonial studies, among others — besides being intrinsic to literary and philosophical discourses. Michael Thomas sums up the Derridean influence succinctly: Deconstruction is now commonly associated with a range of issues, from nationalism (Satzewich 1992; Silverman 1992) to nursing (Ramprogus 1995) and a range of other disciplines, from Architecture (Benedikit 1991) to Social Psychology (Parker and Shotter 1990). It is also possible to find critical studies claiming to deconstruct major thinkers such as Durkheim (Lehman 1993), as well as icons of classical and popular culture, from Macbeth (Fawkner 1990) to Madonna (Lloyd 1993). Deconstruction has been subject to cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary appropriation that has not been limited to Liberal Arts (Thomas 2006: 3).

Although the sweep and force of deconstruction is immense, it has been dogged by negative assumptions as well. The negative assumptions need not constrain us in engaging with Derrida and with the singular impact of deconstruction. The essays in Theory after

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Derrida contain contestory and differentiated readings of Derrida’s works, thereby bringing together contingency and utopia at the site of multiple aporia.

 Many, including Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, see a closure of the ‘philosophical sixties’ with Derrida’s death. Historically, it may be a closure of sorts for theory but, as Nancy maintains, the impact of the 1960s generation will continue, hence, the presumed closure is a nonclosure. The nonclosure, according to Nancy, is contingent upon taking risks in considering ‘philosophy as chance’.3 Deconstruction has taught us the exigencies involved in the aporetic nature of knowledge practice on two registers: ‘the one metaphysical, ontological, and so on and the other epistemological and ideological’ (Fabbri 2007: 214). And, in between the two registers we are led by différance, the vanishing present, the existent–inexistent. Derrida does not make any claim to the singularity of truth, and the fact that nothing is made true by him makes Derrida himself true in his understanding of the unconditional. The unconditional is an ‘accord between the given (the world, you, me) and the absolutely non-given, the incommensurable gift prior to every given’ (Fabbri 2007: 212). The accord between the given and the non-given in Edward Said’s calling is a relationship between the ‘worldliness’ of texts and the textuality of the world that binds ‘you’, ‘me’, others to a world of our own making and unmaking. Whereas that world is also entangled in structures that often oppress and limit ‘freedom’. Talking about his singularity and espousing the cause of ‘freedom’, Derrida says: ‘Do not consider me “one of you”, “don’t count me in”, I want to keep my freedom, always: this, for me, is the condition not only for being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others’ (Derrida 2001b: 27). Derrida considers ‘freedom’ as ‘a postdeconstructive virtue’ (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004: 51) and is indispensable for the singularity of the individual and his/her thought. The passion for freedom — what come under things in the order ‘free’ — and singularity, in a much altered world after 9/11, could only align with ‘ethics’ and ‘justice’. Freedom, thus, finds a new meaning in the reconceptualisation of the ethical that redefines our relationship with the ‘other’ in entering

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into the otherness of the other. This is crucial to Derrida’s concept of the unconditional that allows him to envision a future to come after many ends and plural deaths.



The Past of the Future Through deconstructive textual practice, Derrida becomes an interlocutor between the past and its future. In making sense of the past for a future to come, Derrida projects an ‘impossible possibility’ deepening his sense of the unconditional. Discussing Derrida’s legacy and a future for democracy, in his essay ‘Jacques Derrida’s Legacy: Democracy to Come’ (Chapter 1 of this volume), Fred Dallmayr takes note of Derrida’s relentless exodus from all forms of positivism, conformism, and habitual practices including the prevailing practices of democracy. In an attempt to theorise a future for democracy to come and taking Derrida’s views on cosmopolitanism, global human rights and the cultivation of cross-cultural ‘hospitality’ into account, Dallmayr analyses three of Derrida’s texts, the essay ‘The Ends of Man’ (1982) from his early phase, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (1992) from the middle phase, and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005b) from his final phase. However, ‘democracy to come’ as an unconditional promise, Dallmyar notes, is contingent upon our preparedness for the event to arrive, not in our radical inactivity but in the possible impossibility that is ensconced in a vision of post-humanist democratic praxis, no longer tied to anthropocentrism or any regulative idea. The immensity of the unconditional is not an uncritical assumption but emerges from the ‘terrible condition of reading’. Bernard Sharratt’s essay ‘Quoting Time’ (Chapter 2) is an interestingly serious play with/on Derrida’s acts of reading. While the essay focuses specifically on Derrida’s reading of (‘notes’ on) Aristotle’s Physics, it sets out to unravel Derrida’s far (or over-) reaching claims concerning the entire history of philosophy of the West. Sharratt strategically closes in on (what Derrida identifies as) the ‘pivot of metaphysics’ in Aristotle’s text — almost an unnoticed/unnoticeable word, hama (‘simultaneous’) — and questions Derrida’s evasive, elliptical reading of Aristotle’s text. Given that what is at stake in Derrida’s readings

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is the question (nature and identity) of time (which metaphysics evasively conflates with presence), Sharratt unravels the timing(s) and the structures of Derridean project of deconstruction (especially from around 1968). In engaging with the locus of Derrida’s readings in the itinerary (and method) of his ‘order of reading’, Sharratt offers a dexterous (and strategic) assemblage of dates, claims, styles, citations, inter-animated weavings of texts, events — intra-temporal and intra-philosophical cross-hatchings — and indicates the paradoxical relation of ‘form’ and ‘force’ in Derrida’s project as it came forth during the event of Paris 1968. In a dense but deeply critical performative play with Derrida’s work, Sharratt wonders whether the textualities (citations, readings, iterations) and timings (1968, Paris, US, Vietnam) that structure the master’s work do not still shelter un-rethought notions of time, history, cause and change. In the context of this immense oeuvre, Sharratt probes as to what is the place (if there is or should be) of the socially necessary reading-time (indeed the place of labour-time) in these acts of reading. In this intense and unsparingly agonistic reading, Sharratt seems to question the ‘risk’ of ‘reading relations’ and timed readings that make the texts and claims of Jacques Derrida. Reading Derrida compels us, further, to the necessity of (re)reading others’ works with/by Derrida as part of the ‘terrible condition of reading’. The essays that follow in this volume engage in reading other thinkers/philosophers from the past as well as from among Derrida’s contemporaries, in order to underline Derrida’s legacy vis-á-vis the Western tradition of thought. Gordon Hull (Chapter 3) revisits Deleuze’s and Derrida’s early discussions of ‘Platonism’ in order to challenge the common claim that there is a fundamental divergence in their thought and the standard narrative that deconstruction is a successor to phenomenology. Hull reads alongside Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (see Derrida 2005), Deleuze’s discussion of Platonism and simulacra at the end of Logic of Sense (1990). Both discussions present Platonism as the effort to establish a representative order (of original ideas and authorised reproductions of them) with no excess or outside (simulacra, or ideas that cannot be tied to an eidos). Since such pure representation is impossible, Platonism functions by means of the violent suppression of the simulacra and pharmakoi that exceed its eidetic structures. To overcome Platonism is thus not to reverse it, but to establish something like a practice of counter-memorials: detecting, exhuming,

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and writing back textual traces of what Platonism excludes. Hull then briefly applies this practice to narratives about the history of deconstruction, and suggests that they tend to occlude precisely the materialist elements of that history, as for example, the importance of Spinoza as an interlocutor. In other words, the emerging canonical narrative about deconstruction runs the risk of repeating the Platonic gesture that Derrida spent his career writing against. The inheritance as difference, as implied in Hull’s essay, marks Jon Baldwin’s reading of Derridean theory of the gift together with its critique by Pierre Bourdieu. At stake, according to Baldwin (Chapter 4), is the question of ethical subjectivity and the possibility of disinterestedness. The chapter puts under scrutiny Bourdieu’s critique of the classical subject, the notion of ethical habitus, the sociology of the production of philosophy and Derrida’s reading of the gift, the notion of good conscience, and undecidability. Bourdieu challenges what he views as artificial paradoxes associated with the gift raised by Derrida, and proposes a sociological sanction on the philosophical question of the gift. This critique, however, rests upon a problematic conception of Derrida’s theory of the gift and the notion of undecidability.



The Other of the Heading An epistemological skepticism rules over undecidability and transforms it into a notion of indeterminacy and free play. This skepticism guides our understanding of writing and difference. According to Derrida, writing represents the order of the sign; the sign order controls the graphemes of writing as its representation. In Chapter 5, Silvano Facioni maintains that Derrida’s writing act in Glas (1986) has made the work a turning point in deconstruction’s journey and history. Glas slides on two columns of independent (only apparently independent) writing within which there are open frames, squares, tattoos, and recordings of other writings. Glas discusses Hegel’s work in the left column and French writer Jean Genet’s on the right. Many topics and questions are intertwined and they are recalled from one column to the other: generation and family, desire and sexual difference, ‘proper’ name and identity, gift and economic

Introduction ? 15

exchange, and then sacrifice, transvestitism, the evasive power of writing, and many others, in a game of interlacing themes, ideas and endless references. The originality of Derrida’s thought is revealed primarily in typographical patterns in concurrent reading of Hegel and Genet, authors whose writings bring to the fore a diversity of themes. The method of ‘deconstruction’ plays an operating paradox in the pages of Glas, continuously arguing its own process in order to find an origin which is elusive as well as close. The ontological question surrounding the sign ‘I’ and its representation as being are issues central to Western philosophy. Gianfranco Dalmasso, in Chapter 8, ‘The Generation of the I’, argues that Derrida’s The Gift of Death (1995) re-proposes the theme after his rereading of Heretical Essays by Jan Patocˇka (1996). The generation of the ‘I’ implicates the ‘other’, and the other for Derrida is wholly other who generates the experience of alterity. In accessing and connecting to the other, the ‘I’ assumes responsibility. This responsibility has its origin in discovering the ‘other’ not outside of but as part of the ‘self’. The responsibility that Derrida speaks of, following Jan Patocˇka, is one that is European with a Platonic origin that underlines the care of the soul from a Christian point of view. This springing point that marks Derrida’s understanding of the ‘I’ does not incorporate the I’s relationship with God. The Derridean practice of reading does not admit existential, religious, and transcendent consideration of the ‘I’ but underlines responsibility as a recall of the secret. The secret within this recall does not remain a secret but becomes itself public. In capsizing the sense of the secret, what is underlined is a relationship that exists between the I and its knowing/self-knowing itself. The responsibility at work in the recall of the secret (for me), from the outset, becomes a project of sharing. The ‘I’ cannot be ever fully understood in the absence of its other, the thou. The I/thou relationship that has the name of ‘friendship’ for Derrida is fraught with the radical inaccessibility of the other. Therefore, Derrida proposes a new model of friendship which is based on Levinas’s concept of ‘in-appropriable alterity’. Considering the Greco-Roman model of friendship as a finite model that places friendship above law and politics, Peter Zeillinger (Chapter 6) attempts a reading of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (1997) by taking its avant-propos as a starting point. Going back to and

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rereading Derrida’s early performative textual strategies, he shows why it is necessary for Derrida to ‘invent’ the term différance and how this results in Derrida’s gesture towards an ‘experience of the impossible’ as also his ventured speaking in the ‘mode of the perhaps’, which corresponds to this obligation. On this background, the political relevance of deconstruction becomes obvious, which is the basis for an adequate understanding of Derrida’s work. Derrida situates his analysis of the politics of friendship and humanitarianism in the larger context of nation and nationalism. Derrida’s critique of the nation as a ‘unified community’ marked by borders and sovereignty guides Puspa Damai (Chapter 7) to explore the crucial and significant aspect of Derrida’s work: cosmopolitanism, its limits and promises. Derrida wants to extend unconditional hospitality to the other through his project of cities of asylum against the calculated and restrictive hospitality of the state. Damai examines the critique of existing theories of sovereignty based on onto-theology in distinguishing between the concepts of ‘being at home in the world’ and ‘world government’ in Derrida’s overarching understanding of cosmopolitics. Derrida argues that being a cosmopolitan is rather being at the threshold to welcome the other in fear and trembling. Instead of advancing an easy and utopian borderlessness, as is sometimes assumed to be the hallmark of a cosmopolitan world, Derrida proposes an impossible and radical openness in the form of cities of refuge in which unconditional hospitality could be offered to the sovereign other.



Following not Following For Derrida, the relationship between religion and philosophy, and faith and knowledge is always problematic. Religion or faith is guided neither by reason nor by ethics. God is the name of the wholly other, not as ‘every other (one) is every (bit) other. Tout autre est tout autre’ (Derrida 1992: 77–78). Living in a Christian culture as a Jew, Derrida deconstructs monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — and underlines the responsibility of each religion towards the other. In deconstructing the concept of God, faith and religious practice, he contextualises the community of the pure.

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In Chapter 9, ‘Derrida and Religious Reflection in the Continental Tradition’, Eric Boynton, begins by characterising, with the help of Kant, the continental tradition’s general orientation towards philosophy of religion. The tradition of continental reflection on religion has historically placed special emphasis on a foundational, transcendental interrogation of religion. At the heart of this kind of questioning obtains a tension between the epistemological and the critical tasks. Derrida’s recent reflection on religion, Boynton considers, remains beholden to this legacy as well as the way he attempts to think through this approach and even challenges some of its foundational assumptions. Taking on religious practice, Natalie Roberts in a field study (Chapter 10) reassesses the Derridean idea of ‘following not following’. The essay explores the conceptual possibilities that have materialised through Derrida’s work for the formulation of church praxis as a congregated outworking of Christian faith. Using a base of qualitative research data composed of 17 interview transcripts, the author draws on Derrida’s ideas of death and difference to deconstruct certain conceptual binaries that are commonly found within church experience, such as life and death, self and other, sameness and difference, faithfulness and disobedience. Through this, the aim is to show how death, when finally visible as the counterpart to life, exacts a self-effacement that is also capable of facilitating transcendent identification within the Christian self.



At the Margins of Other Disciplines Derrida’s influence has impacted several areas: art and literature, visual media, including popular cultural items such as reality TV shows, as also serious psychological manifestations such as trauma. In asking whether ‘trauma’ is a viable category that could be articulated in relation to Derridean ‘logocentrism’ in her essay ‘Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies’ (Chapter 11), Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick underlines a definite hermeneutic function in exploring ‘trauma’ in the context of the two World Wars as expressed in the poetry of Amy Lowell. Systematically refuting logocentrism, Derrida’s deconstruction enables exposure

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of the mechanisms, such as binary constructions, that exert a dominant — and domineering — influence over marginalised people, places, and concepts. Specifically, presence and the (falsehood of the) totality of the sign define logocentrism, and these terms cannot productively contribute to trauma studies because it is precisely in texts and textuality that embodied states can be studied. Texts are themselves material embodiments that display ways of thinking. Interrogating the concept of logocentrism and its limitation, in an attempt to go beyond binaries, Goodspeed-Chadwick productively explores gender within Elaine Scarry’s trauma theory. In doing this, she examines the applicability of Derrida’s work to trauma studies as a whole, and in conjunction with other trauma and post-structuralist thinkers like Judith Butler. From trauma we move to translation. Translation, according to Derrida, is a double bind that binds together translatability and untranslatability. It is situated between literary creation and theory where both the original and the translated complete and transform each other. The translator, following Benjamin, Derrida maintains, is in debt; ‘and his task is to render, to render that which must have been given’ (Derrida 1991: 11). However, Derrida argues that translation can never be universal. In a nuanced reading of Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s theories of translation, R. Radhakrishnan in his essay ‘Is Translation a Mode?’ (Chapter 12) makes the point that the project of global understanding should not degenerate into the project of colonising the ‘many’ in the name of the ‘one’. He argues that globalisation and the politics of translation need to be thought through together as part of the same problematic. Globalisation functions like language, and it is crucial that the world speak in many languages rather than adopt the voice of the dominant or hegemonic monolingualism. The socio-political and cultural valences of global English that constitute global communication and miscommunication should be understood not as a universalisation of its jurisdiction, but rather, as an acknowledgment of its vulnerability to the world and its many tongues, accents and registers. A critical translation theory locates meaning as simultaneously inter- and intra-lingual, and in doing so, makes sure that the meaning of the world is forever postponed in the name of its difference from itself. It is only on the basis of the clamour of languages among and within themselves that globality can speak and speak for the world.

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Derrida Elsewhere Considering Derrida’s legacy outside the European heritage and his influence on other cultures, D. Venkat Rao, in the last essay of this volume (Chapter 13), focuses on Derrida’s ‘inheritances’ vis-ávis the predicament of postcolonial inheritances. While critiquing Europeanised passages to the postcolonial pasts, he insists on other possible openings to the past in the Indian — especially the Sanskrit — context. While drawing on Derrida’s work in dealing with the question of inheritance in the complicit disciplinary–institutional context of the university, the chapter highlights the limits of Derrida’s work in responding to cultural singularities of memory. Derrida has redefined for us concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘justice’. These key concepts constitute Derrida’s largeness of the vision for a future to come and also connect that future to his proposed New International — borderless, unregulated and noncoercive. Respecting both singularity and community, linking them to ‘affinity, suffering and hope’, Derrida’s message, clear and loud, comes across the confused/confusing world that we live in today: ‘cosharing is the mantra of coexistence’. This message is Derrida’s Gift to the world, to humanity!



Notes

I thank Sura P. Rath and D. Venkat Rao for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the Introduction. I would also like to acknowledge the contributors’ inputs in this Introduction that helped me to put together diverse thematics in perspective. 1. The term ‘deconstruction’ is not an invention of Derrida, as is believed. It is Heidegger who uses ‘Destruktion’ to imply destruction of ontology, which does not mean annulment, but exists within or inhabits in a certain fashion any structure by which the articulation of that structure is made possible. Derrida adds the Heideggerian concept of ‘Abbau’ or to mine as an added concept of deconstruction. For a comprehensive critique of deconstruction, see Habermas (1987: 113, 187), and Zima (2002: 24).

20 ? Kailash C. Baral 2. Proper name is a key concept in Derrida. In deconstructing the concept, Derrida maintains that the proper name or my name from the beginning is an imposition. Commenting on this, Costas Douzinas, following Derrida, says: ‘My name is not mine. It is applied on/to me; I am the application and repetition of a word. This is how the structure of iterability and the misadventures of the signature start. I am unique in being called a name, in listening to my name, those two arbitrary syllables, as if it was another’s in responding to its call and being responsible for it … every ‘Hey, you’ which creates the ‘me’ answering the ‘you’, my name reiterating the blessing and the rules and conventions it carries and conforms’ (2007: 7). 3. Jean-Luc Nancy in an interview with Lorenzo Fabbri maintains that after the passing away of Derrida, as the last of the generation of the 1960s that includes Lacan, Lyotard and Deleuze, the discourse of philosophy has entered into a phase of uneasiness and uncertainty. Besides this interview (Fabbri 2007), which is included in The Late Derrida, Nancy also offers a comprehensive discussion on Michel Foucault and Derrida in marking the anxiety and aporia about the identification of philosophy. By saying that ‘Philosophical reason does not come to the same (thing)’ and ‘not even to the same as a reason’, Nancy explains the difference between Foucault and Derrida on their take on ‘reason’. According to Nancy, ‘Foucault and Derrida operated on different levels. Foucault was interested in the history of the practical and theoretical schemes of ‘reason’, of the representations and operations carried out under their guidance (the ‘containment’ of madness). Derrida on the other hand, was concerned with the philosophical operation — whatever shape its epochal configuration takes — in so far as it cannot do less than endeavour to keep its suspense, indeed to thwart the schemes and representations of reason at its disposal, at any point of time [dans le cadre de son temps]’ (see Nancy 2007: 18).



References Badiou, Alain. 2007. ‘Homage to Jacques Derrida’, in Costas Douzinas (ed.), Adieu Derrida, pp. 34–46. New York: Palgrave. Benedikit, Michael. 1991. Deconstructing the Kimbell: An Essay on Meaning and Architecture. New York: Sites Book. Caputo, John D. 2003. ‘After Jacques Derrida Comes the Future’, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory, 4(2), http://www.jcrt.org/archives/04.2/ caputo.shtml (accessed 20 June 2008).

Introduction ? 21 Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense, trans. Marc Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1982. ‘The Ends of Man’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. with additional notes by Alan Bass, pp. 109–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1983. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1984. ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’, trans. J. P. Leavey, Oxford Literary Review, 6(2): 3–37. ———. 1985. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986. Glas , trans. John P. Leavey, Jr and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1987. The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988a. ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, trans. David B. Allison, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and Difference, pp. 1–8. Evanston Ill: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1988b. ‘Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 14 (3): 590–652. ———. 1988c. Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Geffrey Mehlman, ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1988d. ‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of Proper Name’, in Christie V. MacDonald (ed.), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell, pp. 1–40. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1989. ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 15(4): 812–73. ———. 1991. ‘Des Tours de Babel’, Semia: An Experimental Journal of Biblical Criticism, 54: 3–54. ———. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1994. ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Jonathan Rée, Radical Philosophy, 68: 28–41. ———. 1995. The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1996. ‘As if I were Dead’ in J. Brannigan et al. (eds), Applying: To Derrida. London: Macmillan Press. ———. 1997. Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso.

22 ? Kailash C. Baral Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, eds Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (1978) 2001a. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Brass, pp. 351–70. London: Routledge. ———. 2001b. The Work of Mourning, eds Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. ‘Following Theory’, in Michael Payne and John Schad (eds), Life.after.theory, pp. 1–51. London: Continuum. ———. 2005a. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, pp. 69–186. London: Continuum. ———. 2005b. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Maurizio Ferraris. 2001. A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, eds Donnis Webb and David Webb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. 2004. For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Douzinas, Costas (ed.). 2007. Adieu Derrida. New York: Palgrave. Fabbri, Lorenzo. 2007. ‘Philosophy as Chance: An Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy’, in W. J. T. Mitchell and A. I. Davidson (eds), The Late Derrida, pp. 209–22. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fawkner, H. W. 1990. Deconstructing Macbeth, the Hyperontological View. London: Associated University Press. Ferguson, Frances. 2007. ‘Jacques Derrida and the Critique of the Geometrical Mode: The Line and the Point’, in W. J. T Mitchell and A. I. Davidson (eds), The Late Derrida, pp. 94–111. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Habermas, J. 1987. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kandell, Jonathan. 2004. ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’, New York Times, 10 October. Lehman, Jennifer M. 1993. Deconstructing Durkheim, a Poststructuralist Critique. London: Routledge. Lloyd, Fran. 1993. Deconstructing Madona. London: Batsford. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2007. ‘Dead Again’, in W. J. T. Mitchell and A. I. Davidson (eds), The Late Derrida, pp. 1–10. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. and A. I. Davidson (eds). 2007. The Late Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. ‘Mad Derrida: Ispo facto cogitans ac demens’, in Costas Douzinas (ed.), Adieu Derrida, pp. 17–33. New York: Palgrave.

Introduction ? 23 Parker, John and John Shotter. 1990. Deconstructing Social Psychology. London: Routledge. Patocˇka, Jan. 1996. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. Erazim Kohak, ed. James Dodd. Chicago: Open Court. Ramprogus, Vince. 1995. Deconstruction of Nursing. Aldershot: Avebury. Satzewich, Vic (ed.). 1992. Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturallism and Racism in ’90s Canada. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood. Silverman, Maxim. 1992. Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France. London: Routledge. Thomas, Michael. 2006. The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation. New York: Palgrave. Zima, Peter V. 2002. Deconstruction and Critical Theory. London: Continuum.

1

Jacques Derrida’s Legacy: Democracy to Come Fred Dallmayr

M

artin Heidegger writes somewhere that ‘higher than actuality is possibility’. With this statement, the philosopher lifts the weight of prevailing conditions and makes room for untapped future scenarios — not in the sense of utopian blueprints but of open horizons and uncharted transformations. To be sure, preoccupied with the linkage of ‘being and time’, Heidegger always remained aware of the interlacing of temporalities — of the future-direction of the past as well as the past sedimentations in the future — and hence of the correlation of actuality and possibility. Yet, even in his case, the burden of an oppressive present tilted the balance; sometimes in the direction of radical transgression — as is evident in his writings on Nietzsche and some other texts penned during the 1930s.1 Suffering under the same oppressive weight, some of his later students or followers shifted the accent steadily towards transgression of, or noncompliance with, actuality; easily, the most resolute thinker in this respect is Jacques Derrida. Influenced by both Nietzsche and Heidegger (and some French Nietzschean thinkers), Derrida placed his focus entirely on ‘overcoming’ of the past — something he called ‘deconstruction’ and which involved the dismantling of the metaphysical–ontological premises or underpinnings of inherited frameworks and traditions of thought. Proceeding in this manner, Derrida’s life-work amounted to a restless journey or peregrination, a relentless exodus from all forms of positivism, conformism, and habitual practices — including the prevailing practices of democracy. In large measure, the fascination exerted by Derrida is rooted precisely in this transgressive spirit, this radically deconstructive élan. To be sure, over the decades, this élan was manifest in different guises and varying contexts. During his early years, a central preoccupation of his work was with language, grammar, and linguistic signification;

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a main effort at this point was to disrupt traditional humanistic conceptions of meaning and understanding, conceptions construing language as a pliant vehicle for the expression of human thought. During subsequent decades, attention began to shift toward broader philosophical and political topics, including the themes of friendship, Marxism, and Eurocentrism; again, the chief endeavour was to challenge or unsettle traditional premises undergirding these themes. It was during this phase of deconstruction that the notion of a ‘democracy to come’ first surfaced in his writings. During ensuing years, Derrida’s outlook came increasingly under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas, especially the latter’s opposition between ‘totality and infinity’ — a bifurcation pitting an immanent actuality against a radically ‘transcendent’ possibility (or what Derrida came to call an ‘impossible possibility’). A major manifestation of this later shift was the concern with questions of religion and with a resolutely transnational cosmopolitanism. For purposes of illustration, I select the following three texts corresponding to the mentioned phases. From among the writings of the early phase, I select Derrida’s critique of humanism, published under the title ‘The Ends of Man’ (1982). Regarding the middle period, I turn to his attack on Eurocentrism launched in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (1992b). Concerning the final period, I discuss his book Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005a) which contains his most extended reflections on trans-national (or post-sovereign) politics and the (im)possibility of a ‘democracy to come’. I conclude with brief comments on the (im)possibility of democratic praxis.



The Ends of Man In the context of French (and more broadly European) intellectual life, the year 1968 constituted a kind of watershed: namely, a turning away from a certain subject-centered phenomenology and existentialism in the direction of a radical de-centering or dispersal of the ‘subject’. In many ways, this change was intimately linked with the status of ‘humanism’ in Western thought. Derrida’s essay ‘The Ends of Man’ (1982) was first presented in the fall of 1968 as a lecture at a colloquium dealing with ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’

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(the latter term being largely a stand-in for humanism). The lecture refers explicitly to the turbulent events of that year: the opening of the Vietnam peace talks, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and (later in that year) the French student rebellion and the invasion of the universities by ‘the forces of order’. For Derrida, these events carried both a political and a philosophical significance because of their impact on cherished French (and European) thought patterns of the past. After the Second World War, he notes, ‘under the name of Christian or atheist existentialism, and in conjunction with a fundamentally Christian personalism, the thought that dominated France presented itself essentially as humanist’ (Derrida 1982: 115). The focus of existentialist and personalist thought was on ‘human reality’ which was a translation of Heidegger’s Dasein but actually closer to the traditional concept of ‘human nature’. Among authors exemplifying the outlook, Derrida mentions such idealists as Brunschvig and (more importantly) the leading existentialist JeanPaul Sartre. In the writings of these authors, he maintains, the meaning and ‘unity of man’ was never really examined but simply presupposed. To this extent, ‘not only is existentialism a humanism [as Sartre had insisted], but the ground and horizon of what Sartre called his “phenomenological ontology” remains the unity of humanreality’ (ibid.).2 In describing the structure of this human-reality, Sartrean existentialism was a ‘philosophical anthropology’ or simply an anthropologism. In Derrida’s presentation, the humanist–anthropological outlook was projected by existentialist writers even on thinkers who were relatively free of the existentialist bias: thinkers like Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. In the case of Hegel, a certain privileging of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) encouraged an ‘anthropologistic’ reading of the philosopher’s work which sidelined such nonhumanist texts as his Logic (1812) and Encyclopedia (1817). In the case of Husserl, the existentialist vogue fastened on the centrality of pure consciousness and subjectivity — neglecting the fact that the critique of anthropologism was ‘one of the inaugural motifs’ of Husserl’s phenomenology. As Derrida states emphatically: ‘The transcendental structures described after the phenomenological reduction are not those of the intrawordly being called “man”; nor are they essentially linked to man’s society, culture, language, or even to his “soul”’ (1982: 118). A similar misreading (or lopsided reading) characterised the reception of Heidegger’s work in France, where

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the tendency has been to interpret ‘the analytic of Dasein in strictly anthropological terms’. At this point, ‘The Ends of Man’ waxes somewhat rhetorical, complaining about a kind of intellectual culture lag which has allowed the existentialist mentality to persist in the radically changed situation after 1968. ‘After the tide of humanism and anthropologism that had covered French philosophy’, Derrida writes, ‘one might have thought that the antihumanist and antianthropological ebb that followed, and in which we are now, would rediscover the heritage of the systems of thought that had been disfigured’ (ibid.). Unfortunately, ‘nothing of the sort’ has happened. On the contrary, despite the dominant aversion to existentialism, the prevailing tendency still seems to be ‘to amalgamate Hegel, Husserl, and — in a more diffuse and ambiguous fashion — Heidegger with the old metaphysical humanism’ (ibid.: 119). The remainder of the essay intends to offer a corrective to these prevalent readings or misreadings. Given the strong condemnation of humanist or anthropological misconstruals, one would have expected a novel exegesis which completely exonerates the discussed philosophers of any humanist leanings. Surprisingly and curiously, this is not — only partly — the case. Although transgressing existentialist appropriations, the essay still detects in the works of the three thinkers traces of a metaphysical humanism — traces that block the needed radical exodus from the humanist tradition. Turning first to the author of the Phenomenology, Derrida finds it necessary to recognise that according to Hegel, ‘the relations between anthropology and phenomenology are not simply external’ because ‘the Hegelian concepts of truth, negativity, and Aufhebung, with all their results, prevent this from being so’ (1982: 120). Basically, the Hegelian system culminated in the notion of ‘spirit’ which in turn was a stand-in for subjectivity and purified consciousness; in this manner, it proclaimed — and could not but proclaim — a higherlevel anthropologism: ‘Consciousness is the truth of the soul, that is, precisely the truth of that which was the object of anthropology’ (ibid.). To be sure, subjectivity in Hegel was not just an isolated ego, but rather a subject writ-large, a synonym for a perfected humanity — and to this extent testified to the unity ‘of God and man, of ontotheo-teleology and humanism’. Although critical of Hegel’s system, Husserl still followed Hegel’s perfectionist teleology by presenting ‘humanity’ as the telos of philosophy. Despite his anti-systemic bent, Derrida observes, ‘humanity’ in Husserl’s work still serves as ‘the

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name of the being to which the transcendental telos . . . is announced’ (ibid.: 122). As in the case of Hegel (but with a different accent), transcendental phenomenology for Husserl remains committed to ‘the ultimate achievement of the teleology of reason that traverses history’ (ibid.: 123). Hence, although distancing itself strictly from any empirical or sociological anthropologism, phenomenology in Husserl’s sense is ‘only the affirmation of a transcendental humanism’. Things are more complicated in the case of Heidegger because of his radical turning-away from the philosophy of subjectivity (inherited from Descartes, Kant, and Husserl). As Derrida acknowledges: ‘The existential analytic [that is, the analysis of Dasein as offered in Being and Time (1967)] has already overflowed the horizon of a philosophical anthropology: Dasein is not simply the ‘man’ of metaphysics’ (1982: 124). On the other hand, several of Heidegger’s writings — including his Letter on Humanism (1977) — testify to the attraction of the ‘proper [eigen] of man’, an attraction which will not cease to direct ‘all the itineraries of his thought’. Basically, what Derrida is trying to do is to bring to light a certain ambivalence in Heidegger’s work — his oscillation between humanism and anti-humanism — by drawing attention to the ‘hold’ which ‘the “humanity” of man and the thinking of Being’ maintain on one another. This ‘hold’ or attraction is manifest already in Being and Time where human Dasein is singled out as the privileged being able to interrogate, or raise the question of, Being. In Derrida’s words: ‘It is the proximity to itself of the questioning being which leads it to be chosen as the privileged interrogated being. The proximity to itself of the inquirer authorizes the identity of the inquirer and the interrogated. We who are close to ourselves, we interrogate ourselves about the meaning of Being’ (ibid.: 126). This emphasis on the proximity of Dasein and Being is a prominent feature which has inspired many ‘anthropologistic’ interpretations of Heidegger in the past — from which Derrida demurs only partially or half-heartedly. ‘We can see then’, he states, ‘that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man. It is, as we shall see, a repetition of the essence of man permitting a return to what once were the metaphysical concepts of humanitas’ (ibid.: 127). As Derrida acknowledges, Heidegger’s work does not merely assert the proximity of Dasein and Being but also their mutual distance, their unfathomable remoteness. ‘The Da of Dasein’, he writes, ‘and the Da of Sein will signify as much the near as the

Jacques Derrida’s Legacy ? 29

far’ (ibid.). Ontologically speaking, the so-called ‘Being of beings’ signals a distance which is ‘as great as possible’. Notwithstanding this admission, the essay returns quickly to the charge of humanism, claiming that Heidegger’s entire thought is guided ‘by the motif of Being as presence’ and ‘by the motif of the proximity of Being to the essence of man’ (1982: 127–28). Derrida at this point turns to the Letter on Humanism (1977) in an effort to corroborate this charge. The Letter famously describes thinking as the ‘thinking of Being’ (in the dual sense of a subjective and objective genitive). Seizing upon this formulation — but bracketing its internal complexity — Derrida briskly integrates the passage into his overall humanist interpretation, stating that ‘the thinking of Being, the thinking of the truth of Being’ remains after all just the ‘thinking of man’. What is happening generally in the Letter on Humanism is not so much a dismissal or transgression but rather a ‘re-evaluation or revalorization of the essence and dignity of man’. Another formulation which can be construed along similar lines is the passage presenting Dasein as a creature of ‘care’ [Sorge], as the caretaker of the Being of beings. For Derrida again, the passage is revealing because: does the stress on care not imply also ‘a concern or care about man? Where else does “care” tend but in the direction of bringing man back to his essence’? Still another formula invoked for the same purpose is the notion of ‘authenticity’ [Eigentlichkeit], with its corollary notion of the ‘proper’ [eigen], familiar already from Being and Time. Derrida interprets the formula, giving it an anthropological twist: If Being is ‘near’ to man and man is ‘near’ to Being, then one can also say that ‘the near is the proper’ and that ‘man is the proper of Being’. What all this adds up to is a refurbished version of humanism, a humanism in which human beings are seen as close to themselves and their being: ‘The proper of man, his Eigenheit, his “authenticity”, is to be related to the meaning of Being; man is to hear and interrogate it in ek-sistence, to stand straight in the proximity of its light’ (Derrida 1982: 133). In opposition to half-hearted revivals or modifications of traditional metaphysics, Derrida’s essay proposes or intimates a more thoroughgoing rupture with the past — a rupture more faithful to, and in keeping with, the anti-existentialist mood after 1968. Are we not witnessing, he asks, a deeper seismographic tremor dislodging the past: ‘Is not this security of the near what is trembling today, that is, the cobelonging and co-propriety of man and the name of Being, such as this

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co-propriety inhabits, and is inhabited by, the [met aphysical] language of the West’ (ibid.)? For Derrida, this trembling is not generated by an internal teleology inhabiting Western thought, but ‘can only come from a certain outside’ which puts an ‘end’ to the internal telos. In his account, this trembling has already given rise to several profound changes or outcomes. One is the decline of existentialism and phenomenology and their replacement by theoretical frameworks focusing on ‘system’ and ‘structure’ — frameworks which seek to determine the possibility of significance ‘on the basis of a “formal” organization which in itself has no meaning’. This shift of focus has a more radically ‘deconstructive’ effect than Heidegger’s own socalled ‘destruction’ of metaphysics which still operated in the mode of a hermeneutical questioning of the meaning and truth of Being. Leaving hermeneutical questioning behind, the structural reduction of meaning operates by means of ‘a kind of break with a thinking of Being which has all the characteristics of a relève [Aufhebung] of humanism’ (in the sense of preservation) (ibid.: 134). Another, still more important outcome of the trembling is a geopolitical dislocation, that is, its impact on the ‘violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other’ or the non-West — with Derrida leaving no doubt that, for him, cultural or linguistic violence is ‘in structural solidarity’ with military and economic violence. Taking together these and related repercussions of the perceived trembling, Derrida sketches two main strategies or responses which intellectuals might adopt — among which he clearly prefers the second. The first strategy is to attempt an exit from, or a ‘deconstruction’ of, the past ‘without changing terrain’, by simply repeating, ‘what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic’ (1982: 135). Although seemingly promising, the strategy comes at a price: for ‘one risks ceaselessly confirming or consolidating’ that which one ‘allegedly deconstructs’. The second strategy requires ‘to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming an absolute break and difference’. As Derrida maintains, the first response or mode of deconstruction is ‘mostly that of the Heideggerian questions’, while the second strategy is ‘mostly the one which dominates France today’ — at least partly due to Derrida’s interventions. Although admitting that the choice between the two strategies ‘cannot be simple or unique’, the ending of the essay is by no means ambivalent or equivocal. Derrida at this point invokes the legacy of Nietzsche, a thinker portrayed as the icon of super-deconstruction, as the one rupturing all forms of proximity and traditional humanism. The essay here likens the

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difference between the two strategies to Nietzsche’s distinction between the ‘higher man’ and the ‘overman’ [Übermensch], where the former is ‘abandoned to his distress’ while the latter ‘awakens and leaves, without turning back to what he leaves behind’ (ibid.). In a frequently quoted passage the essay concludes: He [the overman] burns his text and erases the traces of his steps. His laughter will then burst out, directed toward a return which no longer will have the form of a metaphysical repetition of humanism, nor doubtless . . . the form of a memorial or a guarding of the meaning of Being, the form of the house and of the truth of Being. He will dance, outside the house, the aktive Vergesslichkeit . . . the active forgetting of Being (Derrida 1982: 136).



Beyond Eurocentrism The exit from humanism was one of the early exercises in radical deconstruction; it also was the necessary precondition for all ensuing forms of rupture, exodus, and transgression. In subsequent years, Derrida became preoccupied with many philosophical as well as political issues — but without ever veering too far from the preferred strategy outlined in ‘The Ends of Man’ (1982). Among the important and somewhat startling themes dealt with by Derrida at the time were the topics of friendship and Marxism. As is well known, the topic of friendship — and especially of a ‘politics of friendship’ — has a long and venerable pedigree in Western thought, dating back to Aristotle and Cicero. For readers unfamiliar with the ‘Nietzschean’ strategy (discussed earlier), Derrida’s decision to deal with the theme might thus have suggested a return of the author to this tradition and his willingness to settle for a continuation or relève of the past ‘without changing terrain’. This assumption, however, proved to be misguided. The friendship extolled in Derrida’s book-length treatment was an entirely aporetic relation — in fact, a relation of ‘nonrelation’, an ‘anchoritic’ relation or a community of ‘anchorites’ far removed from each other, and hence without proximity (or shared practices). A similar surprise was awaiting readers of Specters of Marx (1994). Again, readers unacquainted with the rupturing strategy might have suspected — and many did in fact suspect — a

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slight of hand: that is, the sly or covert return of the author to the kind of ‘humanist’ Marxism which had been in vogue in France before 1968. This, needless to say, was not the case. Derrida’s book did not so much deal with Marx or Marxism, as rather with shadowy and fugitive ‘specters’ of Marx far from any actually lived community or ‘communism’. In fact, the central hero of the book was not so much Marx as rather one of his genuinely solitary and ‘anchoritic’ contemporaries: Max Stirner, author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum [The Ego and His Own].3 Probably the most politically transgressive and ‘unsettling’ text of the period was The Other Heading (1992b), subtitled Reflections on Today’s Europe. Derrida in this text refers explicitly to earlier thinkers and literary figures who had reflected on the meaning and future of ‘Europe’ with the aim of preserving the continuity of this meaning or spiritual ‘mission’ of the Continent. Prominent among these ‘Europeanists’ (or Europe-centered) intellectuals were Edmund Husserl and Paul Valéry. In his famous lecture on ‘The Crisis of European Humanity’ (of 1935), Husserl had bemoaned the loss or decline of the inner trajectory or rationale which had animated Europe from the beginning. To counteract this decline or crisis, the lecture pleaded for a restoration of this animating spirit and a recovery of that spiritual–transcendental trajectory ‘for which Europe would be at once the name and the exemplary figure’ (Derrida 1992b: 33–34). At about the same time (before the Second World War), Paul Valéry portrayed the ongoing crisis afflicting Europe as a ‘crisis of spirit’, a crisis of the spiritual meaning and telos of European culture. For Valéry, the ongoing crisis affected the very essence of European identity, the essence of Europe’s cultural ‘capital’ — a capital which, though geographically delimited, carries a universal or universalising significance. In Derrida’s words, European culture for Valéry ‘is in danger when this ideal universality, the very ideality of the universal as the production of capital, finds itself threatened’ (ibid.: 65). What surfaces here is a traditional European self-identification as not just a limited place but as the guardian or avant-garde of a rational– spiritual mission guiding all of humanity to its intrinsic telos: ‘What threatens European identity would not essentially threaten Europe but, in spirit, the universality for which Europe is responsible, of which it is the reserve, le capital or la capitale’ (ibid.: 69).4 This fusion of local identity and universality is at the heart of Derrida’s critical reflections in his text, reflections which revolve

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around what he calls the ‘capital paradox of universality’ (1992b: 71). The paradox resides in a certain mixture of particularity and universality, more specifically in the self-elevation of a particular culture or society to the status of universal ‘exemplarity’ linked with extraordinary rights and privileges. What is involved in this selfelevation is the claim to exemplary leadership, to the ability to offer ‘unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man’ (Derrida 1992b: 73). In his reflections on the crisis of Europe, Valéry had described Europe as the cape, the headland or spiritual promontory of civilisation. It is precisely at this point that Derrida’s text signals a break, as expressed in its title ‘The Other Heading’ (in French, L’autre cap). As he mentions, the word ‘cap’ or ‘cape’ refers to the head, the promontory, the aim or telos, but also the ending or eschatology. In this sense, the title ‘The Other Heading’ might simply suggest ‘that another direction is in the offing, or that it is necessary to change destinations’ (ibid.: 14). This, as it turns out, does not quite capture Derrida’s intent, because it falls short of the strategic requirement of ‘changing terrain’. Instead of simply calling for a change of goal or destination, or else for the replacement of one promontory by another (say Europe by America), the title intimates a completely different meaning of ‘heading’, something which might be rendered as ‘another heading’ or even as ‘the other of the heading’ (or something other than a heading). As the text states in a central passage, what the title brings to the fore is that: there is another heading, the heading being not ours [le nôtre], but the other’s [l’autre] — not only something which we identify, calculate, and decide upon, but the heading of the other before which we must respond and which we must remember . . . the heading of the other being perhaps the first condition of an identity or identification that is not an egocentrism destructive of oneself and the other. But beyond our heading, it is necessary to attend not only to the other heading, and especially to the heading of the other, but also perhaps to the other of the heading, that is to say, to a relation of identity with the other that no longer obeys the form, the sign, or the logic of the heading, nor even of the anti-heading (Derrida 1992b: 15).

In countering Valéry’s notion of the spiritual mission of Europe, Derrida does not hesitate to call attention to another side of this culture — which perhaps is an outcome of its ‘capital’ self-elevation. As he writes, in a statement that might be extended from Europe to the West as a whole: Is it not the same cultural context where, ‘precisely in

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the name of self-identity’, the ‘worst violences’ (Derrida 1992b: 6) — the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism—have been and are being ‘unleashed, mixed up, mixed up with each other’ (ibid.) and even ‘mixed in with the breath, the respiration, the very “spirit” of the promise’? In light of these derailments of self-identity, spiritual or otherwise, Derrida’s text calls for a complete rethinking of identity, where the ‘heading’ or direction signals would be radically changed. Contrary to customary definitions, in a dramatic ‘change of terrain’, the text advances this lapidary axiom or guidepost: ‘What is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself. Not to not have an identity, but not to be able to identify itself . . . to be able to take the form of a subject only in the non-identity to itself or, if you prefer, only in the difference with itself’ (ibid.: 9). Pondering further on the notion of self-difference, the text indicates that it means not only a difference from or with others, but also a difference from or with oneself [différence à soi, avec soi], that is, a difference ‘at once internal’ and irreducible to being ‘at home with oneself’. Underscoring this point, another statement adds that ‘there is no self-relation, no relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, without culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitive and of the difference to oneself’ (ibid.: 10). With regard to the meaning and character of Europe and its presumed mission, The Other Heading proposes a deflation of identity which involves not so much an erasure as a radical transformation. ‘And what if Europe were this’, the text asks, ‘the opening onto a history for which the changing of the heading, the relation to the other heading or to the other of the heading, is experienced as always possible? An opening and a non-exclusion for which Europe would in some way be responsible’ (ibid.: 17)? By comparison with this openness and non-exclusion of otherness, Valéry’s discussion of the ‘capital’ exemplarity of the European ‘idea’ appears now dated and nostalgic, in fact as a part of the ‘traditional discourse of modernity’ — which, to be sure, cannot be entirely discarded or elided by Europeans. Derrida speaks, in this context, of a ‘double bind’ which consists in the need not to abandon what is best in the past and the simultaneous (and more urgent) need to exit from the past by ‘changing terrain’. As he remarks in a remarkable formulation of the ‘double bind’ (which in some ways resembles the strategic tension in ‘The Ends of Man’): ‘It is necessary to make ourselves the guardians of an idea of Europe, of a difference of Europe, but

Jacques Derrida’s Legacy ? 35

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’ — namely, ‘toward the other heading or the heading of the other, indeed . . . toward the other of the heading which would be the beyond of the modern tradition, another border structure, another shore’ (Derrida 1992b: 29). With this emphasis on the needed ‘change of terrain’, the accent is shifted from the past to the future, from the actual to the possible — which, from the vantage of actuality, always appears ‘impossible’. Derrida’s text insists, in both ethical and political domains, on the need for a radical adventure, that is, the ‘experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible’ (ibid.: 41). With regard to cultural identity this means that if Europe wishes to live up to itself and its own ‘immeasurable difference “with itself”’, it must come to terms with a certain non-actuality, namely, the ‘experience and experiment of the impossible’ (ibid.: 45). At this point, the term ‘adventure’ changes terrain and turns into a more potent formula: the prospect of an advent, an arrival, an unexpected event ‘to come’ [à venir]. As Derrida writes, a Europe no longer enclosed in self-identity must be attentive not only to what is concretely present outside Europe, but also to ‘a gate-way to the future, to the to-come [à venir] of the event’, to ‘that which comes [vient], which comes perhaps and perhaps comes from a completely other shore’ (ibid.: 69). It is at this juncture that the notion of ‘democracy’ — not previously thematised — enters the discussion, and again, not in the sense of an actual political condition but of an ‘impossible’ possibility, of an event or advent which may or may not arrive. In opposition to traditional classificatory systems and to facile self-descriptions of many regimes (especially in the West), the text places the term on an entirely different terrain by stating that democracy ‘must have the structure of a promise — and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now’ (ibid.: 78).5



Democracy to Come During the later years of Derrida’s life, his fascination with transgression and exodus was steadily intensified and deepened. In this respect, the work of Emmanuel Levinas exerted a powerful, and

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perhaps dominant influence — above all, Levinas’s opposition between a radically transgressive ‘infinity’ and a totalising–mundane immanence, between an incalculable (im)possibility and a calculable and manageable actuality. In large measure, this influence prompted Derrida to explore, with increasing intensity, the domain of religious faith (especially in the Abrahamic tradition) and also the vast emerging domain of global or cosmopolitan obligations transgressing the traditional confines of state sovereignty. In the former domain, the most important publications are Derrida’s Acts of Religion (2002) and also his conversations with Gianni Vattimo in the volume Religion (1998), texts adumbrating a completely non-dogmatic religiosity and a kind of (im)possible messianism (or a messianic hope without messianism). In the second domain, Derrida has made significant contributions to a reduction of global violence by advocating (together with Levinas) the establishment of ‘cities of refuge’ and the transformation of traditional ‘hospitability’ into a global institution ensuring inter-cultural tolerance and recognition. As he writes in On Cosmopolitanism (2001), perhaps it is possible to retrieve the medieval notion of the ‘free city’ [ville franche] in the contemporary context in such a manner that some cities would serve as places of refuge from the violence of nation-states (see Derrida 2002; Derrida and Vattimo 1998; Derrida 2000; Derrida 2001: 8–9). For present purposes I want to concentrate on one of Derrida’s last writings titled Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005a) which is a translation of two lectures presented by the philosopher in 2002 under the summary title ‘Voyous’. In his Preface to Rogues, titled ‘Veni’ [‘Come’], Derrida points immediately to the problematic character of a ‘democracy to come’ — at all times, but especially in our age of ‘so-called globalization or mondialisation’ (2005a: xii–xv). As he notes, dramatic global events and developments, like September 11 and the upsurge of ‘terrorism’, have called into question the status of traditional nation-states together with their presumed absolute territorial sovereignty. At the same time, these developments have given rise to a rigid bifurcation between legitimate or lawful states — whose lawfulness is disrupted only by sovereign fiat (in a ‘state of exception’) — and so-called ‘rogue states’ [états voyous] bent on violating both national and international laws (thus claiming a permanent ‘state of exception’). Taking up this bifurcation, the Preface considers it crucial to distinguish between ‘sovereignty’, viewed as absolute mastery, and ‘unconditionality’

Jacques Derrida’s Legacy ? 37

seen as an exit from mastery and human control. As opposed to sovereign power (or counter-power), unconditionality signals a ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable force’, a force ‘without power’. Predicated on an ‘unconditional renunciation of sovereignty’,6 it paves the way or opens up ‘unconditionally to what or who comes and comes to affect it’ (ibid.).7 Derrida at this point invokes the notion of khora from Plato’s Timaeus, where the term means (or can be interpreted to mean) a place before any place, a spacing ‘before the world or cosmos or globe’. Taken in this sense, he observes, khora ‘would make or give place’; it would give rise ‘to what is called the coming of the event’. In particular, from this angle, ‘a call might be taken up and take hold: the call for a thinking of the event to come, of the democracy to come, of the reason to come’. In his subsequent reflections — gathered together under the label ‘The Reason of the Strongest’ — Derrida elaborates in detail on the difference between sovereignty and the unconditional (im)possibility of the event ‘to come’. In these reflections, the roots of sovereignty are traced to ancient mythological stories as well as philosophical– metaphysical speculations. As Derrida writes, the ‘theogonic mythology of sovereignty’ — exemplified in Hesiod’s theogony — belongs to ‘a long cycle of political theology that is at once paternalistic and patriarchal and thus masculine’, and that might also be called ‘ipsocentric’ (that is, centered in the self or self-same). In terms of Greek metaphysics, comparable impulses can be found in Aristotle’s notions of energeia and a ‘prime mover’ conceived as ‘pure actuality’. From these early beginnings, a line can be drawn to the writings of Jean Bodin and Hobbes and to the ‘modern political theology’ undergirding monarchic absolutism. The line can be extended further to a certain kind of democracy, namely, the ‘unavowed political theology’ of the ‘sovereignty of the people’ or democratic sovereignty. Derrida in this context refers to Democracy in America (1966) where de Tocqueville asserted that in America ‘the principle of the sovereignty of the people has been adopted in practice in every way that imagination could suggest’ and further claimed that ‘the people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe’. To this equation of the people with divine power or super-power Rogues opposes an entirely different view of democracy far removed from the lure of sovereign mastery. As we read: ‘The ipseity of the [sovereign] One, the autos of autonomy, symmetry, homogeneity . . . and even, finally, God’

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remains entirely ‘incompatible with, and even clashes with, another truth of the democratic, namely, the truth of the other, heterogeneity, the heteronomic and dissymmetric, disseminal multiplicity . . . the indeterminate “each one”’ (Derrida 2005a: 13–17).8 The question which arises here inevitably is whether democracy — even a democracy to come — can exist without some kind of sovereignty, given that democracy has traditionally been closely linked with sovereign freedom of action. In Derrida’s words: ‘There is [seemingly] no freedom without ipseity and, vice versa, no ipseity without freedom — and thus without a certain sovereignty’ (2005a: 23). The issue here becomes whether freedom can be disengaged from sovereignty and self-sameness (ipseity) so that it can turn into a free play or movement, into a ‘freewheeling’ kind of indeterminacy. What emerges into view here, Rogues states, is ‘the concept of a democracy without concept, a democracy devoid of sameness and ipseity, a democracy whose concept remains free, like a disengaged clutch, in the free play of its indetermination’ (ibid.: 36–37). Viewed from this anti-essentialist angle, democracy does not denote a substantive regime or form of government; rather, its meaning resides precisely in ‘this lack of the proper and the self-same’. Invoking his well-known notion of différance — a term involving both deferral and referral — Derrida presents democracy as an exemplification of that notion. In terms of deferral, democracy reveals an ‘interminable adjournment’ of its present actuality. At the same time, referral is manifest in democracy’s openness to the ‘experience of the alterity of the other, of heterogeneity, of the singular, the not-same, the dissymmetric, the heteronomous’ (ibid.: 38). Here is a remarkable passage which succinctly articulates democracy’s escape from customary definitions or clichés: Democracy is what it is only in the différance by which it defers itself and differs from itself. It is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological difference; it is (without being) equal and proper to itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper, at the same time behind and ahead of itself; behind and ahead of the Sameness and Oneness of itself (ibid.).

As Derrida realises, his differential notion of democracy is at odds with traditional ‘democratic theory’ where democracy was linked with freedom conceived as ‘power, faculty, or the ability to act . . . in short, to do as one pleases’. In an effort to find alternative

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approaches, Rogues turns first to some writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, and especially to The Experience of Freedom (1993) which locates that experience somehow outside the ‘autonomy of a subjectivity in charge of itself’ (Derrida 2005a: 42). Although appreciating the decentering gesture in Nancy’s work, Derrida is troubled by a certain emphasis on ‘sharing’ or partitioning of freedom — an emphasis which appears too close to the kind of proximity, togetherness, or ‘fraternocracy’ (ibid.: 50) which had been the target of his long-standing critique. Returning from a brief review of relevant literature, Derrida draws attention to his own writings on the topic of democracy starting around 1990, particularly to The Other Heading (1992b) and Sauf le Nom [On the Name]. As indicated before, The Other Heading had presented ‘democracy to come’ as an unconditional demand, as a radical promise that is ‘kept in memory, handed down, inherited, claimed and taken up’. The sense of unconditionality was intensified in On the Name (1995) where the term ‘without’ (in ‘without condition’) referred obliquely to ‘the apophatic discourse of so-called negative theology’ and indeed to ‘a khora or spacing before any determination’ and even ‘before a negative theology’. Transferred to the political domain, the accent on ‘without’ entails that democracy to come operates ‘like the khora of the political’. As Derrida insists, neither khora nor the phrase ‘to come’ should be taken in the sense of a Kantian ‘regulative idea’, but rather in that of an unconditional promise. In the words of On the Name: ‘The difficulty of the “without” [sans] spreads into what is still called politics, morals, or law, which are just as threatened as promised by apophasis’ (see Derrida 1995: 83). Based on these distinctions and nuanced elaborations, Derrida finally ventures to spell out more clearly the contours of a ‘democracy to come’, and he does so with the help of five ‘focal points’. The first point is that the expression translates into a call for a ‘militant and interminable political critique’ (Derrida 2005a: 86), one that protests against ‘all naïveté and every political abuse’. Above all, such critique assails any rhetoric that presents as ‘democratic’ an actual or existing regime which, in fact, remains ‘inadequate to the democratic demand’. Sharpening the critical edge, Derrida upholds democracy as ‘the only system, the only constitutional paradigm’ in which, in principle, one has the right ‘to criticize everything publicly, including the idea of democracy, its concept, its history, and its name’ (ibid.: 87). Second, the phrase implies the coming of an ‘event’ which — though

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evoking a notion of democracy — remains in itself ‘unforeseeable . . . unmasterable by any ipseity or any conventional and consensual performativity’ (ibid.). The third point is that the expression inevitably reaches beyond the confines of nation-state sovereignty and hence intimates the creation or emergence of an ‘international juridico-political space’ (ibid.), a space exemplified in the notion of global human rights. Fourth, the idea of a ‘democracy to come’ aligns itself not only with the axiomatic of a ‘messianicity without messianism’ but also with a rigorous distinction between (actual) law and (infinite) justice where the latter coincides ‘with disjuncture . . . with the interruption of relation, with unbinding, with the infinite secret of the other’ (ibid.: 88). Finally, democracy to come — contra de Tocqueville — does not refer to an evolutionary process, a teleology unfolding in time. Rather, the phrase wavers between different registers: a descriptive or connotative register (something is coming); a preformative register (I believe, I promise its coming); and an elusive non-or trans-performative register (involving the ‘patient perhaps of messianicity’(ibid.: 90).



A Democratic Praxis? Having followed Derrida’s transgressions and peregrinations through the years, the reader — certainly this reader — is likely to waver also between different registers of response. The primary response is prone to be one of performative affirmation, a response saluting and welcoming Derrida’s spirited exodus from oppressive realities or actualities. Certainly in a time marked by totalising ideologies and the steady entrenchment and widespread glorification of the ‘powers that be’, his plea for a ‘militant and interminable political critique’ corresponds to an urgent contemporary need. Likewise, his critical observations on ‘sovereignty’ — especially nation-state sovereignty — resonate with deep-seated aspirations in our age of globalisation or ‘mondialisation’. His remarks on a new kind of cosmopolitanism point in the same direction — on an ‘international juridico-political space’ making room for global human rights and the cultivation of cross-cultural ‘hospitality’. As it seems to me, some of the most appealingly transgressive passages in Rogues have to do with the

Jacques Derrida’s Legacy ? 41

notion of an ‘unconditionality without sovereignty’ and its corollaries of unconditional hospitality, gift-giving and forgiveness. As Derrida writes in the concluding section: ‘Only an unconditional hospitality can give meaning and practical rationality to a concept of hospitality . . . The incalculable unconditionality of hospitality, of the gift or of forgiveness, exceeds the calculation of conditions, just as justice exceeds law, the juridical, and the political’ (2005a: 149). Difficulties arise when the text turns to the non- or trans-performative register of the ‘to come’ — and often settles on the language of antinomies (the binary oppositions between inside/outside, calculable/incalculable, actual/impossible) (ibid.: 71). Derrida’s Rogues frequently seems to speak not only about, but from the side or in the name of, the ‘to come’, and to do so with insistence. But how can this happen? The prophets of ancient Israel were sometimes called ‘criers in the wilderness or desert’ — but the voice in Rogues seems to come from a desert beyond any desert, from a khora before and beyond any space or place. While appreciating the spirited élan, one seems entitled to ask: What language is adequate to this no-place, and how can one speak at all in (what Derrida calls) a ‘language to come’? Moreover, in this non-language, how can one thematise at all the ‘who’ or ‘what’ of the ‘to come’ — how, for instance, suggest reliably that it is democracy which is coming and not some tyranny or new barbarism? Noting the difficulty, Derrida seeks to guard against incoherence by appealing to the linkage of ‘to come’ with a certain tradition of faith or (what he calls) ‘the inheritance of a promise’ (ibid.: 82). Inheritance at this juncture seems to point to a certain historical sedimentation of expectancy, a sedimentation which might be able to sift the salutary ‘possible’ from the monstrously ‘impossible’. Yet, how legitimate is this appeal to a faith tradition — given that history has in large measure been deconstructed in an effort to ward off any notion of teleology or any derivation of the promise from the past? Difficulties inhabit not only the trans-performative, but also the performative register of Derrida’s text. Rogues (2005a) speaks repeatedly of the ‘urgency’ of the ‘to come’ — an urgency to which we are called to respond, and to do so urgently. The Preface to the text, titled ‘Veni’ [‘Come’], clearly involves an appeal or performative solicitation. The same Preface describes this appeal as ‘an act of messianic faith’ (to be sure, ‘irreligious and without messianism’) (ibid.: xiv), and also links solicitation with greeting or salutation of

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the ‘to come’ (ibid.: xv). Elsewhere, the text speaks of a ‘fidelity to come, to the to-come, to the future’ (Derrida 2005a: 4), or else of ‘the hic et nunc of urgency’ (ibid.: 29) excited by the to-come. But what kind of performance or performativity is involved in this appeal or solicitation? It is at this point, it seems to me, that Derrida’s anti- or counter-humanism — delineated in ‘The Ends of Man’ (1982) — exacts its toll. In order to preserve the pure un-conditionality of the irruption, Derrida needs to detach — in quasi-Manichean fashion — the ‘to-come’ from any human contamination, any human action or practice (beyond verbal invocation).9 But is this sufficiently attentive? Precisely given the august status of the ‘to-come’— its near-messianic quality — would one not expect human beings to prepare busily for this event and thus show themselves worthy to receive it — just like any good host would before the arrival of an important guest? In my view, the prophet Isaiah had a better sense of what is needed when, in pointing to the coming kingdom, he said: ‘A voice cries: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill made low’ (Isaiah 40: 3–4). What comes into view here is the possibility (and not just impossibility) of a post-humanist praxis, a praxis no longer tied to anthropocentrism. Without claiming self-mastery, and especially without pretending to master the coming event, human beings are still called upon to ready themselves through transformative praxis. Traditionally, transformative praxis is a synonym for the cultivation of virtues, a cultivation which — like piano-playing — requires steady application and diligence. Since ancient times, ethical teachings have emphasised the practice of the so-called ‘cardinal virtues’, a practice which over time can lead to a sort of self-overcoming, to a freedom from spurious attachments and forms of bondage, and perhaps even to a display of that unconditional hospitality and forgiveness extolled in Derrida’s Rogues. During the Middle Ages, theologians added to traditional teachings a set of so-called ‘theological virtues’ designed to prepare practitioners more fully for the ‘coming event’ — while simultaneously upholding the complementarity of all virtues (in accordance with the formula of ‘grace completing nature’). By stipulating the radical antinomy between unconditionality and conditional human conduct, Derrida’s work tends to stress — onesidedly — radical human incapacity over human ‘capability’ to act. A post-humanist praxis — including democratic praxis — requires

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a correction of this imbalance. Viewed from this angle, democratic praxis and ‘democracy to come’ complement each other, rather than being separated by an abyss. Just as steady practice in music precedes the great virtuoso, steady democratic praxis makes room and prepares the ground for the democratic event beyond mastery and control. This requires a rethinking of the notion of ‘action’ — perhaps along the lines that Heidegger suggested in the opening lines of his Letter on Humanism (1977) where he noted that the essence of action is ‘fulfillment’ [vollbringen], that is, to allow or enable something to unfold on its own.10



Notes 1. See especially Heidegger (1961); also 1989 and 1997. For Heidegger’s statement that possibility is ‘higher’ than actuality, see Sein und Zeit (1967), p. 38 (paragraph 7C). 2. Compare, in this context, Sartre (1977). 3. See Derrida (1994); also Stirner (1997). Compare Derrida (1997); and Dallmayr (2003). 4. Elaborating on the notion of a spiritual vanguard Derrida adds: ‘Europe takes itself [and has always taken itself] to be a promontory, an advance — the avant-garde of geography and history. It advances and promotes itself as an advance, and it will never have ceased to make advances on the other: to induce, seduce, produce, and conduce, to spread out, to cultivate, to love or to violate, to love to violate, to colonize, to colonize itself’ (1992b: 49). Compare Husserl (1970: 269–99); also Valéry (1962: 196–201). 5. As one should note, ‘future’ for Derrida is not just a linear projection from the past. More importantly, future does not denote a willful project or a reckless search for novelty. As he cautions readers explicitly: ‘Our old memory tells us that it is also necessary to anticipate and guard the heading, for under the banner — which can also become a slogan — of the unanticipatable or the absolutely new, we can fear seeing a return of the phantom of the worst . . . We must thus be suspicious of both repetitive memory and the completely other of the absolutely new; of both anamnestic ‘capitalization’ and the amnesic exposure to what would no longer be identifiable at all’ (Derrida 1992b: 18–19). Unfortunately, the distinction between the unexpected advent and the absolutely ‘unanticipatable’ is not further delineated (and not sufficiently maintained in other writings). For a fuller discussion of The Other Heading (Derrida 1992b) with specific attention to this issue, see Dallmayr (2002).

44 ? Fred Dallmayr 6. Derrida in this context also calls the appeal to unconditionality an ‘act of messianic faith — irreligious and without messianism’ (2005a: xiv). 7. The notion of a ‘weak force’ might be compared with Gianni Vattimo’s notion of ‘pensiero debole’, and also with Stephen K. White comments on ‘weak ontology’ (see Vattimo and Rovatti 1983; White 2000). Compare also Caputo (2006); and Dallmayr (2005). 8. See Tocqueville (1966: 51–53). For the critique of sovereignty compare also Derrida (2005b). To sense extent (one can speculate) this critique involves a self-critique on Derrida’s past since his earlier formulation of deconstructive ‘justice’ as an incalculable and even ‘mad’ decision approximated the conception of a sovereign, God-like intervention in a ‘state of exception’. See in this regard Derrida (1992a); also my critical comments (Dallmayr 1991). However, one may wonder about the significance of the shift, since Derrida still links ‘justice’ with disjuncture or ‘being out of joint’ (2005a: 88). 9. The passages can be multiplied. Only very occasionally and hesitantly, Derrida ventures beyond antinomial formulations (unconditional/ conditioned, incalculable/calculable), for example, in this passage referring to the ‘well-worn, indeed long discredited, word reasonable’: ‘I would say that what is “reasonable” is the reasoned and considered wager of a transaction between these two apparently irreconcilable exigencies of reason, between calculation and the incalculable’ (2005a: 151). Unfortunately the implications of the passage are not further explored, especially in regard to human or political praxis. 10. Krell uses the term ‘accomplishment’ for vollbringen. In Rogues, Derrida repeats and underscores the stark opposition between Heidegger’s work and his own writings, by claiming that ‘Heideggerian deconstruction never really opposed logocentrism or even logos’ while his own ‘deconstruction . . . never took the objectifying form of a knowledge [logos] as “diagnosis” and even less a “diagnosis of diagnosis”’ (2005a: 173–74, n. 14). However, is it really possible simply to exit from ‘logos’ — especially if the term is taken to mean not only reason but also ‘word’ and language?



References Caputo, John D. 2006. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dallmayr, Fred. 1991. ‘Justice and Violence: A Response to Jacques Derrida’, Cardozo Law Review, 13: 1237–43.

Jacques Derrida’s Legacy ? 45 Dallmayr, Fred. 2002. ‘The Ambivalence of Europe: Western Culture and its “Other”’, in Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices, pp. 49–65. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. ———. 2003. ‘Derrida and Friendship’, in Eduardo A. Velásquez (ed.), Love and Friendship: Rethinking Politics and Affection in Modern Times, pp. 549–74. Lannham: Lexington Books. ———. 2005. Small Wonder: Global Power and Its Discontents. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1966. Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence. New York: Harper & Row. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. ‘The Ends of Man’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 109–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992a. ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David G. Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, pp. 3–67. New York: Routledge. ———. 1992b. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995. On the Name, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1997. Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso. ———. 2000. Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge. ———. 2005a. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005b. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, eds Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Gianni Vattimo (eds). 1998. Religion, trans. Samuel Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1807) 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller and J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1812) 1969. Hegel’s Science of Logic. London: Allen & Unwin. ———. (1817) 1990. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sentences in Outline and Critical Writings, eds Ernst Behler, A. V. Miller, Steven A. Taubeneck and Diana Behler. New York: Continuum.

46 ? Fred Dallmayr Heidegger, Martin. 1961. Nietzsche, 2 vols, 2nd edn. Pfullingen: Neske. ———. 1967. Sein und Zeit (‘Being and Time’), 11th edn. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ———. 1977. ‘Letter on Humanism’, in David F. Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, pp. 193–242. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1989. Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65. Frankfurt-Main: Klostermann. ———. 1997. Besinnung, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 66. Frankurt-Main: Klostermann. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Experience of Freedom. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1977. Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet. Brooklyn: Haskell House. Stirner, Max. 1997. The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington. New York: Harper & Row. Valéry, Paul. 1962. ‘Notes on the Greatness and Decline of Europe’, in History and Politics, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews, pp. 196–201. New York: Bollingen. Vattimo, Gianni and Pier Aldo Rovatti (eds). 1983. Il pensiero debole. Milan: Feltrinelli. White, Stephen K. 2000. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2

Noteson onDerrida’s Derrida’s Quoting Time: notes 1 ‘Ousia et Grammè’ Bernard Sharratt

An enormous task is proposed here. The texts pointed out are doubtless among the most difficult and most decisive of the history of philosophy. (38)

D

errida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’ is a note on a footnote in Being and Time,2 itself a note on Hegel’s Jena Logic and Encyclopaedia, on Aristotle’s Physics, on Bergson. Thus, for example, Derrida on (Heidegger on) Hegel (on) Aristotle: Here [in Hegel] the Aristotelian aporia is understood, thought, and assimilated into that which is properly dialectical. It suffices — and it is necessary — to take things in the other sense and from the other side to conclude that the Hegelian dialectic is but the repetition, the paraphrastic re-edition of an exoteric paradox, the brilliant formulation of a vulgar paradox. (43)

Yet a footnote checks this formulation, corrects ‘paraphrastic’ Hegel conceived his relation to the Aristotelian exoteric ... in an entirely other category than that of the “paraphrase” of which Heidegger speaks. (43, note 16)

And a laconic parenthesis within the footnote further queries the term itself: Unless otherwise specified, page-references throughout are to Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Harvester, Brighton, 1982. Page references preceded by M refer to Marges de la philosophie, Les Editions du Minuit, Paris, 1972. 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1967, p. 500, note xxx, referring to p. 484. 1

48 ? Bernard Sharratt (What is to paraphrase in philosophy?)

(In literary criticism it used to be a heresy.) Yet, what is the alternative? To quote, verbatim? (Perhaps to quote a whole previous text, since selective, partial quotation approaches paraphrase? Thus, the mediaeval Commentary. But is Derrida’s ‘Note’ a commentary?). At the pivotal point of his essay (‘The Pivot of Essence’) Derrida quotes Aristotle, Physics 218a 10–15, thus: Si en effet le maintenant est toujours autre, comme aucune partie n’est, dans le temps, en même temps (ama) qu’une autre ... comme le maintenant non-êtant, étant toutefois auparavant, a nécessairement été détruit à un moment donné, les maintenants ne sont pas en même temps (ama) les uns avec les autres, et ce qui fut auparavant a nécessairement été détruit. (M 61)

The reading eye hesitates, returns; recalls; repeats: If in fact the now is always other, and if none of the parts in time which are other are simultaneous (hama) ... and if the ‘now’ which is not, but formerly was, must have ceased to be or been destroyed at a certain moment, the ‘nows’ too cannot be simultaneous (hama) with one another, but the preceding ‘now’ must always have been destroyed.(53–54)

Remembering Aristotle’s Greek, referring to other translations, we may restore, reinstate the phrase removed in Derrida’s rendition: For if the now is always different, and if no two sectional parts of time can exist at once (unless one includes the other, the longer the shorter), and if the now that is not ... (etc.)

Is the (quasi-)parenthesis merely expendable, to be repressed without loss in a paraphrastic quotation? Yet the passage from which these few lines come is, for Derrida, the pivot (cheville: ankle-bone) of the whole of Western metaphysics: Having recalled why it may be thought that time is not a being, Aristotle leaves the question in suspense ... As has been noted, there is here “a metaphysical problem that Aristotle in part, perhaps, has evaded,” even if “nevertheless, he has clearly posed it.” That the evaded question is properly metaphysical might be understood otherwise. What is metaphysical is perhaps less the evaded question

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 49 49 Quoting than the evaded question. Metaphysics, then, may be posited by this omission. In repeating the question of Being in the transcendental horizon of time, Being and Time thus brings to light the omission which permitted metaphysics to believe that it could think time on the basis of a being already silently predetermined in its relation to time. (47)

That ‘silent predetermination’ arises most patently, for Derrida, in Aristotle’s use of hama, which the French translates (here) as ‘en même temps’. We shall return to this pivotal point. Meanwhile, Derrida continues: If all metaphysics is engaged by this gesture, Being and Time, in this regard at least, constitutes a decisive step beyond or within metaphysics ... It is what the question evades that Heidegger puts back into play from the first part of Being and Time on: time, then, will be that on the basis of which the Being of beings is indicated, and not that whose possibility will be derived on the basis of a being already constituted (and in secret temporally predetermined), as a present being... (47)

The claim that Aristotle’s treatment of time in Physics IV has a crucial status is insistently reiterated in various reformulations: ‘... what is evaded in the question propagates its effects over the entire history of metaphysics, or rather constitutes this history as such, as the effect of this evasion’ (47). Even more specifically, insistently: The entire weight of Aristotle’s text comes down upon a word so small (hama) as to be hardly visible, and hardly visible because it appears self-evident, as discreet as that which goes without saying, a word that is self-effacing, operating all the more effectively in that it evades thematic attention. That which goes without saying, making discourse play itself out in its articulation, that which henceforth will constitute the pivot [cheville] (clavis) of metaphysics, the small key that both opens and closes the history of metaphysics in terms of what it puts at stake, the clavicle on which the conceptual decision of Aristotle bears down and is articulated, is the small word hama. It appears five times in 218a. (56)

But if the whole edifice of Aristotelian metaphysics, and with it the entire history of Western metaphysics, embracing even Hegel, Kant and Heidegger himself, rests upon this wobbling pivot, upon this tiny repeated word in this ‘untechnical’ (exoteric, cf. 217b 30) passage

50 ? Bernard Sharratt

in this Fourth Book of one Treatise — if the vast architecture of the house of being can be tracked or traced back to this one omission or evasion — surely Derrida might at least have spared the time to quote the whole crucial paragraph without elision, without omission? Is Derrida’s replacement of Aristotle’s quasi-aside (a mere qualifying exception, after all) by ellipsis a matter of evasion or merely an occasion for relentlessly pedantic quibble? Can we afford simply to forget any part of this apparently foundational aporia? Undecidedly, let us postpone the question — and first ask another.

 “I have forgotten my umbrella.” Derrida quoting Nietzsche, Éperons p. 123

As Derrida himself has reminded us, we seem to need to know (or decide) what kind of (a) writing a quotation comes from in order to make sense of the quotation. What kind of (a) writing, then, is ‘Ousia et Grammè’? Precisely, what ‘enormous task’ is proposed, or even attempted here? Perhaps it is an historical inquiry, leading to and substantiating not only the judgements on the entire history of metaphysics already quoted but also other, pithier claims: ‘From Parmenides to Husserl, the privilege of the present has never been put into question’ (34) and ‘There is no chance that within the thematic of metaphysics anything might have budged, as concerns the concept of time, from Aristotle to Hegel’ (39). Yet Derrida rejects, repudiates, a familiar kind of historical inquiry: ‘without a rigorous critical and deconstructive acknowledgement of the system [of connected metaphysical concepts], the very necessary attention to differences, disruptions, mutations, leaps, restructurations, etc., becomes ensnarled in slogans, in dogmatic stupidity, in empiricist precipitation — or all of these at once’ (39). Rather, ‘we must ... think our relation to (the entire past of) the history of philosophy otherwise than in the style of dialectical negativity, which — as a tributary of the vulgar concept of time — posits an other present as the negation of the present past-retained-uplifted in the Aufhebung, where it yields its truth. It is precisely a question of something entirely other: it is the tie between truth and presence that must be thought, in a thought that henceforth may no longer need to be either true or present, and

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 51 51 Quoting

for which the meaning and value of truth are put in question in a way impossible for any intraphilosophical moment, especially for skepticism and everything that is systematic with it’ (38). This rethinking of our relation to the history of philosophy in relation to, as derived from, germinating from, the concept of time, could — to begin with — revolve around that very concept of history as falling into time upon which Heidegger (it would appear) ‘agrees’ with Hegel: Time is usually considered as that in which beings are produced. Within-time-ness, intratemporality, is taken to be the homogenous medium in which the movement of daily existence is reckoned and organised. This homogeneity of the temporal medium becomes the effect of a ‘levelling off of primordial time’ ... and constitutes a world time more objective than the object and more subjective than the subject. In affirming that history — that is, spirit, which alone has a history — falls into time, is not Hegel thinking in terms of the vulgar concept of time? Heidegger claims to be in agreement with Hegel on this proposition in its ‘results’ (im Resultat) ... but ... Hegel himself has taught us that results are nothing without their becoming, outside the locus which assigns to them an itinerary or a method. (35)

Yet if from Parmenides to Husserl, from Aristotle to Hegel, the history of philosophy constitutes a ‘system’, a thematic within which the concept of time has not budged, the privilege of the present has never been put in question, the tie between truth and presence has been un-re-thinkable, then are not intra-philosophical moments strangely akin to intra-temporal moments (in a vulgar concept of time, of course), Western metaphysics merely a homogenous medium, in which any relation between result and becoming is, already, systemically pre-determined, any discrepancy or disruption, between premise, process and conclusion already pre-cluded? Yet would not any such reading of the history of philosophy risk the kind of strictures once, at another time, passed upon the propositions and ambitions of structuralism: ‘It is also readily demonstrable that what is in question is the metaphysics implicit in all structuralism, or in every structuralist proposition. In particular, a structuralist reading, by its own activity, always presupposes and appeals to the theological simultaneity of the book... [Rousset:] “... reading, which is developed in duration, will have to make the work simultaneously present in all its parts ... The only complete reading is the one which

52 ? Bernard Sharratt

transforms the book into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relationships.” ... [Bergson:] “Duration thus takes on the illusory form of a homogenous milieu, and the union between these two terms, space and duration, is simultaneity.” In this demand for the flat and the horizontal, what is intolerable for structuralism is indeed the richness implied by the volume, every element of signification that cannot be spread out into the simultaneity of a form.’ (Writing and Difference, 24–25) If, once again, the entire weight of Aristotle’s text on time comes down upon, is deconstructed from, one tiny ‘element of signification’, a word so small, hama (‘simultaneous’), as to be hardly visible, operating all the more effectively in that it evades thematic attention, can we be so sure that another, equally rigorous, nonthematic, attention to the texts on time of, say, Aquinas or Leibniz, Plotinus or Duns Scotus, would not reveal or unravel in each case quite another, non-Aristotelian conceptualisation of time, even of presence? A parenthesis in the final footnote of Derrida’s own text momentarily troubles his own overall claim concerning the history of philosophy: Thus Plotinus (what is his status in the history of metaphysics and in the “Platonic” era, if one follows Heidegger’s reading?) who speaks of presence, that is, also of morphe-, as the trace of nonpresence, as the amorphous. A trace which is neither absence nor presence ... (66, note 41).

Already, one might say, Plotinus in Enneads III, 7.7ff, had criticised and repudiated Aristotle’s formulation of time as a circular definition, as already silently predetermined by a taken-for-granted notion of motion as temporal, and had offered his own counter-definition (‘the life of the [universal] soul in movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another’) which may suffer from its own circularity but leaves its considerable alternative traces in later notions of ‘absolute duration’ dissociated from any relation of measurability to physical motion.3 For example, the systematic critique of Aristotle on time by Crescas, in Or Adonai, Proposition XV, 2, leads to a further counter-definition (‘Time is the measure of the continuity of motion or of rest between two instants’) which can indeed be read as a Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 4th. edition revised by B. S. Page, Faber & Faber, London, 1969, p. 228ff.

3

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 53 53 Quoting

re-wording of either Plotinus or Aristotle.4 But what, in any case, is the status of Crescas in (the history of) Western metaphysics? A Jewish philosopher born in Barcelona in 1340, he wrote in Hebrew, in a dialogue mainly with previous Jewish philosophers who mostly wrote in Arabic. Is Crescas too ‘marginal’ a figure to be considered at all, or is he to be placed ‘outside’ the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Husserl, aligned rather with a putatively ‘non-western’ history, perhaps a non-metaphysics, for which a non-Greek notion of time is not impossible — a possibility recently, apparently, suggested and even endorsed by Derrida in his citing of Chouraqui: ‘“The Greek verb conceives time above all as a function of a past, a present, and a future: the Hebrew, or the Aramaic, on the contrary, instead of specifying the time of an action, describes its state under two modes: the finished and the unfinished. As Pedersen has seen so well, the Hebrew verb is essentially intemporal, that is, omnitemporal. I have tried, between two notions of time [temps] irreducible to one another, to resort most often to the present that in contemporary French usage is a very simple, very ample, very evocative tense [temps]....”’5 Yet, in that slide between differences of tense and irreducible notions of time, is Chouraqui merely rehearsing a deeply questionable eurocentric claim whose dubious genealogy is situated in close proximity to 1930s German anti-semitism and which has, pace Pedersen and despite its continued repetition by theologians and Biblical scholars, been devastatingly discredited by, among others, Barr and Momigliano?6 Yet if, indeed, Hebraic notions of time are not a candidate for exemption from the systemic conceptual grip of 4 Cf. H. A. Wolfson, Crescas’ Critique of Aristotle, Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 269 and p. 651, note 23. 5 Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie, Editions Galilée, Paris, 1983, p. 74n; trans. J. P. Leavey, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 1984, pp. 36–37. 6 Cf. James Barr, Biblical Words for Time, SCM Press, London, 1962, and Arnoldo Momigliano, ‘Time in Ancient Historiography’, History and Theory, 6 (1966), pp. 1–23, reprinted in his Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Blackwell, Oxford, 1977, pp. 179–204. Cf. also D. M. Mackinnon, ‘Tillich, Frege, Kittel: Some Reflections on a Dark Theme’, Explorations in Theology 5, SCM Press, London, 1979, pp. 129–37; R. P. Ericksen, ‘Theologian in the Third Reich: the case of Gerhard Kittel’, Journal of Contemporary History, 12 (1977), pp. 595–622; G. Kittel, Die Judenfrage, Stuttgart, 1933, and G. Kittel, ed., Theologische Worterbuch zum neuen Testament, Stuttgart, 1933.

54 ? Bernard Sharratt

‘Western’ metaphysics, to what non-Western ‘history of time’ can Derrida appeal — Chinese, too, it seems, though once a fashionable ally, would hardly fit the bill.7 And if we return even to that most ‘Aristotelian’ of later Western metaphysicians, author of detailed Commentaries on both the Metaphysics and the Physics, St. Thomas Aquinas, there is a certain strained relationship with the Philosopher precisely at those points where Aristotle’s arguments about time, change and action need to be reconciled with those assertions, problems, premises and concepts which St. Thomas derives not from (the history of) philosophy but from another text, another tradition, the Bible or dogmatic theology8 — but does that double allegiance disqualify Aquinas (and many others) from membership in ‘metaphysics’? Indeed, are Derrida’s claims as to the consistency and homogeneity of concepts of time to be sustained only by excluding from the ‘history’ of ‘philosophy’ such ‘forgotten’ authors as Crescas, Albo and Plotinus, such Christian theologians as Augustine or Scotus, such ‘non-metaphysical’ approaches as those of McTaggart, Wittgenstein or Mellor? Or, on the contrary, can — must — his claims be extended not only to all these texts but even to the (‘metaphysical’) ‘grammar’ underpinning the theories of time of, say, Newton, Einstein and Hawking?9 Cf. e.g. Joseph Needham, ‘Time and Eastern Man’, The Grand Titration, Allen & Unwin, London, 1969, pp. 218–98. 8 Most obviously in Aquinas’s various discussions of whether time and the world had a beginning; cf. De aeternitate mundi contra murmurantes (accessibly translated in Appendix 2 of Summa Theologiae, vol. 8, ed. Thomas Gilby, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1967); and e.g. Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 46; Summa Contra Gentiles, I, 13: 12, 13, 30; 15: 3, 6; 43: 13; 66: 7; II, 31–38; IV, 97. Cf. also Aquinas’s discussions of the ‘Real Presence’ in the Eucharist and the problem of change in an instant (Summa Theologiae, IIIa, qq. 73–78), and the ‘time’ of angels (Ia, qq. 50–64). For Aquinas’s own analysis of Aristotle’s argument on time, cf. Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. R. J. Blackwell et al., RKP, London, 1963, Bk IV, Lectures 15–23, pp. 251–88. 9 Cf. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. XI. 3ff and City of God, XI. 4, 6; XII, 11–16; for a useful discussion of Duns Scotus on time, see C. R. S. Harris, Duns Scotus, Oxford University Press, 1927, vol. II, ch. 4, pp. 122–46; J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Cambridge University Press, 1927, vol. II, bk. V, ch. 33; D. H. Mellor, Real Time, 7

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 55 55 Quoting

The question here is not simply whether a rigorous reading of all these texts, in a manner just as detailed as that of ‘Ousia et Grammè’ itself, would be needed to sustain the claims concerning ‘history’ in ‘Ousia et Grammè’, but also what relation any such readings by Derrida would, could, have precisely to ‘Ousia et Grammè’. At stake is the problem not merely of agreeing or disagreeing with the results of Derrida’s reading(s) but of their locus in a becoming, an itinerary or method, at the very least an order of reading, of Derrida. There are two dates, at least, to be assigned to ‘Ousia et Grammè’, its appearance in L’endurance de la pensée, published by Plon in 1968, and a re-appearance in Marges, 1972. Among the differences between these two texts is a certain footnoted supplementation, a cross-referencing, in Marges, to other texts of Derrida: ‘cf. plus loin’, to ‘Form and Meaning’, ‘The Ends of Man’, ‘The supplement of copula’, ‘White Mythology’, and, beyond Marges, to ‘Double Session’ in Dissemination. A familiar feature of an essay collection. Yet with Derrida a certain difference too, perhaps. A note in L’écriture et la différence:10 Par la date de ces textes, nous voudrions marquer qu’à l’instant, pour les relier, de les relire, nous ne pouvons nous tenir à égale distance de chacun d’eux. Ce qui reste ici le déplacement d’une question forme certes un système. Par quelque couture interprétative, nous aurions su après coup le dessiner. Nous n’en avons rien laissé paraître que le pointillé, y ménageant ou y abandonnant ces blancs sans lesquels aucun texte jamais ne se propose comme tel. Si texte veut dire tissu, tous ces essais en ont obstinément defini la couture comme faufilure. (Décembre 1966.)

Cambridge University Press, 1981. Wittgenstein’s characteristic suggestion (The Blue and Brown Books, Blackwell, Oxford, 1964, p. 26) that Augustine’s puzzlement about time could be resolved by clarifying the ‘apparent contradictions’ in the ‘grammar’ of time, can be usefully compared with Sarah Waterlow’s analysis of the ‘grammar’ of Aristotle’s arguments on ‘change’ and ‘nature’, in her Nature, Change and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982. For the notion of a ‘metaphysical grammar’ in relation to scientific theories, cf. Gerd Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969. 10 For an attempt to translate and gloss this dense paragraph, see Alan Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, Writing and Difference, RKP, London, 1978, p. xiii.

56 ? Bernard Sharratt

An answer to an interview, 1967: One can take Of Grammatology as a long essay articulated in two parts ... into the middle of which one could staple Writing and Difference ... Inversely, one could insert Of Grammatology into the middle of Writing and Difference ... I could have bound [Speech and Phenomena] as a long note to one or other of the other two works. (Positions, p. 5)

A comment, ‘hors livre’, referring to three essays dated 1966, 1970, 1969 ‘basted’ in 1972, the year of publication of Marges: Dissemination produces (itself in) that: a cut/cup of pleasure. To be obtained in the break between the two parts of each of the three texts. (Dissemination, p. 57)

Are we, then, at liberty to cite across this chronology,11 to treat this ‘strange geometry’ (Positions, p. 4) as ‘flat and horizontal’, these texts as contemporary, a co-present system (‘certes un système’), simultaneous, or (vel) as stages in a development, a becoming? Either way, would we merely be falling into a ‘vulgar concept’ of time? A public presentation (doubling as a whispered confidence, a confession), dated 2nd June 1980:12 Never have I felt so young and at the same time so old. At the same time [en même temps?], in the same instant and it is one and the same feeling, as if two stories and two times, two rhythms were engaged in a sort of altercation in one and the same feeling of oneself, in a sort of anachrony of oneself, anachrony in oneself.

‘In short, is there a time of the thesis?’

 For example, to note that in ‘Ousia et Grammè’ Derrida writes of achieving a ‘thought that henceforth may no longer need to be either true or present’ (38), while in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, also published in 1968 (Tel Quel, nos. 32, 33) he writes of ‘the posture of the sophist; the man of non-presence and nontruth’ (Dissemination, p. 66). Aquinas in his Commentary is content to characterise the ‘exoteric’ arguments at 218a as ‘sophistical’ (Commentary, p. 25). 12 Derrida, ‘The time of a thesis: punctuations’, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in Alan Montefiore, ed., Philosophy in France Today, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 34. 11

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 57 57 Quoting

(What is to paraphrase in philosophy?) A system can, perhaps, be summarised, reduced, re-stated, reassembled, re-presented, its reciprocal relations retained, recapitulated, its moments re-ordered towards structural simultaneity. But what of a text, a reading? ‘Hegel himself has taught us that results are nothing without their becoming (venir)’ (35). So, indeed: Nous devons en venir à la question du temps. A-t-elle encore à etre posée? A-t-on encore à se demander comment le temps apparaît à partir de cette genèse de l’espace? D’une certaine manière, il est toujours trop tard pour poser la question du temps. Celui-ci est déjà apparu. Le ne-plus-être et l’être-encore qui rapportaient la ligne au point et la surface a la ligne, cette négativité dans la structure de l’Aufhebung était déjà le temps. (M 47)

To write is, to begin with, once again, after all (as we say), to deploy points: points finals (full stops), deux points (colon), point et virgule (semi-colon), to punct-uate; to write in lines (ligne d’écriture), to begin a new paragraph (aller à la ligne), a new page (turn over a new leaf), be in the know (être à la page) or behind the times (ne pas être à la page). Even if, when, to make our extraordinary (hors ligne) point, we ask for reading between the lines, between the breaks, insert two texts in the middle of each other, re-arrange the lay-out, make up the page in double columns, re-order pagination, play with type-face, typography, line-spacing, different point type and spacing, our reader still has to read, in a certain order of reading, whatever order is in the end chosen. What is in question is not only a matter of those temporallyinflected indicators of order that most texts deploy (‘Ousia et Grammè’ not excepted: un point de départ, jamais, à la fois, encore, jusqu’ici, passant à la .., still, if one considers now, yet at the same time, il est toujours trop tard pour poser-passim), or the peculiar practice of prefacing, or the relation between order of argument and order of presentation (cf. Dissemination on Marx, for example). What is in question is not only the time of thinking (a certain relation, for Lacan perhaps, between comprehension time and conclusion time), a time often allocated its own (a-)temporality in

58 ? Bernard Sharratt

the history of metaphysics.13 What the matter comes down to, here, is reading time, constrained by a certain necessary non-simultaneity: faced with parallel columns, interlinear lay-out, we read, inescapably, it seems, according to a before and after, modifiable in any re-reading but always insistent. The reading eye(s) can only — it is how they are made — hesitate, go back, look across, down, up, follow the line (left to right, right to left), flip, scan, glance, one (part of the) text at a time. And yet, two normal, familiar devices subvert this linearity. First, the footnote, the superscription inviting a switch of attention, a suspension, an insertion.14 The first six pages of ‘Ousia et Grammè’, in Marges, are divided almost equally, in terms of overall page-space, into ‘text’ and ‘footnote’. Faced with a footnoted excursus on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics or a reference (plus loin) to, say, ‘Form and Meaning’, do we suspend our reading of this text till we have read the footnote, even till we have read those ‘later’ essays, or perhaps even (re-)read the referred-to texts of Heidegger on Kant? We, probably, do not. But we do read or not-read text and footnote, reference or after-thought, in a certain order of interruption; we cannot follow both lines, read both at once, together, simultaneously (hama), even (especially) in ‘Living On/Border Lines’.15 Yet on the seventh page Derrida begins quoting Heidegger’s footnote, not in a footnote but as text, as quotation, noting that in Being and Time this footnote ‘intervenes’ ‘at the end of the subsection devoted to the Hegelian exposition of the concept of time in the philosophy of nature’ and ‘before the subsection of “Hegel’s Interpretation of the Connection between Time and Spirit”.’ (36). ‘The Note,’ writes Derrida, ‘cuts this sequence in two.’ A quotation is, it seems, precisely the possibility of reading ‘two texts ... together, Cf. Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum: theories in antiquity and the early middle ages, Duckworth, London, 1983, ch. 10, ‘Myths about Non-Propositional Thought’, pp. 137–56. Sorabji, incidentally, p. 10, suggests an Aristotelian solution to the aporia of 218a by appealing to Metaphysics 3.5, 1002a. 28–b. 11. Cf. also Jaakko Hintikka, Time and Necessity: studies in Aristotle’s theory of modality, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973, ch. IV. 14 Thus. 15 Derrida, ‘Living On/Border Lines’, trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism, Seabury Press, New York, 1969, pp. 75–176. 13

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 59 59 Quoting

simultaneously and separately’ (65). A whole text, perhaps not in its own order, can be quoted in-as another text — a limit case (which ‘Limited Inc.’ approaches)16 — or one text can be composed of quotations from other texts (themselves perhaps quoting quotations): ‘You will be expected,’ writes Derrida, in ‘Dissemination’, in Dissemination, ‘to measure, to sum up, in a statistical accumulation of “quotations”, the well-calculated, rhythmically regulated effects of a recurrence ... this accumulation will be the only means, not of presenting, but of feigning to present the text that, more than any other, writes and reads itself, presents its own reading, presents its own self-presentation, and constantly deducts this incessant operation. We will hence be inscribing — simultaneously — in the angles and corners of these Numbers [Nombres: title of a novel by Sollers], within them and outside them, ... certain questions that touch upon “this” text “here”, the status of its relation to Numbers, what it pretends to add to “that” text in order to mime its presentation and re-presentation, in order to seem to be offering some sort of review or account of it. For if Numbers offers an account of itself, then “this” text — and all that touches it — is already or still “that” text.’ And so forth. Thus: ‘The duality between original text and quotation is thus swept away ... you have been warned: “1.5 ... something had begun, but this beginning in turn revealed a deeper layer of beginning; there was no longer any before and after; it was impossible to turn around... — ’’.’ (Dissemination, p. 294 and p. 335, quoting Sollers, Nombres). Let us, then, turn back, at this point, to the pivot. ‘The first phase of the alternative (none of the parts of time is — present — therefore time in its totality is not — which means “is not present”, “does not participate in ousia”) supposed that time was composed of parts, to wit, of nows (nun). It is this presupposition that the second phase of the alternative contests: the now is not a part, time is not composed of nows, the unity and the identity of the now are problematical.’ (53) And Derrida follows his paraphrase of Aristotle’s paraphrase of the traditional aporia with a partial quotation, here with its repressed phrase restored (italicised) again:

Derrida, Limited Inc., Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1977, which quotes (the whole of) John Searle, ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, from Glyph, no. 1.

16

60 ? Bernard Sharratt If in fact the now is always other, and if none of the parts in time which are other are simultaneous (hama) — except those of which one includes the other, as the greater time includes the smaller — and if the ‘now’ which is not, but formerly was, must have ceased to be or been destroyed at a certain moment, the ‘nows’ too cannot be simultaneous (hama) with one another, but the preceding ‘now’ must always have been destroyed. 218a. (53–54)

Or, without indentation: ‘“If in fact ... destroyed.” 218a.’ The ‘ “ ’’ ’ points, single and double, mark off, punctuate, the double quotation, frame the intra-citation, delimit the simultaneity of texts. (Derrida’s own text continues: ‘How do the concepts of number (as the numbered or the numbering) and of gramme [Greek: gramme-, line, stroke of pen, etc; French: gramme, (measure) gram; Derridean: grammè, neologism] intervene in order to refurbish the same conceptuality in the same system?’ — but let us postpone these further parentheses.) The marks are separated by a space (‘“) that marks off two nearly identical beginnings, two almost co-eval limits. But those marks are dispensable, as in ‘Dissemination’, ‘silent’ (we say) quotation. What, then, is the time of a quotation? Perhaps we should, now, after all, ask what the point is.

 histesi he- dianoia : Thinking stands still with something Heidegger quoting Aristotle, De Interpretatione 16b 20

...time is that which erases time. But this erasure is a writing which gives time to be read Derrida paraphrasing Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind 17

Is the final point of Derrida’s note to pinpoint the point at which Aristotle’s analysis of time is already silently predetermined by a Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982, p. 254; Derrida, Marges, p. 53n. Heidegger’s Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, which only appeared finally in 1975, is the text of a lecture course delivered in summer 1927, and in part fulfils the project outlined in the footnote upon which Derrida focusses; for Heidegger’s own discussion of Aristotle on time cf. Pt. II, ch. l, sec. 19 (a).

17

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preconceptualisation of time? Thus his citation of hama in 218a as the cheville of all Western metaphysics .... But in what sense, after all, is 218a Aristotle’s text? At this point Aristotle is prefacing his own analysis of time by paraphrasing a traditional aporia, re-phrasing past formulations of apparently irresolvable problems: (a) whether time ‘is’, and (b) what the nature (physis) of time is. According to Derrida, Aristotle’s failure to return to and answer the question of whether time ‘is’ is the evasion or omission that pivots metaphysics. But Aristotle’s order of argument is important (and may not be the same as his order of presentation).18 He indeed leaves problem (a) behind as an aporia; but his subsequent answer to problem (b) is such that no answer to problem (a), as formulated at 218a, is then called for, since the nature of time is argued to be such that the very formulation of (a) becomes, is now recognisable as, inappropriate, inept, irrelevant. That hama figures in that now-abandoned paraphrastic formulation can hardly be held against Aristotle. Even so, Derrida might — if he would deign to show it — be right in reproving the whole subsequent history of metaphysics for an illicitly pre-determined metaphysics of time; but he would, on this evidence, at this point, have to exempt Aristotle himself from his charge. Yet at another point Aristotle’s ‘own’ text does indeed seem vulnerable — precisely at that point where Derrida locates an ‘anticipation’ of Kant. ‘The paradox would be the following: the originality of the Kantian breakthrough ... transgresses the vulgar concept of time only by making explicit something hinted at in Physics IV’ (49–50) since ‘In effect, as Aristotle says, it is because time does not belong to beings ... and because time is not of ... being in general, that it must be made into a pure form of sensibility (the nonsensuous sensuous)’ (48). ‘In anticipating the concept of the nonsensuous sensuous, Aristotle furnishes the premises of a thought of time no longer dominated simply by the present (of beings given in the form of Vorhandenheit and Gegenwärtigkeit)’ (49). But the paradox, in fact, is this: at the precise point in Physics IV cited by Derrida, what ‘Aristotle says’ is ‘hama gar kine-seos aisthanometha kai chronou’ — ‘for simultaneously (hama) we have the sensation of movement and time’ (219a 4). On this occasion, Derrida chooses to

Cf. the analysis by Edward Hussey in his Introduction to Aristotle’s Physics Books III and IV, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983, pp. xxxvi–xxxviii.

18

62 ? Bernard Sharratt

translate: ‘c’est d’ensemble que nous avons sensation du mouvement et du temps,’ and to gloss, to paraphrase: ‘... il semble alors qu’un certain temps se soit passé et du même coup, d’ensemble (hama), un certain mouvement semble s’être passé’ (M 55). As a footnote earlier remarks: ‘The following pages may be read as timid prologemona to a problem of translation’ (33, note 6). But perhaps one can make too much of a tiny word, a mere difference of translation, an element of signification, a d’ensemble as opposed to an en même temps? On the other hand, if the whole weight of Aristotle’s text comes down upon hama, it is as well to recognise not only that, as Derrida does indeed note, ‘Ama veut dire en grec “ensemble”, “tout a la fois”, tous deux ensemble, “en même temps”. Cette locution n’est d’abord ni spatiale ni temporelle’ (M 64), but also that Aristotle explicitly defines his own use of hama (and several related terms) in Physics V.3 (226b 21) — a passage Derrida does not note: ‘Things are said to be together (hama) in place when the immediate and proper place of each is identical with that of the other.’ But to pursue this definition of hama in place and its relation to time would take us to parts of the Physics that Derrida’s analysis does not reach — to the discussions of ‘place’, ‘contact’ and points, and the various uses of hama, in, for example, 209a, 212a, or in Metaphysics I, 9 and V, 6 — just as any discussion of the (simultaneous) perception or sensation of change and time ‘together’ would have to take into account, for example, passages in De Anima II, 6 and III, 1, De Sensu, I, 437a, De Memoria I, 449b–450a, II, 452b–453a, etc., etc. The connections between hama, time, place, point and change are indeed difficult (‘among the most difficult and decisive of the history of philosophy’) but would require analysis precisely because Aristotle uses spatial change as an analogue, and more than analogue, of time. Analogue only, because (pace Derrida) time is related not just to spatial motion but to any form of motion or change (kine-sis); more than analogue because some moves in Aristotle’s argument undoubtedly, and questionably,19 appeal to specific features of spatial motion. Cf. e.g. G. E. L. Owen, ‘Aristotle on Time’, in Motion and Time, Space and Matter: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science, eds P. Machamer and R. Turnbull, Ohio State University Press, 1976, and reprinted in Articles on Aristotle 3: Metaphysics, eds J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji, Duckworth, London, 1979, pp. 140–56; cf. also Hintikka, Time and Necessity, ch. VI, pp. 114–34. 19

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 63 63 Quoting

But the main point is that Aristotle’s eventual definition of time, his answer to problem (b) — the physis of time — that time is the number of motion according to/by/in relation to (kata) the before and after (ho chronos arithmos esti kine-seos kata to proteron kai husteron, 220a 25)20 designates ‘time’ as a predicate, even a predicate of a predicate, a category of a category, i.e. precisely as not having the kind of being of independent substantiality (ousia).21 To risk, indeed to appropriate, a paraphrase:22 There is nothing more to time than that it is a measurable quantity which attaches to changes in just the same sort of way as e.g. length and heaviness attach to material bodies. There is, in particular, no unified, all-embracing self-subsistent ‘Time’: there are just changes having greater or lesser quantities of time-length (p. xxxviii)

Perhaps only a full and (I suppose) ‘rigorous’ reading of the whole of Physics IV, together with, at least, a consideration of Aristotle’s treatment elsewhere of quantities and measurement (e.g. Metaphysics X. I, 1052b 14ff; Metaphysics, V. 13; Categories 6; Physics IV. 12, 220b 14ff) and his discussion of ‘uniform’ motion (De Caelo 11.6, Physics VIII. 10, V. 4), could justify, sustain this paraphrase, but — since Derrida equally does not provide such a reading — one can nevertheless say that in the light of that definition at 220a there is no need for Aristotle to return to the first aporia of 218a since the kind of ‘being’ postulated of ‘time’ in that formulation is not the kind which characterises time. Nor is it really necessary for Aristotle to return to the second aporia, concerning the part and the 20 It is well worth consulting Liddell and Scott for the various possible senses here of kata. 21 Cf. e.g. Franz Brentano, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, trans. Rolf George, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1975 (originally published in 1862). Heidegger, it will be recalled, wrote: ‘The first philosophical text through which I worked my way, again and again from 1907 on, was Franz Brentano’s Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles,’ Preface to W. J. Richardson, Heidegger, The Hague, 1963, p. xi. For Brentano’s own views on time, and a critique of Heidegger’s editing of Husserl’s comments on Brentano in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, cf. Oscar Kraus, ‘Towards a Phenomenognosy of Time Consciousness’, translated in Linda McAlister, The Philosophy of Brentano, Duckworth, London, 1976, pp. 224–39. Kraus’s article originally appeared in 1930. 22 Hussey, Aristotle’s Physics Books III and IV, Introduction.

64 ? Bernard Sharratt

nun, since his subsequent analysis deploys ‘nun’ not as ‘part’ but as ‘limit’, ‘boundary’ (as, in fact, Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida all recognise) and the conflation of ‘now’ with ‘part’ in 218a 10f renders the formulation there, and therefore the proposed aporia, inept. But though a complete commentary or even overall summary is precluded here (as it is for Derrida: his ‘Note’ is no more a commentary on Aristotle than it is an analysis of the history of philosophy.....), it is worth suggesting, playing with (it can be no more than that) a certain other analogue.

 If one were to ask what is the (physis) nature and mode of being of a quotation, it is apparent that a quotation has to be a quotation of; a quotation depends for its kind of existence upon a relationship between at least two texts, that which is quoted (from) and that which quotes. (A single text could not be a quotation.) And it is the quotation marks, the ‘ ’ which, normally, mark off the ‘end’, the limit, boundary, of one text and the ‘beginning’ of another, though — since the greater can include the lesser — either beginnings or endings may coincide though not both together (“this” text consisting entirely of one quotation would be, in a sense, “that” text quoted): my text may begin (or end) with a quotation from Derrida’s text, which may be the beginning (or ending) of his text. We use, for a certain convenience, marks which are neither indispensable nor part of the quotation (they mark it as a quotation but are not themselves quoted or from the text quoted) and we can indeed recognise a quotation without those boundary-signs; a spacing or indentation can substitute — a matter of conventions. If we were to ask how many quotations a text includes we might seek to use such marks as indicative, merely counting the quotation marks themselves (the minimum unit would be two).23 An unreliable procedure in practice, of course. But there is another question that might be asked: how much of a text consists of quotations? To answer that, a numerical count even of ‘reliable’ quotation marks (and some Cf. Derrida’s original epigraph to section V (‘The Pivot of Essence’) of ‘Ousia et Grammè’, excised in Marges: ‘The smallest number, strictly speaking, is two’ (Physics, 220a).

23

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 65 65 Quoting

‘ ’ are not even marks of quotation)24 is not enough, since even in the most statistical accumulation of quotations (cf. Nombres), quotation marks might not divide the text at sufficiently regular intervals to yield a unit of numeration we would accept; we would need to agree upon some other standard, a unit or uniform regularity. And that could be decided upon by reference to some (abstractly, ideally) uniform material feature of a text — the printer’s m as a unit of line space, for example, or more simply a calculation in terms of page space (Marges pp. 33–38: 18 inches of text, 17 inches of footnote). But of course a ‘ can interrupt the text to be quoted at any point: I can begin quoting from ‘But..., from ‘of course..., from ‘can interrupt..., even from a ‘ itself — though in normal printing practice we deploy an after as well as a before: a single ‘ or a “ indicates before/after the beginning (or ending) of a quotation, but most quotations both open and close. The relations between this potentially intervening ‘, operating a before/after at variable points ‘in’ the text quoted from, and the metric of, for example, m-spaces (in either text) could be further explored, in a certain parallel reading with Physics IV on the relations between nun as limit, boundary, the point and the line, and materially regular motion (a matter, literally, of physics); but it would be tedious to develop a foredoomed analogy to the full. And, in that regard, point-less. Except to make a point, a limited but important point: a matter of demystification. For, to quote, again, a paraphrase: Aristotle is inter alia trying to show that there is nothing intrinsically mysterious about time-stretches: all their inner structure is, as it were, borrowed from other, quite unmysterious things like spatially extended bodies, and they in themselves are straightforward, unstructured abstractions. The de-mystification of time is one of Aristotle’s aims, and that perhaps is the reason why he spends relatively so much time on the description of (e.g.) time-measurement, and on the derivability of its properties. (p. xliii)

This is not to say that he succeeds, but one can suggest (neither a result nor a method, merely an itinerary) that a history of the Cf. Derrida’s remark, in Éperons p. 107, on ‘the epochal regime of quotation marks which is to be enforced for every concept belonging to the system of philosophical decidability.’

24

66 ? Bernard Sharratt

concept of time might well be written which would prioritise, say, Augustine’s recognition that ‘time depends on motion and change, and is measured by the longer and shorter intervals by which things that cannot happen simultaneously succeed one another’,25 the related arguments of Leibniz (against Newton’s — novel — notion of absolute time) that ‘instants apart from things are nothings ... they only consist in the successive order of things’ and ‘the natural forces of bodies are all subject to mechanical laws .. (which) follow the order of efficient causes’,26 through to Einstein’s recognition that the constant velocity of light, which operates as the ‘uniform motion’ of relativity theory, is to be defined (reciprocally) in terms, eventually, of a ratio between energy and mass, and then, further, to the more recent recognition that space-time results from a point singularity of massed energy.27 To put the point in this way is not, of course, to dissolve the problems tackled by Aristotle — they

25 Augustine, City of God, trans. H. Bettenson, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, p. 435; cf. also p. 491. One might consider, for example, that the same person being old and being young ‘cannot happen simultaneously’ (pace Derrida’s feelings, cf. note 12 above); a certain concept of causality, and of history, is here, however, involved. 26 From the correspondence with Clarke, in The Philosophical Writings of Leibniz, trans. M. Morris, Dent, London, 1934, pp. 200, 229. 27 Cf. e.g. A. Einstein, Relativity, Methuen, London, 1920. For attempts to situate the theory of relativity within a history, cf. Stanley Goldberg, Understanding Relativity: origin and impact of a scientific revolution, Birkhauser, Boston, 1984, and Lloyd S. Swenson, Genesis of Relativity, Burt Franklin, New York, 1979. For more recent developments, cf. W. J. Kaufmann, The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity, Little Brown & Co., New York, 1977, and G. W. Gibbons, S. W. Hawking, S. T. C. Siklos, The Very Early Universe; Proceedings of the Nuffield Workshop, 1982, Cambridge University Press, 1985. For an intriguing attempt to develop a theory of integrated levels of different times, see J. T. Fraser, The Genesis and Evolution of Time, Harvester, Brighton, 1982, which argues that since ‘time is a symptom or correlate of the structural and functional complexity of matter’ it follows that ‘time itself has evolved with the increasing complexification of natural systems’ (p. 1) — an approach that might have endeared itself to Aristotle. However, some important components of the dominant cosmological theory are again in question, cf. J. Gribbin, ‘Galaxy Red Shifts’, New Scientist, 20 June 1985, p. 20f.

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 67 67 Quoting

receive a re-formulation perhaps28 but it is to tackle them in the same kind of way as Aristotle. And, arguably, that way is, precisely, aor non-metaphysical, a matter — as Aristotle said of physics. On this reading, it is the persistence of another, unnecessary, subordinate and intermittent component in Aristotle’s analysis that would lead us in a different direct line (un ligne direct, says Derrida) from Parmenides to Husserl to Heidegger even to Derrida: Besides that of the instant, there is another notion for which Aristotle wishes to make room: that of the present. The notion of the present had had a prehistory in Parmenides, Zeno and Plato’s Parmenides [151e 3–152d 4] ... Aristotle justifies this notion of a persistent present by reference to his analogy with spatial magnitudes and change. But the analogy does not require the existence of any such thing ... and in accepting the existence of a persistent present Aristotle complicates his theory considerably. The fact must be that Aristotle thinks he has to accept the notion of a permanent present as given in the phenomenology of the subject. The notion does no further work within Aristotle’s system. (Hussey, p. xliv)

Which is where Derrida would of course disagree, as he would disagree with the very notion of ‘subordinate’. But to incorporate Physics IV within that metaphysical line as its pivot would require a different kind of analysis, a different focus upon Aristotle’s text than that provided by hama in 218a, upon which ‘Ousia et Grammè’ rests its case. Which is not, in fact, to say that one disagrees with certain of Derrida’s conclusions or results, only with his reading of Aristotle’s text. One could contest, say, the reading Derrida offers of Aristotle’s argument concerning the point and the nun (especially the role in Aristotle’s analysis of the moving body itself considered as, for this move only, a point) yet perhaps agree with his assessment of Heidegger’s Being and Time as hinged upon a still-metaphysical opposition between ‘the authentic and the inauthentic’, primordial For an ‘exoteric’ (non-technical) exposition of some of the conundra of the new astrophysics, see John D. Barrow and Joseph Silk, The Left Hand of Creation: the origin and evolution of the expanding universe, William Heinemann, London, 1984, especially ch. 6. One might, e.g., compare the problem of ‘left-handed’ electron spin with Leibniz’s question ‘why everything was not put the other way round (for instance) by changing east and west’.

28

68 ? Bernard Sharratt

and fallen temporality (63), or with his analysis of the difficulty, perhaps ‘impossibility’, of distinguishing rigorously in Heidegger’s text between ‘presence as Anwesenheit and presence as Gegenwärtigkeit’ (64). But insofar as ‘all this, in sum’ is ‘in order to suggest’ (63) — for example — that: In order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary that a trace be inscribed within the text of metaphysics, a trace that continues to signal not in the direction of another presence, or another form of presence, but in the direction of an entirely other text (65)

then one might suggest that Derrida should indeed have found some entirely other text than Physics IV, some other pivot (or trace) than hama. Yet, of course, a word, even a concept, is not to be identified with, or opposed to, Derrida’s ‘trace’: The mode of inscription of such a trace in the text of metaphysics is so unthinkable that it must be described as an erasure of the trace itself. The trace is produced as its own erasure. And it belongs to the trace to erase itself, to elude that which might maintain it in presence. The trace is neither perceptible nor imperceptible. (65)

The hama, after all, was merely ‘hardly visible’ and ‘self effacing’ (56). But, of course, ‘At the same time (en même temps) this erasure (effacement) of the trace must have been traced in the metaphysical text ... only on this condition can metaphysics and our language signal in the direction of (faire signe vers) their own transgression. And this is why it is not contradictory to think together (ensemble) the erased and the traced of the trace’ (66; cf. M 76–77). (It is at this point that a footnote troubles the text, as Plotinus joins the ensemble of Derrida’s texts....) In the penultimate paragraph of his essay Derrida signals that wished-for direction, makes a sign (up): There may be a difference still more unthought than the difference between Being and beings. We certainly can go further forward toward naming it in our language. Beyond Being and beings, this difference, ceaselessly differing from and deferring (itself), would trace (itself) (by itself) — this différance would be the first or last trace if one could still speak, here, of origin and end. (67)

In an ‘Address given before the Société française de philosophie, 27 January 1968, published simultaneously [sic] in the Bulletin de

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 69 69 Quoting

la société française de philosophie, July–Sept 1968, and in Theorie d’ensemble, Coll. Tel Quel (Paris, ... 1968)’ (1) — an address republished in Marges as ‘Différance’ — Derrida speaks (spoke; writes; wrote) of how this ‘neographism’ ‘came to be formulated in the course of a written investigation of a question about writing’ (3). One would need to know the chronology of writing (if such there is) to know if this was indeed the penultimate paragraph of ‘Ousia et Grammè’ but perhaps a certain near-simultaneity is more relevant. In an essay, published in June–July 1963 but re-published as the opening essay of L’écriture et la difference (published in 1967), and already quoted from, ‘Form and signification’, Derrida had written: Since we take nourishment from the fecundity of structuralism, it is too soon to dispel our dream. We must muse upon what it might signify from within it. In the future it will be interpreted, perhaps, as a relaxation, (détente), if not a lapse, of the attention given to force, which is the tension of force itself. Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is, to create. (Writing and Difference, pp. 4–5)

Paris 1968, and precisely those months that cover the addresses, articles, essays, that make up much of Marges,29 perhaps marked a point at which (from the future, now) one can locate a certain détente, a relaxation, if not a lapse, of the attention given to force, an emerging fascination for when one no longer had the force to understand (comprehend, include) force ‘en son dedans’. The form of ‘Ousia et Grammè’ repays attention — not merely the itinerary, the method. A note upon a footnote, a note made up, in large part, of quotations (of paraphrases, too) from other texts, from Heidegger on Hegel on Aristotle on ....; made up, too, in considerable part, of its own footnotes, referring, often programmatically, to other texts, to other readings, to other possible writings: Here, we can only cite and situate several texts on which our examination would have to bear down, patiently. (45, note 21) Again under the rubric of a preliminary survey, let us be satisfied,

The dates assigned to pieces in Marges include 16 January; 27 January; 3–4 February; 12 May; October — all from 1968; others date from August, November, December 1971 and May 1972.

29

70 ? Bernard Sharratt here, with translating Hegel’s text ... (46, note 22) One could show how this value of proximity and of self-presence intervenes, at the beginning of Sein und Zeit and elsewhere... (64, note 39) That it does not go without saying is a problem that we cannot tackle here. We may refer, on the one hand, to ... (51, note 31)

And dare one cite, at this point, another footnote, to a passage which speaks of the ‘necessity’ of a ‘formal rule for anyone wishing to read the texts of the history of metaphysics’: Only such a reading, on the condition that it does not give authority to the security or structural closing off of questions, appears to us capable of undoing today, in France, a profound complicity: the complicity which gathers together (rassemble), in the same refusal to read, in the same denegation of the question, of the text, and of the question of the text, in the same re-editions, or in the same blind silence, the camp of Heideggerian devotion and the camp of anti-Heideggerianism. Here, political “resistance” often serves as a highly moral alibi for a “resistance” of an other order: philosophical resistance, for example, but there are other resistances whose political implications, although more distant, are no less determined. (62, note 37)

What, then, is (has-been?) the fascination of this form, this itinerary, this way of coming? After 1968, a project has emerged, to deconstruct (so it is said) the whole of Western metaphysics — ‘an enormous task is proposed here’ — a valiant mission, extraordinary undertaking, undermining; a task of decisive, not marginal, significance, particularly insofar as violence, the force of totality, of totalitarianism, and metaphysics have already been recognised and delineated in their complicity.30 What, in theory, in practice, was to be involved in this project? As of December 1967 what is to be our position? You know, in fact, that above all it is necessary to read and reread those in whose wake I write... (Positions, p. 4) To be entangled in hundreds of pages of a writing simultaneously Cf. Derrida, ‘Violence et metaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas’, Revue de metaphysique et de morale, 1964, nos. 3, 4. Republished in L’écriture et la difference, 1967. The essay appears to date from mid1963.

30

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 71 71 Quoting [sic] insistent and elliptical, imprinting, as you saw, even its erasures, carrying off each concept into an interminable chain of differences, surrounding or confusing itself with so many precautions, references, notes, citations, collages, supplements.... (Positions, p. 14)

An enormous amount, quite (one might say) literally, of reading time is going to be required of us. To read, and re-read, and rereread, these most difficult (and decisive) texts with such rigour, such intensity of attention (refusing even paraphrase) that not a single word, even a tiny self-effacing, hardly visible word like hama, or perhaps even a trace still less perceptible, will escape our reading. A truly enormous task. Almost a sanctified one. Yet, in its way, necessarily an endlessly deferred task, asymptotically undertaken, interminably recommenced; a displacement of a question that is never, will never be, a system of opposition, a systematic opposition (such terms are under erasure): All these texts, which are doubtless the interminable preface to another text that one day I would like to have the force to write, or still the epigraph to another that I would never have the audacity to write... (Positions, p. 5)

That moment, that position, for Derrida, may have passed. But the fascination remains: to take on not just (simultaneously, at a certain moment of crisis) les flics, the universities, de Gaulle, French capitalism, US imperialism, but (think of it!): Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, the whole of Western metaphysics, the entire history of philosophy from Parmenides to Husserl — and yet, in practice (for criticism of all these texts cannot be simultaneous) to read and write in an interminable deferral, ‘un jeu de la soumission’ (M 72), a deference, a postponement, a supineness. At least, as always, it will keep us off the streets. (“Sous les pavés, l’apostille!”?) Yet, in tracing the concept of time, for example, is there not, perhaps, an interesting omission (or evasion) thus far, to be rectified, returned to, a project of re-reading yet (again) to be undertaken? Among the most difficult, and decisive, of texts upon time is, was, a certain analysis of labour-time, indeed of socially necessary labourtime, not endowed with a metaphysical substantiality of its own, but as a predicate, a mode of numeration, of accounting (for), of matériel, of material processes of change, of production, perhaps a non-metaphysical (for that would be the question) resumption

72 ? Bernard Sharratt

of an Aristotelian analysis of ‘the general system of this economy’ (‘Differance’ p. 3)? And — on the other hand — in the insistent recognition of the ‘repeatability of the sign’, a ‘repeatability’ to be located not as some homogenous medium in which writing occurs, but as a determinate of the material character of inscription, is there perhaps, still (again), a danger (a trace) of a certain appeal (for that would be the question) to a meta-physical concept of time, already silently pre-determining the very notion of repeatability, a time abstracted from the always contextualised act of inscribing (hama does indeed occur five times in 218a)? If indeed we are to ‘think a writing without history, without cause, ... a writing that absolutely upsets all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology’ (the final paragraph of ‘Ousia et Grammè’), in re-inscribing those two Greek terms, ousia and gramme-, we might still do well to recall Heidegger’s own gloss on the first:31 Disposable possessions and goods, property, are beings; they are quite simply that which is, the Greek ousia. In Aristotle’s time, when it already had a firm terminological meaning philosophically and theoretically, this expression, ousia, was still synonymous with property, means, wealth.

And a further sense of the second: gramme-: the line across the course, to mark the starting or winning place. In a race, the line, the tape, by the nature of its material and position, registers a decisive before-and-after, a discrimination between winners and losers, first and second, an order of competitors. To assert anything more than a certain simultaneity (always a matter of chance, coincidence, or causality) between the moment of “1968” (when history, perhaps, fell into time?) and the writing of ‘Ousia et Grammè’ would be to appeal to a perhaps as-yet unrethought notion of history, cause, change;32 but insofar as that

Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 108. Heidegger had already, as it happens, anticipated Derrida in commenting on the (necessary but not necessarily tautologous) use of temporal terms in Aristotle’s definition of time, cf. pp. 240–41. 32 One might also — not quite at random — mention the almost simultaneous publication of the marxist historian E. P. Thompson’s ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’ in Past & Present, no. 38 31

QuotingTime: Time: Notes notes on Derrida’s ‘Ousia et Grammè’  ? 73 73 Quoting

history is not a mere homogenous medium within which intraphilosophical moments occur, the question we still cannot afford to displace, evade, omit or forget, is whether or in what way, in a general economy in which ousia and gramme-, wealth and competition, play no little part, our immense labour of reading-time is, still, socially necessary. The Greeks had a phrase, used of the game of draughts: ton apo gramme-s kinein lithon. It meant to move one’s pieces off the crucial line; in other words: to try one’s last chance, to risk one’s final position in the game. Whitstable, Kent, 4th – 5th July 1985

(December 1967) pp. 56–97, and the situationist Guy Debord’s Société du Spectacle, Paris, 1967, especially ch. V, ‘Time and History’, and ch. VI, ‘Spectacular Time’. The revival of interest in relativity theory can, in part, be dated from the confirmation of pulsars in autumn 1967. Derrida may well be right that the problem of hama, of simultaneity, remains crucial to any re-conceptualisation of history and causality. I have offered some remarks on marxism and time in my ‘Towards a Cultural Study of Time’, forthcoming in David Punter, ed., Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies, Longmans, London, 1986, and in my The Literary Labyrinth, Harvester, Brighton, 1984, especially ‘A Matter of Time’, pp. 185–202.

As the printed appearance of this contribution to the Derrida debate has presumably indicated, another essay could, and should, be written on the indispensable contribution to Derridean scholarship of the various editors, copy-editors, layout designers, estimators, typesetters, printers, and proofreaders, for whom Derrida’s work must always have been a paranoiainducing nightmare. In this instance, I can only acknowledge my own debt to, especially, Rimina Mohapatra and her Routledge India colleagues. Any apparent typographical anomalies or oddities should be regarded by the reader as, deliberately, my own responsibility. B.S. 5th November 2008

3

Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction Gordon Hull

It is still evening, it is always nightfall along the ‘ramparts’, on the battlements of an old Europe at War. With the other and with itself. —Derrida (1994: 14) A book is a little cog in much more complicated textual machinery. —Deleuze (1996: 8)



Introduction

I

n a late interview, Derrida suggests that deconstruction is ‘not about destroying anything: only, and out of fidelity, trying to think how it came about, how something not natural is made: a culture, an institution, or a tradition’ (2005: 115). He then adds that such an analysis should be applied to deconstruction itself: And then you must also do the history of analysis itself and the notion of critique — and even of deconstructions. Because there is also a tradition of deconstruction, from Luther to Heidegger (Luther was already speaking of Destruktion to refer to a sort of critique of institutional theology in the name of the original authenticity of the evangelical message). The ‘deconstruction’ I attempt is not that deconstruction, it’s definitely more ‘political’ too, differently political; but it would take too many words to explain this. And some people might judge what I said to be hermetic (Derrida 2005: 115).

The answer runs against the limits of the interview format, but we are left with at least two clues and a caution. The clues are,

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first, that enough thinkers have engaged in a sufficiently similar and self-referential task of ‘deconstruction’ that one can speak of a ‘tradition’ in this regard; and second, that Derrida’s practice of deconstruction differs from that tradition; one marker of its difference is that it is more ‘political’. The caution is that an adequate elaboration of these clues into such a history runs the risk of being considered too difficult to understand. One might suggest, given that Derrida repeatedly interrogates the tendency of history to lapse into teleology, an adequate history of deconstruction would violate the usual narrative practices of history enough that some would declare it incomprehensible.1 Nonetheless, fidelity to deconstruction itself seems to demand that we speak of this history; in another late interview, speaking of the ‘commitment of deconstruction’, Derrida suggests that it would ‘be possible . . . to treat again this question of différance as a question of inheritance’ (2005: 95). In the moments after Derrida, then, it is appropriate to revisit the history of deconstruction. At the same time, such revisitation needs also to proceed in fidelity to différance, which is to say that it needs to proceed by way of resisting the sorts of totalisations by which historical narratives are always tempted. As Derrida says of a possible history of his own work, there is ‘no historical metalanguage to bear witness to it in the transparent element of some absolute knowledge’ (2005: 181). More politically, to borrow a trope from another thinker to whom Derrida often returns, ‘in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ (Benjamin 1968: 255).2 Here, I will consider one moment in the history of deconstruction, in order to complicate the narrative usually told about deconstruction more generally. That moment is 1968, and the aspect I will examine is the near simultaneous appearance of texts by both Derrida and Deleuze against ‘Platonism’.3 The specific point I want to make is limited: what tends to evaporate from discussions of both Deleuze and Derrida is the degree to which both are political and materialist. Orthodox Marxism, one may readily concede, is dead, either on arrival or certainly after Stalin.4 But French post-structuralism developed precisely in the context of this death of orthodox Marxism, with and through the vicissitudes of the politics of the academic left and the French Communist Party. As Derrida himself points out, ‘one can understand nothing of this period of deconstruction, notably in France, unless one takes this historical

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entanglement into account’ (1994: 15).5 Elsewhere, he adds that such a ‘political dimension’ was ‘decipherable in all my texts, even the oldest ones’ (Derrida 2005: 152). In order to recover something of this political and materialist thought, I want to look at how Derrida and Deleuze characterise the need to overcome Platonism, with primary attention to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994) and Logic of Sense (1990), and Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1981). I will argue that there is a remarkable congruence of their thought, such that we can and should meaningfully speak of a constellation in the sense articulated by Walter Benjamin: Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallises into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognises the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary change in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognisance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history — blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled (1968: 263).

In the next two sections, I will present a reading of Derrida and Deleuze on Platonism. In the final section, I will return to the question of the history of deconstruction.



Winning the War on Drugs For both Derrida and Deleuze, Platonism names a police function that intends the stability of an order of eidetic repetitions that at the same time neutralises anything which might not conform to that order. Conformity is defined genetically, as conforming concepts are those which repeat the structure of the governing eidos; successive instantiations of the eidos thus conform to it as tokens.6 It turns out that what does not conform is material singularity and affect, and so these, and claims based on them, must go.7 The motivation for this police function is not philosophical but moral and political; or, if one prefers, the motive to Platonic philosophy is a political one.

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Conversely, to move against Platonism is to perform a political act, if not the political act, the act which constitutes politics outside the perfectly stabilised Platonic city. Indeed, it is no accident that the Phaedrus (1995), in which the Platonic critique of writing and pharmakoi is articulated, takes place outside the city: it is a dialogue that deals with the necessary conditions for the constitution of the polis itself. As a re-reading of Platonism, then, such an act is motivated not just by theoretical concerns about Plato, but by events excessive to the Platonic texts. Specifically, actual events have exposed the violence of Platonic schema. In this violence lies both the necessary structure of Platonism and the possibility of overcoming it. In short, the claim is that because Platonism requires constituting its own outside, the police function is both essentially unstable and extremely violent. To develop these points, it is best to begin elliptically. In a 1990 interview, Antonio Negri asks Deleuze about a ‘tragic note’ he detects in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Deleuze’s response needs to be read at length: You say there’s a certain tragic or melancholic tone in all this. I think I can see why. I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi where he explains that Nazi camps have given us ‘a shame at being human’. Not, he says, that we’re all responsible for Nazism, as some would have us believe, but that we’ve all been tainted by it: even the survivors of the camps had to make compromises with it, if only to survive. There’s the shame of there being men who became Nazis; the shame of being unable, not seeing how, to stop it; the shame of having compromised with it, if only to survive; there’s the whole of what Primo Levi calls this ‘gray area’. And we can feel shame at being human in utterly trivial situations, too: in the face of too great a vulgarisation of thinking, in the face of TV entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of ‘jolly people’ gossiping. This is one of the most powerful incentives toward philosophy, and it’s what makes all philosophy political . . . There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery. What’s so shameful is that we’ve no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves. How any group will turn out, how it will fall back into history, presents a constant ‘concern’. There’s no longer any image of proletarians around of which it’s just a matter of becoming conscious (1996: 172–73).

In this passage, I think, lies the fundamental tension which animates Deleuze’s engagement with Platonism. On the one hand, we are

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compelled to philosophise, i.e., to form subjectivities, based on collective images and projections. On the other hand, those images function according to a representational model of thought which, when stabilised, necessarily generates human misery. For its part, Platonism is the move that enables representative thought to function, by grounding the distinction between original and image/copy. This grounding performs the political function of authentication: The true Platonic distinction . . . [is] not between the original and the image but between two kinds of images, of which copies are only the first kind, the other being simulacra. The model–copy distinction is there only in order to find and apply the copy–simulacra distinction . . . The function of the notion of the model is not to oppose the world of images in its entirety but to select the good images, the icons which resemble from within, and eliminate the bad images or simulacra (Deleuze 1994: 127).8

From this vantage point, Deleuze’s response to Negri is: the shame is that Platonism is no longer a valid option for us.9 There is no longer an uncontaminated eidos (e.g., ‘proletariat’) available for us to resemble. The ascent of any group toward its eidos is always already tainted by the ‘constant concern’ of its subsequent descent. At such a historical juncture, the effort to execute the fundamental move of Platonism becomes an act not just of violence, but of a violence which experience has rendered impossible to occlude. The problem is not that one cannot imitate; it is that the models for imitation have been shown to be false. In such a context, copies are no longer distinguishable from simulacra, which is to say that the ideas no longer have any particular purchase: ‘in the infinite movement of degraded likeness from copy to copy, we reach a point at which everything changes nature, at which copies themselves flip over into simulacra and at which, finally, resemblance or spiritual imitation gives way to repetition’ (Deleuze 1994: 128). For this reason, ‘the task of modern philosophy has been defined: to overturn Platonism’ (ibid.: 59). Deleuze emphasises repeatedly that Platonism instantiates an ethico-political decision. It is the decision to ‘repress’ (1990: 259) simulacra, to ‘impose a limit’ on becoming, ‘to order it according to the same, to render it similar — and, for that part which remains rebellious, to repress it as deeply as possible, to shut it up in a cavern at the bottom of the Ocean’ (ibid.: 258–59). Simulacra are ‘rebellious

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images which lack resemblance’ and which are ‘eliminated, rejected and denounced’ (Deleuze 1994: 272). In other words, in Plato’s case, ‘a moral motivation in all its purity is avowed: the will to eliminate simulacra or phantasms has no motivation apart from the moral. What is condemned in the figure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy, along with that malice which challenges both the notion of the model and the copy’ (ibid.: 265). Derrida speaks of Platonism in similar terms. The pharmakon, either embodied in the character of pharmakos or in the textual act of writing, is denounced for its inability to represent correctly the authorial voice behind it. In the terms of the Phaedrus, the essence of writing is its inability to copy correctly the words of its father figure. Rather than attempt to reduce the ambiguities associated with the materiality of language (‘the essential ambiguity of the pharmakon’), writing exacerbates them. Hence, worse than even representational painting: Writing thus more seriously denatures what it claims to imitate. It does not even substitute an image for its model. It inscribes in the space of silence and in the silence of space the living time of voice. It displaces its model, provides no image of it, violently wrests out of its element the animate interiority of speech. In so doing writing estranges itself immensely from the truth of the thing itself, from the truth of speech, from the truth that is open to speech (Derrida 1981: 137).

Writing turns the ambiguity of the pharmakon and the polis into ungovernability, so Platonism makes a moral decision, and ‘bad ambiguity is thus opposed to good ambiguity, a deceitful intention to a mere appearance’ (ibid.: 103). Platonism will bring both the tactics of immigration control and those of counter-insurgency against the former. ‘The element of the pharmakon is the combat zone between philosophy and its other’ (ibid.: 138); writing, ‘this signifier of little’, behaves ‘like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed, a vagrant, an adventurer, a bum’ (ibid.: 143). For Socrates to discipline this pharmakon into the Platonic city requires the ‘death of the body’ and the renunciation of the benefits of the pharmakon, of ‘knowledge as power, passion, pleasure’ (ibid.). Plato will thus establish the eidos/copy distinction in order to execute this police function: ‘it is precisely this ambiguity that Plato, through the mouth of the King, attempts to master, to dominate by inserting its definition

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into simple, clear-cut oppositions: good and evil, inside and outside, true and false, essence and appearance’ (ibid.: 103). This repression of the body, Derrida reminds us, carries contextual overtones of extreme violence: ‘in general, the pharmakoi were put to death. But that, it seems, was not the essential end of the operation. Death occurred most often as a secondary effect of an energetic fustigation. Aimed first at the genital organs . . . [t]he blows were designed to chase away or draw out the evil from their bodies’ (Derrida 1981: 132). As Deleuze puts it, ‘it is a dangerous trial without thread and without net, for according to the ancient custom of myth and epic, false claimants must die’ (1994: 60). Such violent dismemberment allows one to underscore that there are two kinds of violence here: there is violence within the representational order, and there is the violence of insisting on the representational order itself.10 The latter violence is, in a sense, necessary, in so far as one is not to affirm an impossible anarchism. What is not necessary, however, is the Platonic move to closure, the announcement that there is no outside. This announcement ‘is myth as such, the mythology for example of a logos recounting its origin’ (Derrida 1981: 128) in terms which fundamentally occlude that origin. Hence, the effort to overcome Platonism will be figured by the effort to speak of a necessary supplementarity, of difference, of ‘ground rising to the surface without ceasing to be ground’ (Deleuze 1994: 28).11 Platonism thus enacts, for both Deleuze and Derrida, an essential police function. The pharmakoi and simulacra are to be denounced, violently repressed. Importantly, these pharmakoi and simulacra are simultaneously the condition of the possibility of the police function which represses them. That is, since the police function involves not just separating inside from outside, but establishing the grounds for that separation, the police function creates that which it represses. For Derrida, ‘the representative of the outside is nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community, chosen, kept, fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside’ (1981: 133), which is to say that ‘the purity of the inside can then only be restored if the charges are brought home against exteriority as a supplement, inessential yet harmful to the essence, a surplus that ought never to have come to be added to the untouched plenitude of the inside’ (ibid.: 128, emphasis in original). In Deleuzian terms, ‘the world of the ground is undermined by what it tries to exclude, by the simulacrum which draws it in only to fragment it’ (Deleuze 1994: 274).

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Counter-Memorial The ‘tragic note’ Negri detects in Thousand Plateaus accentuates the urgency of overcoming Platonism, a move that Deleuze declared to be the task of philosophy as early as Logic of Sense, citing Nietzsche (Deleuze 1990: 253). However, in neither Derrida’s nor Deleuze’s case is the point simply to reverse Platonism in a pure affirmation. In Derrida’s case, the initial point is clear enough: the recognition of différance is the possibility of mourning, i.e., the recognition that presence can never be full. In his later works, the ‘positive’ aspect is more clear, as when he speaks of the necessity of an impossible, unconditional affirmation, especially with regard to hospitality. The affirmation is always political, and never without awareness of its own risk and the need to attend to its own contextual circumstances. Hence, an ‘intellectual’ justifies his or her ‘assumed intelligence . . . in the transaction that suspends the safe horizons and criteria . . . yet without ever leaving the space empty, in other words open to the straightforward return of any power, investment, language, and so on’ (Derrida 2005: 38–39). In Deleuze, the description of the gesture that overturns Platonism is more controversial, though the tendency is to read Deleuze as a purely ‘affirmative’ thinker whose affirmation precisely leaves the space empty for ‘any return’. He writes, in evident support of this proposition, that ‘overturning Platonism, then, means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image, of glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections’ (Deleuze 1994: 66). However, even in the opening lines of the Logic of Sense essay, he is clear that matters are not so simple, as ‘reversal’ is a misguided formula: ‘this formula of reversal has the disadvantage of being abstract. It leaves the motivation of Platonism in the shadows’ (Deleuze 1990: 253). ‘Reversal’ may represent what happens to Platonism, but since the order of representation itself is in question, one must proceed very carefully.12 Not only that, original and copy are not pure categories, and copies do not fully distinguish themselves from simulacra. Thus the overturn of Platonism does not entail glorifying all simulacra and reflections.13 The ‘tragic note’ is Deleuze’s warning against such misreading, and refers precisely to the irreducibility of material singularities to representations. Simulacra should neither

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be banished nor celebrated as such; those moves are mirror images of each other and both belong to the world of representation. What the tragic note emphasises is the necessity of counter-memorial, of a memorial to that which exceeds Platonism, as opposed to a monument which re-presents Platonic mythology.14 This is because Platonism as a moral force tries most of all to occlude its own operation; ‘the world of representation will more or less forget its moral origin and presuppositions’ (Deleuze 1994: 265).15 It will then efface itself; of Hegel, Deleuze writes: ‘to ground . . . is to represent the present — in other words, to make the present arrive and pass within representation (finite or infinite). The ground then appears as an immemorial Memory or pure past, a past which itself was never present’ (ibid.: 273–74).16 For the function of representative memory in general, ‘in order to be represented, the former present must resemble the present one’; such a decision necessarily involves a decision about what is appropriately remembered and what is to be forgotten (ibid.: 80). Plato offers us several demonstrations of this operation, from the myth of the horses in the Phaedrus to that of Er in the last book of The Republic (on this, see Barrachi 2002). To overturn Platonism is thus an effort at counter-memory, at writing the material singularities — the body that has died — back into the history that occludes them, as excesses that cannot be recuperated. Hence, Deleuze’s gesture in the Negri interview not just to Auschwitz, but also to Primo Levi, whose death by suicide preceded the appearance of the interview by three years (see Deleuze 1996).17 Such a messy memorialisation recalls Derrida’s discussion of Platonism’s effort to render memory immaterial. For Plato, this is the problematic of writing; ‘live memory repeats the presence of the eidos’ (Derrida 1981: 111), and ‘what Plato dreams of is a memory with no sign’ (ibid.: 109). Such radical absence of the graphic marks of memory renders memorable only that which can be subsumed under the order of the eidos. Memory itself is to be regulated according to the order of the pure inside: Plato’s problem with sophistic recourse to memory is ‘the substitution of mnemonic device for live memory, of the prosthesis for the organ; the perversion that consists of replacing a limb by a thing’ (ibid.: 108), i.e., of opening the possibility of a cyborg, if not quite a body without organs. As purely representational, memory is also not supposed to be carried in an object, and Plato thinks the sophists are guilty of ‘substituting the passive, mechanical “by heart” for the active

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reanimation of knowledge, for its reproduction in the present’ (Derrida 1981: 108). But the Platonic move gets things backwards: because the order of truth is representative, only aspects of the past whose form allows their representation in it can appear at all. Not just the interpretations of events in the past, but the events themselves as interpretable are constituted by the eidetic structure that represents them. Hence, when Plato attempts to distinguish between ‘memory as an unveiling (re-)producing a presence from re-memoration as the mere repetition of a monument’ (ibid.: 108–9), Derrida suggests that it is the favoured Platonic relation of memory that ends up being a mere repetition: representation can only represent itself, as the same. Memory becomes an effort at monumentalisation, of inscribing the present onto the past. Because they embody traces which betray the monumentalising process, the artifacts of memory are denounced: ‘the sophist thus sells the signs and insignia of science: not memory itself, only monuments, inventories, archives, citations, copies, accounts, tales, lists, notes, duplicates, chronicles, genealogies, references. Not memory, but memorials’ (ibid.: 107). As such a citation, ‘Auschwitz’ signifies our awareness of the impossibility and the violence of applying a universal eidetic schema to the past and insisting on its transparency; this means that in the opposition of memory and memorials, memorials will be all that we have. A memory will turn out to be a strangely self-effacing form of memorial, one that denies its own status as memorial and as event by insisting on its essential resemblance to an immaterial eidos. Memory:memorial thus mirrors copy:simulacra. Overturning Platonism is an effort at counter-memorial, and it is a task for us. Derrida inserts a remarkable passage between parentheses: It could be shown . . . that the problematic that today, and in this very spot, links writing with the (putting in) question of truth — and of thought and speech, which are informed by it — must necessarily exhume, without remaining at that, the conceptual monuments, the vestiges of the battlefield, the signposts marking out the battle lines between sophistics and philosophy, and, more generally, all the buttresses erected by Platonism. 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 Hegelianism (Derrida 1981: 107–8).

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The gesture to Hegel is significant. In his lecture course on the Philosophy of History, Hegel announces: ‘history begins with China and Mongolia, the kingdoms of theocratic rule’.18 Thus begins the familiar Hegelian story of the development of rationality, as figured in a movement of history from East to West. That story has been discounted since Marx and Nietzsche, who pointed to the peculiar inversion at work in insisting that an abstract idea was the bearer of history. Hence, Deleuze will say to his ‘harsh critic’ that ‘what I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics’ (1996: 6).19 What our position, in the morning after Hegelianism, allows us to see is Hegel’s other, nearly a silent move. In the paragraph before the announcement of history’s beginning, Hegel quietly asserts that ‘we have already left several parts of Asia as unhistorical; upper Asia, insofar and so long as the nomads themselves have not stepped up to the historical base [Boden], and Siberia’.20 This ‘already’ is precisely the already of a mythology: we are at the beginning of Hegel’s lecture, and the dismissal of the nomads is authorised only by the proposition that ‘insofar as prehistory is that which leads up to life in a state [Staatsleben], it lies beyond [jenseits] self-conscious life’.21 The effort against this gesture began with Marx, and Marx began writing what, from the point of view being developed here, one might call a counter-memorial. One aspect of this work was of course to tell history from the point of view of labour.22 Another aspect, less wellknown but vital to his early development, was to retell the history of philosophy by emphasising the materialist excesses to the Hegelian system. Marx wrote a PhD dissertation on Epicurus, fronted it with an epigraph from Hume, shortly afterward kept extensive notebooks on Spinoza, and closed the preface to the first version of Capital with a favourable reference to ‘the great Florentine [Machiavelli]’ (Marx 1976a: 21).23 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze — whose list of favoured thinkers reads like Marx’s, but with the addition of Marx and Nietzsche — writes that ‘dialectic loses its peculiar power when it remains content to trace problems from propositions’ (Deleuze 1994: 157), and complains that the ‘dialectical ox leave[s] a moral aftertaste, as though one could affirm only by expiating . . . It is as though Difference were evil and already negative, so that it could produce affirmation only by expiation’ (ibid.: 53). In Hegel, the nomads have been radically silenced. It is not just that their position on the ‘slaughterbench of history’ is determined by the Hegelian concept; it is that they are denied a position in the first place. Like the Homeric poets in Plato’s Republic, they will be driven away from the city altogether. After Hegel, ‘nomad’ becomes

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the trope for the forms of subjectivity and thought which are to be recovered. In Difference and Repetition (1994), ‘the agrarian question’ of the cultivation of ordered plots and properties — of the enclosure movement — is essential within representation. But outside representation, there is a ‘nomad nomos, without property, enclosure or measure’. In such a space, ‘even when it concerns the serious business of life, it is more like a space of play, or a rule of play, by contrast with the sedentary space and nomos’. Instead of the order of property, the distribution is to ‘cover the largest possible space’ (Deleuze 1994: 36). Derrida speaks in similar terms about the nomad and vagrant pharmakoi, cast out of the city, and of Socratic irony as that which ‘alternately and/or all at once . . . petrifies and vivifies, anesthetitises and sensitises, appeases and anguishes’ (Derrida 1981: 52, 119n), which ‘reverses the pharmakon’s powers and turns its surface over’ (ibid.: 119) by reducing it to silence. One’s options are agrarian domestication or banishment: settle down, get a life!24 To overturn Platonism will be to allow these nomads and corpses to speak without yoking them to the representative scheme of the Platonic system; an event that Deleuze says would be ‘as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground’, a state where ‘determination takes the form of unilateral distinction’ (1994: 28). As Derrida says much later in Specters of Marx, it will be a matter of spectrality and haunting, to treat the specters no longer as memories to be exorcised, but ‘as arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome — without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such’ (1994: 175). In Derrida’s later work, the problematic becomes quite concrete, and the gesture of welcome to specters becomes the impossible affirmation of absolute hospitality. The pharmakoi return in the figure of stateless people and the sans papiers. In particular, the ‘paper machine’ today solves the problem of writing by sacralising not just the authorised voice, but the authorised paper. It is necessary to trace this operation, for ‘the history of politics is a history of paper’ (Derrida 2005: 61). Today, ‘the “paperless” person is an outlaw, a nonsubject legally, a noncitizen or the citizen of a foreign country refused the right conferred, on paper, by a temporary or permanent visa, a rubber stamp’ (ibid.: 60). The political function of Platonism is intact, even as the surface level features of a critique of writing are transformed into the demand for writing.25 Today, ‘the words refugee, exile, deportee, displaced person, and even foreigner, have changed their meanings; they call for another discourse and another kind of practical response’ (ibid.: 132). The task is one of ‘finding the best “legislative” transaction, the best

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“juridical” conditions to bring it about that in a given situation the ethics of hospitality are not in principle violated — and are as far as possible respected. For that, you have to change laws, habits, fantasies — a whole “culture”’ (ibid.: 131). Speaking out against this contemporary Platonism remains the task of philosophy. The intellectual is to be engaged in ‘the invention or proposal of new conceptual, normative, or criteriological figures, according to new singularities’ (Derrida 2005: 39). An interviewer asks: ‘looking particularly at the global situation, what might be the contribution of philosophy’. In answer, Derrida, referring again to Specters of Marx, suggests that this ‘New International’ ‘shouts about what is so little spoken of both in political rhetoric and in the discourse of “engaged intellectuals”, even among card-carrying champions of human rights’. He enumerates: To give a few examples of the form of the macrostatistics we so easily forget about, I am thinking of the millions of children who die every year because of water; of the nearly 50 percent of women who are beaten, or victims of violence that sometimes leads to murder (60 million women dead, 30 million women maimed); of the 33 million AIDS sufferers (of whom 90 percent are in Africa, although only 5 percent of the AIDS research budget is allocated to them and drug therapy remains inaccessible outside small Western milieux); I am thinking of the selective infanticides of girls in India and the monstrous working conditions of children in numerous countries; I am thinking of the fact that there are, I believe, a billion illiterate people and 140 million children who have no formal education; I am thinking of the death sentence and the conditions of its application in the United States (Derrida 2005: 125–26).26

Those who belong to this ‘New International’ are ‘all those who, whatever civic or national groups they belong to, are determined to turn politics, law, and ethics in their direction’ (ibid.: 126).



Deconstruction without Organs Derrida says in one of his Paper Machine interviews that ‘what interests me more and more is to make out the specificity of a deconstruction that wouldn’t necessarily be reducible to th[e] Lutheran–Heideggerian

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tradition’ (2005: 138). On the one hand, the constellated proximity between Derrida’s and Deleuze’s early treatments of Platonism allows one to gesture to precisely such a specificity. On the other hand, the act of noticing this proximity is itself a gesture against the tendency to Platonise the history of deconstruction. Both aspects of this gesture point specifically to occlusions operative within the canonical history of deconstruction (at least, as it is adumbrated within philosophical circles), in particular, occlusions of its non-phenomenological elements. To put matters more provocatively: what is the subject of the history of deconstruction? As Derrida says in another interview, ‘there has never been The Subject for anyone . . . The subject is a fable . . . but to concentrate on the elements of speech and conventional fiction that such a fable presupposes is not to stop taking it seriously (it is the serious itself)’ (1995: 264). Since the constitutive fable of Husserlian phenomenology is the ‘intuitive given of originary presence’ (ibid.), and since the complexity of the relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology perhaps cannot be overstated, one must be especially careful in writing the history of deconstruction not to re-enact the mythology of intuitive givenness.27 In other words, one must try not to reify the ‘who’ that represents the subject of that history. Derrida notes that this ‘who’ is ‘a singularity that dislocates or divides itself in gathering itself together to answer to the other’ and that ‘here, no doubt, begins the link with the longer questions of ethical, juridical, and political responsibility around which the metaphysics of subjectivity was constituted’ (ibid.: 261–62). One needs, in short, genealogies of deconstruction. In his eulogy to Deleuze, Derrida says that in Deleuze’s books, he felt ‘not only . . . strong provocations to think but each time the flustering, really flustering experience of a closeness or of a nearly total affinity concerning the ‘‘theses’’, if we can use this word’ (Derrida 2001: 192).28 Subsequent commentators have tended not to accept this judgment. Rather, they find a ‘fundamental difference’ between the two, usually according to a negativity in Derrida and a positivity in Deleuze.29 Leonard Lawlor’s contribution to Between Deleuze and Derrida is exemplary. Lawlor (2003) discusses the language position in both Deleuze and Derrida as writing in response to Husserl, with references beginning in their 1968 Plato essays, and proceeding (in Derrida’s case) to Speech and Phenomena (Derrida 1973)

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and (in Deleuze’s) to other sections of The Logic of Sense (1990). Hence, Lawlor will argue that Derrida is taking up ‘indication’ in Husserl, and Deleuze, ‘expression’. It is true that ‘expression’ is a major term for Deleuze, but it is striking that Lawlor nowhere mentions Deleuze’s Spinoza et le problème de l’expression 1968. There, Deleuze explicitly grounds his usage of expression in Spinoza and Leibniz, and he adduces stoic and medieval nominalist sources for the term. At one point, citing Stoic paradoxes about expression, he even emphasises that ‘these paradoxes of expression play a major role in modern logic (Meinong, Frege, Husserl), but their source is ancient’ (Deleuze 1992).30 The sort of genealogy presented by Lawlor is not wrong — Derrida himself avers that ‘nothing I do would be possible without the discipline of phenomenology’ (2005: 143) — but the occlusion of Spinoza is operative in the case of Derrida, too, though less obviously (and perhaps with Derrida’s complicity). In responding to a question from Jean-Luc Nancy about the ‘history both of the thinking of the subject and of its deconstruction’, Derrida makes one of his (few) references to Spinoza, which needs to be quoted at length: I have always been a little troubled by the Heideggerian delimitation of the epoch of subjectivity. His questions about the ontological inadequacy of the Cartesian view of subjectivity seem to me no doubt necessary but inadequate, notably in regard to what would link subjectivity to representation, and the subject–object couple to the presuppositions of the principle of reason in its Leibnizian formulation . . . The foreclosure of Spinoza seems to me to be significant. Here is a great rationalism that does not rest on the principle of reason (inasmuch as in Leibniz this principle privileges both the final cause and representation). Spinoza’s substantialist rationalism is a radical critique of both finalism and the (Cartesian) representative determination of the idea; it is not a metaphysics of the cogito or of absolute subjectivity. The import of this foreclosure is all the greater and more significant in that the epoch of subjectivity determined by Heidegger is also the epoch of the rationality or the techno-scientific rationalism of modern metaphysics . . . (1995: 265).

Derrida then immediately insists that Spinoza is not the point after all (‘it’s not Spinoza’s case that is most important to me’). The point instead is that if Heidegger’s ‘delimitation is effected through an unjustified foreclosure, it is the interpretation of the epoch that risks becoming problematic’ (ibid.).

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No doubt more needs to be said than I can here — in particular, if we are concerned with singularities, then why is Spinoza’s singularity not an issue? Why does he appear for Derrida only as a token of the type ‘substantialist rationalism’?31 One specificity to which one should attend — particularly as one reflects on the fact that any adequate accounting of the historicity of deconstruction will have to speak of the recurrently violent responses to it (not just in the so-called Heidegger and De Man affairs, but also in the post–9/11 declarations that, finally, deconstruction is no longer ‘relevant’) — is that Spinoza analyses this sort of violence in an account of the affects and a critique of teleology.32 That is (and what follows can only be synechdochal), Spinoza has something to say about the issues at stake here, directly in the case of the reception of deconstruction, and more obliquely in the case of the narration of its history, both topics which fall well within the range of the critique of Platonism presented in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (Derrida 1981). First, as Derrida says, Spinoza presents a ‘radical critique of finalism’. In the Appendix to Part I of his Ethics (1992), he goes further than this, however, offering a genetic outline of why this critique encounters a hostile reception. Ignorance of actual causes, he suggests, leads people to seek refuge in teleological explanations that are projected from the phenomenology of their own experiences. Since they experience themselves as purposive and free, such explanations tend to ascribe purpose to nature and to arrive at the belief in a free, law-giving God who presides transcendently over it. What I would note here is that Spinoza immediately underlines the material and political questions involved: someone who attempts to ‘understand the works of Nature as a scholar, and not just to gape at them like a fool is universally considered an impious heretic and denounced by those to whom the vulgar adore as interpreters of Nature and of the gods’. He then explains that such declarations of heresy are politically useful ‘for these people know that the destruction of ignorance would destroy that stupor which is the one and only support for their argument and the means for the safeguarding of their authority’ (Spinoza 1992: Appendix I; translation modified).33 Second, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (1991) analyses the contingencies of human processes which enable the canonised Biblical text to appear as a unity. Hence, working immanently from within the text as it presents itself, Spinoza shows how features internal to the narrative strongly suggest that it is not of univocal origin. Again, he points to a material, political basis for the persistence

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in the belief of a univocal textual authority. ‘The supreme mystery of despotism’, he writes, ‘is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check so they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation’ (Spinoza 1991: 3). Thus, what I would underline here, on Spinozist grounds, is the extent to which writing Deleuze and Derrida into a post-Kantian phenomenological problematic occludes both the explicitly political intentions animating their works, as well as evidence of materialist bases for those works, Marxist and otherwise.34 In other words, it is not just that Deleuze is less ‘affirmative’ and Derrida less ‘negative’ than such representative schema suggests. By policing materiality out of their thought, the binary succumbs to the temptation to ratchet Derrida and Deleuze to negative and positive lineages. Derrida remarks of the centrality of ‘family metaphors’ to Platonism: ‘it is all about fathers and sons, about bastards unaided by any public assistance, about glorious, legitimate sons, about inheritance, sperm, sterility’ (1981: 143). In short: ‘logos issues from a father’ (ibid.) and ‘mastery of the pharmaka that should be handed down from legitimate father to well-born son is constantly put into question by a family scene that constitutes and undermines at once the passage between the pharmacy and the house’ (ibid.: 167). Platonism, as ‘both the general rehearsal of this family scene and the most powerful effort to master it’ stands for the effort to ensure the legitimacy of patriarchal succession, of the definition of well-marked lines of inheritance in discourse.35 What, then, is at stake in the disciplining of Derrida to negativity and Deleuze to positivity, if not the very repetition of the Platonic gesture? Following Derrida on this point, if what is sacrificed in Platonism is the materiality which exceeds representation, in this case, it is the materiality of textual events that exceed the family history to which they are assigned. Deleuze comments to his harsh critic that ‘the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it’s philosophy’s own version of the Oedipus complex’ (1996: 5). One should read history with a capital ‘H’, a history of the univocal development of a concept. Elsewhere, he writes with Guattari: ‘Oedipus is always and solely an aggregate of destination fabricated to meet the requirements of an aggregate of departure constituted by a social formation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 101). In Deleuze, the outside of Hegelianism and Platonism is found in ‘a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche,

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constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces, the denunciation of power . . . and so on’ (Deleuze 1996: 6; ellipses in original). As early as in the Expressionism book, he says that ‘a philosophy’s power is measured by the concepts it creates’ (Deleuze 1992: 321), and credits Spinoza with creating a new concept of ‘expression’. He adds that ‘Spinoza accepts the truly philosophical “danger” of immanence and pantheism implicit in the notion’ (ibid.: 333). Whatever one thinks of Derrida’s limited engagement with Spinoza, Derrida too constantly points to the externality of forces at work in texts which cannot ever mark their own outside, and names as Platonic, the effort to pretend that such demarcation can ever be complete. On this point, the affinity between Deleuze and Derrida needs to be emphasised and retained, precisely as we constitute our own subjectivities in the ‘and so on’ of Deleuze’s list, and figure the names ‘Derrida’ and ‘Deleuze’ in the assemblage of ‘the history of deconstruction’.



Notes 1. ‘Hermetic’ in this context refers to an earlier question: ‘You are also rather hermetic. That’s what is most often held against you’. Derrida responds: ‘Hermetic? Definitely not. People who say that have obviously not tried to read other philosophers, such as the “classics”. They’re much more difficult. You have to work around thought and language. I do everything I can, as a duty initially, to be intelligible and widely accessible. But at the same time without betraying what in fact isn’t simple in the things themselves’ (2005: 113). 2. For examples of Derrida’s reflections on Benjamin, see the ‘Fichus’ address (Derrida 2005: 164–81); and especially, Derrida (1990). The interpretation of Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ has supported its own cottage industry. I read him as resolutely materialist, see Hull (2000b: 163–86). My own reading is broadly consonant with, and indebted to, that found in Comay (1994); Tiedemann (1983); and Zons and Nitschack (1980). 3. There has been considerable recent interest in comparing the two, most notably the collection of essays in Patton and Protevi (2003). But see also Bearn (2000) and Stivale (2000). 4. Orthodox Marxism as defined here is the thought that economics determines social conditions ‘in the last instance’. The theoretical eclipse of orthodox Marxism in France began with Althusser’s development of ‘overdetermination’; see especially Althusser (1996) and Althusser and

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Balibar (1970). Of the untranslated parts of the original Lire le Capital (see Althusser and Balibar 1970), of particular importance is Rancière (1973). Althusser’s work, often characterised as ‘structuralist’, suffered from the urge to produce a ‘scientific communist’ knowledge. For overcoming these limitations, see also the important but now completely neglected commentary of Gerard Granél (1972) on Rancière. Other explicitly Marxian and materialist works which read Marx against orthodox Marxism include Baudrillard (1975); Callari, Cullenberg and Biewener (1995); Hardt and Negri (2000); Kellner (1995); Laclau and Mouffe (1985); Negri (1991); and Resnick and Wolff (1987). On these topics from a slightly different angle, see Marx-Scouras (1996). See also Wernick (2000), discussing the complexities of the break with ‘humanism’. Whether this is a ‘correct’ reading of Plato is not the point here. I will use both ‘Plato’ and ‘Platonism’ to name the structure of thought articulated by Deleuze and Derrida, rather than to the texts of the historical Plato. One way of casting this in Deleuzian terms is as the loss of event; another is to characterise Deleuze as the philosopher of ‘intensity’. For ‘event’, see Foucault (1977), especially 172ff; for ‘intensity’, see Boundas (2002). Deleuze emphasises the authenticating function as prior to the classifying one. For example, ‘our mistake lies in trying to understand Platonic division on the basis of Aristotelian requirements . . . There is nothing in common [in Plato] with the concerns of Aristotle: it is not a question of identifying but of authenticating. The one problem which recurs throughout Plato’s philosophy is the problem of measuring rivals and selecting claimants’ (1994: 59–60). Cf. ‘Platonism thus founds the entire domain that philosophy will later recognize as its own: the domain of representation filled by copies-icons, and defined not by an extrinsic relation to an object, but by an intrinsic relation to the model or foundation’ (Deleuze 1990: 259). The echo of Kafka is precise: there is hope, but not for us. It is also hard not to hear Adorno behind this thought: ‘the mutual indifference of temporality and eternal ideas is no longer tenable . . . Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience’ (1973: 361–62). A full treatment of these issues would thus attend more closely to the figure of law, in particular as Derrida develops it, following Benjamin, in his ‘Force of Law’. Derrida writes: ‘the word “enforceability” reminds us that there is no such thing as law that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being “enforced”, applied by force’ (1990: 925); one should also note the

Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction ? 93

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

ambiguous treatment of law in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’: law functions as an ideal form of writing (1981: 113). Again, the point is not that writing is per se bad, but to distinguish good from bad writing. See also Foucault, on the world of phantasmata: ‘we must articulate a philosophy of the phantasm that cannot be reduced to a primordial fact through the intermediary of perception or an image, but that arises between surfaces, where it assumes meaning . . . Phantasms do not extend organisms into an imaginary domain; they topologize the materiality of the body’ (1977: 169–70). The caution with which one should read Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism should perhaps be read in the context of the many vulgar efforts to read Marx as ‘reversing’ Hegel, as when he remarks that ‘the mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms . . . With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell . . . It is in its essence critical and revolutionary’ (Marx 1976a: 103). Deleuze is not such an anarchist, despite his usage of terms like ‘body without organs’ and ‘crowned anarchies’. In lieu of a detailed demonstration, it will suffice to recall the following elliptical remark in the ek-static Thousand Plateaus, in which Deleuze and Guattari underscore that their point is theoretic: ‘There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack of impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt. In short, the masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. That there are other ways, other procedures than masochism, and certainly better ones, is beside the point: it is enough that some find this procedure suitable for them’ (1987: 155). One might also recall Nietzsche’s dictum: when you say yes to one joy, you say yes to all sorrow as well. My usage of memorial and counter-memorial is indebted to Young (1994). To transpose: a memorial is a ‘good copy’ of memory, one that aspires to represent the official eidetic historical narrative and to disappear into that representation. A counter-memorial perverts this process. Thus, memorial: counter-memorial, as I use them here, map the Platonic memory: memorial. Cf. also: ‘nor is it certain that it is only the sleep of reason which gives rise to monsters: it is also the vigil, the insomnia of thought, since thought is that moment in which determination makes itself one, by virtue of maintaining a unilateral and precise relation to the indeterminate. Thought “makes” difference, but difference is monstrous. We should not be surprised that difference should appear accursed, that it should

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

be error, sin or the figure of evil for which there must be expiation. There is no sin other than raising the ground and dissolving the form’ (Deleuze 1994: 29). In Marx’s terms, the ground is a ‘manufactured originary state [erdichtete Urzustand]’ which ‘sets out in the form of a fact, the events it should deduce’ (1982: 364). Levi died on 11 April 1987. ‘Mit China und den Mongolen, dem Reiche der theokratischen Herrschaft, beginnt die Geschichte’ (Hegel 1986: 143). Derrida favourably cites him on this, declaring a particular affinity regarding their shared ‘thesis’ ‘concerning an irreducible difference in opposition to dialectical opposition’ (1981: 192–93). ‘Von den einzelnen Teilen Asiens haben wir schon als ungeschichtliche ausgeschieden: Hochasien, soweit und solange die Nomaden desselben nicht auf den geschichtlichen Boden heraustreten, und Siberien’ (Hegel 1986: 143). In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari return this problematic to that of writing: ‘it is the despot who establishes the practice of writing . . . it is the imperial formation that makes graphism into a system of writing in the proper sense of the term. Legislation, bureaucracy, accounting, the collection of taxes, the State monopoly, imperial justice, the functionaries’ activity, historiography: everything is written in the despot’s procession’ (1983: 202). ‘Indem das Vorgeschichtliche das ist, was dem Staatsleben vorangeht, liegt es jenseits des selbstbewußten Lebens’ (Hegel 1986: 142). Whether or not Marx reifies labour and constructs thereby another transcendental history is too complicated of a topic to develop here. For the argument that he does not, and that the category of labour is to be interpreted as immanent to capitalism, see Postone (1993). For the Epicurus dissertation, see Marx (1975–2005). See Spinoza’s ‘Notebooks’ (Marx 1976b). For dating and notes on the manuscript, see Marx (1976b: 773ff.); for discussion, see my paper (Hull 2000a). Hence, e.g., Spinoza is incorporated into Hegel’s system as a moment, no longer Spinoza but Hegel’s Spinoza. For the radical incompatibility of Spinoza and Hegel, see Macherey (1979). Macherey precisely emphasises Spinoza’s resistance to incorporation as a subordinate element: Spinoza ‘élimine de sa conception du réel, de la substance, toute idée d’une subordination hiérarchique entre de éléments: la pensée, comme attribut de la substance, est identique à tout, et n’a donc rien au-dessus d’elle . . . Cette subordination [of matter to thought in Hegel], qui installe dans le mouvement rationnel une hiérarchie de formes, est la clé de la téléologie hégélienne: c’est cette téléologie qu’élimine Spinoza’ (ibid.: 93). See also the interview earlier in Paper Machine (Derrida 2005: 30–31), where Derrida wonders aloud whether Plato would have had to rethink

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26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

his ontology had he been exposed to the word processor. If what I am saying about the political structure of Platonism is correct, the answer is ‘no’: he would only have to change ‘the rhetoric of his teaching’, or perhaps, the technology which he favours. An affirmation of nomadism occurs in a very different vein in Hardt and Negri (2000) whose thought is that all social relations and work are now capitalist, so social antagonism can only express itself in those who refuse work altogether, or who nomadically refuse to have their movements governed by capital (ibid.: 393–413). Note that Derrida emphasises, even here, that Husserl himself moved beyond this myth: ‘how can one forget that even in the most marked transcendental idealism, that of Husserl, even where the origin of the world is described, after the phenomenological reduction, as originary consciousness in the form of the ego, even in a phenomenology that determines the Being of beings as an object in general for a subject in general, even in this great philosophy of the transcendental subject, the interminable genetic (so-called passive) analyses of the ego, of time and of the alter ego lead back to a pre-egological and pre-subjectivist zone. There is, therefore, at the heart of what passes for and presents itself as a transcendental idealism, a horizon of questioning that is no longer dictated by the egological form of subjectivity or intersubjectivity’ (1995: 263). For thoughts on the ‘friendship’ between Derrida and Deleuze, via Blanchot, see Stivale (2000). The most extreme version of the thesis I have found is in Bearn, according to whom ‘the difference between Derrida and Deleuze is simple and deep: it is the difference between No and Yes . . . the difference between Derrida’s No, which reeks of the thick smell of Schopenhauer . . . and Deleuze’s Yes, blowing in, fresh and salty, off Nietzsche’s new seas’ (2000: 441). One should thus note both that the Spinoza book (Deleuze 1992) is contemporaneous with the writing on Platonism in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), and that it treats expression precisely as a problem. For an extended discussion of this passage and its infelicities as a presentation of Spinoza, see Klein (2003). Derrida’s long involvement in these polemics need not be catalogued here. He points out on a number of occasions that Heidegger’s detractors (as well as his own) have, by and large, not read that which they dismiss, an observation that surely applied to Spinoza as well. For an extremely lucid critique of the ‘postmodernism is always bad’ argument, defending Derrida in particular, see Jenkins (2000). Examples could of course be multiplied. Apropos of the current situation, William E. Connolly writes that ‘Spinoza draws attention to how the results of the struggle between the

96 ? Gordon Hull positive and negative passions that always circulate in a society infuse the state, economy, and religious dispositions’ (2005: 877). 34. ‘[T]he truth of writing, that is, as we shall see, (the) nontruth, cannot be discovered in ourselves by ourselves. And it is not the object of a science, only of a history that is recited, a fable that is repeated’ (Derrida 1981: 74). Cf. Deleuze’s remarks on creating concepts; the point to emphasise is the fabular nature of historical writing, because this fabular nature entails, as a consequence, the political nature of historical writing. As a piece of historical writing, then, the present essay’s political intention is precisely to politicise continental philosophy. From such a point of view, Platonism might be viewed as the dream that thought could efface its political character through the pure presence of memory and the ideas. 35. One is immediately reminded of Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’: ‘During the June days [of 1848] all classes and parties that had united as the party of order were against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy . . . They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society”. They had made the catchphrases of the old society, “property, family, religion, order” into military passwords’ (1996: 39–40, emphasis in original).



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Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction ? 97 Callari, Antonio, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener. 1995. ‘Marxism in the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities’, in Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener (eds), Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, pp. 1–10. New York: Guilford Press. Comay, Rebecca. 1994. ‘Benjamin’s Endgame’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, pp. 251–91. London: Routledge. Connolly, William E. 2005. ‘The Evangelical Capitalist Resonance Machine’, Political Theory, 33: 869–86. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense, trans. Marc Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1992. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books. Originally published in French as Spinoza et le Problème de l’expression (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1968). ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus. London: Athlone. ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University press. ———. 1981. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, pp. 63–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1990. ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Cardozo Law Review, 11: 921–1039. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995. ‘Eating Well’, in ed. Elisabeth Weber and trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, pp. 255–87. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2001. ‘I’m Going to Have to Wander all Alone’, in Pascal-Anne Brault and Michel Naas (eds), The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in English in Philosophy Today (42: 3–5), 1998. ———. 2005. ‘What Does It Mean to be a French Philosopher Today?’, in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby, pp. 112–20. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, in Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, pp. 165–96. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

98 ? Gordon Hull Granél, Geìrard. 1972. ‘L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la “coupure”’, in Geìrard Granel (ed.), Traditionis traditio, pp. 179–230. Paris: Gallimard. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1986 rpt. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke 12. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Translated into English as Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Promethens Books, 1990). Hull, Gordon. 2000a. ‘Marx’s Anomalous Reading of Spinoza’, Interpretation, 28(1): 17–31. ———. 2000b. ‘Reduced to a Zero-Point: Benjamin’s Critique of Kantian Historical Experience’, Philosophical Forum, 31: 163–86. Jenkins, Keith. 2000. ‘A Postmodern Reply to Perez Zagorin’, History and Theory, 39: 181–200. Kellner, Douglas. 1995. ‘The End of Orthodox Marxism’, in Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener (eds), Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, pp. 33 –41. New York: Guilford Press. Klein, Julie R. 2003. ‘Nature’s Metabolism: On Eating in Derrida, Agamben, and Spinoza’, Research in Phenomenology, 33: 186–217. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lawlor, Leonard. 2003. ‘The Beginnings of Thought: The Fundamental Experience in Derrida and Deleuze’, Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi, pp. 67–83. New York: Continuum. Macherey, Pierre. 1979. Hegel ou Spinoza. Paris: François Maspero. Marx, Karl. 1975–2005. Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 1976a. Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. ———. 1976b. ‘Spinoza’, in MEGA2 IV(1), Berlin, pp. 233–76. ———. 1982. ‘Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte’, in MEGA2 I(2), Berlin, pp. 323–438. Translated into English as ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, pp. 279–400 (New York: Penguin Books, 1992). ———. 1996. ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Terrell Carver (ed.), Later Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx-Scouras, Danielle. 1996. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Negri, Antonio. 1991. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano. New York: Autonomedia.

Platonism, Spinoza and the History of Deconstruction ? 99 Patton, Paul and John Protevi (eds). 2003. Between Deleuze and Derrida. New York: Continuum. Plato. 1995. Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodroff. Indianapolis: Hackett. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1973. Le concept de critique et la critique de l’économie politique des ‘Manuscrits de 1844’ au ‘Capital’: Lire le Capital III. Paris: François Maspero. Resnick, Stephen A. and Richard D. Wolff. 1987. Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1991. Theological–Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1992. The Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett. Originally published as Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg, 1925). Stivale, Charles J. 2000. ‘The Folds of Friendship: Derrida-Deleuze-Foucault’, Angelaki, 5: 3–15. Tiedemann, Rolf. 1983. ‘Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses “On the Concept of History”’, Philosophical Forum, 15: 71–104. Wernick, Andrew. 2000. ‘The Rhizomatic Genealogy of Deconstruction: Some Features of “The French”’, Angelaki, 5: 137–49. Young, James E. 1994. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press. Zons, Raimar and Horst Nitschack. 1980. ‘Walter Benjamins “Thesen Über den Begriff der Geschichte”‘, Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung, 34: 361–83.

4

‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? Derrida and Bourdieu, Ethical Subjectivity and the Gift Jon Baldwin



Introduction

‘D

errida is always late, en retard, the late Derrida’ (Hillis Miller 2007: 134). So begins J. Hillis Miller’s eulogy to Jacques Derrida. This lateness is a virtue, Hillis Miller opines. It allows Derrida to avoid reaching a goal, a telos, an end which would, thereby, close openness to the other and the chance of an event. In so far as Derrida is always late, then, perhaps theory after Derrida will see Derrida finally on time.1 However, this arrival would be in lieu of the ‘to come’. It would disrupt what Geoffrey Bennington, in a certain register, has called Derrida’s ‘teleology without telos’ (2000: 143).2 It would again jeopardise openness to the other. Derrida is always late, and let us keep it that way. One of the tasks of theory in the wake of Derrida might be the defence against certain misconceptions of his work. In this essay, I want to consider the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his critique of Derrida. Under focus will be Bourdieu’s attempt to replace the ‘ethical subject’ with the agent of ‘ethical’ habitus, a manoeuvre that often takes gift exchange, a key concern of Derrida, as its example. The notion of ethical habitus is clearly a challenge to the classical subject. Bourdieu further feels that his version of the ethical self escapes the paradoxes and dilemmas, the fear and trembling, the vertigo and paralysis, the demand of the other, and the perpetual questioning

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of the ‘good conscience’ that makes up the ethical orientation of the subject in the work of Derrida, Levinas, Kierkegaard, et al. In Bourdieu, the agent of ethical habitus replaces the undecided ethical subject. Once I have detailed Bourdieu’s challenge to the classical or traditional conception of the subject, his notion of ethics will be raised and his response to the question of whether a disinterested act is possible will be given. Bourdieu will be seen to suggest a version of ethical habitus that leads him to proclaim a sociologically informed sanction on the philosophical question of disinterestedness. This leads him into conflict with what he considers to be the ‘artificial paradoxes’ in the work of Jacques Derrida. Response to Bourdieu’s thesis will begin with the investigation of the notion that habitus is a ‘process without a subject’. The status of Bourdieu’s discourse will come under scrutiny as will the sanction against philosophy. As far as I am aware, Derrida has never explicitly (nor implicitly, according to the major commentaries) engaged with Bourdieu’s critique. I shall outline how this debate might proceed. Finally, I am aware that using ‘ethics’, ‘subject’, ‘morality’, ‘habitus’, ‘agency’ and so forth, without appropriate discussion of how they are to be understood, is fraught with difficulty, but suspension of this necessity is required for the sake of discussion.



The Classical Subject To begin to reflect upon Bourdieu’s notion of the self, a reiteration of the humanist or classical subject is necessary. This subject is classical in the sense that it is thought within what has proved to be a classic philosophical problem — presupposing that the self exists prior to the encounter with others. This subject was seen as fully conscious, autonomous and accountable to itself. As Isaiah Berlin has it, ‘I wish above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for my own choices and able to explain them by references to my own ideas and purposes’ (1969: 131). The traditional subject was thought of as the master of its self: ‘the subject is also the absolute master of its decisions, able to make them on its own without interference from any factors over which it has less than perfect control’ (Renaut 1999: xii). This model of the self has received steady criticism for seeing the subject

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as universal, non-relational, independent, individual, and uncaring. Richard Rorty, arguing against the implausible humanist doctrine of autonomy, suggests that ‘the central flaw in much traditional moral philosophy has been the myth of the self as non-relational, as capable of existing independently of any concern for others, as a cold psychopath needing to be constrained to take account of other people’s needs’ (Rorty1999: 77). This ‘myth’ of a subject was seen as exclusively rational and self-interested. Helmuth Berking, referring to agency, suggests that explanations ‘in terms of exchange theory structurally tend to downplay moral ties geared to emotional norms . . . To act is understood as choosing between various options, in accordance with the most rational (that is, the most successful possible) achievement of one’s own interests’ (Berking 1999: 23). Although it is somewhat of a caricature, these quotes can be used to amalgamate a dominant classical model of the self: the subject acts according to rational choices made in their own interest; moral ties are marginalised, if not absent; the subject has the qualities of reason, independence and consciousness; she/he is self-interested, uncaring, perhaps even a ‘cold psychopath’. It is such a concept of the isolated, non-relational, self-interested competitive self that is much loved by economic-based theories of the subject. This selfinterested ideology is used to justify much capitalist social policy, and aids the perpetuation of a monetarist ideology: the easy example here being Margaret Thatcher’s slogan (following the social theory of Locke, Bentham and Mill): ‘There is no such thing as society, only individuals’. Rationale for, and illustration of, the benefit of this ideology often points to game theory/mental puzzles such as the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ which utilise the concept of a subject in-terested in itself. One can begin to analyse Bourdieu’s contribution to the critique of such a conception of the subject by considering his response to the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’.



Bourdieu’s Criticism of the Classical Subject For Bourdieu, there are problems with the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ model of behaviour. The model is simply too abstract — Bourdieu argues that the ‘economic and social conditions that have to be fulfilled for a logical exercise of this type to be possible never are fulfilled’

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(1994: 241). Indeed, it can be added that the economic and social conditions necessary for the traditional concept of the subject are also a fiction. ‘To all those who look to the ‘‘prisoner’s dilemma’’ for the basis of all strategies of cooperation, I would suggest that they imagine it involving not interchangeable strangers but members of the same family in a house on fire’ (ibid.). This latter scenario would find behaviour less rational and not self-interested. The notion of introducing family members or friends into society and culture reaffirms that our dealings and relationships with others are not exclusively ‘means–ends’ with unknown individuals. We are not subject solely to commodity exchange. Gifts are exchanged among family and friends and it is an axiom of gift-exchange theory that the exchange is the just the beginning, not the end, of the process and transaction. Following Marcel Mauss, gift-exchange can be said to evoke a ‘family feeling’ generating devotion, love, generosity, and solidarity. This is witnessed in ‘countless ordinary and continuous exchanges of daily existence — exchanges of gifts, services, assistance, visits, attention, kindness — and the extraordinary and solemn exchanges of family occasions’ (Bourdieu 1994: 68). Social relations are created and sustained by the reciprocal exchange of gifts and services. The notion that the self is always already embedded in reciprocal cycles of gift-exchange — subject to gift-exchange — disrupts the notion of the self subject solely to commodity exchange and the thesis of alienation, reification and so forth that ensues. The problem with game theory and its associated ideology is that social relations are suspended; economic self-interest comes to the fore. On the other hand, if we consider gift-exchange, we enter a field ‘in which the ordinary laws of the economy are suspended, a place of trusting and giving — as opposed to the market and its exchanges of equivalent values’ (Bourdieu 1994: 65). So, here the law of economic interest is suspended; social relations come to the fore and gain importance. This is a challenge to the traditional and economic notion of the self as acting in accordance with his or her own interests — for instance, the maximisation of (monetary) profit. By introducing the family field with the exchange of gifts, Bourdieu challenges economic theories of the subject whose ‘principle of error lies in what is traditionally called economism, that is, considering the laws of functioning of one social field among other, namely the economic field, as being valid for all fields’ (ibid.: 83). The mistake, then, is taking the economic law as the fundamental law. That there

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exists this different mode of exchange (which produces different social relations) challenges the notion of an ahistorical and universal subject. It also challenges the traditionally negative concept of other individuals and society at large, who are only conceived of as a potential restriction/constraint on the traditional subject’s freedom. Gift-exchange makes us rethink the idea of others as problems or obstacles to be overcome in pursuit of self-interest.



Is a Disinterested Act Possible? Bourdieu’s work challenges the narrow conception of the self as a profit-maximising, economic-thinking being. It questions the pursuit of economic interest. It introduces others, but what else of ethical action? How free, for instance, is this new conception from self-interest? Bourdieu’s sustained focus on the possibility of disinterested acts and ethical action is in the collection entitled Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (1994). In answer to the title of one of the essays ‘Is a Disinterested Act Possible?’ Bourdieu, with qualifications, answers ‘no’. Any act that appears as disinterested is really just a decoy hiding self-interested motives: ‘all apparently disinterested actions conceal intentions to maximise a certain kind of profit . . . of being inspired by the search for the symbolic profit of saintliness, or celebrity, etc.’ (Bourdieu 1994: 86). Here we have symbolic profit (attained from seemingly disinterested and generous acts — e.g., giving a gift away) replacing economic profit (attained from interested acts). Bourdieu writes, ‘If disinterestedness is sociologically possible, it can be so only through the encounter between habitus predisposed to disinterestedness and the universes in which disinterestedness is rewarded’ (ibid.: 88). This is somewhat paradoxical — disinterestedness is rewarded. A disinterested act is only sociologically possible in an environment that rewards and celebrates disinterestedness. The reward for disinterestedness would make disinterestedness interested, which would, therefore, annul the supposed disinterestedness.3 Bourdieu acknowledges and celebrates this paradox of interesteddisinterestedness. The suggestion that disinterestedness is rewarded is indeed the paradox in the title of the final essay in Practical Reason,

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‘A Paradoxical Foundation of Ethics’. This is where the notion of an ethical subject is most explicit. The theme under consideration is reiterated by Bourdieu: ‘groups always reward conduct that conforms universally . . . to virtue. They particularly favour real or fictitious tribute to the ideal of disinterestedness, the subordination of the ‘‘I’’ to the ‘‘us’’, or the sacrificing of individual interest to the general interest’ (ibid.: 142). The ‘rise’ from the singular and selfish point of view of the individual to the point of view of the group is approved collectively. The group rewards disinterestedness. As Bourdieu puts it, ‘the subordination of the I to the us’ is because the I is rewarded by the us. Something is gained by purporting to act in a disinterested manner.



Bourdieu’s Ethics Bourdieu follows on from these points to suggest a foundation for ethics. His prescriptive ethical agency or prescriptive practice for the ethical subject would ‘be a question of establishing social universes where . . . agents had an interest in virtue, disinterestedness, and devotion to public service and the common good’ (Bourdieu 1994: 144). His ethics would consist of the attempt to continue to champion virtue and disinterestedness in the subject even though disinterestedness is not possible except in a paradoxical fashion. To be sure, this is certainly a notion of disinterestedness that would not be recognised by Kant and others, but for Bourdieu, this is not a problem since, as shall be seen, he later suggests that we need not concern ourselves with the notion at all. Essentially, Bourdieu argues for a scenario whereby subjects have an interest in disinterestedness — a scenario where the self gains from their disinterestedness. This is why subjects should act in accordance with Bourdieu’s ethics. An example of this can be seen in Bourdieu’s further discussion of gift-exchange. As has been suggested, for Bourdieu, the notion of a free gift would be an illusion. The disinterested gift, the ‘free gift’ would be a lie we tell ourselves, a decoy concealing interested action. Subjects participate in ‘an individual and collective self-deception’ (Bourdieu 1997: 231); the gift is not disinterested, it is a reciprocal gift (the interest being the discharge of a debt) or it demands reward.

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The subjects of gift-exchange participate in ‘collective hypocrisy’. As he suggests, ‘[w]e might be tempted to say that the objective truth of the exchange of gifts is, in a sense, common knowledge: I know that you know that, when I give you a gift, I know that you will reciprocate, etc. But making the open secret explicit is taboo. It must remain implicit’ (Bourdieu 1994: 97). In gift-exchange, for Bourdieu, subjects meet mask-to-mask, not face-to-face. He denies the free gift, the unconditional gift, the disinterested act. We pretend it happens, we reward behaviour and acts that also pretend it happens, but it does not actually happen. The pretence of the generous gift is rewarded. Bourdieu suggests that ‘[i]n a sense, from the group’s point of view, there cannot be a more dutiful act than so-called “white lies” or “pious hypocrisies”’ (ibid.: 141). As we know from the above commentary on Bourdieu’s ethics, he would support the continuation of these ‘lies’ and the perpetuation of ‘hypocrisies’. A significant point to briefly touch upon here is that Bourdieu clearly causes a problem for those thinkers on the gift who see it as a more immediate or moral form of exchange in contrast to the mediated and immoral exchange of commodities. Gift-exchange in the form given to it by Bourdieu as consisting of ‘white lies’ and ‘pious hypocrisies’, is as mediated, contradictory and bound up with ideologies as commodity exchange. In this sense, it is appropriate to speak of a fetishism of gift-exchange as well as the fetishism of commodity exchange. In answer to the question ‘Is a disinterested act possible’, Bourdieu stresses ‘no’, a disinterested act is not possible. He later goes further by rejecting the question of disinterestedness altogether. In a later text, Bourdieu argues: [that the] purely speculative and typically scholastic question of whether generosity and disinterestedness are possible should give way to the political question of the means that have to be implemented in order to create universes in which, as in gift economies, people have an interest in disinterestedness and generosity (1997: 240).

The concept of disinterestedness and the philosophical question of the disinterested gift are to be dropped and abandoned to make way for the more practical and political concerns of the promotion of habitus predisposed towards the paradoxical interested-disinterested, generous-yet-retaining, giving-yet-taking gift. One of the benefits

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of this position is that under the aegis of habitus, ‘exchange shares none of the paradoxes that are made to emerge artificially when, like Jacques Derrida in the recent book Passions, one relies on the logic of consciousness and the free choice of an isolated individual’ (Bourdieu 1994: 95).



Counterfeit Coins: Mauss and Kant By promoting the ‘collective hypocrisy’ of the paradoxical interestedyet-disinterested ethical act Bourdieu is following in the footsteps of giants of anthropological discourse. He likens his approach to that of Marcel Mauss; his ethics are ‘an individual and collective selfdeception, the very one Marcel Mauss refers to in one of the most profound sentences that an anthropologist has ever written: “Society always pays itself in the counterfeit coin of its dream”’ (Bourdieu 1997: 231). It can be suggested that Bourdieu also finds himself, perhaps uncomfortably, close to Kant. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant writes: signs of well-wishing and respect, though originally empty, gradually lead to genuine dispositions of this sort. Every human virtue in circulation is small change; only a child takes it for real gold. Nevertheless, it is better to circulate pocket pieces than nothing at all. In the end, they can be converted into genuine gold coin, though at a considerable discount. To pass them off as nothing but counters which have no value, to say with the sarcastic Swift that ‘Honesty [is] a pair of Shoes worn out in the Dirt’, and so forth, or to slander even a Socrates . . . for the sake of preventing anyone from believing in virtue, all this is high treason perpetrated upon humanity. Even the appearance of the good in others must have value for us, because in the long run something serious can come from such a play with pretences which gain respect even if they do not deserve to (1996: 39).

Bourdieu would no doubt recommend the circulation of these counterfeit coins and recommend the continued self-deception, to do otherwise would be ‘high treason’ against humanity. Alternatively, Derrida would want to probe the cost of the ‘considerable discount’ paid for such a series of pretences (Derrida 1997: 275). Further,

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Baudelaire’s narrator in the prose-poem ‘Counterfeit Money’, discussed by Derrida (1992a), will never forgive his friend for giving a beggar a counterfeit coin. In Bourdieu, then, ethical action is conceived of as maintaining habitus. The ethical self is subject to the habitus of maintaining the pantomime of disinterestedness (not that the smoke and mirrors are always witnessed). Questions of disinterestedness are irrelevant; therefore, the issue is to be dismissed. The development and promotion of dispositions, habits and duties aimed towards giving the illusion of disinterestedness in the subject should replace (not just supplant) the question and investigation of disinterestedness. By doing this one escapes the ‘artificial paradoxes’ that haunt the work of Jacques Derrida. I now want to critically discuss these points.



Habitus: A Process without Subject? In Bourdieu’s thought the ethical self is subject to habitus. If this is the case, then it initially remains hard to see how Bourdieu’s ethical subjects are not simple automatons playing out pre-scripted roles. Unless there is some freedom in (and from) habitus (which would trouble the concept greatly), are their acts any different to robotic procedures following an obvious and interested course of action? How would their acts differ from the pure and simple submission to a rulebook for action? The subject in Bourdieu seems to make a series of automatic actions based upon speculation of reward, be it economic reward or symbolic reward. To be sure, the ethical habitus would necessarily, on occasion, forgo economic reward for symbolic reward, but in the latter case there is still incentive, and interest is gained simply by going through the motions of demonstrating one’s commitment to family or religion. The problem that occurs is that choice and decision seem absent in so far as choice and decision are taken to mean, among other things, courses of thought leading to action not prescribed in advance. Would there be room for Hamlet in habitus? Are his thoughts, his ponderings, and undecidability mere epiphenomena of habitus? For some, this absence of an almost humanist recourse to notions of free will, free choice, is precisely the virtue of Bourdieu’s work.4

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Intellectual Extraterritoriality One of Bourdieu’s aims in ‘Is a Disinterested Act Possible?’ is to extend investigation ‘to all forms of human behaviour, including those presented or lived as disinterested, and to remove the intellectual world from the status of an exception or an extraterritoriality that intellectuals are inclined to accord themselves’ (Bourdieu 1994: 75). Further, ‘nothing more resembles the struggles for honour among the Kabyle than intellectual struggles. In many of those struggles, the apparent stake (to be right, to triumph through reason) hides the stakes of the point of honour’ (ibid.: 111). In a discussion ‘The Philosophical Institution’, Bourdieu contends that the institution ‘takes no account of the social conditions of the production of philosophical discourse and, especially, of the philosopher’ (1983: 8). Bourdieu has made Martin Heidegger the subject of such an investigation (1991). In brief, Bourdieu contends that Heidegger sought cultural capital through deliberate mystification and obscurantism, and was ignorant of the context influencing his thought.5 Bourdieu proposes a socio-cultural and political contextualisation of Heidegger’s thought: Bourdieu’s notion of a ‘political ontology’ challenges the notion of pure ontology. He attempts to reveal the means of philosophical production. In this instance, it is the investigation of the origin and impact of the socially conservative revolution of German intellectuals between the wars. Bourdieu suggests that Heidegger does not reflect upon it and in fact conceals this. Also, Heidegger’s position, a philosophical aristocratism, correlates to a real aristocratism. Heidegger’s peasant origins are ‘overcome’ in carving a distinction and social position for himself. Heidegger’s philosophy is a token, a game played to sustain his class position. Regarding Derrida, Bourdieu suggests that he marginalises, if not ignores fully, the analysis of the social determination of philosophical practice and ideology. However, given Derrida’s later questioning and probing of the issue of philosophy and biography, of the exclusion of biography from philosophy, these are eminently relevant points that are not entirely foreign to deconstruction. Behind debate surrounding the correct reading of the gift and corrections to structuralism then, is Bourdieu’s aim to produce a sociological analysis of the categories of philosophical analysis. An

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early critique is made of Derrida in this regard. Derrida’s reading of Kant, in the appendix to Bourdieu’s Distinction (1986), is rebuked for validating and supporting bourgeois philosophical analysis as a kind of disinterested pleasure. Derrida supports the ‘game’ of philosophy despite performing the occasional transgression. Indeed, as an aside, Bourdieu indicates that the technique of objectifying or reifying the philosophical tradition one belongs to in order to launch critical commentary can be a useful career move, drawing attention to and centring one’s name on the philosophical stage. One gains both ‘the profits of transgression with the profits of membership’ (Bourdieu 1986: 497). Bourdieu suggests that Kantian aesthetics sets itself apart from any political or worldly interests. It is invented at a certain time setting up values of disinterest, detachment, pure aesthetic contemplation and so on. On Bourdieu’s reading, aesthetics should be considered a non-discipline; it fails to notice its connection with the elite; it is merely a cultural construction reflecting the needs of the bourgeoisie to legitimate itself by laying claim to a certain kind of idealised aesthetic disinterest. Behind the most apparently disinterested pure tastes, Bourdieu contends, lies the pleasure of making subtle forms of social distinction, and enjoyment of the ‘experience of a social relationship of membership and exclusion’ (1986: 499). Bourdieu extends this line of critique to all manifestations of the notion of disinterest: such as the art gallery as well as the modern university, the literary salon, the gift (as has been seen), and the whole system of cultural capital. Derrida’s reading of Kant, in Bourdieu’s mind, is one more example of investment (in both the economic and psychoanalytic sense) and the attempt by philosophers to colonise a subject area which is entirely of their own creating. This is simply a means of establishing one’s own academic prerogatives. The competition for cultural capital and struggle for symbolic power is, in this case, cloaked in the language of disinterest. However, it should be objected that Derrida’s reading of Kant is actually somewhat sceptical about the idea of aesthetic autonomy or pure, disinterested aesthetic contemplation. Bourdieu is mistaken in taking Derrida as simply affirming a form of post-Kantian disinterestedness. At the same time, Derrida is not entirely dismissive. He is interested in Kant’s attempt to secure the possibility of disinterested judgement as a way of resisting various agencies or coercions of power which might impose some form of agenda. In essence, Derrida would want to question the notion of disinterest, rather than

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reject it as just an ideological alibi or self-serving fiction. For Chris Norris, this is precisely the distinction between postmodernism and deconstruction: ‘Postmodernism amounts to a generalised scepticism (or cynicism) about the whole idea of disinterested, truth-seeking enquiry; whereas deconstruction is a critical probing and analysis of the presuppositions behind it’ (2003: 90). Here the question might be raised as to how these suggestions — that there is no disinterested discourse; that intellectual activity is but the pursuit of distinction — relate to Bourdieu’s own position? How does his discourse escape the status of an interested struggle for cultural capital and honour? If the intellectual world is not an exception to interest, and if notions of truth and reason are marginal to the pursuit of capital and honour, then how does this affect how we might read Bourdieu? If intellectual habitus forgoes some notion of disinterested reason then why should we accept his work at all? If his discussion of disinterestedness is interested then does this invalidate the discussion? If his discourse is the outcome of intellectual habitus then what reason is there for us to accept this interested discourse over anyone else?6



Sociology over Philosophy As has been seen in Bourdieu, the description of a supposed lack or inability of disinterestedness turns into the prescription for the elimination of concerns related to disinterestedness. The practice of an interest in disinterestedness is to replace theoretical reflection upon disinterestedness itself and replace it with a political question of virtues within gift economies. We thus witness the attempt to transfer power from the philosopher to the sociologist. ‘There is no disinterested act’ becomes ‘there ought not to be a disinterested act’. This is close to saying there is no such thing as a free gift and therefore there ought not to be free gifts. This view sustains hostility to hospitality and incredulity towards unconditional love. It perpetuates the notion that everything has a price and, as Simon Jarvis argues, such an opinion sustains marketist theodicies and an anti-welfare stance. The ‘no disinterested free gift’ sentiment completes the real absence of freedom by prohibiting the very concept of it:

112 ? Jon Baldwin [F]reedom, humanity and justice might be ideologies in so far as they came with a claim to be unconditional or ideal. To label these ideas as mere ‘ideologies’ today, however, testifies only to ‘rage against whatever might refer to the possibility of something better’ (Adorno) (Jarvis 1998: 66).

In Bourdieu, then, the promotion of the simulacrum of disinterestedness not only replaces the possibility of the real of disinterestedness; it also banishes ‘the possibility of something better’.



Derrida’s Gift: Passion and Paradox One of Bourdieu’s targets in valuing sociology over philosophy is Derrida. Gift-exchange thought through with the sociological concept of habitus rather than thought with the philosophical concepts of Derrida is superior because it ‘shares none of the paradoxes that are made to emerge artificially’ (Bourdieu 1994: 95) by Derrida’s analysis. The reference here, as we have seen is explicitly directed to Derrida’s work entitled ‘Passions’ (1992b). Bourdieu accuses Derrida’s understanding of the gift to rely on the logic of consciousness and the free choice of an isolated individual. What exactly are these ‘artificial paradoxes’? What is Derrida’s conception of the gift? The gift is Derrida’s concern in Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (1992a). In the foreword he notes how the ‘problematic of the gift’ has been an issue in some form in much of his work. For instance, in Disseminations (1981) (‘Plato’s Pharmacy’), a note addresses Marcel Mauss’s etymological discussion of the gift as both gift and poison, in the context of the pharmakon: both remedy and poison.7 In Given Time, Derrida reads Mauss’s essay on the gift with a prose-poem from Charles Baudelaire. There is much to say about the gift, but for the purposes of this essay what is significant is the distinction Derrida makes between the gift and exchange, between the gift and the cycle of economic recuperation.8 Derrida announces a departure from the anthropological and sociological tradition of discussion on the gift: We will take our point of departure in the dissociation, in the overwhelming evidence of this other axiom: There is gift, if there is any,

‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? ? 113 only in what interrupts the system as well as the symbol, in a partition without return and without division, without being-with-self of the gift-counter-gift (Derrida 1992a: 13).

In principle, for there to be a gift it ‘must not come back to the giving’ (ibid.: 7), for this would annul the gift; it ‘must not circulate, it must not be exchanged’ (ibid.). All Mauss actually writes about, Derrida proposes, is exchange and not the gift free from exchange. The possibility and implications of the ‘free’ or ‘pure’ or disinterested gift are the themes of Derrida’s reading. Announcing the gift is akin to the Midas touch, rendering it precious and destroying it at the same time: The simple identification of the gift seems to destroy it . . . Consequently, if there is no gift, there is no gift, but if there is gift held or beheld as gift by the other, once again there is no gift; in any case the gift does not exist and does not present itself. If it presents itself, it no longer presents itself (Derrida 1992a: 14–15).

For there to be a gift ‘there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt’ (ibid.: 12). The gift then is ‘difficult’, a paradox, but this is not to deny the (im)possibility of the gift. The gift, if there is one, ‘is the impossible’ (ibid.: 10). Derrida’s later work, for instance, on cosmopolitanism and hospitality (whereby the guest should not give back to the host; the host should not remain ‘master in the house’), and forgiveness (not merely forgiving the forgivable, but forgiving the unforgivable; not requiring conditions such as the repentance of the perpetrator) investigates these impossibilities and the negotiation of the conditional and the unconditional. An aporia is produced when it comes to the question of how to give and receive in so far as the very recognition of the gift annuls it. A good conscience with regard to the gift, as well as cynical pragmatism (such as in Bourdieu) or radical idealism, is a sign of bad faith. 9 This is the scene that is dramatised in ‘Passions’. ‘Passions’ is the essay by Derrida that heads the book edited by David Wood, Derrida: A Critical Reader (1992b). One of Derrida’s concerns in ‘Passions’ is how to respond to the ‘critical’ texts offered elsewhere in the volume. In this sense, the subtitle of the response ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’ is informative. We witness Derrida dramatising self-consciousness, tackling how to respond to the gift of a series of critical texts. One is damned if one responds — one is

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simply going through the duties and motions of exchange and ‘to answer for oneself would here be to presume to know all that one could do, say, or write, to gather it together in an intelligible and coherent synthesis’ (Derrida 1992b: 17). And one is damned if one does not give back — non-response also has its risks: ‘seeming not to take sufficiently seriously the persons and texts offered here . . . to make use of silence in a way that is still strategic . . . to act simply according to a rule . . . giving evidence of a sincere, modest, finite, resigned effort’ (ibid.: 18). We arrive at the paradox, ‘what are we to do? It is impossible to respond here . . . this aporia without end paralyses us because it binds us doubly (I must and I must not. I must not, it is necessary and impossible, etc.)’ (ibid.: 19). In Bourdieu, this paradox or aporia is artificial because habitus ensures that one does not have to pass through or enter this stage of conscious reflection, one acts out of habit, duty, out of obedience to the ‘collective selfdeception’ that is gift-exchange.



Good Conscience Here we reach the crux of the issue between Bourdieu and Derrida. For Derrida, the problems with something like the notion of habitus is that one is (or might as well be) simply going through motions of agency. This may be an appropriate description for much social action, but when it comes to issues of ethics and morality (in so far as these notions retain some sense of reflexivity), the concept of habitus may be over-stretched and lose something in its broad application. Obeying habits and duties, doing what comes ‘natural’ might be the case for much behaviour but something different is expected in many of our moral and ethical affairs. In ethical performance, a ‘gesture “of friendship” or “of politeness” would be neither friendly nor polite if it were purely and simply to obey a ritual rule’ (Derrida 1992b: 8). In contrast to following the rule of duty or habit, and in contrast to the mimesis, mimicry and imitation of disinterestedness, Derrida suggests that ‘morality, decision, responsibility, etc., require that one act without rules, and hence without example: that one never imitates. Mime, ritual, identifying conformity have no place in morality’ (ibid.: 31). Simply going through the motions of morality and responding is problematic simply because it demonstrates unreflective habitus.

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In the ethical or moral response from the other, the last thing we want is an unreflective act simply going through motions, obeying some rule of habit. At the very least we want our singularity to be acknowledged. If habitus has an eye on the outcome, is speculative — ‘a probabilistic logic . . . conditioned by expectation of the outcome of a given course of action which in its turn is based, through the habitus, on the experience of past outcomes’ (Garnham and Williams 1996: 50) — then is the ‘artificial paradox’ in Derrida, which Bourdieu is so dismissive of, simply habitus taken to the nth degree? The final consideration of this issue comes down to how one feels, or not, as the case may be. Derrida might ask how we experience partaking in ‘pious hypocrisies’ and ‘collective deception’. Are we satisfied with our conscience? Does the telling of ‘white lies’ not leave a bad taste in our mouths? Derrida might also suggest that an uneasy feeling accompanies the mimicry of disinterested habitus: [W]e keenly feel this paradox: a gesture remains a-moral . . . if it was accomplished out of duty, in the sense of ‘duty of restitution’ . . . This feeling tells us, perhaps without dictating anything, that we must go beyond duty . . . Should not this disquiet predispose us indefinitely against the good conscience? (Derrida 1992b: 26).



Adolescent Perversity The charge that the presence and discussion of paradox or aporia in Derrida’s work somehow paralyses or causes problems for action is common and features in Terry Eagleton’s recent comments. This detour is worth taking since it will allow a further insight into Derrida’s notion of a responsible decision. Eagleton claims: Ethics, for the later Derrida, is a matter of absolute decisions, which must be made outside of all given norms and forms of knowledge; decisions which are utterly vital, yet which completely evade conceptualisation. One can only hope that he is not on the jury when one’s case comes up in court (2003: 247).

This is the most recent engagement of the two in what has often been a tedious series of attacks upon each other. In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, Eagleton writes

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of an ‘adolescent perversity’ in Derrida’s approach and claims that his grasp of Marxism is that of ‘an averagely-intelligent-layperson kind’ (1999: 85). Further: [Derrida’s] encounter with Marxism which, some decades back in Positions, he wryly announced as ‘still to come’ has finally, in some sense, arrived. He has, as the actress said to the bishop, been an unconscionably long time coming, and it is, as he is himself well aware, a mighty odd time to come (Eagleton 1999: 83).

To this picture-postcard humour, Derrida ‘can only rub one’s eyes in disbelief’ (1999a: 222). On Eagleton’s claim to proprietary rights over Marx, of a proper Marx and a proper reading of Marx, all of which is ironic in so far as it is in lieu of Marx being seen as communal property, Derrida writes of ‘the jealous possessiveness of so many Marxists . . . Has he learned nothing at all?’ (ibid.). On the charge of ‘adolescent perversity’, he replies: this hypothesis makes me smile . . . what, after all, does Eagleton have against adolescent perversity? Is he militating for a return to normalcy before all things? For normalisation? Of what other sorts of perversity as well? Once one has set to castigating one form of perversity, it is never hard to extend the list . . . Even if only one reader took an interest in me, it would be necessary to discuss him too in terms of ‘adolescent perversity’. And if so many ‘perverse adolescents’ in the world incline to this side rather than that, a ‘Marxist’ ought to wonder what is going on — in the world at large, not in the world of my deranged drives. He ought to look for explanations other than the libidinal deviation of an author who is not growing old with the requisite grace (Derrida 1999a: 228).

Finally, Derrida writes of a desire to warrant his ‘breaking off all further dialogue until certain “homework” was done’ by Eagleton (ibid.: 264).



Angry Men Behind Eagleton’s claim that ‘[O]ne can only hope that he is not on the jury when one’s case comes up in court’, as well as Bourdieu’s charge that habitus as a theory of action escapes Derrida’s ‘artificial

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paradoxes’, lies the misconception that Derrida’s notion of undecidability, and notion of aporia, somehow paralyses action. Behind these claims is the idea that with Derrida we never get anything done, that we are like rabbits paralysed by headlights, suffering some kind of apathy or inability disabling agency, muttering endlessly to ourselves ‘on the one hand x, on the other hand y . . .’ It is beyond the scope of this chapter to sufficiently scrutinise Derrida on the notion of decision and undecidability, but something should be said to begin to take issue with this misconception. Eagleton and Bourdieu have in mind something different to Derrida when it comes down to a definition and understanding of ‘decision’. The ability to act decisively is not the opposite of undecidability. The opposite of undecidability would be acting in a formal way akin to some preprogrammed automaton. Derrida claims: If you don’t experience some undecidability, then the decision would simply be the application of a programme, the consequence of a premise or of a matrix. So a decision has to go through some impossibility in order for it to be a decision. If we knew what to do, if I knew in terms of knowledge what I have to do before the decision, then the decision would not be a decision. It would simply be the application of a rule, the consequence of a premise, and there would be no problem, there would be no decision (1999b: 66).

Leaving aside many issues on these points, it can be said that if there is a decision to be made (and this is a big if) then it is not going to be easy — it is going to be a decision by definition of it not being reducible to automatically following action prescribed by a rulebook, habit, algorithm or by knowledge. This would precisely be where Derrida would take to task ‘ethics’ such as Kant’s categorical imperative. To reconsider Eagleton’s notion of Derrida as member of the jury — if there is to be a decision, if the evidence given the jury is not compelling, if the knowledge the case produces does not allow ‘reasonable’ doubt (or does, as the case may be), if one cannot automatically reach a conclusion of guilt or not — then one has to confront undecidability. But these are huge ifs. At this stage it is appropriate to mention a crucial issue regarding ‘Passions’. All of the dramatisation of consciousness and undecidability is preceded by a tremendously important qualification. One would suffer ‘vertigo’, would ‘tremble’, would suffer ‘paralysis’ with undecidability, Derrida says, only with the supposition ‘that one

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ever had any choice in this matter’ (ibid.: 8). If (retaining the jurymember scenario) the court case is compelling and convincing, the evidence and knowledge provided would mean that choice is absent — one would not have to decide, the defendant would ‘obviously’ be found guilty or not guilty. Undecidability only occurs when there is need of decision in the Derridean sense, when evidence and knowledge does not allow for the easy choice of the nomination of innocence or guilt. Derrida, Henry Fonda or Tony Hancock become ‘problematic’ jury members only when there is choice and decision in the matter; ‘when I say “I don’t know what to do”, this is not the negative condition of decision. It is rather the possibility of a decision’ (Derrida 1999b: 66). The notion that undecidability comes into play only if one has no choice in the matter illustrates the Derrida–Bourdieu debate. Habitus does not allow choice; ‘it presents itself as “the only thing to do”’ (Bourdieu 1997: 233). Bourdieu’s reading of ‘Passions’ as a series of ‘artificial paradoxes’ is problematic in so far as it ignores Derrida’s interjection that precedes his discussion: ‘Always supposing — we shall return to this — that one ever had any choice in this matter’ (Derrida 1992b: 8). Bourdieu’s reading has problems in so far as he does not engage with the prospect that Derrida has room for something like habitus — ‘the only thing to do’ — in the sense of the recent notion of the ‘passive’, ‘unconscious’, ‘decision of the other inside me’ (Derrida 1997). Put simply, there is room for something like habitus in Derrida (though much is still to be elaborated upon), however there is no room for something like undecidability in Bourdieu (only, at most, the simulacrum of undecidability and the affectation of choice).



Conclusion Bourdieu’s criticism of Derrida, even if it misses some of its mark, is necessary since at face value Derrida’s prioritising and dramatisation of self-consciousness might be seen as turning scrutiny away from objective determinants and objective contradictions in class and social formations, towards the subjective and personal. On this issue, Foucault on the meaning of the word ‘subject’ may be informative:

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‘There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to its own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (1982: 212). In the first sense of ‘subject’, we find a ‘subject-to-object’, in the second sense, a ‘subjectto-subject’ or ‘subject-to-self’ or ‘subject-to-conscience’. It appears that habitus is concerned with this first subjection to outside forces, for instance, class and social formations. Bourdieu might claim that Derrida prioritises the second understanding of subjection in lieu of the first. This criticism would stick only supposing that Derrida’s commitment to the second sense of subject is at the cost of the analysis of objective analysis. On the matter of the subject, Derrida is far from easy to summarise. He is, like many, critical of the notion of a subject that comes before the engagement with others, before certain experiences and before language. But he does not necessarily liquidate, deny or fully deconstruct the subject since there is no subject to liquidate or deny: ‘There has never been The Subject for anyone . . . The subject is a fable’ (Derrida 1991: 102). Derrida, instead, has in mind a notion, via Artaud, of the ‘subjectile’ (ibid.: 105). ‘It is a word that not only names the subject and subjectivity, but subjection and projection’ (Rapaport 2003: 122). To conclude, I have attempted to question the notion of ethics as habitus. I have raised difficulties with the sociological sanction against the philosophical question of disinterestedness and hope to have begun a response to Bourdieu’s reading of Derrida. While acknowledging the insight and necessity of much of Bourdieu’s labour, I agree with the ‘problematic elements’ in Bourdieu revealed by Briget Fowler in Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997). I share her point when she argues that Bourdieu has a tendency to suggest that there are no possibilities of moving outside the ‘game’ and that he has a ‘disturbing’, deterministic and narrow conception of artists’ ‘interest in disinterestedness’ that lacks any room for altruism. Fowler is also convincing when she argues that there is a cost to be paid in broadening out the idea of ‘capital’. Bourdieu, rightly, moves the self away from being defined as being solely concerned with capitalising in economic interest. However, the new location is the self still interested in capitalising, only now also in symbolic interest. Fowler wants to suggest, and I find this agreeable, that there is a difference that makes these two spheres not as interchangeable as Bourdieu seems to be suggesting. The ambitious and overarching

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use of ‘capital’ comes with a loss. Fowler argues, against Bourdieu, that the interest and capital gained in economic reward is not the correlation of the interest and capital gained in symbolic reward. My point is somewhat similar; the broadening out of habitus to try to include the ethical comes at a loss. Bourdieu’s critique of the ethical subject and replacement by the agent of habitus has difficulties. One final note: Derrida has suggested that the gift of hospitality should, in principle, be pure, without condition, without duty. In Of Hospitality (2000), a footnote follows a brief discussion of Kant’s ‘conforming to duty’. It is a matter, Derrida writes, ‘against and without Kant, of carrying oneself beyond debt and duty and thus even beyond what is done out of sheer duty’ (Derrida 2000: 159). Derrida finishes the note with three words that can also be the ‘end’ to any investigation and vigilance of the gift and economy; that can also ‘end’ any discussion of the sociological investigation of philosophical production; that can also ‘end’ the dream and desire of the gift; and that can also ‘end’ this essay: ‘[t]o be continued’ (ibid.).



Notes 1. In a simple understanding of the word ‘after’, one series of the possible fate(s) of theory after Derrida are addressed in Adieu Derrida, a collection of philosophical eulogies edited by Costas Douzinas (2007). The contributors pay tribute to Derrida and detail the relevance and continuation of the broad enterprise of Derrida’s work. Douzinas’s introduction makes clear that it is really a case of beginning to say ‘Bonjour’ or even ‘mon Dieu’ Derrida rather than ‘Adieu Derrida’. Étienne Balibar’s contribution focuses upon Derrida’s discussion of linguistics and subjectivity. Jean-Luc Nancy expounds upon Derrida’s interest in a certain madness at the heart of the constitution of the subject. Gayatri Spivak continues Derrida’s critique of what she terms ‘reproductive heteronormativity’. Drucilla Cornell discusses law and the notion of an undeconstructible concern for justice. Some contributors begin to detail their objections to aspects of Derrida’s philosophy. The necessary extended debate and discussion with Alain Badiou, who refers to Derrida’s work as anti-philosophy, remains to be fully explored and developed. However, Badiou announces he will now pay Derrida the tribute of spelling his concept inexistence as in-existance, as in différance. Jacques Rancière presents a clarification and critique of a

‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? ? 121 version of Derrida’s ‘democracy to come’. Slavoj Žižek offers a Lacanian response to the ethical turn in deconstruction. Žižek is suspicious of the theology and asymmetry of the Levinasian concern for the other which he views as inspiring such ethics. Žižek wants a return to what he sees as the radical nature of différance. (For what it is worth, Žižek provides a memorable interpretation of différance. He tells a vulgar joke concerning a fool having his first intercourse. The girl has to let the fool know exactly what to do: ‘See this hole between my legs? Put it in here. Now push it deep. Now pull it out. Push it in, pull it out, push it in, pull it out’. ‘Now wait a minute’, the fool interrupts her, ‘make up your mind! In or out?’ Žižek writes that ‘what the fool misses is Derrida’s différance’ (2007: 132), the play of absence and presence, the ‘satisfaction’ of desire from indecision itself, from repeated oscillation.) In the final eulogy, J. Hillis Miller, former Yale School colleague of Derrida, reveals that the last seminars given by Derrida before his death concerned a passage from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (2003). Crusoe discovers ‘the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore’ (Defoe) and is frightened, apprehensive, but also briefly calmed down by the idea that it might have been his own forgotten print. However, the unlikelihood of this only spooks him more. Crusoe is haunted by what will prove to be Friday’s trace; a mark which he had thought was his very own. Derridean themes abound here: iterability, repetition, trace, spectre, and so on. Hillis Miller provides an apposite description of Derrida’s method of discussion and analysis as being ‘like a great Charlie Parker riff’ (Hillis Miller 2007: 136), ‘repetition with variation’ (ibid.: 139), ‘digression or deviation’ (ibid.: 140), as regaling a ‘story about a story about a story’ (ibid.: 135), with ‘word play, exuberant hyperbole, and constantly selftopping inventiveness’ (ibid.: 136). The reason for this, Hillis Miller opines, is that ‘talking, writing philosophy, writing criticism, writing poetry, are different forms of the postponement of death’ (ibid.: 148). This is the consideration of death under the aegis of différance. Hillis Miller can, ‘without hesitation’ (ibid.: 144), assert that the late seminars are Derrida’s unique reflection upon and expression of Heidegger’s definition of man (or Dasein) as ‘Being toward death’. Hillis Miller notes that Derrida’s reading of Robinson Crusoe has ‘one important peculiarity’ (2007: 140) in that it focuses primarily upon Crusoe’s solitary experiences: Crusoe’s relation to himself. Derrida’s Crusoe exemplifies ‘the solitude of Dasein in the world’ (ibid.: 140). This orientation of Derrida’s reading of Crusoe omits themes such as the enslavement of Friday, European racism, colonial exploitation, ethnocentrism, Puritan morality, the role of Crusoe as exemplary Protestant capitalist and homo economicus, J. M. Coetzee’s inversion in Foe (1986), or even Giles Deleuze’s reading of the ‘boring’ novel in which one desires Friday’s cannibalistic consumption of Crusoe. Derrida’s

122 ? Jon Baldwin selection and emphasis upon Heideggerian solitude and the isolated individual, to the marginalisation of other concerns, has often attracted criticism. Indeed, this is one of the positions that Pierre Bourdieu takes. One of the tasks of theory after Derrida might be to address these matters; indeed it is fortuitous that they can be addressed utilising Derridean concepts. 2. In this regard, Bennington suggests that one of the things deconstruction is ‘especially not’ is critique: ‘critique is bound up with a teleological structure’ (2000: 143). This matter can be illustrated by the contrast between a deconstructionist approach to politics and a traditional politics thought within a teleological scheme: ‘A politics thought of as an economy of violence does not allow itself the dream of realising peace (which does not exclude the possibility of dreaming peace as a dream made possible by what disallows its realisation). This implies that politics is now, not projected into a utopian future, but in the event of the tension which is not to be resolved’ (Bennington 1993: 257). ‘[D]econstruction happens more in the journey than the arrival’ (ibid.: 169). 3. It is appropriate to elaborate briefly upon Bourdieu’s key concept of habitus. Bourdieu has previously described it as follows: ‘The habitus is this kind of practical sense for what is to be done in a given situation — what is called in sport a ‘‘feel’’ for the game, that is, the art of anticipating the future of the game, which is inscribed in the present state of play’ (1994: 25). Two commentators suggest the following: ‘the habitus regulates practice according to what Bourdieu calls a probabilistic logic, that is to say, practice in a given present situation is conditioned by expectation of the outcome of a given course of action which in its turn is based, through the habitus, on the experience of past outcomes’ (Garnham and Williams 1996: 50). So on this reading, habitus is some-what speculative, probable; it has an eye on the outcome of an act — it is anticipatory. To reiterate, if one acts disinterestedly, it is because of the anticipation and expectation of some kind of reward for acting disinterestedly. An apparent paradox — disinterestedness is rewarded. 4. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut (1985) discuss Bourdieu’s ‘antihumansim’ in their Essay on Antihumanism. They reiterate Bourdieu’s critique of Althusser. Bourdieu claims that the result of Althusser’s work was ‘to reduce history to a “process without a subject” and merely to substitute for the “creating subject” of subjectivism an automaton subdued by the dead laws of natural history’ (quoted in Ferry and Renaut 1985: 158). This all sounds somewhat familiar to Ferry and Renaut, and the question that must be asked is whether Bourdieu himself is so distant from Althusser? Is his replacement model an improvement? Is the replacement not itself ‘without a subject’ and merely the substitution of the ‘creating subject’ of subjectivism with an automaton subdued by the dead laws of interested habit and duty? If it comes down to a decision between

‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? ? 123 history as a process without a subject, or habitus as a process without a subject, then for Ferry and Renaut there is no decision to be made at all; both options are to be rejected. They quote Bourdieu on habitus: ‘Describing the habitus, [Bourdieu] represents them as the “generating and organising principles of practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their goals”’ (ibid.: 161) ‘Why’, they ask, ‘is this not another representation of social functioning as a process without subject . . . at the level of the habitus . . .? And in what way does taking the habitus into account denaturalise history and re-create a space for freedom (and responsibility)’ (ibid.)? In essence, ‘Bourdieu’s sociology actually appears to be a sophisticated version of vulgar Marxism’ (ibid.: 168–69). This orientation finds support with Judith Butler who writes, ‘Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus might well be read as a reformulation of Althusser’s notion of ideology’ (1997: 210). 5. Heidegger’s ontological project, and methodological removal from the everyday, Bourdieu argues, is political to the core. Language and philosophical discourse is preserved as more than just the conveyance of meaning: ‘the frontier between politics and philosophy is a genuine ontological threshold: the notions relating to practical, everyday experience, and the words that denote them, undergo a radical transformation which renders them barely recognisable in the eyes of those who have agreed to make the magical leap into the other universe’ (Bourdieu 1991: 36). Common words are invested with significance beyond and other to their ordinary and practical use. Neologisms are created and deified to separate Heidegger’s discourse from profane vulgar practice. An aim here is distinction and the validation of the profession of academic philosophy. It might be the case, however, that Bourdieu’s sociology of philosophy lacks a certain specificity. Much of Bourdieu’s detailing of the intellectual historical basis of the Heideggerian philosophical habitus, as Wolin suggests, could have been said of a number of German ‘conservative revolutionary’ contemporaries: Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Splenger and so on. What Bourdieu’s otherwise thorough study lacks is ‘philosophical specificity’ (Wolin 1990: xv). 6. In this regard, Ferry and Renaut suggest that Althusser’s work ultimately contains a fairly devastating contradiction. Althusser is shown to argue that intellectuals reproduce ideology, however: this situation, shared by those petty-bourgeois intellectuals, the philosophy teachers, and the philosophy they teach or reproduce in their own individual form, does not mean that it is impossible for certain intellectuals to escape the constraints that dominate the mass of intellectuals and, if philosophers, to adhere to a materialist philosophy and a revolutionary theory (quoted in Ferry and Renaut 1985: 17).

124 ? Jon Baldwin This notion of escape is hard for Ferry and Renaut to swallow in so far as it seems to contradict Althusser’s oeuvre. In view of his ideas of ‘operations of reification, it is difficult to see which surviving margin of autonomy might be the place where the possibility of these sublime exceptions can take root’ (ibid.). Ferry and Renaut suggest that Bourdieu’s discourse reproduces an ‘analogous inconsistency’. In answer to a question concerning what authorises him to write Homo Academicus, his response was that his ‘point of view is that of true scientific gain’ (Bourdieu quoted in ibid.), and again, ‘the logic of scientific analysis largely transcends individual or collective intentions and desires’ (ibid.: 159). In light of Bourdieu’s discussion of intellectual habitus, it is appropriate to join with Ferry and Renaut’s suspicion and incredulity regarding this supposed disinterested scientific gaze. The inconsistency that Ferry and Renaut attribute to both Althusser and Bourdieu can equally be extended to others such as Debord, Lukács and Baudrillard. The enunciation of the notion that one is subject to ideology, or subject to habitus, or subject to spectacle, or subject to reification, or subject to simulacra, necessarily betrays that same notion by demonstrating, in the very enunciation, at least one exception. This inconsistency is the blind spot of ideology discussed by Rastko Mocˇnik: ‘The position from where a theory of ideology can possibly be uttered undermines the very possibility of its utterance. Such a theory can elaborate upon the utterance/uttering-position relations of any utterance but its own. It is itself its own blind spot. It can take as its object any socio-historical situation but the one it depends upon for its possibility’ (Mocˇnik 1999: 113). Leaving these complex issues to one side, what can be taken from the brief investigation is that Bourdieu’s work allows an exteriority to habitus in the notion of the disinterested scientific gaze. Speculation allows us to ponder the question of how large this space outside habitus is, and whether there is room for any other disinterested activity. 7. In a short article, ‘Gift, Gift’, Mauss notes that in Germanic languages the two meanings of ‘present’ and ‘poison’ diverge into the single word ‘gift’ (1997: 28). Today, it is only in modern German that the meaning of poison is kept, in English the sense of present and endowment is maintained. Mauss asserts that no satisfactory explanation has been provided for this semantic derivation: ‘But why is it precisely the word gift and the idea of bestowal it evokes that have been chosen as symbols of poison’ (ibid.: 28)? Mauss responds by suggesting that for the ancient Germans and Scandinavians, the present par excellence is the gift of drink, of beer: ‘the uncertainty about the good or bad nature of the presents could have been nowhere greater than in the case of the customs of the kind where the gifts consisted essentially in drinks

‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? ? 125 taken in common, in libations offered or to be rendered’ (ibid.: 30). In principle, at least, the drink-present can be poison, the metaphorical ‘poison chalice’. There is also the potential failure to return the drinkpresent, failure to honour the bond. For Mauss, the resonance of this etymological ambiguity is still felt in accounting for ‘the pleasure and the displeasure we still feel when receiving presents’ (ibid.: 31). Here, it is not the case that Derrida has created or invented an undecidable term, rather than (re)discover one. Bourdieu can be seen to marginalise this aspect of the gift. 8. Of course, the ambit of Derrida and the gift (and questions, for instance, of textual, libidinal, and philosophical economy) can only be touched upon. An indication of the importance of the figure of the gift in relation to Derrida’s oeuvre can be gauged from the following: This gift which does not present itself as such precedes any exchange and therefore any dialectic . . . We cannot prevent dialectical thinking from drawing on this, but the fact remains that the dialectico-ontological circle must open onto this pre-ontological gift that it cannot receive as such but must constantly presuppose (Bennington 1993: 190–91). Bennington, as one of Derrida’s ablest commentators/interlocutors ‘invokes’ as a ‘definition’ of deconstruction, ‘the effort to interrupt the Hegelian Aufhebung’ (ibid.: 290). ‘The gift’, he writes, ‘might be the nickname’ of what the Hegelian dialectic cannot ‘think whilst finding in it its condition of possibility’ (ibid.: 291) In Positions, Derrida says: ‘If there were a definition of différance it would be precisely the limiting, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian dialectic everywhere it operates’ (1987: 55). The impossibility of the gift is comparable to the impossibility of différance. 9. The gift in Derrida, as is often forgotten, should not lead to: a sort of adoring and faithful abdication, a simple movement of faith in the face of that which exceeds the limits of experience, knowledge, science, economy — and even philosophy. On the contrary, it is a matter — desire beyond desire — of responding faithfully but also as rigorously as possible both to the injunction or the order of the gift as well as to the injunction or the order of meaning (presence, science, knowledge): Know still what giving wants to say, know how to give, know what you want and what to say when you give, know how the gift annuls itself, commit yourself even if commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift, give economy its chance (Derrida 1992a: 30).

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References Bennington, Geoffrey. 1993. Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. ‘Almost the End’, in Geoffrey Bennington (ed.), Interrupting Derrida, pp. 141–52. London: Routledge. Berking, Helmuth. 1999. Sociology of Giving. London: Sage Publications. Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983. ‘The Philosophical Institution’, in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today, pp. 1–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. ———. 1991. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1997. ‘Marginalia: Some Additional Notes on the Gift’, in Alan Schrift (ed.), The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, pp. 231–41. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Coetzee, J. M. 1986. Foe. London: Secker & Warburg. Defoe, Daniel. 2003. Robinson Crusoe. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Chicago: Chicago University press. ———. 1987. Positions. London: Athlone Press. ———. 1991. ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds), Who Comes After The Subject?, pp. 96–119. London: Routledge. ———. 1992a. Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1992b. ‘Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering’, in David Wood (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader, pp. 5–35. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1997. Politics of Friendship. London: Verso. ———. 1999a. ‘Marx & Sons’, in Mark Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, pp. 213–69. London: Verso.

‘Sociology over Philosophy’? ‘Artificial Paradoxes’? ? 127 Derrida, Jacques. 1999b. ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, pp. 65–83. London: Routledge. ———. 2000. ‘Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality’, in Anne Dufourmantelle (ed.), Of Hospitality, pp. 75–115. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Douzinas, Costas (ed.). 2007. Adieu Derrida. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eagleton, Terry. 1999. ‘Marxism without Marxism’, in Mark Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, pp. 83–87. London: Verso. ———. 2003. ‘Alain Badiou’, in Terry Eagleton (ed.), Figures of Dissent, pp. 246–53. London: Verso. Ferry, Luc and Alain Renaut. 1985. French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel. 1982. ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, in H. L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 208–26. Brighton: Harvester. Fowler, Bridget. 1997. Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory. London: Sage. Garnham, Nicholas and Raymond Williams. 1996. ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture: An Introduction’, in Jerry Palmer and Mo Dodson (eds), Design and Aesthetics: A Reader, pp. 49–62. London: Routledge. Hillis Miller, J. 2007. ‘The Late Derrida’, in Costas Douzinas (ed.), Adieu Derrida, pp. 134–52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jarvis, Simon. 1998. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kant, Immanuel. (1798) 1996. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1997. ‘Gift, Gift’, in Alan D. Schrift (ed.), The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, pp. 28–32. London: Routledge. Moˇcnik, Rastko. 1999. ‘After the Fall: Through the Fogs of the 18th Brumaire of the Eastern Springs’, in Mark Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters Of Marx’, pp. 110–33. London: Verso. Norris, Chris. 2003. ‘Two Cheers for Cultural Studies’, in Paul Bowman (ed.), Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice, pp. 76–98. London: Pluto Press. Rapaport, Herman. 2003. Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work. London: Routledge.

128 ? Jon Baldwin Renaut, Alain. 1999. The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wolin, Richard. 1990. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. ‘A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)’, in Costas Douzinas (ed.), Adieu Derrida, pp. 109–33. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

5

Before and After Glas: Approximations to the Cognitio Vespertina Silvano Facioni



Prelude

I

f, after 9 October 2004 — the ‘unique’ and unrepeatable date of the ‘end of the world’ — it were possible to collect the residue of an experience of thought condensed and plunged into terms like ‘tradition’, ‘inheritance’, ‘fidelity’, ‘testimony’ (four terms that guide, like a wind rose, Derrida’s itinerary and that of his interpreters), one could quote these words that seem to fall like stones in a pond in Circonfession: (‘I wonder, interested in the depth of the bedsore, not in writing or literature, art, philosophy, science, religion or politics but only memory and heart’) (Derrida 1993: 87). ‘Memory’ and ‘heart’ do not only represent the cross-reference to Augustine which pervades the writing of Circonfession, and even less do they incarnate an undefined nostalgic sentiment: poles of a theoretical oscillation that are both rigorous and open, hendiadys of a thought which never gave up seeking its own origin, they indicate the path of a gnoseological hypothesis, which the academic public prefers to call ‘deconstruction’, forgetting for this reason that the theoretical presupposition of each analysis which Derrida delivered during his long way of thought was, and is, the pursuit of a bond with the philosophical tradition, as well as the desire to allow this bond to react with instances — always new, unpredicted, unheard of — arising from reality. The hypothesis I seek to develop here is that the so-called Derridean ‘deconstruction’, a practice that assumed, over time, such features and traits which impede any definition, has to be led back

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to a practice of memory (first of all, starting from the question of the ‘spectre’, of the revenant which obsesses it) and to a practice of heart, i.e., to an attention and a listening of the other (the absolute arrivant), which allows memory to re-settle itself towards the subject which interrogates it and discovers, therefore, to be interrogated by it. Revenant and arrivant represent the declination of ‘memory’ and ‘heart’, which are formed into a diptych, whose moves we shall try to follow, beginning with Derrida’s most famous textual diptych: the writing of Glas.1 From works before 1974 and from Glas onwards (the only text which does not present any point or a beginning to start from), it is possible today to interrogate the possibility of an ‘after’: a ‘before’ (the 30 years before the explosive publication of Glas), a ‘now’ (the questions which are asked of and by Glas), and an ‘after’ (after Derrida, after Glas, an ‘after’ which is also, always a delay, après coup, Nachtraglichkeit, explosion of temporal ecstasies). These imply the problem of the iterability of the unique (see Derrida 1986b); these are not projections of time but irreducible residues in the flowing time.2 The irreducibility of the residue is immediately a ‘death bell’ that announces the ‘ash’ of writing and turns itself into an urn, a sarcophagus, a tomb, a last funerary oration in which G. W. F. Hegel and Jean Genet line up in a procession, gathering for Derrida’s death (see Derrida 2001).3



Allegretto In an astonishing passage in the Tosefta (Megillah 4.41), it is written: ‘who translates in an absolutely literal way is a hoaxer, who adds something is a blasphemer’; then it is of no use to convene sourciers and ciblistes, or Gerolamus and Berman or else to invoke theoretical questions tied to Roman Jakobson’s distinction between ‘endolinguistics’, ‘interlinguistics’ and ‘intersemiotics’: the alternative between falsification and blasphemy swallows anyone who comes close to a text with the intention of translating it and reading it in the whirlpool of an irrevocable condemnation (it is not important that the sentence of the Tosefta refers to the scripture).

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Within the alternative between falsification and blasphemy, are there only the terms of a condemnation? Is it possible that the oscillation discloses — by suspending it — the precarious balance of a salvation within condemnation? Is not the condition of the reader/ translator always the condition of who, coming close — as a stranger to a stranger — to a text, a word, a face, cannot help activating (immediately and exactly in order to safeguard the alterity disclosed in proximity) filters and reservations, keys and locks? Or else, who must inaugurate (soon discovering to be part of it) an economy of exchange (semantic, cognitive, linguistic, political, psychoanalytical, etc.) in which the home (the oikos) discovers to have been founded by the stranger, i.e., opens itself to the possibility that the law of the stranger demolishes, force opens it, spoiling its fundamentals and laws? Does not falsification belong to the structural and inherent conditions of the possibility of an economy? How can one speak of nomos without recognising the possibility of its betrayal (objective and subjective genitive together); how can one deny the impossibility of the nomos expressed by the betrayal, the status of the possibility of the nomos itself? A house which one can force open with false keys and devices for picking locks: this is the way in which the text that one traduces, introduces itself to the reader-translator-thief. The translator-thief must act with a covered face or under a false name: the problem of the name — which feeds the translator’s task like poisoned milk — runs through Glas with an impressive collision, and resounds gloomily in order to celebrate the funeral of the author, the text, the translator, and those about whom (and primarily to whom) one speaks, characters and interpreters always present at their funeral. A ritual — institutionalised, religious or civil — burial was often denied to the thief: the thief is always — both alive or dead — the ‘nameless’. In Glas, proper nouns abound as heteronimies without orthonomy: Hegel, Genet, Derrida, but also Eagle, Broom, Angel (JeAN GEnet), and also Gel, Gl, Behind-the-curtains (DERRIerele-riDeAux), Divine, Divers, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Harcamone, Claire, Solange, Warda. The list could go on and reach Jesus and his mother Mary, and Antigo, Dionysius, Marie and Christiane Hegel as also many other names. Frenzied procession but also a merciful litany hummed in the mouth as an enchanted fort/da on which one can pin one’s existence. Names as amulets hung upon a cradle (Bethlehem’s stall,

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the hammocks which receive the convicts’ love), carved forever on chipped gravestones (the pyramids of Egypt, the colossi), invoked like disappeared divinities (literal cross-reference to two mournings: ‘The great Pan is dead!’ and Eli. Eli, léma sabactàni?) — proper nouns without proprium, hung upon the oscillating destiny of a clapper, which will not peal out. Cut by the sharp Saussurean blade which — although problematically — separates the phonic substance from the cross-reference to a meaning, names put the practice of translation to test: contracted (think about the ‘Semitic’ ‘Hgl’), or distended like a dead boy which lies inside a coffin while an uninterrupted funerary beat re-sounds, proper nouns question the identity paradigm, which would have them as characters of an author’s work (here Derrida). This is because they pulverise the subjective instance under which one would lead back positions and propositions (where does one’s word begin and the word of another finish), because no interpretation or diacritic apparatus will be able to circumscribe their presence, because within the proper noun the possibility of an absence always gleams, of a nonnoun, of death (maybe doubled and confirmed by the resurrection with another name, with another story), i.e., ultimately, the proper noun brings with itself also and first of all those ‘functions’ which, according to Michel Foucault, allow the institution of speech (see Foucault 2001).4 What does it mean, for example, that Jean (Genet) becomes John, the evangelist, and that Jean, the Evangelist, is not already the translation of Yohanan, passed through the Greek Io- anne-s? What happened in the passage from Hebrew to Greek to French? What happened to the Jew who became a pagan? And is it so certain that one cannot invert the process? Is not Glas a text full of Lombrosian (inverted)? Here is the first frontier, the one which inaugurates — inside Glas — the reciprocal facing of title pages, the column of writing dedicated to Hegel and the column dedicated to Genet, while successively, even more inside, the frontiers of Hegelian Aufhebung (which is the institution of frontiers that are overtaken in their selfconstitution as frontiers) encounter themselves. But, further, these are the frontiers of sexual gender: who is really the transvestite Divine — a man disguised as a woman or a woman disguised as a man? The personal pronouns which swap themselves could, alone, capsize the order of the world and the frontiers, maximally unsure, between

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crime and grace, justice and violence, writing and orality: one should read Glas loud, because Glas is a voice which reads (itself). These frontiers of writing, frontiers of rhetorical and stylistic genre, unleash ingenuous and useless taxonomical libidos: textual analysis, autobiographic fragment, notes for a future text, achroamatic versions of the seminary which, for six months, occupied Derrida in Berlin during the years 1973–74, or the diary of an encounter (the one with Genet, of course, but also with Hegel). Glas is all of these things because it is none of them: unique in its ‘genre’, incomparable and inassimilable, it is an erratic mass in the effervescent cultural landscape of Europe in the early 1970s, too easily ascribable to experimentalism and theoretical vanguards which today appear a bit d’antan. One would say it comes from a desert similar to the one which for millenniums guarded the rolls of Qumran or Nag Hammadi, which — once unburied — did not reveal the hidden secrets of papyri to the end. It is like a palimpsest that invites the reader-translator to scrape off, in order to re-trace the memory of earlier writings, to discover unknown alphabets, to capture the enigma, the secret and invisible cipher which retains even the last writing, the one which one has under one’s eyes, or else, the one which still has to come to announce itself. Here, the risk of blasphemy — as it appears in the sentence in the Tosefta recalled in the overture — reaches its point of maximal dilatation until it almost coincides with every practice of reading and/or translation, because the blasphemy (qelalah in Hebrew) is literally the ‘weightlessness’, the absence of weight, the phantasmatic projection of an idea or of an interpretative framework. The phantom of theory, impalpable as a shadow, captivates and casts a spell on the text, by alleviating it of the responsibility, which the author assumes when he takes the floor (because responsibility is taking the floor — word — taken and given): once more an infraction, towards which Derrida assumes even sarcastic tones, and which denounces the dishonest dissimulation that is hidden in every theory (Georges Bataille’s words, together with Jean-Paul Sartre’s — the unmentioned onto-phenomenologist — about Genet’s work, exemplify what one should intend with ‘theory’ but also with ‘phantom’). The reading/translation verges always on the edge of that absence of responsibility which offloads on the ‘author’, the ‘weight’ of what he has written, forgetful of the Blanchotean ‘right of death’ which subtracts the work both from the author and the reader in

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order to submit it to another order in which — as Derrida himself has written: ‘the unit or the identity, the independence of the word remains something mysterious, precarious, not so natural, that is to say historical, institutional and conventional. There is no word in nature’ (2004b: 562).5 Blasphemous weightlessness or subtle blasphemy, like the shiver which shakes the nocturnal thief: done in the darkness (even the darkness of the sense), the theft of words which runs through the possibility of translation — mining it to the roots — will always be a ‘theft of souls’, as Raši teaches by proclaiming the eighth word of the Decalogue: ‘Thou shall not steal’. The translation of Glas is a theft of souls.



Andante con Brio In the monumental biography dedicated to Genet, Edmund White says that the idea of composing Glas on a double column of writing came to Derrida after he had read Genet’s essay dedicated to Rembrandt that was published in 1967 in Tel Quel exactly in the form of two texts with parallel columns. After this notice of scarce importance, there is a mistake that, although involuntarily, seems to open a possible trail of meaning. White writes that Glas’ subtitle is ‘Ce qui Reste du Savoir Absolu’ [What Remains of Absolute Knowledge] (1993: 513). But the version of Glas published in 1974 by Galilée has no subtitle; only in the paperback edition published in 1981 by Denoël/ Gonthier does the subtitle ‘Que reste-t-il du savoir absolu?’ appear. It is the question mark which makes the difference, and which places the question that collects in the unity of a diacritic sign, the multiple senses of Glas. Derrida has dedicated to the question mark, an analysis of a story by Maurice Blanchot titled La folie du jour (1989). On the cover of the journal Empédocle (the story appeared here for the first time), it is presented with a question mark (Un récit?), but the question mark disappears afterwards, both in the internal summary and in the first page of the text (Derrida 1986a: 131–35).

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It is a matter of edges, of ‘framings’, of paratext, of institutions (as the university, where, while investigating the narrative forms, it builds taxonomical jails, as also the editorial institution which establishes the ‘genre’ of a text, and one could go on in the ‘individuating’ series of institutions and of ‘genres’ as well as in the policy which rules its tangle) and, at the same time, a matter of escapes, of subtractions, of infractions. ‘What Remains of Absolute Knowledge’ is the only statement which converts itself into a question in the very instant of its asking, or which can be posed only in the interrogative form. Otherwise, one remains in the paralysis of a contradiction that would explode the case of affirmation (a knowledge which claims to be absolute can not leave any residue and is merely condemned to ‘rest’). Glas moves in the gaps between affirmation and question, thesis and prosthesis (rather than antithesis), in the intervalla (insaniae?) which separate (?) two columns of writing sewn with an invisible thread (is this the rest?) which neither institution nor knowledge will be able to discover. There are two columns of writing and, inside the columns, other columns (textual tattoos, semantic incrustations or niches of writing, aediculae, luxuriant flores rethorici). The column, so wrote Derrida commenting on some texts by Phillippe Sollers during the years in which the project of Glas ripened: inserts space in time and it separates what is compact . . . The column is nothing, and it is meaningless. Empty phallus, it is cut off from itself, decapitated, and it assures the innumerable passage of dissemination and the shift of margins (1981a: 374–76).

Contrary to what the cross-reference to Treatise of the five Orders of Columns in Architecture (the translation of Vitruvius commissioned to Claude Perrault by Jean Baptiste Colbert) (Perrault 1708) would lead us to think, the column guarantees the shift of margins and the disseminating passage: Hegel, Genet, Derrida — one inside the other, one against the other, one for the other, without the possibility of determining a prius or an incipit. Hegenet, Derridhegel, Generrida and the anagrammatic graft could go on infinitely, because infinite are the combinations offered by Glas, like the Talmudic page which Derrida’s work resembles for more than one reason. The Babylonian Talmud, in fact, is composed of 2,947 sheets, i.e., about 6,000 pages: each page — in which there are more columns of

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writing, and in which one finds the voices of the masters unfolded over centuries — is numbered with a recto and a verso. It is significant that each one of the treatises of which the text consists begins with the form in verso (i.e., from the second page) so as to underline the structural difference of the text; it is crossed by a void, by a hole which impedes the fulfilment of reading, by a blank which makes the margin explode, and which renders the ‘closing’ of the text impossible. But the differing, the void, the hole, and the white decrees also the necessity of a return of the text to itself (operative modulation of the often misunderstood ‘there is no hors-texte’ (1997: 158) stated by Derrida in Of Grammatology) so that from it those itineraries of sense (also in the form of dis-sense) can spread; the truth of the hermeneutical instance runs across them as a lymph which (de)constructs itself (a lymph inseparable by a dejection — spit, sperm, milk — which is the categorial index of a possible growth or generation but also of an infinite degeneration). The page of Glas disseminates through the germs, the pollens, the sexual deceptions which fecundate/fuck the two columns of writing, dooming them to that theratogenesis of ends (institutional, academic, political, psychoanalytical, philosophical, literary) in which every reading-translation that aims to pacify sinks unavoidably — as for the Hegelian interpretations which hide the shivers of the system or for the readings of Genet which calcify him in the literary monumentalisation. [F]or a long time already I have drowned myself. Why, in my reveries of suicide, is it always drowning that imposes itself, and most often in a lake, sometimes a pond but usually a lake? Nothing is stranger more to me than a lake: too far from the landscapes of my childhood. Maybe it’s literary instead? I think it’s more the force of the word, lac. Something in it overturns or precipitates (cla, alc), plunging down head first. You will say that in these words, in their letters, I want to disappear, not necessarily in order to die there but to live there concealed, perhaps in order to dissimulate what I know. So glas, you see, would have to be tracked down thereabouts (cla, cl, clos, lacs, le lacs, le piége, le lacet, le lais, là, da, fort, hum . . . [cla, cl, closed, lakes, snare, trap, lace, the silt, there, here, yes, strong, hmm] . . . (Derrida 2007: 234).6

Lakes of words and textual ponds (like the first published verse: ‘glu de l’étang lait de ma mort noyée’ [glue of the pool milk of my

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drowned death]) (Derrida 1974: 219) in which one has to chase Glas, the consonant obsession of gl and the desire of living that is hidden in it. There is the strength of the word which — like a bell — resounds always deadly to announce a jadedness, an exhalation: incinerated, inhumed, buried, interred, deposed, sunk — but one should not consider the series as synonymic, for words abandon life and death in order to survive the first and the latter, and to go on ringing beyond life, the death which announced itself inside them. When a bell rings deadly — or when it announces the agony, the last fight, the extreme shake which decrees the present of a death inside life — the movement is called ‘a glass’, i.e., the oscillation (almost 360 degrees, whilst the oscillation in normal sound is 180 degrees) is restrained when the bell has its ‘mouth’ upwards, and then it falls at rather distant intervals: does not Glas appear like a skywards mouth and a heavy falling? These are two momentsmovements that represent the two columns of writing. But which one has the mouth upwards and which one falls instead? It is impossible to say. Is not Hegel — the system which articulates itself proceeding spirally upwards and which captures (swallows?) in its movement the moments of its elevation — troubled by that Sa (Derridean abbreviation of Absolute Knowledge) which resounds like a homophone of the Ça which translates into French the Freudian Es? The Absolute Knowledge (included the Lacanian declinations) precipitates in the Ça that is the residue of the system. Is not Genet — the man of extreme degradation and abjection, the last of the ‘infamous men’ of whom Foucault wanted to write the history, always precariously balanced on the line like the funambulist Abdallah — the son of an Immaculate Conception waiting for that ascension to the Calvary which will transfigure him like Christ? Genet screams like a mouth that has nothing but an oath to address to the sky. The death-announce of the textual bell resounds for Hegel, for Genet, for Derrida, and for anyone who interrogates the enigma of genesis, of generation, of genre, of general, of genetliac, of gene, along a virtually infinite semantic chain: once again a duplicity, and hendiadys, a double, a two, a couple, a binomial, as for sex, for the relationship father–son, or mother–son, for the bond brother–sister, for the transvestite, for the Incarnation of Christ, for the sexual ambiguity of the flower, for the name and the proper, the author and the work, the scandal and the beatification, the Jew and the Christian.

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It is the announcement of a death which resounds where the double wants to institute itself as suspension or hypostatisation of the undecidable, i.e., where it imposes itself as the tertium (non) datur: Glas is the third between Hegel and Genet or between Hegel and Derrida or between Genet and Derrida. It is the third as break of symmetry, because the two columns of writing are not symmetrical; the colossi do not have the same dimensions — the suspended bell with the mouth upwards and the bell which falls are not the same bell. It is a break of symmetry which can be led back to Derrida’s theoretical itinerary overall during the years in which Glas appears on the French philosophical scene. Already in 1971, in the long interview released to Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, Derrida declares: We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point. In effect I believe that Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation. It is not reduced to a content of philosophemes, it also necessarily produces a powerful writing operation, a remainder of writing, whose strange relationship to the philosophical content of Hegel’s text must be reexamined, that is, the movement by means of which his text exceeds its meaning, permits itself to be turned away from, to return to, and to repeat itself outside its self-identity (2004a: 65).

The rest, the excess, the fissure, already appear as the ciphers of an investigation with which ‘we will never be finished’ because it will always show that — as Bataille noticed — ‘Hegel didn’t know how far he was right’. The critical coordinates do not change in the case of Genet: for Derrida, literature will remain always — one should think of Antonin Artaud and Maurice Blanchot, Francis Ponge and Phillippe Sollers, Franz Kafka and Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Hélène Cixous, James Joyce — the atopic place of verification of the effects of thought when it articulates itself in ‘narrations’, and let these dig dungeons of sense, ungraspable by the argumentative procedures which rule the philosophical speech. Also Genet, as ‘rest’, incarnates simultaneously the inside and the outside of literature: glorified by Jean Cocteau who discovered him and by Jean-Paul Sartre who dedicated to him a long (and, according to Genet himself, paralysing) monograph, he never gave up seeking the ‘outside’ of the literary and

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academic institution, of the civil society, of morals, of international political relationships, of the pathetic rhetoric about hideousness and sublimity of the writers of scandal. Outside is the excrement, the ‘refuse’ of mimesis and the statement of its enormous might, the fake bunch of grapes fixed by Stilitan above the sex, or the sheath which envelopes (arguments?) bodies and flowers and retains organic liquids and pollens, which are the expelled ‘product’ — secreted, spun, squirted, vomited, spewed — between the proper noun and the autograph. Glas circles around the proper noun and the autograph of Hegel and Genet: but where does Derrida sign up? His proper name — anagrammed in the columns of writing — constitutes maybe the rest, left out of the System or out of literature? Does the death knell announce Derrida’s death or does it resound uninterrupted as the figure of ‘sur-viving’? Life in death, the bell announces by running across its silence, the night, the absence: presence of an absence. Present of the no-longer or of the not-yet, life which dies and death which lives, the death bell distends its ringing in time, until it gets lost, until it renders the identification of its provenience no longer possible. From far away and towards far away. Like the reading-translation of Glas.



Adagio ma non troppo In the beginning there is the family — first moment of the syllogism of Sittlichkeit — i.e., that form of bond which, analogously to what will happen with the successive syllogisms of civil society and State, invests immediately the questions about desire, love, marriage, generation and education of the son: bond between individuals in the form of generativity which seems to overtake the scheme of acknowledgement which passes through the form of fight. It is in the Philosophy of Mind (Hegel 1971) and in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel 1991) that the articulation of the syllogism of Sittlichkeit unfolds, i.e., of the syllogism which articulates the first moment of the social life organised into and as institution: the sexual desire (beyond the semantic oscillation between Wunsch and Begierde) appears as the ungraspable categorical focus around which the Aufhebung orbits, and from this it is necessary;

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this is perhaps one of the speculative gains of Derrida’s investigation: to relaunch in every sense the reading of the Hegelian Aufhebung, eventually beyond what Hegel, inscribing it, understood himself to say or intended to mean, beyond that which is inscribed on the internal vestibule of his ear’ (Derrida 1984: xi). It is characteristic of the desire — the dejection beyond itself, the paradoxical denial of its ‘proper’, the constitution as a ‘structure’ which takes off its own hinges and borders and produces itself as a self-cannibal principle (but it will be in the column dedicated to Genet that we will find the truth of desire: in Pompes funèbres, in fact, Genet narrates of having desired to swallow himself ‘by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe . . . that is how I see the end of the world’ (Derrida 1974: 222). In principle, the family is the result or institutional/objective sensory of an original self-lack of the individual: in principle it is a non-governable origin but always, already second, differed or delayed (nachträglich) towards itself, already in-scribed in a derived argumentative procedure, second, setback of its own determination. Desire runs across Hegel’s reading starting from the constellation of questions which spring out of its progress (Jacques Lacan would perhaps say ‘surrender’) as well as from its free inhibition (here lies the difference from the animal as regards the order of enjoyment), and it soon begins to crack — within Hegelian system — that negation of nature which organises the producing/proceeding of the spirit: marriage — first moment of the syllogism of family, first result of the inhibition of sexual desire — is guaranteed by the unity of love which, although it expresses the freedom of individual subjectivities, must necessarily articulate itself into passages in which the negative of death is at work (which is, together with desire, the other possible ‘proper noun’ of the Aufhebung). But the direction assumed by Derrida’s analysis removes the desire to the well-known conception proposed by Alexandre Kojève who leads it almost exclusively back to the struggle for recognition in the dialectic master–slave of the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1979): the desire which animates the syllogism of the Sittlichkeit is not solved in the struggle for recognition; it goes beyond it, at first through the relationship parents–son, which denies the natural immediateness of the relation husband–wife, delivering

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it to a medium — the son — who inaugurates the passage to ethics and, successively, through the relationship brother–sister, in which the desire is absent, suspended, without war.7 The passage from self-consciousness to reason of spirit (of which Antigone is a figure, in the relationship with her brother and in the consequent opposition of the ‘politic’ and the ‘familiar’) underlines the centrality of the ‘speculative’ which — like Gianfranco Dalmasso wrote — ‘is often flattened, also by many critics, under the shield of notions which often work as clichés, like negativity, totality, absolute, in which one misses (a dazzle of which evidence would be the cause?) the connection between the notion of negative and the notion of generation, without which the entire strategy and the entire theoretical language of Hegel would be rendered vain’ (Dalmasso 2005: 48). The structural entwine of the notion of ‘desire’ and the notion of ‘generation’ runs across Glas like a subterranean river and (de)constructs Derrida’s itinerary starting from a presumption which had already been formulated in Of Grammatology: Yet, all that Hegel thought within this horizon, all, that is, except eschatology, may be reread as a meditation on writing. Hegel is also the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs. And he introduced, as I shall try to show elsewhere, the essential necessity of the written trace in a philosophical — that is to say Socratic — discourse that had always believed it possible to do without it; the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing (Derrida 1997: 26).

Derrida’s analysis has to be understood within the theoretical prism of the notions of ‘generation’, ‘memory productive’, ‘book’ and ‘writing’, because only the crossing of book and writing can account for Hegel’s and Derrida’s operation — in that simultaneousness which is the index (also in the sense of ‘dilation’) and the crux of Glas. It is in the moment when Hegel’s writing intersects the notions of ‘generation’ and ‘memory productive’ (his epistolary becomes, in this sense, of fundamental importance) that the book of Absolute Knowledge unfolds its linguistic, argumentative, historical might, allowing to understand that shift from family to society as it happens in the linguistic act represented by wedding. An act in which language — the production of signs — becomes the element of the sublimating spiritualisation: is it starting from here that we have to recognise and/or attribute a theological matrix to the Aufhebung

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which would leads back to the core of the father–son relationship that characterises the Trinitarian Christian setting? And moreover, is not the Trinitarian Christian matrix that which would structure the relationship parents–son deactivated exactly by the lack of the mother? The whole of the system seems to vacillate exactly under the push of the Aufhebung (which is, according to Derrida, ‘la sainte mère chrétienne’) (1974: 228) which wishes to translate the shift from nature to spirit starting from the sexual repression at work within marriage when this is considered as an ethical bond. Is it not in this repression that has hidden that gap which impedes the return of the spirit to itself, or which allows it only under condition of categorical artificialities and empirical argumentations? In the interpretation of Christianity carried out by Hegel the aporias and the gaps of/from the system gather round, compared to the Trinitarian procession, the biblical monotheism, the Eucharistic transubstantiation. Derrida’s interrogation goes on: John’s Gospel (the Hegelian Gospel) has to be considered simultaneously inside and outside Hebraism, because within it, human and divine nature are thought together (whilst within Hebraism, like in Kant — Hegel’s Jew — the separation condemns both of them to an empty formalism of moral). Is the Jew the ‘other’ of the system, possibility and impossibility of the speculative?8 The circle of re-appropriation has to be considered as a return and, moreover, as a return to the father? How to consider, then, the ‘signs’ which characterise the existence of the Christ (the supper, the miracles, the introjection/deglutition of the bread/body and the wine/blood, the relationship with Mary, present absent in the economic trinity)? Is the return to the father, i.e., to oneself, a return that nothing precedes? Here, according to Derrida, the Hegelian system commands to be read as the book of life, movement of an original union that dissolves every contradiction. Life (freed by any determined, abstract vitalism) whose passages have to be run across starting from the Hegelian consideration of sexuality and of the institution of the sexual difference, of the woman and of the phallus, of the seed, of the ring, of the gift and of the exchange, of work and inhumation, of law and burn-all, of ‘natural’ religion, when it is delivered to flowers and animals, to pyramids and obelisks, to the statues of Memnon and to their hollow resounding when hit by sun rays. The movement of spirit incarnates itself historically in India and Egypt, in Africa, in Greece and in Palestine, waiting for that Aufhebung which, pushing it beyond itself, collects every trace, every

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mark, every rest. But the itinerary which leads to absolute knowledge is not an itinerary without rests: reading Hegel will mean, then, recovering them, in order to give them the last, worthy burial.



Adagio At the beginning is the end of family: an end suffered and persecuted, suffered and indefatigably sought by Genet and by many of the heteronomies which run across his work. There is neither father nor mother, neither identity nor signature. The problem of identity runs through Genet’s work and impedes any ‘phenomenological’ description: the lengthy monograph which — about 30 years before Glas — was dedicated to Genet by Jean-Paul Sartre (1952)could not receive a more radical contestation, starting from the Derridean request which drags upon the gallows and ‘beheads’ every sociological or literary analysis.9 Genet is not a ‘case’ nor the emblem, the paradigm of an antibourgeois or pretentiously scandalous literature: if it were present as the dejection of a society which projects in refusal its incapacity of being free, if it would represent the obscure half of that possibility of freedom which determinates the individual and its bond with history, then being orphan, thief, homosexual, could still resound as the exception of a superior social polyphony which guarantees — by de-terminating it — the space for the diverse.10 The whole work of Genet, on the contrary, is crossed by the illegibility of a signature which abrades the possibility of the ‘proper’ by deposing its rests on the page: rests without a centre, without a system, without even the soothe of that arbitrarity of the sign which could be collected within the semantic framework of a possible sense (as it happens with Peter Fonagy’s analysis’s so fiercely deconstructed by Derrida). It is an illegibility of signature which soon becomes illegibility of the text: who are the characters at work and in Genet’s work (those of the so-called narrative works but also the characters of the theatre pièces and, we add, the various groups of social and cultural opposition to which Genet will become close in the last years of his life — with a problematic which never stopped interrogating us)?11

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If Genet’s ‘beheaded’ writing impedes the individuation of a centre or of a direction (Derrida identifies a possible ‘illegibility’ even within the verticality of texts in which the presence of ties, rain, swords, umbrellas, sticks seems to deny the possibility of grasping a cursive way of reading), if the remains of writing never gather into symbols which could be grasped by ontology (here Derrida’s question is central: ‘comment l’ontologie pourrait-elle s’emaprer d’un pet?’[How could ontology lay hold of a fart] (1974: 69)), if limbs and wooden legs, artificial bunches and wild roses are tattooed in the narrative flux in order to obstruct its flow, one must not rethink the whole of orders (of meaning and significant, of diegesis and dispositio, of literature and of the various ‘rights’ which guard their institution) which, disposing themselves along the sequence ‘author ’o work ’o fabula ’o plot ’o style ’o genre ’o…’, end up covering the semantic and hermeneutical virtualities of a text impeding its flowing (or squirting, leaking, dripping)? The problem of signature is additionally complicated by the fact that in French genet can mean both ‘broom’ and ‘ginnet or giannet’ (a Spanish race of horses whose name derives from the Berber nation Zenêta which, in the 13th century, provided the horse-riders to the Sultans of Granada). Flowers and animals which, exactly in the ambiguous relationship they have with mankind, become moments of constitution of the human (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs is the Marian name of the transvestite Divine, gladioluses and roses invade the scene of Les Bonnes and of the Miracle de la rose) and maintain themselves in it (no Aufhebung drags them somewhere else) like the undeductable rest of a memory of time and history. We have flower-names in which the problem of traducibility grafts itself: Genet-broom-giannett is an implosion of language, of literature, of the text; the proper name of the writer and the proper name of the flower are misappropriated, deprived of the ‘proper’ which could authorise their entrance in language, in the system of signs, in the order of communication. But there is also a proper noun which haunts Glas as an absent: a masculine-feminine name, memory of childhood, chased and missed, present only as consonant agglutination, as anagram of the lake/lac, already encountered: Claude, about whom Derrida writes: ‘I miss him in Glas but he never was so far, and he didn’t miss me. The catastrophe is of this name’(2007: 245). Who is Claude ? It is useless to ask or look for explanations which could solve the mystery of this proper name, which is much more and other than a proper name: what is important here is exactly fixing it, like Stilitan’s bunch of

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grapes (and it is exactly to a bunch of grapes that, elsewhere, Derrida will hang Claude’s name), to the constellation of proper nouns and signatures (like Giacometti’s) which obsess the text, but reminding that it is absence from the text (ulterior fissure) which constitutes it as unique, unrepeatable signature, of life/of death of which Glas collects the ash.12 If the autograph signature (the seing which bleeds in Genet’s page) is the attempt to escape the aporia which is intrinsic to the notion of ‘proper’ noun, the price to pay will not be then that of exclusion, reclusion, departure from the generative order, the jail, the execution stage? The circumflexed accent which appears and disappears from the name genêt is then the blade which beheads the author and renders the work orphan or else the artificial head (covering) of an identity which is soon, forever altered, capsized, inverted? Orphan and blind work, forced to disguise and to prostitute itself, hung up to a circumflexed accent which ‘is stitched in the place of a living wound that signs’ (see Derrida 1974: 211), but also possibility of a super-nomination which ‘baptizes’ a second birth, a new blooming, a renewed florilegium. Flowers — natural or artificial, cut off or transplanted, grafted or entwined — which adorn sepulchres and poison the air, delimitate geographic frontiers and frontiers of the sense: Genet’s work is invaded by flowers of uncertain and undecided sexual identity, which, exactly because of the grafts and of the self-fecundations, erase the hypothesis of a genealogy, the traceability of an origin, the delineation of a stem or a style, of a stylema, of a stylistic. Flower and signature mask their identity and bewilder the author, the reader, the critique forcing them to get dirty with textual pollen (phonemes, semantic agglutinations, chops of narrations) and to vagabond from flower to flower (the flores rethorici): the impossibility of a sexual difference (how many hermaphroditic flowers ornate the desolate existences of prisoners like Fontevrault or Mettray!) insinuate itself in the practice of reading and force it to be disguised, sold, penetrated, to condemn itself to a sterility which is the stigma and the subversion of the order of creation. Broom, lily, rose, gladiolus, daisy: a living anthos-logia in which — differently from the religion of flowers about which Hegel speaks in the seventh chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit — innocence is not expression of self-absence, before is not the expression of absence of the self, before the seriousness of life involved in the fight, but, on the contrary, produces itself as the disturbing irruption of a sequence

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of grafts which deactivates the principle of reason suspending the question about the sign or the symbol (the flower is neither symbol nor sign) as well as the interrogation about the status of beauty. From Genet/Derrida’s florilegium, in fact, at least one flower lacks — the tulip — which in the Analytic of Beauty of the Critique of the Power of Judgement (2001) is assumed by Kant as the example of beauty as form of finality without aim because ‘in the perception of it one notices a certain finality which, as far as we can judge about it, refers itself to no aim’.13 Genet’s flowers, without aim or without the concept of finality, do not know the beauty attributed to them by Kant, because they, differently from what happens with the tulip of which ‘it’s possible to know everything, exhaustively, except for what it is beautiful . . . the no-knowledge is the point of view of which irreducibility gives place to beauty, with what is called the beauty’ (Derrida 1987: 103), do not tend — as it happens in the Second Part of the third Kritik — to the finality of nature represented by man. Genet’s flower knows no mimesis or analogy: the various bandages and sheaths which wrap, hide, deform the text represent also a defence from the possibility of proceeding analogically; uninterrupted mimetism so that no mimetic is possible. Maybe, as the funambulist Abdallah who walks on the wire or Alberto Giacometti who in his atelier sculpts and paints, subtracting matter and colours teach to the reader-critic-philosopher, it will be possible only to approximate to a mimic: it is the eternal repetition of a furious, desperate, saving funerary procession.



Notes 1. Published first by Galilée in 1974, Glas was translated into English by John P. Leavy Jr. and Richard Rander in 1986; the Italian translation appeared in 2006, which was edited by me. Considering the difficulties and the theoretical problems which the translation of Glas presents — that face every text of every epoch and from any part of the world — my quotes will refer to the French original edition even when the English translation will be quoted. 2. In a long comment dedicated to some poems by Paul Celan, Derrida (1986b) tackles the problem of the uniqueness of a date and of its coming back (i.e., repeating) as writing.

Before and After Glas ? 147 3. It is interesting to underline that this book is perhaps the only example of a text written and not written by the author: as Derrida explains in the short preface, funerary orations were collected and published by the editors of the work, i.e., Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, because he would never have been able to carry out such a collection. Although published when the author was still alive, this work presents itself as already ‘posthumous’, forever and ever ‘testamentary’ (Derrida 2001). 4. Maybe it is useful to note that this conference, held by Foucault in 1969 at the Société Française de Philosophie, was inserted in a debate launched in the previous year by Roland Barthes with the article ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ (1984): a never-ending debate (around which one should gather, among those who participated, Gérard Genette, Umberto Eco, Kate Hamburger, Wayne C. Booth) which finds in Glas the extreme and definitive modulation. 5. The text of this lecture, pronounced by Derrida (1999)opening a conference of translators in Arles in December 1998 (Quinzièmes assises de la traduction littéraire), is fundamental in order to understand the sense of the Derridean proposal (put forward for the first time in 1968 and accepted today by the great part of French Hegel scholars’) of translating without translating the entire semantic family sprung by Aufheben with the verb ‘relever’. The present participle ‘relevant’, writes Derrida, ‘has a very hard task. Not the task of the translator, but the task to define, nothingless, the essence of translation’ (2004b: 565): perhaps in the column of writing dedicated to Hegel one speaks of nothing but translation? Maybe Aufhebung could mean, properly, ‘translation’? But then, how to translate the translation? 6. This text collects letters and postcards which, as Derrida himself explains in a note, were not inserted in the first part of La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (1981b). The letter, from which the quote is cited, is dated 9 July 1979: one should study and comment in detail the problem of the ‘dispatch’, of the ‘letter’, of the ‘postcard’ also in connection with Glas, because the two columns of writing often assume the character of ‘dispatches’, in which the question is that of the sender and the addresser captured in a textual plot which comprehends them, overtaking both of them. The letters written by Hegel to his sister Christiane, to his cousin, to the councillor Niethammer, as well as the cards furtively exchanged by Genet’s prisoners, belong to a strategy of writing which — in Derridean perspective — capsizes the order of auto-bio-graphy and submits itself to the heterography of testimony, of (cir)confession, of the name of the other. 7. The relationship between Derrida’s reading of Hegel and the French reception of Hegel, after the famous lectures by Alexandre Kojève at the Ecole Pratique — lectures in which, among others, participated Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Queneau, Eric Weil, Maurice MerleauPonty, André Breton, Henry Corbin, Raymond Aron, Pierre Klossowski — would deserve a deepening which I cannot develop here.

148 ? Silvano Facioni 8. Cf. Cohen (2005), who, through the investigation of the figure of the Jew in the writings of the Frankfurt period (1797–1800), tries to reconstruct the entire Hegelian position towards Hebraism. The conclusions of Cohen’s work reverberate Derrida’s position: ‘The Jew is, at the same time, the possibility and the impossibility of the Absolute Knowledge, something as its spectre, its revenant . . . In a word, the Jew would be the life and the death of the speculative . . . It is as the Jew would be the unforeseeable other who has to come in order to remember the aporetisation of the Spirit. It is as “the truth without truth” of the speculative system of the Spirit would be the Jew’ (Cohen 2005: 184). 9. This monumental work by Sartre is never explicitly mentioned by Derrida, but the entire column of writing dedicated to Genet has to be considered as a detailed contestation of Sartre’s thesis (starting exactly from the idea that Genet’s work can be led back to a series of thesis). The legend says that Genet, after having read the manuscript given to him by Sartre with the invitation of doing whatever he wanted with it, threw it into the fire and recovered it soon after: in the various interviews released during his life, Genet always showed ambivalent sentiments towards Sartre’s monograph. 10. If it is true that the interpretation of Genet carried out by Sartre (especially as regards the concept of freedom) can in any case show an intrinsic coherence of method and contents with the whole of the philosopher’s work (and besides, it will be Sartre himself who will recognise the unity of the theoretical project which binds the Saint Genet, Comédien et Martyr (Sartre 1952) to L’Etre et le Néant (Sartre 1969) which appeared about a decade earlier, it is true as well that operations like Ivan Jablonka’s are not justified. In his Les Vérités Inavouables de Jean Genet, Jablonka (2004) tries to reconstruct a presumed ‘dossier Genet’ in which the writer appears like an anti-Semite fascinated by the Nazi lagers and by the atrocities carried out by the Franchist Militias. A turbid glorification (based only on conjectures) which — by assimilating Genet and Drieu La Rochelle — transforms them into the representatives of an aesthetic of betrayal which, at least as regards Genet, finds no hint in their work. 11. This aspect of Genet’s life and work was magisterially investigated by Laroche (1997). 12. In Circonfession, after a note in italics in which he speaks of selfcircumcision, we read: ‘according to what must be declared, like in the customs, my impossible homosexuality, the one I shall always associate with the name of Claude, the male and female cousins of my childhood, they overflow my corpus, the syllable CL, in Glas and elsewhere, admitting to a stolen pleasure, for example those grapes from the

Before and After Glas ? 149 vineyard of the Arab landowner, one of those rare Algerian bourgeois in El-Biar, who threatened to hand us, Claude and me, we were eight or nine, over to the police after his warden has caught us with our hands on the grapes, and there was a nervous burst of laughter when he let us run off, since then I have followed the confessions of theft at the heart of autobiographies, homosexual ventriloquy, the untranslatable debt’ (Derrida 1993: 159–60). Hélène Cixous tried to explain/narrate the ‘stolen pleasure’ of these pages in Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif (see Cixous 2001: 86–92). 13. In Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement (2001), the example of the tulip is present in a note, but flowers are present, in the same section as examples of ‘free natural beauties’ (ibid.: 93).



References Barthes, R. 1984. ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ (Le Bruissement de la langue: Essais Critiques IV). Paris: Seuil. Blanchot, M. 1989. The Madness of the Day, trans. L. Davis. New York: Station Hill Press. Originally Published as La folie du jour (Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 1973). Cixous, H. 2001. Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif. Paris: Galilée. Cohen, J. 2005. Le Spectre Juif de Hegel. Paris: Galilée. Dalmasso, G. 2005. ‘Hegel e la scienza dell’origine’, in Chi dice io: Razionalità e nichilismo, pp. 47–59. Milan: Jaca Book. Derrida, J. 1974. Glas. Paris: Galilée. Translated into English by John P. Leavy Jr. and Richard Rander as Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Translated into Italian by Silvano Facioni as Glas (Milan: Bompiani, 2006). ———. 1981a. Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as La Dissemination (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972). ———. 1981b. La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 1984. Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972). ———. 1986a. Parages. Paris: Galilée. ———. 1986b. Schibboleth Pour Paul Celan. Paris: Galilée.

150 ? Silvano Facioni Derrida, J. 1987. The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as La Vérité en Peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). ———. 1993. Jacques Derrida, trans. G. Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as Circonfession, in G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida, pp. 150–51 (Paris: Seuil, 1991). ———. 1997. Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published as De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967). ———. 1999. Quinzièmes assises de la traduction littéraire, Arles, 1998. Arles: Actes Sud. ———. 2001.The Work of Mourning, eds Pascal-Anne Brault and Michel Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004a. Positions, trans. A. Bass. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Originally published as Positions (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972). ———. 2004b. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’, in MarieLouise Mallet and Ginette Michaud (eds), Cahier de l’Herne: Derrida, pp. 561–76. Paris: L’Herne. ———. 2007. ‘Telepathy’, in Psyché: Inventions of the Other, vol. I, trans. P. Kamuf and E. G. Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Originally published as ‘Télépathie’, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Foucault, M. 2001. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et Écrits, pp. 789–809. Paris: Gallimard. Hegel, G. W. F. 1971. The Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1979. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jablonka, I. 2004. Les Vérités Inavouables de Jean Genet. Paris: Seuil. Kant, Immanuel. 2001. Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press. Laroche, H. 1997. Le Dernier Genet. Paris: Seuil. Perrault, C. 1708. Treatise of the Five Orders of Columns in Architecture, trans. John James. London. Sartre, J. P. 1952. Saint Genet, Comédien et Martyr. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1969. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge. Originally Published as L’Etre et le Néant (Paris: Galllimard, 1943). White, E. 1993. Genet. New York: Vintage.

6

Perhaps the Impossible, therefore, Will have been Necessary: Reflections before Friendship Peter Zeillinger Translated by Marie-Eve Morin

I

n Politiques de l’amitié (see Derrida 1997), as in so many of Derrida’s texts, almost everything could have been already decided at the beginning, before the actual venture, avant propos. We could find plenty of examples of this: from the différance that was introduced in a subsequent (re-)reading of the texts now ‘basted together’ in L’écriture et la différence (see Derrida 1978b), to the beginning of the 1968 lecture ‘La différance’ (see Derrida 1982a) that we will discuss presently, to the opening of the Jerusalem lecture ‘Comment ne pas parler’.1 Dénégations (see Derrida 1992b), where almost everything — as we could recognise at least subsequently — will already have been said in the first paragraph and which, moreover, explicitly refers back to an anterior obligation whose consequences are unfolded for the first time. These examples, to which we could add many more, are by no means arbitrarily chosen but, instead, mark decisive starting points for an understanding of Derrida’s thinking. The reader, then, must endeavour to understand the text from its very beginning, or perhaps from even before. We will therefore limit our discussion here to some preliminary observations and remarks concerning Politiques de l’amitié and its context. In order not to lose sight of the structure of the argumentation, we will at first avoid speaking of friendship, as such; we will also try to avoid the impression of having already provided a reading of the text. Instead, we want to raise, in the end, the question: Is there not an altogether other engagement with the politics of friendship, perhaps still to come?



Some Remarks Avant Propos The first attempt to read a text by Derrida is usually characterised by many difficulties. Thus, it is seldom already clear from the start what

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the actual topic of the work is. The difficulty often already begins with the title itself and becomes greater with an attempt to translate it or with a consideration of an already existing translation. So perhaps in the following as well: (a) The title ‘Politics of Friendship’ seems, with a double genitive, to leave open the question which concept determines which: politics, friendship, or vice versa. Is it a matter of a politics that has the character of friendship, or of a friendship whose polit-ical relevance would be characterised? The plural politiques in the French title seems in any case to give from the start a prefer-ence to the second reading: the title, or the heading2 [le cap] obviously aims at (many) possibilities of understanding, in a political way, a concept of friendship still to be defined. This interpretation is confirmed by a thematic running through the whole book: the understanding of Montaigne’s phrase that, as Derrida says, ‘opens’ [ouverte] (1997: vii) the book, and that, according to Diogenes Laertius, goes back to Aristotle: ‘O mes amis, il n’y a nul amy’ [O my friends, there is no friend] (ibid.: 1). Throughout the text, it will be attempted to wrest a political significance from this phrase. In the detailed central section in which Derrida grapples with Carl Schmitt and his friend–enemy distinction as a foundation of the political (ibid.: 83–167), it seems that the political, as such, is the very focal point of Derrida’s efforts. The reading of these chapters, though, shows that Derrida must first ‘get over’ Schmitt’s understanding of the political and must dedicate an ‘epilogue’, even an epitaph (ibid.: 165ff.), to it so that it becomes possible to think of an altogether other political model [Entwurf] of friendship without enemy (ibid.: 176) or beyond the opposition friend/enemy (ibid.: 246; see also ibid.: 32–33, 123, 284).3 (b) But the statement-like character of the title does not yet reveal anything about the kind of argumentation that awaits the reader as he or she proceeds through the book. Will it be a book at all? This question will have to be raised taking into account Derrida’s earlier publications, and the first two lines of the ‘Avant-propos’ already give us a hint as to the answer: This essay (essai) resembles a lengthy preface (préface). It would rather be (plutôt) the foreword (l’avant-propos) of a book I would one day wish to write (Derrida 1997: vii).

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The word essai is presumably a reference to that literary genre as defined by Montaigne and to his Essais, which will be quoted later. At the same time, essai also means ‘attempt’ and refers, therefore, to earlier contexts in which Derrida characterises his works as attempts.4 Finally, this essai is also said to ‘resemble a lengthy preface’ which can only mean that an actual ‘main text’ will not follow in the same book as we have it now. This also links Politics of Friendship with earlier works.5 The plutôt in the second sentence questions from the start, further, what kind of ‘book’ this ‘lengthy preface’ will have been. The text gives at first no further indications to this. (c) The beginning of the next paragraph also names a theme that runs throughout Derrida’s essai: In its present form, opened by a vocative (‘O my friends’), its form is thus that of an address (Derrida 1997: vii).

The indication here is easy to overlook, but very deliberate. In the course of the argumentation, the vocative, the appeal/call and the address will turn out to be a key both to the concept of friendship that Derrida will develop and to the political context it conveys. The text, moreover, will end with a vocative…. (d) Taking into account the place occupied by the essai in the historical context of the seminars Derrida has delivered in the previous decade, it is possible, looking at Montaigne’s ‘quota-tion’ of Aristotle, to find a further indication concerning the problem under discussion, i.e., concerning what ‘is critically at stake in this analysis’ (Derrida 1997: viii). Insofar as ‘the figure of the friend’ keeps returning in the form of the ‘brother’, the figure seems always to belong to a ‘familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics’. A politics, this is to say, based on the exclusion of ‘others’ — and not the least on the exclusion of woman/women — in Carl Schmitt, and in others. Furthermore, the form in which the problem is posed in the following corresponds to this decisive starting-point of the essai, and is just as decisive for the essai’s broader understanding: Why would the friend be like a brother? Let us dream of a friendship which goes beyond this proximity of the congeneric double, beyond parenthood, the most as well as the least natural

154 ? Peter Zeillinger of parenthoods, when it leaves its signature, from the outset, on the name as on a double mirror of such a couple. Let us ask ourselves what would then be the politics of such a ‘beyond the principle of fraternity’. Would this still deserve the name ‘politics’ (Derrida 1997: viii; see also ibid.: 294)?

‘Let us dream’. It is necessary, if one does not want to miss the status of Politiques de l’amitié from the start, to ask what kind of philosophy and what kind of thinking could really give an adequate response to such a proposition. Given that we are not provided with any identifiable criterion to answer this question, the discourse that has just begun here should at any rate not be interpreted too quickly in any specific direction. As to the content, it appears that Derrida tries to go beyond what he calls a ‘natural friendship’, something he likens to kinship. Natural friendship/kinship denotes here a social relationship which refers in a more or less metaphorical way to the sameness of origin [Herkunft]: isogonia — equality of birth, viz. belonging to the same family, the same political community or the same fatherland — which ultimately also determines equality before the law, isonomia (see Derrida 1997: 93–101). ‘Fraternalisation’ is also charged mostly with the same connotations. Yet this leads, at the same time, to the exclusion of the others as ‘enemies’ or — what in the end amounts to the same thing — to their exclusion by means of a over-hasty comprehension [comprendre] (see ibid.: viii). It is then far too easy to link with this friend–enemy distinction a concept of the political [Begriff des Politischen] like the one that takes on, in Carl Schmitt (see note 3 of this chapter), a ‘systematic figure’ (ibid.: 83ff.). When Derrida speaks of overstepping the concept of ‘natural’ friendship or kinship, then he aims in the end at a definition of the political that is beyond the friend–enemy distinction (not only) in Schmitt (see ibid.: 198ff .). (e) The last paragraphs of the foreword provide us with another indication of the basic design of the essai that should not be overlooked. But the statement is again made in a particular modal form: ‘O my friends, there is no friend’. Opening with an apostrophe, this essay could simply let a call [appel] be heard, certainly, providing the appellation of the call [appellation de l’appel] be drawn out, to call it in turn, well before any destination is set down in its possibility, in

Reflections before Friendship ? 155 the direction of familiar sentences, sentences bound by two locutions: to appeal and to take one’s mark [faire appel, prendre appel] (Derrida 1997: xi).

While this passage sounds somewhat cryptic in the translation, it can be decoded with the help of the dual meaning of the French word appel: as ‘call’, and as ‘appeal’ in the legal sense. Both meanings play an important role in the subsequent text. On the one hand, the essai is characterised as an appeal, as a call/summons [(Auf-)Ruf], and this indirectly means that we will presumably not find a stringent argumentation with aims of persuasion. The last sentence of the passage, therefore, outlines a particular difficulty of the essai: the theme of the text would be an appeal made even before there has been any possibility of a more distinct determination. The text seems, for reasons that must still be clarified, not even capable of calling unequivocally what it tries to name. On the other hand, this call is also characterised in the legal sense as an appeal, a formal objection, a protesting and contesting. This presupposes that a judgment has already been passed and that the appeal against the judgment can point to absurdities or new facts, which require a new judgment, unknown and still to come. The decision ‘to appeal’ [faire appel] would involve a procedure of reexamination. There is a grievance concerning the judgement handed down, concerning its givens, and the most accredited concepts of politics and the standard interpretation of friendship, as to fraternization: with a view to protesting or contesting — that is to say, to appealing — before another testimonial agency, from fact to law and from law to justice (Derrida 1997: xi).

The closing allusion to justice relates what has already been said of the appeal to a political context — and at the same time to another wellnoticed text Derrida wrote at roughly the same time as Politiques de l’amitié: his lecture on the problem of justice and of the foundation of law [Recht, droit] at the Cardozo Law School in New York (October 1989) (Derrida 1990). In the latter text, as in the former, Derrida’s use of legal formulations aims beyond the immediate (formal-) political context. The appeal, and the whole essai therewith, is characterised rather as taking one’s mark [prendre appel]. To leap in the dark. As for the impetus in ‘taking one’s mark’ [prendre appel], this gathers up a stooping body, first folded in on itself in preparatory reflection: before the leap, without a horizon, beyond any form of trial (Derrida 1997: xi).

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Backtracks/Detours The ‘Avant-propos’ leaves the status of the text largely wide open. It gives us the impression that it spares no effort to make any final interpretation — of the thematic that it discusses and of that thematic’s (political) consequences — even more difficult, if not impossible. Exactly this is the common reproach against deconstruction. Contrary to this widespread opinion (see, for instance, Lilla 2001: 159 ff.; Krauss 2001), perhaps we can find in the deconstructive approach to political thinking and behaviour [Handeln] both a non-ideologisable criterion for future politics, and an unsurpassable anticipation of such future politics. It might therefore be necessary for us, in order to strengthen this assertion, to draw attention to some peculiarities of Derrida’s thinking and writing. We have already seen a possible point of departure for such an always posterior memoration [Memoration]: Derrida’s early but nevertheless subsequent introduction or invention [inventio] of the neologism différance turns out to be an expression and consequence of the reflecting recollection of an immemorial past.6 The performative force of Derrida’s texts in the representation of this temporal structure of all thinking and behaving [Handeln] thematised on several occasions has often been overlooked. We will take the risk of sketching it. (a) When Derrida delivered his famous lecture, ‘La différance’, in Paris in January 1968 at the invitation of the Société française de philosophie, he began his speech with the words ‘Je parlerai, donc, d’une lettre’ [I will, therefore, speak of a letter] (1982a: 3). As easy as it may be to understand the words ‘I will . . . speak’, these words are self-contradictory in the context of earlier utterances.7 Only a month before, Derrida’s interview to Henri Ronse entitled ‘Implications’ aimed towards a better understanding of his existing work, which now seemed to be contradicted by the opening of the différance lecture.8 I try to write (in) the space in which is posed the question of speech and meaning(-to-say) [vouloir-dire]. I try to write the question: (what is) meaning-to-say? Therefore it is necessary in such a space, and guided by such a question that writing literally mean(-to-say) nothing [ne-veuille-rien-dire] (Derrida 1981b: 14).

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What is, then, the opening sentence of January 1968 speaking about? How does the speaker come to know all of a sudden that there is here something that can be said? One could also ask: who is it that speaks in this lecture? Derrida’s early readings of Husserl have shown that speech as well as writing bear the character of the supplement.9 Speech itself is always affected by writing. This is why Derrida, in his interview with Ronse, also emphasises the venturous character of every speech that must avoid relating to a delusive centre. To risk oneself [se risquer10 meaning(-to-say-)nothing is to start a play, and first to enter into the play of différance which prevents any word, any concept, any major enunciation from coming to summarize and to govern from the theological presence of a center [d’un centre] of the movement and textual spacing of differences (1981b: 14).

All the more astonishing then is the ‘I will . . . speak’ a month later. The question asked by Jeanne Hersch in the discussion following the lecture shows that the audience was clearly aware of this tension: [E]ven if I do not see exactly what, in the end, you mean(-to-say) [voulez dire], you certainly want to say it [voulez le dire]. This is an important point; I am not trying to raise a smile (Derrida 1988a: 87).11

Derrida’s lapidary answer was merely that he was not so sure to have meant (-to-say) something. Will we be allowed to smile here? But could Derrida have answered something more, or something else? With a close reading, a reader should be struck by the fact that Derrida did in no way simply say: ‘I will . . . speak (of a letter)’, but rather ‘Je parlerai, donc, d’une lettre’ [I will, therefore, speak . . .]. Because the first sentences of Derrida’s texts are always so carefully written, it matters to take the donc (which may remind us of the Cartesian ergo in its performative position at the beginning of a text) seriously. Taken at word, this donc compels us, then, to imagine an event anterior to the beginning of the lecture, but out of which its thematic is nevertheless set free. In the context of the earlier works, it will not be possible to relate this anteriority to an identifiable ground or origin. ‘The anterior’ (if one adopts this functional term) will be present at most qua absent, in the form of an ellipsis. Derrida’s entry in his lecture would have to be understood as a first effect, as an answer or fulfilment to an anterior obligation (see 1992b: 73) or as a performative announcement of that différance whose inaudible written representation will, in a certain way, first be ‘legitimated’ by the (subsequent!) lecture.

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This ventured (re-)reading of the beginning of La différance is, moreover, confirmed by a striking ‘Avant-propos’ that a couple of years later precedes the reprint of the lecture in Marges de la philosophie [Margins of Philosophy]. At the end of this (subsequent) introduction entitled ‘Tympan’ (Derrida 1982b: ix–xxix), the texts are explicitly related back to the movement of différance: ‘An introduction, then, to différance. If there is a here of this book, let it be inscribed on these steps (marche)’ (ibid.: xxviii). Like in the ‘Afterword’ to L’écriture et la différence and like at the beginning of La différance, the connotations of ‘weaving’ as well as of ‘screen-ing’ (a term borrowed from typography) — two actions referred to by the single French term tramer, which also means, in the figurative sense, ‘to hatch, to plot’ — are used to describe the collected texts and are, at the same time, put in relation to the connotations of the tympanum, of the ear and the hearing, and of the being-dependent on a membrane that separates. The ‘enervated repercussion’ of the différance, as the last paragraphs stress, cannot be overheard anymore (‘[t]he canal of the ear . . . no longer closes’), but rather calls for — or calls itself — a coup de donc, as in ‘Tympan’, [(s’)appellent un coup de donc] (Derrida 1982b: xxix). The play of words remains, here again, hard to understand, yet it opens and enters into [(er)schliessen] a great many references when the coup de donc (which suddenly appears) is connected to the donc that opens Margins on the next page. The coup that is linked to the elliptic donc does not seem anymore to be just on the track of an immemorial past, like it could still be said of the différance. As a consequence, the donc that is initiated by the movement of the différance points rather forwards to both the necessity and impossibility of making a distinct future concrete. This is recognisable in an exemplary way, on the one hand, in the ventured [se risquer] name that the différance will always be (even if it can avoid being understood as a word or a concept), and on the other hand, in the inevitability of having to find and invent [(er)finden] a performative representation for that which is recognised as unsurpassable. In this sense, it is consistent that in L’écriture et la différence the word différance was added subsequently in the texts as an expression of its ‘discovery’ and that a note at the end makes us aware of this addition, while its subsequent explicit discussion in La différance ‘opens’ (see note 8 of this chapter) the volume Marges de la philosophie pointing forwards, at the same time, to future unfoldings.

Reflections before Friendship ? 159

Beyond the content of Derrida’s texts, this first structural observation could foreshadow a first conclusion that might be helpful for an appropriate reading of other texts: What is implied from the start in and with Derrida’s texts is the necessary venture [se risquer] of a commitment for a distinct future that cannot be linked back to a given origin. The concluding sentence to the announced coup the donc in ‘Tympan’ points in a particular way to a political context, also linked to it: ‘As soon as it [the coup de donc] perforates, one is dying to replace it by some glorious cadaver. It suffices, in sum, barely, to wait’ (Derrida 1982b: xxix). Wouldn’t it be consistent again to see in the ellipsis opened by the donc the ‘empty place of the power’ that Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet described on several occasions,12 and in that ‘glorious cada-ver’ the dead God or the dead King who in a representation meant to be visible misses exactly the presence it intended to represent?13 (b) A further modal keyword has already been mentioned in light of the consequences that lie in the experience of the différance: both the term différance and the term’s anticipating intentional ‘use’ refer to a distinct impossibility. Right from the start, Derrida brings his readings to the point where the inherent presuppositions of the texts he is reading begin to contradict themselves (for example, in Husserl’s discovery of writing as an unsurpassable, supplementary presupposition to the constitution of ideal objects intersubjectively constituted and ‘omnitemporally’ valid;14 in Foucault’s ‘madness’ to want to write a history of madness;15 or in the unnoticed reintroduction of a ‘centre’ in the structure by structuralism itself).16 Without being already obliged to a positive representation, the deconstructive reading makes clear to what extent the talk of an unsurpassable impossibility or indecidability imposes itself by itself. But the talk of an impossibility receives, in connection with this perception both of the impossibility of an identifiable origin and of the inevitability of what Derrida calls ‘supplement’ or ‘writing’, a more differentiated status. Impossibility is no longer simply the negation of the possibility; it has now a positive meaning. We notice with a closer reading of the texts that Derrida usually speaks of ‘the impossible’ when he refers to this ‘positive’ impossibility. While it is possible, up to a point, to understand the ‘impossibility’ in the traditional sense as the result of a judgment based on given criteria and standards, ‘the impossible’ could designate, in a paradoxical but

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inevitable phrase, the anterior and unsurpassable presupposition of every argumentative discourse, viz. of every future philosophy. This thesis shall be illustrated with two examples where Derrida refers to the impossible. We might then dare to comment about the necessity of our reflections on the ‘Avantpropos’ to understand Politiques de l’amitié as an essai, a dream or a call. (i) The first example is found in La voix et le phénomène (see Derrida 1973).17 Without any explicit mention of ‘the impossible’, Derrida speaks, in the context of the discovery of the différance (with an a), of a definite necessity to avoid something: in so far as the ‘exteriority’ of the signifier necessarily contaminates the pure presence at which Husserl aims, the exteriority contradicts exactly the possibility of this purity but without denying, thereby having the reference to an origin as such. Derrida’s reading of Husserl results, therefore, in the emergence of a (pure) difference which defers infinitely the possibility of representing [Vergegenwärtigung] an immediate presence. There exists always only a supplement of this presence. Yet, as Derrida emphasises, the roots of a possibility lie within this impos-sibility: the condition of possibility of the supplement lies in the impossibility of its pure presence. The supplement refers to the necessity of recognising the (impossible) possibility of an unattainable anterior [eines uneinholbar Vorgängigen] with which we cannot catch up. By delayed reaction, a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on (Derrida 1973).

This sentence would perhaps even sum up a first consequence of Derrida’s early philosophising. (ii) Another reference to the talk of impossibility which is less oriented towards the movement of the différance but more closely connected to Politiques de l’amitié is found in Derrida’s lecture at the symposium at the Cardozo Law School on ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice’. There, Derrida even talks of an ‘experience of the impos-sible’.18 While the law [das Recht] in its concrete political form always represents an ‘element of calculation’ (1990: 947); Derrida characterises justice as the ‘incalculable’. In the interval opened by this outline between the incalcul-able and, therefore, indeconstructible justice and the de-constructibility of the law [des Rechts], deconstruction takes place as a political act.

Reflections before Friendship ? 161 But the paradox that I’d like to submit for discussion is the following: it is this deconstructible structure of law (droit), or if you prefer of justice as droit, that also insures the possibility of deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice. . . Deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of droit (authority, legitimacy, and so on) (Derrida 1990: 945).19

The concept of a ‘separating interval’ could be easily misunderstood as an interval between two opposed and, thereby, comparable poles. Yet, such a comparison between justice and law [dem Recht] would never be possible. The reason for distinguishing between them is rather the absence of a corresponding criterion. This interval will therefore have to be linked up with the deferment of the différance (with an a) which, as Derrida says, ‘produces effects’ (1982a: 11) just as the law [das Recht] also only gets its justification as an ‘effect’ [project, Entwurf] from an anterior, but at the same time always future, justice. It is perhaps this misunderstanding that has induced Derrida to add at this point, in the 1991 German version that was revised in the course of the translation, a whole new paragraph that has no counterpart in the original French–English version. It is at this decisive place, moreover, that the concept of the experience of the impossible appears. Deconstruction is possible as an experience of the impossible, there where, even if it does not exist, if it is not present, not yet or never, there is justice [il y a la justice]. Wherever one can replace, translate, determine the X of justice, one would have to say: deconstruction is possible, as impossible, to the extent (there) where there is X (undeconstructible), thus to the extent (there) where there is (the undeconstructible) (Derrida 2002: 243).

The movement of deconstruction that takes place in the asymmetrical interval between justice and law — and takes place [ereignet sich] only insofar as it exceeds the only inhabitable side of this space, that of the law, towards the ‘mystical foundation of its authority’ — is itself the experience of the impossible. Deconstruction is the gesture that brings forth justice. The former is co-extensive with the latter. Deconstruction is possible (as impossible) and can be experienced to the extent that it lets something undeconstructible — here,

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meaning justice — happen. It might perhaps still not be clear as to in what way justice will become concrete. But the possibility of this impossibility is closely tied to the political–legal–ethical discourse and, in this respect, can be experienced as the impossible, if there is such a thing as justice at all. The examples of the necessity of attesting the possibility of the impossibility could and should be also multiplied here.20 Instead, we now turn to a third modal way of speaking that is based on what has been said so far, and which could be decisive for the understanding of politics in Politiques de l’amitié. (c) The absence of any identifiable ‘origin’ and the relation to an infinitely absent and deferred anteriority on the one hand, and the necessity to calculate with the impossible, on the other hand, probably map out the horizon against which the concept of the political must be proven good. Yet, the real possibility of a political way of acting [Handeln] as such is not yet obvious. Perhaps Derrida outlines anew, in Politiques de l’amitié — again, only subsequently reflected upon — a mode of speaking that corresponds to this claim still to come. This would be the ‘dan-gerous Perhaps’ that Friedrich Nietzsche first introduced — in the history of the rumour of the phrase attributed to Aristotle, in the light of a future absence of enemies (Derrida 1997: 28). But the history of this ‘Perhaps’ in Derrida does not just begin with the Nietzsche quotation. (i) The hidden history of the ‘Perhaps’ can be traced back to at least that lecture in October 1966 in Baltimore that set the stage for Derrida’s reception in the USA (Derrida 1978a). Until then, Derrida had always pursued in his texts and lectures deconstructive readings of other authors’ already existing texts. We can already recognise in these texts and lectures the ‘not-meaning(-to-say) anything’ that later (in the interview entitled ‘Implications’ (see Derrida 1981b) becomes a key to how Derrida sees himself. The Baltimore lecture seems to depart from this pattern for the first time. From the beginning, Derrida defends his own thesis. (Only for a lack of space must we omit a detailed and substantial reading of this lecture.21 A consideration of the structure of the lecture’s argumentation would show how similar it is to the structure of Politiques de l’amitié.) From the first word, Derrida’s thesis appears to be already emancipated from its ‘author’ insofar as it must get by without his —

Reflections before Friendship ? 163

always questionable — ‘authority’. This opens to the reader, from the first moment, an uncertain, at most possible, future. The future of a perhaps changed point of view. Continuing a gesture that already characterised Michel Foucault’s looking to the future at the end of Les mots et les choses (1994) that was published only a few months earlier in April 1966, Derrida also speaks in Baltimore from beginning to end in the mode of a foreseeing uncertainty.22 Perhaps (Peut-être) something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ‘event’, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural — orstructuralist — thought to reduce or to suspect. Let us speak of an ‘event’, nevertheless, and let us use quotation marks to serve as a precaution. What would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a rupture and redoubling (1978b: 278).

To the initial ‘Perhaps’ corresponds on the next pages a consequence formulated in the conditional mode (‘If that is the case, then it must . . .’) as well as another ‘perhaps’ that appears anew within a — only seemingly second — thesis which would support the introductory thesis: The event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning of this paper, presumably (peut être) would have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated (1978b: 280).

Of course, the uncertainty of these ‘Perhapses’ is misleading. It was already in Foucault. No place is conceded for a contrary thesis. Instead, what is said in the mode of the ‘Perhaps’ is said with a certain necessity. The thesis does not get its force from its author anymore, but is rather already the expression and venture of an experience (described in the text). What is said in the mode of the ‘Perhaps’ imposes itself with an inner necessity but it will not achieve the status of a certainty. Therein appears a political moment that opens to action and at the same time escapes any ideologisation: In the mode of the Perhaps, a certain and, because it imposes itself, necessary future is re-presented [beforehand, vorweg] but without having reduced the event of the future as such to an anticipated [vorweggenommene] certainty. (ii) Speaking/writing in the mode of the ‘Perhaps’ can be found in many of Derrida’s texts. In De la grammatologie (see Derrida 1976)

164 ? Peter Zeillinger

too, the argumentation as such is opened by a thesis but this thesis is, because of its ‘impossible’ content, at the same time challenged in (the possibility of) its formulation (but not in the necessity of its ventured expression). The ‘rationality’ — but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence — which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos (Derrida 1976: 10).23

This thesis is another typical example of Derrida’s performative way of writing and arguing. Without being able to give up ‘old names’, the deconstruction of its own diction points to a ‘meaning/significance’ that lies outside of the representable conception on which the broken speech/writing depends. The power of assertion with which this speech is endowed arises first and foremost from its inevitability. In other words, the impossibility of using the ‘old names’ in a usual conceptual order forces the speech to express already upon itself this impossibility in a performative way. The destabilising modality of the ‘Perhaps’ becomes, in its performativity, the condition of possibility to anticipate, or to not miss from the start, the event of the awaited future — and be it only the future of a still ‘impossible’ statement. (iii) It is in Force of Law that the political dimension of the mode of the ‘Perhaps’ becomes explicit again. Taking into account what has already been said, the next quotation may already speak for itself. At most, we should add that this central passage gives something like a ‘definition’ of justice and actually in the form of a politically effective criterion: Justice remains, is yet, to come, à venir . . . Perhaps it is for this reason that justice, insofar it is not only a juridical or political concept, opens up for l’avenir the transformation, the recasting or refounding of law and politics. ‘Perhaps’, one must always say perhaps for justice. There is an avenir for justice [Il y a un avenir pour la justice] and there is no justice except to the degree that some event is possible which, as event, exceeds calculation, rules, programs, anticipations and so forth. Justice as the experience of absolute alterity [altérité absolue] is unpresentable

Reflections before Friendship ? 165 [imprésentable], but it is the chance of an event and the condition of history (Derrida 1990: 969–70; emphasis added).

(iv) The semantics of the ‘Perhaps’ that Derrida had already used so often before he introduced it in Politiques de l’amitié with regards to a (political) way of acting [Handeln] that is directed towards the future is just as simple as it is extraordinary. The connotations that Derrida seeks to unfold in order to lay the foundation of a politics of friendship are especially evident in German.24 Deriving from the Middle High German vil lîhte [very light/easy (leicht)], the German word ‘vielleicht’ designates ‘the supposed possibility that an assertion corresponds to reality or that something takes place or happens’.25 Seen that way, the speech in the mode of the ‘Perhaps’ already binds itself with the responsibility of a future event without having transposed it already into a (irresponsible, unverantwortbar) certainty — it ties together the lodging of an ‘appeal’ [faire appel] and the ‘taking of one’s mark’ [prendre appel] into an active responsibility vis à vis an anterior call.



Necessary Venture of the Perhaps If the former observations avant propos perhaps reveal already a consequently followed train of thought and a ‘criteriology’ that is not just stated but also that must be recognised, then the mode of the perhaps could open a horizon for a responsible [verantwortete] political praxis beyond the suspicion of unsurpassable or unquestionable premises. The history of the subsequent introduction of the name ‘différance’ can certainly (and perhaps only) be understood as a direct consequence of the aporias which have shown themselves in Derrida’s earliest readings.26 This ‘disclosure’ or (necessary) ‘recognition’ of the différance consequently puts into the foreground the question of its adequate (future) ‘correspondence’. Yet, the impossibility of an adequate correspondence that lies in the aporia of the necessity of a (finite) expression of the unattainable anterior calls upon us — if we do not want to fall prey to a resigning, and therein ideologically apolitical, silence — to give, in an act that is conscious of its venture and

166 ? Peter Zeillinger

of its paradoxicality, a finite but nevertheless positive expression to the impossible. Does the linguistic mode of the ‘perhaps’ reveal itself for recognition — as is our concluding thesis which only opens the reading of Politiques de l’amitié — before any substantial discussion and responsibility at least as the adequate possibility to correspond to the necessity of the impossible? In Derrida’s words: For example: . . . By specifying recurrently: ‘if there is one’, by suspending the thesis of existence wherever, between a concept and an event, the law of an aporia, an undecidability, a double bind occurs in interposition, and must in truth impose itself to be endured there. This is the moment when the disjunction between thinking and knowing becomes crucial. This is the moment when one can think sense or nonsense only by ceasing to be sure that the thing ever occurs, or — even if there is such a thing — that it would ever be accessible to theoretical knowledge or determinant judgement, any assurance of discourse or of nomination in general. Thus we regularly say — but we could multiply the examples — the gift, if there is one;27 invention, if there is any such thing, and so forth.28 This does not amount to conceding a hypothetical or conditional dimension (‘if, supposing that, etc.’) but to marking a difference between ‘there is’ and ‘is’ or ‘exists’ — that is to say, the words of presence. What there is, if there is one or any, is not necessarily. It perhaps does not exist or ever present itself; nevertheless, there is one, or some; there is a chance of there being one, of there being some (1997: 38–39).

Perhaps a reading of Politiques de l’amitié could be first tackled only in the genealogical context that we have now outlined along the lines of its own ‘Avant-propos’ . . .



Notes 1. Both the motto from the preface of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés that opens L’écriture et la différence (see Derrida 1978b) without any explicit ‘Avant-propos’ and the ‘Afterword’ bearing the same date that appears in the French edition after the bibliography (after the acknowledgement for the reprint of the texts, and therefore hardly belonging to the book) subsequently foreshadow an anterior elliptic opening to the book. This can be confirmed in comparing the first publications of the

Reflections before Friendship ? 167

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

texts in which most of the explicit references to the différance are missing. Note: The acknowledgement for the reprint is missing in the German and the English editions; Alan Bass offers helpful comments for understanding the inconspicuous ‘Afterword’ in his introduction to the English edition (ibid.: xiii). For an interpretation of the meaning and the significance of the genesis of this book and of the neologism différance that was first explicitly explained after the publication of the book, see Zeillinger (2002). This appears in English in the text. The aim of Derrida’s reading of Schmitt is to show that the latter cannot, in the end, maintain the purity of his distinction, of the ‘concrete antagonism [konkrete Gegensätzlichkeit]’ between friend and enemy (see Schmitt 1963: 30–31; see also Derrida 1997: 114–19). The ‘enemy’ becomes the most important ally just as the ‘friend’ is always the potential enemy. Schmitt’s Theorie des Partisanen (1963b) and his Weisheit der Zelle (1950) make this point clear (Derrida 1997: 148ff. and 161ff.). Derrida emphasises in a footnote the double meaning of stasis as uproar (unrest) and status (rest) — which also matters in the Christian understanding of Trinity — that unity and plurality (alterity) do not at all contradict each other, but that their relationship determines the whole subject of his ‘Essai’ (ibid.: 108–9, n. 13). See, for instance, the ‘Afterword’ at the end of L’écriture et la différence, mentioned earlier. In ‘Outwork, Prefacing’, for instance, Derrida (1981a: 1–59) emphasises — contrary to Hegel’s critical attitude towards Vorreden — that there will perhaps never be more than a ‘prefacing’. This is why the text in question begins with the following suggestive sentence: ‘This (therefore) will not have been a book’ [Ceci (donc) n’aura pas été un livre] (ibid.: 1). Derrida’s reference to the immemoriality of a past ought to be expressly investigated (see 1978b: 66; 1992b: 99 among others). On the meaning of the memoration of a particular immemoriality that seeks to think both the past which still lies beyond the tension between history and myth, and the present opening of a possible future, see Derrida (1997: 111, n. 25): ‘A question, then: is it possible, will it ever be possible, for us to keep the name democracy beyond this alternative, in excluding it both from history as the history of autochthony or eugenics and from myth? In order to confide it to or open it to another memory, another immemoriality, an other history, another future?’ Will one ever dare to relate, and not only in this respect, Derrida’s thought with the one of the late Schelling, the Schelling of the Philosophie der Mythologie (1979) and of the Philosophie der Offenbarung (1983)? The letter in question is of course that inaudible letter ‘a’ that as an orthographical disorder ‘has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word différence’ (Derrida 1982b : 3), and that was explained

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8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

in its semantic performativity by means of an ‘approximate semantic analysis’ in the course of the lecture (ibid.: 7). We will not go into this aspect in detail here. ‘Implications’ was first published in Lettres françaises, 1211, 6–12 December, pp. 12–13, in 1967; it was included in Derrida’s Positions (1981b) which in turn was published around the same time as Margins (1982b) which begins with the reprint of ‘La différance’. The text entitled ‘Tympan’ which seems to precede ‘La différance’ is identified in the French version with Roman numeral pagination as an introduction [ex ergue, Avant-propos]. This distinction is unfortunately not rendered in the German translation. [Translator’s Note: It is, however, rendered in the English translation.] On the early readings of Husserl, see Dreisholtkamp (1999); Caiaramelli (1997), as well as Békési (1995). It is a shame that the English translation drops the reflective phrase precisely here (Derrida 1981b: 14). For a fuller discussion of ‘La différance’, see Derrida (1988a). For instance, in Lefort and Gauchet (1990). See also van Reijen (1992). See Heller (1997) who has explicitly referred to the ‘empty chair of the Messiah’ and to a ‘structural messianism’ in Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994): ‘The empty chair waits for the Messiah. If someone fills this chair, then we can be sure of one thing: he is the corrupted or false Messiah. If someone takes the chair away, then the performance is over and the spirit will abandon the community. Politics can make no use of this empty chair; but as long as we leave the chair where it is, i.e., exactly in the centre of the room, where it remains fixed in its warning and maybe even pathetic emptiness, the political actors must take its presence into consideration. Everything else is pragmatism’ (translated from German from Heller 1997: 87). ‘The important function of written, documenting linguistic expression is that it makes communications possible without immediate or mediate personal address; it is, so to speak, communication become virtual’ (Husserl 1989: 164). ‘In writing a history of madness, Foucault has attempted — and this is the greatest merit, but also the very infeasibility of his book — to write a history of madness itself. Itself. Of madness itself. That is, by letting madness speak for itself, Foucault wanted madness to be the subject of his book in every sense of the word’ (Derrida 1978b: 33–34). Derrida is, of course, not the only one that works out the ‘crisis of the foundation’ noticed here; on that issue, see especially the works of JeanFrançois Lyotard (1986), Thomas S. Kuhn (1970) and Kurt Gödel (1931) who are, in their respective contexts, compelled to draw this same conclusion.

Reflections before Friendship ? 169 17. There is even an earlier instance of Derrida’s talk of the impossible in his reading of Levinas in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ from the year 1964 (1978b: 80–84). We will not get into an explanation of this instance here in order to avoid being accused of making a theologising reading. 18. While there may be earlier instances, we can find a great number of references to the ‘experience of the impossible’, or to the ‘possibility of the impossible’, since the lecture in New York: see The Other Heading (Derrida 1992c), Aporias (Derrida1993), Specters of Marx (Derrida1994) and, last but not the least, Politiques de l’amitié. With Force of Law, we find ourselves in the period where Politics of Friendship is taking shape: in 1988, a first version of the actual Chapter 7 was read at an American Philosophical Association (APA) conference. See Derrida (1988b). 19. The seemingly provocative statement ‘Deconstruction is justice’ was quite carefully put together. It is reigned in several times by conditional formulations. The strength of the paradox does not lie in its sharpness, but in its inevitability. The law [das Recht] is deconstructible. If there shall be such a thing as justice at all, then it is in any case not deconstructible in the same way, in so far as it lies beyond the law [dem Recht]. The same thing also applies to deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Such a deconstruction would then already be the criterion that could uncover, and consequently prevent, the injustice of the law [des Rechts] — and that exactly is justice. 20. See, for instance, Derrida (1992c): ‘I will even venture to say that ethics, politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia. When the path is clear and given, when a certain knowledge opens up the way in advance, the decision is already made, it might as well be said that there is none to make: irresponsibly, and in good conscience, one simply applies or implements a program. Perhaps, and this would be the objection, one never escapes the program. In that case, one must acknowledge this and stop talking with authority about moral or political responsibility. The condition of possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention’ (ibid.: 41). 21. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Zeillinger (2002). 22. The well-known key passage in Les mots et les choses (1994) does not speak at all of a necessary or claimed ‘end of man’, but rather speaks explicitly in the conditional mode and in the mode of the ‘Perhaps’ (Foucault 1994). 23. The thesis refers to the background and reason for the following investigations which is characterised in the preceding section (‘Program’) as a radical extension of the concept of writing. ‘By a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some twenty

170 ? Peter Zeillinger

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

centuries tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the name of language is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the name of writing. By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing . . . is beginning to go beyond the extension of language’ (Derrida 1976: 6–7). ‘To think friendship with an open heart . . . one must perhaps be able to think the perhaps, which is to say that one must be able to say it and to make of it, in saying it, an event’ (Derrida 1997: 30). ‘[D]ie angenommene möglichkeit, dasz eine aussage der wirklichkeit entspricht, oder dasz etwas eintritt oder sich ereignet‘ (Grimm and Grimm 1984: 238). See also the reference of the English ‘perchance’ and ‘perhaps’ to the coming of an event, while ‘maybe’ designates more strongly the indefinite possibility (‘it may be’) (Derrida 1997: 30). Compared to this, the risk remains that ‘the French peut-être is, perhaps, with its two verbs (pouvoir and être), too rich’ (ibid.: 39). We will always be able to read ‘différance’ also as a name, although its orthography will only be rewritten by means of a non-insignificant alteration of the linguistic orthodoxy. In a note here, Derrida points ‘in particular’, to Donner le temps (see Derrida 1992a). See: ‘[D]econstruction, if such a thing exists’ (Derrida 1990: 945); ‘if there is any event today’ (Derrida 1992c: 31); ‘ethics, politics, and responsibility, if there are any’ (ibid.: 41).



References Békési, János. 1995. ‘Denken’ der Geschichte: Zum Wandel des Geschichtsbegriffs bei Jacques Derrida. Munich: Fink. Caiaramelli, Fabio. 1997. ‘Jacques Derrida und das Supplement des Ursprungs’, in Hans-Dieter Gondek and Bernhard Waldenfels (eds), Einsätze des Denkens. Zur Philosophie von Jacques Derrida, pp. 124–52. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. ‘Speech and Phenomena: Introduction to the Problem of Signs in Husserl’s Phenomenology’, in J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, pp. 1–104. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Originally published as La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967). ———. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Originally published as De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967).

Reflections before Friendship ? 171 Derrida, Jacques. 1978a. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sci-ences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 278–93. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1978b. Writing and Difference, trans. (with an Introduction and additional notes) Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in French as L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). ———. 1981a. Dissemination, trans. (with an Introduction and additional notes) Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972). ———. 1981b. Positions, trans. and annotated Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as Positions: Entretiens avec Henri Ronse, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Houdebine, Guy Scarpetta (Paris: Minuit, 1972). ———. 1982a. ‘La différance’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. (with additional notes) Alan Bass, pp. 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in French as ‘La différance’, in Marges de la Philosophie, pp. 1–29 (Paris: Minuit, 1972). ———. 1982b. Margins of Philosophy, trans. (with additional notes) Alan Bass. Chicago: Harvester Press. Originally published in French as Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). ———. 1988a. ‘La différance’, in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and ‘Différance’, pp. 83–95. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1988b. ‘The Politics of Friendship’, The Journal of Philosophy, 85(11): 632–44. ———. 1990. ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, Cardozo Law Review, 11 (5–6): 921–1045. ———. 1992a. Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published as Donner le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1991). ———. 1992b. ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’, in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (eds), Derrida and Negative Theology, pp. 73–142. New York: SUNY Press. ———. 1992c. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington–Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Originally published as L’autre cap suivi de la démocratie ajournée (Paris: Minuit, 1991). ———. 1993. Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

172 ? Peter Zeillinger Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso. Originally published in French as Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994). ———. 2002. ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Acts of Religion, pp. 230–98. New York: Routledge. Original revised version published in French as Force de Loi: Le ‘Fondement Mystique de L’Autorité’ (Paris: Galilée, 1994). Dreisholtkamp, Uwe. 1999. Jacques Derrida. Munich: Beck. Foucault, Michel 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Originally published as Les mots et les choses: Une archeologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Gödel, Kurt. 1931. ‘Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme’, Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, 38: 173–98. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. 1984. Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 26. Munchen Dt. Taschenbuch-Verl. Heller, Agnes. 1997. ‘Politik nach dem Tod Gottes’, in M. J. Rainer and H. G. Janssen (eds), Jahrbuch Politische Theologie, 2: Bilderverbot, pp. 67–87. Münster: Lit. Husserl, Edmund 1989. ‘The Origin of Geometry’, trans. David Carr, in J. Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction, pp. 155–80. London: University of Nebraska Press. Krauss, Dietrich. 2001. Die Politik der Dekonstruktion. Politische und ethische Konzepte im Werk von Jacques Derrida. Frankfurt/M.: Campus. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lefort, Claude and Michel Gauchet. 1990. ‘Über die Demokratie: Das Politische und die Instituierung des Gesellschaftlichen’, in Ulrich Rödel (ed.), Autonome Gesellschaft und libertäre Demokratie, pp. 89–122. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Lilla, Mark. 2001. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York: New York Review Books. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1986. ‘Grundlagenkrise’, Neue Hefte Für Philosophie, 26: 1–33. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1979. ‘Philosophie der Mythologie’, in Manfred Schröter (ed.), Schellings Werke, vol. 6, pp. 1–254. Munich: Beck. ———. 1983. Philosophie der Offenbarung, in Manfred Schröter (ed.), Schellings Werke, Supplementary vol. 6. Munich: Beck. Schmitt, Carl. 1950. ‘Weisheit der Zelle’ in Carl Schmitt, Ex captivitate Salus: Erinnerungen der Zeit 1945/47. Köln: Greven Verlag. ———. 1963a. Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

Reflections before Friendship ? 173 ———. 1963b. Theorie des Partisanen: Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Translated as Theory of the Partisan by G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2007). van Reijen, Willem. 1992. ‘Das Politische - eine Leerstelle: Zur politischen Philosophie in Frankreich’, Transit, 5: 109–22. Zeillinger, Peter. 2002. Nachträgliches Denken: Skizze eines philosophischtheologisch Aufbruchs im Ausgang von Jacques Derrida. Münster: Lit.

7

Cosmopolitanism after Derrida: City, Signature and Sovereignty Puspa Damai



Signatures of Cosmopolitanism

C

osmopolitanism in Derrida’s works sounds like an afterthought in comparison to other more recurring themes of his texts, like ‘writing’, ‘différance’, ‘supplement’, ‘metaphysics’, or ‘violence’. Cosmopolitanism seems to belong to deconstruction, which is often associated with decentring, fragmentation, and critique of totality and universality, only as an intimate other, a foreign element grafted in the body by force, or by miracle. That is the reason why, perhaps, hardly any cosmopolitanist refers to the issue of cosmopolitanism in Derrida or in deconstruction, so much so that even Derrida has written very sparsely on it as it belongs perhaps to the dormant, if not the repressed, other of deconstruction itself, and it surfaces in his thinking only as a surprise, an event, or a gift.1 In this essay I argue that cosmopolitanism in Derrida is the signature, even the decision of the other as his cosmopolitics is predicated upon extending unconditional hospitality to the other, or upon the arrival of the other. Derrida, I contend, radicalises cosmopolitanism not only by rescuing it from both the Statist model that conceives of it as world government, and a utopian model that confines it to world citizenship, but also by critiquing and revising the traditional theoontological conceptualisation of sovereignty and by supplementing it with a new form of decisionism, which can be called the sovereignty of the other. His notion of the city of refuge represents the ‘other heading’ of that sovereignty, which, in contrast to the indivisible nature of traditional sovereignty, is shared and divided, and in which it is always the other who decides without exonerating me from being responsible for its decision.

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Throughout this discussion I stress the fact that cosmopolitanism in Derrida converges with the figure of the other itself, hence his simultaneous reluctance and compulsion to address and approach it directly. On the one hand, he resorts to several discursive detours in order not to compromise the ‘essential’ singularity, autonomy and sovereignty of the other, and not to ‘properize’ or appropriate the other into ‘my’ homolingual address, but also to put the accent on ‘my’ inherently heteronomous nature and ‘my’ finitude. On the other hand, Derrida addresses the other as if it was he who was being exposed to the other’s address. The compulsion to invent new idiom to speak to and about the other, to imagine a new site and politics of the other is already haunted by the uncanny address from the other. It is this event of the other’s address or apparition that makes deconstruction aware of its own cosmopolitan unconscious, which can neither be completely ignored nor fully realised and made present. No wonder that Derrida’s writing on cosmopolitanism is at best preliminary, schematic, tentative, and approximative; but at the same time it is, like all surprises and events, intrepid, provocative, suggestive, and even annunciatory. It owes its provisionality partly to the textual genre it is destined to take. Unlike voluminous discourses on ‘pharmakon’, and ‘friendship’, ‘psyche’ and ‘spectrality’, the text on cosmopolitanism is just an address to the Parliament of Writers of which Derrida was a founding member and vice-president.2 ‘On Cosmpollitanism’ was published, together with ‘On Forgiveness’, another of Derrida’s short addresses, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001b) as if neither of the addresses were integer in and of themselves, and as if cosmopolitanism were integrally associated with some form of apologetics. ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, therefore, does not belong to the rest of his philosophical or theoretical writings in the same way as does, for instance, Margins of Philosophy (1982a). If this ‘address’ belongs, as it were to the margin of the margins, or to what Derrida in Dissemination (1981) calls the outwork ‘that will not have been a book’ (ibid.: 3), and if like all outworks that at once lie out of the work as well as occupy ‘the entire location and duration of the book’ (ibid.: 13), then this short and ubiquitous ‘address’ posits formidable difficulties for reading.3 Since it is, as Derrida writes somewhere else, the ‘ear of the other that signs’ and ‘says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography’ (1985b: 51), the text on cosmopolitanism could be taken as the ‘signature’, rather than a minor text of deconstruction. Therefore, taking on the formidable task of reading

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it could perhaps be the right and the just way to approach Derrida and deconstruction. However, as in every act of signature that for Derrida only reveals the condition of its possibility as the condition of its impossibility insofar as ‘a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form’ (1982a: 328), insofar as ‘the signature has to remain and disappear at the same time’ (1984: 56), or insofar as the signature belongs at once to the inside as well as the outside of the text (1986: 4), the signature in or as cosmopolitanism is not only dispersed, distributed, repeated, and reiterated all over Derrida’s works, and is given to be traced only at the moments when it emerges to disappear, but it also marks the border between his oeuvre and the world of action or praxis.4 Thus, it cannot be read simply as overcoming of the binaries so as to reverse the order of the centre and the margin, the (global) South and the North, the East and the West, or nationalism or national citizenship, and internationalism or world citizenship. Nor can it be read as an act that leaves the relations between the binaries perpetually undecided. The condition of possibility as the condition of impossibility in Derrida is what opens the aporetic or differential space in which nothing takes place but a decision, an event. Derrida’s cosmopolitanism reveals, instead of being marred by the commonly associated vice of undecidability, a vigorous and enabling decisionism that helps him bring into relief the gap between theory and praxis. Seen from this perspective, Derrida’s characterisation of différance, which for him is an assemblage of different ways, as ‘neither a word nor a concept’ (1973: 131) reveals a new meaning. By arguing that différance is neither just a term nor a concept, he neither implies that it is an airy nothing nor that it is a transcendental something. Nor does the letter a in différance simply imply ‘spacing’, as ‘worlding’, spatialising and temporalising; rather it is the inflection of theory by praxis. If cosmopolitanism is Derrida’s call for the world of the other, which will also be a more hospitable and just world, the aporias and impossibilities of theory provide opportunities and generate possibilities for responsible decisions. The texts that bear on the issue of cosmopolitanism, therefore, are all the more crucial in understanding the states of theory in/after Derrida. At the same time these texts, as reiterations of the perennial themes of deconstruction, help us read his earlier texts in a novel way, thereby complicating the easy ways of dubbing his later writings as ‘deconstruction getting serious’ as if to imply that his earlier texts were just frivolous theoretical mind games.5

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There is definitely some truth in Rorty’s argument about the ‘superiority of later to earlier Derrida’ (Rorty 1989: 124); but not necessarily, as he thinks, because the later Derrida creates a way of writing or style as opposed to the earlier one who relied solely on neologism or word magic. James L. Marsh reveals the reason behind such readings that claim the superiority of later Derrida. He argues that there is a strong modernist tendency in later Derrida, which he distinguishes from the earlier, postmodernist Derrida. In ‘Derrida II’, as he puts it, Derrida became ‘much more positive about certain aspect of Western tradition, especially in its attention to universal ethical rights, to justice, and to radical social critique indebted to the Marxist tradition’ (Marsh 1999: 22). If we agree with Marsh, then, Derrida’s cosmopolitanism will be just another version of Western, liberal universalism. Are there cues in Derrida that indicate otherwise? Or his project, if there is one, also betrays the same Eurocentric tendency to ‘present’ itself, in the name of democracy, critique, human rights, justice, as a modern, advanced, cosmopolitan spirit? In reply, one can point to a number of his texts where he sounds quite different from what his critics make him to. In his numerous interviews, such as the ones compiled in Positions (1982b), Derrida clarifies that deconstruction traverses the interiority as well as the ex-teriority of Western philosophy, and he describes his method as a ‘simultaneously faithful and violent circulation between inside and outside of philosophy’ (ibid.: 6). To further elaborate his point, he argues that all the texts of Western cultures need to be read as kinds of symptoms ‘of something that could not be presented in the history of philosophy, and which, moreover, is nowhere present’ (ibid.: 7). And this search for the trace of the impresentable other is what informs Derrida’s works on cosmopolitanism. In the very text in which Derrida is said to have gotten more serious, or with which, together with some other texts of the period, he is said to have entered the second phase, ‘Derrida II’, — ‘Force of Law’, Derrida begins by enumerating the ordeal of speaking in English and goes on to argue that to ‘address oneself to the other in the language of the other’ is ‘the condition of all possible justice’; but at the same time, it is not only impossible to speak the other’s language without, to some extent, appropriating and assimilating it to one’s own, it is also impossible not to demote justice to (human) rights as an element of universality (1992a: 17).

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To instantiate this aporia, Derrida turns to the limits of logocentric law that assumes that the other is capable of language, ‘is capable of language in general, is man as a speaking animal’; and he reminds that not very long ago, ‘man’ meant ‘adult white male Europeans, carnivorous and capable of sacrifice’ (1992a: 18). While ‘there are still, many “subjects” among mankind who are not recognised as subjects and who receive this animal treatment’, what ‘we confusedly call “animal”, the living thing as living and nothing else, is not yet the subject of the law or of law [droit]’ (ibid.: 18). The carno-phallogocentric or anthropocentric legal paradigm, for him, constitutes ‘the legacy we have received under the name of justice’ which comes ‘in more than one language’ (ibid.: 19). The Western tradition or heritage, therefore, is not only multiple, like the multiple languages in which ‘justice’ has been transferred, but it also expresses itself as an aporia or a contradiction, which in this case, Derrida illustrates with the contradiction between law or right on the one hand, and justice on the other, one inextricably associated with the other, but also radically different from the other. Derridean cosmopolitanism, thus, is not based on merely human rights or even on the (anthropocentric) law that has always sought to consolidate man’s rights, or has attempted to extend conditional and calculated rights to certain others. Nor is it confined, as Marsh implies, just to Europe or to the Western tradition. Against precisely such readings, Derrida calls for the invention of ‘another gesture’, which neither seeks to repeat Europe nor to entirely break away from it. The other gesture that he invokes rather strives to ‘assign identity from alterity, from the other heading and the other of the heading, from a completely different shore’ (Derrida 1992b: 30). Derrida’s heading towards alterity, towards the other shore outside of Europe involves a difficult and more complicated strategy of cosmopolitics than the one imposed on his texts by some of his readers. Thus, it is imperative to cut him, as he wishes ‘but in more than two places’ (1999b: 81), and it is equally important to show the transaction or the trace across multiple cuts. Thus, by reading cosmopolitanism in Derrida as a trace that is at once dispersed all over his texts, yet that exceeds them all to head towards other shores, a trace that erases itself radically in the process of presenting itself, or as a signature that is at the same time in and out of the text, that ‘remain(s) resides and falls’ (1986: 5), one not only gains a vantage point to critique simplistic binaries of later and

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earlier Derrida, theory and praxis, Eurocentrist and anti-Eurocentrist Derrida, but one also knows how to respond to charges by detractors who accuse Derrida of lapsing, to quote David Harvey (one of such detractors) ‘into total political silence’ (Harvey 1990: 117). This is as if, to take just one of many examples, Of Grammatology’s rigorous and patient deconstruction of phonetic writing in which the West desires to hear itself speak, and which, coupled with anthropology, serves as ‘the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West’ (Derrida 1976: 10) were not properly ‘political’. If Harvey finds Derrida’s critique of imperial Europe only quietly or improperly political, for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, he is too metropolitan or cosmopolitan to be political. In her essay, ‘Resident Alien’, she hails him for his ‘teleopoiesis’, which she describes as a ‘structure of touching the distant other that interrupts the past in the name of a future rupture that is already inscribed in it’ (Spivak 2002: 47). Yet this poesis of the ‘distant touching’, falls short, for her, precisely because it still suffers from metropolitanism; as a result, for Spivak, Derrida’s teleopoesis remains confined, as do all migratory models of metropolitan hospitality, to ‘arrivant or revenant, arriving or returning’ (ibid.: 47). To redress this limitation, she proposes to add ‘the coloniser as guest’ to Derrida’s list of the guests that include ‘exiles, the deported, the expelled, the rootless, the stateless, lawless, nomads, absolute foreigners’ (ibid.: 54). Spivak finds the example of this foreigner, whom she calls the resident alien, in Tagore’s Gora. What is curious here is not only how Spivak, perhaps unwittingly, succeeds in supplementing Derrida’s cosmopolitanism by that of Tagore’s, whose cosmopolitanism, according to Martha Nussbaum, succeeds in its very failure (Nussbaum 1996: 15). More curious is Spivak’s misreading of hospitality in Derrida, which she relates to the arriving or returning of the immigrant in the metropolis. By proposing Tagore’s Gora as the coloniser-guest, she indeed reverses the binary of the third world immigrant as the guest, and the former coloniser of the first world as the host, thereby attributing the role of the host to the native. But by restricting hospitality in Derrida to the arrival or return of the metropolitan migrant, she not only overlooks the complexity of the metropolis, to which we will return later, in Derrida, but she also ignores the intricacies of what Derrida calls the ‘law of hospitality’. Isn’t that sort of arrival and return what Derrida has always criticised as the conditional hospitality of the

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State? Isn’t that what he at all cost tries to distinguish his concept of hospitality from? Isn’t that what he calls ‘ill of all “rich”, “neoliberal” countries’ that ‘welcome or allow to arrive’, according to the needs of their economies, workers from economically less privileged countries, especially ex-colonies, ‘a work force that they exploit until the day when another set of circumstances, economic, political, ideological, electoral, requires another calculation’ (Derrida 2002b: 140)? Doesn’t he differentiate what he calls ‘an ethics of hospitality (an ethics as hospitality) [or the unconditional hospitality] from a law or a politics of hospitality [conditional hospitality]’ exemplified by the Kantian universal or cosmopolitan hospitality (Derrida 1999a: 19–20)? Wouldn’t he rather start by interrogating the very distinction between the Gora-guest and the native-host, not only because hospitality involves language, the language of the hôte, hôte as both host and guest, but also because, for him ‘the implacable law of hospitality’ is: ‘the hôte who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received hôte (the guest), the welcoming hôte who considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hôte received in his own home’ (ibid.: 41).



Indifferent Hospitality It is not that by deconstructing the binary between the host and the guest Derrida obfuscates the colonial politics of hospitality. In fact, the politics of hospitality is the question — the question as to who gets to ask the question — in all the texts revolving around cosmopolitanism and hospitality. Etymology and conceptual genealogy of hôte and hosti-pet-s (the guest-master), which form the chain of ‘two sovereign powers’ of traditional law of hospitality that brings it close to ipseity, to one’s own (Derrida 1999a: 18), and the perversion or even crimes of hospitality that Derrida illustrates towards the end of his treatise on hospitality by recounting the story of Lot in Sodom in which, in order to save his guests, Lot offers his two virgin daughters as substitutes to the people of Sodom. All of them testify to Derrida’s stringent politicisation of hospitality, in which he critiques the father, familial despot, ‘the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 149).

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Thus, in spite of some reservations about Levinas’s concept of the absolute Other, about his ‘feminism’ that only disguises his masculinist anxieties, and his humanism that limits his concept of hospitality, Derrida nevertheless underscores in Levinas a certain feminist dimension of welcoming as he notes that Levinas defines the welcome, or the ‘welcoming of absolute, absolutely originary, or even pre-originary hospitality’ on the basis of femininity (Derrida 1999a: 44).6 Contrary to what Spivak implies about Derrida’s casting of hospitality in the ‘migrationary’ mode, one finds him overcautious about not compromising the absolute singularity of the newcomer. ‘Pure hospitality consists in welcoming the new arrival’ he clarifies, ‘before imposing conditions on them’, like asking for a name or identity paper; but on the other hand ‘it also assumes that you address them, individually’ for ‘[h]ospitality consists in doing everything possible to address the other’ (Derrida 2005: 67). The absolute singularity of the hôte brings in the corruptible law of hospitality, and may imply that hospitality is being the master at home, and any encroachment ‘on my “at home”, on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host’ would turn the guest into an enemy [hostis], and take me, the host, his hostage. Consequently classical hospitality of the sovereign host is possible only as finitude, that is to say, only by restricting, filtering, selecting, choosing, and electing the visitors or guests. Hospitality is coded into laws, rights, and in the name of protection, it is controlled and limited by the sovereign State. The conditional hospitality of the State is exactly what transgresses the imperative of hospitality as if ‘the laws (plural) of hospitality, in marking limits, powers, rights, and duties, consisted in challenging and transgressing the law of hospitality’, which commands unconditional hospitality to the arrivant. The unconditional hospitality in turn consists, he continues, in saying ‘yes’ to ‘who or what turns up’ before any anticipation, determination, or identification of the arrivant as a ‘foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor’; it is to accede to the arrival itself ‘whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 77). The law of hospitality is, therefore, the law of ‘autoimmunity’, a perversion of perversion, in which hospitality transgresses its own laws, its own threshold; it suspends itself in order to protect itself, it countersigns in order to effect its signature, and it cultivates an

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event of indetermination and indifference, a culture of, to quote his Politics of Friendship, ‘anonymous and irreducible singularities, infinitely different and indifferent to particular difference’ (Derrida 1997b: 106). To reduce Derrida’s ‘in-different’ hospitality to the migration model of ‘arrival and return’ is to misinterpret what he means by ‘arrivance’, which, for him, is an event that remains ‘to come’. The arrivant, who may come or never come, but with whom is inextricably associated the event of welcome ‘must be absolutely other, an other that I expect not to be expecting, that I’m not waiting for, whose expectation is made of a nonexpectation’ even beyond philosophy’s horizon of expectation that in advance anticipates, amortises, and calculates knowledge (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 13). To eliminate all references to the arrivant in the name of calculable, determinable and identifiable others is to renounce the incalculable in all events, hence to renounce justice itself. The other arrival is not predicated on invitation; rather it is a visitation that exceeds the economy of expectation, and surpasses the ceremonies of reception. The hôte visits as if it were a surprise, and one receives him without being ready to welcome him, not in one’s name or identity, or at least without resorting to the principle of sovereign hospitality; rather one receives as if the guest were the master of the house. Hospitality par excellence is the one ‘in which the visitor radically overwhelms the self of the visited, and the chez-soi of the hôte [host]’ (Derrida 2002a: 372). The welcome of unconditional hospitality is, thus, heteronomous even to the binary of the host and the guest, to ontology itself. Derrida clarifies it further in Aporias by arguing that the arrivants (plural) need to be distinguished from ‘the absolute arrivant, who is not even a guest, and with his arrival he surprises the host, who is not yet a host or an inviting power’ (1993: 34). Insofar as the arrivant does not yet have a determined identity, it can neither be an occupier nor a migrant. ‘The absolute arrivant as such’, he continues, ‘is not an intruder, an invader, or a colonizer because invasion presupposes some self-identity for the aggressor and the victim’ (ibid.). That does not mean, however, that hospitality must remain merely an abstract and spectral notion. It must develop into a culture. No hospitality, Derrida reminds in Acts of Religion, is without a culture of hospitality, for hospitality is culture itself; therefore, hospitality should ‘multiply the signs of anticipation, construct and institute

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what one calls structures of welcoming [les structures de l’accueil], a welcoming apparatus [les structures d’acceuil]’ (Derrida 2002a: 361). These indifferent apparatuses or institutes of welcome that are also cognisant of infinite difference are called in ‘On Cosmopolitanism’ — ‘the cities of refuge’. Before we go on to dwell on the ‘cities of refuge’, what is important to note here is not just the inadequacy of approaches to Derrida that seek to divide his texts into later and earlier Derrida, or more or less political Derrida, Marxist or anti-Marxist, modernist or postmodernist, and Eurocentric or anti-Eurocentric Derrida. Certain Marxist and postcolonial theories, as we have seen, misread Derrida’s cosmopolitical thinking precisely because it attempts to invent the other (of) politics, and imagine the other (of) Europe. Rather, we also need to note Derrida’s own unwillingness to directly address cosmopolitanism, as if that would be tantamount to taking it as something that already exists, thus, to accede to what passes for cosmopolitanism, namely, to quote Walter Mignolo’s terms, imperialism, Christianity, neo-liberal globalisation, and emancipatory cosmopolitanism of Vitoria, Kant, or Karl Marx (Mignolo 2002: 158). As Derrida reveals in his contribution to Autodafe, the journal of the International Parliament of Writers, ‘a cosmopolitanism ordered by the traditional concept’ of ‘citizen of the State and the nation’ is not sufficient at all to ‘prepare new concept and new strategies for an international resistance’ (2001a: 65). In other words, cosmopolitanism needs to be re-thought away from its trad-itional concept as world citizenship or world government, which dominates even very perspicacious critique of cosmopolitanism like Craig Calhoun’s (to cite just one of numerous examples), which demystifies certain cosmopolitanism of the frequently travelling class. Yet, by subscribing to Charles Taylor’s notion of ‘cohesive and self-governing societies’, it reverts to ‘active [world] citizenship’ for social solidarity (Calhoun 2002: 96). In their essay, ‘Four Cosmopolitan Moments’, Robert Fine and Robin Cohen (2002) identify in Zeno, Kant, Arendt and Nussbaum four major moments of cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism ‘as a placeless meeting of minds, cosmopolitanism as perpetual peace, cosmopolitanism as justice, [and] cosmopolitanism as an answer to social fragmentation, extreme nationalism or ethnic hostility’ (Fine and Cohen 2002: 162). Even in this fourfold approach Derrida would find varying degree of Statism or anti-Statism, from which he would detour towards a deconstructive or differential relation with the State.

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He would even distance his position from isolating four individual moments as cosmopolitanism as for him cosmopolitanism seldom remains a subject to direct address.



Detours of Cosmopolitanism At the same time, all Derrida’s detours into cities, hospitality, into the critique of home and ontology, that is to say, the critique of ‘one’s own’, and of the host–guest binary, and his foregrounding of the arrivance, are detours from only one point: the State, which, with its principle of indivisible sovereignty grounded in its theo-ontological foundations, its calculative and selective hospitality, and its legal paradigms that operate to uphold citizenship, rights, and the rule of law — all almost invariably exclusionary mechanisms — attempts to freeze all detours, thus reflection and theory, into one moment of presence or univocal political decision. Moreover, detours are not simply sites where Derrida indulges in his notorious play of language; rather, as he suggests in ‘Des Tours de Babel’, all detours are also strategic twists and turns, translations and transferences, or they are politics of speaking or listening to others, other languages; and above all, they represent sites for ‘raising a tower, [or] constructing a city’ (Derrida 2002a: 307). Detours of cosmopolitanism in Derrida are detours from the State to the city, from the indivisible and exceptionalist principles of sovereignty to the differential and dispersed moments of signature. In Politics of Friendship (Derrida 1997b), he takes this detour in order to critique the construction of the political in Western philosophy around the terms ‘the friend and the enemy’. He starts by quoting Montaigne quoting Aristotle: ‘O my friends, there is no friend’; which for him ‘displays the heritage of an immense rumour throughout an imposing corpus of Western philosophical literature: Aristotle to Kant, then to Blanchot; but also from Montaigne to Nietzsche’, who parodies the quotation by reversing it into: ‘O enemies, there is no enemy’ (ibid.: 27). Derrida relates this dictum of the end of the enemy to the post-cold war rhetoric of the end of history, which, on the one hand, announces the victory of ‘parliamentary democracies of the capitalist Western world’

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that now find themselves ‘without a principal enemy’; on the other hand, this destructuration would give way to ‘new reconstitutive enmities’ that would ‘multiply “little wars” between nation-states’, and would seek to identify enemies like China and Islam (Derrida 1997b: 77). By relating this desperate search for an identifiable enemy to Carl Schmitt’s notion of the declaration of the enemy as the foundation of the political, Derrida argues that a spectre of the enemy haunts Western political philosophy that is destined to reproduce and multiply the spectre, for the enemy’s disappearance is made intimate to its own disappearance. The end of the enemy therefore is ‘a crime against the political itself’, and the retribution against this crime is ‘unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented — therefore monstrous — forms’ (ibid.: 83). The reinvention of the enemy that not only eludes but also threatens, due to its public nature, to change place with the friend itself, and the subsequent inflicting of monstrous violence upon it is the only way to repoliticise the political. Against this tradition that cannot be ‘thought without knowing what “enemy” means, nor a decision made without knowing who the enemy is’ (ibid.: 106), against the Schmittian decisionism, which is not only nothing more than ‘a theory of the enemy’, (ibid.: 67), but also a theory of the sovereign subject that is free and willful, to whom nothing happens, not even the event, Derrida calls for a ‘passive’ decision without freedom that ‘signifies in me the other who decides and rends’ (ibid.: 68), or to be more precise, that bears the ‘signature of the other’ on me (ibid.: 32). The un-homely moment of the signature is not the disruption of home by the anonymous world, but by the absolute and singular other that however arrives to trouble identification itself, by the one that is the arrivant itself. Allowing the other to come by withdrawing oneself produces an event in which one sinks ‘into the darkness of a friendship which is not yet’ (ibid.: 43). One cannot be it, be there yet, or have it, but one must be its friend, and, for Derrida, this solitary friend of the other not only ‘overpoliticises the space of the city’ (ibid.: 43), but he also initiates democracy to come. It is the figure of Theuth, the god of writing, who, Derrida says, is hardly a character in Plato’s Phaedrus or Philebus, but who bears strong resemblance to other gods of writing, especially to Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, that plays the role of the friend in Dissemination. Derrida argues that Plato’s visit to the Egyptian

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god is ‘neither a partial or total borrowing, nor of chance or Plato’s imagination’, rather it reveals a structural necessity, which makes the Western logos and its philosophemes unthinkable without the incursion of the ‘foreign’ mythos. In Phaedrus, Plato presents Thoth as ‘a subordinate character, a second, a technocrat, without power of decision’, as he is just an engineer or clever servant admitted to the King’s Counsel merely as a techne or a pharmakon (Derrida 1981: 86). But a second look at the figure of the god of writing or pharmakon in Egyptian mythology will reveal that Thoth is the pharaoh’s top vazir or functionary, and the gods’ secretary; and he is also the son of the Sun king. Thoth, as a divine scribe, therefore, is the master of the books, or the keeper of accounts; therefore he is also called the ‘Master of divine words’ (ibid.: 91). As he also presides over the organisation of death and he counts the weight of the dead souls and enumerates the days of life, thus history, he is as well called the strongest of the gods (ibid.: 92). The figure that Plato considered contagious and poisonous, a pharmakon because he dulls memory, turns out to be the scribe of time and history. In fact, Plato, who tries to comprehend, thereby dominating the god of writing on the basis of oppositions (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside), tries to make each of the terms in the opposition external to the other, whereas in fact, it is writing as pharmakon that opens the possibility of opposition as such without letting itself be comprehended by it. Derrida argues that it is the pharmakon that brings the opposition of the inside and the outside into effect; and, therefore, cannot itself be assigned a site that it situates. It cannot be subsumed under concepts that it draws, it ‘leaves only its ghosts to a logic that can only seek to govern it insofar as the logic arises from it’; one would then have to bend, Derrida concludes, ‘into strange contortions what could no longer even simply be called logic or discourse’ (ibid.: 103). Even though Thoth, for Derrida, is the figure of dissemination that ghosts the binary of inside and outside in which Plato tries to apprehend him, cosmopolitanism is still foreign to the idiom that he deploys to ransack Plato’s pharmacy. Same is the case in Specters of Marx, which intensifies Derrida’s critique of all ‘Platonic’ attempts to salvage binaries by, as he says in Dissemination, leaving ‘the ghost behind’ (1981: 104). Yet, in this text too, cosmopolitanism never makes an appearance. Instead he depicts a world that is steadily wearing and tearing, a world festered with ten plagues he counts on its wounded body, a becoming worldwide of the world he calls

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‘mondialisation’ in which ‘[e]ntire regiments of ghosts have returned’ from the ‘economic wars, national wars, wars among minorities, the unleashing of racisms and xenophobias, ethnic conflicts, conflicts of culture and religion that are tearing apart so-called democratic Europe and the world today’ (Derrida1994: 80). In order to justly respond to these ghosts, he proposes not only an alliance with a certain spirit of Marxism, but also a radicalisation of Marxist critique. Moreover, he puts forward a project of a ‘New Internationalism’ that seeks to profoundly transform international law beyond the sovereignty of the States by including ‘the worldwide economic and social field’ (ibid.: 84). Derrida clarifies that the invocation of the worldwide is neither an anti-Statist argument nor a simple affirmation of the withering away of the State. His ‘New International’ that denounces the de facto take over of international authorities, like United Nations, by powerful nation-states, the hypocrisy of human rights, the states of foreign debts, and the monstrous techno-military inequality, is ‘a link of affinity, suffering, and hope’, which is also an untimely link, ‘without status, without title, and without name’ (ibid.: 85). It must remain for him a link that is without country, without party, without contract, ‘without national community, (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without cocitizenship, without common belonging to a class’ (ibid.). Thus, by articulating an International faithful to the Marxist tradition, but without a national community, or a party, or State citizenship, Derrida not only seeks to dehinge Marxism’s ontological bind with the ghosts, ‘with materialism, the party, the State, the becomingtotalitarian of the State’, but by underscoring a ‘certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise’ (ibid.: 89), he also seems to invoke cosmopolitanism that involves the messianic arrival of the other. Some detractors may wish to ignore Derrida’s highly philosophical moves towards deconstructing ontology, messianism and the laws of hospitality, and ask rather bluntly how notions of friendship, pharmakon, dissemination or the New International (all derived from Derrida’s reading of the canonical European texts, whether by Plato, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Freud or even Schmitt) relate to cosmopolitanism. They may argue that, in spite of its radical edge, Derrida’s cosmopolitanism is one from above, in contrast to the one from below, which Pheng Cheah locates in the works of writers like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Bonnie Honig, Bruce Robbins, Scott

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Malcomson, and Amanda Anderson (Cheah 1998: 21). There are a number of ways one can respond to these objections: one of them would be to bring into play Derrida’s notion of ‘elsewhere’, or ‘to come’ that resists the dichotomy of the above and the below, without, however, failing to evoke a constituency that strongly resembles the ‘below’. In ‘Taking a Stand for Algeria’, his address to a public meeting organised by the International Committee in support of Algerian Intellectuals (ICSAI) and the League of Human Rights in 1994, Derrida talks about ‘elsewhere’ by which he means not only taking a stand for Algeria internationally, but also what he calls in the address, the ‘Third Estate’ that lies below the State politics. The time for democracy in Algeria, he writes, ‘will be long, discontinuous, difficult to gather into the act of one single decision’; such a decision that should take more time may not ‘even be able to gather in Algeria. Things will have to take place elsewhere too’ (Derrida 2002a: 302). In a way, the other has to make decisions for democracy in Algeria, of course not to allow a ‘right of intervention or of intrusion, granted to other states or to the citizens of other states’ but to ‘reaffirm the international aspect of the stakes and of certain solidarities that tie us all the more in that they do not only tie us as the citizen of determinate nation-states’ (ibid.: 304). Derrida invokes this other, international solidarity, for he is aware of the limits of the rhetoric that chants: non-intervention and respect for self-determination, but not without running the risk of being ‘at best the rhetorical concession of a bad conscience, at worst, an alibi’ (ibid.). The ‘future [l’avenir] of Algerian men and women of course belongs in the end to the Algerian people’, he writes, but the Algerian future to come arrives neither from somewhere up high, nor from below, but from elsewhere — the Third Estate, which says ‘no to death, to torture, to execution, to murder’ (ibid.: 307). The only hope of democracy to come is carried by this Third Estate that in his or her country has ‘no right to speak, is killed or risks his or her life because he or SHE speaks freely, he or SHE thinks freely, he or SHE associates freely’ (ibid.). Again the ‘elsewhere’ of the democracy to come is emphasised in ‘Racism’s Last Word’ (1985a), Derrida’s contribution to the catalogue of the Art exhibition against apartheid organised in Paris in 1983 by the Association of Artists of the World against apartheid. In this essay, Derrida likens apartheid’s system of partition and barbed wire to a concentration camp and argues that apartheid remains — as unique manifestation of the lowest extreme of racism — a

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‘Western thing’ (1985a: 293). This resolutely Western state-racism, however, demands or engenders worldwide response in the form of an ‘untimely’ and ‘exilic’ art exhibition by the artist. ‘Artists from all over the world’, he notes, ‘are preparing to launch a new satellite, a vehicle whose dimensions can hardly be determined except as a satellite of humanity’ (Derrida 1985a: 293). The satellite humanity is untimely and exilic in the sense that it yet does not have a fixed place, it does not yet take place, because its destination remains to come, ‘which is South Africa beyond apartheid, South Africa in memory of apartheid’ (ibid.). This does not at all compromise the importance of exhibition as the satellite of humanity, which is at once a ‘mobile and stable habitat’, and like all satellites, it guards, ‘it keeps watch and gives warning: Do not forget apartheid, save humanity from this evil, an evil that cannot be summoned up in the principal and abstract inequality of a system’ (ibid.). There would be no elsewhere to apartheid without the circumambulatory satellite of humanity, no democracy to come without certain levitating to some height that keeps watch and issues warning against forgetting the evil. But Derrida also distinguishes the satellite humanity from European ‘reasons of the states’ that keep on turning Africa into ‘a giant tableau or painting, the screen for some geopolitical computer’ upon which European states project the bottom lines of the profits and losses, yet pretend to denounce apartheid ‘from the heights of international platforms’ (ibid.: 298). Against the ‘dialectics of denegation’, the exhibition, for Derrida, ‘signs with a single stroke’ and appeals ‘unconditionally to the future of another law another force lying beyond the totality of this present’ (ibid.). In ‘Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration’, Derrida speaks of another height and another superiority. He talks about Mandela’s ‘My people and I’, which Mandela uses ‘without talking like a king’ (Derrida 1987: 13) or of Mandela’s autobiographical ‘I’ that ‘reasons and signs in the name of “we” (ibid.: 26), and also of the force of admiration that affects both his admirers and enemies, even though the latter do not easily admit it. The force of admiration of Mandela, according to Derrida, comes not only from Mandela’s admiration for, and reflection on, the Law, but also the ‘law itself, the law above other laws’ (ibid.: 15). It is this law superior to the law of the White man, who does not respect his own law in South Africa, that lies behind Mandela’s defiance of the White supremacist law, and that is also the law before which he wishes to appear. Mandela’s

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evocation of the superior law is not mere reflection of what is called the Western legal deontology of the Magna Charta. Derrida plays on the notion of reflection, correspondence and inheritance and argues that Mandela reflects on, corresponds to, and inherits Western laws, which the White ruling minority of South Africa fails to do. But Mandela’s reflection also responds to another height, another superiority and legacy, that of the structure and organisation of early African societies, that prefigure and ‘make visible ahead of time, what still remains invisible in its historical phenomenon, that is to say, the “classless” society and the end of the exploitation of man by man’ (Derrida 1987: 25). Thus, Derrida’s reading of Mandela’s The Struggle is My Life does not limit itself to reading Mandela as a ‘simpler inheritor’ (ibid.: 17) of the Western juridical tradition, nor does it confine itself to portraying him as someone who mastered the Western legal tradition in order to turn it against the masters themselves. By recognising in him a recognition of the superior law above all laws, the law before the arrival of the White man, Derrida identifies in him an ‘authentic’ inheritor, ‘who conserves and reproduces’, but at the same time, ‘who respects the logic of the legacy enough to turn it upon occasion against those who claim to be its guardians, enough to reveal, despite and against the usurpers, what has never yet been seen in the inheritance’ (ibid.).



Cities of Refuge No legacy, nor any inheritance, it seems, is without doing some violence to the heritage one inherits; in the same way, there is no hospitality without first stepping out of one’s house to meet the hôte on the threshold. It is precisely at this threshold between one’s own and the other, or at the border between the above and the below, and at the limit between the two laws of hospitality — the conditional and the unconditional — that Derrida situates, what he in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001b) would call, ‘the cities of refuge’. The cities of refuge or asylum, which materially manifest, what Derrida terms in Acts of Religion (2002a), the ‘structures of welcome’, are placed at the border he shores up from the distinction between two forms of the metropolis: the City and the State. The notion of the ‘polis’ needs to be ruptured into the

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City and the State because for him the State including the non-State organisations, which are non-State in appellation only as they are often controlled by the powerful states, are the signatories of violence on a worldwide scale. Whenever the State is not the foremost author — it is also not the foremost guarantor against the violence that forces refugees or exiles to flee — Derrida writes, ‘it is often powerless to ensure the protection and the liberty of its own citizens before a terrorist menace’ (2001b: 6). He recalls Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ to argue that while between the two world wars the borders of the states are flooded with refugees and exiles, the homeless and the stateless [Heimatlosen], the right to asylum undergoes a progressive abolition; it is ‘felt to be an anachronism and a principle incompatible with the international law of the State’ (ibid.: 7). Whenever the European nation-states have bothered to think about the rights of asylum, they have done so by referring to it as ‘the control of immigration’, thereby conflating refugee status with the status of the immigrants. On the one hand, by conflating refugee and immigrant statuses, the State brings the rights to asylum back into its demographic–economic interests or into the rhetoric of its electoral programmes. On the other hand, by restricting the international law to the treaties between sovereign states, the State has a sovereign monopoly over asylum seekers. As a result, the asylum seekers are left to the indiscretion of the border police, or what Derrida echoing Walter Benjamin calls, ‘a police without borders’ (ibid.: 14). This formless and faceless menace of the police without borders, aided by new technology, is nowhere more pervasive than in the so-called civilised states, where, the police, omnipresent and spectral, ‘undertake to make the law, instead of simply contenting themselves with applying it’ (Derrida 2001b: 14). It is imperative now to distinguish the ‘border’ cities, the cities of refuge, from this borderless spectrality of the police, already a formidable form of cosmopolitanism that has monopolised powers of legislation and decision over what or who arrives at its border without a border. Thus, for Derrida, cosmopolitanism is always one form of cosmopolitanism against the other, one form of spectrality against the other, one form of sovereignty against the other, or one form of the polis (City) against the other (State), hence the importance of inheritance and decision. ‘If we look to the city, rather than the state’, he clarifies, ‘it is because we have given up hope that the state

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might create a new image for the city’ (ibid.: 6). Creating the new image of the city is not only reaffirming rights to asylum and the laws of hospitality, but to even go beyond rights, deontology, and conditional laws of hospitality to ‘open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law’ (Derrida 2001b: 8). He therefore calls upon the Parliament of Writers not to hesitate to declare their ambition: For let us not hesitate to declare our ultimate ambition, what gives meaning to our project: our plea is for what we have decided to call the ‘city of refuge’. This is not to suggest that we ought to restore an essentially classical concept of the city by giving it new attributes and powers; neither would it be simply a matter of endowing the old subject we call the ‘city’ with new predicates. No, we are dreaming of another concept, of another set of rights for the city, of another politics of the city (ibid.).

Another politics of the city or in Derrida’s word, ‘cosmopolitics’ does not imply the return to traditional concept of the city, rather it suggests a rigorous depoliticisation in which the city has to ‘elevate itself above the nation-state’ (2001b: 9). But elevating au-dessus des Etats-nations does not mean that the city of refuge becomes the legendary tower of Bable that attempts to touch the sky. The elevation or superiority of the city of refuge is its exceptionality as a space of immunity and exemption, so far enjoyed only by kings and their palaces, lords and their castles, and the priests and their churches. Therefore, by referring to urban immunity and exemption, for instance to the Book of Numbers where God ordered Moses to build six cities of refuge, to Levinas’s exegesis of ‘Les villes refuges’ in his meditation on the Verses, and to the medieval tradition of sanctuary provided by the church, or auctoritas that allowed kings or nobles to shield their guests from pursuits, Derrida does not simply repeat or return to the historical and mythical accounts of such spaces. Rather, he is interrogating the sovereign monopoly on exception and immunity, and supplementing it with new, less theo-ontological and more reflective and divisive forms of sovereignty. He also critically examines these traditions for the limits and conditions they impose on the ‘superiority’ of the city. For instance, he acknowledges that the Enlightenment figures, especially Kant, inherit cosmopolitan tradition of Greek stoicism and Pauline Christianity, but he finds Kant’s cosmopolitanism — in spite of the premium it puts on the law

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of universal hospitality without limit, or on hospitality as a natural law, thus inalienable and imprescriptible — compromised by a conditioning logic of hospitality. On the one hand, Kant, for Derrida, thinks that all human creatures have received in equal proportion common possession of the surface of the earth; as a result no one can legitimately appropriate the surface area for himself or withhold access to another man. On the other hand, Kant painstakingly specifies that the common place covers the surface of the earth, that is the case, argues Derrida, not so much to exclude any point of the world or the finite globe (globalisation), but ‘to expel from it what is erected, constructed, or what sets itself up above the soil: habitat, culture, institution, State, etc.’ (2001b: 21).7 By keeping what is elevated above the surface as the space of exception, which is founded on the earth, but not unconditionally accessible, precisely due to its elevation and edification, to all arrivants, Kant succeeds in imposing, according to Derrida, two limits on his otherwise universal law of hospitality: the newcomer has the right of visitation rather than the right of residence; and for Kant hospitality should remain a law to be decided upon by the State police. In contrast to Kantian hospitality that seeks to divide hospitality of the surface of the earth from which men ‘cannot scatter themselves infinitely’ (Kant 1983: 118) and the hospitality of what is above the earth, thus the capital or sovereign hospitality, hospitality of the State, of the capital city and its commerce and culture, from which Kant never rules out the possibility of infinite dispersion, exclusion, banishment, and expulsion, Derrida proposes the elevated city of refuge, which is a sovereign space, but unlike the State, it is left open for the other to arrive without any condition. It is this ‘free city’ constructed, but not in order to monumentalise the construction; elevated, but not as a sovereign head of the State; rather a city, which is based on the axiome d’incomplétude, that, in his view, should ‘reorient the politics of the state’ (Derrida 2001b: 4). What is important to note here is that Derrida does not say the new politics of the city dismantles the State, or makes it wither away. Nor does he say, as Foucault does, for example in Society Must be Defended, that ‘we have to bypass or get around the problem of sovereignty’ (Foucault 2003: 27). Cosmopolitics of the city of refuge reorients the politics of the State insofar as the unconditional hospitality that the city offers to the arrivant cannot be written into any law of any State; the unconditional hospitality thus remains above all states,

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their appropriation and domestication; therefore it is cosmopolitan. At the same time, however, cosmopolitics seeks to transform and improve the existing law. The perfectability or deconstructibility of all State laws implies the possibility of the other of the laws, or justice in the same way as the city of refuge lies on the other side of the State — connected, but asymmetrical: It is a question of knowing how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes place between the law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every other, to all new comers, wherever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of being perverted at any moment (Derrida 2001b: 22–23).

The city of refuge at once embodies in a quasi-normative fashion the unconditional law of hospitality and the perfectability of the conditional laws and rights of hospitality. It calls for a work of juridical transformation and calculation without becoming the Work of a sovereign head, or ontology. Through law, but also beyond law, it makes cosmopolitics, like justice, an impossible experience that cannot wait, or an urgency that calls for ‘a just response, more just in any case than the existing law’ (ibid.: 23). Cosmopolitanism after Derrida is an immediate response to crime, violence and persecution; and the city of refuge for him is the place of reflection in which ‘a new order of law, and a democracy to come’ is put to the experiment (ibid.). If Derrida’s conclusion in the address invokes a ‘cosmopolitanism to come’ that is not because it lies in an uncertain future, but because the cosmopolitanism of the other is as asymmetrical to the time of our living present as are cities of refuge to a ‘globalatinised’ world.



Notes 1. There is a glaring absence of reference to Derrida’s cosmopolitanism in major texts on the subject published around or after the publication of Derrida’s texts on cosmopolitanism. Neither Conceiving Cosmopolitanism eidted by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (2002) nor

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Debating Cosmopolitics (Archibugi et al. 2003), to give just a few examples, mention Derrida’s texts on cosmopolitanism. One also looks in vain for any references to Derrida’s concept of cosmopolitanism in Breckenridge et al’s Cosmopolitanism (2002). As Christian Salmon, in the first issue of the Parliament of Writer’s Journal, Autodafe, informs us, the Parliament convened in haste after the assassination of Tahar Djaout in Algeria in 1993, and Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka were its first two presidents. And from the moment of its creation, it has been involved in setting up network of Asylum Cities that offer refuge to writers and artists threatened by fundamentalist and totalitarian regimes. ‘Five years after its creation’, Salmon continues, ‘there are thirty cities in this network’ that include cities like Barcelona, Frankfurt, Salzburg, and Venice (2001: 13). There is at least one more text by Derrida, ‘Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism’ (see 2002b), that directly bears cosmopolitanism in its title, and no surprise that this text is also his address to UNESCO. Yet, in this too, cosmopolitanism has been, as if by some internal constraints of the concept itself, addressed in the company of other associated concepts. It is addressed as one concept among others, as an other concept, as the concept of the other, or as the other’s concept as if to imply that one cannot address cosmopolitanism directly, as if, to quote from the introduction of the collection of essays on the subject, ‘specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do’ (Breckenridge et al. 2002: 1). It is significant therefore that Derrida’s essay, ‘On Cosmopolitanism’ appeared in Routledge’s series called ‘Thinking in Action’ (see Derrida 2001b). Recalling this fact is not a lapse into the binary between thinking and action, but it is an act of underscoring the indissociability of theory and praxis in Derrida not only in the sense of a certain performative aspect of his texts, but in the sense of their evocation of the signature, event or agency which reside precisely at the borders of theory and praxis. Even very insightful readings of Derrida’s texts like John McCormick’s ‘Derrida on Law; or Poststructuralism gets Serious’ (2001) are hostage to this hostility towards the early, more playful Derrida. That does not, however, mean that they approve of late style or ‘more serious’ Derrida. McCormick quickly adds to qualify his observation about seriousness in the title by arguing that ‘Force of Law’ reveals the decisionism and its bleak association with Heidegger and Carl Schmitt that Derrida harboured for decades (ibid.: 396). Derrida’s reservations about Levinas’s philosophy in general, and his notions of hospitality, femininity and alterity in particular can be found in texts like Writing and Difference (1978), especially in the essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in which Derrida not only detects in Levinas’s thinking a necessity of ‘lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order

196 ? Puspa Damai to destroy it’ (ibid.: 111), but also articulates a problem in Levinas’s envisioning of positive infinity in the name of infinite alterity, which, for Derrida, is possible only when one renounces all languages (1978: 114), thus all differences or exteriority itself. These reservations become more incisive in a very illuminating and ‘dialogic’ essay ‘At this Very Moment in This Work I Am’, in which Derrida (1991) locates a tendency in Levinas to reduce sexual differences and otherness to the height and pre-eminence of man as a human being, to the sameness of the wholly Other. He argues that Levinas’s interpretation of the feminine other as dependence or the ‘initial afterwards’ of Man conceives of a Work signed by the Pronoun He that in turn makes She secondary. ‘She would then undersign the work from her place of derivable dependence’, says one of the interlocutors in the dialogue, but only as the ‘last or first “Hostage”’ (1991: 434). In Adieu again, Derrida (1999a) recalls the same impulse to ‘humanize’ in Levinas, and argues that even though the feminine being has been made the condition of hospitable welcome par excellence, recollection, interiority of the Home and habitation, yet she lacks the height of the face, the absolute verticality of the Most-High. She can speak, but only a human language. ‘There is nothing of the animal in her’ because feminine alterity, Derrida mocks the title of one Levinas’s essay and concludes, is ‘the humanism of the other woman, of the other (as) woman’ (ibid.: 37). 7. The word Derrida uses here for ‘expel’ is ‘exclure’ which becomes more pertinent here if translated as ‘exclude’ or ‘keep out’, rather than ‘expel’, which only confuses, because expelling the State (from guests?) does not make much sense, especially when Derrida is talking about Kant’s condition on accessing what is elevated [s’eleve] over the surface (Derrida 1997a: 53).



References Archibugi, Daniele et al. (eds). 2003. Debating Cosmopolitics. London: Verso. Breckenridge, Carol A., Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds). 2002. ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, in Cosmopolitanisms, pp. 1–14. Durham: Duke University Press. Calhoun, Craig. 2002. ‘The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers: Toward a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, pp. 86–109. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cosmopolitanism after Derrida ? 197 Cheah, Pheng. 1998. ‘Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical – Today’, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, pp. 20–41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomenon and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1978. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1981. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1982a. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1982b. Positions, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Shicago Press. ———. 1984. Signsponge. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1985a. ‘Racism’s Last Word’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 12(1): 290–99. ———. 1985b. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1986. Glas, trans. John P Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1987. ‘Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration’, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Isabella Lorenz, in Jacques Derrida and Mutapha Tlili (eds), For Nelson Mandela, pp. 13–42. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 1991. ‘At this Very Moment in this Work I Am’, trans. Ruben Berezdivin, in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, pp. 403–39. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1992a. ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in David Gray Carlson et al. (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, pp. 3–67. New York: Routledge ———. 1992b. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1993. Aporias: Dying – Waiting (for One Another) at the ‘Limits of Truth’, trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997a. Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!. Paris: Galilee.

198 ? Puspa Damai Derrida, Jacques. 1997b. Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso. ———. 1999a. Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999b. ‘Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds), Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, pp. 65–83. London: Routledge. ———. 2001a. ‘Displaced Literatures’, Autodafe: The Journal of the International Parliament of Writers, 1: 63–65. ———. 2001b. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002a. Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002b. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler. 2002. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interview, trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fine, Robert and Robin Cohen. 2002. ‘Four Cosmopolitanism Moments’, in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, pp. 137–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Kant, Immanuel. 1983. ‘To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)’, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey, pp. 107–43. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Marsh, James L. 1999. Process, Praxis and Transcendence. Albany: State University of New York. McCormick, John P. 2001. ‘Derrida on Law; or, Poststructuralism Gets Serious’, Political Theory, 29(3): 395–423. Mignolo, Walter D. 2002. ‘The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism’, in Carol A. Breckenridge et al. (eds), Cosmopolitanism, pp. 157–88. Durham: Duke University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1996. ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen (eds), For Love of Country?, pp. 3–20. Boston: Beacon Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cosmopolitanism after Derrida ? 199 Salmon, Christian. 2001. ‘The Parliament of a “Missing People”’, trans. Betsy Wing, Autodafe: The Journal of the International Parliament of Writers, 1: 9–15. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2002. ‘Resident Alien’, in David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quaegson (eds), Relocating Postcolonialism, pp. 47–65. Oxford: Blackwell. Vertorec, Steven and Robin Cohen (eds). 2002. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8

The Generation of the I Gianfranco Dalmasso

T

he Gift of Death [Donner la mort] (Derrida 1995) re-proposes and relaunches themes and itineraries of the last 15–20 years of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s production. The constellations of meaning provided by the notions of ‘testimony’, ‘friendship’, ‘responsibility’, ‘secret’, and ‘forgiveness’ come here to a decisive grasp, which is a radical ‘lunge’ on the method of generation of the I itself. The great French thinker’s itinerary is implacable: he constantly proposes and proves an idea of rationality which constitutes itself around a donor and an addressee. An itinerary which dramatically mobilises the origin of the word scene (exactly in the sense according to which speaking is action), in which a certain interpretation of the classical paradigm of the truth of word is suspended and measured in its genesis and in its motives. In The Gift of Death, it is the relationship between secret and responsibility that moves the analysis: pairs of terms which were never dug up so deeply by Derrida as in this text before, where he retraces, perhaps even reconstructs, both the visible and invisible structures of them. Within the richness of themes and textual hints of this Derridean work, I choose a decisive point — not the only one — in order to draw out some questions which interested me in the analysis of the relationship between secret and responsibility, and which I consider crucial for the theoretical language in which we are immersed as well as for the situation of philosophical research itself. I am referring to the Derridean reading of the Heretical Essays by Jan Patocˇka (1996). Amongst the short essays of which this volume is composed, Derrida’s comments are significant, in particular, on the penultimate, entitled: ‘The Technical Civilization is Decadent, Why?’ These writings by Patocˇka are of an impressive lucidity and poignancy, in spite of their brevity, which in style borders on the pamphlet. In ‘Secrets of European Responsibility’, the first chapter

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of The Gift of Death, Derrida’s comment already highlights the close relationship between secret and responsibility. Here the constitutive knot of the I, in which it is conceived (as consciousness, soul, actor, hospitable place or whatever), is tackled from the inside of its generation. Death is the third vertex of a three-dimensional graph within which the concept of I would become accessible, knowable and practicable. The three-dimensionality that retakes measures by running through and evaluating its genesis may be thought in the other important classical, Augustinian, three-dimensionality.1 This way of proceeding shrinks from hermeneutic strategies that appeal to binomial terms such as finite/infinite, problem/truth, and limit/possibility. The question around which the Derridean language organises itself, à la Lévinas, is rather that of a consciousness of the (?) I which follows, which is an ‘after’ (?), an existing which precedes its selfknowing. Death announces itself as a way of saying and discovering one’s true self, as a springing point which is beyond the control of an I but could exercise on itself, which makes no difference in the relationship to/through others with oneself. This springing point also makes no difference to the relationship with God. The question of God is introduced as an inauguration of the question of reason itself. Patocˇ ka’s writing provides Derrida a set of terms and an itinerary as a singularly synthetic and privileged way to approach the questions which are methodological, and to approach the bonds that bind the questions to one another.



The Living Logos is ‘Beyond the Reason’ Patocˇka’s essay organises itself, at the outset, around the problem of the birth of reason for the Greeks. The constitution of that approach connects the ancient thinkers to their experience, which is the birth of logos that frees itself, as known, from the mythical story of theogonic and cosmogonic kind, proposing itself as the capacity of measure and pre-vision, previously unheard-of, of one’s cognitive effort. Patocˇ ka notices and develops the idea that this conscious control on things and on one’s knowing them is also primarily a control over

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the passional, orgiastic, and obscure element that is the enthusiasm and/or the demonic of the initiation mysteries. This element is the inaugural experience of knowledge and underlines the mindset of the first Greeks that is no less than an interest typically rational. The ancient Greek thinker wants to account for this enthusiastic and demonic element, which, for him, is no different from an understanding of the origin of life. This ‘accounting for the demonic element’ coincides with the formulation of the problem of order: order of things and order of our relationship to things and, through them, relationship to ourselves. It is about an order, i.e., a bond and a context in which the I is originally embedded and also originally generated. Life, according to this cognitive approach, constitutes the relationship between the order in which I am generated and what I know about it. This re-proposition of the notion of logos overtakes and also denounces the fragility and the historical drifts of a conception of life that is irrational, energetic but in an absolutely de-potentiated sense, literally, a kind of plastic or liquid material, nearly hydraulic, formless. Weird. The concept of life, in spite of the great Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions, the persistence of Jewish–Christian wisdom and the romantic and idealist revivals, remains, in our cultural order, substantially marginalised from the domain of reason and science. Today, the ideological opposition between life and reason tends to be questioned and sometimes erased by the praxis of scientific experiences by biologists, astronomers and neurophysiologists, as they evade the ideological traps of a positivist cognitivism. The order of the living being implies time as its constitutive element in that the law of procedures and scientific languages about it have to be worked out. The self-organisation of our cognitive systems relaunches the question about the generation of forms as a methodological perspective which is able to question the relationship between the genesis of nature and the genesis of our scientific knowledge itself.2 The Grecian thinker, in Patocˇ ka’s considerations, intends to face the order in which he is originally enveloped and generated, together with his body and with the structure of his reason and word. The relationship between this order and what he ‘gains’ from it, his experience (i.e., the relationship with that order itself), for the Greek, is his truth, the truth of his self. The space of this relationship in the

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order is, for Patocˇka, classically, the soul and the Greek conceives the truth of his self as the care of the soul. The Grecian thinker takes seriously, wants to recognise, and occupies himself with this space in which he recognises his face. This face is not solely the demonic and orgiastic, the indestructible desire, but it is the place which incorporates (this term belonging to Patocˇka’s) this demonic and orgiastic element, and succeeds in identifying a firm bond between the generation of the self and the uncontrollable abyss of the desire. Patocˇ ka notices how the Greek civilisation is the first and unique civilisation in human history that has organised itself on the truth of the self: not on the divine, mythical, celestial and/or magic forces, totem, nor on the cosmic and symbolical incarnations of divinity, but on the truth of the self i.e., on the scene of the soul, on a cognitive and moral control of such a being placed within an order that reason discovers (from Plato to Aristotle and the Stoics). More precisely, and in a surprising (even astonishing) way, the care of soul posed by Grecian leadership — affirms Patocˇka — is a truth which is a political project, a criterion of civil bonding that unifies the city. Patocˇka reminds the efficaciousness of Aristotle’s teaching to the scholar Alexander the Great, whose action, both philosophical and political, was overwhelming not only for the technical and strategic capacity of Macedon phalanges but for the impetuous political initiative (the tradition says that 70 towns were founded during the expedition in the East).



Responsibility and the Secret The link between truth and policy introduces — Derrida underlines this aspect of the Czech philosopher’s analysis — the question of the Grecian and, afterwards, the Roman–European soul, as a question of history. For the destiny of European civilisation today — notices Derrida — it is not that the cultured European man does not know his history but it is a fact that his historical knowledge (whether philologistic or totalising) censures the link between historicity and responsibility. I quote from Patocˇ ka himself, as commented by Derrida:

204 ? Gianfranco Dalmasso Modern civilization does not just suffer from its own faults, its own myopia, but also from failing to resolve the whole problem of history. But the problem of history cannot be resolved; it must remain a problem. The danger of the present time is that an excess of knowledge of detail might lead us to forget how to look at the question and the grounds that give rise to it. It might also be that the question of the decline of civilization has been badly put. Civilization does not of itself exist. The question would be rather a matter of knowing if historical man can yet acknowledge history (1995: 4).

Within the domain of civilisation, the problem remains whether or not the historical man still intends to recognise himself in history, i.e., whether or not he intends to recognise himself as historical. Derrida comments: ‘historicity remains a secret’. This last sentence suggests that historicity remains a secret. Historical man does not want to admit to historicity, and first and foremost to the abyss that undermines his own historicity (ibid.).

Why? Because one claims that responsibility is a kind of concept to be considered frontally and to be ruled. Maybe also, and firstly, in the form of the ‘acquired, conditioned or conditional possibility’. The historicity of responsibility would be extrinsic to responsibility, Derrida comments. Historicity is the experience that consists in the subtraction from one’s historical condition (Derrida 1995: 15). Responsibility and decision are thought of as unhistorical perhaps with the help of some aspects of psychoanalysis. It is therefore difficult to acknowledge such a historicity and, to the extent that a whole ethics of responsibility often claims to separate itself, as ethics, from religious revelation, it is even more difficult to tie it closely to a history of religion (ibid.: 5).

The ‘yes’, essence of responsibility, instead of being historical– temporal in its constitution, is both subtracting from and crossing of its historical being. The problem of history must remain a problem. It is not about a metaphysical and/or Hegelian totalisation (maybe ideologising Hegel himself), but to keep and guard the frontier, the contradiction, not to censure the space of it and the generative movement of one’s yes, of the subject of the historical action.

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Responsibility rules the demonic secret in a way which expresses itself within a language that precedes the submission to the orgiastic and supra-rational aspect. I make mine what I do not have, what I am not, what I am generated by. This is the Grecian move through and beyond the mysteries. The figure of domination, substantially maniacal, turns into the soul as reception of the ‘being generated’. Thus, thought is able to receive, in responsibility, ‘what every soul obscurely pursues’ (Plato 2000: 509b). This receiving, which is the Socratic move, is the passion for truth, an authenticity stronger than sensibility and the chthonic abysses of earth. The Christian event brought about a radical change within this Grecian configuration of the relationship between secret and responsibility. Secret, which in the Platonic text functions like the Good, is unspeakable and beyond speech, but, at the same time, it organises speech and makes it possible. The Good, in the perspective of Incarnation of the logos, no longer, becomes a gift to man in the Grecian experience although he tries to grab the eternal reality in his itinerary. The ‘goodness forgetful of itself, which gives itself’ and gives me — a new experience of death (see Derrida 1995:15). Responsibility and faith go together, however paradoxical that might seem to some, and both should, in the same movement, exceed mastery and knowledge. The gift of death would be this marriage of responsibility and faith. History depends on such an excessive beginning (ibid.: 6).

Christianity brings about the fact that the movement that generates man is in reception of a ‘goodness forgetful of itself’, which gives itself. The encounter as well as its experience with such a self-giving — what comes to me within the movement of my ‘being generated’ — is historical. History is an unheard-of link with the truth of the self. Christianity grafts itself, Patocˇka seems to say, not primarily in historicity but in ‘the properly Christian event of another secret, or more precisely of a mystery, the mysterium tremendum: the terrifying mystery, the dread, fear and trembling of the Christian in the experience of the sacrificial gift’ (ibid.). This trembling seizes one at the moment of becoming a person, and the person can become what it is only in being paralyzed [transie], in its very singularity, by the gaze of God (ibid.).

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Derrida clarifies the difference between mystery and secret in his ‘Secrets of European Responsibility’: The secretum supposes the constitution of this liberty of the soul as the conscience of a responsible subject. In short, waking from demonic mystery, surpassing the demonic, involves attaining the possibility of the secretum, of the keeping of a secret. For it also involves gaining access to the individualization of the relation to oneself, to the ego that separates itself from the community of fusion. But this simply means exchanging one secret for another. A particular economy would happily sacrifice mystery for secrecy within a history of truth as a history of dissimulation, within a genealogy that is a cryptology or general mystology (Derrida 1995: 20).

The Platonic strategy of incorporating demonic and orgiastic irresponsibility is reprised — so continues the French philosopher — by a certain kind of Christianity, what Patocˇ ka calls the Christian upheaval. ‘The essential political dimension of this crypto- or mystogeneology becomes clearer. It seems to describe what is at stake in the passage from Platonic secrecy to the Christian secret of the mysterium tremendum’ (ibid.: 21). Derrida identifies three essential motifs ‘in this linked genealogy of secret and responsibility’. The first order of consideration underlines the fact that the orgiastic mystery always remains at work within history: not only in Platonism, as we have seen, but also in Christianity, and even in the space of Aufklärung and of secularisation. Patocˇka reminds us of the French philosopher, and invites us to consider that every revolution, even the atheistic secular, testifies a return of the sacred in the form of an enthusiasm, i.e., of a presence of the god within us. In particular, Patocˇ ka proposes the example of the religious enthusiasm which animated men during the French revolution. There would also be, at this point, according to Durkheim’s interpretation, an affinity which binds the sacred to the secret, and the sacrifice to initiation: ‘all revolutionary fervor produces its slogans as though they were sacrificial rites or effects of secrecy’ (ibid.). The Platonic triumph of the good is the antidote to the looming depression of such an enthusiasm. Besides, everything happens, Derrida claims, in this entwining between depression and resistance to depression. The ‘Christian upheaval’ inaugurates a different curvature of the sacrifice which implies repentance and a certain form of ‘remotion’.

The Generation of the I ? 207 If I am not exaggerating by relating this interpretation of the epimeleia te-s psykhe-s to a psychoanalytic economy of secret as mourning or of mourning as secrecy, I might say that what separates that economy from Heidegger’s influence is its essential Christianity. Heideggerian thought was not simply a constant attempt to separate itself from Christianity (a gesture that always need to be related — however complex this relation — to the incredible unleashing of anti-Christian violence represented by Nazism’s most official and explicit ideology, something one tends to forget these days). The same Heideggerian thinking often consists, notably in Sein und Zeit, in repeating on an ontological level Christian themes and texts that have been ‘de — Christianized’(ibid.: 22–23).

Patocˇ ka — Derrida notes — would instead engage in the reverse, and symmetrical, gesture. Patocˇka ‘reontologizes the historic themes of Christianity and attributes to revelation or to the mysterium tremendum the ontological content that Heidegger attempts to remove from it’ (ibid.: 23).



The Manifested Secret and the Generation of the Soul Beyond the Nietzschean definition of Christianity as popular Platonism, Patocˇ ka notices how a certain kind of Platonism persists in the heart of European Christianity, insofar as it is tied to a reception, by the Christians, of a certain idea of order of the world. This perspective somehow runs the risk of causing a conflict between Christian experience and the Platonic perspective of a subject who knows and acts being subdued to the objectivity and the truth of a knowledge. What kind of relationship, then, configures itself between a Christian’s responsibility and such subjugation to the objectivity of knowledge? This aporia of responsibility — Derrida observes — produces the effect that Patocˇ ka, by inscribing his ethical and political thought within the perspective of a Christian eschatology, ‘delineates [as] some kind of unthought of Christianity’. Christian consciousness of responsibility is unable to think of its Platonic repressed content and, at the same time, of ‘what the Platonic mystery incorporates from the orgiastic mystery’. This fact appears crucially within the site and subject of this responsibility, i.e., within the person. Patocˇka — continues

208 ? Gianfranco Dalmasso

Derrida — by indicating the characters of the Christian ‘upheaval’ and ‘repression’ in the mysterium tremendum, writes: In the final analysis the soul [in the Christian mystery] is not a relation to an object, however elevated (such as the Platonic Good) [which implies, therefore, ‘such as in Platonism where the soul is the relation to a transcendent Good that also governs the ideal order of the Greek polis or the Roman civitas’], but to a person who fixes it in his gaze while at the same time remaining beyond the reach of the gaze of that soul. As for knowing what this person is, such a question has not yet received an adequate thematic development within the perspective of Christianity (Derrida 1995: 25).

Thematising the concept of a person means entering the secret tangle of responsibility; it means chasing a yes in its springing point, through its affirmations and censures. The secret produced by the reciprocity of gazes between God and man is ungraspable and dissymmetric. It is also about the reciprocity, secret and ungraspability, between the ongoing generation of man by God and that of God by man, which doubles, at the same time, the relationship between God and man, throwing it into an abyss. This cross-referenced relationship exceeds and transgresses Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel, even questions the radically relaunching of the problem of responsibility, unheard-of in this form, within the Hegelian text: We must continually remind ourselves that some part of irresponsibility insinuates itself wherever one demands responsibility without sufficiently conceptualizing and thematizing what ‘responsibility’ means: that is to say everywhere. One can say everywhere a priori and nonempirically for if the complex linkage between the theoretical and practical that we just referred to is, quite clearly, irreducible, then the heterogeneity between the two linked orders is just as irreducible (ibid.: 25–26).

Patocˇka’s perspective offers to join the concept of responsibility and that of heresy, insofar as the latter seems an expression of the first, to be a dynamic of the yes at work. Therefore, knowledge and the transmission of knowledge can not be dominated and guaranteed in their structure. This is a vertiginous relationship between a centre and a periphery which insinuates itself within the Christian body’s flesh.

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Since the transmission of a Christian knowledge (?) is tied to a yes, to the unheard-of ‘care’ of men who take upon themselves the responsibility of the springing point of knowledge itself, Christians, by communicating knowledge, are transformed by it and transform it. Christian responsibility at work is a move towards production of a new history. This responsibility, from a cognitive point of view, is suspended to a structure which is itself not subduable and, which is the most important aspect, not even ‘respondible’. The sense of the response itself is what constitutes and makes possible the origin of the Christian himself. On the other hand, the theme of thematization, the sometimes phenomenological motif of the thematic conscience, is the thing that is, if not denied, at least strictly limited in its pertinence by that other more radical form of responsibility that exposes me dissymmetrically to the gaze of the other; where my gaze, precisely as regards me [ce qui me regarde], is no longer the measure of all things. The concept of responsibility is one of those strange concepts that give food for thought without giving themselves over to thematization. It presents itself neither as a theme nor as a thesis, it gives without being seen [sans se donner à voir], without presenting itself in person by means of a ‘fact of being seen’ that can be phenomenologically intuited. This paradoxical concept also has the structure of a type of secret — what is called, in the code of certain religious practices, mystery (Derrida 1995: 27).

Derrida goes on for a while trying to circumscribe such an unheardof responsibility of Christians in the perspective, itself undecided, of a messianism: Something has not yet arrived, neither at Christianity nor by means of Christianity. What has not yet arrived at or happened to Christianity is Christianity. Christianity has not yet come to Christianity (ibid.: 28).

Now, apart from the reference underlined by Patocˇ ka’s text, I want to maintain that the dialogue between Patocˇ ka and Derrida on a religious position is hardly available within the contemporary theoretical lexicon. Here, it is not about an existential, religious, transcendent consideration of the I, but rather about the sense of responsibility as the recall of a secret. A secret, exactly within this recall,

210 ? Gianfranco Dalmasso

becomes itself abysmally public. All this happens in a form which is not that of unveiling, i.e., that the secret becomes manifest. This perspective seems to be exactly a Grecian one; its logical strength, the dynamic of its prohibition/access to a truth is not worldly available. It is about capsizing the sense of secret which, in its essence, is the relationship between the I and its knowing/selfknowing itself. It is not about a hidden depth (which in any case, one should enter), but about a way of looking at and reading what is under everybody’s eyes. The responsibility at work would be a secret (for me) which from the outset becomes a project of sharing. The question is: Is secret paradoxically public? One which is the effect of the movement of generation of what is temporally knowable within a dimension that implies absence, mourning, delay. The cultural implications of this conceptuality nowadays are, I think, decisive in the form of pseudo-secrets which announce themselves as the current form of ideology. I quote as an example, tender and disarming at the same time, the recent statement of a soccer player: ‘I scored this goal because my father helped me from heaven’. A licit statement anyway within a context which implies a different passage from the hidden to the public implying the fact that the desired object is not available and immediate. All this implies an unbreakable link between desire and secret, in which the form of opposition between private and public has changed. The secret is rather what secretly moves all our yes-es. The secret, deserving this name, is thinkable only from a yes. The secret as a relationship with the origin of the self is possible, in the end, within the act of self-reception and in the ‘being generated’. This placement, known and recognised, finds in its birth, the awareness of that change that is called freedom. This classical conception of freedom is re-proposed in Patocˇka’s mediation through the methodological consideration of a secret that unites beyond the measure of success and unites at a deeper level; this union is more ‘heretical’ than the notion of heresy, something from an ‘inside’ without reservation. Such a notion of secret unites men’s experiences and speech more than the secrets of initiation. Within Christianity, for example, the secret is under everybody’s eyes and it is available for everybody, such as the Eucharist. Now, I will offer a commentary on Patocˇ ka’s notion of mysterium tremendum. The Czech author recalls elements from the religious

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and Christian lexicon, among which he thematises the mysterium tremendum, characterised by terror and the constitutive disproportion of the human. Patocˇ ka neglects, maybe understandably within the economy of his conceptuality, other elements of the Christian experience and language. The ‘disproportion’ in fact, within the core of the Kerigma, alludes (in an even more determinant way) to a movement of love and mercifulness, in which the Christian is ‘born’. The breaking of the measure of knowledge and the reformulation of Christian language seem to be tied, within the history of the Christian body, to a re-creation, which regenerates the soul from the inside. This inside is questioned from within the subject of Good itself, i.e., primarily by linking it to a methodologically lucid consideration of the relationship between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ within Christian thought. Derrida is aware of the problems of languages and boundaries. He grasps them, once again, within the inescapable link between the Grecian and Christian lexicon. The domain of proof is classically neo-Platonism. Derrida evokes the ‘somewhat spectral historic figure (one that becomes all the more fascinating and complex) that is called neo-Platonism’ [e pone il problema di] ‘whatever relates this neo-Platonism to the political power of Rome’. But Patocˇ ka not only refers to the political profile of Neoplatonism; he also makes oblique reference to something that is not a thing but that is probably the very site of the most decisive paradox, namely, the gift that is not a present, the gift of something that remains inaccessible, unpresentable, and as a consequence secret. The event of this gift would link the essence without essence of the gift to secrecy. For one might say that a gift that could be recognized as such in the light of day, a gift destined for recognition, would immediately annul itself. The gift is the secret itself, if the secret itself can be told. Secrecy is the last word of the gift which is the last word of the secret (Derrida 1995: 29–30).

The modalities highlighted by Derrida, after reading Patocˇka, concern sacrifice and death. The Neoplatonist philosopher Julian the Apostate sitting on the imperial throne represents — as Quispel made clear — an important episode in the relations between the orgiastic and the discipline of responsibility. Christianity has not been able to surpass this Platonic solution except by yet another reversal. Responsible life itself was

212 ? Gianfranco Dalmasso conceived in that event as the gift of something that, in the end, while having the characteristics of the Good, also presented the traits of something inaccessible (neprístupného) to which man is forever enslaved — the traits of a mystery that has the last word. Christianity understands the good in a different way from Plato, as goodness that is forgetful of itself and as love (in no way orgiastic) that denies itself (ibid.: 30).

The question of secret within the Christian reality is redefined by the gift of a Goodness forgetful of itself, which unveils itself in its occultation as the generative moment of the human. The crossing of gazes and generative movements find their apex in forgetfulness within the internal edge of an untranscendable and original lack. Death represents such a lack, and is the new Christian name of the truth of the self, of the knowledge of the soul. It is the relationship — simultaneously secret and active/constitutive — in which I recognise, without reservation and without ulteriority, without secret in this case, my ‘being generated’. According to Derrida, it is about an upheaval of the notion of death which is at the same time a redefinition of the idea of sacrifice: For what is given in this trembling, in the actual trembling of terror, is nothing other than death itself, a new significance for death, a new apprehension of death, a new way in which to give oneself death or to put oneself to death [se donner la mort]. The difference between Platonism and Christianity would be above all ‘a reversal in the face of death and of eternal death, living in anguish and hope that couldn’t be more closely allied one with the other, trembling in the consciousness of sin and offering one’s whole being in the sacrifice of repentance’ (1995: 31).

Sacrifice passes through the whole history of religions, as an instrument that makes tolerable the perspective and the angst of loss, constituting a new relationship with oneself, where loss is located exactly in the constitutive point of the individual, just there where it is generated. This movement is thinkable as love/gift, as the constitutive relationship of the I, without reservation and without a ‘third’. The gift made to me by God as he holds me in his gaze and in his hand while remaining inaccessible to me, the terribly dissymmetrical gift of the mysterium tremendum only allows me to respond and only rouses me to the responsibility it gives me by making a gift of death [en me donnant la mort], giving the secret of death, a new experience of death (ibid.: 33).

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The succeeding articulation of Derridean comment connects the being generated of the I to the fact of its unrepeatable and irreplaceable individuality. The Goodness forgets not only itself but it remains inaccessible to the giver: The latter receives by means of a dissymmetry of the gift that is also a death, a death given, the gift of a death that arrives in one way but not another. Above all it is a goodness whose inaccessibility acts as a command to the donee. It subjects its receivers, giving itself to them as goodness itself but also as the law. In order to understand in what way this gift of the law means not only the emergence of a new figure of responsibility but also of another kind of death, one has to take into account the uniqueness and irreplaceable singularity of the self as the means by which — and it is here that it comes close to death — existence excludes every possible substitution. Now to have the experience of responsibility on the basis of the law that is given, that is, to have the experience of one’s absolute singularity and apprehend one’s own death, amounts to the same thing. Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo in my place (ibid.: 41).

These considerations about the given death starting from Heretical Essays offer Derrida an opportunity to reformulate (I would say, surprisingly) one of the most radical apologetics of the Christian language, in a non-ideological sense. He responds and writes in a refined and patristic way starting from an ideal of the rigorousness of rationality. There is no scope to follow all the well-refined passages (in the play of cross-referencing that is architectonical through which the question of a subject of the philosophical language entwines itself with the subject of a Jewish–Christian language). Surely in such an entwining, as regards its itinerary, the analysis measures the extreme limits. Here I intend to underline a last vertiginous theoretical focus on the notion of secret contained in the chapter ‘Tout autre est tout autre’. Starting from the problem of Isaac’s death and Abraham’s vocation, Derrida develops a crossing through some passages of the Gospel, in particular Matthew 5, in order to identify an ‘economy of justice’ which organises itself on the hinge of both the biblical and Christian notion of the heart. But once the light is in us, within the interiority of the spirit, then secrecy is no longer possible. This sort of omnipresence is more radical, effective, and undeniable than that of a spy satellite that turns, as

214 ? Gianfranco Dalmasso one says, ‘in space’. Nothing sensible or terrestrial would be able to stand in its way. There would be no obstacle to interrupt the gaze (Derrida 1995: 100).

The internalisation of the photological source marks the end of the secret, but — and this is the origin of the paradox — it is also the origin of the secret irreducible as interiority. No more secrecy means more secrecy [plus de secret, plus de secret]: that is another secret of secrecy, another formula or shibboleth that depends entirely on whether or not you pronounce the final s of plus, a distinction that cannot be seen literally. There where, wherever, or, since place no longer takes place one should say more precisely as soon as there is no longer any secret hidden from God or from the spiritual light that passes through every space, then a recess of spiritual subjectivity and of absolute interiority is constituted allowing secrecy to be formed within it (Derrida 1995: 100–101).

Derrida suggests, here, the idea of economy of sacrifice in which the coming to the presence, to the manifestation of the sacrifice coincides with a cutting, a dissociating, a making asymmetrical of everything that is paired in the sensible body, in the same way in which one has to break the exchange as a simple reciprocity, as it is said: ‘when you give alms don’t let your left hand know what your right is doing’ (Matthew 6.3). The question is that of a symmetry for which the manifestation of the secret happens by interrupting the economy of exchange: ‘You have heard that it was said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you: offer no resistance to one who is evil’. The logos of this dichotomy and interruption of the exchange is Christ — logos and goodness forgetful of itself — who can teach love to enemies. Derrida re-proposes and develops a conceptuality which is already Alexandrian, then Jewish–Christian, according to which the lord of the world is also the lord of history. Both the Talmudic itineraries and the Christian comments on the Thorax entwine themselves by highlighting how the structures of historical knowledge somehow speak of moments of ‘God’s life’. In this perspective, the secret (referring to God) assumes also a movement and passage between these two aspects. A calculus and a prediction (both ‘metaphysical’ and representing the economy of exchange) underline the passage from a father to

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another one, which is a re-appropriation of a ‘being generated’, of an authentic filiation: And if you salute your brethrens only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the Gentiles (ethnici, ethnikoi) so (ibid.: 106)?

The notion of a ‘God who sees in the secret’ only apparently puts into crisis the supposed autonomy of the subject in the name of a point of view, vertiginous of course, but substantially metaphysical or at least belonging to a theological rationalism. The question is rather, once again, that of clarifying, maybe in the form (?) of definitiveness, the ‘stake’ of the ‘being generated’ of the human. The photology implied by a gaze that does not possess itself and does not possess the light with which one sees, is in fact impracticable and unthinkable except as economy of sacrifice (see Derrida 1995: 147). The sacrifice, in which the I should be the actor and should act upon, underlines the question what happens when the I say yes to God. The awareness that God sees me and the question about what it means telling him yes are aspects of the identical movement of generation. History then (of Christians?) would consider an exchange of wares, including those wares whose meanings are a dissymmetric exchange: the wares are never the gift I would suppose to give, for neither the wares nor the gift are mine. God announces Him, his relationship to himself in that God becomes an object (?) of knowledge and witness to the inner secret. We should stop thinking about God as someone, over there, way up there, transcendent, and, what is more — into the bargain, precisely — capable, more than any satellite orbiting in space, of seeing into the most secret of the most interior places. It is perhaps necessary, if we are to follow the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic injunction, but also at the risk of turning it against that tradition, to think of God and of the name of God without such idolatrous stereotyping or representation. Then we might say: God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior (ibid.: 108).

God would regard, instead, what makes possible a rational (if one can speak like this) clarification of the fact that the order around which the I organises itself is the order of a secret:

216 ? Gianfranco Dalmasso Once such a structure of conscience exists, of being-with-oneself, of speaking, that is, of producing invisible sense, once I have within me, thanks to the invisible word as such, a witness that others cannot see, and who is therefore at the same time other than me and more intimate with me than myself, once I can have a secret relationship with myself and not tell everything, once there is a secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what I call ‘God in me’, (it happens that) I call myself God — a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from ‘God calls me’, for it is on that condition that I can call myself or that I am called in secret (Derrida 1995: 108–9).

Immanentistic developments of Rehnan mysticism — attempts of secularisation like Feuerbach — seem to crumble in front of the incontrovertible and the ungraspable topology of this reading, an itinerary that does not shade off the irrational or rational, but measures (in this case), according to the truth of theory, the generative structure of consciousness. Kierkegaardean subjectivity can be mentioned at this point, in passing, as a relapse of this structure of the invisible interiority (see ibid.: 109). It is a last turning point that is caught in the believable/unbelievable disjuncture, qualifying the visible/invisible itinerary: ‘since I have within myself, thanks to the invisible word as such, a witness which the others don’t see’. [T]he desire and power to render absolutely invisible and to constitute within oneself a witness of that invisibility. That is the history of God and of the name of God as the history of secrecy, a history that is at the same time secret and without any secrets. Such a history is also an economy (ibid.).

The graphical representation of the Christian announces itself like this, once again, in a way that is three-dimensional and ungraspable at the same time: 1. The ‘I’ has no knowledge about itself. 2. The experience of the Christian is a secret that rules the ungraspable graphic of the I. The experience of the Christian means putting to the test the constitutive encounter: a limit that circumscribes him from the inside. The experience we speak of is the fact that the Christian knows neither himself nor his act, which is a secret; but he knows he is generated as the effect of a secret act which is the very condition of being generated.

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3. The Christian knows that the (secret) act which generates him is victorious. The sense of this victory, Derrida goes on to clarify, is not triumphalistic. It is, in fact, rather ironic for it announces the victory (which I would dare to define as apologetic), in the language of the ancient Fathers. The victory indeed is an apology that is ironic and paradoxical, insofar as it succeeds in recognising in the rigour of a secret justice, a ‘secret’ that gives life to us. On Spirit — the Spirit itself. ‘The Spirit of Christianism’ drawn on the young Hegel’s title book, who recognized in the manifestation of this revealed religion, in its event, the announcement of its own truth, that is the absolute Knowledge. Possible allmightiness, dynasty of a Christianism who knows no limit and who eats its borders, who gains invincibility at the cost of being able to win itself: being able to drag itself to the secret market of the secret (Derrida 1999: 148; my translation).

The classical question of faith in both its philosophical and theological implications is the last step of this Derridean itinerary. ‘Genie du Christianisme’ as Nietzsche says afterwards, parodying Chateaubriand’s literature, while he still keeps, perhaps, the naiveté of presuming what does it mean to believe, to make believe, or to give credit, in this march or in this merchandise of infinity. The relation of Christianism with itself, its success or its self-presentation, its beingitself, establishes itself along the hyperbole of this market, along the invisible heart’s visibility (ibid.: 148–49; my translation).

Everyone’s secrets are made, generated in and by the secret of God. The praxis of the Christians, and their acts are measured by an ‘invisible’ which does not represent their external limit, but rather constitutes their secret and victorious resource. Secret in victory, victorious in secret. Who can convince the Christian not to believe? This move, already Augustinian in the Prologue to the De doctrina Christiana, does not rest on the incontrovertible, but is a tautological praxis of the ‘believing to believe’. This conceptuality rests on the impossibility of the objection to constitute itself ‘with justice’ that moves away from the destination what is said in the secret. The destination is constituted within a generative secret of the speech both for the Christian and for his opponent.

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Derrida concludes Tout autre est tout autre by quoting from On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1999). In this text, an operation that destroys the idea of justice itself is accomplished: The justice which began with the maxim, ‘Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off’, ends with connivance (durch die Finger zu sehn) at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape — it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself [what is translated as ‘destroying itself’ is literally sich selbst aufhebend — and Nietzsche adds the emphasis: by ‘raising itself or by substituting for itself’, Christian justice denies itself and so converses itself in what seems to exceed it; it remains what it ceases to be, a cruel economy, a commerce, a contract involving debt and credit, sacrifice and vengeance]. The self-destruction of Justice (diese Selbstaufhebung der Gerechtigkeit)! we know the pretty name it calls itself – Grace (Gnade)! it remains, as is obvious, the privilege (Vorrecht) of the strongest, better still, their super-law (sein Jenseits des Rechts) (Derrida 1995: 113–14).

In its Selbstaufhebung, justice remains a privilege, insofar as it is beyond the right. ‘This obliges us to think about what the Selbst represents in this Selbstaufhebung in terms of the constitution of the self in general, through the secret nucleus of responsibility’ (ibid.: 114). One could also follow the hyperbole of repression [Zurückschiebung] which moralises the mechanism of the debt within consciousness as guiltiness. This sacrificial hubris is, as known, the ‘brainwave of Christianity’: Christianity leads this economy to its excess in the sacrifice of Christ for the love towards the debtor. If there is one secret, the ‘brainwave’ happens only within the instant of that secret, in its infinite sharing. If, on the basis of a thaumaturgical secret, like a technique derived from some capability, or a ruse that depends on a special knowhow, one were able to attribute it to someone or something called ‘Christianity’, one would have to envelop another secret within it: the reversal and infinitization that confers on God, on the other or on the name of God, the responsibility for that which remains more secret than ever, the irreducible experience of belief, between credit and faith, the believing suspended between the credit [créance] of the creditor ([créancer] Gläubiger) and the credence ([croyance] Glauben) of the believer [croyant]. How can one believe this history of credence or credit (ibid.: 115)?

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The question of guilt and the question of the being generated are here transcribed in the graphic (ungraspable, but cognitively original without reservation) of the structure of believing as the secret of generation. The human believing is thus suspended to God’s credit. The ‘more secret than ever’ is the irreducible experience of the belief which is a guilt in the sense of being debtor to a creditor who, besides, lets himself believe. More rigorously the secret that can contain the structure and generation of the secret itself is that God believes that we believe him. This received credit, that erodes its language and its reservation, is God’s credit in which man constitutes himself as a believer; it is His secret.



Notes 1. The three dimensions of the ‘I’ are cognoscere, velle, amare. For the Augustinian analysis of this transcendental volume of the ‘I’ see De Trinitate, Book X. 2. In this perspective, particularly decisive in some recent developments of epistemology, see Functional Models of Cognition, edited by Arturo Carsetti (2001).



References Augustine, Saint. 2002. On the Trinity [De Trinitate]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsetti, Arturo (ed.). 2001. Functional Models of Cognition. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press. Patocˇka, Jan and James Dodd. 1996. Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History. Chicago: Open Court. Plato. 2000. The Republic, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari, trans. T. Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9

Derrida and Religious Reflection in the Continental Tradition Eric Boynton

T

he tradition of Continental reflection on religion has historically placed special emphasis on a foundational, transcendental interrogation of religion: What is religion and how is it possible? At the heart of this kind of questioning obtains a tension between the epistemological and the critical tasks. The philosopher must take stock of religion by exposing its conceptual preconditions and at the same time must ‘reign in’ reason’s tendency to deduce more than it should from its conceptual resources in order that religion not be wholly reduced to philosophy. Of course, the tension between these two tasks describes the motivating force behind Immanuel Kant’s seminal reflection on religion. Kant’s project negotiates the attempt to elucidate the underlying structures of religion and at the same time to avoid the hubris of maintaining speculative reason’s ability to adjudicate matters of faith. Indeed, for Kant, reason can only approach the noumenal, proposing problematic concepts of ideas such as God and freedom. The philosopher reflecting on religion is compelled to offer an account of the practical necessity of the problematic concepts at issue, in a recognition of the limits of speculative analysis.1 This Kantian emphasis on transcendental questioning and the limits of speculative analysis (and the resulting importance of practical reason) is recognisable in much subsequent reflection on religion, albeit manifest in various complex and contradictory ways.2 Jacques Derrida, for instance, locates the animus of Kant’s reflection on religion in a variety of subsequent thinkers’ explicit reflections on religion and especially in their veiled entanglements with religion as an issue. A Kantian ‘logic’ is apparent, Derrida maintains, in the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Levinas, Patocˇka, Ricoeur, and Marion, to name a few figures on a list Derrida believed might be further expanded. According to Derrida, what nevertheless

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binds these complex and different reflections on religion together is a commitment to articulating ‘non-dogmatic doublets’ of religious faith, that is, a thematisation of religion into a system of concepts abstracted from practical experience and developed independently of particular religious traditions. This repetition of religious themes, for Derrida, describes the distinctive philosophical move in the Continental tradition that takes stock of religion, uncovering its conditions, even as religion (at some level) is recognised to surpass philosophical categories. The Kantian tension between the critical and epistemological tasks repeats religious motifs and, as Derrida describes, develops nondogmatic doublets of those religious themes. This insight, implicit in much of Derrida’s recent work, is made explicit in The Gift of Death (1995c) where Derrida’s analysis of the ‘Christian philosopher’ Jan Patocˇka’s work describes the kind of logic that formulates possible positions outside or contrary to those stipulated in the history of Christian thought, liberating or uncovering hidden possibilities.3 With the help of Heidegger, Patocˇka ‘ontologises’ Christian themes in order to redirect or correct certain Platonic propensities within Christianity. Patocˇka’s heretical thought, according to Derrida, engages a kind of Kantian ‘reflecting faith’ and exemplifies the Continental tradition’s devotion to developing non-dogmatic doublets of dogma. This same stance, Derrida suspects, might be of help in understanding the debates that rage over how much Levinas-the-philosopher owes to Jewish sources or whether Marion is engaging in theology or phenomenology, and the attempt to translate, in one way or another, religious notions into a philosophical idiom (that is, without recourse to the authority of a tradition). Kierkegaard (who Derrida relies on in The Gift of Death to supplement his reading of Patocˇka on responsibility) also embraces such a logic. Wishing to expound in non-traditional ways the relevance of Christianity, Kierkegaard, for Derrida, at the same time signals an awareness of the profound limits of such a task. Derrida notes that the critiques of religion developed by figures such as Marx, Hegel, or ‘for provocative effect, Heidegger’ also engage unawares in the thinking of religion by developing nondogmatic doublets. These figures are particularly prone to a ‘temptation’ (Derrida 1998: 15) that lingers in this Kantian logic as the effort to imagine ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’. 4 Indeed, many of the Continental tradition’s most influential thinkers have

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assumed or maintained a strict separation of labour between the theological and philosophical reflection on religion. The result of such a division has often meant that theological inquiry (put mildly) is secondary to the more fundamental philosophical task of elucidating a conceptual logic of ‘the religious’, the founding structure that underlies particular faith traditions and their content. The putative ability to adequately describe the very structure of religion ‘tempts’ the philosopher to ignore or dismiss the Kantian emphasis on the limits of ‘speculative analysis’. Yet these limits on thought are, for Derrida, part and parcel of the logic that develops religious insight in philosophically meaningful or poignant ways. Thinking through the philosophical analyses of religion that claim to eclipse such limits and finding what is unthought in them becomes a way of recalling the kind of ‘extremity’ thought encounters when reflecting on religion. For Derrida, these limits reveal themselves in the very process that attempts to purge philosophical thought of religious contamination — a purgation necessary to claim complete knowledge.



Knowledge as Temptation In a brief remark on Hegel, Derrida maintains that a Hegelian ontotheology ‘determines absolute knowledge as the truth of religion’ and thereby ‘destroys’ religion as such. This destruction that becomes a liberation for thought is actually prepared for by religion in so far as the ‘feeling that “God Himself is Dead”’, is a feeling ‘upon which the religion of more recent times rests’ (Hegel 1977: 190).5 Religion, in this scenario, loses its self-subsistence and becomes a moment (completely explicable) within spirit’s ongoing self-awareness. Yet, for Derrida, this destruction harbours a ‘paradox’ in so far as it also ‘informs, on the contrary, the theological and ecclesiastical, even religious, development of faith’ (1998: 15).6 Figures such as Marx or Hegel ‘exclude as much as they explain, they demand perhaps more than ever this recourse to religion, to the principle of faith, even if it is only that of a radically fiduciary form of the “reflecting faith” already mentioned’ (ibid.: 14).7 This temptation of knowledge (considering the religious to be completely explicable by philosophical thought) also finds different

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expression in Derrida’s slightly more developed discussion of Heidegger.8 Derrida calls attention to a number of concepts uniquely developed by Heidegger (conscience [Gewissen], guilt [Schuldigsein], resoluteness [Entschlossenheit], and others) that can be seen as ontological repetitions of Christian themes ‘de-Christianized’. 9 Focusing on one of the Heideggerian concepts Derrida refers to, let me unpack the notion of fallenness as an instructive example of a non-dogmatic doublet of a Christian theme within Derrida’s scheme. Heidegger states in Being and Time: [O]ur existential–ontological Interpretation makes no ontical assertion about the ‘corruption of human Nature’, not because the necessary evidence is lacking, but because the problematic of this Interpretation is prior to any assertion about corruption or incorruption . . . [W]e have not decided whether man is ‘drunk with sin’ . . . or whether he finds himself in . . . the status gratiae. But in so far as any faith or ‘world view’, makes any such assertions . . . it must come back to the . . . structures which we have set forth, provided that its assertions are to make a claim to conceptual understanding’ (Heidegger 1962: 224).10

Despite Heidegger’s insistence that fallenness ‘in principle has nothing to do with theology’ (1985: 283), Derrida understands this analysis, like many of Heidegger’s existential analyses, to repeat religious themes albeit without commitment to a tradition’s authority. Indeed, Heidegger, as this passage demonstrates, is aware of the Christian resonance of his concept. He is aware of a relation between falling (an existential–ontological Interpretation) and sin (an ontic stipulation of a believer’s world-view). This relation, however, is reckoned in terms of an ontologico-existential repetition of religious themes reduced to their originary possibility. It is here where Heidegger succumbs to the ‘temptation of knowledge’ according to Derrida. Dasein’s ontological tendency towards ‘falling’ is a conceptual precondition of any account of sin. The meaning of religious concerns or faith commitments is revealed in light of the most basic structures of human existence. Heidegger’s thought demands, for Derrida, that a ‘revealability (Offenbarkeit) be allowed to reveal itself, with a light that would manifest (itself) more originarily than all revelation (Offenbarung)’ (Derrida 1998: 15). Philosophical thought expounds the necessary conditions that enable particular, ontic faith commitments to be held as meaningful. In fact, the irrefragable Christian theme of sin

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becomes an ontic concern that prevents thought from the ontological recovery of its very precondition, namely fallenness.11 For Derrida, however, this relation travels in more than one direction. Indeed, caught in the odd relation described as the nondogmatic repetition of dogma, Heidegger engages in thinking the originary conditions of ontical possibility, according to Derrida, in the hopes that he might extirpate ‘Christian vestiges’ from philosophy. This is a ‘strategy all the more involuted and necessary for a Heidegger who seems unable to stop either settling accounts with Christianity or distancing himself from it with all the more violence in so far as it is already too late, perhaps, for him to deny certain proto-Christian motifs in the ontological repetition and existential analytics’ (Derrida 1998: 12). Even as Heidegger attempts to sever the tie that calls upon the religious as resource, he demonstrates his own inability to accomplish such cutting. Is it the case, Derrida asks, that revealability is more originary than revelation, and hence independent of the religious? 12 In so far as the relation remains a repetition, this Heideggerian analysis will always be too late to definitively claim the religious as merely ontic in its scope. This ‘ordeal of undecidable origins’ resides at the heart of this relation as repetition.13 The related term can never be excluded, subsumed, nor wholly explicated. It is this bind that Derrida hopes to highlight by employing phrases such as ‘nondogmatic doublets of dogma’ and ‘religion without religion’. Derrida maintains that it ‘would be easy’ to multiply the references ‘to all those who, before and after all the Enlightenments in the world, believed in the independence of critical reason, of knowledge, technics, philosophy and thought with respect to religion and even to all faith’ (ibid.: 59). Derrida privileges, however, the example of Heidegger’s ‘naïve’ effort to uncover originary sources of religion because ‘of what it tells us, in these times, about a certain “extremity”’ (ibid.). Derrida is not so much concerned with misinterpretation regarding the religious themes Heidegger renders meaningful by recourse to their ontological conditions, but rather with what it is that Heidegger cannot adequately account for in his analyses — an ‘exteriority’ that in fact becomes conditional for his entire project. Derrida’s goal is to demonstrate how Heidegger’s thought remains haunted14 by what his ‘ontologico-existential reduction’ of religious motifs claims to saturate.15

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Derrida calls attention to an early essay, in which Heidegger insists that philosophy remain ‘atheistic’ in order for thought to engage fundamental questions of ontology. Derrida cites Heidegger’s famous remark that Christian philosophy makes as much sense as a ‘square circle’ (Heidegger 1976: 21; see also Derrida 1998: 59).16 The heterogeneity of philosophy and theology, integral to the destruction of onto-theological claims, leads Heidegger to make a bold and, for Derrida, mistaken assertion that ‘belief in general has no place in the experience or the act of thinking in general’ (Derrida 1998: 60).17 Such a denial merely covers over a deep resonance in Heidegger’s thought between ‘faith in general’ and Heidegger’s originary concepts such as Zusage [accord, trust] or Bezeugung [attestation]. The ‘point of departure of Sein und Zeit resides in a situation that cannot be radically alien to what is called faith’ (ibid.: 61).18 That which Heidegger attempted to fix ontically haunts his work in the form of a faith that disturbs and unsettles his thinking even as this faith belongs in an originary way to the piety of thought as questioning—a questioning that he maintained could only be fundamental in so far as it avoided the contamination of faith or theology.19 Not only is the philosophical recovery of the structures of religion in terms of the originary status of revealability never completely adequate, but the reliance on revealability keeps Heidegger’s thought tethered to commitments it must resist. Invoking the Kantian legacy of the Continental reflection on religion, a position such as Heidegger’s does not escape the kind of limits Kant viewed as crucial for any reflection on religion. Indeed, for Derrida, the limit thought encounters, in the case of Heidegger, radicalises Kant’s position, exposing in the process an alterity that resists presentation.



Derrida and Religious Exteriority Philosophical reflection on religion is a task racked by questioning, not one confident in its abilities to fix or pin down its ‘object’. The task of speaking of religion is filled with ‘fear and trembling’, for thought is faced with that which ultimately resists interrogation, or remains excessive of any capacity to know. 20 Philosophy of religion, caught up in the ‘question of the question’, assumes responsibility for an impossible task of engaging ‘the other’ at the limits of its reflective power.

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Derrida’s work can be characterised by the intensity with which he approaches the profound difficulty of attempting to present ‘the other’. In characteristic fashion, then, Derrida’s approach to religion ‘at the limits of reason’ is not a task that seeks deliverance beyond speculation.21 Thinking religion, rather, is aporetic. It gives way to an experience of ‘the other’ as a limit that not only defies presentation, but also ‘presents’ itself (paradoxically) as unpresentable, in this case, as a haunting. This is the kind of exteriority that Derrida finds lurking in the thought of Heidegger—an alterity that resists knowledge, disrupts its completeness and yet funds its task. At the bottom, Heidegger’s thinking of religion, for Derrida, becomes ‘maddeningly unstable’. Yet the emphasis on the ‘idea’ of limits of knowledge that, in this case, bind Kant and Derrida together, establishing a point of agreement, must be qualified. In fact, to resist the temptation of knowledge in his own reflection on religion, Derrida must distance himself from a Kantian ‘reflecting faith’ in so far as such reflection remains committed to Christian content as authoritative. For Kant, ‘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 their concept’ (Derrida 1998: 10). This reflecting faith is simply not radical enough for Derrida and smacks of the mistake of taking faith for knowledge. Kant’s analysis does not seek out the desert (or the intense abstraction of the desert within a desert) that for Derrida puts into question any such commitment.22 ‘Directly related to this desert abstraction, or on the flip side of the same coin’, Derrida must also distance himself from the Kantian position that seeks to avoid the ‘transcendental illusion’ and the rather modern description of the problem of the limits of knowledge. Again for Derrida, Kant is not radical enough, in this instance, when positing the noumenal realm as the limit. Despite limits of theoretical reason, religious phenomena (namely God) nevertheless appear as necessary postulates of practical reason.23 For Derrida, in order to counter the tendency of our discourses to overreach (by recourse to the postulates of practical reason, for instance), he must save a more radical faith—in this case, the primordiality of the promise exposed in his analysis of Heidegger’s work. For all of Kant’s insistence on

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limits, he nevertheless succumbs to the temptation of knowledge. Indeed, this temptation may be endemic to the Continental approach to religion Derrida sketches—a tradition to which Derrida remains tied. In relation to the twofold temptation of knowledge (located either in the certainty of religious dogmaticism or in philosophical analysis), Derrida asks: ‘How then to think — within the limits of reason alone — a religion which, without again becoming a “natural religion”, would today be effectively universal? 24 And which, for that matter, would no longer be restricted to a paradigm that was Christian or even Abrahamic’ (Derrida 1998: 14)? Entertaining the question as to what it means ‘to think religion’, ‘how is it possible’ or ‘[w]hat is religion’, Derrida finds his own interrogations repulsed as ‘though such a project would not dissolve the very question in advance’ (ibid.: 41).25 With the ‘maddening instability’ that he maintains founds any position that would claim to ‘know’ how to begin, reflection on religion is propelled by and remains tied to the originary ambiguity between revelation and revealability. This ‘hyperbolic outbidding of two originaries, the order of the “revealed” and the order of the “revealable”, is this not . . . the chance . . . of another “reflecting faith”’ (ibid.: 21). From what Derrida calls a ‘third place’ there emanates a ‘[n]octurnal light, therefore more and more obscure . . . a third place that could well have been more than archi-originary, the most anarchic and anarchivable place possible . . . a certain desert [that] makes possible, opens, hollows or infinitizes the other’ (ibid.: 16).26 Thinking the ‘interconnectedness’ of faith and knowledge (rather than their heterogeneity), Derrida encounters an ‘alliance, holy or not, of the calculable and the incalculable’ (ibid.: 54).27 Radicalising the Kantian insight, Derrida argues that in the midst of this Continental approach to religious reflection, involving the ‘interconnection’ or interpenetration of faith and knowledge without solution, thought encounters as originary a radical exteriority. Religious phenomena, then, are not so much explained as harnessed or cracked open such that a desertified faith or messianic hope propels philosophy as a ‘religious’ passion. Reflection on religion does not expose religion as an inadequate account of experience in relation to philosophical thought that investigates it, or as a world-view that forecloses on thought, but locates in religious phenomena an engine of questioning, of provocations, of thinking beyond totalising discourse.

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Exposing the untimely, and ultimately impossible, exclusion of faith that proves conditional and therefore inassimilable by thought, Derrida sketches a philosophy of religion which is able to maintain the otherness of religious themes and hold open an awareness of the limits that thought encounters when reflecting on religion.



Notes 1. ‘We now have sufficient insight to tell that we will be satisfied from a practical standpoint, but from a speculative standpoint our reason will find little satisfaction’ (Kant 1978: 27). 2. The use of Kant is simply heuristic since Derrida specifically ties his own work to the legacy of Kant’s reflection on religion. Derrida notes, opening his own consideration of religion: ‘Kant thus defines a “reflecting (reflektierende) faith”, which is to say, a concept whose possibility might well open the space of our own discussion. Because it does not depend essentially upon any historical revelation and thus agrees with the rationality of purely practical reason, reflecting faith favours good will beyond all knowledge. It is opposed to “dogmatic (dogmatische) faith”. If it breaks with this “dogmatic faith”, it is in so far as the latter claims to know and thereby ignores the difference between faith and knowledge’ (Derrida 1998: 10). 3. The philosophical task of understanding the significance and meaning of religious themes, linking these themes one to another embodies a ‘logic’ that, for Derrida: ‘has no need of the event of revelation or the revelation of an event. It needs to think the possibility of such an event but not the event itself. This is the major point of difference, permitting such discourse to be developed without reference to religion as institutional dogma, and proposing a genealogy of thinking concerning the possibility and essence of the religious that doesn’t amount to an article of faith. If one takes into account certain differences, the same can be said for many discourses that seek in our day to be religious—discourses of a philosophical type if not philosophies themselves—without putting forth theses or theologems that would by their very structure teach something corresponding to the dogma of a given religion. The difference is subtle and unstable, and it would call for careful and vigilant analyses. In different respects and with difference results, the discourses of Levinas or Marion, perhaps of Ricoeur also, are in the same situation as Patocˇka. But in the final analysis this list has no clear limit and it can be said, once again taking into account the differences, that a certain Kant and a certain Hegel, Kierkegaard of course, and I might even dare to say for

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

provocative effect, Heidegger also, belong to this tradition that consists of proposing a non-dogmatic doublet of dogma, a philosophical and metaphysical doublet, in any case a thinking that “repeats” the possibility of religion without religion’ (1995c: 49). In his ‘Post-scriptum’ to his spoken remarks at the conference on Capri, Derrida expounds on this temptation as follows: ‘As always, recourse to knowledge is temptation itself . . . The temptation of knowing, the temptation of knowledge, is to believe not only that one knows what one knows (which wouldn’t be too serious), but also that one knows what knowledge is, that is, free, structurally, of belief or of faith’ (1998: 30–31). Derrida’s essay ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’ (1998) explicitly takes up Hegel’s essay similarly titled. In fact, Derrida’s essay draws from and evokes three famous reflections on religion: Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1999), Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge (1997), and Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1977). In this regard, Derrida might also have witnessed in Hegel a similar instability that conditions Patocˇka’s thought. The articulation in and through the speculative philosophy of Christian doctrine remains haunted by what it is thought to articulate philosophically, so that attaining the concept of spirit as an object for itself remains conditioned by the event of a particular religious tradition. Specifically in the case of Patocˇka: ‘How does such thinking elaborate, in the style of a genealogy, a reply to the question concerning what conditions render responsibility possible? . . . Everything comes to pass as though only the analysis of the concept of responsibility were ultimately capable of producing Christianity, or more precisely the possibility of Christianity. One might well conclude, conversely, that this concept of responsibility is Christian through and through and is produced by the event of Christianity’ (Derrida 1995c: 50). Derrida goes on to expound the undecidability at issue here that I will discuss in greater detail subsequently: ‘There is no choice to be made here between a logical deduction, or one that is related to the event, and the reference to a revelatory event. One implies the other’ (ibid.). See also Derrida’s discussion of Marx and religion in Specters of Marx (1994). Derrida travels further with his analysis of Heidegger’s development of non-dogmatic doublets and the ‘Heideggerian’ form of temptation. See Derrida (1995c: 23, 32 and 49); Derrida (1998: 12, 59–65) and Derrida (1989: 129ff.). It is important to point out that naming knowledge as a ‘temptation’ allows Derrida to set his own reflection on religion alongside and draw from figures like Hegel, Marx, or Heidegger who might otherwise, taken at face value, be construed as ‘anti-religious’.

230 ? Eric Boynton 9. ‘[D]oes not Heidegger proceed, from Sein und Zeit on, with an ontologico-existential repetition and rehearsal of Christian motifs that at the same time are hollowed out and reduced to their originary possibility’ (Derrida 1998: 15)? Derrida’s insistence that Heidegger’s mature thought remains tied to Christian theology or Christian themes is not novel. 10. See also ‘Phenomenology and Religion’ where Heidegger states: ‘A theological concept necessarily contains that understanding of Being which is constitutive of human Dasein, insofar as it exists at all. Thus, for example, sin is manifest only through faith, and only a believer can factually exist as a sinner. But if sin, which is the phenomenon contrary to faith as rebirth and hence a phenomenon of existence, is to be interpreted in theological concepts, then the content itself of the concepts, and not just any philosophical preference, calls for a return to the concept of guilt. And guilt is an ontological determination of Dasein’ (1976: 18–19). 11. Philosophy as radical (fundamental) questioning requires methodological atheism. The worldview of the believer (or the positive science of theology) supplies answers too soon. ‘Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth has the answer to the question “why are there essents rather than nothing” even before it is asked: everything that is, except God himself, has been created by Him . . . One who holds to such faith . . . cannot really question without ceasing to be a believer’ (Heidegger 1959: 7). The relation between philosophy and theology or religion in Heidegger’s thought is complicated. Besides Derrida’s consideration of the issue, which I will touch upon shortly, it stretches back into 30 years of scholarship — work that is not necessarily contrary to Derrida’s insights. See for example only a sample of work on this topic in Kockelmans (1973), O’Meara (1986), Schalow (1988), Smith (1997), and Hemming (2002). 12. ‘In its most abstract form, then, the aporia within which we are struggling would perhaps be the following: is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more originary than revelation (Offenbarung), and hence independent of religion? Independent in the structures of its experience and in the analytics relating to them? Is this not the place in which “reflecting faith” at least originates if not this faith itself? Or rather, inversely, would the event of revelation have consisted in revealing revealability itself, and the origin of light, the originary light, the very invisibility of visibility’ (Derrida 1998: 16)? See also Derrida’s 1997 debate with Marion where he speaks of his desire ‘to think otherwise the possibility of these two possibilities’: Offenbarung and Offenbarkeit (Kearney, Derrida and Marion 1999: 73). 13. Derrida maintains that ‘undecidability is the condition of all deconstruction: in the sense of the condition of possibility’ (1986: 135). In

Derrida and Religious Reflection ? 231

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

the case of the Continental reflection on religion to which Derrida claims to be heir, the issue of the ‘ordeal of undecidable origins’ regarding the event of revelation or such an event’s sheer possibility must be seen as conditional. Derrida is, of course, fond of disrupting a professed ability to bring phenomena to presence, employing tropes such as the supplement, the parergon, or the polysemic ‘sauf ’. For a description of ghosts and hauntings, see Specters of Marx (Derrida 1994). Derrida’s understanding of the difficulty of or tension involved when reflecting on religion, which is beginning to take shape here, echoes the kind of logic of negative theology Derrida set out to unpack in On the Name (1995a). The unity and logic of negative theology, in that text, is challenged not by a posited exteriority, a dialectical other, but by its own desire that describes a movement of ‘internal rebellion’. Negative theology (like speech and prayer), for Derrida, is enabled and disabled by that which it attempts to name and relegate to its own margin. From two opposite directions, it seems that negative theology and philosophy of religion both attempt to develop a ‘religion without religion’. This might offer some insight into the undecidability proposed between Khora and God in On the Name, the ‘closeness’ both Marion and Derrida have professed for the other’s thinking, as well as the debates that rage over the relation between deconstruction and (negative) theology. See for example, Bradley (2000). A similar position is described in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1959). This is a paraphrase of Heidegger’s remarks in ‘The Anaximander Fragment’ (1984: 57). ‘That the movement proper to this faith does not constitute a religion is all too evident. Is it, however, untouched by all religiosity? Perhaps. But by all “belief”, by that “belief” that would have “no place in thinking”? This seems less certain’ (Derrida 1998: 62). Derrida offers an explanation for how it might be that Heidegger can reject so ‘energetically’ belief and yet rely so fundamentally upon ‘one of the possibilities of the “religious” ’. Derrida, throughout his essay, makes a distinction between two sources of religion: the experience of sacredness and the experience of belief. Heidegger, according to Derrida, conceives of and thinks through religion solely as it finds expression within the latter — linked, as it is for Heidegger, to dogmaticism and onto-theological grounding. Heidegger is unaware, due to his ‘Graeco-Holderlinian or even archeo-Christian’ proclivities, of the way his thought is involved in the first source. Derrida insists ‘it is the Zusage that constitutes the most proper movement of thinking, and that without it (although Heidegger does not state it in this form) the question itself would not emerge. This recall to a sort of faith, this recall to the trust of the Zusage [happens] ‘before’ all

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

questioning, thus ‘before’ all knowledge, all philosophy etc.’ (Derrida 1998: 60–61). See also Of Spirit: ‘It remains to find out whether this Versprechen is not the promise which, opening every speaking, makes possible the very question and therefore precedes it without belonging to it: the dissymmetry of an affirmation, of a yes before all opposition of yes and no . . . Language is always, before any question, and in the very question, comes down to the promise. This would also be a promise of spirit’ (Derrida 1989: 94). ‘[T]o believe that one knows of what one speaks, would be to begin by no longer understanding anything at all: as though religion, the question of religion was what succeeds in returning, that which all of a sudden would come as a surprise to what one believes one knows: man, the earth, the world, history falling thus under the rubric of anthropology, of history or of every other form of human science or of philosophy, even the “philosophy of religion” . . . If there is a question of religion, it ought no longer to be a “question-of-religion”. Nor simply a response to this question. We shall see why and wherein the question of religion is first of all the question of the question. Of the origins and the borders of the question — as of the response. “The thing” tends thus to drop out of sight as soon as one believes oneself able to master it under the title of a discipline, a knowledge or a philosophy. And yet, despite the impossibility of the task, a demand is addressed to us’ (Derrida 1998: 39). I have noted that title of Derrida’s essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (1998) intentionally evokes three works on religion within the Continental tradition. It is also critically important to note one alteration: Derrida replaces Kant’s ‘Within’ with his own ‘at’. Instead of Reason Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Derrida engages ‘“Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’. In fact, the authoritative Christian content, Derrida reveals in Kant, demonstrates that the same ‘maddening instability’ found in Heidegger can be located at the heart of Kant’s position. Proto-Hegelian in its form, Derrida argues that Kant’s reflecting faith requires a world abandoned by God. Kant must announce and recall the idea that ‘Christianity is the death of God’ (Derrida 1998: 12). See Kant (1978: 123) for corroboration of Derrida’s Hegelian reading of Kant. The man of Enlightenment ‘needs no speculative proofs for God’s existence. He is convinced of it with certainty, because otherwise he would have to reject the necessary laws of morality which are grounded in the nature of his being. Thus he derives theology from morality, yet not from speculative but from practical evidence’ (Kant 1978: 42). Although I have emphasised the kind of temptation accruing to the philosophical reflection on religion as a reductive, Derrida in good Enlightenment fashion criticises dogmatic faith as a temptation of knowledge as well. Compare Derrida’s description of each kind of

Derrida and Religious Reflection ? 233 ‘temptation’: dogmatic faith ‘claims to know and thereby ignores the difference between faith and knowledge’ while the philosopher is tempted ‘to believe not only that one knows what one knows . . . but also that one knows what knowledge is, that is, free, structurally, of belief or of faith’ (Derrida 1998: 10; 31). 25. It is important to note how the ordeal of undecidable origins between a religious event or its sheer possibility — an inability to locate a position of stability in any case — opens up this exteriority. Derrida’s prizing of undecidability means that a certain faith belongs already at the ‘source’ not only of religious phenomena but of his own reflection on religion (as well as any social bond, techno-scientific critique, radical questioning, etc.). This ambiguity allows an interpreter such as Caputo to speak of Derrida’s religion or deconstruction as a religion (without religion) (see Caputo 1997). This is evident in Derrida’s analysis of the promise. Although taken up in various texts, within ‘Faith and Knowledge’ Derrida admits that his own attempt to think religion rests upon or better performs a faithfulness that is already religious and so already in question. In this way, philosophy of religion never stands apart from the religious as resource despite the claims of certain Enlightenment figures (see Derrida 1998: 30; 44–46). 26. With the phrase ‘[n]octurnal light’ Derrida describes his difficult relation to the legacy of the Enlightenment’s reflection on religion. Derrida stresses that deconstruction seeks to unsettle Enlightenment certainties ‘in order to think them better and especially to translate and transform them better in the light of what should be the Enlightenment of our time’ (Derrida 1995b: 428). 27. While Derrida seems to prize a certain Kantian insight and to find in Hegel a certain hubris, his essay harnesses the insights of each. Although Derrida is not interested in ‘reconciling’ faith and knowledge, the heterogeneity between the two in the work of Kant (which for Hegel belies the ‘feeling that God Himself is dead’) must be rethought. Derrida, like Hegel, recognises this heterogeneity as conditional for a certain philosophy of religion that remains unaware of its proper task. This condition must be challenged in order to understand ‘the religion of more recent times’ (Hegel 1977: 190). Derrida meditates: ‘I also told myself, silently, that one would blind oneself to the phenomenon called ‘of religion’ or of the ‘return of the religious’ today if one continued to oppose so naively Reason and Religion, Critique or Science and Religion, technoscientific Modernity and Religion. Supposing that what was at stake was to understand, would one understand anything about ‘what’s-going-on-today-in-the-world-with-religion’ . . . if one continues to believe in this opposition, even in this incompatibility, which is to say, if one remains within a certain tradition of the Enlightenment, one of the many Enlightenments of the past three centuries . . . which

234 ? Eric Boynton traverses like a single ray a certain critical and anti-religious vigilance . . . a certain filiation ‘Voltaire-Feuerbach-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud-(and even)-Heidegger’?’ (Derrida 1998: 28). It is significant that Hegel is left off this list.



References Bergson, Henri. 1977. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Bradley, Arthur. 2000. ‘God Sans Being: Derrida, Marion and “A Paradoxical Writing of the Word Without”’, Literature and Theology, 14(3): 299–312. Caputo, John. 1997. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Memories: For Paul de Man. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. Specters of Marx. London: Routledge. ———. 1995a. On the Name. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1995b. Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1995c. The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in J. Derrida and Vattimo (eds), Religion, pp. 1–78. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Faith and Knowledge. Albany: Sate University of New York Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1959. Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1962. Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Originally published as Sein und Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976). ———. 1976. ‘Phenomenology and Religion’, in The Piety of Thinking. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1984. ‘The Anaximander Fragment’ in Early Greek Thinking. San Francisco: Harper. Heidegger, Martin. 1985 (1925). History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Derrida and Religious Reflection ? 235 Hemming, Laurence. 2002. Heidegger’s Atheism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1978. Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Wood and Clark. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ________. 1999. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kearney, Richard, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion. 1999. ‘On the Gift: A Discussion Between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion’, in John D. Caputo and Michael Scanlon (eds), God, the Gift and Postmodernism, pp. 54–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kockelmans, Joseph. 1973. ‘Heidegger ion Theology’, The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 4(3): 85–107. O’Meara, Thomas. 1986. ‘Heidegger’s Origins: Theological Perspectives’, Theological Studies, 47: 205–26. Schalow, Frank. 1988. ‘A Pre-Theological Phenomenology’, International Philosophical Quarterly XVIII, 4: 393–401. Smith, James. 1997. ‘The Art of Christian Atheism: Faith and Philosophy in Early Heidegger’, Faith and Philosophy, 14(1): 71–81.

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On Following without Following: Deconstructing a Notion of Faithfulness in Church Practice Natalie Roberts

I

n reflecting upon the legacy of Derrida’s work, one may well ask what it is to consider the state and purpose of theory today. What is its relationship to life and the living of life? What implications and directions does such a question hold for the future of critical thought? In a 2001 round-table discussion at Loughborough University, Derrida observed: [T]he word ‘after’ may move around a double meaning: ‘after’ as in coming after, or ‘post’; and ‘after’ in the sense of ‘according to’ — d’aprés . . . following without following (Payne and Schad 2003: 9).

So, we are left to ponder. Theory after Derrida may well be the summation of life after Derrida, a life lived after theory and one of its most controversial figures of the past century, both temporally and influentially. In espousing deconstruction, Derrida created a breach that was as faithful in its intent as its performance was treacherous, providing a philosophical tool that opened boundless margins for double-edged dismantling that collapsed binaries, then re-visioned and enriched them into spectrums of meaning and non-meaning through its insistence upon a space for the other. Yet how should one commit to the cause of deconstruction without following it? Can betrayal be faithful? Theory after Derrida, in my view, must entail acting after Derrida — in living out the constant, impossible yearn to reach a final destination and a final meaning — in perceiving the everyday shadows of différance as they leap from the philosophical pages of our imagination — in formulating a praxis informed by the history and legacy of Derrida. This essay attempts to explore such thoughts by discussing the conceptual possibilities that have materialised through Derrida’s work for the formulation of church praxis as a congregated outworking

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of Christian faith. Odd as the theoretical base and subject pairing may seem, I am of the opinion that church practice has adopted certain traits of positivism under the influence of post-Enlightenment modernity which prove less than beneficial to its functioning, hence a deconstructive exercise upon the dichotomies that have arisen through these traits may prove useful. Using a base of qualitative research data composed of 17 interview transcripts, I draw on Derrida’s ideas of death and difference to deconstruct certain conceptual binaries that are commonly found within church experience, such as life and death, self and the other, sameness and difference, faithfulness and disobedience. Derrida observed that ‘Christianity is the only mad religion; which is perhaps, the explanation for its survival — it deconstructs itself and survives by deconstructing itself’ (Payne and Schad 2003: 36). This, to my understanding, is a statement regarding the way Christianity bases its nature on challenging the self and the breaking down of its opposition to the other through an espousal of sacrificial love. If this is so, deconstruction is logically adaptable to its praxis, and I aim to show how death, when finally visible as the counterpart to life, exacts a self-effacement that is also capable of facilitating transcendent identification within the Christian self. This essay is divided into three primary sections. The first section provides a brief account of my research, including its genesis, aim and method. The second section is a discussion of my findings in the light of Derrida’s idea of death and the function of différance as the deconstructive key that ruptures the opposition between life and death. I ponder the implications resulting from these for the rationale and process of grappling with difference, especially in light of my interviewees’ experiences concerning what it means to follow, and to not follow within a Christian understanding of faithfulness. The third section is the conclusion to this essay, where I reflect upon how this work is informed by Derrida’s theorising and where it situates itself as a result.



Background As an undergraduate, I had increasingly come into contact with stories of disillusionment and protest regarding the church from various Christian acquaintances through friendship and fellowship,

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and wished to understand these accounts for myself by acquiring greater familiarity with various churchgoing experiences. I was convinced that a greater understanding of personal and communal particularities within the church would improve flexibility and sensitivity, and that individuals who possessed legitimate grievances should be given the opportunity to articulate their stories fully and freely to their churches, so that the latter could become aware of them and respond in a constructive manner. This essay is a result of the formalization of some of these enquiries, deriving from a research project which utilises ‘grounded theory’ as methodology, semi-structured interview as field method, and Derrida’s ideas on death and difference as part of its theoretical framework.

Methodology The ‘grounded theory’ approach works to generate or discover ‘an abstract analytical schema’ by closely deriving it from data concerning a situation where ‘individuals interact, take actions, or engage in a process in response to a phenomenon’ (Creswell 1998: 56). This was my first research aim — to develop a schema of understanding in relation to church function by looking at how interviewees responded to their churchgoing experiences. The practical application of grounded theory — whether substantive or formal — requires that the theory we develop possess four interrelated properties: The first requisite property is that the theory must closely fit the substantive area in which it will be used. Second, it must be readily understandable by laymen concerned with this area. Third, it must be sufficiently general to be applicable to a multitude of diverse daily situations within the substantive area, not to just a specific type of situation. Fourth, it must allow the user partial control over the structure and process of daily situations as they change through time (Glaser and Strauss 2001: 234).

Thus, theory and observation must be compatible and consistent, so that theoretical validity and utility, both formal and practical, are maximised through the identification and categorisation of factual elements, and the exploration of their connections (Tesch 1990: 72). Instead of grand narratives or theories that are so narrowly specific as to be generally inapplicable, there is a desire for theory that is empirically valid, practicable, and accessible, which not only

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contributes to field knowledge, but also to the situational literacy and navigation of any person who would choose to practically apply it. This was my second research aim: to create a theoretical platform that could conceptualise future interaction amongst various types of Christians and churches, which, upon reflection, was really the outworking of my opinion that theory must entail an acting after. Qualitative research builds theory from data, as opposed to quantitative research which uses data to test theory (Newman and Benz 1998: 20). Thus, in accordance with my choice of grounded theory as qualitative research methodology, I chose the in-depth, semi-structured interview as field method. In semi-structured interviews, the researcher has a list of questions to be answered, but is flexible in terms of the order in which topics are considered, and allows an interviewee to develop ideas and speak more widely on the issues raised; so, answers are open-ended and there is more emphasis on the interviewee elaborating on points of interest (Denscombe 1998: 113). This means that the process of theorisation begins almost as soon as the conversation does, since the very procedure of generating data is itself conducted in such a way that individuals must draw on their thoughts, emotions, observations, experiences and opinions — in short, raw nuggets of theory. Such an interactive method also helps to avoid alienation between the researcher and the respondent, thereby encouraging the development of a sense of connectedness (Reinharz cited in Sarantakos 1993: 197). I felt that this was especially useful for engaging people who had made the decision to leave their churches or give up the faith, as my findings later confirmed that they are sometimes not very well understood, which causes them to be perceived as misguided or wayward. It is a step toward healing and empowerment for such people, who often struggle with the effects of their church experiences long after putting an end to the physical occurrences of those experiences. According to Marion Martin, empowerment refers to ‘people’s access to resources which increase their capacity as individuals and groups to take greater control of decisions at personal and community levels, so they might challenge relationships and structures of power’ (2000: 194). In the context of my own research, it was my opinion that such empowerment begins with giving people who sincerely try to exercise their spiritual or Christian identities (albeit in nonconformist ways) a voice with which to articulate the path by which they came to their decisions.

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To ensure the validity of my data, I adhered to the grounded theory principle of theoretical sampling for data generation, which is the purposeful selection of research subjects and matter with the aim of furthering the development of theory (see Corbin and Strauss 2003: 111). Consequently, I approached individuals who I knew would produce relevant data due to their actions and experiences: I spoke to churchgoers who were content or doing well, churchgoers who had considered leaving, those who had actually left, and still others who had given up on their faith: 17 individuals in all. Through my engagement with them, I found that Christian practice is, in truth, more fragmented and differentiated than even denominational lineages can account for. Spirituality within the church takes distinct forms at individual levels, resulting in a variety of opinions and beliefs as to what the church should be, experiences and histories as to what the church is actually like, and a plethora of rationales and attitudes toward church attendance — ranging from the firm, principled decision to stay, to equivocation and ambivalence, to conscious, unregretful departure. These narratives, of course, are by no means exhaustive. However, they sufficiently established that one had to recognise the varied nature of church experience in order to discover any commonality that might exist; coming to grips with difference assists one in making out that which is not different. A constant comparative method was also applied during data analysis, which is the continuous checking of categorical coding against raw data to make sure that meaning-making is always grounded within actual research. According to John Seidel and Udo Kelle, data analysis in grounded theory is done ‘by comparing the different pieces of data in order to find commonalities, differences or linkages between them’ (1995: 57), so that ‘meaningful patterns of facts’ (Jorgenson cited in ibid.) may be constructed through the search for structures within data. This means that the researcher does not approach raw data with an empty head, but rather adopts an open mind, using theoretical preconceptions which are not hypotheses in the ordinary sense of the word — meaning explicit propositions about empirical facts — but rather (partly implicit) conceptual networks, which constitute perspectives that help in the selection of relevant phenomena (Seidel and Kelle 1995: 56). These phenomena are then ‘signposted’ through codes, which are stored with the addresses of certain text passages for the researcher to draw on in order to locate all possible information within the raw data on certain topics (ibid.: 57). These instances of relevant phenomena are then gathered,

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thereby breaking the raw data into parts and piling them topically according to codes. Once the different pieces of categorised data are sorted, the researcher then studies them as objects in themselves, analysing several parts of them and their connections or the specific way they could be linked to form a meaningful picture (ibid.: 58) to create theory. Coding is thus refined through the exploration of relationships and patterns across categories, finally leading to an integration of sense-making (Maykut and Morehouse 1994: 126–149). In doing so, grounded theory not only aims to uncover relevant conditions, ‘but also to determine how the actors respond to changing conditions and to the consequences of their actions’ (Corbin and Strauss 2003: 109); so it rejects strict determinism as well as non-determinism (ibid.: 108–9) by taking individual agency and changing circumstances into account. This, of course, fit my research aims because I looked at interviewee actions and stances in a way that accounted for their varied nature. In grounded theory, codes function, therefore, as heuristic devices for discovery in an interpretive methodology that tries to derive information from data by means of a fine-grained analysis that will uncover hitherto unknown aspects of the phenomenon under study through careful and intensive inspection of the original text (Seidel and Kelle 1995: 58). The process of analysing raw data and sorting them into sensible categories must therefore be performed inductively — based on ‘units of meaning’ within textual data — so that meaning-making is grounded in the research itself. To aid this process I used a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (called CAQDAS), ATLAS.ti (version 4.2), which expedited the processes of open and axial coding in this research. According to Strauss and Corbin, open coding fractures data so that one may identify categories, their properties, and dimensional locations, while axial coding puts the data back together ‘in new ways by making connections between a category and its subcategories’ (cited in Lonkila 1995: 43). So, data is first decontextualised, then recontextualised. Decontextualisation temporarily disconnects words, phrases and sentences from their original context, so that they can be recognised as small, basic passages of information in themselves. Recontextualisation, on the other hand, conceives of and locates quotes in such a way that they still fit into the original text, yet are adjusted enough to form new shapes and connections. It resembles the game of Lego™, where one may put the blocks back into the original

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combination in which they came, but also make new constructions out of the same pieces. So, to assess whether I had coded well, I would look at a quote to see if it fit the code I had placed it under, as well as its original context, even though I did not have to refer to the original context to understand it. This was important as a gauge as to whether I was taking my quotes out of context. While this made data analysis very complex, the beauty of using CAQDAS was that it aided the management of a considerable quantity of raw data, and provided the facilities to retrieve all relevant topical information as and when needed, quickly and effectively. Hence, the process remained manageable, even as a large quantity of codes was produced to facilitate a thick description and a fine, close reading of the transcripts (when I ended my data analysis, I had 613 codes). Finally, I did my best to ascertain the trustworthiness of my fieldwork through a careful consideration of the ethics of interviewing, which can be found in my Honours dissertation, ‘Spiritual Persuasions: On Loving and Leaving the Church’, along with other more technical details concerning my research process.1 A descriptive summary of my interview sample is as follows.



Theorisation This section is divided into three segments. First, I look at Derrida’s metaphorical theme of death and the function of différance as the deconstructive key that ruptures the opposition between life and death. In doing so, I establish the simultaneous occurrence of presence and non-presence within the referential relationships of a metaphorical theme, and ponder the implications that result for grappling with difference. In the second segment, I explore with greater depth these implications concerning difference when it comes to the notion of ‘following’ for church-leavers and church teaching, with the conclusion that church-leavers can be reconceived as more than other, and church teaching may benefit from a more reciprocal, rather than unilateral, setting. The third segment examines how spiritual abuse can emerge if concepts of faithfulness and disobedience are dichotomised and adhered to with warped rigidity. Through the experiences of my interviewees, I then contemplate what it means to be faithful, and to not be.

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Details

Comments

Gender

6 females, 11 males

17 persons in total

Age Range

19–64 years

14 were in their 20s

Ethnicity

Malaysian: 12 Chinese 2 Eurasians 1 Indian

To protect their identities, these individuals were asked to provide pseudonyms, so they named themselves thus: Nerd, Aaliyah, Critter, Jeffrey, Vanessa, Philip, Rookie, Natalie, Octopus, Ya’aqov, Messy Christian, Bruce, Jaycee, Bamboo, Ben, VDM, Angsty.

Foreign: 2 European New Zealanders

Methodist Baptist Denominational Presbyterian Background Lutheran Independent Charismatic Assemblies of God Catholic

Ten were born into a Christian environment while the rest were converts. At the time of my research 9 were regular churchgoers, 3 attended occasionally and 5 had become free thinkers or post-Christian.

6 students 2 teachers 2 Christian workers 1 media planner 1 journalist 1 pastor l lawyer 1 factory worker 1 playwright 1 biomedical technologist

Some interviewees designated a different role from their actual occupation (e.g., the playwright referred to himself as an educator), but I have decided to adhere to the latter here as factual record.

Occupation

Death and Difference It must be noted that death can refer to several things in the context of this essay. Here, I will consider it as a metaphorical theme in Derrida’s work, and as the presence of différance within metaphorical reference. These perceptions, in my view, will constitute a way by which to comprehend the diversity of variance that actually exists between the traditional opposition of life and death, which is crucial to a positive recognition and theorisation of difference. According to Rayment-Pickard, death ‘in Derrida’s lexicon is not so much a fixed concept as the maternal metaphor in a familial field of related metaphors’, its theme containing other related concepts such as ‘absence, finitude, sous rature (or under erasure), the “end”,

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closure and non-presence’ (2003: 15). Death, as a maternal metaphor, is thus an umbrella term that gathers a variety of metaphorical items to itself through related connotations. The items in a field of metaphors belong together not because they may substitute for one another, but because they bear both a family resemblance and a necessary dissemblance to one another (RaymentPickard 2003: 16).

So, familial resemblance forms the basic coherence of a metaphorical theme because member items share common elements in meaning that approximate the connotative suggestions of the maternal metaphor. On the other hand, dissemblance demonstrates how metaphor ‘always carries death within itself’ (Rayment-Pickard 2003: 17), because a metaphorical theme necessarily breaks down as the membership of its items widens, varies and diversifies. Consequently, the quality and degree of resemblance within a metaphorical family is ‘an indeterminable combination of similitude and dissimilitude, continuity and discontinuity, life and death’ (ibid.: 16). Différance manifests in its impossible invisibility here through these indeterminable combinations, as member metaphors differ from each other and defer from their maternal designate in a process of relational reference where they do not, and cannot, substitute for one another due to their varying degrees of similitude and dissimilitude. This is the beginning of a process where death is situated alongside life not as its binary opposite, but as a component that is integral to the greater combination of the two as a metaphorical unit of meaning. Subsequently, this observation of life and death, or presence and non-presence, within the relatedness of a cluster of associated metaphors constitutes an avenue for Derrida to explore the other of a metaphysics which begins — and is always grounded in — positive discursive terms: Derrida associates metaphysics with life. Death or absence is the excluded alternative which although repressed by the structures of metaphysics is, none the less, essential to its life (Rayment-Pickard 2003: 18).

For Derrida, the metaphysics of modern Western philosophy is a metaphysics of life, of ‘voice, living’ (Payne and Schad 2003: 7): it is largely, if not always, conducted with the self, presence and consciousness as starting points. However, without death in all its

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metaphorical, ideological and material forms, philosophy cannot continue — indeed cannot be. Death, as the other, is an unacknowledged silence, but without it anything that would identify as the self cannot materialise because there is nothing which it might cohere itself against, or around; without death, there is no life. The simultaneous occurrence of similitude-dissimilitude and continuitydiscontinuity within the mechanisms of reference demonstrates this, that life and death are spliced, meaning and absence constantly bearing allusions of each other as metaphorical items continually slip in their comparative degrees of difference and similarity. Thus, Derrida uses the deathly themes of the other, non-presence and absence to perform a philosophical move that conceptualises difference as something more than aberrant: it is a crucial element to our understanding of existence and reality, just as the items within a metaphorical family collectively constitute a complex, nuanced appreciation of the meaningfulness of a maternal metaphor through their common and differential degrees of reference. Différance is not, and yet it constitutes understanding. The binary of life and death is thus broken because life and death, demonstrably, are not opposed to each other so much as complementary in the process of meaning-making. Through this, Derrida designates a space where there commonly is no space, and lays the foundational margin for a theology ‘which moves between life and death, between the old life-of-God theology of the metaphysics of presence and its repressed other: the theology of the death of God’ (Rayment-Pickard 2003: 18). The in-betweenness of this theology is an assertion: [that] God is or appears, is named, within the difference between All and Nothing, Life and Death. Within Difference, and at bottom as Difference itself. This difference is what is called History. God is inscribed in it (Derrida 2001: 144).

It is a declaration that God is neither All nor Nothing, Life nor Death. He is both, encompasses both, constitutes both, gives meaning to both, and does all this by existing to our understanding within the material plenitude of differences between the two absolutes. At the same time, He is Different: God is what we may conceive of but are not able to be or represent — God is the Other, God is the very fullness of the signified. His Difference is the source, mark, and embodiment of His transcendence . . . it is transcendence.

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The difference that is borne of His creation, however, is the birth of history — history being a compound of the diverse forms, intercourses and outcomes of difference. God speaks and is manifest throughout history, because He is Different — the point from which all difference issues forth according to its kind. Of course, the notion of an originary source is contested in Derrida’s work, and this is where Christianity veers from his position, but the point remains that there is a comprehensible difference between the heavenly and the historical, and this recognition is a positive categorisation of difference that provides the opportunity for an exercise of religious self-reflexivity. When différance shifts into focus as a factor in comprehending the gap between the divine goal of the signified and the limited reach of the signifier, a space opens within the fissures of differential slippage, ‘an immemorial space — for religious reflection. It is to this deserted space that we are called by an Other we can never name’ (Taylor 1992: 27). Différance dictates an enigmatic relation where we are able to conceive of the Other, but are not able to present Him as He is, or to fully know Him — it is a tension between ‘the fullness of the signified’ and the ‘plenitude of the signifier’ (ibid.: 26), a realisation that the relation of différance is precisely composed of the disjunction between the two — the failure of the signifier to truly reach the signified. This acknowledgement cracks open a meditative chasm where we may strive to hear from an other that cannot be named, and acquire ever deepening recognition that the incapacity to do so is due to an intrinsic lack. Gavin D’Costa echoes this sentiment when he asserts that while we know God, we do not know everything about Him: ‘There is a constant tension between Paul’s proclamation that God has given us the gift of himself through his Son by the power of his Spirit and Paul’s insistence that for now, we only know through a glass darkly’ (1998: 38). Thus, the demand is made for God’s Difference to be recognised and distinguished from human difference, for the One who inscribes Himself through these is not a proponent of sameness. Crucially, however, it must be noted that sameness is different from unity — oneness of purpose and like-mindedness do not equal the reduction of alterity, or the singleness of identity. The most obvious spiritual demonstration of this in the Christian context is the Godhead — consider Jesus’ statement about being one with the Father (John 10:30, New King James Version) while He was yet the Son of the Father,

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a discrete entity that at the same time made up part of a whole and partook of a mutual essence. Such a personification of harmonised distinction indicates that difference is part of the meaning of creation, and so should not be removed or ignored. Instead, its admission and comprehension can aid in the deconstruction of harmful dichotomies because we acquire, as a result, the ability to relate to those who are different from ourselves in that they, being human, have infinitely more in common with us than the divine does. As to how this could translate into reality, one of my interviewees — a pastor named Bruce, gave his idea of what a church should be: A place where unchurched people can come. Or people who are not Christians can come to explore the faith . . . with no pressure for them to convert immediately; they can take their time. And also a place for Christians to work out their faith in today’s reality . . . For people who need a place to grow, or were like me, who had questions, a place that questions will be taken seriously . . . A place where we would learn to follow Christ, and also invite others to follow in a safe environment (interview with author, 2005).

From this, I gather that the church does not require common ground amongst its attendees as a starting point: rather, it is a place of becoming which extends itself toward many different people. The range of individuals listed in Bruce’s description — the unchurched, non-believers, Christians — who come together for a variety of reasons — to explore, to work out personal faith, to question, to learn to follow Christ and invite others — indicates a mix of spiritual and personal development that precludes homogeneity. Thus, while church members are supposed to practice unity and common purpose, it does not mean that they have to be a stable, uniform mass. Rather, they are a group of individuals who have to learn to get along and grow together, the spiritual equivalent of a metaphorical family, as it were, with members who gather under the same name but still possess their respective identities. Bruce went on to say: Learning to accept people as they are, even though we don’t approve of everything they think or do, and also believing that there is always room to change . . . They don’t have to remain as they are. I think that would in some sense summarise what I think we would like to be in church (interview with author, 2005).

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The concept of the church as a place of becoming thus indicates that it is also a place of hope, which enables acceptance in a manner that does not engender condoning the shortcomings of others or foregoing personal principles, due to the belief that people do not have to stay the same: instead of focusing on what people currently are, there is a greater perspective that looks forward to what they could become. Such a viewpoint is important to the cultivation of genuine humility, supportiveness and godly equity, for if God is indeed the unpresentable that lies within differential tension, the reality of positive, interactive co-existence becomes possible when we turn our attention to spaces of strife, for it is there that we will find Him, manifesting Himself in the workings of healing, growth, and reconciliation. This is especially vital as it became clear to me through the narratives of my interviewees that sameness is, in fact, deemed synonymous at times with oneness within the embodiment of church praxis, as evidenced by certain acts of dogmatism or even cruelty on the part of church leaders and members toward their nonconformist brethren. I shall consider the treatment of church-leavers and the issue of religious teaching in the next segment, to see how a deconstructive notion of difference may help to revise the dichotomies of self and the other, as well as sameness and difference, in a conceptualisation of what it means to follow.

Following/Not Following When I spoke to interviewees who had decided to leave their churches, I found that they were sometimes ‘othered’ in hierarchically inferior ways: they were people to be reached out to, brought gently but firmly back into the fold — perhaps pitied because they did not know better — or finally left to their own destruction because of their incurable condition. Messy Christian encountered this: My very close friends were church people. Why did they condemn me when I left? I felt like I suddenly became a turncoat in their eyes . . . my ex-best friend, she’s also from that church, she said, ‘I’m disappointed that you left the church. I were you, I [wouldn’t] have left, I won’t be that weak’. And I felt so angry, it’s like, who are you calling me weak, you know? . . . And boy, when I was out of the church . . . people look at me like, oh you gotta go back to church you cannot backslide; it’s terrible there . . . You backslide, then you know, God will spit you out (interview with author, 2005).

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The issue I wish to address, accordingly, concerns the way churchleavers can become prone to being perceived as deviant or backslidden — as ‘turncoats’, ‘weak’, and contemptible in the eyes of God, despite the fact that they may have contributed to church and are well-versed in the ways and beliefs of Christian life, or had legitimate reasons for choosing to leave. Messy Christian, for example, was a convert who could not attend church initially because of family disapproval, so she read books and listened to sermon tapes, particularly material from Philip Yancey and David Pawson. Because of this, she was capable of spotting discrepancies between what she had learnt in self-study and what was being preached in her church, which her leaders forbade the questioning of. She recounted: They even pressured me to go for counselling [laughs] which I thought was very very bad of them because they’re basically telling me that: ‘There’s nothing wrong with us, there’s something wrong with you, go fix it’, so I’ve tried that but it didn’t work; it got worse (interview with author, 2005).

This kind of church, therefore, is quite different from the community where members are supposed to belong, believe and become. Instead, it is an environment that does not consider individual difference or practice self-reflexivity. While pressuring Messy Christian to go for counselling so that she could ‘fix’ whatever was ‘wrong’ with her, the church members did not do much else to ease her dis-ease [sic] with the problems she perceived in church teaching,2 or to address ‘the charismatic things that they do, which I now realise it’s very manipulative’.3 The disjunction eventually became too difficult to handle, and she was forced to leave as a result. Significantly, however, she pointed out: I realise that it’s not for the people that I’m a Christian; it’s for God, and . . . also ‘cause I’m a very stubborn person. ‘I am not going to be drummed out of Christianity ‘cause of people’. [So] I’m not gonna let this Pastor K and Pastor J to be the reason why I left Christianity I don’t wanna give them that much credit [laughs] (interview with author, 2005).

The woman who was treated as a turncoat, it turns out, possesses a different notion of what it means to be a follower. She is not a Christian for the sake of the church community, but for her allegiance to God, which she is not willing to forsake in spite of the difficulties

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she encounters as a result. Being a follower is thus not a black and white decision that can be identified through one’s actions at a given point in time (such as departure from church), but a process of deliberation and choosing which must be taken as a whole. Derrida observed: There is no simple opposition between the acolyte, or the ‘acoluthon’ and the ‘anacoluthon’.4 That is a problem, because to accompany, or to follow in the most demanding and authentic way, implies the ‘anacol,’ the ‘not-following,’ the break in the following, in the company so to speak (Payne and Schad 2003: 7).

There is, as it were, a link between the act of following and the act of not following that does not juxtapose them as opposites — conversely, the latter becomes an inherent element of the former. The paradox of the attempt to follow, it would seem, lies within the fact that its loyal performance intimates a break, or the possibility of a break, in the process of following. I will, hereafter, refer to this as the dilemma of the anacoluthon. Where Christianity is concerned, I believe this arises, for one, from the notion that the church is, in Nerd’s words, ‘God’s body on earth’ — how could the choice to depart from it not amount to betrayal? Subsequently, however, Nerd also stipulated that ‘it’s a meeting place where sinners come together and obtain forgiveness for their sins’. Thus while the idea that the church is God’s body on earth implies that the church is, in itself, a site of transcendence, the claim that it is a gathering place for sinners, for vessels of imperfection, indicates instead that transcendence is not intrinsic to the church — it only becomes a reality when forgiveness of sins takes place. It is a gift. The church, therefore, is not equivalent to God, and the choice to depart from it is not necessarily a sign that one has abandoned the faith. In light of this, the perceived binary of self and other, when it comes to those who are within the church community and those who depart after a well-deliberated choice, is at best tenuous because all individuals who understand and practise Christian spirituality possess pieces of experience and knowledge that contribute toward a comprehension of its larger meaning. This is, in fact, an echo of Derrida’s work on presence and non-presence within the conception of metaphorical relationships, where life and death coexist and cooperate to produce meaning. Individuals such as Messy Christian, who leave church out of an informed insistence on authentic following, therefore, can and should actually be reconceived to become

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question marks that bear the trace of self-revelation for Christian self-understanding (D’Costa 1998: 39), for though they seem like the other to churchgoers, they are not entirely. Engaging them, rather, facilitates a sensible evaluation of church due to the experiences they have in common with other members, as well as the possibility of acquiring different, even constructive perspectives regarding the state of the church. This, in my view, is conducive to fostering greater understanding on all sides, whether it is sincere and informed respect on the church’s part that does not yet deny its responsibility and desire to correct, or self-reflection if the church has indeed committed an offence — in which case, communication, resolution and reconciliation are imperative. The church body cannot hope, otherwise, to live with difference and achieve the uncoerced harmony that is required for like-mindedness which leads to unity — and that, in turn, gives rise to the potential for an environment where church interaction and teaching become one-way and closed. According to Cate Siejk, many religious educators create religious education that is aimed at indoctrination and socialisation (1999: 167). This is due to the positivist influence of modernist epistemology, which induces a comprehensively dualistic way of thinking where truth is deemed objective and universal (Siejk 1999: 157); therefore, one can only be either right or wrong — which encourages binary conceptualisations. I must state before proceeding any further that the issue at hand does not concern whether the Christian worldview provides any kind of a general, inalienable truth that people must subscribe to. Rather, it is a question of how Christians have responded to that world-view in terms of the way they relate to the world and each other. Siejk observes that modernist influences have created a situation where the Christian tradition is conceived of as ‘information that needs to be transmitted from one generation to the next’, and so elements such as ‘mutuality, diversity, challenge, conflict, and change’ are ignored (ibid.: 167). Angsty, a female lawyer from Kuala Lumpur, concurs: Pastors today . . . They’ve been taught to present whatever message they have in a certain way and . . . I really take issue with their presentation like this is the truth and nothing else . . . there is no discussion, there is no dialogue, just accept it . . . People now don’t like you telling them this is the way, this is the answer . . . They want to be able to ask questions. And talk about it (interview with author, 2005).

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That her pastors should maintain, ‘This is the truth and nothing else’, is indicative of a modernist epistemological influence, which, ironically, becomes all the more telling in its insistence because ‘nothing else’ does allude to an other, an other that is repressed — thrust away beneath the shadow of ‘truth’ to be hidden under a deathly mantle of non-entity. This other, in my view, is precisely the reason, ‘people want to be able to ask questions, and talk about it’, because its differentiation from ‘truth’ indicates that it is a necessary component to the understanding of what is true. I am not, of course, endorsing the deliberate foray into heretical thought. However, questions and dialogue are central to the establishment of knowledge, and stem from the desire for greater understanding. To discourage the individual aspect of learning and thought, by over-emphasising the reception of teaching and communal uniformity, is to prevent this genuine seeking from bearing the fruit that it should. It was the same spirit of probing faithfulness that prompted Derrida to say: If I just repeat, if I interpret ‘following’ as just repetition, following in a . . . mechanical way, just repeating, not animating, it’s another way of betraying. So, if I want to follow, I have to hear . . . to listen to and at the same time to . . . understand, to do our best to understand, and to obey at the same time . . . to write in my turn . . . this is fidelity (Payne and Schad 2003: 10).

Thus, although questions by their very nature carry within them the possibility of destabilisation and, consequently, betrayal, the act of following requires listening, understanding and obeying, as well as the questions that necessarily accompany such actions. It is how one acquires the ability to respond fittingly, to ‘write in turn’. Knowing this is vital, for as Jeffrey says: ‘We are the ambassadors of Christ’. Ambassadors, of course, are sent primarily with a task of goodwill to other nations, and their first responsibility is to foster productive relationships (rather than make citizens of the people whom they are sent to). They cannot perform their mission, however, without a deep internalisation and personal understanding of the message they are charged with carrying. Mere reception and repetition, therefore, will not do the Gospel justice as it requires the animation of lived experience and convicted knowledge to be properly conveyed — otherwise, ‘it’s another way of betraying’, a betrayal that is not based on outright disobedience, but indifference and/or non-comprehension.

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At the same time, there is an interdependence between the quality of the individual’s thought and the community’s thinking, which requires religious teaching to be sensitive to developing on-going conversation, inquiry, and openness to diversity, rather than being focused on manipulation or right answers (Siejk 1999: 166). Angsty opines: Personally, I feel that the doctrine that is coming from the pulpit is not wide enough to cater for the people that I mix with . . . It’s a lot of ‘how-to’s, it’s very ‘80s and ‘90s how to this, how to that, this is how you better your life, this is how you be a Christian, this is how you win Christians, but I feel that people of my generation don’t respond to that (interview with author, 2005).

So, cultivating an open attitude in the church where everyone helps each other, whether they are part of leadership or laity, may actually encourage collective spiritual growth through the exchange of ideas concerning what is taught, and how it is taught. Further, it reminds the congregation that it constitutes an essential part of the church, and greatly contributes to the health or detriment of the body, because the church does not actually function independently of its members, nor does it rely solely on the quality of its leadership. In fact, when the church ails organisationally or hierarchically, it will be up to the members to set correction in motion, because the church is, in a very real sense, no greater than the sum of its parts. Elders especially play an important role, as Messy Christian asserts: There are mature believers in there, and I did go back and ask them after I’d left the church, ‘Why didn’t you all stand up?’ People just felt there was no use and I felt betrayed [that . . . the elders of the church knew something was wrong, knew that the teachings were bad but] have not protected us younger people, made us think that there’s something wrong with us, you know? . . . And people are being hurt left, right and centre, especially by this pastor who did a lot of bad things to some of the members . . . the church . . . has become an organisation where you’re supposed to belong, and people think that if you don’t belong there’s something wrong with you (interview with author, 2005).

Thus, the dark side of a closed environment becomes apparent. Faulty leadership goes unchecked (in this case, it ranged from emotional abuse to stealing to obtaining Masters’ degrees by getting the church

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members to write academic papers). Mature believers do not speak because they feel they cannot change anything since everyone should belong, while young believers who continue to enter church do not have the support and encouragement that they need to attain healthy spirituality. The result is a vicious cycle where newcomers either stay and become part of the silent majority, or leave after much struggle (Messy Christian remained in her church for at least three years). In light of such a situation — which does not develop overnight and should be arrested as soon as possible — one is prompted to ask: can there be a comprehensible distinction as to who belongs in a church and who does not, if sameness is a means of complicity, and being different precludes the power or willingness to make actual difference? Or, on the other hand, whether sameness is an expression of accord in spite of difference, and being different is considered natural and acceptable? Sameness and difference are meaningless as opposites in either case, as only unity holds any significance for the creation of a positive environment. Further, is there any inherent distinction between leadership and laity when they are supposed to be gathered in a place where, as Critter expressed it, ‘people come together because of God’? The necessity, in my view, is for the concept of unity to be separated from the notion of sameness, and for the notion of sameness to be deconstructed as an opposition to difference, so that the members of a church body are aware that they have a place and responsibility to uphold and look after each other, even reprove each other, regardless of hierarchical rank and social compatibility. Thus, to recapitulate, the deconstruction of life and death as binary opposites reveals the integral role of difference to the production of meaning, which means that life and death are not divergent so much as complementary in the process of meaning-making. Likewise, the binary of self and other is problematic when applied to the distinction between churchgoers and former churchgoers, because they bear traces of each other and cannot be meaningfully opposed when one attempts to survey and comprehend the length and breadth of Christian experience. Similarly, the opposition between sameness and difference cannot withstand scrutiny in a church environment because sameness cannot substitute for unity, and unity is not, as a matter of course, antagonistic to difference. Thus, the acts of following and not following, as far as a deconstructive notion of difference is concerned, are untenable as a dichotomy in the evaluation of a Christian walk, because Christian faithfulness is a process

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that cannot be judged through acts, single, or even several: it must be taken as a whole. The possibility materialises, therefore, for church-leavers to be reconceived as more than the other, and for church teaching to benefit from a more reciprocal, rather than unilateral, setting. In the next segment, I will look at how spiritual abuse can emerge if concepts of faithfulness and disobedience are dichotomised and adhered to with warped rigidity. Through the experiences of my interviewees, I then contemplate what it means to be faithful, and to not be.

Life and Death within the Church I define spiritual abuse as emotional, psychological, physical and/or sexual abuse that is made possible when the spiritual aspects of an individual’s life and personality are exploited as points of vulnerability. Within the context of my research, the majority of such incidents seemed to stem from the dilemma of the anacoluthon, as interviewees strove to be faithful both to their personal spirituality and membership of the church. It is my belief, consequently, that the binary of following and not following, when pushed to the extreme, becomes a means of indictment through the dichotomisation of faithfulness and disobedience, with decisive implications for the individuals involved. One such person was Ya’aqov: I really felt pulled in two directions. I had leaders on one side, saying — do what you feel in your heart, do what you really feel God wants you to do, and just flow, just use the gift God’s given you. And on the other side I had this very restrictive rule system. This went on for many many years; sometimes I’d cry and it would really hurt me (interview with author, 2005).

Ya’aqov was a gifted teenage musician who was not allowed to display or exercise his abilities under the command of a jealous worship leader, who shouted at him if he disobeyed. At the same time, he was reproached by other leaders for not playing according to his natural capacity, which affected church services. This led him to feel immensely conflicted, but he was absorbed into a routine of repression where he was not allowed to (and did not think he should) talk about what was happening as he had been taught that loyalty to the church and leadership were paramount, and speaking out would constitute ‘gossip’. This, in my view, is a prime example of

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the dilemma of the anacoluthon. Ya’aqov is told, and personally realises, that he has an unusual gift, which he takes very seriously and is encouraged to use. On the other hand, he is trained to submit to leadership even if it means being torn between two conflicting sets of directions. The result is an impossible situation where betrayal is inevitable: he can only choose to go against himself and his vocation to worship, or the community that demands his constancy. This left him in a continuous struggle between intense, unhealthy acts of selfdenial, and defiance, when he would contravene instructions and play as he felt to play, thereby performing a break in his following of the church. This brought unfortunate consequences. [Once a visiting pastor or evangelist] saw that . . . the way I played affected how everyone else played . . . and the whole service would be following me in my worship of God, okay? But the fact was, I wasn’t the rostered worship leader, and in his book, that’s wrong. Unless you’re the rostered worship leader, you shouldn’t be functioning that way. It’s impossible basically . . . so he says that I’m practising witchcraft, and rebelling and . . . manipulating the whole service. And he told the pastors, and then one of the senior pastors singled me out in music practice — there’re 30 or 40 people — and told me how I was doing witchcraft [etc.] in front of ALL these people, and basically character-assassinated me . . . That really cut (interview with author, 2005).

While Derrida stated that to follow in the most demanding and authentic way implies the break in the following, such a situation perhaps proves to be too demanding. Cases like this, I believe, call for a deconstruction of notions of faithfulness and disobedience, as well as the de-polarisation of such notions. Ya’aqov, after all, was asked to be faithful in his service of the worship team, but how should faithfulness be defined when the leadership of his own church had no qualms in attacking one of its own before investigating the (preposterous) accusations of a visitor? And what does obedience mean, when to obey is to abide by a system that has no apparent standard for distinguishing between manipulation and honest worship, or checks and balances where authority over members is concerned? A break is almost certainly necessary, as well as a perspective that does not automatically equate obedience with faithfulness, or disobedience with unfaithfulness. In Ya’aqov’s case, faithfulness and obedience were even required of membership but not necessarily of leadership, which, in my view, is a symptom of the

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binary of sameness and difference, and patently unjust: faithfulness as a standard should be applied to all, while obedience should be evaluated on a more holistic level. This is important for when Ya’aqov finally made the decision to leave his church, he was still haunted by self-doubt and internal conflict, socialised as he was under the binary of faithfulness and disobedience. He is now in his mid-20s and has not resumed church attendance. Upon contemplating the narratives of my interviewees, I should consequently note that in dismantling absolutist concepts of faithfulness and disobedience, two ways of ‘not following’ can be found, which should not be mistaken for one another. The first is a ‘not following’ that, literally, does not follow: it outrightly betrays because there is no regard for the process or meaning of following. According to Vanessa, this manifests in hypocrisy: I think people should just let down all their masks y’know, all these facades they hide behind, it’s ridiculous I mean . . . they try to portray what the church should be like in the Bible, but they’re just not doing it right . . . like my brother, he’s a youth leader, he was the president of his Christian fellowship from Form 3 to Form 5? Form 6? And [he batters me. He physically really abuses me and there were times where I was swollen all over, and he does this in front of my parents and they never sought professional help] it’s so hard to see, they represent the church to me and I get this from them. It’s . . . so ugly (interview with author, 2005).

Vanessa grew up in a home church where both her parents were pastors, and her brother was a member of the music team. Whenever she had a quarrel with her brother, he beat her but her parents did not intervene, choosing instead to console her after the fact. I would argue that there is no meaning to running a church when love, grace, healthy masculinity and a strong family are not valued and upheld in the personal lives of its leaders and members. As Vanessa points out: ‘they try to portray what the church should be like in the Bible, but they’re just not doing it right’, because there is no attempt to follow that holds to authenticity, and this renders hollow titles of responsibility such as ‘pastor’, ‘youth leader’, ‘fellowship president’, and ‘worshipper’. The second type of ‘not following’, conversely, is a study of faithfulness because it strives to adhere to the spirit of following, and to imbue its process with an understanding of what it means to be obedient. I call this the fidelity of the anacoluthon. Interviewees

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who spoke about this type of (not) following espoused a watchful thought process concerning when to follow and when to break from following, which did not pit faithfulness against disobedience, but reconceived the binary as a balance between faithfulness and freedom. In Vanessa’s words: As a bottom line, I think everybody deserves that space to be . . . that Christian he or she really is. Sometimes others don’t really understand what you’re going through, the inner turmoil, the battle that you have going on, raging inside . . . And it’s not like, oh, taking the Holy Communion means you’re a real Christian, or whether or not you listen to gospel music, it’s nothing like that. I think it’s more your relationship with Him . . . how much it means to you or, how you wanna go about it, but just don’t slide off what it’s supposed to be, that’s fine (interview with author, 2005).

Faithfulness is thus interpreted as an internal understanding of the relationship one has with God, and the expression of that understanding within a space that others cannot contravene in the light of a follower’s individuality, a relationship that cannot be judged solely through identifiable acts such as taking the Communion and listening to Christian music. This allocation of freedom, however, is tempered by the awareness that one should not ‘slide off what it’s supposed to be’, which marks the fine line between following and not following. In more practical terms, Philip opines: Instead of people just sitting back, and listening to what the pastor says, people need to be encouraged to find out things for themselves. They need to develop their own sense of who God is, and in saying that I don’t mean that everyone should be running off and doing their own thing. But, I think people need to be encouraged really to be more active in their own spirituality . . . taking responsibility for their prayer life, reading the Bible and what it says (interview with author, 2005).

This is an echo of the fidelity which Derrida spoke of, where listening, understanding and obeying are crucial to an animated following, rather than mere repetition. As far as Philip is concerned, the ability to have one’s own sense of who God is — to write in turn — is a result of the decision to take responsibility for one’s own spiritual development through practices like building up a prayer life, and knowing what the Bible says for oneself. To Philip, finding things out

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instead of just listening to the pastor is not an act of disobedience: it is an informed exercise of personal freedom which is very different from ‘running off’ and doing whatever one likes. In summation, Derrida puts it most succinctly: [Y]ou cannot simply oppose the acolyte and the anacoluthon — logically they are opposed; but in fact, what appears as a necessity is that, in order to follow in a consistent way, to be true to what you follow, you have to interrupt the following (Payne and Schad 2003: 7).

There is thus no simple black and white formula for identifying faithfulness and disobedience when one tries to follow. Sometimes, it is by not following, or by interrupting the following, that one exhibits the greatest heart for what is being followed. One cannot merely be an acolyte, after all, when difference is inevitable, and the only constant in the process of following, quite possibly, is the fact that there will need to be breaks in the company, so that reconsideration and readjustment — rewriting — may take place where needed. As far as Derrida’s insistence on fidelity and authenticity are concerned, this is the demanding but necessary way — the deconstructive way. Some of the issues outlined in this essay, accordingly, cannot be glossed over by the general assertion that no church is perfect — they far exceed mere imperfection, and demonstrate the real need for a shift in thinking and attitude to allow for greater communication, acceptance and honesty within Christian faith communities. This segment thus closes with the observation that the deconstruction of the opposition between life and death, as well as their related concepts in church, may well make the difference between life and death for those who must dwell, meanwhile, in the liminal spaces of différance’s keep.



Conclusion Derrida said in a moment of celebratory confession: I live as if, as if it were possible for the letter to reach its destination or somehow to be present with voice . . . That’s life, consistent with and inconsistent with, following without following (Payne and Schad 2003: 9).

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According to him, it was because there is no pureness or immediacy that he desired it — that Necessity compelled him to insist that there was no such thing even as he loved and lived for the voice, for presence, for intimacy (Payne and Schad 2003: 9); it was part of his complexity as a philosopher who tried to live by what he espoused, even as the very act of doing so demonstrated the contradictory nature of what he espoused. Christianity, by contrast, hails from a different place altogether — an understanding that there is indeed a whole and a one, originary, eternal and final if not yet concrete and present, not of our own making but revealed and certain to anyone who chooses to believe — which, of course, was madness in Derrida’s eyes. ‘Faith must be mad, or absurd’, he said, not reassuring and wise, reliable or probable — otherwise it would not be faith (Payne and Schad 2003: 36). Yet it seems to me that Derrida had respect, nevertheless, for the mad religion, while believers may yet discover one of the most complex and critical appreciations of their faith in contemporary, non-religious thought through his work. Derrida’s effort to understand the subjects of his scrutiny led him to follow them through to their logical ends, until he could not but betray their intent and being, as it were, by making the other manifest. This is the revelation that invites the charge of betrayal, for the acknowledgement of the other is the betrayal of the self. Yet this acknowledgement lies at the heart of Christianity, and composes the means of its survival. The Crucifixion and Resurrection stories speak of a Self that committed voluntary sacrifice, to bridge the gap between the divine and the mortal. Death was the means by which this was accomplished, and the result was a new creation where the divine and the mortal were free to become one thereafter. For the Christian, identification with this Self thus begins with death, and translates into a willing self-effacement that facilitates transcendent identification when peace is made with the other. It is a beautiful irony that choosing death should bring us to life. Likewise, life and death, as well as self and other, are not opposites but colleagues when placed under the lens of deconstruction. This leads me to conclude that Derrida’s philosophy, while undoubtedly subversive to the Christian world-view as a whole, nonetheless provides useful conceptual tools for the formulation of church praxis. The concept of différance, as applied in an acknowledgement of the finitude of the human effort, leads to a willingness to hear from the unpresentable Other, thereby contributing to a greater acceptance of those who seem other to us.

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This complements regular methods of church practice by cultivating an attitude of openness that is crucial for managing issues ranging from doctrinal discrepancy to spiritual abuse. Thus, church practice may be helped by greater self-reflexivity and a willingness to grapple with difference, but I also contend that such an approach should be adopted collectively, so that accountability is maximised within the body and individual church members are given the opportunity to encourage each other (and to be encouraged), since they belong, above all else, to a communal entity. This, in my view, signals a move from the philosophical to a more praxis-oriented use of Derrida’s thinking, as evidenced by the way churchgoers have demonstrated the ability to grapple with ambiguity and difference in their interviews: while they may never venture into the total sophistication or complexity of Derrida’s thought, there is nevertheless an element which they have, under quite independent circumstances, laid hold of to conceptualise their personal faith walks, basic as it may be. To end, I wish to situate this essay with these last words from Derrida: A counter-signature is a signature which both confirms the first signature, the former signature, and nevertheless is opposed to it; and in any case it’s new, it’s my own signature. A counter-signature is this strange alliance between following and not following, confirming and displacing; and displacing is the only way to pay homage, to do justice (Payne and Schad 2003: 10).

I have tried, within the bounds of my ability and understanding, to provide a counter-signature to Derrida’s work that confirms it, even as it deals with a subject matter that, by all accounts, naturally opposes it. It is my hope that I have done justice, in this modest way, to his legacy, in my exploration of the way his ideas may contribute to a praxis-oriented theologising of church practice — for if I commit displacement, I would ultimately wish that it were a faithful one. My stone is small, but laid with the intent to build bridges for fields that, in my opinion, do not cross paths often enough. In that particular respect, I would personally say, then, that theorising is not just an endless problematising of our beliefs and practices — it is a mistrust which should, all the same, be able to coexist with faith in a visualisation of the future (however slight their partnership may ultimately turn out to be), so that the terror of unpredictability may have mad hope as an ally, and so that theory may have praxis as a

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manifest vessel. As far as it is beneficial, therefore, the deconstructive exercise — as well as the spirit of the man who developed its logic and purpose — is to be confirmed in the negotiated meeting of opposites in the name of, and for the sake of, something that is ultimately greater than either of the two.



Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

A copy of the dissertation is available in the Tun Hussein Onn Library, Monash University, Malaysia. For example, Messy Christian recalled: ‘One of the pastors actually said that, if you die young or you have illnesses, then there is something actually wrong with your relationship with God’ (interview with author, 2005). The ‘charismatic things’ refer to the exercise of spiritual gifts or charismata, which, in Christian thought, is the Pauline doctrine of gifts acquired by a few for the benefit of the many (Conyers 2004: 306). In Pentecostal Christianity, spiritual gifts include praying in tongues, prophecy and faith healing. The acolyte is literally, ‘a follower’, from the Greek word akolouthos, and the anacoluthon is a rhetorical device, ‘a sentence or construction lacking grammatical sequence’ (Payne and Schad 2003: 5).



References Conyers, A. J. 2004. ‘Can Postmodernism Be Used as a Template for Christian Theology?’, Christian Scholar’s Review, 33(3): 293–310. Fulltext [online] ProQuest [accessed 6 April 2005]. Corbin, Juliet and Anselm Strauss. 2003. ‘Grounded Theory Research: Procedures, Canons, and Evaluative Criteria’, in Nigel Fielding (ed.), Interviewing, vol. IV, pp. 107–24. London: Sage. Creswell, John W. 1998. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Traditions. Thousand Oaks: Sage. D’Costa, Gavin. 1998. ‘Trinitarian Différance and World Religions: Postmodernity and the “Other”’, in Ursula King (ed.), Faith and Praxis in a Postmodern Age, pp. 28–46. London: Cassell.

Deconstructing a Notion of Faithfulness in Church Practice ? 263 Denscombe, Martyn. 1998. The Good Research Guide: For Small-scale Social Research Projects. Buckingham: Open University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm L. Strauss. 2001. ‘The Discovery of Grounded Theory and Applying Grounded Theory, in Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds), The American Tradition in Qualitative Research, vol. II, pp. 229–43. London: Sage. Leow, Natalie. 2005. ‘Spiritual Persuasions: On Loving and Leaving the Church’. Bachelor of Communication dissertation, Monash University, Malaysia. Lonkila, Markku. 1995. ‘Grounded Theory as an Emerging Paradigm for Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis’, in U. Kelle (ed.), Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis: Theory, Methods, and Practice, pp. 41–51. London: Sage. Martin, Marion. 2000. ‘Critical Education for Participatory Research’, in Carole Truman, Donna M. Mertens and Beth Humphries (eds), Research and Inequality, pp. 191–204. London: UCL Press. Maykut, Pamela and Richard Morehouse. 1994. Beginning Qualitative Research: A Philosophic and Practical Guide. London: Falmer Press. Newman, Isadore and Carolyn R. Benz. 1998. Qualitative-Quantitative Research Methodology: Exploring the Interactive Continuum. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Payne, Michael and John Schad (eds). 2003. life.after.theory. London: Continuum. Rayment-Pickard, Hugh. 2003. Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Sarantakos, S. 1993. Social Research. South Melbourne: Macmillan Education. Seidel, John and Udo Kelle. 1995. ‘Different Functions of Coding in the Analysis of Textual Data’, in Udo Kelle (ed.) Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis: Theory, Methods and Practice, pp. 52–61. London: Sage. Siejk, Cate. 1999. ‘Learning to Love the Questions: Religious Education in an Age of Unbelief’, Religious Education, 94(2): 155–72. Full-text [online] Academic Search Premier [accessed 31 March 2005]. Taylor, Mark C. 1992. ‘Reframing postmodernisms’, in Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (eds), Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, pp. 11–29. London: Routledge. Tesch, Renata. 1990. Qualitative Research: Analysis Types and Software Tools. New York: The Falmer Press.

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Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism: Implications for Trauma Studies Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick

I

n Of Grammatology, Derrida defines logocentrism as ‘the metaphysics of phonetic writing’ that is ‘nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism’, and which, ‘in the process of imposing itself upon the world’, controls the concept of writing, the history of metaphysics, and the concept of science (1998: 3). What Derrida is primarily interested in here is the control and power immanent in logocentrism because this ethnocentric way of understanding the world necessarily shapes how one understands people, places, and concepts. In effect, logocentrism privileges not only a certain type of communication, but it privileges above all else the falsehood (for Derrida) of origins and presence. Such privileging could lend itself to a postcolonial critique: Derrida contends that logocentrism ‘begins to lay hold on world culture’ (ibid.: 4). This kind of theoretical critique would attract theorists, the like of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who translates Of Grammatology. But Derrida’s critique of logocentrism extends past a localised theoretical critique of nation or place to semiotics: ‘The idea of science and the idea of writing — therefore also of the science of writing — is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and within a world to which a certain concept of the sign (later I shall call it the concept of the sign) and a certain concept of the relationships between speech and writing, have already been assigned’ (ibid.).1 Refuting notions of origin and presence leads Derrida to refute Saussure’s rigid concept of the sign as a totality that meaningfully signifies through a pure signifier and a signified. (The signifier refers to the sound-image and the signified refers to the concept of a sign.) The goal, then, for Derrida is to ‘reach the point of a certain exteriority in relation to the totality of the age of logocentrism’ through ‘a certain deconstruction of that totality which is also a traced path’ (ibid.: 161–62). In other words, Derrida claims that we can only know

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a chain of signs, not a presence. As such, our goal should be to deconstruct signs and binary constructions to expose the existing totality of logocentrism. In ‘Lingusitics and Grammatology’, the second chapter in Of Grammatology, it becomes apparent that Derrida is arguing that there is no such thing as an essential presence of a thing (debunking phenomenology and Husserlian ‘intuition’). He counters the idea that any signified — as part of a sign — harbours any presence, other than through the play of signifiers that are themselves unstable and suggestive. On a broad scale, Derrida is refuting not only phonocentrism but logocentrism as well.2 For Derrida, the ideal of Logos (the Word, presence) is false and incompetent because it simply perpetuates erroneous thinking that contradicts itself, as Derrida illustrates in his deconstructive reading of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1966).3 Logocentrism ‘has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing’ (Derrida 1998: 43). In other words, logocentrism governs the very way we think because the dominant beliefs underpinning words, concepts, and essences are assumed and taken for granted. Deconstructing the relationship between speech and writing and showing that the relationship between the two depends on mutual influence allows Derrida to successfully combat phonocentrism. Indeed, Derrida goes so far as to assert that writing-in-general or arche-writing may be the origin of speech and that it is only through the violence of hierarchy, not through any sort of worthiness, that speech is often privileged as an immediate and more accurate representation of communication.4 In accordance with Derridean logic, I argue that the importance of texts and textuality becomes vital to considerations of lived experience, or how one is to understand one’s world and embodied state because texts are also material embodiments that display the way we think. However, language, whether written or spoken, cannot clearly denote any kind of Truth. Because the signified cannot directly relate to the signifier (Derrida’s big break with Saussurian structuralism), there cannot be direct correspondence. Instead, signs are accompanied by traces, ‘the possibility common to all systems of signification’ and that which ‘cannot be thought without thinking the retention of difference within a structure of reference where difference appears as such and thus permits a certain liberty of variations among the full

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terms’ (ibid.: 46–47). Like the idea of trace, Derrida’s concept of ‘supplement’ undermines origin and presence. Indeed, when Derrida invokes ‘supplément’, he uses it to reference both its senses in French, substitution and addition. The ‘supplement’ is always already present and signifying. According to Derrrida: [T]he infinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self. Representation in the abyss of presence is not an accident of presence; the desire of presence is, on the contrary, born from the abyss (the indefinite multiplication) of representation, from the representation of representation, etc. (ibid.: 163).

What marks Derrida’s proposed methodology of studying language and texts is the emphasis on play and signification through a chain of signifiers that bespeak difference or similarity.5 But after a concept is deconstructed or a word is emptied, what does deconstruction hope to accomplish?6 An emphasis on plurality is the effect, as well as a sort of celebration in dismantling what is embedded in a given construct as to be taken for granted. However, Derrida approves of Saussure’s concept of difference as the source of linguistic value, thereby keeping a tenet of structuralism for his poststructuralist project, but improving upon structuralism in order to expand its purview. Because a writer is already working within a system, the writer ‘writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely’ (Derrida 1998: 158). In other words, we have been so constructed by the language and logic of a system that we often take for granted what seems to us to be commonsense or true. Even if one wishes to write against a language and its logic, to some extent, the writer is constrained by the very system he or she is already working within and making sense of. Without the transcendental signified (the absence of the referent), Derrida’s famous tenet comes into play: ‘There is nothing outside of the text’ (ibid.). All that we know is confined to the context of text. For instance, what we know of Amy Lowell or Gertrude Stein in terms of their lives and their work is text and supplement; it matters how one is represented, and representation is always a text that can be read. If there is no pure signified, then it is senseless to attempt to go beyond the text to look for an absence or trace. Derrida’s concept of logocentrism and his strategies for a rigorous deconstructive reading have important ramifications for literary study

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in general. Literature, Derrida asserts, has often escaped a critical systematic reading which takes apart literature’s claim to transcendental meaning or concept.7 According to Derrida, ‘literary writing has, almost always and almost everywhere, according to some fashions and across very diverse ages, lent itself to this transcendent reading, in that search for the signified which we here put in question, not to annul it but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind’ (1998: 160). Thus, a deconstructive reading begins by accepting the absence of the referent. In other words, transcendent reading or meaning does not exist. But many critics of deconstruction argue that ‘if texts are indeed open to any number of readings with no possible appeal to standards of validity or truth — then [deconstructionists] can hardly complain that opponents have got them wrong, or that attacks on deconstruction amount to nothing more than a species of reductive travesty’ (Norris 1990: 136). With charges of reductive and relative tendencies in reading and writing coming from both deconstructionists and non-deconstructionists, each aimed at the opposite theoretical school, discussions of the ways to read and interpret need to be addressed in the college classroom in order to introduce a new generation of readers and writers to the debate; otherwise, students, especially literature students, will surely be confused by conflicting philosophies about how they are supposed to read and write.8



Implications for Trauma Studies Because Derrida’s system is not interested in reversing the power relations inherent in a binary construction, the threat of tyranny is kept at bay. Deconstruction will not switch the terms to privilege one term over the other. Moreover, ethnocentric tendencies can also be diffused in a deconstructive reading, allowing for an examination of the mechanisms at work in a given system. In short, a systematic deconstructive reading will expose a binary and then erase or rewrite the term. Differences are not subsumed, however, which is especially important in essentialist feminism or ethnic studies. Indeed, assimilation into phallogocentric or logocentric logic often results in problems or issues relating to trauma. For Derrida, différance is necessary in the formation of meaning: Meaning comes into being through difference (differ)

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and distinction (deferral). Essentially, all there is left of a supposed origin is a trace. The positive aspect of the trace for marginalised groups is its refusal of closure. The trace holds all of the possible signifieds open at the same time because signification works through a chain of signifieds and signifiers that constantly defer and refer to each other and another. Thus, there is no authoritative signified (or signifier) for the sign ‘woman’ or ‘African American’ or ‘rape victim’ that can accurately capture the idea or experience of a term. All we know is related to us through significations resulting in representations, and if these representations are unstable, the possibility for change or transformation is always open. Meaning is already textual because it has to be constructed and interpreted. Unfortunately, the voice or experience of victims cannot always be represented because they are, at times, unreadable.9 As Derrida concurs: [T]here is also the unreadability that stems from the violence of foreclosure, exclusion, all of history being a conflictual field of forces in which it is a matter of making unreadable, excluding, of positing by excluding, of imposing a dominant force by excluding, that is to say, not only by marginalizing, by setting aside the victims, but also by doing so in such a way that no trace remains of the victims, so that no one can testify to the fact that they are victims (1995: 389).

In the case of victims, their status may not be recognisable in a system that further victimises through exclusion. This supposition is important to keep in mind because it is erroneous to assume that there are no victims when victims are sometimes unable to be represented for the reasons Derrida cites. Although deconstruction cannot get beyond the system of signification, it can be used to study distinctions and binaries, and how they work.10 As such, the study of binaries, contested terms, and logocentric logic should be integral to trauma studies. After all, ‘trauma’ itself is a binary (trauma/healthy), a contested term (who legitimately suffers from trauma?), and part of logocentric logic (a hierarchy of trauma exists). Surely ‘trauma’ as a term of representation, a sign of a sign, needs to be examined as well before it can be rigorously applied in any given scholarship. In my own work, I am engaged in investigating the traumatic experience of women’s lives on the home front during the two World Wars, and further, how the representations of an embodied subjectivity manifests itself in the writing of arguably marginalised writing by mostly marginalised authors.11 It is necessary to take what

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I classify as, broadly, a poststructuralist approach because these female authors’ war experiences were marginalised and dismissed as unimportant, and the trauma they experienced and depict in their work has been rejected by phallogocentrism.12 Each of the authors I have selected has work that is out of print, and the writings I have selected to study are certainly not canonical. The logocentric argument levelled at female civilian writers is that they could not have any realistic or significant experience of war; to find authentic accounts of trauma, one must turn to male combatants or men who had more knowledge of war and war-related trauma than women, simply because they are men. The trauma induced by war, not to mention war itself, has long been considered a male problem. I argue instead that female authors have valuable contributions to make to war and trauma literature; often, these authors expose false binary relationships while also illustrating the trauma and suffering experienced by women on the home front. In addition, I contend that female authors depict active female survivors of war to counter the phallogocentric notions of war as an active man’s experience or activity, thereby effectively positioning war within the sphere of the domestic to illustrate a differently gendered experience of war than what a traditional binary construction of war would have us believe. The power of a deconstructive reading lies in its discernment of binary structures and its concern in exposing and dismantling them. For example, in this project, men are not the only active participants in war, nor are they the only ones who legitimately suffer from warrelated trauma. This logic is directly tied to phallogocentricism, and is so prevalent that a body of work and writers has subsequently been dismissed as unimportant, even though the quality of writing is as good as, if not better than, that of their successful male contemporaries. In many ways, deconstruction is a very liberal and progressive project in its aim to evenly distribute privilege and diffuse power. The power of logocentrism, what legitimates binaries, is emphasised by Derrida. Logocentrism ‘has always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed all free reflection and status of the origin’ (Derrida 1998: 43). The facility to get inside the inside/outside dichotomy defeats the binary but, in turn, presupposes potential trauma for the logocentric system. For instance, ‘nature is affected — from without — by an overturning which modifies it in its interior, denatures it and obliges it to be separated from itself. Nature denaturing itself, being separated from itself, naturally gathering its outside and its inside, is

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catastrophe, a natural event that overthrows nature, or monstrosity, a natural deviation within nature’ (ibid.: 41). In other words, ‘the sign dominates the horizon of contemporary thinking because it is no longer regarded . . . as a secondary instance which represents or communicates a prior entity; on the other hand, just when it assumes this primary position, it moves into crisis’ (Beardsworth 1996: 7). When the outside impinges on the inside, a breakdown of boundaries, albeit arbitrary, occurs, in which the inside must be reconfigured, resulting in a traumatic occurrence. It is relatively easy to see how trauma can ensue when boundaries are erased: What constitutes the inside privileged space and the outside corrupting force? When a binary breaks down, the monstrous outside must be understood as part of what defines and constitutes the inside, thus resulting in, what some may consider to be, a catastrophe. This situation plays out remarkably clearly in trauma studies, especially in Elaine Scarry’s work The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). Scarry gives one such example from her chapter ‘The Structure of War: The Juxtaposition of Injured Bodies and Unanchored Issues’: Driving down the road to X (freedom, authority), we suddenly found many people had stepped onto the road . . . and they were run over. To describe those who die as an ‘accidental entailment’ is as dismissive as to say they are a not particularly useful by-product in the first vocabulary. It is interesting that in the road metaphor . . . the human mind comes very close to articulating and understanding the nature of injury of war, but then shifts the metaphor so that the very thing that must have been intuited when the mind reached for that metaphor slipped from view (ibid.: 74).

The outside has been incorporated into the inside, and the result is a catastrophe — and yet the mind reels at being confronted with horror and wants to shift terms to diffuse the situation. Scarry argues that war simultaneously inflicts and disowns injury on civilians and combatants alike. According to her, the structure of war is such that ‘the main purpose and outcome of war is injuring’ (ibid.: 63), and yet war requires ‘the eventual disowning of the injury so that its attributes can be transferred elsewhere’ (ibid.: 64). Indeed, would we have war at all if the structure of war were laid open, and the destructive and traumatising effects on male combatants and female civilians exposed? What if war were no longer considered to be a male activity? War comprises many dangerous logocentric binaries:

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war/peace, male/female, active/passive, conservative/liberal, necessary/ unnecessary, patriotic/unpatriotic, etc. It is imperative that these binaries be deconstructed in order to understand the terms and structures that engender war. Amy Lowell’s poem ‘Dreams in War Time’ (1919) deconstructs the patriarchal binaries underpinning war and war rhetoric (see Lowell 1955). It focuses on the traumatic experience of war through the dreams of a female persona. Rather than a political, male activity fought in a contained battlefield, ‘Dreams in War Time’ depicts war as an unconstrained activity that explodes binaries; war permeates the domestic sphere and even the unconscious dreams of the female persona in the poem. We know the persona is female (and Lowell’s personas usually are) because she is introduced in the first stanza as wandering through ‘a house of many rooms’, signifying a domestic economy, a conventional representation of femininity through association of place. But Lowell subverts traditional femininity through her invocation of a rose, a traditional symbol of female beauty and sexuality. The persona is trailing her fingers along a wall when: Suddenly my hand shot through an open window, And the thorn of a rose I could not see Pricked it so sharply That I cried aloud (ibid.: 5–8).

The injury is symbolic of war injury, and it is the rose that attacks and gives offence or offers defence for purposes of survival. As such, while women are rewritten through this rose imagery as assailants, capable of the business of war and injury, women are also constituted both as survivors and as victims. Thus, women feasibly fill both roles available during wartime: active battle (i.e., survival on the home front) and passive victimisation. Moreover, in the second stanza, the persona concerns herself with the work of digging a grave. She exerts ‘infinite care’ (Lowell 1955: 10) in preparing the grave, exerting great effort in the digging of it. However, it is her own grave that she is preparing: I stooped, and dug, and never turned, For behind me, On the dried leaves, My own face lay like a white pebble, Waiting (ibid.: 16–20).

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War causalities include civilians, those managing the home front economy during wartime, all the while waiting for the traumatic ramifications of war to manifest and wreak havoc. There is no distinction between war and peace because war has no contained boundaries; in this poem, it is only a matter of time before civilians are implicated in the wartime death toll. Gender is not a marker that signifies in any important manner. Being female does not protect one from the ravages of war since home cannot be a sanctuary. The persona’s home is damaged by her neighbours, mimicking the rape of land that is the province of war. The neighbours celebrate the destruction, but the persona says: I ‘covered my face and wept,/ For ashes are not beautiful/ Even in the dawn’ (Lowell 1955: 41–43). War destroys and demoralises, and she is quick to note the trauma she endures over the ashes that once represented part of her home. She actively experiences war through injury and grieving, even though she is a civilian and removed from the front lines (where the activity of war, a battle between men, is conventionally thought to take place in the traditional war narrative). The conception of peace fostered by women on the home front during wartime, while men are fighting war, is erroneous because the binaries are unstable constructions that prove false. Lowell emphasises the futility in assigning gender to an active or passive role as regards war. Women actively participate in and experience war, and Lowell rewrites the binaries of war/peace, male/ female, active/passive in the fifth stanza to include women in what has been written and gendered as a typically male experience in war literature or narrative: I followed a procession of singing girls Who danced to the glitter of tambourines Where the street turned at a lighted corner, I caught the purple dress of one of the dancers, But, as I grasped, it tore, And the purple dye ran from it Like blood Upon the ground (ibid.: 44–51).

Like the stereotypical parade of men marching off to war amid music and fanfare, the girls march off to their foreshadowed destruction, foreshadowed by the torn dress and the blood simile. They, too, are participating in the war effort, but their effort is metaphorically portrayed. The closing of this stanza with the image of blood running

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into the ground indicates the injury and death brought by war, regardless of gender and geography. ‘Dreams in War Time’ also represents the implosion of patriotism. The persona exhibits staunch patriotism as she eagerly tends to her kite in the last stanza. The kite is reminiscent of the United States flag with its stars and white and red colour. Although a female civilian, and a civilian who has suffered from war, the persona revels in her patriotism, proving that civilian status does not automatically translate into unpatriotic behaviour or attitude (just as serving in the armed forces does not necessarily translate into patriotic behaviour or patriotic attitude). Her friends urge her to take her kite in, arguing that a storm is brewing and danger awaits on the horizon. The danger of the brewing storm suggests war, and the persona’s happiness in flying her kite, displaying her patriotism in the face of war and contention bespeaks the depth of her patriotic feelings. However, at once, lightening appears and strikes down the kite. The end of the poem (‘But still I walked on,/ In the drowning rain,/ Slowly winding up the string’ [Lowell 1955: 75–77]) is wonderfully ambiguous, denying an easy either/or binary position in relation to the persona’s attitude towards patriotism and war. She, like a soldier, perseveres in the face of war in spite of the promise of death (‘drowning rain’), and yet we do not know whether she remains patriotic as she slowly collects the remnants of her patriotism, symbolised by the flag. Throughout ‘Dreams in War Time’, Lowell successfully explodes — in an especially resonant manner for Lowell herself lived through World War I — false binaries concerning war rhetoric and war experience. War rhetoric and war experience, text and textuality, are closely intertwined. Derrida has always been clear about his stance on text and textuality. For him, there cannot be an outside; our own interpretive practices concerning how to read, for instance, bodies or a textbook, all pivot on our ability to interpret signs within a system and the ability to tease out contradictions and multiplicities in meaning/signification. However, Derrida cautions that while there is nothing beyond the text, reading strategies must be learned in order to read both the book, like Derrida’s own critical work, and a cultural sign, like a body. Indeed, Derrida says explicitly: ‘That’s why South Africa and apartheid are, like you and me, part of this general text, which is not to say that it can be read the way one reads a book’ (1986: 167–68). Bodies are already being read, whether constructed in a political (con)text like black bodies in racist settings or read as texts into texts, as in Amy

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Lowell’s poem ‘Spring Day’, in which some of her reading public ridiculed the idea of an overweight lesbian taking a bath outdoors in the first section of the poem, ‘Bath’: the suggestion was scandalous because Lowell’s body was read into the text of the poem as the text, exposed in a sort of palimpsest design, and the effect was condemned as indecent, thereby making her and her poetry readings notorious. Bodies as texts have long been read and received as such, but the rigorous reading method of deconstruction that makes explicit the mechanisms or structures underpinning our assumptions or understanding about text and textuality is not as palatable to detractors of deconstruction — probably because there are political implications of the tenet. For instance, Derrida argues that deconstructive readings and writings are ‘also effective or active (as one says) interventions in particular political and institutional interventions that transform contexts without limiting themselves to theoretical or constative utterances even though they must also produce such utterances’ (1986: 168). These interventions lend themselves to trauma studies. For instance, one of the influences in the formation of apartheid is logocentrism, the prevailing system of Word/presence akin to hegemony when pushed to its extreme limits. Derrida demonstrates in his open letter to McClintock and Nixon that Europe and the US were implicated in the South African situation of apartheid (see especially his poignant ‘Postscript’ in this regard) (ibid.). However, unlike the hegemonic influence of logocentrism, any given system, such as economics, is fraught with contradictions. And, contradictions and multiplicity are precisely what deconstructionists prefer to revel in because acknowledging such conditions perhaps can stave away a monstrous, centralised power structure; there are other factors at play, and exposing the workings of the structure may begin the work to dismantle it. As Derrida asserts: ‘[I]n fact deconstruction begins by deconstructing logocentrism, the linguistics of the word, and this very enclosure itself. On one side and the other, people get impatient when they see that deconstructive practices are also and first of all political and institutional practices’ (ibid.). Rather than being apolitical or ahistorical as many detractors of deconstruction have argued, deconstruction is, from Derrida’s perspective, immensely political and historical. Indeed, how can it be otherwise when the very material deconstruction analyses or concerns itself with is already political, historical, and overdetermined?

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In a political move, Derrida wishes to retain the term apartheid as a word that witnesses and is circulated when necessary so that the calculated and regimented monstrosity of apartheid will not be repeated in the future: ‘And if I ask that we keep the word, it is only for the future, for memory, in men’s and women’s memory, for when the thing will have disappeared’ (1986: 159). In this way, then, the mark of trauma is imprinted on the word apartheid to function as testimony to the atrocities of the meaning of apartheid; when considered in its constructed (false) totality, the sign will resonate with historical ramifications. To extend Derrida’s work, one could argue that the body is a battlefield. As Judith Butler observes, ‘[t]o be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of “woman”, to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project’ (1997: 405). The body becomes intelligible when it is marked with cultural meanings; there is no essentialist presence in Butler’s writing on embodiment. Along with Derrida, Butler cites ‘social temporality’ (ibid.: 402) as crucial to signification.13 When Derrida was asked in an interview about his seemingly disengaged position in the political field, he replied: ‘Ah, the “political field”! But I could reply that I think of nothing else, however things might appear’ (1995: 86). Later on, Derrida explains that deconstruction is not limited to a certain domain or study by a certain type of scholar: ‘The singularity of philosophy is that a domain is not given to it in advance. If there is philosophy, it is a mode of questioning or of research that does not let itself be closed up at the outset in a region of discourse or in a region of knowledge’ (ibid.: 376). As such, deconstruction is not necessarily apolitical; it can be successfully appropriated by other discourses or knowledge communities, such as feminism or trauma studies. From a deconstructionist point of view, the body is a sign that must be read and interpreted. In this process, the body becomes a text. Especially in trauma studies, bodies are violated, contested, and injured: these bodies can be read and explored through deconstruction. In order to gain a better understanding of how trauma is construed and perhaps why trauma is inflicted or experienced by a certain subject, one can employ Derrida’s critical reading strategies and concepts to traumatic situations.

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Properly applied, Derrida’s notions of logocentrism, especially with regards to war activity and rhetoric, can shed light on the situation and terms of the victim and victimiser. Deconstruction enables the reader to examine subjectivity and power relations, especially with binary structures, and this critical methodology allows for an understanding of how and why violence takes form. Ideally, deconstructionists desire to see a diffusing of power; the binary terms are dismantled to show a plethora of terms and subject positions that speak to and define the former privileged and disenfranchised terms. New ways of reading and understanding would open up and counter existing ideas and structures and perhaps offer a new system of logic. In our time of violence, it is imperative that no terms or structures go unquestioned or unexamined. And, according to Derrida, trauma is something that we can never avoid; the future always brings the promise of monsters. For Derrida, ‘the future is necessarily monstrous: the figure of the future, that is, that which can only be surprising, that for which we are not prepared, you see, is heralded by species of monsters. A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future’ (1995: 386–87).14



Notes

 This article was first published in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 6(2), 2006, and is reproduced here with permission. 1. Derrida defines the scientific study of writing as grammatology; see Derrida (1998: 323, n. 4). Derrida wishes to distance semiology — what he replaces with his ‘grammatology’ (ibid.: 51) — from linguistics. (Unfortunately, he fails to distinguish how exactly grammatology differs from semiology; it may simply be a matter of renaming and emptying out the meaning of one term to give its value to another.) According to Derrida, linguistics cannot claim scientificity when it is informed by phonology and logocentrism. He proposes grammatology as a corrective because it will constitute the science of signs, which will ‘give to the theory of writing the scope needed to counter logocentric repression and the subordination to linguistics’ (ibid.). 2. Phonocentrism is the idea that the signifier, the sound image, has some sort of natural bond with the signified, the concept; the concept of phonocentrism is also used to regulate writing as something secondary, imitative, and monstrous in its corruptive influence.

Derrida’s Deconstruction of Logocentrism ? 277 3. Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is mainly a compilation of notes from courses that he taught between 1906 and 1911. For the full text, see Saussure (1966). 4. Arche-writing is the ‘general possibility of inscription’ (Beardsworth 1996: 8). For Derrida, trace is ‘the necessary violence of any mark, and, thus of any institution’ (ibid.: 50). 5. I refer to deconstruction variously as Derrida’s methodology, analysis, and critique, but Derrida himself refers to it as ‘intervention’ because ‘deconstruction’s work is so minutely tailored to the specificity of its object’ (Borradori 2003: 138). 6. In her discerning book Philosophy in a Time of Terror, Giovanna Borradori (2003) defines the project of deconstruction: (i) identify conceptual constructions; (ii) highlight hierarchical ordering of pairs; (iii) invert or subvert ordering, ‘inversion reveals that the hierarchical arrangement reflects certain strategic and ideological choices rather than a description of features intrinsic to the pairs’; (iv) produce a third term for the binary construction, ‘which complicates the original load-bearing structure beyond recognition’ (ibid.: 138). 7. For Derrida, what we call production is necessarily a text, the system of a writing and of a reading which we know is ordered around its own blind spot (1998: 164). 8. See Gerald Graff’s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992). Graff argues that students are exposed to conversations revolving around texts, ideas, and values throughout their coursework, and students cannot begin to enter the conversation until they understand the parameters of the debate, what the terms are or even what the debate is about. Thus, Graff notes: ‘If it goes without saying in [Young Female Professor’s] class that literature is inevitably political and it goes without saying in [Old Male Professor’s] class that such a view is preposterous, the results are likely to be profoundly confusing for the student who goes from one to the other’ (ibid.: 57–58). 9. Derrida associates the value of the perfect victim with what is unreadable. ‘One of the meanings of what is called a victim (a victim of anything or anyone whatsoever) is precisely to be erased in its meaning as victim. The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. One cannot even identify the victim as victim. He or she cannot even present himself or herself as such. He or she is totally excluded or covered over by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot identify’ (1995: 389). Derrida identifies the tragedy of 9/11 as ‘an unnamable event’ (Borradori 2003: 140). 10. In fact, Judith Butler agrees that the most important task feminists can take to liberate the categorical exclusion of women is the dissection

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11.

12.

13.

14.

of binary relationships: ‘Yet, in this effort to combat the invisibility of women as a category feminists run the risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women. As feminists, we have been less eager, I think, to consider the status of the category itself and, indeed, to discern the conditions of oppression which issue from an unexamined reproduction of gender identities which sustain discrete and binary categories of man and woman’ (1997: 407). In particular, I have selected the following authors and genres to study for my book project: Amy Lowell’s war poetry, Hilda Doolittle’s war poetry and autobiographical writing, Gertrude Stein’s war novels and auto-biographical writing, and Djuna Barnes’s notes and novel. See the following primary sources: Lowell (1916), Doolittle (1956, 1960, 1988); Stein (1972, 1984, 1988, 1995a, 1995b); and Barnes (1995, 2005). I completely agree with Derrida in his interview, located in the chapter ‘Passages — from Traumatism to Promise’ in Points when he discusses the texts that are initially rejected as aberrant: ‘Texts and discourses that provoke at the outset reactions of rejection, that are denounced precisely as anomalies or monstrosities are often texts that, before being in turn appropriated, assimilated, acculturated, transform the nature of the field of reception, transform the nature of social and cultural experience, historical experience. All of history has shown that each time an event has been produced, for example in philosophy or poetry, it took the form of the unacceptable, or even of the intolerable, of the incomprehensible, that is, of a certain monstrosity’ (1995: 387). Amy Lowell was ridiculed in her time for performing her poetry as a female, overweight woman who insisted on writing poetry that was feminist and concerned with embodiment. Attention to the literature treating Hilda Doolittle’s painful war experience has been usurped by canonical attention focusing on her early (and less contentious) Imagist work. Gertrude Stein’s novel Mrs. Reynolds (1995b) was dismissed as treating war too superficially because the entire novel is dedicated to a female civilian’s experience of war. Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1995) contains a motif of war, and yet too few critics have mentioned the influence of war on Nightwood. Barnes herself died in virtual obscurity after T. S. Eliot broke ties with her and refused to champion her later work. For Butler, ‘gender is in no way a stable identity of locus of agency from which various acts proceede [sic]; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time — an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (1997: 402; first emphasis added). Derrida says that the future must be monstrous; otherwise, it would be a ‘predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow’ (1995: 387).

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References Barnes, Djuna.1995 (1936). Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, ed.Cheryl J. Plumb. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive. ———. 2005. Collected Poems with Notes Toward the Memoirs, ed. Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Beardsworth, Richard. 1996. Derrida and the Political. New York: Routledge. Borradori, Giovanna. 2003. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, pp. 401–17. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1986. ‘But, Beyond… (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon)’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 13: 155–70. ———. 1995. Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doolittle, Hilda. 1956. Tribute to Freud. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1960. Bid Me to Live: A Madrigal. New York: Dial. ———. 1998 (1944–46). Trilogy. New York: New Directions. Graff, Gerald. 1992. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton. Lowell, Amy. 1916. Men, Women and Ghosts. Boston: Houghton. ———. 1955. ‘Dreams in War Time’, in The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Boston: Houghton. Norris, Christopher. 1990. What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1972. Selected Writing of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage. ———. 1984 (1945). Wars I Have Seen. London: Brilliance. ———. 1988 (1946) Brewsie and Willie. London: Brilliance. ———. 1995a (1953). Lifting Belly, ed. Rebecca Mark. Tallahassee: Naiad. ———. 1995b (1952). Mrs. Reynolds. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon

 12

Is Translation a Mode? R. Radhakrishnan

A

s I wonder how I am qualified to contribute to the theme of translation, a couple of factors come up. I am a translator myself. I translate contemporary Tamil fiction into English, and I have also been guilty of translating my Tamil poems into English. As a translator, I both squirm in pleasure and revel in agony in that place of the ‘between’ that compels the translator to realise her simultaneous love of two languages as a monogamous commitment to ‘pure language’. The other factor has to do with my gratitude for the sheer fact that translated texts are allowed to enjoy academic legitimacy; and here I am thinking of the ongoing debate in graduate departments of literature in the United States about how to enforce the ‘foreign language requirement’, and whether to allow doctoral students to work on the basis of translated texts. But for the reality of translations, Walter Benjamin (1968a) and Jacques Derrida (1998) would be foreign ‘babel’ to my ‘other’ ears. God knows how ‘pure’ sounds and means in German, or for that matter, ‘differance’ in French! Add to this the further confusion that though Tamil is my mother tongue and English my so-called second language, affiliatively speaking, English is as intimately, expressively and amorously mine as is Tamil. As Derrida put it so elegantly: ‘We only ever speak one language. We never speak just one language’ (1998: 7). The monolingualism of the Other is but thematic variation of the multilingualism within the self. There can neither be complete and exhaustive multilingualism nor a pure language secure in its omniscient inclusiveness of the many. To speak is to resonate as echo both within and without, in search of an absent original. One other prefatory act of framing before I actually address Walter Benjamin (1968a) in English: my active subterranean concern in this essay is the issue of globality and its ideological connection with the question of language. Assuming that the world speaks, in which ‘global’ language does it speak? Is ‘globality’ realisable in

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many languages, accents, dialects, or does it have to be secured as the sovereignty of one hegemonic language? In other words, how literal or allegorical is our use of the concept ‘globality’? Most significantly, how and why does the language called English receive such prominence under the aegis of globality? Why global English, and not global Arabic or French or Hindi or Russian or Greek or Tamil? No blueprint of globality can be a fait accompli. Every global orientation has to be unpacked, thoroughly genealogised with all historical traces rigorously acknowledged and accounted for in an asymmetrical world that is ruthlessly structured in dominance. To put it simply, just as it is imperative to say ‘colonial modernity’, and not just ‘modernity’, similarly, ‘global English’ has to be parsed and historicised as postcolonial and decolonised English. I am not for a moment suggesting that languages like English and French should be criminalised forever, without parole or a statute of limitations, in the name of their once having been the language of the colonisers. On the contrary, I would argue that strong discriminations need to be made between the critical–utopian potential of languages and their inevitable entrapment in historical circumstantialities. This was exactly what was at stake in the momentous debate between Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o about the relationship between lifeworlds and language-worlds. The postcolonial deterritorialisation of English is an important, but not the only or the most crucial, component of the larger project of a multilateral globalism. My concern is that in furthering and legitimating the elaboration between globality and a de-and re-territorialised English, we should not become guilty of the hubris that characterised Salman Rushdie’s ill advised claim on behalf of the achievements of literary English in post-independence India.1 With these concerns as the implicit tenor, I now approach the vehicle of my essay: the linguistic mode known as translation. Here, then, is Walter Benjamin: Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability. The question of whether a work is translatable has a dual meaning. Either: Will an adequate translator ever be found among the totality of its readers? Or, more pertinently: Does its nature lend itself to translation and, therefore, in view of the significance of the mode, call for it? In principle, the first question can be decided only contingently; the second, however, apodictically (1968a: 70).

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Let us take a look at that innocuously powerful statement: Translation is a mode. On a register that is typically weak-Messianic, Benjamin declares the strength of translation in a vulnerable mode even as he acknowledges its weakness with transcendent strength. Benjamin insists that the only way to understand, interpret, and valorise translation is ‘modally’. In other words, translation enjoys its integrity as well as sovereignty as its own thing: as methodology, procedurality, as formal autonomy. The truth of the translation can be nothing other than the truth of its modality. But as soon as he announces the ineluctable modality of ‘translation’, he also declares the limitations of modality as such. The autonomy of the mode is in fact heteronomous, for, a mode also has to be a mode of something prior. This heteronomy is legitimately sanctioned by way of a quality called ‘translatability’, a characteristic intrinsic to the original and thereby made available as the first principle that will govern the project of translation. Not quite the dangerous supplement, à la Jacques Derrida, and not quite the acquiescent commentary that ‘comes after’ in a spirit of apostolic secondarity, translation as a mode teases out of, to borrow from Edward Said, ‘the linguicity’ (1975: 340) of the original something called ‘translatability’. In effect, Benjamin declares: no translatability, then no language. To avail of the Lacanian register, the ‘original’ is structured like a language and is therefore constitutively vulnerable to translatability. In other words, even if the task of the translator were not heralded, even then translatability would reside in the original as its unavoidable alter ego or simulacrum. From such an understanding of translation and translatability, Benjamin derives a ‘dual meaning’. He poses two questions, one of which elicits a contingent or historical/secular response; and the other, an apodictic or necessary, or in Benjamin’s terms, a posthumanist and non-anthropocentric response. Translation requires this duality; as a matter of fact, it thrives between contingency and apodictic necessity.2 The hailing of the translator as human agent is historically contingent whereas the ‘interpellation’, if you will, of the mode is apodictic. The ‘task’ then of the translator partakes both of the contingency of historical juncture and of the axiomatic necessity that translation in fact does not require a human translator. Perhaps I should explain why I introduced ‘non-anthropocentric’ and ‘post-humanist’, terms that Benjamin himself does not use. One of the cardinal strengths of Benjamin’s essay is its allegorical

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obliqueness: its ability to create several vehicle–tenor relationships whereby themes that are not explicitly developed work themselves out through allusion and indirection. For example, historiography and history as theory are part of the armature that subtends the rationale of the essay; and yet, at no point does Benjamin overtly address the relationship of history to itself and to the theme of transcendence. Let us take a look at the charming but assertive didacticism of the opening paragraph of Benjamin’s essay: In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a certain Public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an ‘ideal’ Receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man’s physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener (1968a: 69; emphasis added).

It is quite amazing how within the span of a short paragraph Benjamin establishes a number of authoritative articulations among major themes such as art, man’s physical and spiritual existence, and the nature of man as such. It would be a great mistake to construe this passage as no more than a passionate advocacy of aestheticism and the theory of ‘art for art’s sake’. On the contrary, Benjamin’s postulation mandates into existence a normative relationship between art and the very existence and nature of man, and here is the unique Benjaminian twist. It is precisely by alienating ‘man’s response’ while seeming to invoke it that art ‘de-anthrop-centres’ the human being and demystifies it of the humanist–essentialist lie of ‘as-such-ness’. It is by eviscerating the human of a false ‘human-ness’ that art redeems the historicity of humanity. It should be noted that Benjamin takes special care to discredit even ‘the ideal reader’. Benjamin’s intentions are quite other than those of say Roman Ingarden, or Wolfgang User, or any of the canonical reader–response and reception theory specialists. Benjamin rejects both the historically flawed reader as well as the so-called ideal reader for the very simple and yet profound reason that ‘intentionality’ is not addressed at all: neither to the nonideal nor to the ideal receiver. The objective reality of the art work is independent and transcendent of the presence of the historical receiver. The falling of the tree would make a sound even if there

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were no human ear to witness that sound as a humanly received and receivable sound. It would appear that Benjamin is interested in the neo-Kantian project of establishing through the art work the regime of the in-itself, of the noumenal. But, not so fast: Benjamin’s theses are never that simple or orthodox. To understand the argumentative intention of Benjamin’s post-humanist appreciation of art, let me juxtapose another passage from his essay with the one just quoted: One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance. Analogously, the translatability of linguistic creations ought to be considered even if men should prove unable to translate them. Given a strict concept of translation, would they not really be translatable to some degree? The question as to whether the translation of certain linguistic creations is called for ought to be posed in this sense. For this thought is valid here: If translation is a mode, translatability must be an essential feature of certain works (Benjamin 1968a: 70–71).

Out of nowhere, through a tremendous theoretical sleight of hand, Benjamin brings in notions of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ in the context of ‘translation’ as a work of art. Perhaps this is the kind of thinking through analogies and displacements that displeased Theodor Adorno (1977), but this precisely is what makes Benjamin more transgressively insightful than even the redoubtable Adorno himself. The art–translation synonymy has already been effected, and the act of ‘reading’ or ‘receiving’ has been transformed into performances of remembering and forgetting; God, both as a nonname and as the Name of all names, enters the scene as a weak but necessary horizon. But a further qualification needs to be made here: God is not directly posited or adumbrated, but invoked as an absent but potential site where the human can be redeemed in all its plenitude, where the plenitude is not intrinsically human but is rather the function or the consequence of figuring as the object of God’s remembrance. Is God someone or a radical no one in Benjamin’s scheme of things? My sense is that, like Franz Kafka, Benjamin too is an agnostic gnostic: the reference to God is not so much an ostensive gesture towards God, but rather a summary thematisation of human

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finitude and a radical dissatisfaction with this finitude. The question is this: why should God remember at all? Why should God be burdened with remembrance at all? Here is Benjamin’s answer in Thesis III of his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. ‘To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments’ (Benjamin 1968c: 254). Redemption by definition cannot be based on an agnostic premise. The total citability of the past is not just a function of a total recall; citability is not mere remembrance, it is remembrance plus understanding. It is also remembrance of what was permitted to be forgotten by dominant historiographies written from the point of view of the victor. Even if no actual one remembers a particular incident, that incident has a place in God’s remembrance. Benjamin’s reliance on God’s remembrance as the final refuge has to be placed in the context of Fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust. The Benjamin who seeks God’s remembrance as the ultimate receptacle where not even the minutest moment in history will be forgotten is the same Benjamin who offers us the following caveat: ‘Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious’ (Benjamin 1968c: 255). Derrida alerts us to this anti-or post-humanistic register in Benjamin’s essay: From the very title — and for the moment I stay with it — Benjamin situates the problem, in the sense of that which is precisely before oneself as a task, the problem of the translator and not that of translation (nor, be it said in passing, and the question is not negligible, that of the translatoress), Benjamin does not say the task or the problem of translation. He names the subject of translation, as an indebted subject, obligated by a duty, already in the position of heir, entered as survivor in a genealogy, as survivor or agent of sur-vival. The sur-vival of works, not authors. Perhaps the sur-vival of authors’ names and of signatures, but not of authors (Derrida 2002: 114).

It is easy to see where exactly Derrida finds common cause with Benjamin: in the de-authorisation of the human being by the authority of language, or to put it differently, in the textualisation or linguification of human meaning. Whereas the survival of works will ensure the survival of language both intra-and inter-lingually,

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the survival of authors would just be a pandering to their egocentric intentionality in so far as it feigns to lodge its authority extra-textually and extra-linguistically. Both in the Benjamin text and in the Derrida essay, the terms ‘translation’ and ‘language’ function both literally and as conceptmetaphors, to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s locution.3 It is time now to investigate in what zone or discourse these terms acquire their meaning. Let us take the phenomenon of translatability: is this an intra-lingual, or an inter-lingual or a pure-lingual characteristic? In particular, how is ‘translatability’ as the constitutive ‘essence’, if I could use that word within quotation marks, distributed within a language and between languages; moreover, what authority controls and supervises the relationship between the intra-and the inter-lingual dimensions of translatability? How does translatability as such govern the relationship between the source language and the target language? Nowhere in his essay does Benjamin show any awareness of a potential Eurocentrism in his formulations, nor does he ask the important question: ‘in what language is translatability posed and theorised’? Derrida raises precisely this issue in his essay: One should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised and into which a discourse on translation is translated. First: in what tongue was the tower of Babel constructed and deconstructed? In a tongue within which the proper name of Babel could also, by confusion, be translated by ‘confusion’ (2002: 104).

‘The tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised’ (ibid.) is often disavowed as a tongue and naturalised as a world-view or as a form of pre-linguistic, lived, and believed conceptuality. That is exactly why questions like the following arise: multilingualism from which linguistic point of view, whose multiculturalism, whose version of namelessness or unnameability, whose version of eclecticism, etc.4 As Derrida has argued, at some point in the discussion or contestation among equals, suddenly one proper name commits a coup, and in having become a proper name, refuses the obligation to be historically unpacked and rendered syntactic. The proper name could be Israel, Babel, Hari, Allah, or Christ. It is indeed a truly Derridean problematic: of centrism as such and just of any specific centrism such as andro-, gyno-, Afro-, Euro-, logo-, phono- or photocentrism.

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If there are many tongues leading to one common reality, then there are two questions that insist on an answer. First, in which language does that one reality speak; to adopt Benjamin’s terminology, is that reality modal, to be translated, or always already translated? Second, in which language is the statement, ‘All languages lead to one reality’ most powerful and persuasive? Here is Benjamin on the essential relationship among languages: Wherein resides the relatedness of two languages, apart from historical considerations? Certainly not in the similarity between works of literature or words. Rather, all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole — an intention, however which no single language can attain by itself but which is realised only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language (Benjamin 1968a: 74).

In this passage Benjamin is seeking to theorise the foreignness of all languages. This, to be sure, is to admit that all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages. An instant and final rather than a temporary and provisional solution of this foreignness remains out of reach of mankind; at any rate, it eludes any direct attempt . . . In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were. It cannot live there permanently, to be sure, and it certainly does not reach it in its entirety. Yet, in a singularly impressive manner, at least it points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages (ibid.: 75; emphasis added).

Here again is Benjamin insisting that it ‘is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work’ (ibid.: 80). Finally, this famously resonant passage: Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel (ibid.: 78).

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In the first passage just quoted in typical fashion, as in his celebrated essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin (1968b) refuses to give the ‘origin’ any originary or primordial value. Happy neither with the notion of a primordial origin that anchors all history in its transcendent womb, nor satisfied with the mere contingencies of history (what Edward Said, taking his cue from Giambattista Vico, would celebrate as ‘secular history’), Benjamin attempts to secure the relatedness, and not the oneness, of languages in some other founding principle. Here again, Benjamin’s quarrel with history is not that of the formalist or the textualist or the aesthete, but rather that of a victim of history who has no reason to believe, given the history of history as Foucault would have it, in the ethical rectitude of history. His emphasis that the kinship of languages should belong to the order of the ‘suprahistorical’ is based on his desire to protect this vital relationship from the ravages of history. He, therefore, intuits into language ‘intention’, an ‘intention’ that no language by definition can possess completely on its own. If intention is constitutive, I would even say genetic, of language, and if furthermore, no one language can hoard or monopolise intention, then it follows axiomatically that the kinship among languages precedes: (1) any historical determination of the being of language, and (2) any language’s so called atomic or monadic or autonomous individuality. The question that bothers me here is this. In his endeavour to normativise, by way of an a priori, the fundamental relatedness of all languages, is Benjamin guilty of ‘naturalizing’ the a priori, rather than take up responsibility for its theoretical constructedness? Why else would he use terms such as ‘kinship’ and ‘family’, terms that are fraught with a filial and pious organicism? My focus here is on the notion of ‘pure language’. On what basis does Benjamin claim that the legitimation of the intrinsic and spiritual and suprahistorical kinship among languages, based of course on the critical awareness that no language is a complete intentional world unto itself, results in the possibility of ‘pure language’? Why would Benjamin commit the sin of essentialism or go against language in the name of language? Could he be construed as going against the historicity of language in the name of the spirit of language? In which language is the purity announced and practised? In what modality is the purity of language recognised? From a poststructuralist perspective, it would appear that Benjamin begins on

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a Derridean register but ends up with a Heideggerian message. To explain further, initially Benjamin makes the important diagnosis that linguistic intention and ‘language as world’ are possible only in the form of a perennially shifting differential distribution among the different languages of the world. But, in the end, he ends up positing this radical difference in relationality in an essentialist mode, i.e., the non-language of purity. Either that, or, Benjamin has willed his theory to find the world of spirit in the comforting authority of meta-language. There is a certain circularity in the way Benjamin posits the relationship between the ‘trans-historicity’ of ‘pure language’ and the ‘trans-historicity’ of the kinship among languages. Derrida offers us a way of making sense of this circularity: The translation contract, in this transcendental sense, would be the contract itself, the absolute contract, the contract form of the contract, that which allows a contract to be what it is. Will one say that the kinship among languages presupposes this contract or that the kinship provides a first occasion for the contract? One recognises here a classic circle. It has always begun to turn whenever one asks oneself about the origin of languages or society. Benjamin, who often talks about the kinship among languages, never does so as a comparatist or as a historian of languages. He is interested less in families of languages than in a more essential and more enigmatic connection, an affinity which is not sure to precede the trait or the contract of the to-be-translated (2002: 119).

Derrida in this passage identifies the crucial source of energy in Benjamin’s essay: the ongoing dynamic between the nature of language and Benjamin’s need for the transcendence of history. The real question is: how does Benjamin braid these two themes together? Which of the two themes is the vehicle and which is the tenor in Benjamin’s weak-Messianic allegory? As Derrida points out, Benjamin in his own unobtrusively but didactically non-modal way has chosen not to be a comparatist or a historian of languages. But why? What is that ‘more essential and more enigmatic connection’ that he seeks, a connection precluded in comparatism and the study of the history of languages? As we have already observed, Benjamin has a deep quarrel with history and its mode of adjudicating winners and losers and its way of remembering life and its past. His quarrel with history is both ontological as well as epistemological, both

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thematic and generic: in other words, the quarrel is both with what history is (history as ontology) and what history knows (history as knowledge). It is important for Benjamin to nest the potentiality of God’s remembrance (metaphorically and through metonymy) in a pure language that both allows and controls the play of multeity. It is as though he is deconstructing and constructing the Tower of Babel. Is this hubris? Is this an instance of a self-appointed Messiah displaying nothing less than God’s power itself? There is no question, however, that Benjamin is reminding all languages, each mired in its own naturalised absoluteness, of the foreignness of all languages. But having achieved this masterly critique of the ethno-logocentrism of each and every individual language, does Benjamin fail to mark his own centrism — Eurocentrism? Is he a little too self-assured of his rightful capacity to speak for the alterity of pure language to be mindful of the power imbalances that animate and inform the relationship among the different languages of the world: imbalances that result in the ‘othering’ of minor, marginal, and subaltern languages? Despite these strong reservations, there is so much in Benjamin’s thesis that needs to be taken to heart. His uncompromising insistence on the foreignness of all languages enables the poignant and powerful understanding that there is no language that is not always already a translation. In other words, each language needs to be translated to itself in the name of a greater language. It is quite telling that Benjamin should use the image of a vessel and fragments, dare we say, its fragments. The ‘vessel’, whether one invokes Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of ‘the jug’ or not, instantly raises the issue of the content and the container (see Heidegger 1977). The integrity of the vessel is both with reference to its form and its contents. A vessel that does not faithfully and effectively contain is a failed vessel; and it is obvious that nothing exemplifies the vessel theme better than language, that ultimate form and container of meaning. So, the vessel breaks and there are fragments that can be glued together, in replication and in the name of the shape of the original. But, if as Derrida would have it, an enigma is what Benjamin is after, then the vessel has to be construed from the fragments as an a posteriori, but as though it were an a priori. On what basis of prior re-cognition will the fragments be pieced together so that they form a vessel? To know anything as a fragment is to betray some tacit knowledge of an enigmatic totality. What is clear here is that the

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fragments take on a name such as German, Italian, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Arabic, whereas the greater language remains nameless. Did namelessness precede the fragmented regimes of names; or is it the case that the zone of namelessness is produced pre-post-erously in the name of the inadequacies of the fragments? To be specific, how is consent to be produced from the fragments that they are all part of a greater vessel? Benjamin’s caveat that any act of translation between any two languages, except under the aegis of the greater vessel, would be nothing but an act of mutual aggression needs to be taken seriously. It is in the name of the commitment to the total and one vessel that Benjamin hopes that the historical relationships of power and authority between language-fragments can be neutralised and inflected instead as ethical responses to the authority of the pure One. Derrida offers us an interesting gloss on ‘this movement of love, the gesture of this loving one (liebend) that is at work in the translation’. It does not reproduce, does not restitute, does not represent; as to the essential, it does not render the meaning of the original except at that point of contact or caress, the infinitely small of meaning. It extends the body of languages, it puts language into symbolic expansion, and symbolic here means that, however little restitution there be to accomplish, the larger, the new vaster aggregate, has still to reconstitute something. It is perhaps not a whole, but it is an aggregate in which openness should not contradict unity (Derrida 2002: 122; emphasis added).

It is quite astonishing how Benjamin’s rhetoric presages the rhetoric of Derrida and his anticipation of cosmopolitan communities to come: a perennial openness towards unity but not totality. The delicate task is to invoke this unity in vulnerability and not in hubris, and not with the guarantee that this unity is omnipresent in its totality. Benjamin takes great pains not to make absolute and permanent claims on behalf of translation, as in the passage quoted in preceding discussion where he suggests that translation, having risen ‘into a higher and purer linguistic air’, ‘cannot live there permanently, to be sure, and it certainly does not reach it in its entirety’ (Benjamin 1968a: 75). What it does is to point ‘the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment of languages. The transfer can never be total, but what reaches this region is that

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element in a translation which goes beyond transmittal of the subject matter’ (ibid.). As Derrida would have it, ‘the pure untranslatable and the pure transferable here pass into the other’ (2002: 123). True enough; and yet in his zealous endorsement of Benjamin’s formulation, Derrida overlooks the strain in Benjamin’s discourse between allegory and history. The ease with which Benjamin refers to ‘the reconciliation and fulfilment of languages’ in the same sentence as though ‘reconciliation’ and ‘fulfilment’ were themes in affinity is truly astounding. What I find worrisome in Benjamin’s utopian discourse is the utter lack of conflictuality, of any awareness of relationships of power, hegemony, and dominance among languages. The result is that ‘reconciliation’ sounds all too felicitous and the ensuing fulfilment seems like an allegorical fait accompli. It is precisely because Benjamin is not a historian of language that he is impervious to the struggle between languages, major and minor languages, aristocratic and demotic tongues, hegemonic languages and vernaculars. Much like Heidegger and very much unlike Antonio Gramsci, Benjamin is happy to contemplate language in an allegorical void. History, of course, tells us again, particularly in the context of nation-formation and the corresponding need for national languages, that reconciliation among languages is often a euphemism for the submission of the weaker language to the will of the dominant language. Languages, in history, are severely vernacularised and the nation state takes part with a vengeance in the hegemonisation of some languages, and a summary ‘othering’ of other languages. The ‘being’ of any language is very often the result of power-brokering and strategies of gerrymandering among power groups and bargaining constituencies. Unlike as in Benjamin’s idealist–romantic scenario, the fulfilment of one language is predicated on the abjection and impoverishment of another language. Wars have been fought and bitter and copious blood shed in the name of linguistic fanaticism and chauvinism. The fact that Benjamin’s expertise and sensibility do not turn in that direction does not mean that these painful realities do not exist. So, why is it that Benjamin who is so concerned that no language should perpetrate violence on another in the name of its own hegemonic centrism so unmindful of real historical violences and usurpations and pre-emptions in the name of comparatism? The answer lies in the braiding together of two themes in Benjamin’s discourse: God’s remembrance as the answer to the brutalities of history and the theme of the ‘original’ as enunciated by language.

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Let me begin with the broad claim that in Benjamin’s perspective, revisionism or the ‘looking back’ (and who can forget Benjamin’s magnificent reading of Paul Klee’s painting ‘Angelus Novus’) is in fact the most authentic way of looking forward towards the future. It is in this critical production of the future as the promise of a fully remembered past that the ‘original’ is implicated in a contradictory relationship with itself.5 On the one hand, Benjamin will have none of the mystique of the original, but on the other hand, for a different set of reasons, he will court the original in a phenomenological mode. There really is no future but a future anteriority, and the plenitude of the original is available in that improbable temporality known as ‘God’s remembrance’. And here is the conundrum. If God by definition always was, is, and will be, then by definition he is trans-temporal, trans-historical, beyond any theory of the verb. What does God remember: his own utter tense-less-ness? Unless God is given absolute primordiality, there is no point in relying on God’s remembrance. If God’s remembrance is to make whole what is shattered, it will have to achieve this transformation in the name of an original wholeness, i.e., a wholeness that has always been there for God and not for humanity, a wholeness that has to be presented to humanity as a historical plenitude by way of God’s remembrance. ‘In the beginning is the end’, which is why Paradise is both the origin and the destination. The interesting question for Benjamin, as it is for Kafka as well, is this: is Paradise literal or figurative? Is God’s remembrance an article of faith or a trope, true or figural? The same ambivalence haunts Benjamin’s notion of pure language: literal or metaphorical? In the following passage, Benjamin would want to have it both ways with ‘the pure language’: consecrate it as primordial and at the same time make it a function of a modal production. A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade . . . In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolises or something symbolised. It is the former only in the

294 ? R. Radhakrishnan finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of languages themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language (Benjamin 1968a: 79).

This is a fascinating passage, with a number of conceptual twists and turns. Let us turn first to the status of the original and its relationship to the pure language. The pure language seems both dependent and independent of external agency. It requires ‘reinforcement’, but by its own medium. The mediation, in other words, is more of a self-revelation of ‘pure language’ to itself: no alienation here, no production but instead a re-presentation of presence. What is interesting here is Benjamin’s use of ‘as though’: ‘as though reinforced by its own medium’. Benjamin talks in a double voice: it is in fact the transparency of the real translation, its ontological politics of Gelassenheit, that allows the light to shine, but on the other hand, it seems, despite the agency of the translation, that the pure language is haunting itself, as its own medium. It is precisely because the agency of the real translation is transparent, i.e., close to not being an agent at all, that pure language is both revealed and concealed during the moment of illumination. This formulation is strikingly similar to Heidegger’s formulation of the ‘holding void’ of the jug that constitutes the jug-ness of the jug. There are some real historical consequences when we travel with Benjamin’s theory towards specific translation projects. A word-oriented approach tacitly accepts some sort of ideational or conceptual correspondence among languages. Flattering though such a vision is, what does it actually mean and how does it work both intra-and inter-lingually? Benjamin uses the examples of brot in German and pain in French, but these examples of object words simplify the real problem. What is problematic in Benjamin’s literal word-centred theory of translation is the assumption that ‘the word’ within its own language makes proximal sense to itself without the labour of syntax. Equally problematic is the nonchalance with which Benjamin asks, quite magisterially in the name of a latent Eurocentrism: ‘For what is meant by freedom but that the rendering of the sense is no longer to be regarded as all-important’ (1968a: 79)? Whose sense though and from whose point of view? If say, Arabic makes sense to itself in a certain way, is it not the obligation of the translator to be faithful to this sense without in any way fetishising or essentialising it? Why is it more important to celebrate the allegory

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of Freedom at the expense of a laborious intra- and inter-historical fidelity? My point is that the choice cannot be between an enslaving fidelity and a trans-creative freedom. The task of the translator is to dwell rigorously in the tension between fidelity and freedom in such a way that neither pre-empts the claim of the other. Many of Benjamin’s assumptions are just a hop-skip-and-jump away from the anthropological premise that the ‘other’s meaning’ is already available to the self by way of a universal lexicon, that the historical ‘being-for itself’ of the ‘other’ is immediately cognisable and recognisable within a family tree of essentialised meanings. What is foreclosed in this scheme of things is the reality that meaning and intelligibility are always worked out syntactically within each language. A syntactic translation is always more difficult, awkward, and clumsy, indicative therefore of a world that is identical in difference and different in identity. But Benjamin’s theoretical world, and here I would concur with Theodor Adorno’s critique (1977), is based on dialectical imaging and mystical correspondences. Alarming as it may sound, Benjamin’s vision of a world held together by a pure language based on literal correspondences is at the other and progressive side of the same continuum whose right wing is policed by Samuel Huntington and the so-called ‘Clash of Civilisations’. My point is not to insult Benjamin’s allegorical utopianism by bracketing it with the Us–Them virulence of Huntington (1996), but merely to point out that the effects of overlooking history in the name of an unproven oneness of the spirit could potentially be as disastrous as a civilisational identity politics that denies coevalness among different histories. To be fair to Benjamin, he does attempt to differentiate between the historical (finite) and the utopian (infinite) registers of languages when he aligns what can be conveyed and communicated with the finite products of language, and the ineffable with the ‘evolving of languages themselves’ (1968a: 79). The evolving aspect of language and the communicating aspect of language always coexist; and the challenge is to make sure that the evolving aspect, which always entails a certain amount of current or present loss in the name of utopian compensation, leads the way rather than the other way around. Selftranscendence has to be built into every moment of the becoming of language. Even here, what impairs Benjamin’s hope and trust in the ‘evolving of languages’ (1968a: 79) towards a commonly shared infinity of purpose is his resolute refusal to consider the very evolution

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of languages as historical. The fact of the matter is that within any cultural and or nation state formation, the evolution of one language comes in the way of the evolution of another. Some evolutions are born with dominance, others acquire hegemony through politicking and state support, whereas other developments remain episodic and stagnant in their subaltern formations. And, as we know, the painful question is: can the subaltern speak? Within each nation state, think tanks of intellectuals and educationists and policy makers work in complicity with the nation state to produce binding documents on monolingualism and multilingualism: entire ranges of pidgin, patois, dialects, and vernaculars are summarily dismissed from the scene of action and privatised relentlessly. As we fast forward Benjamin into our own times and places, I wonder what he would have to say about global English dressing itself up as global language? How would he be even aware of, leave alone combat, the frightening possibility that the infinite purity of language he is dreaming of will be realised as the evolving purity of the English language that will take on the task of cleansing all other languages of their impurity and finitude? What would he have to say about the United States, which is where he might have migrated to had he not been jinxed by a cruel and ironic fate, and its policy of one nation, one language, namely, English? What would he have to contribute to strident debates in postcolonial nations and cultures that are struggling against heavy odds to keep their languages alive and current with the world spirit that seems to have been hijacked by the dominant languages? How would Benjamin, with his poignant hope in ‘God’s remembrance’, deal with the possibility that many languages and dialects around the world are bleeding to death for lack of administrative and governmental support? Would he not be horrified that the purity of language he is envisioning is in fact being enacted step by step towards its dystopic denouement? Would he even have a language in which he could condemn the linguistic cleansing that has become a feature of our times and the social Darwinism that presides over our languages and our lives? So, what goes wrong with Benjamin’s intention, with his linguistic intention? There are two systemic/discursive flaws in Benjamin’s theory of language: flaws that no amount of individual or authorial goodwill can remedy. The first problem has to do with the very term ‘purity’. To put it very simply, ‘purity’ cannot be a good word. I would much rather go the Bakhtinian way of celebrating the ‘carnivalesque’,

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the dirty, the impure, and the improper. Purity can never be a given unless one believes in the immaculate formula: In my beginning is my end/ The Alpha is the Omega. Purity can only be an exclusionary and sanitising production. What I find mind-boggling is that the same Benjamin who would want to brush history against the grain and diagnose into reality the barbarism inherent in every document of civilisation has no hesitation whatever in using the term ‘purity’. How does ‘pure language’ become a desirable utopian horizon whereas ‘pure race’ is reprehensible? Is utopianism in fact nothing but an invocation of ‘purity’? Is the withering away of the state an opening into ‘purity’? Is purity a presence or an absence, a naming or a letting be of the infinite? Even if it were a letting be, from whose or what perspective? What is missing in Benjamin’s world picture is that most Nietzschean as well as Marxian of concepts: perspectivism. The expectation of ‘God’s remembrance’ is not just that it be complete, total, and all inclusive, but also that God’s remembrance be in the name of those who have been condemned as losers by history. In other words, God’s remembrance cannot be merely descriptive: it cannot just repeat the Hitlers and the Gandhis without discrimination. It has to be a redemptive memory. God’s remembrance has to participate in human history in ambivalence: record with total fidelity and change history, make whole what was once in pieces. To conflate Benjamin somewhat unsystematically with Michel Foucault, it is in God’s counter-memory that history is righted. But in Benjamin’s eclectic and messianic mix of vocabularies, God becomes real: an actual Being who is capable of remembering, rather than be a mere trope or a vessel brought into existence by the act of remembering. As I have argued earlier on in the context of my analysis of the ‘vessel and the fragments thereof’, there really is no vessel except as a retro-active reconstitution of the fragments. Once the rhetoric of messianism is invoked, even in its weak mode, the truths of history are inevitably supernaturalised and God’s remembrance is incarnated as a metaphysical horizon. In taking the leap of faith, Benjamin’s discourse eviscerates history of its historicity. The second flaw with Benjamin’s allegorical realism, if I could call it that, is its obsession with the alterity of God’s remembrance, the big ‘O’ in other words. Benjamin’s allegory entirely overlooks the historical ground where all that is ascertainable is a world structured in dominance where the self–other dynamic is being played out in

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terms of power and the unevenness that power produces. Between the historical verities of the any and every moment in life, and the possibility that this any and every moment could be the opening through which might enter a messianic temporality, there exists an enormously unbridgeable and unmediated gap: and it is this gap that makes a martyr of Benjamin’s allegorical realism. It is this gap that Benjamin will resolutely not address: by not being a comparatist or a historian of languages. What is sorely lacking in Benjamin’s theory is an awareness of conflict among languages. The presiding term in Benjamin is harmony: from different languages to a harmonious purity, from the fragments to the vessel without dialectical mediation. Here again is Benjamin harping on pure language, and the harmonisation of individual languages in that ‘other’ purity: In the individual, unsupplemented languages, meaning is never found in relative independence, as in individual words or sentences; rather, it is in a constant state of flux — until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all the various modes of intention. Until then, it remains hidden in the languages. If, however, these languages continue to grow in this manner until the end of their time, it is translation which catches fire on the eternal life of the works and the perpetual renewal of language. Translation keeps putting the hallowed growth of languages to the test: How far removed is their hidden meaning from revelation, how close can it be brought by the knowledge of this remoteness? (1968a: 74–75; emphasis added).

It is quite uncanny how latency works as a transformative force in Benjamin’s rhetoric: it is what is hidden in languages that makes all the difference. Much like the perennial mystique of the Messiah (the Messiah by definition cannot come, for in having arrived the Messiah will have become the anti-Messiah), it is the mystery behind language that motors Benjamin’s messianic historiography. Languages are driven by a history of absence until ‘the end of their time’, and then, lo and behold, there is eternal life. Between the histories of these languages and the catching fire of the eternal life through translation there exists an absolute and untraversable gap. The movement is from ‘a constant state of flux’ (pure becoming) to harmony (pure being): no identifiable conjunctures of stasis or solid state existence. And here, Benjamin does not mince his words; his vocabulary is decidedly non-secular. It is ‘the hallowed growth of languages (emphasis added)’ that Benjamin is interested in.

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Revelation is the answer and with revelation comes the circularity of translation as a mode. The distance between the hidden meaning of languages and the moment of revelation has already been covered and rehearsed by ‘the knowledge of this remoteness’. Let us see if we can come up with a name, a taxonomic rubric for ‘the knowledge of remoteness’. How about that familiar field known as ‘religion’? ‘Religiosity without religion’ would be a good way to describe Benjamin’s sacred attitude to language and translatability. If hope exists, but not for us, for Kafka, then to Benjamin, the sacred exists, but not for us. And this knowledge of remoteness has to be honoured in its absence: in language, as language. All the little insights and illuminations come to a head at the end of Benjamin’s essay where the sacred text is paid its due and absolute reverence: Where text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to be ‘the true language’ in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is is unconditionally translatable. In such case translations are called for only because of the plurality of languages. Just as, in the original, language and revelation are one without any tension, so the translation must be one with the original in the form of the interlinear version, in which literalness and freedom are united. For to some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true to the highest degree of sacred writings. The interlinear version of the Scripture is the prototype or ideal of all translation (Benjamin 1968a: 82).

As Derrida understands Benjamin: The religious code is essential here. The sacred text marks the limit, the pure even if inaccessible model, of pure transferability, the ideal starting from which one could think, evaluate, measure the essential, that is to say poetic, translation. Translation, as holy growth of languages, announces the messianic end, surely, but the sign of that end and of that growth is ‘present’ (gegenwartig) only in the ‘knowledge of that distance’, in the Entfernung, the remoteness that relates us to it. One can know this remoteness, have knowledge or a presentiment of it, but we cannot overcome it. Yet it puts us in contact with that ‘language of the truth’ which is ‘the true language’ (Derrida 2002: 132).

Translation, then, is a mode only to the extent that it sacrifices its modal being at the altar of pure language and the sacred text whose total transferability as ‘the truth’ does not really require the agential service of translation. Take the messianic end away, and Benjamin’s

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entire essay crumbles for lack of an ethic and a rationale. Monotheistic to the core, Benjamin’s translation lives out ‘the monolingualism of the Other’ as the chronic symptom of its own sur-vival.



Notes

 This article was first published in European Journal of English Studies, 12(1): 15–31, April 2008, and is reproduced here with permission. I thank the journal and Professors Mina Karavanta and Bessie Dendrinos, the editors of the special issue of the journal in which the essay appeared. 1. For a sustained critic of Salman Rushdie’s negative evaluation of literatures produced in Indian languages, see Radhakrishnan 2005. See also Shankar (2004: 64–95). 2. For the nature of duality in the context of the bilingual love of the translator, see Khatibi (1990). 3. For a spirited articulation of feminism with the modality of translation, see Spivak (2000). For a powerful recasting of the politics of translation in a postcolonial context, see Chakrabarty (2000: 72–96 and 272–75). 4. For a thorough critique of liberal multiculturalism, see the chapter, ‘The Use and Abuse of Multiculturalism’ (Radhakrishnan 2003). 5. Chapter 1, ‘Revisionism and the Subject of History’, of Radhakrishnan (2008) deals extensively with the theme of the ‘return’ by way of Friedrich Nietzsche, Adrienne Rich, and Frantz Fanon.



References Adorno, Theodor. 1973. The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Fredric Will. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1977. Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ernst Bloch, trans. Ronald Taylor. London: NLB. Benjamin, Walter. 1968a. ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, pp. 69–82. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1968b. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, pp. 217–51. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1968c. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, pp. 253–64. New York: Schocken Books.

Is Translation a Mode? ? 301 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other: Or, Prosthesis as the Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. ’Des Tours de Babel’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, trans. Joseph F. Graham, pp. 104–34. New York and London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1977. Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Khatibi, Abdelkebir. 1990. Love in Two Languages, trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pennycook, Alastair. 2007. Global Englishes and Transnational Flows. London: Routledge. Radhakrishnan, R. 2003. Theory in an Uneven World. Oxford, MA: Blackwell. ———. 2005. ‘Globality is Not Worldliness’, Gamma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 13: 183–98. ———. 2008. History, the Human, and the World Between. Durham: Duke University Press. Said, Edward W. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press. Shankar, S. 2004. ‘Midnight’s Orphans, or a Postcolonialism Worth Its Name’, Cultural Critique, 56: 64–95. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2000. ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn, pp. 369–88. London: Routledge.

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Derrida Elsewhere: A Mnemocultural Dispersal D. Venkat Rao 

Immemorables

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henever I think of Derrida, two events keep coming back to me. As a graduate student at Kent in the mid-1980s, I had a chance to attend the conference on ‘Linguistics of Writing’ held at Glasgow, where Derrida was in the audience. I seized an opportunity to meet him and wished to talk to him about the conference. But whenever I mentioned the word ‘conference’, he would say ‘conscience?’ I made several attempts to utter ‘conference’ as clearly as possible. But, every time Derrida would promptly say ‘conscience?’ As a result, I never got the chance to talk to him about the conference itself. As readers of Derrida know, the word ‘conscience’ is not a particularly affirmative term in his work. A few years ago Derrida came to India to inaugurate the World Book Fair. Three days after he left India, the entire Book Fair burnt down. At that time, I thought, he came to India and left cinders behind! ‘Conscience’ and ‘cinders’ have remained with me since then, constantly reminding me of my relation with Derrida. Reading Derrida in the most unlikely places, I always thought that he was elsewhere. Moving around in and with his work in small towns and villages devastated by social deaths and executions without trial, across landscape haunted by postcolonial mourning, I always thought that Derrida could be uncannily with us while radically being elsewhere. Obviously, it is not just the physical spacing of the person in relation to his readers that I am alluding to here. That is, the question of who his implied reader is (from which field and from which nation and language) cannot be decided easily in advance. Derrida could also be elsewhere, dispersing himself across languages (Greek, German, French, and Sanskrit, etc.), genos and textures of

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reflection, in and out of his own work. While intensely worm-holing into a singular sedimented SEC (Signature Event Context) — that is, the received readings of the thematics of intention, originality and time (period, location) — he could leap over to breach paths on another terrain elsewhere (the interminable intimations of trace and the millennial onto-theological structures). He would swim through the rhizomes of roots and tendrils, thickets of thorny grasses, ‘dry’ spirits and glide over complicitous bridges, disturbing abysses and gorges of Western thought. But he could also be elsewhere. Being elsewhere suggests a teleiopoetic impulse, a sort of reasoning imagination that touches the distant without presumption. He thought radially, parallelly and teleiopoetically without ever letting this sublimate into any thickening line. He mixed lines, confounded genealogies, and let the lines adrift by playing with the sentinels of the Name. He confounded the laws of genre — in reflection and in writing. He touched the reasoning and imagination of many, too many from a distance — even while appearing to be in proximity. The word ‘mix’ is probably inappropriate in Derrida’s texts. What Derrida confronts is a kind of narcissism of Western traditions of inquiry. The glory of Western thought appeared to flourish in multiple lines of inquiry with its continuous lineage from antiquity, infused with a new vitality awakened during the Enlightenment. All these lines of inquiry are filiated to the revered father figure [God] (Nancy 2006: 240). Emerging from within this heritage (while saying ‘yes’, ‘yes’ to it) and its plethora of lines, Derrida learned to be elsewhere while being in them. He frayed the path of differ-a-nce — spacing himself differently in relation to his inheritance. Differ-a-nce is thus both a deeply conservative and a radically transformative strategy. He forged strategies without finality for using the resources of the heritage to reconstellate them — and thus he demonstrated the ways to overturn the violent heritage and displace it. Suspending oppositionalism, he played with hospitable narcissism — thus opening the passage for the other to come even while affirming the heritage differentially. Differ-a-nce is a forceful node in Derrida’s radial reflections. He always insisted that the terms (nodes) he plays with are not to be consolidated into any conceptual lines. Differ-a-nce is neither a concept nor a metaphor, neither a descriptive nor a theoretical term; it is neither exclusively a part of culture nor of nature. Differa-nce partakes of all these and affects all these classified tools of the reflective tradition, he insisted.

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The other lines of inquiry in the heritage, by default, maintained the divided tools of inquiry, and from time to time only chose to privilege one over the other. Derrida, patiently and without any kind of irreverence, unravelled the way these diverse lines of inquiry repeated and reinforced the violent and oppositional structures of inquiry. Despite their immense differences — differences that Derrida never tried to belittle — these apparently diverse lines of inquiry only reiterated the most sedimented protocols of inquiry installed in the Western metaphysical tradition. Derrida’s immense work, persistently and with patience, illustrated how diverse lines of inquiry in the human sciences kept intact, as guardrails, a specific line of thought — the theologico-metaphysical inquiry that operates with a precomprehension of origin and significance. Derrida tracked and contested this line in its various manifestations throughout his life. He cautioned against false exits and ruptures these lines promised. In his exploration of the genus he moved across the shapes and substances of the species it spawned and programmed. He prepared himself to down the shields of their auto-immunity and exposed their receptions from the genus. He worked and played without alibi. But this pharmakos from elsewhere did not indulge in spewing poisonous polemos. He committed himself to the belief that no system can exhaust the possibilities of its effects and that no system can come into being without exclusions. Not too long ago, responding to the anxieties about the ascendancy of the techno, Derrida calmly reminded us that whenever there is calculation and repetition, the machine is already in place. The machine is inescapable, he warned. It is a part of the language that permeates and surrounds us; it is a part of the body that makes life itself possible. But there is something in the ‘system’ that eludes the ‘machinic’ calculation, Derrida insisted. Thus, even while he was unravelling the programmatic injunctions of the tradition on its species, Derrida tracked with care those energies and forces that could exceed the grasp of the system. He urged us to meditate on the incalculable — that which no machine can programme. Thus, even when every text he engaged with carried the poisonous vials of violence, he tracked the medicinal traces that could nurture the living-on of the heritage, otherwise. He breached open other paths of survival. Derrida firmly acknowledged his debt and gratitude to all those who struggled and left traces of opening that exceed the machine — the

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system. But even here, even when he wandered alone radically, empirically searching for epistemological liberation, even when he named all those psycho-biographical figures of the Western tradition — Derrida seemed to be elsewhere. For Derrida, the heritage cannot be exhausted by these named figures. It is the gift of all those who are unnameable — a gift from the unknowable, an incalculable gift. The heritage is in a sense that powerful force of death that conditions the element of life. It is in this (im)possible circulation of life, death and gift that Derrida challenges us to think of justice and ethics. Justice and ethics for Derrida are acts and events undertaken in the ‘night’ of non-knowledge, by means of a leap over knowledge — they are decisions risked in the absence of paths. In this regard, justice, decision and ethics are decisively opposed to the machine and the calculable — but they are always exposed to the risk of calculation. Justice and ethics are unprogrammable. In Derrida’s radial thought, all these incalculables — justice, ethics and death — are interminably connected to the experience of the other. Derrida insisted that the primary condition of ethics is the commitment to acts of hospitality to the non-transcendental, but incalculable, other — without alibi. On this matter, Derrida even chose to differ from his mentor Emmanuel Levinas who insists on knowing the other before welcoming him. Resisting all temptation to evaluate the other, Derrida yearned for infinite justice in such hospitality. But as he was aware of the risks, he calmly cautioned about the possibility of the best bringing along with it the worst — the lesson of the pharmakon. He committed himself to a planetary justice, which alone, he said, ‘allows the hope . . . of a universalizable culture of singularities’ — a culture, which would promise ‘the abstract possibility of impossible translation’ (Derrida 1998: 18; original emphasis). Tracking such idioms and exploring their transformations, Derrida moved elsewhere. Having failed to communicate with him, learning to listen to him, with the intimations of ‘conscience’ and ‘cinders’ that he gave me without giving, continuing to read Derrida elsewhere, I thought it should be possible to take him elsewhere. Learning from him that the contexts, events and signatures that weave our textures of reflection must be set to work in contexts of our own singular performative enactments, I thought it should be possible to move Derrida elsewhere from his own Europe-centred claims of heritage. While recording my debt to him for my own half-heard, barely understood intimations from his work on the question of memory — I thought it should

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be possible to take him elsewhere to an-other heterogeneous trace structure of memory, to another barely understood a-normative palimpsest of memory traces. Even if it meant betraying him in a certain way, I thought of taking Derrida across to the inexhaustible mnemocultures of heterogeneous India. I wish to affirm my fidelity or gratitude to the memory of Derrida in what might be seen as this un-grateful departure. Yet, this is to affirm him.



In Gratitude Although Derrida’s persistent preoccupation was with the heritage of the West (Greek-Judaic-Roman-Christian), he was attentive to the resources and resonances of some of his thematics in other idioms of thought. Indeed, Derrida invited every one to be open (without domestic appropriations) to thinking outside the monotheistic philosophies (Derrida 1994: 11).1 Thus, for instance, at least three of his crucial themes — gift, debt, and above all, iteration — have turned him toward the Sanskrit language. Each of these ‘themes’, repeated with variation, in a way, weaves the entire trace structure of Derrida’s work. Gift, with its double significance (in European languages, as poison and present), is also the aporetic intimation of the measureless measure of the incalculable (‘promise’) and the ever recurring machinic calculation of economy. The contrary pulls of gift — giving — ‘direct’ him toward the Sanskrit sources and sounds of dana and vanati. The Sanskrit terms, however, mostly serve etymo-philological tracking of sources in Derrida’s footnotes. But the possible ‘direction’ of inquiry, one can notice in yet another footnote, that these resources might suggest, remains deferred perennially: ‘the directions which I ought to pursue here, but cannot’ (Derrida 1992: 27, n. 4). Thus, the ethical thematic of debt, responsibility and duty once again turn him toward the Sanskrit category of rna, but the latter’s atheological and non-ontological drift (neither sin/fall nor ‘contract’ as determining weights) does not evoke any sustained response in the work. Etymologically resourced, this epistemic category of the Sanskrit tradition remains cited in a footnote in small print. There is one — and probably only one — place in his early work where Derrida’s meditation actively invokes a colloquial Sanskrit locution

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and accords it a strategically essential place in his interrogation of the Western heritage. Although with the etymologically tracked source of ‘iteration’, the word itera is acknowledged to have served the programmatologically critical task of receiving and responding to the other. While elaborating the general structure of writing as infinitely repeatable inscription even in the absolute absence of the addressee and author, Derrida states, although in a parenthetic, bracketed sentence: ‘(iter, once again, comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows may be read as the exploitation of the logic which links repetition to alterity)’. Iterability marks the structure of writing itself, announces Derrida (1982: 315). Although the rhythms of this absolutely critical figure-concept of writing in Derrida’s work are acknowledged to be touched by an alien (itara) impulse, once again Derrida does not respond to the ‘direction’ in which this ‘logic’ (of linking ‘repetition to alterity’) unfolds and shapes the rhythms and currents of the Sanskrit ‘IndoEuropean’ legacies. The Sanskrit other serves as an originary source for his extraordinary unravelling of the Western heritage. Such a deferred ‘direction’ concerning responsibility (rna), giving/gift (dana/vana), and iteration (itara) could have suggested other possible depar-tures from the ‘Indo-European’ heritage — departures other than the mono-logo-theological responses of the European–Western (including Greek) heritage which preoccupied Derrida. Yet, it must be affirmed, any effort to trace such departures will remain indebted to the teleiopoetic resonances of his work. For, the measureless measure of his signatures in traversing (im)palpable ‘events’ and ‘contexts’ will haunt all those who are touched by the interminable mourning that his work comports with. Yet, there is no easy return to any heritage, no transparent capital intact out there to be appropriated. This is more so in the contexts of societies and cultures that faced colonialism. Although Derrida never reduces the force of thought to the context of culture, he repeatedly confirmed that European conceptual apparatus is everywhere in place. Every master concept one works with (whatever might be one’s ‘location of culture’) — concepts such as culture, theory, democracy, art, the discipline, and indeed the university — is declared to be of European provenance. The European conceptual grid will continue to mark every effort to engage with pre-colonial pasts. There is a further complication in the contexts of cultures that faced colonialism. Unlike

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in the context of a European–Western intellectual’s return to the past (Greek, Judaic or Christian), a non-European postcolonial will have to, first of all, confront the European conceptual formations, disciplinary protocols of interpretation, languages and indeed the (onto-theological) cultural dynamic that regulates these approaches to the past. Once such a dynamic and its apparatus of interpretation and interrogation are accorded universal modular status, then any other form and mode of reflection and response, any other ‘style’ and texture of living-on will be obliged to function as an anthropological or historical object. The non-European is impelled to confront not just the objectified status of his/her culture, but also face the deeper epistemic grids that classify and designate cultures and cultural differences. Such complicity with European protocols of interpretation and reflection cannot be reduced. Thus, if one wishes to turn to reflective practices of the Sanskrit tradition in the context of the university, one is drawn to confront the two centuries of European Indological cultural translations and interpretations. European Indology, it can be argued, succeeded in appropriating Indic (Sanskrit and other) reflective traditions into European human sciences. But neither Indology nor any other approach to Indian pasts has undertaken a critical unravelling of the grounding presuppositions of European human sciences; nor have they shown any possibility of reflective epistemic openings in general from the idiomatic singularity of cultural articulations that they set out to regionalise and represent. (This indeed is the predicament of all cultures that have been covered by the human sciences.) It is in this complicitous and asymmetric (generalising-European and regionalised non-European) context of thinking that this chapter offers its homage to the work and thought of Jacques Derrida. Working from within the philosophical–political institution called the university, faced with the regionalised field of Indology, this essay explores the possibilities and limits of Derrida’s work in rethinking reflective practices in Sanskrit. This offering, I must confess, is a risky effort to float a ‘jetty’ that neither has an object (of its own), nor an agency to proclaim, nor a project to flaunt or negate one. It is a preliminary attempt to reflect on the received status of these categories even as it hopes to be attentive to the very modes of its own exploration and formulation. This can be offered only as an uncertain jetty (Derrida 1990: 65–66).

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Sign Forces Sign forces divide the sense(s); they bind and unbind the senses. They create an abyss between the two senses of the word/concept of the sense. The force could be of the limb and of the face — it is of the senses. Force can be sensed — it is palpable. The work of culture is forged by the sign forces and is spread across through the sense relays. Thought is the effect of modes of communication; thought is also an articulation of inheritances. Communicational modes carve or inflect the course of thinking. Yet thinking itself is irreducible to the determined modes and materials of thought. The modes of articulation could be broadly identified as lithic and alithic. Although both modes are filiated to the body, and both constitute the externalised memory, they can be differentiated as the gestural– graphic work of the hand and verbal–gestural work of the face. Reflective practices and traditions in fact depend on the articulation of the lithic and alithic modes. Literacy and discursive philosophy, for instance, believed to be the boon of lithic technique of writing, are the celebrated tools of European civilisational demarcation from its others. The alphabetic writing is said to be the mark of European distinction (‘alphabetic writing supporting the history of the development of geometric thought’ (Stiegler 2001: 257)). Archives are the granaries of alphabetic writing. The lithic work of graphics and the alithic expression of speech are, however, deeply related to gesture. If the force of limbs finds externalised articulation in graphics (as in parietal or paleo art) or performance (as in dance), the gestural modulations of internal parts of the body result in the emergence of speech forms. The rhythms of gestural force are at the root of both lithic and alithic memories and articulations. But a hierarchic relation between the alithic speech form and lithic orthography is said to have regulated our reflections on communication systems in their relation to thought across history. A linearised relation between speech and the reductive graphical system called writing got established. In this reckoning, writing would only carry on and extend what otherwise would be lost in speech. As mnemotechnology, writing is the preserver of speech and the quintessential emblem of the archives. Four thousand years of

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linear writing, Andre-Le-roi Gourhan argued, has accustomed us to this bifurcation of graphical art from writing (Gourhan 1993: 192–202). In his strategic project to displace this hierarchy, Jacques Derrida privileges the subordinated lithic figure — writing — and unravels the alithic speech form as a dominant metaphysical dogma underlying the entire (Western) episteme itself. The phonic substance, writes Derrida, ‘presents itself as the nonexterior, nonmundane, therefore non-empirical or noncontingent signifier — has necessarily dominated the history of the world . . . and has even produced the idea of the world (Derrida 1976: 7–8). In questioning the alleged primordialism of speech, its assured filiation with consciousness, its unexamined access to origin — Derrida’s strategic project has been extraordinarily productive. Although it is of tactical and not of empirical significance, or significant as a ‘historically’ specific mode of articulation, the lithic figure of writing does not seem to escape an ethnocentric ruse here. For, it is precisely this ‘historical’ and empirically specific system of communication that was used to demarcate Europe from its others in an entire epoch called colonialism. The oddity of this rather loaded figure (writing) in a radically subversive project (of Derrida’s) does not, however, undermine the critical force of the project. This is because in deploying this empirically and historically singular figure in his project, Derrida is only concerned with forging a filament, weaving a thread, configuring a versatile template of the most general significance. Thus, writing in the narrow sense is a weave of differential system, a chain of variable filaments, spacing among a finite set of elements (letters). The lithic system of writing is constituted by the rhythms of the weave, the forge and the template. These are rhythms without substance; but they bring forth or lend themselves to substance and system — ‘regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos of a certain homo sapiens, the possibility of the grammé structures the movement of its history according to rigorously original levels, types and rhythms’. They are forces without essences; but they appear or lend themselves to engendering essences: ‘But one cannot think them without the most general concept of the grammé’ (Derrida 1976: 84). It is precisely in order to put to work this general force of difference or programme that Derrida draws on the figure of writing. The radical import of this strategy is to redress the historically repeated

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structures of violence — a violence that subordinates the work of hand to the work of face — of the graphic to the phonic. The most prominent casualty of this subordination is the graphical system of alphabetic writing itself. The alphabet is the most illustrious instance of the violence of linearisation. The graphic figure of the alphabet, in this linear dispensation is subordinated to the pre-supposed phonic essence. Hence the divergence between graphical art and writing, observed Le-roi Gourhan. Similarly, alphabetic writing is reduced to little more than writing following speech, simply extending the regime of speech as it is. Yet the power of this schema has remained extremely productive. In subordinating the work of hand and the lithic mode of articulation of memory, to the work of face and the alithic forms of expression, the linear schema has given birth to the archive and the practice of archivation of memories. The alphabetic writing is said to be the mark of European distinction. The deconstructive strategy — of conserving the empirical figure of writing but at the same time annulling it as derivative of speech, precisely in order to allude to the more originary programme of spacing — has initiated a radical questioning of inheritances, modes of communication and sedimented inquiries in the human sciences. But the illustrative significance of the figure of writing has remained undisturbed in the project. Although Derrida was explicit on occasions in declaring the empirical division of speech and writing as irrelevant in his work,2 although he would certainly regard speech very much like writing as a system of differences, constituted by the force of spacing — nowhere in Derrida’s work is the differential system of speech considered as a usable figure (‘concept’) for articulating the force of difference.3 From the very beginning of his work, Derrida has committed himself to recapture, within the history of life as the history of grammé, ‘the unity of gesture and speech, of body and language, of tool and thought, before the originality of the one and the other is articulated and without letting this profound unity give rise to confusionism . . . To recover the access to this unity, to this other structure of unity, we must de-sediment “four thousand years of linear writing”’ (Derrida 1976: 85–86). Yet, nowhere do these ‘original’ communications of speech and gesture offer themselves for unravelling the Western episteme in Derrida’s work. The privileged figure of literacy, the trope of scribal communication system — writing — remains the conserved (and annulled) element of Derrida’s schema. Writing on drawings and art about the

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blind, sketching a scene of sibling rivalry, Derrida’s confession about his investment in the figure of writing (against his brother’s ability for painting) is unequivocal: ‘as for me, I will write, I will devote myself to the words that are calling me’ (Derrida 1993: 37). These are, of course, the words on the page — the traits of alphabetic writing. Quite often in his work, the general force of grammé (mark, trait, trace, etc.) lends itself to the alphabetic figure of writing. This can be seen in his emphasis on Plato’s account of hypomnesic over mnesic or mnemic, the virtual mark (inscription on the soul) over intangible force of memory: ‘The archive is hypomnesic’ (Derrida 1996: 11). At a crucial level Derrida invests in the archive as the material ‘monumental apparatus’ and opposes it to memory as a metaphysical figure. Derrida advances the archive as the material exterior, which is destructive of either ‘memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience’. He argues further that the archive irrupts the ‘originary and structural breakdown of the said memory’. Derrida thus ‘consignates’ only the hypomnesic apparatus (essentially writing in the narrow sense) as the proper material signifier. Speech and gesture — material forces of the exterior — are not reckoned as worthy sign forces that can weave immemorial alternatives to the hypomnesic archive (ibid.: 11). Conversely, his devotion to Freud’s ‘postcard’ over the colossal investment of psychoanalysis in the figure of talk (‘talking cure’), once again reiterates the status of exemplarity accorded to the empirical figure of writing. The ‘hand-written correspondence’ has ‘played’, states Derrida in exploring the relation between the archive and psychoanalysis, a ‘major and exceptional role . . . at the center of the psychoanalytic archive’ (Derrida 1996: 17).4 The figure of alphabetic writing has served throughout Derrida’s work as the most exemplary trope for illustrating the general force of grammé. Indeed, it is the letter, the written alphabetic letter that alone captures his ‘discreet graphic intervention’, his strategic ‘neographic’ substitute for writing: Differ-a-nce. Although differ-a-nce, like writing, is the prior condition for the vulgar division between speech and writing, despite its constitutive play with time and space (difference and distance), and above all its potential for unravelling of sedimented master names and categories, differ-a-nce ‘remains purely graphic’ — only the vulgar sense of writing can provide us access to this ‘non-concept’ in Derrida’s work: ‘it [differ-a-nce] is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard . . . It cannot be apprehended in speech’. Only the ‘written

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text’ will ‘keep watch over my discourse’ (Derrida 1982: 4). Derrida too seemed to believe that the critical protocols of reading — rigour, differentiation and refinement ‘which our heritage continues to associate with the classical forms of discourse, and especially with written discourse, without images and on a paper support’ — are possible only with writing (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 243). Although the materiality of speech forms, in Derrida’s own account, are unthinkable without the work of grammé, neither the immemorial song cultures nor the intractable speech genres ‘before’ writing (in the narrow sense), nor the vibrant performative forms of dance (‘the unity of gesture and speech’ referred to above), have the chance of the exemplary status that writing is accorded in Derrida’s work. Could this be a symptomatic problem of inheritance (the ‘written Torah’) — Derrida’s heritage of patriarchal–monotheological culture whose origin is deeply chiselled in lithic orthography? Although Derrida’s strategic reading of heritage is of profound importance even beyond the confines of his inheritance (his attempts to universalise the singular Judaic–Islamic figure of circumcision as ‘cut’, ‘election’ as the call (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004: 92–95)), in his strategies of putting to work the inheritances, these resources do not have a place for mnemocultures — indeed of speech and gesture and their (ambivalent) articulations of the body.5 They disregard the signatures of memory. If every communication (system) is the effect of spacing, repetition and difference and if it emerges only as a system of differences, why does writing alone become the effective figure for grasping this non-transcendental force? Why can’t differential systems of speech and gesture with their discreet ‘marks’ offer effective resources for unravelling the transcendental? Speech and gesture remain unexplored as differential systems and as figures of/for thought in the work of deconstruction.6 Despite the privilege and power it is accorded, the figure of literacy — alphabetic writing — has had a very limited duration and reach in the human history whereas the origins of gesture and speech remain immemorial and their spread continues to be planetary. If the nonWest is demarcated as devoid of alphabetic writing, the European West could be reckoned as bereft of gesture and speech — though such oppositionalism cannot escape deconstructive critique. The lithic text of the ‘alphabetic body’ displaced, if not silenced, the alithic rhythms of mnemocultures in the West. God is said to have spoken to Moses before he bequeathed him the lithic tablets. But there was no clue to the passion of god’s tongue, the

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rhythm of his speech, the pitch, the grain of his voice, the accent of his breath and the emphasis of what is announced; it is no more a part of cultural memory. In other words, the syntax of the lithic displaced the prosody of utterance and the prosody that enacts the rhythms of sound and movement. But to the author(s) of the alphabetic culture, the question of god’s passion and affect, the accents of his speech, have no sense ‘at least in so far as these traditions [of monotheism] have no resources for establishing differences that could be humanly registered between the ways God spoke and wrote words’ (Rotman 2002). Hence, the necessity of engaging with the lithic and alithic memories, the singularity of their mnemotechniques, or technics in general, and indeed the necessity of responding to the call or conflict of these demarcated heterogeneity of heritages. If the lithic writing brought forth monotheism, discursive philosophy, calculative reason, and codified law — the cherished resources of European colonialism and difference — the destinies of alithic mnemocultural traditions of the world must be reconstellated beyond their enframing in the imperial traditions and their lithic codes. The call of mnemocultural inheritances (of the fourth world) invites other responses, intimates other responsibilities and offers other figures of/for reflection.



Mnemocultures Mnemocultures are cultures of memory. Memory in Indic or Sanskrit mnemocultures, unlike in Plato, is neither figured as a malleable inscriptional substrate nor personified by any archon (Mnemon). Nor does memory here have a presiding deity like Mnemosyne — the mother of all Muses. In effect, memory does not seem to sublimate in any narrative line here. There is no mythology of memory to be valorised as in Plato’s Phaedrus (2003) or Theatetus (1977) in the Sanskrit tradition. One could argue that myths, Puranas, itihasa, etc., are the irrepressible mnemocultural detours of the non-narrative textual traditions of Sanskrit (Vedic) episteme. The Vedic episteme embodies a textual practice which neither has an antecedent nor is it regulated by any originary myth. It comes forth as a mnemocultural event and proliferates with infinite referrals or citations, weavings that are impossible to exhaust. Indeed (to recall Derrida’s idiom) there is nothing outside this intricate

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weave of Vedic textlooms in Sanskrit episteme. And precisely it is for this lack or utter disregard for the outside — the index to an alleged referential reality — this episteme has attracted or repulsed two centuries of European knowledge toward India. This European response of exposing the lack, purveying the absent, foregrounding the real referent — above all, in defining the context — this response not only consolidated a European difference, it also instituted a paradigm of reading, of identifying and relating the text to context. In a word, this European response defined European responsibility toward cultures that ‘cannot’ represent themselves. The fact that despite the challenge and upheaval that this paradigm of reading suffered in recent times from within the European tradition, the discourses of Indology and South Asian studies continue to guard the received protocols of reading goes to prove the tenacity of sedimented European conventions of reading the other. In other words, the modernity of the philologico-archaelogical and referential reading modes have only reconfirmed a classical ideological concept of context and raided the mnemotextual traditions of Sanskrit episteme to determine their contexts (or lack of them). Here, one can point to the wind and fury of the ongoing debates on the IndoEurasia website in the last one year.7 These debates have remained ignorant of or impervious to Derrida’s critique of the phonocentric concept of writing and continue to deploy this concept in declaring societies as illiterate. Second, any one who has followed the flurry of e-mail exchanges (mainly among Euro-American scholars) that flashed across the Indology website three years ago after the attack on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), India, would not have missed the reaffirmations of European responsibility for Indological archives.8 Instead of repeating the usual critique of Indological and orientalist constructions, I try to explore in my larger work (on mnemocultures) two related issues. First, to reconfigure European representations of India as a colossal paradigmatic extension of a classical reading — a reading that seeks a genetic relation between the text and context. The second risky thematic I wish to figure here can be tentatively called a mnemocultural response to textual inheritances. How do mnemotexts receive and respond to the classical concepts/practices of text and context? What is their responsibility toward the textlooms of heritage? Whatever may be their alleged proximity to the metaphysical and the transcendental, mnemocultures of gesture and speech have

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spread as extraordinarily worked out differential systems. In the Indian context, the internally divergent traditions of recitation of Vedic utterance distinctly circulated under the name of specific teachers as Pratisakhyas were said to have taken root by 800 bce. Further, based on the traditions of the Pratisakhyas one can notice the emergence of rigorous sciences for the study of Vedic utterance, known once again in the names of distinguished teachers, as Sikshas — such as Yagnavalkya Siksha, Naradiya Siksha, Paniniya Siksha, etc. As in the case of classical musical traditions, these systems and traditions of recitation and utterance are intimately and constitutively filiated to gestural resources. The lithic mnemotechnology of writing does have a place in the Sanskrit textual heritage, but it is the mnemocultures of speech and gesture that form and disseminate the cultural inheritances. Alphabetic writing does not regulate cultural memory here. No wonder neither the concept nor the institution of the archive finds a place in these mnemocultural inheritances. The archive as a repository of externalised memory is composed by scribal output — it is the product of the handiwork of scribal cultures — whereas mnemocultures proliferate through reiterative processes of speech and gestural learning. What is heard and learnt appears to be a part of the body — an ‘acquired character’, communicated across generations by the face and hand through the rhythm of the body — intimated to the mnemo-scape.9 The Sanskrit textual tradition remains indifferent to the scribal craft even to this day. No wonder the tradition celebrates neither an archive nor an archon. There appears to be no Indic counterpart of the Alexandrian Library. The Sanskrit tradition appears to have by-passed or de-toured the manuscriptural archivation with an in-difference. It must, however, be pointed out that the indifference is only toward the scribal craft in the literal sense. The tradition is acutely aware of the metonymic relations within language and deems language as just one instance of a profounder principle of relation, connection, knot or bond across diverse elements of the universe. The archive, in the form of embodied and externalised memories (smritis) of speech and gesture, existed essentially with(in) the body — and that is the way they remain scattered across the length and breadth of the subcontinent as singularly demarcated bodies. The most significant concept-metaphor that exemplifies and constitutes this structural principle of the tradition is bandha or

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sambandha (connection or bind). This principle is at the basis of all linguistic–phonetic explorations and ritual practices for millennia. It is therefore difficult to come across in the tradition either anxiety for or nostalgia about the externalised scribal material. The Sanskrit text is allusive and elliptical. The tradition is built on the reception and augmented reiteration of these elliptical and allusive traces and fragmentary threads, in unforeseen contexts. The Sanskrit phonetic tradition analyses language in its various aspects in the minutest detail and filiates each element to a part of the body (for example, consonants with the body, fricatives with breath, vowels with soul, etc).10 These are the drifting non-centred enactments and iterations of the received verbal compositions. The sign forces and the sense forms are persistently articulated in the tradition. If the internal movement of the body organs is essential for the emergence of the significance of sound, the external gesticulation of limbs and face function as irreducible supplements of utterance. Imagine a Bhimsen Joshi or a Dagar brother’s body torsions or Nusrat’s facial contortions and convulsions that supplement their magnificently modulated voices.11 It looks as if the writhing of the organs constitutes the rhythm of the sound, as if the ‘pleasure’ of the sound is forged in the pain of the body. As in the case of the body so in the case of sound: they both emerge through a distortion. Needless to point out that these heterogeneous sound forms (of the Vedic and musical) are all a-graphical (in the empirical sense) and alithic in their circulation over millennia. They continued to remain, by choice as it were, indifferent to the alphabetic form and notational script. Similarly, the dance forms of India are the most intricate articulation of a gestural force. Dance indeed demonstrates a differential structure of discreet moves enacted through distinct body parts. The significatory status of these performative gestural forces is enumerated at a micrological level in the dance traditions, and this code opened itself to (as a classical text notes) articulating very diverse domains: Na sa vidyaa na sa kala Na sau yogo na tatkarma natyesmin yanna muchyate No knowledge, form, wisdom, art, yoga, ritual-act exists which cannot be shown in dance-drama/theatre (Bharata, Natyasastra cited in Sriramachandrudu, n.d.: 22–23).

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It is in these intricately layered and correlated sign-forces and sense forms of the heritage that the alithic traditions/codes of speech and gesture have formed the cultural prosthesis and mnemocultural inheritances of the collective but heterogeneous parts and creative practices of the subcontinent. They have sustained the heterogeneity of speech, visual and performative idioms across the entire cultural fabric of India.



Praxial Responses But how are these alithic sign forces organised into a system or a code? What kinds of textualities emerge from such compositions? How do they affect the sense in its two senses? How are the sense and sign articulated in these textualities? Above all, what are their condition of possibility and their singularity of articulation? Memories are residual marks or remainders of interminable events. They are the interminable traces of the unavailable. Although memories are non-phenomenal in their force, they emerge cocooned from the pores of the material biological body. As marks and traces, memories affect the body they inhabit. When memories are articulated, the bodies that give them form are in turn affected by them. A mnemotext is composed of (a) allusion, (b) citation, (c) ellipsis, and (d) enumeration. With these specific compositional features the mnemotext circulates as an interminably proliferative and non-totalisable force. Its manifestation is not directly linked to any specific empirical temporal/spatial coordinates. Mnemotexts are organised on the epistemic figure of memory — memory as singular and incalculable occurrence or emergence. Memories do not abide by the logic of the line. They recur radially and parallelly. Their recurrence — like the re-citation of a mnemotext — does not point to an event or an agent or a determined location in the past, but the repetition, recurrence even as it alludes to an anterior moment of existence, has a performative status. Indeed, the mnemotext is performed at its every single emergence through speech and gesture, in the alithic mode. In every instance, therefore, the singularities of performance constitute the life and drift of a mnemotext. The effectiveness and significance of the mnemotext is contingent upon

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each of its performative receptions. Similarly, singularities of each existence/each life depend on its reception of and response to the ineffable impressions of memory that forms such an existence/life. Memories can be said to emerge from a force-field of traces — traces that haunt the finite body interminably but discontinually and trans-generationally. Memory is not any masterable experience of a determined past or a recoverable event or identity of a past present. Indological and South Asian scholars like Barbara Stoler Miller, Charles Malamoud and A. K. Ramanujan have repeatedly interpreted memory as a recoverable past present in a future present: ‘the past being experienced as if it were present’ resulting in a sort of ‘happy ending’ where the past present is recovered in the current present intact (Malamoud 1996: 251). Contrary to this reception of memory, one could figure memory as a struggle to gather the unavailable thought or experience, the intangible forces of reflection, from the remains of traces. Memory could only be the interminable groping through the finite, fragile but subtle, ineluctable and calculable resources for discerning the unknown and the insatiable. No wonder, memory and desire are inseparable and often are expressed by the same term smara (memory and erotic desire) in the Sanskrit tradition. Malamoud who discusses this double take of smara and effectively relates it to Indian textual traditions arrives at somewhat contrary conclusions whose implications he reduces to the paradigmatic European response. As suggested in the preceding discussion, in one reading of memory, in the context of literary texts, Malamoud reduces it to a recovery or regaining of a past present. Here, both desire and memory sublimate or culminate in a presence of happy ending. This theme gains a curious ethnocentric turn when Malamoud extends his analysis of memory in the context of Indian (Sanskrit) textual traditions. Although Malamoud gives a detailed account of Indian interpretations of memory, memorised productions of knowledge, centrality of internalised knowledge — his ultimate judgment on this mnemocultural practice is ethnocentric. The ‘preeminence of knowledge by heart’, writes Malamoud, ‘bars tradition from being transformed into history’. Mnemocultural traditions, however intricately and complexly woven they are (‘weaving them together, in a thousand different ways, a thousand different weaves’) or whatever the longevity of their pasts (‘timeless’) (Malamoud 1996: 256–57), are forever condemned to be anterior to history.

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Therefore, it is in vain, argues Charles Malamoud, ‘that one seeks to find any notion of recollections linking up with one another, or of their being distributed chronologically so as to form constellations which, while shifting remain coherent and integral’ (1996: 255). There isn’t any notion of the existence of a ‘world of memory’, in the Indic traditions, argues Malamoud. Since there is no unity or totality to impressions/manifestations of memory, there can be no idea here of a sustained, maturing growth of memory. In short, the epistemic figure here does not lend itself to a narrative line. Curiously, even a sophisticated theorist who immersed himself in the Sanskrit textual tradition like Malamoud functions here with an orthodox conception of text. Before texts emerge, Malamoud states, there are data; the data are extra–textual. The function of the text is to record the process in which the extra-textual is related to the text. But can the concept of text be relegated to such a derivative status? Can one ever really have access to such ‘extra-textual data’ without the mediation of the material–textual? Isn’t a conception of text as material formation or constitution of intelligibility always already at work in the very act of recognising the so-called data which are supposed to have given birth to texts? Isn’t it positivistic (which shares metaphysical, theological presumptions) naiveté to assume that data are free of textuality (as the material condition of intelligibility)? Instead of attending to the singularity of Indic textual formations — which he sets out to examine — Malamoud evaluates and subjects them to a sort of ethnocentric teleology: ‘Knowledge incorporated in this [mnemotextual] way, moreover, erases the perception of that which connects the text to the world of extra-textual data out of which it originally arose’ (ibid.). Curiously, the insights he gained in the Indic interpretations of memory (autonomy of each instance of memory, non-consecutiveness of memories, absence of a world of memory) are abandoned in his interpretation of the textual tradition. The epistemic signature of memory here is not seen as the possible organising force of mnemotexts. Instead, an orthodox reading of mnemocultures as devoid of history and as lacking in referential value gets repeated in Malamoud’s work here: ‘Such is, at least, the situation in India where the very contents of texts are generally devoid of any reference to the actual conditions of their production’ (ibid.). The orthodoxy of Malamoud’s reading here results in a confusion of epistemic and empirical issues of the argument. Setting out to

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explain how texts are formed and how knowledge is organised, instead of pursuing the more general implications and possibilities of Indic (Sanskrit) textual formation, its signing on memories, Malamoud, by default as it were, subjects it to the ethnocentric scrutiny. Consequently, he fails to respond to the most general lesson of the mnemotext: its ability to bracket or reduce any empirical context and content. In declaring India’s failure to move tradition into history, Malamoud forecloses the possibility of such a textual formation to offer an account of the text in general. Woven in the textures of the body, mnemotexts move on memories. They drift across all kinds of contextual determinations — even as they manifest in specific contexts. Mnemotexts move with the force of inventiveness. Therefore, every iteration of a mnemotext is a singular invention, a living anew of an inventive principle. No wonder no mnemotext can be absolutely reduced to a specific determined context. The inventive principle brings forth divergent contexts in its formations of mnemotexts. In a very related context, Bhartrhari affirms: Bhedaanam bahumaargatvam [Differences manifest in multiple paths] (Bhartrhari 1974: 5). Although mnemotexts in their indexical relation to memory drift across immemorial pasts carrying ineffable impressions and although they are forever open to inventive futures, they are not anchored in any narrative lineages. Mnemotexts are not governed by any cumulative, sequential or aggregative logic. The force of proliferation guides them, and they disperse across all sorts of temporal and spatial determinations. The efficacy of a mnemotext is neither in its authenticity nor in the gravity of its content. The life of a mnemotext is contingent upon the singularity of its performance, in its interminable articulations of memory and desire from the pores of the body.



Re-Iterations Unlike in Plato’s dream for a ‘pure’ and live memory, memory without prosthetic surrogates, memory in the Sanskrit traditions receives attention mainly in the performative and proliferative movement of mnemotexts. Memory, here, is set to work in the acts of listening to, silent, interior recall and situational recitation (shravana–manana– dhaarana) of mnemotexts. In other words, memory is configured

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mainly in infinite reiterations of intricately composed codes of speech and gesture. These surrogate prosthetic codes of memory and body have an ‘epistemic’ status in the Sanskrit traditions. Yet, the performative rendering of these codes is not oriented toward any valorised truth or meaning of these codes. No wonder Sanskrit mnemocultures do not sublate these codes into ‘philosophy’ or ‘dialectics’. No wonder they have not erected any universalistic law codes, nor have they lent themselves for over a 1000 years before the ‘common era’ (from 1500 to 300 bce) to any iconic or plastic and painted images. Memory in the Sanskrit tradition does not terminate into memorials. Memory, here, comports with an anarchitectural impulse. Neither tombs nor un-aging monuments of eidos or eidolon seem to tempt the memory to sublimate itself in some concretely externalised object. Another crucial word for memory (which continues to circulate in many everyday Indian languages) is jnapaka. The root source for this word and the most valued epistemic term for ‘awareness’, ‘knowing’ (jnana) is the same: jna. The Sanskrit tradition figures the body as the irreducible locus, effect and medium of memory, desire and awareness. As desire and memory abide by the law of repetition — incalculable repetition — the body circulates as the most resilient index of repetition. The emergence or coming forth of the body is itself an absolute and discreet instantiation of the repetitive work of memory and desire. Every birth, and therefore, every body, is also a discontinuous and varied repetition of transgenerational memories and desires texturing the biological and ‘acquired’ rhythms of these reiterated emergences. This absolutely enigmatic reiterative structure of the body has remained the centre of reflective concerns and practices of Indic (Sanskrit) traditions for millennia. In other words, it is this strange and abyssal force of repetition — whose effect the body is — that figures prominently in these reflective concerns. The epistemic code and word for this relentless repetitive beat in the Sanskrit tradition is karma (and also samsara). Karma is at once the act or activity and the effects of acts in an instantiation of the body-complex — that is, birth. There are no originary and terminal instances of karma — there cannot be any such as long as the instantiation of the body — or the body effect — occurs. Karma is also a persistent — if only tacit or silent — invitation or call for changing or modifying the acts or activity of the body. In other words, karma is not just some iron law of determinism (fatalism)

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but it is also at once the open-ended (indeterminable) possibility of a future or promise, the yet to come. The only way to negotiate with this uncanny force of repetition appears to be to (at)tend (to) the most irreducible material instantiation of this force: the body. Tending the body would involve patient and non-aggressive ways of tending the most forceful impulses of desire and memory, without application of any force, non-coercively. The body must be set to work to negotiate with the acts of repetition. It is precisely in the context of this ineluctable ‘law’ of repetition that the Sanskrit tradition addresses the question of freedom. Freedom does not imply an abdication or renunciation of the body as such. It requires setting the body to work. It involves, above all, learning to live the constitutively dual structure of the body-complex. It requires the temperance of tending the an-originary forces of desire and memory. It requires the cultivation and turning of these forces from forgetting or disregarding the differential structure of the body. In the Sanskrit tradition, the body is never reduced to a unified totalised physical substance. On the contrary, it is a complexly layered perishable material entity (with 25 different ‘senses’) that comes forth with an other ‘entity’ that is irreducible to the layered material complex. This absolute other inhabits the body (as a part larger than the discreet unit called the body) as a witness and guest. The body is inconceivable without this an-agentive, non-substantial other coming forth with/in the body.12 Every body bears and lives on with this structure. The epistemic code word jnana requires that one must learn to live with this radical difference within the house of the ‘same’ (body). Jnana is essentially another way of living on with the relentless logic of repetition — other than the machinic repetition of memory and desire that instantiate the body without end. Jnana requires the tending of these forces otherwise. The thematics of repetition, freedom, memory, desire, the body and alterity in Indic mnemocultures suggest the possibility of a different articulation of the body and symbol than the ones unravelled in/as the monologotheism of the West by Derrida. Given that the body (with its differential structure) is the event and horizon that bears the rhythms and pulses mentioned above, it is the body that one (every body, including the gods) is required to negotiate with. In the interminable process of negotiation, the immemorial sign forces of speech and gesture remain the preferred modes for symbolisation. These mnemocultural modes, even as they are deeply involved in the

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process of exteriorisation, bring forth the ‘interior’ as marked by the ‘exterior’ code, at the most material level that they set the body to work. These modes of speech and gesture come forth as embodied, enacted performative acts of the body. Although the constitutively supplemental and prosthetic role of these modes cannot be reduced, their discontinuity with the body cannot be ignored, mnemocultural modes of symbolisation are indifferent in sublimating these modes and codes into autonomous (from the body) systems per se. Mnemocultures offer no metalanguages. Given that the body’s transformation is the only concern here, mnemocultures suspend discursive referentialist consolidation of the sign forces (speech and gesture). Performative modes of living-on, perennially engaged in transforming the repetitive structure of the body, condition mnemocultural survival in Indic traditions. Neither ‘knowledge’ production nor ‘theory’ is valorised in these mnemopraxial reflections. Indeed, Sanskrit reflective practices go to the extent of suspending even the preferred modes of speech and gesture — they recommend the reduction of recitation and ritual in the mnemopraxial engagement with the body. No wonder, unlike in the Greek antiquity, Sanskrit cultural formations have no preferred epistemic space for the positive sciences and objectified knowledge production.



Other Heading Emerging from within the traditions of onto-theology and positive sciences, Derrida’s work persistently and performatively overturned and displaced this heritage. He repeatedly denied any thetic, theoretical, methodological status to deconstruction. Time and again he demonstrated the non-conceptual nature of each of his singular terms that he forged in the languages of his inheritance. He in fact declared that grammatology could not be advanced as a positive science. If his meditations on and his unravelling of his conceptual heritage have left no space for any theoretical metalanguage or an allencompassing system, his radical work on the philosophical–political formation called the ‘university’ challenges us to think about a ‘performative’ university (in contrast to the ‘constative’, ‘truth’ consolidating structure) — the university to come without alibi.

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Overturning and displacing the received heritage, Derrida acknowledged the chance of deconstruction only within the enframings of the Western metaphysics (Derrida 1976: 74). He saw the received theoretical critiques of and acclaimed ‘epistemological breaks’ with the heritage, as offering only false exits. Working with patience and persistence from within the walls of this heritage, Derrida laid bare all kinds of epistemological urges — their promised offerings of truth. Walled in by the heritage, he reached out to extraordinary choreographic acts that set to work the onto-theological heritage. He carved out radical performatives. No wonder, his performative play with the knowledge systems of the West (philosophy, science, art) — his modes of setting them to work — resonates distantly with mnemocultural working of the body. His reasoning imagination, his teleiopoetic acts seem to comport with other forebodings. His mediations on repetition — indeed iteration — as the other inhabiting the same seemed to be in distanced and differing communication to the Sanskrit sources he tapped. As pointed out earlier, however, Derrida forged his in(ter)ventions by drawing on a colloquial Sanskrit locution — itara. The more radial and more disseminated ‘name’ (nama) for the guest-witness that inhabits the layered body-complex in Indic traditions is para (the other). From the most cherished compositions of the Sanskrit tradition to the most heterogeneously spread out speech genres, visual and performative traditions, this alterity within the body circulates in countless number of ways and idioms. Although the colloquial Sanskrit term for alterity — itara — that Derrida chose serves his purpose appropriately, this locution has no epistemic status in Sanskrit reflective practices. But the more radial reflections on the repetition impulse that the body-complex (shareera) shares with the alterity (para) inhabiting it, open up from the Sanskrit tradition another pathless path for living on. The complex of the body, memory, and desire brings forth or embodies the mnemotext. The mnemotext is a radical performative reflective enactment of the most essential and constitutive features of this complex: repetition. Heritage or inheritance is unthinkable without this principle of repetition being at work. The most singular feature of the Indic (Sanskrit) mnemotextual tradition is also the relentless reflection on the question of repetition: repetition of the body, desire and memory. What appears to be a sort of deliriously reiterated and enacted reflection on the question of repetition in the

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Indic textual heritage is also deeply intimated by the question of liberation or emancipation. Derrida’s meditations on repetition from within the heritage of the West are in palpable resonance with these other intimations. Yet, the difference between these two renditions of repetition (relating to the other or para) invites more reflection. One can tentatively propose that the difference here can be tracked as the different departures or breachings that the ‘Indo-European’ genus lent itself to: the mnemopraxial ‘path’ of jnana (Sanskrit) and the epistemophilic direction of knowledge production (Greek-Judaic-Christian). If the former lived on with an anarchival, anarchitectural impulse, the latter consolidated and flourished archival, architectural, and archonal determinations. The latter is haunted by the ‘archontic injunction to guard and gather the archive’ (Derrida 1996: 77). Working deeply from within the heritage of the archive, Derrida’s lifelong performances seemed to sense these other intimations and other rhythms. Yet, it was necessary for him to set to work the heritage of the archive from within. Writing (in the colloquial sense) retains the most inalienable indexical relation to the archive. No wonder, the figure of writing remains the emblem of Derrida’s colossal work. His signatures remain inscribed in writing. Mnemocultural modes of speech and gesture have neither an archon nor an archive to record or memorialise an event or signature or context. The immemorial modes of speech and gesture remain on the margins of the monumental work of Jacques Derrida. Yet, it is his incalculable gift of thought that has taught us to respond and affirm responsibility to margins and countersign anarchontic inheritances elsewhere. Working from within the enabling violence of the university (of the) humanities, with all the ironies and complicities irreducibly at work, this chapter can only yearn to learn ways of countersigning an other inheritance without presuming to advance as a native informant. The body-complex, as argued earlier, with its forces of memory and/as desire persistently weaves the question of repetition and emancipation in the proliferating mnemocultures of Indic textual inheritance. How to re-activate and reconstellate such alithic heritages, the ‘original’ inheritances of the (ambivalent) unity of the body and symbol (of gesture and speech) within the context of lithic heritages of epistemic violence remains the challenging task of the critical humanities in India.

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Reading Derrida in the most unlikely places, hoping to move (with) him elsewhere, I cannot help thinking that he was really a folk philosopher, a sage from the culture of wisdom unravelling the claims of European philosophical machine. With ‘his’ Egypt, and ‘his’ Islam, but above all in his bonding with the pluri-dimensional or radial reflections of mnemocultures before the alphabet, Derrida seemed to communicate with the Nambikwaras of the fourth world. He challenged European responsibility to respond to the ghosts, spectres, and apparitions that haunt us from within. Without such haunting there is no culture, there is no heritage, he declared. Yet, why is it that this radical sense of praxial responsibility does not appear to respond to the call of mnemocultures of speech and gesture? I keep asking this question as I drift in the labyrinth of his inscriptions elsewhere. But this praxial responsibility that Derrida lived with can no longer be territorially filiated to a geopolitical Europe. Globalisation has unleashed a more potent climate of Europeanisation today than what all the previous imperialisms had done. Derrida insisted that in this globalised teletechnologised world, response and responsibility must yearn/struggle for a planetary justice even as one mourns the unavailable; this yearning must manifest in performative engagements, he reiterated. In all such meditations and responses, while being elsewhere, dispersing, Jacques Derrida is with us in the singularity of his performances, cautioning us to be vigilant . . . for what tomorrow will bring . . . one never knows.13



Notes

I thank the editors of Borderlands e-journal for the permission to publish this article in the present volume. It was earlier published in Borderlands ejournal 2007, http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol6no3_2007/rao_derrida. htm. 1. Derrida recommends that without succumbing to the twin pressures of ‘appropriation’ (assimilation and incorporation) and ‘expropriation’ (to lose one’s memory by internalising other’s), one must practise philosophy in languages that are not filiated to the roots of Greek, Latin, German, and Arabic languages (Derrida 1994: 12).

328 ? D. Venkat Rao 2. ‘I will disregard’ declared Derrida in a related context, ‘everything that consists in reducing the concept of text to that of written discourse, in forgetting that deconstruction is all the less confined to the prisonhouse of language because it starts by tackling logocentrism’ (Derrida 1990: 91; original emphasis). 3. Derrida wrote elsewhere, emphasising the singular traits of writing (in the empirical sense): the ‘structural possibility of being severed from its referent or signified (and therefore from communication and its context) seems to me to make of every mark, even if oral, a grapheme in general . . . the nonpresent remaining of a differential mark cut off from its alleged ‘‘production’’ or origin’ (Derrida 1982: 318, first emphasis added). 4. The figures of ‘inscription’, ‘cut’, ‘substrate’, ‘impression’, the ‘press’, ‘house’, and a whole lot of substitutes of writing (in the narrow sense) pervade this text. 5. Although Derrida wrote that he was always drawn to both the ‘general and universal figure of circumcision, of excision and in all the ethnoreligious marking of the body’, it is abundantly clear in his work that his reflective concerns (like those of most notable European thinkers) were circumscribed by monotheisms of Judeo-Christian-Islamic relays. Curiously, Derrida wrote, ‘if circumcision is abandoned (literal or figural circumcision, but everything played out around the letter, in Judaism as well as in Islam), one is on the road to an abandonment of phallocentricism. This would apply a fortiori to excision. This abandonment applies also to Christianity. Since these three religions are powerfully, although differently, phallocentric. In any case, phallocentricism, and circumcision link Islam and Judaism’ (Derrida and Roudinesco 2004: 194–95). If this is Derrida’s way of exemplifying the universalisability of the singular (a conviction which he radically affirmed in his essay, ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (1998)), then one wonders how this monotheistic inheritance can become a synecdoche for a cultural/conceptual universal, for circumcision and excision are not necessarily the universal ‘ethno-religious markings of the body’. One wonders why Derrida, who wove his texts with such extraordinary figural traces of the feminine (track, sign, furrow, hymen, invagination, etc.), who taught us so much about the originary violence of the irruption of life itself, should not consider the deepest mark, that deepest ‘wound’, that brings forth every hominid body. This ‘wound’ — linked to a bare fibrous thread, floating in the non-space of, non-ground of the bodily fluid, yet absolutely essential for any being’s coming forth — leaves the most literally indelible mark on every body. This thread ought to remind every body of the source, indeed ‘history’, and the untraceable origin of the body’s emergence. Yet, the thread is the absolutely significant mark, a mark that no one excepting a woman (female) can inscribe. It is rather a mystery as to why this deepest mark of woman does not find a hospitable shelter in Derrida’s figural weave.

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6.

7.

8.

9.

Reflecting from the specific monotheistic heritage, Derrida sees the possibility of abandoning phallocentrism in the abandonment of circumcision. Reflecting from the other possibilities that the figure of the thread suggests, one begins to see the necessity of rethinking the cultural universal status that phallocentrism has been given in psychoanalytic and deconstructive work. It is here, once again learning from Derrida, that one must begin to explore the most singular, idiomatic articulations of the body and symbol in the heterogeneous inheritances of the past that still weave our existence and being. This appears to be the case even in critiques, which insist that deconstruction should attend to the specificity of different communication systems. For instance, in Bernard Stiegler’s attempt to differentiate the digital conjuncture from the alphabetic context — it is once again the figure of literacy — writing — that by default enters the horizon as a frame of reference. In an interesting dialogue, in contrast to Stiegler’s insistence on the alphabetic writing as the inaugural event of testimony (‘Isn’t this [alphabetic] writing what makes historical work possible?’), Derrida makes an unusual comment: ‘Yes, language, but I prefer to say speech or the voice here. Language in the singular event of a phrase, that is to say, the voice . . . the voice makes language an event. It takes us from the linguistic treasure-house to the event of the phrase’. If speech or voice has this enunciative, event-making force or effectivity, one is impelled to ask, why is it that this figure of speech/voice does not lend itself to unravel the heritage of the West in Derrida’s work? (Derrida and Stiegler 2002: 100–101). Here I am referring to the web-group developed by Steven Farmer, Michael Witzel, and George Thompson (moderated by Farmer), http:// groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasian_research, and http://www. safarmer.com/downloads (accessed 6 November 2007). Although the frenetic responses to it from the West (40 e-mail exchanges in three days between 5 and 8 January 2004) treat it more as a problem of ‘fundamentalism’, the episode brings to the fore the anxieties of the archons — the founders and custodians of ‘cultural material (documents)’. BORI, founded in the name of a new pundit, a creation of European Indological adventure, represents and exemplifi es centralised lithic heritage — a heritage that is to be governed and managed by the new inheritor in the figure of an Indologist. E-mail communication on the BORI episode can be found in the archives of: INDOLOGY@liverpool. ac.uk, http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A1=ind0401&L=indology (accessed 6 November 2007). The phrase ‘acquired character’ is from Freud as discussed by Derrida in Archive Fever (1996). The phrase refers to the ‘Lamarkian’ theme of transgenerational (cultural) memories (ibid.: 34–36).

330 ? D. Venkat Rao 10. The Sanskrit textual tradition emphasises correspondences between various elements across ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ entities of the universe. Thus, the ‘senses’ are not delimited to animate, biological, bodies; they are extended to the five elements that compose the universe. Similarly, the differential structure of language is related to the specifically demarcated body-parts of human being. For a valuable account of such correspondences (in the context of language) see Varma (1961: 2–4). 11. The names mentioned are exponents and performers of classical Indian music traditions. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was an exponent of Sufi music tradition from Pakistan. 12. What is curious about this ‘other’ is that this non-aggressive and nonagentive entity ‘enters’ the body (in its formation) in the womb through the most violent act, renting the head in the middle (from the path where the ‘hemispheres’ join). The Upanishads (like Prashnopanishad) deal with this theme. 13. A shorter version of this essay was presented earlier at the National Conference on ‘The Philosophical Challenges of Postmodernism’ organised by the Department of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad, India from 28 to 30 March 2006. An even shorter version, titled ‘Derrida Elsewhere’, was first presented at a Memorial Ceremony of Jacques Derrida, organised at Oxford University in October 2004. I am grateful to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan for inviting me to speak at this Ceremony. I wish to thank the two anonymous referees of Borderlands for their valuable comments and suggestions.



References Bhartrhari. 1974. Vaakyapadeeyamu, trans. Peri Suryanarayanasastri et al. Hyderabad: Telugu Akademy. Cohen, Tom. 2001. Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Brighton: Harvester Press. ———. 1990. ‘Some Statements and Truisms About Neo-logisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seisms’, trans. Anne Tomiche, in David Carroll (ed.), The States of ‘Theory’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, pp. 63–94. New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida Elsewhere ? 331 Derrida, Jacques. 1992. ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering”’, trans. David Wood, in David Wood (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader, pp. 5–35. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1993. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1994. ‘Of the Humanities and the Philosophical Discipline’, http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/human.html (accessed 6 November 2007). ———. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1998. ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone”’, trans. Samuel Weber, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds), Religion, pp. 1–78. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler. 2002. Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity Press. Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco. 2004. ‘In Praise of Psychoanalysis’, trans. Jeff Fort in For What Tomorrow...: A Dialogue, pp. 77–105. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gourhan, Andre Le-roi. 1993. Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Malamoud, Charles. 1996. ‘Exegesis of Rites, Exegesis of Texts’, in Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, trans. David White, pp. 247–58. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2006. The Multiple Arts: The Muses II, trans. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Plato. 1977. Theatetus, trans. H. N. Fowler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. Phaedrus, trans. Stephen Scully. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing. Rotman, Brian. 2002 ‘The Alphabetic Body’, Parallax, 8(1): 92–104. Sriramachandrudu, Pullela. n.d. Sanskrita Vyakhyana Vimarsa Sampradayamu (Critical and Commentatorial tradition in Sanskrit). Hyderabad: Sanskruta Bhasha Prachara Samiti. Stiegler, Bernard . 2001. ‘Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith’, in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, pp. 238–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Varma, Siddheswar. 1961. Critical Studies in the Phonetic Observations of Indian Grammarians. Delhi: Munshi Ram Manohar Lal.

Editors’ Note to the Second Edition

A

“Postscript” is not an addendum/supplement to a work but another beginning in that new ideas are advanced or new path ways indicated for fresh understanding of issues already presented in a book. Theory after Derrida: Essays in Critical Praxis is a 2009 volume consisting of a set of essays inquiring into Jacques Derrida’s legacy and post-­Derrida scenario. The work has evidently made a mark since it was also made available by the publishers as an electronic edition a few years back. The book has a distinction, if our information serves right, as the only work on Derrida from the subcontinent, after his passing away in October 2004. The credit for the book’s third run (including the eBook) goes to all the contributors whose engagements with Derrida have created the possibility for the volume’s success and its new avatar. The abiding concern of the volume Theory after Derrida in many ways is about ‘the future to come’. We are always challenged with the idea of the future to come. In case of Derrida ‘The future to come’ has been woven into a weave of intellectual horizons. One such horizon is the concept of ‘hum-­animal’ that R. Radhakrishnan looks at in his new essay in this edition, ‘The Philosopher that Therefore He Has to Be’. This essay is topical as he explores what it is to be ‘human’ in a post-­human situation.

Postscript: The Philosopher That ­Therefore He Has to Be R. Radhakrishnan

I

f the “hum-­animal”1 so ably theorized recently by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri were to write and publish an essay about its hybrid and hyphenated ontology, would that essay be somewhat like Jacque Derrida’s celebrated essay on the “animal that therefore he is”?2 Is Derrida that exemplary and eloquent “hum-­animal”? And, by the way, does such a “hum-­animal” even exist except as a rubric of recognition? In other words, it is the sheer act of recognition by the human that “I too am an animal” that literally creates the category of the “hum-­animal” against the grain of the erstwhile human. To put it differently, the neologism “hum-­animal” is no more and no less than a philosophical acknowledgment of the human denial of the animal within. It is a category mired in the twin ruse of anthropocentrism and logocentrism: themes that are intrinsic to Derridean deconstruction, which is to say that deconstruction will have lost its business without the anterior sovereignty of logos and anthropocentrism. It is an act of recognition in, by and for language that makes the hum-­animal viable. And of course, Derrida, that most relentless and rigorous of all anti-­ logocentric, ergo logocentric thinkers, is more than aware of this double bind. Let us take a quick look at how Derrida begins his meditation. In the beginning, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked. Naked in the first place — but this in order to announce already that I plan to speak endlessly of nudity and of the nude in philosophy. Starting from Genesis, I would like to choose words that are, to begin with, naked, quite simply, words from the heart. And to utter these words without repeating myself, without beginning again what I have already said here, more than once. It is said that one must avoid repeating oneself, in order not to give the appearance of training (dressage), already, of a habit of a convention that would in the long term program the very act of thinking.3

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I would maintain, and I can see several objections to my position, that Derrida’s principal intention (there are several other intentions that are subsumed, sublated or hierarchically held in position by the principal intention) is to create an axis of alignment between “the animal that is/am” and “the very act of thinking.” But let me back up a little before I get to that. Derrida is uncomfortably aware, and he wants to claim this discomfort as an opportunity for thinking to intervene and make something of, deconstructively speaking. The Cartesian ergo, the therefore, is an imperative in the title of his essay. “The Animal That I Am” as a title would not only be disingenuous, but quite incredible as an epistemological proposition. There is a reason for the I to want to be an animal, and the reason is philosophical. It is not naturally and not for no reason that the “I” is seeking identification with the animal. This is experimentation seeking the validity of identification. What is emerging in this essay is a thesis about the linguistic intelligibility of a potential relationship between the human and the animal. It is precisely because the dog and Derrida cannot have a conversation in language that Derrida is staging this entire scenario to enact the double and contradictory bind of the human: with itself and with the animal, but on different planes. As a philosopher, Derrida cannot but insist on the cogitative ratiocinative force of the “therefore”. The “therefore I am” is much more important than what the I is trying to be. It could easily have been “the stone that therefore I am,” “the stream that therefore I am,” or “the flower that I am,” so long as the “therefore” has earned its predicative-­cogitative credential. Without the tendentious drive of the Cogito no predication can be valid. The animal or the bird or the stream or the cloud that the I can therefore be, is but experiment material for the operation of human reason. It is the second-­order operation that it is all about and the first-­order that privileges the animal is no more and no less than a pre-­text for the rational performance of the “therefore”. The human is in the way and only the human can attempt the project of getting out of the way self-­consciously. Is such an experimental “pre-­textualization” of the animal warranted, or ethical? The fact that reason is a justification has no jurisdiction beyond the realm of the human; for after all, reason is an exclusively human fabrication. There is no Reason out there in Nature to inspire reason as mimesis in the human. And how about the positing of

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Nature as binding common ground between the human and the animal? Even here we are on shaky ground, since the very positing of the seemingly undifferentiated common ground immediately generates the specification of radical differences within the common ground: species differentiation, such as human nature, canine nature, bovine nature, feline nature, ursine nature. Both the distinctions and the subtending common ground are in and part of the natural script, if script is what it is. Whereas one could say that the divisions galvanized and authored by humans in the domain of the intra-­human, such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the tribe, the nation state, etc. are man-­made, the distinction between species is already evident as nature. It is a founding difference that structures perception itself; it is not a mere function of perception. Is this true though? I am not sure and I will not get into that problem in this limited piece of analysis. But I will just mention in passing that what is required, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued with considerable force and eloquence, is a multi-­scale discourse that in acknowledging fundamental differences in scale will also facilitate communicative interaction and coherence among the different scales.4 The crucial questions to ask are: when does difference matter and why? So what if something is different, i.e., different from a so called “us” exceptionalized beyond the play of difference? To echo Foucault and Deleuze, what is “difference as such” and what are “differences from and within”?5 Should Difference be allowed to build walls among different differences? Why should one scale or template of Difference function as an immovable Ur template? For example, what is the difference between say, a dog asking, “What do they see when they see me?” and a racialized-­colonized body via Frantz Fanon asking “What do they see when they see a Black Man?”6 Clearly, a dog has to be seen as a dog, and a black man has to be seen as a black man, or as a man who is black, and a white woman as white. Is the function of the as to frame or release the object of perception from objectification? Is it pejorative to be seen as ontically human rather than be perceived as an undifferentiated “ontological being”? There is both honor and opprobrium in being perceived as simply because the “as” can produce proper recognition as well as stereotypic distortion and objectification. Indeed a black man is both human and black: not just a racialized reduction

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of his humanity to blackness. The innocuous preposition as marks the ontic level of recognition either as a stigma, as in the case of racialized perception whereby black is pathologized, or unmarks it as an ontic particular so that the particular recognition automatically leads to the general or universal recognition. Being white in particular and being universally human constitute a continuum; the passage from white to human is always already in place. But black does not enjoy the same prerogative. The problem runs quite deep and in fact has to do with finding the right relationship between what I would call “identity structures” and “structures of recognition”. It is precisely because a cat is a cat and not a dog that it has to be recognized as a cat. To recognize a cat as a dog would be an error whereas to overlook the feline being of the cat in the name of some more general inclusive recognition would be an insult to the specificity of the feline ontic register. How bizarre then is it for a philosopher as philosopher to desire an interaction with a cat as cat? Can the as be suspended, or would such a suspension be in bad faith? In light of these thoughts, let us now attempt a close reading of the Derrida passage. Two of Derrida’s central concerns have always been: 1) the issue of the nature–culture undecidability, and 2) what to do with language and logocentrism. Are nature and language (for the human) absolute centers or a priori principles that cannot be messed with or transcended? There is, for example, the famous declaration by Derrida that it is futile to think in terms of a total break or escape from logocentrism: but what is doable is to turn the pages of logocentrism differently, deconstructively. The beginning of this essay very much brings to mind the magnificent opening overture that Michel Foucault makes to language in his lecture, “Discourse on Language”.7 There are the twin themes of disappearing through language and trusting language to do its thing, perform its modality without reference to the human. There is the gesture to “the beginning,” a beginning that could be phenomenological or discursive, a beginning available or not to language as ostensive reference. Having begun with the beginning, Derrida instantly invokes language, and not just language, but the nudity of words, if indeed words can ever be nude. Derrida, the rigorous thinker that he is, is making a distinction between nudity as such and the concept or the category of “the nude” in philosophy. If dressing

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down and going commando is what it would take for the human to signal, highlight and thematize the animal within, then clearly, not only does nudity have to be performed but also commented on by language in general, and by the language of philosophy in particular. If nakedness is a direct and lived reality for the animal, for the human being, nudity can only be the result of the act of denudation. And here’s the rub: what exactly is it that the human being has to denude herself of to seek identification with the animal? Language. And pray, how will the human being be aware that the denudation has indeed taken place? Alas, by way of language. Is this a dead end, a vicious circle, or to avail of Heidegger, a productive way of bravely confronting circularity so that thinking can make a break and go beyond the vicious circle? Let us assume then that a break has been effected. Even then, it has to be admitted that the break has been in the thinking, i.e., in language that the dead-­ end has been transcended, and not in the status quo of the real. As nudity functions both literally and as a concept–metaphor in this passage, the impediment that Derrida is hammering away continues to be logo/­anthropocentrism. The animal motif is a byproduct. The theme of nudity is one that Derrida will come back to when he is tête-­à-­tête with the cat. Derrida in fact is seeking the impossible. Logocentrism cannot be eviscerated of its semantic sovereignty: words are indeed cultural and function as clothing that hides a natural nakedness. And yet, Derrida resorts to the wistful subjunctive desire “to speak from the heart” as though such a deployment of language could be construed as an honorable step in the direction of “de-­nuding” words of their logocentric will to meaning. Indeed, Derrida is invoking language as the pharmakon: poison and remedy. Foucault wishes he could lose himself in language, whereas here, Derrida raises the question of the trustworthiness of language, not just in general, but for the particular project that he is about to undertake: a dialogue or a ventriloquial monologue with a cat. Is there a built-­in systemic incommensurability between the commitment to language and the dedication to the all-­important task at hand? Is language the right tool at all? Is the entrusting “myself to words” naïve, duplicitous, disingenuous? Is language the only tool, because “words” are not only what the human has but also because there is no human without “words”? Should words be forsworn in favor of some other modality, wavelength? Or is deconstruction

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the only option? In a way, Derrida is rehearsing the double-­edged profundity of “there is nothing outside the text.”8 There is a project on hand, and as always, Derrida indulges in a prolegomenon that takes the form of a second-­order evaluation as well as critique of the project on hand. If indeed there is a nothing, and this nothing has a locus that is outside of language and yet intelligible to language as “an absence within,” then, what is to be done by way of an honest negotiation with this “nothing”? Under what conditions then can language be entrusted, and under what conditions, not? Also, is Derrida attempting here to make both a methodological as well as a polemical distinction between deconstructing language and divesting from language? If yes, is he attempting this on the assumption that divesting from language would be more radical, particularly in the context of the conversation with the animal? Is this an endeavor to retain the force of the “therefore” as a function of “words from the heart” rather than as an effect of the Cogito? Is he trying to be post-­linguistic or non-­linguistic, in the manner in which Edward Said attempts to be a be “a non-­humanist humanist”?9 At any rate, Derrida is paying undivided attention to the unfortunate reality that “language” has been monumentalized as that one phenomenon or capacity that forever divides the human from the animal. If this monumentalization has taken place in the field of philosophy, what is Derrida to do as a philosopher of language: abandon language, secede from philosophy? I find it moving that Derrida resorts to a phrase like “from the heart,” as though he were trying to speak as a human being in spite, alas, of being a philosopher and being subject to that subject position. Is philosophy in the way? Is language in the way? Derrida is saying: yes and no. Can he be naked like the animal? Clearly not. For lack of that possibility, Derrida is opting for the next best strategy that perhaps could get him close to the beginning, the Genesis, before language was, before logocentrism was inaugurated. Nudity not being possible ontologically, experientially, existentially for the human, what perhaps is possible is to open up, liberate the nude in what is already a dress, an item of clothing: the nude as a rend, as a gaping hole in the fabric, as a radical evisceration, as the effect of the nothing within the text rather than the nothing or the nude as such. Agamben’s “The Open” and the holding void in Heidegger are similar and compatible thought experiments. In my reading, given the passing but binding reference to Genesis, Derrida is seeking to

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primordialize the human by way of the pre-­human. I must confess to being troubled somewhat by this casual Judeo-­Christian/­theological invocation of Genesis. It sounds more like a nostalgic recall of prelapsarian innocence rather than as a secular performance of critical revisionism. What is the connection between “the heart” and a beginning theologized as Genesis? Is it a move towards a cosmos of pre-­Adamic un-­or non-­differentiation; with no names and Adam and Eve themselves naked, without knowing so? What is not clear is why such a scenario automatically enables words that come from the heart, and not the head, or why such words, rather than those of the philosopher, would in any way negate or at least minimize the distance between man and animal. Derrida’s text, we cannot overlook, is full of references to Judaic and Christian theology. Let us listen to Derrida again. Since time, since so long ago, hence since all of time and for what remains of it to come we would therefore be in passage toward surrendering to the promise of that animal at unease with itself.

Since time, therefore. Since so long ago, can we say that the animal has been looking at us? What animal? The other.10

Again in this passage we notice the almost involuntary stress on the therefore and the corresponding anxiety about temporality. There is raw temporality and the epistemic temporality constituted by the force of the “therefore”, and the wistful look back at whatever it was, before the time of time. What is the connection that Derrida is making between “the promise of the animal” and the unease within the animal? Is the promise nothing but the flipside of the unease: the pharmakon again of the unease which is also the promise? Is the animal here literal or a philosophically generative concept metaphor? Who is the animal animal for, or for whom is the animal, animal? What does surrender mean here: surrender of the human “back” to the animal? Derrida needs the word surrender so that he may surrender to Alterity. Again, he is “using”, allegorizing the animal to make way for and legitimate his philosophic-­discursive agenda. What animal? he asks. And the same Derrida who coins the word “animot” to suggest that there is nothing called the animal except as an anthropocentric human coinage and objectification, the same

340    R. Radhakrishnan

Derrida who forces us in the essay to focus on the animal as such without the help of literary fabulations and anthropocentric animal names, has no hesitation in grandly opening up the place holder called Alterity and forcing the animal into that slot: the animal as other and the other as animal. Moreover, what evidence does Derrida have that the animal has been looking at us since so long ago? All of this Derridean drama has but one objective: to introduce the theme of recognition between the cat and the philosopher. The cat, for purely philosophical reasons, is made to enter this parabolic (as in parable) game of tête-­à-­tête recognition with the philosopher. The philosopher feels the deconstructive imperative of wanting to surrender and subject himself to the gaze of the animal. Whether the animal is gazing or not, the philosopher creates the fiction of being looked at by the cat. The cat is being made guilty of having to look at the philosopher: it has no choice. Before the cat that looks at me naked, would I be ashamed like a beast that no longer has the sense of its nudity? Or, on the contrary,

like A man who retains the sense of his nudity? Who am I, therefore? Who is it that I am (following)? Whom should this be asked of if not of the other? And perhaps of the cat itself? I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the feline that traverses our myths and religions, literatures and fables. There are so many of them. The cat that I am talking about does not belong to Kafka’s vast zoopoetics, something that nevertheless merits concern and attention here, endlessly and from a novel perspective.

Despite all this fussy literalizing of the cat, the fact remains that Derrida’s negotiation with the cat is nothing but epistemologically tendentious. In insisting on being recognized by the other, he is insisting on recognition from the cat who becomes a stand-­in for the other. The only way he can be alienated from his putative human identity, an alienation that he desperately craves, is by way of a remedial misrecognition by the cat. “Who am I therefore?” is the overriding question and the cat, literally, is coerced into participation in the philosopher’s need for a recognition denuded of human identitarian sufficiency. In his own way, Derrida too will

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not let the animal be except in a specified role and position with respect to the philosopher’s locus and need. He needs desperately for the cat to gaze on him so that he can have the “who am I?” question answered like never before. Will the answer take place in the domain called “philosophy” as a result of philosophy’s own capacity for fundamental auto-­critique, or will Derrida have to un-­ philosophize himself to really understand his Mitsein relationship with the cat? On the one hand, his fraternity and collegiality with philosophers, and on the other, his new-­found affinity for the cat, strangely galvanized by his love of philosophy: which will it be, or can it be both? His two conjoined tasks: unlearning both the human and the philosopher; but, in the name of what though? Here Derrida is commenting on, and actually opening up a place for “his words from the heart” about the animal: words that have to be, for good or bad, routed via his subject positionality as a philosopher. Let us hear Derrida evaluating the significance of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan on the animal and the so-­called animal question. Their discourses are sound and profound, but everything in them goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them. At least everything goes on as though this troubling experience had not been theoretically registered, supposing that it had been experienced at all, at the precise moment when they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not seeing. The experience of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at them, had not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse. In sum they have denied it as much as they misunderstood it. From here on we shall circle round and round this immense disavowal, whose logic traverses the whole history of humanity, and not only that of the quasi-­epochal configuration I just mentioned.11

At the risk of sounding irreverent, let me still go ahead and say it: in this passage, not only is Derrida putting his foot in his mouth again and again, but also thoroughly enjoying the immensely rich and productive “negative labor” of deconstruction (let us not forget here how critical Derrida always has been of the naiveté of righteous and pious affirmations made in the name of political rectitude; affirmations that have supposedly made a decisive break from their deconstructive prehistory) as he plunges in relentlessly into philosophy’s resolute disavowal of the animal and the animal

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question. My question is this: after the admirable diagnosis of philosophy’s misrecognition of the entire issue, why on earth should Derrida monumentalize this disavowal and this misrecognition as the starting point of the animal question? What is this obsession with having to “circle round and round this immense disavowal”? Is this just knee-­jerk professionalism: a misguided adherence to one’s discipline despite the discipline’s egregious misbehavior in the field of study? Why not just junk this esteemed group of philosophers as irrelevant to his understanding of the animal? Why is philosophy’s misrecognition of such rich inaugural value? Why is philosophy so special? We do not hold on to erroneous scientific, biological theories, do we? Just imagine holding on to Racism and the White Man’s blindness and Racism’s disavowal of blackness as the starting point of understanding, historicizing and theorizing Blackness and the history of colored people. Would we keep “circling round” these disavowals? Or, for that matter, what about holding on to “the darkness of Africa” in the European mind, or “the unknowability” of feminine sexuality in the male patriarchal canon as the originary point of entry respectively into the truth of Africa and feminist awareness? Unthinkable as well as unconscionable, and yet, when it comes to philosophy, we applaud its myopia as potential far-­sightedness, its scotoma as meaningfully diagnostic of a total vision to come. What philosophy does not know is not worth knowing; and when philosophy gets it wrong, then philosophy retains the generic right to honor its error as the only reliable basis for the truth to come. In my reading, Foucault was right in his counter-­critique of Derrida: philosophy will just not let go, it will keep insisting that it was always there in the beginning and will be there in the end. Not just that, in some mystical trans-­historical mode, philosophy will have “always already” corrected itself even as it makes all sorts of cardinal errors and misrecognitions. Kant and Descartes and Lacan and Levinas can just not be wrong in the long run, and of course, needless to say, the long run is philosophy’s monopoly. Philosophy is just not the domain of knowledge to accommodate animal studies. What it has the obligation to do, however relentlessly, is to call into question humanism, anthropocentrism, centrism as such; and clearly no one is better equipped to perform this than Derrida. But the point I want to make is that there is no guaranteed segue from these deconstructive and auto-­critical

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insights into the human or the post-­human condition to the animal question. Misrecognitions do not happen in a historical or discursive vacuum. They are endemic to specific contexts and domains of knowledge. A famous example of a persuasive misrecognition of a phenomenon in an inappropriate discourse occurs in Shelley’s poem “The Cloud” where Shelley in a poetic mode wrongly identifies the lightning as the pilot of the cloud.12 Or, think of the misdirected truth claims astrologers make about their intimate knowledge of planetary movements and stellar positions. Philosophy’s truth claims about animals, either by way of commission or omission, are no different: just plain irrelevant. For a misrecognition to matter, it will have to fall within an appropriate field of study with respect to its subject matter; only then can that misrecognition be rectified by the relevant procedures and methodologies that constitute, if you will, the “sovereignty” of that particular domain of study. Even within the species-­centric undifferentiated realm of the human, differentiations and distinctions need to be calibrated: differentiate an African misrecognition of an African reality from a European misrecognition (“etic” and “emic” questions of insiders and outsiders) not on the assumption that an African recognition is somehow guaranteed to be correct. The misrecognition has to be germane in the first place to provide the basis for subsequent modification or correction. The procedure then is to affect an alignment, both epistemological and political, between identity and representation, between recognition and representation. It is then the mandate of representation not to nail the answer as an act of infallible or immaculate recognition, but rather to open up the process of representation to multilateral accountability and potential endorsement. Recognitions as ongoing reciprocal, multilateral processes seek representations as contingent identity resolutions and stabilizations. Are “words from the heart” somehow less prone to perpetrating invasive misrecognitions? What kind of words would “words from the heart” be? Literally, do they originate from the heart and for that reason possess the ability to function as anti-­words, i.e., as words not loyal to the sovereignty of logocentrism? In being disloyal to their logocentric formation, would they demonstrate a reliable loyalty to the animal? Would linguistic disloyalty immediately find its right cause in the animal? Is the animal in that case

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reduced to a cause? Are these poetic Heideggerian words capable of releasing the void and the open within despite the baggage of linguistic accoutrements and equipmentality? Or, are words from the heart by very definition anchored in empathy and as a result capable of a Keatsian “negative capability”? Do these words, to invoke Keats again, have a chameleon structure that forswears any kind of identity affiliation: dedicated instead to an ever-­changing tableau of difference? Derrida then could be perceived as rectifying “the heartlessness” of philosophical–linguistic thinking. “The heart of the matter” is no longer dead or obsolete, just because language said so. To ask the all-­important question: what is Derrida’s intention here, and where (as within the truth of what discourse, the “dans le vrai” magnificently elaborated by Foucault)13 does his intention take shape and actualize itself? Would Derrida’s essay belong in animal studies, post-­humanism, deep ecology, ecological materialism, or anti-­anthropocentric philosophy? Where would it belong primarily but with the possibility that the impact made in the primary domain could perhaps ripple across and make a difference in some of the adjoining disciplines as well? To transpose this discussion to the Derrida–Cat scenario, what is Derrida actually doing, and what does he think he is doing; and indeed, is he “guilty” of misrecognizing his activity? Is he speaking for the animal? Is he perpetrating the same folly he had scathingly critiqued Foucault for: attempting to recover the naked beginning, the Genesis before the animal–human split, all the while employing the very discourse that authorizes and enforces that constitutive ontological split? Is he, in simulating a naked pre-­linguistic fellow being with the cat, indulging in a tendentious monologue? Is he being more rigorous than Foucault had been, at least in Derrida’s estimation, in his self-­staging as human and ineluctably anthropocentric? Obviously, unlike as in the intra-­human context that is linguistic through and through, here it is language that creates the divide, and what is more, the philosopher’s attempt at nudity remains the nudity of language. Derrida attempts a neologism with the word l’animot to introduce an anomaly and a transgression in the French language. I was tempted, at a given moment, in order to indicate the direction of my thinking, not just to keep this word (the Animal) within

Postscript   345 quotation marks, as if it were a citation to be analyzed, but without further ado to change the word, indicating clearly thereby that it is indeed a matter of a word, only a word, the word animal (du mot “animal”), and to forge another word in the singular, at the same time close but radically foreign, a chimerical word that sounded as though it contravened the laws of the French language, l’animot. Ecce animot. Neither a species nor a gender nor an individual, it is an irreducible living multiplicity of mortals, and rather than a double clone or a portmanteau word, a sort of monstrous hybrid, a chimera waiting to be put to death by its Bellerephon.14

Uncomfortably and even guiltily aware that the human–­animal limit as border passes through the human but not the animal, Derrida is doing with language and in language all that he can do both to release the animal from the propriety of language, and to acknowledge the human as humanimal. This is a double-­move, and the rest of this essay will seek to understand how Derrida manages this doubleness, this ontological hybridity or hyphenation. Neither authorized to speak for the animal, nor permitted not to think about the animal in terms of solicitude and compassion, Derrida captures this predicament thus. But in forbidding myself thus to assign, to interpret or to project, must I for all that give in to the other violence of asinanity (bêtise), that which would consist in suspending one’s compassion and in depriving the animal of every power of manifestation, of the desire to manifest to me anything at all, and even to manifest to me in some way its experience of my language, of my words and of my nudity?15

The blending of agency as both active and passive in this passage is masterly. The interdiction, the forbidding is figured syntactically as a performance of self-­authorization. There is the brilliant diagnosis, reminiscent of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty in a different context, that either choice still remains an act of violence. The potential possibility alas of having to suspend one’s human compassion for and towards the animal is accounted for as a debit in the animal’s ledger. The animal in itself is quietly ontologized into the animal for the human; and it is made to seem that it is a deprivation for the animal not to be able to a) manifest itself, b) manifest itself

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to “me,” the human, and c) manifest to the human its ability to experience human language and nudity. Manifest “anything at all,” please dear fellow-­animal: that is the philosopher’s plangent plea to the animal. Derrida does his best to endow “manifestation” with multiple meanings: manifestation as the intelligibility of the animal as such or to itself, as inter-­species or reciprocal intelligibility, and finally as the intelligibility of the human to the animal with the animal in this scene becoming the reader/the seer and human ­language/nudity transformed as the scene/the text. Derrida stakes his “philosophical all” on the potentiality of this reversal. Derrida is staging interrogatively and with a sense of pathos, a potential scene of immanent reciprocity between human and animal in the mode of an agonizing dilemma. And why is it a dilemma: simply because Derrida as a human–philosopher does not have the mandate, the imprimatur in whose name he can perform either of these acts of violence. To do anything in the name of the human, however unimpeachable the intentions, would constitute hegemonic unilateralism; to act in the name of the animal would amount to the violence of representation; to act in the name of the common ground, the principle of Mitsein between the human and the animal would be presumptive since the common ground has to be spoken for, and the animal cannot speak. This is a classic moment of Derridean aporia: contradictorily, both empowered and debilitated/paralyzed by the phenomenon of the ontico-­ontological difference, famously expounded by Martin Heidegger, Derrida revels in the aporia and performs the double-­structure of the human assiduously and in chronic compliance. The human too is a human within a tautological formulation of identity, and yet, the capacity to employ the “therefore” is built into the human to alienate and disrupt the tautology into self-­reflexivity and thinking. It is “given” to the human to be double so that it can maintain Cogito ergo sum both as an expression of Being and of Knowing. The given for the animal is different: but what is common both to the human and the animal is a certain given given-­ness. The “therefore”, by way of language and thinking is axiomatized into the human being as its normative nature. But what if such a human being so severely subjected to the Cogito now is made to acknowledge a different but equal subjection, i.e., subjection to its fundamental and constitutive animality. The human being, now recognized as the humanimal for a reason, has to re-­ think, re-­

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re-­deploy and re-­orient the Cogito with respect to its animal base/ basis. Are the animal in the human and the human in the humanimal in two discrete compartments, are they arbitrarily and non-­ normatively juxtaposed, hyphenated hierarchically or non-­ hierarchically, articulated together in the name of an implicit synthesis? What we have here is the classic structure not just of philosophic dualism but also of a political, Du Boisian double-­consciousness.16 After Derrida’s many essays and lectures on human sovereignty and the beast, the human being has not suddenly become the hum-­ animal by way of a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. All that has happened, and this is radical enough, is that now the human being has mustered enough ontological integrity and courage to acknowledge and honor the animal within. This reflexive recognition that runs counter to that of humanism is still well anchored in the Cogito and its linguistic/cerebral/cognitive apparatus. Ironically and poignantly, in claiming the animal that she is, the human is in fact re-­establishing and re-­valorizing what is uniquely human to avow and internalize what is the animal. It has now become human, all too human to acknowledge the animal within. If, as Giorgio Agamben powerfully argues, the dividing line between the human and the animal traverses the human and not the animal,17 then it follows inexorably that it is only by way of acknowledging this dissymmetry that the human can honor the animal within. The acknowledgment takes the form of an ongoing mea culpa: I can never become the animal since I am not all animal. It requires my Cogito and the human being in me to understand and welcome the animal being in me. Even though I am always already part animal (unlike an actual animal, and Nietzsche comes to mind here, whose self-­recognition as animal is either instinctually automatic or totally consubstantial with its animality),18 and yet because in my organization as hum-­animal, the animal coexists not in isolation but in conjunction with the human, it is obligatory and ineluctable that I as a hum-­animal turn the human on in me to acknowledge the animal in me. But the reverse is not true. The animal in me just can be: its being does not have to be thematized by a corresponding Cogito. Strangely then, it is only by “not letting the animal within be,” and by subjecting the animal within to epistemic invasion by the Cogito that the human being is able to own up to its own animal-­being. The human in the animal is constrained to speak for the hybrid configuration. And all of this,

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whatever this is, is taking place in the heart and soul of philosophy and philosophical thinking. Says Derrida: “The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking, perhaps begins there.”19 I assume that the thinking that he is envisioning would be intransitive, and not transitive and possessed of a proper object. Commenting on “the bordercrossings between bios and zoe, the biological, the zoological, the anthropological, as between life and death, life and technology, life and history,” Derrida declares that his intention is “to call into question,” “this auto-­definition, this auto-­apprehension, this auto-­situation of man or of the human Dasein (formulation that reconciles, with some unease, Sartre with Heidegger)20 as regards what is living and animal life,” all that belongs to “this auto-­biography of man.”21 If calling into question this autobiography of man is his deconstructive motif, what is the subject of his affirmation, keeping in mind of course that for Derrida the affirmation is not a break from the deconstruction? Here is Derrida’s answer. Limitrophy is therefore my subject. Not just because it will concern what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, not certainly in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.22

The limit is the problem and the limit is the answer. The limit is what creates borders and the limit is precisely what empowers the proliferation its many “figures”, thereby de-­normativizing any one border, such as the one between the human and the animal. It is in the endless heterogenizing of the limit and the rendering porous without recourse of every conceivable limit, that “thinking” begins. Too rigorous an epistemologist to acquiesce in the dangerous fallacy of what he calls “biologistic continuism”, Derrida, who “never believed in some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the animal,”23 therefore follows the animal for no human reason than to derail the philosopher in the trace of the animal as word. Perhaps I am wrong: but I would like to think that what Derrida is doing, from the very heart and soul of the philosophical domain known as “critique of anthropocentrism”,

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is echoing his great fellow philosopher Giorgio Agamben in granting the “Shabbat of both man and animal.”24 Yet another way to go with this thought, more than enough material for a new essay, is to pose the Deriding double bind along the Du Boisian axis of “double-­consciousness”: to be torn between the human and the animal and refusing a synthesis since the animal has something to teach the human, and the human the animal. The pedagogical aspect of the Du Boisian formulation would be perfectly in consonance with the image of “following the animal” in Derrida’s text. Who is the leader and who the follower, and who the teacher and who the student within the double bind? It is not a coincidence that Du Bois eventually renounces his American citizenship to register his fundamental disillusionment not just with American citizenship, but with citizenship in general and the violent and exceptionalist norm of sovereignty that underlies citizenship and its mono-­thesis. Derrida, as a double-­conscious onto-­political thinker, suggests something similar: the chronic and perennial divestment from the sovereignty of the human without any possibility of authentic embodiment as animal.

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Notes 1. I am referring to Kalpana Rahita Seshadri’s HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language. 2. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. 3. Ibid: 1. 4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” and “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” 5. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-­ memory, Practice. 6. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. 7. Michael Foucault, “Discourse on Language.” 8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. 9. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. 10. The Animal That Therefore I Am: 3. 11. Ibid: 14. 12. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Cloud.” 13. Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. 14. The Animal That Therefore I Am: 41.

350    R. Radhakrishnan 15. Ibid: 18. 16. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. 17. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History. 19. The Animal That Therefore I Am: 29. 20. I am referring here to Jean-­Paul Sartre’s lecture/essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” and Martin Heidegger’s critique of Sartre’s position in “Letter On Humanism”. 21. The Animal That Therefore I Am: 24. 22. Ibid: 29. 23. Ibid: 30. 24. Agamben, The Open: 92.



References Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Atoll. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, 35: 197–222. ———. 2012. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History, 43(1): 1–18. Derrida, Jacques. 1968. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Marie-­Louise Mallet. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I am. Trans. David Willis. New York: Fordham University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Oxford University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1977. Language, Counter-­memory, Practice. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper. ———. 1977. “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, pp. 217–265. San Francisco: Harper. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2000. Humanism and Terror: The Communist Problem. Trans. John O’Neill. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Postscript   351 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1949. The Use and Abuse of History. Trans. Adrian Collins. Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill. Said, Edward, W. 2004. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. Paul. 1948. Existentialism is a Humanism. Trans. Philip Sartre, Jean-­ Mairet. London: Methuen. Seshadri, Kalpana Rahita. 2012. HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

336 ? Theory after Derrida

Index Abdallah, 146; Abdullah, 137 Abrahamic, 227 Abrahamic tradition, 36 Absolute Knowledge, 141, 148, 217 Achebe, Chinua, 281 active Vergesslichkeit, 31 acoluthon, 250 acolyte, 5, 250, 262 Acts of Religion, 182 Adieu Derrida, 2, 3, 4, 5, 120 Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 2, 3 Adorno, Theodor, 92, 112, 284, 295 aestheticism, 283 Africa, 86, 142, 189; South Africa, 189, 273 African–American, 268 agency, 101, 102, 114, 117, 155, 195, 241, 294 AIDS, 86 Albo, 54 Alexander the Great, 203 Algeria, 188, 195 Allah, 286 allegorical utopianism, 295 alithic, 309, 311, 313, 314, 317, 318, 326; alithic memories, 309 alterity, 2, 8, 9, 10, 131, 164, 167, 178, 195, 196, 246, 297, 307, 325; alterity, feminine, 196; alterity of others, 11, 38 Althusser, Louis, 91, 92, 122, 123, 124 ambiguity, 227, 233, 261 America, 33, 37 American Philosophical Association, 169 anacol, 5; anacol, 250; anacoluthon, 250; anacoluthon, 255, 256, 262 analogue, 62, 64

Analytic of Beauty, 146 Anaximander Fragment, The, 231 Anderson, Amanda, 188 androcentric, 153 Angel, 131 Angsty, 251, 253 anterior, 2, 161, 319; anteriority, 162, 293 anthropocentrism, 12; anthropology, 27, 179; anthropologism, 26, 27 anthos-logia, 145 antinomy, 42; antinomial, 44 apartheid, 188, 189, 273, 274, 275 apocalypse, 9, 10; Apocalypse Now, 9 apophatic discourse, 39 aporia, 2, 11, 20, 47, 50, 58, 58, 61, 63, 64, 113, 114, 117, 166, 169, 178, 182, 230 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 187 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 52, 54, 56 Arabic, 53, 281, 291, 294, 327 archeo-Christian, 231 Arche-writing, 277 Archibugi, Daniele, 195 Archive Fever, 329 archon, 314; archonal, 326; archontic, 326 Arendt, Hannah, 183, 191 Arles, 147 Armaic, 53 Aristotle, 12, 31, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 92, 152, 153, 162, 184, 203 Aristotilean, 47, 58, 72; non– Aristotilean, 52, 53 Aristotle’s Physics, 61, 63

Index ? 353 337 Index   arrivance, 182, 184; arrivant, 130, 179, 181, 182, 185, 193 Aron, Raymond, 147 Artaud, Antonin, 119, 138 art for art’s sake, 283 Association of Artists of the World, 188 Asia, 84 as-such-ness, 283 asylum, 190, 191, 192; Asylum Cities, 195 (a-)temporality, 57 atheism, 230 atheological, 306 auctoritas, 192 Aufheben, 147 Aufhebung, 27, 50, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147 Aufklärung, 206 Augustine, St., 1, 54, 55, 66, 129; Augustinian, 201, 217, 219 autobiographical writing, 278 autonomy, 102, 175, 215, 282 autochthony, 167 autos, 37, 175 autobiography, 175; auto-bio-graphy, 147 Autodafe, 183, 195 Auschwitz, 82, 83 avant garde, 10, 43 avant-propos, 15, 151, 152, 156, 158, 160, 165, 166, 168 Babel, Tower of, 286, 290 Badiou, Alain, 8, 11, 120 Bakhtinian, 296 Baldwin, Jon, 14 Balibar, Étienne, 92, 120 Baltimore, 162, 163 Baral, K. C., 1 barbarism, 41 Barcelona, 53, 195 Barthes, Roland, 147

Barnes, Djuna, 278 Barnes, J., 62 Barr, James, 53 Barrachi, Claudia, 82 Barrow, John D., 67 Basic Problems of Phenomenology, The, 60, 72 Bass, Alan, 47, 55, 167 Bataille, Georges, 133, 138, 147 Baudelaire, Charles, 108, 112 Beardsworth, Richard, 270, 277 Bearn, Gordon G. F., 91, 95 becoming, 55, 57 beginning, 4, 59, 60, 64 Being, 8, 15, 28, 29, 30, 31, 63, 230, 292, 297, 329 Being as presence, 29 being and time, 24, 28, 29, 47, 48, 49, 58, 67, 223 being for itself, 295 Békési, János, 168 Benedikit, Michael, 10 Benjamin, Walter, 18, 75, 76, 91, 92, 191, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299 Bentham, 102 Bennington, Geoffrey, 100, 122, 125 Benz, Carolyn R., 239 Berber, 144 Bergson, Henri, 47, 52, 229 Berlin, Isaiah, 101, 133 Berking, Helmuth, 102 Between Deleuze and Derrida, 87 Bettenson, H., 66 Beyond the Culture Wars, 277 Bezeugung, 225 Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 315 Bharata, 317 Bhartrhari, 321

338 ?  Theory 354   Index after Derrida Bible, The, 54, 257, 258 Biblical monotheism, 142 Biblical Words for Time, 53 bilingualism, 300 binary, 90, 179, 180, 182, 186, 195, 244, 251, 254, 257, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 276, 278; binaries, 6, 17, 41, 178, 236, 271, 272 binomial, 137, 201 Biogradables: Seven Dairy Fragments, 9 biological, 322 Biewener, 92 Blackwell, R. J., 54 Blanchot, Maurice, 95, 134, 138, 184 Bloom, Harold, 58 Blue and Brown Books, The, 55 Bodin, Jean, 37 bodies/body, 273, 274, 275, 318, 321, 322, 323, 325, 328, 329 Body in Pain, The, 270 Borderlands, 327, 330 Borradori, Giovanna, 277 Bonaparte, Louis, 96 Book of Numbers, The, 192 Booth, Wayne C., 147 boundary, 64; boundary signs, 64 Boundas, Constantine, 92 Boudrillard, 92, 124 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124 bourgeois, 110, 149 Boynton, Eric, 17 Bradley, 231 Brault, Pascale-Anne, 147 Breckenridge, 195 Brentano, Franz, 63 Breton, André, 147 Broom, 131

Bruce, 247 Brunschvig, 26 Buchdahl, Gred, 55 Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 68–69 bureaucracy, 94 Butler, Judith, 18, 123, 275, 277, 278 Caiaramelli, 168 Calhoun, Craig, 183 Callari, 92 Calvary, 137 canonical, 268, 278, 283 Capital, 84, 111, 119, 120 Capri, 229 Caputo, 44, 233 cardinal virtues, 42 Cardozo Law School, 155, 160 Carsetti, Arturo, 219 Cartesian ergo, 157 carnivalesque, 296 Categories, 63, 241 Catholic, 243 Celan, Paul, 138, 146 centre, 144, 157, 176 centrality of pure consciousness, 26 centrism, 286 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 300 Charlie Parker, 121 Chatteaubriand, 217 Chea, Pheng, 187, 188 China, 84, 185 Chinese, 54, 243 Christ, 137, 142, 247, 252, 286 Christian, 15, 16, 137, 167, 205, 206, 208, 216, 217, 218, 221, 224, 226, 227, 229, 230, 232, 237, 240, 246, 247, 249, 251, 253, 254, 258, 260, 262, 306, 308, 326; Christianism, 217; Christian: eschatology, 207; fellowship, 257; identity, 239; theology, 230; Trinitarian, 142;

Index ? 355 339 Index   spirituality, 250; Christianity, 9, 16, 142, 183, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 218, 224, 226, 229, 232, 237, 246, 250, 260, 262, 328; Christianity, European, 207; Christianity, Pauline, 192 Chouraqui, 53 Cicero, 31 Circonfession, 129, 148; (cir)confession, 147 cities of refuge, 36, 174, 183, 190, 192, 194 citizenship, 176, 184 City, 190; city, 192 City of God, 54 civilisation, 204 Cixous, Hélèn, 138, 149 Clarke, 66 Claire, 131 Clash of Civilisations, 295 ‘classless’ society, 190 Claude, 144, 145, 148, 149 closure, 11, 268; non-closure, 11 Cocteau, Jean, 138 code, 318, 322, 324; codified law, 314 Coetzee, J. M., 121 Cohen, Robin, 148, 183, 194 cogito, 88 cognitivism, 202 cognoscere, 219 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 135 colonialism, 307, 310 Comay, Rebecca, 91 commodity exchange, 106 communism, 32 community, 19, 32 comparatism, 289, 292 Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, 194 condition of reading, 12 conditional, the, 113; unconditional, the, 113, 190

Confessions, 54 confusionism, 311 Conyers, 262 conformism, 12, 24, 75 Connolly, William E., 95 consciousness, 27, 107, 112, 201, 216, 310 constitutional paradigm, 39 continental, 220, 221, 225, 227, 231 contradictions, 55 copy, 81, 83 Corbin, Henry, 147 Corbin, J., 240 Corbin, Juliet and Anselm Strauss, 240, 241 Cornell, Drucilla, 120 Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity, 66 cosmogonic, 201 cosmopolitics, 16, 178, 192, 103, 194 cosmopolitan, 16, 179, 194; cosmopolitanism, 12, 16, 25, 40, 113, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 184, 187, 191, 192, 194, 195, 195 Counterfeit Money, 108, 112 counter-insurgency, 79 counter-memory, 82 Course in General Linguistics, A, 265, 277 Crescas, 52, 53, 54 Creswell, John W., 238 criteriology, 165 Critical Inquiry, 3, 4 Critique of the Power of Judgement, 146, 149 Critter, 243, 254 cross-cultural hospitality, 12 Crucifixion, 260 cryptology, 206 Cullenberg, Stephen, 92, 97 cultural capital, 109, 110, 111

340 ?  Theory 356   Index after Derrida cultural memory, 314; cultures of memory, 314 culture, 86, 181, 187, 193, 309 cyborg, 82 Czech, 203, 210 Dagar brothers, 317 Dalmassso, Gianfranco, 15, 141 Dallmayr, Fred, 12, 43, 44 Damai, Pushpa, 16 dana, 306; dana/vana, 307 Darwinism, social, 296 Dasein, 26, 27, 28, 121, 230; Dasein and Being, 28 Da of Dasien, The, 28; Da of Sien, 28 Davidson, Arnold I., 3 D’costa, Gavin, 246 De Anima, 62 Death, 2, 3, 4, 9, 121, 80, 137, 201, 243, 244, 259, 305 Debating Cosmopolitics, 195 Debord, Guy, 73, 124 De Caelo, 63 decisionism, 174, 176, 195 ‘Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice’, 160 deconstruction: history of, 14, 75, 76, 87, 91; critique of, 19; as a culture, 74; as an institution, 74; as political, 74, 75; as a trdition, 74, 75; reception of, 89 Deconstruction and Criticism, 58 deconstructive reading, 267 Defoe, Daniel, 121 De doctrina Christiana, 217 deferral, 268 deferred, 8 de Gaulle, 71 De Interpretatione, 60 De la Grammatologie, 163 de Man Affair, 8, 10, 89 De Memoria, 62

Deleuze, Gilles, 5, 13, 20, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 121 democracy, 12, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 167, 307 Democracy in America, 37 democratic praxis, 42, 43 democracy to come, 25, 43, 121, 185, 188, 189 Dendrinos, Bessie, 300 Dénégations, 151 Denoël, 134 Denscombe, Martyn, 239 deportee, 85 Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 32 Derrida: A Critical Reader, 113 Derrida and Vattimo, 36 ‘Derrida on Law; or Poststructuralism gets Serious’, 195 Derrida’s ‘Note’, 48 Descartes, 28 De Sensu, 62 despotism, 90 determinism, 322 De Trinitate, 219 ‘Des Tours de Babel’, 184 de Tocqueville, 37, 40, 44 Djaout, Tahar, 195 diacritic, 132 dialectic, 47; dialectics, 72, 84, 189, 322 dialectical: imagining, 295; meditation, 298; negativity, 50; other, 231 dialogic, 196 didacticism, 283 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 60 différance, 2, 8, 11, 16, 38, 69, 81, 120, 121, 125, 151, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 167, 170, 174, 176, 236, 237, 243,

Index ? 357 341 Index   244, 245, 246, 259, 260, 267, 280; differ-a-nce, 303, 312 Difference and Repetition, 76, 84, 85, 95 Dionysius, 131 discourse, 10, 186, 328 dissemination, 135, 186, 187 disinterestedness, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 119, 122 Divers, 131 dogmatism, 227 Doolittle, Hilda, 278 Douzinas, Costas, 3, 5, 6, 20, 120 Dufourmantelle, Anne, 180, 181 D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguére en philosophie, 53 Durkheim, 10, 206 East, 67, 84, 203 Eagle, 131 Eagleton, Terry, 115, 116, 117 eclecticism, 286 Eco, Umberto, 147 economism, 103 economy of exchange, 131; of justice, 213; of sacrifice, 215; of violence, 122 ego, 95 Egypt, 142, 327 ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, 96 Eigenheit, 29 eidos, 13, 96, 78, 82, 322; eidos/ copy, 79 eidolon, 322 Einstein, A., 54, 66 El-Biar, 149 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 13 Eliot, T. S., 278 elsewhere, notion of, 188 Empédocle, 134

empirical, 28, 310, 320 Encyclopedia, 26, 47 endolinguistics, 130 ‘Ends of Man, The’, 12, 25, 27, 31, 42, 55 end of history, 184 Enlightenment: 7, 8, 192, 224, 232, 233, 303; Enlightenment Modernity, 236; Enlightenment Modernity, post-, 237 Éperons, 65 Epicurus, 84, 94 epimeleia les psyches, 207 epiphenomena, 108 episteme: 310, 314, 315, 324; epistemic, 306, 308, 320, 322, 323, 324, 326; epistemological scepticism, 14; epistemology, 210; epistemophilic, 326 epistolary, 141 epitaph, 152 erasure, 34, 68, 71 Ericksen, R. P., 53 eschatology, 33 Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, 53 Essay on Antihumanism, 122 essence, 286 essentialism, 288 ethical: 306; action, 104; subject, 100, 101, 105, 120; subjectivity, 14 ethics, 86, 101, 105, 107, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 170, 305; ethics: of hospitality, 86, 180; as hospitality, 180 ethnocentric, 267, 310, 319; ethnocentrism,121; ethno-centrism, 264; ethno-logocentrism, 290; ethno-religious, 328 Etymological, 306; etymologically, 307; Etymology, 180; etymophilological, 306

342 ?  Theory 358   Index after Derrida eu-logos, 3 Eucharist, 210 euphemism, 292 Eurasians, 243 Euro-American, 315 Eurocentrism, 25, 286, 290, 294 Europe, 32, 33, 35, 133, 178, 179, 183, 187, 274, 310, 327 European, 15, 25, 26, 178, 189, 191, 243, 307, 308, 309, 311, 313, 315, 319, 327, 328; colonisation, 314; culture, 32; languages, 306; non-, 308; racism, 121 European Journal of English Studies, 300 event, 39, 174 evil, 189 exchange, 104, 112, 113, 114, 142; exchange theory, 102 exile, 85; exilic, 189 existence, 245 existentialism, 25, 26, 27 existential-ontological, 223 exoteric, 49, 56, 67 Experience of Freedom, The, 39 Explorations in Theology, 53 Expressionism, 91 exteriority, 160, 196, 224, 227, 231, 264 extra-textual, 320 Fabbri, Lorenzo, 11, 20 Fabula, 144 Facioni, Silvano, 14 ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, 229, 232 fanaticism, 34 Fanon, Frantz, 300 Farmer, Steven, 329 Fascism, 285 fatalism, 322

Fawkner, H. W., 10 fear and trembling, 225 feminine, 196, 328; femininity,181, 195, 271; feminism, 181, 267, 275, 300; feminists, 10, 277, 278 Ferguson, Frances, 7 Ferry, Luce and Alain Renaut, 122, 123, 124 fetishism, 106 Feuerbach, 208, 216, 234 figure of writing, 310, 312 finalism, 88, 89 Fine, Robert, 183 finite, 295, 297; infinite, 295, 297 flores rethorici, 145 florilegium, 145, 146 Foe, 121 following without following, 5, 17 Fonda, Henry, 118 Fonagy, Peter, 143 Fontevrault, 145 Force of law, 92, 164, 169, 177, 195 foreigner, 85, 181 forgiveness, 113, 200, 250 ‘Form and Meaning’, 55, 58, 69 formalism, 142 Forum on Contemporary Theory, the, 4 fort/da, 131 Foucault, Michel, 20, 92, 93, 118, 132, 137, 147, 159, 163, 168, 169, 193, 288, 297 foundational, 220 Fowler, Briget, 119, 120 France, 26, 30, 70, 75, 91 Franchist Militias, 148 Frankfurt, 148, 195 Fraser, J. T., 66 fraternocracy, 39 freedom, 11, 19, 42, 112, 210, 220, 258, 270, 295, 323

Index ? 359 343 Index   free will, 108 Frege, 88 French: 25, 26, 49, 53, 60, 132, 137, 144, 152, 155, 168, 170, 200, 206, 280, 281, 294, 302; Communist Party, 75; philosophy, 27; revolution, 206; student rebellion, 26 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 187, 234, 312, 329 friendship, 95, 114, 153, 154, 170, 175, 187, 200 Functional Models of Cognition, 219 fundamentalism, 329; fundamentalist, 195 future: world, future to come, 2, 9, 12, 19, 161, 164, 293 ‘Galaxy Red Shifts’, 66 Galilée, 134, 146 game theory, 102, 103 Gandhi, 297 Garnham, Nicholas and Raymond Williams, 115, 122 Gauche, Marcel, 159 gaze, 124, 205, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215 Gegenwärtigkeit, 61 Gelassenheit, 294 gender, 272, 273, 278; gender identities, 278 Genesis and Evolution of Time, The, 66 Genesis of Relativity, 66 Generidda, 135 Genet, Jean, 14, 15, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148 Genette, Gérard, 147 geneology, 180, 228, 229 genre, 144 Gentiles, 215

geometric thought, 309 George, Rolf, 63 German, 123, 124, 165, 167, 168, 291, 294, 302, 327; German anti-semitism, 53; German intellectuals, 109 Gerolomus and Berman, 130 Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, 115 Giacometti, Alberto, 145, 146 Gibbons, G.W., 66 Gift, 19, 112, 124 Gift of Death, The, 15, 200, 201, 221 gift,109, 110, 111, 112, 120, 125, 142, 166, 174, 285, 305, 326; gift-counter-gift, 113; gift exchange, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 112, 114; gift of hospitality, 120; gift, the unconditional, 106 Gilby, Thomas, 54 given, the, 11; non-given, the, 11 Given Time, 112 Glas, 7, 14, 15, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136,137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147 Glaser, Barney, G. and Anselm Strauss, 238 Glasgow, 302 global, 280; global English, 18, 281, 296; globalatinised, 194; globalisation, 18, 36, 40, 193; neo-liberal globalisation, 183; globalism, 281; globality, 280, 281 ‘Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism’, 195 Glyph, 59 Graeco-Holderlinian, 231 Graff, Gerald, 277

344 ?  Theory 360   Index after Derrida Gramsci, Antonio, 292 gramme, 60, 72, 60, 73, 310, 311, 312, 313 grammatology, 276, 324 grammar, 55; grammar of time, 55 Grand Tilration, The, 54 Granél, 92 grapheme, 328 Grecian, 202, 203, 205, 210, 211 Greco-Roman model, 15 Greece, 142 Greek, 60, 72, 132, 192, 201, 202, 203, 262, 281, 302, 306, 307, 308, 324, 326, 327; Greek civilisation, 203; Greek metaphysics, 37 Gribbin, J., 66 grounded theory, 238, 240, 241 God, 15, 16, 27, 37, 42, 89, 159, 192, 201, 205, 208, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 230, 232, 245, 246, 250, 254, 256, 258, 262, 284, 285, 290, 292, 293; Godhead, 246; God-like, 44; God’s remembrance, 296, 297 Gödel, Kurt, 168 Goldberg, Stanley, 66 Gonthier, 134 Gora, 179 Gospel, 213; Gospel justice, 252 Goodspeed-Chadwick, Julie Elaine, 17 Gourhan, Andre-Le-roi, 310 Guattari, Felix, 77, 90, 93, 94 guilt, 230 Habarmas, Jürgen, 19 habitat, 193 habitus, 101, 104, 106, 107, 108, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124

hama (simultaneously), 12, 49, 52, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73 Hamburger, Kate, 147 Hamlet, 108 Hancock, Tony, 118 Harcamone, 131 Hardt, Michael, 95 Hari, 286 Harris, S., 54 harmony, 298 Hardt and Negri, 92 Harvey, David, 179 Hawking, 54 heading, another heading, the other of the heading, anti-heading, 33, 34, 35 Hebraic, 53 Hebraism, 142, 148 Hebrew, 53, 132, 133 Hegel, Christiane, 131, 147 Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 15, 26, 27,2 8, 47, 49, 50, 51, 57, 60, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 82, 84, 93, 94, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 167, 187, 204, 208, 217, 220, 221, 222, 228, 229, 232, 233 Hegelian Aufhebung, 125, Hegelian Aufhebung, 132; Hegelian, 27, 58, 84, 140, 148, 208, 222; Hegelian dialectic, 125; Hegelian Gospel, 42; Hegelianism, 83, 84, 90 Hegel on ‘Time and Spirit’, 58 hegemony, 274, 292, 296; hegemonic monolingualism, 18 Hegenet, 135 Heller, Agnes, 168 Heidegger, 63 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 6, 9, 19, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 43, 44, 47, 49,

Index ? 361 345 Index   51, 52, 58, 60, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 88, 89, 95, 109, 121, 123, 187, 195, 207, 220, 221, 223, 224, 229, 234, 230, 231, 290, 292, 294; Heideggerian, 19, 70, 86, 207, 223, 224, 225, 226, 229, 289; Heideggerian/ Heidegger’s delimitation, 88; Heideggerianism, anti-, 70 Heretical Essays, 15, 200, 213 heterography, 147 hermeneutical, 30; hermeneutic strategies, 201 hermaphroditic, 145 Hersch, Jeane, 157 Hesiod’s theogony, 37 heterogeneity, 227; heterogeneity of inheritance, 314; heterogeneity of philosophy, 225; heterogeneous, 318, 329 heteronomy, 282 heteronormativity, reproductive, 120 hic et nunc of urgency, 42 Hindi, 281, 291 Hintikka, Jaakko, 58, 62 historical narratives, 75 historicity, 203, 204; historicity, trance-, 289; historicity of humanity, 283 historiography, 94, 283; historiographies, 285 History and Theory, 53 history: as knowledge, 290; as ontology, 290; as a process, 123; of madness, 159, 168; of philosophy, 47, 51, 52, 54, 62, 64, 70, 177; of metaphysics, 50, 52, 54, 58, 61, 70, 264; of time, nonwestern, 54 Hitler, Adolf, 297 Hobbes, 37 Hofstadter, Albert, 60

holocaust, 285 Holy Communion, 258 Homeric poets, 84 Homo Academicus, 124 homo economicus, 121 homogeneity, 247 homolingual address, 175 homosapiens, 310 homosexual, 143 Honig, Bonnie, 187 hospitality: 81, 85, 111, 113, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 190, 193, 194, 305; conditional, 180; cosmopolitan, 180; culture of, 182; Kantian, 193; law of, 180, 181, 187, 192, 194; politics of, 180; power of, 181; sovereign, 182, 193; unconditional, 180, 181, 193, 194 Hostage, 196 hostis, 181 hosti-pet-s, 180 hôte, 180, 181, 182, 190 Houdebine, Jean-Louis, 138 hubris, 218, 233, 290, 291 Hulbert, James, 58 Hull, Gordon, 13, 14, 91, 94 humanitarianism, 16 humanitous, 28 humanity, 27, 112, 189, 293 human-ness, 283 human: nature, 26; reality, 26; rights, 86; science/s, 308, 311 humanism, 4, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 42, 92, 181, 196; humanist, 27; humanist, anti-, 285; humanist, post, 285; humanist, anthropological, 26 Hume, 84, 90 Huntington, Samuel, 295 Husserl, Edmund, 26, 27, 28, 32, 43, 50, 51, 53, 63, 71, 87, 88, 95, 157, 159, 160, 168

346 ?  Theory 362   Index after Derrida Hussey, Edward, 61, 63 hyperbole, 218 hypomnesic, 312 hypostatization, 138 idealism, radical, 113 identity, 2, 119, 134, 143, 178, 182; identity paradigm, 132; identity politics, 295 ideology, 103, 109, 124, 207, 210; ideologies, 112 illegibility, 143, 144 image/copy, 78 Imagist, 278 immanence, 91 Immanentistic, 216 immemoriality, 167 immigrant/s, 179, 181, 191; immigration, 191 imperialism/s, 183, 327 imperial justice, 94 impossible, 166, 169 (im)possibility, 25; impossibility, 159; impossible possibility, 12, 25; possibility of the impossible, 35 incipit, 135 indecidability, 159 Independent Charismatic Assemblies of God, 243 India, 86, 281, 302, 315, 317, 318; Indic, 308, 314, 320, 321, 322, 325, 326; Indian, 243, 300, 308, 316, 319, 322, 330 indoctrination, 251 Indo-Eurasia, 315; Indo-European, 307, 326 Indological, 308, 315, 319, 329; Indology, 308, 315 inexistance, 8, 120 inexistent, 8 infinity, 36

Ingarden, Roman, 283 inheritance/s, 19, 129, 190, 303, 328, 329 inheritance of a promise, 41 inheritances, postcolonial, 19 intentionality, 283 inteority, 214 interlinguistics, 130 interpellation, 282 intersemiotics, 130 intemporal, 53 International Committee in support of Algerian Intellectuals (ICSAI), 188 International, New, 19, 187; Internationalism, New, 186, 187 International/Parliament of Writers, 183, 192, 195 international state law, 192 internationalism, 176 international juridico-political space, 40; international law, 187, 191 intra-philosophical, 13, 51; intraphilosophical moments, 73 intra-temporal, 13, 51; intratemporality, 51 Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies, 73 Introduction to Metaphysics, An, 231 Io¯anne¯s, 132 ipsocentric, 37 Isaiah, 42 Islam, 16, 185, 328; Islamic, 313 Israel, 286 isonomia, 154 Italian, 291 itara, 307, 325 itera, 307 I/iterability, 121, 130, 307 iteration, 307 itihasa, 314

Index ? 363 347 Index   Jablonka, Ivan, 148 ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist’, 1 Jakobson, Roman, 130 Jarvis, Simon, 111, 112 Jeffrey, 252 Jena Logic, 47 Jenkins, Keith, 95 Jesus, 131, 246 Jew, 16, 132, 137, 148; Jewish, 221; Jewish-Christian, 202, 213, 214; Jewish philosopher/s, 53 jnana, 322, 323, 326 jnapaka, 322 John, 246 John, the evangelist, 132 John’s Gospel, 142 Jorgenson, 240 Joshi, Bhimsen, 317 Journal of Contemporary History, 53 Joyce, James, 138 justice, 9, 10, 19, 43, 44, 112, 120, 155, 160, 161, 164, 169, 177, 178, 183, 194, 261, 305, 327 Judaic, 306, 308, 313, 326 Judaism, 16, 328 Judeo-Christian-Islamic, 215, 328 Julian the Apostate, 211 Jünger, Ernst, 123 juridical, 86, 164 Kabyle, 109 Kafka, Franz, 92, 138, 284, 293, 299 Kandell, Jonathan, 1 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 49, 58, 61, 71, 105, 107, 110, 117, 120, 142, 146, 149, 180, 183, 184, 192, 193, 196, 220, 225, 226, 228, 229, 232 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 58

Kantian, 9, 61, 110, 220, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227, 233, postKantian, 90, 110; neo-Kantian, 284 kala, 63 Karavanta, Mina, 300 karma, 322 Kaufmann, W. J., 66 Kearney, Richard, 230 Kelle, Udo, 240 Kellner, Douglas, 92 Kent, 302 Kerigma, 211 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 300 khora, 37, 39, 41, 231 Kierkegaard, 101, 220, 221, 228; Kierkegaardian subjectivity, 216 kinesis, 62 King, 159 King’s Counsel, 186 King, Martin Luther, 26 Klee, Paul, 293 Klein, Julie R., 95 Klossowski, Pierre, 147 knowledge, 182 Kockelmans, Joseph, 230 Kojève, Alexandre, 140, 147 Kraus, Oscar, 63 Krauss, 156 Krell, David F., 44 Kritik, 146 Kuhn,Thomas S., 168 Kuala Lumpur, 251 La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, 147 La folie du jour, 134 ‘La Morte de l’auteur’, 147 labour-time, 13 Lacan, Jacques, 5, 20, 57, 140, 147 Lacanian, 137, 282 Laclau, Ernesto, 92

348 ?  Theory 364   Index after Derrida Laertius, Diogenes, 152 Lamarkian, 329 language, 41, 44, 123, 232; nonlanguage, 41, 44; languages, Germanic, 124 Laroche, H., 148 Late Derrida, The, 2, 3, 5, 20 Lateness, 4, 100 Latin, 327 law: of hospitality, 179, 193; of genre, 303; of the stranger, 131; logocentric, 178 laws, 86; law, 86, 120, 142, 155, 160, 161, 164, 169, 178, 181, 189, 191, 194, 266, 323 ‘Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration’, 189 Lawlor, Leonard, 87, 88 League of Human Rights, 188 Leavy, J. P., 53 Leavy Jr, John, P., 146 le capital/la capital, 32 L’écriture et la difference, 55, 69, 70, 151, 166, 167 L’endurance de la pensée, 55 L’Etre et le Néant, 148 Left Hand of Creation, 67 Lefort Clande and Marcel Gauchet, 159, 168 Lego, 241 Lehman, Jennifer M., 10 Leibniz, 52, 66, 67, 88; Leibnizian, 88 lesbian, 274 Les Bonnes, 144 les flics, 71 Les Vérités Inavouables de Jean Genet, 148 ‘Les villes refuges’, 192 Lettres française, 168 Letter on Humanism, 28, 29, 43 Levi, Primo, 77, 82, 94

Levinas, Emmanuel, 3, 15, 25, 35, 36, 70, 101, 169, 181, 192, 195, 196, 201, 220, 221, 228, 305 Liberal Arts, 10 libidinal, 125 Liddel and Scott, 63 Life in death, 139 Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War, 9 Lilla, Mark, 156 limits of reason, 226, 232 Limited Inc. 59 linguistic signification, 24 linguistic–phonetic, 317 Linguistics of Writing, 302 Lire le Capital, 92 Living On/Border Lines, 58 lithic, 309, 311, 313, 314, 316, 329 Literary Labyrinth,The, 73 Llyod, Fran, 10 location of culture, 307 Locke, 102 Logic, 26, 186, 190, 221, 228, 231, 266, 307 Logic of Sense, 13, 76, 81, 87 logocentric, 269, 270; logocentric logic, 267 logocentrism, 7, 17, 18, 44, 264, 265, 266, 269, 274, 276, 328 logos, 7, 90, 201; logos, 44, 80, 164, 202, 205, 214 logos, Western, 186, 265 Lombrosian, 132 Lonkila, M., 241 Lord, 42 Lot in Sodom, 180 Loughborough University, 236 Lowell, Amy, 17, 266, 271, 272, 273, 274 Lucretius, 90 Lukács, 124 Luther, 74, Lutheran, 86, 243 Lyotard, François, 5, 20, 168

Index ? 365 349 Index   Macbeth, 10 Macedon, 203 Machamer, P. and R. Turnbill, 62 Macherey, Pierre, 94 Machiavelli, 84 Mackinnon, D. M., 53 MacKenna, Stephen, 52 Macquarrie, J. and E. Robinson, 47 Madonna, 10 madness, 159 Magna Charta, 190 Malamoud, Charles, 319, 320, 321 Malaysia, 262; Malaysian, 243 Malcomson, Scott, 187–88 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 166 Mandela, Nelson, 189, 190 Manichean fashion, quasi-, 42 Marges, 55, 58, 60, 64, 65, 69 margins, 4, 135, 158, 168, 236, 176; margin of margins, 175; marginal, 53, 290 Margins of Philosophy, 7, 47, 157, 175 Marie, Mary, 131 Marion, Jecn-Luc, 220, 221, 228, 230, 231 Martin, Marion, 239 Marsh, James L., 177, 178 Marx, Karl, 32, 57, 84, 92, 93, 94, 96,116, 183, 187, 220, 221, 222, 229, 234 Marxism, 25, 31, 32, 73, 75, 91, 92, 116, 123, 187; Marxist, 90, 116, 183, 187; Marxist tradition, 177 Marx-Scouras, Danielle, 92 masculine, 37 Mathew 5, 213 Mathew 6.3, 214 matter, 66 matertei, 71 materialism, 187; materialist: thoughts, 76; philosophy, 123

Mauss, Marcel, 103, 107, 112, 113, 124, 125 Maykut, Pamela and Richard Morehouse, 241 McAlister, Linda, 63 McClintock, Anne, 274 McCormick, John, 195 McLaughlin, Kathleen, 56 McTaggart, J. M. E., 54 Meaning, 3, 6, 7, 30, 132, 267, 268, 273, 275 Megillah, 130 Meinong, 88 Mellor, D. H., 54 Memory, 43, 82, 83, 85, 93, 129, 130, 305, 306, 311, 312, 314, 316, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323, 325, 327 Memnon, 142 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 147 Messiah, 290, 298 messianic, messianism, 36, 40, 41, 43, 76, 187, 209, 227, 282, 297, 298, 299 metalanguage, 75, 324 metaphor, 244, 270; metaphor, maternal, 244 metaphysical, 11, 48, 92, 179, 204, 214, 215, 297, 304, 315, 320; metaphysical: dogma, 310; doublet, 229; grammar, 55; humanism, 27; metaphysical– ontological, 24; metaphysics: of subjectivity, 87; of presence, 7, 245; Metaphysics, 28, 48, 50, 51, 54, 58, 62, 63, 68, 70, 174, 244, 264; Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, 55 methodist, 243 Mettray, 145 metonymy, 290 metropolitan, 179 metropolitanism, 179

350 ?  Theory 366   Index after Derrida micrological, 317 Midas, 113 Middle ages, 42 Mignolo, Walter, 183 migrationary, 181 Mill, 102 Miller, Barbara Stoler, 319 Miller, J. Hillis, 100, 121 mimesis, 114, 139, 146 mimicry, 114 Miracle de la rose, 144 Mitchell, W. J. T and Davidson, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9 Mnemic, 312 mnemonic, 82 mnemocultural, 314, 315, 319, 323, 324, 326; mnemocultural: inheritance, 314, 316; traditions, 314; mnemoculture/s, 313, 315, 316, 320, 324, 327; Mnemopraxial, 324, 326; mnemo-scape, 316; Mnemosyne, 314; mnemotechniques, 314; mnemotechnology, 309; mnemotechnology of writing, 316; mnemotext/s, 318, 321, 325 Moènik, Rastko, 124 modern political theology, 37 modernity, 281, 315; modernity, colonial, 281 Momingliano, Arnoldo, 53 monadic, 288 Monash University, 262 mondialisation, 36, 40, 187 Mongolia, 84 monolingualism, 280, 296, 300 mono-logo-theological, 307 monologotheism, 323 monotheistic, 300, 306, 328; monotheism, 314, 328, 329 morality, 101, 114, 232 Morris, M., 66

Morphe¯, 52 Montaigne, 152, 184 Montefiore, Alan, 56 Mrs. Reynolds, 278 Moses, 192, 313 Motion and Time, Space and Matter, 62 Mouffe, Chantal, 92 mournings, 132 Muses, 314 multiculturalism, 286, 300 multilingualism, 280, 286, 296 mysterium tremendum, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212 mysticism, Rehnan, 216 myth, 102, 167, 314 Myths about Non-propositional Thought, 58 mythology, 80, mythology, 84, 87, 314, 314 mystagogic, 9 mystology, 206 Naas, Michael, 147 nachträglich, 140 nama, 325 Nambikwaras, 327 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 11, 20, 38, 88, 120, 303 narcissism, 303 Narrative, 14, 272 nation, 9, 16, 183, 302; nation-state/ s, 185, 188, 191, 192, 296 national community, 187 National Conference, 330 nationalism, 9, 16, 183 natural law, 193; natural religion, 227 nature (physis), 61; Nature, 89, 223, 269 Nature, Change and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics, 55

Index ? 367 351 Index   Nature of Existence, 54 nature of man, 283 Natyasastra, 317 Nazi, 8, 77, 148 Nazism, 77, 207 Needham, Joseph, 54 negative theology, 39, 231 Negri, Antonio, 77, 78, 81, 82, 92, 95 neographism, 69 neoliberal, 180 Neologisms, 123, 167, 177 Neoplatonism, 211 New International, 86 Newman, Isadore, 239 Newton, 54, 66 New York, 155, 169 New York Times, 1 New Zealanders, 243 Niethammer, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 6, 8, 24, 30, 50, 81, 84, 90, 93, 95, 162, 184, 217, 218, 234, 300; Nietzschean, 207, 297; Nietzschean thinkers, French, 24 Nightwood, 278 Nitschack, Horst, 91 Nixon, Rob, 274 nomadism, 95 nomos, 85, 131 non-anthropocentric, 282 non-dogmatic, 221, 223, 229 non-Greek notion of time, 53 n o n- m e t a p h y s i c s , 5 3 ; n o n metaphysical, 54, 71 non-ontological, 306 non-presence, 244, 245 non-simultaneity, 58 non-transcendental, 305 normative, 86 Norris, Chris, 111; Norris, Christopher, 267 Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 131 noumenal, 284

Novus, Angelus, 293 now, 48, 60; nows (nun), 59, 60 number, 60; Numbers (Nombres), 59, 65 nun, 64, 65, 67 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, 317, 330 Nussbaum, Martha, 179, 183 obscurantist, 9; obscurantism, 109 Oedipus, 90, Anti-Oedipus, 94; Oedipus complex, 90 Of Grammatology, 7, 56, 136, 141, 179, 264, 265 Of Hospitality, 120 Of Spirit, 232 Offenbarkeit, 230 Offenbarung, 230 O’Meara, Thomas, 230 omnipresence, 213 omnitemporal, 53; omnitemporally, 159 On Cosmopolitanism, 36, 175, 183, 195 On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 190 oneness, 38, 295 ‘On Forgiveness’, 175 On the Genealogy of Morals, 218 On the Name, 39, 231 On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, 63 onto: -phenomenologist, 133; -theology, 16; -theological, 225, 303, 308, 325; ontotheo-telelogy, 27 ontology, 72, 95, 144, 184, 187, 194, 225; ontology: political, 109; pure, 109; ontological: dialectico-, 125; pre-, 125; politics, 294; threshold, 123; ontologicoexistential, 223, 224, 230 oppositionalism, 303, 313

352 ?  Theory 368   Index after Derrida Or Adonai, Proposition, XV, 2, 52 order of sign, 14 orientalist, 315 origin, 266, 288, 304, 328; original, 9, 81, 162, 282, 292, 311; originary, 181, 224, 225, 227, 230, 288, 307, 312, 314, 323, 328; originary: pre-, 181; consciousness, 95; presence, 87; state, 94 orthography, 170, 309, 313 orthonomy, 131 other, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 48, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 191, 225, 226, 330; Other, 196, 245, 280, 295, 300 other heading, 174, 178 Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, The, 12, 25, 32, 33, 34, 39, 43, 169 other’s language, 177 otherness, 12, 34 Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of Proper Name, 8–9 ousia, 59, 63, 72, 73 Ousia et Grammè, 47, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 67, 69, 72 overdetermination, 91 Owen, G. E. L., 62 Oxford University, 330 Page, B. S., 52 Pakistan, 330 Palestine, 142 pantheism, 91 paper machine, 85; Paper Machine, 86, 94 para, 325, 326 paradigm, 143, 178, 184, 200, 227, 315 Paradise, 293 paradox, 47, 169, 214

paraphrastic, 47, 48 paratext, 135 Parliament of Writers, 175 Parker, John and John Shotter, 10 Paris, 13, 69 Parmenides, 51, 67 Particularity and universality, 33 Passions, 107, 112, 117 ‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’, 113 Past & Present, 72 patriarchal, 90; patriarchal– monotheological, 313 patriotism, 273 Patocˇka, Jan, 15, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 220, 221, 228, 229 patois, 296 Patton, Paul and John Protevi, 91 Paul, 246 Pauline, 262 Pawson, David, 249 Payne, Michael, 237 Payne, Michael and John Schad, 244, 252, 259, 261, 262 Pedersen, 53 ‘pensiero debole’, 44 peregrinations, 40 performative, 324, 325, 327; performativity, 164; performative register, 41 Parmenides, 50, 53, 71 permanent present, 67 periphery, 208 perspectivism, 297 Perrault, Claude, 135 Phaedrus, 79, 82, 185, 186, 314 phallocentric, 328; phallocentrism, 328, 329; phallogocentric, 267, 269; phallogocentrism, 269 pharmaka, 90; pharmakoi, 13, 77, 80, 85; pharmakon, 79, 85, 112,

Index ? 369 353 Index   186, 305; pharmakon, 175, 187; pharmakos, 79, 304 phenomena, 231, 233; phenomenal, non-, 318; phenomenon, 238 phenomenological, 209, 293; phenomenological: ontology, 26; post-, 10; reduction, 26; phenomenology, 27, 28, 88, 89, 95, 221, 265; phenomenology: Husserlian, 87; subjectcentred, 25; of the subject, 67; Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, 63; ‘Phenomenology and Religion’, 230; Phenomenology of Spirit, 26, 140, 145; Phenomenology of Mind, 60 Philebus, 185 Philologico-archaelogical, 315 philologistic, 203 philosophical: anthropology, 26, 28; economy, 125; resistance, 70; specificity, 123 Philosophical Writings of Leibniz, 66 Philosophy of History, 84; Philosophy of Mind, 139; Philosophie der Mythology, 167; philosophy: as chance, 11; of religion, 231; of subjectivity, 28; Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 277; Philosophy in France Today, 56; Philosophy of Brentano, 63 philosophemes, 138 phonic substance, 132, 310; phonemes, 145; phonetic writing, 264; phonocentrism, 265, 276; phonological, 276 photocentric, 315; photocentrism, 286; photology, 215; photological, 214 physics, 12, 47, 48, 49, 54, 64, 67; physis of time, 63

Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory, 119 ‘Pivot of Essence, The’, 48 Plato, 37, 67, 77, 79, 82, 83, 87, 92, 93, 185, 186, 187, 203, 212, 314, 321 ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, 13, 56, 76, 89, 93, 112 Platonic, 14, 15, 52, 83, 91, 202, 205, 206, 207, 208, 221; Platonic: neo-, 202; city, 77; mythology, 82; philosophy, 76; responsibility, 211; secrecy, 206; Platonism, 13, 14, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 206, 207, 208; neoPlatonism, 211 play, 85, 118, 122 Plotinus, 52, 53, 54, 68 Plon, 55 plurality, 6, 266; of language, 299 plutôt, 153 poesis, 179 polemos, 303 Portraite de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif, 149 points et virgule, 57 points finals, 57 polemos, 304 polis, 77, 79, 190, 191, 208 political, 10, 131, 136, 152, 156, 164, 168, 179, 180, 185, 271; political: theology, 37; praxis, 44; politics of friendship, 16, 151, 165; Politics of Friendship, 15, 153, 169, 182, 184; politics: of the other, 175; of translation, 18 Politiques de l’amitié, 151, 154, 155, 160, 162, 166, 169 polyphony, 143 polisemic sauf, 231 Ponge, Francis, 138

354 ?  Theory 370   Index after Derrida possible/impossible, 41, 159, 161, 162; possibility, impossibility, 159, 160, 164, 176, 230; possibility of the impossible, 35, 169; possibility of mourning, 81 Positions, 56, 70, 71, 125, 168, 177 positivism, 12, 24 postcolonial: critique, 264; deterritorialisation, 281; English, 281; inheritances, 19; mourning, 302; pasts, 19; theories, 183 postdeconstructve virtue, 11 post-humanist, 282, 284 postmodernism, 111; postmodernist, 183 Postone, Moishe, 94 Post-scriptum, 229 post-structuralist, 18, 269; poststructuralism, French, 75 post-humanist democratic praxis, 12; post-humanist praxis, 42 post-sovereign, 25 postponement, 71 Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, 104 pragmatism, 113, 168 Prashnopanishsd, 330 Pratisakhyas, 316 Pratique, Ecole, 147 praxis, 176, 179, 195, 217, 236 pre-egological, 95 pre-colonial pasts, 307 prehistory, 84 Presbyterian, 243 presence, 52, 52, 265, 266, 274 pre-subjectivist, 95 pre-determined metaphysics of time, 61 presence/absence, presence, 2, 3, 7, 68, 244, 294; presence as Anwesenheit, 68; presence as Gegenwärtigkeit, 68

prime mover, 37 primordial, 67; primordial time, 51; primordialism, 310 prius, 135 proletariat, 78; proletarian class, 96 proper nouns, 132 prosthetic, 324 Protestant capitalist, 121 provisionality, 175 proximity of Being, 29 psyche, 175 psychoanalysis, 204, 312; psychoanalytic, 329; psychoanalytical, 131, 136 psycho-biographical, 305 psychological, 255 Punter, David, 73 punct-uate, 57 Puranas, 314 pure actuality, 37 pure form of sensibility, 61 pure language, 280, 288, 289, 293, 294, 297, 299; purity of language, 296 Puritan morality, 121 pyramids of Egypt, the, 132, 142 qelalah, 133 quasi-normative, 194 Queneau, Raymond, 147 Qumran or Nag Hammadi, 133 Quispel, 211 ‘Quoting Time’, 12 racism, 34, 187, 188 radical, 230 Radhakrishnan, R., 18, 300 Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, 330 Ramanujan, A. K., 319 Ramprogus, Vince, 10 Rancière, Jacques, 92, 120

Index ? 371 355 Index   Rander, Richard, 146 Rapaport, Herman, 119 Raši, 134 rationalism, 88; rationality, 164, 200; rationality, techno-scientific, 88 Rayment-Pickard, Hugh, 243, 244, 245 reader–response theory, 283 (re)reading, 13; re-reading, 58; reading or misreading, 27; reading, relations, 13 Real Presence, 54 reality, 287 Real Time, 54 Reason, 232 Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 276 recto, 136 redoubling, 163 reference, 58; referent, 266, 328; referential reality, 315 refugee, 85 Reinharz, 239 ‘Reiterating, the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, 59 Relativity, 66 relève, 30, 31 Religion, 36, 142, 187 Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 229 Renaut, Alain, 101 Rembrandt, 134 repeatability of the sign, 72 repetition, 121, 323 representation/s, 14, 20, 59, 81, 82, 83, 85, 88, 90, 93 Resnick, Stephen A. and Richard D. Wolff, 92 Republic, The, 82, 84 responsibility, 19, 114, 170, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208, 213, 229, 306, 307, 327

‘Resident Alien’, 179 Resurrection, 260 revenant, 130, 179 revisionism, 293 ‘Revisionism and the Subject of History’, 300 rhizomes, 303 Rich, Adrienne, 300 Richardson, W. J., 63 Ricoeur, Paul, 220, 228 rna, 306, 307 Robbins, Bruce, 187 Roberts, Natalie, 17 Robinson Crusoe, 121 Rochelle, Drieu La, 148 Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, 12, 25, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44 rogue state, 36 Rome, 211; Roman, 306 Ronse, Henry, 156, 157 Rorty, Richard, 7, 9, 102, 177 Rotman, Brian, 314 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 11, 313, 328 Rousset, 51 rule of law, 184 rupture, 163 Rushdie, Salman, 195, 281, 300 Said, Edward, 11, 282, 288 Saint Genet, Comédien et Martyr, 148 Salmon, Christian, 195 salvation, 131 Salzburg, 195 samsara, 322 Sanskrit, 19, 291, 302, 306, 307, 308, 314, 315, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322, 324, 325; Sanskrit mnemoculture, 322; Sanskrit phonetic tradition, 317; Sanskrit tradition, 319, 321, 322, 323, 325

356 ?  Theory 372   Index after Derrida Sarantakos, S., 239 Sartre, Jean P., 26, 43, 133, 138, 143, 148 Satzewich, Vic, 10 Sauf le Nom, 39 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 264, 265, 266, 277 Saussurean, 132 Scandinavians, 124 Scarpetta, Guy, 138 Scarry, Elaine, 18, 270 scene of the soul, 203 Schad, John, 237 Schalow, Frank, 230 Schelling, Friedrich, 167 Schmitt, Carl, 123, 152, 153, 154, 167, 185, 187, 195 Schimittian decisionism, 185 Schofield, M., 62 Schopenhauer, 95 Scotus, Duns, 52, 54 Searle, John, 59 secret, 15, 200, 201, 205, 206, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219 secretum, 206 Secrets of European Responsibility, 200 secrets of papyri, 133 secular history, 288 Seidel, John and Udo Kelle, 240, 241 Sein und Zeit, 43, 70, 207, 225, 230 Selbstaufhebung, 218 self, 15, 37, 101, 102, 103, 104, 119, 218, 260, 280; self-determination, 188; self-effacement, 260; selfgoverning, 183; self-identity, 34, 35, 138; self–other, 297; selfpresence, 2, 8, 70; self-present meaning, 6, 8; self-reflexity, 246, 249, 261 semantic, 131, 135, 147

semantic agglutinations, 145 semiology, 276 Semitic Hgl, 132 sexual difference, 142, 145 Shankar, S., 300 Sharratt, Bernard, 12, 13 sharira, 325 shibboleth, 214 shravana-manana-dharana, 321 Siberia, 84 Siejk, Cate, 251, 253 sign, 2, 3, 14, 68, 141, 142, 264, 265, 268, 275, 309, 312, 317 signature, counter, 261 sign force, 318 signature, 2, 20, 176, 178, 195, 261, 313 signature of the other, 185 signification, 52, 265, 268, 273, 275 signified, 246, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 276, 328 signifier, 246, 264, 265, 268, 310, 312 Signature Event Context, 303 Siksha, Naradiya, 316; Siksha, Paniniya, 316; Siksha, Yagnavalkya, 316; Sikshas, 316; silence, 3 Silk, Joseph, 67 Siklos, S. T. C., 66 Silverman, Maxim, 10 similitude, 244; similitude– dissimilitude, 245 simulacra, 13, 78, 79, 81, 83, 124; simulacrum, 118, 282 singleness of identity, 246 singularities, 182, 318; of memory, 19; singularity, 6, 19, 175, 181, 213, 308, 314, 318, 327; singularity: cultural, 19; of philosophy, 275; of massed energy, 66; of truth, 11 Sittlichkeit, 139, 140

Index ? 373 357 Index   skepticism, 14 slasis, 167 smara, 319 Smith, James, 230 smriti, 316 social temporality, 275 sociological anthropologism, 28 Société du Spectacle, 73 Société française de philosophie, 68, 156; Société Française de Philosophie, 147 Society Must be Defended, 193 Socrates, 79 Socratic, 141, 205 Sodom, 180 Solange, 131 Sollers, Philippe, 59, 135, 138 Son, 246 Sophists, 82 Sorabji, R., 62 soul, 26, 211 sous rapture, 243 South Asian, 315, 319 sovereign, 37, 181, 193; sovereignty, 16, 36, 38, 40, 174, 175, 181, 184, 186, 192, 194, 281; sovereignty of the people, 37 Soyinka, Wole, 195 space–time, 66 Spanish, 144 spatial, 2; spatial motion, 62 spectacle, 124 Spectacular Time, 73 spectre, 121, 130; specters, 85; spectrality, 191 Specters of Marx, The, 31, 85, 86, 168, 169, 186, 229, 231 speech, 7, 87, 132, 157, 164, 205, 265, 309, 311, 313, 318, 327 Speech and Phenomena, 56, 87 Splenger, Oswald, 123 Spinoza, 14, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95

Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, 88 spirit, 148, 217, 246 ‘Spirit of Christianity, The’, 217 spiritual existence, 283 spiritual gift, 262 spiritual subjectivity, 214 Spirituality, 240 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 120, 179, 181, 264, 300 Spring Day, 274 Sriramchandrudu, 317 Stalin, 75 State, 96, 139, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 190, 191, 193, 196; State, non-, 191 state of exception, 44 State laws, 194 state-less, 191 State monopoly, 94 Statism, 183; anti-Statism, 183 Statist, anti-, 186 State citizenship, 187 status gratiae, 223 Steigler, Bernard, 309, 313, 329 Stein, Gertrude, 266, 278 Stilitan, 144 Stirner, Max, 32, 43 Stivale, Charles J., 91, 95 Stoic/s, 88, 203; stoicism, 192 Strauss, A. L., 238, 240 Strauss, Anselm and Juliet Corbin, 241 structure, structurality, 8, 30 structuralism, 8, 51, 52, 69, 109, 159, 266; structuralist, 92, 163; structural messianism, 168; structuralist reading, 51 structure of iterability, 20; of violence, 311; of welcome, 190; ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences’, 7 Struggle is My Life,The, 190

358 ?  Theory 374   Index after Derrida subaltern, 290, 296 subject, 25, 87, 101, 102, 103, 108, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 130, 168, 178; subject: classical, 100, 101; ethical, 100, 120 subject–object, 88 subjectile, 119 subjectivism, 122 subjectivity, 26, 85, 95,119, 268, 276; inter-subjectivity, 95; subjectivity, absolute, 88 subordinate, 67 substantialist rationalism, 89 Sufi, 330 Sultans of Granada, 144 supplement, 157, 159, 174, 266, 282 supra-historical, 287, 288 supra-rational, 205 Swenson, Lloyd S., 66 Swift, 107 syllogism, 139, 140 symbolic, 271; symbolic profit, 104 synecdoche, 328 synonymy, 284 Tagore, Rabindranath, 179 Talmud, Babylonian, 135; Talmudic, 135, 214 Tamil, 280, 281 taxonomic rubric, 299 Taylor, Charles, 183 ‘Technical Civilization is Decadent, Why? The’, 200 technology, 191 techno-military, 187; technoscientific, 233; technoscientific Modernity, 233 teleiopoetic, 303, 307, 325; teleiopoetically, 303 teleology, 28, 29, 72, 89, 100

teleopoiesis, 179 telos, 2, 27, 100; telos of European culture, 32 Tel Quel, 56, 69, 134 temporal, 2, 130 temporality, 68 tertium (non) datur: Glas, 138 Tesch, Renata, 238 testimony, 129, 147, 200 text, 41, 42, 44, 59, 70; of metaphysics, metaphysical text, 68; textuality, 11, 13, 18, 265, 274 textual strategies, performative, 16 Thatcher, Margaret, 102 Theatetus, 314 thematic, 51 ‘The Pivot of Essence’, 64 theratogenesis, 136 theo-ontological, 174, 184, 192 theological, 222, 230, 320; theological: rationalism, 215; simultaneinity, 51; virtues, 42 theologico-metaphysical, 304 Theologico-Political Treatise, 89 theogonic, 201; theogonic mythology of sovereignty, 37 theologems, 228 ‘Theologian in the Third Reich: the case of Gerherd Kittel’, 53 theology, 72, 221, 225, 232, 245 Theory after Derrida, 4, 5, 10–11 theory, 176, 179, 195, 236, 296, 307, 324 Theuth, 185 Thingo, Ngugi Wa, 281 ‘Thinking in Action’, 195 thinking of Being, thinking of the truth of Being, 29 thingness, 1 Third Estate, 188 Thomas, Mitchell, 6, 9, 10 Thompson, E. P., 72

Index ? 375 359 Index   Thompson, George, 329 Thorax, 214 Thoth,the Egyptian god of writing, 185, 186 Thousand Plateaus, A, 77, 81, 93 Tiedemann, Rolf, 91 Tillich, Frege, 53 Timaeus, 37 time, 59, 66, 73; Time, 13, 51, 52, 53, 63; timeless, 319 ‘Time and Eastern Man’, 54 Time and History, 73 Time and Necessity: Studies in Aristotle’s theory of modality, 58, 62 Time in Ancient Historiography, 53 Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in antiquity and the early middle ages, 58 Torah, 313 Tosefta, 130, 133 totality, 141, 174, 189, 264, 275, 320 totalising, 203; discourse, 227; ideologies, 40 totality and infinity, 25 totalitarian regimes, 195 totalitarianism, 70 totem, 203 Tout autre est tout autre, 213, 218 Towards a Phenomenology of Time Consciousness, 63 Towards a Cultural Study of Time, 73 trace, 52, 68, 121, 177, 178, 266, 268, 277, 303, 312, 319; traces, 83, 265, 304, 319 trace of non-presence, 52; traces, textual, 14 tradition, 75, 87, 129, 227, 229, 316 transcendence, 245, 250, 283, 289 transcendent identification, 260; reading, 267; womb, 288

transcendental, 176, 220, 313, 315; transcendental: non-, 313; humanism, 28; idealism, 95; meaning, 267; phenomenology, 28; signified, 266; structures, 26; subject, 95; telos, 28 transubstantiation, 142 transvestitism, 15 transnational, 25 transformative praxis, 42 trans-performative register, 40, 41 trauma, 17, 268, 272, 275, 276 Treatise of the Five Orders of Columns in Architecture, 135 trinity, 142, 167 Trinitarian, 142 Truth, 265; nontruth, 96; truth: of Being, 30; of the other, 38; of writing, 96 Two Sources of Morality and Religion,The, 229 Tympan, 158, 159, 168 Tympanum, 158 unconditional, the, 11, 12, 112; unconditional love, 111; unconditional renunciation of sovereignty, 37; unconditionality, 36; unconditionality without sovereignty, 41 undecidability, 14, 117, 118, 176, 229, 230, 233 Understanding Relativity: origin and impact of a scientific revolution, 66 UNESCO, 195 unified community, 16 United Nations, 187 unity of man, 26 universal, 102, 180; universal: eidetic schema, 83; lexicon, 295; soul, 52; subject, 104; universal/ universalizing significance, 32;

360 ?  Theory 376   Index after Derrida universalism, 18; universalism liberal, 177; universality, 174, 177 university, 110, 135, 307, 308, 324, 326 University of Hyderabad, 330 unrepresentable, 165 Upanishads, The, 330 urgency, 41 Us–Them, 295 ‘Use and Abuse of Multiculturalism, The’, 300 User, Wolfgang, 283 United States, 86, 273; US, 13, 274, 280, 296; US imperialism, 71; USA, 162 utopia, 11; utopian, 174, 281, 292, 295, 297; utopian borderlessness, 16; utopianism, 297 Valéry, Paul, 32, 33, 34, 43 vanati, 306 van Reijen, 168 vanishing moments, 8 Vattimo, Gianni, 36, 43 Vedic, 314, 315, 316, 317 vel, 56 velle, 219 velocity of light, 66 Veni, Veni, 36, 41 Venice, 195 Venkat Rao, D., 19 Verma, S., 330 Versprechen, 232 Vertovec, Steven, 194 Very Early Universe; Proceedings of the Nuffield Workshop, The, 66 verso, 136 Vietnam, peace talk, 13, 26 ‘Violence et metaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas’, 70; ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, 169

Vitoria, 183 vocative, 153 Voltaire, 234 voice, 18, 42 Vorhandenheit, 61 Voyous, 36 War, 270, 271; wars: national, 187; among minorities, 187 Warda, 131 Waterlow, Sarah, 55 weightlessness, 133 Weil, Eric, 147 Wernick, Andrew, 92 West, non-West, 4, 9, 12, 30, 33, 35, 67, 84, 179, 306, 313, 323, 325, 326, 329 Western: cultures, 177; episteme, 311; heritage, 307; Juridical tradition, 190; law, 190; legal deontology, 190; legal tradition, 190; metaphysics, 7, 48, 51, 53, 61, 70, 71, 325; philosophical literature, 184; philosophical tradition, philosophy, 1, 7, 15, 177, 184; political philosophy, 185; state-racism, 189; thought, 13, 25, 29, 303, 303; tradition, 2, 178, 303, 305 White, Edmund, 134 White Mythology, 55 White supremacist law, 189 White, Stephen K., 43 within-time-ness, 51 ‘without’, 39 Wittgenstein, 54, 55 Witzel, Michael, 329 writing, 7, 157, 159, 163, 164, 170, 174, 265, 309, 310, 326, 328, 329; phonetic, 179 Wood, David, 113 Wolfson, H. A., 53

Index ? 377 361 Index   Wolin, Richard, 123 Word, 44, 274; word play, 121 Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The, 288 Work of Mourning, The, 2 world: citizenship, 183; culture, 264; government, 16, 183; worlding, 176; worldliness, 11 World War/s, 17, 268; World War I, 273; World War Second, 26, 32 Writing and Difference, 52, 55, 56, 69, 195

xenophobia, 9, 34, 187 Yancey, Philip, 249 Yohannan, 132 Young, James E., 93 Zenêta, 144 Zeno, 67, 183 Zeillinger, Peter, 15, 167, 169 Zima, Peter V., 19 Žižek, Slavoj, 121 Zons, Raimar, 91 Zusage, 225, 231