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Views and Interviews : On Deconstruction in America
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VIEWS and INTERVIEWS

Contemporary European Cultural Studies Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Series Editors This series publishes English translations of works by contemporary European intellectuals from philosophy, religion, politics, law, ethics, aesthetics, social sciences, and history. Volumes included in this series will not be included simply for their specific subject matter, but also for their ability to interpret, describe, explain, analyze, or suggest theories that recognize its historicity.

Manfred Frank, The Boundaries of Agreement Antonio Livi, Reasons for Believing Jósef Ni   z˙nik,    The Arbitrariness of Philosophy Paolo Crocchiolo, The Amorous Tinder José Guimón, Art and Madness Dario Antiseri, Popper’s Vienna Remo Bodei, Logics of Delusion Giovanni Mari, The Postmodern, Democracy, History Philip Larrey, Thinking Logically Rodolphe Gasché, Views and Interviews William Egginton, A Wrinkle in History

VIEWS and INTERVIEWS On ‘Deconstruction’ in America

Rodolphe Gasché

A volume in the series Contemporary European Cultural Studies Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Editors

The Davies Group, Publishers Aurora, Colorado

Views and Interviews: On ‘Deconstruction’ in America, © 2007, Rodolphe Gasché. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher: The Davies Group, Publishers, PO Box 440140, Aurora, CO 80044-0140, USA www.thedaviesgrouppublishers.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gasché, Rodolphe. Views and interviews : on deconstruction in America / Rodolphe Gasché. p. cm. -- (Contemporary European cultural studies) ISBN-13: 978-1-888570-94-6 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-888570-94-6 (alk. paper) 1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Deconstruction. 3. Gasché, Rodolphe-Interviews. I. Title. B2430.D484G375 2006 149--dc22 2006031835

Printed in the United States of America 1234567890

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Contents Acknowledgments Without a Title

vii 1

From One Topos to an Other Thinking from the Limit

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Saving the Honor of Thinking

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Acknowledgments The three interviews collected in this volume, and which are preceded by the introductory essay, “Without a Title,” were given between 1997 and 1999. The endnotes that accompany them have been added for this publication. The interview with Outi Pasanen, “From One Topos to an Other,” dates from 1997, and appears here for the first time. Outi Pasanen received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York in Binghamton. She is a co-editor of Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Her recent publications include articles in Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003) and in MLN, as well as translations of Jacques Derrida’s work into Finnish. Currently she is affiliated with the University of Helsinki. The interview with Stuart Barnett, “Thinking from the Limit,” was given in 1998, and has been renamed for this occasion. Stuart Barnett is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He is the editor of Hegel After Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998), editor and translator of Friedrich Schlegel: On the Study of Greek Poetry (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), as well as the editor of the forthcoming Head to Head with Deconstruction: Interviews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), in which this interview will also appear. I thank the publisher for the permission to reprint this interview. The interview with Anders Lundberg, “Saving the Honor of Thinking,” dates from 1999, and was first published in Eurozine. It also appeared in a Swedish translation in Glänta 1.02 (Göteborg, Sweden). Anders Lundberg is a critic, translator, and editor of the Swedish poetry and poetics journal OEI. During 1998-1999, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo. vii

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“Deconstruction” has, no doubt, become associated with America even to such a degree that in Europe, in particular, it is often viewed as an exclusively American phenomenon and product. And yet — despite all the publicity “Deconstruction” has received in the profession, as well as in the media, from the middle of the nineteen sixties until today — within the overall scene of North American academia the phenomenon has been a very limited one confined to a minority of scholars and the rather secluded, and politically inconsequential, milieu of certain American universities. It is generally assumed that this primarily academic movement originated in what some saw as a refreshing, others as a regretful, importation of French thought in the late nineteen sixties, first by some French Departments, and then, more importantly, by English and Comparative Literature Departments. Deconstruction has been considered by many as contrary to conventional scholarship and even to American values. Camille Paglia, to name just one critic, associates deconstruction with moral depravity, cerebralism, and the loss of vital powers at the heart of the nation (therefore, sometimes leading to a demand of protectionism in the academy against French thinkers). What has been called, or nicknamed, “Deconstruction” has from the start been nominally linked to the work of Jacques Derrida.1 However, “Deconstruction” — “Deconstruction in America” — can neither simply be traced back, or reduced to, French thought, nor especially to the thought of Jacques Derrida who, indeed, was the first to use the old French word “deconstruction” in his early work in order to translate the Heideggerian notions of “Abbau” and “Destruktion.” Undoubtedly, the conference in October, 1966, at Johns Hopkins University on “Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man,” was



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the beginning of a turn by various literary scholars toward French thought. It was from this moment on that the names of Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida began to eclipse the names of critics who up until then had dominated the literary critical canon. But, it is true as well that the reception of French thought — subsequently labeled post-structuralist, or postmodern — that occurred then, because it took place from afar — from a certain distance — lead to emphasizing the resemblances between the thinkers in question. As a result, this reception neglected to take the fundamental differences into account that, in spite of many analogies, existed between the thought of these French thinkers. Indeed, even though the term itself could only be found in the work of one French philosopher, “Deconstruction” served from the beginning as the generic term under which the new critical approach by all these French thinkers was comprised. As a catchword for what was perceived as a new French critical approach, “Deconstruction” is clearly an American invention. Intimately interconnected with this wholesale reception of French thinking under this title is the technological and methodological understanding of the term “deconstruction” in America. By and large the result of the then still enduring weight of New Criticism, with its instructions for close readings of literary works, the conception of “Deconstruction” as a method for the reading and interpretation of texts is also American through and through. Furthermore, understood as a procedure for demystifying established beliefs and conceptions, “Deconstruction” is also a specifically American phenomenon. Indeed, seen as a method for the demystification of seductive truths, “Deconstruction,” as Derrida has pointed out, is not understandable without the specific American sensibility to all phenomena of prophetism, messianism, eschatology, and apocalypse, as well as the presence of the various American religious traditions — particularly, Protestant, or Puritanist theology and ethics in academia. But although the reference to “Deconstruction” suggests a unitary meaning of

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what happened in a certain North American academic milieu, these three main reasons of why “Deconstruction” is something specifically American do not exhaust the whole phenomenon of “Deconstruction.”2 The phenomenon in question is greatly diverse, perhaps, untotalizable, and, furthermore, since it is still in process, it resists attempts that seek to survey it in its entirety, or to totalize it.3 Needless to say, since “Deconstruction in America” is intimately tied to Derrida’s work, the subject has been of interest and concern to him, and, consequently, he has on several occasions, in interviews and lectures, taken up this issue. Since “Deconstruction” has, unmistakably, several original configurations in America, Derrida has argued that it is not a European import to the United States, and has, at one point, even gone so far as to advance the however quickly abandoned hypothesis according to which “Deconstruction is America.”4 Rather than an import, “Deconstruction in America” is “an adventure of translation,” and of transference, and since translation implies deformation, it is irreducible to some European original of deconstruction.5 Compared to what is the case in Europe, “what goes on in America with deconstruction is not only diverse but other.”6 It is incontestable, Derrida avers, “that it began to be named in Europe,” thus referring to his own use of the term as already a “deforming translation” of Heidegger’s notion of Abbau and Destruktion. But this does not mean, he continues, that “the original of deconstruction is not to be found in America,” but that it has to be looked for in Europe, more precisely, in his own work.7 Although admitting that “both the positive and the negative reception given deconstruction [I assume that here too he is referring to his own work] … has indeed been stronger in the United States than anywhere else,” in an interview from 1985 on “Deconstruction in America,” Derrida highlights the independence of what happened to deconstruction in the United States from his own work: “Even my own work within the field of deconstruction is received very often on the basis of



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the American reception. So something has happened in the United States which is not a simple translation or importation of something European. I believe it has an absolutely new and original dimension in the United States.”8 It comes, therefore, as no surprise when, in “The Time is out of Joint,” he observes that he has never claimed to identify himself with what may be designated by that name “Deconstruction” — that is, with “Deconstruction in America.”9 More significantly yet, in the interview from 1985, he notes: “it frequently happens that I see under the heading ‘deconstruction,’ in the guise of deconstruction, things that are absolutely new and foreign to me and that I never imagined it possible to associate with deconstruction.”10 Or, “When I read deconstruction in English, it’s something else. It’s altogether something else, it’s true. And at the same time, I feel that I’m incapable of explaining the American transformations of deconstruction through and through.”11 These remarks, of course, do not simply amount to a disapproval of what has occurred in North America. If “Deconstruction in America” is an adventure of translation and transference between Europe and America, a certain foreignness and heterogeneity of the forms that deconstruction takes in America is to be expected. And so is the inevitable possibility of all kinds of errings, deviations, perversions that the adventure of translation brings along with it. But notwithstanding these affirmative caveats, one cannot overlook Derrida’s bewilderment as well, both in the interviews and the lectures that so far I have referred to, about the developments of deconstruction in America. At moments, it is as if the only thing that his own thought about deconstruction and “Deconstruction in America” share, is the name. More precisely, the difference between his own thinking about deconstruction and “Deconstruction in America” is that in America the name “deconstruction” has become a title, or a heading. Here is not the place to write the history of what happened under this title in America, or to analyze the specific socio-institutional and cultural aspects of North American universities that

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made it possible for “deconstruction” to be so favorably received, and at the same time so violently attacked, as has been the case in America.12 Neither can the task here be one of exploring why philosophy departments did not take part in “Deconstruction in America.”13 But, nor is a confrontation of “Deconstruction in America” with Derrida’s thought itself warranted at this point. I have done this in some of my work, emphasizing, because of the historical context at the time — that is, the almost exclusive reception of Derrida by literature departments in the United States — the philosophical dimension of Derrida’s thought. The interviews following this introductory essay will to some extent take up this issue as well. But the main reason for foregoing here such an attempt to set the record straight — if such a thing is not only desirable, but feasible as well— is that what happened under the heading “Deconstruction” in America cannot simply be retraced back to a European original — that is, the work of Derrida itself. The fact that from the outset the distinction between an original and a copy has been one of deconstruction’s targets makes it, at the limit, impossible to write a history of deconstruction along the lines of a history of ideas. If Derrida is right to emphasize the independence of “Deconstruction in America” from his own thought, the task instead is to analyze “Deconstruction in America” as an autonomous product in its own right. But, the more important reason for not inquiring further into the difference between Derrida’s thought and “Deconstruction in America,” is the heterogeneity, if not incommensurability, of Derrida’s writings and deconstruction, the American way. This difference limits the very productivity of any such an undertaking to a mere denying of entitlements and titles. If this is so, it is not merely because Derrida’s work would be more philosophical than anything that goes under the heading “Deconstruction,” particularly in departments of literature. It is also that the “performative” dimension of Derrida’s writing is multilayered to such a point that the implications of its sweep go well beyond almost everything that has occurred in “Deconstruction in



Views and Interviews

America.” If, however, the distinction between what went on under the title “Deconstruction in America,” and Derrida’s own thought need no longer bother us, it is also because “Deconstruction,” the American way — and for the moment, at least, Paul de Man’s work as well, which has been so important in this context — has proven to have been a temporary phenomenon. But, finally, there is an additional reason: even though at one point discussing the specificity of this American phenomenon, and its relation to Derrida’s work, was inevitable and necessary, at this juncture in time a different task has become more dominant. Indeed, after the death of Jacques Derrida on October 8, 2004, the necessity is rather one of speaking of the future and reflecting on what is bequeathed to us by his work. Indeed, with the death of this generous and loyal friend, this charismatic and stimulating teacher, this brilliant and original scholar, a task is assigned to us — the task of how to responsibly preserve, and protect, his memory. Thinking within the paths that his thought has opened up for us, this question concerns, above all, our relation to Jacques Derrida as a thinker. The death of the other is the disappearance of a single, unique, irreplaceable, and unrepeatable individual life and entity within the preexisting world into which this individual has been born as a newcomer and a new beginning. But if, as Hannah Arendt held, “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew,” is it not also because what begins anew with each birth is not simply another, new, and singular, world in the world, but another absolute beginning of the very world itself?14 If, with the child who arrives within the world, another origin of the one and only world occurs, the death of an other is also always an absolute end of the world itself. The departure of the other is not merely the disappearance of one singular world within the world, but the cessation of, if I may appropriate a Heideggerian term, the “worlding of the world” itself by the departed individual. Indeed, every other is another, absolute

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opening of the world for the togetherness of all, and, therefore, the death of an other signifies the end of this other’s opening of a world for us to share. What irretrievably ends with each death is the One world of togetherness which he or she singularly opened up for all of us. In sum, then, not only one singular world comes to an end by an other’s death, but the One world — the world we all have in common, the world as a universal opening for being-with, the horizon of all horizons, as Husserl designated it — the World itself. Derrida writes: “For every time, and every time singularly, every time irreplaceably, every time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only one end among others, the end of someone or of something in the world, the end of a life or of a living being. Death neither puts an end to someone in the world nor to a world among others. Death marks every time, every time in defiance of arithmetic, the absolute end of the one and only world, of that which everyone opens as one and only one world, the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of that which is or can be presented as the origin of the world for any unique living being, be it human or not.”15 It follows from this that with the death of an other, the survivor who is deprived of the world is not only left with the infinite task to preserve and guard the memory of the singular, and unique, life that has come to an end, but also of the other’s absolute opening of the world in its totality. To keep the memory of Jacques Derrida, just like the memory of any other, demands of us nothing less than to remember him who has disappeared, his unique world, but also the World that disappeared with him. To be faithful to his legacy, and to be able to built on it, translates, therefore, into the task of recalling ourselves — as we mourn the departed thinker — first and foremost, to the memory of what has been truly universal about his so singular thought. Needless to say, any attempt to answer the question of how to keep the memory of Derrida as a thinker compels us to reflect on what precisely the legacy is that he has left to us. This question is not merely one about what Derrida stands for in the history of



Views and Interviews

philosophy. Even though, time and again, Derrida has questioned the presuppositions of the history of philosophy, or ideas, there will, undoubtedly, come a time when Derrida’s thought will be assigned a specific place within intellectual history, and, in particular, within the history of phenomenological thought beginning with Husserl. However inevitable, and even necessary, such an assignment may be, this may also be the moment when his memory might longer speak to us, and we no longer “hear” what precisely it is that he and his writings demand of us. To remain faithful to his legacy is not to oppose at any price all efforts to situate his thought within the history of philosophical thought, but to resist any such facile assignment by remembering that his writings and his teaching consisted above all in examining unacknowledged presuppositions including those at the heart of the philosophy of history, urging his audience and readers to a relentlessly critical vigilance. All of his work is marked by a systematic questioning of what Hannah Arendt refers to as “frozen thoughts” — that is, all types of assurances, securities, self-evidences, assumptions, presuppositions, dogmatisms, and creeds, whether naïve or artful, subjective or objective, dangerous or well intended.16 No one has more perseveringly questioned the most blinding evidences of philosophical tradition as well as of common sense than Derrida. Yes, at the risk of sounding pompous, I would like to claim that no philosopher, no thinker, hitherto, has been so uncompromisingly vigilant as he has been. No thinker has so diligently probed the undersides of concepts, ideas, or words, no reader so far has been so exacting in leaving no leaf unturned, as he has been. This formidable alertness is not only what constitutes the singularity of Derrida’s thought, it is also one of its universal traits, and, therefore, I hold, the memory of Derrida to which we must respond, and to which we can respond responsibly only by affirming the injunction that such vigilance represents. Incidentally, faithfulness to the memory of this thinker does not foreclose possible “criticism.” But supposing that we are already ca-

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pable of addressing critical questions about his work, any such critique is a futile exercise if it does not take into account vigilance as the very standard that pervades all his thought, in particular the vigilance regarding “critique.” However, a criticism that would consist in charting the occasions on which Derrida, in fact, failed to be vigilant would miss the point, because the possibility of such a failure is not only always possible given the finitude of the thinking subject, it is also a failure whose possibility, as we will see, is structurally immanent to the kind of vigilance that Derrida’s texts have sought to achieve.17 Without the possibility of failure, this vigilance would not even be what it is. However implacable, this vigilance is not a contestation — a radical putting into question and rejecting of the concepts, norms, values, essences, positions, that are examined — above all, of the value of truth itself. Rather, as regards truth, Derrida has shown how individual truth claims are always inscribed within larger and stratified contexts whose differential relations of force cannot be ignored, and upon which the possibility (and impossibility) of these very claims rests. To take these forces into account in evaluating truth claims does not mean to abandon the need for truth at all. But needless to say, a discourse that acknowledges the presence of such forces in truth claims is also one which no longer simply submits to the values of truth and untruth. The inference to be drawn from this is that the vigilance particular to Derrida’s thought is above all not of the order of a skepticism, because no skepticism has ever been able to pose questions about the possibility of truth as radically as is the case in Derrida. Furthermore, as Husserl, for one, has argued, skepticism (and relativism) is a philosophical position in contradiction with itself, and as a result, there has never been, as Heidegger has remarked in an aside, “an ‘actual’ skeptic,” echoing in this Blaise Pascal’s remark that “there has never been in fact an out-and-out skeptic.”18 If Nietzsche’s statement that the philosopher “has a duty to suspicion today, to squint maliciously out of every abyss of suspicion” is understood as aiming at an ex-

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tension of consciousness, then Derrida’s vigilance also has nothing in common with what has become known as a hermeneutics of suspicion since Paul Ricoeur.19 The starting point of Derrida’s work — unlike that of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — to which Ricoeur refers, is not the assumption that “the whole of consciousness primarily [is] ‘false’ consciousness.” Vigilance is not of the order of a “demystification” of “the illusions and lies of consciousness” — that is, a critical procedure that takes place in view of true consciousness, and “a new kingdom of Truth.”20 Consciousness is not the horizon of Derridean thought. Rather, like all the concepts associated with it, consciousness, in Derrida, is a concept no longer to be “used,” but only to be “mentioned.” But if vigilance does not occur for the sake of greater, or more extended, consciousness, then the implication is also that it is neither simply a subjective state of watchful awakeness, nor a deliberate act, or operation, by a fully armed subject, armed, say, with the precepts of rationality and reason. Indeed, vigilance is not without the disarmament of the mastery of the sovereign subject. As is well known, phenomenological reduction consists in putting the empirical, or natural attitude — which naively posits the being of things, and of nature as a whole — into brackets, or parentheses, between inverted commas, or quotation marks. As Husserl remarks in his lectures from 1910 to 1911 on Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, in the phenomenological attitude, “we put every empirical act which may impose itself, or which momentarily we may have accomplished, into brackets [Klammern], as it were, and do no longer take the Being that it offers us for granted.”21 Elsewhere, in Ideas, he writes: “We do not abandon the thesis we have adopted [that is, of positing the Being of the world], we make no change in our conviction, which remains in itself as it is … And yet the thesis undergoes a modification — whilst remaining in itself what it is, we set it as it were ‘out of action,’ we ‘ disconnect it’, ‘bracket it’.22 The ultimate goal of the “essential attitude” (Wesenseinstellung) characteristic of phenomenological reduction,

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is to lay bare the “distinctio phaenomenologico,” or differently put, to exhibit essences in pure self-givenness, which, as fundamental or transcendental agencies, serve to order the elements of a region, variety of regions, and finally, of the world as the horizon of all horizons.23 Derrida has not only repeatedly highlighted Husserl’s Einklammerung, or Heidegger’s crossing out of the word “Being”; his own practice of quotation marks is the hallmark of his thought and writing.24 “Between Brackets,” an interview from 1976, is just one case in point. In the lecture he gave in the spring of 1987 at Irvine for the symposium on “The States of ‘Theory’,” Derrida argued that the demarcation by quotation marks, or inverted commas, becomes a necessity at the moment “when the relationship to all languages, to all codes of tradition, is being deconstructed as a totality and in its totality.” Derrida added that for this form of deconstruction it is no longer possible “to use seriously the words of tradition. They are no longer ever used, merely mentioned.… A ‘don’t use’ is from now on attached to each concept, each word. Don’t use that concept, only mention it.”25 Indeed, I hold that Derrida not only has generalized, but also — assuming that I can still momentarily use this term — radicalized, in a certain sense, Husserlian Einklammerung.26 His “practice [of] a vigilant but, in its very principle,… general use of quotation marks,” is a radicalization of Husserlian Einklammerung in the sense, first of all, that it puts even the self-given evidences, which phenomenological reduction seeks to grasp in intuition, into brackets.27 Rather than “reconstituting what is being deconstituted,” this practice of vigilance does not give up the quotation marks in order to proceed further. The generalization of Husserlian Einklammerung is a radicalization as well, not simply because it never comes to a rest, but also because it is not restricted to the order of the judgmental, or the theoretical. In the interview, “Negotiations” — while explaining the meaning, or reason for the enervating mobility that prevents him from ever stopping to negotiate — Derrida holds: “no thesis, no position, no theme, no station, no substance, no stability, a

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perpetual suspension, a suspension without rest. There is no rest in suspension and, furthermore, suspension, if you were to translate it philosophically, is the phenomenological epoché or the Skepsis or the kind of suspension that Husserl and Heidegger discuss, which still belongs to the order of seeing; one suspends judgments, one sees. The suspension of negotiation I am talking about, on the contrary, is a suspension that cannot be theoretical.”28 What results from all of this is that the practice of quotation marks that characterizes Derrida’s thinking and writing rather than seeking epistemological, or theoretical results — that is, radical, fundamental foundations — is “radical” in the sense that it is the mark of a generalized vigilance. He writes: “What is at stake, then, is another writing of the quotation marks themselves, which, being doubly vigilant, being doubly in quotation marks and redoubling the quotation marks in an inventive way, destabilizes even the opposition between discourse with and discourse without quotation marks, mention and use, and the entire system of associated values; that is, philosophy in its entirety, theory in its entirety.”29 The “space” set free by this generalized and radicalized bracketing — by which even what is gained in the phenomenological change of attitude (the “result”) is suspended — is the “proper” space where deconstruction occurs. As a radical transformation of phenomenological epoché, deconstruction, far from simply casting doubt about the credibility of all theses and positions, is, first and foremost, the opening of a dimension in advance of all the great metaphysical divides. In advance, above all, of the opposition of the empirical and the transcendental, the factual and the ideal, existence and essence, a set of entirely new questions and problems arises. However, by generalizing the quotation marks, and thus radicalizing vigilance, deconstruction is not only a kind of thought that can no longer justify itself by gesturing toward some established certainties or firm self-evidences gained in phenomenological intuition; it is also, in an intrinsic fashion, linked up with the possibility of failure. Speaking in

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“Between Brackets” of Glas, Derrida remarks that this text, which “operates on theses, on positions,” “can only interest the reader if, beyond all the cunning and all the impregnable calculations, he or she is certain that after a certain point I don’t know what I am doing.”30 Furthermore, by adding that, in spite of the numerous calculations to be found in Glas, what is important for him “is not to succeed with this calculation,” he highlights the fact that the “success” of deconstruction depends on “securing” precisely “that point where the calculation gets absolutely lost.” “The calculation only succeeds in/by failing.”31 The risk of failure is a necessary constituent of a thinking that is serious about the suspension of all theses and positions, and would not be what it is without this intrinsic risk. In a passing remark in “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger notes that philosophical thought “stands safely beyond any danger of shattering against the hardness of [the] matter” of thinking,” by “continually obstructing the possibility of admittance into [that] matter.” As a result, philosophical thought only “‘philosophize[s]’ about being shattered (scheitern).” By contrast, a thinking that would open itself to what is thoughtworthy — that is, for Heidegger, the truth of Being — is confronted with the constant risk of failure. Undoubtedly, Heidegger’s claim that “a thinking that is shattered,” and that is “separated by a chasm” from one that only “philosophizes” about failing, is “the only gift that can come to thinking from Being,” does not entirely eschew inflatedness.32 Nevertheless, this claim cogently stresses that any thinking that is worthy its name must proceed without assurances of any kind, and thus face the possibility of failure. Radically vigilant, the “space” of deconstruction that opens as a result of generalized bracketing of all theses and positions, is, therefore, also necessarily prone to the risk of failing in vigilance. As a consequence, there is still another turn to the critical vigilance that pervades all of Derrida’s work, and that needs to be mentioned here. Double, this vigilance is also awake to the inevitable possibility that in having one’s eyes wide open they are wide

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shut. Vigilance as distinct from the state of dogmatic sleep is not safe per se from a dogmatism of its own. In “No apocalypse, not now” — while speaking of the critical vigilance of the historians who, as scientists devoted to episteme, argue that nothing in the nuclear age is absolutely new — Derrida remarks that “the lucidity of memory” and “the critical zeal” that put the brakes on any speeded up conclusion that we are at the brink of apocalypse, at the brink of the abyss, “can [also] make us look like suicidal somnambulists, death and blind.” Vice-versa, in the face of the “critical acceleration,“ which claims that the nuclear age is unique and the catastrophe inevitable, “the doxic argument” of the historian, and his attempt to “critical[ly] and dissuasive[ly] slow down” such a conclusion is also a necessary, if not an equally critical intervention.33 In other words, the vigilance that characterizes Derrida’s thought is a vigilance on this side of the classical distinction between doxa and episteme, light and darkness, waking or sleeping. The demand for lucidity that characterizes this vigilance is accompanied by an awareness of inevitable — that is, of structural, or essential — limits that come with the possibility of light and lucidity. And, therefore, such vigilance also includes the awareness of its own limits. Such a conception of being awake, guardedness, and vigilance, is also at the heart of Derrida’s call for “a new, very new Aufklärung.”34 When facing the probability that something is true, Derrida intractably asks whether “this truth is true, or true enough?” Before any discursive statement that comes with “a certain clarity,” he also notes that “still more light ... is needed.”35 On numerous occasions this “desire for light” is construed as the legacy of the Enlightenment to whose spirit Derrida has consistently appealed. He writes: “we cannot and we must not — this is a law and a destiny — forgo the Aufklärung.”36 This desire for light “imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil, for elucidation, for critique and truth.”37 At the same time, the “good old Aufklärung” is not without its own “unclarity”, and thus prone to an obscurantism

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and dogmatism specifically its own.38 In Derrida’s discussion of Kant’s polemic against an annotated translation of Plato by one Johann Georg Schlosser in the 1796 essay, “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” this obscurantism and dogmatism is linked to an apocalyptic dimension of the Enlightenment whose critique of mystagogy takes place in the name of “a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire.” However, if, as heirs of the Aufklärung, we cannot possibly forgo its desire for clarity and revelation, it is, precisely “in order to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself and with it everything that speculates on vision, the imminence of the end, theophany, parousia, the last judgment,” that is, the project of Aufklärung itself.39 Apocalytic ruses are dissimulated under the desire for light, that, in turn, need to be ushered to the fore. In order to accomplish such demystification, which “must be led as far as possible,” we are, today, Derrida recalls, rather “superarmed,” since we can “mobilize a very great number and a great variety of interpretative apparatus.”40 But if the lucid vigil cannot stop here, it is not only because all demystification implies an end and an interest in view of which it takes place, and whose apocalyptic overdetermination, however subtle, needs to be critically brought to light. If today such demystification involves a great variety of resources, and thus “some secondary work on the system that joins this superarmement to itself, that articulates, as is said, psychoanalysis to Marxism or to some Nietzscheanism; to the resources of linguistics, rhetoric, or pragmatics; to the theory of speech acts; to Heideggerian thought on the history of metaphysics, the essence of science or of technology” imposes itself, this is also because the differential multiplication of the voices — and hence, of the ruses, tricks, and seductions involved in the demystifying effort — are all the more difficult to pin down.41 In any event, in the very name of clarity, the Enlightenment will have to abandon its desire for light with all its inherent apocalyptic mystifications for the benefit of “a new, very new Aufklärung,” by which more light is shed

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on demystifying clarity. This motif of a new Enlightenment in which vigilance is extended to light itself is already anticipated in “Violence and Metaphysics,” in which Derrida takes on Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophical discourse against light as violence.42 After having demonstrated that it is impossible to dominate and pronounce the meaning of the metaphor of light without first having been pronounced by it, Derrida remarks: “If light is the element of violence, one must combat light with a certain other light, in order to avoid the worst violence, the violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse. This vigilance is a violence chosen as the least violence.… The philosopher (man) must speak and write within this war of light, a war in which he always already knows himself to be engaged; a war which he knows is inescapable, except by denying discourse, that is, by risking the worst violence.”43 The vigilance beyond Enlightenment both in the style of the Lumières and of twentieth-century efforts at Aufklärung, is the result of the insight that the demand for clarity at all costs leads to dogmatism and obscurantism, and hence violence. However, it is precisely this demand for clarity and public openness that also makes it necessary to bring more light — a certain other light — to this demand in whose wake this new vigilance is established. “In the open but nocturnal space of the agora — in its plus de lumière: at once no more light, and greater light,” the limits of demystification, which, as already said, must be pursued as far as possible, become tangible.44 The uncompromising demand by the lights of reason and of logos for clarification, adequate description and univocity — that is, also of public use of reason in all domains — that causes light to illuminate itself, turns the light of radical vigilance into an inevitably “dark light.”45 If it is to the memory of such strict vigilance to which we are to remain faithful, and if the generalized practice of quotation — that is, “another writing of the quotation marks themselves,” one which, by suspending even the common difference between the bracketed and the unbracketed, is doubly vigilant — is one of this

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vigilance’s most pervasive effects, it follows that the first task of the responsible response to this memory consists in learning how to read — to read, in general, no doubt, but also, and above all, to read his work. Indeed, do we already know how to read Derrida? Do we not speak and write about Derrida just as if we already knew how to speak and write about his works? But does learning to read a kind of writing, which as that of Derrida is permeated by relentless vigilance, not precisely demand the constant transformation of such self-assured competence? Undoubtedly, we have come away with many things from reading him thematically, but do we know how to read his texts by heeding all the quotation marks whatever form they take, that surround their mentioned themes, in short, by paying attention to the mode of his texts? Are we, even when we follow him closely through his textual meanderings and performative acts, or when we meticulously retrace the strategies that motivate his texts’ involuted organization, and, particularly, when we are attentive to their so-called playful nature, already capable of doing justice to the vigilance that informs all these moves? Furthermore, if, as Derrida argues at the beginning of “Plato’s Pharmacy” — “a text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game,” and, furthermore, any reading of a text also requires the risk of adding “some new thread” in accordance with this law of the text to the text — do we know how to respond in reading responsibly — that is, each time in a singular manner — to what his texts qua text demands of us?46 Are we already capable of the necessary attention to the law of composition and the rule of the play of his texts? Are we sufficiently equipped to establish what — because of the strategies at work in his interpretations, the juxtaposition and confrontation of various positions, the complex relation between what his texts do and what they say, and so forth — is happening in them, and thus also prepared to read each one of them on the basis of the singular logic, law, or principle that organizes its performative, or rather, its event character? What are the analytical tools we have at

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our disposal to talk about events — discursive events, in particular — that would also allow our response to them to be a response to begin with? In sum, how confidently can we claim to be capable of the pains and the due care that it takes to carefully read Derrida’s writings — that is, of the attention required to understand what is happening in his texts, and thus to be able to correspond to them in an appropriate way? Now, if we may not yet be ready — certainly, not ready enough — to read Derrida, how helpful is it, in such a condition, to approach his thought by applying the label “deconstruction” to it? Can this title, granted that it is one, direct us in our reading of his works, and their interpretation? From the very beginning the notion of “deconstruction” has — indeed, much to Derrida’s own surprise, since initially he had made use of the term only as a translation of the Heideggerian notion of Destruktion — been attached to his writings. Much of the reception of his work and the polemical debate surrounding his writings and teachings, first and foremost, in North America, has focused on this theme. Rather than providing the key to his thought, might not this problematic of “deconstruction” be the most efficient way of blinding oneself to what is at stake in Derrida’s thought? Hereafter, I will argue that to be faithful to the legacy of vigilance that he has bequeathed upon his heirs, a responsible response to his work — which, as he himself has argued time and again, cannot be but selective — must, in a very cautious and calculated manner, free his work from the title “deconstruction.” I do not mean to say, of course, that we can simply ignore the fact that his work has been labeled by this term from the start — that Derrida himself has repeatedly taken up the term, and tried to interpret it in a manner that fits his thought — and that, consequently, the problematic of deconstruction constitutes a definite aspect of his extremely stratified work. Neither do I mean that we should no longer refer to the notion of deconstruction, but that we should do so in a specific manner. Indeed, the critical vigilance to which his thought invites us not only demands of us that

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we heed all the guardrails by which he himself has surrounded this term, but that we also reflect on how a title like “deconstruction” — but, in truth, any title — forecloses access to Derrida’s work. What I thus will propose is no longer to use, but only to mention, or cite, the term “deconstruction,” in short, to put it between quotation marks, between inverted commas. Let us briefly recall some of the guardrails that Derrida himself has put into place as regards the notion of “deconstruction.” For this purpose, the reflections on the word “deconstruction” in “Letter to a Japanese Friend” — which, like Heidegger’s “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” focuses on translation — provides a most economic account of what deconstruction “ought not to be.”47 But first let me emphasize that if the word “deconstruction” has no internal unity according to Derrida, and, above all, is not “a proper name” that could serve to identify a specific undertaking, or even an epoch (such as postmodernity), it is because there is “no deconstruction in general” — no deconstruction written with a capital D.48 Deconstruction is not one, it is not monolithic, but always singular.49 Distinct from Husserl’s notion of Abbau, and Heideggerian Destruktion, both of which represent “an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics,” deconstruction, which in Derrida’s early works, translated these terms, is not an “operation” in the first place.50 In other words, it is neither an analysis nor a critique, and cannot be transformed into a method, in particular, if, in the word “method,” the procedural or technical meaning of the word is stressed. Deconstruction is neither a practice, nor is there something like applied deconstruction. But if deconstruction cannot be reduced to some sort of instrumental methodology, it is not simply because “each deconstructive ‘event’ remains singular,” but precisely because it “is not even an act or an operation” in the first place. By contrast, as the “Letter to a Japanese Friend” emphasizes: “deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the

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deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity. It deconstructs itself ... The ‘it’ [ça] is not here an impersonal thing that is opposed to some egological subjectivity. It is in deconstruction.… And the ‘se’ of ‘ se déconstruire,’ which is not the reflexivity of an ego or of a consciousness, bears the whole enigma.”51 Deconstruction, Derrida points out in “Some Statements and Truisms,” “is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today … Deconstruction is the case.”52 Yet even though Derrida clearly hints at a “positive” meaning of deconstruction, he also admits in the “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” that he does not think “that it is a good word [un bon mot]. It is certainly not elegant [beau, that is, beautiful]. It has definitely been of service in a highly determined situation.”53 Consequently, “deconstruction” is also a word “that is essentially replaceable in a chain of substitution” — one which, when the context and the situation changes in which it proved helpful, can become less useful, and should, therefore, be abandoned, not necessarily for another word that again would serve as a title for what happens in Derrida’s thought, but, at the limit, altogether.54 In numerous of his texts, Derrida has taken up what he has called “the question of the title” — that is, the question concerning the place of the title, and the topos of the title, especially, with respect to works of art.55 If “the question of the title” has been for Derrida such a decisive issue that again and again he felt compelled to return to this question, it is precisely because of the way he understands “text” or, for that matter, a work of art. As is demonstrated in “The Double Session,” no title can unambiguously name, identify, and unify a text if it is one. A text does not let itself be commanded from any elevated external location, nor by any topos that would name its unifying essence. But that does not mean for Derrida that works of art, or texts, are simply to remain titleless, or even could remain so. Indeed, as his elaborations on the question of the title in Mallarmé demonstrate — who himself

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“had constructed this question, or rather undone it with a bifid answer, separating the question from itself, displacing it toward an essential indecision that leaves its very titles in the air” — “on the one hand, Mallarmé prescribes a suspension of the title, which — like the head, or capital, or oracle — carries its head high, speaks in too high a voice, both because it raises its voice and drowns out the ensuing text, and because it is found high up on the page, the top of the page becoming the eminent center, the beginning, the command station, the chief, the archon.” On the other hand, the title is to remain suspended, like a lustre, high above the text from which “it expects and receives all — or nothing,” but which, whether blank or not, also provides resources on which the text can draw.56 A text undermines all titles, nothing is capable of entitling it, yet a text is also only a text if it refers to, enables, and folds the extra-textual — that is, the title — into itself in a movement, which Derrida, in his essays regarding the question of the title in Blanchot, has called “invagination.”57 What, then, about the title “deconstructionism” by which one commonly refers, and tries to situate, Derridean thought. On many occasions, Derrida has underlined the need to distinguish deconstruction — its process and its effects — from the “deconstructionism” of the “deconstructionists,” which, in distinction from the term “deconstruction,” he has consistently subjected to quotation marks. As a title, “deconstructionism,” as all titles, is neither empty nor innocent. On the one hand, its aim is hegemonic, and homogenizing — in other words, it serves to subjugate and to control from the outside what takes place under this label and to disqualify it as a discourse of the other. On the other hand, this title also serves as a means of self-legitimation and self-nomination for those who practice “deconstructionism,” and who market it academically. In both cases, as Derrida avers, “‘deconstructionism’ represent[s] an effort to reappropriate, tame, normalize this writing [that is, the writing of deconstruction, which puts “quotation marks within quotation marks”] in order to reconstitute a new

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‘theory’ — ‘deconstructionism’ with its method and its rules, its criteria of distinction between use and mention, the seriousness of its discipline and of its institutions, etc.”58 The aim, or the effect of the title “deconstructionism” is to discipline the process, and the effect of deconstruction, into a theory, or a critical method, in order to either distance oneself from it, or to embrace it in order to meet the academic demand for originality with a new “-ism.” Derrida’s critical discussion of this latest “-ism” in “Some Statements and Truisms,” is not limited to “deconstructionism,” but also evokes the myriad of successive “-isms” that have emerged in the discourses within and outside the academy during the last forty years or so. And so is Heidegger’s discussion of “-isms” in the “Letter on Humanism.” Although provoked by Jean Beaufret’s question of whether his thought is a humanism or not, Heidegger’s response is not restricted to humanism and existentialism. Indeed, in this debate about humanism, he holds that all such headings, or titles (Titel) only cause disaster (Unheil). Undoubtedly, such titles have always been suspect, but suspicion does not go far enough. Suspicion as mistrust, or lack of confidence in “-isms,” is in essence merely the counterpart to the incessant demand for new titles on the market of public opinion. Even though suspicion can lay claim to a venerable tradition, the demand for always new titles only answers the equally pressing desire for the new. Heidegger writes: “True, ‘-isms’ have for a long time now been suspect (misstraut). But the market of public opinion continually demands new ones. We are always prepared to supply the demand.”59 “The dominance of such terms is not accidental,” Heidegger continues, and adds: “It rests above all in the modern age upon the peculiar dictatorship of the public realm.”60 Indeed, in the public realm thinking is marketed, and cashed in on in the form of always new “-isms” that are in competition with one another, and which seek to outdo one another by trying “to offer more than others.”61 From Heidegger’s discussion of the word “humanism” it follows that each “-ism” supplies something essential to the market of essentialisms. Each new “-ism”

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which rests on a claim of the priority of one essence over another, offers a surplus of essence, as it were. In the case of humanism, this is the essence of the human being. The word humanism, Heidegger notes, is not “a mere flatus vocis [empty sound]. The ‘humanum’ in the word points to humanitas, the essence of man; the ‘-ism’ indicates that the essence of man is meant to be taken essentially.”62 Each new “-ism” is such an offering of something that is prioritized in its essentiality, and claims that it is more essential than all other competing essentialisms. Heidegger’s criticism of these “-isms” is certainly predicated on his understanding (and ultimate contempt) of the public sphere as the domain of plurality, and the manifold. Plurality of thought, we will see, is already for him the end of thought. But what he terms “the dictatorship of the public realm,” as it manifests itself in the constant production of new “-isms,” is not to be questioned on the basis of its opposite — individual, or private existence — which with its suspicion of all “-isms,” “remains an offshoot that depends upon the public and nourishes itself by a mere withdrawal from it. Hence, it testifies, against its own will, to its subservience to the public realm.”63 Rather, if Heidegger takes issue with thought’s breaking up into “-isms,” and its subjection to titles, it is because the latter advocate essences, and declare what is essential, as opposed to what is inessential. Even if Sartre’s prioritization of existentia over essentia, “justif[ies] using the name ‘existentialism’ as an appropriate title for a philosophy of this sort,” the mere reversal of this fundamentally metaphysical opposition does not make it less metaphysical, since “existence” merely occupies the place previously reserved for “essence.”64 As such, “-isms,” together with the public sphere in which they flourish, belong to metaphysics, which, as the “Letter on Humanism” shows, is based on a conception of essence as possibilitas distinct from actualitas. Thinking under headings or titles remains bound to the difference between essence and its various others, a difference which, as Heidegger explains, has its provenance in the forgetfulness of Being, which itself is constitutive of metaphysical thought.

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But if thought’s explosion into “philosophies,” or “-isms,” is, in particular, a phenomenon of the modern world, it is also the case, according to Heidegger, that “even such names as ‘logic,’ ‘ethics,’ and ‘physics’ begin to flourish only when original thinking comes to an end. During the time of their greatness the Greeks thought without such headings. They did not even call thinking ‘philosophy’.”65 Not only is the proliferation of titles a symptom of a decline of thinking, the end of thinking was already manifest in antiquity when, in the school of Plato, names such as “logic,” “ethics,” and “physics” came into existence to designate independent disciplines. Even the term “philosophy,” the love of wisdom — more precisely, of wisdom understood as episteme theoretike, or “as a technique for explaining from highest causes” — misconstrues the true nature of thinking.66 At the moment philosophy becomes an occupation, and one busies oneself with philosophy, one no longer thinks, Heidegger remarks.67 Yet, assuming that, during their time of greatness the Greeks thought without headings, titles, labels, catchwords — the title of “philosophy” included — one must conclude that thinking should not let itself be determined by such appellations. It must not seek its justification in titles that prioritize some essence and that in turn entitle it to pretend to be a more essential kind of thought. Thinking, according to Heidegger, must take place without any essential grounds that it claims as possessions, and by which its justification is established. It is to remain in the “nameless,” resisting “the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private.”68 But if thinking is not to decide in favor of this or that essence, and espouse this or that “-ism,” it is not only because of the vigilance without which it cannot do — what Heidegger refers to as thinking’s Achtsamkeit, the “attentiveness in thinking” — but also “out of respect for the boundaries that have been set for thinking as such, indeed set by what gives itself to thinking as what is to be thought, by the truth of Being.”69 By limiting itself to the task that directs it to think Being, a task that consists in what Heidegger calls an“inconspicuous deed (das

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unscheinbare Tun),” thinking suspends the metaphysical interpretation of Being that sustains all establishment of essences, and with this all flashy titles.70 Thinking thinks without titles when it remains, in Heidegger’s words, in its element — that is, when it remains the thinking of Being, and when, rather than breaking up into competing essentializing “-isms,” it remains unified in thinking by what alone demands to be thought — Being. Undoubtedly, Derrida shares with Heidegger this sensitivity regarding titles. But in distinction from the latter, for whom the thinking of Being is to occur without any submission whatsoever to titles, and any seduction by marketable “-isms,” Derrida acknowledges that thought must not want to claim a title, and that it must suspend all titles insofar as they seek to dominate it. But Derrida also recognizes that, not merely for reasons related to the dictatorship of the public realm, but for structural reasons, thought, and all texts, inevitably engender, and provoke, titles. In posing “the question of the title,” Derrida has shown that although a text suspends its title, a text — as a complex structure of reference — unavoidably comes with a title, be it only the blank space above the text. In conformity with what I consider a pervasive characteristic of Derrida’s thought, in broad terms, the fundamental insight and experience that one cannot have one thing without its opposite, or other — thinking, or for that matter texts — entail an external margin that is the space of titles, headings, or “-isms.” However, in the same way that a text — by suspending and invaginating its title, draws on it as a resource — so does thinking also turn to use the titles that are assigned to it by critically suspending them. In the concluding remarks in the “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” Derrida broaches the question of the translation of the term “deconstruction” into another language such as Japanese. He writes: “The chance, first of all the chance of (the) ‘deconstruction,’ would be that another word (the same word and an other) can be found [or would be invented] in Japanese to say the same thing (the same and an other), to speak of deconstruction, and to lead

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elsewhere to its being written and transcribed, in a word which will also be more beautiful.” As an “essentially replaceable word in a chain of substitution,” there is nothing to this word, nothing depends on it.71 It follows from this that although, just like any other word, this word demands to be translated, responsibility toward the legacy of what this word names may also in certain situations require the refusal to heed this demand. If nothing depends on the word “deconstruction,” I suggest that, for the time being, we leave Derrida’s thought without this heading, or any other, in the hope that luck is on our side, and we will begin to think about what is happening in his thought. Derrida has consistently rejected all categorization of his thought as “deconstructionist,” or “deconstructionism.” But even though the word “deconstruction,” which Derrida has not always set in quotation marks (except when referring to the word itself) is not an “-ism,” it too ought to be put into brackets. Although he has repeatedly reminded us that there is not one deconstruction, the word itself lacking a unified meaning, and deconstruction never occurring in the singular, the word “deconstruction” — a catchword that is now applied to all spheres, to deconstructed stews, deconstructed clothes, and deconstructed office space — should no longer be used to refer to Derrida’s thought. Indeed, it has become a label that pretends to define, rubricate, and shelf his thought. Notwithstanding the fact that on numerous occasions, he has reflected on it, and interpreted it in ways to ply it to his thought, this word should henceforth only be mentioned. Indeed, the first requirement of a responsible preservation of “deconstruction” is to cross out this word even in Derrida’s own texts. Indeed, if his thought presupposes a generalized practice of quotation marks, neither the word “deconstruction,” nor any title whatsoever can, or should, become attached to it. Heidegger resisted naming the thought of Being in resisting the explosion of thought by the proliferation of all kinds of “-isms” in the public realm. Though Derrida’s thought is not unified by what is, certainly, not a “theme”

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— namely, Being, and does not think of the public realm as disparagingly as does Heidegger, without, therefore, being a thinker of simple pluralism — the consistency of his thought comes into view only on the basis of this generalized politics of quotation marks. Only when the vigilance extends to all words of the tradition, only then does the “deconstruction” that is at work, or rather that happens whenever and wherever something happens — whether in the world, in discourses, or in texts — come into view. Only on condition that all words, concepts, laws, positions, and so forth are suspended between inverted commas, does it become possible to see how each word, concept, or law, envelops what it excludes — its other, or opposite. On this condition alone, “deconstruction,” as that which is happening between bracketed words, concepts, ideas, laws, etc. — namely, the paradox, the antinomy, or aporia of simultaneous implication and exclusion, of the constant to and fro between inside and outside — comes into view, demanding to be formalized in ways that, inevitably, are both idiomatic and universal, each time in a singular way. Rodolphe Gasché

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Notes 1

Camille Paglia, “Ninnies, Pedants, Tyrants and Other Academics,” in the New York Times Magazine, May 5, 1991. 2 Deconstructive theology, among other things, is one more specifically American form of deconstruction. 3 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler, E. Cadava, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 17. 4 Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 18. For a detailed discussion of this statement, see Michael Naas, “Derrida’s America,” (in For Derrida, Routledge, forthcoming). 5 Jacques Derrida, “The Time is Out of Joint,” in Deconstruction is/in America. A New Sense of the Political, ed. A. Haverkamp, New York: NYU Press, 1995, p. 17. 6 James Creech, Peggy Kamuf, Jane Todd, “Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Critical Exchange, 17 (winter 1985), p. 28. 7 Creech, Kamuf, Todd, “ Deconstruction in America,” pp. 22-23. 8 Creech, Kamuf, Todd, “ Deconstruction in America,” pp. 2, 4. A similar argument is made about “theory” “as a purely North American artifact, which only takes on sense from its place of emergence in certain departments of literature in this country,” in Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” in The States of Theory, ed. D. Caroll, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 71, 81. 9 Derrida, “The Time is Out of Joint,” p. 15. 10 Creech, Kamuf, Todd, “ Deconstruction in America”, p. 29. 11 Creech, Kamuf, Todd, “Deconstruction in America,” p. 23. 12 In the interview from 1985, Derrida himself has sketched out a variety of reasons that explain why the American academic institutions allowed for a reception of deconstruction unlike what has been the case in Europe. See Creech, Kamuf, Todd, “Deconstruction in America,” in particular pp. 3-5. 13 In what is clearly a reference to his experience of philosophy departments in the United States, Hans-Georg Gadamer makes a poignant observation that also explains, to some extent at least, the lack of American philosophers’ interest in the work of Derrida. Gadamer remarks that “abroad one continues to speak a conceptual language that appears to me outdated and inappropriate for the subject matter (sachfern). One speaks of ‘realism’ and ‘idealism,’ but also of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ as if

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such concepts of the history of metaphysics had not undergone a complete change of meaning in the epoch of modern science, and no longer correspond at all to our needs as regards thought. Thinking has to take place in language, and needs language to communicate itself, but there is barely no language anymore when thinking withdraws behind concepts that have been overcome, and become entangled in them.” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Europa und die Oikoumene,” in Europa und die Philosophie, ed. H.- H. Gander, Frankfort/Main: Klostermann, 1993, pp. 70-71). 14 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 9, 97. 15 Jacques Derrida, “Uninterrupted Dialogue: Between Two Infinities, The Poem,” in Research in Phenomenology, Vo. 34 (2004), p. 8. 16 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, One/Thinking, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 175, 17 Repeated explicit reference to this topos of vigilance is to be found in particular in numerous interviews by Derrida. While in the following I will rely on some of these statements in order to highlight the issue in question, lets also keep in mind Derrida’s own characterization of the genre of the interview: “what is important in an interview ... is that I say things precisely in a way that is the least calculated possible, naked; that I try to say things in a form in which I do not usually say them; and that I try to untangle things without trying to justify or defend myself.” (Jacques Derrida, Negotiations. Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed. E. Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 20). 18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, London: SCM, 1962, p.271. Pascall’s Pensées, trans. H. F. Stewart, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950, p. 151. 19 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1989, p. 46. Derrida writes: “Unless one translates by ‘suspicion’ all the modalities of the question, of ‘trying to understand’ or to “account for,’ and to read in a vigilant, critical, or active manner, I do not see why one would wish to privilege the reference to suspicion. I have never done this, and I have always found the way in which the press in the sixties combined all thought that referred to Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud, in one and the same discourse of suspicion to be confusing.” (Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Nous autres Grecs,’” in Nos Grecs et leurs modernes, ed. B. Cassin, Paris: Seuil, 1992, p. 268) 20 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation, trans. D. Savage, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, pp. 32–33. See

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also Paul Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretation, ed. D. Ihde, Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1974, pp. 148–150. 21 Edmund Husserl, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie 1910/11, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992, p. 52. 22 Edmund Husserl, Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson, New York: Humanities Press, 1969, p. 108. 23 Husserl, Grundprobleme, pp. 31, 46. 24 About Husserlian bracketing, see for instance, Jacques Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990, pp. 135–136. Derrida addresses Heidegger’s erasure of the word, or concept, “Being” in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. S. Budich and W. Iser, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. 25 Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms,” pp. 74-75. 26 Speaking of the “value of radicality,” Derrida asserts that it “itself must be deconstructed; it communicates with all sorts of values, such as the values of fundamentality and the origin. If one associated the value of radicality with deconstruction, it woulddo away with itself, would destroy itself, or would destroy all the securities we still need, which, for example, I still need.” (Derrida, Negotiations, pp. 15-16). 27 Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms, “ p. 77. 28 Derrida, Negotiations, p. 13. 29 Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms,” p. 75. 30 Jacques Derrida, Points ... Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. E. Weber, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 21–22. 31 Derrida, Points..., pp. 42, 43. For a more detailed discussion of these passages, and why, furthermore, the relinquishing of total control is not intent on accomplishing unreceivability, see my Inventions of Difference. On Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 230–231. 32 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell, New York: Harper &Row, 1977, p. 223. 33 Jacques Derrida, Psyché, Paris: Galilée, 1987, p. 365. 34 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 141. 35 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans C. Lindsay, J. Culler, E. Cadava, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 33. 36 Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy. Late Essays by Immanuel Kant,

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Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. P. Fenves, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 148-149. 37 Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” p. 148. 38 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 119. 39 Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” p. 148. 40 Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” pp. 159, 149. 41 Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” p. 149. 42 For an extensive discussion of this motif throughout Derrida’s writings, see Hent de Vries, “Apocalyptics and Enlightenment,” in Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, pp. 359-430. 43 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 117. 44 Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 37. 45 Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 34. 46 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p.63. For a detailed discussion of the passage in question, see the Chapter “Giving to Read” in The Wild Card of Reading. On Paul de Man, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 149–180. 47 Derrida, “ Letter to a Japanese Friend,” trans. D. Wood and A. Benjamin, in Derrida and Difference, eds. D. Wood and B. Bernasconi, Evanston, IL. : Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 1. 48 Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms,” p. 88. See also Jacques Derrida, Moscou aller-retour, La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’aube, 1995, p. 125, where he writes: “There is not one deconstruction. Often, especially in the context of polemics in the United States, I am embarrassed by the kind of capital letter attached to the word ‘deconstruction’.” 49 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, p. 17. 50 Derrida, “Letter,” p. 1. 51 Derrida, “Letter,” pp. 3–4. 52 Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms,” p. 85. 53 Derrida, “Letter,” p. 5. 54 Derrida, “Letter,” p. 5. 55 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 24.

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Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 177–179. See Jacques Derrida, Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986. 58 Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms,” pp. 75–76. 59 Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 195–196. 60 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 197. 61 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 197. 62 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 224. 63 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 197. 64 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 209. 65 Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 195–196. 66 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 197. 67 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 197. 68 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 199. 69 Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp., 242, 230. 70 Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 240. 71 Derrida, “Letter,” p. 5. 57

From One Topos to the Other Outi Pasanen received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York in Binghamton. She is a co-editor of Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Her recent publications include articles in Deconstruction: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2003) and in MLN, as well as translations of Jacques Derrida’s work into Finnish. Currently she is affiliated with the University of Helsinki.

Outi Pasanen: Born in Luxembourg, you have studied in Berlin and Paris and taught in the United States, first at The Johns Hopkins University, and later at SUNY-Buffalo, where you currently hold the Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature. Your first publications were on Lévi-Strauss and Saussure, moving soon thereafter to Bataille, Derrida, Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Man, and so on. Your itinerary, in terms of its topology — both in the literal and non-literal sense — would thus seem to place you in an exceptional position for the observation of the developments in, and reception of, philosophy and literary theory in the past twenty or thirty years both in Europe and in the United States. In this reception, and more particularly, in that of Derrida´s work, are there, in your view, national differences of importance? As an entry to contemporary philosophy’s map of bifurcating itineraries and paths, where did your years in Berlin first place you? And your years in Paris? Rodolphe Gasché: To speak of an itinerary is to speak of experience not only in the sense of testing or attempting something, but — as its roots in Sanskrit, Greek, and German suggest — of a passing through, a traveling, or a faring. Through places, needless to say, but as you suggested, through koinoi topoi — common places, or themes, as well — at times so closely linked as to

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become indistinguishable from one another. But the topology in the non-literal sense, through which my itinerary has taken me, has been not so much through established and positive philosophies, but rather primarily through disparate approaches, directions, and senses of the philosophical itself. I like to think of this itinerary as a passage through a series of more often than not arduous, sometimes desperate experiences with the philosophical, as a search to secure a sense of the philosophical independent from philosophical dead alleys, and, ultimately, as the experience of the philosophical as the impossibility of ever attaining something that, unambiguously, could be called a philosophy. In the early sixties, when I began studying at the Freie Universität in Berlin, my interests — which largely were a function of my political commitments at the time (I had been in touch with the situationist movement in France, close to certain avantgarde movements in the arts in Germany, and soon became active in groups that, before they dissolved, or were absorbed by the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) in 1968, gathered around issues of cultural and social criticism) were primarily in the critical philosophy of the Frankfurt School, and those trends in German Idealism (particularly Hegel) with respect to, and in distinction from which, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, or Herbert Marcuse situated their thought. It was the critical thrust of their thought, their assimilation of the philosophical with the critical enterprise (rather than their attempting to establish was der Fall ist, what is the case) that drew my attention. Let me note, however, that I was primarily taken in by the social and cultural implications of critical theory. I started reading Walter Benjamin in this precise context. But Benjamin’s thought progressively led me away from the philosophical concerns of the Frankfurt School and made me embrace the basic tenets of French structuralism. This certainly sounds strange. To explain, I therefore need to mention that in the middle of the sixties, critical theory in Germany faced an increasingly shrill

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call for instant practical intervention. Because of this emphasis on immediate praxis, numerous intellectuals and students even abandoned critical theory altogether on the basis that to analyze and theorize high capitalist society and culture was just one more way of furthering a repressive social and political order. As a result, Marxist-Leninism became fashionable again. In this context, the role of the suprastructures in high capitalism and their relation to the economic infrastructure became a significant issue of debate. In distinction to many of my friends who, motivated by a desire for immediate action, were led to assume the complete derivativeness of the suprastructures — which in turn promised the possibility of active politicization of the contemporary industrial proletariat — I upheld the Frankfurt School conception of a relative autonomy of the suprastructures and of their having their own inherent laws. Benjamin’s reflections on myth — on the interconnectedness of guilt and mythical entanglement — amounted for me to a recognition of a certain independence of the realm of the idealities, and of the need to explore their specific and inherent laws in their own right. French structuralism’s elaborations on the structures of language or of various social phenomena, ranging from kinship to fashion, did just that for me. Even though my turn to structuralism initially took place within and with respect to concerns particular to the Frankfurt School, and consisted in the search for new instruments of research to analyze and establish the “logic” specific of ideologies, mythologies, ideas, and so forth, and although this turn had thus, at first, been politically motivated — this turn, which eventually led me away from critical theory (as well as from sociology, which interested me a lot at the time) — was, in fact, a turn to philosophy, an awakening sense of the philosophical. In spite of the fact that I had been taking courses in philosophy since 1962, it is only thanks to these political debates concerning the relation of theory to praxis which compelled me to argue for a certain autonomy of the laws in

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the realm of ideology, mythology, or particular idioms, and that constitute my first experience with philosophy. I do not mean to say with this, of course, that factually ideologies have an origin and a life entirely independent from the economic infrastructures. Or, as Max Weber held it, that they are responsible for the formation of historical and economic realities. Recognizing that the suprastructures are not merely reflections of the economic infrastructures, but have also a specificity of their own, implies the acknowledgment of a certain autonomy of thought without which even the contention that thought is a mere reflection of the economic infrastructures would not be possible. In other words, the insight in question was an insight in nuce into what sets philosophical thought apart from other discourses, and what makes for its irreducible specificity. My second initiation to philosophy, a decisive one, I owe to Jacques Derrida. When I met him in Berlin in 1968 — he had been invited by Jacob Taubes, then director of the Institute for Hermeneutics at the Freie Universität, and, at that time, my mentor — I had not read a single word of his work. But during the following years that I spent at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (four in total), attending Derrida´s seminars, I had the opportunity not only to familiarize myself in some depth with his writings, but also, most importantly, and as a result of his teaching, to witness an approach to philosophy that helped me to understand philosophy in a new manner. Particularly, the first seminar I attended — the seminar of 1969–70, entitled ”Théorie du discours philosophique” — significantly shaped my sense of the philosophical. Distinct from a philosophy of philosophy, or from a logic of philosophy, this “theory” of the philosophical discourse inquired into a variety of structural laws that permit philosophy to establish the autonomy of its realm and the irreducibility of its questions, but that, at the same time, remain unacknowledged by, and hence outside, at the margin (the essays ”The Supplement of the Copula” and ”White Mythology”

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originated here, and were published in Margins of Philosophy), of philosophy.1 What I learned at that point is that the unquestionably irreducible autonomy of the philosophical is a function of structures which, while enabling and securing this autonomy and irreducibility, also inevitably tie the philosophical to its Others in a complex economy of exchange in which borrowing from other discourses is required to establish philosophy in its unique right and distinctness, but which also exposes it to the threat of never being able to demarcate itself once and for all from what it is not. As a result, I began in my own work to explore the constitutive economies of other — mainly non-philosophical discourses — such as sociology (Émile Durkheim), anthropology (Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), theory of science (Gaston Bachelard), literature (Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Lautréamont), and so forth. Even though I believe I had a good foothold in philosophy — and an understanding of it that could have been fruitfully put to work in the discipline itself — my heart was elsewhere. As my work from this period shows, I was drawn to other areas of knowledge, to other kinds of discursive practices than the philosophical, such as literature and the arts, for instance, in which philosophical insights could be fruitfully put to use. This disposition explains also the ease with which I migrated into literature departments, and finally into a department of Comparative Literature. When, some time after my arrival in the United States, I became aware of how French structuralism, poststructuralism — and in particular deconstruction — were understood by the literary critics, and how they were put to use in literary criticism; when I learned that many literary critics considered poststructuralism, and deconstruction, to imply that philosophy is literature and vice-versa, I realized that I had to deepen my own grasp of these movements, especially of deconstruction — of its philosophical nature and the understanding of the philosophical that it implies — by systematically expanding my competence

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in philosophy in general, and especially my handle of its technical aspects. Indeed, while I was taken aback by what French thought was made to mean by a number of literary critics, I was also unable to make sense of what precisely went on in deconstructionist literary criticism. I was at a complete loss. For instance, I could not figure out the “logic” of a de Manean piece of criticism, not to speak of what the points were that it sought to make! The work I started in 1978 on deconstruction and reflection, and that crystallized in the essay from 1979 “Deconstruction as Criticism,” was first and foremost an attempt to clarify the notion of deconstruction for myself.2 In the pursuit of deepening my own understanding of deconstruction — in the course of which I established a much firmer foothold in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger — my work shifted in direction and thrust. Indeed, now that I have basically completed the task I had set for myself of elucidating the nature of Derridean deconstruction, and its difference from what Paul de Man has termed “readings,” my work has become increasingly “intra”-philosophical, as it were. Also, I like to believe that it is testimony to still another experience with philosophy — one that would not have been possible without the sense of the complexity of its technical aspects, the richness of its discursive strata, and of the fundamentally minimalist (or formal) nature of what it seeks to establish — which I confronted, ineluctably, in clarifying Derrida’s thought. Now whether this itinerary has put me in an “exceptional position” to review and account for the developments in philosophy and theory over the last thirty years, and their introduction and reception both in Europe and in the United States, I do not know. This is not merely a question of modesty, since I can claim familiarity only with a limited number of trends in contemporary thought. But to answer your question concerning the national differences in the reception of philosophies, and in particular the philosophy of Derrida, my answer is yes. “Ideally,” that is,

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according to the self-understanding of philosophy, such differences should not affect the reception of a discourse whose genre is universality. But in the same way that philosophical discourses become articulated in singular linguistic idioms; entertain relations to (national) traditions of philosophizing; and include reference to “horizons of expectations” particular to given nationalities, in the same way, the introduction of a philosophy into a context different from the one in which it originated is inevitably mediated by all the differences characteristic of that context. These differences are not necessarily problematic. They do not obstruct the reception of a philosophy per se (they can, and often do, of course); in principle they can serve to actualize unforeseen possibilities in the understanding of the “original.” However, in my eyes, Derrida´s work has not been given the chance to become meaningful in intellectual and historical contexts different from its own, not in Germany or North America, in any case. In these cases at least, the national differences have inhibited a reception that would have capitalized on the virtual possibilities of Derridean thought. Very schematically: in Germany — in the absence of any continuation of a phenomenological tradition of importance, especially in its Heideggerian form since World War II (except, by a few, and quite conservative thinkers) — the rationalist and the Romantic heritage have provided the philosophical framework in which Derrida has been discussed, a fact that has severely imperiled any productive reception of this work. Viewed in light of a concept of rationality that can be traced back to the Enlightenment and from which any questioning of the possibilizing limits of reason appears as an all-out attack on reason itself, deconstruction amounts to an abdication of reason. This is the position of Jürgen Habermas. Categorized as an extreme form of irrationalism, as one moment in a history of antirational thought that, according to Habermas, begins with the late Hegel, and moves via Nietzsche to Heidegger, after which it takes hold of contemporary French thought — deconstruction, from this

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national perspective — is stigmatized to such a degree, endowed with connotations that prevent all possible debate, not to speak of a productive reception. The other main context for an evaluation of Derrida’s work in Germany is the heritage of early German Romanticism and Romantic hermeneutics. Here Derrida is considered either to have been preceded by the Romantics, and hence to lack all originality, or to not measure up to the advanced insights of the early Romantics regarding individuality and subjectivity, and having abandoned these “values,” to be responsible of irrationalism as well. Both positions are evident in the writings of Manfred Frank. But what about Derrida’s reception in the United States? I limit myself to characterizing Derrida’s reception by the literary critics (his reception in North American phenomenology is rather new). In general, I would hold that this reception has centered all too much on the notion of deconstruction, and is marked by a strange paradox that I would describe as follows: deconstruction is construed as the philosophical legitimation of the priority of the literary over the philosophical. Differently put, Derrida serves to boost the self-esteem of the literary critic, and is seen that way, because he would have abandoned philosophy for literature. But this self-esteem, and the corresponding universalization of the literary, is clearly dependent on Derrida’s alleged philosophical demonstration that philosophy is but one literary genre. In my view, this agenda — particular to the literary critics in North America — remains foreign, exterior, to the concerns of Derridean thought. It has even less power to bring out hidden possibilities in his work that could enrich it, at the same time that it would appear significant in a different national context.

O.P.: Again, born in Luxembourg, your native language is double, Luxembourgish and Flemish, as you point out in passing in ”The Operator of Différance,” an exchange with Derrida on the question of translation to be found in The Ear of the Other.3 You

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publish, nevertheless, not in these, but in three other — for you, foreign — languages: German, French, and English. But is there, in your view, such a thing as a native language or mother tongue? Is a native language already an originary translation, as it is for Heidegger? Or, instead of referring to an originary translation, UrSprache, or reine Sprache (Benjamin) would you prefer to say, as does Derrida in his Monolingualism of the Other, that language comes from the Other? 4

R.G.: Yes, as a child I spoke both Luxembourgish and Dutch. Luxembourgish was my father’s language, Dutch my mother’s tongue. In this sense, my native language was indeed double, divided between a paternal and a maternal language. But both were for me primarily spoken languages, colloquial languages, with the exception of Dutch (there was no Luxembourgish literature worth mentioning) which I also learned to read. But I never acquired writing skills in either of these idioms. I learned to write in languages that were not my own, first in German (a thoroughly foreign language even though Luxembourgish is a Germanic idiom), then in French, and much later in English. Writing from the very beginning was tied for me to the nonnative, to foreign linguistic media. To be able to write meant to learn an Other’s idiom, and to become at home in what was essentially a foreign medium of expression. At the same time, such expression in another’s idiom deprives one of ever properly possessing one’s own articulated thoughts. One may even go as far as to ask whether what is thus expressed, articulated, worked out in the linguistic medium of an other, has ever been properly one’s own, to begin with. Or whether what is thought and articulated in the idiom of the Other remains at all times the property of the Other? Undoubtedly, this experience with language and writing has profoundly shaped my thinking and all my work. Under no circumstances, however, would I wish

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to celebrate or idealize this experience (and only very cautiously would I dare extrapolate general conclusions from this experience for the understanding of a native language or mother tongue). Even though, at one point in my career, I may have achieved such a mastery of German that my writing could set free linguistic potentialities that in turn could nurture and shape my own thinking (but it remains for others to decide whether this is not merely wishful thinking), to have to think and write in foreign languages implies thinking and writing without the (of course, always relative) mastery of a language into which one has been born. Deprived of the full potentialities of a singular idiom, my writing in this idiom has never allowed me to truly make my thinking benefit from the resources of a language; nor did it permit me to achieve an ease with that language, or to master a skill and its different modes, and its rhetoric. Yet, if my work — especially since I began to write in English, that is to say, in the third, and last foreign language that I learned — is sometimes qualified as extremely clear, and has been praised for its precision (while I continue to think that it is never as clear and precise as I think it ought to be), this is, undoubtedly, a function of the impossibility in which I find myself, of letting myself be carried by the language itself. Due to a lack of ease with the idiom, I have begun to cultivate clarity. Not having to resist taking liberties with language, I give undivided attention to formulating things as sharply as possible. I have made a virtue of necessity, as it were. Now is there such a thing as a native language or mother tongue? Yes, of course. Indeed, there are no other languages than native languages or mother tongues. Any thinking worth the name stands in productive relation to it and must at all times negotiate its universality claims with it. It never occurs in a medium that would not be a singular idiom. But for the same reason that thinking, with its bent towards universality, is assisted by the medium, the resources, of a singular idiom into which the

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thinking subject has been born, such a language cannot be simply native, or mine. For a native language to be able to put its resources at the service of philosophical thinking, such a language must have been virtually expropriated already. Virtually, it must have let itself be inhabited by other languages, the languages of others. This is not to be understood to mean that for all native language to become the language in which a thinking enterprise takes place it must overcome its singular idiomaticity in view of a universal language, language in general, or a language so transparent as to withdraw in the face of thought itself. All there is are native languages, an irreducible plurality of mother tongues. What is called Sprache by the later Heidegger, and which is to be distinguished from Benjamin’s concept of a reine Sprache, “only” names — in an inevitably singular, hence ultimately untranslatable idiom (in German!) — the saying that takes place in, and constitutes, a singular idiom (such as German!). By contrast, to opt for a conception of reine Sprache, to which all singular idioms refer as the origin from which they have fallen, is not simply to annul this plurality in the name of one divine language, but, more significantly, to avoid confronting the complex web of relations between the idioms themselves, and in which the singularity, the idiomaticity, the nativity, of languages is constituted in the first place. To conceive of the different languages as the product of a fall from an original language is not to think what makes them singular languages each time. To be able to give singularity its full recognition, it is necessary to take that web of relations between languages seriously. It is, indeed, in this web that an idiom acquires its singularity, and it acquires it, as Derrida says, from the Other. At no point can an idiom be native from itself. That a language can be experienced and conceived as my language, my mother tongue, is an experience and a concept that presupposes a demarcating relation to an Other’s tongue. It follows from this that it is only thanks to the Other that one has a language that is properly one’s own. One receives it from him

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as a gift. But needless to say, this is also to admit that any mother tongue can never entirely be one’s own. If it is to be a tongue, it must inevitably be inhabited by the Other.

O.P.: System and Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille (1978) was your doctoral thesis in Germany.5 Could you tell us something about this work? For example and to begin with, how did you come to choose Bataille as a topic?

R.G.: My initial idea for this study was to expound on the philosophy of Georges Bataille as a whole by way of a microscopic and exhaustive discursive and textual analysis of the posthumously published “Dossier de l’oeil pinéal” (some thirty pages in total in the Oeuvres complètes), intent on showing that all of Bataille’s major themes and moves were at work in these short texts.6 This analysis, based on close reading — and framed and contextualized by the constant reference to the philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud — was to make a specific point. I wanted to demonstrate that Bataille’s philosophy represented the attempt to undo the Hegelian system of Absolute Knowledge in systematic fashion by dismantling it layer after layer, starting from the Absolute Knowledge backwards, brushing the system against the grain, as it were, regressing from the figures of mediation to the unmediated, each time a bit closer to an immediate that would no longer be a figure of immediacy, and that ultimately would not lend itself anymore to idealizing sublation. The texts on the pineal gland were to serve me to argue that after having dismantled the Greater Logic and the different figures in which the Spirit is shown to manifest itself in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the ultimate place where Bataille sought to unseat speculative thought was Hegel’s philosophy of nature — that is to say, the speculative account of

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organic life and inorganic matter.7 But after I had shown that Bataille, in these texts, puts the Hegelian logos in question in the name of what he called “mythological representation,” that such mythological representation could be formalized in terms of what I saw to be a generalized phantasmatology, and that this phantasmatology represented the “unthought” of Hegel’s phenomenology, an unthought that it presupposed but could not master (except at the price of ceasing to be a discourse of mastery) — in other words, after having analyzed four pages of the ”dossier,” and written myself almost four hundred pages, I decided to stop. Indeed, the analysis of the four pages in question formed a coherent whole, and although the material that I did not cover was that which I was most fascinated by and which would have been a lot of fun, I thought that it was time to move on to something different. I became interested in Bataille in the context of the work I did in the late sixties on the pivotal role that structural linguistics played for French anthropology — in particular, LéviStrauss’ attempt to use the insights of linguistics not only to secure the scientificity of discourse of anthropology, but also to develop a theory about the workings of the systems of exchange of goods, women, and signs. Bataille’s elaborations on the economy of expenditure as the background against which all restricted economies and systems of exchange were to be thought caught my attention at that time. Indeed, it opened my eyes to certain limits, both ideological and structural, particular to structural anthropology. Die hybride Wissenschaft was to expound in some detail on these limits.8 But Bataille’s essays on expenditure and his book length study on The Accursed Share subsequently led me to Bataille’s other writings, and I became interested in him for his fierce and bold criticism of Hegel and, more generally, of science and philosophy as discourses of mastery.9

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O.P.: You point out above the importance of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, and French structuralism for your early work, but that of Derrida is also clearly visible already in your first published books, the above mentioned Die hybride Wissenschaft (1973) and System und Metaphorik. Later, you published two books on Derrida, The Tain of the Mirror (1986) and The Inventions of Difference (1994).10 The Tain of the Mirror is known as the most in-depth treatment of Derrida’s work to date, arguing that Derrida’s concepts or non-concepts be analyzed in terms of “ infrastructures” and “quasi-transcendentals,” in the specific sense you give to these two notions. In establishing these notions, you stress, at least to a degree, Derrida’s “more philosophically discursive texts,” and distinguish them from what you consider to be his more “ literary” texts, where philosophical argument would be made “ in a nondiscursive manner, on the level of the signifier, syntax, and textual organization.” Since, on the other hand — for example in System und Metaphorik, your work on Bataille — you seem to emphasize such notions as “reading,” “textuality,” and “materiality” of the text, one is tempted to ask, was the distinction between philosophical and literary texts made in The Tain of the Mirror done solely for strategic purposes, i.e., visà-vis the American reception of Derrida’s work? Or, conversely, would you hold that, in general terms, a distinction between philosophy and literature can be formalized? Can there be a sense or essence of literature?

R.G.: My interest in the Frankfurt School, and in Benjamin in particular, preceded my discovery of French structuralism. As I said before, it is Benjamin’s conception of myth that led me to Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, and from there to structuralism in all its forms. But I began reading Derrida’s writing only after I met him. As it happened, this coincided with the beginning of my first academic publications.

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From what I have said about Bataille in particular, it is certainly obvious that I was very much interested in all the literary aspects of Bataille’s work. But it must, of course, also be noted that Bataille is not a technical philosopher: apart from being a writer, he is best characterized as an essayist. Nonetheless, being interested at the time in what I conceived of as a kind of discourse analysis, which sought to construct the discursive phantasms (or scenarios) that in my view made up the unthought production scene (the text’s sub-text, or matrix) of the disciplinary texts, philosophical or scientific, I paid systematic attention not only to the linguistic signifier — to its syntactic and semantic possibilities — but to the phantasmatic production scene itself shown to be at the heart of the discursive enterprises of the philosophical or scientific genres. It had an undeniable literary quality about it. One could therefore suspect, as you do, that the distinction I made with respect to Derrida between his philosophical texts and his “literary” writings was a reaction against the reception of Derrida in North America. You are undoubtedly right about this. But I must also add that if I appear to have had a more flexible, less rigid, approach to the distinction between philosophy and literature before I arrived in the United States, I never held that philosophy or science is literature, or one genre of literature. I always thought of the phantasmatic sub-text that I sought to extract from philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytical texts — including texts on history and the theory of science (I did some yet unpublished work on Bachelard, for instance), but from literary works as well (I refer to the work I have done on Antonin Artaud, Lautréamont, Gérard de Nerval, and others) — as the “literary” sub-text of disciplinary identities. The aim was to show how the identity of specific discourses emerged, what laws their identity obeyed, and at what price it could be fashioned. In short, my concern with literature never aimed at painting everything in the same hue: rather it was a way of accounting for the scenarios on the basis of which

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disciplines, literature included, positively establish their identity and specificity. But let me turn to my evaluation of the writings of Derrida in terms of works more academically philosophical and of others more “literary” — in that their argumentative structure extends to the signifying levels of texts, including also therefore the possibility that limits of the argumentative structure are brought to bear on the argumentative mode itself. As you know, I never suggested that these more “literary” writings of Derrida are literary (whatever the meaning of ‘literary’ may be). I have resisted this qualification (which, as you know, also serves to identify Derrida with the post-modern) and continue to do so — especially when the literary text is identified with play. Since when, and on what grounds, can literature be called playful, I ask? But let me only evoke what Derrida said in the interview he gave right after the publication of Glas, namely, that in this work he sought to write at the precise point where the calculation is lost absolutely.11 To write at that point where all calculation — that is, full mastery and hence authorial intention — becomes impossible, is not to become playful in the sense many North American literary critics, including some philosophers such as Richard Rorty, conceive of literature but to establish in writing the exact point where, for structural reasons, the text becomes accessible to an Other and an object of the responsibility of the Other. Undoubtedly, this is only one example of what Derrida strives for in his so-called more “literary” texts. But it alone should already suffice — in particular, since it refers to Glas, a text commonly seen as outrageously playful — to make a very cautious use of the term “literary” when it comes to speaking of Derrida’s work. Yes, I do think that philosophy and literature are distinct things. But not because there would be something like an “essence” of literature or philosophy. Theirs is a difference that cannot be formalized precisely because it is not a difference

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between two simple essences. Philosophy and literature relate according to manifold differences. What separates philosophy and literature, what makes them distinct identities, also links them. Since philosophy’s other inhabits or haunts it — and the same is true for literature — the difference in philosophy and literature is a function of what in every specific case is seen to be a dominant (distinguishing) feature. There are many differences between philosophy and literature, since philosophy and literature have manifold traits that can be made to contrast with one another. In other words, literature and philosophy are infinitely different, in infinite ways, in ways that literature and philosophy have not even yet realized: hence, in still unforeseeable ways. This is also the reason why one does not find in Derrida’s work one definite and final answer to what distinguishes literature and philosophy. All answers that he provides, all the formalizations to which he proceeds, are contextual. Even the text on Kafka’s “Before the Law,” in spite of its “transcendental” thrust, is no exception to this.12

O.P.: It is true, as you point out, that the notion of “playfulness” has entertained a rather curious career in the United States, where this term is sometimes taken to refer to “ later Derrida,” “Derrida’s writings on literature” and so on. To what extent, in your opinion, can one locate behind this American reading a translation problem — if not an outright mistranslation, at least a confusion. When Derrida wrote of “ jeu” — for example, in such a text as “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” — the “ jeu,” the “play” in question referred, at least to an extent, to the latitude, slack or room to move in a machine or a system.13 With some American commentators one indeed has the sense that they have taken “play” to mean that reference to a system or systematicity is left behind altogether — i.e., philosophy is no longer a concern.

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R. G.: Yes, the translation of “jeu” as “freeplay” — with its connotations of arbitrariness, whimsicality, and licentiousness — has, from the very start, shaped the reception of Derrida’s thought in the United States. What is interesting about this misrepresentation is, of course, its ambiguity. Some love it; others hate it. Considering the obstinate persistence of this misrepresentation in American academia (first and foremost by his adversaries, but by many of Derrida’s proponents as well) and in the media of Derrida’s thought, the question one needs to ask, therefore, is whether it could merely have been an accident of translation that produced this monumental distortion. The division to which the debate around Derrida has given rise suggests deeper reasons for the mistranslation — something that points to a divide in American intellectual culture itself. I suspect this mistranslation, whether the so-called freeplay is an object of celebration or under attack, reveals something about the ideology underlying intellectual culture and identity in the United States. I’ll explain myself in a moment. First, I wish to evoke a perhaps more immediate cause. Given that New Criticism has provided the background for much of the reception of Derrida in literary departments in the United States, its emphasis on the reader’s own inventive or creative possibilities of interpreting (independently of philological constraints) is not without responsibility as far as the translation in question is concerned. But if one thinks of the serious/non-serious issue prevalent in American analytical, or pragmatic, philosophy and which frames, for instance, Rorty’s embrace of what he understands the later playful Derrida to be, one may already touch on deeper reasons that have necessitated the rendering of “jeu” into freeplay. Indeed, what Rorty’s example shows is the incredibly narrow range of choices available in American intellectual culture for the reception of what originates in another tradition — in this case the so-called continental thought (although analytical and pragmatic philosophy have, of course, their roots in that tradition as well), a kind

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of thinking, moreover, which grapples, in innovative critical ways, with that tradition. In short, what I am hinting at is that a deep-rooted exceptionalist ideology at the core of American intellectual life (according to which American culture has left the decadence and frivolity of continental culture behind, pursuing a distinct route all by itself) preprograms both the Puritanist rejection of Derrida’s thought in the name of seriousness and the celebration of Derrida’s alleged playfulness, and the latter because this playfulness is identified with a wholesale rejection, by Derrida, of the continental philosophical tradition — that is to say, its claims to universality, systematicity, truth, and all the constraints this implies. Had the translation of “jeu” as freeplay been only an accident, the misinterpretation that comes with it could have easily been straightened out. In the European context, a reference to play (especially in a philosophical text) cannot but be understood as a reference to Heraclitus fragment 52 (”Time is a child playing a game of draughts, the kingship is in the hands of a child”) and to the whole philosophical tradition to which this notion has given rise from Plato to Nietzsche.14 Is it not significant that in the reception of Derrida’s thought in the United States this philosophical reference has not had the slightest bearing? If this is so, it is because the same reasons for which the mistranslation of “jeu” as “freeplay” occurred have also prevented any possible reactivation of the philosophical tradition of play. Now of course, to understand Derrida’s notion of play as gesturing toward the philosophical concept of it does not mean that Derrida’s concept of play would be identical with the philosophical concept of it, but only that it has to be thought of with and against that philosophical notion of play. As Derrida’s reflections on play in Plato demonstrate (in “Plato’s Pharmacy”), his is an attempt to conceptualize what in play (in the philosophical sense) exceeds play, and puts play into play.15 In other words, what Derrida is concerned with in play, is the play character of play. It is, therefore,

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that the meaning of “jeu” you have pointed out, namely, play as the latitude, slack, or room to move in a system, is the much more appropriate meaning of the term.

O.P.: In The Tain of the Mirror, there is some emphasis on the universal nature of Derrida’s work — infrastructures, for example, are said to provide “the most economical way to conceptualize all of Derrida’s proposed quasi-synthetic concepts in a general manner” — whereas in Inventions of Difference, the angle to this work is different: Inventions of Difference is “a book about singularity,” “an invitation to think the singularity of the inaugural event in which communality, universality, legality, objectivity, ideality, and so on, arise as the context which by right precedes all thought and invention of difference.” This definition of singularity would no doubt apply as well to the thought of Heidegger (especially the later Heidegger) and to that of Emmanuel Levinas. Having established the singularity of Derrida, several of the articles in Inventions of Difference then seek to differentiate Derrida’s work from that of Heidegger (for example, through analyzing why Derrida’s différance is not a genus or a generalization of Heidegger’s ontological difference); some others have more bearing on the relationship with Levinas (“God, for example,” in particular) or discuss the Derridean thought of différance and trace vis-à-vis theology and negative theology. Although Derrida’s reservations concerning Heidegger’s work (including the later Heidegger) often take the Heideggerian motif of gathering, Versammlung, as their target, in the Introduction to Inventions of Difference you seem to be inclined to retain this notion, because “to reject all gathering … is to close the doors of reflection and philosophical interpretation.” For Levinas, on the other hand, the Heideggerian notion of Versammlung would be, although in a very complex manner, connected with the unity of apperception, subjectivity and, as Levinas says, with the “egology” and “narcissism” of Western philosophy. How do you see Derrida’s

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interest in Levinas in this respect? Is a problematic of subjectivity retained with the notion of gathering?

R. G.: As I noted in the Introduction to Inventions of Difference, this book is a companion volume to TheTain of the Mirror in that it takes up a number of themes and issues in Derrida that I was unable to broach in the earlier work. But between some of the essays written for Inventions and The Tain, there are approximately eight years, in which one could witness a change in the reception of Derrida. These are also years during which my own understanding of Derrida evolved. The emphasis on singularity in the book from 1994 is one indication of the kind of problematics that it became possible to address in a context where it was no longer so urgent to demonstrate (especially to literary critics, but to philosophers, too) the philosophical thrust of Derrida’s work (even though “writing” had been a central issue in his writings often based on “close reading,” that occasionally also dealt with literary texts), as well as deconstruction’s philosophical origins and its specifically philosophical tasks — where in fact it became possible to see that “deconstruction” is not what constitutes what is specific or singular about Derrida’s thinking. The Derrida who thus now came into view is a thinker of the Other, and its, his, or her “primacy” with respect to all identity and unifying gathering. I say “its,” and not only “his or her,” to stress that — in distinction from Levinas, in particular — the Other, for Derrida, is not only the human Other (or God, for that matter), it can also be the animal Other, or the electronic voice in an answering machine. When Derrida, in the The Gift of Death, emphasizes that the Other is always “tout autre,” this means, first, that the Other is any Other, whether human or not.16 Further, the expression implies that this Other is always “tout autre” in the sense of being absolutely Other — in other words, in the position that, for Levinas, is restricted to that of

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the human being, but ultimately only of God. Finally, if the Other is “tout autre,” this also implies that it, or he/she, is never my (specular) Other, but an entirely Other than me. But if the Other is not primarily the human Other (or God alone as absolutely Other), the relation to the demand — to the being-calledupon by the Other — is not at its most elemental an address (by a self) to another self, ego, individual, or subject. The relation to an Other, at its most fundamental, is a relation to an invitation, to being addressed or to being called upon by whatever or whoever is in the place of the Other. Even if the place is empty, a singular demand may originate from it. Given that an Other is an Other only on the condition that its (his or her) demand is in no way reducible to my expectations — hence singular — the relation to an Other that is the thematic in Derrida’s work is a relation to a singularity that precedes all subjectivity and intersubjectivity, while it thoroughly undermines these notions to begin with. This is in contrast to what the title of Jürgen Habermas´ latest book Inclusion of the Other suggests — namely a relation to the Other in which the Other becomes included or incorporated into an already constituted self or entity.17 Neither is the Other by which, by whom, or from whence, the addressed is constituted as an addressee (before being identified, or identifying itself as self), as an already determined Other. The Other (it, he, or she) is infinitely singular, singular in infinite ways. It does not yet have the unity of an entity. It is not yet one entity. A further consequence of this “primacy” of the relation to the Other is that without it no identity in general is conceivable (whether of selves or of identity in the logical sense as well). A corollary of this understanding of the relation to the Other is that there cannot be any relation to one privileged Other. All Others are privileged Others. I offer the following example: it is possible to speak of the relation of philosophy as a specific discursive enterprise to other such enterprises, as well as to enterprises that are other to the extent that they are not analytic

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and conceptual. It is further possible to consider the relation of philosophy to an Other that no longer yields to the logic of self/ other. But it is impossible to hold that literature is the Other of philosophy. This is not to imply merely that philosophy is host to many possible Others, but rather that philosophy responds in equally decisive relations, to a variety of Others that it can never claim to be its Others. What philosophy is, is every single time to be established in response to — and in difference from — one or more Others. The fundamental concern with the question of Otherness underlies most of Derrida’s preoccupations, or themes: singularity, responsibility, the event, invention, the performative, aporia, to name a few. Now, if in Inventions of Difference I emphasized these issues, this does not mean that they would not have been present in some way already in Derrida’s earlier work with which I was mostly concerned in The Tain of the Mirror. But especially, this emphasis on singularity does not at all reduce the importance given to universality in that book. Quite the opposite is the case. Everything Derrida establishes about the singular shows that in order to be singular, the singular must (paradoxically) be minimally repeatable (its first time must always already be the second time), hence participate in, or generate, some minimal ideality, or universal intelligibility. Consider what Derrida establishes in Shibboleth, for instance, about so unique an event as a singular date, and on which occasion he even points to the necessity of resituating the question of transcendental schematism, imagination, and time!18 As a book about singularity, Inventions of Difference, therefore, also continues — though differently — the concerns of my first book on Derrida. But in all fairness, I should say that the thrust of Derrida’s work is neither simply universalist, nor simply about singularities. Derrida has always been interested in working out the complex implications from the fact that universals are inevitably universals for (and of) singulars, and that — as I try to show in Inventions

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of Difference — to conceive of something irreducibly singular requires at least a trace of the universal. If in this last book I make the case for the necessity of gathering, it is, as I argue in the debate with Mark C. Taylor, because gathering (especially in its Heideggerian sense) does not equal (Hegelian) totalization. The point that I try to bring home in that debate is rather banal: that it is not possible to think without intertwining concepts, themes, issues, in an economic fashion, even if this produces only non-unitary clusters of traits (as in the case of the infrastructures), and that can serve to account for, each time in a singular fashion, a number of phenomena by way of the exhibition of a general law. But that is not the same as to totalize. Your question, however, coming from Levinas, from his suspicion that all gathering necessarily presupposes the unity of consciousness — hence the ego — is a more fundamental question. Indeed, you ask whether gathering (Hegelian or not) is an act of a subject, and hence inevitably connected with the transcendental unity of the consciousness of the thinking subject — in sum, a function of the egological closure upon itself of a subject. But let me point out that already the Heideggerian notion of Versammlung does not refer to a subjective act of mastery nor does it designate the effect of a subjective act guided by a unity of consciousness. According to Heidegger, gathering happens in language as logos — that is to say, in the letting lie together of all that is in the gathered gathering of Being. Undoubtedly, even though the Heideggerian notion of gathering is no longer a function of subjectivity, it is still dominated by a sense of unification and Oneness. When Derrida, in Memoires for Paul de Man, asserts a claim to the notion of Versammlung, it is, first of all, with the intention to resist the de Manean stress on unnegotiable difference.19. The gathering he has in mind is not subjective either. But Derrida goes farther than Heidegger, in that he no longer conceives it as a unifying happening. I said that gathering in Derrida is not an act of consciousness.

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Gathering here does not carry with it a problematic of subjectivity. It is first of all something that takes place (and by which the subject, in case there is something like that, would be passively affected), and that takes place in such a way that it inscribes dissemination. The “unity” that occurs in gathering is a unity inhabited by many Others, and hence is never with itself. If it is at all possible to still think about subjectivity in a Derridean perspective (which I doubt, because a subject that inscribes a constitutive relation to an outside, to an Other, and to an Other than itself and its Other, is by definition no longer a subject), this problematic could be unfolded only against the backdrop of the kind of disseminating gathering alluded to. In short, the fact that a certain claim to gathering is made by Derrida is not to be understood as proof of a remainder of the problematic of subjectivity. Or, for that matter, of a possible innovative re-unfolding of the concept of subjectivity. (Think, for instance, of his obstinate refusal in the interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” to even reconsider the possibility of rethinking the subject!).20 The difference between Derrida and Levinas is not least a difference about subjectivity in general — that is, including Levinas’ notion of it.

O. P.: Derrida seems to have been concerned with ethics already in his Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction in 1962, where at least some emphasis is given to “ethico-theoretical decisions”; yet today it is not uncommon to come across views according to which deconstruction has become “ethical” and “political” only recently, particularly in connection with certain orientations of Levinas’ work.21 How do you see this question? Is deconstruction inherently “political,” or does this question necessitate the Levinassian problematic of the Other? Do you have any reservations concerning political uses of deconstruction, for example, in the debates on “political correctness”?

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R. G.: Not only is a concern with ethics already present in Derrida’s Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”, significant traces of such a concern are already to be found in Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl from 1953.22 In order to establish whether Derrida’s thought has ethical and political implications one can, of course, choose to count how many of his writings are actually devoted to political or ethical issues (a rather substantial number, by the way). One can also argue that lately his work has taken a more ethical or political turn (that is, at a time in his career when his production has significantly increased). But if this turn is seen as a result of his recent debates with Levinas, the ethical and political concerns are understood, in the same way as when one judges them in terms of frequency: the frequency with which Derrida has addressed political and ethical issues, as concerns extrinsic to his work, provoked by exterior circumstances (or resulting from increased productivity) and concerns that, at best, demonstrate that in addition to a theory there is also, distinct from it, a Derridean ethics and praxis. But if Richard Beardsworth in Derrida and the Political is right — and I think he is — in that the Derridean meditations on undecidability and aporia are meditations on the ethical and the political, then Derrida’s thinking is not only ethical and political from the start — or at least since Le problème de la genèse on, where a reference to aporia occurs in a decisive context, but it is intrinsically ethical and political.23 I add that the notion of the trace which is — if one can still use this term with respect to Derrida’s work — central to all of Derrida’s thinking, makes the question of the relation to an Other, or to something Other — and with it all the ensuing questions of responsibility, gift, decision, etc. — into a necessary aspect of his whole intellectual enterprise. For this notion of the trace, Derrida is certainly also (in addition, for example, to Freud and Heidegger) indebted to Levinas, but it is in the debate with Husserl that this notion acquires its specific

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Derridean depth and complexity, which he has not yet finished sounding out. But needless to say, Levinas’ problematic of the Other has been for Derrida an important and fruitful incentive in working out further implications that come with his own concept of the trace. In principle, I have nothing against political uses of deconstruction, and I cannot have anything against them if deconstruction is inherently ethical and political. I have reservations, however, if deconstruction is used, applied as if it was a method, or simply a technique, to some material or area previously untouched by, or immune to, it. Understood that way, deconstruction is stripped of its singularity and of its singular demand to do justice to singularity. But it is not possible for me to offer you a global answer to what I think about the many “uses” it has incurred. This has to be decided case by case.

O. P.: You are about to publish a book on the work of Paul de Man, entitled The Wild Card of Reading.24 In this book the notion of singularity plays an even stronger role than in Inventions of Difference: if Derrida is a thinker of singularity, you now term de Man as one of “absolute singularity.” Despite the “absolute singularity” of de Man’s work, The Wild Card of Reading nonetheless seeks to develop the immanent logic or logics running through this oeuvre, and in explicating, for example, such a difficult de Manian key notion as reading — or rather, mere reading — it is no doubt a tremendous help for all of those wanting to come to grips with this complex work. Part of the difficulty with de Man’s rhetorical reading is, as you show at one point, that it explodes texts into linguistic atoms or acts so singular and punctual as to defy any relation, or any unifiable meaning or synthesis. Rhetorical reading certainly defies synthesis — as a “theory,” it puts into question the very notion of theory. But in being singular to the utmost, absolutely singular, as you say, does de Man’s work in sum also run the risk of cutting ties

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with any relation to existing positions, be it in philosophy or literary theory? How would you assess de Man’s importance in terms of the history of literary theory?

R. G.: De Man’s work, I hold, defies all categorization. It cannot be located in any of the schools of literary theory and criticism we know, including deconstructionism. As far as the latter is concerned, I need only to point out de Man’s explicit reservations concerning deconstruction in the introduction to Allegories of Reading.25 But any careful reader of de Man also knows that the operations to which he subjects texts, as well as the perspective in which this takes place, has little to do with what characterizes deconstruction in a Derridean sense. In terms of schools, their philosophical assumptions about literature, their methodology, and so forth, de Man’s work is unique. He forms a school by himself, a school of which he is the only representative, a school that is a non-school. His most zealous followers, by contrast, have formed something that resembles a school, but de Man is neither its father nor a member of it. His position, as I argue in The Wild Card of Reading, is singular to the point of idiosyncrasy. Undoubtedly, some will ask why bother, why take such a position, or rather, non-position, seriously. But, I consider de Man’s enterprise to be quite a feat of intellect. Before I say more about this tour de force, I should note that in my view, de Man’s readings of literary texts do not contribute anything to the field of philology, literary criticism, or theory. What this implies is that the position, or non-position, of de Man is not one within the field of what one traditionally understands by literary criticism. But de Man does not simply set himself critically apart from all existing trends in that field by developing an original and distinctive take on, and within, that field. His work cuts the relation to the field altogether. The singularity thus achieved not only is not the singularity of a specific approach to a regional

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discourse. It is singular in the much more radical way that it cuts its roots to a region of knowledge. De Man’s singularity, therefore, borders on the unintelligible. Yet this unintelligibility is not simply identical to that which any radically new approach runs, nor is it the result of the necessity of which Friedrich Schlegel speaks in his famous essay “On Incomprehensibility,” according to which certain basic insights have to be expressed in ironic, hence incomprehensible, manner, in order not to be misunderstood.26 Perhaps the unintelligibility of de Man’s singular enterprise is closer to the incomprehensibility Kant refers to in the last sentence of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, where he writes that although we do not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative, yet we comprehend its incomprehensibility.27 In the same way that there is something essentially incomprehensible about the categorical imperative, de Man’s singular position is also intrinsically unintelligible — not, as with the categorical imperative, because of our finite constitution as human beings, but rather because it is a position about the impossibility of meaning that seeks to include itself into this impossibility. As you recalled a moment ago, as “theory” rhetorical reading puts into question the notion of theory itself. The essay “The Resistance to Theory” is a case in point.28 I would thus claim that the unintelligibility in question is a constitutive one, as it were. Independently of what a position such as de Man’s amounts to (what its significance is), one has to recognize, it seems to me, that if indeed his work succeeds in achieving a singularity such as the one I have been hinting at, not by taking a position in the field of literary criticism, but rather by cutting all ties to the positions in the field — including the field itself, yet not from the perspective of, or in the name of, some other field, such as philosophy — this is quite an achievement in itself. It is in this sense that the “logic” running through de Man’s oeuvre is so important. Reconstructed, the “logic” that informs all his moves in his works helps one understand how the

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singularity of de Man’s non-position is achieved. It allows one to conceive (at least to a point) the incomprehensibility of his position. But I also think that this “logic,” as all logic, is based on ontological and, ultimately metaphysical assumptions. To figure out what they are in this case — and I think that everything de Man asserts about the ideological nature of aesthetics is important in this context — is highly significant if one wishes to make sense of such a singular endeavor as de Man’s. As I said, I hold that de Man sought a position so singular that it would no longer relate to any of the existing (or future) positions in literary theory and criticism. But even though de Man — and especially the later de Man — had systematically sought to cut all relations of his enterprise to the various orientations in literary criticism — especially to the criticism rooted in phenomenology and to which the early de Man was deeply indebted — this does not mean that there would be nothing in his oeuvre that would not echo the reflections, not to say the influence, of other thinkers. There are a number of thinkers, who, interestingly enough, are not literary critics or philosophers, but rather essayists, that have left deep traces in de Man’s work. I name only three: Jean Paulhan, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot. Precisely what de Man has taken from these thinkers still needs to be worked out.

O. P.: De Man has written much on Kant and Hegel, Rousseau and Nietzsche, and so on, but surprisingly little on twentieth-century philosophy. In your book you give, if only to demarcate de Man’s position — or perhaps rather, non-position — from them, Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s respective views on language as tautology as references that, to some extent, serve to situate de Man on the map of this century’s philosophy. De Man’s relation to Heidegger or Wittgenstein is perhaps a rapport sans rapport, a relation without relation. Apart from some rather elliptical considerations — such as the

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reformulation of the Heideggerian locution Die Sprache spricht into Die Sprache verspricht (sich) — de Man has addressed the possible relation or non-relation, for example, to Heidegger considerably little. What would you take to be the reasons for de Man’s relative silence on these thinkers? Apart from Derrida, to whose work de Man has a most complex relation (as you explicate at length), are there other modern or “post-modern” thinkers that de Man’s work could be seen to address directly or indirectly? In short, where can one place de Man’s singular work in the history of philosophy?

R. G.: The answer to your question requires, I believe, some conjecture and speculation, and can, therefore, only be tentative. But let me first recall two things. First, this: in the interview with Stephano Rosso, de Man insists that he is not a philosopher, but — if I remember well — a reader of texts, one whose thoughts are intimately mediated by the texts read.29 Second, that in “The Resistance to Theory,” the theory of reading that, as I try to show in The Wild Card of Reading, represents the sum and substance of de Manean thought, is said to have originated outside of philosophy. It is neither a by-product to philosophy, nor dependent on it, but rather something entirely independent not only from philosophy but, as I suggested before, from literary criticism as well. What one faces here, then, is an attempt at establishing a discourse irreducible to philosophy and literary criticism, something that despite all the difference, is, at least formally, vaguely reminiscent of the third way that Husserlian phenomenology sought to go. De Man’s ambition has been to develop a novel, entirely nonindebted position — or, rather non-position, one that owes nothing to anyone, or anything, which, consequently, has no links whatsoever to any of the existing philosophical discourses, the phenomenological one included. Such a discourse, therefore, would also be a radically uncompromised discourse. It is a discourse that wishes not only

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to refuse all compromise with philosophy and literary criticism, but also not to concede anything to them. Uncompromising, the theory of reading wishes a position for itself that has been successful at not compromising itself. Not only does it not concede anything to philosophy and literary criticism, it does not promise anything to begin with. It is this thrust of de Man’s work which has compelled me to speak of it as an extremely singular project, one bordering on the idiosyncratic. Radically allergic to the tradition of philosophy and literary criticism, it goes its own, single, and singular way. But, paradoxically, even though the theory of reading disclaims any philosophical debt, the very idea of a position (or non-position) in total disregard of all existing philosophical discourses, absolutely severed from all other modes of thought, is an idea that can only philosophically make sense, or non-sense. Indeed, as I suggest in the book, it is a position that seeks an answer to the perennial philosophical question: What is the singular? De Man´s whole enterprise represents a radical answer to this question, a challenging answer and, therefore, a body of work that in spite of its outrageousness — and even untenableness — merits being read and being taken seriously. Since Heidegger, at least, the question of singularity has been a continual concern of contemporary continental thought. If, notwithstanding de Man’s claim that he is not a philosopher and that he has not drawn inspiration from philosophy, one can place his so singular work in the history of contemporary philosophy, it is precisely with respect to the philosophical elaborations on singularity in the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, to name only these. But why, then, is de Man so reserved and silent about these thinkers? Undoubtedly, because they are philosophers — his ambition being to carve out a place for himself that could not be situated on any philosophical or critical map. Does he not speak of the theory of reading as the wild card in the serious game of the disciplines? But given the complex

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relation that de Man’s work has to that of Derrida, one could perhaps also think of a possible modesty on de Man’s part, leaving it up to the trained philosopher — to Derrida — to tackle Heidegger’s philosophy.

O. P.: De Man’s Aesthetic Ideology has been published posthumously and only rather recently, in 1996.30 What will, in your view, be the place of this collection of essays in the de Man canon? Does the work on Kant included here, for example, remarkably contribute to, or possibly modify our understanding of de Man’s theoretical thinking?

R. G.: Indeed, I believe that Aesthetic Ideology can significantly contribute to our understanding of de Man’s theoretical stance. In seeking to unmask the aesthetic bias of all philosophy — and hence the ideological nature of all philosophy — the essays reunited in this volume certainly help to illuminate and sharpen one’s understanding of the philosophical thrust and implications of de Man’s work. One of the first things that one becomes aware of in reading these essays is the extent to which de Man’s thinking is at odds with and a reaction against the Schillerean interpretation of Kantian philosophy. The Schillerean interpretation of Kantian aesthetics, in particular, is at issue here, insofar as this interpretation has provided the basis, on the one hand, for the formalist and aestheticist tradition of literary criticism, and on the other hand, for the German Idealist aesthetics (Schelling, especially Hegel) which is at the root of thematically oriented literary criticism (for instance, historico-social, Marxist oriented, criticism). Decidedly, de Man has a point here. He has clearly a point, too, when he seeks to demonstrate that the Schillerean reading does not do justice to Kant’s thought. Even though de Man’s own reading of Kant is highly problematic

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— indeed, utterly idiosyncratic, an interpretation which makes Kant look very much like the Romantic writers and thinkers as they emerge from de Man’s two books prior to Aesthetic Ideology, Allegories of Reading and The Rhetoric of Romanticism — it does show de Man in search of a more “philosophical” elaboration of the underpinnings of his theory of reading as being engaged, in fact, in an attempt at a “philosophical” legitimation of sorts.31 I say “of sorts,” because de Man’s hostility toward philosophy is as strong here, if not even stronger, than in the earlier work. Philosophy and aesthetics are shown to be basically the same. But de Man’s “return to Kant” — apart from turning Kant into a protoRomantic, in the sense that de Man conceived of Romanticism — nonetheless mimics the philosophical gesture of legitimation (since early Romanticism at least derives from possibilities within Kantian thought) . And similarly, he provides one with the means to explore in some greater depth what, precisely, the philosophical stakes of reading are. In the analysis of “Kant’s Materialism” that I have proposed in a chapter entitled “Apathetic Formalism,” I try to show that what de Man believes himself to have discovered in Kant — and what he designates as radical formalism, or formal materialism — is a concept of form and matter so opaque, blind, and senseless that such form and matter resist relation to the point of undermining the possibility of relation in general. Such form, or matter, is apathetic in that it does not yield anything, nor to anything. This thoroughly nonaestheticist notion of form, which — thanks to its refusal to become linked to something — remains irreducibly opaque, and becomes synonymous with matter, can be shown to be the philosophical keystone or foundation of de Man’s notion of reading, as well as of all the particular readings that he has offered of literary and philosophical texts at least from Blindness and Insight on — that is to say, readings that explode the texts into a myriad of material elements and arbitrary acts that defy any meaningful synthesis.32 In short, then,

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de Man’s finally published late essays require our special attention since they spell out more clearly than before what the stakes of reading are. More clearly than before, these essays force one to face the decidedly outrageous nature of the claims that de Manean readings make. These claims being philosophical in thrust, the challenge that they represent is a challenge that one cannot avoid responding to. If one can thus speak of these essays as possibly modifying our understanding of de Man’s work, it is above all because they deprive one of all excuses not to read him.

O. P.: Earlier you mentioned that after the books on Derrida and de Man, your work has now become “ increasingly ‘ intra’-philosophical as it were.” What, in broad terms, or in a few words, is the orientation of your current work?

R. G.: When I said that — in the process of seeking to come to grips with Derrida’s thought and the strange effects that it has produced in North American academia — my work has become increasingly intra-philosophical, I meant that after having used philosophy primarily as a reference point to clarify the thrust of Derrida’s thought or to elaborate on the philosophical implications of a project such as that of de Man, I have become interested in certain philosophical problems for their own sake. Of course, this does not mean that all I would be interested in would be pure and disinterested research. I continue to be concerned with contemporary ideological positions in academia, with the question of the reception of continental thought, of its being systematically watered down in what is called ”theory,” and in what is at stake in these processes of appropriation (or resistance against them). In other words, even now that my work has, I believe, become more philosophical in the technical sense, I understand it as an intervention in very specific intellectual debates, and non-

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debates. The work on Kant’s aesthetics in which I am currently involved, for example, and which centers among other things on such issues as form, presentation (Darstellung), and the freeplay of the faculties, in order to demonstrate that the Kantian notion of form is not a formalist-aestheticist conception — and hence not the blueprint for all formalist aesthetics after Kant; that the prominence of the question of presentation in the Third Critique is not to be explained on the basis that the latter would be an aesthetics, and consequently, about representation and its limits; and that freeplay, rather than implying licentiousness, names only the minimal arrangement of the faculties necessary for cognition in general, or morality in general — that is to say, in advance of the usual employment of these faculties. In all three cases, I take issue with very determined interpretations of Kant, with an eye (but not exclusively so) on the North American context. Whatever the agenda of these interpretations may be — whether their goal is to make Kant responsible for what the critics consider the ahistorical, apolitical trends of contemporary intellectual life, or whether, on the contrary, Kant is hailed to have been the first to have anticipated the modern and post-modern problems of representation — they are without exception, I argue, indebted to what I consider a Romantic interpretation of Kant’s thought. In seeking to free Kant’s thought from that Romantic appropriation, I certainly wish to replace it in its proper context and thus to re-establish its philosophical originality and potential. At the same time, such a de-romanticizing of Kant has a polemical edge and represents a critical intervention in the current debates — one which I hope will convince critics and readers to return to the text of Kant’s philosophy.

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Notes 1

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. 1 The essay has been reprinted in Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference. On Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 22-57. 2 The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, ed. C. McDonald, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988, pp. 110-114. 3 Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of The Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. P. Mensah, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 4 Rodolphe Gasché, System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie von Georges Bataille, Bern: Lang, 1978. 5 Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. II, Ecrits posthumes 19221940, Paris: Gallimard, 1970, pp. 11-47. 6 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, New York: Humanities Press, 1969; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 7 Rodolphe Gasché, Die hybride Wissenschaft. Zur Mutation des Wissenschaftsbegriffs bei Émile Durkheim und Claude Lévi-Strauss, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973. 8 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1988. 9 Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 10 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey and R. Rand, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. The interview, “Between Brackets I,” has been republished in Jacques Derrida, Points ... Interviews, 19741994, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, see, in particular, pp. 21-22. 11 See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 181-220. 12 See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 278-293. 13 Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 28. 14 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 61-171.

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Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 16 Jürgen Habermas, Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. C. Cronin and P. De Greiff, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. 17 Jacques Derrida, “Schibboleth, “ in Word Traces, ed. Aris Fioretis, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 18 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay et al, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 19 See Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points ... Interviews, 1974-1994, pp. 255-287. 20 Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction, trans J. P. Leavey, Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicholas Hays, 1978. 21 Jacques Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990. 22 Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, London: Routledge, 1996. 23 Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 24 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 25 Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility,”in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. P. Firchow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971, pp. 259-271, 26 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. A. Zweig, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 262. 27 See Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 28 de Man, The Resistance to Theory, pp. 115-121. 29 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. A. Warminski, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 30 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 31 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Thinking From the Limit Stuart Barnett is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He is the editor of Hegel After Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998), editor and translator of Friedrich Schlegel: On the Study of Greek Poetry (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), as well as the editor of the forthcoming Head to Head with Deconstruction: Interviews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), in which this interview will also appear.

Stuart Barnett: I was wondering if you could give us a sense, or a geographical outline, of the education and the Wanderjahre of Rodolphe Gasché. You seem to be the very embodiment of what George Steiner termed the “extraterritorial.” You were raised in Luxembourg and in Flemish Belgium, went to university in Berlin, and ended up in the United States. You teach in a literature department, but are thought of as a philosopher. You’ve translated Derrida from French to German; your first study was written and published in German; you now write and publish in English; and you speak French at home. (Doesn’t this get confusing? It seems like one should start sounding like Finnegans Wake.) And how do you think this all adds up to make you a different sort of thinker than the typical American critic?

Rodolphe Gasché: Indeed, after having finished high school in Luxembourg, I went to Germany since Luxembourg has no universities of its own. But before taking up philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, I first tried my hand at chemistry in Munich only to discover pretty soon what I knew all along anyway — that my true interests were with the humanities. I guess it was not chemistry that I was looking for when I took up

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my studies in Munich but, rather, something more like alchemy! But joking apart, the decision to start out with chemistry was not altogether without reason. I had, and still have, an intense interest in the sciences and higher mathematics, but, by now, my competence in this area is, of course, only that of a more or less well-informed layman. In any case, when in the late sixties I became involved with structuralism, the scientific aspirations of the disciplines informed by this approach were foremost on my mind. One of my main points of interest concerned the specific way in which these disciplines, whether linguistic, literary critical, or anthropological, sought to raise themselves to the status of scientific disciplines, what scientificity meant in this case, and, in particular, whether the human sciences’ struggle to achieve the status of scientificity did not reveal something about the scientificity of the so-called hard sciences. This concern with the sciences is manifest in earlier work I did on the concept of science in the sociology of Émile Durkheim and the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss — I am referring to my first book, Die Hybride Wissenschaft. I have written on psychoanalysis from a similar perspective, and have worked on Gaston Bachelard and Claude Bernard in this vein as well (this work has yet to be published). But let me return to my dabblings in chemistry. After three semesters I made up my mind and quit chemistry. In Munich, after the daily work in the lab, I had already begun to attend courses in philosophy, such as on the fundamental questions of philosophy, especially in relation to questions in the sciences, the history of philosophy, and — I remember vividly because of the unease I felt in the quasireligious ambiance of this course — one on Plotinus, offered by the Plotinus scholar Henry Deku. And so, in the fall of 1962, finally, I went to Berlin. At the beginning I concentrated on sociology, but then turned to philosophy properly speaking, as well as to the science of religion. I took courses with Jacob Taubes, some on gnosis, Manichaeism, the apocalypse, the

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notion of secularization, and so forth, others from Klaus Heinrich who approached philosophy (and psychoanalysis) with questions that had a religious (though very singular) twist. Given the strong interest I had at the time in the Frankfurt School, the philosophical training that I sought motivated me to study not only Hegel, the Left Hegelians, Marx, but also some more obscure figures (the Austro-Marxists, to give one example), under the supervision of Hans-Joachim Lieber, who familiarized me as well with the work of Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Dilthey, and others. But the authors to whom I was primarily committed up until the late sixties, when I discovered French structuralism, were Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. Initially, I read the structuralists very much for the sophisticated kind of ideology critique that one finds in some of their work as, for example, in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, or in his writings on fashion.1 My transition from the Frankfurt School to structuralism, and what today is called post-structuralism was, therefore, a rather smooth transition. I understood the kind of questions that structuralism raises, and the methodologies that it offers, to represent innovative means to further the goals of Frankfurt School critical theory. But, needless to say, as I deepened my knowledge of structuralism, not only of its linguistic and semiological forms, but also of its philosophical antecedents in the philosophies that sought to replace “substance” with “structure” (Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Cassirer, Georg Simmel, etc.), inevitably, I found myself after a while in a field of investigation and concerns that was entirely foreign to that of critical theory. My work began to take a new turn, and with it I began to feel like a foreigner in the philosophical landscape of Berlin. It was thus only natural that I would go to Paris to continue my studies. I should add, however, that, while I had read most of the literature on structuralism, as well as the writings of Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault by the time I met Jacques Derrida in 1968

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in Berlin, I had not read a word of his work. It is only after the conversation that I had with him that I read Writing and Difference (which, incidentally, I translated into German) and Of Grammatology.2 In the first two years that I spent at the invitation of Derrida at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (I spent two additional years there before I came to the United States, during which I also attended Jacques Lacan’s lectures) not only did I thoroughly accustom myself — thanks to the lectures and seminars of Derrida, Althusser, and others — with French thought, but I also began to realize that I needed to study Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger if I was to continue working within the line of thought with which I was familiarizing myself. The philosophical climate in Berlin had not been very conducive to studying this German philosophical tradition. Adorno’s writings on Husserl and Heidegger, I have to say, discouraged one from even bothering with phenomenology in the first place. Paradoxically, I had to go to France to discover this very important trend of German philosophy. Essentially, then, Paris meant for me becoming acquainted with an approach and a way of asking questions that is phenomenological, and that constitutes not only the background to which structuralism is heavily indebted, but which is also, and especially, the backdrop without which post-structuralism does not make too much sense. But Paris was important for me in still another respect. This stay made me discover literature as a realm that deserves an attention equal to the one that the sciences or philosophy claim for themselves. Paris’ extra-academic scene, including, at the time, the very dynamic Tel Quel Group, but also many French philosophers’ respect for literature, was certainly one of the reasons. This opening up to literature did not simply mean that I developed competence in another field; it was an opening that accompanied the development of a new sense of the philosophical, one that I owed to a large extent to Derrida’s teaching. But this does not mean that I sought to approach

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philosophy from a literary perspective, or the other way around. With Derrida I held philosophy and literature to be separate discursive enterprises. In contrast to the deconstructive approach to literature, I was not interested in establishing the constitutive exchanges and relations between the two. Rather, at the time, my aim was to account for philosophical and scientific discourses, for their unity (thematic, argumentative, structural) — Derrida once accused me of being at heart an epistemologist — by construing what I called the phantasmatic template at the core of every single discourse. In short, I was interested in demonstrating that a certain productive madness is manifest in the form of a minimal phantasmatic narrative in every discourse, and that it is thanks to this generating matrix that discourses — regardless whether philosophical or scientific — have coherence and unity to begin with. Though I should add that literature is not to be confounded with such phantasmatic narratives. I thought of literature as the place where these minimal generative narratives could operate more freely, and could thus be grasped more easily, without being displaced, or overshadowed, by the secondary exigencies of logical, epistemological, or metaphysical unifying principles. Indeed, in so far as it has the cohesion of works, it is itself dependent on these organizing and unifying phantasmatic deep structures. This approach, developed at great length in my book on Georges Bataille, continued to inform all the work I did on the discourses of psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), anthropology (Marcel Mauss), philosophy (Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche), and the philosophy of science (Gaston Bachelard). I had great fun dealing with texts in this way. With this approach in my luggage, I arrived in 1975 at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. For the first years — during which I became affiliated with literary departments — I continued in this direction by bringing this approach to bear on literary texts: Melville’s Moby Dick being the first instance. But, finally, when I realized how and what of French thought (and continental philosophy as a whole) had been

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received in literature (and philosophy) departments, I experienced extraterritoriality in still another way. I was especially taken aback by the absence of all problematic and historical consciousness evident in the appropriation of philosophical thought in literature departments. In any event, this experience was to become crucial for much of what I did afterward — as is obvious from the various essays, and in particular, the two books devoted to the philosophy of Derrida. Another way of describing this experience is that of a loss of innocence. As far as I my own work was concerned, I could no longer continue treating philosophical texts as I had done before. However outrageous my approach to these texts might have been, my readings made sense only in light of specific philosophical tasks and problems. Consequently, when I realized that I could not assume any awareness, or any consensus, of what specifically a philosophical discourse is about, my work took a more expository turn, and as a result I became much more interested in classical philosophical issues and dry technicalities than I had been before. In my particular case, the passage from one intellectual culture to another has fostered a sense of difference. Rather than leaving me confused, or even seeking to fuse all these different traditions into one idiosyncratic amalgam, my frequent migrations have made me obsessed with differences and distinctions. I am constantly afraid of not being precise enough. Of course, this does not exclude occasional confusions, especially, when it comes to language. “O zut nochmal!” is one of the involuntary creations of which I am particularly proud. S.B.: You mention your interest in the sciences, which those familiar with your work on Derrida might find surprising. Yet you gave expression to this interest in your earlier study, Die hybride Wissenschaft.3 Although you focus on the work of Émile Durkheim and Claude Lévi-Strauss there, the implicit object of your inquiry

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is the very notion of scientificity in that you trace the deconstructive effects upon the sciences resulting from the separation of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology from philosophy. This is an intriguing employment of deconstruction, one that has been relatively neglected. I was wondering if you had any comments to make on this line of thought and/or how one could pursue such an avenue further.

R.G.: Indeed, in that first work of mine I was interested in trying to understand how the way in which the human sciences (or soft sciences, as one also calls them today) such as sociology and structural anthropology — sciences that from the turn of the century on sought to emulate the scientific rigor characteristic of the natural sciences — institute, and relate, to their constituting object. As you know, according to the natural sciences, and the philosophy of science, any claim to scientificity depended on these sciences’ ability to define a clearly delimited realm of objects specifically their own. Yet, basing myself on Durkheim’s programmatic work, The Rules of Sociological Method, and a number of texts by Lévi-Strauss in which he broaches the scientific ambitions of structural anthropology, it became clear to me that these sciences not only mustered objects that lacked the required definiteness and unambiguity, but that, discursively speaking, their argumentative procedure matched scientific rationality also only up to a certain point, in short, that their discursive characteristic was textual, and had weblike, or network-like quality.4 However, and this is one of the guiding ideas of Die hybride Wissenschaft, rather than indicating a simple failure, the lack of a well-defined object as well as the textual refinement of these aspiring sciences appeared to me as an achievement, more precisely, as evidence that they took the emancipation of the sciences in general from philosophy one decisive step further. My underlying argument was that the natural sciences’ self-understanding of both their object and

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method was still philosophical, and hence that the proclaimed separation between the sciences and philosophy had not yet been consumed. The human sciences, by contrast, I argued, were the place where a deconstruction of the philosophical understanding of science occurred, and hence where a radical separation from philosophy was happening. Today, I would put this differently, and only say that a separation from a classical and idealist philosophical understanding of scientificity was happening, but not from philosophical thought as such. I sought to show that a novel understanding of scientificity had come into being, one that was also to affect the scientificity of the hard sciences. As you know, in North America in particular, deconstruction has been often viewed as suspicious of scientificity. For a number of Derrida followers, especially in the literary field, the predicate “scientific” soon became the index of a mystification. Undoubtedly, in his early debates with linguistic, literary, and anthropological structuralism — Of Grammatology would be a case in point — Derrida has been critical of structuralism’s ambition to achieve the status of a science. This questioning, however, must be seen as a function of Derrida’s interrogation of the philosophical concept of science, and of everything that as episteme, is tied to this notion in the tradition — a questioning, by the way, which he had begun even earlier with his analysis of Husserl’s project of philosophy as strict science, and of science as the telos of the history of the West. The idea of science is the idea of a full adequation between logos and ousia, between discourse and fully self-present being. However, to deconstruct this idea of science by demonstrating that of the gramme there cannot be a positive science the trace, or différance, is anterior to presence and “presupposed” by such a science, does not imply that one ought or could do without the sciences, or, more precisely, without discursive scientificity. Of the trace and différance, I would add, one must speak with science (as it were), scientifically, but without dreaming the dream of a science of the trace, or différance. My

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claim would be that what deconstruction asks us to conceive, and practice, is scientificity without science. Now, to respond to your question as to how to pursue the avenue of Die hybride Wissenschaft I limit myself to two suggestions. First, one could demonstrate that the hard sciences were factually never as hard as their philosophical self-understanding made them believe. At least not with the developments that occurred in twentieth-century science — in nuclear physics, astrophysics, biology, biochemistry, and nuclear biology — and which historically paralleled the previously mentioned developments in the human sciences. This is becoming increasingly evident from research at the cutting edge of the history of science. I am thinking here of the work by Bruno Latour, and especially by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, who have shown that science is much less theory driven than it itself most of the time is inclined to believe.5 As is also obvious from these studies, it is precisely because in their practice — in the lab, for instance — that the sciences are not that hard that they make unexpected discoveries of new scientific objects. Second, one would have to confront the fact that the objects of the advanced sciences are a far cry from what philosophy traditionally — and in its wake, the philosophy of the sciences as well as science’s own philosophical self-understanding — has conceived as an “object.” Let’s take just one example. I take it, and not accidentally, from the sciences that deal with the infinitesimally small (although astrophysics could provide examples as well for what I wish to say). Scientists in quantum electrodynamics hold that a quantum foam, that is, a foam of particles and waves that spontaneously emerge into and spontaneously pop out again of existence on a barely conceivable time scale, fills the empty spaces between atoms throughout the universe. This is supposed to be a foam of virtual particles and waves, which can lend themselves, as for instance, during the Big Bang, to a conversion into real particles, and thus into the building blocks of real worlds. What kind of object is

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this foam? If one can speak of it as an object at all — which strictly speaking one no longer can — it is only in the sense of what I called, at the time when I wrote Die hybride Wissenschaft, though not entirely unproblematically, “ambivalent” objects. Since this foam of virtual particles is a foam of particles popping in and out of existence, it itself has not the presence of an object, and hence also requires a discursive approach distinct from the philosophical language of the hard sciences, a kind a speculation, and philosophical thinking, without the conceptual and ontological assurances of traditional philosophical thought. Now, in this these physicists’ theories about quantum foam — and, implicitly, about the power of nothing — are not without relation to conceptions we have become familiar with through deconstruction. Structurally, and in terms of what it is supposed to account for, the “object” quantum foam, is similar to, for instance, the “object” pharmakon (I could as well have chosen any of the items that I have called “infrastructures” in The Tain of the Mirror).6 The pharmakon which is the “object” of investigation in Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Plato’s Phaedrus is nothing but the undecideable milieu, or matrix, in which opposites pop in and out of existence, revert into one another, before they become fixed by the Platonism already at work in Plato’s text, frozen, as it were, and instituted as the hierarchical, organized concepts of metaphysics.7 I mentioned this example (which, of course, would require a more extensive elaboration) to suggest that what is going on in the advanced sciences and in certain developments at the cutting edge of philosophy, are not unrelated. Some certainly will object that this is to make a merely literary use of the sciences; that to compare developments in the sciences with developments in the humanities is to assume that they represent regions of equal importance; that all this is sheer self-infatuation. According to these critics, to relate the sciences to the humanities is at best to indulge in an analogy, an exercise permitted only in non-serious talk, to which occasionally one

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may resort without impunity, for instance, in interviews such ours. By contrast, I would argue that to speak here of analogy, is to hold on to a traditional concept of the sciences, oblivious of what factually takes place in their research. The concept of analogy, unless entirely recast, cannot do justice to the interplay between the sciences on the one hand, and on the other, the social sciences, the humanities, and, in particular, philosophy. Indeed, I would claim it is necessary, an urgent task even today, to revisit the relation between the philosophy and the sciences.

S.B.: To follow up on the last question, how could one link or distinguish this early work of yours on sociology and anthropology to work already done in the philosophy of science? I’m thinking, for instance, of Karl Popper’s use of the notion of falsifiability to distance science from a naïve empiricism, or Paul Feyerabend’s use of methodological anarchism to demonstrate the dependence of empirical observation upon theoretical constructs. I guess I’m worried about making a straw man of the sciences. One sees too often literary critics presenting the supposedly shocking news that the empirical is laden with theory, as if this were enough to end the discussion. Yet, if I understand your earlier work, you seem to be pressing upon the much more radical issue of the very idea of a distinction between philosophy and science.

R.G.: The philosophy of science you are referring to, but also the strongly philosophically oriented work in the history of science by Rheinberger I have mentioned — I’ll return to Rheinberger’s work in a moment — are all attempts to account for the phenomenon of the natural sciences through an analysis of their scientific practice. In Die hybride Wissenschaft, by contrast, I centered on disciplines in the humanities that are involved in a search for scientific credibility. You are right to point out

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that what I really was interested in was the difference between philosophy and science, but not so much between the natural sciences and philosophy, which I saw to be much closer than is commonly assumed, at least as far as the self-understanding of science is concerned, but between those discourses in the humanities that sought to establish scientificity and philosophy. Here I held that a radical mutation of the concept of science and scientificity was underway that seemed to me to have deconstructive implications for philosophy. As I said before, I detected a promise in precisely these discourses’ failure to live up to the philosophical idea and ideal of science. If I continue to be interested in developments in the sciences and the new trends in the history of the sciences, it is because the actual scientific practice of a number of natural sciences not only comes close to what I tried to outline in my early work for the human sciences, but, especially, to contemporary research at the cutting edge of philosophy. Take, for instance, the work of Rheinberger. He shares with Feyerabend the insight that the actual practice of the sciences is not driven by a critical rationalism à la Popper. His work differs, however, from Feyerabend in that he does not advocate, under the title “theoretical anarchism,” another novel instrumental theory, however enlightened it may be by the insight that science is not only driven by rational arguments, but also by subterfuge and rhetoric — which is a theory whose task, like that of Popper’s, is to actively encourage and secure progress in the sciences. Rheinberger’s approach is historical, yet has significant implications for the theory the sciences. First, because for him, it is not theory but the experimental system of the empirical sciences that is his starting point. In contrast to what obtains in traditional theories of science (Popper, in particular), he no longer understands the experiment as a mere test for a hypothesis, but as the rock bottom of all empirical research. In other words, and this is his original thesis, the experimental situation in the sciences is not to be understood from, in distinction, or in

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opposition to the theoretical. Analyzing the micro-dynamics of scientific activity, especially in reference to the discovery of protein synthesis, Rheinberger has been especially interested in showing how new, unpredicted, epistemic objects emerge from experimental research and force science to abandon the guiding theories, replacing them by new ones that acknowledge the novelty of the objects, thus redirecting the perspectives of research. Now, what interests me in Rheinberger’s work is that the “experimental thinking” that he finds at work in the practice of the empirical sciences is a thinking that cannot any longer be distinguished neatly from that practice. Indeed, the theory/ practice distinction no longer suffices to account for what takes place in empirical research (at least in molecular biology). The empirical experimental situation is not laden with theory. The classical distinction between the rational and the empirical, theory and practice, becomes displaced here, foregrounded, deconstructed, as it were. And this is what prompts me to consider the possibility that, in its actual activity, the sciences are engaged in a similar — no not similar, but, to use the Heideggerian notion of the same as opposed to the identical — in the “same” kind of operation. I also propose that today both the sciences — I speak here, of course, of sciences that are no longer traditionally theory driven, that is, essentially limited to verifying or falsifying preconceived theories, or hypotheses, where the scientific research is, as I heard a reporter say the other day on the radio, “D’oh!” research, using a child’s expression for what is bloody evident anyway — and philosophy (and again, I refer to certain contemporary trends in philosophy) are engaged in the “same” kind of “rationality.” As, undoubtedly, you are aware, sameness does not exclude difference. On the contrary. And indeed, by arguing for the sameness of the sciences and philosophy, I have no intention of denying their substantial differences. And different they are! But the recognition of their sameness allows for a different notion of

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difference than the one according to which philosophy differs from the sciences because it is the regina scientarum, the radical foundation of the sciences, the safeguard of human values, and that sort of thing; or according to which the sciences prevail because they are more realistic, down to earth, practical, pragmatic, and who knows what else. With the notion of sameness, it is also possible to account for the fact that in spite of their difference, philosophy and science interact, relate, imply each other in different ways.

S.B.: Your earlier work was predicated upon a situation that has undergone radical transformation. You began writing in a context in which it seemed that a poorly informed deconstructive criticism was poised to take over American literary criticism. Your concern clearly was that the real philosophical import of Derrida would be obscured by this activity. Indeed, your work in general has been characterized by a unique combination of a concern for large-scale philosophical issues and a sensitivity for the tone of the current critical temperament in North America. In many respects, The Tain of the Mirror admirably achieved many of its objectives. It raised the stakes in discussion of Derrida’s work by making clear the extent to which it was informed by a larger philosophical tradition. This made it more difficult for literary critics to appropriate Derrida willy nilly. The book also did much to lend philosophical credibility to Derrida’s work for those working in the continental philosophical tradition. Indeed, Derrida is increasingly being accorded more serious attention by the philosophically trained. Yet within literary studies deconstruction seems to have become a chapter in the history of literary criticism. Why do you think that is the case and what do you think it means for literary criticism? And now that there are relatively few people who would lay claim to the pursuit of deconstructive literary criticism, what is the nature of the intellectual task you are setting for yourself?

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R.G.: Right. When I arrived at the Johns Hopkins University in the middle of the seventies, there was a definite, and rather broadly shared, enthusiasm on the part of American literary critics regarding French thought. It was a time of excitement in which people, especially the younger faculty, had a sense of charting new terrain, opening new avenues, and especially of transforming the institution itself. Glyph is a case in point.8 The euphoria that surrounded this project was not only rooted in the understanding that Glyph was to be the mouthpiece for novel scholarly approaches to literature, but that it was also to be the instrument to draw for academia the practical implications that inevitably followed from some of these new approaches. But pretty soon I realized that things were a bit more complex. A number of the members of Glyph were quite uneasy about their association with the project; they felt ambiguous about its program and did so for career-related reasons. Whenever it seemed opportunistic to do so, they publicly distanced themselves from the undertaking. If I mention these internal divisions and disputes within Glyph, it is with an eye to what has happened to deconstruction in literary criticism. The arrangements for its relegation to a dusty chapter in the history of literary criticism were already made in those early days. To understand how the initial euphoria could fade so fast, it is necessary, I believe, to look closely at the cultural and political reality of the American university. Indeed, there is no other university system in the world that is so dominated by changing fashions as the North American university, particularly in the literary fields. I remember a colleague at the Johns Hopkins University who, over a period of two or three years, changed his theoretical allegiances at least four or five times, before turning against them all. Every couple of years new “studies” make their way into the curriculum on the grounds that they do justice to neglected, or newly invented, fields, correct the mistakes of former approaches, or simply because they are more radical than previous studies. An analysis of this phenomenon,

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especially of the constant pressure to self-legitimatize, and hence of the cultural insecurity of the academic profession that this phenomenon reveals, is too demanding to be broached here. All I wish to do is evoke one aspect of the issue, what I would call the ideology of originality that pervades so much of the literary fields. Students of literature are under the inexorable constraint not simply to be competent in their fields, but to appear superb, topnotch, stellar, in an ever-increasing inflationary spiral. They must look unique, original, and competent in areas that also are judged as new. They must work at the cutting edge of the fields. Hence, the constant look for new trends, and the incessant emergence of new studies. The current success of Slavoj Žižek’s work could serve as an example. Žižek promises his readers not only the effortless mastery of Lacan and Derrida, but, above all, a new way of putting them to use by way of a synthesis of their thought. With Žižek, students not only can pretend to be informed about these admittedly excruciatingly difficult thinkers, and to be able to effectively apply their thought, they can also claim to hold a new, more radical position, a position that leaves them both behind. In any case, the merciless demand of novelty is one of the reasons why many North American students and teachers are permanently on the look out for new trends. Few can afford to explore in depth a given theoretical position. Few, therefore, are in a position to provide themselves with the means to contribute effectively to a theoretical configuration; in short, they are incapable of developing it further from within. This is what happened to deconstruction in North America. Once its (facile) applications to literary texts appeared to lead always to ever the same results, it was abandoned. Now in the case of Derridean deconstruction, an additional difficulty made it impossible for many to advance the critical potential of this approach. This difficulty consists in deconstruction’s philosophical nature, and the discipline that such a characterization demands. If, in my first interventions

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and publications in the English language, I sought to emphasize the philosophical dimensions of deconstruction, it was certainly with the intention of bringing the real philosophical import of Derrida into relief. This, however, was not my only concern. More generally, I wanted to bring philosophy back into the game of literary criticism, not only in its function as the discipline from which literary criticism takes many of its starting ideas, and which consequently must serve to question and to evaluate literary criticism’s implications and achievements, but also especially in order to bring literary criticism around to the demand for discipline, and rigor, as well as to the demand not to abandon analysis until the subject matter under consideration has been fully penetrated. The philosophical demand for patience and endurance is not only a theoretical one; it is a primarily ethical demand. From everything I have said so far you could certainly sense that I do not deplore the shelving of deconstruction in literary criticism. Much of what happened under the heading of deconstruction was outright silly. But that does not mean that I think the numerous “studies” that have replaced deconstruction to be any better. The fact that today deconstruction is no longer in the spotlight is also a chance and an opportunity. I mean, it is an opportunity to do sustained and serious work in this area. It is not by accident that only very recently the first philosophically astute studies of Derrida have been published — I think of Richard Beardworth’s Derrida and the Political, or of work by Hent de Vries, Marian Hobson, and Joseph Kronick.9

S.B.: I was wondering if you could talk a little about Romanticism. I’m intrigued by your relation to it. As we know, Romanticism was a very important area for deconstructive literary criticism. Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man made clear how vital this period was to their theoretical undertakings. Others — such as Andrzej

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Warminski, Carol Jacobs, Cynthia Chase — have followed this up. Undergirding all this no doubt is Benjamin’s The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism book and Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute.10 You, however, seem to be much more suspicious of Romanticism, almost bemoaning the impact it had on the American reception of Derrida. Is Romanticism for you, as it was for Hegel, the overhasty attempt to realize the transcendental.

R.G.: I really doubt that Benjamin’s doctoral thesis, or The Literary Absolute, have had any influence in shaping deconstructive literary criticism’s attraction to Romanticism in North America. After all, those two studies focus on early Romanticsm — Jena Romanticism — which is a theoretical configuration quite distinct from British Romanticism. The central focus of deconstructive literary criticism on British Romanticism proves only the extent to which this approach has been a phenomenon within English departments in this country. I also recall that, with few exceptions, Comparative Literature has been a Program in English Departments. The historical reasons why deconstructive literary criticism flowered mainly in English still need to be worked out. Understanding these conditions will also help figure out where the exact origins of deconstructive criticism lie, and to what precisely its agenda within the American university setting amounted. Undoubtedly, what went, and still goes under the title “deconstructive literary criticism” owes a great deal to the thought of Derrida — the late de Man, from Allegories of Reading on, is of course, a case in point — but I think that, fundamentally, deconstructive literary criticism shares with Derridean deconstruction only the name.11 Saying this I do not mean at all to diminish the accomplishments of deconstructive literary criticism. Not only did it breathe some fresh air into the study of British Romanticism, and by extension, into literary

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studies in general in this country, but some of deconstruction’s proponents have also been superb readers, and have given us fresh and innovative readings of the Romantics’ writings. For all of those who have associated themselves or have been associated with deconstructive literary criticism, and for whom the period of Romanticism has been vital to their critical undertaking, this link has not the same meaning of course. However, if de Man, and many of his students, have chosen Romanticism as the prime field of their critical enterprise, it is for reasons that have, indeed, to do with literary deconstructive criticism’s program. The reason for centering on British Romanticism is not because these writers would lend themselves especially well to a deconstructive reading. This is a point usually made with the intention to restrict the import of deconstructive reading to one segment of world literature, and thus to discredit its overall significance. The same point has also been made in Germany with respect to Heinrich von Kleist, who has become the object of numerous readings in a deconstructive vein in that country. The reasons why deconstructive readings in the American academia have largely dealt with Romanticism are manifold I believe, but, first of all, they are political. Romanticism has been targeted by deconstructive readings because of its canonic prestige in the study of national English literature, and its continuing formative role for English studies and criticism. Also important is the fact that Romanticism is characterized by its explicit promotion of philosophical ideas and values (many of which have become suspect even though they continue to undergird much of the teaching done in literary departments). Indeed, what explains deconstructive criticism’s interest in the works of the Romantics is precisely this conspicuousness of their ideal and idealist content and agenda. Thus defined, one can see where deconstructive criticism comes in. Very schematically: by showing that the values, ideas, and truths heralded by Romanticism, its whole philosophical program, and which continues, in one way or

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another, to inform the practice and theory of literary studies are undermined, demystified, by the writings of the Romantics themselves, deconstructive readings seeks to sap the ideological, pedagogical, normative, and formative role of Romantic literature. Deconstructive reading, with its emphasis on the literariness of the literary texts, can thus call for a reformation of literary studies, of a study of literature free of ideology, that is, free of philosophy, of the philosophy in particular that has hitherto stood as a model for literary studies. If I have bemoaned, as you put it, the concern in literary deconstructive criticism with Romanticism, it is because I hold that deconstruction in a Derridean sense is foreign to the problematic and even the agenda of deconstructive criticism. A deconstructive reading in a Derridean sense is not out to debunk ideas, values, and truths in the name of the literariness of the text. Rather, its aim is to assess the limits of philosophical ideas, values, and truths — limits that undoubtedly put into question the halo of metaphysics, but which make them not any the less necessary. I have spoken until now of the second Romanticism, and its undeniable significance for the understanding of deconstructive literary criticism in this country. Let me then also say a word about the relation between early Romanticism and Derridean deconstruction. I do not bring up the issue because of Benjamin or The Literary Absolute. Both works follow entirely different paths. As I have argued in “The Sober Absolute,” Benjamin’s aim in his dissertation is to demarcate his own thoughts about the Absolute from those of the Romantics, who believed that a relation to the Absolute was conceivable.12 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, on the other hand, are trying to establish that early German Romanticism in the aftermath of Kant, represents a conception irreducible to speculative idealism, and that it — between Kant and Hegel — is still at the heart of numerous contemporary concerns, in particular, in literary criticism. The latter work, in particular, has significantly contributed to our

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understanding of Jena Romanticism. Indeed, it shows that this early form of Romanticism escapes Hegel’s criticism; Hegel fails to do justice to it, and that it must be approached as a configuration in its own right. My reason for bringing up early Romanticsm is that a number of German (and British) thinkers have tried to make sense of Derrida’s thought by retracing it back to the thought of the Schlegel brothers, the early Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and others. This is a specifically German attempt to cope with Derrida, and a hopeless attempt on top of it. Depending on how the early Romantics are assessed — as irrationalists (Jürgen Habermas) or path-breaking thinkers (Manfred Frank) — Derrida’s thought is seen either to perpetuate Romanticist obscurantism, belatedly to profess insights that the Romantics had already formulated, or to fall short of the radicality of the Romantic thinkers’ discoveries. As far as this approach to Derridean deconstruction is concerned, it needs to be asked what the rationale is for linking this until recently rather neglected period of German thought to French philosophy. If I had the time I think I could show that it is intimately tied up with the basic tenets of philosophical hermeneutics. Habermas is not an Adorno student, nor is Frank. Both are deeply indebted to Gadamerian thought.

S.B.: Since we’re talking about deconstruction and literature, I’ d like to dwell a bit on the topic. In your work you carefully delineate how deconstructive literary criticism is, in fact, far from deconstructive. You then seem to go beyond this and posit a virtually unbridgeable gulf between Derridean deconstruction and literary criticism. As you note in The Tain of the Mirror, Derrida’s interest in literature has “never led to anything remotely resembling literary criticism.” I guess that many literary critics are left wondering what a Derrideandeconstructive literary criticism would look like. Could you sketch out what would characterize such a form of criticism?

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R.G.: Literary criticism cannot claim any natural privilege in dealing with Derridian thought on the grounds that it was the first to pay attention to it in North America. Indeed, it would have been more “natural” had philosophy responded to the challenge. But had this happened, it would not have followed that philosophy as an academic discipline and field would therefore have been deconstruction’s true addressee. In spite of its indisputably philosophical bent, Derrida’s thought is by nature transdisciplinary. Since the heyday of deconstructive literary criticism, other disciplines — legal studies and architecture, for instance — have in turn discovered deconstruction, and have displaced the literary critics’ claim of being entitled to deconstruction. Now, the literary criticism to which I responded in The Tain of the Mirror — deconstructive literary criticism — was based neither on an informed reception of Derrida’s debate with philosophy, nor on a debate with the philosophical issues that motivated him to take up themes such as writing, text, and literature. These are among the reasons why there is in my view a gulf between deconstructive literary criticism and Derridian deconstruction, but with this I did not imply that this gulf is unbridgeable. I do not think that this is the case, in spite of the fact that in his writings Derrida has taken critical issue with all the major trends in literary criticism. In fact, given Derrida’s criticism of the presuppositions and tenets of literary criticism, it is remarkable that the literary critics who were so quick to embrace what they thought to be deconstruction’s demystification and dismantling of philosophy as a project and a discipline did not at all feel concerned by the thought that deconstruction might also possibly challenge literary criticism as a project and discipline. Instead, the deconstruction of philosophy was interpreted as the very vindication of literary criticism. Indeed, the literary critics were led to believe that their discipline had become a meta-discipline, the new regina scientiorum. However, it was a discipline that, rather than

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claiming to found all the other discourses, could claim the privilege of incorporating them all. Now, although I said that I do not think that the gulf between deconstruction in a Derridean sense and literary criticism is unbridgeable, overcoming that gap is far from self-evident. First, unlike all previously philosophically-oriented criticisms, or criticisms influenced by pilot disciplines in the Humanities — be it Hegelian or Marxist, hermeneutical or phenomenological, structuralist or genetic, sociological or psychoanalytical criticism — a deconstructive literary criticism cannot simply be an application of some philosophical or scientific premises. Deconstruction is not a philosophy, nor a method. There are no such things as deconstructive themes, or philosophemes. Yet if there are no philosophical themes, nor a method to be transposed from deconstruction to literary criticism, how is Derridean-deconstructive literary criticism to come about? How are we think of it, if it is not to be, if it cannot even consist in any kind of application? A further reason why the gulf is not easily overcome is that, in the process of making literary criticism deconstructive, literary criticism is expected to remain literary criticism. It is, therefore, not only a question of what a Derrideandeconstructive literary criticism would look like; one must also question what conditions would allow it to still look like literary criticism. I note that Derrida has repeatedly sought to demarcate deconstruction from criticism. Deconstruction, indeed, is of a different order than the critical operation. He has “criticized” criticism’s desire for clean distinctions as a metaphysical dream, and has in no way spared literary criticism in this regard. In all of his debates with the different orientations of literary criticism, he has put in question the critics’ attempt to define a specific, unequivocal, literary object, distinct from all other objects, and based on which the field of literary criticism could be clearly demarcated from other disciplines. Yet, although for Derrida the critical project is intrinsically metaphysical — the dream of an

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unbreached purity — this does not mean that the critical gesture would be altogether superfluous. Derrida allows for criticism; he deems it to have a crucial function. Even though the purity of distinction is in the last resort impossible, distinguishing is inevitable, even necessary. It is a must. Without distinction, no thinking, no knowledge, no practical intervention, no nothing, would occur. But if literary criticism is a legitimate enterprise (whatever its orientation), it is within the limits of what defines this enterprise that the question of a Derridean-deconstructive literary criticism is to be posed. Worded differently: How is literary criticism to accommodate deconstruction’s interrogation of the project of criticism, and still remain a criticism? I think this is only possible if the literary discipline reflects on what it seeks to achieve and accomplish. In other words, it needs to reflect on the task, the goal, that makes it a literary criticism and not something else. What specific object, domain, or plane, of the literary, could such a criticism cordon and check off as its more or less proper region within which to make critical claims? The elucidation of the specific task and goal of which a Derridean-deconstructive literary criticism would be capable — which would set it apart from all other kinds of literary critical approaches — is still an unresolved question. In light of these difficulties, and there are many more, I would be hard pressed to venture any characterization of what a Derridean-deconstructive literary criticism would look like. Let me only say the following. It would have to be a criticism that makes texts readable (rather than unreading them in the spirit of de Manian deconstructions). Derridean readings of texts not only give these texts to understand, they inquire into the conditions under which alone text can be made intelligible. “Plato’s Pharmacy” is a case in point; here the Phaedrus is rendered readable on the basis of an additional, outside thread woven by Derrida into its texture according to a specific set of rules. Even though nothing in Derrida remotely resembles literary criticism,

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a literary criticism in the wake of Derrida’s thought would be deconstructive only on the condition that it would perform equally positive tasks.

S.B.: Arguing against the tendency of many deconstructive critics to expand the notion of the literary into an all-encompassing category (and thus transform philosophy into a species of literature), you point out, quoting Derrida, that “there is no — or hardly any, ever so little — literature.” From this you conclude in The Tain of the Mirror: “Literary criticism, then, is a philosophy of literature which has from the start yielded to the categories of philosophy, or in other words to literature as such.” Derrida himself, commenting on the notion of “ever so little” literature, points out that “ if it is nothing, it’s a nothing which counts, which in my view counts a lot.” Derrida also notes the exemplarity of twentieth-century literature. It is “more than one example among others.” It “teaches us more, and even the ‘essential,’ about writing in general, about the philosophical or scientific, for example, linguistic) limits of the interpretation of writing.” Literature’s exemplarity thus provides a point of access for the transgression of philosophy. (This is from the interview with Derek Attridge where Derrida is responding to a question about your work).13 The general question — there and here — turns on the specificity of literature. My question breaks down into two parts. Is there a literature that would not be “stillborn”? If yes, what defines it as such? Second: what is your response to Derrida’s response to your work on this question?

R.G.: If I pounced on Derrida’s statement about the scarcity of literature, it was obviously to counter the literary claim that whatever goes by the name of literature is capable of debunking philosophical thought. What Derrida calls literature, in the context of his essay on Stéphane Mallarmé, refers exclusively to a singular

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kind of syntactical arrangement in language — more broadly defined, to a disposition of sense (Sinn) — that for structural reasons prohibits reduction or linkage to a meaning (Bedeutung) capable of totalizing all the syntactical sense possibilities. If this, indeed, is called literature, it is a rare thing, in spite of the fact that some, but of course not all, of twentieth-century literature has deliberately conceived of literature and writing in this vein. But it is a rare thing not merely because of its clear scarcity in the history of literature but also because, thus defined, there is not much to it. The undecidability to which literature in this (narrow) sense lends itself is not due to the depth, or richness of literature, or language, as you know, but to a syntactical disposition. However “insignificant” literature may be, the undecidability that characterizes it counts, and counts a lot, given that such undecidability defies philosophy’s effort to leave nothing unaccounted for, to resume all in One. But a distinction imposes itself here. Drawing one more time on “Plato’s Pharmacy,” where Derrida shows that Plato’s text of the Phaedrus not only allows for positions that do not square with Platonism at all, but that it also “presupposes” the undecidable matrix of the pharmakon, let me point out that Plato’s philosophical text on writing and the voice is not identical with the philosophical positions on these issues in Platonism, that is, with the different forms of the reception of Plato that are at the foundation of Western metaphysics. The pharmakon, in Plato’s philosophical discourse, is a structure, more precisely an infrastructure, that represents the matrix for all the distinctions and differences to which Plato’s text proceeds, but which it also prohibits from being drawn in all rigor and purity. This structure in Plato’s Phaedrus is thus analogous to what the Mallarmé essay calls “literature.” Now, the presence of such a structure does not make the philosophical dialogue of Plato “literature” because it is a structure that — although it is a limiting structure — also allows the dialogue to advance its philosophical claims. This structure does not invalidate, falsify,

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debunk, or transgress the philosophical propositions in the Phaedrus, although it certainly puts the positions of Platonism radically in question. The infrastructure of the pharmakon puts into question philosophical thought as such only if it is identified with Platonism, and the history of metaphysics. But even this history, as Derrida repeatedly recalls, is not a unified history. So, to return to the first part of your question as to whether there would be a literature that is not “stillborn,” the answer is, of course, yes. Moreover, if one does not limit the definition of literature to structures of undecidability on the microlevel of texts (words and sentences), but to undecidability on a macrolevel (arrangements, or dispositions of the parts of a text), there even may be much more literature than what Derrida suggested in the “Double Session.”14 Its exemplarity may not be limited to twentieth-century literature, but may include (at least some of) the literature before. As far as Derrida’s response to my work about the question of literature is concerned, I think I have already implicitly answered that question. Undoubtedly, literature, in the sense under discussion, teaches us a lot, even the essential, about the philosophical limits of the interpretation of writing, including philosophical writing (as is to be found in Plato’s Phaedrus, for instance). But, as I said, such limits make philosophical writing not less philosophical, precisely because the limits in question are also possibilizing limits. Finally, what about the lesson that literature teaches us? It is a lesson about limits, a lesson, consequently, that qualifies as “philosophical.”

S.B.: As we have noted, your work has been particularly attuned to the question of the very idea and possibility of a literary criticism that would find its inspiration in the work of Derrida. I was wondering in particular about the institutional implications of all this. As you comment in The Tain of the Mirror: “One could go so far as to say that the very reasons why Derrida is interested in literature are

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reasons that subvert the very possibility of the institution of literary criticism as such. This subversion takes place through the tracing of the limits of literary criticism as such. It is thus a subversion that is not absolute, that is by no means an annihilation of literary criticism, but that is a decapitation, so to speak, of its pretensions, and thus an assignment of its locus. Therefore it is equally right to say that the very future of the institution of literary criticism hinges on its deconstruction.” Could you expand on these suggestive remarks?

R.G.: The legitimacy of institutions derives from the property claims they make. Any institution must be able to determine, and justify, its particular field of practice, the specific kind of knowledge that is its own, the particular kind of instruction that it provides, its distinct goals compared to other institutions, and so on. As an institution of criticism, literary criticism’s mission is primarily concerned with separating off — the literary, what else? It consists in setting strict criteria for what merits the title “literary” and what does not. But since the criticism of the institution of literary criticism is not merely limited to securing an autonomous field for literary studies, but also to securing the practice of criticism itself, literary criticism is, in addition, if not in essence, the activity of drawing borders, marking limits, with the aim of separating off, definitely, and in all purity and rigor, absolutely (that which is the essence of literature). As I said before, deconstruction does not object to criticism altogether, it only puts into question criticism’s dream of being able to draw the final lines. The decapitation I spoke of in The Tain of the Mirror refers to the deconstruction of this telos of criticism. Yet a literary criticism aware of the intrinsic limits of the critical, and criticism, could no longer remain within its standard institutional boundaries. This does in no way entail criticism’s becoming borderless, or transinstitutional. Without negating them, the limits of such an institution would, by contrast, offer the chance

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of “impossible” exchanges, of passages beyond, ahead of the limits, that is, of exchanges of the kind that count. Of course, literary criticism has always been influenced by philosophy — I should say, by its various forms — as well as by the human sciences. But I am not talking about influence; I am talking about something much more fundamental, something that is not of the nature of an adaptation, or practical application, namely the institution of literary criticism’s exposure to other thought. Such exposure is possible only after a deconstruction of literary criticism’s headings. Freed, as it were, from its pre-programmed orientation, literary criticism would become capable of a future. Therefore, deconstruction is the best thing that can happen to literary criticism, the chance that something may happen to, and within, literary criticism. Has this exposure of literary criticism already happened? I doubt so.

S.B.: You state that Inventions of Difference is a book about singularity.15 Your concern seems to be to argue that one cannot rush into the realm of the singular, that the singular — in order to appear as such — has always already conformed to laws that generality imposes. This does not mean that singularity is obliterated; rather, in its withdrawal it leaves a trace within the minimal universality demanded of it in order for it to appear at all. Yet much intellectual activity seems to operate with a different premise: namely, that singularity is to be pursued by means of political, sociological, and historical specificity. The implication seems to be that philosophy, theory, is precisely the problem in the pursuit of the singular. How does one defend the necessity for a philosophical exploration of singularity?

R.G.: Singularity, indeed, is one of the several threads that tie the different essays of Inventions of Difference together. Thematically,

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these essays deal with very different issues — deconstruction, the relation to the tradition, the concept of difference, infinity, reason, God, to name a few — but singularity, and the relation of singularity to universality, is a constant concern throughout the discussion of these various issues. Not only that, singularity permits pinpointing what precisely it is that Derrida is doing, and of how his elaborations are to be situated with respect to the discourse on universality, namely, philosophy. The point that Inventions of Difference seeks to make is that the specific moves, gestures, and points that characterize Derrida’s thought create a rift between this thought and the discourse of universality, but that it does not, for all that, relinquish all relation to universality. However singular Derrida’s writings may be — singular to the point of breaking the contract with the discourse of philosophy — such singularity does not lose contact with philosophy. It remains intelligible, recognizable in its difference from the discourse of universality, and hence minimally structured by universality. But singularity is also a theme in Derrida’s work. As I try to show in the book, Derrida at all times shows that singularity is not conceivable outside the discourse of universality. As something that is not universal, that escapes universality, it must be identifiable in its resistance to universality. Such identifiability, however, requires it to manifest universally recognizable traits. If the singular is to be singular, that is, if it must be possible to recognize it as the singular, and were it only once, it must be inhabited by traits of ideality. But now to your question! Indeed, the philosophical concern with singularity is quite different from the pursuit of this issue in terms of political, sociological, and historical specificity. The latter prides itself in rediscovering and restoring the singular in all its concreteness, as opposed to its bloodless, lifeless treatment in philosophy — or even its total neglect. But, the characterization of philosophy as abstract, as lacking concreteness, is certainly a highly biased characterization. It shows very little understanding

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of philosophy. But let’s leave that here. More important is the fact that the concrete is not the singular. Like what Hegel calls the particular, the concrete is fully intelligible in terms of universally established laws. It can be entirely accounted for; it is only relatively other; all of its aspects, patterns, structures can be calculated. The exploration of distinct political, social, and cultural differences — undoubtedly, an urgent and necessary enterprise — explores differences that obey conventions, institutionalized codes, that have their history, and which are thus predictable in every respect. Of course, this does not mean that they are already recognized as such, and therefore their empirical exploration from sociological, political, and cultural perspectives is a highly significant task. But that does not make the philosophical exploration of singularity less important. Rather, the opposite obtains, since the singular is precisely that which does not fit, which is other in an unpredictable way. And the task of a philosophical investigation is precisely to respond and do justice to that which escapes all established patterns of intelligibility.

S.B.: Critics have pointed to the importance of Hegel for your work. Some — such as Mark C. Taylor — construe your work as a Hegelian reading of deconstruction. You have, of course, addressed this issue in the Introduction to Inventions of Difference. But I was wondering if you could just reflect — if I dare use that word — on Hegel’s significance for your work. You seem to be dealing — as Derrida did in a different way — with a bifurcated Hegel. There is, on the one hand, the Hegel who is the architect of the systematization of a totalizing speculative thought and there is, on the other hand, the Hegel who is the thinker of difference. And could you expand to consider what accounts for Hegel’s continuing importance for philosophy — and for deconstruction in particular?

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R.G.: Let me start out with a remark about systematization. There is a tendency today, especially among literary critics, to equate philosophy in general with an obsession to systematize. And such systematization is seen as a delusion constitutive of the very project of philosophy. Literature, with its fragmentary style, by contrast, would have accordingly left that illusion behind. Yet, historically speaking, only in the seventeenth century does the notion of system enter the discourse of philosophy. Indeed, the philosophical demand for a systematization of knowledge is the modern response to the emerging natural sciences. Systematization is philosophy’s way to integrate the particular knowledge of the individual sciences into what, traditionally, philosophy has been concerned with — the entirety of what is. Systematicity is thus the historically determined form taken by the philosophical problematic of the relation between the universal and the particular, at the precise moment in which philosophy is faced with the modern sciences. Undoubtedly, this way of accounting for the particular, or the singular, no longer satisfies us today. Systematization is no longer a philosophically cogent way of negotiating the relation between universality and singularity. Still, one must remain aware that the great system builders only sought to respond, by way of the notion of the system, to this major philosophical issue that continues to challenge us today. Therefore, I don’t have any animosity against the notion of the system. It is merely the specifically historical shape that the fundamental question concerning the universal and the particular takes in modernity; it is in no way to be identified with the philosophical as such. Furthermore, I do not consider the fragment to be an alternative to the system. As is evident from the Romantic notion of fragment, fragment and system are correlative concepts. They do not exclude one another. Like all philosophies, Hegel’s too bifurcates. The question, however, is on what precise level, or in which of its dimensions, the

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tensions are operative in Hegel’s thought. Unless one reconceives of the Hegelian notion of difference — as does, for example, JeanLuc Nancy in a recent book on Hegel — difference works for the system dialectically.16 The dialectic of difference understood as opposition and contradiction speculatively engenders totality. In no way does the thinker of difference undo what the thinker of totality has built. In my view, it is impossible to have one Hegel without the other. One cannot choose between them. But that does not mean that Hegel’s thought would have simply achieved the unity and totality aimed at. Apart from the many historical reasons due to which the Hegelian system of philosophy never effectively became completed, the very notion of totality and system rest for their possibility on conditions that at the same time limit and, absolutely speaking, render totality and system impossible. Rather than discursive, or conceptual, these conditions that make Hegel’s thought bifurcate, are operative on a structural level in Hegel’s thought. It is with them that I have been concerned in my dealings with Hegel. If Hegel has been important to me, one major reason is the conceptual refinement of his thinking, its inner logic, and rigor. It is philosophy at its most powerful in that it leaves nothing unaccounted for, and renders everything, including the meaningless, the uninteresting, the unimportant, the senseless, and so forth, meaningful. But if Hegel has, and continues to be important to my work, it is primarily because he is among the first to reflect on philosophy as a whole by conceiving of its completion in the shape of the concept, or absolute knowledge. If Hegel’s thought enjoys a privilege, it is because with him one can begin to reflect on the structural limits with which the philosophical hitherto had to comply, and which inquiry sets the stage for another type of philosophizing — philosophizing on, and at, the limit. For this reason, I believe that Hegel’s thought will continue to enjoy a certain privilege. But this does not mean that the new type of philosophizing that I have in mind, and

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which conceives of philosophical thought from the limit, that is, as concerned with what becomes possible from the limit, which limit simultaneously limits what it makes possible, would be exclusively indebted to Hegel’s thought. If we call this new type of philosophical thinking deconstructive, we also imply that no figure of thinking can claim any definite privilege in the history of philosophizing.

S.B.: Much of your work has seemed to circle around Paul de Man. Already in “Deconstruction as Criticism,” de Man seemed to represent the American deconstructive criticism — with its emphasis on the self-reflexivity of the text — to which you sought to offer a corrective.17 The Tain of the Mirror takes its point of departure from this in showing how deconstruction is a critique of the philosophy of reflection not an extension of it. Now The Wild Card of Reading brings us around to a nice sense of closure in that it is a full and sustained analysis of de Man.18 Yet what we seem to have in this study is a true Auseinandersetzung in that it discloses a process of reading in which it is not certain what the outcome will be. I would have to concur with David Wellbery’s comment that this book is characterized by a rare intellectual honesty. As you remark in a footnote: “If, in this book, the fluctuations in my evaluation of his writings have not been corrected, it is primarily to emphasize that the questioning approach that de Man’s singular work invites is a ‘process’ in which thinking must remain open to rethink that work again and again.” Could you discuss what de Man, his work, and your engagement with it has meant for you?

R.G.: As I noted in the introduction to The Wild Card, my work on de Man originated in my inability, at first, to make any sense of his writings. I did not recognize anything familiar in de Man’s work, nothing I could subscribe to, oppose, or criticize. The

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sheer unintelligibility to me of his works drove me to slowly, and patiently, work out the inner logic of this singular corpus of writings, and with it, the specific kind of problems that he posed. In short, the challenge of de Man’s work for me was to establish first of all what it specifically was about, hence, to make the unintelligible intelligible. Personally, the resistance of de Man’s thought to established patterns of philosophical, critical, ideologo-critical intelligibility forced me to undergo an experience with the philosophical itself. Reading de Man required me not only to refine my own philosophical instruments, but to realize as well — a realization not without pain — that only the singular, and ultimately, something at the limit of intelligibility, something whose identity is not simply decidable, and that threatens to displace philosophical thought to begin with, is an object worthy of philosophical thought. Indeed, the endurance required by philosophical thought deserves to be called so only on condition that the object thoroughly resists what the French call arraisonnement — a nautical term that refers to the boarding of a ship in order to make out its identity, but which also can be understood to mean, subjection to reason, to identifying intelligibility.

S.B.: You’ve written about the reception of deconstruction in North America. I was wondering if you could discuss and characterize the reception of deconstruction in Europe. In a footnote in The Wild Card of Reading you note, for instance, that a paradoxical effect of the de Man affair has been that it has gotten more Europeans to read de Man.

R.G.: Indeed, as colleagues of mine in Germany have told me, hundreds of dissertations on Paul de Man are currently in the making in German universities. This being said, deconstruction

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has not been the success story in Europe that it has been in this country. Many of Derrida’s and de Man’s major works still are not available in translations in German, Italian, Spanish, and so forth. Their reception has been spotty, marginal. But my impression is that this is changing, in Germany, for instance, where after the angry reception of deconstruction, and after Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Manfred Frank, in particular, have shot their bolt, the first serious attempts to debate Derrida’s thought are taking place. From what I have read so far, this promises to become an interesting debate.

S.B.: Now that you’ve completed what you jestingly referred to as your “trilogy” on Derrida and de Man, what will you be taking up next in your work?

R.G.: Yes, with the de Man book I feel that my work on deconstruction has come to a conclusion, of sorts. But even though my preoccupation with deconstruction stretches over more than twenty years, it has never been my sole concern. In any event, the way I approached Derrida compelled me to also look elsewhere. Of all the other projects that I have been pursing for some time already, I mention only a book length study on Kant’s aesthetics, for the simple reason that it is close to being finished —The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics.19 It is an attempt to rethink the concept of form in the Third Critique. I argue that Kant’s notion of form in this work has little to do with what traditionally and commonly one understands by form. It is not primarily an aesthetic concept if aesthetic form is to refer to the harmonious arrangement of parts into a whole. Notwithstanding the fact that aesthetic judgments are distinct from cognitive judgments, I attempt to show that form in the Third Critique is a para-epistemological concept. Form guarantees a minimal

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representability of the object, and its discovery in uncharted, or wild, nature is thus beneficial to the powers of cognition, hence, the pleasure associated with it. To reevaluate the concept of form in this manner has, of course, consequences for all the other issues dealt with in Kant’s aesthetics. I have been interested in the reflective judgment, both in its aesthetic and teleological variants, because the reflective judgment, according to Kant, is a judgment reduced to a mere judgment (as opposed to a determining judgment). What does it mean to merely judge something? And to be concerned in mere judgment with mere form alone? These are the deeper questions that I am pursuing in this study of Kant, and which tie in with my concern with the liminal. What is at stake in Kant’s aesthetics, I hold, is the attempt at securing the possibility of judging where no determined, or cognitive, judgment is possible. The possibility of merely judging an object of nature establishes a principal agreement between nature and reason, hence, a minimal meaningfulness of the object. As Kant’s passing evocation of the nauseating and the monstrous demonstrates, such possibility is far from being self-evident. In the case of the nauseating and the monstrous, not only no determining judgment, but even mere judging fails. The possibility of discovering this minimal agreement of an object of nature with the faculties of mind is something that has to be wrested from undomesticated, uncharted, and unknown, nature. With this problematic of the mere judgment one touches thus at the fundamental enabling (but also constantly threatened) limits of both theoretical and practical judgments in the Kantian sense. With this inquiry into mere judgment, philosophical thinking takes a turn toward the thinking of the limit. This, I believe, is what is important about Kant’s so-called aesthetics, and not what the aesthetic tradition, beginning with the early Romantics, has projected into it.

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Notes 1

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. 2 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 3 Rodolphe Gasché, Die hybride Wissenschaft. Zur Mutation des Wissenschaftsbegriffs bei Emile Durkheim und Claude Lévi-Strauss, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973. 4 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. W. D. Halls, New York: Free Press, 1982. 5 Bruno Latour, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979; Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Experiment, Differenz, Schrift, Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken Presse, 1992, and above all the essays collected in Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 6 Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 7 See Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 61–171. 8 Glyph. Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, eds. S. Weber and H. Sussman, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977–191. 9 Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, London: Routledge, 1996; Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida. Opening Lines, London: Routledge, 1998; Joseph G. Kronick, Derrida and the Future of Literature, Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996; Philippe-Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute. The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester, Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. 11 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 12 Rodolphe Gasché, “The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics,” in Walter Benjamin. Theoretical Questions, ed. D. S. Ferris, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 50–74.

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See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 70–71. 14 Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 173–286. 15 Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference. On Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. 16 Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, trans. J. Smith and S. Miller, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 17 See Gasché, Inventions of Difference, pp. 22–57. 18 Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading. On Paul de Man, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 19 Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form. Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

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Saving the Honor of Thinking Anders Lundberg is a critic, translator, and editor of the Swedish poetry and poetics journal OEI. During 1998-1999, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY Buffalo.

Anders Lundberg: To begin with I would like to pose a question of an institutional nature. You are by profession a philosopher, educated in Germany and France, but you have been working for more than twenty years as a professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In a certain sense, it seems as though you are a visitor at a Comparative Literature department at an American University; these departments seem to more or less have become places for theory or even philosophy. Is it the case that the departments of Comparative Literature have actually come to provide a place for what one, for lack of a better term, might call the “continental philosophy” that has been excluded by regular philosophy departments, which predominantly adhere to an “analytical” tradition?  

Rodolphe Gasché: Perhaps. But let us not lose sight of the fact that the main split between ‘continental’ and ‘analytical’ philosophy divides the very academic institutions of philosophy in this country. The split is one between philosophy departments that are primarily analytical, and those departments, especially in Catholic American universities, which are more continentally, say phenomenologically oriented, as well as between those professional philosophical organizations whose main objective is to promote analytical philosophy (such as the American Philosophy Association) and others, for example, the Society for

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Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, which uphold continental thought. The divide is also found in the area of professional philosophy journals. Undoubtedly, some departments of Comparative Literature, but certainly not all, have increasingly turned philosophical, with some including straightforward instruction in the discipline “philosophy.” But I think it is safe to say that with some exceptions, of course, such instruction remains framed by the requirements and expectations specific to students whose main concerns are literary. I should add, however, that with the inclusion of a number of subspecialties in the literary curriculum such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and so forth, the spectrum of the issues that philosophy can and must address in Comparative Literature has expanded dramatically. With this, new opportunities have arisen for anchoring philosophy in Comparative Literature departments. Evidently, if the philosophy taught in these departments is ‘continental’ it is for good reasons. The students are literary students, and analytical philosophy has nothing to offer them. The causes for this transformation of the discipline, and the institution of Comparative Literature in this country, are complex. It is a development that started with the discovery by the literature departments in the sixties and seventies of French structuralism, and, particularly, poststructuralism. These modes of thinking seemed to offer an alternative to dominant methodologies, or conceptions (such as New Criticism, Formalism, and even the Geneva School of phenomenological literary criticism which had been quite influential, especially in foreign language departments), and also exposed literary scholars to the necessity of familiarizing themselves at least to some extent with the thought of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. Literary critics took to poststructuralism for a number of reasons, no doubt, especially, because the philosophers among the poststructuralists showed a hitherto unseen concern with issues of interest to the literary critics. Indeed, I would say, a main

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reason for which literary critics embraced poststructuralism was the belief that with poststructuralism, philosophy had finally come to acknowledge its status as a literary genre. Suddenly literary criticism saw before itself undreamed-of possibilities for expanding its competence to an entirely new discipline. This is the frame of mind with which many literary critics assimilated philosophy, in other words, as a body of texts that could be read like any other piece of literature. Now, if this development engaged departments of Comparative Literature in a privileged fashion, and lead to the creation of numerous new Comparative Literature programs and departments, it is also, as I have tried to show in an essay, because the theoretical turn of Comparative Literature is inscribed in the very nature of the comparative project, and ultimately represents a solution to the permanent crisis of this discipline’s self-understanding.1 However questionable, and reductive, the treatment of philosophical texts in the process of assimilating French structuralism has been, a number of literary scholars have not contented themselves with equating philosophy to literature — be it because they had a more substantial background in philosophy to begin with — or because, over the years, they acquired more of a philosophical culture and a sense for the history and the technicalities of philosophical thought. It is thanks to these new voices that philosophy is alive, in some cases, quite alive, in certain departments of Comparative Literature. It remains, however, that, as I said before, most of the teaching of philosophy takes place with a special eye toward the issues that are vital to literary students even though these issues now exceed a narrowly literary or aesthetical horizon.

A.L.: You have in your writings, ever since your essay “Deconstruction and Criticism” (1979), on several occasions delivered a severe critique of literary criticism and theory in America, and especially of

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the so-called American deconstruction.2 What does this ‘ deconstruction’ represent, and how do you situate yourself in relation to it and its disputes with more traditional formalist, humanist or historical criticisms, as well as more recent theories like “new historicism” and “postcolonial studies”? And, against the backdrop of what you say in your essay “On Responding Responsibly” in Inventions of Difference, what is the task of literary criticism, if it is possible to speak of such a thing? 3 Is it for example possible to conceive of literary criticism as a “science of the singular”? And finally, what would a responsible literary criticism look like?

R.G.: The deconstructive literary criticism that I targeted in “Deconstruction and Criticism,” a critique that also frames my exposition of Derrida’s thought in The Tain of the Mirror, rests, or rather rested, on the assumption that the literary text is constituted by an integral — flawless — mirror play on all levels of the text ranging from the thematic to that of the signifier.5 The critical operation of bringing the text’s self-reflection to light is what this criticism understood by deconstruction. No doubt the Yale School and its disciples were the prime representatives of this conception of literariness. However, and ironically, Paul de Man, many of whose students adopted the deconstructive literary theory, does not fit easily — rather, does not fit at all — into this scheme, as I have argued in my last book. But the Yale School was not the only spokesman for this approach to the literary text. Deconstructive literary criticism was a much broader phenomenon; it diffused easily, whether as the result of a progressive dilution of the tenets of the Yale School, or as the specific form in which New Criticism became capable of survival. From my criticism of deconstructive literary criticism it is clear that I do not buy its conception of the text, nor its understanding of the task of criticism. It is a reductive approach to textuality. But in order to demonstrate that any literary text worth

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the name achieves full, all inclusive specularity, this kind of criticism had to draw on aspects of language established by linguistics, semiotics, and pragmatics, but neglected by the traditional thematic, humanist, historical criticisms, as well as formalist poetics. Its objections to the traditional modes of criticisms are well founded, and need to be recognized as such. In many ways, deconstructive literary criticism had a sobering effect on literary studies. I would add, however, that deconstruction in literary studies based itself on a conception of the text that is as narrow and as questionable as the ones at the foundation of the more traditional conceptions of criticism. Let me explain myself. Since what counts in deconstructive literary criticism is the demonstration that in a text everything mirrors everything — and, hence, that no single position, statement, theme or truth can prevail — its criticism of other positions is limited to the accusation of disregarding certain aspects of the text which when brought into play would debunk the claims made by singling out one of its items, or levels. Its conception of the text is speculative in essence even though the absolute speculation that animates it serves to demonstrate that there is no absolute knowledge. From this notion of the text, deconstruction in literary studies has leveled its criticism against all the other forms of criticism. It has rarely questioned the philosophical underpinnings of the more traditional forms of criticism, and has never inquired into what it owes to Hegelian thought, for instance. In spite of declarations to the contrary, deconstructive literary criticism has remained just as philosophically naive as the positions it attacked. New Historicism and postcolonial studies have arisen in reaction to deconstructive literary criticism. Some of the concerns broached by these criticisms are legitimate, no doubt. But the strange, eclectic, and — above all — unreflected mix that they represent — of quite conservative positions, and positions originating in the criticism that they supposedly replace — makes them not very different from any previous positions, except that, perhaps,

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they make a more opportunistic, and, at the limit, dishonest (if not cynical) use of theory. This brings me then to your final questions concerning a responsible literary criticism. There are different facets that such responsibility can, and must, take. In order to be responsible, literary criticism must become more philosophical in the sense that it must expose itself critically to a relentless reflection on, and interrogation of, its own presuppositions. Further, to be responsible, it must seek to do justice to its object. This requires, to be brief, what de Man called, though in a different spirit, a return to philology. But to be responsible to, and for, its object literary criticism must not hide behind general conceptions such as genres, periods, oeuvres, the creative process, the author, etc. Even though these conceptions have their place and role in doing justice to the object, to be responsible literary criticism must also represent a response to the object in its singularity. Rather than a science — of the singular there can be no science — it must be a praxis, a praxis that engages the object in its quality as an event, as a happening that claims its beholder, or reader, not in the shape of an ideal beholder, or reader, but as this reader and beholder.

A.L.: Since you mention de Man’s “return to philology,” I wonder to what extent such a responsible criticism draws on the work of de Man, and to what extent his work can be of use today? In your recent book on de Man, The Wild Card of Reading, you seem to defend de Man by taking him seriously, by attempting to respond to his “ idiosyncratic critical idiolect” and by bringing it into the theoretical discourse as a singular voice, quite distinct from what you call the “reductive” positions of “ deconstructionism” in general.4 But you also seem somewhat ambivalent toward his radical positions. For example, vis-à-vis his notion of the “undecidable” or aporia, you write that the undecidable is not, as in the case of Derrida

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for example, the condition for an ethical decision, for responsibility. You also raise questions concerning his notion of language, which in the end seems to amount to a hypostatization of language. In short, what are we to make of de Man today? Is it possible to go further on the path of what you call the “radical empiricism” and the “ linguistic materialism” of de Man, or is it a dead-end, something that will inevitably end up in a monotony, which you describe, paraphrasing Stein, with “ language (is) language (is) language”?  

R.G.: In The Wild Card I have tried to figure out, as precisely as possible, what exactly the de Manian project is about. What is singular about de Man’s thinking, I argue, is the idiosyncratic way in which de Man conceives of, and also practices, singularity. For example, the way in which he elaborates his own position is by critically cutting all possible theoretical influences or allegiances. If notwithstanding this attempt at radically demarcating his own thought from that of others, one tries to situate de Man, the tradition of antic atomism (Democritus), medieval reflections on singularity (William of Ockham), and contemporary philosophical and theological efforts to rethink the notion of singularity (Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida), come to mind. Indeed, by defining the materiality of the signifier, or language, in terms of an absolute opaqueness to meaning and as radically arbitrary — that is, as undercutting any possible relation to meaning — de Man seems to have sought to take the philosophical notion of singularity to an ultimate extreme, to the point, that is, where the singular becomes so singular as to no longer admit any relation whatsoever, and where it is thus constituted by sheer unintelligibility. This peculiar conception of singularity, I suggest in the book, is a dead end. Even though this conception builds philosophically on possibilities inherent in the tradition, and therefore cannot simply be disregarded, it also reduces the notion of singularity to an

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absurdity. A singular that is wholly unintelligible — made so by defying all possible relation to it — is no longer something singular; it is barely a “something” anymore. It would thus seem that de Man’s thought has nothing to offer to a criticism that seeks to responsibly relate to texts, or any other events. This is certainly a possible conclusion that you could draw from my exposition of de Man’s understanding of language, text, and reading in The Wild Card. But as a singular conception, de Man’s work remains open to the future, to readings to come, for readings which — facing different contexts and critical horizons — could cast another light on what in the present context may appear to be an impasse, however impressive. A responsible criticism must do justice to the singularity of its object. You ask me what I think de Man’s work could contribute to the development of a responsible criticism. My answer would be the following: Even though the singular must be recognizable as singular, the singular is also singular on the condition that it is not entirely intelligible, transparent, knowable, etc. Perhaps the challenge of de Man’s idiosyncratic conception of singularity consists in drawing our attention to this irreducibly opaque moment constitutive of all singularity, and which a responsible criticism must under no circumstances ignore.

A.L.: You also mentioned the necessity of approaching the object of criticism as a value that “claims the beholder or reader.” Am I wrong to interpret this as a reference to the Kantian notion of the sublime? Since I know that you are working on a book on Kant’s aesthetics and since the sublime has been somewhat of a topos common to recent French philosophy (Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Derrida) and American literary theory (Paul de Man, Neil Hertz, Paul H. Fry, Suzanne Guerlac), I would like to relate this to some other current concerns. Is it possible to talk about a relation between the interest in the

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ethico-political and the interest in the sublime? With the notion of the sublime, Kant opened up a relation between aesthetics and ethics and Lyotard also seems to want to connect the notion of the sublime with the demands of ethics. Given this tendency to relate aporia often to the sublime, is it possible to read Derrida’s interconnecting of aporia and ethico-political decisions in this light? And why has the notion of the sublime, which is usually connected with aesthetic formalism or some kind of aesthetic Romanticism or aesthetic mysticism, acquired such attention?

R.G.: Before I try to answer your question about the sublime, let me first say that I think that it would be necessary to distinguish between the reasons for which philosophers like Lyotard, Derrida, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe have become interested in the sublime, and the reasons behind literary critics’, including de Man’s, interest in the sublime. As you know, Romanticism, especially British, but also American, is an essential area of teaching and research in English departments throughout the US, and the sublime has therefore the status of a perennial academic subject. De Man’s treatment of the sublime, even though it focuses on the sublime in Kant and Hegel, is to be read against the backdrop of English departments. De Man’s interpretation of the sublime is intent on siphoning out all aestheticizing or moralizing implications of the sublime, and thus on undercutting any edifying or devotional meaning of the issue it might have, rendering it truly unfit for any humanist-oriented pedagogical program. The philosophers’ interest in the sublime — at least of those French philosophers you mentioned — has been a more modest — circumstantial, even — strategic interest aimed at clarifying and furthering certain philosophical problems: Darstellung in the case of Nancy; the possibility of clear-cut distinction — coupure pure — for Derrida; the inner limits of the aesthetics of beautiful form, for Lyotard, and so forth.

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Yes, certainly, when I spoke of the need to conceive of the object of a responsible criticism as a singular event that, because singular, claims the beholder, or reader, the question of the sublime was on my mind. But it was not so much the Kantian sublime, but Lyotard’s interpretation of the sublime in his essays on post-modern painting, that I was thinking of.6 In these essays, Lyotard understands sublimity in terms of the feeling that something occurs rather than nothing: Happening, occurring — that there is something, always for, that is, addressed to someone — which thus solicits a response. The sublime in a Lyotardian sense has thus clearly an ethical thrust. To recall, as you did a moment ago, that already in the “Analytic of the Sublime” in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, a relation between the aesthetic feeling of the sublime and morality is sketched out, is entirely in order, especially if one wishes to evaluate the specificity of Lyotard’s ethical thrust.8 Indeed, in Kant, this relation between the aesthetical and the ethical is grounded in the fact that the feeling of the sublime is a feeling that arises through the sacrifice of everything sensible — the aesthetic feeling of the sublime is a resistance to the aesthetic itself — and hence the sublime is only a formal and aesthetic anticipation of the entirely different order of reason, or morality. By contrast, for Lyotard the feeling of the sublime is inherently ethical. I should say, proto-ethical, because conceiving of the sublime as he does, Lyotard does not simply link aesthetics and ethics as already constituted domains or orders. With the sublime, he gestures toward a feeling that precedes the divide in question, and that is more elementary than the aesthetical and the ethical taken separately. In Lyotard’s sublime, the aesthetical is only present in the quality of the artworks’ event-character (as singular occurrences in time and space), and the ethical in so far as qua occurrences, that is, qua singularities, they claim their beholder. His notion of the sublime is thus also proto-aesthetic. Derrida, no doubt, shares Lyotard’s concerns. As far as ethics is concerned, he too has been

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interested in mapping out the minimal structures of ethicity. His inquiries into the notions of aporia, the impossible, or undecidability, are aimed at elaborating on the conditions under which alone it is possible to speak, rigorously, of decision, rather than merely an execution of pre-programmed, or pre-calculated reactions. Derrida’s concern with aporia thus would seem to indicate a stronger interest in the political. But let us not forget that he too has consistently explored the proto-ethical notions, or structures, of address, solicitation, invitation, response, saying Yes, etc. On the other hand, Lyotard too, in The Differend for instance, gestures toward a political philosophy.7

A.L.: Where does your own principal interest in the sublime lie? Is it primarily the Lyotardian interpretation of the notion, which is possibly more concerned with Edmund Burke (and Barnett Newman) than with Kant, or is it a more general interest in the term? And where do you locate the importance of the notion of the sublime today? 

R.G.: My interest in the sublime is first of all linked to my work on the Third Critique. Right from the start, however, I should say that I believe that the “Analytic of the Beautiful” is the more important part of Kant’s work on aesthetics. I am fully aware that with this I am at odds with some trends in contemporary Kant scholarship, contemporary reflections on art and aesthetics, including Lyotard’s. Indeed, I hold that the Kantian notion of the beautiful has still a lot to tell us today as far as aesthetics is concerned. I would argue that Kant’s notion of beautiful form is neither subservient to the classical notion of beauty (after all Kant had little experience of great, classical art), nor the announcement of an aestheticist cult of form. The reason for this is, precisely, that what Kant calls “mere form” has little to nothing to

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do with art, or aesthetics in a common sense. In the book on the Third Critique, which I am in the process of completing (and you might be interested to know that I waited to write the chapter on the sublime until I was finished with everything else), I call it a para-epistemological concept. The mere form judged beautiful in judgments of taste extends well beyond the realm of art. Essentially, it does not concern objects of art, but objects of nature in the first place. And, paradoxically, for this very reason, the Kantian notion of beauty has, I believe, a largely untapped potential for thinking about contemporary art, which is deeply concerned with the nature of the “object”, with the minimal condition under which something can be apprehended as a “thing.” (In the case of Burke too, the beautiful, I think, and not the sublime, is the richer concept). So, I deal with the sublime because I am writing a book on Kant’s so-called aesthetics.9 But how can one not be interested today in the sublime, given that everyone takes a mouthful of it — literary critics in particular — especially if one tries to remain in touch with developments and trends in the profession. Lately, there has even been some talk about a return to Kant, as if a new wave of NeoKantianism was in the making! Needless to say, such a claim has no substance whatsoever. All it means is that some literary critics concerned with Romanticism read for the first time, and some, perhaps, reread, the “Analytic of the Sublime.” Lyotard encouraged this trend as well by suggesting that the category of the sublime could, or rather had to be put to use to make sense of contemporary art. Lyotard’s recourse to the sublime in connection with the contemporary arts arises from the insight that the inherited conceptions of the beautiful, and form, are of little help in coming to grips with art today. Given that the stock of our conceptual tools is limited, Lyotard proceeds on the assumption that the “other” inherited aesthetic concept — the sublime — distinct from the aesthetical concept of form, possibly offers a new avenue. But as you pointed out, when dealing with

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contemporary art, Lyotard is not primarily referring to Kant’s sublime. His, in my eyes, admirable book on the “Analytic of the Sublime” is further testimony to this because what it establishes about Kant’s notion of the sublime has little bearing on Lyotard’s own attempt to make the concept of the sublime fruitful for his understanding of what contemporary art is about. Burke’s sublime, not Kant’s, is linked by Lyotard to the concern with the event, the happening, the occurrence of Being, that prevails in his understanding of post-modernity, and post-modern art. By resorting to Burke’s notion of the sublime, Lyotard implicitly acknowledges that only by transforming the inherited conceptual tools will we have a chance of doing justice to what is happening today in the arts. If the sublime is important today, it is thus, first, because it is viewed as a means to rethink art, and aesthetics in general. But the sublime is significant today from still another angle. In The Differend, Lyotard speaks, but only in passing, of the task of saving the honor of thinking. As one can show, for Lyotard the problematic of the sublime is somehow linked to this task. It is a task that arises from a differend caused by philosophical thinking itself. What I consider important, and original, as far as this book by Lyotard is concerned, is that it shows, at its deepest moments, that the legitimate exigencies of philosophical thinking — exigencies that can only be rescinded at the price of a falling back into barbarism, tribalism, racism, etc. — inevitably silence and wrong the subjects, positions, and experiences to which they seek to do justice. To save the honor of thinking consist in the effort to find ways to phrase the differends, or unsolvable conflicts, that philosophical thinking itself causes by way of its legitimate, justified, necessary positions. This is the context, I believe, in which the problematic of the sublime today finds its broadest, and most significant, expression.

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A.L.: Since we have already touched upon the reception of deconstruction, and since deconstruction, can be said to have played a major role in your work it would be of interest to approach the reception of the thinking of Jacques Derrida from a more philosophical perspective. The tradition of interpretation and commentary on Derrida — where your books The Tain of the Mirror (1986) and Inventions of Difference (1994) mark a turn towards a more rigorous and philosophical reading of his work — seems in many crucial ways to differ from the reception of philosophers in general. His work has acquired an astonishing amount of attention (since the late 80s there has been a literal explosion of studies on Derrida) at the same time as it has been attacked with an extraordinary aggressiveness. There are two things that are particularly striking about this. First, the apparent lack of an informed and substantial critique, which seems to have been replaced by a hostility that defies even the most minimal standards of philosophical debate. Second, almost all appreciative studies seem to be on the defensive, repeating the same things over and over again. They defend Derrida against basic reading errors, against accusations of relativism, nihilism, etc. without adding anything new to the picture. Instead we are offered pious paraphrases of exactly the same readings and analyses Derrida himself offers in his books. Of course this does not mean that there are no good works on Derrida, but there nevertheless seems to exist an unwillingness to think further, to open a dialogue with other readings and open up his thinking to contexts he himself has not already provided. Why do you think it has turned out this way?  

R.G.: I think I will have difficulties with this question. I am afraid that I will not be able to add anything substantial to the picture that you have drawn. Now, to say something general from a philosophical perspective would require one to include in the picture the ways in which “deconstruction” has been portrayed in the various media. For Derrida’s reception is not only an academic

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issue: the media have caught hold of his weight in academia, and contributed to shaping his reception in significant ways. From rather early on, the newspapers have considered “deconstruction” a “story” worth reporting. This is not accidental, I believe. There is something about Derrida’s work that gives it a public quality. It exposes itself without reserve to being welcomed, rejected, ignored. And any discussion of his reception would have to define, and take off from this dimension of his work. I would say that, indeed, from the early work on, the basic thematic concerns of Derrida — I name only the notion of the trace, writing, and their relation to voice and speech — have to do with the inscription of the exterior in the interior, the public in the private. Moreover, Derrida, in the aftermath of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, has systematically reflected on the intentional structure of texts, writings, works, etc. Indeed, all his work is — explicitly or not — conceived of as a response. All his texts are addressed, and signed. They are, what he calls, des envois, sendings. But — distinct from Husserl and Heidegger — no one has pondered more than Derrida on the chances and risks that one takes in sending a message or in offering a view. From the very beginning, his work has understood itself as being about sending and reception, and, performatively speaking, it has taken the form of addresses and responses. If the reception of Derrida, with all involuntary or deliberate misreadings, is largely the empirical exemplification and verification of the quasi-transcendental laws that he has pointed out — namely, that it is always possible, hence a necessary possibility, that a message may not be understood; that a missive may not reach its addressee; or that a meaning can always lend itself to a deforming repetition — this is not simply an irony. Above all, it is because the public nature of Derrida’s work radically exposes it to the distortions that all reception is fraught with. This leads me to offer a footnote to your analysis. You have referred to the extraordinary aggressiveness of the opponents of

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deconstruction. Indeed, they don’t hesitate to themselves abandon the very principles which they claim have been deconstructed by Derrida, in order to be able to better, and more aggressively, attack his thought. You also pointed to the piety of so many of the proponents of deconstruction, who not only abandon any critical sense, but ruminate on an impoverished version of Derrida’s thought. In both cases, one can, of course, argue that for different reasons they don’t get it right. But if you consider that the main thesis that informs Derrida’s thought — that the very condition that makes it possible for something to come into its own also limits the identity, the propriety, the meaning of what it makes possible, and inscribes in it the very possibility of distortion, errance, nonsense — Derrida’s thought is clearly unsettling in a fundamental way. I would say it leaves its opponents and its proponents bewildered and insecure. Aggression and piousness are two forms of shielding oneself against the threat that this work poses.

A.L.: Today there seems to exist an increasing wish to address issues of politics within theory and philosophy. For some time there has been a lot of talk about a “political turn” within deconstruction as well (even if it seems as though an ethico-political dimension has been of central importance in the work of Derrida from the very beginning). But as the relation between deconstruction and politics has been thought in terms of aporetic impossibility, an undetermined relation between undecidability and decision, aporia and judgment, it seems that a politics of deconstruction would be impossible, since it would require a determination of the law of the law. In this context, claims have been made for a need to alter certain positions and make room for a politics of deconstruction. What is your attitude toward such projects, which include, for example, Bernard Stiegler’s attempts to overcome the impossible logic of aporia by regarding it as determined by material invention or technicity? Or to bring up other examples:

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Ernesto Laclau’s suggestion that deconstruction requires a theory of “ hegemony”, a theory of decisions taken in an undecidable terrain; or Simon Critchley’s more astonishing suggestion that deconstruction should actually be grounded in a Levinasian ethics.

R.G.: Let me first express my general suspicion of all so-called turns. For me “turns” signal unfinished business, an evasion of difficulties, a lacking dedication, a failure in endurance, and so forth. Historically speaking, what you refer to as the “political turn,” — I would add the turn towards ethics — is in my eyes, to a large extent, an effort to escape the demanding nature of theory and philosophy. I consider it a way to avoid what Hegel called the work, if not hardship, of the concept. When the demands of theory and philosophy to deepen issues beyond a certain level of sophistication become too strenuous, a turn is an easy way out. Moreover, such turns have the blessing of good conscience since they are made in the name of concreteness, real life, reality, etc. But any rigorous theoretical or philosophical work does not have to make turns, especially no turns toward the ethical or the political. Even if it is not always fully spelled out, implicitly all philosophical thought is involved — intimately tied — to the question of the ethical and the political. Obviously, this involvement of philosophical thought as such with the political and the ethical can take shape in different ways. Distinct from the philosophical thinking of the past (according to which thinkers — whether systematic or not — sought to do justice to the intimate connection between the different facets or dimensions of thought by developing comprehensive departmentalized philosophies that, in addition to an epistemology and aesthetics, included an ethics and a politics), contemporary philosophical thought, beginning with Husserl and the early Heidegger, no longer seeks to expound the inner connections of thinking to the ethical and political in this way. The reason for this lies with

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the changed task of philosophical thinking in the aftermath of the emancipation of all the traditional domains of knowledge from philosophy, and their establishment in shape of more or less autonomous “sciences” or, simply, “discourses.” Ethical and political discourses have become institutionalized independently of philosophy. They abound, on a l’embarras du choix, as the French say. Faced with this situation, the prime task of thinking cannot consist anymore in adding one more ethical code, and one more political program to the existing ones. Rather, thinking has become interested in what constitutes the political and the ethical. It seeks to determine the strict conditions under which one can speak of ethics or politics to begin with. The task is no longer to propose determined rules for action, or definite horizons, but to spell out what must obtain for an action to meet the criteria of ethicity (I am at loss for a corresponding word for political action). Philosophy from Husserl and Heidegger to the present is therefore concerned with what I would call the proto-ethical, or proto-political. Most, if not all, of the thinkers you have referred to are involved in projects that fall into this line of thought, although some, no doubt, have been tempted to sell a determined politics and ethics as well. Now, though this kind of research constitutes the primary objective of philosophical thinking at the cutting edge, this does not mean, of course, that philosophers and philosophies could not also intervene ethically and politically in determined ways. However, when and where this happens — and it happens all the time — philosophers today, in order to remain faithful to the rigor of their own insights, must measure their own actions against what they have established with respect to the strict conditions under which an action is, indeed, ethical or political, or not. In other words, they cannot proceed naively, based on firm beliefs, or held opinions, common-sense, or not so common-sense values — evidences, in short — of all kinds. An unrelenting critical vigilance about the implications and limits of their interventions must accompany them at all times.

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I will not speak to the different positions in contemporary thought on both sides of the Atlantic that you have evoked; this would take us too far. To do minimal justice to the work of the thinkers that you have mentioned would require me to look at each one of them individually. I wish to limit my remarks to your question concerning whether a politics of deconstruction is possible. According to a widespread belief, deconstruction is incompatible with ethics and politics, because it puts all values and evidences in question. Yet the point of deconstruction is that where given values and unquestioned evidences dominate thinking and action, thinking and action are not ethical or political, but merely execute pre-established programs. Values and evidences prevent any action from meeting the criteria necessary for it to be ethical or political action. They relieve the subject of the responsibility to the singular other or events without which no action is ethical or political. Between parentheses I note that with this we also touch upon the essence of the subject. In any case, an action, in the same way as a thought, is ethical and political only on the condition that they arise from the impossibility, or aporia, to decide, or to execute a program. Rather than precluding ethical and political action (or thought) — undecidability, impossibility, or aporia — are the very conditions without which no such action, or thought, is possible. Differently phrased, if ever there has been, or will be an ethical or political action or thought, it must have been an action or thought that faced a total impasse of decision. With this concern about undecidability, impossibility, aporia — in the face of which alone it is possible to speak of a decision, an intervention, or invention (be it theoretically or practically) — deconstruction is imminently ethical and political. It is situated on the very edge of the ethical and political. But it is so only, and remains so only, on condition that it itself resist the temptation to become a program — in the shape, for example, of a determined method, or a set of precepts.

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A.L.: At the moment you are working on a book about Europe. The actuality of a discussion of the conception of Europe is of course obvious today, with all the rapid changes that are taking place, changes that make Europe seem almost as unstable as it was earlier in the century. Which questions interest you in such a project? And further, what would a philosophical conception of Europe look like today? Is it possible to talk about Europe as something other than a geographical convention? Is a speculative geography — as for example the one Edmund Husserl elaborated in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, where he writes about Europe in terms of a “spiritual community” inherited from ancient Greece, and where Europe becomes “the pure idea of philosophy” open to all cultures that accept the demands of a universal science — still possible? 10 How can we deal with the violence of such a definition as Husserl includes America in Europe, but excludes gypsies, native Americans, Eskimos and so forth? And is it still possible to talk about a European tradition of thought today? Finally, if this European tradition of thought is a tradition of questioning its own postulates, are the ‘anti’-Europeans not in some sense the last Eurocentrics?

R.G.: Indeed, I have begun work on a book about the notion of Europe, more precisely, on Europe as a philosophical concept. Europe is a notion that has always meant more than a geographical entity, or zone. It has always been a speculative concept. But rather than taking on the long history of the notion, my main foci are the attempts that have been made during the last twenty years — especially in France, Italy, and, to a lesser extent in Germany — to probe the concept of Europe, and test whether this old and discredited concept still has some untapped critical potential. Of the thinkers who have intervened in this debate let me mention only Massimo Cacciari, Rémi Brague, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida. Now, it is interesting to

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note that all of these thinkers are in one way or another indebted to phenomenological thought. Yet, Edmund Husserl, as you just pointed out, but also Martin Heidegger and Jan Patočka, have intimately tied the notion of Europe to the phenomenological concept of philosophy. Thus, the attempts in question aimed at recasting the notion of Europe, and have profound implications for our understanding of phenomenology, and more generally, for philosophy. So, in short, I am interested in working out what critical potential the concept of Europe could still harbor, and how such a potential impact could transform the concept of a phenomenological philosophy. To measure the significance of the attempts currently made at revamping the concept, it is, of course, necessary to see how Husserl, Heidegger, and Patočka have put the concept of Europe to work. For Husserl, it is synonymous with the Greek idea of a universal science, for Heidegger, with the Greek notion of philosophy as being attuned to the wonder of Being, and for Patočka, with the Platonic project of a tendance of the soul. All three conceptions have their inherent problems, needless to say; the gypsies you mentioned with respect to Husserl are a point in case. But I hold that the idea of a universal science, of the thinking of Being, and of the tendance of the soul, articulate a demand that can only be relinquished at the cost of a lapse into the worst — nationalism, racism, tribalism, barbarism, you name it. Undoubtedly, the demand to overcome, and abandon, the nation, the peoples, the race, the tribe, in the name of a universal mankind implies violence. Undoubtedly, this demand to recognize, and accept, the other as other is felt as a violent imposition, and so is the demand to account for all the claims one makes according to universally shareable rules, and not on the basis of customary, traditional, or religious beliefs. But this is a violence of a lesser degree than the violence that originates with the peoples, the nations, the races, and the tribes. Or, on that account, with customs, traditions, traditionalisms, religious

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believes, and so forth. But let me say right away that in this debate about Europe, I am not interested in those attempts that simply try to reanimate and reaffirm the old, classical phenomenological conception of Europe however refined. Rather, I am interested in those projects that critically explore, and complicate, the difficult relation between the universal and the singular, between the idea of Europe and the others of Europe. It is in the context of these complexifications, I believe, that the notion of Europe can still reveal a critical potential. More precisely, as a name for a way of thinking and feeling with a universalist thrust that is open to the other, open to what is singular and wholly unpredictable about the other — a thinking and feeling no longer responsible to and for humanity in general — but responsible to and for the other even where and when the other defies all conventional and unconventional categorization, or transcends given horizons of expectation. As to the “anti-Europeans” you brought up, I limit myself to a brief observation. If they seek to make a case against Europe argumentatively, they will have to play by the rules that they claim to resist. In this sense, they are as Eurocentric as any one can be. Like the Eurocentrists, they lack a critical attitude with respect to the foundations from which they think.

A.L.: Finally, I wonder how you conceive of the role of philosophy today. And how do you conceive of the future of philosophy?  

R.G.: In fact, I think that the future of philosophy is intimately (not exclusively, needless to say) tied to this debate about Europe. But let me add, immediately, that this concern with the future of philosophy is what philosophy is to be about today. It is first of all the concern with assuring that philosophical thinking does not become extinct. I do not speak here of philosophy as an

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academic discipline. As such a discipline, it can continue eternally without being alive. What is stake, rather, is philosophy as an active mode of critically questioning what is the case, and of relating, be it in wonder or in horror, that something is the case. But this is not all. To remain within the frame of what we have discussed here, I would define the future of philosophy as a philosophy that remains open to the future, to what cannot be anticipated, to that which it is impossible to predict, and which thwarts all categorization. Taken to its full consequences, such openness to the future, to the unnamable to-come, prohibits thinking from closing upon itself, of remaining by and within itself. Everything that is taken up by and in thought is affected by this relation to the future. Nothing is allowed to rest anymore in its essence, and to shield itself from possible change. A philosophy open to the future is thus a philosophy that is alive, constantly at unrest. The role of philosophy today is to be this philosophy of the future, a philosophy whose most elementary gesture is openness to otherness, including unpredictable otherness, and whose ethicality and political thrust is unsettling — unsettling to the point of unsettling philosophical thought itself. On this condition alone can philosophy ward off the complacency, good conscience, and self-righteousness which inhibit thinking’s obligation to reach out.

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Notes 1

Rodolphe Gasché, “Comparatively Theoretical,” in Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor of Thinking. Critique, Theory, Philosophy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 169–187. 2 See Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference. On Jacques Derrida, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 22–57. 3 Gasché, Inventions of Difference, pp. 227–250. 4 Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror. Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 5 Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading. On Paul de Man, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 6 See in particular Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, as well as Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. 7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 8 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend. Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 9 See Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form. Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 10 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.