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The aim of Derrida Today is to see Derridas work in its broadest possible context and to argue for its keen and enduring relevance to our present intellectual, cultural and political situations. Its aim is not to conceive of Derridas work as merely a major development in thinking about textuality, nor as simply belonging to the specic philosophical discussions in the name of which some philosophers have reclaimed it. Derrida Today attempts, therefore, to have the broadest possible reference, from the philosophical and theoretical through the most aesthetically innovative to the most urgently political. It seeks to consider work that is rigorous and provocative, exact and experimental. It will be prepared to consider any approach to the reading of Derridas work and the application of deconstruction, as long as it produces valuable and useful insights. It aims not to be narrowly pedantic about approach, topic or style, or to police the Derridean legacy for its orthodoxy or purported accuracy or delity to a specic set of conclusions. Given this, the journal is not only about what we as general editors decide it to be, its life and trajectory will also be determined, even perhaps, unpredictably, by the topics and styles contributors offer. In this sense, we hope the journal will promote the ethical commitment of deconstruction; to an openness to the event to come. Nicole Anderson and Nick Manseld
This issue of Derrida Today contains papers originally delivered at the inaugural Derrida Today Conference, held in Sydney between 10 and 12 July 2008 (organised by Nicole Anderson and Nick Manseld). The conference attracted over 150 delegates. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who presented papers at the conference, and who sent in submissions for this issue, even though they could not all be included. We would also like to thank the many people who contributed to the success of the conference: Professor Judyth Sachs, who launched the journal at the conference; our keynotes Andrew Benjamin, Catherine Malabou and Martin McQuillan, and all those who helped with the organisation, especially Stephen Barker, Niall Lucy, Elaine Kelly, Lara Palombo, Ravi Glasser-Vora, Elaine Laforteza, Vanessa Fredericks and Jon Seltin. Our deep thanks to Claire Colebrook and Stephen Barker, who launched Joanna Hodges Derrida on Time and Martin McQuillans The Politics of Deconstruction and Deconstruction Reading Politics at Gleebooks during the conference. Finally thanks to the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, for its generous support. The next Derrida Today conference is planned for London in July 2010 (keep checking http://www.derridatoday.org/ for details).
Extra Time and the Death Penalties: On a Newly Arisen Violent Tone in Philosophy
Martin McQuillan
Abstract In light of recent writing on politics and violence within contemporary continental philosophy, this text revisits Derridas frequently articulated philosophical opposition to the death penalty. This essay expresses dismay at a certain theoretical discourse today that nds within itself the resources to mount a defence from within the humanities of political violence and by extension an overt justication of the death penalty. Slavoj ieks essay on Robespierre is unpicked as one such representative text. It is contrasted to Derridas scrupulous reading of Kant as an advocate of the death penalty. This essay seeks to name and question a new Maoist, thanato-theological current in contemporary theoretical writing and should be considered as an opening salvo in a sustained future challenge to such thought. * I am on the side of life Hlne Cixous (Cixous 2010, forthcoming) While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes mass murder, the rape and murder of a child so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justied in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment. Barack Obama (Obama 2008, 57) You would think that it would be a straightforward thing to oppose the death penalty in Theory today. You would think that this would be an unproblematic and uncontroversial thing, today, in the context of the
What strikes me today about this sentence now, today being another day from the today in which this was written for Derrida Today,
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is that of the political views that Derrida expresses in his texts and which I have the temerity to name here as reassuringly liberal and even familiar and banal the rst to be listed, that is to say the most liberal and the most banal, is his opposition to the death penalty. Is this not the very demonstration of his liberalism, is it not the most banal thing, of which there can be nothing to say and which should be obvious beyond question as a rst principle. I even name his work on the death penalty twice in this sentence as exemplary of his political views: many people were for the release of Nelson Mandela but not everyone was for the release of the death-row prisoner and Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Even so, I think the point that this fatigued sentence was intended to make was that one would expect Jacques Derrida to defend prisoners on death row and that this in itself was not a controversial or necessarily radical political position (this obscure term radical will require some unpicking on another occasion). The force that lies behind this sentence is that of the you would think. This will not require reection at a future date, such positions that Derrida took and arguments that he made were the sine qua non of the decent liberalism with which he was frequently and mistakenly confused. And yet, it would seem that an opposition to the death penalty will be required to be revisited as a live philosophical issue in the humanities today. I am thinking here of Slavoj ieks spectacularly misjudged introduction to a collection of texts by Maximilien Robespierre, Robespierre, or, the Divine Violence of Terror. Now, one hesitates before beginning a reading of a text such as this. On the one hand, to take the time, publicly and prominently, to discuss such stupidity is in some sense to give credit to that stupidity as something worthy of that time, the time of day, as it were, our precious time, the time of (Derrida to)day. This is true and some readers will say that today there are things more worthy of our time than Slavoj iek. On another occasion I might not disagree with them but here I am less concerned with the arguments of ieks text itself, such as they are, but with what they exemplify institutionally, mediatically and pedagogically today. It is this wider, newly arisen violent tone in theoretical discourse, of which iek is only a part, and which I will later call the new Political Theology also the new Maoism, that I have in my sights today. I will have more to say on this presently. The other risk with addressing this essay today in this space is that in addressing stupidity, stupidity will return a stupid answer and in its ignorance mistake the time spent on this essay as an afrmation of its own importance (misrecognizing rebuke for attention) or as indicative of an antagonism between camps, as
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localised and virtual terrorism other than then actualise it? The relation between virtual terror and real terror can only be like the relationship between the Mother of psychoanalysis and real mothers, whereby the former does not refer to any of the latter but all real mothers are de facto subsumed by the Mother whenever it is announced in a relation without relation that is nevertheless and because of this a relation.3 The reason to wish to reinvent terror for iek is the challenge that such a violent irruption would pose to what he calls the postpolitical biopolitics that administers bare life in western democracies and through them orchestrates globalisation. Now, insofar as this critique of western democracy and capital comes from a certain appreciation of Agambens reading of Benjamin, neither Agamben nor Benjamin can be held responsible for the varieties of nonsense that are spoken for or against their writing, anymore than Derrida can. It would take another period of extra time to take a diversion into Agambens misreading of the tricky and precarious distinction between bios and zo in Plato and Aristotle that Agamben, as Derrida notes in Rogues, reduces to a strict opposition as the basis of the quasi-totality of his argument about sovereignty and the biopolitical in Homo Sacer (Derrida 2005, 24). However, it might be worth asking at this moment of ieks position here, how can the present arrangement of western democracy be simultaneously both postpolitical and a biopolitics, that is to say both beyond politics and a political practice? Surely, politics in this phrase has two contradictory and exclusive meanings? To be postpolitical in this sense means to be after a model of political antagonism between identiable and seemingly monolithic blocks of a revolutionary or emancipatory left and a right that defends the interests of capital; as if this were not a cartoon version of the political or even an adequate understanding of the deferred logic of the post.4 That is to say, ieks position as a position exempts itself from the present terrain of politics by dismissing all available positions as the mere administration of biopolitics in favour of a transcendental afrmation of a non-position of pure negation in which no position is pure enough to correspond to the imaginary space of the lapsed world of the imagined pre-postpolitical. Thus, there is no political position from which one can adequately respond to iek, any real position available today being always outanked by his own transcendental revolutionary position as a mere defence of bourgeois biopolitics. In this sense, ieks position is a strict Maoism, closed and impervious to critique. This will become apparent in the course of our present investigation.
I very much doubt whether Robespierre and his fellow lawyers can be said to have been in anyway outside of the structured social eld, but on that point of identifying divine violence with a real event, I could not agree more. It has always been my contention that philosophy should account for its systematic and universalising gestures by putting them at risk through the analysis of positive historical phenomena, even if this would alter the nature of philosophy itself. The question is however, from the very beginning of this treatise, has iek made the correct identication of divine violence? Would not the storming of the Bastille, say, be divine violence by Benjamins denition and the considerably later Jacobin Terror not be something else entirely? Something like a premeditated inaugural violence that founds a state? However, what is interesting here is the ellipsis of the series that runs on from the Red Terror of 1919 (again a bit of a delay after the storming of the Winter Palace). iek is unusually coy here. How does the series run? From 1919 to the terror of the Cultural Revolution, to the terror of the Khmer Rouge, to the terror of Iranian revolution, to the terror of the Taliban? Surely, ieks interpretation of Benjamins notion of divine violence is not limited to good examples, right-on, or left-wing examples? Revolutionary terror as divine violence is surely not unique to the left, as if it were ok for the left to kill people but not the right? Did I miss a day at Theory Camp when it became acceptable to say this sort of thing? Just because the Terror of the guillotine occurred in 1792 that does not mean it is an event redeemable as divine violence any more than year zero and the killing elds of Cambodia would be. And yet, it would seem that this ellipsis, the unsaid in ieks essay, does indeed stand for the bloody run of history. In reclaiming
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Robespierre and reinventing terror, iek clearly wants to tell us a parable for our time. He is quick to defend Robespierre from our modern liberal bourgeois sensibilities and thus from the claim, say, that he unleashed a violent terror that he was unable to control and ultimately fell victim to. He goes on:
One should nonetheless move beyond the quick dismissal of Robespierres rhetorical strategy as the strategy of terrorist culpabilization [all members of a corrupt society are guilty]. And to discern its moment of truth: there are no innocent bystanders in the crucial moments of revolutionary decision, because, in such moments, innocence itself exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle I am witnessing does not really concern me is the highest treason. That is to say, the fear of being accused of treason is my treason, because, even if I did not do anything against the revolution, this fear itself, the fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is external to the revolution, that I experience revolution as an external force threatening me. (iek 2007, xvi)
For iek here the decision seems to be in someway calculable and thus rational. It is on the contrary, for iek, irrational (or just plain bourgeois or counter-revolutionary) to fear that one will become caught up in the machinic violence of revolutionary terror because this would be to position oneself in a relation of exteriority to the revolution and thus act counter to the revolution. All subjectivity, that wishes to be considered revolutionary, should subordinate itself to the machinic computational logic of the revolution. Now, one could begin by picking at this very idea of the inside/outside division which iek and Robespierre have quickly assembled as an apparatus to justify the calculability of the revolutionary decision. This would seem to be the most logo-centric of revolutions (and thus the least revolutionary of revolutions). There is no room, as the killing machine of the revolution gets under way, for saying count me out. So, iek continues:
In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he has unleashed will not swallow him up? It is here that his position takes on a sublime greatness he fully assumes the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason that he is so serene, that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton was a traitor, while he, Robespierre, is pure, a direct embodiment of the peoples Will; it is that he, Robespierre, is not afraid to die his eventual death will be a mere accident which counts for nothing: What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the homeland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy. Consequently, insofar as the shift from we to I can effectively be
At this point I am beginning to wonder if I have missed a whole week at Theory Camp. To recap, it does not matter that the revolutionary terror of mass execution has gone so far out of control that its author and instigator be put to death because through this cleansing divine violence the revolution will be achieved and any lives lost in the event are of no signicance because the idea and purpose of the revolution are of greater importance. Is this a serious proposition in 2008? Let us not even start the task of unpicking this logic of ends and means and of equivalences and of all the logical confusion evident here, but simply ask following the cultural revolution, following the Khmer Rouge and Taliban, are you serious? Is this not a Swiftian comic performance of an absurdism to demonstrate the absurd politesse of academic conventions? If only it were. iek continues, that the truly revolutionary position is not to take care during a time of terror but, quoting Yamamoto Jocho, a Zen priest, to consider oneself dead beforehand (iek 2007, xvii). At this point iek cites Japanese soldiers during World War II who conducted their own funerals before going to war, because we have now seamlessly slipped from the position of the revolutionary to that of the warrior. He may as well be (and indeed by inference he is) talking about the videos of suicide bombers, the French term for suicide bomber is of course kamikaze. Let us not even pause, because iek does not, to consider that it might be problematic to collapse all of these singularities into a continuous and homogenous dialectical history and that the question of the so-called suicide bomber today might be raised as singular occurrence with its own history. However, iek presses on:
This pre-emptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living of course turns the soldier into a properly sublime gure. Instead of dismissing this feature as part of Fascist militarism, one should assert it as also constitutive of a radical revolutionary position. (iek 2007, xviii)
Sorry, there was me mistaking the pathology theocratic death cults with Fascist militarism, how bourgeois of me. I can now see that this fascination with death constitutes the true sublimity of the suicide
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bomber. But iek has more to say when he cites Mao as exemplifying this terroristic sublime when he states that the US nuclear arsenal could destroy the whole of China and blow up the entire world but still not quench the revolutionary spirit:
There evidently is an inhuman madness in this argument: is the fact that the destruction of the planet Earth would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole not a rather poor solace for the extinguished humanity? The argument only works if, in a Kantian way, one presupposes a pure transcendental subject unaffected by this catastrophe a subject which, although non-existing in reality, is operative as a virtual point of reference. Every authentic revolutionary has to assume this attitude of thoroughly abstracting from, despising even, the imbecilic particularity of ones immediate existence, or, as Saint-Just formulated in an unsurpassable way this indifference towards what Benjamin called bare life: I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you. (iek 2007, xviii)
I can now see that I had not in fact missed a week at Theory Camp but in fact was at an entirely different school altogether. There is no negotiating with an argument that recognises itself as inhuman madness but continues anyway to posit a non-real, non-existing revolutionary transcendental subject unaffected by the slaughter going on around it, as the principle by which the authenticity and truth of the revolution should be measured. I cannot speak to this transcendental subject because it does not exist; it does not suffer from the difculties of bare life that one might be required to defend or to emancipate. Its position is one of strict and pure terror as it regulates and justies a closed and violent system of death. This is nothing but a strict onto-thanatotheology of state terror. In what way is the virtual revolutionary subject here different from other virtual subject which might as easily substitute for it, such as the state, the Fatherland and so on? But the problem for iek is not terror; terror simply put is not a bad thing for iek. Indeed it is to be welcomed because it breaks out of the biopolitical administration of life. True it replaces the administration of life with the computational extermination of life, but from the revolutionary point of view the dialectic of contingency and necessity retrospectively confers on an event like the Terror, as the substantialization of the general will, the form of not an aberrant episode but an occurrence that was determined before it took place, by the events of history. This sounds to me like a post hoc ergo propter hoc justication of violence but it remains ieks guiding question, what would a Jacobin politics which took into account this retroactive-contingent rise
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the people demand us to do so that they will not do it themselves (iek 2007, xxix). By this reckoning, by which the purity of divine violence can be mediated and represented by a presumptive virtuous avant-garde, all state violence from the Burmese generals to Serbian nationalism is justiable. However, rather than naming this as a pre-emptive violence of revenge, this is what iek calls democracy because in so far as it intensies the antagonism against the status quo, it is synonymous with politics itself, the dictatorship of the proletariat is another name for the violence of the democratic explosion itself (iek 2007, xxx) he quips. He goes on to justify the execution of Louis XVI as a usurper of the general will (unlike the revolutionary avant-garde), arguing that he should not be accorded a trial by a revolutionary court because such a trial would de facto legitimise the rule of the king as a legal entity. iek quotes Robespierre:
Proposing to put Louis on trial, in whatever way that could be done, would be to regress towards royal and constitutional despotism; it is a counterrevolutionary idea, for it means putting the revolution itself in contention. In fact, if Louis can still be put on trial, then he can be acquitted; he may be innocent; what am I saying! He is presumed to be so until he has been tried. But if Louis is acquitted, if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the revolution? (iek 2007, xxx)
This is to say, that it is quite right for the revolution to guillotine the king because it is so revolutionary that according to its criteria all previous historical legal processes were illegitimate and the king (not as a person but as a virtual subject) should be put to death because his continued existence in itself places the new legal authority of the revolution into contestation. Even though in so doing the revolutionary authorities immediately reinstate a model of sovereignty effectively unchanged and merely passed from the King to the Committee of Public Safety or even to the people. A model of sovereignty that then leaves the new authority open to exactly the same critique of usurpation by a transcendental revolutionary subject which has still to arrive, both corrupting the revolution and auto-immunising itself against/for future revolution. By such a logic, the American military forces in Iraq were quite right then to execute Sadam Hussein as a symbol of an illegitimate regime swept away by the American army acting on behalf of the Iraqi people so that they would not have to do it themselves. The denition of divine violence is now becoming somewhat over-stretched. iek has long since abandoned the divine violence of the mob and has now moved on to the straight-forward justication of state terror, the more authentic
Political violence is ne as long as its virtuous! Are you serious?! What sort of pathology is this? One should be suspicious of the mobilization of virtue not only because it is a historically gendered and Euro-centric term but because it is impossible to defend an idea of the purity of virtue in the face of its exercise in the real world by real un-virtuous individuals.
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I believed in what I was doing, or I was behaving pathologically are surely not defences for either suicide bombing or capital punishment! Its as if deconstruction never happened. Its as if great swathes of human experience had never happened. As the Spanish theologian and physician Michael Servetus rst said in the sixteenth century, to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. Such liberalism for iek is merely the administration of bare life. He states in the text Homo Sacer as the object of the Discourse of the University published in the New York Times in 2003 that todays growing rejection of death penalty is sustained by a hidden biopolitics . . . Those who assert the sacredness of life, defending it against the threat of transcendent powers which parasitize on it. This world of biopolitics leads to the prohibition against smoking, drugs, un-healthy food, unsafe sex and so on, and is the consequence of the combination of biopolitical administration and a postmodern respect for the vulnerable Other brought to extreme, of the attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences itself as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments. The two positions being one and the same thing for iek, he notes:
What the two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher Causes [such as the truth of the revolutionary will, the theological reference here is key, given that iek seems to think along with Robespierre that atheism is aristocratic], the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. Nowhere is the complicity of these two levels clearer as in the case of the opposition to the death penalty no wonder, since (violently putting another human being to) death is, quite logically, the ultimate traumatic point of biopolitics, the politics of the administration of life. To put it in Foucauldian terms, is the abolition of death penalty not part of a certain biopolitics which considers crime as the result of social, psychological, ideological, etc., circumstances: the notion of the morally/legally responsible subject is an ideological ction whose function is to cover up the network of power relations, individuals are not responsible for the crimes they commit, so they should not be punished? Is, however, the obverse of this thesis not that those who control the circumstances control the people? (iek 2003)
Thus, the abolition of the death penalty is merely an ideological ruse to defeat the inexhaustible will of the people who otherwise would be lined up to sacrice their mere dust for the revolutionary cause. When one thinks of all the scrupulous and careful arguments that Derrida made about the deconstruction of phallogocentrism and its non-conceptual orders in the West and the frequent public and institutional pillorying
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penalty because as he puts it the abolitionist discourse, in its present state, seems to me greatly perfectible, philosophically and politically fragile, also deconstructible, if you prefer (Derrida 2004, 148). That is to say, that in rendering a properly philosophical and deconstructed (and so more-than-philosophical) defence of the abolitionist position it will be possible to strip the death penalty of its onto-theological scaffold, of the sort iek attempts to erect here around Kant (Kant himself being a proponent of the death penalty). Kant believes that he recognizes in the categorical imperative an a priori idea of pure reason in criminal law that would not be possible if the death penalty were not inscribed within it, and if it were not commanded by a jus talonis to be reinterpreted. The categorical imperative appeals to the human person, in his dignity (Wrde), as an end in himself. This dignity, says Derrida:
requires that the guilty party be punished because he is punishable, without any concern for utility, without socio-political interest of any kind. As long as the aws of such a line of argument are not made to appear from inside, in the rigour of the concept; as long as a discourse of the Kantian or Hegelian type, which claims to justify the death penalty in a principled way, without concern for interest, without reference to the least utility, is not deconstructed, we will be conned to a precarious, limited abolitionist discourse, conditioned by empirical facts and, in its essence, provisional in relation to a particular context, situated within a logic of means and ends, falling short of strict juridical rationality. (Derrida 2004, 14950)
That is to say, that for Derrida it would not be enough to cite the problematic history of revolutionary terror to counter ieks defence of the death penalty as principled or virtuous. Rather, it would be necessary to demonstrate its internal incoherence as an argument by suggesting that in relation to the distinction between self-punishment [peona naturalis] and hetero-punishment [poena forensis] in Kant the guilty party, as a citizen and a rational subject, should, understand, approve, even call for the punishment, including the ultimate penalty (as ieks Robespierre and Mao do):
This transforms all institutional and rational punishment coming from outside (forensis) into automatic and autonomous punishment or into the indiscernible connes of interior punishment (poena naturalis); the guilty party should acknowledge the reason of the sentence, he would have to acknowledge the juridical reason that gets the better of him [a raison de lui] and leads him to condemn himself to death. To follow this consequence
The point for Derrida is not that this is simply suicide or conversely murder in any easy sense but that the undoing of this logic of the inside/outside and demonstrating the permeability and undecidability of Kants borders offer no easy re-instatement of other reassuring oppositional distinctions of the sort we nd in ieks argument between the kamikaze and the king. However, in the face of the intolerable stupidity and cruelty of ieks text this deconstruction may be a moot point, and it would seem that not only has no philosopher as a philosopher ever contested the legitimacy of the death penalty but that philosophy continues in certain forms to nd the resources to defend the death penalty, even to make a virtue of it. There would be much to say here about this new Political Theology which in the texts of iek, Agamben, Badiou and the reception of recent translations of Carl Schmidt is coalescing around the invention of a new Maoist onto-theology, making a point of dismissing Derrida and the deconstructive legacy (this could be demonstrated in several precise ways in relation to the iek text discussed above) in a fashion that demonstrates simultaneously both an elementary misunderstanding of the text of Derrida and an abyssal unacknowledged debt to his writing. I am not, yet, and without further reading, accusing Agamben and Badiou of producing the singular nonsense that iek does in this essay but I am putting down a marker that would wish to contest this newly arisen violent tone (virtual or actual) in contemporary so-called continental philosophy. Faced with a choice between compliance with biopolitical administration or sublimation to the will of revolutionary terror, I am reminded of the line from Nick Parks Chicken Run when Ginger, the leader of the impounded chickens, declares, we will die free chickens or die trying [to escape] and a dissident voice from the multitude replies are they the only choices? I would like to say no to the terror that polices the vital force of political dissent in western democracies; I would like to say no to any terror that opposes itself to those democracies as the presumptive avant-garde of a certain revolutionary violence; I would like to say no to the terror of an ultimately non-revolutionary and reactionary type that opposes those democracies in the name of a medieval theo-thanatology; I would like to say no to the so-called war on terror that justies depoliticisations and
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suppressions of dissent across the globe. I want to say no to all of these things rstly because it is my democratic right to do so. I do not need a Jacobin vanguard to decide this for me. I want to say no to all of these things, secondly, because they are all un-deconstructed onto-theologies of the closed book that open themselves onto no future other than the pre-ordained ends their bloody means will have latterly justied. I do not accept the premise that the new Political Theology seems to treat so easily that the long march of history demands blood. On the contrary, history as progress requires us to imagine the possibility of revolutions without blood and of the perfectibility in principle of public institutions and of democratic structures. Perhaps, Jean-Luc Godard is right when in response to the question why dont humane people start revolutions? he offers humane people dont start revolutions they start libraries and grave yards.6 I want to say as Father Gabrielle does in Robert Bolts screenplay of The Mission that If might is right, then Love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so, but I dont have the strength to live in a world like that.7 I want to say all of this because as with Cixous, I wish to remain on the side of life and this, I think, when presented with the emergence of a new onto-thanato-theology such as this, is what it might mean to be for Derrida Today.
References
Cixous, Hlne (forthcoming), The Book I Do Not Write, ed. Eric Prenowitz, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Derrida, Jacques (2005), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques and Elizabeth Roudinesco (2004), Death Penalties, in For What Tomorrow. . . A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort, Stanford: Stanford University Press. McQuillan, Martin (2008), Is Deconstruction Really a Social Science? Derrida Today, 1/1, pp. 11930. Obama, Barack (2008), The Audacity of Hope, Edinburgh: Canongate Press. iek, Slavoj (2003), Homo Sacer as the object of the Discourse of the University, The New York Times, 25 September 2003. A version can be found at www.lacan.com/hsacer.htm iek, Slavoj (2007), Robespierre, or, the Divine Violence of Terror, Virtue and Terror (Revolutions): Maximilien Robespierre, London: Verso.
Notes
1. This text was rst presented at the inaugural Derrida Today conference, Macquarie University, Sydney July 2008, organized by Nicole Anderson and Nick Manseld my thanks and endless debt to them.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000487
Lisa Guenther
Abstract In LAnimal que donc je suis, Derrida analyzes the paradoxical use of discourses on shame and original sin to justify the human domination of other animals. In the absence of any absolute criterion for distinguishing between humans and other animals, human faultiness becomes a sign of our exclusive capacity for self-consciousness, freedom and awareness of mortality. While Derridas argument is compelling, he neglects to explore the connection between the human domination of animals and the male domination of women. Throughout LAnimal, Derrida equivocates between man and humanity, and between the biblical gures of Ish and Adam. In so doing, he repeats a gesture that he himself has insightfully criticized in other philosophers, such as Levinas. By articulating the distinctions that Derrida elides, I suggest a way of reading Genesis which avoids this difculty, but also continues Derridas project. * The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there. Derrida 2002, 397 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed g leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. Genesis 3:7 In LAnimal que donc je suis, Derrida begins his meditation on animals with a playful recapitulation of the Fall. He describes himself standing naked and ashamed before the little female cat who follows him into the bathroom every morning and regards him with a steady
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2002, 374). Human beings would seem to be distinctively aware of their nakedness; and yet, Derrida argues that this awareness turns on a feeling of shame which already covers the human body with cultural techniques that modify nakedness and mediate it in innumerable ways. Man . . . would only be a man to the extent that he was able to be naked, that is to say to be ashamed, to know himself to be ashamed because he is no longer naked (Derrida 2002, 374). Man only becomes aware of his nakedness at the moment when he feels the need for clothing that shame provokes, and so like the other animals, if for different reasons man is not naked even when he is naked. Derrida identies a temporal delay or contretemps between the shameful nudity of man and the shameless nudity of the animal, and he claims that this delay has only just begun doing us harm in the area of the science of good and evil (Derrida 2002, 374). This delay is expressed in the ambiguous title of the essay, which could be translated as either The animal that therefore I am (as if I were brought back to my own animality, for example, through the encounter with a cat), or The animal that therefore I follow (as if I were following the animal on an evolutionary timeline, or following in obedience and submission, or following it in order to track it down like a hunter (Derrida 2002, 380)). The double meaning of je suis functions more like a split in this context, raising the question of whether being an animal and following the animal can ever coincide, given our past and current understandings of the human-animal relation. Does not the very attempt to dene what is special about the human, or what distinguishes us from other animals, condemn us to always either following the animal or insisting that it follow us? Can I be the animal that I follow? Can I catch up with the animal that I am? These questions are complicated by the ambiguous position of woman in relation to both man and animal. When is a woman also part of man? Only when she, too, is following the animal? For the most part in LAnimal que donc je suis, Derrida analyzes the relation between man and animal as if women were simply a part of man in general. For example: In principle, with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to clothe itself (Derrida 2002, 373). Here, homme is presumably identied with humanit. But at other points in the text, he uses the same term homme to refer to male human beings in particular. For example: [W]hy would a man be both more and less modest than a woman? (405). Later in the text, Derrida locates a place of intersection between the general singularity of the I and the general singularity of the animal, arguing that both terms gather a multiplicity under a
Ha-adam, or the adam is created last after all the other animals, and he is created in the plural, as a they which is both male and female.3 There is a long history of biblical commentary, both Jewish and Christian, which tries to sort out whether the name Adam in this verse refers to a single man, or an androgynous person, or all of humanity, or an originary male-female couple, or some mixture of these.4 Some commentators translate Adam as earth creature (Trible 1978, 80) or even clod (Bal 1987, 113) in order to emphasise the non-specicity of this rst creature and its relation to the dust of the earth (ha-adamah) from which it was created.5 But however one reads it, the Adam of Genesis 1 cannot be simply identied with an exclusively male human being. God grants this ambiguous earth creature(s) dominion over all the animals, but does not specify what this dominion entails, nor the responsibilities that may be involved with this dominion.
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In Genesis 2, the story of creation is told again in a completely different way. This time, ha-adam is created before the other animals, formed from the dust of the ground and placed in the garden of Eden as a kind of groundskeeper. Ha-adam still alone is commanded not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; but immediately after giving this command, God says, It is not good that the man [ha-adam] should be alone; I will make him a helper t for him (Gen 2:18). God creates all the other animals of the world, bringing them one by one to be named by Adam; but no t helper is found among them. Finally, God puts Adam to sleep and removes a rib, fashioning another creature out of it. Upon waking, Adam says: This at last is bone of my bones and esh of my esh; she shall be called Woman [Ishah], because she was taken out of Man [Ish]. (Gen 2:23) The word Ish does not appear in the bible until a specically female human being has been created. In other words, ha-adam (translated in most English versions simply as the man) identies itself as Ish, or specically male, only after identifying this new creature as Ishah, or specically woman.6 Until the creation of Ishah, there is no mention of a specically male human being or Ish in the Bible. Therefore, Adam is not simply identical to Ish, even if after the creation of Ishah, the previously ambiguous term Adam or ha-adam will come to refer to the male human exclusively, and be attached to him as a proper name. But until the duality of male and female exist, it makes no sense to specify the human or ha-adam as male.7 This is not to say that Adam is sexually neutral, but whatever sexuality Adam has at that point cannot be determined as simple maleness. Who follows whom on this reading of Genesis 2:23? On one hand, Ish follows Ishah, since he can only be distinguished as a sexuallyspecic human being in response to a sexually-different other. But, on the other hand, the text tells us that the new creature shall be called Ishah because she was taken out of Ish not because she was taken out of Adam or ha-adam. The implication seems to be that the creation of a sexually-different human being does not leave the past untouched; rather, this new differentiation is projected back onto the pre-differentiated earth creature, such that ha-adam becomes in retrospect but only in retrospect, and only by his own account, not by Gods decree a proto-Ish. According to the human being who nds
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(Gen. 3:20). Woman is the only creature named by Ish preceding Ishah or Ish all alone; every other animal is named by the ambiguous earth creature, Adam, prior to the emergence of Ish as a distinctively male human being. This naming (and renaming) of the woman enables man to position himself as the one who will have named all of the animals by himself as the one who follows them, hunts them, and issues their death sentence.8 Woman is both the rst and the last creature to receive her name twice from Ish alone. And yet, the deep sadness of this woman, and her ambiguous position between human and animal, remains silent in Derridas text. Or does it? Derrida marks the proximity between woman and animal, albeit eetingly, in a number of places. For example, in his assessment of writers on animality, Derrida places more of the blame for ignoring the address of animals on men than on women; he contrasts all those males but not all those females who deny being seen by the animal, with those men and women who admit taking upon themselves the address of the animal (Derrida 2002, 382, 383; emphasis added). Derrida seems to suggest that women are more open to animals, closer to their own animality, not quite as fallen as men. This point is emphasized by the femaleness of his little pussycat, and the femaleness of the hybrid beast, Chimera, the latter of which becomes his privileged example of the animot (or animal-word) which is meant to deconstruct the opposition between human and animal, writing and nature (41315). And yet, what may rst have seemed like a compliment, as if women were more advanced in their relation to animals, could also appear like a trap, putting women on the side of the animals hunted by man. In order to follow the traces of womans ambiguous effacement from the drama of man and animal, we must situate Derridas reading of Genesis in LAnimal que donc je suis in relation to an earlier reading of the same text.
Paradoxically, Levinas insists on a certain priority of the masculine not in order to privilege men over women (or at least, not avowedly), but in order to secure the equality of all human beings, and to prevent the marks of sexual difference from prescribing different treatment for different kinds of people. But as we have seen in our reading of Genesis 1 and 2, it makes just as much sense to argue that the masculine specicity of Ish follows after the creation of Ishah, that precisely because woman was taken from the side of ha-adam, there is a certain pre-eminence of woman, with Ishah coming rst in the genesis of sexual difference, and Ish following (almost) immediately after. My point is not that woman really did come rst, but rather that neither can be said to follow the other without producing hermeneutic incoherence. In At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am, Derrida criticizes the logic with which Levinas attempts to secure universal equality by subordinating sexual difference to a neutral humanity. He argues that, wherever this subordination is made, humanity is simultaneously marked as pre-eminently masculine: he before he/she, son before son/daughter, father before father/mother, etc. . . How can one mark as
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masculine the very thing said to be anterior, or even foreign, to sexual difference? (Derrida 1991a, 430). While Levinas wants to save ethics by insisting on the neutrality of humanity, he simultaneously makes a self-interested, unethical gesture, placing masculinity in command and at the beginning (the arkhe) (Derrida 1982, 73). This gesture marks the patrix of phallogocentrism in the West: the conation of humanity in general with the masculine. But precisely by subordinating the specicity of the feminine and consigning sexual difference to second place, the text of Levinas betrays the prior inuence of the feminine: Then the Work, apparently signed by the Pro-Noun He, would be dictated, aspired and inspired by the desire to make She secondary, therefore by She [Elle; later in the text, Derrida troubles the distinction between Elle and E.L., the initials of Emmanuel Levinas] (Derrida 1991a, 434). Once again, we run into the question: Who follows whom? Who is being followed, and to what end? Derridas critique of Levinas helps to shed light on his own conation of humanity with the masculine in LAnimal que donc je suis. By blurring the distinction between Adam and Ish, Derrida remains continuous with the patriarchal tradition that he critiques in Levinas and others; and yet, his text is nevertheless haunted by the excluded feminine. For example, Derrida attributes the very genesis of time to the contretemps between Ish and the animals: God lets Ish [sic] call the other living beings all on his own, give them their names in his own name, these animals that are older and younger than him, these living things that came into the world before him but were named after him, on his initiative according to the second narrative. In both cases, man is in both senses of the word after the animal. He follows him. This after, that determines a sequence, a consequence, or a persecution, is not in time, nor is it temporal; it is the very genesis of time (Derrida 2002, 386). If man is after the animal, then where or when is woman? What role, if any, does woman play in this genesis of time? In the rst Genesis narrative, all the non-human animals are created rst, and Adam (both male and female, singular and plural) follows; but in the second narrative, Adam is created rst and the other animals follow, with Ishah, the female part of man, created last (385). The least stable position in this second narrative belongs to Ish, who both follows after Ishah and also will have preceded her thanks to his own retrospective identication with Adam. By repeating Ishs (and Levinass) gesture of conating humanity with maleness, Derrida also perhaps unwittingly positions
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serpent (Derrida 2002, 409). She is followed hunted and pursued by Bellerophon, a gure to whom Derrida admits an old and ambivalent attachment (410). Like Derrida in the opening scene of this essay, standing ashamed before his shameless female cat, Bellerophon is put to shame by a group of shameless women who expose themselves in all their nakedness to the hunter in a strategy of self-defense (414). Bellerophon comes to their city in order to destroy it, and rather than attempting to counter his enormous physical strength, the women use their own nakedness against him, disarming him by exposing their bodies and offering themselves to him. The city is saved, immunized against shameful violence by the shameless self-exposure of women, a self-violation designed to stave off greater physical violence. But in the end, Bellerophon tames the animal, Pegasus, and uses him in order to trap and kill Chimera (Hesoid 319).9 Shame, it seems, only goes so far in restraining violence. Who follows whom? Who pursues whom, and to what end? The female animot may seem to follow obediently in the footsteps of her master, but is her obedience also a trap? Derrida identies (albeit ambivalently) both with the hunter Bellerophon and with Chimera herself: Chimera interests me therefore because chimerical will be my address (Derrida 2002, 410). He needs a hybrid, perhaps even monstrous discourse in order to track his way through the logic of the human domination of animals. But he risks getting tangled in his own discourse to the extent that he irts with the female animot without fully interrogating the relation between the human domination of animals and mens domination of women. To respond well to his own imperative to behold the animot, Derrida would have to face not only the female non-human animal, but also the female human animal, the creature whose ambiguous position highlights the impropriety of both man and animal. In his own words, Derrida would have to face the naked truth, if there is such a thing, of his or her sexual difference, of all their sexual differences (418). Without this critical interruption of sexual difference into discourses on the ends and beginnings of man, women and animals remain caught within a classic narrative in which the female animot both inspires a discourse on the hybrid animal, and is also hunted down by a man with the help of his tamed animal-brother. Perhaps the proper companion of the animot, the one who neither hunts nor is hunted, would be a version of the ambiguous earth creature whose dominion is characterized not by domination but by a vocation of responsible care. This companion would respond to the other animal in its unsubstitutable singularity (Derrida 2002, 378) rather than reducing
In the beginning, there was the worm: neither male nor female nor sexless, but rather imbued with a sexual difference prior to binary opposition. Ha-adam. Derrida remains fascinated by the possibility of a non-dichotomous sexual difference, a sexuality that the child sees clearly, but whose naked exposure is eventually covered over in shame. The silkworm, like Chimera, is an animot whose ambiguity promises to heal the opposition between man and woman, but also between man and animal. This promise returns again and again in Derridas writings on sexual difference. It appears in Geschlecht, in which Derrida argues that Heideggers Dasein embodies the other sexual difference (1991b, 401), prior to the fall or dispersion into opposite sexes, a predifferential, or rather a predual sexuality (387), more originary than the dyad (288). And it appears in Choreographies, which concludes with this question:
[W]hat if we were to reach, what if we were to approach here . . . the area of a relationship to the other where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating? The relationship would not be a-sexual, far from it, but would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond bi-sexuality as well, beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality which come to the same thing. (Derrida 1982, 76)
Behold the philosophers bestiary, which is marked from the beginning from before the beginning with a sexual difference that remains irreducible to the mutually-exclusive oppositions of phallocentrism and anthropocentrism.10 What better gure for this non-binary sexual difference than the ambiguous earth-creature ha-adam? And what better starting-point for the passage beyond the shame and violence engendered by Christian interpretations of Genesis than a feminist reinterpretation
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which challenges the domination of both women and animals, both for their own sake and for the sake of the men who ultimately get caught in their own traps? The female animot may seem to follow obediently in the footsteps of her master, but this obedience is also a strategy for the renewal of embodied difference beyond the oppositions that have hitherto structured them. Thinking perhaps begins here where the female human animal interrupts the epoch of mans domination, and contests the very genesis of time.11
References
Bible, Revised Standard Edition, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type= DIV1&byte=1801 Adams, Carol J. (2000), The Sexual Politics of Meat: a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, New Yorkand London: Continuum. Adler, Rachel (1998), Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics, New York: Jewish Publication Society of America. Bal, Mieke (1987), Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Bellis, Alice Ogden (1994), Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Womens Stories in the Hebrew Bible, Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press. Boyarin, Daniel (1995), Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques (1979), Spurs: Nietzsches Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1982), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1991a), At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 40539. Derrida, Jacques (1991b), Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 380402. Derrida, Jacques (2002), The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter). Derrida, Jacques (2003), And Say the Animal Responded? trans. David Wills, in Zoontologies, ed. Cary Wolfe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques (2006), Lanimal que donc je suis, Paris: Editions Galile. Derrida, Jacques and Christie V. McDonald (1982), Choreographies, Diacritics 12:2 (Summer), Cherchez la Femme: Feminist Critique/Feminine Text, pp. 6676. Hesoid (1973), Theogony: and, Works and Days, trans. Dorothea Wender, New Yorkand London: Penguin Classics. Kvam, Kristen E., Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler (1999), Eve and Adam, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel (1994), And God Created Woman, in Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Arnowicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merchant, Carolyn (1990), The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientic Revolution, New York: HarperOne. Stone, Ken (2006), The Garden of Eden and the Heterosexual Contract in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, ed. Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville, New York: Columbia University Press.
Notes
1. For example, see Merchant 1990, Adams 2000, and Taylor 2008. 2. If anything, what is proper to man is his lack of propriety: [W]hat is proper to man, his superiority over and subjugation of the animal, his very becomingsubject, his historicity, his emergence out of nature, his sociality, his access to knowledge and technics, all that, everything (in a nonnite number of predicates) that is proper to man would derive from this originary fault, indeed from this default in propriety and from the imperative [il faut] that nds in it its development and resilience (Derrida 2002, 413). Derrida makes a similar argument in The Ends of Man (1982, 10936) and Spurs (1979, 8293). 3. See also Genesis 5:12: This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. / Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. 4. For example, Maimonides refers to various explanations of the sages, one of which is that Adam and Eve were rst joined at the back and later separated into two creatures (Maimonides, in Kvam et al 1999, 219). Philo disambiguates the two creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 by arguing that Genesis 1 refers to the creation of a spiritual, non-corporeal idea of humanity made in the image of God as neither male nor female but androgynous, while Genesis 2 refers to the creation of mortal, corporeal human beings, rst male and then female (see Boyarin 1995, 3742). In the feminist literature on Genesis, Phyllis Trible argues that Until the differentiation of female and male (2:2123), adham is basically androgynous: one creature incorporating two sexes (Trible 1999, 432). Elsewhere, however, Trible argues that Adam refers to all of humanity, male and female, rather than a single androgynous creature: Ha-adam is not an original unity that is subsequently split apart by sexual division. Instead, it is the original unity that is at the same time the original differentiation. From the beginning, the word humankind is synonymous with the phrase male and female, though the components of this phrase are not synonymous with each other (Trible 1978, 18). Mieke Bal calls the Adam in Genesis 1 a sexless creature (Bal 1987, 112) rather than androgynous or bisexual, since sexuality is still to be created (113). For more detailed commentaries on Genesis 15, see Adler 1998, 111125 and Kvam et al 1999, 2240. 5. Incidentally, ha-adamah is a feminine noun in Hebrew; so ha-adam (a masculine noun) comes from ha-adamah (feminine). But we should be wary of drawing any conclusions about the gender of ha-adam as a person from the grammatical gender of the noun. To conclude that Adam is a man because ha-adam takes a masculine pronoun is just as unsound as concluding that all persons are women because, in French, la personne is a feminine noun. I thank Murray Johnston and Idit Dobbs-Weinstein for sharing this insight. 6. Incidentally, this woman is not named Eve until after the expulsion from Eden, when Adam gives her a new name to reect her fallen status and so, technically, Eve did not eat the fruit of knowledge, Ishah did.
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7. Phyllis Trible comments: Before this episode the Yahwist has used only the generic term adham. No exclusively male reference has appeared. Only within the specic creation of woman (ishah) occurs the rst specic term for man as male (ish). In other words, sexuality is simultaneous for man and woman. The sexes are interrelated and interdependent. . . The two are neither dichotomies nor duplicates (Trible 1999, 433). 8. Already, the gift of a name issues a death sentence, since the name can be separated from the singular creature to which it refers, and may therefore seem to render this creature superuous. [F]rom the moment that [a mortal existence] has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance (Derrida 2002, 379). 9. Derrida acknowledges the taming of Pegasus (who happens to be Bellerophons half-brother), and he reects at some length on the parallel between this brotherly relation and the biblical narrative of Cain and Abel (Derrida 2002, 410), but he does not mention Bellerophons use of this tamed animal to hunt and kill Chimera. 10. These passages from Derridas earlier work on sexual difference shed light on the moments in LAnimal. . . when he refers to being faced with a cat of one or the other sex, of one and the other sex (2002, 3801). Or, again with reference to his cat: It is true that I identify it as a male or female cat. But even before that identication, I see it as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked (3789). 11. Thank you to Ellen Armour, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Maxime Doyon and Murray Johnston and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000499
Laurie Johnson
Abstract Does a Postal Principle, a principle of destinerrance, hold true for computer mediated communication (CMC)? Perhaps. However, the question is not one concerning technology. Is it rather the case that we must ask, after Derrida, after all, whether destinerrance ever held true, as a principle? This paper considers the prospect that the Postal Principle was, in principle, or as a principle, an expression of a truth value from something that can not in fact, be held at all: the ghost in the machine. Drawing on a phenomenology of computer practice, the paper argues that there is greater explanatory value to be found in Derridas more recent comments on the relative exteriority of the technological apparatus (in Archive Fever and elsewhere), framing an understanding of the human body as partes extra partes. Yet it is demonstrated here that this same framing was already in place from the moment that the principle of destinerrance was rst articulated, and that a subsequent technical turn in Derridas work merely extends a framework already set in place in the earlier work (in The Post Card, for example). It is argued, then, that in articulating a Postal Principle for the purpose of guaranteeing its failure, Derrida had calculated the future trajectory and had built the logic of the calculation and of the jet words, as he calls them, into this trajectory of what I call the fantasy of the disembodied virtualm through which users of CMC project themselves into the archive of archives that the internet was bound to become. * A postscript a writing after writing to begin, if such a thing is possible: I wrote a letter to Jacques Derrida a number of years ago, too long ago, about four years ago, as it happens. I do not know if the letter ever reached him.
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At this point, already, we must, of course, pause. When I observe that I do not know if the letter ever reached him, to whom do I refer? Jacques Derrida? The writings that bear this very name lead us to adopt caution at such a suggestion, but it is a note of caution that I would prefer to leave held in abeyance. As we seek to begin, to write in this space and in this time, the goal must be in the rst instance to not get ahead of ourselves, not yet. The simple fact remains, then, that after many years of pausing at the prospect of writing to Derrida, I had nally sought to begin a correspondence. A letter was written. It was sent. Did it arrive? I do not know. Only a few short months later, I learned the terrible news that this man to whom I had addressed this letter was gone. This news produced one certainty: the certain non-response to which Derrida refers in his funeral oration for Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida 1996a, 4). This correspondence had ceased before it began, before the rst response. The irony was not of course lost, of such a palpable proof of what Derrida himself had described in The Post Card as the fatal necessity of going astray of the letter (Derrida 1987, 66). This fatal necessity was, of course, what Derrida was describing in that work as a principle of destinerrance, of a postal principle which holds that a letter has no destination. If the letter is destined at all, it is destined to be errant. Reading The Post Card over again, one is never done being amazed at the lengths to which the work is willing to extend itself and this idea of a postal principle in order to gainsay the nal line of Jacques Lacans Seminar on The Purloined Letter: what the purloined letter, that is, the not delivered letter means is that a letter always arrives at its destination (cited in Derrida 1987, 443). The question to which the present paper addresses itself, yet without wanting to suggest that the answer should be an either/or proposition either Lacan is the facteur of truth or else Derrida is is this: does a postal principle hold true for computer mediated communication? The question might presuppose that there is a form of communication for which the postal principle undoubtedly holds true and which is capable of being differentiated from a form of communication that can be called computer mediated. In other words, the reader might suspect that by asking the question, I suggest that the potential for a postal principle to hold true for one form of communication could be established in a relative measure to another form of communication for which it is already assumed to hold true, namely, communication that predates the advent of computer mediated communication. Despite the anecdote with which this paper begins, and despite the palpable proof that it was said to have offered of the going astray of the letter, the
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related to open architecture networking, the idea of virtual communities, a widespread belief in the disembodied nature of cyberspace, the notion of disinhibition, histories of the computer workstation and its peripherals, GUI design, VR aids, and so on such that the project has rarely provided opportunities to consider the work of any specic thinker in relation to these issues. If two names could be said to have loomed larger than any others in this project to date, it would be those of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. There is no doubt some irony in returning to these two gures most insistently in a project devoted to the study of a recent technological phenomenon, since it is well known that each found at least one not quite so new technology to be quite abhorrent. Heidegger, we know, believed the typewriter to be a loathsome device that tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e. the realm of the word (Heidegger 1992, 81). Levinas, likewise, experienced a profound loss of ease on the telephone, as recounted by Derrida during his funeral oration:
I cannot speak of the interruption without recalling, like many among you no doubt, the anxiety of interruption that I could feel in Emmanuel Levinas when, on the telephone for example, he seemed at each moment to fear being cut off, to fear the silence or disappearance, the without-response, of the other whom he tried to call out to and hold on to with an allo, allo between each sentence, and sometimes even in midsentence. (Derrida 1996a, 7)
Nevertheless, these two gures have on occasion been crucial for my project in ways that are directly relevant to the question at hand. Using Heideggers comments on the fundamental nature of technology as a touchstone, I have argued along the way and in detail in one unpublished essay that the individuals engagement with cyberspace hinges on a fantasy of disembodiment, which I call the projection of a virtualm onto the technologies with which one is engaged in very real and directly embodied ways. What I suggest, in other words, is that the computer user must bypass the readiness to hand of the mouse, keyboard, and so on, in order to construct a fantasy of the invisible breakdown of the technology, which Heidegger posits as the creation of the unfamiliar and, in accordance, the begetting of self-awareness. Using Levinas, I have argued that the notion of the face towards which ethical responsibility is directed before all else has a crucial role in constructing a workable ethics of CMC, despite the obvious point that CMC in direct opposition to face-to-face communication. I contend that in the engagement of the user with a graphical user interface, there is an enjoinder to bypass the constructed fantasy of a breakdown of
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it were, of the postal principle. In My Chances, Derrida comes to terms with the postal principle in part through this gure of the throw: how can I calculate my chances in this address to you, he asks of his audience, mindful that what he sends out will always not arrive at its destination. Yet here this sending and this destination are captured by the gure of the throw, the jet words: the ob-ject is thrown and instead of destination there is only the fall, that is, where the ob-ject happens which is also one of the double meanings of arriver that is invoked in The Post Card, as it also happens to fall, where it should chance to descend from its tra-jectory. To throw is not haphazard; this is where the calculations that precede the throw are brought to bear, assigning a tra-jectory. Derrida assures us of this but then adds that the throw does involve releasing an object unto hazard, luck, or chance. In place of the destination, then, there is only where the object should fall, yet it arrives there by having been sent along a trajectory or course (Derrida 1988, 4) that originates with the hand of the thrower. This is, I submit, the directionality of the postal principle, an orientation of the throw toward which its jets propel it, so to speak, and it is a directionality that has been calculated to oppose this very term calculation here, in My Chances, by virtue of the principle that the object will always happen to fall once it is thrown. Yet in My Chances, Derrida cannot any longer overlook that other jet word so crucial to the Freudian view of the inside and the outside of the human being: pro-jection. Crucially, though, at this moment in My Chances when projection is recognised by Derrida as a movement of throwing outside and ahead of himself (Derrida 1988, 25) that which the subject is assumed to hold inside, he nevertheless avers that through the concept of projection, the scheme of the jet again provides the essential mediation between inside and outside, respecting the boundary between them (Derrida 1988, 26). By reducing pro-jection to the scheme of the jet, glossing the key differences between the prexes pro- and tra-, for example, Derrida neatly draws our attention away from the changing directionality on which the prex surely insists. Rather than a throwing toward, as in the trajectory of the object, projection involves a throwing outside and ahead, implying a movement that has no direction relative to a dened subject or object, nor any specic course from A to B. It is precisely on this concept of projection that I think the phenomenology of CMC hinges in relation to the question of the postal principle. Why? Because the level of engagement between user and interface as I have described it above can be said to constitute nothing more or less than what Freud would call a projection, except that the
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that opposes it to actuality, to effectivity, or to reality? Will we be obliged to continue thinking that there is no thinkable archive for the virtual? For what happens in virtual space and time? It is hardly probable, this mutation is in progress, but it will be necessary, to keep a rigorous account of this other virtuality, to abandon or restructure from top to bottom our inherited concept of the archive. (Derrida 1996b, 667)
On the way to On Touching, though, these impressions regarding the capacity of the new technologies to transform the space-time and reality of the archived event (and of everything that is demarcated by this archive, the entire public and private space of humanity) are occasional detours or deviations from the direction the work is taking toward the three principal theses in which Archive Fever culminates. Also on the way to On Touching, in Echographies of Television, Derrida takes up the challenge presented by these archival impressions: What the accelerated development of teletechnologies, of cyberspace, of the new topology of the virtual is producing is a practical deconstruction of the traditional and dominant concepts of the state and citizen (and thus of the political) as they are linked to the actuality of a territory (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 36). He notes that this taking-place of these teletechnologies as he labels them here is delimiting a new modality of how place is thought and experienced, which amounts to a practice of deconstruction. By the time he returns to complete the work on touching, the practical implications of such observations become clearer: it is no longer the case that the technologies of cyberspace are required to deconstruct in the most pragmatic terms those concepts around which we have previously constructed a world of actualities; rather, the history of Western philosophy is seen as having been out of touch, so to speak, with touch and technology per se. The comments on word processing are therefore no mere diversion but an extension of the arguments about technicity itself. No longer the need to search for a short circuit in the archival logic at the extreme edge of new technologies, that is, in the coupling that opposes actuality to virtuality; instead, the more concrete components of the computer (the hard-drive and the keyboard) enable a demonstration of the capacity for being at once both a system of storage (or permanence) and a system of touch (or immediacy). Does this mean that Derrida has in the past two decades abandoned the concept of the postal principle? This would presume that he had previously accepted or taken hold of the principle, in order that it might be subsequently thrown away according to the new logic of CMC. We need look no further than The Post Card itself to locate a couple of
How apt a description is this of the prosthetic-projected fantasy of the virtualm? Yet here it does its duty on the way to re-inscribing the postal principle: In the beginning, in principle, was the post, and I will never get over it, he afrms later in the note of the same day (Derrida 1987, 29). Perhaps, though, this was always the point of the postal principle: that it needed to be re-inscribed, in a word or in a proper name, for it to be capable of being held, let alone for it to be capable of holding true. My reading of The Post Card hinges on this idea that a postal principle was set up to be vanquished, by virtue of the fact that the initial terms by which it could be vanquished this enormous library are in principle beyond the scope of any single work, yet the principle continues to be articulated as if it holds true by virtue of a process that withdraws from the virtual and into the realm of an actual exchange, these envois.
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Correspondence between a sender and a co-respondent thus becomes a neat analogue for this principle on the verge of failing to be grasped, of vanishing into a terrifying archive, for it can be sustained, if by nothing else, by the continual insistence of the signature, a proper name. Indeed, may we now realise that this attempt on our own part to re-inscribe the postal principle within the realm of CMC was already circumscribed by the insistence of this signature, this proper name Derrida, today? To refer back to my comments about the directionality of the postal principle, it is the proper name after all that provides a guarantee of the A and B of an exchange. Is it merely the case, then, that my question about the holding true of the postal principle in the realm of CMC is already framed by the non-response to which I refer in the opening scene of a letter that had met with the fatal necessity that the postal principle names? We could do worse than conclude on the point that by questioning Derrida, today, we seek to reinscribe the proper name through a writing that comes after writing; that is, to reinscribe that which has already been ex-scribed. Yet I am convinced the stakes are much higher than such an abysmal picture suggests. As we have observed, Derridas articulation of a postal principle was itself already calculated to fail, which is to say perchance that it was pre-destined not to arrive at its destination. Its failure is expressed, of course, in the drift toward a vast network, the worldwide connection, which amounts after all to a terrifying archive (Derrida 1987, 27). This archive of archives is, I contend, where the stakes can be found in questioning the principle of destinerrance, for it is in the daily chore of logging in to the modern worldwide connection that the scene of pre-destined non-arrival played out in the Envois and My Chances has its terrifying analogue. The ghost in the machine, which I call the fantasy of a disembodied virtualm, works by insisting on the possibility of the taking of a place for oneself out there beyond the machinery to which the body is connected, albeit partes extra partes. This is to say that the participant in CMC participates in a radical refusal to think the vast network as archive, by projecting oneself imagined whole, not in parts outside and ahead, into the breach of an interlocution, recast in ones own participatory logic as an A and a B of the exchange. In Rape and the Memex, I have recently argued that a logic of the archive has undergirded the internet from its ideational origins, yet the fantasy of disembodiment underpins the individual users engagement with cyberspace precisely to render this logic invisible. Derrida wrote of the mutation of the archive that would eventually dispense with the opposition of the virtual and the real, removing from us the necessity of the full and effective taking-place
References
Derrida, Jacques (1987), The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1988), My Chances/ Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies, trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 132. Derrida, Jacques (1996a), Adieu, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Critical Inquiry 23, pp. 110. Derrida, Jacques (1996b), Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Derrida, Jacques (2005), On Touching Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler (2002), Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek, Cambridge: Polity Press. Heidegger, Martin (1992), Parmenides, trans. Andr Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, Laurie (2007), Face-Interface, or the Prospect of a Virtual Ethics, Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics, 4.1/2, pp. 4956. Johnson, Laurie (2008), Rape and the Memex, Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. 13, http://blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/refractoryhome/
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000505
Gerasimos Kakoliris
Abstract The aim of my paper is to focus upon those aspects of Derridas relation to language and textual interpretation that have not been adequately dealt with by either proponents of deconstruction, who take Derrida to have effected a total revolution in the way in which we must read texts, or those critics who view deconstruction as having subverted all possible criteria for a valid interpretation leading, thus, to an anarchical textual freeplay. This inadequate approach by both proponents and critics is the result of a failure to consider Derridas deconstructive approach as enacting a process of double reading. This double reading commences with an initial stage or level which seeks to reconstruct a texts authorial intention or its vouloir dire. This initial level then prepares the text, through the identication of authorial or textual intention, for the second stage or level. At this second stage or level, which is the passage to deconstructive reading per se, the blind spots and aporias of the text are set forth. Through this focus upon the process of deconstructive reading as doubling reading, it becomes evident that deconstruction is not as revolutionary as proponents or critics have assumed. For, Derridas initial reading, or the doubling of a texts authorial or textual intention is rmly set within a traditional interpretative form. * For Jacques Derrida, the entirety of the history of western thought, and the texts produced within this tradition, with only some singular exceptions (for example, Nietzsche), are constituted by hierarchical binary oppositions. This hierarchical ordering is produced by the primacy accorded to the term of the opposition related to an originary presence, while the other term is considered as the subordinate
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reproductive reading practices. As Derrida points out in one of his latest texts entitled To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis (1991):
In a protocol that laid down certain reading positions . . . I recalled a rule of hermeneutical method that still seems to me valid for the historian of philosophy. . . namely the necessity of rst ascertaining a surface or manifest meaning . . . the necessity of gaining a good understanding, in a quasischolastic way, philologically and grammatically, by taking into account the dominant and stable conventions, of what Descartes meant on the already so difcult surface of his text, such as it is interpretable according to classical norms of reading: the necessity of gaining this understanding . . . before and in order to destabilize, wherever this is possible and if it is necessary, the authority of canonical interpretations. (Derrida 2001, 84)
The traditional reading (the reproduction of the authorial or textual intention) is then destabilised through the utilisation of all those elements that have refused to be incorporated within it, with the result that the meaning of the text is different from that which its author intends it to say. For example, in Of Grammatology, Derrida writes:
To speak of origin and zero degree in fact comments on Rousseaus declared intention [intention dclare] . . . But in spite of that declared intention, Rousseaus discourse lets itself be constrained by a complexity which always has the form of the supplement of or from the origin. His declared intention is not annulled by this but rather inscribed within a system which it no longer dominates. (Derrida 1976, 243; Derrida 1967a, 345)
Hence, the meanings produced during the rst reading of deconstructive reading become disseminated during the second reading. In other words, during the second reading the text loses its initial appearance of semantic determinacy, organized around the axis of its authorial intention, and is eventually pushed into producing a number of incompatible meanings which are undecidable, in the sense that the reader lacks any secure ground for choosing between them. In Platos Pharmacy, Derrida exhibits the way in which the text of the Phaedrus, despite Platos intention to keep the two opposite meanings of pharmakon separate namely remedy and poison ends up afrming la fois both, thus exhibiting another logic, that of both . . . and (namely, pharmakon is both remedy and poison, both benecent and malecent) (Derrida 1981, 70; Derrida 1972, 87). This, other, logic cannot be incorporated by metaphysics since it nds itself in opposition to the logic of identity and non-contradiction. This logic of the both . . . and, Derrida names the logic of supplementarity [logique
In this double reading or double gesture [double geste] (Derrida 1988, 21; Derrida 1990, 50), Derrida is obliged to use classical interpretative norms and practices and, at the same time, to negate their power to control a text, to thoroughly construe a text as something determinate, and to disseminate the text into a series of undecidable meanings (Abrams 1989, 44). Derridas double interpretive procedure is one which can only subvert a text from the tradition from a position in which its meaning has been held to have a high degree of determinacy. In order for a texts intentional meaning to become destabilised, the text needs to possess a certain stability so that it can be rendered determinate. However, the xity generated by this preliminary procedure is necessarily undermined by Derridas subsequent destabilization of this textual structuration of meaning which precludes the accordance of any (even relative) stability to it.3 It is this shift between the two layers of reading which reveals a tension within this procedure. Hence, despite the fact that he thinks that no communicative action or textual practice is able to prevent the dissemination of meaning a dissemination which is irreducible to polysemy (Derrida 1988, 201; Derrida 1990, 50) or despite all he says about the endless play between concepts, the ssure that diffrance
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effects on the core of presence, the sign which is just a trace, or, putting it in the language of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, despite the fact that the self-identity of the signier conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move (Derrida 1976, 49; Derrida 1967a, 72), Derrida treats authorial or textual intention as something which can be determined univocally. This seems to ow from the necessary prerequisites of deconstruction itself. Deconstruction is installed between a texts intended meaning (its declarative layer) and the text itself (its descriptive layer). Derridas deconstructive reading repeatedly uncovers opposed meanings between what the metaphysical author (for example, Rousseau) wishes to say and what he says without wishing to say it, or between what the author declares and what the text describes without Rousseaus wishing to say it:
He declares what he wishes to say [Il dclare ce quil veut dire], that is to say that articulation and writing are a post-originary malady of language; he says or describes that which he does not wish to say [Il dit ou dcrit ce quil ne veut pas dire]: articulation and therefore the space of writing operates at the origin of language. (Derrida 1976, 229; Derrida 1967a, 326) Or Rousseau would wish [voudrait] the opposition between southern and northern in order to place a natural frontier between different types of languages. However, what he describes [dcrit] forbids us to think it . . . We must measure this gap between the description and the declaration. (Derrida 1976, 21617; Derrida 1967a, 310)4
What Rousseau declares and wishes to say is what is construed by standard reading; what the text ungovernably goes on to say, unbeknownst to the writer, is what gets disclosed by a deeper deconstructive reading. In this context, if a texts authorial intention were not xed and univocal, then it would be difcult for deconstruction to juxtapose against it contradictory elements found in the same text. Thus, contrary to the text as a whole, which Derrida treats as heterogeneous and equivocal, authorial or textual intention is presented as always possessing coherence, homogeneity and as being characterised by a lack of ambiguity. Hence, for example, in Violence and Metaphysics, Derrida explicitly declares that [w]e will refuse to sacrice the selfcoherent unity of intention [lunit dle soi de lintention] to the becoming which then would be no more than pure disorder (Derrida 1978, 84; Derrida 1967b, 125). Despite Derridas claim that the meaning
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never examines the possibility that other interpretations of authorial intention are also possible (without being theoretically able to preclude such a possibility). The aim of this is to protect the effectiveness of the strategy of deconstruction. If Derrida accepted, even potentially, that other interpretations of a texts vouloir-dire were possible, then he could not preclude the possibility that other, non-metaphysical determinations of a texts intentional meaning could be feasible determinations that would not thus be in dire need of deconstruction. This, in turn, would affect his whole narrative about Western philosophy as logocentrism or metaphysics of presence, which is animated by the spirit of an unequivocal interpretation of the texts of the philosophical tradition, thereby depriving it of much of its credibility. Moreover, if he conceded the possibility of the existence of other plausible interpretations, either metaphysical or not (although this is something that he could not know in advance), then the deconstruction of merely one interpretation out of this potential plethora of plausible interpretations would have a far more limited signicance and effectiveness. The degree of certainty about a texts wants-to-say [vouloir-dire] that deconstruction requires, is possible only if authorial meanings are pure, solid, self-identical facts which can be used to anchor the work. However, this way of conceiving meaning is in direct opposition to deconstruction, for which, meaning is impossible to determine in terms of a xed entity or substance. An authors intention is itself a complex text, which can be debated, translated and variously interpreted.6 It is remarkable that Derrida, despite the way in which he conceives the constitution of linguistic meaning as a differential game [jeu] of signs without beginning and end,7 despite the fact that he adduces this kind of constitution in order to justify the deconstruction of authorial or textual intention, seems paradoxically to share the prejudgement that philosophical texts, at least if only at an initial level, are integrated wholes, as if the unity of the work resides in the authors all pervasive intention. However, there is, in fact, no reason why the author should not have had several mutually contradictory intentions, or why her intention may not have been somehow self-contradictory. This is actually a possibility that Derrida does not consider at all. The way in which authorial intentions appear in texts does not necessarily form a consistent whole, and it may be unwise to rest upon this assumption too heavily, particularly if one speaks, as Derrida does, about intention as only an effect. For example, in Limited Inc a b c . . . , Derrida calls for the substitution . . . of intentional effect for intention [deffet intentionnel intention] (Derrida 1988, 66; Derrida 1990, 128). Also,
References
Abrams, M. H. (1989), Construing and Deconstructing, Deconstruction: A Critique, ed. Rajnath, London: Macmillan. Bernasconi, Robert (1992), No More Stories, Good or Bad: de Mans Criticisms of Derrida on Rousseau, Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood, Oxford: Blackwell. Burke, Sean (1992), The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Critchley, Simon (1992), Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Oxford: Blackwell. Derrida, Jacques (1967a), De la Grammatologie, Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1967. Derrida, Jacques (1967b), Lcriture et la diffrence, Collection Essais, Paris: ditions de Seuil. Derrida, Jacques (1972a), La dissmination, Collection Essais, Paris: ditions de Seuil. Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1981), Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, London: The Athlone Press. Derrida, Jacques (1988), Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber, Evaston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1990), Limited Inc, Paris: Les ditions de Minuit.
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Derrida, Jacques (1992), This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (2001), To Do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kakoliris, Gerasimos (2004), Jacques Derridas Double Deconstructive Reading: A Contradiction in Terms?, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 35: 3, pp. 28392.
Notes
1. Derrida calls this initial reading that deconstruction enacts on the text, dominant interpretation [interprtation dominante] (Derrida, 1988, 143; Derrida 1990, 265). 2. Some other critical readers of Derrida who have also described deconstructive reading as double reading are Robert Bernasconi in No More Stories, Good or Bad: de Mans Criticism of Derrida on Rousseau, 147 and M. H. Abrams in Construing and Deconstructing, 38. 3. For this contradiction, see Kakoliris 2004, 28392. 4. See also, Derrida 1976, 200; 238; 242; 245; 246 and Derrida 1967a, 286; 338; 344; 348; 349. 5. Derridas ungenerous interpretation of Rousseaus intention is also underscored by Sean Burke, who, in the Death and Return of the Author, writes: That there might be a speculative side to the Essay, that Rousseau might be asking that we chance a journey to the origin of languages, and in the expectation of discovering all sorts of things on the way, is never taken into account. Rather the text must always and everywhere be interpreted with an ungenerous, and intractable literality (Burke 1992, 146). 6. See Derrida 1988, 143; Derrida 1990, 265. 7. Derrida, in Of Grammatology, denes play as follows: One could call play the absence of the transcendental signied as limitless of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1976, 50; Derrida 1967a, 73. Also, in Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida mentions: The absence of the transcendental signied extends the domain and the play of signication innitely (Derrida 1978, 280; Derrida 1967b, 411). Strangely enough, no one of the aforementioned positions seems to have, for Derrida, any implications for the way in which he understands the doubling of authorial or textual intention by deconstructive reading during its initial phase. 8. To the question, does the doubling commentary, in practice, really differ from other traditional reconstructions of a texts authorial intentions? the answer would be rather no. Derrida seems paradoxically to agree with it: And you are right in saying that these practical implications for interpretation are not so threatening to conventional modes of reading (Derrida 1988, 147; Derrida 1990, 271). Although Derrida, in Signature, Event, Context claims that [w]riting is read; it is not the site, in the last instance, of a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth, however, the reading-writing that the doubling commentary enacts is, in practice, clearly orientated towards such a hermeneutic deciphering or decoding that Derrida rejects (Derrida 1988, 21; Derrida 1990, 50). 9. I would like to thank Dr Peter Langford for his invaluable help.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000517
Marguerite La Caze
Abstract Derridas purpose in Death Penalties (2004), is to show how both arguments in favour of capital punishment, exemplied by Kants, and arguments for its abolition, such as those of Beccaria, are deconstructible. He claims that never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty. (2004, 146) Derrida also asks how it is possible to abolish the death penalty in a way that is based on principle, that is universal and unconditional, and not because it has become not only cruel but useless, insufciently exemplary? (2004, 137) In my paper, I examine Derridas claim about the lack of systematic opposition to the death penalty on the part of philosophers and suggest an answer to his question concerning the possibility of a universal and unconditional opposition to capital punishment. * Derridas purpose in Death Penalties (2004), a dialogue with Elisabeth Roudinesco, is to show how both arguments in favour of capital punishment, exemplied by Kants argument in The Metaphysics of Morals (1996), and arguments for its abolition, such as those of Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments (1964), are deconstructible. In the course of his discussion of arguments for the death penalty, Derrida claims that never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty (2004, 146). In relation to abolition, Derrida asks how it is possible to abolish the death penalty in a way that is based on principle, that is universal and unconditional, and not because it has become not only cruel but useless, insufciently exemplary? (2004, 137). The difculty
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here is his view that such an approach is itself deconstructible, thus appearing to leave the abolitionist in an untenable position. In my paper, I examine Derridas claim about the lack of systematic opposition to the death penalty on the part of philosophers and suggest an answer to his question concerning the possibility of a universal and unconditional opposition to capital punishment.
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assertion of the need to question this exception is based on the inconsistency of having such an exception. He links this sovereign exception to the possibility of bringing leaders in general to trial, and notes that there seems to be a connection between the trials of heads of state and the rejection of the death penalty in international criminal trials. The implication is that once the death penalty is not considered, it becomes possible to try sovereigns for crimes. 5. Finally, and most importantly, Derrida points to an inconsistency in Kants application of the idea of respect for persons, which Kant claims is compatible with the death penalty (Derrida 2004, 15052).8 Kant believes that we can respect a person and execute them by avoiding barbaric punishments. In contrast, Derrida points out that we cannot show there is no cruelty in the death penalty. Kants inconsistency on this point needs to be emphasised. He argues in The Doctrine of Virtue that there are some punishments that dishonour humanity itself due to their cruelty (Kant 1996, 6; 463). These, he says, are worse than the loss of life or possessions and cause spectators to feel shame. Furthermore, he states that we should never break out into complete contempt and denial of any worth to a vicious human being; for on this supposition he could never be improved, and this is not consistent with the idea of a human being, who as such (as a moral being) can never lose entirely his predisposition to the good (Kant 1996, 6; 464). If we take this idea seriously, then capital punishment is not consistent with the idea of a human being, because it both denies that a human being can improve and deprives them of the possibility of so improving. Perhaps it can also be shown that the death penalty itself is cruel, and that to take someones life away is cruel. Much more could be said concerning the deconstructibility of Kants argument. For the moment it is sufcient to show that there are serious difculties with the attempt to provide principled support for the death penalty. Are there similar difculties with opposition to it?
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opposed to these as well. Legitimate self-defense, if legitimate, need not be opposed. Derrida wishes to distinguish some state-sanctioned killings from the death penalty strictly speaking. Thus, the Shoah, Derrida argues, cannot be understood in relation to the death penalty, because there was no semblance of legality, such as a trial. Nor can the Shoah be thought of as punishment for a crime. It may also be wrong to speak of the death penalty when there is no ofcial announcement, as that is required by European law (Derrida 2004, 154). Countries wish to retain the right to invoke the death penalty in certain particular cases and circumstances, and this is why, Derrida argues, many international declarations concerning a right to life are only advisory and recommend that the death penalty be an exception or should be practised according to certain procedures (Derrida 2004, 153). This is another sense in which opposition to the death penalty is conditional, in that even those countries that do not have it do not dare to proscribe it in other countries and bow to the authority of those states who practise it. In the next section I examine unconditional opposition to the death penalty.
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is not cruel, or that once a non-cruel method has been devised then there is no reason to be against capital punishment.14 Of course, another way to argue, as I suggested earlier, is to show that death or being killed or being deprived of life is cruel in itself. Sovereignty, according to Derrida, is dened by this possibility of making a decision over the life or death of subjects (thus being above the law) or the ability to make an exception for itself (Derrida 2004, 144). He believes that to properly question the death penalty we need also to question the sovereignty of the sovereign: one cannot again place the death penalty in question in a radical, principled, unconditional way without contesting or limiting the sovereignty of the sovereign (Derrida 2004, 144). The implication is that the power of the sovereign over life or death has to be taken away in order to ensure that the death penalty cannot be invoked by them. Questioning the power of life and death, the states monopoly on violence (Derrida 2002a, 268) is to question sovereignty.15 He believes that sovereignty is questioned in Europe, writing all the old states of Europe . . . have at the same time abolished the death penalty and begun an ambiguous process that, without putting an end to nation-state sovereignty, exposes it in any case to an unprecedented crisis or puts it back in question (Derrida 2002a, 262). Abolishing the death penalty limits the sovereignty of the state to some extent. In the case of democracies, Derrida notes that sovereign power can be transferred to the people (Derrida 2004, 144). In the US, the constitutional right to bear arms undermines the states monopoly on violence. In this case, Derrida might suggest that this transfer of the right to violence transfers sovereign power to the people and makes it more likely that they kill others. One could consistently argue that sovereignty should be limited in this respect in the case of both the state and individuals. In Psychoanalysis Searches the State of its Soul, Derrida simply refers to an unconditional without sovereignty, and thus without cruelty, which is no doubt a very difcult thing to think and links it to other impossibles such as hospitality, the gift, and forgiveness (Derrida 2002a, 276). Thus he indicates that unconditional abolition has a similar structure to these other unconditionals. How does unconditional abolition compare to other unconditional concepts such as unconditional hospitality or forgiveness (Derrida 2001)? It is difcult to see how in the case of capital punishment the conditional can temper the unconditional as it does in the case of hospitality by limiting it, for example. That approach would imply that we should accept the death penalty in some cases. This appears to be an unwelcome implication
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place where forgiveness is part of the law is in the sovereigns right to grant clemency. Otherwise forgiveness and punishment are of two distinct orders. I think that even in this case the sovereign does not have to forgive when they pardon. Perhaps a better way of thinking about this issue of the kind of attitudes involved in abolition is that abolishing the death penalty involves renouncing revenge. While Kant tries to separate capital punishment from revenge, Derridas suggestion that such a separation is tenuous at best is well-founded (Derrida 2004, 150). De Beauvoir is remarkably honest in connecting the death penalty with desires for revenge (Derrida 2004, 247).17 We should also reconsider the punishment of life in prison, Roudinesco proposes (Derrida 2004, 161). I believe she is right to recommend that concern about the death penalty should be related to concern about prison reform, punishment, and justice in general. Opposition to the death penalty should include opposition to targeted assassinations, linked to opposition to killing for political purposes, and tied to efforts to limit killing in war. Unconditional abolition should be universal, so held to apply in all countries and should question both state sovereignty over life and death and the power of non-state actors to choose the death of others in such cases as assassination and terrorist killings. Unconditional abolition does not have to be opposed to all killing, such as killing in self-defence or killing in wars. The deconstructibility of unconditional abolition is a contingent rather than a necessary one.
References
Arendt, Hannah (1994), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin. Arendt, Hannah (1998), The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beccaria, Cesare (1964), Of Crimes and Punishments, The Column of Infamy, Allessandro Manzoni, trans. by Kenelm Forster and Jane Grigson. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 4552. Bernasconi, Robert (2002), A Love that is Stronger than Death: Sacrice in the Thought of Levinas, Heidegger, and Bloch, Angelaki, 7:2, pp. 916. Blumenthal, Ralph (2007), Not the Killer, but Still Facing a Date with the Executioner, New York Times, 30 August. Camus, Albert (1960), Reections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin OBrien, New York: Knopf, pp. 175234. Caputo, John; Dooley, Mark and Michael J. Scanlon (eds) (2001), Questioning God, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. De Beauvoir, Simone (2004), An Eye for an Eye, Philosophical Writings, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 24560.
Notes
1. I would like to thank audiences at the Derrida Today Conference in Sydney and the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference in Montral for helpful comments and questions, as well as Damian Cox for discussion of an earlier version. I am also grateful to the Australian Research Council for support during preliminary research for this paper.
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2. Derrida discusses Platos support for capital punishment in the laws in 2002b, 1923. See Plato (1999, Laws X, 907910d). Derrida also notes that Rousseau is unusual in separating sovereignty from the exercise of the condemnation of criminals. Rousseau writes: Condemnation of criminals is a right the sovereign can confer but not exercise himself (1968, 79). 3. See Camus (1960). The key phrase here is that philosophers have not opposed the death penalty qua philosophers. However, Derridas separation of Camus essay on the death penalty and his philosophical writing merits further discussion, given that his essays and literary writings are not clearly distinguishable from his philosophy. Its also odd that Derrida would make such a sharp distinction in this case. 4. See Kaplan (2000) for a discussion of Brasillachs trial. 5. Lex talionis refers to the idea of an eye for an eye, or like punishment for like crime, from Leviticus 24: 1722. Bernasconi argues that for Levinas, we can only justify killing in defense of another (2002). 6. John Stuart Mill also, disappointingly, argues against abolition (1988, 26672). 7. The idea of holding people responsible for crimes they were accomplices to is prevalent in states in the U.S. and the death penalty is used in these cases in Texas, for example (Blumenthal, 2007). 8. Derrida also raises the question of whether we know that criminals are fully responsible for their actions (2004, 152). 9. Much of the debate in the US still concerns these issues. (See Dow, 2006, Liptak, 2007, and Greenhouse, 2008, for example.) 10. Derrida also makes this point in 2002b, 23. 11. Derrida does not associate his own opposition to the death penalty with opposition to abortion, suggesting that is sometimes a Christian fundamentalist position (2004, 140). 12. This inconsistency has been noted in relation to the former and to a certain extent the current Australian governments lack of condemnation of the death penalty for the Bali bombers in Indonesia (Zwartz, 2008). 13. One could ask whether pleasure is necessarily taken in cruelty, an issue I do not have the space to discuss here. 14. Derrida mentions that some states in America decided that lethal injection was not cruel or unusual punishment (2004, 157). 15. See Force of Law (1992) for Derridas discussion of the founding violence of the state. 16. See my discussion of the workings of hospitality and forgiveness in La Caze, 2004 and 2006. 17. De Beauvoir maintains that human beings have a spiritual appetite for vengeance that is a metaphysical requirement (2000, 247).
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000529
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Abstract This paper explores the way that Elizabeth Presas artworks respond to Jacques Derridas thought. By examining how the particularity (the beside) and its supplements (the besides) operate in Presas works, it is shown how this movement between beside and besides is also central to Derridas thought. * Barely four years after Derridas death, I was in Readings bookshop in Melbourne and I noticed that for the rst time the books on the shelf about Derrida outnumbered the books bearing Derridas name as their author. The ratio was almost two to one. Beside Derridas own writing, numerous monographs, collections of articles and introductions were waiting, like friends, even though there are no friends: perhaps because after death there can only be mourners. Besides Derridas writing, the others writings, which respond to Derrida by continuing in his aftermath, and also by discontinuing or deforming his thought. Oscillating between a derrida industry and the processes of mourning and response that constitute part of his legacy and promise, all these books showed that there is no security in advance about the tenure of the reply.1 The most that can be hoped for is the possibility of a reply, the possibility of being beside the other in such a way as to be besides the other. Beside the nite presentation of singularity inscribes, and is inscribed within, a besides its innite supplement, parergon, or diffrance, to list but a few of its names that demand still others to come. *** Beside the writing, a form. Beside the amorphous hieroglyphs on the white page, the morphe. Elizabeth Presas rst work on, about, with,
Derridas back-up copy of what he was writing at that moment is taken up by Presa for the construction of a series of kimonos. The alphabets characters are no longer read but rather folded into a garment that both dresses up the text into a visual extravagance and, simultaneously, undresses it of its purpose to become a book. The folding, Presas touching of Derridas words assuming that the possessive is appropriate for an electronic back-up in a oppy disk, while noting that Presas printout challenges the straight-forwardness of such an assumption is the possibility contained in the promise of singularity, it is the enactment of that possibility. Presa beside Derrida, and also Derrida beside Presa. The verblessness of this touching disables any hierarchies in this contact. The rst is second and the second rst. Neither purely seen, nor purely read. Dressed and undressed. Side by side. Amorphous form.3 *** Besides the verbless touching between Presa and Derrida that the work enacts, there also arises a meditation on the limits of this amorphous form. The beside lets a thinking of the besides take place. This besides is gestured towards by Presa with reference to Edmond Jabs insistence
Figure 1. Kimono from Presas exhibition The Four Horizons of the Page (2000). Source: photo by Elizabeth Presa.
Besides the book, this also applies to art. In a reading of principally Kants aesthetics as presented in the third Critique, this besides is called parergon by Derrida. In his close, attentive reading of Kants text, Derrida early on points to a fundamental indecision permeating the Kantian discourse: Common sense is constantly presupposed by the Critique, which nevertheless holds back the analysis of it (Derrida 1987, 35). In summarizing his reading of The Analytic of the Beautiful, Derrida asserts:
In the fourth and last moment of the judgment of taste (modality), the value of exemplarity appeals to common sense (Gemeinsinn). The rule of the exemplary judgment attracting universal adhesion must remain beyond all enunciation. So common sense does not have the common meaning [sens] of what we generally call common sense: it is not intellectual, not an understanding. What then is its status? Kant refuses to decide here, or even to examine (we neither want not are able to examine here) whether such a common sense exists (if there is one) as a constitutive principle of experience or else whether, this time in a regulatory and no constitutive capacity, reason commands us to produce (hervorbringen) in ourselves a common sense for more elevated ends. What remains thus suspended is the question of whether the aesthetic principle of pure taste, in as much as it requires universal adhesion, has a specic place corresponding to a power of its own, or whether it is still an idea of (practical) reason, an idea of the unanimous universal community which orients its idealizing process. As always, so long as such an idea remains on the horizon, moral law allies itself with empirical culturalism to dominate the eld. (Derrida 1987, 11516)
Judging something as beautiful exceeds its own enunciation in the sense that it is a universal judgement, shared by all. This by all is the excess and is identied with common sense, which is explicitly dissociated from the judgements of understanding. Is this beauty, then, self-subsistent, autonomous, or is it maybe that which enables, in a regulatory . . . capacity, the creation of a community? Derrida does not castigate Kant for the failure to answer this ambiguity. On the contrary, Derrida indicates that the besides as the common sense of a community nds its proper excess not in itself, but rather in the double bind that
This is where the importance of the animal in Derridas work arises. Beside the idealized communitys culture, there is sericulture. Beside the artist, the sericulturist. Beside the human, the animal. The others unassimilable identity effects ones own self-differentiation. Presas second artwork in response to Derrida tackles this constellation of ideas. The installation A Silkroom of Ones Own (Linden Gallery, Melbourne, 28 September to 11 November 2007) makes an explicit reference to the last few pages of Derridas A Silkworm of Ones Own, where Derrida recalls how he cultivated silkworms as a child in Algeria. At one corner of the room there is an old display cabinet in which silkworms are cultivated. A veil of silk hangs in front of the large window on the other side, softening veiling the bright light (see gure 2).
Figure 2. The silkworm cabinet photographed behind the silk veil from Presas exhibition, A Silkroom of Ones Own (2007). Source: photo by Dimitris Vardoulakis.
No possibility is entertained here that the silkworms will reproduce or represent anyones work. The silkworms are unlike the proverbial monkey who, reason had it can the monkey be allowed by reason to be referred to by a personal pronoun, a he or a she? that if it typed for an innite number of years, it would produce by accident Shakespeares works. This fable about the monkey presupposes a plenitude of reason within which the animal is assimilated. Presa and Derridas animals, and their silkworms in particular their particular silkworms, those in a boys bedroom and those in the care of an artist question this presupposition. They inscribe the irrational within the rational in such a way as to show that they can never be separated. The image here recalls the silkworm itself, as Derrida observes in Rogues:
I would be tempted to take somewhat seriously this metaphor of the cocoon . . . that objectivizes, animalizes, indeed naturalizes a nonnatural movement: reason spontaneously envelops itself in the web and threads that it itself weaves, after having itself secreted them like a silkworm. The threads
According to Derrida, reason animalizes itself. When reason is beside the animal, there is a reversal. Instead of the truth remaining a prerogative of reason and the animal being used as a metaphor in this context, the imagery is here reversed: reason resembles the physis of a silkworm. The animal is at the core of reasons potential. The irrational is indissociable from the rational dictating its economy of veiling and unveiling. *** Besides the animal, there is the human. The title of the exhibit A Silkroom of Ones Own could be understood as a misnomer, since a number of friends from around the world sent email messages that Presa transcribed with a pencil on the white walls of the Gallery beside Derridas own text about his silkworms. Besides the artist and the silkworms, besides Derrida and the silk veils, there are also communiqus by Geoff Bennington, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alexander Garcia Dttmann. The nature of these messages varies. For instance, on 4 November Nancy wrote:
Are you really waiting for messages oh my dear and unknown worms? I am not sure you really wait. I think you wait for silk to write messages yourselves. . . . Id like very much to get some answer from you! If you are too busy to do that, please ask Elizabeth to do it for you!
Nancy asks: can an animal wait? This question echoes Derridas own question: can an animal feel shame? And it also echoes Augustine, who in the Confessions describes God as that one from whom one waits for an answer but who never replies. But besides these echoes, there is also a humorous edge, coupled with affection for Derrida, Presa, and the silkworms themselves.5 The registers proliferate. The silkworms are for Dttmann a prompt to think about sexuality. The message dated 10 October asks:
What if the decision to be gay were a decision to remain virginal like a silk worm? A lubricant consisting of silk worms that gather around the erect penis and allow it to slide in and out while causing additional excitement by moving in a sinuous manner.
Figure 3. The transcribed messages on the wall of the gallery from Presa, A Silkroom of Ones Own (2007). Source: photo by Dimitris Vardoulakis.
Dttmann asks: If to call someone virginal is to inscribe their sexual activity within a moral register, can an animal not be virginal? Can a gay person not be virginal when in touch with the animalistic sexual desire? And besides this problematic, Dttmann also asks Presa: will you allow such a discourse to be written on the white virginal? walls of the gallery space? And more generally, can an artwork not be virginal?6 Benningtons messages are different from Nancys or Dttmanns. Presa had rst contacted Bennington, writing on 17 September:
As the translator of Veils I was wondering if you would be interested in writing, a little each day or every few days, something that could become part of the installation? The idea being that as the translator of the original French text into English, you would, in effect, continue the process of translation as a form of generation. . . like the silkworms themselves!
The challenge, then, was to continue the text, to continue the process of translation, to let the besides unfold. Remember that, besides being a translator, Bennington had also collaborated with Derrida, most notably in the writing of the parallel text of the volume that was
Can one help but feel a jealous admiration for such a writing that has the capacity to unfold its possibility besides other writings the drawing of childhood memory, Derridas writing, and so on and in that way extend the other writings possibilities? Beside writing, more writing. Beside the beside always a besides. Can one help but feel part of this beside(s) which is both the condition of the possibility and the enactment of writing itself? *** Beside(s) names two neither/nors. The ontological status of the relation it allows is neither regulatory nor constitutive. And this relation itself is presented as neither constative nor as performative. This double matrix allows the interplay between singularity and repetition. Is this a circuit that is, in Benningtons words, so self-satisfying and self-satised, almost smug, like the drawn silkworm itself? My contention is that Presas works are anything but. I agree with Kevin Hart, that Presas work neither construes Derrida as a cultural monument nor ironizes the process of monumentalizing (Hart 2001, 174). Self-satisfaction would entail a halting of the neither/nors. It would be a state in which the neither/nors would function as a justication, an alibi, or a grounding of a libidinal economy. Conversely, residing on the beside(s), Presas works are restless; restlessly dissatised, because restlessly probing, they resist nality. They persist because they are without a horizon of expectation, other than the promise of their persistence.
References
Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida (1993), Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hantai, Simon, with Jean Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida (2001), Connaissance des textes: Lecture dun manuscrit illisible, Paris: Editions Galilee. Hart, Kevin (2001), Horizons and Fold: Elizabeth Presa, Contretemps, 2: 1715. Jabs, Edmond (1990), The Book of Resemblances, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1987), The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1992), The Other Heading: Reections on Todays Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, Jacques (2005), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dttmann, Alexander Garcia (2005), Verwisch die Spuren: Mit Bildern und Arbeiten von Elizabeth Presa, Zurich: diaphanes. Malabou, Catherine (2006), Another Possibility, Research in Phenomenology, 36: 11529. Presa, Elizabeth. (2003), The Poetics of the Book in Sculpture, Ph.D. dissertation, submitted at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University, awarded in 2003.
Notes
1. And the same point can be made about all the Derrida conference, symposia and seminars in the past few years. The presented paper was written for one such conference, titled Derrida Today (Sydney, 1012 July 2008), organized by the editors of the homonymous journal, Nicole Anderson and Nick Manseld. 2. I believe that the detail about Derrida ying to Sydney is wrong; in fact Derrida was ying to Auckland, New Zealand. 3. Derridas own response to The Four Horizons of the Page can be found in his postscript to Hantai with Nancy and Derrida, Connaissance des textes. 4. The passages in quotation marks are from Jabs, The Book of Resemblances, 13. 5. Nancy has written on two other exhibitions by Presa. See http://elizabethpresa. com/nancy.pdf and http://elizabethpresa.com/marie.pdf (date accessed 10 May 2008). 6. Dttmann has written the catalogue for another exhibition by Presa; see http://elizabethpresa.com/alex.pdf. But, even more importantly, in Verwisch die Spuren Dttmann has used Presa works as a prompt for his own reections. 7. Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1993). See References.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000530
Blair McDonald
Abstract This paper will address the political and ethical ramications of Derridas concern for friendship in relation to his concerns with the future of democracy, rights of hospitality and cosmopolitics. The questions addressed read as follows: Is there a way we can get beyond this stance which not only consolidates a friendship of the perhaps with a friendship of the promise, but also implicates their consolidation with the very future of what we today call democracy? Is there a way in which we can substantiate something more than a romanticized call for a future integration of friendship and democracy while avoiding the pitfalls of on one hand, substantiating a model of friendship for politics or, on the other, offering a disguised and nave return to a metaphysics of friendship as the saving grace of social unity? Through a close reading of the conclusion to Politics of Friendship as well as his concerns with friendship in Spectres of Marx and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason it will be argued that Derridas insistence on the future of friendship is bound up with the notion of an ethical promise to the thought of friendship as the condition for its political and ethical relevance.
* This paper takes its point of departure from the concluding claims of Jacques Derridas Politics of Friendship where he ends with what appears to be an anticipatory lament for the future of friendship and the future of democracy (Derrida 1994; Derrida 1997). In these nal pages where perhaps we had anticipated moving one step closer to the truth and meaning of friendship and further, a better understanding of its place within the political and ethical concerns of our current constellation of democracy, he proceeds to mark friendships future as one of both promise and uncertainty. Ironically while the Politics of
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Friendship comes as Derridas remarkably thorough consideration of the philosophical heritage of the question of friendship and fraternity from Aristotle to Cicero, Michel Montaigne to Carl Schmitt, as much as he closes in on the question of friendship, in the end, the political and ethical future of the question remains open-ended. Derrida leaves us uncertain as to what remains of the concept, how we might address something like the future of friendship and what responsibility one ought to have with regards to the politics and ethics of this futural demand. In what follows I will address the political and ethical ramications of Derridas concern for friendship in order to ask the following: Is there a way we can get beyond this stance which not only consolidates a friendship of the perhaps with a friendship of the promise, but also implicates their consolidation with the very future of what we today call democracy? Is there a way in which we can substantiate something more than a romanticized call for a future integration of friendship and democracy while avoiding the pitfalls of on one hand, substantiating a model of friendship for politics or, on the other, offering a disguised and nave return to a metaphysics of friendship as the saving grace of social unity? Let us return to the particular reverberations of his call to a friendship of the promise which dominates his conclusion in the Politics of Friendship, and appears here and there in his work Spectres of Marx (Derrida 1994) and Rogues (Derrida 2005). Recalling the concluding chapter of Politics of Friendship, For the First Time in the History of Humanity, Derrida envisions a new ethics of social relations modeled on an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness (Derrida 1997, 306). Yet it is not clear how the values which govern this particular ethical viewpoint could serve as a model for a coming politics. Furthermore we are left uncertain how this call to immeasurability coalesces with the question of political commonality since Derridas work leaves open the ways in which a concept of friendship could promise and thus found a new conception of political relations, and further, what kind of subject would correspond to this characterisation. While Derrida argues that what haunts the canon of discourses on friendship is the impossibility of not only delimiting what is friendship but who corresponds to the gure of the friend, it remains impossible to gleam from his work who this future friend-subject is; how it could be thought in conjunction with a new thought and experience of democracy, and where the relation between justice, friendship and politics can be made possible independent of an aporetic social economy.
First what ought to be claried is that I interpret Derrida to suggest that this to come of democracy does not anticipate a coming presence of total democracy that would nally live up to and be equal to the term. Derrida offers no such hope. This is not to say that his conception of democracy is hopeless. It is rather that the messianic impulse of his notion of democracy neither anticipates nor expects an eventual and total coming to presence of democracy at a future time. Second, what
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must be understood about the to come is not only its innite deferral and dispersed sense of being-such but its inexhaustible quality. When Derrida writes in so far as it remains he is making a claim on the inexhaustible coming of the concept; in other words, that it is not of the order of accomplishment is not its defeat, but what remains, even if what remains is not of the order of either a substantial or metaphysical nature. No practise of democracy could assume the truth of democracy in action or in word. The promise of its future is not a question of its becoming present, but the question of a becoming present which complicates the time and space in which we assume something to be thought present, arrived and thus there as such. In Simon Critchleys essay The Others Decision in Me (What are the Politics of Friendship?) the question of friendship is framed less around the concern of presentability qua concept and more on the question of friendship beyond the limits of fraternity and the reconciliation of ethics and politics. The difculty for Critchley is not so much Derridas concern with fraternity but the place of friendship in political affairs and how their interrelation situates the questions of ethics (Critchley 1999, 254). Like Derrida, while Critchley recognizes the lack of closure in Derridas work he is unable to imagine the passage between an ethics and politics that could serve as a foundation for a coming political or a politics that could best serve this negotiation without becoming normative and thus hostile to the question of particularity in friendship. Unable to resolve the problem of normativity he asks: Must it be the case that there is no passage assur between friendship and politics, no deduction from one to the other, no foundation? (Critchley 1999, 272). Without a solution to this question of foundation, Critchley returns to the question of the decision as the means by which a new ethics and politics of friendship can be attempted. He asks: might there not be a hiatus between friendship and politics that far from inducing paralysis or resignation, perhaps opens onto an experience of the political decision? (Critchley 1999, 272). Although Critchley remains uncertain as to what the decisive content of this passage between friendship and politics would be, he attempts to unite a Levinasian conception of ethics as hospitality with Derridas suggestion that the ethical is at one and the same time the performance of a political intervention. Rightly Critchley asks whether it is possible for an ethics of hospitality to found the sphere of politics and law (Critchley 1999, 275), but is unable to overcome the difculty of deducing a politics from an ethics. Nonetheless Critchleys conclusions are important because instead of nding a passage out of this said paralysis he claims that the very indeterminacy of the passage from ethics to politics entails
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Weber makes a similar concern. For Weber, Derridas work is not merely a question of philosophical subtleties (Weber 2007, 327). Given the complications of presence his work performs, she suggests that it is an attempt to move within and out of words, discourses and institutions that delimit in what ways a politics can be thought possible. Derridas work, she offers, persists in uncovering the fragility and aporias of this suspension, its risks and its change, the potential of its arrivance and aimance, by meticulously deconstructing the layers of asserted foundation, origin or presence that have been heaped onto it (Weber 2007, 329). In agreement with Weber, this is the inexhaustible burden and test for the implementation of a politics thought and experienced otherwise. Similarly, stressing the productive nature of this struggle, Richard Beardsworth argues that Derridas philosophy only makes sense politically in terms of the relation between aporia and decision and neither in terms of a unilateral philosophy of decision: in other words, aporia is the very locus in which the political force of deconstruction is to be found (Thomas 2006, 158). The contradictions Derrida draws out of things are an afrmation of faith in the concepts survival and enrichment. In this way John Caputo is right to contend that there is no non-ironic way to express the faith in deconstruction, no expression of a deconstructive faith that does not preserve an ironic distance between itself and the name in which it puts its faith (Caputo 2004, 56). If there is indeed a cohesive politics at work in Derridas texts it is still of the order of work but not a work that solicits a return to a metaphysical conception of the political whereby the truth of its arrival and presence are thought under eventual expectation. Instead Derrida ought to be read as trying to locate a passage between the demand and the promise to improve democracy while remaining hospitable to its becoming different; to work within the impossibilities of its becoming present while all the while engaged with its perfectibility in the absence of its total accomplishment. Inherent to democracy and I contend any concept for that matter, is its inexhaustible, non-appropriable difference at the limit of its said identity. This is the paradoxical register of Derridas account. Whether it be a question of democracy or friendship there is no identity without a relation of the non-identical, withinwithout, as the structuring and un-structurable limit of what it is. Derrida does not say it like this, but his point is that democracy remains something of a question that marks its essence. From this perspective it is the concepts difference to and within itself which means that its identity qua concept remains resistant to the very foreclosure it is out to delimit. While there are parallels to be drawn between the
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McQuillan 2007, 52). Like Derrida, Nancy concludes his concerns with a question: Are we equal to the task of conceiving a democracy in this way, with such a degree of intensity? (Nancy cited in McQuillan 2007, 53). While this question opens up and poses the risk of re-imagining the political as the site of the incommensurable it remains to be seen how such a politics can be put into practise, and what the nature of Nancys faith is aiming toward. Here I suggest that the intensity of Nancys question is to be read alongside Derridas frustrated attempt to imagine a politics of friendship that makes a break with theological and humanist ideologies of social unity. In a question that Derrida himself cannot come to answer he poses the following:
Is it possible without setting off loud protests on the part of militants to think and to live the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of a certain ahumanity, in absolute separation, beyond or below the commerce of gods and man? And what politics could still be founded on this friendship which exceeds the measure of man without becoming a theologem? Would it still be a politics? (Derrida 1997, 297)
Like Nancy, Derrida entertains the possibility of separating a thinking of friendship from a humanitarian impulse and wonders whether such a divorcing can still be rendered recognisable. What is signicant about Derridas question is that it once again suggests the impossibility of divorcing friendship from its current political framework without marking a return to the religious or a humanist metaphysics. A politics of friendship imagined in separation to discourses of humanity would not take place in the space of the purely political. It would instead risk placing itself within a theologico-metaphysical tradition which would reproduce the problem of presence central to Derridas concern with discourses of political community. Consequently, the problem remains how to work within and beyond the trace of these traditions while making a call for another politics without surrendering to a salvationary messianism or a totalizing model of social relations (Derrida 1994, 94). These concerns take on an added signicance given Derridas call in Spectres of Marx for what he calls a New International. What I would like to call Derridas humanitarian intervention is his call for both a profound transformation, projected over a long term, of international law, of its concepts, and its eld of intervention (Derrida 1994, 105) and elsewhere, more specically, the imagining of a politics in divorce from current discursive underpinnings of sociopolitical belonging. The play I invoke here on the term humanitarian intervention comes about in response to Derridas discussion of the
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how political and ethical responsibility would operate in the face of socalled anonymous relations and subjects. Of course, this point must be nuanced by recognizing the problem of the opposite scenario as well; that is, where calls to identity become the grounds for a new political imaginary. If anonymity undermines responsibility there also remains the danger in replacing anonymity with identity. Both have signicant drawbacks for negotiations of social unity. The problem here is one of limits and in what contexts these limits are to be opened and/or closed. In a more abstract sense, the question remains: What are the points were sameness and difference intersect and how can new political and ethical imaginaries accommodate their compatible and incompatible natures? In an interview with Geoff Bennington on his work on friendship, while Derrida remains optimistic that critique can lead to new forms of political imaginaries, he can only index to an uncertain future whereby a reinvention of the classical political concepts would be necessary for a new conception of political alliance and therein the role of friendship. Once again invoking this call to a New International as the renewal of hope, he adds:
I think that what I try to call a New International in Spectres of Marx should go beyond this concept of the cosmopolitical strictly speaking. We have to do a lot of things, and to work of course within the space of the cosmopolitical, and an International Law that keeps alive the sovereignty of the State. There is a lot to be done within the State and in International Law that keeps alive the sovereignty of the State, thats what we call politics today, but beyond this task, which is enormous, we must think and be oriented by something which is more than cosmopolitical, more than citizenship. (Bennington and Derrida 1997)
Derrida is insistent that his work on friendship, hospitality, and democracy does not necessarily provide a new platform through which a new politics can be founded. Yet at the same time his work makes way for a rethinking of frameworks in which these concepts are understood and experienced. With regard to his conceptions of friendship and hospitality he argues that it does not automatically translate into a platform for politics because what friendship is and what hospitality is, exceeds, precisely, knowledge (Bennington and Derrida 1997). He continues, there is some type of experience, of political experience in friendship and hospitality which cannot simply be the object of theory, (Bennington and Derrida 1997) and therefore, I add, instrumentalised in such a way. What is exciting and also troubling for many is that his conception of friendship in relation to the political does not allow a coming subject to be substantiated in advance. Friendship remains
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a question as a possibility which maintains its futurity. In this sense, perhaps all we are left with is the promise, as Derrida insists, to give friendship a future; to maintain the future of friendship qua concept as the condition of its survival however apolitical this may seem. Insofar as we remain hospitable to the question of friendship, however vague and romantic, in this spirit may we say and act with the faith of its possibility. Such a friendship would be one whose delity remains bound to the thought of friendship in such a way that the returning to the question would itself mark a return to friendship, in the sense of a befriending of its concern as something which one is driven to experience and/or accomplish. In this sense, may the promise of friendship remain as much its promising thought as the promise of the thought. To afrm a politics from this thought reafrms the politics of practising that which we call philosophy. It gives way to the redoubling of the question of the political and the philosophical, afrming its tension; it divides and overlaps but nonetheless afrming that this very redoubling is none other than the work of friendship, as much its home as its other.
References
Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida (1997), Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida, Centre for Modern French Thought: University of Sussex, transcribed by Benjamin Noys, http://hydra.humanities. uci.edu/Derrida/pol+fr.html Caputo, John (2004), Love Among the Deconstructibles: A Response to Gregg Lambert, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 5: 2, pp. 3757. Critchley, Simon (1999), Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought, New York: Verso. Derrida, Jacques (1994), Politiques de lamitie, Paris: Galile. Derrida, Jacques (1994), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1997), Politics of Friendship, London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques (2000), Hostipitality, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 5: 3, pp. 318. Derrida, Jacques (2005), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McQuillan, Martin (ed.) (2007), The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, London: Pluto Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007), On the Multiple Senses of Democracy, The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy, ed. Martin McQuillan, London: Pluto Press. Thomas, Michael (2006), The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, Elizabeth (2007), Suspended from the Others Heartbeat, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 106: 2, pp. 32544.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000542
Nicole Pepperell
Abstract Derridas Specters of Marx asks whether and how we could inherit Marx today: whether we might nd, in a certain spirit of Marx, the critical resources to challenge resurgent liberal ideals, without this challenge assuming a dogmatic or totalitarian form. Derridas own response to this question involves a curious move: a material transformation of Marxs text, in which Derrida rst foreshadows, and then carries out, the excision of a single sentence from the pivotal passage in which Marx christens the commodity fetish. The excision subtly transforms the meaning of Marxs text and, in the process, acts out a vision of inheritance as an active, transformative performance, rather than as a passive transmission of inherited content to its heirs. In this paper, I explore the way in which Derrida foreshadows and then effects this curious elision. I highlight the distinctive understanding of transformative inheritance at the heart of Derridas text, and also pose the question of why Derrida should effect this particular transformation in the search for a certain deconstructive spirit in Marxs work. * After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in the face of the triumphalist declaration of the nal victory over communism of the market and liberal democracy, Derridas Specters of Marx poses the question of whether and how we could inherit Marx today whether we might nd, in a certain spirit of Marx, the critical resources to challenge resurgent liberal ideals, without this challenge assuming a dogmatic or totalitarian form. Derridas own response to this question involves a curious move: a material transformation of Marxs text, in which Derrida rst foreshadows, and then carries out, the excision of a single sentence from
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the pivotal passage in which Marx christens the commodity fetish. This excision subtly transforms the meaning of Marxs text and also acts out a vision of inheritance as an active, transformative performance, rather than a transparent transmission of inherited content to its heirs (Derrida 2006, 1417; 646; 6970).2 By drawing attention to the elision, I want both to highlight the distinctive understanding of transformative inheritance at the heart of Derridas text, and also pose the question of why, in carrying out a transformative inheritance of Marx, Derrida should effect this particular transformation. To explore this problem, I rst examine some of the complex textual parallels that tacitly connect neo-liberal triumphalism with Soviet orthodoxy, and Derridas critique of Fukuyama with Marxs critique of Stirner. These parallels open onto an analysis of how the gures of impure and transformative inheritance operate as a standpoint of critique. I then turn to a more detailed examination of how Derrida rst foreshadows, and then carries out, his transformative modication of Marxs text. Finally, I analyse the stakes of this particular transformative inheritance to begin to cast some light on what Derrida attempts to excise, and what he attempts to creatively enact, from our inheritance of Marx. Reecting on how to respond to the triumphalist charge that the collapse of the Soviet Union invalidates any contemporary inheritance of Marx, Derrida rules out the simplest response: that the Soviet Union was a corruption of a true spirit of Marx a perversion or false inheritance of a communist ideal that must be differentiated from the empirical entities that proclaimed themselves to be communist. His argument here is subtle and displaced: offered in the form, not of a direct critique of this attempted defence of the communist ideal, but rather a critique of Francis Fukuyama, author of the triumphalist The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama, Derrida argues, defends liberal democracy by identifying it alternatively with its empirical manifestations or with a non-empirical counterfactual ideal. Empirically, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unravelling of centrally-planned economies are taken to ratify liberal democracy as though the empirical hegemony of liberal institutions conrms their normative superiority. At the same time, Fukuyama systematically discounts the empirical failings of liberal institutions, arguing that liberalism must not be identied with its empirical manifestations, but must rather be understood as a counterfactual ideal from which actually existing democracies and markets might deviate, without these deviations undermining the ideal itself (Derrida 2006, 712; 76; 7882).
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to Marxs own analysis: the non-identity generated by the process of exchange (Derrida 2006, 51; 2059). Derrida gathers together each of these destabilising factors under the overarching term spectrality. The category of spectrality thus captures a range of destabilising potentials that haunt any possible present and, in words Derrida cites from Hamlet, throw the time out of joint. Derrida ties the possibility of critique to this disjointure of the present borrowing, again from Hamlet, the image that we are called to justice called to set the time right precisely by our sensitivity to those spectres that unsettle and destabilise any self-identity of the present time (Derrida 2006, 237; 325). The task of inheriting impurely is therefore linked in this text with the task of developing a form of critique that does not ground itself on presence a form of critique that does not attempt to proceed by stripping away a veil of illusion or false appearance, in order to reveal some form of underlying essence that purports to provide a stable ground for critical ideals. For Derrida, critique relies instead precisely on the absence of stable ground an absence that does not undermine the search for justice, but rather represents its condition of possibility (Derrida 2006, 325; 45). The preservation of spectrality the embrace of the haunted and non-identical character that renders our time out of joint is therefore central to Derridas concept of critique. When he seeks to inherit a certain spirit of Marx, it will therefore be a spirit willing to commune with the dead, rather than a spirit that seeks to exorcise their ghosts a spirit that seeks to destabilise the present, rather than a spirit that seeks to bring to presence some underlying reality that would provide a rm ontological ground for critical ideals (Derrida 2006, 67).4 To develop this possibility of an impure inheritance of Marx, Derrida suggests that inheritance cannot be understood as a transmission (Derrida 2006, 18). Inheritance does not comprise the contents of some transparent communication from the dead, and therefore heirs cannot be distinguished from one another by their authenticity or accurate possession of what has been bequeathed. Inheritance is not a form of passive reception, but rather something actively enacted a performative act one that takes place through interpretations that selectively appropriate what will and what will not be inherited. The dead do not bury themselves and so they, least of all, are safe from the actions of those who would inherit them: inheritance interprets the past in a way that intrinsically transforms it (Derrida 2006, 143). In his most explicit discussion of this point, Derrida makes direct reference to Marxs Theses on Feuerbach where Marx criticises philosophers for
Derridas citation of this passage adds commentary that draws attention to the imagery of the head in the argument about religion (Derrida 2006, 2089). It also, however, removes a single sentence specically, the sentence in which Marx distinguishes the fetish from religion the sentence that reads: So it is in the world of commodities with the products of mens hands. Derrida foreshadows this elision throughout the text: its arrival was expected, foretold. The chapter in which it occurs is called The Apparition of the Inapparent subtitled the phenomenological conjuring trick. Images of hands, prestidigitation, manipulation, and related terms are scattered throughout the text, as are references to disappearance, displacement, conjuring, and exorcism. The most direct foreshadowing, however, takes place in an extended discussion of Valry that was added into Derridas rst chapter after the lectures were originally delivered. In this passage, Derrida draws attention to a work in which Valry reects on the fate of Europe by staging a scene in which Hamlet surveys illustrious skulls and nds, in the skull of Kant, a line of
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inheritance that runs from Kant to Hegel, and then from Hegel to Marx. Derrida then remarks that Valry returns to this same passage, quoting it entire in a later work, except for a single line. Derrida lingers over this point, drawing the readers attention to the omission, noting:
At this point, Valry quotes himself. He reproduces the page of the European Hamlet, the one we have just cited. Curiously, with the errant but infallible assurance of a sleepwalker, he then omits from it only one sentence, just one, without even signalling the omission by an ellipsis: the one that names Marx, in the very skull of Kant. (Derrida 2006, 4)
Derrida then asks: Why this omission, the only one? The name of Marx has disappeared. Where did it go? Exeunt Ghost and Marx, Shakespeare might have noted. The name of the one who disappeared must have gotten inscribed someplace else (Derrida 2006, 4). These questions return to haunt the text when Derrida effects his own elision, omitting just one sentence signalled with an ellipsis this time, but leaving no less pressing the question of why this omission, the only one: the hands of Marx have disappeared. We may have some sense of where they have been most manifestly reinscribed: images of hands, ngers, and digital manipulations paw their way through this text, while the backdrop for the entire work is the apparent triumph of the markets invisible hand, over the planned economies and the utopian communist project. But why this omission? What is Derrida attempting to preserve and what is he attempting to excise with this re-performance of the act through which Marx originally christened the concept of commodity fetishism? What sort of impure inheritance is Derrida attempting to effect, when he makes the hands of Marx disappear? In both the analysis of Valry quoted above, and in a subsequent discussion of Blanchots Marxs Three Voices, Derrida draws attention to the gure of the ellipsis. Derrida tells us that Valry fails to mark his omission by an ellipsis (Derrida 2006, 4), while he speaks of Blanchots work in terms of a very powerful ellipsis that amounts to an almost tacit declaration in order to introduce the modications he is soon to make overtly to Blanchots original text (Derrida 2006, 42). Ellipses omissions, excisions are linked explicitly with the gure of deconstruction, described as a process of linking an afrmation (in particular a political one), if there is any, to the experience of the impossible, which can only be a radical experience of the perhaps (Derrida 2006, 42). The text thus prepares the reader for the omission to come the transformative interpretation that will result from the selective inheritance of Marxs work a material transformation of
As Derrida sees this argument then, Marx seeks, like Stirner, to abolish spectrality (Derrida 2006, 5760; 1289; 132; 141; 155; 165; 1768;
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21314). Marx, however, believes that this abolition can be achieved only through a process that transforms the practical structure of the world, a transformation effected specically, in Derridas reading, through the mediation of labour (Derrida 2006, 94; 163). On this reading, labour gures as a despectralising form of action; and production, actualisation and technique are positioned as forms of practice that can effect an exorcism, abolish the ghost that renders the time out of joint, and set the time right, once and for all, by constituting a self-identical present moment that is rationally and transparently in control of its own emancipatory possibilities (Derrida 2006, 1634; 2015). Derrida nds a similar logic in Marxs argument about commodity fetishism (Derrida 2006, 1856). He understands Marx to be mobilising a form of critique that relies on the possibility of unveiling and bringing to presence a pure ontological ground in this case, the material ground of use value, labour, and production (Derrida 2006, 35; 18691; 195205). Derrida takes Marxs argument to be that this pure material essence is currently distorted, corrupted, and hidden by the market: by exchange value (Derrida 2006, 1868; 195). In this reading, exchange value is a spectralising force a factor that renders the time out of joint and non-identical with itself because it conceals and prevents labours central social role from achieving presence (Derrida 2006, 51; 55; 1934). The christening passage in which Marx names the fetish looks like the attempt to distinguish a proper, material body the body of use value, constituted by labour and by technology from the spectralising force of the market that distorts and conceals this proper body, generating the need to set the time right by bringing the proper material body to light and allowing labour to structure social life in an open and transparent way (Derrida 2006, 94; 1934; 2015). Derrida thus hears Marxs argument about the fetish as an attempt to locate and identify the remains of the spectre that spurs critique, by situating this spectre in some contingent, and therefore exorcisable, element of the practical structure of the world. He sees Marxs theory as aimed at the abolition or burial of this spectre, in order to enact a time that has fully and transparently realised its own potentials, and is therefore no longer out of joint (Derrida 2006, 578; 60; 1289; 195; 20114). From Derridas perspective, Marxs conception of emancipation therefore also entails the abolition of the possibility of critique, as the non-identity that fuels critique can be overcome through the transformation and abolition of those elements of the practical world that prevent the present from achieving full self-identity, transparency, and rationality (Derrida 2006, 2056).
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has hitherto veiled (Derrida 2006, 94; 186205; 21114). Seeking to interrupt Marxs performance, Derrida excises from this passage the pivotal sentence through which, he believes, Marx attempts to bring to presence the hidden content that the market veils: Derrida takes away Marxs reference to labour; he hides the sentence that refers to the products of mens hands. Derridas edit to Marxs text thus symbolically keeps labour secret, removing the step by which, in Derridas reading, Marx attempts to reveal the true material relations of capitalist society. In Derridas transformative re-enactment of the christening passage, the ghost gets to stay. Always still to come, always to haunt, forever non-identical with a present time perpetually out of joint: this is the certain spirit of Marx that Derrida enacts in his selective iteration of Marxs text. What Derrida effects here, then, is an exorcism of exorcism. He attempts to inherit in a way that maintains in perpetuity our ability to communicate with the ghost (Derrida 2006, 13; 211; 220). In a text lled with gures chasing ghosts in order to eradicate spectrality, Derrida enjoins us to chase ghosts as well. He asks us to do this, however, not in order to drive the ghosts away, but in order that we may be receptive to the ways in which these spirits continue to haunt us to set our time right (Derrida 2006, 45; 945; 11012; 211; 220). A certain spirit of Marx, Derrida believes, suggests this possibility: the spirit of the Communist Manifesto the spectre of a communism that is threatening, but not yet presenced the spectre of a communism that, in this interpretation, is eternally to haunt, a stranger always already inhabiting Europe, an abstract, desert messianic spirit that remains unaligned with parties, organisations, programmes, and presence, providing critical purchase on both empirical realities and regulative ideals (Derrida 2006, 23; 467; 856; 10712; 1746; 211). It is this spirit that Derrida attempts to inherit through his impure, transformative interpretation of Marxs work. This transformative interpretation establishes certain possibilities for how we might inherit Marx today. It sets forth the possibility for a non-dogmatic, non-essentialising inheritance of Marx that would not ground its standpoint of critique on the potential to bring essence to presence (Derrida 2006, 856; 945; 11314; 21114). The excision through which Derrida enacts this inheritance, however, forswears much more than dogmatism and essentialism: it also cuts away the elements of Marxs critique that are oriented toward the practical transformation of the social institutions through which contemporary forms of injustice are enacted. Derrida leaves unclear how the abstract desert messianism that
References
Ahmad, Aijaz (2008), Reconciling Derrida: Specters of Marx and Deconstructive Politics, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinkler, London: Verso, pp. 88109. Arthur, Christopher J. (2004), The New Dialectic and Marxs Capital, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Derrida, Jacques (2006), Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge Classics. Fukuyama, Francis (2006), The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press.
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Macherey, Pierre (2008), Marx Dematerialised, or the Spirit of Derrida, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinkler, London: Verso, pp. 1725. Marx, Karl (1990), Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl (1993), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin Books. Postone, Moishe (1998), Review of Specters of Marx, History and Theory Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 37087. Ryan, Michael (1982), Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Appraisal, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1995), Ghostwriting, Diacritics Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 6584.
Notes
1. This paper developed from a collaborative project with Duncan Law. Duncan was unable to participate directly in the original conference, and this piece therefore appears, with his endorsement, as a solely-authored work. Its concepts and analysis owe a strong debt, however, to our ongoing collaboration. I want also to thank Robert Briggs, Jessica Cadwallader, Andrew Dunstall, Carl Dyke, and Nate Holdren for their comments, questions and critical insights on earlier versions of this piece, as well as the commenters who participated in discussions of the piece at the Rough Theory academic blog, http://www.roughtheory.org 2. Existing reviews of Specters even where they focus directly on Derridas argument about the need for a transformative inheritance of Marxs texts appear to have overlooked how literal is Derridas material transformation of the commodity fetish argument in Capital see, for example, Macherey, 2008. 3. A number of critics overlook the substantive point being made through this ironic, self-referential dimension of the text, and therefore focus their critiques in what I would suggest is a too-literal way on the manifest content, without noticing how later passages of text work to undermine that content in a way that is often compatible with the critical reactions to the text. See for example Ahmad 2008, 8990. 4. A few critics working at the boundaries of deconstruction and Marxism have suggested that Derrida is insufciently attentive to the ways in which Marxs method and textual strategy are already consonant with a deconstructive critique of approaches that would ground their critical standpoint in any type of presence. This point was made, before the publication of Specters, in Michael Ryans Marxism and Deconstruction, which draws attention in particular to passages from Marxs Grundrisse that suggest an anti-essentialising understanding of critique operative in Marxs work (see Ryan 1982, 62, 102). Responding more specically to Specters, Spivak takes Derrida to task for attening the way in which the use-value/exchange-value distinction plays out in Capital, and for thereby attributing to Marx a set of ontological claims that do not necessarily inhere in Marxs work. I would suggest that more recent reinterpretations of Marxs work, particularly those associated with what Christopher Arthur calls the new dialectic, make more explicit the potential afnities between Marx and Derrida. Unfortunately, this potential afnity is often resisted from the Marxist side, as can be seen in the reections on Derridas work by, for example, Arthur and Postone.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000554
Julia Ponzio
Abstract The focus of this paper is Derridas idea of rhythm. I will analyse how the idea of rhythm can work in a contemporary semiotic, and in particular in a semiotic of interpretation, in order to eliminate the confusion between interpretation and semantics and to constitute a syntactic model of interpretation. In The Double Session Derrida uses the Greek word rytmos in order to indicate the law of spacing. Rytmos is a form that is always about to change or to break up, because it is not a denitive form. It is a not-proper form. But when I say here that a rhythmic relation is a not-proper form, the word proper is intended in the sense of Heideggers Eigentlichkeit. In this sense a not-proper relation is a relation which is not grounded on a justication. What Im trying to demonstrate in this essay is that the rhythmic relation discovers another sense of the word proper, another meaning, which is far from Heideggers Eigentlichkeit. In this sense, it is possible to say that the problem of a rhythmic relation is the problem of a relation between two that is not justied by the third element which makes it proper or eigentlich. * The focus of this paper is Derridas idea of rhythm. Ill analyse how the idea of rhythm can work in a contemporary semiotic, and in particular in a semiotic of interpretation, in order to eliminate the confusion between interpretation and the semantic and to constitute a syntactic model of interpretation. What do we mean by rhythm? In Glas Derrida writes: From The Double Session onward, the purpose would be to rethink the value
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of rhythm and to introduce it to a re-elaboration of the graphics of mimesis (Derrida 1986, 154). The reference to The Double Session (collected in Dissemination, 1981) is very important because Derridas idea of rhythm takes shape in this essay. In The Double Session, Derrida uses the Greek word rytmos in order to indicate the law of spacing. In Derridas discourse, this law of spacing has to do with written character and cadence, with a punctuation which articulates the text, opening white spaces in it (2001, 178). In order to clarify what he means by the word rhythm, and why he uses the Greek word, Derrida quotes from Problems in General Linguistics where Benveniste analyses the etymology of the word rytmos (Derrida 2001, 178, note 4). The ancient meaning of this word, according to Benveniste (1971, 283), is not an orderly sequence of movements or events; it is not the scansion of the march, which divides time in equal and numerable parts in order to control it. The original meaning of rytmos has rather to do, according to Benveniste, with the concept of schema, or form. But while a is a xed form, a realised or objectied form, rytmos indicates the form in the moment in which it is assumed, the form in the moment of its formation, that is to say a uid form, an improvised, momentary, modiable form, like waves on the sea (Benveniste 1971, 283). Rytmos is a form that is always about to change or to break up, because it is not a denitive form, it is not the form. It is a not proper form. But when I say here that a rhythmic relation is not proper form, the word proper is intended in the sense of Heideggers Eigentlichkeit. In this sense a not-proper relation is a relation which is not grounded on a justication. What Im trying to demonstrate in this essay is that the rhythmic relation discovers another relationship to the proper, at a distance from Heideggers Eigentlichkeit. In this sense, it is possible to say that the problem of a rhythmic relation is the problem of a relation between two that is not justied by a third element which makes the relation proper eigentlich a third which the relation can make reference to in order to demonstrate that it is proper. The condition of a rhythmic relation in which it is always about to change or to break up involves the link between rhythm and mourning. This link between rhythm and mourning provokes, as I will attempt to show in this essay, an inversion of the idea of the proper, and this inversion of the idea of the proper is the main effect of the introduction of rhythm in the graphic of mimesis. In the classic theory of the sign, the relation between signier and signied needs to be justied, to be motivated by a third element.
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What distinguishes language from pure resonance? The resonance of a body hit by an external element is directed from the inside to the outside. The resonance is therefore dispersed and cannot be recovered. What is missing in the resonance is the tympanum, which recovers what is said, bringing it again inside interiority. Language works in Hegel through the indissociable couple voice-hearing. Situated a moment before language, congured as prelude to language, as prelude to the semantic relation, what Hegel calls Klang shows, in Derridas discourse, another possibility of the relation between signier and signied: it shows an other possibility of the proper. The relation between sound and resounding object announces the semantic link: this means that signier and signied appear in Hegels discourse in the instant before their realization in language. In this instant before language, they appear in a double relation in which they are at the same time separated and kept together by a white space which is not lled in by a semantic link. Derrida shows how without a semantic link to motivate the relation, it is impossible to distinguish Klang and Gerusch, that is to say to distinguish a proper from an improper relation between signier and signied. Both in the case of the relation between the knell and its Klang and in the case of the broken knell and its Gerusch, the object and its sound are separated and kept together in an unmotivated space. This relation is therefore an unjustied relation, which is not, however, an indifferent relation, and thus not a relation between one thing and another. The pure resonance is something that is able to establish what Im dening here as a rhythmic relation, and this means, as I intend to show, that the pure resonance before language is writing, criture. The problem of Klang, that is to say the problem of the unjustied relation between signier and signied, is also what determines, as Derrida shows in Glas, the question of the onomatopoeic sounds in Saussures Course in General Linguistics (Derrida 1986, 908). Onomatopoeic sounds constitute a problem in Saussures discourse because they are an exception to the rule of the arbitrary relation between signier and signied. Saussure tries to show, according to Derrida, that they are not really an exception to the rule of motivation that makes proper the relation between signier and signied. Onomatopoeic words, according to Saussure, are not to be considered signs, but symbols. When Saussure says that the relation between signier and signied is an arbitrary relation, he means that it is a relation that is not natural. For this reason, Derrida says, Saussure distinguishes between sign and symbol. In the case of the symbol, the link
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Derrida highlights that the word glas constitutes a destabilizing element in this discourse:
Furthermore, the concept of onomatopoeia presupposes, in the way it is handled here, a very simplied structure of imitation (between the noise of the thing and the sound of the language). In this respect, the resemblance is faint, verily nonexistent, between glas and what in fact? the noise of a bell [cloche]? between fouet and the noise of the stinging [cinglantes] lashes. One wonders why Saussure chose these words as examples of presumed onomatopoeias. (Derrida 1986, 93)
According to Derrida, the words Saussure uses in order to exemplify onomatopoeic words glas and fouet are not well chosen or, perhaps, on the contrary, are chosen too well. In this passage, Derrida italicises onoma to suggest, as I will show, that onomatopoeia works, in Saussures discourse, as proper names. It is actually very difcult, says Derrida, to perceive the natural link between the sound of the word glas and the sound of a bell, or between the sound of the word fouet and that of a lash. Saussure himself admits that the word glas is not an authentic onomatopoeic word, and the fact that in the evolution of language this word has changed to the point where it has become similar to the sound it signies, is an accidental event (Derrida 1986, 91). The word glas can be put in relation with the sound it signies only in an improper way. For this reason, the Klang emerges in the word glas as the pure resonance that is not a prelude to language but is, on the contrary, something that disconcerts language. It disconcerts language because it shows the possibility of a relation between signier and signied which cannot be motivated by a third term. In this way, the onomatopoeic word, the symbol and mimesis, become, in Derridas discourse, things that the laws of reason cannot subjugate, because they show a link which refuses to justify itself, which withdraws from every attempt to establish an identity. It is important to stress that this relation is however not a relation of indifference: the sound of a knell and the knell that produces it, the sound of a knell and the word that signies it, belong to each other, but in a sense distant from the Heideggers Heigentlichkeit. When this kind of relation appears, the concept of the proper itself is disconcerted. The sense that the proper acquires in this relation is the sense in which a name can be proper. The relation between the knell and its sound, its
In the proper name, property is no longer linked to motivation: this separation determines a property which doesnt allow any translation or substitution. The proper name cannot be translated and who it is who bears the name is not replaceable with another person with the same name. The link between the name and the named is not a semantic link. The name is a gift, an act without past, a gratuitous act without motivations and without justication. In this unmotivated appurtenance the signier resounds in a way which disconcerts the ear, the tympanum, that is to say, it disconcerts the possibility of what Derrida in Tympan calls entendre, in the double sense of to listen to and to understand. Derrida writes in Glas: like the fouet and glas, words strike; like the fouet and glas words make noise and strike the ear. It would be as though there were morsels of fouet and glas in each word (Derrida 1986, 93). The noise of words, their resonance emancipated from the semantic relation, is the timbre of the voice, the style of writing. What Derrida calls style, which has to do with the difcult operation of the sexualization of difference, is what prevents the rhythmical relation from becoming a mechanical or indifferent relation of anything with anything else. If rhythm makes it possible to think the graphic of mimesis in a new way, it is not therefore the neuter rhythm of a march, it is not a rhythm indifferently played by a clapping of hands, by an instrument or by an electronic device. An image that Derrida often links with the idea of the rhythmic relation is laughter. The main scene of Mallarms work, which Derrida analyzes in The Double Session, is a curious mime in which Pierrot takes his revenge, killing his wife, tickling her and provoking uncontrollable laughter (Derrida 1981, 2001). The image of laughter appears many times in Derridas works, for example in From Restricted to General Economy, (collected in Writing and Difference, 1967) with reference to Batailles critique of Hegels system. Laughter is nothing other than a vibration, a rhythmic succession of glottal movements, separated from empty, white, senseless spaces. But laughter has also a timbre, a style, a voice: I can
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recognise someone from his laugh. The rhythm of laughter is not a neuter rhythm: laughter in The Double Session (and perhaps in all cases where the image of laughter appears) does not have a feminine voice. This timbre, this style, is what the tympanum cant hear: Derrida stresses the fact that the explosion of laughter in Mallarms text is mimed, that is to say as silent as the a of the word diffrance. This means that laughter cannot be heard by the system of metaphysics. It cannot be captured by its tympanum. Derrida writes in Qual Quelle:
The timbre of my voice, the style of my writing are that which for (a) me never will have been present. I neither hear nor recognize the timbre of my voice. If my style marks itself, it is only on a surface which remains invisible and illegible for me. Point of speculum: here I am blind to my style, deaf to what is most spontaneous in my voice. (Derrida 1982, 296)
I am therefore deaf and blind to what is peculiar, proper, to me, to what, more than every other thing, appertains to me, to what is missing if I am not here. This proper, inverted by a point of speculum, cannot be heard by the system of metaphysics and this means that it cannot become present. It is a speculum that is not present to mark an opposition between original and copy. The timbre of my voice, the style of my writing, did not pass through a living present and this means I have never assumed or chosen them: they already are, they are dj. When I say here they are dj, I am using the verb to be (perhaps crossing it) only in the sense of the attribution of a name, in the same sense in which, for example, I say: I am . . . Julia. In Spurs Derrida says: Already (dj), such is the name for what has been effaced or subtracted beforehand, but which nevertheless left behind a mark, a signature which is retracted in that very thing form which it is withdrawn (Derrida 1976, 35). When Derrida says dj is the name, he is saying it is a proper name. Derrida sometimes writes dj with a capital D not to hypostatise it, but to underline that it is a proper name. What Derrida names dj is what opens the possibility of an interpretation whose sense doesnt coincide with semantics. That which is the proper name of what comes before every presentation, Derrida says in Glas, is neither an origin, nor a beginning, nor a ground (Derrida 1986, 11). The origin; the beginning; the fundament, produce a linear development: the origin realises itself in what is originated, as in Hegels system, without producing a remainder. On the contrary, what Derrida names dj produces a movement that is neither linear nor without remainder: it produces a movement of continuous inversion.
243
ratied, chosen, requested by a living presence, it is dj. When dj is introduced, interpretation and the semantic can no longer be confused. My style, the timbre of my voice, exceeds the meaning of what Im saying or writing: it exceeds successful communication. Style is dj. It is the proper I have not chosen. It marks with the heaviness of the rest the light pureness of the signier but, at the same time, it is also what is missing when my words are translated: it is the irreplaceable part of what Im saying which shortens time because I already miss what I feel as irreplaceable. The Dj which inverts the proper makes impossible the confusion between interpretation and the semantic because it makes the time of interpretation totally different from the time of the semantic. When a signier enters into an impossible relation with dj, the time of this relation is no longer the time of the provisional absence of the signied. Time is no more the lengthy wait of the substitution of the provisional signier. When I am waiting for something, time is always too long and boring. On the contrary, when a signier enters into a relation with a dj, time becomes too short, as when I am in relation with something I feel to be unique, something which cannot be substituted. The proper in this case is not a property right but the mourning for what is irreplaceable. In this sense, the signier in relation with a dj is inverted, that is to say I feel it as already dead, as something that I miss even before its absence. This time that is totally different from the temporality of consciousness, from the temporality of being or from the messianic waiting, is the time of interpretation. It is denitely what makes possible a relation without a third, which motivates it. It is, we can say, a time in which the proper is no longer more a relation of need but is a relation of desire. It is the time which ows, and which is always too short, the time in which I miss something before its absence: this missing is what agglutinates, keeps together, but keeps together in a relation that is always about to change or to break up, in a relation where, therefore, mourning, has already began. It is not an original relation, where proper has the form of what Derrida calls Greffe, or Couture, which at the same time both keep together and mark a fracture:
For seams [couture], this must be stressed, do not hold at any price. They must not be, here, for example, of a foolproof solidity. This is why that [a] works all the time. To sew up [coudre] a wound, to ght [en dcoudre], to resew, to be forced to sew, to be kept from sewing. [. . .] Sewing [couture] than betrays, exhibits what it should hide, dissimulacras what it signals. (Derrida 1986, 209)
References
Benveniste, Emile [1967] (1971), Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elisabeth Meek, Coral Gables: University of Miami Press. Derrida, Jacques [1967] (2001), Writing and Difference, trans Alan Bass, London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques [1972] (1981), Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques [1972] (1982), Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques [1974] (1986), Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques (1976), perons. Les styles de Nietzsche / Spurs. Nietzsches styles / Sporen. Die stile Nietzsches / Sproni. Gli stili di Nietzsche. Venezia: Corbo & Fiore.
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000566
Caroline Sheaffer-Jones
Abstract Jacques Derrida returns relentlessly to the question of literature which is already a prominent concern in early texts such as Writing and Difference. The focus of this article is the conception of literature in Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation, in which Derrida discusses liation with reference to Abraham and Isaac, the fundamental necessity of secrecy and the notion of the pardon. Above all, it is Kafkas Letter to His Father which perhaps provides a paradigm for dening literature. In this specular address, the promise of a heritage is in the balance. Writing incessantly on Kafka, Maurice Blanchot also reects on literature. The notion of literature put forward by Derrida in Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation is considered in this article, as well as reections by Blanchot, to show what might be at stake in Kafkas Letter to His Father. * It [art] has a name: self-destruction, innite disintegration. And another name: happiness, eternity. Blanchot 1995 [Whereas] literature is the place of all these secrets without secret, of all these crypts without depth, without any bottom other than the abyss of the call [appel] or the address, without any law other than the singularity of the event, the work. Derrida 2005
Derrida focuses on the absolute gift and the instant which is impossible to grasp, on the necessity for Abraham to speak, not in a language which is common or translatable but in tongues, without which there would in effect be no gift (Derrida 1995, 74). It would instead be a negotiation. Abraham suffers beyond what is part of give and take and beyond the economy of sacrice for the economy itself is sacriced. The instant to which Derrida directs attention cannot be inscribed within any economy. It is the paradoxical moment when it is as if Abraham, by obeying God absolutely, were a murderer, where contradictory positions are joined. Derrida makes the following comment in his text in parentheses: (God stops him at the very instant when there is no more time, where no more time is given, it is as if Abraham had already killed Isaac: the concept of the instant is always indispensable) (Derrida 1995, 72, original emphasis). What is crucial is that the extremes of giving and not giving death, saving and losing, meet in a gift of death which engulfs God, Abraham and his son Isaac, the hope for the future. There is no clear distinction there between ction and non-ction; it is indeed as if Abraham had already carried out the act. Literature would have its origin in this unfathomable secret, the beginning of literature yet perhaps also its end, where literature might be consumed without remains or testimony. Derrida not only examines the absence of meaning exemplied in the sacrice and brought to the fore in the phrase Pardon for not meaning, but he also analyses the word pardon and above all the aporia of forgiveness (pardon) where one can only ask forgiveness for the unforgiveable (Derrida 2005, 5). On the one hand, there is obviously
After identifying the aporia of forgiveness in Abrahams plea to God, Derrida leads on to a discussion of other texts in particular Kafkas Letter to his Father. It is apparent that the question of asking for forgiveness from someone other than oneself or asking oneself for forgiveness are impossible questions. Two questions to which one is always held to answer yes and no, neither yes nor no (Derrida 2005, 15). How would one ask oneself for forgiveness? Indeed asking for forgiveness from someone else, as evident in the passage cited, poses the problem of identication with the other and of the possibility of putting oneself in the place of the other while repeating the perjury in the very request for forgiveness. Derrida emphasises above all the impossible substitution of places at the boundaries of literature, evident in the gift of death in the secret sacrice of Isaac, and where there remains above all the incomprehensible and empty testimony of Pardon for not meaning.
In the relentless changing of places of the real and imagined fathers and sons, in the endless speculation of this address in the letter within the letter, it is apparent that Kafka who writes to his father no less addresses himself. In the letter, the narrative voice moves around among all of the players; Kafka speaks as his father and many other gures, as the son he was and the son he would have liked to be. In this testimony, in these archives, forgiveness and fault are at once evident, as Kafka writes about both father and son and living and dying (Kafka 1979b, 236; 2004, 52). Derrida discusses the aporia in which by asking for forgiveness from someone, I would have to experience in his place the wrong which I did to him. Such a replacement of him by me is not simple. In his reading of Kafka, among others, Derrida highlights in the request for forgiveness a place which is unable to be situated, somewhere at the borders of literature. Derrida writes: This question of the asking, this plea [prire] of forgiveness asked for seeks its undiscoverable place [son lieu introuvable], at the edge of literature, in the replacement of this in the place of [ la place de] that we have recognized in the letter of the son to the father as the letter of the father to the son, from the son to the son as from the father to the father (Derrida 2005, 15; 1999, 189). Most importantly, in play in these substitutions are indeed the frontiers of literature, that place without place of Blanchots narrative voice; the abyssal address where it is not known who speaks, be it father or son, indeed neither one nor the other. This is the address of endlessly echoing voices, where no gure could occupy a position of truth, as in Derridas reading of Lacans Seminar on The Purloined Letter (Derrida 1987, 41196; Lacan, 3972); it would be a narrative about the non-narrative, Pardon for not meaning. What is spoken is simply the afrmation of the address itself, the unconditional Here I am which Abraham says to God and to his son Isaac. Derrida writes about the relationship of literature to the question of asking forgiveness for keeping a secret, which could be Pardon for not
References
Antelme, Monique et al. (2009), Blanchot dans son sicle, Lyons: Sens Public. Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida. (1993), Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1955), LEspace littraire, Paris: ditions Gallimard. Blanchot, Maurice (1969), LEntretien inni, Paris: ditions Gallimard. Blanchot, Maurice (1981), De Kafka Kafka, Paris: ditions Gallimard. Blanchot, Maurice (1982), The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1992), The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson, Albany: State University of New York Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1993), The Innite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Blanchot, Maurice (1995), Kafka and Literature, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, pp. 1226. Blanchot, Maurice (1999), The Madness of the Day, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays, ed. George Quasha, Barrytown; New York: Station Hill Press, pp. 18999.
Notes
1. This section is not in the English publication The Gift of Death which appeared in 1995. I will refer to Adam Kotskos English translation, Derrida 2005, 125. I have sometimes modied the translations quoted in my article. 2. Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire may be translated as Pardon for not meaning, or literally Pardon for not wanting to say. 3. On Kafka, see in particular Derrida Abraham, lautre, 2003 and Before the Law 1992; Cixous 1991 and Deleuze and Guattari 1986. See also Bennington/Derrida 1993, 3315. 4. Derrida writes: Literature will have been meteoric. Like the secret. One calls the meteor a phenomenon, that which appears in the brilliance or the phainesthai of a light, that which is produced in the atmosphere. Like a sort of rainbow (2005, 12). 5. See also Derridas discussion of I have lost my umbrella in Spurs 1979b, 12243. 6. Blanchots title La Voix narrative (le il, le neutre) in LEntretien inni, 556 is translated in The Innite Conversation as The Narrative Voice (the he, the neutral), 379. For recent collections on Blanchot, see Hoppenot and Manoury; Antelme et al. 7. 1. And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. 2. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of (Genesis, 22. See also Kierkegaard 1970, 27). 8. 7. And Isaac spoke unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the re and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? 8. And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together (Genesis 22). 9. Derrida writes in The Gift of Death: Abraham had consented to suffer death or worse, and that without calculating, without investing, beyond any perspective of recouping the loss; hence, it seems, beyond recompense or retribution, beyond
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000578
Francesco Vitale
Abstract The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derridas later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derridas early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other. * My paper focuses on the experience of testimony. It will attempt to testify for testimony. To this purpose I should refrain from quoting. It is for this reason that I will try, as much as possible, to avoid quotations, perhaps precisely to show (I hope it will be understood at the end) that testimony, in its very irreducible singularity, cannot give up the word of the other.1 I would start with some reections elaborated in a just published essay (Vitale 2006), which I devoted to a not well known yet, as far
Derrida intends to trace the irreducible structure of the link to other through the experience of trust, the duciary relation and of the act of faith, before its incorporation in a determinate religion which yet it renders possible. First, Derrida puts into relief two essential elements he considers as characterizing religion: faith and holiness. On the one hand, there is the experience of the holy, the unscathed, the entire, the sound, the safe, the immune, the pure, the proper, the experience of the identity where the removal of the other, in its irreducible singularity, is the elementary condition of a community grounded on the general economy of sacrice.2 On the other hand, you have the experience of belief, faith, trust and the experience of testimony, where the relation to the other is, let us say it now, constitutive.
However, Benveniste distinguishes superstes from testis, which is the Latin word for witnessing in law: testis is the third part, the superior authority which intervenes as a guarantor in the case of the relation between two individuals at the same level and, thus, submitted to the same authority. On the contrary, superstes is a witness without any guarantee of credit; he asks to be believed without being able to bear proof, without referring to any acknowledged authority but only to belief, to the faith of the other. Thats the way the term survives in superstition, that is, what eludes the authority of ofcial religion, what essentially remains strange or foreign to the constituted order of the community and is even a threat to its integrity. Derrida appeals to the testimony of superstes to retrieve the structure of the relation to the other as the irreducible condition of the link to others. Therefore the irreducible condition of all address to the other would be the blind trust, that is acquiescing to the testimony of the other; of the utterly other who is inaccessible in its absolute source (Derrida 2002, 70). That is trust in the other without any guarantee. How is it possible? Is it not just in such an act of belief that one is exposed to the greatest danger? Does not such an act perhaps conrm the economy of sacrice in its absolute extremity, that is, the resignation of the self in the name of the other to whom one submits oneself without the possibility bringing forward any reason? To the other who can always be a liar, as no authority can guarantee his word within the order of proof or knowledge? To understand how it is possible to remove witnessing from the general economy of sacrice, from the community depending on it, it is necessary to understand why the experience of testimony bears the trace of the irreducible conditions of any relation to the other. What really characterizes the experience of testimony? In fact testimony implies the survival of superstes: the witness as such calls for the belief of the other in relation to an event which he states to have been present to but which is no longer present, which is irreducibly removed from the regime of presentation, which is intuitive, constative, sensible and, thus, separated from the order of proof and knowledge. And this is the case with all testimony. It is possible to elaborate a whole series of verication procedures to inscribe testimony into the regime of proof, within the order of knowledge, and this is the case of religious, legal and scientic
Therefore the punctuality of consciousness is deferred through the reference to an intuition which is no longer immediately present, a
This means that in this rst and elementary determination of meaning, where the presence of the self to itself is at stake, the relation to the
There is no other possible experience of presence but that of posthumous testifying, where I can only decide, promise, bind myself to testify that the representation derived from the past through memory is mine and true, and, thus, as we saw at the beginning, that of the testifying in which I can set a link to myself and, thus, to the other that I am, rst of all, with regard to myself, in a moment different from that of the experience actually present and unspeakable in itself. It is now time to draw some conclusions about the question set at the beginning: that is, the ultimate structure of the link, of the being-with-others, or, at least, a rst outcome, since abyssal questions arise here, which Derrida named the promise, responsibility, oath, perjury, and the messianic. Archi-writing reveals that the relation to the other, before any actual address to the other, in this or that factual and contingent event; is the irreducible condition of experience. If the relation to the other is what renders possible the inscription of presence
References
Benveniste, mile (1969), Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes, 2 vol., Paris: Minuit. Derrida, Jacques (1973), Speech and Phenomena; and other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1989), Edmund Husserls Origin of Geometry: an Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques (2002), Faith and Knowledge: the two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason alone, in Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber and ed. Gil Anidjar, New York and London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (2005), Poetics and Politics of Witnessing, in Sovereignties in Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit, Outi Pasanaen, New York: Fordham University Press. Vitale, Francesco (2006), C da darsi. Sulla ducia in Jacques Derrida, Quaderni di comunicazione, 6, pp. 5565.
Notes
1. To respect the meaning of this promise, without escaping the claims of proof, I added in the notes the texts which my paper intended to bear witness to, while refraining from quoting them. 2. With regard to the unscathed, Derrida (2002, 61) takes up in a note the entry sacrice (sacrice) from Benvenistes Dictionary (1969), where he deals with the Latin notion evolving from Roman law towards a religious meaning: Indemnis: that which has not suffered damage or prejudice, damnum; this latter word will have given in French dam (au grand dam: to the detriment or displeasure of) and comes from dap-no-m, tied to daps, dapis, that is, to the sacrice offered the Gods as ritual compensation. In this latter case, one could speak of indemni-cation and we will use this word here or there to designate both the process of compensation and the restitution, sometimes sacricial, that reconstitutes purity intact, renders integrity safe and sound, restores cleanliness and property unimpaired. This is indeed what the word unscathed says: the pure non-contaminated, untouched, the sacred and holy before all profanation, all wound, all offence, all lesion. 3. We will not be able to undertake here all the analysis required by distinctions that are indispensable but rarely respected or practised . . . . But among them, before or after them, we will put to the test the quasi-transcendental privilege we believe ourselves obliged to grant the distinction between, on the one hand, the experience of belief (trust, trust-worthiness, condence, faith, the credit accorded the good faith of the utterly other in the experience of witnessing) and, on the other, the experience of sacredness, even of holiness, of the unscathed, that is safe and sound (heilig, holy). These comprise two distinct sources or foci. Religion gures their ellipse because it both comprehends the two foci but also sometimes shrouds their irreducible duality in silence, in a manner precisely that is secret and reticent (Derrida 2002, 72). 4. See the entry Fidelit personnelle (personal faithfulness) in Benvenistes Dictionary, (1969) where he reconstructs the history of the term faith from the oldest use in the Eastern religious contexts to its Christian articulation with the term credo, through the Roman use of des, which was essentially politicalmilitary and economic. 5. Beyond the culture, semantics or history of law moreover intertwined which determine this word or this concept, the experience of witnessing situates a convergence of these two sources: the unscathed (the safe, the sacred, or the saintly) and the duciary (trustworthiness, delity, credit, belief or faith, good faith implied in the worst bad faith) . . . . In testimony, truth is promised beyond all proof, all perception, all intuitive demonstration, even if I lie or perjure myself (and always and especially when I do), I promise truth and ask the other to believe the other that I am, there where I am the only one able to bear witness and where the order of proof or of intuition will never be reducible to or homogeneous with the elementary trust, the good faith that is promised or demanded. The latter, to be sure, is never pure of all iterability nor of all technics, and hence of all calculability. For it also promises its repetition from the very rst instant. It is involved in every address of the other. From the very rst instant it is co-extensive with this other and thus conditions every social bond, every questioning, all knowledge (Derrida 2002, 98). 6. At any rate, even if something unusual and improbable it were still contemporary at the moment of attestation, it would be inaccessible, as perceived presence, to the addressees receiving the testimony who are placed in the order of believing or are asked to place themselves there. The witness marks or declares
DOI: 10.3366/E175485000900058X
Book Review
Martin Hgglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 255pp, hb $65.00 (USD), ISBN-10: 080470077X, ISBN-13: 978-0804700771; pb $24.95 (USD), ISBN-10: 0804700788, ISBN-13: 978-0804700788. * At a Strathclyde University conference in 1986, Derrida brought a questioner up short with the comment,
Ive never said nor thought that the metaphysics of presence was an evil . . . . Im inclined to think exactly the contrary, that its good. There is no good outside the metaphysics of presence. (Derrida 1987, 257)
Jonathan Culler, sensing the consternation among many members of the audience who had heard that deconstruction was an attack on the metaphysics of presence, asked Derrida to expand on his remark, and to explain what drives the impetus to deconstruct, which he did, in part, as follows:
I have to deal with Necessity itself. It is something or someone, some x, which compels me to admit that my desire, for good, for presence, my own metaphysics of presence, not only cannot be accomplished, meets its limit, but should not be accomplished because the accomplishment or the fullment of this desire for presence would be death itself; the good, the absolute good, would be identical with death. . . . Necessity is the drive, or the counterdrive; its a drive which bars the fundamental drive towards presence, pleasure, fullness, plenitude, etc. The dream beyond Necessity . . . is the plenitude which wouldnt be death. This combination of dream and necessity explains the indefatigable drive for deconstruction. (Derrida 1987, 2601)
This response probably didnt reduce the perplexity of many in the audience, but it did set out very clearly a nexus that remained central to Derridas thinking throughout his career. In his important and hardhitting new book, Martin Hgglund lucidly delineates the argument by means of which Derrida problematises the desire for plenitude in its various guises, and on the strength of this clarity of insight offers
What then is our relation to unconditional hospitality? In his repeated attempts to answer this question, Derrida pushes at the limits of conceptual language and conventional morality, attempting to nd a language to articulate what is strictly unthinkable and unarticulable:
To be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken [surprendre], to be ready to be not ready, if such is possible, to let oneself be overtaken, to not even let oneself be overtaken, to be surprised, in a fashion almost violent, violated and raped [viole], stolen [vole], . . . precisely where one is not ready to receive and not only not yet ready but not ready, unprepared in a mode that is not even that of the not yet. (Derrida 2002a, 361)
But he also asserts repeatedly the inseparability of this absolute hospitality from conditional hospitality, and the insufciency of the latter without its relation to the former:
Just hospitality [i.e., unconditional hospitality] breaks with hospitality by right [i.e., conditional hospitality]; not that it condemns or is opposed to it, and it can on the contrary set and maintain it in a perpetual progressive movement; but it is as strangely heterogeneous to it as justice is heterogeneous to the law to which it is yet so close, from which in truth it is indissociable. (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 257) Conditional laws would cease to be laws of hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even, by the law of unconditional hospitality. (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000, 79) Only an unconditional hospitality can give meaning and practical rationality to a concept of hospitality. Unconditional hospitality exceeds juridical, political, or economic calculation. But no thing and no one happens or arrives without it. (Derrida 2005, 149)
Accordingly, for Hgglund, unconditional hospitality exerts no ethical claims indeed, he asserts that Derrida deconstructs the ethics of unconditional hospitality (1034), on the model, presumably, of the deconstruction of presence. We recognise here the logic of the absolute as death exemplied in Derridas Strathclyde comments. We may desire to exercise unconditional hospitality, but if we could, it would be disastrous; fortunately,
Deconstructions rapport with the other is described in somewhat different terms in Psyche, where Derrida describes the invention of the
Deconstruction as an activity cannot make the other come, but can unsettle existing structures that inhibit its coming. In its openness to the other, it can always lead to evil consequences, as Hgglund would remind us at this point; but Derridas tone here and in a hundred other places indicates that this risk-taking, afrmative attitude is preferable to its opposite. Pure justice, absolute forgiveness, unconditional hospitality: all these are impossible and unthinkable, constitutively open to contamination from the rst, and without guarantee as to outcome; but without them there would be no justice, forgiveness, or hospitality of any kind, there would only be law, calculation, self-interest. Hgglund has shown superbly how Derridas account of time underlies his explorations of these ethical topics, and how unlike traditional ethical postures the results are; but what is missing from his account is Derridas reinvention of ethics, a philosophical adventure that was not divorced, as many who knew him can testify, from his own practice of living. DEREK ATTRIDGE University of York
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000591
References
Attridge, Derek (forthcoming), Posthumous Indelity: Derrida, Levinas, and the Third, in Hospitalities of Mourning, ed. Tony Thwaites and Jude Seaboyer. Derrida, Jacques (1978), Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, in Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 79153. Derrida, Jacques (1987), Some Questions and Responses, The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 25264. Derrida, Jacques (1990), Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 367. Derrida, Jacques (1992), Psyche: Invention of the Other, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, New York: Routledge, pp. 31043.
Notes
1. In responding to Levinass account of the relation between ethics and justice or politics, Derrida repeatedly insists that the latter the third, in Levinass account does not wait, but is already implicated in the face-to-face ethical relationship. He thus departs signicantly from Levinas while claiming to be faithful (Attridge forthcoming). 2. For a clearly normative use of the notion of the unconditional, see Derridas The University without Condition, where he asserts that the modern university should be without condition (2002b, 202).
Notes on Contributors
Lisa Guenther is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, in the United States. She is the author of The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (SUNY Press, 2006), as well as articles on Heidegger, Beauvoir, Levinas and Agamben. She is currently working on the phenomenology and politics of shame. Laurie Johnson is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies and a member of the Public Memory Research Centre at the University of Southern Queensland. He is the author of The Wolf Mans Burden (Cornell University Press, 2001) and has published several articles and book chapters on cyber studies and games studies, literary theory, phenomenology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Gerasimos Kakoliris is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Athens, while he also teaches European Philosophy in the Hellenic Open University, Greece. He has published a book on Derrida and Deconstructive Reading in Greek as well as various papers on this topic and more generally on language, theories of reading, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. He is currently working on Derrida and hospitality. Marguerite La Caze is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Queensland. She has research interests and numerous publications in European philosophy and feminist philosophy in the elds of ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. Her publications include The Analytic Imaginary (Cornell, 2002) and Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (Ashgate, 2003). Her papers on Derridas work in relation to that of Immanuel Kants and the concepts of hospitality, forgiveness, and autoimmunity have been published in Philosophy Today, Political Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism and Contemporary Political Theory. She has also published papers on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Michle Le Duff and Luce Irigaray. Blair McDonald is a Phd candidate at the Centre of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Notes on Contributors
283
Martin McQuillan is Professor of Cultural Theory and Analysis at the University of Leeds, UK. His recent publications include Deconstruction after 9/11 (Routledge, 2008) as well as the twin volumes Deconstruction Reading Politics (Macmillan 2008) and The Politics of Deconstruction (Pluto Press, 2007). Nicole Pepperell is a lecturer in social theory at RMIT University, where she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on how Marx conceptualises the standpoint of critique in the rst volume of Capital. Her research interests include the emergence of classical social theory and political economy, twentieth century critical theories, the contemporary rise of new forms of materialism, and the relationship between shifts in critical ideals and changing potentials for social transformation. Julia Ponzio is a Researcher in Philosophy and Theory of Languages at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bari, Italy where she teaches Semiotics and Semiotics of text. Her works include: Il presente sospeso. Alterit appropriazione in Heidegger e Levinas (Suspended Present: alterity and appropriation in Heidegger and Levinas, Bari: Cacucci, 2000); Il ritmo della scrittura. Tempo, alterit comunicazione (Rhythm of Writing. Time, Alterity and Communication, Bari: Schena, 2005); Language, time and the Other, in Analecta husserliana, Phenomenology of logos, logos of phenomenology, Vols. LXXXVIII-XCII, Springer, 2006; and Politics not left to itself, in Levinas, Law, Politics, edited by M. Diamantides, London: Glasshouse Press, 2007. Caroline Sheaffer-Jones teaches French literature and philosophy in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has published widely on Blanchot, as well as on Camus, Cocteau, Derrida, Genet, Kofman and Levinas, and recently Congurations of a Heritage: lisabeth Roudinescos Philosophes dans la tourmente, Contemporary French Civilization: An Interdisciplinary Journal Devoted to the Study of French-Speaking Cultures Throughout the World, 33: 1, (2009), 10122. Dimitris Vardoulakis is lecturer at the University of Western Sydney and honorary fellow at Monash University. His monograph The Doppelgnger: Literatures Philosophy is forthcoming by Fordham University Press. Other edited or co-edited volumes include Spinoza Now (Minnesota University Press, forthcoming); Benjamin and Heidegger (Continuum, forthcoming); Kafkas Cages (forthcoming);
DOI: 10.3366/E1754850009000608