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De-Facing Derrida
Gregg Lambert
Deface:1. To mar or spoil the face or surface of; to disfigure. 2. To impair the usefulness, value, or influence of. 3. Obsolete: To obliterate; destroy.

Throughout his life and his work, Derrida always called our attention to the innumerable possibilities of defacement, as well as to the limits of memory figured in testamentary signs, traces, hypograms, hypomnemata, signatures and epigraphs, or autobiographical memoirs (Memoires, 29). One wonders, on occasions like these, an occasion that is already overdetermined, discursively (and otherwise), if it would be better to remain silent; to keep the act of memory secret or private, perhaps even intimate; not to risk betraying the other who is in me or between us to the spectacle of a loud display; to hold in confidence and completely away from the public the moments (however brief and, no doubt, inconsequential) I may have shared with one who is now departed and who only exists as a shadow, a shadow of a shadow, whose presence has been consigned to memory, forgetfulness, and de-facement. And yet, on occasions like these, we know that Derrida himself never chose to remain silent, or refused the strange imperative to speak publicly in the memory ofof course, not without a series of endless qualifications that quickly became a hallmark of his manner (or style) of speaking on these occasions. Derridas own performative acts of memoryand there were many, particularly in recent years when friends, colleagues, and former mentors passed awayhave already attested to the impossibility, the doublebind, the extreme risk of speaking in the memory of. I always had the suspicion that on these occasions, in addition to assuming a responsibility for the other, he was also preparing us for precisely this moment when we would be compelled to speak in the memory of J.D. (As he said, Funerary speech and writing do not follow upon death; they work upon life in what we call autobiography [Memoires, 22]) Perhaps, anticipating his death and the incredible work of mourning that would immediately ensue, as well as the inevitable acts of de-facement that were all too familiar to him when he was alive, Derrida was already forewarning us concerning the pitfalls and the incredible seductions that such an act of
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memory bears in its performative sensethe spectacles of proximity and the claims of authentic mourning (vs. the inauthentic, the insincere, or the self-interested), the institution of new hierarchies or the consolidation of old alliances in his name, and, of course, the frenetic production of new testamentary signs, traces, hypograms, hypomnemata, signatures and epigraphs, or autobiographical memoirs. I would not be alone in observing that our professionand Derrida frequently spoke about the archaic religious determination of our community lives off occasions like these, and in these moments we gather together to engage in signs, rituals, and speeches that are purely formal in some sense. This is our Mass, our Eucharist, or rather, our Tea Ceremony, which does not mean that as a performative event its meaning is completely inauthentic. Not completely. However, as a community founded upon an extremely conflicted and even tortuous relation to the natural (if not brutal) fact of the animality that afflicts each of its individual members who are fundamentally alone, whether this solitude is experienced in the silence of writing, in sexuality, or in the death of an otherthese rituals always bear within them the implicit danger of becoming pure acts of snobbery.1 It is already a remarkable, but equally, a strange habit that when an animal dies the human is compelled, if not obligated, to transform this simple biological fact into speech (logos). Stranger still are the acts of memory that metamorphose the animal into a ghost resurrected from the dead animals body in order to respond to the living communitys solicitation to come; who can thereafter be invoked (either through sance or through citation) to speak as if in his own name. I would like to think that this a pure accident of language, a symptom or lapsus, even the miraculous property only made possible by indirect discourse and the third-person impersonal pronoun, which liberates the other from a too natural and biological destiny, and allows him to go on speaking postmortem, to come from beyond the grave and respond to the living in absentia. Of course, while he was alive, Derrida has cautioned us many times (if not constantly) not to delude ourselves concerning the fictional status of this kind of speech; the fiction essentially belongs to the sovereign figure of prosopopeia. Thus, on the occasion of his own performance of speaking in the memory of Paul de Man, Derrida reflected at length on the predominance of this figure, which he described as a sovereign, secret, discrete, and ideal signatureand the most giving, the one that knows how to efface itself (Memoires, 26). As Derrida quotes De Man,

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[I]t is the figure of prosopopeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latters reply, and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the tropes name, prosopon poiein, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). [] Our topic deals with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration. (Memoires, 27)

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In the above chain of tropological substitutions, we might observe that the face is given precedence even though it comes last in the complete manifestation of the Others voice. The act of prosopopeia, which belongs to the art of memory, and of mourning in particular, confers upon the other, who is a deceased or voiceless entity, the power of responding as if in his own name. Thus, Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face. What is the face in the above meditation? Why does it take precedence in the act of seemingly conferring upon the other the power of speech, as if from beyond the grave? Who gives this power to the Other, if it is not indeed merely the accident of language? Or rather, is it simply a figure, a trope which knows how to efface itself as Derrida suggests in his own funereal meditation? As he writes, as soon as the gathering of Being and totalizing memory are impossible, we recognize the failure of this tropological dislocation, which is another turn of memory, another twist of memory (Memoires, 24). As we follow the twists and turns of memory, this would seem abyssal, since in the act endowing the other with a facethat is, with a magical power to respond, with the power of speechone already effaces the truth of a voiceless and silent entity. In giving back the face, one turns away from the true image of the others face that is deathly silent and decomposing. As Derrida observes in his own use of its sovereign figure, here is the figure, the visage, the face and the de-facement . (Memoires, 26). And yet, perhaps the entire movement of subjectivity, especially in bereaved memory, corresponds to this simple trope of an interior that can never be totalized, captured in the act of memory; or of a surface that is always destined to become too superficial, a disfiguration of the other in himself. Again, Derrida has already reflected on many of these questions before usthat is, it would seem that he already performed the act of memory, on several occasions, as if to rehearse its multiple paradoxes, cunning traps, and blind-alleys, and, above all, to underscore the complexity of a structure of narcissism that is inevitably implicated in bereaved memory. I will cite the following passage that seems particularly relevant to Derridas own cautious observations on how

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the art of memory should be performed on occasions such as this. He asks:

What does this mean? What do we mean by in memory of? or, as we also say, to the memory of? For example, we affirm our fidelity to a departed friend by acting in a certain way in memory of him, or by dedicating a speech to his memory. Each time, we know our friend to be gone forever, irremediably absent, annulled to the point of knowing or receiving nothing himself of what takes place in his memory. In this terrifying lucidity, in this light of this incinerating blaze where nothingness appears, we remain in disbelief itself. For never will we believe either in death or immortality; and we sustain the blaze of this terrible light through devotion, for it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself: because he lives in us and because we live this or that in memory of him. This being in us, the being in us of the other, in bereaved memory, can be neither the resurrection of the other himself (the other is dead and nothing can save him from this death, nor can anyone save us from it), nor the simple inclusion of a narcissistic fantasy in a subjectivity that is closed upon itself or even identical to itself. If it were indeed a question of narcissism, its structure would remain too complex to allow the other, dead or living, to be reduced to this same structure. Already installed in this narcissistic structure, the other so marks the self of relationship to self, so conditions it that the being in us of bereaved memory becomes the coming of the other, a coming of the other. And even, however terrifying this thought may be, the first coming of the other. (Memoires, 21-22)

Here, we might find in Derridas meditation on the narcissistic structure of bereaved memory already a reply to the question of whether we have to wait for death for the other in us to come. In some way, the other first arrives, as Derrida says in the last sentence, only after death. And yet, death cannot be simply identified with the event of dying, the punctual event of mortality, since we know that the death of the other is always anticipated, feared, and sometimes, as terrible as this sounds, even desired. And it would not be false to say that there are many who have secretly desired Derridas death, and who have participated in his defacement even when he was alive; who actively sought to impair the usefulness, value, or influence of his thought, even to obliterate or destroy his continued influence. The acts of memory and of prosopopeia that followed the defacement caused by The New York Times obituary demonstrate this aporia very well. Many responded in the name of Derrida to decry his disfigurement. Many signed their names (and there were many names, including my own), and these signatures were testamentary signs to the act of giving and taking away the face. Nevertheless, one does not have to await the moment of death for disfiguration and de-facement to occur. Has not Derrida always already
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responded, incessantly, to his inevitable defacementalways already, beginning with the reception of his writings and his proper name under the sign of deconstruction, which has always been superficial, too much of a simple surface? From Derridas remarks concerning the complexity of narcissism we might conclude that any relationship that warrants being implicated in this narcissistic structure of the egos own survival, the other (whom I loved, or even, whom I hate, or who persecutes me and disturbs my fantasy of a subjectivity that is closed and identical to itself) is only a prefiguration of the other who first comes to us and in us in the experience of bereaved memory. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the death of the other opens (or re-opens) an immemorial narcissistic wound, and the act of bereavement for the other (in us) must first be situated in the complexity of the narcissistic structure. In a well-known line that occurs in Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes the coming of the other as a shadow that falls across the ego. This is a very poetic description of bereaved memory, but one that captures this event perfectly. The other who is lost, in life or in death, who had been present to us and in us, suddenly becomes a shadow, a trace of a trace. But the ego is cloaked in this shadow also, de-faced and disfigured, and there is a moment where the other and the self are identical: both become shadows of an object that was once present and now only exists in the act of memory. But it is here, as Derrida describes above, that the other first arrives, as the difference that so marks the self of the relationship to self, a relationship conditioned precisely by a narcissistic structure; it is here that the other finally comes free from being implicated in this structure, causing the complex relationship of self to self to undergo further differentiation (or complexity). This implies two things: that the significance of death can only appear within a subjectivity that is already conditioned by narcissism; in some there would be no mourning, true or not, outside the structure of narcissismit is absolutely necessary to the first coming of the other. (And here lies Derridas fundamental argument with Levinas concerning an other who might arrive without being always already implicated in this structure.) But, secondly, Derrida seems to imply that there is no other, either living or deceased, that does not disrupt this structure from its simple fantasy of identity, that does not disturb and essentially deface the egos own image. In other words, the other is the first cause of the egos defacement, and Freuds description is only a poetic representation of a surface that is originally obscured, if not eclipsed, by the shadow of the others passing. The Freudian concept of the Unconscious is fundamentally grounded

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upon this simple tropeas the sovereign, the secret the one which knows how to efface itselfand it is not by chance that psychoanalytic knowledge has concerned itself almost exclusively with revealing the traces of this effacement in the fantasies of subjectivity, of a totalized self, a self identical with self. Derrida often spoke of the irremediable finitude of memory (in us, between us), a finitude directly related to the others irreducible precedence (ibid.). One might ask why, in the act of memory, Derrida himself employs this word, precedence, to name the trace of the other? Precedence names something that comes first in the order of events or beings, is higher in rank or preference; that claims a state or right of preceding or priority. For example, in the above passage cited from De Man, we have observed in the series of tropological substitutions (voice, eye, face), that the face assumes precedence even though it is the last to become manifest. Likewise, Derrida reminds us that the other who comes to us after death and in bereaved memory is, in some sense, the first coming of the other. Thus, this coming of the other takes precedence, even in a temporal sense, in that this coming now precedes every moment and manner in which the other might have come to us in the past. That is, the manner in which Derrida comes to us today must take precedence over every other memory, in us or between us, that we might have shared. We have no other choice than to observe this coming first, to obey its rank and its superiority (even the capitalization of the other as Other), to recognize its claim and its ineluctable right to precedence. In the earlier passage cited above, perhaps this first coming of the other refers to this terrible light that Derrida spoke of: the terrifying lucidity, in the light of this incinerating blaze, where nothingness appears . In the blaze of such a light, however, we must recognize that no shadow can exist, including the shadow that now obscures the face, and we have been blinded by its terrifying lucidity. Consequently, in the terrible light of this nothingness, we can only say that there is no mouth, no eye, and finally, no face either. As Derrida himself has already demanded of us on the occasion of speaking in the memory of, still more light (plus de lumire) is needed (Memoires, 33). For it would be unfaithful to continue to delude ourselves into believing that the other living in us is still living in himself. Finally, this is my devotion to the irreducible precedence of Jacques Derrida: that I will forever remain in a constant state of disbelief in his memory, or in the memory of him. Syracuse University

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1. Here, I am employing Kojeves insights on the nature of a kind of society that has negated the animal and the natural and has resolved these into purely formalized valuesvalues empty of all human content in the historical sense. The fact that the animal body has become an obsessive theme of discourse already attests to our distance and alienation from the experience of our own animality. In some way, the nature of academic society can be compared to a social form that has sublimated the risk of death, including the risk that is attested to by the death of the other, into a purely formal value, or discursive genre, that has supplanted real communal existence. See Kojeve, pp. 161-162.

Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man, rev. ed., New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

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