THE TIME HAS COME TO BID FAREWELL (ADIEU) TO THE dead, to these philosophers of rebellion so different from one another, who never stopped arguing with and loving one another, and whose heirs, like it or not, we are. That is why I close this book by rendering homage to Jacques Derrida, to the man who was my friend for twenty years. The last survivor of this generation, he was the last to die, but also the only one to have bid his own farewell, in a book,1 to most of those who formed this generation, and to many others as well, to which I add here a sort of postscript and so render my own homage in turn to what is immortal in friendship, to what is strongest in the fact of evoking the past the better to face the future: learning to think for tomorrow, learning to live, understanding what tomorrow will be made of.2
The law that governs the relationship that each subject maintains with the dead friend, and thus with death and friendship, is a structural and universal law, an “inflexible and fatal law: of two friends, one will see the other die.”3 This death, when it comes, is not just the end of such and such a life, but the “end of something in totality.” In consequence, no mourning is possible. But since the absence of mourning always risks driving mad the friend who remains behind, only the state of melancholy permits the integration into oneself of the death of the other and the continuation of life.
I have had to confront such loss and I have had to compose farewells to dear ones and friends who have departed. And I have always said goodbye to the dead person right after his or her death. Never have I been able to write a funeral eulogy before the real death of those who were to die, even when they were condemned in advance by an implacable illness.
No one can ever, it seems to me, speak death before the coming of death. And when that does occur, when a farewell is written in advance, like a murder of death, the imposture is readable between the lines. The dead person is then deprived of the possible narrative of his death, and that death identified with a nothingness. Betrayal of chronology, betrayal of the time necessary for the approach of death, for its narration, for its celebration. Supreme transgression, finally, because this act of putting to death of death, perpetrated before death, makes the one who is composing the text the master—necessarily illusory—of a suspension of time. For nothing actually guarantees that the author of a necrology before death will not already be dead at the moment of the death of the one whose death he has related.
Ultimate separation, the farewell is spoken from out of life, as the moment at which are intermingled the death lived, the death undergone, the death celebrated, the memory of death. To say adieu, the make one’s adieux, to make a visit of adieu, all these expressions really signify that he who is departing remits to God [à Dieu] the soul of the one who remains behind: for ever. To say farewell is also to disappear oneself, to cut oneself off from the world in which one had lived and accede to another world. But, to pronounce an adieu, to say adieu to a dead friend, may on the contrary also be, for the survivor, to remit à Dieu the soul of the departed one so that the memory of friendship may live beyond death, eternally. But this may also be to transform the à Dieu into an adieu, to pass discreetly from the kingdom of God to that of the death of God. The à Dieu presupposes the existence of God and the adieu his effacement. And it is no accident that the distinction between adieu and au revoir [until next we meet] came about in French usage at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of a revolution that had destroyed, with a regicide unique in the world, the bond that joined God to royal sovereignty. The à Dieu faded away, replaced by adieu and giving rise to au revoir. A century earlier people still said: adieu, jusqu’au revoir.
The execution of Louis XVI was not just the decapitation of a king but the putting to death of the monarchy. From out of life, and so that the nation might live, it was necessary, with no ceremony of farewell, with no remitting of the soul of the deceased à Dieu, with no adieu, jusqu’au revoir, to say adieu to royalty, which had become the kingdom of the dead.
As for mourning for the departed loved one, it never really takes place, and it was to give meaning to this impossibility that Freud felt the need, in 1915, to tie and untie, in the same movement, the bonds that unite mourning and melancholy. At the risk, in fact, of making melancholy not a subjective destiny but a pathology proper to narcissistic neuroses. Only with the discovery of the death wish, and the lived experience of the death of certain members of his family, especially his daughter and his grandson, was the master of Vienna able to accept the idea that certain mournings are impossible to perform. About the death of Sophie, he wrote: “One knows that after such a loss, the sharp grief will wane, but one always remains inconsolable, without finding a substitute. Everything that takes this place, even occupying it entirely, always remains other. And at bottom, it is better so. It is the only way to perpetuate this love, which one does not wish to abandon at any cost.”4 And: “It is true, I have lost my dear daughter, aged twenty-seven, but I have supported the loss strangely well. It was in 1920, one was worn down by the misery of war, prepared for years to find out that one had lost a son. Submission to destiny was thus prepared…. Since the death of Heinerle, I no longer love my grandchildren, and I no longer rejoice in life. This is also the secret of indifference. People have labelled this courage in the face of the threat to my own life.”5
What these two passages, which nevertheless contradict one another, show is that the death of a rising generation, when not caused by war, epidemic, natural disaster, or massacre, is felt as a pathology. The rule of evolution does in fact dictate that the genealogical order should never be disturbed.6 For it is written in the great book of time that a man should always disappear after his forebears and before his offspring. So the more death strikes against this apparently immutable destiny, the greater the suffering that invades the soul of the survivor forced to accept the unacceptable. From the end of the eighteenth century, and even more so at the end of the twentieth, the transgression of this rule has been experienced as an even more intense anomaly.7
Derrida’s farewells are words torn from silence and nothingness: “ In memoriam, the taste of tears, by dint of mourning, I shall have to wander all alone, friendship-before-all-else.” And finally, about Lévinas: “But I have stated that I did not wish only to recall that which he entrusted to us of the à Dieu, but above all to say adieu to him, call him by his name, as he is called at the moment when, if he no longer responds, it is also that he responds in us …by reminding us: ‘à-Dieu’ Adieu Emmanuel.”8
Before a friend’s tomb, before the dead one henceforth deprived of words, it is indeed a question of holding off the onset of mourning with a challenge. Of saying adieu and not à Dieu. And if “each time is unique,” that means that everyone has the right to a singular salutation, which can also be the repetition of a same evocation of loss: “Too much to state, my heart fails, my strength fails, I must wander by myself, absence remains ever unthinkable to me henceforth, what is happening stops me breathing, how not to tremble? how to act? how to be? to speak is impossible, to remain silent also, what I thought was impossible is there before me, indecent, unjustifiable, intolerable, like a catastrophe that has already taken place and that must necessarily be repeated. I ask you to pardon me if today I have strength for no more than a few very simple words. Later I shall try to speak better.” One could multiply ad infinitum the list of these mournful words that punctuate the farewells of Jacques Derrida to his friends, des adieux sans Dieu.
Without posing the question of the ways of dying in the West, without distinguishing between the various ways of dying—suicide, accident, illness, violent death, gentle death, longed-for death, sudden death, surrender to impulse—and whatever the age of the person to whom he was addressing his salute, Jacques Derrida constructs his discourse like the palimpsest of the moment of death, like the instantaneous trace of that unique moment at which the passage from life to death comes about. Thus he is able to summon to himself the entire buried memory of a fragmented existence. Every time a detail surges up out of the darkness, so that the melody of the “inflexible and fatal” law may be enlivened: “To have a friend, to behold him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know, in a manner a little more intense and wounded in advance, always insistent, more and more unforgettable, that one of the two will inevitably see the other die. One of us—each says—one of us two, one of these days, will see himself no longer seeing the other.”9
The farewells of Jacques Derrida are thus neither funeral eulogies in the classic sense, nor necrologies, nor narratives of agony. It is not he who has chosen to speak the moment of death, or the degradation of the flesh, or the horror of the visage as it freezes or the corpse as it stiffens. He did not recount the last days of Emmanuel Kant, nor write a Last Moments of Baudelaire or a Dying Voltaire. He did not have to bear witness to any “ceremony of farewell.”10
Nor did he gather together the words for death—perish, disappear, succumb, pass over, decease (the most horrible). And he did not portray graphically either the last moments of the ones condemned to die, nor the last words invented for death by the living awaiting death: “O death, old captain, it is time. Let us lift anchor.” Or: “This idea of death installed itself definitively in me, as a love does.” Or again: “Death, the masked specter, has nothing beneath his visor.”11 Neither infamous deaths nor illustrious deaths. Quite simply, death.
Derrida’s farewells to his friends do not present either mortuary masks or the grand ceremonial of preparation for death. Between rupture and return, between the separation of “with God” and reintegration of the other into oneself, in sum, between the adieu and the au revoir, they allow us to understand, in an undertone, the pain and the fainting, and above all the narrative and almost ontological, structure of every recital of death and friendship: one person will have to disappear before the other. Thus they do not refer to the biographical trajectory of the loved being except through a writing of the parenthesis comparable to the cinematographic technique of the flashback.12 Ever gasping, the word shatters in a perpetual unfulfillment: “Deleuze certainly remains, despite many divergences, the one among all those of this ‘generation’ to whom I have always thought myself closest…. And then I recall the memorable ten-day Nietzsche conference at Cerisy in 1972, and then so many other moments that make me, along with Jean-François Lyotard no doubt (who was there too), feel myself quite alone today, surviving and melancholy, out of what they call with a terrible and slightly false word, a ‘generation.’”13
The “generation” of which Derrida speaks is presented inside quotation marks, as if the word bore the imprint of a suspect historicism. I myself am fond of this word, and lay claim to it. And I think that this “generation”—the one that is presented in this book—really is one, notwithstanding the disparity of the actors, for what unites them is stronger than what divides them. Of course, in this ensemble there are circulating multiple subterranean filiations, where at least three generations intersect: one was born at the beginning of the century; the second during the interwar period; and the third, my own, between 1940 and 1945.
At the risk of a certain approximation, I wish to define some traits common to this “generation” that combines three generations. Whether it issues from phenomenology, or one terms it structuralist, poststructuralist, or antistructuralist, it assembles authors whose characteristic it was to have questioned the nature of the subject and to have exposed to the light what lies hidden behind the use of this noun. Rather than cling to the idea that the subject is at one moment radically free, at another entirely determined by social or linguistic structures, the thinkers of this generation preferred to doubt the very principle of such an alternation. And that is why they persisted in criticizing, sometimes very violently, the illusions of the Aufklärung and the logos, even if it meant forcing philosophy outside philosophic discourse so as to interrogate its margins and contours in light of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, even if it meant emptying literature of any romantic content and recentering it on its own literality or on the conditions of its emergence. The poets, writers, and philosophers belonging to this generation, marked by the “new novel,” wrote neither novels nor “new new novels” (which would still have been novels), but literary texts that put the very notion of novelistic universe into question.
All the friends to whom Derrida’s farewells were addressed, fifteen men and one woman, were witnesses to or heirs of the two great European catastrophes of the twentieth century: the Shoah and the Gulag. They were also the actors or spectators of the end of the colonial empires, the student youth revolt, and the collapse of communism.
And if each of them was confronted, at some point in his life, with the question of the genocide of the Jews, were it only in radically challenging the positions taken by Heidegger in his “Rectoral discourse,”14 none of them really took part in the anti-Nazi struggle—militarily or politically, and to the death—as did for example Marc Bloch, Jean Cavaillès, Boris Vildé, Georges Politzer, and Yvonne Picard.15 Some were too young, others were elsewhere.
From 1940 to 1941 Barthes was teaching literature in two Parisian high schools. A year later, suffering from a recurrence of his tuberculosis, he found himself forced to stay in various sanatoriums for the next five years. Having collaborated in the writing of at least two texts of an anti-Semitic nature in Belgian newspapers, Paul de Man protested against the German takeover of the newspaper Le Soir and went to work in a publishing house.16 Called up by the French army, Althusser and Lévinas spent the war in prison camp, while Edmond Jabès combated fascism by founding the League against anti-Semitism and the French Friendship Group at Cairo. Too young to take part, Gilles Deleuze witnessed the arrest of his brother, who would be exterminated in Auschwitz for having engaged in resistance, as was the father of Sarah Kofman, deported in 1942 as a Jew after having been rounded up by the Vichy police.
As for Blanchot, after passing his youth in the service of the Young Right, he wrote two of his major works under the occupation, Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab. The latter text owes its title to the biblical figure, but also to the younger brother of Emmanuel Lévinas, assassinated by the Nazis in Lithuania, who bore this name. Blanchot subsequently maintained discreet ties to the Resistance, protecting individuals on the run and friends, especially members of the Lévinas family. In June 1944 he barely escaped a Nazi death squad, an episode he related fifty years later in The Instant of my Death.17
Thus the stories of some link up to the stories of others, into a story of life and death into which are woven the bonds of au revoir and adieu, of death undergone, of death lived, of the farewell one says to him who remains, of the farewell one addresses to him who departs.
Jacques Lacan was not among those to whom Derrida bid farewell in The Work of Mourning. First, because they were never friends, and second because no family member had invited him to the cemetery before the tomb of the master, who was buried in strictest privacy in 1981, according to the consecrated formula: without honors or flowers, or speeches, or a cortège.
And yet, on another occasion Derrida had in fact included Lacan in the list of his dead, the list of those whose death he would have wished to celebrate: “There was death between us, it was a question of death above all,” he wrote in 1990. “I would even say only of the death of one of us, as with or chez all those who love reciprocally. Or rather he spoke of it by himself, for I for my part never uttered a word. He spoke, by himself, of our death, of his own that would not fail to arrive, and of the death or rather of the dead man which according to him I was playing.”18
For love of Lacan, Derrida here records a scene—a scene of the father and death, one could say—a scene he had told me about five years earlier and that I had related in volume 2 of my History of Psychoanalysis in France. Lacan had accused Derrida of “not recognizing the impasse he himself attempts on the Other by playing the dead man.” A celebrated scene, overarchived by now. For love of Lacan, for the death of Lacan, for the death Lacan addresses to his recipient, for the undelivered letter that the recipient sends back, Derrida exhumes in this scene a whole secret zone of the history of his relations with Lacan. Promise of life and struggle to the death. He who remains in life dispatches his salute to the dead one, even if he be the very one who had wished most strongly that he not remain in life. The scene plays out on a deathly shore on which four characters fetch up: the king, the queen, the minister, and the chevalier, all portrayed to the life, as in a tragedy of Shakespeare, at four moments of their history, during which each attempts to exercise undivided sovereignty over the other.
Here words are not lacking, breathing is not cut short. This is clearly a true funeral oration, classic, constructed, ordered. And on this account, no doubt, it could not figure among the farewells delivered to his friends. For in this game of life and death, which had once set the two men against each other, the friend was not a friend but the adversary to whom it was necessary, now, to render posthumous homage.
The death of which Derrida speaks in dedicating, to his friends, the farewells of one who must live to bear witness that the friendship had indeed existed, is thus not of the same nature as the death of the adversary honored in retrospect. But no more is it like the heroic death of those who “died on the field of honor.”
More even than soldiers who fall in battle, the committed and the resisters choose a manner of dying. They decide to die in saying farewell to the world in which they have lived so that a new world may come about. Thus they give their lives without ever having the certainty that their death will have been the crowning moment of a fulfilled existence. Acceptance of death coincides with the gift of life because death becomes more desirable than slavery, and freedom more desired than life. Those dead—assassinated, tortured, executed, cut to pieces, burned to ashes, thrown in trenches, annihilated, disappeared—are never allowed to have farewells spoken at the instant of their death. They have no military cemetery. No more, for that matter, than the victims of the final solution do. Their death is a crime against death.
But the farewells to those dead, to those who died for freedom, to those who died without guarantee or certainty, always come afterward. And I know of nothing more moving in this domain than the famous last words of the funeral oration for Jean Moulin delivered by André Malraux at the foot of the Pantheon on 19 December 1964: “Enter here, Jean Moulin, with your terrible cortège. With those who died in the cellars without having spoken, like you; and, what is perhaps more atrocious, having spoken; with all those wiped out and all those shorn away in the concentration camps; with the last shivering corpse of the frightful files of Night and Fog; fallen, finally, under crosses; with the eight thousand Frenchwomen who did not come back from prison; with the last woman who died at Ravensbrück for having given shelter to one of ours. Enter, with the people born of shadow and vanished with shadow—our brothers in the order of the night.”
Likewise, I know nothing more rigorous than the farewell of Georges Canguilhem to his friend Jean Cavaillès.19 Finally, once again, for this twentieth century, I know nothing more overpowering than the farewells to the dead gathered by Claude Lanzmann among the Sonderkommandos. Words carried off, stolen, extirpated in the deepest depth of being and death, conspiracy of nothingness in order to accede to a memory of death: “You know, ‘to feel’ out there…. It was very hard to feel anything at all: imagine working day and night among the dead, the cadavers, your feelings disappear, you were dead to feeling, dead to everything.”20
When I first read Derrida’s farewells to his friends, I was just finishing Alexandre Dumas’s great trilogy The Three Musketeers.21 Struck by the analogies existing between these two texts, between two ways of celebrating death and saying farewell, and since I could already see that he considered himself as a survivor living on borrowed time, as the survivor who was going to die in his turn of the illness with which he was afflicted and against which he struggled, knowing all the while that he would not recover,22 I decided to offer Jacques Derrida the story of the thirty-five years of friendship of the most celebrated heroes of French literature: Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan.
In the France of the age before Colbert that Dumas chose to bring back to life, with the bourgeois cynicism he found repugnant growing ever more prevalent, the four friends incarnate a chivalric ideal that is continually ground down during their lifetimes. They have chosen pure heroism, a true challenge thrown at the new state order created by Richelieu and then Mazarin, and finally by Louis XIV with the imposition of absolutism. Every day they engage in duels, every day they kill and risk being killed. With sword in hand, and at close quarters, far from the theater of war, they never combat the contemptible, odious enemy, but the adversary, the one like them, the alter ego. For only he who is willing to risk his life for the pleasure of glory, for the splendor of panache, or for the love of a prince, conceived as the ideal of an imaginary royal lordship, only he has the right to die by being run through: the last flowering of heroic life.
Which of the four friends will depart first? Which of the four will say farewell to the other? This is the great question posed by the novel, and this is also the uncertainty that assails each of them for thirty-five years: Porthos, the giant, the naif, the baroque, the bravest of all; Athos, the melancholic and puritan noble, attached to the chivalric ideal of a past age; Aramis, the libertine, billowing and feminine, a future general of the Jesuits, secretive and cunning, but most faithful of the faithful to the only prince he has chosen for his master (Fouquet); d’Artagnan, finally, the most intelligent, most modern, most complex, in his quest for a principle of sovereignty that constantly eludes him. The friendship that unites these four men, to life and to death, and often two by two, excludes love and sexual difference. No woman would be able to share the life of any of them without putting in danger the pact that commands the very existence of the friendship.
This is why the female characters brought into the story by Dumas are devilish (Milady de Winter, the Duchess of Chevreuse), angelic (Constance Bonacieux), or deceptive (Louise de la Vallière, Anne of Austria). Whatever their role, all the women who cross the paths of the four friends are destined to destroy them. For the Musketeers are united only by the exclusive bonds of a friendship that bars each of them from being a husband, a lover, a father. And when Athos inherits a son (Bragelonne) conceived out of wedlock with the mistress of Aramis, this son, destined to perish, will have not one father nor one mother but four fathers, to the point of existing only after he has incorporated the essential element of each of them: the bravery of the first, the melancholy of the second, the femininity of the third, and the thirst for glory of the fourth.
So they had to be made to die, otherwise Dumas would have been condemned never to finish his novel, adding a fresh episode to the previous one year after year. Bound to the earth by his simplicity of spirit, Porthos departs first, crushed by rocks deep in a cave after a Herculean battle against a troop of adversaries. Aerial, and saddened by the death of his son, Athos disappears second, drawn upward by an angel who carries him off to the celestial home of interminable mourning. D’Artagnan finally, the lord of fire and war, dies third, riven by a cannon ball. And at the moment of the last passage, on which the trilogy concludes, he utters a few “cabalistic” words “that had once represented so many things on earth and that no one except this dying man understood: —Athos, Porthos, au revoir—Aramis, adieu forever!”23
A stunning inversion of the logic of farewell. D’Artagnan, from his death, and from a time past unknown to the living, from a time immemorial before his death, says au revoir to his dead friends and adieu forever to the friend who does not die, to the friend whose soul has already been claimed by God, to the friend who is condemned to live eternally knowing that no friend will ever bid farewell to him.