In the Preface he wrote for the volume entitled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Each Time Unique, the End of the World),1 a collection of memorial addresses, Jacques Derrida emphasizes how much the “adieu” should salute nothing other than “the necessity of a possible non-return, the end of the world as the end of any resurrection.” In other words, the “adieu” should in no way signify a rendezvous with God but, on the contrary, a definitive leave-taking, an irremissible abandonment—as much an abandonment of the deceased other to his effacement as an abandonment of the survivor to the rigorous privation of all hope in some kind of afterlife, whether that of the other or indeed, ultimately, of the survivor himself: I, who salute the other, whom another will salute, some other day.
This necessity is tied to that according to which we must recognize, in each death, the end of the world, and not simply the end of a world: not a momentary interruption in the chain of possible worlds, but rather the annihilation with neither reserve nor compensation “of the sole and unique world,” “which makes each living being a single and unique one.” We must say “adieu” without return, in the implacable certainty that the other will not turn back, will never return.
A salutation [salut] “worthy of the name” rejects all salvation. It salutes the absolute absence of salvation [il salue l’absence absolu de salut], or, again, it “foregoes salvation [salut] in advance,” as Derrida wrote already in Le toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy.2 Just as he then addressed that salute to me, that salute dismissing salvation, he again directs to me the monition of this “book of adieu.” He specifies, in effect, that “resurrection” must be refused, not only “in the usual sense, which imagines bodies that have come back to life get up and walk about; but even in the sense of anastasis of which Jean-Luc Nancy speaks.”3 In effect, the latter “continues to console, were this with the rigor of a certain cruelty. It postulates both the existence of some God and that the end of one world may not be the end of the world.”
I would like, in turn, to salute this salute and not reject the rejection it carries, but rather attempt to clarify it differently, so far as it is possible to bring whatever light there might be to this material, and so far as it is not necessary—to the contrary—to abide with it with eyes closed, definitively and obstinately closed, to everything that is not related to a night and a sleep without tomorrows and awakenings. Eyes open, consequently, to the night, in the night, and as themselves nocturnal: eyes that see the end of the world, not represented before them, but unleashing in them the collapse of the vision and touch of the night itself. Night against eyes like other eyes, which would arrest and drown in them all possibility of vision, of intentionality, of direction, orientation, and recourse outside the adieu without return.
If my salutation is to be worthy of its name, it must salute without salvation, but it must salute. The noun salut denotes address, invitation, or injunction with a view to being safe. Safe (salvus) is that which remains whole, unscathed, intact. What is safe is thus not the saved, separated from the injury or the pollution that had touched it, rather it is that (or that one, he; that one, she) which remains intact, out of reach—that which has never been touched. In this way the dead carry off with them, as we say, the unique and sole world each of them was. They carry off, this way, the entire world, for never is the world a world if not unique, alone, and wholly intact. Solus, salvus: there is salvation only of the sole, the single, yet the sole or single is the desolate par excellence: devastated, deserted, given over to a total isolation (desolari).
No more than the word consolation has anything but assonance with the word desolation (solor, “comforting,” is foreign to solus), no more can there be a consolation for desolation, if consoling signifies soothing the pain, restoring a possible, retrieving the presence and the life of those who are dead. Everything must, on the contrary, “console” in the sense of fortifying the desolation, of making its harshness inflexible and untouchable. Touching the intact: this is what death offers us, and that means that the deceased disappears in the absolute isolation of his or her untouchable death, while the living one who salutes him or her stays on this side, which no other side confronts, for there is no shore on which to land, and no possible contact (neither sensible, nor intelligible, nor imaginary) with the intact. It is precisely this that the salutation salutes: the salutation touches the untouchable in the form of an address that confirms, to itself, its disappearance, which gives back to itself in some way its foreclosed absence, and the world in it that is over. To say “adieu”—Derrida said it in his Adieu to Levinas4—is “to call him by his name, to call his name.” The salutation salutes the other in the untouchable intactness of his or her unsignifying propriety or ownness, his or her name plunged henceforth into the nonsignificance which is that of the proper name and, through it or in it, each time that of the world as a whole. Saluting the name [nom] and the no-[non] placed upon that name, the salutation desolates it as it desolates itself: I am alone, each time absolutely alone before this isolating, this isolation of the other “facing,” which, properly speaking, I can no more stand than I can touch it without flinching or failing, deprived of this very sense and, in it, of all sense.
It remains nonetheless true that the salutation salutes and that in so doing—in doing nothing, moreover, in producing nothing, only desolating—it addresses and invokes, it calls, it announces even again, or really for the first time, it convokes, it declares, and it proclaims something—more precisely, someone. In this, whatever it might want and whatever it might claim to do, it cannot fail to console others, and itself. It fortifies the desolation, and this confortation, which crushes it and leaves it without a voice, is nonetheless that—and is all the more so the failing that opens in desolation the passage for a voice—of its salute to what will not let itself be saluted. Sixteen times modulated for sixteen deceased ones, Derrida’s salutation (elsewhere, other salutations, each time that someone is there to say “adieu”—and we know what a frightful sadness reigns when there is no one, and we know with revulsed knowledge what horror stretches out there where the tomb itself is refused, and with it any salvation, the tomb that is the monument to salvation)—Derrida’s salutation still saves no matter what. It saves nothing from the abyss, but it salutes the abyss saved. Now the abyss thus preserved, desolate and declared in its desolation, the abyss impossible to reseal just as it is impossible to sound, gives to salutation the dignity—strange, unbearable, in tears—of the world that collapses. At the same time, the salutation gives the ruined world [monde abîmé] its dignity as world. To the proper name deprived of sense it gives the totality of sense. The unverifiable and manifest truth that “the world,” each time, means to say.
What anastasis would designate—in the essay I wrote to deconstruct it or to turn around its value, understood as “resurrection”5—is nothing other than redress (anastasis), this raising up [cette levée] (and not a sursumption or a relay [relève])6 of ruined sense like a truth cast forth, appealed to, announced, and saluted. Truth cannot but be saluted, each time, and never saved, for there is nothing to save, nothing to carry back up from the depths of the death [rien à remonter du tréfonds du trépas]: yet even that is saluted, hailed, each time, in the funeral oration, which is not an ornament but a necessary element of the structure or event called “dying.” Through this oration, through this salutation, “death”—this supposed entity, thing, or subject, that to which Hegel concedes the name on the sole condition that “if we would thus name this nothingness”—finds itself saluted qua the dying proper to this one or that one, to him or her who was here or there (who was the world here or there), and who is no more nor shall be anywhere, at any time. In his dying, each one is saluted for himself to the entire degree to which this “himself” is desolated, intact, and no more comes back to himself than he comes back to us or will come back to us. Not coming back, lying dead, he stands aright, stands anew in a saluted truth.
This salutation effects no surreptitious return. If desolation consoles in this way, as little reassuring as it is perfectly uncontestable, then this is not by way of some dialectical machination that would convert the loss into a gain. It is not through the fantastic operation that religion appears to contrive in order to seize hold of a credulity ready and quick to gobble up salvation. In religion itself, it is not sure that the representation of salvation plays, in the final instance, the consoling role that we believe, perhaps a bit quickly, we are able to lend it, like the effect of an illusion. It would certainly not be aberrant to think that a true believer has never died nor watched another die, childishly imagining an unbroken passage toward another world just like this one, only exempt from suffering. Assuredly, religions, like metaphysics, never cease promoting a salvific beguiling and reassuring consolation. Nevertheless, “God” or the “other world” manifestly never names a continuity, and still less the continuation of this world across some furtive passage. The tomb is not a passage; it is a non-site that shelters an absence. Faith never consists—and this, no doubt, in any religious form—in making oneself believe something in the way that one might convince oneself that tomorrow one will be happy. Faith can only consist, by definition, in addressing what comes to pass, and it annihilates every belief, every reckoning, every economy, and any salvation. As the mystics knew, without attaching any exaltation to this, faith consists in addressing or in being addressed to the other of the world, which is not “an other world” except in the sense of being other than the world, the one that each time comes to an end without remission.
“God” designates but that alterity in which the alteration of the world, of the whole world, makes itself absolute, without appeal, without recall. And it is the without-appeal that calls and recalls, each time, through the address to the deceased. This address is salutation. It is too contemptuous to represent humanity to oneself as though the immense majority of our peers (and we should no doubt extrapolate, varying our terms somewhat, to include animals) passed their lives—or their deaths, whichever you prefer—misunderstanding more or less consciously, more or less unconsciously, the intractable real that is dying. In a more subtle way, an infinitely more dignified way, everyone knows something of the nescience [du non-savoir] that befalls him and forbids him, with an extreme rigor, to claim to appropriate any part whatsoever of an object called “death,” since such an object remains without consistency (in truth, it is death that is fantastic), whereas the subject who dies and he who, in saluting him, addresses him where no address can reach, these two salute each other without saving each other. They share the anastasis, whose elevation and rectitude cuts perpendicularly across the unsublatable recumbency of the body in the dust. There is no return, no rebirth, no reviviscence. But there is “resurrection” in the sense of the raising of a salute, of an “adieu”: the departure is its own announcement; it reveals nothing; it leads to no secret; it effects neither thaumaturgy nor transfiguration. In a sense, there is nothing to say about this last saying, about this oration in which glimmers only the salutation, the time of a few words in a sob, in a flash of blackness. The oratio is discourse or prayer; it is discourse qua prayer. Prayer is neither demand nor a trafficking of influence, it is supplication as well as praise. It is supplicating praise: at once, and each time, prayer celebrates and deplores, it demands a remission and declares what is irremissible. This is what discourse becomes when the world, liquidated, no longer allows us to link together the slightest signification. At that moment, and each time, prayer without expectation and without effects makes up the anastasis of the discourse; the salute stands and addresses [se dresse et s’adresse] at the precise point where there remains nothing to be said.
It is unbearable: How not to bow before the fact that the living never cease bearing this and saluting it, making it even, in the final analysis, their reason for living, the only absolutely unimpeachable factum rationis, and the unthinkable without which none would die, that is, without which none would live?
Who then would live, ultimately, without practicing, albeit without knowing it, what I am here designating with a citation extracted by force and placed out of context: “a hymn, an encomium, a prayer” turned toward the other of the present life within life itself, “an imploration for surrection, for resurrection,”7 such that it is this itself, this imploration, that is the resurrection?
Who then, after all, evoked a music (if not music itself) thanks to which “the my-self, dead but raised up by this music, by the unique coming of this music, here and now, in a single movement, the my-self would die in saying yes to death and would thereby resuscitate, saying to itself, I am reborn, but not without dying, I come back to life posthumously, the same ecstasy uniting in itself a death without return and resurrection, death and birth, the desperate salute of the adieu without return and without salvation, without redemption but a salute to the life of the other living in the secret sign and the exuberant silence of a superabundant life”8—who then, if not Derrida, the same or an other? And what is a superabundant life if not life tout court—yes, in all its brevity—inasmuch as it exceeds all that we could recognize and salute, inasmuch as it exceeds itself and it dies, thereby confiding and giving us over [ainsi se confiant et nous confiant] to superabundance and exuberance?
Exuberance is none other than the exactitude of life when existence surrenders to it. Exactitude is a word that he generously credited me with having “resuscitated.”9 This would accord too much thaumaturgy to a simple lexical trope. But let us say, simply, that without supposing God or salvation, we never lack, dead or alive, a language by which eternally, immortally, to salute ourselves, the one the other, the ones and the others. Such a salute, without saving us, at least touches us and, in touching us, gives rise to [suscite] that strange turmoil of crossing through life for nothing—but not exactly in a pure loss.
Translated by Bettina Bergo