I speak of mourning as the attempt, always doomed to failure – a constitutive failure, precisely – to incorporate, interiorize, introject, subjectivize the other in me. Even before the death of the other, the inscription of that other’s mortality constitutes me. I am in mourning therefore I am – dead with the other’s death, my relation to myself is primarily one of mourning, a mourning that is moreover impossible. This is also what I call ex-appropriation, appropriation caught in a double bind: I must and must not take the other into me; mourning is an unfaithful fidelity if it succeeds in interiorizing the other ideally in me, i.e. if it fails to respect the other’s infinite exteriority.1
This volume gathers a number of pieces about Jacques Derrida which, with the exception of the first, were all written since his death in October 2004. Some of them explicitly attempt to address that death and its impact (at least its impact on the author), but all, in spite of their differences of occasion and audience, of tone and style, whether directed to a more or less ‘professional’ deconstructive audience (‘That’s Life, Death’ or ‘Handshake’) or one presumed to be less familiar with Derrida’s work (‘Foundations’ or ‘The Limits of My Language’) are profoundly marked by Derrida’s death, and are often struggling to go on thinking in its wake. Several of these pieces invoke Derrida’s own reflections on mourning and melancholia, and more especially on what he sometimes calls half-mourning or demi-deuil, a kind of suspended or interrupted state of the ‘normal’ work of mourning as famously described by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia.2 If this ‘normal’ mourning works in view of a recovery of the self from the loss of the other through a withdrawal of cathexes from that other back into the ego, then demi-deuil, insofar as it implies incomplete mourning, clearly has affinities with mourning’s doublet, melancholia. But this melancholia is no longer seen as a pathological condition, and rather as a kind of ethics of death, whereby the other’s loss is not lost in the interests of the self, as is the case in ‘normal’ mourning, but is in a certain sense maintained as loss, and therefore mourned in a process that is structurally non-teleological and always incomplete. ‘Normal’ mourning gets over it and gets to the end of itself in the more or less triumphant reaffirmation of the subject and its constitutive narcissism: demi-deuil, in Derrida’s use of the term if not in its traditional specification, is a kind of structural state of not getting over it, and therefore remaining permanently somewhat short of recovery, surviving with a ‘slash-scar, or narcissistic disfiguration’.3
Demi-deuil, half-mourning, is not simply an espousal of melancholia, however, in spite of the impression one or two of these pieces might give, written as they were from a distress that often seemed on the point of compromising any further ability to work at all. Part of that distress as it bore specifically on these pieces was the thought that, whatever happened, Jacques Derrida would never read them. For although I did not systematically send him everything I wrote, even about him, he was in a certain sense the implied reader of everything I had ever written. The intrinsically unpredictable and slightly crazy structure of reading, which he had helped me think about,4 and that is explored again here in more than one chapter, was now cut through by a cold certainty of a different order: whatever else happens, Jacques will not have read this.
And yet if, as he suggests more than once, all work is work of mourning, then there is clearly mourning as well as melancholia in these still quite industrious pieces, and in the volume they are now brought together to constitute, and some appeal still to reading across and through the interruption of death. Indeed, demi-deuil in Derrida’s construal is, according to a pattern familiar from elsewhere in his thinking, not really opposed to mourning, nor is it even an etiolated form of mourning, but, affirmatively and even militantly, the only possible mourning, even as it marks mourning with a kind of impossibility. (For the possible in general to be really possible, radically possible, and not just the unfolding of a pro-gramme, it must always in a certain sense be impossible.5) Half-mourning, we might suspect, just is life itself as the state of survival or living on we might also venture to call half-life: life is always half-life. And again, as ‘That’s Life, Death’ and ‘Half-Life’ here suggest, half-life is not a restricted or second-rate life, but life itself, as alive as can be, as good as it gets.
Demi-deuil, half-mourning, then, might be re-formulated as not half mourning, if I can exploit the ambiguity (in colloquial British English at least) whereby ‘not half’ can function, as it were, either side of half, moving undecidably in either direction from the halfway line: ‘it’s not half bad’ means it’s less than half bad, and therefore not so very bad, really quite good: but the rejoinder ‘Not half!’ (or perhaps more often glottally stopped as ‘No?’alf!’) usually functions antiphrastically as an intensifier, so that in the exchange ‘Was it good?’; ‘No?’alf!’ the response means that it was really good, much more than (merely) half good. ‘Are you in mourning?’; ‘No?’alf!’6
In a short piece written as a very free translation of an earlier French text, and delivered in London on what turned out to be the last occasion I saw Jacques Derrida, in July 2004, I related this idiomatic use of ‘not half’ to another English idiom –‘no end’.7 ‘I had no end of trouble writing this piece’, or ‘writing this piece troubled me no end’.8 There is no end of mourning in these essays: they are not half melancholic. The apparent restraint of ‘not half’, with its internal antiphrastic double, and the apparent limitlessness of ‘no end’ in fact work together to describe what elsewhere and more technically I have tried to describe as ‘interrupted teleology’, and which I believe to be a specific but generalisable structure within the absolute generality of what Derrida himself most often calls différance.9 In the present case, this underlying thought of interrupted teleology shows up especially in relation to a perception about the structure of Derrida’s work itself, as its ‘progress’ always involves a kind of looping back or rereading of its own earlier moments, so that (and exemplarily here in the case of the concepts of mourning and life) apparently unobtrusive or perhaps simply ill-read moments in ‘early’ Derrida can be shown, but only retroactively, nachträglich, to open up, through rereading, more obviously thematised later occurrences. The life of Derrida’s work (for example on the concept of life, but also all the other concepts) is itself bound up in this half-mournful reading relation to itself (for example in relation to the concept of mourning, but also all the other concepts). ‘Not half’, then, affects half-mourning, making it always less than half and more than half; and by the same token makes it endless, so there’s no end of (not-half) mourning. And this ‘no end’ also responds to Derrida’s own contention, in a number of late texts recalled more than once in this volume, that death is always a fin du monde, an end of the world; not the end of this or that world, but each time uniquely the end of the one and only world. For if this were simply or literally true there would be no mourning at all, and no survival or living on (and thus no reading) either: so the end of the world must be also, simultaneously, no end of the world, and one of the most immediate and most intolerable experiences of the death of the loved other is just this fact that the world does not end when it ends, that it simply carries on after its end, has no end, that the end of the world is not the end of the world, that its end in death is also the perspective of an endlessness, an ad infinitum that opens onto just the not-half-mourning I have been describing, which is also the not-half melancholia of this very situation in which I continue to read.
Not half (life mourning death) no end.
New York, May 2009
1. Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension (Paris: Galilée, 1992), p. 331. Although I have on occasion benefited from consulting published translations, all translations from the French in this book are my own.
2. To my knowledge, Derrida first invokes the concept of demi-deuil in the interview ‘Ja ou le faux-bond’ (October 1975), reprinted in Points de suspension (Paris: Galilée, 1992), p. 54), where it seems to be assimilated to a process of ‘mourning (for) mourning’, faire son deuil du deuil. Demi-deuil subsequently appears in La Carte postale (Paris : Aubier-Flammarion, 1979), pp. 355–6; Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), p. 161, and ‘Circonfession’ (in Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991)), period 31.
3. La Carte postale, p. 361. Demi-deuil is what also troubles the psychoanalytic distinction between introjection and incorporation. See ‘Fors’, Derrida’s introduction to Abraham and Torok’s book Le verbier de l’homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976).
4. See especially my Dudding: des noms de Rousseau (Paris: Galilée, 1991), Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy and Open Book/Livre ouvert (both 2005, from bennington.zsoft.co.uk).
5. See, for example, Derrida’s improvised comments in Simon Glendinning (ed.), Arguing with Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 55.
6. 3. not half: a long way from the due amount; to a very slight extent; in mod. slang and colloq. use = not at all, the reverse of, as ‘not half bad’ = not at all bad, rather good; ‘not half a bad fellow’ = a good fellow; ‘not half long enough’ = not nearly long enough; also (slang), extremely, violently, as ‘he didn’t half swear’ (OED).
7. ‘Not half: no end’, delivered to a seminar at Queen Mary, London, July 2004, to mark Jacques Derrida’s Honorary Doctorate there. Published along with the French text ‘De mon mieux . . .’, of which it is a sort of translation, in Deconstruction is Not What You Think (e-book, 2005). I had first proposed ‘not half’ and ‘no end’ as semi-serious candidates to translate Derrida’s use of the French idiom ‘plus d’un’, meaning both ‘more than one’ and ‘no more (only) one’ in my translation of Derrida’s ‘Et Cetera . . .’, in N. Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 304, n. 27.
8. 21. no end: (colloq.) a vast quantity or number (of). Also (mod. slang) as adv., = ‘immensely’, ‘to any extent’; and (with of) qualifying a predicate (OED).
9. See especially my Frontières kantiennes (Paris: Galilée, 2000) and ‘Almost the End’, in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 141–52. See too my translation of part of Frontières kantiennes as ‘The End in Here’, Tekhnema, 6 (2001), 34–50.