Auto-

(Little polyparergonal frame for three ‘photographs with automobile’ that were never taken.)1

-affections

‘Auto-affection constitutes the self-same by dividing it.’²

‘Before all else one must affect oneself with one’s own death (and the self does not exist before all else, before this movement of auto-affection), make death be auto-affection of life or life auto-affection of death. The whole of différance is lodged in the desire (desire is only this) of this auto-tely.’³

According to the analyses of the Grammatology, there is no auto-affection without hetero-affection, without exposure, without a vulnerable surface and a relation with a certain outside.⁴ I affect myself – always with the other. I am – I live – as revenant: returning to myself from this outside. Vital and mortal exposure, skin deep. Narcissistic revenant that keeps exposing its vulnerability. No inner sense without this relation to the outer, no time without this space. Whence, among other things, a certain return of ‘experience’, after the warnings in the Grammatology:⁵ experience would be nothing without peril, without perishing – all experience would be in some sense traumatic.⁶ There are a thousand figures of this configuration: ‘l’Un se garde de l’autre’; ‘l’Un se fait violence’.⁷

No exposure without protection, however. What exposes me protects me: what protects me exposes me. In Freud, this would be the fable in the Project as well as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli. Indeed embryology, in its capacity as a recapitulation of developmental history, actually shows us that the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism and may have inherited some of its essential properties. It would be easy to suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance to a certain depth may have become permanently modified, so that excitatory processes run a different course in it from what they run in the deeper layers. A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been so thoroughly ‘baked through’ by stimulation that it would present the most favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become incapable of any further modification.8

I am – done. It’s a fable, though, fabulous because of the origin thus dreamed: in fact everything has to begin double already, the undifferentiated must be already differentiated – in the beginning was the membrane, already, then, difference.⁹ Around me the limit closes, and therefore opens on its other side: for every interior there is an external surface that can never quite be internalised. This protection exposes me, protects me as it exposes me. Franz Kafka’s Burrow or Todd Haynes’s film Safe. This is life itself, as ‘economy of death’, because total exposure would be instant death (looking straight at the sun), just as total protection would be asphyxia. Auto-hetero-thanato-bio-. (Perhaps, as in cybernetics: even so-called ‘closed’ systems are a little open; even ‘open’ systems are a little closed.) And -graphy: according to ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’: ‘there is no writing that does not constitute itself as protection, protection against itself, against the writing whereby the “subject” is itself threatened in letting itself be written, exposing itself.’¹⁰

-mobile I

Just about our first meeting. Oxford, November or December 1979. A colleague who is a bad driver is taking us in her car from the station to the room where the seminar will take place. Filthy weather, very ‘English’, grey wet streets. JD, sitting in front, imperturbable in spite of several very near misses, turns round and says calmly to me, sitting in the back, in a tone of polite conversation, knowing that the driver does not speak French: ‘Je vois la mort à chaque tournant [I’m seeing death at every turn].’

-immunities

Auto-immunity figures for the first time in Specters of Marx and Politics of Friendship, but gets its first real development in Faith and Knowledge.11 Religion and reason (philo-techno-scientific reason) have the same source: ‘Religion and reason develop together, from this common resource: the testimonial gage of any performative, which engages one to answer just as well before the other as answer for the high-performing performativity of technoscience.’ (Foi et savoir, p. 46) A single source but immediately double, the mechanical duplicity of which does not immediately call up the more organic figure that will follow: ‘The same single source divides mechanically, automatically, and opposes itself reactively to itself: whence the two sources in one. This reactivity is a process of sacrificial indemnisation, it attempts to restore the unscathed (heilig) that it threatens itself’ (ibid.). To be formalised twenty pages later: ‘This same movement that renders indissociable religion and tele-technoscientific reason in its most critical aspect inevitably reacts to itself. It secretes its own antidote but also its own power of autoimmunity. We are here in a space where all self-protection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound [du sain[t] et sauf], of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power to reject, its ownness in a word, i.e. its immunity. It is this terrifying but fatal logic of the auto-immunity of the unscathed* that will always associate Science and Religion’ (ibid., p. 67).¹² The logic of auto-immunity (which will always subsequently be a double logic of immunity/auto-immunity) will thus attempt to describe a situation in which, to protect oneself, one also protects oneself against what protects, attacks one’s own protection for protection. So religion is hand in glove with technoscience, but ‘it wages a terrible war against what protects it only by threatening it’ (ibid., p. 71). Which gives rise to a new, still more complex formulation, which will open onto political perspectives that interest us more especially: ‘auto-immunity haunts community and its immunitary survival system like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of auto-immunity’ (ibid.).

-mobile II

End of the 1980s. When we leave the restaurant after a debate at the Collège international de philosophie, the car is boxed in on the Place du Panthéon: impossible to open the doors because of other cars parked too close. JD, a bit roguishly, cigar clamped between his teeth, gets in through the back hatch and makes it to the wheel by crawling over the seatbacks.

-craties

As is always the case in deconstruction, then, what a ‘metaphysical’ thinking would like to separate from the essence (according to the logic of immunity, precisely), is reintegrated into the heart of the essence as the necessary (essential, automatic, mechanical) possibility of its destruction as well as of its ‘life’. That’s life. What makes possible will also make necessary the becoming-impossible of what is thus made possible. Here, explicitly, community: ‘Community as com-mon auto-immunity [commune auto-immunité] there is no community that does not maintain its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (of the maintenance of the intact integrity of the self) . . . This self-contestatory attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, i.e. open to something other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other . . .’ (ibid., p. 79). To what happens in general, as it happens, for better and for worse, as it were, at the same time.

‘Auto-immunity’ itself will return, dozens of times this time, in Voyous,13 quoting Foi et savoir, and sketching the relation that this figure might entertain with others (namely double bind and aporias (Voyous, p. 60): I would say many others too, starting with différance itself: that there be such a dispersion of terms is evidently to be thought as an ‘effect’ of auto-immunity). Opening what always also tends to close itself again to the necessary possibility of the event of the other, auto-immunity cannot fail to open too a ‘political’ dimension. Whence ‘democracy (to come)’, because, from the ‘inside’ of politics, ‘democracy’ would name the reason why politics does not simply have an inside. And this is why, in Politiques de l’amitié, and precisely in the context of a discussion of the name ‘democracy’, one finds this bringing together of democracy and deconstruction:

In saying that the maintenance of the Greek word ‘democracy’ is a matter of context, rhetoric or strategy, of polemics even, in reaffirming that this name will last the time it must but scarcely more, in saying that things are accelerating curiously these days, one is not necessarily giving in to the opportunism or the cynicism of the antidemocrat concealing his hand. Quite to the contrary: one is keeping one’s indefinite right to question, critique, deconstruction (rights which are in principle guaranteed by every democracy: no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction). One keeps this right in order to mark strategically what is no longer a matter of strategy: the limit between the conditional (the borders of the context and the concept that enclose the real practice of democracy and feed it with earth and blood) and the unconditional that, from the beginning, will have inscribed an auto-deconstructive force in the very motif of democracy, the possibility and the duty of democracy to de-limit itself. Democracy is the autos of deconstructive auto-delimitation. (Politiques de l’amitié, pp. 128–9)

Autos. Let us also understand this: democracy de-limits itself also by limiting and holding itself back. If democracy can, in principle, interrupt itself to protect itself against the democratic arrival of the anti-democrat (the example of the 1992 Algerian elections, evoked in Voyous, pp. 53ff.), this is because democracy can always also interrupt itself to protect itself against itself, and this is all that it does. Auto-immunity and auto-delimitation do not supervene on an otherwise ‘normal’ democracy: rather they constitute it as ‘default of proper and same’ (Voyous, p. 61). No auto. Democracy is made only of this self-interrupting ‘process’, that alone prevents democracy from being fully ‘itself’, which would be the end (the death) of the political, pure auto-maticity that would put an end to every decision and every event. Democracy works only unhinged, limping, out of joint, heterocracy.

Auto- without auto-, then. The auto comes to a halt. The ‘autodeconstructive force’ of democracy is a force that auto-deconstructs, of course, but in so doing also deconstructs the auto-. And so never deconstructs itself all by itself. The other deconstructs. The other – who is not another self, or who is another self only insofar as the self is itself already, if not exactly tainted, then at least altered, othered. I am – the other other. The other deconstructs and is deconstructed. The other auto: the autro. Democratic authrority: autronomy.

JD: the authror of everything he writes, autrobiographical animal.

-mobile III

Suburb of Paris, beginning of the 1990s. Deserted streets. JD slows down and stops, good as gold, at a red light. M., feigning incredulity at such good behaviour, points at the traffic light: ‘But . . . it’s red!’

Notes

1. This short piece was originally written in French, on the invitation of René Major, for a projected volume to celebrate Jacques Derrida’s 75th birthday, which would have fallen in July 2005. The book was subsequently published as Jacques Derrida pour les temps à venir (Paris: Stock, 2007), pp. 480–9: the French version of this text is also published in my book Deconstruction Is Not What You Think (from bennington.zsoft.co.uk), pp. 125–37. The motif of ‘photograph with automobile’ refers to a series of pictures of Jacques Derrida reproduced in Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

2. De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 237.

3. La Carte postale (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980), p. 382.

4. Among others: ‘By affecting oneself with another presence, one adulterates oneself [on s’altère soi-même]. Now Rousseau neither wants to nor can think that this adulteration does not supervene on the self, that it is its very origin’ (De la grammatologie, p. 221; cf. too pp. 263–5). We should also have to read here Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy: see, for example, p. 206: ‘must we not rather distinguish between several types of auto-hetero-affection without any pure, purely proper, immediate, intuitive living and psychic auto-affection?’ There are no doubt ‘effects’ of auto-affection but the analysis of them cannot, or so we believe, skirt the hetero-affection that makes them possible and continues to haunt them even where that hetero-affection in general (coming from the transcendent thing or the other living being) seems to be effaced, returning irresistibly to impose itself in the analysis and the exposition of its results.

5. Ibid., p. 89: ‘As for the concept of experience, it is here extremely awkward. Like all the notions we are using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we can use it only under erasure. “Experience” has always designated the relation to a presence, whether or not this relation has the form of consciousness. However we must, according to this contortion or contention that the discourse cannot avoid here, exhaust the resources of the concept of experience before we can, and in order to, get at it, through deconstruction, in its final depth.’ See too pp. 400–1.

6. ‘Experience’ returns from the 1980s onward, no doubt in part because of its reinscription by Jean-Luc Nancy in L’Expérience de la liberté (Paris: Galilée, 1988) (although Derrida is critical of other aspects of that book in Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003)). ‘Experience’ comes apparently to name the opening (without horizon of expectation) to the other in general, and thereby to the event which by definition interrupts ‘traumatically’ the ordinary course of experience in the sense deconstructed in the Grammatology. See Papier machine (Paris, Galilée, 2001), pp. 114 and 146. This traumatic aspect is already recognised in ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), especially pp. 300–1. More generally, the description of deconstruction as an ‘experience of the impossible’ often imposes itself: see Sauf le nom (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 32 (‘the very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible’), which also refers to ‘Psyché: invention de l’autre’, in Psyché: inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), p. 59.

7. See Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995), pp. 124–5: ‘The One both keeps some other and keeps itself from the other; the One does violence to itself and itself turns violent, becomes violence.’

8. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–74), Vol. XVIII, p. 26.

9. See my ‘Membranes: a reading of Freud’s metapsychology’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 3 (1994–5), 369–82, reprinted in Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy (e-book available from bennington.zsoft. co.uk), pp. 97–123.

10. Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 331.

11. See Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 224; Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), p. 94, where it is already about an ‘auto-immunity from which would be exempt no region of being, physis or history’. Foi et savoir is a text that is more complex than others as to its dates: it does revolve around a specific meeting (at Capri, 28 February 1994 (as recalled in 3, p. 11)), but without simply being reducible to that meeting: ‘At the beginning of a preliminary exchange, Gianni Vattimo suggests that I improvise some suggestions. Let me recall them here, in italics, in a sort of schematic and telegraphic foreword. Propositions that were different, no doubt, were sketched out in a text of a different character I wrote after the fact, restricted by merciless limits of time and space. A quite different story, perhaps, but it is the memory of what I ventured at the beginning, that day, that will continue to dictate more or less closely what I write’ (Foi et savoir (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 11–12). The thought of auto-immunity is developed only in the second (non-italic) part of the text.

12. It is in the note that Derrida explicitly defines immunity and auto-immunity: ‘The immune reaction protects the indemnity of the body proper by producing antibodies against foreign antigens. As for the process of auto-immunisation . . . it consists for a living organism . . . in protecting itself basically against its self-protection by destroying its own immune defences.’ Given this figure’s political developments to come, note that the general explanation given by the National Institutes of Health website metaphorises the process in terms of ‘friendly fire’: the body fires on its own cells as though they were ‘enemies’. That these ‘enemy’ cells be precisely those charged with normal immune protection (rather than just any cells) seems to take auto-immunitary logic to the point of a certain crisis of the autos itself. Auto-immunity: autro-immunity.

13. Voyous, for example pp. 43, 57–60, 64–6, 70–1, 74, 80, 83, 95, 120, 126, 128, 130, 143–4, 154–5, 160, 173, 175–6, 178, 198, 208, 210–11, 214–15.