Jacques Derrida: . . . A Life
Here’s my story.1 The story of my life. Jacques Derrida taught me everything, but he couldn’t, and didn’t, prepare me for this. I was not ready, I am not ready. Nowhere near ready, still, one year on. I am still speechless. I really have nothing to say. Nothing. Anything I said would already be too much: I need and want to spend my time here saying nothing. Nothing, nothing, maybe seven times nothing. Nothing about Jacques Derrida’s life, or his death. As Jacques himself was saying, increasingly towards the end, towards death, death is each time the end of the world,2 not of this or that world, but of the one and only world, the world itself, leaving only a world after the end of the world, as he says in Béliers, written in homage to Hans-Georg Gadamer, and goes on:
For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is no less than the end of the world. Not merely one end among others, the end of someone or something in the world, the end of a life or a living being. Death does not put an end to someone in the world, nor to one world among others, it marks each time, each time in defiance of arithmetic the absolute end of the single and same world, of what each one opens as a single and same world, the end of the one and only world, the end of the totality of what is or what can present itself as the origin of the world for such and such a unique living being, human or not.3
So the world ended. Leaving nothing. It’s nothing. I’ll get over it. I’m surviving. Melancholically – for this is melancholy, almost militant melancholy, a melancholy that Derrida says later in Béliers is a condition of ethics in its very protest against so-called ‘normal’ mourning – melancholically saying nothing about Jacques Derrida’s life, but wondering, having seen and heard some of the more or less ridiculous and offensive things that have been said since he died, what will get said about that life. We might imagine that sooner or later some form of ‘biography’ might get written, and it would seem difficult in this case to imagine a biography that managed to take into account what the subject of that biography thought and wrote. What would a biography of Jacques Derrida have to look like to be a Derridean biography? I have tried to argue elsewhere that biography is itself a fundamentally philosophical concept, so that a biography of a philosopher is in some senses the most biographical biography imaginable. It is easy to show, on the basis, say, of Plato’s Phaedo, that the character we call ‘the philosopher’ is in part defined by leading a life that will have been philosophical enough to warrant a biography, and that life is philosophical enough insofar as it is oriented towards death, a preparation for or pedagogy of death. The philosopher becomes the philosopher he was going to be in death, and his ‘life’ can then be written as sealed by that death. Philosophy needs philosophers, and it needs them to live and die philosophically. In this regard, among others, Jacques Derrida was not simply a philosopher, famously refusing this schema:
. . . no, I’ve never learned-(how)-to-live. Not one bit! Learning how to live ought to mean learning how to die . . . Since Plato, this is the old philosophical injunction: to philosophise is to learn how to die.4
Jacques Derrida taught me everything. Here’s one thing he taught me. Life is an economy of death. This seems to mean something like this. If life were simply life, purely life or merely life, it would be death. Life may seem as though it would tend teleologically toward a fullness of itself, its own plenitude, life itself, transcendental life, but such life is, or would be, death.
This is true in Freud as much as in Descartes or Husserl. The latter, call it transcendental, version works broadly (a little caricaturally) as follows: I think, and my thinking bears witness to my being an essentially immortal thinking substance. From the height of this essential immortality, my death looks like a mere empirical accident, a contingency that can be essentially discounted. Look at that contingency down there: it’s nothing. But, says Derrida, the transcendental position was only achieved in the first place on the back of the relation to death. My death is a condition of possibility of the transcendental position itself, a sort of perverse transcendental of the transcendental. Transcendental life is the life of death, life after death. And this is the pattern against which Derrida protests near the end, whereby philosophy would be to do with learning how to die. From Socrates onwards, philosophers, apparently, cannot wait to die, to piggy-back out of contingency into the death-free (because already dead) realm of the concept.
The Freudian version goes something like this: life is ruled by the so-called pleasure principle, the model for which is the discharge of energy stored in the living system. But a system that simply obeyed this principle without further ado would die immediately, as Freud admits breezily enough (it is this admission that opens up the realm of what Freud also rather breezily calls a ‘theoretical fiction’). As we could confirm in a slightly different way in Bataille, a purely living life, a sovereign life, would be instant, if glorious, death, a flash and then the night. As Derrida lays out in both ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’ and ‘Spéculer – sur Freud’,5 the result is that life is itself, is life, is alive, only to the extent that it compromises its life with a principle of reserve (in Freud, that it maintains a non-zero inner level of energy even though that in principle entails unpleasure), a principle of reserve that is also already a principle of death. In order to live at all without simply going up and out with a bang, life must die a little: life is life only to the extent that it is not purely or merely life; life inhibits itself as life, inoculates itself with death in order to be life at all. To anticipate on some later Derrida formulations, a life worthy of its name, digne de son nom, must fall short of itself, not quite be itself, hold itself back, be a little less than itself, in order to be itself. The life most worthy of the name ‘life’ is a life that’s a little less than full or pure life: life must reserve itself in order to preserve itself, inhibit or restrain itself, and that inhibition, restraint or falling short involves already a relation to death. Life is, then, life-death, or else survival, living on. As Derrida says again in the interview to Le monde, this concept of survival or living on is originary, it does not derive from life (or death, for that matter), and it is originary with respect to Derrida’s own conceptuality: ‘All the concepts that have helped me to work, especially the concept of the trace or the spectral, were related to “living on” as a structural dimension’. At the origin, then, there is a life that is not pure or mere life, but life-death, or life as the economy of death. Whence too what Derrida calls ‘originary mourning’ that must inhabit life from the start.6
This then, is my story, the story of my life. Naturally I have no intention of telling you the story of my life. In fact, in saying ‘my story’ or ‘the story of my life’, I was quoting Jacques Derrida, who was himself quoting Diderot at the beginning of Apories, Diderot reacting by saying ‘c’est mon histoire’ to Seneca’s text De Brevitate Vitae, and more especially to Chapter 3 of that text, although Derrida also says that Diderot ‘is right to recommend reading [Seneca’s text], from the first word to the last, in spite of this brevity of life which in any case will have been so short’ (p. 16). In fact Derrida says that ‘c’est mon histoire’ is ‘what always has to be understood when someone talks 11 about someone else, cites or praises him’ (p. 17), in fact my story, the story of my life, is not just the story of my life, as we might also have confirmed by reading the rather extraordinary reflections on autobiography to be found throughout Derrida’s work, but more especially at the beginning of Papier machine, where he is wondering about the possibility and necessity of thinking together ‘event’ (as unprogrammable and unforeseeable singularity) and ‘machine’ (as principle of repetition or repeatability), whereby even the story of my life, with all its singular events, would be marked by a mekhanè.7 The story of my life is in a complex relation of repetition, almost of quotation, to many other lives and their stories.
Let’s take a moment to re-establish the context of Diderot’s comment, the ‘c’est mon histoire’, which Derrida is quoting from the Essai sur la vie de Sénèque le philosophe. Derrida is picking up on Diderot’s on the one hand criticising, or appearing to criticise, Seneca for ‘going beyond the limits of truth’ in De Brevitate Vitae, but then on the other accusing himself of wasting his own life, thus confirming Seneca’s main point. And it is in glossing this part of Diderot’s commentary that Derrida suggests ‘One might translate into the future perfect the tense of this murmur: “Ah! How short life will have been!” [Que la vie aura été courte!]’ (Aporias, p. 17).
Diderot criticises Seneca for going beyond the limits of the truth, but then recommends that everyone read the treatise on the brevity of life, and more especially everyone who works in the arts (the precise point at which Diderot thinks Seneca goes beyond the limits of truth is to do with his apparent condemnation of involvement in public affairs); and Derrida too recommends that we read the treatise from start to finish. And if, in spite of the brevity of life, which Derrida asserts at least five times, like a mantra, in Aporias,8 we find or make the time to follow Derrida’s recommendation and read Seneca’s text, the first thing we will find, surprisingly enough, already in Chapter 1 of De Brevitate Vitae, is that life is not really short at all (‘Life is long enough . . . the life we receive is not short . . . our life is amply long’ says Seneca in that first chapter). Life, says Seneca, is not really so short, life, at least life as given by nature, is long enough, if it is well invested; the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it; our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.’ And again, at the opening of Chapter 2, ‘Life, if you know how to use it, is long’.9
Seneca’s persistent and apparently familiar analogy in his text is between time and money, or at least between time and wealth. Life is short only if time is squandered or scattered (more literally ‘dissipated’): life is long if time is invested. But life is not simply time, or a matter of time. Already in Chapter 2 of his treatise, Seneca, quoting with approval ‘that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: “The part of life we really live is small”’, goes on to say that ‘all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time [Ceterum quidem omne spatium non vita sed tempus est]’. Life is short if time is squandered, and squandered time, we might be tempted to say, is just time, or merely time: whereas time not squandered or dissipated, but capitalised and invested, is life, and life is intrinsically not short at all.
Life, as non-squandered time, comes into its own when not devoted to others (this is the point of Diderot’s complaint about the limits of truth). Derrida, in the context of the Cerisy conference on Le passage des frontières in 1992 to which his text was first presented, emphasises Seneca’s analogy of one’s paradoxical tendency to defend one’s property and wealth against the least incursion across its borders, as opposed to one’s readiness to distribute one’s life or spread one’s time about with abandon.
Pursuing Seneca’s text a little beyond this preliminary use Derrida makes of it, we can see that the potential tension between life and time (or life and mere being or existence, as Seneca sometimes says [Chapter VII, non ille diu uixit, sed diu fuit]) develops into a number of paradoxical consequences. These are, I think, entirely consistent with what Derrida goes on to develop so spectacularly in Aporias around Heidegger and the death-analysis in Being and Time, but perhaps sit curiously with the repeated insistence on the future-perfect-brevity-of-life. Let’s pursue a little the logic of Seneca’s text: business (busy-ness) is the enemy of the relation to time that Seneca calls life or living. In Chapter VII he says: ‘There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn’, and immediately goes on to make the familiar link between living and dying, learning (how) to live and learning (how) to die:
There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn. Of the other arts there are many teachers everywhere; some of them we have seen that mere boys have mastered so thoroughly that they could even play the master. It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and – what will perhaps make you wonder more – it takes the whole of life to learn how to die. Many very great men, having laid aside all their encumbrances, having renounced riches, business, and pleasures, have made it their one aim up to the very end of life to know how to live; yet the greater number of them have departed from life confessing that they did not yet know – still less do those others know. [So even given control of one’s own time, learning how to live, as learning how to die, is not straightforward: taking control of one’s own time may be a necessary condition for that learning, but appears far from sufficient. However the principle whereby it might at least be possible to learn how to live and die seems clear enough – not allowing others to take one’s time away.] Believe me, it takes a great man and one who has risen far above human weaknesses not to allow any of his time to be filched from him, and it follows that the life of such a man is very long because he has devoted wholly to himself whatever time he has had. None of it lay neglected and idle; none of it was under the control of another, for, guarding it most grudgingly, he found nothing that was worthy to be taken in exchange for his time. And so that man had time enough, but those who have been robbed of much of their life by the public, have necessarily had too little of it.
What kind of great man might fulfil these conditions? Well, unsurprisingly enough, perhaps, the philosopher seems to be a promising candidate, and this is in part because the philosopher has a particular relationship to time. Time, remember, is not life, but life, the life one can learn how to live by learning how to die, is lived on the basis of a certain way of comprehending or managing time. This comprehension is based on the fundamental trope we have seen, and that Derrida stresses, of a kind of jealous guarding of one’s time by analogy with a jealous guarding of one’s money or wealth.
The slightly tortuous argumentative sequence in Seneca that culminates with the philosopher begins with a consideration of the future: there is no better way to squander time than to subordinate the present to the future, says Seneca. This is one of the many figures of busy-ness that pervade the text:
Can anything be sillier than the point of view of certain people – I mean those who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they spend life in making ready to live! They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes today. (Chapter IX)
This does not, however, lead to the perhaps expected conclusion that life would involve a straightforward inhabiting of the present. In spite of certain appearances, living in the present is not quite the way to live, insofar as living in the present takes the essential form of being ‘engrossed’ (occupatus).10 Even if I do not mortgage the present to the future, the attempt to seize the present as present fails, and this seems to be true even without the further problem of dissipation or distraction, that now appears to be rather tacked on to the more essential problem of engrossment, to do with the nature of the present itself. Seneca presents it as follows:
Present time is very brief, so brief, indeed, that to some there seems to be none; for it is always in motion, it ever flows and hurries on; it ceases to be before it has come, and can no more brook delay than the firmament or the stars, whose ever unresting movement never lets them abide in the same track. The engrossed, therefore, are concerned with present time alone, and it is so brief that it cannot be grasped, and even this is filched away from them, distracted as they are among many things. (Chapter X)
It follows that ‘living’, the kind of living that has to be learned and that is bound up with dying, with learning how to die, will rely essentially on a relation to neither the future nor the present, but to the past. The point about not being distracted or, more fundamentally, engrossed in the present, and more generally the point about jealously keeping one’s time to and for oneself, is that only thus does one have time, in the present, to inhabit the past. Living, truly living, involves using the present time to live in the past, and the reason for this is that, in contradistinction to the fleeting present and the contingent future, the past is, as Seneca puts it, certain. Fortune or chance as a general figure of uncertainty has no more control over the past, ‘the part of our time that is sacred and set apart [pars temporis nostri sacra ac dedicate: sacrosanct or immune, we might be tempted to say in the light of Derrida’s late work], put beyond the reach of all human mishaps, and removed from the dominion of Fortune, the part which is disquieted by no want, by no fear, by no attacks of disease; this can neither be troubled nor be snatched away – it is an everlasting and unanxious possession [omnis humanos casus supergressa, extra regnum fortunae subducta, quam non inopia, non metus, non morborum incursus exagitet; haec nec turbari nec eripi potest; perpetua eius et intrepida possessio est]’ (Chapter X). The leisure and tranquillity that is a condition of learning how to live is the leisure to allow the present (no longer occupied by engrossment, busy-ness or distraction) to be taken over by the past. And this is why life is not intrinsically short, however short it in fact is – for those who live the past in the present, time is always ‘ample’ [spatiosa]:
None of it is assigned to another, none of it is scattered in this direction and that, none of it is committed to Fortune, none of it perishes from neglect, none is subtracted by wasteful giving, none of it is unused; the whole of it, so to speak, yields income. And so, however small the amount of it, it is abundantly sufficient, and therefore, whenever his last day shall come, the wise man will not hesitate to go to meet death with steady step. (Chapter XI)
After a long catalogue of different forms of being engrossed (including, incidentally, ‘spending one’s time on useless literary problems’ and thereby seeming ‘more of a bore than a scholar’ (Chapter XIII)), Seneca finally comes, as I was saying, to the philosopher. The philosopher is (as philosophers often claim) the one who really knows how to live (and therefore how to die), and this true knowledge extends or supplements the kind of freeing up of the present for the past that had been proposed thus far. This extension or supplement seems to involve a transgression of the individual propriety or even jealousy that has marked the argument thus far, and that Derrida comments on at the beginning of Aporias. Taking time now for the past is one thing: but really living, really overcoming the brevity of life, involves not being content merely with one’s own past and the time it capitalises:
Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live [my emphasis]; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men’s labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters? (Chapter XIV)
The past is ‘certain’, we have seen, as opposed to the contingent future and the fleeting present: now it is also boundless (so that our jealous guarding of the bounds of our time, that marked the beginning of Seneca’s argument and that Derrida insisted on, here opens up differently to an outside) – boundless, and endlessly and perpetually available: a little later in the same chapter, Seneca adds Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, Aristotle and Theophrastus to the list of names, and says that ‘all mortals can meet with them by night or by day’.
Philosophy, then, reconciles life and time, and confirms that life is not short, need not be short: the philosophers whose company I keep, says Seneca, teach me how to die (Chapter XV) without forcing me to die. The point here for Seneca seems less the positive lesson I might draw from one or other of these philosophers, and more something to do with philosophy itself. In philosophy, I know how to die without really dying, and that’s really knowing how to live. Philosophy, moreover, allows me to choose my fathers, says Seneca strikingly in Chapter XV, and to inherit their name and property which I will no longer have to guard jealously (whence the boundlessness mentioned earlier): and by this fact, philosophy of itself opens onto immortality: just because philosophical works cannot be harmed by time, the life of the philosopher,
The life of the philosopher . . . has wide range, and he is not confined by the same bounds that shut others in. He alone is freed from the limitations of the human race; all ages serve him as if a god. Has some time passed by? This he embraces by recollection. Is time present? This he uses. Is it still to come? This he anticipates. He makes his life long by combining all times into one. (Chapter XV)
We might wonder what such a life would look like. In order to free himself from the brevity of life, the philosopher needs leisure, and that leisure is not devoted to a still engrossing and anxiety-producing pursuit of pleasure (which, in an important development, Seneca says makes the time seem long but thereby in fact only accentuates the brevity of life), but to a practice of philosophy itself as frequentation of the philosophy of the past. The philosopher ‘makes his life long by combining all times into one’, but that operation depends on a rigorous subordination of present and future to the past.
All of which is, of course, very edifying: the very basis of all that is edifying. Worse still, it is clearly mortiferous. Imagine for a moment the ‘life’ here described. The fleeting present is filled with the solid past, which suffices to predict and therefore disallow the future. The life recommended by Seneca has no future: it is a kind of living death. We are, naturally enough, inclined to say to Seneca, ‘get a life!’ In so doing, we are not necessarily endorsing Diderot’s actual complaint or accusation,11 nor in general preferring the so-called active life over the so-called contemplative life. The life it would be a matter of ‘getting’ could still be figured (broadly speaking) on the side of what might normally be thought of as the contemplative life: where Diderot complains and needs his philosopher to be more estimable in the Senate than at school, in the law court than in the library, we might reasonably suggest that the essential problem with Seneca’s argument is that it closes off anything like ‘life’ even in the library. And this may be why there was no explicit mention made of reading in Seneca’s description of the philosopher defined by his dealings with other philosophers – Seneca in fact always evokes one’s commerce with the philosophers of the past in terms of frequentation and conversation. If we take reading seriously (and this really is what Jacques Derrida taught me, this really is my story and my history), then we have to factor into it a relation that short-circuits the temporality as described by Seneca and allows the possibility of events of reading in the very time that Seneca has designed to foreclose any events at all. That opening up of reading will unsettle any opposition between the active and the contemplative life. Worse, it will also mean that the remedy for the perceived shortness of life is illusory: Seneca says life is not short so long as we are philosophers in the way he describes. The life that is devoted to learning how to live by learning how to die (or by having already learned how to die) is always plenty long enough, says Seneca (and we might be tempted to say that it is both interminable and deathly, however short): but once we register the irreducible trace of reading in that life, then it will again have been too short, always too short, but only that essential brevity gives it whatever length it will have had. And perhaps, in the end, that’s not exactly nothing, that’s life, that’s survival, c’est mon histoire.
Notes
1. This previously unpublished paper was originally written for the April 2005 Georgetown University conference ‘Jacques Derrida: Cosa Mentale’: this revised version was read to a special Derrida memorial session of the October 2005 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Salt Lake City.
2. Already in fact in Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1992), p. 131: ‘nothing less than the end of the world with each death’.
3. Béliers, le dialogue interrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 23.
4. Apprendre à vivre enfin (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 24.
5. ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, in L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 293–340; ‘Spéculer – sur “Freud”’, in La Carte postale de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1980), pp. 277–437.
6. Apories (Paris: Galilée, 1996), p. 133.
7. Papier machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001), pp. 33–6. Is it by chance that the type of event brought out here as in some way exemplary should be that of a theft?
8. Apories, pp. 16, 55, 91–2, 123, 136.
9. I quote Seneca’s essay in John Basore’s translation, from the Loeb classical library edition of Seneca’s Moral Essays, Vol. II (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1932).
10. This would be one essential difference between Seneca’s text and its often literal reprise in Rousseau’s Emile: see, for example, the opening of Book IV.
11. ‘I would have no difficulty finding in Seneca more than one place where he complains about the quantity of business affairs and the rapidity of the hours. The animal knows when it is born everything it needs to know; man dies when his education has scarcely begun. [ . . . ] Pace Seneca, when one has compared the difficulty of perfecting a science, of perfecting oneself, with the rapidity of our days, one finds that the man who has managed his moments with the greatest economy, who has let none of them be stolen from him out of facility, who has lost nothing of his hours to illness, laziness or negligence, and who has reached extreme old age, has nonetheless lived very little. [ . . . ] Your doctrine tends to give pride to the lazy and the mad, and to disgust good princes, good magistrates, truly essential citizens. If Paulinus does his duty badly, Rome will be in turmoil. If Paulinus does his duty badly, Seneca will be short of bread. The philosopher is a man who is estimable everywhere, but more so in the Senate than in school; more so in the law-court than in a Library; and the sort of occupations that you disdain are really those that I honour; they require labour, precision and probity; and the men who are endowed with these qualities seem common to you! When I see those who have made a name for themselves in the magistracy, at the bar, far from thinking that they have lost their years so that only one of those years should bear their name, I shall be in despair not to be able to count such a fine year in my whole life. How many must one have consumed in study, and stolen from pleasures, passions and sleep, to obtain that one! Wise is he who ceaselessly meditates on the epitaph that the finger of justice will engrave upon his tomb. [ . . . ] It is such a general fault, to allow oneself to be carried away beyond the limits of truth, out of interest for the cause one is defending, that one must sometimes forgive Seneca for it. [ . . . ] I was unable to read Chapter 3 without blushing: it is my story. Happy the man who will not emerge from it convinced he has lived only a very small part of his life! This treatise is very fine: I recommend that all men read it; but especially those who are drawn to perfection in the fine arts. They will learn from it how little they have worked, and that it is as often to wasting time as to lack of talent that one must attribute the mediocrity of artistic productions of all sorts’ (Denis Diderot, Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Néron et sur les mœurs et les écrits de Sénèque, ed. Roger Lewinter, 2 vols (Paris: Union Générale d’Édition, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 172–9).