Foundations
Since Jacques Derrida died in October 2004, during what for me has been a nameless process of mourning, or rather of melancholia, ‘militant melancholia’ as I first called it, of half-mourning or demi-deuil as he often said1 (that demi-deuil that would traditionally begin one year after the loss, that one year being the period of grand deuil) – since that day in 2004, I have found myself thrown back to something like my own ‘childhood memories’ of Jacques, and more especially of my ‘early’ reading of what one might call his ‘early’ work.2 Not for the first time, I have been tempted (tempted perhaps almost in a religious sense), tempted by the thought that somewhere, if I looked and worked hard enough, I would find the starting point or the origin of his thought. In the curious kind of coherence that marks Jacques Derrida’s thinking, for which there is no doubt as yet no good working model, no satisfactory representation, it is as though I were searching for an origin-point, a point of founding or grounding, a moment of originary insight in which Derrida would have seen, if only perhaps in some embryonic or otherwise undeveloped form, what was to come, a moment that would provide the foundation for an edifice of thought, or perhaps be the first call for that ‘institution of reading’ called for, according to Jacques Derrida, by every text,3 and be simultaneously the beginning of the structure of legacy and inheritance that he taught us (especially in Spectres de Marx) is just part of being, and that has come more starkly into view since his death.
Such a (more or less lucidly desperate) search for an origin rapidly finds of course that Derrida’s ‘originary’ insight, if there were such a thing, would be something like that there is no origin (and therefore, perhaps, no founding insight). Put more correctly, Derrida says that there is complexity at the origin. From his very early Master’s thesis on Husserl, in which he writes of an ‘originary dialectic’ and an ‘originary synthesis’, it seems that his thinking turns around the thought that the origin is not simple, and that a non-simple origin has immeasurable consequences for thought. One of the many ways in which these consequences appear throughout his work is in a thinking about institutions, and more especially about the founding gesture of institutions, the very instituting or the institution of institutions.
Let me first briefly establish the argument about complex origins. This argument is, as they say, ‘well-known’, but it is nonetheless often misrepresented, as for example a proposal or project or programme. Derrida’s most general argument is that what he calls the attempts of ‘metaphysics’ to derive complexity from simplicity, and more especially from an origin which always comes down to some form of presence. Even if we now find ourselves in a situation of complexity, and even of negativity and evil, that situation has arisen (so metaphysics says) on the basis of a presence that (perhaps only ideally, in some sense of ‘ideal’) came before it as its origin. Very different stories can then be told about how the original presence or plenitude came to fail, or fall, or be lost, but they all share a common structure. And this ‘archaeological’ dimension to metaphysics is often (probably always) mirrored by a ‘teleological’ dimension in which current complexity can be (perhaps only ideally again, in some sense of ‘ideal’) directed towards some final, perhaps redemptive, state of presence. This archaeo-teleological schema is in fact definitive of what Derrida means in general by ‘metaphysics’.
Derrida wants to argue that any such ‘presence’ is not really originary at all, but at best a secondary effect that must emerge from an ‘earlier’ state that he famously calls (among other names) différance. Simple, present origins are always in fact projected (or, rather, retro-jected) on the basis of a situation in which they are already lost: retro-jecting them as origins is an attempt to overlook or avoid the fact that they never really come first, but are only said to come first from a situation that precedes that retro-jective saying or naming of that origin. The supposedly simple and present origin itself has an origin in something else, and that something else, the origin’s origin, is not an origin in the normal sense at all, because it cannot be simple or simply present. For many of us, the most perspicuous way to think about this ‘earlier’ moment, what precedes the origin, is in terms of the trace, which Derrida most clearly develops in his reading of Saussure, but which he famously says in the Grammatology combines in one and the same possibility, ‘and without it being possible to separate them other than by abstraction, the structure of the relation to the other, the movement of temporalisation, and language as writing’.4 Broadly speaking, what Derrida is able to show is that Saussure’s insight concerning language as a ‘system of differences without positive terms’ entails a thinking of identity in which any element in a plurality is identifiable as the element that it is only insofar as it in some way bears the ‘trace’ of all the elements that it is not. This ‘trace-structure’ means that apparently ‘present’ elements are never simply present (because to be what they are they are necessarily bearing the trace of all the ‘absent’ elements that they are not) and that the apparently ‘absent’ elements cannot be simply absent, in that their ‘absence’ is somehow present (but present as absence, as a trace of absence, precisely) as a condition of the apparently ‘present’ element’s being ‘present’ at all. This complication of presence and absence, derived here from a description of language, but rapidly proposed by Derrida as a matrix for thinking about effects of identity in general, is what justifies Derrida’s claim that différance precedes even what Heidegger calls the ontico-ontological difference, and indeed Being more generally, and is what will give rise in his later work to the thematics of ghosts and haunting, and the more sweeping proposal, in Specters of Marx, to rethink ontology as hauntology.
The trace, which allows things to emerge as apparently ‘present’ while being itself never simply present, is in this sense more originary that anything one might have wanted to think was at the origin, and is thus the origin and possibility of the origin itself. The trace is the origin of the origin. Derrida is quick to point out, however, that ‘trace’ cannot in fact be thought of in traditional terms as an origin, just because ‘origin’ has traditionally entailed precisely the value of presence that we have just seen ‘trace’ disrupt. The trace is ‘originary’ in such a radical sense that it disrupts the very concept of an origin. At the origin of the origin is something non-originary, what Derrida sometimes refers to as a kind of radical or absolute past that was never present. This radical or absolute past is ‘past’ in a sense that the normal sense of ‘past’ (as past present) cannot capture, and so is arguably in excess of the very concept of time itself, at least insofar as time is thought by metaphysics, or insofar as time itself is (as Derrida at least once famously suggests) an irremediably metaphysical concept.5 And a similar (though not entirely symmetrical) argument can be developed around the future, so that just as the thought of the trace gives rise to an ‘absolute past’, it also secretes a kind of ‘absolute future’ (what Derrida sometimes, often in political contexts, calls an à-venir, literally a to-come, rather than an avenir) which never will be present. I shall return to this strange kind of futurity a little later.
These points are now no doubt somewhat familiar, even if ‘familiarity’ is just what they most obviously and immediately unsettle. The trace can never really be familiar, whence the importance of rehearsing these points, each time. It is, however, striking in our context here that in the course of the very dense and difficult pages from Of Grammatology in which he lays out the thought of the trace, Derrida already has recourse to the concept of institution. This is perhaps not so very surprising, in that Saussure, who is of course Derrida’s main reference in this discussion, already has some quite complicated and interesting things to say about language as an institution, and even as a ‘pure’ institution, by which he seems to mean that language is, precisely, an originary institution that makes all others possible, the institution to begin and end all institutions, the institution without which there could be no other institutions. (This is what separates Saussure’s view of language from the kind of traditional conventionalism with which it is sometimes confused.) Once language is up and running, as it were, other institutions can come into being by conventional or contractual means: but the institution of language itself is radical, and ‘pure’ in Saussure’s sense, in that it cannot have come about this way – the traditional conventionalist account of the origin of language (according to which people at some point agree on what words to use for what things or what ideas) must in fact presuppose a language already in existence, a problem which Saussure recognises when he says that I do not consent to the language-system within which I speak, but receive it like the law.6
Saussure’s own remarks about the institutionality of language are complex and, not unusually, a little inconsistent. Let me cite a few of these comments, not only to show Saussure struggling to isolate the specificity of language in this respect, but also because his reflections have recourse to a political and juridical language that will be of interest to us in a moment. For example (all emphasis mine):
. . . for Whitney, who assimilates language to a social institution just like any other, it is by chance, for simple reasons of convenience, that we use the vocal apparatus as the instrument of language: men might just as well have chosen gesture and employ visual instead of acoustic images. No doubt this thesis is too absolute; language is not a social institution in all points like others; what is more, Whitney goes too far when he says that our choice fell by chance on the vocal organs; they really were in some ways imposed on us by nature. But on the essential point the American linguist seems to us to be right: language is a convention, and the nature of the sign agreed upon is indifferent. The question of the vocal apparatus is thus secondary in the problem of language.7
[The language system] is the social part of language, external to the individual, who alone can neither create it nor modify it; it exists only in virtue of a kind of contract passed between the members of the community.8
With respect to the linguistic community which uses it, [the signifier] is not free, it is imposed . . . the mass itself cannot exercise its sovereignty [note this reference to sovereignty, which will return as a problem] on a single word; it is bound to the language system as it is.9
Language can therefore no longer be assimilated to a contract pure and simple, and it is precisely from this angle that the linguistic sign is particularly interesting to study; for if one wants to show that the law admitted in a collectivity is something one suffers and not a rule freely consented to, it is indeed language that offers the most striking proof of that.10
Language . . . is at every moment everybody’s business; dispersed in a mass and handled by that mass, it is something that all individuals use all day. On this point, one can establish no comparison between language and other institutions. The prescriptions of a code, the rituals of a religion, maritime signals, etc., only ever occupy a certain number of individuals at once and for a limited period; in language, on the contrary, everyone participates at every moment, and this is why it ceaselessly undergoes the influence of all. This capital fact suffices to show the impossibility of a revolution. Language of all social institutions is the one that offers the least purchase for initiatives.11
The other human institutions – customs, laws, etc. – are all founded, to diverse degrees, on the natural relations of things; there is in them a necessary fit between the means employed and the ends pursued. [ . . . ] Language, on the contrary, is in no way limited in the choice of its means, for one cannot see what would prevent any given idea being associated with any given sequence of sounds.
To bring out clearly that language is a pure institution, Whitney quite rightly insisted on the arbitrary character of signs, and in so doing has placed linguistics on its true axis. But he did not go far enough and did not see that this arbitrary character radically separates language from all other institutions.12
In Derrida’s terms, this ‘pure’ institutionality of language shows up in the thought that language, which we have already seen to entail the trace, consists in instituted traces. As instituted trace, language will, in due course, be better described, says Derrida, as writing, in part just because of this institutional character: ‘If “writing” signifies inscription and primarily durable institution of a sign (and this is the only irreducible nucleus of the concept of writing), then writing in general covers the whole field of linguistic signs.’13
It is no doubt this radically inaugural or ‘pure’ sense of institution that leads to Derrida’s later, more thematised reflections on institutions and their institutionality. For example, in ‘Mochlos or the Conflict of the Faculties’, commenting more especially on the institution of the University:
The question of the right of right, of the founding or foundation of right is not a juridical question. And the reply to it can be neither simply legal nor simply illegal, neither simply theoretical or constative nor simply practical or performative. It can take place neither inside nor outside the University that the tradition has bequeathed to us. This response and this responsibility as to the basis [fondement] can only take place in terms of foundation. Now the foundation of a right is not more juridical or legitimate than the foundation of a University is a university or intra-university event. If there can be no pure concept of the University, if there can be within the University no pure and purely rational concept of the University, this is quite simply, to say it a little elliptically [ . . . ] because the University is founded. An event of foundation cannot simply be understood in the logic of what it founds. The foundation of a right is not a juridical event. The origin of the principle of reason, which is also implied at the origin of the University, is not rational, the foundation of a university institution is not a university event. The anniversary of a foundation might be, but not the foundation itself. Although it is not simply illegal, such a foundation does not yet come under the internal legality it institutes. Although nothing appears more philosophical than the foundation of a philosophical institution – be it the University, or a school or department of philosophy – the fondation of the philosophical institution as such cannot be already strictly philosophical.14
Or again, in Force de loi:
The origin of authority, the foundation or grounding [fondement], the positing of the law being unable by definition to lean finally on anything but themselves, they are themselves a groundless violence. Which does not mean that they are unjust in themselves, in the sense of being ‘illegal’ or ‘illegitimate’. They are neither legal nor illegal in their foundational moment. They exceed the opposition of the founded and the unfounded, as of any foundationalism or anti-foundationalism. Even if the success of performatives that found a right (for example and it is more than an example, of a State guaranteeing a right) – even if that success presupposes prior conditions and conventions (for example in the national or international space), the same ‘mystical’ limit will reemerge at the supposed origin of those conditions, rules or conventions – and of their dominant interpretation.15
This paradox of the foundation, whereby the act of foundation (the act of instituting the institution, the institution of the institution) cannot ever quite be understood within the logic of what is founded by the act of foundation, opens the institution from the start to an ongoing relation to the violence in and against which the foundation took place, so that in a Hobbesian, Rousseauian or even Kantian view of politics, the founding contract that is supposed to get us out of the intolerable violence of the state of nature would, on this reading, remain marked or haunted by the violence of the context from which it supposedly emerged. The pre-legal – a-legal if not yet strictly illegal – violence of the founding act, whereby the institution comes to be, persists as something like the ‘essence’ of the political as such, or at least as something without which there would be no politics or institution, but only nature. The full measure of this paradox16 can be gauged from the thought that the founding act itself is neither legal nor illegal, just because it precedes the institutional law to which it gives rise, but the repetition of that act (which no institution can do without, if only because of the analytic relation between law and repetition17), just because it takes place within the institution thus violently and pre-legally founded, is both legal and yet illegal, confirming the legality of the institution, the legitimacy of its institution, just as it shows up its illegitimacy. Whence the fact that institutions indeed are institutions (and not just nature), and whence too the fact that institutions are constantly subject to contestation, modification and overthrow, or to the very violence against which they were instituted in the first place, i.e. what we usually call ‘nature’ (but that in the tradition has other names too, such as ‘civil war’ in Hobbes). Institutions by definition mark a break with nature, yet insofar as their founding moment can never be fully integrated and institutionalised, but remains as a kind of traumatic memory of their non-legal foundation, they remain haunted by a nature they have never quite left behind (I want to say – I’m not sure if Derrida would agree – that that’s just what nature is),18 and which can always re-emerge to destroy them (this is a constant theme in Rousseau’s political thought, for example, where the very fragile cohesion of the State is always on the verge of breaking and dispersing back into nature). Institutions thus ‘live’ in a kind of constitutive dissension or even permanent revolution that affects every institutional act or event imaginable, and explains their constitutive shiftiness and inevitable tendency to corruption. Institutions, we might say, are ‘corrupted’ and made fragile from the start by the violence of their institution, of their foundation, which is also however the only measure of their legitimacy.
This is why, among other things, it is possible for language to change and new things to get said, even though the institution of language tends also to secrete sub-institutions (academies, dictionaries, etc. . . . ) the job of which is to attempt to prevent, or at least to restrain, change. Just as every act or event that takes place within an institutional framework both confirms the institution within which it takes place and simultaneously opens up the perspective of that institution’s demise (just because it is an act or event, and as such not quite totally within the grasp of the institution that nonetheless made it possible), so every act of parole (in Saussure’s sense) both confirms the langue which makes it possible (so that everything I say here in English cannot fail to confirm the English language in its Englishness, so to speak) and, insofar as it is an event at all, makes something new happen, and however minutely changes the very langue it also confirms.
This disconcerting logic opens up a strange diremption within institutions between what it is tempting to call a transcendental dimension (the apparently immutable practices of the institution itself, its capacity to repeat itself or reproduce itself as itself, its tendency to acquire a kind of timeless or immemorial quality, whereby things are done a certain way just because that is the way they have ‘always’ been done, and nobody can do anything about it), and what it is tempting (but certainly inadequate) to call an empirical dimension, whereby the transcendental is both confirmed and challenged by the events that come about, always with a measure of contingency, and without which the institution (which insofar as it is not natural in the usual sense, is always, ex hypothesi, historical) would not exist. This ‘empirical’ or contingent dimension is then what Derrida would call the chance of the institution, and simultaneously the constant threat to its survival, the permanent possibility of its ruin.
I think I can show this in political thinking by again taking the example of Rousseau. According to Rousseau’s theory of the social contract, the ‘sovereign’ produced by the founding contract itself is necessarily perfect: ‘The Sovereign, by the very fact of being, is always all it should be’,19 but in fact the social body as merely or purely sovereign is also atemporal and powerless, living in an atomistic succession of pure present moments, unable to establish any temporal link to past or future because in so doing it would compromise its sovereignty. (This is, incidentally, the point at which what Rousseau calls ‘sovereignty’ looks surprisingly similar to what Bataille calls ‘sovereignty’.) The purity of the institution is its sovereignty, but that sovereignty is nothing (least of all an institution) unless it finds a way to exist and maintain itself in time. In Rousseau’s terms, this means that it must give itself a government in order to be sovereign, but as Rousseau shows remorselessly and rigorously, the government, which cannot simply coincide with the Sovereign in some kind of radical democracy (a people of gods, says Rousseau, would govern itself democratically, but that would be a ‘government without government’ and the same as no politics at all)20 – the government cannot fail to usurp the sovereignty of the sovereign and lead to the eventual ruin of the social body itself. The institution can interpose between itself and this inevitable ruin any number of intermediate bodies, but the most that can be hoped is that they can delay what is an absolutely inevitable process. The outcome of that process is a return to a (‘natural’) violence that the social body was formed to guard against. Rousseau says this, in what I’m tempted to describe as a ‘fabulous’ account of the demise of the institution:
The Sovereign People wills by itself, and by itself it does what it wants. Soon the inconvenience of this concourse of all in everything forces the Sovereign People to charge some of its members with the execution of its wishes. After having fulfilled their charge and reported on it, these Officers return to the common equality. Soon these charges become frequent, and eventually permanent. Insensibly a body is formed that acts always. A body that acts always cannot report on every act: it only reports on the principal ones; soon it gets to the point of reporting on none. The more active the acting principle, the more it enervates the willing principle. Yesterday’s will is assumed to be today’s; whereas yesterday’s act does not dispense one from acting today. Finally the inaction of the willing power subjects it to the executive power; the latter gradually renders its actions independent, and soon its will: instead of acting for the power that wills, it acts on it. There then remains in the State only an acting power, the executive. The executive power is mere force, and where mere force reigns the State is dissolved.21
Of course we are not obliged to accept the narrative-historical account that Rousseau gives of this process on its own terms: rather the point would be to recognise that it is a structural description in which the aspects that we have isolated are clearly visible.
Similarly, I have tried elsewhere to show in some detail how a similar problem besets Kant’s political theory, even as Kant is arguably more lucid than most about the violent nature of the foundation of the state. In the Doctrine of Right, part of the doctrinal text Metaphysics of Morals, Kant recognises that the factual origin of the state is most probably (almost certainly) a violent one, and to that extent marked with illegitimacy: but transcendentally speaking, the state must be considered legitimate, just because sovereignty is necessarily right, as we saw Rousseau saying. (The form of the argument about sovereignty’s necessary rightness is disconcertingly simple: to argue that the sovereign was illegitimate or wrong would imply adopting a position of sovereignty above sovereignty, which is either contradictory (it would mean that there were two sovereigns), or else resolves into the same necessary rightness at the level of the ‘new’ sovereign. Sovereignty is not so easily escapable, and indeed, as Spinoza points out, it is part of sovereignty to interpret sovereignty and decide what it is.) Kant’s solution to the problem is to say that subjects must therefore not even inquire as to the origin of the state, in that any investigations they might undertake would tend to undermine the transcendental legitimacy of the sovereign just by insinuating that the sovereignty of the sovereign might have been founded on an act of violence (rather than on an act of contractual agreement, which is the transcendental truth of the matter). The factual truth of the origin of the state must therefore remain a secret, and that secret is always a secret about violence. Kant’s idea (which of course he violates in the very fact of formulating it in a published work) is that what we might call the violence of politics (the violence without which there would be no politics at all, what I am here assimilating to the foundation of institutions in general) can be managed only by containing it as a sort of secret enclave or crypt (as Derrida sometimes used to say on the basis of Abraham and Torok) within the state itself. This conversion of founding violence into something secret or unspeakable would then be a fundamental feature of institutions as such.
If we had time, we could pursue this logic in what Derrida says more specifically about the institution of the University. For although the most general level at which the question of foundations can be asked is that of the institution in general (and perhaps especially the so-called ‘pure institution’ of language, as we suggested), there is a specificity to the institution of the University (and indeed this is already hinted at in the paradoxical fact that Kant, in an essentially ‘university’ context, as we have just seen, argues for the legitimacy of secrecy in the State in a way that ipso facto opens that secret). In L’Université sans condition,22 Derrida argues that the University should be a place of absolute, unconditional resistance, where in a sense nothing need be secret, where everything can be said (and, crucially, said publicly, published), and that this opens it to a kind of responsibility that is not the same as that of other institutions: as an institution, the University must subject the institution in general, the very institutionality of institutions, to a kind of questioning that institutions in general can hardly fail to want to repress according to the kind of logic we just saw in Kant. The University, and more especially, says Derrida, the ‘Humanities’, have a responsibility to foster events of thought that cannot fail to unsettle the University in its Idea of itself. For this to happen, the special institution that the University is must open itself up to the possibility of unpredictable events (events ‘worthy of the name’, as Derrida often says, being by definition absolutely unpredictable) in a way that always might seem to threaten the very institution that it is. On this account, the University is in principle the institution that ‘lives’ the precarious chance and ruin of the institution as its very institutionality.
In the last ten years or so of his life, Derrida increasingly turned to a language of immunity and auto-immunity to describe this kind of situation and to pursue the deconstruction of sovereignty. In conclusion, I would like to suggest that this recourse, which can sometimes appear a little puzzling, flows directly from the early questions directed to Saussure, and notably from the complex concept of ‘instituted trace’ that I mentioned earlier. Derrida himself says several times in that context that a meditation on writing ought to unsettle the opposition between nature and institution, physis and nomos (De la Grammatologie, p. 66) that he suggests is ‘everywhere’, and particularly in linguistics, used as though it were self-evident.23 It now seems that the logic of foundation itself entails a troubling of that opposition, given that an institutional foundation must, as we have seen, retain or secrete within it a pre-institutional moment, a moment of ‘nature’, which then inhabits the institution as the permanent haunting possibility of its violent collapse or overthrow. Something like a nature, then, always to some extent encrypted or secret, secreted within the institution that was erected against it, not only threatens the institution, but gives it a chance of being, as it were, alive, in the sense that life entails an openness (a ‘hospitality’, perhaps, to use another late-Derridean concept) to alterity and event, which is also an openness to the possibility of instant death and destruction (for a life that did not involve this openness would not be a life worthy of the name ‘life’, at best a kind of suspended animation or living death). As Derrida shows in his repeated use of the concept of auto-immunity – whereby the efforts of an organism (literal or analogical) to secure its own immunity lead it to turn on itself and even destroy itself after the fashion of auto-immune disorders – a measure of auto-immunity is in fact a condition for there to be an event at all. For example, in the second essay collected in the book Voyous:
If an event worthy of the name is to happen, it must, beyond all mastery, affect a passivity. It must touch a vulnerability that is exposed, without absolute immunity, without indemnity, in its finitude and in a non-horizonal fashion, where it is not yet or already no longer possible to face up to, to put up a front, to the unpredictability of the other. In this respect, auto-immunity is not an absolute evil. It allows for exposure to the other, to what is coming and to who is coming – and must therefore remain incalculable. Without auto-immunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen again. One would no longer wait, expect, expect oneself and each other, or any event at all.24
‘Auto-immunity’ is the last in the long series of ‘quasi-transcendental’ terms that Derrida introduced, beginning with trace, archi-writing, différance, dissemination, and so on. It attempts, perhaps more clearly than some of those others, to capture a certain undecidability of life and death (including the ‘life’ and ‘death’ of institutions), but to do so on the side of life, as it were. (The much earlier Derridean development of ‘lifedeath’ is perhaps more concerned to stress death as a way of questioning the metaphysical concept of life as, essentially, presence.) Deconstruction is, so Derrida often says, essentially an affirmation, and an affirmation of life: whence too his expressions of reserve and even revolt (for example in his last interview with the journalist Jean Birnbaum) against the old philosophical presentation of philosophy as ‘learning [how] to die’.25 All the early work’s efforts to find something like death at work ‘in’ presence, and in naive conceptions of life as essentially presence, lead to the idea that these efforts – deconstruction itself – take place in the interests of a life that would be ‘worthy of its name’, which is a life that involves death in itself as part of its affirmation. Life, including the life of institutions (but it would probably not be difficult to show that life in this sense always involves a certain institutionality or institutionalisation) affirms itself as life just by affirming its exposure to the absolutely unpredictable event that is, as it were, the life of life, the chance of life, just as it always might end life at any instant. Only thus would life have any future, in the radical sense I mentioned at the beginning, but this is now a future that comes from no ‘horizon of expectation’, and indeed no horizon at all, and can hardly be thought of within the traditional philosophical terms available for thinking about time.
Here’s a passage from the same late text in which these strands come together quite clearly, and indeed explicitly go back to the early work on Husserl:
It is reason that puts reason into crisis, in an autonomous and quasi autoimmune way. It could be shown that the ultimate ‘reason’, in the sense of cause or ground, the raison d’être of this transcendental phenomenological auto-immunity, is to be found lodged in the very structure of the present and of life, in the temporalisation of what Husserl calls the Living Present (die lebendige Gegenwart). The Living Present produces itself only by altering and dissimulating itself. I do not have the time, precisely, to go down this route, but I wanted to mark the necessity of it, in the place where the question of becoming and thereby of the time of reason appears indissociable from the immense, ancient and quite new question of life (bios or zoe), at the heart of the question of being, of presence and the entity, and therefore the question of being and time, of Sein und Zeit – a question this time accented on the side of life rather than the side of death, if that still makes – as I am tempted to believe it does – a certain difference.26
Derrida increasingly related this thought to his call for an unconditionality without sovereignty. We might recast this now by saying that sovereignty (as we saw briefly in Rousseau, but as we could verify in more detail in Bodin, or conversely, from the other direction, as it were, in Bataille or Schmitt) is just the attempt at immunity that would be a kind of death through foreclosure of any possibility of event, the kind of ‘living death’ we often experience as institutional or political paralysis, the sense that nothing can happen; the unconditionality referred to here involves exposure to the absolutely unexpected event as a condition of anything like ‘life’. This is the only chance of institutions, but one against which they also necessarily guard themselves.
And this is why it is probably no accident that Derrida’s death leaves no organised institution of deconstruction whatsoever, no department or school or institute, no institution of deconstruction, and at most, at best, but it is best, institutions in deconstruction, something along the lines of what he sometimes called the ‘New International’, something that certainly involves the plurality of languages that deconstruction also always affirms, plus d’une langue –one of his ‘definitions’ of deconstruction, meaning both ‘more than one language’ and ‘no more of (only) one language’ – a ‘New International’ that will certainly never be achieved, but which we nonetheless embody here and now, today, for the moment, in this our fragile and precious institutionality, thanks to his legacy, and thanks to your hospitality.
Notes
1. See for example ‘Circonfession’, in Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), period 32.
2. This paper was originally written for the conference ‘Derrida: pasiones institucionales’, held in Mexico City, November 2005. This revised version was presented at the University of Pécs (Hungary) in November 2006 as the second annual Jacques Derrida memorial lecture. Previously published in Spanish as ‘Fundaciones’ (translated by Marionela Santoveña), in Esther Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida: Pasiones Institucionales, 2 vols (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 2007), I, pp. 119–51, and in Hungarian as ‘Alapok’ (translated by Jolan Orban), in Replika, 61 (2008), 21–34
3. See ‘Mochlos, ou le conflit des facultés’, in Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 397–438 (p. 422), and ‘Ulysse Gramophone: l’oui-dire de Joyce’, in Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 94ff.
4. De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 69.
5. Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 73.
6. Here as elsewhere in Derrida, it is interesting to compare these insights with what is to be found in Rousseau: in the latter’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau presents an interestingly sceptical account of the relation between the origin of language and the origin of society, and puts the problem of the origin of the institution of language thus: ‘The first language of man, the most universal and energetic, and the only one he needed until he had to persuade an assembly, is the cry of nature. As this cry was dragged out only by a kind of instinct on occasions of urgency, to implore help in great danger, or relief in violent pain, it was not of any great use in the ordinary course of life, when more moderate sentiments reign. When men’s ideas began to spread and multiply, and a tighter communication was established among them, they sought for more numerous signs and a more extensive language: they multiplied the inflexions of the voice, and joined to it gestures that are by their nature more expressive, and whose meaning depends less on an anterior disposition. So they expressed visible and mobile objects by gesture, and those that strike the hearing by imitative sounds: but as gesture can scarcely indicate any but present objects, or ones easy to describe, and visible actions; and as it is not always of use, since darkness or the interposition of a body render it useless, and as it demands attention rather than exciting it; one came round in the end to substituting for it vocal articulations which, without having the same relation to certain ideas, are better able to represent them all, as instituted signs [my emphasis]; a substitution that can only happen with common consent, and in a manner difficult to realise for men whose coarse organs had as yet not been exercised, and more difficult still to conceive for itself, since this unanimous agreement had to be motivated, and speech seems to have been very necessary to establish the use of speech.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1958–96), Vol. III, pp. 148–9 (my translation).
7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, ed. T. de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1976), p. 26. All translations mine, especially in view of the notorious inaccuracies and wilful distortions of the published translations of Saussure’s Cours.
8. Saussure, p. 31.
9. Saussure, p. 32.
10. Saussure, p. 104.
11. Saussure, pp. 107–8.
12. Saussure, p. 110.
13. De la grammatologie, p. 65.
14. Du droit à la philosophie, pp. 434-5.
15. Force de loi: le ‘fondement mystique de l’autorité’ (Paris: Galilée, 1994), p. 34.
16. In the only example of which I am aware of Derrida himself using the syntagm ‘institution de l’institution’, this ‘paradox’ is clearly linked to the later thematics of messianicity, justice, faith and the performative. See Foi et savoir, 
21–22, and especially the following: ‘First name: the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration . . . An invincible desire for justice is linked to this expectation. By definition, it is and should be certain of nothing, through no knowledge, no consciousness, no foreseeability, no program as such . . . This messianicity stripped of everything, as it should be, this faith without dogma that moves forward in the risk of absolute darkness, will not be contained in any received opposition
of our tradition, for example the opposition between reason and mysticism. It announces itself everywhere that, reflecting without wavering, a purely rational analysis shows up this paradox, namely that the foundation of the law – the law of the law, the institution of the institution, the origin of the constitution – is a ‘performative’ event that cannot belong to the set of events that it founds, inaugurates or justifies. Such an event is unjustifiable in the logic of what it will have opened up. It is the decision of the other in the undecidable.’
17. ‘Law is always the law of a repetition, and repetition is always subjection to a law’, La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 141.
18. See my Frontières kantiennes (Paris: Minuit, 2000), chapters 1 and 2.
19. Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, III, p. 363.
20. More radically still: ‘If it were possible that the Sovereign, considered as such, should have the executive power, right and fact would be so confused that one would no longer know what is law and what is not, and the body politic would soon fall prey to the violence against which it was instituted’ (ibid., p. 432). Politics, we might want to say, lives and dies in the separation of fact and right.
21. Lettres écrites de la montagne, in Oeuvres completes, III, p. 815.
22. L’Université sans condition (Paris: Galilée, 2001).
23. Cf. too: ‘All of this refers, beyond the nature/culture opposition, to a supervening opposition between physis and nomos, physis and tekhnè the ultimate function of which is perhaps to derive historicity; and, paradoxically, to recognize the rights of history, production, institution, etc., only in the form of the arbitrary and against a background of naturalism. But let us leave this question provisionally open: perhaps this gesture that in truth presides over the institution of metaphysics is also inscribed in the concept of history and even in the concept of time’ (De la grammatologie, p. 50); ‘This explanation of the “usurpation” is not only empirical in its form, it is problematic in its content, referring to a metaphysics and an old physiology of the sensory faculties which is constantly belied by science, as it is by the experience of language and of the body proper as language. It imprudently makes of visibility the sensory, simple and essential element of writing. Above all, by considering the audible as the natural milieu in which language must naturally carve out and articulate its instituted signs, thus exercising its arbitrariness in that milieu, this explanation removes all possibility of any natural relation between speech and writing at the very moment that it asserts it. It thus scrambles the notions of nature and institution that it uses constantly, instead of deliberately dismissing them, which one should no doubt begin by doing’ (ibid., pp. 62–3); and, most trenchantly perhaps: ‘If “writing” signifies inscription, and first of all durable institution of a sign (and this is the only irreducible nucleus of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the whole field of linguistic signs. In this field there can subsequently appear a certain species of instituted signifiers, ‘graphic’ in the narrow and derived sense of this word, ruled by a certain relation to other instituted signifiers which are, then, ‘written’ even if they are ‘phonic’. The very idea of institution – and thus of the arbitrariness of the sign – is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon’ (ibid., p. 65).
24. Voyous, p. 210.
25. Partially published as ‘Je suis en guerre contre moi-même’, Le monde, 19 August 2004. The full text of the interview was subsequently published as a booklet: Apprendre à vivre enfin: entretien avec Jean Birnbaum (Paris: Galilée, 2005).
26. Voyous, pp. 178–9.