I
One way of talking about ‘Derrida’s event’ is to try to understand the event of Derrida, the perhaps philosophical or perhaps more broadly ‘cultural’ event that he was.1 It seems to be no accident that we might be inclined to do this upon the fact or event of Derrida’s death, on the basis of his now (and henceforth) ‘being’ dead, to understand the philosophical or cultural event that he was, in the past, or perhaps more properly that he will have been, in a projected future past, a future perfect that is also a perfect future in which things will finally have been what they always were to be. That’s certainly one kind of approach one might be inclined to make, and it seems to be invited by the event of Derrida’s death: now that Derrida is dead, the thought would go, the time has come to have an at least preliminary stab at putting him in his place, assigning him his rightful position and importance in the philosophico-cultural history of, say, Modern French Thought, or maybe Modern European Thought, or even just Modern Thought, or Western Thought, or (why not?) just Thought.
This kind of assessment, which seems to be essentially related to the fact (if not quite the event) of Derrida’s death, appears to be fundamentally necrological, and wants, post-mortem, to get things straight, ordered and hierarchised, to deal with the estate and the legacy. It’s no accident that its most appropriate tense should be the future perfect, the tense of what will have been, what will have turned out to be in some projection or fantasy of a Last Judgement, and one of the favourite adverbs of this type of assessment is indeed ‘ultimately’. ‘Ultimately, then, Derrida . . .’.2 Nothing was more common in the notices and obituaries immediately provoked by the event (or at least the news) of Derrida’s death, even when (perhaps especially when) those pieces had been (or may as well have been) prepared long in advance. (It was at least five years earlier that the London Times had approached me to write such an anticipatory obituary of Derrida: I never replied, I’m afraid.)
Let’s say that that’s one way of approaching Derrida’s event. Derrida will have been such and such a figure, and the event that he was or will have been is, as it were, rounded off or completed by his death. Thinkers, like other cultural figures, die, and their death provokes a flurry of activity seeking to order, assess, classify and thereby, I’d be tempted to say, to forget and to neutralise. One thing that seems certain to survive the death is just this kind of talk, a sort of discursive machinery that assumes certain ways of processing events and writing them down, writing them up and writing them off into the great, ongoing and ultimately ultimate History of Everything.
II
We might imagine in this vein that sooner or later some form of ‘biography’ of Derrida might get written, but 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.3 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.
This essential relationship between philosophy and death, or the philosophical life and death, is also what calls for biography, rather than autobiography. Autobiography (‘the least inadequate name for what I do’, as Derrida says somewhere) is a tricky way for a philosopher to deal with death: writing my autobiography, the story of my life, I pretend to be gathering my life up into a totality, rounding it off in preparation for death, but by the very fact of writing the autobiography I am adding a new event to my life (to parody Lyotard in Le différend, the synthesis of all the syntheses that make up my life is a further synthesis in my life), a new event which may be the most important event of my life, which by definition the autobiography can never catch up with – by becoming the narrator of my own life, I am enacting a fantasy of immortality, insofar as, structurally speaking, narrators cannot die. But biography, at least in its classical forms, waits for the death of its subject before telling his (usually his) life and gathering it up into a meaningful whole. Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change. Biography fulfils the philosophical programme of the philosopher by being predicated on his death: the biography of the philosopher, his written life, is written from his death, writing his life out in the future perfect tense that it will have been. But only this death confirms that the philosopher really was a philosopher in the philosophical sense of that term: the death of the philosopher allows for his life in the sense of the written account that will consecrate him as a philosopher and thereby consecrate philosophy as philosophy. Real life is always elsewhere, and the philosopher’s real life comes after his death. Diogenes Laertius gives us some precious indications about this in the Introduction to his book: the distinction between a sage and a philosopher, due, according to Diogenes, to Pythagoras, is that the latter merely seeks to attain wisdom during his life (whereas the sage claims to have achieved it). The written life can then be the account of that search, and, because it is predicated on the idea that the search is not quite fulfilled in life (but only in death), the writing can include all sorts of elements which are not yet of the order of wisdom. If the philosopher is a philosopher only to the extent that he has not yet achieved wisdom, then his biography, teleologically dedicated to charting the path of philosophy towards the wisdom achieved only in death, can allow itself to recount all manner of more or less unedifying anecdotes along the way, and these anecdotes will tend to confirm a contrario the ontological status of the philosopher himself. Socrates is still the clearest example of this set-up, if I can use the notion of example here: let’s say that Socrates is the exemplary philosopher.
What I have called elsewhere the ontologico-biographical supplement, then, is constitutive of the philosophical concept of biography, and indeed the philosophical concept of philosophy. Without it, that is without philosophy’s giving rise to philosophers, philosophy would not quite be philosophy. But this supplement which makes all the difference to philosophy, and which as such, in the case of individual philosophers, is the proper domain of the biographer, is not itself philosophical in any obvious sense at all. Biographies of philosophers, even when written by philosophers, are not in principle works of philosophy, or destined solely for philosophical reading. The feature of a philosopher which most saliently makes him into a philosopher is not itself philosophical, but of the order of the anecdote, and it is not clear what philosophy (as opposed to biography) can have to say about it. For philosophical biography (or the biography of philosophers) is not primarily concerned to give a genealogical account of the thought of the philosopher concerned, not simply to document facts about the philosopher’s philosophical life, but deals with his life as a whole insofar as that life is not philosophy but should bear some relation to philosophy. This means that philosophical biography always teeters on the brink of triviality or the merely anecdotal (if only because it is predicated on the idea that the reader of the biography does not understand the thought of the philosopher concerned), but also that philosophy is constitutively compromised by this more or less unhappy relationship with philosophical biography – for philosophy cannot do without the ontological supplement documented in biography – and therefore cannot do without potential triviality. Any biography that tried to escape its normal teleological form would have, perhaps, to refigure this whole economy.
I think there is something very unsatisfactory about this whole set-up and its generally presupposed culturalist historicism. It’s not just that those of us who were more or less close to Derrida, intellectually and personally, experienced his death in a way that makes this type of recuperative bio-philosophical assessment difficult to want to do (and difficult to stomach), leaving us very far from the ultimatelys and the in the last analyses and the future-historians-will-tell-us-thats, and the Derrida’s-main-contribution-will-have-beens, in a state that makes even an event such as this, ‘Derrida’s event’, a challenge, more of a challenge than previous non-posthumous Derrida events, at any rate, so that it feels harder to know what’s going to happen next – not just that, then, but rather that Derrida’s event, the event of Derrida in the sense of the event as thought about by Jacques Derrida, seems to be more or less radically incompatible with that type of reaction.
For part of the event that Derrida is, and not the least important part, will have been a way of thinking about and writing about the event that makes it, and him, difficult to process in the ways I’ve been describing.
III
One way of casting this difficulty is in terms of mourning. As those of us who are in mourning try to mourn Derrida’s death, maybe it is time to look again at some of the things Derrida said, at least from Glas (1975), but more especially in later texts, about death and mourning. Broadly speaking, the problem is this: so-called ‘normal’ or ‘successful’ mourning consists in a process of getting over it, of recovering from the loss of the other by withdrawing one’s investments or cathexes in that other back into the self, back into the service of the self, the ego. Whether at a personal level or at the level of the kind of reaction I have just been mentioning, this is a teleological process the outcome of which is to lose the loss, to turn the loss into a profit, to come back to oneself, to show a return, in spite of the other’s definitive departure. However ‘healthy’ we might want to think this process is, this model of mourning seems extraordinarily self-involved and self-interested (even jubilant in the case of several of the pieces published since Derrida’s death), part of a more general take on what we all now call ‘the other’ that is precisely concerned to neutralise alterity in the interests of identity. (A lot of the recent talk about ‘the other’, in all its supposedly ‘ethical’ piety, is in fact a fairly transparent alibi for just this kind of self-interest.) And indeed this whole set-up is part of an age-old philosophical conception about life and death, and about philosophy as a process of ‘learning how to die’ which is of a piece with the ‘biography’ conceptuality I was mentioning earlier. It is against just this conception that Derrida protests in a lot of late texts, often reflecting on the death of friends and colleagues, and perhaps most strikingly in the interview given to the French newspaper Le monde less than two months before his death.
For example, in Béliers, originally written in homage to Hans-Georg Gadamer, after the latter’s death, and which opens explicitly on the question of melancholia, Derrida is prepared to say that some failure of this structure of ‘normal’ mourning, something more of the order of what Freud calls, then, ‘melancholia’ (broadly speaking, the state of one who does not achieve the goal of mourning, but remains attached to the lost other), is in some important, ‘ethical’, sense preferable to mourning ‘proper’. In fact, he thinks that only something that looks more like melancholia, as a kind of protest against mourning, a militant melancholia, then, gives any ‘ethical’ dimension to mourning. For example, as part of a meditation on Celan’s enigmatic line ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen’ [literally: ‘the world is gone, I must carry you’]:
According to Freud, mourning consists in carrying the other in oneself. There is no world any more, it is the end of the world for the other when the other dies, and I take into myself this end of the world, I must carry the other and the other’s world, the world in me: introjection, interiorisation of memory (Erinnerung), idealization. Melancholia is supposed to be the failure and pathology of this mourning. But if I must (this is ethics itself) carry the other in myself in order to be faithful to that other, to respect its singular alterity, a certain melancholia must still protest against normal mourning [my emphasis]. It must never resign itself to idealizing introjection. It must rail against what Freud says about it with such calm certainty, as though to confirm the norm of normality. The ‘norm’ is nothing other than the good conscience of amnesia. It allows us to forget that keeping the other inside oneself, as oneself, is already to forget the other. Forgetting begins right there. So melancholy is necessary.4
This is part of a movement of thought whereby the death of the other is always, rather literally, each time singularly, the end of the world, as the French title of what was first published in English as The Work of Mourning has it, and as Derrida also says much earlier in Béliers:
For each time, and each time singularly, each time irreplaceably, each time infinitely, death is nothing less than an end of the world. Not only 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 a world among others, it marks each time, each time defying arithmetic, the absolute end of the one and only world, of what each opens as a one and only world, the end of the unique world, the end of the totality of what is or can present itself as the origin of the world for such and such a unique living being, human or not. (ibid., pp. 22–3)
But this ‘melancholic’ state of half- or semi-mourning (demi-deuil, as Derrida also sometimes calls it,5 trying to capture, as is often the case in deconstruction, a kind of inhibition, arrest or interruption of what might otherwise seem to be a ‘normal’ teleological process pursuing its course to the end) does not in fact wait for the event of death to kick in. Rather it marks one’s relation to the other from the start, just because the radically interruptive structure of any relation to any other is a measure of that other’s very alterity.6 My relation to the other is marked from the start by the asymmetry, distance, separation and interruption that makes ethics possible (while making any certainty that I am ever in fact behaving ethically quite impossible) as it respects precisely what makes the other other (and not me). And so one can speak of an ‘originary mourning’, or rather originary half-mourning or originary melancholia, as Derrida does in that last interview, an originary melancholia that then defines living itself, vivre, as a survival, a survivre, that would have a conceptual priority over one’s usual (metaphysical) notions of life and death.
IV
Once we’ve complicated the status of the event of death in this way, with all that it entails, what is there left of the event in Derrida? What is an event worth calling an event in Derrida’s work? Or, to use an idiom that returns almost obsessively in his later writing, what is an event worthy of the name?7 We call all manner of things events, after all, but maybe something about why we do so can be brought out by trying to isolate the features of an event that’s a real event, that’s really worth calling an event.
One predicate Derrida insists on is this: an event worthy of the name must be radically unpredictable or unforeseeable. An event that arrives on cue, as predicted or programmed, loses its edge as an event just because you saw it coming. A real event (worthy of the name, then) seems to derive its eventhood from some quality of out-of-the-blueness. Events in this sense befall us, surprise us, don’t politely announce their arrival and then arrive as announced: rather they land on us, hit us, appear out of nowhere, from above, below, from the side or from behind, rather than from up ahead. Derrida often stresses that events in this strong sense (and thereby the eventhood of events more generally, what makes events events) cannot adequately be thought of in terms of a horizon of expectation – what you see coming against the horizon is not an event (or at least, what in an event you could see coming was not its eventhood). This never-any-certainty-about-an-event means that I am never in control of it, and never sure of it, never sure it will happen. And this leads Derrida to what looks like a modulation in his thinking: from an earlier position where there was a kind of unconditional affirmation of the event in this sense, a kind of call on the event to come and happen in its unpredictability,8 there seems to be a shift of emphasis at least to a formulation of a kind of transcendental ‘perhaps-ness’. No event would not be marked by this ‘perhaps-ness’ of its very happening.9
Whence too the explicit suggestion in some of Derrida’s late work that events are always in some sense traumatic. This is probably less a psychological remark than an attempt to borrow something of the thought that in trauma there is a kind of overwhelming of a system caught short in its preparation, something of an inability to process what befalls, advenes or supervenes – and this would be true of so-called happy events as well as unhappy ones.10
Some rather paradoxical consequences flow from this thought of the event (which is also an event of thought, perhaps).
1. How simple is it to think in this perspective of events happening in their place and time? If I don’t, and can’t see it coming, and if I can’t process it in its arrival, then when exactly can it be said to happen? Freud famously used the term Nachträglichkeit (in an early text Derrida says that this is Freud’s real discovery, though it seems clear that Freud himself did not think so: as a student of mine recently pointed out, Nachträglichkeit itself only became an important or even thematised concept after the event, nachtràäglich11) – Freud used that term to try to capture something of this structure (‘deferred action’ seems a poor translation of this: rather Nachträglichkeit seems to suggest a kind of intrinsic after-the-eventness of the event in this sense, i.e. that of an event worthy of the name and thereby in some sense traumatic). If events are traumatic and therefore marked as events by a kind of after-the-eventness, then events in the strong sense Derrida is trying to bring out can be said to be events that don’t entirely or simply happen in their happening or at the moment of their happening. In the kind of cases described by Freud, at any rate, it often makes more sense to say that the event happens as an event only in a strange kind of repetition after the event (sometimes long after the event), or at any rate that the eventhood of the event cannot be given a simple date and time, and defies simple insertion into a continuity.
2. Second paradoxical consequence. If an event worthy of the name is marked as radically unpredictable, irruptive, and not integrable into any straightforward temporal or causal continuum, then an event worthy of the name must presumably also exceed or interrupt the name and concept of event itself. Just as a singularity, if it is really to be singular, has to resist in some sense being recognised as a singularity (as merely an instance of the general concept of singularity), so an event should each time be a challenge to the very concept of event that we’ve been using more or less confidently. At which point the ‘worthy of the name’ part becomes complicated too – an event really worthy of its name would seem to have to be so worthy of its name that its name would no longer be so worthy of it. As Derrida puts it in an interview just after and about the event now known as ‘9/11’, an event in the strong sense we have been following entails failure of comprehension and appropriation (so that an event is by definition something I don’t quite understand, marked by the fact that I don’t understand it), and that really ought to put questions to the concept of event itself (and by extension, perhaps, to philosophy and talk of essences and truths and concepts more generally), so that, he asks: ‘Would an event that still confirmed to an essence, a law or a truth, or even to a concept of the event, be a major event? A major event ought to be unforeseeable and irruptive enough to unsettle even the horizon of the concept or the essence from which one believes one can recognize an event as such.’12
V
An event so worthy of its name that it would suggest a kind of impossibility (Derrida sometimes defines deconstruction as ‘an experience of the impossible’) or unthinkability (and so, I’d like to say, always a kind of unworthiness to go with its worthiness) may, in a sense, never quite happen. An event so ‘pure’ as to escape recognition altogether might not even be worth calling an event. In fact, Derrida’s work, from the start, stresses an economy of the kind of pure or radical event we’ve been sketching with all the things that seem determined to deprive it of its eventhood. Events are always also involved in some type of repetition or repeatability, reproducibility or recognisability. A logic of the event as singularity always goes along with what Derrida also recently calls a ‘logic of the machine’, of mechanical repetition or reproduction.
This is of course why the kind of recuperative cultural-historical reactions to Derrida’s event, with which I began, can even get started. The suspicion, however, would be that those reactions are not given sufficient pause by the eventhood of the event that I’ve been trying to suggest is what Derrida is trying to bring out. Repetition may be compulsive, but there’s still repetition and repetition. What Derrida famously calls iterability, in one of his earliest explicit discussions of the event,13 may affect the event from the start, dividing its uniqueness and giving rise to the possibility of different versions and accounts of the ‘same’ event, but iterability also entails alteration and difference, so that something new, a new event, also takes place in every account of an event. If we take seriously the after-the-eventness structure of Nachträglichkeit, then it ought perhaps to be harder than is often thought to carry on in the massively culturalist and historicist mode that is unfortunately still (and perhaps increasingly) the norm in this domain.
I’d like to suggest in conclusion that Derrida’s work in general, ‘deconstruction’, if that’s what we want to call the series of events signed with his name, consistently exhibits and performs just the kind of complex after-the-eventness that he also thematises and describes. One way of bringing this out consists in asking the question: ‘When is the deconstruction?’ of any of Derrida’s texts. A spectacular example here is the reading of Plato published in 1972 as ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in which Derrida brings out of Plato’s texts a way of thinking about writing quite different from the view that Plato most obviously seems to be putting forward. Derrida is certainly not just reporting the received Platonic view and then disagreeing with it or putting forward an alternative theory – rather claiming to read in and out of Plato (perhaps through Plato would be a more Derridian way of describing it)14 another way of construing writing. This ‘other view’ is at least as much ‘in’ Plato as it is ‘in’ Derrida. It does not seem a satisfactory description of this situation to say simply that ‘Derrida deconstructs Plato’ (in 1972, then), nor that ‘Plato deconstructs himself’ (in fifth-century BC Athens, then). Rather the event of deconstruction seems to happen disconcertingly across or between these two dates (and in fact across a wide range of intervening dates too, the whole history of the ‘reception’ of Plato). And this seems to be what Derrida is trying to bring out when he says in a slightly different context that ‘Plato’s signature is not yet complete’, the event ‘signed’ Plato being ongoingly and more or less unpredictably countersigned by any number of subsequent events that become, after the event, components of the supposedly ‘original’ Plato event.15 And it looks as though this situation can be generalised across the whole of Derrida’s work, the whole of ‘deconstruction’ as it carries through and interrupts the ‘tradition’. The undeniable event of Derrida’s reading of Plato happens, then, but exactly when and where it happens is probably impossible to say, and insofar as we are still here trying to figure that out, it seems also that, like Plato’s signature, the event of Derrida’s reading is also not complete, but open for reading and rereading in the future. This structure of reading, which is absolutely fundamental to deconstruction, is something that cultural and historical approaches will never in principle understand.
All of which tends to dissolve or explode ‘Derrida’s event’ into a kind of scattering or dispersion of its eventhood across a range that defies any simple accounting or accountability. The irreducible multiplicity entailed by that thought of scattering also (but that’s another story I try to tell elsewhere) defines deconstruction as irreducibly ‘political’. To the extent that it still seems important to gather that dispersion or scattering enough to identify a ‘Derrida event’ at all, we might want to say that Derrida’s own work, in its constant reprises and displaced repetitions, its constant re-readings of itself, constantly tries to find ways of thinking together, in the same thought, singularity and repetition, the singular repeating as the same each time differently. Quite a good name for this might still be ‘thought’. Derrida’s event is an ongoing series of after-the-event reprises and iterations of an event of thought about the event and its constitutive after-the-eventness. And one thing this means is that Derrida’s event never quite or entirely happened, or finished happening, and is to that extent still to come, yet to happen, here today in London, for example, and then again elsewhere, tomorrow.
1. This is an expanded version of an informal talk given in the ‘For Derrida’ series at the Tate Modern in London in February 2005, for the session entitled ‘Derrida’s Event’. Previously published in S. Glendinning and R. Eaglestone (eds), Derrida’s Legacies (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 26–35.
2. I reserve for a future occasion a discussion of the function of the word ‘ultimately’ in philosophical argument and in cultural criticism.
3. See ‘A Life in Philosophy’, in my Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy (e-book available from bennington.zsoft.co.uk), pp. 405–25, from which I excerpt a couple of pages here.
4. Jacques Derrida, Béliers: Le dialogue interrompu entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 74.
5. For example in ‘Circonfession’ (in Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991)), especially period 32.
6. See most recently Derrida’s clarifications in Mustapha Chérif, L’Islam et l’Occident: Rencontre avec Jacques Derrida (Paris/Alger: Odile Jacob/Editions Barzakh, 2006), especially pp. 102–3 (where, however, ‘rapport de nos rapports’ on p. 103 is clearly a mis-transcription of ‘rapport du sans-rapport’), but already ‘En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici’ (in Psyché: inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 159–202 (especially pp. 176–81)), and the insistent allusions to Blanchot’s ‘rapport sans rapport’ (for example in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), pp. 188, 207, 277), and its radicalisation as a ‘sans sans sans’ (ibid., p. 151).
7. I first drew Derrida’s attention to his frequent use of this idiom at another event involving Simon Glendinning, namely the conference entitled ‘Derrida’s Arguments’, held at Queen Mary, London, in 2001, explicitly following up on the 2000 University of Reading conference ‘Arguing with Derrida’ that Glendinning had organised. (See my ‘ . . . you meant’, in Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy (op. cit.), pp. 83–94 (p. 92)). We subsequently discussed it on a number of occasions, notably at the SUNY Stony Brook ‘Politics and Filiation’ conference (New York, November 2002): in Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 28, Derrida says that this is ‘a turn of phrase I use so often and that will one day lead me to provide a long justification’.
8. Cf. the analyses of an irreducible affirmation preceding any possible question in, for example, De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987); Ulysse Gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987), and, for the ‘call’ on the event, Jacques Derrida, D’un ton apocalyptique adopte naguere en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1983).
9. See the analysis of the ‘perhaps’ in Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), pp. 58ff., and the more informal presentation in the discussion with Alexander Garcia Düttman, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’, PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (1997), pp. 1–18.
10. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Papier machine: le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses (Paris: Galilée, 2001), p. 114: ‘ . . . always essentially traumatic, even when it is happy: an event is always traumatic, its singularity interrupts an order and, like any decision worthy of the name, tears a normal tissue of temporality or history’.
11. Cf. ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, in L’ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 303, 314, 317. I am grateful to Susi Schink for pointing out to me the nachtràäglich nature of the concept of Nachträglichkeit.
12. Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le ‘concept’ du 11 septembre: dialogues à New York, Octobre–Décembre 2001, Avec Giovanna Borradori (Paris: Galilée, 2004), pp. 138–9.
13. See ‘Signature, evénément, contexte’, in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), and more generally Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Paris: Galilée, 1990).
14. Cf. La voix et le phénomène (Paris: PUF, 1967), p. 98: ‘Through [the] text, i.e. in a reading that can be neither simply that of commentary nor that of interpretation.’
15. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévesque and Christie McDonald, L’oreille de l’autre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions: textes et debats avec Jacques Derrida (Montréal: VLB, 1982), p. 119.