That’s Life, Death
What laws are followed by re-naissances, re-discoveries, occultations too, the distancing or re-evaluation of a text that one would like naïvely to believe, on the faith of a signature or an institution, that it remains the same, constantly identical to itself? A ‘corpus’, in sum, the self-identity of which is supposedly even less threatened than that of a body proper? What must a text be if it can, of its own accord as it were, turn to shine again, after an eclipse, with a different light, at a time that is no longer that of its productive source (was it ever contemporaneous with it?), then repeat this resurgence again after several deaths including among others that of the author, and the simulacrum of a multiple extinction?1
The modality of the possible, the insatiable perhaps would destroy everything, implacably, through a sort of auto-immunity from which no region of being, physis or history would be exempt. [ . . . ] A time said to be contemporary that would be anything but contemporary. [ . . . ] If it presented itself, and with some word said ‘I’, [this time] could only speak like a madman, and if it said it was alive, this would be perhaps again, and more probably than ever, a sign of madness.2
Here: a bit sans queue ni tête . . .3
I
Talking about life here, we’ll (always) be talking about life after . . . What kind of life is this, here and now, that we’re living? Inheritance and legacy (‘to be is to inherit’ (Spectres de Marx)), mourning and melancholia (a mourning digne du nom would look somewhat more like melancholia than ‘normal’ mourning). There seems to be something very specifically difficult and maybe daunting in what we’re doing here, in what Peggy’s wonderful initiative, Michael’s great idea for a subject, and the generosity of the Borchard Foundation have made possible.
Talking about Jacques Derrida and life, after his death, after his life, we’re enjoined to think about this very situation in which we find ourselves en ce moment même . . . What kind of ‘community’ (lots of good Derridean reasons for scare-quotes here, especially from Politiques de l’amitié) do we want to be, what kind of institution is called for by what we’ve been reading and rereading?4 It seems clear that if we read what JD wrote, we must read (or perhaps hear?5) a call to some more inventive type of being-together than is perhaps usual in academic circles. I’m sure we can all think of lots of more or less unpleasant models and examples as to what might typically happen after the death of a figure such as JD (assuming there ever was any other such figure): I am imagining that part of our task is to be smart enough to avoid simply following (or falling into) those models and examples.
It’s still a new experience, at any rate, to find ourselves not only at a ‘conference’ (that may already be far from the right word to describe what is happening here . . . ) on JD without JD’s tutelary presence, but in the knowledge that never again will we find ourselves at a conference with that presence, or with that presence in quite the same way (because of course I’m sure we all feel that JD is nonetheless present here today, watching us in a way that is clearly different (but perhaps economically different, within a general spectrality) from when he was apparently more straightforwardly ‘present’ and able to respond). As JD himself points out in ‘Devant la loi’, reading the Freud of Totem and Taboo, the dead father may be more alive than the living father – but that might just mean that the last way for us to think of JD is as our father (living or dead). Part of our question, at any rate, must be that of life, now, as an after-life that would certainly not be inventively faithful to the legacy bequeathed to ‘us’ (qui ça, nous’?, always a good question, n’est-ce pas?) if we did not try to figure that after-life, our sur-vival, otherwise than in terms of the model of patrilinear descent that is at the centre of the question of life as thought by the tradition that JD will have spent forty years and more ‘deconstructing’. I, for one, am hoping that we’ll figure out, if only ephemerally, for these few days, some way of being together (some kind of ‘New International’, maybe) that will be at least attentive and responsive to everything that JD’s legacy will have given us to think, and more especially given us to think about legacies, inheritance, and living on or survival. Maybe it would be not much of an exaggeration to say that all of JD’s work is there to prepare us for this very moment, for which, however, it seems so hard to be prepared.
Here, for a famous example, from Spectres de Marx:
An inheritance is never gathered, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can only consist in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. You must [il faut] means you must filter, select, criticize; you must sort out among several of the possibilities that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in contradictory fashion around a secret. If the legibility of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not simultaneously call for and defy interpretation, one would never have to inherit from it. One would be affected by it as by a cause – natural or genetic. One always inherits a secret, which says ‘Read me, will you ever be up to it?’ The critical choice called for by any reaffirmation of the inheritance is also, like memory itself, the condition of finitude. The infinite does not inherit, is not inherited from. The injunction itself (‘choose and decide in what you inherit’, it always says) can be one only by dividing, tearing itself, differing/deferring itself, speaking both several times and in several voices. (p. 40)
Will I ever be up to it? Of course not. So rather than reading here, I’d rather be reading out, happy to quote and do little more than quote (not, I think, that I ever really did anything else, even when I ‘quoted’ not at all . . . ), and especially quote some passages I’m tempted to call ‘magnificent’, from texts (especially ‘early’ texts) that I fear are no longer being read so much these days, and that I’m anxious not be forgotten.
(For me, here, at least, this situation has seemed to bring me to something like ‘childhood memories’, and so I found myself ineluctably brought back to my early readings of some of JD’s ‘early’ texts. How deconstructive is it, I can only wonder, to want to bring the whole thing back to its origins, to tend to think that it all flows in some way from an (I imagine blinding) originary moment of insight into the non-simplicity of origins . . . ? And yet, note how JD in later texts increasingly refers to, and quotes, his earlier ones. JD is a fantastic reader of what is bequeathed by the metaphysical tradition, but also of his own earlier texts. JD’s work constantly loops back through itself, finding itself in itself as other than itself, re-vitalising itself, keeping itself alive (maybe re-inseminating (re-disseminating) itself?) What kind of life-form is that? In any case, rereading, it seems possible to claim, as JD often did of himself, ‘La vie? Mais il n’a jamais parlé que de ça!’)
II
One of our questions here might, then, be this: how are we to think of the form of ‘life’ that deconstruction is? What is at stake in saying that deconstruction is alive (or even, as we might wish to say, ‘alive and well’?) What kind or type of vivant is it if it is alive? Living organism (but organisms always seem to call for teleological judgement . . . ?); oeuvre?;6 corpus?7
Or maybe, more probably, the form of life that deconstruction is might be something, as in La pharmacie de Platon or Donner le temps, that would be sans queue ni tête:
In order to be ‘acceptable’, a written discourse ought to be subjected, like living discourse itself, to the laws of life. Logographic necessity (anankè logo-graphikè) ought to be analogous to biological or rather zoological necessity. Without which, of course, it has neither head nor tail. We are indeed dealing with structure and constitution, in the risk run by logos of losing through writing both its head and its tail. [ . . . ]
Socrates: But here’s a thing that you would at least agree to, I think: that every discourse (logon) must be constituted (sunestanai) after the fashion of a living being (ôsper zôon): have a body that is its own, so as to be neither without head nor without feet, but to have a middle at the same time as two ends, written so as to fit with each other and with the whole. (264 b c)8
And in Donner le temps, apparently content to quote the Baudelaire of the Spleen de Paris:
To Arsène Houssaye.
My dear friend, I am sending you a small work of which one could not say without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since the whole thing, to the contrary, is both head and tail, alternatively and reciprocally. Consider, I pray you, the admirable convenience this combination offers us all: you, me and the reader. We can cut it off where we will: me my reverie, you the manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not suspend the latter’s restive will on the interminable thread of a superfluous plot. Take out a vertebra, and the two pieces of this tortuous fantasy will join up effortlessly. Chop it into many fragments, and you will see that each can exist on its own. In the hope that some of these sections will be alive enough to please and amuse you, I dare to dedicate the whole snake to you. (Baudelaire, quoted [but with surprisingly little commentary on the ‘tête’ and ‘queue’] in Donner le temps, pp. 116–17)
III
More specifically, what has to have happened to the inherited concept of ‘life’ (but also the concept of ‘concept’, and thereby all others) for it to have an after-life in deconstruction? What is at stake in continuing to use the language of life (and inheritance) about objects that are not ‘literally’ living? Whatever ‘literally’ means here, it looks as though we’re very soon engaged in a kind of tropic or metaphorical drift (itself maybe a form of life?). This issue of literal/metaphorical senses of ‘life’ is itself an important part of JD’s ‘early’ discussions: so, for example, in the ‘Hors livre’ section of La dissémination, this, on Hegel:
Engendering and enjoying itself, the concept sublates its preface and plunges into itself. The Encyclopedia gives birth to itself. The conception of the concept is an auto-insemination.30
This return to itself of the theological semen interiorises its own negativity and its own difference from itself. The Life of the Concept is a necessity which, by including the scatter of semen, by making it work for the profit of the Idea, excludes by the same token any loss and any chance productivity. The exclusion is an inclusion. In opposition to the seminal differance thus repressed, the truth that speaks itself in the logocentric circle is the discourse of what returns to the father. (See too Donner le temps, p. 68)
30 [Derrida’s note:] Life, an essential philosophical determination of the concept and of spirit, is necessarily described according to the general features of vegetal or biological life, the particular object of the philosophy of nature. This analogy or this metaphoricity, which poses formidable problems, is possible only according to the organicity of encyclopedic logic. Read from this point of view the analyses of the ‘return to self’ of the ‘seed’ (
347 et 348), of ‘internal chance’ ([ . . . ] 351), of ‘lack’ and ‘copulation’ (369) and more generally of the syllogism of life, the life of spirit as truth and death (term) of natural life that carries in it, in its finitude, its ‘originary illness and its innate seed of death’. [ . . . ] Is the preface the nature of the logos? The natural life of the concept?9
And here too, the important discussion of the ‘metaphor’ of paternity in La Pharmacie de Platon, which is the fuller context for the ‘sans queue ni tête’ remarks earlier:
What we are continuing, provisionally and for convenience, to call a metaphor belongs in any case to a system. If the logos has a father, if it is a logos only assisted by its father, this is because it is always a being (on) and even a genus of being (Sophist I 260 a), and more precisely a living being. The logos is a zoon. This animal is born, grows, belongs to physis. Linguistics, logic, dialectics and zoology are hand in glove.
In describing the logos as a zoon, Plato is following certain rhetors and sophists who before him opposed to the cadaverous rigidity of writing the living speech, infallibly adjusting itself to the needs of current circumstances, the expectations and demands of the interlocutors present, sniffing out the place to present itself, pretending to bend to circumstance at the very moment it is becoming both persuasive and constraining.
The logos, a living and animate being, is therefore also an engendered organism. And organism: a proper differentiated body, with a centre and extremities, joints, a head and feet. In order to be ‘acceptable’, a written discourse ought to be subjected, like living discourse itself, to the laws of life. Logographic necessity (anankè logographikè) ought to be analogous to biological or rather zoological necessity. Without which, of course, it has neither head nor tail. We are indeed dealing with structure and constitution, in the risk run by logos of losing through writing both its head and its tail . . . [ . . . ]
Like every person, the logos-zoon has a father.
But what is a father?
Should we assume that we know this and with this – known – term illuminate the other term in what it would be precipitous to describe as a metaphor? In that case one would say that the origin or cause of the logos is compared to what we know to be the cause of a living son, i.e. his father. One would understand or imagine the birth and the process of the logos on the basis of a domain foreign to it, i.e. the transmission of life or relations of generation. But the father is not the generator, the ‘real’ procreator before and outside any language-relation. For how is the father/son relation distinguished from the cause/effect or engenderer/engendered relation if not by the agency of the logos? Only a power of discourse has a father. The father is always the father of a living/speaking being. In other words, it is on the basis of the logos that something like paternity shows up and gives itself to be thought. If there were a simple metaphor in the expression ‘father of the logos’, the first word, which seemed the most familiar, would nonetheless receive from the second more meaning than it would transmit to it. The first familiarity always has some relation of cohabitation with the logos. Living beings, father and son come to us, relate to each other in the domesticity of the logos. From which one does not emerge, in spite of appearances, to transport oneself by ‘metaphor’ into a foreign domain in which one would come across fathers, sons, living beings, all sorts of convenient beings for explaining to someone who did not know, and by comparison, how it is with the logos, that strange thing. Although this hearth is the heart of all metaphoricity, ‘father of the logos’ is not a simple metaphor. There would be one if one were to state that a living being incapable of language, if one wanted stubbornly to go on believing in such a thing, had a father. So we must proceed to a general inversion of all the metaphorical dimensions, and not ask whether a logos can have a father but understand that what the father claims to father cannot go without the essential possibility of the logos.10
IV
In a slightly less obvious way, perhaps, this question of life is at the absolute centre of the argumentative structure of La voix et le phénomène, which goes something like this (quotes provided as aides-memoires, with crucial moments in bold):
1. All the faults and perversions denounced by Husserl come down to a failure to appreciate the absolute originarity of the form of the ‘living present’ in its transcendental ‘life’:
One could bring out the unique and permanent motif of all the faults and all the perversions that Husserl denounces in “degenerate” metaphysics, across many domains, themes and arguments: it is always a blindness to the authentic mode of ideality, the one that is, can be, repeated indefinitely in the identity of its presence by virtue of the fact that it does not exist, is not real, is unreal not in the sense of fiction but in another sense which can have many names, whose possibility will permit one to speak of the non-reality and the necessity of essence, noema, intelligible object and non-mundanity in general. As this non-mundanity is not another mundanity, and as this ideality is not an existent fallen from the sky, its origin will always be the possibility of the repetition of a productive act. In order for the possibility of this repetition to open idealiter to infinity, an ideal form must ensure this unity of the indefinitely and the idealiter: this is the present, or rather the presence of the living presence. The ultimate form of ideality, in which in the last instance one can anticipate or recall every repetition, the ideality of ideality is the living present, the self-presence of transcendental life. Presence has always been and always will be, to infinity, the form in which – one can say this apodeictically – the infinite diversity of contents will occur. The opposition – inaugural for metaphysics – between form and matter, finds in the concrete ideality of the living present its ultimate and radical justification. We shall return to the enigma of the concept of life in the expressions ‘living present’ and ‘transcendental life’. (La voix et le phénomène, pp. 4–5)
2. But, wonders JD, what is the value of the term ‘life’ here? That is, how does transcendental (non-real, ideal) ‘life’ relate to ‘real’ life?
Ideal presence to an ideal or transcendental consciousness. Ideality is the salvation or the mastery of presence in repetition. In its purity, this presence is not the presence of anything that exists in the world, but is in correlation with acts of repetition that are themselves ideal. Does this mean that what opens repetition to infinity or opens to it when the movement of idealization is assured is a certain relation of an ‘existent’ to its death? And that ‘transcendental life’ is the scene of this relation? It is too soon to say. We must first pass through the problem of language. Nothing to be surprised at there: language is indeed the medium of this play of presence and absence. Is there not in language, is language itself not first of all the very thing in which life and ideality might seem to come together? Now we must consider the fact on the one hand that the element of signification – or the substance of expression – which seems best to preserve both ideality and living presence in all its forms is living speech, the spirituality of breath as phonè; and that, on the other hand phenomenology, a metaphysics of presence in the form of ideality, is also a philosophy of life.
A philosophy of life, not only because at its heart death is only granted the empirical and extrinsic signification of a mundane accident, but because the source of meaning in general is always determined as the act of a living, as the act of a living being, as Lebendigkeit. Now the unity of living, the hearth of the Lebendigkeit that diffracts its light in all the fundamental concepts of phenomenology (Leben, Erlebnis, lebendige Gegenwart, Geistigkeit, etc.) escapes the transcendental reduction and, as unity of mundane life and transcendental life, even clears its path. When empirical life or ever the region of the pur psychic are bracketed,
it is still a transcendental life or in the last instance the transcendentality of a living present that Husserl discovers. And that he thematizes without for all that posing the question of the unity of the concept of life. The ‘soul-less (seelenloses) consciousness’, the essential possibility of which is established in Ideas I (54), is nonetheless a consciousness that is transcendentally alive. If one were to conclude, with a gesture that is in indeed very Husserlian in its style, that the concepts of empirical (or in general mundane) life and transcendental life are radically heterogeneous and that the two nouns entertain a relation that is purely indicative or metaphorical, then it is the possibility of this relation that bears the whole weight of the question. The common root making possible all these metaphors still appears to us to be the concept of life. In the last instance, between the pure psychic – a region of the world opposed to transcendental consciousness and discovered by the reduction of the totality of the natural and transcendent world – and pure transcendental life, there is, says Husserl, a relation of parallelism. [ . . . ]
But the strange unity of these two parallels, what relates them the one to the other, cannot be divided by them and, dividing itself, finally welds the transcendental to its other, is life. One indeed notices very rapidly that the only nucleus of the concept of psychè is life as relation to self, be it or not in the form of consciousness. ‘Living’ is thus the name of what precedes the reduction and finally escapes all the divisions that it makes visible. But this is because it is its own division and its own opposition to its other. By determining ‘living’ thus, we have therefore just named the resource of insecurity of the discourse, the point where, precisely, it can no longer assure in a nuance its possibility and its rigour. This concept of life is then grasped anew in an instance that is no longer that of pretranscendental naivety, in the language of everyday life or of biological science. But if this ultra-transcendental concept of life allows one to think life (in the common sense or the sense of biology) and if it has never been inscribed in language, perhaps calls for an other name. (La voix et le phénomène, pp. 8–10, 14)
3. So: the unity of (transcendental) life and (psycho-empirical) life is still provided by the concept of . . . life, or perhaps now ‘life’ or Life. But that concept of life is also as much its own division as its own unity. This ‘ultra-transcendental’11 sense of ‘life’ ‘appelle peut-être un autre nom’ . . . and my thought today would be: maybe ‘auto-immunity’ just is that (or one such) autre nom, already called for here from this 1967 text.)
4. If this concept of ‘life’ or ‘living’ is its own partage or division, this is because (jumping forward almost 50 pages):
(a) of the way it relates to ‘death’ (mortality):
What is meant by the value of originary presence to intuition as the source of meaning and evidence, as a priori of a prioris? It means first of all the certainty, itself ideal and absolute, that the universal form of all experience ( Erlebnis) and therefore of all life, has always been and will always be the present. There is never and there never will be anything but the present. Being is presence or modification of presence. The relation to the presence of the present as ultimate form of being and ideality is the movement whereby I transgress empirical existence, factuality, contingency, mundanity, etc. And first of all my own. To think presence as the universal form of transcendental life is to open myself to the knowledge that in my absence, beyond my empirical existence, before my birth and after my death, the present is. I can empty out all empirical content, imagine an absolute upheaval of the content of any possible experience, a radical transformation of the world: the universal form of presence – I have a strange and unique certainty of this since it concerns no determinate being – will not be affected by it. It is therefore the relation to my death (to my disappearance in general) that is hidden in this determination of being as presence, ideality, absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of the sign is this relation of death. The determination and effacement of the sign in metaphysics is the dissimulation of this relation to death that nevertheless produced signification.
If the possibility of my disappearance in general must in a certain way be lived for a relation to presence in general to be able to be instituted, one can no longer say that the experience of the possibility of my absolute disappearance (of my death) comes to affect me, supervenes on an ‘I am’ and modifies a subject. As ‘I am’ is lived only as an ‘I am present’, it presupposes in itself the relation to presence in general, to being as presence. The appearing of the I to itself is thus originarily a relation to its own possible disappearance. ‘I am’ thus originarily means ‘I am mortal’. ‘I am immortal’ is an impossible proposition. We can then go further: as language, ‘I am that I am’ is the avowal of a mortal. The movement that leads from the I am to the determination of my being as res cogitans (and therefore as immortality), is the movement whereby the origin of presence and ideality conceals itself in the presence and ideality it makes possible. (La voix et le phénomène, pp. 60–1)
(b) because of the temporality of the trace:
Without reducing the abyss that might indeed separate retention from re-presentation, without hiding from the fact that the problem of their relations is none other than that of the history of ‘life’ and the becoming-conscious of life, one must be able to say a priori that their common root, the possibility of re-petition in its most general form, the trace in the most universal sense, is a possibility that must not only inhabit the pure actuality of the now, but constitute it through the very movement of différance that it introduces into it. Such a trace is, if one can use this language without immediately contradicting it and crossing it through, more ‘originary’ than phenomenological originarity itself. (La voix et le phénomène, p. 75)
And
(c) because ‘I am’ makes sense only as ‘I am dead’:
My death is structurally necessary to the pronouncement of the I. That I be ‘living’ too and certain of that fact comes on top of the fact of meaning-to-say. And this structure is active, it retains its original efficacy even when I say ‘I am living’ at the very moment when, if this is possible, I have the full and actual intuition of it. The Bedeutung ‘I am’ or ‘I am living’, or else ‘my living present is’, is what it is, has the ideal identity proper to every Bedeutung, only if it is not affected by falsehood, i.e. if I can be dead at the moment when it functions. No doubt it will be different from the Bedeutung ‘I am dead’, but not necessarily from the fact that ‘I am dead’. The utterance ‘I am living’ is accompanied by my being-dead and its possibility requires the possibility that I be dead; and conversely. This is not an extraordinary tale by Poe, but the ordinary story of language. (La voix et le phénomène, p. 108)12
(d) which means, among other things, that phenomenology (and thereby presumably metaphysics more generally), falls foul of an essentially paradoxical structure:
In its ideal value, the whole system of ‘essential distinctions’ is therefore a purely teleological structure. By the same token, the possibility of distinguishing between sign and non-sign, linguistic sign and non-linguistic sign, expression and indication, ideality and non-ideality, subject and object, grammaticality and non-grammaticality, pure grammaticality and empirical grammaticality, pure general grammaticality and pure logical grammaticality, intention and intuition, etc. – this pure possibility is deferred to infinity. Given this, these ‘essential distinctions’ are caught in the following aporia: de facto, realiter, they are never respected, as Husserl recognizes. De jure and idealiter, they efface themselves because they live, as distinctions, only on the difference between right and fact, ideality and reality. Their possibility is their impossibility.
But how is this difference given to be thought? What does ‘to infinity’ mean here? What does presence as differance to infinity mean? What does the life of the living present mean as differance to infinity?
The fact that Husserl always thought of infinity as an Idea in the Kantian sense, as the indefiniteness of an ad infinitum, makes one think that he never derived difference from the plenitude of a parousia, the full presence of a positive infinite; that he never believed in the accomplishment of an ‘absolute knowledge’ as self-presence of an infinite concept in the Logos. And what he shows us as to the movement of temporalisation leaves no doubt about this: although he did not thematise ‘articulation’, the ‘diacritical’ work of difference in the constitution of meaning and sign, he deeply recognized its necessity. And yet the whole discourse of phenomenology is caught, as we have amply seen, in the schema of a metaphysics of presence that tirelessly exhausts itself deriving difference. Within this schema, Hegelianism appears to be more radical: most notably at the point at which it shows that the positive infinite must be thought (which is possible only if it thinks itself) for the indefinity of differance to appear as such. Hegel’s critique of Kant would no doubt work against Husserl too. But this appearing of the Ideal as infinite differance can only happen in a relation to death in general. Only a relation to my-death can bring out the infinite differance of presence. By the same token, compared to the ideality of the positive infinity, this relation to my-death becomes an accident of finite empiricity. The appearing of infinite differance is itself finite. At which point differance, which is nothing outside this relation, becomes the finitude of life as essential relation to self as to one’s death. Infinite differance is finite. One can no longer think it in the opposition of finity and infinity, of absence and presence, of negation and affirmation. (La voix et le phénomène, p. 114)
(‘La différance infinie est finie’:13 why? Because infinite ‘différance’ would be presence again . . .
Compare in the Grammatologie:
The subordination of the trace to full presence resumed in the logos, the abasement of writing below a speech dreaming of its plenitude, these are the gestures required by an onto-theology determining the archeological and teleological meaning of being as presence, as parousia, as life without differance: another name for death, the historial metonymy in which the name of God keeps death at bay. (De la grammatologie, p. 104)
and:
This whole structure appears as soon as a society begins to live as a society, i.e. from the origin of life in general, when, at very heterogeneous levels of organization and complexity, it is possible to defer presence, i.e. expenditure or consumption, and to organize production, i.e. the reserve in general. This happens well before the appearance of writing in the narrow sense, but it is true, and one cannot neglect this fact, that the appearance of certain writing systems, three or four thousand years ago, is an extraordinary leap in the history of life. The more extraordinary for the fact that, at least during these few millennia, no noteworthy change in the organism went along with this prodigious increase in the power of differance. It is precisely what is proper to the power of differance to modify life less and less as it expands. If it became infinite – which its essence excludes a priori – life itself would be returned to an impassive, intangible and eternal presence: infinite differance, God or death. (De la grammatologie, pp. 190–1))
I want to say that this general argument is already the whole structure of (auto-)immunity, ‘life’ mutating into an economie de la mort, something that calls for that autre nom . . . .
Death is the movement of differance insofar as it is necessarily finite. Which means that differance makes possible the opposition of presence and absence. Without the possibility of differance, the desire for presence as such would have no room to breathe. This means by the same token that this desire bears within itself its destiny as non-fulfillment. Differance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible. (De la grammatologie, p. 206)
V
We could illustrate at much greater length still the insistence of these motifs in all the ‘early’ texts. Life is an ‘economy of death’ because otherwise life just is (immediately or ipso facto) death. Life as either complete self-enclosure or as complete exposure is just death. So life begins by dying a little so as not to just die immediately. Some kind or some measure of death protects life from life itself, i.e. from death. If we had time, I’d quote at even greater length from the Grammatologie (and especially pp. 326, 344, 347–8, 388 and 411); or still more from ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’ (and more especially the great passage on pp. 165–7 which picks up from the filiation language and does a reading of democracy and its relations to différance and writing that is already close to ‘Voyous’); from ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, or from ‘Spéculer – sur “Freud”’ on an originary death constituting life as life in its essential finitude. Metaphysical life/death mutates into deconstructive life-death.
VI
I’d like to think that this at least sketches the ‘genealogy’ of the later ‘auto-immunity’. (Of course, if the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence necessarily passes through the deconstruction of the unity and coherence of the concept of ‘life’, and accessorily of all the attendant metaphorics of logos and paternity, and eventually fraternity too (Politiques de l’amitié), then I can’t really say ‘genealogy’ here . . . ) So I probably want to say that ‘auto-immunity’ would be the latest in the sequence of ‘non-synonymic substitutions’ that began with terms like différance, dissemination, trace, pharmakon, and so on.
With maybe this difference . . . The ‘early’ work did its deconstructive thing by apparently playing previously devalued terms (most obviously ‘writing’) against what metaphysics seemed most clearly to want to value (most obviously ‘presence’, but in this context also essentially ‘life’). If there were a ‘turn’ in JD’s work, might it not be towards a kind of ‘retrieval’ (not a resurrection, at any rate) of some of the terms that metaphysics had seemed to appropriate? So just as the ‘Envois’ to La carte postale say that JD really was only interested in voice and presence, just as ‘experience’ returns as a valorised term after the quite severe mise-en-garde in the Grammatologie, so the later work might make it clear that the deconstruction of life is nonetheless done in the name of life, and more especially in the name of a life worthy of its name. A life worthy of the name would have to be not only involved in the economy of death that the ‘early’ texts elaborate, but would, more especially, have to be ‘open’ (i.e. alive) to the event of the other in the radical sense of event that the later work spends a lot of time describing. So the deconstruction of life leads nonetheless to something like an affirmation of life, or an affirmation in the name of life.
And indeed this seems pretty clear in the second essay in Voyous:
It is reason that puts reason into crisis, in autonomous and quasi-auto-immunitary fashion. One could show that the ultimate ‘reason’, in the sense of cause or foundation, 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 occurs only by altering and dissimulating itself. I do not have the time precisely, to go down this route but I wanted to mark its necessity, where the question of becoming and therefore of the time of reason appears indissociable from the immense, old and entirely new question of life (bios ou zoe), at the heart of question of Being, of presence and beings, therefore of the ‘being and time’ question, of Sein und Zeit – a question with the accent this time placed on the side of life rather than the side of death, if, as I am tempted to think, that still makes any difference. (Voyous, pp. 178–9)
However thoroughly the terms life and death have been mixed up together, then, something still seems to emerge from that mix on the side of life, as it were, something that’s different from what emerges on the side of death. That something seems to be along the lines of: that something always might happen is a good; that nothing ever could happen is bad. That the possibility of the event (an event worthy of the name) be held open, whatever that event may be, is unconditionally ‘good’. And this is apparently why, in spite of some appearances in Derrida’s later work, ‘auto-immunity’ as the very structure of deconstructed life, or at least as a kind of radical possibility ‘before’ any ‘actual’ auto-immune phenomenon, cannot be all bad:
If an event worthy of the name is to happen, it must, beyond all mastery, affect a passivity. It must touch an exposed vulnerability, without absolute immunity, without indemnity, in its finitude and in non-horizontal fashion, where it is not yet or no longer possible to face up to, to put up a front, to the unforeseeability of the other. In this respect, auto-immunity is not an absolute evil. It allows exposure to the other, to what is coming and who is coming – and must therefore remain incalculable. Without auto-immunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen. One would no longer wait, expect, each other, or any event. (Voyous, p. 210)
To say that ‘l’auto-immunité n’est pas un mal absolu’ seems, however ‘negative’ some of its later characterisations in terms of cruelty or suicide, to be a complex gesture to say the least. It may be that, as Foi et savoir seems to suggest, auto-immunity has something to do with what Kant calls ‘radical evil’: but on a Derridean construal, radical evil may well be radical, but is not so much evil as the positive condition, the chance of the good in an ethical sense. Whence, I think, the insistence on ‘pervertibility’ rather than ‘perversion’ at certain points. Always-necessarily-pervertible (following the general logic from, say Limited Inc, on the necessary possibility of mis-), is the positive condition of the chance of the ethical.
VII
Final (or always only penultimate) thought. It seems to me to be no accident that these formulations are always and everywhere struggling with teleological structures – exemplarily at the end of La voix et le phénomène, and elsewhere in the repeated discussions of the ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ (most recently the mise au point in Voyous), which begins with a curious gesture:
The fact remains that, for want of something better [faute de mieux], if one can say ‘for want of something better’ of a regulative Idea, the regulative Idea remains perhaps an ultimate reserve. This last resort might well run the risk of becoming an alibi, but it retains a dignity. I would not swear that I never give in to it. (Voyous, p. 122)
‘Une ultime réserve’. What would it mean for the ‘ultimate’ itself to be of the order of a reserve? And for that ‘ultime réserve’ to be of the order of dignity? I’m guessing that this would be the place to look into JD’s very insistent and (for me at least) enigmatic use of the idiom ‘digne de ce nom’.14 I want to say that ‘auto-immunity’ is an attempt to capture a structure whereby a teleological tendency (drive? urge? movement?), here registered in the refusal of a simple refusal of the Idea-in-the-Kantian-sense, is registered in its very inhibition or holding short of itself. This is, I think, the sense of the ‘infinite différance is finite’ remark in La voix et le phénomène, and the glosses in the Grammatologie to the effect that différance cannot by definition be or become infinite. ‘Life’, on this suggestion, would be described as an inhibited tendency towards an autos or ipse that would, however, if achieved, be the end of life. The ‘auto-’ in auto-affection, auto-nomie, auto-biography would then be affected by a +R effect, part of the hospitality of the host to the guest or the ghost: autro-affection, autro-nomy, autro-biography. With this effect, auto-affection is already auto-immunity. And even autro-immunity.
Now auto-affection is a universal structure of experience. Any living being has the power of auto-affection. And only a being capable of symbolizing, i.e. of auto-affecting itself, can let itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the condition of an experience in general. This possibility – another name for ‘life’ – is a general structure articulated by the history of life and giving rise to complex and hierarchized operations. Auto-affection, the as-for-oneself or the for-oneself, subjectivity gains in power and mastery of the other as its power of repetition becomes idealized. Idealization is here the movement by which sensory exteriority, the one that affects me or serves me as a signifier, subjects itself to my power of repetition, to what from then on appears to me as my spontaneity and escapes me less and less [ . . . ]. Auto-affection constitutes the same (auto) by dividing it. (De la grammatologie, pp. 236–7)
And that’s life, death.
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Qual Quelle: les sources de Valéry’, in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), pp. 325–63 (p. 331).
2. Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), p. 94.
3. This text was distributed, along with those of the other participants, in advance of a small three-day seminar organised by Peggy Kamuf and funded by the Borchard Foundation, entitled (on Michael Naas’s suggestion) ‘Jacques Derrida and the Question of Life’, Château de la Bretesche, France, in July 2005. The point of the papers presented was as much to lay out some materials for discussion as to make an argument. The other participants were Thomas Dutoit, Marian Hobson, Peggy Kamuf, Elissa Marder, Ginette Michaud, Michael Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, Nicholas Royle, Elisabeth Weber and David Wills.
4. Cf. ‘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. for the argument that all texts call for an institution devoted to their interpretation.
5. Cf. ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Husserl, L’origine de la géométrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), p. 155: ‘The Idea is that on the basis of which a phenomenology establishes itself in order to accomplish the final intention of philosophy. The fact that a phenomenological determination of the Idea is henceforth radically impossible perhaps means that phenomenology cannot reflect itself as a phenomenology of phenomenology, and that its Logos can never appear as such, never give itself to a philosophy of seeing, but only, as with any Speech, to be heard through the visible. The Endstiftung of phenomenology, its ultimate critical jurisdiction, the thing that tells it its meaning, its value and its rights, is thus never directly within the scope of a phenomenology. At least it can give access to itself in a philosophy to the extent that it announces itself in a concrete phenomenological self-evidence, in a concrete consciousness that makes itself responsible for it in spite of its finitude, and insofar as it grounds a transcendental historicity and intersubjectivity. Husserlian phenomenology sets off from this anticipation lived as a radical responsibility. This does not seem to be literally the case with Kantian critique’; and ibid., p. 156, n. 2: ‘Husserl rigorously distinguishes the Idea from the eidos (cf. Ideas . . . I, Introduction). The Idea, then, is not the essence. Whence the difficulty – already pointed out – of an intuitive grasp and an evidence of what is neither a being nor an essence. But one must also say of the Idea that it has no essence, for it is only the opening of the horizon for the appearance and determination of any essence at all. As the invisible condition of evidence, it loses, while saving sight, the reference to seeing implied by the eidos, a notion from which is nonetheless comes, in its mysterious Platonic heart. The Idea can only be heard.’
6. On the notion of the œuvre, cf. in Voyous, on Being and Time: ‘One must think the event otherwise to welcome into thought and history such a “work” [« œuvre »]. Sein und Zeit seems to belong neither to science, to philosophy or poetics. Maybe this is the case for any œuvre worthy of the name: what puts thought to work [en œuvre] in it exceeds its own frontiers or what it itself proposes to show of them. The work gets outside itself, overflows the limits of the concept of itself that it claims to have properly of itself as it presents itself. But if the event of this work thus exceeds its own frontiers, i.e. those that its concept seems to give itself – for example those of an existential analytic of Dasein in the transcendental horizon of time – it does so in that place wherein it faces the test of aporias, and perhaps of its premature interruption, its very prematuration’ (Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2008), pp. 64–5). Or, in Papier machine: ‘ . . . I insist in this seminar [on pardon, perjury, and capital punishment], on a certain irreducibility of the work [l’œuvre]. As possible inheritance of what is initially an event, the work has a virtual future only by surviving its signature and cutting itself from its supposedly responsible signatory. It thus presupposes, however implausible this may appear, that a logic of the machine go along with a logic of the event’ (Papier machine: le ruban de machine à écrire et autres réponses (Paris: Galilée, 2001), p. 38).
7. Cf. especially in Marges, and more especially still ‘La mythologie blanche’: ‘The names we have just associated show this clearly and, what is more, the divisions to be defined or maintained pass inside discourses signed with a single name. A new determination of the unity of corpuses ought to precede or accompany the elaboration of these questions’ (p. 255); ‘Through an empiricist and impressionist precipitation towards supposed differences, in fact towards divisions that are in principle linear and chronological, one seems to go from discovery to discovery. A rupture under every step! For example, one might present as the physiognomy proper to the rhetoric of the 18th Century a set of features (such as the privilege of the noun) which are inherited, although not in a straight line, with all sorts of discrepancies and inequalities in the transformation, from Aristotle or the Middle Ages. We are here brought back to the program, which is entirely still to be worked out, of a new delimitation of corpuses and a new problematic of signatures’ (p. 275: clearly with Foucault in mind); ‘This implies that one critique both the model of the transcendental history of philosophy and that of systematic structures perfectly closed on their technical and synchronic arrangements (heretofore only recognized in corpuses identified by the proper name of a signature)’ (p. 304); ‘If one tried for example to fix the diagram of the metaphorics proper (or supposedly proper) to Descartes, even supposing, concesso non dato, that one can rigorously delimit the metaphorical corpus coming under this signature alone . . . ’ (p. 318). See too the remarks on Rousseau in the Grammatologie, e.g. p. 231.
8. La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 89–90. And, a little later in the same text: ‘This parricide, which opens the play of difference and writing, is a fearful decision. Even for an anonymous Stranger. It requires superhuman strength. And one must risk madness or risk passing as mad in the wise and sensible society of grateful sons. And so the Stranger is still afraid of not having the strength, of playing the fool, of course, but also of holding a discourse that would be genuinely without head nor tail; or else, if you like, to start out down a road he could only walk down on his head. This parricide, in any case will be as decisive, cutting and fearsome as capital punishment. With no hope of going back. In it, one is playing – if one wishes to give it this name – for one’s head at the same time as the head of state [le chef]’ (La dissémination, pp. 190–1). There would be a lot more to say about this figure of the Etranger, of course, also in the work on hospitality.
9. La dissémination, p. 56.
10. La dissémination, pp. 89–91.
11. On the ‘ultra-transcendental’ see too De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 90: ‘For there is, we think, a this side and a beyond of transcendental critique. Seeing to it that the beyond does not return to the this side involves the recognition, in contortion, of the necessity of a crossing. This crossing must leave a wake in the text. Without this wake, abandoned to the simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text will always look just like the pre-critical text.’
12. Cf. too in ‘Signature, événement, contexte’: ‘All writing must therefore, in order to be what it is, be able to function in the radical absence of any empirically determined addressee in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture of presence, the “death” or possibility of the “death” of the addressee inscribed in the structure of the mark (this is the point, I note in passing, at which the value or the “effect” of transcendentality is necessarily bound to the possibility of writing and death thus analysed)’ (Marges de la philosophie, p. 375). Or, from the Grammatologie: ‘Now spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject. Through the movement of its drift, the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire for presence. This becoming – or this drift – does not supervene on the subject either choosing it or letting itself be passively drawn into it. As relation of the subject to its death, this becoming is the very constitution of subjectivity. At all levels of organization of life, i.e. of the economy of death. Every grapheme is essentially testamentary. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also that of the thing or the referent’ (De la grammatologie, pp. 100–1, my emphasis).
13. On the understanding of this sentence, see also ‘Handshake’, below.
14. I first drew JD’s attention to his use of this locution at the Queen Mary conference, London, in March 2000 (see my ‘ . . . you meant’, in Other Analyses, which is essentially a commentary on 38 of Foi et savoir). He subsequently sent me some notes he had made on the question, and the issue was the subject of conversations between us at the SUNY Stony Brook ‘Politics and Filiation’ conference in November 2002, and at another Queen Mary event (on the occasion of JD’s receiving an honorary doctorate) in July 2004.