Handshake
‘I used to be a mason, but I canna mind the grips.’ (Para Handy, Master Mariner)
What kind of greeting does Derrida give to his friend Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy?1 What kind of address, salutation, salute and welcome? There is of course the slightly lurid dream Derrida reports of kissing Nancy on the mouth (Le Toucher, p. 339). We could also easily imagine something involving hugging, cheek-kissing and possibly some back-slapping, a classic French accolade fraternelle, although the blurb for this conference invites us – I’m afraid I might not manage this – to think ‘beyond the intimacy of the fraternal relation between Derrida and Nancy’. There is also a strange passage in Le toucher that, perhaps inadvertently, Derrida repeats in extenso and almost unchanged (pp. 125 and 160) in which he reflects dialogically on the strangeness of his own gesture, of his own ‘drôle de salut’, the first time because it looks as though he is trying to render the whole vocabulary of touch useless or forbidden, the second, slightly modified and expanded version, because it looks as though he is trying to reappropriate that vocabulary for the tradition or for a filiation, or to cordon it off in that tradition as though it were a principle of contamination or even a virus.2 So, for now at least, rather than jumping straight into the complexities of that configuration, trying as usual to keep things simple, as simple as possible, let’s just start by imagining them doing that very French thing: exchanging (if ‘exchange’ is the appropriate verb here, which I doubt) – exchanging or giving each other [se donnant] a handshake.
A handshake is of course not a simple thing, either historically or phenomenologically. Somewhere between the ‘blow’ and the ‘caress’ that will occupy Derrida later in Le Toucher, supposedly a gesture of trust and confidence, whereby I extend my empty right hand (usually the right hand) toward the other’s empty right hand, originally it would appear as proof that it is not holding a weapon, but which I then still use, in the very clasp and shake (if there is a shake: in French one does not ‘shake’ hands (though my hand may of course shake with fear or anxiety as I extend it toward yours), one ‘squeezes’ or ‘clasps’ hands or even gets a fistful of hand [serrer la main à quelqu’un; une poignée de main]) – which I might still then use somewhat as a weapon, perhaps trying to intimidate my interlocutor by the firmness of my grasp, while simultaneously measuring it against the firmness of his (usually his: the paradigmatic handshake of course takes place between two men).3 Not a simple thing, then, a handshake, as rapidly becomes clear from any self-help manual for businessmen (of the type one sees being read in planes by those businessmen still unsuccessful enough to be travelling economy, back with the academics, who then surreptitiously try to read their self-help manuals). The site askmen.com, for example, distinguishes between the ‘wet’ handshake (referring to sweaty or clammy palms, which apparently are a widespread problem and do not go down at all well in the business world), the ‘softy’ handshake (else-where referred to as the ‘wet fish’ or ‘dead fish’, perhaps a little like the handshake of the Autodidacte in Sartre’s La Nausée, the hand like ‘a fat white worm’ (Livre de poche, p. 14)),4 the ‘tipsy finger’ handshake (prissily squeezing the fingers rather than getting a good virile palm grip), the ‘squeeze’ grip (sometimes known, I believe, as the ‘bonecrusher’) and the ‘homey’ grip, which seems to refer to a variety of more or less showy, exotic, acrobatic or merely complex handshakes, apparently best avoided in the boardroom.5 This last category, like the supplementary signifier in Levi-Strauss (or perhaps one of the entries in Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia),6 is really a placeholder for all the rest, all the other possibilities, the ‘etc.’s that the rest of the classification has not exhausted. (So other sources, for example, make a separate category for the ‘glove’ handshake, when one of the shakers uses both hands to enclose the one hand of the other, whereas we assume that the ‘glove’ is simply part of the ‘homey’ category in the askmen.com classification I have taken as my guide, and others still distinguish a kind of handshake called the ‘pumper’, enthusiastically moving the hand some distance up and down several times.) This remainder or ‘reste’, as usual, rapidly also opens abyssally onto the world of the secret, here secret handshakes and signs of recognition, secret signs exchanged, perhaps openly, but all the more secretly for that fact, conspiratorial possibilities opened behind a gesture which is, after all, one of closure7 as much as one of opening. By definition, I cannot tell you the meaning of secret handshakes in general: we can never tell for sure whether a secret has or has not been exchanged in a handshake that happens in plain view, and in shaking hands neither of us could ever know for certain whether a secret has in fact been transmitted or failed to be received. But insofar as some secrets can be and have been revealed or unveiled (in at least a formal sense, so that I can know something of the secret even if I still don’t know exactly what the secret is), we might look briefly at an example from a ‘well-known’ repertoire of secret handshakes, or grips, namely that of the freemasons. Here for example:
The hand is taken as in an ordinary hand shake, and the Mason presses the top of his thumb against the space between the first and second knuckle joints of the first two fingers of his fellow Mason; the fellow Mason also presses his thumb on the corresponding part of the first Mason’s hand.
The name of this grip is ‘Shibboleth’. When a candidate is imparted with this grip and its usage it is done in this manner:
First, the Worshipful Master says to the candidate:
‘I now present my right hand in token of the continuance of friendship and brotherly love, and will invest you with the pass-grip, pass-word, real grip and word of a Fellow Craft. As you are uninstructed, he who has hitherto answered for you, will do so at this time. Give me the grip of an Entered Apprentice.’
As previously explained from the Entered Apprentice degree, he then has this exchange with the Senior Deacon, who is standing next to the candidate, who is still kneeling at the altar, after having assumed the obligation of this degree):
WM: Brother Senior Deacon.
SD: Worshipful Master.
WM: Will you be off or from?
SD: From.
WM: From what and to what?
SD: From the grip of an Entered Apprentice to the pass-grip of a Fellow Craft.
(At this time, the candidate is shown the Pass Grip)
WM: Pass. What is that?
SD: The pass-grip of a Fellow Craft.
WM: Has it a name?
SD: It has.
WM: Will you give it to me?
SD: I did not so receive it; neither will I so impart it.
WM: How will you dispose of it?
SD: Letter or syllable it.
WM: Syllable it and begin.
SD: You begin.
WM: Begin you.
SD: Shib
WM: bo
SD: leth
WM: Shibboleth, my Brother, is the name of this grip. You should always remember it, for should you be present at the opening of a Fellow Crafts Lodge, this pass-word will be demanded of you by one of the Deacons, and should you be unable to give it, it would cause confusion in the Craft.8
‘Shibboleth is the name of this grip’, although it would seem that the pronouncing of the word ‘shibboleth’, which is of course a word made for pronouncing if ever there were one, is reserved for this occasion of initiation, and prepared by the syllabic version of it (other such names are first given backwards or in some other order) when the candidate is ‘imparted’ with his grip: and one might imagine that a tendency to speak the name of the grip when performing it might undermine its purpose as a discreet sign of mutual recognition between masons when among non-masons.
‘Shibboleth’, to be distinguished from other more or less complex and unpronounceable grips, such as the ‘Boaz’, ‘Jachin’, the ‘Tubalcain’ or the ‘Ma-Ha-Bone’.
In Le Toucher, among those apparently more exciting forms of contact, such as kissing or the mysterious touching of eyes that opens the book, Derrida mentions the handshake in the course of the Tangente devoted to Merleau-Ponty (the central section of the book, and the longest of the five tangentes). In a footnote, he points out that ‘Just as he [ . . . ] denies any anthropological presupposition, Merleau-Ponty everywhere accords an exemplary importance to the experience that consists in shaking [serrer] the other’s hand’, and goes on to point out that this is a culturally limited ‘ritual gesture’, presumably thus casting doubt on its general phenomenological pertinence. This note is provoked by a passage from Merleau-Ponty which presents itself as a reading of Husserl, and which, as is the rule in Derrida’s relatively few explicit discussions of MerleauPonty, Derrida will suggest is a misreading,9 even though (or perhaps especially because) one might be tempted to see in Merleau-Ponty’s apparent attention to a certain implication of alterity within the selfsame a gesture of thought that would be at least Derrida-friendly, worthy of some kind of acknowledgement or salut, perhaps itself in the form of a handshake.
Put briefly, the point of contention is this: Merleau-Ponty argues, with explicit and apparently precise reference to Husserl, including page-references and words in German, for a kind of continuity between the experience in which I touch one of my hands with the other (this moment of the touchant-touché having become a kind of MerleauPontyan signature, although it is first discussed, and at some length, by Husserl himself),10 and the experience in which I shake another’s hand. In Merleau-Ponty’s phrase here quoted by Derrida (from ‘Le philosophe et son ombre’), ‘Ce n’est pas autrement que le corps d’autrui s’anime devant moi, quand je serre la main d’un autre homme ou quand seulement je le regarde’ [It is not otherwise that the body of another person comes to life before me, when I shake another man’s hand or when I merely look at him]. So do I experience the other (in the handshake) the same way I experience myself (when I touch my right hand with my left), or do I experience myself (when I touch my right hand with my left) the way I experience the other (in the handshake)? These apparently symmetrical options and the ways in which they are not in fact entirely symmetrical will become the difficulty that is here concentrated in the handshake as a kind of shibboleth between phenomenology and deconstruction.
Derrida wants to make two moves in this situation, in a way that seems entirely characteristic: first, to re-establish a more accurate, even rather literal, reading of the Husserl passage to which Merleau-Ponty is rather ostentatiously referring; and then on the basis of that to propose what he thinks is a more radical or irreducible version of the self–other relation here being described by Merleau-Ponty. The first move is dictated in part by ‘a concern for philological integrity or discipline’, but also because of what Derrida calls ‘some of its paradoxical and typical consequences’ (p. 216). The thought seems to go something like this: Husserl could never have agreed that ‘ce n’est pas autrement’ in the experience of the touchant-touché and that of the other man’s hand, just because I have a relation to my own body (and hand), as indeed does the other to his own body and hand, that is in some sense immediate and ‘without introjection’, as Husserl puts it: but my access to the other always and irreducibly has to go via introjection and appresentation. Derrida has always been impressed by Husserl’s insistence on the fact that any access I might claim to have to the other is always of this appresentative nature, that there is a really radical interruption which just is the structure of the alterity of the other, an interruption without which there simply would be no other and therefore no possibility of a relation to him (her, it . . . : for the intrinsic non-humanity or ahumanity of the other in ‘its’ alterity is provided for by this same structure).11 What looked as though it might be a ‘Derrida-friendly’ gesture on Merleau-Ponty’s part, in that it seemed to suggest that there was a kind of similarity or continuity between on the one hand the kind of access I have to my own embodied self (through the experience of one hand touching the other), and the kind of access I have to the other (through the experience of shaking his hand), turns out, ‘paradoxically’ but ‘typically’ (both Derrida’s words here), to end up comforting and supporting the sameness of the same, allowing in something that might look like alterity, but doing so in such a way that that alterity is always in fact on the way to being subsumed under a sameness. This is an absolutely fundamental point in Derrida’s work in general, and engages a sort of ‘less is more’ logic that is one of the features that distinguish deconstructive from dialectical thought. Here is how he puts it in Le Toucher:
Typical because [these consequences] have often given rise to similar gestures, especially in France. Paradoxical because, just when they send Husserl in the direction of taking the other into account more audaciously (of an other originarily in me or for me, etc.), to the detriment of a Husserl who is more classical, more egocentered, etc., one runs the risk of arriving at exactly the opposite result. One runs the risk of reconstituting an intuitionism of immediate access to the other, as originary as my access to my most proper proper – and by the same token, doing without appresentation, indirection, Einfühlung, one also runs the risk of reappropriating the alterity of the other more certainly, more blindly and even more violently that ever. In this respect, Husserl’s prudence will always remain before us, as a model of vigilance. One must watch over the alterity of the other: it will always remain inaccessible to an originary presentive intuition [intuition donatrice], to an immediate and direct presentation of the here. (p. 191)
Derrida’s measured defence of Husserl on this point (and, as usual, it is only a measured defence, because as Derrida also says on this same page, this thought of the radically-only-appresentational status of the other is difficult for phenomenology itself ‘to assimilate to its intuitionist “principle of principles”’, and is indeed a kind of ongoing internal ruin of phenomenology) – this measured defence can be seen to communicate with more obviously Derridean themes in the immediately following paragraph, because this structure of the alterity of the other as thought in terms of a radical interruption with respect to all my powers of presentation or intuition just is the structure of what we are familiar with Derrida calling elsewhere ‘originary mourning’ or, as he does here, ‘preoriginary mourning’, i.e. the structure whereby the other is, structurally speaking, even when alive, already in a relation to death as part of his (her or its) alterity. And this seems even to have given a certain principle to Derridean ethics, around a refusal of the supposedly normal structure of mourning, the work of mourning as ‘normally’ and normatively conceived, and gives it a character that one might be more tempted to associate with melancholia:
If I have often spoken on this matter of pre-originary mourning, linking this motif to that of an ex-appropriation, this was to mark the fact that in this mourning before death, interiorisation, and even the introjection that is often granted to normal mourning, cannot and should not [or must not: ne peut pas et ne doit pas, my emphasis on this crucial point of what I call interrupted teleology] be accomplished. Mourning as impossible mourning. And, moreover, a-human, more than human, pre-human, other than the human ‘in’ the human of humanism [humainisme for the main, the hand]. Well, in spite of all the differences that separate the discourse I am holding at the moment from a Husserlian-style discourse, and doubtless too the great mountain-ranges of phenomenology, I find that it has more affinity with the discourse that Husserl obstinately maintains on the subject of appresentation (and that I am tempted to extend and radicalize, at the price of the necessary displacements, but this is not the place to insist on this), then with the discourse of a certain Merleau-Ponty: the one whose typical gesture at least we are following here – typical because it recurs often in his work and in that of others even if, whence my respectful prudence, it is far from exhausting or even dominating his thought through and through. (pp. 218–19; see too the explicit association with melancholia in Béliers)12
[Parenthetical ‘methodological’ remark: this is also a ‘typical gesture’ on Derrida’s part. Identifying and formalising a ‘typical gesture’ (even if this is not always what he calls it) in the text being read (what he famously calls Saussure’s ‘propos déclaré’, for example, as opposed to ‘un autre geste’; or what he says Rousseau voulait dire, even if Rousseau also says more or something other than that) – this gesture, ‘typical’ of Derrida, is also what regularly provokes protests from his readers (Paul De Man a propos of Rousseau; Barbara Johnson a propos of Lacan; Gillian Rose or Slavoj Žižek a propos of Hegel; I imagine any number of phenomenologists here a propos of Merleau-Ponty) on the grounds that Derrida is somehow in so doing limiting the author concerned to this typicality which is, after all, simply the most obvious or surface aspect of the text, and saving for himself the credit for more complex insights that, so the reproach goes, are really already ‘in’ the author concerned. There are several ways to respond to this widespread (indeed ‘typical’) objection, which is in principle the objection of hermeneutics to deconstruction. (1) Derrida in fact reserves no credit at all for himself, and regularly finds deconstructive insights in the texts he is reading (so, for example, the whole of deconstruction may be said to be ‘in’ Plato when Plato is read a certain way, against the grain of Platonism, for example, as in ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’). (2) But this apparent ‘credit’ given to the text of the other also involves the necessity of an activity of reading that draws from that text (through the operation of what Derrida famously in La voix et le phénomène says is no longer of the order of commentary nor that of interpretation (p. 98)) material that its signatory never signed (and perhaps never would sign), through the counter-signing operation in which ‘counter’ has a sense of contestation as much as of endorsement, and which must in principle break the horizons of hermeneutics in an operation I have been tempted on occasion to call ‘pure reading’. As always in Derrida, this ‘methodological’ remark is not to be separated from the ‘substance’ of his thought (and this inseparability already in fact flows from the apparently methodological remark itself): here, for instance, just the insistence on the irreducibly appresentative relation to the other as a condition of the other’s alterity, the very fact, explicitly thematised here, that I cannot directly intuit the other qua other, already entails the fact of what I have just called reading. I read the other in general just because I cannot intuit him (her, it . . . ) directly. Only the alterity of the other, maintained thus as radical and irreducible (if not ‘absolute’), provokes the operation worthy of the name ‘reading’ in the sense that exceeds the resources of hermeneutics – and simultaneously the ‘activity’ of reading in this sense always already bears witness to the irreducible alterity of the other. End of ‘methodological’ parenthesis.]
Derrida goes on immediately to say that this ‘typical’ gesture does not exhaust or even dominate Merleau-Ponty’s thought through and through, and that it is also, simultaneously, ‘exposed’ (the word is significant and precious) ‘to an antagonistic necessity, to the other law’ (p. 219). And this too would be characteristic of the configuration I’ve just been describing, as the ‘autre geste’ in Saussure or what Rousseau ‘dit sans vouloir dire’. This ‘autre loi’ is not just, or not entirely, idiomatic to Merleau-Ponty, but (and this would be partly its law-character) in part at least a general law of metaphysics itself, which ‘is’ ‘itself’ (though of course this law is the law whereby it never is quite itself) only to the extent that it is inhabited or haunted by this other law, to which it is not only exposed, but which is a law of exposure, of the intrinsic exposure of metaphysics to its other(s), what will later usually get called ‘auto-immunity’.
Insofar as it looks as though Merleau-Ponty is doing his best to think and formulate explicitly something of this exposure, one can see why it might be thought that Derrida is being a little parsimonious in the credit he is prepared to give him. After all, the Merleau-Pontyan thought might go, here is Merleau-Ponty describing the constitution of the same, the propre as corps propre, in terms of an originary implication of the other, of the outside, so that my being myself as corps propre involves an external surface exposed to touch, be that touch my own in the never quite self-coincident, never quite completely reflexive example of the touchant-touché, or that of the other whose hand I grasp, or whose hand grasps me, in the handshake.
And it is true that Derrida’s difference with Merleau-Ponty here is subtle, and is reminiscent of other gestures made with respect to authors one might suspect of being close to him. In terms of a semi-serious taxonomy I once proposed,13 this would be characteristic of Derrida’s dealings with those who look as though they might be his friends or his brothers, i.e. texts or authors who look as though they are more or less radically contesting ‘metaphysics’, but who, on Derrida’s reading, turn out still to rely at least to some extent on insufficiently thought through or deconstructed metaphysical schemas. For example, in Spectres de Marx, Derrida finds Heidegger thinking about justice as always involving a discord or an out-of-jointness, an Un-fuge, but then says that nonetheless (in spite of the ‘credit’ he gets for this perception), he tends still to resolve things towards a gathering, a fit or a harmony, and thus to lose the edge of the very Un-fuge he is credited also for having thought.14 This general schema, one might suspect, is one that could also be recognised more generally in Derrida’s relations with Hegel and the speculative dialectic: in a very general and schematic way, what Hegel calls ‘the negative’ looks just like something for which Derrida might have to give him what I’ve been calling ‘credit’, to the extent that it seems to disturb the identity of the same or the self-same – but of course that negative is from the start and to the end destined for the complex kind of recovery called Aufheben. In the particular case before us, here is how Derrida in Le toucher, sums up this issue around Merleau-Ponty:
What is it that makes reading Merleau-Ponty so uneasy (for me)? What is it that makes the interpretation of his mode of philosophical writing something that is both gripping and difficult, but also sometimes irritating or disappointing? Perhaps this, in a word: the movement we mentioned, this experience of coincidence with non-coincidence, of the coincidence of coincidence with non-coincidence15 can be seen again transferred into the (non-consequent) consequence or the (interrupted) continuity of the philosophical statements, and not always diachronically, following the evolution or the mutation of a thought, but sometimes synchronically. Should we give the philosopher credit for this [faut-il en créditer le philosophe], as I am most often tempted to do, or on the contrary regret that he was unable to proceed to a more powerful reformalization of his discourse to thematize and think the law under which he was thus placing himself, always preferring, at the end of the day, in fact, the ‘coincidence’ (of coincidence with non-coincidence) to the ‘non-coincidence’ (of coincidence with non-coincidence)? (pp. 238–9)
This is a subtle, almost enharmonic, distinction at a second level – and perhaps this second-level distinction could be used a principle of formalisation to describe Derrida’s relation to texts of this type (where ‘of this type’ refers to the ‘fraternal’ relation he might be thought to have with texts or authors who might seem to be his friends, texts, then, that appear to be anti- or at least not-so-simply metaphysical, not so straightforwardly founded on the value of presence; and indeed the problem Derrida has with the very concept of fraternity, and notably in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, would then be emblematic or strongly exemplary of this configuration, so that we might be tempted to say that what comes between Derrida and those we might think of as his brothers is precisely this concept of brotherhood, what separates the members of this apparent fraternity is the concept of fraternity itself, what sets Derrida apart is the insistence on the Husserlian sense of the radical apartness of the other as really and radically not available to me in intuition, but at best in analogical appresentation, that alterity of the other constantly belying the claim to fraternity, constantly making the handshake the mark of separation as much as and in fact more than that of joining, the place of the shibboleth as also the irreducibility of reading, which then becomes another name for just that irreducible alterity of the other that the motif of fraternity is always reducing. I have to read, and I have to read just where it is unreadable, precisely because of this structure, which constantly, in the fact of reading itself, brings back the priority of non-coincidence over the coincidence that, in reading, Derrida finds thematically prioritised by Merleau-Ponty. Reading in the strong sense practised by Derrida, even when it is not being thematised, is the proof, in actu, as it were, of the priority of non-coincidence over coincidence that is the undoing of the ‘principle of principles’ of phenomenology even as it is drawn from a phenomenological insight. And this would then go too for Derrida’s reflections on Didier Franck (whose claim as to an originary impropriety of the proper looks at first blush fairly Derridean) and Jean-Louis Chrétien (whose insistence on interruption and interval can also have a deconstructive feel).
What kind of handshake might Nancy give, or be giving, in return? Even a ‘normal’ handshake must involve two hands and two shakes, as it were (this being one of the reasons why in fact my shaking the other’s hand is an experience incommensurable to my touching my right hand with my left: just because I have one right and one left hand I cannot really shake hands with myself, in that a handshake involves usually two right hands (or occasionally, as I believe is the case in the boy scout movement, two left hands)). So nothing prevents (and in fact all the self-help business world discussions more or less secretly presuppose) some asymmetry at work in the handshake. The ‘wet fish’ handshake is, one imagines, identified as such by and from a handshake of a different type. The ‘pumper’ is usually pumping a non-pumper (two pumpers pumping each other is really not a pretty sight). The ‘glove’ is by definition not quite reciprocal: there are enclosing hands and a hand enclosed by them. So however we characterise the handshake Derrida gives Nancy, in Le Toucher or in Voyous, we might expect to find a different handshake coming back from Nancy to Derrida. How does it look when we consider the shaker shaken?
One element of a response to this quite difficult question would, I think, come from looking at the fate of what I’m tempted to call a ‘line’ from Derrida, in Nancy’s hands. This ‘line’, from La voix et le phénomène, and which we might also call a slogan, a motto, a maxim, a sentence, even perhaps a witticism, is one that I was once moved to call, about twenty years ago, ‘one of the most enigmatic statements in the whole of Derrida’,16 and reads simply: ‘La différance infinie est finie’ [‘Infinite différance is finite’].17 This difficult claim, in which we might suspect that a lot of Derrida is packed, or tightly curled up around itself like those extra spatial dimensions that string-theory postulates, shows up at least three times in Nancy,18 once before Derrida’s death (and indeed before Le Toucher), and twice since. The most recent of these occurrences is in the short piece Nancy wrote in Libération after the very recent death of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
One day I happened to use the word ‘syncope’, and you liked it too. This is probably where we best touched each other and that we were given the chance of a singular sharing of life and thought. Between us, yes, a suspense, a holding-back of presence, numerous and strong signs exchanged from one bank to the other, and the crossing always necessarily deferred. But différance, memory between us of this word of Jacques’s and of Jacques himself, the différance from one to the other differs little, in the end, from the différance from oneself.
Today infinite différance is finite [or: finished, over]; the caesura becomes eternal, the syncope remains open. This is not without beauty, in spite of everything, you know that: that’s even your most intimate knowledge.19
‘Aujourd’hui la différance infinie est finie’. There’s obviously a strange effect in adding the specific ‘aujourd’hui’ to what elsewhere looks rather like a general claim, perhaps even a definition, although in a sense all it does is remind the reader of the finitude in the definition itself: if we take seriously the thought that ‘infinite’ difference is finite, then that finitude or perhaps becoming-finite of the infinite différance might be thought to entail something of the order of a now or an aujourd’hui in general, if I can put it that way, that would here be being re-marked by Nancy. Différance, we might want to say, brings with it an each-time-nowness that would bear some measured cross-reading with the each-time-mineness, the Jemeinigkeit, that Heidegger famously attributes to Dasein in Being and Time, and that Nancy himself comments on at some length at the beginning of L’Expérience de la liberté.20
Moving back in time, the next reference is in the address Nancy gave to the event organised by the Collège international de philosophie after Derrida’s death, in October 2004.21 Here, under the title ‘Trois phrases de Jacques Derrida’, Nancy again quotes the sentence (‘La différance infinie est finie’), and tells an anecdote about once talking with Derrida about this line, with Derrida reportedly replying: ‘You know, I’m not certain I really understand it myself’ [‘Tu sais, je ne suis pas certain de très bien comprendre moi-même’] (p. 69). Whatever we might make of that anecdote (so that we always might wonder, alterity-of-the-other oblige, whether Derrida ‘really meant’ it when he said it, assuming he said it, in the proto-fictional structure that Derrida finds at work in any act of witnessing or testimony)22, which we should also put in the perspective of a relative paucity of viva voce philosophical discussion between Derrida and Nancy,23 there is something striking about it, a kind of humanising gesture with respect to a difficult thought, perhaps, but also something of a self-protective gesture on Nancy’s part, perhaps, a kind of avowal of non-comprehension that then needs to support itself or cover itself with the idea that even Derrida himself did not understand it. Nancy says firmly of this sentence (for this, rather than the slogan itself, is one of the ‘trois phrases’ that Nancy is reporting, as we know from the fact that he opens his remarks with the observation that the three sentences in question are all spoken rather than written) that, in saying it, Derrida ‘Was smiling, but was not joking’ [Il souriait, mais ne plaisantait pas] (How could one be sure?). Nancy then reports of his reaction to Derrida’s saying this:
That day I understood that for him too thought got away: one’s own thought overran, necessarily, by some extremity – and I felt that thought always has to do with this escape, this inaccessibility in the very event of access. Jacques never thought he had finished a thought. And just that is ‘differance’: not a simple distinction between Being and beings, but the thought of Being differed/deferred in beings. (p. 69)
This sense of a perhaps slightly recuperative need to protect or cover something can be given further support by the fact that, although to my knowledge neither Derrida nor Nancy ever publicly refers to this fact (though this could perhaps have been the reason for their conversation that day, that Nancy has just been reporting), this same motto or slogan shows up earlier still in Nancy, this time in the preface to Une pensée finie (1991), where, however, it is misquoted as ‘La différence finie est infinie’ (p. 20 n.).24 Here Nancy is again glossing, in a footnote, Heidegger’s ontico-ontological difference, and suggesting (not uncontroversially, I think, given what Derrida says himself, for example in the Grammatologie)25 that Derrida’s différance is an attempt to capture the Heideggerian sense in which that difference involves a self-differing and deferring of Being, and goes on:
This is what Jacques Derrida wanted to bring to light with the neither-word neither-concept ‘différance’. And as he wrote in La voix et le phénomène (Paris: PUF, 1967, p. XXX [sic: one imagines that Nancy had meant to correct this in proof and forgot to do so or was perhaps prevented (by illness?) from doing so]: ‘Finite différence [with an e, so this is also a misquotation] is infinite.’ – ‘This sentence, I fear, is meaningless’, he said one day [perhaps this refers to the same incident differently reported in the ‘Trois phrases’ piece?]. Perhaps, but meaning is in it. (p. 20 n.)
This misquotation is, in a sense, less being corrected than being repeated and justified in the ‘Trois phrases’ piece (even though there Nancy does not mention his own earlier misquotation and is this time very careful to quote the sentence correctly, even insisting with an almost parodic scholarly care and accuracy, rather like Merleau-Ponty quoting Husserl: ‘I reread it yesterday, it is on page 114’ (p. 69)). This very precise reference is then pursued as follows: ‘ . . . it is on page 114, and I saw that the sentence, printed in italics, follows these words: “the finitude of life as essential relation to self as to one’s death”.’ And Nancy proceeds, after closing the quotation marks, by way of commentary: ‘And that very thing is the infinite or else makes the infinite’ [Et cela même est l’infini ou bien fait l’infini]. This seems a little like a repetition or justification of the earlier misquotation, still making Derrida’s slogan turn toward the infinite, whereas Derrida seems to have it always turn or fold back to the finite.26 And this motif of the infinite, or this turn to the infinite on Nancy’s part, returns in the third of these ‘three sentences’:27 this one is about Derrida in hospital, after an operation, just a day or so before his death, and saying to Nancy, with reference to the latter’s heart transplant: ‘Now I have a scar as big as yours’. Nancy comments:
Beyond the humour, [this sentence] touched me: as though there were a friendly rivalry in the suffering, incision and inscription of the body. As though from the one scar to the other there could be competition – for what? For the incision and inscription of what? Of our finitude the tracing of which makes our infinitude appear in ‘the sans of the pure cut’ as he wrote earlier.
And Nancy ends this part of his short text with a little one-sentence paragraph: ‘But I don’t want to make him say more than he said’ [Mais je ne veux pas lui faire dire plus qu’il n’a dit].
I don’t want to make Nancy say more than he said either, of course (although there would be a good deal more still to say about what that would mean, and how reading may also always involve having the text say more than it says), but I want to suggest in conclusion that this somewhat anecdotal thread can help us approach something of the difference between Derrida and Nancy more generally. In Le Toucher itself, Derrida is concerned to bring out and even celebrate an aspect of Nancy’s thinking that tends to distinguish him from the configurations he sketches out in the five ‘Tangents’ that form the middle portion of the book, and that are concerned essentially to pursue the fate of a certain reading of Husserl, and more specifically the Husserl of Ideen II, in twentieth-century French thought. What Derrida likes in Nancy’s account of touch and space and corporality is that, unlike the Merleau-Pontyan drift we have been following, it seems to stress the ‘non-coincidence’ part of the second-level equation of coincidence and non-coincidence, and in so doing more radically exposes the thought of touch to the type of alterity we have been talking about, especially in the directions of exteriority, the inhuman, the inorganic, the graft and (thereby and essentially) the technical (see among other examples pp. 205–6, but more especially the ‘precision’ on pp. 322–3).
But let’s imagine here that there’s an even more refined version of the ‘second-level’ structure I laid out earlier, and that we’re here in a ‘third-level’ logic, which can only be paradoxical. On the ‘second level’, dealing with Merleau-Ponty exemplarily here for us, Derrida takes propositions that might look somewhat ‘deconstructive’ (or at least not standardly metaphysical), and shows how, even if they stress something of the order of non-coincidence at the first level, they still, on a second level of the relation between coincidence and non-coincidence, tend to prefer the coincidence of coincidence and non-coincidence to their non-coincidence (or, in the Heidegger example, prefer the jointedness of the jointed and the out-of-joint to their out-of-jointness: or, perhaps more generally, prefer the gathering of gathering and dispersion to their dispersion, etc.).28 Nancy helps Derrida make these second-level points, for example through his insistence on the partes extra partes, a kind of non-gatherable exteriority that would open up to the ‘technical’ and also be the condition of ‘freedom’.
And yet, on what I am here pretending to isolate as a ‘third level’, the thought would be that Nancy still, in spite of everything, for example in the motif of fraternity in the freedom book, or more generally in his attachment to Christian motifs, or here, more symptomatically, in his repeated and insistent difficulty with the slogan about infinite différance being finite, in the end, ‘ultimately’ (the ultimate here being very precisely part of the problem)29 – Nancy ‘prefers’ the infinite to the finite even as he thinks the finite more finitely, more ‘exactly’, than the phenomenologists. Nancy’s initial misquotation of Derrida’s slogan as to the finitude of infinite différance, and then his complex countersigning of that misquotation in the ‘Trois phrases’ essay, in which in spite of the letter of Derrida’s text what emerges is a somewhat un-Derridean emphasis on the infinite, shows that even as Nancy holds thought open beyond the already complex phenomenological closure, at what I am artificially here calling the ‘third level’, he closes it again, paradoxically enough, by ‘preferring’ the infinite to the finite, preferring to read the always radically finite trace as still a trace of an infinite, rather than, as in Derrida himself, the always finite opening of the finite itself as (infinitely) finite, or more properly, as the same passage from La voix et le phénomène goes on to make clear, as neither straightforwardly finite nor infinite.30
This extremely subtle (‘third-level’) difference (which it would be nice to be able to articulate with the difference Derrida himself proposes between the ‘Il n’y a pas “le” . . .’ of Nancy and his own ‘S’il y en a . . .’ (pp. 323–4)) is the very surface of the difference in the handshake, the trace of non-reciprocity that the thought of exposure entails, the shibboleth that always might go unrecognised in the grip but that reading can perhaps bring out as at least a possibility, the residual possibility of a violence that the concept of fraternity violently denies. If I’m not mistaken, this is also what Derrida calls ‘salut’, in the non-soteriological sense he briefly develops at the very end of the first essay in Voyous, the ‘salut sans assurance à l’autre qui vient ou qui part’ (Voyous, p. 160), salute without safety or salvation, always shibboleth perhaps, some more or less secret grip I’ll never be certain of having really grasped, and which makes perhaps its first appearance here, at the very end of Le Toucher, before the longer development in Voyous, last wave or handshake still with the dignity of the name, ‘un imprésentable salut qui d’avance renonce, comme il se doit pour être un salut digne de ce nom, au Salut.’31
Notes
1. This paper was presented to the March 2007 conference ‘The Future Matters: Apropos of Derrida’s Touching on the Technology of the Senses to Come in a Post-global Horizon’ at the University of Leeds. Previously published in Derrida Today, vol. 1, no. (2008), pp. 167–89.
2 Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000). (1) Page 125: ‘( – And you say to yourself, internally: this is a funny admiring and grateful salute you’re addressing here to Jean-Luc Nancy, a curious way of claiming to touch him while doing everything as though you wanted to take his vocabulary of touching out of service from now on. Or put it on the banned list, even. Or as though you were stubbornly recalling that this vocabulary should always already have been out of service, even if we like it, touching, precisely when it is impossible-forbidden, and that we even like to call that loving – abstain. Like the messiah. Funny present, indeed, what an offering! Just as if, right when you are calling on others to get ecstatic about this great work and this immense philosophical treatise on touching, you were murmuring in his ear: “Now, Jean-Luc, that’s enough, don’t touch that word again, it’s forbidden, you hear me, abstain from this ‘touching’, don’t ever use this incredible vocabulary again, this concept with nothing definite corresponding to it, these figures without figure and thus without credit. Moreover did you not say yourself, I’ll remind you again, ‘there is not “the touching”’”? So don’t keep on pretending to believe, stop making believe you want us to believe there is something that might be called touching, a “thing-itself” about which we could pretend to agree, just where, touching on the untouchable, it remains untouchable. Knowing you as I do, this objection won’t stop you – I tell myself. No, you carry on, and me too, and gratefully I follow you.’). (2) Page 160: ‘(And you say to yourself, internally: this is a funny admiring and grateful salute you’re addressing here to Jean-Luc Nancy, a curious way of claiming to touch him while doing everything as though you wanted to put his vocabulary of touching back into the service of a tradition, or worse, of a filiation, even. Or recall that this vocabulary ought always already have been referred to usages or even an ageless usury, even if we like that, touching, anew, precisely, when it is impossible-forbidden and even that we like to call that loving – abstain. Funny present, indeed, what an offering! Just as if, right when you are calling on others to get ecstatic about this great work and this immense philosophical treatise on touching, you were murmuring in his ear: “Now, Jean-Luc, that’s enough, give that word up, it’s forbidden, you hear me, leave it to the ancestors, no longer compromise yourself with it, don’t let yourself get contaminated by this megalovirus, don’t ever use this incredible vocabulary again, this concept with nothing definite corresponding to it, these figures without figure and thus without credit. Don’t keep on, like them, pretending to believe, stop making believe you want us to believe there is something that might be called touching, a thing itself about which we could pretend to agree, and say something new, just where, touching on the untouchable, it remains untouchable. Touching is finitude, period. Did you not say yourself ‘there is not “the” touching’”? Knowing you as I do, this objection won’t stop you – I tell myself.
– You neither. Would you like to touch him, as you say, the way one touches someone in a duel, with a covered sword-point? “Touché”, as the Americans say in French, with a funny accent, when they score a point.
– On the contrary, it is his singularity, his “being singular plural” that matters to me here above all, even when I’m talking to the others about the others. It is this absolute singularity of his signature that I am striving to get at here.
– You’re striving? What does that mean?)’
3. I remember too from schooldays that there was reputed to be a way of giving a very specific and well-timed shake of the hand that would dislocate the other’s shoulder. Remember too OddJob’s literally bone-crushing handshake in the movie Goldfinger.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée [1936] (Paris: le livre de poche, 1963), p. 114.
5. Of course the language of handshake and handshaking extends in a way I am sure Derrida would be cautious about calling metaphorical to other types of situation. Do not get me started, for example, on the computer science network protocol use of the term, which would, however, comfort the ‘technological’ drift of Derrida’s argument. Or how about this, from an article by John G. Cramer called ‘The Quantum Handshake’: ‘The absorber theory description, unconventional though it is, leads to exactly the same observations as the conventional one. But it differs in that there has been a two-way exchange, a “handshake” across space-time which led to the transfer of energy from emitter to absorber. This advanced-retarded handshake is the basis for the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is a two-way contract between the future and the past for the purpose of transferring energy, momentum, etc. It is nonlocal because the future is, in a limited way, affecting the past on the same basis that the past affects the future. When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction’ (http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw16.html).
6. See Derrida’s quoting and commenting on Foucault’s use of this in the Preface to Les mots et les choses, in ‘Et Cetera . . . ’, in N. Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 282–305 (pp. 284–8). The original French text was subsequently published in the special Jacques Derrida issue of the Cahiers de l’Herne published in 2004 (pp. 21–34).
7. The handshake is the sign of closing a deal as well as of opening negotiations.
8. See http://www.ephesians5-11.org/handshakes.htm.
9. See, for example, the ‘Introduction’ to L’origine de la géométrie, pp. 71–2 and 116–22, and L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 245, n. 1. A couple of pages earlier in Le Toucher, Derrida has reflected more generally on this tendency in Merleau-Ponty (and elsewhere), after quoting a passage from ‘Le philosophe et son ombre’: ‘on this passage and so many others, we would have to locate the moment when, by a simple rhetorical slippage, the accompaniment of the commentary, the pedagogical restitution, without simply betraying the other’s intention, begins to inflect it discreetly to lead it elsewhere. Moreover, the precaution that consists in giving a precise reference and in sheltering behind a literal quotation, in German, sometimes betrays the betrayal – and not only in Merleau-Ponty’ (p. 214).
10. In, Ideen II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 
36ff.
11. See, for example, La Voix et le phénomène (Paris: PUF, 1967), pp. 5, 42ff., 94 n. 1; L’Ecriture et la différence, 181ff. Recalled also in Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), p. 73 and Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997), p. 96.
12. Cf. too Le Toucher, p. 65: ‘If Psyché is life itself, the mourning of Psyché will not be one mourning among others. It is mourning itself. It is absolute mourning, mourning of life itself, but a mourning that this time could not be borne (no life can bear this mourning any longer), nor do its ‘work’. Mourning without work of mourning, mourning without mourning. Mourning on the threshold of mourning. Our life itself, no?’ See too p. 66: ‘There is no autobiography, there never was a “I touch myself” for Psyché, for a psyche entirely exposed to the outside and the other. No signed autobiography for she who, untouchable to herself, feels or knows nothing of herself. The mourning of autobiography is not an autobiography among others, any more than the mourning of Psyché lets itself be preceded or properly figured by any other. As much as to say that, because it is unimaginable, it can give rise only to figures, tropes, allegories or metonymies opening the ways of a technique. Because it is undeniable, it can only give rise to negation. And then mourning without mourning will never be overcome in any “work of mourning”, be it successful or a failure.’ (See too a slightly different derivation of this ‘technical’ moment on p. 206.) This passage occurs shortly after a complex sequence in which Derrida notes that ‘Touch remains for Nancy the motif of a sort of absolute, irredentist and post-deconstructive realism’ (p. 60), and then returns to Aristotle to show how death supervenes immediately in the absence of touch, but also in the face of too great an intensity of touch (p. 61): touch must then take place in a kind of measure, a self-restraint or tact. See too the development around tact and the law, pp. 81–2.
13. See my ‘Circanalyse’, in R. Major and P. Guyomard (eds), Depuis Lacan (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), pp. 270–94; English translation in my Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 93–109.
14. ‘Does not Heidegger, as always, dissymetrise in favour of what he indeed interprets as the very possibility of favour, favour accorded, namely the accord that gathers or brings together harmoniously (Versammlung, Fug), even in the sameness of differences or disputes, before the syn-thesis of a sys-tem? [ . . . ] Beyond right, and still more so beyond juridicalism, beyond morality, and still more so beyond moralism, does justice as relation to the other not presuppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a dis-jointing or an anachrony, some un-Fuge, some ‘out of joint’ dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjoining that, even as it always runs the risk of evil, expropriation and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable assurance, could alone do justice or render justice to the other qua other?’ Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 55. See too Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 128.
15. This kind of ‘second-level’ argument might provide a tool for formalising the relations here: cf. Hegel in Glas, and the question of the relation between the dialectical and the non-dialectical, which must be dialectical according to Hegel, but perhaps need not be for Derrida.
16. See my ‘Deconstruction and the Philosophers: The Very Idea’, in Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso Books, 1994), pp. 11–60 (p. 31).
17. Here is some immediate context, even though this sentence has a sententious quality to it and to that extent tends to detach itself from its context: ‘The fact that Husserl always thought of infinity as an Idea in the Kantian sense, as the indefinity of an ad infinitum, leads one to believe that he never derived difference from the plenitude of a parousia, from the full presence of a positive infinity; that he never believed in the accomplishment of an “absolute knowledge” as presence to itself, in the Logos, of an infinite concept. And what he shows us of the movement of temporalisation leaves no doubt on this subject: although he never made a theme of the “articulation”, of the “diacritical” work of difference in the constitution of meaning and the sign, he deeply recognized its necessity. And yet, the whole phenomenological discourse is caught up, as we have sufficiently seen, in the schema of a metaphysics of presence that tirelessly exhausts itself deriving difference. Within this schema, Hegelianism appears to be more radical: par excellence at the point at which it brings out the fact that the positive infinity 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 also be valid against Husserl. But this appearing of the Ideal as infinite differance can only take place in a relation to death in general. Only a relation to my-death can make the infinite differance of presence appear. 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. Given this, differance which is nothing outside this relationship, becomes the finitude of life as essential relation to self as to one’s death. Infinite differance is finite. One can thus no longer think it in the opposition of the finite and the infinite, absence and presence, negation and affirmation’ (p. 114).
18. Almost four times, perhaps, if one includes the tangential reference in the discussion between Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe transcribed in the ‘Penser avec Jacques Derrida’ issue of Rue Descartes, no. 52 (2006), pp. 86–99, which opens with a reference to a notion of ‘finitude infinie [infinite finitude]’ that Derrida and Nancy supposedly share (p. 88), whereas, according to Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe would be on the side of an ‘infinitude finie [finite infinitude]’.
19. ‘Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, la syncope reste ouverte’, Libération, 2 February 2007.
20. Cf. too Une pensée finie, p. 19: ‘This “single” meaning has neither unity nor singleness: it is a “single” meaning (of a “single” being), because it is each time meaning.’
21. Published in Rue Descartes, no. 48 (2005), ‘Salut à Jacques Derrida.’
22. Cf. Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Galilée, 1998) and Donner la mort (Paris: Galilée, 1999).
23. This is something Nancy reports in Safaa Fathy’s film D’ailleurs, Derrida, and (with Lacoue-Labarthe) in the collective volume Penser à Strasbourg (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 15: ‘Jean-Luc . . . was discovering Jacques Derrida’s capacity for silence . . . we were vaguely astonished: we were learning that one does not necessarily talk philosophy with a philosopher, and that the work goes via the texts’ (p. 15). Anecdotally again, I along with many others can confirm an experience of that ‘capacity for silence’. At Cerisy in 2002, after Derrida’s paper (subsequently published as the first essay of Voyous) in which there is a long, detailed and intransigent critique of Nancy’s appeal to the motif of fraternity in the Freedom book, I asked Derrida if he and Nancy had ever discussed the matter before: he replied, ‘No, in fact we’ve never talked so much philosophy as we have this week.’
24. If I can again briefly enter the realm of anecdote: when I mentioned this to Derrida, who at the time had not yet read Nancy’s book, and saw his look of surprise, I said a little lightly: ‘but maybe in the end it comes to the same thing’. Derrida very quickly and seriously said: ‘I don’t think so’, giving me a curious look as though I had just shown myself to be an imbecile after all.
25. See, for example, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 38: ‘To get to the point of recognizing, not short of but on the horizon of the Heideggerian paths, and still in them, that the meaning of being is not a transcendental or trans-epochal signified (even were it always dissimulated in the epoch) but already, in a properly unheard-of sense, a determinate signifying trace, is to assert that in the decisive concept of ontico-ontological difference, everything is not to be thought at once: entity and Being, ontic and ontological, “ontico-ontological” would be, in an original style, derived with respect to difference, and with respect to what later on we shall call differance, an economic concept designating the production of the differing and the deferring. Ontico-ontological-difference and its ground (Grund) in the “transcendence of Dasein” (Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 16) would no longer be absolutely original. Differance tout court would be more “originary”, but one could no longer call it “origin” or “ground”, these notions belonging essentially to the history of onto-theology, i.e. the system that functions as effacement of difference. However, difference can only be thought up close to itself on one condition: that one begin by determining it as ontico-ontological difference before crossing this determination out. The necessity of the passage through the crossed-out determination, the necessity of this turn of writing is irreducible. This is a discreet and difficult thought that, through many unnoticed mediations, ought to carry the whole weight of our question, a question that we are still provisionally calling historial. It is thanks to it that later we’ll be able to try to make differance and writing communicate.’
26. ‘It is precisely what is proper to the power of differance to modify life less and less as it spreads. If it became infinité – which its essence excludes a priori – life itself would be reduced to an impassive, intangible and eternal présence: infinité differance, God or death’ (De la grammatologie, p. 191).
27. The first of the three sentences is a remark from around 1970, ‘no doubt’, told as follows by Nancy: ‘I was in a moment of doubt and discouragement, and I said to Jacques that I thought I didn’t have, or no longer had, much to say. He replied the following, brusquely, almost angry: “Yes, I know, these are pretexts one gives oneself to avoid having to write”. I was astonished, and that’s why I didn’t forget what he said (later, he had forgotten)’ (p. 68).
28. Cf. Derrida’s piece on Bernard Tschumi: ‘Point de folie – maintenant l’architecture’, in Psyché, inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1988), pp. 477–93.
29. Just after the footnote in Une pensée finie, Nancy explicitly addresses this question, in the context of Heidegger’s ‘being-toward-death’: ‘what carries thought in an expression like “being to death” [“être à la mort”] (zum Tode sein) [Nancy here has a note justifying the translation with “à” rather than “pour” on the grounds that “pour” is too purposive], is not primarily “death”, but the to, about which “death” indicates only that it is maintained, as a structure of being, “to the end” [jusqu’au bout] – which is an absence of “end”, extremity or finality [fin: also just “end”] where the infinite circle of a sense-less appropriation would be closed. [ . . . ] . . . in “finitude” the question is not that of the “end” [fin], neither as aim nor as accomplishment, but only of a suspense of sense, in-finite, each time played anew, re-opened, each time exposed with such a radical newness that it immediately misses itself’ (p. 21). The question is simply that of the passage from ‘each time anew’ to ‘in-finite’.
30. This is not just a terminological question, of course. Derrida himself uses the word ‘infini’ (for example in a reference to the ‘infini secret de l’autre’, in Voyous (p. 128)): but most often it is still wrapped in a paradoxical relation to the finite. Cf., still in Voyous, p. 211: ‘For once reason does not close itself to the event of who or what comes, if it is not irrational to think that the worst can always happen, and well beyond what Kant still contains under the name “radical evil”, then only the infinite possibility of the worst and of perjury can grant the possibility of the Good, of veracity and sworn faith. This possibility remains infinite but as the very possibility of an auto-immunitary finitude’ (my emphasis). See too the important mise en garde in the Grammatologie, p. 99: ‘That the logos be first an imprint and that this imprint be the scriptural resource of language means, of course, that the logos is not a creative activity, the continuous and full element of the divine word, etc. But one would not have taken a single step outside metaphysics if one took from it no more than a new motif of the “return to finitude”, of the “death of God”, etc. This is the conceptuality and problematic that we must deconstruct. They belong to the onto-theology they contest. Différance is also something other than finitude’ (my emphasis). In Le Toucher itself, in the second version of the repeated passage (pp. 125 and 160), we do find the following, but the context clearly suggests a kind of free indirect discourse: ‘Le toucher, c’est la finitude, un point c’est tout’ [touch is finitude, period]. Immediately followed by the mention of the English (or American) usage of ‘touché’ in the language of the duel or of fencing (see note 2 above).
31. ‘An unpresentable salute that in advance, as it must in order to be a salute worthy of the name, renounces Salvation.’