Half-Life
The word deuil, mourning, seems scarcely to appear in Derrida’s early work.1 Unless I am mistaken, not once in the ‘Introduction’ to the Origine de la géométrie, not once in La voix et le phénomène. Not once in Marges – de la philosophie. In La dissémination, the word appears, I think, only in quotations of Lautréamont (p. 47, in a note), of Gorgias (pp. 131–2), and in a gloss on the etymology of the word ‘hymne’ (p. 242). In the 436 pages of the French edition of L’Écriture et la différence, the word ‘deuil’ appears, I believe, precisely twice (once in a quotation of Jabès), and in De la grammatologie only once. For a thinker who in a later interview more or less claims that he ‘runs on’ deuil the way a car runs on gas,2 and whose encounter with the ‘singular event of psychoanalysis’ seems significantly to involve this concept of mourning, this might seem like an almost unbelievably small amount of fuel (really only two instances of his using the word ‘in his own name’, as he might have said), an extraordinarily energy-efficient way to cover the several thousand pages that one might otherwise have thought (that I, for one, have tended to think) laid down the bases for much, if not all, of the Derrida to come.
This ‘early’ work, the work of the first half of Derrida’s life, of course already quite clearly registers the importance of psychoanalysis (said, along with linguistics, in the Grammatology, to offer some chance of breaking with metaphysical thought,3 and of course given a long and complex reading in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’4), but a psychoanalysis the philosophical importance of which seems to reside more with the notion of Nachträglichkeit (supposedly Freud’s true discovery) than with anything else.5 If deuil is so scarce in this early work, and if it is nonetheless a fundamental motif in Derrida’s thought in general, as he himself seems to think, then it would seem at first sight as though this motif simply makes its thematic entry after this ‘early’ swathe of work, perhaps inaugurating a new ‘period’ of deconstruction – and indeed one might even be tempted to refer its quite dramatic and insistent appearance in texts from the 1970s to some biographical event, most obviously the death of Derrida’s father in, precisely, 1970.
It is true that these few, these precious few, these really only two occurrences of deuil in that ‘early’ work are not without their interest, and, promisingly enough for the Derridean fundamentalist that he once accused me of being (‘puritanical rigorist’) and that I guess I am (by which I mean that I think that in a non-teleological and non-trivial sense all of Derrida is already ‘in’ the early work, already at least half there, at least half alive, in at the start or the origin, available and already living on for later returns in reading and rereading; that, like in fractal geometry, everything can be unfolded from an arbitrarily small segment of the curve, and that that just is the life of deconstruction, its life as the half-life that is the structure of reading as such, beyond or before any periodising or historicising concern) – promisingly enough for the fundamentalist that I am, then, in both cases these apparently incidental occurrences of deuil are attached to recognisably ‘important’ moments. In the Grammatologie, the single occurrence of the word appears as part of the reconstruction of the presuppositions informing Saussure’s treatment of so-called phonetic writing as supposedly ‘external’ to speech, and anticipates on what will be the longer analysis of this ‘Platonic’ moment in ‘La Pharmacie de Platon’ a few years later:
A particular system the principle or at least the declared project of which is to be external to the system of spoken language. Declaration of principle, pious wish and historical violence of a speech dreaming its own self-presence, living itself as its own resumption: so-called [self-saying] language, self-production of so-called living speech, capable, as Socrates said, of assisting itself, logos that believes itself to be its own father, thus rising above written discourse, infans and infirm in that it cannot respond when questioned and which, always ‘needing the assistance of its father’ (το
πατρòς 
ε
δε
ται βοηθο – Phèdre 275 d), must thus be born of a primal cut and expatriation, which doom it to wandering, blindness and mourning. (De la grammatologie, pp. 58–9)
Writing, then, at least in this initial sense, prior to its generalisation as archi-writing, here less perhaps primarily parricidal than simply orphaned, ex-patriated in the sense of fatherless, less voyou than vulnerable and pathetic – writing wanders blindly, in mourning (perhaps, after all, rather like Oedipus arriving at Colonus, as discussed at some length thirty years later in De l’hospitalité ([Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997] pp. 37ff.)), arriving as a blinded, parricidal, mournful expatriate who also presents himself explicitly as an outlaw and a ghost (we’ll see the ghost explicitly in a moment, in L’Ecriture et la différence: in the Grammatologie itself, Derrida says rather discreetly in the Saussure reading that writing, the wanderer proscribed by linguistics, ‘has never ceased haunting language as its primary and most intimate possibility’ (De la grammatologie, p. 64, my emphasis)). And the passage from the Grammatologie that mentions deuil will go on to make the ‘signature’ Derrida claim that the fact that supposedly full speech can even begin to lend itself to spacing in written form, ‘places it originarily in relation to its own death’ (ibid.). Writing, we might be tempted to say on the basis of this description, is not only itself the abandoned wandering mourner, not opposed to, nor really even distinct from speech, but speech ‘itself’ beside or outside itself, already in originary and endless mourning for itself, and thereby (because of the endlessness or the already) not exactly in mourning, but in something more like the melancholia or the ‘deuil du deuil’, the demi-deuil, of later work.
In L’Écriture et la différence, the other place where the word or concept of ‘deuil’ appears in this ‘early’ work, the word ‘deuil’ shows up only at the very end of the text, in the curious kind of postscript entitled ‘Ellipse’: the only part of the book that had not already been published elsewhere, dedicated to Gabriel Bounoure, a friend of Derrida’s (but of the generation of his father) who was himself to die shortly afterwards. ‘Ellipse’ is indeed a rather elliptical text (at seven and a half pages, one of Derrida’s shortest ever), and seems to function both as an explicit post-scriptum to the book it (all but) closes, and as a short commentary on Edmond Jabès (the subject, of course, of a much longer treatment earlier in the volume).
[The very figure of the ellipsis in Derrida might also repay some further attention,6 even though it is only elliptically thematised as such in this text that takes it as its title: ellipsis names both a geometrical and a rhetorical figure, and also shows up, for example, in the title of a subsection of ‘La mythologie blanche’, and then more or less discreetly or elliptically throughout Derrida’s work (in the very title of Points de suspension . . . , for example, and quite often in the interviews collected in that volume) up to the late Voyous, where the very opening of the first essay goes as follows:
For a certain sending that awaits us, I imagine an economic formalization, a very elliptical phrase, in both senses of the word ellipsis. Ellipsis does not just name the lack. It is also a curved figure with more than one focal point. We are already between the ‘one less’ and the ‘more than one’. [entre le « moins un » et le « plus d’un »: between the not half and the no end – GB]
Between the ‘one less’ and the ‘more than one’, democracy has perhaps some affinity with this turn or trope called ellipsis. The elliptical sending would come to us by e-mail, and we would read:
‘Democracy to come: it has to give the time that there is not.’7
This elliptical association of democracy and ellipsis, which I cannot develop here, but whose being-elliptical already, one might suspect, has something to do with the structures of living on and mourning, and Derrida’s elliptical prolixity more generally, would also perhaps have to take into account the suggestion from the Grammatologie, in the course of the Lévi-Strauss reading (just before the famous discussion of the war of proper names), of the need to return to ‘Another ellipsis on the metaphysics or ontology of the logos (especially in its Hegelian moment) as impotent and oneiric effort to master absence by reducing metaphor in the absolute parousia of meaning. Ellipsis on originary writing in language as irreducibility of metaphor, that must be thought here in its possibility and this side of its rhetorical repetition.’8]
The opening gesture of this little text entitled ‘Ellipse’ sets up a kind of ‘end of the book and beginning of writing’ scenario (also of course laid out in the Grammatology), in terms of ‘book’ and ‘text’:
Here or there we have discerned writing: a division without symmetry sketched out on one side the closure of the book, on the other the opening of the text. On one side the theological encyclopedia and, modelled on it, the book of man. On the other, a tissue of traces marking the disappearance of a God exceeded [excédé: at the end of his rope] or a man effaced. The question of writing could only be opened with the book closed. The joyous errancy of the graphein was then without return. The opening to the text was adventure, expenditure without reserve.9
But to correct the hasty reading one always might give this kind of assertion (and that was indeed often enough given by early commentators on Derrida, excited or indignant by the prospect of getting to choose one of the famous ‘two interpretations of interpretation’ formulated in the ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ essay that immediately precedes this one in the book (see pp. 427–8), despite the precautions Derrida himself always took to try to avoid such haste) – to correct such a hasty reading, Derrida immediately offers the following corrective:
And yet did we not know that the closure of the book was not just one limit among others? That it is only in the book, ceaselessly returning to it, drawing all our resources from it, that we could indefinitely designate the writing beyond the book?
The Return to the Book is then given to be thought.
This leads to an extended gloss on Jabès, from which I’ll try to extract some argumentative nuclei, if you’ll allow me that unsatisfactory formulation (unsatisfactory for reasons that have absolutely to do with the thought I am trying to unpack here). Writing unsettles the Book (and thereby God10) just through its powers of repetition: the return to the book takes the book outside itself just because of the figure of the return itself. The book (the Book) may think that it has an origin and an end, but the very movement whereby it tries to make sure of that fact undoes origin and end, deports identity into a sameness that is not the same as identity, not identical with identity. This power of repetition, without which the Book would not be the Book, but with which the Book cannot quite be the Book either, entails the disappearance of the centre:
This repetition is writing because what disappears in it is the self-identity of the origin, the self-presence of so-called living speech. The centre. The lure that gave life to the first book, the mythical book, the eve of all repetition, is that the centre was safe from play: irreplaceable, withdrawn from metaphor and metonymy, a sort of invariable forename that could be invoked but not repeated. The centre of the first book should not have been repeatable in its own representation. As soon as it lends itself just once to such a representation – i.e. once it is written – , when one can read a book in the book, an origin in the origin, a centre in the centre, then it is the abyss, the bottomlessness of infinite redoubling. The other is in the same . . .11
This disappearance of the centre through repetition happens simply because a sign is originarily in repetition, a sameness of the same only in non-identical repetition. And now here comes the apparently passing reference to deuil: for might one not want to say that there never was a centre to disappear, that originary difference and repetition entail that there is simply no origin, never was any origin to regret: if the grapheme in its intrinsic repetition thereby has no natural place or centre, why not just affirm that centrelessness or decentring as such:
As soon as a sign arises, it begins by repeating itself.12 Without that fact, it would not be a sign, it would not be what it is, namely this non-self-identity that refers regularly to the same. That is to another sign which itself will be born by dividing itself. Thus repeating itself, the grapheme has therefore no natural place or centre. But did it ever lose them? Is its excentricity a decentring? Can one not affirm non-reference to the centre rather than beweeping the absence of the centre? Why mourn the centre? Is not the centre, absence of play and difference, another name for death? The death that reassures, appeases, but from its hole also creates anxiety and puts into play?13
Pourquoi ferait-on son deuil du centre? Why mourn for something that was not even lost because it was never there? Why not just celebrate play? (This is probably another way of saying: why not just let it go, get over it – ‘take it away, I never had it anyway’ – as the song says) and be postmodern?). Derrida’s reply (after a quotation from Jabès in which we read that ‘Le centre est le seuil [ . . . ] Le centre est . . . sous la cendre. [ . . . ] Le centre est le deuil’ [The centre is the threshold . . . The centre is . . . under the ashes . . . The centre is mourning]: this quotation apparently being the impetus for Derrida’s ‘own’ use of the word ‘deuil’ in these pages) is unusually dense, and arguably all we’re going to need to read the rest of Derrida, all the rest of Derrida, his other whole half-life, which would then, in a sense, be written in memory of this:
Just as there is a negative theology, there is a negative atheology. Complicitously it still bespeaks the absence of the centre when it should already be affirming play. But is not the desire for the centre, as a function of play itself, indestructible? And in the repetition or return of play, how could the ghost of the centre not call on us? This is where, between writing as decentring and writing as affirmation of play, the hesitation is infinite. It belongs to play and links it to death. It is produced in a ‘who knows?’ without subject and without knowledge.14
And this situation is now given an unusually lurid figuration that it scarcely takes psychoanalysis to find at least striking:
If the centre is indeed ‘the displacement of the question’, this is because one has always nicknamed [overnamed; supernamed] the unnameable bottomless pit whose sign it was, sign of the hole that the book tried to fill. The centre was the name of a hole; and the name of man, like the name of God, bespeaks the force [strength] of what has been erected in order to make a work in the form of a book. The volume, the roll of parchment was to be introduced into the dangerous hole, penetrate furtively into the threatening dwelling, with an animal movement, quick, silent, slick, shiny, slithery, like a snake or a fish. Such is the unquiet desire of the book.15
This perhaps surprising reference to animality (and already life, come to that: the animal is ‘vif’, quick in the sense that the quick is not the dead), long before any obvious thematisation of it in Derrida’s work, also shows up in the earlier piece on Jabès from l’Écriture et la différence, where this passing reference to life is made explicit, and indeed capitalised:
There is, then, an animality of the letter that takes the forms of its desire, unease and solitude. [ . . . ] Of course, the animality of the letter at first appears as one metaphor among others . . . But it is above all metaphor itself, the origin of language as metaphor, in which Being and Nothing, the conditions beyond metaphor of metaphor, never say themselves. Metaphor, or the animality of the letter, is the primal and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life. Psychic subversion of inert literality, that is of nature or of speech become nature again. This super-power as life of the signifier happens in the unease and errancy of language always richer than knowledge, always with the movement to go further than peaceful and sedentary certainty.16
Breaking off here (elliptically) our reading of ‘Ellipse’, it looks, then, as though simply turning around this passing and unobtrusive reference to deuil has brought us, with metaphoricity, animality and life (even Life), to an expanding constellation of terms that set the scene for deconstruction more generally, throwing forward a standing possibility for reading and rereading that can take us up to and back from the very last work too. In this strange, anticipatory but non-teleological structure, that may begin to give a hint of how one day we might be in a position to describe Derrida’s oeuvre as a whole (if you’ll allow me that unsatisfactory formulation), we may find among other things a way of approaching Derrida as constantly ‘rereading’ himself (perhaps not literally), finding resources in his own textual ‘memory’ for developments decades later. And this relationship may itself need to be formulated in terms of the deuil that only barely appears here, but as it turns out appears dramatically and strongly enough to bear the weight of what will be put upon it for years to come. For it transpires that quite a good nickname for this infinite ‘hesitation’ between a kind of negative relation to the ‘lost’ centre and a positive affirmation of centreless play, here being aligned with a kind of animal life, is, not of course simply deuil, which is only one aspect of the hesitation, but, precisely, demi-deuil – and ‘demideuil’, half mourning not half mourning, no end of mourning, would then be a quite good way of thinking about deconstruction in general. If all work is work of mourning, as Glas and Spectres de Marx argue, and if the crux of that identification of work and mourning is to do with teleological structures, including that of the book itself, with finishing up and finishing off, then we would perhaps be justified in claiming that deconstruction, as always unfinished work, just is (in) the demi-deuil of metaphysics, never quite an achieved deuil or ‘deuil du deuil’, that would be the end of metaphysics, but the apparently more melancholic situation (affirmed on quasi-ethical grounds in, for example, Béliers) that is, however, life or Life itself. But ‘life itself’ as always life-death, primary survival or living on (as he says in that last interview), living on in the anticipated memory of an inheritance still yet to be read, for this is (half-)life(-death) as reading, reading-life only half-life not half life no end
Notes
1. Paper presented to the April 2008 annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, in the context of a seminar organised by Steven Miller under the title ‘Jacques Derrida and the Singular Event of Psychoanalysis’.
2. ‘To work on mourning is also, indeed, to get into the practical, effective analysis of mourning, to elaborate the psychoanalytical concept or concepts of mourning. But it is first of all – in doing this very thing – the operation consisting in working on mourning the way one speaks of running on this or that source of energy, this or that type of fuel, running on high-octane gas, for example. To the point of exhaustion’ (Points de suspension (Paris: Galilée, 1992), p. 54).
3. De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 35.
4. In L’Écriture et la differénce (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 293–340.
5. On this status of Nachträglichkeit, see L’Écriture et la différence, p. 303. For discussion of Derrida’s complicated ‘declarations’ about psychoanalysis at this time, cf. my ‘Circanalyse: la chose même’, in Patrick Guyomard and René Major (eds), Depuis Lacan (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), pp. 270–94; English translation in my Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 93–109.
6. See some brief considerations by Nicholas Royle, in Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 16 and 48. See too Jenny Chamarette, ‘Flesh, Folds and Texturality: Thinking Visual Ellipsis via Merleau-Ponty, Hélène Cixous and Robert Frank’, Paragraph, vol. 30, no. 2 (2007), pp. 34–49, which, however, incorrectly identifies Writing and Difference as having been translated by Ian McLeod and myself (p. 49, no. 5).
7. Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 19.
8. De la grammatologie, p. 156. See too Che cos’è la poesia, ‘a poem must be brief, elliptical by vocation, whatever its objective or apparent extent. Learned ignorance of Verdichtung and retreat’ (Psyché, inventions de l’autre, 1st edn (Paris: Galilée, 1987), p. 304). The affinity of democracy and literature is the object of forthcoming work.
9. L’Écriture et la différence, p. 429 – the very opening of ‘Ellipse’.
10. Remember already the ‘simultanéité théologique du livre’ in ‘Force et signification’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 41).
11. L’Écriture et la différence, p. 431.
12. Cf. the locus classicus of this argument in La Voix et le phénomène: ‘A sign is never an event if event means an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical uniqueness. A sign that took place only “once” would not be a sign. A purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign. A signifier (in general) must be recognizable in its form in spite of, and through, the diversity of empirical characteristics that can modify it. It must remain the same and be repeatable as such in spite of and through the distortions that what is called the empirical event necessarily makes it suffer. A phoneme or grapheme is necessarily always other, to a certain extent, each time it presents itself in an operation or a perception, but it can function as sign and language in general only if a formal identity allows one to repeat and recognize it. This identity is necessarily ideal. It thus necessarily implies a representation: as Vorstellung, the place of ideality in general, as Vergegenwärtigung, possibility of reproductive repetition in general, as Repräsentation, insofar as every signifying event is a substitute (for the signified as much as for the ideal form of the signifier). As this representative structure is signification itself, I cannot begin an “effective” discourse without being originarily engaged in an indefinite representativity’ (La Voix et le phénomène (Paris: PUG, 1967), pp. 55–6).
13. L’Écriture et la différence, p. 432, my emphasis
14. L’Écriture et la différence, p. 433
15. L’Écriture et la différence, p. 433.
16. L’Écriture et la différence, pp. 108–110.