‘Pourquoi un faux départ du discours est-il toujours nécessaire? [ . . . ] pour-quoi est-ce toujours à partir du constitué, c’est-à-dire du produit dérivé, que l’on doit toujours remonter vers la source constituante, c’est-à-dire vers le moment originaire?’1
This is a false start.2 And even several false starts. First, the epigraph that is talking about false starts, but which also, like all epigraphs, is itself a false start (so this one is a double false start, a false start about the false start). But also, secondly, this paper itself may well turn out to be a false start for our conference, ‘Deconstruct, he says . . .’, at least in the sense that my title was dictated (we’ll see in a moment that that’s the word for it) by a little moment of bad temper. As though something or someone in me wanted to refuse or at least take some distance from the overall conference title, or wanted at least to react to its Durassian feel3 (as far as I know, Duras was not an author to whom Jacques felt particularly close), and above all to take a stand against what tended, in this quasi-quotation, to pull the verb ‘deconstruct’ towards Duras’s ‘destroy’, whereas Jacques’s most constant effort, when he did indeed say or write ‘deconstruct’ or ‘deconstruction’ (that word that he said one day in Montreal rather unpleasantly surprised him with its worldwide success)4 was constantly to separate it from that. No, I said to myself, certainly too quickly and reactively, he did not say ‘deconstruct’ in that way.
Perhaps this can be explained by a mechanical reaction, a mekhané, as he calls it in Papier machine,5 which (as part of the work of mourning, or rather the work of half-mourning, as he often calls it, that I have been living with for almost five years now, like survival itself, a work without work that in my case has remained rather massively on the side of melancholia, what I early on christened my ‘militant melancholia’) – a mekhané, then, that has pushed me more and more, in a way that is no doubt rather perverse, and certainly paradoxical, toward the ‘origins’ of Jacques’s thought, as though (as I explain elsewhere) I could hope to find an origin, precisely, get back by dint of reading and rereading to the moment at which Jacques had the (I imagine blinding) intuition, the striking intuition that there is no origin, or that the origin is always already complex, and therefore not really an origin. At the beginning, at the origin, there would have been a moment at which he would have seen a certain impossibility of the origin, an originary complexity or secondarity, an ‘originary synthesis’, an originary trace, something radically non-simple, the very necessity of the false start. That the origin be complex in this way – and this is the ABC of deconstruction which once again I shall be content to do no more than spell out – complex and therefore non-originary, is, clearly enough, his originary thought.
Approaching this origin, this non-origin at the origin, one does indeed find oneself in the vicinity of his earliest thinking. (For me – and you’ll have understood that I’m telling my life-story here, a bit mechanically, that I am confessing, avowing, writing my autobiography, owning up – it’s as if there were two origins or two beginnings here, or at least two false starts: what I am calling Jacques’s first thought is something he had or was had by around the age, no doubt, of 22 or 23, while writing his thesis for the Superior Diploma, on ‘The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy’; on the other hand, I myself was 22 when I first discovered ‘Differance’ and De la grammatologie.) At the age of 22, then, Jacques was already concerned, in this precocious reading of Husserl, with the complex relations between the transcendental and the historical, between a transcendental genesis and a historical genesis, between a (transcendental) origin and its (historical) origin, or between a (historical) origin and its (transcendental) origin.
There, we’ve started. A true false start.
This originary thought about the non-originary, or about an impossible origin, is something he says much less than he writes, or – more precisely – that he finds already written (if not exactly said), for example in Husserl. And this is the very sense of the irreducible or ‘necessary’ false start. The false start is what I must always begin by reading. He finds this thought written, sees it in writing, and rereads it in 1990 when thinking about publishing it.6 He reads it, then, according to the already complex structure that he describes in one of his first published texts, ‘Force and signification’, in 1963, in which he speaks precisely of a fundamental and anguishing experience of secondarity which comes from ‘that strange redoubling whereby the already constituted – written – meaning is given as read, preliminarily or simultaneously, where the other is present, vigilant, making irreducible the coming and going, the work between writing and reading’,7 or again towards the (so dramatic) ending of ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, where
. . . pure perception does not exist: we are written only when we write . . . The ‘subject’ of writing does not exist, if one understands by that some sovereign solitude of the writer. . . [This ‘sovereign solitude’ is the theme of Derrida’s very last seminar, in 2002–3.] . . . the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is nowhere to be found . . . One would search the ‘public’ in vain for the first reader, i.e. the first author of the work. And the ‘sociology of literature’ perceives nothing of the warfare and rusing that have as their stakes the origin of the work, between the author who reads and the first reader who dictates.8
This complex origin, this false start, between ‘the author who reads and the first reader who dictates’, is what means that deconstruction is written and read before being said, even when it is said, and what means that everything in these now classic texts that has to do with writing in the narrow or ‘vulgar’ sense remains of the greatest interest for whoever tries to put themselves in this complex position where reading and writing become confused and differentiated in the same place and time, as it were. Putting oneself in this position (to try to read Derrida in this strong and difficult sense – a little later I’ll be claiming that no doubt nobody (with the possible exception of Derrida himself) has yet done this kind of reading) consists among other things in letting oneself be taken up by a whole slightly diabolical machinery (every text being a sort of machine that is as such perfectly indifferent to the life or survival of its signatory or its readers) that no doubt still has some surprises in store for the (professional) readers that we are.
(I shall often be invoking here the ‘young’ Derrida of the 1950s and 1960s, but what is at stake here remains so until the end of his life, and so well beyond. Allow me to quote a few sentences from the very last seminar to show this. This is a passage from the third session of the seminar in which Derrida puts forward a whole rather breathtaking meditation on the possible relation between on the one hand the structures of ‘auto-’ in general (auto-nomy, auto-sufficiency, auto-affection, auto-biography, and so on) and what draws them all, fatally, into auto-immune paradoxes, and on the other hand the minimal technical apparatus or minimal machine constituted by a wheel turning and returning upon itself around a fixed axis. According to the seminar, this becoming-machine of the auto-, as it were, has the closest relation to the structures of reading and writing we are, precisely, turning around here:
One could say that every autobiography, every autobiographical fiction, and even every written confession through which the author calls and names himself, presents himself through this linguistic and prosthetic apparatus – a book – or a piece of writing or a trace in general, for example the book entitled Robinson Crusoe, which speaks of him without him, according to a trick which constructs and leaves in the world an artefact that speaks all alone and all alone calls the author by his name, renames him in his fame [le renomme en sa renommée] without the author himself needing to do anything more, not even be alive.)
This quasi-mechanical configuration of writing and reading most often in these early texts goes via explicit reflections on writing in the most ‘mundane’ or ‘vulgar’ sense of the word, ‘before’ the limitless generalisation of this same term and others close to it such as ‘text’ or ‘trace’. For example, still in ‘Force and Signification’:
The thought of the thing as what it is already merges with that of pure speech; and that with experience itself. Now, does not pure speech require inscription, a little like Leibnizian essence requires existence and pushes toward the world as potential toward act? If the anguish of writing is not and must not be a determinate pathos, this is because it is not essentially an empirical modification or affect of the writer, but the responsibility of this angustia, this necessarily narrow passage of speech against which the possible meanings push and get in each other’s way. Get in each other’s way, but also call on each other, provoke each other, unforeseeably and as though in spite of me, in a sort of autonomous super-compossibility of meanings, a potential of pure equivocality compared to which the creativity of the Classical God seems still too poor. Speaking scares me because never saying enough, I also always say too much. And if the necessity of becoming breath or word restricts meaning – and our responsibility for meaning – then writing restricts and constrains still more than speech. Writing is the anguish of the Hebrew ruah experienced from the side of human solitude and responsibility; from the side of Jeremiah subject to God’s dictation (‘Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee.’) or of Baruch transcribing Jeremiah’s dictation, etc. (Jeremiah 36, 2–4); or again the properly human agency of pneumatology, the science of pnuema, spiritus or logos, which was divided into three parts: divine, angelic and human. This is the moment when we must decide if we will engrave what we hear. And whether engraving saves or loses speech. (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 19)
Meaning is meaning only in the passage of this passage, then, which is paradoxically both restrictive and liberating, an anguished passage that can be seen or felt more easily in writing than in speech. Why? Because, he goes on to say a little later:
Paradoxically, inscription alone – although it is far from doing this always –has poetic power, i.e. the power to awaken speech from its sleep as sign. By consigning speech, it has the essential intention and runs the mortal risk of emancipating sense from every current field of perception, from this natural involvement in which everything refers to the affect of a contingent situation. This is why writing will never be simply the ‘painting of voice’ (Voltaire). It creates meaning by consigning it, confiding it in an engraving, a furrow, a relief, a surface that is supposed to be infinitely transmissible. (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 24)
Writing constrains meaning (which is, remember, the meaning of experience itself, of ‘the thought of the thing as what it is’) in the anguished passage which both limits and liberates its ‘potential of pure equivocality’, and does so by leaving a trace that is not exhausted in its immediate context, but emancipates itself and opens itself to the risk and the chance of a pure transmission that never will be pure, but which, through this very impurity, opens the concrete possibility of reading itself. (We’d need to reread here Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry the better to follow the detail of this logic according to which a certain ideality liberated by writing is then reinscribed in a certain mundane facticity which alone, however, ‘delivers the transcendental’ (p. 71).) Writing, or so one might imagine, will of course always offer itself (to reading, then) in a given ‘current field of perception’, but none of these fields will really be ‘its’ field, it will survive any current field of perception and any current affect, eventually to reappear in another, and again another, indefinitely. Or so he writes, for he writes this so that it can be transmitted and read and reread, to infinity, for example here today, and he writes it again two or three years later, against Levinas (but already for, in view of, or in the name of a certain ‘ethics’) who thinks writing can only be a sign whereas only speech can be expression:
Can one not reverse all of Levinas’s propositions on this point? By showing, for example, that writing can help itself out, because it has time and freedom, escaping better than speech from empirical urgency? That, neutralising the requests of empirical ‘economy’, it is in essence more ‘metaphysical’ (in Levinas’s sense) than speech? That the writer absents himself better, i.e. expresses himself better as an other, and addresses himself better to the other than the man of speech? And that, depriving himself of enjoyments and the effects of his signs, he better renounces violence? [ . . . ] The thematic of the trace (distinguished by Levinas from the effect, the track or the sign which do not refer to the other as absolute invisibility) ought to lead to a certain rehabilitation of writing. Is not the ‘He’, whose transcendence and generous absence are announced without return in the trace, more easily the author of writing than the author of speech? (L’Écriture et la différence, pp. 150–1)
Write, then, in the name of poetry, of ‘pure speech’, in the name of liberty and the other, in the name of what liberates meaning for a reading, for the time of reading, and therefore for a history (or at least a historicity). Writing will be generalised (this will be the very movement of deconstruction) on the basis of what is, in spite of everything, first of all writing, inscription in the most familiar (heimlich/unheimlich) sense you like, except that clearly sense and the familiar will be carried or dragged away in the generalisation it makes possible (which is none other than said ‘liberation’ or ‘emancipation’). By taking its time and its liberties with respect to the immediacy of speech, writing also liberates itself, at the same time, as it were (or rather time itself, time itself as the distension and differentiation of the same time, its dislocation), liberates its originary secondarity and carries off in its passage the domain that speech would have liked to reserve for itself, so that, as he writes a little later, ‘ . . . if writing is second, nothing takes place before it’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 152).
Write, he writes: and he means write. Dictated liberated. Writing thus written is deconstruction in action, de-livering any Book from its fantasised ‘theological simultaneity’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 41).
This originary secondarity of writing affects in turn with secondarity any other supposed originarily, and this makes it easier to understand why writing in this sense implies reading. It affects with secondarity, for example, the so-called ‘speaking subject’, as he will say in ‘La parole soufflée’, which is also already the purloined letter (I emphasise in passing the moments most relevant to my concerns today):
Given this, what is called the speaking subject is no longer the very one or the only one who speaks. It discovers itself to be in an irreducible secondarity, an always-already stolen away origin on the basis of an organized field of speech in which it seeks in vain a place that is always missing. This organized field is not only the one that might be described by certain theories of the psyche or the linguistic fact. It is first of all – without this meaning anything different – the cultural field from which I must draw my words and my syntax, a historical field in which I must read by writing. The structure of theft lodges (itself) already (in) the relation of speech to language. Speech is stolen: stolen from language, and therefore by the same token from itself, i.e. from the thief who has already lost his property and initiative. Because one cannot come before its beforeness, the act of reading makes a hole in the act of speaking or writing. Through this hole I escape from myself.
That speech and writing be always unavowably borrowed from a reading, that is the originary theft, the more archaic stealing that both hides and spirits away my inaugurating power. Spirit spirits away. Proffered or inscribed speech, the letter, is always stolen. Always stolen because always open. It is never proper to its author or its addressee and it is part of its nature that it never follows the trajectory leading from one proper subject to another proper subject. Which comes down to recognizing as its historicity the autonomy of the signifier that before me says on its own more than I think I mean and with respect to which my meaning, undergoing something rather than being active, finds itself in default, or, let’s say, inscribes itself at a loss [en passif]. Even if the reflection of this default determines the urgency of expression as an excess. Autonomy as stratification and historical potentialisation of meaning; a system that is historical, i.e. somewhere open. (L’Écriture et la différence, pp. 265–6)
Reading, as unavowable theft, thus also implies this ‘system that is historical, i.e. somewhere open’. Everything here has to do with history, with the very possibility of history, in this ‘somewhere open’. (All the more surprising that Derrida has so often been reproached with a lack of interest for history.) Remember, still within Writing and Difference, a remark of Derrida’s about Husserl, in his first ever public lecture, ‘Genesis and Structure and Phenomenology’ – a lapidary remark according to which ‘What I can never understand, in a structure, is that whereby it is not closed’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 238). This opening that I cannot understand is not other than what we have seen Derrida call ‘liberty’ or ‘emancipation of meaning’, and coincides with the very possibility of reading. I read only (even here, I confess) where I do not understand, in the very opening of my non-comprehension. And, let it be said in passing, my reading (this is what distinguishes and will always distinguish deconstruction from hermeneutics) lives only on and in this opening, which it must not therefore close or fill, even ideally. Reading, in the very strong sense of the term implied by this young thought, this inaugural thinking of reading, takes place on the basis of my non-comprehension (where I read I do not entirely understand). If there is history, this is because this opening (of reading) remains a priori open, and thus will remain open forever, and this is obviously what is at stake in what is sometimes called, in the English-speaking world at least, the ‘debate’ between Derrida and Foucault around the cogito and madness, this opening as madness that for the young Derrida we are especially speaking about here is the very place of philosophy, the place in which I philosophise in ‘the terror, but the avowed terror of being mad’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 96). (This avowal of terror already opens the structure of what much later, after Spectres de Marx and Politiques de l’amitié, is called ‘auto-immunity’: here, ‘the avowal is, in its present, both forgetting and unveiling, protection and exposure: economy’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 96).) Or, as he says already in ‘Genesis and Structure’, just before the sentence I just quoted about the opening I can never understand: ‘on the basis of the structural description of a vision of the world, one can, then, account for everything, except the infinite opening to truth, i.e. philosophy’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 238). There is history (in spite of all the historians in the world, who are professionally occupied in reducing this historicity, in not reading – because the historian as such does not read) – there is history only because there is reading: and if there is reading (which is no doubt what there most indubitably is if we follow the logic of the false start that is ours here) there is no end of history, no last judgement, no arrival that is not a new departure. Still young, and perhaps a bit of an ‘idealist’ (in the vulgar sense of the term), he calls it ‘philosophy’, this opening to reading which is also an avowal and a profession, but one that the philosophical profession can only want to close down, for what is thus avowed is unavowable. For, let’s just come out and say it, the philosopher as such, the professional philosopher, does not read, any more than does the historian.9
This historicity, which is a little mad, then, which is the opening of reading or the opening to reading,10 the thought of which comes to him from writing (in the most current sense of the term), and what in writing ‘emancipates meaning from any current field of perception’, gives the time of reading as liberty and madness – this historicity is, as he says at the same period about Bataille, ‘absolutely adventurous’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 407) or, this time on Nietzsche, ‘seminal adventure of the trace’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 427), to be summed up, elliptically, at the beginning of that strange little text which closes Writing and Difference, entitled ‘Ellipsis’, precisely:
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, modeled on it, the book of man. On the other, a tissue of traces marking the disappearance of a God exceeded 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. (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 429)
Liberty and madness, we were saying, and so, often, ‘adventure’ and ‘risk’. Writing, as in a phrase we have already quoted, takes the ‘mortal risk of emancipating meaning from any current field of perception’. This is a risk in the sense that the meaning thus emancipated, thus de-livered, liber-ated from the book, might always dissolve or be lost. He writes of Jabès: ‘A poem always runs the risk of having no meaning and it would be nothing without this risk’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 111). In other words, meaning, all meaning, essentially written in the sense we have seen, thus destined in principle to an infinite transmissibility, is nonetheless ‘poetic’ in that it always runs this risk of being lost, scattered in its dissemination. Already at the end of the Introduction to The Origin of Geometry, ‘if the light of meaning is only through the Passage, this is because it can also be lost en route’ (p. 166). Auto-immunity again or always already, if you will: the writing that emancipates meaning and makes it legible exposes it by the same token to its loss, to unreadability. Which is in fact the same thing: whence the madness. I read only where it is unreadable, whence the fact that this risk is, as he often writes, also chance. The risk that meaning be lost is also the only chance for meaning to pass: Bataille’s ‘absolutely adventurous’ writing is then, as he says in the same sentence, ‘a chance and not a technique’.
He calls it ‘philosophy’, we were saying, in an avowal or a profession which is, however, not strictly of the profession, a profession that is probably not very ‘professional’. Although I have hoped for years for a properly philosophical reception of Derrida’s work (indeed if I know any philosophy, it’s starting from reading his texts), I have also been reading, from the start, in everything we have noted thus far, something that will always remain unacceptable to philosophy as such. Let’s be clear on this point. If we affirm that writing according to Derrida, deconstruction if you will, will remain forever unacceptable to philosophy (in spite of this ‘idealistic’ profession by the young Derrida, according to which the opening itself, and the avowed madness, just are philosophy), this is not at all in the name of another recognised or recognisable discipline, especially not literary criticism or ‘theory’. Because we must allow for what, in all this work by the ‘young’ Derrida, is an impassioned defence of philosophy and what he sometimes calls its ‘dignity’, against the encroachment of the discourse of the ‘human sciences’ in general, which goes along with an inflation of language (or the sign ‘language’ or the sign ‘sign’) that he points out a little ironically at the beginning of the Grammatology.11 This nexus of Derrida’s work is quite complex (as I suggested years ago, this is something of the rule that governs the texts gathered in Margins of Philosophy in 1972): let me just say rapidly that it is this defence (let’s say this measured defence) of philosophy against these ‘human sciences’, all inspired at the time by Saussurean linguistics and its ‘scientific’ ambitions, that dictates or is dictated by an apparently paradoxical refusal by the young Derrida of all linguisticism. Which is why, extremely vigilant in this respect, he takes his distances from literary criticism in spite of all sorts of at least apparent proximities: for if ‘literary criticism is structuralist at every epoch, in essence and destiny’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 11), and if ‘the structuralist attitude, and our posture today before or in language, are not merely moments in history. Astonishment, rather, by language as the origin of history. By historicity itself . . .’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 10), one might think there would be an essential proximity between Derrida and that literary criticism or structuralism. But then no, ‘in spite of some appearances’, as he often says at this time: because if ‘philosophy has been determined in its history as reflection on the poetic inauguration’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 47), literary criticism, for its part, ‘has already been determined, know it or not, like it or not, as philosophy of literature’ (ibid.). Blindly determined, be it understood, following the law of what much later he will call ‘transcendental contraband’. Now – this is the crucial point – this contraband, which in this case will prevent criticism from ‘explaining itself and exchanging with literary writing’ (ibid.), always passes, however paradoxical this may appear, via an inadequate account of language. Just when everybody, or almost everybody at the time thought that they had been liberated by the advances of the human sciences from the age-old illusions of philosophy, so that people thought it possible to reduce philosophy to being no more than the blind and mechanical reflection of linguistic, rhetorical or poetic categories, Derrida with a rare lucidity sees very clearly that (as he will say in the Grammatology) even if one might hope that linguistics (with or alongside psychoanalysis) could bring about a ‘breakthrough’ with respect to the limits of ontology (De la grammatologie, p. 35), this breakthrough would have at the same time to shake up the ‘theoretical’ or ‘scientific’ bases of that same linguistics, which remains ‘enclosed in a classical conceptuality’ (ibid.).
This vigilant suspicion with respect to the sciences of language sometimes translates, in Writing and Difference, rather mysteriously in fact, into a suspicion about the tendency to cover over all ‘thought’ with language. For example, in a famous and dense note to ‘Cogito and History of Madness’ that points out in Foucault the difficulty of doing a history of madness ‘itself’, insofar as any history would inevitably be a history of reason, Derrida goes on to posit the need to dissociate thought and language in a ‘non-classical’ way. I’m going to quote this note at some length, to show how on the one hand this idea involves his whole relation to the history of philosophy, and on the other how, once again, Derrida still believes in philosophy (note in passing the repeated motif of avowal):
And if there is history only of rationality and meaning in general, this means that philosophical language, as soon as it speaks, recuperates negativity – or forgets it, which is the same thing – even when it claims to avow it, recognize it. Perhaps more securely in that case. The history of truth is, therefore, the history of this economy of the negative. So it is necessary, it is perhaps time to return to the ahistorical in a sense that is radically opposed to that of classical philosophy: not in order to misrecognize but this time in order to avow – in silence – negativity [‘avow in silence’ to avoid the trap of the false or dishonest avowal of philosophy that claims to avow out loud a negativity that in fact it recuperates and thus forgets]. It is this negativity and not positive truth which is the non-historical fund of history. We would be dealing in that case with a negativity so negative that it could no longer even be named thus. Negativity has always been determined by dialectics – i.e. by metaphysics – as labour in the service of the constitution of meaning. Avowing negativity in silence means acceding to a dissociation of a non-classical type between thought and language. And perhaps between thought and philosophy as discourse: knowing that this schism can only be said, while effacing itself, in philosophy. (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 55: my emphasis on the motif of avowal)
Same gesture, though perhaps still more complicated, in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, from which I’d like now to summarise (a little brutally, for lack of time) an argumentative sequence (it’s not easy, for one senses in all these texts a slightly mad exuberance, almost an overflowing of thought that is trying to say everything at once, whence a certain irreducible precipitation that is also part of the logic of the false start).12 Here: Levinas tries to ‘dismiss’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 165) the current concept of exteriority which, remaining too closely bound to space, tends to lose the radical nature of the alterity that would be absolute exteriority, absolutely non-spatial exteriority. But then, why keep the word (‘exteriority’) which, through this spatial reference, belongs to the sphere of the same, of totality – why maintain this word to bespeak a ‘true’ exteriority that would be non-spatial, why must we ‘still inhabit metaphor in ruins, dress in the tatters of the tradition and the devil’s rags’? Because this metaphor (this spatial metaphor, inside/outside13), metaphor itself, the mortal risky emancipation of meaning in writing following the structures we have seen, would be ‘the welling-up of language itself’, that at best philosophy (‘which is only this language’) can try to speak as such, and thus to think (‘in the silent horizon of non-metaphor: Being.’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 166)). Without this originary compromise with a language that is involved in space, and which is therefore metaphorical and finite, I would have no chance of saying the infinite. But, speaking the infinity (of the Other) in this way, in the finitude of language (and this would perhaps be the moment to quote again what I once called the ‘slogan’ from the end of Speech and Phenomena, namely ‘Infinite differance is finite’ (a phrase it would be nice to have printed on a t-shirt) – speaking the infinite in the finite in this way, I make the infinite into no more than an in-finite, I am obliged to say it negatively with respect to the finite, and in so doing I am reduced to ‘writing by crossings out and crossings out of crossings out’ – and obviously crossing out writes, i.e. ‘draws in space’. Because this metaphoricity and finitude are originary, they bespeak by the same token the rootedness of all philosophical language in so-called natural language, and thus in natural languages in the plural, because there are many of them (whence later a definition of deconstruction as ‘more than one language’ (or: ‘no more of only one language’: plus d’une langue)). This naturalness, plurality and finitude entail an irreducible equivocality, which the philosopher must therefore take on. Taking it on, he must, however, recognise (as Levinas, or Derrida’s Levinas here, seems not to want to do) that it affects every positive infinity with an essential negativity which is also the very condition of its alterity: ‘The Infinite is heard as Other only in the form of the in-finite’ (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 68: this is why much later he will say that ‘every other (one) is every (bit) other’: tout autre est tout autre). This moment (at which the properly unspeakable infinite betrays itself as in-finite) is, then, the moment at which ‘thought breaks with language’. I quote:
The fact that the positive plenitude of the classical infinite can only be translated into language by betraying itself in a negative word (in-finite) perhaps situates the point at which thought most deeply breaks with language. A break that will thereafter only resonate throughout language. This is why a modern thinking that no longer wishes to distinguish or hierarchize thought and language is essentially, of course, a thinking of finitude. But it ought then to abandon the word ‘finitude’, ever a prisoner of the classical schema. Is this possible? And what does it mean to abandon a classical notion? (L’Écriture et la différence, pp. 168–9)
In any case, after a brief passage via Descartes and Bergson (each of whom, accepting in his own way the separation of language and thought (whereas for Levinas thought is language), would be less troubled by this rootedness of language in space insofar as they can oppose it to a thought or an intuition which for their part can claim to be pure of any such rootedness), Derrida shows that this essential finitude of discourse, this irreducible spatiality and therefore this metaphoricity which is also the necessity of the practice of crossing out (and the crossing out of crossing out, thus of ‘drawing in space’, thus of writing), this naturality (not without relation to everything later to do with animality – he even says, here in Writing and Difference, about Jabès, that a certain ‘animality of the letter’, the metaphor of the animality of the letter, is ‘above all metaphor itself, the origin of language as Metaphor’) – Derrida shows that this finitude, spatiality, metaphoricity and naturality are nothing other than a certain inevitability of violence, or what he will call an economy of violence. This irreducible violence, linked in this radical way to spatiality and metaphoricity, to animality and metaphoric naturality, is not fundamentally different from the historicity, madness or adventure that we have already pointed out.
Now this violence, the irreducible ‘economy’ of this violence, which stems from the fact that meaning is exiled or liberated, ‘emancipated’ – which we see more clearly in writing because writing, grave, heavy, earthy, as he says in a note about Feuerbach (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 19, n. 1), obviously spreads itself out in space, makes us see, as it were, this originary ‘metaphoricity’ of all language (which is of course not answerable to the philosophical concept of metaphor, as he will explain at length a few years later in ‘The White Mythology’) – this violence which appears to be part of language (to come back at last to the enigma of a ‘non-classical’ separation of thought and language) entails that everything not be language, and that difference, the differences more or less calmly identified as belonging to the supposed ‘inside’ of the language in Saussure’s sense (or even the episteme in Foucault’s sense) become differance, which bespeaks (or such is my hypothesis today), or writes, rather, not only the dynamism of a process contained within the limits of such a system, but the essential opening of this same system (that essential opening that I will never understand, then, the mad opening of history and reading), to events of language, of course, to ‘poetic’ inventions in which something unprecedented, something really unheard of gets said or written (which is already a good deal, and enough to trouble all the Saussurean-style oppositions between language and speech, synchrony and diachrony) – to events of language, then, but also (and this is where, from being ‘a great deal’, it gets huge, monstrous as he says, more or less), the possibility of the event tout court. Of the event as such. For what comes or advenes (always via ‘writing’, now emancipated and adventurous), insofar as it comes or advenes, to be, as he says so often later, an event ‘worthy of the name’ (and therefore, as I shall try to show elsewhere, unworthy of any name, unspeakable, unnameable), that it come or advene always ‘traumatically’, as he will say in Papier machine (p. 114), trace already, is not, or not yet of the order of language. What means that the poem must always run the risk of non-meaning, the risk of the violent irruption of non-sense in sense itself (everything we have seen from the start) also means that we are no longer, at these moments of madness at which the totality is exceeded and something maybe gives itself to be read, no longer simply in the order of language. Unlike the ‘human sciences’ thinkers, then, Derrida never gives in to linguisticism; but unlike many other philosophers, nor does he give in to a referentialism that must always oppose language and world, and then wonder how we are supposed to manage, more or less mysteriously or magically, to cross over the gap between the two. (If we had time here, I would show how these two gestures – enclosing everything in language on the one hand, and positing a ditch or an abyss between language and world on the other – are in perfect solidarity with one another, following a logic that would explain also how the philosophers who wish at any price to exclude literature from philosophy get on so well with certain literary people and can even argue for the excellence or higher importance of the literature thus excluded). According to this properly inaugural thought of Jacques Derrida’s, this event, which is traumatic, then, this Derrida-event, comes about in what I have here imagined or fictioned as a moment of blinding insight, a moment that for fifty years he tries to read and reread, grasp and sign – according to this inaugural thought, then, what he still here calls ‘meaning’ is itself only insofar as it is exposed, by writing (at first, then, in this entirely current sense), spread out in space (and thus exposed too to a certain stupidity, insofar as space and spacing are fundamentally stupid), and by that very fact, because of what we can call ‘materiality’ only if we take all sorts of precautions, this ‘meaning’ is meaning only by being also something other than meaning, does not ‘make’ sense through and through: sense does not entirely make sense. This necessary exposure of meaning, the very possibility of meaning that means that meaning is impossible as merely meaning, gives as it were the schema of all Derrida’s thought, the very signature of Jacques Derrida: that the start always be a false start, that the possible in general be impossible,14 that infinite differance be finite, that risk also be chance, that promise be a priori inseparable from threat, that in general we find ourselves in a milieu of interminable writing and reading – all that, or so it seems to me, flows from this supposedly original ‘insight’ or moment of genius.
Closing remark, to begin to pick up on what I said earlier about reading Derrida. Remembering what is said in ‘Force and Signification’ about the deferred reciprocity of reading and writing, about the first reader who dictates and the author who reads, might one not say that Derrida, obviously a great reader, is also a great reader of himself, that he never stops writing, constantly and continually, a reading of this initial intuition that throws him from the start into this writing-reading, and a rereading of earlier readings of this same ‘originary’ moment? Which is why, among other things, he is justified in writing sometimes, in avowing or confessing, that everything he writes is autobiographical or confessional, is an avowal, without that structure ever being able to close off anything like a self-sufficiency or an autarchy. For (this would obviously help to motivate his fascination with Rousseau) each written sentence, every event of writing, calls for a reading that must in turn be written and read, and so forth indefinitely. This law, which I have elsewhere called ‘autronomy’, which allows an ‘auto-’ effect to appear only by affecting it from the start with the other, exposing as it were its outer surface to a reading – this law (this auto-immunity already) is simply writing itself doing its thing, secreting itself in secret without secret like the silk [soie] of the worm that, just because of this secretion, will never quite be a self [soi], be itself in or for itself, never quite an ipseity, as he would say in his last texts.
Melancholic and jubilatory, this writing: the thing he has written also bequeaths us melancholy and jubilation in our in-finite reading and rereading. And means that he, wherever he be now, smiling no doubt, after the final false start, is still reading and therefore writing. If, as he said one day, ‘Plato’s signature is not yet finished’15 – and that must be true of any signature, which is why every signature signs a sending, an envoi, a demand for countersignature whose mourning or melancholic inheritors we are – this would be doubly true of the signature of Jacques Derrida, who also signs (and it is an event, a trauma occurring in the history of writing), let’s admit it, the statement of this essential unfinished nature of any signature, including his own, including this one.
There, it’s started.
1. ‘Why is a false start in discourse always necessary? [ . . . ] Why is it always on the basis of the constituted, i.e. the derived product, that one must always move back up toward the originary moment?’ (Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 2, n. 2). See too the false starts at the beginning of ‘Limited Inc a b c’ (Limited Inc (Paris: Galilée, 1990)). Or the first three sections of Mal d’archive (Paris: Galilée, 1995), entitled ‘Exergue’, ‘Preamble’ and ‘Foreword’. See too Le problème, pp. 139–40, and the ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Husserl, L’origine de la géométrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), p. 128: ‘ . . . the dependency and a certain secondarity of our text. They are those of any point of departure.’ And, more famously, in De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 233: ‘We must begin somewhere where we are and the thought of the trace, which cannot not take nose-following [flair] into account, has already taught us that it was impossible to justify absolutely a starting point. Somewhere where we are: in a text already where we believe ourselves to be.’
2. This paper was written in French for the opening session of the conference ‘Déconstruire, dit-il . . . ’, Paris, May 2009. In the event I was unable to attend the conference at short notice, and the paper was read on my behalf by Joseph Cohen, preceded by the following note: ‘This paper, as you are about to hear, begins with one or more false starts, and among other things puts forward a logic of false starts in general. When writing it, I obviously did not know that between its being written and its being read, in what Jacques Derrida calls the “deferred reciprocity” of reading and writing, which is also my subject today, an even falser false start would intervene and quite simply prevent me from being here to answer for what I am advancing. Allow me, before delivering the letter and the meaning of this little text over to its reader or spokesperson, before exposing it to the risk and chance of reading, to salute the organizers of this wonderful conference, and especially Joseph Cohen who did me the great honour of inviting me to give this opening paper.’
3. Cf. Marguerite Duras, Détruire, dit-elle (Paris: Minuit, 1966).
4. L’oreille de l’autre: otobiographies, transferts, traductions. Textes et débats avec Jacques Derrida (Montréal: VLB, 1982).
5. Papier machine, p. 33.
6. ‘This panoramic reading that here ranges across the whole of Husserl’s œuvre with the imperturbable impudence of a scanner lays claim to a sort of law the stability of which seems all the more astonishing to me for the fact that, including its literal formulation, it will not have ceased, since then, commanding everything I’ve tried to demonstrate, as though a sort of idiosyncrasy were already negotiating in its own way a necessity that would always go beyond it and that would have interminably to be reappropriated. What necessity? Always that of an originary complication of the originary, an initial contamination of the simple, an inaugural gap that no analysis could ever present, render present, in its phenomenon or reduce to the instantaneous and self-identical punctuality of the element’ (Le Problème . . . , pp. vi–vii). It will perhaps be objected that the prefatory note from which I quote these sentences starts out with what it calls ‘the idiomatic quality of the French expression “s’écouter” [to listen to oneself]’ (ibid., v): but in fact, far from any ‘hearing-oneself-speak’, the ‘listening-to-oneself’ here passes via technical apparatus that make of it a writing, ‘like on a magnetic tape or on the screen’ (ibid.).
7. L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 22. The passage continues: ‘Is not what one calls God, who affects all human navigation with second-arity, this passage: the deferred reciprocity between reading and writing? Absolute witness, third party as diaphaneity of meaning in dialogue in which what one begins to say is already a response.’
8. L’Écriture et la différence, p. 335, my emphasis.
9. Who reads? A huge question. Dasein does not read.
10. In the Origine Introduction, he says that ‘in all acceptations of the word, historicity is le sens [sense, meaning and direction]’ (p. 166). Compare with a famous text from the Grammatology, which recognises the necessity of the ‘moment of redoubling commentary’ in ‘critical reading’ (which otherwise would run the risk of ‘going in just about any direction and authorizing itself to say just about anything at all’, only to continue immediately: ‘But this indispensable guard-rail [garde-fou] has only ever protected and never opened a reading’ (De la grammatologie, p. 227). It would be interesting to follow this motif of the garde-fou in Derrida, which can take on rather different valences depending on context: see, for example, the Origine Introduction (p. 97) or Du droit à la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), p. 205, among others.
11. ‘This inflation of the sign “language” is the inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation, inflation itself’ (De la grammatologie, p. 15).
12. Already in the Problème: ‘this constant anticipation . . . a certain anticipation is thus faithful to the meaning of every genesis . . . If always some anticipation is necessary, if always the future precedes as it were the present and the past . . . ’ (pp. 9 and 14). This motif of anticipation already anticipates on the very opening of Glas.
13. Compare with what is said in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ on the primacy of the inside/outside opposition as the very force of every opposition in general (La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 117–8).
14. Cf. Le Problème de la genèse, p. 169, n. 89, which also pursues the problem of the internal historicity of Husserl’s work with respect to its transcendental ambitions. I shall follow this problem further elsewhere.
15. L’oreille de l’autre, p. 119.